Much of Japan pop is repetitive. For example, the popular song style known as enka is made up of a combination of sounds taken from a large repertoire of musical formulas. The songs are comprised of stock phrases and scenerios. Similarly, many television shows and musical releases use repetitive themes or patterns. The plots seldom change and the outcomes are predictable. The show Tora san, televised for thirty years, had the same basic plot from one episode to the next. The Japanese audience, like television audiences around the world it seems, prefers the predictable and the nostalgic. They know what to expect and the new reminds them of the old. This preference for predictability is a reaction against the intense change that has surrounded Japan’s rapid industrialization.
Japanese pop also exhibits a strong element of feminism. Many women have successfully written and directed their own shows and comics, and they are figured as heroes in much of the pop literature. Sailor Moon, for example, features females as superheroes. They are fighting, warrior-like, yet definitely feminine, full of romantic notions and filled ideas about fashion and appearance. The emphasis on both male and female characteristics makes this particular show appealing to both genders. In fact, most genres in Japan try to capture audiences of varied age groups.
Manga, for example, is a book-length comic that people can read aboard fast trains or in crowded environments. First marketed for the baby boomers, it now has expanded to embrace a wide range of consumers, and the Shonen Magazine and Shonen Jump are household words to Japanese children. Manga are noted for their illustrations that convey emotion and tell a story for which people do not require full concentration. For this reason, manga are equally suited to the tired businessperson as to the younger generation raised on television who prefer pictures to print. Indeed, many manga, like Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, use illustrations that create cinematic effects with a mixture of far away shots, closeups and angles. The images are not detailed but are rather a series of strokes that create a generic person with whom anyone can identify.
Many genres illustrate the versatility of Japanese pop culture to mix traditional and contemporary elements. Enka, which could be described as a kind of Japanese country-and-western music, is very innovative, combining western instruments with Japanese scales and vocal techniques. In this and other types of popular music, English words are interspersed with Japanese words. In many ways, this mixture is a reflection of the modern culture that often uses English words in Japanese sentences because no Japanese word exists or because the English word conveys a wider semantic range (96).
While each pop genre is distinctive, much of Japan pop shows striking similarities. Unlike North American literature, where life is often depicted ideally (the happily-ever-after Disney notion), life in Japan pop is portrayed realistically with both triumph and tragedy. The characters are also more rounded and include both their strengths and their weaknesses. Even the villains have redeeming qualities. This is a concept that presents moral problems to some Westerners. For example, mistresses are often depicted sympathetically with such desirable traits as loyalty and devotion. Therefore, while despising their profession, the reader is forced to recognize that they may possess some important virtues.
Next page: Japanese Pop's Growth Throughout the World
