Craig Norris, PhD
This is a revised version of the article which first appeared in Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, Vol 20 (6 November 2012) ISSN 1447-4905 (2012)
Abstract
Fan pilgrimages to media locations have been described as fads or underground activities. More recently, there has been a trend to consider cult media tourism as increasingly incorporated into official tourism branding and promotion strategies. This article details how fans and industry ‘play’ with popular culture to experiment with their surroundings in new and novel ways. This phenomenon is observed in two cases: first, Saitama City’s attempt to appear in a Godzilla movie as documented in the BBC series Japanorama, and second, the experience of western Godzilla fans travelling to Japan. By discussing similar ‘fan tools’ used by different stakeholders, this paper will show how locations can be reimagined into popular culture portals that serve a variety of agendas.
Introduction
In 2002, the BBC series Japanorama, hosted by popular British entertainer Jonathan Ross, ran an episode on Godzilla and the Japanese city of Saitama’s attempts to be destroyed in the next Godzilla film. Ross explains, ‘Japanese cities crave the publicity that comes with a visit from Godzilla, and Saitama with its brand new city centre is a perfect setting for some Godzillian demolition’. Following a replay of Godzilla destroying various cities in Japan, we are introduced to Saitama’s town planner, Tetsuo Takahashi. He tells us he has arrived at a unique way to pitch Saitama to the Toho Company. To make Saitama stand out from the other cities vying for Toho's attention, Takahashi has written a script for a new Godzilla movie that shows how spectacular Godzilla’s destruction of Saitama could be. Sadly, Takahashi explains his concern that ‘we haven’t heard back from the Toho company’. The episode then centres around helping Saitama appear in a Godzilla movie. We are shown Takahashi touring the city with various Saitama civil servants and two actors who played Godzilla in the films. Various strategies are discussed to help Saitama’s destruction by Godzilla, and the audience is left feeling optimistic about Saitama’s chances of appearing in the next Godzilla movie.
This Japanorama episode poses both conventional and unconventional ideas about media tourism. We are told that local governments want the publicity appearing in a Godzilla film brings. Possibly based on the assumption that connecting Saitama to Godzilla will give them an audience or particular relevancy they otherwise would not have. We can imagine potential economic rewards from tourism or some positive cultural capital through being associated with a famous entertainment icon like Godzilla. Yet, there is very little information about the business and branding of media tourism. We don’t see a Toho spokesperson discuss the decisions that go into choosing locations or council plans to erect Godzilla statues and design tourist information. Instead, the episode concentrates on the fun practices and processes of participating in Takahashi’s Godzilla vision. A movie script is written, a Godzilla toy is used to destroy a scale model of Saitama, buildings are discussed in terms of how exactly Godzilla would stomp on them and tear them apart, and people act out their fantasies of being Godzilla by destroying small cardboard models of Saitama’s cityscape.
The audience is left knowing less about the business and marketing of media tourism and more about the fun of being a Godzilla fan and media tourist. The town planner’s script is a type of fan fiction, the Godzilla performances are typical of the alternative identities fans adopt through cosplay, and the use of scale models draws on the simulations and games fans create. The assistance Japanorama offers Saitama’s Godzilla bid seems to be based on the creative forms and collaborative problem-solving of fan culture. For Saitama, the hope is that these fan-type practices are the best way to show how and why Godzilla would destroy Saitama and, more importantly, why Toho should use this location.
The use of appropriation, game-play, mash-ups, and Godzilla performances in Japanorama is an example of the increasing appropriation of what was once marginalised activities of hard-core fans into moments of professional discourse and mainstream entertainment (Green & Jenkins 2009). Usually, a town planner wouldn’t write a Godzilla movie script or use a plastic Godzilla toy to explain why his city is exciting and important. But here, these approaches are used to solve problems and experiment with reimagining a city. We may see a variation in converging production and consumption practices similar to ‘prosumers’ (Toffler 1980) or ‘produsers’ (Bruns 2008). In this case, Saitama City is producing the very Godzilla story, and they hope it will position them as a city to be used by Toho.
