The intra-East cinema

For many, Japan’s defeat in the Pacific war was greeted with great jubilation, and for those who lived in Japanese occupied territories the defeat was especially important. The Pacific war was the end result of a series of Japanese colonial and imperial initiatives which started in the late nineteenth century. ¹ Prior to defeat, the Japanese Empire had colonized Korea, Taiwan, and large areas of China including Manchuria and Inner Mongolia and had occupied Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Burma, and Malaysia. Although the Japanese Empire may have ended over seventy years ago, its legacy lives on in many aspects of East Asian society, culture, politics, and government and as Kuan-Shing Chen (2010) notes, a continual examination of the colonial period is needed to fully comprehend modern politics and cultural trends in the region. This chapter is focused on one main form of cultural product, namely cinema. From as early as 1910 and particularly during the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese Empire pioneered its vision of a “Greater East Asian Film Sphere” (GEAFS). This idea, clearly linked to the baggage of a harsh colonial rule, became consigned to history when Japan was defeated in 1945. However, as this chapter will explore, it can be seen as one of the first attempts to construct a cinema presenting a vision of a pan-Asian identity. The first part of this chapter will focus on the narratives told by the GEAFS, and the second part of this chapter will examine examples of modern cinema that re-engages with the legacy of the Empire and its vision of a pan-Asian cinema in new and unique ways. The chapter will focus on two key films Perhaps Love (Hong Kong and China, 2005) and Cape No. 7 (Tawian, 2008) to extrapolate a vision of a new (since 1990) pan-Asian cinema. ² The aims are to provide a discussion of an intra-East Asian cinema that creates and sustains its own narratives and mythologies. ³