ABSTRACT

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japanese cinema today, through cutting-edge scholarship that reflects the hybridity of approaches defining the field.

The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four parts, each representing an emergent area of inquiry:

  • "Decentring Classical Cinema"
  • "Questions of Industry"
  • "Intermedia as an Approach"
  • "The Object Life of Film"

This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of 200 years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty-first century.

This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies, and cultural studies more broadly.

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

part I|102 pages

Decentering classical cinema

chapter 1|18 pages

Suspense and Border Crossing

Ozu Yasujirō’s crime melodrama

chapter 2|20 pages

Beyond Mt. Fuji and the Lenin Cap

Identity crisis in Taniguchi Senkichi’s Akasen kichi (The Red Light Military Base, 1953)

chapter 3|17 pages

Home Movies of the Revolution

Proletarian filmmaking and counter-mobilization in interwar Japan

chapter 4|13 pages

When Marnie was There

Female friendship film and the genealogy of queer girls’ culture

chapter 6|16 pages

Geysers of Another Nature

The optical unconscious of the Japanese science film

part II|61 pages

Questions of industry

chapter 7|15 pages

Kaiju Films as Exportable Content

Reassessing the function of the Japanese Film Export Promotion Association

chapter 8|13 pages

“Fugitives” from the Studio System

Ikebe Ryō, Sada Keiji, and the transition from cinema to television in the early 1960s

chapter 9|12 pages

Solo Animation in Japan

Empathy for the drawn body

part III|108 pages

Intermedia as an approach

chapter 11|21 pages

Utsushi-e

Japanese magic lantern performance as pre-cinematic projection practice

chapter 12|15 pages

“Inter-Mediating” Global Modernity

Benshi film narrators, multisensory performance, and fan culture

chapter 13|18 pages

Between Silence and Sound

The liminal space of the Japanese “sound version”

chapter 14|16 pages

Marionettes No Longer

Politics in the early puppet animation of Kawamoto Kihachirō

chapter 15|16 pages

Rhetorics of Autonomy and Mobility in Japanese “AAA” Games

The Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil series within a global media context

chapter 16|16 pages

Pointing Through the Screen

Archiving, surveillance, and atomization in the wake of Japan’s 2011 triple disasters

part IV|88 pages

The object life of film

chapter 19|17 pages

A Case Study of Japanese Film Exhibition in North America

The Japan Society, New York

chapter 20|15 pages

Regional Film Archive in Transit

Yasui Yoshio and Kobe Planet Film Archive

chapter 21|21 pages

New Paths toward Preserving Japanese Cinema

The Toy Film Museum backstory