Alternatively, the moves Saitama is making towards fan practice may be related to what Jenkins (2007a) refers to as the phenomenon of astroturfing, where media industries create fake grassroots campaigns to appeal to particular consumers. While Saitama’s effort to convince fans and Toho of its Godzilla credentials through fan-like practices is similar to astroturfing, it is not attempting to hide its involvement. A stronger parallel may be with the phenomenon of ‘affective economics’ (Jenkins 2006a), which describes the industry's enthusiasm to secure the loyal viewers of a cult property. It is based on the hope that, over the long term, a small cult audience will yield more significant profits than a numerically more considerable but less engaged general audience. Similarly, the enthusiasm shown in the Japanorama clip to create a Godzilla cult geography in Saitama suggests that local councils are trying to tap into cult media's loyal viewers to rejuvenate visits to a city. At the same time, however, Toho's lack of interest in Saitama’s Godzilla pitch since the broadcast of this episode in 2002 suggests that Toho has struggled to build a relationship or feedback loop between Toho and Godzilla fans. In this context, Saitama’s efforts to get some ‘Godzillian destruction’ may remind us of the challenges facing non-industry players who want to be more directly involved in media production or utilise media properties for their own ends. However, as I will show, appearing in the media through Japanorama may still secure a foothold in Godzilla’s cult geography for Saitama.
Additionally, this has to be understood within Japanorama’s agenda as a television show that needs to tell its audience a particular ‘weird and wonderful Japan’ story. The show has been edited to best meet these commercial and creative agendas. There is a gentle ‘laughing at’ the town planner’s over-enthusiasm for the destruction and pleasure Godzilla would find in terrorising the citizens of Saitama. While this does limit the power Saitama has to control the representation of their Godzilla bid, it does give them an audience and a profile they otherwise would not have. As I will show in this paper, this profile is built on the types of fan skills that can be brought into problem-solving (Brabham 2008) and experimenting with notions of place (Brooker, W 2007; Couldry 2007; Longhurst, Bagnall & Savage 2007; McBride & Bird 2007).
As I argue in this paper, embracing fan practice can solve some challenges in transforming a city into a pop-culture tourism phenomenon. Rather than the Saitama Council positioning itself around more conventional top-down strategies to convince fans and the Toho company, they position themselves as creating a cult geography by using the bottom-up practices of fans. To explain this, we need to look beyond the divide of an active fan community or exploitative industry agenda. The fact that this town planner appropriates fan practice reveals a more complex hybrid media ecology at work (Benkler 2006; Jenkins 2006a; Jenkins & Deuze 2008). As my explanation shows, various stakeholders (fans, government, and industry) are constructing this cult geography. To explore the interdependent and conflicting factors that facilitate this, I will compare Japanorama’s framing of Saitama’s Godzilla bid to the experiences of Western Godzilla fans who have travelled to Japan.
By comparing Japanorama’s portrayal of media tourism practices with how fans speak of their Godzilla tourism, this paper will connect cult geographies to the discussion around the emergence of a ‘networked information economy’ (Benkler 2006). In Benkler’s consideration of the stakeholders within new media networks, for example, he emphasises the ongoing struggles around competing purposes for the same media space. He suggests that as well as bringing people together, networks are spaces where various complimentary and conflicting agendas such as profit, persuasion, enlightenment and entertainment are played out for ‘benefits to reputation’ (Benkler 2006, 43). Green and Jenkins (2008) refer to Benkler’s argument as defining the emergence of a
hybrid media ecology where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, and educational media producers interact in ever more complex ways, often deploying the same media channels towards very different ends.
Within Godzilla’s hybrid media ecology, this paper will focus on the relationship between two of these stakeholders – local government and fans – and their shared strategies but diverging purposes for creating a Godzilla cult geography.
Before analysing the practices of fans and industry, I wish to briefly outline how the data for this study of Godzilla fandom was collected. The focus of the fan data was the Toho Kingdom community (www.tohokingdom.com), an extensive website ‘committed to covering all aspects of the film company Toho Eiga [Film]’ and is not affiliated with the Toho Company. With over 500 members, over 90,000 posts, and over 3,000 topics, it provides one of the most extensive portals into Toho films in English. Godzilla, as one of the most famous Toho properties, features extensively throughout the site, with various topics focusing exclusively on Godzilla's significance and continued relevance. I posted a link to a survey on this forum targeting Godzilla fans who had travelled to Japan. The link directed them to a ten-question survey addressing Godzilla's role in their travels around Japan. In total, I received 51 responses. The data was collected during three months in 2010.
From media tourism to cult geography
To return to the earlier quote by Japanorama’s host, ‘Japanese cities crave the publicity that comes with a visit from Godzilla.’ This comment reveals how much the act of visiting media locations has become commonplace, and it is now routine for tourists to plan their trips around an interest in popular culture. Fans can visit specific places made famous for them through popular culture and perform typical tourist acts such as photographing themselves in front of these recognisable landmarks or icons, buying merchandise and so on.
While we may be familiar with media tourism, the Japanorama clip clearly shows that the practices occurring here go far beyond the mere recognition of a media location. Hills (2002) argues that participating in cult geography involves more elaborate fan practices. In Fan Cultures, Hills (2002) further refines cult geography as the ‘diegetic and pro-filmic spaces (and ‘real’ spaces associated with cult icons) which cult fans take as the basis for material touristic practices’ ( 144). This process of fans visiting locations and sites based on their interest in their favourite pop culture text redefines that location’s meaning around their fan interest. The main aim of this paper is to show how various fan practices facilitate the production of Godzilla cult geography.
