This edited volume investigates the relation of politics to visual media in
Japan through the twinned, and often overlapping, processes of politicization and depoliticization. This collection offers new research on a wide array of visual media texts including classical narrative cinema, television, documentary film, manga, and animated film. Asking “How are visual media
texts created, positioned, or read by consumers in such a way as to foster
politicization or its opposite, depoliticization?,” we consider the various
roles played by popular entertainments in the production of political or
apolitical, ideologies and subjectivities. This question, we suggest, centres on
the particular character of such entertainment products as fulfilling multiple
roles, whether these be edifying and enriching, preaching and indoctrinating,
or providing escapes from people’s everyday lives.
The power of visual media texts can be found in two interrelated dimensions. First, they are public (often commercially created) means to access either mass or elite audiences and possibly influence their attitudes towards different social issues, potentially leading them to political action.
Second, they are devices for creating multi-sensory experiences that appeal
to viewers in ways that capture their attention (or deflect it) and (again,
possibly) mobilize their interests (Aarseth 1997). In identifying visual media
texts’ potential for mobilization, we are suggesting that visual media may
evoke emotions and sentiments that lie at the basis of collective political
action. Furthermore, while visual media texts differ from other entertainment and educational forms such as theatre performances or educational classes, visual media productions often resonate with – echo, mimic, and reinforce – other forms of cultural production.