Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Encyclopedias of Contemporary Culture)

Rating:
Summary: Not Just Pop Culture
Review: One of this book's greatest values is that it is not merely an encyclopedia of Japanese *pop* culture. While it does cover music, film, TV and comics, it also looks at more traditional aspects of Japan in the modern world, including kabuki and noh, fishing and fireworks. These are often neglected by modern researchers, or confined to hermetically-sealed specialisations -- their inclusion here imparts Buckley's book with considerable endurability.

Popular culture often attracts the wrong sort of writer -- virgin territory may be a fertile ground for pioneers and innovators, but also for charlatans and ne'er-do-wells. Japanese popular culture has been lucky in the past, with excellent researchers like Schodt, Schilling, Powers and Kato, but also a large number of self-appointed pundits. This book, luckily, falls into the former camp more often that not.

The first thing anyone does with an Encyclopedia is look up stuff they already know -- often an unfair test of the editor's broader achievement. The first places I checked contained several minor typographical errors; Yurusei Yatsura for Urusei Yatsura, Ikeda Ryoko for Ikeda Riyoko, and the wrong release date for Neon Genesis Evangelion. The entry for Murakami Haruki notably points out that A Wild Sheep Chase was the third in a four-book series, but seems, presumably at the editing stage, to have accidentally assigned the first book, Hear the Wind Sing, as the umbrella title for the whole. But these errors can all easily be altered on a reprinting, and the size of the book makes it likely that print-runs are small, and that by the time you read these words, such minor problems will have already been fixed.

The general thrust of the articles remains objective and critical in the best sense of both words. For a Japanese scholar, this is a book that demands to be read from cover to cover, not just because you only realise what you *don't* known when you stumble across it, but also because the filing system mixes English and Japanese words with impunity. Bathing is filed under "Ofuro", but "Ikebana" is filed under Flower Arranging; luckily an index helps sort this out. Some of the choices for inclusion are also a little baffling. While it is noble to include an entry pointing out that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is *not* a Japanese product, the entry occupies the same word-count as that for the entire 40-year run of Ultraman.

With "only" 634 pages to play with (trust me, they fill up fast), the book sensibly points readers towards more in-depth studies. You may not get all the answers you want from an entry, but in most cases, you can close this book with a better idea of where you should look next. The suggestions for further reading (included in almost every entry) are an excellent addition for researchers, though occasionally of debatable provenance. The entry on pornography, for example, cites a single essay as a resource (the editor's own), but not more comprehensive works such as Japan's Sex Trade, Permitted & Prohibited Desires or, frankly, The Erotic Anime Movie Guide.

It is important to consider the ... price ... in context. When buying something of this weight, I tell myself if it costs as much as ten lesser books, it should do the work of twenty. This is certainly true in this case. I have no choice but to award this book the full five-star rating Amazon allows, since whatever niggles I may have, it is still an informative tome, liable to occupy me for considerably longer than many of its lesser brethren.