Previous research in media tourism has discussed the tours and pilgrimages to the locations that were used in popular culture such as the X-Files (Hills 2002), Dracula (Reijnders, Stijn 2011), Blade Runner (Brooker, Will 2005), Inspector Morse (Reijnders, S. 2009), The Sopranos (Couldry 2007), Sex in the City (McCabe & Akass 2004), and The Lord of the Rings (Tzanelli 2004). While this work has addressed various aspects of the tourist and industry experience of media place, I wish to combine existing fan theory approaches within this field, in particular, Hills’ (2002) concept of ‘cult geography’ with Gee’s (2007a) ‘affinity space’ approach from participatory culture and education studies. Drawing on fan theory and participatory culture research in this way will shed new light on spatial imagination's impact on the meaning of place and text.
Through these approaches, I will show how local governments and fans use particular fan practices to transform locations into cult geographies. Focusing on the Japanorama episode and the TohoKingdom.com fan community, I will map three practices used to create a Godzilla cult geography. Firstly, improvising cult geography through play and, secondly, generating authenticity through fan practice. Thirdly, it combines narrative, place, and travel in an ‘affinity space’ (Gee 2007a). These practices will show the interdependent and interrelated production and consumption processes at the core of these practices. It will also show how popular culture can be used to participate in foreign spaces with a powerful sense of purpose.
Creating a cult geography
In discussing Godzilla’s cult geography, Japanorama’s Saitama town planner and the TohoKingdom.com fans emphasise a sense of ‘play’. Recent research into new media literacies (Jenkins et al. 2006; Knobel & Lankshear 2007) has approached the idea of play as a core skill that needs to be further understood. This research has linked play to the serious work youth do addressing issues such as ethics, judgement and identity while playing video games (Gee 2007c), participating in social networks (Lyman et al. 2009) or using Google search and Wikipedia (Jenkins 2007b). A key value of this play is that it encourages people to engage deeply and fully with complex material and issues (Gee 2007c). This use of play to attain deeper learning was evident in Takahashi’s performance on Japanorama and the stories Godzilla fans related in their survey responses. Takahashi hopes to create a space for a deeper engagement with Saitama through Godzilla, and, as I will show later, fans use various types of play to experiment with their surroundings to solve problems, improvise identities, or understand real-world events and histories. However, the particular characteristics of how this play is configured and established differ between these two cases.
To return briefly to the Japanorama episode, while fan practices are emphasised, playing is also configured as a business undertaking. Takahashi is responsible for making Saitama popular and relevant; this aligns with a belief in the Godzilla brand association to generate interest around specific locations. Again, this is framed as a critical motivation for Saitama’s hoped-for media tourism, emphasised throughout the Japanorama episode by the frequent use of clips showing Godzilla’s destruction of specific landmarks and cities. Takahashi’s optimistic belief in his ability to use Godzilla to change the public’s perception of Saitama’s brand-new city centre is reinforced through three fan practices: appropriation, performance and simulation.
Consider, for example, the attention given to Taskahashi’s Godzilla movie script:
So far Godzilla has destroyed most of the famous architecture in Japan. Saitama New Urban Centre is the only place he hasn’t destroyed. We sent our proposal to Toho, Godzilla’s film production company. Apparently a lot of cities are doing the same thing. But what we did was send them an original script to give them a more precise idea – and they found this an unusual approach.
Here, we see the value of appropriation through the emphasis given to it as the ‘unusual approach’ Saitama has taken to show that it can be transformed into Godzilla’s cult geography. Writing the movie script will show Toho that they understand Godzilla and can contribute to its community and brand. A belief in the positives of good fan play underpins this approach. In particular, the advantages of meaningfully remixing media content (Black 2005; Jenkins 2006b; Thomas 2007). Writing about fan fiction, Jenkins et al. (2006) identify essential skills being developed by these writers, such as demonstrating knowledge and creativity through ‘an appreciation of the emerging structure’ and ‘potential meanings’ ( 32) of the original text. The hope for Saitama is that their movie script expresses knowledge of the Godzilla universe and convincingly links their city with the ‘emerging structure’ and ‘potential meanings’ of the films creatively. But more than telling a good story, it needs to persuade Toho to film there. Fan fiction becomes one of the council's strategies to make their bid stand out and transform Saitama from just another city into a cult geography inhabited by Godzilla.
