Christopher Bolton, Interpreting Anime; Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media

It is the year 2019 and we now live in the present of the cataclysmic event credited for first introducing the world beyond Japan to anime. I am of course talking about Akira (1988), the seminal feature-length animated film, which, as the author of one of the books reviewed here puts it, took its contemporary audiences by wonder and surprise. In a way, then, what was once part of a distant and imaginary future has somehow already become our present. And while now effectively caught up with this post-apocalyptic fantasy, there still appears to be an ongoing and unresolved battle about whether anime can be taken and discussed seriously. Scholarship is still striving to come to terms with what anime is or could be used for. Interpreting Anime by Christopher Bolton and The Anime Ecology by Thomas Lamarre aim to advance the subfield and surpass previous work; despite differences in purpose and scope, both treat anime seriously and often playfully too. Inasmuch as these efforts come from the two editors of the long-running Mechademia series (since 2006 also published by University of Minnesota Press, arguably the pioneer in the field of anime studies), the establishment of authority is also at stake here. Arguably, contrasting these two major contributions to anime scholarship will help elucidate their respective ambitions and achievements, insights and blind spots

Sõnade asjatu flirt

A collection of selected poems by Tanikawa Shuntar

Naoki Yamamoto, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame

Has there ever been film theory in Japan? This question posed more than four decades ago by Satō Tadao, the doyen among Japanese film scholars, has more recently found new resonance and relevance. Naoki Yamamoto’s first monograph, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame, should be seen as a seminal contribution to this trend and an important step towards finding an affirmative answer to the nagging question. Previously, Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory (2010), had first built up expectations about this new line of inquiry in Anglophone Japanese film studies. In Japan, the 2018 publication of the bulky (746 pages) Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory — An Anthology, sought to present examples of critical engagement with cinema by dozens of pre-1945 writers, including Nakai Masakazu, Imamura Taihei, Sugiyama Heiichi and Nagae Michitarō, all discussed in detail by Yamamoto. Last but not least, Media Theory in Japan (2017), from where Yamamoto has found cues for his approach to Japanese film theory as a “local, medium-specific, and culture-inflected practice” (p. 5), displays a similar desire to bring about something of a paradigmatic shift, although it is mostly confined to material from the second half of the century

Lumearmee

A collection of selected poems by Bei Da

Better Off Being Bacteria: Adaptation and Allegory in Dr. Akagi

This chapter looks at how certain alterations and shifts in emphases to the short story by Ango Sakaguchi (1906-55) on which Dr Akagi is based shaped it into a film dealing with a number of issues that Imamura has made central to his ouevre. Looking at the production process and the main themes and motifs of this adaptation enables us to detect allusions both public and private, with the depiction of a war-torn rural community extending to Imamura’s own family and professional background. By presenting allegories of state-induced violence and perseverance of common people, Dr Akagi readily relates to a number of concerns that permeate his work while quite deliberately adding finishing touches to a long career in filmmaking

One Big Happy Family? The Social Relationships and Legacy of the Kinoshita-gumi

The interpersonal relationships in Japanese film production under the studio system have often been represented in familial terms, as the work commonly took place in team (kumi) built around individual directors. Arguably, none of these possessed the intimacy and longevity of the one devised by Kinoshita Keisuke at Shōchiku, the core of which comprised his actual family members (composer-brother Kinoshita Chūji, screenwriter-sister Kusuda Yoshiko, cinematographer-brother-in-law Kusuda Hiroshi). The line-up of the Kinoshita-gumi also included a number of protégés who subsequently went on to have careers as some of the most important directors of their generation (Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Yoshida Kijū) as well as several hitherto understudied filmmakers and writers (Kawazu Yoshirō, Matsuyama Zenzō, Ōtsuki Yoshikazu, Yamada Ta’ichi). While such master-apprentice relationships have been at times regarded as oppressive, according to the reminiscences of former crew members, the nurturing and supportive Kinoshita seems to have been an exception to the rule. The aim of this essay is 1) to delineate the Kinoshita-gumi and its inner relationships and by so doing 2) to identify the scope and influence of its working methods and thematic preoccupations beyond Kinoshita’s own directorial features as well as 3) to chart his legacy as it extended to popular television drama series broadcasted under the label of Kinoshita Keisuke Theater (Kinoshita Keisuke gekijō, 1964-67) Kinoshita Keisuke Hour (Kinoshita Keisuke awā, 1967-74) and Kinoshita Keisuke’s Songs of People (Kinoshita Keisuke Ningen no uta, 1970-77)

The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies by Alexander Zahlten

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of the book that still has to be considered the most, if not the only comprehensive history of Japanese cinema in the English language. While Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1959, co-authored by Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, and slightly updated in its 1982 edition) was criticized for its auteurist and Cold War-era attitudes, its immense achievement and authoritative status is impossible to ignore. Its very existence seems to have effectively prevented any study of comparable scope from emerging, while the field of Japanese film studies itself has expanded considerably during the last few decades. This lasting anxiety of influence is visibly imprinted on Alexander Zahlten’s first monograph, The End of Japanese Cinema, both in its provocative title and in its book design that borrows from Anderson and Richie the intricate charts that delineate apprenticeship lineages and studio affiliations and blurs out all names, as if to suggest the need to eschew these industrial relations that have been hitherto considered an inextricable part of structuring Japanese film history

The Screw

A translation of Ishii Shinji's short story The Scre

Kahtlased kujud öises rongis

A translation of Tawada Yōko's novel Suspects on the Night Trai