Identity Politics at an Academic Seminar on Campus

The following article was written as an assignment for the World Regions and Culture class.

---

Introduction

My Freshman Year

A university is a place where a student isolates oneself from the ‘real world’ and cultivates oneself for an academic purpose. At the same time, one can see competition and power politics below the surface among the students. Thus exploring an academic community is interesting in that one can observe the students struggling for their impression management. As Rebekah Nathan writes from an anthropological point of view, a college student is seen at a liminal stage while he/she is in the university (Nathan 2005:146-147). Based on my fieldwork at an academic seminar held at the Japan campus of an American university in Tokyo, I would like to examine and illustrate how an American undergraduate student in an American university tried to represent himself as a member of minority groups and to be accepted as a member of an intellectual American community in a foreign country.

Setting
My fieldwork had been done during an academic seminar that was hosted by a research institute belonging to the American state university’s Japan campus in Tokyo. The settings were as follows: It was a Friday night from 7:30p.m. until 9:00p.m. The seminar was open not only to the students and faculty at the institute and university, but also to the public. It was all done in English. On the third floor of a business building, two classrooms were combined and used as a site. 80-90 seats were available in the room. First only one of the rooms was used, but as more people came, partitions between the two rooms were removed and another room was opened to the audience right before the seminar started. In there, two people shared one table. There was a podium and a big white screen at the front of the room. Two tables with chairs were set beside them for two guest speakers and a moderator to sit. The front area of the classroom was a bit dark during the first half of the seminar due to the use of a projector. After the first speaker finished using it, lights went on. A university’s brochure was left on the table at each seat. There were a few chairs also available on the window side.

Description

The events during the seminar had occurred as follows: At 7:15p.m., my observation started. This time I attended the lecture as a participant. The seminar was free. No reservation or procedure was needed. I sat at the end of the row at the left corner so that I could observe all the audience members in the room. There were about 20 people in the classroom then. Many were white and aged between 40 and 60. Most of them wore dark-color suits or light-color jackets. Among them, there were a few Asian men (probably Japanese) and a few white and Asian women. There were two undergraduate students (male and female) working as assistant staff. They were helping set up the seminar by checking a video camera position and microphone volume, and setting tables and chairs. I talked with one of them. There were a few graduate-like students in their thirties and several professors that I know in the room. I also saw two black undergraduate students (male and female) in their twenties in the audience. Other than that, I could not see any undergraduate students in the room. Most of the audience seemed like foreigners working in Japan.

At 7:30p.m., the lecture session began. The number of the audience members increased to more than 50 by then. More Japanese-like men were seen in the audience. The director of the institute gave a short speech to the audience. Then the first guest speaker, who was a white, college professor in the U.S., started his lecture using PowerPoint. The topic of the seminar was the 2012 U.S. Presidential election and Republican primaries. The lecturer explained the geographical and historical factors of the Republican Primary race going on in the U.S. in detail. One person in the audience pointed out a mistake in the speaker’s data, but other than that, the audience was listening to the lecturer’s speech quietly and intently.

At 7:50p.m., the first speaker finished his speech and the second guest speaker, who was a white, Tokyo-based political analyst, started his lecture. He did not use PowerPoint. The number of the audience members increased to about 60. The audience laughed once when the speaker made a mistake in telling a candidate’s name. Besides that, they seemed to listen to him quietly and intently. There were two very old white women sitting at the first row near the podium. The older one kept nodding during the speeches.

By 8:12p.m., there were few available seats. In total, there seemed to be about 70 people in the room. 90 percent of them were men. Among them, 10 percent were Asian. There seemed to be no undergraduate students in their twenties in the audience besides the two mentioned earlier.

