Media Theory in Japan

M E D I A T H E O R Y in J A PA N
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M E D I A T H E O R Y in J A PA N
marc steinberg and
a l e x a n d e r z a h lt e n , e d i t o r s
Duke University Press Durham and London 2017

© 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steinberg, Marc, [date] editor. | Zahlten, Alexander, [date] editor.
Title: Media theory in Japan / Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, editors.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016043543 (print) | lccn 2016046042 (ebook)
isbn 9780822363125 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822363262 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373292 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Mass media—Philosophy. | Mass media—Social aspects—Japan—
History—20th century. | Mass media—Political aspects—Japan—History—
20th century. | Popular culture—Japan—History—20th century.
Classification: lcc p92.j3 m44 2017 (print) | lcc p92.j3 (ebook) |
ddc 302.23/0952—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043543
cover art: Photo by Alexander Zahlten
Chapter 11 appeared originally in Review of Japanese Culture and Society,

vol. 22, 88–103 and is reproduced with permission.
Contents
Acknowledgments [ix]
Preface (Interface) [xi]

akira mizuta lippit
Introduction [1]
marc steinberg and
alexander zahlten
PA R T I . CO M M U N I C AT I O N T E C H N O LO G I E S
1. From Film to Television:

Early Theories of Television in Japan [33]
aaron gerow
2. Architecture as Atmospheric Media:

Tange Lab and Cybernetics [52]
yuriko furuhata
3. The Media Theory and Media Strategy

of Azuma Hiroki, 1997–2003 [80]
takeshi kadobayashi
4. The InterCommunication Project:

Theorizing Media in Japan’s Lost Decades [101]
marilyn ivy
PA R T I I . P R A C T I C A L T H E O R Y
5. McLuhan as Prescription Drug:

Actionable Theory and Advertising Industries [131]
marc steinberg
6. The Culture Industries and Media Theory in Japan [151]

miryam sas
7. Girlscape:
The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan [173]
tomiko yoda
8. 1980s Nyū Aka:

(Non)Media Theory as Romantic Performance [200]
alexander zahlten
9. Critical Media Imagination:

Nancy Seki’s TV Criticism and
the Media Space of the 1980s and 1990s [221]
ryoko misono
10. At the Source (Code):

Obscenity and Modularity in
Rokudenashiko’s Media Activism [250]
anne mcknight
PA R T I I I . M E D I AT I O N A N D M E D I A T H E O R Y
11. An Assault on “Meaning”:

On Nakai Masakazu’s Concept of “Mediation” [285]
akihiro kitada
12. Much Ado about “Nothing”:

The Kyōto School as “Media Philosophy” [305]
fabian schäfer
13. Kobayashi Hideo and the Question of Media [328]

keisuke kitano
[vi] Contents
14. Media, Mediation, and Crisis:
A History—and the Case for Media Studies
as (Postcultural) Anthropology [347]
tom looser
Afterword. The Disjunctive Kernel

of Japanese Media Theory [368]
mark b. n. hansen
Bibliography [389]
Contributors [413]
Index [417]
Contents [vii]
Acknowledgments
A journey is made by one’s traveling companions, as the Japanese expres-

sion goes. On the journey that resulted in this volume, we had the benefit of
an incredible group of contributors. We thank each and every one of them
for taking the time to put their ideas into conversation, and to forge this
collective project. We are grateful to them for the journey as well as for the
final product. Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault at Duke University Press
were immensely supportive of this project from the very beginning, and
their continuous advice—and patience—were invaluable in navigating it
through its multiple stages. The Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies was
vital in supporting a workshop that allowed the contributors to meet and
spend an intense and very rich two days exchanging ideas on all aspects of
this enterprise. The current form of this volume started to take shape at the
Histories of Film Theories in Asia conference at the University of Michigan
in 2012, organized by Markus Nornes, where we benefited from early and
immensely sensible advice from Tomiko Yoda. Karen Beckman, Yuriko Fu-
ruhata, Joshua Neves, Masha Salazkina, and Haidee Wasson offered guidance
and solidarity in the art of creating an edited collection. We extend our deep
thanks to our talented research assistants, Peter Bernard, Alain Chouinard,
Andrew Campana, Kimberlee Sanders, and Edmund Stenson. We thank
everyone in our contexts near and far who offered advice and support dur-
ing this project.
Finally, there is one contributor who is especially in our thoughts. Ryoko
Misono enthusiastically agreed to contribute a central chapter to the volume
at a late stage in its development, greatly enhancing the project as a w hole.
She tragically passed away just days a fter sending in her essay. With Misono-
san the fields of film and media studies in Japan lost one of its most promising
young scholars. It is our hope that this volume helps keep her work alive and
realizes the intervention about which she felt so deeply.
Note on Names:
Japanese names in this volume appear in the order f amily name first, given
name second, unless the person goes by the given name first, family name
second convention. For the sake of consistency, all contributors to this vol-
ume are referred to by their given name first, f amily name second.
[x] Acknowle dgments

Preface (Interface)
A k i r a M i z u ta L i ppi t
The volume that follows is long overdue. Which is not to say that it arrives
late, or even too late, but rather that its timeliness appears in the form of
a long-anticipated, and thus deferred, actualization. It represents a needed
point of contact, or interface, between a media culture and its thought, be-
tween the material and conceptual dimensions of media culture in Japan.
For too long there has been a perception that visual media cultures are prac-
ticed in Japan—film, art, architecture—but understood or thought else-
where. Practiced within but thought from without, this false rift effects an
erasure of t hose who have thought and continue to think media in Japan from
within. Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten’s anthology Media Theory
in Japan brings these dimensions together for the first time, perhaps—
certainly in English—and into a present that also, at once, takes the form of
a past, hence overdue. A past folded at the same time into a present, arriving
in the dual temporalities of a future anterior, or perfect.
This overdue volume portrays a lively media theory in Japan then and
now by many of the critics and theorists most active in media studies t oday.
But even with its publication, this volume remains overdue. Past due, past
the time of its anticipated arrival, Nachträglichkeit, and yet at the same time
absolutely timely in its presentation of a coherent interface between media
theory and practice in Japan. How is it possible to reconcile postponement
with timeliness, and what sort of temporality is invoked in such a temporal
schism?
It is perhaps the temporality of a media theorization par excellence. The
deferred arrival of such a volume, overdue, reveals the problem of a national
media and its theorization as chronic, which is to say, “about time.” What
sutures the practices and discourses of media within a cultural sphere bound
by a single language, however porous, and however multilingual that language
(as Japan’s frequently is), may be temporal. A temporality marked by the time-
liness of delayed arrivals.
In this sense, it is not only history that separates media practices and
discourses, nor even languages and cultures, but also times that disjoin the
two, times that are born of the material infrastructure of media praxes—of
technologies and creativities, technologies of creation, one might say—and
of media discourses, in all of the complexities that language interacts with:
thought, representation, and expression. The task then may lie in finding
the temporality that allows the incommensurate temporalities that define the
media to interface, to encounter one another in a temporality other than one’s
own. It is this temporality that arrives in this volume, overdue.
An overdue volume is also one that acknowledges, and in some cases
settles, debts. These debts are to a set of past inscriptions, “a line of credit,”
to use Derrida’s idiom, that makes possible the present. It is not only about
settling and closing accounts, of “counter-signing” as Derrida says, but also
about acknowledging a past that reverberates in the present, that continues to
resonate in the contemporary discourses on Japanese media. A series of such
lines throughout Media Theory in Japan attribute indebtedness to a present
that channels a frequently underacknowledged foundation.
Keisuke Kitano invokes literary theorist Kobayashi Hideo, while Takeshi
Kadobayashi and Thomas Looser situate Azuma Hiroki’s interventions in
subculture studies as modes of media theory. As antecedents to media theory,
Anne McKnight traces a lineage through feminist art and criticism; Alexan-
der Zahlten, through “New Academicism”; and Fabian Schäfer, through the
Kyoto school, as modes of media philosophy and thought. As critical moments
in the evolution of Japanese media theory, Akihiro Kitada inscribes leftist
philosopher Nakai Masakazu; Ryoko Misono, the artist Nancy Seki; Mari-
lyn Ivy, ntt’s InterCommunication project; Marc Steinberg, the reception
of Marshall McLuhan in Japan; and Miryam Sas, the mistranslation of poet
and theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger. For Yuriko Furuhata, architecture
informs Japan’s media theory; for Tomiko Yoda, it is marketing and advertis-
ing. For Aaron Gerow, the history of Japanese television theory provides a
foundation for contemporary media theory in Japan. Each account offered of
media theory in Japan originates from and returns to a place other than the
narrow confines of e ither nation or thought. A portrait of displaced origins
and impossible teleologies appears throughout Media Theory in Japan.
This volume, then, is as much about an alternative media archaeology as
it is about theorizing the eccentric genealogies it reveals; as much about pay-
ing dues and giving due to those that make the present visible. The authors
[xii] Akira Mizuta Lippit

of Media Theory in Japan settle a debt that goes beyond the field of media
studies; one that expands the realm of media in Japan to include philosophy,
feminism, literary theory, economics, and art. What makes the nature of
these accounts of media archaeology in Japan, these lines of credit extended,
remarkable is that they mark the advent of a media theory located not only
in media studies. A media theory that takes place not only outside of the na-
tion but also as a discourse of the outside. A media theory that comes from
and returns to a Japan dislocated.
In Japan and elsewhere, media studies represents the aggregation of vari
ous disciplines, lines of thought, and modes of expression. Its boundaries are
located not in national or even postnational contours, nor are they effects of
cultural, ethnic, or aesthetico-political practices. Instead, the media and its
thought take place as a series of extensions, to borrow McLuhan’s idiom, and as
what Deleuze and Guattari call “lines of intensity” and extensity, which traverse
technology and art, practice and expression, discourse and politics. As intensi-
ties, these lines move from without to within Japan; as extensities, from within to
without. In this matrix of media praxis and thought, Japan itself becomes a
medium, an interface of multiple lines of practice and thought bound by the
charges that animate the nation as a temporary and finite media state. Japan
itself is not, as the authors reveal, a permanent state, nor is Japanese media a
national entity, an infrastructure of phenomenon. Japanese media theory is
defined by the authors in this volume not as the delineation of a national prac-
tice but rather as the disarticulation of a national discourse; media theory in
this sense performs a “dejapanization.”1 To undo the nation, but also to under-
stand the name of the nation not as the culmination of a discourse but as that
which is already inscribed in advance, and then erased. Déjàponisme, déjàpan.
In this formulation, what is overdue comes to be déjà vu. What arrives
late was already there once before. Japan appears and disappears in this
work, an organizing principle/unsustainable origin, and destination. B ecause
all media actualized and theorized exceed the terms by which nations are
formed. Media practice and theory are no more Japanese than they are clas-
sical Greek or modern American, no more “Oriental” than Western: they
arrive in the form of translations and mistranslations, transpositions and dis-
placements, taking place between and outside of nations as such. And thus
perpetually.
the critical probl em taken up by Media Theory in Japan is neither

media theory nor Japan as such but the conjunction that brings them into
Preface [xiii]
contact: in. What type of interface does the title’s “in” represent? For the
chapters that constitute this volume hardly remain within Japan: what takes
place in and around media theory in Japan comes from without as well as
from within, not only from the registers of national thought but also from
within and without the disciplines and practices one might call “media the-
ory.” Media Theory in Japan is thus neither about media theory nor Japan but
rather a phantasmatic possibility of the two together, conjoined by an “in,”
which is not even or strictly in. The “in” here also means “out,” within and
without, inside out as much as outside in.
In this sense, the volume undoes the very set of binds, dialectics, and
causalities that would ascribe lineage and nationality to ideas, as if such fab-
rications were even possible. In Media Theory in Japan, media theory itself
disappears along with Japan, only to return as a series of provocations that
begin neither here nor t here, and arrive, as it were, only when overdue, en-
suring the postponement of a destination that would posit something like a
“media theory in Japan.” Déjàponisme might describe the trope that undoes
the axioms of national thought and practice but also speaks of their simul-
taneity: media theory in Japan can only be thought, perhaps in advance and
après coup. As such, any timeliness would require the split temporalities and
historicities that this volume performs. To arrive overdue is to arrive on
time, in time, as a chronic mode of undoing what cannot be done in the
first instance, which is to ascribe national identity to thought, particularly
to media thought. To be overdue, in this case, is also to invoke déjà vu. A pres
ent made possible by the before that appears in every after, the after inscribed
in any before.
How then to preface that which is overdue and déjà vu? What does it
mean to write before such a volume, to inscribe or prescribe a text before a
set of interventions that arrive later than imagined or desired? How to signal
that which has already come and returned again? What could such a preface
achieve, and in what temporal form?
To preface a work is to stand before it, to speak in advance of that which
follows. It is at once a provocation (calling forth) and an utterance a priori:
the first word, or rather a word before the first word, facing before any face
has appeared. But when the word to come has already come, when what
follows is also already past, then any preface can only intervene en route.
Because the interventions collected in this volume signal a history of theory
in transit as well as transition, the only possible preface would be an in-
terface. That which would arrive in the m iddle, which is to say never, sus-
[xiv] Akira Mizuta Lippit

pended in a thought in transit, and no longer prefatory. A preface defaced, if
not effaced, neither undone nor overdue, in lieu of a proper preface to arrive
later, perhaps much later, in due time.
notes
1. See, in this connection, Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Playing against Type: On Postwar
Japanese Film,” Artforum (February 2013): 210–17.
Preface [xv]
INTRODUCTION
m a rc st e i n b e rg a n d a l e x a n der z ah lt en
Can you name five media theorists from Japan? This is intended less as a
confrontational question than a loaded one. If you can, what are you saying
about theory? What are you saying about media? If one moves beyond the
very specific and circumscribed sociotope of North American and Euro
pean academic work on media (or Japan), and what is defined as “theory” by
what “we” do, then questions come crashing in that force a reassessment of
some of the goals, assumptions, and methods of a very important inquiry:
How can we understand our inescapable relationship to media? How can we
understand our attempts to understand media, especially under the wobbly
umbrella of “theory”? And how do we move away from a narrowly defined
“we” in both of these questions?
In the English-language context both early discourse on media and its
recent resurgence have tended to elide engagement with some of the most
complex sites of media practice and theorization. Theorists wrote instead
from the position of the universal, assuming that the West stood in for the
world. This tendency to a degree continues with the rise of the Internet and the
spread of digital media, at a moment when media theory in the European and
American milieus has gained a new and more speculative life. In the wake of
the flurry of work around new media, the retracing of formerly new media,
and the subsequent critique of the framework of the “new,” there has been
a turn to what can now be called media theory or media studies in a novel
form. New lines of inquiry emerge from the convergence of film, screen,
and video studies; cultural studies; science and technology studies; and new
media studies, as these established fields are being reshaped in the process.1
The objects of media studies are the many forms of media made visible by
new media studies, past and present. Its concerns are with format, platform,
infrastructure, body, paper, language, and other facets of mediation, ranging
from the decidedly abstract to the distinctly material.2 Scholars wrestling
with the affordances of this specific transitional moment in media history
are searching for the theoretical tools to engage with a radically shifting
media ecology. Forgotten texts from another era of media transformation—
most notably Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, penned at a time
when the new medium of television was first turning heads—have devel-
oped a renewed influence. Moreover, German media theory represented by
the work of Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst has had a strong impact on
Anglo-American work on new media, even as the scope of this work is still
being explored.
However, knowledge of media-theoretical discourse outside of North
America and Europe is extremely limited. Japan, with one of the largest and
most complex media industries on the planet and a rich and sophisticated
history of theorization of modern media, is nearly a complete blank spot on
the Euro-American media-theoretical map. If Japanese models of industrial
production were the subject of great interest—and much hand-wringing—
from the 1980s onward, the lively theorization of media taking place in Japan
was markedly not. If media technologies and media cultures from Japan—
consider trends in mobile media and miniaturization—exerted immense
influence on everyday life around the world, then the specific models of
media that thinkers in Japan have developed have remained overwhelm-
ingly unknown even to specialists. Philosopher Nakai Masakazu’s theory
of film reception, formulated in the 1930s, focuses on the lack of a copula
in film aesthetics and the results for corporeal spectatorship; it would have
been a fruitful approach for reception theory in the United States and Eu
rope decades ago and remains relevant today—if one had had the opportu-
nity to engage with it (see Akihiro Kitada’s contribution in this volume for
Nakai’s approach). This kind of invisibility is particularly regrettable consid-
ering the strong interdisciplinary cross-pollination that the theorization of
media has allowed for in Japan. It is also part of a larger and by now familiar
structural imbalance in knowledge production itself—something that Mit-
suhiro Yoshimoto effectively pinpoints in his critique of the discipline of
film studies—between a West that is figured as the site of Theory, and the
[2] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

Rest as the site of history or raw materials (“texts”).3 As Aaron Gerow fur-
ther elucidates, this structural imbalance was at times internalized by Japa
nese film theorists themselves, who lamented the absence of film theory in
Japan, despite the country’s rich history of film theorization.4
Let us be unequivocal at the outset, then: t here is media theory in Japan.
Even taking a relatively conservative definition of it, the theorization of
media in Japan spans a time period from at least the beginning of the twen-
tieth century until today. Sociologists from Gonda Yasunosuke to Miyadai
Shinji to Ueno Chizuko to Yoshimi Shunya; philosophers from Nakai Ma-
sakazu to Yoshimoto Takaaki (also Yoshimoto Ryūmei); art theorists and
critics such as Ishiko Junzō, Hasegawa Yūko, Matsui Midori, and Sawaragi
Noi; editors and authors such as Ōtsuka Eiji; film critics and theorists such
as Osaki Midori and Hasumi Shigehiko; artists, economists/critics such as
Asada Akira; and ethnologists such as Umesao Tadao—the list of writers who
have profoundly engaged with media goes on. Japan experienced an intensi-
fication and multiplication of media technologies and practices in the twen-
tieth century similar to that in North Americ a and Western Europe. Th ere is
accordingly a long history of reflection on t hese processes. (To give one small
example, the term “information industry” was coined in Japan a decade
before Daniel Bell introduced his idea of the “information age.”)5 These writ-
ers and the debates that they and others have engaged in have formed a
heterogeneous yet dense discourse on the relationship of media and life that
was eminently aware of global developments in media theorization, even as
English-language writing remained almost entirely oblivious to the discus-
sions taking place in Japan. Hence we agree w holeheartedly with Alexander
Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark when they write, “The story
of media theory in the twentieth century has still yet to be written.”6 We
would simply add that this is all the more true in the Japanese context—
not to mention other sites marginalized within the theory imaginary, from
China to South Asia, or Africa to the Arab world.7
This volume aims to trace some of the central theoretical and conceptual
work around media in Japan from the 1910s to the present day, paying at-
tention to the technological, historical, institutional, and cultural practices
that form the ground for its emergence and development. As such, this
volume offers, to our knowledge, the first systematic introduction to and
contextualization of the history of media theory from Japan in any language,
including Japanese. Yet it operates alongside Euro-American frameworks—
chronological history, the concept of “theory”—even as it problematizes
them. The specter of colonial time, then, which defines Euro-American
Introduction [3]
thers as continually belated and too late, lurks in the background of the
O
discussions found h ere.8 Japan, itself a colonial power for the first half of
the twentieth century, has shown the capacity to continually and actively
complicate that specter. The temporality of both theorization and its trans-
mission, then, remains a central concern for this endeavor. A different—but
not necessarily belated—temporality will haunt any discussion of media ter-
minology and theorization. To give but one example, Lev Manovich’s land-
mark volume The Language of New Media (2001) was published in Japanese
in 2014, which is slow for a publishing industry with a massive translation
arm that so quickly responds to global trends in media writing. In fact the
translation lag in this case may be explained if we remember that Japan’s in-
fatuation with the term “new media”—which referred mostly to vcrs, cable
tv, and the computer—had its boom and fizzle in the 1980s, leaving l ittle ap-
petite for the recycled framework of “new media” in the late 1990s and 2000s
(even if this time it was used in reference to computational media).9 Ac-
counting for these differences in uptake and description of media events and
their theorization outside the comfortable synchro-functions of “belated”
and “advanced” opens up new avenues of exploration, which are undertaken
by the essays in this volume.
Two aspects require us to rethink some of our fundamental premises
about what exactly we mean by media theory. First, this compound is a
tenuous link between two moving targets. As David Rodowick describes in
g reat detail in An Elegy for Theory, the concept of theory has a long and vari-
able genealogy, and the linking of theory with a medium such as film—in
the now naturalized form film theory—is intensely historical. As Rodowick
notes when referencing the first time this then highly idiosyncratic link was
formulated by Béla Bálazs: “What film studies has forgotten in the interven-
ing decades is the strangeness of this word, as well as the variable range and
complexity of the questions and conceptual activities that have surrounded it
over time like clouds reflecting light and shadow in ever-changing shapes.”10
This variability is joined by the shifting criteria for defining or even just nam-
ing “media.” Lev Manovich has pointed out some of the ways technological
changes have shifted the definitional standards for this qualification, in a
manner that simply adds on new categories without revising the existing
ones. While film and photography were still distinguishable via the divisions
between time-and space-based media going back to Lessing, the advent of
television and video did not allow for that framework. Instead they were al-
lotted roles as distinct media by the practices they afforded. The criteria thus
shifted to the social sphere and to questions of engagement. The computer,

in Manovich’s argument, radicalizes that shift and confronts us with a post-
medium situation.11
Second, media theory is itself profoundly reliant on media—particularly
the medium of print, and the circulatory networks of print capitalism (mag-
azines, journals, book volumes, and their publishers), but also the specific
configurations of media institutions and their histories, with which media
theorization grapples. Th
ere is more interaction between media theory and
the contexts for this theorization than has been accounted for in most stud-
ies of media theory.
The Situation Is Media Theory

We can best illustrate this last point by turning to the very title of this vol-
ume, which raises more questions than it answers: Media Theory in Japan.
As several of our contributors aptly pointed out in a workshop leading up to
this volume, all of these terms deserve to be put in quotation marks. Each
term within this title raises questions: What are media? What is media the-
ory? What is media theory in Japan?
Whichever question we grapple with, one thing is clear: media theory
as a kind of conceptual work is conditioned by the constellation of media
and the practices associated with them. Hence this book’s emphasis on
“in Japan”; this is not simply a marker of a location but a way of broach-
ing the inevitably contextual process of media theorization itself. (Here we
bracket the way that “Japan” is a baggy construct that stands in for a series
of often geographically circumscribed practices of writing and interaction
that sometimes engage the question of the nation but just as often do not.
Indeed, the case could be made that media theorization is quite a regional
affair, sometimes centered in Kyoto, as in the 1930s, and sometimes in Tokyo.
Still, we use “Japan” as a conceptual shorthand for the intersection at which
this engagement with media occurs.) As media studies moves away from its
exclusive concern with the temporal location of “new media,” we take the
opportunity to pose questions about the spatial locatedness of theory and
the specificity of certain kinds of theoretical work. This enables the explica-
tion of the geopolitical unconscious (or semiconscious) of media theory,
structured among o thers by university ranking systems, the uneven trickle
and flow of translation, military and economic power, and an aesthetic poli-
tics of knowledge.
W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen’s Critical Terms for Media Stud-
ies offers an inspiring point of departure for moving beyond media theory’s
Introduction [5]
recent emphasis on thinking new media, showing the continuities between
thinking about media new and old. The volume helpfully suggests the ter-
rain encompassed by media studies, and maps out a number of theoretical
problems that compose the field of media theory. As Mitchell and Hansen
forcefully emphasize in their introduction, media do not simply designate
an externality against which to position the human. Rather, “media names
an ontological condition of humanization,”12 and for this reason is a perspec-
tive from which to think the human-media condition. Hence Mitchell and
Hansen propose that we pivot away from Friedrich Kittler’s famous dictum
“Media determine our situation”13 to instead situate “media as a perspective
for understanding.” This shift, they write, “allows us to reassert the crucial
and highly dynamic role of mediation—social, aesthetic, technical, and (not
least) critical—that appears to be suspended by Kittler.”14
But what happens if the very conditions of thinking mediation arise from
the particular media and media-cultural forms with which we interact? This
is an aspect of media theorization that Mitchell and Hansen’s volume—and
the vast majority of writings on the subject—tends to pass over in silence.
Put differently, the contributions to their volume concern media problems
often posed in the language of the universal, drawing on texts and traditions
that are exclusively from European or American contexts. While the techno-
logical and intellectual development of media theory is examined, the geo
graphical or geocultural focus on American, British, French, and German
events and writers is all too pronounced.15 In that sense, media theory has
always already been a covert subset of Euro-American area studies on the
one hand, and complicit in larger geopolitical power structures on the other.
The canon is also a cannon.
In this book we pass from the ontological status of the coconstitution
of human and media, to the practical (and historically grounded) problem
of how distinct cultural-media configurations give rise to distinct forms of
mediation, and distinct kinds of media theorization. That is, we resist the
universal language of theory in favor of a contextual and unstable practice
of theory, without giving up on the belief that theorization—of media or
anything else for that matter—is an indispensable tool with which to grapple
with our times.
This volume of essays proposes to make this shift from media theory as
universal to media theory as a practice composed of local, medium-specific,
and culture-inflected practices. Such practices are as much about perfor
mance and the particular dynamics of a given media ecology as the content
of a given theory. This volume, then, proposes to reframe certain practices

as part of a history of media theorization. Ideas cannot be separated from
the economic, historical, and medial conditions of production. This is not
simply to say in a materialist vein that ideas are produced by material con-
ditions, however. The essays in this volume also show how the practices of
theory themselves intervene in and transform these medial and economic
conditions. Theory makes the news, and theoreticians sometimes become
media celebrities, making theory of media in the media. We acknowledge
too that theory may be—or perhaps even habitually is—consumed as a com-
modity, complete with cycles of novelty and obsolescence that have pro-
found consequences for the ways that theories are produced, circulated, and
read.16 We may go so far as to say that debates and denominational battles
between proponents of competing media, theoretical paradigms and the way
they are organized tell us as much about t hese paradigms as the conceptual
frameworks they put forward. Theory, as it is understood here, is as much
based on the performative as the constative, not to mention the mediatically
connective. The modes of performance of theory tell us something about the
theories themselves, and, we argue, require us to rethink the very status of
media theory today. Put differently, accounting for the materiality of media
theory opens the space for rethinking the materiality of media.
We might paraphrase Kittler, then: situation determines our media the-
ory. Or perhaps more accurately: the situation of more or less temporally
and spatially bounded media cultures and ecologies determines or informs
media theory. This gives us the opportunity to, on the one hand, test the
ways canonical media theories from Europe and North America have fared
in different climes, and, on the other, also see how existing philosophical or
critical movements in Japan can be read differently when looked at from the
angle of media and mediation. The importance of the situation does not sim-
ply mean we need to gather more empirical facts about local media theories;
it also means that the very contours of what we call media theorization must
be tested, and reexamined. Situation informs, or transforms, theorization.
Media Theory in Japan, then, presumes that different media-cultures
give rise to distinct forms of media theorization, and also require that think-
ers of media reexamine what they mean by “media theory.” Rather than
starting with a restrictive or prescriptive sense of what media theorization
is or should be, our contributors approach the contours of media theory
in an exploratory manner. As always, what is included in the category of
theory is a political question that often brings understandings of media
encrusted from years of living with the existing canon. Without wishing to
completely relativize the term, the essays here nonetheless provoke a sense
Introduction [7]
of questioning around what habitually is called “theory.” This means that
on the one hand, writers in the European and American context should
understand their work as conditioned by historical circumstance, and on
the other, that they use this as a basis for understanding other contexts as
something more than a variation on a universal theme. It also means that
writers in Japan or other non-Euro-American contexts understand their dis-
courses as something other than “local.” Our hope is that the diverse modes
of media theorization or media studies in Japan (and elsewhere) potentially
highlight the presuppositions of “media theory” as it is practiced and ar-
ticulated today, in a predominantly European and American media studies
context.
Hence this book does not walk the narrow path of an intellectual history,
nor does it offer an account of pure ideas that stands in for the ahistorical
aura of high theory. Instead it holds on to the premise that the conditions of
knowledge production work back on the knowledge produced. It also aims to
build on existing channels that create the institutional conditions for multi-
channel exchange. By building on existing projects such as Traces, Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies, and Mechademia, which aim to create new series of “inter-
references”—to borrow Kuan-Hsing Chen’s felicitous term—that translate
and generate dialogues in, around, and outside Asia, as well as projects that
aim to translate and make available film and cultural theory in English, this
volume participates in the questioning and unsettling of the unidirectional
translation of Western sources into local target languages.17
In Kittler and the Media, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young addresses the manner
in which non-Anglo-American media theories are marked from the outset:
The overwhelming presence of the Anglo-American academic industry

in media and communication studies is such that many Anglophone
practitioners no longer consider it necessary to situate their work by
using national adjectives, yet contributions that originate elsewhere
need to be labeled “French,” “German,” or “Japanese.” These appella-
tions do not refer to anything specific to France, Germany, or Japan,
but merely serve to indicate that the work in question is not English.
Nonetheless, the label German can and should be applied to Kittler.18
The question we engage here is a similar one: To what degree is Japan not
merely an appellation designating something that is not Anglo-American?
How might “in Japan” designate a set of qualities or conditions that orient
the work of media analysis, and mark the modes of circulation of media the-
ory? How might attention to the situation force us to pause, and rethink our

assumption—held particularly strongly in North American institutions—
that the default setting for media theory is Americ a; for a philosophy of
media, France; and for media philosophy, Germany?
Zeronendai—Thought from the Aughts

Perhaps this point would be best made by referring to the situation from
which this project emerged. In medias res, as it were, in the midst of an effer-
vescence of media theorization in Japan: the 2000s. This is a moment when
an increasingly large group of writers—collectively referred to in Japan as
zeronendai no shisō, or “thought of the aughts”—took to analyzing Japan’s
vibrant popular media formations from the vantage point of an engagement
with critical theory. The result was a critical mass of multigenerational writ-
ers bending themselves to the task of engaging critically with the spread of
mobile phones, the rise of the Internet, the increasing cultural prominence
of console and computer games, and especially the transformations of fan
cultures that were read as the frontlines of changes in Japan’s media-cultures.
It was also a moment when such theorization produced best sellers, fueling
a high-velocity rhythm of zeronendai publications. Examining the particu-
larities of this moment will allow us to demonstrate the complexities of the
situation of media theory.
Starting in the early 1990s practitioner-critics such as Nakajima Azusa
and Ōtsuka Eiji began to write complex analyses of the intersection of
fandom and the popular media culture around manga and anime, often as
an indicator of broader sociopolitical developments. From the mid-to late
1990s, writers such as the psychoanalyst Saitō Tamaki, the sociologist Mi-
yadai Shinji, the sociologically inflected writer Kotani Mari, and a young
critic trained in Russian literature and Derridean philosophy called Azuma
Hiroki turned toward the crucial intersection of anime-manga-games-light
novels and the cultural transformations they saw as attending the rise of
digital media. Azuma in particular began actively fostering an even younger
clique of writers who took on various aspects of (generally male-oriented)
otaku, or geek media forms, though the discourse was by this point largely
dominated by young male voices. This very male clique points to a longer
history of exclusion of female voices from Japanese media writing, which
in turn suggests the need to look elsewhere to sites where female writers
could do media theoretical work, from manga writing and criticism—where
important work on queer (media) theory has developed—to art historical
writing. The centrality of zeronendai critics was due in part to their creation
Introduction [9]
of multiple platforms for their work, among which was the prominent if
short-lived journal Shisō chizu (Thought map), which Azuma cofounded
and coedited with sociologist and media theorist Akihiro Kitada.19 This and
other platforms gave the sense of a coherent discursive space in which t hese
writers could develop critical analyses of aspects of Japanese media culture.
Most engaging was the way the writers combined an attention to techno-
cultural transformations that were under way with a close attention to fan
media forms.
Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, originally serialized in 2001
and published as a paperback volume in the same year as Dōbutsuka suru
posutomodan (Animalizing the Postmodern), became a best seller and one of
the main markers of this development, performing a function similar to Lev
Manovich’s landmark The Language of New Media, published the very same
year in English. Azuma focuses on animation, theorizes the database as a
principal construct for the interpretation of post-Internet culture, and ex-
amines new media artifacts such as fan-produced video games—all topics
that resonate with Manovich’s work. Where they differ is that for Azuma the
representative structuring force of new media and contemporary Japanese
society (what Azuma calls the “postmodern,” extending the life of a term by
then in the decline) is to be found in Japan’s fan culture and the figure of the
otaku. In short, it is an analysis of new media through the prism of the geek.20
Instead of a study of new media anchored in discussions of the filmic and
net.art avant-gardes (Manovich), the central anchor for new media studies in
Japan becomes the lowbrow, avant-pop, subcultural forms of anime, manga,
and dating simulation games.
As a result, the grounds for new media theorization of the 2000s in Japan
were less what Geert Lovink calls “vapor theory” and Jeffrey Sconce calls
“vapor studies”—speculative and questionable studies of new media from
the angle of f uture technologies to come (albeit t here was some of this too).21
Rather, the grounds for zeronendai thought tended to be the actually exist-
ing, concrete, if equally masculinist studies of male fans’ productions of and
interactions with dating sims, often down to the level of programming code.
Fan cultures w ere placed at the center of this media writing, albeit removed
from the complexities of reception studies normally associated with the study
of fans from a cultural studies perspective. To put it polemically, imagine if
4chan (a clone of the Japanese Futaba channel, which is itself a clone of the
2chan), not net.art or virtual reality, were at the analytical core of new media
studies in North America, and one will get the sense of the object parameters
of Japanese new media theorization.

The interest the zeronendai writers generated both inside and outside of
Japan—Azuma is widely read in South Korea, for example—in many ways
made this volume’s project of writing a history of media theory in Japan think-
able. As a network of theorization that is both proximate and distant, the ze-
ronendai work became, for us, a useful point of departure.22 For one t hing, an
encounter with zeronendai work also necessitates a recalibration of what we
mean by “theory”; the works produced by the zeronendai writers draw on but
do not usually read as high theory. It also is not Theory in the capital T sense
that is figured in Terry Eagleton’s suggestion that “theory means a reason-
ably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions,” or, as he puts it later
in his book After Theory, in speaking of “critical self-reflection which we
know as theory”: “Theory of this kind comes about when we are forced into
a new self-consciousness about what we are d oing.”23 While theory may in-
deed be defined as a kind of self-reflexive practice, it is also something more.
It has another a ngle that we might term the cultures of theory—cultures here
including languages, disciplines, institutions, publishing venues, politics of
knowledge mobilization, bookstore display patterns, and local cartographies
of theoretical production and consumption. The cultures of theory must
also include the geopolitical situation in which this theorizing takes place:
print capitalism, the Cold War, the structure of knowledge transfer that
mirrors the very special relationship of the United States and Japan during
the postwar period, and so on. This “something more” to theory becomes
exceedingly clear when we look at the zeronendai group, which never un-
folded its debates through academic journals, and only rarely through con-
ferences. Nor was it neatly the kind of popular theory or vernacular strate-
gies of fans adopting or “poaching” theory, as suggested by Matt Hills—that
is, a kind of theorization from below, by fans.24 That said, it is clear that the
writers associated with zeronendai often themselves explicitly self-identify as
fans, and even more interestingly, self-identify as fans of theoretical practice
itself. Azuma’s operation of theory camps, or dojo, and the theory competi-
tions modeled on the geisai amateur art festivals deployed and exploited
by artist-provocateur Murakami Takashi to find new artistic talent, actively
harnessed this amateur-theory-fan nexus.
The conception of the cultures of theory we posit h ere finds resonance in
what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih envision in their call to “creolize”
theory. “Creolization,” they write, “indexes flexibility, welcomes the test of
reality, and is a mode of theorizing that is integral to the living practices
of being and knowing.” It denotes a mode of theory that “is not the ‘The-
ory’ most familiar to, and at times most vilified by, scholars in the United
Introduction [11]
States.”25 This unfamiliar theory, which nonetheless must be accepted as
theorization, interests us most here.
Defining Media Theory

We have perhaps come to a point where we can better address the questions
that the title of our volume raises, and that we flagged in the opening of this
introduction: What are media? What is media theory? What is media theory
in Japan? Here we would like to move from a general definition of the terms
to a consideration of the disciplinary locus of media theorization, first in the
Anglo-American academies—where traditions of media studies have been
particularly strong—and then in Japan.
Following Mitchell and Hansen, we would assert, “What is to be under-
stood [in media studies] is not media in the plural, but media in the sin-
gular; and it is by understanding media in the singular—which is to say, by
reconceptualizing understanding from the perspective of media—that we
will discover ways to characterize the impact of media in the plural” (Critical
Terms, xxii). Media should not simply be understood as a collection of in-
dividual mediums—books, newspapers, radio, television, Internet, computer,
and so on. Media are not simply “a plurality of mediums, an empirical accumu-
lation of things” (Critical Terms, xxi); they are also the experience of media in
the singular-plural, and the theorization of media that arises from this expe-
rience. Thus understood media are also (significantly for any media society
but maybe especially so for Japan) an emergent system with its own set of dy-
namics and semiautonomous rules. As Galloway, Thacker, and Wark formu-
late in their introduction to Excommunication, “Media force us to think less
about things like senders and receivers, and more about questions of channels
and protocols. Less about encoding and decoding, and more about con-
text and environment” (2). That is, media make us think about more than
classically conceived modes of communication—they force us to examine
the context and environment in which they not only operate but also cocre-
ate. Hence media theory cannot be reduced to communication theory.
There are many possible accounts for the development of media studies.
John Guillory has recently offered an insightful genealogy of the genesis of
the concept of media, arguing that ultimately it is only in the context of the
plurality of media forms that we can come upon something like the concept
of medium.26 In other words, the specificity of a given medium—as much
as the set of general properties of a category usefully termed “medium”—is
only revealed upon the emergence of another, newer medium with which it

can be compared, and through which it is remediated. Akihiro Kitada in this
volume quotes Mizukoshi Shin, who argues similarly that “tremors in media
can awaken media theory”—that is, transformations in the media give rise
to something like media theory. This is certainly something we find borne
out in the various essays of this volume; moments of new media are often
moments of new developments in media theory.
What we would call media theory in the European and North American
context finds its origins in a particular institutional lineage of media stud-
ies.27 A brief overview of this lineage would trace: (1) early research on com-
munications technologies, as it curves through (2) the Marshall McLuhan
moment—arguably the first figure to articulate a research agenda around the
development of media theory—into (3) the rise of film studies in the French,
British, and particularly American academy during the 1970s, inspired by a
particular conjuncture of formal analysis allied with Marxist and feminist
theories of the filmic image, to (4) the simultaneous impact of television
studies and UK cultural studies on the landscape of film studies, shifting to
another, more quotidian medium—the television—at the same time as more
empirical forms of analysis are introduced, to (5) the rise of “new media”
in the 1990s, which saw a revival of earlier media theories (notably Mc
Luhan’s) and the embrace of wider-ranging theories of media to make sense
of the sometimes novel media forms (Wendy Chun, Jay Bolter and Richard
Grusin, Lev Manovich, Geert Lovink, Mark Hansen, and Lisa Nakamura),
to (6) the more recent dropping of the term “new” to brand a kind of media
studies that nonetheless is indebted to the epistemological frameworks and
questions of power that emerge through the particular lineage sketched here
(shifting to analyses of formats, platforms, media objects, and materialities:
Lisa Gitelman, Jonathan Sterne, Alexander Galloway, and Jussi Parikka). This
is largely an outline filtered by the engagement with media in institutional-
ized, academic contexts. Th ere exists of course an entire body of theorization
outside of this specific form of institutionalization. And, as we know from
the abundant self-referentiality within film, comics, and television, media
auto-theorize. At yet another level, as John Caldwell has effectively shown,
“industrial cultural theorizing,” or m
iddle-level theorization, also happens at
the level of media producers themselves.28
We call “media theory” any sustained engagement with media such that
it produces new ways of knowing this media. This engagement could be of a
theoretical, reflective kind of the sort imagined by Eagleton in his definition
of theory cited above. But it must also make room for a kind of vernacu-
lar theorization, or a theorization that happens in the performance of the
Introduction [13]
media condition, rather than in a reflection on these conditions. Distinct
from communication theory, this is a theory of media that is produced from
within media; from media lived as context, and as ecology.
Media Studies in Japan

Nonetheless, theory located in and produced from within university struc-
tures plays a decisive role in shaping the course of other locations of theo-
rizing. It is therefore important to acknowledge the institutional history of
media theory in Japan as well. There is a difference implied in the terms the-
orization of media and media theory. The latter tends to point to an academic
institutionalized setting. It is difficult to claim that this was the dominant
force in determining the course(s) of the theorization of media in Japan,
and indeed media theory / theorization in Japan may provide an important
occasion for complicating the relation between theory and Theory. Yet the
work done from within the university has provided important affordances
for, and exerted considerable influence on, nonacademic contexts as well.
Though the institutional history of the study of media in Japan appears in
the coming chapters in fits and starts, it is useful to give a rough account
of it h
ere. Before d
oing so, it is important to note that the following insti-
tutional account neglects the important noninstitutional history of media
theory that includes particularly female voices such as Osaki Midori, whose
work on cinema is often cited as an important moment within film theory in
Japan, or the tv criticism of Nancy Seki, whose combination of written text
and metatheoretical “eraser prints” is the subject of Ryoko Misono’s essay in
this volume.29
Meiji era thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi have already discussed the
importance of print, electric transmission, and postal services for “mod-
ern civilization.” With the presupposition that media theory is closely con-
nected to the development of mass media and tends to ask questions about
the interconnection of textual content and issues of circulation, reception,
and the resulting system, the study of media from within academia argu-
ably makes one tentative start in Japan in the 1910s with sociologist Gonda
Yasunosuke’s investigations into film (although Gonda did not have a full
university position at the time but rather worked at a school teaching Ger-
man). However, the initiative for creating a legitimate site for the study of
media took hold in the 1920s, when Ono Hideo promoted shinbungaku (lit-
erally “newspaper science”). The term was directly translated from the Ger-
man Zeitungswissenschaft, and Ono’s theoretical approaches w ere strongly

oriented toward the German model, a fact that became a common point
of criticism by figures such as philosopher Tosaka Jun. Ono, set on estab-
lishing an institutional home for shinbungaku in Japan, travelled in 1923
to various institutions in Germany, Britain, and the United States. After
an initial attempt to establish a research institute for newspaper studies at
Tokyo Imperial University (currently University of Tokyo) in 1927 failed (it
was deemed too practitioner-oriented), a proposal for a newspaper research
seminar (shinbun kenkyūshitsu) was approved in 1929. This seminar quickly
developed a sociologic al bent—another legacy of German influence via Karl
Bücher—and would exert considerable influence over the course of media
theory in Japan until t oday.30
The Second World War exerted an inhibiting influence on the study of
media, while in the immediate postwar period the US occupation actively
encouraged establishing shinbungaku departments, for example at Waseda
University in 1946. Media studies received its next big push in the 1950s
when the introduction of television in 1953 created an awareness of the need
to shift away from a purely print-based model of media research. Yet for sev-
eral decades, media theory would not take place in specialized departments
but rather in departments for literature, psychology, and, to a significant
degree, sociology. The sociologist Katō Hidetoshi developed an influential
approach to television in the late 1950s, and indeed it was one of Katō’s teach-
ers, Minami Hiroshi, who would become the first chairman of the Japan So-
ciety of Image Arts and Sciences (Nihon Eizō Gakkai; jasias) in 1974. This
was to become one of the main venues for research on film, television, and
other aspects of moving-image media. Both Katō and Minami had studied
at American universities (Katō at Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford; Minami
at Cornell), and the influence of American social science on their work was
considerable.
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies in the United States originally
focused on film (or rather cinema) and only added “media” to its name in
2002. The term eizō as used by the jasias provided a similar but somewhat
different bent on accommodating a larger perspective on media. The term
can loosely be translated as “moving image,” but Yuriko Furuhata has argued
that in the debates around the term in the 1960s it most basically suggested a
mediated image, be it still or moving.31 Such an attempt to avoid a medium-
specific orientation is also visible in the founding of the Department for
the Study of Culture and Representation (Hyōshō Bunkarongakka) by film
critic and literature theorist Hasumi Shigehiko, theater director Watanabe
Moriaki, and others at Tokyo University, where the influential Interfaculty
Introduction [15]
Initiative in Information Studies was later founded in 2000. The Association
for the Study of Culture and Representation, which grew out of the Depart-
ment for the Study of Culture and Representation, was founded in 2006 and
takes a high-theory approach toward what one might call media studies.
Specialized societies for the study of a particular medium came later; the
Japan Society for Cinema Studies (Nihon Eiga Gakkai) and the Japan So-
ciety for Animation Studies (Nihon Animēshon Gakkai) w ere founded in
2005 and 1998, respectively.32
Issues of institutional power have played a significant role in the develop-
ment of media studies in Japan. While much of the media theoretical work
of the 1950s to 1980s straddled the line between academic work and hihyō
(criticism) and was formulated in a wider space of discourse across many in-
stitutions, media theory as it developed from the 1990s onward was heavily
influenced by the sociologic al model developed at Tokyo University. (For
the decisive role of the specific genre of hihyō criticism in both theorizing
and negotiating the possibilities of theoretical language caught up in post-
colonial tensions, see Keisuke Kitano’s chapter in this volume). In part due
to shinbungaku’s role as forerunner at the university, and also due to the
university’s cultural capital and its financial power to institute new depart-
ments, the University of Tokyo’s sociologic al model of media studies has
spread widely and can be sensed in the work of prominent theorists such
as Yoshimi Shunya, Miyadai Shinji, Mizukoshi Shin, Akihiro Kitada, and
Azuma Hiroki. From this brief institutional history we can see that gen-
eral questions around media have superseded investigations of a particular
medium.
As we discuss in more detail below, the individual chapters in this vol-
ume similarly range across media—from photography to film to television
to architecture to fashion and the Internet—in an attempt to account for the
diversity of sites around which the theorization of media takes place, and
where discussions of media are concentrated at particular moments in time.
Yet this approach also sometimes puts this volume at odds with the institu-
tional history of media studies within Japan. Above we stress the importance
of a critical approach to media theorization in Europe and North Amer
ica, and its marginalization of other modes of theorization; in this volume
our contributors similarly take up different moments in the development
of media theory, some from within the halls of academic institutions, and
some from within the structures of the mass media themselves. The rejec-
tion of familiar modes of legitimation is key to (re)narrating the history of
media theory. Nonetheless, there are institutional dynamics of field and dis-

cipline that this volume has to work with while working around them. The
contributors to this volume predominantly write from within e ither a film
and media studies or an area studies context. While disciplinary affiliation
by no means determines approach, it does have an impact on how the schol-
ars here treat media theorization—whether as part of an institutional or cul-
tural formation, or as part of a philosophical inquiry. That said, we believe
that each contribution here does some of the work of chiseling away at the
traditional complicity of the divide between history (or culture) and theory.
Each chapter embarks on an account of media theorization that is histori-
cally nuanced and aware of the geopolitics of Theory.
Volume Structure
Does the materiality of the book form of necessity support a “brutal” con-
ception of history, that is to say a chronologically determinist one? Does a
printed volume on media theory necessarily bias its investigations toward
the allegiances of print capitalism—modernity and nationally organized,
linear history? These are decisive questions for a volume concerned with
how theorists of media in Japan negotiated these concerns and how they
dealt with narratives of “the West” and temporally skewed hierarchies.
This volume does not track the history of media theory in Japan via a
simple line drawn from the 1920s to today.33 This is due in part to a refusal to
subsume a markedly diverse series of encounters to a linear history and the
overly simplistic trajectory it implies. In part this is also due to our sense
that contributions to this volume broach different topics, and take different
tacks. Some essays are more accurately described as cultural histories of an
encounter with media theory; others trace the engagement of different theo-
rists around common questions, such as technology. O thers still dig deep
into the philosophical questions around mediation such that they encour-
age us to think media theory more precisely as mediation theory. Some deal
with particular media forms, others with a multiplicity of media, o thers still
with the problem of mediation as such. The organization of this volume re-
flects this diversity of approaches.
The volume opens with a section titled “Communication Technologies,”
which groups together a series of inquiries into how media technologies
were thought, be it as materials, as environments, or as orchestrators of con-
sumption. At times their theorization unfolded as a forgotten return, as they
were framed much like previous media were, without an explicit aware-
ness of the prior debates. Tracing such a development, Aaron Gerow turns
Introduction [17]
our attention to tensions arising around the strangely familiar theorization
of the new kid on the media block in the 1950s: television. Television first
began broadcasting in 1953, and gained much theoretical and critical atten-
tion during its first decade of existence. But, as Gerow informs us, theoreti-
cal accounts of the medium began appearing as early as the 1930s, a point
in time when the medium was still in its experimental phase. Moreover,
these accounts recall earlier theorizations of film and its specificity in the
1910s and 1920s. Against this historical backdrop, Gerow examines debates
around television during the 1950s, suggesting, “Early television theory was
as much about the possibility of media theory in a changing society, as it
was about the medium and its effects.” He poses the question of why many
discussions around early film returned, accompanied by a sense of (strate-
gic?) amnesia in the late 1950s. Television is associated, as most material and
immaterial technologies are, with a certain spatial practice that has strong
connotations of class, gender, and a certain temporality—in this case, new-
ness. Gerow disentangles t hese associations and how they interact with “tv
theory,” which becomes a major impetus for the development of an explicit
theory of media.
Yuriko Furuhata’s contribution moves from the wartime period through
Expo ’70, focusing our attention on the site of a redefinition of technolo-
gies of mediation: the field of architecture. Furuhata’s essay sheds light on
the role of the renowned architect Isozaki Arata as an intercessor between
avant-garde visual artists and architects, suggesting the importance of ar-
chitectural discourse as a site of media theory. Furuhata’s essay sheds light
on what she calls the “cybernetic turn” of Japanese architectural theory as a
historical precursor to contemporary attempts to rethink media’s relation-
ship to the environment. Focusing on the formative role of Tange Lab and
the work of associated architects Tange Kenzo and Isozaki Arata, Furuhata
suggests how the postwar articulation of the cybernetic model of the in-
formation city both inherited the legacy of colonial urban planning, and
responded to the postwar governmental push for postindustrialization and
the experimental practices of building multimedia environments. Furuhata
hence examines the intersection of architectural practice with communi-
cations theory, discourses around cybernetics and the information society,
and media theory.
Takeshi Kadobayashi traces a very different model of environment and
mediation in the work of Azuma Hiroki, one of the most influential young
theorists of the 2000s and a major figure of the zeronendai group. Azuma
wrote his first work in the pages of the journal Hihyō kūkan (Critical space)—

the main platform for criticism in the 1990s, established by Nyū Aka (New
Academism) veterans Asada Akira and Karatani Kōjin—and the new media
journal InterCommunication (a journal that is the focus of Marilyn Ivy’s
contribution). Kadobayashi sees Azuma’s InterCommunication article series
“Why Is the Cyberspace Called Such?” as a transitional phase for Azuma. It
was this moment that led Azuma from his role as young apprentice to the
older generation to what he is known as today: the preeminent theorist of
popular media culture in Japan. It is here too that Kadobayashi discovers
Azuma’s incipient—and partially abandoned—media theory.
Marilyn Ivy examines a form of missed or mis-communication through
the history of the pathbreaking InterCommunication journal in the 1990s
and 2000s. Sponsored by one of the largest telecommunication companies
in the world and edited by some of the major intellectual figures of the time,
the journal was planned to provide a passageway to the global intellectual
sphere and heavily featured translations and, at least initially, English sec-
tions. Ivy interrogates the different functions of this journal, positioned in
the interstices of exchange and insulation; traces the utopian bent the jour-
nal followed with regard to technologies of communication in particular;
and gives an outline of some of the decisive debates of 1990s media theory in
Japan. Insofar as these debates lay the ground for the central media theorists
of the 2000s, Ivy’s essay provides a picture of an often-overlooked transition
point between the Nyū Aka movement of the 1980s, and the zeronendai no
shisō (thought of the aughts) generation that emerges in the 2000s, of which
Azuma was a central figure.
The next section, “Practical Theory,” assembles six contributions that look
at the practice of media theorization as performative acts, or, put differently,
how acts such as creating advertising campaigns, translating theories (and
performing that translation), or even performing a media persona have in
Japan functioned as implicit and sometimes explicit theorizations of media.
Marc Steinberg details one of the most prominent cases of performing the-
ory, which took place around the translation and interpretation of one of
the ur-texts of media theory in North Americ a and (Western) Europe, Mar-
shall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. As Steinberg details, McLuhan’s work
also possesses this status in Japan, where the term media-ron (media theory)
emerges around the introduction of the Canadian media theorist’s work.
This introduction was channeled by a kind of doppelgänger theorist who
both mirrors and redirects McLuhan’s very flexible body of work: Takemura
Ken’ichi, a man deeply embedded in the advertising world. Steinberg out-
lines the contours of the lively public debates around McLuhan’s work in the
Introduction [19]
late 1960s. Th ese debates—which often revolve around how well McLuhan
can be used in advertising practice—suggest the important ties between
media theory and commercial practice that inform media theorization in
Japan to this day, and highlight the key institutional role advertising agen-
cies played in introducing and popularizing media theoretical work, as
“actionable theory.” They also shed light on the politics of influence and
translation on the reception of theory, and even on the conception of the-
ory itself.
Miryam Sas explores the contentious discussion, aggravated by mistrans-
lations, at a symposium organized in connection with the visit of German
poet and (at the time) media theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Sas lu-
cidly analyzes the reactions of a number of key leftist intellectual figures of
the 1970s to the direct encounter with Enzensberger. The chapter is also
very much an account of the attempt to salvage and defend the model
of ideological critique within media theory at a moment when the depo-
liticization of the public sphere in Japan already loomed on the horizon.
Highlighting this site of interdisciplinary encounter between artists and
media critics, Miryam Sas uses Enzensberger’s visit to Japan as a vantage
point from which to examine how networks of media theory operate along
transnational axes. In so d oing, she reopens the question of nation and how
it functioned at what was a highly performative event, in which almost all
participants were aware of the intersections of geopolitical power relations
that undergirded their conversation. Here Sas points to the importance of
placing Marxist media theory in a transnational context, with the arrival of
Enzensberger providing a chance to reveal a vibrant cross section of Marxist
media theory in Japan and beyond. The Enzensberger moment also sheds
light on an increasing preoccupation of intellectuals and writers of the time:
the growing prominence of the cultural industries, the shifts occurring within
the cultural industries, and the transformation of political society u
nder their
influence.
It is to this transformation of the cultural industries that Tomiko Yoda
turns, focusing on the manner in which market segmentation and industry
practice created the identificatory figure of the young girl and placed her
at the center of a consumer culture conceived of as both utopian and egali-
tarian. Dubbing this the “girlscape,” Yoda investigates the medial practice
of defining this new consumer as situated on a plane of free choice that is
apparently removed from the pressures and power relations that structured
society in Japan. Mapping the visual and verbal strategies that accompanied
the rise of the girlscape, she relates this development to the highly political

“landscape theory” developed in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a
prominent discussion of how power structures life in a rapidly transforming
country. The cultural industries developed their own theory of media at the
time, one that was fundamentally dependent on the (en)gendering of con-
sumers, and the incorporation of these consumers into the girlscape.
Alexander Zahlten’s chapter probes the coincidence of the rise of the
academic media celebrity in early 1980s figures such as Asada Akira and
Nakazawa Shinichi with a ten-year winter of media theory. Zahlten tracks
the appearance of the so-called Nyū Aka theorists and the discourse around
these massively popular best-selling authors, who were in such high demand
in print, tv, and radio of the 1980s. He argues that while in a transitional
moment—the effects of which are still felt t oday—Nyū Aka seemingly never
formulated a theory of media, and that the reason for this is to be found in
the manner in which the group changed the mode of theorizing itself: Nyū
Aka performed a media theory rather than formulating one. A central aspect
of this practice as media theory is the concept of irony as it was employed
by Asada and fellow Nyū Aka writer Karatani Kōjin. Irony, by softening up
the relation between content and form, allowed this group to play with the
semantics of theory while actually enacting a theory of media in practice.
Ryoko Misono focuses on the body of work of the popular media figure,
tv critic, and eraser-stamp artist Nancy Seki. An enormously prolific author
writing about tv at exactly the moment its primacy in the media ecology
of Japan began to wane, Seki developed a complex reservoir of self-reflexive
tactics that included artistic practices that reference Warhol and deploy a
sharp humor. Misono sees the late Seki as enacting a media theory that made
heavy use of the tools of popular culture itself. As Misono outlines in her
essay, Seki’s tools w
ere threefold: critical text; an “eraser print” illustration
of a tv celebrity’s face, based on a carving into the medium of the rubber
eraser; and a short tagline included below the illustration. The three ele
ments worked together to offer an immanent critique of television itself, cir-
culated in the form of a weekly or monthly page-long magazine column. A
singular figure within popular culture, Seki understood her work as dealing
with media when t here is no longer an outside to media. Misono examines
Seki’s concern with the question of what shape the public sphere takes in
a mediatized society, and how to operate within media flows, all the while
critiquing them.
Finally, Anne McKnight looks at how art practices in the 2010s are de-
veloping alternative modes of reflection on media. Focusing on the exam-
ple of the artist Rokudenashiko, who was arrested for obscenity, McKnight
Introduction [21]
specifically looks at ways in which Rokudenashiko circumvented the male-
dominated space in which theorization has largely taken place in Japan—
the space of hihyō that Keisuke Kitano outlines in his contribution to this
volume. By using humor to work through issues of the commodified female
body and the restrictive national role assigned to it, Rokudenashiko hit a
nerve that provoked a state reaction. While Nancy Seki attempted to ironi-
cally reflect on the media system while deliberately positioning herself at its
center, Rokudenashiko operates at its fringes, using its shrapnel to construct
an alternative space. Referencing McKenzie Wark’s concept of “low theory,”
McKnight maps one attempt to connect reflections on media models and
gender roles to everydayness in ways that appear whimsical but are decidedly
oppositional.
The final section, “Mediation and Media Theory,” brings together four
contributions that each engage with the fundamental questions of what me-
diation is and how to deal with it theoretically. What is a medium, and what
are media? How can they be configured between materiality and metaphys-
ics, between social reality and geopolitical power relations? The section be-
gins with a contribution by one of the foremost Japanese media theorists
today, Akihiro Kitada, a central figure of the “thought of the aughts” genera-
tion. Kitada’s chapter offers a close and unique reading of the media theory
of Nakai Masakazu, a leftist theorist with some connections to the Kyoto
school (a philosophical movement of the 1930s and 1940s), and later head
of the National Diet Library. Nakai draws on German philosophy to create
a highly corporeal theory of cinematic spectatorship, a sophisticated com-
munal model of how we make sense of filmic media that stands in produc-
tive tension with today’s phenomenological and embodied approaches to
film. Nakai is often considered the Walter Benjamin of Japan—for reasons
that will be made apparent in Kitada’s essay. He was fascinated by the new
medium of the cinema, and deeply involved in thinking through the kind
of political potential this medium could have. Kitada’s essay on Nakai points
to the latter’s development of the German concept of the Mittel, which be-
comes the basis for an embodied theory of media effects. For Nakai, the dis-
junctures of meaning that media create are bridged by audiences/users, who
intuitively and physically adjust to the common experience of media. Kitada
goes on to outline how Nakai both prefigures important developments in
Euro-American media theory by decades, and can at the same time still func-
tion as an important stimulus for thinking about media today.
Fabian Schäfer’s chapter reenvisions the philosophy of the Kyoto school—
which for many has problematically become a metonym of philosophy in

Japan—as a philosophy of mediation, or what in German is called Medi-
enphilosophie, which we may provisionally translate as “media philosophy.”
Schäfer provides an overview of early debates on mediation and distills many
of the conceptual stakes of media theory that philosophers in 1930s Japan
prepared, addressing the work of central figures such as Nishida Kitarō, Ta-
nabe Hajime, Tosaka Jun, and Nakai Masakazu, as well as that of the some-
times marginalized figures of Watsuji Tetsurō and Kimura Bin—most of
whose work dates to the prewar and wartime eras. In this very unusual per-
spective, Schäfer suggests that these thinkers’ work on mediation and in-
betweenness is in fact a full-fledged theory of mediation that in turn forms
the basis for a media philosophy (with a strong allusion to the term “media
philosophy” in the German context). This novel rereading of the central fig-
ures of the Kyoto school suggests that their work should be reevaluated as
central to the media theory that came after it.
Kitano Keisuke then focuses our attention on the literary sphere, in order
to explore how questions of media theorization w ere framed. It is to the key
figure of the mid-twentieth-century critic Kobayashi Hideo that Kitano turns
to investigate the status of a particular kind of media critique in the 1950s,
focusing on Kobayashi’s approach to media such as photography and cinema
through the genre of criticism known as hihyō. Hihyō and its conventions
have defined the larger part of public intellectual discourse in Japan since
the 1930s, and inevitably s haped most of the discussions of media presented
in this volume. Taking place mostly in magazines and journals and situated
somewhere between criticism and academic theory, hihyō was tailored to the
needs and speeds of a massively productive print culture. As conceived of by
Kobayashi, it deals fundamentally with the question of how to use language
and thought that is always-already-hybrid in order to consider the specific
location of modern Japan. Put differently, Kobayashi grapples with the com-
plex question of how to talk about media in Japan when the technology/
medium of language and theory already operates with gears and screws that
are not entirely “made in Japan.” Kitano thereby shifts our attention from
the sphere of high philosophy to that of literary critique and the attempts
of public intellectuals from the literary establishment to find another site of
media theorization—albeit a more vernacular one.
Thomas Looser closes the section with a review of media theory from the
1980s to the 2010s, and a return to a consideration of theories of mediation—
this time in the contemporary moment, and in relation to questions of social
change. Looser considers how media theory and the possibilities it offers has
in Japan always been tied to a crisis in thinking about possible social orders
Introduction [23]
and subjectivity. Focusing on the “lost decades” and the sense of crisis that
began in the 1990s and gained a new sense of urgency with the meltdown
at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, he follows especially the work of Azuma
Hiroki. Looser detects shifts in the way Azuma and his group deal with the
problem of mediation and suggests that these shifts are closely tied to the
manner in which media technology and social change are thought together.
At the same time, Looser tracks the role of media theory as an indicator of
social change, demonstrating how the presuppositions underlying media
theory have transformed from the economic boom time of the 1980s to re-
cessionary, post-Fukushima Japan. In so doing, Looser brings to the surface
the (otherwise implicit) theories of mediation that structure the work of
contemporary media theorists such as Azuma, Kitada, and o thers.
This volume concludes with an afterword by Mark Hansen, whose work
on media theory has been germane to and inspirational for this volume.
Hansen acutely engages with the essays in this volume by rethinking their
organization and the possibilities this reorganization offers. Beginning with
the significant tension between the intra-and transcultural he finds under
lying the volume’s stress on media theory in Japan, Hansen rearranges the con-
tributions into three “modes”: “Remediating the West,” “Mediatizing Japan,”
and “Inter-izing (beyond) Japan.” By doing so he draws out possibilities of
speaking to specificity of media and media theorization while taking the
movement across contexts into account. It is in this negotiation, which he
distills out of a careful rereading or rather additive reading of this volume’s
contributions, that he locates ways to consider the concrete manifestations
of the “continuum of life in the age of global media.”
To close this outline of the volume’s contributions, we end with its open-
ing, or rather, the preface, written by Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose work has
consistently operated as theory at the borders and interstices of Japanese
and North American academies. Like Hansen, Lippit emphasizes the many
valences and crisscrossing passageways the “in” Japan indicates. Far from
proposing a closed national boundary, Lippit underlines how he sees the
project of the volume pointing to an out, or rather “an inside-out as much
as an outside-in.” This spatial dynamic, according to Lippit, plays out on the
background not only of media and their theorization from different times
but also of the different temporalities they respectively are charged with:
“The task then may lie in finding the temporality that allows the incom-
mensurate temporalities that define the media to interface, to encounter one
another in a temporality other than one’s own.” It is an encounter that is in
Lippit’s view both necessarily overdue and timely.

Conclusion
ese, then, are the parameters of this volume, one that attempts to be capa-
Th
cious in its coverage of time period and eras, but also focused in its concern
for key debates within media theory in Japan. However inclusive we may have
aspired to be, we cannot claim adequate coverage. Indeed, a mere list of what
is left out would itself take a dedicated chapter. Or two. It would include, for
instance, a discussion of the interaction of media theorization with Japanese
colonialism or a more sustained engagement with the influential postwar
Shisō no kagaku movement of the 1950s (which both Gerow and Furuhata
touch upon in the course of their essays); the encounter of free radio, radi-
cal Marxist media theory, and Deleuzoguattarian thought in the persons of
Kogawa Tetsuo and Ueno Toshiya; a close examination of the feminist media
work of Ueno Chizuko in the 1980s and 1990s; theories arising from authors/
fans/theorists such as Ozaki Midori (in the 1930s) and Nakajima Azusa (in
the 1980s/1990s); the move t oward dialogues around media within Asia in the
1990s and 2000s via the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies collective, with key figures
such as Yoshimi Shunya, Chen Kuan-Hsing, and Chua Beng Huat, or, later,
Kim So-Young with the TransAsia Screen Culture project, moving discussions
of media beyond the nation-state and to questions of the regional—and this is
just to scratch the surface. All of t hese specific moments w
ill in turn provide
intersections with larger developments and spheres of study. Many of the
above cases would allow for a much-needed foray into the exploration of
the role of sound, for example—from the role of m usic on the street to
avant-garde m usic’s role within 1960s experimental media cultures in Jikken
Kobo and at the Sogetsu Art Center to the central role of popular m usic in
the media mix, and from sound demonstrations to ambient sound design
to contemporary idol culture. This volume tendentially weighs itself toward
discourses in and through print and visual culture primarily to provide a
focused point of departure (in several senses) for such investigations in the
near future.34
This also brings us to the issue of media forms covered in this volume. As
we noted earlier, this volume opts for thinking media as more than (to quote
Mitchell and Hansen again) “a plurality of mediums, an empirical accumu-
lation of things” (Critical Terms, xxi). As such, the essays in this volume do
not treat individual media as a set of channels or technologies to be covered
each in turn. The reader will not find a procession of media commodities or
institutions, from woodblock prints to newspaper to film to radio to film to
video, and so on, each afforded a distinct chapter. That said, despite being
Introduction [25]
thought of as always-already-relational, the contributions in this volume
do provide a plurality of media forms to be considered, from television
through architecture and the medium of a journal. Insofar as the particular
materiality of a given medium lends greatly to the manner in which it is
theorized, a consideration of multiple distinct media forms (and their effects
on the manner of their theorization) is nonetheless fruitful, if provisional.
A particularly underrepresented medium that has been subject to vibrant
theorization is film itself; we omit a close discussion of film b ecause t here
has been such impressive work on it already, and additional work being
prepared.35 The body of work existing and forthcoming on film in particular
reduces the urgency for this volume to focus on the question of the theori-
zation of film, even if it does play a large role in the background.
The chapters within this volume both introduce key moments of media
theorization in Japan and pose questions relevant to media theory in gen-
eral (that is, media theory both in Japan and outside of it). This work is
a beginning, and the issues, movements, and events within Japanese media
theory that we have not been able to discuss will, we hope, be the subject of
subsequent study that further expands what we understand by media theory
in Japan, and what we include as media theory in this volume. We hope that
this volume both initiates and continues a move toward a more nuanced
and less geopolitically centered conception of media theory. It hopefully
stands alongside other emerging nationally, regionally, or transnationally
conceived accounts of media theory that will write not only the history of
media theory more or less known to media studies in North America and Eu
rope but also those histories that are not yet known, thereby transforming
once again our established understanding of what media theory is. But “dis-
covery” is not the impetus that can drive such a project. Rather it is the ex-
pectation of increased engagement, interaction, and ultimately intra-action
(to abuse Karen Barad’s term) between contexts of theorization. Together
the essays here represent, we hope, a moment on the road to developing an
organic or useable definition of globally situated media theorization. Geo
graphically situated but constantly intra-acting media infrastructures, a fter
all, determine our situation. And media theories that respond to this situ-
ation remain one of our central tools for describing, critiquing, and trans-
forming it.

notes
1. For an exemplary text in this regard, see Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker,
and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
2. Think of the fruitful influence of a materialist strain of media theory that initially
entered English-language scholarship through the reception of Friedrich Kittler’s work,
and the further interaction of that line of media theory with more recent work often
subsumed under New Materialism, such as Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
3. The opposition—and complicity—between theory and history that Yoshimoto iso-
lates in his earlier critique in “The Difficulty of Being Radical” (251–52) is rearticulated
as the distinction between Western theory and non-Western (“Japanese, Taiwanese or
Indonesian”) text in his extension of this important work in Kurosawa: Film Studies and
Japanese Cinema, 36–37. For the original essay, see Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The Difficulty of
Being Radical,” boundary 2 18, no. 3 (fall 1991): 242–57; and for its extension, see Mitsuhiro
Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2000).
4. Aaron Gerow, “Introduction: The Theory Complex,” Review of Japanese Culture
and Society 22 (December 2010): 2.
5. Umesao Tadao established the term in Jōhō Sangyō-ron [The theory of the infor-
mation industry, 1963], and was possibly influenced by Fritz Machlup’s The Production
and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1962). The expression “information society” ( jōhō shakai) gained currency in
articles from 1967 onwards, and especially in Masuda Yoneji’s Jōhō shakai nyūmon:
Konpyūta wa ningen shakai wo kaeru [Introduction to information society: Comput-
ers transform human society] (Tokyo: Pelican, 1968), while “informationalizing
society” became an important term from Hayashi Yūjirō’s Jōhōka shakai: Hādo na
shakai kara sofuto na shakai e [Information society: From hard society to soft soci-
ety] (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho, 1969) onward. See also Tessa Morris-Suzuki,
Beyond Computopia: Information, Automation, and Democracy in Japan (New York:
Kegan Paul, 1988).
6. Galloway, Thacker, and Wark, Excommunication, 5.
7. Unsurprisingly, important work in these areas is emerging. See, for instance,
Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Real
ity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the
Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009); and Kay Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels: Syria, Palestine, Dubai, and Beyond
(London: British Film Institute, 2016). While not engaging media theory per se, an impor
tant challenge to rethinking the boundaries of theory comes in the way of Françoise
Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s edited collection, The Creolization of Theory (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011).
8. Johannes Fabian, Time and Its Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
Introduction [27]
9. This reason for the lag in translation for the Manovich book was suggested to us
by Kadobayashi Takeshi.
10. David Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2014), 3.
11. Lev Manovich, “Postmedia Aesthetics,” in Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the
Arts, and the Humanities, ed. Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson (Oakland: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2014), 34–44.
12. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xiii.
13. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxix; quoted in Mitchell and Hansen,
Critical Terms, vii.
14. Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms, xxii.
15. The exception to this slant is found in David Graeber’s and Lydia H. Liu’s contribu-
tions, which, while evoking a wider geography, refer to t hese places in relation to their
past (in the history of exchange in Graeber’s case, and the history of writing in Liu’s).
This unfortunately reproduces the sense of West as present, and Rest as past.
16. For an early, incisive critique on the consumption of theory as a commodity in
Japan, see Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge
in Postmodern Japan,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry D.
Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).
17. Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010),
211–55. This volume is directly influenced by the growing number of books in the field
of Japanese cinema that put the theoretical into the history of the discipline, such as
Thomas Lamarre, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and “Orien-
tal” Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005); Markus Nornes, Cinema
Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007);
Aaron Gerow, ed., “Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film
Theory,” special issue, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010);
Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Sea-
son of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). This project began to
take on its current form at the Histories of Film Theories in East Asia conference orga
nized by Nornes and held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, September 27–30,
2012.
18. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
2011), 2.
19. The journal had a five-volume run, and was published biannually from 2008 until
2010, when Kitada split off from the project and Azuma continued the journal under
the name Shisō chizu β.
20. This approach has been adopted more recently in relation to North American
geek or hacker culture. See in this regard Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Sig-
nificance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Gabriella
Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, NJ: Prince
ton University Press, 2013).

21. Geert Lovink, interview by Peter Lunenfeld, “Enemy of Nostalgia: Victim of the
Present, Critic of the F uture: Interview with Geert Lovink,” paj: A Journal of Perfor
mance and Art 70 24, no. 1 (January 2002): 8; Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic
Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 181.
22. Yet even as the zeronendai functioned as an initial motivating factor for this proj
ect, it also continues to work as a cautionary tale against setting up this recent efferves-
cence of media theory in Japan as the end point in the narrative h ere.
23. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 2, 17.
24. Matt Hills, “Strategies, Tactics and the Question of Un Lieu Propre: What/Where
Is ‘Media Theory’?” in Social Semiotics 14, no. 2 (2004): 133–49.
25. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: The Creolization of Theory,”
in Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, ed. The Creolization of Theory (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011).
26. See John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (win-
ter 2010): 321–62.
27. Nick Couldry offers a useful synopsis of the institutional history of media studies
in “Theorizing Media as Practice,” Social Semiotics 14, no. 2 (2004): 116.
28. John Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in
Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 9.
29. For a consideration of Ozaki’s work, see Livia Monnet, “Montage, Cinematic Sub-
jectivity and Feminism in Ozaki Midori’s Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense,”
Japan Forum 11, no. 1 (1999): 57–82.
30. For an excellent overview of the debates around shinbungaku, see Fabian Schäfer,
Tosaka Jun: Ideologie, Medien, Alltag (Leipzig, Ger.: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011).
31. For a thorough outline of the discourses around the term eizō, see Furuhata, Cin-
ema of Actuality.
32. Dudley Andrew offers a brief overview of the history of film studies in Japan in
“The Core and the Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35 (summer 2009): 885–87.
33. The reader may, of course, choose to read it that way, in which case we would
advise reading in the following order: Akihiro Kitada, Fabian Schäfer, Keisuke Kitano,
Aaron Gerow, Marc Steinberg, Yuriko Furuhata, Miryam Sas, Tomiko Yoda, Alexan-
der Zahlten, Ryoko Misono, Marilyn Ivy, Takeshi Kadobayashi, Tom Looser, and Anne
McKnight.
34. Moreover, a large body of work on sound and m usic exists for such explorations to
draw on; research by such scholars as Hosokawa Shūhei, Michael Bourdaghs, Mori Yas-
utaka, David Novak, Sasaki Atsushi, and others already provides an immensely fertile
ground for future work.
35. The special issue on film theory in Japan in the Review of Japanese Culture and
Society (December 2010), guest edited by Aaron Gerow, stands as an immensely impor
tant intervention that explores the question of what theory means in the context of
Japan as much as how it manifests vis-à-vis film. The forthcoming edited collection on
film theory in Japan by Markus Nornes and Aaron Gerow w ill add even further to the
discussion of film and its theorization.
Introduction [29]
I . C O M M U N I C AT I O N T E C H N O L O G I E S
1 . F R O M F I L M T O T E L EV IS I O N
Early Theories of Television in Japan
a a ron g e row
Repeating Theory
Lev Manovich has already speculated in The Language of New Media about
the parallels between the historical development of new media and that of
older media such as cinema,1 but I would like to explore possible parallels
between the histories of theories of a new media, here television in Japan,
and t hose of a previous media, the motion pictures. New media are new to
the degree that they are accompanied by a theoretical apparatus that stakes
out their claims to newness, but just as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has under-
lined, the meaning of “new” itself often “contains within itself repetition,”
as something is re-newed only after it has become old in a cycle that mani-
fests itself through planned obsolescence and endless upgrades.2 Theories
too may replicate this repeated newness when they name the new, but likely
again in a cycle of theory becoming—or being—outdated and then novel.3
Peter Krapp suggests as much when he argues that claims made about new
modes such as hypertextuality e ither forget precomputer hypertextual modes
such as the card index, or seem to recall the past as a confirmation of the dig-
ital present: “Recollection becomes oblivion, the interface-principle wysi-
wyg becomes wysiwyf: what you see is what you (for)get.”4
One can see similar repetitions in Japanese film theory and Japanese tele
vision theory in their early stages, even when the latter was contrasted with
the “old” as a “new” media. Not only were there analogous efforts at arguing
media specificity, comparing the new to the old, particularly through the
issue of the relation of image to spectator, but also claims about the specific-
ity of the new that, it was forgotten, w
ere already made of the old. Such par-
allels, I would argue, not only problematize arguments about the new and
about medium specificity, but they can also, through close analysis, show
how claims about new media can serve to mask larger continuities in the
struggles over media in industrial capitalism. In Japan in particular, theories
of film and television were deeply imbricated with historically specific but
long-standing conflicts over problems of class, mass society, the everyday
(nichijō), theory, and the place of the intellectual.
Shisō and Shimizu Ikutarō on Television

As was also the case with film, discourses about television preceded the ex-
istence of the medium as a real presence. As Jayson Makoto Chun has sum-
marized, prewar writings about television emphasized its ability to establish
connections with the West, and bring the outside into the domestic sphere.
Its utility for education and for national or imperial unity was also stressed,
as well as its importance as a gauge of national progress.5 These were all
arguments made for cinema in its first decades as well.6 What was different
was television’s potential for live simultaneity, but that was a claim already
made about radio. Chun argues that discussions of radio actually laid the
foundations of prewar television discourse, even as prewar discussions of
television then established the basis for postwar television theory.
Writings on television increased after the war, especially after broad-
casting truly began in 1953. Journalistic discourse concerning the medium
was in many ways epitomized by Ōya Sōichi’s expression of frustration in
1957 that through television Japan would become a nation of “100 million
i diots” (ichioku sōhakuchika)7—a phrase that became such common cur-
rency that it even appears in Ozu Yasujirō’s Good Morning (Ohayō, 1959),
a film that centers on two boys who start a protest to get a tv set. Other
scholarly writings would be less alarmist, even as they attempted to specify
what was particularly new or problematic about the medium. Arguably, the
first major milestone in television theory was the November 1958 issue of
Shisō (Thought)—perhaps the premier intellectual journal at the time—an
issue that declared itself the start of television studies and which, as Yoshimi
Shun’ya claims, proved “a major influence on subsequent television research.”8
Authors included not only such established sociologists, psychologists, and
[34] aaron gerow

culture critics as Shimizu Ikutarō, Hidaka Rokurō, Hatano Kanji, and Min-
ami Hiroshi, but also names such as Katō Hidetoshi, Arase Yutaka, and Inaba
Michio that would later dominate mass communication research in Japan.
The variety of writers included the film critic Uryū Tadao, the film and liter-
ary critic Sasaki Kiichi, and even literary giants Nakamura Mitsuo and Abe
Kōbō.
Shimizu’s essay “Terebijon jidai” (The Television Age), which appeared
as the leadoff batter in the issue, was in many ways seminal; Shisō even re-
printed the piece in its 2003 issue commemorating the semicentennial of
television broadcasting. Analyzing it, along with some of Shimizu’s other
television essays (“Terebi no honshitsu” [The Essence of Television], an Asahi
shinbun essay from 1957; and “Terebi bunmeiron” [On tv Civilization], pub-
lished a few months before his “Terebijon jidai” piece in Kinema junpō), I will
consider how Shimizu’s focus on medium specificity, audience behavior,
and the everyday is emblematic of early approaches to television, while also
being oblivious to how early texts of film theory treated the same issues.
Shimizu was a prominent leftist sociologist who was active from before
the war in such organizations as the Yuibutsuron Kenkyūkai (Materialism
Study Group). In such books as Ryūgen higo (Rumors, 1937), he had already
voiced his concerns about the interactions between official and unofficial
communication. Investigating the phenomenon of rumors a fter such events
as the 1923 Kantō earthquake, Shimizu considered how breaks in official
news information could be filled by unofficial flows of information among
the masses, ones that could be both resistive and reactionary. While rumors
were by definition without basis in fact, they could serve as social modes
of belief that functioned as an alternative to inadequate official announce-
ments. Shimizu thus distinguished between rumors born from the masses
in crisis and those purposely created to foment unrest, even as he described
how rumors could be manipulated or controlled through information.
Shimizu did not see television’s flow of communication as either estab-
lishing the rule of facts or enabling horizontal modes of social belief. He
primarily considered television in contrast to printed media. Both may be
mass media, but Shimizu saw a fundamental difference between reading and
viewing. Reading, he argued, requires energy and concentration b ecause the
book does not provide the reality beforehand: the reader must construct
it. Television viewing however, “starts from the image that appears at the
end of the act of reading,” leaving the viewer “excused from the hard work
involved in creating and supporting reality by oneself.”9 A reader can stop
reading in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the reality of the book,

meaning “one can desire only the degree of reality that fits one’s capacity.”
That is why Shimizu thought that the pressure to reform or reconstruct one’s
sense of self ( jiko no kaizō) rarely occurs with reading, since t here is always
a critical space for the reader to negotiate such forces.10 Television, however,
is “forceful,” refusing to allow a critical space for negotiation; instead, “the
entire person is absorbed” and possibly reconstructed.11 The book remains
in hand, available for critical reflection, while “the television program only
exists on a metaphysical level,” leaving no evidence behind after viewing that
can be used for critique. To Shimizu, this indicates that “the transition from
the age of printing to the age of images is the transition from an era where
we possess the evidence to one where evidence is taken from us.”12 He as-
sociates this with the rise of monopoly capitalism. While he recognizes the
potential of television, given its forcefulness, to deeply penetrate the viewer
if and when it did actually engage in critique of the current situation, he be-
lieves neither commercial television nor Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai (Japan Broad-
casting Corporation) (nhk) would allow that.13 Given the capital involved,
“the more advanced a media is, the easier it is for its content to become con-
servative or reactionary.”14
To Shimizu, television is the culmination of capitalistic mass commu-
nication. Earlier commentators on television, such as Kamimura Shin’ichi,
had argued that the new medium represented the revival of the family, as
fathers supposedly ceased seeking entertainment outside the home in bars
or at the movies, and returned to the bosom of their family.15 To such theo-
rists, argues Shimizu, mass communication is what removes the individual
from the home and melds them into the mass. The motion pictures are
purportedly the epitome of this, but to Shimizu, cinema actually represents
an inadequate development of mass communication. If the history of the
movies were likened to that of soap, cinema would be like women going
to the village center to wash clothes together, and television would be like
mass-produced soap, which everyone can bring home to use.16 People come
home because television has succeeded in the true mass production and dis-
tribution of symbols. Quoting Günther Anders, Shimizu says turning on
the tv is like “turning on a cultural faucet,” making television equivalent to
modern utilities.17 To Anders, this had profound implications: “If the world
comes to us instead of we to it, then we are no longer in the world. Instead
we are merely spoiled consumers in the world. . . . If the world comes to us
as an image, then it is partially present and partially absent, thus a phan-
tom or illusion.”18 Shimizu does not go as far as Anders—concluding that
through television humanity loses the world through a form of idealism—in
[36] aaron gerow

part b ecause he wants to maintain a space for individuated reading. Still, the
critique resembles Anders’s. The problem is that the return to the home does
not entail a new life for the f amily: under the power of the image, “they have
come closer spatially, but they do not face or talk to each other. . . . People
have not returned home from the movie theater; the relationship between
screen and audience has instead occupied the inside of the home.”19
To the sociologist Shimizu, this constitutes a problem. Resonating with
what Jürgen Habermas was writing about at the same time regarding media
and the public sphere, Shimizu saw the home as ideally a space free of soci-
ety, where the individual could become “zero.” “Human beings can restore
their selves for the first time at the moment they become zero to society,”20
gaining the time and freedom to complain about society. While he does
not, like Habermas, theorize a space of discourse between the private and
the public that can serve to mediate and check the two, Shimizu does share
Habermas’s worries that new media dissolve the boundaries between public
and private, facilitating both the invasion of the private by the public, as well
as the publicization of a reduced form of the private.21 Television to Shimizu
now structures that once-free time, leaving little opportunity for p eople to
develop critical perspectives. “The human being that had become zero is now
again absorbed through the television set in what is external to the home.”
For Shimizu, a socialist, “Television cannot permit the conditions that foster
the roots of revolution.”22
Before considering what Shimizu may propose as a solution to these
problems, let us dissect whatever distinction he might make between the
new and old media of film and television, focusing first on his contention
that “people have not returned home from the movie theater; the relation-
ship between screen and audience has instead occupied the inside of the
home.” Despite asserting that the need to collectively watch images in a dark
theater was a mark of the underdevelopment of cinema as mass communica-
tion, Shimizu essentially contends that the relationship of image to viewer
does not change when the screen enters the home. This does not mean he
finds no difference between film and television. While admitting he was not
much of a moviegoer, he said that the confusion he experienced emerging
from the dark symbolic space of cinema into the real world did not last long.
Television, however, is on all the time one is not at work or sleeping, mak-
ing unclear what is fiction and what is reality. This is even more the case
with the realistic world of color television: “The vibrant world of television
itself becomes reality, and the faded world that contradicts that becomes
fiction. We will live under the rule of appearances.”23

For Shimizu, then, the difference between film and television is primar-
ily a matter of location and frequency. If film consumed as much time in
the day as television, viewers would presumably experience the same rule
of appearances. The real difference between film and television viewing lies
less in the nature of the medium than in its space; the fact that television is,
unlike film, viewed in quotidian space makes frequent viewing more likely,
a condition that ultimately undermines the distinction between the image
and everyday life. The everydayness of television, from its location to its re-
petitiveness, was to Shimizu more central in defining the medium than its
technology.
The Everyday in Film and Television

Not all of Shimizu’s contemporaries concurred with his assertion that t here
was an essential similarity between film and television. The majority w ere
engaged in a medium-specific argument about the apparatus of television,
even as they, like Shimizu, could argue that the effect of television can vary
depending on how it was received. Most did echo Shimizu’s focus on the ev-
eryday and contended that television’s form of reception was fundamentally
different. Katō Hidetoshi, who published his own book, Terebi jidai (The
Television Age, 1958), the same year, argued that if all popular arts up u
ntil
then were arts of the crowd ( gunshū geijutsu), television involved the small
group.24 This could disrupt the absorption in the image Shimizu presumed
was equal between film and television. Sasaki Kiichi contended that the
multiple viewers in the home put a brake on one-way communication, in
the sense that, even if family members did not always talk together as they
watched, there was a kind of “unconscious communication” between view-
ers, forming a distance that could enable greater control of television and
occasional critique.25 Minami Hiroshi went so far as to argue that this was
precisely the problem with television from the standpoint of developmental
psychology. If identification is crucial to the process of subject formation,
then television viewing thwarts this by occurring in a place where identifica-
tion is often disrupted by the disturbances of f amily members and domestic
activities. Minami even suggested having a television for each family mem-
ber as a way to prevent this.26
Conceptions of the effects of television viewing on quotidian life may
have differed, but most agreed on the central relation between the new me-
dium and the everyday. Katō in particular defined television through the
everyday—not only its content and place, but even its form of reception, he
[38] aaron gerow

argued, is that of everyday life. Focusing on the relationship between the
performer and the spectator, Katō argues that television renders spectat-
ing, which in the age of the massification of spectatorship still necessitated
proactively going to see something, into an activity that requires no special
effort: one just remains at home and watches tv “because it’s there.” “The
unique characteristic of television as a form of entertainment,” he writes, “can
be found in its rendering spectatorship everyday.”27 Its relationship with quo-
tidian life is both the danger and potential of television. To Katō, its ability to
penetrate everyday existence provides it with considerable power, and could
lead to the establishment of fascism in a time of peace. But its allegiance with
an everyday that is not planned or scripted—evident in both documentary
and sports programming—makes television a medium centered on realism,
in contrast to the printing press, which developed out of fiction.28
Whether writers see this relation to the everyday as positive or negative,
they usually use the everyday to contrast television with cinema. Shimizu
aligns cinema and television as image media against print media, but then
consigns cinema to incompleteness because it has not penetrated the ev-
eryday world on a massive scale. Katō sees cinema spectators entering a fic-
tional world in such a way that they are incapable of relating it to an everyday
context.29 And to Minami, television, unlike film, “does not leave the fiction
world to be as it is, but rather crams fiction into the quotidian world and
makes it recognized as part of the everyday.”30
Reading these accounts, one encounters early formations of many of the
ideas that would dominate later accounts of television, but it is important to
stress their historical contingency. First, the association of television with the
everyday and the home was based on an ideologically refracted view of the
contemporary situation. In 1958, a major sector of the Japanese population did
not view television in the home but at television sets located in public spaces
such as train stations or cafés. As Yoshimi Shun’ya argues, the association
of television with the home is a historical construction that involved forget-
ting television’s history of being viewed by anonymous crowds outside the
home.31 This selective view of the historical context was in part class-based.
When Katō argues that the content of television is the everyday, he does so
by claiming that viewers recognize a certain reality in its content, seeing in
home dramas, for instance, “the same furniture or dishes” or finding “little
separation between the conversation of a mother and daughter sitting there
and that found in a real home.”32 Yet in November 1958, still only 8.2 percent
of Japanese households had a television set: it was still a luxury that even
the m iddle class could not yet acquire.33 In television theory, however, we

already see the construction of both the television audience and the Japa
nese as uniformly middle class, at the cost of ignoring significant sectors of
the populace. Furthermore, considering that in 1958 a major portion of tele
vision programming was foreign, the claim that Japanese would see them-
selves in Father Knows Best makes sense only if one adopted a deterministic
vision of the televisual apparatus that in practically imperial fashion ignored
geopolitical difference.
This vision in part resulted from the fact that many Japanese scholars
of television, like Katō, w
ere schooled in American communication stud-
ies.34 Shimizu was often ambivalent, both criticizing the capitalist Cold War
geopolitics of the United States—sometimes through the lens of Marxism
and European critical theory—while also using American sociology and
Deweyan pragmatism as the basis on which he built his arguments.35 Other
authors in the Shisō issue, however, repeatedly cite some of the major con
temporary American academic research of mass media and society, such as
that of Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, David Riesman, Reuel Denney,
and Leo Bogart. Although Japanese social scientists had closer ties to Marx-
ism than their American counterparts, they also, like the Americans, seemed
to have shifted the object of media research from propaganda to mass com-
munications, a concept that, especially under the limited effects model, con-
sidered the mass to be less a broad and long-term social phenomena than an
accumulation of levels of personal influence and short-term minimal effects.
Several of the writers in the Shisō issue, including Katō, Minami, and Hidaka
Rokurō, w ere members of Shisō no Kagaku (Institute of Science of Thought),
a long-lasting postwar research group that, while eclectic in politics and
methodology, largely focused on “studying the philosophy of the common
man”—that is, the ideas borne by the average Japanese.36 Even though they
could often produce bottom-up conceptions of cultural production, and use
these to promote the reform of Japanese society—a reform-mindedness that
Katō thought distinguished Japanese communication studies from those
of America37—this reform was usually modeled on a modernization thesis
grounded in American social science.
It may not be easy to claim of Japanese scholars that they were, as Timo-
thy Glander and others have charged of American media researchers, shift-
ing from propaganda to mass communications research in order to protect
television—and the media corporations they had financial ties to—from
criticism as propaganda, thereby providing cover for more precise manip-
ulations of media by Cold War industries and governments.38 Some, like
[40] aaron gerow

Minami, were supported by sectors of the media industry, however.39 As a
whole, Japanese television researchers w
ere operating in a space in which
Japanese television was deeply imbricated in Cold War politics, as recent re-
search on the relations between Matsutarō Shoriki (the head of the Yomiuri
media conglomerate and founder of ntv (Nippon Television Network), the
first commercial television broadcaster) and the CIA shows.40 While their
positions do not neatly map onto the American debates over media effects—
“limited effects” versus the “hypodermic” model—their writings could reflect
how the contingency of American tv studies came to claim the essence of
television theory, and thus how much Japanese television theory, as with the
Japanese tv industry, was shaped by Cold War visions.
Forgetting Theory
Japanese researchers seem not only to be wearing the blinkers of Ameri-
can theory, they also appear to be forgetting Japanese prewar media theory
as well. Katō’s history of communication research in Japan, written in 1959,
declares that “the study of communication did not develop” before the war
because of the lack of free speech and an obsession with foreign theory.41 The
line thus drawn at 1945 helps valorize postwar media research as democratic
and homegrown, but effaces continuities and the fact that, in this case, many
early television commentators echoed statements originally made about cin-
ema. Minami Hiroshi’s arguments about identification, for instance, while
cloaked in the discourse of developmental psychology, essentially replicate
the efforts of the Pure Film Movement in the 1910s to create a mode of film-
spectator relations that would allow for deep interactions with the image, in
part through attempts to eliminate distractions in the theater (such as the
benshi, or noisy spectators). Shimada Atsushi’s arguments about television
as art, while posing an intriguing thesis that it is the montage less of shots
than of tv programs in the flow of the programming day that makes televi
sion artistic,42 heavily depend on film theory and echo the position of such
early aestheticians as Shimizu Hikaru that only montage enabled cinema to
escape the mechanical reproduction of reality that Konrad Lange defined
as antithetical to art.43 Further, Yoshimura Tōru’s argument that televisual
signs are inadequate for transmitting concrete thought, and thus that print
media should leave description to television while keeping the job of “form-
ing consciousness” to itself, although based on a general argument about
“image symbols” (eizō shinboru) that can include film, essentially replicates

the claims made by Murayama Tomoyoshi and others over twenty years ear-
lier about the “limitation” of cinema: film was too rooted in the visual and
the bodily to depict psychology and complex ideas.44
What I would like to concentrate on here is how claims about television
and the everyday tend to forget how theorists argued decades before for an
essential relationship between cinema and the everyday. Gonda Yasunosuke
was one of the first. The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures
(Katsudō shashin no genri oyobi ōyō), published in 1914, described in cinema
a cultural mode that not only aligns with the practical methods of under-
standing used by lower-class audiences but also creates “the value of everyday
life,” first, by enabling its audiences to become the subject of culture; second,
by taking art (if not also scholarship) away from the halls of the elite, where
in the Kantian dictum it was defined as “purposiveness without a purpose,”
and reinserting it in the world of practical value; and third, by bringing
the everyday world into art (through photographic recording) and simulta
neously allowing spectators to insert their everyday emotions and ideas into
the film.45 Unlike Shimizu Ikutarō’s claims about the image, Gonda argued
that viewing cinema required effort, as it was the spectator who supplied the
silent film with sound, color, and three-dimensionality, “an unconscious but
difficult task” that resulted in the viewer inserting not only their subjectivity
but also, in contrast to Katō’s claim, their everyday life into the film.46
Harry Harootunian has already described a number of prewar Japanese
thinkers, from Kon Wajirō and Gonda Yasunosuke to Hirabayashi Hatsuno-
suke and Tosaka Jun, who looked to the category of everyday life as both a
means of understanding modernity and an enabling concept for construct-
ing a better present and f uture.47 Against t hose who, like Yanagita Kunio and
Watsuji Tetsurō, turned to an atemporal folk culture for an alternative to a
modern everyday that temporalized everything, rendering all aspects of life
in the present, t hese thinkers sought the possibilities entailed by newness, by
a modern life that was novel b ecause it was embodied by the manifestation
of newness in everyday existence. The modern opened up novel personal
worlds of experience, challenged existing social identities and relationships,
and promised new realities that would be experienced in new ways. While
this may seem to be a celebration of capitalism and commodity culture, to
Harootunian, many of these thinkers believed that the difference between
the abstract present of the commodity and the lived now of the everyday
could enable a “revolution [that] came from within modernity” that could
break the commodity form and resolve alienation.48 I see a similar use of the
everyday with film. Most of t hose thinking about the everyday wrote about
[42] aaron gerow

film precisely because they saw it both as embodying the infusion of the
modern into the everyday and as the primary means of expressing the novel
forms of living found in the new everyday.
Gonda, for example, responded to efforts to forcibly locate cinema in
districts (such as Asakusa) or in peripheral class cultures, first by reversing
these spatial hierarchies, rendering the periphery the center, and second by
then looking to the modern undermining of divisions of space, especially as
enabled by capitalism, as a force breaking up even those hierarchies. Cin-
ema became less an issue of space and territory than a question of time (the
now), of experience, and of culture. Gonda was attempting to bring cinema
back to the real world not by arguing for a realist style, or even for a realist
aesthetic philosophy, but instead by arguing for an experiential realism, in
which what mattered was less the ontological than the existential relation of
film to reality. Cinema was conjoined with everyday reality more through
the mediating actions of spectators making film part of their everyday ex-
istence than through textual style or technological indexicality. Cinema not
only ceased to be confined to the realm of disinterested art, but it would also
undermine all such art, and diffuse it throughout lived experience. Art itself
would then cease to have a proper location but simply become part of life.
Gonda, who had been trained in aesthetics at the University of Tokyo, wrote
“about popular matters in a popular mode” in his first book in an attempt to
also relocate theory.49 If film entertainment returned culture to the everyday,
his film study would take theory out of the ivory tower and bring it back to
the realm of popular discourse.
Gonda was not alone in exploring the political possibilities of cinema’s
relation to the everyday. Modernists such as Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, for in-
stance, saw the machine art of cinema as less the domination of space than
a means of eliminating the alienation between work and life, and of better
presenting on-screen a more mechanized modern life through mechanical
means.50 Nakai Masakazu, whom Akihiro Kitada discusses in this volume,
contemplated forms of “unmediated mediation” in which the masses’ practi-
cally bodily interaction with cinema enabled them to fill in the gaps in such
media with their world historical experience. The Marxist philosopher To-
saka Jun, who is the subject of Fabian Schäfer’s chapter, offered probably the
most suggestive ideas about epistemology and the cinema of everyday life. As
Naoki Yamamoto has described them, Tosaka’s essays on film treated motion
pictures as an essentially epistemological problem,51 and his concern was
elucidating how cinema had its own means of presenting thought.52 These
means, Yamamoto argued, fundamentally revolved around everyday life,

or fūzoku, as Tosaka called it. In the first place, cinema had a unique abil-
ity to inform p eople of their everyday life: “The screen,” he wrote, “teaches
humans about the goodness of materiality, the delight of the movement of
matters in this world. These are the things we usually see in our daily life,
but we h aven’t recognized their virtues u ntil they appear on the screen.”53 It
can do that precisely because cinema is the art of the everyday, presenting
society in a sensual, not necessarily intellectual fashion, in such a way that
society becomes visible in a concrete manner.54 Th ere is something remi-
niscent of André Bazin in Tosaka, especially when he focuses on cinema’s
unique ability to approximate everyday modes of perception: for him, “film’s
particular realism lies in where the actual reality of the real world becomes
the aesthetic reality of the medium as it is . . . . Particular attractions of film
are thus derived from a simple fact that on the screen we are able to see
the world in the same manner as we observe it in reality.”55 With Tosaka,
however, the manner in which we observe things in reality is not a natural
mode of perception but rather one that is shaped by fūzoku, the manners
and mores of everyday life particular to historical relations of production.
Cinema does not just approximate modes of perceiving reality, it embod-
ies a society’s—to Tosaka, mostly the masses’—ways of both thinking and
confirming itself, of articulating and knowing itself in a social fashion.
Watching film is then a means of experiencing, embodying, and eventually
knowing the social formulation of everyday life. This is not solipsistic ideal-
ism, but one fundamentally based on material modes of thinking, which is
why Tosaka connects cinema to science. While Tosaka could not develop
this idea before he was arrested (he eventually died in prison), o thers, such
as Imamura Taihei, contemplated the possibility of cinema actually being a
material mode of thinking that uses everyday things themselves as elements
of thought.56 This is one of the reasons that Imamura, the prominent theorist
of documentary, was attracted to animation as a form: it enabled everyday
objects in the world to expressively embody thought about the world.
A number of important early film theorists thus believed that the relation
between cinema and the everyday was a fulcrum for overcoming alienation
and rethinking art and epistemology. Why then did early television theo-
rists forget these precedents, and then actually assert the opposite about cin-
ema, relating the everyday to television instead? First, we must understand
that this forgetting is not uncommon: as I have noted elsewhere, the history
of Japanese film theory is plagued by such amnesia, especially as part of a
“theory complex” that is crisscrossed by neocolonial anxieties and politi
cal ambivalences, in which Japanese theory is conceived as subordinate to
[44] aaron gerow

that of the West, and thus not sufficiently theoretical to be included in the
historical narratives of film theory.57 Second, the conception of the relation
of the image (eizō) to the everyday might also have changed over time, es-
pecially considering the claims made in the “eizō debates” of the late 1950s,
in which some participants, such as Okada Susumu and Hani Susumu, ar-
gued that a new reality necessitated a new image, thus rewriting the image/
everyday axis.58 Similarly, and third, one could argue that the content and
meaning of the “everyday” had also changed after the war. Gonda and Tosaka
are primarily discussing a social phenomenon, seeing in the new mass and
public forms of interaction a novel form of quotidian life that represented a
transformative modernity. The everyday of Shimizu and Katō is largely the
middle-class home, defined by its privacy and atomism. Postwar theorists
were facing a bourgeois consumer culture on a scale quite different from
what it had been before the war.
Fourth, this is the foundation for the everyday having taken on a more
negative political valence. Shimizu prizes the sphere of intellectual reading,
and sees in the mundane space of daily repetition an antithesis that televi
sion comes to represent. Sasaki warns that the flow of a speedy and efficient
modernity has entered the mind through television. While hoping that de-
veloping new expressive forms based on nonwritten communication may
help viewers “digest” television, he declares that it is “impossible for tele
vision in its current state to provide viewers with an experience of artistic
stimulation.” To him, even if “television is a need [hitsuyōhin] in everyday
life, it is not a need for building a true human life.”59 Sasaki thus clearly
distinguished between “real human life” and “everyday life,” with con
temporary television satisfying only the latter. One could find in postwar
artistic intellectuals an increased suspicion of the everyday, fueled by anxiety
about the spread of consumer mass culture, Cold War image politics, and
disillusionment with the artistically conservative old Left. The promotion
of avant-garde, experimental, or surrealist expressive forms by Haneda Ki-
yoteru or Matsumoto Toshio was aligned with the project of undermining
conventionalized modes of seeing that had become quotidian.60 Later on
in television, Tahara Sōichirō’s stance on documentary similarly sought to
battle against the everyday, but from within, making the goal “to make a
non-everyday space or way of life not outside the everyday but inside it. To
drop out inside everyday life.”61 In these accounts, overcoming the everyday,
not recuperating it, was the means of overcoming alienation.
This did not mean that the everyday was always a negative object. The
end of the 1960s saw several attempts to reappropriate the everyday as a

radical realm. The television director Wada Ben in his book Engi to ningen
(Acting and the Human) theorized television as that which is severed from
both cinema and history: the everyday flow of expression that is resistant to
thought.62 The founders of tv Man Union—Hagimoto Haruhiko, Muraki
Yoshihiko, and Konno Tsutomu—concluded their famous tv manifesto,
Omae wa tada no genzai ni suginai (You Are Nothing but the Present), with
eighteen precepts, one of which touched on the everyday: “Television is
the everyday [ke/nichijō]: Life itself—to both the senders and the receivers.
The mundane [zoku]. The massive details up u ntil the encounter with the
divine. Drama with a date attached.”63 It was by being everyday that televi
sion could, to them, be a radical non-art, one defined by the present, the fluid,
and the physical—by a kind of jazz. Miryam Sas, in this volume, discusses
Konno’s effort to seek out modes of thought within the “concrete, everyday
labor process,” a project that aligns with other attempts she describes to enact
bodily modes of thinking and return to the physical everyday. One could
argue, however, that this later reevaluation of the everyday is involved with
yet another politics than that of 1950s television theory, one more closely as-
sociated with a late 1960s questioning of language and representation, par-
ticularly the attempts to rethink the relation of the individual to media she
notes in Matsuda Masao and others. Given the shift from a positive to a more
negative approach to media, the everyday was neither transformative moder-
nity nor bourgeois torpidity but perhaps a last-ditch, positive, less mediated
site for questioning the modern regimes of time and narrative.
Class and Everydayness of Theory

It is important to acknowledge these debates over and transformations in
the use of the concept of the everyday. As Chun suggests, there is repetition
in each of these attempts to fashion a new politics vis-à-vis media. What I
want to stress here is that each repetition involves a forgetting that at the same
time also enables the repetition. The assumptions in early television theory
that television was uniquely associated with the everyday, made at the cost
of ignoring the history of cinema’s relations with the mundane, functioned
in part to repress the historical politics of the everyday, or, more specifically,
the history of media’s relationship with the everyday. To a certain extent this
was a factor of the forgetting common to claims about a new media, as the
assertion that a media is new often involves claims of medium specificity
that assert too-clear binaries between media such as film and television or,
as earlier, between film and theater.
[46] aaron gerow

I would also argue, however, that this forgetting is also a means of avoid-
ing the problems underlying the project of the media theorist. Shimizu’s
groundbreaking essay ends not with a conclusion about television but with
a call for printed media to combat the feared dictatorship of the televisual
image. This core text about a new medium was then r eally about a suppos-
edly old medium. Shimizu’s turn to the printed medium was intimately
related to what became his solution to the problem of television: theory, or
shisō, as Yoshimi Shun’ya summarizes it. While Shimizu often placed him-
self on the side of the people (shomin) against intellectuals,64 his stance was
in the end often that of the scholar enlightening the masses.65 The threat
to intellectual thought posed by television had to be dealt with through
intellectual thought and only in the medium conducive to it: the printed
word. But not only does this solution reproduce the hierarchies between
the intellectual and the viewer (who is often of a lower socioeconomic class
than the scholar), it ultimately argues that new media is inimical to theory,
or that, in a corollary, theory’s role is to control such threatening media.
Here again, early television theory is repeating early film theory. From the
days of Nakagawa Shigeaki, who wrote the first philosophical account of cin-
ema in Japan in 1911—only to reject film as an art—the resistance of many
intellectuals to cinema was deep rooted, and, as is evident in the Pure Film
Movement, could often manifest itself in film practice by only creating hier-
archies between word and image, intellectual and spectator, modernism and
modernity. Television theory of the 1950s was largely in continuity with these
structures of power, effectively reconstituting them not by recalling that his-
tory but rather by obfuscating it, by stressing the difference of new media in its
relation to the everyday. New media theory then served to mask continuities
in the sociopolitical conflicts over media in modern capitalism.
Early tv theory also forgot Gonda. Although Katō cites Gonda, he does so
in the wrong field. What Gonda was ultimately stressing by focusing on the
relationship between cinema and the everyday was not simply the new lived
geography of media, but the problem of theory as well. The debate over the
everyday was not just about which media was closer to the everyday or what
constituted the mediated everyday, but also about the relation of theory to
the everyday—the everydayness of theory. Hidaka also suggests this at the
end of his contribution to the Shisō issue, when he declares that it would be
purely illusory to study “100 million becoming idiots” without considering
why there were no labor unions in the Japanese broadcast industry—that is,
how capital operated on the everyday bodies of tv workers and spectators.66
A new media demanded not only a new theory but also a new way of d oing

theory, one that itself had to confront the problems of the intellectual, mo-
dernity, capital, labor, and medium through considering its own everyday-
ness. Otherwise, it would simply repeat the theory of an older media.
notes
1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2001).
2. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?,” in
New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and
Thomas W. Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.
3. Others have found and explained such repetitions in various ways. Ellen Wartella
and Byron Reeves, who found similarities in early research of film and television’s ef-
fects on c hildren, blame such repetitions on basic assumptions in American social sci-
ences; “Historical Trends in Research on C hildren and the Media: 1900–1960,” Journal
of Communication 35, no. 2 (June 1985): 118–33. Jan Simons argues that many theories of
new media end up repeating an insufficiently questioned “folk theory” of media; “New
Media as Old Media: Cinema,” in The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: bfi,
2002), 231–41. And William Uricchio even suggests that the repetition may be reversed:
“television . . . can be argued to have established the horizon of expectations for film
itself some ten to 15 years before the Lumières’ first 1895 projection”; “Old Media as New
Media: Television,” in Harries, New Media Book, 223.
4. Peter Krapp, “Hypertext Avant La Lettre,” in Chun and Keenan, New Media, Old
Media, 361.
5. Jayson Makoto Chun, “A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots”?: A Social History of
Japanese Television, 1953–1973 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 25–29.
6. See my Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spec-
tatorship, 1895–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
7. Ōya first used the phrase in January 1957 in the Tokyo shinbun, but later softened
his stance. See Ōya Sōichi, “ ‘Ichioku sōhakuchika’ meimei shimatsuki,” in Ōya Sōichi
zenshū (Tokyo: Eichōsha, 1975), 339–48.
8. See Yoshimi Shun’ya’s introduction to the reprint of Shimizu Ikutarō’s “Terebijon
jidai” [The television age]: “ ‘Terebijon jidai’ kaidai’ ” Shisō 956 (December 2003): 7–10.
9. Shimizu Ikutarō, “Terebijon jidai,” Shisō 413 (November 1958): 6.
10. Shimizu, “Terebijon jidai,” 11.
11. Shimizu, “Terebijon jidai,” 11–12.
12. Shimizu, “Terebijon jidai,” 12–13.
13. Shimizu Ikutarō, “Terebi no honshitsu” [The essence of television], Asahi shinbun,
May 2, 1957 (morning ed.), 5. Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai is Japan’s national public broadcast-
ing organization.
15. See J. M. Chun, 47–48.
16. Shimizu Ikutarō, “Terebi bunmeiron” [On tv civilization], in Besuto obu Kinema
junpō (Best of Kinema junpō) (Tokyo: Kinema Junpōsha, 1994), 1:709.
[48] aaron gerow

18. Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Meschen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), 1:111;
quoted in Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Con-
tributions of Günther Anders (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 47. Shimizu is working with
the original 1956 edition.
21. Habermas said this of television and radio: “They draw the eyes and ears of the
public under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it u
nder
‘tutelage,’ which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to
disagree.” Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An In-
quiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: mit
Press, 1991), 171.
23. Shimizu, “Terebi bunmeiron,” 708.
24. Katō Hidetoshi, “Terebijon to goraku,” Shisō 413 (November 1958): 43–47.
25. Sasaki Kiichi, “Terebi bunka to wa nanika,” Shisō 413 (November 1958): 227–28.
26. Minami Hiroshi, “Terebi to ningen,” in Kōza gendai masu komyunikēshon 2: Ter-
ebi jidai, ed. Minami Hiroshi (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1960), 7–16. In the Shisō
issue, Minami argues that television, because it cannot be reviewed due to its continual
flow, demands concentration. Since that is a burden on viewers, however, they have
to resort to such tactics as personalization, viewing everyone on television as if they
are “like” someone in the neighborhood, in order to bring the image closer and make
it easier to consume. See Minami Hiroshi, “Terebijon to ukete no seikatsu,” Shisō 413
(November 1958): 105.
27. Katō, “Terebijon to goraku,” 43.
30. Minami, “Terebijon to ukete no seikatsu,” 106.
31. Yoshimi Shun’ya, “Terebi ga ie ni yatte kita,” Shisō 956 (December 2003): 26–47.
33. NHK Nenkan: 1962 (Tokyo: Rajio Sābisu Sentā, 1962), 8. The rate of ownership
would increase dramatically in the next few years, but significant regional differences
would remain. In March 1962, for instance, 68.6 percent of Osaka h ouseholds would
have a tv (compared to the national average of 49.5 percent), but only 17.4 percent of
Kagoshima homes would (see NHK Nenkan, 10). The tv middle class was even then
not uniformly national.
34. Katō himself studied at Harvard and the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s
and was a student of David Rietman. See Yoneyama Toshinao, “Katō Hidetoshi,” Gen-
dai jinbutsu jiten (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun, 1977), 335.
35. See, for instance, Amano Yasukazu, Kiki no ideorōgu: Shimizu Ikutarō hihan
(Tokyo: Hihyōsha, 1970), 193–205.
36. Hidetoshi Kato, “The Development of Communication Research in Japan,” in
Japanese Popul ar Culture, ed. Hidetoshi Kato (Rutland, VT: Charles Tuttle, 1959), 35.

