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 fa-mous opera was contingent on the circumstances of the Japanese record indus-try, 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.