At 8:15p.m., the second speaker finished his speech and a Q and A session started. During the session, there were about 7 or 8 questioners. All of them were male and all of them except one (an undergraduate student to be mentioned later in this paper) were working adults. They all asked questions related to the U.S. Presidential election. Most of them gave their names and their job titles or company’s names before they asked a question.  Among them, an American lawyer, a U.S. official of the Department of Treasury, and a Japanese researcher working at a Japan’s top economic think-tank were included. A few of them seemed to know each other since they mentioned each other’s names in their questions. At the very end, the black male undergraduate student, who was sitting at the end of the last row, raised his hand and asked two questions to the lecturers. One of them was about why a college student like him could not vote from abroad. The other one was about how ‘minority people’ in the U.S. are affecting the election this time. His first question was immediately answered not by the lecturers, but by two of the audience members. Right after he finished asking questions, and before the lecturers opened their mouths, two of the questioners (the lawyer and the U.S. official) commented on his first question. First, the lawyer confirmed with the student that he is a U.S. citizen, and pointed out that he can vote even if he were in Japan. The undergraduate student seemed to understand that what he just said was based on wrong information, and just said “Okay” to him. The lawyer added that he or the U.S. official could help the student on this issue if the student needed their help. He then replied to the lawyer jokingly saying, “I usually don’t trust lawyers, but thanks.” After these exchanges among the audience members, his second question was briefly answered by the lecturers. The Q and A session continued until 9:00p.m., and the seminar finished with a short speech by the director of the institute.

Social events on campus in the U.S.

Before analyzing the event described above, I would like to explain what an academic event means to an undergraduate student. The fact that very few undergraduate students actually participated at the academic seminar on campus was no surprise to me at all. In general, social events on campus are reported to have become less influential in the last decade as young students become more individualistic. They are more likely to shut themselves in their comfortable friend networks such as on Facebook or among friends from high school. As a result, many college students are less likely to attend social events on campus (Nathan 2005:41-66). Among social events on campus, according to the New York Times, only college sports games (Pappano 2012) and corporate-sponsored promoting campaigns run by hired students (Singer 2011) are the two most powerful social events mobilizing people on campus today. As Nathan pointed out, contemporary college students draw on little academic interests and contacts on campus (Nathan 2005:57). For most students, the university community is experienced as a relatively small, personal network of people who did things together (Nathan 2005:54). Therefore, it is quite understandable that most students did not spare their time to attend the academic seminar even though the topic such as the U.S. Presidential election was familiar and important for them and was held in one of the classroom they usually used.

Analysis

Small Places, Large Issues

From an anthropological point of view, the point I focused most during the seminar is the Q and A session. In this session, each questioner represented oneself as a ‘qualified’ speaker who had a keen interest in today’s U.S. politics and was intelligent enough to comment on the current political trend with a sharp insight. Their job titles and company’s names would have given them added prestige. This is what Thomas Eriksen describes as a form of impression management, that “Americans may strive to acquire status symbols” (Eriksen 2001:153). They were a minority (foreigners) in Japan, but at this seminar, they were the majority in terms of the language spoken and the topic discussed in the room. In other words, they represented themselves as intellectual elites who could discuss the political issue academically with the experts.

The most interesting questioner was, however, the undergraduate student who asked his questions last. He also tried to represent himself as a representative of dual minority groups. In his first question, he asked why an American student in a foreign country like him did not have a chance to vote. This question sounded more like a complaint against the working adults in the same room. In this case, he represented himself as a representative of other American undergraduate students at the same campus in Tokyo. What he said to the lawyer last clearly showed that the student was positioning himself as an anti-authoritarian. He also positioned himself as a member of ethnic minority groups in the U.S. when he was asking the second question regarding minority effects on the election. This is what often happens in class on campus in the U.S. Nathan writes in her book that “when the [racial or ethnic] subject is raised, as in the occasional class, students of color report being continually expected to educate whites about minority issues or speak” (Nathan 2005:60). In a sense, the undergraduate student just did what minority people are expected to do on campus although the half of his initial attempt unfortunately failed. From an anthropological point of view, he just stepped into the part of the ‘real world’ on his campus with his identity as a college student and also as a member of the ethnic minority group, and faced his immaturity as a result. For him, attending the academic seminar and asking questions to the experts would have been a challenge to become a grown-up adult in the society. In a word, this could be seen as a rite of passage for him in order to be accepted as a politically-conscious American citizen like the other participants.

