Recently, a surge in interest regarding microaggressions has been observed. Unlike overt discrimination, such as hate speech, understanding the impact of routine, often unintended remarks and actions is crucial, as they can psychologically affect individuals when they accumulate.
　This study aimed to examine the encounters with microaggressions faced by individuals with multiple minority identities. It highlights the necessity of addressing these normalized oppressive situations at various levels, such as interpersonal, organizational, and societal.
　The convergence of multiple minority statuses often leads to a distressing daily routine that involves an individual being subjected to microaggressions from various perspectives.
Therefore, it is essential to examine these intricate experiences through an intersectional lens. However, studies on intersectionality in Japan frequently overlook the aspect of race.
　Additionally, in secular–based discussions, experiences related to religion and faith often take a backseat.
　Therefore, this study attempts to investigate individuals’ frequent encounters with microaggressions and their repercussions through the perspective of a second–generation Muslim woman with a mixed background raised in Japan. The utilization of collaborative autoethnography, a research and writing process involving interaction and cooperation, enables collective exploration of subjectivity. It fosters sharing power among researchers, non–academic individuals, and practitioners, leading to profound learning for all involved.
　The present study specifically outlines microaggressions experienced in education, job hunting, workplaces, and daily life, elucidating their impact on mental and physical well–being. Ultimately, it emphasizes the necessity of tailored responses for each of these scenarios.

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　This study aimed to uncover the social reality experienced by my family members (Zainichi Korean; Korean residents in Japan) by analyzing the construction of their narratives as a routine interactive activity and how they position themselves within these narratives.
　In the narrative, my father introduces a frightening “hypothetical scenario” of needing to flee Japan owing to the enactment of the Specially Designated Secrets Act, which means to return the country to the pre–war setting, drawing parallels with the Holocaust under the Nazis. In this way, the narrative that certain Zainichi Korean families contemplated fleeing from Japan as a last resort reflects that they harbored critical views of the Japanese society, especially amidst its rightward shift and rise in xenophobia, and they felt routinely threatened with exclusion.
　Moreover, differences in the ethnic identities of the three Zainichi Korean participants are revealed in the narrative: what these three identities had in common is that they were contrary to the dominant discourse in the Zainichi Korean society. These identities were articulated through conversations among minorities within the intimate family sphere, suggesting that this study served to rediscover the “self” liberated from the constraints of ethnic identity.

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To date, some studies have been conducted to reveal the difficulties that sexual minorities face in their daily lives. On the other hand, while discriminatory discourses that unilaterally condemn transgender women’s participation in women’s sports have intensified, few studies have shed light on the difficulties that sexual minorities face in sports.
This paper aims to make visible the difficulties experienced by sexual minorities in sports and the emotions that accompany them, as well as to explore the backgrounds that give rise to such experiences and emotions. For this purpose, we analyze open–ended responses on difficult experiences in sports.
As a result, 8 main–categories and 25 sub–categories were generated. From the examination of the relationships among categories, it was considered that sports are constituted by “material conditions” and “environmental conditions” in which cisgenderism, heterosexism, and ableism are embedded, and that supported by such conditions, difficult experiences arise in “instruction and education” and “relationships with others”. Such difficult experiences construct the “perceived body” as negative. Additionally, the discriminative ideologies that constitute sports were also found to be at work in the “psychological relationship with sports” and “actual relationship with sports” that were cultivated in these experiences.
From this study, it can be understood that the norms of gender and sexuality are deeply embedded in the idealized body in sports. Therefore, to talk about the reform of sports, which fundamentally contains structures that generate discrimination, it is necessary to face up to the difficult experiences in sports.

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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the fact that in the sexual minority community, the parties involved have begun to actively identify themselves not only with “sexuality” but also with “romantic” and even “fraternity/friendship” on the spectrum, and to examine the social and cultural meaning and significance of such identities.
In conducting the analysis, a literature review was conducted on sexuality and friendships, and in parallel, interviews were conducted with parties who identify themselves with ‘zucchini’ an identity based on fraternity/friendship. This paper attempts to extend the study of sexuality from the intersectional perspective, and to describe and analyze the complex identities from three phases, including fraternity/friendship in addition to sexuality and romantic.
This paper then analyzed from interviews with the parties involved how fraternity/friendship is trivialized by “amatonormativity”. Naming identities based on fraternity/friendship is a practice of presence statement and self–understanding, an attempt to dismantle amatonormativity. Recognizing the existence of the norm of amatonormativity and acquiring the perspective of fraternal identity is needed for the future study of sexuality.

