Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, eds. Media Theory in Japan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. 440 pp.
Review by Michael Raine
20 June 2018
This groundbreaking collection is a welcome contribution to recent writing that focuses on Japan not only as an object of study but as a location of theory. It supplements existing work on Japanese media and media history by taking a strikingly broad approach to media theory as "any sustained engagement with media such that it produces new ways of knowing this media" (p. 13). This approach incorporates literary criticism, architecture, magazine columns, advertising discourse, and art practice as forms of media theory. The editors have also taken advantage of a lull in the chronology of “new” media to pay renewed attention to space: Japan’s location outside the western world. Inverting Friedrich Kittler’s (in)famous epigram that “media determine our situation,” they propose that “the situation of more or less temporally and spatially bounded media cultures and ecologies determines or informs media theory” (p. 7).[1]
Media Theory in Japan is not the first intersection of Japanese media with putatively Western theory in English language scholarship. The earliest sustained writing in English on Japanese media used non-Marxist communication studies to address mass media and popular culture as part of a cold-war era attempt to understand America’s non-Western ally in the language of “modernization theory.”[2] After the success of the Japanese economic miracle, another series of books attempted to account for, or debunk, Japan’s status as an always-already postmodern country characterized by a highly developed media culture.[3] The claim of this volume seems less the priority of Japanese media theory (though the chapters show it was often remarkably prescient), nor that existing Euro-American theory should be tested against non-Western examples, but something more restorative: that media theory should be deprovincialized to produce a “more nuanced and less geopolitically centered conception of media theory” (p. 26).
The editors’ informative introduction gives an outline of the history of media theorization in Japan and makes a strong case for considering “theory” outside of the usual academic setting. It argues for studying the performative as well as constative dimensions of media theory as a practice of “creolization” (p. 11) that incorporates art and criticism into the usual stream of abstract thought and, crucially, engages with the work of women, who have been structurally excluded from the Japanese academy. This self-awareness extends to what this volume slights: the role of media in Japanese colonialism; the importance of the Science of Thought (Shiso no kagaku) group to the theorization of popular media; contemporary process philosophies of media; trans-Asian perspectives; and media theories of cinema and sound. Of course, it is not possible for a single volume to cover every aspect of this rich topic, but here the editors lay down a clear roadmap that any future volume could follow. Perhaps most surprisingly, although the editors give a brief historical survey of academic media studies in Japan, there is no chapter that traces that history in more detail or focuses on any major figures in that tradition. Arguing that “the rejection of familiar modes of legitimation is key to (re)narrating the history of media theory,” the editors focus instead on the often-performative theories of public intellectuals such as Nakai Masakazu and Azuma Hiroki (p. 16). To this reader at least, a more detailed picture of the more orthodox history would have been illuminating.
The introduction is just one of three paratexts that supplement the chapters. In addition to the helpful survey provided by the editors, Akira Lippit contributes a brief and incisive commentary that highlights the spatial and temporal complexity of bringing Japan into the field of media theory. He argues that the chapters are overdue “provocations” that undo both “media” and “Japan” and even the preposition “in” by showing how both theory and media history exceed national borders, a trope he terms “déjàponisme” (p. xiv). That preface is bookended by Mark Hansen’s insightful coda, which engages deeply with the chapters and puts into relief the challenge they pose to universal media theory. I will return to Hansen’s afterword after discussing the rest of the volume, which is divided into nonchronological chapters under three section headings: “Communication Technologies,” “Practical Theory,” and “Mediation and Media Theory.”
Part I: Communication Technologies
In chapter 1, “From Film to Television: Early Theories of Television in Japan,” Aaron Gerow reads the discourse on television in Japan at the point it reached critical mass as a social technology at the end of the 1950s. Gerow shows that the arguments of public intellectual Shimizu Ikutarō recapitulated ideas about cinema from the 1930s, when that medium came to dominate Japanese popular culture. That historical amnesia, Gerow argues, stems from a “theory complex” (p. 44) in which arguments made in Japan are occluded by translated theory even among Japanese critics, blinding them to the acuity of prewar evaluations of cinema and television as capitalist media that both made the new mass society visible and offered the potential for a form of critique. Beyond that missed opportunity, the theory complex committed Japanese media theory to a negative evaluation of the postwar televisual everyday as domestic and atomized, as described in US mass communications research, even though television had a more public history in Japan, where lower incomes lent greater importance to public exhibition through “street corner television” sponsored by the first private broadcaster, NTV. That negative political valence given to the everyday missed both the prewar “overcome by modernity” argument that the way out of capitalism was through it, but also the later claims of television practitioners such as Konno Tsutomu that the “asocial” nature of television—isolated in the home—could also be the site of an alienation from official narratives, a “radical non-art” (p. 46) made of fragments of everyday reality that could once again be the basis of a social critique.
