Through the Butterfly Window: A Japanese Media Entomology

An expansive view of the domestic media ecology from the 1920s to 1940s can partly explain the boom of Japanese interest in Madame Butterfly, a racist, exoticist, Orientalist cultural product of Western imaginary, but a closer look at one particular medium is more telling. The consumer mania for the famous opera was contingent on the circumstances of the Japanese record industry, which shaped how the content of the Madame Butterfly myth transformed. Through consideration of cultural products derived from the Madame Butterfly story, this article proposes a new approach to studying media that combines micro and macro scales of inquiry.