Download or read book Film and Political Culture in Postwar Japan written by Michael H. Gibbs and published by Framing Film. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Japanese political culture from c. 1940 to 2009 challenges standard periodizations of «postwar» Japan, arguing that the postwar period began, much later than previously argued, when a culture of pacifism developed. We can see evidence of this in feature films from the era and in the activities of groups involved in film promotion and criticism. Film and Political Culture in Postwar Japan asks us to take Japanese pacifism seriously and not assume that it is merely a passing phenomenon. This study of the political left questions previous assumptions about such marginalization after the Red Purges of 1950 and the sectarian infighting of the 1960s. Michael H. Gibbs provokes the reader to look beyond the standard «national» parameters of Japanese culture, to examine the role of other states in fomenting war during the 1940s-1970s and in keeping the subsequent peace. In addition, he challenges the neglect of mainstream Japanese film criticism in English-language scholarship, focusing on many filmmakers seen as important in Japanese film culture but relatively little discussed in the west. Gibbs sets the canon of Great Japanese Directors to one side and focuses on the work of Kinoshita, Yamamoto, Masumura, Kuroki, Yamada, Higashi, Negishi, Sakamoto, and Nishikawa. Scholars and students of Japanese and East Asian history, film, war and peace studies, and comparative and world history should find this volume of great interest.
Download or read book Persistently Postwar written by Blai Guarné and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.
Download or read book Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan written by J. Victor Koschmann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, Japanese intellectuals believed that world history was moving inexorably toward bourgeois democracy and then socialism. But who would be the agents—the active "subjects"—of that revolution in Japan? Intensely debated at the time, this question of active subjectivity influenced popular ideas about nationalism and social change that still affect Japanese political culture today. In a major contribution to modern Japanese intellectual history, J. Victor Koschmann analyzes the debate over subjectivity. He traces the arguments of intellectuals from various disciplines and political viewpoints, and finds that despite their stress on individual autonomy, they all came to define subjectivity in terms of deterministic historical structures, thus ultimately deferring the possibility of radical change in Japan. Establishing a basis for historical dialogue about democratic revolution, this book will interest anyone concerned with issues of nationalism, postcolonialism, and the formation of identities.
Download or read book Bodies of Memory written by Yoshikuni Igarashi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period. Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.
Download or read book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan written by Justin Jesty and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting the transformational nature of the early postwar, Jesty deftly contrasts it with the relative stasis, consolidation, and homogenization of the 1960s.
Download or read book The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan written by Kirsten Cather Fischer and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. In The Art of Censorship Kirsten Cather traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafu to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience. The work draws on diverse sources, including trial transcripts and verdicts, literary and film theory, legal scholarship, and surrounding debates in artistic journals and the press. By combining a careful analysis of the legal cases with a detailed rendering of cultural, historical, and political contexts, Cather demonstrates how legal arguments are enmeshed in a broader web of cultural forces. She offers an original, interdisciplinary analysis that shows how art and law nurtured one another even as they clashed and demonstrates the dynamic relationship between culture and law, society and politics in postwar Japan. The Art of Censorship will appeal to those interested in literary and visual studies, censorship, and the recent field of affect studies. It will also find a broad readership among cultural historians of the postwar period and fans of the works and genres discussed.
Download or read book Imagining Japan in Post war East Asia written by Paul Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours.
Download or read book Screening Enlightenment written by Hiroshi Kitamura and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the six-and-a-half-year occupation of Japan (1945–1952), U.S. film studios—in close coordination with Douglas MacArthur's Supreme Command for the Allied Powers—launched an ambitious campaign to extend their power and influence in a historically rich but challenging film market. In this far-reaching "enlightenment campaign," Hollywood studios disseminated more than six hundred films to theaters, earned significant profits, and showcased the American way of life as a political, social, and cultural model for the war-shattered Japanese population. In Screening Enlightenment, Hiroshi Kitamura shows how this expansive attempt at cultural globalization helped transform Japan into one of Hollywood's key markets. He also demonstrates the prominent role American cinema played in the "reeducation" and "reorientation" of the Japanese on behalf of the U.S. government. According to Kitamura, Hollywood achieved widespread results by turning to the support of U.S. government and military authorities, which offered privileged deals to American movies while rigorously controlling Japanese and other cinematic products. The presentation of American ideas and values as an emblem of culture, democracy, and sophistication also allowed the U.S. film industry to expand. However, the studios' efforts would not have been nearly as extensive without the Japanese intermediaries and consumers who interestingly served as the program's best publicists. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from studio memos and official documents of the occupation to publicity materials and Japanese fan magazines, Kitamura shows how many Japanese supported Hollywood and became active agents of Americanization. A truly interdisciplinary book that combines U.S. diplomatic and cultural history, film and media studies, and modern Japanese history, Screening Enlightenment offers new insights into the origins of this unique political and cultural transpacific relationship.