In chapter 2, “Architecture as Atmospheric Media: Tange Lab and Cybernetics,” Yuriko Furuhata traces a correlation between Isozaki Arata’s “cybernetic” architectural practice and recent interest on the part of media artists and theorists in media as atmosphere or environment.[4] Isozaki trained in the lab of globally renowned Japanese architect Tange Kenzo and shared his teacher’s interest in the hard and soft systems of circulation that link architected objects into urban environments. He went beyond Tange’s “structural” interest in circulation networks into the more “symbolic” aspects of cities as media environments—it is no surprise that Isozaki was a member of the media arts collective Group Environment in the 1960s, nor that he was involved in the planning of Expo ’70 in Osaka. This chapter makes an important argument for an early recognition in Japan of media as environment and environment as medium, in both architecture and intermedia arts. Sometimes Furuhata’s reliance on argument by “affinity” (p. 73) seems itself rather atmospheric: it focuses less on Isozaki’s programmatic statements than on establishing homologies among similar practices, tracing a lineage from Gotō Shinpei’s colonial planning to the military operations research that led to the efflorescence of cybernetics and systems analysis that Tange studied after World War II.
Both the first two chapters mention an important group of media theorists that, as the editors note, does not have a chapter dedicated to it: the Science of Thought (Shiso no kagaku) group led by Tsurumi Shunsuke (Gotō Shinpei’s grandson) that aimed to democratize intellectual life in postwar Japan by introducing American philosophy and social thought. Members of the group, often returned from study in the US, used American sociology and social psychology to analyze a broad span of popular culture, from everyday expressions to popular songs, and mass media such as film, radio, and television. Because they treat the cold war as the “environment” of postwar media theory, there is perhaps a tendency for the essays to set aside the work of Science of Thought as complicit with US propaganda, though Adam Bronson’s work shows the relation of the group and their sponsors to be more complex.[5] Whatever “ghostly provenance in military operations research” (p. 68) cybernetics may have, it was also an important resource for displacing the centrality of the human subject in the theories of Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Kittler that inform much of the recent turn to “materialist” media theory.[6] Although the Science of Thought group took pragmatism and cybernetics in a different direction, perhaps this would be a good time to explore that alternative line of thought in Japanese media theory.
The other two essays in the “communication technologies” section discuss in more or less detail the work of Azuma Hiroki, a zeronendai (first decade of the twenty first century) critic whose work on media has pioneered new media strategies on the part of public intellectuals in Japan. In chapter 3, “The Media Theory and Media Strategy of Azuma Hiroki, 1997–2003,” Kadobayashi Takeshi traces Azuma’s failed attempt to write a critical theory of Japanese postmodernity to a shift in both his thinking and his media strategy. Kadobayashi detects a contradiction between Azuma’s Deleuzian philosophy of the “database” as a form of invisible control without consent in his more philosophical articles and his relatively positive view of database consumption as a rejection of modernist subjectivity in his Dobutsu suru posutomodan (translated as “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals”).[7] That distinction lies not only at the level of argument but in its mode of expression. By shifting from the high philosophical tone of the earlier work to the relatively straightforward prose of his writing on subculture, Azuma did not simply abandon media theory but performed it in his engagement with the mediated circuits that made him a celebrity commentator on the “otaku culture” of manga, anime, and computer games (p. 81, for instance).
