Review of Teaching Japanese Popular Culture- Edited by Deborah Shamoon and Chris McMorran

Abstract

Deborah Shamoon, Chris McMorran, and Kam Thiam Huat organised a ‘Teaching Japanese Popular Culture’ international conference that was held at the National University of Singapore in 2012, with the support of the Japan Foundation. The book, however, more than a printed upshot of that athenaeum is a production of the Association for Asian Studies, which has its headquarters in the United States. In this sense, Teaching Japanese Popular Culture is to be framed as a US-American book, edited and produced in the United States by the Aas. I will get back to this detail in the final remarks of this review.

Now, anybody who ever edited a book formed of contributions by various and diverse authors perfectly knows about all the issues that may come along. One of the most frequent is to find an organic trajectory, a path, an overall meaningful structure out of what often is, at first, a discontinuous group of writings that not necessarily have much in common with each other.

If the editors are not inspired, or the materials selected or available aren’t mutually matching enough, there is [...]