Kimberly Hassel’s professional journey began in elementary school.
The assistant professor in the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies grew up in the 1990s watching “Pokémon,” “Sailor Moon” and other Japanese cartoons on Saturday mornings. Like many of her peers, anime and the cute, brightly colored toys associated with it were her introduction to Japanese pop culture. “I had this Hello Kitty phone with angel wings,” she recalled.
Hassel’s interest in Japan might not have progressed beyond that point if it hadn’t been for the foresight and support of her mother, who saved for years to take Hassel and her sister to Japan when they were in middle school. “I grew up low income, raised by a single mother who immigrated from the Dominican Republic,” Hassel said. “I’m so indebted to her because of that trip. It was like, ‘Oh my God, there's more to Japan than Hello Kitty and Pikachu.’ Without my mom’s sacrifice, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
Hassel began learning Japanese as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow. The fellowship funded fieldwork for her senior honors thesis focusing on the Japanese schoolgirl uniform as commodity. That research ignited a fascination with Japanese youth culture.
Hassel’s dissertation at Princeton University, “Mediating Me: Digital Sociality and Smartphone Culture in Contemporary Japan,” won the university’s Marjorie Chadwick Buchanan Dissertation Prize. The fieldwork, funded by a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship, extended Hassel’s research into the digital realm. She found that young people in Japan have a nuanced relationship with digital culture, really thinking about the pros and cons of social media and cell phone use in their lives.
“I was curious about how my interlocutors were using the digital to navigate various life stages and transitions,” she said. “For example, shakaijin (recent college grads) would lament that they couldn’t find the tight social circles in the workplace they’d had in school.” Still, in 2019, most of them viewed social media as a supplement to in-person interactions, but never as a replacement.
Then the COVID pandemic upended everything.
“When the pandemic started, I began doing follow up interviews with young people online. They had all changed their minds about the centrality of the digital in their lives,” Hassel said.
The pandemic also changed the direction of her research. “The project morphed into an examination of what happens when digital sociality is the new normal.” Even though the isolation brought on by the pandemic has ended, Hassel noted that the landscape was permanently changed.
2020 was also marked by monumental protests against police brutality and the subsequent international projection of the Black Lives Matter movement. “A narrative circulating in Japan was that the issues being discussed in the BLM movement weren’t relevant because racism doesn't exist in Japan and the population is homogenous, which isn’t true,” Hassel said.
“Black Japanese youths turned to social media to share their experiences of anti-Blackness and to educate others about the relevance of BLM. That led to a significant wave of recognition of the presence of Black people in Japan. It was an important discussion that needed to happen.”
Hassel’s research topics and techniques place her in the vanguard of digital anthropologists and ethnographers. It’s a relatively young field — only developing in the last decade or so — but it’s here to stay.
“Digital anthropology not only looks at digital phenomena and digital technologies — like video games, social media and smartphones — but also acknowledges that digital spaces are no less real than physical, in-person spaces,” she said. Hassel uses the digital as a lens into societal shifts and social issues, like the BLM movement in Japan, taking the hybrid approach of engaging with her interlocutors both offline and online. “There's not just one way to do digital ethnography,” she said.
Hassel’s current book project, tentatively titled “Intimate Solitudes and Solidarities: Digital Sociality, Youth Culture, and Identity in Contemporary Japan,” is based on her dissertation fieldwork and has been solicited by an academic press. Her second book project will focus on the Japanese diaspora in the Dominican Republic and the subsequent Dominican diaspora in Japan. It’s a page of history that isn’t often explored in either country, but it’s a project that personally resonates with her.
“This research is near and dear to me as a Dominican New Yorker,” she said. “It’s going to be an auto ethnography, as it will focus on my family's relationship with the diaspora and on my own experiences as a Dominican ethnographer of Japan.”
This semester, Hassel is teaching The World of Japanese Pop Culture. The class is divided into three content areas: the commodification of media, using anime as a lens into societal and historical issues, and the globalization of Japanese pop culture. “What I really like about this class,” Hassel said, “is that it teaches students how to analyze the pop culture they consume and to ask deeper questions about the context from which it emerges.”
Hassel’s ongoing research examines transnational Black digital networks in the context of Japan. She is looking forward to collaborating with colleagues in other departments, such as Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies. “There's a lack of literature on Afro Japanese encounters,” she said. “I really want to create an open access syllabus that can be used at other institutions to develop curricula in Afro Japan or, more broadly, Afro Asia.”
Hassel is passionate about sharing her story with students. “I want my students to know that your academic journey can begin with a Hello Kitty phone,” she said. “The pop culture you love can be a wonderful window into societal issues. Your parent doesn’t have to have a Ph.D. and you don’t have to have archival experience to discover you like research.
“It's important to nurture students’ interests, especially students with marginalized identities. I really would like to see academia become a place where no one feels like an outsider.”