Amerika-Mura: discourses of modernity and identity in contemporary urban Japan

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the notion of modernity in the context of Amerika-mura ('American Village'), a district of Osaka, Japan commonly styled as the centre of that city's wakamono bunka ('youth culture'). The thesis begins with a presentation of historical and theoretical approaches to the study of Japan, problematising both essentialist and postmodern treatments. The theme of 'multiple responses to modernity' is proposed as an alternative to the notions of 'culture' and 'society' as a tool for the investigation of mutually constitutive personal and spatial identities in specific contexts. A series of examples demonstrates the complex relationship between such responses, firstly exploring historical contexts in Osaka and Japan in which notions of the 'new', the 'foreign' and the 'strange' have been interpreted, framed and spectacularised.

At the level of the urban environment in Amerika-mura, these responses are shown to range from the 'framing discourses' of tourism and planning to nostalgic appeals for a return to a simpler, more 'authentic' time and place At the level of individual engagement with this environment, they vary from the collective project of sutoriito fasshon ('street fashion') to the network of unique trajectories which create personal 'topographies of taste.' This thesis explores all of the above discourses through a selection of contexts where these intersect with the physical site of Amerika-mura. It draws upon a variety of theoretical approaches from the fields of anthropology, human geography and cultural studies, in addition to a selection of conceptual frameworks proposed by Japanese sociologists. These are deployed in an investigation of Amerika-mura as a 'microcosm of modernity', a site in which a unique spatial identity is paradoxically constructed around the juxtaposition of ostensibly disparate elements. Parallel to this investigation, a series of personal narratives is deployed in an exploration of the way in which 'authentic' individual identities are shaped both within, and in opposition to, the multitude of discourses mediated through the district.