Todd Joseph Miles Holden (also known as T.J.M. Holden and Todd Holden) is an American-born social scientist, essayist, philosopher, and novelist. He was the first tenured foreign professor at Tohoku University, one of Asia’s elite universities, where he taught for 26 years. His scholarship has been multi- and trans-disciplinary, embracing globalization, media studies, cultural studies, semiotics, advertising, television, Japanese popular culture, sociology, cultural anthropology, political communication, gender, identity, and digital youth. Between 2000 and 2009 he was a contributor to the international webzine PopMatters, writing a regular column on Japanese popular culture called ReDotPop, and creating PM’s first blog, Peripatetic Postcards. In 2011 he published a book by the same name, bearing the subtitle "the journey of life through 25 of the world's cities". Recent work has included literary treatments of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, dystopia, philosophical detection, comedy and caper.
Academic background Holden received his BA in Social Ecology from the University of California, Irvine, and his PhD in Interdisciplinary Social Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
At UCI, he was strongly influenced by Ralph (Ray) Catalano and worked with Larry Agran, who went on to become Mayor of Irvine and, later, candidate for President of the United States. At Syracuse he was mentored by John A. Agnew, who oversaw his dissertation, along with Ralph Ketcham and Thomas E. Patterson. Other important influences were Barry Glassner, then-chair of the sociology department, and Robert Bogdan, whose approach to ethnography and qualitative content analysis have been apparent in Holden's scholarship.
Administrative career Upon obtaining his PhD, in 1988, Holden was recruited by Tohoku University, the third oldest of Japan's so-called “Imperial Universities", and one of Asia's top-ranked universities. His initial post was lecturer in the Department of English in the (now-defunct) College of General Education. Thereafter, he taught in the Department of Social Structure and Change in the Graduate School of Information Sciences and was an associate professor of society and culture at the (now-defunct) School of Language and Culture. In 2001 he was appointed professor of mediated sociology in the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies (GSICS), becoming the first foreigner to secure tenure at Tohoku University since its establishment in 1907. Twice Chair of the Department of Multi-Cultural Societies, he helped build a small, but dynamic graduate program on media, culture and society. He retired in 2014 after nearly 27 years of service.
In 2000 Holden served on the planning committee of Tohoku University's "International Symposium on Research and Education in the 21st Century," (ISRE 2000), an assembly that led to exchange agreements with 29 universities and 114 university departments from 31 nations. In 2005 he was part of the working group that designed the so-called Internet School (ISTU), the university's first step toward establishing a distance education program.As detailed in the following account from Kyoto University's Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education (in Japanese). In 2008 he was a visiting lecturer in geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, teaching a course on sports globalization; in 2013, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, working on "Ukiyo-ad", a book on Japanese advertising, cultural communication and media theory.
During his career, Holden held executive positions in various international professional associations, including two terms (8 years) as chair of the Gender and Communication section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), 4 years as vice-president of the Asia-Pacific Sociology Association (APSA), and 4 years as executive committee member of Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ). He also served as webmaster and communications director for all three of these associations.
Academic career In the main, Holden's research has attended to the multiple, cross-cutting relationships between societal structures and processes, cultural values and practices, and media. Funded and published research has explored: cell phones, the Internet, television, advertising, novels, children's picture books, and film. The work has generally, but not exclusively, centered on Japan.Early work, in particular, explored American political philosophy and political history, as well as American media such as novels and television advertisements. Some work, including a study in Media, Culture & Society has also looked at Malaysian advertising, both in isolation and comparative context. And, both his medi@sia book and the earlier Globalization, Culture and Inequality in Asia treat multiple countries and contexts in the Asian region. Reflecting his familiarity with various communication platforms, his scholarship has appeared in the Sage Handbook of Media Studies (a global survey of advertising), The Encyclopedia of Television (a historical overview of Japanese TV), the first book ever on Japanese Cybercultures (a chapter on Internet dating), and Global Youth (a study of adolescent cell phone use in Japan). His Internet dating study, co-authored with Takako Tsuruki,Originally published in Nanette Gottlieb and Mark McLelland (eds.), Japanese Cybercultures. London: Routledge (2003), pp.34-49; Subsequently reprinted in David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (eds.), The Cybercultures Reader (2nd Ed.). has been extensively cited,See, for instance, Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jock Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey, “The Mobile Communication Society : A cross-cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technology,”; see also: Joel Matthews, “Suicide and the Japanese Media: On the hunt for blame,” electronic journal of contemporary Japanese studies, July 20, 2008; and the weblog Futures of Learning: Japan. In her review of the work, Leslie M. Tkach-Kawasaki opined:In this chapter, the use of technology not only as a tool for forging personal relationships but also as a means of mediating one's relationship with society as a whole is especially intriguing. These illustrations of how new technologies are being used to renegotiate one's self on a personal basis as well as in relation to society as a whole are especially germane to a Japan that seeks balance within itself and the world around it. as has his grounded theorization of media-reproduced "surveillance" in Japanese society."Surveillance: Japan's sustaining principle," Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 28, Issue 1 (Summer 1994):93-102. This article served as the theoretical core of Dorota Krysinska's “Hikikomori (Social Withdrawal) in Japan: Discourses of Media and Scholars; Multicausal Explanations of the Phenomenon”. Holden's pithy turn of phrase ("Discreet statements of difference for those wishing to be considered as discrete statements") -- which aptly captures the expression of individual identity through material culture under conditions of extensive social control -- was reprised by Brian J. McVeigh in his Japanese Higher Education as Myth (2002:120).