Conclusion
An academic seminar or conference on campus has ambiguously symbolic meanings. Most of the audience members are usually professionals and experts, but the event is held right in the middle of an undergraduate students’ territory. For the undergraduate students, the seminar is the part of ‘real society’ right next to their ordinary campus life so that they can easily step in and feel the atmosphere of it. My fieldwork this time was based upon these dimensional settings. On an anthropological perspective, a young undergraduate student’s attempt to represent himself in the ‘real world’ was made in the middle of the impression-managing game among the other adult audience members, most of whom have symbolic statuses. It was interesting to observe this symbolic politics played by American people in a classroom in Japan.

Analysis on the Communication Process in the Prime Minister's Office during the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

The following article was written as an assignment for the Business of Media class.

---

Introduction

Investigation report

What people can do after a huge disaster is limited. One of the most important things left to do for them is to record what happened, analyze it, learn what they could have done before the crisis happened, and find out what they can do before the next big disaster occurs. In the same way, people can also learn much from the experience of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake in Japan. Japan's government faced a desperate situation and went through an extremely difficult time to deal with the crisis. A year after the disaster, an investigation report (Fukushima) was released by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, which was established by a private think-tank, Rebuilt Japan Initiative Foundation (It also released the summary of the last chapter of the report (Funabashi and Kitazawa) in English). In this report, the Commission members interviewed more than 300 people who were involved in the crisis including the top government officials such as Prime Minister at the time Naoto Kan (The top executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) declined their request to be interviewed). In here, what had actually happened at the Prime Minister's Office in the first week of the crisis is described in detail. Through examining the communication process inside the Office at the early stage of the crisis from structural and personal-characteristic perspectives, I would like to propose a desirable system for crisis management that will surely correspond to a crisis and work functionally in a huge disaster in the future.

Members in the Prime Minister's Office
Before analyzing communication process during the crisis, I would like to provide background information in minimum about the important members in the Prime Minister's Office in Tokyo. There were 7-8 core members of top officials and experts. Basically, they made all the important decisions during the first seven days of the crisis. They were Prime Minister Kan, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) Banri Kaieda, three assistants to the prime minister, TEPCO's fellow Ichiro Takekuro, and Chairperson of the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC) Haruki Madarame.

Structural analysis on communication process

Prime Minister's Office

First, I would like to analyze the communication process among groups from a structural point of view. The final report points out that the most important point to discuss in the crisis management by the government in this crisis is the communication gaps between the government and nuclear industry (Funabashi and Kitazawa 1). There was several communication channels established during the crisis including the ones between the Prime Minister's Office and TEPCO, the Office and the nuclear experts, the Office and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) and the NSC, the Office and the TEPCO's on-site office at the nuclear plants in Fukushima, and the TEPCO's headquarter in Tokyo and its on-site office. In many cases, most of these channels did not function well to convey information rapidly from the on-site workers to the top government officials, and pass down the orders other way round. The information was not supposed to be transmitted in these ways. According to a crisis manual prepared by the government and TEPCO for a nuclear accident long before the actual accident happened, there should have been nuclear emergency response headquarters, so-called the “off-site centers,” immediately being established near the Fukushima plants when a nuclear accident happened. They were supposed to serve as frontline headquarters. However, the center had never been set up because tsunami hit the planned location on March 11th. Instead of this two-hierarchical model between the off-cite centers in Fukushima and the headquarter in Tokyo, the actual information process at the early stage of the disaster had at least four levels to convey the information from the bottom to the top: From the Fukushima plants to the TEPCO's headquarter in Tokyo, from there to the NISA, and then from the NISA to the Prime Minister's Office (Fukushima 104). This multilevel structure of the communication channels actually prevented the Office members from having the smooth flow of the information and making quick decisions. In many cases, the information was blocked and not conveyed to the Office immediately. This situation became one of the causes that TEPCO and NISA lose the Office members' trust at the early stage.

