THE WORLDS OF JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by D.P.K. Martinez. Cambridge University Press, 1998, 212 pp., unpriced. THE WORLDS OF JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by D.P.K. Martinez. Cambridge University Press, 1998, 212 pp., unpriced.

As Mark Schilling said in his indispensable "Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture," postwar popular culture "has been extraordinarily fertile, vibrant and commercially successful." Its reverberations have been such that it has achieved academic status and is something at which scholars are looking.

Ten such scholars (five of them anthropologists) here offer a diversity of views of what Japanese popular culture is and how it is best approached and understood.

D.P. Martinez explains in her opening essay that Japan remains for many a seemingly homogeneous society where aesthetics are valued, where the males are businessmen and the females are submissive. She points out that "anthropologists should be foremost in debunking some of these images . . . but they must do so in the face of a national culture which stresses similarity over difference."