Session 9: Evil in Japan

Session 9: Panel – Evil in Japan
Chair: Greg Turek

Adolescent Angst and Adult Anxiety in Japanese Popular Culture

‘Within the discourses of ‘new violence’ of the 1990s, good versus evil is displaced onto the dominator and the dominated […] [T]he increasing drift towards greater visceral appeals through the specularization of violence encouraged in the digital age has further shifted the emphasis away from violence as a performative language of morality or justice to a displace of phallic power as the end point […] (Standish, 2005)

The purpose of this panel is to examine representations of adolescence in Japanese Popular Culture, and in particular to interrogate the relationship between adolescence and adulthood in film, manga and anime. And whilst the Japanese may not have the same binary concept of good and evil as embedded within Western discourse, in contemporary films and other cultural artefacts, these concepts are in some way articulated through the battle between the teenager and the parent-figure, or in Standish’s terms, the relationship between ‘the dominator and the dominator’.
The key question to be examined within this panel, then, is who exactly is at fault, in narratives of adolescence gone bad? Through a close textual analysis of key films such as Battle Royale and The Suicide Club, this panel will examine the inter-generational conflict in Japanese popular culture, with specific reference to questions of evil and/in adolescence.

Lois Drawmer
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, United Kingdom

Colette Balmain
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, United Kingdom

Charles Nuckolls
Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama, USA