Marilyn Ivy contributed a critical analysis of the media circuits of Japanese publication culture to Postmodernism and Japan, one of the first books in English to recognize how Japan’s economic rise might challenge established understandings of media culture. Ivy’s chapter 4 in this volume, “The InterCommunication Project: Theorizing Media in Japan’s Lost Decades,” is a similarly ironic account of one product of that period; the journal InterCommunication published by the national telephone provider NTT, at one time the most highly capitalized company in the world.[8] Ivy argues that even though it published articles by Azuma Hiroki that Kadobayashi analyzes in his chapter, as well as Azuma’s critique of the media theory published by InterCommunication, in general the journal’s “Nyu Aca” (new academic; see Zahlten’s chapter in this volume) editors resisted the turn toward subculture and held open the possibility of a kind of high modernist, cosmopolitan, gallery-based media theory of “transmission, translation and (inter)communication” with the world beyond Japan (p. 125). In the end, Ivy argues, the journal’s cosmopolitan vision went unrealized: Western scholars still do not read Japanese theorists, even in translation. I would have liked to learn more from the article what theories of media the journal supported, and what Azuma criticized in its pages, but the emphasis on translation is important. I will take up that question again in response to Mark Hansen’s afterword on the space and time of Japan.
Part II: Practical Theory
The second section of the book deals with “practical theory,” theory which combines abstraction with specific media situations, from the introduction of Marshall McLuhan as a kind of advertising guru in the 1960s to the intervention by the feminist artist Rokudenashiko in the meaning and ownership of women’s bodies in the 2010s. In chapter 5, “McLuhan as Prescription Drug: Actionable Theory and Advertising Industries,” Marc Steinberg contrasts media researcher Gotō Kazuhiko’s translation of McLuhan’s constative arguments in Understanding Media with advertising man Takemura Ken’ichi’s more influential “performative” McLuhanism. Gotō’s Japanese title Mediaron (Media Theory) introduced the term, but it was Takemura’s channeling of McLuhan’s media theory as “actionable theory” (p. 131) or “media prophecy” (p. 143) for decision makers in the worlds of TV and advertising that made McLuhan famous in Japan. Steinberg argues that Takemura’s claims were not simply a misreading of McLuhan, a bastardized “TakeMcLuhanism,” but a kind of media event sponsored by two major institutions: the Dentsū advertising agency (the largest in Japan) and the Asahi newspaper group through its broadcasting journal Asahi hōsō. That emphasis on translation and institution is crucial to this volume’s insistence on the situatedness of Japanese media theory, just as the distinction between constative and performative is fundamental to its attention to media theory outside of the academy.
Steinberg argues that Takemura’s (mis)translation of McLuhan attracted criticism in Japan that paradoxically insulated the Canadian from the attacks on his ignorance of social theory leveled at him in the West, most famously by German author and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger.[9] In chapter 6, “The Culture Industries and Media Theory in Japan,” Miryam Sas observes a slightly later missed connection when Enzensberger was invited to Japan for a two-day symposium in 1973 with Japanese art historians, avant-garde artists, activists, critics, and TV producers. Sas argues that the invitation marked a shift in the Japanese New Left from hard-line political opposition (mostly clearly in the bomb throwing and street fighting of the “Battle of Tokyo” in 1969) to a Gramscian “war of position” in the field of culture. In Sas’s reading, although the Japanese participants criticized Enzensberger’s relative optimism that networks of cultural production could reverse the organization of capitalist media, they also reached toward similar strategies of cultural intervention in place of direct political opposition. For example, Nakahira Takuma’s photographs at the Paris Biennale, conceived as disrupting a smooth media landscape, or Tsumura Takashi’s shift to ethnicity and gender as sites of resistance to the Japanese state.