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This paper examines Barbie (2023) in the genealogy of popular media representations in “women’s films” or “feminist films”. Mainly since the early 2000s, academic discussions encompassed representations of femininity offered in the genre, problematising the discursive production of a postfeminist sensibility. Feminism, it seemed, was taken for granted yet repudiated at the same time. More recently, scholars have argued that a neoliberal embracement of postfeminism has complicated popular receptions of the sensibility. While feminism has been increasingly acknowledged as a critical social agenda, emancipation from oppression has been rendered an individualised project and consumption has been incited as the remedy to social anxieties, not coalitional resistance. Applying narrative analysis to the most recent, record–breaking feminist film, Barbie, I argue that the movie disrupts postfeminist representations in popular media culture, offering glimmers of hope to transcend the conventional sensibility. More specifically, I underscore how the film effectively engages with a self–critique of postfeminism despite being a birthchild of the same system. I demonstrate how it effectively demystifies the overarching sensibility by outlining its process of production in a specific tempo–spatiality and deconstructing the permeance of a patriarchal Symbolic order that supports ideological domination. Furthermore, I describe how the narrative proposes a transcendence of the postfeminist sensibility by offering alternative ways to live in one’s “all”, embedded in assemblages of care. Finally, I discuss certain limitations in the film’s production to assess how Barbie could be considered in terms of the changing postfeminist landscape.

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　Pornography for heterosexual men prominently displays a gender–disproportionate allocation of the gaze. The question of whom the viewer identifies with, shaped by the gaze constituting pornography involves the power of not only oppression over women but also subjectification over men. However, discourse on the relationship between pornography and identification oscillates between attributing a near–singular effect to techniques and overestimating the potential for diverse interpretations. Therefore, this paper uses male–oriented adult videos as an illustrative case to explore the ways in which visual techniques shape viewer identification with female or male personas. The analysis elucidates that identification is influenced by visual techniques but remains open to various intrinsic possibilities encapsulated within the images.
This paper introduces the concept of “point of view (POV)” and subjective objectification termed “semi–subjective” image. The prevalent screen composition in male–oriented pornography, centering the actress, could be potentially perceived as prioritizing identification with women, especially when interpreted as a female semi–subjective image. Moreover, contextual factors and selective viewing practices in AVs allow for the possibility of “misinterpretation” for viewers to identify with women. Male semi–subjective images sometimes appeared simultaneously with POV, which are usually incompatible, as in cubism.
Consequently, this paper reveals that male–oriented adult videos are a visual culture with a unique style, in which the technique has an effect that differs from that of film. The study elucidates that while identification is guided by the technique, the potential for gendering to the opposite sex is inherently depicted in pornography.

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This paper focuses on the fact that women are subjects involved in men’s clothing through housework such as doing laundry and helping men change their clothes in Ozu Yasujirō’s postwar films. This study aims to clarify that women’s involvement in clothing has the function of maintaining “everyday life” and the death of the male owner of the clothing is anticipated through the absence of the involved women.
This paper follows previous studies focusing on clothing research and semiotic analysis. It then situates housework such as doing laundry and helping men change clothes, which have tended to be overlooked in research on clothing, as involvement in clothing.
I clarify that the everyday life maintained by women’s involvement in clothing is threatened by their absence, shown in the daughter’s marriage that frequently appears in Ozu’s postwar films. In addition, when Ozu focuses on the “bereavement” of characters, men tend to reject women’s involvement in their clothing. This leads to the absence of the act that maintains everyday life and sniffs out the extraordinary that appears in everyday life, which makes the audience anticipate The death of the men, the subjects who reject women’s involvement.
Consequently, this study clarified that women’s involvement in clothing symbolizes the act of maintaining everyday life and that the absence of that women’s act functions as a foreshadowing of extraordinary events that occur in everyday life.

