Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary JapanHarvard University Asia Center, 2005 - 290 ページ Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the conceptualization of selfhood among adolescents in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. The author explores how the idol-manufacturing industry absorbs young people into its system of production, molds them into marketable personalities, commercializes their images, and contributes to the construction of ideal images of the adolescent self. Since the relationship between the idols and their consumers is dynamic, the study focuses on the fans of idols as well. Ultimately, Aoyagi argues, idol performances substantiate capitalist values in the urban consumer society of contemporary Japan and East Asia. Regardless of how crude their performances may appear in the eyes of critics, the idols have helped establish the entertainment industry as an agent of public socialization by driving public desires toward the consumption of commoditized fantasies. |
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... of desire by the mass media is more easily accepted in Japan than elsewhere ; in the United States , for instance , media stories tend to be received with greater skepticism . Just as shaping a tree by pruning is a traditional practice ...
... of the audience to gather information about the latest trends . Given the function of the mass media to provide the public with fictions that cultivate conventional themes and perspectives , pop idols strive to become the topic ( wadai ) of ...
... of events that occurred at the level of , say , national politics and state economy . Idol fans and au- diences enjoy creating their own epoch - marking stories as they re- late themselves to their idols . The mass media function here ...