Fabienne Darling-Wolf is Professor of Journalism and Director of the Media and Communication Doctoral Program in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, USA. Her recent publications include Imagining the global: Transnational media and popular culture beyond East and West (2015).

• Introduction: Why the Japanese media? Fabienne Darling-Wolf PART I: The rise of Japanese media 1. Who’s the ‘great imitator'?: Critical reflections on Japan’s historical transcultural influence, Fabienne Darling-Wolf 2. Girls’ magazines and the creation of shōjo identities, Sarah Frederick 3. Gender, consumerism and women’s magazines in interwar Japan, Barbara Sato 4. Eusociality and the Japanese media machine in the Great East Asia War, 1931–1945, David C. Earhart 5. Fire! Mizuno Hideko and the development of 1960s shōjo manga, Deborah Shamoon 6. Sport, media and technonationalism in the history of the Tokyo Olympics, Iwona Regina Merklejn PART II: Media, nation, politics and nostalgia 7. Born again yokozuna: sports and national identity, Michael Plugh 8. Changing political communication in Japan, Masaki Taniguchi 9. ‘National idols’: the case of AKB48 in Japan, Patrick W. Galbraith 10. Media idols and the regime of truth about national identity in post-3.11 Japan, Yunuen Ysela Mandujano-Salazar PART III: Japanese identities — plural: race, gender and sexuality in contemporary media 11. Queering mainstream media: Matsuko Deluxe as modern-day kuroko, Katsuhiko Suganuma 12. Mediated masculinities: negotiating the 'normal' in the Japanese female-to-male trans magazine Laph, Shu Min Yuen 13. Writing sexual identity onto the small screen, seitekishōsū-sha (sexual minorities) in Japan, Claire Maree 14. Housewives watching crime: mediating social identity and voyeuristic pleasures in Japanese wide shows, Michelle H. S. Ho 15. Beyond the absent father stereotype: representations of parenting men and their familities in contemporary Japanese film, Christie Barber 16. Japan Times’ imagined communities: symbolic boundaries with African Americans, 1998–2013, Michael C. Thornton and Atsushi Tajima PART IV: Japanese media in everyday life 17. Culture of the print newspaper: the decline of the Japanese mass press, Kaori Hayashi 18. Japanese youth and the usage of SNS: peer surveillance and the conditions governing tomodachi, Kiyoshi Abe 19. On manual bots and being human on Twitter, Amy Johnson 20. Keitai in Japan, Kyoung-hwa Yonnie Kim 21. Character goods, cheerfulness and cuteness: ‘consumupotian’ spaces as communicative media, Brian J. McVeigh 22. Nature, media and the future: unnatural disaster, animist anime and eco-media activism in Japan, Gabrielle Hadl PART V: Japanese media and the global 23. Cultural policy, cross-border dialogue and cultural diversity, Koichi Iwabuchi 24. I hate you, no I love you: growing up with Japanese media in (postcolonial) South Korea, Sueen Noh Kelsey 25. Remade by Inter-Asia: the transnational practice and business of screen adaptations based on Japanese source material, Eva Tsai 26. Anime’s distribution worlds: formal and informal distribution in the analogue and digital eras, Rayna Denison Conclusion: Final reflections on the Japanese media’s global voyage, Fabienne Darling-Wolf