In addition to appropriation, Saitama’s bid is explained through the common fan practice of performing Godzilla’s destruction through simulation. In Japanorama, Takahashi demonstrates how Godzilla would destroy Saitama by using a plastic toy Godzilla leg on a stick to enact Godzilla’s destructive trail across a large-scale model of the city:
With this stick here I will show you how Godzilla will destroy Saitama City Centre. Godzilla appears from the south and destroys each building. He appears with the Godzilla theme song [Takahashi hums the tune]. Then he finds a new building he turns around and hits the building. The people run around screaming everywhere [Takahashi imitates the sound of people screaming]. He torches two building [Takahashi lets out a roar]. Godzilla loves train stations, he destroys the whole station and the people there are in a big panic. There is a bullet train by his side and he picks up each coach and throws them everywhere. And that is my idea of Godzilla demolishing Saitama New Urban City.
By positioning himself as the knowledgeable Godzilla expert describing Godzilla’s destruction on a detailed map, Takahashi performs one of the core practices of cult geography – adopting the identity of key characters and expressing the theme of the series. Hills’ (2002) analysis of X-Files tourists and Couldry’s (2007) analysis of The Sopranos tour highlight the moments where tourist practices and problem-solving reinforce the broader themes in the series, such as The X-Files’ hiddenness or The Sopranos’ tension between the private and public. For Hills (2002),
the manner of this quest [to find the filming locations] replays the 'hiddenness' of The X-Files own tropes and secrets: 'signs' and ‘informants' leak out of the text, as if it provided a guide for the cult fans' creative transposition. This transposition is one of the key aspects of ‘cult geography’ ( 148)
A similar ‘creative transposition’ can be seen in the Japanorama clip. Through his simulations of a Godzilla attack, Takahashi evokes some of the motifs of military and scientific advisors in the Godzilla series. The films often feature sequences where military advisors and scientists crowd around a map, plotting Godzilla’s trail of destruction and interpreting its actions. Alternatively, this performance of planning and controlling Godzilla's movements may also emulate the villain masterminding Godzilla’s assault on a city.
Although the importance of adopting the alternative identities and tropes from popular culture has been previously examined, my concern is how these performances also function as an authenticating strategy for those working in local government or industry.
Authenticity
The goal for Saitama is to make their new city centre an authentic location on a tour of Godzilla’s destruction of Japan. While they can’t guarantee a Toho Godzilla film featuring Saitama, they can imagine it. They can play, perform and construct models as if the city had been destroyed in a Godzilla film. They can rely upon the generic aspects of the town that already fit the canon of Godzilla’s favourite things to smash (train stations, skyscrapers, and new buildings). And tell a story of Saitama within the narrative of Godzilla arriving, destroying buildings, terrorising the population and leaving. In a way, the broadcast of these practices on Japanorama already bestows pseudo-authenticity onto Saitama as Godzilla cult geography. Even without an official Toho film endorsing Saitama, it has been filmed and promoted as offering a virtual experience of mapping and coordinating Godzilla’s destruction. What is produced is an unofficial tour conducted by Saitama’s town planner, produced by the Japanorama TV program and circulated through broadcast and online media.
Like a fan’s creative transposition when they photograph themselves reenacting scenes in front of landmarks (Hills 2002, 149), Japanorama’s mediation of Saitama’s Godzilla cult geography generates a type of authenticity through the meaning the ‘fan’ acts give to a location. Turning a train station, a skyscraper and other structures of Saitama’s cityscape into the raw materials of a Godzilla film gives them a new symbolic meaning. This is not just a train station, this is the train station Godzilla destroys or the location where people fled from Godzilla. As Hills (2002) argues, the fan’s ability to make these locations meaningful through this creative transposition:
allows for a radically different object-relationship in terms of immediacy, embodiment and somatic sensation which can all operate to reinforce cult 'authenticity' and its more-or-Iess explicitly sacralised difference. The audience-text relationship is shifted towards the monumentality and groundedness of physical locations ( 149)
Takahashi aims to transform Saitama from just another big city in Japan into the ‘radically different object-relationship’ of a cult geography. The movie script, re-enactment of Godzilla’s destruction, and walking tour of Saitama hope to give authenticity to Saitama’s Godzilla cult geography. Having these performances filmed and circulated through the Japanorama program pushes Saitama into the realm of becoming a media place – one in which the Japanorama program and Godzilla have shaped our perceptions of it.
However, such positioning towards cult authenticity does not go unchallenged. While Takahashi is defined around his confidence and status, this is undercut somewhat by his performance during the episode. He hums a tune different from the iconic Godzilla soundtrack while re-enacting Godzilla’s destruction. Later, Godzilla's actors corrected him on how Godzilla would destroy large buildings. This raises the question of whether Takahashi is a fan or only interested in Godzilla for the profile it might bring Saitama.
