Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan / Edition 1

by Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez, Dolores P. Martinez

Overview

From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785339592
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	03/27/2019
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Blai Guarné is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the East Asian Studies Programme at the Universityat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has been Visiting Fellow at the University of Tokyo and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. His publications include Antropología de Japón (Bellaterra 2017) and Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-first Century (Routledge 2018).

Artur Lozano-Méndez teaches Japanese Studies at the Universityat Autònoma de Barcelona. He holds a doctorate in Translation and Intercultural Studies. His publications include ‘Mamoru Oshii's Exploration of the Potentialities of Consciousness in a Globalised Capitalist Network’ (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2015) and El Japón contemporáneo. Una aproximación desde los estudios culturales (2016).

Dolores P. Martinez is an Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London and Research Associate at ISCA, University of Oxford.  She has authored and edited numerous books, most recently Assembling Japan (2015), and Gender and Japanese Society (2014) and is co-editor of the Berghahn Books series Asian Anthropologies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Politics of Media and Memory Representation in Japan
Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez, and Dolores P. Martinez

PART I: WAR’S AFTERMATH

Chapter 1. The Death of Certainty: Memory, guilt and redemption in Ikiru
Dolores P. Martinez

Chapter 2. Postwar Narratives and the Avant-garde Documentary: Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen
Marcos Centeno Martín

Chapter 3. Radical Subjectivity as a Counter to Japanese Humanist Cinema: Ōshima Nagisa’s Nūberu Bāgu
Ferran de Vargas

PART II:  THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

Chapter 4. Recreating Memory? The Drama Watashi wa kai ni naritai and Its Remakes
Griseldis Kirsch

Chapter 5. From Myth to Cult: Tragic Heroes, Parody and Gender Politics in the 1960s–1970s ‘Bad Girls’ Cinema of Japan
Laura Treglia

Chapter 6. Collective Remorse for the Past: Japanese Film and TV Representations of the 1960s Student Movement
Katsuyuki Hidaka

PART III:  THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

Chapter 7. Depicting the Persistence of Being Postwar: Eden of the East
Artur Lozano-Méndez

Chapter 8. Rethinking Anime in East Asia: Creative Labour in Transnational Production, Or, What Gets Lost in Translation
Tomohiro Morisawa

Afterword: The Persistence of Trauma
Dolores P. Martinez, Blai Guarné, and Artur Lozano-Méndez

Editorial Reviews

“Persistently Postwar uses a variety of detailed case studies to demonstrate how the contested legacy of the Asia-Pacific War has helped to shape the artistic and intellectual life of postwar Japan. This thought-provoking and highly readable collection of essays leaves the reader with deep insights into not only depictions of war in Japanese popular culture, but also how the war has affected broader cultural production from yakuza films to the anime industry.” • Philip Seaton, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

From the Publisher