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<TITLE>J-horror as national formatting</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>There are a lot of ways the history of J-horror could go, I imagine, but I wanted to get back to the crux of Mathieu’s original question about the circulation of the concept of “J-horror.” The question, as I remember it, was “what in the world is specifically Japanese about” the particular kinds of gothic, spiritualist, and horror elements that are identified in festivals and in print journalism as J-horror. <BR>
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I think the etymology is J-horror is really interesting. <BR>
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My gut feeling is that the “J” prefix began to convey a marked emphasis on mass, national aesthetics in a significantly new way in the mid-90s. I think that the coining of “J” as a term is just as important as tracking down and digging up where the generic bodies of horror are buried. I wonder if the heightened attention to “J” as a new, edgy, youthful framing mechanism didn’t pave over a whole lot of differences that existed in the initial films. For instance, a kaidan is a ghost story, and has a whole legion of different antecedents in stage and oral story-telling, and in the print cultures of Edo Japan, contexts that set it apart from the horror context where it is typically placed in present-day criticism. <BR>
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I never thought I’d be sorry to see the discussion of Japanese post-modernism fade into the sunset. But it did provoke people who thought about culture to think about how films are very layered, hybrid things, and aren’t organic elements of J-tradition. I think that because the pomo discussion was so attentive to shifts in markets and money, and not just to tradition and style, that is probably useful to keep in mind, as a potential default to the ‘national cinema’ model from the early 20th century that so often dominates discussion of J-horror. Of course, on the other hand, I think the whole idea of “national cinemas” is highly useful to multi-national production companies and studios, as they can keep finding and trading pure strains of national cinematic production, combing back through the archives, to excavate new “influence” back and forth from east to west, in deals whose special effects really make the contents of the films pretty pale and disappointing, as I gather from the oft-tragic tone of much commentary on J-horror. <BR>
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I wonder, has the invention of “J-horror” made for better films, or just neater slots, differences that can be overcome through remakes, and better deals through the “discovery” of new pure cinemas, and their global re-formatting? Maybe another way of asking this is, does J-horror exist if you are making films outside of a global studio system, or does it make sense only inside that context?<BR>
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As for the increased visibility of “J,” this interest in new native forms seems pretty periodisable—how to periodise this, or document when it caught fire, was the initial question that set this discussion off.. I don’t think you can set off J-horror from the other new J-markets of the mid-90s, the new markets and modes of J-pop and J-bungaku—positioned as edgy, youthful, auteurist, and national versions of global aesthetics. Pop music in Japanese had been around for decades complete with swooning teenagers and catchy melodies and production, yet a new genre and market was formatted as J-pop in the mid-90s in the context of global distribution. J-pop first became institutionalised in HMV’s Shibuya store in 1994, and J-bungaku was trumpeted in the mid-90s, with writers like Abe Kazushige (Individual Projection) and Akasaka Mari (Vibrate). They were extremely aware of genre and the expressive possibilities of different kinds of media, such as cinema, and gave prose fiction a jolt at a time when “serious” literature was seen to be dying, and in danger of becoming a mere subculture. “J” is “universally” understandable in the alphabet of markets, standing for Japan/Japon/whatever other roman letter-based spellings you might want to suggest, not Nihon. J-culture seemed to aim to tap into a globalised, if not a universal, market, in the mid-90s, following the multi-national money. <BR>
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I’m not sure “influence” between Japan and Hollywood tells the whole story for me. To me, the rise of “J” is about much more than the nichi-bei slugfest/lovefest of adaptations between these two bilateral parties in a postwar relationship marked by treaties in 1945/1952, and all about the global formatting of cultural products in an era where one man’s mass culture in its place of production might be another man’s subculture a few time zones away. Making J-horror a mass culture phenomenon, rather than a subculture phenomenon, also seems part of the mission of “J,” to me. In my memory, in the salad days of “J”-culture, “J” for “Japan” was tacked onto kinds of pop culture that could be globalised, and formatted in their respective national versions, but that had to be stamped with “J” as a way of showing that the product belonged to “mass culture” (big markets, nationally formatted and sandwiched between, say, “I”-pop and “K”-pop) in the alphabetic map of markets and not “subculture” (small markets, often segmented by sex or other demographic category, for subculture people perversely indifferent to national belonging). Stamping cultural products with “J” for mass, national culture prevented their global reception from taking place as if they were subcultural objects. Made them accessible to multiple audiences when they were transferred to other places & contexts, as something for the masses, for everybody, not select weirdo connoisseurs of a subculture. In some ways, J- de-exoticised or de-particularised genres (like horror) that could be potentially hemmed in to subculture status, by racking “J” up as just one in a series of nationally formatted global projects, in the alphabet of the market. It seems like a way of preserving at least the idea of national cinema and national aesthetics. I imagine that the “J” also built on the ubiquitous familiarity of the J-league, and its membership in global sports, and marks a bid for the J-object to seen as a mass culture, that is to say, a national cultural product with widespread appeal in other globally linked national markets. <BR>
