This week I presented my paper Japan Somewhere: Transcultural Comedy on Youtube for our symposium on Japanese comedy, at the University of Salford. I was joined by Dr Till Weingärtner, lecturer in Contemporary East Asian Studies (Japan), and director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC) at University College Cork. We were also joined by Theatre Producer Beri Juraic, who is researching contemporary Japanese performance at Lancaster University for a PhD.
Dr Weingärtner's paper How to make Japanese Audiences Laugh: Popular Comedy in Japan tells us that
Manzai, stand-up double acts, are the site of innovation, while genres which emphasise tradition, such as the rakugo style of comedic story-telling, continue to draw in audiences and adapt to changing media and popular demand. (Japanese Comedy Symposium abstract, 10/3/2022)
Japan has experienced a comedy boom in the 21st century, (Hirose: 2020; Weingärtner 2021), and in the process has seen Manzai and Rakugo adapt and appear in new spaces and platforms such as Youtube. Historically, the 'traditional' form Rakugo, a solo comic theatre in which the performer kneels on a cushion on a raied platform, has accommodated more and more international performers. The image above shows three well-established performers, Gregory Robic, Johan Nillson Björk, and Diane Kichijitsu, performing rakugo in Japanese and their first language, English and/or Swedish in the case of Björk. What interests me here is not so much their translation of the neta, or content of each monologue, but the options for adaptation of the form in the online platform, including Youtube. The invitation or opportunity to adapt works pushes against assumptions that the style and technique of comic forms in Japan are somehow unchanging, unique or exceptional. I hope to introduce a number of examples in which technical playfulness and stylistic creativity online also stimulates a fluidity in notions of 'native' identities.
In the same spirit, Beri Juraic's paper dealt with an international source of humour, the fart. Beri demonstrated that a fart can be more than a gastric shrug, more than a subversive expression of 'whatever'-ness, and that it has been developed as an art form His title was The Art of Farting : Japanese Satire as a Deconstruction of Japanese Identity.
Beri told us that
So-called ‘flatulence battles’ or Hōhi Gassen [as depicted on] Japanese picture scrolls started to appear in the early Heian period (794-1185). These scrolls depicted men and women eating flatulence-inducing food and partaking in farting contests. [...] In the last decade, specifically in the post-Fukushima period, theatre makers have also been using scatological imagery. [...] Director and playwright Yudai Kamisato wrote a play 'Hemispherical Red and Black' (Reddo to kuro no bōchō hankyū karada – hōhimushi) in 2011 in which the Japanese have become the cattle who fart...[thus] Kamisato’s plays deconstruct the idea of the Japanese uniqueness. (Juraic, Japanese Comedy Symposium abstract, 10/3/2022)
This blog is a response to these two angles on Japanese comedy: craft and cheek, as they relate to online performances. And to limit the scope of this exploration I will consider performances whose topic for the most part is the Japanese language, and mainly for language learners. This includes performances by non-professionals. The latter are comedians whether they like it or not: language teachers of the recent pandemic explosion in language learning on Youtube.
A scatalogical trope in the classroom.
I have already considered the Teppei and Noriko Podcast/Youtube output as a kind of sitcom and have discussed it here.
Only a few days ago, as I write this, Teppei and Noriko were discussing the effects of losing weight, due to so much time on the computer. Teppei and Noriko ＃２５８ 'About Days That Aren't Smooth etc' (Sumūzu jyanai hi to ka ni tsuite).
Apparently Teppei's bum is shrinking. The other night in bed he noticed that the bed felt bigger, presumably because he had shrunk. He imagines that his bum will shrink so much that one day he won't be able to perch on the toilet seat, but will fall down the hole in the seat, like his little boy does. But part of the reason for his reducing body is that his work online prevents him from exercising much. The two language teacher nerds are tapping into a Japanese trope – the backside, the digestive system. Nothing radical here you might say, just a marveling at the strangeness of the body and weakness of human will. While the banter is less argumentative than some instances of manzai, it seems to fit a familiar comic topic and tone. The comical efforts of puny human resistance - no more transformative than a gently farted 'bff' - seem in tune with the bathos of the newspaper cartoon strip that became a Studio Ghibli hit 'Our Neighbours The Yamadas' (Tonari no Yamada kun, 1999）by Takahata Isao or, another example of humble hubris, Sazae-san by Machiko Hasegawa (Sazae-san, Asahi Shimbun, 1946).
Matayoshi Naoki: lessons in creative interpretation
Professionals may be more driven or their audiences may demand something more cutting, but Matayoshi Naoki is so adaptable that his Youtube comedy is continuously changing shape: he's a self-reflexive academic one moment, and a competitive sportsman the next. Maybe you watched 'Spark' on Netflix based on the cult hit novel Hibana (Yoshimoto Agency, 2015). This was the Matayoshi's Netflix series about a contemporary manzai comedy in Japan, which has now been published in English, translated by Allison Watt.
I am a big fan of Matayoshi Naoki in his wily persona Professor Sharekoube. ‘Instant Fiction’ is a regular item on his channel, in which Sharekoube (L) and side-kick Kodama explore the comical nuances to be uncovered in 400 letter extracts of contemporary Japanese literature. Kodama plays the 'stupid' student dealing with his tutor's idiosyncratic reading. 'Dokushōtte tanoshii' says Sharekoube, ‘Reading books is fun’, but this harmless occupation reveals unexpected desires in the subtext.
Image: Screengrab from Piisu Group Youtube Channel - ‘Instant Fiction’ a regular feature with Matayoshi Naoki as Professor Sharekoube Banbaku and Kodama Tomohiro of duo 'Sarugorira' (trans: 'Monkey and Gorilla').
The 'reading' is accompanied but full explanatory subtitles and has thousands of followers around the world. Aside from the interest in the content of each short text analysed in regular episodes, the little personal insights that Kodama teases out of his tutor hint at this fictional persona as an acute observer of humanity. His eye for psychology implies an outsider's fascination. The network between Kodama, the viewer, Sharekoube and the text creates both the complicity and distance required for comic observation, as Freud pointed out. And Sharekoube looks for the driest comical observations. That said, he explains that he has such an investment in these books that he has 'fallen in love' with 100s of female protagonists - at which point his student cuts the lesson short.
Sharekoube takes his elegant flights of imagination through literature. Teppei and Noriko offer a fantastical public conversation about physiological and family problems. Both these classroom environments share an exquisitely constrained tension even as they build strange images. Marguerite A. Wells discusses this constraint in Understanding Humour In Japan (in Milner Davies, 2006, pp193-217), pointing it up as an inclination in Japanese theatre and poetry and novels in contrast to a more cutting European satirical tendency. In Japan in various periods, theatrical farce, has been more widespread than overt satire, the 'emotional indulgence' (208) and 'fantasy release' of farce having a counterpart in the 'wry humour' of poetry, and together responding to externalized standards regulating individuals in Japanese society. This is contrasted with humour derived from a sense of internal guilt which is supposed to occur in the monotheistic societies of the West, Europe.
What does this guilty humour look like on Youtube then? Since we invited Till Weingärtner to the symposium let's look at the difficulties of defining a national or native humour for learners. Till says he is a German with a passion for Japan 'and that's not a joke' he says, pointing up the fact that neither country has a reputation (in Western Europe at least) for a GSOH. Here the presenter of 'Easy German', the German language learning site, has a go at defining German humour:
Image: 'What is German Humor?' | Easy German 184. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi-8k-3NBfs> Easy German: Learn German From the Streets!Porduced with:http://www.theglobalexperience.org
In the quest to find German humour in Cologne we discover that the Rhineland has its own distinctive sense of humour acknowledged by the rest of Germany; meanwhile a 'passing' English visitor (and polyglot) claims that English people make a joke out of every sentence. Its all subjective then, confused by attachments to place and additionally muddled by blurring different comic contexts (carnival for instance) and devices (e.g. clever puns versus physically revellery). In defence, one reveller says that Germans do like to party and have fun more than they like to admit. Or remember. By visiting the carnival in Cologne the episode illustrates the fact that comical transgression is temporary: 'normality' is restored. And as such the trangression is a brief outlet for social pressure. Marguerite Wells points to a similar 'expurgating' function in Japan (210), a means of managing excess.
Wells also reminds us that styles of humour change like fashion and so she is not looking for a fixed idea of a national Japanese comedy or to re-inforce a well-known post-war analysis of group dynamics in Japan (Benedict 1946). Writing about changes in performance in Japan following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Disaster, Kyouko Iwaki, argues that yet another upheaval in the form of radical protest at a flawed recovery plan was not welcome in Tokyo in 2011. The reason for this has something to do with the endless seductions and options of the vast city, its excess if you like. She cites participatory theatre maker Takayama Akira's comment on 'Atomised Theatre', which he developed after Fukushima: 'in a carnivalesque country inundated with stimuli' he says, 'an artist should not exalt a radical revolution, but should seek a small and sensitive everyday revolution' (Iwaki, 2017, pg210). This constraint then is one way of being heard in a crowd.
Image: Takamatsu Nana. Youtube. Takamatsu Nana Channeru. When I imagined a predicion of 30 years in the future was real, it was too frightening. Sanjunengo no mirai wo riaru yosō shitara, osoroshisugita. Shakai fūshi konto. [Social satire cont]. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MhXcNbupt0> [Accessed 18/3/22]
More recently, solo comedian Takamatsu Nana started her career with a satrical stand up routine accompanied by a flip chart or Powerpoint. This too was like a classroom or lecture. This format has transferred to Youtube easy and her output as a satirical commentator is prolific, like a kind of Agit-Prop news-stand. It's not directly related to language learning, but bear with me..
Laurie Brau, a Canadian anthropologist, described how rakugo fans in the late 1990s become so empassioned and zealous that they published harsh critical opinion of performers who were not their personal favourites (Brau, 2002). But these personal attacks were not satirical or ironic, so they when performers complained they were quickly withdrawn. Humorous satire would resist any objection, surely. Like many Youtubers, Takamastu has had to apologise to fans for aspects of the business of being a Youtuber that become entangled in politics and fend off misunderstandings which are fanned by the more established media. For at least 6 years she has used a highly-educated entitled but naïve 'Keiō University Princess' persona to pick holes in the turgid political system in Japan, which is dominated by a single voice, the Liberal Democratic Party or LDP. Thus Takamatsu has become an advocate for more diverse representation and engagement in politics. And this is where Takamatsu becomes relevant to our symposium discussion, because she is very much part of the wave of interest groups and pressure groups post 2011 that have unravelled ideas of Japanese homogeneity, through small-scale protests like theatrical monologues.
Youtube, though, tends to be homogenous, in the sense that interactions between Youtubers and their followers are regulated by advertising interventions derived from algorithmic tracking. Performers are confirmed through the Patreon loyalty subscription system that monetizes the more popular Youtubers. The pandemic has been a global predicament but some have fared better than others, celebrities who lost live performance income quickly found a new income source through a platform arguably designed to democratise audience access to 'ordinary' or everyday creativity. The aesthetic of Youtube shares background music and editing options via the Youtube studio and seem determined to produce a tone that strikes me as 'optimistic' or cheerfully positive (Billig 2006). How then are Youtubers able to counter normative styles, identities and stereotypes?
Kikuchi Daijirō is fascinated with difference and hosts Youtube interviews to investigate English pronunciation, in the mouths of 'natives' compared to those who acquire it. This occasionally focuses on ‘superior comedy’ that mocks failed reproductions of native phrasing and tone. Relatively recently acquired sounds are influenced by the sound of the speaker's first language. Listened to out of this context, the ear is drawn to the components of accent and regional 'habits'. In the global Youtube pot-pourri this is observational comedy that sometimes verges on an in-joke.
Image: Daijirō. Youtube Channel. ‘30 selected differences between American-English and English- English’ (Amerika eigo to Igirisu eigo no chigai sanjuusen)
15/5/2021 [Accessed 6/9/21]
For me the fun here is to be found when actors familiar to me with some status in British or American TV or film are taken out of context and used as examples of speech on repeat. A models for elocution they are emptied of cultural capital or significance and become comically devalued.
Image: だいじろー Daijiro. 2021. Let's Ask the Girls with English accents in Love Actually Love Actually de Igirisu hatsuon no girls wo kiitemiyō
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YOBfvOjNZk&list=PLk38o8Ix8RETGpCjhmKM2KtKI_Vsq_AXJ&index=3> [Accessed 15/3/22]
Humour in Youtube language learning: Japanese word play.
Image: 'koolmook'. 2022. Youtube. The Two Ronnies - 'Swedish Lesson' (BBCTV 1976)<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vMsCEWbd-A> (Accessed 15/3/22)
The national stereotypes explored by British comedians of the 1970s The Two Ronnies seem very unfashionable now. But I'd argue that there was more going on there: they might have been asking how we construct these types in the first place. The national stereotypes are mere dressing up in the context of more profound troubles: hidden anxieties about European borders and loyalities, something still humming down the lines in a Cold War order (and for some comedians in this era post-WWII traumatic disorders yet to detonate, see Wilkie 2018)
In their series of topsy-turvy sketches that play with language, they repeatedly detached signifiers from signs. Thier 'Four Candles' catchphrase has become a shorthand for double meaning. In the 'Swedish Language' sketch The Two Ronnies transpose morphs into codes associated with hyper-efficient military communication. In contrast, Japanese has a complex and arguably inefficient code with three forms of writing. It has an imported-Kanji element in which pictograms have several meanings and names and this presents a mountainous challenge to learners. They need to decode the pictogram/phoneme, or its mental image if they can recall it, before they can translate the equivalent meaning of a word. Furthermore, conversational language, the sort of regional banter and indigenous strains exchanged in manzia presents another tangle for someone who has not been immersed in it. Again, I am not emphasising the exotic. I am arguing that some aspects of Japanese comedy maybe thrive on such convoluted systems. Some aspects of the Japanese written language, may have been so self-consciously set down (Sansom, 1928) that they invite popular adaptation and subversive play as a way of dealing with a complexity. In the context of its comic performance, making sense of language in Japan requires a lot of input relative to output, and that is a comical formula shared with clowning and also with the laborious process language acquisition; even of a first language.
Humour is frequently deployed in Japanese language teaching. Here's an example. Thanks to Beri for sharing with me this link to a 2020 Japanese Foundation workshop on Rakugo and language teaching. Professor Kazumi Hatasa (Purdue University) has been teaching Japanese through rakugo since the late 1990s. Some of the videos and texts he created with his students show how the success of the comedy depends on the successful articulation of non-native Japanese language speaking. In other words, the success is derived from a copy that's not quite perfect.
Education through play is very well recognised alternative to laborious Kanji learning. It is worth noting that the scene Beri comments on from Yasujirō Ozu's 1958 film Good Morning (Ohayō) begins with dawdling on the way to school. It features three schoolchildren in their severe and Prussia-inspired black uniforms breaking up their walk in to class, with a game of breaking wind. This is a stupid game but it involves a little bit of technique. The farter is supposed to fart when his (these are all boys) forehead is tapped. Some boys can do this on command. The bigger you are, the deeper your fart. This embodied automatic comedy is in tune with an early to mid 20th century notion of the comically rigid or mechanical body (Bergson 1907; Chaplin 1936), and the fart seems like it's useless by-product. If the formal teaching of grammar and writing is a form of 'violence' then this is a little rebellion spoken from the fart.
What seems to have emerged in the Japanese language learning environment online in the last two years of the pandemic are some more extravagantly performative examples of playing with proper speaking. As comedy and comedians have grown in influence and status, Youtuber teachers have been deploying more involved editing devices (e.g. Dōgen) and devising hypothetical dramatic situations (e.g. Teppei, Nick Norton of 'Time Bomb' Manzia Duo, Gou Senpai) using word and accent play (Dōgen and Daijiro), absurd characterisation and parody (Daijiro). I will discuss a couple of these below. Such scenarios can be understood as 'entextualised', in so far as imagined conversations and situations are cited and interwoven with shared accepted meaning to create a space for the evolution of new identities. This is, arguably, a form of cultural translation that, as Sociolinguist Sarah Maitland points out, is
at the heart of human communication, as the means by which we produce and engage with cultural, political and social production (my italics) in a globalized, multicultural world, and, as such, it views cultural translation as the site of such contestations (2017, pgs 10-11)
As discussed above Japanese comedians are emphatically ‘not political’, but because the most successful comedians have become so prominent they can be drawn into issues in the global public sphere. In Olympic year, 2021, a Youtube sketch emerged in which Kobayashi Kentaro, director of the opening ceremony and former member of manzai duo 'Rahmens', considered which material would be off limits for the manzia act. Though high profile commentators such as writer Ken Mogi defended his artistic integrity, and although this discussion was in the context of a sketch, Kobayashi had to step down. This speculation was interpreted as mocking Holocaust victims. Kobayashi apologised unreservedly. His Youtube site for Rahmens gives an insight into a body of work that consistently plays with meaning and interpretation, specifically the language lesson is seen as a space for comedy.
Image: ‘Rahmens’ duo present Italian Language School. Kobayashi Kentaro with Katagiri Jin, 2010 Manzai contest.
‘Rahmen's’ Italian Language School sketch underlines by the impossibility of defining a national humour while also finding new meaning thanks to mispronunciation. The Italian 'rrr', rolling through the Japanese names of prefectures produces new meanings and images and leads to a game of mixing up and compounding partial names, making them cute like a lover or imposing like an uncle figure.
The videos of manzai performances from previous decades are permanently available with audience members popping by long after the video has been uploaded. This leading viewers back to the comment field at different times and with different perspectives. For Matayoshi, Teppei and others who are livestreaming, the interaction with the audience is always evolving. Youtubers recycle, re-upload and re-curate their material. Interpretations of identity and meaning evolve through these new transactional dynamics. And this is somewhat different to the setting of the one-off live stand up gig. There are still hecklers in the Youtube space, but their regulating effect lags. In live stand up the audience may be troubled by the provocations of the comic, nudging towards an uneasy consensus and conceding to the ambivalent forces of communal laughter. Meanings implied by humour on Youtube are contested. So the online classroom, is also a space where we can play with borrowed language. Comedy celebrates contingency though these improvisations with accent and identity forcing learners to celebrate and enjoy their language failures. In language learning this is not only permission to get things wrong but to return and recyle these online efforts, to keep pushing it out half-baked intention and meaning as a form of relief from social stricture.
Dōgen: self as double act.
Daijirō's counterpart is American Japanese language teacher, Dougen, or Kevin O’Donnell. The name Dōgen is styled on the Zen Buddhist hermit. With an apt aesthetic of single-mindedness, he has made a speciality of precision with the pitch accent in Japanese and with approaching native sounding standards of Japanese speaking. Here he explains that Hana はな ・ 花 and Hana はな・ 鼻 both sound almost the same but have different pitches and therefore different meanings.
Image: O'Donnell, K.2022. Dōgen. 'When a Japanese native teaches Japanese pronunciation. Nihongo no Neitibu ga nihongo no hatsuon wo kangaeru to <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwNjFaK4OXY> (Accessed 10/3/22)
Dōgen's performances of character read like a Kōan or dialogic interrogation between Zen master and pupil. O'Donnell positions himself in the video frame according to who is speaking and this appears Rakugo inflected. There is a comic characterisation convention in Rakugo in which the speaker will look up and down according to a clear social hierarchy that uses the gaze as a keep site for expression, since the speaker is sitting permanently on a cushion. (Brau, 2002)
In the sketch about an attempt to explain the nuance of pitch even the teacher becomes confused in a self-relfexive cycle of pedantry. In desperation he resorts to the catch-all: 'don't worry people will understand from the context'.
The teacher reaches a block and out pops his excuse. In other sketches O'Donnell uses titles to cast comic asides whispering from behind a vertical hand to offer a a suitably Zen option: - 'Forget the Japanese you learned in class'.
Dōgen also resists Japanese exceptionalism. The exceptionalism for Dōgen though is on both sides of the Japanese-language dialogue: Japanese native speakers revering foreigners who speak any level of Japanese, or students of Japanese who feel superior simply from opting to study the language.
Conclusion
The symposium was a moment to re-evaluate Japanese comedy performance, in particular in the context of what is available to view on global digital media, such as Youtube. 11 years after Fukushima - almost to the day - our symposium suggests that manzai competitions are thriving on Youtube, and that the setting for 'banter' or rakugo story telling is adapting to new locations. Ancient images of historical farting competitions are easily accessible online and Youtubers adapt comic traditions. These are less structurally formal than manzai or classical rakugo but influences can be discerned in Teppei and Noriko's Podcasts or the front seat setting of banter in Gou Senpai's taxi-based Tokyo Gaijin Ride, for example.
Rakugo performance adapts easily to international languages and performers and, by the way, travels well in the remediating entextualising frame on Youtube. Rakugo as ‘cultural heritage’ in 21st century is updated/globalized through Dōgen's solo storytelling setting, word play, and high quality productions. And just as the cushion, fan and handkerchief used in rakugo are theatrical tools, so Youtube editing invites performers to invent new devices and styles of interaction.
Humour usage and comical performance on Youtube language learning sites facilitate identity play. The Public Sphere on Youtube is not a radical space but one that is not only open to natives, educated or celebrity elites. It is also a zone to play with the 'emotional intelligence' of comedy, and for language novices to stutter, blurt and fluff their way through the complexities of (Japanese) language.
Japanese Comedy Symposium Recording:
Please note that this is a private link for my blog viewers and that images are subject to third party copyright and so may only be used for background educational research and not wider dissemination.
The papers presented at the symposium are works in progress and the presenters intend to publish more developed versions of these in due course, so please bear that in mind when citing them in any way.
This is the link to the full playlist.
and the four parts:
Part 1: Introduction and Till Weingärtner. How to make Japanese Audiences Laugh: Popular Comedy in Japan
Part 2: Beri Juraic. The art of farting : Japanese satire as a deconstruction of Japanese identity https://youtu.be/SFuE075k5-0
Part 3: Richard Talbot. Japan Somewhere: Transcultural Comedy on Youtube
Part 4: Roundtable
References (relevant to this blog discussion)
Brau, Lorie (2008) Rakugo: Performing Comedy and Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Tokyo. Lexington Kentucky; Lexington Books, reviewed by: Till Weingärtner The Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2009), pp. 405-408 (4 pages
Hibbett (2002) The Chrysanthemum and The Fish. Tokyo Kodansha. [Accessed 20/6/21]
Hirose, K. (2021). 21st Century History of Rakugo. Nijuuisseiki Rakugoshi. Tokyo: Kōbunsha
Laera (2020) Theatre and Translation. London Macmillan
Milner Davis (ed) (2006) Understanding Humour in Japan. Wayne State University Press
Maitland, S (2017) What is Cultural Translation? London: Bloomsbury
Sansom, G (1928). Historical Grammar of Japanese. Oxford: OUP
Wilkie, I. 'Denis Norden: elder statesman of gentle comedy forged in heat of World War II.' The Conversation. September 24, 2018
Youtubers
だいじろー Daijiro, Daijirō, K <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy5A4S8tY0pxvzRhYrxodwg>
Dōgen - O'Donnell, K <https://www.youtube.com/user/Dogen>
Takamatsu Nana <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmV-bbmjWF4XzublsXRjxiQ>
Easy Languages. Easy German <https://www.easygerman.org/about>
Manzai
Matayoshi Naoki Peas/Peace ピーズ Group <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXPu1w_qdV3BJgs3dej5bjQ> [Accessed 18/3/22]
Time Bomb <https://www.sunmusic-gp.co.jp/talent/timebomb/> [Accessed 18/3/22]
Rahmens <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ75mjyRYZbprTUwO5kP8ig> [Accessed 18/3/22]
[Accessed 18/3/22]
Rakugo
Diane KitchiJitsu <https://www.diane-o.com/profile> [Accessed 18/3/22]
San Yūtei Jūbei John Nillsen Björk
Teppei and Noriko <https://teppeinorikojapanese.com/>
TV
The Two Ronnies (Swedish Language Lesson. BBC TV, 1976)
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