37. Kato, “Communication Research in Japan,” 41–43.
38. See Timothy Glander, Origins of Mass Communications Research during the
American Cold War (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000).
39. Kato, “Communication Research in Japan,” 38.
40. See Arima Tetsuo, Nihon terebi to cia (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2006).
41. Kato, “Communication Research in Japan,” 34.
42. Shimada Atsushi, “Terebi geijutsu no kiso,” Shisō 413 (November 1958): 232–39.
43. See Shimizu Hikaru, Eiga to bunka (Kyoto: Kyōiku Tosho, 1941), especially
3–22.
44. See Murayama Tomoyoshi, “Eiga no genkaisei,” Kinema Junpō 507 (June 1, 1934):
67–68.
45. See Gonda Yasunosuke, Katsudō shashin no genri oyobi ōyō [The principles and
applications of the moving pictures] (Tokyo: Uchida Rōkakuho, 1914); or my transla-
tion of sections of that book, “The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures
(Excerpts),” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (2010): 24–36.
46. Gonda, “Moving Pictures,” 26.
47. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 95–101.
48. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 101.
49. Gonda, Katsudō shashin no genri, 441. For more on his attempts to relocate the-
ory, see also my discussions of Gonda in my Visions of Japanese Modernity; and “The
Process of Theory: Reading Gonda Yasunosuke and Early Film Theory,” Review of Japa
nese Culture and Society 22 (2010): 37–43.
50. See Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 106–18.
51. Naoki Yamamoto, “Realities That M atter: The Development of Realist Film The-
ory and Practice in Japan, 1895–1945” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2012), 163–81.
52. Tosaka Jun, “Eiga no ninshikironteki kachi to fūzoku byōsha,” Nihon eiga 2, no. 6
(June 1937): 13–19.
53. Tosaka Jun, “Eiga no shajitsuteki tokusei to fūzokusei oyobi taishūsei,” in Tosaka
Jun zenshū (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1966–67), 4:285–86, quoted in Yamamoto, “Realities
That Matter,” 170.
54. Tosaka, “Eiga no ninshikironteki kachi,” 17.
55. Tosaka, “Eiga no shajitsuteki tokusei,” 289; quoted in Yamamoto, “Realities that
Matter,” 171–72.
56. See, for instance, Imamura Taihei’s “Geijutsu keishiki to shite no eiga,” in Eiga
geijutsu no keishiki (Tokyo: Ōshio Shoin, 1938), 129–62. One can accept Yamamoto’s
argument that “Imamura was different from Tosaka in his tendency to define cinematic
cognition not as the process but as the result of someone’s cognitive activity” (Yama-
moto, “Realities That Matter,” 206), but even then, it is a result that involves a process of
rendering thought concrete.
57. Aaron Gerow, “Introduction: The Theory Complex,” Review of Japanese Culture
and Society 22 (December 2010): 1–13.
58. See, for instance, Hani Susumu and Okada Susumu, “Eiga ni okeru henkakuki to
wa nanika,” in Besuto obu Kinema junpō (Tokyo: Kinema Junpōsha, 1994), 1:882–85. For
[50] aaron gerow

more on the debates, see Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde
Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
59. Sasaki, “Terebi bunka to wa nanika,” 774–75.
60. See, for instance, Matsumoto Toshio, “A Theory of Avant-Garde Documentary,”
trans. Michael Raine, Cinema Journal 51, no. 4 (2012): 148–54.
61. Tahara Sōichirō, “Nichijō kara no tonsō,” Tenbō (October 1971): 78; quoted in
Niwa Yoshiyuki, “Dokyumentarī seishun jidai no shūen,” Terebi da yo! Zen’in shūgō, ed.
Hase Masato and Ōta Shōichi (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2007).
62. Wada Ben, Engi to ningen (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1970), 2–10.
63. Hagimoto Haruhiko, Muraki Yoshihiko, and Konno Tsutomu, Omae wa tada no
genzai ni suginai: Terebi ni nani ga kanō ka [You are nothing but the present: What is
possible for television?] (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1969), 367.
64. See Oguma Eiji, Shimizu Ikutarō (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobō, 2003), 38–45.
65. According to Takeuchi Yō, Shimizu “used the people as a means of confront-
ing intellectuals, but when confronting the people, could say they ‘needed to listen to
the research and opinions of scholars.’ ” See Takeuchi Yō, Media to chishikijin: Shimizu
Ikutarō no haken to bōkyaku (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 2012), 331.
66. Hidaka Rokurō, “Terebijon kenkyū no hitotsu no zentei,” Shisō 413 (November
1958): 29.

2 . A R C H I T E C T U R E A S AT M O S P H E R I C M E D I A
Tange Lab and Cybernetics
y u ri ko f u ru hata
Much of the current debate and critical approaches to media ecology and ubiq-
uitous computing echoes architectural discourse on the media-saturated urban
environment from the 1960s. It was then that the rapid growth of telecommu-
nication networks and the intensification of data traffic prompted architects
to consider urban space in relation to technical media. For these architects,
thinking about urban design became inseparable from thinking about com-
munication and information technologies, and architectural criticism became
contiguous with media theory. While an echo from the past is only part of the
conversation in the present, the reverberations between Japanese architectural
theory from the 1960s and current media theory are worth considering, if only
to contextualize the historical specificity of the former and to gain a compara-
tive perspective on the latter.
The current discussion of technical media in North America is increas-
ingly inflected by ecological and environmental factors. Mark Hansen, for
instance, has argued that twenty-first-century media—from social media
to data mining to microsensor technologies that imperceptibly shape our
social milieu—is more “elemental” or “atmospheric” than twentieth-century
media, whose temporal vectors are directed toward the past and the pres
ent while directly addressing h uman users. Characterized by the anticipa-
tory temporality of the future, and embedded in computational processes
that operate below the thresholds of h uman perceptual experience, twenty-
first-century media, in contrast, offer new sensory affordances that radi-
cally reconfigure the relationship between h umans and their environments.
“Human experience is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation
caused by the complex entanglement of humans within networks of media
technologies that operate predominantly, if not almost entirely, outside the
scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense per-
ception, etc.),” argues Hansen.1
What he calls the constitutive doubleness of these networked media thus
derives from their dual capacity to mediate our sensory access to the world,
and to affect this access by becoming constitutive of the very sensory data
of the world. One of the most provocative points Hansen makes in this re-
formulation of media lies precisely in his characterization of media as atmo-
spheric. Media has become our atmosphere, seamlessly blending into our
surroundings, like the air that we breathe and that envelops us.
Although operating from a different perspective, John Durham Peters
makes a similar observation in his recent book, The Marvelous Cloud. The
ubiquity of digital devices, argues Peters, “invite[s] us to think of media as en-
vironmental, as part of the habitat.”2 Contemporary technical media are again
conceived as atmospheric and elemental, actively blurring the boundary be-
tween artificial and biological environments. Taking this observation as a
point of departure, Peters calls attention to the conceptual affinity between
medium and milieu: “Medium has always meant an element, environment,
or vehicle in the m iddle of t hings.” Tracing the etymological root of the term
“media” back to the ancient notion of natural environment, he then dem-
onstrates how the instrumental understanding of an intermediate agent,
articulated by eighteenth-century philosophy, paved the way for the mod-
ern understanding of media as man-made channels and processes of h uman
communication: “The concepts of medium and milieu have long orbited each
other, as twin offspring of Aristotelian material and the Latin word medius,
m
iddle.”3
Returning to this older connotation of media allows Peters to conceive of
environments—from natural elements such as water and fire to cultural arti-
facts and infrastructures—as media, that is to say, as means and processes of
communication not only for h umans but also for nonhuman agents. While
Hansen’s and Peters’s theoretical premises are different, they share a com-
mon ground: to rethink media as atmospheric, as an immediate given.
One discipline in which much thought has gone into this presupposed
connection between media and milieu is architecture. Although the cur-
rent discourse on atmospheric media in North Americ a complicates our

understanding of the ubiquity of electronic media through the framework
of the environmental given, the Japanese architectural discourse of the 1960s
sheds a different light on this situation. It allows us to see how specific eco-
nomic, political, and epistemic conditions contributed to this environmen-
tal understanding of media in the first place. The Japanese situation, in other
words, shows that the connection between media and milieu is a historical
construct.
This chapter will examine the historical connection between media and
milieu articulated by Japanese architects at a time when the cybernetic con-
cepts of communication, control, and feedback first entered architectural
criticism. The aim h ere is to trace what might be called “the cybernetic turn”
of Japanese architecture during the 1960s in order to tease out its relevance
to the current discussion of atmospheric media. This moment unfolded in re-
lation to several historical factors, including postwar high economic growth
and governmental investment in the reconstruction of communication in-
frastructures devastated by the war.
At the center of this cybernetic turn was a group of architects who boldly
reimagined urban space: Tange Kenzō and his students who worked in and
graduated from Tange Lab at the University of Tokyo. Tange Lab was a birth-
place of visionary architects, including those who called themselves Metab-
olist. Politically, it also functioned as an informal think tank that conducted
government-commissioned research on the economic and social optimiza-
tion of urban design and national land planning since the late 1940s. While
technofuturistic images of Metabolist projects (such as Kurokawa’s capsule
housing) tend to obscure the complex activities of Tange Lab and its par-
ticipation in the rebuilding of Japan, the political importance of Tange Lab
cannot be measured by its futurism alone. Rather, as architect and critic Yat-
suka Hajime sharply argues, the legacy of Tange Lab is inseparable from the
grand project of nation building, a project that harkens back to the imperial
days of colonial urban planning.4 If that is the case, then, we need to take a
nuanced look at Tange Lab’s cybernetic turn in the 1960s.
In the sections that follow, I will first sketch the general context surround-
ing Tange’s turn to cybernetics (“The Cybernetic Turn”) and his inheritance
of the biopolitical vision of colonial urban planning (“The Biopolitical Vi-
sion of Colonial Urban Planning”). Next, I w ill explore the specific con-
texts within which architects at Tange Lab and their associates responded
to cybernetics through the managerial discourse on the postindustrial in-
formation society and logistics (“The Information Revolution”). I w ill then
address the postwar importation of communication theory and the artistic
[54] yuriko furuhata

uptake of interactivity, which informs the work of Isozaki Arata, a graduate
of Tange Lab and architect whose vision of the responsive cybernetic envi-
ronment anticipates the contemporary debate on atmospheric media (“The
Cybernetic Environment”), before concluding with some thoughts on the
relevance of this history to contemporary media theory.
The Cybernetic Turn

Among others, Marshall McLuhan’s idea that housing is a medium of com-
munication best captures the mid-twentieth-century vision of atmospheric
media.5 McLuhan famously defined media as a technological extension of
the human body, whose historical impact is measurable through its capacity
to alter our sensory perceptions. “For the ‘message’ of any medium of tech-
nology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into h
uman
affairs.”6 The railroad, for instance, accelerated the scale of movement and
transport. In so doing, it reshaped the contours of modern cities. Becoming an
indispensable part of housing, the electric light also reconfigured living and
working spaces by abolishing “the divisions of night and day, of inner and
outer, and of the subterranean and the terrestrial.”7 Electric lighting was not,
however, the only technological invention that altered our perception of the
habitable environment: electronic media and information technologies had
radically changed the way architects envisioned it.
As Mark Wigley notes, architects gave serious consideration to informa-
tion networks accelerated by the proliferation of electronic media in the 1950s
and 1960s. It is not an overstatement to say that architecture was at the core
of media theory’s turn to information networks. Even McLuhan’s idea of elec-
tronic media as a prosthetic extension of the h uman nervous system owes
to his encounter with architects.8 By the mid-1960s, architects and urban
planners across continents w ere collectively developing a new paradigm of
urban design based on insights gleaned from cybernetics and communica-
tion theory. Architects Constantinos Doxiadis and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, for
instance, gathered an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars—
from Margaret Mead to Marshall McLuhan—in order to analyze urban
planning in relation to information flow and communication networks. It
was then that the very idea of the network became integral to architecture,
and the Japanese architect Tange Kenzō was among t hose who partook in this
international effort to rethink urban design through the lens of cybernetics.
According to Wigley, “Tange drew on cybernetics to discuss the influence of
all the contemporary systems of communications—arguing, in McLuhanesque

fashion, that there has been a second industrial revolution, an information
revolution that prosthetically extends the nervous system in the same way
that the first one physically extended the body.”9 Popularized by the work
of Norbert Wiener, cybernetics draws parallels between the information-
processing machine and the human nervous system. Wiener did not simply
draw a comparison between social organization and biological organization;
he collapsed the two by redefining both through their internal communica-
tive capacities to fight entropy or disorder through feedback loops.10 This
structural parallel between the communicative capacities of the city and
those of the living organism appeared frequently in Tange’s own writing in
the 1960s.
Tange shared his vision of the city as a living organism endowed with
its own nervous system at the Delos symposium organized by Doxiadis in
1966. His vision seems to have struck a chord with many who attended the
meeting. This was partly because his idea had already been introduced to an
international audience through the architectural journal Ekistics as early as
1961.11 Having taught at mit in 1959 and participated in various architectural
symposia, Tange was familiar with the impact cybernetics had had on archi-
tecture, though it would be remiss to simply conclude that his vision of the
city as a sentient organism was a direct result of his experience abroad. As we
will see shortly, Tange’s appropriation of cybernetic metaphors was, in part,
also a logical extension of the biopolitical discourse on colonial architecture
and urban planning.12
Well before his participation in the Delos symposium, Tange frequently
used the biological metaphors of blood circulation and the central nervous
system to articulate his vision.13 In order to grow and maintain its healthy
metabolic cycle, the city, in his view, required the constant circulation of
energy and information to facilitate efficient communication among its or-
ganic parts. Tange set this biological analogy of energy and information cir
cuits at the center of his urban planning.
For instance, Tange’s well-known but unrealized urban project, Plan
for Tokyo 1960, hinges on the reconfiguration of transportation networks.
These networks are organized along “the spinal axis” stretched across Tokyo
Bay. This axis functions as the “central nervous system” of the city, as if to
emulate the anatomical structure of the vertebrate animal.14 Similarly, in his
essay “The Future of the Japanese Archipelago: The Formation of Tōkaidō
Megalopolis” (1965), Tange presents a biological metaphor of the Japanese
archipelago as a vertebrate animal that grows along the central urban “spi-
nal” axis that links and networks several metropolises.

In the course of the 1960s, Tange updated this biological model of the city as
a complex living organism—his favorite example was the vertebrate animal—
to a cybernetic model of the city, adding the communicative elements of feed-
back and control to the static infrastructure of circulation. But if he did so, it
is because the models of organism and communication provided by cellular
biology and cybernetics w ere compatible. For Tange, urban planning was all
about organizing space in order to maintain an effective communication or
circulation of elements within the organism called city.15 Following Wiener,
he argued that an organism strives toward organization through the com-
municative processes of information management and feedback. Tange ap-
plied this logic to his theory of urban design by highlighting the centrality
of traffic, energy, and information networks.16
This thematization of circulation—of air, vehicles, and pedestrians—was
not new. Rather, it was a central tenet of modern architecture and urban-
ism. In the late 1920s, designing efficient networks of transportation became
one of the main objectives of modern architecture and urbanism. The idea
was first promoted by the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne
(International Congresses of Modern Architecture), an international asso-
ciation of architects founded by leading European figures such as Walter
Gropius and Sigfried Giedion.17 This modernist idea of efficient circulation
clearly influenced Tange, but he read it through the newly acquired lens of
cybernetics and its organizational logic of feedback. He writes: “Organization
is neither a perfect container for freedom nor a despotic mold. Rather, it is
a living organism that voluntarily controls the process of feedback between
freedom and order. I believe that a modern society is a highly developed form
of a living organism. Its growth resembles an evolutionary process of devel-
opment from plant to animal, to h uman, as it has developed its own nervous
system within social organizations, and started to engage in brain activities.”18
The modernist discourse on urbanism had long relied on organic, cellular,
and evolutionary metaphors of the city.19 But Tange’s organicist view of the
city also has a more specific origin, namely the biopolitical vision of colonial
urban planning.
The Biopolitical Vision of Colonial Urban Planning

While the cybernetic paradigm of organization brought a new way of imag-
ining the environment, the political function of postwar Japanese architec-
ture, especially that of Tange Lab, cannot be dissociated from the imperial
project of expanding Japan’s “living sphere” (Lebensraum) through colonial

urban planning. As Yatsuka suggests, the Metabolist and Tange’s organicist
vision of the city in the postwar period clearly inherits the earlier biopoliti
cal vision of the colonial administrators and urban planners such as Gotō
Shinpei.20
Gotō, who served as the colonial administrator in Taiwan and Manchuria
and oversaw a number of urban projects in the colonies as well as on the
mainland, is often credited as the founding father of Japanese urban plan-
ning.21 In addition to serving in high-ranking positions, such as director-
general of the Manchurian Railway Company, a linchpin of Japan’s settler
colonialist expansion in Northeast China, Gotō also served as the commu-
nications minister, the first chairman of the Urban Studies Association, and
even the mayor of Tokyo. He is also known as an infamous proponent of
the scientific management of colonies based on “biological principles” com-
bined with biopolitical structures of governance such as centralized medical
police. It is his experiments in colonial administration and city planning
that Yatsuka highlights as an important precursor to Tange’s and Metabo-
lists’ postwar urban projects of expanding Japan’s “living sphere” a fter the
loss of all of the overseas colonies. Even the seemingly technofuturistic proj
ects of megastructures suspended in the sky and floating over the sea fit
within the purview of this imperial paradigm of literally expanding the ter-
ritory and its habitable environment.22
Echoing Yatsuka’s historical repositioning of Tange and Metabolism as
direct heirs to colonial architecture and urban planning, Isozaki Arata and
Sawaragi Noi have also noted that the wartime discourse on “the environ-
ment” (kankyō) was an important precursor to the postwar popularization
of the term by Asada Takashi, another affiliate of Tange Lab.23 Among other
graduates of Tange Lab, Isozaki held the most critical stance toward Tange’s
commitment to nation building and his collaboration with the wartime re-
gime, though, as we will see later, he too came to embrace the organizational
logic of cybernetics.
When we look closely at the writings of Gotō and his biopolitical vision
of the colonial administration, we begin to see how much Tange’s postwar
vision of the city as a living organism echoes an earlier Japanese discourse
on urban planning and nation building. A fter all, Tange was not the first to
deploy the metaphors of the “vertebrate animal” and the “central nervous
system” to describe the organization of the city. Gotō had done so in his
discussion of optimizing the communicative capacities of the administra-
tive apparatuses of the empire during the 1910s, using the same metaphors

of the vertebrate animal and the nervous system in his discussion of the
governance of Manchuria.24
As if to anticipate Tange’s postwar call for the self-regulating growth of
the living city along the spinal axis of the centralized transportation net-
work, Gotō argued for the organized growth of the empire through commu-
nication networks. “The current state of colonial Manchuria in the empire
is characterized by its disunity, which is comparable to the de-centralized
nerve ganglia of a lower form of animal life,” writes Gotō. In his view, if the
office of the Kwantung governor-general in Manchuria were to function as
the “brain” of Japan’s imperialist expansion in Asia, it had to unify its judi-
ciary, police, civil engineering, and telecommunications apparatuses. Only
then could these administrative apparatuses properly function as the “cen-
tral nervous system” of the empire. And the Japanese empire, in his view,
was analogous to the intelligent “vertebrate animal.”25
Given Tange’s wartime contribution to the expansionist ideology of the
empire—as demonstrated by his design for the Commemorative Building
Project for the Construction of Greater East Asia (or the Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere Monument) of 1942—it is not surprising to find this
similarity between his and Gotō’s organicist visions.26 While Tange spoke
nothing of the empire—or his wartime involvement—his ambition to re-
build the city of Tokyo and to restructure the entire Japanese archipelago
through the cybernetic paradigm of communication and control betrays a
residual trace of the biopolitical rhetoric of governance that colonial admin-
istrators such as Gotō espoused and passed down to later generations of
architects and urban planners.
That being said, however, I do not mean that Tange’s view of urban design
did not change from the wartime to the postwar period. Rather, I would
argue that it mutated in a timely response to the infrastructural and discur-
sive changes taking place around the conceptualization of the environment
in the postwar years. His embrace of cybernetics was part of this timely re-
sponse to these changes.
The Information Revolution

The cybernetic metaphor of the city so favored by Tange, in other words,
did not simply follow the colonial discourse on urban planning but was
prompted by the postwar debates on the information society, postindustri-
alization, and the logistics revolution. Promoted by a group of sociologists,

economists, architects, and policy makers (some of whom had a direct link
to Tange Lab), the Japanese discourse on the information society ( jōhōka
shakai or jōhō shakai) applied the cybernetic logics of feedback and control
to business, and saw logistics and automation as essential to the optimization
of the economic productivity of the nation. This discourse critically inflected
the way in which architects such as Tange interpreted cybernetics.
One of the characteristics of information society discourse, like its con
temporary American counterpart, is an overtly optimistic outlook on
computerization. For instance, according to Masuda Yoneji, a bureaucrat, fu-
turologist, and the founder of the Institute for the Information Society, com-
puter technology signaled the dawn of “computopia” (or computer-based
utopia) and the arrival of “the information époque.” For Masuda, the infor-
mation society is characterized by the rise of intellectual labor, economic
synergy across industries, automation, and participatory democracy in
which citizens actively engage in policy decision making through networked
systems of communication feedback. He contends, “As the 21st century ap-
proaches . . . the possibilities of a universally opulent society being realized
have appeared in the sense that [Adam] Smith envisioned it, and the infor-
mation society (futurization society) that w ill emerge from the computer
communications revolution will be a society that actually moves toward a
universal society of plenty.”27 Masuda’s optimism is echoed in much of the
Japanese information society discourse of the 1970s.
In hindsight, we can see that the Japanese discourse on the information
society was part of the governmental and corporate push toward postindus-
trialization. But in the early 1960s, when the idea of the information society
first began to circulate, there was no definitive understanding of what the
term meant. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki argues, “The term ‘information society’
is one which is more often used than defined.”28 Even though the term cir-
culated widely through a myriad of publications, the meaning of the term
itself was not always clear to its users. For instance, in the book Information
Society: From Hard Society to Soft Society (1969), Hayashi Yūjirō—an advisor
to the influential Economic Planning Agency and the person who is often
credited for the popularization of the term “information society”—lists a se-
ries of heterogeneous definitions of “information” excerpted from the work
of prominent academics such as Umesao Tadao (an intellectual known for
developing the idea of the information society in Japan), Miyagawa Tadao,
and Fritz Machlup. Ultimately, however, he admits that there is no precise
definition of “information society.” Referring to an international sympo-

sium organized by the Japan Techno-Economics Society (Kagaku Gijutsu
to Keizai no Kai) and held in 1968, Hayashi explains that the conclusion he
drew from the symposium was that the definition of “information society”
remained ambiguous to both Japanese and American academics.29
Similarly, in the opening chapter of the Japan’s Information Society: Its Vi-
sion and Challenges (Nihon no jōhōka shakai: Sono bijon to kadai, 1969), edited
by the Information Committee for the Economic Council (Keizai shingikai
jōhō kenkyū iinkai, an advisory board for the prime minister composed of
corporate and governmental representatives), the meaning of the keyword
“informatization” ( jōhōka) is ultimately left undefined: “The word informa-
tization became popularly used in the past few years, but as is usual with a
trendy neologism its meaning remains vague. . . . Certainly, the term infor-
matization is often equated with computers but they are not the same thing.”30
In spite of its vagueness concerning the key concept of informatization,
the book nonetheless covers a wide range of topics, including the rise of the
information industry ( jōhō sangyō), the computerization of banking sys-
tems, strategies of business management, the impact of automation on the
labor market, and the introduction of computers into educational institu-
tions, as well as transformations in logistics and the distribution of com-
modities. And it is this last topic—logistics—that deserves special attention,
as it holds a direct relevance to the research activities of Tange Lab.
Broadly defined, “logistics” concerns the management of movement, and
the coordinated flow of both things and military operations. The term derives
from military usage, but it has come to be associated with the post-Fordist
capitalist mode of production and distribution through the expansion of the
business logistics of the 1960s and 1970s. Business logistics also focuses on
supply chain management, a field that grew rapidly amid the introduction
of computers and operations research, the innovation of the containership
and the corresponding reconfiguration of transport infrastructures, and the
application of cybernetics to the manufacture and distribution of goods.
In Japan, this way of thinking about logistics began to circulate in the
early 1960s, in popular books such as economist Hayashi Shūji’s A Revolution
in Distribution (Ryūtsū kakumei).31 Indeed, the 1960s was the time when op-
erations research, systems theory, and the technocratic discourse of the infor-
mation society all converged around a set of related issues: logistics, comput-
erization, and the transportation and communication infrastructures of urban
space. All of this left an indelible mark on Japanese architectural criticism and
informed its embrace of cybernetics.32

Moreover, if cybernetics can be broadly defined as “the field concerned
with information flows in all media,”33 architecture was cybernetic even be-
fore architectural criticism embraced its vocabulary. In this regard, Tange
Lab’s systematic studies of information and energy flows in the 1950s and
early 1960s warrant attention. For instance, in 1963 Tange Lab conducted
a comprehensive analysis of “the connections between the more than 100
departments and bureaus of the government and the movement of 10,000
workers” inside the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.34 Through-
out the 1960s, Tange’s interest in the coordinated management of the flow
of things as a key component of architecture and urban design coincided
with the economic rationality of the information society discourse, and
dovetailed with governmental investment in the studies of information
traffic.
Given the close institutional ties between the postwar Japanese govern-
ment and Tange Lab, it is not surprising to find this resonance between
Tange’s theorization of urban design and information society discourse.
For instance, two architects trained at Tange Lab—Shimokōbe Atsushi and
Obayashi Jun’ichirō—went on to become powerful bureaucrats who worked
for the Economic Planning Agency, the Ministry of Construction, and the
National Land Agency. Shimokōbe’s and Obayashi’s research on industrial
productivity had a direct impact on the Comprehensive National Develop-
ment Plan (Zenkoku Sōgō Kaihatsu Keikaku) launched by the Economic
Planning Agency in 1962, around the same time that Umesao Tadao’s essay
on the information industry and Hayashi Shūji’s book on the logistics revo-
lution were published.35
Under the aegis of Shimokōbe, one of the masterminds b ehind the Com-
prehensive National Development Plan, several members of Tange Lab also
participated in government-sponsored research activities on the impact of
information technologies on urban space. In 1967, for instance, Shimokōbe
appointed Kurokawa Kishō, a graduate of Tange Lab and a prominent mem-
ber of the Metabolist group, to take part in an information network research
group. In 1970, Shimokōbe edited and published a book, Dialogues with In-
formation Society: Information Networks for F uture Japan, and presented the
outcome of a research project commissioned by the Economic Planning
Agency (see fig. 2.1). We find Kurokawa’s name yet again listed among the
participants of this research group, which included both government officials
and corporate representatives from the telecommunications industry, such
as the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (ntt), Japan
Broadcasting Corporation (nhk), and Dentsū.36 In 1972, Kurokawa published

[fig. 2.1] The cover
of Shimokōbe Atsushi,
Jōhōshakai to no
taiwa: Mirai Nihon
no jōhō nettowāku
[Dialogues with
information society:
Information networks
for future Japan]
(Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai
Shinhōsha, 1970).
The F uture of Information Archipelago Japan, a book that echoed the title
of Tange’s 1965 essay “The F uture of the Japanese Archipelago.”37 Kuro-
kawa was also a participant of the futurology division of the Japan Techno-
Economics Society, which published an official report titled Developing a
Super-Technological Society: Humans in Information Systems in 1969. The
book was edited by none other than Hayashi Yūjirō.38
Tange Lab thus had close ties to the proponents of the information so-
ciety and their government-sponsored research activities at a time when
Japan was undergoing massive infrastructural transformations. The afore-
mentioned essay by Tange (“The Future of the Japanese Archipelago”) was
also a direct result of Tange’s lecture delivered at the Japan Center for Area
Development Research, a foundation established and administered by the
Ministry of Construction.39 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Tange Lab
carried out a number of similar statistical and theoretical research projects,

analyzing issues ranging from population density, the distribution of indus-
trial resources, and transportation infrastructures to urban reconstruction
and development. It is reasonable to assume that Tange Lab’s emphasis on
communication, information flow, and cybernetics directly paralleled the
Japanese government and telecommunication industry’s investment in the
processes of informatization.40 Tange’s interest in cybernetics and electronic
media, and his biological metaphors of the city as a living organism endowed
with a central nervous system, develop different implications once we situate
them within the historically specific context of Japan’s postwar land develop-
ment, economic reform, and logistics revolution. The futuristic vision of the
Japanese archipelago as a self-organizing organism extending its tentacles
of information networks did not simply emerge out of the discipline of ar-
chitecture. Nor was it simply a continuation of the wartime discourse on
colonial urban planning; rather, it was fostered within the expanded sphere
of information society discourse.
As Tange and his students clearly understood, the logistics revolution in
Japan went hand in glove with the proliferation of electronic media, and with
it the connotation of communication infrastructure shifted from the visible
networks of transportation to the invisible networks of information. This
paradigmatic shift in their understanding of networks critically inflected the
way in which these architects also understood the relationship between ar-
chitecture and media. They frequently turned their attention to the ephem-
eral presence of wireless signals and invisible flows of data traffic crisscross-
ing urban space. To design the urban environment meant to pay attention
not only to “hard” transportation networks but also to “soft” information
pathways. In short, milieu became contiguous with media.
It is not surprising, then, to find frequent discussions of media in rela-
tion to urban design in the writings of architects associated with Tange Lab.
Everything from community cable television to facsimile and computers,
electronic media, and their environmental nature are mentioned repeatedly
as being part of the challenges facing architects working in the age of the
information society. Kurokawa, for instance, attributes his interest in the bio-
logical system of data processing to the architect’s need to respond to the de-
mand of the time: “I became interested in the vital mechanism, especially in
the living organism’s information systems since I predicted that the informa-
tional soft component of the h uman environment—namely, communication,
transportation, and energy—rather than its hard component would become
more prominent in the future.”41

The work of Isozaki Arata, a graduate of Tange Lab who kept a critical
distance from the Metabolist group but who also shared their interest in
a biotechnical conception of the city, participated in this paradigm shift.42
Isozaki’s theorization of the “cybernetic environment” and his exploration of
the semiotic dimension of information networks suggest another important
aspect of the cybernetic turn of Japanese architecture. In the last section, I
will explore how Isozaki’s work paralleled the postwar reception of com-
munication theory in addition to cybernetics, and how he inflected both
through the notions of interactivity or responsiveness, notions that were
gaining traction within the avant-garde art world.
The Cybernetic Environment

Isozaki worked for Tange on several key projects, such as the Plan for
Tokyo 1960 and Expo ’70, the first world’s fair held in Japan. If Shimokōbe,
Obayashi, and Kurokawa represent the bureaucratic face of Tange Lab as a
research institution, then Isozaki represents its artistic face. He was closely
involved in the art world,43 and was close to avant-garde artists such as
Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Yasumura Masunobu, Shinohara Ushio, and Arakawa
Shūsaku.44 He produced artworks and was interested in “happenings” and
action painting. Isozaki was a member of the artist collective Group Envi-
ronment (Enbairamento no Kai), which organized the landmark exhibition
“From Space to Environment” (Kūkan kara kankyō e ten) in 1966. With Ya-
maguchi, he also founded the company Environmental Planning as he pre-
pared to design the multimedia setup of the Festival Plaza at Expo ’70.45 He
called this main attraction site a prototype of the cybernetic environment,
one that relied on computer-programmed operations of multimedia devices
and built-in sensor technologies.
Describing the Festival Plaza as a type of “soft architecture” or responsive
environment, Isozaki designed it with the man-machine interface in mind.46
Its multimedia setup included two g iant robots that allegedly formed a feed-
back circuit with the mainframe computer placed inside the central control
room. The ambitious plan for the Festival Plaza aimed to wire the robots
with sensors that collected ambient data on changing sounds, light, and
movement. This data was then supposed to be sent back to the control room
computer, which would modulate the multimedia devices accordingly.47
Although the Festival Plaza fell short of actualizing a fully interactive sys-
tem modulated by the ambient data of the physical environment, it was still

[fig. 2.2] The diagram of the Festival Plaza from Kenchiku bunka (January 1970).
Courtesy of Isozaki Arata.
visionary,48 and one could read its architectural design as a precursor to our
contemporary atmospheric media, which incessantly collect ambient data
and modulate our environment.
The plan for the Festival Plaza, which was developed over two years, from
1967 to 1969, emphasized the elements of communicative interactivity and
feedback. Isozaki and Tsukio Yoshio, an architect and computer program-
mer who helped design the plaza, envisioned this computer-controlled space
as a type of “environment as a responsive field” (ōtōba to shite no kankyō,
see fig. 2.2). Bridging the disciplines of architecture and computer science,
the multimedia setup of the plaza fits the description of a responsive envi-
ronment defined by computer artist Myron Krueger: an environment “in
which a computer perceives the actions of those who enter and responds
intelligently through complex visual and auditory displays.”49 Isozaki’s de-
sign thus paralleled and, in part, anticipated the theorization of responsive,
intelligent architecture equipped with artificial intelligence by architects
such as Nicholas Negroponte.50 Isozaki and Tsukio originally envisioned
this responsive, cybernetic environment of the Festival Plaza as modulat-
ing its output according to the self-learning process of its main computer,

though this ambitious plan of having a fully operative artificial intelligence
ultimately failed due to technical and economic limitations. Regardless of
its practicality, however, what is crucial is the fact that the Festival Plaza
signaled a new phase in the cybernetic turn of Japanese architecture. H ere,
architectural design literally merged with electronic media, creating a com-
munication feedback loop between human participants and computers.
Indeed, in Japan in the 1960s, communication itself was a frequent focus
of boundary-crossing artistic experiments—from multimedia installations
to expanded cinema and video art. Arguably, buzzwords such as “informa-
tion,” “feedback,” “participation,” “interactivity,” and “communication” that
characterize Japanese art criticism of this decade all belong to the same cyber-
netic paradigm. Postwar Japanese avant-garde art’s investment in the notion
of the environment, in particular, hinged on the desire to transform pas-
sive viewers into “active receivers of the message” sent by the artwork.51 It is
here that we see an interesting twist in the postwar iteration of the concept
of the environment, which played an important role in prewar and wartime
architectural discourse and its articulation of the biopolitical management
of the empire and its occupants. The term “environment” (kankyō) gained
popularity in postwar Japan partly through the impact of avant-garde art
movements such as Fluxus and the rise of intermedia and environmental
art practices. Yet, to separate the architectural context of thinking about the
environment from its avant-garde art context would be to miss a historical
convergence of these two contexts around Tange Lab, and more specifically
around Isozaki, who frequently collaborated with avant-garde artists such as
Yamaguchi Katsuhiro.52
As we saw earlier, even Tange Lab’s approach to the environment shifted
from its biological understanding of the milieu to a cybernetic understand-
ing of the communicative field. When transposed to the context of art, the
communicative process of feedback also gained the added connotation of
interactivity, resonating with the leftist critique of the unidirectionality of
mass media.53 Throughout the 1960s, the construction of multimedia installa-
tions and environmental artworks that allowed interactive and participatory
experiences through feedback loops thus became the locus of experimentation
among artists as well as architects in Japan.54
Crucial to this collective investment in interactivity and participation
was the postwar reception of communication theory. As media scholar
Matsui Shigeru suggests, the loan word komyunikeeshon (communication)
gained currency in Japan in the immediate postwar period, when scholars
associated with the Institute for the Science of Thought (Shisō no Kagaku

Kenkyūkai) began introducing communication theory from the United
States.55 The institute, led by liberal intellectuals such as Tsurumi Shunsuke
and Minami Hiroshi, was instrumental in popularizing the term and estab-
lishing the disciplines of communication studies and social psychology in
Japan.56 The Cold War political climate heavily conditioned this institution-
alization of communication studies during the occupation era and a fter.
According to Tamura Norio, a communication studies scholar associated
with the Institute for the Science of Thought, the journal Shisō no kagaku
published a special issue, titled “Studies of Communication,” in 1948. Tamura
also credits the work of Inokuchi Ichirō for the establishment of the “new”
newspaper studies and communication science (komyunikeeshon kagaku) in
Japan,57 the latter based as it was on the American style of communications
studies.58 Noting unesco’s first General Conference (1946) and its promo-
tion of communication research, Inokuchi contended that communication
science could contribute to the maintenance of peace in the nuclear age.59 In
short, the timing of the Japanese reception of communication theory per-
fectly coincided with the Cold War campaign by the United States to pro-
mote mass communication research, a campaign couched in the rhetoric
of liberal democracy. Tsurumi, for his part, argues that the English terms
“communication” and “mass communication” were introduced to Japan
around 1947.60
By the early 1970s, however, the Institute for the Science of Thought tried
to tackle this Cold War provenance of communication research. Tsurumi, for
instance, cautioned against the danger of subordinating academic research to
the interests of the military-industrial complex. Tsurumi writes, “In the midst
of the superpowers’ arms race, research on communication history could
easily be used for studying and testing the optimal communication methods
within the military.”61 In order to steer the nascent discipline of communica-
tion studies away from Cold War military science, Tsurumi called for a more
holistic framework for understanding communication, which went beyond
the history of technical media. Referencing the work of Jacques Ellul, Aldous
Huxley, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Johan Huizinga, he argued that communi-
cation studies scholars must not let their research become “a technique that
benefits the oppressor.”62
The ideologically ambivalent position occupied by the Institute for the
Science of Thought in the postwar Japanese period mirrors the political am-
bivalence Isozaki recognized in his own application of cybernetics to the
Festival Plaza. In both cases, the emancipatory potential of communication
is haunted by its ghostly provenance in military operations research.

Isozaki’s turn to cybernetics was, moreover, underscored by a critique of
architectural modernism. It is on this point that he went a step further than
Tange. While both architects helped initiate the cybernetic turn of Japa
nese architecture, Isozaki’s vision was more in tune with the avant-garde
art context, and perhaps more representative of the new generation of ar-
chitects who actively sought to expand the conceptual horizon of architec-
ture through their engagement with technical media. Isozaki articulated his
practice of urban design as a deconstructive gesture, an act of dismantling
“architecture” that is akin to boundary-crossing approaches of the avant-
garde art movement of the 1960s. When we place Isozaki’s articulation of
the cybernetic environment within this context, we also find nuanced dif-
ferences in Tange’s and Isozaki’s cybernetic approaches to urban space. To
better understand these differences, let us examine Isozaki’s writings on cy-
bernetics and urban design.
In his essay “Methods of Urban Design” (Toshi dezain no hōhō, 1963),
for instance, Isozaki articulates the main difference between Tange’s vision
of urban planning and his own. The difference is suggestive insofar as it
indicates how the cybernetic paradigm embraced by Isozaki ultimately
shifted the focus of urban design away from the hardware of transporta-
tion and communication infrastructures toward the software of responsive
environments.
In this essay, Isozaki divides the history of urban design into four stages:
the substantial, the functional, the structural, and the symbolic. His own
practice belongs to the symbolic stage, and Tange’s practice belongs to the
structural stage. Isozaki cites Tange’s conception of the “urban axis” in the
Plan for Tokyo 1960 as an example. The notion of the urban axis reflects
Tange’s structural perspective, which privileges physical or visual “patterns”
of the city.63 By contrast, Isozaki argues that his approach to urban design
is based on a simulated model instead of an existing pattern of the city. In
short, the symbolic stage of architecture based on the cybernetic logic of
simulation is distinct from and opposed to the structural stage of architecture
based on the mechanical logic of coordination. Put differently, the structural
approach extracts a pattern from the already existing city, while the symbolic
approach generates a model conceived in and through technical media.
The idea of coordination was central to industrial modernity. From Le
Corbusier to Bruno Taut, modernist architects and urban planners operated
within the twin logics of coordination and organization. This mechanical
model of urban design “concentrated entirely on the organization and coor-
dination of elements or on the discovery of a structure to serve as an assembly

theory.”64 What the modernist practice of urbanism lacked, in Isozaki’s view,
was a model of feedback. Tange tried to incorporate the insight of cybernet-
ics into his urban design, but his priority was still on structural organization
and coordination, although filtered through a newer engagement with logis-
tics and information society discourse. By contrast, Isozaki takes ephemeral
networks of information to be the central element of urban design.
Isozaki’s interest in the ephemeral or informational dimension of the city is
also evident in his earlier essay, “Space of Darkness” (Yami no kūkan, 1964),
in which he discusses the importance of the man-machine interface that
mediates our experience of the city. He uses the example of a pilot who flies
an airplane at night. Because of the darkness, the pilot cannot trust his own
vision and thus “must rely solely on signals received by flight instruments”
in order to navigate the aircraft.65 Isozaki extends this metaphor of the pilot
to the daily experience of the contemporary city that is heavily networked
with information and communication signals.66 Inversely, the task of con
temporary architects becomes how to design urban space without losing
sight of t hese virtual networks of information and communication signals.
For Isozaki, architecture’s turn toward cybernetics and methods of com-
puter simulation comes naturally out of this understanding of the city as
primarily an information environment.
Arguably, Isozaki’s emphasis on computer-generated models as the new
basis of urban design is indicative of the historical moment within which
he was writing. Simulation, as historian of science and technology Paul Ed-
wards reminds us, was the reigning cultural logic of the Cold War era.67 The
era of simulation also signaled for Jean Baudrillard the end of the modernist
order of mechanical reproduction. Writing around the same time as Iso-
zaki, Baudrillard argued that the simulation of models—rather than serial
products, which belonged to the second order of simulacra—ushered in the
third order of simulacra that corresponded to the proliferation of codes.68
Isozaki’s vision of urban design that privileged codes, signs, and simulated
models is reflective of the time when cybernetics and information science
changed the ways in which the relation between technical media and reality
was understood in various fields.
Isozaki’s interest in the primacy of codes is best articulated in his essay
“The Invisible City” (Mienai toshi, 1967), which also provides a theoreti-
cal framework for his design of the cybernetic environment of the Festival
Plaza.69 The essay begins by addressing the inadequacy of using the exist-
ing concept of urban space to understand cities such as Los Angeles and
Tokyo.70 The chaotic layout and sprawl of t hese cities prevents him from see-

ing their structure in a systematic manner. Lacking grid patterns and land-
mark structures, the urban space of the contemporary city is no longer rep-
resentable through spatial coordinates. Instead of landmarks and grids,
the city is grasped relationally, that is, by gauging constantly shifting
“relations between objects.”71 Precisely because the experience of space
is no longer connected to physical elements, however, the city becomes
intelligible only when one pays attention to “an aggregate of various invis-
ible signs and codes; flickering lights, acoustic sounds, telecommunica-
tions, traffic, activities, and trajectories of moving objects.” In place of
measurements, these ephemeral signs, codes, and signals generate hap-
tic sensations. The city dislodged from measurable space thus becomes
subjective, relative, and environmental.72 Isozaki calls this “invisible city”
composed of invisible networks of ephemeral signs, codes, and signals a
“virtual structure.”73
The term “invisible city” used in this essay seems to evoke Lewis Mum-
ford’s theorization of urban space. Tracing a history of the reorganization
of cities in the early 1960s, Mumford argues that invisible networks of com-
munication and information systems represent and condition contemporary
urban space: “The electric grid, not the stone age container, provides the new
image of the invisible city and the many processes it serves and furthers. It
is not merely the pattern of the city itself, but every institution, organization,
and association composing the city, that will be transformed by this develop-
ment.”74 Taking a cue from Mumford’s observation of the invisible infrastruc-
ture of communication, Friedrich Kittler has also suggested that the modern
city has long served as a model of media. “Ever since it had become impos-
sible to survey cities from a cathedral tower or a castle, and ever since walls
and fortifications have ceased to contain them, cities have been traversed and
connected by a network of innumerable networks.” In a typically axiomatic
tone, Kittler contends that “no matter w hether t hese networks convey infor-
mation or energy—that is, w hether they are called ‘telephone,’ ‘radio,’ and
‘television,’ or ‘water supply,’ ‘electricity,’ and ‘highway’—they all are informa-
tion (if only because every modern stream of energy needs a parallel control
network).”75 For Kittler, media is what stores, transmits, and processes in-
formation. In this broad definition of media, “media include old-fashioned
things like books, familiar ones like cities, and new ones like computers.”76
Isozaki would agree with Kittler, given how he too conceives of urban space
as first and foremost networks of information.
Of course, to simply state that Isozaki and Kittler share the idea of the city
as a medium of communication would be to overlook manifold historical

factors that affected postwar Japanese architectural criticism and practice,
which I have traced in depth in this chapter. Nonetheless, a theoretical af-
finity between their approaches to architecture through the lens of media
theory is worth noting, because the conflation of the city and media has
become reality, or at least, so it appears in today’s debates around ubiquitous
computing and atmospheric media. As I noted at the beginning of this essay,
the connection between milieu and media is a historical construct, yet this
historicity gets lost if one takes this analogy between media and the city as a
point of departure, as Kittler does. To graft a history of architecture onto the
history of media theory is all the more necessary today, as the discipline of
media studies increasingly directs its attention to the atmospheric, elemen-
tal, and ecological dimensions of media, and takes the environment as an
ahistorical given.
Conclusion
In hindsight, Japanese architects’ theorization of urban design through
the conceptual frameworks of information networks, cybernetics, and com-
munication theory points to an incipient theory of the city environment as
atmospheric media. Like the critical stance video and multimedia installa-
tion artists took to go beyond the modernist adherence to medium specific-
ity, the cybernetic model of communication embraced by these architects
was meant to dismantle the modernist ideal of architecture. Cybernetics and
its concomitant logic of feedback in particular played an enabling role by
allowing young architects such as Isozaki to shift the weight of urban de-
sign away from the monumental permanence and the functionality of built
structures toward the ephemerality of information flows and semiotic sys-
tems of codes and signs.
While there is no space in this chapter to elaborate, it is worth mention-
ing that this cybernetic turn in Japanese architecture paved the way for the
subsequent, separate reception of French critical theory—in particular the
structural semiotics that brought attention to the systematic understanding
of signs and codes—in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, scholars have
outlined the significant impact cybernetics and information theory had on
the development of structuralism and semiotics.77 Isozaki, for instance, be-
came closely involved with the so-called New Academic circle, most notably
through his collaboration with Asada Akira in the international Any confer-
ence series, along with architects and philosophers such as Peter Eisenman

and Jacques Derrida.78 The early stages of the Japanese reception of struc-
turalism and poststructuralism might thus be found in the cybernetic turn
of architecture in the 1960s.
The cybernetic turn of Japanese architecture also points to the fact that
the theorization of media, including architecture, is heavily determined by
the political and technological conditions of the time in which it is produced.
Theory, as we know, is never value-free or conflict-free. If what we mean by
“media theory” implies a systematic way of thinking about mediation (not
only technological, but also political, economic, and social), as well as the
geneses of various apparatuses of communication, and the interrelations be-
tween these different media forms, then Japanese architectural discourse of
the 1960s offers a productive site to rethink these issues. This was the mo-
ment when architectural discourse thought seriously about the atmospheric
and environmental nature of electronic media, and reconceptualized urban
space through networks of information and communication.
Historically, architecture has held close affinities with the notion of a sys-
tem. Its propensity toward organization and unity—architectonics—has, for
instance, made it a privileged metaphor of rational and systemic thinking in
philosophy.79 Japanese architectural criticism of the 1960s complicates the
architectonic aspect of architectural design by introducing a new kind of
systematicity based on cybernetics. Architecture changed from a practice of
constructing buildings to a practice of designing a communication environ-
ment through information technologies. At that point, architecture became
part of the communication network, or what Gregory Bateson once called
“media ecology.”80 It is h
ere that we find a clear link between contemporary
theories of atmospheric media and Japanese architectural criticism. More-
over, these early theorizations of architecture as media environment could
provide some inspiration—or at the very least further contextualization—
for contemporary scholars turning to the environment as the basis for their
theorization of media.
notes
Acknowledgments: This essay greatly benefited from the intellectually stimulating
conversations I had with the participants of two workshops: “Media Theory in Japan,”
organized by the editors of this volume, Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten, at Harvard
University in 2013; and “Media Crossings,” organized by Thomas Lamarre and Alanna
Thain, at McGill University in 2014. In addition, I want to thank Yatsuka Hajime for his
generous and thoughtful engagement with my research, as well as Matsui Shigeru and

Orit Halpern for their comments on this essay. Special thanks go to Isozaki Arata for
allowing me to reproduce the diagram of the Festival Plaza.
1. Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the F uture of Twenty-First-Century Media
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 5.
2. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: T oward a Philosophy of Elemental
Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 4.
3. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 34.
4. Yatsuka Hajime, “ ‘Metaborizumu Nekusasu’ to iu ‘kindai no chōkoku’ ” [The over-
coming modernity called Metabolism Nexus], in Metaborizumu no mirai toshi [Me-
tabolism: The city of the future] (Tokyo: Mori Bijutsukan, 2011), 11. See also Yatsuka
Hajime, Metaborizumu Nekusasu [Metabolism Nexus] (Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2011).
5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge,
MA: mit Press, 1994), 127.
6. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8.
7. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 126.
8. Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory
Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006),
377.
9. Wigley, “Network Fever,” 387.
10. Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corpo-
rate Space (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2003), 21.
11. Wigley, “Network Fever,” 388. Wigley writes, “Doxiadis’s idea of network form had
itself been informed by the earlier work of Tange.”
12. Following Michel Foucault, I use the term biopolitics to mean a modern regime
of governance and regulatory techniques applied to control and manage the biological
processes of the h
uman population, or “man-as-species.” For more on this concept of
biopolitics, see Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège
de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey
(New York: Picador, 2003); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
13. Tange Kenzō, Nihon rettō no shrōraizō: 21 seiki e no kenchiku [The future of the
Japanese archipelago: The formation of Tōkaidō megalopolis] (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
1966), 32.
14. Tange Kenzō, Kenchiku to toshi: Dezain oboegaki [City as architecture: Notes on
design] (Tokyo: Sekai Bunkusha, 1975; repr., Tokyo: Shōkokusha, 2011), 87.
15. Tange’s cybernetic turn can be seen as part of the epistemic paradigm, which
Reinhold Martin has called the “organizational complex.”
16. Tange, Nihon rettō no shrōraizō, 34–35.
17. Eric Paul Mumford, The ciam Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge,
MA: mit Press, 2000), 25.
18. Tange, Nihon rettō no shōraizō, 42.
19. Martin, Organizational Complex, 57–61.
20. Yatsuka, Metaborizumu nekusasu, 19.

21. Kobayashi Hideo, “Manshū” no rekishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho, 2008),
41–42. On the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company’s research depart-
ment, see also Kobayashi Hideo, Mantetsu chōsabu: “Ganso shinku tanku” no tanjō to
hōkai (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005).
22. Yatsuka, Metaborizumu nekusasu, 19; and Yatsuka, “Metaborizumu,” 13.
23. See Sawaragi Noi, Sensō to banpaku (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2005); Isozaki
Arata, “Tange Kenzō no ‘kenchiku=toshi=kokka’ kyōdōtai to shite no Nihon,” in Sans-
hutsu sareta modanizumu: “Nihon” to iu mondai kikō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005),
173–202. It is worth noting that Yatsuka studied with Tange and worked with Isozaki. For
more on the relation between the postwar notion of the environment and architecture,
see Yuriko Furuhata, “Multimedia Environments and Security Operations: Expo ’70 as
a Laboratory of Governance,” Grey Room 54 (winter 2014): 56–79.
24. Gotō Shinpei, Seiden: Gotō Shinpei, Mantetsu jidai, 1906–1908 (Tokyo: Fujiwara
Shoten, 2005), 4:149.
25. Gotō, Seiden, 4:149.
26. This was an unrealized project, though some of its elements are preserved in his
postwar design of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. On the connection between
these two projects, see Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics
of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Hyunjung Cho, “Hiro-
shima Peace Memorial Park and the Making of Japanese Postwar Architecture,” Journal
of Architectural Education 66, no. 1 (2012): 72–83.
27. Masuda Yoneji, The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society (Tokyo: Insti-
tute for the Information Society, 1980), 147.
28. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Beyond Computopia: Information, Automation, and Democ-
racy in Japan (London: Kegan Paul, 1988), 8.
29. Hayashi Yūjirō, Jōhōka shakai: Haado na shakai kara sofuto na shaka e [Infor-
mation society: From hard society to soft society] (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho,
1969), 49.
30. Keizai shingikai jōhō kenkyū iinkai, Nihon no Jōhōka shakai: Sono bijon to
kadai [Japan’s information society: Its vision and challenges] (Tokyo: Daiyamondo Sha,
1969), 5.
31. Hayashu Shūji, Ryūtsū kakumei: Seihin, keiro, oyobi shōhisha [A revolution in dis-
tribution: Products, pathways, and consumers] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsho, 1962).
32. For more on this, see Morris-Suzuki, Beyond Computopia, chapters 4–6.
33. Katherine Hayles, “Cybernetics,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 145;
italics in source.
34. Toyokawa Saikaku, “The Core System and Social Scale: Design Methodology at
the Tange Laboratory,” trans. Watanabe Hiroshi, in Kenzō Tange: Architecture for the
World, ed. Seng Kuan and Yukio Lippit (Zürich: Lars Müler Publishers and the Presi-
dent and Fellows of Harvard College, 2012), 25.
35. Toyokawa Saikaku, Gunzō to shite no Tange Kenkyūshitsu: Sengo Nihon kenchiku
toshi shi no meinsutoriimu [The Tange Lab as a group: The mainstream of postwar
Japanese architecture and the history of urban design] (Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2012), 44. On

Tange Lab’s impact on social and economic policies, see also Toyokawa, “Core System
and Social Scale,” 15–28.
36. Shimokōbe Atsushi, ed., Jōhōshakai to no taiwa: Mirai Nihon no jōhō nettowaaku
[Dialogues with information society: Information networks for future Japan] (Tokyo:
Tōyō Keizai Shinhōsha, 1970), iii. See also Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds.,
Project Japan: Metabolism Talks . . . (Cologne, Ger.: Taschen, 2011), 638.
37. Kurokawa Kishō, Jōhō rettō Nihon no shōrai [The future of information archi-
pelago Japan] (Tokyo: Dai San Bunmei Sha, 1972), 1–2. Kurokawa argues that he became
first interested in the concept of information around 1958, when he began to formulate
the “metabolic” conception of the city as a living organism.
38. See Hayashi Yūjirō and Kagaku Gijutsu to Keizai no Kai, eds., Chō gijutsu shakai
e no tenkai: Jōhōka shisutemu no ningen [Developing a supertechnological society:
Humans in the information system] (Tokyo: Daiyamondo Sha, 1969).
39. Yatsuka, Metaborizumu nekusasu, 320.
40. Toyokawa, Gunzō to shite no Tange kenkyūshitsu, 314.
41. Kurokawa, Jōhō rettō Nihon no shōrai, 2.
42. Isozaki often describes the difference between his view of urban design and that of
the Metabolist group as a difference between the image of “ruin” and the image of utopia.
On his discussion of the future city as a ruin, see Isozaki Arata, “Haikyo ron,” in Kigō no
umi ni ukabu “shima” [Islands in the sea of signs] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2013), 24–40.
43. Isozaki participated in landmark art exhibitions, including Shikisai to kūkan ten
[Color and space, 1966); Kūkan kara kankyō e ten (From space to environment, 1966);
and the Fourteenth Milan Triennale (1968). He also worked as an exhibition space de-
signer for Okamoto Tarō ten (Okamoto Tarō exhibition, 1964).
44. Isozaki Arata, “Aatisuto-Aakitekuto no jidai: Osaka banpaku nosōzōryoku o
hokan shita aato shin” [The era of an artist-architect: Art scenes that supplemented
the imagination of the world’s fair in Osaka], interview with Arata Isozaki, by Yasuko
Imura, Yuriko Furuhata, and Shigeru Matsui, Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku Eizōkenkyū Kiyō
(October 2012): 36–80.
45. Isozaki notes that they established this company in order to receive public fund-
ing. Isozaki Arata, in discussion with the author, June 2013.
46. In his essay “Sofuto aakitekuchua,” published in Kenchiku bunka in 1970, Isozaki
described the computer-programmed cybernetic environment of the Festival Plaza as
“soft architecture,” a phrase he borrowed from Warren Brodey’s work. See Warren M.
Brodey, “The Design of Intelligent Environment: Soft Architecture,” Landscape 17, no. 1
(autumn 1967): 8–12.
47. Isozaki Atelier, “Sofuto aakitekuchua: Ōtōba to shite no kankyō,” Kenchiku bunka
279 (January 1970): 73. Moreover, the model for this tightly networked two-way com-
munication environment was the mission control center at nasa, which he had visited
in 1967. See Isozaki Arata and Hino Naohiko, “Taaningu pointo: Kūkan kara kankyō e,”
10+1 48 (2007): 203.
48. While the published materials of the Festival Plaza, such as the article “Sofuto
aakitekuchua” in Kenchiku bunka (1970), indicate that the robots w ere responsive,
Tsukio Yoshio notes that the plaza’s computerized system of control was imperfect and

did not actualize the original plan of creating a fully interactive environment. Tsukio
Yoshio in discussion with the author and Matsui Shigeru on November 12, 2015.
49. Myron W. Krueger, “Responsive Environments,” in The New Media Reader, ed.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2003), 379.
50. For more information on Negroponte’s and Krueger’s work, see Nicholas Negro-
ponte, Soft Architecture Machines (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1976); Krueger, “Re-
sponsive Environments,” 379–89.
51. Isozaki Arata and Tōno Yoshiaki, “ ‘Kankyō’ ni tsuite,” in “Kūkan kara kankyō e,”
special issue, Bijutsu techō [Art notebook] 275 (November 1966): 100.
52. Isozaki and Yamaguchi set up a company called Kakyō Keikaku (Environmen-
tal Planning) during their participation in Expo ’70. See Isozaki and Hino, “Taaning
pointo”, 10+1 48 (2007): 197.
53. For more on this, see Miryam Sas’s contribution to this volume.
54. The use of video was particularly important for creating feedback loops. See David
Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2007); and
on multiscreen environments, see Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia
and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2014). On intermedia and environmental art experiments
in Japan, see also Miryam Sas, “By Other Hands: Environment and Apparatus in 1960s
Intermedia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Miyao Daisuke (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 383–415.
55. Matsui Shigeru, “Fukusei gijutsu no tenkai to media geijutsu no seiritsu: 1950
nendai no Nihon ni okeru terebi, shakai shinrigaku, gendai geijutsu no sougo shintō”
[The development of reproduction technology and the establishment of media arts:
Interpenetrations among tele vi
sion, social psy
chology, and con temporary art of
the 1950s], Eizō media gaku: Tokyo geijutsu daigaku daigakuin eizō kenkyūka kiyō 2
(March 2012): 46.
56. Andrew E. Barshay, “Postwar Social and Political Thought, 1945–90,” in Modern
Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 305.
57. Tamura Norio, “ ‘Atarashii Shinbungaku’ no tanjō to ‘Masu komi’ ron no eikyō:
Inokuchi Ichirō ni hajimaru sengo no ‘Amerikashu’ kenkyū no inyū” [The birth of “new
newspaper science” and the impact of mass communication theory: The postwar intro-
duction of the “American” style of research that began with Inokuchi Ichirō], Komyuni-
keeshon kagaku 35 (2012): 123–33.
58. Inokuchi Ichirō, Masu komyunikēshon: Dono youni taishū e hataraki kakeru ka
[Mass communication: How to influence the masses] (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1951), 26.
59. Inokuchi, Masu komyunikēshon, 30–31. As evidenced in Inokuchi’s implication
of a nuclear threat, discourse surrounding the emergent discipline of communications
studies in Japan clearly belonged to the Cold War context.
60. Tsurumi Shunsuke, “Komyunikēshon shi e no oboegaki” [Notes on the history of
communication], in Komyunikēshon shi: Kōza komyunikēshon [The history of commu-
nication: A course on communication], ed. Etō Fumio, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Yamamoto
Akira (Tokyo: Kenkyūsha, 1973), 2:17. See also Matsui, “Fukusei gijutsu no tenkai,” 47;

and Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009), 44.
61. Tsurumi, “Komyunikēshon shi e no oboegaki,” 19.
62. Tsurumi, “Komyunikēshon shi e no oboegaki,” 19.
63. Isozaki, “Toshi dezain no hōhō” [Methods of urban design], in Kūkan e [To
space] (Tokyo: Kajima Shuppankai, 1997), 106.
64. Isozaki Arata, “Invisible City,” in Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary
Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Columbia Books of Architecture, 1993), 405.
65. Isozaki Arata, “Yami no kūkan,” in Kūkan e [To space] (Tokyo: Kajimashuppankai,
1997), 151.
66. Isozaki, “Yami no kūkan,” 151.
67. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in
Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1996), 14.
68. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage Publication, 1993), 56.
69. Isozaki Arata and Hino Naohiko, “Kūkan e, Omatsuri Hiroba, Nihon no toshi
kūkan: 1960 nen dai ni okeru toshiron no hōhō o megutte,” 10+1 45 (2006): 187–97.
70. Isozaki Arata, “Mienai toshi” [The invisible city], in Kūkan e [To space] (Tokyo:
Kajima Shuppankai, 1997), 374. My translation. This first section of the essay has not
been translated into English, though the second half of the essay has been translated
under the same title, “Invisible City.” See Isozaki, “Invisible City,” 403–97.
71. Isozaki, “Mienai toshi,” 378.
72. Isozaki, “Mienai toshi,” 381.
73. Isozaki revisits this notion of the city as the invisible information environment
in “Konpō sareta kankyō” [Packaged environments], in Kūkan e [To space] (Tokyo:
Kajimashuppankai, 1997), 421.
74. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 567.
75. Friedrich Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of
Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 139. Kittler’s
point, however, is that t hese information networks also existed in the past, well before
modernity.
76. Kittler, Technological World, 144.
77. As Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan notes in his careful research on Roman Jakob
son’s and Lévi-Strauss’s investments in information theory and cybernetics and their
ties to the Rockefeller Foundation, mit, and Harvard, French structuralism and semi-
otics are rooted in the mathematical theories of communication. See Bernard Diony-
sius Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss,
and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry 38 (autumn 2011): 96–126.
78. Isozaki and Asada were regular participants in the Any series of international con-
ferences on architecture and philosophy, which Isozaki initiated with Peter Eisenman in
1999. For more on the Any conference series, see Isozaki Arata and Asada Akira, eds.,
Any Kenchiku to tetsugaku o meguru sesshon, 1991–2008 [Any: Sessions on architecture
and philosophy, 1991–2008], (Tokyo: Kajima Shuppan, 2010).
79. Jacques Derrida, “Architecture Where the Desire May Live,” in Rethinking
Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 319.

See also Karatani Kōjin, Inyu to shite no kenchiku [Architecture as metaphor] (Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1989), a book translated into English as Architecture as Metaphor: Language,
Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: mit, 1995).
On Isozaki’s interest in poststructuralism and deconstruction, see his conversation with
Derrida, “Anywhere: Dikonsutorakushon to wa nanika” [Anywhere: What is deconstruc-
tion?], in Any: Kenchiku to tetsugaku o meguru sesshon, 1991–2008 (Tokyo: Kajima
Shuppan, 2010), 81–100.
80. Tracing the genealogy of the term media ecology (which has garnered much
attention in recent years) through the work of the British social scientist and cyberneti-
cist Gregory Bateson and the video art magazine Radical Software, William Kaizen has
argued that media ecology is deeply intertwined with the cybernetic discourse of com-
munication, and in particular with Bateson’s theory of communication. See William
Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and
the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (fall 2008): 91.

3 . T H E M E D I A T H E O R Y A N D M E D I A S T R AT E G Y
O F A Z U MA H I R O K I, 1997–2003
ta k e sh i ka d obayash i
Since the turn of the twenty-first c entury, Azuma Hiroki has been one of the
most influential public intellectuals in Japan. As a critic he works mainly in
the field of otaku culture, although his recent writings cover various issues,
from the possible revision of the Constitution of Japan to the aftermath of
the accident in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, and he has
even written novels and anime scenarios. In what is up to now his most
important work, Dōbutsuka suru postomodan: Otaku kara mita nihon shakai
(Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals), published in 2001, he analyzed various
fields of otaku culture, such as anime, video games, trading cards, and light
novels through the key concept of the “database animal,” placing t hese in the
broader context of the societal transition from modernity to postmoder-
nity. According to Azuma, the media mix strategy and derivative amateur
works have become the norm in otaku culture since the 1990s, in which the
otaku’s consumptive activities are oriented toward the database-like g rand
nonnarrative (ōkina himonogatari) behind individual works, exemplifying
the broader social phenomena of postmodernity after the collapse of mo-
dernity’s grand narratives (ōkina monogatari). To this day the book remains
one of the most influential works in the study of subcultures in Japan, and
it offers insights into the new media environment that appeared with the
development of information technology. Indeed, it would be impossible to
think of postmillennium media theory in Japan as a whole without acknowl-
edging Azuma’s work.
In spite of this, Azuma Hiroki is not necessarily regarded as a “media
theorist” in Japan. This probably has something to do with the trajectory of
his career as a critic. He debuted in 1993 with a paper published in the highly
influential critical theory journal Hihyō kūkan (Critical space), “Solzhenit-
syn shiron: Kakuritsu no tezawari” (An essay on Solzhenitsyn: The feel of
probability), which he wrote while still an undergraduate student. He then
began to publish studies on Jacques Derrida in the same journal, and this
culminated in his first book in 1998, Sonzairon teki, yūbin teki: Jacques Der-
rida ni tsuite (Ontological, Postal: On Jacques Derrida). In the 1990s Azuma
Hiroki was thus a promising young critic who used sophisticated philosoph-
ical language to develop highly abstract arguments.
In a different vein, Azuma began publishing articles on subculture in the
late 1990s, and since the publication of Otaku in 2001, he has been active regu-
larly as a critic of otaku culture. In the so-called zero nendai (the first decade
of the 2000s), critical discourse on otaku culture such as anime, manga, light
novels, idols, and video games blossomed in Japan and drew wider social at-
tention. As a result, and also b ecause of the increasing international visibil-
ity of otaku culture and the Japanese governmental policy toward it (“Cool
Japan”), the negative implications the word “otaku” formerly possessed were
swept away. Azuma, who had turned from the high-blown discourse of con
temporary philosophy and critical theory to subcultural criticism, played
a significant role in this shift, and his influence in this regard is hard to
overestimate.
The image we have of Azuma is thus somewhat overdetermined by these
two careers, and t here is a certain sense of incongruity, at least in the Japanese
context, to insert between them a different moment of Azuma as a media
theorist.1 Nevertheless, Azuma’s career so far abounds with thoughts on
media and information technology. In addition to Otaku, which dealt with
otaku culture using the terminology of information technology, Azuma also
hosted, for example, an interdisciplinary roundtable series on the informa-
tion society at the International University of Japan’s Global Communication
Center from 2004 to 2005, later published as a massive two-volume book:
Ised: Jōhō shakai no rinri to sekkei (Ised: Ethics and Design of the Information
Society, 2010). One of his most recent books, Ippan ishi 2.0: Rousseau, Freud,
Google (General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, and Google, 2011), is an attempt to
visualize the possible shape of government in the age of the Internet.
The Media Theory of Azuma Hiroki [81]

Furthermore, Azuma wrote two serial articles that explicitly addressed
the subject of media theory in the context of the information society around
the time of the publication of Otaku: “Cyberspace wa naze sō yobareru
ka” (Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?), serialized in InterCommunication
(1997–2000), and “Jōhō jiyū ron: Data no kenryoku, angō no rinri” (On
Information and Freedom: The Power of Data, the Ethics of Code), serial-
ized in Chūō kōron (2002–3). According to Azuma’s own recollection, he
intended to assemble these two series of articles with another series of arti-
cles, “Kashiteki na mono tachi” (The Overvisibles) in Eureka (2001)—which
is in fact an earlier version of Otaku—and publish them all as “a book that
contains something like a comprehensive theory of the postmodern.”2 As I
will argue later, given that postmodernity, for Azuma, is a historical condi-
tion that cannot be separated from the social penetration of information
technology, it is reasonable to regard this trilogy as a blueprint for his grand
theory of media in the postmodern age.
Ultimately, this conception of a book that offered “a comprehensive theory
of the postmodern” was not realized. Azuma quickly published the second
installment of “The Overvisibles” independently as Otaku after a thorough-
going rewrite, even before he began the subsequent serial “On Information
and Freedom.”3 Considering the attention he had already gained from criti-
cal circles and journalists in Japan, we can assume that it would have been
possible, and even desirable, for him to publish “Why Is Cyberspace Called
Such?” and “On Information and Freedom” in book form without extensive
rewrites—yet Azuma opted not to. Indeed, Azuma’s decision to instead pub-
lish a book about otaku culture has come to have a definitive effect not only
on his c areer but also on the whole discursive space of the zero nendai in
Japan. These circumstances seem to partly explain why he has not been read
as a media theorist to this date, at least in Japan, despite his extensive interest
in issues of media and information technology.
This chapter seeks to explore Azuma’s work from 1997 to 2003 to trace
the possible shape of his abandoned media theory. My purpose w ill be to
reconstruct the implicit theory he envisioned in this period, and at the same
time, through a close reading of the texts themselves, expose the reason why
it failed to bear fruit. In addition to uncovering a neglected aspect of Azuma
as a media theorist, this reading w ill also offer an account of his change in
attitude as a critic (and its corollary, a change in his media strategy). In so
doing, I hope to cast light on the break that divides the 1990s and the zero
nendai, not only within the career of Azuma Hiroki but also within the dis-
course on media in Japan more broadly.
[82] takeshi kadobayashi

Cyberspace as Metaphor, Postmodern as Condition
The idea of cyberspace first appeared in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel
Neuromancer (1984). In it, Gibson bestows upon the near-future city of Chiba
in which the story takes place an Asian or techno-orientalist character, and
at the same time creates a space in which the consciousness of the characters
appears within their electronic bodies—that is, a space called “cyberspace,”
which is distinguished from physical space. According to Azuma’s first serial
“Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?,” these two imaginary spaces—the near-
future “Oriental” urban space and the electronic space detached from the
real world—function in the same manner. That is, both of them are needed
to localize the “uncanny (unheimlich) elements” manifest in the informa-
tion technologies within a space divorced from the (Occidental) real world
in order to “exorcise” (akuma barai) them.4 Therefore, the metaphor of cy-
berspace in Neuromancer is an ideological apparatus used to project t oward
the other the heterogeneous elements within oneself, that is, the products of
“techno-orientalism.”5
For Azuma, t hese “uncanny elements” are “the sense of the division of the
‘here and now’ of the characters and the duplication of their consciousness,
themselves mediated by electronic media, and the resulting spectrality of
the electronic self ” (wc1, 164). In other words, introducing the stage of
“cyberspace” as a location separate from real space and then confining the
electronic self within it, Neuromancer excludes the possibility that the con-
sciousness of the characters in the “here and now” of real space are haunted
by electronic selves that serve as their doubles.
According to Azuma, this notion of cyberspace appeared alongside the
social transformation from the modern to the postmodern, although, cru-
cially, it was still a modern idea in denial of the postmodern, given that it ap-
pealed to a spatial metaphor (wc10, 173–75). In other words, the metaphor of
cyberspace was a modern idea that was deployed to repress the postmodern
conditions that already characterized contemporary society. To understand
how the arguments in “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” proceed toward
such a conclusion and its implications, we need to first evaluate the con-
tours and background of Azuma’s theory of the postmodern, which goes
beyond an interpretation of the metaphor of cyberspace as it appears in
Neuromancer.
In the serialization of “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?,” the terms
“postmodern” and “postmodernism” are introduced in the fifth article (Au-
gust 1998) in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s discussions of cyberspace. In the two

articles that Azuma cites, Žižek criticizes the studies of Sherry Turkle and
Allucquére Rosanne Stone—who both suggest that the splitting of identity
is caused by computer-mediated communication—using Lacan’s model of
subjectivity.6 In “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” Azuma limits his discus-
sion to Žižek’s criticism of Turkle, and, in the course of summarizing the
issue, theorizes postmodern subjectivity by sublating and synthesizing their
standpoints, defining this new subjectivity as “interfacial” (wc5, 165).
According to Azuma’s summary, Žižek’s critique of Turkle proceeds as
follows. Turkle argues that virtual communications such as irc (Internet
Relay Chat) and mud (Multi-User Dungeon) create a split in the user’s iden-
tity that she characterizes with the term “taking things at interface value.”7
That is, the user takes information appearing on the interface of the screen
at face value, constructing his or her self through imaginary identification
with it, so that the user comes to have plural, disintegrated identities that cor-
respond to the plural virtual communications on screen. However, for Žižek,
this is a crude argument that fails to grasp the dimension of symbolic iden-
tification, as outlined in Lacanian theory: following the latter’s conception of
subjectivity, the virtual subject that arises from this “at interface value” atti-
tude on each occasion is in fact only an effect of the imaginary identification
with the objet petit a, and human subjectivity completes itself by symbolic
identification with the big Other that unifies these imaginary identifications.
Therefore, Žižek argues, the imaginary splitting of identity that Turkle points
out never threatens the Lacanian concept of subjectivity.
Following this argument, Žižek discusses the decline of the symbolic order
in contemporary society in general, concluding that the metaphor of cyber-
space is desired as a supplement to the loss of the symbolic order. Azuma, in
turn, prompted by this view, argues that Turkle’s theory, in the first place, is
structured in a way that reflects the decline of the symbolic order. In other
words, he hypothesizes that the “at interface value” attitude Turkle argues
for is an attitude that is inevitably required, because the invisible big Other
behind the visible world of the screen suffers a malfunction; it substitutes
symbolic identification with imaginary simulation. Azuma calls such a for-
mation of subjectivity “interfacial subjectivity.” For him, this new subjectivity
presents a radical break from the modern idea of subjectivity, and therefore
is inherently a postmodern conception of subjectivity.
For Azuma, the modern idea of subjectivity has been constructed along-
side the metaphor of the eye, and is organized by the dialectic of the visible and
the invisible (wc6, 158–65). For example, the Lacanian concept of subjectiv-
ity, to which Žižek refers, is constructed by the duality in which the imagi-

nary identification with the visible objet petit a is sustained by the symbolic
identification with the invisible big Other. According to Azuma, however,
postmodern conditions are those that render impossible such a modern
conception of subjectivity based on the distinction between the visible and
the invisible. Such conditions appeared in the 1970s and saturated the 1990s
in the following two moments:
1 The decline of the symbolic order, or the “grand narrative” that

gives order to the visible world presented to the subject, though
remains invisible itself. Referring to the theories of Jean-François
Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, Azuma in “Why Is Cyberspace
Called Such?” summarizes the emergence of postmodern condi-
tions in the 1970s, an epoch characterized by the gradual collapse
of “the world view and the political vision (grand narrative) that
sustained the counterculture of the 1960s” (wc5, 165). His subse-
quent writings then begin to argue that this situation reached a
saturation point in the 1990s: if the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
and the following disintegration of the Communist bloc was a
crucial moment in the decline of the grand narrative in world
history, then the terrorist attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995
can be considered an equivalent historical moment in Japan.
2 The invention of the gui (Graphical User Interface) in the 1970s
and its social saturation in the 1990s. gui technology leaves the
user unaware of the invisible behind the screen—the binary data
running inside the integrated circuit. As a result, t here appears an
interfacial subjectivity that causes the user to take the visible on
the screen at face value (the “at interface value” attitude) without
considering the existence of the invisible behind.
Azuma then proposes to offer a distinction between postmodernism as a

philosophical standpoint and the postmodern as a historical situation. That
is, he argues that postmodernism as a philosophical standpoint, which ap-
peared in the 1970s in the West and was represented particularly by New
Academism in the 1980s in Japan, should rather be understood as a resis
tance to the historical tendency toward the postmodern. Azuma offers an
intricate explanation of this view in the ninth article of “Why Is Cyberspace
Called Such?” and in another independent article titled “Postmodern saikō”
(Rethinking the Postmodern), which can be schematically summarized as
follows.8 While the postmodernists insisted on the decline of the invisible
symbolic order that made possible the distinction between the visible and

the invisible, when it came to the tendency toward an information society,
they followed the preceding discourses of the 1960s and the 1970s, such as
Daniel Bell’s “post-industrial society” and Alvin Toffler’s “third wave,” often
summed up u nder the umbrella term “futurology” (miraigaku) in Japan. The
ideology of futurology, however, is inherently in opposition to postmodern-
ism’s insistence upon the impossibility of grand narratives, in that it fore-
saw the next stage of capitalism as coterminous with the rise of information
technologies, and thus it newly reconstructed the grand narrative. And yet,
independent of the macroscopic view futurologists took toward the com-
ing information society, there proceeded the development of gui technol-
ogy, which nullified the distinction between the visible and the invisible at
a microscopic level, and brought forward the new “interfacial subjectivity.”
Postmodernism as a philosophical standpoint could not foresee the advent
of this new subjectivity radically disconnected from the modern idea of the
subject, and thus it paradoxically functioned as an ideology that constituted
the newer narrative of “the end of the modern,” resisting the historical ten-
dency toward the postmodern. That is, the discourse of postmodernism “ap-
peared in order to acknowledge postmodern reality, and at the same time
deny it” (wc10, 173). In this sense, Azuma argues, postmodernism as a phil-
osophical movement is modern thought par excellence.
In this way, the postmodern condition, for Azuma, is a social phenom-
enon that began taking shape in the 1970s, and then, after its denial by the
philosophical movement of postmodernism in the 1980s, reappeared in full
force in the 1990s, constituting at this moment a clear break from modernity.
Now, how can the idea of “cyberspace” be situated within this gradual,
multitier transition from the modern to the postmodern? As I have already
noted, the conclusion in “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” is that cyber-
space is a modern idea in denial of the postmodern in that it still appeals to
a spatial metaphor. Accordingly, in Azuma’s argument, the idea of cyberspace
shares the same position as postmodernism distinguished from the post-
modern in that they both “acknowledge postmodern reality, and at the same
time deny it”—in other words, “deny” (verleugnen) in the sense of a psycho-
analytic defense mechanism.
This conclusion, however, derives from Azuma’s somewhat illogical iden-
tification of the spatial metaphor with the visual one (spatial metaphors are
not, of course, necessarily limited to visuality, as, for example, in Marshall
McLuhan’s appeal to the metaphor of “acoustic space” in describing the na-
ture of electric media). That is, for Azuma, the idea of cyberspace provides a
spatial, and therefore visual, metaphor of postmodern conditions, in which

t here is no longer a distinction between the visible and the invisible, thereby
functioning as an exorcism of uncanny elements. According to him, cyber-
punk “is a movement in which the sci-fi imagination, having lost the totality
of the modern world in 1968—and as a result, the validity of the modern
non-world such as the universe (space) or the future (time), too—attempted
to revive itself by compensating this loss with the introduction of the new
image of ‘cyberspace’ ” (wc7, 146).
However, during the course t oward the postmodern, interfacial subjectiv-
ity has appeared, a phenomenon that cannot be analyzed by the visual meta
phor founded on the antithesis between the visible and the invisible, since
everything is totally visible on the surface. This new subjectivity without
depth, argues Azuma, therefore requires a new theoretical metaphor. How-
ever, there was not to be a substantial theoretical push toward this new task
within this serial, and Azuma’s next serial article, “The Overvisibles” (which
formed the basis of Otaku) should have been the place where his argument
developed in full. As indicated by the title, however, the theoretical metaphor
Azuma introduced there was more thoroughly visual. In addition, the divi-
sion of the visible and the invisible, which he had rejected as a modern theo-
retical framework, seemed to reappear in a different form.
From Cyberspace to Database

According to the formulation in “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?,” the post-
modern age, in which the distinction between the visible on the surface and
the invisible in depth has lost its effect, is a result of the collapse of the sym-
bolic order that had sustained modernity. Interfacial subjectivity, for Azuma,
is a new form of subjectivity in which everything is visible on the surface
and therefore cannot be analyzed by visual-spatial metaphors. In contrast,
“The Overvisibles” abandons the idea of total superficiality, introducing the
“database” as “the new depth of the postmodern” at the beginning of its first
article, as if it w
ere already established previously in “Why Is Cyberspace
Called Such?”9 However, “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” barely uses the
term “database,” and certainly does not construct it as a key concept. Ac-
cordingly, we can assume that Azuma, upon assembling t hese serial articles
as a book, planned to reconstruct the discussions in “Why Is Cyberspace
Called Such?” with “database” as its central concept. Since such a work has
not been realized, and since our purpose here is to reconstruct the media
theory being conceptualized at this moment, we must thus speculate on how
“Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” could have been rewritten, referring to

the arguments concerning the database in “The Overvisibles” and in Otaku
as clues.
Let us begin this task by reintroducing the theoretical framework of
Otaku. In this work, Azuma theorizes what he calls “database consumption,”
taking examples from collectible stickers (bikkuriman stickers), characters
in anime (Ayanami Rei from Evangelion), the genre of young adult novels
which would later be called “light novels” in Japan (the works of Seiryoin
Ryūsui), dating sims (Kizuato, Yu-No, e tc.), and so on. Especially exemplary
among these is the case of Di Gi Charat, an image character of Gamers, a
retail store group that sells anime and game-related goods.
Di Gi Charat is said to have appeared around 1997 or 1998, originally only
as a graphic design, and without a narrative world behind it. However, it grad-
ually gained attention, and anime, novels, and games with the character as a
protagonist were later produced. In the process, the narrative world around
the character (the story, other characters, the personalities of the characters,
etc.) came to be formed anonymously and collectively. Thus, in Di Gi Charat,
the normal order in which the narrative world of a certain work is followed
by its character goods is reversed, and its narrative is only one subordinate
element within the whole strategy of the media mix.
In addition, the visual appearance of Di Gi Charat is composed of design
elements favored by otaku (Azuma calls them “moe-elements”), such as cat
ears, hair sticking up like antennae, and maid costumes, “as if to downplay
the authorship of the designer as much as possible” (ov2, 202). According to
Azuma, “We should grasp what is currently called ‘character’ rather as a kind
of output generated from preregistered elements and combined according to
the program of each work” (ov2, 202), and Di Gi Charat is exemplary in this
regard.
Therefore, in otaku culture, according to Azuma, each individual work that
appears at a surface level can be understood as an expression of a database-like
depth in the following two ways. On the one hand, each narrative-based work
is a subordinate element of a media mix strategy without coherent order. On
the other, each character is an “output” of a latent database of “moe-elements”
accumulated within the w hole otaku culture. By consuming each individual
work or good, the otaku consumes this database-like deep structure behind it,
which is an accumulation of random and incidental data without any order or
hierarchy. Azuma thus calls this deep structure the grand nonnarrative, dis-
tinct from the g rand narrative that sustained modernity as a symbolic order.
In this manner, the theory of database consumption retrieves an invisible
depth behind the interfacial subjectivity that is entirely visible on the surface.

To find the appropriate place of this database-like depth within the theo-
retical framework of “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?,” we might be able
to interpret it as the uncanny elements exorcised by cyberspace. Azuma in
“Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” argued that the two spaces described in
Neuromancer, cyberspace and Chiba city, are needed to localize the uncanny
elements manifest in information technologies. What if t hese two imaginary
spaces reflect the surface/depth double structure of postmodern subjectiv-
ity? In other words, what if the image of cyberspace in this novel provides
a figuration of the place in which interfacial subjectivity appears, while the
disordered Oriental urban space cluttered with various gadgets is an image
of the uncanny elements behind it? For this to be the case, the new database-
like depth inserted within postmodern subjectivity would require substan-
tial modification to the place of Neuromancer—and cyberspace as a general
idea—within the transition from the modern to the postmodern in “Why Is
Cyberspace Called Such?.”
However, we must remember that Azuma figures gui technology as an
exemplar of interfacial subjectivity. If we follow his argument in “Why Is
Cyberspace Called Such?” that interfacial subjectivity—exemplified by gui
technology—takes what appears on the surface “at face value” without any
assumption of the invisible b ehind the screen, then the database-like depth
of the postmodern corresponds precisely to the innumerable data and pro-
grams b ehind such superficiality. In fact, Azuma’s argument concerning the
postmodern in “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” might become a theory
that accounts strongly for the Internet environments that came to the fore
after the 2000s, if postmodern subjectivity is reformulated as a double struc-
ture with interfacial surface and database-like depth (this idea was partly de-
veloped in “On Information and Freedom”).10 However, the stance of “Why
Is Cyberspace Called Such?,” which emphasizes the superficiality of the post-
modern discursive space—Azuma shared this view with the postmodernists
he criticized in this work—could not adequately describe the rapid transfor-
mation of the situation as it stood.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that Azuma’s abandonment of this
early media-theoretical project came only as a result of theoretical discrep-
ancies and the rapid transformation of information environments b ehind
them. It is also bound up with a dramatic shift in Azuma’s writing style—in
other words, a change in strategy in which he addresses his thoughts to his
readers, a remarkable shift when we compare “The Overvisibles” with Otaku.
“The Overvisibles,” written as a follow-up to “Why Is Cyberspace Called
Such?” and originally intended to be included in a voluminous book on the

postmodern, shares by and large the same style as Azuma’s previous work:
it prioritizes the clarity of abstract arguments, and uses the terminology and
idiolect of contemporary philosophy and critical theory. Discussions on this
level are largely omitted in Otaku, which is oriented more t oward a nonaca-
demic prose that dispenses with the technical terms of critical theory (this
shift of course also reflects certain considerations for publishing the work as
a paperback book for a general audience).
In line with such a stylistic change, there is also a significant shift in Azu-
ma’s critical position towards otaku culture. Around the opening of the first
article of “The Overvisibles,” he makes it clear that his arguments concern-
ing otaku culture are useful insofar as they represent exemplary cases in
understanding the larger issue of postmodern society (ov1, 226). In sharp
contrast to this scholarly attitude, Azuma concludes Otaku by announcing
his w ill to engage in a struggle of values in defense of otaku culture: “This book
was written to create a moment in which g reat works such as this [a dating
sim titled Yu-no] can be freely analyzed and critiqued, without distinctions
such as high culture versus subculture, academism versus otaku, for adults
versus for c hildren, and art versus entertainment. The development from
this point is left to each reader.”11
As a result of this change in his stance as a critic—one might paraphrase
this as a change in media strategy—Azuma’s theoretical book on the post-
modern was destined to reach a deadlock at the moment Otaku was published,
even before Azuma started his next serial article, “On Information and Free-
dom.” Conflicts on the level of theory due to a long span of serialized articles
were coupled with a break in his strategy. For our purpose of describing the
media theory he conceived at this period in its totality, however, we should
ascertain how “On Information and Freedom” can be positioned within the
whole program, and how it cannot be.
On Information, Freedom, and Animals

“On Information and Freedom” is an attempt to consider how the idea of
“freedom” can be reconstructed in a society in which social engineering via
informational management has started to control the privacy and security
of the individual in a hitherto unimaginable way. Accordingly, this article
orients itself toward the dimension of political power, and the dimension of
ethics that the subject can or should secure, while taking over the analysis of
postmodern subjectivity from the preceding two series. As one of the major
theoretical frameworks for such a task Azuma refers to a late short essay by

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990), in which De-
leuze famously suggested the possibility that a new form of power, different
from the disciplinary power Michel Foucault articulated, had been taking
shape. As exemplified by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon model of surveil-
lance, the Foucauldian modern subject is formed by the internalization of
power by discipline. In contrast to this, Deleuze conceives of a new power
that does not require such internalization, using the term “societies of con-
trol.” Deleuze offers an image of such power through his description of a
system that controls the entrance and exit of a certain building or block by
certification with an electronic identification card.12 In this case, the power
resides in the information network and database that decide if a certain per-
son is legitimate or not, without the need for the subjective internalization
of norms. Azuma labels this “environmental control power” (kankyō kanri
gata kenryoku). The transition from disciplinary power to environmental
control power, for Azuma, signals the end of the modern subject formed by
the internalization of the external gaze, and thus corresponds to the broader
social context of the transition from the modern to the postmodern.
To paraphrase t hese arguments in “On Information and Freedom” in line
with the terminology of Azuma’s prior work, we can say that the symbolic
order that determines the subject from within at a deep invisible level has
collapsed, and instead, the database-like depth, no longer located within
the interiority of the subject, comes to exercise a determining power on the
subject. In this way, “On Information and Freedom” shares many things in
common with Otaku. However, t here is also a barely reconcilable difference
between their attitudes t oward postmodern subjectivity. Media theorist Ha-
mano Satoshi gives an account of this, referring to the (apparently unof-
ficial) statement by Azuma himself that “[‘On Information and Freedom’]
drew too much on the motif of left wing criticism of surveillance society.”13
In other words, the point of conflict lies in whether postmodern subjectivity
is regarded affirmatively as an emancipation from the troubles that the mod-
ern idea of the subject implies, or negatively as a crisis of the subject per se
(the same ambiguity that characterized preceding postmodernist discourse,
as Azuma himself points out; wc9, 160–68).
Azuma accords an important role to the metaphor of the “animal” in
explaining this ambivalent state of postmodern subjectivity in both Otaku
and “On Information and Freedom,” albeit in different ways. The abovemen-
tioned point of conflict manifests itself most clearly in this metaphor. We
can largely divide the origin of the figure of the “animal” in Azuma’s discus-
sions into the following three sources:

1. The ontology of the animal and the problem of anthropocentrism in
Heidegger. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929–30), Heidegger
states that the stone is worldless (weltlos) and the man is world-forming (welt-
bildend), while the animal is world-poor (weltarm).14 In an article preceding
“The Overvisibles” serial “Sōzōkai to dōbutsuteki tsūro” (The Imaginary and
the Animal Route), Azuma outlines the theoretical path in which Heidegger’s
statement above paradoxically leads to anthropocentrism by referring to its
deconstructive reading by Derrida.15 According to Derrida-Azuma, Heidegger
formalizes the distinction between the t hing and man as an ontological dif-
ference between the objective presence (Vorhandensein) and Dasein so that
he can do away with the essentialist definition of man, and thus rejects an-
thropocentrism. However, the intermediate state of the “world-poor” ani-
mal inserted between the “worldless” thing and the “world-forming” man
unsettles the sharp formal distinction made between the thing and man, re-
ducing it to a difference in degree. This loss of formalism again brings about
an essentialist definition of what determines man, thus leading to a return
to anthropocentrism, and even to ethnocentrism (the racist ideology of Na-
tional Socialism). The figure of the “animal” plays an ambivalent role in this
reading. On the one hand, it unsettles the formal distinction between the
thing and man, secretly introducing “the animal route” in between, but, on
the other hand, it is precisely this “animal route” that makes anthropocen-
trism return to the philosophy of Heidegger, which should ostensibly have
rejected a naïve humanism.
2. Alexandre Kojève’s arguments on “return to animality” and “Japanese
snobbery.” In a long footnote added to the second edition of Introduction to
the Reading of Hegel (1962), Kojève mentions two modes of life that remain
after the end of History in the Hegelian sense: “man’s return to animality” as
a result of the “American way of life,” and “Japanese snobbery,” a condition
nurtured by experiences following the end of History that had continued for
around three centuries (since the Edo period).16 For Kojève, the society of
consumption in postwar Americ a has brought about “the definitive annihila-
tion of Man properly so-called” (Kojève, Introduction, 160), and people there
live an animal life in which they satisfy their wants by conditioned reflexes.
Contrary to this, Japanese snobbery barely makes a man human by living
“according to totally formalized values” (162).
Azuma, in turn, relates Kojève’s ideas to the arguments concerning the
end of modernity—that is, the postmodern—in “The Overvisibles” and Otaku,
and discusses them as follows. The mode of snobbery, in which people live
according to pure form without content (history), corresponds to the inter-

mediary phase from the modern to the postmodern, in which one had to
“believe in the semblance that life is meaningful” (ov3, 223) by fabricating
the grand narrative in spite of it having already been lost. Contrary to this,
in the more complete phase of the postmodern after the 1990s, the otaku
does not need even false narratives to fulfill the meaning of life anymore, as
(s)he has become an animal whose mode of existence is closed within the
“want-satisfaction circuit,” consuming moe-elements in order to pursue in-
stant satisfaction.
3. Hannah Arendt’s idea of animal laborans. In The Human Condition
(1958), Arendt classifies h uman activities into three categories: labor, work,
and action. According to her, labor “is the activity which corresponds to the
biological process of the human body,” and thus she calls this mode of being
animal laborans.17 Conversely, work and action are activities that belong to
and form the human world in opposition to nature. Following Azuma’s re-
formulation, work is an activity that forms the world of artifacts, though
its subject remains anonymous, while action is an activity to appear in the
world with a proper name, and he proposes the term “onymous” (kenmei)
as opposed to “anonymous” (tokumei) in order to consider this domain of
activity called action.18
Arendt considers labor as an activity coupled with consumption, and
warns against the state in which, with the advent of the society of consump-
tion, labor encroaches on the domain of work and action, thus depriving us
of humanity. Following this argument, in “On Information and Freedom,”
Azuma points out that the social saturation of information networks exem-
plified by rfid (radio-frequency identification) technology instead deprives
us of anonymity in the animal layer of our living, that is, l abor-consumption.
For him, the new form of environmental control power deprives us of mod-
ern subjectivity by making onymous our animal activities, which in turn
gain more and more weight in our social life. In order to theorize the right
for freedom anew in such a situation, Azuma reconstructs the dichotomy
of anonymous/onymous in a more complicated way, and foregrounds the
right to reject the passive onymity that is put into effect in the animal layer,
in other words, “the right not to be connected to networks” (if11, 286–95; if12,
264–73).
Now, is it possible to reconcile these three distinct genealogies of animal

metaphor within the development of Azuma’s theory at this particular mo-
ment? His comments about this matter are limited to a short footnote in “On
Information and Freedom” that points out the similarity between Kojève

and Arendt (if10, 289n102). Indeed, their texts, written around the same
period, share a line of argumentation that recognizes in the kind of lifestyle
that has become conspicuo us in postwar Americ a a negative moment—a
retreat from humanity—and they describe it through the metaphor of the
animal. What about, then, the two animalities Azuma himself has developed
from these two genealogies respectively? For this purpose, let us consider
the position of the first genealogy (Heidegger-Derrida) within the w hole
argument Azuma made about animality. According to his argument in “The
Imaginary and the Animal Route,” the intermediary state of the world-poor
animal makes the formalization of ontology in Heidegger incomplete, pierc-
ing it to open a “route” that short-circuits and confuses diff erent categories of
being. Is it possible to open an “animal route” in the divide between man and
animal in Kojève and Arendt by such a deconstructive procedure? Azuma
a fter Otaku ceased to make such arguments through abstract conceptual op-
erations at the formal level. The conception, however, of the coexistence of
animality and humanity within the same subject, which is shared by Otaku
and “On Information and Freedom,” can be seen as executing at different
levels a conceptual operation that is analogical to the short-circuiting of dif
ferent categories via the “animal route.”
In “On Information and Freedom,” Azuma questions the necessity to
“subjectify” oneself again as Man in order to overcome the tendency of the
information network to make onymous the animal level of our being. For
him, “we cannot be a full-time man. . . . Our starting point should not be
the dialectical image of man that overcomes inner animality and is elevated
into a total man, but rather the fragmented postmodern image of man in
which part-time actions are stranded in a lazy animal life of consumption”
(if11, 293). Analogically speaking, his task here is to partially open a “human
route” within the general tendency toward animality by breaking up an exclu-
sive antinomy between man and animal. At its most modest, Azuma’s ar-
gument proposed “the right not to be connected to networks,” that is, to
momentarily or partially recede from animal onymity.
In Otaku, on the other hand, Azuma acknowledges a counterargument to
the assertion that the otaku’s animality is closed within the “want-satisfaction
circuit” of database consumption—that is, that they exhibit a strange sociality
in the information exchange about such databases—and says: “Correspond-
ing to the double-layer structure of the database world, the postmodern sub-
jectivity is also divided into double-layers. This subjectivity is motivated
by ‘the need for small narratives’ at the level of simulacra and ‘the desire
for a grand nonnarrative’ at the level of database; while it is animalized

in the former, it maintains a virtual, emptied-out humanity in the latter”
(Otaku, 95).
However, according to Azuma, this humanity that coexists with animal-
ity within postmodern subjectivity always reserves the freedom “to drop
out” (Otaku, 93), contrary to modern subjectivity, which was accompanied
by responsibility. To quote a sentence from “The Overvisibles” that is omit-
ted in Otaku, “The postmodernized otaku in the 1990s never allows for
ethics that support the whole society, thinking that they can always cut off
uncomfortable social circuits insofar as they do not threaten their own small
narratives” (ov3, 234). For the otaku subject, the “human route” is nothing
but a route that opens insofar as it can be cut off at any time.
Around the conclusion of the “On Information and Freedom” series of
articles, Azuma states, “There is no freedom without the spirit of tolerance
towards alterity, that is, the other” (if14, 332). Azuma had hopes for the
possibility of securing the domain of anonymity as a space in which such
alterity could appear within the total onymity environmental control power
had brought about. From this point of view, the “human route” must always
be open, however fragile it may be, and the sociality of the otaku that reserves
the possibility to be cut off would never be desirable. At a different level, how-
ever, one could make the argument that the spirit of tolerance toward the
other has to be extended also toward the otaku, the database animal. Open-
ness to alterity, that is, should also include openness to the otaku. As we have
noted, in the course of the revision of “The Overvisibles” into Otaku, Azuma
steered his critical strategy in the direction of the latter. As a result, “On
Information and Freedom,” which continued to be written a fter Otaku as
a part of tripartite works on the postmodern, could not find a proper place
within Azuma’s activities as a critic.19
Conclusion
This chapter has analyzed three serialized articles that Azuma Hiroki pub-
lished from 1997 to 2003, examining how his theory and strategy of media
have developed intertwiningly. During this process, Azuma gradually trans-
formed from a young critic who wrote with highly philosophical termi-
nology into a more mature critic who provided a clear-cut perspective on
otaku culture. In this period, the transformation of the cultural environment
around the Internet had gradually taken shape, the completed form of which
would l ater be called Web 2.0.20 Internet culture in the 1990s was fostered by
a diy atmosphere, and possessed somewhat of a countercultural appeal. At

least a certain amount of knowledge of programming language was neces-
sary to actively participate in this culture. Such sharp distinctions between
the sender and receiver of this culture have been gradually dissolved, first
by the popularity of blogs, and then by the saturation of social networks. At
the same time, Google and commercial services such as Amazon have reab-
sorbed such a culture into the mainstream capitalist economy.
We can characterize the media theory of Azuma at this period—informed
by the key terms of interfacial subjectivity, database-like depth, and the ani-
mal—as pioneering work that quickly responded to such transformations
of information culture, providing a plausible theoretical framework with
which to understand them. Though “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” was
published in InterCommunication, which at that time was one of the vehicles
that represented earlier, critical Internet culture, this serial clearly intended
to distance itself from the 1990s discursive space on media by critically ex-
amining one of its central concepts: cyberspace. Azuma’s intention gained
more tangible theoretical results in his following two series of articles, espe-
cially through the discussions of environmental control power in “On Infor-
mation and Freedom.” This meant, however, that in order to respond to the
transformation of the information environment that occurred during the
six years of his writing, each serial necessitated substantial modifications to
his theory.
The conversion of Azuma’s stance as a critic and the ongoing transfor-
mation of the information environment at the same moment necessitated
the almost constant remodification of Azuma’s thought: the former urged a
change in his media strategy, and the latter forced a change in his media the-
ory. These two factors, which prevented Azuma’s three serial articles from
bearing fruit as a unified g rand theory in spite of their abundant theoretical
possibilities, no doubt possess an inseparable correlation. As I cannot fully
demonstrate this in this chapter, I instead wish to conclude by citing a sort of
primal scene that illustrates the intricate relation between Azuma’s strategy
and his theory.
On January 9, 1999, when Azuma had already started the serial article
“Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?,” a symposium titled “Ima hihyō no basho
wa doko ni aru noka” (Where is the place of criticism now?) was held at
Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo. The participants included Karatani Kōjin and
Asada Akira, who edited Hihyō kūkan; the conservative literary critic Fu-
kuda Kazuya; and two young critics associated with Hihyō kūkan, Azuma
Hiroki and Kamata Tetsuya.21 Azuma began the symposium with a keynote
speech, in which he outlined his dissatisfaction with what was then a com-

mon criticism of his recently published work Ontological, Postal. Accord-
ing to him, a reviewer had misunderstood the concept of “postal text,” an
idea that Azuma proposed by deconstructing the dichotomy of “constative”
(the meaning of a certain text) and “performative” (the effect achieved by a
certain text).22 For Azuma, the postality of text is its possibility of misdeliv-
ery or its unpredictability, but this is never related to linguistic style per se.
Though we cannot introduce his argument in detail, in the context of the
symposium, such ideas lead to the strategy to make text postal.
I am engaged in something which might look like a “selling activity,”

though my understanding of the current situation is that criticism can-
not come into existence today without such selling activities. . . . Even
if you made up a text at a high level, I think it would be so unpostal
if it w
ere only read among thousands of fixed readers. In this sense,
there is no distinction between the constative and the performative—
these two are entangled with each other. My book is as it is including this
selling activity. (“Ima hihyō no . . . ,” 11)
By reducing the idea of postality to having as many readers as possible, it might

appear that this statement undermines this very idea, that is, the condition of
the text to reach various addressees (sometimes in spite of the author’s in-
tent). Karatani disregarded Azuma’s comments as being “too self-conscious”
(“Ima hihyō no . . . ,” 17), while Asada repeatedly insisted to Azuma that to
write a text is a fter all akin to throwing a message in a b
ottle from a desert
island: one cannot control its performative effects. However, Azuma’s state-
ment that “selling activity” (eigyō katsudō) was necessary for a text to be
postal uncannily predicted the discursive space in Japan in the late 2000s
and 2010s—after he had abandoned his project of media theory. It is simply
commonplace today that critics and other writers make use of Twitter or
Facebook to enhance the postality of their texts—in the sense of reaching a
wider audience—and Azuma is one of the critics who uses such a strategy
most skillfully.
At the aforementioned symposium, Azuma proposed, “A new strategy
is needed that weaves the constative and the performative together” (“Ima
hihyō no . . . ,” 27). How about, then, understanding the media theory and
media strategy he developed from 1997 to 2003 as a trial leading toward
this “new strategy”? In other words, what if we can understand t hese serial
articles on media as Azuma ceaselessly altering his own media theory (con-
stative), while interweaving a newer media strategy (performative) within
it? Of course, this is only an analogy based on a crude interpretation of the

elaborated reading of Derrida by the early Azuma. It seems, however, to
help us understand this unfinished project, much like Azuma’s paraphrasing
of postality as a “selling activity.” To pursue this analogy with postality fur-
ther, can we not say that as a media theory in the postmodern age, Azuma’s
tripartite project was, in fact, misdelivered? Perhaps we should rather say
that Azuma sealed part of a letter conceived as media theory, wrote “otaku
culture studies” on the envelope, and posted it.
notes
1. In addition to the reason discussed above, this sense of incongruity also has
to do with the fact that the term “media theory,” or media-riron, is not particularly
common in Japan. In Japan, media-ron (“arguments on media” or simply “on media”)
is a more commonly used term, and accordingly, discourses on media tend to be
constructed loosely.
2. Azuma Hiroki, “90 nendai o furikaeru: Atogaki ni kaete 2” [Looking back at the
’90s: In place of postscript], in Cyberspace wa naze sō yobareru ka+: Azuma Hiroki
archives 2 [Why is cyberspace called such?+: Azuma Hiroki archives] (Tokyo: Kawade
bunko, 2011), 453.
3. “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” and “On Information and Freedom” were later
published as Jōhō kankyō ronshū: Azuma Hiroki Collection S [Papers on information
and environment: Azuma Hiroki collection S] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2007) with slight
modifications. The former was subsequently published with other essays as Cyberspace
wa naze. . . .
4. Azuma Hiroki, “Cyberspace wa naze sō yobareru ka” [Why is cyberspace called
such?], ten articles in InterCommunication, nos. 22–30 and 32 (1997–2000), 1:163 (here-
after cited as wc, with serial part number followed by page numbers as they appeared in
the original article). Azuma makes it explicit that his term akuma barai (literally “devil
expulsion”) derives from Jacques Derrida’s terminology of “conjuration,” explaining in a
footnote that it is “a function of ideology” (wc1, 165n12), though without further elabo-
ration. In the following, I use “exorcise” or “exorcism” as a straightforward translation
of akuma barai, avoiding the intricate implications of the Derridean term “conjuration,”
one meaning of which is equivalent to “exorcism” in English. See Jacques Derrida, Spec-
ters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
5. Azuma refers to Ueno Toshiya’s article “Techno-orientalism to Japanimation”
[Techno-orientalism and Japanimation], InterCommunication no. 16 (1996): 84–89. See
also David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Land-
scapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995).
6. Slavoj Žižek, “Cyberspace, or, the Unbearable Closure of Being,” in The Plague of
Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 161–213; “Cyberspace, or How to Traverse the Fantasy
in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other,” Public Culture, 10, no. 3 (1998): 483–513. Žižek
refers to the following two studies: Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age

of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Allucquére Rosanne Stone, The
War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: mit
Press, 1996).
7. Turkle, Life on the Screen.
8. Azuma Hiroki, “Postmodern saikō: ‘Gendai sisō’ o, hitotsu no ideology toshite
saiseiri suru tame ni” [Rethinking the postmodern: In order to rearrange “contemporary
thought” as an ideology], Asteion no. 54 (2000): 203–17.
9. The full sentence reads as follows: “We have confirmed in the previous chapters that
the new depth of the postmodern can be understood as a database, and the predominant
model of the new subjectivity t here is in part necessarily multiple personality (plurality
by the combination of memories).” Azuma Hiroki, “Kashiteki na mono tachi” [The over-
visibles], four articles in Eureka, vol. 33, issue nos. 3, 4, 6, and 8 (2001), 1:226 (hereafter
cited as ov, with serial part number followed by page numbers as they appeared in the
original article).
10. In this sense, it is remarkable that Azuma wrote “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?”
around the same time that Lev Manovich published his groundbreaking work The Lan-
guage of New Media (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2001), in which Manovich argued
that the database is a symbolic form in the era of new media. For further developments
in this direction, see, for example, Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Mem-
ory (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2011).
11. Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and
Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 116.
12. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 7.
13. Hamano Satoshi, “Kaisetsu: Azuma Hiroki no jōhōronteki tenkai ni tsuite,” [In-
troduction: On Azuma Hiroki’s development of information theory], in Azuma, Cyber-
space ha naze . . . , 470.
14. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2001).
15. Azuma Hiroki, “Sōzōkai to dōbutsuteki tsūro: Keishikika no Derrida-teki sho-
mondai” [The imaginary and the animal route: Derridean problems of formalization],
in Hyōshō: Kōzō to dekigoto [Representation: Structure and event], ed. Kobayashi Yasuo
and Matsuura Hisaki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2000), reprinted in Azuma,
Cyberspace ha naze . . . , 232–60.
16. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenom-
enology of Spirit, ed. Alan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1980), 159–62.
17. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 7.
18. Azuma Hiroki, “Jōhō jiyū ron: Data no kenryoku, angō no rinri” [On information
and freedom: The power of data, the ethics of code], fourteen articles in Chūō kōron,
vol. 117, issue nos. 7–12, vol. 118, issue nos. 1, 3–7, 9, and 10 (2002–3), 9:306–7, 10:285–86
(hereafter cited as if, with serial part number followed by page numbers as they ap-
peared in the original article).
19. As noted in the last article of “On Information and Freedom,” the publisher of
Chūō kōron planned to publish this serial as a book. However, Azuma abandoned the
rewriting work and instead published the original articles on his website, Hajō-genron,
in 2005, in response to requests for easy access (it was later republished in Jōhō kankyō
ronshū: Azuma Hiroki Collection S in 2007). On this web page, Azuma mentions “the
change in his philosophy” as a background to the abandonment of its publication as a
book, requesting that readers take note of this on the occasion of citation or reference.
According to this web page, Azuma’s plan for a book on the postmodern around the
beginning of the 2000s was to “treat the theoretical issues of the postmodern in the first
chapter, its developments in the information society in the second chapter, and its devel-
opments in subculture in the last chapter.” In this plan, “The Overvisibles” and “On Infor-
mation and Freedom” correspond to the third and second chapter, respectively, and thus
were written in the reverse order. See Jōhō jiyū ron: html Version Index [On information
and freedom: html version index], 2005, http://www.hajou.org/infoliberalism/.
20. Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the
Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly, September 30, 2005, http://www.oreilly.com
/pub/a/ web2/archive/what-is-w
eb-2 0.h
tml.
21. Karatani Kōjin, Asada Akira, Fukuda Kazuya, Kamata Tetsuya, and Azuma Hi-
roki, “Ima hihyō no basho wa doko ni aru no ka” [Where is the place of criticism now?],
Hihyō kūkan II-21 (1999): 6–32.
22. Azuma Hiroki, Sonzairon teki, yūbin teki: Jacques Derrida ni tsuite [Ontological,
postal: On Jacques Derrida] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1998). On the idea of “performative” in
speech act theory and its deconstructive reading, see also, for example, J. L. Austin, How
to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1962); and Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jef-
frey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

