23

GENDER IN DIGITAL
TECHNOLOGIES AND
CULTURES
Jennifer Coates and Laura Haapio-Kirk

Digital technology affords new modes of engaging with gender, often in ways that challenge
extant inequalities through simulation and transformation. Yet digital iterations of gender do
not make a radical break with pre-existing lived experiences and practices and can even support
the development of conservative or exclusionary gender ideologies rather than proliferation of
difference. Furthermore, the major research activity around Japanese digital cultures to date has
tended to cleave to disciplinary boundaries without a great degree of cross-reference, and so key
approaches and definitions central to the study of digital technologies and cultures vary across
different fields. This problem is exacerbated by the ubiquity of digital technologies in various
aspects of Japanese life.
For the purposes of this chapter, we will define the digital as “all that which can be ulti-
mately reduced to binary code but which produces a further proliferation of particularity and
difference” (Horst and Miller 2013, 3). To date, scholarship on Japanese digital technologies and
cultures has clustered around the fields of art history, anthropology, media studies, film studies,
communications, and cultural studies. Digital popular culture products, including online games,
computer games, streamed television and film content, and other entertainments, have been the
focus of much scholarship, though the dominant approach tends towards textual analysis, posi-
tioning these studies closer to classic media studies than research on digital technologies in Japan.
As a number of chapters in this volume assess media texts with a significant digital component,
we will focus more closely on the gendered impacts and implications of digital technologies in
contemporary Japan.
Anthropologists and digital film researchers specializing in documentary genres have recently
stressed the relevance of digital media for health and medical issues. In relation to Japan, digital
media texts and scholarship on digital media and digital devices have tended to focus on the
health challenges of a super-aging society and health issues related to the aftermath of the triple
disaster in Fukushima in March 2011. The case study presented in the second part of this chap-
ter demonstrates this interdisciplinary approach to studying digital technologies and cultures
in Japan. First, however, we will introduce some of the key areas, disciplines, and topics around
which scholarship on Japanese digital technologies and cultures has been developing. It is our
hope that the overviews to follow, as well as the pioneering case study, will inspire researchers
to develop interdisciplinary approaches for further study of Japanese digital cultures, particularly
in relation to gender.

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Gender in the digital arts

Counter to the trends in anthropology and documentary film studies noted previously, other
fields have seen less overlap and cooperation. For example, the digitization of existing art works
and artefacts has become a major focal point in the field of art history, but is rarely brought
into conversation with other areas of digital scholarship. The digitization boom changing the
face of art history in the twenty-first century has been driven by Japanese institutions such
as the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto and the Research Institute
for Cultural Properties at Tokyo University. Outside Japan, significant digitization activities
are being pursued by institutions with Japanese art collections such as the British Museum,
the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, and the Metropolitan Museum in New
York. The digitization of historic art and cultural materials relates to gender in a number of
significant ways, yet there has been little overlap between digital art historical scholarship and
the media and cultural studies work that takes gender as a central issue for the study of digital
media, gaming, and the design of digital-born art and cultural materials, including technologi-
cal aides such as robots.
In the most basic terms, digitization of historical materials is changing the gender make-up of
the field, incorporating a significant number of digital native researchers from younger genera-
tions and, in the process, a larger number of female researchers than the field has previously seen.
But it is not only the back rooms of galleries and research facilities that are changing. Digitiza-
tion of aged materials allows for greater variety in what can be studied and shown to the public
by changing how those materials can be displayed. Scholars and the general public alike can now
view a large number of pre-modern and early modern Japanese art works through catalogues
and databases featuring high-resolution images of recently cleaned and restored works, as well as
images of works considered too fragile to be publicly displayed.With the development of three-
dimensional (hereafter 3D) scanning technologies, a number of collections provide even greater
access, in terms of detail viewable, to online visitors than to visitors within the physical gallery
space, allowing online audiences a researcher’s view of certain objects.
The increasing number of Japanese art works available for public view has a significant gen-
dered aspect. Ever since Chino Kaori’s seminal paper “Gender in Japanese Art” (1996), Japanese
art history has included consideration of key art works and their production histories in the
context of gender. At the Eastern Regional Conference of the Art History Association of Japan
(Bijutsushi gakkai) in 1993, Chino argued that an idea of “the feminine” had been appropriated
by male elites and used to mask the power held by men in patriarchal feudal periods of Japa-
nese history. Her argument constituted such a significant intervention in the field that she was
required to explain “the very concept of ‘gender’ ” to her audience at that time (Mostow 2003,
8). Chino argued that certain eras of Japanese art production, such as the Heian era, have been
perceived as “feminine,” drawing a distinction between sex and gender to demonstrate how
men in positions of power have historically deployed a self-definition as feminine to obscure the
precise origins and location of the power that they held. Chino’s argument shows the deeply
gendered aspects of the ancient art works now on display to a global audience thanks to digitiza-
tion. Digital databases and catalogues now allow scholars all over the world to continue Chino’s
pioneering work placing Japanese history of art within the context of gender.
While Chino’s argument was largely illustrated by examples from the Heian, pre-modern,
and early modern eras of Japanese art production, contemporary Japanese art history continues
to explore gender issues. In the field of digital-born art, that is, artworks that rely on binary code
for their material existence and development, gender features frequently in relation to three key
concepts: space, law, and the nature of human imagination. A number of digital-born art works

