Japanese Media Mix Gender Dynamics: Pokemon vs. YuGiOh& Hamtaro

In her article “The Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix”, Mizuko Ito takes an interesting position of analyzing the gendering seen in gaming culture and animated content among children in Japan. She talks a lot about “media mix”, which is not a term I had heard of before, but it simply means the varied products through which consumers can interact with a franchise. This concept is present in America, but is particularly prominent in Japan (Ito 2).  For example, Pokemon would be a strong example of this concept, as the Pokemon franchise spans over 60 separate series of comic books, over 800 TV episodes, 17 movies, nearly 70 video games on both handheld and console platforms, a wildly popular trading card game, and countless other products, from toys to candy to apparel and stationary. She talks about how Japan is unusual in that the serialized comic books or まんが(manga) are often at the center of a given mix, introducing the characters and developing long narratives that are eventually translated into video games(2).

            She next explores kawaii and otaku cultures. These are sort of equal but opposite in my reading. Kawaii, meaning cute, products seem marketed towards young girls, but in reality people of all ages and genders consume these items (3). I have pictures from Japan of a zoo shuttle painted to look like an enormous panda (complete with winking headlights and a bow),  smiley faces on every food items imaginable, and kitties doodled on my Starbucks cup by the barista to say thank you.  Even a tower I went to visit had a cute-ified cartoon version of itself posted all around — kawaii culture is everywhere. Otaku culture is a similar obsession, but more associated with video games and technical knowledge. It is acceptable for a boy to be this deeply interested in media, but for a girl it is seen as a bit unusual, unless they draw manga.

            In general, Ito presents facts on a different gender culture from America’s, not her opinions on it (as she warns in the beginning of the article). The body of her research was comparing the followings of Hamtaro (a typically girly media mix) and YuGiOh (a typically boyish media mix). She found that there was crossover in each, with boys showing interest in Hamtaro and every student in a third grade class she surveyed owning YuGiOh cards, but that neither reached the level of integration that Pokemon had as far as incorporating networked game play, simultaneous story lines, and creating Pokemon themselves that widely appealed to both boys and girls. I think the success of Pokemon, as previously illustrated by how far reaching the series is, is indeed due to its appeal to not only just young girls and boys, but really people of all ages. To be honest, I bought myself a 3DS this summer so that I could play the new Pokemon games, and I’m sure I’m not the only one in the class, nor am I by far the oldest active Pokemon player. I would challenge anyone in the comments to think of an American franchise that has been quite as popular or widespread. , I agree with the one opinion Ito does share: by creating an adventure series with both cute and tough monsters, games that you could eventually play as a boy or a girl character, and spreading their fingers as far as possible into all forms of media, Pokemon really has come to exemplify what all producers should strive for when creating a show for maximum popularity. (Just don’t ask what I think about the last 300 or so Pokemon.)

Pretty Sailor Suited Soldier

In Anne Allison’s “Fierce Flesh,” she discusses the powerful and feminine relationship in Sailor Moon: the Sailors are fierce action heroines as well as a spectacles of flesh.

Sailor Moon represented a new model in anime, “fashion action” (129). While there are action elements in the show, as seen through Usagi’s fight with Morga in the pilot episode, the world is one entrenched in fashion and other “feminine” delights. Usagi’s transformation sequence makes her more powerful and able to defeat deadly, dangerous monsters. For her to get to that point of power, the narrative is stopped in order for Usagi’s to morph. As Allison remarks, “the process is more of a ‘makeover’ than a ‘power-up,’” since Usagi turns sparkly, pink, adorned with jewels, and wears an overly feminine outfit (138). The fashion and action within Sailor Moon cannot be separated; it is inherently linked to the world and how the heroine behaves.

Usagi represents a strong link between fashion, and by extension femininity, and power. Allison notes fantasy within fashion action. Young girls who watch Sailor Moon want “to be powerful yet selfish…in indulging one’s earthy desires” (135). This sentiment is the same as Usagi’s proclamation against the evil Morga: “For Love and Justice, the pretty sailor suited soldier Sailor Moon! In the name of the moon I will punish you!” Usagi is combining both qualities, to be selfish and earthly while having a sense of goodness and justice. Love and justice are uttered in the same breath, equating the two, and Usagi is as quick to point out she is pretty as she is to point out being punishing.

This power usually reserved for masculine heroes being awarded to female characters performing ultra-femininity can be empowering, but it has negative connotations as well. Empowerment is secondary to marketing and merchandise sales. In the construction of the fashion action genre, boy action shows were “adapted” to girls (131), and in this case, adaption meant fashion and feminine traits such as ditziness, romance problems, and shopping. Power itself is still coded as masculine unless properly dressed up in enough glitter and tulle. Instead of increasing the market and audience of Power Rangers, they created a “girl” version to bring in girl consumers. Gender roles and gender dynamic are not being investigated or challenged, just capitalized on to create a new product. The fetishization and sexualized merchandise of Sailor Moon characters is an extension of this. Knowing that the morphing sequence and outfit is skimpier and more sexualized, it can be co-opted to bring in sales from adult men.

