Mobile Media

Japanese mobile phone culture is quite interesting. In Japan, mobile phones are everywhere. Most of the Japanese owns a cellular phone, especially flip phones, most of them have video and camera capabilities, very multifunctional. According to a research in the May 2008 around 30% of elementary school  students and 60% of middle school students owns a cell phone.  Which means a large amount of the polulation owns a cell phone no matter what, it is just culture.

Japanese mobile phones are very pretty,   and the most important thing is that they can watch television on their phone on the train or any public transport. You must be thinking that it will be very noisy with so many people watching different channels of tv programms, this really interesting thing is that they are recommended to switch their phones on silent on public transports. 

Food in Asia

There is a huge difference between Asian food and western food. Firstly, the flavour of any cuisine majorly depends on the recipe and the ingredients that is being used in each dish, Asian food uses a vary amount of sauces which hits the sweet palate, sour palate and salt palate all at once, maintaining a balance between flavours is a key to Asian cuisine. Western food uses meat a lot as their major dish such as steak and is particularly more aware of the serving-size. Similarly, western cuisines also emphasises on sauces, seasonings and accompaniments. And I personally love Asian cuisines. Secondly, the manner and different utensils are used in different cuisines, the most obvious one is that western people uses forks and knives whereas, Asians uses chopsticks. Thirdly, Asians in this case I’m referring to Chinese, we like to use round tables instead of squared tables, it is mainly because we like to sit closely together, the fact that round table can fit a whatever amount of people, there tend to be a lot of visitors in Chinese culture, thus it is very convenient and harmonious for every to sit closely against each other. Additionally, we like share the dishes among each other instead of having separate individual dishes of our own when eating. We believe in “sharing is caring"”at all times. 

Week13:Asianism

Like the economy, Japanese male has lost masculinity during the modernization. Asian guys are now threatening the predominance of Japanese male. Japanese female are sick of the effeminacies of Japanese guys, hence, Japanese female draw their attention to other Asian guys. Most of them thought Asian guys’ sexiness is something that Japanese guys do not have after modernization.

Due to the heavy promotion of Hong Kong movies in Japan in 1990, the image of  Hong Kong to be promoted as a modern city like any major city in Euro. Hence, Japanese female start to consume the product from HK Idols because Japanese female found what Japanese male had lost, in those Hong Kong idols such as the loss of energy and power of Japanese society. Through the consumption of HK popular culture, Japanese feel they have regained the vigor and hope lost in their daily lives.

            By looking into different mode of Asian modernity, it can see what had been gone wrong with the process of Japanese modernization. Like what features Japan had lost and What Japanese modernity has never achieved.

The traditional thing and modernity in Hong Kong can coexist even after achieved high economic growth. Japan has thrown away the good old things so much, so that everything looked merely quasi-Western.

It can be concluded that nostalgia arises out of a sense of insecurity, sorrow in present and pessimism about the future especially for the prolonged economic recession in Japan. Japan had looked to the West too much; as a result, Japanese culture has became closed and lost a meeting point with other Asian culture and has came to a kind of dead-end situation and has no further possibility.

Sport in Asia

As every one knows, Sport is the best way to communicate amongst races just like Olympic. In Asia, the most popular world event may not be Olympic, but World Cup.   FIFA, which is a prime national football association, President Blatter flattered the regional representatives of football from the continent with the world’s largest population and highest economic growth rates that the ‘future of football is Asia’. This indicated that football is not just a simple game anymore; it now consists of other factors such as commercialization.

In 2002, South Korea – Japan World Cup, only two Asian teams were able to qualify together with the host nations, compared to 13 fixed places for European nations with only half the number of ordinary football players thus, it can be seem Asia is part of the outside edge on the global football map where compare to traditional European nations.

In qualifying for the 2006 tournament, Asia’s minor position is further expressed in no Asian nation was entered the final round of 16 knockout stage hence, this showed that Asia lags behind the any other contingents, Europe and South America. However, we know that as football are commercializing the size of television audiences, and accordingly economic activity and income generated by the game are the most influential factor nowadays.

The growing of football in Asia is closely related to the commercialization of the game, which itself is a consequence of the crisis of the Fordist production system which simply means the player must be paid a higher level of wages in order to perform better.

Shifting the focus from well developed football markets towards new territories such as Asia would corresponded with the expansionary of capitalism. For the profit-making aspect, the transnational television broadcast of football open a high way to giant population like China which can also funding the football clubs with large amounts of income from sponsorship revenues and television rights. An example is SkyPerfecTV! in Japan, which competed with other broadcasters for exclusive coverage of the entire 2002 World Cup Finals for approximately 100M Euro and final turned profitable in 2004, and Wolfram and John believed this largest sum ever for a single sport event was just an temporary step in the network to enlarge its subscribers size by sport.

