Christine Yano

Professor

Background
General Interests
Current Research
Recent Publications
Recent Awards

Background: I have undergraduate degrees in Communication (Film) from Stanford University and Musicology (Ethnomusicology) from the University of Michigan. My graduate degrees are all from the University of Hawai'i, M.A. in Musicology (Ethnomusicology) and Anthropology, and Ph.D. in Anthropology. My Ph.D. work was on a Japanese popular music genre, enka, which I analyzed as a cultural form that incorporates constructions of emotion, gender, and the nation. The book form of that dissertation has been published as Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song (2002) by Harvard University Asia Center/ Harvard University Press.

General Interests:

With Japan, and more recently Japanese Americans, as a focus, my interests lie in the processes by which nation-cultures construct and sustain themselves, in particular in forms of popular culture. Therefore I look at music and other consumer goods with an eye to their interactions within the larger frameworks of gender, class, nationalism, and globalism.

Current Research:

I am currently involved in several projects, some of which are offshoots from my original work on enka. One of them analyzes various popular musics around the world that might be subsumed under the label "country music" - that is, music that locates itself within a language of rusticity, indigeneity, and sentimentality. Some of these are derived from American country music; others are related only through common issues and themes. My co-editor, Aaron Fox (Columbia University), and I include musics from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Hawai'i, Brazil, Egypt, Japan, Indonesia, and the U.S. Our aim is to examine these country musics as signifiers of global processes that link emotion and song through nostalgized expression.

Another music-related project focuses on deceased Japanese postwar diva, Misora Hibari, whose current fandom may be interpreted as a site of collective memory. Having joined her fan club in 1999, I have been attending yearly meetings and charting her continuing popularity. I focus in particular on her female fans-those who call themselves 'Hibari's generation' and see in Hibari fictive kin ties of mother and elder sister, as well as lover. This affective community of fans pinpoints Hibari as the center of an emotional life often rooted in pastness.

I have embarked on newer research as a result of a course I currently teach on Japanese popular culture. I am interested in the topic of "cute culture" in Japan, in particular as a consumer item through the business practices and goods of Sanrio (e.g. Hello Kitty). These goods, sold to children and young adult females throughout Japan, package cuteness and its cultural values as an aesthetic, a set of morals, and a prescription for action (or passive inaction). My focus is on Hello Kitty as a global product, and I have been conducting surveys in Honolulu on the consumption of these goods. I have also conducted interviews at corporate headquarters in Tokyo and South San Francisco, investigating some of the marketing strategies that have enabled global sales. My research is further enabled by the company's website, which has availed me of hundreds of pages of company literature of their business practices and goods, as well as access to chat rooms of Hello Kitty fans. Through these internet links, I have conducted on-line interviews with fans. I believe that cuteness provides a fertile ground for exploring issues of gender and power through global consumer culture.

During 2001-2002, I have conducted research on a Japanese American beauty contest in Hawai'i known as the Cherry Blossom Festival Pageant. Through extensive interviews with past and present queens and organizers, as well as archival research, I have amassed a quantity of historical and ethnographic data on the event. I interpret the Cherry Blossom Pageant as a production of ethnic/cultural identity that has changed over its fifty-year history as its audiences have shifted. What was once a platform to perform an overtly American identity, has become a cultural event with a complicated relationship to race, ethnicity, and the nation. The book on this topic has been published by University of Hawaii Press in 2006 as Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai'i’s Cherry Blossom Festival.

During the academic year 2006-2007 I am in Washington DC at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum as a Verville Fellow to complete research on a relatively new project, “Airborne Dreams: Japanese American Stewardesses with Pan American World Airways, 1955-1972.” This research project focuses on Pan Am’s program to recruit Japanese speakers as flight attendants in the mid-1950s, ostensibly to compete with the newly formed Japan Airlines. I analyze the macro-story of America’s premier international airlines in terms of globalization and Cold War strategizing using, in part, the gendered services of these Asian American women. I also juxtapose the micro-stories of the women themselves as they learn the ways of cosmopolitanism and upper-class service. The results of this research will be written up as a book manuscript. In the spirit of broader-based communication, I am also curating an exhibit on this project at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i scheduled to run from November through December 2006.

Recent Publications:

2006 Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai'i’s Cherry Blossom Festival. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

2006 “Monstering the Japanese Cute: Pink Globalization and Its Critics Abroad,” IN William Tsutsui, eds., In Godzilla’s Footsteps. New York: Palgrave. Pp. 153-166.

2006 “Shifting Plates: Okazuya (Japanese American Delicatessens) in Hawai'i,” Amerasia Journal 32(2).

2005 “Covering Disclosures: Practices of Intimacy, Hierarchy, and Authenticity in a Japanese Popular Music Genre.” Popular Music and Society 28(2):193-205.

2004 “Panic Attacks: Anti-Pokemon Voices in Global Markets,” IN Joseph Tobin, ed., Pikachu’s Global Adventure; The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Durham: Duke University Press. Pp. 108-138.

2002 Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song. Cambridge: Harvard East Asia Center. Harvard University Press.

Recent Awards:

2006 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum A. Verville Fellowship. (Airborne Dreams) ($45,000)

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