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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...
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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 ...
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.
"In the world history of writing, Japan presents an unusually detailed record of transition to literacy. Extant materials attest to the social, cultural, and political contexts and consequences of the advent of writing and reading, from the earliest appearance of imported artifacts with Chinese inscriptions in the first century BCE, through the production of texts within the Japanese archipelago in the fifth century, to the widespread literacies and the simultaneous rise of a full-fledged state in the late seventh and eighth centuries. David B. Lurie explores the complex processes of adaptation and invention that defined the early Japanese transition from orality to textuality. Drawing on ar...
Theorizing Colonial Cinema is a millennial retrospective on the entangled intimacy between film and colonialism from film's global inception to contemporary legacies in and of Asia. The volume engages new perspectives by asking how prior discussions on film form, theory, history, and ideology may be challenged by centering the colonial question rather than relegating it to the periphery. To that end, contributors begin by excavating little-known archives and perspectives from the colonies as a departure from a prevailing focus on Europe's imperial histories and archives about the colonies. The collection pinpoints various forms of devaluation and misrecognition both in and beyond the region that continue to relegate local voices to the margins. This pathbreaking study on global film history advances prior scholarship by bringing together an array of established and new interdisciplinary voices from film studies, Asian studies, and postcolonial studies to consider how the present is continually haunted by the colonial past.
Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.