Such questioning of Takahashi’s Godzilla knowledge challenges the hoped-for alliances between Saitama and Toho and the fan audience. While Takahashi can generate local portals into Godzilla’s cult geography, does he share a passion for Godzilla films, and is his vision shared by others in the Saitama council? These ambiguities between production and consumption are significant. As authors such as Green and Jenkins (2009) point out, while companies are re-evaluating the opportunities offered by fan participation, there remain ‘potential conflicts since fan and corporate interests are never perfectly aligned’ ( 219). Scholars in tourism studies have also been aware of the complexity and ambiguity of authenticity, particularly in the context of mediated representations and externally managed tourist experiences’ (Karpovich 2010, 12). For example, media tourism to sites featured in the film Braveheart with its origins in Scotland, yet filming in Ireland raises as many questions about heritage and popular culture as the tours appear to be celebrated (Aitchison, Macleod & Shaw 2000). To explore this complexity further, this paper will discuss how Godzilla fans define their cult geography practices around authentic and improvised moments.
Improvising Godzilla’s space
During the Japanorama episode, fan practice establishes a clear vision of what it means to inhabit the cult geography of Godzilla’s Japan. In contrast to the slickly produced Japanorama performances, more personal and improvised notions of cult geography are evident in the survey results from the Toho Kingdom community.
For these fans travelling to Japan as a Godzilla fan is connected to being a tourist. While this engagement reflects the typical practices of tourism – such as leisure, travel, and souvenir collecting – it is also connected to the motifs and narrative of Godzilla. They are tourists travelling around Japan but they are also adopting Godzilla fan identities to improvise, discover and experiment with their surroundings. In some cases, the fans’ creative transpositions are used to establish their active involvement and participation in the landscape around them.
Godzilla locations
That Saitama could be framed so strongly as a tourist location through the Godzilla text can be understood by considering how Japan’s rural, industrial and urban landscapes can become portals into a Godzilla space. To understand the complex relationship between text, fan practice and place, I will focus on two ways that fans use creative transposition to move between the Godzilla text and the real geography around them: first, the use of significant and banal locations as portals into the text; and second, the process of using Godzilla’s destruction trope to frame historical events and places.
The locations that Godzilla fans use as portals into the fantasy space of Godzilla include typical monuments that evoke recognition and awe. Godzilla destroyed the Diet Building (the seat of Japanese political power), other noteworthy historical structures, such as the Osaka Castle, and significant architectural and cultural landmarks, such as Ginza’s Wako department store and clock tower. These locations within the Godzilla space are privileged because of their political, historical and cultural significance and the dramatic action surrounding their destruction in the films. These monuments are prominently featured in the advertisements for many Godzilla films and appear in many fans’ recollections of travelling to Japan. As the comment below attests:
My first morning in Japan, travelling south from Tokyo station on shinkansen [bullet train], I was looking at bright, shiny modern skyscrapers and suddenly the Diet building’s cold grey concrete, came into view for a second or two. It was a dreamlike, cinematic moment, making me think Godzilla might come into view next.
As well as the monuments one would expect to evoke media tourism portals, Godzilla’s cult geography extends to more banal, everyday locations such as train stations, power lines, oil refineries, hills and even the view out to the ocean. These portals reveal how acts of cult geography turn something banal into something spectacular and how the fans foreground their role as choreographers of these cult geographies. For example, the following comment shows how being a Godzilla fan changes a typical tourist act – travelling from one city to another – into generating a Godzilla space.
I think that I had two moments that could be considered Godzilla moments. The first Godzilla moment I had was when I was in the JR Rail going to Fukuoka from Osaka. While taking in the scenery, I noticed the high voltage electrical lines that are shown in many Godzilla films. In my mind I started to play Godzilla's theme by Akira Ifukube.
A banal aspect of tourism – looking out the window of a train and noticing the landscape – is here presented as evoking the landscape of a Godzilla film. Again, what is interesting is how bland the portal can be — in this case, the many power lines that cover Japan. In contrast to reducing these structures to straightforward explanations of power supply or barely noticing them beyond their global familiarity, the Godzilla fan becomes a cult geographer by turning these power lines into the power lines often used to battle Godzilla. The ‘Godzilla moment’ is further established by recalling the Godzilla theme music from the composer Akira Ifukuba and moving onto this view of the landscape. These acts remind us of Takahashi’s similar use of music in his re-enactment of Godzilla’s destruction of Saitama in Japanorama.
The use of Godzilla’s narrative and motifs as scaffolding over the Japanese landscape gives the location a new relevance and excitement. It also casts the cult geographer as an active participant in this geography. In this way, the cult geographers see themselves as improvising an exciting and stimulating environment far removed from the actual banality of these locations.
