Global Adentity: Theorizations from Japan. Todd Joseph Miles Holden Mediated Sociology Dept. of Multi-Cultural Societies Tohoku University Sendai, Japan.

Global Adentity:

Theorizations from Japan

Todd Joseph Miles Holden

Mediated SociologyDept. of Multi-Cultural

SocietiesTohoku University

Sendai, Japan

Paper prepared for the Association for Cultural Studies’ Crossroads, 2006, Conference

• Istanbul Bilgi University, 20-23 July, 2006

Overview

This presentation is based on numerous interlocked (theoretical) parts:•Mediated Identity• Adentity•Global Career• Sportsports

Basic Claim

• The melding of contemporary ads, globalization through sports, and the core position of sportsports in Japanese society has resulted in the re/production and conjugation of local identity.

Demonstrated

Assessing scores of advertisements involving Japanese athletes, this paper reveals complex adentifications in Japan today, concerning: “we Japanese”, group affiliation, independence, individual achievement, freedom, self-esteem, gender, sexuality and the uniqueness of indigenous cultural values.

About “Mediated Identity”

• Definition here

About “Adentity”

• The mediation by advertising of Japanese images of self, group, nation, possibility and performance– It amounts to a phenomenon due to its

ubiquity

Past Work on Adentity

Scanning advertisements, one continually encounters product - mediated identifications.

• The product provides its user with an identity

• The product maintains or validates one’s «true» (core) identity

• The product assists the user in unleashing unexpressed identities

Past Work on Adentity

Scanning advertisements, one can content analyze based on previously theorized categories. Thus, one finds:

• Dominance / Difference• Group traits• Signification• Similarity / Difference

Adentity: A working theorization

• significations,• conveyed in advertisements• through representations of sameness

and difference,• and brought into relief by :

1. the relationship between people and products;

2. the depiction of relationship(s) between:1. individuals (and/or)2. groups; and

3. references to (socially constructed) group-based traits.

Adentity: Amendments in the working theorization

Added to the previous would be:• significations,• conveyed in advertisements• through representations of individual activity• And the identifications (to self, group and

nation) that accrue as a result

The reason for this addition will become clear as we consider the next element in this discussion: “sportsports”

About “Sportsports”

Sportsports is a two-fold phenomenon linked to – if not fueling – globalization.

It involves the flow of sporting “goods” – in the form of games, players, practices and philosophies – both into and out of nations.

This is a flow that is abetted, if not entirely propped up by media.– delivered via TV, newspapers, Internet, advertising,

magazines and books

Effect

This has effectively multiplied discourse about what it means to be Japanese in the contemporary world.

Specifically, this has transpired via codification of sports information into conceptions of:

• inside and outside• local (national) and global• self and other.

Macro Level Analysis:“Global Career”

• This conceives of globalization as transpiring in stages or “careers” – distinctly expressed for various theoretically specifiable entities, epochs, and activities.

• In a nutshell, deciphering a nation’s career means distinguishing between the "import” and “export" of ideas, personnel, diplomacy, trade and military contact, to name but a few, at different historical moments.

Japan’s Past Careers

• Japan’s past careers have corresponded to the political, economic, and social sectors; today, however, it is the cultural sector that drives the country’s global career.

• Specifically, it is the import and (especially) export of sport/stars – most often abetted by indigenous media such as television news, entertainment programming, advertising, the Internet and publishing.

• Although Japan’s popular cultural stage of globalization includes film, music and fashion, the most locally pervasive and influential is sportsports

About Japanese Television

The Role of TelevisionThe Role of Television

“Binding Mechanism”– Not only linking citizen to State, but– Connecting a community through the

inculcation, re/production of shared beliefs, practices and values

The role of Japan’s sports exports in serving as an emotional unifier, as a binding mechanism, cannot be over-emphasized

Shunya Yoshimi (2003)

• Historical assessment of TV in Japan• Argues that TV has been a “symbolic object

linked to nation and gender” (2003: 475).• Also it has “structured the horizons of

people’s bodily sensations and experiences through its broadcasts.” (ibid.).

• “The intimate sphere of the Japanese household in its postwar form was itself created on a national scale through the medium of TV.” (ibid.:477)

Shunya Yoshimi (2003)

• Concludes that “TV was the central medium in the construction of this postwar nation state.”

• And… “although the nationalism forming the basis of TV has begun to disintegrate, on the level of ideology and program scheduling, nationalism is even stronger than before.”

