ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to clarify Bourdieu's notion of cultural intermediaries through a case study of the dual survival strategy adopted by a Japanese pink film studio, Ōkura. Emerged in the late 1960s, pink film is a genre referring to all the softcore pornographic movies produced in Japan. Pink films, however, have been declining in the past 20 years. To survive, Ōkura was seen to adopt a dual strategy, one of which was to start to produce R-15 version of pink films so that these films can be shown in ordinary theatres. Another strategy is to go overseas, promoting Japanese pink films under the new label, ‘Japanese new erotic films’. We argue that these two strategies provide two important clarifications to the understanding of the notion of cultural intermediaries. First, the defining characteristic of cultural intermediary is essentially about difference-making, especially significant differences such that there is a reordering of things in a given structure. However, these differences will only acquire significance when they are mediated by a specific context, which is also to say that we can never a priori identify who is the cultural intermediary, because we can only know this retrospectively. Second, the cultural intermediary can be either individual or collective actors. Sometimes it is collective actors that initiate the differences and thereafter they are identified as cultural intermediaries. At other time a certain individual is deemed as a cultural intermediary as he or she makes significant differences. But it seems to us that many colleagues take this for granted and do not try to explore why individual rather than collective cultural intermediary is used in their narrative. We contend that it is not a trivial issue; nor is it a theoretically unimportant matter. We shall argue in this chapter that the subject of the cultural intermediary is dependent on the nature of change it caused.
