Contrary to what cultural essentialist views of Japan might suggest, Japan is far from being an “all work, no play” type of society. On the contrary, Michal Daliot-Bul argues that play is an essential aspect of culture that informs many aspects of human activity, and that reflecting on how play changes can offer important insights into the mentality and atmosphere of an era, as well as the human condition in general.
License to Play engages in extensive research into how play and leisure activities are approached in the academy, offering a good review of the topic in both Japanese and foreign scholarship. While considering different terms used to designate creative activities, play, and leisure in Japan, Daliot-Bul chooses asobi as the focus of her inquiry. The scope of the research is bi-dimensional: on the one side, Daliot-Bul approaches play from a historical perspective, highlighting how the transformation of play during different historical eras reflects larger changes within Japanese society; on the other side, she analyzes what play represents in the field of cultural studies, approaching the relationship between play and different realms of human activity, but also new dynamics of play in the context of the postmodern era.
After laying out the theoretical frame of the book in an extensive introduction, the first chapter opens with a linguistic analysis of the meaning of asobi and related terms, illustrating that Daliot-Bul approaches the concept of play as a “road map showing how people perceive, interpret, think about, and express their views of the world” (14).
In the second chapter, the author focuses on the role of play in the lifestyles of three different social groups throughout the history of Japan: the court aristocrats of the Heian period (794-1185), the urbanites of the Edo period (1603-1868), and the urban youth of the 1970s. For these groups, the author argues, play was not only a way of exhibiting their aesthetic and moral ideals, but also of negotiating these ideals, resisting social trends, and shaping communities based on a shared fascination for a certain lifestyle. These groups, favoring play as a means of cultural expression, have had a considerable role in shaping the taste of Japanese society as well as the image of what we get to think of as Japanese. Therefore, it can be said that for Japanese society play has represented a “powerful civilizing force” (47).
As play is often described in opposition to the realm of “serious life,” Daliot-Bul chooses to approach the “otherness of play” as the theme for the third chapter of her book. Since for the three social groups in chapter 2 play and leisure activities happened in carefully delimited spaces apart from everyday life, the author engages in a historical reconstruction of the sakariba, the amusement quarters which emerged in the city of Edo and still exist nowadays in Tokyo. The demarcation of the sakariba, both physically within the urban space and symbolically through behaviors such as dressing up, is seen as a way of conserving the otherness of play, and efforts to maintain or transgress the boundaries of these spaces can be interpreted in relation to the cultural construction of play.
From chapter 4 on, Daliot-Bul’s focus switches completely to modern-day urban Japan and how play has metamorphosed in post-war era Japan. Chapter 4 considers the work-oriented culture that Japan developed under the influence of large corporations in the 1970s and the information culture that emerged in the context of Japan’s late-consumer culture when discussing what play consists of and what a good player is under these socio-economic circumstances in Japan. The chapter offers interesting insights into the role played by economics in shaping ideology by focusing on phenomena such as the development of edutainment through karucha senta (cultural centers) and bukatsu (extra-curricular club activities), and the emergence of otaku, cosplay, and other subcultures. A particular interest is shown in cosplay culture and what is considered a best player in this form of play. The author observes that, as was the case for Heian and Edo period aristocrats, mastery of a vast amount of information and the aestheticizing of play are key elements for one to be considered a skillful player in postmodern Japan.
The fact that in many of the games the players manifest their creativity, not through original endeavors, but rather through skill that is a direct result of accumulating information and knowledge invites the subject of the next chapter: creativity in play. Daliot-Bul approaches creativity as a sociocultural rather than individual construct and shows that in the case of highly structured, knowledge-based games such as cosplay, or fashion subcultures such as the ganguro or yamanba, accumulation of information allows for creativity while submitting to the agreed rules of the game. The emphasis on aesthetics and information, while also characteristic of postmodern cultural production, is also part of “a long historical lineage of artistic creativity articulated by skillful selection and combination, intertextuality, remediation and parody in visual arts, performing arts, and literature” (116). The author argues that creativity is both linked to patterns of creation within a certain culture and influenced by the way the economy and society are organized in a certain era.
The last chapters delve deeper into analyzing the status of play in the most modern era under the influence of post-consumer culture. One of the most insightful aspects of this discussion is the process of politicization of play in Japan, which culminates with the integration of play into Japan’s national strategy of promoting itself overseas through the “Cool Japan” campaign. Daliot-Bul hints that this campaign is the tipping point of a larger process that blurred the boundaries between everyday life and play, once an area of social resistance in Japan.
License to Play is an ambitious project covering a large subject area related to play and culture over a long time-span through presenting episodes in the history of play in Japan. Daliot-Bul demonstrates that Western scholarship has plenty to gain from applying its theoretical frame to territories outside its geographical extent, but at the same time the book testifies to the difficulties of reconciling two vast academic spaces. While the title refers to the ludic in Japanese culture, it is probably worth mentioning that the book limits itself to the urban space of Japan, and the area in which the author provides her own fieldwork data is restricted to brief mentions of several interviews, regarding mostly cosplay culture. A different structuring of the book could have reflected the author’s interests better while doing justice to this fascinating theme.
It is worth emphasizing that Daliot-Bul takes the theme very seriously, offering important insights into the relationship between play and culture for scholars of both Japan and cultural studies as a whole. Despite its seriousness, the book also presents what the Japanese would call asobigokoro (playfulness) with important parts of the book being set to an epigraph, either a poem or a colloquial phrase that includes the word asobi, the key word that discretely ties the whole book together.
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[Review length: 1167 words • Review posted on October 11, 2016]