Even in the government, there was an information divide between the Crisis Management Center on the mid-second floor and the Prime Minister's Office on the fifth floor in the same building. For example, prediction data projected by the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) was delivered to the Crisis Management Center, but had never passed on to the Office at first (Fukushima 105). These information blockages caused the Office members to intervene more with micro management at the on-site center in Fukushima. Finally on 15th, Kan decided to set up a joint response headquarter at TEPCO and assigned one of his assistants Goshi Hosono as the chief of the center and ordered him to station there. This new headquarter enabled the Office members to gather information much more quickly than before. At the same time, they were also able to pass on the orders from Kan to TEPCO and the on-site office in Fukushima immediately (Fukushima 106).

The final report concludes that the two biggest problems regarding the crisis management system are the malfunction of the off-cite centers and bureaucrats' poor management ability to deal with a sudden crisis (Fukushima 394). This is just what Arjen Boin says in “The New World of Crises and Crisis Management: Implications for Policymaking and Research” (2009). Here Boin refers to the political-administrative challenges of preparing government agencies to deal with sudden adversity as one of the three types of challenges that the government faces in a crisis (Boin 370). According to Boin, what is required in the crisis management is flexibility, improvisation, redundancy, and the occasional breaking of rules (Boin 373). These points are still remained as the structural problems of Japanese government's crisis management system.

Personal analysis on communication process
Next, I would like to analyze the communicating process between individuals in the Prime Minister's Office from a personal-characteristic point of view. The point can be summarized in Kan's poor crisis management ability and risk-communication skills. His characteristics can be summed up in the following four points:

1. Poor risk-communication skills. Many members in the Office told the Commission members that he often shouted to others, which made many officials and advisers shrink under his direction. NSC Chairperson Madarame said that he could not fully tell what he should have told Kan then because of Kan's harsh attitude toward him (Fukushima 110).

2. Deep involvement into the micromanagement. At the night on March 11th (the first day of the crisis), Kan tried to arrange power-supply cars at the Fukushima plants by himself. He even asked the staff about the size, weight, and length of the batteries they needed over his cell phone. The report concludes that his conducts such as asking about minor technical details only further complicated the process (Funabashi and Kitazawa 10).

3. Personal advisers outside the government. He no longer believed what the experts and advisors from TEPCO and NISA said any more at the early stage (Madarame lost his trust because he told Kan on the 11th that there would be no hydrogen explosion, which actually had occurred on the following days). He often called experts and advisors that he knew. He called them and asked their advices even in the middle of the crisis. One of the Office members said that the ‘experts' and ‘advisors’ who had no responsibility and authority should not have involved in the decision-making process in such a way (Fukushima 112).

4. Top-down management style. He tended to play a leading role in decision making on various issues in detail. In the report, the Commission evaluates some of his behaviors that actually led the situation getting better. One of them is the fact that he refused TEPCO's request to pull all its workers from the Fukushima plants. Kan and other officials immediately rushed into the TEPCO's headquarter in Tokyo and made a speech in front of 200 TEPCO's employees saying that there was no way TEPCO could accept defeat and they should put their lives on the line to salvage the situation (Fuhabashi and Kitazawa 8).

Prime Minister then Kan

By Kan's action and statement mentioned above along with the decision to establish the joint crisis-management center there, the report says that the government bore the ultimate responsibility for bringing a nuclear accident under control (Fuhabashi and Kitazawa 8). On the other hand, it also points out that Kan's management style to get involved in detail also made unnecessary confusion and stress around him. (Fukushima 98). As Boin points out, usually it is not clear who has a responsibility of the crisis and who must deal with it (Boin 368). However, even if it is hard to collect, analyze, and comprehend the necessary information to develop a so-called “common operational picture,” to develop a capacity for fast-paced information processing under stressful conditions is necessary for high reliability organizations such as a government (Boin 372). In this sense, Kan's decision to establish the joint operation center at TEPCO turned out to be a better solution at the time even if his heroic statement and action at TEPCO are assessed as inappropriate in crisis management.