Tsumura Takashi was also one of the first media-aware critics to recognize the importance of new women’s magazines such as An.an and Non.no which, he claims, took over the desire for “transformation” that had energized the Battle of Tokyo protests. In chapter 7, “Girlscape: The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan,” Tomiko Yoda argues that the magazines produced an inwardly-focused “girlscape,” a lifestyle group before it became a demographic, that offered a kind of ambivalent resistance, an “assemblage of maneuvers” (p. 194) against young women’s expected life courses in some ways similar to the “war of position” discussed in the previous chapter. Yoda’s main example is the “Discover Japan” tourist campaign created by Fujioka Wakao at Dentsū that ran in An.an and Non.no. The campaign pioneered a turn to mediatic ambiance that dissolved the object of the advertisement into its mediation. The advertisements drew on the rough and blurred style of the avant-garde Provoke photographic magazine that negated the use of landscape photography used in conventional tourism advertisements. Fujioka was connected to the avant-garde, having arranged performances by Terayama Shūji’s theatre troupe at the Sony Building in the Ginza at the same time that Terayama was debating Enzensberger, while another of Enzensberger’s interlocutors, Nakahira Takuma, was a member of the Provoke group and developed his well-known “landscape theory” in a commentary on the Discover Japan campaign.[10]
Yoda quotes another contributor to this volume, Akihiro Kitada, on the similarity between advertising discourse and the “Nyū Aca” theorists of the 1980s that are the subject of chapter 8, “1980s Nyū Aca: (Non)Media Theory as Romantic Performance,” by Alexander Zahlten. Zahlten argues that the Nyū Aca theorists dissolved their theory in media without developing an explicit media theory. Rather, they took advantage of the highly mediated culture of Japan during its economic bubble to shift from a transmission model of media to an implicit model based on “synchronization” and “performativity” (p. 211). Critics such as Hasumi Shigehiko and, especially, Asada Akira did not explain but demonstrated that the materiality of mediation is constitutive of meaning. Asada, another contributor to the previously mentioned Postmodernism and Japan, edited a journal GS (Gay Science) that published critics, but also copywriters such as Itoi Shigesato and film directors such as Morita Yoshimitsu. In Zahlten’s account the always-already postmodern Japan of the bubble years was in some ways a return of the antirationalist romanticism of the 1930s. In his history of media and media theory in Japan, Zahlten argues for an oscillation between the seriousness and auto-critique of the postwar generation and the generations that came before and after, characterized by cynicism and play.
Nancy Seki was not regarded as a Nyū Aca theorist, but she also performed her media theory through her playfully mediated identity. As Ryoko Misono tells us in chapter 9, “Critical Media Imagination: Nancy Seki’s TV Criticism and the Media Space of the 1980s and 1990s,” Seki wrote TV criticism in various magazines, including a regular column that incorporated commentary alongside a naïve-art “eraser print” (created by cutting and inking a rubber eraser) and a caption. Misono argues that Seki’s articles went beyond entertainment commentary to a kind of pedagogical media literacy campaign, or even a theory of televisual mediation in Japan. Her incisive comments, and especially the captions to the eraser prints, exposed the gender biases of televisual celebrity in Japan even as Seki herself assumed a celebrity persona. Misono traces that awareness to Seki’s own history growing up in the Japanese provinces but within a media culture nationalized by entertainment magazines distributed through the postal system, working at an advertising industry magazine during the media turn described by Yoda, and living as an outsider to the conventional sexual embodiment of Japanese women. Misono argues that Seki’s critical practice exposed not celebrities but the “structure of the media as an information network” (p. 248) subordinated to the state, making a case for understanding even the eraser print as a form of media theory.
Anne McKnight makes a similar claim for feminist art as a site of media-theoretical practice in chapter 10, “At the Source (Code): Obscenity and Modularity in Rokudenashiko’s Media Activism.” She argues that the Japanese artist Igarashi Megumi, known as Rokudenashiko (something like “good-for-nothing girl”), takes advantage of the tendency of technically reproducible digital media to produce modular series by creating and transmitting data that represent a three-dimensional image of her genitals in the whimsical form of a landscape or a boat, for example. Prosecuted several times for obscenity, Rokudenashiko first documented her struggles in a protest manga but then turned to more “cute” publicity strategies to expose this policing of even immaterial representations of women’s bodies. Tracing a history of antagonism in Japan between “women’s lib” and mainstream media, as well as “theory” (characterized as male), McKnight argues that the data for the 3-D models is a medium that requires processing to become an object, and that the development of Rokudenashiko’s media strategy is a performative media theory. This “low theory” (p. 253) reflects not only on technical media but on the use of women’s bodies as a kind of medium to produce economic growth in Abenomics (Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzō’s policies to boost GNP by increasing women’s employment), and challenges women to take back that sovereignty.
Part III. Mediation and Media Theory
Most books on media theory would begin with, and perhaps only include, this section. The articles deal with individual scholars, often attached to universities, well-versed in European philosophy and making abstract claims about contemporary media. It is a measure of the editors’ commitment to the performative over the constative and to undoing academic gatekeeping in Japan that they leave this section until last. Even here, the subjects are somewhat tangential to a conventional understanding of media theory: Nakai Masakazu was a left-wing associate of the Kyoto school, which is usually understood as concerned with Buddhist ideas of absolute nothingness; Kobayashi Hideo was a literary critic; and Azuma Hiroki could perhaps be more easily described as a social commentator or media celebrity than as a media theorist.
