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This article considers the 1973 Nikkatsu Roman Porn film adaptation of a short story by Japanese literary giant Nagai Kafū, “Underneath the Papering of the Four-and-a-Half-Mat Room” (“Yojōhan fusuma no urabari”). This low-budget erotic film appeared in the international context of the “liberation” (or decriminalization) of pornography that had swept Europe by the early to mid-1970s and in the domestic context of a severe crackdown on such trends. At the time of the film's release, both the story and the studio were at the center of high-profile obscenity trials in Japan. In this essay, I examine how and why these contexts led the filmmaker to take considerable liberties in adapting the story, in particular its conspicuous incorporation of archival photographs that document the rise of Japanese militarism in the mid- to late Taishō period (1912–26). I argue that the insistent injection of such politically and formally radical content strove to legitimize the film and, by implication, also its source text, as politically and aesthetically defensible in both legal and artistic circles. But because the film had to function in its generic context as well, as a studio-branded “porno,” I insist also on considering the pornographic efficacy of such a strategy. I ask: What is the effect of injecting stilled historical images into a genre famous instead for its lush color moving ones? What can such a strategy tell us about postwar historical memory, the relationship of politics to pornography and of still photographs to moving film images, and the nature of film adaptations and their literary source texts? This film offers an extreme-limit case that brings to the fore the tensions between economic and generic demands on the one hand, and juridic, aesthetic, and auteurist imperatives, on the other, that are inherent in any film production.
This is a study of Hanada Kiyoteru, a communist literary and art critic whose position in the world of postwar art criticism has gone relatively unexamined in Japanese studies and art history in English. One of the more aggressive critical figures during the immediate postwar era, he helped to foster a community of art critics and artists who carried into practice aspects of his dialectical and surrealist-inflected method of reading. He was in many ways responsible for signifying how postwar avant-garde art should be read, as well as how the prewar efforts could be revived to continue the leftist struggle. This article is primarily concerned with his earlier work, starting from his first collection of essays, Spirit of Renaissance (1946), to his well-known Avant-Garde Art (1954), touching upon some of his major motifs found in these texts. Beginning with Hanada's concern for the “transformative age” referred to as tenkeiki , the article examines his dynamic thinking process, which mirrored the very performative maneuvers he saw in the figures who occupied a transitional period. His investment in the historical interstice was a way to escape essentialism, humanism, and ultimately, Japan. He did so in order to conceive of plurality, nonhuman agency, and becoming. This article, rather than to place Hanada in the historical context in which he wrote, treats his work aesthetically, paying particular attention to the rhythmic and agile movement of his writing and thought.
In the early 1960s, the synthetic fiber vinalon became North Korea's national fiber, a product that symbolized the independence and ingenuity of its state-led socialism, from the raw materials needed to make it (the abundant coal and limestone) to the person who invented it (the colonial chemist Ri Sŭnggi, scouted by North Korea in 1950). The Vinalon Factory near Hamhŭng City—a factory originally built by a Japanese chemical company and a city rebuilt with the assistance of East Germany—also became a national emblem of its own, as a factory that arose solely from the toil of the North Korean people. The history of vinalon is a confluence of the colonial industrial system, the postliberation nationalist ideology of state building, the dynamics of multinational postwar reconstruction, and the monopoly of economy and politics by the regime of Kim Il Sung. Vinalon City, as the immense factory was called, was a transnational object par excellence, but at the same time, it was immutably localized for the ordinary North Korean people, replete with its labor heroes who achieved superhuman levels of productivity. This industrial narrative has a dimension of concrete, everyday reality, as vinalon is worn as clothing and produced by the workers. The everyday dimension is precisely where the ideological workings of state power are hidden. Furthermore, the history of vinalon reveals a characteristic of ideology of work—the subsumption of life by labor—a characteristic that is certainly not limited to North Korea.
Exploring the visual representations of the barefoot doctors in China's Cultural Revolution, this article demonstrates how a medical policy is visualized and politicized, and it also shows how the visual culture of the time was richer than it has been assumed. This article meanders through different visual means such as propaganda posters and cinema in order to explore the difficult relationships between politics and policy, as well as the uneasy position occupied by femininity on the national political stage. Focusing on the barefoot doctor as a case study, this article provides a specific angle for us to understand the intense dynamics between culture and politics in the Cultural Revolution.
In this essay we argue that stories of rich merchants enable us to see new forms of neoliberal subject imaginary. They serve to teach the public about how to become a profit-seeking person, given that previously formal education did not prepare citizens of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to pursue profit. These popular materials invite the public to reconceptualize the relationship between individuals and society and in this sense constitute a significant cultural strategy for governing the population. Tracing the Chinese variations of the global logic of neoliberal economic man and cultural governance, we intend to read the merchant stories as instances of “glocalization” of neoliberal economic man and demonstrate that the “translation” of the global logic of capitalism to suit local conditions is by no means a neat and tidy task. Our analysis proceeds in two parts. The first section discusses Michel Foucault's concept of human capital and Ludwig von Mises's theory of human action to define neoliberal economic man and then relates these concepts to the formation of a variety of rich-merchant stories. The second section delves into the question of how biographies of the new rich convey, in concrete terms, the practices of cultural governance and reshape agents in the model of the neoliberal economic man, and how these rich-merchant stories prove paradigmatic for entrepreneurs-to-be.
In this interview the Japanese avant-garde filmmaker and scholar, Toshio Matsumoto, discusses his creative practice, as well as his ideas about the complexities of representing reality, memory, and time. He has numerous short experimental works to his credit, and four feature-length narrative films including Bara no soretsu ( Funeral Parade of Roses , 1969), Shura ( Demons , 1971), Juroku-sai no senso ( The War of the Sixteen-Year-Olds , 1973), and Dogura magura ( Dogra Magra , 1988). He has contributed significantly to the critical study of film in Japan as well, writing among things Eizo no hakken ( Discovery of the Image , 1963/2005), Hyogen no sekai ( World of Expression , 1967), and Genshi no bigaku ( Aesthetics of Illusion , 1976). Despite these many accomplishments, Matsumoto has gone largely unrecognized in US scholarship. The conception and representation of reality, memory, and time are significant tropes in Matsumoto's films. Bara no soretsu , for instance, set in the gay district of Tokyo, freely shifts between various points in time, mixes narrative fiction and documentary, and allows for the intermingling of the actors' own personal memories and the memories of the characters that they are playing. Each actor effectively plays a character that is modeled after his or her own life. The film is loosely adapted from Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour and appropriates many of the elements in it, including, most significantly, haunting flashbacks from a repressed traumatic memory. It is also a recasting of the Oedipus narrative, which to one degree or another is also about memory. In all of Matsumoto's feature films, a character suffers from some form of delusion and/or trauma that materializes in a surging pulse—the spectral return of the repressed—and this manifests not only as plot elements but also in cinematic form (e.g., flashbacks, non-linear narrative structures, overlapping editing). Although certainly not the first to reconceptualize narrative temporality, Bara no soretsu confounded film critics at the time; many assumed that Matsumoto didn't even know how to tell a story or how to edit a film. Audiences today, however, are quick to accept the playful interventions in narrative form. This interview introduces this filmmaker/scholar who, in many respects, was far ahead of his time, to the English-speaking world.
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