"Bubble Economy Culture: What Really Happened in Japan in the 1980s?" Author: [Japanese] Hara Hiroyuki Translator: Zou Yun Publisher: Zhejiang University Press

Consumers of contemporary Japanese culture are all over the world. From pop music to the second dimension, from luxury goods to otaku, more and more people around the world are being influenced by the culture produced in Japan. But where did these cultural phenomena originate? And when did they come into being?

This book places the major transformation of contemporary Japanese culture in the Japanese bubble economy boom period of the 1980s. The author believes that the characteristics of Japan in the 1980s, the so-called "bubble economy culture", is a culture that emerged after the disappearance of "transcendence". It is a product of the economic boom and the secularization of values. This book discusses the process of bubble economy culture from its inception to prosperity and then to transformation, focusing on the relationship between the political and economic conditions and culture before and after it, and makes excellent and convincing arguments that are eye-opening.

The book is not only an excellent work of sociology and cultural studies, it also contains a large number of interesting examples of popular culture, ranging from luxury goods and pop music, fashion magazines, to TV dramas and comedian culture. It is all-encompassing and a very readable work.

Hiroyuki Hara is a professor at Meiji Gakuin University in Japan and a doctoral student at the University of Paris VIII in France. He specializes in the history of French and Japanese thought and media theory. He has written many academic monographs, including "Lectures on Representational Media (Justice)" and "Discourse Analysis: Transformation of Communicative Thinking".