Teaching Japanese Popular Culture

The export of Japanese television programs overseas started in the 1970s and the rapid
\ngrowth of Japanese television programs globally especially in Asia started in the early 1980s.
\nHowever, in the 21st century, the glory of Japanese dramas seems to have faded and replaced by the
\n“Korean wave”. Perhaps the younger generation nowadays has not heard of “J-Pop” and here is an
\nexamination of the past consumption of the Japanese television culture outside of Japan, especially
\nAsia.

In Taiwan in the 1990s, there was such an explosion in the demand for Japanese popular culture that the phenomenon was given the term ‘Japan Mania Boom’ (hari fengchao). The mania for Japanese products and, to some extent, for Japan itself, has since waned, but these products still remain in demand. The spread of Japanese popular culture (henceforth, pop culture) began with the lifting of Martial Law in 1987, and the mass importation of Japanese products that followed. It was enhanced in the early 1990s when Taiwan cable channels began to broadcast Japanese drama on local television. The importation of Japanese drama was accompanied by Japanese manga (comics), anime (cartoons), fashion, and pop music. These began circulating as part of an underground culture, but rapidly gained widespread acceptance and entered the cultural mainstream. As a result, even newspapers and broadcasting companies that had typically taken an anti-Japanese stance had no choice but to respond to popular demand. This demand, which begun as a trickle in the 1980s, rocketed in the 1990s. Taiwan is not the only East Asian society where there is a high level of demand for Japanese popular culture. People in mainland China and South Korea – especially the young – have evinced a similar attraction to Japanese pop culture and fashion. However, Taiwanese attitudes to Japan and things Japanese are distinctive from those typical in China and Korea, where perceptions of the ‘real-world’ or ‘political’ Japan tend to be overwhelmingly negative. Since the end of the Japanese colonial era, sentiment with respect to Taiwan’s erstwhile colonial masters has included both anti- and pro-Japanese feeling, as well as the above-mentioned ‘mania’ for Japanese culture. The formation of and changes in popular sentiment towards Japan reflect Taiwan’s peculiar historical context, including but also transcending the legacy of war and colonisation. The present chapter traces the shifts from post-colonial anti-Japanese sentiment to the Japan Mania of the 1990s, with reference to this historical backdrop, and examines the images of and sentiments towards both Japan and Taiwan itself that we see refracted through the prism of popular culture.

Adapting Shakespeare’s literary works for introduction into Japanese popular culture has been an act of intercultural translation. Shakespeare and Japanese popular culture, particularly manga [Japanese graphic novels] could be seen as cultural polarities: the West vs. the East, as represented by Japan, a contrast between high culture and pop culture, the canonical vs. the lowbrow. Yet Shakespeare’s works as adapted in manga format do, as this article argues, problematize such hierarchical distinctions. Shakespeare found in manga can be both a challenge and a tribute to his authority, giving him a global and intercultural after-life. The first group of Japanese manga with Shakespearean motifs dates back to the early 20th century. Similar efforts have since continued through to the early 21st century, making manga with Shakespearean motifs a conspicuous, widespread phenomenon as part of Japanese pop culture. The greatest recent contribution in this regard is Manga Shakespeare Series. Published by a British publishing house, it helped to turn manga into an important vehicle for the intercultural translation of Shakespeare. This article aims at placing into perspective Shakespeare and his presence in Japanese pop culture in general and in Japanese manga in particular. Specifically, efforts will be made to introduce Japanese manga with Shakespearean motifs as a genre and show how it has become a representative intercultural art collaboration form. Western graphic novels with Shakespeare incorporated will be contrasted with Japanese manga, including Classics Illustrated, to see different levels of faithfulness to one of the world’s greatest writers. The findings indicate that while Western graphic novels tend to show a higher levels of faithfulness to the original works, Japanese manga takes greater liberty with Shakespeare. This suggests that manga with Shakespearean motifs should be viewed not as debasement of his literary authority but as creative innovation. Rather than trying to remain strictly faithful to Shakespeare’s original works, efforts should be made to identify previously overlooked aspects of Shakespeare’s works and expand the possibility of making the most of his legacy in enriching the human culture through hybridization and glocalization.