As a leading member of a younger generation of media theorists, Kitada Akihiro would be the subject of a chapter in a more conventional book. Here, in chapter 11, “An Assault on ‘Meaning’: On Nakai Masakazu’s concept of ‘Mediation’,” Kitada traces how this left-wing aesthetician understood media in the 1930s, when radio, sound film, and electrically recorded records first permeated urban culture in Japan. Nakai, like Walter Benjamin, steered between the “machine romanticism” of futurists and similar movements and the “alienation discourse” (p. 287) of insecure intellectuals who rejected technology altogether. A cinephile and a close reader of German philosophy and sociology, Nakai understood film not as a Medium (a vehicle for messages) but as a Mittel (a matrix for experience) in which audiences could achieve a collective experience not as a readymade community but as its insufficient precursor in the “common labor” of interpretation. Kitada points out that this distinction between abstract Medium and experiential Mittel—and between a reductive idea of achieved community and the process of it coming into being through shared activity—helps distinguish a number of influential theoretical positions, from apparatus theory to cultural studies and McLuhan-style media extension theories, as well as the “anthropological materialism” (p. 298) that characterized Benjamin and Nakai.
Nakai was a member of what Fabian Schäfer calls the “Kyoto school left wing” (307). In chapter 12, “Much Ado about ‘Nothing’: The Kyoto School as ‘Media Philosophy,’“ Schäfer argues that the members of the school, especially its progressive wing, were centrally concerned with “mediation.” Tosaka Jun’s philosophy of time, for example, makes of the “everyday” a materialist mediation between past and present, rejecting both Marxist teleology and Kyoto School founder Nishida Kitarō’s idealist metaphysics. Nakai goes beyond Tosaka in recognizing the in-betweenness of film as an everyday “practico-poietic” mediation. Endorsing Kitada, Schäfer notes Nakai’s distinction between Medium as representation and Mittel as experience, or praxis. For Nakai film was not only a cognitive medium but a “sensory formation,” a material registration of the world, and the site of active reception in a state of distraction (p. 318). Schäfer’s goal in excavating Nakai’s account of cinema is both to broaden the “functionalistic and vertical understanding” (p. 323) of media under the aegis of newspaper studies in 1930s Japan, as outlined in the introduction, and to recognize connections to contemporary European thinkers that even resolve some of the dualities (subject/object, matter/spirit, body/consciousness) of “Western correlationist philosophy” (p. 323).
Chapters 11 and 12 establish Tosaka and Nakai as vital film and media theorists in prewar Japan. In the 1930s, Nakai’s arguments had a strongly modernist cast, even if he even if he rejected what Kitada calls the "meaning-centered doctrine of modernism" (p. 296). His main filmic example was the rapid montage of Mikhail Kaufman’s avant-garde documentary In Spring (1929), and his references to film language and film sound explicitly reject the intertitle or the talkie, which were the subject of much debate at the time.[11] His claims about the future of perception in those articles seem quite different from the “copula theory” that Nakai put forward in the more democratic climate of 1950 in his “The Grammar of the Shot.”[12] Both Kitada and Schäfer are a little vague on this point: I would like to know more about the “debate” (p. 307) between Tosaka and Nakai, including the chronology of their claims and any points of disagreement, and about any relation between Nakai’s “copula” theory and Sergei Eisenstein’s widely discussed 1929 article on Japanese cinema and culture that plays around with a similar metaphor.[13]
Much of Nakai’s writing falls into the genre of “criticism” or hihyō rather than academic philosophy. In chapter 13, “Kobayashi Hideo and the Question of Media,” Keisuke Kitano argues that hihyō is a distinct mode of theorization in Japan. A highly developed publication culture created a forum for public intellectuals like Kobayashi whose essays exhibited a nuanced understanding of language and translation. His “double-folded critical skepticism” (p. 338) treated language as the matrix of experience, foregrounding the situation of Japan and Japanese as lying outside the geographical and linguistic power centers of the world. Translation, even when compelled by the threat of colonization by the West, is not just a transfer of meaning but what Naoki Sakai called a “schema of configuration” that produces a sense of linguistic difference and therefore “national consciousness or identity” (p. 333). But, Kitano argues, Kobayashi’s hihyō was “double-folded” because translation both deracinates the language that should produce identity and is the overwhelming condition of contemporary Japan. As Kobayashi wrote in “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933) Japanese specificity lay in having “grown so accustomed to this Western influence that we can no longer distinguish what is under the force of this influence from what is not” (p. 335). Kobayashi’s hihyō is notoriously unclear, sometimes even after Kitano’s exposition, but it seems that insufficiency of language in the face of geopolitics caused Kobayashi to shift his attention from language to visual media that can bear witness to experiences he could not bring himself to write, or to recognize, during the disaster of world war two.