Despite the core attention to media/tion, Holden's overriding concern has been the interaction between indigenous and exogenous values and practices – what is generally referred to as "globalization". This intellectual thread is directly traceable back to Agnew's "landmark" study of place,This characterization belongs to Fred M. Shelley, in his "Commentary, Classics in human geography revisited", published in Progress in Human Geography 27,5 (2003) p.605. completed during Holden's final year at SU.See Agnew, J.A. (1987), Place and politics: the geographical mediation of state and society. Boston and London: Allen and Unwin. For Holden, it is the mediation between people, media technologies and communication content in specific contexts that best accounts for political, cultural, and social phenomena, (and thereby reveals the contours and extent of globalization). This focus is most evident and best captured in the title of his 2006 book medi@sia: Global media/tion in and out of context (co-edited with Timothy J. Scrase). Even so, this geo-symbolic mediation can be discerned a decade earlier, in his comparative content analysis of 3,059 Japanese and American television ads,Todd Joseph Miles Holden, "Standardizing Information Society?: A Comparative Study of Commercial Culture," Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Vol. 1 (1994), No.1, pp.93-102. and his study of differential presentations of the body in national advertisementsTodd Joseph Miles Holden, "The Commercialized Body: A comparative study of culture and values," Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, (November 1996), Vol.2, No.2:199-215 – a research topic that also bears some echoes of Glassner's body study, launched during the latter's time at SU.
The question of place also arises in Holden's widely circulatedThe paper is often posted as a resource for/representative work on gender advertising on compilation sites; see, for instance this site on Japan: Women & Family Issues, sponsored by the University of Redlands, and this site on Gender, Race and Ethnicity in Media (Advertising), sponsored by the University of Iowa Department of Communication Studies. The article has also been frequently cited by other authors; see, for instance: Michael Prieler, (2007) "The Japanese Advertising Family," in P. Backhaus (Ed.), Japanstudien 19: Familienangelegenheiten (pp. 207-220). Munich: iudicium; and Mark McLelland, (2003) Western Intersections, Eastern Approximations: Living more like 'oneself': transgender identities and sexualities in Japan. updating, to Japan, of Goffman's classic “gender advertisements”. This Japanese study, Medcalf noted, demonstrates that discrepancies in the hetero-normative narrative are “not a result of post-modern, globalizing transformations, but, rather, of long standing internal cultural and historical processes and contradictions.”Anne-Marie Medcalf, “Cultural Representations, Translations, Appropriations: Spaces, Media and Performance: Introduction,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context (Issue 3, January 2000). Such complex relationships between gender, media and local distinctiveness were further explored in a much-sampled 2005 article on masculinities in Japanese cooking shows.The original article, "The Overcooked and Underdone: Masculinities in Japanese food programming", appeared in Food and Foodways Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment, Volume 13, Issue 1 & 2 (2005), pp.39-65, then was re-issued in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (eds.), Food and Culture: A Reader (2nd Ed.), (2007), pp.202-220. It then was picked up for use in classes at the University of Georgia ("Anthropology of Eating: Environment, History, Culture, and Politics") and Saint Michael’s College ("The Politics of Food").
Holden has also employed other approaches to expose the distinctiveness of place-based ideas and practices. For instance, qualitative, semiotic-attuned content analysis demonstrated the integral role color plays in generating cultural meaning in American and Japanese advertising.See: "The Color of Meaning: The significance of black and white in television commercials," Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (1997), Vol.3, No.2:125-146; "The Color of Difference: Critiquing cultural convergence via television advertising," Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Vol.5, No.1 (May 1999):15-36). The significance of such research, Patrick Hunout has observed, is that: