Global Adentity:
Theorizations from Japan
Todd Joseph Miles Holden
Mediated Sociology
Dept. of Multi-Cultural Societies
Tohoku 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) groupbased 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 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 overemphasized
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 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
Sports Television
TV’s Re-import of Japan’s sports exports (in the
form of advertisements, news stories, wideshow 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 Identity
Media 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.
2.
3.
4.
Japanese out in the world
Japanese succeeding in the world
Japanese national teams
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
as visual
representations,
which when
removed from their
totality, offer a
microcosm of that
world from which
they are extracted
Fractals as Structurespecific
The fractal analogy
must be tempered by
the understanding
that, just as with a
triangle or a
snowflake, it is limited
to representing a
particular object or
active 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
these two concepts is the
Distortion engendered by
underlying Structure:
• Political-Economic
• Historical-Cultural
• Social 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)