Download or read book Imagining Japan in Post war East Asia written by Paul Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours.
Download or read book Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema written by William Carroll and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968, Suzuki Seijun—a low-budget genre filmmaker known for movies including Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, and Youth of the Beast—was unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu Studios. Soon to be known as the “Suzuki Seijun Incident,” his dismissal became a cause for leftist student protestors and a burgeoning group of cinephiles to rally around. His films rapidly emerged as central to debates over politics and aesthetics in Japanese cinema. William Carroll offers a new account of Suzuki’s career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan. Carroll places Suzuki’s work between two factions that claimed him as one of their own after 1968: the New Left and its politicized theoretical practice on one hand, and the apparently apolitical cinephiles and their formalist criticism on the other. He considers how both of these strands of film theory shed light on the distinctive qualities of Suzuki’s films, and he explores how both Suzuki’s works and unheralded Japanese film theorists offer new ways of understanding world cinema. This book presents both a major reinterpretation of Suzuki’s work—which influenced directors such as John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino—and a new lens on postwar Japanese film culture and industry. Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema also includes a complete production history of Suzuki’s filmography along with never-before-discussed information about his unfinished film projects.
Download or read book Cinema of Actuality written by Yuriko Furuhata and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese avant-garde filmmakers intensely explored the shifting role of the image in political activism and media events. Known as the "season of politics," the era was filled with widely covered dramatic events from hijackings and hostage crises to student protests. This season of politics was, Yuriko Furuhata argues, the season of image politics. Well-known directors, including Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Wakamatsu Kōji, and Adachi Masao, appropriated the sensationalized media coverage of current events, turning news stories into material for timely critique and intermedial experimentation. Cinema of Actuality analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers' struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment, one that was increasingly dominated by television. Furuhata demonstrates how avant-garde filmmaking intersected with media history, and how sophisticated debates about film theory emerged out of dialogues with photography, television, and other visual arts.
Download or read book Japan s Postwar written by Michael Lucken and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical surveys of postwar Japan are usually established on the grounds that the era is already over, interpreting "postwar" to be the years directly proceeding World War II. However, the contributors to this book take a unique approach to the concept of the postwar epoch and treat it as a network of historical time frames from the modern period, and connect these time capsules to the war to which they are inextricably linked. The books strength is in its very interdisciplinary approach to examining postwar Japan and as such it includes chapters centred on subjects as diverse as politics, poetry, philosophy, economics and art which serve to fill the blanks in the collective cultural memory that historical narratives leave behind. Originally published in French, this new translation offers the English speaking world important access to a major work on Japan which has been greatly enriched by the translator’s great accuracy and knowledge of English, French and Japanese language, history and culture. Japan's Postwar will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Modern Japanese History as well as historians studying the world after 1945.
Download or read book Politicised Cinema written by Miia Huttunen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politicised Cinema demonstrates how taking a collection of seemingly apolitical films and using them as an instrument for serving explicit political aims can be used as a force for good. Through an analysis of Orient: A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture, a film catalogue published by UNESCO and the BFI in 1959 to promote intercultural understanding between the East and the West, this book argues for the importance of studying the ways the interpretation of films can be guided to serve a specific political agenda, even when the films themselves were originally produced with very different aims in mind. The author focuses on how the catalogue positions culture and its cinematic representations as a marker of difference between the Eastern and Western worlds, and shows that even major cultural conflicts such as the Cold War and the decolonisation process can be reframed in service of UNESCO’s cultural diplomatic agenda. The book explores the ways in which the catalogue of Eastern films deemed suitable for Western audiences became a weapon to fight against prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry in a politicised battle over dismantling the proclaimed link between difference and conflict. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics in visual politics, cinematic international relations, cultural diplomacy, global governance, and international cultural politics, as well as film studies, Asian studies, and cultural studies. In addition, policymakers and practitioners in the fields of cultural diplomacy and cultural policy will find the empirical case study to be of use in practical work.