A further remixing can be seen in the sampling of discourses combining personal travel diaries, fan knowledge, and the language of cinematography in many of the responses. For example, in a later comment, the same fan positions themselves as less of a tourist and more of a film director:
As I continued to Fukuoka, I saw a refinery and immediately my thoughts went to naming monsters that have destroyed refineries in Godzilla movies. Finally on the JR Rail I noticed two things that I saw in the 1993 Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla. They were the Fukuoka Tower and how the color of the ocean from the sea of Japan is really a pink color as the sun sets. My other Godzilla moment was when I was on the island of Kikai-Shima. The island itself is no where near Tokyo, but I could not help to think of the first image of Godzilla shown on the big screen. Like in the movie there was a hill on the island that I was walking up and my mind had a flash back to the movie. I kind of chuckled and said to myself, wouldn't it be something if I felt the ground shake and look up to see Godzilla himself roaring.
The Godzilla space exists here in parallel with these locations. The fan improvises a Godzilla geography through specific ‘concrete’ triggers in the environment around them. From monuments (the Diet Building), recognisable architecture (the Fukuoka Tower), banal industrial locations and structures (refineries and power lines), cityscapes (skyscrapers) and geographical formations (a hill). The combination of witnessing monumental locations, large natural formations, and imposing man-made structures while choreographing their destruction by giant monsters generates the portal into the narrative and practices of the Godzilla text.
Cult geography as an affinity space
Recent research into the impact of new media and online networks on learning provides a helpful comparison. In his study, Gee argues that the strength of a learning environment can be best measured in terms of its ‘affinity space’ (Gee 2007b) rather than focusing on the people who inhabit a space and their ‘communities of practice’ (Lave 1996). Gee defines an affinity space as the organisation of an area around a shared purpose and the processes that support or inhibit participation, collaboration and the circulation of expertise and knowledge. His research reveals that spaces are organised around generators (things that give the space content) and platforms (that give users access to content). For Gee, what matters is more than just identifying these two processes, the significance of an affinity space lies in measuring the relative strength of the feedback loop between portals and generators. As Gee (2007a) argues, ‘we want to know whether content organization and interactional organization reflexively shape each other in strong or weak ways, not just whether they do or not’ ( 96).
While Gee focuses on learning and education, affinity space offers insight into some of the critical features of cult geography – particularly in understanding how a place's meaning can be reordered around its connection to popular culture like Godzilla. To return briefly to Japanorama, the episode builds an affinity space at one level by trying to generate as many Godzilla portals as possible to influence Toho’s next Godzilla film. While Saitama is aggressively attempting to contribute to official Godzilla content directly, affinity spaces also underpin many more modest acts of informal learning and sharing performed by the Godzilla fans I surveyed.
As Godzilla fans travel to Japan shows, experiencing Godzilla’s cult geography is part of a more significant social and place-based participation. They draw upon various resources that offer support for achieving a successful pilgrimage. Survey respondents mention multiple websites and travel publications devoted to Godzilla fans travelling to Japan. In addition to online forums like Toho Kingdom, examples included the fan-produced The Monster Movie Fan's Guide to Japan (Vaquer 2009), tours to Japan organised by fan clubs such as G-Fan, and the Japanese Wikipedia site for Gojira. Through these sites, fans have planned their trips to Japan, offered advice to others, and shared information and knowledge. Takahashi and the Saitama council hope to foster this type of participation and engagement in their city through Godzilla.
Experiencing Godzilla’s cult geography draws upon these online and published resources, the motifs and fictional narrative of the films, and the generic and monumental resources of one’s surroundings. When fans visit the Diet Buildings or see an oil refinery or power line and transpose a Godzilla narrative over it, they draw upon these portals to generate a Godzilla experience. In transforming a power line into a Godzilla space, we see that particular ‘raw ingredients’ help develop this new, remixed content. Two of these have already been discussed: the use of banal and monumental locations and adopting alternative identities. Both show that the Godzilla fan travelling in Japan is more than an awed witness. They are the choreographers of virtual mass destruction by giant monsters menacing Tokyo.
A third portal that Godzilla fans use to access Godzilla space is the real stories of destruction that have occurred in places and buildings featured in the films. Here, Godzilla fans present themselves as navigating grand but tragic portals of Japan through Godzilla’s destruction. These creative transpositions include terrifyingly catastrophes both within Japan and overseas, as the following comment reveals:
I've been to NY (assuming you include the 1998 American Godzilla movie in the study). I feel all the locations are important, because it shows that no place is safe or off limits, especially to catastrophe or a rogue force of nature.
