Media Culture in Transnational Asia

Convergences and Divergences

Hyesu Park

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978804142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences examines contemporary media use within Asia, where over half of the world's population resides. The book addresses media use and practices by looking at the transnational exchanges of ideas, narratives, images, techniques, and values and how they influence media consumption and production throughout Asia, including: Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran and many others. The book's contributors are especially interested in investigating media and their intersections with narrative, medium, technologies, and culture through the lenses that are particularly Asian by turning to Asian socio-political and cultural milieus as the meaningful interpretive framework to understand media. This timely and cutting-edge research is essential reading for those interested in transnational and global media studies.

Part I

Transnational Approach

1

Converging on Love and Indifference

Mediated Otherness in South and East Asia

REA AMIT

The Indian film, The Japanese Wife (directed by Aparna Sen, 2010),¹ is emblematic of the compromised transnational flows between East and South Asia, while at the same time also of the anachronistic media convergence by which such flows are contrived. The film depicts an impossible love story between an Indian man and a Japanese woman that develops solely through a letter exchange. It is based on a short story by Kunal Basu, for whom Japan was an imaginary land epitomized by his infatuation with Japanese cinema. Basu’s affection for Japanese cinema led him to name his Japanese protagonist Miyagi, after the name of the character in Mizoguchi Kenji’s periodic fantasy, Ugetsu (1953).² This chapter further elaborates on the limited media exchanges between these two Asian regions while highlighting the fundamental self-contradicting motivation that drives them to opposite emotional excesses: affection, identification, or love, on the one hand, as well as disregard, intentional blindness, or indifference on the other. Concentrating on medial representations of East Asia in South Asia, and vice versa, as a cultural Other, I argue that such inter-Asian transposition eventually falls in outdated categories of Orientalism, Japanism, and other stereotypical archetypes.

Scholars have long criticized the West’s mystification of the East, many among them influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism. Although Said focused mainly on the region known as the Near East, critics used his conceptual analysis to discuss Western depictions of the Far East as well as of South Asia. Surprisingly, perhaps, this chapter identifies similar propensities in various media forms in Asia itself. These do not pertain to new concepts, such as self-Orientalism, by which scholars, particularly in the context of Japanese popular culture, discuss works of fiction or art that lend themselves to Western consumption by exacerbating stereotypes.³ Rather, the chapter concentrates on how Western preconceptions about the non-West, the ones that gave rise to clichéd images of the East, influence the way the non-West itself depicts other non-Western cultures.

Specifically, the chapter singles out the national characteristics of the production and consumption of mediated imaginaries, both of Japan, as an East Asian nation, and of the South Asian nation, India. Yet, unlike the notion of national character as an outward-projected image of the nation onto the world, I explore the imagining of a cultural Other that India and Japan project inward, catering to a distinct mode of consumption that is unique to a specific community. For both India and Japan, the other country provides an imaginary site that is at the same time near enough to be legitimately toyed with and aesthetically remote enough to serve as a domestic Asian Other. I will elaborate on this by drawing attention to parameters in the consumption and production of images that project communal forms of appropriation, and to the role media plays in circulating such images. While the chapter mainly focuses on film and film culture at large, toward the end I also discuss a Japanese animated work catering to local young audiences that showcases a similar tendency in this medium as well.

I argue that both Japan and India take liberty in depicting their counterpart along lines that are tantamount to Orientalist discourses, a process predicated on the notion that these problematic depictions are wrongly conceived—as if available for their eyes only—much like the compromised and anachronistic media use exemplified in the letter exchange in The Japanese Wife. Unlike Sen’s film, however, where circumstances prevent the Indo-Japanese couple from meeting, Indo-Japanese media products representing the other country seem to intentionally turn a blind eye to any meaningful transnational exchanges as a form of voluntarily blindness. The chapter concludes by underscoring this point.

Initial Close Encounters of a Special Kind

Unlike the impression created by The Japanese Wife and despite the two countries’ relative remoteness, there have been real contacts between Japanese and Indian people in the modern era. There is even one early, well-documented account of a real love story between a South Asian woman, born in a part of India that is today Bangladesh, and a Japanese man. The two married, and the woman, Hariprobha Basu Mallik, became Hariprobha Takeda and moved to Japan in 1912. She published her firsthand impression of the country, the people, and her experience as a Japanese wife in 1915. However, having firsthand experience does not always counter stereotypes or cultural biases. Despite her intimate contact with the country and its people, scholar Geeta Keeni indicates that Malik/Takeda highlighted positive Japanese characteristics similar to those identified by Indians who had only briefly visited the country.⁴

Apart from love stories, another early case that demonstrates—despite the good intentions (or indeed, precisely because of favorable inclinations)—how seemingly unmediated⁵ impressions conjure up what seems to be a straightforward example of Orientalism, is Indian spiritual leader Swami Vivekananda’s comments about the country during his Japanese sojourn. In one of his letters from Japan, he wrote, “The short-statured, fair-skinned, quaintly-dressed Japs, their movements, attitudes, gestures, everything is picturesque. Japan is the land of the picturesque!”⁶ Vivekananda’s remarks are problematic, but he did not intend to publish his impressions at the time, and writing norms were different in the late nineteenth century. His comments are significant because they are indicative of the fact that seemingly unmediated encounters do not necessarily yield a mindful account of a foreign culture.

Vivekananda also writes that Japanese individuals he met had also expressed unrealistic enthusiasm about India. Indeed, as Fabio Rambelli indicates, India was considered in premodern Japan to be the center of the world, mainly due to its recognition as the birthplace of Buddhism. However, Rambelli also points out that due to the lack of significant direct encounters between the two regions, the image of India (or Tenjiku, as it was known in Japan for many centuries), was shaped through an “emphasis on foreignness and exoticism (as signs of Indianness).”⁷

While imaginaries of South Asia in premodern Japan are understandable, in the modern era (much like in Vivekananda’s case), Japanese unmediated conceptions of India evince innate tendencies. The most notable example in this regard is those of Kakuzō Okakura (widely known as Tenshin). Famous or infamous for his promotion of the idea of “one Asia,” Okakura visited South Asia in late 1901 and early 1902. There, however, Okakura did not see that part of Asia for what it was but rather as a subject with which to promote his own nationalistic ideology. Focusing on India as a concept, Okakura reduced the profusion of South Asian ideas and arts to a single Indian civilization.⁸ Although he did acknowledge the multiplicity of “Asiatic races,”⁹ his notion of Asia located Japan at its center, in aesthetic terms, as a “museum of [one overarching] Asiatic civilization.”¹⁰

Okakura’s host in India, Rabindranath Tagore, who visited Japan several times, criticized the rise of nationalism in Japan and similar nationalistic tendencies in his Japanese acquaintance’s theorization of Asia. However, as Rustom Bharucha points out, both men share the erroneous view of an Asian continent that is “more imagined than real, constituting a primordial fellowship and genealogy without which it would have been impossible for them to invent an ‘Asia’ outside the Orientalist strictures of the West.”¹¹ Thus this is another indication of the fraught outcomes of even unmediated expressio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Transnational Approach
• Part II: Single-Nation Approach
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index