The present study addresses the status and use of irony in Japanese popular culture by closely examining its’ cultural variations on a corpus consisting of ironic utterances and situations from three popular culture media: Japanese drama, anime, and manga. While it is likely that Western popular culture abounds in ironic aesthetics and standpoints, the concept of “irony” faces cultural reconstruction within Japanese culture and society, a fact easily reflected in national media and cinematographic productions. In such cases, the cultural and linguistic distance between Japanese and English, and the striking difference, which exists between these two geographical and cultural contexts, increase the challenge interposed by the understanding and interpreting of irony. Moreover, on a conversational level, ironizing one’s communication partner is considered socially unacceptable and penalised accordingly. It stands against the much-expected politeness and traditional Japanese concepts such as “honne” and “tatemae,” which, if preserved, can create harmony in communication. In conclusion, the ambiguous definition of irony, together with the negative perception and reluctance of Japanese people towards its usage, has contributed to frequently branding irony strictly as a Western phenomenon. However, as the present research attempts to demonstrate, the usage of irony in Japanese popular culture embraces multifarious approaches, and it extends to reach the borders of semantics.

There has been a surge in the interest in Japanese popular culture worldwide. The objective of this paper was to explore the extent to which products, images, and activities associated with Japanese popular culture are achieving the status of recognizable and sustainable consumer brands overseas. A specially designed survey was used to examine the levels of awareness, interest, and participation in Japanese popular cultural activities of individuals from different national backgrounds. Regression analysis and other statistical techniques were used to evaluate the empirical findings. The results strongly supported the view that Japanese popular culture products and services have tremendous branding potential overseas. By breaking down popular culture into recognizable components, it was possible to explore the underlying branding potential trends and gain insights into areas for further market development. This approach can be generally applied to the study of the development and marketing of popular culture products & services.

Over the last two decades, Japanese popular culture products have been massively exported, marketed, and consumed throughout East and Southeast Asia. A wide variety of these products are prominently displayed in the region's big cities. Many Hong Kong fashion journals, for example, can be found in either the original Japanese or Cantonese versions. Japanese manga are routinely translated into the local languages of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, and China, and they dominate East Asia's comic book market. The Japanese animated characters Hello Kitty, Ampan Man, and Poke'mon are ubiquitous, depicted on licensed and unlicensed toys and stationary items in the markets of every Asian city. Japanese animation, usually dubbed, is the most popular in its field, particularly in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Astro Boy, Sailor Moon, and Lupin are animated characters seen in almost every shop that sells anime in Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. In China's big cities, too, Japanese popular culture products fill local stores, opening doors into the country's expanding cultural market, though in some markets they also face stiff competition from Korean and Chinese products. The success of Japanese popular culture in East and Southeast Asia has occasioned a flood of academic writing, notably in the fields of cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnography. The majority of works have focused on particular examples, emphasizing the reaction of audiences to cultural exposure in relation to the global-local discourse (Allison 2006; Craig 2000; Ishii 2001; Iwabuchi 2004; Martinez 1998; Mori 2004; Otake and Hosokawa 1998; Treat 1996). These studies consist of specific case studies with a strong tendency to privilege the text and its representational practices. No single study has yet comprehensively assessed the newly created Japanese cultural markets in East and Southeast Asia, nor framed these issues within a regional paradigm.

