Daniel Johnson

Biography

Daniel Johnson earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in the joint program in Asian Cinema (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations + Department of Cinema and Media Studies). Prior to joining William and Mary in 2022, he taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University as a Faculty Fellow. He is the author of Textual Cacophony: Online Video and Anonymity in Japan, which was published in 2023 by Cornell University Press as part of the Cornell East Asia Series.

Professor Johnson’s teaching and research focus on topics related to media in contemporary Japan and East Asia, including television, video games, and visual effects. He is also interested in the relationship between language and media in Japan and has published on topics such as the dubbing of foreign films for Japanese television and the role of opacity in online media cultures.

Recent Courses Taught

Spring 2025: The 1980s in Japan: Memory and Image, Then and Now (COLL 150); Sound Media in Japan

Fall 2024: Language and Media in Japan (JAPN 410); Japanese Video Games

Spring 2024: Growing up with Japanese Television; Crime Fiction in Japan (COLL 150)

Fall 2023: Third Year Japanese; Japanese Sentimentality

Spring 2023: Contemporary Japanese Literature; Japanese Video Games

Fall 2022: Third Year Japanese; New Media in Japan

Thesis and Independent Study Supervision

Professor Johnson has advised students on the following subjects for thesis projects and independent study:

Film history in South Korea

Music video and media criticism in South Korea

Debates over gender in East Asian internet media

Visual effects in Japanese and East Asian cinemas

Documentary film in East Asia

Students interested in doing research on topics related to Japanese and/or Korean film, media, and contemporary literature/culture are welcome to inquire about advising.

Research

Professor Johnson is completing a book on Japanese video games from the 1990s, entitled Playing with Animation and Technology. This project discusses the introduction of technologies such as performance capture, recorded voice, and image compositing to Japanese video games from the perspective of animation theory. It draws heavily on materials published in Japan during the 1990s to describe how game development staff understood their efforts alongside other developments in new media during that period, and particularly in terms of the growing ubiquity of digital media in contemporary life. This project aims to bring a new type of research archive to the study of Japanese games while also putting video games into greater dialogue with concepts and theories related to animation.

Professor Johnson is also in the process of writing a book on Japanese and Korean television during the 1980s. Tentatively entitled RE: Television: Ideologies of Expansion Between Japan and South Korea in the 1980s, this project is concerned with television’s role in imagining a changing economic and cultural reality for audiences in Japan and South Korea. This includes discourses on what television meant as material force in defining and even driving that sense of reality through its role as a commodity, a place for work, and target for cultural debate. Some of topics discussed include the growth of production design in music shows, bootleg video scenes under the Korean ban on Japanese culture and media, and the travel of staff between industries.

Some of Professor Johnson’s other research interests include issues of translation in popular literature in contemporary Japan, media convergence and adaptation in analog games, and popular discourses on emotion in East Asian television.