Cuteness vs. Adulthood in Japan

In Cuties in Japan, Sharon Kinsella explores the ideologies and practices of ‘cuteness’ in Japan. Since the 1980s, Kawaii style has become a dominant aspect of Japanese culture that is ubiquitous in everyday life, impacting the ways Japanese populations–especially young women–dress, eat, write, and affiliate within civic life. Kawaii, connotes childlike fashion, a “style which is infantile and delicate at the same time as being pretty” that values not only surrounding oneself with ‘cute things’, but also is “about ‘becoming’ the cute object itself” (Kinsellsa 220, 237).

           

            Kinsella explains that this interest in cuteness reflects a rebellion by Japanese youth against the mainstream principles of self-sacrifice, work ethic, and responsibility that had allowed for Japan’s rapid redevelopment after World War II. To teenagers and young adults, the age groups most interested in cute fashion, impending adulthood implies the loss of personal identity– the “cover up of their real selves and…emotions under a layer of artifice” (Kinsella 240). Further, maturity and civic life, are seen not as avenues for freedom of action, but rather as the defined by cooperation, compromise, obligation, and social responsibility that render adulthood oppressive and un-fun (Kinsella 243). This dreariness is especially apparent to young women who will no longer be able to live independently, free from other’s desires, once she marries and starts a family.

           

            Thus, in startling contrast to the bleakness of adulthood, Japanese youth organically developed Kawaii style. Instead of worrying about harsh family and work responsibilities, cute fashion acts as outlet for “an escape from reality” through “cuteness, nostalgia, foreignness, romance, fantasy, and science fiction” (Kinsella 252). Not only does Japanese cuteness create an existence apart from everyday social pressures, but it is also based on an idealized childhood that never truly existed. “Cute childlike behavior [is] considered genuine and pure”, a reassertion of innocence, even as it is an artifice–“a style derived from adults pretending to be childlike” (Kinsella 240). Nevertheless, Kawaii style is a genuine expression of an alternative identity at odds with mainstream Japanese culture.

            Yet, as detailed by Kinsella and as I observed in Japan this summer, cuteness is everywhere in Japan and has become a key aspect of Japan’s hyper-consumerist culture. Almost every product and company has an associated cartoon. Many young women fully embrace the Victorian, virginal-child look (as sold at this store: http://shop.milk-inc.com), and the general aesthetic of women’s fashion is overtly feminine, reminiscent of school uniforms, pastely, and very frilly. Further, cuteness is a defining aspect of Japanese pop (idol) bands (such as Moiromo Clover Z: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PpyfM3nwTY), its mixed media industry, and Japan’s exports abroad (such as http://morninggloryus.com). Thus Kawaii sytle, an identity the purports to counter Japanese adulthood, has become a key proponent of consumerism allowed by work and productivity in that adult world.

            In relation to our class, there exists another tension within Kawaii style that sticks out to me. While cuteness has been embraced as an identity meant to differentiate oneself from a life restricted by responsibilities, it also entails a disempowering message. According to cute culture, “young people become popular” because of “their apparent weakness, dependence, and inability, rather than because of strengths and capabilities” (Kinsella 237). More than implying cuteness, the word Kawaii also refers to pitifulness, vulnerability, and powerlessness. By idealizing these attributes, Japanese cute culture does more than relinquish unwanted responsibility–it celebrates young women’s submissiveness and child-like dependence in a society where women are already unequal (http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201310260017).  Based on Kinsella’s reading and the other articles for this week, do you guys think that Japanese youth culture simply continues gender inequality? Or, by highlighting independence and freedom removed from work responsibilities, it actually allows for young women to create their own, alternative identities?

Virginal Astronauts

Sobchak explores the "Virginity of Astronauts" by first defining the lens through which sexuality - or the lackthereof - is viewed in science fiction films. Her argument is that sexuality is denied to female characters in science fiction movies, essentially creating a sameness of their bodies to those of the male characters. The argument that this is a sustained theme as opposed to one indicative of a certain time period - her example is the 1950s - is a compelling one.

"The deemphasis on human female sexuality in the science fiction film, then, is not limited to a particular period, but rather seems particular to the genre" (45). Her contextual example of Marilyn Monroe makes that point all the more valid. One could argue that the hallmark domesticity and perceieved cultural roles of women in the 1950s are the reason for this depiction in science fiction films yet the pattern plays out with characters like Princess Leia and Ripley in Alien, a character so thoroughly non-feminine that her role was initially written as a male.

