Japanese

Cinema in the
Digital Age
Nobody Knows (Daremo shiranai, 2004, Kore’eda Hirokazu)
 Japanese
Cinema in the
Digital Age

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS

honolulu
© 2012 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12    6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo.
Japanese cinema in the digital age /
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8248-3594-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—Japan. 2. Digital cinematography—
Japan. 3. Motion picture industry—Japan. I. Title.
PN1993.5.J3W327 2012
791.430952—dc23

2011052145

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-

free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and
durability­of the Council on Library Resources.

Designed by Julie Matsuo-Chun

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Note on Romanization  xi
Introduction 1

1.  New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema  28

2. Digital Authenticity 51
3.  The Rise of “Personal” Animation  74
4.  Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema  97
5.  Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination  114

Conclusion 131
Notes 141
Bibliography 161
Index 171
 Acknowledgments

This book project started with my teach-

ing at Carleton University. The topics emerged in classroom discussions with
my students and conversations with my colleagues. I express my thanks to
them all. I am especially grateful to my colleague André Loiselle throughout
those years. My discussions with André, a specialist on Canadian horror film,
have enabled me to grasp the attraction and depth of such genre films. My
former students Murray Leeder and Christopher Rohde gave insightful input
to this book as well.
My current book received benefit from more than a few fellowships.
When I first arrived at Ottawa, Canada’s capital, I complained about the long
winter, but I am now grateful for the nation’s financial support for academics,
particularly the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The fellowship not only provided sufficient funding for my research, but its
rigorous assessment aided my planning in bringing this project to completion.
Many of my colleagues at Carleton supported me during the application pro-
cess: Charles O’Brien, Carol Payne, Ming Tiampo, William Echard, Lauralee
Raffelsieper, and Darlene Gilson. Andrea Fowler looked after me through-
out the fellowship period with her swift work on monetary issues. Carleton
University also supported me with a half-year teaching release by granting

vii
me the Research Achievement Awards. I thank the faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences, especially John Osborne, for that generosity. Finally, the one-year
fellowship from the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in
Kyoto, Japan, helped me to turn this book into a Japanese version. My stay in
Japan from 2010 to 2011 expedited the translation process, and the Japanese
edition was published unexpectedly prior to this current English edition in
December 2010 by Nagoya University Press. I deeply appreciate my Japanese
editor Tachibana Sogo’s advice and continuous support. Since I have already
made another set of acknowledgments for people involved with the Japanese
version, I will not repeat it here.
In the process of producing Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age, I have pub-
lished sections of this book in some journals and an anthology. I want to
thank the editors of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, William C. Wees,
Charles Acland, and Catherine Russell, and the outstanding contributors for
the issue I guest edited, William Gardner, Aaron Gerow, and Daisuke Miyao.
I am very honored that the late film scholar, Keiko McDonald, invited me to
contribute to her special issue of Post Script. Jinhee Choi and I coedited our
anthology, Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema for Hong
Kong University Press. My interest in J-horror was considerably enlarged
from this experience. I thank Jinhee for her patience and friendship, and my
gratitude also goes to other contributors for their thoughtful works. The press
editor for the anthology, Michael Duckworth, was steadfast with his encour-
agement. The chapter on transnational cinema owes a great deal to a work-
shop on transnational Asian cinemas organized by Tonglin Lu and Meaghan
Morris. The attendees at the workshop, including Chris Berry, Catherine
Russell, and Jung-Bong Choi, offered me productive suggestions for revision.
This book would never have been possible without in-person dialogues
with filmmakers. I started interviewing directors in 2006, and regrettably
I could not include all of these valuable conversations in this edition. My
gratitude goes to Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Shimizu Takashi, Kore’eda Hirokazu,
Kawase Naomi, Yamamura Koji, Shinkai Makoto, Matsue Tetsuaki,
Terada Yasunori, Tezuka Yoshiharu, Kato Harue, Ishibashi Yoshimasa, and
Yokohama Satoko. Meeting with actual filmmakers, intriguingly, made me a
very sympathetic viewer of their work, but not only that, I was able to sense
how dramatically digital technology has been changing their filmmaking pro-
cess. In conducting a number of interviews, my good friend Kawaguchi Misa
always welcomed me to stay with her in Tokyo.
Many thanks go to Patricia Crosby, my editor. Your constant support
has led me to this book. Also, I would like to thank from my heart Carole
Cavanaugh and Darrell William Davis for their helpful suggestions for

viii   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
revision.­Darrell’s book, East Asian Screen Industries, coauthored by Emilie
Yueh-yu Yeh, was particularly beneficial, a benchmark work in film studies.
Along the same line, Abé Mark Nornes’ work on postwar documentary film,
Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary, was indis-
pensable in my writing of chapter 2. Simon Nantais’ and Lee S. Motteler’s as-
sistance in editing my writing was invaluable. Last but not least, my love and
gratitude go to Daniel Marciano, who is always my first reader and best critic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS     ix
 Note on Romanization

Regarding Japanese language expres-

sions, the macron symbol that typically indicates long vowels in Romanized
Japanese words has been omitted for the sake of consistency. The practice
of writing Japanese names with the family name preceding the given name
has been followed here, except for Japanese who reside and publish their
work outside Japan. Their given name appears first, as in my own case.
The same practice applies to names in the notes. Film titles are written in
English translation first followed by the original language, production year,
and director’s name. All title translations are based on the Internet Movie
Database, at www.imdb.com, unless otherwise indicated (i.e., author’s trans-
lation). All other Japanese-to-English translations are the author’s, unless
noted otherwise.­

xi
 Introduction

The notion of “global cinema” has

been changing dramatically in the last two decades due to the increasing
ubiquity­of digital technology. The cinematic event has been steadily relocated
from the theater to the home, and the act of viewing has thus also been trans-
formed from a collective experience to an individual one. Moreover, the once
dominant flow of movie screen culture, historically centered in Hollywood,
has been dispersed with the diversity of cinematic commodities such as DVDs
or Blu-ray Disc as well as Internet-enabled distribution. The directions of that
cultural flow have become more variegated and even reversed, as regional
genres such as anime and J-horror (Japanese horror films) gain momentum
across global markets. While genre films have often been considered as alter-
native cinema or B movies and are usually neglected by international festivals
and prestigious film awards, regional genres have become increasingly popu-
lar in contemporary Japan and elsewhere.
Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age investigates how the new media, pri-
marily computer and digital technologies, have impacted the flow of cinema
culture, especially in the global commodification of such regional genre films.
Within these technological advances and the new cinematic flow, contempo-
rary cinemas often express the transnational as an object of desire, a desire­

1
that is nonetheless inseparable from national identity. Most of the films that
succeed in the global market manage to cross the boundaries between cul-
tural particularity and universality. For example, a frequent plot device in
J-horror is ghostly visitations through videotapes, cell phones, or computers.
These information technologies reproduce the individual scale of the specta-
tor’s local, small-screen experience, but their now ubiquitous presence reso-
nates with the contemporary global audience. This book attempts to unravel
Japan’s conflicting desires toward the transnational stages of culture, market-
ing, and viewership, which are in conspicuous play in regional film genres. If
the transnational is defined as “the global forces that link people or institu-
tions across nations,” many recent Japanese films ought to be considered as
transnational.1 And, indeed, many Japanese films are produced with multina-
tional financing (The Grudge, 2004, Shimizu Takashi, Japan/United States/
Germany), and some use only the Korean language despite the fact that the
majority of the cast is Japanese (The Hotel Venus, 2004, Takahata Hideta).
Some are shot entirely abroad, such as in the United States (Brother, 2000,
Kitano Takeshi) or in Thailand (Last Life in the Universe, 2003, and Invisible
Waves, 2006, both directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang). But I find myself ask-
ing, What makes these films transnational? In other words, do the logistics of
those films’ productions add up to a transnational identity? Might their multi-
national elements—such as the address to a diasporic Korean ethnic subject in
the film Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004, Sai Yoichi)—be better understood
within the particular national framework of Japanese exceptionalism among
Asian countries, as suggested in Koichi Iwabuchi’s work on Japanese trans-
nationalism? Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age explores the strategic rationale
behind the transnational cinema in both the film industry and recent critical
paradigms.

Questioning Transnationalism
Iwabuchi’s work, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism, is central to my book’s conceptual groundwork. The signifi-
cance of his work is his perception that Japanese popular culture’s encounters
with other Asian countries in the 1990s have reconfigured the flow of global
culture away from the normative center in “the West” or America toward
Asia.2 Iwabuchi also depicts the state of the mediascape between Asian na-
tions by deploying the marketing term “glocalization,” referring to “a global
strategy, which does not seek to impose a standard product or image, but in-
stead is tailored to the demands of the local market.”3 Through such examples
as the Taiwanese reception of Japanese television dramas and the Japanese

2   Introduction
obsession with the Singaporean singer Dick Lee or Hong Kong stars such as
Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau, Kaneshiro Takeshi, and the late Leslie Cheung,
Iwabuchi analyzes how various Asian nations’ popular culture negotiates the
national divide between Japan and other Asian countries. In those analyses,
Iwabuchi underscores that “hybridization” of modern Japan’s national iden-
tity is not imagined simply within the dichotomous relation of “the West” and
Japan but in the historically sustained “asymmetrical totalizing triad between
‘Asia,’ ‘the West,’ and ‘Japan.’”4 My own work, Japanese Cinema in the Digital
Age, builds on the concept of a recentered mediascape in global culture. My
focus is on the negotiations in the name of “glocalization,” especially in the
production, distribution, consumption, and representations of Japanese pop-
ular cinema from the 1990s through the 2000s.
While my book shares those aspects with Recentering Globalization, it
also presents critical differences, which stem from the fact that we view “the
transnational” in different ways. Iwabuchi situates the recent emergence of
Japan’s transnational culture against the historical backdrop of Japanese pan-
Asianism,­a continuity stretching across prewar nationalism to the economic
expansion in the 1970s to the current era of late capitalism. Since the late
1980s, various social facts—such as the collapse of the bubble economy in
Japan, the worldwide reconstruction of the political and economic order after­
the end of the Cold War, and the radical development in Asian countries’
economies—led Japanese culture to pursue reconciliation with the East in
the 1990s.5 With this historical viewpoint, he describes the new cultural con-
dition and defines “transnational” as a cultural flow by adopting the social
anthropologist Ulf Hannerz’s idea of the transnational and the social-cultural­
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “disjuncture” in the global
cultural economy. Iwabuchi writes, “The intricacy and disjunctiveness of
emerging­intra-Asian popular cultural flows under globalizing forces are better
expressed by the term transnational, as opposed to international or global, for a
variety of reasons. . . . The term transnational is ‘more humble, and often a
more adequate label for phenomena which can be of quite variable scale and
distribution’ than the term global, which sounds too all-inclusive and decon-
textualized.”6 The critical point in his definition of “transnational” is that he
views it as a cultural flow of information and images. For Iwabuchi, this cul-
tural phenomenon is understood as the Japanese popular culture’s encounter
or reencounter with other Asian countries, after the cultural introversion of the
postwar period. Where he and I part company is that I see greater evidence
of discontinuity in transnational trends. In Iwabuchi’s view, national culture
remains largely intact despite its flow across borders and temporalities. On
the contrary, I conceive the transnational as the negation of the national, as

Introduction     3
one can see in the regular usage of political and economic acronyms such as
NGO (nongovernmental organization) or TNC (transnational corporation).
I think the challenge that the transnational poses vis-à-vis culture is best il-
lustrated in the increasing prevalence of such entities as NGOs and TNCs. Let
us consider how the term “TNC” is defined in general. If we accept the defini-
tion of TNC by economists Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal,
who have long been asserting the primacy of the TNC since the early 1990s,
there are three central aspects that are usually at play. First, the TNC pursues
economic efficiency or productivity at the global level. It not only depends
on the profit of international trades but generates profit directly in various
nations or regions. Second, the TNC has no clear division between so-called
head offices and branches in sharing business knowledge and organizational
infrastructure. In other words, the TNC avoids treating “branches” simply as
passive objects for investment. Finally, the TNC has flexibility in its business
strategy to negotiate effectively and deal with various regional needs.7 What is
new is the indeterminability of cultural subjects, as the organizing principal of
the nation is diminished in the transnational flow of capital. So I differ from
Iwabuchi’s view that since culture has always been migratory, it necessarily
follows that transnationalism has historical continuity. I do not necessarily
believe that the nation ceases to be operative, figuratively and literally. This
book explores new possibilities of viewing culture by foregrounding the role
of transnationalism in current cinema and image media, such as the multi-
plicity of new distribution channels from digital technology.
The confusion over “the transnational” is rather conspicuous in various
academic writings, such as work on immigration in social science. While so-
ciologists Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald indicate that “connectivity”
between source, a migrating subject, and his or her destination points is an
inherent aspect of the migration phenomenon, they rouse our attention to
“recent social scientists [who] are looking for new ways to think about the
connections between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ as evidenced by the interest in the
many things called transnational.”8 Waldinger and Fitzgerald cast dual ob-
jections toward the current tendency among social scientists: First, many of
them dichotomize the “transnational” experience from “assimilation”; and
second, they use the term “transnational” in opposition to “those by-products
of globalization denoted by the concept of ‘transnational civil society’ and
its related manifestations.”9 Waldinger and Fitzgerald view the treatment of
assimilation and transnationalism as polar opposites to be fundamentally mis-
taken.10 The problem originates in the double meanings of the terms. While
“assimilation” is in general defined as the reduction of ethnic difference within
a nation-state, it can also be considered as “the making of difference between

4   Introduction
national peoples.”11 In other words, they view the sociology of assimilation as
an ideology that obscures the state’s coercive forces to sustain a nation-state
society by excluding outsiders. Likewise, they explicate the contradiction re-
garding transnationalism as follows: “The relevant forms of social action [for
the conventional usage of transnationalism] do not transcend difference but
rather are directed entirely toward specific places or groups.”12
This formative sociological dichotomy has existed for much longer than
one might think. The term “transnationalism” allegedly originated from
Randolph Bourne, a progressive writer and public intellectual in the 1910s.
Following the philosopher Horace Kallen’s 1915 article, “Democracy versus
the Melting-Pot” and its assertion of multiculturalism, Bourne published
his own article in The Atlantic Monthly on February 25, 1916, titled “Trans-
National America.”13 In the article, Bourne argued that the United States
should abandon Anglo-Saxonism, a policy that forces various immigrants to
assimilate to the dominant Anglo-American culture, and instead accommo-
date immigrant cultures into a “cosmopolitan America.” Like Kallen, Bourne
rejects the theory of “a melting pot” and declares that immigrants from
around the world living in the United States neither completely disconnect
themselves from their own cultures and mother tongues nor monolithically
assimilate in the dominant Anglophone culture. He also asserts that view-
ing the particular assimilation as “Americanization” is simply false. Bourne
promotes “trans-national spirit” as an alternative concept, and indicates that
the new U.S. direction must be led by the new cosmopolitan ideal. He writes:
“The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into
some homogeneous Americanism, but have remained distinct but cooperat-
ing to the greater glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the na-
tive ‘Americanism’ around them.”14 We must pay attention, however, to his
discourse’s temporal and spatial specificity, namely that it was published just
before the U.S. decision to enter World War I, which ended a long period of
isolationism supported by the Monroe Doctrine. Neither of the terms “trans-
national” nor “transnationalism” introduced in his article transcends the ac-
tual notion of nation or nationality, and they are rather presented as ideal
concepts for the formation of the nation-state, especially in the United States.
In Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age, I avoid viewing the historically am-
biguous term “transnational” as a self-evident concept and instead analyze
how it has been used in contemporary cinematic discourses. If the new global
cultural economy can be seen as “a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order
that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery
models”15 as Appadurai indicates, what kinds of meaning accrue from the
so-called transnational cinema in such a disjunctive economy? And if the new

Introduction     5
cultural economy is inseparable from historicity, cultural unevenness, vari-
ous localities, and people’s “imagined world,”16 how do identity politics func-
tion behind such a contradictory cultural subject as Japanese cinema, pro-
nounced as transnational? Likewise toward the transnational itself, this book
also avoids viewing “Japanese cinema” as a priori connected with Japan, the
Japanese, or Japanese culture, or even equating it with films made in Japan,
but rather critically analyzes how the cinema is discursively constructed and
framed. The difficulty of discussing the notion of cinema and other visual
media in the age of cultural globalization is rooted in the inherent contradic-
tion of such fundamental things as “culture.” As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto writes,
“the notion of culture, which, on one hand, functions as code word for the
national and, on the other, conceals the production of unevenness.”17
From this perspective, we might consider how the notion of transnation-
alism or transnational culture may be problematic as reified depictions of cul-
tural neutrality and statelessness. Iwabuchi offers the expression “culturally
odorless”18 in place of the term “culturally neutral,” which was coined by the
economists Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus for explaining the characteristic
of Japanese consumer technologies.19 Then, Iwabuchi suggests that the ex-
pression is equivalent to “mukokuseki (stateless),”20 elucidating it as follows:
“The characters of Japanese animation and computer games for the most
part do not look ‘Japanese.’ Such non-Japaneseness is called mukokuseki, liter-
ally meaning ‘something or someone lacking any nationality,’ but also imply-
ing the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a context, which does
not imprint a particular culture or country with these features.”21 Iwabuchi
notes that “while ‘odor,’ or ‘smell,’ seems to be a natural phenomenon, the
perceived attraction of any particular odor is, in fact, closely associated with
the historical and social construction of various kinds of hierarchies such as
class, ethnicity, and gender.”22 If, as he explains, the usage of “odor” is cultur-
ally specific in Japan, how does it function in the global cultural system, since
the term has an explicit connotation only working in the Japanese cultural
sphere? For that matter, mukokuseki in particular carries rather unique cultural
associations with the nation and the Other—associations that are historically
opposed to transnationalism.
As Iwabuchi mentions, the term mukokuseki was first used in the early
1960s as a new film genre, Nikkatsu mukokuseki action.23 As the oldest film
studio, Nikkatsu was established by integrating four smaller film compa-
nies in 1912, which later suspended production as the distribution company
Daiei absorbed Nikkatsu under the wartime governmental policy in 1942.
It was not until 1954 that Nikkatsu finally resumed film production. Due to
the Five-Company Agreement (gosha-kyotei)—a corporate trust consisting

6   Introduction
of Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Shin-Toho, and Toei—Nikkatsu faced difficulties
enticing­popular stars from those companies. Consequently, it had to discover
and promote new faces, such as the stars of the so-called Nikkatsu Diamond
Line: Ishihara Yujiro, Kobayashi Akira, Akagi Kei’ichiro, Wada Koji, among
others. Nikkatsu first advanced an action film genre with those male stars
from the late 1950s, and the term mukokuseki was popularized with some
series­in the action genre—the wataridori series (literally a “migratory bird,”
but it was known as “out-of-towner” series, 1959–1961) and the nagaremono
series (drifter series, 1960–1961), in which Kobayashi Akira took the leading
role. Going by the nickname of Maitogai (mighty guy), Kobayashi’s two film
series were enormously popular and distributed to Nikkatsu theaters at the
rate of one a month. The films embraced many foreign icons associated with
American Westerns and a burgeoning fad in collecting gun replicas, likely
results of being subjected to postwar American culture. Kobayashi often ap-
peared on horseback or in a horse-drawn carriage with a ten-gallon hat and
a gun, which was an absurd cultural mismatch since the films were typically
set in Japan. While the diegetic space was often located in the rustic Japanese
countryside, the films offered elaborately staged cabaret sequences with top-
class dancers displaying Hollywood-style choreography.
Explaining the action genre in the history of Japanese cinema, the con-
temporary film critic Kishi Matsuo wrote a blistering critique in a 1961 article:

Recent Nikkatsu films have no shame. They present a Western-like

town in a wasteland, which is somewhere in Japan. Kobayashi
Akira, Shihido Jo, and Nitani Hideaki act as drifters [nagare-
mono], out-of-towners [wataridori], good-for-nothing fellows
[rokudenashiyaro],­or killers [koroshiya], and shoot their guns openly
in broad daylight as they laugh at the current hopeless police system.
This genre’s recent popularity will likely continue despite critics
denigrating them as “mukokuseki films.”24

What emerges from Kishi’s critical discourse is that the term mukokuseki
was not a marketing strategy coined by the production studios or distribu-
tors but rather a term spread through the pages of film criticism at that time.
Another significant aspect is that contemporary audiences did not receive
those films as literally mukokuseki but accepted the estranged scenery as part
of Japan, thereby connecting the expression to the mismatched quality in the
narrative space of the films.
The mismatch in the mukokuseki films—of statelessness, but at once
belonging­to Japan—becomes clear by carefully examining the actual film

Introduction     7
series. There are nine films in the wataridori series, from The Rambling Guitarist
(Gita o motta wataridori, 1959) to The Guitarist, Returning Home (Wataridori
kokyo­e kaeru, 1962). The “mighty-guy” Kobayashi goes abroad only once—
to Bangkok and Hong Kong in The Guitarist, Plowing the Waves (Hatou o
koeru wataridori,­1961)—and instead travels all of Japan from Hakodate in
the north to Miyazaki Prefecture in the south. The geographical mapping in
the film series reveals the social and cultural ideology of that era—a time
of financial­restrictions­and when the government regulated overseas travel.
It was extremely difficult for the Japanese to travel abroad in the 1950s and
early 1960s. On April 1, 1963, one year after the end of Kobayashi’s two
series, the Japanese government for the first time allowed Japanese business-
men to travel strictly for business purposes, and then in 1964 the government
officially gave all citizens permission to go abroad as tourists. However, due
to the low exchange rate of the Japanese yen and the expensive airline tick-
ets in the 1960s, the number of tourists abroad did not start to increase until
the 1970s, when the yen’s value soared. Japanese consumers’ longing toward
traveling abroad in the 1950s and 1960s was indeed reified into the popu-
lar culture in general, not only cinema. The long-lasting television program,
Kaoru Kanetaka’s “World around Us” (Kanetaka Kaoru sekai no tabi, KTR/TBS,
December 13, 1959, to September 30, 1990) lured viewers with this longing
away from Nikkatsu mukokuseki action films. Journalist Kanetaka, fluent
in English, served as producer, director, and reporter for the program and
visited a number of countries. Although this television program actually re-
vealed many areas abroad, which differed significantly from the mukokuseki
films simulating “foreignness” in Japan, both became extremely successful
products­in 1960s’ Japanese popular culture.25 Both texts fully shared the con-
temporary viewers’ desire and provided, in a way, a representation of the
encounter between the desired “foreignness”­and the Japanese.
The historical context of post-occupation’s Japan is indispensable for un-
derstanding the mukokuseki films, especially its connection with “America” as
image through television. Sociologist Yoshimi Shun’ya asserts that a duality
of “Americas” has been sustained since post-occupation Japan. He writes,

In the late 1950s, the dual “Americas” gradually appeared in Japan.

The one is “America” as image, introduced and consumed via
media, and the imaged “America” put historical scenery of the oc-
cupation period such as military bases and brothels for GIs as its
background. The other is “America” as “violence.” The association
with violence is reified in the actual military bases, which have been
exposed to censure due to widespread resentment among Japanese

8   Introduction
 towards the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (1960). While those dual
“Americas” are indeed two sides of the same coin, they were sepa-
rated during the period of Japan’s economic miracle in the 1960s
and 1970s, so that they now sustain each imaginary reality as if they
are not connected with each other at all.26

Yoshimi also highlights that the introduction of television played a crucial

role in mediating the imaged version of “America.” When Japanese television
culture began in 1953, with the start of NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai, Japan
Broadcasting Corporation), programs were limited to news and sports such as
sumo, pro-wrestling matches, and baseball games. Although the television set
itself was still quite expensive for a regular household in the 1950s, viewership
finally reached saturation levels with the televised wedding of Crown Prince
Akihito in 1959 (over 2 million televisions were sold by that year).27 Many
U.S. television drama series were adapted in the formative period of Japanese
television, especially Western drama series such as Buffalo Bill Jr. (U.S. in
1955; Japan NTV in 1957), Laramie (U.S. NBC in 1959–1963; Japan NET
in 1960–1963), and Rawhide (U.S. CBS in 1959–1965; Japan NET in 1959–
1965). In the late 1950s, while the memory of the U.S. occupation had been
gradually withering in Japan, the Japanese nonetheless kept their relationship
with America through consuming its televised images. In other words, it can
be argued that these televised American images ignited the boom of Nikkatsu
mukokuseki films.28
Let us return to the terms “culturally odorless” and “mukokuseki,” which
Iwabuchi uses to situate the transnational character of the 1990s Japanese
popular culture. As we historically contextualize mukokuseki, it reveals that
the term does not signify the erasure of racial or ethnic markings, nor does
it originate­as a business strategy to depict characters without distinct Asian
features in anime.29 I find a similar discrepancy between the term “cultur-
ally odorless” and Iwabuchi’s rationale toward it. For instance, the recently
popular “Lohas (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) cinema” in Japan has
served as a marketing term for specifically targeted consumers who are alert
to health and environmental issues. The films link those issues to travel and
transnational culture for a mostly female audience demographic in Japan.
A number of films, such as Kamome Diner (Kamome shokudo, 2006, Ogigami
Naoko), Glasses (Megane, 2007, Ogigami Naoko), Pool (Puru, 2009, Omori
Mika), and Honokaa Boy (Honokaa boi, 2009, dir. Sanada Atsuhi), foreground
the concept of Lohas, which was introduced in the mid-2000s via self-help
discourses in television and print media. While Ogigami’s Kamome Diner
captures Japanese women (Kobayashi Satomi, Katagiri Hairi, and Motai

Introduction     9
Masako) opening their own restaurant in Helsinki, Finland, and serving
Japanese “soul food” rice balls (onigiri), another Ogigami film, Glasses, de-
picts the transformation of a woman’s state of mind from fatigue with her
own life in Tokyo to building her self-confidence through her stay at a beach
inn, Hamada, on a remote southern island (shot in Yoronjima, Kagoshima
Prefecture, but unrevealed in the film). In Pool, the director Omori recasts
many of the same actors from Ogigami’s films and depicts the quiet life of the
Japanese migrants in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The actress Kobayashi Satomi
takes a leading role in the film as an owner of a chic and well-maintained inn
with a small swimming pool. The location of the film Honokaa Boy is in the ac-
tual area of the Hawaiian Islands: Honoka‘a, a town on the island of Hawai‘i
with only about two thousand residents, a place where many Japanese immi-
grated and still live. The film portrays a heartwarming relationship between
the elderly Japanese “Bee” (Baisho Chieko) and a newly arrived youth Leo
(Okada Masaki), working as an assistant projectionist, and depicts how he
gradually grows up, full of affection among Honoka‘a’s people. Those films’
casts are almost all Japanese, can speak foreign languages fluently (Finnish
in Kamome, Thai in Pool, and English in Honokaa), and have no resemblance
to longstanding Japanese stereotypes: They carry no expensive cameras; they
never bow; and most eschew wearing glasses (though the cast in Glasses is the
exception). So, while the Lohas films might emphasize the Japanese charac-
ters’ assimilation, differences­from the Others in their foreign countries are
diminished. In other words, one may view this assimilation as a reified repre-
sentation of cultural odorlessness. This assimilation in Lohas and mukokuseki
cinemas, however, shares the contemporary cultural “synesthesia,”30 borrow-
ing Appadurai’s term, which derives from the glocal strategy, targeted at local
markets and influenced by the ideology of global consumer culture.
Iwabuchi offers the paradigm shift in theory as one of the larger con-
texts for those terms and Japan’s transnationalism, more specifically citing the
swing from criticism on Americanization or cultural imperialism to cultural
globalization.31 In Recentering Globalization, Iwabuchi literally succeeds in pre-
senting a recentered formation of culture’s circulations by examining Japanese
media culture in East/Southeast Asian countries and vice versa, in which
Western or American culture is indeed no longer the driving force. While he
highlights the spread of Japanese popular culture in the Asian region, tracing
it to a resurgence of expansionist nationalism in Japan’s desire to reconnect
with Asia economically, he completely suppresses the culture’s connection
with the West or more specifically the United States. As we can see in the
cases of Lohas and mukokuseki films, however, the relation between cinema
and cultural syaesthesia is neither monolithic nor stationary. The mukokuseki

10   Introduction
films, on the one hand, present an imagined spatial formation, one following
closely the pattern of Kobayashi Akira’s ethnoscape, to borrow Appadurai’s
terminology for globalization, the migratory figure moving from the center
(the capital Tokyo) to the periphery (domestic frontier towns). The Lohas
films, on the other hand, represent global mapping from a reference point
centered in Japan, in which those Japanese travelers go to areas that are re-
mote from the political and financial centers or take up residence in “foreign”
welfare states. The difference in their scales of movement is influenced by the
dissimilar financescape of each historical period (the yen had weakened against
the dollar in the 1950s and 1960s, and it became stronger in the 1980s). If we
focus on the ideoscape in each cinema, however, we realize that Iwabuchi’s
idea of expansionist nationalism in Japan inspiring the connection with Asia
is simply a part of cultural multiplicity, and the idea conceals the ever-present
unevenness in a culture’s production and consumption.
For instance, the mukokuseki films share the ideoscape of Western cow-
boys in the American television programs from the 1950s and 1960s. Both
film historians Watanabe Takenobu and Itakura Fumiaki indicate the signifi-
cance of mythic individualism in those Nikkatsu mukokuseki action films, and
that the genre’s characteristic becomes more visible through comparing it with
the subsequent genre yakuza films (ninkyo eiga), which were mainly produced
in the 1960s and 1970s at Toei studios. Although the two film genres deploy
common themes and icons, such as male bonding, revenge, and endless kill-
ings with guns and swords, the hero’s outlook on life and death or his desire
toward assimilation within his own community in Toei ninkyo films—a hero
often seeks redemption with his group by sacrificing his own life at the end—
differs from the ethos of individualism or rootlessness in mukokuseki action
films.
In the case of Lohas cinema, it is much easier to reveal the cinema’s
ideoscape, which often determines a sense of value in a diegetic space. As The
New York Times’ article explains, the term was coined in the early 2000s as a
marketing brand to encapsulate consumers with keen interests in health and
environmental issues. In her 2003 article amusingly titled “Business: They
Care about the World (and They Shop, Too),” The New York Times’ corre-
spondent Amy Cortese writes, “The name [Lohas] was coined a few years
ago by marketers trying to define what they regarded as a growing oppor-
tunity for products and services that appeal to a certain type of consumer.
It may be the biggest market you have never heard of, encompassing things
like organic foods, energy-efficient appliances and solar panels as well as al-
ternative medicine, yoga tapes and eco-tourism.”32 In other words, the core
concept of the Lohas cinema is the globally disseminated marketing term

Introduction     11
allegedly­originating­from the United States. The crucial point here is that
there is a “disjunctive” connection, again borrowing Appadurai’s term, be-
tween the ethnoscape, depicted on the representational level in the films, and
the ideoscape, expressed as a sense of value in the narrative space.
If indeed there was a huge shift in how to view culture in the 1990s as
Iwabuchi has stated, it was not simply in the swing from criticism on cultural
imperialism to cultural globalization or from American-centered global cul-
ture to one consisting of multiple centers and cultures. Rather the notion of
culture itself has transformed through continuous shifts in layered theoretical
paradigms. The shift in theoretical paradigms has continued since the “linguis-
tic turn” and the “interpretive turn” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the sweep-
ing political and economic changes of the late 1980s, such as the collapse of
Cold War formations and the rise of late capitalism, have spurred the theoreti-
cal transformation to something new, suitable to a social condition of global
economy and culture, or neonationalism set against global integration. This
new theoretical formation, expressed as a “cultural turn,” has been gradually
introduced since the late 1990s.33 My goal in Japanese Cinema in the Digital
Age is to investigate how Japanese cinema has been reconstructed in this con-
tinuously transforming, multifaceted theoretical paradigm, along with the dra-
matic change in the concept of culture itself. In other words, I view Japanese
cinema as a discursively constructed cultural formation. My questions are
how has it functioned in the ebb and flow of global culture and what kinds of
meanings has it been making? In order to wrestle with these questions, I have
chosen three indispensable contexts of the Japanese cinema: industry in the
post-studio era, technological transformation, and the cultural imagination of
the “transnational,” which will be discussed in the following sections.

Changing Topography in the Post-Studio Era

The year 1997 was celebrated as a turning point for the Japanese film in-
dustry. Kitano Takeshi’s Hana-Bi (1997) won the Grand Prix at the Venice
Film Festival, Kawase Naomi’s Suzaku (Moe no suzaku, 1997) received the
Golden Camera Award at Cannes, and Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke
(Mononoke hime, 1997) broke domestic box-office records by grossing nearly­
19 billion Japanese yen, approximately U.S.$182 million.34 Following these
successes, a number of popular magazines rather hastily proclaimed a
Japanese cinematic “Renaissance.” Celebrating the revitalized cinema, the
Japanese edition of Newsweek, for instance, devoted its front cover to rising­
filmmaker Iwai Shunji.35 Studio Voice had a special feature on “Japanese
cinema’s­legend,”­which begins with the line, “Japanese cinema is not dead

12   Introduction
yet.”36 Brutus focused on the success of Kitano’s Hana-Bi, and the magazine’s
cover announced, “Got it! The Venice Film Festival Grand Prix. Only the
Japanese don’t value the Japanese cinema.”37 Eureka, in a special issue on
Japanese cinema, included­a long discussion between the filmmaker Aoyama
Shinji and the poet and film critic Inagawa Masato on Japanese cinema’s lat-
est comeback and on its ability to endure.38 After the long-term economic
recession of the 1990s, film critics and audiences viewed the cinema’s striking
box-office increase in 1997 (¥32.6 billion from ¥23 billion in 1996) as just
short of a miracle.39
The cinema’s resurgence, however, had less to do with the contributions of
talented auteurist directors than with structural changes that were already un-
derway in the film industry, starting in the late 1980s. Although the Japanese
film industry had been declining since the early 1960s, the end of “program-
picture” production further accelerated the decline in the 1980s.40 The studio
system of production with star actors under exclusive contract and the steady
output of films for distribution to studio-franchised movie theaters started
collapsing in the 1970s with the downturn of moviegoing, and the systematic
production in the industry almost disappeared during the 1980s. At the end of
the 1980s, major studios such as Shochiku, Toho, and Toei would rarely pro-
duce their own films, acting largely as distributors for films created by small
production companies.41 As film critic Abe Casio points out, the decline of
studio production has been the most influential factor for the contemporary
cinema, especially since the end of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porn genre (a soft-core
porn genre since 1971) in 1989, the last program pictures to follow the pattern
of studio production from the heyday of the film industry.42
Thus in real terms, the success in 1997 notwithstanding, productions by
the major Japanese studios have been steadily decreasing, with some com-
panies even selling off their studio properties (e.g., Shochiku sold its studios
in 1999 and Nikkatsu in 2000). Historically, the Japanese film industry had
maintained its vertical distribution structure (i.e., each studio distributes its
films to its own movie theaters) and block-booking system (local theaters are
contracted to screen only a single studio’s films). Toho and Shochiku are the
best examples of this case, having kept their theaters since the prewar period
and even increased the number in the heyday of the 1950s. The newcomer
Toei, established in 1949, followed the pattern and expanded its theaters, es-
pecially along the Tokyu Toyoko Line, a major commuter railway connecting
Tokyo and Yokohama. These studios survived the decline of film production
by collecting revenues on the distribution and theater receipts of Japanese
and Hollywood films. Nikkatsu and Daiei, on the other hand, without their
own theaters, suffered a lack of cash flow, which accelerated the closure or

Introduction     13
curtailment­of their businesses. The tendency to reduce production and de-
pend on distribution and theatrical revenues has become a viable business
strategy for the major film companies, which are for the most part film studios
without production.43
At present, so-called independent—or furi (freelancer) in Japanese terms—
filmmaking has become the norm. Beginning in the 1990s, independent­film
production gained ground against the major three companies (Shochiku,
Toho, and Toei), increasing dramatically from 18 percent in 1992 to 32 per-
cent in 1997.44 In 2008, the numbers of the major three and the independents
have completely reversed: The production number of the major Japanese stu-
dios is now only 15 percent, though those major companies have also invested
in some independent films as coproducers.45 The independent filmmakers
are now major players, producing films with much tighter budgets and under
more constraints due to their investors’ unwillingness to shoulder significant
risks. Indeed, the defining characteristic of contemporary cinema in Japan is
that it belongs to this post-studio condition.
Even Yamada Yoji, the longtime Shochiku director of the hugely popular
Tora-san series (1969–1995), for instance, is not exempt from this condition.
Since his later films, such as his Academy Award–nominated Best Foreign
Language Film The Twilight Samurai (Tasogare seibei, 2002), were being fi-
nanced by the Seisaku Iinkai (a film investment group), Yamada dealt with
several investors, such as an advertisement company (Hakuhodo), a television
network (Nippon Television), and a trading company (Sumitomo Corp.). The
film was shot entirely on location, namely Tsuruoka in Yamagata Prefecture
and Motaishuku in Nagano Prefecture, where Yamada built an open set in-
stead of renting expensive studios. Yamada’s former company, Shochiku, lim-
ited its contribution to the film’s production by providing extras (Shochiku
Kyoto Yosei-jo), music production (Shochiku Music Publishing), and sound
recording (Shochiku Sound Studio), and yet Shochiku monopolized the film’s
domestic distribution, both in movie theaters and DVDs and other post-
cinematic­products. This pattern has become the norm of production and
distribution in the current Japanese film industry.
One might think of Studio Ghibli as a counterexample of the post-studio­
condition, with its films’ enormous theatrical successes. But despite its pre-
fix “studio,” it is more reasonable to consider Ghibli as an independent film
producer in the Japanese visual media industry. Until 2004, Ghibli had al-
ways produced their feature-length animations with the publishing com-
pany Tokuma’s financial backing, and Toho has distributed all of Ghibli’s
films domestically except for My Neighbors the Yamadas (Hohokekyo tonari no
Yamada-kun, 1999, distributed by Shochiku). In other words, while Ghibli’s

14   Introduction
films have generated top sales for the film company Toho, the way in which
Ghibli produces and circulates its feature animations has been remarkably
similar to other independent film producers, often manufacturing films under
the financial system of Seisaku Iinkai. This pattern, though, is likely chang-
ing, as Ghibli parted ways with Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co. to become
a public limited company in 2004, with Hoshino Koji, the former represen-
tative of Walt Disney Company (Japan) Ltd., as its new president in 2008.
However, Ghibli was capitalized at a relatively modest 10 million yen (about
U.S.$130,000) in 2011, which is about 1/1,000th of Toho’s capitalization and
1/3,000th of Shochiku’s (Toho U.S.$125 million in 2010; Shochiku U.S.$377
million in 2009).
With the loss of the studios as centers of production, the majority of
filmmakers in Japan have found new production modes and thematic focuses
that distinguish their films from previous ones—in particular, the assimilation
of digital media and the representation of the transnational. The former has
made it possible to lower production costs, especially compared with 35mm
film, and the latter has increased opportunities for overseas distribution and
promotions via a number of international film festivals. While many old-
school filmmakers still adhere to 35mm, they increasingly rely on a digital
video recording system to check each take in order to economize their produc-
tion costs. I argue in this book that the characteristics of these contemporary
films constitute Japan’s response to the variegated flows of global economics
and cultures. What is happening in Japanese contemporary cinema addresses
the dilemma faced by other national cinemas, whether in the East or West,
many of which are struggling to remain viable at the global level of cinema
consumption.

Japan’s Media Convergence

It is necessary, however, to highlight that Japan’s film business occupies an
atypical position compared with other East Asian screen industries.46 Darrell
William Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh introduce three distinct production
and distribution practices, or “benchmarks,” in contemporary East Asian
screen businesses.47 In the case of South Korea, “the state crafted a cinema
boom resulting from capitalist incentives for commercial reinvention of na-
tional cinema.” Davis and Yeh emphasize the commitment of chaebol (giant
conglomerates) in the new pattern of production, distribution, and market-
ing of the visual industry in South Korea. As the second benchmark, they
draw on the case of Chinese-language film, such as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon (2000). The box-office success of the film set a standard for

Introduction     15
transnationally financed pan-Chinese productions, and a number of succes-
sors, such as Hero (2002, Zhang Yimou), House of Flying Daggers (2004, Zhang
Yimou), and The Promise (2005, Chen Kaige), have followed this pattern. The
third benchmark is illustrated with the Hong Kong cinema’s recent success,
especially film series such as Infernal Affairs (2002, Lau Wai-keung and Mak
Siu Fai). They describe its characteristic as “synthesizing local genre elements
with international styles and norms.”48 Davis and Yeh, however, clearly make
the distinction that Japan’s screen business is atypical compared with those
East Asian benchmarks and emphasize its concentration of cross-media busi-
ness within the culture: “Japan’s huge production, consumption and intri-
cate distribution networks make it the area heavyweight, the biggest screen
player—­yet set apart from regional trends. . . . The [Japanese] screen industry
is a gigantic enterprise with complex links between film, video, television,
telecommunication, animation, publishing, advertising and game design.”49
As a response to the new condition of post-studio, decentralized produc-
tion, Japanese cinema has shifted its position more profoundly within the
nexus of the current popular culture, increasing its affinity with other visual
media and industries domestically. The boundaries between cinema and televi-
sion, film and other visual media have grown more permeable due to the na-
ture of digital technology; that is, “content” is easily transferable to any media.­
The buzzwords kontentsu sangyo (content businesses)—more specifically,­
businesses­producing various forms of visual and sound culture, such as manga
(comic books), anime (animation), computer games, character goods (such
as Hello Kitty, Doraemon, and Pokémon), popular music, trendy television
programs, and films—describe the current state of those culture industries. In
other words, “media convergence,” to borrow Henry Jenkins’ term, has inten-
sified intraculturally through both the flow of cultural content across numer-
ous media platforms and the cooperation between multiple media industries.50
Analyzing the condition, some cultural critics, such as Azuma Hiroki, assert
that a completely new critical paradigm for the “contents” of a variety of me-
dia is required in order to discuss contemporary Japanese popular culture.51
Yet framing the present convergence of media as an irreparable postmodern
rift has the scent of market opportunism—the promotion of a recycled truism
as something “new.” I will elaborate on this aspect in the conclusion.
It is worth noting that Japanese television drama (J-drama) has been
taking­a radically different move from cinema in terms of expanding its
consumer market throughout the East Asian cultural sphere, and the dis-
similarity is caused by their different levels of affinity with the “regional”
technology­video­compact disc (VCD). Due to its high compatibility with
VCD, J-drama has been extremely trendy in East Asia. VCD is indeed a

16   Introduction
significant­new medium­in terms of discussing J-drama in interregional cul-
tural flow. VCDs are especially well liked in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the People’s
Republic of China (PRC), and the overseas Chinese diasporic communities,
but intriguingly they are virtually absent from the Japanese, North American,
and European markets.52 The irony of VCDs, as Davis and Yeh indicate, is
that “Sony, Panasonic, and other Japanese companies make and sell VCD
players for a large Asian market—excluding Japan.”53 Without the Japanese
broadcast industry’s strict censorship and regulations, J-drama was widely
circulated­in the cultural sphere of East Asia, though that affinity did not take
place in the case of cinema, which is historically more regulated and strictly
licensed by distributors. Since the trend of J-drama and its circulation through
VCD in East Asia require their own research projects, J-drama and VCDs are
beyond the scope of this book and will not be discussed here.
Although cinema and television cultures have distinct flows in the regional­
cultural sphere, one area of proximity between television and cinema still
needs to be pointed out here. The television medium has indirectly supported
the cinema’s affinity with popular culture by assuming the role of launching
new talent and nurturing existing old-time movie stars. This has led to a sym-
biotic relation between cinema and television, as in the boom of trendy televi-
sion dramas with the appearance of movie stars. Likewise, filmmakers since
the late 1980s have drawn from television’s talent pool and tended to use less
expensive, emerging stars such as Yakusho Koji, Watanabe Ken, Toyokawa
Etsushi, and Asano Tadanobu, all of whom started their careers on television.
It has been almost four decades since the collapse of the studios’ star system,
and the boundaries between movie and television stars have been blurring. In
other words, movie stars in a traditional sense have almost completely van-
ished, except for superstars such as Takakura Ken and Yoshinaga Sayuri.
In this sense, the filmmaker Kitano Takeshi’s way of distinguishing his
personas—Kitano Takeshi as a filmmaker and Beat Takeshi as a television
persona—is a significant phenomenon since it underlines the current rela-
tionship between Japanese cinema and television. Critics such as Abe Casio
highlight Kitano’s opposing dual identity to the two media, not their connec-
tion or reciprocity: “Kitano’s portrayal of a series of criminals has made it
possible for him to completely avoid the phenomenon of televisionesque flesh in his
own films.”54 Abe draws the cinematic image of Kitano neglecting and destroy-
ing his television image as a clever, sharp-tongued, but nonetheless intimate
comedian. Daisuke Miyao’s analysis develops the binary opposition as an
indication of power dynamics in Japanese television-oriented popular culture:
“Takeshi Kitano . . . embodies the gap between cinephilia and telephilia in
the Japanese context. . . . The gap between the critical success of Kitano’s

Introduction     17
films and the enormous popularity of Beat Takeshi as a television personality­
implies the nature of telephilia-oriented film culture in contemporary Japanese soci-
ety. Consciously or unconsciously, Kitano problematizes the inevitable coex-
istence between TV and cinema in Japan.”55
Against the dichotomies of Kitano Takeshi vs. Beat Takeshi or filmmaker
vs. television comedian, however, other critics, such as Aaron Gerow, ques-
tion the way of viewing the two media, cinema and television, as separated or
antagonized enterprises. Gerow writes that “the divisions in his identity have
thus never been easily reducible to the television/cinema split.”56 By citing­
Kitano’s stated metaphor, “television as ‘insurance’ allowing him to do very
different work in cinema,” Gerow views Kitano’s relationship between televi-
sion and cinema as one where television is the source of his financing and
serves as the testing grounds for filmmaking ideas.57 In other words, for Kitano,
cinema is another platform where he can express or engender something that
he cannot do on television. The dichotomy between television and cinema is
also challenged by the fact that Kitano uses the name “Kitano Takeshi” for
his publications as well. Kitano is also renowned as a prolific writer, and he
has published more than sixty books in Japanese. Those books, however, have
never been written solely by him; instead they are produced by spin crews or
they are collections of interviews.58 The question here is his authorship. While
film is always a creative product of combined efforts, Kitano has manufac-
tured his publications in the same way. This “writer” without writing reminds
us of the impossibility of straightforward indexicality between an author and
his or her product. It seems to be more reasonable to conceptualize Kitano
as “cultural industry,” to borrow Davis’ term, than an author of different cul-
tural products in film, television, and printed media.59 Kitano, the cultural
industry, is connected with all those media platforms, and the structure that
he deploys effectively functions within the aforementioned content industry
in Japan, or “convergent culture” in Jenkins’ terms.
The various filmmakers coming from different backgrounds, such as
Kitano from television, have accelerated the transformation of the cinema’s
affinity with other media. With the loss of studios as training grounds for
new directors, many emerging filmmakers have come from other fields, such
as Ichikawa Jun (Tony Takitani, 2004) and Nakashima Tetsuya (Memories
of Matsuko, 2006) from commercial production, Wada Makoto (Uneasy
Encounters, 1994) from printed media illustration, Mitani Koki (The Magic
Hour, 2008) from theater, and Kore’eda Hirokazu (Still Walking, 2008) from
television documentary work. In the era of post-studio cinema, alongside
those filmmakers with training outside of cinema, the contribution of gradu-
ates from art universities and film schools has grown significantly. Hashiguchi

18   Introduction
Ryosuke (All around Us, 2008), for instance, is a graduate of the film produc-
tion program in Osaka University of Arts, and Kawase Naomi (The Mourning
Forest, 2007) graduated from the film production program in Visual Arts
Osaka.
It is well known that animation artists, such as Oshii Mamoru and An’no
Hideaki, are not only enthusiastic cinephiles but have also made live-action
films (Avalon, 2001, Oshii; Ritual, 2000, An’no) that target the cross-media
audience—that is, animation fans. Otomo Katsuhiro, the creator of the
groundbreaking animation Akira (1988), directed the recent box-office success­
Bugmaster (Mushishi, 2006). Miyazaki Hayao’s animation productions
with Studio Ghibli have benefited from the studio’s tie-in with the Tokuma
Publishing Company, which has assumed the roles of producer since Nausicaä
of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no naka no Naushika, 1984), promoter of Ghibli’s
animations in its monthly animation magazine Animage (1978–present), and
publisher for all of Ghibli’s print products, such as comics and children’s pic-
ture books.
The post-studio filmmakers’ notable successes have conducted the fusion
of the audience/consumer in various fields of cinema, television, theater, pub-
lishing, popular music, and animation. The concept of media mix, anime’s­
early strategy of product tie-ins, has been fully expanded to the contemporary
cinema culture in Japan. In 2006, with its revived popularity among the do-
mestic Japanese audience, a series of box-office successes, and its visibility
in international film festivals as well as Hollywood remakes, film critic Mori
Naoto declared that the contemporary Japanese cinema had finally succeeded
in reversing its perceived “negative” image to a “positive” one.60 The share
of Japanese films in the domestic market, indeed, had long been lower than
foreign films since 1975, but the proportion has reversed since 2006.61

Digital Technology
The changes brought about by the increased use of digital shooting and com-
puterized editing systems have become apparent in the new cinema’s aes-
thetic. In place of expensive 35mm film, high-definition digital video is of-
ten used and later blown up to 35mm for theatrical release. With lightweight
cameras, less equipment, and smaller crews, filmmakers have developed new
cinema that can attract both Japanese and global audiences. In order to avoid
the high rental costs of the studios, contemporary filmmakers have tended to
make films on location much as the American cinema verité filmmakers did
with 16mm cameras in the 1960s. As a result, new filmic styles, such as fea-
ture dramas incorporating formal aspects of documentary, have appeared in

Introduction     19
contemporary Japanese cinema. The documentary-style drama emphasizes
ordinary Japanese landscapes, experiences, and identities more than ever, and
moreover, it expresses a sense of contemporaneity, something “authentic” to
present-day Japan.
Japanese cinema in the digital age, at the same time, shares aesthetic
similarities with other national cinemas created under parallel industrial
conditions. These include the Chinese Urban Generation cinema, especially
Zhang Yuan’s documentaries and narrative features; Jia Zhangke’s oeuvres,
including Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006) and 24 City (Er shi si cheng ji, 2008);
Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (Mong jing, 2003); the Dogme 95 series, exemplified by
Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998); and Belgian
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Rosetta (1999) and The Child (L’enfant, 2005).
Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les murs, 2008) popularized the style even
for American audiences. Those filmmakers do not belong to film studios and
need to work as producers as well in order to obtain enough financing for
filmmaking. While many of these films are made with digital technology,
what the filmmakers deal with consists of people from everyday life rooted
in a specific locale, region, or culture. Kore’eda Hirokazu, for instance, with
a background in television documentary, has created feature films within
this aesthetic tradition, and his film Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, 2004)
received high critical praise for crossing boundaries between feature film and
documentary. While the film tells a story based on an actual incident of a
mother deserting her children, the alienation of the children’s life is depicted
through images of mundane acts in the Tokyo metropolis, such as shopping
at a convenience store, playing video games at home, and drying their clothes
on the balcony of their small apartment. Each sequence obtains a sense of
contemporary Tokyo, which is unique from any other place in the world. This
contributes to the filmic aesthetic being at once universal and local.
The sense of the universal and the local in film’s aesthetics has also be-
come significant in animation artists’ play with techniques of photo-realism.
By using computer graphic software such as Photoshop, Shinkai Makoto, for
instance, embeds photo images from Tokyo suburbs in his animation. This
process reproduces a similar effect of shooting the actual locales in film pro-
duction but in a more intensified and strategic way in his animations. His
one-man production Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no koe, 2002), for instance,
materializes those local images as objects of desire for the characters set in
the futuristic narrative space. The local areas from Tokyo neighborhoods or
its outskirts captured in various animation images provoke the audience as
objects of nostalgia, which appear in digital gadgets such as the personal com-
puter, the cell phone, the iPhone, and the BlackBerry.