In the reform era, the function of Chinese media and culture industry has changed from propaganda tools to that of serving both purposes of facilitating ideological control and boosting economic growth. While the party-state continues to carefully regulate the importation of foreign products in China, the rapid expansion of cultural market and commercialization of the media provides various opportunities for the foreign products to be introduced to China through informal or semi-informal channels.
\n
\nThis dissertation, then, takes the imported Japanese and Korean popular cultural products and their corresponding fandoms/anti-fandoms as cases to study the negotiation among the ideology of party-state, the discourse of the fans and the discourse of the media. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how Chinese fans of Japanese and Korean popular culture have formed their own nationalistic discourse since the 1990s.
\n
\nDuring the formation of both fandoms, the state tried to control fan organizations and fan activities through shaping policy at the organization level. For Japanese popular culture, the state treated it as a subversive culture. On the contrary, the state tried to boost Korean cultural products for ideological and diplomatic purposes. With state support, transnational capital could enter the Chinese market. Rapid commercialization eliminated the diversity of Hallyu fandom cultures. The differences in the formation and structure of two fandoms make the fan labor of Hallyu fans be subjected to severe exploitation, while the fan labor of Japanese popular culture fans contributes much to the production of subversive discourse and practice which deviated from state’s control.
\n
\nCreative fan labor plays an important role in the formation of the fandom, reception of the popular culture, construction of discourse, and mobilization of fan activism. Because of the highly commercialized fandom, the Hallyu fans mainly utilize their fan labor to facilitate the commercial promotion and avoid historical or political discussions, which makes the Hallyu fans be less vocal when they encounter radical anti-fans in the online public sphere. Fans of Japanese popular culture have been diligent in constructing diverse but unique historical narratives and nationalistic discourses. Historical narratives are very important in developing nationalism and controlling sentiments on current diplomatic disputes between China, Japan and Korea. Thus historical narratives created by fans or anti-fans may challenge, resonate or radicalize the party-state’s patriotic indoctrination and ideology in different ways.
\n
\nBoth fans of Japanese popular culture and Korean popular culture exhibit perception on hierarchy of East Asian cultures which asserts the superiority of Chinese culture. But the fans in offline life exhibit strong individualism, while in the online public sphere, the boundary between politics and culture, and individuals and groups is blurred in online discourse—a discourse that has strong nationalistic sentiments.
\n
\nIn my dissertation, I will be analyzing the production of nationalistic discourse by fans through fan
\nlabor and reception of cultural contents.

<p>Over the last few decades, self-injury has gained wide visibility in Japanese popular culture from <em>manga</em> (graphic novel), <em>anime</em> (animation), to digital games and fashion. Among the most conspicuous is the emergence of <em>menhera</em> (a portmanteau of “mental health-er”) girls, female characters who exhibit unstable emotionality, obsessive love, and stereotypical self-injurious behaviors such as wrist cutting. Tracing the expansion of this popular cultural slang since 2000, this conceptual article explores three narrative tropes of <em>menhera</em>—the sad girl, the mad woman, and the cutie. Within these <em>menhera</em> narratives, self-injury functions as a self-sufficient signifier of female vulnerability, monstrosity, and desire for agency. These <em>menhera</em> tropes, each with their unique interpretation of self-injury, have evolved symbiotically with traditional gender norms in Japan, while destabilizing long-standing undesirability of sick/detracted female bodies. The <em>menhera</em> narrative tropes mobilize cultural discourses about female madness and subsequently feed back into the social imaginaries, offering those who self-injure symbolic resources for self-interpretation. We argue that popular cultural narratives of self-injury like <em>menhera</em> may exert as powerful an influence as clinical discourses on the way we interpret, make sense of, and experience self-injury. Being attentive to cultural representations of self-injury thus can help clinicians move toward compassionate clinical practice beyond the medical paradigm.</p>