TV’s Binding FunctionTV’s Binding Function

Japanese TV employs genre, form and content to elicit emotion, thereby creating a national family– a nation-wide uchi– See Holden and Ergul (“Japan’s Televisual

Discourses: Infotainment, intimacy, and the construction of a collective uchi, Forthcoming)

The Binding Function of The Binding Function of Sports TelevisionSports Television

TV’s Re-import of Japan’s sports exports (in the form of advertisements, news stories, wide-show topics, and actual game footage) serve as:– an emotional unifier– a binding mechanism

Supported by the News Routines, Tropes and Rhetorical Practices of the Media

About TV Advertising in Japan

Fractals of IdentityMedia Routines have

created fractals that contain specific, consistent messages.

One of the major messages speaks: (1) of Japan’s globality, and (2) Japanese achievement and ability under conditions of globality.

“MOVE THE WORLD”

Japan’s Media Fractals and their Unified Refractions

Looking at the daily stream of data from fixed formatic approaches in TV’s CMs, sports news, and morning and wide shows, one sees consistent frames:

1. Japanese out in the world2. Japanese succeeding in the world3. Japanese national teams4. Japanese individuals representing the nation

This basically amounts to the same unified frame

Fractal Defined

A fractal is:• any of a variety of extremely irregular curves

or shapes• for which any suitably chosen part is similar

in shape• to a given larger or smaller part • when magnified or reduced to the same size

Simple Fractal

These fractals most commonly come to mind

Complex Fractals

But these profound structures are also fractals

Fractals as Societal Slices

Fractals, then, serve Fractals, then, serve as visual as visual representations, representations, which when which when removed from their removed from their totality, offer a totality, offer a microcosm of that microcosm of that world from which world from which they are extractedthey are extracted

Fractals as Structure-specific

The fractal analogy The fractal analogy must be tempered by must be tempered by the understanding the understanding that, just as with a that, just as with a triangle or a triangle or a snowflake, it is limited snowflake, it is limited to representing a to representing a particular object or particular object or active fieldactive field

Refraction: Defined

Refraction is the bending of a wave when it enters a medium within which its speed then differs.

Refraction

Thus, we can assert that a second kind of distortion engendered by media is “refraction”

Refraction: Distortion in Transmission

Refraction is influenced by the speed of the medium through which it passes

Refraction: Distortion in Lens and Substance

Distortion is measured by the “degree of bending” • With light serving as communication (both as

source and by analogy)

Distortion depends on:• substances that come in contact with the wave of

light

• The lens through which that light passes

Applied to Contemporary Japan

• The medium through which light is being passed is actually the “media” • News program, Wide Show, Advertising, Newspapers, etc.• Where each of these reflect a different “substance” (akin to vacuum,

water, gas, etc.)• The speed which the communication passes through the medium is

heightened by Internet’s 24 hour news cycle, as well as TV’s 20 hour cycle

• Supported by nightly news, morning “wake-up” and afternoon “wide shows”

• The light which is emitted is the communication• The light emerges as vectors reflecting differently colored “light”.

Examples include:• Consumption• Politics• Internationality• Popular Culture• Nationalism

Refraction Exemplified

1. Commercial Refraction

2. Consumption Refraction

3. Political Refraction

4. International Refraction

5. PopCult Refraction

6. Gender Refraction

7. Nationalism Refraction

Commercial Refraction

Consumption Refraction

Political Refraction

International Refraction

PopCult Refraction

Gender Refraction

Nationalist Refraction

The Bridge Between Fractals and Refraction

The connection between The connection between these two concepts is the these two concepts is the Distortion engendered by Distortion engendered by underlying Structure:underlying Structure:

• Political-EconomicPolitical-Economic• Historical-Cultural Historical-Cultural • Social PsychologicalSocial Psychological

“Everyday Nationalism” and Social Reproduction

• In short, nationalism emanates (naturally, without opposition) from the world containing us.– Especially through Institutions like the state,

but not only the state– The media is a major institution responsible

for transmitting and reproducing social knowledge and “taken-for-granted reality”

• Result: nationalism becomes part and parcel of lived experience

“Everyday Nationalism” as “Common Stock of

Knowledge”• From Berger and Luckmann (1966:41-46)

– CSK is inherent in the “givenness” of things such as institutions

• The institutions serve as bearers and perpetuators of social knowledge

• Their activity (embodying Point of View) also reproduces it

– One example is the State, which is an extensive, external, objective entity often incomprehensible to human agents and resistant to their efforts at changing them (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 60-61)