The allusion here to the 9/11 terrorist attacks locates Godzilla’s meaning squarely in its indiscriminate destruction of monuments and places where ‘no place is safe or off limits’. This theme suggests one of the core meanings of Godzilla. As Tsutsui (2004) points out, Ishiro Honda, who directed the first Godzilla movie in 1954, approached ‘Godzilla as a means of “making radiation visible," of giving tangible form to unspoken fears of the Bomb, nuclear testing, and environmental degradation’ ( 33). Within the survey results, members of the Toho Kingdom community repeated Honda’s reading of Godzilla as a cautionary tale of ‘unspoken fears’. For example, one respondent echoed this as the reason Godzilla destroys cities: ‘Godzilla destroyed these buildings because he is furious at mankind's use of atomic weapons. He is an instrument of nature's wrath and will continuously destroy Tokyo’.
Fans draw upon Godzilla as a ‘tangible form to unspoken fears’ as they interpret and construct a parallel story of real-world destruction through their travel to Godzilla locations. The convergence of places and their destruction, both fictional and real, asserts the fan’s engagement with some of the feelings of fear and vulnerability that lie in the intersection between the text and their surroundings.
For example, the convergence of history, narrative and place is seen in the recent fan-produced travel guide, The monster movie fan's guide to Japan (Vaquer 2009). In the following entry for Ginza and Hibiya Park, we see the shift from specific locations in Tokyo’s Ginza area to the Godzilla narrative and then to the destruction visited upon these locations during WWII.
Ginza is Tokyo’s upscale shopping district. It first appeared in Godzilla (1954) as a detailed minature. The craftsmen at Toho faithfully recreated Ginza well enough to give viewers an idea on how the district looked in 1954. During Godzilla’s nighttime rampage in Tokyo, the clock atop the Wako Department store at Ginza Crossing gonged the hour and thus annoyed the giant beast. Godzilla then proceeded to tear down the clock and the department store along with it. He also torches the Matsuzakaya Department Store, one of Tokyo’s priciest retailers. Across the street from the Wako Building, is the Mitsukoshi department store. The Mitsukoshi was one of the first Western-style department stores in Japan. It sustained heavy bomb damage in World War II, but has been rebuilt and is still a thriving department store. (Vaquer 2009, 28)
In this example, Godzilla’s presence in Tokyo is destructive: it commits a ‘nighttime rampage’ on Tokyo, ‘tear(s) down the clock’ and ‘torches the Matsuzakaya department store’. For Vaquer, the destruction of Ginza by Godzilla replicates the wartime destruction of Ginza by Allied bombers, like the process of ‘narrative leakage’ described by Hills (2002), one of the critical practices in cult geography is moving from the fictional narrative space to one’s surroundings through meaningfully remixing both.
Conclusion
The analysis presented in this paper explores the strategies used by fans, local government, and the media to transform the environment around them. The focus on Saitama’s Godzilla bid and TohoKindom.com’s fans has revealed several similar strategies used to remix Godzilla into one’s surroundings. These strategies could be broadly labelled as ‘fan practices’, including appropriation, performance, and simulation. These practices also impart an authenticity to these locations through meaningfully reordering them as spaces of Godzilla affiliation. In many of these examples, Godzilla was also used as scaffolding for other purposes – such as drawing more attention to Saitama or reflecting on the historical destruction of those locations.
Differences between Japanorama and TohoKingdom also emphasise the conflicting purposes between stakeholders within this hybrid media ecology. On the one hand, Saitama hopes to exploit a potential synergy between their new city centre and Godzilla’s destruction of significant landmarks. In contrast, Godzilla fans seek to improvise a Godzilla experience when and where they want to. Convergence cultures, as Jenkins (2006a) has argued, have changed how media are circulated and engaged with and have meant we need to move beyond power relations based on a weak or strong audience/producer divide.
Power issues must be addressed from multiple perspectives and sympathetic to alternative norms. For example, while Saitama and Japanorama use fan practices, fans are absent from the episode. We are only provided with the opinions of professionals. This keeps the labour fans have done to re-circulate, comment on, and contribute to popular culture like Godzilla largely invisible. While there remain essential concerns around the diverging agendas of various stakeholders, the fan practice ‘tool kit’ outlined here is evidence of the forms of participation that are being learned and appropriated between stakeholders. By valuing the types of practices of fans and trying to appear loyal to the spirit and enjoyment of Godzilla, Saitama may still appeal to the hard-core Godzilla fan audience. Even without the direct involvement of the Toho company, Saitama may still have become a cult geography.
Japanorama episode reference
Japanorama. Horror. Season 1, Episode 6. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Hotsauce TV, 1 June 2002.
References
Aitchison, C, Macleod, NE & Shaw, SJ 2000, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies, Routledge, London.
