JPST 354: Introduction to Japanese Cinema

The reality of transnational innovation and dissemination of new technologies, including digital media, has yet to make a dent in the deep-seated culturalism that insists on reinscribing a divide between the West and Japan, even in realms of technological activity that are quite evidentlydispersed across cultures. Film and media studies are not immune to this trend. They continue to fret over the "Westernness" of film technologies vis-a-vis the apparently self-evident "Japaneseness" of other modes of cultural production.The main goal of The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema is to counter this trend toward dichotomizing the West and Japan and to challenge the pervasive culturalism of today's film and media studies. This volume addresses productive debates about what Japanese cinema is, where Japanese cinema is, andwhere Japanese cinema is going at the period of crisis of national boundary under globalization. In order to do so, this volume attempts to foster dialogue between Japanese scholars of Japanese cinema, film scholars of Japanese cinema based in Anglo-American and European countries, film scholars ofnon-Japanese cinema, film archivists, film critics, and filmmakers familiar with film scholarship.

Digital technology has transformed cinema's production, distribution, and consumption patterns and pushed contemporary cinema toward increasingly global markets. In the case of Japanese cinema, a once moribund industry has been revitalized as regional genres such as anime and Japanese horror now challenge Hollywood's preeminence in global cinema. In her rigorous investigations of J-horror, personal documentary, anime, and ethnic cinema, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano deliberates on the role of the transnational in bringing to the mainstream what were formerly marginal B-movie genres. She argues persuasively that convergence culture, which these films represent, constitutes Japan's response to the variegated flows of global economics and culture. With its timely analysis of new modes of production emerging from the struggles of Japanese filmmakers and animators to finance and market their work in a post-studio era, this book holds critical implications for the future of other national cinemas fighting to remain viable in a global marketplace. As academics in film and media studies prepare a wholesale shift toward a transnational perspective of film, Wada-Marciano cautions against jettisoning the entire national cinema paradigm. Discussing the technological advances and the new cinematic flows of consumption, she demonstrates that while contemporary Japanese film, on the one hand, expresses the transnational as an object of desire (i.e., a form of total cosmopolitanism), on the other hand, that desire is indeed inseparable from Japan's national identity. Drawing on a substantial number of interviews with auteur directors such as Kore'eda Hirokazu, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Kawase Naomi, and incisive analysis of select film texts, this compelling, original work challenges the presumption that Hollywood is the only authentically "global" cinema.