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By Anne Allison, Gary Cross
From sushi and karaoke to martial arts and technoware, the forex of made-in-Japan cultural items has skyrocketed within the international market up to now decade. The globalization of eastern “cool” is led by way of adolescence items: games, manga (comic books), anime (animation), and adorable characters that experience fostered child crazes from Hong Kong to Canada. reading the crossover site visitors among Japan and the USA, Millennial Monsters explores the worldwide acclaim for jap early life items at the present time whereas it questions the makeup of the fantasies and the capitalistic stipulations of the play concerned. Arguing that a part of the allure of such dream worlds is the polymorphous perversity with which they scramble identification and personality, the writer lines the postindustrial milieux from which such fantasies have arisen in postwar Japan and been popularly acquired within the usa.
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Extra info for Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination
Example text
My time frame runs from the year 1993, when the Japan-based Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (a live- 16 / ENCHANTED COMMODITIES action television show about teenagers who morph into superheroes to save the world, and humanity, from destruction) was successfully launched (but heavily Americanized) in the United States and elsewhere, to 2000, a pinnacle year following Japan’s sensational successes with the Pokémon craze (a media-mix empire of Game Boy game, comic, cartoon, movies, cards, and toy merchandise structured as a virtual world with hordes of pocket monsters that players try to discover, catch, and collect).
Kids ENCHANTED COMMODITIES / 31 have continually told me that, in this realm of play, they feel a certain sense of control and also comfort: that this space is their own—to generate pets, friends, or card decks but also to destroy and rearrange as they see fit. This, too, then, is a form of mimetic play where youth explore the world by creatively replaying it—by duplicating breakdown (with potentially destructive, even violent, implications) but also by producing connections. It is in the latter I see the seeds of a dialectical fairy scene: the potential for postindustrial play technologies to give back to youth that capacity for experience that late-stage capitalism threatens to take away.
In this way, playing with a Japanese fantasy good both replicates and reproduces the very conditions of postindustrial capitalism (fragmentation, speed, flux, flexibility), with its effects on subjectivity (anxiety, atomism, and alienation). Yet there is another side to this frenzied addiction. As I was told often (by children, parents, marketers, child experts, and scholars of play) in the course of fieldwork for this project, the sensation that is also produced in the course of immersion in a Japanese playscape like Sailor Moon or tamagotchi is one of titillation, mastery, and abundance.