Audience studies is experiencing renewed interest in Japanese media studies. This chapter explores the potential of working with audience members to understand the daily uses of various popular media in Japan, as well as the impacts of that media on social imaginaries, life worlds and senses of self. Providing an overview of the earlier history of studying media audiences in Japan, this chapter offers an account of the development of audience studies in early Japanese cinema history and shares some findings from a recent study of memories of cinema-going in the Kansai region of western Japan.

Introduction

At the time of writing, audience studies is experiencing renewed interest from scholars in a number of the fields of research which comprise Japanese media studies. Why might the study of media audiences be of interest (again) to contemporary researchers, and what can we learn about media from studying audiences? The opening section of this chapter explores these questions, outlining the potential of working with audience members to understand the daily uses of various popular media in Japan, as well as the impacts of these media on social imaginaries, life worlds and senses of self.

While audiences, users and gamers have been a central feature of scholarship on gaming and digital media since the beginning of research on the topic (Hjorth 2007; Galbraith 2017; Whaley 2018), the histories of audience studies in earlier eras of Japanese film have looked slightly different. Providing an overview of the earlier history of studying media audiences in Japan, the next section of this chapter offers an account of the development of audience studies in early Japanese cinema history. Moving through the introduction of audience and reception studies to the 1950s, this overview ends with an assessment of new developments in the field unfolding today.

I conclude by sharing some findings from a recent study of memories of cinema-going in the Kansai region of western Japan, generated from an ethnographic research project that I conducted from 2014–2018. This section introduces a variation on audience studies in the form of the ethno-history (Kuhn 2002), a mode of researching memories of viewership in past times, which blends audience studies approaches with methods of research and analysis drawn from memory studies.