Contemporary Art in Japan and Cuteness in Japanese Popular Culture

This thesis is an art historical study focussing on contemporary Japan, and in particular the artists Murakami TakashL Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo. These artists represent a generation of artists born in the 1960s who use popular culture to their own ends. From the seminal exhibition 'Tokyo Pop' at Hiratsuka Museum of Art in 1996 which included all four artists, to Murakami's group exhibition 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' which opened in April 2005, central to my research is an exploration of contemporary art's engagement with the pervasiveness of cuteness in Japanese culture. Including key secondary material, which recognises cuteness as not merely something trivial but involving power play and gender role issues, this thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of cuteness in contemporary Japanese popular culture, and examines howcontemporary Japanese artists have responded, providing original research through interviews with Aida Makoto, Mori Mariko and Murakami Takashi. Themes examined include the deconstruction of the high and low in contemporary art; sh6jo (girl) culture and cuteness; the relation of cuteness and the erotic; the transformation of cuteness into the grotesque; cuteness and nostalgia; and virtual cuteness in Japanese science fiction animation, and computer games. Director of Studies: Toshio Watanabe Supervisors: David Ryan and Omuka Toshihar

Lady Killers: Depictions of Gendered Subjective Violence in Audition

This thesis will examine the depiction of Asami as a female antagonist figure in the 2001 film adaptation of the novel Audition directed by Miike Takashi and adapted from the 1997 novel of the same name by Japanese horror author Murakami Ryū. By considering the differences in her original portrayal and how the language of film changes the presentation of Murakami’s female antagonist, this project aims to analyze how Murakami and the directors who choose to adapt his works approach depicting acts of violence committed by women in a genre inundated with male-coded violence against female-coded characters. The existing framework for analyzing horror film antagonists is by framing them as inherently masculine. Murakami’s female characters, however, often predicate their violence and antagonism on their femininity, not despite it. This paradigm of female antagonists who are physically violent is not one which has yet been thoroughly explored. These female characters, who are aggressive villains not in spite of their femininity but because of it, upset the current model of “victim as female” and highlight a lack of scholarly language to describe physically violent female characters in villainous roles in fiction

Travelling Films: Western Criticism, Labelling Practice and Self-Orientalised East Asian Films

This thesis analyses western criticism, labelling practices and the politics of European international film festivals. In particular, this thesis focuses on the impact of western criticism on East Asian films as they attempt to travel to the west and when they travel back to their home countries. This thesis draws on the critical arguments by Edward Said's Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) and self-Orientalism, as articulated by Rey Chow, which is developed upon Mary Louise Pratt's conceptual tools such as 'contact zone' and 'autoethnography'. This thesis deals with three East Asian directors: Kitano Takeshi (Japanese director), Zhang Yimou (Chinese director) and Im Kwon-Taek (Korean director). Dealing with Japanese, Chinese and Korean cinema is designed to show different historical and cultural configurations in which each cinema draws western attention. This thesis also illuminates different ways each cinema is appropriated and articulated in the west. This thesis scrutinises how three directors from the region have responded to this Orientalist discourse and investigates the unequal power relationship that controls the international circulation of films. Each director's response largely depends on the particular national and historical contexts of each country and each national cinema. The processes that characterise films' travelling are interrelated: the western conception of Japanese, Chinese or Korean cinema draws upon western Orientalism, but is at the same time corroborated by directors' responses. Through self-Orientalism, these directors, as 'Orientals', participate in forming and confirming the premises of western Orientalism. This thesis thus brings out how 'Orientals' participate in the formation and maintenance of Orientalism via selfOrientalism or self-Orientalising strategies. As Edward Said (1978; 1985) remarks, 'Orientals' adopt the terms and premises of Orientalism and use them in exactly the same way, or reverse them. Vis-a-vis this point, this thesis shows that self-Orientalism, as a response to Orientalism, is mediated by its relationship with the national and historical contexts of a particular society. Western Orientalism does not fully determine how 'Orientals' define their own culture and respond to Oriental ism. This thesis shows that a national film industry can more easily break into the international film market if internationally recognised auteur directors from the particular country have been recognised at international film festivals. This thesis elucidates the practice of labelling foreign films categorised as 'national cinema' and 'art cinema'. While Hollywood films are assumed to possess 'universality', the international art-house circuit and film festival circuits label films from other countries by their specific nationality or national culture, which is assumed to be reflected in high/traditional art. In this circuit, the names of 'auteur' directors from each country act as brand names, moulding audiences' expectations of films from a specific country. Film festivals, meanwhile, seek to become sites for 'discovering' supposedly unknown auteur directors and national cmemas

