First book of its kind to examine images of women in Japanese consumerism. Explores a variety of media targeted at women - in particular magazines, but also television, popular literature and consumer trends. Covers visual and print media.

Examining images of women in Japanese consumerism, this book explores a variety of media targeted at women - in particular magazines, but also television, popular literature and consumer trends.

This is a fascinating look at various forms of Japanese popular culture: pop song, jazz, enka (a popular form of ballad genre music), karaoke, comics, animated cartoons, video games, television dramas, films, and idols -- teenage singers and actors. As pop culture not only entertains but is also a reflection of society, the book is also about Japan itself -- its similarities and differences with the rest of the world, and how Japan is changing. Relations between the sexes, shifting gender roles, social and family life, Japan's cultural identity, and views on love, work, duty, dreams, war and peace, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death -- all are cast in a revealing light by Japanese pop culture as presented in this book. The authors are all specialists on their subjects, and in addition to analyzing Japan's pop culture they give the reader a direct taste through the presentation of story plots, character profiles, song lyrics, manga (comics) samples, photographs and other visuals, as well as the thoughts and words of Japan pop's artists, creators and fans. The book features 32 pages of manga plus 50 additional photos, illustrations, and shorter comic samples.

This anthology has a cultural focus and addresses issues of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.

DIVA study of the "modern" woman in Japan before World War II./div

This Companion is a comprehensive examination of the varied ways in which gender issues manifest throughout culture in Japan, using a range of international perspectives to examine private and public constructions of identity, as well as gender- and sexuality-inflected cultural production. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, with chapters drawing from a range of perspectives, fields, and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, politics, and sociology. This reflects the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the dual focal points of this volume—gender and culture—and the ways in which these themes infuse a range of disciplines and subfields. In this volume, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, and Mark Pendleton have brought together an essential guide to experiences of gender in Japanese culture today—perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in Japan, culture, gender studies, and beyond.