Asia Shorts. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2021. xii, 190 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$16.00, paper. ISBN 9781952636219.
This book intends to be and is, indeed, an ideal textbook for teaching media, gender studies, Japanese studies, and, most importantly, how to be a critical reader of media content. When read separately, each chapter uses carefully selected examples of American television shows that refer to Japan (sitcoms, young adult animation, and reality TV) to discuss television history, the specificities of television production, the power of merchandizing and tie-ins, and the global-local nexus in the adaptation of foreign television shows. By combining the chapters and arranging them chronologically, the book’s declared overall aim is to reconstruct how images of Japan on American television have changed since the 1950s. Its underlying hypothesis is that television has been the most prevalent, accessible, and influential middlebrow media of the latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. As such, television has played an important role in shaping how American viewers understand and think about Japan. The book offers historically contextualized analyses of narrative contents, visualizations, formats, and engagement with genre conventions, thereby demonstrating convincingly how the often hilarious and seemingly harmless images of Japan on American television reflect transnational, racial, and gender power structures. One of its most important arguments is that the othering of Japan on American television has been consistently used as a means of reaffirming US hegemony and “correct” belief systems, and behavioural norms.
Following an introduction that presents the theoretical frames used in this book, the first two chapters explore the renewed circulation from the 1950s through the 1970s of anti-Japanese wartime propaganda stereotypes, first, in the parodied images of male judo instructors and later, in those of samurai. Imported Japanese martial arts culture provided American writers with enticing possibilities for gags, sound effects, exoticism, and recognizable costumes. Japanese judo instructors were uniformly portrayed as short with buck teeth, wearing round-rimmed glasses, and being absurdly polite. They became staple side characters in many sitcoms (animated and real life). Since the 1970s, thanks in part to the globalization of international award-winning Japanese period drama films, popular interest in samurai in American culture grew substantially. It transformed the samurai into a metonym for Japan, which diverged on television into two different expressions. On the one hand, similar to the earlier parodies of Japanese judo instructors, the overserious and overzealous samurai provided sitcoms with the format for another staple side comical character. On the other hand, mystified images of the samurai promoted an exoticized image of a distant feudal Japan that existed before and beyond the Pacific War. The author argues critically that none of these sets of images encouraged American audiences to reflect on local prejudices.
The next chapter examines an unusual portrayal of Japan on American television in the 1980s at the height of the US-Japan bilateral tensions provoked by a trade imbalance. The chapter focuses on appearances of “Japan” on Sesame Street, particularly on the episode “Big Bird in Japan.” Against the “Japan bashing” backdrop of the mediascape, this episode (a co-production by Sesame Workshop and the NHK that aired in Japan in 1988 and in the United States a year later) presented an image of an accessible and non-aggressive Japan. The author explains this (unusual for its time) cultural acceptance of Japan as both part of the program’s ideological agenda of education for multiculturalism and anti-racism and the result of the American producers’ efforts to secure financial support for Sesame Street in Japan.
Chapter 4 focuses on episodes with Japan-related plots from the popular, young-adult-oriented animated sitcoms, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and South Park, which aired between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Written and produced at a time when Japanese popular culture was becoming a global trend, their nonsensical plots parody primarily the American working class or middle class (depending on the show) and many aspects of Japanese culture. The author argues that the repeated engagement with war memories in these episodes reaffirms the United States as victor and Japan as vanquished. But it is perhaps another argument in this chapter—namely, the fact that younger generations define Japan and their relations with it through its popular culture while older generations recall the Pacific War—that better indicates how these sitcoms projected the then emerging new images of Japan.
Chapter 5 focuses on the short comedy skits “J-Pop America Fun Time Now,” which aired between 2011 and 2012 on Saturday Night Live. The skits were staged as fan broadcasts by American University anime club members, who love Japanese popular culture to the point of wanting to be Japanese. The students are very knowledgeable about J-pop but get everything else about Japan wrong to the contempt of their professor, who is there as the “responsible adult” representing the university. These skits offer a triple-layered parody: the first of an exaggerated, overly cute, and consumption-centred Japanese popular culture; the second of its uncritical American fans; and the third of the professor, who fails to comprehend the important moment in media history that these fans embody.
The last chapter compares the Netflix 2019 reality show Tidying up with Marie Kondo, which follows Kondo as she teaches American families how to make life more enjoyable by reorganizing their living spaces, with the Japan-based 2019 season of another Netflix reality show Queer Eye: We’re in Japan, in which the show’s five hosts, who specialize in personal makeovers, travel to Japan. While Kondo reproduces the image of a Japanese (female) master who teaches with calm and confidence how to create a harmonious environment, the Queer Eye hosts insist on American expressiveness, confidence, and activism. While the two programs create opportunities for close communication between Americans and Japanese and the subsequent advancement of multiculturalism, Japanese and American practices remain distinct.
The many television shows discussed in the book (of which only a few are mentioned in this review) arguably trace, as promised, a trajectory of the changing images of Japan on American television: from the images of a defeated enemy nation depicted in racist stereotypes to the images of a nation that arouses genuine curiosity. The generously provided watch list and discussion questions at the end of the book are wonderful. While I thoroughly enjoyed reading and thinking with this book, on a more critical note, the author argues in the introduction that television, by its nature, tends to comfort and amuse rather than offer critical engagement with pressing concerns. While this is often the case, many of the examples in this book actually contradict this claim. This could have been an opportunity to rethink the idea of resistance on mainstream television. In addition, the author develops in the introduction a theory about a history of convergence and conflict between Japanese kawaii and American cute, but I remain unconvinced. Japanese kawaii is a contextualized, culturally specific modality that loses its cultural baggage when understood simply as cute. Lastly, I would have liked an analytic engagement with how the transfer from traditional television to streaming television has impacted the production of images of Japan made by Americans, instead of looking at this historical transformation as nearly seamless.
Michal Daliot-Bul
University of Haifa, Haifa