‘The Wandering Adolescent of Contemporary Japanese Anime and Videogames’

PhDThis thesis examines the figure of the wandering adolescent, prominently visible in Japanese television anime and videogames produced from 1995 to the present. Japan in the 1990s and at the millennium experienced intense economic and social change, as the collapse of the 'bubble' economy of the 1980s resulted in a financial recession from which the country has yet to recover. At the close of the decade, the national experience was characterised in media descriptions of malaise and disenfranchisement, and the loss of perceived core traditional cultural values. Arguably in this period the figure of the adolescent changed qualitatively in Japanese culture, rising to prominence within youth panic discourses circulated by the Japanese news media. These concerned the perceived rise in antisocial and problematic teenage behaviour, including the otaku, the hikikomori shut-in, classroom disobedience, bullying, and prostitution, while multiple cases of brutal murder perpetrated by teenagers became the focus of extensive media coverage. Public discourse expressed alarm at the perceived breakdown of the traditional family and the growing commodification of childhood in Japanese culture. This thesis develops understanding of the shifting attitude in Japan towards adolescence within the context of these cultural anxieties, and through the analysis of anime and videogames suggests strategies that are at work within popular cultural texts that are the product of, contribute to and reorient debates about the position of the suddenly and inescapably visible teenager in Japanese society. Through analysis of discourses relating to the shifting representation of the wandering adolescent as it moves across cultural texts and media forms, the thesis forms an original contribution to knowledge and understanding of Japanese anime and videogames through illumination of a prominent motif that to date remains unexamined

A wicked countenance : the vengeance seeking woman in Japanese cinema

A Wicked Countenance: The Vengeance Seeking Woman in Japanese Cinema argues the female onryo, or vengeance seeking spirit, belies Japan's often conflicted relationships to the various socio/political contexts of the last 100 years. The onryo is an archetype, appearing throughout Japanese film, theatre and folkloric cultures, and yet the specificities of that archetype change greatly through time. Japanese modem history has been conditioned by its various interactions in geo-politics and this thesis argues that the various permutations of the onryo have been correspondingly impacted by the nation's political actions. Viewing history, not as a teleological series of cause/effect relations but rather as a product of a system of competing discourses, the thesis argues that those discourses shape the onryo in differing manners dependent on the competing ideological positions of the era. Film cannot escape its context and is imbued with the ideologies of the society from which it is produced. Ideology is itself a product of the interaction between a society and its media, both being shaped and reinforced through that interaction. While capitalism, as proposed by Eric Cazdyn in his The Flash of Capital, has been the dominant contributing discourse in the shaping of ideology, my own work, stemming from Cazdyn's project, considers discourses as varied as feminism, cultural nationalism and nationhood. These are discourses which, though marked by capitalism, comprise inherent particularities which direct ideology in ways independent of capitalism. In this work, Japanese film history is divided into three different temporal/ideological contexts. The first half of the 20th century in Japan was mar(r/k)ed by the introduction of the west to Japan. The earliest films struggle to create a Japanese cinematic language and while ideology struggled to better articulate what constituted appropriate womanly behavior, women often became representations of 'womanliness'. The postwar period, conversely was a time of questioning. With the end of the occupation, Japan re-discovered political and cultural autonomy. Japanese film culture began to actively explore its relations to the past, and to question what it is to be a Japanese individual with autonomy and how to participate in the democratic environment of free will and personal subjectivity. The films then become an exploration of the attempts to negotiate the self as Japanese within the context of political autonomy and the onryo becomes indicative of that quest to articulate 'japaneseness.' Finally, the contemporary period is an era marked by globalization. Empire, as defined by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their book of the same name, is different from Imperialism. Empire posits that the new world order of interdependency and corporate economic expansion has resulted in the exploitation of offshore labour forces for personal economic gain and that all people who participate in contemporary capitalism are culpable in Empire's exploitations. The films, cognizant of the culpability of the individual within Empire's exploitations, manifest those fears in the onryo. The onryo, devastating in its usage of the media's vehicles of transmission (television, cell phones, the internet), becomes metaphorical of capitalism's destructiveness. While the thesis examines Japanese film culture of the last 100 years, the onryo films themselves are not restricted to those past historical contexts. As long as film continues to be produced by Japan, they will continue to reflect the ideological idiosyncrasies germane to the Japanese identity