20   Introduction
 As the multiformats in animation markets exemplify, the cinema’s trans-
formation through digital technology occurs in its distribution and recep-
tion as well. A major change in film distribution began in the 1980s with
the availability of film on video for home viewing, accelerated in the mid-
1990s by DVD’s improved visual and sound quality. Within this transforma-
tion, certain film genres have achieved unparalleled success—notably anime
(Japanese animation), action film series in V-CINEMA (a feature “film”
without theatrical release, distributed only on videotape/DVD), horror films,
and adult video (AV). With legions of enthusiastic fans, anime, for instance,
has emerged as a purchase-oriented medium since the 1980s. Many anime
auteurs are creating feature-length films for theatrical release as well as televi-
sion series and cycles of post-theatrical video or DVD releases, such as An’no
Hideaki’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin seiki evangerion, 1995). The confluence
of B-movie genres and DVD distribution since the late 1990s has led to an
unprecedented boom in the production of J-horror and Asia Extreme (a label
coined by the recently defunct video/DVD distributor Tartan Video), with
subsequent Hollywood adaptations in continuous production.62
The current cinema’s increasing affinity with new media, typically digi-
tal video production, occurs not only at the level of individual filmmakers
but also through the major studios’ adjustment to the new era of production
and distribution. Toei Film Company, for instance, has largely shifted to the
V-CINEMA since the 1990s. As a pioneer of the V-CINEMA filmmakers,­
Takahashi Banmei directed the first successful work, Neo-Punk, the Lost
Messenger (Neo chinpira, teppodama pyu, 1990). Representative directors of this
period, Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself series, 1995–1996)
and Miike Takashi (Full Metal Yakuza, 1997), established their careers as
prolific V-CINEMA directors and emerged as directors for higher-budget
productions,­whether in high-definition video or film.
One significant development in contemporary digital cinema has been
the adjustment of theaters, especially the emergence of the cinema complex
with its increased number of screens. While this has become the norm for
cinema in the digital age, in Japan the cinema complex has been shaped by
the local contours of digital movie viewing along with the prevalence of in-
dependent films with their low-spectacle and personal narratives, which are
thoroughly compatible with a diminished size of screen. Toei, for instance,
has invested in digital distribution and reception by launching a new cinema
complex franchise, T-JOY, equipped with Digital Light Processing (DLP) and
satellite distribution. Since the first cinema complex, Warner Mycal Ebina,
was built in Ebina City, Kanagawa, in 1993, the cinema complex’s percentage
of all screens has become 76 percent in 2007.63 Although the early cinema

Introduction     21
complexes were built in suburban shopping malls like Ebina, from 2003 on,
cinema complexes in Japan have gradually advanced into the major cities’
central districts, such as Roppongi, Shinjuku, and Shibuya in Tokyo. The pat-
tern of development of those cinema complexes has started affecting distri-
bution patterns with greater selection and tailoring films toward a smaller
theater screen. As a result, the number of screens in Japan has radically in-
creased, for instance, from 1,993 screens in 1998 to 3,221 in 2007, a 60 percent
upsurge in ten years.64 Yet, while the number of Japanese film releases has in-
creased along with the booming number of screens—from 238 in 1993 to 407
in 2007—the number of moviegoers has not changed significantly in the same
period: 130.72 million in 1993 to 163 million in 2007.65 To put this in per-
spective, on average in 2007, Americans went to a movie theater 4.578 times
while the Japanese went only 1.277 times.66 As the numbers indicate, Japan’s
film viewing in post-theatrical media, such as video, DVD, and Blu-ray, has
radically superseded theater viewing, and the number of post-theatrical media
viewers is reported at more than 900 million, which approaches the industry’s
peak in 1958 of 1.12745 billion.67

The Transnational within the

Cultural Imagination
After a long-term decline that began in the 1960s, Japanese cinema has
achieved its long-sought recovery through a major structural shift to concen-
trated cross-media businesses targeted at the domestic market. It is something
of a paradox that while the screen industry has focused on the domestic
audience,­many of the actual films reveal a palpable sense of the transna-
tional, fluidity in identities, and national boundaries. Recent narratives treat
as commonplace that the Japanese, particularly young people, are adept at
living and working abroad. But the interesting aspect of this transnational
sensibility is the films’ emphasis on the particularities of time and locale—
most frequently in present-day Asia.
Reflecting the gradual political and economic shifts of the post–Cold War
period, this regional emphasis in contemporary Japanese cinema restructures­
and reimagines Japan’s place within the world. By way of comparison,
Kurosawa Akira’s jidaigeki films in the 1980s, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985),
highlighted an exotic Japan with their theatricality and spectacle, which were
arguably intended to appeal to worldwide audiences. Kurosawa’s reiteration
of grand themes from Western literary humanism also secured Japan’s place
within the cosmopolitan community. The cultural vector from Japan to the
West is no longer the solitary path in the contemporary Japanese cinema, as

22   Introduction
the films reveal the new mapping of Japan within the region of Asia. While
filmmakers in Japan have consciously aimed at international reception via film
festivals or international distribution of film and DVD, they have also engaged
the domestic audience’s interest with self-reflexive ties to national identity or,
alternately, subverting the conventions of “official” identity narratives.
The director Sai Yoichi’s ethnic cinema, for instance, often centralizing
zainichi Koreans (resident Koreans in Japan) in his films’ cinematic space,
takes the place of the Japanese audience’s object of desire in the midst of the
Korean wave (Kanryu or Hallyu) in the early 2000s. The frequent appearance
of zainichi Koreans or migrant workers from other Asian nations in the con-
temporary Japanese cinema signals displacement of the nation’s xenophobia
both within material conditions of everyday life and within the cultural imagi-
nary, the repository for how the Japanese want to be seen or see themselves.
The bitter history of Japan’s imperialism in Asia and the unresolved issues­
of compensation are also displaced within a metanarrative of pan-Asian
commonality and understanding. In Zhang Yimou’s Japanese-financed film,
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005), the initial difficulty of communica-
tion and cultural differences leads to genuine understanding and affection be-
tween the old Japanese man and Chinese locals, which is further pronounced
through the iconic Japanese star Takakura Ken befriending a Chinese boy.
The popular Japanese films, Pacchigi! (2004) and Pacchigi! Love & Peace (2007),
highlight the struggle of zainichi Koreans, softened through the cross-cultural
romance between a Japanese man and a zainichi Korean woman.
Characterizing the recent Japanese cinema as “landscape cinema with un-
known bodies (mumeiteki nikutai no, fukei no eiga),” Abe Casio underlines
the pan-Asian quality of the characters’ bodies, embedded in the ubiquitous,­
often denationalized landscape of the cinema.68 Miike Takashi’s Ley Lines
(Nihon kuroshakai—ley lines, 1999)—arguably the quintessential Miike film—
for instance, casts the second generation of Japanese orphans in China (zanryu­
koji), who escape from an unknown countryside in China to Shinjuku, Tokyo,
and further dream about fleeing to Brazil, a country with old Japanese im-
migrants.69 For Abe, Miike’s way of using the various locales lacks a sense
of Asia as grounded reality and rather reveals a sense of displacement or
provisionality toward individual identity.70 I would interpret the image’s in-
determinacy as a representation of the Japanese cultural imagination, the
cultural sphere that is only sustained by its differentiation from others. Along
with the Korean cultural boom in Japan from the early 2000s, the motif of
Asia as a borderless region has become a crucial signifier in the contemporary
Japanese cinema, one which attracts the Japanese desire to be transnational,
unconstrained­by official identity roles and self-affirmed as cosmopolitan.

Introduction     23
 Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age addresses the crucial role of digital
technology­in Japanese cinema from the 1990s to the present by examining
the salient film genres or media networks—horror, documentary-style fiction,
animation, transnational cinema, and ethnic cinema—which have particularly­
shown their affinity with this technological development. The impact of new
media (digital cameras, computer editing, digital projection, and alterna-
tive distribution via DVD and Blu-ray Disc) on cinema has been enormous.
Meanwhile, academic discourses have failed to address the surprising speed
and uncertainty of these changes within various national cinemas. As techno-
logical and industrial transformations permeate film production and distribu-
tion, a new cinema has reshaped our vision of national cinema to one that
is more transnational, literally and imaginatively. This book attempts to map,
however tentatively, this changing topography by addressing central questions
regarding current Japanese cinema: What has been the impact of digital pro-
duction and distribution on cinema? While the digitalization of these processes
has been popularized all over the globe, the results are not necessarily the same
as one might find in, for instance, J-horror, one of the most successful cases
of the transitional assimilation between cinema and digital technology. I in-
vestigate this process within the nexus of local cultural imperatives and global
cultural flows. Another question is: How have new technologies affected the
construction of identity within and through cinematic mediation? This second
question entails a more primary query of how national identity in cinema is
deconstructed through the current transmediated platforms, such as DVDs. If
power politics always shape the structure of one’s social identity, as Stuart Hall
asserts,71 what current forces determine the identity of Japanese cinema? I ex-
plore this question by focusing on the current use of the term “transnational”—
a conspicuous substitution for “national,” in my view—in both the industrial
and academic spheres. And finally, I would like to consider whether national
cinema truly becomes transnational cinema, which, for some scholars, repre-
sents a new vehicle for renovating the discipline of cinema and media studies.
This book is organized with five chapters focusing on the effects of new
media on the characteristic of the transnational in contemporary Japanese
cinema. All chapters grapple with the ongoing contestations and negotia-
tions between cinema and digital media, the national and the transnational,
and global cinema and Japanese local culture through analyses of the works
by such timely filmmakers as Nakata Hideo, Shimizu Takashi, Kore’eda
Hirokazu, Kawase Naomi, Hara Kazuo, Tsuchiya Yutaka, Takahata Hideta,
and Sai Yoichi, as well as animation artists Oshii Mamoru, Shinkai Makoto,
and Yamamura Koji. I have been very fortunate in being able to interview
many of them, sometimes visiting their production offices or conducting an

24   Introduction
interview over lengthy correspondence by e-mail. The reoccurring impression
throughout the interviews is that unlike studio production in the 1950s, the
filmmakers must resolve anew issues of labor and finance with each produc-
tion outside of studios. Their role is not limited simply to directing a film, but
they are rather involved as producers, securing financing, obtaining suitable
casts, and taking care of postproduction matters such as finding distribution
and promoting their films.
Chapter 1 provides an analysis of the horror genre cinema, which emerged
in the late 1990s along with the rise of DVDs and Internet fan culture. As the
case of J-horror exemplifies, the new digitalized multimedia form of cinema
is now a dispersed phenomenon, both ubiquitous and transnational as tech-
nology, yet regional in the economic, industrial, and cultural contingencies
of its acceptance. I would argue that such a phenomenon as national cinema
challenging the centrality of Hollywood products and their distribution is not
entirely new in film history, but what makes those “alternative” films most
interesting is their vernacular staging within a specific time, locale, and me-
dia. How did J-horror, which began as a low-budget alternative genre (one
that is intrinsically linked to regional popular culture), become a transnational
film franchise? The answer lies in the contingencies of industrial conditions—
production, textual elements, distribution, and consumption—underlying the
genre’s emergence or expansion from the 1990s on as a form of transitional
filmmaking, which is less based on theatrical modes of exhibition than on
new digital forms of media. Highlighting the work of the seminal J-horror
director Shimizu Takashi, I analyze the film Marebito (2004), revealing its high
affinity with digital technology not only on the level of production and dis-
tribution but also on the level of its self-reflexive narrative as the technology
demonically merges with the protagonist’s own cognition.
Chapter 2 elaborates on how digital technology forges a documentary-
style in cinema. A new filmic style—the feature film that uses documentary
technique as its primary mode of expression—has appeared in the contempo-
rary Japanese cinema. At the level of production, digital’s influence is most ap-
parent in the increased use of digital cameras, which has resulted in a blurring
of boundaries between film and video, fiction and documentary. Eschewing
the cost of filming on sets, this method of filmmaking emphasizes shooting
in Japanese locales and representing the everyday experiences of ordinary
people, and yet it also shares aesthetic similarities with other national cinemas
created under parallel industrial conditions as I explained earlier. This chapter
examines a style of authenticity that is now prevalent in Japanese fiction and
documentary films, especially the personal documentary. Three films are at
the center of my discussion: Nobody Knows, Tarachime (2006, Kawase Naomi),

Introduction     25
and The New God (Atarashii kamisama, 1999, Tsuchiya Yutaka). Drawing upon
the documentary tradition, these films highlight the stylistic merging of fic-
tion and documentary and express a sense of unstable actuality by playing
with digital aesthetics and the idea of authenticity.
Chapter 3 contextualizes anime’s ongoing development within a history
of converging media forms. While much of what is written on anime rests
upon notions of intrinsic cultural difference, the history of anime’s diverse
range of media platforms, genres, textual aesthetics, and various activities in its
reception—such as otaku culture and costume play (kosupure)—demonstrates
otherwise.­ Anime is a discursively constructed term that I view as “a nodal
point in a transmedial network,”72 to borrow Thomas Lamarre’s designation,
which deserves to be examined in specific historical—local and at once global—­
contexts. As an alternative to the cultural determinism that has configured
anime­studies, I discuss how technological developments in media have shaped
anime production and stylistic diversity, primarily as matters of production
scale and targeted audience. Thus, when it first appeared as television cartoons
with limited animation, Japanese anime represented a radical departure from
Disney movies. But closer to the present, anime, in such high-budget, feature-
length films as Akira, also displaces the jerky movement of limited animation in
its marketing to the global audience. Or in the case of Evangelion (1995–1996),
originally a television series that morphed into a media-mix product through
film, DVD, and games, anime becomes a conscious return to limited animation
in its search for distinction in the global animation marketplace. Throughout its
history, anime has reflected the local response to the global culture, whether as
a strategy of localization, delocalization, or relocalization.
The animation works of Shinkai Makoto and Yamamura Koji serve as
examples of the smaller “cottage industry” production that digital technol-
ogy has enabled. Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star, for instance, captures lo-
cal ambiance through digital photo images of mundane everyday life, trans-
formed by Adobe Photoshop, a graphic editing program, into anime scenes.
Yamamura, on the other hand, intentionally relocalizes the images of Japan—
cherry blossoms,­gray-suited salarymen—in his art film Mount Head (Atama-
yama, 2002) as a strategy for garnering recognition by international animation
festivals. His later work, Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (Kafka—Inaka isha,
2007) orchestrates images (that are visually removed from Japanese identity)
and audio (that deploys the traditional kyogen players’ voice over) to a pro-
foundly unsettling­effect.73 At the other end of the scale, anime’s high affin-
ity with digital­technology subverts the existing dichotomy of Disney-style
realism versus Japanese animation’s limited movement. Oshii Mamoru’s
Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (Tachiguishi retsuden, 2006) exemplifies

26   Introduction
the stylistic­diversity of experimental realism by deploying a variety of visual
media: drawings, photos, computer-generated imagery (CGI), and paper the-
ater (kamishibai),­all of which parallel the risk-taking tendencies of the smaller
but flexible Japanese animation industry.
Chapter 4 analyzes the concept of transnationalism in contemporary
Japanese cinema. The term “transnational cinema” has been posed as a
substitute for “national cinema,” which has long been criticized for various
reasons. While nationalism has been repeatedly invented in popular culture,
national borders have become increasingly permeable. Global exchanges have
noticeably accelerated with the development of communication technologies.
In the case of film studies, the expansion of multinational finance and the di-
versified distribution beyond theatrical release has put the present framework
of national cinema in a tenuous position. Although the concept of national
cinema can be seen as obsolete, I am still skeptical of the abrupt shift in film
and media studies to a transnational framework, especially in the post–Cold
War period. The recent shift brings another set of questions, theoretical and
historical. This chapter examines the issue of transnational cinema from dual
angles: on the level of discursive construction in film studies and on the level
of film texts, especially in terms of space, identity, and language. I interrogate
what benefit, if any, the framework of transnational cinema brings us over
that of national cinema through my analysis of the Japanese film, The Hotel
Venus (2004, Takahata Hideta).
Chapter 5 examines the attractions of ethnic cinema, specifically in the
case of Blood and Bones, which depicts the transnational figures of zainichi
Koreans residing in Japan. This chapter examines the tension between the
cinematic effect and its related knowledge, especially knowledge associated
with Japanese popular culture—the “cultural imaginary” as it were, nurtured
by such seemingly disparate discourses as Korean images in Japanese cinema,
the star discourse of Kitano Takeshi, television family dramas in the 1970s,
and the professional wrestling hero, Rikidozan. Is the tension Blood and Bones
presents different from other ethnic films in Japan? How does this tension
operate through the film? Recalling the director Sai’s ambition of reaching
a wider audience, how does the film enact the contradiction of the ethnic
desire, being “minor” in its social status yet “major” in its aspiration? I argue
that Blood and Bones is strategically targeted to domestic audiences through
the Japanese “cultural imagination,” a practice that can only be sustained by
differentiating the cultural sphere from something else, in this film’s case from
Korean or zainichi Korean culture. I elaborate on the film’s cinematic effect
and how this is wrapped up with the cultural knowledge, or schemata, drawn
upon by the film.

Introduction     27
 New Media’s
Impact on Horror
Cinema

The main objective of this chapter

is to scrutinize new media’s effect on contemporary Japanese cinema, es-
pecially the horror film genre “J-horror.” In particular, I will examine the
ongoing contestation and negotiation between cinema and new media in
contemporary Japan by analyzing the impact of new media on the transna-
tional horror boom from Japan to East Asia and finally to Hollywood. While
academic discourses on the connection between cinema and new media have
been increasing, many of them are following the historical constellation of
hegemony and capital in cinema—namely, Hollywood as the primary center
of production and distribution. From my perspective, the emerging possibili-
ties of new media in cinema have less to do with the progress of computer-
generated imagery (CGI) effects in such Hollywood franchises as the Star
Wars series (1977–2005, George Lucas) than in the ways regional movements
or genres (I will elaborate on these terms below), such as Dogme 95, Chinese
Sixth-Generation Films (typically low-budget films made outside the state-
run studios), and J-horror, have challenged the long-standing flow of capital
and culture emanating from Hollywood. I argue that such a phenomenon is
not entirely new in the history of the cinema, but what makes it most interest-
ing is its vernacular staging within a specific time, locale, and media. How did

28
a low-budget B genre intrinsically linked to regional popular culture become
a transnational film franchise? The answer lies in the contingencies of new
media’s influence at all levels of production, text, distribution, and reception.
In this chapter I frame J-horror’s emergence since the 1990s as a form of trans-
media commodity, one that is based less on theatrical modes of exhibition
than on new digital media.
Before examining the crucial role of digital production in J-horror films,
I want to clarify the relationship between J-horror as a film genre and as a
film movement. Simply put, I view them as inseparable entities. In her essay,
Kinoshita Chika considers J-horror, like the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)
before it, as a cinematic movement and writes, “J-horror [is] a local move-
ment in the late 1990s that comprised films, TV series, and film theory and
criticism written by filmmakers, with particular emphasis on everyday life and
media. . . . [And also] J-horror specifically refers to a group of relatively low-
budget horror films made in Japan during the late 1990s.”1 In her rationale, a
movement can encompass not only a filmic text, but also a director’s writings,
marketing, and critic’s reception—paratexts that are integral to the J-horror
discourse.2 For this chapter, examining the inclusive processes of J-horror—
such as production, distribution, aesthetics in film/DVD texts, and scholarly
or journalistic reception—I find it advantageous to share her view of J-horror
as a movement and at the same time as a particular body of films: that is, a
genre. I conceive of the cinematic movement in a slightly different way from
Kinoshita’s in its geographical specificity, in which the movement is not limited
to Japan and is rather more permeable and interconnected with other areas—
namely Asia or, in a sense, even the United States via Hollywood remakes. In
other words, J-horror for me comprises the “national” (“J-” for Japanese writ
large) and, at once, the “regional” (as we can see how it often shares some
common elements with contemporary horror films from South Korea, Hong
Kong, and Hollywood remakes), and consequently I must consider J-horror
as a more inclusive cinema movement crossing disjunctive streams of culture,
economy, and media. Suffice it to say, the notion of “J-” is thoroughly con-
nected with the media distributor’s strategy of marketing their product both
inside and outside Japan. Therefore, as the genre films were produced and
disseminated, they were tied not only to the contemporary Japanese national
culture but to its various consumers, as we can see with the success of Ringu
in 1998, for instance, a success that immediately spread throughout the intra-
Asia region. This concept of inclusive cinematic movement is applicable not
only to J-horror but also to Shochiku nuberubagu (Nouvelle Vague) in the late
1960s. One can easily see the parallels between the film movement in Japan
and the movements in world cinema, including French Nouvelle Vague, so

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    29

that we cannot possibly analyze the Japanese filmmakers’ own discourse, such
as Oshima Nagisa’s, without contextualizing it alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s
and François Truffaut’s discourse. The speed and scale of cultural flows en-
countered with the development of digital technology and global economy,
however, have made the negotiations between the national and the regional in
J-horror both more intense and more multifaceted.

The Shift to Digital Production

The first part of this chapter focuses on the contemporary Japanese film
industry­and J-horror’s production processes and examines how the J-horror
boom is closely connected to the ubiquitousness of digital and computer tech-
nologies. Since 1989, in tandem with the steady decline of its once vaunted
economy, Japan has experienced widespread cultural changes. In this twenty-­
year period, the Japanese film industry reconfigured itself at all levels of
production, distribution, and reception. The primary role of film studios has
shifted from actual filmmaking to the distribution of films in multimedia for-
mats, such as DVD and cable television. Due to the industry’s risk-averse
environment,­most directors have become paradoxically independent as film-
makers and increasingly dependent on multimedia financing and distribution by
the major film companies. The Japanese film industry has been split into two
types of filmmaking groups—“major” and “independent”—and the former­
now stands for three film companies, Toho, Shochiku, and Toei, while the
rest of the filmmaking productions are more or less independent.3 As Geoff
King observes on American cinema, “The term ‘independent’ has had rather
different connotations at different periods.”4 In the case of the contemporary
Japanese cinema, the distinction of cinema being “independent” from the
studios is rather meaningless given the current ubiquity of independent film-
makers. This is different from American cinema in the mid-1980s, which King
describes as “the more arty/quirky, sometimes politically inflected, brand of
independent cinema [that] began to gain a higher profile and a more sustained
and institutionalized base in the broadly off-Hollywood arena.”5 Writing on
recent Japanese cinema, Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp offer this description of
the independent filmmakers: “These were filmmakers whose attitudes and
philosophies of cinema were entirely different from those of the old studio
period. They were independent in spirit: artists with nothing to lose, but with
everything to gain.”6
Given the current economics of filmmaking, however, independent
Japanese no longer means independent production. During the studios’ hey-
day of production, the gap between the major companies’ films and those of

30   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

independents was considerable in terms of budgets, production modes, and
aesthetic output. In the current post-studio period, the dichotomy of major
versus independent has been reconfigured to a symbiotic relationship of the
studio as investor and distributor, while the independent actually produces
the film. Thus, independent filmmakers often work with the sponsorship
of the major studios and collaborate with a film and television production
company. In contrast to Mes and Sharp’s idealized notions, independent
filmmakers are seldom free from business constraints, whether their financ-
ing comes from the major studios or from conglomerates such as Kadokawa
Publishing Company and Fuji Television. For instance, both J-horror film
directors Nakata Hideo and Shimizu Takashi are so-called independent film-
makers, and yet they concentrate on commercial genre films: Ringu (1998,
Nakata Hideo) was produced by Kadokawa and distributed by Toho, and Ju-
on­:­­­­­­­­­ The Grudge (2002, Shimizu Takashi) was produced by Toei Video Co. Ltd.
Nakata, one of the last from the generation of studio-trained directors, started
his career as an assistant director in Nikkatsu Studios in 1985 and then made
his debut as an independent director in 1992. His first directed works are not
films but three segments for the television series Real-Life Scary Tales (Honto ni
atta kowai hanashi, 1992, Nakata Hideo et al.).7 On the other hand, Shimizu
started his career with a short video, produced as his film school project, and
he was subsequently offered the chance to direct his first horror program for
Kansai Television.8
The integration of major and independent has also served to maintain
the major studios’ traditional tactic of releasing films in series that inculcate
audience loyalty. While the majors have steadily decreased their in-house
production­numbers, they have remained heavily dependent on so-called
program­pictures—typically a film series like Shochiku’s Tora-san with forty-
eight episodes­(1969–1995, Yamada Yoji) or Toho’s Godzilla series (1954–
2004, Honda Ishiro et al.). Each company has nurtured its brand associa-
tions with its particular program picture built around a specific character and
usually the same director, and they release a new installment once or twice
a year during the high-profit holiday seasons. The program picture has pro-
vided a measure of economic stability to the production side, since it fulfills
expectations in the triangular relationship of production, distribution, and
reception. J-horror, like many of the films that have come out of the recent
independent production system, has often been molded after this pattern of
serialization as well. The independent film production company Ace Pictures,
for instance, produced Ringu and distributed it with another horror film, Ring
2: Spiral (Rasen, 1998, Iida Koji), as a special event. In the following years,
they proceeded to make it a series, following the program picture pattern.

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    31

Within three years, under the “Kadokawa Horror Series,” they produced
Ringu 2 (1999, Nakata Hideo) and Ringu 0 (2000, Tsuruta Norio). As these
examples indicate, J-horror grew out of the specific context of the contem-
porary Japanese film industry—the disintegration of the studio system and a
leveling of competition,­even increasing affiliations among “major” and “in-
dependent” film productions.
In the current post-studio period, many of the Japanese filmmakers are de
facto independent, lacking the extensive 35mm training that many directors
once had during the studio production period. These new filmmakers, howev-
er, have been quick to embrace new media, whether digital video or computer
editing, in order to trim their production budgets and schedules. For example,
the director Shimizu Takashi shot his film Marebito (2004) in just eight days,
between the production of Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003) and the Hollywood re-
make, The Grudge (2004).9 J-horror filmmakers’ prolific production, both in
speed and number, has been a major reason for the genre’s success, and their
productivity has been made possible by new media technologies. More impor-
tantly, the abundant growth in production was not simply related to film and
its theatrical release but also to an alternative venue for marketing—namely
the DVD, another new technological influence since the late 1990s. What
then, is the result of this technological conversion to digital on the level of
filmic or postfilmic texts?

New Iconographies and the Rhetoric

of New Media
The appeal of J-horror films can be seen in their textual elements drawn from
the urban topography and their pervasive use of technology, elements that are
at once particular and universal. In the current post-studio climate, the con-
ditions of low-budget and studioless production are imprinted on new film-
makers’ work, especially with reference to location shooting that frequently
captures a sense of Tokyo urbanity. J-horror has often effectively used this
dense topography to represent a uniquely urban sense of fear attached to the
possibilities of the megalopolis and its mythos. The images of Tokyo and
the surrounding locales tied with the city dwellers’ lives have been significant
motifs in J-horror. Ringu, for instance, revolves around three locales: Tokyo,
Oshima island, and the Izu Peninsula. Oshima island is sixty miles south
of Tokyo, where the film’s female “monster” Sadako (Inoue Rie) was born,
and Izu is southwest of Tokyo, where she is now confined in an old well and
waiting to extend her reach. Both Oshima and Izu are usually considered
weekend resort areas for Tokyo dwellers. The mix of familiarity and relative

32   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

remoteness­of these areas gives the film a sense of spatial and temporal reality­
as well as a mythical undercurrent related to the remnants of premodern cul-
ture lurking in rural locales. Besides Ringu, many of the J-horror films use
Tokyo as their spatial backdrop and even as a causal aspect for a character’s
isolation. As one can see in Audition (1999, Miike Takashi), the female “mon-
ster” Asami’s (Shiina Eihi) residence is an old and drab apartment in Tokyo,
and her isolation is suggested by the empty space, her apartment largely un-
furnished except for a telephone. Audition also draws upon various Tokyo lo-
cales, such as the subterranean, run-down bar in Ginza, where its owner was
killed and chopped to pieces, and the former ballet studio in Suginami Ward,
where Asami, as a child, was molested by her stepfather. Those spaces in
Tokyo give both feelings of familiarity and repulsion in Julia Kristeva’s sense
of “abjection,” the concept of letting go of things that one would still like to
keep.10 The old capital Tokyo indeed has a number of these derelict spaces,
which enrich the megalopolis with history and nostalgia, and yet they are also
dysfunctional and archaic, waiting to be discarded in order to introduce some-
thing new. The “abject” spaces can be depicted as “uncanny” as well: They
are familiar but at the same time “foreign,” a relic of disappearing history. In
the case of the Ju-on series, the film uses an abandoned and haunted house
that conjures J-horror’s dual sensibility of space that is both ordinary and
familiar and yet isolated, neglected, and dreadful. A sense of claustrophobia
is created by the use of an actual house, with the camera work dictated by the
tight dimensions of a typical Japanese residence. When the director Shimizu
made the Hollywood version of The Grudge, he even built a replica of the
house in Tokyo, with its compartments and alcoves, in order to keep the sense
of spatial banality and the feeling of claustrophobia.
It is revealing to compare the aspect of locality in Ringu and its Hollywood
adaptation, The Ring (2002, Gore Verbinski). In the Hollywood version, geo-
graphical specificity is transferred from Tokyo to Seattle. The film demysti-
fies locations and does not use the dual sensibility of space to conjure fa-
miliarity and abjection, relying instead on more firmly established characters
and narrative causality. For instance, the “Moesko Island Lighthouse” that
Rachel (Naomi Watts) visits is a fictional name for a real lighthouse located
in Newport, Oregon; the Seattle setting is actually Vancouver.11 What the film
creates with its locales is not a simulation of an urban dweller’s actual to-
pography but only a geographic plot device for the narrative development.
Strengthening the characters and the narrative causality makes The Ring more
rational and expository than the original, and consequently the film allows
the audience to identify with the characters and their predicament rather than
Ringu’s identification through the shared knowledge of topography.12 Ringu,

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    33

for its part, presumes a level of regional sophistication from its audience, an
understanding of the spatial and temporal logic underlying the film’s sche-
mata and the time and the distance that the characters have to travel in their
attempt to ward off Sadako’s curse. Still, Ringu’s appeal to international au-
diences rests on the realism of its depiction of locales, images that resonate
with a sense of Japan as a repository of the “antiquated” and the “mysteri-
ous.” The independent distributor Rob Straight, for instance, points out that
the attraction of Asian horror films is their well-received original stories and
culturally inflected images. “Many of the films that we’ve handled . . . are
terrifying in a cerebral kind of way. Asian cultures provide supporting my-
thologies of spirits and demons that are new to us, and that make the terror
feel more rooted, less arbitrary. They are not the usual kind of slash-and-cut
horror films, and I think people were ready for a change.”13
Despite the transformation of locale, The Ring accurately follows the
original’s use of technology as a medium for the horrific.14 The indispens-
able gadgets of urban life, such as televisions, videos, cell phones, surveil-
lance cameras, computers, and the Internet, augment the anxious reality that
J-horror films produce. Various J-horror films, including Ringu and the Ju-on
series, play with the conceit of that technological fluency. A character often
becomes the target of an evil spirit by a mistaken belief in his or her ability
to read the texts emitted from electronic devices that unexpectedly become
conduits of spirits. Ringu’s sense of the horrific derives from the idea that a
curse is disseminated through transmedia, such as Sadako crawling out of a
television screen, a notice of death via the telephone, or a videotape function-
ing as a medium for transferring the curse to others. All of these cases have,
as their basis in reality, the possibility of a destructive force spreading through
media traffic like a computer virus. Like an epidemic spiral, the more these
everyday technologies are diffused, the more pervasive the horror becomes. In
the sequence of the cursed videotape, Ringu carefully overlaps the frame of
the television screen with that of the film itself. The gaze of the character in
the film thus completely overlaps with the camera’s gaze and then the audi-
ence’s as well and thus becomes the perfect identification between the victim
and the film’s spectators. The whole scheme creates the illusion that the film
itself is the medium transmitting the curse.
Likewise, Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse (Kairo, 2000) deploys the Internet as
a medium for transmitting a curse.15 The film presents a succession of sui-
cides among Internet users and subverts the subject-object relation between
human and computer by depicting the Internet images persisting on the moni-
tor even after the user shuts off the computer. Kurosawa broke through with
Cure (1997), so he has often been described as a forerunner of J-horror. He

34   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

has stated, however, that his later film Pulse is the first and only work that he
consciously associated with the J-horror boom. Kurosawa points out that the
boom in J-horror actually started in the early 1990s, with so-called original­
video (straight-to-video) films by filmmakers such as Konaka Chiaki and
Tsuruta Norio. According to Kurosawa, since early J-horror films were pro-
duced on videotape, the cheap, flat aesthetic of home video provided J-horror’s
most distinct characteristic.16 Placing something extraordinary in those ordi-
nary looking video images, such as the image of a dead person appearing in
one’s home videotape, was the charm of the contemporary Japanese horror
films.17 Their methods of producing horror films were distinctly different from
Hollywood’s more expensive and “cinematic” film productions and from pre-
1970s Japanese classical horror films, which relied on elaborate studio sets
and classical narratives, such as The Yotsuya Ghost Story (Yotsuya Kaidan, 1959,
Nakagawa Nobuo) and Kwaidan (Kaidan, 1964, Kobayashi Masaki).18 In this
sense, Pulse shares the characteristic of J-horror’s juxtaposition of the extraor-
dinary with the ordinary, in the device of using the Internet and seeing the
already dead person’s images in it.
I have discussed how the new technologies have influenced J-horror films
in terms of iconography, such as the Internet in Pulse. J-horror films also take
advantage of digital editing to create new styles on the level of aesthetics
and narrative structure. Many of the films use the rhetoric of new media,
and in the dialectic relationship between film and new media, the genre takes
on the role of a storyteller appealing to younger audiences who are already
steeped in a variety of digital technologies, including computer games, DVDs,
and home theater systems. Moreover, they are used to the repeated viewings
made available by these technologies. Ju-on: The Grudge uses the concept of
“modularity,” in which the narrative is constructed of multiple modules or
narrative segments, each one titled with a victim’s name. This structure simu-
lates the “chapter” format of the DVD, which is typically used to cue to an
exact sequence, either for a repeat viewing or to watch the text intermittently.
The majority of home theater viewers tend toward an interrupted pattern of
viewing rather than watching a film straight through, as in a movie theater. As
Timothy Corrigan puts it, watching movies at home becomes “a combination
of . . . visual ‘grazing’ and domestic ‘cocooning.’”19 The fragmented format of
the film Ju-on: The Grudge is perfectly suited to this type of spectatorship, one
predicated on the need for immediate satisfaction, fulfilled by the placement
of a horrific moment within each short segment. This structure was elimi-
nated in the Hollywood remake The Grudge, a fact that reveals the shift of the
targeted audience from DVD home viewers to audiences in a movie theater.
The director Shimizu Takashi is especially keen to create horror films

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    35

using the rhetoric of new media. Shimizu’s aforementioned film Marebito—
digitally shot, edited, and distributed—is one of the best examples that bares
the influence of new media rhetoric in its narrative structure and aesthetics
and takes advantage of the spatializing properties of digital editing. Marebito’s
nonlinear narrative appears as the result of digital editing, and the film even
simulates “digital error,” a range of techniques that use the disrupted flow of
image or sound, popular among digital video artists. The film was originally a
straight-to-DVD, having been released theatrically only in New York and Los
Angeles in late 2005. The narrative concerns a freelance video cameraman
(Tsukamoto Shin’ya) who works for television news programs and is obsessed
with finding the most dreadful horror one can possibly see. He engages with
the world largely through a video camera, and the boundary between the real-
ity in his life and the reality captured by his camera is increasingly blurred.
One day, he discovers an entrance to the underground, where he encounters
mysterious creatures called “Deros” (detrimental robots). He takes a female
Deros (Miyashita Tomomi) back home and confines it like a pet.
As in recent science fiction films with CGI such as The Matrix (1999,
Andy and Larry Wachowski) and eXistenZ (1999, David Cronenberg),
Marebito deploys double layers in its narrative: a real world and an under-
world. The doubling of spatial layers is deepened by a matching sense of
the protagonist’s double selves, one governed by his sane cognition and the
other by emerging paranoia. The film deviates from a linear narrative devel-
opment, using fragmented time and space instead to develop the complex
layers. Time skips back and forth, following the oscillation of his mental state.
The sequence of a seemingly disturbed woman pursuing him is repeated; only
later is it revealed that she is his ex-wife. The “rhizomatic” narrative—the
multiple­and nonhierarchical­collection of narrative segments—represents
narrative expansion­within a temporal and spatial mesh. The film’s combina-
tion of stratified and nonlinear narrative strands can be seen as the product of
its dependence on digital editing, which allows more spatial extension than is
typical of analog editing. Laura U. Marks describes such digital editing as an
“open form” and notes that the advantage of digital editing is “to multiply the
opportunities for flashbacks, parallel storylines, and other rhizomatic narrative
techniques, producing a story that is so dense it expands into space as much
as it moves forward in time. Experimental video remains the pioneer of the
digital open form, as it is more free of narrative cinema’s will to linearity.”20
The film also mimics “digital errors,” the now familiar innovations of
electronic musicians and video artists. They “intentionally mess with the
hardware: turning the computer on and off, or plugging the ‘audio out’ into
the ‘video in,’ liberating the electrons to create random effects,”21 and they try

36   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

to subvert or challenge already existing music or images with techniques such
as “stutter,” repeating the same sound or image as if it is caused by a techni-
cal mistake, and “breakdown,” shutting down the sound or image abruptly.
In the film Marebito, the latter technique is used for the sequence that I call
“the twelve-seconds mystery.” The protagonist monitors the Deros with two
surveillance cameras when he is out, and upon returning home he finds that
the Deros is near death. He then rewinds the surveillance tapes to find out
what happened to it. However, once both tapes reach the same point, they
inexplicably show only blank screens. Twelve seconds later, the monitoring
images come back and show the Deros in convulsions. This breakdown of im-
ages works by extending the protagonist’s inner state to the audience, blurring
the boundary between reality and the video world and threatening him (or us)
with the nightmarish proposition that there is no reality when it is not record-
ed. What Marebito accomplishes in a near poetic symmetry of narrative and
form is an exploration of the human tendency to apprehend reality through
the prosthetic of technology. As our dependence on technology increases and
what passes for reality consists of mediated images, there is a corresponding
loss of subjectivity, an inability to grasp “the real.” The film’s digital rheto-
ric effectively simulates the prosthetic connection between a subject and a
camera, a viewer and a screen, the now privatized scale of experience that is
characteristic of digital and computer technology.
A surveillance camera or its aesthetic is often used in works that are digi-
tally shot, whether they are films or video art. Timecode (2000, Mike Figgis)
deploys four screens, continuously and simultaneously shot by four digital
cameras.­ Dead End Job (2003, Ryan Stec) uses the actual images from sur-
veillance cameras and edits them into a hallucinatory collage. The device al-
lows for an exploration of real-time recording, albeit to different effect than
J-horror. A significant number of J-horror films use surveillance camera im-
ages to create a moment of shock through the intrusion of something extraor-
dinary within the banality of the ordinary. Shimizu’s Ju-on: The Grudge has a
sequence of a ghost appearing in a surveillance monitor, where the film skill-
fully uses continuous short cuts and slowly leads the spectator’s point of view
to the full size of the monitor image. At first, Hitomi (Ito Misaki), the “chap-
ter’s” victim, witnesses the image of an office hallway, partially distorted with
static interference appearing on the screen; then she sees a security guard
gradually enveloped by the ghost’s shadow. After the cutback to Hitomi’s re-
action (she freaks out and runs away), the last shot in the monitor displays the
usual image of the same hallway, only now the guard has disappeared. The
film cleverly reduces the visual information in the sequence—first, reducing
its color to black and white, which Ringu also used for the cursed videotape

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    37

and, second, lowering the visual resolution by blowing up the image of a small
surveillance television monitor onto the full screen. The film undermines our
preconception that the image of a surveillance camera is objective reality and,
as the director Kurosawa pointed out, it creates J-horror’s idiosyncratic mo-
ment, in which the ghost’s extraordinary figure appears (through CGI in this
case) in the mundane space of the monitor.22 The principle of reduction in or-
der to create an eye-catching image can be seen as a consequence of the popu-
larity of digital cameras, since anyone can now take a well-lit focused image,
even with synchronous sound; in other words, to create an expressive image,
one needs to find a way to reduce what the camera captures, instead of adding
more elements. Digital shooting represents an aesthetic regime of reduction
that is markedly different from conventional filmmaking, in which one needs
to add the necessary elements, such as enhanced lighting and sound, in order
to grant the image a higher degree of verisimilitude.23
As a result of using digital video cameras and computer editing, contem-
porary Japanese horror films have a new look. It is certainly not only in the
case of horror, as one can also see this stylistic transformation in other genre
films, such as the comedies Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims (Mayonaka no
Yaji-san Kita-san, 2005, Kudo Kankuro) and Takeshis’ (2005, Kitano Takeshi)
and the drama Distance (2001, Kore’eda Hirokazu). Yet only J-horror has
managed broad commercial success with global audiences through the alter-
native distribution of DVD, rather than depending on international theatrical
release. Both Kore’eda and Kitano, on the one hand, brought their films to
the Cannes Film Festival and tried to extend their distribution to international
markets. On the industry’s belief that comedy does not cross cultural bound-
aries well, Yaji and Kita targeted only the domestic box office. It bears repeat-
ing that the boom of J-horror occurred alongside the cultural contingency of
independent filmmakers’ affinity with digital technology. Moreover, J-horror
has been especially successful in tapping the aesthetic of new media, in par-
ticular the digital regime of fragmentary narrative, which highlighted atten-
tion to the disrupted electronic image, privatized spectatorship, and aesthetic
reduction. J-horror’s appeal to global audiences is due to this new look and
how the filmic content is packaged and distributed, as I will outline in the
following­ section.

