Globalization Theory from the Bottom Up: Japan's Contribution

Odours of Mobility: Mobile Phones and Japanese Cute Culture in the Asia-Pacific

“…The process of affects and synaesthesia so integral to the local are both salient and contingent, it is a vocabulary augured by corporeal reorientations that project, transfer, relocate and realign. Neo-scent is not a post-odour analogy but rather expansion of the ways in which migrations of object and people, processes of what Befu sees as 'authenticity' versus 'creolisation', can be understood in today's disjuncture globality (Befu 2003). To understand the remediated genealogy of customisation one must articulate temporality as polyphonic*/simultaneous narratives wafting, migrating, anchoring and evolving.…”

Beyond ‘the West as Method’: Repositioning the Japanese Education Research Communities in/against the Global Structure of Academic Knowledge

“…Indeed, according to Yoshio Sugimoto (2014), Japan has long served as "a productive space for testing-and potentially enriching and modifying-general sociological theories of Western origin" (p. 192). As a corollary of this knowledge practice, knowledge produced in the academic peripheries, including Japan, is deemed 'local' and 'provincial,' thus assumed unable to travel beyond the confine of specific localities and nationalities (Befu 2003;Chen 2010;Kuwayama 2004). Indeed, social theory as we know it today is "an ethno-sociology of metropolitan society" (Connell 2007, p. 226), in that the development of modern social theory has been largely based on the experiences and perspectives pertaining to European modernity, while suppressing "the colonial and imperial dynamics from the terminological toolkit of classical sociology" (Boatcā and Costa, cited in Go 2013, p. 33).…”

Sport in Asia: Globalization, Glocalization, Asianization

“…Though the Asianization of Western culture was always a reciprocal feature of imperial expansion and exploration, the process of the Asianization of Western popular culture accelerated after World War Two. Ironically, the growing wealth of Asian nations, particularly Japan, precipitated an increase in the process of Asianization of popular culture to "suit Asian tastes" (Befu, 2003) whilst at the same time retaining its Euro-American essence. Befu (2003) noted that this may well stem from the "common implicit yearning of Asians for Western culture."…”

“…Ironically, the growing wealth of Asian nations, particularly Japan, precipitated an increase in the process of Asianization of popular culture to "suit Asian tastes" (Befu, 2003) whilst at the same time retaining its Euro-American essence. Befu (2003) noted that this may well stem from the "common implicit yearning of Asians for Western culture." This definitively applies definitively to the growing engagement of the Asian market with sport, though now, as has been illustrated in this analysis, the geopolitical characteristics of the major stakeholders are changing.…”