‘Reflections on the Development of Cultural Studies in Japan’

‘Reflections on the Development of Cultural Studies in Japan’ (Free to read)
Tomoko Tamari

Published in Theory, Culture & Society 2006, Volume 23, Issue 7–8

Image courtesy of Murai .hr via Unsplash

Extract

The first phase of the introduction of cultural studies into Japan occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s, when some sociologists who had become interested in the relationship between politics and the media began to pay attention to ‘critical audience studies’. This was a new academic movement,3 strongly influenced by Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding and decoding model’, along with audience ethnographies such as The Nationwide Audience (1980), Family Television (1986) by David Morley, Watching Dallas (1987) by Ien Ang, and Television Culture (1987) by John Fiske.

The strong impact of Hall’s encoding/decoding model (1980), which has as its basic conception the idea of the active diverse audience, provided a new horizon for mass communication studies (for a recent Japanese discussion see Shiina, 2006). It is important to note here that the chief interest of audience studies in Japan is to show not only how the mass media interpretation of audience is constituted, but also how their interpretation was influenced by existing political power structures. Japanese media studies became more focused on the power conflicts between the subjectivity of the audience and the political and cultural situation in society. This was linked to the fundamental question of how everyday life was constituted under multi-layered socio-cultural conditions and how we can understand the ways such complex power dynamics operate in society. This focus on the linkages between culture and power directly links to the core question of cultural studies.