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Content analytic approaches interpreting the “codes” of media representation and those focusing on the active audience have overlooked the effects of materiality associated with the agency of objects and the materiality of symbols. In contrast, this paper integrates into the theory of audience studies the subversion caused by non–human materiality, a form of subversion that cannot be reduced to active interpretive practices by humans.
Hall’s active audience theory has been associated with Butler’s performativity theory. In contrast, this paper establishes a connection between Shannon’s communication theory, the origin of the encoding/decoding theory, with Derrida and Hiroki Azuma’s misdelivery theory. Consequently, the subversion induced by material “noise” is conceptualized as “misdelivery.”
An instance of political subversion resulting from misdelivery is evident in the phenomenon where sexual desire for two–dimensional characters is differentiated from human–oriented sexuality. This paper critically assesses Azuma’s assertion that the desire for two–dimensional characters is “analogous to the behavioral principle of drug addicts.” Drawing on Becker’s examination of marijuana users and Akihiro Kitada’s non–semantic media literacy theory, the paper demonstrates the political potential of the “addictive audience” formed through engagement with media content.
Conventional content analytic approaches and active audience approaches falls short in capturing the phenomenon that the same “code” can yield different effects based on alterations in the material requirements that instantiate that code. We must not only consider the aspect wherein material objects constrain human action but also recognize that human meaning-making, social, and cultural conditions constrain the agency of objects.

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In prewar and wartime Japan, live sports broadcasts and radio calisthenics classes were often listened to collectively in public, in a street setting, called “street collective listening” practice in this paper. This paper examines the effects of street collective listening on radio broadcasts in the street, in contrast with the group listening held inside buildings, as another form of collective listening.
Group listening was conducted by people sharing attributes in a closed space under a hierarchy of guidance and accompanied by auxiliary texts that reconstructed the relationship between the group and the place destroyed by the radio. In contrast, street collective listening made it possible to include people with different attributes, as it was done outdoors, on the street. This created a synergistic effect between radio broadcasts and “publicness on the streets”, constructing a “fascist publicness” and fostering a sense of “nation” that was far larger than the given group and incorporating people into the “imagined community” of a “nation–state”. In this process, “representations of space” and “spaces of representation” (both terms are of Henri Lefebvre) coincided, and the space of the street played the role of an interface in this process.

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This paper examines the role of YaNeSen, a local magazine that focuses on the Yanaka, Nezu, and Sendagi neighbourhoods (collectively referred as Yanesen) of Tokyo, in preserving everyday cultural practices and constructing collective memory. The study utilises Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire to thematically analyse each issue of the magazine. This approach aims to identify how the magazine serves as a contemporary site of memory, connecting residents to their local heritage. The magazine YaNeSen was founded in 1984 by three housewives with the aim of rediscovering the historic richness of the area and fostering community identity. It captures the microhistories and mundane daily experiences that characterize the Yanesen areas through interviews, essays, and illustrations. The three neighbourhoods are artificially linked into one cohesive place with a shared history.
The analysis of the magazine’s content and visual style demonstrates how it constructs an imagined community, defines local identity, and opposes homogenizing redevelopment. After ceasing publication in 2009, the magazine’s archive was preserved at the Storehouse of Memories in the same neighbourhoods. This paper argues that YaNeSen offers a counternarrative to Tokyo’s official heritage discourses by emphasizing vernacular, community-based preservation initiatives.
The article presents heritage as a dynamic and inclusive process that involves everyday locations, items, and narratives. By bringing history to the present, it empowers citizens to shape their shared memory in a way that reflects their own experiences. This research provides insight into how community organisations can redefine urban identity and contest dominant narratives of development and erasure.

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This paper examines the implications of One World: Together at Home, an 8-hour virtual benefit concert organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the international advocacy organization Global Citizen on April 18, 2020, for shaping narratives surrounding a global emergency. It analyzes how One World was intended by the WHO and relevant social actors to retain their discursive positions and symbolic power in guiding the discourses against the pandemic at its onset. It starts by reviewing the scholarship on critical event management and media events, establishing the theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of the virtual concert. It then examines the production and delivery of One World, explaining how the WHO, major American television networks, celebrities and digital platforms are involved in constructing a US-centric “mediated center” in the global discussions of the handling of COVID-19. As examples illustrating how the meanings of One World were appropriated beyond the English-speaking, US-focused context, this study then investigates how the agendas of One World was perceived in China and Taiwan, respectively. By focusing on the geopolitical complexities surrounding Taiwan and China, particularly Taiwan’s struggle to obtain the WHO membership and China’s internet censorship, this paper explains how and why, as a form of symbolic power, One World in practice triggered a sense of exclusion from the version of “one” world it sought to construct in both Taiwan and China for very different reasons. It also reveals the implications of One World for the ongoing geopolitical tensions in the global healthcare discussions.

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