DVD and the New Paradigms of Distribution

and Consumption
J-horror’s emergence parallels the rise of the DVD market in Japan. The
timing­of its appearance was fortuitous, since the genre had both a sufficient

38   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

mass of existing narrative content in novels, manga comics, and television
programs and speed in generating new content, whether shot on film or video,
to meet the demand of the growing DVD market. Indeed, one difficulty in
discussing J-horror is due to the genre’s symbiotic relation with the new digi-
tal technology, which leads the film genre into a tangle of cross-media traffic.
Simply put, the centrality of film as the primary medium for production, dis-
tribution, and consumption has shifted with the emerging predominance of
DVD. Consequently, a discussion of J-horror must be placed within this tran-
sitional stage of cross-media consumption. Shimizu Takashi, for example, has
serialized his original video Ju-on (1999) in a number of films and videos, as
well as Japanese and Hollywood feature film versions. Shimizu has already
directed six Ju-on videos and films: Ju-on (video), Ju-on 2 (video, 2000), Ju-on:
The Grudge (film), Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (film), The Grudge (film), and The Grudge
2 (film, 2006). The Grudge 3 (2009, Toby Wilkins) was released in May 2009 as
a straight-to-DVD, though Shimizu did not direct it. The multiple versions of
Ju-on, whether originally released on video or film, are available as separate
texts in the DVD format. J-horror’s affinity with the extra-filmic products of
DVD (and television programming for the domestic Japanese audience) has
fueled the J-horror boom both inside and outside Japan. In other words, the
genre is constructed of a number of media products, only one of which is in
the traditional form of a theatrically released feature film.
The profusion of horror omnibuses is the best example of J-horror’s com-
patibility with new media, especially DVD. They often circulate in the DVD
market without depending on the theatrical release at all, and they are either
reedited from already existing television programs or produced straight-to-
DVD. The DVD Dark Tales of Japan (Nihon no kowai yoru, 2004, Nakamura
Yoshihiro et al.), for instance, is an omnibus of five television programs that
were originally broadcast in September 2004. Shimizu Takashi directed one
of the five episodes, “Kinpatsu kaidan/Blonde Kwaidan,” and in the nar-
rative, he mockingly intertextualized Hollywood’s rush for adaptations of
J-horror films, including his own The Grudge. These omnibuses function as a
system for creating and sustaining the J-horror boom in three principal ways:
(1) Relatively young and inexperienced filmmakers can start making a short
film as training for the role of director; (2) horror films on DVD find alterna-
tive distribution without the expense of theatrical release marketing; (3) it
facilitates cross-media, intertextual references to contemporary popular cul-
ture. The decision to distribute films directly on DVD makes sense given that
there are still too many films produced and not enough screen space avail-
able, and thus they are shelved and unreleased. As the film producer Kuroi
Kazuo states, “Although the mass media has been fussing by saying that the

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    39

Renaissance of Japanese cinema has come, there are about one hundred films
still unreleased and put up on the shelf. . . . There are a limited number of
screens, and too many films.”24
In terms of the third aspect, the practice of referencing or even adapting
from other media such as comics, television programs, and novels secures an
already existing audience for both films and DVD. The omnibus format in
the horror genre has indeed a long history, as we can see in various examples.
Three Tales of Terror (1912, Jacob Fleck et al., Austria-Hungary) has three epi-
sodes directed by Jacob Fleck, Luise Fleck, and Claudius Velée. Tales from the
Crypt (1972, Freddie Francis, United Kingdom/United States) is based on the
same-titled comic-book series, and the film has the omnibus format of five
people trapped in a crypt and shown their futures. Two Evil Eyes (Due occhi
diabolici, 1990, Dario Argento and George A. Romero, Italy/United States)
is composed of two horror segments based on the Edgar Allan Poe stories,
“The Facts about Mr. Valdeman,” directed by Romero, and “The Black Cat,”
directed by Argento. As evinced by the omnibus format, the horror film genre
in general has developed under the influence of short stories or comic-book
segments. This format is even more suitable for the DVD medium since its
chapter structure allows one to watch an individual segment or to skip to
another episode. In the case of J-horror, one of the most significant intertex-
tual references for those omnibus DVDs is manga comics, as illustrated by
the horror omnibuses Hino Hideji’s Mystery Theater DVD-Box (Hino Hideji kaiki
gekijo DVD-Box, 2005, Shiraishi Koji et al.) and Umezu Kazuo’s Horror Theater
(Umezu Kazuo kyofu gekijo,­2005, Kurosawa Kiyoshi et al.). The Umezu omni-
bus includes six shorts, all based on the comic artist Umezu Kazuo’s horror
manga comics. While a few of those films had limited theatrical release in
Tokyo (Cinema Vera Shibuya in June 2006) or at film festivals (Fukuoka Hero
Festa, November 2006; Sapporo Film Festival, November 2006), the series
was packaged for the DVD market. The Tomie series (Oikawa Ataru et al.) is
also based on the manga comics of the same title by the artist Ito Junji. This
series has a television version as well, which is repackaged on DVD in the
form of an omnibus titled Tomie: Another Face (1999, Inomata Toshiro). The
original comic’s serialization of the story of a clone Tomie (Nagai Runa) who
has the ability to regenerate her body even after her murder is not just timely
as a topic but also works for extending the series.
From the industrial point of view, the central force enabling J-horror’s
entry to the world market has been its integration with the DVD format. The
rise of new media, DVD in particular, has altered the trajectory of cultural
flow worldwide toward a decentralized model of multiplied venues that are
less beholden to the theatrical screen. The concept of “global cinema” has

40   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

been changing along with the distribution of cinematic content in multimedia
formats. With the exception of India and the United States, few countries
have thriving and profitable national film industries that can manage to sus-
tain the notion that theater screening is the epitome of cinematic distribu-
tion. Even in the United States, the state of moviegoing has been gradually
changing with the qualitative improvement of home theater systems and the
corresponding steep rise in DVD player ownership. As Barbara Klinger notes,
“Rising from a 2 percent to a 30 percent penetration of U.S. homes from
1999 to 2002, DVD players have inspired owners to upgrade their entertain-
ment equipment so that the superiority of DVD picture and sound can be
fully realized.”25 The discipline of film studies itself is still struggling to as-
similate the fact that film is no longer represented solely by movies in the-
aters. David Bordwell writes that “a truly global cinema is one that claims
significant space on theater screens throughout developed and developing
countries. . . . The only global cinema comes from America. Blockbusters
like Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich) and Titanic (1997, James
Cameron) are international media events. . . . The Hollywood of the East is
Hollywood.”26 While the Hollywood blockbuster might still command such
attention, it should be emphasized that the examples Bordwell cites here are
films produced when DVDs had only recently entered the market. Moreover,
since the mid-1980s, more people have been watching Hollywood films at
home than in theaters.27 As of December 1998, Titanic’s gross for rentals in
the United States ($324,425,520) was already much higher than its box office
totals ($128,099,826).28

Japanese Cinema in the Global Marketplace

Until the advent of J-horror, Japanese cinema had never been a “global cin-
ema” except for anime (Japanese animation) and some auteur films circulated
via various international film festivals. J-horror’s border traffic represents a
significant departure from the cinema’s long-standing failure in foreign mar-
kets. The history of Japanese exported film (yushutsu-eiga) has largely been a
series of misfires, which, despite an often-favorable critical reception, failed to
reach wide theatrical release and box office profits. Outside of the occasional
art-house film, there have been few attempts to export Japanese cinema in a
commercially viable way, much less to create a global cinema. The influence
of Japanese popular culture has, instead, largely been in the commodities tar-
geted at children, such as television animations and video games. As Anne
Allison writes, “Japanese ‘cool’ is traveling popularly and profitably around
the world and insinuating itself into the everyday lives and fantasy desires of

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    41

postindustrial kids from Taiwan and Australia to Hong Kong and France.”29
The historian William Tsutsui agrees:

Japanese popular culture exports have had a profound influence in

America (and indeed, throughout the world) in the decades since
World War II. From Godzilla in the 1950s through Astro Boy in the
1960s, Speed Racer in the 1970s, and the more recent phenomena
of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Hello Kitty, Nintendo, and
Pokemon, creations of the Japanese imagination have been high
profile and big business in the United States.30

As Tsutsui’s examples indicate, Japanese cultural exports to the United

States have specifically flourished in the categories of monster and animation
products—­but seldom in the cinema. However, there were a few periods when
the Japanese film industry tried to intensively promote their films abroad even
before the Second World War.
Japanese cinema was, arguably, first introduced in the United States in
1904, when the producer Kawaura Ken’ichi screened the newsreels from the
Russo-Japanese War at the exposition in St. Louis, Missouri.31 Later, a num-
ber of bunka-eiga (cultural films)32 were shown at the New York Exposition,
and most of the films served to introduce Japan to foreign audiences, as
indicated by such titles as Nara and Kyoto (Nara to Kyoto, 1933), Festivals in
Japan (Nihon no matsuri, 1934), Japan in Four Seasons (Shiki no Nihon, 1933),
and Glimpses of Japan (Nihon bekken, 1936), all produced by the Japanese
International Tourist Bureau.33 Although the director Murata Minoru’s at-
tempt to promote his film, The Street Magician (Machi no tejinashi, 1925), in
Europe failed in 1925, another director, Kinugasa Teinosuke, succeeded in
marketing his film, Shadows of the Yoshiwara (Jujiro, 1928), in Germany. The
well-known producer Kawakita Nagamasa made two multinational produc-
tion films, The New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, 1937, Itami Mansaku and Arnold
Fanck, Japan/Germany) and The Road to the Eastern Peace (Toyo heiwa no
michi, 1938, Suzuki Shigeyoshi). Naruse Mikio’s film Kimiko (Tsuma yo bara
no yo ni, 1935) was shown in the United States and harshly reviewed by The
New York Times in 1937.34 The breakthrough of Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon
(1950), which won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, opened the
way for many Japanese films, especially “art films,” to be accepted at various
international film festivals and, hence, seen by potential foreign buyers.
One might argue that the overall resistance within the Japanese film
industry to produce more exportable commercial products is based on an
intrinsic­condition of Japanese cinema’s coexistence with Hollywood: Only

42   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

those Japanese films that were distinguished by culturally specific genres could
compete with the dominant Hollywood films in the Japanese market, and due
to the cultural specificity of these films the industry assumed that they were
unsuitable for export. J-horror, exemplary of Japanese genre cinema, would
change those assumptions. Thanks to DVD distribution, it managed to tra-
verse the historical boundaries that shaped Japanese cinema as a fundamen-
tally domestic product. J-horror, thus, followed the model of Japanese anime
videotapes of the 1980s.
Japanese television animation crossed cultural boundaries to the global
markets due to its capacity for modification on the level of text; it was easily­
redubbed and reedited to make it more universal. As Tsutsui’s recollection
indicates, the animations Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan Atomu, Fuji Television,
1963–1966, Tezuka Osamu et al.) in the 1960s, Speed Racer (Mahha go go go,
Television Tokyo, 1967–1968, Yoshida Tatsuo et al.) in the late 1960s, and
Pokémon (Poketto monsuta, Television Tokyo, 1997, Yuyama Kunihiko et al.) in
the 1990s found success abroad in dubbed and reedited versions on television
worldwide, and it was likely that the majority of the viewers did not even reg-
ister that those animations were from Japan. The phenomenon of Japanese
animation crossing cultural boundaries accelerated in the boom of anime with
multiple media formats of television, film, and videotape. Japanese anima-
tion has managed to reach a wider spectrum of audiences of varying age and
gender, primarily through its multitude of texts, subject diversity, and varia-
tions in quality. Such platforms as videotape and DVD have enabled anime to
preserve aspects of cultural authenticity, such as keeping Japanese language
with English subtitles, Japanese names, and culturally specific scenes of eat-
ing and bathing.
Similarly, J-horror’s assimilation with new digital technology enabled it to
cross market boundaries, despite its culturally specific images, such as a ghost
with a white painted body theatrically stylized like a Butoh dance performer
and a vengeful woman figure with long black hair. Such cultural specificities
are, on the one hand, generally diminished in Hollywood remakes, reflecting
the calculations of marketing to a generic worldwide audience, and on the
other hand, they are highlighted in the DVD packaging of J-horror films that
aims at a cult fan demographic with an appetite for the culturally authentic
and macabre violence. Both anime and J-horror demonstrate a formidable
capacity for variegated production targeted toward diverse consumers with
products that range from high to low quality. One can, for instance, find 1,000
anime DVDs and more than 350 J-horror DVDs by using combinations of the
key words “animation” and “Japan” or “horror” and “Japan” at one of the
most popular Asian film Internet sites, HKFlix.com.35

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    43

 The DVD is inextricable from the enriched flow of cinematic commodi-
ties that leads away from the Hollywood-centered film distribution model to
more region-oriented models. Worldwide, the DVD has extended the film
industry’s market models beyond the theatrical release to address diverse,
private, and home-based reception patterns. The excessive price of going to
a movie in Japan (approximately U.S.$22 per adult, or ¥1,800) and the indus-
trial strategy for marketing certain B-genre films solely in DVD formats have
spurred the tendency to purchase films on DVD. Its high information capacity
combined with the ability to distribute dubbed and subtitled versions in mul-
tiple languages has also expanded the marketing potential of J-horror across
national boundaries. The worldwide success of J-horror illustrates how digital
media have extended cinema’s reach as a global commodity through both offi-
cial and unofficial channels, such as downloading films from the Internet, file
sharing, and piracy. Indeed, the regional boom of the genre has been largely a
matter of unplanned cultural contingencies, the intersection of digital media
and mobile culture.
In the case of Ringu, for instance, the executive producer Hara Masato
attributes the unexpected success of the series to the technological fluency of
schoolgirl culture. Originally, the production side planned to market Ringu as
a “date film,” but it turned out that many female high school students came
to see the film, and the positive word of mouth generated by their cell phone
text messaging contributed to the success of the series. Ringu’s gross sales
were more than U.S.$10 million, and the following year, Ringu 2 doubled its
sales.36 The income is, of course, not only from their theatrical releases but
also includes video and DVD sales. Ringu’s release was especially timely, since
it came right after the DVD was legally licensed in Japan in 1996, and the
promotion of both DVD software and hardware encouraged the purchase of
films. The same strategy was later used in the United States, and The Ring
DVD sold more than 2 million copies in the first twenty-four hours of its
video release.37
Significantly, the global circulation of J-horror has depended on the rise
of digital networking and film piracy concurrent with the popularization of
DVD since the late 1990s. As Shujen Wang notes, “The rapidly changing spa-
tiotemporal dynamics and configurations afforded by these new [digital] tech-
nologies have radically changed the nature of ‘property’ and market, the bal-
ance of power, and the relations and means of production, distribution, and
reception/consumption.”38 J-horror, in its upending of the existing hierarchy
of film distribution, is one of the best examples of the potential of exploiting
new digital technologies. Global audiences who purchase the latest techno-
logical equipment and are better informed about new trends in software and

44   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

films through instantaneous streaming are no longer content to wait for the
local release of films when they can purchase the film’s DVD on the Internet
or download it from file-sharing sites. While safeguards such as region codes
prevent the cross-national flow of DVDs from one region to another, multire-
gion DVD players are cheap and widely available. A techno-literate audience
creates a perfect market for such pirated products. Furthermore, they promote
local digital entertainment products, such as B-movie films like J-horror, on
their blogs. The phenomenon of a digital network acting as an alternative
distribution system subverts the long-standing policy of major studios and
distributors to avoid exporting local genre films to other major markets, par-
ticularly the United States.
Digital networking is much faster and more flexible when compared with
the containment strategies of law enforcement or its legitimate counterparts
(such as Hollywood or other national film industries). J-horror’s regional
boom is largely a matter of the contingencies of DVD distribution in Asia,
a model that is functionally different from Hollywood’s traditional sched-
uling of its film release dates. Such an exercise of global control has never
been tenable­for regional or national cinemas, but digital networking has en-
abled these cinemas to decenter the pattern of cultural globalization vis-à-vis
Hollywood. The newly emerging geography of digital cinema thrives on its
centerless quality, a dynamic that also allows for the uncontrolled circulation
of its products. In the case of Ringu, the film was released in Japan on January
31, 1998, and its DVD was available in Japan as early as June 1998. The film
was released in East Asian markets, such as Hong Kong in April 1999 and
in South Korea on December 11, 1999. Intriguingly, a South Korean adapta-
tion of the film titled The Ring Virus (1999, Kim Dong-bin) was released on
June 12, 1999, which predates the Japanese original’s release by six months.
Such accelerated circulation of film (as content, whatever its form), enabled
by digital technology, has started to reshape the flow of culture and the bal-
ance of power in different media. As Wang points out in the case of Ang
Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long, 2000), this circulation
reverses the usual directional flow of commodities from Hollywood to global
regions: “This Hong Kong-Taiwan-China coproduction was released in Asia
five months before its U.S. premiere. . . . Pirated video copies of the film
were circulating in the U.S. market long before the film’s formal U.S. release
in December 2000.”39 In another case of reverse cultural flow, not only at
the “illegitimate” level but also as an act of “legitimate” global acceptance,
J-horror’s circulation gave rise to the subsequent horror boom in Asia and,
ultimately, accelerated the export of both adaptations and new filmmakers to
Hollywood.

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    45

 J-horror is well suited for the circumstances of industrial transition and
the new economics of small-screen movie viewing. The genre targets younger
audiences, who would rather rent or purchase DVDs than pay exorbitant ticket
prices at movie theaters in Japan. The tactics of emphasizing DVD sales also
suits the current circumstances of the Japanese film industry, in which digi-
tal cinema has not grown as fast as DVD’s popularization. “Digital cinema”
refers to the use of digital technology to distribute and project films. Movies
are distributed through hard drives, DVDs, or via satellite and are projected
using a digital projector instead of a conventional film projector.40 In contrast
to the rapid spread of DVD acceptance since the late 1990s, the Japanese film
industry has been experiencing a difficult time digitalizing its distribution and
projection systems. Computerizing the system and purchasing a digital pro-
jector for each theater is about four to five times as expensive as the traditional
film projection system.41 For the majority of movie theaters, investing in this
technology guarantees neither an increase in patrons nor revenues. Moreover,
theater owners are hesitant to switch to the digital system until the format and
regulation of the system are standardized. T-JOY, funded by Toei in 2000, is
one of the few companies that accepts digital cinema, but by summer 2009 it
had only fifteen entertainment complexes throughout Japan.42

Critical Reception and the Loss of

Filmic Content
J-horror’s proclivity for crossing borders of media and patterns of reception
has made the genre fertile ground for airing problems in film studies’ as-
similation of the transitions occurring in cinema. The genre represents what
I see as the dual potentialities of new media: on the one hand, a greater
access to different media and multiplicity of texts, and on the other hand,
the power of digitalization to erase historical context. Because of the genre’s
affinity with the DVD format, J-horror has extended its reach through an
enormous amount of works and thereby broadened its categorical param-
eters. This reconstruction of the J-horror genre as a pragmatic category in
the DVD market has led to a shuffling of media (i.e., the erasure of content
origin as films, the production of straight-to-video films, and the formatting
of television programs into DVD) and history (i.e., repackaging nonhorror
films of the 1960s as the precursors to J-horror). The materiality of the genre,
whether it is in a form of film or DVD, now needs to be specified if one is
to analyze the genre in the context of film history. The proper identification
of each medium has become crucial to the analysis of a text since the anti-
quated hierarchy­among media—that film is the ultimate product and other

46   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

postfilmic products are simply spin-offs—has been subverted, especially in
the case of J-horror.
J-horror’s high affinity with DVD has led both DVD distributors and
scholars to rewrite film history, projecting an often false continuity to earlier
Japanese cinema. For instance, the anthology Japanese Horror Cinema, edited
by Jay McRoy, displays a glaring need for clarification on horror cinema’s
basic materiality. As the anthology’s filmography reveals, what the book con-
siders “film” is actually DVD, and this substitution causes the reconfiguration
of the horror genre itself. Although the act of analyzing a film in different for-
mats has been indispensable to film scholars since the 1980s, the critical prob-
lem here is that in blurring the distinction between those media, the contribu-
tors to the anthology take an expansive view of what constitutes Japanese
horror cinema that is far beyond the historic context of the genre. A number
of films covered in the anthology, such as Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953,
Mizoguchi Kenji), Throne of Blood (Kumonosujo, 1957, Kurosawa Akira), Blind
Beast (Moju, 1969, Masumura Yasuzo), In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korida,
1976, Oshima Nagisa), Tetsuo, the Iron Man (Tetsuo, 1989), Freeze Me (Ishii
Takashi, 2000, Tsukamoto Shin’ya), and Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru, 2000,
Fukasaku Kinji), were never associated with the horror genre at all in regard
to the films’ production or distribution in Japan. They were distributed and
discussed within the regimes of the auteur (Mizoguchi and Kurosawa); as
genre films, such as jidaigeki-eiga (period film); or bungei-mono (literary adap-
tation) in the case of Blind Beast; a sexually explicit art film in the case of In
the Realm of the Senses; a cyberpunk film in the case of Tetsuo; and a psycho
thriller in the case of Freeze Me. Or simply, they have been viewed as topical
films in connection with best-selling novels, as in the case of Battle Royale.
Peter Hutchings is right about the difficulty of defining horror when he notes,
“If one looks at the way that film critics and film historians have written about
horror, a certain imprecision becomes apparent regarding how the genre is
actually constituted.”43 I do not think, however, that the issue is solely a matter
of genre categorization in the case of Japanese Horror Cinema. Rather it is the
failure to acknowledge the connections among a text, its historical context,
and the discursive subject. Such connections are ever more crucial in my view,
given that new media have the tendency to encompass and reposition the old
media and the past as well.
If one visits any Internet site that promotes and distributes Japanese hor-
ror films, he or she will find that the films mentioned above are actually cat-
egorized as “horror.” At HKFlix.com, for example, Battle Royale is included
in both the “horror” and “thriller” genres, and other keywords are “action,”
“children,” and “teen[-pic].”44 DVD distributors and countless Internet retailers

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    47

recategorize their products to deliberately widen their appeal to potential cus-
tomers. The difference between film and DVD genre categories is also reflected­
by the shift of the target audience/consumer from regional movie­theater au-
diences to global DVD consumers. In the case of J-horror, the dominance
of DVD in the marketplace has produced a new genre system in postfilmic
distributions. It is a system with more generic terms, but at the same time it re-
sembles the genre categories of Hollywood cinema. Amidst this process, local­
generic terms such as jidaigeki-eiga have been erased. Rick Altman indicates
that “the technological and representational explosion of recent years only
reinforces earlier patterns of alienation and lost presence. . . . While genres
are certainly not as simple as most people think they are, many a placebo has
provided a successful cure. Because people see safety in the apparent stability
of genre, they find genre films useful as signs of successful constellated com-
munity communication.”45
This shifting of genres between film and DVD helps us understand the
difficulty of connecting a filmic text with its historical cultural context. With
the help of digital technology, visual content is released not only in multiple
formats but also with multiple layers of ownership rights. The content is of-
ten manipulated (from black and white to color, reedited as a director’s edi-
tion, and so on) and repackaged. Recently, the director Shindo Kaneto’s film
Onibaba (Onibaba’a, 1964) was released on DVD in region one (the United
States and Canada) on March 16, 2004. Although Criterion, one of the lead-
ing DVD distributors of classic films, makes no connection with “horror”
on its repackaged version of Onibaba, one finds that “horror” has nonethe-
less gradually sneaked into the marketing of the DVD. Amazon.com’s edi-
torial review, for instance, begins its description of the DVD with the fol-
lowing: “A curse hangs over Kaneto Shindo’s primal Japanese classic like a
looming storm cloud, but the supernatural has got nothing on the despera-
tion and savagery of the human animal trying to survive the horrors of war.”
The International Movie Database (IMDb) categorizes the film as “Drama/
Horror” and includes a link to Amazon.com DVD shopping.46
Once analyses of this film appear in academic discourses outside Japan,
the film is without any hesitation categorized as “horror,” as we see in
Jyotsna Kapur’s essay, “The Return of History as Horror: Onibaba and the
Atomic Bomb,” and Adam Lowenstein’s chapter, “Unmasking Hiroshima:
Demons, Human Beings, and Shindo Kaneto’s Onibaba,” in his book Shocking
Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film.47
Kapur “focuses on haunting histories and regional gothics” and reveals that
“the traditional Japanese horror film . . . is a radical reworking of this genre
into a political allegory of survival in conditions of scarcity amidst class

48   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

antagonism­ruled by war.”48 Lowenstein “examines Shindo’s horror film
Onibaba as a means of refiguring how cinematic representations of Hiroshima
are legislated theoretically, with particular attention to the political issues of
victim consciousness, war responsibility, and the construction of gendered
models of Japanese national identity.”49
It has been a while since Frederic Jameson’s allegorical reading on “Third
World Literature” was criticized due to its lack of specificity and its ahistori-
cal tendencies.50 I have no interest in directing the same criticism toward these
scholars’ allegorical approach to Japanese cinema, but I must indicate the gap
between the regional, journalistic discourses that followed the film’s release in
1964 and their post–DVD academic discourses. None of the advertisements,
film reviews, or interviews that were published at that time connected the film
with the horror genre. The generic categories that these regional discourses
associated with the film were either folktale genre (minwa-mono) or indepen-
dent film (dokuritsu-puro-eiga).51 When Onibaba was released on November 21,
1964, an advertisement for the film highlighted three aspects of the film: It
was directed by Shindo Kaneto, who was already well known as a realist film-
maker; it was submitted to the Minister of Education Awards for Arts (geijut-
susai), a wide-ranging annual festival (including theater, film, television pro-
grams, music, dance, performance, etc.) sponsored by the government since
1946; and it was distributed nationwide by Toho, one of the country’s major
film companies.52 In stark contrast to recent essays highlighting the film as
horror, Onibaba was primarily cast as one of the best new independent films
in the Japanese critical discourse of the mid-1960s.53
The year 1964 was the turning point for both independent filmmakers and
major studios. As the film industry began to see declines in both revenue and
number of viewers in the early 1960s, the major studios dropped their policy
of excluding independent films from their distribution channels in order to
reduce their own production costs and to profit from the distribution of inde-
pendent films. Onibaba was one of three independent films that year (the other
two were Woman in the Dunes [Suna no on’na, 1964, Teshigahara Hiroshi] and
Kwaidan [Kaidan, 1964, Kobayashi Masaki]) that were distributed by Toho
and made large profits for the company. As a result, the regional discourses
in both advertisements and film reviews naturally focused on Onibaba’s aspect
as an independent film. Shindo himself commented on this: “It has become
common knowledge that one cannot make a film if he leaves a major film
studio. So the fact that I showed that one can still make a film outside of the
major studios, is some sort of contribution of this film.”54
The history of Onibaba and Kwaidan (its DVD was also released in October
2000 in the United States) has been reconfigured by their DVD release­within

New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema    49

the context of the recent horror boom. Similarly, as obscure films are revived
through DVD, greater access to film has occurred; or, put differently, the fact
that the film medium has been subsumed within multimedia has multiplied
the connections between texts and their histories. As Jan Simons indicates,
“Multimediality in itself, however, [is] neither unique nor new, and the novelty­
of new media mainly and most importantly consists of a repositioning and
redefinition of old media.” He continues, “A film’s content can be redefined
as ‘information’ that can be conceived of as a collection of data that can be
organized in various ways, out of which a film’s particular narrative is just one
possible choice.”55 As a film is located as information within the digitalizing­
process, the notion of cinema—films shown in movie theaters—becomes only
one particular interface to that information. The concept­of film as an immu-
table, superior material may be preserved only in the specific nostalgic sense
of “aura,” as we now recognize in the sound of vinyl records.56 Kapur and
Lowenstein’s allegorical reading of Onibaba is, after all, the result of their in-
terfacing with the text, and while one may also view the film as a precursor
of J-horror, neither view is supported by the film’s historical context. Such
connections seem plausible only once the film is wrenched from its historical
materiality.

50   New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema

 Digital
Authenticity

In his recent overview of contem-

porary Japanese cinema, the Japanese film scholar Sato Tadao notes that
“Japanese cinema has lost the strong support of investment capital, but it has
gained more freedom in its production.”1 The whole film industry has gradu-
ally become financially dysfunctional, and the major film companies have dra-
matically reduced production numbers since the 1960s. This industrial trans-
formation has created a domino effect. The program pictures (or B-movies),
which were once the studios’ main source of revenue, are no longer produced.
The film industry also scrapped the system of nurturing the careers of movie
stars with those program pictures. Due to the collapse of the studio produc-
tion and distribution systems, the major studios no longer manage produc-
tion output to suffice the booking of their direct-owned theaters. Finally, the
paucity of big movie stars and the wildly fluctuating quality within each film
genre have alienated audiences from seeing Japanese films in movie theaters.
Films that entertain audiences of all ages, social backgrounds, and genders
are now rare, and both the genre system and the distinction between art and
popular films have broken down. The recent nationwide success of Yamada
Yoji’s jidaigeki (period film) trilogy, The Twilight Samurai (Tasogare seibei, 2002),
The Hidden Blade (Kakushi ken oni no tsume, 2004), and Love and Honor (Bushi no

51
ichibun, 2006), can be interpreted as a literal “last samurai,” an elegy for the
good old days of the Japanese film studio era, as Yamada’s films hearken back
to the studio’s golden age of genre filmmaking in the 1950s.
Within these industrial conditions, documentary filmmakers have been
creating a number of outstanding works in both documentary and narrative
film. Due to the disruption of the genre system, these filmmakers’ works no
longer stand as mere alternatives to the mainstream of feature narrative films.
Working from the documentary tradition of a smaller production scale and
with extensive use of locations and multimedia (not only film, but also video),
documentary filmmakers have found ways to develop innovative filmmaking
practices amidst the disrupted terrain of contemporary Japanese cinema.
Addressing the recent debates over documentaries, David Hogarth frames
their paradoxical predicament as follows: “the world is being swept by a wave
of ‘documania’—by an unprecedented volume and velocity of real-life images­
that inform viewers about world affairs as never before,” but, he argues, we are
“suffering from a glut of ‘McDocumentaries’—standardized factual products­
offering few aesthetic surprises and no political punch.”2 In the case of the
contemporary Japanese documentary, it has emerged as a thriving area of
filmmaking against the backdrop of industrial decline, but it is far from a
“standardized” product. Its attraction rests on a sense of novelty that distin-
guishes it from the postwar Japanese documentary tradition—a tradition that,
as Abé Mark Nornes situates it, was established by the work of the filmmaker
Ogawa Shinsuke and his film collective (Ogawa Pro), which depicts “a slice
of the social history of postwar Japan.”3 Nornes highlights Ogawa’s practice
of filmmaking as drawn from “the collective, the political, . . . institutional,
and interpersonal conditions.”4
While Ogawa is still seen as a representative figure in the documentary
tradition who conscientiously chooses his social and political subjects, many
of the new documentarists have positioned their work against that tradition
or have remained detached from it. Those new documentarists’ “politics” rest
on their distance from the larger, more collective public discourses; in other
words, their focus is on the more private and individualized projects of iden-
tity and the confrontation of personal or family crises, which ultimately posi-
tion their documentaries diametrically opposed to Ogawa’s works. Historical
intertextuality has also worked differently in various regional documentary
practices. Chris Berry addresses the considerable influence of Ogawa’s films
on the Chinese documentarists. Although the political engagement of Ogawa’s
films was not adopted, since “for the Chinese new documentary makers, be-
ing socially and politically engaged has never been an option because such
movements are ruthlessly suppressed in the People’s Republic,” Ogawa’s

52   Digital Authenticity
method of relating a filmmaker to filmic subjects by living or working among
them has been deeply emulated in the contemporary Chinese documentaries.5
What seems new in recent Japanese documentary practice is a mode of
authenticity that requires a new definition, distinct from either real or genuine
in a literal sense and connoted with a quality of seeming to exist, a sense of re-
ality expressed in the vernacular term “riaruna.” This authenticity is not sim-
ply embedded in the text itself, as in the assumed reality of the observational
documentary or in the notion of transparent reality that André Bazin found
in Italian neorealism. It is rather an authenticity constructed in the process of
viewing, particularly in the scale and close proximity of the viewer’s everyday
life. For instance, the relative subjectivity of the viewer is engaged through the
momentary disruption of the documentary image that recalls any person’s
experience of viewing the imperfect image on the small display screen of a
digital camera. We all can recognize that there is a difference between reality
and representation in a documentary, but our acceptance of this fact does
not negate the sense of authenticity that we create as viewers. The quality of
authenticity is also the latest commercial value, established in the accelerated
impossibility of distinguishing between copy and original or fiction and non-
fiction that is prevalent in the current saturation of digital technology.
The distinction between documentary and fiction film has long been dis-
cussed, as we find in the scholarly works of Richard Barsam (1973, 1992), Eric
Barnouw (1974, 1983, 1993), Michael Renov (1993, 2004), Carl Plantinga
(1997), Noël Carroll (1999), Trevor Ponech (1999), Paul Wells (1999), Stella
Bruzzl (2000, 2006), a number of contributions by Bill Nichols (1991, 1993,
1994, 2001), and others, but these ongoing attempts have seemingly never
reached consensus.6 We also encounter the endless increase of subgenres in
documentary without any regulatory term, such as “documentary drama (or
docudrama),” “dramatized documentary,” “mockumentary,” “docufiction,”
“reality television” format in film, and “fictional entertainment.” Moreover,
those scholars’ methodological or theoretical differences make the discus-
sion more multifaceted. For instance, from the point of view highlighting the
author’s intentionality, as one can see in filmmakers Kevin MacDonald and
Mark Consins’s statement, “Documentary . . . is more a statement of atti-
tude than content,”7 the other way of constructing the distinction between the
megagenres of documentary and fiction film on the basis of textual elements
such as techniques, styles, and narrative forms does not make any sense. As
Philip Rosen indicates, if the notion of documentary has a genealogy that is
described with various references to the concept’s historicity, I would place
my analysis of new documentary in Japan within the vernacular historical
genealogy. Although Bill Nichols has established an influential documentary

Digital Authenticity     53

“family tree”—poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and
performative—in his numerous works, forcing the deceptively universal ge-
nealogy onto Japanese documentary history, more specifically the new docu-
mentary, is simply marginalizing our subject within the constellation of the
central canon of films: namely, Anglophone and Francophone documentary
films.
To reiterate, the quality of authenticity is not simply a monolithic aesthetic,­
technique, or the result of a remarkable auteur director such as Ogawa. This is
due in part to the growing infiltration of digital images and the unparalleled­
immediacy and detail that it allows. The leveling out of filmmaking econom-
ics, that is to say the decline of film as the exclusive medium of filmmaking
due to its superior depth—aesthetic and otherwise—has shifted the framing
of reality to the now ubiquitous digital image. Indeed, the virtually unlimited
storage capacity of digital imaging and its cheap, democratic utility links it to
the banality manifest in home video, video diaries, and surveillance cameras­
that operate perpetually. Among recent documentarists, there have been suc-
cessful attempts to incorporate and question the medium’s premise that it
represents an authentic reality, one connected with a private, personal, and
singular subject.
One might wonder how this authenticity is different from the “realist
aesthetic” of Anglophone documentary discourses. By adapting this term, I
would like to highlight the crucial distance that the contemporary Japanese
documentary has from both the “performative” documentary in Bill Nichols’s
sense, represented by the works of directors such as Trinh T. Minh-ha, Errol
Morris, and Marlon Riggs, and the more traditional documentary of the Euro-
American filmic scene, characterized by objectivity tied to a “constantive­
enunciation”—a language securing authority and authenticity—in Susan
Scheibler’s sense.8 Simply put, the Japanese documentary remains isolated,
for the most part, from theoretical practices that have informed its Western
counterparts.
Abé Mark Nornes, for example, reveals the fundamental regional ten-
dency in the work of the contemporary Japanese documentarist Hara Kazuo,
who differs from his precursors in the private scale of his film subjects and
who at the same time is part of the mainstream of the Japanese documentary
tradition, exploring the relationship between the filmmaker (shutai) and filmic
subject (taisho). Describing Hara’s work as “an exploration of and penetration
into the line drawn between the public and the private,” Nornes nonetheless
sees his films as having more in common with the observational documentary
of such Japanese filmmakers as Hani Susumu in the 1950s than with foreign­
documentary makers.9 What is intriguing here, however, is that Nornes asserts­

54   Digital Authenticity
this notion of “the private” in Hara’s case as being firmly rooted in the history
of Japanese documentary, which has been “supported by a rhetoric that was
very nearly hermetically sealed from theories from abroad.”10
The goal of this chapter is to analyze the significance of the new authen-
ticity in the contemporary Japanese documentary. Some of the aspects that
these works have in common, such as a focus on the private over the public,
have only recently been seriously broached among Japanese documentarists,
critics, and audiences. I shall examine the mode of cinematic authenticity
through the works of Kore’eda Hirokazu, Kawase Naomi, and the documen-
tary activist Tsuchiya Yutaka, each of whom challenges the aesthetics of ac-
tuality in documentary and fictional narrative film in their own way.
Kore’eda Hirokazu’s Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, 2004) was nomi-
nated at the 2004 Cannes International Film Festival for the Golden Palm
Award. Kore’eda worked for the production company TV Man Union, Inc.,
and he made a number of documentaries as television programs before di-
recting his first narrative film, Maboroshi (Maboroshi no hikari, 1995). Among
his seven narrative films so far—Maboroshi, After Life (Wandafuru raifu, 1998),
Distance (Disutansu, 2001), Nobody Knows, Hana (Hana yori mo naho, 2006),
Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo, 2008), and Air Doll (Kuki ningyo, 2009)—he
has adapted his documentary production skills and innovated a narrative film
with documentary styles, such as interviews consisting of talking heads in
After Life and a cinema verité–type of handheld camera on location in Distance.
Kawase Naomi represents the rise of the personal documentary (shiteki
dokumenrari) juxtaposed against the Japanese documentary tradition that has
often emphasized social problems and official discourses in films about envi-
ronmental pollution or promoting private companies in the so-called public
relations (PR) film.11 Kawase has always produced in her home prefecture of
Nara, which is remote from the filmmaking centers in Tokyo and Kyoto. Her
films, both documentaries and narratives, constitute a focused exploration of
the boundaries between these accepted categorizations. Moreover, she has sus-
tained her personal interests across various visual media (8mm, 16mm, 35mm,
video, HD digital video), interests that include her family history, identity,
friends, community, and issues and narratives rooted within the local sphere.
For instance, her recent fiction film, The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori, 2007),
is about the relationship between an old man suffering from senile dementia
and his caretaker working at a nursing home in Nara. Kawase has subverted the
hierarchy of film subjects by which such preoccupations are typically relegated­
to the “home movie,” and she has developed her own cinema of realistic film
(riaruna eiga), subscribing neither to the conventions of documentary nor to
those of the narrative feature film. Her filmmaking is specific to the region,

Digital Authenticity     55

often foregrounding Nara’s locales, people, and their dialect, and yet at the
same time her interest in and assimilation to particular tendencies of European
art cinema, such as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s films, places her regional
work within a global cinematic context. Her riaruna eiga is formed through her
negotiations with the demands and possibilities of various film festivals and
television broadcasts, which have hitherto clustered toward Europe, such as
the Cannes or Locarno International Film Festivals and the Franco-German
European television network Arte. I will address her work’s regionalization of
the quality of authenticity by analyzing her riaruna eiga, Tarachime (2006).
The third example that I will cover is video activist Tsuchiya Yutaka’s
work, The New God (Atarashii kamisama, 1999). The subgenre of personal
documentary has become conspicuous both in Japanese critical discourses
and movie theaters since the 1990s, reflecting on the availability of inexpen-
sive digital cameras and personal computers equipped with editing software
and on the increasing number of small screens in Japan’s urban cinema com-
plexes, which provide low-budget films with more chances to be screened in
public. Indeed, the rapid proliferation of small theaters is a unique aspect of
the topography of documentary in Japan. Introducing the critical discourses
around these personal documentaries, this section will analyze the mode of
authenticity produced in this work. While the films of personal documenta-
rists are thematically and stylistically diverse, they share one prominent aspect
with Kore’eda’s and Kawase’s works, which is a preoccupation with cinema’s
reconstruction of reality on the smaller scale of everyday life. In my view, this
current of the personal documentary is symptomatic of the many constraints
that contemporary filmmakers face in Japanese screen industries, as well as
in their own social lives. The societal and historical aspects in their culture—
such as the long-lasting economic recession and the rise of neonationalism as
a response to accelerated cultural globalization—have in turn brought about
an emphasis on local realities in Japanese cinema. Obviously, the realities
that those filmmakers create are representations, but they are indeed cultural
agents, negotiating the boundaries with other cultures and histories. The mul-
tiplicity of those films’ realities challenges the authenticity of documentary
cinema, or even that of national culture itself.
The tendency to negotiate with cinematic authenticity in documentaries
does not belong exclusively to contemporary Japanese cinema; it is a rather
ubiquitous trait in world cinema. Japanese documentarists share in the cur-
rent technological transformation that has emerged worldwide with digital
modes of production and distribution. However, their innovative filmmaking
processes have also derived from the Japanese screen industry’s economic and
cultural transformation. Japanese cinema indeed reached a Renaissance in

56   Digital Authenticity
the late 1990s, and yet this is not simply because of the international attention
brought toward festival winners such as Kitano Takeshi and Miyazaki Hayao.
The Renaissance, if we can call it that, is principally a result of alternative
films, such as the new documentaries and the small-budget genre films of
J-horror, AV (adult video), and anime, demonstrating their ability to adapt to
the new realities of post-studio filmmaking.

Nobody Knows, a Fictional Narrative with

Documentary Style
Early in his career, Kore’eda Hirokazu directed a number of award-winning
documentaries, many of them presenting an “objective” point of view of a
contemporary social issue that garnered enough interest to be broadcast on
television. In Kore’eda’s first televised documentary, However . . . (Shikashi—
Fukushi kirisute no jidai ni, Fuji Television, 1991), by investigating two suicide
cases, he reveals the hypocrisy of the governmental welfare system. The first
case involves a woman whose application for welfare benefits was rejected by
a welfare office, and the other case revolves around a high-ranking bureaucrat­
who struggled professionally within the bureaucracy. In Lessons from a Calf
(Mou hitotsu no kyoiku—Ina shogakko haru gumi no kiroku, Fuji Television,
1991), Kore’eda reports on students in a rural grade school who raise a calf
for their class project. The documentary maintains objectivity and neutrality
as the camera captures the children’s development throughout the class proj-
ect without intruding on their everyday lives. In August without Him (Kare no
inai hachigatsu ga, Fuji Television, 1994), Kore’eda depicts the last days of an
HIV–positive patient. The subject was somewhat sensational at the time, yet
the camera nevertheless holds an objective position as we witness the banality
of the patient’s everyday life.
In Without Memory (Kioku ga usinawareta toki, NHK, 1996), Kore’eda
and his crewmembers regularly visit a patient who has lost his short-term
memory­due to an incident of medical malpractice at a hospital. At each visit,­
they must introduce themselves again. The repetitious and rather comical
sequences­depict the patient’s serious condition and how difficult it is to live
without memories. Although the patient is in his thirties, he must depend on
support from his wife and the government. The documentary’s purpose seems
to be twofold: One is an indictment of the medical system that caused the par-
tial brain damage, and the other is to help us imagine a life without memory.
Although memory and identity must be significant subjects for Kore’eda, since
they reappear in his narrative feature films—After Life and Distance—Kore’eda
maintains an objective detachment from the subject in this documentary. The

Digital Authenticity     57

critical appraisals of these noncontroversial documentaries clearly indicate
their provenance within the television documentary tradition. The knowledge
Kore’eda gained through his documentary practice grants his more recent nar-
rative films a sense of play with heterogeneous realities. This is a significant
achievement given the constraints at present on filmmaking in Japan.
Coming from the documentary tradition, Kore’eda Hirokazu highlights
the stylistic merging of dramatic feature and documentary in Maboroshi, After
Life, Distance, and Nobody Knows. Each of his films represents a different ap-
proach to cinematic authenticity or realism. Maboroshi captures still images
of ordinary people’s lives with long shots and long takes. Kore’eda visualizes
moments of epiphany, such as the crossover images of dream and memory,
death and disappearance. In After Life, the talking-head style of interview
is deployed for the fictional video production of one character’s memories.
Distance uses John Cassavetes–like acting improvisation along with a hand-
held camera. The actors are “obliged to go out into the real world without the
presence of any of the usually visible markers of the fictional status of the ac-
tion,”12 and what the audience sees is the reality of those actors’ spontaneous
utterances and reactions—that is, a documentation of acting. Finally, Nobody
Knows represents the culmination of Kore’eda’s experiments in merging dra-
ma and documentary with a yearlong schedule of shooting children’s natural
acting. His sustained interest in actuality has produced a remarkable new style
with each film, engaging differently with the visual expressions of new media.
Nobody Knows is about four siblings living with their mother in a small
apartment in Tokyo. They all have different fathers and have never been to
school. They are told to hide from the landlord, except the eldest, Akira. The
narrative begins in early fall when they move into the new apartment, and
one day during winter the mother leaves them with a little money and a note
instructing Akira to look after the others. They survive alone for six months
until the next summer, when the accidental death of the youngest daughter,
Yuki, ends their period of abandonment, about which, as the title suggests,
“nobody knows.”
Many film critics and interviewers in Japan framed Nobody Knows as a
narrative film merged with a documentary, and they praised that aspect as
the film’s main attraction.13 However, against the critical discourse, Kore’eda
himself has overtly stated that the film is very much a work of fiction. For ex-
ample, one of the most skillful sequences is the first dinner-table scene in the
new apartment: Kore’eda shot the three-minute-and-eight-second sequence
with sixteen shots, which through careful editing creates the seamless impres-
sion of one long take. As David Bordwell highlights in his work on cinematic
staging, “filming around a table . . . consumes a lot of production time. . . .

58   Digital Authenticity
There are so many details involved that most dinner-table scenes . . . contain
mismatches.”14 In other words, Kore’eda makes his camera “invisible,” much
as it is done in many Hollywood films, and he constructs “reality” in the sense
of classical Hollywood cinema: His whole narrative space is an enclosed
world, a perfect “reality” within the small apartment. In my interview with
the director, Kore’eda described shooting the dining sequence three times and
editing the three takes into the current version.15
Still, I would argue that the critics’ approval of Nobody Knows is largely
due to their sense that the film offers something different from the dominant
narrative film style, which resembles the authenticity of documentary. In ac-
tuality, the film accomplishes this aspect through momentary “ruptures” in
the narrative cohesion, when a more subjective form of reality seems to in-
trude. What this spectatorial reality represents is cinema’s mimicry of the
representational strategies of the new media—particularly digital video’s way
of capturing images and forming narrative. As such, the realist aesthetic of
this film exemplifies the present stage of cinema as one of transition in the age
of digital technology.
One key rupture in the narrative cohesion occurs late in the film when
Akira loses himself and wanders downtown after his sister Yuki’s death. This
is one of a few sequences in which the film expresses such stylistic punctua-
tion. The sequence starts from the moment when Akira touches Yuki’s cold
hand (figure 2.1). He stares at his own hands, after which a jump cut takes
us to the street outside. From here on, Kore’eda deploys a handheld camera
(Aaton XTR super 16 film camera), and the image becomes more subdued
due to the film’s overexposure. It is a rather short sequence and the subdued
style soon returns to the original exposure, but its visual difference clearly
stands out in the film. Akira’s almost murmured singing assures the spectator
that his point of view coincides with the camera’s gaze. Akira/the camera/
the spectator begins roaming around the shopping area. This subjective view
consists of four shots: staring at a police station (figure 2.2); passing by a con-
venience store (figure 2.3); wandering inside a supermarket (figure 2.4); and
finally, the image of a mother holding the hand of a young girl who resembles
Yuki from the back (figure 2.5). Akira hears a male voice, one that sounds
fatherly, calling his name. Then he suddenly comes back to reality. This is rep-
resented by the camera’s detachment from Akira’s point of view. The camera
now shoots him as a second person, looking around to see if anyone is there
but finding nobody (figure 2.6).
Akira’s point-of-view sequence lasts for a relatively short sixty-eight
seconds,­but the sequence leads the spectator from one reality (the cinematic,
diegetic reality) to the other (the spectatorial, self-reflexive reality) that has

Digital Authenticity     59

Figure 2.1. Nobody Knows (Kore’eda Hiro- Figure 2.2. Akira’s first subjective point-of-
kazu, 2004). Akira (Yagiri Yuya) touches his view shot, gazing at a police station. Shot by a
sister Yuki’s (Shimizu Tomoko) cold hand. hand-held camera, the subdued image is cre-
ated through the film’s overexposure.

Figure 2.3. Akira passing by the neighbor- Figure 2.4. Akira wandering inside a super-
hood convenience store. Although he sees the market. The unaffected banality of the every-
kind employee (Kase Ryo) inside, Akira can- day contrasts with Akira’s sorrow.
not say anything.

