Mutual Images Journal

The virtual cultural tourist: Film-induced tourism and Kubo and the Two Strings

Dennis Yeo — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past two decades, there has been growing research in film-induced tourism. Much of this research is focused on how film influences tourist destination choices. There has been less emphasis, however, on the nature and types of movies that may induce this attraction to such locations. By examining Kubo and the Two Strings (Knight, 2016), a stop-motion animation produced by Laika Studios, this paper aims to apply film studies to explore current understandings of film-induced tourism. This paper argues that Kubo is itself a form of film-induced tourism by positioning the viewer as a virtual cultural tourist whose cinematic experience may be likened to a veritable media pilgrimage through Japanese culture, history and aesthetics. The movie introduces the viewer into an imagined world that borrows from origami, Nō theatre, shamisen music, obon rituals and Japanese symbolism, philosophy and mythology. The resulting pastiche is a constructed diorama that is as transnational and postmodern as it is authentic and indigenous.

From China to the World: The main media pilgrimages of Sun Wukong and Son Gokū

Giovanni Ruscica — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The ‘Journey to the West’, also translated as the’ Pilgrimage to the West’, is one of the masterpieces of ancient Chinese literature. Published anonymously by the putative author Wu Cheng'en in the late 16^th century, the story traces in broad outline the journey taken by the monk Tripitaka in the year 629 a.D. to India to acquire Buddhist scriptures, and it is the result of reworking antecedent works, such as ‘Poetic notes on the pilgrimage of Tripitaka of the Great Tang to acquire the Sutras’ and ‘‹Journey to the West› Opera’. In this fiction, the writer moves away from the authenticity of the traditional pilgrimage: here the monk is escorted by sinful-followers (i.e., a dragon-horse, a pig, a demon, and a monkey) capable of removing malevolent beings throughout the journey. Sun Wukong is the wild and skillful monkey that ascends to Buddhity, becoming a ‘Victorious Fighting Buddha’ at the end of the literary work. Later on, the Chinese work of fiction was used as a source of inspiration for the creation of Dragon Ball, a Japanese fantasy & martial arts manga. Published in 1984 as a manga and then adapted into an anime, Dragon Ball sketchily follows the Chinese work of fiction. After coming across Bulma, young Son Gokū decides to escort the girl in her quest to collect seven magic dragon spheres. The series’ success allowed the manga’s author, Akira Toriyama, to continue the story arc and launch a new series in 2015. Since 1986, several videogames with a monkey character have entered the market. The purpose of this article is to highlight the main affinities between Sun Wukong and his Japanese counterpart Son Gokū first, and then attempt to explain how the monkey character has become a world-famous symbol, and contextualise it into the phenomenon of ‘worldwide pilgrimage’.

Fashionable pilgrims: Rental and second-hand kimono shops styling paths of new embodied communities

Lucile Druet — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since the Meiji period, the kimono has been commodified — nationally and internationally — as the Japanese national dress, symbolising Japan as a land full of exquisite, exotic traditions. While kimono production is now in decline, its image is still thriving, actively promoted and marketed to attract tourists — domestic and international ones alike — in quest of an “authentic”, sometimes premium, Japan experience.

As a result, the kimono consumed by visitors in Japan, especially in the emblematic “traditional” Kyoto, becomes an object that can be placed at the nexus of content and fashion tourism as well as pilgrimage, with the rental kimono practices or second-hand kimono purchases employing similar liminal dynamics.

This article analyses the interactions the kimono entertains between design and marketing, experience and global consumerism, tourism and pilgrimage; mapping the different territories shared by kimono pilgrims and their communitas by first looking at kimono as contents and secondly, kimono as rental / second-hand object.

Cute at an older age: A case study of Otona-Kawaii

Shiri Lieber-Milo — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The word kawaii, meaning ‘cute and sweet’ in English, has been part of the Japanese culture for centuries. While the word and trend were historically associated with young women and children, there has recently been an attempt to expand the definition of kawaii outside of its traditional borders to other age and gender groups by creating uniquely synthesised words and trends. The newly coined term otona-kawaii [‘adult-cute’] refers to mature women who passed their teen years and continue to dress cute and behave innocent and adorable. In this paper, a focus will be taken upon the new concept of otona-kawaii, and how it is defined and evaluated by the Japanese people.

Results of a recent survey conducted among male and female respondents between the ages of 18 to 29, showed that many of them were in favour of the idea of behaving cute at an older age. It was also found that women were more familiar with the term otona-kawaii and had a more positive approach towards it than men. The results of the study suggest that kawaii can be extended beyond infants and may apply to other age populations, such as mature women.

