A few months ago, I was glad to participate in distributing the Call for Papers for Communicating with Cool Japan: New International Perspectives on Japanese Popular Culture, a one-day mini-conference that would run in Tokyo, at Waseda University, on June 8, just ahead of (and in connection with) the 66th annual conference of the International Communication Association. The preliminary schedule for this event, has now been announced.
As the schedule currently stands, it will consist of a keynote address presented by Prof. Koichi Iwabuchi (Monash University), and a total of 9 sessions, running simultaneously (2/3 at a time), each organized around a common theme.
The themes that the sessions will address are:
- What We Live For: Women, Expression, and Empowerment in Japanese Fan Cultures
- Methodologies of Cultural Power
- Image/Text
- Audience Studies, Otaku, and Fan Cultures
- Institutionalization and Nostalgia
- Discontented Japanization
- The Living Popular
- Digital Productions: Distribution, Piracy, and Globalization
- Localization, Adaptation, and Hybridization
These sessions will feature a total of 39 individual presentations, and speakers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Given the mini-conference’s broad focus on “any area of Japanese popular culture”, not all of them address anime/manga, but, many do:
Session 1.2: Methodologies of Cultural Power
10:20 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Why hasn’t Japan banned child-porn comics?”: An Investigation into the Socio-legal Attitudes towards Yaoi Manga
Simon Turner (Chulalongkorn University)