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consider the human body in public space from the perspective of how people use buildings and
their technologies, as well as who can occupy what kinds of space and how. These questions are
of course deeply gendered. For example, Igarashi Megumi, the artist better known as Rokude-
nashiko (literally, “good-for-nothing girl”) has clashed repeatedly with Japanese obscenity law
over her silicone moulds, casts, and 3D printed replica of her own genitals (McLelland 2018).
From tiny key chain ornaments to a full-size canoe, Rokudenashiko has produced numerous
molds and sculptures shaped like her vulva, challenging viewers and lawmakers alike to define
where and how the female body can be depicted in public spaces such as trains, schools, rivers,
and other locations outside the art gallery.
On 8 May 2016, the Tokyo District Court handed down a mixed verdict on Rokudenashiko’s
artistic activism, following her arrest in July 2014, and trial for obscenity. A 400,000-yen fine was
imposed for distributing 3D printer data over the Internet, but Rokudenashiko was acquitted
on charges of “displaying obscene materials publicly” (McKnight 2017, 251). Rokudenashiko’s
3D printed replica of her vulva ironically uses digital technologies to critique popular media and
pornographic representations of the female body marred by another kind of digital interference,
in the form of the pixilation (bokashi) that covers the genital areas of both men and women in
erotic and pornographic photographic images produced and sold in Japan (Hambleton 2016, 5).
In this way, her irreverent digital-born art uses the master’s tools to attempt the dismantling of
the master’s house, if those tools are understood as digital technologies of representation and the
house is understood as a sphere of gendered representational practices perpetuating a sense of
shame around sex organs and the normalization of restrictive and often heteronormative depic-
tions of human bodies. Digital-born art has been at the forefront of much recent art activism
that protests the treatment and control of human bodies in designed living spaces such as cities,
workplaces, and legal frameworks.

Gendered by design: digital devices, aides, and robots

Rokudenashiko’s work shares concerns with another area of digital-born art that reflects how
we imagine the ideal body and its functions. In Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and
the Japanese Nation, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson considers the design principles of digital
aids such as robots from a gender perspective, coining the term “robo-sexism” (Robertson 2017,
89–97). Robertson argues that digital initiatives in household and workplace aides, in the form
of humanoid or human-like robots, entrench earlier discriminatory ideas about gendered labour.
Robots are developed to “perform a repertoire of roles that maintain the status quo” (Robert-
son 2017, 89–90), and, as such, often take over roles pejoratively stereotyped as women’s work.
Consequently, such robots and digital aides have been imagined almost exclusively as taking the
form of a stereotypical, idealized, biologically female body.
In extreme cases, Robertson writes, this has even restricted the development of technology
itself. Roboticist Takahashi Tomotaka, who introduced the “Female Type” robot in 2006, claims
that previous generations of robots had taken the form of machines, men, or boys, because
“female-like robots posed greater technical difficulties” (quoted in Robertson 2017, 102). Taka-
hashi cites the perceived requirement for female-gendered robot casings to be slim and curvy as
the major complication in the development of female-type robots, suggesting that the normali-
zation of aestheticized ideal images of women to which Rokudenashiko attributes her motiva-
tion for her art activism also operates in the world of robotics design. Robertson argues that the
“gendered upbringing and everyday behaviour” of roboticists themselves is reproduced in the
gendered names and forms that they give to robots designed for certain types of work (2017, 90).
As such, Robo Sapiens Japanicus is a good example of the interdisciplinary scholarship developing

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between anthropology, design, and architecture that interrogates the role of gender in the digital
technologies and cultures of Japan today.