Disaster also features in Tom Looser’s account of Azuma Hiroki’s changing media theory of Japan in chapter 14, “Media, Mediation, and Crisis: A History—and the Case for Media Studies as (Postcultural) Anthropology.” Looser argues that Azuma developed a kind of anthropology of the economic forces and media constraints that produced “otaku culture” in Japan in the 1990s. He criticizes that formulation, translated as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, for reducing the dialectic of humanity and bare life in Kojève, Agamben, and others into a simple duality without mediation: the otaku against the bourgeoisie. After the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Eastern Japan in 2011, Looser claims that Azuma turned from G. W. F. Hegel and Jean-François Lyotard to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, looking for a more inclusive sense of Japaneseness that could be mediated by new media technologies. Azuma disappoints Looser again by having no theory of mediation for the networked sociality of the Rousseauian General Will that he imagines can replace politics in Japan with a series of essentialisms such as “nature, culture, and humanity” (p. 363) that belie the need for media theory.
Several recent anthologies have concluded with an afterword by a disciplinary expert who can tease out themes that are hidden to authors and readers more familiar with the subject matter. Media theorist Mark Hansen’s incisive review proposes an alternative organization for Media Theory in Japan grounded less on the chapters’ disparate objects (communications technology, practical theory, abstract theory) than on the relationality between Japan and the West that they propose: “(1) remediating Western theory from the Japanese perspective; (2) theorizing media within the intellectual traditions of Japan; and (3) positioning Japan within (which need not mean assimilating Japan to) an expanded international field.” (p. 371). Drawing on Kitano’s refusal to “domesticate” Kobayashi Hideo by translating him as the Japanese Walter Benjamin, Hansen sees the new categories as linked by “convergence around the media-inflected theme of resistance to (cultural) translatability” (p. 373). Hansen likens the “a-signifying resistances” of Japan to a “central theme of recent media theory”— Friedrich Kittler’s distinction between meaning and the materiality of any particular medium that is the “empirico-transcendental condition of possibility of meaning” (p. 372). But this formulation reads Kobayashi’s “double-folded critical skepticism” in a somewhat one-sided way. Hansen sees language as the “material core of life itself,” a “form of vital nourishment” in Kobayashi’s media theory, but in perhaps his most famous essay “Literature of the Lost Home” Kobayashi claimed that in a linguistic and cultural milieu permeated by translation western influence was so pervasive in Japan that the distinction between Japan and the foreign had been lost (p. 376). Even to his own mother, he wrote, the desert of Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) was more familiar than the confused mix of East and West, past and present, in the streets outside the cinema: “we feel closer to the Moroccan desert we have never seen than to the landscape of Ginza before our eyes.”[14] Experience is in language (or other media), and Japan is overwhelmed by translation; all experience is rendered geopolitically unstable by the presence of the West.
In other words, the cultural distance between Japan and the West is non-commutative: where Japan seems alien from a Western perspective, the West is much more familiar in Japan, to the point that what is “translation” and what is not becomes confused. For example, Nakai used the original German to distinguish between Medium and Mittel in his articles, which Kitada repeats in his commentary. Zahlten, Kitada’s English translator, points out that other work translates the latter as “middle,” which obscures the Hegelian sense of Vermittlung that Nakai would have retained (p. 300). As Zahlten argues, even where Nakai used Japanese—for example, in his use of hyōshō (representation)—he used it in the expectation that at least some of his readership would recognize the antecedent, and broader, German significance of Vorstellung (p. 301). This collection could be organized in yet another manner: by the language of the media theory intertexts that the different subjects draw on. Perhaps it is a mark of Aaron Gerow’s “theory complex” that the work of more academic thinkers has specific foreign intertexts—the German phenomenology and social theory in Kitada, Schafer, Sas, and Yoda; the more literary French tradition in Kitano, Kadobayashi, and Looser; and the English-language social science in Gerow, Furuhata, and Steinberg. The performative theory of the Nyū Aca celebrities in Ivy and Zahlten’s chapters range across the gamut of Euro-American thought while, strikingly, the chapters by Misono and McKnight feature female artists who are plugged into an always-already translated popular culture but stand outside that ambivalent dependence on foreign theory.