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I also find the gendering of J-horror interesting, as it is able to reformat highly gendered conventions for a mass culture audience overseas. To me, it seems to draw a lot on trad aspects of gothic fiction—domestic terror, haunted relationships, spooky family histories, melodrama run amok to a pitch of hysteria. In lit and film, these are traditionally girly territory. The suspense of J-horror tends to wallow in emotion and dysfunctional relationships ragged with “discommunication”—I’m thinking offhand of Ring and Kurosawa Kiyoshi. That import of the gothic into horror is really interesting. I wonder if it’s taken the place of those weepy yakuza films of the 60s, the ones that use stoicism and style in characterisation in alternation with the sentimental rivers of melodrama that literally carry you through the film—here I’m thinking of matatabi-mono in general, or the more globally appreciated Tokyo Drifter. Think of Kill Bill and how it neutralises those elements of melodramatic tension into “bang bang, I shot my lover down,” while preserving the style in the literal mimicking of shots and the backdrop of a song. Horror, these days, seems more accommodating of the tension between emotion and stoicism. <BR>
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The debates on “cultural essentialism” might, when named by this name, seem turgid or academic. But I do find these dubious totalities like J-horror to be a bit unsatisfying because they encourage us to think of genres, which like “horror,” are typically made of precipitates and pastiches of radically different cultural forms from different times, as one organic category whose beginnings and endings and changes aren’t even relevant. Obviously, it’s hyperbolic, and remote from the original newspaper article that started this discussion, to compare this to the functions of a term like “the war on terror” in a telegraphic way, as I am doing. But the dynamic is the same—de-historicise, retro-fit an origin in the natural resources of “tradition,” remake it, distribute and sell it back as a global commodity. I guess I’m interested in how, as a container, J-horror implies a set of relationships, deals and exchanges, and how those are in dialogue with other kids of global media formations. What does it mean that horror is so active in an era where media from micro- to conglomerate are concerned with processing and distributing fear and suspense, often in very culturalist terms? <BR>
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Thanks for an interesting discussion, so far.<BR>
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Anne<BR>
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On 6/8/06 7:48 PM, "Mathieu St-Pierre" <cteve@hotmail.com> wrote:<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#000098">> Does anybody know where the term "J-HORROR" come from? Because to my opinion <BR>
> this thing never really exist... What I mean is Japanese horror movies <BR>
> always been around. It only been massively recognized by the U.S. and Europe <BR>
> with the arrival of Ring. But the term "J-HORROR" was probably used by the <BR>
> movie industry in the u.s. or the DVD industry to sell more easily something <BR>
> that was difficult to market at that time. So "J-HORROR" would only be a <BR>
> market name so to speak. Maybe the critics started using it afterward. But, <BR>
> I may be all wrong. This is just my opinion.<BR>
> <BR>
> <BR>
> Mathieu St-Pierre<BR>
> <BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#006600">>> yeah thanks for the article, i am doing my phd on j-horror's influence on <BR>
>> hollywood do u have anything else on this subject?<BR>
>> <BR>
>> <BR>
>> <BR>
>> Emma Newbery BA<BR>
>> Programme Leader<BR>
>> BTEC National Diploma in Media (Moving Image)<BR>
>> Blackpool and the Fylde College<BR>
>> <BR>
>> <BR>
>> <BR>
>> <BR>
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</FONT><FONT COLOR="#980000">>>> From: Michael McCaskey <mccaskem@georgetown.edu><BR>
>>> Reply-To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu<BR>
>>> To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu<BR>
>>> Subject: Re: J-horror Inquirer article<BR>
>>> Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 14:16:08 -0400<BR>
>>> <BR>
>>> Many thanks! You all are practically writing my new lecture for me.<BR>
>>> <BR>
>>> Michael McCaskey<BR>
>>> <BR>
>>> ----- Original Message -----<BR>
>>> From: Brian Ruh <brianruh@yahoo.com><BR>
>>> Date: Thursday, June 8, 2006 1:12 pm<BR>
>>> Subject: Re: J-horror Inquirer article<BR>
>>> <BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#660098">>>>> On 2006.6.8, at 11:17 AM, Michael McCaskey wrote:<BR>
>>>>> <BR>
>>>>> Does anyone know about any other non-horror remakes, recent or on<BR>
>>>>> the horizon?<BR>
>>>> <BR>
>>>> After my previous post I saw the announcement that New Line has bought<BR>
>>>> the rights to remake Battle Royale:<BR>
>>>> <a href="http://www.darkhorizons.com/news06/060608b.php">http://www.darkhorizons.com/news06/060608b.php</a><BR>
>>>> <BR>
>>>> == Brian<BR>
>>>> <BR>
>>>> Brian's Essential Reading:<BR>
>>>> Book: <a href="http://www.oshiibook.com">http://www.oshiibook.com</a><BR>
>>>> Research: <a href="http://www.animeresearch.com">http://www.animeresearch.com</a><BR>
>>>> <BR>
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</FONT><FONT COLOR="#980000">>>> <BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#006600">>> <BR>
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