4 . T H E I N T E R C O M M U N I C AT I O N P R O JE C T
Theorizing Media in Japan’s Lost Decades
m a ri ly n i v y
ey’re bound in sunflower-gold covers, when not in dull olive or darkened

Th
burgundy or plain black: the back journals, that is, stored in the libraries of
Columbia University. One can check out bound journals for two weeks at a
time and renew them online eight times before having to return them to the
library to reboot the process. In a first in my academic c areer, I checked out
the entire run of a journal: InterCommunication: New Contexts of the Post-
Digital World, a landmark Japanese journal of media and communication
theory, digital technology, and art, which first appeared in 1992 and ran for
sixteen years and sixty-five issues. I had to roll two substantial suitcases to
the Starr East Asian Library to transport them to my office, not including the
three volumes shelved at Columbia’s industrial-park offsite storage facility,
which it shares with Princeton University and the New York Public Library.
The journals are nothing if not heavy—extraordinarily heavy (it’s the hard
covers).
It would be temptingly dramatic to say that I was the first person at Colum-
bia University ever to check out InterCommunication (Intākomyunikeishon,
in romanized Japanese). I wasn’t. In 2005 someone checked out one volume.
But I was, indeed, the first person ever to have checked out any of the other
twenty-odd volumes. That is not to say that students and scholars of Japan
did not peruse issues of InterCommunication as they languished on the peri-
odical shelves of the Starr East Asian Library reading room. But once bound
and shelved, the journals have more or less remained archivally incommu-
nicado. True, it is possible that a curious Japanologist has pulled one of the
volumes (nt 72.t4 z58) from the shelves on occasion. And I must recog-
nize here the lone Japanese-language reader in 2005 with enough interest
to borrow and haul one of these heavy tomes (issue nos. 47–50) from the
sub-basement depths of the Starr East Asian Library to the street level of
Morningside Heights. But substantially, for twenty-one years, these volumes
of InterCommunication were simply not in communication.
Thus I begin with the melancholy instance of a Japanese journal about
communication, about intercommunication, a journal titled InterCommu-
nication, interred, out of communication, in the depths of an American uni-
versity library. It signals an intercommunication that has been inter-rupted,
ruptured between the two poles of its ostensible sending and receiving: in
this case, one in Japan, the other, here in the United States. It is the place of
the “inter” that ruptures and reveals the broken redundancy of the very idea
of “intercommunication” itself. Indeed, when is a communication not an in-
tercommunication? For inter means “between or among.” The oed tells us
that it can also mean “mutually” and “reciprocally.” Tellingly, communica-
tion, in English, comes from the Latin word communicare, “to share.” To share
means there must be more than one, an overlap, an exchange of some sort.
Can t here be a one-way communication? Isn’t communication intercommu-
nication, always already? But what is the (inter)communication of a journal
rarely opened, seldom read?
This allegory of a media and communications journal virtually out of
communication is one that gestures, perhaps paradoxically, to the status of
media theory in Japan and the communications/media/information com-
plex that is disaggregated with increasing difficulty in the contemporary post-
digital moment. What is media? What is media theory? And not least: what
is Japan? All these questions must come to the fore in an English-language
work, published in the United States, on media theory in Japan. Perhaps the
archival discommunication of this journal implies an indictment of the state
of Japanese studies at American universities today. Perhaps it is an indica-
tion of the difficult nature of the journal itself, the understandable reluc-
tance to read too much translated European theory rendered in Japanese,
the lack of directed study of contemporary theory in East Asian studies, or
simply the decline of Japan as an object of intensive scholarly engagement in
the wake of the recessionary years and the dominance of China. Or perhaps
it equally indicates the receding fortunes of print in general, and in partic
[102] marilyn ivy

ular those of back issues of print journals, which even in the best of times
were often destined to repose for years in suspended animation.
I want to consider the significance of this notable arts, culture, and tech-
nology journal for the theorization of media in post-1990 Japan, the decades
after the deflation of the bubble economy. I aim concurrently to reflect on
the destinies of the trope of “communication” (komyunikeishon) itself dur-
ing this period as it both discursively formed the theoretical surround of
the journal and as it moved through the pages of InterCommunication—that
trope that so often is complexly enfolded within the ambit of “media” and
“mediation,” often without remainder. One has only to look, for example,
at the “communication” entry in the authoritative Critical Terms for Media
Studies (or the introduction to the volume) to get a sense of the theoretical
difficulties of separating the notions of “media,” “communication,” and “in-
formation.”1 Lev Manovich’s now-canonical distinction—between communi-
cation as entailing a notion of real-time contact, disclosed by the ubiquitous
use of the Greek preface tele-(telegraph, television, telephone), in opposition
to the archiving, memorializing function of the term media, which high-
lights the mediatic object itself (film, CDs, video) rather than the temporality
of transmission—sought to maintain a workable division between the two
terms. While t here might be instances when communication does theoreti-
cal work that media cannot (and the reverse), new digital technologies and
diverse aesthetic and experimental theorizations in their wake have thrown
into question the real efficacy of the distinction. Nowhere would that distinc-
tion lose its force more so than in the complexly cosmopolitan and intellec-
tually rich terrain of Japanese media/communications theory in the decades
around the turn of the millennium.
Even given this abundance, however, InterCommunication had an un-
usually overdetermined relationship to the communication trope in media
studies (although its actual content was not limited to anything that could be
imagined narrowly as “communication studies”: contributions ranged ambi-
tiously and promiscuously over the entire globalized terrain of technology,
media theory, arts, and culture) because it was founded and financed by Nip-
pon Telegraph and Telephone—commonly known as ntt (Nippon Denshin
Denwa Kabushikigaisha)—the massive corporation, originally a state-run
“public corporation” (originally known as Nippon Denshin Denwa Kōsha,
founded in 1952) that monopolized telecommunications in the Japanese
postwar period: think at&t in overdrive. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
was still dominant in 1992, the inaugural year of InterCommunication, even
The InterCommunication Proje ct [103]

a fter its then-recent privatization. Part of an ambitious arts and technology
initiative developed by ntt in the early 1990s, the journal was imagined as an
avant-garde house organ in anticipation of the establishment of the perfor
mance, gallery, and documentation space called icc, the InterCommunication
Center, opened in 1997. Both these enterprises vividly disclosed ntt’s aspira-
tions to develop cutting-edge cultural theory and to sponsor performances
that would reveal the utopian, fabulously novel dimensions of the emergent
digital universe and its capital importance for (tele)communications.
The print journal ceased publication in 2008, but the InterCommunica-
tion Center itself flourishes even now in western Shinjuku, on the fourth
and fifth floors of the Tokyo Opera City Tower, one of the highest skyscrap-
ers in Tokyo (with fifty-four floors, the seventh-highest skyscraper in Tokyo,
a global city of multiple towering megabuildings). Construction on Tokyo
Opera City began in 1992, the same year as ntt started the publication of
InterCommunication, and was completed in 1997, when ntt East (ntt be-
came a holding company divided into ntt East and ntt West) moved into
its newly completed quarters at the Tokyo Opera City Tower, along with
none other than Microsoft and Apple (and the New National Theater, on the
lower levels).
Disseminating globally sourced writings on communication, technology,
and media; showcasing a staggering number of intellectuals, performers,
artists, and writers from around the world (heavy on Europe) in per
formances and lectures; and featuring Japan’s own homegrown theorists
and practitioners in almost endless roundtables, symposia, exhibitions, and
conversations, icc and the journal (and website) InterCommunication (all
funded by the original m other ship of ntt and then ntt East, when ntt
was broken up into independent regional corporations)—the InterCom-
munication project, I’ll call it—played pivotal curatorial roles in delineat-
ing and expanding the parameters of media theory and technoart in Japan
at the turn of the millennium and beyond. In close conversation with its
linked sister-journal Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan), and along with other
high-powered technology and arts publications, perhaps most important
the architecture-focused journal 10 + 1,2 the journal InterCommunication
committed itself to extensive labors of translation: translating EuroAmer-
ican works on media into Japanese; providing interpreters from (mostly)
European languages for the many non-Japanese artists, scientists, and theo-
rists icc brought to Japan; and publishing select translations of articles from
Japanese into English, a number of which are archived on its still-functioning
website.
[104] marilyn ivy

The 1990s milieu of intensifying globalization, Japanese recession, ex-
panding privatization, and dramatically ramifying digital communications
and media technologies coalesced into an official and also popular discourse
of “internationalization” (kokusaika). Kokusaika provided an overarching
rubric for efforts to think theory and media beyond the Japanese frame, ef-
forts that ever and always entailed the necessity of translation. The proj
ect of InterCommunication was a large-scale experiment in what one of its
editorial founders, the noted theoretician, postmodern critic, and scholar
Asada Akira called an attempt at “dialogue”—a model of communication
based on an exchange of speech—between technoscience and art. At the
same time, the project unfolded within a translational economy that was
aimed precisely at overcoming the conditions of something called “Japanese
media theory,” such that the place of what one could confidently call “Japa
nese theory,” “Japanese media,” “Japanese media theory,” or “media theory”
in Japanese was ceaselessly destabilized. The journal was thus as much about
translation, one could argue, as anything else.
Yet its splendid efforts at interlinguistic and international intercommuni-
cation ran up against the ever-recurring limitations of translation itself, the
forlorn textual evidence of those limitations archivally remaindered in the
stacks, in this instance, of an American university library. It was perhaps in
the aftermath of the inevitable limitations of interlinguistic intercommuni-
cation that the digital arts—particularly the visual and sonic arts—came to
occupy an increasingly valuable place of mediatic communication-without-
remainder: non-Japanese-speaking p eople could still revel in a language-free
performance by Ikeda Ryōji (recently performing at MoMA, for example),
virtual reality demonstrations, or an exhibition of oneiric architecture—
works that could stand alone and “communicate” internationally, without
the undue mediations of the translations that the journal project required.
Media arts, digital arts, and communication arts (and, crucially, architecture)
held out promises of transcending the impasses of mutually unintelligible
languages, of the hard labor of translation in a globalizing world. When we
speak of “media theory in Japan,” then, we have to remind ourselves repeat-
edly of the global (inter)translational economy of which Japan is, and was, a
part, and that fatefully determines much of what becomes legible outside the
intra-Japanese surround.
The journal InterCommunication, or ic, thus rode the sequential waves
of the extraordinary digital tsunami that overtook Japan and the rest of the
world in the 1990s and beyond, translating and theorizing, recording, and—
indeed—archiving the transformations as they were occurring in technology

and the arts on a global scale. Funded as the journal was by a corporation
originally founded as the sole provider of telephone and telegraph service
throughout Japan, ic was commercially framed within the well-worn log-
ics of telephonic communication. By the 1990s, the fundamental ideological
presuppositions of that logic—the transmission of information, messages,
and affect across a material sonic connection, connected by voice itself—
were in the midst of a shake-up of seismic proportions. The digital upheavals
in communications and media prompted ntt to turn to the premier media,
art, and cultural critics in Japan to establish a cutting-edge technoarts and
theory journal and center, a complex that could help ntt divine the cul-
tural future of the digital telecommunications revolution. The positioning
of ic revealed that the journal was tied, however loosely, to a vision of com-
municative technologies as unifying, domesticating, and humanizing forces
within a late capitalist, globalized economy. As the InterCommunication
project spanned the unfolding recessionary “lost decades,” the decades of
Japan in the 1990s and 2000s (which some recent scholarship now claims
were not as lost as we had thought), it revealed tenuous, yet tangible, lines
of connection between the recessionary and neoliberalizing movements of
capital during this period.3 The project’s admirable efforts to harness the
fading afterlife of corporate largesse in the name of cultural reflection, tech-
noaesthetic experimentation, and media theoretical explorations were, of
necessity, linked to ntt’s neoliberalizing strategies, which evolved as the
recession was unfolding.
The founding editorial figures and powers, committed to what we might
imagine as a high (post)modernist take on what was still a b ubble-enabled
cosmopolitanism, defined the project’s extraordinarily ambitious, even uto-
pian, energies. These figures were important cultural-intellectual presences
of the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, most prominently Asada Akira, who was also
coeditor with Karatani Kōjin of the journal Hihyō kūkan (Critical Space), itself
a massive enterprise in the translation of high theory from European lan-
guages. The trajectory of InterCommunication thus expressed a commitment
to media and arts theory at the ever-receding edge of postmodernism. The
Asada touch is evident, which meant that recognizably international Japanese
figures from architecture (Isozaki Arata), m usic (Takemitsu Tōru and Saka-
moto Ryūichi), performance art (Dumb Type), computer art, and beyond
regularly contributed to the journal, supported by a veritable army of trans-
lators and interpreters, mobilized for the plethora of art events and sympo-
sia featuring artists and performers from outside Japan (William Forsythe,
Bill Viola, and Laurie Anderson, among many others). The online archive of
[106] marilyn ivy

these performances, lectures, and exhibitions—along with numerous vid-
eotaped interviews, assiduously translated for Japanese viewers—forms a
remarkable repository of media arts and theory over a span of some twenty
years.
What w ere the ramifications of one of the largest telecommunications
companies in the world providing the resources for InterCommunication?
As noted, ntt had been a public corporation, but by the early 1990s it was
in the endgame of its thoroughgoing privatization. At the time, it was the
largest privatization of a national telecommunications agency in history, one
that was seen to be a model for the developing world’s communications in-
dustries. As Timothy E. Nulty, a senior economist at the World Bank, stated
at the time:
The privatization (or partial privatization) of ntt stands as the single

largest effort of its kind in history and for that reason alone merits care-
ful attention. But there are more reasons:
The telecommunications sector is, and is likely to remain for some
time, on the cusp between wholly private and wholly public activities.
Further, it is one of the most rapidly growing and technologically
dynamic of all sectors. Thus, the “privatization” of the telecom sec-
tor (or “transformation,” or “reform”—whatever term one finds most
sympathetic) presents some of the most difficult issues currently faced
anywhere in the field of microeconomic policy making. The pressure
to move the sector out of its traditional public utility monopoly status
into something new—more liberal, more competitive, more private—
is being felt everywhere in the world and is ultimately irresistible.4
Thousands of employees were laid off in ntt’s privatization (as many as

169,000) in one of the most explicit demonstrations of the neoliberalizing
costs of the lost decades.5 It was precisely at this moment that the InterCom-
munication project was initiated as a high-profile revelation of ntt’s invest-
ment in the f uture, as the promise of a better digital tomorrow shimmered
on the distant horizon of the deepening Japanese recession. Yet this opti-
mism, of course, was tightly entwined with a palpable nostalgia for earlier
moments of capitalism when then-novel forms of technology indicated a
brighter, more expansive future—a nostalgia, indeed, for the telephone it-
self: ntt founded InterCommunication at least in part to commemorate and
celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of telephone service in
Japan in 1890. This appeal to the origins of the telephone firmly placed the
InterCommunication project in a retrospective mode, a retrospection that,

again, secured the departure point for another communications revolution,
this time digitally underwritten.
The promise of so-called information capitalism was palpable in the 1990s.
From Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s prescient book Beyond Computopia: Informa-
tion, Automation, and Democracy in Japan (published in 1988, right before
the Japanese boom went bust), we know that the dream of “information
capitalism” and the technocommunicative innovations it entailed were in-
creasingly promoted as a way out of late twentieth-century economic im-
passes.6 The fantasy of unbridled and unencumbered telepresent labor took
off from the imperatives of capitalism to revolutionize productive technolo-
gies, at any and all costs. In this narrative, ntt (along with other communi-
cation and transportation bureaucracies and industries) played a crucial role.
Only with the burgeoning promises of Internetted communication pathways,
along with the computer and media technologies that facilitated them, could
the fantasy of telecommuters in decentralized, utopic work zones take on
real force. It is not evident in the early 1990s issues of InterCommunica-
tion that the radical implications of mobile cellular phone technologies had
really come into sharp relief. The Internet, however, and vr technologies
vividly figured as salvational technological fixes for what would come to be
the increasingly obvious woes of Japanese (and global) capital.
Yet a stable telephonic logic installed at the journal’s origins worked to
keep the metaphor of communication (and transmission and education)
overarching the radical mediatic projects generated at icc. Models of con-
tact and transmission basic to the telephonic paradigm w ere an important
part of the InterCommunication project; metaphors of contact, communica-
tion, connection, and conversation all point to the at-least residual structur-
ing of the experimental spaces of “dialogue” between art and technology
(itself an opposition that bespeaks a necessarily instrumentalized relation-
ship to the sphere of business and publicity). A still-regnant “capitalism of the
voice” (and the fact that voice figured centrally in the telephonic regime, what
we might call televoice) would continue to shape ntt’s strategies even within
the exploding communicative regimes of email, texting, and messaging.7
To look at these back issues of InterCommunication in all of their graphic
splendor (Japanese book and journal design of this period went far be-
yond the standard American fare) is to be struck by the markers of techno-
temporalities past. To look at advertisements in old journals is to wonder at
superseded fantasies, both unfulfilled and fulfilled, as prophetic precursors
of the present. In opening 1992’s issue number 0 (yes, zero), the first image
[108] marilyn ivy

one sees is ibm’s then-newest word processor, now impossibly retro. The
ad emphasizes the computer’s lightness and the fact that it is bilingual in
Japanese and English; it is able to be used throughout the world and is there-
fore global. Turning the page, the next ad, for the Mainichi Shinbun (Mainichi
newspaper) contains the headline “Shinbun kakumei shinkōchū” (In the
midst of the progress of the newspaper revolution). Here we can see, in 1992,
the unfolding of the revolutionary implications of the “digital revolution” that
was overtaking newspapers and, indeed, all print-based communication. In
Virilian fashion, this revolution was about speed. The headlines continue:
“You can understand the news in 19 minutes and 30 seconds” is emblazoned
above a newly redesigned front page dated December 5, 1991 (one wonders at
the exactitude of nineteen minutes and thirty seconds). New colors, flags, in-
dices, and graphics: simple to use, easy to understand, clearer type, big color
pictures—in short, approaching, approximating the layout, the aesthetic of
the screen. In its invocation of an atarashii jidai (new age), Mainichi Shin-
bun recognized the writing on the wall, or the page, as the case may be: the
drive to consume the “necessary news” (hitsuyō nyūsu) in a short period of
time (mijikai jikan de). Little did Mainichi Shinbun know how short that time
would become with the acceleration of digitalized temporality, but the news-
paper nevertheless anticipated it in its now-poignant attempt to retain the
primacy of print by making the page look like a screen.
There are a few other ads: for high-end French timepieces, phone cards
(yes, phone cards), and Pia Magazine, with its assertion of being “Japan’s
first real cultural event data service.” Pia’s “Cultural Event Data File,” too, was
a print “file,” but imagined, and presented, in the language of digital storage.
There are no telephone ads from ntt, strangely enough, but Japan’s interna-
tional phone company, for international calls, kdd (as it was called then; it
is kddi now) placed an advertisement instructing callers to use zero zero
wandafuru (zero, zero, wonderful)—that is, 0–0–1—to make their phone
calls, followed by an example of a call to New York in what must have been a
novel bit of information for at least some of the readers of InterCommunica-
tion (how to make an international phone call to New York?). And in what
was really an almost ad-free issue, there are two final solicitations at the
back: a modest one-page ad for ntt Publishing (the publisher of InterCom-
munication) and, finally, unexpectedly, an ad for Key Coffee, one of the most
ubiquitous brands in Japan (hardly high-end), with a two-page spread on
the cost effectiveness and value of coffee from Toraja, Indonesia, as opposed
to the more famous and widely distributed Blue Mountain coffee.

Telephones, newspapers, computers, and coffee: such are the communica-
tion resources the journal featured in 1992. The advertisements, of course,
were part of the layout of the entire quarterly, committed to print, as it would
be for sixteen years, alongside an ever-burgeoning web presence. They oper-
ate consistently in InterCommunication as virtual framing devices. One might
say that magazine advertisements always have an ambiguous relationship to
the “real” work, nowhere more so than in contemporary fashion and design
magazines, where one is sometimes hard-pressed to know where commercial
solicitation begins and the ostensibly noncommercial spreads end. But in a
journal of high theory, translation, and technoartistic experimentation—and
one sustained by corporate sponsorship—the place of advertising was mar-
ginalized, reduced to a near-zero degree. As discreet parerga, the ads appear
to be both inside and outside the primary body of the work at hand.
The parergonal advertisements of ntt East had shifted, of course, over
the years. In 1996, just a few years a fter the journal debuted, the corporation
ran two innovative ads in ic, both featuring a dapper, bespectacled man, an
aesthete from the 1920s, perhaps (a time of intense cultural intercommuni-
cation and what is sometimes called “borrowing” from Europe). In the first
ad, the bourgeois gentleman (in a three-piece suit) is seated on a tatami mat
floor, zazen style, with floating images of the iconic rock garden of the Zen
temple Ryōanji emerging from the floor and repeated on Japanese screens
in the background (see fig. 4.1). He muses on media and communication—as
the copy reveals:
Ah, so humans are multimedia!

The human heart is indomitable. On the other side of what we can
see, we always sense a truth that is concealed. On the other side of a
beautiful melody, we imagine an unknown landscape. People are tied
together by images. R umans are multimedia. We can commu-
eally, h
nicate more. We can understand each other more. Telecommunica-
tion [jōhō tsūshin] is getting more interesting. . . .
The bottom of the ad reads “Anata ni, jōhō no chikara [To you, the power of
information],” brought to you by the corporate sponsor, in this case identi-
fied as the ntt Group [ntt Gurūpu].8
Here we see an evolution toward the explicit promise of “information”—
jōhō—and away from the simple wonders of making a long-distance telephone
call to New York, featured just four years earlier. Th
ese ntt Group ads—
probably the most textually and visually sophisticated within the long run
of ntt’s InterCommunication sponsorship—feature a lone man, an educated
[110] marilyn ivy

[fig. 4.1] ntt ad in InterCommunication (winter 1996).
and alert modernist at a technological turning point, mirroring the oppor-

tunities offered by the intensifying digital revolution of the 1990s. An inter-
communicating aesthetic fusing East and West and a cosmopolitan human-
ist vision suffuse the technological excitement that ntt seeks to convey. In
the following ad in this sequence, our cosmopolitan man is standing, arms
folded, with neat bow tie, in front of a multitude of framed depictions of
Giverny, with Monet’s lily pads escaping their frames and flowing into what
becomes a lush Western (French?) drawing room, complete with yellow
roses on a table (see fig. 4.2). West meets East again, ineluctably. The revo-
lution in the sensory depiction of the world that impressionism disclosed
becomes the backdrop for the digital transformation:
Within me, multimedia is starting to move. . . .

Humans live by connecting emotional impressions. We feel sounds
in light, sense colors in sounds, and we try to transmit all the dyna-
mism that is found there as a single image. What we really want to
describe are the vicissitudes of time. What we r eally want to convey are
the quiverings of our hearts. Becoming the shape of t hose feelings . . .
multimedia are the technologies of the human heart.
To you—the power of information.

[fig. 4.2] ntt ad in InterCommunication (summer 1996).
In succeeding years, as new cable, optical fiber, and broadband technolo-

gies advanced, ntt East held out hopeful promises of an ever-expanding
future, now couched increasingly—perhaps as ic’s core readership aged—in
the less-exalted terms of convenience, practicality, enjoyment, and connec-
tion. The lone philosopher-entrepreneur embodying the best of East and
West gave way to images of single young w omen, telecommunicatively sur-
rounded by family and friends. The overdetermined term kizuna, indicating
the emotional “bonds” of relationship, rather than the sheer possibilities of
“information,” emerged as key, at the same time that new broadband tele-
communications technologies promised to bring the far near, to bridge what
distance separated, all with the familiar possibilities and logic of telepres-
ence. Yet ntt’s repeating and abiding theme through the years was still that
of anata ni: “to you.” In a final variation on that theme published in the last
year of InterCommunication’s publication, ntt East revealed a good deal
of exactitude when it stated that what it was communicatively conveying
“to you” was not only the power of information and the words and feelings
of those bonded to you, but also ultimately light itself (hikari): “Hikari wa
anata e” (Light—to you). In an unambiguous allusion to the laying of fiber
optic cables throughout the archipelago, in its “next generation network”
[112] marilyn ivy

(ngn), ntt East suggested that light is now not only the medium of trans-
mission but also the very stuff of mediation, simultaneously the luminous
conveyance and the spiritualized essence of (tele)communication itself.
The advertising strategies used by ntt and ntt East in the pages of Inter-
Communication indicate the technological and subjective transformations
of the communication paradigms that coincided with the journal’s run. We
are not able, however, to draw unmediated lines of influence from ntt’s
advertising strategies and InterCommunication’s editorial vision. In an on-
line interview in 1998 with the Polish media theorist and journalist Krystian
Woznicki, Asada Akira answered his interlocutor’s pointed queries about
the dilemmas created for a radical media journal when it is funded by a
megacorporation such as ntt:
woznicki: Does the fact that the financial basis for this magazine (as
well as for the entire icc project) is provided by the biggest telephone
company [ntt] in Japan affect the editorial agenda?
asada: Well, of course it is very hard to persuade p eople at ntt, first

to make the icc and then to provide resources for research activities
or publications. Until now we have somehow succeeded. But I am not
really sure. Now that they are having a center. . . . As soon as you have
hardware it is very easily institutionalized and bureaucratized. Therefore
I am not sure if we can go on as we have been doing. But at least until
now there has been only little influence or pressure from the company.
woznicki: I wonder what it means to do research for a telephone

company that has naturally also its own plans to go into multimedia
and the Internet.
asada: In fact ntt is a huge bureaucracy and they do not have a

unified agenda. There are many people and no unification, no unified
strategy. They are speaking about corporate Japan and it’s a myth. It’s
a very ineffective huge bureaucracy. Everyone has something to say
and nobody is ready to take responsibility. The same thing accounts
for ntt. There are a lot of institutes: such as the institute for h uman
interface, basic research, etc. but no unified planning. We are basically
taking advantage of the situation. . . . In a sense the icc project is re-
garded as . . . independent of ntt’s business, as an activity to cleanse
their hands. In that way we have been somehow independent. At least
from my personal point of view Critical Space and InterCommunica-
tion are both sides of the strategy. . . . With InterCommunication we

are trying to open up new horizons and to stimulate a dialogue of what
has been called culture and technoscience. For the time being I think
that they are, if not complementary to each other, then some vague
sides of a unified project.9
ere Asada makes no bones about it: the ic project was designed to take
H
radical advantage of the situation, to use the massive telecommunications and
technology capacities of ntt (and their support) to further a freewheeling,
experimentalist set of endeavors exploring the interfaces of art, technology,
and media. In this context, Asada remarks upon the dense interconnections
between Critical Space and InterCommunication. While Critical Space even
now is viewed (at least in the United States) as an academic or para-academic
journal, InterCommunication was tied more directly to corporate sponsor-
ship, as it were, as well as to the innovative art and media projects of the icc
itself. Critical Space, like ic, is immediately attached to the name of Asada
Akira, yet even more so to the name of Karatani Kōjin, perhaps Japan’s most
esteemed literary and cultural theorist. Karatani was, however, not as promi-
nent in the InterCommunication project.
We might take the inaugural issue of the journal as a special revelation
of the theoretical, aesthetic, and political choices of InterCommunication,
ones that did not necessarily accord in any simple, or even complex way,
with ntt’s commercial fantasies. And, after all, shouldn’t the first issue give
some indications of the aims, ambitions, and predilections of the editors? If
we look then at the first essay in InterCommunication’s opening issue, issue
number 0 (again, zero), we see that it was a translation from an essay by
the French technology and media theorist Paul Virilio, “The Revolution in
Speed” (Sokudo kakumei), followed by a review of Virilio’s related exhibi-
tion in Paris. Virilio’s work thus marks the initial issue, and his work b
ecomes
a touchstone and point of return in later issues as well. The Virilio essay
and the exhibition review exemplify the entirely impressive translation
work and international interests that occupy much of the journal. Virilio
and Derrida, Baudrillard and Kittler: these theorists provided the govern-
ing Franco-Germano communication and media theory armature for the
quarterly. In the mix w ere also essays by eminent computer theorists, virtual
reality scientists, science fiction writers, and industrial designers—foreign
and domestic—as well as uncounted taidan, or roundtable discussions, with
Japanese artists and intellectuals, architects and performers.
Subtitled on the cover as a “journal exploring the frontiers of art and
technology” (different from Columbia University’s catalogue subtitle: “new
[114] marilyn ivy

contexts of the postdigital world”) IC no. 0 featured a special section titled
“The Contemporary Moment of Communication” (Komyunikeishon no
genzai), with a further section titled “Frontiers of Communication.”10 In
this first issue, then, the emphasis fell on the trope of communication, and
indeed, intercommunication. We see the straining toward the evidence
of translation, and translatability, throughout, with the careful English-
language translations of all headings, subheadings, and article titles. By the
end of the journal’s run in 2008, this l abor of translation had been effectively
abandoned (and we see the same t hing on the website; a fter the year 2000,
it appears that no, or few, new English-language translations of article titles
appear online). It is as if, by then, the dream of (inter)communication across
languages had been given up and the inevitability of the native language
had reasserted itself in a kind of exhaustion of the effort to intercommuni-
cate. Never in the journal’s history was t here any attempt to provide transla-
tions into any language other than English, although t here were translators
of other European languages for the visiting foreign artists, scientists, and
creators (French, German, Polish . . .).
Nevertheless, the inaugurating issue no. 0 presented the hope of inter-
communication across two languages: Japanese and English (with the hid-
den languages of French and German constituting the source languages
for much of the theory to be translated). The non-Japanese-reading reader
could find some limited solace in the titles and headings, giving a sense, at
least, of what was at stake, some ability to grasp the import of the meander-
ing density of the journal, with its head-spinning mash-up of topics, themes,
images, and essays. Graphically and theoretically, the journal attempted to
communicate, if you w ill, as much as possible in its densely overwritten
pages. The reiteration of the inter itself structured the format with sections
titled (in English only): “InterDialogue,” “InterCity,” “InterTechnology,”
“InterCritique,” “InterForum,” “InterProject,” and “InterCreation.” Through-
out, the printed evidence of the desire to find that mediate place between,
that inter, that would allow communication to take place, in-between cities,
technologies, critiques, dialogues—all become substitutable, metaphorized
in the interspace of intercommunication. It is as if in this movement of the
in-between, the inter-, a Japanese media theory might be found. In the dis-
cursive space of the journal, it is as if a theory of media, mediation, and com-
munication became possible only in the intercommunicative interspace
between theoretical formations and possibilities. While Asada called for a
dialogue between technoscience and art (and dialogue implies that the poles
of the conversation are already constituted in advance), the journal itself

seemed to embody what would be more appropriately imagined as a rhizo
matic structure, marked by an immensity and diversity of information, with
theoretical and topical nodes communicating metonymically, horizontally,
and often unexpectedly. Dialogue, however, in its explicit form was never
excluded, and the familiar Japanese format of the roundtable discussion, or
taidan, in addition to numerous interviews, symposia, and conferences, takes
its place throughout.
What is arguably the most original translation project of the journal,
however, and one that has particular import for thinking about media
theory in Japan in the post-bubble decades, was the first installment of a sec-
tion of Jacques Derrida’s 1980 La Carte postale (The Post Card), (the transla-
tion of the entire work did not come out until 2007, uncharacteristically late
for a Japanese translation of Derrida).11
While it might have operated on some levels as a mere signifier of French
theory and its relevance to all things intellectual, The Post Card nevertheless
marked a milestone in media/communication theory. Following Virilio’s
rethinking of speed and velocity, h ere was a Japanese translation of Der-
rida’s interrogation of communication as always-already conditioned by the
condition of its miss, with its governing metaphor the postcard that always
might not arrive at its destination, a might not that determines the possi-
bility of any communicative destination and arrival whatsoever. The Post
Card also wrote of the signature that could possibly move across media to
motivate a transportation—a translation?—of the force of the writer, of the
destination and always-assumed arrival that secures both the poster and the
postee of a self-same identity: sender and receiver.
This postal logic, this normative postal logic, could be said to be of a similar
order to telephonic logic, the logic of the telephone that would undergird
ntt in its place, at least in 1992, as the dominant carrier of electronic com-
munications in Japan. It is a logic that would assume that a message sent
out from the sender, h ere, should reach, would reach a receiver, and that
the receiver, t here, would pick up the phone. Of course, the phone might be
busy (this was pre–call-waiting, after all), or the intended receiver might not
be present to answer the call. The “call,” of which Avital Ronell makes so
much, could be missed, even refused. The differences between postal logic
and telephonic logic are, however, not inconsequential, turning on the desti-
nation and destiny of the voice as opposed to the problematic of writing and
the authority of the signature foregrounded in The Post Card.12
This question of postal logic and the place of Derrida is not unimpor
tant, for Derridean deconstruction was the theoretical work that perhaps
[116] marilyn ivy

more than any other defined the turn to poststructuralism and, indeed, to
postmodernism in 1980s Japan. And it was Asada Akira, more than any
other Japanese intellectual figure of that period, who popularized the array
of theories subsumed by the term “poststructuralism” with his 1983 Kōzō to
chikara (Structure and power).13 In the 1990s, InterCommunication and Criti-
cal Space—with Asada figuring prominently as energetic force and editorial
presence—became public discursive spaces for large collaborative projects in-
volving architects, artists, translators, computer technologists, scientists, vir-
tual reality experts, musicians, media theorists, composers, and writers (and
more). An entire generational world of high theory and culture was drawn
together into the curatorial space of these two intertwined journals.
So it should come as no surprise that ic, with Asada as one of its editorial
founders, should begin its publication life with selections translated from the
French icons of communication theory in the late-twentieth c entury: Virilio
and Baudrillard, who immediately come to mind as media theorists, if not
more-than-media theorists. Yet it might not be as obvious (or acceptable)
to many in university media or communications programs, say, that Jacques
Derrida should be considered a signal media or communication theorist.
By translating La carte postale into Japanese, ic signaled that Derrida was a
foundational thinker for the theorization of the intersection of new commu-
nication technologies, new media, and the arts (in a journal funded by ntt).
What is striking, even in the midst of the fabulous abundance of theo-
ries, events, fantasies, and possibilities purveyed by the InterCommunication
project, is how closely it hewed to a demanding standard of what might be
called, not ironically, a late-modern international style (following the jour-
nal’s inspirations from the icons of postwar modernist Japanese architecture),
artistic endeavor, and reflection. This was not primarily a journal about the
media effects generated by mass culture or popular culture, nor did it regu-
larly feature critical writings that crossed over into pop terrain, stylistically.
Although every potential permutation of the technoarts and creative new
media was pursued, work about anime, mass mediation, manga, and the
minutiae of everyday Japanese mass culture tended not to be foregrounded.
Moreover, one searches the journal in vain for even passing references to
the defining political or economic crises of the day. In the issues for 1995
(or even 1996), for example, I found no articles or discussions about Aum
Shinrikyō, the religious group that carried out the infamous poison gas at-
tacks in Tokyo’s subways in 1995. Nor did I encounter any essays dedicated to
the Kōbe earthquake of 1995, the recession, or the so-called Shōnen A (youth
A) incident of 1997, in which a high-school student carried out a decapitation

of another student. That is to say, the quarterly resolutely kept to its primary
mandate to explore new technology and art—to theorize media, communi-
cation, and culture (although that is not to say that contemporary political
issues were not discussed in any of the numerous roundtables and dialogues
that ic published). It was this intercommunication, this exchange, between
technology and art—and perhaps with the emphasis on the powers of art—
that seemed to provide a way out of the deepening crises of the recessionary
period. With its late (if not post) modernist notion of the resistant powers of
art and theory to harness technological powers, InterCommunication kept a
certain distance from the more ubiquitous products of the culture industry,
as well as from the vicissitudes of natural, social, and political disasters.
Much of the 1990s constituted a period before the global fame of art
superstar Murakami Takashi and the international reach of his “Superflat”
concept, even if, alternatively, anime auteur Miyazaki Hayao was becom-
ing a household name in Euro-America. The decisive lamination of high
cultural theory with the stuff of Japan’s everyday mass-mediated digital
worlds did not occur conclusively u ntil what we might call the Azuma Hiroki
intervention.
It is therefore telling to trace Azuma’s rise to prominence through his
writings in Critical Space, but also, revealingly, in InterCommunication. His
first contribution to the journal was a book review, published in 1995 (issue
no. 14) titled “Sore ni shitemo mediaron wa naze konnani konnan nano ka?”
(Why is it that media theory is so difficult?), in which he reviewed three
then-recent books about media theory.14 One of the books he reviewed was
Ohsawa Masachi’s Denshi mediaron (Theories of electronic media), a book
consisting of articles about media written by Ohsawa in the pages of Inter-
Communication, starting with issue number 0.15 Azuma starts the review by
stating that there are no good Japanese books on media theory, critiquing
Ohsawa’s essays by asserting that he (Ohsawa) does not understand the place
of the “other” (seeing the other as only a projection from an internal split),
does not problematize the very notion of media, and that—in fact—much of
his book has nothing to do with media. Azuma ends his short review with a
toss-off recommendation: take some hints from Derrida’s newly published
Mal d’Archive (Arushiivu no aku) to get away from the present situation that
is so poor in media theory (mediaron no mazushii genjō o nogareru). Azuma
thus promoted Derrida as a peerlessly deep media theorist, a theorist who
could rescue mediaron from its impoverished circumstances.
Azuma was already theorizing anime in the mid-1990s, including one ar-
ticle in InterCommunication in 1996, so anime was not completely excluded
[118] marilyn ivy

from the journal. He also wrote a series of articles on cyberspace for In-
terCommunication in succeeding years (he was publishing in Critical Space
during this time as well). But I linger on the Derrida connection through
InterCommunication because Azuma consolidated his place as a Japanese
intellectual superstar with his 1998 book Sonzaironteki yūbinteki: Jakku
Derrida ni tsuite (Ontological, postal: On Jacques Derrida).16 Yet by 2000, at
least, and certainly by the publication of his Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan
(The animalized postmodern) in 2001, Azuma had performed a renuncia-
tion of his Derrida fixation, which was no doubt entangled with Asada’s
and Karatani’s suspicions of Azuma’s otaku theorizations and with his in-
creasingly direct denunciations of the Asada-Karatani approach to critical
work.17
InterCommunication, therefore, did not accompany Azuma into his f uture,
a future that established “Japanese media theory” t oday as finding its exem-
plary objects in anime and the complex internetted media mixes constitut-
ing everyday electronic culture, enabled by the communication devices and
services that ntt (East and West), among o thers, provides. Nor did ic go
the Superflat route, while Azuma’s collaborations with Murakami Takashi
became globally celebrated.18 Instead, the journal and the center continued
to invest in the Euro-style critical fusions of art, theory, and new media tech-
nology with which it started. Projects have included, for example, a collab-
orative 2007 installation titled Life—Fluid Invisible Inaudible by Sakamoto
Ryūichi and visual artist Takatani Shirō, a core member of the renowned
performance group Dumb Type. This project is exemplary of the kind of
installations, projects, and exhibitions that might be found at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, or at any of the innovative exhibition spaces in Amster-
dam, Berlin, Milan, Oslo, or New York, for that matter—at Eyebeam, Perfor
mance Space 122, the Park Avenue Armory (where the sonic and visual artist
Ikeda Ryōji had a mega-event titled the Transfinite in 2011), or perhaps even
MoMA. Performance art, installations, exhibitions: the place of visual or
sound art becomes the site for staging the internationalized intercommuni-
cation that is particularly vibrant in Euro-American avant-classical spaces.
It is arguable that these performative stagings of the aesthetic possibilities
of digital technologies and telemediatic arts constitute the most powerful
internationalized, intercommunicative legacy of the InterCommunication
project.
InterCommunication ceased print publication in the annus horribilis 2008
(the same year as the journal 10 + 1). Its final issue (no. 65) ended with a short
note to its readers:

With this issue, InterCommunication will suspend publication. The
magazine has been the h ouse bulletin of ntt’s Intercommunication
Center, established in 1997, and which it preceded by its initial pub-
lication in February 1992. Since that time, InterCommunication has
continued publication, making its editorial objective the illumination
of current issues with a focus on art and science, media technology,
and information environments, as well as m usic, film, architecture,
sociology, philosophy, and more—the vast territory of contemporary
culture.
However, during the sixteen years since our initial publication, huge
transformations have occurred in society, in media, and also in the
publishing world. At this time, our company has decided to suspend
publication of InterCommunication, with our determination to end its
role in the medium of a magazine [zasshi media]. Thank you for read-
ing InterCommunication.
ntt Publishing Corporation

InterCommunication Editorial Staff 19
By this time, Asada Akira and the original editorial group w ere no longer
directly involved in the publication (although Asada still takes part in live
events at icc). In retrospect, one might be amazed that the journal contin-
ued for as long as it did through the dramatic digital transformations that
it so presciently publicized, theorized, critiqued, and celebrated. InterCom-
munication’s archive migrated to the website of the icc, where it lives a selec-
tive afterlife: some articles are available for perusal, some are not; some are
translated into English, most are not. Th
ere was never any effort, it appears,
to reach Asian readers or constituencies: to my knowledge, no Chinese, no
Korean translations. Japanese has become more default than ever. Yet the
InterCommunication Center continues to operate as an ongoing site for new
media explorations, including its gallery, Open Space; its website archive,
called the “Hive,” and its still-numerous live performances and symposia.20
In 2013, five years after the cessation of InterCommunication, I visited
the InterCommunication Center in the Tokyo Opera City Tower, with its
bookstore, interactive displays, and galleries (where entry was free, as it
had always been). The facilities are not g rand, but they are respectable (the
original vision of the center was compressed for financial considerations,
post-bubble). Upstairs, on the fifth floor, is the Open Space gallery, with its
signature sunken timeline, a glass-covered trench in which is embedded—
in chronological order—a curation of artifacts from information ages past:
[120] marilyn ivy

first editions of McLuhan’s works, Beatles a lbums, artifacts of obsolete com-
munications technologies (telephones), and newspaper articles from each
period documenting the important events of the day (strange how the frag-
ile reality of newspapers becomes the perduring last guarantee of temporal
authenticity, even now).
Open Space has exhibitions of long duration, possibly because of ongoing
financial constraints (again, entry is free). The permanent works are largely
interactive, with hands-on computer activities, projections with digital cam-
eras, remote sensing games. The bona fide art installations in the fifth-floor
galleries are meant to dramatize the mandate of the “dialogue between art
and technoscience” that Asada Akira first articulated. Like the journal itself,
however, icc’s installations continue to theorize and stage the complexities
of communication far beyond the humanistic model that ntt would explic
itly want to purvey in its own commercially driven enterprises.
icc—like the journal—is not only a site for the new, which was always
one of the objects of InterCommunication, but also for retrospection, even
nostalgia. Surmounted technologies are not left out. The intercommunica-
tion between art and technology staged in the journal and the center is an
inter-ruptured one, a broken dialogue perhaps, at times staged with tangible
force. Here remain palpable the investments in the performance, or the stag-
ing, of the aporias of new and not-so-new and old media technologies and
their communicative possibilities.
Technoartist Hachiya Kazuhiko’s mid-recessionary installation Seeing Is
Believing (Miru koto wa shinjiru koto, 1996) was restaged at Open Space in
the summer of 2013, explicitly reopening the emergent aporia of communi-
cations in the 1990s to the space of public legibility. In 1995, in the still-early
stages of email and Internet communication, Hachiya solicited contribu-
tions from a global range of emailers, asking them to send him “diary” en-
tries on the Internet, as he assembled an early archive of Internet messages.
The translated English-language web page on icc Online states, “The artist
refers to his dream of a library collecting diaries written by p eople around
the world as the catalyst that inspired him to launch the project. In a way it
may be considered as a realization of the dreamed library in times saturated
with web services such as blogs and Twitter.”21
But Hachiya did not simply post the messages in his installation (or online,
or anywhere else). When one entered the darkened chamber of his installa-
tion at icc, a ceaselessly moving array of digital lights randomly streamed
over the electronic signboards that covered the gallery’s walls, a random
constellation—no transmission of messages, no language, no reception of

communication. Only by taking up what appeared to be a species of ste-
reoscopic device (called a hitsuji, or “sheep”) and peering through it could
one see that the streaming lights were in fact the led-articulated messages
of innumerable people, the Internetted archive of the diaries of Hachiya’s
informants. The lights became legible, readable; the title of the installation
might well have been Miru koto wa yomu koto (Seeing is reading). The
sublimity of the virtually inexhaustible relay of text, now readable, through
the intimate prosthesis of the hitsuji; the action of peering through the de-
vice, reminded one of nothing more than the fascination of the stereoscopic
View-Master devices of childhood, with their frozen revelations of unknown
landscapes, arrested in uncanny 3-d relief. At Hachiya’s installation, the
hitsuji allowed the digital stream to resolve itself into characters, into sen-
tences, into the messages of emailed communications, now rendered legible
and believable—because visible?—for the solitary viewer, positioned as the
now-authorized reader of private communications, made public—yet only
for those with the proper technoprosthesis, looking back from 2013 to the
moment of 1996.
The Library of Babel, the Borgesian dream of the complete archive, is re
imagined h ere in the partial, streaming terms of the digitally hidden emailed
communications of the most intimately quotidian variety. Anticipating all
the technical and aesthetic labors and wonders that would increasingly pre-
occupy the InterCommunication Center (not yet in place when the instal-
lation was first produced in 1996), and which would eventually displace the
paper-based work of the print journal InterCommunication, Seeing Is Be-
lieving staged the obscure dream of a technology of revelatory translation,
rendering visibility into belief itself (see fig. 4.3).
The aporia of the technologies of communication, the interruptions that
consolidate it, the broken temporalities and technological doublings that en-
able it at the same time as they disable it, have structured many of the criti-
cal technoaesthetic projects at the InterCommunication Center, works that
travel to and from Japan, works that originate within and outside of Japan.
Hachiya has another interactive work dating from 1993 that was restaged in
New York in 2004 at Eyebeam, one of the premier media arts centers in the
United States. This work technoperformatively theatricalized the ways that
intercommunication is founded on a fundamental impasse and a founda-
tional instability of terms, in an undoing of the transparency of communi-
cation that seemed to be commenting, uncannily, on the theoretical aporia
structuring the journal InterCommunication itself—most vividly in its Der-
ridean encounters (see fig. 4.4).22 To quote from Eyebeam’s website:
[122] marilyn ivy

[fig. 4.3] Hachiya Kazuhiko, “Seeing Is Believing,”
(Miri koto wa shinjuru koto) 1996. Image courtesy of the artist.
Kazuhiko Hachiya’s Inter Dis-Communication Machine, composed of

a video camera, transmitters, head-mounted displays, batteries, and
feathers is a communication system aimed at transmitting and receiv-
ing sensual experiences.
Used by two p eople wearing head-mounted displays, the “machine”
projects one wearer’s sight and sound perception of the environment
into the other one’s display, thus confusing the borders between the
identities of “you” and “me.”
The Inter Dis-Communication Machine allows its wearers to “enter”
each other’s body and perception without being able to influence it.23
Hachiya’s potently playful virtual reality piece, complete with two pairs of
angel wings (one pair black, one white), produces exactly what Eyebeam
describes: the “trading places” of the perceptual apparatus of one subject
for the other, a sensual intercommunication confused, willingly (Hachiya
titled the piece in Japanese Shichōkaku kōkan mashin [Audiovisual exchange
machine]). Disorientation ensues in the midst of the interrupted “inter,”
a between that allows an exchange. The space between is the space of

[fig. 4.4] Hachiya Kazuhiko, The Inter Dis-Communication Machine,
(Shichōkaku kōkan mashin) 1993. Image courtesy of the artist.
miscommunication, even dis-(inter)communication, allowing the possibil-

ity of contact in the very gap opened up. Hachiya’s interdiscommunicated
(if not excommunicated) angels, along with his invisible email archive made
visible, linger on, virtually, in spaces already prepared by the labors of the
InterCommunication project. That he would title his work (in English) “The
Inter Dis-Communication Machine” reveals a pointedly amusing, yet un-
canny, recognition of the paradoxes of communication and a barely coded
reference to the InterCommunication project itself (another exhibition by
Hachiya was one of the last exhibitions at the center while the journal was
still in operation).
We can take Hachiya’s work as an allegory of angelic intercorporealiza-
tion, an instantiation of the transformative powers of vr art, when the other
virtually becomes one’s self. Perhaps this is the dream of intercommunica-
tion, one we saw imagined in the discursive space of the journal, shifted into
a theatrical, technoperformative domain that stages “trading places” through
an audiovisual exchange machine: an exchange that technologically embod-
ies the dream of perfect intercommunication in its very impossibility (and,
[124] marilyn ivy

thus, an exchange of angels: angels as impossible beings). It enacts a post-
utopian moment of translation’s beyond, a communico-mediatic theory
made palpably, technologically corporeal.
This allegory of inter dis-communication taken to its extreme is a po-
tently wry commentary on the end, indeed, of the kinds of translation en-
deavor that deeply anchored the InterCommunication project. Yet to return
to the status of Japanese media theory—or media theory in Japan, or of
Japan—the question of translation cannot help but be ceaselessly reiterated.
Within Hachiya’s New York performance at Eyebeam, where is Japan lo-
cated? And what is a media theory that could be located within something
called Japan? The InterCommunication project was an unprecedented ex-
periment in theorizing technocultural futures in Japan, in all their mediatic
and communicative possibilities—both via the journal itself and through
the ongoing performative and exhibitionary spaces of the icc—where novel
mediatic and aesthetic possibilities w ere publicized. While providing artis-
tic cover to a neoliberalizing ntt, the experiments that took place, both
theoretical and otherwise, far outstripped the gigantic telecommunication
corporation’s capacity to contain them. At the same time, they did not ac-
cede to a kind of post-Azuma take on media theory as primarily linked to
youth culture and to a distinctly Japanese sensibility ranged under the now-
omnibus heading of otaku culture. Instead, the InterCommunication project
embraced an older cosmopolitanism refunctioned for the recessionary de
cades of neoliberalization and globalization, along with a stubborn experi-
mentalism in which aesthetic practice and performance were bound up with
theory itself and the critical necessity of translation work. The ic project held
open, even in the recessionary period, the ongoing promises of internation-
alist high-theory and avant-gardist technocultural work. As such, it played
a critical role in ensuring that media theory in recessionary Japan was not
located simply within Japan, and that a beleaguered, cosmopolitan intercom-
munication was not inevitably reduced to the containments of an exclusively
Japanese intracommunication.
My bound volumes of InterCommunication will go back to the Columbia
University stacks soon enough. When disinterred from their library burial—
and perused—they reveal the wild proliferation of media thought in Japan’s
rapidly receding lost decades. They signal, perhaps first and foremost, the
foundations of mediatic thinking in theories of transmission, translation,
and (inter)communication. At the same time, they perdure as material-
textual reminders of a singular institutional project, one that articulated

corporate sponsorship and the passions of avant-garde media theory and
practice. Even in its uninterrupted archival slumber the journal continues
to disclose the InterCommunication project’s critical centrality to our reflec-
tions on what we could possibly mean by media theory in Japan, today.
notes
1. See Bruce Clarke, “Communication,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 131–44.
2. The journal 10 + 1 began publication in 1995, three years after InterCommunica-
tion. It ended publication in 2008, the same year as ic. As of 2014, the association of
architects that founded the journal maintains a vibrantly useful website, as well as an
accurate subsite that lists the back issues of 10 + 1, including English-translated titles of
special issues and articles. See LIXIL, “10+1,” accessed July 9, 2014, http://10plus1.jp/.
3. See Eamonn Fingleton, “The Myth of Japan’s Failure,” New York Times, January 6,
2012.
4. Timothy E. Nulty, “Introductory Note,” in Yoshiro Takano, Nippon Telegraph and
Telephone Privatization Study: Experience of Japan and Lessons for Developing Coun-
tries, World Bank Discussion Paper 179 (1992), vii.
5. See Thomas Thummel and Max Thummel, “Privatization of Telecommunications in
Japan,” in Limits to Privatization: How to Avoid Too Much of a Good Th ing, ed. Ernst Ulrich
von Weizsäcker, Oran R. Young, and Matthias Finger (London: Earthscan, 2005), 77.
6. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Beyond Computopia: Information, Automation, and Democ-
racy in Japan (London: Routledge, 1988).
7. See Yoshimi Shunya’s Kittler-inspired “Koe” no shihonshugi: Denwa rajio chikuonki
(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995).
8. This ad was repeated in InterCommunication twice during 1996, both in issue no. 15
(winter 1996) and issue no. 16 (spring 1996). Translations mine.
9. Asada Akira, interview by Krystian Woznicki, Nettime Mailing Lists, accessed
July 9, 2014, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9802/msg00100.html.
10. InterCommunication, no. 0 (spring 1992).
11. Published as “Hagaki yori,” [From The Post Card], InterCommunication, no. 0
(spring 1992): 34–39. See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and
Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
12. See Avital Ronell’s unclassifiable work The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizo
phrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) for a wildly inven-
tive performance of the radical potentiality opened up by telephonic logic.
13. Asada Akira, Kōzō to chikara: Kigōron o koete [Structure and power: Beyond
Semiotics] (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1983).
14. Hiroki Azuma, “Sore ni shitemo mediaron wa naze konnani konnan nano ka?” [Why
is it that media theory is so difficult?], InterCommunication, no. 14 (1995); see footnote.
15. Ohsawa Masachi, Denshi mediaron [Theories of electronic media] (Tokyo: Shinyōsha,
1995).
[126] marilyn ivy

16. Jonathan Abel has provided an overview of Azuma’s relationship with Asada and
Karatani as custodians of a determined high cultural ambiance in the journals they
edited. See Jonathan Abel, translator’s introduction to Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals,
by Hiroki Azuma (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxii–xxvi.
17. Azuma, Otaku, 120–21. See Abel’s notes.
18. Azuma has been closely and collaboratively involved with Murakami Takashi’s
work; he is perhaps Murakami’s most important critic. See, for example, Azuma’s impor
tant essay “Superflat Speculation” in Superflat, ed. Murakami Takashi (Tokyo: Madra,
2000).
19. InterCommunication 65 (summer 2008): 151. Translation mine.
20. Please see the center’s remarkable website: ntt, “ntt Intercommunication Cen-
ter,” accessed July 9, 2014, http://www.ntticc.or.jp/index_e.html.
21. Both Japanese and English-language descriptions exist for his installation: ntt,
“Seeing Is Believing,” accessed July 9, 2014, http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Exhibition/2013
/Openspace2013/Works/Seeing_Is_Believing.html.
22. Eyebeam, “About Eyebeam,” accessed March 7, 2016, http://eyebeam.org/about.
Eyebeam explains its project thus: “Founded in 1997, Eyebeam was conceived as a non-
profit art and technology center dedicated to exposing broad and diverse audiences to
emerging artistic practice critically engaged with new technology, while simultaneously
acting as an educator of technology’s potential for creativity.”
23. Eyebeam, “Inter-Discommunication Machine,” accessed March 7, 2016, http://
eyebeam.o rg/p
rojects/i nter-discommunication-machine. A video of the devices in use
was uploaded by Hachiya to YouTube: Kazuhiko Hachiya, “Inter Dis-Communication
Machine (1993),” YouTube, accessed March 7, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=JOzVzcmK0VU.

II. PRAC TICAL THEORY
5 . M cL U H A N A S P R E S C R I P T I O N D R U G
Actionable Theory and Advertising Industries
m a rc ste i n b e rg
One of the turning points in the history of Japanese media theorization as

media theory was the influx of Marshall McLuhan’s work into Japan in the
years 1966–68, and the “McLuhan boom” that ensued. McLuhan likely needs
no introduction: he was a Canadian theorist of media famous for his apho-
ristic one-liners such as “The medium is the message” and “The content of
one medium is another medium.” He is known for his polarizing distinc-
tions between hot and cool media and between literate and oral cultures.
Hot media, such as the radio, are information-dense and prone to firing up
emotions. Cool media, such as the low-res television image of the pre-h dtv
years, require a good deal of viewer participation and involvement (the latter
being another key term in his vocabulary). Retribalization and the reemer-
gence of the synthetic, multisensory, oral “man” was McLuhan’s vision for
humanity u nder conditions of electr(on)ic media. He was duly famous for
his technological determinism, or at least his deterministic view of media
forms—it doesn’t matter what a train car is carrying, what matters is that
train tracks connect one city to another. Content is irrelevant, and to focus
on it would mislead the analyst; only the social effects of media matter, and
those effects follow from their mediatic form. In shifting the object of analy
sis from message to channel, and in understanding channel with an eye to
its environmental and social effects, McLuhan often claims the distinction of
being one of the first theorists of media as such.
Being a figure who read into technological transformations the rise of a
social formation based around total awareness and the reunification of the
senses, and made grandiose claims about global retribalization—following in
the wake of the specialization and separation of the faculties brought about
in the West u nder print technologies—McLuhan was unsurprisingly divisive.
Tempers flared, and there were some very hot reactions to his supposedly
systematic, cool approach. Not only was McLuhan seen as divisive, he was
also seen as divided. For evidence of this we can turn to the introduction
of one of the first collections of critical essays around the media theorist’s
work: McLuhan: Hot and Cool. There editor Gerald Emanuel Stearn writes,
“It is fashionable to suggest that there are two Marshall McLuhans: one, a
rather donnish, slightly eccentric professor, working away in the sheltered,
musty precincts of the academy on trivial literary exercises; the other, a wild
idiosyncratic Popster who is on to a good thing—media analysis, a subject
badly in need of exploration.”1 Ultimately Stearn suggests that this image of
two McLuhans is misguided, as there are real continuities across the figure’s
work. Yet the image of a divided McLuhan is perhaps nowhere more tangible
than in Japan in the 1960s, where on the one hand he was painted as the sav-
ior of the business world, a made-for-advertising guru, and on the other as a
potentially influential media theorist who was badly misread.
The Japanese reception of McLuhan seems to repeat some of the familiar
debates found in his Anglo-American reception. Yet it also has significant
local inflections that stem from the sites and institutions that mediated this
introduction, and this, in turn, influenced the manner in which he was pre-
sented. Concretely, McLuhan’s reception in Japan was colored by the fact that
he was introduced by figures closely associated with television broadcasters
and ad agencies, and thus he was read as a management guru by white collar
“salarymen,” media workers, and business moguls alike. In Japan perhaps
more than anywhere else, McLuhan was regarded as a prophetic figure who
spoke directly to ad executives and the managerial class. To be sure, ele
ments of this reception by business and marketing people exist elsewhere
in the world; McLuhan was famously taken up as the darling of Madison
Avenue and lectured at major corporations in North America in the mid-
1960s and early 1970s. The image of McLuhan as an oracle for executives had
currency for contemporary commentators, many of whom touch on this in
their assessments of the writer.
Nonetheless, an examination of the McLuhan boom in Japan reveals that
there, more than anywhere else, the writer was received first and foremost as
a marketing guru. In a 1967 article, Kadoyama Nobu outlines three peculiar-
[132] marc steinberg

ities of this reception: (1) McLuhan’s works had yet to be translated into Japa
nese (and hence those who did not read the English original w ere wholly
reliant on his local interpreters); (2) in Japan people assume that McLuhan
gave birth to a revolutionary change in marketing, and also assume that this
is the reason for his popularity in the United States; and (3) McLuhan is not
being introduced as a theorist but rather as a prophet.2 As this chapter will
argue, McLuhanite media theory was seen as marketing theory, or what I
will call actionable theory—theory that promises to provide concrete results
to its users (with the caveat that with theory the promise is more important
than whether results are in fact provided).3
The perception of McLuhan as a marketing guru is in large part due to
the man most responsible for his introduction: Takemura Ken’ichi, a figure as
reviled for bastardizing McLuhan as he is recognized for his popularization
of the man. In fact, one might better describe Takemura as someone who
channeled McLuhan, more than popularized him. Takemura was the Japa
nese McLuhan. Indeed, contemporaries of Takemura, such as Seijō Univer-
sity professor Ishikawa Hiroyoshi, dub the late 1960s media theory craze the
“Takemura/McLuhan boom,” putting distinct emphasis on the Takemura side
of the equation.4 McLuhan’s work was so marked by his most vocal proponent
in Japan that the two were collectively known as “Takemura McLuhan.”5 The
verb “channel” is not chosen arbitrarily: Takemura often says that he “under-
stands McLuhan in his w hole body.”6 He functioned as something of a local
spiritual medium for the Canadian media theorist, producing something else
in the process. H ere I dub this thing produced TakeMcLuhanism.
Not surprisingly, Takemura also came to stand in for everything intellec-
tuals and writers in Japan and around the world hated about McLuhan. So,
rather than writers treating McLuhan as a false prophet, they tended to treat
Takemura as one, and this had the effect of immunizing McLuhan against
the type of attacks he was subject to in North Americ a and Europe. Indeed,
some of the fiercest critics of Takemura were in fact those who claimed to
find theoretical value in McLuhan. As I will demonstrate here, the reception
of McLuhan through Takemura—TakeMcLuhanism—points to the institu-
tional importance of the advertising industries in enabling and channeling
the adoption of media theory in Japan.7
Takemura is a particularly fascinating figure because he stands at the inter-
section of media theory, the advertising industries, and advertising practice.
To many in Japan, Takemura may be best known for his long c areer as a tele
vision tarento, or celebrity performer, a commentator on contemporary af-
fairs who hosted his own television programs on the major national networks
McLuhan as Prescription Drug [133]

during the 1970s and 1980s.8 Yet Takemura has at least two other claims to
fame, both germane to the topic at hand: first and foremost, he is known as
the person who popularized McLuhan in 1960s Japan; and second, he was
an advocate for mōretsu, or “intense,” as a principle of advertising practice
in the mid-to late 1960s. “Mōretsu” became a buzzword in the world of ad-
vertising and television commercials especially, and Takemura was known
as one of its strongest proponents as a principle of advertising.9 While this
article w
ill not be able to cover the brief intersection of McLuhanism and
mōretsu, this close relationship does presage the bond between media the-
ory and advertising practice that informs later instances of theoretical work
analyzed in this volume. Insofar as the introduction of McLuhan launched
Takemura’s television career—as of 1968 Takemura became an embodiment
of McLuhanism as a kind of media practice—this episode also points to the
peculiar yet fundamental role that ad agencies and media practices have
played in the history of media theory in Japan.
Media Theory Put to Work

ere are three reasons in particular why we should consider the McLuhan
Th
boom (and TakeMcLuhanism) to be a key moment or inflection point in
the history of media theory in Japan. First, and perhaps most significantly
for a volume on the history of media theory in Japan, the very term for media
theory—mediaron or, alternatively, media riron—was coined around the time
of the influx of McLuhan’s writing into Japan.10 Hence, though the lifespan of
the McLuhan boom may have been brief, it marked a shift in the terminologi-
cal terrain of media theory. In a recent essay on McLuhan, Tsuno Kaitarō
suggests that it was only in the late 1960s that “media” became a stand-alone
word in Japan. Previously the term had always been coupled with the quali-
fier “mass,” as in “mass media,” and even then, the term appeared only in
the early 1950s. This coincides with the introduction of the term “mass com-
munications” (masu komyunikēshon) into Japan in the late 1940s and early
1950s by unesco, with the contraction masu komi and its variation masu
media popularized by journalists in 1954, just in time for the emergence of
the newest of mass media, television.11 The first use of the term “media” as
a stand-alone entity coincides, Tsuno suggests, with the 1960s McLuhan
boom in Japan. Confirming McLuhan’s key role in the reception of media
theory, Akihiro Kitada suggests that the term itself was most firmly estab-
lished in the Japanese language when a new 1987 translation of Understand-
ing Media rendered McLuhan’s famous work as Mediaron.12 Hence the very

term “media” and the concept of “media theory” (mediaron) are both firmly
associated with the reception of McLuhan.
A second reason for this chapter’s emphasis on the McLuhan boom is its
effects on adjacent fields, such as art history and architectural theory. Yuriko
Furuhata’s contribution in this volume notes his influence on architectural
discourse, but it also made inroads to the field of art criticism in Japan: it fea-
tured prominently in the writings of critics such as Hyuga Akiko and Tōno
Yoshiaki, among others, and the art journal Bijutsu Techō dedicated a special
issue to McLuhan’s work in January 1967, at the height of his popularity.
The third and perhaps most important reason for examining the Mc
Luhan boom is that it makes visible the central role Japanese television
broadcasters and ad agencies have played in the introduction and filtering of
theory in general. Ad agencies would later become hubs of critical theory—
particularly its French variety, from Baudrillard to Derrida to Deleuze and
Guattari—in the late 1970s through the 1990s. As Marilyn Ivy points out
in her seminal work on the consumption of theory in the b ubble era,
the poststructuralist emphasis on difference and play gelled well with the
principles of market segmentation and the production of identity-through-
consumption, inspiring ad practice in the 1980s in particular.13 At this time
ad agencies functioned as zones of contact between academics (Asada Akira
and Nakazawa Shin’ichi), independent and affiliated sociologists and critics
who wrote for marketing journals or ad agencies (Miyadai Shinji, Kayama
Rika, and Ōtsuka Eiji), and copywriters who circulated among critical theo-
rists (Itoi Shigesato and Fujioka Wakao).
The embrace of McLuhan in the late 1960s was an early instance of the
translation of theory into commercial practice, a translation that involved the
production of actionable theory that resulted in the transformation of existing
models of consumer society as well as the literal creation of television com-
mercials. Takemura congratulates himself for starting a trend whereby books
by “intellectuals” became best sellers in Japan, writing, “This [McLuhan
boom] was the first time an intellectual became a hot topic in the Japanese
publishing world. After that intellectual books like [Peter] Drucker’s works,
Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, and [Edwardo] de Bono’s Lateral Thinking [New
Think] became bestsellers or booms, but the start of all of this was McLuhan’s
World.”14 This narrative is clearly self-serving, and omits the earlier adoption
of other non-Japanese intellectuals before McLuhan, but it does contain a
kernel of truth: this was the first of a series of best sellers that walked the fine
line between futurology (miraigaku)—a discipline popular in Japan from
the early 1960s—management theory, and media studies.15 In this context

McLuhan’s thesis concerning the epochal shift from print-oriented, and
thereby linear “man” defined by a focus on a single sense organ (the eye), to a
sound-oriented, multisensory man defined by total field awareness provides
the explanatory framework for the success of ad campaigns. The Mustang
brand was popular, according to Takemura, because it acknowledged the
“birth of tactile man.”16 It also provides the basis for understanding changes
in production technique and product design: Takemura praises Honda for
understanding that they needed to cater to the “age of variety” and person-
alization, and personally takes credit for T oyota’s important shift to product
diversification and small-batch production.17 McLuhan’s work—as Take-
mura presents it—is a handbook for the creation of successful ad campaigns.
Nowhere was the impact of the practical McLuhan more strongly debated
than in the fields of television, advertising, and management theory. It is to
this reception that I now turn.
Two Pillars of the McLuhan Boom

The McLuhan boom in Japan was brief but intense: it began in late 1966,
and had all but died out by mid-1968.18 Takemura Ken’ichi, who takes credit
for this boom, was at the time a little-known media researcher and jack-of-
all-trades writer who had spent some time in the United States. By the early
1960s he was writing a column in Hōsō Asahi (Asahi broadcasting), a jour-
nal published by the television network and newspaper publisher Asahi. One
of these columns was rather fittingly titled “Buraunkan no kage ni,” or “In
the Shadow of the Television Screen.” Takemura remained in the shadows
of television until his debut as a McLuhan popularizer in the August 1966
edition of Hōsō Asahi. This introduction provoked a groundswell of interest
in the media theorist and his popularizer. According to Takemura’s meticu-
lous bibliographical accounts, by January 1968 at least eighty-one newspa-
per, magazine, and journal articles and eight books had been published on
McLuhan, the bulk of which w ere released in 1967.19 This gives a sense of the
magnitude of the McLuhanacy whirlwind sweeping through Japan in the
late 1960s.
Takemura’s introductory article and its institutional context are worth ex-
amining, since both shape what was to come. Hōsō Asahi was a widely circu-
lated pr journal published by the Osaka Asahi Broadcasting Corporation.20
The journal featured relatively highbrow debates around issues key to the
emergent information society discourse, and television culture in particular.
It was a mixture of an in-house research journal, a promotional magazine,

and a forum for debate among public intellectuals who worked in the field of
moving-image culture.21 It was also the launching pad for a group of future
studies scholars who would have a large impact on the conceptualization
of Expo ’70, as well as the development of information society discourse.
Indeed, prior to Takemura’s introduction to McLuhan, Hōsō Asahi had been
running a multiyear series of specials titled “Theory of Information Indus-
tries” led by Umesao Tadao and novelist Komatsu Sakyō, among others. It
was here that Umesao first coined the term “information industries” ( jōhō
sangyō) in 1961 in an article on the figure of the “broadcaster” (hōsōjin)—the
human component of the radio and television industries. It was also h ere
that he published his programmatic essay “A Theory of the Information In-
dustries” in January 1963, an article that launched the discourse on informa-
tion industries and information society in Japan.22 Hōsō Asahi followed up
on this by r unning numerous articles and hosting roundtables on the infor-
mation industries through 1963, and formalized the growing body of work
into an official series in its November 1964 issue, under the title “Towards
the Development of the ‘Theory of the Information Industries.’ ”
In August 1966, Takemura’s essay on McLuhan inaugurated a new series
titled “Eizō bunka ron,” or “Theories of Image Culture,”23 that followed closely
on the heels of the “Information Industries” series and included many of
its contributors in subsequent issues. Given McLuhan’s own debt to cyber-
netics and emerging accounts of postindustrial capitalism, it is appropriate
that he should be introduced following a series on the information indus-
tries, as Takemura himself remarks in his introductory article.24 Moreover,
Umesao treated the “communication industries” of television, radio, and so
on as information industries, and the editors of Hōsō Asahi followed him in
this equation. Hence theorizing the image would be seen as a natural exten-
sion of theorizing information industries.25
In fact, Takemura was not alone in introducing McLuhan in this issue of
Hōsō Asahi. There was another article by a certain Gotō Kazuhiko, who was
at the time a researcher affiliated with the Broadcasting Research Depart-
ment of nhk, the national public broadcaster in Japan.26 If Takemura rep-
resented one side of the McLuhan boom in Japan, then Gotō, his principal
detractor and occasional nemesis, was the other. Takemura was described as
a critic; his article for Hōsō Asahi was titled “Marshall McLuhan, the Prophet
of the Television Age” and was accompanied by the subtitle, “Introduction
to the Person.” Gotō’s contribution is the more academically titled “The Me-
dium Is the Message: Introduction to the Theory.” The difference between
these two inaugural articles sets up the two poles of McLuhan’s reception in

Japan: Takemura was the popularizer, Gotō the academic; Takemura went
for spirit and application, Gotō for fidelity and theory. Takemura’s McLuhan
was all personality, style, and performance, while Gotō’s McLuhan was a seri-
ous academic, the understanding of whose work required laborious reading.
The difference in institutional affiliation is also telling: Takemura was giv-
ing biweekly courses on McLuhanism at the planning division of the Ōsaka
office of Dentsū, the largest ad firm in Japan, u nder the title “McLuhan’s
Theory and Its Application for Broadcast Programming.”27 Gotō, as well as
working as a researcher on broadcasting in the government-funded nhk
research lab, wrote for leftist magazines as often as broadcasting journals.
Both were attracted to McLuhan as a communications theorist, but Gotō
claims to have first heard of the man as a graduate student in the United
States in the 1950s, well before the North American McLuhan craze (a friend
introduced him to McLuhan’s 1951 work The Mechanical Bride). Takemura
first encountered McLuhan’s work in 1966 when he visited New York City
and was introduced to the media theorist’s oeuvre by friends who worked on
Madison Avenue during the height of the McLuhan craze there.28 The dif-
ferences in their encounters with McLuhan are sharp, and profoundly shape
their readings of him.
Takemura was from the start firmly entrenched in the advertising world,
and this is the perspective from which he introduced McLuhan to Japan. In
fact, a Shūkan sankei article from September 1967 on the McLuhan boom
insinuates that Dentsū itself was the sponsor of this boom, and claims the
ad firm saw McLuhan as a means of snagging more advertising contracts.29
The article also claims that Dentsū funded Takemura’s trips to the United
States and Canada, where he would learn more about the McLuhan phe-
nomenon. Takemura’s version of the story is that he was working for the
US Department of Education as a Japanese-language consultant in Min-
neapolis from September 1967 to 1968, during which time he did indeed
contact McLuhan, arranging a meeting with him that formed both the
basis of a thirty-minute tv special broadcast on Mainichi television, and a
later book titled Makurūhan to no taiwa (Conversations with McLuhan).30
What makes the Shūkan sankei article interesting is how it voices the per-
ception that the McLuhan boom was manufactured by an ad firm. And
indeed this is not so far from the truth: Takemura acknowledges that it
was Dentsū’s Osaka office planning director, Irie Yūzō, who suggested that
he study McLuhan, based on Irie’s intuition that McLuhan would be big.31
Gotō himself also suggests that the McLuhan whirlwind was produced by
ad agencies.32

Several months after his Hōsō Asahi article, Takemura published his
1967 book Makurūhan no sekai (McLuhan’s world), a work of applied Mc
Luhanism that sold 200,000 copies, ten times more than the eventually
translated Understanding Media, making it up to eighth on the best-seller
list of 1967.33 McLuhan’s World was the Understanding Media for Japanese au-
diences. What marked Takemura’s work was its appeal to the general reader,
and its presentation of McLuhan as the prophet of the electronic age, best
read by business p eople, salaried workers, television industry heads, and
marketing executives. He subsequently published a number of other books,
all combining introductions to McLuhan with his own prophecies of things
to come. Takemura channeled a very specific McLuhan for Japanese readers:
McLuhan the business visionary, the adman, the prophet of media industries
and their transformations—and, perhaps most importantly, a McLuhan lo-
calized for the Japanese context, complete with references to Japanese popu
lar culture, ads, and politics, with predictions about the coming transfor-
mations of society and commerce thrown in to boot. McLuhan’s focus on
television as a tactile medium meshed with then current journalistic discus-
sions about tv kids as the “skin tribe”; television was presented as a “hap-
pening” medium, a conceptual link invented by Takemura (albeit loosely
based on McLuhan’s own interest in happenings) that influenced both tv
producers and advertising directors; Toyota came in for praise for properly
grasping the current age as one of variety, market segmentation, and post–
mass production, and so on.34
It is for this tendentious reading of McLuhan that Takemura’s work was
derided by scholars such as Ōmae Masaomi, Tōno Yoshiaki, and Gotō Ka-
zuhiko, who published their own articles and books on McLuhan. Gotō, as
we’ve already seen, was particularly active, publishing in ad journals, leftist
periodicals, and newspapers, as well as authoring books. For a time he was
everywhere, preaching a reasoned approach to McLuhan that was decisively
not the applied McLuhanism Takemura practiced. Yet Gotō’s work perhaps
unwittingly reads as defensive, written against what is clearly the dominant
Takemura-esque understanding of McLuhan as adman. Even his translation
of Understanding Media did not help rectify the dominant positioning of
McLuhan as a prophet of the information age. Takemura implicitly refer-
ences Gotō and these other writers, suggesting that they w ere at “the fore-
front of anti-McLuhanism” in Japan, in a 1968 letter to McLuhan (a letter that
also includes an apology for having “sensationalized” the media theorist’s
work, resulting in sales of “320,000 copies” of McLuhan’s World).35 It would,
however, be more accurate to say that they were anti-TakeMcLuhanism.

Gotō presented himself as the rational assessor of the merits and limita-
tions of McLuhan’s work. The dust jacket of the book Gotō, Tōno, and o thers
cowrote loudly proclaims that the book is “the first genuine introduction” to
McLuhan, a clear dig at Takemura’s earlier McLuhan’s World. In the conclu-
sion to his section of the book, Gotō remarks that he hopes the reader has
now come to a better understanding of McLuhan’s thinking and concepts.
His remarks encapsulate the divide between his camp and Takemura’s:
The reader will likely find their impression of McLuhan [as ex-
plained here] to be very different from the image of McLuhan that
has spread throughout our nation. The image of McLuhan that has
been spread here is that of an extremely applicable McLuhan. It is a
McLuhan that can be used like a prescription drug for management,
advertising, marketing and store window displays. It is true that even
in the US we can find this kind of reception h ere and t here. However,
if we were to think through McLuhan himself directly, t here is no way
one would arrive at this image.36
Against this “prescription drug” model of an applicable McLuhan who pro-

vides actionable theory and immediate results for the ad industries, Gotō’s
aim was to get to the real meat of the man’s thought, treating it as “objec-
tively” and academically as possible.37
Yet fight as Gotō would against this practical McLuhan that promises to
work like a prescription drug, it is precisely this latter variation of McLu-
hanism that most marks his reception in Japan. Takemura was lambasted by
Gotō and others who saw in him a snake charmer who distorted media the-
ory into advertising practice. Takemura unabashedly presents McLuhanism
as a “weapon for businessmen and admen” and argues for its usefulness in
management practice.38 Yet despite the common use of Takemura as an in-
tellectual punching bag, his influence cannot be underestimated—he truly
did shape the McLuhan boom in Japan. There is no better measure of the
effect of Takemura’s McLuhan than to look at the multitude of reviews, both
negative and positive, of McLuhan’s work. Ultimately many of the articles
within magazine special issues titled “Advertising and McLuhan” or “Com-
mercials and McLuhan” came to the same conclusion: the drug didn’t work
as promised. A common complaint about the way McLuhan was introduced
was that he promised an easy road to commercial application, a road that
was either false (Gotō et al.) or misleading (writers griping that McLuhan is
harder to read than initially expected, has l ittle immediate applicability, does
not talk all that much about advertising after all, etc.). This sentiment was

expressed in many of the specials on McLuhan and the advertising or man-
agement worlds at the time.39 Yet this very framing of McLuhan in terms
of functionality or applicability is an index of Takemura’s enduring influ-
ence, and a clear indication of the pervasiveness of this image of the media
theorist as marketing guru. TakeMcLuhanism framed the manner in which
McLuhan was understood in Japan, with McLuhan’s World displacing Un-
derstanding Media as the must-read text.40
In part this displacement is due to the physical absence of McLuhan him-
self; the author did not make an appearance in Japan during these years,
apart from a short tv program, despite appeals by Takemura and corpora-
tions for him to visit and stay in the country. The result of this displacement
was that Takemura became the target for any and all the criticism about
McLuhan as adman. Gotō, for his part, came off looking like the serious
academic. Takemura adopts the performative dimension of McLuhan, pres
ent in both his writings and his media presence in North America; and
Gotō takes up only the constative dimension of McLuhan, focusing solely
on what McLuhan objectively meant.41 In playing the performative to the
hilt (and instrumentalizing it in the process), Takemura a dopted the most
divisive elements of McLuhanism, thereby becoming the object of criticism
in McLuhan’s place. The end result is that he immunized McLuhan from the
outright denunciations we find in his Anglo-American reception.
Media Times, Media Institutions, Media Consulting

Let us take a moment to consider the issue of the performative translation of
theory in Takemura’s time and our own. For all of the fascination of seeing
McLuhan played to the hilt within the iconoclastic TakeMcLuhanist project, the
performativity of Takemura’s McLuhanism occasionally comes off as a bit
unidimensional. McLuhan’s performativity refers to his tendency to enact
his theory of media through language itself. Takemura tends to translate this
performativity into mere performance, a repetition of the gestures of McLu-
han. Nothing is more striking than Takemura’s easy way of denouncing nay-
sayers: he claims they are stuck in an earlier media age, and an old way of
thinking. This is vintage McLuhan as mannerism; anyone who d idn’t follow
McLuhan was easily dismissed as a “print person”—stuck in a linear mode
of thinking that just did not fit the new electric media era, with its focus on
integral thinking and total field awareness. Rational, step-by-step argumen-
tation was past its best-before date, a relic of a bygone era in which the lin-
earity of print dominated both thought and critical discourse. Takemura all

too readily adopts this dismissive attitude t oward critics. Total media change
is a useful tool for dismissing critics as being merely b ehind the new media
times.
Yet this very formalization of the gesture of media-determined dismissal
does raise a series of useful questions around the relation between media
technologies and media theory. Do new media conditions require new
modes of critique, that is to say, new forms or temporalities of criticism? Can
new media conditions produce new ways of thinking or writing about these
conditions? To what degree are theories of media affected—in content or in
form—by the media they describe? Do new media forms require new forms
of media theory? These questions reassert themselves at various moments in
media history. In recent years they reappeared in debates around whether
the “real time” temporality and heightened speed of Internet-enabled com-
munication required a new mode of criticism that would adopt the speed
and tactical strategies of the Internet and its users. Outlining the contours of
this debate, Wendy Chun notes that some argue that the “time of theory itself
needs to change,” with certain theorists such as McKenzie Wark and Geert
Lovink advocating a form of theory that would “take on the same temporality
or speed as digital media, refusing to stand outside their mode of dissemina-
tion.”42 Chun herself ultimately rejects this approach, arguing that “we need
to think beyond speed,”43 implicitly upholding a purist model of theory.
Jodi Dean similarly finds problem with what she sees as the immediacy of
electronic media, praising the slower temporality of print as an enabler for
thought. Dean sees the lag inherent in print as a positive form of slowdown
that contrasts with the libidinally driven immediacy of blog posting and re-
posting, which she describes as “react and forward, but d on’t by any means
think.” Dean hence finds something redemptive in the very temporality of
44
print, suggesting that “critical media theory is possible in book form. . . . The
book mobilizes the gap of mediacy so as to stimulate thought.”45 Internet-
fueled “react and forward” media networks do not create the mediacy neces-
sary for critical thought, but the book form in its slower temporality and its
medial gap does. If Dean discovers resistance to the affective dynamics of
the web in the inertial pull of print, Geert Lovink searches rather for a new
form of Internet criticism adequate to the age, interrogating existing terms
such as network, community, blog, friends, and link, as well as developing his
own conceptual paradigms such as network cultures.46 Where Lovink and
Dean agree is in the way in which they reflexively grapple with the problem
of how to write in an older medium (print) or in an older form (criticism)
under new media conditions.

This dilemma recalls McLuhan’s own transformation of writing u nder the
pressure of the televisual image and the new logic of culture he believed
it generated. McLuhan’s aphoristic, fragmented style was presumably not
merely a result of the influence of the modernist writers he admired; it was
an active, formal response to the electronic media conditions that saw frag-
mentation, reading across gaps, total field awareness, and so on emerge as
defining elements in a new media environment. McLuhan’s to some merely
unintelligible writing style and illogical mode of argumentation can be more
charitably read as the writer’s attempt to develop a style of writing and ar-
gumentation adequate to the new electric media era. Where McLuhan dif-
fers from Dean and Lovink is that he attempts to perform the media effects
within the print medium. This attempt later led him to collaborate with
Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, who took this principle to its logical conclu-
sion in their creation of what scholars Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels
have smartly called The Electric Information Age Book.47
Returning to the reception of McLuhan in Japan, we may ask: Did Take-
mura also innovate in print or prose in accordance with the pressures of the
electric (im)age? Do Takemura’s writings perform the new media conditions
in their form? Are Takemura’s works the appropriate form of response to
the televisual era, in a way that Gotō’s are not? While Takemura operates
far more in the spirit of McLuhan than does Gotō, he did not perform new
media in the fragmented manner of McLuhan. Takemura’s writing is easy in
a way that McLuhan’s is not; his slide t oward application is not an immedi-
ate consequence of media transformation per se but rather a consequence of
the commercial institution of corporate broadcasting and advertisers’ drive
toward sloganeering. Takemura may have understood McLuhan in his entire
body and performed a kind of McLuhanite media prophet in his writings
and in his subsequent c areer as a tv personality. However, his performance
of McLuhanism as prophesy-making for ad agencies stands as a reminder
that we need to examine the institutional conditions and economic auspices
under which media change happens. Under the right conditions, media
theory is channeled into media prophesy. Or, to use a slightly more modern
term for the latter, media consulting.
Examining the McLuhan boom in Japan, we can discern three conditions
for the channeling of media theory into consulting practice: the source ma-
terial (Marshall McLuhan), the institutional conditions (ad agencies’ need
for actionable knowledge), and the medium (Takemura Ken’ichi) who could
transform the first into a body of work fit for the second, and thereby pro-
duce TakeMcLuhanism.

Takemura’s performance of media theory registers a very real complic-
ity between his own style and McLuhan’s; it exposes the ease with which
the latter’s work slides from analysis to futurological prediction. McLuhan’s
aphoristic sound bites w ere easily translated into ad speak and management
theory; the fragmented abstraction of McLuhan’s high modernism as media
theory becomes the language of ad copy. This works in part because embed-
ded within both McLuhan and Understanding Media is a certain complic-
ity with the existing order. Consider McLuhan’s easy dismissal of the entire
critical tradition of Marxism, his tendency to write from the point of view
of the capitalist affirmation of novelty (not to mention the seemingly inexo-
rable march of the spirit of innovation), and a propensity to throw in free
advice for media masters and corporate heads with whom he seemed to iden-
tify in his writing. Consider too the stated goal of Understanding Media, to
“bring [media] into orderly service,” and his later, rather governmental vision
of using media to “program a reasonable and orderly future for any human
community.”48 Consider all of this, and it is no surprise that McLuhan was
sometimes seen as a prophet for a decidedly apolitical but business-oriented
elite.
On this count Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s rather unkind assessment of
McLuhan as “an author who admittedly lacks any analytical categories for
the understanding of social processes, but whose confused books serve as
a quarry of undigested observations for the media industry” nowhere rings
more true than in Japan.49 The abstraction of McLuhan’s style and the bina-
ries and ad-copy-ready catchphrases found therein are also what enabled his
work to be channeled through the person of Takemura. Takemura, in turn,
further filtered this writing through the existing needs of the advertising in-
dustry and management discourse, both of which necessitated the translation
of McLuhan into media practice or actionable theory. TakeMcLuhanism, that
is, highlights an aspect of McLuhan that must not be forgotten in the more
recent moves in Japan and elsewhere to reclaim him as a media theorist.
The figure of Takemura is also important as a reminder of the key role
media institutions play in the brokering and adoption of media theory, par-
ticularly but by no means exclusively in Japan. Theoretical activity can never
be divorced from its medial and institutional conditions, and Takemura’s
career as a McLuhanist both in print and on television reminds us of the
formative role ad agencies and broadcasters had in the generation of Japan’s
first McLuhan boom. W hether or not Dentsū created the McLuhan boom
or funded Takemura’s travels, it was Dentsū and the massive Asahi group
where the McLuhan whirlwind first touched down. Th ese institutions evince

a thirst for knowledge and managerial direction found first in McLuhan, and
later in the other bestselling foreign authors with whom Takemura puts his
own McLuhan’s World on a continuum: management guru Peter Drucker,
and futurologists and consultants Edward de Bono and Alvin Toffler.
Today, this role is increasingly played by a professional class known as
management consultants. Consultants hail from such globally operating
firms as the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey and Company—which
established offices in Japan in 1966 and 1971, respectively, just as the Japa
nese corporate model seemed to be eclipsing the American one.50 Consul
tants operate as agents of knowledge transfer. As Christopher McKenna ar-
gues, “Consultants acted as the transmitters—or as technological historian
Hugh Aitken called them, the ‘translators’—of managerial ideas developed
in other organizational settings.”51 Former McKinsey and Company Tokyo
office consultant Obara Kazuhiro describes consultants in similar terms, as
agents who transmit knowledge from other contexts—in Obara’s case mainly
what was g oing on in US companies during the 1990s—and who operate at a
faster pace than magazines or the popular press. Consultants’ reports have,
in his words, “a time machine-like value.”52
Takemura operated as a protoconsultant for Dentsū. Translator, time ma-
chine, and medium, Takemura provided actionable theory for the media in-
dustries, McLuhanism as prescription drug. As such he anticipated the effect
of consulting practice in years to come, as well as the continuing search on
the part of ad industries for new theories from which to learn new models
of practice. By the time the McLuhan whirlwind of the mid-to late 1960s
started to lose momentum, Takemura had parlayed his initial fame as a chan-
nel for the media theorist into a successful television c areer, even as he con-
tinued to write digestible sound bites about media for popular consumption.
Takemura may well have been the first television celebrity (tarento) whose
inspiration, spiritual guidance, and road to fame were born of a media theo-
rist. But he was certainly not the last. Takemura’s embodied performance
and translation of McLuhan anticipates later engagements with media by
theorists—such as Asada Akira, as is argued by Alexander Zahlten in this
volume—who deepen this performative mode of theory. TakeMcLuhanism
may have been a short-lived phenomenon, but its influence persists to this
day in the continuing dependency of ad agencies on the transformative
translation of media theory into commercial practice.
Beyond the particular situation of Japan, TakeMcLuhanism also provides
a useful lesson of the manner in which theory is always instrumentalized in
some manner, and is always already on a continuum with action, no m atter

the end, putting the sanctity of “Theory” in question. Academic practitioners
of the arcane art of Theory would likely identify with Gotō’s defense of an ob-
jective approach to McLuhan, neglecting thereby the economic, institutional,
and medial conditions of theory itself, and by the same token also delimiting
what can and cannot be inducted into the cannon of theoretical work. Take-
mura may be an extreme case of the rendering-actionable of theory. But he
is also much more than a symptom of a particular cultural milieu in which
theory is made actionable; his is, rather, an extreme case that makes legible
the actionability at the heart of theory everywhere. As such it is also a direc-
tive to expand the very bounds of what we call theory. A useful drug indeed.
notes
1. Gerald Emanuel Stearn, introduction to McLuhan: Hot and Cool, ed. Gerald
Emanuel Stearn (New York: Signet Books, 1967), xv.
2. Kadoyama Nobu,“Māketingu kihon genri ni arazu” [These are not the basic princi
ples of marketing] Kindai keiei [Modern management] (September 1967): 60.
3. Actionable theory is proposed as a variant on the military and business buzzword
“actionable intelligence.” The US military defines the latter term as “intelligence infor-
mation that is directly useful to customers for immediate exploitation without having
to go through the full intelligence production process.” “Department of Defense Dic-
tionary of Military and Associated Terms,” November 8, 2010 (amended February 15,
2016), http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf, 1. Actionable theory would
hence imply a theory that could be immediately implemented for (in this context) com-
mercial results. The actual economic value of theory interests me less here than the
perception of the theory as valuable, or actionable.
4. Ishikawa Hiroyoshi, “Bijinesuman dokusho hakusho” [White paper on the busi-
nessman’s reading], Eguzekutibu [Executive] (December 1967): 7.
5. Takemura Ken’ichi, Nijū shikō no ōyō to tenkai [The application and development
of twofold thought] (Tokyo: Daiwa Shobo, 1970), 30. Takemura emphasizes his feelings
of shared sensibility with McLuhan, and writes of using the latter’s mouth to speak his
thoughts. See Takemura Ken’ichi, Takemura Ken’ichi jisenshū: Makurūhan no sekai:
Gendai bunmei no taishitsu to sono miraizō [Takemura Ken’ichi’s self-selected works:
McLuhan’s world: The constitution of contemporary civilization and its f uture] (Tokyo:
Tokuma Shoten, 1980), originally published as Makurūhan no sekai: Gendai bunmei no
taishitsu to sono miraizō [McLuhan’s world: The constitution of contemporary civiliza-
tion and its future] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1967), 2.
6. Takemura Ken’ichi, Media no karuwazashi tachi: Makurūhan de yomitoku gendai
shakai [Media acrobats: Reading contemporary society through McLuhan] (Tokyo: Bi-
jinesu Sha, 2002), 7; italics mine.
7. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the important work of Gary
Genosko on the reception of McLuhan in France as a precursor and inspiration to the

work done here. Among his opening remarks to his McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters
of Implosion, is the following statement: “Further work needs to [be] done on his influ-
ence in Japan, for instance, with special attention given to the debates over the relevance
of the ‘cult of McLuhanism’ in the Tokyo press recounted to McLuhan in unpublished
correspondence with Kenichi Takemura.” It is precisely this suggestion that forms the
starting point for this article, as well as a similar, verbal suggestion by Ueno Toshiya
that Takemura is a key figure in both McLuhanite theory and advertising practice in
the 1960s. See Gary Genosko, McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion (London:
Routledge, 1999), 1. Thanks go to both Genosko and Ueno for their encouragement to
pursue this line of research.
8. Here I use Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin’s translation of the term
tarento. Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction: The Mirror of Idols and Celebrity,” in Idols
and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture, ed. Galbraith and Karlin (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 6.
9. Takemura acknowledges his advocacy for mōretsu in several places, among them
a dialogue in which he describes himself (if self-mockingly) as the “ancestor” of the
popular catch term mōretsu. See Takemura Ken’ichi, “Ima wadai no tv komāsharu wo
saiten suru” [Rating the most talked about current tv commercials], in CM Gurafiti, Ter-
ebi 25nen no kiroku, ed. Yamamoto Kōji (Tokyo: Sebundō Shinkōsha, 1970), 2:24. Fujioka
Wakao, one of the most important copywriters of the 1970s, similarly credits Takemura
with being “the trendsetter for the mōretsu boom” and the man who “fanned the flames
of the mōretsu boom in magazines like Shūkan Posuto and Shūkan Genzai.” See Fujioka
Wakao, Mōretsu kara biutifuru e [From intense to beautiful], vol. 2 of Fujioka Wakao zen
purodūsu [Fujioka Wakao’s complete production] (Tokyo: php, 1988), 29. Takemura first
introduced the keyword mōretsu in his 1967 book on American entrepreneurs such as
Hugh Hefner titled Gonin no mōretsu na Amerikajin [Five intense Americans] (Tokyo:
Kodansha, 1967).
10. Dennitza Gabrakova has recently, albeit in a different context, noted the ambigu-
ity of the suffix ron: “Now, the Japanese suffix ron . . . requires an attention and indeed
a theory of its own. Ron is an expression that is relatively easily attached to common
and personal names and could mean anything from an opinion to a view to a doctrine.”
See Dennitza Gabrakova, “Archipelagic Thought and Theory’s Other: Traveling Theory
in Japan,” positions 22, no. 2 (spring 2014): 473–74. Hence mediaron could as readily
be translated as “on media” as “media theory.” It is this ambiguity that this volume on
media theory in Japan investigates—writings around media, about media and theories
of media. McLuhan’s work is alternatively framed as mediaron and media riron, the lat-
ter being unambiguously “media theory,” the former being—more in keeping with the
problematic of this volume—“theory of media” or, perhaps more simply, “writing on
media.”
11. Saitō Ryōsuke suggests that the term masu komi was first introduced in 1951. Saitō
Ryōsuke, Omocha hakubutsushi [A natural history of toys] (Tokyo: Sōjinsha, 1989),
160–61.
12. Kitada Akihiro, “Imi” e no aragai: Mediētion no bunka seijigaku [An assault on
“meaning”: The cultural politics of mediation] (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 2004), 7.

13. Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in
Postmodern Japan,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Haroo-
tunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 21–46; and Ivy, Discourses of the
Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
14. Takemura, Makurūhan no sekai, 14.
15. On Japanese futurology or future studies, see William O. Gardner, “The 1970
Osaka Expo and/as Science Fiction,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society (Decem-
ber 2011): 26–43.
16. Takemura, Makurūhan no sekai, 100.
17. Takemura Ken’ichi, Makurūhan no riron no tenkai to ōyō [The development and
application of McLuhan’s theory] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1967), 97, 115–7; on T oyota, see the
1980 discussion in the republished edition of Makurūhan no sekai, 24.
18. The adjectives used most often to describe this phenomenon are McLuhan
“boom” (būmu) and “whirlwind” (senpū).
19. Takemura Ken’ichi, Makurūhan to no taiwa: Nihon bunka to Makurūhannizumu
[Conversations with McLuhan: McLuhanism and Japanese culture] (Tokyo: Kodansha,
1968), 212–22.
20. Gardner, “1970 Osaka Expo,” 29.
21. In a retrospective glance at the era, Gotō Kazuhiko introduces Hōsō Asahi as an
Asahi pr journal from Osaka. See Gotō Kazuhiko, “Makurūhan to Nihon no media”
[McLuhan and the Japanese media] Chishiki (April 1981): 190. Umesao Tadao, one of
its most significant contributors, describes Hōsō Asahi as a pr magazine created by the
recently established Asahi Hōsō company, but one that featured dense quality content
and “the vision of a high quality magazine.” See Umesao Tadao, Jōhō no bunmeigaku [A
civilization study of information] (Tokyo: Chūō Bunko, 1999), 16.
22. The latter essay was subsequently republished in Chūō Kōron in March 1963, and
both essays are collected in Umesao, Jōhō no bunmeigaku, 37–63.
23. While the shift from “information industries” to “theories of image cultures” had
already been planned, Takemura claims credit for suggesting the special on McLuhan,
having mentioned the recent Life magazine special on the media theorist to the editor
of Hōsō Asahi, Igarashi Michiko, who asked him to write his introductory article on
McLuhan. Takemura, Makurūhan no sekai, 239. For an overview of and intervention into
debates around the eizō, see Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde
Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
24. Takemura Ken’ichi, “Terebi jidai no yogensha M. Makkurūhan: Jinbutsu shōkai”
[M. McLuhan, the prophet of the television age: An introduction to his personality], in
Makurūhan: Tanjō 100nen media (ron) no kanōsei wo tou (Tokyo: Kawade, 2011), 160.
25. See the “Kaisetsu” in the second installment of the special section “Towards the De-
velopment of a Theory of the Information Industries,” Hōsō Asahi (December 1964): 10.
26. By 1967 he is described as the section chief of the nhk General Broadcasting
Research Center, Broadcasting Research Department. See his biography in Masaomi
Ōmae, Makurūhan: Sono hito to riron [McLuhan: The man and his theories] (Tokyo:
Daikosha, 1967), 282.
27. Takemura, Makurūhan no sekai, 23, 240.

28. Takemura, “Terebi jidai no yogensha,” 161.
29. “Mōi no Makurūhan senpū” [The raging McLuhan whirlwind], Shūkan sankei 16,
no. 40 (September 1967): 98.
30. Takemura discusses arranging this meeting in Media no karuwazashi tachi,
82–85; he discusses the Mainichi tv program in a letter to McLuhan dated May 24,
1971, held in the National Archives of Canada, mp 38/30. Takemura wrote and pub-
lished Makurūhan to no taiwa: Nihon bunka to Makurūhanizumu [Conversations with
McLuhan: McLuhanism and Japanese culture] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1968) while in Min-
neapolis, subsequent to meeting with McLuhan at the beginning of November 1967.
31. Takemura Ken’ichi, “Uchū wo nomu hitotsu me” [One eye that swallows the uni-
verse], Hōsō Asahi (June 1967): 9.
32. Gotō Kazuhiko, “Makurūhan no unda gensō” [The illusion produced by
McLuhan], Asahi jyānaru 9, no. 42 (October 8, 1967): 19.
33. Media Rebyū, ed., Za messeeji: McLuhan ikō no media kankyō (Tokyo: Heibon
Sha, 1982), 56.
34. Takemura discusses the “skin tribe” in Makurūhan no sekai, 73; television as a
happening media is found in Makurūhan no sekai, 182; and his praise of Toyota and
Honda are most developed in Makurūhan no riron no tenkai to ōyō, 97, 115.
35. Letter to McLuhan dated January 9, 1968, held in the National Archives of Can-
ada, mp 38/30.
36. Ōmae, Makurūhan, 72.
37. Ōmae, Makurūhan, 11. Takemura’s response to the call for an objective reading of
McLuhan came soon a fter: if read objectively—and as typographic people—McLuhanism
would die. See Makurūhan no riron, 3. This restages the all-too-familiar back and forth
between those who would embrace the spirit of McLuhan and t hose who would hold
the author and his supporters accountable for their words.
38. Takemura, Makurūhan no riron, 248.
39. Such specials include marketing journal Brain’s “Makurūhanizumu to kōkoku”
[McLuhanism and advertising], special issue, 42, no. 10 (October 1967); management
journal Kindai keiei’s special McLuhan issue (September 1967); and Dentsū’s ad journal
Māketingu to kōkoku’s special McLuhan issue (October 1967).
40. The significance of the very frame of understanding of McLuhan—in terms of
use for marketing—and Takemura’s influence on it is suggested by Ishikara Hiroyoshi
(who considers this framing a misunderstanding), within the “McLuhanism and Ad-
vertising” special issue of Brain 42, no. 10 (October 1967): 35.
41. Here I draw on a very useful distinction Kadobayashi Takeshi makes within
McLuhan’s own work. See Whatcha Doin, Marshall McLuhan? An Aesthetics of Media
(Tokyo: ntt Shuppan, 2009), 24–25.
42. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or The F uture Is a Memory,”
in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo
and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 186–87.
43. W. Chun, “Enduring Ephemeral,” 187.
44. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cam-
bridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), 3.

45. Dean, Blog Theory, 3.
46. Geert Lovink, Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2011), 69–70.
47. Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels describe this McLuhan/Agel/Fiore col-
laboration on The Medium Is the Message and The Global Village in their brilliant The
Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).
48. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964), 6; McLuhan, “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,”
in Marshall McLuhan Unbound, ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon (Corte
Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 2005), 19.
49. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” in The New
Media Reader, ed. Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge, MA: mit Press,
2003), 271.
50. Christopher D. McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting
in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 189.
51. McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 53. McKenna (277n11) describes the concept
of translators within Aitken’s work as “those individuals who transfer a critical piece of
information from one network to another,” referring the reader to Hugh G. J. Aitken, The
Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900–1932 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton,
1985).
52. Obara Kazuhiro, IT bijinesu no genri [The principles of IT business] (Tokyo: nhk
Shuppan, 2014), 26.