The aim of this study is to bridge the gap between kawaii and maturity by providing some empirical evidence and information, bringing to a deeper understanding of the concept of kawaii, contributing to the scholarship of the kawaii culture in Japan.

Undermining the gendered genre: Kabuki in manga

Olga Antononoka — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

According to Jaqueline Berndt, Thomas LaMarre, and other critics, manga is a highly participatory media form. Narratives with vibrant characters and creative inconsistences in the plotline encourage the reader to recontextualise the text, create new contents and unfold activities which go beyond reading (such as fan art and CosPlay). Recent popularity of manga about Japanese traditional arts – for example, Kabuki – further expanded the potential interaction with manga and other popular media to include (re)discovering traditional Japanese culture. Examples, such as Kabukumon by Tanaka Akio and David Miyahara (Morning 2008-2011), or Kunisaki Izumo no jijō by Hirakawa Aya (Weekly Shōnen Sunday 2010-2014) and a variety of other manga, anime and light novels exemplify this tendency. Consequently, influential franchises, such as Naruto and One Piece boast adaptations as Super Kabuki stage-plays. Furthermore, Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto observes how thematic and stylistic overreaching in contemporary manga further distort the notions of the gendered genre that lays at the foundation of the manga industry. In this case, Kabuki theatre as a theme employs a variety of gender fluid characters and situations. For this purpose, Kabuki manga utilise cross-genre narrative and stylistic tropes, from overtly parodying borrowed tropes, to homage, and covert inclusions. On the example of Kabuki-manga I will explore a larger trend in manga to employ elements of female genres in male narratives, thus expanding the target readership. My paper explores specific mechanism that facilitates reading manga cross-genre, I also inquire what novel critical potential thematic and stylistic exchange between audiences may entail.

In the steps of the Prophets: The dissemination and reinterpretation of David Roberts’ Holy Lands sketches through the Shows of London

Jeremy Brooker — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The body of drawings and sketches created by the Scottish painter David Roberts (1796-1864) during his expedition to the Holy Lands in 1838-9 marked the high point of his professional career. This paper will look at the period after his return to Britain in July 1839, particularly to 1842. It will suggest that although Roberts was no doubt influenced by his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, religious faith was not as central to his trip as has often been supposed. It was instead through the business acumen of his publisher F.G. Moon that this body of work came to be regarded not merely as an aesthetic achievement but as a cause célèbre. A skilful and coordinated marketing campaign elevated these drawings to the status of a pilgrimage; a contemplative journey through the sites of biblical antiquity. Through detailed analysis of contemporaneous accounts it will show how one of the costliest publications of the era was disseminated, passing from prestigious galleries and the libraries of a wealthy elite through a continuum of public art exhibitions and popular media including panoramas, dioramas and the newly-emerging field of dissolving views. This will provide a rare case study into the interconnectedness of London’s exhibition culture in the 1840s.

Bodies in motion and image recomposition in the early 20th Century

Angela Longo — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The question of the appearance of the body surges in a play of overwhelming forces, and its register in artworks assumes different shapes as their representation spreads towards other mediums. Firstly, following Aby Warburg’s thought, this article will analyse the process of the survival of bodies as potential motion in images. Warburg proposed an Iconological approach where the analysis of potential movement in the image yielded a formula for its analytic recomposition. Furthermore, he captured the transition at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the body representation moved to media that allowed movement reproduction, such as animation and cinema. The bodies' survival or capture contained an animist belief that gained propulsion with the first apparatuses and optical toys that allowed movement and live-action recording. This movement allowed for the production of a simulacrum of the living body and the power to recompose it in space. Therefore, this article will focus on the evolution of body representation and its survival to understand how images from the early twentieth century shaped and traveled around the world.

Immersed, yet distant: Notes for an aesthetic theory of immersive travel films

Nicolas Bilchi — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this article is to highlight a few stylistic and aesthetic principles, common to the genre of the travel film (both documentary and fictional), as employed by immersive media and devices from the twentieth century – such as the Hale’s Tours of the World, Todd-AO, and Cinerama – up to today’s digital systems like Virtual Reality and 4D Cinema. I will discuss how the different experiences of simulated travels, proffered by those media, are all related to a broader aesthetic tendency in creating what I label as enveloping tactile images. Such images are programmed to surround the viewer from every side, thus increasing their spectacular dimension, but at the same time they strive to temper and weaken the haptic solicitations aroused in the viewer by the immersive apparatus itself. In this sense I propose that the spectator of immersive travelogue films is ‘immersed, yet distant’: she is tangled in the illusion of traversing an enveloping visual space, but the position she occupies is nonetheless a metaphysical one, not different from that of Renaissance perspective, because even if she can see everything, the possibility to interact with the images is denied, in order to preserve the realistic illusion. By analysing the stylistic techniques employed to foster the viewer’s condition of non-interactive immersion in the enveloping world presented by the medium, I will consequently address the topic of the conflict that such immersive aesthetics establish with traditional forms of audiovisual storytelling.

