We present an ethnographic observational study of six robot cafes in Japan to understand
how service robots are performatively staged and presented to the public. We particularly …

Recently, the smart phone app Kuaishou emerged in China with more than 400 million
registered users. An app where users upload pre-recorded videos and a small number of …

This article examines the Japanese cat café boom, which peaked in 2009 yet remains a
significant retail phenomenon throughout Japan, and in particular Tokyo. How do humans …

ABSTRACT Beginning in 2014, Chinese Internet-users can purchase care and concern
online. Customers can hire both male and female virtual lovers (xuni lianren) to talk to them …

This chapter revisits the study of the Japanese fan or “otaku,” resituating this figure through
the combined lenses of media mobility and urban space. It proposes a “pedestrian method,” …

Animal cafés—businesses in which customers pay by the hour to have a drink and relax in a
space filled with cats, rabbits or other animals—began to appear in Japan in 2004, as a part …

Though dansō—female-to-male crossdressing—has been historically embedded in Japan
as tradition, performance, and entertainment, in the last fifteen years it has fractured and …

This paper situates the 'Blind Box'consumption, collection and prosumption practices in
China within globalisation and the 'media-mix'fandom, which is to consume and resell media …

In late capitalism, the whole of society metamorphoses into an articulation of production and
social relations turn into the relations of production (Tronti 2013 [1962]), leading to …

The Japanese animation and comics first introduced to the United States were carefully
scrubbed of cultural markers, but for hardcore aficionados the 'Japanese-ness' of such …