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"Mass media and culture Japan History 20th century."
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Writing technology in Meiji Japan : a media history of modern Japanese literature and visual culture
\"Boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. This book represents the first systematic study of the ways in which media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late 19th to early 20th century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Promiscuous Media
InPromiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation of Russian and British film theory as well as American film genres and techniques. Hori provides a range of examples that illustrate how maternal melodrama and animated features, akin to those popularized by Disney, were adopted wholesale by Japanese filmmakers.
Emperor Hirohito's image, Hori argues, was inseparable from the development of mass media; he was the first emperor whose public appearances were covered by media ranging from postcards to radio broadcasts. Worship of the emperor through viewing his image, Hori shows, taught the Japanese people how to look at images and primed their enjoyment of early animation and documentary films alike.Promiscuous Medialinks the political and the cultural closely in a way that illuminates the nature of twentieth-century Japanese society.
eBook
Primitive selves
This remarkable book examines the complex history of Japanese colonial and postcolonial interactions with Korea, particularly in matters of cultural policy. E. Taylor Atkins focuses on past and present Japanese fascination with Korean culture as he reassesses colonial anthropology, heritage curation, cultural policy, and Korean performance art in Japanese mass media culture. Atkins challenges the prevailing view that imperial Japan demonstrated contempt for Koreans through suppression of Korean culture. In his analysis, the Japanese preoccupation with Koreana provided the empire with a poignant vision of its own past, now lost--including communal living and social solidarity--which then allowed Japanese to grieve for their former selves. At the same time, the specific objects of Japan's gaze--folk theater, dances, shamanism, music, and material heritage--became emblems of national identity in postcolonial Korea.
eBook
Fandom Unbound
In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. This timely volume investigates how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all, as this collection shows, is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. In this collection of essays, Japanese and American scholars offer richly detailed descriptions of how this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, this groundbreaking collection provides fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
eBook
Visions of Japanese Modernity
Japan has done marvelous things with cinema, giving the world the likes of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. But cinema did not arrive in Japan fully formed at the end of the nineteenth century, nor was it simply adopted into an ages-old culture. Aaron Gerow explores the processes by which film was defined, transformed, and adapted during its first three decades in Japan. He focuses in particular on how one trend in criticism, the Pure Film Movement, changed not only the way films were made, but also how they were conceived. Looking closely at the work of critics, theorists, intellectuals, benshi artists, educators, police, and censors, Gerow finds that this trend established a way of thinking about cinema that would reign in Japan for much of the twentieth century.
eBook
Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries
Drawing on first-hand materials collected from the Chinese and Japanese literature as well as interviews with more than twenty filmmakers and scholars Kinnia Shuk-ting Yau provides a solid historical account of the complex interactions between Japanese and Hong Kong film industries from the 1930s to 1970s.
The author describes in detail how Japan’s efforts during the 1930s and 1940s to produce a \"Greater East Asian cinema\" led to many different kinds of collaborations between the filmmakers from China, Hong Kong and Japan, and how such development had laid the foundation for more exchanges between the cinemas in the post-war period. The period covered by the book is the least understood period of the East Asian film history. Filling the gaps surrounding one of the most important but least understood periods of Asian film history this books discusses facts and resources once obscured by controversial issues related to wartime affairs with new insights and perspectives.
This book is an invaluable source of information for understanding how the current East Asian film networks came into existence by looking beyond conventional single-case studies and adopting a transnational perspective in tracing the connections between different film industries.
Dr. YAU Shuk-ting, Kinnia is Associate Professor at the Department of Japanese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
1. Hong Kong and Japanese Cinemas before and during Wartime 2. Connection between Chinese and Japanese Cinemas Initiated by Zhonghua Dianying 3. Immediate Causes of Hong Kong-Japan Collaboration 4. The Golden Age of Hong Kong-Japan Collaboration. Conclusion
eBook
Preparing the People for Mass Clemency: The 1956 Japanese War Crimes Trials in Shenyang and Taiyuan
The lack of official government attention to Japanese war crimes during the Mao years has been widely acknowledged. Yet in the summer of 1956, years of preparatory work by Zhou Enlai culminated in the little-known and summarily dismissed trials of 1,062 self-confessed Japanese war criminals in Shenyang and Taiyuan. The extraordinarily lenient sentences given to 45 of the worst offenders – and wholesale pardons of 1,017 – were prompted by larger geopolitical considerations that effectively hamstrung PRC authorities from bringing the trials into closer alignment with previous ones in Europe and Japan. Zhou's determination to adopt a “policy of leniency” towards the Japanese prisoners, however, was sorely at odds with the sentiments of the general public. The need to prepare the people for a counterintuitive mass clemency saw a sudden and drastic shift in media discourse in 1954, followed by a series of remarkable cultural and intellectual campaigns that were designed to persuade the Chinese people that they should henceforth let bygones be bygones.
Journal Article
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.
Journal Article
Envisioning Asia
The birth of cinema coincides with the beginnings of U.S. expansion overseas, and the classic Hollywood era coincides with the rise of the United States as a global superpower. In Envisioning Asia, Jeanette Roan argues that throughout this period, the cinema's function as a form of virtual travel, coupled with its purported \"authenticity,\" served to advance America's shifting interests in Asia. Its ability to fulfill this imperial role depended, however, not only on the cinematic representations themselves but on the marketing of the films' production histories—and, in particular, their use of Asian locations. Roan demonstrates this point in relation to a wide range of productions, offering an engaging and useful survey of a largely neglected body of film. Not only that, by focusing on the material practices involved in shooting films on location—that is, the actual travels, negotiations, and labor of making a film—she moves beyond formal analysis to produce a richly detailed history of American interests, attitudes, and cultural practices during the first half of the twentieth century.
eBook
Dying to Tell: Sexuality and Suicide in Imperial Japan
Robertson discusses the common sense or dominant notion in Japan past and present about the dichotomous constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality. In imperial Japan, lesbian double suicides and attempted suicides were predicated on a revolt against the normalizing functions of tradition as sanctioned by the civil code.
Journal Article