Anime tourism in Italy: Travelling to the locations of the Studio Ghibli films

Giulia Lavarone, Marco Bellano — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Film-induced tourism, intended as travelling to places where films and TV series have been shot or set, has been extensively studied in the last two decades in several disciplinary fields. For example, the term ‘media pilgrimage’ emerged in media sociology to highlight the sacred dimension these practices may assume, while fan studies have focused on the narrative of affection built upon specific places. Calling forth the relationship between film and landscape, these phenomena have been also explored in the light of film semiotics and media geography.

In the past decade, the representation of landscape and the construction of the sense of place in animation benefited from increased scholarly attention; however, the links between tourism and animation still appear under-explored. Japanese animation, because of its prominent use of real locations as the basis for the building of its worlds and the tendency of its fanbases to take action (even in the form of animation-oriented tourism), is an especially promising field, in this respect. In the last fifteen years, a debate on ‘content(s) tourism’ has involved the Japanese government as well as academic scholarship, referring to a wide variety of contents, from novels to films and TV series, anime, manga, and games.

The article presents a case study: a discussion of the experience of anime tourists who visited the Italian locations featured in the films by the world-famous animator and director Miyazaki Hayao, especially in Castle in the Sky (1986) and Porco Rosso (1992). The experiences of anime tourists were collected from images and texts shared through the social network Twitter.

Ipar Haizearen Erronka: A boat trip from the Basque Country to Newfoundland

Maitane Junguitu Dronda — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The nature of animated cinema involves the creation of any realistic or fantastical characters, places, and situations. Animation can be used to take characters far from their hometowns on believable journeys without big budgets used on location shooting.

The Basque animated feature film Ipar Haizearen Erronka (The Challenge of the North Wind), directed in 1992 by Juanba Berasategi, illustrates how animation can represent a journey and a historic reality in a plausible way. The movie depicts a Basque whale hunting vessel travelling to the wild coast of Newfoundland, Canada in the sixteenth century. Typically, Basque live action movies in the 80s would recreate foreign locations with nearby settings. Ipar Haizearen Erronka avoids this problem by showing America through drawings.

In this paper, we will use the movie Ipar Haizearen Erronka to interpret how animation uses backgrounds and objects to represent a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and determine the realistic accuracy of the social and historical moments represented in the movie. We will also see how this journey embodies the characteristics of the literary genre of Bildungsroman, as well as the narrative structures pointed out by Vladimir Propp’s folktale and Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The study also focuses on how the film depicts the most representative characteristics of the journey, and how they are used as filming narrative resources. A closer look will be taken into the main vessels, the captain's logbook, the map, the historical context of the sailing of the ship, the maritime laws where sexism is abundant, the financing of the trip, and the work on board.

Journeying to the actual World through digital games: The Urban Histories Reloaded project

Stefano Caselli, Farah Polato, Mauro Salvador — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The paper aims at reflecting on the potential of digital games to convey meaning, tell stories and, most importantly, become a tool to discover and experience the actual world. Using as a case study the experience of the Urban Histories Reloaded. Creatività videoludica per azioni di cittadinanza (Urban Histories Reloaded. Digital Game Creativity for citizenship actions) project (UHR), we will discuss the role digital games can play in activating territorial processes, by favouring the engagement with the actual world as well as with playful approaches to city living.

In particular, we will focus on the artist residency for game designers, game artists, and game programmers held in Padua between September and October 2020 within the frame of the project and on its main outcome, the mobile game MostaScene. MostaScene consists of a fifteen-minute mobile game set in District 5 Armistizio-Savonarola of Padua. Both its design and its overall content have intertwined with the urban space since the very beginning.

Above all, we will inspect the use of digital games for city-making actions via two different paths: on the one hand, through the involvement of stakeholders (public institutions and specific groups, but also and most importantly citizens) as co-designers; on the other hand, using digital games as non-functional experiences that may encourage innovative interpretations of the urban space for player.