Desirable communication system in crisis

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Based on the facts and analysis examined above, I would like to illustrate a desirable crisis-management system briefly. One of the big problems is that the top officials did not know the right procedure for the crisis. As mentioned earlier, there was a manual for a nuclear crisis, but it was not used at all as it was supposed to. One of the Office member Tetsuro Fukuyama said that he did not even know such a manual existed and bureaucrats did not tell him about it, either (Fukushima 101). They did not even know how much and how far they had to get involved. This is one of the main causes of the risk-management failure in this crisis. As the report suggests (Fukushima 389), a totally new organization specified only for crises such as FEMA in the U.S. should be designed so that the government staffs can define their roles precisely by law and would not get confused during the crisis.

A worst-case scenario

Damaged reactors after explosions

The other fundamental problem is how to correspond to the changing situation accordingly. This is especially important when the situation is not clear at its first stage. On March 22nd, as the situation was getting worse, the Office members decided to make what they called “a worst-case scenario.” It was supposed to be made by Madarame, but since Kan did not trust him at all, Chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Shunsuke Kondo was secretly assigned to draw it up. According to the scenario, in the worst case, 30 million residents in Tokyo would need to evacuate. It had not been revealed until Kan stepped down from the Prime Minister and referred to it six months later (Fukushima 93). The report concludes that the scenario was made in the middle of the crisis so that the Office members could see the whole picture of the crisis from a wider perspective. On the other hand, it also points out that the tendency of the government unwilling to disclose information triggered the public distrust toward the government as a result (Fukushima 394-395). As Boin points out, a crisis tends to undermine the legitimacy base of governing structures and processes (Boin 369). To stop this situation, they must offer a convincing rationale that generates public and political support for their crisis management efforts (Boin 373). That is what Japan's government failed to acquire in the crisis management during this crisis. I think one of the main reasons that caused the public distrust is its public announcement policy that it only announces facts. According to then Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano, It does not say anything that includes speculation. This is why they did not admit meltdown in the plants at the early stage. This government attitude surely created distrust among the public and made them believe that the government hid inconvenient truth. By transferring the authority to a specialized, independent organization, it may keep its credibility to a certain extent.

Conclusion
As the final report described, the biggest problem with the crisis management by the Office members in the crisis was “the amateurish level of its crisis communications” (Funabashi and Kitazawa 10). All the examples and analysis argued above indicate that the Office members had a very hard time at the early stage to set up an efficient information system that can transform itself according to the on-going situation. Bureaucratic sectionalism was also a big problem for putting the transformation forward. As the report suggests, what is needed on emergency is not a rigid, well-structured plan, but a system that can flexibly made new plans (Fukushima 396). In other words, the system should be designed as a flexible organization that can offer interim and optimum solutions at each phase of the changing situation accordingly during the crisis. As Boin suggests, a crisis can be a good opportunity for policy reform, institutional overhaul, and even leadership revival (Boin 374). This may be the best chance for Japan's government and public to think about the way they did during the crisis and find out what they can best do for the next generation.

Identity Managgement on the Internet

The following article was written as an assignment for the World Regions and Culture class.

---

Today, I'd like to talk a little about online identity in this presentation.

Identity policy of Facebook
Regarding the online representation of oneself, there are interesting comments in the anthropological paper  titled "Facework on Facebook: The presentation of self in virtual life and its role in the US elections." At the end of the paper, it says,

"Almost everyone, in the West too, has relations they would rather keep quiet about... One major task that remains is to uncover the ways in which social networking sites provide different possibilities for both revelation and concealment of aspects of personhood and social reality." (Steffen Dalsgaard 2008)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

What is said in here is that Facebook or Myspace forced the users to show all of your social relationships with your friends, family, and co-workers to the world. They didn’t allow public / private separation at the time when this article was released in 2008. This identity policy came from the philosophy of Mark Zuckerberg, who is the founder of Facebook. He once said that each person has to have a single identity online. This is easily understood because the more Facebook acquire the personal information of the users, the more it benefits by selling the data to advertising and marketing companies. It's better for its business. However, there has been a huge demand to keep the multiple personas of oneself and control one's representation of self according to circumstances. A part of this problem was solved in 2011 when Google launched its new service called Google Plus. It features a function called Circles so that one can arrange different groups of one's relationships with other friends and show one of them to one's friends accordingly. Facebook also started a similar service called Smart Lists. Now one can show different personas by arranging different friend relationships for each friend.