Through this elimination of any resemblance to real human sexuality, Sobchak arrives at the thesis of the virginal astronaut - "a sign of penetration and impregnation without biology, without sex and without the opposite, different sex" (48). The reason presented for this avoidance of overt sexuality is that female sexuality would pose a direct threat to the male interaction with technology, a departure from various interstellar missions. This form of repression as Sobchak deems it, serves the greater narrative of displacing female sexuality to that of an alien, mutant or space itself. It's interesting to consider Alien in this regard as the physical act of implanting or impregnating the people onboard the vessel with alien eggs is overtly sexual, yet the humans themselves are not active participants in this sexuality. It is only towards the very end of the film that the viewer gets any glimpse of Ripley as a female human - an affectation that is jarring as Sobchak describes it. I'm interested in discussing what implications this has for both science fiction narrative structure and the roles that women can occupy in films. Someone in class astutely mentioned the character Alice Eve plays in Star Trek into Darkness, one which is overtly sexualized. Does this mark a shift in science fiction film portrayals or simply another version of the same repression? Has this theory held completely or is there a new distinction female characters have in modern science fiction films?

Sobchack's female identity and Ripley

The main argument of Sobchack’s article The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film claims that both men and women in science fiction films (with a particular focus on those set in space) are of an asexual nature. Little time is given to depicting romantic or sexual relationships of any kind – instead, the men and women of science fiction are essentially covered up to give them very similar bodily looks. I was intrigued by Sobchack’s characterization of men in sci-fi films as idealized intrepid explorers who, in their adventures, attempt to break free from biology and dependence on what she several times refers to as the “Mother” or the “Other”. She essentially conflates these biological entities with the female persona in general. However, this brings me to one of my issues with Sobchack’s argument, and the one that I want to explore: the concept that “woman”, as a whole, essentially always means the same thing in film.

            When trying to theorize what a traditional “woman” in a science-fiction film would be like, she places Marilyn Monroe in her heyday into this role. What results from this is a very Mulvey-esque argument that sexual females, as they are often portrayed in film, would be incompatible with the genre, which is not only narratively driven, but tends to have technical focuses on science and technology which sometimes take a good deal of explanation in order to seem natural in that world. Naturally, all Marilyn Monroe (or any sexual woman) would do in this environment is arrest the ultimately more important narrative with her spectacle. I was often unclear as I was reading whether Sobchack was taking the viewpoint of films that have portrayed women, or her own, but it seemed to me that all this argument showed was that she couldn’t imagine a sexual female in a sci-fi movie in any other way than, say, Barbarella.

            This was especially illustrated for me in her passage about Ripley from Alien. Her claim is that Ripley was essentially sexless – more pointedly, not a woman – for the majority of the movie, until the very end where she encounters the alien one-on-one, scantily clad. Sobchack claims that Ripley is now “an irrational, potent, sexual object – a woman”. However, there is no difference in Ripley, character-wise, between how she is at the end and how she is for the rest of the movie. Her screams, her methodical singing, then carefully placing herself in the space suit and blasting the alien out of the ship – they are all rational and consistent with her character. So really, what is it that Sobchack is saying makes a woman a woman – presentation of her body parts? There was nothing about Ripley that didn’t make her woman-like before this point.

Slash Writers, T'Pring and Feminism

In “NASA/Trek,” Penley discusses slash fiction in relation to Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. The slash fiction was written almost exclusively by women and was homoerotic in nature. Because science fiction is seen as an extremely masculine and non-sexual genre, the creation of these slash stories rely on the undertones and implications the viewers picked up in their watching of the show. I agree with Penley that the slash fiction writers were feminist writers. Though they were writing about a male/male relationship, these women reinvent masculinity in pursuit of sexual equality. Their fiction works under the assumption that “the idea of sexual equality, which will necessarily require a renovated masculinity, is taking a long time to become a lived reality and is hard to imagine, much less write” (Penley, 127). For these women, the possibility of sexual equality is not a part of their personal realities and is much easier to conceive in a futuristic setting. By writing about Kirk and Spock, who live in the distant future, these women are able to create a world where masculinity does not rule and “yielding phallic power does not result in psychic castration or a demand to be extravagantly praised for having relinquished that power” (Penley, 128). I thought that this was a really interesting and innovative way for the women to encourage sexual equality without alienating men, as feminists in the 70’s were prone to doing. This brought to mind Emma Watson’s recent speech regarding the He for She campaign with the UN, where she invites men to join in the feminist movement because they too are inhibited by gender norms (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-iFl4qhBsE).

This rewriting of Star Trek allows for women to take charge of the show in a way that they otherwise would be unable to. They create their own agency in a world that is otherwise not extremely welcoming. The way that women created their own means of participating in the show actually brought to mind T’Pring’s actions in the episode of Star Trek we watched. I found the Vulcan ceremony to be misogynistic and primitive. Spock basically already had possession of T’Pring, and there was really not much she could do about it. The way she handles the situation, though, shows how she could find leverage even in a situation that seemed to work against her. By choosing Kirk as her champion, she found a situation in which she would always get to be with Stonn, the man she truly wanted to be with. Her ability to take charge of a situation in which she had very little power paralleled the women slash fiction writers to me. They did not participate in the creation of the show and there were very few female characters with which they could identify (and the female characters in the show were in the periphery and not very powerful), yet they were able to find a way to not only partake more fully in the show and its story, but also identify with the male characters.