Wednesday 28 February
13:00-14:00 GMT
Online via Zoom
Content warning: this talk contains discussion of sexual abuse and harassment.
About the Talk
Much of contemporary Japanese popular media, be it music, animation, or games, is connected by narrative threads of seishun: youth or adolescence. These threads are further woven together though the figure of the idol, a popular music performer who is themselves a teenager and embodies youth as the domain of performed, idealised effort. Since the early 2000s, billions of yen have been invested in designing planned multiplatform “media mix” stories of seishun and idols, with Kadokawa’s Love Live! School Idol Project franchise being a prime example
In this talk, I will delve deeper into the roots of seishun stories in Japanese popular media, which stretch from the planning and promotion of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics to Virtual YouTubers (“VTubers”), online personas who use virtual avatars that pastiche seishun tropes and idol music. I will draw on research into case studies from across the Japanese mediascape, interviews with lyricists, and analysis of a corpus of idol music, to ask: how did these stories of idol youth come to dominate Japanese popular media? And what does their continued omnipresence mean for Japanese youth and society?
In light of the continued revelations of sexual abuse perpetrated against young people in the Japanese idol industry, this talk will additionally explore how we might use critical analysis of the sociocultural entrenchment of seishun narratives in Japan to develop measures to protect young people in Japan’s cultural industries, empowering them to tell their own stories of youth.
About the Speaker
Dorothy Finan is a Lecturer in Cultural Industries at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. She researches youth in popular music and wider cultural industries in Japan and East Asia. She is interested in how cultural producers and consumers are connected beyond borders and media forms, and in how these different stakeholders imagine each other.
Dorothy has published journal articles on the “global” branding of East Asian popular music industries and on player interaction with images of female adolescence in Japanese mobile games, as well as a book chapter on “divas” in Japanese popular music. She has provided insights into Japan’s cultural industries for the BBC World Service and has delivered multiple public lectures. You can read her doctoral thesis, on which this talk is based, through this link. She is working on a monograph that will present a multimedia history of youth in Japanese idol music.
Image: Love Live! School Idol Festival. 2013. Google Play [Game]. BushiRoad: Tokyo
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