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This article develops an institutional understanding of borders. Drawing on constitutive constructivism and theories of practical communication we argue that bordering as a process is a form of sorting through the imposition of status-functions on people and things, which alters the perception of that thing by setting it within a web of normative claims, teleologies and assumptions. Studying any border, therefore, extends to include the rule structure that constitutes it as well as the sources of that structure's legitimacy. Furthermore, rule structures are both restrictive and facilitative and importantly they overlap while retaining different sources of legitimacy: actors bring different constitutive perspectives on the border depending on the particular rule structure they are drawing on in order to make legitimate claims about what that border produces. This recognition sensitizes analysis to the interplay between different sense-making regimes and their authoritative underpinnings. Methodologically it points researchers towards the practical and discursive methods actors use when making arguments about what a particular border can and does do.

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Through the framework provided by what Billig (1995) terms 'banal nationalism', this paper analyses performance of national identity in the Japanese media. The specific target for analysis is an episode of nodame cantabile, first broadcast on the Fuji Television Network in 2006. After a review of literature on Japanese nationalism a number of bordering processes are identified, in particular: the presentation of a Japan-The West dichotomy; the re-presentation of social relationships and semiotic markers of Japanese-ness; narrative devices that promote confidence in the Japanese mode of social organisation; and the role of 'trickster' played by a 'foreign' conductor. The significance of these processes becomes clear when placed within the context of what, in the literature, has been termed the emergence of a diverse and multicultural 'New Japan'. Although the observations contained in this paper do not refute this thesis, they do add a cautionary note. As will be shown, the representation of Otherness found in this episode, and the way in which 'Japanese-ness' is placed in relationships with the Other, highlights difference and instrumentalizes foreigners in a way that reinforces ideas of national and cultural boundedness. In order for a 'New Japan' to emerge it is argued that alternative forms of representation are needed; however the possibility of this or any kind of neutral representation is called into question. The paper concludes by considering avenues for further research, as well as the limits and potential of this type of interpretive research.

This article offers an exploratory reading of two works by Kon Satoshi: his debutPerfect Blue (1998c) and the television series Mo -so -Dairinin/Paranoia Agent (2004b). The goal of this article is to work through the relationship between social ontology and ethics embedded in these two examples. To do this the article develops a concept of ontological flatness, both as a description of the specific late modern phenomenon of the levelling of value distinctions between previously differentiated and privileged sources of social identity, and a method of representation Kon uses in order to both portray and critique this condition by pushing it to its logical conclusions. It is argued that rather than a gleeful celebration of this postmodern flat condition, there is a distinct modernist humanism in Kon's work: whereas the effect is ontological flatness, the goal is always to regain a sense of rooted perspective, or depth. This Archimedean point is anchored to a concept of the responsible human actor, who works through existential suffering as a matter of ethical obligations outside of historical and technological determination. Thus, while representing the postmodern experience of the self, in this aspect we can situate Kon's critique within a modernist tradition in Japanese political thought.