Postwar Japanese Cinema Research Articles

Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, by William Carroll

Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, by William Carroll

Kazuo Ishiguro’nun Değişen Dünyada Bir Sanatçı (1986) Adlı Eserinde Endüstri olarak Kültür

Kazuo Ishiguro’s works generally revolve around the function and meaning of art for individuals in society, and he emphasizes the subjectivity and volatility of fragmented individual memory as a counterpart to collective memory as in the case of Masuji Ono in An Artist of the Floating World (1986). The story is narrated by Ishiguro’s unreliable and resentful narrator Masuji Ono, whom the reader learns was once in the service of the Japanese imperial government with his propagandistic paintings and teachings during the Imperial period. In this essay, I will argue that Ishiguro attempts to show us the deception of an entire nation in which the traumatized collective memory of the post-war period collides with the individual and subjective memory of the self-deceiving Masuji Ono through specific examples from the text. In order to show the fragmented and disturbed public memory, the changes in Japanese society and culture depicted in Ishiguro’s novel are examined and observed using examples from Ono’s grandson Ichiro’s cinematic experiences, which show us the Americanization process in occupied Japan in light of Adorno’s theory of the "culture industry."

The Global White Snake by Liang Luo

Reviewed by: The Global White Snake by Liang Luo An-Ru Chu THE GLOBAL WHITE SNAKE. By Liang Luo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 402 pp. Hardcover, $85.00; paperback, $39.95. Liang Luo's new book, The Global White Snake, examines the migration and transformation of the White Snake legends in Mainland China, Japan, Korea, the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s. Luo asks: "How should we understand the seemingly endless regenerative powers of the White Snake legends? What does their pervasive and long-lasting popularity suggest?" (p. 6). Interweaving historical contexts and textual analyses in chronological order, Luo scrutinizes and compares artistic oeuvres of the legends in various forms, such as xiqu, plays, opera, feature-length films, animations, novels, and fashion videos. This book makes a valuable contribution to exploring the global genealogy of the White Snake legends, especially when there is a stark contrast between the wide popularity of the legends in East Asia and the scarcity of relevant scholarly studies in English. Chapter one introduces the main themes of the White Snake and the earliest versions of the legends in China. Luo deciphers the multi-directional transmigrations and reincarnations of the narrative, mainly through the lenses of gender and species, as well as media and politics. Luo traces the origin of the White Snake legends back to the ninth-century short story "Li Huang," and recognized the 1624 collection, Stories to Caution the World, compiled by Feng Menglong, as a fully established White Snake story. A summary of the White Snake framework is as follows: the male protagonist, Xu Xuan, comes across two beauties at West Lake: one dressed in white (Madame White), and one in green (Little Green). Xu is married to Madame White soon, but then Abbot Fahai discovers that the two women are transformed from a white snake and a green snake. After a series of chaotic incidents, Madame White is incarcerated under the Thunder Peak Pagoda by Fahai, and Xu becomes a monk. Taking the social, political, and cultural factors into account, Luo's book delves into the significant twists and turns this prototype has experienced. Chapters two and three describe the developments of the White Snake legends in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Chapter two begins with two Anglophone versions adapted by Woodbridge, and Cloud. Though not the primary focus, these two versions transformed the legends into a love story by adding details of the characters' motives and values in each of their translations. [End Page 414] The legends were central to the popular culture in Shanghai. Focusing on "newness," the Shanghai entertainment industry reimagined the legends through technical innovations on stage, the emergence of female performers on the male-dominated stage, and intellectual debates about the legends' superstitious narratives and vulgarizing trends. Chapter three investigates how the 1924 collapse of the Thunder Peak Pagoda, a real-life incident, prompted modern reinterpretations of this iconic landscape and thus popularized a paradigm shift of the legends from a male to a female-oriented perspective. Lu Xun's 1924 essay, viewing the pagoda as a feudal oppressive symbol and thus celebrating the liberation of the White Snake, was especially influential for the PRC government. Part two, including chapters four and five, probes into the retelling of the legends in an inter-Asian context during the Cold War. Chapter four analyzes three Japanese feature-length films. Ugetsu, a black-and-white film directed by Mizoguchi Kenji in 1953, epitomizes Japanese aesthetic traditions while expressing concerns for women's wartime trauma. Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yoren), directed by Toyoda Shiro in 1956, was a color film adapted from Hayashi Fusao's 1948 novel. The Tale of the White Serpent (Hokujaden) in 1958, recognized as Asia's first full-length color animation, targeted children and families in Japan and other Asian regions, as the production company Toei Animation was deeply influenced by Disney. As Luo points out, these three films "reveal the importance of a mediacentered approach in examining the White Snake legends in postwar Japanese cinema" (p. 20). Chapter five covers the Korean director Shin Sang-ok...