I78 Reviews Nouvelles mythologies de lamort. By ISABELLECASTA. (Bibliotheque de Litterature Gen6rale etComparee, 67) Paris: Champion. 2006. 228 pp. E43. ISBN 978 2-7453-I495-6. Has our relation to death changed? This is the question Isabelle Casta sets out to answer inherwide-ranging, superbly documented study of recent popular culture in France, Britain, and theUS. Death, thedead, and theundead seem tobe ever-present indetective novels, supernatural fiction, films,and on television. Casta's guiding pre sumption is thatpopular culture tells us more about a society's imaginary than high art or theorycould. The book catalogues thedistinctivelymodern traitsof thecentral figures in thenew mythologies of death: the serial killer, the detective, and thepatho logist, togetherwith the legions of ghosts, vampires, and zombies who rise from their graves tohaunt our fictionand our dreams. The point here isnot that these figures aremodern inventions in themselves, but that something has changed in theway they are represented. The reader or viewer is spared no detail of the victim's suffering; the pathologist's examination of the corpse is described with meticulous accuracy; and the supernatural mingles seamlessly with the everyday as ghosts routinelywalk among us. Casta's study relishes theprofusion of gory evidence, piling example upon example to show theoverwhelming variety and coherence of her themes across a vast number of works. The cumulative effectof the analyses is impressive, as the book demonstrates both society's pervasive fascinationwith death and the stubborn belief that death is not the end. The key work here isBuffy theVampire Slayer. In 144 episodes of the television series and dozens of novels, Buffy is a sweet, attractive ado lescent in sunny California facing theordinary difficulties of growing up, learning to deal with familyand friends,not entirely keeping up with her schoolwork, and begin ning toexplore her emerging sexuality. She isalso theChosen One, living on the edge of theHellmouth, uniquely capable of defending humankind against Evil. She is the Slayer who kills demons and vampires but who also sometimes falls in lovewith them, sleeps with them, dies herself (twice) and is resurrected, before ultimately leading a band ofwarriors into the final, apocalyptic showdown which will decide the fate of theentireworld. The phenomenal success ofBuffy theVampire Slayer comes from its dazzling combination of teen drama and themes of Shakespearian proportions: death, sacrifice, and forbidden love.Casta takesBuffy very seriously, and the affectionate at tention she pays it,especially inher finalchapter, pays dividends as she demonstrates persuasively how it involves a verymodern take on some very ancient themes. The book represents an extremely valuable contribution to the academic study of popu lar culture and theway itencodes, mirrors, and informs society's attitudes towards death. Given that the author is clearly very familiarwith English-language culture, it is surprising that she does not make more use of scholarly work written inEnglish in the fieldofwhat is sometimes called hauntology. Moreover, her focus on popular culture means that she says little about the themes of death and the dead inmore rarefiedbut perhaps no less interesting contemporary texts. Itwould be interesting to know, forexample, how theghosts which appear innumerous modern filmsdo or do not relate to the spectres of Jacques Derrida's philosophy or, inpsychoanalysis, to the phantoms disinterred by analysts drawing on thework ofNicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. On its own merits, though, this is a fascinating and powerful book, driven by a sharp insight into the refusal of death which strikes against a knowledge of our own mortality: 'moi qui parle de lamort (des autres), je vaismourir' (p. 194). ROYAL HOLLOWAY,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON COLIN DAVIS ...

The last several decades have seen a growth in the transnational circulation of Japanese queer popular culture such as Boys Love Media, bara manga, and pornographic videos. Since the 1990s, the Philippines have emerged as an important market for Japanese media with queer themes. Drawing upon interviews with 31 Filipino fans of queer Japanese popular culture from a variety of gendered and class backgrounds, this presentation explores how Filipino consumers engage with fantasies of Japan as an “aspirational resource” that challenges experiences of societal heteronormativity. I reveal that Filipino consumers especially value the queer popular culture of Japan as it provides an affirming representational politics that they believe is absent within Philippine mainstream media, producing fantasies of Japan as an “LGBT paradise”. These fantasies, I suggest, play an important role in contouring how Filipino fans affectively experience and conceptualise their queerness, producing sexual knowledge grounded in Japanese popular culture. In particular, I chart how fans’ initial encounters with Boys Love and gay male pornography helped facilitate their identification with same-sex attraction and provided them with a vocabulary to express and make sense of their desires. I conclude the chapter by juxtaposing the informants’ attitudes towards the queer popular cultures of Japan and the US, which was a common theme in interviews. I specifically expose how the informants’ disavowal of the US as a site of queer liberation and their privileging of Japan reveals shifts in the “libidinal economy” of the Asia-Pacific within which the Philippines are situated.

Social welfare is a condition that humans strive to achieve a decent life in terms of material, social and spiritual aspects. After World War II, Japan was known as a country that experienced rapid economic and social welfare improvements. In addition, a wide range of Japanese popular culture products such as Manga & Anime, J-Pop, Video Games, and others have also grown and accompanied the established life of Japanese society. Therefore, Japanese popular culture has been supported and can spread to all corners of the world. This situation can indirectly improve the economy and existence of the Japanese state internationally, although, since the 1990s, Japan has experienced a lost decade. This study aims to discover in depth the correlation between the welfare of Japanese society and the development of Japanese popular culture after World War II. This study uses historical and descriptive qualitative methods with a multidisciplinary approach, such as history, social science, and culture. The results of this study show that social welfare is not a factor that can directly relate to or influence the development of Japanese popular culture. Other factors that lead to a marketing strategy and technology utilization, such as talented creators who have been good at finding opportunities, mass media culture, and Japanese government policies can influence the development of Japanese popular culture in domestic and abroad.