Gender and digital spaces

A related strand of anthropological scholarship on gender and the digital draws from commu-
nication studies work to consider the impact of digital devices such as mobile phones, portable
screens, and other daily use objects that connect the user to a digital sphere, world, or space.
A diverse range of studies have considered gender as a factor in how mobile phones are used
(Ono and Zavodny 2005) and the “digital divide” in gendered access to mobile technologies
and the Internet. In 2001, for example, a Japanese government survey found higher rates of
Internet use among men with higher incomes, as opposed to women with lower, or no, income
(Freeman 2003, 244). By 2007, however, scholarship had begun to place greater consideration
on the content of digital and online media, as well as the form in which such media is presented.
Ethnographers, communications studies researchers, and media studies scholars of computer
games and online gaming cultures began to argue for new potentials stemming from the use
of digital devices and consumption of digital media. For example, Larissa Hjorth suggests that
the use of kawaii cute culture to “humanize dehumanized technologies” occurs alongside the
shifting of gender inequalities “through changing technological platforms and industries” (2007,
378).While some of these shifts may be positive developments in the direction of lessening gen-
der inequalities, we must also remain aware of the areas of the digital sphere that are increasingly
experienced as less safe for users who do not occupy the hegemonic position of cis-gendered
male users of digital technologies and digital spaces.
Scholarship on these areas of the digital sphere, including digital media and video games fea-
turing ultra-violence and sexual assault, has sometimes struggled to deal with the age-old ques-
tion of to what extent what we see affects how we think and behave. In his examination of the
computer game RapeLay (2006), which allows the game player to rape female characters, Patrick
Galbraith questions whether “fantasy itself ” is “a problem” (2017, 105). Galbraith makes a dis-
tinction between the production and reception of sexually violent material involving human
actors and the production of virtual violence such as that of the computer game. Asking, “Is it
all right to fantasize about sexual violence or, as some critics argue, does such fantasy normalize
sexual violence against women?” (2017, 105). Galbraith uses digital media content to consider
cultural approaches to sexual fantasy, play, and harm in Japan. In suggesting that sexual fantasy
be afforded more space in the everyday public sphere, however, little consideration is given to
the other gendered bodies inhabiting that sphere and how the dissemination of digital content
influences the non-digital environment in which it is disseminated, as well as the digital and
online spaces inhabited by a variety of users of digital technologies.Without conflating the con-
sumption of violent imagery with increased levels of actual violence perpetrated in the material
world by game players, we can still insist that violence perpetrated in the digital sphere is likely
to make that sphere less comfortable, welcoming, or attractive to game players of the gender,
race, or positionality against which the violence is disproportionately levelled. By extension, we
must question whether spaces that drive out difference can be conducive to the development
of a fair and equal society.
A number of recent studies do give consideration to the everyday material world in which
computer gamers live, work, and relate, as well as the connections and overlapping aspects of
this world with the everyday physical world pre-existing the digital age, in which many of our
extant norms and expectations were formed. For example, Ben Whaley’s research on the “social
narrative” of action puzzle game Catherine reveals the use of computer games to reflect and

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explore “the changing nature of romantic relationships and gender roles in Japanese society”
(2018, 99). While director Hashino Katsura explores the “universal themes” of love and mar-
riage in the story,Whaley argues that the protagonist is designed to challenge standard ideas, and
ideals, of masculinity, moving across a spectrum of possible image, identity, and behaviours that
encompasses the salaryman and the opposing “herbivore man” (2018, 102).While it may be rare,
as Whaley argues, to see such consideration of the changing nature of gender and the family in
a “mass-market commercial video game” (2018, 103), scholarly consideration of such narratives
is enlightening and even refreshing in a field that can tend towards a focus on the darker side of
digital media content. Like similar innovations in digital film, these examples reveal the value
of digital technologies and worlds for solving the very concrete and material problems that we
face offline as well as on.