6 . T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R I E S A N D
M E D I A T H E O R Y I N J A PA N
m i rya m s as
Transnational, Media, Theory

The term “transnational” has gained broad currency in film and media stud-
ies since the late 1980s as a way of tracking an intermediate scale of analysis—
neither “local” or “national” nor “world/global.” Some have argued persua-
sively that the theories of the transnational arising out of Miriam Hansen’s
writings on vernacular modernism tend to underplay the unequal power
relations that condition transnational relations and can lead to an elision
of the specificity of local contexts; nonetheless, she articulated a useful as-
pect of that transnational scale in which the “local” is inherently imbricated
with various world systems.1 The editors of a recent volume on transnational
cinemas similarly argue that the transnational, b ecause it “operates ‘above
the level of the national’ but below the level of the global,” can represent an
emergent mode of analysis, one that “acknowledges the persistent agency of
the state” and yet takes into account unevenness, mobility, and shifting so-
cial relations.2 Transnational, they claim, replaced “international” in critical
discourse where the prefix “inter-” seemed to imply parity, and “global”
pressed toward a picture of increasing homogenization. In such an open
and mobile vein, then, this essay aims to analyze a key moment within a
broader shift in leftist discourses that we might say was mediated at such a
“transnational” scale—understanding locally embedded articulations (already
replete with intertextuality) alongside this broader network of (unequal)
relationships.3
If globalization, for many critics, marked a direction of homogenization
and an infrastructurally conditioned reduction of specificity/difference, the
well-known fūkeiron (landscape theory) discourse developed in Japan was a
trenchant critique of this overriding vector toward flatness and uniformity
and a careful analysis of infrastructural manifestations of power. The critics
around fūkeiron were important media theorists who played a crucial role
in the 1970s culture industry debates that are the subject of this essay. Mat-
suda Masao, born in 1933, was a key theorist of fūkeiron, a set of discourses
that emerged out of and in conjunction with the work of filmmakers such
as Adachi Masao and Ōshima Nagisa,4 as well as in the essays and photo-
graphic practices of Nakahira Takuma. The work of Matsuda and Nakahira
around 1970 form part of a web of leftist thought and artistic work that en-
compassed the pioneering, provocative theories of Tsumura Takashi, known
for his work on (internalized) discrimination, and critic Taki Kōji, who was
a member of the groundbreaking photography collective that founded the
photo journal Provoke. These thinkers can be understood as part of a much
wider network of leftist artists/intellectuals who first participated in the late
1960s protest movements and, at the moment that such protests were seen to
be “over,” catalyzed the shifting modes of critique in the early 1970s. Deeply
engaged with the new theorizations of the “third world” and emergent post-
colonial thought, they were part of a historic critical shift in strategies and
tactics of the Left in the wake of the perceived failure of the violent con-
frontations of the protest movements. Each in his own way was engaged at a
deep level in a form of activism and media practice (art, organizing, photog-
raphy, filmmaking) that informed and responded to the pressing theoretical
articulations of the day; each held a profound commitment to the question
of the relation between language (critical writing, theory) and other forms
of making or acting in the sphere of “media.”5
Suga Hidemi describes the situation in Japan around 1970, when the
strategies of protest were seen to have failed, in the following terms:
Prior to [1970], Japan’s “1968” movement was caught up in a kind of

“resolution-ism” [determinism, ketsudan-shugi: wanting to escalate
violence to achieve a decisive result]. With the “defeat” of January 18–
19, 1969 at Tokyo University’s Yasuda Auditorium,6 the New Leftists
were driven into a corner, realizing that t here was nothing more that
could be done with staves, thrown rocks, and fire bottles. In such a
[152] miryam sas

context, there began to be talk in the Bund [Communist Party alli-
ance, established in 1958 among New Left groups] about the establish-
ment of an “army,” and the Red Army came on the scene. . . . Each
party began escalating their armed fights on the streets. There were
already visions of fights with bombs as well. This impetus, today, is
critically reflected on as a [problematic] “weaponism” (唯武器主義)
that dreams about revolution by means of escalated armament.7
Many leftists both in Japan and internationally argued that the struggle had
to be pushed further in the direction of radical violence. O thers felt that the
struggle should be shifted to a more symbolic level, fought more in terms of
cultural values and discursive power structures, with particular focus on im-
migration control, discrimination, and minority issues. A crucial intertext
for these articulations was Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli’s Art of War.
Following Machiavelli,8 Gramsci outlined an opposition between a “war of
maneuver” (kidōsen in Japanese, a mobile war)—the war of “staves, thrown
rocks, and fire b ottles” mentioned above, or of even more explosive arms—
and a “war of position” ( jinchisen, a positional war, war of encampment) or
“protracted war” ( jikyūsen, a contest of endurance) to be fought on the ter-
rain of culture, thought, law, and power.
My argument maps how, along with these shifting strategies, new critical
understandings emerge of both “media” and “theory,” in their relation and
nonrelation, as depicted by practitioners who had a deep stake in both terms.
These thinkers’ work reflects a highly dense notion of the relation between
theory and practice, an investment that conditions their writings on media
and theory. They ask: Is “media” always already complicit with capital? How
can theory “mobilize”? In ways that partially parallel Baudrillard in his “Re-
quiem for the Media” (1971), t hese critics in 1973 Japan called for a deep decon-
struction of the systems and structures of media as currently constituted, and
in the process a rethinking and restructuring of theory as a critical act as well.
Media Theory, Culture Industries, and the Enzensberger Moment

Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929–) was (and is) a prominent media theorist,
part of a network of leftist intellectuals in Europe that includes Jürgen Haber-
mas (also born in 1929), following in the lineage of Walter Benjamin, Herbert
Marcuse, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and to some extent Georg Lukács
and Bertolt Brecht, among others. Enzensberger’s “Constituents of a Theory
of Media” made a splash when it was published in Japanese in August 1971 in
The Culture Industries in Japan [153]

Bungei journal.9 Media theorists and artists gathered in force when the Ger-
man Cultural Center and the publisher Film-Art Company (Firumu-āto-sha)
invited him to appear in a two-day symposium at Asahi Hall in Tokyo on
January 22–23, 1973. It was an event filled with promise: two days of conversa-
tion bringing together the most prominent artists and critics of the day.
The leading filmmaker Kawanaka Nobuhiro, known for spearheading the
“personal film” movement, staged the event as a producer, using monitors
in two lines that extended out through the rows of seats of the auditorium
so that it was reflexively “mediated/mediatized” in its very moment of oc-
currence.10 On the first day, the symposium included Tōno Yoshiaki, one of
the “Big Three” art critics of the day who also wrote critical essays on tele
vision and had done his own closed-circuit television performances; Ter-
ayama Shūji, the theater director, filmmaker, and writer who was also active
in radio and television; Sasaki Mamoru, the tv/radio/film scenario writer
and editor of Kiroku eiga (Documentary film), producer, and activist; the ar-
chitect Hara Hiroshi; and, as moderator, the television producer, writer, and
activist Konno Tsutomu, who founded the first independent tv production
company (terebiman yunion). On the second day, the symposium featured
the art critic Hariu Ichirō, another of the “Big Three”; the photographer/
theorist Nakahira Takuma; and the radical Left critic Tsumura Takashi. In
various publications, a flurry of reflections and responses, reactions and—as
we shall see—passionate rejections ensued.
Why was it necessary to rethink media and its relation to capitalism at
this particular moment? Or one might ask why invite Enzensberger—clearly
a media star in his own right—to stand at the center of this Japanese debate?
Enzensberger and many other American and European theorists had been
read and translated extensively throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and
in the end the Japanese theorists would both draw on and push against the
model he provided. Enzensberger’s essay is by no means univocal in its op-
timism, but his essay is usually cited for its “linking of media critique with
a systematic plan for alternative production, together placed in the service
of cultural empowerment.”11 Indeed, the essay functions—among its many
caveats and reservations—as a “call to arms” for alternative modes of produc-
tion, as his closing sentence signals. In the process of “bringing the liberating
factors in the media . . . to fruition,” Enzensberger closes, the author/artist
must “work as an agent of the masses. He can lose himself in them only
when they themselves become authors, the authors of history.”12
Enzensberger himself articulated one of the most persuasive summaries
of the contradictions involved in such a process and the many false forms of
[154] miryam sas

“feedback”—meaningless or empty participation—that can be constructed
in the media, he ultimately lands on an argument for an inherent power and
potentiality of the media as a participatory and mobilizing force. Such an ar-
gument, J. T. Caldwell rightly notes, “prefigures digi-speak.” In the end, both
Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard in his famous retort to Enzensberger,
“Requiem for the Media,” agree that the media need a fundamental destruc-
turing and reorganization in order to realize whatever potentiality they may
have.13 Both agree that there are many false directions and impasses. Yet the
emphasis of Baudrillard in his retort to Enzensberger is part of a deeper
doubt about the way the superstructure (within which we find semiosis, dis-
course, representation) should be understood in relation to infrastructure
(base, economic production)—a strong critique of the Marxist tendency to
read both as responding to the same dialectical progression. Baudrillard ac-
cuses Marxists of homogenizing: thinking infrastructure and superstructure
as if they were part of the same substance that could be thought in the same
forms. He claims that, for now, the “dialectic lies in ashes,” and “it is neces-
sary to toll the requiem of the infra-and super-structure.”14
It is worth considering this Enzensberger-Baudrillard debate h ere in some
detail as part of the backdrop for a wider—transnational—scale of leftist
discourse in which Matsuda most strikingly but also Taki, Nakahira, and
Tsumura Takashi are key participants. If our critical viewpoint excludes
these contributions, we miss a highly nuanced and center-shifting (or de-
centering) piece of the story, and the opportunity to understand this mobile
and antihomogenizing critique in a manner that itself performs a movement
against the flattening of perception and debate.
Today, when we read Enzensberger’s “Constituents of a Theory of Media,”
it is striking how many aspects of his writing still resonate for contemporary
discussions of electronic media. We may note the very speed of circulation
of t hese theoretical works, along with the speed and ease of circulation of per-
sons (with the rise of affordable airline tickets), as well as the powerful ex-
tensiveness of what Enzensberger was calling “new media” in 1970. Among
the prior twenty years of “new media” he referred to in 1970, he included
news satellites, color television, cable relay television, videotape recorders,
videophones, stereophony, laser techniques, electrostatic reproduction pro
cesses (copy machines), electronic high-speed printing, time-sharing com-
puters, and data banks.15 The issue of telephone tapping that he discusses
and the impossibility of monitoring all phone lines (which he claims is un-
feasible b ecause it would require a monitoring system larger than the entire
telephone network) resonate with today’s questions around corporate use of

search result algorithms and the monitoring of email (Matsuda, like Bau-
drillard, points out that sampling can work wonders: as Matsuda says, “my
phone is tapped”). Enzensberger’s analysis of the situation of media and em-
powerment draws on Fanon, Lefebvre, Benjamin, Lissitzky, and Adorno—
all of whom were available to Japanese media theorists to differing degrees
in translation or through citation by other Japanese media theorists—and
also includes critiques of Lukács and a trenchant dismissal especially of
McLuhan, the latter having just a few years earlier enjoyed g reat influence in
Japanese art-critical circles.16
The affective dimension of this encounter, brought on by the layers of
identification and (mirroring) investment in the figure of Enzensberger, turned
out to be a telling component of the dialogue with Japanese media critics.
Enzensberger himself famously characterized the symposium during day
one as “four pessimists and one optimist.” Nagai Kiyohiko attempted to ex-
plain this by pointing out differences in the situation of West Germany and
Japan: “In general, the very fact that Enzensberger, a ‘dangerous person’ with
revolution on his lips, can be sent into Japan by a public institution/organ
ization from West Germany, eloquently expresses the difference from the
current situation in Japan.”17 Nagai argues that the overall positive support
of work such as Enzensberger’s by tv and radio—some of it was sponsored
by state-owned West German television, for example, though it was also
restricted from some print media—might have contributed to his alleged
optimism about these media. By contrast, within the symposium, Nakahira
refers to the anti-n hk war and affirms the need to destroy rather than re-
form the bureaucratic media structure.18
Enzensberger’s theoretical writings relentlessly look for spaces of what he
calls “leakiness”—the “leaky nexus of the media”—and yet he also advocates
“utilizing” the contradictions within media while remaining aware of the
propensity for absorption of contradictory opinions within the liberal/re-
formist frame. In “Constituents for a Theory of Media,” his “optimism” con-
sists especially in a critique of the leftist sense of impotence and the oversim-
plifying oppositional logic that views the media as pure manipulation of the
masses, a view he links to the 1960s New Left.
Matsuda’s Critique: A New Axis for Media Theory

Matsuda opens his Bijutsu Techō article of May 1973 in full (negative) criti-
cal mode. He compares Enzensberger’s statement that “television, like the
telephone before it, should come to be used effectively, free of the ‘oppres-
[156] miryam sas

sive uses of media’ ” with Kropotkin’s writing in The Conquest of Bread that
the railroad network was an example of a “free agreement” that foreshad-
owed the dying away of the state.19 Matsuda explains the sleight of hand
that allows Enzensberger to misperceive tv as mobility and therefore po-
tential freedom: “The first concrete example that Kropotkin raised of his free
agreement was none other than the railroad network. In other words (not to
sound too much like Tsumura Takashi, but) e very problem of power must
actually begin with a problem of communication.”20 Enzensberger accounts
for many of the possible counterarguments to his t heses in his own writings,
and does so compellingly. Matsuda thus mobilizes the critic’s own language
to attack his “unbearable” optimism, citing Enzensberger’s The Consciousness
Industry to diagnose such thinking as a form of false consciousness: “What is
abolished,” writes Enzensberger/Matsuda, “is therefore not exploitation but
the consciousness of exploitation. . . . I should declare that precisely on
account of the existence of the ‘free agreement,’ the cunning [kōchi] of
history has enabled the state to maintain its full force”; Matsuda, “Media
kakumei,” 53–54.
Matsuda thus criticizes the panelists and Enzensberger, not for their pur-
suit of incommensurability, or the delving into chaos at its deepest level (as
Kobayashi Hideo might put it), but for the fact that they establish and end
up standing too much on common ground, Enzensberger and Sasaki resem-
bling each other, Matsuda says, “like two acorns.” Both hold e ither absolute
or relativized oppositions between a “we” and a “they,” “our media” and “their
media.” The commonality establishes the use of binary oppositional axes—they/
we or theirs/mine (‘yatsura’ to ‘ore’) or in other cases plays itself out in a dichot-
omy between idealist/conceptualist (Terayama) versus realist (Enzensberger).
Matsuda argues that it is necessary to shift the ground from such a series
of binary oppositions, framed in the symposium around the issue of “access,”
to another directionality or vector (“axis”):
Today, what media theory needs is to rotate fundamentally what ap-

pears as an existing given, the axis between “them” and “us” or of “them”
and “me” [ore]. Instead of debates about access [akusesu], what is needed
is to reset the axis [akushisu] itself. . . . [To say it in Enzensberger’s
words,] “It would be impossible without the self-organization (institu-
tionalization) of the participants. This is itself the political crux of the
problem of media.” Exactly so: the axis for media revolution should be
set in a direction, to speak metaphorically, where the question is by
what circuits (paths) the lonely “I” [ore] before the television set will

organize himself toward a “we,” and only in this direction. (Matsuda,
“Media kakumei,” 56)
ere Matsuda once again speaks alongside Enzensberger. His citational per
H
formance takes on without mirroring Enzensberger’s meaning, or takes it
farther, in a sense performing the redirecting axis shift that he is advocat-
ing: he reorganizes an altered collectivizing theoretical mode that figures a
version of the lonely “I” redirecting itself t oward a “we.” Matsuda effectively
asks: How can discourses—say, media theory—themselves dependent on
the media for circulation, catalyze a reorganization of the relation of the
individual to media? Through what forms of movement can the individual
pass (circulate, circuit) in order to be organized as part of a collective of
some kind, and what kind of collectivity?
Matsuda’s statement about this shift in relation is highly striking b
ecause
issues of communication or commensurability, and of comparability or cor-
respondence, are themselves key problems for Marxist media theory as a
whole, where at stake is precisely the relation that should obtain between the
“vanguard” thinkers and the “masses,” as well as between thought and move-
ment. In Matsuda’s own past essays, he had written in terms of a “spontane-
ous harmony” between intellectuals and the masses, a kind of unmediated
direct access, but in this essay he criticizes his own earlier position—and
here he shows the ore (I) itself as multiply constituted over time by its own
language and transmission, such that the issue of the external network has to
relate also to an “internal network” discussed by some symposium panelists,
especially Terayama and Nakahira.21
Matsuda realizes that he had depended on an idea of one unconscious or
subconscious directly and instantly connecting to (another)—a kind of “cor-
respondence replacing communication” (as Léopold Sédar Senghor had put
it), kōkan (empathy) instead of dentatsu (transmission).22 Here again he uses
furigana for corespandansu (correspondence, or, more deeply, the Baudelair-
ian correspondances) to double the physical feeling, the affective experience
of kōkan, empathy showing correspondence as an affective mode, to replace
the more media-based transmission of information=dentatsu as communi-
cation, but at that time he had still been within a frame of binary thinking,
what he calls the “demon of dichotomy” (nibunhō no oni). Like Baudrillard,
Matsuda had earlier framed the communication model of dentatsu, the
transmission of a message from producer to receiver, as a model that needed
to be transcended and ruptured in order to give way to a more direct, un-
[158] miryam sas

mediated relation. However, here repudiating his Senghorian framework (as
many came to do), he instead articulates a new and alternative view of mo-
bility and mobilization, and of gestures, one by which he reframes the whole
question of media theory, saying, “The only thing that could organize the
frenzied heat of the overwhelming majority of the ‘masses’ was the media/
mediation of the unconscious power that spurted out ( funshutsu) all at once
(instantaneously) from within the ‘masses’, in other words, ‘what was not
words/language’ ” (Matsuda, “Media kakumei,” 59).
Matsuda’s writing in this moment thus traces a shift between “media”
and “mediation” (baitai, 媒体), where the word baitai has the katakana
furigana reading “media” filled in. Media here is seen not as something ex-
ternal but as something that has a bodily quality, something like blood, that
spurts out all in an instant not from an individual body but from a collective,
“the masses,” not in the form of language but in the form of an unconscious
power that has the capacity precisely to organize passion, affect, and frenzied
heat into a soshiki (an institution, formation, or organization). In this for-
mulation, media is not itself the system or organization, but media is the
mediating force that has the power to organize the unconscious power of
the masses. The member of the masses, “only by performing revolution in
this way, was able to transform himself into one of the innumerable name-
less p
eople who slashed open history, so that he could mobilize [dōin] him-
self in the true sense of the word, like a dancer, a football player, a gue-
rilla . . . ” (Matsuda, “Media kakumei,” 59).23 It is in this way that Matsuda
argues for directing the vector (or axis) of media theory toward the ques-
tion of how the individual comes to relate to the broader organization, and
how the person can “mobilize himself ” not via language but via a corporeal
movement (in some sense beyond consciousness or language). At the same
time, he inhabits Enzensberger’s language of mobility, moves within En-
zensberger’s theory and redirects it toward this spurting, this tearing, this
organization of affect, the mobilization of an organization that emerges in
an instant, the “media”/mediation of the power of the masses’ emergent
unconscious.
Matsuda then concludes, “The Kropotkian inversion (tentō/overturn-
ing) extends far beyond the ‘symposium with Enzensberger’ to cover (con-
ceal / hang over) not only the theory of violence but also the entire sphere of
the theory of media” (Matsuda, “Media kakumei,” 60). Theory of violence, the-
ory of media: for Matsuda, t hese w hole realms contain the problem he had
named with Kropotkin—the sense of a “freedom” or “free will” that conceals

an infrastructural network underlying and conditioning them. The uncon-
scious gesture and the affective mood become crucial pathways and poten-
tialities within Matsuda’s concluding call to continue to “dig ever deeper”
(into what he ironically calls the “unconsciousness industry”).
Paradigm Shift of the New Left

To more fully understand the significance of Matsuda’s intervention in cul-
tural media theory, it is worth taking a moment to understand the ideas of
voice/parole and the complex assertions about mediation made by other theo-
rists at the time. In the postscript to the republication in 2012 of the writings
of prominent leftist critic Tsumura Takashi, Suga Hidemi suggestively situates
Tsumura as perhaps the pivotal player in the “paradigm shift of the new left” in
the late 1960s to early 1970s discussed above. Tsumura, who in the early 1980s
abandoned this form of political writing to launch a c areer as a new age qigong
practitioner and writer about Asian health practices, had been a prolific critic
and journalist on topics including antinuclear power theory, ecology, “third
world” issues, and urban space. He was known as an activist protest organizer
around immigration issues and Koreans and Chinese living in Japan, and his
“discrimination theory” (sabetsuron) made him a central player in the impor
tant Kaseitō Kokuhatsu incident.
At a meeting commemorating the thirty-third anniversary of the Marco
Polo Bridge (Rokōkyō) incident known as a trigger for the launch of the Sino-
Japanese War, on July 7, 1970, a group known as the “Overseas Chinese Youth
Strike Committee” (Kaseitō Kokuhatsu) accused Japanese new leftists of har-
boring nationalism/narcissism in their thought and policies. The group was
protesting Japan’s immigration control policy; Suga argues that this episode,
in which Tsumura’s writings on discrimination played a key role, “can easily be
considered one of the most important events in postwar ideology.” “To date,”
Suga writes, “we are not able to f ree ourselves completely from the paradigm
which this event created.”24
Far ahead of the cultural studies and postcolonialism debates, Tsumura
(along with Matsuda, Taki, and Nakahira) gave us a piercing analysis of the
intersecting constructs of race, class, and (to a lesser extent) gender. Suga con-
tends that Tsumura’s arguments have a concreteness and practicality often
missing in what Suga sees as the “politically correct” consensus of some later
versions of postcolonial critique, cultural studies, and feminist thought as
received in Japan’s academic world.25 In the more subtle “war of positions”
that emerged at this time, struggles turned to questions of buraku (social mi-
[160] miryam sas

norities traditionally considered as outcasts), feminism, race, immigration,
nuclear power, rural residents’ struggles, and the “minorities as a potential
subject of revolution.”26
Photographer Nakahira Takuma in the late 1960s to early 1970s wrote tren-
chant leftist theoretical critiques—part of the discursive “war of positions”—
while pursuing a correspondingly innovative and rigorous photographic
practice. For example, in 1971 Nakahira Takuma had contributed his photog-
raphy project Circulation: Date, Place, Event to the Seventh Paris Biennale,
an event whose theme was Interactions (along the continuum of concerns
about response and interactivity contemporaneously addressed by Enzens-
berger, Baudrillard, Matsuda, and Taki). Nakahira had spent each day of his
time at the exhibition r unning around Paris taking photographs/documents,
developing and printing them on that same day in the darkroom, and he
had then allowed t hose fragments, or what art critic Yasumi Akihito calls
“remnants,” to intervene back into the landscape of Paris in the space of
the biennale—rumpled, tacked up, piled on the floor, barely dry, including
some photos of the exhibition itself among them. Although Nakahira was
extremely critical or even dismissive of the biennale event and encountered
many difficulties in the process of participation, Yasumi has argued nonethe-
less for the importance of Nakahira’s contribution, writing that Circulation:
Date, Place, Event functioned to “cut up the continually moving world and
its homogeneous flow of time: a history is buried within this cutting process
itself, like a time bomb.”27
Nakahira’s roughly contemporaneous writings on the homogenization of
landscape ( fūkeiron), developed alongside Matsuda’s, bring the power regu-
lation of landscape and infrastructure as well as image and perception into
the realm of media critique. Not only, as Nakahira claims in his response
to Enzensberger, is it the “political role” of media such as television to “en-
force a certain rhythm throughout everything, a rhythm of pre-established
harmony so the world can continue as it is,”28 and not only do the dominant
media, as he wrote in the same essay, “squeeze our senses into molds and
regulate our senses on a daily basis,” a f actor that he calls “the only and big-
gest political role of existing media,” in essence flattening time (alongside
landscape), but also, beyond those roles of media, the problem is that the
landscapes both of Japan and of the rest of the world have come to seem
flattened, frozen, immutable—not only within images or representations
but within our own perceptions or ability to apprehend. “Like the flattened
‘landscape’ of Japan . . . ” argues Nakahira, “the worldwide relationships be-
tween exploiter-exploited, oppressor-oppressed have been snugly enveloped

within a landscape like a beautiful picture postcard, a landscape which to me
appears to lack even a single crack, or a single indication that perhaps the
beauty and stability of this landscape will one day be overturned.”29 Address-
ing the complicity of the individual subject within t hese larger systems was
the key goal of Circulation: as Nakahira put it in his writing on the project,
“From the midst of everyday existence I took up the camera as a means of
immediately recording and then discarding the bias arising from the process
of continually eroding, transforming, and violating my self by subjecting it
to the world.”30
The key problem of langue versus parole (structured system versus in-
tervention of a momentary instance selected from within it) structures
Nakahira’s response to Enzensberger, as it does Baudrillard’s. Nakahira calls
for a “kinetics,” and it is in this way that his search for speech/voice/parole
(nikusei) parallels Matsuda’s interest in gesture and mobility. In order, shall
we say, to “claim expression,” or to “respond” at all, to “take on the role of
the manipulator” (in Enzensberger’s words), it would be necessary from Naka-
hira’s point of view first of all to invent a new way to be in/amidst media, to
be a photographing/media-involved subject. In his writing on Enzensberger
and media theory, then, Nakahira evokes the voice (parole/nikusei) as a col-
lective: “What exactly is our voice? It is something which has rather nothing
to convey—it is just our silence directed towards the dismantlement of all
existing things: this is what our paradoxical language is.”31 In relation to a
hegemonic and engulfing homogenization, as well as the futility and batter-
ing of the world, it is his own “silence,” then—his time bomb—as another
side of parole, that Nakahira feels goes unnoticed in all this hypersaturated
discourse on culture industries and media.
Inverted Eyes
For Provoke cofounder Taki Kōji, Nakahira’s paradoxical parole joins with
questions of postcoloniality, the “third world,” and the gaze in photography.
For Taki, too, media takes the form of a hegemonic system/force, a veritable
“monument.” His response to Enzensberger takes the occasion of the “death
of Life” (Life magazine had temporarily ceased publication in 1972) to reflect
on the gaze constructed by this monolithic and homogenizing media struc-
ture. The emergence of parole (nikusei, moment of speech, raw voice) would
involve an overturning of the intensely homogenizing logic of media.
For Taki, Life magazine’s “visual logic” requires analysis b ecause this
media “gaze” is the “productive force of media itself.”32 He argues that Life’s
[162] miryam sas

journalism—f sa photographers such as Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-
White, Dorothea Lange—had participated in the spirit of the New Deal by
making “objective reports” that w ere also aesthetic and emotional in their
effects. In his view, with the Vietnam War there was a shift from the reporting
that had happened earlier in Life on the New Deal and US foreign policies in
the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Korean War, a shift that con-
cerned the structure of the “public” (taishū). In the Life version of a docu-
ment, he tells us, what is photographed becomes an exhibition or exemplary
display (chinretsu, Taki writes, following Lefebvre) and monument (fol-
lowing Foucault). “Life, while making every document into a monument,
has also come to confirm itself as a new monument, or in other words, as
media,” writes Taki (Taki, “Aru media no bohimei,” 47).
To understand what needs to change (and is changing), Taki cites Ortega,
who in the 1930s wrote of the masses as an “image” that emerged precisely
with reproductive media but is “a group/mass that has neither a specific cul-
ture nor its own voice [nikusei].” What is needed is “to look into technological
media from the other side of words [kotoba no acchi], through inverted eyes
[sakasa no me]” (“Aru media no bohimei,” 48). For Taki, the “eyes of Amer
ica” represent an ethnocentric gaze historically based in European imperial-
ity, capital, and metaphysics. He identifies the beginning of the postcolonial
era as the moment when the unified myth that he calls in quotation marks
the “eyes of America,” and the concept of document or record that was Life
magazine, comes to be exposed to the danger of dissolution because “the
eyes looking back from the third world [which he also calls the “historical
eye of the oppressed”] began to be understood by part of the U.S. public”
(44), although t hose “eyes of Americ a” continue to have a disconcerting re-
silience. For Taki, there is nonetheless a gap opened by the (ultimately mo-
mentary) death of Life: “At the same time that Life brought to the surface an
image of the masses, it absorbed the consciousness of the masses, and made
them one part of its own story. The fact that Life was abandoned (haihinka,
made junk) as a medium is political, and this happened [this junk media/
abandonment was born, as it were] when the masses began to have their
own voice. . . . This potential for the acquisition of a voice is precisely what
is indicated, as a photographic negative, in Life’s death (49).” Taki hovers
intriguingly between the metaphors of voice/parole and those of the photo-
graphic logic of the negative, just as above he conceptualized the other side
of words alongside the inverted eyes. In another mixed metaphor, like Mat-
suda with a figure of burrowing, he envisions the conditions of possibility
for “digging out the voice.”

As Benjamin and other Frankfurt school theorists also argued, it is
through mass media and technological reproducibility that the idea of the
“mass” comes into its own, even as it is, in some fundamental way, objectified
or managed through these same media. Taki writes,
ntil very recently there was a deep-rooted perception of the masses as a

U
floating thing that was easy to manipulate as a whole. However, whether
it has a voice or not, whether this is only internal or external, individual
or collective, cannot be decided. On both of t hese sides, both of t hese
faces, [the problem of speech/parole] is correlated with “freedom,” and
moreover, concrete and real freedom itself can have a metaphysical
meaning. For as long as they are split by class, neither the exclusive and
internal intellectual bourgeoisie nor the regulated masses has a voice.
Freedom itself is (just) a word, but no one yet has this word. (Taki, “Aru
media no bohimei,” 48)
The subtlety of Taki’s point emerges in his attempts to transcend the “demon
of binary” that haunts the very language and analysis of freedom and voice.
Metaphysics and materiality meld; there is an “ambivalence of media” in
that it holds to a place of having and not having a voice, “opening up and
closing down” possibility. Taki goes so far as to suspend temporarily the ques-
tion of having or not having a voice (parole): this in itself is only an op-
portunity proposed that depends for its realization on the transcendence of
class divisions, the division between individual and collective, materiality
and metaphysics.
Examining the paradigm shift of the New Left at this (transnational)
scale, we see how, as with Baudrillard, the concept of parole takes on a cen-
tral role: it opens a promise for imagining (mediated) immediacy, response,
interaction, overturning, or breaking through the homogenizing structures
of time and space. Though the theory of the last thirty years has taught us
to find even-tempered calls for immediacy suspect, we can nonetheless re-
spond to these articulations of a movement that would aim to be both prac-
tical and theoretical at once—a dismantling and trenchant analysis of critical
impasses offered by these theorists for problems that extend only deeper in
today’s new media theory and utopian/antiutopian dialectics of digispeak.33
For Taki, the ambivalence of the media is that it “opens up and closes down
political possibilities” at each stage of advancement. Nakahira (quoting
Georges Sorel on the disheartened optimist) says that a “pessimist’s glory” is
to “stay in this reality and to crush it,” representing his own kind of positive
negativity (Taki, “Aru media no bohimei,” 97). Each media theorist carefully
[164] miryam sas

evades the naïve optimism of unqualified “agency” or “subjectivity,” as well
as a reified or essentialized notion of embodiment, focusing instead on the
ideas of movement, of liminality and affective irruptions, trying to frame a
critique that w
ill allow for a “grasp” or a “handhold” on the pervasive sys-
tem of media that of course will come to absorb/redeem, by turning into a
media-event both Enzensberger and their own responses to his ideas.
The Future of Media

The moderator of the Enzensberger symposium, Konno Tsutomu (Ben) in-
sightfully summarizes the problems and approaches to media that emerged
from the culture industry debates at the time with an eye toward the in-
creased prominence of electronic media and future changes in the media
system. Konno, known for forming the first independent television produc-
tion company, “tv Man Union,” in 1970, along with his colleagues Hagimoto
Haruhiko and Muraki Yoshihiko, proposes a mode of thought from within
the “concrete, everyday labor process” of working in television production,
as a “broadcast laborer” (hōsō rōdōsha).34 Some critics in Japan, like film
scholar Hirasawa Gō, would point out that there should be a very dark line
drawn between theorists such as Matsuda Masao, Tsumura Takashi, and
Nakahira Takuma⎮ (there it is) and Konno Ben and his tv Man Union group.
Matsuda, with his entirely unflinching critique of capitalist structures, was
expelled from France on suspicion of plotting guerilla activities with Ja-
pan’s Red Army and continued to support escalated armed resistance from
within Japan. P eople like Konno w ere, from Hirasawa’s perspective, entirely
aligned, or (depending on your stance) absorbed, brought to collude, or at
the very least believed it was possible to work from within the established tv
system.35 The problem, then, according to Konno (citing Tsumura), is how
the “two attitudes and two battle fronts”—the critical spirit of the radical
militant Left and the “proposals of the possible” that work within the media
production process like his own—can “be mediated synthetically (strategi-
cally).”36 In their book published in 1969, Konno and his colleagues had at-
tempted a praxis-based theory of television:
If “power” is that which has the right to restructure time politically as

a matter of course and then present it as “history,” then the existence of
television, which tries to present the “present” [ genzai] as it is would
be something difficult for power to allow. If “art” is that which selects
and internalizes “time” and presents it as a “work,” then television,

only by pursuing time and thus trying to possess its own specific expres-
sion, will lack the essence of art in its primary sense. Not desiring to be
restructured either by power or by art, but only by creating/developing
the present can television determine its own future. And that which
can do so is of course not the functionality of television itself but the
new expressive person who has taken part in television: the tv man.37
ere is more to say about the idea of capturing the present as it is (Konno and
Th
his colleagues write the words in English as well as paraphrasing them aru ga
mama), and its resonances with theories of photography and document in the
same period, like those of the (dark line separated) Nakahira in his Circula-
tion project, who “cuts up the flow of time” and “buries history within it . . .
like a time bomb.” Konno understands that it is easy to m istake a theory of
media for a “theory of the f uture”—a superficial optimism and opportunism.
Konno begins his discussion of the Enzensberger symposium with his group’s
manifesto from the book in order to attempt to aggregate the more possibility-
inclined position (although he refutes the position of optimist for himself and
Kawanaka Nobuhiro, as producers of the event in its media form) with the
more purely negatively dialectical critical stance of leftist theorists who, like
Matsuda, find themselves “dumbfounded and taken aback” by Enzensberger’s
position. Like Matsuda attempting to move beyond the binary, Konno tries to
envision—and he again turns to the framework of mediation, a term worth
further inquiry here—some way to mediate and/or synthesize these seemingly
opposed frames, and hence to come to a kind of “organization” that would be
strategic. Thus he returns to the problems of mobilization that Matsuda also
left us with, but with a very different tactical approach.
Konno thus allows us to see clearly one wing of a transition that was taking
place in this historical moment, from approaches to photography and docu-
ment with their theories of m atter/materiality to thought of electronic media/
television (he calls it chūkei no shisō—relay-thought?) as a site of radical media
theory. The disparate media theorists who gathered to engage in these culture
industry debates give us a fuller picture of the possibilities and contradictions
that opened in this key era of the development of electronic media, problems
that persist unresolved and in many ways remain caught in similar impasses
in today’s critical writings on capitalism, globalization, and digital media.
How, that is, can one mobilize in a world where so many things are al-
ready (and increasingly) mobile without really changing? What does it mean
to move (affectively)? Nakahira, Matsuda, and Tsumura offer highly inci-
sive analyses of the media system within the rubric of a “total media” (sōgō
[166] miryam sas

media) and a broad comprehension of urban media geographies.38 Taki sees
reason for a qualified hope in the death of Life and the activated return of the
gaze of the “third world.” Tsumura (and Konno) ask in different ways how to
mediate between the two seemingly opposed strategies or, more pertinently,
to transcend (shift their axis) of opposition. Tsumura quotes his own state-
ment from the end of the symposium to open precisely this question:
It is real to say that there is nothing to be done except struggle persis

tently within the system, however unstylish that position may be; and
it is real to say that the only way to proceed is by complete personal
refusal. Each approach grounds itself on one side of the extreme polar-
ity of bourgeois society which continues its “flight t oward the f uture.”
Neither approach can therefore smash through its own limits—which are
the limits of this society. The problem, then, is none other than this: how
is it possible to mediate [baikai] synthetically (strategically) these two
attitudes, these two battle fronts, one that is the display of the possible,
the other that is leftist criticism?39
Tsumura goes on to develop his concept and practice of “limit criticism”

( genkai hihyō) as a response to his own question. Reflections on media, that
is, require a larger grasp of “dominant urban media” as environment within a
broader biopolitics—what Tsumura calls “super-media.”40 Rereading media
critique and culture industry debates of the 1970s thus takes us to a moment
when globalization was imminent and perceptible, 1968 was vivid in recent
memory, and a new “battle of position”—the slower battle of significations—
was taking a new form. An understanding of urban infrastructure and social
forms as a part of the media system opened leftist thought to new critiques
of gender, class, and racial power. Yet the feeling of a pressing need for pres
ent action, combined with a profound sense of theory’s necessary relation to
daily practices, found one of its most compelling transnational articulations
here in a way it has seldom since touched again.
notes
1. Hansen challenges “the fixation of the vernacular on the side of the local—for
instance, through ahistorical notions of indigenous identity—and [she] allows us to see
vernacular practices as part of the very processes of translocal interactions that produce
the local as much as the global.” Miriam Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking
Cinema on a Global Scale,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša
Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 297.

2. See Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational
Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), 10, x. While the editors of that volume gen-
erally see the term “globalization” as marking homogenization, they and others ac-
knowledge the decentered and potentially decentering practices of late capitalism. For
Arjun Appadurai, the term “globalization” can be paired with “grassroots” (“grassroots
globalization”) to give it a more fragmenting nuance that more closely aligns it with
Ďurovičová and Newman’s sense of the transnational. See Arjun Appadurai, Globaliza-
tion, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
3. I am indebted to Maiko Morimoto Tomita and Takako Fukasawa for their excellent
research assistance during the development of this essay.
4. For an excellent discussion of fūkeiron, see Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality:
Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2013), especially chapter 4.
5. It is interesting that each of the four main theorists considered h
ere subsequently ran
aground in some part of their media and political practices. Nakahira famously suffered
an attack of illness and aphasia in 1977 and stopped writing and photographing for many
years, only picking up his photography practice again quite recently. Tsumura shifted to
a qigong practice and ceased explicit leftist political journalism in the early 1980s (again
until quite recently). Matsuda lived in France in 1973 but was detained and deported from
France in 1974 on suspicion of planning international guerilla activities with Japan’s Red
Army, and after that was confined to Japan (though he continues to write and support
Red Army activities and the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, and continues to work on
films off and on). Taki’s work as a practicing photographer was confined to the ground-
breaking Provoke journal, though he went on to be a celebrated critic of photography,
painting, and architecture, and was posthumously awarded the lifetime achievement
award for criticism from the Photographic Society of Japan. All but Taki are still living at
the time of this writing.
6. Students occupied the nine-story clock tower at Tokyo University and over the
course of two days in January 1969, thousands of police in riot gear with tear gas
and high-pressure water broke down the student barricades. Students retaliated with
Molotov cocktails, threw flagstones, and used the famous geba-bō, Gewalt (violence)
sticks or pointed wooden sticks. Many were injured on both sides. Neither side used
firearms.
7. Suga Hidemi, “ ‘1968-nen’ to 3.11 ikō o tsunagu shikō” [Thought that links 1968
to the aftermath of 3.11], in Tsumura Takashi seisen hyōronshū: 1968-nen igo, ed. Suga
Hidemi (Tokyo: Ronsōsha, 2012), 388.
8. Note Barbara Spackman’s excellent essay on Machiavelli’s resistance to firepower
and his advocacy of a warfare of “brute semiosis.” Spackman, “Politics on the Warpath:
Machiavelli’s Art of War” in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literatur, ed. Vicky Kahn
and Albert Ascoli (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 179–93. See also Antonio
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
9. The work was originally published in German in the opposition and student move-
ment journal Kursbuch 20 in 1970 (Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien), in New Left
Review in English also in 1970, and in Japanese in August 1971 in Bungei.
[168] miryam sas

10. Kawanaka, born in 1941, is an experimental filmmaker, founder of Japan Film-
makers Cooperative, founding member of Image Forum, and a central member of
Video Hiroba.
11. John Thornton Caldwell, “Introduction: Theorizing the Digital Landrush,” in
Electronic Media and Technoculture, ed. J. T. Caldwell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2000), 18.
12. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left
Review 64 (November/December 1970): 36.
13. Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” trans. Charles Levin, in For a Critique
of the Political Economy of the Sign, ed. Charles Levin (Saint Louis, MO: Telos Press,
1981): 164–84.
14. Baudrillard, “Requiem for the media,” 166, 169.
15. “News satellites, color television, cable relay television, cassettes, videotape,
videotape recorders, video-phones, stereophony, laser techniques, electrostatic re-
production processes, electronic high-speed printing, composing and learning ma-
chines, microfiches with electronic access, printing by radio, time-sharing computers,
data banks. All these new forms of media are constantly forming new connections both
with each other and with older media like printing, radio, film, television, telephone,
teletype, radar and so on.” Enzensberger, “Constituents,” 13–14.
16. See Marc Steinberg’s work in this volume on the presentation/dissemination of
McLuhan in Japan for advertising executives as a “practical” and applicable work on
how to do things with media; see also Kadobayashi Takeshi’s writings on the reception
of McLuhan, including “Umesao Tadao’s Theory of Information Industry and 1960s
Japanese Media Theory,” presented at Histories of Film Theories in East Asia confer-
ence, University of Michigan, September 29, 2012.
17. Nagai writes of the quieting down of student movements in both Germany and
Japan, and of how, around 1972, Enzensberger “was still as cheerful and optimistic in his
viewpoint [as he had been in 1968]. . . . Perhaps it has something to do with his being
from south Germany. An ordinary German, affable and vivacious [yōki] in a way that
one can hardly imagine in a radical left fighter.” Nagai Kiyohiko, “Kaikaku to handō
to—Entsensuberugā no rainichi o megutte,” Sekai (May 1973): 228, 231. The image of
the “south” seems to figure in Nagai’s identification of/with Enzensberger to place him
in a more flexible and marginal position in relation to the power of German culture as a
whole. (He too is “other,” Nagai seems to say—like us—and at the same time he is ideal-
ized as someone who performs this role as a confident, optimistic leader.)
18. The anti-n hk war was a movement against nhk led by Maeda Yoshinori, who
was famous for his authoritarian management style and his ties to conservative politics
and the prime minister, Satō Eisaku. The anti-n hk war involved the labor union and
more general public components; for example, Honda Katsuichi published a book, The
Logic of nhk Payment Refusal, in 1971.
19. Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings, ed. Mar-
shall Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
20. Matsuda Masao, “Media kakumei no tame no akushisu” [The axis of media revo-
lution], Bijutsu techō (May 1973): 53; italics in original.

21. For a discussion of the ideal of direct access or nonmediation in Terayama and
thers, see Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter,
o
Engagement, and Imagined Return (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Cen-
tre, 2011). Baudrillard in his “Requiem for the Media” also ends up advocating for an
immediacy of response and interaction to transcend or rupture the semiotic models of
transmitter-message-receiver, even as a two-way street: he favors a model of reciprocity
and “immediate communication process” (182), a contestatory ambivalence of meaning.
(“Speech must be able to exchange, give, and repay itself, as is occasionally the case with
looks and smiles”; 170.) Without giving a full account of Baudrillard and the intellectual
trajectory he launches into—toward literary deconstruction, Kristéva’s Révolution du lan-
gage poétique, and alongside Foucault’s reading of power—we can note that his emphasis
on speech (parole) as intervention parallels that of Taki and Nakahira discussed below.
22. It is notable h ere that Matsuda had been drawing on the work of Senghor, presi-
dent of independent Sénégal from 1960 to 1980, who was widely criticized for his es-
sentialist version of the idea of négritude and had a Bergsonian view of “vitalism” that
informed his ideas of African culture. It is notable that the emphasis on the affective
dimension thus can rhyme with other racially inflected vitalist views, and that Matsuda
later discredits or disavows these earlier affiliations even while sustaining his interest in
the affective and embodied dimension.
23. Here Matsuda uses Enzensberger’s image: “like a dancer, like a football player, like
a guerilla.” Discussion of Matsuda’s appropriations of Yamaguchi Masao’s (and theater
historian René Fülöp-Miller’s) ideas of gesture remains for another time; this, too, is an
example of the generation of movement at an unconscious communicative level, and
leads him to the formulation cited above. Matsuda uses butōka as the word for dancer,
as the translation for Enzensberger’s dancer, which to my ears has a very specific local
ring (think Hijikata).
24. Suga summarizes the Overseas Chinese Youth Strike Committee and describes
Tsumura’s role and o thers’ responses to it in his postscript to Tsumura’s work. Suga,
“ ‘1968-nen’ to 3.11 ikō,” 381.
25. For an interesting analysis of this problem of political correctness as a détour-
nement of critical feminist and race theory, see the writings of Barbara Johnson, for
example in the recent collected volume of her essays, The Barbara Johnson Reader: The
Surprise of Otherness, ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, Keja L.
Valens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
26. Suga Hidemi, “ ‘1968-nen’ to 3.11 ikō,” 381; 388. Tsumura commented on the limi-
tations of this last position and the “rationalization” it implied.
27. The photographs from the Circulation project have been published in a photog-
raphy book, along with Yasumi’s essays and three essays by Nakahira related to the
event. Yasumi Akihiro, “Optical Remnants: Paris, 1971, Takuma Nakahira,” in Nakahira
Takuma, Sākyurēshon: Hizuke, basho, kōi = Circulation: Date, Place, Events, trans. Franz
Prichard (Tokyo: Oshirisu, 2012), 316.
28. Nakahira Takuma, “Nikusei no kakutoku wa kanô ka: Media-ron hihan e mukete”
[Is it possible to capture the voice (nikusei)?: Toward a critique of media theory], Nihon
dokusho shinbun, March 19, 1973, 97.
[170] miryam sas

29. Nakahira, Circulation, 53.
30. Nakahira, Circulation, 45.
31. Nakahira Takuma, “Nikusei no kakutoku wa kanô ka: Media-ron hihan e
mukete,” 97.
32. Taki Kōji, “Aru media no bohimei,” Bijutsu techō (May 1973): 38–50, 40.
33. From Arlie Hochschild’s analysis of emotion work and deep capitalism to Eva
Illouz’s understanding of the structures of everyday intimacy, the analysis of embod-
ied articulations of capitalist forms and media proceeds in many directions. See Arlie
Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973) and Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia:
Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997).
34. For a fuller elaboration of their theory and practice, see Hagimoto Haruhiko,
Muraki Yoshihiko, and Konno Tsutomu, Omae wa tada no genzai ni suginai: Terebi
ni nani ga kanō ka [You are nothing but the present: What is possible for television?]
(Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1969).
35. Hagimoto Haruhiko had already been deeply involved in experiments in formally
provocative and entertaining television broadcasts, such as his collaboration with Ter-
ayama Shūji in the sixties. For example, in the latter half of the decade, they produced
“Anata wa . . . ?” at tbs. (By contrast, the constraints of commercial viability, as En-
zensberger also discussed, limited the formal radicality of independent/subcontracted
productions such those of tv man u nion. On this show and the development of tv
in the 1960s, see the writings of Matsui Shigeru. Such programming is precisely what
Nakahira was referring to when he discusses radical programming as still, in spite of its
radicality, self-consciously or unwittingly reinforcing television’s dominating rhythm.)
36. As we saw above, Tsumura rejected the stance of radical negativity of the Japa
nese leftist intellectuals, and urged them to move toward thinking “what is possible,”
or at the least to explicate the base and conditions of the existing contradictions. Yet
Matsuda and Nakahira also emerged into their own forms of radical practice and con-
tinually rethought their relation to the larger media systems.
37. Konno Tsutomu (Ben), “Kanōsei no teiji ni mukatte” [Toward the presentation of
possibility], Geijutsu kurabu [Art Club journal] (July 1973): 91.
38. Tsumura, for example, writes in 1971, “When the computer line and television
are combined, and albeit a somewhat radical hypothesis, if nhk and Nippon Tele-
graph and Telephone Public Corporation were to merge, this net will perhaps pos-
sess power equivalent to the former imperial state [kokutai] system.” From Tsumura
Takashi’s comment on the Enzensberger symposium in Tsumura “Toshi=soshikiron to
shite no mediaron o kaku to suru jōhō kankyō-gaku e no kōsatsu” [Thoughts toward
information-environment studies centered on urban=organizational theory], Hōsō
hihyō, no. 4 (1973): 38. The essay was reedited and included in Tsumura’s Media no seiji
[The politics of media] in 1974.
39. Tsumura, “Toshi=soshikiron,” 36; italics mine.
40. Tsumura is citing a work by Marxist economist Inomata Tsunao (1889–1942),
“The Contemporary Phase of the Urban and the Rural,” in which Inomata elaborates

a theory of “the media of dominant authority” (i.e., hegemonic media) and “city as
media.” Tsumura writes, “What Inomata calls ‘The Contemporary Phase of the Urban’ is a
super-media encompassing the distribution system of information + trust (credit) + lo-
gistics [the physical distribution of objects]. . . . Only from this perspective can the
labor unions, farmers unions and consumer unions be understood as urban media of
varying types, and it becomes possible to reconsider scientifically both the urban media
of dominant authority and these movements as their strategic and objective comple-
ment.” “Toshi=soshikiron,” 37.
[172] miryam sas

7. GIRLSCAPE
The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan
to m i ko yoda
In discussing contemporary conditions, distinctions among terms such as

“media culture,” “material culture,” and “consumer culture” are difficult to
parse out, not only b ecause market forces seem to affect all forms of cul-
tural production, but also because of changing modalities of object, media,
and media environment. Jean Baudrillard famously argued in his analysis of
consumer society that modern objects are marketed not so much for their
utility, sociosymbolic meaning, or the economic (exchange) value attributed
to discrete products but rather are sold in relation to other objects.1 While Bau-
drillard characterized this system of objects as semiotization (organized under
a signifying system akin to language), Adam Arvidsson, in his study of mod-
ern brands and brand marketing, discusses the “mediatization” of objects in
a more open-ended manner. He examines how modern objects have become
interconnected with each other through diverse social and technological
arrangements—that is, networks of meanings, symbols, images, discourses,
and information diffused by media such as television, magazines, film, radio,
and the Internet.2 Thereby, objects have come to be swathed, as it were, in “me-
diatic ambience,” blurring the distinction between the manufactured product
itself and its distribution and promotion.3
One of the major concerns of contemporary marketing, then, is how to
manage this mediatic ambience of things—to associate commodities with
a more or less consistent set of affects, sensibilities, and intensity—which
can be extended onto the diverse reaches of the mediascape, and translated
across multiple media platforms. Themed environments of consumption,
transmedia marketing (or media mix, as it is known in Japan), and perhaps
most importantly, branding, are some of the overlapping means of market-
ing mediatic ambience. Scott Lash and Celia Lury, while covering similar
ground to Arvidsson, also emphasize the concurrent “thingification of
media.” On the one hand, not only material objects but also physical infra-
structures of consumption such as dining, retail, and resort facilities are me-
diatized, injected with themes, icons, characters, and narrative. On the other
hand, blockbuster films, popular television dramas, and lifestyle magazines
serve as material links in the relay of commodities. Their signifying function
as media texts seems secondary to their capacity to channel consumers’ at-
tention to itself and other objects, encouraging operational and navigational
rather than interpretive engagement. Lash and Lury suggest that the media
environment today is a meeting ground between t hings and media, m atters
and images, constituting the continual flux of things becoming media and
media becoming things.4
Relatedly, the conceptualization of consumption has also undergone sig-
nificant transformations. As Marx has pointed out, classical liberal econom-
ics tended to define consumption as the terminal point in the social processes
(of production, exchange, and distribution) wherein objects move from the
domain of economic relations into the private sphere of reproduction.5 By
contrast, marketing discourses today increasingly cast consumption as an
expressive, experiential, and generative endeavor. The productivity of con-
sumers has been at the center of debates over the explosive spread of social
media and the plethora of user-generated content on the web. Moreover,
contemporary marketing and advertising foreground the consumer’s “cre-
ative” relation to oneself and o
thers. Many of the most celebrated advertising
campaigns—from the “Think small” slogan of a Volkswagen Beetle ad in
the 1960s (launched in 1959) to Apple’s “Think different” in the late 1990s—
have associated brands and products with consumers’ ability to craft their
thers in differentiation from existing sociocul-
sense of self and relation to o
tural identities and norms. In other words, the mediatic ambience of com-
modities serves as the milieu for continual experimentation with and the
performance of one’s personality or connectedness to social groups.
If, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued, the dominant
form of contemporary production is “biopolitical”—generating “immaterial
goods” such as ideas, knowledge, communication, social relationships, and
forms of life6—marketing also appears to have taken a biopolitical turn. It
[174] tomiko yoda

seeks to extract value from consumers’ capacities to produce lifestyles, sub-
jectivities, and social relations through their engagement with commercial
goods and services.7 For such biopolitical marketing, consumer behaviors
are to be governed not through prescription or prohibition but “by provid-
ing an ambience in which freedom is likely to evolve in particular ways.”8
Put differently, the biopolitical turn of marketing points to the broader ten-
dencies of contemporary capitalist enterprise as discussed by Maurizio Laz-
zarato, which endeavors to generate less the object than the “world” in which
both objects and subjects exist.9 In the face of the massive proliferation of
commercially designed and managed ambiences, serving as platforms for
our action and experience in everyday lives,10 a key question for the critical
study of contemporary media culture is how to conceptualize the disjunc-
ture immanent to such media ecological conditions.
The Mediatization of Consumption and 1980s Japan

In Japan, the mediatization of commodities drew heightened attention
among culture-industry professionals, critics, and scholars during the 1980s,
a decade remembered for the rise of the speculative bubble economy and the
heady excesses of conspicuo us consumption. Mediatization was discussed
largely in terms of the postindustrial and postmodern changes in marketing
and advertising techniques that foregrounded the informational and semi-
otic values of objects.11 Th ese processes were also understood to reflect a
large-scale shift in Japanese consumers, epitomized by the rising generation
of youths dubbed by the media as the “new breed” or “new h uman” (shin-
jinrui). Coming of age after the youth rebellion and experimentation of the
1960s, these post–baby boomer children of affluent Japan w ere profiled as
self-absorbed and cheerfully complacent with regard to the status quo. It was
said that they sought their self-realization through the selective consumption
and manipulation of commodities and mass-mediated information, form-
ing fragmented lifestyle tribes and subcultural groups. They w ere deemed
to be exemplary subjects of the post–, meta– and segmented–mass society
announced in marketing literature.12
The mediatized consumer culture and the new breeds’ adaptation to it
were discussed in highly expansive terms—that not only objects but physi-
cal environments, bodies, identities, and social relations were absorbed into
webs of sign-objects. Akihiro Kitada suggests that these totalizing discourses
grew out of the close interworking between commercial practices and popu
larized brands of high theory (in particular, Baudrillard’s theory of consumer
Girlscape [175]
society and cultural semiotics). On the one hand, these theories w ere dis-
seminated and given credence through marketing and advertising practices,
which already drew on them. On the other, the theories announced the
power of marketing and advertising (to turn everything into images and
signs), underwriting the industries’ privileged status in 1980s Japan. Kitada
suggests that in this “discourse network of the 1980s,” even the critique of
consumer society often seemed to echo ad and marketing speak, reinforcing
the image of Japan as a postmodern, simulacral world without an outside.13
The discussion of the new breed and the excesses of semiotic consumption
fell out of fashion as the bubble economy went bust and Japan entered a
long-term economic downturn and stagnation. Nevertheless, the narrative
of mediatized consumer culture in Japan—that it took shape in accordance
with 1980s advertising and marketing discourses and was buoyed by the ac-
tivities of depoliticized Japanese youth—remains largely unchallenged. How
might we address contemporary media-cultural transformations, grappling
with their novelty, without reproducing the claims of marketing literature as
its putative vanguard?
In this chapter, I would like to offer an alternative account of the history
of mediatized consumer culture in Japan. My discussion w ill focus not on
the 1980s but on conditions roughly a decade earlier, when the mediatization
of consumption was just crossing over the threshold of recognition. Early
forays into marketing the ambient milieu of consumption often involved
practitioners who saw themselves as critics of postwar capitalist order and
the mass society it generated. These projects—which germinated in zones of
contact between the commercial and the avant-garde, such as advertising,
graphic design, fashion, and photography—sought to mobilize youth, draw-
ing on countercultural ideas and tactics popularized in the late 1960s. Their
experimental fervor and utopianism complicate the received narrative that
draws a simple contrast between the politically charged turbulence of 1968
and the hyperconsumerism of the subsequent decades.
Moreover, the new marketing trend addressed not just baby boomer
youths (a generation of Japanese as a whole) but female youths (high teens
and young adults) in particular, evoking what I refer to as “girlscape.”14 Girl
scape refers not so much to the a ctual sites of shopping, recreation, and leisure
designed for young female consumers. Rather, it is a mediatic milieu, dis-
seminated via a variety of media channels, linking feminine bodies, affects,
objects, and environment. It was promoted as the setting of female pleasure
and self-fashioning, autonomous of institutions of production and social
reproduction, such as the family, the workplace, and school. In analyzing the
[176] tomiko yoda

emergence of girlscape in late 1960s to early 1970s Japan, I will foreground
the multiplicity of forces at work, as well as unanticipated reverberations
and accidental mobilizations. At the end of the chapter, I w ill consider how
attention to t hese contingencies, often missing from global accounts of me-
diatized consumer culture as well as from more localized discussion in and
on Japan, may clear some ground for the feminist and micropolitical analy
sis of contemporary media culture.
Post–Mass Consumption and Market Segmentation

The years between the late 1960s and the early 1970s in Japan marked the end
of an era characterized by massive postwar economic expansion, the surge of
radical oppositional movements, the reorganization of everyday life under
the spread of electronic technologies into homes, and the establishment of
mass consumer society. Advertising and marketing discourses at the time
expected the decade of the 1970s to see the deceleration of high-speed eco-
nomic growth, inaugurating more differentiated modes of consumption. As
mentioned earlier, the notion of the mass market displaced by fragmented
niche markets and lifestyle groups is a marketing and managerial discourse
that came into vogue in Japan in the 1980s, but its initial iterations date back
to the early 1970s.
A number of media brands appeared roughly simultaneously, becoming
high-profile responses to this anticipated change of tide. H ere, I would like
to focus on two in particular. First, in 1969, Parco began its operation as a de-
veloper of “fashion building” ( fasshon biru), a form of shopping center that
brings together as its tenants various fashion-related specialty stores. Parco
was influential not only for pioneering this new model of trendy fashion
retail (fashion buildings proliferated in Japan during the 1970s and 1980s)
but also for its advertising and multipronged marketing campaigns, which
incorporated bold visual advertising, event marketing, and urban develop-
ment. Second, in 1970, an advertising agency, Dentsū, launched the Dis-
cover Japan (dj) campaign, a massive multiplatform campaign for Japanese
National Railways. The campaign promoted individuated domestic travel
as opposed to organized, group tourism and the massive traffic of p eople
traveling from cities to hometowns during traditional holidays. Operating
on a scale unprecedented in the history of advertising in Japan, it became a
major reference point not only for advertising, tourism, and corporate pr,
but also for 1970s popular culture in general. Consequently, it also became
a significant object through which Left critics tackled the shifting politics
Girlscape [177]
of image and media in the early 1970s. Girlscape, then, exploded into vis-
ibility not so much by the design of a particular industry or corporation but
through reinforcements among discrete projects pursued by multiple actors.
A key strategy shared by Parco and the dj campaign was a form of market
segmentation that targeted youth. H ere, I will draw on Campaign of Parco:
Parco’s Advertising Strategy (Kyanpēn obu Paruko: Paruko no senden sen-
ryaku), a dense exegesis of Parco’s advertising, marketing, and organizational
techniques, published by the editorial department of its in-house marketing
research journal, Across. This book explains that market segmentation was
typically used in the past as a means to sell existing products more cost-
effectively, by dividing the market into smaller units rather than taking on
the mass market all at once. By contrast, Parco coordinated its products to
meet the latent demands of a specific market segment: “A campaign can-
not have a strong impact u nless it sets off a chain of explosions—consumers
detonating other consumers—eventually blowing up everything around
them . . . we designed campaigns that set off domino effects, starting with
the powerful baby boomers, affecting other generations.”15 The passage is a
striking example of the hyperbolic rhetorical style favored by Masuda Tsūji,
the maverick manager who directed the launch of Parco and later became
its president (he is credited as Campaign of Parco’s editorial supervisor).
It also highlights the demographic target of Parco’s market segmentation:
baby boomers who w ere reaching their late teens and young adulthood in
1969, when the company opened its first store in Ikebukuro. Not only that,
Parco’s campaign expected the boomers to draw other generations into the
force field of its campaign. Masuda discusses advertising as an instigator of
“movement,” agitating the youth to become sympathizers and sect members,
relying on their energy to influence other generations.16 Parco’s advertising
and marketing strategy, therefore, was to be fundamentally different from
those that addressed the “masses” indiscriminately.17
The notable rise of youth marketing was a global trend in industrial-
ized societies during the 1960s and 1970s. What was more locally specific
to the new marketing current in Japan was the degree to which it was gen-
dered, focusing on single w omen in their early twenties as the model con-
sumer. For instance, Parco’s initial marketing target was “21-years old, single,
office worker.”18 We need to keep in mind that u ntil the late 1960s, a large-
scale marketing campaign that concentrated on young female consumers
was an underexplored venture in Japan. N eedless to say, the image of young
women—valorized for their aesthetic appeal and often serving as a symbol
[178] tomiko yoda

[fig. 7.1] The image
of fashionable young
women in Parco’s
poster advertising
the opening of the
Ikebukuro store in
1969.
of modernity—has been a staple in Japanese advertising art since the early

twentieth century. But paradigmatic female consumers in Japanese advertis-
ing during the 1960s w ere middle-class h
ousewives who controlled spend-
ing on mass-produced and mass-marketed consumer durables.19 In fashion
retail, large department stores, which had traditionally catered to married
women as their prime customers, were just starting to have fashion sales
events for youth. Parco, by comparison, took youth-oriented fashion retail
to a new scale: the first Parco in Ikebukuro assembled around 170 specialty
stores as its tenants, and the company went on to open a series of fashion
buildings in Tokyo and other cities.20 Feminist scholar Ueno Chizuko un-
derscores the risk that Parco took in setting its demographic focus, when
she explains that it “literally ventured or gambled when it created a market
of powerful female consumers that had not yet existed.”21
Girlscape [179]
Female Youth Marketing and the Critique of Mass Society
How should we understand the rise of speculative investment in the gen-
dered youth market in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s? A recollection
by Fujioka Wakao, the account executive at Dentsū who led the dj project
team, is highly suggestive. Fujioka was tasked with developing advertising
and marketing strategies for Japanese National Railways to c ounter the ex-
pected downturn of domestic tourism after the half-year run of Expo ’70
held in Osaka (a megaevent that attracted over sixty-four million visitors).
Fujioka recounts that it was not on the basis of careful market research that
the team decided that their campaign should target young w omen.
When the project team began discussing the campaign, they quickly
realized that their own experience of leisure travel was limited to harried
overnight golfing trips or special-occasion honeymoon trips. Fujioka ob-
serves that the men on his team, and salarymen in general, are members of
“administered society” (kanri shakai), and therefore assume that their lives
should revolve around their professional commitments and ambitions, even
when they are away from their offices. Spending time otherwise—on hob-
bies, family, or travel—would stigmatize them as “social dropouts” (shakai
no rakugosha). He admits that the team could have explored these issues
further, but this was not where the discussion went: “Before t hese questions
bounced back on each of us and cast a chill in the room, we arrived at a mu-
tual understanding. Our close-knit team reached an agreement that travel
is for young women.”22 Fujioka writes as though the team (presumably all
men) reached the consensus to target young w omen as a way to avoid con-
fronting their social conformity head-on.
Fujioka rationalizes this decision by pointing to the different ways in
which the pressures of administered society bear down on w omen and men.
While men, even rebellious student radicals, will submit to social strictures
and the logic of their corporate employers sooner or later, women never
have to be a part of rule-bound society. Even a fter marriage, Fujioka mused,
younger generations of wives were given free rein because husbands, ex-
hausted from the grind at work, simply sought safe haven at home.23 This
greater latitude of freedom enjoyed by women predisposed them to new
values and consciousness. As a result, Dentsū’s campaign addressed w omen
as an “entry point” (iriguchi) through which they could influence other de-
mographic groups into adopting new forms of individuated leisure travel.24
Fujioka came to the dj project on the heels of developing an acclaimed
ad campaign for the Fuji Xerox, known as a manufacturer of photocopiers.
[180] tomiko yoda

The Xerox campaign’s first tv commercial aired in 1970, featuring Katō Ka-
zuhiko of Folk Crusaders, the most commercially successful band to emerge
from the underground folk-music scene in the late 1960s Japan. In the com-
mercial, Katō, sporting longish hair, strolls leisurely through a crowded
street in Ginza, holding flowers and a handwritten sign in English: “beauti-
ful.” At the end of the segment, the frame freezes and copy runs across it:
“From gung ho to beautiful” (mōretsu kara byūtifuru e). Only in the final
shot does the ad refer to its sponsor—a Xerox logo briefly appears against
a blank background. Instead of an explicit “sales pitch,” the ad brands the
corporate image through the countercultural celebration of a hip, romantic,
and individuated lifestyle.
Fujioka recalls that in 1970, the waves of radical student movements had
already receded, but the focus of public attention had yet to turn to envi-
ronmental pollution. He was deeply irritated by the “gung-hoism” (mōretsu
shugi) saturating the Japanese mass media, epitomized by the fevered,
anticipatory drumroll to the opening of Expo ’70—a gargantuan paean to
Japanese postwar economic expansion and prosperity.25 Fujioka sought to
work against this national zeitgeist by promoting post- or de-advertising
(datsu kōkoku). Reminiscent of the term datsu kōgyōka (postindustrializa-
tion) popular at the time, the notion of de-advertising envisaged advertis-
ing stripped of its primary function: selling products. Fujioka suggests that
to the extent that advertising is becoming a ubiquitous environment and a
form of expressive culture in its own right, it needs to take its social effects
and ethical responsibility more seriously.26 Both in terms of message and
form, he saw his Xerox and dj campaigns as exercises in de-advertising.
Fujioka’s notion of de-advertising echoes the iconoclastic gestures that
thrived in the US advertising industry of the 1960s, referred to as “anti-
advertising” by Thomas Frank in his book The Conquest of Cool. Frank
points out that during the decade of the “creative revolution,” Madison Ave
nue loved to hate the mass society of the 1950s—a social order defined by
soul-numbing conformism, technocracy, and rigid hierarchy. Moreover, it
rebelled against the dominance of scientific marketing and propagandist
techniques, concurring with growing public criticism against its own indus-
try, aroused by books such as Vance Packard’s bestselling Hidden Persuad-
ers. Frank argues that in the course of the 1960s, the advertising industry
celebrated and even at times anticipated tendencies of counterculture as an
embodiment of creativity and youthful attitudes, turning “hip” into a cen-
tral way in which American capitalism understood and explained itself in
public.27
Girlscape [181]
Promoters of youth marketing in early 1970s Japan also had their fingers
on the pulse of domestic countercultural and underground movements. In
1970, Fujioka’s team recruited two leading troupes of underground theater
movements, Tenjō Sajiki and Jōkyō Theater (led by Terayama Shūji and Kara
Jūrō, respectively), for a three-month run of performances at Fuji Xerox’s
showroom located in the upscale Sony Building in Ginza.28 Parco’s Masuda,
a theater buff (and a left-leaning teacher at a vocational high school until he
became a department employee in the early 1960s), also kept a close watch
on figures such as Terayama and Kara, noting the way the underground
theater scene won the hearts and minds of youth audiences.29 In Japan as
elsewhere, the contemporary advent of youth marketing arose not simply
to sell products to young consumers.30 Hamano Yasuhiro, an influential
fashion marketer and a lifestyle producer, writes in his dizzyingly oracu-
lar marketing tract published in 1970, “In fashionized society, in the society
of flux, in order to prognosticate triggers of change, one needs to focus on
youth. Hence all products will youthify . . . and the mass of ‘young at heart’
will evolve, youthifying the w hole society.”31 Thus, young female consumers
evoked in the new marketing trend w ere less an actually existing, coher-
ent body of the population than a lifestyle group, called forth by the very
marketing of young thinking and young feeling (or, more specifically, girl
thinking and girl feeling). In other words, the female youth market was not
just segmented in terms of scale; it incarnated a new mode of conceptual-
izing consumers.
The City as a Medium

The “environment” was a pivotal notion in the strategy for cultivating such
consumers, defined by their shared aesthetics, affects, attitudes, and bodily
comportments. With the opening of its flagship Shibuya store in 1973, Parco
began to systematically market “scenes” constituted of people, goods, events,
and the urban milieu. In this regard, it saw the city as a medium of seg-
mentation, an apparatus that gathers, directs, and intensifies the sympathy
and participatory energy of its vanguard consumers.32 Parco’s flagship store
was built in an area more than five hundred meters away (and partly uphill)
from Shibuya station, a site considered to be relatively ill-suited for a retail
location. Campaign of Parco discusses how the firm turned this geographic
disadvantage into an asset. The slope leading to its store, drably known as
“District Ward Office Street” (kuyakusho dōri) was renamed “Park Street”
[182] tomiko yoda

(kōen dōri; parco is “park” in Italian). For the opening campaign, the street
was lined with old-fashioned street lamps, “Via Parco” street signs, and a
traditional horse and carriage offered a ride between Shibuya Parco and
trendy Harajuku. A catch copy of its opening campaign reads like a haiku
of fleeting exchanges among urban strollers: “Beautiful people . . . glancing
back . . . Shibuya Park Street” ( furikaeru hito ga utsukushii, Shibuya Kōen
Dōri). Parco sought to brand Park Street (and thus itself) as a milieu, draw-
ing on the bodily movement, sociality, and aesthetic appeal of consumers
themselves.
In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Shibuya Parco continually launched
a diverse range of campaigns that spilled out into its urban neighborhood not
only to attract customers to the cluster of fashion buildings it operated (by
1981, Parco Part 2 and Part 3 w ere opened in Shibuya) but also to stimulate
and steer the circulation of p eople in the surrounding streets. Parco is often
credited for transforming Shibuya from a busy but staid urban hub of com-
muting traffic to a shopping and entertainment zone teeming with youths. At
the same time, the firm drew criticism for enacting the corporate takeover
of urban space. In an influential study published in 1987, Yoshimi Shun’ya
characterizes the changing cultural geography of Tokyo during the 1970s as a
transition from “Shinjuku-esque” (Shinjuku teki) to “Shibuya-esque” (Shibuya
teki). Shinjuku was arguably the densest urban center in Tokyo in the late
1960s, well known for a high concentration of intimate bars and entertain-
ment facilities, and attracting people from all walks of life, both mainstream
and marginal. Toward the end of the decade, in particular, it was a highly
charged locus of repeated (and some very large-scale and violent) political
demonstrations, youth street culture, and underground (angura) experimen-
tal theater, film, and performance.
Yoshimi describes Shinjuku in the 1960s as a disorderly place that ab-
sorbed a high volume of youths moving from rural to urban areas, a space
where a shared sense of dislocation brought solitary migrants into contact
with each other.33 He contrasts this with what began taking shape in Shibuya
in the 1970s and crystallized in the 1980s—an insular and controlled urban
environment shaped by corporate design, inhospitable to those who did
not meet the standards of youth, trendiness, hygiene, or “cuteness.” He ana-
lyzes the Shibuya-esque as a trend supported by an increasingly urban-and
suburban-raised youth population and their ebullient and depoliticized
postmodern culture of consumption (i.e., new breeds). Moreover, Yoshimi
argues that under the guise of freedom and creativity, it turned urban
Girlscape [183]
interactions into an alibi for narcissistic self-performance played out against
ready-made scripts, backdrops, and props.34
Miura Atsushi, a marketer who worked u nder Masuda in the 1980s, ob-
jects to such characterization of Parco’s urban strategy. Rather than seeing
Parco as exemplifying 1980s postmodern consumer culture, he argues that
the firm’s orientation (at least in its heyday between the 1970s and the early
1980s) was powerfully shaped by Masuda’s sensibility, which was closely in
tune with the hippy counterculture and street culture of the 1960s.35 Indeed,
Masuda’s expressed taste in urban aesthetics was hardly aseptic: he favored
streets that accommodated the homeless and urban locations that hinted at
their underside of sewer systems and vermin scurrying in the shadows.36
Masuda, like Fujioka, saw himself as a nonconformist, challenging the
modus operandi of his industry and the bureaucratic order of mass society.
A long-term Parco employer characterizes his management style as antiau-
thoritarian and nondogmatic, centering on “staff work” that promoted open
debates and creative collaboration among employees, regardless of their se-
niority or gender.37 Masuda also recalls favoring talented female employees,
who tended to care less about their corporate standing than the quality of
their work: “I am a combative type who disobeys rules. So I liked working
with combative women, who w ouldn’t let me hide behind my corporate
authority.”38
What both Miura and Yoshimi overlook is the more slippery status of
Parco, straddling between the cultural and aesthetic experimentation of the
late 1960s and new sets of commercial and managerial strategies that be-
came increasingly normalized in subsequent decades. Parco and other early
promoters of youth marketing prefigured the system of capitalist accumu-
lation and government we have come to know as neoliberalism, precisely
by harboring critical attitudes toward the postwar capitalist order (which
also made them sympathetic toward counterculture)—celebrating creativ-
ity, experimental openness, individuated lifestyles, self-organization, flex-
ibility, the removal of rigid hierarchy, and schemes to extract values from
cultural volatility. Drawing on the postoperaist thought of Paolo Virno, Ger-
ald Raunig suggests that while Adorno and Horkheimer described the cul-
ture industry as a latecomer to Fordism, the contemporary culture industry
anticipated the post-Fordist transition ahead of the curve.39 What is crucial
for our discussion, however, is less the point that contemporary marketing
(or advertising) may have functioned as the leading edge of post-Fordism or
neoliberalism. Rather, we need to address the challenges of analyzing media
culture and culture industries in relation to the unstable and constantly mu-
[184] tomiko yoda

tating capitalist socius, in which multiple regimes of control and capture (as
well as lines of flight) coexist.
DJ Posters and Radical Media Criticism

The dj campaign operated across a variety of media platforms, including
television commercials, a tie-up television travel program, print ads, and
so on. But it is most remembered for a series of advertising posters that ap-
peared on the walls of train stations and inside train carts around the coun-
try in large numbers. Th ese posters powerfully linked the dj campaign to a
broader constellation of new images and discourses of feminized travel at
the time. Of particular importance was the campaign’s synergy with the new
generation of fashion and lifestyle magazines such as An・an and Non・no
that targeted young, unmarried female readers (launched in 1970 and 1971,
respectively). These magazines were unprecedented in many respects, utiliz-
ing the latest printing technology to pioneer large-sized all-gravure-printed
“glossy” magazines in Japan. Emphasizing visual appeal through their ample
use of color photography and innovative layout design, they promoted fash-
ion as a matrix of lifestyle, covering a wide variety of goods, services and
leisure activities, including travel. Although women’s magazines of the 1960s
occasionally ran fashion photos taken at well-known touristic destinations,
An・an and Non・no wedded fashion and travel with much greater frequency
and intensity. Their articles on travel typically featured photographs of fash-
ionably dressed models shot on location, striking casual but dynamic poses.
The photos also frequently played with the cultural/ethnic association of
places and the models, using tall white models to offset traditional Japanese
settings or staging the comical mismatch of city girls in rustic settings (see
figure 7.2).
The signature motif of early dj posters echoed the visual composition of
An・an and Non・no travel photographs—fashionable young women e ither
alone or in pairs against unnamed scenic or atmospheric backgrounds such as
natural landscapes, traditional storefronts, and temple hall interiors (see
figure 7.3). Instead of promoting particular touristic destinations, they fore-
grounded the ambience heightened by the unexpected chemistry between
the women and their surroundings. One of the first dj posters featured a
photograph of a young woman bending over the ground to rake fallen leafs
at an unspecified outdoor location (without even the fine print identifying
the place; see fig. 7.4). The image is so heavily blurred that we cannot make
out the model’s expression. We just see the uneven outline of her body and
Girlscape [185]
[fig. 7.2] Photo
graph from a fashion
and travel feature,
“Happy New Year at
‘Shinshū,’ ” An・an
(January 5, 1971).
[fig. 7.3] Discover

Japan poster no. 4,
January 1971.
[fig. 7.4] Discover
Japan poster no. 2,
November 1970.
clothing bleeding into the ruffled texture of the autumn light and colors that
surround her.
The massive circulation of dj posters, using cutting-edge advertising art
to promote the financially beleaguered and state-owned national railways,
did not go unnoticed by writers on the Left. Nakahira Takuma, a critic and
a leading proponent of radicalizing Japanese photography, recalls that when
the dj posters were first released, a friend teased him that Provoke (a short-
lived [1968–70] but influential coterie photography journal of which he was a
founding member) had become so big, even the Japanese National Railways
was doing the blur.40 Provoke was known for featuring photographs using
the so-called are, bure, boke (grainy, blurred, and out-of-focus) effects. The
journal was an experimental project seeking to negate the dominant mode
of photography, “which clings to meaning, begins with meaning and ends
up in meaning—photography as an illustration of pre-articulated words.”41
Moreover, Nakahira describes Provoke’s impulse to challenge the dominant
Girlscape [187]
regime of vision using the photographer’s “corporeal voice” (nikusei, glossed
in French as parole).42 Yet he ponders w hether the true lesson of Provoke,
which the dj posters brought home, might have been something more chill-
ing: “Though we dared to believe in are bure as techniques that resulted from
our raw experience of life, from the direct encounter with the world, they
were instantly transformed into a design (ishō). Our rebellious stance and
its image w ere tolerated and embraced as rebellious mood and rebellious
feeling.”43
Fujioka, for his part, claims that among the various advertising media that
his team used, the posters were most critical because they conveyed the dj
campaign’s inner theme, which was not only “discovering Japan” but also
“discovering myself.”44 He explains that the association of travel with self-
discovery was inspired by interviews he conducted with women about their
travel experiences. Interviewees spoke about their trips rapturously, as if de-
scribing scenes from movies in which they were the heroines. What seemed
to matter to these women was that travel offered them a setting in which
they could become someone other than their ordinary selves at home or at
the workplace.45 Fujioka then turned this observation into the idea that the
essence of travel lies in the longing that everyone has to break free of admin-
istered society and find another, more authentic self. If that was the case, the
dj campaign should arouse consumers’ desire to travel in order to discover
not a nature, a landscape, or a people but oneself.46
Hence, dj posters w ere designed to negate the referentiality of land-
scape photography used in conventional tourism ads.47 Moreover, the dj
project team agonized over the question of how to convey the journey of
self-discovery—the sensual experience of contact (and missed contact)—
without drawing too much attention to female models.48 In other words, they
sought to highlight the subjective experience but not the subject represented.
Thus, although there are clear formal differences between the colored blur of
dj posters and the grainy urban images of Nakahira’s monochrome photo
graphs from the Provoke era, we may detect certain strategic resonances be-
tween them. Nakahira himself hints that the dj campaign did not simply
mimic his technique but corroded the rapport between theory and praxis
by neutralizing the political relevance he had invested in an experimental
approach.49
Furthermore, by 1972, the dj posters seem to have become indicative for
Nakahira of the changing modality of power that the Left needed to contend
with—from the heavy-handed state suppression of dissent and insurgency
to the more dispersive and intimate effects of urbanization and the satura-
[188] tomiko yoda

tion of everyday life by mass media and commercial objects. Correspond-
ingly, Nakahira’s concern about the politics of image began moving away
from the problem of representation/signification to that of simulation. One
of his main theoretical sources on this issue appears to be a text that he does
not cite explicitly but evokes obliquely by referring to “the age of illusion/
image” ( gen’ei/imēji no jidai).50 This is the Japanese title of Daniel J. Boorstin’s
The Image; Or, What Happened to the American Dream (1962; published in
Japanese in 1964).51 In The Image, Boorstin argues that our experience of real
ity has been fundamentally altered under three major historical develop-
ments since the nineteenth c entury: (1) the “graphic revolution”—that is, the
explosive development of technologies to reproduce, transmit, and dissemi-
nate visual and acoustic images; (2) the exponential growth of mass media
and advertising; and (3) the growing reliance on manufactured events (staged
“pseudoevents”) in journalism, politics, and all forms of public relations.
“Image,” Boorstin writes, “more interesting than its original, has itself become
the original. The shadow has become the substance. Advertising men, indus-
trial designers, and packaging engineers are not deceivers of the public. . . .
They elaborate image, not only b ecause the image sells, but also b ecause the
image is what people want to buy.”52
For Nakahira, too, the “age of image” marks the prevalence of the simula-
tive process in which the image appears “more real” than reality and reality
begins to model itself on the image.53 Moreover, this predominance of the
image has triggered a perverse chain reaction, in which the medium becomes
more fetishized than the mediated content. Thus, Nakahira argues that the
image, which used to be a copy of reality, becomes autonomous, constituting
a second reality.54 Boorstin saw the proliferation of the image and of pseudo-
events as a deviation that unwittingly crept into American society. By con-
trast, Nakahira identified a system of control at work. We may draw a parallel
between Nakahira and the French situationist Guy Debord, who drew on
Boorstin while rejecting his conservative idealization of the past.55
In the early phases of the dj campaign, some voiced suspicion that the
posters served as state propaganda, falsely romanticizing the rural, the natu
ral, and the native. Nakahira cautions such critics that “authentic” nature,
rural life, and the reservoir of premodern traditions have already been ef-
faced from Japan. Regardless of the superficial appearance of differences, the
whole archipelago has become urbanized.56 Moreover, he argues that such an
ideological critique is ultimately ineffective because the dj posters are not
conventional mediums of propaganda, delivering false representations of
reality. Instead, they draw viewers into the image or design, which no longer
Girlscape [189]
represents and embellishes a message but is itself a message.57 In a sense, Na-
kahira seems to agree with Fujioka’s claim that the dj posters are less about
discovering Japan than about discovering “myself.” Yet, instead of the utopic
authenticity of the experiential subject (the true theme of the dj posters
according to Fujioka), he detects a form of capture: “The image ultimately
systematizes life itself. We are now living ourselves as image.”58 For Naka-
hira, the autoreferential system of advertising neutralizes the revolutionary
potential in the desire of the oppressed mass, arresting it in fascination with
an image of the “nature” and “freedom.”59
The Micropolitics of Girlscape

The female youth market that the advertisers and marketers speculated
on seems to have swiftly found a highly visible incarnation. By 1973, the
mainstream media w ere issuing reports on young w omen alone or in small
groups, crowding travel destinations (and urban shopping districts) pro-
moted by An・an and Non・no, carrying t hese magazines in their arms, and
dressed up in the youthful, hip fashion styles promoted by these titles. The
“An-non tribe” (an-non zoku) was described as a perplexing but harmless
outburst of feminine consumerist exuberance, more an object of mockery
than moral panic. However, in retrospect, some have observed that the
media at the time underestimated the significance of the event at play—that
is, the mastery over information on travel and many other fields of lifestyle
consumption switching from men to (young) w omen.60 Even though the
An-non tribe was relatively short-lived (diffusing into an exploding diver-
sity of youth fashion and means of consumption by the late 1970s), it inau-
gurated a continual series of girl and girly personae spotted on the streets
and touted in the media as the embodiments of latest consumer lifestyles.
The biopolitical effectiveness of girlscape, which aroused feminine pas-
sion for consumption, activating their bodies, and spawning a new form of
life (or at least a lifestyle), may conjure up the specter of a gendered cliché—
feminine and feminized consumers as easy prey to media deception/manip-
ulation. Yet, if as Nakahira suggests, the force of the dj posters bypasses the
conventional problematics of representation and the modern, liberal ethics
of communication (concern for truth value, reason, relevance, and so on),
the very question of w hether female consumers w ere duped by them would
be moot. It did not matter whether or not young women, either individu-
ally or in groups, interpreted the dj posters as the representation of gender,
youth, or nation—what was more important for the marketing of girlscape
[190] tomiko yoda

was that spontaneous and yet identifiable patterns of action by a large num-
ber of young women materialized the scene. Or, perhaps more accurately,
girlscape became operational as a mediatized milieu not only b ecause of the
fortuitous reverberations among commercial media brands but also because
of the intensity that female youth supplied. If advertising and media cam-
paigns helped project an environment of consumption and self-fashioning,
feminine bodies appeared to serve as the medium that relayed and amplified
its effects.
At the same time, this account of the emergence of girlscape may seem too
proximate to the very kind of marketing discourses that began to circulate
in the 1970s, which claimed to harness the dynamics of trends and booms,
profiting from these fluxes. If we follow Nakahira’s suggestion that the para-
digm of representation is no longer an adequate tool for analyzing the poli-
tics of media, should we also heed his caution that even if the dj poster
does not deceive, it still operates as an insidious form of postideological
control? Moreover, even if the concern over media deception and gullible
feminine consumers turns out to be a “false question,” how should feminism
approach girlscape and its implications for our present—that is, the media
mobilization of feminine bodies and affects that does not seem to hinge on
the construction of norms and meanings?
To begin responding to t hese questions, I want to turn to a different set of
scenes, t hose that preceded the appearance of girlscape. By so d oing, I hope
to foreground the forces at work in the emergence of girlscape, unnoticed
by cutting-edge marketers or by radical media critics at the time. In Janu-
ary 1968, Sō’en, a leading fashion (and dressmaking) magazine, ran a spe-
cial feature on travel. Together with a travel guide to a well-known touristic
destination, there are articles that list, in excruciating detail, the things one
needs to pack and all of the advanced planning to be done before taking off.
One of the articles enumerates various maxims to keep in mind while travel-
ing, and concludes by cautioning the readers that common inns are hostile
to women traveling by themselves: “If they see you smiling by yourself, they
will think that you are mentally unhinged. If you are quiet, they will worry
that you are about to kill yourself.”61 Sō’en’s tedious advice and fussy injunc-
tions give us a glimpse into the many forms of discipline expected of young
women that were taken for granted in the mass media of the time.
Writing in 1981, Tsumura Takashi traces the past decade back to two
seemingly unrelated events: on the one hand, the opposition against the re-
signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1970, and on the other hand, the
launch of the dj campaign and An・an. Tsumura characterizes the former,
Girlscape [191]
centered on student movements, as a radicalism aimed not only at social
but also subjective transformation—the metamorphosis of the subject (hen-
shin). The latter, however, demonstrated how capitalism stole this idea and
ran with it, especially by appealing to w omen, offering commercial and pre-
emptive self-transformation: “It was w omen more than youths who urgently
craved self-transformation at the time, trapped in the cage of m iddle-class
domesticity, isolated and stifled. If only the student radicals’ theme of subjec-
tive transformation could have been conveyed to women in terms accessible
to them, something truly momentous could have happened.”62 During the
1970s, Tsumura was a leading left activist/theorist of minoritarian causes and
a significant media critic. Anticipating the displacement of class politics by
semiotic consumption,63 he paid close attention to pop culture, advertising
(including the dj campaign), and the early discourses of lifestyle marketing.
While Nakahira was blind to the gender-modulated address of the dj post-
ers, Tsumura, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, identified the question of
women looming over the media-cultural shift that the campaign took part in.
Nevertheless, his lament over the missed opportunity for student radicals to
politicize feminine yearnings for self-transformation seems misplaced, if not
outright patronizing.
As many have testified, the constraints and expectations that followed
women to leisure travel in the late 1960s had also stalked them to the very
sites where established order was being radically challenged. At campus bar-
ricades and street clashes between students and riot police, female activists
were told to stay away from the frontlines, to crack pavements into pellets
for male comrades to throw, to take care of the injured, and to serve in the
“rice-ball brigade” (onigiri tai) so as to feed o
thers. The new generation of
radical feminists appeared in Japan in the early 1970s, voicing their rage over
the gender division of labor, sexism, and sexual exploitation that female ac-
tivists encountered in New Left movements.64 Recent scholarship has also
directed our attention to the limits imposed on female participation in radi-
cal artistic experimentations of the 1960s. Noting the absence of female
directors in small theater movements in Japan until the latter part of the
1970s, Nishidō Kōjin points out the patriarchal and homosocial tendencies
of underground (angura) theater in the 1960s.65 Citing Nishidō, Kuroda Raiji
comments on the homosociality and masculinism of “anti-art” performers
and performance groups of the 1960s, such as Zero Jigen. Kuroda observes a
pervasive failure to question patriarchal/heteronormative violence and op-
pression not only in works by these outliers of the art world but also in more
broadly recognized avant-garde performances by male artists at the time.66
[192] tomiko yoda

If Shinjuku was an urban refuge for migrant youths as Yoshimi has
suggested, perhaps it was not equally so for girls who had left their homes.
Fukasaku Mitsutada’s urban ethnography in late 1960s Shinjuku hints at the
gender pecking order operating in an informal sociality of street youths,
loosely held together by their common disdain for middle-class domestic-
ity.67 When the mass media clamored to report on the “loitering” ( fūten)
youths hanging out by Shinjuku station in the summer of 1967, Fukasaku saw
that the boys glowed under media attention—showing up in hippie-style hair
and attention-grabbing attire, responding to the barrage of reporters’ ques-
tions with idiosyncratic eloquence. Girls by contrast, he writes, remained
hemmed in by conventions, looking drab, sullen, and lacking in opinions of
their own.68 A documentary film on Japanese youth made in 1968, Nippon Year
Zero (Nippon zeronen), features Kyōko, who might have been one of the fūten
girls that Fukasaku studied.69 Not shy about speaking her mind when prod-
ded by an interviewer, she says she left home because she could not stand the
confinement of “familial relationships” and has been hanging out in Shinjuku
for about a year. Asked what she would like to do most, she answers that she
wants to go travelling and visit Kanazawa (a quaint, historical city that the
An-non tribe will flock to in a few years), so she can be alone and gaze into
herself. Though she had fled “the cage of domesticity” for a life on the street,
she appears ill at ease and restless, speaking repeatedly about wanting to find
herself, by any means possible, but she d
oesn’t know how to.
the dj campaign targeted young w omen as the social group least encum-
bered by the strictures of administered society, and thus they presented the
path of least resistance for promoting a hip, individuated lifestyle. Yet, as I
have sketched out above, not only in conventional disciplinary enclosures
such as the home, school, and workplace but also in leisure travel, oppositional
political activism, and even loitering on the streets, female youths seem to
have had more of a limited space to negotiate than their male counterparts.
If dj and other media campaigns of the early 1970s helped excite the new
mobility of traveling feminine bodies, it was in spite of the industries’ mis-
recognition of the multiple layers of constraints imposed on young w omen.
This is to say that the emergence of girlscape was a release of potential,
which was under blockage even in oppositional discourses and practices,
and in sites marginal to the mainstream. At the same time, we need to note
that this release was almost immediately recaptured as a form of new life-
style consumption and segmented mass, quickly normalized as the habitus
Girlscape [193]
of feminized youth as consumers. The currents that decode femininity, un-
mooring it from the relative fixity of social identity in a disciplinary regime
of mass society, also recode it as a more fluid set of qualities and person-
alities animating the mediatized milieu of consumption and biopolitical
production. Nevertheless, the gap between “before” and “after” the appear-
ance of girlscape is an important aperture for the feminist study of media
culture. Through this narrow fissure we can probe the forces pushing back
against the limited room for mobility afforded to young w omen, creating
pathways that cannot be reduced to preexisting social conditions, or to new
advertising and marketing techniques. Fujioka himself admits that the mo-
bilization of the An-non tribe was something unexpected (he appears un-
troubled by the irony of having built his career as an advertising guru on the
promise to control and repeat such unintended consequences).70
Thus, I would like to argue that the rapid proliferation of girlscape was a
political event, however minor, or precisely politics in a minor register, con-
ditioned on “missing the p eople”—that is, prearticulated forms of sociopo
litical identities and collective justification.71 It was not a contestation against
the capitalist state’s exploitation of the mass, an opposition to the patriarchal
subjugation specifically exercised on w omen, nor a generational rebellion
against the adult establishment. Instead, it was an assemblage of maneuvers
against the concrete, local, and yet broadly spread forms of constriction tra-
versing the ordinary lives of young w omen. I should hasten to add that my
intention is not to valorize the An-non tribe and their consumer lifestyle as
agents wresting “small victories” from the hegemonic—along the lines of ar-
guments often made in popular cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s. For
one, the An-non tribe did not constitute but was constituted in the milieu
that I have referred to as girlscape. Moreover, traveling, shopping, and dress-
ing up are not, in themselves, subversive to modern patriarchal norms and
clichés of “femininity.” Yet, as girlscape came into visibility, t hese quotid-
ian and dissipating practices, steeped in commercial media culture, exerted
tactical effects, jiggling loose new passages, enabling a new distribution and
mobility of feminine bodies in physical spaces and mediascape. And, in that
process, these practices marked something heterogeneous to the design,
operation, and logic of marketing. As I suggested at the beginning of this
chapter, the marketing of mediatic ambience has been theorized as an indi-
cation that contemporary capitalism increasingly encompasses social life
as a w hole, foreclosing any exteriority. The history of girlscape challenges us
to map the difference not against but immanent to this field, dilating as it
does out of minor figures and their micropolitics. It draws our attention to
[194] tomiko yoda

media-cultural transformation in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as
a contentious and contingent event that involved radical practices and theo-
rization, competing strategies within culture industries, speculations made
on misguided assumptions, and feminine bodies, desires, and imaginations
pressing against the power holding them in tight spaces.
notes
1. Baudrillard discusses this notion both in his System of Objects [1968] and in The
Consumer Society: Myths and Structures [1970]. See Jean Baudrillard, The System of Ob-
jects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996); Jean Baudrillard, Consumer Society:
Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998).
2. Adam Arvidsson, Brand: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (London: Rout-
ledge, 2006), 36.
3. Arvidsson, Brand, 77.
4. Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry: The Mediatization of Things
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 9.
5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 89.
On the complexity of Marx’s own views on consumption and its relation to production,
distribution, and exchange, see Jason Read, The Micro-politics of Capital: Marx and the
Prehistory of the Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), especially
48–60.
6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 94.
7. Zwick Detleve and Julien Cayla, eds., Inside Marketing Practices, Ideologies, Devices
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 236–37.
8. Arvidsson, Brand, 74.
9. Maurizo Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media,” republicart, accessed June 2015, www
.republicart.net/disc/representations/lazzarato01_en.h
tm.
10. Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (London: Routlege, 2004), 6.
11. Kido Hiroyuki, “Shōhi kigōron to wa nandatta no ka?” [What was the theory
of consumer semiotics?], in Wakamono ron o yomu, ed. Kotani Satoshi (Kyoto: Sekai
Shisōsha, 1993), 86–109.
12. Some of the representative pronouncements from mid-1980s on the displace-
ment of the mass market by the segmented mass include Across Henshūshitsu, ed., Ima,
chōtaishū no jidai: shin shōhin-kankyōron [Now, is the age of the meta-mass: the new
theory of product environment] (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1985); Hakuhōdō Sōgō Seikatsu
Kenkyūjo ed., Bunshū no tanjō: nyū pīpuru o tsukamu shijō senryaku to wa [The age of
segmented mass: what is the market strategy for capturing the new people?] (Tokyo:
Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1985); and Fujioka Wakao, Sayonara taishū: kansei jidai o dō
yomuka [Goodbye mass: how to read the age of sensibility] (Tokyo: php Bunko, 1987).
13. Akihiro Kitada, Kōkokutoshi Tokyo: Sono tanjō to shi [Advertising city, Tokyo: Its
birth and death] (Tokyo: Kōsaidō, 2002), 93–94.
Girlscape [195]
14. I would like to acknowledge Vera Mackie’s use of “girlscape” as a term convey-
ing a peculiar “place of young girl (shōjo) in Japanese culture.” In a nuanced study of the
contemporary subcultural figure of “Lolita” in Japan, Mackie unpacks its relation to the
longer genealogy of discourses on shōjo, stretching back at least to the early twentieth
century. See Vera C. Mackie, “Reading Lolita in Japan,” in Girl Reading Girl in Japan,
eds. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (New York: Routledge, 2010). While I adopt
the term “girlscape” in this chapter, my use of “girl” in “girlscape” is not meant to be a
translation of shōjo. Instead, it refers to the new conceptualization of feminine youth
emerging out of the media-cultural transformations in the late 1960s and early 1970s
Japan. Moreover, although I did not have the space to elaborate on this issue h ere, I
initially coined the term “girlscape” to work off and against the “landscape” ( fūkei) de-
bated by filmmakers and critics who sought to theorize the nonrepressive forms of
control permeating the urbanized, commodified, and technologically mediated quotid-
ian (nichijō) in post-1968 Japan. While leftist critics such as Nakahira Takuma (whom
I will discuss later in this chapter) and Matsuda Masao identified the landscape as an
apparatus of the capitalist state, I propose to approach girlscape as a milieu of creation
and capture, tactical resistance and modulated control. Moreover, while Nakahira and
Matsuda were invested in positing the autonomy of political subject that “tears up”
(kirisaku) the landscape of seductive lure, inauthentic image, and regressive, mock uto-
pia (mobilizing a whole host of predictable gender binaries in the process), I discuss the
politics of girlscape in relation to the new distribution and mobility of feminine bodies
it afforded. On the association of “landscape” with an ironic citation of maternal fantasy
(the utopic desire to return to the womb), see Matsuda Masao, Fūkei no shimetsu [The
extinction of landscape] (Tokyo: Kōshisha, 2013), especially 7–20 and 141–50. For a so-
phisticated discussion of landscape theory and its critical innovation, see Yuriko Fu-
ruhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking of the Season of Image
Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
15. Gekkan Across Henshūshitsu, ed. Kyanpēn obu Paruko: Paruko no senden sen-
ryaku [Campaign of Parco: Parco’s advertising strategy] (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan,
1984), 40.
16. Masuda Tsūji, “Sōzōteki Paruko kyōwakoku: Sono kyōkan konseputo” [Republic
of creative Parco:Its concept of sympathy], Senden kaigi (November 1976): 12.
17. Gekkan Across Henshūshitsu, Paruko no senden senryaku, 31.
18. The target of sales for Ikebukuro Parco was somewhat broader: nineteen-to
twenty-nine-year-old single women. See Gekkan Across Henshūshitsu, Paruko no sen-
den senryaku, 58.
19. Yoshimi Shun’ya, “ ‘Made in Japan’: The Cultural Politics of ‘Home Electrifica-
tion’ in Postwar Japan,” Media, Culture, and Society 21, no. 2 (1999): 158–60.
20. Gekkan Across Henshūshitsu, Paruko no senden senryaku, 182–83.
21. Ueno Chizuko, “Onna to iu shisō” [A theory called w oman], in Onna no
nanajūnendai, 1969–1986: Paruko posutā ten, ed. Masuda Tsūji (Tokyo: Disuku Emu,
2001), 28
22. Fujioka Wakao, Karei naru shuppatsu: Disukabā Japan [A splendid departure:
Discover Japan] (Tokyo: Asahi Shuppan, 1972), 29–30.
[196] tomiko yoda

23. Fujioka, Karei naru shuppatsu, 32.
25. Fujioka Wakao, Mōretsu kara byūtifuru e [From gung-ho to beautiful] (Tokyo:
Dentsū Shuppan, 1991), 17.
26. Fujioka Wakao et al., “Zadankai: Disukabā Japan kyanpēn uraomote” [Roundtable
discussion: Front and back of Discover Japan campaign], Senden kaigi (January 1972): 18.
See also Fujioka, Mōretsu kara byūtifuru e, 92.
27. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the
Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 26.
28. They performed kamishibai, or “paper theater”—a street theater for children
popular before the war and during the early postwar era. It tells stories through narra-
tion and by showing a series of illustrated boards.
29. Masuda Tsūji, Kaimaku beru wa natta: Masuda shiatā e yōkoso [The opening bell
has rung: Welcome to Masuda theater] (Tokyo: Tokyo Shinbun, 2005), 110–12.
30. Adam Arvidsson, Marketing Modernity: Italian Advertising from Fascism to Post-
modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), 112–19. Also see Frank, Conquest of Cool, 119–21.
31. Hamano Yasuhiro, Fasshonka shakai: Ryūdōka shakai, fasshon bijinesu, kyōkan
bunka [Fashionizing society: Society in flux, fashion business, and the culture of sym-
pathy] (Tokyo: Bijinesusha, 1970), 74.
32. Gekkan Across Henshūshitsu, Paruko no senden senryaku, 134–36.
33. Yoshimi Shun’ya, Toshi no doramaturugī: Tokyo sakariba no shakaishi [Drama-
turgy of the city: The social history of Tokyo and entertainment districts] (Tokyo:
Kōbundo, 1987), 296.
34. Yoshimi, Toshi no doramaturugī, 320–21.
35. Miura Atsushi, Jiyū no jidai no fuan na jibun: Shōhi shakai no datsu shinwa
[The anxious self in the age of freedom: Demythologizing consumer society] (Tokyo:
Shōbunsha, 2006), 125.
36. Masuda Tsūji, “Shibuya: Machi wa butai da” [Shibuya: City is a theater], parts
1–4, Asahi Shinbun, morning edition, October 7, 1986; October 8, 1986; October 9, 1986;
October 10, 1986.
37. Masuda, Kaimaku beru wa natta, 113.
38. Masuda, Kaimaku beru wa natta, 107.
39. Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray, and Ulf Wuggenig, eds., Critique of Creativity: Pre-
carity, Subjectivity, and Resistance in the “Creative Industries” (London: Mayfly, 2011),
197; and Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary
Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cacaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Ange-
les: Semiotext(e), 2004), 58–59.
40. Nakahira Takuma, Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga [Fire on the shore of continual look-
ing] (Tokyo: Orisis, 2007), 234.
41. Nakahira, Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga, 231.
42. Nakahira, Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga, 233. For a more extensive discussion of this
concept, see Miryam Sas’s chapter in this volume.
43. Nakahira, Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga, 233–34.
Girlscape [197]
46. Fujioka, Karei naru shuppatsu, 48. We need not take Fujioka’s account of how
the campaign theme evolved at face value, especially given the fact that (as many have
pointed out) dj’s copy bears more than a passing resemblance to the “Discover Amer
ica” tourism campaign in the United States that began in 1967. Moreover, Fujioka’s slip-
pery rhetoric, which begins with observations on feminine theatricality and moves on
to associate travel with the authentic masculine yearning for emancipation, or how the
journey of self-discovery becomes translated into the campaign title advocating the dis-
covery of Japan, raises many questions. For a series of penetrating analyses on these is-
sues, see Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1997).
49. Nakahira, Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga, 234.
50. Nakahira, Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga, 215; Nakahira Takuma, Naze shokubutsu
zukan ka: Nakahira Takuma hihyō seishū, 1965–1977 [Why an illustrated botanical
dictionary: Nakahira Takuma’s critical writings, 1965–1977] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō,
2007), 281.
51. The Japanese translation of Boorstin’s book is, Gen’ei no Jidai: Masukomi ga seizō
suru jijitsu [The age of illusion: The manufactured reality by mass media], trans. Gotō
Kazuhiko and Hoshino Ikumi (Tokyo: Gensōsha, 1964); on the book cover, the Japa
nese word “gen’ei” (illusion) in the title is glossed in English as image.
52. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York:
Vintage Books, 1992), 204.
53. Although Nakahira did not use the term “simulation,” his writings from the 1970s
repeatedly allude to the problem of the growing autonomy/disassociation of “copy” vis-
à-vis its original, “design” vis-à-vis its content, or “image” vis-à-vis its supposed referent,
sometimes using the term “graphism” to discuss this condition (see for example, his essay
“Gurafizumu gensōron” [Theory of graphism as an illusion], in Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi
ga, 114–26).
54. Nakahira Takuma, Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga, 215.
55. Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, 1994), 199.
56. Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 279.
57. Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 282–83.
58. Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 281.
59. Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 282–84.
60. Mabuchi Kōsuke, Zokutachi no sengoshi [A postwar history of tribes] (Tokyo:
Sanseidō, 1989), 223–32.
61. “Tabi no kokoroe jukkajō” [Ten maxims for travelling], Sō’en (January 1968): 63.
62. Tsumura Takashi, “An・an kara no jūnen” [Ten years since An・an], Waseda bun-
gaku (August 1981): 28.
63. Tsumura Takashi, “70nen bunka kakumei to ‘hōkōtenkan’ no shomondai” [The
cultural revolution of the 70s and the problems of “changing course”], Shin nihon bun-
gaku (May 1972): 159.
[198] tomiko yoda
64. I make this point while acknowledging Setsu Shigematsu’s warning not to reduce
the complex relations between the New Left movements and the rise of radical femi-
nism in Japan to the issue of feminist outrage against the former’s sexism. See Setsu
Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The W omen’s Liberation Movement in Japan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 55–62.
65. Nishidō Kōjin, “Enshutsuka no shigoto” [The work of the director], in Enshut-
suka no shigoto: 60nendai, angura, engeki kakumei, eds. Nihon Enshutsusha Kyōkai and
Nishidō Kōjin (Tokyo: Renga Shobō Shinsha, 2006), 60–61.
66. Kuroda Raiji, Nikutai no anākizumu: 1960nendai nihon bijutsu ni okeru pafōmansu
no chika suimyaku [Anarchy of the body: Undercurrents of performance art in 1960s
Japan] (Tokyo: Grambooks, 2010), 408.
67. Fukasaku Mitsutada, Shinjuku kōgengaku [Shinjuku modernology] (Tokyo:
Kadokawa Shuppan, 1968), 128.
68. Fukasaku, Shinjuku kōgengaku, 147–48.
69. There are many uncertainties about the history of this film, which began as a col-
laborative documentary project organized by Ōtsuka Kano, a producer at the Nikkatsu
film studio. The segments on Kyōko and other fūten youths were apparently composed
of documentary footage taken by Kawabe Kazuo. Nippon Zeronen [Nippon Year Zero],
dir. Kazuo Kawabe and Shigeya Fujitam (Tokyo: Paionia ldc), dvd.
70. Fujioka Wakao, ed. Disukabā Japan 40nen kinen katarogu [Discover Japan forti-
eth anniversary commemorative catalogue] (Tokyo: php Kenkyūsha, 2010), 119.
71. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 216.
Girlscape [199]
8. 1980S N YŪ A K A
(Non)Media Theory as Romantic Performance
a l e x a n de r z a h lten
Oboccha-man Asada Akira (roughly “man-child Asada Akira”) is the title of

an article written by Ura Tatsuya for the journal Ushio in 1984.1 The essay is a
commentary on the notorious and until then unthinkable success of Asada’s
book Structure and Power (Kōzō to chikara: Kigōron o koete) and the im
mense media presence that followed.2 Observers at the time were stunned
by the fact that a book on poststructuralist theory could become a massive
best seller. Asada and a slew of young academic celebrities that appeared
at this time were branded as belonging to “New Academism” (Nyū Aka-
demizumu or Nyū Aka) and became the center of an intense public interest
that they reacted to with astonishing media savvy. Yet in the previously un-
imaginable near-omnipresence of these pop stars, speaking in the language
of French high theory in print, on the radio, and on prime time tv, t here
is one conspicuous and surprising absence: The arguably most intense diffu-
sion of “theory” in popular media—in fact, theory’s synchronization with the
rhythms of popular culture—takes place without a formulated media theory.
This fact is all the more remarkable seeing as media theory had been
building up to a critical mass in Japan since the mid-1960s.3 It was the dif-
fusion of tv that had initially raised the question of media specificity and
led to attempts to modify what had previously been an almost entirely print-
focused area of inquiry. Katō Hidetoshi’s “The age of television” (Terebi jidai,
1958), and especially his “From spectacle shows to television” (Misemono
kara terebi e, 1965), opened up new lines of questioning at a time when
media and communications studies w ere still largely conducted u
nder the
umbrella of shinbungaku (newspaper studies). Publications such as manga
superstar Ishinomori Shōtarō’s “Introduction to manga artistry” (Manga-
ka nyūmon, 1965) stake out an aesthetic specificity for manga, and the first
introduction to Marshall McLuhan appears in 1967 (see Marc Steinberg’s
chapter in this volume). The subsequent McLuhan boom is also a sign of a
heightened sensitivity to media as a larger formation.
In discourse on film throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, the attempt to
negotiate medium specificity vis-à-vis the increasing interconnectedness of
media gravitated around the term eizō, roughly translatable as “technically
mediated (moving) images.”4 According to Kitada Akihiro, in the 1970s such
approaches to non-text-based media platforms exerted influence back onto
literary theory, with Maeda Ai’s seminal “The creation of the modern reader”
(Kindai dokusha no seiritsu, 1973) becoming a particularly central work. At
the same time publications on jōhō shakai / “information society” and jōhō
kankyō / “information environment” were gaining currency throughout the
1970s and taking a wider perspective on media interactions.5 It seemed as if
the time of media theory was arriving.
Why then did the appearance in the early 1980s of the first generation of
scholars to surf the entire breadth of the mediascape with apparent ease also
press the pause button on the broad discussion of theoretical approaches to
media? Arguably, this happened at exactly the same moment that the media
ecology in Japan transitions into a quantitatively and qualitatively new de-
gree of intensity. Yet not u ntil the petering out of New Aca discourse in the
late 1980s to early 1990s would this line of inquiry resume, with books such
as “Telephone as media “ (Media toshite no denwa) in 1992.6 How can we
explain this strange state of affairs?
This question, however, may rely on a false premise. This chapter will
explore what one might call the implicit media theory of Nyū Aka discourse
and especially the “man-child” Asada Akira. It will map a grand and par-
tially failed experiment in redefining the practice of “theory” itself, which
plays out exactly as a performed media theory. Put differently, it is in the
practice of highly self-reflexive, playful, and ironic performance—all in the
context of the high time of consumer culture and the “high-image” society
(Yoshimoto Takaaki) in Japan—that a media theory is formulated.7 Various
voices have claimed a seminal break in the practice of shisō (theory/thought)
in the early 1980s.8 This chapter will attempt to map some aspects of the trans-
formations of that time through the implicit media theory it developed.
1980s “Nyū Aka” [201]

