Globalizing the regional, regionalizing the global: Mass culture and Asianism in the age of late capital

Public Culture

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 233-257

  Ching, Leo ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0034408793     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-12-1-233     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. For historical perspective on Asianism, see J. Victor Koschmann, "Asianism's Ambivalent Legacy," in Network Power: Japan and Asia, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 83-110; and the seminal article published in 1963 by Takeuchi Yoshimi, collected in Nihon to ajia [Japan and Asia] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobô, 1993).
2. For historical perspective on Asianism, see J. Victor Koschmann, "Asianism's Ambivalent Legacy," in Network Power: Japan and Asia, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 83-110; and the seminal article published in 1963 by Takeuchi Yoshimi, collected in Nihon to ajia [Japan and Asia] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobô, 1993).
3. Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1970), 244.
4. See my "Yellow Skin White Mask: Class and Identification in Japanese Colonial Discourse," in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1998).
5. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), 322.
6. Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 51.
7. Andrew Gamble and Anthony Payne, eds., Regionalism and World Order (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
8. Malcolm Waters, Globalization (London: Routledge, 1995).
9. Fredric Jameson, for instance, has identified the increasingly interpenetrating relationship between the economic and the cultural - what he calls "the becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural" - as the primary features that characterize what is now widely known as postmodernity. See Fredric Jameson, "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue," in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 54-77.
10. The resort to "culturalist" explanations for the rise of Asia is, needless to say, the working of both Eurocentrism and self-Orientalism, which are two sides of the same essentialist coin. The various "miracles" attributed to the Asian "tigers," "dragons," and "flying geese" only serve to accentuate the "natural" development of capitalism in the West. The recent collapse of some Asian economies is explained as the fall of "crony capitalisms" that are merely bad copies of the original Euro-American model. Interestingly, the various revivals of Confucianism that have explained the rise of Asian economies on cultural and philosophical grounds are, in the midst of the worsening economic condition, completely silent. Here, "Eurocentrism" and "self-Orientalism" are understood as intellectual positions and not ontological or geographical entities.
11. Karatini Kôjin, "Senzen" no shikô [Considering "prewar"] (Tokyo: Bungei shunshû, 1994), 14.
12. Iwai, Katsuhiko, Shihonshugi wo kataru [Talking about capitalism] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1994).
13. Marx writes: "The trading peoples of old existed like the gods of Epicurus in the intermundia, or like the Jews in the pores of Polish society. The trade of the first independent and highly developed trading cities and peoples, as a pure carrying trade, rested on the barbarism of the producing peoples between whom they acted as intermediaries." Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981), 447-48.
14. Iwai, Shihonshugi wo kataru, 20.
15. Iwai, Shihonshugi wo kataru, 29.
16. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), chap. 4, "The General Formula for Capital."
17. Etienne Balihar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology" in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 89.
18. Balibar, "The Nation Form," 89.
19. Balibar, "The Nation Form," 89.
20. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121-27.
21. For a cogent analysis and critique of the Asia-Pacific idea see Arif Dirlik, ed., What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).
22. Ironically, once deemed inconsistent with capitalist modernization, Confucianism has been recasts as a prime mover of capitalist development.
23. Bruce Cumings, "Rimspeak; or, The Discourse of the 'Pacific Rim,'" in Dirlik, What Is in a Rim?, 42.
24. Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).
25. Mike Featherstone, "Global Culture: An Introduction," in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 1.
26. Dirlik, After the Revolution, 62.
27. Jameson, "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue," 67.
28. The phrase is taken from Saya S. Shiraishi, "Japan's Soft Power: Doraemon Goes Overseas," in Katzenstein and Shiraishi, Network Power: Japan and Asia, 234-72.
29. Collected in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27-47.
30. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 32.
31. See, for example, Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North (New York: Verso, 1997).
32. Bruce Cumings, "Japan and Northeast Asia," in Katzenstein and Shiraishi, Network Power: Japan and Asia, 138.
33. For a discussion of the theory of culture in late capitalism see Kenneth Surin, "On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture," South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (1995): 1179-99.
34. Oshin was first aired in Japan from April 1983 to March 1984 and commanded a staggering 60 percent of the daytime television audience. It was first broadcast in Singapore in 1984, again with tremendous success. Over the subsequent ten years, it was shown in more than forty countries including Belgium, Australia, and Mexico. In Indonesia, it is estimated that 65 percent of the population watched the broadcast of Oshin, and it garnered astonishing 89.9 and 82 percent audience ratings in Beijing and Iran respectively. In Taiwan, with the removal of the ban on Japanese music and television programming in 1994, Oshin became an instant hit. Doraemon was created as a children's comic book character in 1970 by Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko, who shared the penname Fujio Fujiko. The comic was animated for television in 1978 and began broadcasting outside of Japan in the 1980s, mainly in Asian countries but also in Italy, Spain, Russia, Brazil and other Latin American countries, and in the Middle East.
35. Tsubouchi Takahiko, "Look East Policy and Oshin," http://www.iijnet.or.jp/asia/database/ mw 9510_1txt (1997).
36. Sakurai Tetsuo, "Doraemon toiu 'hunanjô'" [Doraemon as "refuge"], Ryûkyû Shimpô, 29 September 1996, 17.
37. Ozaki Hotsuki, Kindai bungaku no shôkôn [The scar of modern literature] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1991), 139.
38. Karatani, "The Discursive Space of Modern Japan," in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, a special issue of boundary 2, 18(3): 204.
39. Okakura writes of Japan's privileged status: "The history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals - the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sandripple as it beat against the national consciousness" (The Ideals of the East, 8).
40. Karatani, "The Discursive Space of Modern Japan," 204.
41. Iwabuchi Kôichi, "In Dialogue with 'Pop Asia': Japan's Consumption of 'Asia' Popular Culture" (paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Boston, 1999).
42. Yoon Keun-cha, Nihon kokuminron: kindai nihon no aidentiti [On Japan and citizenship: The identity of modern Japan] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobô, 1997).
43. Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," in Culture, Globalization, and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 27.
44. Quoted in Hannah Beech, "Will Japan's Top Hit Maker Become Asia's Too?," Time, 3 May 1999, 33