In my previous blog post, I had recounted my initial experience with utaite culture way back when, during the early 2000s. Although in present day, I feel as if I’ve assimilated what I could from the online Japanese cover-singer niche fandom and further Japanese behaviorisms are no stranger to me, I realize that instead of simply having accepted those behaviours as normal straight off the bat, I inevitably had to do some mental gymnastics to be able to figure out their meanings and social norms at the start. After all, I wasn’t Japanese, and nobody is ever truly clear of bias.
I had specifically chosen an old experience with utaite culture as the center of my auto-ethnography investigation because despite the experience’s age, I think it was a much more organic ethnography experience, and because it meant so much to me personally, it would put me in a good place to now critically analyze what was a genuine interest and experience into a foreign culture.
Source: https://utaite.fandom.com/wiki/Blessing
Before learning about ethnography, I had always prided myself for being able to keep an open mind whenever I learnt new things, and instead of thinking that things were weird or odd or something that was abnormal, I would do my best to assume that this was simply something that I did not know, and by learning it, I had overcome that obstacle.
I still keep that mindset now. Although I am less proud of it than before, I still believe that by thinking of something as odd or ‘other’, only creates judgement and intolerance.
However, I also now understand that there’s also a negative side to ignoring your own biases. And biases aren’t always negative things—it’s what we decide to do with them that’s important. It means that all the cultures that I was born into are all impacting the way I approach things, affecting even my method of ‘open-mindedness’ versus a more conservative, cautious approach. It is undeniable that my own cultural framework influences how I view and consequently understand cultures that are not of my own.
I was, or am, a mixed culture child, and during the early 2000s when I first stumbled upon utaite culture and Japanese cover-song video streaming, I was studying abroad in the UK and I had already previously been very much a fan of Japanese pop music, boy-bands and TV dramas. Therefore, it would be natural that I would not immediately view utaite culture to be something too out of the ordinary and was more pliant towards new Japanese customs.
However, there’s no denying that the entire premise of a ‘vocaloid’, or Hatsune Miku in particular, was incredibly novel and more than a little bit odd to me, because this was a virtual singer that looked like a little child, whom everyone suddenly loved despite her very robotic voice. It was also the first time that I realized that cover-songs could also be treated the same way as original, pop-music releases, and that there was an approachability, a more intimate setting, for cover-singers to interact with their fans compared to pop-stars that were signed to entertainment companies. It was specifically to do with the platform on which they operated. I was so used to real life people on television, people I could see, and they would dance, and they were the only ones who sang their songs—nobody else who sang them could take credit for originality. And they were untouchable—so remote and far away in Japan, and they were genuine celebrities. I was already used to the fact that the extent of my interaction with them would be watching them on blurry YouTube videos and buying their merchandise.
So, when utaite came up and was the entire opposite of everything that I was used to (except for the language and the music), it wasn’t a natural assimilation of simply new music to me, it was an entirely new subculture under the umbrella of a larger culture. The mannerisms and way of speaking was still the same, but otherwise, it was not only a Japanese cover-singer phenomenon, it was also a cover-singer phenomenon, which at the time was almost unheard of.
This absolutely has to do with my cultural background. If I were less exposed to various cultures, I believe that my initial ethnography approach would simply be to stick to a ‘foreign’ culture and let it end there. However, simply because I had grown up in a city, going to schools that taught in a different language and then subsequently moved overseas to study, I was accustomed to adopting new cultural mannerisms, and from that I discern that instead of nationalities and languages, I held above all biases to do with entertainment, or art, expression, and expectations of what it was to be a popular ‘celebrity’, always assuming that they had to be human and viewable. Explained by Isfiaty in her own terms, my experience is also a part of the indication of digitalization of social experiences, and that culture itself is capable of moving away from individuals and can be a projection of human thinking and their actions instead of simply icons. The utaite singers are utilizing a crowd-sourced, symbiotic and multiple-actant program that although appears as one entity, is actually a framework of different contributors that add on to its functions (Kit Yan To, 2014). They also take advantage of a ‘vocaloid’s intangibility and incorporate that into their own approach—all utaite music videos are anonymous, without faces, and posted under a pseudonym (only on their own social media or additional live-streams do they bring up personal information).
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My investigation will then rely on both the epiphanies of my unique background and their subsequent biases which I need to accept, and incorporate into my research, and the actual informative, scholarly research and statistics which will provide me with a framework on which I build my analysis.
Owned by the Kadokawa Corporation, niconico was the first online video sharing platform that was widely available to the Japanese audience. According to their Company Research and Analysis Report from August 2019, their services includes a ‘niconico Douga video community’, which are small pages for fans to subscribe to that updates them on their singer’s activities, ‘niconico Live’, a livestreaming function, and ‘niconico Channel’, which is the singer’s individual section of the website which they can upload their videos and make playlists and such. Back during the website’s launch, there were few alternatives and niconico was immediately extremely popular for its free viewing and live-comments features. However, in recent years video streaming has almost exploded in popularity, and with the advent of YouTube’s constant evolution and updates of its services, niconico has fallen behind in terms of bandwidth (requiring users to pay in order to view and upload high-quality videos) and also ease of use. One other thing that YouTube has acquired earlier on than niconico is the incorporation of other languages. Although YouTube was once an English-only site, its global development by Google has ensured that all languages are welcome and are supported by the program’s code, enabling them to easily fit in and create their own niche on the site. In comparison, niconico had only recently made an English counterpart of their site, and even then, it is completely separated from the Japanese version of the site.
Source: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm32097576
Source: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm32097576
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY_kcG6zpks
My original experience was back when there was no English, only Japanese, but the advent of these changes means that globalization and everyone’s biases are also beginning to change with time. This should be in no little part because of the bloom of social media and the blurring of language barriers with translation devices such as Google Translate available at all times.
But what about utaite culture itself? In my previous blog, I had automatically assumed that part of what made utaites so popular was in part, because of the platform on which they published their songs. With further research and also the passage of time, I realize that my assumptions were wrong. Currently, niconico is struggling financially, and although ‘Uttatemita’ (the verb for utaite) is still the top searched tag on the site, their website hits and revenue is going down. However, the culture itself has not diminished one bit, as utaites are constantly releasing new singles and creating more cover songs and the popularity (in terms of views) of those videos have not lessened in the slightest. Because of this, I suspect my research will move away from the platform, and focus more towards the symbiotic system between the fans, the cover-singers, and the producers, which I believe have proven themselves to be the backbone of this niche culture, instead of the video sharing platform.
All in all, I realize how much my initial project has changed into what it is now after thorough research. The understanding of my own biases towards a new subculture were far different from what I had initially thought, and I underestimated how much I had to accept and change back them in order to fully experience what utaites had to offer. With the augmentation of recent statistics, I believe that it has given me a much clearer direction of where my focus should be, and also to approach research from a less passive, statistics-based perspective (as it influenced too much by companies and the success of online platforms, which this culture is not limited to) and towards a more personal methodology to examine the true backbone of utaite culture—the creators and the fans behind it.
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Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (n.d.). Autoethnography: An Overview. Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095
Isfiaty, T. (2020). Study of Cultural Transformation Based on the Hatsune Miku–Vocaloid Phenomenon. Proceedings of the International Conference on Business, Economic, Social Science, and Humanities – Humanities and Social Sciences Track (ICOBEST-HSS 2019). doi: 10.2991/assehr.k.200108.014
To, K. Y. (2014) The Voice of the Future: Seeking Freedom of Expression Through VOCALOID Fandom. The University of Texas at Austin.
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Reblogged this on DIGC330 Digital Asia.
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