Japan: Can You Or Can You Not? Revisited

Digital Asia

The experiences of social conventions vary immensely across the globe. From Andrei Mamor: Social Conventions, conventional rules have an arbitrary nature. This means that we should be able to determine an alternative rule to achieve the same purpose, and if the conventional rules are not followed within the community they lose their specific purpose. But why do people follow conventional rules? It is tied to the fact that others follow it too, and therefore it becomes a recognisable expression that indicates a specific purpose. For example, in Australia consider the convention of saying “hello” when we answer the phone, the same response reflects the manifest feature as an expression that enables the caller to recognise that someone has answered.

What I didn’t realise, is just how different these are translated across cultures, this was seen in my first YouTube encounter in ‘Japan: Can You Not?’ where I…

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Ethnographic Experience of Japanese Social Conventions

Digital Asia

For my individual research project I have decided to examine Japanese cultural conventions via YouTube. As Ellis outlines, autoethnography “is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systemically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience.” This includes the manners, customs, and ‘Japanese way’.

As stated on Inside Japanese Tours, Japanese people grow up picking up the subtleties of the unique culture as they progress through life, respecting both the invisible and varied societal rules. However, to someone who has not grown up in this culture, and as a foreign visitor this can seem extremely complicated.

To reflect on my past autoethnographic experiences I must engage with the statement “about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (Ellis). By investigating Japanese social conventions without travelling to Japan the largest influence…

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Re-examining Gojira (1954)

Digital Asia

Re-examining my first post for DICG330 ‘Autoethnography and Gojira (1954)’, I have developed deeper concepts and knowledge surrounding this subject, including autoethnographic research. To recap:

“autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis 2011).

In my first post, I expressed my thoughts and experience of the film, Gojira (1954), which is “viewed as a thinly veiled critique of the incendiary and atomic bombings of Japan during World War II.” One of the main assumptions that I researched in relation to Ishiro Honda’s 1954 film was the metaphorical concept of nuclear warfare. Buchman (2015) states that, “the film might be a monster movie at first look, but beneath the surface the film is a profound political statement against the use of nuclear weapons in warfare.” This comes as World War II…

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Autoethnography and Gojira (1954)

Digital Asia

Autoethnography is a qualitative research practice that forms from analytically looking at experience. It is the way we study the formation of ourselves, as it requires self-reflection and writing to explore personal ideas and realizations that occur, and are made possible due to being part of a culture and/or from possessing a specific cultural identity.

As Ellis states, Autoethnography

“acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist.”

(Gojira: The Japanese Original)

The concept of Autoethnography relates to Digital Asia as I reflect and write on the similarities and differences that occur between cultures, specifically in the industry of film. Watching the film Gojira (1954) explored a whole different side of film which was a new experience for me. I found it extremely interesting and thought provoking once I got past reading the subtitles at the…

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