Paranoiacs, Schizo-Kids, and Performativity
When in 2008 cultural critic Kayama Rika asked Nakazawa Shinichi if he and
the other stars of New Aca discourse at the time assumed that their readers
understood their arguments or theoretical frameworks, he simply laughed
and replied, “Most definitely no.”9 And yet their writings achieved a com-
mercial success that was regarded as a sensation at the time. It has become
customary to point out that when Structure and Power, an introduction to
poststructuralist thought, was published in September 1983, certainly no one
expected it to sell 150,000 copies and become a major best seller. Nakazawa
published his similarly successful Tel-Quel and Kristeva-infused “Mozart in
Tibet” (Chibetto no mōtsuaruto) in 1983, and only half a year a fter his first
book Asada published “A theory of escape” (Tōsōron), which became another
best seller. On January 23, 1984, an article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper
identified a group of emerging young theorists as part of Nyū Akademizumu
(New Academism). They quickly became the center of a publishing boom
and, in a way, their own transmedia franchise. This loose grouping was seen
to center mostly on young graduates of Tokyo University or Kyoto Univer-
sity, such as Asada, Nakazawa, Yomota Inuhiko, and—one of the few female
“members”—Ueno Chizuko. However, the group also came to include more
senior names, such as Karatani Kōjin, Hasumi Shigehiko, and Kurimoto
Shinichirō, who had written works that in many ways prepared the performa-
tive mode of theorization that came into full force after Structure and Power.
While the intense media presence of the group associated with the Nyū
Aka label was founded in print culture—a connection we w ill return to
shortly—these theorists were common guests on radio and television. No
one was more present than Asada Akira, who became the main representa-
tive of the diffuse Nyū Aka designation. He could be found on television pre-
senting his thoughts on fractals, cellular automata, or the Menger sponge.
For a pop-cultural moment he was seen as cool, and carrying his books
was a fashion statement. While it is almost a tradition among those writ-
ing about Nyū Aka discourse to announce the suspicion that virtually no
one read Asada’s volumes beyond the front page and some of the graphs, a
number of buzzwords from the books immediately entered into circulation.
Among these were two contemporary archetypes Asada sets up with some
inspiration taken from Deleuze: the paranoiacs and the schizo-kids. Despite
understanding New Aca’s role as a performative (media) practice and not as
a group with a coherent theory, it is nonetheless useful to consider some of
the conceptual ground that Asada covers.
[202] alexander zahlten

Paranoiacs were essentially conceived as a personification of the mod-
ern. Functioning along a logic of accumulation and control, the paranoiac
searches out information only for the purpose of integrating it into a larger,
cohesive structure— differently put, a grand narrative. In contrast, the
schizo-kids are nomadic, rejoicing in the fragmentary and an excess of in-
formation. To explain these strategies Asada sets up two further terms, shi-
rake (to be left cold) and nori (to get on board). Shirake describes the feeling
of being unimpressed, maybe even cynical about a situation, which Asada
saw as one of the attributes of information-saturated, depoliticized and me-
diatized youth culture. Nori is a straight-faced adherence to and passion for
something, which is by implication associated with the student movement of
the 1950s and 1960s. However, the schizo-kids do not commit themselves to
either, as this would represent an acceptance of grand-narrative type consis-
tency. Rather they oscillate between the two, dipping their toes into commit-
ment and then returning to the opposite pole of disinterest. This movement is
what Asada describes as asobi, or play.
The schizo-kids were in some ways the intellectualized and idealized ver-
sion of the early 1980s subcultural category of the moment, the New H umans
(shinjinrui). The New H umans were conceived and promoted by a new alli-
ance of academic writing and fashion and lifestyle magazines and referred
to the generation that graduated from university in the late 1970s and early
1980s. They w ere defined by a specific relation to labor that distinguished
them from the previous prototype of the salaryman. Working primarily in
“creative” jobs and in the media, they were seen as stylish free agents exist-
ing in an economic sphere parallel to that of corporate office workers. An
amalgamation of popular fantasies and actual shifts toward less long-term
contractual work relations, shinjinrui was a category made possible by the
intensification of consumer culture, and indeed Asada makes this connec-
tion for his loftier schizo kids. At the center of the schizo-kids’ existence is
not only a nomadic mode of navigating information but the performativity
involved in handling it.
One of the most visible examples of the New Human phenomenon was
Itoi Shigesato, in some sense the advertising industry counterpart to Asada:
a near-omnipresent media personality of the early 1980s and something of
a prototype for the shinjinrui category.10 Itoi also personified the supposed
switch from political activism to an intensified, self-reflexive consumer culture.
Initially active in the student movement, Itoi became famous for designing
the postmodern advertising campaigns for the fashionable department store
chain Parco. His highly successful activities eventually ranged from designing
1980s “Nyū Aka” [203]

calendars to writing books, developing video games and conducting inter-
views for magazines with public figures and intellectuals. It is with figures
such as Itoi or Asada that one of the decisive strategies of the early 1980s
comes into relief. As one writer claims, “When regarding Itoi Shigesato and
what one might call his constantly changing associations, one realizes that
more than what we conventionally call a medium—such as tv, magazines or
newspapers—Itoi the person himself is the medium.”11
Such a Copernican turn to the human as medium is in fact an increas-
ingly common theme from the late 1970s onward, and is deeply embedded
in New Aca practice. It is an important element of the econo-cultural cur-
rent that Asada in particular picks up on, and that leaves few of the New Aca
associates untouched. This is also one of the reasons that New Aca is t oday
often evaluated as the moment of the commodification of theory in Japan.
The acceleration of discovering ever-new subcultural groups, such as the
New H umans, to write about is then only one symptom of this consumer-
oriented approach to theorization.12 Indeed, Karatani Kōjin, with his strong
background in Marxist theory, felt uneasy with New Aca—and certainly
with being grouped in it—almost as soon as it appeared. Karatani felt that
the postmodern/poststructuralist approaches New Aca developed and mar-
keted were too closely synchronized with accelerating consumption cycles—
in this case the consumption of knowledge.13 An increasing turn to tenta-
tively explicit leftist politics of critique and resistance in the late 1980s and
especially the run-up to the first Iraq war were seen as marking the end of
Nyū Aka (ニュー・アカ), or rather the turn toward, as Sasaki Atsushi puts it,
the homophonic Nyū Aka (“New Red” / ニュー・赤).14
This somewhat s imple narrative of repoliticization needs to be compli-
cated if we are to understand what New Aca’s strategies in the 1980s were
designed for. As Asada himself claims several years later, he was following an
accelerationist master plan that “attempted to drive consumption towards
the extreme point when it becomes apparent that it is ‘game over.’ ”15 This
point, of course, never arrived—despite the burst of the assets bubble and
the onset of recession in the early 1990s—and Asada would later take re-
course to his model of infantile capitalism to find a longer-term explana-
tion for the resilience of the system.16
New Aca as a set of practices without doubt took a highly participatory
stance toward capitalist commodification and market-oriented performativ-
ity. However, as a practice it also widened the scope of how theory functions.
New Aca discourse shifted the performance itself into the practice of the-
orization, made the theorist into the medium of the performed discourse,

[fig. 8.1] Screenshot from “Asada Akira tv.”
and blurred the lines between content and form. It integrated the lessons of
Marshall McLuhan and his reception in Japan into the idea of the public in-
tellectual: the medium is the message is the celebrity academic. In terms of
mediation, New Aca enthusiastically participated in the dissolution of bor-
ders between theory and theorizing practice, between transmission and per
formance, mediated and mediating. Along this line it is not surprising that
Asada Akira’s almost only explicit treatment of a media platform—the com-
puter and its synthetic, postmedium, virtual qualities—was itself designed as
a tv series called “Asada Akira tv,” with Asada essentially becoming televi
sion (see fig. 8.1). Such a complex strategy necessitated a significant shift in
the mode of delivery, both in terms of media practice and in terms of what
we might diffusely call (performed) sensibility. Irony—in its definition as
radical undecidability—in particular was a central part of the New Aca proj
ect, and it is one that is extensively discussed by the New Aca associates.17
1980s “Nyū Aka” [205]

This ironic strategy is, historically speaking, high context. It forms as a re-
action to very specific developments in both academia and society in Japan
in the 1960s and 1970s, about which more in a moment, and its effects on theo-
ries of media can still be felt today. But irony also presents a link for an in-
direct historical connection—that between early German Romanticism and
New Aca—that this chapter w ill touch upon briefly. First, however, a brief
look at the direct prehistory of New Aca discourse will offer some insights
into the role of play and performance.
Transitioning to New Aca

For the volume “Film: Ecriture of seduction” (Eiga: Yūwaku no ekurichūru),
Hasumi Shigehiko designed the format of the book and of the text to con-
form to the 35-millimeter film ratio of 1.33 to 1, which Asada saw as one sign
of Hasumi transforming words into film. This dissolution of formal bor-
derlines between media platforms may seem to run counter to the ideas of
medium specificity that Hasumi seems to uphold when he valorizes film
(and the analog) over tv (and the digital). Asada however interprets such an
argument as simply an ironic, self-consciously “snobbish” gesture.18 Hasumi
and Kurimoto Shinichirō were the figureheads of a beginning shift in criti-
cism/theory in the 1970s that embraced form as a central channel of com-
munication. It was a shift that struck a nerve, especially with the generation
that had been born in the mid-to late 1950s.
Hasumi was originally known for translations of French literature (Flau-
bert) and theory (Deleuze). In the late 1970s, he began to publish extensively
on film, poststructuralist theory, and questions of criticism. Hasumi’s writ-
ings quickly gained a reputation for near esoteric, unusually long sentences—
one of his books famously begins with a sentence stretching one and a half
pages—and almost deliberately oblique arguments.19 Yet Hasumi acquired
a small but dedicated following among university students, though less for
his introductions to poststructuralist theory than for his writings on film.
Director Kurosawa Kiyoshi, a student of Hasumi’s at Rikkyo University, re-
members that Hasumi’s focus on film as an aesthetic formation to be played
with, and not as necessarily representative of an explicit political stance, was
perceived as liberating by a young generation increasingly phobic and wary
of direct and programmatic political expression (and indeed, tawamure, or
jest/play, was one of Hasumi’s central concepts).20 For the same reason, it
was also eyed suspiciously by an older generation of intellectuals. In a dis-
cussion between Hasumi and Yoshimoto Takaaki, who in some ways was

a transitional figure between traditional politicized public intellectuals and
New Aca discourse, Yoshimoto admits to harboring doubts whether Ha-
sumi is serious. Hasumi replies that when writing, he is confused, and in
turn the reader is confused as well; however, “if both are confused anyway
then playing [tawamurete] with that confusion is one way to go.”21
The reasons for this shift from a transmission model of theory (and
politics) to a formalistic, performative one are multiple, but two appear
particularly plausible. Firstly, the readers of the early 1980s were the first
generation that had grown up in an everyday suffused by an overabundance
of visual, textual, and aural media. Moving image media now seamlessly
permeated both private and public space, and were not just situated in the
anti-quotidian spectacle of cinema or street corner television. This provided
a perspective on media that went beyond a mere transmission model that
understands media as merely transporting “content.” It is a perspective that
intuitively recognizes media materiality and the forms that it helps produce
as constitutive of the meaning it produces.
Secondly, the emergence of media-aesthetic form as a principal force in
communication, as opposed (as far as this can be separated) to the level of
content, was accompanied by a decrease in at least very explicit political
stances in media texts. The much repeated idea that a general disillusion-
ment with explicitly formulated (leftist) politics and political action set in
after the discovery of the horrific internal violence within the United Red
Army in 1971 and 1972 is in definite need of reassessment. In its rough out-
line, however, it adequately describes a very real and much-registered de-
politicization of public discourse that was concomitant with the rejection
of—not only political—blunt communication.
Kurimoto Shinichirō was more aggressive than Hasumi in abandoning
the humanist stance of earlier public intellectuals. It was Kurimoto that is
often purported to have coined—or at least popularized—the term “shinjin-
rui,” and even more than Hasumi he became a common presence in maga-
zines and on tv. In his writings, Hasumi (who was originally an economist)
picked up on the (French) intellectual trends of the 1970s—such as Bataille’s
ideas on an economy of expenditure based on the tradition of potlatch—and
quickly morphed them into more general theories of society. Kurimoto was
less willfully perplexing in his writing style than Hasumi, yet much more
performatively provocative and antihumanist, with one of his best-known
books on h uman society being “Apes in pants” (Pantsu o haitta saru, 1981).
It is no doubt significant that the two intellectuals to most visibly begin re-
defining academic discourse in the public sphere w ere an economist and a
1980s “Nyū Aka” [207]

cinephile who cared increasingly less about the boundaries of their disci-
plines, and who were both subject to a strong influence by French poststruc-
turalist theory.22
Hasumi and Kurimoto w ere becoming part of the mainstream of intel-
lectual practice with their shift from explanatory criticism, or hihyō, to style
and performance (for an analysis of the significance of hihyō to intellectual
discourse in Japan, see the chapter by Kitano Keisuke in this volume). How-
ever, this breaking down of borders between realms of expertise and both
modes and platforms of expression was taking place in the Japanese media
more generally. Structurally speaking, a negotiation between respective media
set in, one that experimented with the overlapping and the coordination of
media channels. Such intensified interaction between theater, film, literature,
and the graphic arts was perhaps most prominently practiced in the 1960s
by Terayama Shuji, but it affected nearly all artistic practice of the younger
generation, often u nder the umbrella term “intermedia” (intāmedia). Even
in the realm of highly commercial “pink film” production, the combination
of stage performances and pink film screenings became commonplace in the
late 1960s.23 The mid-1970s then saw the introduction of the systematic media
mikkusu (media mix) as a mainstream business strategy, most confronta-
tionally and—again, significantly—performatively practiced by the publish-
ing company Kadokawa and its flamboyant president, Kadokawa Haruki.24
Kadokawa entered the film industry in 1976 and began to coordinate
marketing efforts for novels, films based on novels, and film soundtracks to
immense success. The company and the man were reviled by film critics
because of Kadokawa’s heavy reliance on advertising, media spectacle, and
what they termed a “superficial image culture.” Kadokawa also marketed the
concept of the media mix itself as part of the Kadokawa brand, introducing
a new level of self-reflexivity that is one of the most significant aspects of late
1970s and early 1980s media culture in Japan. Additionally, he introduced
a new kind of talent in the Kadokawa sannin musume (“three Kadokawa
girls”), most successfully with the actresses Yakushimaru Hiroko and Ha-
rada Tomoyo, whom he used to tie together the films, music, magazines,
and other products he sold while carefully avoiding providing them with a
fixed public image. To remain semiotically flexible and mobile across media
platforms, the actresses had to remain as empty and, in a sense, as unreal as
possible.
At the same time, new formats in established media platforms were work-
ing hard to establish and commodify a culture of amalgamation. The maga-
zine Yū (Play), which was published from 1971 to 1982, is one of the most

intriguing examples. Conceived and edited by Matsuoka Seigō, who later
became the chairman of ntt’s Information Culture Research Forum (see
Marilyn Ivy’s essay in this volume for more on ntt’s activities), Play was
an eccentrically designed wild fusion of topics (from design to academia
to criticism to art and media) that unapologetically announced its roaming
attitude toward knowledge and synthetic playfulness in its fragmented, no-
holds-barred design and cover subtitles: “[Moving] from Higher Learning to
Play Learning,” “Logic Is Fashionable,” “Stealing Isn’t Scary if We All Do It
Together,” and, referencing the publication’s self-reflexive and ironic spin, “Yū
Is an Important Magazine That Will Show You the Forest and the Trees.”25
Play, previously mentioned as a central term for Hasumi as well, was becom-
ing a kind of cultural paradigm, preparing the way for the “man-child” Asada
Akira’s explosive entrance.
Enter the New Aca: Tropes and Themes

The perception of a generational divide became central to the rhetoric that
suffused New Aca’s reception, again, often with a focus on Asada Akira. The
idea of youth as dangerously disruptive is of course common anywhere, and
had gone through recent cycles in Japan as well. As a media manifestation,
it most prominently featured in the postwar taiyōzoku (“sun tribe”) films of
the 1950s and in periodic sensational crimes committed by young adults. But
this time it seemed that youth was beginning to be perceived less as a prob-
lematic phase than as both an essential alterity and an optional state. The
term “shinjinrui” and its c areer in lifestyle magazines is a testament to this.
This shift had been brewing for quite some time. By the mid-1970s, terms
such as naikō sedai (inward-looking generation) and mijuku (unripe/imma-
ture) were in common use by cultural critics, and the bestselling book “The
age of the moratorium human” (Moratoriamu ningen no jidai, 1978) by psy-
choanalyst Okonogi Keigo announced the inability to mature as a national
problem.26 In the early 1980s, this trope began to be used in a more ambigu-
ous sense, sometimes with scorn and at times as valorization. It became in-
tricately tied to the public image of New Aca discourse.
Especially in the first years after Asada entered the public media sphere,
it became almost mandatory to allude to his youthful appearance and the
young age at which he had achieved his extraordinary prominence. Miyamoto
Mitsugu, in an article titled “The Complete Mystery of This Terribly Difficult
Book’s Sales,” in a special on the “Asada phenomenon” in the Asahi Journal in
1984, only refers to him as the “boy Asada” (shōnen Asada), connecting him
1980s “Nyū Aka” [209]

to the “internationally virulent” Peter Pan syndrome. Ura Tatsuya of nhk
(Japan Broadcasting Corporation) is much more positive about Asada, while
retaining the association of adolescence in his above-mentioned “man-child
Asada Akira.” He compares Asada to a shitamachi no kodomo (downtown
kid) as well as an “alien from the near future,” and supposes that his propen-
sity for play gives him a “psychological age of five.” Ura quite explicitly, and
affirmatively, ties the childhood theme in with the other tropes and concepts
often connected to New Aca: play, boundlessness, and an ahistoric “absence
of trauma.”27 Youth seemed to suggest both a frightening and an attractive
state of free-floating suspension, not tied down by a problematic national
history or, increasingly, even the present. Again, this discourse permeates
multiple spheres in Japan and is not only a hermetic intellectual concern.
The 1970s is also the time when youth becomes a major theme for pop idols,
whose age dropped significantly—Minami Saori’s 1971 hit “17 Sai” (Seven-
teen years old) can be seen as a starting point for this development.
Asada and o thers embraced these tropes of unboundedness and inte-
grated disciplinary promiscuity into their intellectual projects. Prepared
already by Yū’s ironic promotion and the increasing disciplinary border cross-
ing of Yamaguchi, Hasumi, Kurimoto, and others, Asada Akira, Yomota In-
huhiko, and Itō Toshiharu edited the legendary magazine/journal gs, short
for Gay Science, or Gai Savoir, which achieved such high sales that it merited
an article in the Nihon Keizai Shinbun financial newspaper.28 A well-known
section from the editors’ statement in the inaugural issue is worth quoting:
“Speed, unfaithfulness, humor. Until recently ‘fun knowledge [chi]’ has been
forbidden within the solemn expression of knowledge, and we will now don
it like the magic cloak of a pagan religion. Neither the initiation chant of
an esoteric sect nor the efficient writing of enlightenment, we ask you to
keep an open eye out for this frivolous and radical plot of perverse knowl-
edge.” Again, this refusal to be bound by specialization and the joy of freely
indulging in different territories of knowledge and practice was seen as a
common cultural practice of the young generation, including not only aca-
demic figures such as Asada, Nakazawa and Yomota, but also copywriter Itoi
Shigesato, tv commercial director Kawasaki Tōru, film director Morita Yo-
shimitsu, playwright Noda Hideki, and novelist Shimada Masahiko. It also
enabled the increasing commodification of knowledge/discourse and essen-
tially turned New Aca discourse into a form of knowledge curation. Asada’s
waxing philosophic about the connection of schizo-kids and gambling in a
horse-racing magazine did not endear him to critics of the breadth of topics,
themes, and media channels that New Aca participated in, and was seen as

symptomatic of a lack in focus, depth, and seriousness.29 New Aca discourse
was formed and promoted in lockstep with developments in popular media
and the structure of the media industry itself. Indeed, it can be argued that it
deliberately modeled its practices on the media industry, thus making itself
into a radicalized reflector of emerging media practice.
Synchronization and Performativity

Criticism leveled against both the superficiality and the obscurity of New
Aca discourse may then be founded in a misinterpretation of New Aca’s
project as one based on a transmission model of media. Play as a central
concept of New Aca was closely tied to questions of performativity and re-
flexivity, both of them popular topics of cultural critique in the early 1980s.
This is a sign of New Aca’s deliberate synchronization with themes and
strategies in contemporary popular culture.30 On the structural side, how-
ever, it is both an indication of the intensified synchronization of intellectual
discourse with the publishing cycles of print capitalism in Japan (founded in
hihyō; again, see the chapter by Kitano Keisuke in this volume) and the in-
creasing interlocking of print capitalism with other media systems. The New
Aca practice’s drive for a dissolution of media borders, and for a departure
from a transmission model of media even for intellectual discourse, was no
doubt centered on print, and indeed, Nakazawa Shinichi has named several
journal and magazine editors he regards as central to creating and sustain-
ing the New Aca boom. However, it also almost directly overlaps with the
establishing of media mix strategies as a default media industry strategy by
companies such as Kadokawa.
Performativity was such a prominent topic at this time that the Asahi
Journal organized a large conference on it and devoted a three-issue spe-
cial to the transcripts of the discussions. Asada Akira was part of the third
and final panel, and asked to give a first conclusion concerning the discus-
sions. He proposed two general tendencies as apparent in current cultural
production that made performativity such a prominent topic: that the work
(sakuhin) itself was being deemphasized vis-à-vis the process of producing a
work, and that individual subjectivity was being deemphasized vis-à-vis the
external relations that help produce the work. The root of this development,
according to Asada, was a developing distrust of the idea of a finished work
as a representation of the coherent subjectivity of the producer.
The way it is phrased, Asada’s analysis can relate to artistic production as
much as to academic production. Fundamentally it points to shifting ideas
1980s “Nyū Aka” [211]

of mediation: a simple transmission model, operating on the assumption
of a clear sender and receiver mediated by a decodable, bounded work and
evaluated according to its truth value is not feasible anymore. In terms of
strategies for coping with such a situation, Asada might as well be talking
specifically about New Aca. Works such as Hasumi’s “Declaration of surface
criticism” (Hyōsō hihyō sengen) or Asada’s Tōsōron function less on the
basis of transmitting an easily decipherable set of ideas than on perform-
ing a discourse of play and, self-reflexively, of performance.31 The process
of play becomes more relevant than the straightforward formulation of a
message, and consequently this academic discourse and hihyō shift t oward
formalism.
Politics?
What, then, did (media) politics mean for the New Aca discourse? Its shift
toward a more formalist model embraced the blurring of the mode of enun-
ciation, the content of the enunciation, and the channel it was transported
with—and deconstructed such a simple model of transmission along the
way. New Aca discourse’s performativity was an attempt to recalibrate
the handling of information and mediation, not to condemn it. As Asada
famously punned, “beta yori meta,” or, roughly, “meta-perspectives rather
than sticky seriousness.” Such a directive met with considerable ambiva-
lence on the side of academia and mainstream cultural criticism. A stream
of articles trailed the success of Structure and Power and Escape Theory in
attacking Asada’s mode of scholarship. While t hese attacks often enough an-
nounced themselves as such interventions, they essentially participated in
the “Asada Akira phenomenon” while criticizing it, as for example in an ar-
ticle by Ozeki Shūji from 1984 subtitled “Criticizing the Asada Akira Group’s
‘Fashionable Thought.’ ”32 The ease with which Asada and others seemed to
discard any attempt at resistance-based political conversation like an out-
of-fashion pair of shoes was difficult to swallow for the only slightly older
generation of scholars that had come of age in the milieu of student activism
and Marxist debates.
Yet at the same time, New Aca discourse was immensely popular, espe-
cially among young academics and students. The popular press, as well as
advertising trade magazines such as Hōkoku Hihyō (where Asada had a se-
ries of articles that would later be collected in Escape Theory) and more in-
tellectually inclined magazines and journals such as Gendai Shisō, Gunzō,

and Chūo Kōron wanted in on the theory/practice that had obviously cap-
tured the public imagination (and immense sales numbers). Nonetheless,
Asada’s initial exposure came in the Asahi Shimbun, on the pages of which
the label “New Aca” was first proposed, and the Asahi Journal was one of
the most active facilitators of New Aca discourse (it also featured Kurimoto
Shinichirō’s column on the New H umans). That these left-leaning media
outlets essentially facilitated if not enabled the boom of this aestheticized
discourse is significant and points to the way in which political discourse
had already gone through a deep transformation.
How, then, can this development of “depoliticization” be described with-
out resorting to problematic concepts of historical rupture, without simply
following the announcement of New Aca as “new”? One avenue is that of
searching for trajectories connecting 1960s politics and 1980s consumer cul-
ture rather than seeing them as radically separate or even opposed. Kitada
Akihirō, for example, has traced a continuity of reflexivity in popular culture
in Japan. According to Kitada, the spiral of reflexivity developed its first level
of intensity within the Japanese left of the 1950s and 1960s, with its culture of
hansei (reflection) and sōkatsu (roughly “self-summary”), institutionalized
as self-criticism. This reached its radical apex in the lynchings within the
United Red Army in the winter of 1971–72, which w ere largely committed
for the supposedly insufficient (tellingly) performance of hansei/sōkatsu.33
What the 1970s brought, according to Kitada, was not a traumatic rupture
between leftist activism and frivolous consumer culture but a migration of
practices of reflexivity. Essentially, the famously self-aware catch-copies of
former student activist Itoi Shigesato for the Seibu department store chain,
the rise of reflexivity on tv in the form of shows that observe media person-
alities as they observe other media personalities (now the bread and butter
of Japanese television), and the explicit performativity of New Aca all fit into
this general shift.34
The mixed feelings over the perception of a depoliticized New Aca prac-
tice erupted at several points in the 1980s. The author Haniya Yūtaka and
the philosopher and critic Yoshimoto Takaaki’s famous spat over a photo
shoot for the fashion magazine Anan is a many-layered example. Yoshimoto,
one of the heroes of the Japanese New Left of the 1960s, was featured in an
Anan article for which he posed in clothes designed by Kawakubo Rei of the
fashion label Comme des Garçons in 1984 (with the price for each piece of
clothing conveniently displayed beneath the picture). Haniya, a figure of the
Old Left, harshly criticized Yoshimoto for the excursion into high fashion
1980s “Nyū Aka” [213]

in his “Final Letter to Yoshimoto Takaaki,” in which he accused Yoshimoto
of collaborating with the violent powers of capitalism. In a sense a belated
and displaced falling out between two senior figures of the intellectual scene
(neither of which was directly associated with New Aca discourse), this inci-
dent nonetheless demonstrated how intellectual discourse was moving into
the proximity of consumption practice—or, indeed, was significantly over-
lapping with it.
While the deterritorializing impetus of New Aca discourse was immensely
successful in generating attention and media presence, it was much less suc-
cessful in the institutionalized setting of the university, which was largely built
on the territorial logic of disciplines. Even the arguably central figure of New
Aca discourse, Asada Akira, had some trouble finding a university position,
and the “Nakazawa Shinichi incident” of 1988 was a case in point. Nakazawa,
who was phenomenally successful in terms of book sales, was one of the most
experimental thinkers that appeared in the early 1980s and was perceived as
one of the most obscure in terms of his writing. The attempt to provide him
with a faculty position at Tokyo University was eventually voted down in what
became a very public controversy, in which it was widely assumed that older
faculty had rebelled against the appointment, illustrating the generational rift
and the fantasies surrounding it.
Irony, Humor, Theory, and Romantic Mediation

What then, in terms of a theory of both media and mediation, sets New
Aca discourse apart from Marshall McLuhan’s model of performative, aes-
theticized theory? Was McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message
simply internalized and localized by New Aca practice? The initial path
that McLuhan’s introduction in Japan took via advertising theory (described
in Marc Steinberg’s contribution to this volume), in combination with the
closeness of New Aca discourse to advertising, offers one way of detecting
continuity. However, there is another important line of discourse embedded
here, one that allows the detection of somewhat unexpected parallels: that
of irony.
The concept of irony first became central to modern thought via early
German Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel. In its initial usage by Schle-
gel, irony represented primarily radical indeterminacy. For the Romantics,
irony was interesting because it does not supply us with a closed and static
structure of meaning, with a secure knowledge about what is being said.
Rather it opens up possibilities and keeps them open, at its best creating

constant oscillation, restless movement. For the Romantics and for New Aca
discourse, irony is thus connected to basically the same central vocabulary:
it is both tool and representation of total relativity (relativität/sōtai-sei), of
fragmentation and differentiation (zersplitterung/sai-ka), and it reveals a
focus on the aesthetics of play (spiel/asobi)—and there are an astonishing
number of additional examples.
The working principle of irony is constant movement. Sasaki Atsushi,
reflecting on discursive practice in theory/criticism (shisō) in Japan since
the early 1980s, proposes a seesaw model in which t here is no directionality
to shisō anymore, only a constant performative and aestheticized action-
reaction swing. These positions—or poses—elicit counterreactions, which
again lead to counterreactions, all with the sole purpose of generating move-
ment.35 Ruth Sonderegger, in her analysis of Schlegel’s romanticist aesthetic
strategy, finds a similar pattern. Sonderegger frames Schlegel’s proposed per-
spective as a back-and-forth movement between hermeneutic and decon-
structive practice, with a clear commitment to neither or both, with the
emphasis lying on the eternal movement this swinging motion generates.
This of course bears a strong resemblance to Asada’s model of oscillation
between shirake and nori, which results in a movement he terms play/asobi.
It is thus motion and play itself that becomes the center of a new epistemology,
not a transmittable message or theory. Accordingly, it is media practice that
becomes linked to such a model, not a theory of media. An additional ingredi-
ent in this genealogy is the Japanese Romantic movement of the 1930s, most
centrally Yasuda Yojūrō. Yasuda famously (and true to romantic tenants, with
a strong nationalist bent) framed Japan itself as quintessentially ironic, as os-
cillating between production and destruction. Without being able to treat this
aspect exhaustively, there are considerable unacknowledged parallels between
discourses surrounding New Aca and the Japanese Romantics, from the em-
phasis on the centrality of the ahistoric “poems of youth” (Yasuda) to “Japan as
irony” and an eventual turn toward culturalism along the lines of nihinjinron
theories (theories of the Japanese) that were so popular in the 1980s.36
Humor played a role in New Aca’s project, though more as an object of
study than one of practice. Unsurprisingly for the inherently reflexive strategy
of irony as the main tool for performative mediation, both the Romantics
and New Aca discourse theorized extensively about the role of irony, and
through it arrived at humor. In a roundtable reprinted in Escape Theory,
Asada and Karatani discuss the difference between humor and wit (referring to
the German terms Humor and Witz). Marx and Freud, so their opinion goes,
followed a model of humor that is explained by Freud himself. Humor here is
1980s “Nyū Aka” [215]

an in-between position that allows for making a statement but knowing of
its relativity, a kind of doublethink that is both “situated in a certain posi-
tion” but “at the same time stands on the meta-level.” Again, the similari-
ties to Yū’s media-reflexive proposition of showing “both the forest and the
trees” are clear. This distinguishes Humor—which only a select group can
understand—from Witz, which has no metalevel or awareness of its own
relativity. Asada sees the tendency toward Humor in Marx as his nomadic
(= Deleuzian) side. Humor, Asada claims, has the distinct advantage of creat-
ing endless movement, while serious (majime) commitment exhausts itself
at some point.37 Both Karatani and Asada come back to this point, and the
question of irony itself, in various later texts.38
As described above, such a valorization of the noncommital elicited push-
back. The criticism that met New Aca discourse also mirrors that directed
at the Romantics. Carl Schmitt’s harsh treatment of the German Romantics
in his Political Romanticism reads almost as if it were directly targeting the
styles of Asada, Hasumi, and Nakazawa. Schmitt derides Romanticism as
“anti-categorical” and as an “expansion of the aesthetic”: “In romanticism the
subject treats the world as occasion and opportunity for its romantic pro-
ductivity.” He sees the valorization of irony only as a kind of flight from
actual engagement with the world: it is obsessed with retaining the widest
thinkable range of potentiality and therefore decides to do nothing. “The
romantic, in the organic passivity that belongs to his occasionalist structure,
wants to be productive without being active.”39
These are correspondences that open intriguing avenues, and there are
more: the nationalism of the Romantics and the increasing focus on nihon-
jinron (theories of Japanese specificity) of New Aca discourse in the late 1980s
is but one example. While such similarities are not usefully framed as s imple
repetition, it is interesting to think about the parallels in the perceived situa-
tion in which t hese two elite groups of (over)educated young men found
themselves: the fall of g rand narratives (the church, feudalism, Marxism), the
full bloom of a media revolution and an explosion of available knowledge
(intensified print culture, intensified media society), and accelerated global-
ization viewed from a decidedly national vantage point.
New Aca discourse is usually seen to have petered out in the early 1990s,
just after the burst of the assets bubble and as the first Gulf War introduced
a tentative repoliticization to intellectual discourse. Karatani, always by far
the most unhappy with the New Aca label and his association with it, repur-
poses the theory of irony in his antiwar activities, although this time with
diff erent valences.40 In a discussion with Takahashi Genichirō in May 1992,

he identifies different positions t oward the Iraq war. Deleuze, who protested
the war, is associated with humor; his is a positive attitude toward the other
with no ulterior motive.41 Baudrillard, however, with his famous statement
that the Iraq War never actually took place, is associated with irony—seen
here as a perspective that interprets everything external as stemming from
oneself, an eminently Romantic position. There is no question that Karatani
aligns himself squarely with Deleuze.42
After the New Aca fever had receded, Asada and Karatani published the
journal Hihyō Kūkan throughout the 1990s, and it became one of the central
platforms for theory in Japan. In terms of wider cultural influence, it was also
a relatively marginal journal, far from the public hysteria of the New Aca
boom. Asada, Nakazawa, Karatani, Yomota, and o thers stayed prominent
figures in intellectual discourse but never again achieved the kind of media
presence they almost magically attracted in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, the
legacy of New Aca discourse is profound, and can be traced without much
trouble in the zeronendai (thought of the aughts) theorists of the early 2000s.
In a symposium organized by Azuma Hiroki for the Azuma co-published
journal Shisō Chizu, Asada Akira states that nothing he heard from zeronen-
dai representatives such as Azuma, Uno Tsunehiro, or Hamano Satoshi seems
new, and that all of these ideas w ere already discussed in the 1980s. While this
is undoubtedly true, it is this time Asada who may have misunderstood the
mode of theorization at play, indeed employing a different model of play.
While Structure and Power appeared in the same year as Nintendo’s Fami-
com gaming system (called nes, or Nintendo Entertainment System in the
United States), it was the zeronendai theorists that grew up with it and inter-
nalized a different perspective on play, both in theory and in practice. This,
however, is a topic for a different occasion.
notes
1. Tatsuya Ura, “Oboccha-man Asada Akira” [Man-child Asada Akira], Ushio 304
(August 1984): 106–14.
2. Akira Asada, Kōzō to chikara: Kigōron o koete [Structure and power: Beyond semi-
otics] (Tokyo: Keisō Shibō, 1983).
3. See the introduction to this volume on the discourse of media as a “singular-plural.”
4. For an excellent overview of the debates around eizō, see Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema
of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
5. See, for example, Hidetoshi Katō, Jōhō shakai kara no chōsen [The challenge issued
by the information society] (Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shinpō-sha, 1971). Also see Uchikawa
1980s “Nyū Aka” [217]

Yoshimi et al., eds., Jōhō shakai [Information society] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan-
kai, 1974). The term “information society” was introduced by Umesao Tadao.
6. Shunya Yoshimi, Mikio Wakabayashi, and Shin Mizukoshi, Media toshite no denwa
[Telephone as media] (Tokyo: Kobundō, 1992).
7. Takaaki Yoshimoto, Hai imēji-ron [High-image theory] (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten,
1989).
8. For an early example, see Akira Kōzu, Bunka no keikō to taisaku [The tendencies
and countermeasures of culture] (Tokyo: Chijin Kan, 1984). For a more current exam-
ple, see Atsushi Sasaki, Nippon no shisō [Japanese thought] (Tokyo: Kodansha Gendai
Shinsho, 2009).
9. Rika Kayama, Poketto no naka 80 nendai ga ippai [My pockets are filled with
the 1980s] (Tokyo: Bajiriko, 2008).
10. For an excellent account of the connection between New Aca discourse and the
logic of the advertising industry, see Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The
Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed.
Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989),
21–46.
11. Across Henshū-shitsu, ed., Ima, chō-taishū no jidai [Now, the age of the super-
popular] (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1985), 179.
12. An opinion voiced by Marilyn Ivy and many others, though most recently in
Sasaki, Nippon no shisō.
13. See Kojin Karatani, Hihyō to posutomodan [Criticism and the postmodern] (Tokyo:
Fukutake Shoten, 1989).
14. Sasaki, Nippon no shisō.
15. Quoted in Sasaki, Nippon no shisō, 147.
16. For more on infantile capitalism, see Akira Asada, “Infantile Capitalism and Ja-
pan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Harry Harootu-
nian and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 273–78.
17. See, for example, Kōjin Karatani, Hyūmoa to yuibutsu-ron [Humor and material-
ism] (Tokyo: Kodansha Geijutsu Bunko, 1999).
18. Akira Asada, Tōsōron: Sukizo kizzu no bōken [Escape theory: The adventure of the
schizo kids] (Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 1986), 289.
19. Shigehiko Hasumi, Hyōsō hihyō sengen [Announcement of a critique of surface
layers] (Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 1985).
20. Kiyoshi Kurosawa (film director), in discussion with the author, March 2004.
21. Shigehiko Hasumi and Takaaki Yoshimoto, “Hihyō ni totte sakuhin to wa nani ka”
[According to criticism, what is a work?], Umi 12, no. 7 (1980): 236–66. The concepts of
tawamure and asobi used by Hasumi and Asada are most probably both influenced by
Derrida’s concept of f ree play / freeplay. See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1978).
22. Th
ere are, of course, a number of other precursors to New Aca discourse; Maeda
Ai, Maruyama Keizaburō, and especially anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao are often
named as examples.

23. Combinations of stage performance with film screenings had been common in
the form of rensageki in the early phase of cinema in Japan, but had disappeared by the
1930s.
24. For more on the highly self-reflexive business strategies of Kadokawa Haruki, see
Alexander Zahlten, “The Role of Genre in Film from Japan. Transformations, 1960s–
2000s” (PhD diss., umi, 2009).
25. See Yū volume 11 (1980) and volume 12 (1981).
26. Keigo Okonogi, Moratoriamu ningen no jidai [The age of the moratorium human]
(Tokyo: Chūo Kōron Shinsha, 1978). Etō Jun was an important figure in establishing the
idea that maturation had become problematic in the postwar Japanese climate. See,
for example, Jun Etō, Seijuku to Sōshitsu [Maturity and loss] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo
Shinsha, 1967).
27. Mitsugu Miyamoto, “Kono chō-nankai-sho ga ureru makafushigi” [The complete
mystery of this terribly difficult book’s sales], Asahi Journal 26, no. 15 (June 1984): 11–13.
See also Tatsuya Ura, “Oboccha-man Asada Akira.” The disc, discussion of adolescence,
especially of the male, has a long and complicated history in the Japanese context that,
especially in the postwar period, became strongly connected to questions of the nation,
a discourse picked up on by Etō Jun, among others. Aaron Gerow has claimed that
the manzai comedy boom of the early 1980s was an attempt to stake out a gendered
space for the immature male. See Aaron Gerow, Kitano Takeshi (London: British Film
Institute, 2008). Taking Tomiko Yoda’s thesis of the development of a “girlscape” in
1970s Japan into account (see her essay in this volume), it is also possible to interpret
New Aca practice, despite the presence of Ueno Chizuko, as strategically gendered. It is
worth noting that Ueno attempted to gender New Aca themes such as play as female in
several of her books. See Chizuko Ueno, Onna asobi [Women’s play] (Tokyo: Gakuyō,
1988); and Watashi sagashi gêmu [Search-myself game] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1987).
28. “Wadai no Zasshi ‘GS,’ ” Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Tokyo), June 29, 1984.
29. Miyamoto, “Kono chō-Nankai-sho ga Ureru Makafushigi.”
30. For more information on the spirals of reflexivity and performativity intensify-
ing throughout the 1980s, especially in terms of tv culture, see Akihiro Kitada, Warau
Nihon no nashonarizumu [A sneering Japan’s “nationalism”] (Tokyo: nhk Books, 2005).
31. It is no surprise, then, that Hasumi would, in 1980, participate in the aforemen-
tioned discussion with Yoshimoto Takaaki titled “For Criticism, What Is a Work?” See
Hasumi Shigehiko and Yoshimoto Takaaki, “Hihyō ni totte sakuhin to wa nani ka”
[What is a work according to hihyō?], Umi 12, no. 7 (1980): 236–67. Also Hasumi, Hyōsō
hihyō sengen.
32. Ozeki Shūji, “Gendai no ningenkan o tō: Asada Akira-ra no ‘ryūkō shisō’ o hihan
suru,” [Inquiry into the contemporary idea of the human: Criticizing the Asada Akira
group’s “fashionable thought”], Bunka Hyōron 279 (June 1984): 28–57.
33. Kitada Akihirō, Warau nihon no nashonarizumu [A sneering Japan’s “national-
ism”] (Tokyo: nhk Books, 2005), 27–64.
34. It is interesting to note that Itoi himself had a history within the student move-
ment, and in many ways embodies exactly this shift.
35. Sasaki, Nippon no shisō, 19–23.
1980s “Nyū Aka” [219]

36. See, for example, Kevin Michael Doak, Dreams of Difference. The Japanese Ro-
mantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994).
37. Akira Asada, Katsuhito Iwai, and Kōjin Karatani, “Marukus, kahei, gengo” [Marx,
currency, language], in Tōsō-ron: Sukizo kizzu no bōken, by Akira Asada (Tokyo: Chi-
kuma Bunko, 1986), 151–239. It is worth noting that the Japanese transliteration of
“irony,” when used by Asada and Karatani, in the 1980s begins with ironī, which trans-
literates the German pronunciation that probably goes back to Yasuda, and in the early
1990s becomes aironī, the English pronunciation that is probably more influenced by
the translation of Richard Rorty’s work.
38. See, for example, Karatani, Yūmoa toshite no yuibutsu-ron.
39. My translation of Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik [Political Romanticism]
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998), 18, 65. In an interesting turn, Uno Tsunehiro, one
of the main figures of the zeronendai discourse of the 2000s, made Schmitt’s concept
of decisionism one of the cornerstones of his analysis of contemporary popular culture
in Japan.
40. Karatani voiced explicit criticism of New Aca discourse as early as 1984, but gen-
erally continued to be seen as associated with it. See, for example, Karatani, Hihyō to
posutomodân.
41. In the transliteration of humor into Japanese, we find a shift from Karatani’s ear-
lier usage, which used the German pronunciation, to the English translation being used
here.
42. Kōjin Karatani and Genichirō Takahashi, “Gendai bungaku o tatakau,” Gunzō 47,
no. 6 (May 1992): 6–50.

9 . C R I T I C A L M E D I A I M A G I N AT I O N
Nancy Seki’s TV Criticism and
the Media Space of the 1980s and 1990s
ryoko m i s on o
Translation by Ryoko Misono,

Edmond Ernest dit Alban, and Marc Steinberg
Famous entertainers have the right to tell their own stories, be it about their per-
sonal lives, their “philosophy,” “aesthetics,” or even trivial subjects like “my dog and
me.” Open any magazine and you’ll find somebody telling their story about something.
These stories accumulate in the media, whether in the form of the “extended interview”
or the “exclusive confession,” never to be corrected, refuted, or mocked. tv talk shows
also have this function. But the efficacy of tv as a transmission medium is reduced by
the inclusion of the talk show host’s unnecessary commentary and reactions. Sure, in
magazine interviews there’s always an interviewer asking the questions, too, but in most
cases, the personality of those interviewers doesn’t come to the fore in the text. In the
case of the magazine interview made to highlight a specific celebrity, the personality of
the interviewer is no more than an intrusion, a mere means of increasing the intensity
of the interview (even if the interviewer shares just a little in the narcissism of the
celebrity). However, as talk shows follow the principle of tv as medium, a certain bal-
ance must be struck between the host and the celebrity, sometimes allowing the host’s
personality to take priority.
nancy seki, “ ‘Wain de dekiteiru’ Kawashima Naomi wo rikai dekiru ka” (Made of
Wine: Can We Understand Kawashima Naomi?), in Shūkan Bunshūn, 1997
Nancy Seki, Eraser Print Critic

The above is a passage from an analysis of “the story” told by an actress in
her late thirties, Kawashima Naomi, during a short tv interview program.
The resemblance of this text to the academic study of television is striking.
This media critique h ere grasps the political implications of the complete ab-
sence of political analysis that should exist between “sender” and “receiver,”
all the while attacking the uncritical nature of the producers and performers
b
ehind tv, magazines, and other information media.
This incisive gaze that cuts through the irrationality of the information
business resembles that of media studies scholars. But, in fact, this text was
written by Nancy Seki (born Seki Naomi), the most energetic and edgy fe-
male columnist and illustrator Japan has known, who was active from the
1980s through the 1990s. Holding the unique title of “eraser print artist,” she
was the author of numerous columns, and made tv criticism the core of
her writing activities. She had more than ten serial columns in monthly and
weekly magazines when she died at the young age of thirty-nine in 2002, in
the midst of her most productive period as a writer and illustrator. Never-
theless, even now her popularity has not waned, and the incisiveness of her
criticism has not gone dull. What factors make her tv criticism so compel-
ling? While playfully debating key concepts of media theory, she was gifted
with the talent of managing the circulation of her written texts and printed
images as commodities within the market of the publishing industry. What
are the historical, environmental, and cultural factors that generated the
critical imagination and unique vocabulary of this outstanding media per-
former who lived in the media network herself? Before undertaking to an-
swer this question through an analysis of her work, I w ill first present the
particular characteristics of Nancy Seki’s tv criticism.
Nancy Seki began her c areer as an “eraser print” illustrator, for which
reason her early works w ere mostly illustrations, though she also undertook
interviews and reportages. That said, her representative work was undoubt-
edly her tv criticism serialized in two major weekly magazines, and it was
there that her basic style was established. Her columns were in principle one
page long, and within this short page she would develop her criticism of tv
personalities and celebrities (tarento). Next to the text in each column would
be an engraved likeness of the celebrity discussed, made by Nancy Seki using
her unique medium or technique of the eraser print—a print made from
an eraser carving—and accompanied with a poignant one-line comment.
Within this particular format, composed of a short text and an image with a
sharp catchphrase published together in the temporally immediate medium
of the weekly magazine, we can, I would argue, find the most basic style of
tv criticism for which Nancy Seki is known.
Nancy Seki’s tv criticism was satirical and ironical, to be sure, but it also
never forsook its nature as a form of entertainment. It was a bracing read,
[222] ryoko misono

but also an amusing one. The main reason for this was Nancy Seki’s spe-
cial talent for comical phrasing, and her ability to perfectly verbalize what
people were thinking in the depth of their minds. Her sharp analysis would
at times be gentler, at times more abrasive, but this textual analysis was al-
ways paired with the rough lines unique to the eraser print technique of her
portrait, lines that revealed her deep understanding of the person discussed
in the article, and lines that returned the reader to the world of visual repre
sentation from which that person came. What she did was slow down the
immediacy and quickness of the televisual medium through the medium
of text, at the same time as she returned the reader back to the realm of
the image, albeit as a new kind of image. This interaction between text and
image was in turn put back into circulation using the fast-moving medium
of the weekly magazine, where readers would consume it. Nancy Seki’s tele
vision criticism can therefore be defined as a cyclical system that has three
distinct moments: (1) the reception of televised images and information;
(2) the conversion of these images into critical written analysis combined
with the primitive eraser print image; and (3) the subsequent recirculation
of analysis and eraser print image in the form of print media such as the
weekly magazine.
To be sure, we cannot overlook the moment of the reader’s active decod-
ing of Nancy Seki’s texts. Nancy Seki’s fans (including many who did not
r eally watch tv) often say that she wrote what they w ere thinking. But in fact
this shows that her real talent was precisely to put into words, give s imple ex-
pression to, and make comprehensible what p eople could plainly see but not
articulate. Her talent was to say what p eople thought but could not them-
selves express. She had the ability to find, name, and express the universal
truths found within the secular microcosm of popular television. This sort
of cathartic revelation of the truths about tv, fused with her comical writing
style, was at the core of her appeal.
However, the period during which Nancy Seki was most active as a
critic—from the late 1980s to 1990s—is known in Japanese media history as
a time of decline for the television industry. It is said that during the 1980s,
tv culture reached its apex and saturation point. This, combined with the
collapse of the b ubble economy in the early 1990s, accelerated the decline
of television as an image-based information industry which leads us to ask:
Why would Nancy Seki put tv criticism at the center of her critical activities
in an age of decline for tv as a medium? What w ere her intentions in d oing
so? And how did her tv criticism grapple with the general degeneration of
tv culture?
Nancy Seki’s TV Criticism [223]

As the citation at the opening of this essay suggests, Nancy Seki was en-
dowed with a theoretical perspective on media that enabled her to develop
metalevel analyses of the very structure of media. She had an ability to criti-
cally read the information emitted from a medium to decipher a hidden
signification different from the “official” meaning intended by the sender,
and then offer it to her readers as an alternative reading. As a part of a period
when the images and information transmitted on tv were no longer part of
a monolithically constituted entity but rather, were troubled by complex gaps
of meaning and dissonances, I would argue that her tv criticism played an
ethical and indeed pedagogical role as an alternative form of media literacy
aimed at the general public.
That said, we also have to acknowledge that, filled as it is with proper
names, Nancy’s tv criticism can be very difficult to grasp for those who
were not part of her media environment. Moreover—and perhaps related
to this—there has been little theoretical analysis of the way her tv criticism
was fostered by the dynamics of multiple media crossovers during the late
1970s and 1980s, and little engagement with the crucial relationship between
her written text and her unique eraser print images, which she never gave up,
even a fter she was recognized for her prose. In this article, I will explain the
conditions for the emergence, development, and consumption of Nancy Seki’s
unique talent. I will examine the power of her critical imagination as well as
its limitations, and, finally, I w
ill ask w
hether t here is a means of g oing beyond
these limitations.
Television as a Media Public Sphere

By the end of the 1950s, television had become the medium with the great-
est influence for many Japanese. Before the creation of personal computers,
our lives w
ere filled with newspapers, radio, magazines, films, records, and
so on, but television unquestionably occupied a central place within mass
media. Even today, watching television is the activity Japanese people spend
the most amount of time doing at home, aside from sleeping. Of course, this
is not unique to Japan; television has had a powerful influence all over the
world since World War II. But the influence of television is especially strong
in Japan, where it occupies a symbolically key place in p eople’s consciousness.
For instance, while cinema was at the center of the media ecology in postwar
America, in Japan the television in the living room was the centerpiece of its
media sphere. But how did television come to occupy such a central place in
Japan?
[224] ryoko misono

From the 1950s to 1960s, in the United States and in European countries,
as well as in Japan, television became a mass medium almost simultaneously.
After the 1960s, it permeated everyday life in many countries, exerting
an influence greater than cinema, radio, or even newspapers. In the case of
Japan, two symbolic factors for the popularization of the tv w ere “street-
corner television” ( gaitō terebi) and the broadcasting of the marriage parade
of Crown Prince Akihito. These were also two defining moments for the con-
nection between television and the public sphere in Japan.
The first defining moment, street-corner television, was born in 1953 as
a marketing strategy for Nihon Terebi (ntv), a private broadcaster that
emerged almost simultaneously with the national broadcaster Nihon Hōsō
Kyōkai (nhk). As a strategy for generating an audience and a consumer base
for television at a time when tv sets w ere prohibitively expensive, ntv’s
street-corner television set gave the masses a feel for television, even as ntv
profited from the advertising revenues it received for the expanded audi-
ence. More than 220 large-sized television sets w ere put around the Tokyo
metropolitan area and its surrounding prefectures, located mostly near train
stations and high-traffic entertainment quarters. Television in this incarna-
tion was first and foremost a public medium.
The other defining moment, the crown prince’s marriage in 1959, was a
decisive opportunity for the television industry to expand the locations of
tv sets from the street corners on which they had started to the homes of
individual viewers. The number of television sets in Japanese homes had
surpassed the one million mark in May 1958, but a fter the announcement
of the engagement of Prince Akihito and Shoda Michiko later that year,
and of the marriage procession that was going to be televised, the number
of television sets sold exploded, reaching two million sets by April 1959, and
then three million by October 1959. Amid this sudden diffusion of television
sets into homes, the live coverage of the April 1959 marriage parade became
the first national media event on Japanese television.
This event symbolizes the birth of a media public sphere, a communica-
tion space made accessible through the mediation of television as a medium
and as a technology. However, this space was at the very same moment limited
by the publicness of another rival public space: the nation. We can indeed
call this the national public sphere. Any person who is part of this public
sphere could freely communicate within it by using its language. However,
the media public sphere created by the television network was built on the
outlines of the nation, and was therefore trapped inside the national space.
I would like to try to propose a definition of this national public sphere as it

is mediated by television. For this is a form of public sphere that ironically
inverts the original meaning of the concept “public sphere.” And, in my view,
Nancy Seki’s discourse is closely tied to the establishment of this televisually
mediated national public sphere.
Jürgen Habermas, the leading thinker of the concept of “public sphere,”
defined “civic publicness” as follows in his Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as
the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the
public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves,
to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the
basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and
social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and
without historical precedent: p eople’s public use of their reason.”1 The pri-
vate sphere has the intrinsic potential to resist “public power” (represented
by the state or an aristocratic society), operating through commerce, clubs,
newspapers, and even the “city” as the space where heterogeneous forms of
exchange take place, all of which form a parallel network of information and
a space of f ree discussion distinct from public power. It goes without saying
that this definition illustrates Habermas’s idealist model of the media space,
and we should add that this very model has often been criticized for this
very idealism. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the media history of
television in postwar Japan, engaging with Habermas’s work may be useful.
There is a double-sidedness to this usefulness, which relates directly to the
definitions of the terms “citizen” (shimin) and “publicness.” To anticipate my
conclusion, television in postwar Japan succeeded in definitively connecting
the private sphere to the network of the public sphere. In a sense, this was a
kind of “opening.”
The magical box of the tv had within itself, or, perhaps more accurately,
through itself, the power to make possible the sharing of information, becom-
ing the basis for reciprocal communication. Moreover, there was one such
magic box for each and e very household, and each magic box was placed in
the center of the family living room. Television clearly opened the private
space of the family living room onto the public communication network.
However, regardless of the fact that postwar Japan’s television network
started with the two-tiered system of the nhk public channels and private
broadcasting channels, because of its deep ties to the advertisement indus-
try and ultimately to the economic and industrial worlds, tv ended up as
a medium of “national unification.” In other words, the originally open tv
network was quickly bound to the confines of the nation, and with it, citizens
[226] ryoko misono

became national subjects, and publicness became national community. The
manner in which public space emerges from the actions of independent citi-
zens is from the start antithetical to the logic of blood that binds together
private space and nation. As this communicational space emerging from the
private sphere changes into a public one, their intimate relationship evolves
into an equation between the private and the national. Hannah Arendt firmly
denounces the merging of the private and the public, seeing their confusion
as having brought about the worst tragedies of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, even as Habermas quotes Arendt in the citation that fol-
lows, he modifies her argument to suggest that the convergence of the two
spheres is inevitable, and that they are in fact difficult to separate in the first
place: “Hannah Arendt refers to this private sphere of society that has become
publicly relevant when she characterizes the modern (in contrast to the an-
cient) relationship of the public sphere to the private in terms of the rise of
the ‘social.’ ”2 H
ere, Habermas clearly, and perhaps intentionally, transforms
Arendt’s conceptualization of the relationship between the public and the
private spheres. What Arendt calls “the ‘social’ ” is the contaminating ele
ment within public space that signifies the decay of publicness itself. (As
Arendt writes, in a passage cited by Habermas, “Society is the form in which
the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes
public significance, and where the activities connected with sheer survival
are permitted to appear in public.”3)
Recalling that Arendt’s concept of the public space is based on the model
of the ancient Greek polis, we must of course be generally wary of the Eu-
rocentrism and elitism of her views on “publicness.” Nevertheless, what I
would like to do here is to examine the manner in which the peculiar rela-
tionship between nation and publicness—terms that are normally mutually
exclusive—gains a paradoxical if concealed compatibility within the space
created by postwar Japanese televisual media.
Nancy Seki’s National TV Criticism

Nancy Seki was born in Aomori prefecture the same year the very first na-
tional media event aired on tv—the wedding parade noted above. She her-
self has explained how she was not very close to the medium of tv in her
childhood, but despite this, we can say that her own growth and development
was synchronized with the establishment of tv as a national media network.
Along with the diffusion of the tv network, the 1960s saw the start of the
collapse of the original television broadcasting system wherein nhk was

responsible for national broadcasting, and commercial broadcasting was in
principle fragmented between different local stations. While there are many
reasons for the expansion and consolidation of commercial broadcasters
into national networks, a few of t hese include the limited social role of small,
local broadcasters; the inability of local stations to compete on the program-
ming end with tv shows produced and aired by metropolitan broadcasters;
and the attempt by these metropolitan stations to augment advertising
revenues. Private broadcasting companies also increasingly strengthened
their stations, with a particular focus on news. By the second half of the 1970s,
the five major commercial tv stations had established business affiliations
with the five national newspapers. In particular, the national newspapers and
the Tokyo-based flagship commercial networks (known as key stations, or
kiikyoku) increasingly deployed their shared capital and h uman resources
to make the best use of their commercial alliances.
Following national broadcaster nhk’s example, the five central Tokyo
flagship networks and their regional affiliates developed on a national scale.
At this point, wherever p eople w ere in Japan, they would be able to watch
nhk as well as a number of local affiliates of the five major commercial net-
works. For this reason, Nancy Seki, who was raised at the northmost tip of
Honshū Island in Aomori prefecture, could, at least in principle, watch the
same programs as c hildren raised in the massive metropolises of Tokyo or
Osaka, or for that m atter, as c hildren raised in regions equally far removed
from these cities. They were all connected by the fact of living in a shared
media public sphere called “television.” All of them could know the same
tv celebrities, could watch the same programs, and could speak the same
language. Indeed, I would argue that it is the certainty of this capacity to
communicate with a large number of unknown people through the same
experience of the televisual media public sphere that lies at the very core of
Nancy Seki’s TV criticism.
We have to understand that Nancy Seki’s critical strategy of using tv ce-
lebrities’ nicknames without any explanation, making in-jokes about celeb-
rities, assuming the public’s general knowledge of the significance of these
names and their televisual referents, and so forth, could not work without a
certain prerequisite: her readers’ participation in a common media network.
As much as Nancy Seki’s rise as a tv critic was based on her ability to as-
sume a common knowledge of this media network, her decline was also tied
to the collapse of this common network starting in the 1990s. As a prelimi-
nary hypothesis, then, we can say that Nancy Seki’s tv criticism was born
within and intimately connected to this particular televisual public sphere.
[228] ryoko misono

Yet we cannot forget that this media public sphere within which she oper-
ated was national at the same time as it was public. This public sphere was
bounded and enclosed, forming an insular and homogeneous community.
If Nancy Seki’s criticism had limitations, they are to be found in the way the
borders of the nation and the national media sphere strengthen the basis of
her critical language yet also prevent her work from crossing t hese borders.
Her words and the images she made with her eraser carvings seemingly can-
not cross national boundaries. These limitations follow from her choice of
the national public sphere formed by tv as her workplace.
Nancy Seki liked to write about famous personalities. Consider Hagi-
moto Kinichi, Nakamori Akina, and Maeda Chūmei, for example. Th ese
three names w ill be familiar to anyone of any generation within the na-
tional public sphere of Japanese television. But outside of Japan, are t here
any who would know who these people were, what jobs they held, or the
television programs in which they appeared? Hagimoto is a comedian in
his sixties; Nakamori is a former idol (aidoru) in her thirties; and Maeda is
a famous entertainment news reporter in his fifties. The core technique of
Nancy Seki’s criticism was to capture and satirically poke fun at the mo-
ments when the public image of celebrities such as these broke down. For in-
stance, she did not fail to point to the moment when Hagimoto failed to act
like a proper show business entertainer ( geinōjin) at the closing ceremonies
of the Olympics. She pointed out the inability of Nakamori to get back her
formerly wholesome image after her failed suicide attempt. And when Maeda,
who publicly boasted about being the number one reporter in the entertain-
ment world, failed to get the scoop on the wedding of his closest friend and
idol—this, too, Nancy Seki would not let slide. However, as I will argue here,
Nancy Seki’s deep understanding of television’s information transmission
system also allowed her criticism to dislocate and denaturalize it. What she
offered, then, was not a s imple caricatured portrait of celebrities but rather,
something closer to a metalevel, media theoretical analysis of the phenom-
enon of tv.
It is difficult to crack the code of t hese tv personalities as mediatic signs
without a deep familiarity with Japan’s television culture. Moreover, given
that this media network was circumscribed by national boundaries and en-
closed within a public space, and given that the signs to which Nancy Seki
referred could be consumed only within this space, the power of her critical
discourse was also trapped within her country’s national boundaries. Nev-
ertheless, is this really a decisive limitation of her criticism? Does it also
circumscribe the reach and applicability of the meta-level reflections and

the media theory that she develops through her criticism? To respond to
these questions, we must first look at the origins of her critical imagination,
which, unsurprisingly, are not to be found solely in the national medium of
tv. Then we must examine the factors at work in her transformation from
Seki Naomi, a female university student from the countryside, into Nancy
Seki, the nationally famous eraser print artist, tv critic, and columnist.
Media Crossover City: Tokyo

Nancy Seki failed at her first attempt to pass her university entrance exams
and moved to Tokyo in 1981 to attend preparatory school and then retake the
exams the following year. It is said that she was seduced by the attractions
of the Seibu Department Store in Ikebukuro—which was along the route
to her preparatory school—and began g oing there regularly. To understand
why we should not regard this merely as an example of her attempt to satisfy
her desires as a consumer requires that we acknowledge the specific social
meaning and indeed vibrancy possessed by the Ikebukuro Seibu Department
Store in the 1980s. In doing so, we must also touch on the role that the parent
company, Seibu Saison, and its particular “Seibu Saison culture,” played in
creating this vibrancy, as well as the meaning it possesses within the history
of urban culture.
The Seibu Saison Group, which was responsible for creating Seibu Saison
culture, is, to more precisely define it, “a distribution enterprise that had at its
nuclei Credit Saison, Seiyū and Seibu Department Stores.”4 The Seibu Saison
Group was in turn divided into Seibu Railway and Seibu Department Stores
(its retail distribution unit), each managed by one of the two b rothers of the
Tsutsumi industrialist family. Tsutsumi Seiji, the older of the two b rothers,
managed the retail distribution unit, while the younger b rother, Tsutsumi
Yoshiaki, was responsible for overseeing Seibu Railway. It was Tsutsumi Seiji
who planned and developed Seibu Saison culture. Although Yoshiaki was
the better industrial manager, Seiji was something of a literary figure who
also published many novels and poems under the pseudonym Tsujī Takashi.
The two faces of Tsutsumi Seiji—the manager and the artist—were reflected
in the development of Seibu Saison culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, the
Seibu Saison Group was widely known for supporting artists and organizing
different cultural activities.
The Seibu Department Store of Ikebukuro, where Nancy Seki was a regu-
lar, included the Seibu Museum within the space of the department store.
The museum mostly presented art thought to represent the international
[230] ryoko misono

artistic avant-garde of the twentieth c entury, and took on many projects in
cooperation with Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art. In addition to the
museum, the Ikebukuro Seibu also had a multifunctional live music venue
on its eighth floor, called Studio 2000, which became a center of cultural ac-
tivities, including film, drama, and dance. Seibu Saison culture also included
a variety of establishments, including the edgy record shop wave (found in
Roppongi, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro), the film theatre Cine Vivant Roppongi,
the Ikebukuro bookstore libro, and o thers too numerous to name. All
of these were incredibly influential sources of information on urban and
cutting-edge arts. G oing to a department store, and particularly to the Seibu
Department Store, as Nancy Seki did, was not, therefore, merely an act of
satisfying one’s desires for commodities; it was rather a means of basking in
the shower of information found t here. In this department store, Nancy Seki,
a newcomer to Tokyo, was exposed to a complex multimedia apparatus creat-
ing and diffusing information about the semiotic matrix of urban culture in
which she now dwelled.
The information relayed by the Seibu Saison culture was the result of
what we might call the crossover of multiple kinds of media. Of course, even
before this time, the department store already functioned as a complex and
composed cultural medium, but its life as media node was further crystal-
lized by its encounter with the advertising industry. It was the ad industry
that remade the department store into an image that could be circulated
even further. Central to this transformation was, not surprisingly, the celeb-
rity copywriter Itoi Shigesato, whose fresh sensibility allowed him to leave
a permanent mark on the history of Japanese advertising. By 1980, Itoi was
in charge of the Seibu Department Store ad copy. In 1981, he came up with
the copy “Strange, I love it” (Fushigi, daisuki), and in 1982, he offered up
what was l ater recognized as the number one ad copy in the history of post-
war Japanese advertising: “Delicious living” (Oishii seikatsu). Th ese phrases
transcended their roles as catchphrases for a department store to become ex-
pressions that symbolized an era. They also launched the copywriter boom
of the 1980s, during which the advertisement industry came to occupy the
center stage of urban culture. During this time, Itoi Shigesato went from being
a simple copywriter to becoming a kind of nexus who linked multiple media
forms.
In 1980, Itoi took charge of the readers’ letters section of the subculture
magazine Bikkuri House. This section—humorously titled “Good Little Per-
verts Newspaper” (Hentai yoiko shinbun)—gained passionate young fans;
Nancy Seki herself was an enthusiastic reader from her high school days

onward, and often sent in letters. It is also at this period that Itoi began as-
sociating himself with artists and musicians, often collaborating on lyrics.
He became even more renowned between 1982 and 1985, when he hosted
you, the nhk program for youngsters. Itoi became the vessel for transmit-
ting cutting-edge information even as he actively crossed over multiple
media, from advertising to publishing to m usic and television. One of the
representative media celebrities of the 1980s, this copywriter connected
music, fashion, theatre, and publishing, dynamizing them all and becoming
the very embodiment of Tokyo’s vibrant culture at the time.
Let us step back and imagine for a moment the figure of Nancy Seki walk-
ing in Ikebukuro Station in 1981. The Seibu Department Store she often vis
ited was directly connected to the station, and the walls and pillars of the
station were covered with posters animated by Itoi Shigesato catchphrases.
Station kiosks sold magazines and newspapers filled with information. In
the museum, she could see art; in the record store, she could catch up on the
latest m
usic; and in the bookstore, she could look for the latest publications—
all depending on her mood. Riding the train, she could easily get to other
cultural hubs in the city, such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Roppongi. “Now, I
stand at the crossroads of media”—this is likely how Nancy Seki felt in her
very body.
Nevertheless, compared to the high-speed movement of the information
network in Tokyo, Nancy Seki herself was a “stationary person” (ugokanai
hito). After a year of studious preparation for the entrance exams, she fi
nally passed them and entered Hosei University. But after a short period in
classes, she suddenly stopped going to school, instead staying at home read-
ing books and watching tv. Soon after entering Hosei she left it, choosing
instead to go to the vocational school Kokoku Gakkō (literally Advertising
Academy). This was a school aimed at training copywriters, run by the mag-
azine Kōkoku hihyō (Advertising criticism). The very metamedia existence
of a magazine such as Kokoku hihyo, which aimed to offer a space for the
criticism of advertising, a medium initially meant to simply transmit infor-
mation, is a testament to the highly developed media environment of 1980s
Japan. That said, the Kokoku Gakkō advertising academy, while riding on
the popularity of copywriting at the time, can hardly be considered a serious
training ground for copywriters given its short length (three months) and
the absence of any clear path toward careers. According to Nancy Seki’s own
recollections, she was not particularly attracted to copywriters or their pro-
fession (indeed, she is said to have had a very critical opinion of Itoi Shige-
sato’s catchphrases), and once the program ended, she quickly returned to
[232] ryoko misono

her lazy life. But the experience at Kokoku Gakkō in fact led to her job as
columnist and illustrator.
A friend she met at Kokoku Gakko fell in love with both her eraser print
art and her rhetorical abilities, and introduced Nancy to her boyfriend, who
was working as a freelancer for magazines. Nancy Seki, an amateur still using
her given name (Seki Naomi), took some of her eraser prints to a meeting
with her friend’s boyfriend, who immediately recognized the originality and
unique sensibility of her work, and granted her membership in Shuwac-
chi, the freelance writers group he was part of. This was in 1985. From there,
Nancy Seki quickly made her name in the publishing industry.
She debuted as an eraser print illustrator in a male fashion and culture
magazine called Hotdog Press, eventually taking on a series of written col-
umns too. With the help of a number of young writers and editors that she
collaborated with, Seki turned out one ambitious and original work after
another. From 1988 to 1991 she was the official cover illustrator for the well-
established Music Magazine (significant because before Nancy Seki, only art-
ists with long illustrious careers had this honor), and from t here, she gained
societal renown as both a professional artist and a columnist. A girl from the
far north of Japan who in 1980, arrived at the intersection of media in Ike-
bukuro’s Seibu Department Store and experienced firsthand the dynamism
of Tokyo’s multiple media crossovers, Nancy Seki now found herself on the
path to the very center of this media environment.
However, it is said that Nancy Seki herself, as well as her close friends
who were writers and editors, did not have the sense that her work would
continue indefinitely. The very name Nancy Seki was the on-the-spot in-
vention of an editor of Hotdog Press, Itō Seikō (who later became a novelist
and a celebrity), and Nancy Seki never really got used to it. The w hole pro
cess of her career, therefore, seemed a mere extension of the playful activi-
ties of an amateur young woman looking to do something interesting. Her
eraser prints and her very name, Nancy Seki, reflected how Seki was playing
the role of a young w oman trying to make it big, as if it w ere a game. This
feeling of play and the temporal consciousness of living for the moment is
very closely tied to the general sentiment of 1980s Japan, an atmosphere
sustained by economic prosperity and the delicate premonition of life within
an economic b ubble, with crisis on the horizon. Indeed, at that time the
publishing industry was experiencing an era of unprecedented economic
vitality, and was in a constant search for young talent. When Nancy Seki began
her career as writer and illustrator in 1985, the annual income of the print
market was ¥1.7 trillion; it would continue rising u ntil its peak at ¥2.6 trillion

in 1996. The scale of the market at the time is clearly different from that of
the present, in which the publishing industry has been in a recession for a
long time. In this sense, we can say that Nancy Seki timed the start of her
career well. The 1980s seemed like a time when anyone who dreamed of
making it onto media’s shining stage could do so, and Nancy Seki was one
of the many people who realized this dream.
Nancy Seki at the Crossroads of Media

Of course, the reality was that things were not that s imple; not just anyone
could ascend to the media stage, and luck alone was not sufficient to get you
there. Nancy Seki had the precious ability to survive the exalted and rapidly
changing dynamics of a diverse media environment. But what kind of media
environment was Nancy Seki raised in, in which her talents ultimately bore
fruit in the form of her television criticism? In this section, I would like to
emphasize the fact that even though Seki ended up working in the medium
of tv, tv itself was not the only source of her critical imagination. She was
raised and lived at the crossroads of media that included radio, magazines,
and music, in addition to the medium of television, around which she ulti-
mately focused her critical talents.
Nancy Seki often repeated the story that one of the greatest influences
on her was the legendary midnight radio program “Beat Takeshi’s All-Night
Nippon.” Kitano Takeshi is now internationally recognized as a film director,
but he got his start as a manzai comic actor u nder the name of Beat Takeshi as
part of the two-man manzai team Two Beat.5 Although Beat Takeshi started
in show business’s underground, he quickly gained renown as a talented en-
tertainer with devastatingly sharp jokes and a quick delivery style.
“Beat Takeshi’s All-Night Nippon” debuted at midnight on New Year’s
Day in 1981 and aired each Friday from 1 am to 3 am. Although today Ki-
tano Takeshi is extremely popular and a key figure on national television,
the comedian Beat Takeshi was just starting to gain renown when his radio
program kicked off in 1981, riding on the manzai boom of the time. Subse-
quently, Beat Takeshi’s tv appearances also grew more frequent. The radio
program continued airing u ntil 1990, during which time it influenced many
young creators and gave birth to successors. Nancy Seki was still in high
school in Aomori at the time the program started and became a passionate
fan. She never missed an episode, and recorded each and every one on tape,
continuing this practice even after she became a busy columnist.
[234] ryoko misono

Beat Takeshi’s assistant host on the show, Takada Fumio, recalls, “ ‘All-
Night Nippon’ was the radio show that marked a complete transformation
of Japanese humor.”6 Through the nationally syndicated but somehow still
seemingly underground format of midnight radio, Beat Takeshi developed
a unique style of rhythm and humor that diverged from Japan’s existing sys-
tem of repetitive comedy, and thereby extended his influence to all youth
in Japan, carving his unique intensity into their hearts. Around that time,
increasingly large numbers of regular men started emulating Takeshi’s man-
ner of speaking. As for Nancy Seki, her prose exuded Takeshi’s influence, and
possessed a strange cadence, with colloquialisms suddenly interrupting her
text, and sudden bursts of self-criticism, such as “or maybe not” inserted at
the end of a long, reasoned argument. Nancy Seki’s prose possessed an oral
quality that clearly distinguished it from a more academic style of prose; in
this aspect alone, we can sense the influence of “Beat Takeshi’s All-Night Nip-
pon.” Fellow columnist Odajima Takashi recounts his surprise at Nancy Seki’s
manner of speaking—that she spoke as if raised in downtown Tokyo, just like
Kitano Takeshi, rather than in the dialect of her native Aomori.7 Much like
television, the medium of radio reinforced the homogeneity of the Japanese
nation with its countrywide network, making it possible for people from Ja-
pan’s remotest areas to its major city centers to share the same information
and the same sense of an era. In this sense, we can say that Nancy Seki’s writ-
ing style and even her sense of humor w ere born from the medium of late-
night radio as a form of national public sphere.
Another factor that developed Nancy Seki’s alternative media sensibility
was the proliferation of subcultural magazines on art and culture that
emerged at the end of the 1970s. When, in magazine interviews, Nancy Seki
was asked what kind of magazines she had read as a high school student,
she responded with titles such as Bikkuri House, Omoshiro hanbun, Goku,
Kōkoku hihyō, Studio Voice, Takarajima, and Yasō. These magazines have
by now mostly ceased publication, or have downsized, but in the 1980s, they
were representative of the subculture boom, and indeed were part of the
fringes of the New Academism or Nyū Aka movement (on Nyū Aka, see
Alexander Zahlten’s essay in this volume). One element common to all of
these magazines was their active exclusion of political discourse. From the
1960s through the beginning of the 1970s, the arts influencing youth culture
(such as film, theatre, art, and music) w
ere inevitably colored by leftist ideol-
ogy or leanings; their most commonly shared values can be summed up by
the attitude that “to rebel against the established order is cool.” H owever,

after the 1973 hostage taking by the Japanese Red Army, known as the
Asama Sansō incident (which, incidentally, is remembered as a televisually
mediated media event), the social influence of leftist ideology went into a
quick and sudden decline. What took its place was an intellectual culture
industry—Nyū Aka—and a relatively apolitical subculture, both of which
arose against the background of economic prosperity.
In a sense, the cultural industries that w
ere the very basis of the b
ubble
economy’s extravagant consumer culture were themselves made possible by
the widespread change in values among youth, wherein “being intellectual,”
“being urban,” and “having a mastery over all things media” became the new
cool. Of course, by the late 1970s, the number of youth who shared t hese values
was still limited to those cutting-edge young people who were particularly
sensitive to these media changes. Nancy Seki recalls that in her hometown, the
only person reading these magazines, aside from her, was her best friend. But
what should amaze us is that t hese art and subculture magazines w ere sold in
local bookstores in the countryside, even despite such a limited readership.
This fact speaks to the publishing industry’s high level of maturity, but also to
the delicate weave of a media network capable of distributing even such niche
magazines all across Japan. Nevertheless, what we also must conclude from
this is that the media apparatus itself was still very much focused on Tokyo,
with the concordant centralization of power that this implies. As the epicenter
of the diffusion of such information, the publishing industry and media intel-
lectuals located in Tokyo sustained and indeed heightened the mythic repre
sentations of Tokyo as an information city. Therefore, moving to Tokyo was a
completely natural decision for girls in high school with a highly developed
media sensibility, such as Nancy Seki and her friend. They innocently dreamt
of g oing to Tokyo to bathe in the glow of the latest information, to penetrate
the media network, and to themselves become the senders and disseminators
of information.
In addition to the impact of “Beat Takeshi’s All-Night Nippon” and the
proliferation of subcultural magazines on art and culture, a third major
factor that brought Nancy Seki into this network of media subcultures was
music. A particularly strong influence on her in this respect was the elec-
tronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra, or ymo. While the legendary
ymo lasted only from 1978 to 1983, in these five years of activity it became
a central group in techno and new wave movements at the beginning of
the 1980s. One could say that the group’s rise constituted a major cultural
event that transcended m usic, fashion, speech, and media. Moreover,
it represent an exception in Japanese m usic as ymo’s cds were released
[236] ryoko misono

abroad and the group even undertook worldwide tours. ymo was a pio-
neer in its deliberate crossing of national borders. Even a fter the group
disbanded, the members continued to influence Japanese popular m usic
by creating music for international films or songs for national idols at the
height of their careers.
But how did Nancy Seki come upon this cutting-edge m usic? We get a
glimpse in her recollection of how she spent her time after school let out:
“During high school my behavior was pretty much determined. First t hing
after school ended, I went to a bookstore with my friends. A fter two hours
spent there we went to the nearest electronic shop, sat on bicycle seats and
watched videos of ymo concerts. Then after that we’d go to a record shop,
but couldn’t buy anything ’cause we didn’t have any money.”8
With this testimony, we can see the media environment in which Nancy
Seki was ingesting information before her move to Tokyo. She was always
going to places that w ere part of a public space with access to the national
media network, such as bookstores, electronic shops, tv and record shops,
and so on. From the different information and signs lined up as commodi-
ties before her, she chose the most subcultural and cutting-edge elements,
and burned them into her eyes and ears, even without buying them. This
practice of absorbing information—quite similar to hunting—allowed her
to transform even such mainstream devices as the television set into a trans-
mitter of subcultural signs such as ymo. Could the sharpening of her ability
to dissect and absorb semiotic information have been the educational pro
cess that ultimately trained her eyes to see the truth of tv that everyone can
see but no one actually notices?
Here I want to highlight again the fact that, although Nancy Seki made her
worksite the national tv network that united Japan as a nation, her manner
of absorbing information allowed her to feed on underground or alternative
media. The information she collected was far from the mainstream of so-
called national culture. This ability to “read obliquely” no doubt allowed her to
develop her highly perceptive media sensibility. Nevertheless, we can also see
that within the media environment of the 1970s and 1980s, this cutting-edge
subcultural information was itself part of the national media network, and
was concentrated in the privileged center called Tokyo. Perhaps, then, Nancy
Seki’s true talent as a television critic was to put herself at the crossroads of
multiple media. From this place, she resisted the power of mainstream media
to unify the nation, and from within the high volume flow of information
and signs, she found for herself a uniquely contrarian and nondominant
perspective.

Furthermore, given that Nancy Seki was one of the rare women who had suc-
ceeded in establishing her position as a “female critic” in a male-dominated,
masculinist discursive space, there is a need to consider her identity from
the point of view of gender theory. In many senses, Seki was not a person
who could easily be characterized as an “ordinary w oman.” Perhaps what
most made her a rather exceptional woman in Japan at the time was her
large figure, which became the basis of her public image. Although she was
of average weight as a young child, in her fourth year of elementary school,
she suddenly gained a considerable amount of weight. As a precaution, she
was checked by the hospital, but was diagnosed as healthy, albeit heavyset.
While obesity could have been a sensitive problem for a girl during adoles-
cence, Seki was not bullied at school. That said, I do think that her physical
size did have a significant impact on the formation of her personality.
In a three-way conversation published in 2000 in the gay magazine Queer
Japan (Kuia Japan) that included editor Fushimi Noriaki and Matsuko
Deluxe (now an immensely popular female cross-dressing tv personality
known for her cynical manner of speaking, who was, at that time, the editor
of another gay magazine), Nancy Seki rather surprisingly discussed her own
physique and sexuality.9 The apparent reason she was asked to participate
in the dialogue was that Fushimi was under the misconception that she was
bisexual—a label Nancy Seki dismissed. Nevertheless, Fushimi persisted;
he sensed something “queer” about her style, to which Seki responded that
from her childhood on, she had always considered herself a “nonstandard”
person, someone who did not make the same choices as other girls (who
always wanted to have the same hairstyle as pop stars or idols). This was
not because she was troubled, she emphasized, but simply b ecause she po-
sitioned herself differently. In fact, one might suggest that Nancy Seki’s con-
sciousness of herself as “nonstandard” in relation to the majority of girls may
have been the basis from which she developed her critical wherewithal for
deciphering media from an oblique point of view. When this nonconformist
attitude is thought from within the frame of sexuality, “queer” may indeed
be the most suitable category to describe her.
Indeed, Nancy Seki’s critical texts and logically constructed thinking pre
sent some nonbinary or genderqueer elements. According to numerous tes-
timonies, many of Seki’s readers thought that she was a man b ecause of her
style. Of course, this very reception reflects the gendered categorization
of discourse itself, wherein well-structured texts and critical thinking are
labeled as “masculine” in style. But as a persona, Nancy Seki was not de-
scribed as a scornful masculine figure, but rather as a delicate and thoughtful
[238] ryoko misono

oman, or even as an intimate older sister. Even as she maneuvered within
w
the gender stereotypes of queer or masculine styles of speech at the discursive
level, Nancy Seki cannot be inserted into the heteronormative dichotomy of
male or female. In other words, Nancy Seki was a woman who, unlike other
women, did not need to participate in the heterosexual model of gender pol-
itics, nor did she feel that becoming the object of male sexual desire was the
necessary condition for the formation of her gender identity. While fleeing
from the pressure of compulsory heterosexuality, she nonetheless maintained
her “femininity.” This rather exceptional, antiestablishment gender identity
(within the context of Japanese media) enabled her to have a panoramic
view of the decadent media market, and of tv in particular, where the com-
modification of sex was on full display. By developing her unorthodox “sex-
uality,” Nancy Seki was in turn able to see sexuality objectively as a sign that
is culturally constructed by power.
Facial Supremacism and the Elements of Nancy Seki’s Critical Practice

We can trace the origins of Nancy Seki’s turn to tv as an object of criti-
cism to her series of columns in the magazine Uwasa no shinsō (The truth
about rumors), which debuted in the May 1990 issue and continued u ntil
her death. Nancy Seki’s column started as a short text, without the eraser
print illustrations, but ended up as one of the most emblematic and widely
read columns in the magazine. Uwasa no shinsō was a scandal magazine that
published articles about celebrities without regard for their truth or falsity.
Yet it was also a magazine put together by an anarchic and antiauthoritarian
editorial team that was unique in the publishing industry. This extremely
subcultural magazine matched perfectly with Nancy’s bold and sharp style
of criticism. A year and a half a fter its start, Nancy Seki’s column was re-
named “Meikyū no hanasono” (The flower garden labyrinth), becoming a
full page in length and featuring an eraser print image. The reason for the
expansion of Nancy Seki’s column was the release of her first book and the
serialization of some of her works in other major magazines. In other words,
she started to become famous.
A year later, the title of Nancy Seki’s popular column changed again, this
time to “Ganmen shijōshugi” (Facial supremacism), and remained in this
form for the next ten years or so. Seki would later explain the meaning of
the peculiar title—which she claimed expressed her basic stance on tv it-
self—in the following terms: “Facial Supremacism is based around the motto
that ‘the human is the face,’ and centered on the principle that h umans can

be judged on their face alone.” “You can only see what is to be seen,” she con-
tinued. “But if you look close enough, you can break through to their inner
truth. That is Facial Supremacism.”10 Seki refuses the conventional attitude
of the tv viewer who decodes the information or meaning inside or be-
neath the television image. Instead, she focuses her attention squarely on
the image alone, seeking to discover a meaning other than the official one. In
other words, she relates to the tv not as a preconstructed viewer or receiver
(ukete) but rather as a critical reader (yomite). This was the crux of Seki’s tv
criticism, and for this reason I would like to highlight the merits of her focus
on the surface of images transmitted through the tv set.
The face is the extreme condensation of a person, the very proof of exis-
tence. To find the distortions and gaps, the conflicts and excesses in the face
(which acts as the ostensible guarantee of the self-sameness of the person),
is to look beyond the semantic meaning transmitted by the medium of tele
vision, and to expose the failures in the structure of signification itself. This
is an extremely risky activity. But Seki put her work decoding the surface
of the image into practice in the form of her eraser print illustrations of the
facial images of the tv personalities who were the objects of her criticism.
In these illustrations of f aces that she reconstructed through the filter of her
critical eye, she revealed what “everything anyone could see but failed to
notice.” In 1993, in recognition of her penetrating criticism, Seki was given
two new series of tv columns and became a nationally famous columnist.
The first column was “Komimi ni hasamō” (Let’s overhear it), for the major
weekly Shūkan Asahi, and the second was “Nancy Seki no terebi shōtō jikan”
(Nancy Seki’s tv curfew time) in another national weekly magazine, Shūkan
Bunshun. These serial columns were her first weekly column series, and she
would not miss a submission until her death in 2002.
Many p eople tend to elevate Nancy Seki’s prose criticism over her eraser
prints that accompanied it. However, this article takes the opposite stance.
Of course, her texts were of fine quality both as sharp social criticism and as
entertaining reads. However, it was her adoption of the unique eraser print
form that was most indispensable; it was these prints that allowed her work
to transcend the status of a mere cultural commodity circulating within the
publishing industry and become the true scalpel for taking apart and ana-
lyzing the tv medium. Nancy Seki used her unique eraser prints as a knife
blade to extract and put on display alternative interpretations of an original
image that appeared within the real-time flow of images that is television
(ostensibly a medium for transmitting information and meaning via images).
Below, I would like to examine the most notable features of Nancy Seki’s
[240] ryoko misono

criticism, focusing especially on her unique combination of text with eraser
print image.
The first notable feature of Nancy Seki’s criticism that she herself empha-
sized is the fact that almost all of the images of tv personalities engraved in
her eraser prints are of faces. As I’ve already noted, her tv criticism was in
principle the criticism of tv personalities, and is hence full of personal names
difficult to decode without sharing the same contemporaneous media envi-
ronment. In the case of the tv medium, tv personalities are all given a sort
of semantic meaning as an image and are asked to play their role in accor-
dance with this meaning. Personalities are reduced to a sign designating a
proper name that slowly takes the place of their real identities. In the case of
the structure of television as a medium, the corporeality of tv personalities
is reduced to the mere image of their face, appearing on the screen. Th ere
the very proof of existence of a personality is found in their proper name,
and its image equivalent, a face. However, Nancy Seki takes this proof of
the existence of the television personality—their face—and transforms it
into the reproducible medium of the eraser print.
The face of public personalities as altered by the clunky lines of the cheap
medium of the eraser print revealed that their televisual images were merely
commodities of mass consumption operated on and reproduced by tv, far
removed from that personality’s material existence. Moreover, this medium
into which their faces w ere recoded and carved is the rubber eraser—the
very instrument made to erase images and words. H ere we should recall that
Nancy Seki referred to her eraser print engravings as her hanko or “seal.” In
Japan, one’s hanko seal is used in place of one’s signature, as the proof of the
very existence of a person, proxies of a being who leaves no handwritten
trace. Indeed, even the artisanal technique of grinding ink to stone in prepa-
ration for the creation of a print is absented from the hanko seal process,
which uses an industrially produced ink-pad instead.
The method whereby Nancy Seki replaces the image of a tv personal-
ity with a reproducible printed image which in turn becomes a commodity
consumed on the market has much in common with the method of pop art.
In fact, for her 1996 exhibition, “Ganmen Hyakkaten” (Department Store of
Faces), she displayed several plastic works which are reminiscent of pop art
practice. For example, she recovered a Lichtenstein-like picture of a blonde
beauty with the face of the B-level celebrity Mickey Yasukawa, made an upper
body print of tv personality and musician Ono Yasushi and covered the
entire door of a white refrigerator with it, printed a white wedding dress with
a pattern made from the face of enka singer Suizenji Kiyoko, and so on. On

the one hand, t hese works disclose the fact that the existence of a tv person-
ality is reduced to his or her face and, as such, is quite similar to ready-made
commodities that are merely reproduced and consumed. On the other hand,
we can also see how close to pop art she was as she disrupted the meaning
of those images as commodities by breaking the direct relationship between
face and proper name. That said, making artwork was never the main focus
of Nancy Seki’s practice. For her, even the most subversive pop art creation
ended up becoming a form of authority and commodity at the moment it
was endowed with artistic value—thereby becoming the butt of her jokes
and criticism. Most damningly, the moment artworks became art objects
they fell off the stage of the present-tense media environment that was her
real object of interest.
Nancy Seki was, then, not a capital “A” “Artist,” but rather something of
a performer who participated in the media network herself, functioning as
an agent for sending and receiving information within this system. She pin-
pointed the real essence of tv personalities as a semiotic commodity of the
tv medium and grasped the reproduction of their existence in the equation
“face = proper noun.” But rather than stopping there—or perhaps produc-
ing stand-alone artworks based on that formula—she re-imaged these ce-
lebrities through the ironic reproductive technique of the eraser print, and
circulated these revised images in the high-speed medium of the weekly
magazine. This method demonstrates her highly attuned media sensibility
and literacy.
The second major feature of Nancy Seki’s criticism is to be found in the
critical attitude she manifests in her very reproduction of faces through
her eraser print technique. The delicately if purposefully deformed traits
of the face capture the moment of a semantic gap or rupture within a tv
personality’s public persona, effectively introducing a contradiction between
public image and eraser print image. In addition, the short line appended to
the image of the face discloses that the image is not merely a reproduction of
the existence of the person her/himself, but rather its reconstruction from
a critical perspective. As an example of this, let us look at her treatment of
Guts Ishimatsu (born Suzuki Yūji), the legendary professional boxer who
became a tv personality, and later a congressman.
The face of Guts Ishimatsu is depicted in a small square frame, with the
face just a little too big for the frame. With only a small gap separating the
image and text, we find the line: “Congressman Guts” (Gattsu daigishi).
The accompanying prose text functions as a sort of comical commentary
destroying the strong image of the face: “Guts Ishimatsu—there are no other
[242] ryoko misono

‘idiots’ for whom so many people have such high expectations.” After suc-
ceeding as a professional boxer, Guts Ishimatsu achieved public notoriety
with his unique, comedic speech and behavior, graduating to a c areer as a
tv personality. For the media, his semantic meaning was “a strong person
who isn’t so smart, but who does and says funny t hings.” Yet, this very per-
son who was semantically marked as an idiot on tv became a congressman
in the political field. Of course, this move into politics was not fully his idea;
this career development was nothing but a political strategy to use his popu-
larity. However, Nancy did not leave this paradox unseen. Her illustration of
the face of Guts Ishimatsu drew on his persona on television as strong but
familiar, recalling the image of him as an “interesting man lacking common
sense.” Against this common image of his televisual personality she juxta-
posed his nominal identity: “Congressman Guts.” The gaps and contradic-
tions raised by this juxtaposition lead to multiple questions: Why would a
known unintelligent character like Guts Ishimatsu take on the serious job
of being a congressman? Is the combination of the name “Guts” with the
occupation “congressman” itself nothing more than an antinomy (though of
course an antinomy that would no doubt draw laughs from p eople)? In the
face of this antinomy, Nancy combines a humorous text with the image, eas-
ing the anxiety caused by this apparent incongruity, and finding the truth
within this contradiction—even as she sublimates criticism into entertain-
ment. In other words, she did not directly mock Guts Ishimatsu’s entry into
politics, but rather showed that what general audiences still expected from
him was not a political program, but rather the televisually habituated se-
mantic meaning of Guts as the unintelligent tv personality. In the succinct
yet humorous lines of the text, she also shows her discomfort and criti-
cal consciousness about the political exploitation of a tv personality in this
manner.
Nancy Seki’s tv criticism is hence composed of three distinct yet co-
constituting elements: the image made with her eraser print technique, the
brief one-liner engraved below the print, and the critical text on the per-
sonality. Her criticism demands that her readers move back and forth
between the three elements; as such, it operates as a lesson that teaches read-
ers the media literacy required to analyze the medium of tv, allowing them
to interrupt for a moment the present-tense and unilateral flow of televi-
sual images. Moreover, her engagement with both image and text equally
in turn highlights the materiality of language itself—a materiality normally
obscured in the supposedly transparent transmission of information in the
medium of the magazine. To summarize, Nancy Seki’s tv criticism on the

one hand was a media practice based on the evaluation of tv personalities.
On the other hand, her criticism interrogated the mediality of words and
images themselves; it disrupted the natural power difference between words
and images, and gestured at the materiality of both words and images that
was normally hidden under the expectation of the transparent transmission
of information or meaning.
The third feature of Nancy Seki’s tv criticism was her humorous manner
of revealing the tv personality as a commodity, and of deconstructing tv as
a media market informed by the logic of capitalism. The short lines inscribed
either alongside the face of a tv personality on the eraser print, or as the title
of the column that week, w ere arresting in their amusing phrasing and the
condensed meanings hidden within. In this sense, these one-liners recall the
advertising copy writing practices that are the symbol of consumer culture,
and the origins of Nancy Seki’s career as a writer. But in the case of her eraser
print one-liners, they do not function to illuminate the tv personality as a
commodity (as an ad copy would). On the contrary, the one-liners strip away
the aura attached to the popular facial image, and uncover the true nature of
the tv personality as a media commodity concealed u nder a smooth and
decorated appearance. Let us take a look at the following line as an example:
“Male nipples also earn money; the true equality of the sexes is close.”11
This cheeky line is the title of the July 1997 edition of her serial column
“tv Curfew Time” for Shūkan Bunshun. Few people could guess the topic
of this column from its peculiar title. By borrowing the vocabulary of or-
thodox feminism (“the true equality of the sexes”), Nancy Seki sarcastically
demonstrates the extent of the market’s commodification of sexuality with
the unexpected twist that “male nipples” too earn money, inverting ordinary
male/female gender roles. The line is remarkable for its rhetorical ability to
surprise readers even as it brings smiles to their faces. In fact, this particular
column happens to be about the tv drama Beach Boys (Bīchi bōizu), which
featured two popular male actors in the leading roles. The commodity value
of this drama as a tv program was surely the sexual attractiveness of the
two main actors, as well as the fashionable setting and subject. The “Monday
9 pm” slot of the Fuji tv station is known even now as the slot with the
potentially highest ratings, in which celebrities at the height of their renown
appear. Seki took the male nipple element from this prestigious Monday
9 pm drama and introduced it into a classical feminist frame of reference,
destroying the image of the tv drama, which was supposed to be consumed
for its “stylishness,” and exposing instead how it was simply being sold as a
sexual commodity created by a media market selling signs of male sexiness.
[244] ryoko misono

The eraser print put alongside this critical text was not of the two main
actors but of a young male assistant of the nationally popular variety pro-
gram Waratte iitomo! (It’s okay to laugh!). Seki described this famously in-
competent young assistant—known for his inability to perform his job—as
“revolutionary,” suggesting that he was “a man operating within the same
patterns as a w oman.”12 Before this young assistant’s appearance, only fe-
male celebrities existed on air solely because of their value as sexual objects in
the media commodity market. The rise of this man who was clearly “incapable
of d
oing anything” was for Seki a signal that now men, too, had become sexual
commodities. Hence, she treated the image of the incompetent assistant for
Waratte iitomo! as the effective equivalent of the popular male actors playing
the leading roles in the mainstream tv drama Beach Boys, heightening the
irony by adding her catchy tag line, “Male nipples also earn money; the true
equality of the sexes is close.” By adopting this ironical critical strategy in
her column, which then itself circulated as a commodity through the me-
dium of the magazine, Nancy Seki inverted the commodity flow of the tv
medium and adopted a critical method that satirically commented on the
commodification of sex within media capitalism. In other words, she de-
ployed “parody” as a critical method against the logic of media capitalism.
The fourth feature of Nancy Seki’s tv criticism is what we might call her
ethical attitude toward the tv medium. For Seki, tv personalities existed as
“signs” within a semantic network generated by the tv medium; their labor
was to play the roles assigned to them by their semiotic markers, and this
in turn was the basis on which they received their wages and compensation.
Nancy Seki presented these facts as self-evident truths within a tv medium
manipulated by the system of capitalism (that the foundation of the tv in-
dustry was its cozy relationship with big business had become apparent to
all by the late 1980s), and she herself operated with an awareness of this
in mind:
To me the term “show business” [ geinōkai] is almost synonymous with

tv itself. For me, tv is my lens to look at entertainment. But the major
difference between tv and show business lies in the fact that no one
could survive only by their work in show business (we often hear people
calling themselves entertainers [ geinōjin], but in fact only a handful can
survive as entertainers alone). Most entertainers can only put food on
the t able by being on tv. The moment the entertainer appears on tele
vision, no matter what they may be doing, they are in fact laboring;
this is what they look like when they are “making money.” Of course,

the cost of their performances differs greatly from one entertainer to
another and it is hard to say how much they can actually “live” on this
activity. What we can say for sure is as soon as they appear on tv they
are making money.13
This passage is taken from an article in which Seki discusses a volleyball

player become tv personality, Kawai Shun’ichi. Kawai was given the seman-
tic meaning of “someone who can’t do anything” or simply “a uselessly tall
person” on tv. However, while Kawai is not doing anything to merit the term
“labor” in its traditional sense, Seki uses this column to think more broadly
about what she terms “Kawai Shun’ichi–style labor.”14 To analyze this fur-
ther, she chooses to focus on a scene that occurred during a midnight talk
show program. There, Kawai, who had just returned from his honeymoon,
introduced his bride and handed over a Gucci bag as a souvenir to the talk
show host Wada Akiko, who had a higher position than Kawai within show
business and in the semantic arrangement of the tv medium. In return,
Wada surprised him with a wedding-cake-cutting ceremony during the show.
Nancy Seki opines, “This scene between a powerful figure of the industry
and a person living under her umbrella should be a private scene. It is only
an everyday life situation.”15
Nancy Seki was outraged by the fact that tv had either abandoned its
original mission of creating entertainment, or had lost its power to do so.
This scene was proof that the barrier that was supposed to exist between the
entertainment industry and everyday life—and that should have existed—
had fully collapsed, and that exposing everyday life had itself become a form
of “labor.” As a side note, we might recall that this scene comes at a particular
moment within the history of Japanese tv sketched above. A fter its popu-
larization (or nationalization) in the 1960s, its maturation in the 1970s as a
self-referential medium, and its saturation in the 1980s, by the 1990s, with
the end of the b ubble economy, Japanese tv had already passed its peak. It
goes without saying that it was during this moment of contraction, when tv
no longer possessed its former power of attraction, that Seki was writing
her tv criticism. And yet, even in this period of stagnation, Nancy Seki con-
tinued to develop her critical attitude toward tv as a medium. The eraser
print next to the text was a portrait of Kawai Shun’ichi: an average man, an
everyman, without any special characteristics. And yet, without doubt, it
also resembled Kawai. Instead of emphasizing Kawai’s uniqueness, then, this
eraser print image emphasized “mediocrity” as the most prominent feature
of Kawai as a tv personality, demonstrating the vagueness of the sign called
[246] ryoko misono

“Kawai Shun’ichi.” Moreover, when this vague image is put alongside the
critical column that interrogates the ambiguity of the contours of Kawai as
a sign, the eraser print image becomes like a knife blade that cuts through
the increasing laziness and corruption of the tv medium. Beside Kawai’s
portrait we can read the short phrase “Akko-saaan (the nickname of Wada
Akiko),” recalling Kawai’s spoiled tone of voice. Tagline, eraser print image,
and critical text together offer a bracing and clear critique of the unethical
stance of the tv industry that so easily and cheaply commodifies and circu-
lates the everyday life of its celebrities.
Conclusion
In this article, I have attempted to present and analyze the activities of
the eraser print artist, tv critic, and columnist Nancy Seki, outlining the
unique and novel perspective she developed principally in her work as a
magazine columnist. Early on, Seki made the national medium of tv the
focus of her critical work. The effectivity and reach of Seki’s criticism was
arguably circumscribed by the enclosure of Japanese television within its na-
tional boundaries, constituting as it did a very national public sphere. Nancy
Seki’s work, as we have seen above, overflows with proper names and signs
that are arguably understood only within the Japanese context. But was Seki
really just limited to the medium of tv? When we examine the process that
led to her becoming a critic, or indeed the process of her identity formation
before she arrived in the media city of Tokyo, we see clearly that she herself
was not enclosed by the centralizing medium of television. Rather, she fos-
tered and sharpened her unique media sensibility at something of a media
crossroads that included m usic and radio, magazines and department stores.
More important still, the media Nancy Seki fed on in her adolescence was
anything but mainstream; rather, she grew up on alternative and subcultural
media forms. On the one hand, her ability to access this subcultural media
without regard for whether she was in the metropolis or in the countryside
was a testament to the maturity of Japan’s media network; on the other, we
can also see that this network had the political effects of homogenizing na-
tional media space and centralizing power.
Within the transformative moment of this media space, around the years
1979 to 1980, Seki put herself at the center of its increasingly rapid stream of
information, and started to distinguish herself as an illustrator and, later, as
a columnist. The main battlefield, which she ultimately made her own, was,
of course, television criticism. That said, her finely sharpened style of prose,

combined with her unique eraser print images, allowed her to avoid being
subsumed by the national medium of tv. Instead, Nancy Seki was able to see
through the semiotic meanings of the people who appeared on tv, to reverse
and make inoperative the information and meanings transmitted by televi
sion, and ultimately to critique the very nature of television as a medium.
In so d oing, the proper names and the facial images that were the objects of
her criticism became mere signs cut off from the physical existence of the
real tv celebrities themselves, and Nancy Seki analyzed them from within
the perspective of the media network. In other words, despite appearing to
take proper names and people as her objects, Seki’s tv criticism in fact cut
the singularity out of proper names, showing how they operated as signs
within the medium of television, and thereby exposing the truth of media
as an information market. For this reason, in answer to the question as to
whether Nancy Seki’s tv criticism was by definition limited to the tv media
space as a national public sphere, I believe this essay has shown it is not. The
object of Seki’s criticism was not the singularity of the names of individual
tv personalities, but rather the very structure of the media as an information
network. For this reason, regardless of w hether or not one was an avid tv
viewer, one could find pleasure in Nancy Seki’s tv criticism—at least so long
as one is interested in the politics and principles b
ehind the media network and
the information circulated within it. Conversely, when this manner of criti-
cal reception became increasingly required during the decade of the 1990s,
we can say that Nancy Seki’s criticism performed a pedagogical function by
showing the possibility of “unorthodox” readings. In a word, her critical texts
were lessons in how to look at and read things from another perspective.
Nancy Seki’s good friend and interlocutor, the ethnographer Ōtsuki
Takahiro, put it best when he said, “Always keep Nancy in one’s heart.”16 This
phrase asks us to relativize our own thoughts and to develop our capacity to
critique—our self-reflexivity—all the while keeping ourselves in the middle
of the maelstrom of information flowing through the media network. In-
deed, Nancy Seki was the driving force behind the type of critical imagina-
tion that everyone needs in this media society. We have yet to see another
critic of her stature.
notes
1. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1991), 27.
[248] ryoko misono

2. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 19.
3. Hannah Arendt, Human Condition, 46.
4. “Saison Gurupu,” Wikipedia, accessed July 16, 2016.
5. Manzai is a type of Japanese stand-up comedy, usually involving two comics hav-
ing a humorous conversation.
6. Yokoda Masuo, Hyōden Nancy Seki: “Kokoro ni hitori no Nancy wo” [A critical
biography of Nancy Seki: “Always keep Nancy in one’s heart”] (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko,
2014), 102.
7. Yokoda, Hyōden Nancy Seki, 102.
8. Nancy Seki and Ōtsuki Takahiro, Jigoku de Hotoke [Like meeting my saviour in
Hell] (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko, 1999), 209.
9. “Kuia Japan, tokushū: Miwaku no busu,” in “Alluringly Ugly,” special issue, Kuia
Japan [Queer Japan] 3 (October 2000).
10. Nancy Seki, Nani wo ima sara [What do you want now?] (Tokyo: Kadokawa
Bunko, 1999), 26.
11. Nancy Seki, “Otoko no chikubi ga kane ni natte, shin no danjo byōdō wa chikai”
[Male nipples also earn money; the true equality of the sexes is close], Shūkan Bunshūn,
July 1997; reprinted in Nancy Seki, Terebi shōtō jikan 2 (Tokyo: Bunshu Bunko, 2000),
24–27.
12. Seki, Terebi shōtō jikan 2, 25.
13. Nancy Seki, “Kawai Shun’ichi wa ikiteiru koto ga sunawachi rōdō de aru” [Kawai
Shun’ichi’s very act of being alive is labor], in Terebi shōtō jikan 2, 2000), 53.
16. Seki and Ōtsuki, Jigoku de Hotoke, 310.