Figure 2.5. Akira views a mother holding the Figure 2.6. Akira’s point of view sequence is
hand of her daughter, who resembles Yuki now over, and the camera shoots him looking
from the back. around to find who has called his name. But
there is, of course, nobody.
increasingly become familiar to us as photographers with our frequent ex-
perience of using a digital or video camera. One stares at a small screen on
the back of the camera, and the image floats around until you push the shut-
ter button. This allusion to what I would describe as a “spectatorial reality”
is the defining characteristic of the cinematic impression of Nobody Knows
and accounts for the critical reception of the film as “documentary-like,” a
“merging­of documentary and fiction,” and looking “realistic.”16 However, it
needs stating­that this realist aesthetic—or the authenticity of the sequence—
is one that is deftly mediated and keenly self-reflexive. In other words, the
sequence is as much about Akira’s position as it is about converging media
and the realities they represent.
The “spectatorial reality” breaks through the previously established cine-
matic or diegetic reality, but it does not challenge the spectator’s narrative cog-
nizance. Instead, it alerts the viewer’s attention to the sense of the “real.” This
impact can be compared to Roland Barthes’ “punctum” that characterizes the
power of photography. For Barthes, “studium” describes “a kind of general,
but enthusiastic commitment” to what one sees, and “punctum” is an element
disturbing that commitment, something “ris[ing] from the scene, shoot[ing]
out of it like an arrow,” which, as a result, strongly grasps the viewer.17
The Akira sequence represents not only film’s mimicry of the digital im-
age, but it simulates as well the digital media’s pattern of making meaning.
New media analysts, such as Lev Manovich and Michael Allen, emphasize
the replication of aesthetic forms among media. Manovich writes that “if we
place new media within a longer historical perspective . . . many of the prin-
ciples . . . are not unique to new media, but can be found in older media tech-
nologies.”18 Allen also notes that “digital imaging technologies and techniques
are striving to replicate what already exists: the photographic representation
of reality,”19 and he continues: “[CGI] camera movements try to mimic as pre-
cisely as possible identical camera movements which might be used in a whole
live-action film. In one sense, they try to become invisible. . . . In another,
however, their very extravagance, their overt sweep and style, are intended to
be noticed by the spectator.”20
In other words, the “newness” of new media is marked by its formal sim-
ulation of the “old” medium, film, while at the same time, within a narrative
flow, demarcating itself as spectacle. What the film Nobody Knows reproduces
within Akira’s point-of-view sequence is this “newness,” the digital media’s
way of negotiating with the hitherto dominant medium of film. I do not in-
tend to suggest that Kore’eda is consciously mimicking the logic and aesthetic
of new media, but I want to highlight his awareness of what a video camera
and its editorial processing can and cannot do.

Digital Authenticity     61

Tarachime, a “Realistic Film”
Kawase began her career as Kore’eda did, in documentary filmmaking, but
in 1997 the success of her first feature narrative film, Suzaku, at Cannes made
Kawase well known in Japan, and since then she has alternated between
making­relatively low budget documentaries and more costly fiction films.
Her latest fictional narrative, The Mourning Forest, received the Grand Prize of
the 2007 Cannes International Film Festival.
The term “riaruna eiga” was first introduced to me by Kawase herself dur-
ing our interview in late 2006. As is typical of borrowed expressions from
English, “riaru” is written in katakana, the angular Japanese phonetic sylla-
bary, and has gained prevalence in the recent Japanese consumer culture, dis-
tinguished from more established terms such as “genjitsu” (reality) or “genjitsu
no” (realistic). Kawase often intentionally eschews objectivity in her docu-
mentary films by locating her camera inside her filming events. Her voice
engages in dialogue with a filmed subject, mostly her grandmother Uno in
the case of Tarachime, a fact that always reminds us the camera is between
them. The camera’s location being inside the “reality”—the representation
of events—is in common with the formation of recent reality television, in
which surveillance cameras are omnipresent. In this formation, such dichoto-
mies as “natural” and “artificial” or “reality” and “the representation of the
reality” are not sustainable. In the constructed “reality,” for instance, the arti-
ficiality of the camera’s constant observation becomes the most natural thing,
and a real event can exist for the viewers only within the representation of the
reality.­This “double awareness,” borrowing Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro’s term—
which makes sense of the event as a real-life happening and, at once, as a
spectacle of “reality”—has become ubiquitous in the world of late capitalism,
in which all experience turns into spectacle.21 Kawase’s “riaru na eiga” ma-
nipulates the viewer’s awareness with her images and sounds that convey the
highly personal, at home “banality” in everyday life, effacing her film’s profes-
sional quality in its editing and conceptualization. It is revealing that Kawase
after all names it “riaru,” the borrowed word that has become ubiquitous and
yet betrays the illusionary aspect of current digital technology.
Kawase’s recent films especially have demonstrated her intention to tra-
verse the boundaries between documentary and dramatic narrative. What
differentiates her career from Kore’eda’s is that while he steadily created
documentaries for television programs early in his career, a context in which
questions of authenticity are rarely posed, Kawase’s documentary style has
adhered to “personal documentary,” which has only recently been recognized
as a professional filmmaking practice in Japan. Kawase’s stance toward her

62   Digital Authenticity
subjects is always personal—even intimate—and the relationship that the
filmmaker has with her subjects is always established within a private space,
particularly of family. She started her career with 8mm film at the Visual Arts
Technical School in Osaka, and her work became publicly known with the
autobiographical, personal documentaries Embracing (Ni tsutsumarete, 1992)
and Katatsumori (1994), which were awarded prizes at the 1995 Yamagata
International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF). Both films are about her
relationship with her family’s complex personal history: Kawase tries to visit
her unknown father in Embracing; in Katatsumori, she films her grandmother
and asks questions about her childhood. Her career development is rather
“rhizomatic,”22 in the sense of Deleuze’s term, in that her career unfolded in
multiple ways and has continued to do so without having a specific hierarchy
among those categorizations. Her official Web site visualizes her career as a
“tree”23 whereby the forked roots (genres and media) of the tree (Kawase’s
entire career) are extending simultaneously into various directions: fiction fea-
tures, documentaries, personal documentaries, television programs, and other
projects.
In an interview with me, Kawase expressed her difficulty in gaining ac-
ceptance from both audiences and critics at the beginning of her career. Some
critics have dismissed her work as “facile” because of her focus on her close
family, and some have criticized her films for “lacking social consciousness”
because she is preoccupied with her own identity and personal family prob-
lems.24 Nevertheless, Kawase’s work is in keeping with a long history of North
American filmmakers such as Philip Hoffman, Su Friedrich, Jonas Mekas,
Sadie Benning, and George Kuchar. Kawase developed her film practice be-
tween documentary and narrative fiction film and later created her own style
of realistic film (riaruna eiga). As she explained in our interview, “realistic
film” is neither documentary nor drama in the ordinary sense, but it arouses
in the viewer a sense of reality and truth, albeit one that is unquantifiable.25
The realistic film takes the role of “antidocumentary” by interrogating both
the boundaries between documentary and narrative fictional drama and the
filmic language governing those categorizations.
One of Kawase’s latest personal documentaries, Tarachime, is a successful
case of this sort. The forty-three-minute documentary was produced by the
French television station Arte and was awarded a “special mention” at the
2006 Locarno International Film Festival in the “Filmmakers of the Present”
section. She introduced her film with these English comments:

I had initially intended this film to trace the period from the day I
conceived until the birth of the new life. But as the work progressed,

Digital Authenticity     63

 I came to the understanding that this was not a story of just the one
life. Soon the film elevated itself to depict the knot between living
beings. I realized that my ambiguous question, why people are all
alone was fundamentally incorrect in the way it was set up. . . . And
the moment the child left my body, I consumed the singular internal
organ that had connected me with it. It tasted a little bloody and
warm. The title “Tarachime” means “mother” in archaic Japanese
language.26

As Kawase’s introduction points out, the film captures her child’s birth,
and it begins with the close-up of her baby’s placenta, fresh and wet, having
just come out of her body. Although it is unclear what it is at first glance, its
vivid crimson color and unusual organic texture capture our attention (figure
2.7). The long duration of the shot indicates Kawase’s strong fetishization of
the placenta, and the scene also allows audiences to identify with the fetish-
ism. The film displays “reality” by shooting the actual organ with its striking
materiality, and this first-glance authenticity immediately sets the viewers to
situate themselves in the mode of watching something real—a documentary,
not a feature film.
Tarachime displays three generations of Kawase’s family: her grandmother,­
Uno, Kawase herself, and her newborn son, Mitsuki. A new life is born and
the old one is gone; one of documentary’s frequent subjects, a representa-
tion of death, is depicted. Without the benefit of any scripted dialogue, the
audience­begins constructing a narrative based on the order of shots and
their visual connections. The film first shows her aged grandmother, and her

Figure 2.7. Tarachime (Kawase

Naomi, 2006). The camera
persistently captures Kawase’s
own placenta in close-up. The
image becomes a background
for the title.

64   Digital Authenticity
corporeality­is introduced with her wrinkled body. She is then abruptly taken
in an ambulance and hospitalized; we are shown her deeply bruised “death
face” (figure 2.8). At the end of the film is a sequence of Kawase and Mitsuki
visiting Kawase’s family grave. The placenta, the grandmother’s wrinkled
breasts, Kawase’s own naked body still holding traces of ephemeral youth, a
plate of leftover salmon, her own wood-framed house, and the family grave—
the images of intimate and ordinary materiality that we view in the film are
literally “real,” including the exact moment of her baby’s birth. Against those
real-life images, however, the video skillfully keeps us from “reality”—the
actual­death of her grandmother does not take place.
The film does not give any clue throughout as to whether it is a fictional
drama, and yet the narrative movement toward her grandmother’s death is
carefully edited. I viewed this work at Kawase’s office in Nara, Japan, and
I had no idea that what I had seen was fictional until I was informed that
her grandmother is alive and well and that she had simply fallen and frac-
tured a bone. The film’s contrivance is similar to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname
Viet Given Name Nam (1989), in which the viewer realizes during the ending
credit sequence that all the Vietnamese women interviewed in the film were
actors. The difference here is that Kawase does not disclose the fact that she
has misled the viewer by leaving out information and rearranging sequences.
Tarachime breaks the logic of “expository” or “observational” documenta-
ries that require precision and objective “truth,” and, in Bill Nichols words,
this video “prompts us to reconsider the underlying premises of documentary
epistemology itself.”27
The mendaciousness of “realistic film” in Tarachime is a product of

Figure 2.8. After Kawase’s

grandmother Uno has been
taken to the hospital, her
bruised “death face” appears. It
is a moment of “deception.”

Digital Authenticity     65

the historical­conditions of the contemporary Japanese film industry—
specifically,­the decline of studio production. After all, without any sponsors
and thus without any artistic restrictions, Kawase is free to disengage herself
from the reliable meaning of images that constrains the “rules” for documen-
taries. Kawase’s personal films are promoted through international film fes-
tivals as the work of an auteur and are sold directly from her official Internet
site. In my interview with her, Kawase maintained that she is no different
from a housewife when she is not making films. In other words, her filmmak-
ing does not generate enough money to fully fund her next film project. Her
status as a well-known auteur, and also as an amateur in the sense of film-
making for its own sake, problematizes another commonplace notion of the
dichotomy between “auteur” versus “amateur” in Japan, where documentary
filmmakers often work for television or produce PR films.28
Kawase’s struggle between auteur and amateur resonates in other coun-
tries. In her essay on digital video documentary in postsocialist China, Yiman
Wang describes the ostensibly mismatched relationship between auteur and
DV (digital video) documentarists. Wang tells us that

The author (or auteur) and the amateur have conventionally occu-
pied two opposite ends. . . . In the context of post-1990s Chinese DV
documentary . . . the author and the amateur are connected by their
common stress on the independent creative consciousness of an indi-
vidual fully immersed in his/her material circumstances. Such a cre-
ative individual differs from the bourgeois concept of the individual
significantly. . . . [The creative individual] refers to a self-consciously
assumed subject position that is defined in response to specific mate-
rial circumstances, and that directly affects the ways of documenting
one’s material surroundings and individual experiences.29­

Clearly, the characteristics of contemporary Chinese DV documentary are

not limited to postsocialist China. Kawase, for instance, exactly embodies this
oxymoronic amateur-auteur position, and this structure is apparently the only
way for her to continue her career as a filmmaker. I would argue that it is not
the filmmakers’ intentional stress on their “independent creative conscious-
ness,” but the “material circumstances” that strongly determine how they
produce their works. Wang is never specific about the material circumstances
in her essay, but in the case of Japanese contemporary cinema, the condi-
tions of production are a determining factor. That is to say, local conditions
in Japan have remade the personal documentary in ways that are particular to
contemporary­Japanese culture. I will further explain in the following section.

66   Digital Authenticity
The New God and Personal Documentary
Documentary films in Japan have seldom reached a wide audience, but recent
documentaries, especially the “personal documentary,” have become more
accessible to the general public. This is due to gradual changes in their produc-
tion, distribution, and ultimately their reception. More film schools have been
founded, and financial support has been gradually established for student
filmmaking. The film schools typically offer students up to about U.S.$12,000
(1 million Japanese yen) to make their graduation films, and they encourage
them to submit their works to film festivals, either domestically or interna-
tionally. The increase of film festivals plays a significant role, especially the
YIDFF, which has raised the profile of documentaries in Japan. The rise of
minitheaters in urban areas has provided more screens for documentary films.
In the case of Tokyo, Shibuya has become the center of minitheaters that
showcase documentaries. The number of smaller movie theaters with a hun-
dred seats or less has dramatically increased in the area in the last ten years.30
The availability of digital cameras and computer technology for inexpensive
production, editing, and distribution on DVD format has brought the cost
of filmmaking down to a level accessible to a greater number of filmmakers.
The recent success of documentary films from abroad, including The Fog of
War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003, Errol Morris),
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, Michael Moore), and Super Size Me (2004, Morgan
Spurlock), has also increased Japanese audiences’ interest in documentary.
Even more conspicuous has been the support of the current documentary
boom on Japanese television.
NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai, Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) has
been consistently providing various “official” documentaries since its in-
ception in 1950, especially through its educational channel. While docu-
mentaries used to be broadcast during nonprime-time hours, such as early
Sunday mornings or after 11 p.m., recently they have been increasingly
shown during prime time. The Fuji Television network has broadcast topi-
cal documentaries, such as the video documentary on Chinese immigrants’
lives in Japan, “The Chinese Series—Living While Crying” (“Chugoku
shirizu—­Nakinagara ikite,” prod. and dir. Zhang Liling, 2006) on the prime-
time television program Friday Prime Station (Fuji Television, Friday, 21:00–
23:00).31 From the very beginning, this documentary was clearly designed
for a television audience; it has a conventional plot emphasizing social is-
sues and shared interests among local viewers, and it holds a journalistic
point of view that projects unquestionable “authority.” Despite such conven-
tions, however,­these recent television programs have greatly expanded the

Digital Authenticity     67

visibility­of documentary in general and the audience for art house–oriented
personal documentaries.
Despite its apparent novelty, the personal documentary actually has its
roots in Suzuki Shirouyasu’s 1970s home movies. He directed The Impression
of the Sunset (Nichibotsu no insho, 1975) in 16mm in the mid-1970s, which was
influenced by Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscence of a Journey to Lithuania (1973).32
Suzuki had worked as a 16mm film cameraman for NHK for about fifteen
years, and he later became an independent filmmaker (although he is better
known as a poet) in the 1960s. As one of the earliest personal documentary
filmmakers, his work has been identified within various categories of “self-
documentary,” “diary film,” “essay film,” and “‘I’ cinema.” While some of
these descriptions are associated with Mekas’ work, “I” cinema is an expres-
sion specifically related to the Japanese literary tradition of the “I” novel.33
In the same period, Hara Kazuo directed Extreme Private Eros: Love Song
1974 (Gokushiteki erosu—Renka 1974, 1974), a film about his ex-wife, Takeda
Miyuki, who lived in Okinawa and was expecting a baby fathered by an
American black soldier. It is worth noting that Hara adapted the phrase “ex-
treme private (gokushiteki),” which was coined by Suzuki in his poems and
literary criticism of the early 1970s.34 Extreme Private Eros incorporates the
director himself as part of Miyuki’s life. Hara weeps on camera when Miyuki
informs him of her decision to keep her baby. Indeed, the film often seems to
be a pretext for Hara, as director and cameraman, to be close to her again. In
the bedroom sequence, Hara shoots Miyuki’s face from above while he has
sex with her. In another sequence, the accidental loss of focus during the birth
sequence exposes Hara’s panic. Throughout the film, Hara transgresses the
boundaries between a filmmaker and his subject, Miyuki in this case, allowing
his personal provocation and Miyuki’s unintentional complicity to appear on
screen. That Extreme Private Eros focuses on personal subjects over objective
discourses aligns the film, in some respects, with the definition of “performa-
tive” documentary.
Abé Mark Nornes, however, underlines the differences between the “per-
formative” documentary and Hara’s work in his analysis and elaborates the
latter as “action documentary,” situating it within the tradition of the Japanese
documentary. Nornes tells us that

[Hara’s] films rarely exhibit the experimental qualities of the film-

makers listed above [Trinh T. Minh-ha, Errol Morris, Jill Godmilow,
and Marlon Riggs]. Rather . . . his cinema is always the record of
a meeting between the filmmaker and the filmed, between subject
and object. His films begin with the presence of the filmmaker

68   Digital Authenticity
 penetrating­private space, exposing it to the glaringly public view of
the cinema. . . . Hara’s films . . . are always self-conscious perfor-
mances for the camera, for the world.35

This quality of “self-conscious performances for the camera, for the world”
needs to be addressed as a characteristic of the personal documentary in
Japanese contemporary cinema—and indeed as the ontological premise of
the film, The New God.
Although Hara is not a prolific filmmaker, his mode of documentary pro-
duction, making films “on spec,” has become enormously influential to subse-
quent generations of film students. The films are typically made with borrowed
money, and the filmmakers later pay back the debt out of distribution and sales
of tapes and DVDs after completion. Hara has been teaching at various film
schools (Waseda University and Cinema-juku); his films are highly regarded
among film critics and academics, and thus his risk-taking approach has be-
come a model for new documentary filmmaking. The personal documentary
has been established by the reciprocal enforcement of practice and theory, cre-
ated and promoted in large part by Hara himself.
These types of cultural contingencies grant the personal documentary in
Japan its own regional formation. Since 1977, the Pia Film Festival, for in-
stance, has promoted 8mm amateur filmmaking (gradually shifting to digital
video in the 1990s), and since 1989 the YIDFF has offered a practical exhibi-
tion venue for young filmmakers. Moreover, the popularization of affordable
digital video cameras and nonlinear editing software on personal computers
accelerated amateur video making in the late 1990s. In these circumstances,
film school students like Kawase became increasingly engaged with the per-
sonal documentary form and, unconstrained by self-censorship and free of
corporate funding, they began to find more public venues to screen their docu-
mentaries.
These young documentarists’ works have three characteristics in common:
the search for identity, the focus on the private world of family and their every-
day lives, and an aesthetic that lies between the amateur and the professional.
Documentary filmmaker and critic Sato Makoto criticizes the “preciousness”
of their works—he categorizes them as “shiteki” (personal) documentary—
claiming that these filmmakers tend to submit their work to festivals without
the awareness that their films’ potential power is largely in the subject material
itself and not in the films’ form. For Sato, the audiences’ positive reception
is based on the “sozaishugi” (the material’s specificity­and attraction) and pos-
sibly on the filmmakers’ selection of it, but not on the quality and form of the
film itself. In his view, many such films lack “eiga-teki senryaku”­ (cinematic

Digital Authenticity     69

strategy), or worse, the filmmakers are not even aware of it. They have com-
pleted their works without becoming “professional” filmmakers, a vocation
that requires working and collaborating with many other people (such as pro-
ducers, editors, recording directors, and music composers).36­
Sato’s analysis is further enforced by the apparent difficulty of many
student documentarists to produce another successful film, such as Tezuka
Yoshiharu (Over the Threshold/Kazoku shashin, 1989) and Terada Yashunori
(My Wife is Filipina/Tsuma wa Filipina, 1994). Both of these filmmakers use
“strategies” that are based on their own experiences of being married to for-
eigners and the various frictions that entailed in those relationships. In Sato’s
view, the lack of a coherent filmmaking strategy leaves students ill prepared
for the next step of finding a new project with a subject not so close at hand.37
Both Tezuka and Terada started their careers with 16mm film in the 1980s
and the early 1990s. As the high cost of My Wife is Filipina (U.S.$84,000) in-
dicates, producing a personal documentary on 16mm film cannot normally
be self-financed.38 Indeed, it is an oxymoronic task to create a personal film
with a budget exceeding one’s personal income. The tradition of the personal
documentary film, however, has been reinvigorated by DV makers.
The DV activist Tsuchiya Yutaka is an outstanding case of a filmmaker
without “auteur-ness.” In contrast to Sato Makoto’s notion of professional-
ism, Tsuchiya eschews the collaborative aspect of cinema and successfully
materializes his own interests. Maintaining a vision and producing a com-
modity that can generate profits are not easy to combine in filmmaking, but
Tsuchiya shows that it is possible with the relatively low cost of DVD produc-
tion and distribution. He directed the documentary The New God, in which
he hands over his video camera to his subject, Amamiya Karin, a singer in a
right-wing punk rock group. The documentary starts with Tsuchiya admitting
to his odd interest in her right-wing political beliefs. While he argues against
the emperor system in Japan, he seeks to understand Amamiya’s eclectic
identity as a right-wing pro-emperor nationalist and punk rock vocalist while
working at a hostess club (kyabakura) to make ends meet. Amamiya has been
a social outcast since she was young and later became a suicidal teenager, but
she finally found her raison d’être in her political activism. This is the period
when she first meets Tsuchiya.
Amamiya takes over the position of “auteur” by taking charge of the
camera in the middle of the film and refuses to return it when Tsuchiya asks
her to do so. The technique of passing a video camera back and forth be-
tween the video maker and their shooting subject is not Tsuchiya’s invention,
and he openly admits that he was influenced by an experimental work called
Video Letter (1982–1983, Tanikawa Shuntaro and Terayama Shuji), in which

70   Digital Authenticity
the avant-garde theater director Terayama Shuji exchanges video letters with
the poet Tanikawa Shuntaro for a year until Terayama’s death in 1983. What
Tsuchiya adapted from Video Letter is not only its format but also its way of ex-
panding the conceptual world within their correspondence from an individual
monograph to a layered dialogue.
The common aspects of Tsuchiya’s video and the new personal documen-
taries are several: First, they are fully aware of the blurred boundaries between
fiction and documentary and do not suppress the fact that there is often a
degree of performance that a camera brings into the process of production;
second, their work—either fiction or documentary, film or video—is socially
engaged. Both characteristics resonate with Nornes’ description of Hara’s
work as “performances for the camera, for the world.” Tsuchiya explains how
he conceptualized reality in The New God:

It is strange that none of us (Tsuchiya, Amamiya, and Ito Hidehito,

the right-wing band’s leader who is also a main subject of the film)
knew how the video would end, but all three of us created the
“story.” . . . I sense from the video that it consists of both eiga (fic-
tion film) and genjitsu (reality). However, this “reality” was able to
appear through the existence of a video camera, and things did not
turn out as they are in the video without the camera’s presence.39

In his statement, there is no shrinking from the fact that his video might be
seen as staged or faked, and there is also no strict sense of attachment to genre
categorization, either documentary or fictional drama. Tsuchiya directed a
fictional narrative as his second feature-length video, Peep “TV” Show (2003),
which also focuses on two urban youths with identity crises: a young man who
videotapes everything and senses reality only through the television monitor
and a girl whose identity is inseparable from her “gothic-Lolita” costume. The
video work has a narrative that, while perhaps not sophisticated, is nonethe-
less a humorous social satire. The intriguing similarity between The New God
and Peep “TV” Show is that both films reveal the tenuous connection of youth
and society, with the camera providing a possible dialogue between them.
Social engagement through video is apparent in The New God, especially
in Amamiya’s attitude toward the camera itself. When Tsuchiya asks her to
return the camera to him, she comments: “Although Tsuchiya asked me to
give his camera back, I can’t live without it.” Tsuchiya rationalizes that she was
not talking to the camera or to him while she was shooting, but she was fully
aware that her monologues would be screened in public; therefore the camera
was a tool for her to communicate with “society.”40

Digital Authenticity     71

 Other personal documentaries, such as Fatherless (Chichinaki jidai, 1998,
Shigeno Yoshihisa) and Home (Homu, 2001, Kobayashi Takahiro), are at-
tempts to use video as a catalyst for personal and social change. The for-
mer documentary is about a suicidal, self-mutilating young man, Muraishi
Masaya, who returns to his hometown to encounter his parents and his step-
father, whom he has long blamed as the cause of his mental deterioration.
The director, Shigeno Yoshihisa (a classmate of Muraishi from film school),
shoots as if he is standing beside Muraishi, which underscores Muraishi’s
awareness that he is addressing not only his family but also the larger public
via the video. Thus when Muraishi confesses all of his resentments to his fam-
ily on screen, he is also confessing to us, the audience. The presence of the
camera enabled Muraishi to confront them, an act which he had suppressed
for many years. Sato Tadao writes that Muraishi even stated that he was plan-
ning to commit suicide once the video was completed, but the video-making
process apparently changed his mind.41 Kobayashi Takahiro, the director of
Home, also went back to his hometown in order to film his brother, who for
many years was a depressed shut-in (hikikomori). His father had already left
home to avoid encountering the shut-in brother, and his mother had been suf-
fering from depression and was sleeping in the car at night because she was
afraid of the brother’s violent tendencies. Home ends with the brother moving
out to become independent. The camera works as a device for the filmmaker’s
brother and family to change a dead-end situation.
Both films deal with singular moments and situations: a son’s reunion
with his parents and a filmmaker’s confrontation with his brother’s violence.
In the logic of Sato Makoto, these films can be disparaged as being only about
content—namely great subjects—without a specific documentary strategy. It
is intriguing, however, to contrast Sato Makoto’s criticism of these personal
documentaries with critic Sato Tadao’s view of them as films with “the latent
democracy of documentary.”42 Sato Tadao further explains that these films
signal the possibility of documentary not only for professional filmmakers but
also for anyone who wants to express him or herself and communicate with
society. Public expression with a camera has long been available only to the
relatively privileged, but these films show that, with the rise of inexpensive
digital cameras, ordinary people can realize the potential of documentary to
express their lives as stories.
The new documentary filmmakers in Japan are not simply survivors of
the film studios’ collapse; they have developed their own innovative film-
making styles with their own sense of cinematic realism. The attraction of
their films is simply seeing what they present on the screen, whether it is an
encounter with death (Nobody Knows), the despondency after a child’s birth

72   Digital Authenticity
(Tarachime), or the total isolation from society and a desperate need to re-
connect (The New God). The sensation they create is very close to the purely
immediate experience that the early cinema offered a long time ago. In ex-
plaining his admiration of Louis Lumière’s early documentary-style films,
documentary editor Dai Vaughan attributes “mendacious actuality” to their
beauty.43 The incidentals that those early films present on screen, such as
“smoke from a forge, steam from a locomotive, brick-dust from a demolished
wall,” are spontaneously embedded in Lumière’s films.44 A fictional film
can also present the spontaneous reality that a director cannot fully control.
Vaughan designates the actuality as an ability of cinema to portray “sponta-
neities of which the theatre was not capable.”45 Indeed, the cinema’s ability
is highlighted once again by many of the contemporary Japanese documen-
tarists in this digital age.

Digital Authenticity     73

 The Rise of
“Personal”
Animation

The diversity of Japanese animation

in terms of its history, media, genre, and style makes it both an exciting sub-
ject and a difficult one to analyze. Anime is often misperceived as represent-
ing the whole history of “Japanese animation,”1 a premise that emphasizes
its intrinsic cultural difference from the norm, American animation—namely
Disney. Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy’s The Anime Encyclopedia,
for instance, covers an impressive list of over two thousand Japanese anima-
tion titles from 1917 to 2001. They introduce terms such as “early anime” and
“wartime anime” for Japanese animation produced in the period up to 1945.
However, the term “anime” became prevalent only as the genre boomed in the
late 1970s.2 In other words, there is a significant gap between the encyclope-
dia’s discursive anime and anime as a historical nexus for converging media.
Anime’s low-budget, “limited” animation style has often been understood
as a form of resistance to the high-value “full” animation style of Disney. That
resistance, or difference, has been the dominant frame of analysis whenever
anime is in English-language studies. If there is a crucial distinction in anime,
however, it is not simply a matter of timeless cultural differences but rather of
the anime industry’s limited scale and peculiarity of the domestic market. The
Japanese industry, for instance, has been slow to adopt the CGI animation

74
technology, exemplified by Pixar’s Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter) or more re-
cently, Disney Digital 3-D animation films such as UP (2009, Pete Docter and
Bob Peterson). The industry’s high affinity with television and OVA (origi-
nal video animation) has configured the characteristics of anime primarily
as 2-D, or a style evoking cel (celluloid) animation. Anime’s distinctiveness,­
moreover, is not singular but rather diverse. As it has developed over the last
four decades, anime has become further individuated from the oft-discussed
“robot genre” anime to even various works of “anti-animation,” such as those
seen in the last episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion (TXN, October 4, 1995–
March 27, 1996). In an instance of anime deconstructing its fans’ expecta-
tions, the director Anno Hideaki boldly subverted Evangelion’s climax by sub-
stituting a raw pencil-sketched storyboard in place of animated sequences.
The linguistic distinction of “anime” from “animation” is both a bless-
ing and a curse in that it has effectively conferred cultural capital to the
market brand while attaching a constricted paradigm of cultural difference
in attempts to understand it. The defining question of anime has long been
whether it should be understood as a visual and narrative form with particular
ties to Japanese society and its cultural traditions or as simply another mode
of expression in multimedia, diversified within the endless cross-cultural
exchanges­of global culture. Indexical differences such as otaku, the fan-based
culture of anime, for instance, are too often presented as prima facie subjects
rather than explicated in relation to industrial strategies. Indeed, the Japanese
animation industry has emphasized a particular type of auteur branding,
which eschews Hollywood-sized promotion budgets and instead shapes an-
ime’s reception based on consumers’ connoisseurship that is typically associ-
ated with otaku culture. The anime industry has been astute at tapping into the
otaku culture’s market demand, and the otaku culture in turn helps promote
products to a larger global audience by creating buzz via the Internet, subti-
tling, or otherwise.
In this chapter, I first discuss the problem of how anime has been discur-
sively constructed largely upon notions of intrinsic cultural differences out-
side Japan. Second, I argue that anime, or more precisely Japanese animation,
is not culturally monolithic but rather diverse in its convergence of media and
stylistic deployments. Anime instead needs to be examined in light of its affin-
ity with media convergence; in other words, technological developments (tele-
visions, videos, laser discs, DVDs, personal computers, Blu-ray Discs, etc.)
have punctuated shifts in anime’s production and its stylistic diversity. In or-
der to explore these two aspects, I discuss the animations of Shinkai Makoto
and Yamamura Koji as examples of the smaller, personal scale of production
in Japanese animation, now possible through home-based digital technology,

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     75

in contrast to Oshii Mamoru’s large-scale studio production. Yamamura’s
animation has, for example, intentionally emphasized “Japaneseness” on
levels­both of narrative and visual image, and yet the cultural specificity does
not originate from an intrinsic cultural difference but is strategically—and
deliberately—­embedded by the author, who relies on international animation
festivals to develop an audience for his works. The stylistic diversity of the ex-
perimental realism, enabled by technological development in current Japanese
animation, is exemplified by Oshii Mamoru’s Amazing Lives of the Fast Food
Grifters (Tachiguishi retsuden, 2006), Shinkai Makoto’s Voices of a Distance Star
(Hoshi no koe, 2002), and Yamamura Koji’s Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor
(Kafka: Inaka isha, 2007). Against the so-called realistic movement that char-
acterizes Disney animation, these films represent realist aesthetics by deploy-
ing a variety of visual media or their concepts—drawings, photos, computer-
generated imagery (CGI), and paper theater (kamishibai)—that underscore the
risk-taking tendencies of the smaller but flexible Japanese animation industry.

The Discursive Construction of Anime

in the U.S. Academy
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson differentiate between full animation as
a style or technique employed by big-budget studio cartoons (such as Disney’s
films) with “lots of movement and detailed drawing” and limited animation
as a style or technique created in cheaper production houses with “only small
sections of the image moving from frame to frame,” a technique “mainly used
on television, although Japanese theatrical features have exploited it to create
flat, posterlike images.”3 They locate Japanese animation films as part of the
television-animation tradition, citing the “flatness” aesthetic of the film Silent
Möbius (1991, Kikuchi Michitaka and Tomizawa Kazuo). The anime con-
structed in this discourse is located in the nexuses of full and limited anima-
tions, film and television, big budget and cheap, and American and Japanese.
What is lacking in this view is the diversity of Japanese animation, which
deploys a variety of full and limited techniques and, moreover, a coherent
distinction between full and limited animations, since both can represent “lots
of movement” and use “detailed drawing” in their expressions. For instance,
many animation films or OVAs have extensively detailed drawing in their
backgrounds to compensate for the limited movement in the foreground, and
many of the so-called full animations seldom use twenty-four cels per second,
since it is too expensive and time consuming, even for Disney.
Although the stylistic distinction of anime as limited has often been used
for differentiating it from other kinds of animation, the limitedness represents

76   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

merely one aspect of anime, and, as Bordwell and Thompson indicate, this
aspect most often characterizes television animation whether in Japan or else-
where. Also, with the appearance of highly elaborate CGI productions, such
as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001, Sakaguchi Hironobu and Sakakibara
Moto), the limitedness is no longer even an essential characteristic of anime.
However, Bordwell and Thompson’s focus on the differences in media, televi-
sion, and film, rather than simply on aesthetics, is a central issue in terms of
discussing anime, which I will elaborate on later.
Casting anime’s difference in terms of culture, Antonia Levi treats anime
as an “index” for Japan.4 She positions both anime and Japanese culture as
fixed, ontologically axiomatic objects that are radically different from their
counterparts in the United States. She writes, “Anime can show you a side of
Japan few outsiders ever even know exist. Unlike much of Japanese literature
and movies,­anime is assumed to be for local consumption only. . . . [Anime
artists]­write for and about Japanese. As a result, their work offers a unique
perspective, a peeping Tom glimpse into the Japanese psyche.”5 For Levi,
anime is different because it “comes from Japan and Japan is not a Judeo-
Christian culture.”6 Axiomatically connecting anime with Japan or Japanese
culture is obviously problematic, since culture is permeable and Japanese ani-
mation in particular has a long history of hybridization.
Generally, scholars in anime studies have attempted to move away from
such essentialist approaches and address anime as an “international” prod-
uct within the flows of cultural globalization. Amidst this transition, one can
even see an almost “schizophrenic” sway between viewing anime as particu-
lar to Japan and as a ubiquitous global commodity. With the popularity of her
book, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (2001; the updated edition chang-
es its title to Howl’s Moving Castle, 2005), Susan Napier successfully established
the position of anime in U.S. universities. Since the book has often been ad-
opted as an introductory text for courses related to Japan, anime is now fully
enclosed as an object of knowledge in Japanese studies. This development
of anime studies within the trajectory of Japanese studies has cemented the
provenance of anime in cultural terms, for better or worse.
The value of Napier’s work is that she consciously tries to avoid limiting
anime as a subject of cultural “difference” and instead situates it as “a cultural
force” bringing “the wider issue of the relationship between global and local
cultures.”7 However, her analyses of anime often return to anime’s connection
with the broad swath of Japanese history and culture, as one can see in her
central outline of three narrative “modes” (the apocalyptic, the elegiac, and
the festival) that, for Napier, characterize Japanese culture. Her monumen-
tal work in anime studies neglects viewing anime’s historical specificity, the

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     77

moment of cultural nexus within specific developments of visual media and
technology. In other words, it overlooks the rise of anime in the late 1970s and
1980s that came about as a result of the popularity of animation programs
on television, their expansion to film, and their release on videotape and how
this media convergence created the foundation for the anime boom in Japan.
More recently, the focus on media, or its variation and relations, has
been emphasized as a more productive approach to anime studies, as one can
see in the special issue of Japan Forum in 2002. In his introduction, Thomas
Lamarre adapts a “relational theory” by shifting the focus from anime as a
cultural object to its relations with other media, mainly cinema. He states
that “our articles strive to think ‘intermedia,’ to move between cinema and
animation, in order to create relational approaches to anime,”8 and he contin-
ues, “emphasizing the object tends to generate descriptions and comparison,
mostly at the extremely general level concerned with story and character. The
articles in this issue thus move towards a (relational) theory of anime.”9
Each essay in the special issue has contributed significantly to anime
studies,­particularly in their emphasis on the materiality of anime as multiple
media, not simply as a delimited text, and the contributors’ cross-disciplinary­
approaches free anime from the axiomatic ties with Japan and Japanese
culture. However, a question arises as to how one sets viable limits within
this relational approach. For instance, in the first essay, as his title “Before
Anime” indicates, Daisuke Miyao skillfully analyzes Japanese cinema and
animation in the Taisho period (1912–1926). Apart from their correspond-
ing positions as “a medium [being] discursively constructed as an object of
knowledge,” how does the animation of the 1910s–1920s connect with the
anime of the 1970s–1980s?10 If Catherine Russell’s intriguing essay is indeed
“less concerned with the possibility or impossibility of differentiating cinema
and anime”­as Lamarre describes,11 isn’t there any divergence between the
relations of cinema in the 1930s and its audience and those of anime in the
1990s and its audience? It seems to me that the expansiveness of the relational
approach raises questions of tenability regarding the historical specificity of
anime and its contexts.
In Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, the editor
Steven T. Brown also shifts the question from “What is anime?” to “Where
is the anime screen?” in order to “avoid essentialization of anime into the
unitary, fixed object that is presupposed by the other.”12 The anthology’s nine
essays are divided into three parts: anime’s engagement with the politics of
identity (self-invention, gender, and cultural negotiation between anime fans
and characters); post-humanism in anime; and anime as the media extend-
ing the aesthetic limits of cinema. The overall emphasis of the anthology

78   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

is, Brown writes, “anime’s hybridity of different styles and modes of image
making,”13 and he consciously avoids locating anime within Japan or else-
where. Differentiating anime from cinema, Brown states, “Instead of being
defined as a pale reflection of national cinema, anime is repositioned along
a continuum of visual production mapped in relation to the intersecting and
multidirectional lines of transnational movement out of which political, eco-
nomic, social, technological, ethnic, and aesthetic flows emerge, coalesce,
enter into conflict, and take flight.”14 One finds in his statement the erasure
of a cultural “agent” and the invention of a perfectly neutralized subject. If
it is a “transnational movement,” where are the sites for the “continuum of
visual production” actually located? The volume’s goal of departing from the
ontological question “What is anime?” or the “cultural difference” discourse
causes another difficulty: a case of “amnesia” regarding the “agents” of an-
ime’s cultural expansion from Japan since the 1970s and1980s. And, if anime
is the result of absolute hybridization of “different styles and modes of image
making,” why does the anthology present analyses only of animations created
in Japan and not elsewhere?
The recent exhibition, “Massive Change: The Future of Global Design,”
held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2004, showed various forms of contem-
porary visual culture: anime, comics, video games, and art. The curator Bruce
Grenville asserts in the exhibition’s catalog, Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime
+ Comics + Video Games + Art, that recent visual culture, including anime, is
“best described as a field of production, with points of intersection and points
of divergence.”15 In Krazy! Grenville divides “the delirious world” into seven
categories—comics, graphic novels, animated cartoons, computer and video
games, anime, manga, and visual art—and assigns one or two specialists in the
field as both curator and commentator for each section. Anime is a separate
category from animated cartoons, as is manga from comics or graphic novels.
For instance, the cocurators of the comics section, Seth and Art Spiegelman,
select seven American comic artists and one Canadian (Seth himself) and in-
troduce their representative works. In the manga section, cocurators Kusumi
Kiyoshi, a cultural critic, and Ueno Toshiya, a sociologist, both from Japan,
selected eight Japanese comic artists. The sections on animated cartoons and
anime are also rigidly divided by nationality without any explanation why or
how anime is different from animated cartoons. The cultural “intersection”
that Grenville describes does not appear to apply to the field of animation;
“anime” equals “Japanese” and “cartoons” are “North American,” and never
the twain shall meet.16
I view Grenville’s “intersection,” as well as Lamarre’s notion of “inter-
media,” as similar attempts at freeing anime, or Japanese animation, from the

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     79

extremes of either cultural determinism or transnationalism. The difficulty is
how one can explicate the “intersection” or “intermedia” phenomenon with-
out losing a subject’s ties with specific points of history and its cultural con-
texts. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the historical intersection of
anime and technological development in visual media in Japan as the specific
cultural context.

Anime and Media Convergence:

Oshii Mamoru
As we can see in both Lamarre’s special issue and Brown’s anthology, they
tend to focus on the intermediation between “anime” and “cinema,” and
many of these discussions have often been caught up in the stylistic or the-
matic differences between anime and the cinema. If we look at anime’s
trend since the 1970s, however, we notice its affinity with the latest “delivery
technologies”—­television, video, CD-ROM, DVD, computer games, iPod,
and so on—and their convergence. Cinema’s high-end production model has
played a large role in anime’s rise, as we can see in Toei Doga’s and Studio
Ghibli’s feature-length animation films. But this is only part of anime’s in-
tersection with various media.17 Particularly since the late 1990s, when both
computer production and DVD distribution became relatively inexpensive
and popular, anime’s intermediation with digital technology exceeded that
of its other ties. In other words, anime’s intermediation needs to be examined
within both historical specificity and diversity.
By focusing on three animators of different generations, Oshii Mamoru
(1951–), Yamamura Koji (1964–), and Shinkai Makoto (1973–), I will discuss
how these animators produce their works within specific intermediations.
Through the comparison, I extend my analysis into anime’s recent trend to-
ward a smaller, even personal mode of production (Yamamura and Shinkai),
which coexists with the opposite trend—the concentration of media attention
and capital by a small handful of larger anime studios and productions. Oshii,
for instance, has worked within larger animation studios, such as Tatsunoko
Production (1977­–1980), Studio Pierrot (1980–1989), and Production I.G.
(1989–present). The full variety of Japanese animation comes from this pro-
duction environment, in which seemingly adversarial or even predatory rela-
tions between small and larger studios productions are not necessarily working
against each other, and they often share the demanding markets of Japanese
animation both domestically and abroad. This pattern of coexistence between
new media technologies (personal production) and mainstream commercial
media (larger studio production) is not limited to Japanese animation; it can

80   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

be seen in many cultures and societies, including the American media envi-
ronment.18
Revisiting his early career in the 1970s, Oshii Mamoru describes anime’s­
formative ties with television, particularly the anime programs’ roles as mer-
chandise vehicles for their sponsors (typically toy or snack food companies).
Oshii nonchalantly admits that there was little self-reflection about creat-
ing something artistic, nor were original ideas ever requested.19 Seen in this
light, anime’s best-known genre, the “robot genre,” which includes icons
such as Gundam, seem less reflective of a techno-oriented Japan than sales-
driven promotions by the sponsor companies and their ties with television.
Although the practice of merchandise tie-ins had already been established
with Tezuka Osamu’s television cartoon Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan Atomu, Fuji
Television, January 1, 1963–December 31, 1966),20 the success of the produc-
tion company­Sunrise’s tie-ins with Mobile Suit Gundam (Kido senshi Gandam,
TV Asahi, April 7, 1979–January 26, 1980) became the landmark of anime’s
potential for a wider marketing demographic.21
The emergence of the videotape transformed not only the distribution pat-
tern but also, according to Oshii, dramatically changed both the mode of pro-
duction and the way the product was received by audiences. 22 As consumers­
adopted home video recorders and began recording animation programs at
home for repeat viewings, they demanded higher-quality anime. Anime critic
Kitano Taiitsu highlights the television series Brave Raideen (Yusha Raidin, TV
Asahi, April 4, 1975–March 26, 1976) as a significant marker in changing
modes of production, as animators’ shifted from a passive role of hired hands
to active creators with greater responsibilities, such as writing the screenplays
for each episode.23 This change in production resonates with a parallel trans-
formation in reception away from the fleeting ephemera of weekly television
programming to the viewer’s increased identification with matters of “author-
ship” and “style.” For example, Raideen’s director, Tomino Yoshiyuki, who
also directed the landmark anime Mobile Suit Gundam (he directed and wrote
screenplays), became a “deified” robot anime maker with his adult-oriented­
screenplays, which dramatically widened anime audiences beyond the show’s
child demographics. Animation magazines such as Animage (1978–), Animedia
(1981–), and Newtype (1985–) also emerged as the videotape spread in popu-
larity, and these magazines accelerated the pattern of anime reception, the
“auteur” formation, and its appreciation in anime fan culture, which has con-
tinued to the present.
Oshii underlines a characteristic of anime audiences in Japan as their
high convertability among different media, and he attributes his success as an
anime maker to that aspect.24 Of course, this fluency in media convergence

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     81

can be credited to the economic affluence of Japan, which fed a growing
consumer appetite for new gadgets. Still, anime has kept its affinity with tech-
nological developments, and its success on television has led it to reproduce
itself via film adaptation, videotape, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and video
games. Oshii states his own case as follows: “The reason that I have been able
to continue my career is in this high ‘convert-ability’ among the Japanese an-
ime fans. My works have been reproduced and re-promoted each time when a
medium’s format is converted. In other words, I received royalties each time,
which often supported me when I had a scarcity of work. . . . Indeed, all my
works have been distributed in video, LD, and DVD, and they allowed me to
buy a house like other people.”25
As one can see in both his oeuvres and his animation style, such as adapt-
ing camera movement and shot angles from live-action films in his anima-
tion, Oshii has always demonstrated his interest in cinema, and he has di-
rected some live-action feature films: The Red Spectacles (Jigoku no banken: akai
megane,­ 1987), Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops (Jigoku no banken: Keruberosu,
1991), Talking Head (1992), Avalon (2001), Kiru (2008), and Assault Girls
(2009). His recent “animated” film, Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters, even
deploys a technique called “super-live-mation,” which combines digital photo
images of actors with a frame-by-frame animation technique to create a sort
of pixilated film. In other words, film, whether as animation or as live action,
is Oshii’s ultimate medium for his creative output.
Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters emphasizes a history of postwar
Japan until the end of the Showa period (1926–1989) through both narrative
and animation techniques. Fictional folklorist Inugai Kiichi narrates the sto-
ries of eight con artists and their legendary skills in ordering fast food without
paying. They are all petty criminals, but they are nonetheless presented as
masters due to their “philosophy” and “aesthetic” of bilking. Inugai’s story
starts in 1945 at the end of World War II, and it continues until 1988, the year
before Emperor Hirohito’s death. The vicissitudes of Japanese fast food cul-
ture, from a cheap bowl of noodles to a hamburger at franchised restaurants,
contributes to the narrative’s chronological development. Each episode is in-
troduced with “historical” documentary-like footage from postwar to current
Japan, which is done in CGI. The film presents a new type of realist aesthetics
with its usage of “super-live-mation.”
Super-live-mation’s concept originated from kamishibai, a regional me-
dium for storytelling. The film deploys not only the new media of digital
technology, it also revitalizes this antiquated local medium. There are some
academic debates about the origins of kamishibai; some assume that it started
from Buddhist temples’ picture scrolls (emaki) in the twelfth century, but it is

82   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

clear that kamishibai’s popularity as a commercial enterprise for the entertain-
ment of children dates from the 1910s and remained popular until the early
1950s, when television began broadcasting in Japan.26 From kamishibai, Oshii
adapted the concept of “pepusato,” a Japanese-English word that means “a
paper puppet” having two images with slightly different expressions on both
sides of a stick, and the image changes as one turns the stick. The shift from a
still image to a moving image caused by rapid movement of the two drawings­
creates a sense of liveliness, or realist aesthetic, regardless of the picture’s
quality (figures 3.1a and 3.1b). The expression “pepusato” was used in post-
war Japan when inventive kamishibai performers tried to distinguish their art
by using more complex picture puppets. Oshii took thousands of photos of
actors’ theatrical poses and digitally processed the images as CGI data. Super-
live-­­mation lacks the sense of reality that we see in Disneylike animation, but
it presents its own cinematic, photogenic, and theatrical quality through its
realist aesthetics. These images look neither like film, photo, or theater, but
they bear traces from all those existing media. In other words, Amazing Lives
of the Fast Food Grifters represents the process of visual media’s convergence of
the old with the new, and of paper with film and digital imaging.
By incorporating kamishibai in his film, Oshii not only adapts its tech-
nology but also highlights the aspect of craftsmanship, which stands out for
its handmade quality. In contrast, high-budget digital animation tends to ef-
face the individual craftsmanship of animators in the process of production.
Oshii, meanwhile, demonstrates a willingness to leave his fingerprints in such
self-referential deployments as the con artist grifters reappearing from his ear-
lier work, such as the comedy, Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamers (1984). The
maker’s craft is also evident in the kamishibai puppets that reference the short
animation omnibus Minipato (2002, dir. Kamiyama Kenji; writing, concept,
and music Oshii Mamoru), itself a parody of his earlier mobile robot anime
Patlabor: The Original Series (Kido keisatsu patoreiba, 1988). The densely crafted,
complex images simulating postwar documentary footage and the esoteric
narration overflowing with often fictional cultural information that is, at best,
tangential to the plot—such signature aspects of Oshii’s work seem designed
for repeated viewings and reward the expectations of his fans.