Single identity online?

4chan founder Christopher Poole at Web 2.0 Summit

But still a single online identity is required both on Facebook and Google Plus. As we often see on the Internet, there are other kinds of self-representation styles such as handle names and anonymity. By examining these types of self-representation, a redefinition of personhood can be done. An article from wired.com argues this issue from a SNS user's point of view. In this article titled "You Are Not Your Name and Photo: A Call to Re-Imagine Identity" published in October 2011, the author argues a different online-identity form by quoting Christopher Poole's speech, who is the founder of 4chan. As many of you may know, 4chan is the site that seems to have more influence over not only the online world but also the real world recently. It is now known as the website where a hacker group called Anonymous (with a capital A) came from (they have attacked multinational corporations, governments, celebrities in the past). The site now has nearly 11 million users and more than a million messages are posted a day. Roughly 90% of all messages on the site are posted under the site-default "anonymous" identity. According to the article, the founder Christopher Poole has a totally opposite opinion to Mark Zuckerberg's. He made a speech at Web 2.0 conference in October 2011 and told the audience that even with Circles or Smart Lists, both Facebook and Google still diminish plural identities online. According to him, Twitter handles identity better than Facebook or Google because it allows handle names, multiple accounts, and even fake accounts. I'm not going into detail about his philosophy here. For more detail, please listen to his speech on YouTube. What I'd like to point out here is that although Facebook is so powerful in the U.S. that it's now used as an ID on the web, there is an on-going debate on identity management that is different from that of Facebook.

Japanese tendency to be anonymous online
When we turn our eyes to contemporary Japan, the situation becomes totally different. As many of you might have already noticed, most Japanese usually do not reveal their real names or faces online. This is often said as the reason why Facebook is not so popular in Japan. This Japanese tendency is also demonstrated by another research group. This academic paper titled "Anonymity in Computer-Mediated Communication in Japanese and Western Contexts - Comparisons and Critiquesis-" is not an anthropological paper, but I think we can find useful data and perspective here. According to the paper which was published in 2010, compared to the U.S. SNS users, Japanese SNS users seem to prefer much greater anonymity online.

Table 1 through 4 show how they actually are (In these tables, "second-tier anonymity" means that an individual adopts a new online identity by using a handle name or an avatar). Here the authors say that there is a distinct degree of an identity exists between real identity and total anonymity. They roughly divide the levels into three degrees of groups and name them "Lack of Identification," "Dissociation of Identity," and "Visual Anonymity." Again I'm not going into detail of their theory here, but you can read the paper online if you would like to. What they basically say in here is to avoid stereotyped Japan-U.S. or East-West cultural dichotomies by examining several social networking sites such as MySpace, Japan's mixi, and Yayoo's Q & A, and see the self presentations there more in detail.

Mixi and 2channel in Japan

2channel logo with the image

As we examine the online identity situation in Japan, this "second-tier anonymity" is quite important because many Japanese SNS users actually use it. As for the SNSs in Japan, each website has its own characteristics of the user's identity. For example, one of Japan's largest SNSs, mixi, used to allow the users to resister under handle names. It once forced the users to use their real names, but finally received a lot of criticism against its revised policy. It now allows the users to use handles. According to an article titled "New Media Practices in Japan Part Two: The Internet" published in 2009, one of the characteristics of mixi is that an average user has very small-scale friend relationship on the site. mixi users have four or less friends in their my-miku (my friend list) and only 4.8% have over 41 friends listed on their friend lists. On the other hand, 2channel, which is said to be the original website of the U.S. 4chan, has probably the largest anonymous online community not only in Japan, but also in the world. It is actually not a SNS. Here, almost all the messages on more than 800 threads are posted under anonymous identity. More than 2.6 million messages are posted in total on the site daily. Because of this massive amount of posting, death threats and other inappropriate messages regarding illegal stuff are often posted.

