Celebrity Media Intertextuality in JAPAN has one of the highest rates of media consumption in the world.
With the intensity of its media culture, idols and celebrities create an intertextual web of meanings that link forms and contents together to produce new meaning In film, television, music, and advertising, meaning is contained not within individual texts, but rather across a network of textual relations.
As John Fiske (2011, 109) notes, "intertextuality exists [...] in the space between texts." The idol, as a multimedia performer, is always operating within a system of meanings and codes that are referencing other texts.
The intertextuality of idols, through its potential to activate audiences, is fundamental to the structure of the Japanese media. First, the intertextuality of the Japanese media is reflected in the way that idols perform across genres and platforms in the entertainment industry.
From drama, game shows, music, travel, and sports programs, they mediate the television viewing experience. Moving freely between genres, they form the axis around which the media revolve and are the locus of audience identification.
To understand Japanese television, the audience must draw on a vast cultural knowledge about celebrity. This intertextual knowledge activates the audience to produce meaning by tracing the relations to other texts or past performances.
For example, when an idol appears on a variety show, the audience's knowledge of his/her roles in other programs, like dramas, will be an essential part of the interpretive process.
While this form of horizontal intertextuality is common in the medium of television, the performers more than the genres are fundamental to the organization of intertextual relations in the Japanese media.
Second, idols appear in both fictional and nonfictional contexts, and their performances reference both their real and their onscreen lives.
With the private lives of idols and celebrities forming a site of greater knowledge and truth, the journalistic discourse on celebrity creates new opportunities for the production of intertextual meanings.
This form of intertextuality in the Japanese media necessitates a high degree of familiarity with the performances, as well as the gossip and trivia about idols and celebrity performers that circulates on wide shows and in weekly magazines, tabloids, and other media.
Consequently, Japanese idols, even more than their counterparts in other countries, cannot escape their "real life" persona when they appear on the screen.
Due to their sustained exposure, across genres and platforms of performance, they cannot help but appear as themselves in a drama or other fictional context; the perception is that they are not playing characters so much as they are playing themselves.
As a result, the real world and the onscreen world cease to be different, and instead a deeply intertextual form of televisual pleasure is created between the performer and audience.
The audience's desire for knowledge about the private lives of idols becomes the means for staging publicity. Third, the idol is an intertextual commodity that circulates in the media landscape to link different media forms and to produce promotional discourse.
An immense media industry exists in Japan for the purpose of promoting and selling other media, particularly through the idols and celebrities who provide the means of connecting disparate media texts.
Often, celebrity performers appear on variety, talk, and game shows for the purpose of promoting other programs or products.
While intertextuality describes how texts relate to other texts to produce meanings for the audience, the celebrity as an intertextual commodity engages with the interactive or fan audience by expanding promotional discourse across cultural forms and different media outlets (Marshall 1997).
With the media industry's attempt to cultivate loyal audiences to engage in greater consumption, cultural commodities are endlessly cross-referenced between newspapers, magazines, online social media, and television.
Through the audience's familiarity and knowledge of the idol, intertextuality seeks to create a deeper and more affective relationship to the audience that will facilitate promotional discourse. Fourth, intertextuality in Japan is nostalgic.
With intertextual knowledge based on a shared cultural framework of texts, it is historically rooted in the cultivated a camp image that parodied, with a sense of irony, the female idols that dominated the 1980s.17 With her cute songs and dress, she embodied nostalgia for the idol culture of an earlier time, before the economic stagnation of the 1990s.
Indeed, the nostalgic production of intertexual knowledge is a staple of Japanese television programming. Music shows will often spend as much time featuring segments about the past (usually in the form of countdowns) as they do featuring performances of the latest artists.
Idols, like other cultural forms in Japan, are nostalgic texts that link the past to the present through the intertextuality of their image and performance. Intertextuality in the Japanese media sustains and nurtures a close relationship to its domestic audience, but limits its broader appeal.
Since the popularity of Japanese idols in large part derives from the intertextuality of the Japanese media system, once removed from the Japanese media context, idols must appeal to audiences for reasons beyond the mere reproduction of their celebrity.
Without the intertextual knowledge that comes from a shared understanding of the cultural codes that circulate across media forms within Japan, the idol is reduced merely to his/her ability as a singer, dancer, or actor, which is limited.
As a result, Japanese popular culture does not translate well cross-culturally, since its forms are overdetermined by the self-referential structures of the domestic media landscape.
18 That said, idols have been relatively successful in Asia (Aoyagi 1996), and producers are increasingly considering how to expand into Asian markets and better serve fans there.
