Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture edited by Timothy J. Craig. Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe, 2000.
For the West, Japanese culture has traditionally been associated with geisha girls, exotic dress and Oriental art. In the 1970's, other stereotypes emerged: economic success, business efficiency, long working hours, extreme formality and successful imitations. Recently, however, a new image from Japan has emerged on the world scene. Japan is now becoming renowned for its cartoons, comic books and pop stars. Pop culture is big business in Japan, and its exports are sweeping through Asia and Europe and beginning to penetrate the North American markets. In his anthology Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture, Timothy Craig, an international business instructor at the University of Victoria, skillfully demonstrates that the Japanese have become successful transformers of various forms of pop culture.
Throughout his collection of well chosen essays, Craig explores the various facets of Japanese pop. Each essay gives insights into the uniqueness of the pop genre, or at least tries to explain its growth in popularity in Japan and throughout the world. The book is aptly divided into four major sections: popular music, comics and animation, television and film, and pop culture abroad. Within these sections, the reader becomes familiar with popular jazz, anime (Japanese animated film), manga (comics), enka (a musical style that mixes Western and Japanese elements), karaoke, video games, television and teen idols.
The anthology does not address all forms of popular culture. Books such as Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture are certainly broader in scope, covering religious culture, the performing arts, sports and architecture. Instead, Craig focuses on the genuinely influential examples of Japanese pop culture -- the Tora-san movies, Doraemon, Sailor Moon, and many others that have become household words in Japan and in many parts of the world.
By examining these different genres, the reader quickly discovers that Japan pop is highly complex and diverse, having evolved over the last decade to its current high quality of artistic skill and craftsmanship. Through his selections, Craig manages to capture the flavor of Japan pop. His readings clearly illustrate recurring themes and characteristics, and the reader is certainly able to answer questions like “What’s so special about Japanese pop culture?” and “Why is it gaining such popularity outside Japan?” (6).
The idea of the anthology grew out of a conference on Japanese pop culture held at the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 1997. Craig noticed a gap between the different groups interested in pop culture and hoped that his collection of essays would allow these groups to “speak” or at least “understand” the same language (21). To accomplish this task, the anthology provides a mixture of popular and scholarly readings with representatives of both Japanese and Western viewpoints. However, since each contribution has been written in isolation from each other, the reader is often left with insufficient information and an overlapping of ideas. Craig attempts to bridge this gap with his lengthy introduction, but the readers are left wanting more. A bibliography containing source material would have been a useful inclusion, as well as a glossary of key terms for North American readers.
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