This dissertation examines the history of videogames in Japan through the lens of time, conceived in two ways. First, it considers time as intrinsic to video game design in terms of tempo and rhythm. Second, it analyzes time as an extrinsic, socially constructed matrix in which play must find a suitable context with regard to other developmental, educational, and productive functions impinging on players. My research argues for approaching digital play time in its design and social narratives as a significant political frontier to videogames, one that is formed dialectically between the flowing times of designed play, and social efforts to contain it. These politics have particularly crystalized around the playing child or youth, a polysemic figure within the adult imaginary. Concern about the meanings of this child and their play time constellated a wide network of adult actors, including policymakers, police authorities, pedagogues, parents, social and cultural critics, as well as game designers and industry insiders. The widespread debates between these social agents have hinged upon the in/compatibility of digital play with the existing organization of time, drawing videogames into an uneasy relationship with the expanding adult administration of children’s lives. The dissertation opens with a consideration of how game designers themselves approach the temporality of the medium. Through expert interviews, I show that designers professionally active between the late 1970s and early 1990s conceptualized videogame time through the notion of rhythm, of tempos and excitations and relaxations of intensity to produce what I term “durational appeal”—the ability of games to hold the player’s attention over long spans of time. I subsequently trace how designed durational appeal emerges discursively in the three situated contexts of early gaming history. First, I look to the interstitial times of play that portable games inhabited through the Nintendo Game & Watch (1980-1985) series, arguing that the situation of these devices in moments-in-between other areas of life gave digital play a predefined, and contained, place. Second, I analyze the emergence of arcades in public space towards the end of the 1970s, paying particular attention to how the legal regime around entertainment configured the spatial and temporal borders around mechanical and, later, digital play. Finally, I turn to the process of domesticating digital play, to consider how the Nintendo Family Computer (1983) foregrounded concerns around children’s play time. I conclude by suggesting that this focus on the changing times and places of play can help further not only game studies in Japan, but also in the East Asian and transpacific regions as well.

In this thesis, I consider how a controversy over a monument commemorating the suffering of victims of imperial Japan’s “comfort women” sexual slavery system erupted in Glendale, California, a small suburb of Los Angeles, in 2013. On its surface, public speakers and activists used the language of historiographical debate that questioned the types of historical evidence that can be considered legitimate and which interpretations are well-founded. Yet, underneath the surface, this debate is less about history and more about conflicting group identities. First generation Japanese immigrants, motivated in large part by fear of discrimination and pride in being Japanese, took Glendale’s monument project as a threat against which fearful members of this diasporic community could rally. In other words, the monument could be used as a vehicle to build and strengthen a community of otherwise scattered individuals who feel in some sense endangered by the rising ride of critical sentiment against Japan for crimes committed over seventy years ago. In contrast, Korean Americans and Armenian Americans used the media attention the controversy attracted as an opportunity to demonstrate their authenticity as Americans by building the monument and framing it as a symbol of Glendale residents’ cosmopolitan memory and courageous defense of women’s human rights.

I based this research on ten interviews I conducted in 2017 with people who were actively involved in either the project to install the Peace Monument in Glendale or who spoke in favor of or against that project at a special hearing the city council held on July 9, 2013 to assess the public’s opinion. In addition to the interviews, I reviewed the city’s records of their deliberations on whether to build the peace monument, with special attention given to video recordings in which city officials or members of the public discussed the matter. I similarly reviewed pertinent local and international newspaper articles mentioning Glendale and the actors involved with an eye toward the vocabulary such articles used to frame the controversy for local and international audiences. The information I gathered from these various sources form the corpus from which I formulate my take on how the controversy in Glendale unfolded and how we should situate it in the scholarship on Japanese nationalism and the continuously expanding “comfort women” redress movement.

As academic scholarship on the Japanese popular media genre known as Boys’ Love has been focused upon the genre’s fan culture and female readers, this thesis project aims to move away from the fans and to the texts in order to explore how the genre is in conversation with changes in societal understandings of same-sex sexuality in Japan. Following brief introductions of four portrayals of men that are commonly found in Japanese popular media, three contemporary manga titles are analyzed to explore how the authors negotiate the narrative conventions of the Boys’ Love genre with the shifting understandings of same-sex sexuality vis-à-vis the visual appearance of the characters, the role of these characters in their fictionalized societies, and the settings wherein the narratives take place.

How does the U.S. military make use of the foreign cultures into which it has inserted itself? Based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork on and around U.S. military facilities in Japan (host to over 100,000 American military personnel and family members), this dissertation argues that military policy generates narratives for American troops’ self-identification and aspiration vis-à-vis the local culture that are ultimately detrimental to the U.S.-Japan Alliance. Specifically, it identifies four such narratives and their consequences: First, American troops are told they are ambassadors in a bid to get them to spend more time outside of the bases. I conclude that this is a means of shifting responsibility for troops’ mental well-being and morale onto the Japanese communities surrounding the bases and that it makes some Japanese feel they are being forced into complicity with American militarism. Second, military narratives divide troops into “good neighbors” and “bad apples” in a move that both isolates the “bad apples” from cultural and historical patterns of behavior (and thus absolves the military of responsibility for those patterns) and rewards personnel for good intentions and the appearance of good deeds regardless of the often-problematic consequences of their altruistic efforts. Third, American troops adopt the mantle of samurai as a means of replacing the aspirational fantasy at domestic bases of being “super-citizens” (Lutz 2001, 236), naturalizing U.S. military deployment in Japan in a way that encourages the widespread dismissal of all forms of Japanese masculinity. Finally, Okinawans—residents of the prefecture most impacted by the military—are painted as adversaries to the U.S. military’s goals and operations, sorting them into binaries of good/pro-base/Japanese and bad/anti-base/Okinawans that deny the complexities of their relationships with troops, bases, the United States, and Japan. This is the first ethnographic study of how forward-deployed military bases navigate and utilize local culture and contributes to scholarship on the constitutive interplay between interpersonal and international relations, highlighting how imperial and Orientalist legacies inform the everyday functions and expressions of alliance.