ABSTRACT
Let’s start by considering some culture. In recent years, aided by the rise of the internet, the fascination with animé (animation) that started in Japanese manga (comics) has spread worldwide. Like many other forms of popular culture, animé generates interest ranging from casual engagement to organized fandom. But in Japan, a preoccupation with animé has intersected with another cultural reality-the difficulties that some adults have establishing friendships with people of the opposite sex. The convergence manifests in moe-intense imaginary relationships that some (typically male) Japanese establish with (typically female) animé characters. However, moe relationships are not always imaginary, private affairs. In one district of Tokyo, middle-aged men can be found carrying around body pillows with printed covers featuring full-size animé girls with their trademark doe eyes. One man, claiming to have been brought back from the brink of suicide by his 2-D relationships, touts the possibility of having more than one pillowcase and “dating around” (something he believes is discouraged in normal social life). Other men reportedly prefer 2-D over 3-D relationships because the former, unlike the latter, are “pure,” unthreatening, and unconditional (Katayama 2009; https://www.anime-bliss.com/smf/ index.php?action=printpage;topic=201.0). In Japan and elsewhere, people will find elements both familiar and bizarre in moe
culture; many will also no doubt be disturbed, just as people are variously disturbed by video games that supposedly blur fantasy and reality, by the popularity of staged “reality” television shows, or by the pursuit of status through lavish “lifestyle” purchases. Ultimately, what is considered normal, bizarre, fictive, or real is a cultural matter, and a socially constructed one-either on a broad public basis, in face-to-face social life, or both. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz once wrote, people are animals “suspended in webs of significance” that they themselves spin (1973: 5). Of course, how people spin “webs of significance” is culturally variable. Multiple
social and cultural considerations shape the ethical, moral, and aesthetic sensibilities that yield perspectives on whether something appears strange, foreign, or bizarre. In particular, in a rapidly globalizing era, it is increasingly difficult to sustain the stereotypical assumption that such variations occur primarily along societal or national lines. Thus, the moe phenomenon may (for now) be localized among certain Japanese men, but we
would be grossly mistaken to generalize it as characteristic of “Japanese society.” By the opposite token, frustrations over love and romantic relationships are expressed in culturally diverse ways around the world. Although most of them do not involve dating one’s pillowcase, we should not miss the widely shared social tension that underwrites alternative cultural expressions of frustration. As the example of Japanese moe culture suggests, culture, social life, and social
institutions are mutually implicated. Following any single strand of cultural analysis is likely to quickly open out into a broad set of considerations: of personal relationships, everyday life, economic institutions and their cultural bases, public etiquette, transnational differences, technology and culture, global diffusion, and more. The ways in which the social and cultural intersect and mutually constitute one another routinely connect lifeworlds and globalization. A specifically cultural sociology, as we editors envision it, takes up the challenge of understanding these analytic relationships. A cultural sociology, optimally, is sociology tout court.