“Personal Production” of Anime:

Shinkai Makoto
Since the 1990s, anime’s affinity with digital technology’s development
has shifted to nearly all aspects of production, distribution, and reception.
Producing anime with personal computers and distributing them on DVD or

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     83

 Figures 3.1a & b. Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (Oshii Mamoru, 2006).
The rapid movement of two images creates a sense of animation.

Blu-ray Disc have led anime production to be more flexible and diverge from
a larger studio-oriented mode, as in the case of Oshii Mamoru, to a single
creator form. The move toward a smaller scale of production and greater per-
sonalization can be keenly sensed in Shinkai Makoto’s work. After working
for five years as a designer for a computer game company, Shinkai became an
independent anime maker without receiving any training from anime produc-
tion companies. He was part of a new generation of animation artists who
had little drawing skill but were knowledgeable in computer animation soft-
ware. His first recognized solo work is the twenty-five-minute digital anima-
tion, Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no koe, 2002), and he recently directed his

84   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

first feature-length animation film, 5 Centimeters per Second (Byosoku 5 senchi-
metoru, 2007).
Thanks to his home computer (a PowerMac G4 400 MHz), Shinkai not
only assumed all the principal roles of director, screenplay writer, drawing
artist,­art director, cinematographer, and editor in Voices of a Distant Star, but
he also provided the voice for the leading character, Noboru.27 In a DVD
bonus-­feature interview, Shinkai asserts that the affordability of computer
hardware and software in the late 1990s and early 2000s allowed him to pro-
duce animation from his home (“personal production”):

When I started thinking about making Voices of a Distant Star, I was

still working at a video game company. That was the period when
the prices of hardware and software for making digital images be-
came affordable for individual/home users. Moreover, the DVD had
already become popularized via PlayStation II in Japan at that time.
My colleagues and friends started to discuss the high possibility of
“personal production” of visual image. In my case, I had already
owned these hard and soft digital tools and trained myself how to
use them at least on the basic level at work. Then, I thought why not
start making an animation alone.28

In his animation, Shinkai intermediates with not only “new” digital or

computer technology, but he assimilates his animation with “old,” coexisting
media, such as television (anime series), printed media (manga and contempo-
rary novels by Murakami Haruki), and popular music from iPod. He creates
patterns, intermedia networks that weave across contemporary Japanese pop-
ular culture historically and synchronically and are strongly influenced by his
own personal experience and interests. This personal experience—that is, a
pattern of accessing media individually—is a trend among the post-cinematic
or nontheatrical cinema generation in Japan and elsewhere.29 They listen to
music with iPods (a pattern that was established with the release of Sony’s
Walkman in 1979), send text messages via cell phone, view films on personal
computers or via their smartphone devices, and play games on Game Boys.
Shinkai even describes his goal in making animation as creating an “environ-
ment” for himself modeled on the lifestyle of a manga artist or novelist, one
who usually creates his or her work alone (or with a few assistants) and lives
on royalties.30 What he produces in his creative process and work is the “per-
sonal experience” of both producers and consumers in the popular digital
culture that he has grown up with and knows intimately. His animation Voices
of a Distant Star is a typical example of the breakdown between producers

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     85

and consumers, in which, as Henry Jenkins describes, “consumers seek to act
upon the invitation to participate in the life of the franchises.”31
On the level of aesthetics and narrative, Shinkai’s “new” digital solo ani-
mation Voices of a Distant Star has converged with “old” television animation
and photo images. His work shares many techniques with television anime,
such as “library” (recycling background images), “tome-e” (using one image
for a long duration of time), and the main characters’ anime-ish look (usually
teenage boys and girls with a pointed chin, big eyes, a small mouth, pointed
noses without nostrils, and they are often thin and wearing school uniforms)
and a story similar to the television animation series, Neon Genesis Evangelion,
in which teenagers have a double life as a student and a pilot of a mobile suit
robot (figure 3.2). Voices of a Distant Star’s narrative is a familiar trope within
the anime world, which has been established with a number of mobile suit
robots and teenage pilots over more than four decades. The fifteen-year-old
heroine Mikako is accepted to be a member of the United Nations Universal
Army, which will deploy her throughout the universe, and her boyfriend
Noboru is left alone on Earth. Their communication is limited to their cell
phone text messages, but the farther Mikako is from the Earth the more time
it takes for their text messages to reach each other; by the end of the film,
it takes more than eight years for a message to reach them (figure 3.3). The
film is full of characters’ narrations, either dialogue or monologue, which
do not necessarily correspond with the still images onscreen. Shinkai’s use
of this limited television animation technique was the only way for him to

Figure 3.2. Voices of a Distance Star (Shinkai
Makoto, 2002). Adhering to the mobile-suit
genre’s conventions, the protagonist Mikako
(voice, Shinohara Mika) is a pilot of a space
force protecting mankind.
Figure 3.3. The last text message from Mika-
ko to Noboru (voice, Shinkai Makoto), which
took more than eight years to reach him.

86   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

Figures 3.4a & b. Typical suburban images, originally photographed by Shinkai and transferred
into anime with CGI.

make animation­effectively with limited labor and time. Shinkai presents en-
vironmental images of the Earth, typical suburban images of houses, roads,
and empty lots, which he originally shot himself, or images of fighting in the
universe, which he created with 3-D CGI (figures 3.4a and 3.4b). These digital
images were all processed by Photoshop and AfterEffects to make them suit-
able for the “anime” look.32
Shinkai has been creating his animation content in the fast-paced digital­
era, in which “old” and “new” media have converged. This convergence
works in the ad hoc formation of “an old concept taking on new meanings,”
or in Jenkins’s terms, “a kind of kludge.”33 The gap between Shinkai’s highly
techno-oriented production mode and the “familiar” expression of both aes-
thetics and narrative in his animation can be explained as a product of tech-
nological “kludge.” Through my correspondence with Shinkai in e-mails, I
asked him whether he had a particular medium in mind for distributing his
work. Shinkai replied,

I was thinking of selling on CD-ROM when I created my earlier

independent work in the late 1990s. Then, the targeted distribution
medium for Voices of a Distant Star became DVD in 2002, and I con-
sciously made the following work The Place Promised in Our Early Days
[Kumo no muko, yakusoku no basho, 2005] with HD DVD. For my latest­
animation 5 Centimeters per Second, I made it a download-friendly­
content for net streaming or iPod. But, now I feel that we no longer
need to think about the difference in media anymore. . . . All media
are connected to the Internet, whether television, the information

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     87

 for theatrical release, and DVD sales. In other words, one can even
say that any contents that are not connected with the Internet do not
exist­in the current market.34

And at the end of this question-and-answer session, Shinkai highlighted the

following “individual audience”:

But the other end of this net line is ultimately an individual.

Therefore, I think that any content needs to be created for individual
not mass audiences, though there are many more factors that might
be involved for planning production costs and marketing. I sense
more and more that “personal animation” does not necessarily
mean a solo production, but rather content produced for an indi-
vidual.35

In this sense, Shinkai’s animation—or moreover its targeted audience—is

very different from Disney’s or Pixar’s animation, which is strictly designed
for family viewing. Though both are called “animation,” they differ in many
facets, from production to the pattern of consumption. As Shinkai has com-
mented, “I hope both are needed in this world.”36 The difference between
Shinkai’s and Disney’s animation derives not simply from intrinsic cultural
differences but is more directly linked to the needs and demands placed upon
animation in each market, which can sometimes outpace any limits set by
national or cultural boundaries.

“Japanese” Animation: Yamamura Koji

Anime’s recent trend toward a small-scale production using personal
computers­and DVD distribution has further diversified Japanese animation,
which has led to the convergence between short and feature-length films and
art and commercial animations. Yamamura Koji is another animation artist
who normally works in solo production. A small condominium in Setagaya
Ward, Tokyo, serves as the workshop for Yamamura Animation, and his wife
Sanae is his only full-time assistant. Like Shinkai, Yamamura occasionally
hires assistants for larger projects, such as Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor. But
with the use of his computer, he usually works on his own to avoid extra
expenses. While Shinkai’s work inherits the flat anime aesthetics of the televi-
sion series Neon Genesis Evangelion and shojo manga (manga aimed at school-age
girls) in both stylistic and narrative forms, Yamamura, on the other hand,
draws upon his “art animation” background, detaching his animation style

88   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

from the ubiquitous “anime look” and promoting his work via another type
of mediation—namely animation film festivals. The popularity of recent ani-
mation in Japan is due both to its diversity and multiple connections with
various media; in other words, animation’s numerous ways to gain “cultural
capital.”37
Yamamura’s animation is usually described as “art animation” or “au-
teur animation,” and it looks distinct from anime or commercial animation
with its handmade quality of errant lines. One can see how this difference is
often discursively highlighted, for instance, in the text of the official festival
Web site of the 2008 Ottawa International Animation Film Festival: “‘A New
Wave of Japanese Animation’—A showcase of exciting and eclectic Japanese
auteur animation. Presenting another side of ‘anime,’ this program has been
curated by a panel of animation producers, directors and distributors includ-
ing Academy Award nominee Koji Yamamura and Taku Furukawa.”38
As the indefinite expression “another side of anime” indicates, the dis-
tinction between anime and art animation has often been an arbitrary one,
and it is sometimes used strategically in anime studies as well. In the case
of Hu Tze Yue, she analyzes the omnibus animation Winter Days (Fuyu no
hi, 2003, Kawamoto Kihochiro et al.), to which Yamamura contributed one
short, forty-second animation, and Hu terms the animators as “independent,”
“auteur,” and “animation artists.” Although she briefly mentions the histori-
cal parallel between the puppet animation artist Kawamoto’s past ventures
and the “golden peak period of anime in Japan” in the 1970s, Hu does not
reference their intersection any further.39 Livia Monnet, to give another ex-
ample, examines the Japanese artist Tabaimo’s (real name: Tabata Akiko)
animated installations and short animated films, which have been available
since her debut in 1999. Although Monnet’s essay does not make a specific
distinction between Tabaimo’s art animation and anime, we can see that there
is an ambiguous connection between the two since the essay is presented in an
anthology focused on anime.40 The division between art animation and anime
reinvokes the disputed dichotomy of high and low cultures and is often sub-
stituted with another set of divisions: independent and commercial. However,
as Yamamura himself asserts, such divisions are ultimately unreasonable or
even false, since, except for a very few animations, they all have sponsors pro-
viding financial support and have commercial venues where they can reach
audiences.41
In an interview with the author, Yamamura states that since he was a
boy in primary school, he has been interested in various animations from
around the world, not just Japanese anime.42 He started drawing comics and
making animation, and he attended an art college to study abstract drawing.

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     89

He has both the skill to create different styles of animation and an impressive
knowledge regarding animation’s history and techniques, all of which has
been displayed in his book Welcome to the World of Animation (Animeshon no
seaki he yokoso, 2006) and his exhibition “Yamamura Animation Museum”
at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. It is interesting to note that he even worked as
an assistant animator at the animation production company Mukuo Studio,
which has specialized in art design and background drawing for film and tele-
vision animation series, such as Harmagedon (Genma taisen, 1983, Rin Taro)
and Sailor Moon (Bishojo senshi sera mun, TV Asahi, March 1992–February
1997). As an accomplished virtuoso, Yamamura can create a wide range of
animations in diverse styles and techniques, and his work has complex levels­
of adaptation, intertextualization, and collaboration. Within this process of
production, one can see Yamamura’s conscious choices for distinguishing his
work in the challenging markets he pursues. I will examine this aspect by
comparing his two recent festival-awarded works: Mount Head (Atama-yama,
2002) and Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor.
Yamamura has sent all his solo-production animations to international
animation film festivals, which function as sites for finding new talents for
commercial productions. For those animation makers like Yamamura or
Shinkai with a personal production system, international festivals are indeed
the most important venue to display their work and get future producers or
sponsors. But as Liz Czach, a film programmer at the Toronto International
Film Festival, has written, “Cultural nationalism and national identity are
bound up in the histories of film festivals,” and film festival programming
often takes a role in forming a national cinema.43 The case of animation film
festivals is no exception.
Yamamura’s first acclaimed animation, Mount Head, received the grand
prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France (2003),
the World Festival of Animation Film in Zagreb, Croatia (2004), and the
Hiroshima International Animation Festival (2004), among others. The ani-
mation was also nominated for the category of short film at the 75th Academy
Awards (2003). These animation festivals are not simply celebrating the year’s
achievements; they function as fully commercialized marketplaces for finding
the year’s best “crop.” Especially in the field of short animation, the success-
ful ones are considered to be “portending the shape of things to come.”44
The ten-minute film Mount Head is an adaptation from a traditional comic
storytelling­ (rakugo) of the nineteenth century, and it is narrated by Kunimoto
Takeharu, the famous recitation performer (rokyoku-shi), accompanied by a
shamisen (a three-stringed musical instrument).
The narrative’s temporal and spatial aspects are set in contemporary

90   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

Tokyo, in which businessmen with indistinct gray suits and office girls in
salmon-pink uniforms enjoy the cherry blossoms in their crazy hanami (cherry
blossom viewing) festival (figures 3.5 and 3.6). In a bizarre twist, the event is
held on Mr. Mt. Head, where a marvelous cherry tree, the symbol of Japanese
spring, grows from a bald man’s head. After endless disturbances by those
visitors, who are drinking, smoking, dancing, and even urinating on the tree,
Mr. Mt. Head finally uproots the tree and creates a ditch, which becomes a
pond after it begins to rain. Again, people start visiting his head for swimming
and fishing in the pond. In order to end this madness on his head, Mr. Mt.
Head finally jumps into his own pond and drowns (figure 3.7).
Mount Head obviously makes the form of animation intersect with the
story from the Japanese narrative tradition and the rokyoku-shi Kunimoto’s
voice performance, adding more of the sense of “classical” and “Japan.”
In this animation, Yamamura apparently made a conscious attempt to put
“Japaneseness” at the forefront, in both narrative and sound (including its
shamisen music), and his attempt worked in those international animation
festivals. As a result, he later became an acclaimed auteur animator in Japan as
the first grand prizewinner at all four well-known animation festivals: Annecy,
Ottawa, Zagreb, and Hiroshima.45 This aspect of performative or constructed
“Japaneseness” in his animation can be further highlighted by contrasting it
with his later animation The Old Crocodile (Toshi o totta wani, 2005), which has
fewer cultural references to Japan and had only a modest reception at those
same international film festivals.
In Yamamura’s most recent animation, A Country Doctor, he successfully­
translated Kafka’s internalized narrative in visual terms and received the
grand prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2007, among
other festivals (Etiuda and Anima International Film Festival, in Poland; the
International Trickfilm Festival of Animated Film, Stuttgart, Germany). As
in Franz Kafka’s short story, written in 1919, Yamamura enforces the cultural
intersection with Europe via the reproduction of the setting in eighteenth-
century­Prague, Austria-Hungary. His work skillfully articulates the story’s
ethereal spatial and temporal aspects, typical in Kafka’s stories, with the
culturally­inflected voice of a kyogen-shi (performers for a traditional Japanese
theater­, kyogen, a comedic intermission of sorts in Noh performance),
Shigeyama Sensaku and his family.
The animation’s narrative starts with the country doctor being summoned
by a family with a sick boy. The doctor’s horse has just died the night before,
so he sends his maid Rosa to borrow horses for his carriage. Although she
comes back empty-handed, the doctor instead finds a mysterious groom and
borrows his horses. The doctor senses the groom’s desire toward Rosa, but

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     91

Figure 3.5. Mount
Head (Yamamura Koji,
2002). In contemporary
Tokyo, businessmen
with indistinct gray
suits enjoy their crazy
hanami festival.

Figure 3.6. Finally a

crowd gathers on the
bald man’s head.

Figure 3.7. People

again start visiting his
head for swimming and
fishing.
his horses take him abruptly to the sick boy’s house. Even after arriving at the
house, the doctor rather worries about his maid being assaulted by the groom
while he is away. The doctor tries to escape from the boy’s house, but his fam-
ily takes off all his clothes and confines him to the boy’s room. At the end,
the doctor succeeds in fleeing and returns to his house, yet we do not find out
what happened to either Rosa or the sick boy.
The characters’ monologues are crucial to the narrative’s interior psycho-
logical realm, and they are expressed by a group of kyogen-shi with their darkly
comical and culturally marked voice performance. Whether an animator cre-
ates anime or art animation, their way of gaining “cultural capital” is not
intrinsically tied with their inherited culture but rather with a “performance”­
of national identity—be it their own or someone else’s—in order to gain
distinction.­All techniques and expressions can be, at once, aleatoric and
highly­intertextualized with various other animations, and yet Yamamura
boldly and consciously chose the European story to encounter with the
remarkable­Japanese voice performance, and he synthesized the encounter
through his skillful animation techniques and styles.
In A Country Doctor, Yamamura’s repertoire of various techniques and
styles delivers a novel impression to the work, a detachment from either “full”
or “limited” animations. Those techniques, while not being completely his
own invention, are drawn from his encounters with other animations and vi-
sual media. In his interview, Yamamura states that A Country Doctor was influ-
enced by Nicholas Ray’s Western, Johnny Guitar (1954), in its description of
characters’ movements in some of the sequences capturing the external space
with blowing wind and a sandstorm.46 He exemplifies this influence in his
animation, especially in the first long sequence, in which both the doctor and
Rosa are seeking horses on a cold winter day. These two characters’ move-
ments are not only exaggerated but also conceptualized by losing their spatial
reality; they do not follow the rules of perspective or gravity and constantly
swell with changes in their sizes or standing positions, which creates an un-
usual visual depth (figures 3.8a and 3.8b). It is a distorted aesthetic that is well
suited to the tortured psychology of Kafka’s work, the sense of the self ’s inte-
rior pressing out through the body’s membranes. The distorted movements of
the characters separate his animation from both full (Disneylike articulation
of smooth movement) and limited animations (jerky or lack of movement). In
fact, the movements of Joan Crawford (Vienna) or Sterling Hayden (Johnny
“Guitar” Logan) in the Wild West have no relation to the doctor’s and Rosa’s
distorted body movements in A Country Doctor, but there is some proximity
between­those texts, particularly in regard to textural materiality—that is,
layers­in the space within those scenes.

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     93

Figures 3.8a & b. Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (Yamamura Koji, 2007). The Doctor’s (voice,
Shigeyama Sensaku) exaggerated movement disrupts the spatial reality and presents unusual
visual depth.

Yamamura creates a three-dimensional textual volume for the film in

his two-dimensional animation with layers of images and their movements.
This layering is one of the best examples for animation’s transformation by
its digitization. Due to the change from a hand-drawn cel frame to a digitized
image, animators now can use numberless layers to create a rich and more
textual image. Yamamura uses various images of lighting, reflection, snow,
or even a couple of ropes trembling from the strong winds and layers them
into his digital and, at once, handmade animation. This attempt at creating a
handmade aesthetic can be seen in his animation’s drawing lines, often subtly

94   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

shaking in order to create the visual tension and materiality against the flat
uniformity of digital animation. For the handmade look, he even tactically
reversed the order of pencil drawing and color marker painting and kept the
pencil’s black blot (figure 3.9). This technique, as Yamamura himself points
out in his interview, is well known in some other animators’ works, such as
Paul Driessen from the Netherlands, creator of The Killing of an Egg (1977)
and 3 Misses (1998).47
When scholars talk about intermedia, the connection between anime and
cinema is emphasized, since it is assumed that they share similar patterns
of viewing. Scholars borrow and apply frameworks from film studies that
already have an established history with its own terminologies, concepts, and
theories. However, anime’s affinity with technology, the expansion of its con-
tents across various media—the “media mix,” which is the prime source of its
attraction for fans—has created a pattern of intermediation markedly differ-
ent from cinema’s essential characteristic of collaborative production and the-
atrical viewership, which has also been transforming dramatically in the last
few decades. In short, anime is post-cinematic in its nature, as its first appear-
ance coincides with the 1980s’ prevalence of home videotape, the exact pe-
riod when the cinema was compelled to adopt new distribution and reception
patterns. If the cinema’s natural order originates in groups in its production
and reception, anime’s natural order originates in the smaller scale of private­
television viewing. Moreover, its early investment in multiple media has made
it possible for anime to remain adept in changing with the high speed of tech-
nological development required for anime’s production and distribution.

Figure 3.9. The handmade aesthetic: Yamamura’s pencil smudge.

The Rise of “Personal” Animation     95

 Returning to the question of “difference,” anime is different from Disney’s
or Pixar’s animation, as Shinkai clearly stated. But the difference is not rooted­
in anime’s ethnic identity; rather, it stems from its ties to media convergence,
at the intersection of both local and global markets. As Oshii’s long career
with various media indicates, his success at multiplying royalties from the
same content rests on his audience’s high convertability, their receptiveness
to hardware and media “upgrades,” which has accelerated with Japan’s
economic affluence from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Shinkai’s “personal”
animation, which resembles in style and narrative such television anime as
Evangelion, has successfully tapped into television animation’s characteristi-
cally loyal audience in Japan; in other words, Shinkai’s OVA animation does
not need to compete with Disney or Pixar, whose marketing investments are
heavily centralized with the theatrical release. Yamamura’s highly technical
animation highlights “Japan” or “Japanese culture,” but these are all per-
formative and constructed conscious elements, which can be attributed to a
“coercive mimeticism” engendered in the dynamic of international film festi-
vals.48 Anime is indeed difficult to study because it is diverse, and a large body
of work has been produced. Moreover, its high affinity with technological de-
velopment makes studying anime even harder and more demanding in terms
of speed and knowledge. However, anime is fascinating precisely for these
reasons. Anime sustains its attraction through risk-taking challenges either
on the level of style, such as new realist aesthetics of a revitalized kamishibai,
the limited still image, or a layered materiality, or on the level of narrative of
either Japanese postwar con artists, an esoteric story from Kafka, or a story
about an eight-year-old text message from across the universe.

96   The Rise of “Personal” Animation

The shift from “the national” to “the
transnational,” nonetheless, cannot Finding the Nation
be divorced from the notion of crisis,
which somehow carries us back and in Transnational
forth between “home” and “world.”
—esther cheung and yiu-wai chu,
Cinema
“Introduction: Between Home and World”1

I have recently encountered a num-

ber of films skillfully promoted as transnational cinema, such as The Hotel
Venus (2004, Takahata Hideta), which features a multinational cast (American,
Japanese, and Korean) all speaking Korean and presented with Japanese sub-
titles. The film was made with Japanese capital, produced for the most part
by a Japanese crew, and was filmed entirely on location in Vladivostok, the
administrative center of Primorsky Krai, Russia. This further highlights the
contradiction that one encounters in recent transnational cinema. If the trans-
national is defined, in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden’s sense, as “the global­
forces that link people or institutions across nations,” this film is without any
doubt transnational.2 But I find myself asking, What is it that is transnational
about this film? In other words, do the film’s production logistics necessarily­
result in a transnational identity? Might its multinational elements—in
particular,­the film’s address to a Korean ethnic subject—be better understood
within the particular national framework of Japanese exceptionalism among
Asian countries? Indeed, there are a number of films that, like The Hotel Venus,
are presented as “transnational cinema” without being substantially different
from films analyzed in the national cinema practice. Then, what is the reason
for identifying those films as transnational over national cinema?

97
 The term “transnational cinema” has been used recently as a substitute
for or an improvement on the critical framework of national cinema, which it-
self has been problematized for a number of reasons. A primary reason is the
increasing permeability of national borders due to global exchanges of human­
labor, media information, finance, and other exchanges.3 Specifically in the
case of cinema, the present framework of national cinema is increasingly­dif-
ficult to sustain in the face of a great upsurge in multinational financing, the
coproduction of films, and the cross-border flow of stars and skilled labor
such as directors, cinematographers, and choreographers. Although anyone
can see the escalating incompatibility between the concept of national cinema
as a critical framework and the current industrial situation, I am still puzzled
by the abrupt shift in cinema and media studies from the national to the trans-
national in the post–Cold War era. What are the risks and benefits of shifting
the critical framework from the national to the transnational?
We can see that the idea of transnational cinema—more specifically,
the recent shift in the critical frame from national cinema to transnational
cinema—­brings with it another set of questions, theoretical or otherwise. This
chapter examines the issue of the paradigm shift on the levels both of the
critical discourses regarding Chinese-language and Nordic cinemas and the
film texts, especially focusing on contemporary transnational films from the
East Asian region, and it interrogates what profits, if any, the framework of
transnational cinema brings us over those of national cinema. At the end of
the chapter, I will return to the question, What is so transnational about The
Hotel Venus?

The Cases of Chinese-language Film and

Nordic Cinema
Major social and cultural changes since the end of the Cold War in the late
1980s—such as the gradual enlargement of the European Union (EU), Hong
Kong’s reunification with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997, and
the shift from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the
World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995—have led to significant cross-
national­geopolitical transformations. But have those historical changes
wholly­transformed the practice of cinema and its products, or is it a matter
of how the cinema is “narrated” in the academy, especially in the “global
English” academy?
In the field of U.S.–based Chinese cinema studies, Sheldon Hsiao-peng
Lu states that “transnational cinema in the Chinese case as well as in the
rest of the world is the result of the globalization of the mechanisms of film

98   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

production, distribution, and consumption. . . . Chinese national cinema can
only be understood in its properly transnational context.”4 There are three as-
pects of transnationalism in the Chinese case, according to Lu: the political
split of China, especially after 1949; the impact of transnational capitalism
in the 1990s global economy; and the filmic representation of plural Chinese
identities that calls into question the unitary concept of “China.” Yet, Lu’s
interpretation of the beginnings of the transnational in Chinese cinema is
problematic. His interpretation posits that Chinese national cinema has been
in the context of the transnational since its inception, although more so since
1949, when the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong were triangulated. Further, as
Lu suggests, did it become even more transnational with the advent of “glo-
balization” in the 1990s? Lu insinuates that, throughout its history, Chinese
cinema has been in essence a transnational cinema. But does it follow that ap-
plying the critical framework of transnational cinema makes more sense than
that of national cinema? How can we discuss the individual national identity
of, for instance, Taiwan’s political isolation from the United Nations since
the late 1970s or mainland China’s isolation not only from Taiwan but from
the rest of the “Western” world during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)?
Moreover, the tripartite model of the Chinese cinemas obscures the national
policies embedded in the government’s engagements with their cinemas, often
through direct subsidy.
Lu later substitutes the framework of Chinese-language film for the trans-
national Chinese cinema in the anthology co-edited with Emilie Yue-yu Yeh.
They alternately deploy “Chinese cinema” and “Chinese-language film,”
defining the latter as “films that use predominantly Chinese dialects and are
made in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora, as
well as those produced through transnational collaborations with other film
industries.”5 As this example indicates, Lu’s way of using the concept of the
transnational is markedly different from its general use for describing transna-
tional organizations or corporations, often considered as central to “a process
of global consolidation.”6 Lu’s use of the transnational is opposed to the no-
tion of consolidation on the global level, but it emphasizes the cinema’s location
in a specific region that exceeds the national boundaries and yet keeps its own
cultural identity as “Chinese” intact against the rest of the world. This en-
larged structure, from nation to ethnicity, raises a question: Can Lu’s regional
model of cultural production still be termed transnational, or should we locate
the provisional status of the Chinese cinema as a particular condition of trans-
nationalism? Indeed, the territorial construct of a nation-state representing­a
cohesive vision of the Chinese or Chinese-ness is concealed or replaced by the
higher level of unity that Lu demarcates as “Chinese-language film.” Within

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     99

that unity, to be sure, there are certainly transnational flows. However, as Chris
Berry and Mary Farquhar indicate, this can also be “the kind of culturalism
that supports Western discourses ranging from Orientalism . . . to Chinese dis-
course on Great China (Da Zhanghua).”7 The kind of pan-Chinese ethnicity
that Lu puts forth comes awfully close to supporting the ethnocentric trium-
phalism now commonplace in nationalistic discourses.
It is intriguing to see how the discursive approach to Chinese cinema has
been transformed amidst seemingly polarized Chinese desires to be both “uni-
versal” and “particular” in the Anglophone academic sphere since the late
1980s, including Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu’s contributions. As Esther M. K.
Cheung and Yiu-wai Chu indicate, “The cinema began to be legitimized in
the English scholarships in the late 1980s when critics tried to conceptual-
ize the relationship between the emergence of Chinese-language films.”8 In
the early 1990s, the anthologies of both Chris Berry and Nick Browne et al.
pluralized the term “Chinese cinemas,” with the notion that “the similarities
and differences among the three Chinese cinemas . . . have been shaped by the
elements of a common culture and different historical circumstances.”9 The
concepts of “transnational Chinese cinemas” and “Chinese-language film”
have apparently emerged from the same intellectual current as these plural-
ized “Chinese cinemas,” with the polarized desire of having the “Greater
China” perspective on one hand and keeping the tripartite structure of the
PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong on the other. As we see in the anthology edited
by Poshek Fu and David Desser, as well as in Esther C. M. Yau’s anthology
on Hong Kong cinema, the discourses in the field have focused on those three
Chinese cinemas’ plural identities and the reframing of each cinema as an
“object of knowledge” and “an analytical category.”10 Their critical focus on
the localized Hong Kong cinema is in concert with Yeh Yueh-yu’s soundly
reasoned criticism against the “Greater China” perspective:

English-language film studies treat Taiwanese cinema and, to some

extent, Hong Kong cinema as subgroups of Chinese (or China’s)
cinema. The idea seems to come from a generally accepted notion
that culturally speaking, Taiwan and Hong Kong are inseparable
parts of China. Taiwan and Hong Kong cinema, as a result, are
treated as parts of Chinese cinema or perhaps different kinds of
Chinese cinema. . . . Without exception, New Chinese Cinemas also
shows an adherence to the imperial national conception of “Middle
Kingdom” (zhonggou).11

This quote illustrates the irresolvable conceptual fissure between China’s

100   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

historical­sense of nation as the “Middle Kingdom” and the modern nation-­
state, rather than the methodological differences between the Chinese-
language film and Chinese cinemas’ plural identities. This also clarifies why
Lu views Chinese cinema as being “in essence” transnational throughout its
history, which is due to a preconception of an indivisible empire, the “Middle
Kingdom.”
The problematic issue of a greater coherence among individual nations
is conspicuous not only in the idea of the “Middle Kingdom” but in other re-
gional cinemas as well. In the case of Nordic cinema, for instance, the consol-
idation among the nation-states or the national cinemas is not the result of a
transhistorical cultural unity but rather stems from the economic and political
integration caused by shifts in the global economy. Within the latter case, one
can also recognize an abrupt shift in the critical discourses from the frame-
work of individual Nordic national cinemas (Danish, Finnish, Icelandic,
Norwegian, and Swedish cinemas) to the concept of a transnational Nordic
cinema.12 Trying to distinguish their own work, Transnational Cinema in a
Global North (2005), from the previous work Nordic National Cinemas (1998),
Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington offer the following:

Tyti Soila, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, and Gunnar Iversen’s Nordic

National Cinemas (1998) also take the nation as a given. . . . The
present volume, by contrast, challenges historically the national as
a point of departure in the first place, seeking to identify an ongo-
ing transition in Nordic cinema: from national to transnational and
global cinema. While historical continuities with national cinema
analyzed by others exist, our argument is that at the millennial junc-
ture, the influence and nature of the transition requires a new turn
in the research, which will furnish more nuanced accounts of Nordic
cinema in times of transnationalism and globalization.13

In a strategy similar to Lu’s reconstitution of Chinese cinema as transnational,­

Nestingen and Elkington oppose the consolidation on the global level and in-
stead locate the transnational component on a specific regional level, which
in this case is the EU. They remark on that aspect as follows:

The rise of the welfare state, the arrival of workers, refugees, and
asylum seekers since the 1950s, and the full-scale European and
global economic integration of the Nordic nation-states since
the 1980s have made these places truly transnational. We can no
longer assume—if we ever could—the economic, political, and

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     101

 cultural­homogeneity­of the Nordic nations, as a brief survey of the
economic-­cultural terrain of the Nordic world at the turn of the mil-
lennium makes evident.14

According to the authors, there are seemingly concentric circles, systematized

within the hierarchy of the Nordic world at the center and Europe and “the
global” in outer spheres. Throughout the book, Nestingen and Elkington em-
phasize the fluidity among the multiple nation-states in the Nordic region
and, further, between those nation-states and the rest of the EU. But what they
mean when they say that the Nordic nation-states are “truly transnational”
remains a puzzle.
Against Nestingen and Elkington’s blanket view of the individual nation-
states and their national cinemas, Mette Hjort counterposes Danish cinema as
“a case of a small nation engaging in a politics of recognition, for the aim was
to ensure that a national culture found continued expression in film and that
the value of that culture registered to the greatest extent possible both within
and beyond the relevant national borders.”15 She presents the new Danish
cinema as “a small nation’s response to globalization . . . the emergence of
alternatives to neoliberal conceptions of globalization or cinematic globalization
on a Hollywood model.”16 The differences between Nestingen and Elkington
on the one hand and Hjort on the other rest on how to understand the dynam-
ics of globalization—more specifically, which dynamic one focuses on and
analyzes and for whom this work is intended. While the former authors place
emphasis on the cohesion of either Nordic cinemas or the EU’s cinematic
community against Hollywood dominance, the latter author centers on more
particular accounts: the local situations of Danish cinema and globalization’s
multiplicity.17
The disparity stems from the mismatch between the actual phenomena of
transnational cultural flows and the overeagerness in the American-centered
Anglophone academic realm for creating a new paradigm shift that accords
with neoliberal conceptions of globalization. The transnational flows of cul-
ture are indeed still contested and constructed on the local, the national, the
regional, and the global levels in diverse ways in different regions. The hetero-
geneity of this phenomenon, broadly termed “cultural globalization,” needs
to be examined with careful scrutiny of particular histories within specific
local situations. The academic reception of the new paradigm, instead, seems
to originate from “a crisis of belonging,” specifically in American higher
education institutions that are now dealing with the post–Cold War, post–
Soviet Union realignment of territorial alliance and the dominant theory
of neoliberalism­in market economies, which substituted for the rhetoric of

102   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

East versus West or socialism versus capitalism.18 As we see in Nestingen
and Elkington’s case, it is worth recalling that such an enthusiastic engage-
ment with transnationalism indeed reveals the other side of the same coin—
their subject’s vulnerability among U.S. academics. They describe the Nordic
cinema’s domestic situation as follows: “In order to understand the current
state of domestic markets [for Nordic cinema], we first need to examine their
size. They are diminutive. They cannot generate the profits to finance large-
scale cinema production.”19 Their readiness to make Nordic cinema a part
of a larger, more visible and significant frame, namely the EU, is a reaction
to the current hegemony of the U.S. economy, in particular its universaliz-
ing ethnocentricity, which emerged as a post–Cold War narrative. As H. D.
Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi describe, “These newer perspectives [multi-
culturalism or globalization] merely reinforce the post-Cold War structure of
power, as surely as area studies reinforced the claims of the national security
state in the preceding decades.”20 Suffice to say, without the larger frame of
the EU and the aspect of transnationalism granted therein, Nordic cinema
would have little geopolitical currency among U.S. academics.
The hastened shift from the national to the transnational framework in
the cinema and media studies in the U.S. academy tends to prevent us from
recognizing the significant contribution of the critical framework of national
cinema, particularly the problematizing of film studies’ universalism. Paul
Willemen describes the singular role of national cinema, or the national, in
challenging the ethnocentricity of the discipline:

The notion of cultural specificity that may be deployed against the

universalizing ethnocentricity at work in film studies, works at the
level of this geo-temporal construction of the national. The question
of cultural specificity can be posed on other, social community levels
(and these community levels may themselves be transnational, as are
some constructions of gender- and class-based politics). But in film
studies, the issue of specificity is primarily a national one.21

All of this underscores what remains a persistent problem in cinema

studies­in the United States: the promiscuous application of norms configured
by the study of classical Hollywood cinema onto other cinemas. Numerous
studies on national cinemas have challenged the disciplinary universalism and
presented the need for cultural specificities and historical contextualization.
As was stated at the beginning of this chapter, the time for the unconditional
acceptance of the analytical framework of national cinema has passed, and
in general, current social conditions are characterized by the great fluidity of

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     103

finance, people, information, and ideologies. The framework of national cin-
ema has as a result become problematic, but Willemen’s insight still reminds
us that American ethnocentricism in the discipline has neither been mitigated
nor erased in the era of global culture.
Returning to the question of what advantages the framework of trans-
national cinema brings us over that of national cinema, Sheldon Hsiao-peng
Lu suggests that “the study of national cinema must then transform into
transnational film studies.”22 This is a case of throwing the baby out with the
bathwater, and this shift seems driven by “the notion of crisis” in the posi-
tion of Chinese cinema or its studies by post–Cold War U.S. academics.23 As
Andrew Higson also aptly frames the issue, “It would be foolish . . . to attempt­
to do away altogether with the concept of national cinema,” because it is
“too deeply­ingrained in critical and historical debate about the cinema for a
start.”24 We should certainly deploy the knowledge and methodologies that
various national cinema studies have produced, since the contestations within
and among nations are part of an ongoing process, coexisting with cultural
transnationalism and globalization. The following section will demonstrate
how the coexistence of the national and the transnational can be found in
many so-called transnational films, while considering how best to apply both
critical frameworks.

Far from “Transnational”

Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden’s anthology, Transnational Cinema: The Film
Reader, offers a range of films analyzed within the transnational framework.
But reading the essays raises a number of significant questions. How is the
transnational accounted for in their methodology, conclusion, and moreover,
the films they analyze? At present, where once stable connections between
a film’s place of production, exhibition, and distribution have now blurred,
does the mere difficulty of assigning a fixed national identity to a film auto-
matically qualify it as transnational? In her contribution, Diane Negra dis-
cusses Hollywood’s “new woman’s film” and concludes that the “expatriate
romances” in such recent films are “unified in their commitment to staging
coupling outside of US borders altogether, and because of this they gesture
at an indictment of contemporary American social and economic struc-
tures.”25 Do films such as Only You (1994, Norman Jewison), Four Weddings
and a Funeral (1994, Mike Newell), French Kiss (1995, Lawrence Kasdan), The
MatchMaker (1997, Mark Joffe), and Notting Hill (1999, Roger Michell) need
to be analyzed in the theoretical framework of transnational cinema, not in
the national cinema? What is so transnational about those films, if indeed

104   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

the highlighted ideological message of the new Hollywood films is merely an
indictment of American society?
It is certainly the case that the contexts of production, distribution, and
exhibition of cinema have dramatically changed in the last three decades due
to the widespread circulation of videotape, DVD, and other computerized
and digitalized technologies, and the transnational flow of culture is one sig-
nificant aspect accelerated by this technological transformation. However,
this shift cannot necessarily be depicted as a distinct change “from national
to transnational cinema,”26 but rather as one of the various transitional con-
texts that we must grapple with to analyze the new configurations of cinema.
Moreover, the concept of the national is still often indispensable for discussing
the construction of identity in cinema.27 Thus, for the purpose of this chap-
ter, I focus on how films manage to balance transnational resources (fund-
ing, locales, and languages) among the film cultures of Japan, South Korea,
and Hong Kong with their own territorial identities rooted in the national. I
will particularly address how the national “Other” has been created to serve
for the territorial identity in those films. Examining this issue in three con-
temporary films that are typically defined as “transnational,” Asako in Ruby
Shoes (Sunaebo, 2000, E. J-young), Initial D (2005, Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai
Mak), and The Hotel Venus, I argue for the inseparable relation between the
two critical frameworks of transnational and national cinema.

National Boundaries: Blurred but

Not Transcended
The film Asako in Ruby Shoes depicts relationships built around national, gen-
der, and economic identities. A Korean man, U-in, and a Japanese woman,
Aya (a.k.a. Asako, her “stage” name in an Internet porn site), form a rela-
tionship that mirrors the structure of Korean consumption and Japanese
production through the world of cyberporn.28 The film wittily overcomes the
language barrier between its Korean and Japanese characters (which is usu-
ally difficult to do, as we can see in the tone-deaf Korean spoken in The Hotel
Venus) by employing English, the lingua franca of the Internet. The film has
the bilateral narrative structure of U-in’s story located in Seoul and Asako’s
in Tokyo, and their distant locales were shot by separate film crews, led by
the cinematographers Hong Kyeong-pyo and Chikamori Masashi, respec-
tively. The two characters actually meet twice, though very briefly: While
Aya is visiting­Seoul for her school trip, they unknowingly bump into each
other without exchanging words; and the second time they meet, they are
just becoming acquainted in Anchorage, Alaska, at the beginning of their

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     105

real relationship.­The film even inserts their imaginary encounter, where they
collide in a subway station, despite the fact that they are living apart in Seoul
and Tokyo. Besides being a multinational production (four companies from
South Korea and Japan coproduced Asako) about an expatriate romance be-
tween a Korean man and a Japanese woman, there are other aspects that
make the film more than simply “Korean” or “Japanese” cinema: the differ-
ent ethnicities of the protagonists (Korean, Japanese, and even Iranian); the
multinational locales (Seoul, Tokyo, and Anchorage); and the transnational
cinematic signifiers, such as intertextualizing The Wizard of Oz (1939, Vincent
Fleming), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964, Jacques Demy), and Bollywood
musical films.29
Yet once we consider the level of critical discourse—how to analyze the
film—it seems to me that examining Asako in Ruby Shoes in relation to Korean
or Japanese national cinematic or historical contexts is still viable. In the
anthology New Korean Cinema, Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient
scrutinize the film by highlighting both aspects of the transnational and the
national. They emphasize its multinational collaboration between South
Korea and Japan and how, at once, it specifically connects with Korean spec-
tatorial positions through the threatened Korean masculine subject in the late
1990s and the literary reference of P’i Ch’on-duc’s 1980 essay, “Inyon.”30 As
for the transnational aspect, Chung and Diffrient note that Asako in Ruby Shoes
was one of the first coproduced film projects by South Korean and Japanese
companies after the 1998 summit meetings between President Kim Dae-jung
and Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo, meetings that ostensibly confirmed South
Korea’s commitment to opening its markets to Japanese popular culture.
In other words, this transnational aspect of collaboration is deeply tied to
a history of international relations between South Korea and Japan, and it
is impossible to interpret the transnational aspect without understanding the
specific­national histories involved.
The aspect of the national is more obvious for suggesting the tie between
Asako in Ruby Shoes and the South Korean national identity in Chung’s and
Diffrient’s view, especially the threatened masculine subject after the wake of
the 1997 Asian currency crisis. Chung and Diffrient also locate the film within
recent South Korean cinema’s portrayal of women of different ethnicities and
nationalities, such as Failan (2001, Song Hae-sung) and Musa (2001, Kim Sung-
su). Writing that “South Korean women are literally invisible or desexualized,­
whereas traditional Chinese femininity is privileged as an object­of the male
gaze. . . . Women of different ethnicities and nationalities are mobilized to
promote the virtues of traditional femininity,”31 they make a connection be-
tween the cinematic male gaze and the Korean masculine subject’s increased

106   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

anxiety in the midst of an economic crisis, which resulted in “massive lay-offs,
bankruptcies and family upheavals.”32 It is possible that one can also analyze
the reverse case of such an allegorical reading by focusing on the Japanese
character Aya in relation to the socioeconomic conditions in contemporary
Japan, since the film illustrates the uncertain female subject’s weariness and
alienation in the ethnically diverse and economically affluent megalopolis of
Tokyo. As these observations reveal, while this film crosses national boundar-
ies in many ways, the boundaries are neither erased nor transcended.

Glocalization: Local Strategy First,

Global Phenomenon Second
Holding both frameworks of the transnational and the national is valid when
analyzing other recent films such as Initial D. The film is an adaptation from
Japanese comics (originally published in Weekly Young Magazine since 1995),
and it is coproduced by Japanese (Avex Inc.), Hong Kong (Basic Pictures,
Media Asia Group), and PRC (Sil-Metropole Organization) production
companies. The film’s diegetic locale is supposedly set in Gunma Prefecture,
Japan, and yet the casting is almost all from Hong Kong and Taiwan ex-
cept for Natsuki (Japanese actress Suzuki Anne), the girlfriend of the main
character­Takumi (Jay Chou, the multitalented Taiwanese musician, singer,
music producer, actor, and filmmaker). The film lacks any authenticity in its
art design and reveals a rather Sinocized image of Japan, but the hybrid aspect
paradoxically heightens the sense of fun of this comic-adaptation film.
In a material sense, Initial D is not simply a film but a spin-off product;­
it must be viewed as one installment of the “Initial D project,” which builds
upon the existing comic-book fan base. For the majority of the film’s audi-
ences, at least in the Japanese market, its narrative and characters are already­
familiar, so what those audiences are primarily interested in about the film
is how well it was adapted from the original comics and anime series. The
multilateral­promotion strategy has tapped into various audio and visual­
media. The original comics (comic artist Shigeno Shuichi’s original comics
started in 1995 and are still continuing) were first adapted as television ani-
mations (Fuji Television, 1998, Misawa Shin). Then, the television anima-
tion series was packaged as a DVD series, volumes 1–7, in 2000. The second
season of the television series was continuously broadcast as Initial D: Second
Stage (1999, Masaki Shinichi) and packaged likewise on the DVD version in
2000. When the television series gained a 24.5 percent rating, the animated
film version Initial D: Third State (2001, Mitsusawa Noburo) was released
in theaters­throughout Japan. By now, both the television animation series

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     107

and its DVDs have reached Initial D: Fourth Stage (television, 2004–2006,
Tominaga Tsuneo; DVD, 2006). The comic series is still continuing, so ap-
parently the following “stages” of the animation series are expected to be
produced. Other spin-off products are three OVAs (original video anima-
tions): Initial D: Battle Stage (2002, Yamaguchi Fumitsugu), Initial D: Extra
Stage, Impact Blue (2001, Yamaguchi Fumitsugu), and Initial D: Battle Stage 2
(2006, Yamaguchi Fumitsugu). Battle Stage and Battle Stage 2 are collections
of all battle (car-racing) sequences from both the broadcast television anima-
tion series and the theatrical film, and Extra Stage, Impact Blue is a recomposed
animation with additional footage focusing on the female characters in Initial
D. Moreover, the game company Sega made the “Initial D project” into video
games for Sony’s PlayStation 2: Initial D: Special Stage (2003), Initial D: Special
Stage, The Best (2004), Initial D: Street Stage (2006), and Initial D: Street Stage,
The Best (2007). In addition, the soundtrack and music of all aforementioned
products have been on sale as fifty-three different versions of CDs: from Initial
D Sound Films vol. 1 (Avex Trax, 1998) to Initial D Fourth Stage Music Complete
Box (Avex Trax, 2007). Avex, the leading J-pop (Japanese popular music since
the 1990s) record company founded in 1990, has provided a number of theme
songs and music soundtracks for animations and video games including the
“Initial D project,” and it should be highlighted that Avex is also one of the
production companies of the film, Initial D.
Initial D is a perfect example of global localization or glocalization, a term
that “refers to a global strategy which does not seek to impose a standard
product or image, but instead is tailored to the demands of the local mar-
ket.”33 Although sociologist Diana Crane defines this glocalization specifi-
cally within the frame of “cultural forms that originated in the West and that
diffuse globally,”34 the case of Initial D is more an instance of Japan-centered
cultural glocalization, one that resonates with Koichi Iwabuchi’s notion of
“recentering” or “decentralizing forces of globalization.”35 The visual and au-
dio products of the “Initial D project” have been promoted with the same title
and different subheadings over a staggering variety of media, which are al-
ways available through various Internet stores such as Amazon. As the case of
Initial D indicates, transnational culture or its products are often able to cross
barriers of nation or language into different markets through “transmedia”—­
the practice of circulating related content in different forms of media such as
film, television programs, videos, video games, CDs, comics, and DVDs. The
product is stripped of the traces of the country of origin through multilateral
marketing strategies designed for the local audiences, as we see in both the
film Initial D and many of the Japanese anime repackaged worldwide as tele-
vision programs since the 1970s.

