Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. xv, 423 pp. (Illustrations.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6326-2.
As Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten point out in their introductory essay to this groundbreaking collection, the robust history of media theorization in Japan is wholly invisible to existing Euro-American media studies discourses, despite having one of the most developed and influential media industries in the world. In this sense, the collection can be read as a demonstration of the simple fact that media theory exists in Japan. Yet, it goes much further than this by selecting essays that together illuminate the dynamic historical conditions and intellectual horizons of media theory in Japan. Instead of a chronological survey of the historical development of Japanese media theory, it seeks to provide an overview of the manifold contexts and modes of thought as part of—rather than apart from—the history of Japan’s media industries and cultures. As such, the collection’s integrative approach to the study of media theory in Japan sheds new light on how media contextualizes thought—and vice versa—in ways that are both informed by, and in transversal of, discrete historical and discursive contexts.
Not only do the collected essays vividly chart key instances of media theorization born of the specificities of local and regional media histories and cultures in Japan, but the editors situate the collection as part of ongoing reassessments of the locatedness of media theory. Thus oriented by a keen focus on the contextual and situational conditions of media theorization, the novel perspectives and specificities revealed by the collected essays greatly expand the location of media theory beyond the seemingly habituated spatial and temporal contours of European and North American media studies. By inviting new questions as well as expanding the given scope of theoretical inquiry into media forms, this important collection seeks to open up a number of discursive contexts to deeper modes of fruitful exchange.
A crucial part of what makes this volume so successful in these efforts is the interplay among the essays and the layered organization of the collection as a whole. Following Akira Lippit’s evocative preface and the editors’ introduction, the collected essays are divided into three parts, organized by the diverse approaches and subjects of the texts themselves. While unable to fully describe the entirety of the collection’s contributions, a brief outline of the major highlights to be found within each section will illustrate the indispensable value of the collection. In part 1, “Communication Technologies,” the essays explore instances in which the theorization of media captured profound media-technological and societal change in Japan, resulting in a nuanced portrait of the critical resonances among diverse historical and discursive contexts. Aaron Gerow reminds us of the forgetful nature of “new” media in a comparative look at the emphasis on the “everyday” shared by theorizations of TV in the 1950s and film in the 1910s. Yuriko Furuhata complicates the cybernetic vision of urban environments in 1960s architectural discourse by overlaying it with the prior moment of colonial urban planning to critically recast the “newness” of a biopolitical model of the city. Takeshi Kadobayashi deftly unpacks the shifting media strategies that influential critic Azuma Hiroki deployed across rapid changes in the technological and discursive contexts of the 1990s and early 2000s. Working within the same transformative moment, Marilyn Ivy excavates the multi-media horizons of the print journal InterCommunication to retrieve a different vision for media theory from Japan’s “lost decades.”
Part 2’s simple thematic title of “Practical Theory” belies a complex set of essays that undertake a much-needed inquiry into media practices as critical modes of thought, including those engaged in diverse acts of making and thinking media. Steinberg traces the role played by Japanese translations of McLuhan’s work during the 1960s in shaping the practice of media theory within the advertising industries. Miryam Sas illuminates the contours of a radical practice of media theory found in the writings of critics Matsuda Masao, Nakahira Takuma, and Tsumura Takashi, and crystallized by a 1973 symposium with German critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Contrasting advertising strategies and leftist critiques of image media in the early 1970s, Tomiko Yoda’s essay examines how the national railway’s Discover Japan campaign envisioned new forms of mobility and captivity for young female consumers. Zahlten introduces the performative nature of 1980s media theorizations, and offers a useful survey of the influential thinkers that exemplified this highly commodified modality of critique, such as Asada Akira and Hasumi Shigehiko. Likewise, Ryoko Misono showcases the TV criticism of Nancy Seki, and illustrates how her weekly columns during the 1990s, including portraits of TV personalities etched into erasers, were a potent form of critique of network media structures. With a nuanced reflection on the legacies of the woman’s liberation movement of the 1970s, Anne McKnight rigorously delineates the expanded media ecologies traversed by Rokudenashiko’s “manko” (or, “vulva”) art-activism in the contemporary moment.
Part 3, “Mediation and Media Theory,” traces the diverse ways in which major Japanese thinkers have produced novel vocabularies of media, mediation, and medium, with essays by Akihiro Kitada on Nakai Masakazu, Fabian Schafer on Nishida Kitarō and Kyōto School philosophy, and Keisuke Kitano on Kobayashi Hideo. Following these engagements with celebrated historical figures, Tom Looser’s essay on Azuma Hiroki’s recursive orientation after the Fukushima nuclear disaster offers a fitting call for a different kind of media studies today. The articulately conceptualized editorial vision of this volume not only answers to this call, but the diverse range of rigorous and engaging essays make the collection as a whole essential reading for an extensive range of audiences in media studies, Japan studies, and humanities-based area studies more broadly.
Franz Prichard
Princeton University, Princeton, USA