Description
Book Synopsis 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.
Trade Review “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
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
