This book uncovers and explains the ways by which politics is naturalized and denaturalized, and familiarized and de-familiarized through popular media. It explores the tensions between state actors such as censors, politicized and nonpoliticized audiences, and visual media creators, at various points in the history of Japanese visual media. It offers new research on a wide array of visual media texts including classical narrative cinema, television, documentary film, manga, and animated film. It spans the militarized decades of the 1930s and 1940s, through the Asia Pacific War into the present day, and demonstrates how processes of politicization and depoliticization should be understood as part of wider historical developments including Japan’s postwar devastation and poverty, subsequent rapid modernization and urbanization, and the aging population and economic struggles of the twenty-first century.
Introduction JENNIFER COATES AND EYAL BEN- ARI SECTION A Historical contexts 1 A question of form: dissent and the nouvelle vagueISOLDE STANDISH 2 Negotiating sex, the bizarre, and politics: the Abe Sada incident in films KATSUYUKI HIDAKA 3 The four lives of Matsugorō the Lawless: agency, constraint, and what is ""worthy"" of film censorship in trans-war Japan IRIS HAUKAMP 4 Tarzan and Japan: racial portraits of a nation in Boy Kenya DEANNA T. NARDY SECTION B Critique, contestation, and resistance 5 Down in the dumps: Tokyo wastelands and marginalized groups in Japanese film and anime ALISA FREEDMAN 6 Cinema at the edge of the world: visions of precarity in the films of Kumakiri Kazuyoshi LINDSAY NELSON 7 How to remember 3.11? Post-Fukushima documentary and the politics of Tōhoku Documentary Trilogy (2011–2013) RAN MA SECTION C Creating the political subject through media 8 The Japanese self-defence forces and cinematic productions: resonance and reverberation in the normalization of organized state violence ATSUKO FUKUURA AND EYAL BEN-ARI 9 Politicizing the audience? Film fans’ experiences of cinema in the 1960s JENNIFER COATES 10 Fading away from the screen: cinematic responses to queer ageing in contemporary Japanese cinema YUTAKA KUBO
Jennifer Coates is a senior lecturer in Japanese studies in the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. Eyal Ben-Ari is director of the Kinneret Center for Society, Security and Peace, Israel.
