Lecture
Marketing Nostalgia: Packing and Unpacking the Everyday Lives of Children in Japan
- Sabine Frühstück (UC Santa Barbara)
- Date
- Monday 18 November 2024
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.02
Asia is the world’s fastest-aging region, and Japan along with South Korea and Singapore lead this trend. Today, twenty-nine percent of Japan’s population is sixty-five or older, the highest proportion in the world. By 2040, that figure is projected to reach thirty-one percent. Acknowledging the country’s frontrunner position as a “hyper-aging society”—from which the rest of the world will undoubtedly learn in the years to come—in 2019 the Japanese government announced its “age-free society” project, which builds on earlier changes to the retirement system and accelerating rhetoric and policy designed to facilitate people’s “liberation from the restrictions of age.”
In this talk, I will argue that this anxiously pronounced “longevity revolution” highlights and feeds into the desire to memorialize, maintain, and preserve, and exacerbates the production and marketing of nostalgia—a concept deeply imbricated with the reactionary conservatism of sentimentality, intent to preserve the past rather than forging a future. Nostalgia has also become a key project for old crafts and new technologies and practices alike. Exemplary businesses literally propose “giving shape” to individuals’ pasts and their childhoods in particular in order to resurrect, revive or at least recall those years of fun and happiness.
I will examine this trend by describing the trajectory of one particular everyday object: the elementary school bag which mass media often hail as unique to and symbolic of Japanese culture. I will ask how it has come to both signify an inherent contradiction of capitalist culture, namely the intimate interconnections of consumer acts and emotional life, and to facilitate the expression and experience of nostalgia.
About the speaker
Sabine Frühstück is Distinguished Professor and the Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Most recently she authored the monographs, Playing War: Children and the Modern Paradoxes of Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2017; trans. "Sensō gokko" no kingendaishi: Jidō bunka to gunji shisō. Jinbun Shoin, 2024) and Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her current research is about modern manifestations of immortality and the malleability of the human body and its parts.
