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Recentering Globalization

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Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 275 pp., including references and index. ISBN 0-8223-2891-7.
In this book, Koichi Iwabuchi, a Cultural Studies scholar based in Japan, explores intellectual discourses, marketing strategies and audience consumption of Japanese popular culture in a transnational Asian context. In other words, he examines Japan's encounter with a 'modern' Asia by focusing on the diffusion of its commercialized popular culture. This has been made possible by the globalization of media, which itself encouraged an incipient expansion of a hitherto largely domestic-oriented Japanese media production system to other Asian markets.
There have been two results from this expansion of mediated popular culture. In the first place, it brings into question the assumed hegemony of
American mass culture (from Disney to McDonald's) and shows how, in
East and Southeast Asia at least, Japanese contemporary culture is extremely significant – especially in the global cities of Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong
Kong, Singapore and so on. Second, and more troubling so far as Iwabuchi is concerned, Japan's 'return to Asia' from the 1990s, when it began reasserting its Asian identity, contains echoes of World War II colonialism since Japanese tend to regard themselves as 'above' other Asian countries because of their superior technology and production capacity. This means that there is a continuous potential for serious misunderstandings between the Japanese and their Asian neighbours.
Iwabuchi contextualizes his discussion of research data in the general theoretical discourses of globalization and transnationalism, and provides a far more nuanced discussion of globalizing processes and flows than have most sociologists and other scholars in

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