Memories of the grateful visitor. A look at Spanish spaces, ethnography and material artifacts through contemporary Japanese Entertainment Industries

Audiences from all over the world may differ in the way tl1ey perceive a particular country or cultural tradition. Even when it is possible to argue that fictionality can't be really isolated from any kind of representational form, communicational genres might contribute significantly to this, variability. This phenomenon is made clearer when media and genre are linked to the existence of certain narrative components (or narrativity). As individual narrators, we constantly experiment with the difference vantage points. It might be said that we even "enjoy" the way cultural depictions are defined, through the influence of spatial, temporal and, eventually, psychological individualities. This process, necessarily, has to work together with the denotative and referential nature of communicational genres. In this paper, I propose some core elements for the description and understanding of Spain and the Spanish through the Visual Culture and Entertainment made in Japan. This image, while from an inner point of view might result rough and debatable, makes more sense in terms of foreigner reception. My main hypothesis will be that the understanding and enjoyment of contemporary Spanish Culture has been dissolved in a kind of representation similar to that from vivid and performative representation (memories). While it can be argued that any country will elicit similar ways of mediatized interaction, it is clear that countries and national identities have acquired different connotations, a difference that has been studied through constructs such as 'National Branding' or 'Soft Power'. That is to say, from cognitive and marketing perspectives, they create products that evoke different meanings among international audiences. Spain is for Japanese audiences and markets primarly a desirable tourist destination where fictionality plays an essential role in the construction of spaces and cultural artifacts (tangible and intangible). Several examples of these processes will be analyzed with the aim of test my hypothesis while examining some fictional representations from the main Japanese entertainment industries