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In Svetlana Boym’s article “Nostalgia and It’s Discontents” (2007), she argues that the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but also with changing conception of time (12). She defines nostalgia as a sentiment of loss and displacement while also a romance with one’s own fantasy (7), thus, there is the danger of nostalgia in that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one (9-10). To this, she cites three important characteristics of nostalgia: that it is not anti-modern, rather it coevals with it; that while it appears to be a longing for a place, it is actually yearning for a different time; and that it is not always retrospective (8). In other words, Nostalgia is selective. She further discusses this by presenting two types of nostalgia: the first is restorative nostalgia which stresses the need to reconstruct the lost home or the believed good of the past making it collective, political and taking itself in a serious way; and the other is re...

A Brief Study on Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of Gion (February 8, 2017) Sisters of Gion provides a suitable study for the poignancy in Kenji Mizoguchi’s film, while exploring the sufferings of women in a particular social class. For this paper, I would like to discuss the artistic style used in the production, particularly the play of the camera, and how the particular shots have become representative of the salient messages that Mizoguchi wants to say in his films. In doing so, it is also important to give a foundational overview of the director’s life and influences that helped shape the portrait painted in this film. To begin with, a brief summary and explanation of the movie is needed. Sisters of Gion tells the story of two geisha sisters in Gion– Umekichi (the older sister, traditional and observant of practice and customs), and Omocha (the younger sister, a sort of modern girl who sees to take advantage of her patrons in order to better her life). From this simple co...

In Colin Harvey’s chapter on “A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling” from his 2014 book Storyworld Across Media, he argues that transmedia storytelling is more fruitfully understood as a broad category to describe instances of convergent storytelling but also varieties of pre-digital, licensed tie-in production that anticipate convergence, as well as contemporary cross-media production that incorporates elements of the analogue and the digital (278). Specifically, he argues that varieties of cross-media storytelling are linked by their reliance on memory not only in terms of what a creator asks the audience to remember, but also in terms of what a creator requires the audience to forget (278-279). Furthermore, he contends that “legally proscribed memory is a way of differentiating kinds of transmedia storytelling in the form of a taxonomy, drawing on theoretical positions from the diverse field of memory studies as appropriate (279). He explores his arguments by outlining the categorie...

In Jason Mittell’s chapter on “Narrative" from the book The Craft of Criticism (2018), he suggests that we should consider the study of narrative as an approach itself, where the central object of analysis is storytelling form and structure, not primarily the content of a story (35). In order to do so, Mittell divides his discussion into three parts, namely ‘narrative concepts’, ‘techniques’, and ‘structures’. He further explains that narrative concepts refers to 'story' (pertaining to the elements such as character, setting and events), ‘discourse' (pertaining to the method through which the story becomes accessible through a specific instance of storytelling (35) which puts focus on analyzing the different versions, tones, points-of-views, etc of each renditions of the story), and ‘medium' (pertaining to the format that the particular storytelling takes place (36) and how the medium shapes the narrative). For his discussion on techniques, Mittell gives a brief h...

Translation as Negotiation (October 10, 2019) In Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “Task of the Translator”, he argues that the ultimate task of the translator should not be concerned about the literalness of the translated work that shows likeness to the original, but to move towards a pure language, “of finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original” (20), thus, “translation ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages” (17). In a sense, I would describe his concept of translation as an act of negotiation, and in this negotiation there should be an understanding of how historical transformations by translations are connected to the relationship between languages, thus affecting its continued life. Firstly, Benjamin cautions the reader by stating that translation is a mode (16), in which case it presumes that the original’s essenti...

Reevaluating Scholarships (October 17, 2019) In Claudia Strauss’s article “The Imaginary” (2006), she gives a detailed discussion and analysis of the major scholarships in cultural studies regarding the matter of the Imaginaries, such as the works of Castoriadis, Lacan, Anderson, and Taylor, in order to map out the essential arguments that are more popularly being used/cited in cultural studies research, before she examines how Ivy uses these concepts with regard to the national-imaginaries with the Japanese socio-cultural sphere. In summary, Strauss explains that Castoriadis was concerned with "concepts of cultural abstraction, reification and homogenization, while Lacan used the concept of the imaginary to explain fantasies, and Anderson and Taylor used the concept for explaining cultural models as potentially valuable when used with person-centered ethnographic methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects” (323). Despite the summation of the the...

The Problematic Nature of Culture (October 10, 2019) In Susan Wright’s article “The politicization of ‘culture’” (1998), she argues that t the prominence (or distribution) of culture in the 1990’s as itself a cultural phenomenon (7). She does so by dividing her argument into two phases: firstly, to briefly discuss and differentiate the so called ‘old’ and ‘new’ anthropological approaches to culture; and secondly, to use these approaches in examining the resulting interaction and effects undertaken by decision-makers (such as politicians, the media, the academia, etc.) to use culture in three areas: namely, in the case of culture as a means to promote nationalism; culture, through an anthropological lens and method to create new forms of organizations and organization cultures; and lastly, concerning international developments regarding culture as it (at around the time of her writing) was vastly entering the International discourse as a result of the UNESCO report “Our ...

In his 1993 article, “The Birth of Godzilla: Nuclear Fear and the Ideology of Japan as Victim”, Morris Low looks into the ideology associated with the atomic bomb and focuses on the Godzilla monster movies of the 1950s and their meaning for Japanese and Americans. His discussions can focuses on the following themes, 'fear of the nuclear and involvement of science’; 'monster mania' (particularly in cinema); 'birth of Godzilla' (social climate and involvement of science and technology); ‘Japan and USA’s perception of monster movies, particularly of Godzilla, which includes narrative editing’; ‘transformation of Godzilla into a good monster’; and ‘Godzilla as either symbol or allegory of Japanese society.’ In doing so, Low gives a detailed analysis of the various factors that brought upon, not only the popularity of Godzilla in Japan and abroad, but also of the possible social commentaries that these movies would actually represent – which is to reflect the Japanese pe...

Jame Watson’s 1997 article “Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia" examines the image of McDonald’s in the minds of ordinary Chinese people, particularly on how it fit into the Chinese market, as well as the ways in which Beijing consumers have appropriated McDonald’s for their own use. Through his research, Watson portrays how McDonald’s is seen as the symbol of America, however it needed to cater to local taste. As such, the success of McDonald’s in China is not so much because of its Americanized cultural taste that was imported, rather, that it had to be repackaged into the Chinese culture through appropriation and localization while retaining its Americanized food service culture and corporate philosophy. As such, the attraction was not so much about the food but the atmosphere and the fulfilling experience which brought about new behaviors such as good manners, soft spoken public, good hygiene and cleanliness. Overall, this article is helpful to the general reading pub...

In the 1995 article, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571” by Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, they claim that global trade emerged when all important populated continents began to exchange products continuously – both with each other directly and indirectly via other continents– and in values sufficient to generate crucial impacts on all the trading partners. For this purpose, they situate Manila as a central point of global trading when Spaniards founded the city’s trading ports in 1571. They continued their argument by explaining how the new opening of a trading route has allowed the movement of silver to cross continents (from the Americas, Europe, and Asia) and how it eventually accumulated in China. What I would like to criticize in this article is its glorifying tone of how Spain managed to create a global trading route and its omission of already established tradings routes within the region. For example, Manila was not necessarily discovered by the S...

In Khodadad Rezakhani’s article, “The Road That Never Was: The Silk Road and Trans-Eurasian Exchange” (2010), he argues that while the regional studies on the Silk Road has attracted many scholarships, the concept of the Silk Road as a whole tends to ignore realities such as geography and ecology, as well as political units, facts that become lost among the more potent romantic notions. He continues by saying that what is amazing about the Silk Road is its pervasive influence and the continuous use of its manufactured boundaries and cultural markers in defining modern geographical and ethnopoliticao concepts, although there is less scholarship that tackles about those that reside along the route of the Silk Road. Furthermore, the Silk Road has become a grand narrative that serves mostly to obscure important details, to which Rezakhani suggests is counter-productive and has no basis in historical reality or records, thus a need to rethink the artificial and nostalgic concept of the Silk...

In Tonio Andrade’s 2012 article, “Koxinga’s Conquest of Taiwan in Global History: Reflections on the Occasion of the 350th Anniversary”, one important argument to be made was quoted from Timothy Brook, 'The 17th century was a time of unprecedented intercultural communication: more people were in motion over longer distances and sojourning away from home for longer periods of time than at any other time in human history.’ This was an ‘Age of Partnership’ as Europeans sailed through Asia with Asian guides, and Asia, in turn, exchanged knowledge and technology with Europeans. This contact and movement between various people was the norm of this era. To this idea, Andrade establishes how nationalist views of Koxinga fail to realize that Koxinga was an embodiment of the fascinating globalizing world of the seventeenth century and that he won the war primarily because he was better at listening to people from the other side than were the Dutch. He supports this argument by giving a deta...

In Kären Wigen’s “Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Inter-Area History” (2005), she contests that each of the four ocean schemes (national seas, maritime arcs, bounded basins, and a single global ocean – as experimented by previous Western cartographers) constitutes a useful metaphor for a specific paradigm in the emerging field of inter-area history, specifically as part of the inter-area studies must be a critical analysis of location from many different perspectives. She does this by discussing in detail about National Seas as means of depicting transnational entanglements framed in national terms, thus a useful metaphor for diplomatic and imperial history; Ocean Arcs as means to mark pathways of interactions, thus metaphorical to the study of transnational networks and diaspora; Ocean Basins as being concretely defined as a bounded body of water that extends right up to the shoreline, thus a metaphor for the study of contact zones, frontiers, and borderlands...

Philip Seaton (2015) Taiga dramas and tourism: historical contents as sustainable tourist resources, Japan Forum, 27:1, 82-103, DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2014.962568   In this study, Taiga drama becomes the mediated form wherein historical and cultural heritage and signification is transferred to real world locations, boosting regional tourism and a deepening of interest in the subject matter. Through this study, there is a concept of heroes/heroines accumulating effect over a period of many years as they appear in more than just one drama, thus becoming a point for localities to build up a set of heritage/cultural tourist assets relating to local heroes/stories that are (re)visited when the Taiga drama features those contents. This allows Taiga drama to fit into a broader context of multi-use: the historical contents feature in many media forms and are promoted by local tourism authorities/sectors in the form of museums, monuments and merchandise. This study greatly ...

Navarro-Remesal, Victor, and Antonio Loriguillo-López. "WHAT MAKES GÊMU DIFFERENT? A LOOK AT THE DISTINCTIVE DESIGN TRAITS OF JAPANESE VIDEO GAMES AND THEIR PLACE IN THE JAPANESE MEDIA MIX."  Journal of Game Criticism 2, no. 1 (2015): 1-17. http://gamescriticism.org/articles/navarro-remesalloriguillo-lopez-2-1/. In this study, Navarro-Remesal et’al suggests that gêmu have defining foundations, practices and trends in their use of mascots, cultural references, the general notion of Japaneseness, their game design, genre framing, and even their animation concepts, which can be traced and linked to the cultural inheritance and media mix, thus, gêmu evolved aesthetically from, or at least inherited traits from, manga and anime. The discussion is explored through two sections: a situating of gêmu along with manga and anime as cultural global goods in the Cool Japan tag, and a case study of manga and anime, that allowed for transferrable method of analysis that can be...

HUTCHINSON, Rachael. 2018.  Refracted Visions ： Transmedia Storytelling in Japanese Games. 立命館大学ゲーム研究センター . http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/0026/00010502. Hutchinson builds upon the influential transmedia study discourses, particularly, on Henry Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling, and furthering this discourse by suggesting that transmedia is a way to better understand games, as well as how a set of games could function as a common unit addressing a unified idea. To be precise, she explains the action of viewing media as text in relation to each other and in relation to society, where the prefix “trans” implies the possibility of new creation via boundary crossing and connectivity. This interpretation of “transmedia storytelling” points to a nation’s understanding of itself as told in various kinds of stories across various kinds of games. In addition, Hutchinson examines the reflections of transmedia storytelling within the videogame discourse, wherein, she asserts that th...

Consalvo, Mia. 2009. "Convergence and Globalization in the Japanese Videogame Industry".  Cinema Journal.  48 (3): 135-141. Consalvo alludes to the convergence of content across media platforms, and the joining together of media producers and consumers in the production and negotiation of that content – through user-generated content, greater feedback mechanisms for consumers, or fan-driven media campaigns. Her discussion on the role of convergence is divided into two sections: (1) convergence as content moving across platforms; and (2) converged culture. She also derives from Mizuko Ito’s work on media mix, “which includes games as one component of a broader media ecology that includes anime, manga, trading card games, toys, and character merchandise”, as one form of creating a larger narrative within the universe of a certain franchise. In addition to a fictional media universe drawing from a theme or character to create a diversity of content across multiple ...

Styhre, Alexander, Anna Maria Szczepanska, and Björn Remneland-Wikhamn. 2018. "Consecrating video games as cultural artifacts: Intellectual legitimation as a source of industry renewal".  Scandinavian Journal of Management.  34 (1): 22-28. The study gives a detailed account of the video game industry as a knowledge-intensive, profession-based, high-growth industry at the intersection between entertainment, computer sciences, and cultural production, thus requiring what Styhre et’al suggests a consecration of the video games in order to acquire legitimization in order to explore new economic possibilities through new technology and market penetration. Specifically, in the video game industry, the consecration of some video games and some video game genres is intended to leverage the status of the video game production and video games in the eyes of key constituencies, including e.g., high-brow consumers and new entrants into the industry, primarily female presump...

Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game , edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–30. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. In this article, Jenkins examines games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility. He list downs the characteristics of games as defined by current Ludology versus Narratology debates such as: (1) not all games tell stories but they do have narrative aspirations, follows genre entertainment and previous narrative experiences; (2) narrative analysis need not be prescriptive; (3) games should not be reduced to the experience of a story; and (4) if games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories for games as a medium, specifically, is what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. He also lists down the problems and limitations within the current game study discourses, often pointing out how ...

Chapman, Adam. "Privileging Form Over Content: Analyzing Historical Videogames."  Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 2 (June 2012): 42-46. In this article, Chapman argues that it is important to adopt an approach that privileges understanding the video game form (and the varying structures this entails) and its integral role in the production and reception of historical meaning, rather than solely, or even primarily, on the content of specific products as historical narratives. He argues against the usage of historical accuracy as the sole approach to comprehending and analyzing historical video games because it does not further the discourse, and proposes to consider the form instead. Firstly, there is the question of whose truth is portrayed in the video game narrative, which already proposes a lens through which the audience must see, placing a limitation on the veracity of the narrative. Secondly, unlike the majority of historical forms (such as film), vid...

Zeiser, Anne. 2015. “Be Transmedia”.  Transmedia marketing from film and TV to games and digital media. New York [u.a.]: Focal Press. http://www.tandfebooks.com/isbn/9781315880112. In chapter 2 “Be Transmedia”, Zeiser goes back to the fundamentals of transmedia by giving a brief account of its origin, its early conceptions of being multimedia, cross-platform and multi-platform, of its established discourses and definitions by Marsha Kinder ( and Henry Jenkins (2003), the three categories of the transmedia (native content, marketing, technology platforms), and by briefly describing the key elements of transmedia storytelling (world-building, characterization, and backstory and exposition) as laid out by transmedia writer and game designer, Andrea Philips. In doing so, Zeiser creates a framework in which to approach transmedia, whether as a content creator, a marketer, a consumer, or a researcher.

Steinberg, Marc. 2012.  Anime's media mix: franchising toys and characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. In this book, Steinberg introduces Anime’s Media Mix which proposes to analyze the interaction of media forms and consuming subjects by situating the emergence of the anime system in the context of media transformations (the systematization of the media mix); cultural shifts (rise of post-Fordism and its consumer culture); and the continuous serial consumption of transmedia worlds that develops out of these. It offers a different point view of transmedia movement as it presents the longer history of the media mix and suggests that it cannot be thought of apart from the media phenomenon that garnered Japan fame and acclaim in recent decades: through anime. Specifically, three concepts explored in this book will provide significant foundations for discussion within my research: (1) Character merchandising, to which Steinberg defines within th...

Jenkins, Henry. "Transmedia Storytelling."  MIT Technology Reviews , January 15, 2003.  https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/. In this article, Jenkins introduces what he terms as “transmedia storytelling” within the game industry and design, that situates the growing connection between different media channels in creating an overarching narrative that transcends the initial boundaries of a specific platform. He states that there is a creation of new narratives, expanding on the current, exploring on the unknown, and even testing the pre-established or possibly contesting against it. In discussing this further, Jenkins lists current limitations and difficulties in transmedia entertainment, specifically, the lack of the media industry to do collaborative productions that compel transmedia experience – that is, there is a need of a new model for co-creation, rather than adaptation-of content that crosses media. In response, Jenkins prop...

The World of Economic Transactions and Power-relationships: Cafes and Cafe Waitresses in the late 1920s Japan (February 8, 2019) According to Miriam Silverberg, the cafe has become a symbol of Japan’s modernity, not in the same sense as it was a reaction to the bourgeois culture of the Western context (or the feudal society of old Japan), but that it was the site most often associated with the experiences characteristic of the new age, which was defined by a series of ‘vanguard’ gestures that had ostensibly broken away from any traditional framework (1998, 208-209). One good example is how Japanese commentators agree that this so called Japanese modernity was very much aware of the presence of women, thus, the images of the cafe waitresses, along with the vibrating presence of the modern girl, were placed front and center (Ibid, 210). The world of cafes and cafe waitresses, in the context of the late 1920’s Japan, is one of economic transaction and power relationshi...