Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. xxxiv, 186 pp. (Black and white illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3940-6.
Michal Daliot-Bul’s License to Play is a worthy addition to the field of cultural studies in Japan. In this monograph, she investigates the changes in cultural understandings of play over time and analyzes how those changes are both a product of and an influence on the sociohistorical context in which they occur. In doing so, she seeks to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between culture and play to better understand the way this relationship influences daily life. While this work offers an overview of the history of play in Japan, Daliot-Bul focuses her analysis on what she perceives to be the three most instructive periods for this topic: the Heian period (794–1185), the Edo period (1603–1868), and the 1970s.
With her first chapter, “The Linguistic Concept of ‘Play’ in Japanese,” Daliot-Bul starts her study of play in Japan by delineating the boundaries of the word “asobi,” arguing that through its susceptibility to cultural shifts, there is a clear role for play in Japanese sociocultural life. While the idea of play is found throughout the history of Japan, Daliot-Bul argues that at certain periods, certain groups, by their position and status, could engage in “legitimized” play, rendering it a “formative element of culture” as “a seedbed of cultural production” (15). According to Daliot-Bul, there is a cycle, albeit irregular, during which play achieves high cultural status and legitimacy and when play becomes the model for aesthetic and moral ideals. Her analysis of various usages of the word asobi is interesting and helps readers understand the long history of play in Japan, but by confining the history of pre-modern play to this chapter, Daliot-Bul misses out on some of the intertextual richness she might have incorporated into later chapters.
In chapter 2, “Play as a Formative Element of Culture,” Daliot-Bul discusses how play came to be part of daily life by focusing on the courtiers of Heian Japan, the city dwellers of Edo Japan, and the urban youth of the 1970s. While she acknowledges that these aren’t the only three possible examples, she argues that in these three groups one can see the most instructive changes in the scope of asobi as embodied in the sociocultural and economic developments and thus demonstrates how play becomes an increasingly influential force. The choice to focus on these specific groups seems unconvincing at times and causes the reader to wonder why other important examples from Japanese history (the mobo and moga urban culture of the Taisho era being a notable example) are omitted.
In chapter 3, “The Otherness of Play,” Daliot-Bul moves beyond the historical and turns her focus to contemporary playscapes. In particular, she argues that the boundaries of play are culturally constructed symbols of the separation between play and reality and uses the example of modern-day Tokyo sakariba as a liminal “third space” that facilitates a sociocultural inversion. Even as the boundaries shift, Daliot-Bul argues, it is precisely in this third space that players are given an opportunity to critique social norms and experiment with different identities. As her analysis shifts to contemporary practices of play, the crux of her arguments regarding the significance of play in Japan becomes much clearer.
In chapter 4, “The Rules of the Game, or, How to Become the Best Player,” Daliot-Bul studies the practice of play as enacted by many different types of players, from the high school club member to the Shinjuku cosplayer. According to Daliot-Bul, the “ideologies of hegemonic work-oriented culture” (77) and the growing information culture of contemporary Japan have heavily influenced late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century consumer culture, and, as a result the way people play. By looking at how people learn to play and then how they play, Daliot-Bul highlights the culturally and temporally constructed practices of play.
In “Creativity in Play,” the fifth chapter, Daliot-Bul turns the discussion away from the complex rules and social structures of play, and explores instead the connections between play and creativity. Daliot-Bul argues that the best creative players are not the ones who work outside of the rules but the ones who are able to use mimicry and parody—what she refers to as the “eloquent subjugation to rules, patterns, and structures of knowledge” (114)—to legitimize their play. Daliot-Bul’s discussion of the practice of play (in chapter 4) and its derivatives (in chapter 5) speaks to the long history of intertextuality in Japanese culture.
In the final chapters “Contested Meanings of Play” and the epilogue, Daliot-Bul analyzes the potential for play to be the avenue through which people can best engage with cultural rhetoric relating to shifting notions of societal value. By focusing on the various sociocultural discourses that give play its meaning in contemporary Japan, Daliot-Bul suggests that play has become idealized precisely because it allows players to have agency in a world of constantly shifting realities.
Daliot-Bul covers a broad sweep of history and cultural shifts while also giving readers a firm grounding in the theoretical underpinnings of her argument. The brocade of analysis she presents focuses on trends in play culture from the 1970s to today. This is a dense, scholarly book with thick academic prose. As such, it may not be accessible to a broader and more general audience, who would greatly benefit from the research presented here. That aside, given the depth and breadth of research here, Daliot-Bul has created an engaging theoretical and analytical work that should appeal to scholars interested in intellectual history, contemporary Japanese cultural studies, and play and game theory.
Susan W. Furukawa
Beloit College, Beloit, USA
pp. 905-907