blacks in Japanese films

Michael Raine michael-raine
Sat Oct 31 11:19:05 EST 1998


Oops, forgot Kiku to Isamu! What I like best about that film is the
challenge to racial representation in Japan figured in clearly racially
different bodies with perfect regional (and therefore, in Yanagidan
fashion, more truly Japanese) accents. Are there any Other films that don't
automatically treat blackness as otherness? this issue is much larger than
just US-Japan relations of course: think of the place of "nan'yo" in the
imperial imagination and its postwar nostalgic echo. That's even satirized
(I hope!) in films like Kawashima Yuzo's Guramaa shima to yuuwaku [I think]
or Imamura's Nishi Ginza eki mae. 

Michael

At 09:43 AM 10/31/98 -0600, you wrote:
>At 7:41 PM 10/30/98, Maureen Donovan wrote:
>>>From hobbs.35 at osu.edu Fri Oct 30 20:12:30 1998
>>Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 11:54:36 -0500
>>From: Ayanna Hobbs <hobbs.35 at osu.edu>
>>To: NIHONGO at UTKVM1.UTK.EDU
>>Subject: Re: blacks in Japanese films
>>
>>
>>Does anyone know of any films where blacks (African-Americans) appear in
>>Japanese films or in Japanese literature between 1930's - 1970's?   I think
>>there is a Japanese film called, "Who's the guy who sang 'Akai Hankachi'?"
>
>There is the Oshima Nagisa film version of _Shiiku_ (The Catch, 1961) from
>the original story by Oe Kenzaburo.  There is also Imai Tadashi's 1959
>_Kiku to Isamu_, about mixed-race Japanese/African-American children.
>
>David Desser
>
>
>




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