This research begins with a critique of the “tolerant” attitude towards sexual minorities created by the politics of recognition. In the space of media, sexual minorities are represented as possessing distinctive tastes, such as in the stereotype “sophisticated gays.” Based on these ideas, media often represents sexual minorities as creators of new products, or as people whose individual preferences we must be “considerate” of. This kind of consideration and tolerance regards sexual minorities as consumers who have chosen a particular lifestyle and who belong to private space. Such images may further isolate sexual minorities. Public space, despite being fixed in heterosexual norms, has been constructed as a value-neutral space. The predominance of heterosexuality along with the exclusion of non-heterosexuality and the power of selection are quietly excused. Further, when the tastes of some gay men come to represent sexual minorities as a whole, the existence of women sexual minorities grows even fainter. That is, the lives of the majority of sexual minorities―lived in everyday spaces and not coinciding with the images produced in media―are excluded from the boundaries of “recognition.”

In this article, I observe how the historical memory of the past has been represented in the reconstruction of jangseung and the creation of the jangseung ritual in Noryangjin, Seoul. This article investigates how the jangseung ritual is perceived beyond the boundaries of the regional district and what its meaning translates to in the larger society. This study also examines the process of the invention of tradition through the creation and practice of the jangseung ritual. By revealing the conflict with Christians during its nascent practice, I also illuminate how the jangseung was perceived in modern society in Korea. In so doing, I explore the distribution of roles within participating groups and their relationships with each other in order to shed light on the significance of Noryangjin's jangseung ritual.

This article explores the various changes that the residents of Matsubara District in Japan enacted after the town was granted permission to implement forest therapy and the ways in which they embraced this public policy. However, it must be noted that the government did not unilaterally impose this policy on the residents while they passively accepted it. Although the incorporation of forest therapy could have been seen as the national government's expansion of recreational facilities for its citizens, some community members saw it as a buried treasure trove waiting to be discovered by the revitalization of their region. In this article, I will focus on the means through which a policy that was conceived and implemented by the local government won the acceptance and understanding of community members. To do so, I will investigate this case through the framework of regional revitalization. This paper is an analysis of the discourse on regional revitalization by way of forest therapy in the context of symbolic politics. Regional revitalization provided a strong motivation for residents of declining farming and mountain communities to unite. I will examine how this phenomenon functioned as a mechanism for political symbolic value.

This article aims to conduct an exploratory study of the concurrent dualities that operate on various levels in real-time internet broadcasts and accompanying typed comments from participants. AfreecaTV is a real-time internet broadcasting website with an unrivaled share of and scale in the Korean market. The site is often criticized by politicians and in public discourse as a hotbed of socio-pathological problems, a phenomenon linked to the fact that online activity remains a blind spot within the system. This study, by contrast, approaches AfreecaTV as a society existing in cyberspace. It is an attempt to grasp the internal logic of the relationships between AfreecaTV broadcasting jockeys and viewers, who describe themselves as “monsters” and make a habit of “problematic” speech and behavior. From a local perspective, the world of “monsters” operates according to highly social principles. This is shown by starballoons, the virtual currency given by viewers to BJs, and by the arguments that take place on the site. Here, we find a combination of trading relationships and gift-based relationships, reputation and speaking rights coupled to accumulated starballoons, and anti-authoritarian tendencies that keep these in check.

In this study, I investigate the ways that different concepts and senses of place in rural Japan collide during the process of applying the “Aging in Place” (AIP) philosophy by diverse actors, including the central government, regional governments, civic groups, NPOs, the elderly and their neighbors, which paradoxically results in the elderly, who are the targets of the policies, becoming alienated. First, the study analyzes in depth the experiences of place and placelessness of the elderly in local communities, examining how the elderly's sense of place is changing. Second, the study critically observes the gap between the places the central and regional governments offer and the elderly's sense of place. Third, the study discusses the attempts at and limitations to the offering of alternative places by old people's cooperative unions and volunteer groups. The study critically observes the political and economic context for placelessness and stresses the importance of suitable and practical alternatives, given the elderly's changing sense of place, in order to implement AIP successfully.