Abstract
This paper re-examines and further develops the concept of “field,” first proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and applied to the case of contemporary Japan by Katsuya Minamida, through a case study of the Japanese bishoujo game field. According to Bourdieu and Minamida, as a sphere of cultural consumption with a unique sense of values, participants of a field achieve favorable differentiation from the “outsiders” through consumption of the medium. An investigation of the Japanese bishoujo game field reveals a different, much more complicated situation, in which participants highly appreciate the medium while holding negative views of the audiences, giving rise to a cultural sphere that merely differentiates each participant from other “even more inferior”; participants internally without any hope of external favorable differentiation. The underlying reason is the existence of an extremely unbalanced social power relationship between girl game players and non-players in the social space where the field is placed. A partial cultural sphere disrupted by an external hegemony can be conceptualized as an “incomplete field,” with the bishoujo game field in Japan as a typical example.
