Japan Pop!: Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture

SYNOPSIS

This book looks at various forms of Japanese popular culture: pop song, jazz, enka (a popular ballad genre of 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 product and reflection of society, the book is also about Japan—about Japan's similarities and differences with the rest of the world, and about how Japan is changing. Relations between the sexes, shifting gender roles; social and family life conditions; Japan's cultural identity; and views on love, work, duty, dreams, war and peace, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death—all of these are cast in a revealing light by Japanese pop culture as captured in this book.

The authors are all specialists in their subjects, and each chapter is academically sound, intriguing, and accessibly written. In addition to describing and analyzing the authors also give the reader a direct taste of Japan's pop culture via the presentation of story plots, character profiles, song lyrics, manga (comics) samples, photographs, and other visuals, and the thoughts and words of Japan pop's artists, creators, and fans. This book is visually enhanced by 32 pages of magna plus 50 additional photos, illustrations, and shorter comic samples.

FROM THE CRITICS

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