Tokyo is considered one of the world's style capitals for its vibrant youth fashion culture. Part guidebook, part fashion photography album, Tokyo Fashion City takes a stroll through eight Tokyo neighborhoods, each with its own unique fashion characteristics, to see what streetwise young Tokyoites are wearing, where they're shopping, what they're eating and drinking, and where they're hanging out.

The kimono is an iconic garment with a history as rich and colourful as the textiles from which it is crafted. Deeply associated with Japanese culture both past and present, it has often been thought of as a highly gendered, rigidly traditional and unchanging national costume. This book challenges that perception, revealing the nuanced meanings and messages behind the kimono from the point of view of its wearers and producers, many of whom - both men and women - see the garment as a vehicle for self-expression.

Although some trace the phenomenon of kawaii as far back as Japan's Taisho era, it emerged most visibly in the 1970s. As colorful as its subject matter, this book contains numerous interviews with illustrators, artists, fashion designers, and scholars. It traces the roots of the movement from sociological and anthropological perspectives and looks at kawaii's darker side as it morphs into gothic and gloomy iterations.

Home of Sega, Nintendo and Sony, Japan has a unique and powerful presence in the world of video games. This book introduces overseas readers to the world of the Japanese gemu senta. It deals with a different kind of game, starting with the UFO catchers and print club machines at the entrance and continuing through rhythm games and fighting games.

In the early days of arcades and Nintendo, many players didn't recognize Japanese games as coming from Japan; they were simply new and interesting games to play. But since then, fans, media, and the games industry have thought further about the "Japaneseness" of particular games. In this book, Mia Consalvo looks at what happens when Japanese games travel outside Japan, and how they are played, thought about, and transformed by individuals, companies, and groups in the West.

Power-Up is the first English-language work of its kind to examine the reasons behind the success of Japanese video games, rather than focusing on the history of video games. Profiles of some of the most fascinating Japanese video game designers in the industry, along with a critical look at Japanese video games from their earliest beginnings to new, exciting trends that ride the bleeding edge of popular culture.

From the beginning of the American Occupation in 1945 to the post-bubble period of the early 1990s, popular music provided Japanese listeners with a much-needed release, channeling their desires, fears, and frustrations into a pleasurable and fluid art. Pop music allowed Japanese artists and audiences to assume various identities, reflecting the country's uncomfortable position under American hegemony and its uncertainty within ever-shifting geopolitical realities. In postwar Japan, pop music both accelerated and protested the commodification of everyday life, challenged and reproduced gender hierarchies, and insisted on the uniqueness of a national culture, even as it participated in an increasingly integrated global marketplace.

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.

Enka, a sentimental ballad genre, epitomizes for many the nikongin no kokoro (heart/soul of Japanese). To older members of the Japanese public, who constitute enka's primary audience, this music - of parted lovers, long unseen rural hometowns, and self-sacrificing mothers - evokes a direct connection to the traditional roots of Japaneseness. Overlooked in this emotional invocation of the past, however, are the powerful commercial forces that, since the 1970s, have shaped the consumption of enka and its version of national identity. Informed by theories of nostalgia, collective memory, cultural nationalism, and gender, this book draws on the author's extensive fieldwork in probing the practice of identity-making and the processes at work when Japan becomes Japan.

Nuclear power has been a contentious issue in Japan since the 1950s, and in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, the conflict has only grown. Government agencies and the nuclear industry continue to push a nuclear agenda, while the mainstream media adheres to theofficial line that nuclear power is Japan's future. Public debate about nuclear energy is strongly discouraged. Nevertheless, antinuclear activism has swelled into one of the most popular and passionate movements in Japan, leading to a powerful wave of protest music.The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima shows that music played a central role in expressing antinuclear sentiments and mobilizing political resistance in Japan. Combining musical analysis with ethnographic participation, author Noriko Manabe offers an innovative typologyof the spaces central to the performance of protest music - cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. She argues that these four spaces encourage different modes of participation and methods of political messaging. The openness, mobile accessibility, and potential anonymity ofcyberspace have allowed musicians to directly challenge the ethos of silence that permeated Japanese culture post-Fukushima. Moving from cyberspace to real space, Manabe shows how the performance and reception of music played at public demonstrations are shaped by the urban geographies of Japanesecities. While short on open public space, urban centers in Japan offer protesters a wide range of governmental and commercial spaces in which to demonstrate, with activist musicians tailoring their performances to the particular landscapes and soundscapes of each. Music festivals are a space apartfrom everyday life, encouraging musicians and audience members to freely engage in political expression through informative and immersive performances. Conversely, Japanese record companies and producers discourage major-label musicians from expressing political views in recordings, forcingantinuclear musicians to express dissent indirectly: through allegories, metaphors, and metonyms.The first book on Japan's antinuclear music, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised provides a compelling new perspective on the role of music in political movements.

Grounded in the fields of Ethnomusicology, Anthropology, Popular Music Studies, and Japanese Studies, this book explores the underground Tokyo hardcore scene, ultimately asking what play as resistance through performance of the scene tells us about Japanese society in general.

Mechademia’s subject area extends from manga and anime to game design, fashion, graphics, packaging, and toy industries, as well as a broad range of fan practices related to popular culture in Japan. We are interested in how the academic and fan communities can provide new possibilities for critical thinking and popular writing.

An anime and manga entertainment and news periodical published from 2003-2009. Cover art via Wikipedia.

An exhaustive and visually engaging account, Mangasia charts the evolution of manga from its roots in late nineteenth-century Japan through the many and varied forms of comics, cartoons, and animation created throughout Asia for more than one hundred years. With maps, timelines, and reproductions from Japan, China, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh, this book is the first to explain the significance of key themes, the meanings of embodied myths, and the connections between various manga traditions.

Anime: A Critical Introduction maps the genres that have thrived within Japanese animation culture, and shows how a wide range of commentators have made sense of anime through discussions of its generic landscape. From the battling robots that define the mecha genre through to Studio Ghibli's dominant genre-brand of plucky shojo (young girl) characters, this book charts the rise of anime as a globally significant category of animation.

Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives makes available for the first time to English readership a selection of viewpoints from media practitioners, designers, educators, and scholars working in the East Asian Pacific. This collection not only engages a multidisciplinary approach in understanding the subject of Japanese animation but also shows ways to research, teach, and more fully explore this multidimensional world.

In recent years Japan's cuisine, or washoku, has been eclipsing that of France as the world's most desirable food. UNESCO recognized washoku as an intangible cultural treasure in 2013 and Tokyo boasts more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris and New York combined.

Follow journalist Yamaoka Shiro on a rich cullinary adventure as he hunts for the "ultimate menu".

Oishinbo in original Japanese language.