108   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

 Within the paradigm of film texts, Initial D’s most revealing aspect is its
unabashed use of dubbing. On its face, the use of dubbing carries the aspect
of the transnational, and yet it is rooted in Hong Kong film production prac-
tice as a cinema of export. In the film’s international theatrical version, the
cast “speaks” Cantonese. The aforementioned Japanese actor Suzuki Anne’s
voice is dubbed with fluent Cantonese, and her voice-over is characteristically
out of sync. However, the film’s rapid editing, its action-oriented narrative,
and the frequent use of long shots make the mismatch relatively insignifi-
cant for audiences. The Universal Media Disk U.S. version for the PlayStation
Portable console, moreover, has Cantonese, Mandarin, and English language
settings, and the Japanese version for “region two” has both Japanese and
Cantonese settings, further emphasizing how such platforms are custom pack-
aged for the local consumer.36 One might reasonably argue that the unabashed
use of dubbing grants Hong Kong film productions a measure of authenticity
specific to the local film industry. For the film’s audiences, who are familiar­
with the Hong Kong style of dubbing and the overuse of long shots, the
lack of language authenticity is no longer a negative aspect, but Initial D’s
Sinocized “Japan” is rather appealing as kitsch. Thus, the film Initial D is a
site of the local glocalization process in which the local negotiates, appropri-
ates, and extracts profits out of the global markets. This activity is far removed
from the usual cultural exploitation or domination norms by the center of the
periphery.
As these examples show, the regional production practice can be analyzed
in contexts of both the transnational and the national, and neither of them
is exclusive. Initial D certainly represents the continuous morphing of me-
dia, which can erase national boundaries, especially language barriers in the
various platforms. However, the real attraction of the film is based on the
genealogy­of the product (comics, television anime, PlayStation, OVA, film,
and DVD) and how each of those products is specifically targeted at its local
consumer. The more a person is knowledgeable of the “Initial D project” and
its fan culture, the more the individual product, such as the film Initial D, ap-
peals to him or her. This multimedia cultural literacy bears some resemblance
to the spectatorial experience of repeated theatergoing. We can see the Kabuki
classic, The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon Chushingura, 1703–), for
instance, over and over and appreciate the new casting and directorial nov-
elty each time. The difference between Chushingura and Initial D, apart from
high and low cultures, is that the latter is more thoroughly connected with
the strategies of the contemporary global market. The genealogy of popular
culture is not necessarily limited to the national sphere, as we can see, for ex-
ample, in the case of the television series Pokémon (Pocket Monster, 1997–2002,

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     109

Television Tokyo), which flies around the world as an icon for All Nippon
Airways (ANA) 747 jets, but it is rather shaped by the marketing strategies­
of how those cultural fads are planned and targeted by their producers.37­ In
other words, the local strategy, whether within national or regional spheres,
comes first, and the global phenomenon or fad follows. Without analyzing the
local phenomenon first, it does not make sense to simply analyze the global
or transnational result.

The Case of The Hotel Venus

The desire for transnationalism has taken hold in Japanese cinema, particu-
larly juxtaposed with the current phase of nationalism in Japan. The film
The Hotel Venus reveals the perpetuity of this cultural condition like a Mobius
strip—the prevalence of nationalism is the cause for seeking something trans-
national, and the increasing presence of the transnational reinforces the ten-
dency toward nationalism. Indeed, across the spectrum of Japanese popular
culture—cinema, computer games, anime, fashion, and popular music—there
is an intensified interest in the idea of transnationalism, a movement away
from the long-held notion of Japanese exceptionalism. In the case of The Hotel
Venus, the idea for the central character, Chonan Gang (played by Kusanagi
Tsuyoshi, a member of the Japanese pop-music group SMAP), has its origins
in the Japanese desire to traverse the national and cultural borders between
Japan and South Korea. The character Chonan first appeared on the midnight
television program Chonan Gang (Fuji Television, 2001–2004), in which he
tried to learn the Korean language and promote himself as a star in Korea.
The Hotel Venus was a spin-off at the end of the television program in 2004.
The Hotel Venus is the story of a diasporic group of characters who have
left their home cities and countries for various reasons and now reside at the
hotel called Venus. The hotel has a café on the first floor where the owner,
Venus (Ichimura Masachika), works and offers the drifters shelter. Chonan
is one of those wanderers, who first came to the hotel after losing his girl-
friend in a car accident. Since then, he has been both a waiter at the café
and a manager­for the hotel. With the exception of Venus and Chonan,
other characters­have archetypal­titles for names, such as “wife” (Nakatani
Miki), “doctor” (Kagawa Teruyuki), “soda” (Jo Eun-ji), “boy” (Lee Jun-gi),
and “guy” (Park Jung-woo), which negate any connections with a specific
ethnicity­or nationality, yet they all speak Korean. Moreover, they are the
residents in an unknown “dead-end” town; indeed, the film elides any refer-
ence to its Vladivostok location. The film in effect creates a denationalized,
uprooted space, substituting statelessness for transnationalism.

110   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

 The desire for the transnational that the film represents, however, needs to
be discussed within specific contexts, such as Japan’s cultural “reunion” with
Korea since 1998. The South Korean government officially declared a more af-
firmative acceptance of Japanese culture in 1998, and since then there has been
a growing interest in Korean popular culture in Japan, evinced by the soaring
popularity of Korean television dramas, film stars such as Bae Yong-jun, and
the sudden increase in people learning the Korean language. The Kanryu (the
interest or the fad in things Korean in Japan) or Hallyu (Korean pronunciation
of Kanryu) boom has dominated Japanese popular culture since 2003, when
the Korean television drama Winter Sonata (Gyeoul yeonga,­2002, KBS) was
broadcast on the Japanese public station NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai or the
Japan Broadcasting Corporation) four times throughout 2003–2004.38
Sociologist Hayashi Kaori describes this Korean boom in Japan as a birth
of “new Korea” and lists the following events as signifying opportunities for
the renewal of the (positive) national image of Korea: the Seoul Olympics in
1988, the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World
Cup cohosted by Japan and South Korea in 2002, and the aforementioned
television drama series. Moreover, the number of Korean language learners
through NHK’s radio program soared in 2004.39 Hayashi further analyzes the
renewed image of the Korean in the context of Japanese nationalism, noting
that “the Koreans in those contemporary television dramas are either cau-
tioning against Japan’s exceedingly modernized society, or they are courte-
ous and genuine, images which are very different from the negative ones that
dominated in Japan previously.”40 However, the courteous Korean figure can
be viewed as a form of Japan’s “popular Asianism,” the concept that Koichi
Iwabuchi describes as Japan’s contradictory stance toward Asia—locating the
Asian Other as modern but with a mark of “not-quite.”41 This “imperialist”
nostalgia toward other Asian countries can be recognized in other contempo-
rary Japanese films, especially in their showcasing of Korean actresses. The
films Kisarazu Cat’s Eye: Nihon Series (2003, Kaneko Fumiki) and All About
Tanaka Hiroshi (Tanaka Hiroshi no subete, 2005, Tanaka Makoto), for instance,
both cast Yoon Son-ha as Yukke, the protagonist’s girlfriend who works at a
Korean pub in Japan and as an illegal alien worker selling boxed lunches on
the street, respectively. Revealingly, the name “Yukke” is from the Korean
dish yukhoe, consisting of raw ground beef topped off with the yolk of raw
egg, which is a very popular Korean dish in Japan. The fact that there might
be a “voluptuous” denotation, but certainly no glamorous connotation to the
name, lends further weight to one’s sense of latent condescension in such
recent depictions of Koreans.
The Hotel Venus avoids applying the same kind of typecasting of Korean

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     111

actors and actresses, and yet the film’s whole narrative is carefully planned to
reveal a pure romantic love, a mainstay theme associated with many recent
Korean television dramas popular in Japan and, moreover, with the “imperi-
alist” nostalgia. In separate interviews, the leading actor Kusanagi (Chonan
Gang) and Ichimura (Venus) both highlight that the “purity” (junsuisa) of the
screenplay moved them, and Ichimura especially states that this type of story
is nowadays rare among Japanese films.42 Such longing for purity in the less
introspective melodrama of another culture smacks of condescension toward
the “Other” (Korean), who, lacking “our” (Japanese) sophistication, is still
able to experience emotion in a more direct and naive fashion. However ad-
miringly that gaze is directed at the Korean Other, it is still marginalizing the
Other as an object of the desires of the Japanese subject.
The “imperialist” nostalgia is also expressed in the retro art design of the
CD, “A Love Song” (Ai no uta: Chonmaru saranheyo, Victor Entertainment,
2002), including the television program’s theme song (figure 4.1). The CD
jacket design reminds us of the stark color tones of the Cultural Revolution
period’s Chinese posters and ceramics, and the CD includes the 3-D Chonan

Figure 4.1. Kusanagi Tsuyoshi on the CD “A Love Song” (Ai no uta: Chonmaru
saranheyo, Victor Entertainment, 2002), including the TV program’s theme song.

112   Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

Gang card. With further resonance for the Japanese audience, this style of
flickering image cards was popular among children in 1970s Japan.43 After
all, the nostalgic imagery of Chonan Gang is specifically targeted toward the
Japanese consumers who have lived through Japan’s period of greatest eco-
nomic affluence and who are now indulging in the Kanryu boom.
To that end, The Hotel Venus functions as the visual textbook for those cul-
tural consumers in Japan who are not only interested in seeing the film but also
learning the Korean language through the cinematic experience. Watching the
Japanese actors exchanging simple daily conversation in Korean, those audi-
ences are reassured in their comprehension of the conversation through the
Japanese subtitles. This pattern is more obvious in the case of the aforemen-
tioned CD. All songs are sung in Korean, and the lyrics sheet has the Korean
hangul writing, the Japanese katakana notation, and the Japanese translation.
As this Chonan Gang fan culture indicates, the aspect of the transnational is
closely connected with the present period’s national culture, in this case of the
Japanese.

So, What Is So Transnational

about This Film?
It is obvious by now that The Hotel Venus is transnational in its processes of
production and on the level of text (narrative and locale) but less so in its
reception, such as in the Kanryu boom fan base; the film is strongly tied with
contemporary Japan in discourses that the culture has about itself. Quite apart
from expressing a new sense of the transnational in its characters or their rela-
tions, what the film tries to create is the sense of cosmopolitanism, or “worldly­
sophistication,” which at the same time reflects how many in Japan want to
see themselves. The transcultural elements of the film—speaking the foreign
language, Korean, living in an unfamiliar and distant town, Vladivostok, and
having no national or ethnic identity—largely articulate the preoccupations of
the Japanese audiences within the affluent Kanryu cultural boom.
One can, however, find significance in discussing the film under the con-
cept of the transnational as well. This is not only because transnational prac-
tices have already become a part of our cultures, but it is also a matter of
cinema’s signifying potential—which one can see in both academic discourses­
and cinematic products—for the desire to construct one’s identity beyond
the constricted sense of the national. In sum, the desires of both scholars
and media consumers in the age of globalization are worth further analysis,
grounded,­of course, in the particularities of cultural contexts—in my case, in
U.S. academics and the Japanese Kanryu boom.

Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema     113

 Ethnic Cinema
in the Japanese
Cultural
Imagination
5

The zainichi Korean (Korean resi-

dent of Japan) filmmaker Sai Yoichi’s film Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004)
garnered major film awards in 2005 in Japan.1 The film centers around a
zainichi Korean man, Kim Shunpei (Kitano Takeshi), and his family’s lives as
oppressed ethnic minorities in Japan from the 1920s to the early 1970s. 2 As the
novelist and the film’s screenplay writer Yan Sogiru (Yang Seok-il) describes­
it, Sai expressed no interest in making Blood and Bones a “minor” film target-
ing the Korean minorities in Japan, but rather he wanted a “major” one.3
Indeed, the film’s success with critics and at the box office in Japan signals a
triumph of sorts for ethnic cinema in Japanese film history. All factors of the
film, both its narrative and production process, reflect the potential cultural
“traffic” between Korea and Japan, and even with the worldwide market: the
film is adapted from the zainichi Korean writer Yan’s best-selling novel; the di-
rector Sai shot the film’s last sequence on location at the thirty-eighth parallel
between North and South Korea; and the film casts internationally acclaimed
Japanese director and star Kitano Takeshi in the leading role.4 Variety’s article
captures the film’s ethnic heterogeneity as “a kimuchi (a traditional Korean
fermented dish)-flavored, Nipponese blend of The Godfather (1972, Francis
Ford Coppola) and East of Eden (1955, Elia Kazan).”5 While the film deals

114
with difficult subjects of the diasporic Korean family in Japan and their un-
bearable lives with the violent and dictatorial father Shunpei, Japanese do-
mestic audiences warmly accepted the film, and critics generally offered high
praise for the realism of Kitano’s performance as the brutal character.
Curiously, however, Blood and Bones has had little impact outside the
Japanese domestic market. The film was first released in Japan on November
6, 2004, and since then it has not been screened theatrically abroad except in
South Korea.6 The film was officially entered in the seventy-eighth Academy
Awards in the United States, but it was not selected as a nominee. Tartan
Video, the London-based DVD distributor, initially picked up the film’s DVD
distribution rights for their label “Asia Extreme” and released the DVD in
September 2006.7 The DVD became available in North America through
relatively minor distributors: Seville Canada in August 2007 and Kino
International in November 2008. Critically the film met with indifference,
despite Kitano Takeshi’s international star power—all of which indicates
that the film is a difficult product for the distributors to market outside of
Japan. The film’s length (144 minutes) is one of the reasons, but the crucial
aspect for the film’s marketing failure abroad is more likely due to the difficul-
ties non-Japanese audiences have in understanding zainichi Korean culture
and history in Japan—namely the ethnic dimension of the violence and the
required­cultural­knowledge—which directly associates with Shunpei’s image
as a zainichi subject within the reservoir of popular culture in Japan.
This chapter seeks to understand the Japanese attraction to Blood and Bones
by examining the connection between the cinematic affect, such as violence,
and its relation to cultural knowledge associated with ethnic minorities in
Japan. The cultural knowledge has been nurtured by such disparate discourses­
as Korean or zainichi Korean images in Japanese cinema, the star discourse
of Kitano Takeshi, television family dramas in the 1970s, and the zainichi
Korean professional wrestling hero Rikidozan. Is the naturalized connection
between violence and zainichi Koreans presented in Blood and Bones differ-
ent from other ethnic films in Japan? Recalling the director Sai’s ambition
to reach a wider audience, how does the film enact the contradiction of the
ethnic desire, being “minor” in its social status yet “major” in its aspirations?
I argue that Blood and Bones is strategically targeted to the domestic audience
through the Japanese “cultural imagination” that can only be sustained by
differentiating the cultural sphere from something else, which in this film’s
case is to differentiate Korean and zainichi Korean culture from the dominant
Japanese culture.8 I will elaborate on the film’s cinematic affect and how this
is wrapped up with the cultural knowledge drawn upon by the film. I first dis-
cuss the novelty of Blood and Bones within the historical context of Japanese

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     115

ethnic cinema, particularly as Japanese cinema’s interest in minority subjects
and ethnic identity grows. Secondly, I will be examining the film’s calculated
portrayal of the brute Shunpei, which strangely caters to the Japanese au-
dience’s appreciation for the stoic charm associated with the historical fig-
ure of the violent male in Japanese popular culture. I argue that such violent
figures—­such as the actor Kitano Takeshi himself; Kantaro (Kobayashi Asei),
the hopelessly stubborn and fierce father in the popular television drama se-
ries, The Family of Terauchi Kantaro (Terauchi Kantaro ikka, TBS, January 16,
1974–November 5, 1975, writer Mukoda Kuniko, director Kuze Mitsuhiko);
and the “ethnically-marked” pro wrestling hero Rikidozan in the 1950s and
1960s, whose success was enabled and constrained by his hidden identity as a
zainichi Korean—not only contribute to the attraction of Blood and Bones but
also encode the cultural meanings for the film’s violent affect.

Cinematic Violence as Affect

The leading characteristic in recent zainichi Korean films is that they make a
link between violence and Korean ethnicity. In the film, GO (2002, Yukisada
Isao), both the protagonist Sugihara (Kubozuka Yosuke) and his father
Hideyoshi (Yamazaki Tsutomu) are depicted as unreasonably violent. The
father is a former boxing champion; in one sequence, Hideyoshi punches
Sugihara until a tooth falls out (figures 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3). Through the Night
(Yoru o kakete, 2002, Kim Sujin), the film directed by a zainichi Korean film-
maker, has the leading zainichi character Yoshio (Yamamoto Taro) murmur-
ing after a violent dinner gathering, “That’s why I hate Koreans. They always
fight when they get together.”
In the case of Blood and Bones, the protagonist Shunpei is a violent brute to
all his family members and employees. The film starts in 1923, when Shunpei
leaves the Korean island of Jeju-do for Japan, and it depicts his life as a zainichi
Korean until his “return” to North Korea in the early 1970s with one of his
children. Shunpei believes only in money and in himself. After accumulat-
ing sufficient money from his first postwar enterprise, running a boiled fish-
paste (kamaboko) factory, he becomes a loan shark and is universally hated by
everyone.­Lacking a sense of morality and education, he rapes women and has
multiple mistresses, and he even disgustingly eats rotten meat crawling with
maggots, believing that it has higher nutritional value. The prolonged melee
sequence, in which Shunpei fights with his son Takeshi (Odagiri Jo), displays
how realistically such violent acts are represented in the film. The sequence
uses both dexterous editing and the long take and overlays the camera’s view
with the spectatorial experiences, which I will examine later in greater depth.

116   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

 Figure 5.1. GO (Yukisada Isao, 2002).
Sugihara (Kubozuka Yosuke), right, and
his friend (Arai Hirofumi) are waiting for
Sugihara’s parents in the school principal’s
office.

Figure 5.2. Sugihara’s father Hideyoshi

(Yamazaki Tsutomu) enters the room and
immediately punches his son’s face.

Figure 5.3. Hideyoshi continues to strike

Sugihara.

How can we talk about the connection between zainichi Korean figures
and cinematic violence in these recent ethnic films? In Japanese culture,
zainichi Koreans have historically been stereotyped as “violent,” and myths
about their “violent behavior” have not receded. Violence, in a respected and
sanctioned form such as martial arts, for instance, has provided an entrance
for many zainichi Koreans to achieve some degree of elevated social status
in Japanese society. This can be seen in Rikidozan’s (Kim Sin-nak) career
in pro wrestling and in Oyama Masutatsu (Choi Bae-dal), a karate master
and the founder of Kyokushin kaikan (a particular style of full-contact karate).­
Koreans have been wrongfully accused of destroying Japanese property,
raping­women,­and of committing other violent antisocial acts during periods
of great upheaval, such as the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and World

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     117

War II. And, of course, there are always nagging questions of complicity on
the part of minorities in reiterating such racist myths, since the threat of mi-
nority violence confers upon them a certain degree of power even as it helps
perpetuate their marginal status. Of all the ideological elements of the ethnic
myth, violence has translated most consistently and successfully to the screen,
especially because it plays to all sides.
Since violence is an aspect of politics and social control, when a film-
maker provides a motive for the violence, some of the basic ideological con-
cerns of the society are usually engaged. In other words, violence has often
been historically contingent, and it has to be contextualized for the audience
to understand its meaning. It is rather convenient perhaps to interpret those
violent acts from the sociological or social-historical point of view. There are
various cases among recent films in ethnic cinema in Japan where the “vio-
lent” zainichi Korean subject is no longer idealized but rather depicted as the
“primitivized” subaltern. This condescension conforms to Rey Chow’s propo-
sition toward Chinese women in Chinese literature and film,9 or such images
can be alternately explained within “popular Asianism” in Koichi Iwabuchi’s
description of Japan’s armchair stance toward the rest of Asia in the 1990s.10
However, such cultural or reflectionist approaches that relate a general histori-
cal condition to the specific screen violence run the risk of abstracting the vio-
lence on screen from its cinematic context. As Stephen Prince asserts, without
an examination of the cinematic components of filmic violence, “violence
becomes [simply] a theme, an idea, or furnishes a proposition about society. It
is taken to a second-order level of existence, removed from the primary mate-
rial of the films themselves.”11 I shall, then, examine the violence in Blood and
Bones as the primary material, especially the ways in which the spectator re-
ceives its affect within the more specific context of Japanese popular culture.
While Blood and Bones is indeed a violent film, the nature of its violence is
fundamentally different from the ultraviolence of Hollywood “Renaissance”
cinema such as Sam Peckinpah’s Western, The Wild Bunch (1969), or the
more recent superrealistic war films in New Hollywood cinema, such as
Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg). Blood and Bones deploys neither
weapons nor scenes of killing.12 Any motive or rationale for the violence is
never clearly depicted on screen. The cinematic violence of the film is simply
caused by Shunpei and seems vaguely naturalized as an extension of his brute
character. Moreover, the film’s violence is extremely personal, a characteristic
that is usually considered as more immediate, perhaps even more affective
than the impersonal violence usually associated with war films. The film also
does not elaborate on any direct consequence of the violence; the lack of
any moral justification runs counter to the codes of the Hollywood cinema.

118   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

As incompatibilities­between Blood and Bones and Hollywood’s general im-
peratives over cinematic violence indicate, the domestic violence in Blood and
Bones seems to work more appropriately in the tradition of Japanese popular
culture, both on the narrative and visual levels.
Audience reception of the film in Japan, indeed, bifurcated in two direc-
tions: On one hand, it praised Kitano Takeshi’s magnificent acting, and on
the other hand it grumbled over the lack of historical accuracy and reality,
especially concerning conflicts between Japanese and zainichi Koreans. One
of the most popular Internet cinephile sites, Eiga-seikatsu (Cinema Life), lists
audiences’ comments on the film since its first release in November 2004.
In many of the comments on the first direction, there is a similar emphasis
on the viewer’s physical reaction—how fatigued they were right after com-
ing out of the theater. One contributor, Yukiya, comments that “Takeshi’s
powerful acting is great. I am astonished by his vitality and physical strength.
I still remember that I was so exhausted when I came out from the theater.”13
Another contributor, Rikutsuya, describes the film as follows: “It is a film
about a fucking crazy oyaji (old man), behaving violently and raping women
around him.”14 As these audiences’ reactions indicate, the endless violence of
the film has no real narrative logic beyond the fact that Shunpei is an angry
“fucking crazy oyaji,” and this lack of rationale or cinematic cause and effect
for the violence leaves the audiences without a clue about what will happen
next and what is the theme of the film. Through its images of violence, the
film rather consciously attempts to assault the spectator’s body and make it
react involuntarily. In a sense, the film functions in ways similar to the “body
genre” films, to borrow Linda Williams’ term, and directly works on the spec-
tatorial body.15 It seems to me that the recent Japanese ethnic film has rene-
gotiated and reanimated the immediacy and affective quality of the cinematic
experience itself: We are made to “feel” Takeshi’s performance but not to
“think” about what it means. As Barbara Kennedy, a Deleuzean film scholar,
asserts, cinema is a medium primarily expressing an experience of noncogni-
tive senses.16 Blood and Bones thus offers an intense example of the physical
link between the spectator and what is on the screen.
The following question for us is how the audience makes sense of the
physical “assault” that runs throughout the film. As Paul Gormley writes
about how the spectator creates meaning in the new brutality films, “After
all, virtually all . . . film since its beginning has depended on pleasure through
knowledge as well as immediacy or affect,”17 yet the two seemingly polarized
aspects of cinema, cultural knowledge and cinematic affect, do not usually
act separately. In the case of Blood and Bones, the cinematic affect caused by
the extreme violence is both popularized and ethnocized in the film—but

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     119

only within the knowledge drawn from the Japanese cultural imagination.
My expression of the Japanese “cultural imagination” borrows from Toni
Morrison’s depiction of the dominant white American literary culture, which
she names the “white American literary imagination.”18 While Morrison ex-
plains that blackness operates as a cultural symbol for what is beyond the ma-
jority’s cultural knowledge, I argue that the case of the zainichi Korean image
on screen and the ethnic cinema in Japan parallels her description. Violence is
the only currency for zainichi Korean figures to have “subjectivity” within the
Japanese “cultural imagination,” so that even postcolonial attempts to under-
stand such violence within the history of Japan’s oppressed minorities can be
criticized for merely reflecting the cultural imagination.

Ethnic Cinema
In my use of the term “ethnic cinema,” I have perhaps misled the reader
into thinking that it has a long-established use in Japanese film. In fact, there
has been neither such a term nor a movement trying to fully depict minori-
ties in Japan from a postcolonial perspective or otherwise in the history of
Japanese cinema. Although some films have dealt with the minority issue,
they often appeared as “one-off films,” which, of course, is understandable
from a business perspective.19 However, minority figures have often appeared
as backdrops from the cinema’s early period. In Mr. Thank You (Arigato-san,
1936, Shimizu Hiroshi), Korean laborers are filmed transferring from one
mine to the other, and in Forget Love for Now (Koi mo wasurete, 1937, Shimizu
Hiroshi), a Japanese boy plays with the children of Chinese immigrants in
the Yokohama Bay area. Those images of the “Other” as a presence in daily
life often functioned as both an indicator of Japan’s cosmopolitanism and a
mechanism for constructing the national subject, disseminating the sense of
who the Japanese were through the popular medium of cinema.
The formula of using an ethnic group as a backdrop was used frequently
in Japanese wartime films, especially those produced in the principal areas of
the Greater Japanese Empire—occupied parts of China, Taiwan, Manchuria
(Manchukuo), and in Korea as well. The “queen” of the film genre, Li Xianglan
(a.k.a. Ri Koran, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and Shirley Yamaguchi) appeared as
a Chinese actress first in China Night (Shina no yoru, 1940, Fushimi Osamu),
and the melodramatic plot line—the Chinese girl, first being averse to the
Japanese, later falls in love with a Japanese man—lured the film’s audiences,­
who were less concerned with the ethnic conflicts between Japanese and
Chinese. Further, Li’s disguise—she was ethnic Japanese and yet debuted as
a Chinese actress—made this film a completely “closed” text produced by the

120   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

Japanese for the Japanese. Film critic Sato Tadao describes how her imagery
provided an illusion that Chinese women accepted the Japanese occupation
in China with joy and pleasure.20 While Watchtower Suicide Squad (Boro no
kesshitai, 1943, Imai Tadashi) is one of the few war films that offers an actual
image of the enemy, in this case the anti-Japanese guerrilla band in Korea, the
film hires the same pattern of “reform” when a young Korean man realizes
that the Korean guerrilla members are misguided and he decides to side with
the Japanese, finally fighting against the guerrilla band.
The image of Koreans and zainichi Koreans changed in the 1960s from
second-tier laborers and juveniles in need of reform to communist believers
and the downtrodden poor. This was not much of an improvement in their
image, but it was a change that reflected their overwhelming support for the
communist regime of North Korea before and after the Korean War (1950–
1953). The filmmaker Urayama Kirio directed Cupola, Where the Furnaces Glow
(Kyupora no aru machi, 1962), which depicted a zainichi Korean boy, Sankichi,
“returning” to North Korea with his Korean father. The film portrays the wave
of zainichi Koreans’ “return” to North Korea, which began in 1959 and was
organized by Chosen-soren (the General Association of Korean Residents)
and promoted under the slogan, “North Korea is the earthly paradise.” The
film neither supports nor dismisses Chosen-soren’s communist propaganda
but simply presents the Sankichi family’s struggle for a better life.
Oshima Nagisa, on the other hand, directed the short documentary,
Yunbogi’s Diary (Yunbogi no nikki, 1965), one of several documentary films de-
picting the poverty of Koreans or zainichi Koreans in the 1960s.21 In the film,
he creates a collage from the best-selling Korean novel, Yunbogi’s Diary (pub-
lished in Japanese in 1965), with Oshima’s poetic narration responding to the
novel and still photos of the unknown Korean boys, which Oshima himself
shot in Seoul in 1964. For Oshima, the Koreans were the “ideal” oppressed
victims leading poverty-stricken lives; the subject suited the social-political
climate of Japan in the 1960s with its numerous student movements and the
political struggles against the 1960 Japan–U.S. Security Treaty (struggles that
resurfaced in 1970). The image of poor Koreans consoled a still economically
struggling Japanese middle class and resonated with the national feeling of
Japan’s role as America’s political vassal. The soliloquy of the narration goes
as follows: “Lee Yun-bogi, you are a ten-year-old boy. Lee Yun-bogi, you are
a ten-year-old Korean boy. Lee Yun-bogi, you are a chewing gum seller in
Korea. Lee Yun-bogi, you are a Korean shoeshine boy. Lee Yun-bogi, you are
a newspaper seller in Korea. Lee Yun-bogi, you are all of the boys in Korea.”22
Sato Tadao asserts that the narration is nothing but Oshima’s love letter to the
idealized Korean subjects: “It is as if Oshima states that only the Koreans can

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     121

be in genuine agony; therefore, they can gaze at themselves clearly and over-
come their social and financial predicament.”23 His later feature film, Death
by Hanging (Koshikei, 1968), presents the young zainichi Korean man as the
leading character, in which one can see Oshima’s empathy toward him, but it
is rather condescending in its idealization of the zainichi Korean subject.
Films with Koreans or zainichi Korean subjects did not become popular
until the 1990s. Even zainichi Korean director Sai Yoichi was rather cautious
about using Korean figures in his works during the 1980s, when he started
making films as a young director. Instead, he situated his films in Okinawa,
Japan’s southernmost major island, which had been occupied by the United
States since 1945 and was finally returned to Japan in 1972. Sai’s first com-
mercial hit, Sleep Quietly, My Friend (Tomo yo shizukani namure, 1985), was
shot entirely in Okinawa, and his other Okinawan film, A Sign Days (1989),
was about the local cabaret singers in the pleasure district named “A Sign”
in Naha, Okinawa’s capital city. Sai waited about a decade to make his most
well known film, All under the Moon (Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru, 1993), which
illustrates the zainichi Korean among other minorities in Japan, and in its pro-
motion the film was overtly linked with the director’s own ethnic background.
The aforementioned Yukisada Isao’s GO was the first box-office success
among a recent group of films on zainichi Koreans, and Kim Sujin’s Through
the Night, Izutsu Kazuyuki’s Break Through! (Pacchigi! 2004) and Pacchigi! Love
& Peace (2007), and Sai’s Blood and Bones have followed GO’s financial success.
What is new in those films is that the zainichi Korean characters are de-
picted casually and have nearly the same manner and depth as the Japanese
characters. They do not speak Japanese with a “Korean” accent, nor do they
have a provincial outlook on life in Japan, though they are typically marked
as “Korean” by their occupations, such as running a Korean BBQ restaurant,
a pachinko parlor, or a money lending business. Those films even deploy physi-
cally attractive stars such as Yamamoto Taro (Through the Night), Takaoka
Sosuke (Break Through!), and Kubozuka Yusuke (GO), and they even freely
alternate their roles in other films without being typecast as zainichi Korean
characters, as we can see with Kubozuka’s role as an ultraright-wing Japanese
youth in Madness in Bloom (Kyoki no sakura, 2002, Sonoda Kenji). Director
Sai’s hiring of Kitano—who is not so physically attractive but is still very
popular—as the main character for Blood and Bones was not surprising within
this historical context of Japanese cinema, especially after they were both cast
in Oshima Nagisa’s film Taboo (Gohatto) in 1999. The underlying formation
throughout the contemporary ethnic films is that those appealing, energetic,
and ethnically marked characters—being oppressed and unfairly segregated
in Japanese society—act out within the diegetic ideological justification, a

122   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

point of view that can be easily shared with the audiences through their iden-
tification with those attractive Japanese stars.

Star Power and the Japanese Cultural

Imagination
Among those Japanese stars, the presence of the star persona of Kitano Takeshi
creates a particular meaning for Blood and Bones—one that is indispensably­
connected to the Japanese cultural imagination. The majority of the film’s
audience compares and contextualizes Blood and Bones within Kitano’s own
oeuvres—both his directed films (which he usually acts in as well) such as
Zatoichi (2003) and his acting career such as playing a sadistically­violent high
school teacher in Battle Royale (2000, Fukasaku Kinji)—and in turn evaluates
Blood and Bones as “Takeshi’s best performance.”24 Kitano’s performance as
a zainichi Korean in Blood and Bones is indeed his second time after taking
the role of Kim Hiro in a television drama in 1991. Kim Hiro was a zainichi
Korean who took hostages after killing gangsters, and whose protest against
the police, deploring their racial discrimination, provoked sympathy among
the Japanese intellectuals in the late 1960s.25 Throughout his career, Kitano
has built up a complex star persona as an abusive and often absurdly witty
television personality, a talented filmmaker (his films often include a pessi-
mistic point of view, abrupt violence, and death), and a topical writer bitterly
criticizing the world of entertainment and Japanese society. This star persona
needs to be read within the Japanese cultural transformation into the conser-
vative stagnation and neonationalism of the 1990s.
While acting the role of a zainichi Korean character seems to highlight
a political dimension of Kitano’s star persona, perhaps even subverting the
prevalent social ideology against minorities in Japan, in reality the majority
of his domestic fans have strangely avoided connecting Kitano with politics.
Kitano’s star persona—or more specifically, the fans’ notion of his political
stance toward Japanese culture, as Aaron Gerow argues—is always distinct
between foreign and domestic film consumption. While “some appraisals of
Takeshi, especially abroad, have been political, asserting that his gags are a re-
bellious effort to subvert the status quo,”26 in the actual domestic cultural con-
text, “Kitano and his supporters in Japan have always stressed that his works
are not social critiques, . . . mainly because they distanced these movies­from
the serious social message films made by the left in the 1950s and 1960s.”27
His voiced criticisms are often targeted at postwar democracy and phenom-
ena resulting from it in Japan and sometimes even closely overlapping with
views of right-wing intellectuals, such as Mishima Yukio.28

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     123

 Blood and Bones’ association with this culturally influential star persona
creates a “contaminated” spectatorship that views Kitano’s role as a perfor-
mative achievement in his oeuvre, but not as a political statement or any type
of subversion. As I mentioned earlier, many of the audiences’ comments in-
deed highlight this aspect of the film and connect it to the film’s success. The
actual background of this iconic film star and television personality—born
in Adachi Ward, Tokyo, from Japanese working-class parents and so on—
has also been thoroughly circulated in various talk shows and his numerous
autobiographical books.29 The image in Blood and Bones creates a “double ex-
posure”: Shunpei is a Korean, but he is also Kitano Takeshi, a prominent
Japanese. As a result, the causality between zainichi Korean identity and vio-
lence becomes invisible, and the mythic connection between zainichi Korean
identity and brutality is unexamined and merely reproduced to serve the pre-
rogative of entertainment via Kitano’s intense performance.
Another indispensable aspect of cultural knowledge is the domestic vio-
lence that is often naturalized in the family dramas centering on the nostalgic
patriarchal father figure. Both GO and Blood and Bones are, simply put, films
about domestic violence: A father loses his temper and acts out his anger on
his family. This link between father figures and violence has long been ac-
cepted, even nostalgically celebrated, within the Japanese cultural context.
Writing about Japanese men’s drinking and women’s total care for them, an-
thropologist Amy Borovoy proves how prevalent violent family men are in
Japan. By reframing a Japanese social worker’s words, Borovoy indicates that
“Japanese men have problems with alcoholism and Japanese women have
problems with codependency.”30 The acceptance of a violent father figure is
not only due to the residual perceived value of the feudal family structure
but also its affirmative representation in homu dorama (the television family
melodrama). In the mid-1970s, the television drama The Family of Terauchi
Kantaro was broadcast nationwide. The father, Kantoro, is stubborn and short
tempered, so he often ends up getting angry and striking his family members.
But the program at the same time depicts him as a sympathetic and even a
lovable character, and the whole family, after all, shows affection toward him.
The program was enormously popular, with an average audience rating of
31.3 percent, an unprecedented number for a family melodrama.31 Of course,
not all the viewers of Blood and Bones have actually seen the television drama,
but the legend and referential influence of the series have a positive cultural
currency and signify a certain tolerance for the domestic violence of such
patriarchal figures from “the good old days.”32
Blood and Bones likewise has an extraordinary character in the violent
father­figure, but it follows the prototype of a zainichi Korean narrative of

124   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

an individual marked by alienation, which is also prevalent in the Japanese
cultural imagination. In this sense, the professional wrestling hero Rikidozan
and his star discourse are influential for Blood and Bones, both in terms of
the aesthetic of “violence” and the zainichi Koreans’ shared diasporic narra-
tive. Being acclaimed as the most famous person in postwar Japan after the
emperor,­Rikidozan became a legendary star persona not only in the field of
sports but also throughout popular culture of that time.33 Rikidozan’s legend
began in 1954 when he fought in the first televised pro wrestling match in
Japan and ended with his accidental death in 1963. The star discourse on
Rikidozan consists of two conflicting narratives: the nationalistic sentiment in
Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, which celebrated his performance as a national
hero, and the scandal of Rikidozan hiding his zainichi Korean background
from his fans.
As Yoshikuni Igarashi describes, Rikidozan created a spectacle with na-
tionalist appeal out of his wrestling events: “After enduring the foreign wres-
tlers’ dirty attacks and seeing his tagmate in trouble, Rikidozan began beat-
ing his opponents mercilessly with a distinctively Japanese final ‘weapon.’ In
this sense, the drama that his performance produced in the ring was a faith-
ful reproduction of wartime propaganda, the appeal of which did not dis-
appear in the postwar period.”34 Both his business tactic of staging matches
in a dichotomy between the Americans and the Japanese and his symbolic
final­“weapon”—­karate chops—produced the national sentiment against the
Americans and also assuaged “memories to Japan’s defeat.”35
Blood and Bones contains a fight sequence that bears comparison to such
nationalistic spectacles of the Japanese triumphing over larger Western ad-
versaries in the ring. The stylization of violence in Blood and Bones and its
lack of martial artistry as the characters take an inelegant beating have some
significant links with the rough-housing aesthetic of professional wrestling.
The prolonged, almost six-minute battle between Shunpei and his son Takeshi
expresses “displaced meanings,” and “the ‘unsaid’ and ‘unspeakable’ find cin-
ematic expression in the mise en scène.”36 In this sequence, one can see multiple
visual analogies between their fight and a pro wrestling match, and indeed the
square, four-and-a-half-meter tatami room, where they start fighting, close-
ly mimics the proportions of the wrestling ring. The camera captures their
fight with constant cuts from basically three different directions (front, left,
and right of the room), which stages the room for the dramatic performance
(figures 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6). A handheld camera is also used twice during this
sequence, which adds more dynamism to the fighting, as we can often see in
a real pro wrestling program. Shunpei even takes up the “illegal weapons”
of a metal cudgel and a small chest to strike Takeshi, which reminds us of a

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     125

 Figure 5.4. Blood and Bones (Sai Yoichi,
2004). Takeshi (Odagiri Jo) starts a fight
with his father, Shunpei, who is off the
screen. The camera is located in the front
of the room.

Figure 5.5. Now the camera is located

on the left side of the room. Takeshi and
Shunpei (Kitano Takeshi) are fighting.

Figure 5.6. The camera moves to the

right side of the room. The camera’s
triple positions transform the image of
the room to that of a fighting ring.

villainous wrestler’s secret weapons, such as a bottle opener or a collapsible­

metal chair. They finally entangle and break the glass doors, then tumble down
outside the house. The sequence of shots now mimics a scuffle outside the
ring, as is habitually enacted on television (figure 5.7). There is even an insert
shot of an excited spectator Masao (Morita Naoyuki), another son of Shunpei
and also the narrator of the film, who jeers their father, shouting out, “Brother,
kill him!” as one often sees with audiences at wrestling matches (figure 5.8).
In the original novel, Shunpei’s character is described as a huge man with a
sturdy­structure, but in the film, Kitano Takeshi is rather small, though very

126   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

 Figure 5.7. Shunpei and Takeshi tumble
outside of the house: “a scuffle outside
of the ring” scene.

Figure 5.8. Shunpei’s younger son

Masao­(Morita Naoyuki) roots for
Takeshi and shouts, “Brother, kill him!”

stout. Indeed, within the sequence, the physical contrast between short Kitano
and tall Odagiri and the dissimilarity between the aging father and ascending
son even creates sympathy toward the former, just as many pro wrestling fans
felt sympathy toward the underdog Japanese fighters. These iconographies
and topographies strongly resemble pro wrestling matches, even reenacting
the nationalized body discourse linked to violent spectacle.
As a film audience, we all know that their fight is not real, but it is none-
theless realistic. The issue of reality or realism is a critical aspect in the field
of pro wrestling studies. Following philosopher Irifuji Motoyoshi’s analysis
on realism in pro wrestling, film scholar Aaron Gerow stresses the aspect
of “fictional performance” in the entertainment: “It is still presumed that
it must use its resources to present a convincing illusion of the real.”37 For
this exact reason, the televised wrestling matches of the late 1950s and the
early 1960s and the fighting in Blood and Bones share a sense of reality that
requires the audience’s understanding, if not complicity. Irifuji’s point that
“in its essence, pro-wrestling is less a transformation of a real fight than a
performance that allows the complex imagination of the ultimate—and thus impos-
sible in reality—free-for-­all”38 is indeed applicable to the sequence of our film.
The aforementioned contributors’ comments from the Internet cinephile site,

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     127

such as Yukiya’s praise of Takeshi’s powerful acting or fatigue upon exit-
ing the theater,­are similar to many pro wrestling fans’ reactions toward the
events. This parallel between the fight sequence and pro wrestling is, however,
displaced from the audience’s consciousness by the extradiegetic sentimental
music of the music director Iwashiro Taro, which is blasted throughout the
sequence, and the theatrical downpour outside the house further accelerates
the melodramatic mise-en-scène.
The second narrative surrounds the scandal of Rikidozan, which
gradually­emerged in the 1980s, exposing the fact that Rikidozan was indeed
zainichi, born in Korea prior to the Japanese annexation of Korea. The gap
between this scandal and the historical fact that Rikidozan publicly chose to
live as a Japanese and erased all traces of his Korean family while he was
alive aroused the reporters to bring Rikidozan back to the media even after
his death. One of the first articles on this scandal appeared in Weekly Playboy
in 1984, and it completely rewrote the events of Rikidozan’s life to emphasize
his zainichi identity. As the article relates, Rikidozan was actually born in a
poor village in what is now North Korea and was forcibly brought to Japan at
the age of seventeen­in 1924. Rikidozan’s match with the former judo cham-
pion, Kimura Masahiko, was the Japanese pro wrestling association’s conspir-
acy against the zainichi champion. After watching the television report on the
zainichi Koreans’ mass migration to North Korea in 1959, Rikidozan consid-
ered returning to his hometown, but he was unsure whether the North Korean
leader Kim Il-sung would accept someone who had “passed” as a Japanese.
Thus he sent an expensive foreign car and a note reading, “Viva! The President
Kim Il-sung,” which he penned in his calligraphy for President Kim’s birthday
in 1962.39 Since the article’s “postcolonial” version of Rikidozan’s life story
was published, many other writers have extended Rikidozan’s image from the
Japanese national hero to the ethnically marked hero. Pro wrestling fan and
writer Muramatsu Tomomi even notes that “Rikidozan’s starkness, the scale
and grandeur of his heroic stature, went up several times as much as when he
was a ‘Japanese.’”40
While Rikidozan’s story of losing one’s nation and identity first ap-
peared in the form of scandal, it later proliferated as a sympathetic tragedy
of the zainichi Korean throughout the media,41 which has strongly influ-
enced the Japanese people’s general consciousness toward zainichi Koreans,
including­many creative writers and their works, as we can see in Yan Sogiru’s
semiautobiographical­novel about his father, the original basis for Blood and
Bones. The novel starts in the early 1930s, when Shunpei works as the first-
generation zainichi labor force at a fish-cake factory in Osaka, and the story
tells of his return to North Korea in the 1970s at the end. Unlike Rikidozan,

128   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

Shunpei chooses to go back to North Korea, and the novel explains that he
brought five cars, five trucks, two German printing machines, one hundred
Japanese wristwatches, and all the money he made as gifts to his brethren,
just as Rikidozan sent a foreign car to President Kim Il-sung. While both the
novel and the film depict Shunpei’s “return” to North Korea rather abruptly
and incomprehensibly, the narrative needs to be read in relation to the histori-
cal experience of the migration of over ninety thousand zainichi Koreans to
North Korea from 1959 to 1984, an unforgettable memory for many zainichi
Korean families.42
The novel resonates with the narrative formation of the “postcolonial”
Rikidozan-style story, relating a colonized subject’s life since the interwar pe-
riod via one personal experience, which is skillfully established so that the
majority of the Japanese can identify with it. It is not mere coincidence that
Rikidozan (Yaeokdosan, 2004, Song Hae-sung) was produced in South Korea
the same year as the film Blood and Bones. As film scholar Yomota Inuhiko
points out, the film Rikidozan tries to depict the zainichi Korean’s helplessness,
pain, and dilemma in Japan in a more realistic manner than the other film
about an ethnically marked hero and karate champion Oyama Masutatsu,
Fighter in the Wind (Baramui Fighter, 2004, Yang Yun-ho).43 The fact that re-
visionist narratives of colonized or ethnically marked heroes have gained
currency in both societies perhaps most of all signals the reestablishment of
cultural and historical connections in the post–Cold War period, when both
Japan and South Korea require mutual economic support against the threat
of China’s economic rise.
One can say that all films are political because they manipulate the au-
diences with certain historical myths of the cultural imagination. The film
Blood and Bones deploys a fear of zainichi Korean violence against the forces
of law and order, a fear that is already thoroughly engrained in the culture.
The film ethnocizes the affect in a Japanese way by overlaying the cinematic
violence with the ethnic subject of the Korean. Giorgio Agamben’s idea of a
“homo sacer” (sacred man)—the individual who exists under the law as an
exile—illuminates the zainichi Korean predicament. 44 It is through the same
law that zainichi are excluded and, at the same time, offered an identity as
zainichi Koreans. Recalling the director Sai’s intention that Blood and Bones
be received not as a “minor” but as a “major” film, Sai’s words can be read
as a challenge to the paradox of the zainichi Korean or the ethnic cinema, the
inability to take the position of “major” without reinforcing the basis of their
“minor” status.
Despite director Sai’s aim, however, the film was not quite the interna-
tional success he had hoped for. All Japanese actors in the film try to mime the

Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination     129

language and gestures of the Korean figures described in the original novel,
which covers almost half a century of Japanese-zainichi Korean history (from
the 1920s to the 1970s); however, the process of this miming is more complex
than one might think, since there are no such recognizable figures or spaces
outside of the mythic discourses created in the cultural imagination that the
novel occupies. The world that the film creates is so completely self-contained
that it does not seem to belong to either Japan or Korea. Blood and Bones repre-
sents an “ideal” zainichi Korean world, which excludes any political structure;
there are neither Japanese oppressors nor oppressed Koreans. The characters
in the film are no longer “zainichi Korean,” since they are the de facto majority
of the cinematic world, and the only oppressor in the film is the violent father,
Shunpei. Of course, we might get lost in the middle of the film and wonder,
“What is this film really about?” The trap is that to gain major status, the film
merely fulfilled the audience’s expectations of the violent zainichi Koreans,
erasing the characters’ complex identities beyond the cultural imagination.

