A brief synopsis of the material in Senden Kaigi can be found at

http://64.62.152.78/index.php/weblog/comments/yankee-gal-otaku-and-akb48/consuming_japan/

I think that women’s practices are more likely to be coded as play due to assumptions about who “works” (in given society) and how they use economic resources. This allows some anthropologists to code institutions like the beauty industry as being frivolous since they stereotype activities like using make-up as not as important as real work. Of course, “real work” is usually defined in terms of men’s economic and political activities.

Young male and female entertainers are treated as products sold by the media corporations and consumed by fans, they are used in product tie-ups, commercials, farmed out to the same TV programs, and are expected to keep their private lives out of the scandal magazines. The majority make it in the geinokai because they accord with current fashion and aesthetic norms, and because they fill their pro forma roles well, and rarely because they have exceptional talent. We aren’t talking about musical hipsterdom here, these no-dating rules are for the prefab groups who are created for specific markets. And one of the rules of that market is to not have an obvious normal private life.

Over the years I have seen an increase in female popular music singers and singer-songwriters that go beyond the idol production system. So, in addition to a continuing idol system, there are also new types of girl-centered music and avenues for artists to become popular outside the production companies. Talented artists such as Hamasaki Ayumi, Aikawa Nanase or OreSkaBand are not told not to date.They are free to pursue relationships and have children, and no one gets upset. The fake idol groups are a special category, so at least I understand the no dating logic. AKB48 in particular is selling a constructed image of schoolgirl cuteness, so there’s an explicit level of artificiality to begin with that suggests that members shouldn’t mess with the fantasy. I wouldn’t call my attitude cynical, I just don’t feel sorry for AKB48 members who get booted out when they date. If they had real talent, they could go on to work on a solo career or write songs. But they don’t have real talent.

I think there was a small upset among Gackt (hot boy signer) fans whenever there were rumors of his past marriages or that he dates women, because of his carefully constructed media persona as a sort of edgy yaoi (boy’s love) object of interest. Kimura Takuya of SMAP has always ignored the non-dating rule from the beginning, but that’s because he had the goal of being taken seriously as an actor all along. And he now is a serious actor.

As I understand the furosato post, it is that you (Laura) originally had a rather cynical view of enka as bad-faith emotional ‘investment’ in a capitalist fantasy (one with ugly nationalistic overtones). But over time, you have come to see the legitimacy in that ‘longing’ for the furosato that actual fans of the music might experience, not as fake or abstract imagery but as a real place.

But then in the admittedly very brief comments made about AKB48, you seem to have the same kind of reaction as what you describe to be your original reaction to the enka song(s). Again it seems to be a rather cynical view, where this time it is the phenomena of AKB48 (and presumably other jpop idols) that showcase a bad-faith emotional investment rooted again in a capitalist fantasy (this time likely with ugly gendered overtones?).

While I think this is definitely true to an extent (as it is with enka), I think it misses the possibility of the original insight from the furosato post. I.e. that the ‘purity’ or ‘availability’ of these jpop idols is not, at least as I understand it, an abstraction for the fans (the big, obsessive, buy every merchandise fans that is) but, again I think, an actual person that they long for in a very emotional way. I’m no expert on idols nor enka, but from the conversations I have had this seems to be what is explained to me. Of course it is enforced in ways that seem quite ugly, but from the perspective of the fans, I think the idol having a romantic partner is a bit like having the furosato paved over and replaced with a Wal-Mart.

Since the other post brought up the issue of age, it kind of made me think: if you need to be over 50 to get a good grasp on enka, how young do you need to be to get a grasp on jpop idols?

Anyway, just some thoughts. As I said, I enjoyed both posts a lot and they are very thought-provoking.

Hot off the presses! The September 15, 2012 issue of Senden Kaigi has a long special section devoted to the reemergence of “Yankee” (military uniform and other tough-guy, punk looking styles) among a substantial and possibly growing fraction of young women in Japan. Among the researchers’ observations are that around 20% of audiences as AKB48 events now wear this style—which may be due to Majisuka Gakuen, a TV Tokyo drama series in which members of AKB48 appear as tough, nasty girls wearing this style, who quarrel, scream, hit each other, or, in sum, behave in the way characters in punk-oriented manga do. I am reminded of an observation by my favorite Japanese trend tracker, Atsushi Miura, that as the belief “you have to be beautiful to succeed” becomes increasingly pervasive among young people, a fair number are reacting with “f-you” moves in the opposite direction (I am probably exaggerating what he says for effect, but the implication is there).

Anyway, I am planning to translate a bunch of material from this special section and put it up on our company website, in our Consuming Japan blog stream. May take a couple of days, but should you be interested, take a peek at http://www.wordworks.jp/ to see what I find.

Discouraging to hear it confirmed that it doesn’t in fact seem like many people are reading the articles. But it is also not at all surprising, unfortunately, given dismissal, denial, and disregard are also how white power/privilege works/is (re)produced.

