This paper organizes the cannabis liberation movement in contemporary Japan, focusing on developments from the 1990s on. Cannabis is being legalized in the United States and Europe, where this topic is regarded as a political conflict between the liberal and conservative factions and frequently made an issue in the same way as gay marriage and gun control. The cannabis legalization movement is endorsed by liberal supporters and has had pragmatic effects on regulation changes, which differs greatly from the situation in Japan. The cannabis liberation movement in Japan started with the beatniks and hippies of the 1960s, and a network has been created and issue framed in multiple ways from 1990s until today. This movement cannot be reduced to a single organization, but is a group composed of individuals with diverse intentions and concerns. There is not sufficient knowledge of these trends in the world of sociology. To that end, this paper attempts to first comprehend the associations in this movement formed by groups and individuals, rather than interpret a single event or organization. The current cannabis liberation movement has multiple goals such as total legalization, medical use, and industrial use. At the same time, examining the discourse indicates that it is dispersed, ranging from that dependent on academic research to spiritualism, nationalism, and conspiracy theories. This background includes developments in the spirituality, new age, and reggae subcultures and the cannabis legalization movement has progressed while crossing into the music and culture of these groups. This paper first provides a general view of the history to organize situation in Japan from the 1990s, considering the actions and claims of various groups and discussing the ways each has resisted social circumstances.

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Prostitutes are distinguished from other “innocent” and “respectable” women. In this paper, I use Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque to explore how literature blurs this line. Grotesque is based on the ‘Toden OL Murder Case’ in 1997, the victim of which worked as a prostitute by night, while she was an elite career woman in TEPCO by day. Therefore, the media, especially weekly gossip magazines, covered her private life as a sex worker insistently. I compare Grotesque’s narrative to the magazines’ version to analyze the representation of prostitutes in literature versus the mass media. The media’s gossip excluded the victims from having the “normal” life of innocent citizens. In other words, they labeled prostitutes as “social death.” Similarly, the narrator of Grotesque, “Watashi,” vilifies her sister, Yuriko and her classmate, Kazue, who worked as sex workers and were murdered. Watashi’s narrative attempts to emulate media’s narrative and distinguish herself from them. However, she fails. I point out that the failure reflects her melancholy toward the victims. It enables her to mourn for the murdered prostitutes in the last scene of the novel. I conclude that the novel shows the work of mourning for prostitutes, who are labeled “social death” by the media.

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In this essay I reread the photographer and critic Allan Sekula’s essays in terms of the critique of the division of labor. In Japanese academic discourses on photography, there are only a few writings dealing with his theoretical works, and they do not seem to fully address his Marxist way of thinking in explaining his ideas. One of the two aims of this essay is to interpret his theory coherently, referring to the books that affected his thought such as Valentin Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language or Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital. Another aim of this study is to reconsider the concept realism by interpreting his theoretical writings. While advancing his theoretical thinking on photography, Sekula defended “realism” in artistic creation from the late 1970s. In Europe and the US, “realism” came under harsh attack from the mid-1970s when new photographic discourses began to dominate. Largely influenced by post-structuralism, such discourses identified realism with positivism and attempted to abandon the former’s critical possibility altogether. This kind of thinking on photographic realism became hegemonic not only in Europe and the US but also in Japan afterwards. However, in this country, the critical conception of realism has not been devised and the anti-realist tendency of some photography theories has not yet been critically examined. Drawing on the argument of the art critic John Roberts, who critically conceptualized realism and its relationship to photography, this essay revisits the 1980’s anti-realist photography theories and differentiates Sekula’s view from other contemporary theorists.

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This paper examines the political significance of covert animosities behind the celebratory atmosphere of interracial solidarity among French-speaking, English-speaking writers and intellectuals at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, one of the crucial moments of the Third Worldism. The major focus of this article is dedicated to the analysis of the papers delivered by the black American author Richard Wright (“Tradition and Industrialization”) and the Barbadian novelist George Lamming (“The Negro Writer and His World”), including a report on the conference by James Baldwin, the then young African American author at his sojourn in Paris. I argue that in the context of the rising anti-communism inside and outside the U.S. soil, the problematization of racism and colonialism that were on agenda for most of the French speaking African and Caribbean, was differently dealt with by Anglophone authors. First, the historical and political context of the early cold war era is offered. Second, I examine how Richard Wright, due to his tendency to psychologize the people in the colonial and ex-colonial regions, touched upon crucial issues such as racism and colonialism, but immediately passed them onto a comparatively urgent reality of economic and technological modernization. Third, I argue that George Lamming, through his philosophical adumbration on the affectivity of shame, points at the realm that cannot be grasped by a schematized, if not wholly paternalistic, understanding toward the ex-colonized peoples, and thus offers an enduring critique toward the difficulty and possibility of the interracial solidarity per se.

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This paper explores how media mix, which is a characteristic of the Japanese cultural industry, actually works. By interviewing the field practitioners of media mix who are the Light Novel editors of KADOKAWA, this paper shows how the practitioners perceive their job and media mix, and what practices are being made based on their perception. The finding show that the media mix functions as a strategy to sell more of the editors’ books, and practitioners’ motivation is not due to creativity, but fear of risk. This paper further demonstrates that there are three risks in the practice of media mix, and attempt to show how light novel’s editors are overcoming it. The first risk is the narrowness of the light novel market, the second risk is the anxiety about the partner company, and the third risk is the anxiety about the media mixed work. In order to overcome this, the light novel editors make efforts to create good works with media mix. As a usual practice, they focus on making characters well, and when choosing an illustrator they proceed with thinking about the media mix. Second, they constantly collect information about partner companies, and sometimes present them at partner companies. Third, they control the timing of the release of their work to complete a good media mix work, in order to not lose the charm of the work by participating periodically and actively in the screenplay.

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In 1973, International Association of Art (IAA) held a congress in Bulgaria and resolved to emphasize “cultural identity” in each country and region. This notion of “identity” became a key concept for “Asian Art Show” that was held by the Fukuoka Art Museum (FAM) in commemoration of the establishment of the museum in 1979. Since then, the FAM organized “Asian Art Show” almost every 5 years until the fourth show in 1994. These were pioneering exhibitions to introduce Asian contemporary art in Japan. After the 2nd World War, most of countries in Asia emerged from colonial rule and achieved nationhood. In the process of building each nation, the formation of “identity” became an important issue even in visual art field. Indicating the notion of “identity” with different words, the 1st to the 3rd “Asian Art Show” explored commonality rather than difference in Asian Art. On the other hand, however, the 4th show focused on individual artworks and criticized the previous attitude in the past shows. This essay examines the reception and transition of the notion of “identity” in Asian contemporary art, by taking “Asian Art Show” as the early example to deal with the notion in the exhibitions. This essay also analyzes the way of understanding the notion in each “Asian Art Show”. By examining it, the essay emphasizes the necessity to produce discourse for Asian contemporary art as well as to reconsider the attitude of Japan toward Asia.

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