Pokemon anime landscape12/28/2022 ![]() ![]() Since 2004 I’ve collected the brochures to use as examples of friendly authoritarianism while teaching with Sugimoto’s text in a summer course. Anyone who has ever seen a child in Tokyo calmly commuting to school alone could consider them as possibly having been trained with Pokemon’s help. The Pokemon stamp rally provides multiple exposures to these posters as well as more directive aural messages (e.g., stand behind the yellow line), not to mention familiarity with JR staff and stations, over the course of play. #Pokemon anime landscape full#As any Tokyo train rider knows, stations and trains are full of manners posters (see Miller 2011), often depicting amusing caricatures of misbehavior while appealing to one’s needs for personal safety and desires not to cause problems for others. ![]() This socialization technique in Japanese civil society includes the use of positive encouragements to conform, portrayal of the powerful as benevolent, promulgation of an egalitarian ideology, and the strategic use of fun to painlessly pervade authority. As for manners, the JR Pokemon stamp rally supports the concept of ‘friendly authoritarianism’ coined by Sugimoto (2014). “The urge to collect fantastic specimens and their stories has deep roots (Foster 2009) in Japanese culture, dating back to the Tokugawa period when people would collect folklore on yokai goblins.” The collecting of stamps – which one can do with or without rallies in various public venues - derives from shrine pilgrimages and also appears in bureaucratic paper trails. The rally combines various threads of Japanese cultural practice beyond the pursuit of Pikachu. These messages are inherent to the JR Pokemon stamp rally, a promotion luring children and their parents yearly since 1997 out into the heat during summer holiday to get the pamphlet, buy a day pass and ride the trains collecting character stamps at stations in greater Tokyo (and other JR regions). ![]() While Pokemon has been misinterpreted as the devil’s temptation by some in the USA, it seems to me that in its home country Pokemon has continued to inspire personal safety instructions, and public manners training as well. ![]() From then on, all anime contain warnings at the start of each show to viewers to maintain distance from the screen and watch with lights on. I was downtown teaching English conversation when that notorious episode triggered epilepsy in some viewers fortunately my kids were safe at the neighbor’s. Back then the original media consisted of the card-based game, Game Boy games, and the summer’s movie, all based on the anime. In the late 1990s Pokemon had entertained my kids while we were living in Sendai during my dissertation fieldwork. Yet here in its birthplace, Pokemon GO is just one of the summer events centered around this franchise. From the start, news from various countries of the changes wrought by Pokemon GO framed it as both a new source of social mayhem and conversely, a boon to the sedentary, depressed gamer. I downloaded it and embarked on participant observation ethnography for the next three weeks in Tokyo, and have played it in various parts of Kyushu since then. Pokemon GO, one of the big waves in summer 2016 media-mix pop culture, was released Jin Japan, immediately triggering warnings about personal safety and public manners. ![]()
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