130   Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

 Conclusion

In this book, I have focused on the shift

in cinematic modes from the film studio era to the post-studio period, particu-
larly as they relate to the recent developments in digital technology. Another
transformation is in the critical framework from the national to the transna-
tional cinema. To what extent, then, has the national cinema truly become the
transnational? How should a film scholar forge ahead, if indeed technology
has so transformed film’s material reality as to render all such guideposts—
national or transnational—equally untenable?
It is tempting to see a parallel between the two dichotomies—studio/post-
studio­production modes and the national/transnational aspects of cinema—­
since the parallel thereby compartmentalizes cinema’s recent development.
I doubt, however, that the unambiguous structural equalities between the
national cinema and the studio system or between the transnational disposi-
tion and the post-studio production mode are viable, because this neat com-
partmentalization masks the fact that Japanese cinema has been historically
diverse and in cultural flux throughout both the studio period and the post-
studio era.
In my previous work, Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and
1930s, I advanced the manifold identity of the cinema, the idea that the

131
interwar­Japanese cinema received significant influence from Hollywood
cinema,­and all the while the film studios created their own classical cinema
through negotiations with both the external influences and the demands from
the Japanese audiences—that is, the cultural agents of that time.1 Therefore,
a study on the studios is indispensable, rather than simply focusing on au-
teurs such as Ozu, Kurosawa, and Mizoguchi, in order to understand the
vernacular cinematic modes and norms, the infrastructure of the cinema. The
film studio system in Japan was established in the 1920s, led by the studio
Shochiku Kamata (1920–1936), but half a century later this system collapsed
altogether. I assert that equating the fifty-year Japanese film studio era with
national identity puts us into a conventional structure of knowledge, one con-
structed among U.S. academics through the postwar U.S.–Japan relationship.
The postwar historical narrative of Japan has often been built upon the
dichotomy of American universalism and Japanese particularism. This pat-
tern of knowledge reveals, as Naoki Sakai stresses, “the postwar bilateral and
co-figurative relationship between the U.S. and Japan.”2 Japan’s particularism
has been discursively constructed in both American and Japanese academies
and has already reached the level of ideological belief in Japanese society.
One finds a belief in Japanese particularism in, for instance, the Japanese
area studies of scholars such as Robert N. Bellah in the 1960s and Kevin
M. Doak in the early 2000s and in the numerous nihonjin-ron discourses
by Japanese scholars such as Kato Shuichi in the 1950s, Nakane Chie in
the 1960s, and Doi Takeo in the 1970s.3 In 2000, while historian Amino
Yoshihiko’s work, What Is “Japan”? (“Nihon” towa nani ka), radically ques-
tioned historical “facts” regarding Japanese particularism, mathematician
Fujiwara Masahiko’s ideological tract, The Dignity of the Nation (Kokka no
hinkaku), reasserted the uniqueness of Japan and became a best seller in
2005.4 America’s universalism and Japan’s particularism have cohabited with
each other, creating a complicit relationship throughout Japan’s postwar his-
tory. More to the point, Japanese cinema studies have been influenced by that
complicity. It is perhaps a truism that in order to publish, we academics tend
to find a cohesive object to analyze and diagnose its characteristics against
the “universal” standard, with which we can take the position of a distant
observer toward a particular observed, and, moreover, the result seems rea-
sonable for the majority of readers.­
Another reason that I distrust such explicit structural equalities is that
one can also find historical evidence, on the one hand, of an estranged rela-
tion between the cinema in the studio system period and the nation-state,
and on the other, of the strong connection between the cinema in the post-
studio era and the national. Until very recently in Japan, there has been a

132   Conclusion
lack of governmental support for either film production or academic research.
The Japanese government never subsidized the major film studios, such as
Shochiku, Toho, and Toei. It has chosen to rescue major heavy industries
and banks with bailouts, but this policy was never extended to struggling film
companies like Daiei or Nikkatsu. The Japanese government’s designation of
culture has long been defined, as Aaron Gerow indicates, as “what came be-
fore Westernized modernity.”5 Therefore Japanese cinema, according to this
official view, was not deemed a true representative of Japanese culture. The
index of the Diet Library (the Japanese national archive) largely ignores film
magazines, which provides more evidence of the Japanese government’s low
priority in supporting its national cinematic history.6 Recently, however, this
attitude has changed somewhat due to the global popularity of anime and
its diplomatic value. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs designated Doraemon
as its Anime Ambassador in 2008, and the film Doraemon: Nobita’s Dinosaur
2006 (Doraemon Nobita no kyoryu 2006, 2006) was subtitled in four languages
(English, French, Chinese, and Russian) and screened at major Japanese em-
bassies and cultural institutions around the world.7
The age of digital information has changed many aspects of Japanese
cinema,­but that does not mean that the cinema has transformed into some-
thing totally different. Within our predispositions of knowledge and practices,
we tend to view Japanese cinema as more cohesive and particular than it
actually is, but we must not overlook the multilateral forces and flows that
shape the cinema. Certainly, the topography of Japanese cinema in the digi-
tal age is in a state of flux. While film itself has become a nostalgic medi-
um, cinema’s future is uncertain in terms of its materiality—that is, where
and how to see a movie in the convergence of media accelerated by digi-
tal technology. Therefore, I conclude this book by proposing a few research
interests­that might reveal the new cinema’s counterintuitive connection with
the national—­more specifically, the cinema as “content,” a topic that directly
addresses­the future of Japanese cinema. The first example is in the symbiotic
relationship that exists with media content between cinema and television,
the medium mostly associated with the domestic, national audience. The sec-
ond instance concerns Japan’s national policy regarding media content, as the
government attempts to forge an economic bloc of regional cooperation to
trump the forces of global capitalism.

Television Cinema
On one level, the film industry’s growing affinity with other media—television­
in particular—­­is backed up by a viable rationale. The digital mediascape

Conclusion     133

offers­opportunities for multiplied screens and multiplied revenue from film’s
initial content. Yet on the other level, the industry’s embrace of the “one-
source, multi-use” strategy betrays a measure of uncertainty toward the future
of movies, since cinema’s centrality as a primary source or site for content is
likely to further diminish.
In the introduction, I touched on the relationship between cinema and
television, specifically concerning the exchange of stars between those media.­
In reality, that affiliation has become one of complex interdependence. In
the view of many film company executives, the most drastic changes in the
contemporary Japanese screen business are (1) television stations’ active
entry­into filmmaking and (2) the rapid increase of multiplex movie theaters
(“cinema­complex” in Japanese terminology).8 These two aspects have in-
tertwined and determined the market strategies of the major film companies
(Toho, Shochiku, and Toei) in Japan.
Along with the end of the studio system, those major companies ended
their roles as sole financiers and instead merged into filmmaking consortiums
(seisaku iinkai) in which they can share the risks of financial failure. As mem-
bers of the consortiums, the television stations have begun taking a significant
role, such as promoting tie-in projects between cinema and television. A film
based on an original story from another media—for instance, popular novels
and comics—is not something completely new. In the current Japanese film
industry, however, many of the films produced by major film companies and
television stations originated as popular television programs. This tendency
is further accelerated by the increasing number of cinema complexes. A film
that does not draw well in its first week is usually pulled from the theater or
moved to a smaller venue with fewer seats. Therefore, the major films need to
have nearly immediate success when they are released theatrically. Prerelease
advertising has become more critical in determining a film’s success, and a
film that is already familiar among the general audience, such as the adapta-
tion of a popular television program, has a significant advantage.
There are numerous examples of this type of “television cinema,” and, of
course, they are not limited to a specific film company or television network.
The hit film Hero (2007, Suzuki Masayuki), for instance, is one of the best
examples of this kind. The film was coproduced by Toho, Fuji Television
Network, and two other production companies, while Toho undertook the
film’s nationwide theatrical distribution. The original drama of the same
name (Fuji Television, Suzuki Masayuki, and others) was televised in 2001
(January 8–March 19), and a onetime special program was produced in 2006
(July 3). Hugely popular, the program garnered the second-highest audience
ratings ever for a drama (except NHK programs).9 Right before the film’s

134   Conclusion
release­(September 8, 2007), Fuji Television reinforced its prerelease adver-
tising by rebroadcasting the 2001 television drama series in July and August
2007. As a result, the film made 8.1 billion yen (about U.S.$98.2 million) in
total, and more significantly, the film’s revenue for the first two days reached
about one-eighth of the total, 1.01 billion yen (about U.S.$12.2 million). This
business pattern has been considered an “ideal model” as television cinema
appears more frequently at cinema complex theaters.
The case of television cinema Nobody to Watch over Me (Dare mo mamotte­
kurenai, 2009, Kimizuka Ryoichi) is more strategic than simply a spin-
off from television. The film was produced again by Toho, Fuji Television
Network, and two other productions and released on January 24, 2009. On
the date of the film’s release, Fuji Television aired a drama, Nobody Can Watch
over Me (Dare mo mamorenai, Fuji Television, 2009, Sugiyama Taichi), with
the same casting and continuous narrative as the film. From the onset, the
drama was planned as an “advertisement”­for the film, borrowing film critic
Yamane Sadao’s terms, and so of course it aired bracketed by trailer spots
for the film.10 While the film is about the police’s protection of the assailant
and his family and the television drama is about the protection of the victims,
Yamane appropriately asks a question: “Why Nobody to Watch over Me has to
be a film, not a television drama then?”11
The identity as cinema, or the film’s materiality as a movie, whether it
is 35mm film or digital cinema, has been completely effaced in such ubiqui-
tous television cinema. Some of the television cinemas are not even simply
tie-in products between television and cinema, but they are simply another
stage of the current IT business strategy of “one-source, multi-use”—that is
to say, releasing the same “content” over multiple platforms. Working with
TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, Inc.), Toho made the film Boys
over Flowers, Final (Hana yori dango fainaru, 2008, Ishii Yasuharu), which is an
incessant spin-off created out of multiple media: manga comics (1992–2004),
CD books (1993), novels (1994–2008), animated television series (September
8, 1996–August 31, 1997), television drama series (part 1, October 21, 2005–
December 16, 2005; part 2, January 5, 2007–March 16, 2007), and a Nintendo
DS game (2008).12 Targeting an existing audience, or more appropriately the
“consumers,” over 240,000 advance tickets were sold, and as a result, revenue­
reached 1.06 billion yen (about U.S.$12.8 million) in the first two days of
release out of total box-office receipts of 7.7 billion yen (about U.S.$93.3
million).13­
From the TV corporations’ point of view, the television cinema is simply
another platform in the maximization of the “one-source, multi-use” strat-
egy now prevalent in the age of digital technology—but of what benefit is

Conclusion     135

it to the Japanese film industry? It seems to me that the film industry has
been participating in the new business model without developing its own vi-
sion and stratagem for cinema’s future. Film critics’ or producers’ opinions
on this aspect are indeed varying. Critic Hirota Keisuke, for instance, states
that it is no longer­possible to make a successful film without television’s sup-
port,14 and film producer Yamamoto Mataichiro, on the other hand, warns
that people will stop going to movie theaters if films are the same as tele-
vision programs.15­ My interest is not in judging this tendency one way or
another,­but I am curious­as to how the screen industry might rebuild its own
identity—­its raison d’être—and sustain cinema’s materiality in the digital age.
In this uncertainty of television cinema and multiple use of a single “con-
tent,” the promotional strategy for the Studio Ghibli’s recent film Ponyo (Gake
no ue no Ponyo, 2008, Miyazaki Hayao) can be read as a timely resistance
against the industry’s tendency. Studio Ghibli and nine other production com-
panies (including Nippon Television Network, Toho, Dentsu, and the Walt
Disney Company) took the approach of restricting the filmic image only to
movie theaters before and during the film’s theatrical release. The promotion
of Ponyo was atypically centered on the film’s theme song, with a limited
number of moving images being televised. Marketing even eschewed cur-
rent practices like offering free downloads of screen images and songs. Their
strategy­was a clear statement to the audience: “See the film in the movie
theater.”16­ One might argue that the tactic works only because Studio Ghibli
has been producing financially successful animations.17 I simply hope, how-
ever, that the film industry can create critically and commercially successful
films in the near future, as Ghibli frequently does.

National Policy on Media “Content”

The second interest is the current Japanese cinema’s relationship to the
kontentsu­ sangyo—the business of producing and selling digital media
products.­In Japan, as well as many other cultures, entertainment businesses
have become more interconnected, and the intensive digitalization of the
field during the last decade has accelerated this trend. The term “kontentsu
sangyo” (contents business) has become a Japanese buzzword since the early
2000s, widely believed in Japan to be a universal expression, and yet in reality
it is a Japanized concept, including its very particular cultural connotations.
Along with the term’s popularity, there are increasing discourses on kontentsu
culture (digital media culture) regarding anime, manga, and games, and some
of the discourses often obscure the boundaries existing among cultures and
overstate the present Japanese subculture as the forefront of all other kinds of

136   Conclusion
this subculture. These discourses, however, sound to me like skewed reitera-
tions of Nihonjinron (nationalistic discussions about Japanese national and
cultural identity), whose value and criteria are often confined within Japanese
culture.
The term “kontentsu sangyo” is significantly constructed as a top-down,
national concept; in other words, the term always brings a sense of cultural
policy as well as its function as a capitalist business principle. This aspect
makes it seemingly ubiquitous—there are digital media industries all over
the world—but also particular to Japan or Japanese culture. Kontentsu sangyo
has been officially stipulated and promoted by the government, especially
by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), since 2001. The
official­statement by METI regarding kontentsu sangyo in its Digital Content
White Paper 2001 declares, “The bilateral view is indispensable in the support
for kontentsu sangyo, as industrial and cultural policies.”18 As this declaration
clearly indicates, the Japanese government consciously tries to use the new
culture industry to serve Japan’s international interests, especially in healing
historically damaged relations with its neighbors in the powerful Northeast
Asia economic zone.
METI presents the architecture of kontentsu sangyo with four major sub-
categories: (1) visual images, (2) music or aural sound, (3) games, and (4)
printed media. This is a classification that is more selective than the U.S.
Department of Commerce’s categories for the entertainment business, which
include a broader range of industries such as toys, sports, the theater, shows,
gambling, and theme parks.19 METI’s definition also neglects IT businesses
such as computer application software, database systems, and digital design.
METI’s strategy of emphasizing entertainment products obviously shows the
government’s belated realization of the benefits of projecting global popular
culture over staid tradition.
For me, it is intriguing to read the cultural criticisms on kontentsu sangyo or
kontentsu culture in Japanese academic discourse, particularly for their elision
regarding the culture’s connection with national policy. For instance, after
lamenting the scarcity of analyses on various kontentsu of manga, anime, and
raito noberu (teen fiction), cultural critic Azuma Hiroki asserts that these sub-
cultural texts require a completely new paradigm and style of criticism.20 In
his earlier work, Azuma suggests that analysis of otaku (in his words, “those
who indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to anime, video games,
computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figures, and so on”)21 is
essential for understanding the kontentsu subcultures by making connections
with the postmodern social condition. Azuma contextualizes the relationship
between kontentsu culture enjoyed by otaku and postmodernity, stating that

Conclusion     137

“the essence of our era (postmodernity) is extremely well disclosed in the
structure of otaku culture,”22 and he highlights Japan’s postmodern excess by
focusing on the extreme affiliation of the otaku subjects with kontentsu culture;
their hunger for “content” leads Azuma to characterize them as “database
animals.”23 Putting aside his belief in postmodern theory, which has been in
decline in the West since the 1990s, what is lacking in Azuma’s discourse is
the awareness of the kontentsu culture’s association with national policy and
the official cultural narratives promoted by the government. His postmodern
take neglects an essential aspect of the kontentsu culture in Japan: the fact that
it is crafted by nationalist sentiments.
In this context of the kontentsu culture, it is indispensable to analyze
the contemporary Japanese cinema’s transformation—especially its strong
interest­ in kokusai kyodo seisaku (multinational production)—and METI’s
subsidy program, such as J-Pitch (an international coproduction support
program), which was initiated in April 2006. Japan’s multinational film pro-
ductions are driven less by the Japanese film industry’s inroads into foreign
markets than by government policy. As I indicated in earlier chapters, the
film industry has for a long time been rather lukewarm toward taking part
in multinational productions, because the Japanese market is big enough to
generate profits without relying on the revenue from screenings abroad, a tac-
tical difference from Hollywood’s approach. And when Japanese production
houses engage in multinational productions, they limit themselves to the East
Asian region, particularly South Korea, the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
In a way, this regional specificity is very close to the situation in the EU, such
as Media Plus (a program designed to support the audio-visual industry in
the EU), which has always endorsed their products as bulwarks against the
dominance of Hollywood cinema in their markets. J-Pitch follows along the
same lines as Media Plus when, for instance, they decline to invite Hollywood
as a potential coproducer. On J-Pitch’s official home page, U.S. business infor-
mation is omitted, and the locations of the International Financing Forums
that J-Pitch has been attending are always located outside the United States.
As a result, Japan–South Korea coproductions have comprised 48 percent of
Japan’s total coproduction output since 1998.24
In the unresolved history of Japan’s postwar period, other nations in Asia
have constantly derided Japan for always looking toward the United States
rather than working with its neighbors to mend economic and political fences.
METI’s efforts to support kontentsu business or multinational coproductions­
can be read as a stage in Japan’s introspection regarding its identity in Northeast
Asia, the ascending global economic powerhouses. Within this framework,
looking at two recent multinational coproduced films—The Longest Night in

138   Conclusion
Shanghai (PRC and Japan, 2007, Zhang Yibai) and Tea Fight (Taiwan and
Japan, 2008, Wang Yeming)—is enthralling due to their depictions of Japan
and its dilemma in Asia. The theme of both films is the challenge of cross-
cultural communication; only compassion for each other joins the Japanese
and the Chinese in one film, and the tea ceremony draws the two in the sec-
ond film. The Longest Night ends with the protagonists never understanding
each other verbally, and Tea Fight, a comedy, overcomes this difficulty simply
in a lighthearted if nonsensical manner by making the whole cast bilingual
in Japanese and Chinese, a very similar solution as with The Hotel Venus and
Blood and Bones. After all, the limitations of those multinational films compel
us to see the problem of Japanese cinema—how to locate Japanese identity in
global culture—as not simply a matter of one specific industry, but one that
needs to be dealt with at the level of the nation-state.
The increasing ubiquity of digital technology has indeed made Japanese
cinema more accessible to global markets and even created a reverse cul-
tural flow as new global cinema set against Hollywood’s dominant flows.
Achieving status as “global cinema,” however, does not necessarily mean that
Japanese cinema is completely transnational or lacking any cultural identity.
Cinema’s identity is something that has always been and will continue to be a
subject of inquiry, even in the case of the most ubiquitous and often culturally
“transparent” Hollywood cinema. Moreover, as METI’s recent support for
kontentsu business indicates, a nation-state or its desire for buttressing national
sovereignty has never diminished against the increasing difficulty of keep-
ing clear boundaries between cultures. In the age of global culture, Japanese
cinema—now set free from the studios’ protection and control—has faced
another difficult moment to find a viable direction for its survival.

Conclusion     139

 NOTES

Introduction
1. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “General Introduction: What Is
Transnational Cinema?” in Transnational Cinema, the Film Reader, eds. Elizabeth
Ezra and Terry Rowden (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.
2. Iwabuchi Koichi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 18.
3. Ibid., 46.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Ibid., 11.
6. Ibid., 16–17.
7. Christopher A. Gartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, Transnational Management:
Text, Cases, and Readings in Cross-border Management. 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-
Hill, 2004).
8. Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald, “Transnational in Question,” American
Journal of Sociology 109.5 (March 2004): 1177.
9. Ibid., 1178.
10. Ibid., 1179.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American
Nationality,” the Nation (February 25, 1915). Reprinted in Culture and Democracy,
ed. Horace M. Kallen (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924). This article can
be read at the following Web address: http://www.expo98.msu.edu/people/
Kallen.htm (accessed September 22, 2011). Randolph Bourne, “Trans-
National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97. This article

141
 can also be read at the following Web address: http://www.swarthmore.edu/
SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Bourne.html (accessed June 4, 2010).
14. Ibid.
15. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32.
16. Ibid., 33.
17. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Why Japanese Television Now?” In Television, Japan,
and Globalization, ed. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Eva Tsai, and JungBong Choi
(Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010), 4–5.
18. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 27.
19. Ibid., 26–27.
20. Ibid., 28.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 215–216.
23. Ibid., 215.
24. Kishi Matsuo, “Nihon eiga to katsugeki no miryoku,” Kinema junpo 228
(Special Issue, July 1961): 43.
25. Their targeted viewers/audiences were apparently different; the Kanetaka’s
television program was designed for family viewers, enjoying the Sunday morn-
ing program at home, and the mukokuseki films were aimed specifically at teens
and audiences in their twenties.
26. Yoshimi Shun’ya, “Amerika, senryo, homudorama,” In Sengo Nihon sutadizu 1,
1940s–50s, ed. Iwasaki Minoru, et al. (Kinokuniya shoten, 2009), 216.
27. COZAL-TV, “Terebi no rekishi nenpyo” Tereviru mainichi,
http://cozalweb.com/ctv/shiryo/rekishi.html (accessed June 4, 2010).
28. We can even see the evidence of their association in the statement of
Kobayashi Akira’s fan, Tasaki Toshiaki. He states in a roundtable talk with
other fans of other movie stars that Kobayashi even had an interview with
Laramie’s leading actor, Robert Fuller, who visited Japan at the behest of the
program’s fans. “Akira is a sort of Cowboy western type. I assume that he
has been studying how to maintain that image by seeing movies. His meeting
with Robert Fuller, who just visited Japan, was evidence of Akira’s effort.”
Futaba Juzaburo et al., “Warerawa suta no shin’eitai: Suta kouenkai zadankai,”
Kinema junpo 293 (September 1, 1961): 68.
29. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 28.
30. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 17.
31. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 37.
32. Amy Cortese, “Business; They Care about the World (and They Shop, Too),”
New York Times, Business Section (July 20, 2003), http://www.nytimes.com/
2003/07/20/business/business-they-care-about-the-world-and-they-shop-too.html
(accessed June 4, 2010).
33. The term “cultural turn” was introduced and disseminated by leading books such
as David Chaney, The Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural
History (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), Fredric Jameson, The Cultural
Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), and
Victoria E. Bonell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in
the Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). In Japan,
sociologist Yoshimi Shun’ya also published on the topic: Yoshimi Shun’ya,
Karuchuraru tan, bunka no seijigaku he (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 2003).

142   Notes to Pages 5–12

 34. Murakami Yoshiaki and Ogawa Norifumi, Nihon eiga sangyo saizensen [The
Front Line of the Japanese Film Industry] (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 2000),
124.
35. Newsweek: The International Newsmagazine (September 3, 1997): cover page.
36. Studio Voice 263 (November 1997): 31.
37. Brutus (October 15, 1997): cover page.
38. Aoyama Shinji and Inagawa Masato, “Nihon eiga wa naze kiki o kaihi suru-
noka,” Eureka 29.13 (October 1997): 214–230.
39. Eiga biginesu deta bukku 2008 [Film Business Data Book 2008] (Tokyo: Kinema
junposha, 2008), 176.
40. Program pictures are intended for distribution as the less-published, bottom
half of a double feature, or often part of a film series, in which a star repeatedly
plays the same character. The Japanese film industry had preferred to use the
expression “program picture” over “B-movie.”
41. Sato Tadao, Nihon eigashi, Vol. 3 [Japanese Cinema History, Vol. 3] (Tokyo:
Iwanami shoten, 1996), 227.
42. Abe Casio, “Asian barokku e [To Asian Baroque],” in Nihon eiga no yomikata
1980–1999 [Ways of Reading the Japanese Cinema 1980–1999], ed. Takefuji
Ki’ichi and Mori Naoto (Tokyo: Firumu atosha, 1999), 84–89.
43. Regarding the financial aspect of the contemporary film industry, Saito
Morihiko published a book on the issue using insider information. Saito
Morihiko, Nihon eiga hokai: Hoga baburu wa koshite owaru [Who Will Kill the
Japanese Movies?] (Tokyo: Daiamondosha, 2007).
44. Murakami Yoshiaki and Ogawa Norifumi, Nihon eiga sangyo saizensen, 36.
45. I received the information about the year 2008 from Nihon Eiga Seisakusha
Renmei [Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, Inc.] directly by
email (May 7, 2009). The number of films of the three major companies is
65 out of the annual total of 418 Japanese films, and the number of their co-
produced films is 8. Independent productions number 20 and others number
325 (78 percent). The increase in the “other” category from 184 in 1998 (74
percent) indicates how the combination of producers has become more com-
plex and diverse. It also needs to be noted that contrary to the fewer number
of films, the three major film companies’ box-office revenues have remained
superior to the independents. In 2007, Toho made ¥595.11 billion, Shochiku
¥145.56 billion, Toei ¥82.54 billion, and the other/independent categories
reached only ¥123.24 billion. Toho’s extreme success especially in the last ten
years seems a consequence of (1) its careful selection of new projects, (2) timely
tie-ins with television stations (Fuji Television, Nippon Television, Tokyo
Broadcasting System Television), and (3) releasing popular animation films,
such as Studio Ghibli’s productions, Pokémon series, and Crayon shin-chan
series. See “2007 nen eiga-gaisha gaikyo, Toho kabushiki gaisha [Overview of
Film Companies in 2007, Toho],” Eiga biginesu deta bukku 2008, 24.
46. Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, East Asian Screen Industries
(London: British Film Institute, 2008), 64.
47. Ibid., 13.
48. Ibid., 29.
49. Ibid., 64–65.
50. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York
and London: New York University Press, 2006), 2.

Notes to Pages 12–16     143

 51. Azuma Hiroki, Kontentsu no shiso [The Concepts of “Contents”] (Tokyo:
Seidosha, 2007), 10.
52. VCD is extremely popular in many African countries as well. The popularity
of so-called Nollywood (contemporary Nigerian films) has benefited from the
cheap and ubiquitous VCDs.
53. Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “VCD as Programmatic
Technology: Japanese Television Drama in Hong Kong,” in Feeling Asian
Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, ed. Koichi
Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 228.
54. Casio Abe, Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano, with a preface by Lawrence Chua;
ed. William O. Gardner and Daisuke Miyao (New York: Kaya Press, 2005), 29.
The italics are mine.
55. Daisuke Miyao, “Telephilia vs. Cinephilia = Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano?”
Framework 15.2 (fall 2004): 58–59.
56. Aaron Gerow, Kitano Takeshi (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 3.
57. Ibid.
58. Gerow, Kitano Takeshi, 34.
59. Darrell William Davis, “Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi,” Cinema
Journal 40.4 (summer 2001): 58.
60. Mori Naoto, “Nihon hatsu eiga zero sedai to wa nanika?” [Departing from
Japan: What Is the Cinema Zero Generation?] in Nihon hatsu eiga zero sedai
[Departing from Japan: The Cinema Zero Generation], ed. Mori Naoto
(Tokyo: Filmartsha, 2006), 6–8.
61. “Statistics of Film Industry in Japan,” table in Motion Picture Producers
Association of Japan, Inc., at http://www.eirem.org/statistics_e/index.html
(accessed May 6, 2009).
62. For more elaboration on these films, please see my edited book, Jinhee Choi
and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, eds., Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in
Asian Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
63. Kakeo Yoshio, “Shinema konpurekkusu no fukyu wa toshin no eiga kankyaku
no nagare o kaeta” [Cinema Complexes Changed the Flow of Audiences in
Cities], Eiga biginesu deta bukku 2008, 35.
64. Ibid.
65. Anon., “Kanmatsu deta-shu” [Data Collections], Eiga biginesu deta bukku 2008,
176.
66. Anon., “Nihon eiga sangyo deta-shu” [Japanese Film Industry Data
Collections], Eiga biginesu deta bukku 2008, 16.
67. Anon., “Kanmatsu deta-shu” [Data Collections], Eiga biginesu deta bukku 2008,
176–181.
68. Abe, “Asian barokku e” [To Asian Baroque], 88.
69. Tom Mes, “Ley Lines,” in Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike (Guildford:
FAB, 2003), 154–157.
70. Abe, “Asian barokku e,” 86.
71. Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity,
ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 1–17.
72. Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xiv.
73. Kyogen is a comical form of traditional Japanese theater performed during the
intermission of Noh plays.

144   Notes to Pages 16–26

Chapter 1: New Media’s Impact on Horror Cinema
An earlier version of this chapter was published in Canadian Journal of Film Studies
16: 2 (fall 2007): 23–48. The revised version was published in the anthology­Horror
to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo
Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 15–37.
1. Chika Kinoshita, “The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft and
J-horror,” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed.
Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2009), 103–104.
2. Ibid., 104–105.
3. Lee Bong-Ou, Nihon eiga wa saiko dekiru [Japanese cinema can revive] (Tokyo:
Weitsu, 2003), 8.
4. Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2005), 8.
5. Ibid., 8–9.
6. Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film
(Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2005), vii. Emphasis is mine.
7. “Profile,” Hideo Nakata Official Page, the latest update 2005, http://
hw001.gate01.com/hideonakata/ (accessed August 21, 2006).
8. “Shimizu Takashi Profile,” Shaiker’s Official Page, the date of publication
2004, http://www.shaiker.co.jp/shimizu_p.html (accessed August 21, 2006).
9. “Trivia for Marebito,” International Movie Database (hereafter IMDb), the
latest update 2005, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434179/trivia (accessed
August 21, 2006).
10. Julia Kristeva, Power of Horror: An Essay of Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Colombia University Press, 1982).
11. “Trivia for The Ring,” IMDb, date of publication 2002, http://www.imdb.com/
title/tt0298130/trivia (accessed August 21, 2006).
12. Hollywood’s version closely follows the conventions of American horror films
in this regard: The characters that “get it” often seem to deserve their fate. The
sexually promiscuous, the know-it-all, and anyone conspicuously upper class
are frequently the targets of the monster’s rampage. Unlike a lot of J-horror
films, Hollywood films assure us that this is, after all, a moral universe.
13. David Chute, “East Goes West,” Variety, posted May 9, 2004,
http://www.variety.­com/ index.asp?layout=cannes2004&content=
vstory&articleid=VR1117904412&categoryid=1713&cs=1&query=
david+and+chute&display=david+chute (accessed August 21, 2006).
14. There is a sense of irony in the role of the videotape’s dreadful curse in the
remake of The Ring: Videotapes were still popular when the original Japanese
film was released in 1998 but much less so in 2002, when the Hollywood
remake came out. Needless to say, the obsoleteness of videotapes stands out
quite awkwardly in The Ring 2 in 2005.
15. Pulse’s distribution rights were purchased by Magnolia, and the film was also
remade under the same title by Jim Sonzero and released in August 2006. The
remake rights for Kurosawa’s previous film Cure have also been acquired by
United Artists.
16. This information was provided by Kurosawa Kiyoshi in an interview with the
author in Tokyo, June 2006.

Notes to Pages 28–35     145

 17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 27.
20. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 233.
21. Ibid., 158.
22. Kurosawa, interview with the author (see note 16).
23. Ibid. The idea of “reduction” and “addition” is also pointed out by Kurosawa.
24. Kuroi Kazuo and Hara Masato, “Sokatsuteki taidan: Soredemo anata wa
purodyusa­ni naruno ka [Summarizing Interview: Do You Still Want to
Become a Producer?],” Eiga prodyusa no kiso chishiki: Eiga bijinesu no iriguchi kara
deguchi made [A Basic Guide for the Producer: From Entrance to Exit of the
Movie Business] (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 2005), 178.
25. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 23.
26. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 82–83.
27. Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1994).
28. “Business Data for Titanic,” IMDb, the latest update, December 2003, http://
www.imdb.com/title/tt0120338/business (accessed August 21, 2006).
29. Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 5.
30. William Tsutsui, Godzilla on My Mind (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 7.
31. Tanaka Jun’ichiro, Nihon eiga hattatsushi I, katsudo shashin jidai [The History
of Japanese Film Development I, the Age of Motion Pictures] (Tokyo: Chuo
Koronsha, 1975), 117–118.
32. The term bunka (culture) came from the German term kultur, and the film genre
is usually defined as the nondrama or nonnews film. It is also known as kyoiku-
eiga­(educational film), kagaku-eiga (science film), and kiroku-eiga (documentary
film). Fujii Jinshi describes bunka-eiga as a mere representation or a discursive
construction that cannot be fully quantified. See Fujii Jinshi, “Bunka suru eiga:
Showa 10 nendai ni okeru bunka eiga no bunseki” [On bunka eiga: Analyzing
the Discourses of “Culture Film” in 1935–1945], Eizogaku [ICONICS: Japanese
Journal of Image Arts and Sciences], 66 (2001): 5–22.
33. Yamamoto Sae, “Yushutsu sareta Nihon no imeji: 1939 nen nyuyoku bankoku
hakurankai de joei sareta Nihon eiga” [The Export of Japan’s Image: Japanese
Films Screened at the New York World’s Fair, 1939], Eizogaku [ICONICS:
Japanese Journal of Image and Sciences], 77 (2006): 62–80.
34. Susanne Schermann, Naruse Mikio: Nichijo no kirameki [Mikio Naruse: The
Glitter of Everyday Life] (Tokyo: Kinema junposha, 1997), 82.
35. HKFlix http://www.hkflix.com/home.asp (accessed August 21, 2007).
36. Hara Masato, Eiga purodyusa ga kataru hitto no tetsugaku [Philosophy for Making
a Hit by a Film Producer] (Tokyo: Nikkei bipisha, 2004), 193.
37. “Trivia for The Ring,” IMDb, date of publication 2002, http://www.imdb.com/
title/tt0298130/trivia (accessed August 21, 2006).
38. Shujen Wang, “Recontextualizing Copyright: Piracy, Hollywood, the State, and
Globalization,” Cinema Journal 43.1 (2003): 38.

146   Notes to Pages 35–44

 39. Ibid., 40.
40. “Digital Cinema,” Wikipedia, date of publication July 2006, http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Digital_cinema (accessed August 21, 2006).
41. Sugaya Minoru and Nakamura Kiyoshi, eds., Eizo kontentsu sangyoron [Visual
Content Industry Studies] (Tokyo: Maruzen, 2002), 207.
42. “T-Joy,” Wikipedia, http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ T-JOY (accessed January
29, 2009).
43. Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited,
2004), 1.
44. “Battle Royale,” HKFlix, http://www.hkflix.com/xq/asp/filmID.531295/qx/
details.htm (accessed August 21, 2006).
45. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 194.
46. “Onibaba, Criterion Collection (1965),” Amazon.com, www.amazon.com/gp/
product/ B00019JR5Y/sr=1–1/qid=1155234743/ref=pd_bbs_1/
104–0203025–4315974?ie=UTF8&s=dvd and www.imdb.com/title/tt0058430/
(accessed August 21, 2006).
47. Jyotsna Kapur, “The Return of History as Horror: Onibaba and the Atomic
Bomb,” in Horror International, ed. Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 83–97. Adam Lowenstein,
Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern
Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 83–109.
48. Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams, “Introduction,” in Horror
International, ed. Schneider and Williams, 6.
49. Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 83.
50. Frederic Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (autumn 1986): 65–88. For criticism of Jameson’s
approach, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and
New York: Verso, 1992), 95–122.
51. The folktale genre is cited from anon., “Nihon eiga shokai, Onibaba’a”
[Introduction of Japanese film, Onibaba’a], Kinema junpo 379 (November 1964):
80. Independent film is cited from Itoya Hisao, “Onibaba’a seisaku no kiroku:
Dokuritsu puro, sono genjitsu to daikigyo to no kankei” [The Records of
Onibaba’a Film Production: Independent Production, Its Situation and Relation
with Major Studios], Kinema junpo 387 (March 1965): 23–25.
52. Kinema junpo 380 (December 1964), n.p.
53. The first boom of independent films was in 1951–1957. The major studios
started to exclude those independent filmmakers and their films from the film
industry once they had stabilized their production and distribution system in
the late 1950s. Many independent directors gave up filmmaking during this
period. Shindo Kaneto was one of the few remaining independent filmmakers.
He continued filmmaking by either sending his work to international festivals,
as in the case of The Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960), which was awarded the
Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1961, or by negotiat-
ing with a very limited number of independent movie theaters to screen his
films.
54. Interview with Shindo Kaneto, Imai Tadashi, and Daikoku Toyoji, “Imai
Tadashi, Shindo Kaneto shinshun taidan: Omo ni eiga sakka no shutaisei wo
megutte” [The New Year Interview, Imai Tadashi and Shindo Kaneto: About
Filmmaker’s Subjectivity], Kinema junpo 383 (January 1965): 56.

Notes to Pages 45–49     147

 55. Jan Simons, “New Media as Old Media: Cinema,” in The New Media Book, ed.
Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 237.
56. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
in Illumination, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 217–251.

Chapter 2: Digital Authenticity

An earlier version of this chapter was published in Canadian Journal of Film
Studies, A Special Issue on Contemporary Japanese Cinema in Transition, ed. Mitsuyo
Wada-Marciano, 18. 1 (spring 2009): 71–93.
1. Sato Tadao, Nihon eiga-shi III [Japanese Film History III] (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 2006), 223.
2. David Hogarth, Realer Than Real: Global Directions in Documentary (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006), 1.
3. Abé Mark Nornes, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese
Documentary (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007),
xxii.
4. Ibid., xiii. Nornes also depicts the transformation in the postwar Japanese
documentary tradition: “While the politics of documentary shifted from
Japan’s wartime brand of nationalism to a postwar democratization—if not
radicalization—­the largely fictive form of documentary realism remained
standard and stable”(151). Among the representative postwar documentarists,
Nornes highlights the importance of Hani Susumu’s observational docu-
mentary in the 1950s, the public relations film from the Iwanami Publishing
Company, and the New Left filmmakers, such as Higashi Yoichi, Tsuchimoto
Noriaki, and Ogawa Shinsuke. “They completely eschewed the reenactments
with nonactors, a continuous practice since the 1930s, and explicitly took sides
with political movements of one sort or another” (152). Abé Mark Nornes,
“Private Reality: Hara Kazuo’s Films,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal
Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2003), 144–163.
5. Chris Berry, “Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism,” in
The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first
Century, ed. Zhang Zhen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007),
130.
6. See Richard Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992); Eric Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-
Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Renov, ed.,
Theorizing Documentary (London: Routledge, 1993); Michael Renov, The Subject
of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Carl
Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Noël Carroll, “Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of
Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis,” in Film Theory and Philosophy,
ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999) 175–202; Trevor Ponech, What Is Non-Fiction Cinema? (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1999); Paul Wells, “The Documentary Form: Personal and
Social ‘Realities,’” in An Introduction to Film Studies, ed. Jil Nelmes (London:
Routledge, 1999) 211–235; Stella Bruzzl, New Documentary (Abingdon, UK,

148   Notes to Pages 50–53

 and New York: Routledge, 2006); Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and
Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Bill
Nichols, “ ‘Getting to Know You . . . ’: Knowledge, Power, and the Body,” in
Theorizing Documentary, ed. Renov, 174–191; Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries:
Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994); and Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2001).
7. Kevin MacDonald and Mark Consins, Imagining Reality (London: Faber and
Faber, 1996), 311.
8. Nichols, Blurred Boundaries. See especially chapter 5, “Performing
Documentary,” 92–106. Susan Scheibler, “Constantly Performing the
Documentary: The Seductive Promise of Lightning over Water,” in Theorizing
Documentary, ed. Renov, 135–150.
9. Nornes, “Private Reality,” 147.
10. Ibid., 150.
11. Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s film Minamata (Minamata: Kanja-san to sono sekai, 1972) is
one of the representative works about environmental pollution, and legendary­
antiwar filmmaker Kamei Fumio even later directed a number of PR films,
such as The Southern Cross Is Calling (JAL sora no tabi sirizu—Shin minami jujisei­
wa maneku, 1967), a promotional film for Japan Airlines, and Wishing for
Tomorrow’s Happiness (Asu no shiawase o inotte—Sekai o tsunagu Ito-Chu, 1981),
another promotional film for the construction company Ito-Chu.
12. Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2005), 110.
13. “Dokyumentari [Documentary],” Kokoku hihyo 278 (October 2003): 80–89.
14. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 3–4.
15. This interview with the author was held at Kore’eda’s office, TV Man Union,
in Aoyama, Tokyo, in June 2006.
16. In the interview with Kore’eda Hirokazu, “Dokyumentari to ficushon no sogo
noriire [Reciprocity between Documentary and Fiction],” the “documentary-
like” style in the film is highlighted and discussed further. Kokoku hihyo 278
(October 2003): 80–89. Describing the characteristics of Kore’eda’s earlier film
Distance, film critic Kitakoji Takashi uses a similar expression: “a back and
forth movement between documentary and fiction.” Kitakoji Takashi, “New
Generation Directors: Kore’eda Hirokazu,” in Nihon eiga nyuweibu “riaru” no
kanata e [Far Away from the Real: The New Direction in Japanese Cinema]
(Tokyo: Esquire Magazine Japan, 2000), 23.
17. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26.
18. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001), 50.
19. Michael Allen, “The Impact of Digital Technologies on Film Aesthetics,” in
The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2002),
110.
20. Ibid., 114.
21. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “ ‘Genjitsu’ (Reality) / ‘Reariti’ (Reality): In Lieu of an
Introduction,” trans. Shota Ogawa, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 21
(December 2009): 79–92.

Notes to Pages 53–62     149

 22. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
23. See Kawase’s homepage at http://www.kawasenaomi.com/kumie/
k_works_film.html (accessed April 16, 2008).
24. This interview with the author was held in Nara, Japan, in December 2006.
Kawase was in the middle of editing The Mourning Forest, scheduled for submis-
sion at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2007.
25. Ibid.
26. Kawase Naomi, Tarachime “Birth/Mother” description from the promotional
material for the international release. The author received it from Kawase’s pro-
duction office, Kumie.
27. Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 99.
28. Kawase also directs work for television stations, some for NHK (Nippon Hoso
Kyokai, Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and some for a television station in
France. She submits her original proposal, and those television stations buy its
broadcasting rights. In other words, she can still make what she wants without
pressure to make something fit within a specific theme requested by the net-
works. This information is from my interview with Kawase in December 2006.
29. Yiman Wang, “The Amateur’s Lightning Rod: DV Documentary in
Postsocialist China,” Film Quarterly 58.4 (2005): 17–18.
30. The number of movie theaters is twenty-three in Shibuya, which is more than
any other area in Tokyo (Ginza, seventeen; Shinjuku, fifteen; Ikebukuro,
seven).­Among those twenty-three theaters, there are a total of thirty-five
theater­rooms and twelve of them are designed for a seating capacity of one
hundred or less. Weekly Pia 1204 (June 21, 2007): 77–82.
31. “Living While Crying” was broadcast on November 3, 2006. It is part of the
Chinese Series, which started in 2000 and continued for six episodes until 2006.
“Living While Crying” was the series’ last episode.
32. Nada Naofumi, “Self-Documentary: Its Origin and Present State,”
Documentary Box 26. http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/26/box26–2-e.html
(accessed­March 9, 2007).
33. Ibid. Both expressions, “diary film” and “essay film,” reveal the link with
the critical discourses on Jonas Mekas’ work, such as in Renov, The Subject
of Documentary, 104–119. Originally published in Afterimage 17.1 (February
1989).
34. Suzuki Shirouyasu, Kyokushiteki gendaishi nyumon [The Introduction to Extreme
Private Poetry] (Tokyo: Shichosha, 1981). Those poems and literary criticism
were originally published in various journals: Gendaishi techo, Waseda bungaku,
Bungei, Eurika, Eiga geijutsu, Kokubungaku, and Subaru in 1973 and 1974.
35. Nornes, “Private Reality,” 157–158.
36. Sato Makoto, Documentari no shujigaku [The Rhetoric of Documentary] (Tokyo:
Misuzu Shobo, 2006), 14–44.
37. Ibid., 36–40.
38. The film consists of two parts: The first part was completed with financial
support of about U.S.$12,000 (1 million Japanese yen) from the film school,
and the latter part was produced by Terada himself for about U.S.$90,000 (7.5
million Japanese yen). Neither amount includes payments for his few crew
members (a cameraman and a recording assistant); in fact, they have never

150   Notes to Pages 63–70

 been paid. This information is from the author’s interview with director Terada
Yasunori in e-mail exchanges on March 13, 2007.
39. Tsuchiya Yutaka, “Documentary,” interviewed by Shimuzu Kuniro, Koukoku
hihyo 275 (October 2003): 92.
40. Ibid.
41. Sato Tadao, Eiga no shinjitsu: Scrin wa nani o utsuhite kita ka [Truth in Cinema:
What a Film Screen Shows] (Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha, 2001), 173.
42. Ibid., 192.
43. Dai Vaughan, “Let There Be Lumière,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative,
ed. Thomas Elsasser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990),
66.
44. Ibid., 64.
45. Ibid., 65.

Chapter 3: The Rise of “Personal” Animation

1. Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing
Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3.
2. The first time the term “anime” appeared in Japanese printed media was in the
children’s book series Television Masterpiece Picture Anime Theater [Terebi meisaku
anime gekijyo] from Popurasha in 1975. This suggests that the term was already
understood in general and strongly connected with already ubiquitous televi-
sion animation programs for children. http://ja.wikipedia.org/
wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%8B%E3%83%A1, August 4, 2008 (accessed
August 12, 2008).
3. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 144–145.
4. In her discussions on cultural exchanges, Levi often addresses her readers as
Americans: “The new generations of both Japan and America are sharing
their youth, and in the long run, their future”(1) or “American’s Generation X
and Japan’s shin jinrui will never again be complete strangers to one another”
(2). Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation
(Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996).
5. Ibid., 16.
6. Ibid., 17. This cultural “differentiation” in anime has been promoted not only
outside Japan but also within. The postmodern critic Asada Akira indicates
the whole cultural trend of “J-kaiki” [Japanese return] in the 1990s—naming
various cultural media with the initial “J” such as J-pop, J-horror, J. league (the
Japanese Professional Soccer League), J-movie, and Japanimation, or anime—­
and rationalizes­the trend as Japanese resistance against global capitalism­
within­the economic recession. But this belongs to a set of studies related to
neonationalism in the contemporary Japanese culture, which is outside the
focus­of this chapter. Asada Akira, “J-kaiki no yukue,” http://
www.kojinkaratani.com/criticalspace/old/special/asada/voice0003.html
(accessed­September 3, 2008).
7. Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke, 8–9.
8. Thomas Lamarre, “Introduction: Between Cinema and Anime,” Japan Forum
14.2 (2002): 186. Within this scope, the six contributors provide essays on
anime and its relations with other media, mainly cinema: (1) analyzing both

Notes to Pages 70–78     151

 cinema and animation as constructions of social discourses and regulations,
especially­in the cases of the 1910s–1920s “pure film” movement and anima-
tion; (2) anime as one variation in the cultural discourses of modernity, particu-
larly how Tokyo has been configured along with the media of visual culture; (3)
“genre effects” in anime and other cyberpunk precursors in film and literature;
(4) the material conditions for making and viewing animation in reference
to Imamura Taihei’s wartime animation study; (5) questioning the historical
transition from analog to digital by proposing some mixed-media or intermedia
contexts from early cinema and anime; and (6) highlighting the relations of in-
stitutional boundaries among cinema, animation, and anime.
9. Ibid., 187.
10. Daisuke Miyao, “Before Anime: Animation and the Pure Film Movement in
Pre-War,” Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 208.
11. Lamarre, “Between Cinema and Anime,” 186.
12. Steven T. Brown, “Screening Anime,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements
with Japanese Animation, ed. Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006), 2.
13. Ibid., 1.
14. Ibid.
15. Bruce Grenville, “The Art of Visual Culture,” in Krazy! The Delirious World of
Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art, ed. Bruce Grenvill et al. (Vancouver, BC:
Vancouver Art Gallery: Douglas & McIntyre; Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 2008), 22. Emphasis is mine.
16. It should be pointed out that the sections on “games” and “visual art,” curated
by Will Right and Grenville respectively, discard such national divisions. In the
section on anime, the selection of a nonanimator, Kanno Yoko (composer for
anime scores), is noteworthy for revealing the curators’ intention to emphasize
the intermedia aspect of anime.
17. Toei Doga is an animation studio owned by Toei Co., Ltd., one of the few
major film companies in Japan. It was founded in 1949 to create animation
movies for children. Studio Ghibli is an animation film studio founded in 1985,
which produced several feature-length animation films by Miyazaki Hayao,
such as Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 2002) and Ponyo on the Cliff
by the Sea (Gake no ue no Ponyo, 2008).
18. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York
and London: New York University Press, 2006), 17–18.
19. Animation meister, vol. 4, Oshii Mamoru interview, Bunka-cho media geijutsu­
puraza [Festival Museum Information Blog], http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/
museum/­meister/animation/vol4/ (accessed August 22, 2008).
20. The television program Mighty Atom was sponsored by Seika Co., Ltd., a
stationery­production company for children.
21. Gundam’s animation production, Sunrise, was part of Namco Co., one of
Japan’s biggest toy companies, as well as one of the principal producers of
plastic­model kits for children.
22. Animation meister, vol. 4.
23. Kitano Taiitsu, Nihon anime shigaku kenkyu jyosetsu [The Introduction of
Japanese Anime Studies], (Tokyo: Yahata Shoten, 1998), 62.
24. Animation meister, vol. 4.
25. Ibid.

