Description
Popular culture is often discussed in terms of its ‘banality’, i.e., how it reinforces socially constructed interpretations as ‘commonsensical truths’, around which government policy is woven or to which it is geared. This encourages a focus on how it sustains what is already there, however, as well as reproducing social constructs, popular culture can also introduce different ones to challenge and recalibrate established ‘truths’, clearing the way for changes in government policy. Using a New Durkheimian framework to emphasise popular culture’s capability to disrupt as well as reinforce ‘commonsensical truths’, I identify two market trends in manga: the conservative adult market in the 1980s; and moe-ification in the 1990s, that disrupt Japan’s military taboo, clearing the way for positive representations of military violence conducted by the Japan Self-Defense Forces to return to mainstream Japanese media. I further identify three patterns of violence: constrained, frantic, and spectacular, which are constituting an overall positive, but amorphous, vision of military violence; one which can be constrained for antimilitarist sceptics concerned about resurgent militiarism, which can be forceful for citizens concerned for their own security in the context of increasingly unstable world; and one which can be unapologetically dominant for nationalist conservatives.