User communities on Nico Nico Douga

Streaming video with user's comments on Nico Nico Douga

In between these two big online communities in Japan, Nico Nico Douga plays an important role in forming online (and also off-line) communities among young people. It is a YouTube-like video-sharing and live-streaming website. It now has more than 26 million members and is very popular especially with the young generation. It is said that 85% of the people in their twenties are the members of the site. What is different from other SNSs is that the users interact with each other quite often even if they don't know each other at all. Many online communities are created among them and hold streaming lives and chats (Between 30,000 to 100,000 streaming lives are aired a day). They often have off-line meetings and events, too. This is probably because the site is appropriately categorized into different sub-genres such as music, dance, and games. The users of Nico Nico Douga are more topic-oriented unlike the Facebook users who are more identity-oriented. On this site, almost all the users use handles, not their real names. Still, they are encouraged to interact with each other off-line with their online identities. The website itself often holds a variety of off-line events such as concerts and exhibitions in order to give opportunities to the users to mingle with others. A variety of off-line meetings and events are also held among the users. The important point here is that the users usually interact with each other without knowing their real names and social statuses, and their online identities often become their identities in real life. This could be a new form of Japanese socialization process in the digital age. I think self representation in contemporary Japan can be examined more from this aspect.

Conclusion
In conclusion, as of self representation in a society, anthropological studies on the web identity are also done recently. A single-identity policy online is questioned even in the U.S. And although most SNS users in Japan try not to be identified on the web, they seem to have different identity management styles on each SNS accordingly. Finally, here is my question from the text to the class: How does information technology contribute to a redefinition of personhood in contemporary Western societies? My tentative answer for this is that as I discussed earlier, there can be plural identities on the web. A whole-person approach to an individual doesn't seem to work any more when it comes to anthropological studies on the Internet.

Hatsune Miku: What comes next to Anime and Manga

The following article was written as an assignment for the Newsroom Management class.

---

Introduction

Vocaloid Hatsune Miku

The Internet has dramatically changed subculture scenes worldwide in the last decade. Even in the last five years, after various social networking websites have played an important role in networking people and establishing online communities, subculture fans have shared information and contents they like with others who love the same genre. Some have even created their own pieces such as music, videos, photos, and writings, and posted on their Facebook pages. In Japan, the same things happen, but in a bit different way. People developed online contents collaboratively and share them with other users in a unique way. In the following article, by using the example of Hatsune Miku, I'd like to show how the online collaborative creation process has develop and become a huge phenomena that can no longer be ignored in Japan today.

Hatsune Miku phenomenon in Japan

Click the image to watch live video

A digital character called Hatsune Miku has been popular on the Internet in Japan in the last few years. She now became a virtual pop idol in the digital age, especially for the younger generation. For example, the tickets of her two-day concerts held last month were immediately sold out. 10,000 people enjoyed lives at the theater, while more than 120,000 people watched them online. It now becomes more than 123-million-dollor business in Japan. Many kinds of commercial goods such as CDs, figures, and games are sold at the stores and online. For example, SEGA sold more than one million copies of Miku-related games in total so far. At a karaoke shop, more than 1,700 Miku-related songs are distributed and sung by fans. Her songs became so popular that one of her songs was sung in the graduation ceremonies at several junior high and high schools.

Hatsune Miku phenomenon in the U.S.

Click the image to watch Toyota ad

Her name also becomes known outside of Japan. Last year, she had her first ‘virtual’ concert in L.A. with 5,000 audiences (See the live video above). There, she was shown as a projection of 3D animation, as if she were singing on top of the stage. Some big-brand companies also started to use her popularity in the ads. Last year, Toyota featured her in its TV commercial aired in the U.S. She was also featured as a campaign character after Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber in the Google Chrome's global promotion campaign.

