ABSTRACT
The idea of the book is basically very simple. The production of Japanese AVs is never absolute but culturally, and thus socially, relative because the character of the ‘use value’ of Japanese AVs is symbolically constituted according to a cultural code that is never the only one possible but relative to society. The same cultural code also specifies the sexual desires of the Japanese people and the means to satisfy them, which is also to say that human sexual desires should not be studied in biological terms, but in terms of cultural meanings that are relative to a particular society. Seen in this light, the relation between production and consumption is not as opposed as is commonly regarded. Arguments that either production or consumption provides a better mode of investigation of a cultural good are not only unnecessary, but also misleading, because they presume that production and consumption entail different lines of logic while in fact they follow the same cultural code. Our goal here is to synthesize accounts of production and consumption because, from the perspective of a cultural code, they are two manifestations of the same thing.