御園生涼子著『映画の声―戦後日本映画と私たち』（みすず書房、2016年10月） 書評

御園生涼子著『映画の声―戦後日本映画と私たち』（みすず書房、2016年10月） 書評

Blurred Boundaries: Ethnofiction and Its Impact on Postwar Japanese Cinema

This article explores the use of ethnofiction, a technique emerging from the field of visual anthropology, which blends documentary and fiction filmmaking for ethnographic purposes. From Imamura Shōhei’s A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu, 1967) to Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Cafe Lumieré (Kōhi jikō, 2003), Japanese cinema, including Japan-set and Japan-associated cinema, has employed ethnofiction filmmaking techniques to alternately exploit and circumvent the structural barriers to filmmaking found in everyday life. Yet the dominant understanding in Japanese visual ethnography positions ethnofiction as an imported genre, reaching Japan through Jean Rouch and French cinema-verité. Blending visual analysis of Imamura and Hou’s ethnofiction films with an auto-ethnographic account of my own experience of four years of visual anthropology in Kansai, I interrogate the organizational barriers constructed around geographical perception and genre definition to argue for ethnofiction as a filmmaking technique that simultaneously emerged in French cinema-verité and Japanese feature filmmaking of the 1960s. Blurring the boundaries between Japanese, French, and East Asian co-production films, and between documentary and fiction genres, allows us to understand ethnofiction as a truly global innovation, with certain regional specificities.

Embedded film, embodied reception: Tsurumi Shunsuke’s autobiographical film criticism

ABSTRACTReflecting on the aftermath of WWII in the emerging Cold War context of Japan’s compromised sovereignty, members of the intellectual group Science of Thought (Shisō no kagaku) sought possibilities of ‘thought’ (shisō) in ‘the people’ and turned their attention to the production and reception of mass culture. Jidaigeki (Japanese period films) presented a unique challenge for envisioning postwar modernity and democracy in Japan. US Occupation censors and progressive Japanese critics alike regarded jidaigeki with suspicion, calling into question its relationship to the past. This paper focuses on the group’s founder Tsurumi Shunsuke’s review of 1952 jidaigeki The Mad Woman in Kimono (Furisode kyōjo) and examines his populist defense of jidaigeki. Born into one of Japan’s most politically and intellectually prominent families and educated in the philosophy department at Harvard, Tsurumi struggled to define the significance and political utility of jidaigeki by negotiating his own position in relation to not only ‘the people’, but also with regard to the compromised sovereignty of occupied and post-occupation Japan. By unpacking interrelated negotiations in Tsurumi’s review and the film itself, I argue for the utility of jidaigeki as an analytical lens through which we begin to understand the dynamic historicity of postwar Japanese cinema.

Introduction: mediating affect

ABSTRACTThis Special Issue brings together seven affective mediations on the theme of mediating affect. The articles were presented in an earlier form at the inaugural Affect Theory Conference, held in Millersville (USA) in October 2015. Responding to a Call for Papers, authors were invited to take on the question of ‘media’ and ‘mediation’ in the context of the blossoming field of affect studies. Each article in turn tackles a particular trajectory of concern examined as a multiplicity – the philosophy/study of living and feeling, fear and the amplification of affect, trauma and absence, detention and compassion, memorialization and shōjo (少女) (the girl trope in postwar Japanese cinema), and whiteness and the good life. The theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural lineages are many. Developed together within the context of the project of cultural studies, the resulting Special Issue provides an opportunity to consider more deeply how ‘media-world assemblages’ (Murphie, A., in press. The world as medium. In: E. Manning, A. Munster, S. Thomsen and B. Marie, eds. Immediations. Sydney: Open Humanities Press) give rise to certain political and ethical questions. In this Issue, we encounter six different media-world formations and learn how they shift as they pulsate with affective relations. As well as introducing these relations, this Introduction canvases some of the conceptual work that has gone into ‘mediating affect’, addressing the context that underpins this bringing together of terms and seeking out ways of provoking further research.

Mediating memory: Shōjo and war memory in classical narrative Japanese cinema

ABSTRACTConsidering the impact of the trope of the shōjo, or girl trope in post-war Japanese cinema, this paper argues for the repeated motif as a key factor in the creation of a particular affective economy around the memorialization of war in Japan. I trace the development of the shōjo motif from the post-defeat era through the anti-nuclear films and activist movements of the early 1950s to show how the affect generated by the repeated trope drew real-life events into a persuasive cycle of repetition. The tone of this repeated trope thereby came to dominate the practice of public memorialization of war in Japan. Today’s post-pacifist Japan is informed by these past moments in the memorializing process, which impact on contemporary anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.

