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Gender, Substance, Fantasy: Undisciplined Observations on Gender Presentations in Japan
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The Memory That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Memory, Monsters and Oblivion in Japanese Popular Culture
No full textIn this paper, I aim at identifying traces of the trauma in Japanese popular and visual culture of the postwar period. Following the Freudian definition, the recollection of the traumatic event is repressed and thus constitutes an absent presence that resurfaces in compulsive repetitions either in the form of re-enactments or in the form of flashbacks. These resist conscious remembering and take on an agency of their own, that is, they are experienced as independent entities that come back to haunt the traumatized person. I thus maintain that when researching the traces of trauma in postwar Japan it is to monsters and ghosts that we need to turn. [NB: An earlier version of this paper was published as Gygi, Fabio. 2008. Mnemonic Monsters: Memory, Oblivion and Continuity in Japanese Popular Culture. Minikomi 75:5-12. We thank the editor of Minikomi, Roland Domenig (Meiji Gakuin University) for permission to republish it in a revised open-access version here.
Robot Companions: The Animation of Technology and the Technology of Animation in Japan
Full text linkContemporary Japan is often described in utopian terms as a place where humans and nonhumans live and work together in harmony. This acceptance of nonhuman others is explained by some anthropologists as stemming from an “animist unconscious” (Allison 2006) that allows people to attribute “life” to robots and other artefacts, a notion that is explicitly linked to the “Shinto universe” of “native animist beliefs” (Robertson 2010). Contrary to the darker tone of robot fantasies in the EuroAmerican tradition, this “techno-animism” turns technological objects into non-alienating allies, or so the narrative goes. This chapter critically examines the ideological underpinnings of these claims. Instead of attributing “modern techno-animism” to a native and naïve ontology, the author argues that all forms of animism are “techno-animism” because they are based on a technology of animation. In turn, this technology of animation is based on what Bird-David (1999) understands as “relatedness”, but which the author hesitates to call a “relational ontology” because what enables animation is often a relation that emerges from an unexpected and surprising encounter. Drawing on the work of Japanese roboticists and anthropologists of technology, this chapter proffers the heuristic device of an “animation continuum” to better apprehend the broad range of relations that result in animation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
"Each Life Has its Place": Transgender Existence in Contemporary Kansai
Full text linkMy PhD dissertation is an ethnography of transgender identities in Japan with a focus on Kyoto and Osaka. To date, Japan has not figured as an area of interest in Anglophone Trans Studies; nor has transness been the subject of much scholarly attention in Japan related anthropology. I bring the two into dialogue based on eighteen months of fieldwork, Autumn 2018-Summer 2020. Almost all extant work on 'Trans Japan' has been done by cisgender [non-transgender] researchers: no full-length study of transgender Japanese lives by a trans researcher is yet available in English. What work does exist centres on Tokyo. With a few notable exceptions, most academic studies of trans communities in Japan use either slurs or clinical terminology, neither of which find much favour in trans circles today. The literature as it stands therefore has considerable gaps in the areas of language, location, and lived experience. This thesis redresses all three by taking the reader into Kansai's understudied trans communities through the lens of a transgender ethnographer. My central research question is: How do transgender people in Japan maintain trans identity in relation to the 'legal' transition requirements demanded by the Japanese State? I am particularly interested in the language that Japanese trans people use to describe themselves and each other, away from Gender Identity Disorder [seidōitsuseishōgai] towards dignity, creativity, and play. This is an ethnography of the 'trans ordinary': what all the days in trans people's lives look like when we are not in the Gender Clinic, the family court, or the operating room. My theoretical framework is the ethnomethodology of gender: specifically, the idea that we all are 'passing', and that any study of trans people tells us equally as much about the constructed nature of cisgender identity. Trans people in Japan are far from a monolithic category. Rather, they comprise a diverse and complex social group with different personal and political aspirations, as well as different ideas of what being transgender means to them and to the wider community. My thesis explores both the collective struggle for trans liberation and the individual ways in which my respondents make lives for themselves. My most significant finding is that of the assumed complete inextricability of heterosexuality from 'proper' gender. Trans people's genders are provisionally acceptable on the basis of their straightness, with no awareness or visibility of gay trans people within or without the community. Based on my respondents' testimonials, on conference papers, and on my on-the-ground involvement with LGBTQ activist groups in Kyoto, I found that trans existence in Japan is undergoing a seismic shift, little of which is visible even to the mainstream public and which is almost completely unknown abroad. Some changes to trans people's collective condition are positive. As of August 2018, for example, health insurance must cover all transition-related care; more and more municipalities are passing anti-discrimination ordinances. However, trans people still have no concrete protections regarding healthcare, education, housing, and many other key areas, although the movement to challenge such discrimination is gathering steam
Assemblages of Memory: Protesting Bodies and Collective Identities at the Wednesday Demonstrations in South Korea
Full text linkThis thesis explores how Japanese colonialism is remembered in contemporary South Korean society by focusing on the weekly protest in support of the resolution of the ‘comfort women’ issue known as the Wednesday Demonstrations. Memories of Japanese military sexual slavery had been suppressed in patriarchal South Korea for approximately half a century before being catapulted to the surface of the collective consciousness in the early 1990s by a survivor’s public testimony. Over the next thirty years, the ‘comfort women’ movement grew in numbers mainly through the Wednesday Demonstrations and the memorial installed at the protest site. Established as a festive platform advocating for peace and human rights, the Wednesday Demonstrations were suddenly embroiled in intense contestation in May 2020 when another ‘comfort women’ survivor offered public testimony – this time describing the mistreatment she had received from the activist group organising the Wednesday Demonstrations. This attracted counter-protesters to the protest site and transformed it into a space of disputation among various protest groups sympathising with different conceptions of nationalism. Based on ethnographic research spanning the periods before and after the arrival of counter-protesters, this thesis investigates how different groups protesting at the Wednesday Demonstrations site perform their acts of protest while exploring the relations these performances have with the collective identity of the Korean nation. The stories presented include those of survivors of sexual slavery resenting their past, of people sympathising with the suffering of ‘comfort women’ victims, and of groups who disbelieve in the narrative offered up by the ‘comfort women’ movement. The close associations of the Wednesday Demonstrations with national identity make it a prime example of the contestation of ‘sites of memory’ (Nora 1989). This thesis takes this site of memory and analyses it as an assemblage, understood based on the assemblage thinking developed through the works of Gilles Deleuze and Fe lix Guattari as a multiplicity of elements gathering into an overall entity and undergoing transformations powered by affect. The application of assemblage thinking to the analysis of a site of memory stresses the emotional, performative, and transformative aspects of memory. By doing so, this thesis aims to contribute to the discussion in the subfield of memory studies known as memory activism through an analysis of streets protests as an urban form of ritual
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