152   Notes to Pages 78–82

 26. Yamamoto Taketoshi, Kamishibai—gaito no media, http://www.waseda.jp/
prj-m20th/yamamoto/profile/books/book00_10/content.htm (accessed
September 9, 2008).
27. Shinkai Makoto, Other Voices, Profile http://www2.odn.ne.jp/~ccs50140/
index.html (accessed September 10, 2008).
28. “Shinkai Makoto Interview,” in Voices of a Distant Star, DVD Bonus Features,
(Tokyo: Co Mix Wave Inc., 2002). Author’s Japanese translation.
29. Barbara Klinger, for instance, in writing about the condition of nontheatrical­
cinema in the United States, states that “for approximately two decades,
more U.S. viewers have been watching Hollywood films at home than at the
theater, and the revenues generated from the distribution of feature films in
the nation’s households have surpassed big-screen box office takes.” Barbara
Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006), 4.
30. Hoshi no koe, Shinkai Makoto rongu intabyu [Voices of a Distant Star, A Long
Interview with Shinkai Makoto], http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/
feature.html?docId=359763 (accessed September 3, 2008).
31. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 20.
32. Without Photoshop and AfterEffects, Shinkai stated that he could not have
produced­his own animations. E-mail interview with the author on September
8, 2008.
33. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 17.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
38. Ottawa 08 International Animation Festival—Schedule, A New Wave of
Japanese Animation, http://ottawa.awn.com/
index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=130&Itemid=790
(accessed­September 4, 2008). The emphases are mine.
39. Hu Tze Yue, “Japanese Independent Animation: Fuyu no hi and Its
Exclusivity,” International Journal of Comic Art 7:1 (spring-summer, 2005):
389–403.
40. Livia Monnet, “‘Such Is the Contrivance of the Cinematograph’: Dur(anim)
ation, Modernity, and Edo Culture in Tabaimo’s Animated Illustrations,” in
Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, ed. Steven T. Brown
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 189–225.
41. Yamamura Koji, Animeshon no sekai ni yokoso [Welcome to the Animation
World] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2006), 137–139.
42. The interview with Yamamura Koji was held on December 17, 2008, in his
studio­in Tokyo.
43. Liz Czach, “Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National
Cinema,” the Moving Image 4.1 (spring 2004): 76–88.
44. Jerry Beck, “Short List Portends Future Feature Trends: Crop of Oscar
Hopefuls Brings Large Selection of Toon Techniques to Table,” Variety
(December 13, 2005), http://www.variety.com/awardcentral_article/
VR1117934591.html?nav=news&categoryid=1985&cs=1&query=dreamworks
(accessed September 10, 2008).

Notes to Pages 83–90     153

 45. The Annecy International Animated Film Festival is one of the world’s most
prestigious animation film festivals. Annecy and three other animated film
festivals, Ottawa, Zagreb, and Hiroshima, are officially approved by ASIFA
(International Animated Film Association). Annecy became independent
from the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, and it has various categories including
“feature-length films,” “short films,” “films produced for television and adver-
tising,” “student films,” and “films made for the internet (since 2002).”
46. Kafuka: Inaka isha, Animations zadankai 5 [Kafka’s A Country Doctor, Animations
Table Talk, No.5], http://www.animations-cc.net/body-interview.html (accessed­
September 11, 2008).
47. Ibid.
48. Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,”
Boundary 2, 25.3 (autumn, 1998): 18.

Chapter 4: Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

1. Esther M. K. Cheung and Yiu-wai Chu, “Introduction: Between Home and
World,” in Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, ed. Esther
M. K. Cheung and Yiu-wai Chu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
xxxii.
2. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “General Introduction: What Is
Transnational Cinema?” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, Elizabeth
Ezra and Terry Rowden (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.
3. Arjun Appadurai indicates that the global cultural flows consist of media, tech-
nology, ideologies, ethnicities, and finances. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture
and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2 (1990): 1–24.
4. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, “Historical Introduction: Chinese Cinema (1896–
1996) and Transnational Film Studies,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas:
Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 3.
5. Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film:
Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 1.
6. Mohammed A. Bamyeh, “Transnationalism,” Current Sociology 41.3 (1993): 1.
7. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006), 5.
8. Cheung and Chu, “Introduction: Between Home and World,” xvi.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., xxii.
11. Yeh Yueh-yu, “Defining ‘Chinese,’” Jump Cut 42 (1998): 73–76.
12. In 1998, Tyti Soila, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, and Gunnar Iversen published
Nordic National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), and in 2005
the same cinemas are repackaged as transnational cinema in Andrew Nestingen
and Trevor G. Elkington, eds., Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic
Cinema in Transition (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005).
13. Nestingen and Elkington, Transnational Cinema, 12. The italics are mine.
14. Ibid., 14. The italics are mine.
15. Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xi.
16. Ibid., 8–9. The italics are mine.

154   Notes to Pages 91–102

 17. For further reading on globalization’s plurality, Mark Juergensmeyer’s short
essay is useful: “The Paradox of Nationalism in a Global World,” in The
Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity, ed. Ulf Hedetoft and Mete Hjort
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3–17.
18. Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in
the Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 1.
19. Nestingen and Elkington, Transnational Cinema, 6. The italic is mine.
20. H. D. Harootonian and Masao Miyoshi, “Introduction: The ‘After Life’
of Area Studies,” in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, ed. H. D.
Harootonian and Masao Miyoshi (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2002), 13.
21. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: British Film Institute, 1994),
209.
22. Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas, 25. The italic is mine.
23. Cheung and Chu, “Introduction: Between Home and World,” xxxii.
24. Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in
Transnational Cinema, ed. Ezra and Rowden, 23.
25. Diane Negra. “Romance and/as Tourism: Heritage Whiteness and the (Inter)
National Imaginary in the New Woman’s Film,” in Transnational Cinema, ed.
Ezra and Rowden, 178.
26. Ezra and Rowden, “General Introduction: What Is Transnational Cinema?”
13.
27. See Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, Chinese on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006), especially the introduction.
28. Asako in Ruby Shoes was released in Japan with a different title: Jun’ai-fu (the
literal translation is “Pure Love Pedigree”).
29. The four production companies are Koo & C Film Company (South Korea),
Shochiku Co. Lid. (Japan), Cinema Service (South Korea), and Terra Source
Venture Capital Co. (South Korea). Film Indexes Online, http://
film.chadwyck.com.proxy.library.carleton.ca/fiaf/framesets/
fii_frameset.­htm (accessed November 4, 2007).
30. Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient, “Interethnic Romance and Political
Reconciliation in Asako in Ruby Shoes,” in New Korean Cinema, ed. Chi-Yun­Shin
and Julian Stringer (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 193–209.
31. Ibid., 199.
32. Ibid.
33. Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 46.
34. Dianna Crane, “Culture and Globalization: Theoretical Models and Emerging
Trends,” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, ed. Diana
Crane, Nobuko Kawashima, and Ken’ichi Kawasaki (New York and London:
Routledge, 2002), 17. The italics are mine.
35. Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 44.
36. The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is a specified video format compatible with
the PlayStation Portable console. It is “an optical disc medium developed by
Sony. . . . It can hold up to 1.8 gigabytes of data, which can include games,
movies, music, or a combination thereof.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Universal_Media_Disc (March 14, 2007).

Notes to Pages 102–109     155

 37. Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 2–6.
38. The first run was from April to September 2003; the second run was from
December 15, 2003, to December 26, 2004; the third run was during the sum-
mer of 2004; and the fourth was at the end of 2004. The cable television station
LaLa was scheduled to broadcast the program for the fifth time in April 2006,
but I have not confirmed it.
39. Kaori Hayashi, Fuyusona ni hamatta watashitachi: Junai, namida, masukomi
soshite Kankoku [We, Captivated by “Winter Sonata”: Pure Love, Tears, Mass
Communication, and South Korea] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2005), 128.
40. Ibid., 134–135.
41. Koichi Iwabuchi, “Time and the Neighbor: Japanese Media Consumption
of Asia in the 1990s,” in Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic, ed. Koichi
Iwabuchi, Stephen Mueche, and Mandy Thomas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2004), 151–174.
42. “Cast Interview,” Disc 2, The Hotel Venus, special ed. DVD, directed by
Takahata Hideta (Tokyo: Victor Entertainment, 2004).
43. In 1973, one of the biggest Japanese snack companies, Calbee Foods Co., Ltd.,
started producing bags of potato chips with 3-D “baseball cards” featuring the
most popular Japanese baseball players flickering in two poses.

Chapter 5: Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination

An earlier version of this chapter, entitled “Ethnically Marked ‘Heroes’: From
Rikidozan to Shunpei in Blood and Bones,” was published in Post Script: Essays in
Film and Humanities 28.2 (winter/spring 2009): 101–111.
1. The film received various awards from the Japanese Academy Awards, in-
cluding Best Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor,
and it received the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Hochi
Film Award for Best Director, the Kinema Junpo Awards for Best Actor, Best
Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, as well as Mainichi Film
Concours for Best Actor, Best Film, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting
Actress. This information is cited from the film’s official site, Blood & Bones,
2004, http://www.lhp.com.sg/blood (accessed June 4, 2007).
2. “Chi to hone shinario” [The Screenplay of Blood and Bones], in Eiga Chi to hone
no sekai [The World of Blood and Bones], ed. Sai Yoichi, Chon Wishin, and Yan
Sogiru (Tokyo: Shinkansha, 2004) 94.
3. Mochinaga Masaya, “Yan Sogiru intabu: Zainichi Korian o egaite kakkiteki na
eiga da to omoimasu” [The Interview with Yan Sogiru: An Extraordinary Film
Depicting Zainichi Koreans], Kinema junpo 1417 (November 2004): 37.
4. In the screenplay of Blood and Bones, the casting name for Shunpei is listed as
“Beat Takeshi.” As I explained in the introduction, Kitano and his company,
Office Kitano, have intentionally used his two names for different purposes:
“Kitano Takeshi” as a creator in a cinematic field and “Beat Takeshi” as a televi-
sion personality. However, I use “Kitano Takeshi” throughout this chapter because
this is the more familiar name outside of Japan due to his career as a filmmaker.
See Aaron Gerow, Kitano Takeshi (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 1–13.
5. Russell Edwards, “Blood and Bones (Chi to hone),” Variety (December 6–12,
2004): 42.

156   Notes to Pages 110–114

 6. The film was screened at the Pusan International Film Festival in October
2004. In the interview, Sai stated that the film was scheduled to be released
in South Korea in fall or winter in 2004, but I have no information regard-
ing how many theaters screened the film nor how much money it made. Sai
Yoichi, “Eiga Chi to hone kantoku intabyu; Chi to hone wa eigakai hisabisa no
daibakuchi da” [The Interview with the Director of Blood and Bones: The Film
Industry’s Biggest Gamble], the Tsukuru (December 2004): 100.
7. “Blood and Bones,” Wikipedia, June 4, 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Blood_and_Bones (accessed August 12, 2009). The film and DVD distribu-
tor Tartan declared bankruptcy and merged with the U.S. company Palisades
Media Group to form Palisades Tartan in summer 2008.
8. I adapted this concept of “cultural imagination” from Toni Morrison’s expres-
sion of “the White American literature imagination.” Toni Morrison, Playing in
the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Picador, 1993).
9. Rey Chow introduces the term of “primitive passions” in the context of under-
standing “how visuality operates in the postcolonial politics of non-Western
cultures,” especially when we consider “the fact that non-Westerners also gaze,
are voyeurs and spectators.” She writes, “For me, the lesson from such eye-
opening works on the question of primitivism in East-West relations is not only
the exploitation of the non-West by the West but how this dialectic between
formal innovation and primitivism characterizes the hierarchical relations
of cultural production in the ‘third world’ as well. In the ‘third world,’ there
is a similar movement to primitivize: the primitive materials that are seized
upon here are the socially oppressed classes—women, in particular—who
then become the predominant components of a new literature. It would not
be farfetched to say that modern Chinese literature turns ‘modern’ precisely
by seizing upon the primitive that is the subaltern, the woman, and the child.”
Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary
Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 13–21.
10. Koichi Iwabuchi explicates this “popular Asianism” in 1990s Japan as a per-
ception stressing “on the temporal lag between Japan and other Asian nations.”
He further explains it as follows: “Now, modernizing Asian nations are nos-
talgically seen to embody a social vigor and optimism for the future that Japan
allegedly is losing or has lost. This perception, revealing as it does Japan’s
refusal to accept that it shares the same temporality as other Asian nations,
illustrates­the asymmetrical flow of intraregional cultural consumption in East
Asia.” Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 159.
11. Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in
Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2003), 3.
12. Shunpei actually kills his mistress, Kiyoko, after she becomes comatose, but
this murder is not depicted as an act of violence but rather his act of mercy in
the film’s diegetic space.
13. The online name, Yukiya, “Dokan to kuru kessaku!” [The Moving
Masterpiece], Eiga seikatsu, January 27, 2007, http://www.eigaseikatsu.com/
imp/101818/245688/ (accessed June 4, 2007). All translations from Japanese
to English are by the author.
14. The online name, Rikutsuya, “Atama no okashii oyaji no hansei” [A Story

Notes to Pages 115–119     157

 about a Fucking Crazy Old Man], Eiga seikatsu, January 25, 2007, http://
www.eigaseikatsu.com/imp/101818/245270/ (accessed June 4, 2007).
15. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies, Gender, Genre, Excess,” Film Quarterly 44.4
(1992): 2–13.
16. Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
17. Paul Gormley, The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005), 13. The italics are by the author.
18. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(London: Picador, 1993).
19. Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Colombia
University Press, 2002), 119.
20. Sato Tadao, Nihon eigashi 2 [Japanese Cinema History 2] (Tokyo: Iwamani
shoten,­2006), 77.
21. Oshima directed a good number of documentaries for television in the 1960s
and 1970s, such as The Forgotten Army (Wasurerareta kobun, 1963), which
focuses on the injured ex-soldiers who are unable to receive the government’s
financial support due to their status as zainichi Koreans.
22. Yunbogi’s Diary (Yunbogi no nikki), screenplay by Oshima Nagisa, director
Oshima Nagisha, Sozosha, 1965.
23. Sato Tadao, Oshima Nagisa no sekai [The World of Oshima Nagisa] (Tokyo:
Chikuma shoten, 1973), 137.
24. The online name, Peacha, “Kono eiga wa kessaku da” [This Film Is a
Masterpiece!], Eiga seikatsu, February 5, 2007, http://www.eigaseikatsu.com/
imp/101818/247702/ (accessed June 4, 2007).
25. The information regarding the drama and Kim Hiro is from Kim Hiro jiken, http://
www.alpha-net.ne.jp/users2/knight9/kimuhiro.htm (accessed February 27, 2008). The
television drama is named “Jitsuroku hanzaishi shirizu, Kim no senso raifuruma sat-
sujin jiken” [The Crime Document Series: Kim’s War, the Crime of the Gun-Crazy],
writer Hayasaka Akira, director Odagiri Masaaki, Fuji Television, April 5, 1991.
26. Gerow, Kitano Takeshi, 29.
27. Ibid., 31.
28. Gerow points out the fact that Kitano often quotes right-wing nationalists such
as Mishima Yukio and Nishibe Susumu, and it is intriguing to sense Kitano’s
concept about a “correct” social structure—having a dictator in each district—
presented in the translation of Kitano’s words. Gerow, Kitano Takeshi, 32.
29. Kitano Takeshi has published six autobiographical books from the publisher
Rocking-on from 2001 to 2007, and his other book Komanechi! Beat Takeshi
zen kiroku [Comaneci! Complete Chronicle about “Beat Takeshi”] (Tokyo:
Shinchosha, 1999) was published in paperback, which clearly indicates how
thoroughly the information about Kitano has penetrated in Japan.
30. Amy Borovoy, The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of
Nurturance in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1.
31. Terauchi Kantaro Ikka [The Family of Terauchi Kantaro], Wikipedia, February 18,
2008, http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/寺内貫太郎一家 (accessed March 1, 2008).
32. Even in the 1990s, due to the program’s high popularity, the main casts were
hired to appear in character for a television commercial. The program was re-
produced into three drama specials in 1991, 1998, and 2000. In 1999, the drama
was also adapted as a theatrical play and presented at the Shinbashi Enbujo.

158   Notes to Pages 119–124

 33. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture,
1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 122. Matsumutsu
Tomomi, Gappon watakushi puroresu no mikata desu [A Double Volume, I am a
Professional Wrestling Fan] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1994), 310.
34. Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 124.
35. Ibid.
36. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London:
Reakton Books, 2006), 146.
37. Aaron Gerow, “Wrestling with Godzilla: Intertextuality, Childish
Spectatorship, and the National Body,” in In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop
Culture Icons on the Global Stage, ed. William Tsutsui and Michiko Ito (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 74. Irifuji Motoyoshi’s original essay is
“‘Honto no honmono’ no mondai toshite no puroresu,” published in Gendai
Shiso 30.3 (February 2002): 78–95.
38. Gerow, “Wrestling with Godzilla,” 75.
39. Muramatsu Tomomi, Rikidozan ga ita [There Was a Man Called Rikidozan]
(Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 2002), 333–345.
40. Ibid., 347.
41. In addition to the aforementioned Muramatsu Tomomi’s Rikidozan ga ita,
there are a number of books describing the zainichi persona of Rikidozan,
such as Oshita Eiji, Eien no Rikidozan [Rikidozan, Forever] (Tokyo: Tokuma
shoten, 1991); Lee Sunil, Mou hitori no Rikidozan [Another Rikidozan] (Tokyo:
Shogakkan, 1996); Tanaka Keiko, Otto Rikidozan no dokoku [My Husband,
Rikidozan’s Wail] (Tokyo: Futabasha, 2003); and Kim Tegon, Kitachosen ban
Rikodozan monogatari [Rikodozan’s Story, North Korean Version], trans. Park
Jung Myung (Tokyo: Kashiwashobo, 2003).
42. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 11.
43. Yomota Inuhiko, Nihon eiga to sengo no shinwa [Japanese Cinema and Postwar
Myths] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2007), 204.
44. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Conclusion
1. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).
2. Naoki Sakai, “Imperial Nationalism and the Comparative Perspective,”
Positions: East Asia Cultures Critic 17.1 (spring 2009): 173.
3. Robert N. Bellah, “Japan’s Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of
Watsuji Tetsuro,” Journal of Asian Studies 24.4 (1965): 573–594 and Kevin M.
Doak, “Building National Identity through Ethnicity: Ethnology in Wartime
Japan and After,” Journal of Japanese Studies 27 (2001): 1–39, cited in Sakai’s
essay. Kato Shuichi, Zasshu bunka: Nihon no chiisana kibou (Tokyo: Kodansha,
1956); Nakane Chie, Tate shakai no ningen kaneki: Tamitsu shakai no riron (Tokyo:
Kodansha, 1967); Doi Takeo, “Amae” no kouzou (Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1971).
4. Amino Yoshihiko, “Nihon” towa nanika (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000); Fujiwara
Masahiko, Kokka no hinkaku (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2005).
5. Aaron Gerow, “Introduction,” in Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies, ed.

Notes to Pages 125–133     159

 Abé Mark Nornes and Aaron Gerow (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 2009), 1.
6. Ibid., 1–7.
7. See the official site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan regarding the
Anime Ambassador at “Puresu ririsu, anime taishi shunin ni tsuite,” http://
www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/press/release/h20/3/rls_0319e.html (accessed July 1, 2010).
8. Matsutani Soichiro and others, “Tokushu, eigakai no tettei kenkyu, soron
Nihon eiga no kakyo wa honmono ka” [Special Topic: Thorough Analysis on
the Japanese Screen Business; Is the “Boom” of the Japanese Cinema Real?],
Tsukuru 38.7 (July 2008): 24–27.
9. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(テレビドラマ) (accessed July 25, 2009).
10. Yamane Sadao, “Nihon eiga jihyo 241,” Kinema junpo 1528 (March 15, 2009):
130–131.
11. Ibid.
12. In 1995, Fuji Television and Toei produced the film, Boys over Flowers (Hana yori
dango, Kusuda Yasunori) prior to the final.
13. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/
花より男子F#2008.E5.B9.B4.EF.BC.88.E6.9D.B1.E5.AE.9D.E7.89.88.EF.BC.89
(accessed July 31, 2009).
14. Hirota Keisuke, “Ima ya saidai no eiga seisakugaisha terebikyoku ni kaserareta
sekimu” [The Obligations of Television Stations, the Current Biggest Film
Production Companies], Tsukuru 38.7 (July 2008): 42–49.
15. Yamamoto Mataichiro, “Terebi wa taisetsuda keredo izon shisugiru to eiga ga
usuku naru” [Partnership with Television is Important, but Cinema’s Existence
Will Become Questionable If We Depend on Television Too Much], Tsukuru
38.7 (July 2008): 58–61.
16. Hoshino Koji, “Oku no hito ni mite morau to iu animeshon no genten”
[Showing It to as Many People as Possible: The Standing Point of Animation],
Tsukuru 38.7 (July 2008): 66–69.
17. Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and Princess Mononoke (1997)
have historically been the best three box-office attractions and respectively made
30.4, 19.6, and 19.4 billion yen. “Nihon eiga rekidai kogyo shu’nyu besuto­50”
[The Best 50 Box-Office in Japanese Cinema], Eiga bijinesu deta bukku 2008 [Film
Business Data Book 2008] (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 2008), 182.
18. Keizai Sangyosho Shomu Joho Seisaku-kyoku [Ministry of Economy, Trade and
Industry] supervised; Dejitaru Kontentsu Kyokai [Digital Content Association of
Japan], ed., Dejitaru kontentsu hakusho 2001 [Digital Content White Paper 2001] (Tokyo:
Digital Content Association of Japan, 2001), 3. The emphasis is by the author.
19. Fukutomi Tadakazu, “Kontentsu to ha nanika” [What Are “Contents”?],
Kontentsu-gaku [Contents Studies], Hasegawa Fumio and Fukutomi Tadakazu,
eds. (Kyoto: Sekaishisosha, 2007), 9.
20. Azuma Hiroki, Kontentsu no shiso [Theory of “Contents”] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2007), 10.
21. Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and
Shion Kono (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3.
22. Ibid., 6.
23. Ibid., 25–95.
24. Anon., “Nihon ga kawatta, kin’nen no omona kyodo seisaku sakuhin”
[Changing Japan: The Recent Coproduced Films], Eiga bijinesu deta bukku 2008
[Film Business Data Book 2008] (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 2008), 150–151.

160   Notes to Pages 133–138

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Interviews
Ishibashi Yoshimasa (filmmaker), June 2007, Tokyo, Japan.
Kato Haruyo (filmmaker), March 2007, Ottawa, Canada (e-mail).
Kawase Naomi (filmmaker), December 2006, Nara, Japan.
Kore’eda Hirokazu (filmmaker), June 2006, Tokyo, Japan.
Kurosawa Kiyoshi (filmmaker), June 2006, Tokyo, Japan.
Matsuhe Tetsuharu (filmmaker), March 2007, Ottawa, Canada (e-mail).
Shimizu Takashi (filmmaker), December 2006, Tokyo, Japan.
Shinkai Makoto (animation artist), September 2008, Ottawa, Canada (e-mail).
Terada Yasunori (filmmaker), March 2007, Ottawa, Canada (e-mail).
Tezuka Yoshiharu (filmmaker), March 2007, Ottawa, Canada (e-mail).
Yamamura Koji (animation artist), December 2008, Tokyo, Japan.
Yokohama Satoko (filmmaker), September 2009, Ottawa, Canada.

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Bold page numbers refer to figures.
Abe Casio, 13, 17, 23
Ace Pictures, 31
Agamben, Giorgio, 129
Allen, Michael, 61
Allison, Anne, 41–42
Altman, Rick, 48
Amamiya Karin, 70, 71
Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters
(Tachiguishi retsuden; Oshii), 76,
82–83, 84
Amazon.com, 48, 108
American culture, 5, 8–9, 30, 41–42,
120. See also Hollywood films
Amino Yoshihiko, 132
animation: art, 89; artists, 19, 20, 89;
Hollywood films, 74–75, 88; tele-
vision programs, 76, 77, 86, 90,
107–108, 109–110
anime: audiences, 75, 81, 88, 95; digital
technology used, 20, 83–85, 87,
94; discursive construction of,
76–80; distinction from animation,
74–75, 76, 88, 96; distribution
171
INDEX
technologies, 21, 81–82, 83–84,
87–88; diversity, 74, 75, 76, 88, 96;
exhibitions, 79, 90; Japanese cul-
ture and, 77; media convergence
and, 75, 80–83, 85, 86, 87–88,
95–96; otaku culture, 75, 137–138;
personal production, 83–88, 96;
product tie-ins, 19, 81; robot genre,
75, 81, 86; scholarship on, 74,
76–80, 89, 95, 151n8; studio pro-
ductions, 80, 152n17; success, 21,
133; television programs, 43, 78,
81, 88; use of term, 151n2; video-
tapes, 43, 81, 95
An’no Hideaki, 19, 21, 75
Aoyama Shinji, 13
Appadurai, Arjun, 3, 5, 10, 11, 12
Argento, Dario, 40
Asako in Ruby Shoes (Sunaebo) (E.
J-young), 105–107
Asia: DVD distribution, 45; film in-
dustries, 15–16, 138–139; horror
films, 34, 45; Japanese films set in,
 22–23; Japanese views, 111, 118,
138; J-drama circulation, 16–17;
migrant workers from, 23, 120;
pan-Asianism, 3, 11, 23. See also
individual countries
assimilation, 4–5, 10, 11
Audition (Miike Takashi), 33
Azuma Hiroki, 16, 137–138
Barnouw, Eric, 53
Barsam, Richard, 53
Barthes, Roland, 61
Bartlett, Christopher A., 4
Bazin, André, 53
Berry, Chris, 52, 100
Blood and Bones (Chi to hone; Sai), 114–
116, 118–120, 122, 123–128, 126,
127, 129–130, 156n1
Bordwell, David, 41, 58–59, 76, 77
Borovoy, Amy, 124
Bourne, Randolph, 5
Brown, Steven T., 78–79, 80
Browne, Nick, 100
Bruzzl, Stella, 53
cameras: digital, 25, 38, 53, 61, 67,
70–71, 72; surveillance, 37–38
Carroll, Noël, 53
CGI. See computer-generated imagery
Cheung, Esther M. K., 100
Chinese films: documentaries, 52–53,
66; transnational context, 98–101;
Urban Generation, 20. See also
Hong Kong cinema
Chinese-language films, 15–16, 23, 45,
98–101, 109
Chow, Rey, 118, 157n9
Chu, Yiu-wai, 100
Chung, Hye Seung, 106–107
cinema complexes, 21–22, 56, 67, 134,
150n30. See also theaters
Clements, Jonathan, 74
comics. See manga comics
computer-generated imagery (CGI)
effects,­28, 36, 74–75, 83, 87
Consins, Mark, 53
convergence. See media convergence
Corrigan, Timothy, 35
Cortese, Amy, 11
172   INDEX
Crane, Diana, 108
cultural imagination, 22–24, 115, 120,
123–125
culture, 12. See also popular culture;
transnational culture
Cupola, Where the Furnaces Glow
(Kyupora no aru machi; Urayama),
121
Czach, Liz, 90
Danish cinema, 20, 102. See also Nordic
cinema
Davis, Darrell William, 15–16, 17
Desser, David, 100
Diffrient, David Scott, 106–107
digital errors, 36–37
digital technology: anime production,
20, 83–85, 87, 94; cameras, 25, 38,
53, 61, 67, 70–71, 72; CGI effects,
28, 36, 74–75, 83, 87; contents
business, 16, 136–138; cost reduc-
tions, 15, 67; for documentaries,
54, 56, 67, 69; film editing, 35, 36,
56; genre films and, 24; graphic
software, 20; impact, 19–22,
24, 45, 50; in J-horror, 34, 36,
37–38; media convergence and,
16–19, 87–88, 133–134, 135–136;
mimicry of older technologies,
61; personal use, 85; piracy, 44,
45; projectors, 46; shift to, 30;
V-CINEMA, 21; video compact
discs, 16–17; video recording, 15,
19, 21, 38. See also DVDs; Internet
directors, 18–19, 20, 24–25, 66, 70–71,
89, 91
Disney Company, 15, 74, 75, 76, 88, 96
documentaries: audiences, 67–68,
69; authenticity, 53, 54–55, 58;
Chinese, 52–53, 66; contemporary,
52–56, 72–73; democracy of, 72;
digital technology used, 54, 56,
67, 69; directors, 66; distinction
from fiction films, 53; financing,
70, 150n38; foreign, 54, 67, 73;
Japanese tradition, 52, 54–55,
148n4; personal, 52, 54–55, 56,
62–63, 66, 67, 68–72; PR films, 55,
66, 149n11; scholarship on, 53–55;
 screenings in small theaters,
56, 67; by students, 67, 69–70;
subgenres, 53, 56; for television,
57–58, 67–68; on zainichi Koreans,
121–122, 158n21
documentary-style dramas, 19–20,
58–59
Dogme, 20, 95
DVDs (digital video disks): anime, 21,
83–84; chapter format, 35; home
viewing, 21, 35, 85; Japanese
market, 21, 22, 38–39, 44, 45, 46,
49–50; J-horror, 21, 38–41, 43–46,
47, 48; world market, 40–41, 44,
45, 47–48, 115
Elkington, Trevor G., 101–102, 103
ethnic cinema, 23, 114–117, 118–120,
121, 122–128, 129–130
exported film (yushutsu-eiga), 41, 42–43
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
(Gokushiteki erosu—Renka 1974;
Hara), 68
Ezra, Elizabeth, 97, 104
Family of Terauchi Kantaro, The (Terauchi
Kantaro ikka), 116, 158n32
Farquhar, Mary, 100
Fatherless (Chichinaki jidai; Shigeno), 72
film festivals, 12, 13, 42, 63, 66, 67, 69,
89, 90, 91, 154n45
film industry, Japanese: audiences, 22;
distribution structure, 13, 21–22,
30, 46; exports, 41, 42–43, 133;
financing, 2, 14, 51, 70, 134;
future of, 133–136, 139; govern-
mental support, 132–133, 138; in
interwar period, 131–132; market-
ing, 11–12, 108, 115, 134–135,
136; media convergence, 16–19,
133–136; post-studio era, 12–15,
18–19, 30–32, 49, 131, 134; renais-
sance seen, 12–13, 39–40, 56–57;
restructuring, 30, 51; size, 16;
television industry and, 17–18,
133–136; wartime, 120–121. See
also studios
film schools, 67, 69
Fitzgerald, David, 4–5
INDEX     173
Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (Kafka:
Inaka isha; Yamamura), 76, 88,
91–95, 94, 95
Fu, Poshek, 100
Fuji Television, 31, 67, 134–135
Fujiwara Masahiko, 132
genre films: digital technology used,
24; DVD distribution, 21, 44;
jidaigeki (period film), 22, 47,
51–52; media, 46–47; Nikkatsu
mukokuseki action, 6–8, 11; popu-
larity, 1; shifting categories, 47–49;
yakuza films (ninkyo-eiga), 11. See
also J-horror
Gerow, Aaron, 18, 123, 127, 133
Ghibli. See Studio Ghibli
Ghoshal, Sumantra, 4
girls. See schoolgirl culture
Glasses (Megane; Ogigami), 9, 10
global cinema, 1–2, 40–41, 139
globalization, 102. See also transna-
tional culture
glocalization, 2, 3, 10, 108
GO (Yukisada), 116, 117, 122, 124
Gormley, Paul, 119
Grenville, Bruce, 79
Hall, Stuart, 24
Hannerz, Ulf, 3
Hara Kazuo, 54, 68–69, 71
Hara Masato, 44
Harootunian, H. D., 103
Hashiguchi Ryosuke, 18–19
Hayashi Kaori, 111
Hero (Suzuki), 134–135
Higson, Andrew, 104
Hirota Keisuke, 136
Hjort, Mette, 102
HKFlix.com, 43, 47
Hogarth, David, 52
Hollywood films: animated, 74–75,
88; blockbusters, 41; CGI effects,
28; DVD distribution, 41; horror,
145n12; J-horror remakes, 32, 33,
35, 39, 43; “new woman’s,” 104–
105; violence, 118–119; Westerns,
7, 9, 93
Home (Homu; Kobayashi), 72
home theater, 35, 41, 85
Hong Kong cinema, 16, 45, 100, 109
Honokaa Boy (Honokaa boi; Sanada), 9,
10
horror films, 34, 45, 145n12. See also
J-horror
Hoshino Koji, 15
Hotel Venus, The (Takahata), 97, 110–
113
Hutchings, Peter, 47
Hu Tze Yue, 89
Igarashi, Yoshikuni, 125
immigrants, 23, 67, 120. See also
Koreans
imperialism, 112–113, 120, 129
Inagawa Masato, 13
independent film production, 14–15,
20, 25, 30–31, 32, 49, 147n53
Initial D (Wai and Siu), 107–109
intermedia, 95. See also media conver-
gence
Internet: DVD retailers, 45, 47–48; film
downloads, 44–45; in J-horror
films, 34–35; media convergence,
87–88; porn sites, 105
Irifuji Motoyoshi, 127
Itakura Fumiaki, 11
Ito Junji, 40
Iwabuchi, Koichi, 2–3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11,
108, 111, 118
Iwai Shunji, 12
Jameson, Frederic, 49
Japanese government, 8, 132–133, 137,
138
Japanese International Tourist Bureau,
42
Japaneseness, 91
J-drama, 16–17
Jenkins, Henry, 16, 86, 87
J-horror (Japan horror): boundaries,
47–48; context, 31–32; cultural
specificity, 43; directors, 31, 39;
distribution, 38; DVDs, 21,
38–41, 43–46, 47, 48; early, 35;
as film genre and movement, 29;
fragmented narratives, 35, 36,
38; Hollywood remakes, 32, 33,
174   INDEX
35, 39, 43; marketing, 29, 31, 43,
44; new media rhetoric, 35–36;
omnibuses, 39, 40; production
technology,­30, 32, 35–36, 38;
scholarship on, 47; series, 31–32,
39; technology motifs, 2, 34, 36,
37–38; urban imagery, 32–34
Johnny Guitar (Ray), 93
J-Pitch, 138
Ju-on series, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37–38, 39
Kabuki theater, 109
Kafka, Franz, 91
Kallen, Horace M., 5
kamishibai, 82–83
Kamome Diner (Kamome shokudo;
Ogigami), 9–10
Kanetaka Kaoru, 8
Kanryu boom (Korean wave), 23, 111,
113
Kapur, Jyotsna, 48–49, 50
Kawakita Nagamasa, 42
Kawamoto Kihochiro, 89
Kawase Naomi, 19, 55–56, 62–66,
150n28
Kawaura Ken’ichi, 42
Kennedy, Barbara, 119
Kim Il-sung, 128
Kimizuka Ryoichi, 135
Kim Sujin, 116
King, Geoff, 30
Kinoshita, Chika, 29
Kinugasa Teinosuke, 42
Kishi Matsuo, 7
Kitano Taiitsu, 81
Kitano Takeshi: in Blood and Bones,
114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 123–124,
126–127; as filmmaker, 2, 12, 17–
18, 38, 57, 123; star persona (Beat
Takeshi), 17–18, 123–124, 156n4;
writings, 18
Klinger, Barbara, 41
Kobayashi Akira, 7, 8, 11, 142n28
Kobayashi Satomi, 10
Kobayashi Takahiro, 72
kontentsu sangyo (contents business), 16,
136–138, 139
Korean-language films, 2, 110, 113,
129–130
Koreans: actors, 111–112; characters,
105–107, 111–112; guerrillas, 121;
migration to North Korea, 121,
128–129; zainichi, 23, 114–119,
121–125, 128–130
Korean wave, 23, 111, 113
Kore’eda Hirokazu, 18, 20, 38, 55,
57–58, 62
Kristeve, Julia, 33
Kuroi Kazuo, 39–40
Kurosawa Akira, 22, 42, 47
Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 21, 34–35, 38
Lamarre, Thomas, 26, 78, 80
Lee, Ang, 15–16, 45
Levi, Antonia, 77
Ley Lines (Nihon kuroshakai—ley lines;
Miike), 23
Li Xianglan, 120–121
Lohas (Lifestyle of Health and
Sustainability) cinema, 9–10,
11–12
Longest Night in Shanghai, The (Zhang),
138–139
“Love Song, A” (Ai no uta: Chonmaru
saranheyo) CD, 112–113, 112
Lowenstein, Adam, 48, 49, 50
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, 98–99, 100,
101, 104
Lumière, Louis, 73
MacDonald, Kevin, 53
manga comics, 40, 79, 88, 107–108
Manovich, Lev, 61
Marebito (Shimizu Takashi), 32, 36–37
Marks, Laura U., 36
martial arts, 117, 125
materiality, 135, 136
McCarthy, Helen, 74
McRoy, Jay, 47
media convergence: anime and, 75,
80–83, 85, 86, 87–88, 95–96;
digital­technology and, 16–19,
87–88, 133–134, 135–136; films
and, 16–19, 50, 107, 109, 133–136;
television cinema, 133–136
Mekas, Jonas, 67, 68
Mes, Tom, 30
Miike Takashi, 21, 23, 33
INDEX     175
Ministry of Economy, Trade and
Industry (METI), 137, 138, 139
Miyao, Daisuke, 17–18, 78
Miyazaki Hayao, 12, 19, 57, 136
Miyoshi, Masao, 103
Monnet, Livia, 89
Mori Naoto, 19
Morrison, Toni, 120
Mount Head (Atama-yama; Yamamura),
90–91, 92
Mourning Forest, The (Mogari no mori;
Kawase), 55, 62
mukokuseki (non-Japaneseness), 6, 7–8,
9, 10–11
Muraishi Masaya, 72
Muramatsu Tomomi, 128
Murata Minoru, 42
My Wife Is Filipina/Tsuma wa Filipina
(Terada), 70, 150n38
Nakata Hideo, 31, 32–34, 44, 45
Napier, Susan J., 77–78
Naruse Mikio, 42
national cinema, critical framework,
98, 101, 103–104, 105, 106, 131
national film industries, 41
national identities, 3, 23, 24, 90, 93,
102, 105, 138
nationalism, 110, 111, 137
Negra, Diane, 104
Nestingen, Andrew, 101–102, 103
New God, The (Atarashii kamisama;
Tsuchiya), 56, 69, 70–71
new media rhetoric, 35–36
NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai), 9, 67,
111
Nichols, Bill, 53–54, 65
Nikkatsu studio, 6–8, 11, 13–14, 31
Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai;
Kore’eda), 20, 55, 57–61, 60
Nobody to Watch over Me (Dare mo
mamottekurenai;­Kimizuka), 135
Nordic cinema, 20, 101–103
Nornes, Abé Mark, 52, 54–55, 68–69,
71
North Korea, 121, 128–129
Ogawa Shinsuke, 52–53
Ogigami Naoko, 9–10
Okinawa, 68, 122
Onibaba (Onibaba’a; Shindo), 48–49
Oshii Mamoru, 19, 75–76, 80, 81,
82–83, 96
Oshima Nagisa, 47, 121–122, 158n21
otaku culture, 75, 137–138
Other, 6, 10, 111, 112, 120
Otomo Katsuhiro, 19
OVAs (original video animations), 75,
76, 96, 108
Oyama Masutatsu, 117, 129
pan-Asianism, 3, 11, 23
particularism, 132
Peep “TV” Show (Tsuchiya), 71
personal documentaries (shiteki doku-
menrari), 55, 56, 62–63, 66, 67,
68–72
photo-realism, 20
Pixar, 75, 88, 96
Plantinga, Carl, 53
Poe, Edgar Allan, 40
Pokémon (Pocket Monster), 16, 42, 43,
109–110
Ponech, Trevor, 53
Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo; Miyazaki),
136
Pool (Puru; Omori), 9, 10
popular culture: for children, 41–42;
exports,­41–42, 43, 106; Korean,
23, 111, 112, 113; media conver-
gence, 16–19. See also American
culture; anime; genre films; tele-
vision programs; transnational
culture
postmodernity, 137–138
post-studio era, 12–15, 18–19, 30–32,
49, 131, 134
Prince, Stephen, 118
program pictures, 13, 31–32, 51,
143n40
Pulse (Kairo; Kurosawa), 34–35
Ray, Nicholas, 93
realist aesthetic, 54, 59, 61, 76
reality television, 62
Renov, Michael, 53
riaruna eiga (realistic film), 53, 56, 62,
63–66
176   INDEX
Rikidozan, 115, 116, 117, 125, 128, 129
Ringu cycle, 31–34, 44, 45
Romero, George A., 40
Rosen, Philip, 53
Rowden, Terry, 97, 104
Russell, Catherine, 78
Sai Yoichi, 23, 122. See also Blood and
Bones
Sakai, Naoki, 132
Sato Makoto, 69–70, 72
Sato Tadao, 51, 72, 121
Scheibler, Susan, 54
schoolgirl culture, 44, 88
Seisaku Iinkai, 14, 15
Sharp, Jasper, 30
Shigeno Shuichi, 107
Shigeno Yoshihisa, 72
Shimizu Takashi, 31, 32, 35–37, 39.
See also Ju-on series
Shindo Kaneto, 48–49, 147n53
Shinkai Makoto, 20, 80, 84–88, 96
Shochiku studio, 13, 14, 15, 30, 31
shojo manga, 88
Simons, Jan, 50
Siu Fai Mak. See Initial D
South Korea: film industry, 15, 23,
45, 106, 138; popular culture,
23, 111, 112, 113; relations with
Japan, 106, 110, 111, 129. See also
Koreans
Straight, Rob, 34
Studio Ghibli, 14–15, 19, 80, 136,
152n17
studios: distribution structure, 13,
14, 21–22, 30; Five-Company
Agreement, 6–7; history, 131–132;
program pictures, 31–32; revenues,
143n45; roles, 30, 31. See also film
industry
Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh),
65
surveillance cameras, 37–38
Suzuki Masayuki, 134–135
Suzuki Shirouyasu, 68
synesthesia, 10
Tabaimo, 89
Taiwan, 45, 99, 100, 120
Takahashi Banmei, 21
Takahata Hideta, 97, 110–113
Takakura Ken, 23
Takeda Miyuki, 68
Tanikawa Shuntaro, 70–71
Tarachime (Kawase), 56, 62, 63–66, 64,
65
Tea Fight (Wang Yeming), 139
technology. See digital technology
television cinema, 133–136
television industry, film industry and,
17–18, 133–136
television programs: in 1950s, 9; ani-
mated, 43, 76, 77, 78, 81, 86, 90,
107–108, 109–110; documentaries,
57–58, 67–68; dramas, 116, 123,
124; horror, 39, 40; J-drama, 16–
17; Korean, 111, 112; reality, 62;
sponsors, 81; stars, 17; travel, 8
Terada Yashunori, 70, 150n38
Terayama Shuji, 70–71
Tezuka Osamu, 81
Tezuka Yoshiharu, 70
theaters: complexes, 21–22, 56, 67,
134, 150n30; digital projectors, 46;
prices, 44, 46
Thompson, Kristin, 76, 77
Through the Night (Yoru o kakete; Kim),
116
Titanic (Cameron), 41
T-JOY, 21, 46
TNCs. See transnational corporations
Toei Doga, 80, 152n17
Toei studios, 11, 13, 21, 30, 46
Toho studios, 13, 15, 30, 31, 49, 134,
135, 143n45
Tokuma Publishing Company, 14–15,
19
Tokyo: cinema complexes, 22, 67,
150n30; imagery in J-horror films,
32–34
Tomino Yoshiyuki, 81
transnational corporations (TNCs), 4, 99
transnational culture: in Asia, 2–3,
10, 23; cultural imagination and,
22–24; definition, 2, 3; evolution
toward, 1–2; flows, 102, 105;
Japanese interest, 110; marketing
of, 109–110; multiple media, 108;
INDEX     177
national cultures and, 3–4, 5–6;
odorlessness, 6, 9, 10
transnational films: co-productions,
2, 106, 107, 138–139; critical
framework, 98–104, 113, 131;
differences­from national films,
23, 97–98, 104–105, 106; dubbing,
109; national identities and, 97,
105; Nordic cinema, 101–103.
See also Chinese-language films;
J-horror
transnationalism, 4–5, 97
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 54, 65
Tsuchiya Yutaka, 56, 69, 70–71
Tsutsui, William, 42, 43
Umezu Kazuo, 40
United States: film studies, 103–104;
relations with Japan, 8–9, 132. See
also American culture; Hollywood
films
Urayama Kirio, 121
Vaughan, Dai, 73
VCDs. See video compact discs
V-CINEMA, 21
Verbinski, Gore, 33, 34
video compact discs (VCDs), 16–17
Video Letter (Tanikawa and Terayama),
70–71
videotapes, 34, 35, 43, 81, 95, 145n14
violence: in American culture, 8; audi-
ence reactions, 119, 127–128; of
father figures, 124–125; in films,
118; in Japanese culture, 116;
realism,­127; in zainichi Korean
films, 115, 116–117, 118–120,
125–128, 129; of zainichi Koreans,
117–118
Voices of a Distance Star (Hoshi no koe;
Shinkai), 76, 84–87, 86, 87
Wai Keung Lau. See Initial D
Waldinger, Roger, 4–5
Wang, Shujen, 44, 45
Wang, Yiman, 66
Wang Yeming, 139
Watanabe Takenobu, 11
Wells, Paul, 53
Westerns, 7, 9, 93 Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu, 15–16, 17, 99,
Willemen, Paul, 103 100
Williams, Linda, 119 Yomota Inuhiko, 129
wrestling, 125, 127, 128. See also Yoon Son-ha, 111
Rikidozan Yoshimi Shun’ya, 8–9
Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 6, 62
Yamada Yoji, 14, 51–52 Yukisada Isao, 116, 117, 122, 124
Yamamoto Mataichiro, 136 Yunbogi’s Diary (Yunbogi no nikki;
Yamamura Koji, 76, 80, 88–95, 96 Oshima), 121–122
Yamane Sadao, 135
Yan Sogiru (Yang Seok-il), 114, zainichi Koreans, 23, 114–119, 121–
128–129 125, 128–130
Yau, Esther C. M., 100 Zhang Yimou, 16, 23

178   INDEX
 About the Author

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano is associ-

ate professor of Film Studies at Carleton University in Canada. In 2010–2011
she was a visiting scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Kyoto, Japan. Her research interests are Japanese cinema, especially
its relationship with Japanese modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, the cine-
matic representations of Japan’s postwar period, and East Asian cinemas in
global culture. She is the author of Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s
and 1930s (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). Wada-Marciano is also the
coeditor of Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (Hong
Kong University Press, 2009) and the guest editor for “Unfinished Business:
The Endless Postwar in Japanese Cinema and Visual Culture” for Review
of Japanese Culture and Society (vol. 21, 2009). She is currently working on
Japanese postwar cinema in the 1950s.
Production Notes for…

Wada-Marciano/Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

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