2018 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
The Culture of Japanese Character Imitation and Parody
| Project/Area Number |
18F18743
|
|---|
| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
|---|
Principal Investigator |
Karlin Jason 東京大学, 大学院情報学環・学際情報学府, 准教授 (80361632)
|
|---|
| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
FEENEY WILLIAM 東京大学, 大学院情報学環・学際情報学府, 外国人特別研究員
|
|---|
| Project Period (FY) |
2018-11-09 – 2021-03-31
|
| Keywords | popular culture / mass media / imitation |
|---|
| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This research examines longstanding practices of celebrity impersonation and embodied imitation (monomane) in Japan in order to closely consider the relationship between mass media and social process. Much previous research has tended to approach media process and social process as separate domains of action and focus on the interplay between them. This project seeks to complicate this prevalent approach through an examination of professional and everyday practices of embodied imitation as a site where social and media processes become powerfully enmeshed. Such citational performances turn the body into a medium capable of invoking a host of mediatized personas. At the same time, these same citational acts routinely perform a range of social work within everyday contexts. An examination of the broader social circulations enabled by monomane as a widespread social practice pushes for a reconceptualization of circulation as something that is iterative and takes place in discrete moments of replication by people in everyday contexts in pursuit of their own social goals. Ultimately, this perspective enables a perspective on media process that shifts attention from the movement, flow or transmission of discrete objects, such as books, recordings and texts, and towards the performative tools, imitative models and situated social aims that motivate people to cite, (re)animate and manifest many of the media personas that populate Japan’s richly intertextual popular culture.
|
| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
1: Research has progressed more than it was originally planned.
Reason
Significant progress has been made on archival research concerning the historical development of monomane as a professionalized expressive form in Japan as well as the increasing prevalence of citational play within everyday sociality. This archival work is ongoing and a necessary preparation before undertaking ethnographic fieldwork this coming summer.
In addition to archival research, progress has been made on the semiotic analysis of selected monomane performances. Preliminary analysis has shown these performances to be creative interpretive projects. The obvious differences between individual imitative performances highlights their variability. This, in turn, suggests that the production of a sense of similarity which underlies such imitations does not derive from a simple ‘natural’ process. Rather, these early analyses indicate that the projection of resemblance appears to be a highly complex semiotic achievement. In this way, monomane appears to be a performatively complex process capable of drawing on a broad range of potential features (such as features of voice, customary dress, gesture or movement, facial features, signature activities, etc.) as source materials which performers selectively reanimate to craft their imitations.
|
| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Research activities over the next year will involve a combination of ongoing archival research, media analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. Archival research will take two primary forms. The first will be to continue reviewing the available scholarly and popular literature concerning the practice of monomane in Japan. This involves gathering and reviewing texts related to the development and history of the practice, but also texts that speak to the specific performative features and strategies that organize monomane as a recognizable expressive form. In a second mode, work will also continue to develop a media archive that contains a robust supply of exemplary professional and mundane acts of imitation.
Materials from the media archive will continue to provide rich audio-visual data for ongoing media analysis of selected monomane performances. Media analysis will not only trace the manifold complex ways that performances are designed to perform their citational labor, but also provide necessary data points to strive and trace the ways they appear to propagate.
Finally, Professor Feeney will seek out and conduct interviews with professional monomane performers to gain further insight into monomane as a professionalized practice. Interviews will focus on the specific ways that performers craft their imitations as well as their thoughts on the circulation of these embodied media forms. These interviews will help shed light on the ways that these imitative forms, as well as the performative means to produce them, propagate and spread among the broader public.
|
