TY - JOUR
AU - P., Spring, Dawn
AB - In the enjoyable Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America, Andrew C. McKevitt successfully demonstrates Japan’s centrality to the “intellectual origins” of globalization in the American imagination (25). Arguing that “consuming all things Japan helped create a globalized America” (2), McKevitt illustrates his points well with the American domestication of Japanese automobiles, video cassette recorders (VCRs), and sushi through the era when Japanese brands, consumer goods, and entertainment products became staples in average American lives across the country. As the “Great Facilitator” (150), Japan produced the “tools that defined a new era” (135), a point that is made especially salient in McKevitt’s discussion of the VCR as an “iconic object of contemporary cultural globalization” (133). By the end of the 1980s, VCR-loving, sushi-eating Americans had moved beyond just driving gas-efficient Hondas and Toyotas to making them at American-based manufacturing plants; at the same time, anime fan clubs connected “local communities and the global flow of culture” (192). The welcoming of all things Japan into middle-class American households despite “Japan Panic” proved America’s “global benevolence,” its success in helping transform Japan from a World War II adversary to the nonthreatening consumer nation of Nintendo and Sony, and the inevitability of global consumer capitalism (81, 169). McKevitt nicely assesses the films and television shows that presented Japan to Americans during this era, the experience of small American communities encountering Japanese manufacturing facilities, the significance of the VCR as a tool of global connection, the Americanization of sushi, and the importance of anime in capturing American imaginations while linking American fans directly to each other and to a globalizing world. In 1977, the community of Marysville, Ohio, received news that the Honda Motor Company of Japan would open a motorcycle manufacturing plant. That development offers a revealing case study in the complexities of an international rival setting up shop in the Midwest and having American workers build Japanese products for Americans. In 1980, seventy million American broadcast-television viewers received a “transpacific cultural education” from the miniseries Shōgun, based on the popular James Clavell novel (52). McKevitt effectively argues that the experience represented an acceptance of Japan’s global role. His discussions of the VCR, sushi, and anime prove most illustrative in demonstrating Japan’s unique globalizing power. In the 1980s, Japanese-made VCRs sold globally in enormous numbers, yet as McKevitt shows, this popularity normalized the technology’s use so much that it no longer bore a direct connection to the consumption of Japanese culture. While the VCR’s ubiquity helped Americans lose sight of where this consumer good originated, Americans incorporated sushi into their diets, hybridizing it for American tastes. Equally successfully, McKevitt brings unacquainted readers into the world of anime fandom, conveying the qualities unique to anime that facilitated both its global popularity and fan culture. Unfortunately, even as McKevitt focuses on gender, he does comparatively little to address the complex historiography of cultural, business, economic, political, and social history, foreign relations, soft power, and structural elements of consumer capitalism, such as advertising, branding, print media, public relations, radio, and television. While his discussion of the Rochester Institute of Technology and Central Intelligence Agency’s “Japan 2000” document provides insight into ideas guiding American policymakers, his discussions of cultural nationalism fail to move beyond a superficial, Americanized understanding of Japanese culture, and McKevitt has difficulty navigating the complexities of racism and cultural nationalism. Signifying “the other” primarily in terms of the American positioning of the Japanese, he misses the opportunity, when discussing workplace culture in American-based Japanese automobile plants, discrimination lawsuits brought against Honda, and American business trips to Japan, to explore the implications of Japanese perceptions of the American as other. Further deconstruction of the American advertising and marketing campaigns conducted by Japanese automobile companies could have provided greater understanding of both the underpinnings of global consumer capitalism and Japanese understandings of the American market. Godzilla, Donkey Kong, and, for the most part, the Walkman are oddly missing, and of the video game powerhouse Nintendo, McKevitt says barely more than that during the 1980s the company went from “unknown” to “household name” (39). While an argument could be made for each as to why it is not the best example to illustrate how “consuming Japan” helped Americans transition from a Cold War to a globalized world, each warrants more than a mention. Over the decades, the iconic Japanese character Godzilla has had numerous American iterations, beginning with the 1964 showings of the film. In the period that McKevitt covers, the children’s cartoon Godzilla, produced by Japanese company Toho Co. Ltd. and the American Hanna-Barbera Productions, aired in 1978 on broadcast television; Marvel Comics ran the series Godzilla, King of the Monsters; and Toho collaborated with the American toy manufacturer Mattel Inc. on a toy line called Shogun Warriors that included a Godzilla. The Nintendo-produced game Donkey Kong made its way from arcade to living room as Americans purchased home video game consoles, launching a decades-long popular video game franchise and contributing to the growth of the video game industry into a global entertainment powerhouse. As the 1970s came to a close, the Sony Walkman portable audio cassette player began to change American and global listening habits. The book’s epilogue helps to clarify the absence of these seemingly significant elements of the pop culture landscape. The book has much to teach about the effects of consumption of Japanese culture in America, but opening with personal anecdotes about his family suggests that McKevitt’s engagement is with his personal consumption of Japanese culture as much as with the experiences of Americans as a whole, and the author’s foray into personal punditry and foreign relations predictions also diverges from his strictly historical work. © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Andrew C. McKevitt. Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America.
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhy092
DA - 2018-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/andrew-c-mckevitt-consuming-japan-popular-culture-and-the-globalizing-ehBfaWeIDj
SP - 1349
VL - 123
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -