| 内容 |
Today, characters can be found everywhere in Japan. Scholars have emphasized how such characters can generate feelings of healing (iyashi) from stressful situations, but it is unclear exactly how such healing works. While Yano (2013) has discussed Hello Kitty in-depth, recently another character, “Chiikawa”, has gained popularity among young Japanese females. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight female Chiikawa fans to discover how young Japanese women cope with societal pressures such as work-related pressure including job-hunting, gender inequality, and human relationships. This research identified two key findings: first, growing dependence on Chiikawa becomes one way to escape from not only work-related pressure but various kinds of societal pressure in real life. Second, a strong tendency to judge women based on their appearance, or “lookism” (Itagaki, 2020), is another cause of societal pressure that leads women to seek healing from characters like Chiikawa. This research suggests that young women in Japan depend on characters like Chiikawa because of the harsh and stressful situation in the Japanese labor system, along with forms of societal pressure unique to women. As long as these situations do not improve, young Japanese women will continue to look to characters like Chiikawa as a coping mechanism. |
| 講評 |
This research project had a promising start: a topic that speaks to contemporary popular culture, an appropriate selection of relevant literature, and a good eye for details such as reference list formatting. Somewhere along the way, a few issues emerged that resulted in a lack of integration of relevant literature, especially regarding sociological and anthropological considerations of “iyashi”. Moreover, the initial conclusions seemed to insufficiently capture the voice of the study participants, and it was difficult to see how the various topics were interconnected. Despite these issues, hard work on final revisions has still yielded a thesis that makes an interesting contribution to the growing scholarship on characters, societal pressure, and “healing” in Japan. |