In the Style of Ozu: Critical Making and Postwar Japanese Cinema

Interest in modern and contemporary Japanese visual culture—whether through film, art history, or literature—is growing among students who already have an exposure to and love for Japanese popular culture via visual media such as manga, anime, video, and social media. In combination with student demand for courses that engage with the visual, there is institutional demand for innovative courses that offer experiential and active learning approaches to critical inquiry. This pedagogical essay introduces the concept of “critical making” and the importance of new modes of student assessment that engage with creative acts of making. It discusses the development and application of a semester-long student filmmaking project in Postwar Japanese Cinema and concludes with a critique of the project and the broader implications for including critical making in East Asian studies courses that emphasize the study of visual culture. This student film project reflects my background and training in Japanese art, cinema, and visual culture—not in filmmaking or media production—and is just one example of how to approach the study of postwar Japanese cinema through the lens of critical making.

Roundtable: The Position of Women in Post-War Japanese Cinema (Kinema Junpō, 1961)

In contrast to the canonical history of cinema and film theory, often dominated by academic texts and Western and/or male voices, this article presents a casual conversation held in 1961 between four of the most influential women in the post-war Japanese film industry: Kawakita Kashiko,,Yamamoto Kyōko, Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko. As they openly discuss their gendered experience in production, promotion, distribution and criticism, their thoughts shed light on the wide range of opportunities available to women in filmmaking, but also on the professional constraints,and concerns which they felt came along with their gender. Their conversation reveals how they measured themselves and their national industry in relation to the West; at times unaware of their pioneer role in world cinema. This piece of self-reflexive criticism contributes to existing research on both womens filmmaking and the industry of Japanese cinema, and invites us to reconsider non-hegemonic film thinking practices and voices.

Wakao Ayako and the post-war Japanese studio system: celebrity and performer

Wakao Ayako (1933–) is one of the most popular film stars of post-war Japanese cinema, yet there is little academic work, in Japan and elsewhere, devoted to her. Following upon Christine Geraghty's classification of stardom, this article looks back to Wakao's early career and focuses on the evolution of her star persona, from a celebrity as Daiei Studio's new face, to a star-as-performer from the late 1950s onwards. I will argue that it is not a lineal evolution, but that Wakao has preserved until today a dual star image intended for different audiences and fulfilling different functions. Her vocal performance will be analysed as a significant feature in her star persona and its duality. Through the analysis of Wakao's star image in different texts and media, I will explore the meaning as well as the form of stardom in post-war Japan and critically reflect on the application of the term ‘diva’ in this context.

Vengeance was his: The post-war cinema of Japan’s Shohei Imamura

Outrageous, insightful and sensuous, the films of Shohei Imamura (1926–2006) are among the greatest glories of post-war Japanese cinema, yet Imamura remains largely unknown outside Japan. It is the explosive, at times anarchic quality of Imamura’s work that makes him appear ‘uncharacteristically Japanese’ when seen in the context of the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi or Kurosawa. Perhaps no other film-maker anywhere has so taken up Godard’s challenge to end the distinction between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ films. Indeed, Imamura has been referred to as the ‘cultural anthropologist’ of the Japanese cinema. Yet, if anything, Imamura’s films argue against an overly clinical approach to understanding Japan, as they often celebrate the irrational and instinctual aspects of Japanese culture. This article is an overview of Imamura’s entire career, with emphasis on Vengeance Is Mine (1979), a complex, absorbing study of a cold-blooded killer and Imamura’s greatest commercial as well as critical success.

Landscape, Allegory, and Historical Trauma in Postwar Japanese Cinema: Recapitulating Existential Horror in Onibaba (1964) and Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Abstract Perhaps no national cinema has more thoroughly and consciously explored the crises of its nation's history and culture than the Japanese. The collapse of the old warrior class in the 19th Century, the bitter struggle between traditional values and western economics, the crisis of identity that Japan faced, all led Japanese cinema to sword swaggering samurai to gangster films, disaster epics to primitive pasts, wartime propaganda to traumatic representations of defeat, nuclear holocaust, and occupation. Japan's preoccupation with cultural choices and Japanese identity has always managed to surface onto the film screen.

Misora Hibari and the Girl Star in Postwar Japanese Cinema

In Japanese cinema after World War II, the girl star becomes a site of contesting normative and deviant models of female behavior and also a site for confronting anxieties surrounding the perceived loss of native culture. Part of the process of redefining “proper” girl behavior in the postwar period involved an erasure of older behavioral models and the creation of an imaginary, idealized “traditional” girl persona, derived not from prewar examples but from postwar anxieties about the loss of morality and chastity in girls. This can be seen in the career of Misora Hibari (1937–89), the single most popular female film and singing star of the early postwar period and an icon of “proper” Japanese femininity. Hibari’s career underwent several transformations: she began performing on stage immediately following World War II, in 1946, as a precocious, scandalously sexualized child, but in making the transition to teen film star, her image changed radically from disruptive and risqué to conservative and chaste. This essay focuses on the early part of her career, when she was a girl star, and on the girl stars who succeeded her, through the 1970s. Hibari’s career mirrors changes in postwar society and changes in status of the sexuality of girls and women, as both audience and industry played out fantasies of what it means to be female and Japanese in the postwar years.

Images of Americans in Postwar Japanese Cinema

Images of Americans in Postwar Japanese Cinema