1 0 . AT T H E S O U R C E ( C O D E )
Obscenity and Modularity in
Rokudenashiko’s Media Activism
anne mcknight
Timeline
June 30, 2012 Decoman manga published
June 18, 2013 Crowd-funding campaign for “man-boat” begins;

ends September 6
July 12, 2014 First arrest
July 18, 2014 Released on bail
March 2014 Launch of “man-boat”
December 3, 2014 Second arrest
December 26, 2014 Released on bail
April 3, 2015 What Is Obscenity? (ワイセツって何ですか？)

published
April 14, 2015 Trial begins in Tokyo District Court
May 20, 2015 My Body Is Obscene?!: Why Is Only My Lady Part

Taboo? (私の体がワイセツ？女のそこだけなぜタブー)
published
February 1, 2016 Prosecutor states intent to seek fine of eight hun-
dred thousand yen but no prison term
May 8, 2016 Tokyo District Court hands down mixed verdict.

A four hundred thousand-yen fine is imposed for
distributing 3-d printer data over the Internet, but
Rokudenashiko is acquitted on charges from the
July 2014 gallery arrest of “displaying obscene mate-
rials publicly.” Rokudenashiko and her team vow to
appeal
The Source of Activism

On a fine spring day in March 2014, the artist Rokudenashiko, known legally
as Igarashi Megumi, set sail on a voyage down the Tamagawa River, a major
waterway that empties into Tokyo Bay, where it connects to the open seas.1 The
boat was featured in l ater news reports not only for its cute rubber-ducky look
and handcrafted aesthetic; more notoriously, Rokudenashiko’s voyage down
the Tamagawa River ultimately landed her in jail and on trial for obscenity.
This innocuous-looking boat and other works of diy sculpture provoked two
arrests at the same time that the media splash over the artist’s works, many of
which w ere confiscated by police along with her computer, launched Rokude-
nashiko into coverage in the news, in flagship journals of music and art criti-
cism, and even in mainstream women’s magazines and blogs, where response
has been even more supportive outside Japan than inside.
While Rokudenashiko’s works provoked outsized reactions in Japan, at
the same time, awareness of her trial plugged her into a global cohort of
artists that includes iconic Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei. Following Rokude-
nashiko’s June 2015 visit to Beijing to meet Ai, an exhibition of her work took
place in Hong Kong in the fall of 2015 with the aim of “thinking feminism via
the works of artists from Japan and Hong Kong.”2 The show featured contri-
butions from the internationally known contemporary artists Aida Makoto
and Sputniko!. News of Rokudenashiko’s arrest and trial has been the subject
of a documentary feature on Vice magazine’s new women-geared channel
Broadly, and the technorati blog Boing Boing posted its related story, written
by editor in chief Mark Frauenfelder, under the tags “art,” “censorship,” “hy
pocrisy,” and “war on women.”3
Rokudenashiko’s arrest conferred on her the honor of being the first
woman in Japanese history tried on grounds of obscenity as spelled out in
At the Source (Code) [251]

[fig. 10.1] Rokudenashiko stands by her “man-boat” kayak,
whose top attachment was modeled on her vulva, on the banks
of the Tamagawa River. Photograph by Taishiro Sakurai.
Article 175 of the Criminal Code of Japan.4 The trial began in April 2015
and served as a venue for Rokudenashiko to challenge a double standard
that judges the representation of women’s bodies in starkly different terms
than that of male bodies.5 Rokudenashiko’s works link to existing lines of
feminist art that employ new media, challenge the sexual politics of the art
world in their crafting of digital cultural forms, and create a persona for
activism based on humor and the customization of mass cultural forms
via craft.
In the following sections, I map the legal case against Rokudenashiko
as Megumi Igarashi. Then I turn to explore the formal composition of two
types of works, figures and dioramas, and the processes of their making as
prototypes of modular aesthetics. Finally, I situate Rokudenashiko’s work in
the broader context of cute aesthetics and show how she uses modular forms
to engage with processes of everyday life, not only suggesting critique but
modeling alternatives to the fantastically plastic ways that women’s bodies
are imagined under Abenomics. This set of policies typically presented as a
salve to a national crisis of degrowth imagines w omen to be available for
any and all jobs at hand, from care giving for the elderly, to child rearing, to
upward climbs through the glass ceiling of corporate life.6
This chapter argues that the aesthetic of Rokudenashiko’s diy projects—
which I call modular aesthetics—is a powerful case of speculative design with
resonance in Japan as well as in transnational fields of digital and craft-based
art. Though her media—which include sculpture, dioramas, and figures—
replicate parts of the body that are often sexualized, the works themselves
are not about eroticizing those body parts. Bawdy, meticulously crafted, and
funny, Rokudenashiko’s sculpture work draws on the traditionally low tones
of art found in craft to offer media theory an invitation to “low theory.” “Low
theory,” in McKenzie Wark’s turn of phrase, is an attempt to connect ideas
with life processes using what he calls “the labor point of view,” with an eye
to the infrastructures and collaborations that connect the art work to the
cultural work.7 In this case, the lowness comes in the common or mass-
produced materials as well as the perceived vulgarity of subject m atter. The
kayak is made of a customized insert attached to a mass-produced base; the
dioramas are meticulously handcrafted with art materials and found objects
on top of an alginate cast; and the figures are cast from plastic. Rokudena-
shiko’s low-theory use of new media forms in the digital age poses questions
about how material (usually female) bodies might be meaningful beyond
ways they are conventionally morcellized and sexualized in a commodity-
based market of images.

Rokudenashiko’s use of her own body as a raw material for dematerial-
ized art making is a call for a return to experience, to grasping how one’s
own body can be understood in the same terms as other media—specifically
other plastic media. The question of how a body might be a medium and its
experiences revalued in a better f uture is characteristic of the field of specu-
lative design, a field that according to Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby is
guided by
the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better under-
stand the present and to discuss the kind of f uture p
eople want, and,
of course, ones p eople do not want. The[se projects] usually take the
form of scenarios, often starting with a what-if question, and are in-
tended to open up spaces of debate and discussion; therefore, they are
by necessity provocative, intentionally simplified, and fictional. Their
fictional nature requires viewers to suspend their disbelief and allow
their imaginations to wander, to momentarily forget how things are
now, and wonder about how things could be.8
In both small plastic sculptures and digitally produced 3-d -printed ob-
jects, Rokudenashiko’s body is presented as just such a “necessity provoca-
tive, intentionally simplified, and fictional” prototype that imagines such
better futures beyond the tired tits-and-eyes images, pixelated genitals, and
fetishized body elements seen in commercial representations of the female
body that overvalue parts (breasts, genitals, etc.) at the expense of not only a
whole but of any other context or value. In the words of the digital historians
Alan Galey and Stan Ruecker, one goal of the prototype designer “has been
deliberately to carry out an interpretive act in the course of producing an
artifact.”9 In this case, interpretation comes from the speculative questions
that arise from interpreting the artifact of the female body as something re-
signifiable, whose meaning may shift into new narratives—not guaranteed
to be better in terms of female power, but at least different, with potential.
What if your body were just another surface or backdrop—like a rolling
lawn, the moon, or a golf course? Would you disappear into the background
like camouflage? Or would you be framed into another narrative? Or made
meaningful as a stand-alone entity in another way entirely?
Rokudenashiko calls her works manko—named for the vulgar word for
“vulva,” or, more generally, the ensemble of her external genital nether areas
(the word in Japanese is pronounced mahn-ko). Her “man-boat” (see fig.
10.1), is thus a kayak with one part modeled on a representation of her
vulva (her English translator translates this word as “pussy,” perhaps in trib-
[254] anne mcknight

ute to the feminist art activist group Pussy Riot, or perhaps simply to claim
ownership of the “dirty” word). Rokudenashiko claims this boat is a work
of art rather than a pornographic image, a creative object that interprets but
departs from reality because it lacks realist details such as hair, and not a
reproduction that can be judged obscene on the basis of verisimilitude. The
term “art” is important in a l egal sense b
ecause realism is typically judged as
being closer to obscenity. Still, the word “manko” itself is controversial and
has the signifying power of undiluted reality despite its rather blurry, per-
sonal, and idiosyncratic definition for each person. The word is rarely printed
in Japanese without fuseji, marks that block out characters to obscure their
meaning.
While print censorship literally blocks out parts that represent the
female body, Rokudenashiko’s art has drawn attention to the fixation on
defining sexuality via one body part by developing an entire aesthetic out
of the modular unit of the manko and its plastic boundaries. She uses the
manko as a surface, ground, and platform for plastic arts and reconnects
this blurrily defined body part to other processes by which w omen’s bodies
are valued. Rokudenashiko makes the process of prototyping the center-
piece of both her creative work and the basis of her representation of the
legal system in her manga and a range of other media forms. By chal-
lenging the idea that a woman’s body is a medium for promoting national
economic growth using artistic forms that rely on digital materialities, she
extends the feminist critiques of women’s relation to property that began in
the 1970s.
Contexts: Materials and Fighting Words

Rokudenashiko was indicted for three separate counts of violating Article
175 of the criminal code, the main basis for regulating obscenity in postwar
Japan. Her boat is a product of the most exuberant element of her art—
modeling parts of her sculptures on her own vulva. Rokudenashiko makes
art in character, sculptures that are accompanied by extensive textual appa-
ratuses that contextualize modular elements of the story. For example, the
manko theme reappears in her manga, as well as in her figures and stickers.
Her aim is to not only critique but defamiliarize or render impossible the
fetishization of women’s bodies that both reduces the freedom of their own
expression and which accrues a different value than, in contrast, fetishized
male organs and the powers they underwrite. While visitors flock to phallus
festivals celebrated by city fathers and judged as “tradition” and “folkloric

tradition,” bringing sought-after tourist dollars to rural areas, the art lovers
who seek out Rokudenashiko’s work are testimony of its “social danger,”
which is prosecutable under Article 175.10 A two-part exhibition of shunga,
Edo-period erotic art, was held at the Eisei Bunko Museum in 2015. Many
male and female bodies were ravished and lavished with erotic attention and
graphically drawn sexual organs that are arguably more provocative than the
vulva of Rokudenashiko’s art.
The provocation and ultimately the cultural work of this project lies in
Rokudenashiko’s treatment of her own body as a digital prototype that can
be dematerialized into a mass of code, exchanged, transformed, and custom-
ized in myriad open-ended directions by users in their own time, in their
own place. Rokudenashiko’s works—whether 3-d kayak, figure, handheld
sculpture, or sticker—are all portable and available to be customized in their
possessor’s settings. While Rokudenashiko l abors, she does not present her-
self as a “worker.” She appears publicly in character; it is only newspaper
scolds and law enforcement officers who use her legal name to define her as
a public figure. She wears a wig, uses the “pen name,” and has a militantly
cheerful attitude. We can read Rokudenashiko’s use of the manko and her
whimsical character persona as a meditation on what it means to take the fe-
male body out of an economy and reshape it to meet more personal (or even
irrelevant or whimsical) needs with the same materials available to policy
makers, who use them for productivity and nationalism.
Rokudenashiko first established herself as a manga artist and then as a
peripheral member of the art scene. Sculptures whose making she docu-
mented in her first published stand-alone manga in 2012 attracted the ire
of law enforcement and made her a major figure in the media. Her plastic
sculptures have served as a lightning rod for discussions of media repre
sentation of female sexuality far beyond the world of art and craft. Her
contribution to media theory comes most forcefully through practice. It is
self-authorized through experience rather than anchored in the almost ex-
clusively male pantheon of conceptually oriented media critics who work in
the category of “criticism” (hihyō) historicized in Kitano Keisuke’s essay in
this volume. Rather than analyzing the approach in which a subject stands
outside a system (such as modernity, Frenchness, the self) and analyzes it
as a set of externalities, Rokudenashiko is planted firmly in that system as
it moves dynamically around and through her, giving her the very means to
make t hings. Her works reference less t hese groundings and more the possi-
bility of generating new works, new readings, and, accordingly, new articu-
lations of social formations.
[256] anne mcknight

Rokudenashiko’s media persona depends on her work and her character
being taken lightly, an approach that staves off automatic resistance by ap-
pearing benignly humorous or playful as opposed to agonistic. Early in the
legal struggle, she distanced herself both from mass politics and, ironically,
from feminism, when she put the anger of the age of protests behind her. As
we see in the manga What Is Obscenity?, this anger also manifests itself in
angry men who lash out at the Rokudenashiko character for daring to take
artistic license with “their” object of sexual desire. However personally fu-
elled by anger to turn the t ables Rokudenashiko may be, in terms of artistic
process she says, “I see myself as an artist who turns anger into smiles through
manga and art. I’m often called a feminist, but the word doesn’t r eally cap-
ture me. . . . I don’t intend to fight anger through demonstrations or rallies,
I’d rather express myself through art and make p eople smile” (にこにこする
niko niko suru). 11
These “demonstrations or rallies” are shorthand for a series of sometimes

violent protests that took place in the 1960s and 1970s contesting US military
presence, the reversion of Okinawa, and the eminent domain takeover of
farmland for the Narita airport, among other struggles. Those uninformed
about Japanese media history of the last ten years may interpret Rokudena-
shiko’s statement as an insouciant step away from such mass politics into a
glib realm of kitsch that, like many Cool Japan products, seems out of touch
with lived reality or the kind of cultural work that art can do. Th ese people
would be wrong. While Rokudenashiko may disavow the term “feminism,”
or give it more fluid definitions than is customary among academics, we
should note that she uses the word “smile” strategically with awareness of
its media context and its gendering. She is able to remain on point with her
messaging and at the same time appear playfully nonallied to a party in her
quest for a level playing field for the female body.
Rokudenashiko’s rhetoric taps into interfaces with immense popular ap-
peal and stands apart from the angry male revolutionary figure whose
exhaustion has prompted many to seek alternate emotional grounds for
galvanizing popular movements. The verb for smiling, niko niko suru, is
a homonym for the name of one of the most popular media platforms in
millennial Japan.12 Nico nico dōga (ニコニコ動画 smiling moving images)
allows users to upload their comments to video files so that they can be
played back simultaneously while additional users comment in real time
on the right. Rokudenashiko introduced her “man-boat” project on this
platform, much to the amusement of its users. Most commenters giggled
and made liberal use of x, a mock-fuseji letter, and w, indicating laughter,

making fun of the practice of censorship while delighting in using the word
“manko.”13
Naming her mission in terms of a “smile” does not refer to happiness or
hospitality (“Have a Coke and a smile!”) but instead locates Rokudenashiko
within a style of media performance that emphasizes user-generated con-
tent and draws attention to the user-object relation as it exists in a process
of making, including value making. Niko Niko is also the name of a tech/it
think tank, the Niko Niko Beta Working Group (学会 gakkai). Niko Niko
Beta sponsors large symposia at which members present their gadgets and
new tech experiments, many in “beta” mode, not fully formed and still in the
process of modeling, testing, and troubleshooting. 110,000 people attended
the first conference in 2012.14 The working group is composed of academics,
fringe intellectuals, tech researchers, and entrepreneurs. All of its projects rely
on user-generated research.15 Given this connection to high tech, Rokude-
nashiko’s citation of “smile” when describing her mandate situates her in the
thick of maker culture: diy culture that emphasizes experiments in technol-
ogy that occur in irreverent ways.16
As a freelancer who has hustled at multiple part-time jobs while making
art as a hobby (趣味 shumi), Rokudenashiko is part of this class of user-
creators. What makes her work distinct from many Niko Niko Beta proj
ects is the close link it retains to her body as its source; differentiating her
is her use of amateur craft styles as well as high-tech tools while the market
role of the work’s prototype is untested.17 Many forms of applied knowledge
prototyped at Niko Niko Beta, including the “man-boat,” fall into the cat-
egory of what I call “modular aesthetics.” “Modular aesthetics” is a term with
broad application that encompasses a tendency in Japanese cultural forms.
“Modular objects”—which we can call “modular aesthetics” when they work as
art objects—refers broadly to media objects that follow a tendency in Japanese
cultural forms to serialize (as in the case of modern fiction), link (in the case
of video games or manga), or translate across media platforms (in the case of
media mix products) such that story or object parts can recombine, reproduce,
or innovate story worlds while extending their reach and interconnections.18
The other feature of modularity is its ability to detach and reattach, due to a
set of standards that are technical as distinct from textual: like light bulbs that
work in all sockets with the same wattage, modular aesthetics plug and play in
any media environment with the same standards. Use of modular aesthetics
in general proliferated with mass production (tracks on a record), amplified
with figures and personal electronics (like the Walkman), and overflowed in
the digital era (software plug-ins).
[258] anne mcknight

Modularity
Modularity as a design discourse was coined by architect Arthur Bemis
in the 1930s and appeared in the fields of architecture and the construction
of electronic computers in the 1950s and 1960s, according to information
historian Andrew J. Russell—but it really took off in the 1970s. In the archi-
tectural field, modular practice sprung up “within the mid-century Ameri-
can housing and building industries.”19 The idea of modular replaceable
elements featured similarly in the design and construction of projects by
Metabolist architects active in Japan from about 1960. Modularity was espe-
cially strong in the works of Kikutake Kiyonori (1928–2011) and Kurokawa
Kishō (1934–2007). Kikutake saw wooden buildings as exemplary because
their structural system allowed the “possibility of dismantling and reassem-
bling” standard components to compose a “system of replaceability” that
could be adapted to various scales throughout a city.20 Kurokawa, in turn,
was the pioneer of the affordable capsule h otel as well as more avant-garde
buildings such as the Nakagin Capsule Tower, built in Tokyo in 1972. In the
computer field, modularity helped to equilibrate traffic to make networks
transmit information smoothly and evenly, and in the industrial literature,
modularity is associated with order and control. But when we transfer the
concept of distribution to Rokudenashiko’s sphere of speculative design and
social formations, the equilibrium that is operationalized here aims to level
beliefs, practices, and desires vis-à-vis the sexualized body.
Rokudenashiko’s works all stress a connection to processes of “making”
in the realm of modular materiality and use both retro forms such as diora-
mas and hand drawing as well as postdigital forms such as 3-d printing and
scanning. While modularity is by no means restricted to Japanese cultural
forms, Japanese makers, from auto makers to craft makers, tend to think
about design objects as well as narrative arcs and make plugging, playing, and
translating conceptual issues important over and above technical issues.
Characters also exist in modular form, as with artist Murakami Takashi’s
dob character. Dubbed Murakami’s most “ubiquitous and enduring char-
acter” by wired magazine, dob appears in paintings and installations in
many iterations of color, size, and, especially, setting.21 Rokudenashiko’s
keen focus on the content of her “module,” however, singles her out from
the pack of analysts who treat technical or infrastructure elements, or create
characters but deprioritize the substance of their content.
Modular aesthetics can be operationalized by using media machines as
common as any convenience store copy machine. In the summer of 2015,

a series of visible protests against modifying the constitution used the net-
work of these ubiquitous stores to distribute a prominent antiwar poster. A
Japan Times article notes, “The poster features characters originally written
in a calligraphic style by haiku poet Kaneko Tota. It can be printed from
multifunction photocopiers with Internet connections at convenience stores
nationwide. To access the data, copier users need a code distributed by activ-
ists on websites, Twitter and Facebook.”22 Th ere is nothing technologically
determined about the use of modularity in design; in fact, using that means
of production in similarly distributed ways has allowed makers to use in-
dustrial standards to challenge and customize cultural and political norms.
Customizing, in the case of Rokudenashiko’s kayak, follows through the pro
cess of speculative design to register an awareness of the “standards” of gender
norms at the same time as it distributes a customized and transformed vision
of prototyped bodies that build but depart from those norms.
The 3-d printer, to whose wonders Niko Niko Beta introduced Rokude-
nashiko, is modular in many ways. It is modular at the level of the data that
it uses (it dematerializes a given design into component parts of 1’s and 0’s).23
Then, it is modular b ecause it makes parts that have to be assembled with
other parts to make the object. And finally, it is modular because the same
set of coding standards ensures that however personal Rokudenashiko’s
body was, it can be scanned, designed, and printed so that it becomes part
of multiple and innumerable kayaks that fit the same design standards.
In other words, the vulva attachment could hypothetically fit any of a number
of ready-made store-bought kayaks. The link to property is especially key to
the third category of modular design: Rokudenashiko retains the “original”
mold, so while it may be technically possible to reverse engineer the kayak
part, retaining the mold and the data allows Rokudenashiko to technically
allow reproducibility while also prioritizing access to the information to
those who have donated to her cause. As in many fan cultures, a tacit trust is
assumed between the artist and the funder/fan who will customize the data
in his/her own form.
Niko Niko Beta provided Rokudenashiko’s modular aesthetics with a
bridge to out-of-reach r&d resources such as the printer.24 The artist credits
Niko Niko Beta with changing her aesthetic, which had had an “ero-guro”
look, an aesthetic deriving from the pulp press in prewar Japan and known
for its erotic, perverse, and decadent genre stories.25 When Rokudena-
shiko states that the 3-d printer was a conduit to something more “pop”
and “high-tech,” she retains the link to mass culture through which pop art
takes its materials but empties it of its perversity. I take “high-tech” to mean
[260] anne mcknight

made with costly electronic machines with high-level software. With this
move, Rokudenashiko both takes the manko out of the field of a recognized
genre of erotics and estranges it so that we see it as just another set of poten-
tial materials. We should thus think of her cheerful “smile” as less an act of
feminine hospitality and, like her manko itself, more a plug into the world of
high-tech maker culture with a feminist twist.
Indiscreet Rules
One of the mainstays of the w omen’s lib movement (in Japanese, ūman ribu,
typically known as ribu) that emerged in the 1970s was a sustained critique of
how not only laws but also labor, domestic, and erotic practices collaborated
to situate women as objects in a system of property relations that transferred
women as assets between men, while using their labor as a conduit to af-
firm these relationships of patriarchy.26 Mass media and the culture industry
were not exempt from this critique. Rokudenashiko’s works draw on parts
of this history, such as personal liberation, and making life experience the
grounds for liberation. This section analyzes the story of Rokudenashiko’s
first full-length manga to show how it provided a basis for two key aspects of
her work: modularity and process.
The story of how the “man-boat” set sail is rooted in the aesthetics and
industry of manga. A fter graduating from college in Tokyo, Rokudenashi-
ko’s c areer in the manga industry began in the genre of “experiential report-
age” (体験ルポ taiken rupo), or reality manga. In 1998, she won a new artist
award from big-three publisher Kōdansha’s w omen’s manga Kiss. The story
was a love comedy about a “sort of stalker-like” character modeled on the
artist herself who worked in a real estate agency. Despite the initial fast-
track entrance into the industry, Rokudenashiko found that the prize only
meant an entrée to further competitions, and even when a work finally was
selected, if it did not get good results in reader surveys, it would be pulled.
The momentum faltered, and Rokudenashiko sought work at a publisher
that specialized in experiential reportage. In this stint, which provided the
basis for Rokudenashiko’s sculptural work, life experience became a source
material for work.
Reportage in general is a genre that emerged in the proletarian litera
ture movement and refers still to fact-finding missions that reveal obscure
or hidden information to a larger public. Experiential reportage mixes the
fact-finding mandate of earlier reportage with the expressive rhetorics of
first-person fiction—“literally putting real experiences into manga,” as

[fig. 10.2] The cover for Decoman, Rokudenashiko’s first stand-alone manga,
published in 2012. The style draws on the introspection, iconography,
and color palette of the suspended princess story that is a staple of shōjo manga.
© Rokudenashiko/Bunka-sha [ろくでなし子／株式会社ぶんか社].
Rokudenashiko puts it.27 The sub-genre of experiential reportage emerged
in the late 1970s as fieldwork-oriented reporting by devotees, as opposed
to scholars published in manga or para-academic paperbacks called shin-
sho (new books). Early examples of the genre featured life experiences of
labor, while more recent examples focus on how people have navigated the
systems of life such as elder care (“Social Welfare and Elder Care in Japan”)
or more frequently gambling and the sexual underworld (“Sex with Women
from Fifty-One Countries: Diary of a Man Who ‘Conquered’ 5000!”).28 Ex-
periential reportage is documentary in its depiction of real events, but focal-
izes the story through a writer’s eyes, body, and pen, and is often organized
in modular case-study form. In Rokudenashiko’s case, the first-person voice
compounds the fact-finding impulse of reportage with the highly interpretive
visual and story conventions of shōjo manga. The result is a first-person story
buttressed by empirical details that contribute a truth effect to the highly per-
sonal vision and track a process while the outcome often remains suspended.
The processing of modular elements frames this tale conceptually because
shōjo are frequently represented in mainstream media as raw materials that
will ultimately be brought into a sexual marketplace after a phase of con-
sumerist polishing. This pending state was described in a 1982 article by lit-
erary historian Honda Masuko, who was among the first to establish “girls’
culture” as an independent field of study. Her essay used the key metaphor
of the cocoon to explain the ontology of the shōjo: “There comes a day when
a girl realizes she is a shōjo, a day she also learns she can never be a boy, a
shōnen. From that time it is as if she spins a small cocoon around herself
wherein to slumber and dream as a pupa, consciously separating herself
from the outer world. H ere, she lives life to her own time, a time that can
never be lost.” This cocoon-like ability to put reality on pause and develop
29
a vivid interior life is the hallmark of shōjo manga, one that Rokudenashiko
puts to different ends than either opting out of the system or entering the
marketplace leading to marriage.
Rokudenashiko’s big break came with a manga that mixed t hese two genres
by putting life on “pause” to figure out her alienated and vexing relationship
with her own sexual body. Decoman (2012) (see fig. 10.2) is an ambitious tale
of experiential reportage that is structured as seven fairy tales, modular chap-
ters, in the mode of shōjo manga. Processing is also an important alterna-
tive to both the technocracy that disadvantages female cultural producers
and to the act of revolution and conflagration pursued by male revolution-
aries. These modular aesthetics work to shift and show the shift of relations
between women-as-things and the world of things in general. While shōjo

texts often introduce technological processes into the everyday through sub-
plots that involve magic, these projects articulate processes that are repli-
cable in the nontextual world. They are geared t oward questions about femi-
nine invisibility and how to disrupt that invisibility.
Decoman pursues the question of visibility as a kind of kunstler-manga. It
documents Rokudenashiko’s artistic formation vis-à-vis a series of anxieties
she represents about her own body and what she thought of as its abnor-
malities, sparked by a beautiful older sister, a too-blunt family and a series
of careless lovers and eager surgeons. (In her later manga What Is Obscenity?
the Rokudenashiko character explains that her editor at the time encouraged
her, in order to ramp up sales, to depict feelings of inadequacy that inspired
her to get plastic surgery on her labia. The frame story in the later manga
distances Rokudenashiko from feelings of inadequacy and plastic surgery-
related “complex” to cast the art as less sensational and more speculative.) In
Decoman’s story of artistic formation, the Rokudenashiko character comes
to the conclusion that many other women l abor under the same internalized
anxie ties, and starts making art and giving art workshops on making deco-
rated manko art (see fig. 10.3).
“Deco” is an abbreviation of “decoration,” where decorating the objects is
a demonstration of its attachment to your person, and a sense of intimacy.
A related, and equally gendered, example is the deco-tora—a trailer truck
whose macho driver spruces it up with the flair of paintings, horns, and
interior design that in total plays the part of an eighteen-wheeled low-rider.
Rokudenashiko advocates a kind of manko relativism, while chronicling
the process of t hose discoveries for herself and others. The story closes in a
metamoment, as Rokudenashiko closes a scrapbook—the materials of this
comic itself—and congratulates herself for having survived and thrived. The
phrase she uses, jiko-man means “self-satisfaction,” and includes the first
syllable in the word for vulva, man. After living through this series of trials,
the syllable “man” becomes Rokudenashiko’s modular key to finding and
rejoicing in anything “man”-related she comes across.
The sculptural form Rokudenashiko returns to is the decorated manko,
or “decoman” diorama, of which there are two kinds. The “deco” part is a
process that involves Rokudenashiko taking an impression of her vulva on
a disposable sushi tray with the same kind of alginate molding that dentists
use to make casts for false teeth and pouring a cast of the mold (see fig. 10.4).
Then the solidified object serves as a surface for various miniature decora-
tions. The result is that the manko becomes the setting for a world, like a
little landscape dollhouse with people caught in motion.30
[264] anne mcknight

[fig. 10.3] The technical information of experiential reportage comes through
as a plastic surgeon explains how he will reconstruct the character’s labia after
a botched attempt at another clinic. The big bold type and skeleton face indicate the
intensity of horror felt by the narrator as she realizes the mistake in process.
© Rokudenashiko/Bunka-sha [ろくでなし子／株式会社ぶんか社].
[fig. 10.4] A decoman diorama depicts a pastoral scene outside of a girls’ school.
Credit: Shinjuku Gankarō Gallery.
Let us look briefly at two kinds of diorama. The first is more traditional,
derived from the nineteenth-century genre of landscape scenes, in which
the ground of landscape for each diorama is the cast of Rokudenashiko’s
own vulva. With this kind of diorama, the key formal property is verisi-
militude. Trees look like trees, and the scale of distance from the church to
the grassy knoll is proportionate to real life. Each scene features a group of
people in a mass setting, oblivious to the ground on which they walk. The
second kind of diorama is purely decorative and nonrepresentational. In this
mode, Rokudenashiko’s work is reminiscent of “craft” in its individual min-
iature scale. Her workshop recalls the cottage industries such as the transis-
tor radios that w ere put together by deft feminine hands to propel Japan’s
economic success in the late 1950s (see fig. 10.5).31
In a slightly different vein of craft, one US journalist (in the Daily Beast)
called Rokudenashiko the Norman Rockwell of manko art. I take this to
refer to the homemade look and the sense of generic tableau in art objects
[266] anne mcknight

[fig. 10.5] Rokudenashiko at her home workshop, full of craft materials.
Photograph by Christina Sjögren.
distributed in a mass cultural form. Other decorative objects include lamp-

shades, tissue covers, and the delightful category “et cetera” (など n ado).
This strikes me as a wonderful characterization of modular manko art—that
as a medium it could be anything, and it could turn into anything or serve as
the ground for anything. The object featured in the Decoman manga, the
manko itself, gradually eclipsed the medium of the manga as the star of the
show. Initial works w ere process-oriented in three ways: their production
required carefully sequenced and reflexive steps; they engaged the viewer
in a sense of play in tandem with literal reorientations of sight; and their
paratexts linked them to the world in ways that speculated on changes that
the world, too, might start processing.
In addition to the dioramas depicted in Decoman, Rokudenashiko began
to devise new formats for her manko art, of which two are most key: figures
and the man-boat.
Character-based figures such as these manko-chan often spin off from
known franchises, but here it is the emotion that is key—there is no “larger”
arc or world (see fig. 10.6). These examples look perhaps shocked (almost as

[fig. 10.6] An array of manko-chan figurines, each of which features
a clitoral third eye. Photograph by Christina Sjögren.
if screaming “Help!”), and their facial expressions and arms akimbo are a bit
at odds with the bright pink and plastic-toy aesthetic. They are palm-sized,
small in scale; Rokudenashiko often appears with them in photos. Th ese
images are for sale on the Shinjuku Ophthalmologist Gallery website.32 They
are very affordable, and you can buy one at a time; there is no push to pro-
liferate characters or to “collect them all.” The w hole point is that they are
modular—they are all variations on a theme. This is a further way of evacu-
ating the aura that applies both to the work of art and to the manko itself at
the same time that Rokudenashiko also uses modularity to build a “brand”
and garner support. Manko-chan images, character figures modeled on a
cute personified manko, are modular in that they appear on her newsletter,
in the autographed pictures she gives out at book signings, and in a stamp
set for supporters—character “goods” for people who go to her events and
donate to her campaign.
In summer of 2015, the kayak, despite its modular programming, distri-
bution, and possible reproduction, was beached—confiscated and held as
evidence. Its existence as data and as boat begs the question of how processing
affects the legal status of an object: what is the status of a set of manipulable
data? An Asahi shinbun article from July 15 notes that Rokudenashiko was
charged with sending a thirty-year-old male company employee in Kagawa
[268] anne mcknight

prefecture the data from her “female sexual organ/s” (女性器) that he could
reproduce (復元) as a third object.33 As a l ater Asahi article pointed out, data
has a materiality that does not restrict it to “reproducing” something.34 For
example, a faculty member of Tokyo University of the Arts used data com-
piled from weather info collected in Tokyo in one day in 2014 and formed it
into the shape of a big, squat vase. He demonstrated that the processed prod-
uct bears no resemblance to its place of origin or its processing software, nor
is it supposed to.
Traversing media with the special 3-d software demonstrates how, as
Johanna Drucker notes, “the stripping away of material information when
a document is stored in binary form” of zeros and ones “is not a move from
material to immaterial form, but from one material condition to another.”35
Rokudenashiko’s claim hinges on this point: that data from her body can
represent it but are not it as such. To think of data as a medium that requires
processes and shaping to become an object is a very empowering thing.
What the kayak enables via digital materiality it loses in authenticity. No
longer does the kayak retain an indexical link to Rokudenashiko’s body. As
of 2016, although the manipulation of data into a new material form would
seem to anchor it in the realm of “art,” the legal status of data is undecided,
as is the status of a work of art in a digital process.
Despite the manifest cuteness, the emotion that overwhelmingly ap-
pears in Rokudenashiko’s descriptions of reactions to her art—very mod-
estly displayed in small galleries at prices that even small collectors could
find reasonable—is rage. The story of this little woman in a boat leapt off
the page and into everyday life in 2014. On June 18, 2013, Rokudenashiko
started a campaign on the crowd-funding site Campfire to seek funding to
build an attachment to a kayak modeled on her vulva. The campaign reached
194 percent of its goal—a total of one hundred million yen—on Septem-
ber 6, with contributions from 125 people. In July 2014, at 9:00 on a holiday
morning, Rokudenashiko was arrested for an alleged violation of Article 175
of the criminal code for distributing obscene data (ワイセツ電磁記録媒体頒
布罪) in March of the same year. Rokudenashiko had emailed a link to the
3-d scanner data of her vulva to p eople who had supported her campaign at
the level of three thousand yen and above (sixty-five people were eligible),
and gave a cd-r om with the data to seventeen o thers.36 Rokudenashiko was
released after a week, a fter an online petition at Change.o rg registered more
than 21,000 signatures. “I turned the whole ordeal into a manga satirizing
the police. That hurt their pride, so they trumped up some charges and ar-
rested me in December.”37

fter this first arrest, the press portrayed Rokudenashiko as angry, and
A
something of an imposter as a “so-called artist” (自称芸術作家), a label she
embraced proudly in her 2015 manga What Is Obscenity? by using it as the
subhead for the eighteen chapters that narrate both her artistic formation
and her run-ins with police. The initial press followed the line of police
press releases closely.38 And indeed, as we saw above, Rokudenashiko’s early
manga show her as angry, taken aback, frustrated, and outraged. In this, her
affect coincides with a classic oppositional mode of protest, often gendered
male in Japanese leftist politics. A
fter the student movement dwindled in the
late 1960s, many male activists suffered melancholia or political fatigue.39
Following that portrayal, Rokudenashiko made a change in her camera de-
meanor and in her writing to use emotional directness less, and emotional
processing more. She began to use humor in a way that did not stress the
absurdity—although her target, the law and the state, could be made to seem
absurd, and therefore belonging to a dimension apart from reality. She be-
came militantly cute, an approach I explore later in this section.
On December 3, 2014 Rokudenashiko was arrested for a second time at
an exhibition of her works—a collection of dioramas—in the window of a
gallery in a sex shop owned by Kitahara Minori.40 This arrest became the
subject of Rokudenashiko’s second book, What Is Obscenity?, a memoir of
her time in jail.41 What Is Obscenity? ditches the shōjo narrative structure to
narrate the experience leading to Rokudenashiko’s arrest, confinement, and
continued activities after her release. The period of confined waiting often
featured in shōjo stories must have seemed difficult to maintain as a fan-
tasy after being handcuffed in a locked room with five other people over an
eight-hour period in mid-July while waiting for trial. The book features a
number of stand-alone essays and taidans with male leftists, and made way
for a slightly new version of the character.
Cute Strategies, Close Readings

fter Rokudenashiko’s media baptism, her new camera demeanor and conspic
A
uous use of humor had two prongs: cuteness and ubiquity. Rokudenashiko’s
strategy of cuteness differs almost 180 degrees from the typical revolutionary’s
method of leadership standing outside of the masses or taking an avant-garde
role that precedes them. Her stance indeed draws on outrage: a classic emotion
that sparks a narrative of wrong, critique, and redress to announce a position
of strength and conviction typically based on ideals or reason. At the same
time, her stance rings supremely cute, an aesthetic that solicits protection but
[270] anne mcknight

[fig. 10.7] An official
photo from Rokude-
nashiko’s blog cap-
tures her candidly, in
a girlish color palette,
modestly dressed and
smiling. Courtesy of
Rokudenashiko.
can also engender aggression, and exists in a commodity-based world of ex-

change. It calls on intimacy, feelings of belonging and play that follow from
the attachment to personal-sized modular objects. Cute, writes Sianne Ngai,
taps into a “spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that
we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities.”42
This spectrum is evident in users’ reactions, which range from the devoted
standing in line to solicit her autograph to the outsized police reaction of
confiscating works of art that any art lover actually has to make a g reat deal
of effort to track down (see fig. 10.7).
Rokudenashiko’s cheerful insistence on the word “manko” embodies this
dual tone of supplication and aggression. The tactic might be mistaken for
shock art that provokes or shames by confronting the viewer with some-
thing uncomfortable. But Rokudenashiko’s mandate is quite the opposite of
shock. Her strategy is stressing the ubiquity of this foregrounded object,
the manko, draining the dreaded syllable of its impact and redirecting it
by showing how it is already present, and we already converse with it in
daily life.43 The familiarity of “cute” allows users to realize that they already
fully integrate this word and the body part it refers to into daily life; the ef-
fect is to deprive it of its aura, and it even loses its frisson of eroticism (and
shame) as “just a part of a woman’s body.”44
At this point it is worth setting Rokudenashiko’s affect and stance in
context of the women’s liberation movement indigenous to Japan known

as ūman ribu (women’s liberation, usually known as ribu). Ribu activists
who emerged in the waning days of the student movement critiqued the
fact that women were legally framed as objects, not subjects, by the family
system (家制度 ie seido) that regulated structures of inheritance. But the
critique went beyond literal realms of inheritance to touch on social and
cultural forms that underwrote women’s status as object. Sexuality was
included in this equation; activists opposed the default of marriage and railed
against the cult of virginity.45 Ideas and debates were often spelled out in
mini-komi (mini-communications or small-circulation periodicals, alterna-
tive print and image media production-distribution systems in contrast to
large-circulation masu-komi media) communicators. Writing in retrospect
about the student movement, the ribu activists and writers who published in
ribu journals and mini-komi provided critiques of the way in which sexual
and gender politics were sidestepped as mass protest escalated in violence.
Mini-komi emerged to confront this system of property relations and to en-
able liberation through critique and the creative acts of other alternatives
as personal life was imagined to empty into politics. Although it is based in
digital materiality and plastic arts rather than print culture, Rokudenashiko’s
use of modular aesthetics allows for the distribution of information that
facilitates building social movements in ways that recall the cultural work of
mini-komi.
Setsu Shigematsu summarizes Iijima Akiko’s well-known position paper
from 1970, one that “cleared a politico-theoretical space for ribu” as an in-
dictment of the fact that “the ‘laboring class,’ ‘labor u nions,’ and ‘theory’
were men’s domains,” and went so far as to declare that “theory was a
man.”46 While this claim is easy to discard as hyperbolic if taken literally,
it is readily understood to mean that theory has worked in myriad ways to
reinforce rather than dismantle patriarchal structures. The same is true of
critics, practitioners of theory in commercial, academic, and para-academic
areas of the culture industry. One venue that included the culture industries
and saw creators as critics was the journal Onna erosu (Woman/eros). Onna
erosu began publication in 1973. Its first issues featured lacerating critiques of
patriarchal systems, one of which was media institutions, up to and includ-
ing independent film productions. For instance, one contributor penned
an essay about her disappointment with the heroine of a successful porno
movie series called The Young Wife: Confessions (幼妻: 告白 Osana dzuma:
kokuhaku) directed by Nishimura Shōgorō and starring Katagiri Yūko. The
series depicts the heroine as “embracing [!] the dream of marriage,” but she
is raped by the older brother of her fiancé. Initially protesting, she gives way.
[272] anne mcknight

The older brother gives her some money, and she says resignedly, “I knew
that t hings would end up this way.” The Onna erosu writer, in a column called
“The Female Sharpshooter” (女狙撃兵 “Onna sogeki-hei”), writes that the
film disappoints because it does not offer a reality other than the patriarchal
one that currently exists, but rather affirms it while posing as progressive:
Film is supposed to have the quality of transporting the spectator to

“another reality.” It is a medium where it is possible to present reality,
anticipating it, and anticipate what might come of it. Among which,
“porno” is able to be so far ahead of its time that it causes scandals in
court. But because only this kind of “pitiful w oman” is the only one
featured, in the end porno film is not able to set foot out of its dark
little self-satisfied castle and fly the flag of progressivism.47
At the time porno movies were embattled with censors. There were ob-
scenity trials, but directors and staff also reveled in an antiestablishment
antiauthoritarian stance. Kishida ends her article in disbelief. About the
disconnect between roman porno’s bout for legitimacy in the courts and
the conventional passive fate of this movie’s heroine: “You call that a strug
gle?!?” (闘争 tōsō). Kishida’s main objection is that, in the film, the heroine
is “cast upon the flow of fate,” both sacrificed and numbly meek about
her fate, whereas many women in this era actually “make fate and move
forward.”
Like the ūman ribu activists, Rokudenashiko’s stance of militant cheer and
“making” is an alternative to the sacrificial maiden role to which women w
ere
frequently consigned in 1960s mass movements. In the end, both Rokude-
48
nashiko and ribu activists refuse to delink the female body from other sys-
tems. But unlike ribu activists, Rokudenashiko does not look directly to the
erotic dimension of sexuality as her domain, although one could certainly in-
troduce the manko into a new discourse of sex, once its fetish value has been
leveled. Nor does Rokudenashiko demonize particular men or male charac-
ters. Rather than raising the ideal of freedom via sex, she chooses to deflate
a word that represents something so ideal as to be talismanic: manko. This
effort resembles the precision of ribu activists when they shifted the word for
oman from fujin (wife) or josei (woman) to another slightly more salacious
w
and lower-class-sounding term, onna, as a marker of departure from con-
ventional gender norms. But Rokudenashiko’s strategy inverts this: the very
syllable of the word destigmatized is actually built in everywhere. Of course,
the words are standing for the body part that, if it is not exactly everywhere,
is one among many parts of half the world’s population.

The Japanese syllable man can be found everywhere, in every walk of life,
from man-boat, and manhole, to one-man (ワンマン運転) driven train, man-
dala, even manga.49 When you consider how the syllable man is built into
the Japanese language, it quickly becomes clear that language as a whole
would be poorer without it. But at the same time, the arbitrariness of judg-
ing manko as obscene while mandala are revered clarifies how much h uman
projection is committed to fetishizing this one modular organ. Th ese strate-
gies of ubiquity and cuteness embrace if not celebrate contemporary con-
sumer capitalism, within which Rokudenashiko is very much located. If in
consumer culture and its close relative, media culture, we are saturated at all
times with overflows of information, Rokudenashiko’s strategy is to cheer-
fully and polemically point out that “man” is a syllable that has always been
with us and whose absence would cause significant semiotic damage not
only to that syllable but to others attached to it. At a roundtable and book
signing in May 2015, Rokudenashiko laughed gleefully at the way the trans-
lator at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club mispronounced her signature
work as “man,” adding a second-language opinion to her claim of ubiquitous
male privilege. “Man” is present, it is ubiquitous, and by deleting it, we delete
significant parts of reality while making it a source of abjection consigned to
its secret, shameful, and hidden place.
Angry Reactions
An acrimonious Twitter exchange in July 2015 saw Rokudenashiko being
castigated for incorrect use of the label “feminist.” The discussion between
Rokudenashiko’s more freewheeling use of the term and her critics’ literal
criteria is ongoing. We might wonder why police officials as well as some
feminists react so strongly. We could guess at reasons, both art historical and
political. On the art-historical front, t hese dioramas seem to be sui generis—
self-authorized. In early works before the arrests, Rokudenashiko rarely made
reference to earlier artists.50 This tendency distinguished her from the ribu
generation as well as from its academic allies. Sociologist and critic of femi-
nine wartime collaboration Ueno Chizuko’s stand-alone first essay collec-
tion, for instance, Women at Play (女遊び, Onna asobi), used modular ele
ments from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party in its book design and in its
structure.51 Chicago’s installation is epic in scale and in labor. It is a work of
media archeology that retrieves underknown women’s biographies, concret-
izes a design form for each, and places them in a stylized communal setting
as a metaphor for a convivial conversation between w omen across spaces
[274] anne mcknight

and times. Dinner Party incorporates rather than proliferates its model and
variations, as does Rokudenashiko’s work. Because of this sui generis pre
sentation, the interpretive weight of Rokudenashiko’s work was likely placed
fully on her. What is compelling about her works is that they do not attempt
to hide their source, but they do not flaunt it either: they use it as just an-
other material—unlike Ueno and ribu, Rokudenashiko’s work directly refers
to no past, and sees the manko as another substance, not an ideal; but like
Ueno and ribu, it seeks to use this modular body part to create the ground
for a better, or more potential-filled, future.
Rather than monuments, Rokudenashiko’s works are miniature. The hand-
held dioramas invite intimacy, and their small size demands close scrutiny
to read the arrangement in any way; the figures and dioramas are cryptic
in the emotions they invite. Interrupting with the body of the artist seems
important in the way p eople interpret Rokudenashiko’s work. Realizing that
the mass-produced object is indexically related to a specific body causes
shock and repulsion—or amusement. That these fantasies should be made
concrete in a kitsch form, and not very well groomed, goes against the disci-
plinary rules of cosmetics and grooming culture that regulate many w omen’s
relations to their bodies and that surface in Rokudenashiko’s early manga.52
The nonchalance with which soldiers lie in wait for the enemy in foxholes
dotting a manko battlefield, or the schoolgirls romp up a manko hill to cha-
pel might strike someone as inappropriate, if they w ere interested in female
bodies as either pure functionality, or pure erotic fetish “belonging” to them.
Far from being erotic (the subject of sexualized fetishism never surfaces,
Rokudenashiko’s works are very much seen as killjoys), they are a kind of
medium.53
Coda
Rokudenashiko joins other manga artists who are technically too old to be
shōjo yet use the received conventions of suspended time and interior ex-
pression to dilate on a particular issue. A sense of personal time detached
from chronological time lends itself to the genre of the fairy tale. Th
ese for-
mal dimensions reinforce a set of story conventions that privilege yet sus-
pend the happy ending—a temporal dynamic of suspension I return to vis-
à-vis Abenomics in the coda to this essay.
In 2016, the role of w
omen in a national context is driven by Abenomics—
the policy directives of prime minister Abe Shinzō’s administration that aim
to stabilize the economy as well as increase the birth rate. Forty p ercent of

the Japanese work force does contract labor, and frugality and craft have
surged in popularity. The labor situation for women is asymmetrically bleak,
with female workers occupying disproportionately low-paying or temporary
jobs with yet less chance for advancement or security than male workers.
Abenomics is a grey area whose policy ideals have been articulated, even
if the concrete results are new or not in place. In the interim, women have
started to press for equal wages, but without using the label “feminist.” Th
ese
women are of the generation that grew up with the narrative of the shōjo
manga, whose key metaphor was the cocoon and whose key climax was the
happy ending. Rokudenashiko is one of these w omen who grew up with
suspended creation as an ideal, but used that cocoon moment in her work to
dream and make rather than to sleep.
Rokudenashiko’s navigation down the Tamagawa River, avoiding the rocky
shoals of obscenity and delivering its content to its destination, resembles
nothing less than the voyage of Norbert Wiener’s storied cybernaut.54 In
Wiener’s account of cybernetics, the system requires a steersman who is re-
sponsible for the self-reflexive check on communication processes and who
ensures that the system continues to function while incorporating input from
outside the system, and at the same time stays on course ethically. Rokude-
nashiko channels and updates the critique of property by claiming her body
as an object that she steers and navigates in a dynamic world that the river is,
stands for, and connects. Who is to govern sexual representation is precisely
the question at stake.
This river, like many ecological objects, including media ecologies, is no
longer a closed system that can be isolated in analysis or lived experience
from a larger ecology and the h uman effects on it. While Rokudenashiko
reconnects the art object to a prominent natural location, she does not con-
nect it to wild feminine nature. Her boat launch suggests a bawdy and
unabashedly suburban version of Gaia in which a h uman-object encounter
ends up taking the artist back to a primal source of life, water, at the same
time that it connects her to the thoroughfares of the nation and world, not to
mention mass-produced products and digital communications. The works
challenge and redraw ideas of ownership and property—typical concerns of
ūman ribu, Japan’s 1970s feminist liberation movement.55 They do so by an-
ticipating and rerouting what consumers, male or female, expect to receive
when they purchase a small and affordable, even cheap, art piece. Rokudena-
shiko’s work is celebratory not because it builds a canon, or even because it
sees knowledge as enlightenment—though it definitely has its pedagogical
side. These enthusiasts merely reinforce the point Rokudenashiko’s manko
[276] anne mcknight

art brings home over and over again about this vessel: it is already t here, it
is a free channel, its boundaries are fluid, and as a taxpayer (or owner),
it already belongs to you. Own it.
notes
Thanks to Jean-François Blanchette, Phil Brown, Kirsten Cather, Laura Forlano, Ian
Lynam, Namiko Kunimoto, Lisa Onaga, and the editors of this volume.
1. The Tamagawa River boat launch draws on histories of freedom, expression, and
resourcefulness that characterize riverbanks as a space. Like many such spaces in Japan,
the Tamagawa’s banks have a rich tradition of serving as a public space for physical and
artistic activities. Sports teams have playing fields there, while the grassy open spaces
also offer a refuge for musicians and o thers who cannot make their noise at home. His-
torically, rivers were home to social outcasts called kawaramono, river dwellers who later
specialized in garden design and became artistic advisors to the ruling government.
2. See “Gender, Genitor, Genitalia—Rokudenashiko sapōto-ten,” Campfire, accessed
July 12, 2015, http://camp-fire.jp/projects/view/2809.
3. Mark Frauenfelder, “Japanese Artist Goes on Trial over ‘Vagina Selfies,’ ” Boing Boing,
July 28, 2015, http://boingboing.net/2015/07/28/japanese-artist-goes-on-trial.html;
“Who’s Afraid of Vagina Art?,” Broadly, accessed March 1, 2016, https://broadly.vice.com
/en_us/topic/r okudenashiko. Rokudenashiko’s name itself is a definite step away from a
feminism of virtue that stands outside a system and judges. Rokudenashiko—meaning
a “no good” but ultimately harmless w oman who is a known or familiar character—
comes from the pen name the artist used when writing an experiential reportage about
cheating on her husband. The “no good” was clearly a parodic knock on the artist’s own
everyday life, and contributes to the rhetoric of honesty about conventional morality
that affirms the “true story” quality of her chosen genre.
4. Jonathan E. Abel, Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2012). Kirsten Cather, The Art of Censorship in Post-
war Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012). There was one earlier case of
public obscenity that featured a w oman. Ichijō Sayuri was a celebrated stripper from
Osaka who also appeared in Kumashirō Tatsumi’s roman porno films, including one in
which she plays herself doing strip shows and is arrested by the police. Though Ichijō’s
media were crime and live performance, like Rokudenashiko, her crime was exposing
her genitals. Ichijō was arrested under Article 174, public indecency, and served six
months in prison. See Kirsten Cather, “The Politics and Pleasures of Historiographic
Porn,” positions: east asia cultures critique 22, no. 4 (2014): 753.
5. Two examples from different generations of creators are photographer Araki No-
buyoshi’s celebrated nudes, which strengthen the indexical relation to reality via their
personal tie to the photographer himself, and Murakami Takashi’s 2015–16 exhibition
at the Mori Art Museum, The 500 Arhats, which features a drawing of an elephant in-
spired by Edo-period aesthetics in which the elephant’s fantastical “third eye” is an
aestheticized vulva.

6. Helen Macnaughtan, “Womenomics for Japan: Is the Abe Policy for Gendered
Employment Viable in an Era of Precarity?,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 5,
2015, http://apjjf.org/2015/13/12/Helen-Macnaughtan/4302.html.
7. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso,
2015).
8. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and So-
cial Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2013), 2–3.
9. Alan Galey and Stan Ruecker, “How a Prototype Argues,” Literary and Linguistic
Computing 25, no. 4 (2010): 406.
10. “Seiki katadotta sakuhin geijutsu ka waisetsu ka” [Is a decorated sex organ art or
obscenity?], Asahi shinbun, December 17, 2014, chōkan edition.
11. Samantha Allen, “Japan’s ‘Vagina Kayak’ Artist Fights Back against Obscenity
Charges—and Misogyny,” Daily Beast, January 13, 2015, http://www.thedailybeast.com
/articles/2015/01/13/japan-s-vagina-kayak-artist-fights-back-against-obscenity-charges
-and-misogyny.html.
12. Although the spelling differs, the pronunciation of nico and niko is the same. The
spelling nico is part of the branding of the online commenting platform and is favored
by its users; niko is the standard favored by linguists and dictionaries; and Niko is the
preferred spelling of the name of the working group.
13. “Rokudenashiko ‘Decoman,’ ” Niconico dōga, accessed June 30, 2015, http://www
.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm24004330.
14. Kōichirō Eto, Niko Niko Gakkai Beta wo kenkyūshite mita [I went and studied
Niko Niko Beta working group] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2012).
15. While affiliated with research universities and corporate think tanks, Niko Niko
Beta’s organizers are less concerned with institutional authority than the think tanks
analyzed in Marilyn Ivy’s chapter in this volume. And while the extrainstitutional spirit
of New Aca is echoed, Niko Niko Beta is less about epistemology’s role in producing a
“gay science” than about experimenting irreverently with forms of applied knowledge.
16. Niko Niko Beta partnered with Maker Faire to hold a conference in Singapore
in 2015.
17. Megumi Igarashi (Rokudenashiko): Art and Obscenity: Did the Japanese Police Go
Too Far with Her? (Tokyo: Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Tokyo, 2014), https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=u 35rEg_n TV8.
18. For a discussion of the “media mix” and pop culture commodity forms, see Marc
Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
19. Andrew L. Russell, “Modularity: An Interdiscplinary History of an Ordering
Concept,” Information and Culture 47, no. 3 (2012): 259. For a discussion of how Arthur
Bemis’s idea was transposed into Japanese architecture after 1945, see Izumi Kuroishi,
“Mathematics for/from Society: The Role of the Module in Modernizing Japanese Ar-
chitectural Production,” Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics 11, no. 2
(2009): 201–16.
20. Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Mod-
ern Japan (New York: Routledge, 2010), 102.
[278] anne mcknight

21. Jeff Howe, “The Two F aces of Takashi Murakami,” wired, November 1, 2003,
http://www.wired.com/2003/11/artist/. Thanks to Namiko Kunimoto for noting the
Murakami exhibition.
22. “United in Outrage, Protesters Printing Anti-Abe Posters in a Nationwide Cam-
paign of Dissent,” Japan Times, accessed February 16, 2016, http://www.japantimes
.co.jp/news/2015/07/19/national/politics-diplomacy/anti-abe-posters-raised-across
-nation-protesters-rally-security-bills/#. Published July 19, 2015.
23. The 3-d printer has changed design processes not only in architectural offices but
also in artistic practice. Workspaces such as Fab Café in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood
offer the use of facilities and machines such as 3-d printers for hire that struggling art-
ists cannot afford on their own.
24. Rokudenashiko, Watashi no karada ga waisetsu?!: Onna no soko dake naze tabū
[My body is obscene?!: Why is only my lady part taboo?] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō,
2015).
25. Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead
in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). A com-
parably vulgar scene of the pink film is explored in The Pink Book, an anthology of writ-
ings on the “ero-duction” that is very much of this era—grungy, low budget, embedded
(enseated?) in its viewing context, and slowly disappearing. Kimata Kimihiko’s essay
taps into an ancestral strand of parody and irreverence whose tributary may be found
in Rokudenashiko’s work. Essays by Roland Domenig and Kirsten Cather focus in par
ticular on censorship issues, where Cather also points out that “obscenity” was a posi-
tive marketing term for pink films b ecause it referred to a sub-genre. Sharon Hayashi’s
essay in the same volume notes Wakamatsu Koji licensed his staff to shoot “anything as
long as it was anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment” (Sharon Hayashi, “Marquis de
Sade Goes to Tokyo,” 284). Markus Nornes, ed., The Pink Book: The Japanese Eroduction
and Its Contexts (Ann Arbor, MI: Kinema Club, 2014).
26. Much crucial work has been done on the intellectual, social, and movement his-
tories and discourses of ribu. In English, see Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shad-
ows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012); and Vera C. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment,
and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Curious readers inter-
ested in media are referred to a three-volume set of documents, Mizoguchi Akiyo, Saeki
Yōko, and Miki Sōko, eds., Shiryō Nihon ūman ribu-shi (Tokyo: Shōkadō, 1992). Work
on documentary film treats women in new left contexts; see Markus Nornes, Forest of
Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007). Many recent feminist studies of early twentieth-century so-
cial and art movements have recently appeared, forming a protohistory of ribu as seen
in shōjo and revolutionary cultures, but a synoptic media history of ribu is still a work
to come.
27. Rokudenashiko, Watashi no karada ga waisetsu?!, 117.
28. Yamai Kazunori and Saitō Yayoi, Taiken rupo: Nihon no kōrei-sha fukushi (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1994). Demachi Ryūji, Taiken rupo: Zainichi gaikokujin josei no sek-
kusu 51-ka kuni: 5000-nin o “seiha” shita otoko no nikki (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2011).

29. Masuko Honda, “The Genealogy of Hirahira: Liminality and the Girl,” in Girl
Reading Girl in Japan, ed. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (Oxford: Routledge,
2010), 19–37. Media artist Sputniko’s work, based at the mit Media Lab, has also used
the cocoon as a metaphor for shōjo culture. See her 2015 installation, “Tranceflora:
Amy’s Glowing Silk,” Sputniko! Official Website, accessed February 22, 2016, http://
sputniko.com/2015/04/amyglowingsilk/.
30. Unlike other recent uses of the term “world,” the decoman sculptures are not part
of a larger narrative structure, nor are they translations of or exports to other national
discourses. For the former approach, see Ōtsuka Eiji, Teihon monogatari shōhi-ron
[Authoritative edition: On monogatari consumption] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten,
2001). For the latter, see Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B.
DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
31. See Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the
Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
32. Shinjuku Ophthalmologist Gallery website. See http://www.gankagarou.com
/shop.h
tml.
33. “3-d purintā yō dēta ‘waisetsu-butsu’ hanpu no utagai: Jishō geijutsu-ka taiho,
yōgi hinin” [3-d printer data charged with “distribution of obscene item”: Self-professed
artist arrested, denies charges], Asahi shinbun, July 15, 2014, chōkan edition.
34. Ōnishi Wakato, “Āto to waisetsu—hasama de” [Between art and obscenity], Asahi
shinbun, July 23, 2014, chōkan edition.
35. Cited in J.-F Blanchette, “A Material History of Bits,” Journal of the American So-
ciety for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (2011): 1042–57.
36. Campfire is restricted to people with Japanese addresses and bank accounts.
37. Samantha Allen, “Japan’s ‘Vagina Kayak’ Artist Fights Back against Obscenity
Charges—and Misogyny,” Daily Beast, January 13, 2015, http://www.thedailybeast
.com/articles/2015/01/13/japan-s-vagina-kayak-artist-fights-back-against-obscenity
-charges-and-misogyny.html. That manga was called Waisetsu-tte nan desuka? and
was published by Kinyōbi (for whom Rokudenashiko has written some articles) on
April 3, 2015.
38. Shibuya Tomomi, “Sekai no shio: Rokudenashiko taiho ga aburidasu shakai no
jinken kankaku” [Winds of the world: Rokudenashiko’s arrest shakes up the perception
of human rights], Sekai, no. 860 (2014): 38.
39. See Miryam Sas’s essay in this volume about the afterlives of male revolutionaries.
40. Love Piece Club is open once a week by appointment, and does not allow male
visitors. Kitahara is not only a small-business owner, but a visible public intellectual
and writer. Her recent published taidans include dialogues with novelist Takahashi
Gen’ichirō and academic feminist Ueno Chizoku. Along with sex toys, swimsuits and
horoscopes, the store’s website also blogs regularly on issues of concern to w omen, work,
and sex with a focus on the sexual double standard that parallels Rokudenashiko’s.
41. Rokudenashiko, Waisetsu tte nan desu ka? [What is obscenity?] (Tokyo: Kinyōbi,
2015).
42. “Zany, Cute, Interesting: Sianne Ngai on Our Aesthetic Categories,” Asian Ameri-
can Writers’ Workshop, accessed June 8, 2015, http://aaww.org/our-aesthetic-categories
-zany-cute-interesting/.
[280] anne mcknight
43. As testimony to how powerful a re-alignment this is, I w ill note that her support-
ers in English have insisted in translating her work as “vagina” art. It’s not, it’s about
the vulva, or the pussy, or—but the word “vagina” has come to be a part of public dis-
course in much more acceptable ways in the last twenty years due to Eve Ensler’s play
The Vagina Monologues. The play was produced both in English and Japanese begin-
ning in 2004, when a Filipina theatre troupe did the first production.
44. Support MK Boat Project! The World’s First 3-d Scanned Peach on the Beach, ac-
cessed June 9, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A 5qq4cXoR9w.
45. For a representative manifesto, see Tanaka Mitsu, “Benjo kara no kaihō” [Libera-
tion from the toilet], Onna erosu, no. 2 (1973): 178–90.
46. Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows.
47. Kishida Masao, “Porno eiga no heroinu wa naze furui onna ka?” [Why is the porn
movie heroine so old-fashioned?], in “Onna sogeki-hei” [The woman sniper], Onna
erosu, no. 1 (1973): 170.
48. Kanba Michiko was the most frequently cited and mourned of these students.
See Chelsea Szendi Schieder, “Two, Three, Many 1960s,” Monthly Review, June 10, 2015,
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/schieder150610.html.
49. Man doesn’t necessarily recall the English word referring to maleness, but it cannot
be completely ruled out. A recent movement to encourage men to take a greater role in
child raising is called the ikumen movement, from the words for raising c hildren (ikuji)
and the English “men.” And the cartoon character Anpanman is, a fter all, an indetermi-
nately aged male figure with a head made of delicious anpan (bean paste–filled bread).
50. As the trial dragged on, however, Rokudenashiko and her legal team began to use
more examples of internationally-known artists such as Valie Export, Shigeko Kubota
and Judy Chicago to point out the double standard at work.
51. Ueno Chizuko, Onna asobi [Women’s play] (Tokyo: Gakuyō Shobō, 1988). I should
note that Ueno’s book—a New Aca edition—also uses the word “manko” without fuseji.
Modular book design took off in the 1980s when the style of New Aca writing started
to depend on data points of knowledge to which it linked in footnoted summaries and
bibliographies. This mode of citation is linked to broader trends in data visualization,
such as the chart (of intellectual movements, tendencies, and relations), and dtp de-
sign aesthetics allowed for multiple layers of print and page units without the labor of
typesetting.
52. Article 175 has been especially active in policing “hair nude” or full-frontal nude
photography where pubic hair but not genitals is captured. Enforcement of a block on
photographing pubic hair started to relax in the 1980s and 1990s, with Shinoyama Kishin’s
1991 Water Fruit a benchmark.
53. In this Rokudenashiko is like the photographer Takano Ryūdai, who had an exhi-
bition at the Aichi Prefecture Art Museum from August through September 2014. The
photos featured naked and mostly male bodies, and w ere censored; instead of taking
the photos down, the photographer displayed them with the odd-looking curtains.
54. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and
the Machine (New York: J. Wiley, 1948).
55. Setsu Shigematsu, “The Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement and the United
Red Army,” Feminist Media Studies 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 163–79.
I I I . M E D I AT I O N A N D M E D I A T H E O R Y
1 1 . A N A S S A U LT O N “ M E A N I N G ”
On Nakai Masakazu’s Concept of “Mediation”
a k i h i ro k i ta da
Translated by Alex Zahlten
The sociologist Inaba Michio once complained that “the state of ‘newspaper
studies’ is such that while there is a profusion of talk about whether the
newspaper constitutes a medium or a mass medium, the theoretical mean-
ing of the argument that a newspaper is a medium or a mass medium is not
explored at all.”1 In the pages of the Japanese Journalism Review (Shinbun-
gaku hyōron) Inaba proposed, as a remedy to this “state,” a discussion of
Nakai Masakazu’s theory of mediation—despite the fact that Nakai had been
known until then primarily for his philosophy of aesthetics.2 The relevance
of Inaba’s acute formulation of the problem—“Media researchers disregard
the question of ‘What constitutes media?’ ”—as well as his attempt at open-
ing interdisciplinary avenues through a link with Nakai’s theory of aesthet-
ics, has not faded in the thirty years since.
However, it seems difficult to dispute that Inaba’s attempt to unearth the
range of Nakai’s work on aesthetics has been insufficiently pursued by sub-
sequent “media researchers.” Of course Nakai himself—the heretic theorist
of aesthetics within the Kyoto school of philosophy—was not engaged in
direct intellectual exchange with the “media research” specialists of his time
such as Ono Hideo and Koyama Eizō.3 Yet one can assume that Nakai, pre-
cisely by being situated outside of the institutionalized system of journalism
studies, was paradoxically able to develop a penetrating logic regarding the
problems of “What are media?” and “What kind of act is mediation”? The
first two sections of this article will target the various approaches and an-
swers Nakai’s theories of technology and mediation offer to the basic ques-
tion “What are media?” The last section w ill then proceed to ascertain the
relevance of Nakai for contemporary media studies, especially the central
fields of the theory of reception and theory of the public media sphere. The
aim is to pursue and further develop the questions that Inaba raised thirty
years ago within the present context.4
What Are Media and Technology? The Thinking of Unmediatedness

and the Thinking of Common Labor
Any attempt to comprehend Nakai’s discussion of medium and media
(baitai/media) must naturally begin with a consideration of the early litera
ture on Kant’s third critique.5 However, in light of the amount of space avail-
able here, this article w
ill take a detour and first identify Nakai’s deliberately
assumed distance from the media technology discourses of his time, tracing
his arguments by way of this contrast.
The cultural situation of the 1920s and 1930s saw the entertainment media
of radio, sound film, and records permeating urban space. The metadis-
course turning these media technologies into objects of study can roughly
be divided into two basic patterns. Nakai described the first pattern as fo-
cusing on the “living and romantic beauty of the machine,” “detecting some-
thing alive, a combustion-inducing adoration, in the pathos-like passion of
the machine, loving the great profile it discovers in the blueprint for steel
and concrete.”6 This includes the views of machines held by American ro-
mantics such as Walt Whitman just as much as those by the futurists. The
second pattern puts forth “a thinking that despises machinization and mas-
sification as the mortal enemy of culture,” “imagining machinization, or the
materialist machine, and its cold steel and toothed wheels cruelly wringing
out the blood of humanity.”7 In other words, it theorizes the masses and ma-
chines from the perspective of alienation. Acutely contrasting t hese discur-
sive spaces, Nakai then proceeds to discuss both of them critically.
First, he condemns the “machine romanticism” that stretches from Mari-
netti to Léger and cubism as being “not a legitimate push [toward the prob
lem], but a temporary, fanatic gust, nothing more than an interested glimpse
passing by in the accelerating fashion of street consumerism.”8 It seems le-
gitimate to say that the foundations for this line of argument basically lie
in Nakai’s unique theory of technology that originates in Kant. According
to Nakai, the “new perspective” that combines cause and effect phenomena
[286] akihiro kitada

subordinate to the natural order—such as falling w ater—with an intentional-
ist “human order,” expressed through such terms as “in order to,” is part of
“the meaning of technology as dialectical mediation.”9 In other words, the
essence of technology’s mediating character is not “mediation by epistemo-
logical categories” (ninshiki hanchūteki baikai), which separates the human
(the subjective / shukan) and the world (the objective / kyakkan) and thereby
enables the former to consciously observe the latter. Rather, the essence of
technology’s mediating character is “mediation by existential categories” (son-
zai hanchūteki baikai).10 Like acquiring skills in sports, “humans can make
mistakes, and based firmly on these m istakes turn the actions of the self into
an object for the self, and through this mediation be able to create new actions
by themselves.”11 Technology as mediator is then not an abstract phase, such
as a school of thought and systematic principles, mediating h uman thought
and consciousness; it is rather a (physical) thing that initiates the trial-and-
error process of interaction between the h uman and nature, as well as, within
this process, the transformation of its own functions/abilities. Technology is
not a tool enabling the h uman manipulation of nature but rather a medium
that enforces both reflection on and renewal of the very relationship of hu-
manity and nature.
Such a perspective on technology must be critical of the romanticism
that pulls the machine from the context of concrete usage—“abstract isola-
tion rather than real existence”—and detects in the machine a possibility
of overcoming the h uman. It is a romanticism that suppresses the original
dynamic mediatory nature of technology while covering up the dynamism
of the trial-and-error process with abstract theory.12
Next, when Nakai discusses alienation discourse, he does not treat it as a
constative discourse but rather as a discursive effect brought on by the inse-
curity of intellectuals unable to comprehend the historicity and the mediating
nature of technology.13 Thus, according to Nakai’s diagnosis, when intellec-
tuals attempt to comprehend the form of communication made possible
by machines/technology through “existential category-based mediation” via
the frameworks of modern individualism (where the subjective and objec-
tive become epistemologically opposed) or romanticism (where the genius
grasps the world’s culture ironically), the result is “the philosophers’ harsh
criticism of machine culture.”14 But what exactly does this mean?
As just described, technology, neither affirming nor negating, enforces
reflection on the relationship between humanity and nature. Put differ-
ently, technology points out the fact that the Etwas called “self ” is deprived
of its privileged position as epistemological subject (Subjekt) in the world,
Nakai Masakazu’s “Mediation” [287]

and is relativized as a term (kō) in a function (kino/kansū) that is itself only
one of many in the series of h uman–nature relationships.15 That is to say,
the individual and the self are nothing more than terms in the trial-and-
error process mediated by technology. It follows that since the individual
has become a term in a function, consequently “its expression as well as
sensual reception exceeds the realm of individual consciousness, and is in-
stead formed on the grounds of a collectively structured sociality” when it
enters the territory of the machine/technology.16 Now, when this historical
state of the “functional relativization of the individual” and the “turn to a
collective principle of expression and sensual reception” is judged from the
emphatically modern frameworks of individualism or romanticism, the re-
sults are the contemporary notions of “alienation of h uman beings through
technology” or “contempt for the masses.” Nakai criticizes the intellectuals
that so lament the “machinification and massification” in the following way:
“A certain class of intellectuals commonly refers to machines, jazz, or the
talkies when discussing their fears of the modern aesthetic. They endlessly
bemoan these as unavoidable nuisances. However, at the heart of this lament
lies a cruel contempt for humanity that these intellectuals themselves are
perennially unaware of.”17 When reality, prompted by the mediation of the
machine/technology, probes a new relationship between human beings and
nature, intellectuals attack this as “human alienation” in their discourse. Such
an enlightenment discourse, harboring a “cruel contempt for humanity,” is
much like Minerva’s owl in always being too late to begin its flight, missing
its opportunity.
Now, what form exactly does this concept of technology as a “medium”
take, one that enables Nakai to criticize the futurist celebration of the
machine as well as, one might say, the “cultural industry” approach of alien-
ation theory? Here, the well-known distinction Nakai makes between Mittel
(baikai) and Medium (baizai) is highly relevant.18 We will try to grasp this
distinction by using (1) the aspect of the relationship between medium and
human, and (2) the aspect of the communication between h umans (which
is itself connected to the first aspect) as the two axes of investigation. The
example of a boating competition, which Nakai himself employs, w ill make
it comparatively easy to understand.
(1) First of all, let us think about the way that the tool/technology of the
oar and the human body that employs it are involved with each other. As one
can say of every sport, “mastering” a sport does not involve “understand-
ing” the technique and rules of the sport by way of speculative thinking but

rather learning by experience on the level of corporeal knowledge, in the
sense of “getting the hang of it,” the respective connection between body—
tool (oar)—nature (water).
When the, so to say, structural Funktion of the water and the bodily
structure’s Funktion become deeply intertwined in a continuous and
unobstructed relationship, it is exactly h
ere that one finds a developing
Form, a model of the living body. This reduces the coach’s countless
19
admonitions to mere complications; this Form is basic and not con-

veyable with words but only as something that falls into place, or in
other words, it is something only labor itself can convey.20
This “getting the hang of it” is obtained by “not leaving out a single beat of
the oar, without deception, it is not something that must be said but rather
something that must be tasted by the muscles.” In other words, the distinc-
tion between the subjective and the objective becomes idle in the sense that
“subjectivity is muscular, just as objectivity is muscular.” H
ere, there is no
room for the “conscious” theory and thought presented by the coach’s di-
rectives that “must be spoken.” Nonetheless, it is not as if the attainment of
corporeal knowledge is achieved without any reflection. Certainly, reflec-
tion using abstract theory or thought as its Medium does not take place;
however, in the continually ongoing negotiation/trial-and-error process
between nature (water) and h uman (oarsman), an “Ah, that was it!” post
factum kind of reflection is continually demanded of the oarsman.21 Hence,
what can unearth the opportunity for moving the subject t oward direct and
unmediated reflection is not “the mediation of the Medium on the con-
scious level” brought about by theory and thought (shisō), but the concrete
reality of beating the oar.22 Nakai refers to this “unmediated mediation,”
as one should call it, this paradoxical kind of mediation, as the Mittel, and
clearly distinguishes it from the term he uses as representative of systematic
thought, Medium.23
Keeping Walter Benjamin’s theory of technology in mind, I would like
to call the character of Nakai’s concept of the Mittel a thinking of Unmittel-
barkeit.24 According to Nakai, the Mittel is not an apparatus for transmitting
intentions/messages/meaning/information in the sense of “through or durch,”
but rather a site where humanity progressively renews/reestablishes/renegoti-
ates the relationship with nature in the sense of “amid or in.”25 As the next
section will show, this incorporation of the concept of the Mittel into Nakai’s
theory of film allows him to sharply contrast it with a discourse that simply
posits film as a message-transmission device.

(2) Now this mediated—in the sense of a Mittel—boating competition
will not only affect the individual relations of competitor—oar—water, it
also effects a displacement of the communication between the athletes. This
is to say: “every individual self follows the specific functions and positions of
each of the other seats and only has a meaningful existence as a mutually
collaborative existence.”26 Especially in terms of sports, it is “that mutual
collaboration” that is the main point, “rather than a tool entrusted [ futaku-
sei] with considering the collective.”27 Of course, the type of cooperation
discussed here is not one in which unity (Einheit) is guaranteed in advance
through thought or concepts; rather it must be called a dynamic “com-
mon labor,” based on the faith that “this is g oing well,” which continually and
mutually adjusts the basic state of dis-communication.28 Individuals are not
connected by transcendent ideas as in a social contract (as in a Medium-type
mediation), but rather each individual relativizes itself as a term in a function.
It is the “peculiar spatial character” of sports that creates the opportunity for
reflecting on the relationship of one’s function to o thers.29
I will call this intellectual perspective of Nakai’s, one that stakes itself on
a group structured by Mittel-type concrete action, “Ko-operation based
thought.” Nakai himself refers to this kind of common labor as possessing a
“social collective character,” and it can be thought of as sharply opposed to
the concept of an (interpretative) community that is integrated by abstract
“meaning.”30 The communication space made possible amid/in technology
always already obstructs the all too easy pre-assumption of a homogenous
identity.
Here it becomes clear that Nakai conceives the reproductive technolo-
gies of film and radio as shattering the (pre-machine-technological culture)
aesthetics based on contemplation and individual reception through the
medium of thought. He proposes viewing reproductive technologies affir-
matively, as an opportunity for a space of unmediated coexistence between
human beings and nature; here a common l abor is realized that does not tol-
erate conceptual or individualist self-sufficiency. When modern individual-
ism attempts to comprehend this opportunity, it simultaneously invites two
discourses that actually stem from the same root: a romanticism that turns
the machine into an object of contemplation, and an alienation theory that
laments the burying of individualism u nder larger forms of organization.
Yet, it is precisely Nakai’s highly original theory of the medium, connot-
ing the “thinking of direct, unmediated thought” and “thinking of common

labor,” that enables us to keep a distance from the binary options of both ex-
treme optimism and extreme pessimism regarding machine/technological
culture.
Severing the Space of Meaning: The Cinematic Theory

of the “Lack of the Copula”
Nakai set his sights on film, the most popular medium of his time, as the
space where “the thinking of directness / the thinking of unmediatedness”
and the “thinking of common labor” were most completely realized. In the
following I w ill focus on Nakai’s fairly well-known theory of the “lack of the
copula” to investigate his theory of film and media, all the while confirming
the unique quality of his approach in the context of his time.
The copula possesses a syntactical function, essentially allowing the
speaker (or writer) to present a judgment, such as “is” or “is not” (de aru
and de nai in Japanese), regarding the content of a proposition, enabling easy
comprehension by the listener (or reader). The copula can thus be thought
of as an indicator that clarifies the intention of the speaker on a metalevel,
in the sense of an instruction to “understand it in this way.” Generally, in
symbolic actions such as theater and literature, the continuity of meaning
is controlled (to a degree) in advance by the sender by way of the copula.
According to Nakai, film is characterized by the lack of such a copula: “Lit
erature possesses ‘is’ / ‘is not,’ the copula that connects one representation
to another. The sequentiality of film lacks this. What this means is that the
filmmaker’s subjectivity cannot attach conditions to an editing cut. It is the
heart of the viewing public that establishes continuity between shots.”31 Of
course, there is no question that filmmakers keep this fact in mind when
working.32 However, “even if the filmmakers intend to create a continuity
of meaning from this ‘cutting off ’ [setsudan], it is not possible for them to
demand of the audience an explanatory account based on the copula in the
manner of literature or novels.”33 In other words, film spectators go beyond
the original intentions of filmmakers by reading an unanticipated continuity
(a meaning-based connection of shot to shot); in film, any attempt to exert
control via “meaning” is, in the end, futile.
Here it is important to keep in mind that the audience implied in the
theory of the “lack of the copula” is not of the same kind as the hermeneu-
tic reader of reception aesthetics, one that tries to fill a vacuum or fill in
any kind of “meaning” that might be useful for interpretation.34 Rather,

resented amid or in film/media, this audience is able to transparently view
p
(durchsehen) the new arrangement of the relation of nature-humanity itself.
For example, writing on the film The Power of Plants (Kraftleistung der
Pflanzen, dir. Wolfram Junghans, 1934), Nakai praised the fact that this film,
“by shooting the sprouting of a bud with dropped frames over a long period
of time, and reproducing it in a talkie of 24 frames per second,” creates an
intersection between “plant time” and “human time,” “placing the essential
structure of the plant before the essential structure of the h uman, as if they
can be converted into equivalents.” If a novel (Roman) were to attempt to
35
express the same thing, it would necessarily “mediate it via psychological

subjectivity” in the sense of “like a sprouting bud.” In contrast, film does not
mediate via the eminently human Medium of psychological subjectivism but
rather allows the spectator to immediately/unmediatedly construct a “way
of looking” at (or a way to read the transparency/Durchsichtigkeit of) this
new nature. When the h uman connects with water via the medium of the
oar, the opposition of h uman/subject to nature/object becomes invalid; in
film, the h uman is able to see a state of nature and an immediate negotiative
relationship that was previously inaccessible—the mediated marriage (bai-
kai kekkon) of h uman judgment and physical order.36 In other words, film is
an opportunity to make manifest the “thinking of directness/unmediated-
ness.” Accordingly, the audience is not mediated by the human-born con-
templative Medium of “consciousness” and “subjectivity,” but rather it “sees
through” an “unexpected order” or functional connection.37 The “lack of the
copula” is not compensated via human intentionality or “meaning/Sinn,” but
is gradually supplemented through an always ongoing projection/Entwurf
by an audience that “within differential categorical structures discovers a
projected and relational equivalence of the modi of concern [Sorge].”38 This
is not an audience that strings together a story or meaning in the sense of a
hermeneutical subject but rather must be called a naked corporeal (kinetic)
subject that, physically situated within the film-receptive space (in), creates
an Entwurf.
This also means that, according to Nakai, the speech-based copula pre-
sented through dialogue in sound film or through subtitles and intertitles—
facilitating control of the audience via the language-based meaning imple-
mented by the filmmaking side—should not be viewed uncritically, much
less affirmatively.39 Certainly, as the sociologist Sugiyama Mitsunobu has
pointed out, Nakai does not exhibit the same definite sense of crisis as Ben-
jamin about the introduction of sound and how it turns film into a mere de-
vice that transmits “meaning.”40 He was, however, very clear that film-specific

“cinematic sentences” and “cinematic sound” are entirely different from the
language-based meaning of sub-and intertitles and cannot be reduced to
linguistic meaning.41 Nakai saw the “visual vocabulary” that is unique to
film, and which creates a different horizon than the “spoken word,” “writ-
ten word,” and “printed word,”42 as overcoming the limits of conventional
language-based meaning. It places stake in the opportunity to construct
the new relationship between the human being and nature that the “thinking
of directness/unmediatedness” dreams of, where “meaning” and “intention,”
which result in the continuity of comprehension, are ceaselessly deconstructed.
Film is not a tool for transmitting messages or meaning in the sense of pass-
ing “through/durch.” The person positioned “in” film, which severs the self-
evident meaning-space of the everyday, relativizes his/her existence as a “term”
in a function, or as “a body that completely becomes nature,” and never ceases
perceiving the continuously new arrangement of “human-nature” (or of con-
nected functions).43
Just as in the case of sports, the film audience that projects a plan (=cre-
ates an Entwurf ) into the “lack of the copula” is not solely situated in the
relation of “individual (spectator)–technology (film)–nature” but also par-
ticipates through common labor with o thers. Of course, it is the “individ-
ual” that is the point of reception for a film; yet, since the filmmaker cannot
present a consistent recipe for “how to fill the lack” in a film, the spectator
must constantly confirm his/her own “way of filling the lack” via his/her
relationship with other spectators.44 “Together the characters of the lens,
film, and vacuum tubes possess a particular, collective character. This is not
only in the sense that they possess a relational atmosphere as contemplative
objects. Rather, it has to be stressed that they intrude into the senses them-
selves. They are, so to speak, the very nerve tissue of the social collective
character.”45
Take the example of a montage in which the timelines of various events
are portrayed simultaneously, or in which a flashback summons past events
into the temporal plane of the present. This evokes a temporality completely
different from the quotidian sense of time, yet this filmic sense of time is
by no means something that can be obtained individually. Rather, it is ex-
perientially acquired first through image-based conventions that are con-
structed socially or collectively: “The individual cannot accept this given
light without passing through this new social collective atmosphere.”46 A
“training” that takes place through common l abor is necessary to experience
the new sense (the new relation of h uman—nature) that the technology of
film offers. Of course, it is not possible to completely share this sense with

thers through such training; yet if the exchange with o
o thers is abandoned,
the “lack” cannot be filled, and it becomes impossible to see a film.47 As long
as a “way of viewing” based on a univocal “meaning” cannot be guaranteed,
the audience must endure this endless process of common l abor with o thers
as a “viewing existence.” 48
For us, as a contemporary audience that naturally understands such “tech-

niques” as the flashback, Nakai’s arguments may seem exaggerated. However,
we must remember that the 1920s and 1930s, when Nakai began his specula-
tions on film, w ere without question a transitional period in which such con-
ventions as described above w ere still in the process of becoming systematized
and self-evident. A “memo” by Suzuki Shigesaburō illustrates this transitional
aspect quite well:
When visiting a third-run theater I saw there was a poster advertis-

ing the following week’s screening, Blood Splattered Takadanobaba
[Chikemuri Takadanobaba], and next to it a poster twice the size pre-
senting a “warning” as follows: “In this film t here are scenes that pro-
ceed very quickly. This is not a mistake of the projection, but a new
method of shooting.” It seems that if one goes to the theaters in the city
outskirts that it is not uncommon to hear jeering when a flashback,
which is currently very popular, appears: “Projectionist, get your act
together!” . . . It made me think that running a film theater is truly a
tough job.49
ntil the 1930s, in Japan the film narrator, or benshi, in communication with
U
both the audience and the projectionist, played a central role by spinning
out stories in an occasional sense. When Suzuki describes a jeering audience
unable to understand the function of the “technique” of the flashback, it
shows the “confusion” of bodies acclimatized to the reception style of benshi
culture (which was centered around jidaigeki, or period films) coming into
contact with foreign films that had fully internalized the unique “grammar”
of film (while jidaigeki w ere basically copying theater, and the “lack of the
copula” was somewhat weak). In the context of the twisting and turning
of transitional spectatorship within the urban space, Nakai, rather than re-
treating to “stage-theatrical-like film” (which would have meant the submis-
sion of film to theater), or depending on the language-based meaning made
possible by subtitles, intertitles, and the like (which would have indicated
the defeat of film by literature), turned his thoughts to the possibilities of
films that used a film-specific “visual vocabulary” that cultivated the com-
mon labor of the audience as a “viewing subject.”

However, Nakai’s views on the common labor of the audience are less
restricted to the “audience” than reliant on his excellent discussion of the
“collective.” In an unpublished early text from 1930 titled “Collective Aes-
thetics” (Shūdanbi), he writes the following: “Public [kōshū] language is
inflected with the sense of ‘the multitude as chaos’ and is related to a single
center. But a collective’s [shūdan] language implies the idea of ‘the multi-
tude as order,’ an order in which everything, functions and compounds, are
elements of the collective, and which derives from the mutual regulation of
those elements. There is no center. Rather, the individual is a connective for-
mation that has always already completely penetrated the w hole.”50 Nakai’s
“collective” is characterized not by a public as “chaos,” or as supported by a
center/Medium, but rather by an autopoietic order, a multitude in which order
emerges as a result of mutual regulation. Therefore, this must be understood
as completely removed from the notion of the homogeneous community
whose unity is (or should be) secured through some kind of idea/Medium,
as was the case with the “proletariat that must be enlightened,” the stance that
[the 1920s/1930s leftist film organization] Prokino assumed, or with the “state
citizen” that national policy films (kokusaku eiga) aimed for.51 Rather, while
retaining an excess that resists assimilating with the community, common
labor is given the name “collective”—in contrast with the “public”—precisely
due to this very continuous relationality itself. For Nakai film is not a device
“through which” (durch), the ideological or hermeneutic space of the public
was enlightened but rather a topos “amid which” (in) the public characterized
by “multitude as chaos” was trained to move toward a “multitude as order.”
To our contemporary eyes, Nakai’s film and media-theoretical concep-
tion of film certainly seems excessively optimistic, with its idea of film as a
training equipment, constantly presenting a new relationship of humanity
and nature, and of the space of film reception as a locus where links with
others, which resist the assimilation into a meaning-based community, can
be born. However, in the discursive situation of the 1930s and 1940s, not
only the national policy films supervised by the renovationist bureaucracy
but also those produced by the leftist camp shared a view of film focused
solely on appropriating cinema as a tool for the transmission of messages.
Thus, Nakai’s attempt to liberate film from a perspective that positions
cinema as a device for the transmission of meaning must be regarded
as exceptional.
Nakai is frequently remembered as the “progressive” coeditor of jour-
nals such as Beauty/Criticism (Bi Hihyō) and World Culture (Sekai Bunka),
an “oppositional scholar of aesthetics” who organized resistance together

with students during the Takigawa incident at Kyoto University and was
later victimized under the Peace Preservation Law.52 However, rather than
reductively considering him an ideological dissenter, we should view him as a
radical critic and materialist scholar of humanities who rejected the meaning-
centered doctrine of modernism.53 He should be regarded as a radical who
saw through the—to this day inescapable—“disease of meaning.”
The Current Relevance of Nakai Masakazu

Up to this point I have considered Nakai Masakazu’s film theory together
with an outline of his theory of technology and the medium. As a final point, I
will now discuss the topicality of Nakai’s ideas in the context of contemporary
media research, especially the currently central themes of reception theory
and media network theory.
First, by basing his theory of media technology on the “thinking of direct-
ness/unmediatedness,” Nakai brings to the surface the problems inherent
in treating media as a simple transmission device for meaning/messages.
The communication model of “sender—code—receiver” shared—if one
abstracts the finer differences—by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s
information theory, by semiotics in the vein of Umberto Eco and Roland
Barthes, or by Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, all treat media as
a device for transmitting meaning and information “through/durch.”54
It is difficult to say that these in any way suitably consider the status of
the recipient with a concrete body “amidst/in” media who is constantly
projecting herself. Of course, there is no need to deny the importance of
ideology-focused readings, or of the critique of the content of transmis-
sions and messages. However, is it not true that when analyzing, for exam-
ple, manga, soap operas, or films, we inadvertently omit questions such as
“Why manga?” or “Why television?” and thereby leave out the specific his-
torical context of the respective media, simply extracting—truly in the sense
of a Medium-type medium—an abstracted ideology? Drawing on Inaba’s
criticism from the beginning of this article, we can say that the question
“What are media?” is overlooked in f avor of a focus on the (highly modern)
hermeneutical theme “What is the message?” and “How is it interpreted?”
Media technology is not merely an accessory “tool” to the mediation of
thought and consciousness in the sense of a Medium. With Nakai’s “think-
ing of directness/unmediatedness,” we are able to reassess the—one might
say media-theoretical—state of the receiver: the human (the receiver) is a
subject in the sense of an existential category (Wie-sein) that is amidst (in)

media in a direct/unmediated way, and throws its body into the receptive
space. It is not a hermeneutical subject (Was-sein) that limits itself to the
interpretation of meaning.
Second, from the “thinking of common labor,” which rejects the kind of
community guaranteed by “meaning,” our attention is emphatically turned
to the heterogenous confusion of the “public sphere / Öffentlichkeit” made
possible by media. Media do not simply expand communication in space
and time but rather are a space where the discommunication with another
person is exposed: the state of being in a double bind that is always already
laden with the gap between “what is said / the message” and “what is con-
noted / the meta-message,” in which the “failure” of transmitting an intention
cannot be synchronously repaired via a direct meeting.55 They are a field of
confrontation that seems to repeatedly demand common labor for its conti-
nuity. For example, the recently much-discussed internet community should
not just be seen as an information exchange system or an expansion of the
time-space continuum of community; rather, we should give attention to the
state of discommunication seen in the appearance of “flaming” and cyber-
crimes. That is to say, we must not only abandon treating media as an infor-
mation transmission apparatus but also relativize the dream that media w ill
produce community in the sense of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.” 56
Nakai’s penetrating thought does not regard film as a device for imple-
menting community but as a locality for enduring the anxiety of common
labor with that which is qualitatively Other. Of course, it goes without
saying that the dominance of classical Hollywood (narrative) films had
systematized film as a meaning device by the 1940s, and that, as various cin-
ematic apparatus theories have pointed out, it had been conditioned into an
ideological/subject-establishing device (apparatus).57 However, as current
developments in media technology have made diverse forms of reception
possible, the problem of the corporeal character of reception through the
audience, irrecoverable by the narrow communal interpretation of meaning,
has to be addressed once again.
If one w ere, very simply, to position Nakai’s theory of the medium within
the coordinates of contemporary film studies and media research, it would
look something like this:
The range inherent in Nakai’s theory of film can be described as follows:
First, it shares with the Antonio Gramsci / Hall schools of “hegemony / the-
ory of articulation” (1) an awareness of how psychoanalytic theories of the
subject-establishing apparatus (3) may have grasped the political nature of
media but have simplified the spectator and disregarded the diversity/

Common labor
1) Political sciences based on 2) Anthropological materialism

competition of meaning
- Articulation model (Hall; reproduction (Benjamin, Nakai)
Birmingham school) - Media aesthetics (Kittler, Bolz)
Medium-type mediation Mittel-type mediation
3) Apparatus theories of subject 4) Media theory

formation - Principle of physical
- Psychoanalytical apparatus extension (McLuhan, Ong;
theory (Metz, Mulvey, Toronto school)
Screen-school)
- Culture industry theory
(Adorno, Horkheimer)
Community
confusion of the multilayered interpretative space. Second, it does not focus

on the struggle over the simple interpretation of meaning “through” media
but rather prioritizes the status of the possibilities “in” media for the corpo-
real projection of the spectator (in a different sense than the technological
determinism of [4]). Of course, Nakai’s “theory” cannot lead to a framework
for direct, experiential research in the sense of, for example, the encoding/
decoding model. The question of how to inherit and translate Nakai’s acute
theoretical framework regarding media into effective, concrete research will
test our “sociological imagination.”
If it is true that, as media theorist Mizukoshi Shin has said, “tremors in
media can awaken media theory,” then Nakai’s texts, just like Benjamin’s,
will be called upon again and again when society goes astray amidst the
dynamics of the media environment.58 Just as Inaba did when a flood of tv
and weekly magazines rose before his eyes, we must once again “discover”
Nakai at a time when rumors spread of the “decline of mass media.”
notes
Originally published as Akihiro Kitada, “<Imi> e no aragai: Nakai Masakazu no ‘bai-
kai’ gainen o megutte,” in Akihiro Kitada, <Imi> e no aragai: Mediēshon no bunkasei-
jigaku (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 1994), 47–73. The translator would like to specially thank
Patrick Noonan, Aaron Gerow, and Miya Elise Mizuta for their very helpful comments
on the translation.

Nakai Masakazu (1900–1952) was a philosopher, critic, librarian, and social activist
often seen as loosely connected—and sometimes placed in opposition to—the Kyoto
School of philosophy. A fter graduating from Kyoto Imperial University in aesthetics
and philosophy in 1925, he taught there until resigning in protest a fter the Takigawa
incident (see footnote 52 for details). He was active as one of the chief editors of the
leftist intellectual magazines “Beauty/Criticism” (Bi Hihyō) and later “World Culture”
(Sekai Bunka) as well as the newspaper “Saturday” (Doyōbi), which relied largely on
anonymous article contributions. Arrested in 1938, Nakai went on to become first vice
librarian at the National Diet Library a fter the war. T oday Nakai is best known for his
theory of aesthetics, which has recently attracted renewed attention among a new gen-
eration of media scholars in Japan.
1. Translator’s note: The sociologist Inaba Michio (1927–2002) was a prominent fig-
ure in Tokyo University’s Newspaper Research Department (Tokyo Daigaku Shinbun
Kenkyūjo) in the 1960s and 1970s, and served as department head from 1980 to 1984.
2. Inaba Michio, “Nakai Masakazu no ‘baikai’-ron shōkai,” Shinbunkagu hyōron 18
(1989): 112. Translator’s note: The Japanese Journalism Review was published by the
Japan Society for Studies in Journalism and Mass Media Communication from 1952 to
1992.
3. Translator’s note: The journalist Ono Hideo (1885–1977) was instrumental in intro-
ducing newspaper studies (shinbungaku) in Japan. Partially due to his background in
German philology, and partially for reasons of institutional legitimization, he chose the
theoretically oriented German Zeitungswissenschaften (which also translates as “news-
paper studies”) as a model over the more pragmatically oriented American journal-
ism studies. He also wrote the first monograph on the history of newspapers in Japan
and later became the first director of the University of Tokyo’s Newspaper Research De-
partment. Koyama Eizō (1899–1983), a disciple of Ono’s, was active in researching print
media and advertising at various universities, introducing sociologic al approaches to the
study of the press and its effects. For an excellent overview of the historical roles of Ono
and Koyama, see Fabian Schäfer, “Public Opinion and the Press: Transnational Contexts
of Early Media and Communication Studies in Prewar Japan, 1918–1937,” Social Science
Japan Journal, advance access, published June 28, 2010, doi: 10.1093/ssjj/jyq030.
4. Nakai’s quotes, unless otherwise noted, will be taken from the four-volume Nakai
Masakazu zenshū, ed. Kuno Osamu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1964–81).
5. Sugiyama Mitsunobu, Sengo keimō to shakaikagaku no shisō (Tokyo: Shinyōsha,
1983).
6. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:251.
13. Translator’s note: The term Nakai uses in Japanese and that has h ere been trans-
lated as “alienation discourse” is sogaironteki gensetsu, which actually carries a dual

meaning. First of all, it denotes a discourse on alienation, but it also hints at the fact
that the discourse itself possesses aspects of alienation, or better, possesses an alienated
quality.
15. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 1:191. Translator’s note: Here the double meaning
of “function” in English comes into play, as Kitada uses both the words kinō and kansū,
both of which can be translated as “function” in English. Kinō means “function” in the
sense of ability or practical function, while kansū denotes a mathematical function (as
in “a trigonometric function”). The word kō denotes a term in a mathematical function.
18. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:171. Translator’s note: Baikai can be translated
as “mediator” or “mediation,” while baizai refers to a mediating material. Nakai himself
uses the German terms.
ere Nakai uses the German words Funktion and Form. This
19. Translator’s note: H
pair was frequently discussed by Hegel and Kant, both major influences on Nakai’s
work.
20. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 2:419–20.
23. Walter Benjamin, “Gengo ippan oyobi ningen no kotoba ni tsuite,” in Benjamin
korekushon I, trans. Asai Kenjirō (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunkō, 1995), 13. Also Imai
Yasuo, Benjamin no kyōiku shisō (Tokyo: Seori Shobō, 1998), 62–64. Translator’s note:
Nakai himself uses the German terms Mittel and Medium. Aaron Moore translates the
term as “middle” in his essay “Para-Existential Forces of Invention: Nakai Masakazu’s
Theory of Technology and Critique of Capitalism,” positions 17, no. 1 (2009): 125–57.
However, I choose to let the German term stand just as Nakai did (and Kitada does);
the translation of Mittel as “middle” makes the term easily understandable but erases
the philosophical reference to the Hegelian term Vermittlung just as much as the more
quotidian meaning of “means to an end,” both of which the heavily Hegel-influenced
and German-reading Nakai was well aware of.
24. Translator’s note: In German Unmittelbarkeit denotes immediacy, and literally
means “unmediatedness.”
25. This Mittel-type mediation can be understood as a geworfener Entwurf. See Inaba,
“Nakai Masakazu no ‘baikai’-ron shōkai,” 112. Translator’s note: The Heideggerian term
geworfener Entwurf is usually translated as “thrown projection” or “thrown project” in
English. For more on the term Entwurf, see footnote 38.
28. However, the workings of common labor (kyōdō) are, for those involved,
grounded in the reliance on community (kyōdōsei), and it is exactly the failure of com-
munity that sets common labor in motion. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that
the gap between common labor and community does not point to a distinction between
two different patterns of communication. Translator’s note: Nakai h ere contrasts two
homophonic words, both pronounced kyōdō, that are written with different Chinese
characters and have a similar meaning but subtly different connotations. The more
commonplace 共同 usually refers to cooperation or collaboration, while the less often
used 協働 also denotes cooperation, but the characters emphasize the aspect of com-
mon labor and activity. This translation will follow these connotations in distinguishing
the terms.
30. Translator’s note: Here I will follow Aaron Moore’s translation of the term shakai-
teki shūdan-teki seikaku as “social collective character”; literally, it connotes a combina-
tion of the concepts of society and community, which in turn relies on the distinction
of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft proposed by Ferdinand Tönnies at the end of the nine-
teenth century, which again Nakai would have been aware of.
31. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:192. Translator’s note: Nakai here uses the word
hyōshō, which is usually translated as “representation” in English. He is thereby using
the Japanese translation of the German Vorstellung, which is also commonly trans-
lated into English as “representation” (and is a very central term for both Kant and
Heidegger). This translation has recently received some criticism, as it very much
narrows down the meaning and implications of the German term, which is actually
somewhat closer to “presentation,” especially in its Kantian usage. Nakai will no doubt
have been aware of that usage, so the word “representation”—used h ere for the sake of
consistency—should be regarded with some caution.
32. Translator’s note: Here the term seisakusha is translated as “filmmaker.” The Japa
nese term can be written in two ways, and Nakai chooses one that is diffuse enough to
encompass both directors and producers.
34. Translator’s note: Reception aesthetics is a school of literary criticism introduced
primarily by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser.
35. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 1:171. Translator’s note: In the original Nakai here
uses the Japanese title of the film, Moe dezuru chikara. The one-reel film was directed by
Wolfram Junghans for the largest German studio, ufa (Universal Film ag).
38. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 2:28. Translator’s note: A few words on the no-
menclature that Nakai employs: Entwurf is a Heideggerian term translated in Japanese
as 投企 (tōki), and in English often as “project” or “plan”; however, to convey Nakai’s
usage of it, the Japanese term will h ere be translated as “projection,” literally meaning
a plan/project that is of a tentative, temporary nature (the Chinese characters used
literally mean “thrown plan,” and parallel the Heideggerian expression of a “geworfener
Entwurf. ” In German Entwurf also means “draft, sketch,” although the Heideggerian
usage emphasizes the literal connotation of Wurf = throw; it is this physical connotation
that Nakai also is undoubtedly aware of.
Sorge is Heidegger’s term for the being of the being-there (Sein des Daseins). It is ba-
sically an existential-ontological term that refers to the complete structure of existence,
although in German it literally means “care” or “concern,” and that connotation carries
over into Heidegger’s theory as well; we are always already concerned / in care, as we are
always already inside being.
40. Sugiyama, Sengo keimō to shakaikagaku no shisō. Translator’s note: Sugiyama
Mitsunobu is currently professor on the faculty of literature at Meiji University. He has
worked widely on the thought of postwar Japan and on the theory of journalism.
41. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:149. Nakai felt a need to examine this specific
“language” of film, and actually produced an experimental film together with Tsu-
jibe Seitarō, a fellow collaborator on the magazine Bi hihyō (Beauty/Criticism). Nakai
Masakazu,“Shikisai eiga no omoide,” in Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:232–35. Also
Iwamoto Kenji, ed., Nihon eiga to modanizumu, 1920–1930 (Tokyo: Ribropōto, 1991),
205–9. Translator’s note: Nakai himself referred to Kinosatz and Kinoton, and while
Kitada quotes the Japanized terms eigago (映画語, literally “cinema language”) and eig-
aon (映画音, literally “cinema sound”), the translation orients itself t oward the nuance
of the German terms.
45. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:159–60. Translator’s note: This quote takes hints
from Aaron Moore’s translation of the same passage, which can be found in Moore,
“Para-Existential Forces of Invention,” 144.
47. Nakai emphasizes not an “enlightenment” via thought but rather a physical disci-
pline that evokes “training, practice, getting used to” (Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū,
1:415). In terms of film, his thinking here shares common ground with Benjamin, who
argues that film was the “most adequate tool for training,” a reception in the sense of
distraction/Zerstreuung. Walter Benjamin, “Fukusei gijutsu jidai no geijutsu sakuhin,”
in Benjamin korekushon I, trans. Asai Kenjirō (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunkō, 1995),
626.
48. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:310. Asada Akira’s statement that “Nakai Ma-
sakazu [while denying that] a return to the old form of subjectivity was impossible,
was, I think, trying to theorize a process in which the subjectivities do not stay bound
to a single place but are connected transversally, opened up to the outside” encapsu-
lates the point of Nakai’s communication theory; Asada Akira, Karatani Kōjin, and
Kuno Osamu, “Kyōtō gakuha to sanjū-nendai no shisō,” Hihyō kūkan II, no. 4 (1995):
25. Also to be taken into consideration is Tsurumi Shunsuke’s view that the relation of
Nakai’s concepts of organization (soshiki) and collective (shūdan) are like that of Japan
to the “Japanese Soviet,” one that differs from both the “individual” of modernist liter
ature and from the “collective” of the Soviet or Chinese type. Tsurumi Shunsuke et al.,
“Zadankai: Nakai Masakazu to wareware no jidai,” Shisō no kagaku 14 (1983): 84. See
also Suzuki Tadashi’s argument for similarities between Nakai’s Iinkai no ronri [The
logic of committee]; and Mao Zedong’s Jitsuroron [On practice], in Suzuki Tadashi,
Nihon no gōri-ron: Kanō Kōkichi to Nakai Masakazu (Tokyo: Gendai Shichōsha, 1961).
See also Ueyama Shunpei, “Nakai Masakazu no ‘Iinkai no ronri,’ ” Shisō no kagaku 23
(1960): 55–60.
49. Suzuki Shigesaburō, “Zakkan,” Eiga ōrai (April 1928): 60.

51. Translator’s note: Prokino was the Nihon Puroretaria Eiga Dōmei (Proletarian
Film League of Japan). Officially formed in 1929, Prokino was a left-wing organization
with many prominent members from the film industry and film criticism, and was
active in filming and screening of events such as labor day parades or demonstrations.
It additionally published magazines such as Shinkō Eiga and Puroretaria Eiga, and pro-
duced educational animation. Coming under increased pressure from the government
in the early 1930s, it was officially disbanded in 1934. For a detailed account of Prokino’s
activities in English, see: Markus Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era
through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2003).
52. See, for example, Yamada Munemutsu, “ ‘Bi hihyō,’ ‘Sekai bunka,’ ” Shisō 470 (1963):
101–14. Also see Hirabayashi Ichi, “ ‘Bi—hihyō’ ‘Sekai bunka’ to ‘Doyōbi,’ ” in Senjika
teikō no kenkyū I (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1968), 239–75. However, Kinoshita Nagahiro
objects to the 1960s-style characterization of Nakai as an “oppositional person” by fo-
cusing on Nakai’s “conversion” (tenkō) to the topic of “Japanese beauty.” See Kinoshita
Nagahiro, Nakai Masakazu—Atarashii “bigaku” no kokoromi (Tokyo: Riburopōto, 1995).
While I am in agreement with Kinoshita’s insight that Nakai’s aesthetics contain elements
that can be articulated within the discursive space of “overcoming the modern,” I would,
however, like to direct attention to the fact that Nakai’s theory of technology/mediation
has the fundamental potential of dislocating the very premise of a meaning-centered
ideological critique. Translator’s note: The “Takigawa incident” unfolded in 1933, when
the minister of education, Hatoyama Ichirō (grandfather of the recent prime minister
Hatoyama Yukio), forced the resignation of Kyoto Imperial University professor of law
Takigawa Yukitoki due to supposedly Marxist thought. This led to the resignation of
the thirty-nine remaining members of the faculty as well as organized protests by the
students. The incident is referenced in Kurosawa Akira’s film No Regrets for Our Youth
[Waga seishun ni nikui nashi, 1946]. The Peace Preservation Law mentioned here refers
to the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 (there were several previous such laws passed) that
was in force until the end of the war in 1945. Introduced to provide the government with
increased legal leeway for suppressing particularly leftist political activities, it essentially
made any kind of political opposition potentially illegal.
53. Walter Benjamin, “Shururearizumu,” in Benjamin korekushon I, trans. Asai
Kenjirō (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunkō, 1995).
54. Translator’s note: The model of communication developed by Claude Shannon
and Warren Weaver postulates a linear chain of information transmission. This chain
consists of an information source, a transmitter that encodes the message, a channel
through which it is transmitted, noise as an entropic factor that distorts the message,
a receiver that decodes the message, and a destination at which it arrives. While Shan-
non was an employee at Bell Telephone Labs when they developed the theory, it proved
immensely influential for the social sciences, although it has often been criticized for
being applied to human communication in an overly simplified way.
55. I have elaborated on this kind of discommunication concept and its media-
theoretical connotations in Kitada Akihiro, “ ‘Kansatsusha’ toshite no ukete,” in Masu
komyunikēshon kenkyū 53 (1993): 83–96. Further, for the distinction between “things

one is told” and “things that are connoted,” see Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
56. Katsura Eishi, “Automaton Kompurekkusu,” in 20 seiki no media 3 maruchimedia
no shosō to media porichikkusu, ed. Katsura Eishi (Tokyo: Jasuto Shisutemu, 1996).
57. For the conditioning via film, see Nakamura Hideyuki, “Tobichitta gareki no naka
o,” in Jōhō shakai no bunka 2: Imēji no naka no shakai, ed. Uchida Ryūzō (Tokyo: Tokyo
Daigaku Shuppankai, 1988).
58. Mizukoshi Shin, Media no seisei (Tokyo: Dōbunkan, 1993). Translator’s note:
Mizukoshi Shin is associate professor of the Interfaculty Initative of Information Stud-
ies at the University of Tokyo.

