Suchergebnisse

This treatise conflates cultural sociology, media theory, and Japanese philology in order to better understand the way media scandals are produced in contemporary Japan. In cultural sociology, scandal is understood as a social performance between ritual and strategy. In my previous research I focused on the ritual aspect, analyzing Japanese scandals as dramatic public performances of confession, exclusion, and reintegration. In this treatise, I focus on the strategy aspect, approaching scandals as symbolic products of media routines and journalistic practices. The former part of this treatise examines how the actor-network of power circles co-defines the way scandals emerge and unfold in Japan. The latter part focuses on the role of Japanese media organizations in the process of transforming leaks into scandals.

First of all we wish to reveal certain universally-structuralist qualities, same as culturally-relative features of scandals and their mediation in a non-Western society. Secondly, we will illuminate how the mass media take active part in processing political issues in Japan, where as anywhere else in the media-saturated modern industrial world politicians significantly depend on the media (and vice versa); where political live shows and news programs – including scandals – became an important force, at times driving public sentiment while eventually generating support for opposition; and where wealth and its surplus is in evitably tied to a higher potential to grasp and secure power. We will then proceed to the main part of the paper, where we focus more closely on Japanese political scandals whereby preparing theoretical ground for a discourse analysis in the scandal case study of Ozawa Ichirō – one of the most powerful political heavyweights, and simultaneously one of the epitomes of political corruption in Japan.1 In our endeavor we were motivated by the fact that there exists plethora of literature on scandals in the west, but a detailed media discourse analysis of Japanese scandals is still lacking in academia worldwide.

In this article, we demonstrate that the antihero archetype informs our understanding of Trump in important ways, including his rise to and fall from power. We introduce an analytical framework for analyzing Trump's antiheroic traits based on his social positioning, individual motivation, and personal charisma. We argue that Trump is fascinating because he is powerful, amoral, and charismatic, and suggest that the American public was primed for Trumpism through a zeitgeist hospitable to antihero worship. That is, Trump's dogged popularity with nearly half of the American public was foretold by decades of pop-cultural obsession with, and adulation for, the antihero.