Gender and digital culture in film and media

Like gaming culture, the digital age has changed cinema cultures, exhibition, and content in
Japan. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano argues that digital technologies have “transformed cinema’s pro-
duction, distribution, and consumption patterns,” bringing Japanese cinema to ever more global
markets (2012). Increasing the visibility of Japanese cinema, particularly those genres less likely
to have a cinema theatre release, by bringing films to international film festivals and streaming
sites has also increased the visibility of female filmmakers. Director Kawase Naomi, founder
of the Nara Film Festival, credits the streaming website Netflix with the potential to revitalize
the Japanese film industry by backing little-known and experimental filmmakers (South China
Morning Post 2017). It is striking to note that many of these filmmakers are female, particularly
in the context of the few women directors working on feature film over the long history of
the Japanese studio system. For example, in Ten Years Japan (Jū nen 2018), which expands on the
Netflix-hosted Ten Years  anthology film franchise begun in Hong Kong, three of the five young
directors introduced by Koreeda Hirokazu are female. New digital platforms such as Netflix are
diversifying the Japanese cinema landscape by supporting work by new female artists, as well as
more experimental work by senior female directors like Kawase.
In terms of film content, digital cinema has democratized documentary filmmaking, making
it possible for grassroots concerns to be brought to a wider public (Kamanaka et al. 2018). In
recent years, the single biggest issue in amateur, semi-professional, and professional documentary
filmmaking has been the aftermath of the triple disaster that struck Fukushima in March 2011
in the form of an earthquake, tsunami, and the failure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power
plant. While a number of documentary films have focused on the impact on farmers, the largest
number deal with the health implications of nuclear fallout. Unsurprisingly, this has become
something of a gender issue, with digital documentary films communicating the concerns of
activist groups formed by mothers of young children living in the area suffering from thyroid
gland cancers. In documentary films such as A2-B-C (dir. Ian Thomas Ash 2013) and Coda:
Ryuichi Sakamoto (dir. Steven Nomura Schible 2017), digital cameras are used to record the use
of devices such as Geiger counters, now a part of everyday life in certain areas of Fukushima pre-
fecture. The voices of mothers of affected children are commonly amplified in these narratives,
gendering the testimonies of sufferers just as the classical narrative films of the 1950s gendered
nuclear issues feminine by focusing on female characters (Coates 2018). Today digital technolo-
gies are used to make invisible threats and issues such as radiation and inequality more visible. As
filmmaker Kamanaka Hitomi observes, the day-to-day experience of dealing with such invisible
threats often becomes women’s work (2018, 22).

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Digital filmmaking allows filmmakers to bring these stories more directly to a wide audience,
often circumventing classic studio system era production and distribution models.While this trend is
supported by newly emerging digital devices that significantly reduce the costs and physical difficul-
ties of filmmaking, it has not been the only catalyst for greater representation of women filmmakers.
Rather, the independent documentary sector has been noted for its higher number of women from
the 1930s. As Hikari Hori has shown, militarism and the development of the “culture film” (bunka
eiga) in 1930s and 1940s Japan created a rare opportunity for women directors and editors to find
work in the Japanese film industry. After the war, however, women were discouraged from taking up
these roles in the postwar studio system (Hori 2018, 138). The development of digital filmmaking
devices and digital streaming sites is increasing the representation of women on both sides of the
camera, but digital technologies rarely drive social change entirely in and of themselves. Public atti-
tudes and governmental initiatives play a large part in increasing the effectiveness of digital technolo-
gies, as the case study presented in the second part of this chapter demonstrates.

Digital devices, gender, and aging in contemporary Japan

The second part of this chapter presents a contemporary case study in order to show how digital
technologies are being used to research gender-related social issues.The comparative multi-sited
Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing project at University College London (UCL)
conducted research on smartphone use and ageing in the city of Kyoto and rural Kochi pre-
fecture from 2017 to 2019, investigating how the smartphone is used by middle-aged people
(45–70 years old) in an era of changing aspirations and expectations around mid-life. Compared
to other sites included in the study, what became apparent in the Japanese case was the inher-
ently gendered nature of mobile phone usage. In both the rural and urban sites it was more
commonly women who stayed abreast of the latest developments in mobile phone technology.
They were more likely than men to have replaced their flip-style feature phones (garakei) with
smartphones, primarily because female study participants were more invested than men in the
affective labour of digital communication with friends and relatives. The gendered practice
of care-at-a-distance and co-presence through the smartphone among primarily mothers and
daughters in Japan was documented by Ohashi et al. (2017). Through an exploration of family
communication via the messaging application LINE, their study demonstrated how the visu-
ally affective nature of LINE stickers fostered intimate forms of digital kinship. However, this
affordance of expressions of intimacy is not new but has long been documented in association
with older mobile communication technology in Japan. Ito et al. (2005) argued that from its
inception, Japan’s keitei culture made previously tacit emotions more explicit.
LINE is the most popular mobile messaging application in use today in Japan, with 78 mil-
lion monthly active users in its home country as of October 2018 (Statista 2018). A distinctive
feature of messaging on LINE, compared with other messaging applications such as WhatsApp,
is the use of stickers or graphics which are sent as an individual message rather than embedded
in text, as is common with emojis (see Figure 23.1). Sun Sun Lim argues that visual commu-
nication through LINE stickers allows users to “attain communicative fluidity” (Lim 2015) and
express feelings which might otherwise be difficult to put into words. The affective quality of
this visual form of communication not only has the potential to “humanize cold technology”
(Hjorth 2007, 378), as in kawaii culture discussed previously, but for the women in the UCL
study, the technology itself provided the potential to foster warmer and more personal relation-
ships through kawaii LINE stickers. This was especially important when communicating across
age categories, which would typically require a degree of formality. With middle-aged women

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often returning to the workforce after raising children, many of the study’s participants found
that the majority of their colleagues were significantly younger than themselves, and they would
use respectful distancing language at work, which reminded them of the age gap. However, on
work LINE groups, these boundaries were overcome through the use of LINE stickers, which
expressed meaning without the user having to type words. For example, one research participant
described their use of the app in this way.

I think that LINE stickers are quite useful when speaking to various generations.
Because stickers make communication more approachable, warmer. You can use it
across all ages. It’s not that LINE makes us feel younger but more that it makes us not
even think about our age.

By not having to conform to traditional modes of formal language, the selection of a particular
LINE sticker to express a phrase or a sentiment became a kind of leveller, bypassing otherwise
required modes of conduct and “warming up” otherwise cool relationships.While these women
consider the affective nature of LINE stickers to be important for their relationships, to the
extent that they are willing to pay for particular sets of stickers, Stark and Crawford (2015) cri-
tique this commodification of affective labour and also note the valuable data which companies
can gather from the use of such affective markers.
Women in the UCL study purchased LINE stickers of their favourite cartoon characters
and sometimes found sets with their own names embedded within them. The women instantly
knew which friend had sent a message because of the style of the sticker: some people chose
cute ones, whereas others opted for more comedic styles, depending on which they felt aligned
most with their personality and tastes. In this way, LINE stickers appeared to be a way to express
personality and extend more of oneself into the digital sphere. This personalization of LINE
mirrored the way that the exterior of the phone was often decorated, especially by women.
Phone charms, cases, and real stickers were applied according to the owner’s tastes. This habit
of aesthetic personalization of the smartphone was a continuation of how people treated their
garakei, yet participants in the UCL study noted increased closeness and attachment to their
smartphones since they felt that they had greater control over how they could craft the phone’s
interior to match their personality. One woman explained:

I feel more towards the smartphone. I want to have it near me always. I feel shy about
showing people my apps. It’s kind of like a bookshelf, it shows my personality. You
would only put the covers of the books you want to show in the front too. The smart-
phone is who I am.

Mid-life can by a trying time for Japanese women, when they increasingly take on the respon-
sibility of care for elderly parents, often at the same time as returning to work and experienc-
ing shifting relationships with spouses and children (see Takeda 2004; Oshio 2014; Lock 1993).
One participant shared her feelings about this change: “It’s really hard and sad to see your own
mother and father deteriorate, especially if they get dementia. It’s like a tunnel without an end-
ing.” As one ages, the ability to draw on the comfort of friends through trying times, such as
experiencing sickness or caring for elderly parents, becomes increasingly important. In particu-
lar, messaging allowed many research participants to feel supported.

If I have a particularly hard day with my mother, smartphones can give me a quick
window to reach out to my friends and get sympathy. That aspect of being able to

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reach out to someone right at that second when you need them is a great thing about
smartphones, and receiving stickers that tell me “It’s okay!!” is great.

The smartphone is integral to lightening the load of being a middle-aged woman in Japan and
the responsibilities this represents. Female-to-female peer support fulfilled a need for empathy,
which was sometimes perceived as lacking from male partners. One study participant noted that:

I think the way women and men think are different. The support my husband gives
me is different from my girlfriends because women to women, they know what to
say and the things you want to hear. I feel more understood when speaking with my
friends. Men are more logical. I am not seeking for, you know, an answer. I just want
someone to listen to me.

