6. Mediated Expressions
John Brownlee, “Anime Flash Mob Dances in Akihambra,” Wired, April 12, 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/04/anime-flash-mob/.
Hamano Satoshi, “Suzumiya haruhi no seisei-ryoku: Kyarakutā-teki karada no mimēshisu,” Yuriika, July 2011, 597.
Toshiya Ueno, “Techno-Orientalism and Media-Tribalism: On Japanese Animation and Rave Culture,” Third Text 13, no. 47 (1999): 95–106.
Azuma Hiroki, General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google, trans. John Person (New York: Vertical, 2014).
Bernadette Wegenstein, “Body,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 19.
Wegenstein, “Body,” 33; Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 51. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity, and the Ideal Figure (New York: Routledge, 2018); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar (1933),” trans. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique 17 (1979): 65; Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 333.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), ix. See also Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 132.
Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 52.
Hansen, 190.
Hansen, 190.
Saitō Tamaki, Media wa sonzai shinai (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2007), 77.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 218n44.
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 263. And later she writes that Benjamin’s conceptualization of mimesis is an “inventive reception” (264).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004), 115.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 133.
Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2012), 102.
Hansen, Bodies in Code, 145.
Slavoj Žižek, “Ideology Is the Original Augmented Reality,” Nautilus, November 2, 2017, http://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/ideology-is-the-original-augmented-reality; Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019).
And the group had a profound influence on the early Wittgenstein, who adopts a similar picture theory of language in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). Thomas E. Uebel, Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle: Austrian Studies on Otto Neurath and the Vienna Circle (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), 90. See also Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein (London: Granta Books, 2019), 41.
Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, with Robert S. Cohen (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), 224.
Squarely Rooted, “PRESENTING: The Entire US Economy Depicted in Emoji,” Business Insider, October 17, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-economy-in-emoji-2014-10.
Ōta Yukio, Pikutoguramu [emoji] dezain (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1987), 79–90.
Ōta, Pikutoguramu [emoji] dezain, 95.
Tsurumi Shunsukei, Kotoba wa hirogaru (Tokyo: Fukuinkanshoten, 1991), 412.
A summary of the work was published in Aaron Marcus, “New Ways to View World Problems,” East West Perspectives (Summer 1979): 15–22. See also Aaron Marcus, “Visualizing Global Interdependencies,” Graphic Design (Japan) 79 (1960): 57–62, video available at AMandAssociates, “Visualizing Global Interdependencies,” July 21, 2011, YouTube video, 14:53, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc8Skq4HVwc.
Marcus, “New Ways to View World Problems,” 15.
Yoshimoto Takaaki, “Mōsha to kagami,” in Yoshimoto Takaaki zenshū, vol. 13 (Tokyo: Keisō shobo, 1969), 144.
See Yutaka Satoh, “Ōbunshotai,” Type-Lab, accessed August 22, 2018, http://www.type-labo.jp/Ohbun.html.
Zaruemon channel 02, “1995-nen-goro no CM hadzuki riona Dokomo no pokeberu berumī,” September 1, 2015, YouTube video, 0:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0eRqp3Lcx4.
Though they seem to share a common root, emoticon is an English compound truncation from emotion and icon, whereas emoji is a Japanese expression composed of e (“picture”) and moji (“characters”). Emoji, therefore, have no necessary or inherent connection to emotions. See, for instance, the mistranslation of emoji as emoticon in Matsuda Misa, “Discourses of Keitai in Japan,” in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, ed. Mizuko Itō, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 35.
See Nakamura 001, “Dokomo kara jīmēru ni mēru o okuru to ‘onpu’ no emoji ga ‘unko’ ni naru,” Tsuyobi de susume (blog), November 26, 2010, http://nakamura001.hatenablog.com/entry/20101126/1290736227.
Inamasu Tatsuo, “‘Emoji’ no tsukawarekata (tokushū keitai sekai): Keitai hyōgen,” Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 53, no. 5 (2008): 109.
See Inamasu, “‘Emoji’ no tsukawarekata.”
See Koichi Yasuoka, “Pictographs in Mobile Phones and Their Character Codes,” Journal of Information Processing and Management 50, no. 2 (2007): 67–73.
