Points of contact: cultural contexts in understanding Japanese literature and cinema

Abstract

The article focuses on cultural influence and exchange between Japan and America—a process that can be observed in texts produced by those cultures and is facilitated by the global access to information and the active, critical reception of cultural texts by audiences. Both cultures keep interacting and changing due to the interest and activity of consumers, including the use of message boards and peer to peer file-sharing, fan-subbing communities and social networks. As a result, the interchange is moving away from official, controllable, and subject to censorship channels to amateur, unsupervised channels fuelled not by professionals, not even by fans, but potentially all consumers.