ABSTRACT
The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media is a comprehensive study of the key contemporary issues and scholarly discussions around Japanese media. Covering a wide variety of forms and types from newspapers, television and fi lm, to music, manga and social media, this book examines the role of the media in shaping Japanese society from the Meiji era’s intense engagement with Western culture to our current period of rapid digital innovation.
Featuring the work of an international team of scholars, the handbook is divided into five thematic sections:
- The historical background of the Japanese media from the Meiji Restoration to the immediate postwar era.
- Japan’s national and political identity imagined and negotiated through diff erent aspects of the media, including Japan’s ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s and today’s ‘post- Fukushima’ society.
- The representation of Japanese identities, including race, gender and sexuality, in contemporary media.
- The role of Japanese media in everyday life.
- The Japanese media in a broader global context.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of use to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and Japanese popular culture.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|89 pages
The rise of Japanese media
chapter 1|11 pages
Who’s the ‘great imitator’?
part II|67 pages
Media, nation, politics and nostalgia
part III|89 pages
Japanese identities – plural: race, gender and sexuality in contemporary media
chapter 12|20 pages
Mediated masculinities
chapter 13|13 pages
Writing sexual identity onto the small screen
chapter 14|15 pages
Housewives watching crime
chapter 15|13 pages
Beyond the absent father stereotype
chapter 16|15 pages
Japan Times’ imagined communities
part IV|106 pages
Japanese media in everyday life
chapter 18|17 pages
Japanese youth and SNS use
chapter 21|15 pages
Character goods, cheerfulness and cuteness
chapter 22|27 pages
Nature, media and the future
part V|60 pages
Japanese media and the global