Chicchikichī, “Emoji shōsetsu,” Muka shōsetsu nara Eburisuta (blog), August 10, 2007, https://estar.jp/_novel_view?w=2637775.
See “Oneohtrix Point Never - Boring Angel,” Oneohtrix Point Never, December 23, 2013, YouTube video, 4:17, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmlJveN9IkI. See Cara Rose DeFabio, “Game of Phones,” April 2, 2014, YouTube video, 1:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0SYKT4FgGU.
See Aaron Marcus, “User Interface Design and Culture,” in Usability and Internationalization of Information Technology, ed. Nuray Aykin, 51–78 (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005).
See Wikipedia, s.v. “うんこマーク,” accessed August 22, 2018, https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/うんこマーク. The Yakult packaging is further discussed in “Kogane no rasen wa doko kara kita no ka: Maki guso no kigen [washiki],” Dodome iro no hakubutsukan iyageriumu neo (blog), http://iyagerium.blog90.fc2.com/blog-entry-85.html.
Gomi Taro, Minna unchi (Tokyo: Fukuonkan Shoten, 1977); Gomi Taro, Everyone Poops, trans. Amanda M. Stinchecum (La Jolla, Calif.: Paw Prints, 2008).
See Mona Chalabi, “The 100 Most-Used Emojis,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), June 5, 2014, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-100-most-used-emojis.
Sora Song, “Study: 1 in 6 Cell Phones Contaminated with Fecal Matter,” TIME, October 17, 2011, http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/17/study-1-in-6-cell-phones-contaminated-with-fecal-matter/.
Inamasu, “‘Emoji’ no tsukawarekata,” 111.
Andrew McGill, “Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji,” Atlantic, May 9, 2016.
Jason Reed, “The Problem with Emoji Skin Tones That No One Talks About,” Daily Dot, November 23, 2018, https://www.dailydot.com/irl/skin-tone-emoji/.
Paige Tutt, “Apple’s New Diverse Emoji Are Even More Problematic than Before,” Washington Post, April 10, 2015.
See Marcel Danesi, The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016); Sabine Doran, The Culture of Yellow, or The Visual Politics of Late Modernity (New York: A&C Black, 2013).
Miriam E. Sweeney and Kelsea Whaley, “Technically White: Emoji Skin-Tone Modifiers As American Technoculture,” First Monday 24, no. 7 (2019): https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/10060/8048 (emphasis added).
Alexander Robertson, Walid Magdy, and Sharon Goldwater, “Self-Representation on Twitter Using Emoji Skin Color Modifiers,” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (March 28, 2018): 680–83; Alexander Robertson, Walid Magdy, and Sharon Goldwater, “Emoji Skin Tone Modifiers: Analyzing Variation in Usage on Social Media,” ACM Transactions on Social Computing 3, no. 2 (April 19, 2020): 1–25.
See Jane Hu, “Ang Lee’s Tears: Digital Global Melodrama in The Wedding Banquet, Hulk, and Gemini Man,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 7, no. 2 (2021): 151–76. See also Gertrud Koch, “The Human Body as Generic Form: On Anthropomorphism in Media” (Animate panel, Terms of Media II: Actions Conference, Brown University, October 10, 2015).
Conclusion
See the work of Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro critiquing just such usage in film studies: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order,” boundary 2 18, no. 3 (1991): 242–57; Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Questions of Japanese Cinema: Disciplinary Boundaries and the Invention of the Scholarly Object,” in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, 368–400 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
Christopher Bush, The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
Karatani Kōjin, “One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Harry Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, 259–72 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987).
See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Andrew Wachtel, Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Bruce M. Knauft, Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002); Thomas Lamarre and Kang Nae-hui, ed., Impacts of Modernities, vol. 3 of Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004); Peter Osborne, “Modernism as Translation,” in Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2013), 67–76.
Even Pound’s injunction to “make it new” presumes an ontological “it” that is remade in the process. Ezra Pound, Make It New: Essays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971).
Ricardo Roque, “Mimesis and Colonialism: Emerging Perspectives on a Shared History,” History Compass 13, no. 4 (April 2015): 201–11.
Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4; see also 118 for her use of “imperial mimesis.”
Gertrud Koch, “The Human Body as Generic Form: On Anthropomorphism in Media” (Animate panel at Terms of Media II: Actions Conference, Brown University, October 10, 2015).
