Japanese pop culture has become famous all over the world, and for good reason. Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes it’s beautiful, and sometimes it’s just plain wacky. I’ve been taking a pop culture class while studying at Kansai Gaidai, and we’ve been given many opportunities to learn about and experience many elements of Japanese pop culture first hand.
One of the experiences that I had this week was at a doujinshi festival. Doujinshi are amateur productions, usually comic books of some kind, that aren’t owned by any publishers. These can range from original works to parodies of existing works. For example, fans can take two characters from an existing series and write a comic book about them being in a relationship, and they can sell these comics at festivals (because the owners of the series see it as free publicity).
The venue took up three rooms at Intex Osaka (a large convention center). In the first room, people dressed up as their favorite characters and socialized with each other. In the second and third room, there were rows of booths set up with doujinshi of all kind, and the third room also included a special closed-off area dedicated to people in costume. Costumed people, called “cosplayers” (costume players), were required to only have their pictures taken in these designated area so that other people at the festival would not be unwillingly exposed in a photograph. Also, unlike in America where cosplayers can be seen outside of convention centers, these people are forbidden to wear their costumes anywhere except for at the venue. So, on the train home, I saw several very normal looking people who would be completely unsuspected, except for the fact that I could see the luggage they carried which indicated that they had been in costume only moments before.
Around the same time, I did a presentation on a cultural phenomenon called “otaku”. The closest English equivalent would be “nerd”, although it has a far more extreme meaning in Japan. Otaku become so obsessed with a certain interest (anime, computer games, weapons, etc.) that they memorize as much data about it as possible and often disengage almost completely from reality. Some otaku have huge collections that crowd their rooms, but they never intend to do anything with their collection besides have it. They are social outcasts to the Japanese people who believe that otaku live in fantasy rather than reality.
Learning about Japanese pop culture has helped me understand many aspects of regular culture as well, and helps me compare my own culture with theirs in very interesting ways. How do fans in different countries express themselves? How far do they go to enjoy the fantasy? How do they deviate from societal norms and how is that perceived by “regular” people? How does that differ from the way we interact with pop culture?
Besides that experience, I’ve been learning and speaking more Japanese, and I’ve started to pick up on the Kansai dialect. Learning a high context language like Japanese is very difficult when you expect concrete grammar, but it can be a bit refreshing at times to see how interpretive Japanese can really be.
Experiencing language, regular culture, and pop culture altogether has really helped me get a better feel for what Japan is like. All of these things and many more are what create the behaviors of certain groups of people, and now I’m able to analyze myself and the actions of others in a much more knowledgeable way, which means that my goal of experiencing and learning about a new culture has been a success.