12. MUCH ADO ABOUT “NOTHING”
The Kyōto School as “Media Philosophy”
fa b ia n s c hä f e r
Prelude: What Is “Media Philosophy”?

The term “media philosophy” (Medienphilosophie) is not particularly com-
mon in e ither Japan or the United States. Thus, I suggest beginning this ar-
ticle by explaining the term. Most philosophers of media agree that “media
philosophy” does not deal with single media ontologies in particular but with
the concept of “medium” itself. According to Stefan Münker, “It is the af-
fair of media philosophy to reflect upon conceptual problems caused by the
manipulation and utilization of electronic and digital media.”1 In addition to
Münker, who considers media philosophy to have become particularly nec-
essary in the digital age, Alexander Roesler defines media philosophy as “the
contemplation on . . . the concept of the ‘medium’ ” in general, namely “the
apprehension of what this concept could mean and everything related to it.”
It is thus “the contemplation on the theoretical ramifications this concept has
for other concepts, and on the status of theories built around this concept.”2
In everyday language, the term “media,” or “the media,” is most com-
monly used interchangeably with “mass media,” and thus functions as an
umbrella term for different types of information or entertainment media,
such as radio and television broadcasting, the press, or film. From an ety-
mological perspective, however, the Latin term medium, as well as its Sino-
Japanese counterparts baikai and chūkai, refer to the “middle” or “middle
ground” (medius). Moreover, as something situated “in-between” (metaxy
in Greek), the medium “mediates” (namely constitutes and separates) the
things that lie on e ither side of it—it is the mediation of things mediated in
a medium. Accordingly, “in-betweenness” and “mediation” might thus be
considered the two most fundamental philosophical meanings of the con-
cept “medium.” German philosopher Georg Christoph Tholen describes this
pair as the philosophically “strong” conceptual meaning of the term, argu-
ing that it was with the Enlightenment and Romanticism that “[an idea of
the] self-referentiality of language-induced understanding assumed shape,
which didn’t consider the medium as a passive tool or instrument, but as
the constitutive activity of ‘in-betweenness.’ ”3 Whereas the focus lay ex-
clusively on the role of language in the Idealistic and Romanticist media
philosophy of Hegel or Schleiermacher, its contemporary counterpart “as-
sumes a universal concept of the medium, which enables us to understand
language as merely one specific and prominent medium amongst others.”4
Hence, philosophical investigations into the concept of the medium, accord-
ing to Sybille Krämer, refer to the “study of the constitutional power of the
medium” within the epistemological process of cognition and apperception
in general.5
With that said, what I will attempt to do in the subsequent part of this
chapter is to reread the Kyōto School, Japan’s most prominent strand of
modern Japanese philosophy, as a Japanese version of a media philosophy
in the aforementioned sense. This is of the utmost importance, since the
Kyōto School has been repeatedly and exclusively labeled as a “philosophy
of nothingness.” Scholars in Japan who contributed to this opinion were as-
sisted by scholars of Japanese religions in Europe and the United States, who
considered the proponents of the school as creators of an original Japanese
or “Eastern” spiritual mysticism or Buddhist theology based on nothing-
ness, which they could exoticize and oppose to certain dogmatic religions
or rationalistic philosophies in the “West.” Moreover, the sole critique of
this affirmative view of the school was in fact just as ideological, since it was
mostly Marxist or leftist scholars who, since the postwar period, criticized
certain proponents of the school for their unprompted hypostatization and
essentialization of the term “nothingness” in the 1930s and 1940s, so that it
would match with the official propaganda of the Japanese ultranationalist
wartime regime.
If one shifts attention away from the concept of nothingness and instead
toward the concepts of “dialectic” (benshōhō) and/or “mediation” (baikai)—
dialectics understood here as one form, or rather method, of mediation—
[306] fabian schäfer

one is able to observe at least one further conceptual constancy in the 1930s
among the school’s core members. Accordingly, I w ill argue that—borrowing
and slightly modifying the title of James Heisig’s landmark study of the thought
of the Kyōto School, Philosop hers of Nothingness—one might also consider
the members of the school as philosophers of mediation and, thus, the Kyōto
School as a school of “media philosophy.”6 Considering mediation and in-
betweenness instead of nothingness as common conceptual denominators
reveals a very different picture regarding possible membership of the school.
Not only would Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of in-betweenness (aidagara) or
Kimura Bin’s concept of in-between (aida)—which I unfortunately do not
have the space to touch upon in this chapter—fit perfectly in this regard, but
so do thinkers not typically associated with the school, most notably its “left
wing,” namely Tosaka Jun, Nakai Masakazu, and Miki Kiyoshi.
Rereading the Kyōto School as media philosophy, however, is also sig-
nificant in that it broadens our understanding of the prewar discourse on
media in Japan in general, which was at that time dominated by single media
theories of the press, emerging from the then new academic discipline of
shinbungaku (newspaper studies).7 In fact, until as recently as 1989 sociolo-
gist Inaba Michio could still complain that newspaper studies, based on its
own disciplinary boundaries, did not produce a more universal theory of the
medium.8 To remedy this theoretical desideratum, Inaba himself introduced
Nakai Masakazu’s media philosophy of the 1930s (see also Kitada Akihiro’s
chapter in this book) in which he, together with Tosaka Jun, engaged in an
intellectual debate on the philosophical meaning of film. The aim of this
chapter, however, is to take a further step back in time and inquire into the
various ways the first generation of thinkers of the Kyōto School dealt with
the concepts of medium and mediation, which has to be understood as the
intellectual background against which Nakai could develop his thought.
Nishida and Tanabe: “Unmediated” and “Absolute” Mediation

Generally, Nishida’s thought is divided into at least three, though sometimes
five, phases, characterized by the terminology he used predominantly at
each particular stage of his thought. Nevertheless, one can argue that the
foundation of his thought was already included in his first important book,
An Inquiry into the Good, (Zen no kenkyū), published in 1911.9 Here Nishida
defines “pure existence” as the nondivided “Chora”—in a Derridean sense,
so to speak—prior to any epistemological or ontological division into sub-
ject and object, being and nonbeing, or spirit and matter:
The Kyōto School [307]

By pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is without the
least addition of deliberative discrimination. The moment of seeing a
color or hearing a sound, for example, is prior not only to the thought
that the color or sound is the activity of an external object or that one
is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what color or sound might
be. In this regard, pure experience is identical with direct experience.
When one directly experiences one’s own state of consciousness, there
is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object are com-
pletely unified.10
The phrase “direct [chokusetsu] consciousness,” by which Nishida refers to

this precognitive condition in which subject and object cannot yet be thought
of as distinct entities, is replaced by various other terms in the subsequent
phases of his intellectual development. Starting with Jikaku ni okeru chokkan
to hansei (Intuition and reflection in Jikaku, 1917), the term jikaku replaces
Nishida’s often-misunderstood notion of pure consciousness, and has since
then found a permanent place in his thought. Commonly mistranslated as
“self-consciousness,” the compound consisting of the two characters ji (self)
and kaku (aware) is perhaps best translated as “self-awareness.” In Nishida’s
own words, jikaku needed to be understood as “a self, reflecting itself in
itself.”11 It is therefore not the conscious self-reflection of the Cartesian ego
and does not refer to a perceiving or knowing Kantian subject (self), but in
fact means a completely unmediated spontaneity (Von-sich-selbst).
Heralding the beginning of the third phase of his thought, Nishida, in an-
other anthology published in 1927, Hatarakumono-kara mirumono-e (From
acting to seeing), for the first time employed the original term basho (place,
or, perhaps more accurately, field) of “absolute nothingness” (zettai mu no
basho) to explain, and slightly modify, the function of pure experience or
jikaku. Nishida’s nothingness is an absolute nothingness b ecause it is dif
ferent from relative nothingness in the sense of “nonbeing.” Nevertheless,
absolute nothingness is not the same as “absolute negativity,” as Nishida
pointed out, since within the field of absolute nothingness affirmation and
negation reciprocally self-reflect each other eternally; it is a field engender-
ing (umareru) and extinguishing (kie) all contradictions, which at the same
time lets “these contradictions retain in themselves.”12
Since the end of the 1920s, which was considered to be the beginning of
phases four and five of Nishida’s intellectual development, Nishida started
to use the term “dialectic” to describe the nature of the preontological and
preepistemological field of nothingness. He found the concept of dialectics

so useful in relation to his own thought because he considered it a prelogi-
cal concept—something he (mis)understood through his reading of Marx
and Hegel—that integrates all contradictions. In his understanding, dialec-
tic was the “absolute contradictory self-identity” of the subject and object in
particular, and of the universal and the individual in general. Nishida explic
itly differentiated, in his terms, this “true” understanding of dialectic (shin
no benshōhō) in the sense of an all-embracing “dialectical space” of noth-
ingness, encompassing all possible contradictions, from any form of Hege-
lian or Marxian “procedural” (katei-teki) dialectics.13 Despite the fact that
Nishida began to use the term “mediation” (baikai, denoting it “M”) almost
synonymously with the term “dialectic” in his thought in a further attempt
to conceptualize nothingness as the mutual interrelation and interpenetra-
tion of all things, since around the beginning of the 1930s, nothingness in
fact remained something unmediated and absolute:
True dialectical determination needs to be thought of as the mutual

determination of at least three things: A relates to B in the same way as
to C, and B to A and C in the same way as C to A and B. . . . To think
of the mutual determination of these three things in such a way means
the same as to think of it as the interrelation among innumerable in-
dividuals. It is only in this way that the mutual determination of truly
independent things, i.e., the mutual determination of individuals,
can be conceived. . . . The medium M between individuals signifies a
placial/-field-like determination. This is the reason why I define dia-
lectics as the self-determination of the dialectical universal, and why I
ground it not on procedural determination, but on placial/-field-like
determination. My notion of one [universal] qua many [individuals;
ichi soku ta], of many qua one, also signifies this placial/-field-like de-
termination. . . . The idea of an internal link fails here, and ideas of
the linear and the procedural must be negated. Otherwise, we remain
bound to the standpoint of the idealistic dialectic.14
This is not concrete mediation but rather the sum of all possible mediations
between innumerable individuals. It should be apparent already that Nishi-
da’s philosophy of nothingness, particularly his nondialectical understand-
ing of dialectics, in fact represents a philosophy of nonmediation rather than
one of mediation, and as such, is fairly remote from what I have called “media
philosophy.” For Nishida, dialectics in fact meant the self-contradictory “un-
mediated mediation” (mu-baikai-teki baikai) of any possible ontological or
epistemological opposition within the place/field of absolute nothingness.15

Nishida understood dialectics not in the Hegelian sense as the triangular
movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (or a mediating tertium, some-
thing in-between A and C), but instead used it as yet another name to de-
note the field of absolute nothingness, in/from which any contradiction or
conceptual opposition collapses and arises. Nevertheless, it was his “misap-
propriation” of the term that gave cause for critical debate on the meaning of
the concept of “mediation” within the Kyōto School at large.
In the first instance, it was Nishida’s colleague Tanabe who accused Nishida
of absolutizing and hypostasizing nothingness, because to him, Nishida’s
unmediated or transdialectic absolute nothingness must be considered an
“ultimate and static-transhistorical t hing” (chorekishi zettai-teki naru mono)
and thus the complete opposite of something dialectically mediated. To Ta-
nabe, any assumed dynamic inherent to absolute nothingness which could
trigger a process of distinction into subjects and objects, or into the par
ticular and the universal, could thus be merely described as emanationist
(hasshutsuron-teki). To him, Nishida’s philosophy was nothing but a per-
mutation of idealistic Fichtean identity philosophy—and hence a monistic
philosophical theory rejecting any ultimate bifurcation into spirit and na-
ture or subject and object, finding fundamental unity only in the absolute:
If one turns absolute nothingness into the underground or background

of the dialectical world and considers this as the place where all beings
are situated . . . , absolute nothingness is fixated into an immediate
being and at the same time actually forfeits its meaning as nonbeing.
Thus, despite all other beings that are negatively mediated [baikai] as
dialectical unity of negation and affirmation [hitei soku kotei] and be-
come being within nothingness, the place of mediation itself, which
lets them be beings within nothingness, is nondialectically and im-
mediately affirmed. Thereby absolute nothingness forfeits its meaning
as being as well as nothing and inevitably turns into an immediate
being.16
In Nishida’s thought, absolute nothingness is not mediated, either in the sense

that it is a middle, or mediation, or in-betweenness. According to Tanabe,
for nothingness to be truly dynamic and dialectical, its nature cannot pos-
sibly lie in an unmediated annulment of all contradictions and oppositions
but rather has to sustain the mediated tension between them. Put differently,
Nishida’s monistic and static understanding of dialectics as unity-despite-
duality stands against Tanabe’s dialectical and procedural duality- despite-

unity. In opposition to Nishida, Tanabe understood dialectics as the “uni-
versal mediation of any particular through the universal,” and not as the
reciprocal annulment of both within the field of nothingness. In this regard,
Tanabe’s critique resembles Horkheimer and Adorno’s severe repudiation
of any kind of sociological or philosophical thought based on the nondia-
lectical and total identification of the universal and the particular, which
“nullifie[s] . . . the absence of tension between the poles: the extremes which
touch have become a murky identity in which the general can replace the
particular and vice versa.17
Any dialectical mediation, to be a true mediation (and not some philo-
sophically nonsensical and superficial application of the rather specific term
“mediation” as “unmediated mediation”) has to be thought of as procedural.
In fact, Nishida’s interchangeable usage of the static-transhistorical absolute
nothingness and terms such as “mediation” and “dialectics” must be con-
sidered a categorical mistake, b ecause the latter cannot, by terminological
definition, encompass an idea of a superordinate and ultimate truth, even if
this ultimate “truth” is considered as “absolute nothingness.”
Refusing to succumb to the pitfalls of identity philosophy as Nishida had
done, Tanabe asserted that, for an absolute mediation between the particu
lar (individual) and the universal (genus) to be truly dialectical, the species
(shu) is necessary as a mediating third term (which from here on I will call
the tertium mediationis of mediation), in the sense of something lying in-
between, reciprocally mediating the things mediated. Generally speaking,
and this is important, Tanabe’s inclusion of the third term into the process
of mediation (what other than a “process” would mediation be?) must not
only be considered an intellectually innovative attempt to convert Nishida’s
identity-philosophical perspective into a genuine media-philosophical per-
spective, but also an intellectual intervention into underlying post-Kantian
“correlationism,” itself based on the Cartesian dualism of subject and object
that forms the basis of most philosophies in the West.18
Hence, it is arguable that it was not until Tanabe’s substantial critique of
Nishida’s paradoxical idea of the nonmediatedness of nothingness that the
members of the Kyōto School improved theoretically by performing a turn
toward a true media philosophy. This turn, however, would remain unno-
ticed by Western scholarship, because of the aforementioned labeling of the
Kyōto School as an “Eastern” philosophy of “nothingness.” Beginning with
Tanabe’s critique of Nishida, it was, in particular, the disciples of the two
with a strong inclination toward Materialist dialectics, most significantly

Tosaka Jun, who not only further advanced Tanabe’s critique of Nishida but
also developed unique philosophical answers to the problem of dialectics
and mediation worth taking into consideration.
Tosaka and Nakai: “Three-Dimensional” Dialectic and

“Technical Mediation”
Tosaka’s critique of Nishida overlaps with Tanabe’s in various aspects. For
Tosaka, too, Nishida made the m istake of eventually “equat[ing] nothing-
ness with being” in his thought.19 According to Tosaka, for Nishida the con-
tradiction between being and thought lies neither within thought nor within
being but arises from the bottom of nothingness, in which the difference of
thought and being itself is not yet conceived.20 Nishida, Tosaka concluded,
despite offering a very thorough inquiry into the origin of the meaning of
contradiction, and thus of a possible “meaning” of dialectics, wanted to make
his readers believe that “he found through this inquiry into its meaning,
the cause of dialectic itself.”21 This equation of cause and meaning, however,
necessitated an all-compassing “cosmological system of meanings” (imi
no uchū-ron taikei), which—taken by itself, Tosaka admitted—might be
considered as completely coherent. However, Tosaka argued, if one replaces
the determination of being by a system of meanings, one “tacitly replaces
the determination of being with an interpretation of the meaning of being.”
In this sense, Tosaka suggested, Nishida did not look at how things “really
are” but was instead merely interested in the denomination of things and
their respective meaning; in other words, instead of “being concerned with
what society, history, and nature actually are,” he inquired into the “meaning of
concepts such as society, history, and nature” and the position they “occupy in a
categorical system of meanings.”22 This becomes most obvious with regard
to the question of the dynamics of Nishida’s dialectic. From where, Tosaka
asks, would Nishida’s in fact merely interpretative “transdialectic” (chō-
benshōhō-teki) gain its dynamic (dōryoku), namely its “dialectical contra-
diction” (mujun), if any “dialectical dynamic necessarily has its origin in
this contradiction”?23
Eventually, the “logical instrumentarium” applied by Nishida was one of
mere “metaphysical categories,” by which he tried to interpret the mean-
ing of dialectic, and not dialectic as such.24 No different from a great deal
of philosophy produced at academic institutions, Nishida’s thought was, to
Tosaka, an idealistic-metaphysical “bourgeois philosophy” that was merely
an “ideational systematization and organization of fundamental concepts or

categories of reality,” an “interpretation of the world” (sekai no kaishaku),
and therefore a kind of philosophy that, in its refusal to speak of the impetus
to change it, was not interested in actual reality.25 Instead of “clarifying the
real order of t hings,” Nishida applied a clever “trick” (teguchi) allowing him
“to establish and maintain an order of meaning [imi no chitsujo] to corre-
spond with reality.”26 In the final analysis, Nishida’s philosophy, in Tosaka’s
view, turns out to be nothing other than a more refined sort of hermeneutic
(and thus purely idealistic) philosophy.27
Naoki Sakai argues in his reading of Tosaka that the latter’s “critique of
[Nishida’s] hermeneutics is inadequate” because it overemphasized exis-
tence over consciousness from a Materialist perspective and thus “did not
pay attention to the poietic function of interpretation.”28 Although Tosaka
did have a strong inclination toward Materialism, Sakai himself clearly
overlooks the fact that Tosaka did not uncritically adopt a deterministic
orthodox-Marxist viewpoint, which would argue that the latter was deter-
mined by the former. Rather, to Tosaka, the relationship of “individual con-
sciousness” and “historical-social existence” was based on the fact that both
progress “logically” in the broadest sense of the word. On the one hand, the
mind worked cognitively in the idealistic sense of Kant or Hegel because “con-
sciousness could only come into effect as consciousness by means of its capa-
bility to think logically.”29 On the other hand, however, existence progressed
logically as well, because it was based on the (dialectical) “logic of existence”
(namely historical materialism), which represented “existence’s necessary
structure.” Hence, Tosaka declared that it was this twofold logic that “medi-
ates” between existence and consciousness.30 However, Tosaka emphasized,
although the determination between the two was mutual, each had different
qualities. He explained, “The way in which consciousness determines m atter
(existence) is partial, fragmentary, and noncosmological [sekai hōsoku-teki de
nai]. On the contrary, matter (existence) can formatively determine the con-
tents of consciousness. Only matter determines t hings in a universal, categori-
cal, and cosmological way.”31 To put it in the words of Joachim Israel, Tosaka
was not an “ontological” but a “methodological materialist,” who begins his
inquiry not from transcendental reflection, as Nishida did (despite the fact
that the latter refused his labeling as an “idealistic” philosopher by Tosaka),
but from the social-historical world.32
Having summarized Tosaka’s own critique of Nishida’s philosophy, I w ill
now discuss the temporal and practical structure of mediation, which will
lead us beyond Nishida’s notion of a nonprocedural and static unmediated
mediation.

THE TEMPORALIT Y OF MEDIATION
The merely hermeneutic character of Nishida’s thought becomes most obvi-

ous in his philosophy of time and history. Nishida understood time, diverg-
ing from the commonsensical linear understanding of time, as something
evolving against the background of the “discontinuous continuity” (hiren-
zoku no renzoku) of “true time.”33 To him, this was the “self-determination
of the present” or the “self-determination of the eternal now,” out of which
the three modes of time, and therefore time as it exists in our conscious-
ness, come to the foreground. For Nishida, Tosaka argued, “the present is
something . . . that can expand into eternity,” whereby Nishida equated
“the present with the past, the present, and the future.”34 In Nishida’s
own philosophical jargon this is formulated as follows: “Time, as the self-
determination of the eternal now vanishes [kie] and emerges [umareru]
everywhere. Therefore, time touches the eternal now at every moment. That is
to say, time vanishes and emerges from moment to moment. Time has to be
thought of as ‘discontinuous continuity’ [hirenzoku no renzoku].”35 Nishida
explains his understanding of history and how it corresponds to this idea of
time only three years later in an essay titled “Self-Identity and Continuity of
the World” (Sekai no jiko dō’itsu to renzoku): “History is not merely devel-
opment, but metamorphosis. The different historical times can all be con-
sidered as metamorphoses of primordial history [ genrekishi]. One can say
that each time as a self-determination of the eternal now reflects the shadow
of the [platonic] idea.”36 Tosaka harshly criticized this otherworldly under-
standing of time and history as a permutation of discontinuous continuity
or primordial history by asking, “Why [does Nishida] explain time ensuing
from its origin or a primordial time,” if “this means an inversion of the order
of things?”37 For Tosaka, history, in contrast, had to be considered from the
opposite direction, namely the end of time that is open and contingent: the
future. In other words, he considered the “character [seikaku] of time” to lie
not in its (assumed) origin, “but in the exactly opposite direction, namely
the point from which time is moving towards us.”38
Despite being critical of Tanabe’s emphasis on religion and Christianity in
particular (Tanabe repeatedly referred to the Holy Trinity to explain the rela-
tionship among the individual, the species, and the genus),39 Tosaka was in
general very sympathetic to Tanabe’s logic of the species because the latter em-
phasized its meditated and temporal character. At some point, to explain his
notion of dialectical “absolute mediation,” Tanabe compared the mediating role
of the species to the uniqueness of the present among the three temporal forms:

Nobody would deny that time is something which is absolutely medi-
ated by the three modi past, present, and future, and that each of these
three modes is essential for the mediation of the remaining two. . . .
However, one would at the same time also not deny that the mediation
by the present occupies a particularly unique place in the realization
of time. . . . For us to be positioned in the present, the movement and
the unity of time are related to each other. The mediating character of
the present does not merely contradict the character of absolute me-
diation, it enables it. To doubt this would mean to consider the logic of
absolute mediation not as dialectical, but to objectifyingly turn it into
formal logic.40
In this regard, the species in Tanabe’s Aristotelian thought occupied a unique

twofold mediated middle position in-between the individual and the uni-
versal (genus)—namely, individual ↔ species ↔ genus. This is very different
from Nishida’s aforementioned notion of absolute mediation as the “inter-
relation among innumerable individuals.” Tanabe’s mediation of the present
was absolute only in the sense that it was embedded in “a real dynamic of
reciprocal dialectical negation and affirmation.”41 Tosaka, in his philosophy
of time/history, further developed Tanabe’s notion of dialectical (absolute)
mediation and logic of the species in a Materialist direction.
PR AXIS AND THE THREE-D IMENSIONAL MEDIATION

OF A
C TUAL REALI T Y AND PROJEC TED F UTURES
For Tosaka, logical and temporal “three-dimensionality” signifies the contin-

gency of history in the present toward the future. One cannot—as Nishida
did—consider the future as the future in the present but rather as a future
present in the sense of a “possibility not yet given to us,” which can be s haped
through contemporary praxis, since “society, or the social world, is . . .
something . . . mediated, i.e., produced by man,” and “something which is
produced [that] can also be changed,” as Joachim Israel put it.42 Accordingly,
Tosaka insisted, with a sharp-knifed attack on Nishida’s one-dimensional
“mediation” of primordial history, that a three-dimensional understanding
of history has nothing to do with an idealistic utopia, because
only if we treat the historical, namely the historico-social, as a question

of praxis, logic and the three-dimensionality of the now completely
coincide (instead of merely corresponding to each other). . . . Al-
though historical perspectives, namely [Nishida’s] difference between
before and a fter or fore-and background, might possess different

logical values, it is nothing but a logical fallacy eventually inhibiting
any praxis to consider the given reality and the f uture not yet given to
us on the same plane as something nonquotidian or formal-logical.
This is a logical fallacy usually described also as utopia.43
Among the three temporal forms, the present therefore occupies a par
ticular position in Tosaka’s thought as well, since it is the “centre of three-
dimensional historical time,” which can “expand and contract if necessary.”44
The necessity according to which the present time can “condense” even into
the today (kyō) or the now (ima) is “the necessity of practical life” ( jissen-teki
seikatsu).45 Eventually, the character of the present determines each single
moment of time—both “are identical by their meaning.”46 Tosaka described
this coincidence of the whole historical time in the now also as a basic
principle of his philosophy of everydayness (nichijō-sei no genri).
Hence, one can understand Tosaka’s philosophy of the everyday devel-
oped in the 1930s as an important attempt to take a stand against any tele
ological (modernistic or orthodox-Marxian) or metaphysical-idealistic in-
terpretation of history, such as that of his mentor Nishida. B ehind Tosaka’s
philosophical reappraisal of the “actuality” of the everyday lay the attempt
to liberate Japanese academic philosophy, basically represented by idealism,
phenomenalism, or the Kyōto School, from its dependence on religion, its
otherworldliness, its celebration of the noneveryday, and its engagement
with purely metaphysical terms such as genjitsu (reality). Tosaka, rejecting all
purely phenomenological, psychological, or scientific explanations of time
and history in particular, in an interesting move that combines Heidegger and
historical materialism, located the logic of time not in individual conscious-
ness but in history itself. It was his idea that “the present” ( genzai) and “the
now” (ima) represented the “kernel” of historical time, because the present
as a period ( gendai) was not just a historical period like any other, but, to To-
saka, something in which “the accent of total historical time” lay.47 The now
(which Nishida understood as the imperceptible moment in the foreground
of an underlying “eternal now” or “primordial history” from which single
historical periods would miraculously evolve) in Tosaka’s thought represents
the profane everyday that facilitates—despite being determined by current
politico-economic conditions—(revolutionary) class praxis which dialecti-
cally mediates the actual present with a better possible f uture.
From the perspective of media philosophy, however, Tosaka seems to be
entangled in a kind of moderate but still naïve mirror theory of represen
tation. Despite acknowledging elsewhere that the “realization of mimetic

representation [mosha] is by no means the result of direct, natural, and un-
conditioned reflections but always involves the process of exerting endless
mediation” and thus “is never like what one thinks of as [a] passive and con-
templative mirror” and “nothing but a sign that indicates the goal of cognition
gained through mimetic representation,”48 a uniquely dialectical answer
to the question of the epistemological function and temporal and practical
structure of the medium qua mediation and in-betweenness was given only
by Nakai Masakazu. Nakai described this structure of the dialectical media-
tion of the actual present and possible futures as gijutsu (téchne, in the sense
of “technology” or “technique”), which he understood neither as a purely
physical means to an end nor as a Kantian-idealistic “cognitive-categorical
medium” (ninshiki hanchū-teki baikai)49 enabling the subject to perceive an
object in the first place but rather—inspired by Martin Heidegger’s philoso-
phy—as an “existential-categorical medium” (sonzai hanchū-teki baikai) in
the sense of a poiesis by which beings always somehow relate to their world.
To Nakai, it is in the present, through the practico-poietic technique of the
medium, that our perception or consciousness of the past (“representation”)
is mediated with a possible future (Heiddegerian) “projection” (Entwurf ):
Consciousness is not causally an agglomeration [katamari] yielding

and grasping memory; rather, memory itself is already one phase of
a projective structure inheriting the possibility to represent [mosha]
many series of the world [sekai keiretsu]. Since t hese possible projec-
tive structures provide all these worlds with a suspending and shift-
ing target-aimed direction [setsudan to dōza hyōteki hōkō], the a ctual
mode of “consciousness” thus lies in the transformation of memory,
as a mediatory [mediumu-teki] possibility, into mediate [mitteru-teki]
actual action. . . . In contrast to memory (or perception in a wide
sense) being a static projective element, consciousness as a dynamic
pivot or projecting moment being directed towards something, trans-
forms these elements into subjective actual action. It transforms the
projectiveness of the mediatory form into the projectiveness of the
mediating form. In other words, consciousness thus possesses its own
logical structure as that which transforms the mediatory mediation of
the “spirit” spontaneously into the mediate mediation of “possibility.”50
This relationship by which beings steadily relate to the surrounding world

is a self-reflective and future-oriented mediated process that “allows people
to err and, through the mediated observation of one’s own actions, to spon-
taneously create new modes of action based on the mistakes made.”51 For

Nakai, technique/technology hence was not something that enables h umans
to manipulate nature but rather a “medium” (baikai) through which beings
are enabled to mediate the a posteriori reflection of one’s relation to nature
and constantly renew this relation. In other words, technique/technology
is a moment of “praxis” ( jissen) and thus “transformation” through which
beings, within a process of “dialectical mediation” (benshōhō-teki baikai),
can “actively transform the categories of impossibility into possibility, irreal-
ity into reality, and necessity into contingency—and vice versa.”52 Generally
speaking, mediation is therefore—and h ere Nakai is in line with Tosaka’s
three-dimensional philosophy of history—a constant pendular movement
between the reflection of the a ctual situation and the projection of a pos
sible future. It is important to note, however, that this pendular movement
mediating the past and the future in the present described by Nakai, despite
being a very smooth, almost invisible mediation, and thus appearing as an
almost “unmediated mediation,” remains to be procedural and truly dialec-
tical, very different from Nishida’s idea of a nonmediated mediation.
FILM THEORY AS MEDIA PHILOSOPHY
The aforementioned perspectives of Tosaka and Nakai on the concept and

temporality of mediation culminated in a fruitful philosophical discussion
of the new medium of film among the two thinkers. Film having become
one of the most important technological media in Japan by the 1930s, Nakai
and Tosaka related this process of three-dialectical mediation qua poietic
téchne particularly to film. Their approach was very different from con
temporary discourse on film, which theorized film from the perspective of
single media ontology, centering on the question of art in film, or film art, or
compared the new technological capacities of film to previous media tech-
nologies. The approach to which Tosaka and Nakai had subscribed focused
more on philosophical questions, mostly the question of the constitutive
role of the medium qua mediation and in-betweenness within the episte-
mological process of perception or cognition in general. Although Tosaka
and Nakai also dealt with the new capacity of film with regard to the visual
perception of movement (a single media ontology), the larger share of their
thought on film is of a philosophical nature. All in all, three aspects are of
relevance to Tosaka and Nakai in their approach t oward the new medium
of film: (1) film as new “cognitive capacity” or “sensory formation,” (2) the
realistic actuality of film based on vision and movement, and (3) the col-
lective reception in a state of “distraction” and the active/practical/kinetic
character of film.

Tosaka from the outset stated that “within cinema, it is precisely ‘film,’ not
‘art,’ that is the question.”53 Although film, if seen from the perspective of “cul-
tural history,” might signify an “artistic” or “stylistic” means of cognition, from
a philosophical viewpoint, it represents “a new h uman cognitive capacity”
(ningen no hitotsu atarashii ninshiki nōryoku), and is thus just another “name
for a means of cognition [ninshiki shudan] or a function of cognition [ninshiki
kinō].”54 Tosaka describes the difference between the artistic and philosophi-
cal perspective on film and its actual reality based on motion as follows:
Let us leave the photography and reporting of natural or social events

aside for a while and point out here that in other artistic modalities,
the photographic effects of everyday natural phenomena often merely
end up as a servile realism, trivialism, or mimicry, but within film,
these same effects appear as the most outstanding and viciously in-
cisive. In terms of natural phenomena, it is the screen that teaches
humans the goodness of the materiality of the world, the joy of the
movement of matter. By and large, we observe t hese t hings every day,
but this element of goodness, this joy, actually occurs to us first when
it appears on the screen. There was already the endearing nature of
the photograph, and the attraction of the graph itself, but the screen
is above all a photograph in motion and thus draws all the more atten-
tion to actual reality itself.55
The attention directed by the moving pictures toward a ctual reality, or sim-
ply “actuality,”56 is not based on mass curiosity, Tosaka emphasizes. Rather,
it is “something based on the journalistic instinct of the human being.”57 To
Tosaka, journalism was, despite its rapid commercialization in the Taishō pe-
riod, based from the outset on the “everyday life of the p eople,” “inhabiting”
a world that is “quotidian, social, external and sometimes as well profane.”
He continues, “Journalism, in contrast to academism, despite its internal
antagonistic moments, is generally based on the principle of . . . actuality,
a consciousness that originates in the activity of everyday social-life [nichijō
shakai seikatsu katsudō].”58 It is, according to Tosaka, “an immediate expres-
sion of how people see the world. Within journalism, the social circumstances
[sesō] appear in a lively way.”59 Thus, for Tosaka, film, particularly newsreels
and documentaries (though not the official propaganda films, or bunka eiga,
of the 1930s and 1940s), was a new form of journalism based on a completely
different means of cognition, vision, and movement.
Nakai, in a manner very similar to Tosaka, stated that film has created
a new collective “sensory formation” (atarashii kankaku-teki kōsei), which,

given the predominantly visual nature of the medium, “neither merely
correspond[s] to conventional visuality, nor to written or spoken language.”60
However, it is not only what is depicted in film—social reality—but also the
reception of the visuality of film itself, Nakai asserted, that is based on a
socially constructed “convention” (konbenshon, yakusoku), which needed to
be “practiced” by the audience, just as one practices a sporting technique.61
Nakai thus finds himself in close intellectual proximity to Walter Benjamin,
who similarly argued that the reception of media, namely “the manner in
which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is ac-
complished,” is “determined not only by nature” “but also by historical cir-
cumstances as well.”62
However, this mode of filmic reception based on actuality and movement is
not as new as one might suggest. Interestingly, Nakai and Benjamin both draw
a parallel to the much earlier optical and tactile experience of architecture,
which they consider analogous to the cinematic experience. Benjamin writes,
Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by

perception—or rather, by touch and sight. . . . On the tactile side
there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile
appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit.
As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical
reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than
by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropria-
tion, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances
acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus
of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical
means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by
habit, u
nder the guidance of tactile appropriation.63
Moving pictures, Tosaka also writes, thus possess a very particular mate-
riality, a collectively experienced materiality of movement: film is a visual
representation of movement, a “language in which matter speaks through
a body.” Whereas spoken language is based on hearing, the perception of
movement is based on vision (in film and reality), and vision, in contrast
to hearing, “possesses the characteristics of the touch, the caress. In con-
trast to the temporal continuity of hearing, it has a feeling of the tension of
spatial continuity.”64
For Nakai, not only vision itself, but particularly the fact that people bodily
move through and live within buildings—Benjamin called this the “tactile
side” of this mode reception—bears similarities to the reception of film,

leading in both cases to a habitualized “collective” experience. It was par-
ticularly with the advent of glass and steel structures in modern times that
this collective appropriation of architecture came to the fore, a time in which
people started to observe the city through “glass walls,” or “animated walls
of painting, painting scrolls that unfold themselves without limitation, a
revolving lantern that never repeats itself as time flows.”65 “Vision itself,”
Nakai writes, in reference to modern architecture, “has sunken into a col-
lective character and an organized structure through the fragmentary vision
that people have achieved from the glass walls.”66 Film, he suggests, has a
similarly collective character: “Together the characters of the lens, film, and
vacuum tubes possess a particular, collective character. This is not only in
the sense that they possess a relational atmosphere as contemplative objects.
Rather, it has to be stressed that they intrude into the senses themselves.
They are, so to speak, the very nerve tissue of the social collective character
[shakai-teki shūdan-teki seikaku].”67
According to Nakai, the viewer of a film—in contrast to the contem-
plative and hermeneutic reader of a book—watches a movie not mediated
via the contemplative medium of their subjective consciousness but rather
“sees through” the “order” of film in an “unpredictable” way,68 just as he
walks “through” a piece of architecture. Reception of film in a collective
mode of distraction, according to Nakai, had already become a “standard”
in the 1930s: it is “the vision and the nerves of the collective itself, it is one
action [kō’i]. It is . . . , so to speak, the standardized form of one collective
vision providing action, or rather, with action attached to it.”69
Tosaka concludes that “for the cognition of reality, vision, more than
hearing, has a fundamental significance,” b ecause “ ‘seeing’ is not merely
contemplation [kanshō] but a practical measure [jissai-teki shochi] taken in
relation to things.”70 The recipient of a film is hence not a “hermeneutic”
subject, weaving together meaning or narration from single fragments of
meaning, but a “kinetic” being,71 projecting itself within cinematic space,
just as it moves collectively through a piece of architecture. Film is not a tool
or channel “through” which a message is transmitted to the receiver; rather,
the viewers are located “within” the film by “seeing through” it. Thereby, their
existence is “relativized”—in a very Latourian sense—into a “functional term”
of the process of reception in its entirety.72 Tactile and haptic movement, key
components of Benjamin’s “mode of reception in distraction [Zerstreuung],”
replaces isolated contemplation: “A man who concentrates before a work
of art is absorbed by it. . . . In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work
of art.”73

Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that the process of mediation
described here does not mean—either for Benjamin or for Nakai—that the
viewer (subject) and the filmic representation (object), in idealist fashion,
merge together within a field of “absolute nothingness” or “unmediated
mediation,” but rather that out of a process of dialectical mediation and ha-
bitualized reception a new dialectical tertium of distinct elements emerges,
namely a social collective of massified film-viewers or viewer-films and their
future projections. From the perspective of media philosophy, film is just
another epistemological apparatus that is, in terms of its epistemological
function, no different from any other media, and is understood as the media-
tion of representations of reality and possible futures. It is only b
ecause of the
absorption or immersion of the film viewer into a realistic depiction of reality
based on visuality and movement that film appears to be a gradually more
“realistic” medium than language. That is to say, the medium qua mediation
and in-betweenness does not disappear or stop—within the filmic reception
the dialectical process of mediation is continuing but becomes invisible due
to the proximity of subject and object. Therefore, an invisible mediation re-
mains as mediation, which is something profoundly different from Nishida’s
unmediated mediation. The more “invisible they are, the more they stay below
the threshold of perception [Wahrnehmungsschwelle],” and the more a medium
fulfills its function as a realistic depiction of reality.74 And this, Karatani Kōjin
has taught us, is true not only for visual representations of reality but also for
language. To Karatani, “realism” is a “semiotic constellation” that “requires
the repression of the signification, or figurative language (Chinese charac-
ters) . . . , as well as the existence of a [phonocentric] language which is sup-
posedly transparent,” in order for us “to assume it to be natural that things
exist and the artist merely observes them and copies them.”75
Conclusion
One can draw the following conclusions from the aforementioned remarks
on the thought of the Kyōto School. First, a revised reading of the thought
produced by thinkers of the inner and outer circle of the school in the 1930s
reveals a strand of media philosophy centering on the concepts of “media-
tion” and “dialectics,” which contradicts the established understanding of
the school as merely offering a meontological “philosophy of nothingness.”
One can argue that it was only based on this narrow reception of the school
that it was possible to create an intellectually consistent picture of it as a

school of philosophers of nothingness in the first place. Moreover, it was
also based on this retrospectively constructed image that it was possible to
bring the school’s philosophy into a position in which it could be contrasted
with Western philosophy as an allegedly genuine Eastern philosophy. In
the case of the Kyōto School, this has often restricted research into possible
conceptual contact points between philosophies in the West and in Japan
concerning the concept of nothingness, which was most frequently studied
in relation to Heidegger’s philosophy or Derrida’s deconstruction. More-
over, as we have seen through a close reading of the thought produced by
the thinkers of the school particularly during the first half of the 1930s, this
newly discovered strand of theorization can not only be fruitfully compared
to and contextualized on a transnational level with other media philoso-
phies in Europe but might also help widen the scope of theorizations of the
medium within the intellectual discursive space of Japan in the 1930s, then
dominated by newly emerging academic disciplines such as sociology and
newspaper studies, and their rather functionalistic and vertical understand-
ing of the role of the medium.76
Secondly, from a perspective internal to the discourse and its very me-
chanics, one could understand the thought of the proponents of the school
presented here as a critical engagement with the concept of nothingness,
representing a fruitful attempt to “fill” the “aching” conceptual emptiness
that Nishida’s philosophy left behind, by explaining, if not replacing, noth-
ingness with the concepts of mediation (baikai), dialectic (benshōhō), or the
in-between (aida). Instead of understanding Nishida’s concept of nothing-
ness in a pseudoreligious or esoteric Buddhist manner, these thinkers re-
interpreted the idea of “absolute nothingness” as an intermediary medium
(a field or place; basho in Nishida’s terminology) of dialectical mediation,
out of which something common (i.e., via a process of “commun-ication”)
or the negotiation of subjective perceptions and collective projections of
reality could emerge. At the same time, this move avoided the pitfalls of
essentializing the concept of the medium or nothingness without question-
ing Nishida’s attempt to overcome the subject/object dualism produced by
Western philosophy in general. Nakai, Tosaka, and Tanabe all gave answers
to the philosophical question of overcoming, but not negating, the duality
of subject/object, matter/spirit, and body/consciousness in Western corre-
lationist philosophy by proposing various forms of media philosophy that
manage to think of all of t hese dichotomies as dialectically coinciding in the
process of mediation.

Third, on an entirely media-theoretical level, one has to welcome Tanabe
and Tosaka’s critique of Nishida’s twisted use of the terms “mediation” and
“dialectics,” climaxing in the prelogical and paradoxical nonconcept of
“unmediated mediation.” As we have learned from the thinkers presented
here, for mediation to qualify as mediation one necessarily needs to as-
sume a (logical or fictional) intermediary third tertium mediationis me-
diating between the things mediated. Regardless of whether this tertium is
the ethnical “species” (Tanabe), the proletarian “class” (Tosaka), or the “col-
lective” of moviegoers (Nakai), the tertium of any process of mediation bears
unique characteristics, is contextual, and cannot possibly be defined as a
transhistoric/temporal and static “absolute nothingness.” One can further
argue that, in short, each of the three tertia presented h ere fulfill the func-
tion to construct—beyond any ideological valorization—imaginations of
forms of a sensus communis based on fictions in the Kantian sense of “regu-
lative ideas.” It is the medium, as Nakai put it, with which f uture projections
(“fictions”) are negotiated with “contemporary representations” of “actual
reality.” Media—and Nakai recognized this all too well—are not just screens
depicting one version of contemporary reality (all constructivist problema-
tizations of the idea of reality in general set aside) but possess the constitu-
tive power to open a “three-dimensional” (Tosaka) or dialectical space (Frei-
fläche) for the negotiation of representations of the present and speculative
projections of alternative future worlds. Put differently, one finds the most
fundamental function of the medium qua dialectical mediation in the juxta-
position and mediation of visualized/imagined contrafactual and futuristic
projections and “realistic” (“actual”) representations of the present.
notes
1. Stefan Münker, “After the Medial Turn: Sieben Thesen zur Medienphilosophie,”
in Medienphilosophie: Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs, ed. Stefan Münker, Alexan-
der Roesler, and Mike Sandbothe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl,
2003), 20.
2. Alexander Roesler, “Medienphilosophie und Zeichentheorie,” in Münker, Roesler,
and Sandbothe, Medienphilosophie, 35.
3. Georg Christoph Tholen, Zur Ortsbestimmung analoger und digitaler Medien
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005), 151, 153; italics mine.
4. Sybille Krämer, “Erfüllen Medien eine Konstitutionsleistung? Thesen über die
Rolle medientheoretischer Erwägungen beim Philosophieren,” in Münker, Roesler, and
Sandbothe, Medienphilosophie, 89.
5. Krämer, “Erfüllen Medien eine Konstitutionsleistung?,” 89.

6. See James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).
7. For a detailed account of the discourse on the press, please refer to Fabian Schäfer,
Public Opinion, Propaganda, Ideology: Theories on the Press and Its Social Function in
Interwar Japan, 1918–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
8. Inaba Michio, Komyunikēshon hattatsushi [History of the development of com-
munication] (Tokyo: Sōfūsha, 1989), 112.
9. Shimomura Toratarō rightly argues that Nishida in fact completed his intellectual
development at the time he came up with the logic of place and that all subsequent
shifts in terminology have to be considered as applications of the very same fundamen-
tal idea to other subjects such as history or society. See Shimomura Toratarō, Nishida
Kitarō: Hito to shisō [Kitaro Nishida: The man and his thought] (Tokyo: Tōkai Daigaku
Suppankai, 1977); and Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and
Christopher Ives (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
10. Nishida Kitarō, Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, new ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2002), 1:9;
Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, 3.
11. Kitarō, Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, 4:215.
12. Nishida, Nishida Kitarō zenshū, 4:220.
13. Nishida, Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, 6:346–47; 11:73–74.
14. Nishida, Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, 7:313–14.
15. Nishida, Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, 6:386.
16. Hajime Tanabe, Shu no roni [Logic of the species], (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko,
2010), 365–66.
17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosoph-
ical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 102.
18. Quentin Meillasoux, Nach der Endlichkeit (Zürich: diaphanes, 2008), 18.
19. Tosaka Jun, Tosaka Jun zenshū, (Tokyo: Keisōshobō, 1966), 3:75. See also Fabian
Schäfer, Tosaka Jun: Ideologie, Medien, Alltag: Eine Auswahl ideologiekritischer, kultur-
und medientheoretischer und geschichtsphilosophischer Schriften (Leipzig, Ger.: Leipziger
Universitätsverlag, 2011), 208.
20. Schäfer, Tosaka Jun, 208.
21. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 3:77; Schäfer, Tosaka Jun, 210.
24. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 2:346.
28. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 202n7.
29. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 2:113, 114.
30. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 2:113, 114.

32. Joachim Israel, The Language of Dialectics and the Dialectics of Language (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 43. Joachim Israel’s words perfectly paraphrase
Tosaka’s perspective: “If society, or the social world, is not something which is immedi-
ately given, then it is mediated, i.e., produced by man. But something which is produced
can also be changed. It can no longer be conceived as something existing independently
of the producing man, or as imposing on him the inner lawfulness of its own goals. The
notion of active forces in society to which man is submitted—e.g., the notion of tech-
nology imposing its inherent goals upon us—can be revealed as an appearance whose
essence is the process of reification, i.e., the transformation of man into an object. Fur-
thermore, if we comprehend reification as a process inherent in the capitalistic system
of production, we can also begin to grasp how by overcoming the posed constraints to
change it. This presupposes understanding of the given as something produced, pro-
duced through praxis in all its forms. ‘When existence is revealed as mediated, it will be
conceived as product.’ ” See Israel, Language of Dialectics, 69.
33. Kobayashi Toshiaki, Denken des Fremden: Am Beispiel Kitaro Nishida [Thinking the
alien: The example of Kitaro Nishida] (Frankfurt am Main: Stromfeld/Nexus, 2002), 46.
34. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 3:100–101.
40. Tanabe, Shu no ronri, 393–94.
41. Johannes Laube, “Westliches und östliches Erbe in der Philosophie Haijme Ta-
nabe,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 20 (summer
1978): 1–15.
42. Israel, Joachim, The Language of Dialectics and the Dialectics of Language (Atlan-
tic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 69.
47. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū , 3:101.
49. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, ed. Osamu Kuno (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha,
1964–81), 2:124.
50. This is a slightly modified version of Aaron Moore’s translation. Nakai, Nakai
Masakazu zenshū, 2:124–25.
53. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:468; Tosaka Jun, “Film as the Reproduction of the
Present: Custom and the Masses,” in Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, ed. Ken C. Kawa
shima, Fabian Schäfer, Robert Stolz, trans. Gavin Walker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia
Series, 2013), 119.

54. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:469; Tosaka, “Film as Reproduction,” 120; Tosaka,
Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:468; Tosaka, “Film as Reproduction,” 119.
55. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:285–86; Tosaka, “Film as Reproduction,” 108–9; ital-
ics mine.
56. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:286; Tosaka, “Film as Reproduction,” 109. For an
account of Tosaka’s notion of the practical and temporal aspect of actuality please refer
to Schäfer, Tosaka Jun.
57. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:285; Tosaka, “Film as Reproduction,” 107–8.
62. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1990), 478; italics mine.
63. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I.2:504–5.
64. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:286; Tosaka, “Film as Reproduction,” 109.
65. Tosaka, “Film,” 296.
66. Tosaka, “Film,” 297–98.
67. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 3:153 (trans. Alex Zahlten).
70. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 4:283; Tosaka, “Film as Reproduction,” 105.
71. Kitada Akihiro, “ ‘Imi’ e no aragai: Nakai Masakazu no ‘baikai’ gainen o megutte”
[Against “meaning” on Nakai Masakazu’s concept of “medium”], in “Imi” e no aragai:
Mediēshon no bunka seijigaku (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 2004), 58–59.
72. Nakai, Nakai Masakazu zenshū, 2:196; Kitada, “ ‘Imi’ e no aragai,” 59.
73. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I.2:497, 503–4; italics in source.
74. Sybille Krämer, “Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat,” in Medien, Computer,
Realität: Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien, ed. Sybille Krämer (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 74.
75. Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 61.
76. See Stefanie Averbeck, Kommunikation als Prozess: Soziologische Perspektiven in
der Zeitungswissenschaft, 1927–1934 (Münster, Ger.: Lit, 1998); and Fabian Schäfer, Pub-
lic Opinion.

1 3 . K O B AYA S H I H I D E O A N D
THE QUESTION OF MEDIA
k e i su k e k i ta n o
Kobayashi Hideo was once described in English as “the pivotal Japanese

critic of his time, as crucial a presence in his own literary culture as, for
example, Edmund Wilson, Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes were in
theirs.”1 In the twentieth—and even twenty-first—century in Japan, Ko-
bayashi, initially trained in the study of French literature, has been ener-
getically discussed within the context of letters, philosophy, social thought
and many other intellectual fields, but his work has not often been exam-
ined from the viewpoint of media studies. Yet one can arguably state that
Kobayashi was one of the first, if not the first, intellectual seriously engaged
in considering the impact of the advent of mass media in society, which hap-
pened in 1920s and 1930s in Japan, as an important subject of intellectual com-
mitment. In the way that Kobayashi appeared on an intellectual scene satu-
rated with mass media culture, from print capitalism to radio to cinema, he
can be reckoned as the first acclaimed writer to emerge within Japan’s mass
media culture.
How an intellectual g iant of this sort conceived of media and media cul-
ture is then a crucial question to be tackled to understand the history, or
histories, of media theories in Japan. This essay will focus on how Kobayashi
approached media and media culture, in the process demonstrating his con-
tribution both to the field of media studies in particular, and to the broader
trajectory of intellectual activities within modern Japan.
Target, Scope, and Orientation
When exploring Kobayashi’s complex theoretical practice we should be
attentive to the way we contextualize Kobayashi’s work with reference to
media culture. Although an analytical comparison between Kobayashi and
Benjamin, as indicated in the quotation cited above, might give one a sense
of understanding the situation in question, it would be fatally misleading to
take it literally. That would be merely a naïve comparative study of intellec-
tual practices, leading to nothing but an instance of a new version of orien-
talism in the age of what might be called the Empire or some other slogan of
globalization. Conducting a comparative study concerned with different in-
tellectual practices in different cultures generally tends to transform what is
happening, that which has been developing immanently, into what is trans-
latable on the level of the receiver, ending up with a geopolitically biased
production of the power of knowledge. Furthermore, Kobayashi was highly
aware of such geopolitical tensions in modern Japan, which I will discuss
later, and that awareness mobilized his singular writing practice. I am afraid
that a naively formatted comparative approach might flatten out many issues
of geopolitical dynamism potentially folded onto the signifying planes of
discourse in such a work as Kobayashi’s.
In addition, one has to be aware of the other side of the comparative study
coin. It would be hopelessly optimistic to presume that an intellectual in Japan
thinks in the same way that the original writer in the West did when one finds
quotations from the latter’s propositions and/or theories in the former’s writ-
ings, which is another geopolitically naive approach toward consideration of
discourses in different languages. Therefore, with this in mind, this paper at-
tempts to organize its methodological orientation in the way that Kobayashi,
in his early period, emerged in a society with a mass media culture similar to
the one Benjamin saw in his time, almost contemporaneously, in Germany—
which does not necessarily mean that Kobayashi was a Benjamin in the Japan
of the time. Our consideration will be focused on how Kobayashi then ap-
proached the question of media and media culture, roughly speaking, in the
period from the 1920s to the 1940s, in his early career.
In a roundtable discussion held in the early 1990s, some of the leading in-
tellectuals of the time—namely Asada Akira, Karatani Kōjin, Hasumi Shige-
hiko, and Miura Masashi—met to reconsider the genealogies of intellectual
practices in modern Japan under the rubric of the history of hihyō, a term
most often translated into English as “criticism” or “critique.”2 During the
discussion, the participants offered a synchronic and diachronic account of
Kobayashi Hideo and Media [329]

discursive practices in the 1920s and 1930s, and identified Kobayashi Hideo
as the most important figure within this configuration (which surveyed
events ranging from the impact of the introduction of Marxism, in partic
ular the introduction of its Lukácsian iteration by Fukumoto Kazuo, who
had become acquainted with those who would later be called the Frank-
furt school, through to the advent of the phenomenology-oriented Kyoto
school of philosophy and to the emergent Japanese Romantics led by Yasuda
Yojūrō). Indeed, it has been more widely argued that it was Kobayashi—
writing within a context in which Japanese society was undergoing its first
exposure to a variety of modern mass media, from print capitalism to the
gramophone and from radio to cinema—who elevated the literary genre of
criticism in Japan to the point where it could vigorously address not only
literature but also philosophy, political economy, civilization, and even sci-
ence. Kobayashi led the intellectual orientation of the discursive sphere in
Japan before, during, and after the Second World War. Arguably, although
he died in 1983, he continues to do so even now.
In Kojin Karatani’s understanding, hihyō refers to something more than
literary criticism in the s imple sense; it also names “the quintessence of the
intellectual activities in modern Japan.”3 That is to say, Karatani argues that
hihyō functions as a radical intellectual enterprise of skepticism t oward both
what stands in front of human beings as well as the very foundation of one’s
own thinking practices—and we might add toward the milieu of media,
with language at the center. He adds that as such it resembles the work of
Immanuel Kant’s questioning of the foundation of metaphysics. While it
might be said that, in the field of Japanese literature, this type of work began
with Natsume Sōseki, Karatani argues, “It is in the work of Kobayashi Hideo
that one finds in Japan the intellectual enterprise that truly compares with
Kant’s Die Drei Kritiken.”4 We might say that it was through Kobayashi that
hihyō as we understand it today was created.
If, in the words of Japanese literature scholar Katō Shūichi, “it was
Kobayashi who made criticism into a work of literature,”5 then hihyō, as Ko-
bayashi practiced it, was highly self-aware, attending to the materiality of
language and its embeddedness within Japan’s burgeoning mass media cul-
ture. Furthermore, Kobayashi was highly aware of contemporary geopoliti
cal tensions surrounding Japan—a topic I w ill discuss later—and that keen
awareness equally informed his singular writing practice. Indeed, much
subsequent media theorization in Japan has taken place within this mode
of hihyō, and as such, inherits from Kobayashi a reflexive attitude toward its
own mediating and mediatized mechanisms, as well as the concept of media
[330] keisuke kitano

more broadly. Examining the work of this highly influential figure in both
the pre-and postwar period—who therefore matured intellectually at an
important moment within the history of media in Japan—is not only key to
understanding the history of media theory in Japan; it is also clearly impor
tant to the understanding of media in Japan.
This chapter thus intends to demonstrate the most significant develop-
ments in Kobayashi’s thought, and how this is reflected in his changing at-
titude toward the concepts of mediation and media. By first turning to the
linguistic context in Japan in the 1920s and then proceeding to Kobayashi’s
conception of translation, we w ill lay the ground for an explication of his
critical methodology, focusing, in particular, on his conception of verbal
language as a form of mediation. From that, we will turn to Kobayashi’s
postwar writing, so as to demonstrate how he developed a more embodied
theory of mediation following his encounters with the then new media of
cinema and photography.
Linguistic Conditions of the Twentieth Century

One of the driving questions for Kobayashi throughout his c areer, argues
Kojin Karatani, was “not simply that of modernity, but more crucially the
question of the geopolitical and linguistic conditions surrounding Japan. No
one can escape from that question even now.”6 That is to say, for Kobayashi,
it was not simply a question of modernity per se, where even poetry was to
be reformulated in each of the countries facing it in its early stages, but
also specifically the question of modernity in Japan (forcefully introduced
due to the geopolitical situation at the time).
We must therefore confront the problematic of the Genbun-icchi move-
ment—a drastic transformation of the linguistic order during the Meiji pe-
riod (1868–1912)—which attempted to unify the chaos of spoken and written
languages in Japan into a single modern, secular, uniform language. While
in a narrow sense it was largely a literary movement initiated and imple-
mented by literary figures such as Futabatei Shimei and Yamada Bimyo, I
would like to suggest that it reflects a much larger, radical restructuring
process of the Japanese language as a whole.7 Together with the chaotic
circumstances involved in the construction of various institutions on the
level of state government in the age of imperialism—namely the activity
surrounding Japan’s nation building—this language revolution lead to the
elevation of a national consciousness within the minds of those living in
a country only recently named “Japan.” “Nation” here, then, designates the

political-economic agenda of nation-state building.8 In other words, Japan
was undergoing the building process of what Benedict Anderson called an
“imagined community.”9 In this sense, when confronting the question of the
ontological and epistemological status of language, we also find that it is a
part of the larger problematic of the intervention of media into the societal
psyche within Japan during the height of the Genbun-icchi movement.
Although Kobayashi appeared on the intellectual scene in the 1920s after
a significant portion of language restructuration had been achieved, it is
arguable that, in fact, it was an agenda that had no end, once it had been
extrinsically motivated and geopolitically exhorted.10 Hasumi Shigehiko be-
lieved that the period from the 1910s to the 1920s—though roughly identifi-
able as “the Taisho period,” it is more tellingly demarcated as lasting from the
Japan-Russo War (1904–5) until the great Kanto Earthquake (1923)—can be
characterized not only by the emergence of mass media culture and the ideo-
logical movement of “Taisho democracy” but, more importantly, by its slogan-
like speeches and addresses in journalism and academia. Th ese focused on
idiosyncratically abstract words and phrases related to such nebulous notions
as sekai (the world) and shutai (the subject).11
Kobayashi’s Engagements
As long as the tensions generated by the interstate relations of world politics
brought about a mediated and mediatized linguistic revolution, one cannot
help but consider the problematic of translation in contemporary society,
which is a key component of Kobayashi’s conception of media. Even during
Japan’s period of international isolation (that is, before it opened its doors to
the outside world around 1854 with Perry’s Treaty of Kanagawa) the question
of translation was already present in the form of the circulation of various
forms of knowledge. After the doors opened, this question simply began to
make one more conscious of the difference between what is to be translated
and what is translated, or the h ere and the t here, geopolitically and linguis-
tically demarcated. Kobayashi, though belonging to a younger generation,
was immersed in the problematic of translation in an unparalleled way. His
commitment to it was so enormous that he devoted tremendous energy to
translating works by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Gide. One can argue that he
sought to cultivate his horizon of intellectual engagement through commit-
ting to the act of translation more profoundly than did other intellectuals—
not in the sense of producing extensively, but of engaging in the question

of how translation was practiced in Japan. His intense exploration of that
question helped him find ways to critically work in and for Japan.
To grasp the significance of Kobayashi’s thoughts concerning translation
as mediation with regard to issues of selfhood and nation, we can refer to
Sakai Naoki’s theorization of the problematic of translation. Sakai contends
that the process of translation occurs differently from what is generally as-
sumed. That is to say, it does not simply entail a transfer of meaning from an
“origin” to a “destination” language. On the contrary, it is the conception and
act of translation that brings about the horizon of thinking where the differ
ent existential units of different languages are to be apprehended—and only
after such apprehension can one engage oneself in translation. What is at
work as a practical m atter is the mobilization of what Sakai calls “the schema
of configuration,” the mechanism that configures the epistemological set-
tings in which one language and another language could exist respectively
and face each other so that someone—acting as a translator—could engage
in the performance of mediating them. This would further effectuate the
consciousness of the ontologically autonomous status of one language, lead-
ing to the realization of a national consciousness or identity.12 Translation as
mediation is thus inherently connected to the question of nation and self.
One can reasonably argue that, even in the late Edo period, the question
of translation was what concerned many leading intellectuals working within
the fields of philosophical consideration that considered what Japan was, is,
and should be. Intellectual efforts to distinguish what was inherent to Japanese
culture from what was historically imported from Chinese cultures, which
were so dominant in the public sphere, w ere rooted in fervent polemics and
debates centered around the question of how the Japanese language could be
identified as distinct from the Chinese language. Kokugaku (national learning
or, quite literally, “the study of our country”), conceived and refined by think-
ers such as Ogyu Sorai and Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth c entury and
practiced most actively by the Mito school of thought, identified a distinction
between the Japanese style and the Chinese style of aesthetics and exerted an
influence on the modern history of Japan over many generations. Undoubt-
edly the question of translation was pivotal to the thinkers of the Edo period,
as it helped them to constitute the idea of what it is to be Japanese.13
Yet, from the Meiji period onward, the problematic of translation came
to be more seriously considered and energetically discussed. One can argue
that even the form of the question of translation changed. When the govern-
ment decided to modernize (i.e., Westernize) the country on many different

levels, various issues relating to the question of translation—such as whether
or not this or that Japanese culture could be translated or whether or not
Western culture could be translated into a Japanese one—became pressing
and urgent for those intellectuals concerned with the task of considering
which direction Japan, as an emerging modern nation, should take. Which
is to say that intellectuals, witnessing the process of modernization/Western-
ization (which can be interpreted as the process of translation in the broad-
est sense of the word) had to consider how they should and could place their
own consciousness in an emerging and growing landscape of this kind.
The question of translation found its locus, sometimes even its specific posi-
tion, placed, with material intensity, in relation to this self-consciousness of
intellectual life.
With Sakai’s theoretical scheme, one may compare and distinguish these
two historical stages of translation in the Edo and Meiji periods, understand-
ing, of course, that the difference between them can be understood only in
terms of degree.14 Put simply, in the mid-Edo period thinkers w ere involved
in their translation willingly, while in the Meiji period, intellectuals, includ-
ing political elites as well as others, w ere pressed and impelled to do trans-
lation. This leads one to see more clearly that, theoretically speaking, the
geopolitical demands of translation are more visible within a framework that
emphasizes questions of medium production and circulation that are spe-
cifically, and materially, formatted. In other words, the act of translation, to
someone like Kobayashi, was not just an intellectual practice of transmit-
ting a message written in one language to those who could understand it
only in another language. It instead existed as a sort of material process that
could intervene in the conditions of ongoing patterns of thought. Kobayashi
acutely recognized this asymmetric configuration of his own geopolitical
situation, which is why, as we w ill see, he realized he could by no means be
a Rimbaud in Japan.
However, Sakai’s theoretical scheme is not sufficient in itself to capture
the unique orbit within which Kobayashi’s practice was situated, which
concerned the domestic positioning of intellectuals in society at that time.
In the 1920s and 1930s, after several stages of drastic efforts toward nation
building—which began in 1867—intellectuals, in particular t hose not work-
ing in elite politics or for big trades or industries, w ere substantially alienated
from what went on within the social mainstream.15 For example, in 1933, Ta-
nizaki Jun’ichiro, an already successful novelist contemporary to Kobayashi
but belonging to a slightly older generation, wrote the following, to which,
as we will see later, Kobayashi attentively responded:

It is true that adult taste runs mostly toward the Chinese classics, or
else t oward certain Japanese classics, though not t oward modern writ-
ing. . . . Few can claim to have avid readers scattered widely throughout
the population, among farmers and workers, for example. Of all arts,
literature alone is trapped inside this narrow and cramped universe.16
Tanizaki lamented the shrinking of their generation’s influence on society

over the course of the Meiji period, later commenting that he and his con
temporary artists should return to an Eastern cultural heritage.
In contrast to this, Kobayashi was well aware of the fact that little re-
mained to be modernized/Westernized, that is, to be translated. In his per-
spective, there were no longer any substantial older customs or cultures that
could be translated into Western languages. One of the reasons for this is
that the Japanese language of his day was already adjusted to the Western-
izing/modernizing forces to a significant degree. He emphatically remarked
that nothing that the Japanese had experienced before Westernization ex-
isted any longer. Kobayashi was thus entangled not only with the question
of translating, but also with the question of the impossibility of translation.
This was the subject of his “Literature of the Lost Home” in 1933:
Some speak of the modern world as one beset by a common, universal

social crisis, although I can only feel that contemporary Japanese society
is collapsing in a quite distinctive way. Obviously, our modern literature
(for all practical purposes we might substitute “Western” for “modern”)
would never have emerged without the influence of the West. But what
is crucial is that we have grown so accustomed to this Western influence
that we can no longer distinguish what is under the force of this influ-
ence from what is not.17
The difficulty that Kobayashi had to contend with was that, while he under-
stood that “Mr. Tanizaki referred to a ‘literature that will find a home for
the spirit,’ ” for him “this is not a mere literary issue, since it is not at all
clear that I have any real and a ctual home.”18 Instead, he had to explore how
a Japanese person would “think” in a situation of this kind. To Kobayashi,
all one could do was perform the act of translation as a mediating practice
without any reliable recourse for implementing such a mediation—there was
no point in returning in the past, no point in envisioning the future. This is
why Kobayashi was not in agreement either with t hose who resisted or with
those who naively welcomed the ongoing translation process. In this sense,
it would be a m istake to evaluate his work with reference to the theory of

“invented traditions.” Tradition cannot be recovered and should not be re-
lied upon. That was his comprehension, tinged with resignation.
It was giving himself up to the translation of the work of Arthur Rimbaud
that most pointedly led Kobayashi to establish his own intellectual enterprise
as a writer concerned with the issues of geopolitical-linguistic conditions in
the Japanese context discussed above. Indeed, his study and translation of
Rimbaud has been so influential it is still the most widely read work on the
French poet in Japan. Kobayashi made some suggestive comments at a round-
table discussion organized by the editorial board members of the most influ-
ential postwar journal, Kindai bungaku (Modern literature), just a fter the Sec-
ond World War. The discussion concerned the manner in which Kobayashi
should reflect on his own c areer as a critic, touching upon the issues of war
responsibility and the emperor system. With regard to his own commitment
to translation, he explains,
I translated the work of Rimbaud because I thought translating could

make me read his poetry all the better. Translating his work into Japa
nese and introducing it to the public was in no sense my motiva-
tion. . . . If you translate Rimbaud, it would unquestionably no longer
be Rimbaud. But Rimbaud’s influence on me, that is realized in a new
form. . . . Which is what you can detect in any work of translation. In
particular it is true in poetry. If you translate a poem into Japanese,
then it would be a Japanese poem.19
Rimbaud, to Kobayashi, was unique. By translating his poetry and reading

it better, Kobayashi hoped that he could gain an understanding of the philo-
sophical import of individuality and modernity in the West, or of the indi-
vidual’s solitude in a homogenous civil society—the question of how one can
reasonably live one’s own singular life under the conditions of modernity. Yet
what Kobayashi learned was the harsh truth that, while Rimbaud’s work is fas-
cinatingly instructive in this regard, it was by no means possible for a Japanese
to become Rimbaud or to share an essential sympathy with his work. That is
to say, in spite of and at the same time b ecause of receiving and emulating the
question of individuality in Western art, Japan, through approaching, receiv-
ing, and translating many instances and layers of Western modernity, always
ends up realizing the logical truism that it is not a Western country. For Ko-
bayashi, then, translation cannot but help emphasize the difference between
Japan and Western countries: Rimbaud was a French poet, not a Japanese one.
Despite this realization, it was through this interaction that Kobayashi
came to realize the possibility and potential of the Japanese language as the

locus for his critical engagement. This enabled him to take into account
the entire geopolitical condition of living in a country called Japan and of the
ensuing domestic events. In a sense, his approach was very simple: language
was something fundamentally tied to what it meant to be a h uman being;
therefore, in Kobayashi’s view, satisfactorily practicing criticism in language
might lead to capturing the nature of one’s own existence. He pointedly re-
marked that “unless you get married to language, you would not become
visible in the world.”20 Kobayashi’s commitment to language was so unparal-
leled that his achievement in the writing culture of the day surpasses that of
any other intellectual—whether thinker, philosopher, theorist, or writer—in
contemporary Japanese history.
In Kobayashi’s view, it was an undeniable fact that p eople living in a
country called “Japan” employed the Japanese language, conversed in this
language, constituted their everyday experience in this language, and or
ganized their thinking and sensibilities in this language. All the Japanese
intellectuals could do, in Kobayashi’s view, was to explore the potential of
the ongoing Japanese language that existed specifically and concretely in
plain view. To Kobayashi, the only way to engage in such an intellectual
search was to entangle oneself with what went on in this language by way of
double-folded skeptical criticism. One can embody double-folded criticism
by simultaneously intervening in one aspect of language that constitutes the
form of world experience—or the “life world” in the sense of Wittgenstein’s
philosophy—and in another that conditions one’s own way of thinking. In
other words, Kobayashi was engaged in the acrobatic task of investigating
the position of Japanese language in its geopolitical relation to and distance
from what went on outside the country while at the same time critically
exploring the possibilities it offered for the future.
Kobayashi’s Methodology: Its Contour and Background

As we have seen, Kobayashi’s work took place in the context of a geopoliti
cal conjuncture that was highly mediatized and destabilizing of e very aspect
of Japanese society. It now remains for us to articulate what double-folded
skeptical criticism entails. To do so, we turn to one of Kobayashi’s earliest
essays, “Multiple Designs” (Samazamanaru Isho)—first published in the
September 1929 issue of Kaizo monthly, as it illuminates some of his core
methodological concerns, which w ill, in turn, help us to understand how,
for Kobayashi, issues of language, translation, mediation, and geopolitics
were intimately intertwined. This essay analyses contemporary ideological

and theoretical undertakings in Japan in the early twentieth century, and so
it is no surprise that Kobayashi begins by questioning what criticism is and
what it should be:
Just as poets and novelists inhabit a literary world, so too do literary

critics. The poet’s desire is to create a poem, a storyteller’s to write a fic-
tion. Does the literary critic have an analogous wish—to write literary
criticism? This is a question rife with paradox.
“How simple,” it is said, “to practice criticism by just following one’s
own taste.” But it is just as uncomplicated to practice criticism that
follows an ideological yardstick. What is hard is to maintain tastes
that are ever vital and alive, and to possess ever living and responsive
ideas.21
ere, Kobayashi deliberately rejects any fixed, clear-cut formula to inter-

H
pret this or that literary work. For him, such an approach cannot succeed
because it does not allow the reader any intellectual excitement in expe-
riencing the act of reading a work of criticism (hihyō). Instead, Kobayashi
proposes to deconstruct the binary opposition between the subjective and
objective, with particular reference to Baudelaire’s work: “The magical power
of Baudelaire’s criticism derives from his awareness that to write criticism is
to make oneself conscious. To say that the subject of criticism is the self and
the other is to say t here is but a single subject, not two. For is not criticism
finally the skeptical narration of our dreams?”22 In simple terms, one can
summarize this passage by saying that Kobayashi understands criticism as
an intellectual undertaking within language whose function is to critically
mediate our experience of the world and oneself. This mediation targets not
only the world around oneself but also what makes one who s/he is. In this
view, all of the contemporary theoretical or ideological frameworks—what
Kobayashi calls “designs”—from Marxism to “art for art’s sake,” from real-
ism to symbolism—prove to be fatally ineffective b ecause, it seems to him,
none of them would succeed in identifying what positions and functions
they serve in reality. Within the conditions of the society named “Japan,”
those “designs” w ere merely w holesale imports. As such, they simply could
not touch upon the potentially questionable status of one’s own intellectual
foundation.
This is what Karatani tries to pin down with the term hihyō: a strategic
methodology with which to critique one’s own consciousness. What is to be
mobilized in Kobayashi’s critical methodology is the mechanism of what
we have earlier called double-folded critical skepticism. It is a critical activity

vis-à-vis a work of literature or art, a media object, or a historical situa-
tion, but it simultaneously uses that activity to perform a critique of its own
foundations.
Let us take a closer look at how such a double-folded critical skepticism
might function specifically in relation to thinking about media. Kobayashi
produced a considerable number of essays and other writings demonstrat-
ing that he was intensely interested in media culture. Clearly his attention
was caught by what was emerging in the then new mediums of photography,
cinema, and the gramophone. He pointedly notes this later, some years after
the Second World War, in “Letters from van Goh (Gohho no Tegami)”:
Reading literature in translation, listening to m

usic on the gramophone,
seeing paintings in reproduction. Everyone has done this. At least as
far as modern arts are concerned. We first appreciate works through
experiences of this sort. More often than not, people talk about trans-
lation culture rather pejoratively. That seems quite reasonable, but being
excessively reasonable would lead to a lie. To say that the culture of
modern Japan is nothing but translation culture is one thing, but to
say that our joy and sorrow have been simply immersed in it and will
continue to be so is another. Whatever the state of affairs may be, the
real nature of culture stands out, not as problems or tasks we have to
deal with, but, most importantly, as food given to us that is impera-
tive for our living. Everybody lives on something that cannot be cat-
egorized, not on an abstract idea named “translation culture.”23
Likewise in “Mozart” (Mootuaruto), one of Kobayashi’s most popular es-

says, published just a fter the Second World War, he narrates how, before the
war, the melody of Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 sounded in his mind as he was
walking in downtown Osaka and he rushed into a department store to buy
a recording of the piece. This passage has often been cited to emphasize Ko-
bayashi’s romantically toned descriptions of his encounters with the beauty
of such works of art.24 Yet it is important to keep in mind the mediated na-
ture of this encounter, as Kobayashi himself was incisively aware of his own
interest in the reproduction culture produced by the mass media of the day.
In other words, Kobayashi, cognizant of his fond regard for media culture,
oriented his critical involvement toward problems concerning the nature of
the medium. This, considered together with Kobayashi’s critical mechanism
of double-folded critical skepticism, indicates that Kobayashi’s hihyō har-
bors what we might call multidirectional signifying vectors t oward readers,
then and now. “Multidirectional” here does not refer to a psychoanalytical

connotation associated with overdetermination lurking in the unconscious.
Rather, it is a writing strategy. Kobayashi’s conception of a medium is not
something that transparently transmits a message or content; rather, it is
something tactically embedded in his writing practices. Kobayashi thus es-
tablished a highly reflexive critical method with language.
Kobayashi’s Mediating Interventions

It is in the postwar period, when Kobayashi’s attention shifts more explicitly
to visual media, that his language-based model of mediation and interven-
tion is destabilized. To understand that shift, we must turn to the question of
how Kobayashi dealt with “media” and “media culture”—two terms that we
might categorize as different kinds of mediating practices.
As we have seen, Kobayashi’s critical methodology was firmly founded
on the role of language in relation to the particular form of h uman exis-
tence within modernity. It was designed and conducted with a view of the
geopolitical-linguistic conditions of Japan between the 1920s and the late
1940s, and during this time Kobayashi’s understanding of language began
to moderate his understanding of other mediums. To consider the question
of media as such, it w ill be necessary to examine to what extent Kobayashi
considered media culture to be similar to and different from literature or
language practices more broadly.
Kobayashi was certainly sensitive to the question of whether language-
based criticism needed to radically change its orientation in order to ap-
proach new media, especially visual mediums such as film. He clearly states
this in an essay titled “On Film Criticism” (Eiga-hihyo nitsuite), written
in 1939:
To the general audience, watching a movie is a part of everyday life.

Entertainment is something earnest, just like eating. None of them has
any extra time to spare for watching a film in a special manner that
a film critic might term pure appreciation of cinema. P eople watch
movies simply because of the joys and pains, vitality and exhaustion
in their lives. For the mass, or more precisely speaking, for human be-
ings, entertainment in the true sense of the word is nothing but what
exists in this sort of way.
Their [peoples’] appreciation of cinema can be said to be impure,
without any consistency, one may say. Yet, looking closely at the way
it is, it is a disorder at surface value. Or it would be better to say that

they respond meekly to the attractiveness of cinema, which engenders
a sort of ordered atmosphere. And the audience, holding their own
impression, in a variety of shades, indulges itself in the atmosphere in
the theatre.25
Referring to this essay and another essay, “On Theatre Criticism (Engeki-ni-
tuite)” (1936), Kawakami Tetsutaro, a friend and critic contemporary to Ko-
bayashi, explains that the latter perceived, within theatrical and cinematic
practices, a specific “sociality” that went beyond language.26
It is a sociality of the same kind as that mentioned in Kobayashi’s essay
“On the ‘I’ Novel” (Shishosetsu-ron) and for which he perceived some critical
possibilities (he even turned a negative gaze t oward those plays straightfor-
wardly adapting literary works in Shingeki, or modern theater). Kobayashi
was able to observe distinctly different sorts of socialities, or mediations,
engaging the spectator’s mind and body, w hether an audience member or a
reader, and in different cultural practices, w hether new or old. At the end of
“On Film Criticism,” Kobayashi laments that film criticism was becoming
like literary criticism.27
Here Kobayashi touches upon the problem of material conditions, or
the materiality of a medium. One can argue that his intervention into con
temporary culture is essentially different from that of sociologist Gonda
Yasunosuke, one of the founding figures of research on popular culture in
Japan. In 1922, Gonda noted, “Last summer about 10 students from Waseda
University visited me and asked me to introduce some Western books to
which they could refer to b ecause they had been thinking that they would
like to deal with the subject of p eople’s entertainment in their graduation
thesis. However, there are no books on people’s entertainment. So I sug-
gested to them that ‘there are no Western books of this kind in stores, but
the topic of this sort of study could be readily apprehended in Asakusa.’ ”
Asakusa is the name of a popular district full of amusements and attractions.
Therefore, Gonda’s advice was that t hose students do some field research in
the entertainment district, and adopt a bottom-up approach t oward cultural
practices. As an established sociologist, Gonda believed that one was able to
reach some sort of truth through on-the-spot knowledge production and
positivistic sociological research.28 In contrast to Gonda’s positivistic ap-
proach, Kobayashi’s notion of sociality was based on the fact that the con-
ditions of language, which supported the fragile ontological state of self at
that time, are unimpeachably embedded in the life form. That embedded-
ness, according to Kobayashi, should be considered when thinking about

the concrete materializations of works of art, w hether linguistic, theatrical,
or cinematic.
How then can one understand Kobayashi’s differentiation of medium(s) in
terms of their material conditions? Let us turn to Kobayashi’s narrativization
of his own experience of photography. In a provocative essay titled “On the
Photographs of Dead Bodies, or, The Dead Bodies” (Shitai-shashin aruiwa
Shitai ni tsuite), written in 1949, Kobayashi describes what impressed him
when he visited “the Exhibition of Real Images of Crimes” in Kamakura. He
reports, “I felt so sick at heart and had pain in my stomach, and left the exhi-
bition.” He goes on to describe what he thinks is the most impressive scene
in the exhibition: “A woman holding a baby on her back, watching the pho-
tographer, says ‘look, strangled!’ Fondling the baby, she says ‘strangled!’ ”
She obviously represents the audience in general. How else could they
possibly react? The material traces of the dead bodies exposed outside
of the context of criminal investigation do not necessarily tell you any
story of what happened. . . . The objects displayed are nothing but ma-
terial things that used to be human beings. Yet, looking more closely,
they turn out to be low-grade material things, which one might not
even call material things.29
ere Kobayashi is expressing more than an affect or affective response in

H
the narrow sense of the word. Instead, he touches upon a media engage-
ment outside of language, one that involves the material and the corporeal.
Later in the text he compares photographic or filmic experience with that
of theater:
The audience by nature knows that cinema stands not as an extension

of ordinary social life as theatre does. The audience, including me, are
to be drawn, in silence, into this isolated mechanism. Everything goes
on as predicted. All one has to do is sell one’s soul to the devil. The
mind rotates with the film. How can one call the mind rotating with
the film the mind of a human being? Laughter and tears are merely
mathematical functions of shadows in motion, which are not ours. It
is hard to sniff the smell of the dead. We are so weak that being awake
is the most difficult of difficulties.30
One is reminded of André Bazin’s thoughts on the nature of photography,

published in the late 1950s, though Kobayashi’s essay was written in 1949.
However, we need to read t hese words in the context of Kobayashi’s life and
the history of intellectual practices in Japan. As shown above, Kobayashi

had previously examined the similarities and differences between literary
criticism and film criticism in two earlier essays, and had also indicated
that there w
ere different strands of mediation process. Even compared with
these essays, the postwar “On the Photographs of the Dead Bodies, or, the
Dead Bodies” uses a noticeably different kind of phrase to describe photo-
graphic properties: “the smell of the dead.” Here, photography as a mediat-
ing practice is considered similar to the change of material conditions in
the act of confronting a dead body via one’s eyes, nose, and body. At this
point, Kobayashi, almost abandoning his exploration of the materiality of
media experience, begins to incorporate his own experiences into his con-
siderations. Indeed, he suddenly begins to talk about his experience visiting
China as a war correspondent during the Second World War:
As a war correspondent, I, having no scruples, looked continuously

on a series of dead bodies, exposed u nder the bright sun, without feel-
ing any poignancy. The senselessness of the dead bodies left my mind
senseless. My memory prowls around the words saying that those were
surely dead bodies. And I noticed some form of emotion coming out
of it. If my mind were a dry plate, a photograph of dead bodies must
have been taken. A photograph is able to do such a thing. A photo
graph does not express anything if one takes the word “expression” to
signify its original meaning, that is to say, that of pressing t hings out.31
This is a key point that demonstrates the break in Kobayashi’s linking of lan-
guage and mediation, one that is deeply connected to the experience of the
war. Witnessing the war led him to be unable to consider anything but the
mediation of such experiences. However, we should be attentive to the fact
that Kobayashi, in this paragraph, is commenting on a particular mecha-
nism of perception at work between the viewer and the dead bodies. The
materiality of the experience, described in this quotation, is to be rendered
physically before the camera, optically reflecting from the object being shot.
Yet this can be contrasted to what is also present in the aforementioned quo-
tations regarding the exhibition of the dead bodies: in the latter essay, the
material plane of photography was considered an experience to be consti-
tuted from the perspective of the viewer standing before the photograph.
Logically, this chapter argues, the working mechanism of the reproduc-
tive medium can be rendered as two distinct channels: that of the experi-
ences of people in front of the camera, and that of the photograph or screen
depicting those people. One may reformulate this, for instance, as the dif-
ference between the mechanically tangible representation of what might be

called reality and a specifically sensed reality without any signification on
the side of the spectator. After Kobayashi’s travels as a war correspondent,
it seems that these two channels began to overlap. Experience and photo-
graphic depiction became less distinguishable.
In other words, in the prewar period Kobayashi saw, within visual media,
the potential to go beyond linguistic (in)capacity and to extend and expand
people’s sensibilities, imagination, and thinking. However, at some point dur-
ing the war, Kobayashi, consciously or not, took this further, and began to
rely on the possibilities and potentials of such visual media to transcenden-
tally go beyond his own inability to identify and analyze—with his double-
folded skepticism—the contemporary conjuncture in which dead bodies
were lying on the field. Consequently, he began to intermix two experiential
channels: that of the photographed and that of the viewer. By doing this,
the mechanism of reproducing reality in such mediums as photography and
cinematography could potentially, or romantically, overcome Kobayashi’s
critical incapacity to hold himself exposed in the Japanese language in con-
fronting the war. It was at this point that Kobayashi became incapable of
identifying the conjuncture of geopolitical tensions any longer.
notes
1. Paul Anderer, Introduction to Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—
Literary Criticism, 1924–1939, trans. and ed. Paul Anderer (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1995), i.
2. The roundtables were published first in the journal Kikan Shicho (Tokyo, Shinchosha)
no. 5 (July 1989), no. 6 (October 1989), no. 7 (January 1990), and no. 8 (April 1990); and
subsequently in Hihyō-kūkan (Tokyo: Fukutakeshoten) no. 1 (April 1991), no. 2 (July 1991),
and no. 3 (October 1991). You can now find all of them in Karatani Kōjin, Asada Akira,
Shigehiko Hasumi, and Masashi Miura, Kindai Nihon no Hihyō I: Shōwa-hen (Tokyo:
Fukutake Shoten, 1990–91); and Karatani Kōjin, Asada Akira, Shigehiko Hasumi, and
Masashi Miura, Kindai Nihon no Hihyō II: Shōwa-hen (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1992).
3. Karatani Kojin, “Bunkoban e no Jobun” [Introduction to the paperback edition],
in Kindai Nihon no Hihyō I: Shōwa-hen, ed. Karatani Kojin (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997), 8.
4. Karatani, “Bunkoban e no Jobun,” 8–9.
5. Katō Shiuichi, Nihon Bungakushi josetsu ge (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1980), 489.
6. Karatani Kojin and Kenji Nakagami, “Beyond Kobayashi Hideo,” in Karatani
Kōjin, Nakagami Kenji zen taiwa [All dialogues between Karatani Kojin and Nakagami
Kenji] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2011), 62.
7. Many scholars, Suga Hidemi among them, have been engaging with this question
since the 1980s, when problematizing the Japanese language and national conscious-
ness began to be discussed. This is why I phrase this question as the problematic of the

Genbun-icchi. See Suga Hidemi, Nihon kindai bungaku no tanjo: Genbun-icchi ūndo to
nashonarizumu (Tokyo: Ota Shuppan, 1995).
8. Karatani Kojin, “Karatani Kojin’s Afterword to the English Edition (1991),” in Ori-
gins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993), 193–94.
9. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
10. In this sense, this chapter takes a different position from that of Carol Gluck,
who argues that “by 1915 Japan possessed a public language of ideology that retained
currency through the end of the Second World War” ( Japan’s Modern Myths, 247).
However, even though Gluck understands that “ideology appeared as a conscious en-
terprise” and “a congeries of ideologies,” it seems she misses the issue of the material
conditions for ideologies in the beginning of the twentieth century. For more informa-
tion on Gluck’s position, see Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late
Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 3, 16, 247.
11. See Shigehiko Hasumi, “ ‘Taisho-teki’ gensetsu to hihyō,” in Kindai nihon no
Hihyō: Meiji-Taisho hen, ed. Karatani Kojin (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997), 146–76.
12. See Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural National-
ism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 51–71.
13. For more on the question of translation, see chapter 4 of Sakai, Translation and
Subjectivity, 472.
14. Sakai, in his dialogue with Nishitani Osamu, mentions that the problematic of
translation in modern Japan should be considered not in relation to nationalism or
national identity but to imperialism or expanding nationalism. See Naoki Sakai and
Osamu Nishitani, “Sekai-shi” no kaitai: Honyaku shutai rekishi (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 1999).
15. Alain-Marc Rieu justifiably contends that the many knowledge circulation sys-
tems forming and working restricted the power and function of ideas and knowledge
that intellectuals produced in their writings and dialogue in early twentieth-century
Japan. In a sense, Japanese intellectuals who worked not in politics, trades, or other
practical businesses but in writing activities were situated in circumstances in which
what they wrote about could have efficacy only in a highly limited way. See Alain-Marc
Rieu, Savoir et pouvoir dans la modernisation du Japon (Paris: puf, 2001).
16. Junichiro Tanizaki, “ ‘Gei’ ni tsuite” [On art], Kaizo (March–April 1933), reprinted
as “Geidan,” in Tanizaki Junichiro zenshu, vol. 20 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982), 442–44; the
English translation is from the quotation in Kobayashi, “Literature of the Lost Home,” 47.
17. Kobayashi, “Literature of the Lost Home,” 53.
18. Kobayashi, “Literature of the Lost Home,” 50.
19. Hideo Kobayashi, “Komedi literēru: Kobayashi Hideo o kakonde,” Kobayashi
Hideo zenshū 15 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2001): 27–28.
20. Hideo Kobayashi, “X e no Tegami,” in Kobayashi Hideo zensakuhin 4 (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 2003), 78.
21. Hideo Kobayashi, “Multiple Designs,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi
Hideo—Literary Criticism, 1924–1939, trans. and ed. Paul Anderer (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1995), 20–21.

22. Kobayashi, “Multiple Designs,” 20–21.
23. Hideo Kobayashi, “Gohho no Tegami,” in Kobayashi Hideo zensakuhin 20 (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 2004), 14–15.
24. Hideo Kobayashi, “Mōtsuaruto” [Mozart], in Kobayashi Hideo zensakuhin 15
(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2003), 47–102.
25. Hideo Kobayashi, “Eiga-hihyō ni tsuite” [On film criticism], Kobayashi Hideo
zensakuhin 11 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2003), 56–57.
26. Kawakami Tetsutaro, “Kaisetsu,” in Kobayashi Hideo Zenshu, dai-yon-kan, Shin-
chosha, 1978, 396.
27. Hideo Kobayashi “Eiga-hihyo ni tsuite” [On film criticism], Kobayashi Hideo
zensakuhin 11 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2003), 61.
28. Gonda’s focus on popular culture is part of a larger context of intellectual ac-
tivities that Watanabe Kazutami, an outstanding postwar French Literature scholar, de-
scribes when he notes that in the 1920s and 1930s, Marxism had seized the intellectual
trend, leading “intellectuals to an excessively impetuous self-negation and the ideologi-
cal placement of absolute trust in the p
eople.” See Watanabe Kazutami, “Sengo shiso no
mitorizu,” in Sengo nihon no shiso-shi—sono saikento, ed. Tetsuo Najita, Maeda Ai, and
Kamishima Jiro (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1988), 98. Kato Shuichi, for his part, argues
that when attempting to criticize Marxist thought, Kobayashi’s strategy was neither that
of logical positivism nor that of establishing alternative social theories as typified in the
work of Karl Popper; see Katō Shuichi, Nihon bungakushi josetsu ge (Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobo, 1980), 484.
29. Hideo Kobayashi, “Shitai-shashin aruiwa Shitai nituite” [On the photographs
of the dead bodies, or, the dead bodies], in Kobayashi Hideo zensakuhin 17 (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 2004), 38–39.
30. Kobayashi, “Shitai-syashin aruiha Shitai ni tsuite,” 42–43.
31. Kobayashi, “Shitai-syashin aruiha Shitai ni tsuite,” 174.

1 4 . M E D I A , M E D I AT I O N , A N D C R I S I S
A History—and the Case for Media Studies
as (Postcultural) Anthropology
to m l o o se r
The conscious thinking through of practices that mediate and organize life,
including in terms of literal, even mechanical technologies, is not new in
Japan. One might look back, for example, to the early modern Kabuki the-
ater. Kabuki became one of the first theaters in the world to use complex
mechanical technologies for staging, and also to then highlight those tech-
nologies as themselves subjects of life and action; this included plays that
consisted of nothing more than quick changes of stage sets (as if to openly
acknowledge that offering different technologies of space itself dramatized
different modes of life), and an entire sub-era in which mechanical dolls and
thereby mechanized life replaced living humans as the subjects of action
onstage. The idea that there are technologies of life—as technologies that
mediate life itself, and social life in particular—has been tied to Japanese
modernity and capitalism for a long time.
The institutional form of media studies is of course much more specific,
and the history of media, mediation, and social media theory in Japan is
not simply framed by the generalized terms of modernity. To the extent that
there is a disciplinary field of new media studies in Japan, it is really a post-
war development, and, as other essays in this volume show, even in the more
immediate history of the postwar period the changes within media studies
have at times been dramatic. This chapter is concerned with changes in the
assumptions underlying media studies that occurred during the post-bubble
decades of crisis in Japan, roughly beginning in the 1990s—in particular the
ways media studies engages with and proposes conceptions of mediation.
This is not meant to propose a theory of media studies that is ultimately
defined in terms of historical crisis. But at the very least, times of real crisis
may indicate a fundamental uncertainty within a given order of social life
(perhaps; obviously crisis capitalism does not work quite that way, since it
depends on crisis for its continuity). Further, periods of crisis may also be
the points at which a very different order of social life and subjectivity be-
comes visible—and real. Media studies in Japan has been at the forefront of
thinking about the fundamental questions of changing social life and social
subjectivity, and changes in the discipline also reveal possibilities that have
emerged from the lived conditions of crisis within contemporary Japan.
Reading the recent history of media studies in Japan along these lines is my
primary aim, although this is just a single genealogy of one stream of thought
within the field of media studies.1 My focus is on changes within the work of
Azuma Hiroki, with some reference to those writing around him. Azuma is
one of the most prolific and influential figures in the field; he is thoughtful,
and his influence symptomatically indicates the accuracy of some of his per-
ceptions. He is not always systematic, however, and is at times content with
suggestive description rather than rigorous analysis. But his work is not ran-
dom. However much it may invoke seemingly contradictory positions, Azu-
ma’s work itself offers the reader an overview of the definitive terms of media
and mediation within critical moments in contemporary Japanese history.
The trajectory outlined below highlights publications from two general
periods: Azuma’s work in the late 1990s (as in his Dobutsuka suru posuto-
modan), and writing that he produced in reaction to the Fukushima disas-
ters of March 2011 (such as Japan 2.0 and General W ill 2.0).2 As the general
discourse moved first toward practices of the subcultural otaku and then
toward governance and a broader vision of the social, one can see a change
in the very idea and role of the (new) media studies field that implicates
everything from the perceived grounds of mediation to the place of the po
litical and cultural idea of Japan to the image of the social and the bound
aries of animality and the self-making human.
Background
By the time Azuma published Dobutsuka suru posutomodan in 2001 (which
was translated and published as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals in 2009),
discussions concerning the deep changes felt to be occurring in Japanese
[348] tom looser

society were well under way. New media studies had begun to take on a cen-
trality in these dialogues, as a field that was ideally situated to address t hese
changes. Social change was thus tied to epistemological change, and the turn
away from other disciplines and t oward new media studies implies a shift in
thought as well as in social form. Dobutsuka suru posutomodan can be seen
as a significant element in this shift—a pulling together of something new.
The constellation of thought that Dobutsuka suru posutomodan helped to
concretize still included discussions of city form, artistic production, socio
logical analysis, and psychoanalytics, but media studies became a privileged
arena within which these interests could come together in a critical concern
with new social and cultural forms. This epistemological transition—which
included a movement away from more traditionally constituted approaches
to philosophy, literary criticism, and even anthropology—is evident in the
institutional shift of focus from journals such as Gendai shisô (begun in 1973)
and Hihyô kûkan (started in 1991) toward newer publications such as Inter-
Communication (1992), Ten Plus One (1994), and, to varying degrees, the
publications attached to Genron (2010).3
One can see the weaving of more traditional approaches and interests
into Azuma’s Dobutsuka suru posutomodan. He borrows heavily from Hege-
lian philosophy via Alexandre Kojève, and from the philosophy and literary
theory of Jean-François Lyotard. His references span everything from the
art history of Sawaragi Noi to the cultural theory of Roland Barthes, Jean
Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. He also retains a Lyotard-like interest in
narrative form, and the transformation or loss of narrativity, as a basis for
understanding contemporary culture. But with his focus shifted to the otaku
as the subject of production, Azuma understands media technologies (the
database and gamification) rather than economics to be the definitive condi-
tions of consumption in Dobutsuka suru posutomodan.
In a sense, then, in this early iteration centered on the otaku’s “database”
methods of creation, mediation was conceived above all in terms of the
materiality of media. Database modes of practice, and the otaku popula-
tions that went with them, are still concerned with consumption, but at
this point consumption has more to do with t hese technologies of cultural
production and consumption (the way a “database” of imagery operates for
the otaku, including as the ground of consumption) than with the impe-
tuses more strictly of capital. These arguments w ill be fleshed out below.
For the moment, it w ill suffice to note that in this earlier breed of Japanese
media studies articulated by Azuma, the effect was to locate the conditions
for a new, historically unique order of human life within the practices of a
Media Studies as Anthropology [349]

specific population (the otaku) who were defined by their usages of new
media technologies.
After the large-scale natural and nuclear disasters related to the earth-
quake and tsunami in March 2011 (or “3.11”), however, Azuma developed
and published a very different kind of vision. He and o thers turned away
from the otaku and the claim that Japan was effectively in a posthistorical
condition. There is a return to politics—even constitutional politics, in some
cases—and, at least for Azuma, the framing influences shift from the historical
visions of society of Hegel and Lyotard toward the a priori individual, and
the question of governance as figured by Rousseau and Freud. New media
technologies, including the idea of the database, are still part of the discus-
sion but are now more fully situated within the cultural, historical, and geo-
graphic conditions specific to Japan. Social signs of death seem to take on as
much prominence as the possibility of an open and undetermined human
(or animal) life.
Does this trajectory signal the end of media studies? And, furthermore,
does it signal the end of the social subject of new media? Is this a return to
the disciplinary perspectives, the visions of the social, and more traditional
categories of nation, culture, and humanity that have defined modern social
thought? Are we returning to more traditional understandings of mediation
itself, and the outcomes of social mediation?
By answering these questions, I intend to offer a perspective on at least
one stream of thought within Japanese media studies, and to provide a view
of the changing grounds of what might be called “mediation.” I w ill work
with the two poles I have set up in these introductory comments: I take
Dobutsuka suru posutomodan to be the concretization of elements already
visible at the beginning of the 1990s, itself a time of crisis, and I view writ-
ing that has emerged post-3.11 as part of a second, if related, crisis moment.
Although there is clear continuity between t hese times, and in the ongoing
assumptions of media studies scholars writing about them, there are none-
theless new kinds of remediations of earlier thought in post-3.11 writing.
That is to say, there is real history to contemporary Japanese media studies.
Azuma and Synthesis 1 (Post-1980s)

Media studies may have been a newly formed discipline in the postwar era,
but it was certainly not new to look at media materialities in order to
discern the specific grounds for the exchanges that produce social realities.
Anthropology, for example, has tended to look at language as the basis for
[350] tom looser

the cultural specificity of social worlds. In crude terms, if there is a distin-
guishing characteristic that defines media studies in Japan (as elsewhere), it
has been a concern with the practical technologies that govern our everyday
relation to the world—everything from digital photography to social media.
But even the turn away from language has real effects on how one might
conceptualize human social life. The vision of social life that Japanese media
studies arrives at by the end of the twentieth century includes a theory of
media technologies, but it is wide-ranging and eclectic.
The genealogy leading to contemporary Japanese media studies includes
Nakai Masakazu in a critical early role. Taking up film as a primary me-
dium of everyday life, Nakai attempted to understand both its material and
aesthetic conditions in terms of the values and priorities of capitalism. Capi-
talism, for him, was thus the real materializing force and the ground of me-
diation in mid-twentieth-century modernity. The attempt to read film as an
order of capitalism is not always entirely successful (Kitada Akihiro’s reading
is perhaps the best attempt to find success in Nakai’s approach4), and it is not
always clear how capitalism forms the specific structures of film discussed by
Nakai. The result is neither an argument for media techno-determinism, nor
a subsumption of technological conditions within the then popular Marxian
interest in the mediating force of capitalism. One can see a real sensitivity to
the particularities of specific media (along with Nakai’s interest in film, his
analysis of cataloging systems was predictive of conditions later described
as digital), but it is never fully clear what mediates technologies such as film
with economic forces such as capitalism in ways that define a historical era.
Much more recently, and contemporary to Azuma, Ōtsuka Eiji has been a
pivotal figure in rethinking how best to conceive of the contemporary prac-
tices that materialize social form. Ōtsuka’s seminal essay Monogatari shôhi-
ron (Theory of narrative consumption, 1989)5 brought together Baudrillard’s
insistence that by the 1980s people w ere consuming pure signs (and relations
between signs) rather than things, with a renewed emphasis on consump-
tion as the site at which the making of worlds happens. Although interested
in narrative, Ōtsuka was no longer thinking in classic literary critical terms
of the production of meaning, or of the tie of literary production to nation
and culture. And despite emphasizing consumption in his study of the
narratives of commodities (Bikkuriman chocolates in particular, and the
stickers that went with them), his argument was not framed in classic eco-
nomic terms.
More than the chocolate itself, what c hildren w
ere consuming, in Ōtsuka’s
view, was narrative, and the worlds of narrative that attached to individual

commodities. These small worlds were ultimately driven by an underlying,
larger narrative—what Ōtsuka called a “worldview.” Somewhat utopically,
Ōtsuka foresaw the possibility that consumers might eventually not only dis-
cern these larger worldviews but also break free from their messages (which
in this way sounds almost like corporate advertising as ideology) and fully
create their own worlds in the act of consumption. It is not without some
irony that Ōtsuka already in 1989 saw the otaku—a social category at that
time more typically thought of as unable to navigate social life at all—as the
preeminent self-creating consumer-producer of worlds.
It is nonetheless difficult to identify the ground of mediation in Ōtsuka’s
analysis. Economic conditions are relevant, but not determinant. The same
can be said of media specificity: without fully explaining why, Ōtsuka wrote
that his model works for chocolates but not for the narratives of video
games—so the type of medium is relevant, but also not determinant. Grand
narratives and ideologies are still present, but we do not necessarily know
what exactly constitutes them, or what really allows for their overcoming.
Ōtsuka understands the hyperconsumerist otaku to be the real agent of
history, the place where something like a coming-into-conscious about the
structures of consumption might happen. This is a potentially new kind of
agency, not necessarily tied to modern frameworks of culture and nation but
able to engage both in world making and to modulate across worlds.6 This
implies some kind of mediation, which allows the otaku to take on this role,
even if we do not have an entirely clear view of what that is.
People such as Nakai and Ōtsuka were influential in pushing away from
traditional disciplinary approaches, but a much fuller picture of a new
media studies field is elaborated in works such as Azuma’s iconic Dobut-
suka suru posutomodan. With Ōtsuka, Azuma, and the wide circle around
them (Miyadai Shinji, Morikawa Kaichiro, Okada Toshio, Osawa Masachi,
etc.), by the start of the twenty-first century, otaku are taken as the new sub-
ject of history.7 This signifies the end of the bourgeoisie, or the vast middle
class, as Japan’s postwar historical subject, and of the economistic readings
of both culture and mass cultural consumption that went with that partic
ular subject of history. The otaku are thus the subject that congeals within
this moment of crisis, and the claim has tended toward reading their mode
of consumption as not only different from and resistant to classic capitalist,
mass cultural modes of consumption but also as pointing toward a recon-
figuration of the social world more generally.8
One might say that labor is still part of the picture—in its materialist
sense as the grounds of self-making (and the point at which mediation actu-
[352] tom looser

ally happens)—but it is now conflated with consumption; the latter is where
productive and not just alienating self-creation happens. This includes
the act of consuming and producing literature. Clearly “literature”—or more
specifically, “fiction”—now means a somewhat transformed institution. It is
the act of mediating what Azuma sees as the opposing poles of his time: a
database that underlies everything (the equivalent of an earlier time’s grand
narrative, now without narrative structure—a kind of collective base, albeit
one that is a value system only within itself and does not refer to larger,
outside, “historical” meanings) and surface-level, localized affective elements
(moe; these could be a visual character element, a narrative trope, etc.) that
pull the reader into an open and creative relation with the database in a way
that satisfies individual needs.9 So t here evidently is mediation, and in fact
“fiction” (in this new guise) if anything takes on a newly important role. One
might also see in this at least the possibility for an almost utopic mode
of mediating production, with more radically individualized beings fully
self-producing their own independent and self-fulfilling worlds out of a
“database” commonality.10 This moves us toward a different subject forma-
tion, but it is not yet the full picture.
It should also be pointed out that while Azuma characterized this prac-
tice as a form of postmodernism, it has little to do with the more pejora-
tive readings of postmodernism, which describe a world of empty signs that
leads to the impossibility of creative action. “Postmodernism,” instead, is
seen as a material situation of real potentiality (already visible in Ōtsuka
Eiji’s depiction of the world-producing capability of signs, described above)
that lies within modernism, rather than as a kind of empty entropy deriving
from the loss of grounding in narrative meaning.
At a simpler and more general level, Azuma tends to invoke a dualistic
model that therefore begs for a theory of mediation. This includes not only
the dividing of subjectivity into a relation between (common) database and
(individual) affect, but also a relation between h uman and animal. Despite
the fact that Azuma cites Kojève and is typically read along the lines of Kojève
(some of this is appropriate, as described below), which might imply a Hege-
lian idealistic dialectics, his model of the world, although often described
as post-Heideggerian, is in fact very close to a Heideggerian model of the
modern world.
Heidegger not only felt that physical technologies do make a difference
in our relation to the world (and Being)—for example, in our age reducing
humanity to a “standing reserve”—he also ultimately sees life in a dualistic
relation with humanity. That is to say, life in some ways is conceived of as

external to humanity, in ways that one can also see in the more structuralist
statements of Agamben and Foucault: life by itself (Agamben’s “bare life,”
for example) is not only external to the h uman (and to technology),11 it is
that which humanity seeks to control; for Foucault, this is what biopolitics
is (humanity’s control of itself through the control of “life”). Azuma and
others in Japanese media studies might be thought of as invoking this kind
of model (with “life” being mediated by new technical modes of consump-
tion), although, in fact, when it comes to the relation between life and the
human, the lines are more blurred, and in interesting ways.
I will return to this latter question on the externality of life to the
human—but first a l ittle more on the dualisms that define this stage of media
studies under Azuma—including the relation of h uman to animal. Azuma’s
formulation of animality and animal consumption, as well as his vision of
history, are only lightly based on Kojève. In part, Azuma is simply laying
out an opposition of modes of affect: the animal mode is defined by “satia-
ble” cravings that have no larger meaning or implications attached to them,
while the “human” mode always entails a search for meaning, which, being
impossible to complete, means a mode of desire that is insatiable. In effect,
Azuma is describing classic modern mass culture as the mode of the h uman,
and this other, “postmodern” mode as the animal. This might sound like a
historical trajectory—moving not only from classic mass culture to some-
thing else but also from human to animal—and Azuma at times is read that
way, but that is only partially accurate.12 Azuma largely retains the dualism
of human versus animal, following Kojève.
The opposition that Azuma takes up most directly is that between a “snob”
and an animal. For Kojève, the (human) snob is like the animal insofar as
neither has anything to do with historical quests for meaning anymore. The
epitome of the snob is one who in essence believes in and follows formalized
values (value is form itself, and so one will follow that form, whatever the
outcome—as in the example of “gratuitous” formal samurai suicide). This
might be read as the outcome of bourgeois taste; Kojève then projects it
into the “posthistorical” moment. And while the gratuitous h uman quality
of snobbishness might oppose the snob to the animal (which has no snob-
bery), Kojève sees these as two sides of the same thing. Both can be part of
the positive, posthistorical society that no longer involves the impossible
desire for meaning (the “human” content that has previously structured his-
tory). Kojève locates the conditions for this posthistorical moment in both
Japan and the United States: the countries are, in essence, the inverse of one
another, and represent, respectively, the figure of the snob and the figure of
[354] tom looser

animal that together populate posthistory. There is thus no more meaning
sought or transferred in this posthistorical lifeworld. H uman discourse is
nothing more than “the language of bees.”13 This is a world of value distinc-
tions, perhaps, but not of communication.
Azuma takes up the ambiguities and tensions of Kojève’s posthistori-
cal world, retaining some dual oppositions (the snob and the animal), but
nonetheless resolves them into something either more open or utopic. For
Azuma, it is clear that the database is not a meaning-based or classically lit
erature-based order of consumption. So otaku are already either snobs or
animals. Further, there is no mediation with the “real” world of historical
human meanings in that sense.
Accordingly, t here would be no hope in looking to narrative out of a classic
desire for revolutionary politics—no hope for narrative to raise awareness
of historical struggles, contradictions, or aims. However, the implication is
that there is no need for that kind of meaning. Meaning goes with an older
bourgeois subjectivity, which is itself hanging on to a categorization of the
human, and the humanities, that is in fact a kind of entrapment of life into
a falsely fixed concept. This is a different kind of politics, one that involves
reevaluating the very category of the h uman, and this happens by breaking
its tie to those o
rders of meaning.14
These relations are further clarified in Azuma’s discussion of animality.15

