ABSTRACT
Japan is a media-saturated society, and at its core are powerful and persistent images of what it means to be a woman or a man. Gendered media messages, which include stereotypical and highly stylised normative images of femininities and masculinities, are ingrained in daily life. The commute to school or work is a good example of this. From the train station platform to the train ride itself, commuters are bombarded with advertisements for cosmetics, diet products, education, travel and commercial media productions. Advertising for print magazines and television dramas, now commonly referred to as “traditional media,” continues to be a ubiquitous part of the visual environment of train carriages in Japan. As an extension of this traditional media, many train companies also have small television screens in carriages showing a mix of news, sport, weather and entertainment, some pre-programmed but sometimes also including live broadcasting. In this environment, many commuters will also be engaged with “new media”—watching YouTube videos or anime, playing games or using social media on their smart phones or tablets. It’s not uncommon to catch a glimpse of explicit content in this congested public space, such as lolicon (sexualized prepubescent girls) anime viewed on smartphones or the “soft porn” images of naked women in shūkanshi (weekly tabloid) magazines and sports newspapers. These media representations and messages are consumed during the daily commute in a sociocultural context in which there is a high incidence of chikan (train groping) and sexual harassment of women (Horii and Burgess 2012), leading to the introduction of women-only train carriages in major Japanese cities in 2000. This is not to assert a causal link but rather to establish that the characteristics of media-saturated Japan are intertwined in complex and often troubling ways with culturally accepted notions of gender and deeply rooted patriarchal norms (Suzuki 2005). In this chapter, I will examine the process of “mediated misogyny” in Japan and its associated patterns of marginalization, trivialization, and stereotyping (Vickery and Everbach 2018, 8), which impact not only women but also non-normative masculinities, as well as gender and sexual minorities. Since systemic gender inequality continues to be a major issue that is impeding social and economic progress in contemporary Japan (Ehara 2013), the role of media and the gendered nature of the media industry itself are pertinent topics.