Benkler, Y 2006, The wealth of networks : how social production transforms markets and freedom, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.
Black, RW 2005, 'Online fanfiction: What technology and Popular Culture Can Teach Us about Writing and Literacy Instruction', New Horizons for Learning Online Journal, vol. 11, no. 2.
Brabham, DC 2008, 'Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases', Convergence, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 75-90.
Brooker, W 2005, 'The Blade Runner Experience: Pilgrimage and Liminal Space', in W Brooker (ed.), The Blade Runner Experience, Wallflower, London, pp. 11-30.
Brooker, W 2007, 'A Sort of Homecoming: Fan Viewing and Symbolic Pilgrimage', in J Gray, C Sandvoss & CL Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities in A Mediated World, New York University Press, New York, pp. 149-164.
Bruns, A 2008, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second life, and Beyond : from production to produsage, Digital formations, v. 45, Peter Lang, New York.
Couldry, N 2007, 'On the set of The Sopranos: "inside" a fan's construction of nearness', in J Gray, C Sandvoss & CL Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities in A Mediated World, New York University Press, New York, pp. 139-148.
Gee, JP 2007a, 'Affinity Spaces: From Age of Mythology to Today's Schools', in Good video games + good learning : collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy, P. Lang, New York, pp. 87-103.
—— 2007b, Good video games + good learning : collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy, New literacies and digital epistemologies, P. Lang, New York.
—— 2007c, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Green, J & Jenkins, H 2008, 'The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part Two)', Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The official weblog of Henry Jenkins, viewed 24 March 2011, <http://henryjenkins.org/2008/03/the_moral_economy_of_web_20_pa_1.html%3E.
—— 2009, 'The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Audience Research and Convergence Culture', in J Holt & A Perren (eds), Media Industries: History, Theory and Method, Wiley-Blackwell, New York.
Hills, M 2002, 'Cult geographies: between the 'textual' and the 'spatial'', in Fan Cultures, Routledge, London; New York, pp. 144-157.
Jenkins, H 2006a, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, New York.
—— 2006b, 'Why Heather Can Write', in Convergence culture : where old and new media collide, New York University Press, New York ; London, pp. 169-205.
—— 2007a, 'Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube', vol. May 28, viewed 25 Jan 2011, <http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_propositions_towards_a_cultu.html%3E.
—— 2007b, 'What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies', Journal of Media Literacy, vol. 54, no. 2 & 3, pp. 11-29.
Jenkins, H, Clinton, K, Purushotma, R, Robinson, AJ & Weigel, M 2006, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, MacArthur Foundation, viewed 1 May 2009, <http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf%3E.
Jenkins, H & Deuze, M 2008, 'Editorial: Convergence Culture', Convergence, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 5-12.
Karpovich, AI 2010, 'Theoretical approaches to film-motivated tourism', Tourism and Hospitality, Planning and Development, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 7-20.
Knobel, M & Lankshear, C 2007, A new literacies sampler, New literacies and digital epistemologies, v. 29, Peter Lang, New York.
Lave, J 1996, 'Situating Learning in Communities of Practice', in L Resnick, J Levine & S Teasley (eds), Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.
Longhurst, B, Bagnall, G & Savage, M 2007, 'Place, Elective Belonging, and the Diffused Audience', in J Gray, C Sandvoss & CL Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities in A Mediated World, New York University Press, New York, pp. 125-138.
Lyman, P, Ito, M, Thorne, B & Carter, M 2009, Hanging Out, Messing Around, And Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media, MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, Cambridge.
McBride, LB & Bird, ES 2007, 'From Smart Fan to Backyard Wrestler: Performance, Context, and Aesthetic Violence', in J Gray, C Sandvoss & CL Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities in A Mediated World, New York University Press, New York, pp. 165-178.
McCabe, J & Akass, K 2004, Reading Sex and the City, I. B. Tauris, London New York.
Reijnders, S 2009, 'Watching the detectives: Inside the guilty landscapes of inspector morse, baantjer and wallander', European Journal of Communication, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 165-181.
Reijnders, S 2011, 'Stalking the count: Dracula, Fandom and Tourism', Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 231-248.
Thomas, A 2007, 'Blurring and Breaking Through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction', in M Knobel & C Lankshear (eds), A new literacies sampler, Peter Lang, New York, pp. 137-166.
Toffler, A 1980, The third wave, 1st edn, Morrow, New York.
Tsutsui, W 2004, Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Tzanelli, R 2004, 'Constructing the 'cinematic tourist': The 'sign industry' of The Lord of the Rings', Tourist Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 21-42.
Vaquer, A 2009, The Monster Movie Fan's Guide to Japan, ComiXpress, Dumont , NJ, United States.
コメント