ABSTRACT

To be a cultural heckler in Japan is not easy. Things may well change, of course, but hitherto the rhetoric of popular culture has tended to keep the Japanese firmly in their social place. It is true that there are certain cultural forms-like some types of the manga comics, for example-that threaten to take apart the tight web of morality in which post-war society has been woven, but there is a tendency for them all to be sucked by the capitalist spider into its (post-) industrial labyrinth and made central to it.1 Thus comics become no more than ‘an effective and often polite way of transmitting information’ (Schodt 1983:148) in a society that, even more than our own under a similarly conservative regime, places great emphasis on the value of information in an attempt to prevent questioning and real debate.