Precarious Consumption after 3.11
―Television, Charity, and the Semiotics of Tears―

Jason G. Karlin
(Associate Professor in the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, University of Tokyo)

Date/Time September 26, 2013 6:30 PM
Location Room 549 5th floor, Akamon Sogo
Kenkyuto Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo [map(http://web.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/cjg/contact/)]

Abstract The Japanese mainstream media’s
relentless promotion of idols in the period after the triple disaster in Fukushima is a reflection of the importance of consumption to Japan’s precarious post-industrial economy. Rather than a sign of economic prosperity, the intensification of the idol industry in recent years, after a period of decline in the 1990s, is a product of Japan’s unsustainable consumption-based media system thrown into crisis by globalization and convergence. In modern societies, institutionalized systems of risk, such as consumer markets, are highly unpredictable and unstable, since much of what we consume is defined more in terms of its exchange rather than use value. Like all institutionalized risk cultures, consumer culture too in Japan engages in the reflexive monitoring of risk.
Just as the Hollywood star system provided a guarantee, or promise, against loss on investment for the film industry, idols are an immunity against instability since they regulate and ensure regular consumption in post-industrial society. For the media industry, idols colonize the future by dispersing risk into a more manageable system for regulating consumer desire. This presentation will examine television advertising and the role of Japanese celebrities in charitable activities in the wake of 3.11. Through spectacles of mediated suffering, the Japanese mass media have sought to re-constitute audiences who have become cynical and disillusioned with its disposable, tabloid culture.
Just as the distinction between labor and leisure, paid and unpaid work, and production and consumption have disappeared, charity (jizen) and self-promotion (gizen) have also become indistinguishable in today’s capitalist society. This analysis will reveal how the Japanese media is clinging to power through the domestication of suffering, sacrifice, and spectacle in the period after 3.11. In the process of national recovery, anachronistic appeals to traditional values of perseverance and sacrifice, which echoed the rhetoric of wartime conservation, have confronted the reality of a post-industrial economy that increasingly thrives on affective consumer economics.

Bio Jason G. Karlin is an associate professor in
the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. He specializes in gender and media studies, and is the co-editor of Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and author of the forthcoming Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History (University of Hawaii Press, May 2014).