Interview with Shunya Yoshimi
Image: Professor Shunya Yoshimi. Source: Tokyo Forum.
‘Cultural Studies in Japan An Interview with Shunya Yoshimi’ (Free to read)
Tomoko Tamari
Published in Theory, Culture & Society 2006, Volume 23, Issue 7-8
Excerpt
Tomoko Tamari: Could you tell us a little about your role in the development of cultural studies in Japan?
1996 Today Conference
Shunya Yoshimi: On 15–18 March 1996, Tatsuro Hanada, Shin Mizukoshi and myself organized the international conference ‘A Dialogue with Cultural Studies’ at the University of Tokyo. We invited Stuart Hall, David Morley, Angela McRobbie, Charlotte Brunsdon, Ali Rattansi and Colin Sparks, who are admired as representatives of the British Cultural Studies once based at Birmingham. It was held over four days with the intention of providing a productive dialogue between Japanese critical intellectuals who had been carrying out important work in the fields of cultural history, gender studies and postcolonial studies, such as Chizuko Ueno, Yoichi Komori, Ichiro Tomiyama, Sang-Jung Kang and people from the UK.
One of the major reasons to have the conference was to open up and change the appreciation of cultural studies in Japan.
Until the early 1990s in Japan, cultural studies was often understood as a new type of audience studies, and part of mass communication studies. The new critical audience studies was not only important for the discovering of the active audience, but also related to much wider perspectives, such as the politics of knowledge, feminism, postcolonialism, subculture, new social movements and neoliberalism. Cultural studies provided a broader agenda than mass communication studies, and was seen more as part of the fluctuating field of academic knowledge in modern society. Cultural studies was able to problematize the dynamics between discourses and subjects and between texts and contexts along with introducing a variety of types of knowledges around cultural practices. After 1996, cultural studies in Japan went beyond mass communication studies. It expanded into many areas, such as postcolonialism and feminism. It became a movement, which sought to make connection with many varieties of critical theory in Japan. This was a positive consequence of our international conference.
It is now fair to say that the conference became an epoch-making event in Japanese cultural studies. It is clear that the conference led to a boom in cultural studies (1996–97), involving many young researchers and postgraduate students who were working on culture and cultural history. Their various interests and research could not always be categorized within existing disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and literature. Cultural studies provided them with a common term to cover diversity with a common field and set of perspectives. At the same time, it helped these people to start to make cross-disciplinary research networks with those in their own generation.