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In Promiscuous 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 Media links the political and the cultural closely in a way that illuminates the nature of twentieth-century Japanese society.
Mark Lewis has been employed all of his working life in the packaging industry in a laboratory environment. He has interests in military history, aviation, competition photography and martial arts. Mark has studied judo, kendo, aikido and is currently studying Tai Chi. As an avid modeller he has written articles and book reviews on aviation and modelling subjects. His main area of interest is WW2 aircraft, which has led to his first book Project Z. By writing the Air War Japan 1946 series he hopes to stimulate interest in Japanese wartime aviation.
The chapters in this volume put a human face on aging issues, and consider multiple dimensions of the aging experience with a focus on Japan.
Writing on Japanese cinema has prioritized aesthetic and cultural difference, and obscured Japan's contribution to the representation of real life in cinema and related forms. Donald Richie, who was instrumental in introducing Japanese cinema to the West, even claimed that Japan did not have a true documentary tradition due to the apparent preference of Japanese audiences for stylisation over realism, a preference that originated from its theatrical tradition. However, a closer look at the history of Japanese documentary and feature film production reveals an emphasis on actuality and everyday life as a major part of Japanese film culture. That 'documentary mode' – crossing genre and mediu...
This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the “beautiful woman” (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868–1912). With origins in the formative period of modern Japanese art and aesthetics, the figure of the bijin appeared across a broad range of visual and textual media: photographs, illustrations, prints, and literary works, as well as fictional, critical, and journalistic writing. It eventually constituted a genre of painting called bijinga (paintings of beauties). Aesthetic Life examines the contributions of writers, artists, scholars, critics, journalists, and politic...
In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats—an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film itself. The world’s very first animated movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world’s richest archives of wartime memory...
After the turn of the 20th century the leadership of Imperial Japan looked at ways to increase the size and economic power of the Empire. These ideals were also in the forefront of the competing European nations and America. Quickly realizing their military forces would require substantial enlargement to apply “adequate political pressure” the Japanese government undertook a major directional change in policy. The Japanese navy and air force were enlarged and reorganized along European lines. These expansionist policies soon raised the ire of the competing nations. Japan had always been looked down upon as a second class nation and this attitude stung many young Japanese officers and bur...
Following the disastrous defeat of the Japanese naval forces at the Battle of Midway the head of the Nakajima Aircraft Company drew up a new battle plan. He clearly understood that the enormous industrial capacity of America would soon make the war unwinnable for Japan if the current war strategy did not change. In August 1943 after consultation with his board and design staff Nakajima approached the Japanese military bureaucracy with a series of radical changes to alter what he felt was the current defeatist Japanese war strategy. With these changes in place Nakajima was confident Japan could regain the superiority in the war. Project Z was born from one of these proposals. Project Z was the codename for the long range heavy bomber project designed to strike back at the American mainland and cripple the American economy. This book describes how the Japanese aircraft industry as a whole attempted to stave off defeat by adopting new technologies and the latest aeronautical developments. In a blending of fact and fiction the air combat scenarios over Japan and the Pacific theatre are described.
Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema’s persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake ...
"This book addresses how gender became a defining category in the political and social modernization of Japan. During the early decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Japanese encountered an idea with great currency in the West: that the social position of women reflected a country’s level of civilization. Although elites initiated dialogue out of concern for their country’s reputation internationally, the conversation soon moved to a new public sphere where individuals engaged in a wide-ranging debate about women’s roles and rights. By examining these debates throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Marnie S. Anderson argues that shifts in the gender system led to contradictory consequ...