Some suggestions for JSTOR search strategy

28 Sept
It may be useful for me to have a place to put some of my comments in answer to the recurrent problem "...nothing about my topic...". Partly it's a matter of devising and expanding terminology, finding synonyms, looking for more general terms for the specific thing you're hoping to learn about, and generally becoming more sophisticated and knowledgeable about a Subject. Here's a question and my response --see if it helps YOU figure out what to do:
i am having some trouble finding stuff on jstor about my project. what do you suggest i do?
(JT, whose project deals with a current fad in Japan, so recent that it's not in the mouldy old JSTOR journals)

What to do? It's really a matter of stepping back to the more general. The pop culture phenomenon you're looking at is new in its details, but fads have swept Japan before. So what's a term that encompasses Hello Kitty and those others? If I do a search for " popular culture" AND "japan" and choose both Anthropology and Asian Studies journals I get more than 100 hits. Some will have nothing useful at all... but a few just may really broaden your ideas about the specific phenomena you're looking at. And the bibliography in articles may direct you to other stuff you need to be looking at. At the very least you'll pick up a lot more terminology in the "popular culture" realm, and expose yourself to some other aspects of Japanese culture that may prove interesting and useful in other connections.