From a theoretical perspective, this research requires us to look at digital games as both fictional worlds that involve imagination and interpretation, as well as digital worlds that are experienced as part of reality in a phenomenological sense. Once this is acknowledged, we can provide an overview of how games can tackle reality and engage with the actual world.

What is visual Vaporwave? Vaporwave arts and their history and position in China

Xiaolong Zhang — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

By Vaporwave we refer to a digital-born electronic music genre and a trend in visual aesthetics. It emerged in some US-based online communities in the early 2010s, and now its visual expressions are in vogue in Chinese visual media context. In this article, Vaporwave’s aesthetics are discussed through three stages of analysis. In the first part, the paper outlines relevant theories and general features of Vaporwave’s (both visual and musical) aesthetics; next, the paper focuses on Vaporwave's visual characteristics, and, to provide a deeper understanding of its visual aesthetics, I discuss a school of painting derived from early twentieth-century Italy—Metaphysical art. In the second part, the article discusses why and how vaporwave aesthetics are inseparable from some Japanese visual characteristics and how it is represented in China, with particular reference to examples of Japanese comics from the 1980s/early 1990s and one popular Chinese video-focused social media TikTok in recent years. In the third part, the article focuses on illustrating Vaporwave's visual features in the Chinese context in recent years, and several examples are provided.

Editorial – Fulfilling the purpose of a rich, productive, and successful 2021. And preparing for an as much as possible, definitely “true normal” 2022

Maxime Danesin, Marco Pellitteri — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Dear readers, students, fellow scholars, welcome to this tenth instalment of Mutual Images Journal, which we have titled “Aesthetic journeys and media pilgrimages in the contexts of pop culture and the creative industries from and to East Asia”, trying to subsume in it the variety of themes the volume hosts.

Audaces fortuna iuvat

The Latin adage of this introduction states: “good luck helps the daring ones”. We think this is what happened to us and Mutual Images, both the journal and the association as a whole. We had left 2020 with more than just the proverbial mixed feelings: we were all uncertain and confused about what would and could happen in 2021. We won’t give you a summary of the many facets of what 2020 has been for the world, because each of you knows that all too well. But for MIRA, at least, 2021 was a moment of rally and refocus on what we hold dear: research, publishing, and the careful organisation of workshops and similar events. We rolled up our sleeves as so many people around the world did, and, in our microcosm of transcultural research in the humanities, media, cultural sociology, and area studies — whether supported by universities or independently run — we brought home two very nice workshops and a summer school. One workshop was held in Italy and Spain in November 2020 and the other in Japan in January 2021, although, for obvious reasons, both were technically conducted mainly online; and the summer school took place on-site in China, in June 2021.

The two workshops saw [...]

Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia – Nana Sato-Rossberg & Akiko Uchiyama (eds)

Jamie Tokuno — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia is the 27th volume in the Peter Lang series New Trends in Translation Studies. While each chapter in Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia independently bears fruit to the particular facet of translation studies that it examines, as a whole this edited volume reads as one sweeping encapsulation of contemporary East Asian translation studies that demonstrates the depth and potential of the field. It engages [...]

When the World Laughs. Film Comedy East and West – William V. Costanzo

Jose Montaño — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While film genres have risen or declined along with the times and its trends, according to Aldredge (2019), comedy has remained steady in high popularity through all the years since 1910, which is practically to say throughout the whole history of cinema as an industry. Furthermore, it can be said that comedy stands as the second genre in the number of films produced. Furthermore, it can be said that comedy stands as the second genre in number of films produced when considering only a single genre tagging. However, [...]

The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age – Hoyt Long

Vicky Young — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age by Hoyt Long (Columbia University Press, 2021) sets out with two aims: to ask what computational methods might bring to the acts of reading and studying Japanese literature; and to open up the Digital Humanities, which in the United States have been dominated by the English language, to alternative insights, challenges, and solutions that arise when the objects of analysis are Japanese texts. The book’s opening sets [...]

An Affair with a Village – Joy Hendry

Aurore Yamagata-Montoya — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Joy Hendry is today a leading Japanese studies scholar and anthropologist, recompensed with the Order of the Rising Sun, who founded and presided over several major research associations over the past decades. However, at the time this story starts (as it is a story Hendry is writing in this book), she is a young woman starting her fieldwork for a doctorate. She had mastered the Japanese language already, but many aspects of Japanese daily life, especially in a retired rural area such as the small village of Kurotsuchi (Kyushu), elude her – as it did for most foreign academics in the 1970s.

Written during lockdown due to the pandemic, Hendry narrates [...]