The InterCommunication Project: Theorizing Media in Japan’s Lost Decades

This chapter examines a form of missed or mis-communication of theory through the history of the pathbreaking InterCommunication journal in the 1990s and 2000s. Sponsored by one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world and edited by some of the major intellectual figures of the time, the journal was planned to provide a passageway to the global intellectual sphere and heavily featured translations. Interrogating the different functions of this journal, positioned in the interstices of exchange and insulation, the chapter traces the utopian bent the journal followed with regard to technologies of communication in particular, and gives an outline of some of the decisive debates of 1990s media theory in Japan. This chapter thereby provides a picture of an often-overlooked intellectual transition point between the nyū aka (New Academism) movement of the 1980s and the generation that emerges in the 2000s, within which Azuma Hiroki was a central figure.