Hansen is surely correct that Japan and theory mutually inform each other, and that the “singular and transformative” results of these research projects should have a deprovincializing force, informing how we do media theory “after Japan” (p. 386). And not only after Japan but after China, South America, Eastern Europe, and so on.[15] This book is a valuable start to that necessary cultural commutation, a kind of atlas of thinking on media in Japan that only makes me wish for more pages. Language itself is not the problem here but institutional connections and the economics of translation. Although the Japanese government has worked to raise the international profile of Japanese universities, international exchange is still limited and the vast bulk of Japanese scholarship remains untranslated and unreadable to most scholars. Ivy reports that she was the first person at Columbia to take out the volumes of InterCommunication’s translated media theory in a decade. Expectations of radical cultural and philosophical difference clung to “postmodern” Japan, but there is no territory to this map: media theory in Japan is a transcultural and translingual space of shared concerns and specific differences.[16] I would like to know more about the institutional history of media theory in Japan, from prewar Zeitungswissenschaft to the Japanese engagement with postwar academic media theory. I would also like to know about the understanding of media in educational policy and wartime propaganda, the nuanced mediation of media theory provided by the Science of Thought group, and the empirical study of media in Japan, which has its own implicit theory. But that will only be possible if the non-commutative cultural distance between Japan and the West is reduced, through academic exchange and translation in spite of all.
[1] Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: 1999), p. xxxix.
[2]Japanese Popular Culture: Studies in Mass Communication and Popular Change, ed. Kato Hidetoshi (Tokyo, 1959). The Ford-Foundation-sponsored Conference on the Modernization of Japan at Hakone in 1960 produced a series of books that accounted for Japanese history from the perspective of “modernization theory”—an attempt by US scholars to create a non-Marxist theory of global historical development.
[3] On the debunking side, see Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C., 1989), originally a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly. Both a subject (Isozaki Arata) and an author (Marilyn Ivy) of this volume contributed to that book. See also Japan in the World, ed. Miyoshi and Harootunian (Durham, N.C., 1999), originally a special issue of Boundary 2.
[4] Furuhata is drawing here on John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, 2015).
[5] See Adam Bronson, One Hundred Million Philosophers: Science of Thought and the Culture of Democracy in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, Hawaii, 2016).
[6] See Lydia Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010) and Kittler, “The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine,” trans. Stefanie Harris, in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 130–46.
[7] See Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis, 2009).
[8] The journal specialized in the translation between Japanese and western languages of articles by artists and scholars, often featured in NTT’s gallery space. I worked at the time as a translator of Japanese articles into English for the journal, and transcriber of interviews with subjects such as Peter Greenaway and Slavoj Zizek on topics such as “virtuality” that would be translated into Japanese.
[9] See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 271. This essay was translated into Japanese in 1971.
[10] For a discussion of landscape theory, see Yuriko Furuhata. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, N.C., 2013), especially chapter 4.
[11] Nakai Masakazu, “Haru no kontinyuitii,” Bi.hihyo (March 1931), reprinted in Nakai Masakazu zenshu v. 3, p. 149.
[12] Nakai Masakazu, “Katto no bunpo,” Shinario (July 1950), reprinted in Nakai Masakazu zenshu v. 3, p. 196.
[13] Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot (1929),” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Taylor and William Powell (London, 1998), pp. 82–92.
[14] Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, 1924–1939, ed. and trans. Paul Anderer (Stanford, Calif., 1995), p. 53.
[15] In the first instance, see the extraordinary translinguistic insights into Chinese media theory in Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis, 2015) and Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis, 2015).
[16] See Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif., 1995) for a foundational statement of the significance of translation in East Asia.