Download or read book Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema written by Isolde Standish and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study argues that in Japanese popular cinema the 'tragic hero' narrative is an archetypal plot-structure upon which male genres, such as the war-retro and yakuza films are based. Two central questions in relation to these post-war Japanese film genres and historical consciousness are addressed: What is the relationship between history, myth and memory? And how are individual subjectivities defined in relation to the past? The book examines the role of the 'tragic hero' narrative as a figurative structure through which the Japanese people could interpret the events of World War II and defeat, offering spectators an avenue of exculpation from a foreign-imposed sense of guilt. Also considered is the fantasy world of the nagare-mono (drifter) or yakuza film. It is suggested that one of the reasons for the great popularity of these films in the 1960s and 1970s lay in their ability to offer men meanings that could help them understand the contradictions between the reality of their everyday experiences and the ideological construction of masculinity.
Download or read book Re Viewing the Past written by Sean D. OReilly and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-Viewing the Past: The Uses of History in the Cinema of Imperial Japan analyzes the complicated relationship between history films, audiences, reviewers and censors in Japan for the critically important years from 1925-1945. First contextualizing the history of the popular “Bakumatsu” period (1853-1868), the moment of Japan's emergence as a modern nation, Sean O'Reilly paves the way for a reinterpretation of Japanese pre and postwar cinema. Setting a film in the Bakumatsu period offered 'cultural breathing room' to both filmmakers and viewers, offering a cinematic space where apolitical entertainment and now-forbidden themes like romance still reigned. Some filmmakers-and viewers-even conceived of these films as being a form of resistance against Japan's growing militarism. As comparisons between the popularity of such films versus that of state-sponsored propaganda films show, audiences responded enthusiastically to these glimmers of resistance. O'Reilly argues that we should turn our attention to the much more popular films of the time that were major hits with audiences in order to understand what resonated with wartime spectators, and to speculate about why this might have been the case. Including clips of these rare films, a so-far neglected area of Japanese film history is now firmly situated in context to offer a thought-provoking, multidisciplinary approach.
Download or read book Under Foreign Eyes written by James King and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the perception of Japan in the sixty films set there by gaijin (foreigners) —outsiders who almost always do not speak or read Japanese. My area of attention is directed to films depicting post World War II Japan and the Japanese, and, in many cases, films showing how foreigners in the same time frame respond to Japan. Why have a substantial number of films been set there by strangers? As a body of work, what do they tell us about contemporary Japan and about cinema? These films certainly provide a new cultural history of the West’s reaction to Japan, but, even more, they are constructions that demonstrate how the West gazes at Japan. As such, more information can often be derived about the onlookers as on those looked-upon.
Download or read book Divided Lenses written by Michael Berry and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-12-31 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia is the first attempt to explore how the tumultuous years between 1931 and 1953 have been recreated and renegotiated in cinema. This period saw traumatic conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War, and the Korean War, and pivotal events such as the Rape of Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which left a lasting imprint on East Asia and the world. By bringing together a variety of specialists in the cinemas of East Asia and offering divergent yet complementary perspectives, the book explores how the legacies of war have been reimagined through the lens of film. This turbulent era opened with the Mukden Incident of 1931, which signaled a new page in Japanese militaristic aggression in East Asia, and culminated with the Korean War (1950–1953), a protracted conflict that broke out in the wake of Japan's post–World War II withdrawal from Korea. Divided Lenses explores the ways in which events of the intervening decades have continued to shape politics and popular culture throughout East Asia and the world. The essays in part I examine historical trends at work in various "national" cinemas, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the United States. Those in part 2 focus on specific themes present in the cinema portraying this period—such as comfort women in Chinese film, the Nanjing Massacre, or nationalism—and how they have been depicted or renegotiated in contemporary films. Of particular interest are contributions drawing from other forms of screen culture, such as television and video games. Divided Lenses builds on the growing interest in East Asian cinema by examining how these historic conflicts have been imagined, framed, and revisited through the lens of cinema and screen culture. It will interest later generations living in the shadow of these events, as well as students and scholars in the fields of cinema studies, cultural studies, cold war studies, and World War II history.
