Cornell East Asia Series. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023. US$27.00, paper; US$18.00, ebook. ISBN 9781501772269
It’s no secret that a great deal of twenty-first century media has been influenced by internet subcultures; unfortunately, much of this culture has been lost to time. Many emergent online cultures of the 2000s have proved tragically ephemeral, with the scarce documentation that exists often falling into the trappings of cultural nostalgia. Thankfully, Daniel Johnson’s Textual Cacophony: Online Video and Anonymity in Japan functions as a critical analysis that documents and preserves an important moment in Japanese media history that continues to resonate across national borders.
Textual Cacophony focuses mainly on the video-sharing website Niconico, which was launched in December 2006, a year after YouTube. Many of the early users of Niconico were also active on the anonymous 2channel message board, the model for the English-language site 4chan. During the 2010s, all four websites became plagued by the extreme political messaging that has influenced ultranationalist discourse in Japan and the United States. In the 2000s, however, the tone of Niconico and 2channel was much more playful, and the sense of potential engendered by new methods of anonymous communication resulted in the creation of loosely connected cultures of language and visual symbology. While always remaining aware of the broader political history of Japanese internet subcultures, Johnson is primarily interested in exploring their aesthetic dimensions.
Johnson’s brief introduction lays out the ways in which the online mediation of asynchronous communication facilitated a sense of community across time and distance during a period roughly spanning 2006 and 2014. The postscript returns to this discussion by way of the more recent phenomenon of “online fatigue,” which arises from the sense of obligation to maintain one’s standing and relationships on social networking services that require a fixed handle. Communication that is both anonymous and asynchronous removes the pressure to perform an identity, and online spaces that host such anxiety-free forms of discourse thus facilitate communities based on play and experimentation.
Chapter 1, “Animated Writing,” outlines the features of Niconico and lays the groundwork for the concept of textual polyphony by introducing the various types of linguistic play present on the site. One example is nonstandard metadata tags such as “pedestrians who can read between the lines,” which indicates the brief appearance of bystanders who politely pretend as if they’re not being filmed. The use of similarly humorous tags spread organically across Niconico, thus creating “new ways of thinking about connections based on more abstract or locally understood interpretation of video content and the discourse of the site’s community” (34).
Chapter 2, “Characters of Language,” expands on another type of linguistic play common on Niconico: deliberate mistypings enabled by the manner in which Japanese text is entered on a keyboard. The visually representational ways in which characters are (mis)used have collectively resulted in what Johnson terms “the toyification of text.” Pictorial and abstract images composed of characters were ubiquitous on 2channel but took on a new animated dimension on Niconico, where they could be overlaid onto video like graffiti. “The transformative potential in graffiti writing is not simply tagging one’s territory,” Johnson writes, “but also in turning something familiar into a new kind of writing surface” (52).
Chapter 3, “Repertoire and Accumulation,” continues the exploration of animated captions on Niconico to illustrate how text art becomes a type of performance conducted in concert with moving images. Chapter 4, “Collecting, Copying, and Copyright” details how this specific linguistic subculture has spread from Niconico and affected the visual landscapes of Chinese video-sharing sites such as Youku, as well as mainstream broadcast television in Japan.
Chapter 5, “Scripted Laughter,” covers how the culture of asynchronous communication on Niconico has been translated to the more recent digital phenomenon of “let’s play” performances in which the broadcaster plays a video game for an online audience. Platforms expressly designed for video game streaming, most notably the highly-trafficked service Twitch, feature scrolling sidebars of comments that allow a live audience to interact with the performer. Recorded “let’s play” sessions hosted on Niconico recreate this sense of intimacy by allowing the viewer to experience user-generated comments at the exact point in the video when they were originally added.
Using examples drawn from popular videos, Johnson explores how this interface operates in order to demonstrate how “the voices becoming an anonymous mass in turn create a communication dynamic essentially between two parties: the streamer and the aggregation of the audience” (126). The audience is not passive, but rather speaks in a collective voice in dialogue with the performer in a manner resembling the interactions between guests and hosts on televised Japanese variety shows.
In Japan, as in many other countries, certain groups within internet subcultures surrounding video games have become a gateway for ultranationalist political views and conspiracy. As Jeffrey J. Hall argues in Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism (New York: Routledge, 2021), the appeal of such extremist communities is that they offer a sense of belonging that might be lacking elsewhere in life, especially for those who feel powerless and disenfranchised. Textual Cacophony is instrumental in demonstrating how a tangible sense of community can arise through a culture of linguistic mores shared between people who will probably never meet in real life. As Johnson convincingly argues, it is of critical importance not simply to highlight the problematic aspects of these subcultures, but also to understand their creative appeal and transformative potential.
Through its careful documentation, critical analysis, and contextualization within broader internet cultures, Textual Cacophony serves as an enlightening companion to Marc Steinberg’s The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019). With numerous references to transnational online currents and enlightening ties to cross-cultural strands of critical discourse, Textual Cacophony serves as a key resource for anyone interested in how Japanese-language internet subcultures have shaped contemporary media landscapes.
Kathryn Hemmann
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia