Japan Zoominar @ UC San Diego: *"Girl Culture is No Joke" with Laura Miller

Wed, May 18, 8:00-9:00 am JST (Tue, May 17, 4:00-5:00 pm Pacific)

Trends in Japan's female oriented-culture are the bread and butter of journalistic snark. From power spot hunting to self-photography, many activities are regularly viewed as trivial, silly, and wasteful. One consequence is that lucrative domains such as the beauty industry and the divination industry are ignored or trivialized in both scholarship and media. Laura Miller takes feminized occupations, pastimes, and consumption out of these misogynistic frames to examine their actual cultural and economic significance.

Laura Miller is the Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of History at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has published widely on topics such as youth slang, girl characters (gyaru moji), self-photography (purikura), elevator girls, and figures from history such as Himiko and Abe no Seimei. She is the author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (2006), and co-editor of four other books, including Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History (co-editor Rebecca Copeland, 2018). Her forthcoming book is Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan.

Ulrike Schaede is Professor of Japanese Business at GPS, UC San Diego, and the Director of JFIT. Her research focuses on Japan's changing corporate strategies, including business culture, change management, and business organization. Her 2020 book "The Business Reinvention of Japan" analyzes how Japanese companies are responding to the rise of China and the changing global competition.

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