Matthew Hawkins, “Game Character More Real Than Actual Human, Says PBS,” NBC News, April 4, 2012, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/game-character-more-real-actual-human-says-pbs-flna654235.
Sandra Annett, “What Can a Vocaloid Do? The Kyara as Body without Organs,” Mechademia: Second Arc 10 (2015): 163–77; Cole Masaitis, “The Vocaloid Phenomenon of Vocal Synthesis and Sample Concatenation” (master’s thesis, University of Mary Washington, 2017). See discussion in Takahashi Yoshitaka, “Zeami no ‘monomane’ to Yōroppa-teki mimēshisu,” in Takahashi Yoshitaka bungei riron chosaku-shū-ka (Tokyo: Jinbunshoin, 1977), 161.
See Maruyama Masao, Gendai seiji no shisō to kōdō (Tokyo: Miraisha, 2006); Komori Yōichi, Posutokoroniaru = Postcolonial (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Imagology Revisited (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).
David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 1995), 147–73; Eve Bennett, “Techno-Butterfly,” Science Fiction Film & Television 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 23–46; Christopher Fan, “Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 6, no. 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.5070/T861019585; Ken McLeod, “Afro-Samurai: Techno-Orientalism and Contemporary Hip Hop,” Popular Music 32, no. 2 (May 2013): 259–75; Greta Aiyu Niu, “Techno-Orientalism, Nanotechnology, Posthumans, and Post-Posthumans in Neal Stephenson’s and Linda Nagata’s Science Fiction,” MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008): 73–96; Takeo Rivera, “Do Asians Dream of Electric Shrieks? Techno-Orientalism and Erotohistoriographic Masochism in Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 2 (January 2014): 67–87; May Telmissany and Stephanie Tara Schwartz, Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Wester Wagenaar, “Wacky Japan: A New Face of Orientalism,” Asia in Focus: A Nordic Journal on Asia by Early Career Researchers 3 (2016): 46–54.
Some of this work of transfer from body to media and back has begun in Japanese studies in the work of scholars like Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro on film, Thomas Lamarre on anime, or Ian Condry on rap music.
Ueno Toshiya, “Japanimation and Technoorientalism,” in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, ed. Bruce Grenville (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001). See also Ueno Toshiya, “Rizumu dansu mimeshisu,” Urban Tribal Studies 3, no. 10 (July 2000): 228–41.
Hayashi Yūjirō, “Jōhō shakai to atarashii kachi taikei,” Chochiku Jihō 74 (1967): 20–25; Hayashi Yūjirō, Jōhōka Shakai (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho, 1969).
Tonuma Koichi, “Human Settlement Pattern in Japan,” Ekistics 25, no. 148 (1968): 187–92; Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013); Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, ed. Kayoko Ota and James Westcott (London: Taschen, 2011).
David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 3.
Drawing on Kant, Karatani calls this willful ignorance a “bracketing” of concern. See Karatani Kōjin, “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism,” trans. Sabu Kohso, boundary 2 25, no. 2 (1998): 145–60; Karatani Kōjin, Teihon Karatani Kōjin shū: Nēshon to bigaku 4 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004); Karatani Kōjin, Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud, trans. Jonathan E. Abel, Hiroki Yoshikuni, and Darwin H. Tsen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
See Kikuchi Yuko, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004).
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 235–36; Osukā Wairudo, Osukā Wairudo zenshū 4-sho, trans. Nishimura Kōji (Tokyo: Ōdzuchi-sha, 1981). See also Rinko Miho, “Osukā Wairudo no ‘yuibishugi’ saikō e no oboegaki: ‘The Decay of Lying’ ni okeru japonisumu,” Rīdingu 26 (September 30, 2005): 92–100.
Marc Steinberg, The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 180–205.
Steinberg, Platform Economy, 193–95.
On odorlessness, see Iwabuchi Koichi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 24–30. On mukokuseki, see Ōtsuka Eiji, Kasō genjitsu hihyō: Shōhi shakai wa owaranai (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1992), 151; Ōtsuka Eiji, “Komikku sekai sehai,” Sapio 8 (1993): 10–12.
Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Anders Koed Madsen, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2013), 42–74.
Mizumura Minae, The Fall of Language in the Age of English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).