Asian Popular Culture

New, Hybrid, and Alternate Media

Edited by John A. Lent, Lorna Fitzsimmons

Publication date:

13 December 2012

Length of book:

224 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739179611

Asian Popular Culture: New, Hybrid, and Alternate Media, edited by John A. Lent and Lorna Fitzsimmons, is an interdisciplinary study of popular culture practices in Asia, including regional and national studies of Japan, China, South Korea, and Australia. The contributors explore the evolution and intersection of popular forms (gaming, manga, anime, film, music, fiction, YouTube videos) and explicate the changing cultural meanings of these media in historical and contemporary contexts. At this study’s core are the roles popular culture plays in the construction of national and regional identity. Common themes in this text include the impact of new information technology, whether it be on gaming in East Asia, music in 1960s’ Japan, or candlelight vigils in South Korea; hybridity, of old and new versions of the Chinese game Weiqi, of online and hand-held gaming in South Korea and Japan that developed localized expressions, or of United States culture transplanted to Japan in post-World War II, leading to the current otaku (fan boy) culture; and the roles that nationalism and grassroots and alternative media of expression play in contemporary Asian popular culture. This is an essential study in understanding the role of popular culture in Asia’s national and regional identity.

Introduction
Chapter 1. Weiqi Legends, Then and Now: Cultural Paradigms in the Game of Go
by Marc L. Moskowitz
Chapter 2. Locating Play: The Situated Localities of Portable and Online Gaming in East Asia
by Dean Chan
Chapter 3. Regionalism in the Era of Neo-Nationalism: Japanese Landscape in the Background Art of Games and Anime from the Late-1990s to Present
by Kumiko Saito
Chapter 4. Otaku Evolution: Changing Views of the Fan-boy in Kon Satoshi's Perfect Blue and Paprika
by Joseph Christopher Schaub
Chapter 5. Breaking Records: Media, Censorship, and the Folk Song Movement of Japan's 1960s
by James Dorsey
Chapter 6. Mad-Cow Disease and Alternative YouTube Videos: Brechtian Politics of Aesthetics in Grassroots Media Spectacles, Voluntary Mobilization, and Collective Governance from Korea's Candlelight Movements
by Gooyong Kim
Chapter 7. Reaching Beyond the Manga: A Samurai to the Ends of the World and the Formation of National Identity
by Michael Wert
Chapter 8. Zen Dog: Lian Hearn's Hybrid Otori Pentalogy
by Sheng-mei Ma

Emerging popular cultural and new media forms which have tended to evade historical and critical attention, now get thorough analyses by a diverse set of critics who create points of cogent analysis on the vast and diverse global map in Lent and Fitzsimmons' book. Clarity in these particular views creates a sense of the enormous change emerging in the cultures of Asia.