If Casshern Doesn’t Do It, Who Will?

paradigm of keeping animals—is both unstable but also comforting in a lifestyle that is itself in a state of shift and fluctuation (180). Allison positions Pokémon as allowing the consumer both to raise imaginative creatures and to achieve a heroic status (à la Power Rangers and Sailor Moon) by becoming a Pokémon master. She uses the Foucauldian theorization of knowledge (and, by extension, power) to promote Pokémon’s emphasis on knowledge acquisition and creature care over the eye candy fetishization (in the Freudian and Marxist sense) of the Power Rangers’ and Sailor Moon’s “money shot” (103). For Allison, it isn’t that Pokémon is devoid of fetish but rather that the interactivity inhering in Pokémon bequeaths a more empowering, or at least less exploitive, fetishization in children’s play. Here Allison makes her boldest franchise-specific assertion: “Pokémon capitalism” allows commodities to “double as gifts and companions” (197) by referencing a milieu of premodern animist spiritualism in “New Age” aesthetics. The pocket monsters promote capitalist Japan’s ascendancy, but act as the accomplice and corrective of its monstrous exploitation of its people. Curiously, Allison never defines what “New Age” means exactly, nor where this age is taking Japan and North America in terms of capitalist cycles of accumulation, alienation, and healing. The answer, by implication, is not much of anywhere. Anecdotes of violent incidents perpetuated by persons connected to these pop culture products dot the book, but because Allison stresses the lack of causality between the two, it is unclear what the references accomplish. While she rightly avoids the antifan sentiments of older academic research in this area, Allison assumes that U.S. fans equate Japaneseness with coolness and lack interest in their products’ authentic Japaneseness for its own sake. This drives home her point about fan fetishization. However, it overlooks fans’ need for authentically Japanese narratives behind the products that can speak to their identities as fans, many of whom participate in an active pedagogy of Japanese culture to make sense of both of them. Nevertheless, Allison researched her theoretical tools and her subject matter very well. She makes especially keen insights on hybridity, mutability, and perfomativity in unexplored contexts of character identity. While postmodern in much of her approach, Allison remains steadfastly critical, even Marxist in her sensibilities toward the likes of Usagi and Pikachu. However, even those who do not occupy any of these critical camps should nonetheless make room on their shelves and in their reading schedules if they are at all interested in these new configurations of production and play.