Here, too, Azuma cursorily adopts Kojève’s model. The otaku are Japan’s
snobs, living now in posthistory, and by living at the level of pure form they
are able to make a more radical break from the kinds of prescribed mean-
ings, aims, and use-values that have hitherto helped to define what it means
to be h uman. Azuma gives more weight to the role of the snob/Japanese
otaku, and less importance to the American than Kojève (American animals
quickly drop from Azuma’s discussion), so that for Azuma, the otaku is itself
both snob and animal. This animal being may have emerged out of Japan’s
“new human” (shinjinrui), the spoiled bourgeois youth of the wealthy 1980s,
but it is now part of a world that is contented by the complete satisfaction of
only immediate, “animal” needs, and refuses narration into anything larger
(not even the narratives of commodity consumerism—so this is not mass
culture).
Even in Azuma’s depiction of a posthistorical world of a life freed from
previous expectations and predefined desires, some categorizing dualities
remain. Fiction remains opposed to reality, even while fiction takes over as
the only realm of life. Similarly, while the new animal-human lives only at
the level of form, unconcerned with the old contents that defined the good

uman life, the opposition of form and content remains. And while the cate-
h
gory of the “human” is now intentionally blurred with the idea of the animal
(as defined by animal needs),16 not only does the distinction of h uman versus
animal remain, but the category of the h uman itself remains a clearly de-
fined object (the one quote Azuma pulls from Kojève indicates t hese points:
“post-historical Man must continue to detach ‘form’ from ‘content’ . . . so
that he may oppose himself as a pure form to himself and to o thers taken as
a ‘content’ of any sort”17). Further, also following from Kojève, Azuma con-
tinues in an understated way to retain both culture and nation (privileging
Japan as the location of the posthistorical) for this supposedly content-free
posthistorical human, and ultimately therefore retains history itself.
In sum, Azuma’s model in Dobutsuka suru posutomodan at once offers
a vision of life that opens up to practices not set on predetermined paths—
making human life a more unknown world of potential—and yet invokes
the kind of oppositions that retain the boundaries of life and humanity, and
even culture and nation, that we have known. For Hegel and Kojève, this was
part of a dialectic, but for Azuma it is a l ittle less clear—especially given that
this dualism is part of the posthistorical world, so t here would be no further
resolution of these oppositional categories possible.
Azuma’s analysis does work through and identify both economic forces
(the bourgeois life that led to the otaku) and media constraints (databases,
etc.). These both do seem to be grounds of mediation, and so deserve to
be central to his form of media studies. But as Azuma moves toward the
posthistorical as the heart of his understanding of the present, and therefore
as media studies in this case moves closer to an analysis of life itself, his
model seems to move toward a world of distinctions only—a world without
mediation at all. Media studies without mediation—a kind of metaphysics
without ontology.
As a postscript to this first position, it is worth pointing out that at this stage
one can see the movement of media studies into a kind of anthropology—
but one in which the foundation shifts from a relation between media and
culture toward a relation between media and humanity (human life).
If the above can be taken as one concretization of media studies, as a
central discipline for the analysis of social life in its post-bubble-era form—
with the otaku as the centrally important subject of life—then the writings
of Azuma and the orbit of writers and critics around him immediately after
the events of 3.11 raise the possibility again of a different order of t hings.18
[356] tom looser

Azuma and Synthesis 2 (Post-Fukushima)
Azuma was only one of a very wide spectrum of writers and critics in Japan
who saw the March 2011 events as not just part of repeating crises but as a
catastrophe that was genuinely disclosing something new in Japan’s postwar
social life. In the first postdisaster issue of Shisôchizu bêta, Azuma immedi-
ately wrote that even the social criticism of the first decade of the 2000s—
which was premised on finding new ways to maintain the image of Japan as
largely homogenous, middle-class, and equal—was revealed as untenable.19
In Nihon 2.0, he added that Japan needed a new “image,” and a new mind-
set, because things had changed; “a new society requires a new mindset.”20
As Azuma therefore put it in his opening description of the overall Gen-
ron project, “For the next 5 to 10 years, Japan will become a sort of testing
ground for diverse political, social and cultural undertakings.”21
Azuma’s circle of interlocutors changed, especially as institutionalized in
the Genron-based journals, particularly Shisôchizu bêta. Some of Azuma’s
statements look different enough to raise the question w hether, as a result of
this observation, Azuma not only saw a revolution in Japanese society but
also fundamentally transformed his own thinking (and what one might call
“media studies” in the process); this raises further questions as to whether
the terms of the field, therefore, have once again been reorganized as well.
There are some real continuities in Azuma’s positions—at least one can
see the development of ideas stated earlier—and he does at times note that
the changes he is working with were in part already in motion before the
March 2011 disasters. But to the extent that one can find a coherent outlook,
there does seem to be a real shift in how Azuma’s circle conceives of society
and media studies as means of understanding the social. Th ere are tremen-
dous inconsistencies and contradictions even within Azuma’s own publi-
cations, but again, his work is perhaps best taken as an expression of the
landscape of thought in the immediate post-3.11 era. This includes some of
the basic contradictions that have organized the field. A brief sketch of this
landscape should start with Azuma’s Ippan ishi 2.0 (General w ill 2.0), a work
that he began before the 2011 disasters, and which offers some of his fullest
and most systematically conceptualized reworkings of earlier models.
If anything, Ippan ishi 2.0 is even more of a conscious effort to rethink
the very nature of the social, and the mediating grounds of what we call
“society,” than was Dobutusuka suru posutomodan. At least on the surface, it
appears to return to some of the more traditional assumptions and catego-
ries of the social that Dobutusuka suru posutomodan had sought to move

past—or perhaps it is trying to invoke but remediate those categories (it
is worth leaving this as an open question for the moment). The otaku are
no longer mentioned at all, for example, nor do subculture and subcultural
consumption any longer play a central role; instead the book almost appears
to return to the more mainstream bourgeois urbanite as the real subject of
social life and of history.22
We are also returned to history. The present is no longer described as a
posthistorical moment, and to the extent that there is a utopic quality to
Ippan ishi 2.0, it is phrased as a world to come—a futurity (raising the ques-
tion as to what w ill mediate or drive history). The book furthermore vaguely
returns to Japan itself, and it specifies why the new vision of democracy
and society might come uniquely from Japan. We are even told of some-
thing like the Japanese character,23 which appears to be especially a dept at
sensing the general (and informational) “atmosphere” of social and political
conditions.24
Azuma still retains a focus on a conception of the database, and on
social media technologies as a critical site of mediation, but these are once
again truly mass-media technologies and include Google, Twitter, television,
and the video-sharing website Nico Nico Douga (Niconico). So in the same
way that Azuma returns to a more mainstream and mass-oriented bourgeois
subject, he also returns to mass mediation. Th ere is also, therefore, a possi-
bility that he is returning to mass culture as the model of society.
The book’s aim is primarily to outline a new image of democracy, and
thereby a new kind of state—a “state to come”—and media technologies are
considered in that light. The “database” now refers to a collective unconscious
(if t here is a social whole, this would seem to be its defining characteristic)
that also serves as the general will. This is the general will that for Azuma
should drive what he calls “politics.” Rejecting the politics of deliberation
and debate, the role of media is in effect to collect a general sentiment, which
politicians should follow more than guide. There is a visual component to
Azuma’s discussion as to how this practical mediation might work: Azuma
dreams of a “giant visual screen” that would be placed in front of the national
Diet building, revealing the general w ill in real time (Ippan ishi 2.0, 182);
he also offers several televisual models, describing democracy in terms of
performer-audience relations to the camera and screen. Although it might
seem that Azuma is invoking something akin to screen theory—in which
the screen is the equivalent of the unconscious—these visual components
seem for the most part to act simply as a window for immediacy. There is no
more concern with mass culture, or even a database of subcultural content,
[358] tom looser

that then gets mediated by—or comes to the surface through—an otaku-like
creative process of consumption. The database now is what you already see,
on the surface, transparently and immediately.
Azuma does go on to offer us several possibilities for mass mediation.
In television, a variety show is equivalent to populism, in which perform-
ers might pay attention to things such as viewer ratings, and so minimally
act as representatives of viewers’ wishes, but really the viewers are simply
spectators. The performers (or politicians) act on their own, while viewers
ultimately just listen, and lead an existence without power. The educational
show, on the other hand, is worse. As in elitist politics, in educational shows
scholars simply speak with one another, in a space entirely divorced from
the viewer; the general public is entirely cut out of the process. Azuma’s more
ideal model comes from the live debate programs on the Niconico website.
These are live broadcasts in which the performers continually interact with
live comments from viewers posted on a real-time monitor (and sometimes
that is all they do). In this case, the performer/politician principally reacts to
the overall will of the fragmented viewership, and only occasionally tries to
guide or rechannel it.
This is helpful, but these are only models (Azuma is not claiming that
Niconico itself has become the site of democracy)—apparently for a f uture
to come. It is not clear w hether any of these models might be more definitive
of conditions in the present than any other, or what holds them all together
as part of the present. And even if Niconico could literally serve as the struc-
ture of governance in a future to come, it remains unclear how that future
might come (as opposed to any of the other models taking precedence, for
example) and what would mediate the present toward that future. Thus, in
Ippan ishi 2.0 Azuma gives even more weight to history itself as the grounds
of mediation, but there is no real theory of history provided.25 To the extent
that Azuma does call up history, it is more the history of a primordial past,
as figured by people such as Rousseau (more on this below).
More generally, in Ippan ishi 2.0, as in Azuma’s previous work, his frame-
work continues to return to and rely on dualisms. The democracy to come,
he tells us, w ill be somewhere between populism and elitist governance,
between purely rational and purely emotional action, between direct and
indirect democracy, and it w ill be both h uman and animal (with “human”
now abstractly standing for classic liberal idealism, and “animal” for selfish
and anarchistic desires).26 But, as in Azuma’s earlier work, t hese are not r eally
dialectical oppositions, and while they seem to beg for explanation as to what
will mediate them, there is no clear indication of what w
ill do so.

ose specific dualisms are important, and the uncertainty as to what
Th
really mediates between apparently opposed tendencies is symptomatic.
But behind all of this, and perhaps more importantly, Azuma is really pre-
senting us with two very different sets of assumptions, and two very differ
ent worlds in this later phase. To the extent that they are hoped-for dreams
of the future, they are also perhaps two different utopias.
On the one hand, it is possible to see in Azuma’s new “general will” a
networked, connective sociality that is by no means a return to a more
mainstream bourgeois image of society. It is largely an affectively formed
and governed subject formation (a “sea of compassion”), neither fixed as
a structured “society” by an overarching governing idea, nor made up of
stable, monadic individuals acting in their own essential interest. By these
terms, the “social,” and the collective “unconscious” that defines it, seems to
be a much more open, provisional formation that operates in relation to
dispersed individualities, which come together in specific ways for specific
reasons and in ways that are for the good of all. This would be the kind of
cloudlike social subjectivity that is visible in new media studies elsewhere,
premised on new media techniques (especially as in ubiquitous computing)
and on some of the practices of global capital.27 It is part of Azuma’s new re-
jection of Hegel and of anything like idealism or deliberative social politics.
As a reading of Rousseau, it is in this sense closest to the “general will,” as
something that is a collective unity and somehow always true to itself, as op-
posed to the “will of all,” which is merely the sum of individual wills and may
at times include elements that are not truly the will of the people.28
On the other hand, Azuma’s turn away from Hegel and Lyotard and back
to Rousseau also suggests a very different analysis of the present. In The So-
cial Contract, Rousseau’s vision anchors a more stable category of the human
being, utopically, in nature and in a primordial past. Further, this stable sub-
ject is naturally a monadic individual (the social contract is, of course, a
secondary formation, with individuals willingly ceding some of their rights
in order to regain greater individual freedom out of a collectivity). So Rous-
seau, arguably, not only assumes an a priori, nature-based fixed category
of the human as his starting point, he also can be used for more neoliberal
socioeconomic views: that the individual should always come first.29 It is not
surprising that, if Azuma is thinking along these lines, he would also draw
from Robert Nozick.
It is as if Azuma’s underlying interest in and emphasis on animality as the
full satisfaction of selfish needs serves as more of a guiding principle than
is openly acknowledged. In this world, one does not seem to need an over-
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arching guiding idea for the social b ecause it is already t here from the start.
The origin really lies within the a priori individual, and even compassion
is as much an innate quality of the individual as it is a fortuitous outcome
of social mediation. There is, in other words, an unstated dependency on
essentialisms, including the essential character of the human. The greater
emphasis on the atomistic individual as apart from and prior to the social
is then expressed when Azuma turns away from the visual realm of mass
media and comments that, despite the massive scale of the world’s current
population, the real mode of connectivity is “friend of a friend of a friend
of a friend” (Ippan ishi 2.0, 221). Thus, from this perspective, despite the
world’s massive population numbers, the scale and mode of connection is
small rather than massive—this is not like television, with a mass cultural
society collectively watching the same show, en masse—and even with its
multiple connections the social form might be described more as a collec-
tion of individuals than a unified collective unconscious. It is therefore ap-
propriate that, in this context, Azuma depicts the social as divided into myriad
collectivities (kyôdôtai), or “island universes” (Ippan ishi 2.0, 221). Further-
more, these island universes themselves are akin to unique individuals, and
the way Azuma describes them, they are composed simply of like-minded
people; they are islands of sameness, apparently composed of individuals
who are innately similar and so of like mind, without mediation and pre-
sumably more than just provisional unities.30
A tendency to reattach this naturalized individual to earlier essentialist
categories is evident in other publications that Azuma produced around the
same time. These include quick journalistic pieces, and the format may par-
tially explain the reason for the less subtle modes of argument—as in Azu-
ma’s New York Times editorial “For a Change, Proud to Be Japanese,” wherein
he recounts a new patriotism and pride in the national government that
was already visible almost immediately a fter the tsunami.31 But the tendency
is apparent in more carefully crafted work as well, as in Azuma’s return to
constitutional politics, and his joint drafting of a new constitution—which
he believed would serve as the “central pillar” of a new Japan.32 Along with
the return to nation and nationalism, Azuma’s politics change too: from the
nonpolitics of an animalistic human, liberated precisely to the extent that it
can no longer be identified by any earlier (grand) narratives at all, Azuma is
again working with the narrative of fixed identities and historical meanings
or ideals.
Accordingly, this starts to look like a tenkô—not only a reversal of outlook
on the world, but a return to far more traditional visions of Japanese social

form, and far more traditional disciplinary approaches to this social form. Is
3.11 therefore just a crisis for Azuma, rather than a moment of revolutionary
change? Does it merely uncover the truth of an earlier social world? Might
it even uncover the lack of importance of media studies altogether, as it had
come to be constituted by the turn of this century?
Despite the reappearance of fixed categories such as the nation and even
the human, and despite the turn back to earlier social theorists such as Rous-
seau and Freud, this is in some ways a new reformulation as much as it is a
reinstatement of those older terms. As media studies has taken on the task of
rethinking and remediating social and cultural theory in Japan’s late postwar
era in the face of new networking technologies, new alternative modes of
capitalist consumption, and the fraying of older social fabrics, one can see in
the work of Azuma himself and those around him distinctive and apparently
new contradictions. Although perhaps unintended, these might be read as
definitive contradictions of the moment. Again, Azuma and media studies
are helping in this sense to give voice to the present.
Some of the contradictions and inconsistencies are clear. On the one
hand, Azuma’s later work implies a mass collective unconscious, or general
will, that transcends any single individual (that is a subject formation in
its own right),33 but not any given moment (it is always only provisional,
being only of the moment). This requires mass mediation, as in the public
screen, or mass media, as with television—even if it is a kind of immediate
or transparent mediation, in the sense of something that simply conveys
rather than translates. On the other hand, one can also see an argument laid
out for the undiminished primacy of atomized individuals, who can think
and act rationally on their own behalf, whose very being stems mostly from
essential qualities given to them by nature, and, if there is grouping of these,
it tends toward unchanging communities of sameness.34 This is not merely
an opposition in which a new animalistic networked subject is opposed to
an older vision of a society of h umans brought together by a common ideal.
Either way, t here is apparently no need for real mediation—either the gen-
eral will is simply a transparent reflection of a networked being, or it is the
transparent expression of already-existing essentialisms. This is what both
politics and society are reduced to.
But these really are contradictory images of the future, and both are mani-
fest in Azuma’s more recent examples of media studies. Azuma may be a
voice of the era, but insofar as he is again producing a new approach to the
social, he is really depicting two different materialities, two different subject
formations, or two different worlds. At the risk of reduction, it is also pos
[362] tom looser

sible to read into t hese two differing sets of assumptions a kind of affective
openness on the one hand, and a rational and categorical closure on the other.
If that is the case, then this is not such a new framework after all. It is this
opposition that is closest to reviving a more classic modernist framework.
Media studies, in other words, in this sense, ends up only replaying the older
conceptual structures that it was ostensibly remediating, even if it is apply-
ing those conceptual structures to conditions that appear to be truly trans-
formed. One can see the tremendous difficulty of escaping dependencies not
only on received categories such as nation or culture but, more importantly,
on the terms by which t hose categories are thought, or approached. If media
studies was meant to rethink the order of t hings, and in the process to medi-
ate and push history, the project clearly is complicated.
In Azuma’s case, the post-Fukushima inclination has been t oward closure
and even essentialisms. To cite a final example, one might look to Azuma’s
own proposals for dealing with the aftermath of Fukushima. The idea is to
bring Fukushima into the circulation of death tourism, and turn the nuclear
disaster zone into a tourist park. D oing so, Azuma has said, will remind
people of the reality (and tragedy) of death. In a crisis not only of economic
and material infrastructure but of life itself, Azuma wants a true reconcilia-
tion with something we may once have been more easily able to think about,
and with—reclaiming a stable understanding of the terms and limits of the
human, and the measures of human life that once helped to describe them.
It may be that these are the definitive contradictions of the time, but if so,
giving voice to them in this way nonetheless does not mean mediating them.
Throughout Azuma’s varied images and practices of media studies in works
such as Ippan ishi 2.0, there is a thematic drive for immediacy. Even when
Azuma is building the image of a more mass-oriented collective unconscious,
the visual realm that helps pull things together into a collectivity functions
ideally like a window, as noted above. It is a transparent graphing, without
even the suggestion of a software interface that might play a mediating role.35
And when Azuma turns toward the model of the Rousseauian individual, me-
diation seems to be unnecessary b ecause the ultimate grounds of the social
already lie within the individual as a naturally provided essentialism. Th ere
is a kind of social presence, or immediacy, without any need for mediation.
At worst, if t here is a return to something in the post-Fukushima media
studies projects it is a repetition of the old binarisms that have structured
modernist thought on h uman life and social form (oppositional relations
such as affective versus rational life), and a return to the categorical essen-
tialisms (such as nation, culture, and humanity) that have given practical

form to those modes of thought. It would make sense, then, that the crisis
of 3.11 might result in death theme parks that enshrine stable notions of life,
labor, consumption, and production.
If that were the case, it would lead to the end of media studies. In some
ways, as I hope I have shown, that end is already visible. Yet even the con-
tradictions that Azuma resorts to, as well as the specifically new condi-
tions he outlines, show why a kind of media studies—perhaps as a kind of
anthropology—is needed now as much as ever.
notes
1. Suggestions of other genealogies are evident even in other essays in this volume, as,
for example, Marilyn Ivy’s essay on the InterCommunication project.
2. Azuma Hiroki, Dobutsuka suru posutomodan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001); translated
by Jonathan Abel and Shion Kono as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2009). Azuma Hiroki, Nihon 2.0 [Japan 2.0] (Genron: Tokyo,
2012). Azuma Hiroki, Ippan ishi 2.0: Rusô, Ruroito, Gûguru [General will 2.0: Rousseau,
Freud, Google] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2011).
3. Genron is the company founded by Azuma Hiroki in 2010. Genron’s focus is on
publishing, in particular building on the tankôbon journal/book series Shisôchizu, ed-
ited by Azuma and Kitada Akihiro from 2008 to 2010 and published by nhk, and
more recently, the triannual Genron, begun in 2015. Other Genron publications include
Shisôchizu beta; Genron e tc., Genron Tsûshin, and Kankôchika Mail Magazine. The com
pany also manages a café that holds lecture series; runs its own live streaming channel
on the Niconico video sharing website; and coordinates the Genron Tomonokai paid
members’ group, which includes exclusive newsletters, online magazines and newspa-
pers, and so on.
4. See Alexander Zahlten’s translation of Kitada Akihiro, “An Assault on ‘Meaning’:
On Nakai Masakazu’s Concept of ‘Mediation,’ ” in this volume.
5. Otsuka Eiji, Monogatari shôhiron: “Bikkuriman” no shinwagaku [Theory of narra-
tive consumption: Myth analysis of “Bikkuriman”] (Tokyo: Shinyôsha, 1989). See also
the annotated translation with translator’s preface, “World and Variation,” trans. Marc
Steinberg, Mechademia 5 (2010): 99–116.
6. It is perhaps not surprising that Otsuka has viewed himself as above all an
ethnographer.
7. The refocus onto the otaku is strong enough to leave open the possibility of an
alternative subject-history for this era.
8. There is some tendency to read this new focus on the otaku as a turn from the
mainstream to subculture, and from theory to pop cultural objects (e.g., anime). There
may be some accuracy to this, but it is reductive and simplistic. Much of Japanese post-
war mass culture has in fact been made up of subculture (it changes but is not a new
formation in the 1990s), and “theory” may be refigured in the new media studies, but
[364] tom looser

thought is not lost. Rather, the more appropriate question has in part been, what is
an otaku subcultural mode of thought, and how does it differ from a more bourgeois
mode? As Azuma makes clear, this happens at all levels of critical practice, including
obvious ones: the s imple fact that he was writing for cheap paperback book editions
to be read by a not-fully-academic readership already implies a different complex, and
process, of “critical thought”; one sees here too a different thoughtful subject. This is a
subject/readership that has long existed in postwar Japan, but in this context it takes on
a new significance.
9. Azuma does seem to recognize the power of affective forces, saying that if any-
thing it is the moe elements rather than the authors that become “gods,” but he does not
see these as adding up to anything like a coherent g rand narrative—either of culture or
of corporate advertising. See Dobutsuka suru posutomodan, chapter 2.
10. A commonality of social practice that also replaces the more determining con-
cept of a collective unconscious. For a reading of this, see Marc Steinberg, “Review of
Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals: Japanese Postmodernity Reconsidered,” Mechademia,
last modified November 2011, http://mechademia.org/reviews/marc-steinberg-review
-of-otaku/.
11. The clear separation of life as a distinct property or force has left this structuralist
approach open to critique for invoking a kind of vitalism.
12. The possibility of a historical trajectory away from mass culture is more evident
and comprehensible in Azuma’s explanations. See especially chapter 2 of Dobutsuka
suru posutomodan.
13. Alexander Kojève, Introduction to Reading Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology
of Spirit, ed. Alan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1980), 160.
14. Here, too, one can see a different and subtler understanding of postmodernism
than the plain notion of a world of signs that have lost their contents.
15. The attention given to Azuma’s conception of animality is somewhat surprising,
given the brief space he devotes to its explication (and perhaps the lack of rigor with
which he pursues it). But it is critical to his larger view of mediation, and the fact that
“animalization” is featured in the title of Dobutsuka suru posutomodan seems to indi-
cate that he realizes that.
16. At times the opposition of animal and human seems to be reduced to a relation
between passive and active consumption.
17. Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, 69.
18. Azuma has been somewhat like Murakami Takashi, in the sense that he has
drawn in people around him who are working on similar issues in similar ways but
who are not always entirely in agreement (the incorporation of his company Genron—
originally called Contectures—was in a sense the formalization of this process). A full
survey would require discussion of the differences between some of these points of
view, which space h ere does not allow. There are certain people with whom Azuma
has continued to maintain dialogue, such as Murakami Takashi. In other ways, he has
moved from discussions with t hose interested in subcultural content (Morikawa Kaich-
iro, for example) to close cooperation with media theorists such as Kitada Akihiro (his

coeditor of the first Shisôchizu journal project, which ran from 2008 to 2010), to a wider
range of engagement that plays out across his media platforms (including the journal
publications of Shisôchizu beta, Genron Tsûshin, and Genron etc. These include con-
versations with sociologists such as Miyadai Shinji, architects such as Fujimura Ryuji,
philosophers such as Umehara Takeshi, science-oriented thinkers such as Kazutoshi
Sasahara, and politicians such as former vice governor of Tokyo, Inose Naoki.
19. “We are not equal. . . . With the disaster, we became aware that we were frag-
mented”; Azuma Hiroki, “The Disaster Broke Us Apart,” Shisôchizu beta 2 (2011): 222.
20. Nihon 2.0, E9.
21. This statement, dated May 10, 2011, is included on the online Genron portal:
http://global.genron.co.jp/aboutus/ (accessed June 1, 2014).
22. As Naoki Matsumoto, Azuma’s chief translator and “global outreach” point person,
put it in a 2012 interview with Giant Robot, “The main point is that it’s not about subcul-
ture per se. Subculture is becoming less of a focus. . . . It’s more about the contemporary
Japanese situation at large”; “Interview: Genron,” G iant Robot, accessed October 2, 2014,
http://www.giantrobot.c om/blogs/giant-robot-s tore-and-gr2-news/15804763-interview
-genron. Azuma does reference the earlier Dobutsuka suru posutomodan in Ippan ishi
2.0, so there is at least the implicit possibility that otaku now stands for all Japanese
people rather than any subcultural group. But even in Nihon 2.0, Azuma was already
writing that the otaku are no longer concerned with content at all (subcultural or other
wise), and were instead (like other Japanese) themselves interested in competing busi-
ness models: “Things have completely changed . . . and otaku have become significantly
more sociable” (E24). So there really is no need to use the term otaku.
23. Azuma does explicitly say that this is “not a theory of Japan” (Ippan ishi 2.0, 9),
but he consistently returns to qualities and characteristics particular to Japan. He also,
for example, suggests that Japan’s “Galapagos syndrome” (having media practices that
develop uniquely within its island geography) is an additional way in which the new
universals of democracy might originate from within Japan.
24. Ippan ishi 2.0, 7.
25. The best that one might hope for is a kind of unstated deconstructive mode of
history, in the way that one might read into Heidegger, but there is little reason to read
Azuma in this way.
26. The closest Azuma comes to an a ctual example of the in-between figure is that of
youth “going through the confusing rush of desire during puberty” (Ippan ishi 2.0, 198).
In this work, amid all the dualities, Azuma tends to favor the affective over the rational,
and suggests a world that operates through a “sea of compassion.”
27. There are points in Azuma’s description in which this general will seems to take
on a life of its own, in ways that make it sound like a radical Durkheimian society (a col-
lectivity that almost transcends the individuals that make it up). For example, Azuma
cites Richard Rorty in saying that deliberation should be confined to the private sphere,
while public nature is wholly of the unconscious w ill of the general public (Ippan ishi
2.0, 220). It is hard to see what practical relation there might be, then, between the
private and the public. But Azuma does not generally suggest such a radical separation.
28. See Ippan ishi2.0, chapter 1.
[366] tom looser

29. It is also therefore not surprising that Azuma emphasizes that even the “general
ill,” as opposed to just the “will of the p
w eople,” is in his view a mathematical product
of the population—in other words, it emerges simply out of the sum of the individuals
that make up the collectivity. Thus, no government or other mode of representation or
mediation is necessary. See, for example, Ippan ishi 2.0, 47–49.
30. This formulation is even more apparent in Nozick’s writings, as in his idea that
like-minded people might create geographically isolated communities. See Robert
Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
31. Hiroki Azuma, “For a Change, Proud to Be Japanese,” New York Times, March 16,
2011.
32. Nihon 2.0, E11. Even in Ippan ishi 2.0, Azuma writes that the Japanese people
should give up on chasing a political system that is “not suitable for them” ( jibuntachi
ni mukanai); Ippan ishi 2.0, 7.
33. Even Azuma’s use of Freud at some points functions in this way, working out a
conception of the unconscious by these terms rather than as the inner anchor of an
atomized and privatized individual.
34. Th
ese are clearly part of the more libertarian and neoliberal tendencies in Azu-
ma’s approach.
35. In many ways, this seems to be all that is meant by Azuma’s privileging of an af-
fective “democracy without communication.”

A F T E R W O R D. T H E D I S J U N C T I V E K E R N E L
O F J A PA N E S E M E D I A T H E O R Y
m a rk b. n . ha n se n
Situation Determines Our Media Theory

“Situation determines our media theory.” It is with this reversal of the
(in)famous opening statement of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film,
Typewriter that Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten announce the pro-
grammatic aim of their fascinating collection of essays on “media theory
in Japan.” At once the proclamation of an imperative to bring geocultural
specificity to media studies in general and a concrete call to particularize
media theory and development in Japan, this reversal—situation, not media,
as determinant—furnishes a basis upon and a background against which
to evaluate the stakes of Steinberg and Zahlten’s project. At the same time,
it serves as an anchor for interweaving what are, to be sure, highly diverse
contributions whose commonality stems less from any shared commitment
or claim than from a collectively singular, though highly disparate, engage-
ment with the situation of Japan.
Informing Steinberg and Zahlten’s reversal of Kittler’s perspective is an
ambivalent reception of the volume that I coedited with my then University
of Chicago colleague W. J. T. Mitchell, Critical Terms for Media Studies. In
our introduction to this volume, Tom and I also took up Kittler’s infamous
pronouncement by deforming it. “Rather than determining our situation,”
we wrote, “media are our situation.”1 By this, we meant that media permeate
our lives so thoroughly as to be inseparable from our “situation,” whatever
that may be; in this perspective, any attempt to understand our situation must
proceed through the media that inform it, although, to be sure, not narrowly
or exclusively. For us, and in contrast to Kittler’s strongly antihermeneutic
thrust, media constitute “a perspective for understanding” that reinstates the
“crucial and highly dynamic role of mediation—social, aesthetic, technical,
and (not least) critical—that appears to be suspended by Kittler.”2
Citing these very lines, Steinberg and Zahlten wholeheartedly endorse
our central gesture to restore the dynamic role of mediation, as well as the
general aim of our volume to historicize mediation well beyond current no-
tions of digital media and canonical media forms. Yet they wonder—with
some justification—“what happens if the very conditions of thinking media-
tion arise from the particular media and media-cultural forms with which
we interact?”3 Contending that the Critical Terms volume—here standing
in for “the vast majority of writings on the subject”—largely “pass[es] over”
questions of geographical and geocultural specificity, Steinberg and Zahlten
position their volume as a remedy for such “silence.” Specifically, they sug-
gest that the contributions to Media Theory in Japan, despite their diver-
sity and disparateness, each in their own way grapples with the “practical
(and historically grounded) problem of how distinct cultural-media con-
figurations give rise to distinct forms of mediation, and distinct kinds of
media theorization.”4 This double call—to think media from the trenches
and to (re)anchor theorization within concrete media practices—compels
Steinberg and Zahlten to nuance their programmatic reversal of Kittler in
an important way: it is always and necessarily a specific situation—“the situ-
ation of more or less temporally and spatially bounded media cultures and
ecologies”—that determines our media theory.5
Far from a simple call to gather empirical facts about local media theories
and developments, the task of excavating how media theory arises from the
concrete geocultural realities of mediated life in twentieth-and early twenty-
first-century Japan requires a dual trajectory. On one hand, Steinberg and
Zahlten inform us, we must carry out a transcultural exploration of how
Japanese reception deforms European and North American media theories;
on the other, we must focus intraculturally on how media-theoretical framing
modifies entrenched philosophical or critical movements within Japan. Posi-
tioned across such a double articulation, media theory operates both as an
unstable set of practices subject to geocultural deformation and as a power
ful set of agencies in the transformational rewriting of intranational intel-
lectual history. What gives impetus to the deformations and transformations
Afterword [369]
at issue in each case is nothing other than Japan itself—which is to say, nothing
other than the concrete realities of media-cultural life in Japan at particular
moments of its recent history. This impetus to deform and transform is pre-
cisely the double agency accorded the “in Japan” of Steinberg and Zahlten’s title:
Japan as both transformative assimilator of “universal” media theory and shift-
ing medium for the ongoing, reiterated rearticulation of theory after media.
“. . . in Japan”
Taking up this double, intra-and transcultural agency of Steinberg and
Zahlten’s “in Japan,” I s hall dedicate my commentary h ere to exploring
how these trajectories are in effect two components of a larger recursive
correlativity between Japan and the West. Building on the findings of this
exploration, I shall speculate about how the dual agency of “in Japan” might
actually or potentially inflect or otherwise affect the “language of the univer-
sal” that is all too often held—either blindly or with critical eyes—to consti-
tute the default, Euro–(North) American mode of media theory. To do this,
Iw ill adopt the same position Tom Mitchell and I took up with respect to
the terms and categories with which we chose to structure Critical Terms for
Media Studies: that of self-reflexive humility. Such a position begins by rec-
ognizing that any configuration, not least the one we settled on, is only one
possible instantiation of a much broader field of potentiality and only one
attempt to organize it categorically. As Tom and I noted in our introduction,
many of our entries could perfectly well have been placed in different and
indeed in multiple categories; and our three categories (aesthetics, society,
and technology) are themselves nothing other than more or less contingent
markers of tendencies we judged to be fundamental but that might well strike
others as partial or misleading.6 For their part, Steinberg and Zahlten rec-
ognize a similar contingency at the heart of their enterprise. They are keenly
aware of the very disparate strata from which their contributors address
media in Japan; the essays they have chosen range from “cultural histories of
an encounter with media theory” to “philosophical questions” that urge us
to rethink media theory as “mediation theory.”7 Steinberg and Zahlten are
also self-conscious concerning the contingency of the organization of their
volume. To see this, we would do well to consult the explanation they offer
for their decision not to present the essays in the chronological order of their
topics, but also—and in some sense, more significantly—their recognition
of the viability of such a chronological reading strategy as one possible actu-
alization of their volume.8
[370] mark hansen

Exploiting the critical space opened by this contingency of organ
ization, let me propose another actualization of—and another strategy for
actualizing—the disparate themes and explorations constituting Media The-
ory in Japan. I propose that we substitute—as organizing categories for the
volume as a whole—a different tripartite division: “Remediating the West,”
“Mediatizing Japan,” and “Inter-izing (beyond) Japan.” In place of the general
topics Steinberg and Zahlten select (communication technologies, practical
theory, and mediation and media theory), these categories name three dis-
tinct, though certainly overlapping, modes of relationality between Japan
and the West: respectively, (1) remediating Western media theory from the
Japanese perspective; (2) theorizing media within the intellectual traditions
of Japan; and (3) positioning Japan within (which need not mean assimi-
lating Japan to) an expanded international field. Not only do these modes
collectively encompass the disparate investments of all of the contributions
to the volume, but together, they allow us to reconfigure the significance of
each contribution differentially in relation to a single critical problem: how
to account for the nontrivial and always concrete and local agency of Japan as
“deformer-assimilator-perturber” of globally circulating trends in media and
media theory.
It is precisely their common, though to be sure disparate, engagement
with this problem that unifies the contributions of the volume around a sin-
gle venture: making good on the specificity of Japan. To see how this venture
expresses Steinberg and Zahlten’s animating aim, let me focus on Keisuke
Kitano’s account of the difficulties of translating between cultures. Rooted in
his refusal to identify Japanese media theorist Hideo Kobayashi as the “Wal-
ter Benjamin of Japan,” Kitano’s argument foregrounds the crucial, indeed
irreducible, role played by the resistance to translation in any mediation be-
tween Japan and Western media theory:
Although an analytical comparison between Kobayashi and Benja-

min . . . might give one a sense of understanding the situation in ques-
tion, it would be misleading to take it literally. That would be merely
a naïve comparative study of intellectual practices, leading to nothing
but an instance of a new version of orientalism in the age of what might
be called Empire or some other slogan of globalization. Conducting
a comparative study concerned with different intellectual practices
in different cultures generally tends to transform what is happening
into what is to be translatable into the level of the receiver, ending up
with a geopolitically biased production of the power of knowledge.
Afterword [371]
Furthermore, Kobayashi was highly aware of contemporary geopo
litical tensions surrounding Japan . . . and that keen awareness equally
informed his singular writing practice. I am afraid that a comparative
approach naively formatted might flatten out many issues of geopo
litical dynamism potentially folded onto their signifying planes of dis-
course written in such a work as Kobayashi’s.9
Kitano’s argument h ere gives a concise formula for taking stock of the
“deforming-transforming-reforming” operationality of culture that Steinberg
and Zahlten would like to introject into—or better, to discover retroactively
to have always already been at the heart of—media theory, including (above
all) media theory in the (Euro–North American) major key. Kitano’s formula
takes the form of an injunction to the media theorist: focus on the a-signifying
resistances to cultural translatability, not its signifying successes.
Not surprisingly, this formula is itself a restatement—and a specification—
of a central theme of recent media theory, namely, the disjunction of materi-
ality from meaning. And this disjunction is, in its turn, also a restatement—or
better, an extension—of the theoretical distinction that gives rise to media
studies as a discipline: the distinction of media and communication. Stein-
berg and Zahlten cite Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie
Wark, who introduce a precise division of labor between the two: commu-
nication involves “things like senders and receivers, . . . encoding and de-
coding,” whereas media attends to “questions of channels and protocols, . . .
context and environment.”10 Together with the disjunction of materiality
from meaning that it informs, this division of labor lies at the very heart of
Friedrich Kittler’s discipline-inaugurating “media-science” (Medienwissen-
schaft) and, through Kittler’s wide-ranging influence, has come to inform
much recent scholarship in Euro–(North) American media theory. Kittler,
as is well known, extends Foucault’s work on the archaeology of knowledge
into the domain of media technics: if, for Foucault, what can be said (or
seen or heard) at any given historical moment depends on a virtual archive
of what is sayable (or seeable or audible), for Kittler, what is sayable (or see-
able or audible) in turn depends on a technical archive, which is to say, on
the concrete technical media that make available fluxes of letters, images,
and sounds to human eyes and ears at a given historical moment. For Kit-
tler, media operates to materialize the sensory fluxes that w ill subsequently
become the raw material for meaning effects, which means that media is
the empirico-transcendental condition of possibility for meaning. As such,
media lies outside the scope of hermeneutics, and Kittler can mark the apo-
[372] mark hansen

ria within McLuhan’s project to understand media: simply put, media can-
not be understood.
What happens when this abstract and categorical disjunction of meaning
and materiality is transposed to the terrain of transcultural difference? Itself
the “experiment” Media Theory in Japan aims to perform, such a critical and
cultural transposition operates by concretely and differentially embedding
the disjunctive kernel of media theory—the categorical resistance of media
to meaning—into a vast network of highly disparate sites of cultural pro-
duction and contestation. As a result of such embedding, the abstraction
of mediatic materiality is exploded into a potentially infinite number of
concrete, practical operations, each of which has something singular to
contribute to the encounter of Japan with media theory. Although Stein-
berg and Zahlten’s collection can, in the end, include no more than a tiny
share of this potentiality, what it does include provides a “fractal” image of
the richness, diversity, and sheer messiness that characterizes media theory
in Japan. By rendering commensurable quite disparate reference frames—
from the advertising industry in 1960s Japan to the intellectual mode
of hihyō (criticism), from governmental policies compelling w omen to
service work to the television’s assimilation into daily life—Steinberg and
Zahlten’s collection underscores how these operations, together with the three
modes through which they engage the recursive coupling of Japan with the
West, belong to a single continuum, the continuum of life in the age of global
media.
Redistributing Media
Bearing in mind the sheer contingency of any possible actualization of this
potentiality, I propose the following redistribution—a redistribution animated
by my desire to capture both the disparity of the respective operationality of
each frame of reference and their convergence around the media-inflected
theme of resistance to (cultural) translatability:
remediating the west:

• Human-Animal: Chapter 3: Takeshi Kadobayashi, “The Media
Theory and Media Strategy of Azuma Hiroki, 1997–2003”
• TakeMcLuhanism: Chapter 5: Marc Steinberg, “McLuhan as Pre-
scription Drug: Actionable Theory and Advertising Industries”
• Double-Folded Critical Skepticism: Chapter 13: Kitano Keisuke,
“Kobayaski Hideo and the Question of Media”
Afterword [373]
• General-Will-in-Real-Time: Chapter 14: Tom Looser, “Media,
Mediation, and Crisis: A History—and the Case for Media Studies
as (Postcultural) Anthropology”
• Man-Machine: Chapter 2: Yuriko Furuhata, “Architecture as At-
mospheric Media: The Tange Lab and Cybernetics”*
• Lack-of-Copula: Chapter 11: Akihiro Kitada, “An Assault on
‘Meaning’: On Nakai Masakazu’s Concept of ‘Mediation’ ”*
• Mediation: Chapter 12: Fabian Schäfer, “Much Ado about ‘Noth-
ing’: The Kyōto School as ‘Media Philosophy’ ”*
mediatizing japan:
• Everydayness: Chapter 1: Aaron Gerow, “From Film to Television:
Early Theories of Television in Japan”
• Exo-Data: Chapter 10: Anne McKnight, “At the Source
(Code): Obscenity and Modularity in Rokudenashiko’s Media
Activism”
• Contingency: Chapter 7: Tomiko Yoda, “Girlscape: The Marketing
of Mediatic Ambience in Japan”
• Performance: Chapter 8: Alexander Zahlten, “1980s ‘Nyū Aka’:
(Non)Media Theory as Romantic Performance”
• National Public Sphere: Chapter 9: Ryoko Misono, “Critical
Media Imagination: Nancy Seki’s tv Criticism and the Media
Space of the 1980s and 1990s”
• Lack-of-Copula: Chapter 11: Akihiro Kitada, “An Assault on
‘Meaning’: On Nakai Masakazu’s Concept of ‘Mediation’ ”
• Mediation: Chapter 12: Fabian Schäfer, “Much Ado about ‘Noth-
ing’: The Kyōto School as ‘Media Philosophy’ ”
• Double-Folded Critical Skepticism: Chapter 13: Kitano Keisuke,
“Kobayaski Hideo and the Question of Media”*
inter-i zing (beyond) japan:

• Man-Machine: Chapter 2: Yuriko Furuhata, “Architecture as
Atmospheric Media: Tange Lab and Cybernetics”
• (Inter)Translation: Chapter 4: Marilyn Ivy, “The InterCommunica-
tion Project: Theorizing Media in Japan’s Lost Decades”
• Marxisms: Chapter 6: Miryam Sas, “The Culture Industries and
Media Theory in Japan”
• Everydayness: Chapter 1: Aaron Gerow, “From Film to Television:
Early Theories of Television in Japan”*
[374] mark hansen

• TakeMcLuhanism: Chapter 5: Marc Steinberg, “McLuhan
as Prescription Drug: Actionable Theory and Advertising
Industries”*
• Performance: Chapter 8: Alexander Zahlten, “1980s ‘Nyū Aka’:
(Non)Media Theory as Romantic Performance”*
ittle more than my own free associations to claims raised by the respec-
L
tive essays, my categories—and my naming exercise as such—are, to be
sure, fraught with contingency. What I hope to capture with this eclectic
mix of very local and specific terms (TakeMcLuhanism, double-folded critical
skepticism, general-will-in-real-time, exo-data, lack of copula) and far more
general, if not indeed abstract, terms (everydayness, human-animal, contin-
gency, performance, man-machine, mediation, Marxisms) is the disparate tex-
ture, shifting scale, and wide range of the resistances at issue in the encounter
between media and Japan. (Note that asterisks indicate entries that seem to
straddle two categories; though these are only my associations, they serve
to underscore the continuum linking the categories and exemplify a poten-
tially quite numerous set of alternate distributions.)
Remediating the West

The essays grouped in “Remediating the West” all instantiate Kitano’s argu-
ment against translation: “It was an undeniable fact that people living in a
country called “Japan” employed the Japanese language, conversed in this
language, constituted their everyday experience with this language and or
ganized their thinking and sensibilities with this language.”11 The subject
of his essay, the influential literary and media critic from the early twenti-
eth century, Kobayashi Hideo, makes a similar point when he writes of his
own translation work (in lines cited by Kitano): “If you translate Rimbaud,
it would unquestionably no longer be Rimbaud. But Rimbaud’s influence
on me, that is realized in a new form. . . . Which is what you can detect in
any work of translation. In particular it is true in poetry. If you translate a
poem into Japanese, then it would be a Japanese poem.”12 What Kobayashi’s
translations bring home is a certain generic impossibility of translation, the
fact that translation cannot overcome or eliminate the vast cultural differ-
ences it aims to bridge: “In spite of and at the same time because of receiving
and emulating the question of individuality in Western art, Japan, through
approaching, receiving and translating many instances and layers of Western
modernity, always ends up realizing the logical truism that it is not a Western
Afterword [375]
country. For Kobayashi, then, translation cannot but help emphasize the dif-
ference between Japan and Western countries.”13
This cultural injunction against translation underpins Kitano’s introduc-
tion of what he calls “double-folded critical skepticism”: “a critical activity
vis-à-vis a work of literature, art, a media object or a historical situation,
but [one that] simultaneously uses that activity to perform a critique of its
own foundations.”14 By reconstructing Kobayashi’s intellectual c areer, Ki-
tano is able to show how it is a certain deployment of language—of language
embedded within everyday life—that makes such double-valenced criti-
cism possible. It is through language, not solely or primarily as a medium
of translation but rather as the material core of life itself, that we encounter
the cultural world; and yet, because every such encounter is mediated by
language, we meet the cultural world not as something external but, in-
stead, as a form of vital nourishment: “food given to us that is imperative
for our living.”15 For Kitano, two aspects of this digestive model of media-
tion deserve mention: on the one hand, Kobayashi’s embeddedness within
a robust media culture; on the other, Kobayashi’s assimilation of medium to
the mediation that is life-in-language.16 The implication of this argument is
profound: Japan can assimilate foreign media precisely and only b ecause of the
very impossibility of translation foregrounded by Kobayashi’s model of media-
tion as digestion: for if reading literature in translation is akin to listening to
music on the gramophone or seeing paintings in reproduction, as Kobayashi
claims, that is because in all cases what is demanded is a material transforma-
tion of life-in-language. This “in-every-case-concrete” transformation—and
not the abstract, if medium-specific, technical operations of modern media—is
the site of mediation understood as a complex activity of materialization, indel-
ibly connected to geopolitical realities, that at the same time marks a concrete
resistance to translatibility.
The two chapters devoted to the critical work of Hiroki Azuma—
Kadobayashi’s and Looser’s—perfectly exemplify the specificity at issue in
such materialization. Though they share a common focus on a controversial
critic who is perhaps the foremost voice of media theory in Japan t oday, the
two essays introduce terms, and develop arguments, that lie at opposite ends
of the above-envisioned critical continuum. More than a mere paradox, this
situation exemplifies the productivity involved in each and every concrete
encounter between media theory and Japan.
Human-animal, the more abstract of the two terms in question h ere, is
a distillation of the central claim animating Kadobayashi’s reconstruction
of Azuma’s abandoned media theory (chapter 3): to wit, that the différend
[376] mark hansen

disjoining Azuma’s transitional work on media theory from his subsequent
celebration of otaku culture in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals can be traced
to a dispute—a perspectival dispute pitting academic theory against fan
practice—over how to understand the relation of animality and humanity.
It is precisely a shift around this issue that explains Azuma’s turn in his 2001
book Database Animal to an identification as a fan, a shift that ultimately
explains why Azuma felt compelled to abandon his plans to publish a
comprehensive theory of media. As Kadobayashi compellingly illustrates,
this shift is motivated by Azuma’s altered strategy for piercing the animal-
human antinomy in the two bodies of work: if, in the work on media the-
ory, and in particular in the text “On Information and Freedom,” Azuma
is committed to discovering a “human route” within the general tendency
towards animality that constitutes the “lazy animal life of consumption” in
the postmodern era, in Otaku, by contrast, Azuma goes back on his notion
that “otaku’s animality is closed within the ‘want-satisfaction circuit’ of da-
tabase consumption,”17 in order to contend that it harbors a split subjectiv-
ity bridging the animal-human divide: “This subjectivity,” Azuma writes,
“is motivated by ‘the need for small narratives’ at the level of simulacra
and ‘the desire for a g rand nonnarrative’ at the level of database; while it is
animalized in the former, it maintains a virtual, emptied-out humanity in
the latter.”18
General-will-in-real-time, the term I have chosen for Looser’s essay
(chapter 14), takes up this same conceptual problematic of the human and
animal with the aim of tracing its dualism forward to Azuma’s recent po
litical theory in General Will 2.0, where the operation of mediation itself is
superceded, or, we might better say, with a nod to Azuma’s Kojève-mediated
Hegelianism, sublated. For Looser, this means that we must reject the pre
sentation of the h
uman-animal as an implicit historical narrative, in which the
rational, modern, meaning-seeking h uman cedes its place to the postmodern
animal mode of consumption defined by “satiable” cravings without larger
meaning. Such a historical trajectory is only “partially accurate,” Looser
specifies, for it fails to register the fact that Azuma “largely retains the dual-
ism of h uman versus animal, following Kojève,” and further that the animal
is much closer kin to the snob than is usually recognized, since “neither has
anything to do with historical quests for meaning anymore.”19 To this Looser
adds an absolutely crucial claim, namely that as animal and/or snob, otaku have
effectively given up the operation of mediation: “There is no mediation with
the ‘real’ world of historical h uman meanings.”20 This same claim reappears in
a new guise in Looser’s account of Azuma’s apparent rehabilitation of more
Afterword [377]
traditional political categories in his post-Fukushima text, General Will 2.0.
Though still articulated as a co-positing of contradictory tendencies—now
the database qua collective unconsciousness (or “general will”) and the indi-
vidual as a neo-Rousseauesque essence that always already includes the so-
cial from its origin—Azuma’s vision of a new politics, replete with his draft-
ing of a new constitution for Japan, similarly marks the end of mediation, as
Looser explains: “Rejecting the politics of deliberation and debate, the role
of media is in effect to collect a general sentiment, which politicians would
follow more than guide. . . . Azuma dreams of a ‘giant visual screen’ that
would be placed in front of the national Diet building, revealing the general
will in real time.”21
This concept of general-will-in-real-time perfectly captures the shortcir-
cuiting of mediation that occurs when meaning becomes something avail-
able only in a relation of immediacy without interface. In Azuma’s figure of
the giant visual screen, the immediacy central to the Rousseauesque indi-
vidual, the implication of the social as the essence of the individual fuses
with the immediacy provided by social media, Google, television genres
such as the live debate and—in Azuma’s favored example—the video shar-
ing website Nico Nico Douga, such that the revelation of the social ker-
nel of the individual, the crux of the general will, occurs spontaneously,
in-real-time. Here, the contradictions between the animalistic drives of
the social media sphere and the atomistic essence of the Rousseauesque
individual are, similarly to the earlier case of the animal-human, not so
much overcome as held together in an immediacy without outside: “It may
be,” concludes Looser, “that these are the definitive contradictions of the
time, but if so, giving voice to them in this way nonetheless does not mean
mediating them. . . . Even when Azuma is building the image of a more
mass-oriented collective unconscious, the visual realm that helps pull
things together into a collectivity functions ideally like a window. . . . It is
a transparent graphing, without even the suggestion of a software interface
that might play a mediating role.”22 Likewise, in the case of Azuma’s appro-
priation of Rousseau, where “mediation seems to be unnecessary b ecause
the ultimate grounds of the social already lie within the individual,” there is
“a kind of social presence, or immediacy, without any need for mediation.”23
The fusion of these conflictual components leads Looser to a double specu-
lation: on one hand, with Azuma’s double celebration of a contradictory im-
mediacy, the end of media studies is “already visible”; on the other, the very
contradictions Azuma resorts to show why media studies is “needed now as
much as ever.”24
[378] mark hansen

Mediatizing Japan
Despite their concern with issues predating Azuma’s post-Fukushima medi-
tation on the Internet, the essays grouped in “Mediatizing Japan” all respond
to this call for a revitalization of media studies in Japan. In one way or an-
other, they each engage the problematic explored by Azuma—the paradox
of “unmediated mediation”—and seek to think through media in order to
theorize mediation. Following the pattern of Azuma’s account of the In-
ternet as the “general will,” each of these studies trades in a focus on the
medium as artifact or techne for a far broader concern with mediation as a
practical activity of everyday social and cultural life. Whether this think-
ing occurs through a reflection on the media of girl culture (Yoda), on the
vagina as a medium of art (McKnight), or on the everydayness of televi
sion itself (Gerow), in each and e very instance it is some specific feature of
Japan—the legal status of women, the critical amnesia of postwar tv schol-
ars, the gendering of the youth market—that takes center stage and operates
in ways that fragment and pluralize the social impacts and cultural effects of
media’s mediation.
In his study of the Kyōto School as media philosophy—a study that would
appear quite far removed from the just enumerated concerns of this section’s
essays—Fabian Schäfer proposes the contemporary German critical constel-
lation of Medienphilosophie (media philosophy) as a promising avenue for
theorizing this common critical project. For Schäfer, it is its buried poten-
tial to give rise to a capacious concept of mediation, and not its canonical
status as the “most prominent strand of modern Japanese philosophy,” that
accounts for the Kyōto School’s importance.25 The crux of Schäfer’s revision-
ist argument concerns the misappropriation of the Hegelian dialectic on the
part of Kyōto School mainstay, Nishida Kitarō. For Nishida, writing at the
end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, dialectics meant the discovery
of a “prelogical concept” capable of integrating all contradictions; in Nishi-
da’s understanding, “dialectic was the ‘absolute contradictory self-identity’ of
the subject and object in particular, and of the universal and the individual
in general.”26 The tacit connection Nishida here forges—the connection be-
tween nothingness as encompassing all possible contradictions and media-
tion as “interrelation among innumerable individuals”—yields what Schäfer
dubs a “categorical mistake”: the paradox of “unmediated mediation.”27
In the hands of Nishida’s colleagues (Hajime Tanabe) and disciples (To-
saka Jun and, particularly, Nakai Masakazu), this paradox of “unmediated
mediation” becomes the starting point for a fundamental reworking of the
Afterword [379]
concepts of “media” and “mediation” that echoes the program of Medienphi-
losophie. For Tanabe, whose intervention initiates the medial transformation
of nothingness, and for Tosaka, who follows his lead, what remains absent
from Nishida’s approach is the operation of a third term. Such a term is
necessary, these critics argue, in order for Nishida’s categories to be more
than concepts forever trapped in a shadow play of mere meaning. Nakai
brought this line of criticism to fruition by positioning technology as a
third term: for him, technology furnishes not just a means for something,
but “an ‘existential-categorical medium’ [sonzai hanchū-teki baikai] in the
sense of a poiesis by which beings always somehow relate to their world.”28
Breaking with the conceptualism of Nishida, Nakai thus views technology
as a resolutely practical domain, one that mediates not “by epistemological
categories” but rather by “existential” ones.29 Far from an abstract mediator
between human consciousness and a reality outside it, technology is, in the
words of Kitada Akihiro (chapter 11), “a (physical) thing that initiates the
trial-and-error process of interaction between the h
uman and nature, as well
as, within this process, the transformation of its own functions/abilities.”
More than just a “tool enabling the human manipulation of nature,” technol-
ogy is “a medium that enforces both reflection on and renewal of the very
relationship of humanity and nature.”30
Central to this line of thinking is Nakai’s concept of the lack of copula
(my term for Kitada’s intervention), which serves, in the narrow frame, to
differentiate cinema medially from literature, but which also more broadly
positions technology as a practical and nonrepresentational mediator be-
tween being and world. “Literature,” Nakai observes, “possesses ‘is’/’is not,’
the copula that connects one representation to another. The sequentiality of
film lacks this.” What results from this concrete medial lack is a situation that
quite literally exceeds the bounds of any hermeneutic contract between film-
maker and audience: “What this means,” continues Nakai, “is that the film-
maker’s subjectivity cannot attach conditions to an editing cut. It is the heart
of the viewing public that establishes continuity between shots.”31 Together
with the empowerment of the viewing public it produces, the lack of copula
accounts for cinema’s capacity to operate as a “new collective ‘sensory for-
mation,’ ”32 which is precisely to say, as a technology in Nakai’s understand-
ing of the term. The lack of copula elicits a collective response—“common
labor”—that places the cinematic audience in a practical, unmediated, and
nonhermeneutic relationship with reality, and that positions cinema itself as
a technology for renegotiating humanity’s relationship with nature. As a me-
dium constituted by the lack of copula, cinema becomes more than just one
[380] mark hansen

medium among others: cinema, that is, must be understood as baikai and
not as baizai, as Mittel (means) and not just as Medium (medium), following
Kitada’s gloss on Nakai’s well-known distinction.33 For it is as baikai/Mittel
that the medium of cinema becomes, or reveals itself to be, a technology;
and it is as baikai/Mittel that cinematic mediation can be understood dia-
lectically, as an “unmediated mediation” that, unlike Nishida’s antidialectical
concept of “nothingness,” neither founders in nor simply encompasses (and
thus levels) all contradiction.
Following his example of a boating competition, in which a direct and
continuous connection of body, tool (oar), and w ater is subjected to ongoing
practical negotiation by trial and error, Nakai’s understanding of cinema as
baikai/Mittel likewise foregrounds the practical: cinema in this view is not
an apparatus for transmitting messages, meaning, or information through
a channel, but rather “a site where humanity progressively renews/rees-
tablishes/renegotiates the relationship with nature in the sense of amidst or
in.”34 As if in response to sociologist Michio Inaba’s 1989 criticism of the
limitations of “newspaper studies” in prewar Japanese discourse on media—
itself the pretext for Kitada’s intervention—Nakai’s theory views cinema as a
cosmo-anthropo-logical activity that occupies a position at the very opposite
extreme to any “single-medium” conceptualization.
If Nakai’s view holds certain parallels with Walter Benjamin’s roughly
contemporaneous meditation on technical reproducibility and cinema as
a mimetic, tactile, and in some sense cosmological technology, it is none-
theless flavored by the concrete institutional realities of media study in
Japan. This geocultural specificity appears clearly in Inaba’s critique of
“newspaper studies”: when Inaba bemoans the failure of Japanese newspa-
per studies to reflect on the being of the medium, he effectively foregrounds
the need for a radically different ground on which to develop media philoso-
phy in Japan. For Inaba, and for Kitada following him, it is precisely Nakai’s
standing as a heretic theorist of aesthetics within the Kyōto School, and thus
as a critic situated outside the institutionalized system of journalism studies,
that accounts for the value of his contribution to an ontological interroga-
tion concerning media and mediation. As a Japanese philosopher reflecting
on the role of media in mid-twentieth-century Japan, Nakai was not bound
by the institutional constraints of media study then in force. Indeed, Nakai’s
eschewal of any medium-centered or “single-medium” approach—whether
we view it as an unsolicited response to the limitations of newspaper stud-
ies or an anomalous development of his heretical aesthetic theory—serves
both to differentiate him from Benjamin and to anchor him, indelibly if
Afterword [381]
involuntarily, within the critical space of Japan and Japanese thinking on
media.
Here again we confront the cultural injunction against translation fore-
grounded by Kitano, and once again it takes form in a refusal to identify a
Japanese media theorist with the legendary figure of Walter Benjamin. Ac-
cording to Kitada, where Benjamin famously discovered the principle for
his cosmosocial revelation of film’s tactile and collective potential in a tech-
nical element of its mediality (technical reproducibility), Nakai pinpoints
a certain disjunction between medium and mediation as the source for
film’s cosmo-anthropo-logical vocation. If film is a technology, in the sense
Nakai lends the term, it is precisely b ecause of its failure to operate as a
self-contained and self-referential medium, which is equally to say, b ecause
it opens a practical space of contact between humanity and nature that of-
fers a recompense of sorts for its inability to secure a hermeneutic contract
with the viewer. Accordingly, although both Benjamin and Nakai shift the
focus of film theory to the activity of reception, they do so in fundamentally
different ways. Focusing on Nakai’s contribution as an exemplar of a specifi-
cally Japanese inflection of media studies, what we find then is a strikingly
original reformulation of Nishida’s concept of “unmediated mediation” that
appropriates dialectical thinking for a theory of humanity’s practical imbri-
cation with technology.
Inter-izing (beyond) Japan

If Kitada’s exposition of Nakai’s media theory emphasizes the “agency” of
Japan, Yuriko Furuhata’s account of Arata Isozaki’s theorization of urban de-
sign (chapter 2) emphasizes the tension that emerges as Japanese architec-
tural theory negotiates the “postmedium” condition. In a study that yields
the term man-machine, Furuhata depicts Isozaki as a young architect and
architectural theorist caught between the international forces of cybernetics
and communication and the domestic legacy of Japan’s colonial era urban
planning. How Isozaki negotiates this tension marks his work as specifically
Japanese but in a way that remains subordinate to the broader global forces
informing the cybernetics revolution. For this reason, Furuhata’s essay per-
fectly exemplifies the third and final clustering of essays I have proposed,
namely “Inter-izing (beyond) Japan.” By articulating the significance of
cybernetics and communications specifically in relation to the program of
his teacher, Tange Kenzo, Isozaki marks the break with Japanese colonial era
reflections on biopolitical governance as crucial to his own reflections on
[382] mark hansen

architecture in the cybernetic age. In this formulation, the practices of Tange
Lab—specifically, its allegiances to a structural paradigm and to a biopo
litical mandate—constrain Isozaki’s theorizing in ways that exemplify the
force of the “inter-”: here understood—perhaps exemplarily—as the agency
that technically driven, international trends hold for the “cybernetic turn” of
Japanese architecture.
To grasp the significance of Isozaki’s contribution in all its singularity,
let me turn briefly to Marilyn Ivy’s account of intertranslation (chapter 4).
Devoted to the Japanese journal InterCommunication, which ran from
1992 to 2008, Ivy’s study focuses on the paradox of a journal devoted to
intercommunication—literally “sharing in-between”—that has been placed
out of communication (assuming that her own consultation of literally un-
read print copies in the Starr East Asian library at Columbia is indicative
of the journal’s reception fate). For Ivy, this paradoxical situation provides
a compact “allegory” of the status of media theory in Japan, by which she
means an allegory of the missed opportunity—or, alternatively, the latent
potential—that the journal’s interrogation of the “trope” of communication
proffers to contemporary media theory. Simultaneously bemoaning the fail-
ure of the journal’s desire to mediate the “inter”—the “place between” that
would “allow communication to take place, in-between cities, technologies,
critiques, dialogues”—and celebrating the critical potential of the journal’s
mission in the face of Japanese media theory’s turn to pop culture, anime,
and the Internet (largely synonymous with the name of Azuma Hiroki), Ivy
urges a return to what she regards as a now lost vision of media theory in
Japan: a vision that would take seriously InterCommunication’s allegiance
to “internationalist high-theory and avant-gardist technocultural work” as
the sole hope for a media theory that would not be “located simply within
Japan.”35 Here “inter-izing” takes form as a countermeasure to the “contain-
ment of an exclusively Japanese intracommunication”36—hence the aptness
of intertranslation as a theme.
Regarded as a contribution to precisely such an “inter-izing” project, Isoza-
ki’s negotiation of the tension within Japanese architecture furnishes what I
take to be a different model, one that marshals the forces of the international
avant-garde t oward a markedly different and, in some sense, “antiaesthetic”
end. For Isozaki, as Furuhata’s account underscores, it is the practical nego-
tiation of urban space—and not the furtherance of an autonomous interna-
tional aesthetic discourse—that is and must be at stake in any specifically
Japanese negotiation of cybernetics. Consider Isozaki’s analogy for negotiat-
ing the informationally mediated city of the cybernetic age: a pilot flying at
Afterword [383]
night. Unable to trust his vision due to the darkness, the pilot must rely on
signals received by his airplane’s flight instruments in order to fly the plane.
In a similar way, urban dwellers must increasingly rely on man-machine in-
terfaces in order to maneuver effectively in the cybernetic city, and architec-
ture must make use of computational modeling and data in order to design
spaces as informational environments that are capable of supplementing
human perceptual and cognitive capacities.
Notwithstanding its specific historical heritage, Isozaki’s vision of the
man-machine interface speaks to the role data plays in our world today. In-
deed, once we factor in the possibilities for surveillance and control that
any contemporary reliance on a machine interface affords—and to which
we are certainly more attentive today than was Isozaki’s generation—we dis-
cover a lingering trace of the colonial heritage of biopolitical governance
at the very heart of Isozaki’s program for a “symbolic” (as opposed to Tange’s
“structuralist”) architecture. In one respect, this lingering agency of biopo
litical governance resolves the “tension” that, for Furuhata, animates Isozaki’s
urban theory and architectural practice: specifically, it demonstrates how
Japanese architecture can “sublate” its own contradictory heritage precisely by
recontextualizing—and indeed, by “inter-izing”—the operationality of gover-
nance itself in a far broader, indeed global perspective—the perspective, pre-
cisely, of global media culture. Yet even as it does so, it leaves open the ques-
tion of how the agency of governance—an agency concretized in the colonial
era mandate to design for habitation—will exert itself in the context of the
cybernetic turn in international architecture, and in culture more generally;
and it also—and in some sense, more importantly—leaves open the question
of how governance will acquire a specifically Japanese inflection, as the “inter-
izing” movement is reentered into debates about Japanese media theory.
Media Theory . . . after Japan . . .

Let me close by suggesting one provisional “answer” to this line of thinking.
In General Will 2.0, his 2011 study of Rousseau, democracy, and the Internet,
Azuma Hiroki develops a quirky if compelling account of how the Internet
can revitalize democracy. With its capacity to mine the behavioral nuances
of the population, the Internet provides a concrete means to constitute Rous-
seau’s general will—to transform it from the mere idea that it was and could
only be in Rousseau’s time into a materially instantiated and politically ef-
ficacious entity. Azuma announces his dream at the outset of his study: “In
Rousseau’s times, the general will was an entirely fictive construct. . . . He
[384] mark hansen

probably never dreamed that it would become possible to see and feel the
texture of the ‘general will.’ Yet, two and a half centuries on, we’ve acquired
the possibility of technically ‘implementing’ his hypothesis and doing away
with any trace of mysticism. It is this kind of dream that I’m about to talk
about.”37 In Azuma’s vision, the capacity for direct, real-time monitoring of
behavioral nuances and expressions allows us to concretize Rousseau’s dis-
tinction between general w ill and “will of all,” and, specifically, to fathom
and indeed to make concrete the notion that the general w ill “never errs”:
as the direct, unmediated expression of the p eople (which is not equivalent
to “public opinion”), the general w ill simply is the sum of data the Internet
generates on the basis of user input.
As such, the Internet allows us to marshal Rousseau’s general w ill t oward
a revitalization of democracy premised on a strict separation between pri-
vate and public, and indeed on a startling reversal of their traditional func-
tions. In the scenario Azuma sketches, and informed by the data made
available by the Internet “governance,” government will perforce be minimal
government—he likens it to a waterworks utility—whose job is simply to
ensure the basic conditions for life (“managing potentially violent relations
with the exterior” and “managing violence in the interior”38). In this op-
eration, the state becomes “an infrastructure service . . . that merely seeks to
distribute resources with efficacy”; in the process, it loses its “political char-
acter.” The state, that is, becomes the guarantor of animal life, and animal life
becomes the basis of society, publicness, and solidarity. “In a society u nder
democracy 2.0,” Azuma explains, “it is precisely the aggregate of private,
animal actions that shape the public realm (database), while public, human
actions (deliberation) can only be established behind closed doors, that is to
say, in the private realm.”39
This startling reversal of the political inflection of private and public is
certainly informed by Azuma’s earlier theorization of the “database animal,”
in which he concluded (as we have seen) that contemporary subjectivity circa
2000—“motivated by the ‘need for small narratives’ at the level of simulacra
and ‘the desire for a g rand nonnarrative’ at the level of the database”—is a
database animal: “animalized in the former,” a “virtual, emptied-out human-
ity in the latter.”40 Despite the 2011 Fukushima disaster, which occasioned a
partial disavowal of Azuma’s “dream” for the renewal of democracy,41 it is
not hard to see in his theory the legacy of Isozaki’s cybernetic renewal of
architecture. Just as Isozaki focuses on the practical impact of the cybernetic
revolution, on the way it transforms how we live and how we must design
for living, Azuma discovers in the very animalization of culture, itself the
Afterword [385]
contemporary legacy of cybernetics, the basis for political hope. If Fuku-
shima shifted the tenor of this project—transforming it from a universal
project instantiated by the example of Japan into a more tentative, specifi-
cally Japanese project—Azuma’s decision to publish the manuscript as is,
which is to say, as a general argument for the contemporary materialization
of the general will, and hence for the universal possibility of democracy, at-
tests to the complexities of the “inter-.” For who indeed—whether Japanese,
American, or some other contemporary world citizen—could have foreseen
what Azuma makes us see: the figure of Rousseau’s general will reinvented
in a specifically Japanese form as a model for future democracy worldwide?
As an instantiation of the complexities of the “inter-,” the felicitous
surprise occasioned by Azuma’s text exemplifies the potential of each and
every text in this collection to actualize the generativity of media theory “in
Japan.” If, in e very case, the difference of Japan matters for how we concep-
tualize media theory, and concrete theoretical approaches m atter for how
we understand Japan, each text’s orchestration of a specific encounter yields
an insight that is both singular and transformative. If my own experience is
indicative of the collection’s performative force, it attests to the significance of
the collection as a contribution to media theory, as a collective mode of doing
media theory: for in its wake, we will need to address media theory not simply
as it operates “in Japan” but also as it itself is inflected by this operation—as, in
short, media theory after Japan . . .
notes
1. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), xxii.
2. Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms, xxi–xxii.
3. See introduction to this volume, Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, “Intro-
duction,” 6.
4. Steinberg and Zahlten, “Introduction,” 6.
6. See, for example, John Durham Peters’s remarks on our volume (to which he con-
tributed) in his recent book, The Marvelous Clouds. Peters includes our volume as an
example of what he considers to be an unfortunate trend in media studies to ignore
the “social-scientific tradition of empirical research on p
eople’s attitudes, behavior, and
cognition in a mainstream political context.” With reference to Elihu Katz’s 1987 parti-
tion of media studies post-Lazarsfeld into three fiefdoms—critical approaches to media
as battlefields of domination and resistance, historical accounts of how media tech-
nologies shape underlying psychic and social order, and the above-named tradition
[386] mark hansen

of empirical research—Peters advances the following indictment against the majority
of humanistic treatments of media (again for which our volume stands as exemplar):
“Most of the recent interest in media among humanists fits in this [historical] tradi-
tion . . . , and often ignores Katz’s other two traditions, with their interests in audiences,
institutions, and political economy, which can be a regrettable omission; I personally
want no part of a media studies that has altogether lost the ballast of empirical investi-
gation and common sense.” In Peters’s eyes, Critical Terms is “an otherwise strong col-
lection that reinvents media studies without regard to decades of social-scientific work”;
The Marvelous Clouds: T oward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 17–18; italics mine. To this, all I would say is that to satisfy Peters,
we would have had to have made different choices that would have resulted in a vastly
diff erent volume.
8. See Steinberg and Zahlten, “Introduction,” note 33, for a recommended chrono-
logical ordering.
9. See chapter 13 of this volume, Kitano Keisuke, “Kobayashi Hideo and the Question
of Media,” 329.
10. Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication, 2,
cited in Steinberg and Zahlten, “Introduction,” 12.
11. Kitano, “Kobayashi Hideo,” 337.
14. Kitano, “Kobayashi Hideo,” 338–39.
15. Kobayashi, cited in Kitano, “Kobayashi Hideo,” 339.
16. “Indeed, it has been more widely argued that it was Kobayashi—writing within a
context in which Japanese society was undergoing its first exposure to a variety of mod-
ern mass media, from print capitalism to the gramophone and from radio to cinema . . .”;
Kitano, “Kobayashi Hideo,” 330; “Kobayashi’s conception of a medium is not something
that transparently transmits a message or content; rather it is something tactically em-
bedded in his writing practices”; Kitano, “Kobayashi Hideo,” 340.
17. See chapter 3 of this volume, Kadobayashi, “The Media Theory and Media Strat-
egy of Azuma Hiroki, 1997–2003,” 94.
18. Azuma, cited by Kadobayashi, “Media Theory and Media Strategy,” 94–95.
19. See chapter 14 of this volume, Tom Looser, “Media, Mediation, and Crisis: A
History—and the Case for Media Studies as (Postcultural) Anthropology,” 354.
20. Looser, “Media, Mediation, and Crisis,” 355.
22. Looser, “Media, Mediation, and Crisis,” 363; italics mine.
25. See chapter 12 of this volume, Fabian Schäfer, “Much Ado about ‘Nothing’: The
Kyōto School as ‘Media Philosophy,’ ” 306.
26. Fabian Schäfer, “Much Ado about ‘Nothing,’ ” 309.
27. Schäfer, “Much Ado about ‘Nothing,’ ” 315, 311.
Afterword [387]
28. Schäfer, “Much Ado about ‘Nothing,’ ” 317.
29. See chapter 11 of this volume, Kitada Akihiro, “Assault on ‘Meaning’: On Nakai
Masakazu’s Concept of ‘Mediation,’ ” 287.
30. Kitada, “Assault on ‘Meaning,’ ” 287; italics mine.
31. Nakai cited in Kitada, “Assault on ‘Meaning,’ ” 291.
32. Schäfer, “Much Ado about ‘Nothing,’ ” 319.
33. See Kitada, “Assault on ‘Meaning,’ ” 288–89.
34. Nakai cited in Kitada, “Assault on ‘Meaning,’ ” 289.
35. See chapter 4 of this volume, Marilyn Ivy, “The InterCommunication Project: The-
orizing Media in Japan’s Lost Decades,” 115, 125.
36. Ivy, “InterCommunication Project,” 125.
37. Hiroki Azuma, General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google, trans. J. Person and N.
Matsuyama (New York: Vertical, 2014), 7; italics mine.
38. Azuma, General Will 2.0, 205.
39. Azuma, General Will 2.0, 162.
40. Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and
Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 [2001]), 95.
41. As Azuma explains in his foreword to General Will 2.0, Fukushima installed a
caesura between the world to which his dream belonged and the new reality facing
Japan following the disaster: “After the disaster,” he reports, “I grew unable to talk sin-
cerely about a dream as a dream. I could only have written this book before the di-
saster” (xi). Although he gives some hints concerning how he would have written the
book after the disaster, he recounts his decision to publish it “as is,” which is to say, as a
document belonging to a time now past, and in some way, to an obsolete “version” of
the author—to Azuma 1.0.
[388] mark hansen

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Contributors
yuriko furuhata is associate professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and
Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies and World Cinemas Program
at McGill University. She is the author of Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde
Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (2013), which won the 2014 Best First Book
Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. She has published articles in
journals such as Grey Room, Screen, Animation, Semiotica, and New Cinemas. She is
currently working on a book, tentatively titled The Rise of Control Room Aesthetics, ex-
ploring the historical connections between Japanese expanded cinema, cybernetic art,
and security technologies during the Cold War period.
aaron gerow is professor of Japanese cinema in the Film Studies Program and the
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He received
an mfa in film studies from Columbia University in 1987, an ma in Asian civilizations
from the University of Iowa in 1992, and a PhD in communication studies from Iowa in
1996. His book on Kitano Takeshi was published by the bfi in 2007; A Page of Madness
came out with the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan in 2008;
and Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship,
1895–1925 was published in 2010 by the University of California Press (the Japanese
version is forthcoming). He also coauthored the Research Guide to Japanese Film Stud-
ies with Abe Mark Nornes (2009). He is currently working on books about the history
of Japanese film theory and about Japanese cinema a fter 1980.
mark hansen is professor of literature at Duke University, and author of numer-

ous monographs on new media, such as Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
(2006); New Philosophy for New Media (2004); and Feed-Forward: On the F uture of
Twenty-First-Century Media (2015). He is the coeditor (with W. J. T. Mitchell) of the
volume Critical Terms for Media Studies (2010).
marilyn ivy is professor of anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author

of numerous articles and essays concerning modernity, mass mediation, aesthetics, and
politics in contemporary Japan, and her book Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity,
Phantasm, Japan (1995) won the 1996 Hiromi Arisawa Memorial Award for Japanese
Studies from the American Association of University Presses. Professor Ivy is on
the editorial board of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique and was an active
member of the editorial board of Public Culture for many years.
takeshi kadobayashi is associate professor at the Department of Film and Media

Studies, Faculty of Letters, Kansai University, and received his PhD from the Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo. He specializes in media theory, epis-
temology, and studies of culture and representation. He is author of the book Watcha
Doin, Marshall Mcluhan?: An Aesthetics of Media (in Japanese; 2009), and coedited site
zero / zero site 3 (2010), and Hyosho: Journal of the Association for Studies of Culture
and Representation 8 (2014).
akihiro kitada is associate professor in the Gradate School of Interdisciplinary

Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. His numerous publications include
Warau Nihon no “Nashionarizumu” (2005) and Kōkoku no Tanjō: Kindai Media Bunka
no Rekishi-Shakaigaku (2000). He has coauthored books with Yoshimi Shunya, Miya-
dai Shinji, Nakamasa Masaki, and Ōsawa Masachi, among others. He served as coedi-
tor, with Azuma Hiroki, of the book series Shisō Chizu (2008~2010).
keisuke kitano is professor of the College of Image Arts and Science, Ritsumeikan
University, Kyoto, Japan. He has published numerous books and essays, including In-
troduction to Theories on Visual Image (in Japanese, 2009) and Society of Control (in
Japanese, 2014).
thomas looser is associate professor in the Department of East Asian Studies

at New York University. He received his ba in cultural anthropology from the Univer-
sity of California, Santa Cruz (1979), and his ma and PhD in anthropology from the
University of Chicago (1999). Previously, he taught at McGill University and Emory
University as an assistant professor in East Asian Studies. Looser is the author of many
articles on Japan’s cultural and historical anthropology, cinema and new media, and
globalization, and his book from the Cornell ceass Series is titled Visioning Eternity:
Aesthetics, Politics, and History in the Early Modern Noh Theater (2008). Works in pro
gress include a coauthored book on anime and new media in Japan, and a volume on
Superflat art and 1990s Japan.
anne mcknight is associate professor and teaches Japanese literature and compara-
tive culture, as well as courses on public design and California studies, at Shirayuri
College in Tokyo. She is the author of the monograph Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the
Writing of Ethnicity (2011) as well as essays in camera obscura, positions, and elsewhere.
akira mizuta lippit teaches literature and film at the University of Southern
California. His books include Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and
[414] Contributors
Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric
of Wildlife (2000); and, most recently, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s
Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016).
ryoko misono was associate professor in the College of Japanese Language and Cul-
ture at the University of Tsukuba. She is the author of Film and the Nation State: 1930s
Shochiku Melodrama Films (in Japanese, 2012), which won the annual prize of the Asso-
ciation for Studies of Culture and Representation. She coedited the volume Awashima
Chikage: The Actress as Prism (in Japanese, 2009) and published many essays on gender,
on the history of film and of film criticism in Japan, and on directors such as Nagisa
Oshima, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Kiju Yoshida.
Miryam Sas is Professor of Film and Media, Japanese and Comparative Literature at
the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is Experimental Arts in
Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (2010). Earlier
work has explored models for thinking about avant-garde movements cross-culturally
(Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, released 2001), butô dance
(in Butôs, 2002), and technology and corporeality (in Histories of the F
uture, 2005). She
has forthcoming articles on intermedia in Japan, experimental animation, and pink
film, and she is working on a book about critical media practices and transcultural
media theory in Japan from the 1960s to the present.
fabian schäfer is professor of Japanese Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander Univer-

sity of Erlanger–Nuremberg. He is the author of Public Opinion, Propaganda, Ideology:
Theories on the Press and Its Social Function in Interwar Japan, 1918–1937 (2012), and the
editor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (forthcoming) and Tosaka Jun: Ideology, Media,
Everydayness (in German, 2011). His current research interests include Japanese cul-
tural studies, media and cultural theory, and transnational intellectual history.
marc steinberg is associate professor of Film Studies at Concordia University,

Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in
Japan (2012) and Why Is Japan a “Media Mixing Nation”? (in Japanese, 2015). He has
published essays in Japan Forum; Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Journal of
Visual Culture; Theory, Culture & Society; Mechademia; and Canadian Journal of Film
Studies.
tomiko yoda is the Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities in the Department

of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She received her PhD in Japanese from Stan-
ford in 1996 and taught at Duke, Cornell, and Stanford before arriving at Harvard. She
is a recipient of fellowships from neh, ssrc, the Japan Foundation, and the National
Humanities Center. She is the author of Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts
and the Constructions of Japanese Modernity (2004) and coeditor, with Harry Haroo-
tunian, of Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the
Present (2006).
Contributors [415]
alexander zahlten is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Lan-
guages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He received his PhD in film studies at
Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. In 2011–12 he was assistant pro-
fessor at the Department of Film and Digital Media of Dongguk University in Seoul,
South Korea. He has curated film programs for institutions such as the German Film
Museum and the Athénée Français Cultural Center, Tokyo, and was program director
for the Nippon Connection Film Festival, the largest festival for film from Japan, in
2002–10.
[416] Contributors
Index
Abenomics, 253, 275–76 Azuma, Hiroki, 9–11, 16, 18–19, 24, 83–88, 98,
actionable theory, 20, 133, 135, 140, 144–45 118–19, 125, 217, 348–64, 378–79, 383–86;
advertising, 19–20, 184, 203, 208, 225, 228, and On Information and Freedom, 82,
244, 352; contemporary changes in, 174–81; 89–96, 100n19, 377
criticism of, 232; of Discover Japan,
185–90; industries in Japan, 131–41, 144; Baudrillard, Jean, 70, 114, 117, 217; and
and InterCommunication, 110, 113; and communication, 153–64, 170n21; and
girlscape, 190–94; and New Aca discourse, consumer society, 174–75, 351
214; and Seibu Saison, 231–32. See also Bazin, André, 44, 342
de-advertising Beat Takeshi, 234–36
animality, 348, 354–55, 360, 365n15, 377; and Bell, Daniel, 3, 86
Imaginary and the Animal Route, 92–95 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 164, 289, 292,
animation, 10, 16, 44, 103, 303n51 298, 302n47, 320–22, 328–29, 371,
architecture, xii, 18, 105–6, 117, 120, 259, 381–82
320–21; and the cybernetic turn, 52–58, Beyond Computopia: Information, Automa-
62, 64–67, 69–73, 383–85 tion, and Democracy in Japan, 108
Arendt, Hannah, 93–94, 227 biopolitics, 54–59, 67, 74n12, 167, 174–75, 190,
Article 175 of the Japanese criminal code, 194, 354, 382–84
253, 255–56, 269, 281n52
Asada, Akira 19, 21, 72, 78n78, 96–97, 117, 135, Caldwell, John, 13, 155
145, 329; as editor of InterCommunication, capitalism, 34, 36, 42–43, 86, 137, 181, 192–94,
105–6, 113–14, 117, 120–21; and humor, 214, 274; print, 5, 11, 17, 211, 330; and infor-
215–16; and New Academism, 200–202, mation, 107–8; and mediation, 47, 194, 154,
206, 212–14, 217; and New Humans, 203–4; 244–45, 351
and youth, 209–10 Chen, Kuan-Hsing, 8, 25
Asada, Takashi, 58 Chun, Jayson Makoto, 34, 46
Asama Sansō incident, 236 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 33, 142
atmospheric media, 53–55, 66, 72–73 cinema, 15, 22–23. See also film, motion
audience: of television, 40, 225; theories of 35, pictures
37, 291–95, 297, 340–42, 358, 380. See also Cold War, 11, 40–41, 45, 68, 70, 77n59
spectators colonialism, 3–4, 18, 25, 382, 384; and
avant-garde, 10, 18, 25, 45, 65–69, 104, 126, urban planning, 54, 56–59, 64. See also
176, 192, 231, 259, 270, 283 postcolonialism
communication theory, 12, 14, 54–55; import Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 20, 153–59,
to Japan, 65–68, 72; and InterCommunica- 161–62, 165, 169n17, 171n35
tion, 101, 116–17 epistemology, 43–44, 215
Constituents of a Theory of Media, 153, 155–56 eraser print image, 223–24, 239, 241–42,
consulting, 141–45 246–48
consumer culture, 20, 45, 244, 274; and me- everyday (nichijō), 22, 34–35, 196n14, 207, 253,
diatization in Japan, 173–77; and postmo- 264; in film and television, 38–39, 42–48,
dernity, 184, 201, 203, 213; and youth, 236 293, 351; and labor, 246; and language, 337,
consumerism, 176, 286, 355 375–36; philosophy of, 316, 319. See also
Cool Japan, 81, 257 quotidian life
creolization, 11 experiential reportage, 261, 263, 266, 277n3
Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan), 18, 81, 96, 104, Eyebeam, 119, 122–23, 125, 127n22
106, 113–14, 117–19, 217, 349
Critical Terms for Media Studies, 5–6, 12, 25, fan, 9–11, 260, 377. See also otaku
103, 369–70 feminism, 191, 199n64, 244, 251, 257, 277n3
cultural theory, 104, 118, 362 film criticism, 340–41
culture industries, 21, 151, 162, 184, 195, 272 film theory, 4, 33, 35, 41, 44–45, 47, 318
cute aesthetics, 253, 268, 270–71 film, 38, 273, 293, 318, 321. See also cinema,
cybernetics, 137, 276, 382–86; and architecture, motion pictures
73; as environment, 65–70; and structur- Freud, Sigmund, 81, 215, 350, 362, 367n33
alism, 72; the turn to, 54–65 Fujioka, Wakao, 135, 147n9, 184, 194, 198n46;
cyberspace, 83–87; and database, 87–89; and and Discover Japan, 180, 188–90; and
Azuma, 96 de-advertising, 181–82
fūkeiron (landscape theory), 21, 152, 161
database, 10, 80–96, 348–50, 353–59 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, 24, 80.
de-advertising, 181. See also advertising See also 3.11
Dean, Jodi, 14243 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 14
Decoman, 250, 262–64, 267 futurology (miraigaku), 63, 86, 135
déjàponisme, xiii, xiv
Deleuze, Gilles, xiii, 91, 202, 217 Gay Science (Gai Savoir journal), 210
democracy, 60, 68, 332, 358–59; and internet, Genbun-icchi movement, 331–32
384–86 general will, 81, 348, 357–58, 360, 362, 366n27,
Denshi media ron, 118 367n29, 377–79, 384–86
Dentsū, 62, 138, 144–45, 177, 180 Genron, 349, 357, 364n3, 365n18
Derrida, Jacques, xii, 73, 81, 92, 94, 98, 114, Gibson, William, 83
116–19, 218n21, 323 girlscape, 20–21, 176–78, 196n14, 219n27; and
digital media, 1, 9, 142, 166, 305, 369 female domesticity, 190–94
digital revolution, 109, 111 Gonda, Yasunosuke, 42–43, 45, 47, 341
Discover Japan (DJ), 177–81, 185–93 Good Morning, 34
double-folded critical skepticism, 339, 376 Gotō, Kazuhiko, 137, 138–41, 143, 146, 148n21
Doxiadis, Constantinos, 55–56, 74n11 Gotō, Shinpei, 58–59
gui technology (graphical user interface),
Eisenman, Peter, 72, 78n78 85–86, 89
eizō, 15, 45, 137, 148n23, 201 Guillory, John, 12
environment: cybernetic, 53–57, 65–70, 72–73;
in post-war Japan, 58–59, 174; urban, 64, Habermas, Jürgen, 37, 49n21; and Structural
182–83. See also media environment Transformation of the Public Sphere,
environmental control power, 91–96 226–27
[418] index
Hachiya, Kazuhiko, 121, 123–24 interfacial subjectivity, 84–89, 96
Hagimoto, Kinichi, 229 intermedia, 67, 208
Hajime, Tanabe, 379 International Congresses of Modern Archi-
Hamano, Satoshi, 91, 217 tecture, 57
Haniya, Yūtaka, 213 Internet, 9–12, 16, 81, 95–96, 108, 174,
Hansen, Mark B. N., 5–6, 12, 24–25, 53 297; and general will, 379, 383–85;
Hansen, Miriam 151, 167n1, and identification, 84, 89; temporality
Harootunian, Harry, 42 of, 142
Hasumi, Shigehiko, 3, 15, 202, 206, 329, 332 intertitles, 292–94. See also subtitles
Hayashi, Shūji, 61–62 invisible city, 71
Hayashi, Yūjirō, 60, 63 Ippan ishi 2.0 (General Will 2.0), 81, 348,
Heidegger, Martin, 92, 94, 300n25, 301n31, 357–63
301n38, 316, 317, 323, 353 irony, 21, 194, 205–6, 214–17, 220n37
hihyō (criticism), 16, 18, 22–23, 81, 167, 208, Isozaki, Arata, 18, 55, 58, 66, 78n78, 106
211–12, 256, 329–30, 338–39, 373 Itoi, Shigesato, 203–4, 210, 213, 231–32
Hills, Matt, 11 Ivy, Marilyn, 19, 135, 218n10, 218n12, 278n15,
Hirabayashi, Hatsunosuke, 42–43 364n1, 383
Hollywood, 297
Hōsō Asahi (magazine), 136–37, 139, 148n21 Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 15
Japanese publishing industry, 4, 222, 233–34,
Igarashi, Megumi, 251, 253. See also 236, 239–40
Rokudenashiko
Imamura, Taihei, 44 Kadokawa, Haruki, 208, 211
Inaba, Michio, 35, 286, 299n1, 307, 381 Kamimura, Shin’ichi, 36
in-betweenness (aidagara), 306–7, 310, kankyō (environment), 58, 65–67
317–18, 322 Kant, Immanuel, 286, 300n19, 301n31, 308,
industrial capitalism, 34, 137 311, 313, 317, 324, 330
information age, 3, 120, 139. See also informa- Karatani, Kōjin, 19, 21, 96, 106, 114, 202, 204,
tion society, information industry 220n37, 322, 329–31
information capitalism, 108 Katō, Hidetoshi, 15, 35, 38, 49n34, 200
information industry (jōhō sangyō), 3, 27n5, Katō, Kazuhiko, 121, 181
61–62, 137, 148n23, 223 Katō, Shūichi, 330, 346n28
information society (jōhō shakai), 27n5, 60, Kawanaka, Nobuhiro, 154, 166
201; and Information Networks for Future Kitada, Akihiro, xii, 2, 10, 13, 22, 351, 365n18;
Japan, 62; and Future of Information and mediatization of consumer culture,
Archipelago Japan, 63 175, 201, 213, 380–81; and unmediated
information technologies, 52, 55, 62, 73, 83, mediation, 43, 134
86, 89 Kitano, Keisuke, xii, 16, 22–23, 208, 211,
Informatization (jōhōka), 61, 64 371–72, 375–76, 382
Inokuchi, Ichirō, 68 Kitano, Takeshi, 234–35. See also Beat
InterCommunication (journal), 19, 82, Takeshi
96, 101–4, 126, 383; advertisements in, Kittler, Friedrich, 2, 6–8, 27n2, 71–72, 114,
109–13; first issue of, 114–16; founding 298, 372; and Gramophone, Film, Type-
of, 105–8; and InterCommunication writer, 368–69
Center, 121–24; and intercommunication, Kobayashi, Hideo: and hihyō (criticism), 23,
114–19 328–31; and Japanese modernity, 331–37;
InterCommunication Center (icc), 104, 108, and translation, 371, 375; and visual media,
113–14, 120–22, 125 340–44, 387n16
index [419]
Kojève, Alexandre: 93–94, 349, 353; and McLuhan, Marshall: xiii, 2, 13, 19–20, 55, 86,
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 214, 297–98, 373–75; divisive nature of, 132;
92; and post-history, 354–56 impacts on Japanese media theory, 132–38;
Kōkoku hihyo (Advertising Criticism maga- legacy of, 131; reception in Japan, 136–41,
zine), 232, 235 156, 201, 205; and performativity, 141–46
Konno, Tsutomu, 154, 165 media: and community, 142, 227, 229, 290,
Kurimoto, Shinichirō, 202, 206–7, 213 295–98, 300n28, 332; sociological model
Kurokawa, Kishō, 62, 76n37, 259 of, 14–15, 35–37, 40, 285, 292, 307, 381;
Kyōto School of philosophy, 22–23, 285, 299, transmission model of, 103, 106, 108, 125,
305–11, 316, 322–23, 330, 379, 381 158, 207, 211–12, 243–44, 295–97. See also
print media, mass media, visual media
La Carte postale (The Post Card), 116–17 media arts, 105–7, 122
Life magazine, 148n23, 162–63 media cultures, 7, 9, 25, 369
logistics, 54, 59–64, 70 media mix, 25, 80, 88, 174, 208, 211, 258.
Lovink, Geert, 10, 13, 142–43 See also transmedia
low theory, 22, 253 media philosophy, 23; explanation of, 305;
Lyotard, Jean-François, 85, 349–50, 360 and Kyōto School, 306–7, 311, 322–23, 379
media public sphere, 224–29
Mainichi Shinbun (Mainichi newspaper), mediaron (media theory), 98n1, 134, 146n10
109 media technologies, 3, 17, 53, 105, 108, 121, 141,
Makurūhan no sekai (McLuhan’s World), 286, 349–51, 358, 386n6
135, 139–41, 145 metabolism, 54, 58, 62, 65, 76n42, 259
Manchuria, 58–59 middle class, 39–40, 45, 49n33, 179, 192–93,
manga, 9–10, 81, 201; and Rokudenashiko, 352, 357
255–58, 261–70, 275–76, 296 Minami, Hiroshi, 15, 35, 38, 41, 49n26, 68
man-machine, 65, 70, 375, 382, 384 mini-komi, 272
Manovich, Lev, 4–5, 10, 13, 33, 99n10, 103 Mitchell, W. J. T., 5, 6, 12, 25, 368, 370
marketing: in 1980s Japan, 176–78; biopolitical Mittel, 22, 288–90, 298, 300n23, 381
turn in, 174–75; and gender, 190–94; and Mizukoshi, Shin, 13, 16, 298
McLuhan, 132–33, 139–41; and mediation, modernity, 42, 45, 47, 179; and grand narra-
173–74; to youth, 178–84 tives, 80, 86–88, 92; in Japan, 331, 347, 351;
Marx, Karl, 174, 215–16, 309 in the West, 336, 375
Marxism, 40, 43, 144, 155, 204, 212, 330, modular aesthetics, 253, 258; in the work
346n28, 351; and media theory, 13, 20, of Rokudenashiko, 260, 263, 268, 272.
25, 158 See also modularity
mass communication, 35–37, 40, 68, 134. modularity, 259–60. See also modular aesthetics
See also mass media Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 60
mass media, 67, 189, 224, 261, 298, 305; in motion pictures (movies), 33, 36, 43, 188, 273,
Japan, 181, 191, 328–32, 339; and television, 340. See also cinema, film
224, 361–62; and theory, 14, 134, 164 Murakami, Takashi, 11, 118–19, 127n18, 259,
Masuda, Tsūji, 178, 182, 184 277n5, 365n18
Masuda, Yoneji, 60
materialism, 313, 316 Nakahira, Takuma, 152, 154, 161, 165, 187,
materiality, 22, 26, 164, 259, 269, 272, 372–73; 196n14
of language, 243–44, 330; of media, 22, 26, Nakai, Masakazu, 22–23, 43, 285, 307; and
166, 207, 320, 341, 343, 349 machines; 286–88; 380–82; and Mittel,
Matsuda, Masao, 46, 152, 165, 196n14 288–91; relevance of, 296–99; theory of
Matsui, Shigeru, 67 film, 291–96, 307, 317–24, 351–52
[420] index
Nakajima, Azusa, 9, 25 Ozaki, Midori, 14, 25
Nakazawa, Shinichi, 21, 202, 211, 214 Ozu, Yasujirō, 34
nation building, 54, 58, 331, 334. See also
nationalism Paranoiacs, 202–3
national public sphere, 225–26, 229, 235, Parco, 177–79, 182–84, 203
247–48 performativity, 141, 203–4, 211–13
nationalism, 160, 216 , 256, 235n14, 361 Peters, John Durham, 387n6; and Marvelous
Neuromancer, 83, 89 Cloud, 53, 386n6
New Academism (New Aca, Nyū Aka), 19, Philosophers of Nothingness, 307
21, 85, 218n22, 219n27, 235; emergence of, photography, 4, 152, 161–62, 166, 168n5, 185,
200–202; and humor, 214–17; and media 187–88, 319, 339, 342–44
theory, 204–7; as play/performativity, popular culture, 139, 192, 383
211–12; and politics, 212–14; and popul ism, postcolonialism, 16, 152, 160, 162–63. See also
209–11 colonialism
New Humans (shinjinrui), 207, 209, 175, postindustrialization, 18, 59–60, 181
203–4, 213, 355 postmodernity, 10, 100n19, 106, 117, 119;
new media studies, 2, 10, 347–49, 352, 360 Azuma’s theories of, 81–98; 353–54, 377;
Nico nico dōga (Nico Nico Video), 257, and consumer culture, 183–84; and New
358, 378 Aca, 203–4
Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai (nhk), 36, 137–38, 156, poststructuralism, 73, 117, 135, 201–8
169n18, 171n38, 210, 225–28, 232 print culture, 23, 202, 216, 272
Nihon Terebi (ntv), 225 print media, 39, 41, 156, 223
Nico Nico Beta, 258, 260, 278n15 Prokino, 295, 303n51
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (ntt), Provoke (magazine), 152, 162, 168n5, 187–88
103–4, 108–21, 125, 209, 171n38; advertise- Pure Film Movement, 41, 47
ments from, 109–13; privatization of,
106–7 quotidian life, 38–39, 45. See also everyday
Nishida, Kitarō, 379–80, and materialism,
313; and time, 314–16; and unmediated radio, 34, 49n21, 131, 137, 234–35, 266, 290
mediation, 307–12 realism, 39, 43, 255, 319, 322, 338
nothingness, 306–312, 322–23, 379–80 reception theory, 2, 296
Nozick, Robert, 360, 367n30 reportage. See experiential reportage
nyū aka. See New Academism Rimbaud, Arthur, 332, 334, 336, 375
Rokudenashiko, 21–22, 250–51, 277n3, 281n53;
Obayashi, Jun’ichirō, 62, 65 artistic methods of, 251–24; arrest of,
obscenity, 21, 250–51, 255, 257, 270, 273, 276, 255–56; and feminism, 256–57, 261, 274–76;
277n4, 279n25 and modular aesthetics, 258–61; and cute-
Okonogi, Keigo, 209 ness, 271–74. See also Igarashi Megumi
Onna erosu (Woman/Eros journal), 272–73 Romanticism, 206, 216, 286–88, 306
Ono, Hideo, 14–15, 285, 299n3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 350, 359, 361–63, 378,
otaku culture, 9–10, 93, 98, 125, 352, 364n8, 384–86; and Social Contract, 360
366n22; and animality, 94–95, 355–59, 377;
and Azuma, 80–82, 88–85, 88, 90, 348–50 Sakai, Naoki, 313, 333–34, 345n14
Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, 10, 80–82, Sasaki, Atsushi, 204, 215
87–92, 94–95, 348 Sasaki, Kiichi, 35, 38
Ōtsuka, Eiji, 9, 135, 351 Sawaragi, Noi, 58, 349
Overvisibles, 82, 87–90, 92, 95 schizo-kids, 202–203, 210
Ōya, Sōichi, 34 Schlegel, Friedrich, 214–215
index [421]
Second World War, 15, 163, 224, 330, 336, mobility, 156–57; and Nancy Seki, 21,
339, 343. 220–48; and New Academism, 200, 204,
Seibu Saison Group, 230–231 206, 213
Seki, Nancy, 14, 21, 22, 221–26, 248; influ- temporality, xii, 4, 52, 103, 109, 142, 293,
ences on, 227–28; as queer, 238–39; writing 314, 318
style of, 235–47 Third World, 152, 160, 162–63, 167
semiotics, 72, 78n77, 176, 296 3.11, 168n7, 170n24, 170n26, 350, 356–57, 362,
Shannon, Claude, 296, 303n54 364. See also Fukushima Daiichi disaster
Shih, Shu-mei, 11 3-D printer, 251, 260, 279n23, 280n33
Shimizu, Ikutarō, 34–35 Tokyo University, 15–16, 152, 168n6, 202,
Shimokōbe, Atsushi, 62–65, 214, 269
shinbungaku (newspaper science), 14–16, 201, Tokyo, 5, 104, 117, 120, 179, 183, 225, 228, 247;
299n3, 307. as information city, 236–37; and media
Shisō (journal), 34–35, 40, 47 crossings, 230–33; and Tange Lab, 56–59,
Shisō no Kagaku (Science of Thought, jour- 62, 65, 69–70
nal), 25, 40, 67–68 Tōno, Yoshiaki, 135, 139–40, 154
Shōjo (girl), 196n14, 262–63, 270, 275–76, Tosaka, Jun, 15, 307, 323–24; and the ev-
280n29 eryday, 42–45; and critiques of Nishida,
simulation, 69–70, 84, 189, 198n53 312–15; and temporality, 315–18; and film,
Society for Cinema and Media Studies 318–22
(scms), 15 transmedia, 174, 202. See also media mix
spectator, 34, 39, 42, 273, 291–93, 297–98. transnational, 151, 155, 164, 167
See also audience Tsukio, Yoshio, 66, 76n48
spectatorship, 2, 22, 39, 294 Tsumura, Takashi, 152, 154–55, 157, 160,
speculative design, 253–54, 259–60 165, 191
Steinberg, Marc, xi, xii, 19, 169n16, 369–73 Tsutsumi, Seiji, 230
street-corner television (gaitō terebi), 225 Tsutsumi, Yoshiaki, 230
structuralism, 72–73
Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics Ueno, Chizuko, 25, 179, 202, 219n27, 281n51
(Kōzō to Chikara), 117, 201–2, 212, 217 ūman ribu (women’s liberation), 261, 272–76,
subcultural magazines, 235–36 279n26
subtitles, 292, 294 Umesao, Tadao, 27n5, 60, 137, 148n21
Suga, Hidemi, 152, 160, 344n7 uncanny, 83, 87, 89, 122, 124
Sugiyama, Mitsunobu, 292, 302n40 unmediated mediation, 43, 289, 309, 311, 313,
supply chain management, 61 318, 322, 324, 379, 381–82. See also Mittel
symbolic order, 84–88, 91 Ura, Tatsuya, 200, 210
urban design, 52, 54–55, 57, 59, 62, 64, 69–72,
Takada, Fumio, 235 76n42, 382
Takemura, Ken’ichi, 19, 133–46, 146n5 urbanism, 57, 70
Taki, Kōji, 152, 162 urban planning, 55–57, 69; colonial, 18, 54,
Takigawa incident, 296, 299, 303n52 57–59, 64, 382. See also urban design
Tange Lab, 18, 52–70, 74n15, 383–84 urban space, 52, 54, 83, 160, 183, 286, 294,
Tange, Kenzō, 18, 54–55, 382 383; and Tange Lab, 61–62, 64, 69–73
television (tv), 4, 12–15, 21, 49n33, 154, 166, Uwasa no shinsō (The truth about rumors),
181, 240, 362; in contrast to print media, 239
15, 34–36, 39, 49n26; early theories of, xii,
18, 33–38, 48n3; and the everyday, 38–48; Virilio, Paul, 114, 116–17
and McLuhan, 2, 132, 139, 141, 143; as visual media, xi, 227–28, 340, 344
[422] index
Wark, McKenzie, 3, 12, 142, 372; and low Yoshimoto, Ryumei. See Yoshimoto, Takaaki
theory, 22, 253 Yoshimoto, Takaaki, 201, 206–7, 213–14,
Watanabe, Kazutami, 346n28 219n31
What Is Obscenity?, 250, 264, 270 Young Wife: Confessions (Osana dzuma:
Wiener, Norbert, 56–57, 276 kokuhaku), 272
World War II. See Second World War Yū (Play magazine), 208–9
Yamamoto, Naoki, 43, 50n56 Zahlten, Alexander, xii, 21, 145, 235,
Yasuda, Yojūrō, 215, 220n37, 330 368–73
Yellow Magic Orchestra (ymo), 236–37 zeronendai, 9–11, 18–19, 217
Yoshimi, Shun’ya, 34, 39, 47, 183 Žižek, Slavoj, 83–84
index [423]

Media Theory in Japan

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M E D I A T H E O R Y in J A PA N

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Duke University Press Durham and London 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

cover art: Photo by Alexander Zahlten

Chapter 11 appeared originally in Review of Japa­nese Culture and Society,

Preface (Interface) [xi]

1. From Film to Tele­vi­sion:

2. Architecture as Atmospheric Media:

3. The Media Theory and Media Strategy

4. The InterCommunication Proj­ect:

5. McLuhan as Prescription Drug:

6. The Culture Industries and Media Theory in Japan [151]

8. 1980s Nyū Aka:

9. Critical Media Imagination:

10. At the Source (Code):

11. An Assault on “Meaning”:

12. Much Ado about “Nothing”:

13. Kobayashi Hideo and the Question of Media [328]

Afterword. The Disjunctive Kernel

A journey is made by one’s traveling companions, as the Japa­nese expres-

[x] Acknowl­e dgments

[xii] Akira Mizuta Lippit

the critical prob­l em taken up by Media Theory in Japan is neither

[xiv] Akira Mizuta Lippit

[2] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[4] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

The Situation Is Media Theory

[6] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

The overwhelming presence of the Anglo-­American academic industry

[8] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

Zeronendai—­Thought from the ­Aughts

[10] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

Defining Media Theory

[12] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

Media Studies in Japan

[14] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[16] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[18] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[20] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[22] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[24] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[26] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

[28] marc steinberg and alexander zahlten

Shisō and Shimizu Ikutarō on Tele­vi­sion

[34] aaron gerow

Early Theories of Television in Japan [35]

[36] aaron gerow

Early Theories of Television in Japan [37]

The Everyday in Film and Tele­vi­sion

[38] aaron gerow

Early Theories of Television in Japan [39]

[40] aaron gerow

Early Theories of Television in Japan [41]

[42] aaron gerow

Early Theories of Television in Japan [43]

[44] aaron gerow

Early Theories of Television in Japan [45]

Class and Everydayness of Theory

[46] aaron gerow

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chapter 11 appeared originally in Review of Japanese Culture and Society,

1. From Film to Television:

4. The InterCommunication Project:

A journey is made by one’s traveling companions, as the Japanese expres-

[x] Acknowle dgments

the critical probl em taken up by Media Theory in Japan is neither

The overwhelming presence of the Anglo-American academic industry

Zeronendai—Thought from the Aughts

Shisō and Shimizu Ikutarō on Television

The Everyday in Film and Television

The Biopolitical Vision of Colonial Urban Planning

1 The decline of the symbolic order, or the “grand narrative” that

Now, is it possible to reconcile these three distinct genealogies of animal

By reducing the idea of postality to having as many readers as possible, it might

ey’re bound in sunflower-gold covers, when not in dull olive or darkened

The InterCommunication Proje ct [103]

The InterCommunication Proje ct [105]

Thousands of employees were laid off in ntt’s privatization (as many as