The ‘Everyday’ in the Context of Japanese Cultural Anti-Modernism

A Case Study of Isao Takahata’s Anime My Neighbors the Yamadas

Abstract

With the opening up of Japan’s borders to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, after about two hundred years of self-isolation, and its eventual defeat in World War II, Japan rushed into an age committed to conscious modernization. The goal was large-scale economic growth, with success depending on the construction of the middle-class ‘salaryman’. In keeping with Lefebvre’s understanding of the modern ‘everyday’ and its ‘everydayness’, the Japanese bourgeois society found itself caught up in an urban ‘everyday’ of anxiety, loneliness and mental depression. This article seeks to highlight anti-modernist voices which look for a ‘rehabilitation’ of this ‘everyday’ by taking recourse to traditional Japanese aesthetic principles. The article points to the distinctly nuanced Japanese approach to the difference between the ‘regular’ and the ‘grand’, such that the ‘everyday’ and the ‘non-everyday’ is appreciated as one and the same. The article critically looks at Isao Takahata’s anime, My Neighbors the Yamadas, to underline the question of success of such Japanese anti-modernist manoeuvres within the domain of a commodified popular culture