In short, although the Asian quality of football is improving, it still lags behind other contingents. And there are some problems Asian need to resolve such as improving the quality of team manager and players, improving training facilities in order to overtake other contingents. Asian is a large market which contain huge amount of resources, large population in Asia is a great advantage that Asian should wisely exploit. If these things can be solved, then ‘future of football is Asia’ which can be proven.

Masculinity

Masculinity is the topic for this week, being male or female is not only based on biological sex. “Societal values and expectations effect gender role stereotypes in a culture,” and tells males to be “masculine” females to be feminine. In my personal point of view, Masculinity is defined as maleness or showing manly characteristics of the male sex. Although masculinity is mostly recognized as self sacrifice, strength, vigor and power, this idea is also reflected in their style of fashion, clothing are expressed through dark range of colors such as black or blue. Also, this journal would focus on how masculinity is shown through fashion. The tradition muscular outfit usually does not fit Asians such as wearing a normal undershirt and showing off muscles; Conversely, Japanese Masculinity is more suitable for Asians to follow, due to the skinny physical framework which encourages wearing slim cut jeans and clothes. Japanese products always give first impression of high quality to people and of course including the industry of fashion. Japan has had a leading position in fashion trend in Asia and has been a logo of Asian trend for the last decade. As an international student from Hong Kong, where people are highly influenced by Japanese, one of the reasons of this Japanese masculinity being popular is that this Japanese masculinity has a high acceptance of both male and female genders. Masculinity may also be explained to the ability of attracting attention of female. There is no difference between Western and Asians masculinity on this perspective; it is only a different way to show their racial features and just the difference of cultures thus there is no fixed definition of masculinity.

According to Carl Milos R. Bulilan, Japanese youngsters’ fashion goes beyond the boundaries of gender differentiation. In Japan, it is common to see male having a long and dyed hair. In many cultures, men do not have long hair like western people. This long and dyed hair may be presumed as females’ act and Carls Milos R. Bulilan also stated it appears to be so natural among Japanese youth to see men which such hairstyle in day-to-day life. Furthermore, Japanese men like to wear feminine accessories, bags and boots; they would put cosmetics on just to give them that flawless glow, also, they aim to have a pasty and pale looking skin color, thus they are very keen on using a lot of skin care products and even whitening skin care products to look more like a woman.

In short, Masculinity is defined by society and usually other gender related social expectations can be specified which may vary from culture to culture. The western muscular masculinity may not be suitable for all Asian especially to those have skinny physical framework, on the other hand, the new revolution of masculinity in Japan impact the” tradition” explanation of masculinity and create the new value or explanation of masculinity by feminine themselves. This Japanese masculinity has a high acceptance amongst Asian countries or even influences the fashion trend of some western countries.

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J Pop

I have listened to J-pop music for almost 7years, and J pop is the main reason why I start to aware of Japanese fashion, trend and culture. Everybody may watch anime while their childhood and their theme songs are one of the features of these anime. These theme songs always contain the element of pop music and usually performed by popular groups and singers. And actually, these theme songs are usually consisting of guitar and drums and cause anime pop music found familiar with J Rock.

L’Arc~en~ciel, Luna sea and X Japan are my favorite bands. X Japan is a ‘whistle band’, the costumes are very emo-like. They are very quite exaggerated and bold. These songs are recommended to you guys, hope you guys like it 

L'Arc~en~ciel - Driver's high

Luna Sea - I For U

Tears - X japan

Bollywood

In my own point of view, the definition of Bollywood is Hindi movie. Although I don’t really pay much attention to the Indian culture and I have only watched a couple bollywood movies. But in fact I find it quite interesting; the bollywood movies that I have watched mainly involve a lot of music, dancing and singing, very energetic and upbeat. And in dancing tv programs such as ‘so you think you can dance’, some genre involve bollywood, the most familiar thing to me are the bollywood dance step.

Additionally there is one song, I am not sure whether the dance moves in this music video is counted as bollywood. It is called Jai ho from the pussycat dolls. I really like the song, I guess it does reflect part of the element of Bollywood as being energetic enchanting and joyful. Also, there is one movie that is recently nominated in the 10 Academic awards and came eighth, it is the slumdog millionaire. This was the movie that is greatly internationalized. The movie was great. I will post the above mentioned movies and music below, hope you guys like it! 

Pussycat dolls - Jai Ho

Slumdog millionaire trailer