The gross face and virtual fame: Semiotic mediation in Japanese virtual communication

Abstract

This article examines an emerging art of self–fashioning and sociality in Japanese–language virtual communication. Through an ethnographic exploration I argue that crucial to the structure and experience of Japanese virtual communication are acts of opacity. People in the Japanese virtual mobilize elaborate techniques of material camouflage and anonymity to effectively conceal their body and obscure their identity. They are normatively faceless. I offer this ethnography to suggest that these acts of obfuscation, the presentation of the self–in–disguise in everyday life, force us to reorganize our own modernist epistemological framework. Treating acts of opacity in the Japanese virtual not as a question of presence, secrecy, and truth but instead as themselves a complex social project, this article aims to parse out competing ideologies of communication in the contemporary culture of media. I will address these ideologies as they inform a set of interconnected categories such as anonymity, privacy, and personhood, which are themselves deeply couched in modernist epistemological terms.

Strangership and Social Media: Moral Imaginaries of Gendered Strangers in Rural China

“…Observing similar "acts of opacity" among Japanese Internet users, Nozawa (2012) warns against assuming such practices merely signify desire for anonymity, arguing they instead indicate the radically different ideologies of communication governing these spaces, through which users generate their own online agency. In Anshan Town, similar ideologies of communication perceive avatars as useful for testing the nature of the relation between the person the avatar represents and their interactants, in addition to concealing the user's identity.…”

Animating creative selves: Pen names as property in the careers of Canadian and American romance writers

“…That is, the figure of an author (their public identity) and the person behind all other roles need not be identical. This nonidentity is prevalent in new‐media environments (Manning and Gershon ; Nozawa , ). For instance, Japanese fans producing videos on the popular website Niconico Douga strenuously mask their “real life” identities, instead focusing attention on their online characters (Nozawa ).…”

“…These names are not inert signs but the location of both agency and social status (4). They share some characteristics with some kinds of online presentations of self in Japan, where “thick layers of obscuring signs” allow people to “figurate a character and give this character a reality and agency of its own” (Nozawa ). Similarly, the animation of romance writers’ pen names produced a kind of agency for these public characters and writers constructed their pen names in forms that they hoped would attract the right kind of agency.…”

Idolatry and Mediumship: Topologies of Affect in Japanese Media Culture

“…Following the widely shared fan idiom of "dimensionality" (Galbraith 2020a; also Sugawa-Shimada in this volume), we can approach idols as animated beings that inhabit the actual or "threedimensional" (sanjigen) world, whereas seiyū effectuate animating forces for fictional or "two-dimensional" (nijigen) characters, themselves often playfully identified as "2.5-dimensional" beings. While drawing on the indispensable and hugely productive scholarship on idol culture (e.g., Aoyagi 2005; Galbraith and Karlin 2012;Katsuki 2014;Nishi 2017), in this chapter I hope to articulate a slightly different perspective on idols informed by my ongoing ethnographic project on seiyū culture and the labor of characterization (see Nozawa 2012;Nozawa 2016;Nozawa 2020). 2 If popular idols motivate analysis based on the religious idiom of "idolatry," as insightfully suggested by Aoyagi, I suggest that seiyu ̄'s "2.5D" image recalls the operation of mediumship.…”