Popular culture embraces diverse arenas of expression, such as mythic narratives, news story archetypes, advertising, songs, games, political campaigns, public rituals, toys, comic books, films, television series, sports, celebrities, sermons, web sites, music, and biblical commentaries for lay readers. The label “popular” carries no pejorative flavor—as it did in mid-twentieth-century discussions of “mass culture”—nor does it imply consensus about popular culture's valuation by those who experience it. Compared to more mature fields, the scholarly study of religion and popular culture lacks a single disciplinary home. Inspiration for academic study with interdisciplinary texts and courses came from the Popular Culture Association, which originated at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. This article deals with eschatology in popular culture, focusing on early forms of popular eschatology, Bible-influenced popular culture in the United States, postmillennialism in civil religion, millennialism in superheroic fictions, the millennial vision and the video game, and premillennial fictions at the turn of the century.

The aim of this article is to explore some critical moments in the formation of 'popular' culture studies. This objective is not exhaustive, cannot be exhaustive in the space of a single article, since popular cultural studies have grown into an academic industry which not even five live-times of academic work by any individual can exhaust! This article is therefore, a rapid but hopefully, provocative view of understanding popular culture. The article uses the concept of myth to problematize some aspects of the debates of popular culture in some works by the Frankfurt school, the pioneering work of E. P Thompson, Stuart Hall and in the case of Africa, the work of Njabulo Ndebele. None of these works claim to be canonical in their treatment of popular culture. However, the problem identified in this article and therefore to be ad- dressed is that there still remains a certain condescending theoretical attitude in the definitions of what is popular by works indicated above. To be sure, each of these writers on popular culture have evolved from previous standpoints and yet it is still important, particularly from an African perspective where the popular is still viewed as inferior, to trace the genealogy of this mistrust of the popular. We argue that myths and symbols of popular culture should be viewed as social constructs; they do not represent the interests of everyone in the community in the same way, for ever.

(Re)Playing AnimeBuilding a Medium-specific Approach to Gamelike Narratives Selen Çalik Bedir (bio) The ontological status of fictional characters has been a central issue in theoretical discourses on Japanese popular culture, especially in Japan. Since the early 2000s, while Ôtsuka Eiji has attracted attention to the mortality of semiotic bodies as a noteworthy particularity of manga and anime narratives, some researchers following his lead have focused on characters’ increasing clinginess to life in recent works of Japanese popular culture. Being from the second camp, in Gêmuteki Riarizumu no Tanjô (The Birth of Gamelike Realism),1 Hiroki Azuma extensively discusses light novels featuring characters dying and coming back from death, or getting stuck in time loops to live the same day or hour again and again. While Azuma’s focus falls mainly on light novels, not surprisingly this motif of “restart and repeat” is fairly common in manga, anime, and even beyond Japanese popular culture, as it arguably finds its roots in the coming of postmodernity. The weakening of widely accepted social norms and values, which is usually acknowledged as a characteristic of the postmodern age, seems to have deprived narratives of dominant directions for plot development, while the possibility of restarting a story after it reaches an ending has been embraced as an efficient narrative strategy. Today, in official sequels or prequels as well as in fan-made derivative works, dead characters can be resurrected easily and their fates can be redrawn or “replayed,” which brings to mind the experience of playing games. However, what seemingly emerges as a unifying quality, that is to say, a “gamelikeness” that can be observed in contemporary narratives finding form across media, goes against what is commonly acclaimed as a unique quality that sets games apart from storytelling media. The distinguishing trait of games is widely considered to be enabling repetitive interaction as opposed to the developmental teleology of movies or novels. While Azuma does not make it his goal to address medial differences, his discussion may provide a new entrance point to reconsider the media that are compared to games, [End Page 45] specifically to reconsider anime, which incorporates audio elements like most video games, and possesses dynamic as well as static qualities. The question is, can we talk about an overarching similarity between contemporary media, that is, a gamelikeness, without disregarding media specificities? Can we use the concept to discover anime’s specific take on gamelikeness? Before addressing these questions, a definition of “medium” here is in order. In “Narration in Various Media” (2012), Marie-Laure Ryan lists three conceptual frameworks capturing three different aspects of media: semiotic, material-technological, and cultural.2 Semiotically, for instance, anime is a pluricodal medium (combining visual and aural codes with language), which possesses both static and dynamic properties and produces narratives that extend over time and space. Anime’s material-technological background (especially its reliance on the use of celluloid sheets, hand-drawn images and limited animation techniques) has particularized its narrative style further and even more visibly. On the other hand, anime has been in contact with digitalization for long enough to leave its material-technological limitations behind, at least, potentially. But instead, anime today chooses to embrace its material-technological heritage on a cultural level, by preserving cel animation style to a great extent even when computer graphics (CG) are heavily employed, and by keeping on picturing 2D worlds in a fashion that the audience has come to recognize. With the addition of its particular positioning on the cultural level, anime comes forward as a distinct medium. In order to address media specificities, as the above application shows, at least the three aspects that Ryan covers should be taken into consideration, not only in connection with each other but also with time. To begin with, there is an intrinsic connection between a certain technology and the age in which it appears or stays in use. Moreover, the semiotic as well as the material-technological potential of a medium is always activated in relation to its cultural background, and to the predominant tastes or ways of thinking of the age. Thus, time leaves a significant mark on media, to the point...

