“Participatory Culture and Creative Remix: From Traditional Japanese Performance Arts to Contemporary Manga”

This event, with an attendance of 90, consisted of three parts: a lecture in the form of an open class, to which Professor Haruo Shirane from Columbia University was invited to speak, a group discussion, and report presentations. The lecture was titled “Participatory Culture and Creative Remix: From Traditional Japanese Performance Arts to Contemporary Manga” and was given in English, accompanied by Japanese-language slides.
Professor Shirane noted that a major characteristic of traditional Japanese arts and performance (such as Noh and the tea ceremony) is the transmission of basic movements (kata) from master to disciple through a house or school system. While, at first glance, this might seem a conservative or closed way of transmitting techniques, it allowed different arts (music, dance acting, martial arts, etc.) to be transmitted over centuries. Furthermore, these schools taught amateurs, especially their patrons, providing a means of support for the professionals who could not make a living otherwise. Another kind of participatory culture is festival culture, in which a variety of people, including townspeople and amateurs, could participate. As Professor Shirane showed, this was historically linked to the practice of professionals teaching students who could pay for the one-on-one lesson—a practice that led to the culture of “parlor performances” (zashiki geinо̄) in which the various aspects of Noh performance (for example, music, dance, and singing) could be learned separately by amateurs.
Professor Shirane argued that this kind of “parlor performance,” in which amateurs are taught and corrected by professional teachers, has been passed down in different traditional arts such as haiku composition and which continues into the present, as evident in televisions shows in which amateur celebrities compete with each other in composing haiku and are judged and corrected by teachers, or professionals. The practice of submitting work and getting corrections from professionals also occurs in such genres as manga magazine contests for amateurs. A secondary award for winning such contests is publication in the pages of the sponsoring magazines. Comments from the judges of the contests are incorporated into the manga before publication, creating a transition from amateur to professional in some successful cases. A similar arrangement can be found in light novels written by amateurs and posted online servers such as “Kakuyomu,” sponsored by media companies such as Kadokawa. If an amateur wins one of the contests for “new authors,” the works are reworked with the help of the judges, before publication.
Another kind of participatory culture that Professor Shirane described is fan-written sequels and additions to existing “hits” or popular texts. This can be traced all the way back to The Tale of Genji, when fans wrote sequels or parts that they felt have been left out. The practice is very visible today in popular culture in the form of the dōjinshi, or amateur self-publications, which add sequels to existing games, anime, manga, or light novels. This kind of participatory culture, in which the reader composes additions to the existing stands at the heart of classical Japanese poetry, going back to the ancient period, in so-called “banquet culture” in which poems are written in response to other poems, as if they are in dialogue, or to create a sequence, as they appeared in medieval linked verse. The same phenomenon occurs with vernacular prose in which readers added to existing works.
   Professor Shirane then turned to the phenomenon of a “media mix” in contemporary popular culture. Frequently, light novels are adapted into manga, or vice a versa, or manga is made into anime. Obviously, such diverse forms of media-crossing did not exist in early modern Japan. Instead, we have a different kind of media mix in which different media (such as poetry and painting) are combined together, often in dialogic fashion, with a painting responding to a poem or a poem responding to a painting. Haiga, or haiku painting, is an example of amateur painting that was very popular in the premodern period and continues to this day.
Professor Shirane went on to argue to note that participatory culture and “parlor performance” takes many different forms. Parlor performance can occur in a highly vertical, hierarchical structure, in which the student must strictly imitate and follow the instructor, who has the authority. Another kind of participatory culture has a more horizontal structure in which the participants, with the help of an instructor or a senpai, can shape the content and direction. Professor Shirane gave an example of university bukatsu clubs (such as American football), which tend to be highly vertical in structure (kind of like the military), and more informally organized “circles,” which have a more horizontal, free structure. This led into the group discussion portion of the event in which the Waseda undergraduate students from JCulP (Global Studies in Japanese Cultures Program) were asked to fill out a questionnaire in which they were asked if they had any experience in “participatory culture,” and if so, what kind. The students formed groups in which they discussed this issue and chose one person to represent each group. Each student representative spoke briefly about his or her group discussion, which led to larger discussion. During the question and answer session, there was a query as to whether gender might be related to participatory culture. Professor Shirane explained that those who participated in “adding” sequels to The Tale of Genji were probably and largely women, who attempted to imitate the style and who were engaged in that world, while almost all the written commentary was done by men, male scholars or poets, who were interested in the text as an authoritative classic.

Many of the student participants confirmed different types of horizontal and vertical groups that they were involved in, from “airplane or glider flying” clubs (which was very vertical) to “dancing in geta” (which was more horizontal). The event went on for two hours, consisting of a lecture, a group discussion, and a question and answer session. The audience actively participated in the event throughout, and the lively event became something of an embodiment of the “participatory culture” mentioned in the title of the lecture.

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Date and time of event: August 2, 2018 (Thur.), 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Venue : Conference Room 1, Waseda University International Conference Center
Lecture title:“Participatory Culture and Creative Remix: From Traditional Japanese Performance Arts to Contemporary Manga”

Lecturer: Haruo Shirane (Professor, Columbia University)
Moderator: Hitomi Yoshio (Associate Professor, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University)