Who is Hatsune Miku?

Vocaloid 2 interface shot

Hatsune Miku is the name of an anime-like female character created and released in 2007 by Crypton Future Media, Inc. She is the mascot image of Vocaloid 2, which is singing synthesizer application software developed by Yamaha (Her name in kanji literally means “first sound in the future”). By typing lyrics and melody, a user can synthesize singing so that amateur songwriters can produce their original songs without any ‘real' singers' help for their vocal parts. There are more than 30 types of Vocaloids available now with different characters including male, child, and Korean characters. Miku's voice still sounds a little ‘robotic' for the first-time listener, but the latest model IA in Vocaloid 3 sings songs so perfectly like a ‘real’ singer that the listener doesn't recognize the song being sung by a Vocaloid.

Hatsune Miku as a ‘singer’

Click the image to watch music video

Today many amateur songwriters and musicians use Vocaloid as their ‘singer’ and upload their original songs on YouTube and Nico Nico Douga, which is the most popular video-sharing website in Japan. More than 32,000 Vocaloid-related songs were uploaded on Nico Nico Douga last year. Several songs have become No.1 hits on the charts. For example, the song used in the Google TV commercial called “Tell Your World” by Livetune reached No. 1 on Japan's iTune Store chart. Some professional musicians such as Tetsuya Komuro also started adopting Vocaloid to their music. As a result, many music listeners now choose songs by songwriter's names, not by band's names. In a sense, as Hatsune Miku becomes a ‘common property’ among the listeners, song composition and live performance by a group band are no longer seen as a standard musician style.

Massively collaborative creation

Click the image to watch video

Song writing is, however, just a beginning of the consequent creating process by different kinds of creators. As I examined one of the songs' variation in my previous blog post, a various types of videos related to a song are created collaboratively by many users in different genres (You can see how they are actually interrelated to each other in the video on the right). For example, one user draws illustrations that match to the song, attaches them to it, and uploads the video. The other user sings the song and uploads the video. The other ones create MAD videos based on the lyrics of the song and upload them. Some play the song with musical instruments. Another user choreographs the song, which makes others dance with it and upload their dancing videos. Some create 3D CG video with the Vocaloid character dancing to the song. Another user makes a hit chart of the week including the song. These different kinds of videos are uploaded simultaneously within a few months by many users if the song becomes popular among the them. Several genres such as singing, dancing, and 3D CG are so popular on Nico Nico Douga that hundreds of videos about a popular song are uploaded in each genre. Some of them are watched over a million times. In many cases, the viewers are inspired by other videos and make their own videos. In this way, they form loose creator communities online. On Nico Nico Douga, the reuse of existing videos on the website is welcomed. All users upload their videos in acknowledgment of the videos they used. Last year, the site started its own creator's incentive program so that the video creator can receive a certain amount of money accordingly if the video were viewed a certain times for a certain period. The Google TV commercial (See the video below) describes the collaborative works among different online users very well in 60 seconds without any words.

Copyright issue

Crypton CEO Hiroyuki Ito

All the creations mentioned above can be done because there is no copyright issue involved. Crypton allows the users to use Miku's voice, name, and image freely as far as it is not commercially used and offensive. In other words, these creations cannot be done with other commercial characters such as Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty. In this sense, Crypton proposes a new licensing business model. This coexistence between commercial products and fan creations is widely supported by the Internet users in Japan. This is thought partly due to Crypton's CEO Hiroyuki Ito's career background as a programmer and Japan's fan-fiction culture of anime and manga.

Conclusion

Click the image to watch Google ad

“HATSUNE MIKU is not merely music software anymore. It's turned into a source of inspiration to create its derivative works.” --- What Crypton says on its website describes precisely what actually happens on the Internet today in Japan. Miku has emerged as a new type of music creation and consumption in the online-sharing culture. I'd like to see how this ‘digital diva’ will change the music scene also in the world.