The term kodokushi (solitary death) has become a recognised social issue in rapidly ageing Japan
(Nozawa 2015), where elderly people are increasingly living alone with infrequent social con-
tact. In this context, middle-aged participants in the UCL study, especially women, expressed
the feeling that the smartphone was integral to reducing loneliness when looking towards the
future when they themselves will be elderly and may have limited social support and restricted
mobility. Conversely, the study found indications of a rejection of the smartphone among older
men, often for reasons of cost and practicality. Many middle-aged and older male participants
said that their garakei served them well enough, often explaining that they had all their work
contacts on their garakei and therefore switching would be troublesome. For men approaching
or just post-retirement, maintaining this connection to their working lives through the garakei
was especially important. In rural Kochi, men would typically see friends and acquaintances
at a local bar (izakaya), and they would use their mobile phone minimally to arrange such
meetings. In the cases where male participants did own smartphones, they would often protest
that they did not know how to use them or that they only used their smartphone for playing
games, keeping their garakei for making calls because it was cheaper. While smartphones con-
tinue to reduce in price, monthly data bills are still costly in Japan, so for men who often do
not feel as strong a need to be socially connected through the smartphone, the garakei remains
a popular choice.
Finally, the UCL study reveals how the digital world influences recent flows of migration
from urban to rural Japan, which also appears to be a gendered process. Over the past eight
years, since the March 2011 earthquake, the Internet has been a major source of news at a time
when mistrust of government information was widespread. Ohashi et al. (2017) note how Twit-
ter became a vital source of up-to-date and trusted information in the post-3.11 context. One
woman who made the move to rural Kochi from Tokyo explained: “I would follow news about
the disaster coming from foreign sources, such as from France, because they would tell us more
about what is actually happening than our own news channels.” Another mother who moved to
rural Kochi with her two young children explained that she had been inspired by the blog of a
woman who had recently made the move:

When the earthquake happened I picked up both of my children, one under each
arm. I was so scared, and I felt so helpless. I knew then that I did not want to stay in
the city where I was dependent on others for everything, and where my food could
come from contaminated land. I was inspired by reading blogs by other women who
had moved with their families to the countryside and could grow their own food and
be more self-sufficient.

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Blogs and social media provided a glimpse into another possible life for these women and
their families, and as such they held great potential to contribute towards processes of rural
repopulation and regeneration.

Conclusion
While digital technologies and cultures continue their fast-paced development, an overview
of the field remains challenging and a conclusion even more so. This chapter has attempted to
bring together diverse areas of scholarship on digital technologies and cultures in Japan, identify-
ing areas of commonality across disciplinary boundaries. We have focused more on digital tech-
nologies than the content of digital media texts, in part due to the comprehensive scholarship
in media studies, communications studies, film studies, and anthropology that provides in-depth
contents analysis of games, television, film, and animated entertainments. Instead we aimed to
demonstrate the interconnected nature of the digital and physical aspects of life in Japan today,
insisting on remaining aware of historical contexts in order to understand the promising yet
relatively limited degree to which technological innovation has so far been converted into con-
crete social change in gender roles, norms, and expectations.
While digital technologies and cultures will be central to future developments in gender
in Japanese culture, we must remain aware of the elements of digital cultures that reflect, or
even actively entrench, gender inequalities and gendered labour. While female digital technol-
ogy users are relied on by others to maintain family and social bonds through smartphones,
for example, or while women use apps to seek emotional support from other women while
shouldering the burden of caring duties, we must ask whether digital technologies are really
changing gender roles to any great degree. What would it mean to hand such women’s work
over to a female-shaped robot or hologram? As we argued in the early stages of this chapter,
digital iterations of gender do not make a radical break with pre-existing lived experiences and
practices. The challenge for scholars is to remain aware of these constraints and push for greater
understanding of the many roles and potentials of digital technologies and cultures, currently
studied behind disciplinary boundaries. An interdisciplinary approach in a global context like
that of the UCL study will allow for a nuanced understanding of the possibilities and constraints
presented by digital technologies and cultures in Japan today.

Related chapters
  9 Attitudes to Marriage and Childbearing
11 Intimacy in and Beyond the Family
18 Gender, Labour, and Migration in Japan
27 Performing Gender: Cosplay and Otaku Cultures and Spaces
32 Gender and Visual Culture
33 Gender, Media, and Misogyny in Japan
34 Representing Girls in Cinema
35 Gendered Desires: Pornography and Consumption

References
Chino, K. (1996) “Gender in Japanese Art,” Aesthetics 7 49–68.
Coates, J. (2018) “Mediating Memory: Shōjo and War Memory in Classical Japanese Cinema,” Cultural
Studies 32 (1) 105–125.

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