Acknowledgments

The foggiest notions of this book occurred to me during an Association for Japanese Literary Studies conference in 2008 at Princeton University, at which I presented a paper on Japanese cell phone novels and alternative history fiction. More than a decade of discussions, courses, research projects, presentations, and publications afforded me opportunities to clarify and refine the ideas. I am grateful to the many institutions and people who placed early bets on the nascent whim of this book.

I thank the various archives and institutions that provided access and affiliations: Meiji University, Waseda University, the National Diet Library, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the JCII Camera Museum, the Yokohama Archives of History, the Johnson-Shaw Stereoscopic Museum, the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum Archives, Chiyoda-ku Library, and countless fan sites, blogs, and online communities provided key material support and information.

I thank various funding organizations: the Japan Foundation supported preliminary research in Tokyo; the Northeast Asia Council’s Short-Term Research Travel Grant brought me back to Japan to continue research; Penn State’s Institute for Arts and Humanities provided the time and space in which I first conceived of the present form of the book and began the arduous process of bringing parts together and presenting early ideas; and Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information gave me a chance to explore whether a related digital humanities project could fit into the book. The Department of Asian Studies at Penn State gave me the opportunity to direct our Global Summer Institute with Tina Chen and Joseph Jeon on the topic of Digital Asias, which helped me further consider the relation between analog and digital cultures and resulted in a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, published in 2021.

I thank my students who, over the years, have been sounding boards for many of the ideas here, in both my Japanese film and new media undergraduate classes and my Mimesis and New Media graduate seminar. In this regard, special thanks go to my colleague Brian Lennon for sharing his new media syllabus with me at that early stage.

Many colleagues gave sage advice and inspiration along the way: Shion Kono, Kukhee Choo, Yoshimi Shunya, Alex Zahlten, Tom Lamarre, Michael Bourdaghs, Alan Tansman, Christine Marran, Lea Pao, Bo An, Siting Jiang, James Kopf, Vasilije Ivanovic, Darwin Tsen, Sarah Townsend, Shuang Shen, Nergis Erturk, Christopher Castiglia, Michael Bérubé, Christian Haines, Yoshikuni Hiroki, Akira Lippit, and Steve Ridgely.

Though there is also a crowd of scholars too numerous to mention here who contributed in countless ways, a smaller subset of people whose deep engagement or off-hand remarks had profound effects on the specific directions taken here. I do my best to recall them all in the order in which their contributions can be read in the book, with certainty that there are names I have missed. Markus Nornes helped me think through the very first paragraph about film history and gave suggestions about photography. Andrea Bachner’s symposium “The Global and the Primitive” encouraged me to push my thinking on early photography into the anthropological and three-dimensional. A conversation with Maki Fukuoka gave me perspective on Rokudenashiko’s commitment to body scanning and printing as part of her embodied augmentation and modification practice. Mimi Long’s invitation to speak at the Access Asia Forum at University of California, Irvine gave me the kick I needed to finish the chapter on records. I still cannot believe the tragic loss of my friend Sari Kawana, who gave me the brilliant advice to research Wilhelm Plage. Kerim Yasar kindly shared with me a draft of his work that dealt in part with the early record copyright precedent of naniwa bushi stylist Tōchūken Kumoemon. Hiromu Nagahara suggested a reading list on musicology that helped enrich my understanding of record culture in early twentieth-century Japan. Christopher Reed encouraged me to think more about the staging of Miura Tamaki’s performances. Matthew Fraleigh helped me work through the Chinese on the dagger. Alisa Freedman not only encouraged my work on television through a conference panel that she organized but also included my piece on Gekkō kamen in a special issue of Japan Forum on children’s culture. Aaron Gerow’s comments about Harimao challenged me to transform that early research into the television chapter published here. At the 2017 Replaying Japan conference, I was first able to sound my ideas about games, which benefited from those in attendance, including Rachael Hutchinson, Mimi Okabe, Martin Roth, and Hosoi Koichi. Subsequent revisions of early drafts of that unwieldy forty-thousand-word “video game chapter” benefited from the comments of Rachael Dumas and Paul Roquet. Elena Giannoulis’s excellent conference on emoji at the Free University of Berlin helped me to articulate thoughts on scripting the world and resulted in a publication in the conference volume. In addition to reading through the manuscript in final stages with perceptive catches and suggestions, Seth Jacobowitz gave me the first public forum for presenting the main idea for the book in its entirety at the Kempf Fund Lecture Series in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University.

Several other people also helped me through the final stages. Eric Hayot read theory-heavy drafts of the Introduction and Conclusion and offered suggestions that tightened the argument and smoothed the writing. Joe Jeon read the entire thing after it was accepted and gave truly spot-on constructive criticism, most of which I have been able to use to make the present volume more comprehensible. I thank Vincent Bruyere for reading in the late stages and highlighting some of my tendencies, as well as for introducing me to Damisch, Belting, and Bredekamp. Special thanks to Samuel Frederick for suffering through nearly the entirety immediately before submission to the press for review. I am truly fortunate to have such friends who are not only brilliant but also incredibly generous!

I would like to thank the University of Minnesota Press and especially Jason Weidemann, who saw potential in an early proposal, and Zenyse Miller, whose reassuring emails made the review process bearable. I would particularly like to thank the two excellent blind reviewers of the book, who generously revealed themselves afterward to open conversations and ultimately guarantee that what you hold in your hand is better than the draft they read. Accolades go to Ziggy Snow for judicious copyediting and Fred Kameny for the index.

Deep thanks go to Jens-Uwe Guettel, Benjamin Schreier, and Samuel Frederick of the Zeno’s Paradoxical Writing Group, which read very early drafts that always seemed to be heading toward a finish line without quite arriving. Particular thanks go to Jennifer Boittin and Maryam Frederick and the rest of the crew for moral support, angsty commiseration, and gustatory sustenance.

Thanks go to Benjamin D. Abel for auditory delights, for his unbridled curiosity, and for being my most cherished distraction during much-needed time away from the project. And to the person who listened to me drone on about this, who read drafts, suggested alternative angles, edited my sloppy writing, cracked me up when I needed to laugh, and burst my bubbles when they were floating too high, above all, I thank Jessamyn R. Abel, without whom none of this would exist.