I teach Jane Hill’s book and the chapters students resist the most are on Mock Spanish and the word squaw. I add on lectures on the naming practices of sports teams and US military that use putative Native American names and images. Because these are sincere and well-meaning students (they are sitting in a non-required linguistic anthropology class), they get very upset to imagine that usage of Mock Spanish and Native American naming is racist. As Hill notes, the American folk model of racism is that it is an individual psychological problem, so my students feel as if their integrity is being attacked, rather than seeing it as part of the structure of white privilege. I don’t always know how successful I am teaching this material, but it sits with lessons on language ideology as one of the topics linguistic anthropologists are very interested in these days.

As Hill herself writes, pointing these things out means running into a wall of often very-angry white denial. And the ferocity and abusiveness of that anger increases the farther down the race/color/status hierarchy one goes: i.e. a white male anthropologist will generally be treated with far more respect and deference than a dark-skinned black female anthropologist (always authorized to speak v. how dare *you* tell me something I don’t want to hear and I am NOT going to countenance coming from the likes of you!!). Everyone can’t point of the microaggressions equally, unfortunately, and as both “Racism in the Academy” and “Anthropology as White Public Space?” discuss. 

Moreover, how many white anthropologists have read these articles? From a the interactions I’ve had recently it seems not a lot and that, sadly, many individuals who would most benefit from reading these publications are not in fact reading them (such that they would not question what ‘real racism’ there is ‘in anthropology in 2012’, or express incredulity that there could be profound racism in an elite anthropology program). There is a lot of ‘Well, I certainly don’t need to read that since I’m not racist’ dismissal going on. Some white anthropologists, and I am speaking from real-life experience here (not hypothetical rhetorical flourish), just dismiss such articles as “whining”, the ‘whining’ of ‘over-privileged’ minorities who ‘know nothing of “real racism” and just like to “frivolously complain about racism that does not actually exist”‘.

This idea that there is (putatively fake) ‘racism,’ and ‘real racism’, is a big reason I am not as hopeful as you. When it comes to racial microaggressions, even just trying to point them out becomes an opportunity for being subjected to more racial microaggressions. Many of the most intractable forms of structural racism can’t even be discussed as the structural racism that they are. The definition that most people have for racism, including many (white) anthropologists, is of racism as conscious and intentional bias/discrimination/hatred of another person or group because of ascribed racial status. But this is not a useful, critical, or particularly anthropological, definition. But because it is the definition used in political discourse cum common parlance, one gets endless denials of racism even when it is operant (e.g., “But I didn’t intend to be racist”), and hears things like the ridiculous denials about how Mitt Romney ‘does not have racism in his heart’ and Paul Ryan can’t be racist because he dated a black woman in college and the Romney/Ryan welfare ads aren’t racist because they don’t explicitly say “black President, Barack Obama, loves to give welfare checks to lazy n*ggers in the ghetto”. (Newsflash: one does not have to be A Racist–a card-carrying klansman–in order to be racist, behave in racist ways, promote racial policy: yes, there can be racism absent conscious racist ‘intent’ per se.) And the corporate media generally shies away from any constructive critique of these ‘I’m not racist/I didn’t mean to be racist denials’ and does a poor job of explaining *structural racism*, much less actually uses the term. Meanwhile, actual racial-disparity statistics (on wealth, employment, law enforcement and incarceration, residential segregation, educational re-segregation, health) continue to increase (the general trend with some exceptions), even as many people believe ‘we’re post-racial now’ due to an increase in *symbolic representation*. And yes, many improvements in racial inequality have occurred since the 1960s, but this does not mean that we are still not a profoundly racist and unequal country (not that many of these issues of race/color inequality aren’t also global), nor does it mean that we are doing a better job of talking about these inequalities, even in anthropology. Some anthropologists may be doing a better job, but it does not mean the discipline as a whole is. The space for talking about microaggressions, especially as a black (and female) anthropologist–much less for discussing white privilege and daily forms of white supremacy–is small, very small. On this blog my comments are generally not engaged by more than a handful of commenters, and are often totally ignored. Simply posting as ‘Discuss White Privilege’ is seen as ‘antagonizing’ and offensive and trolling, because directly discussing white privilege happens infrequently enough to make asking to discuss a ‘radical’ act, though it’s really not. 

Anyway, I won’t be wearing a N*ggers Vote pin anytime soon (http://newsone.com/1936535/obama-dont-renege/). And that I won’t speaks to the ways in which racism and sexism are not equivalent, even if both forms of discrimination; and speaks to the ways in which (antiblack) racism makes it necessary to ‘discuss white privilege’, especially in anthropology. Especially in an election year, with Barack Obama as president. Kind of a relevant topic for anthropological discussion, especially for those advocating for a public anthropology that is not considered ‘irrelevant’.

Allow me to reproduce it here for those who don’t click through to read the whole thing.

“It’s good business,” says Dr. Laura Miller, a professor of Japanese studies and anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “The group members are fantasy products, and allowing fans to imagine them as potential partners or as innocent and pure is part of their capital. It’s in their interest and those who are trying to make money off them to keep their actual lives, personalities, and humanity separate.”

“Here as always we need to remember the hierarchical constructed-ness of the category woman/girl/female.”

Yep. You’re definitely right about that.