BLURB FOR TOTAL PROP MAILER Total Propaganda moves the study of propaganda out of the exclusive realm of world politics into the more inclusive study of popular culture, media, and politics. All the participatory functioning elements of the society are aspects of membership in the popular culture. Thus, the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and even international trade become everyday propaganda to which everyone may relate. To emphasize the necessity for new thinking about propaganda, Edelstein creates the concepts of the new propaganda and the old, and he devises a language of uninyms to convey their meanings more quickly. Oldprop is characteristic of mass cultures and utilizes totalitarian methods of conflict, hegemony, minimization, demonization, and exclusiveness to achieve its goals. By contrast, newprop is created by members of the popular culture to allow them to engage in accomodation, enhance the individual, and promote inclusiveness. Shifts in the old and the new propaganda are tracked across social issues such as race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, and the environment, as well as in fashion, politics, advertising, sports, media, and politics. Central to the concept of total propaganda is that it is not simply additive; it is the product of new energies that are produced by the fusing of propaganda in such related forums as music, art, advertising, sports and politics. It is these synergies, and their production of new energies, that make total propaganda greater than the sum of its parts. Edelstein concludes that the most important distinction that should be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text; i.e., its propaganda. In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda; in a mass culture almost everyone consumes it but only a few create it. This formulation offers new ways to discuss power and ideology in media texts. As an example, where once the least informed and the least educated were the most subject to propaganda, now the most informed and most educated often are the first to create propaganda and the first to consume it. FORMER BLURB COPY.......It is widely recognized that the mass media provide us with ample information which we use to construct some sense of the world around us. It is not as widely recognized that consumers of media messages are active in this constructive process, making meanings that are sensible to them in particular life circumstances. The media target a younger, more media savvy generation who are more likely to be participants in the messages than members of any previous generation. This participatory aspect of new media is central to what the author defines as the new propaganda. Although critical and cultural theories are often prohibitive for undergraduate students, the author's formulation offers an accessible way to discuss power and ideology in media texts. Without using the critical discourse, he provides compelling arguments that power and ideology are created and maintained through the active participation of audience members. The conceptualization of the old and new propagandas helps move the study of propaganda out of the realm of world politics into the study of popular culture. The author views all of the participatory functioning of the society as aspects of membership in a more embracing popular culture. This point of view recognizes that the mass media are extremely important forces in the consumer's construction of reality and that they are no longer exclusive channels for disseminating the messages of the powerful elites. Instead, the media -- particularly the new media -- are accessible to and used frequently by less powerful members of society -- children, ethnic minorities, and marginal members of society -- to create realities that more satisfactorily fulfill their needs. NEW BLURB COPY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... Total Propaganda is a fresh answer to the question of the inclusiveness of the popular culture. It demonstrates how the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and international trade have become everyday propaganda to which everyone relates in some way. Edelstein demonstrates that the most important distinction that can be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text (i.e., its propaganda). In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda, whereas in a mass culture, almost everyone consumes but only a few create it. This book presents a new language of propaganda that makes it possible to draw comparisons between mass and popular cultures. The language is used to observe shifts in propaganda across various social issues -- race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, the environment, print and broadcast media, new technologies, and politics. It also examines fashion, advertising, sports, and lobbying. Total Propaganda is not defined only quantitatively; it mirrors the synergies that have come about in every social and political realm and the energies that these synergies produce. As such, the sum of total propaganda is greater than the sum of its parts.