Japanese film and the political right

[Abe-Nornes]

>The issue of Asia and the Asian Audience is crucial and I'm glad Gavin 
>brought it up.  SNIP We need to be very careful when we talk about Asia in 
>contemporary Japan, because many conservative politicians have recently 
>picked up pan-Asianism in their own way.  SNIP Do we 
>make distinctions between Yamamoto Masashi's Asia and Iwai's?  Can we 
>call a consumerist interest in Asia pro-Asia?  

I have a feeling a focus on "Japan in/as Asia" will take us a long way in
working through the overwhelming complexity of the issues this thread is
bringing up. Of all the sign systems in this massive shift to the right
which everyone is talking about, the one most striking to me is "Asia". In
the 1990s in particular, it's as if there were tectonic shifts and
everyone's map of the world got pulled from underneath their feet. To
borrow tropes I recall from some Asahi Shinbun editorial several years
back, the nation went from "sen" (line) to "men" (surface) way of thinking,
from a world dominated by Nichibei relations to a more hermetically sealed
Japan in an Asian sphere. Nowhere is this more obvious than in moving image
media (and probably music as well). In this decade, nearly all of the
important films in Asia have found distribution in Asia, and some Asian
filmmakers have been more successful at raising money than their Japanese
colleagues! Television is replete with programs about Asia. Festivals
feature Asian sections, and occassionally nothing but Asian film, and the
number of high-quality traveling packages of Asian films is impressive.
There are far more books on Asian cinema in Japanese than in English.
Certainly, much of this activity involves converting things Asian into
products that hold many splendorous pleasures to consume. The extreme
example would be the tv tabebangumi, which sends tarento out to the
hinterlands to discover foreign wonders and eat them. It often looks like a
kind of cannibalism! But the politics of all this activity is exceedingly
complex, tapping into all the questions being raised by this discussion on
KineJapan. 

One of the useful things about approaching the drift right by focusing our
attention on this pan-Asianism is that it forces acknowledgement that the
tropological timeline is actually "men"--->"sen"--->"men". This new
interest in Asia (and in Japan as Asian) is a _newfound_ interest, and has
to be understood as part of the historical legasy of the colonial period
and the war. It may be tempting to think that the apoliticality of the 80s
and 90s marks the end of the post-war period, the end of the era when
everything references the war (which young people _supposedly_ know nothing
about). But if you start your consideration of politics in the discourses
of "ajia," it returns you back to history and memory. The only way you can
make Asia a pleasurable consumable is to extract the teeth from cultural
difference, and this also depends upon a sidestepping of the colonial
history. However, there are many producers that are unwilling to do this,
and it's this dance that we see in the film world. 

This occurs in so many locations with so many politics. There are the
strengthening ties to other Asian economies and the rise in importance of
geopolitical entities like ASEAN. Various levels of government participate
in it; for our purposes, two significant sites have been the ASEAN Bunka
Senta of the Japan Foundation and government-sponsored film festivals. The
name of the ASEAN Culture Center clearly wore its politics on its sleeve,
but covered it up with the name change to Asian Cultural Center. However,
its programming of films (by film scholar Ishizaka Kenji) never failed to
pull its punches. I often had the feeling that the film events subverted
the politics of the institution. You can find a similar dynamic in the
1990s boom in film festivals. The programming of the Asian section at the
Tokyo Film Festival is confused and riddled with contradiction (even
directors I know had this impression of the offices themselves when they
visited), thanks in large part to its deep connections to the central
government and multi- and transnational corporations and the festival's
strong desire to be a marketplace. At the same time you've got the
appearance of film festivals sponsored by regional governments, and quite a
few of them made "Asia" a central feature. For example, Yamagata has
clearly sided with various kinds of progressive politics and has never lost
sight of Japan's historical relationship to the rest of Asia. The Fukuoka
"Focus on Asia" Film Festival is far more ambiguous in its relationship to
this geopolitical sea change in the mindscape. 

My sense is that, while the film world may not have the rigorous (and
occassionally hysterical) political activism of the late 1950s-early 1970s,
and while you don't find films confronting the issues that usually
preoccupied the left, there are plenty of people who are still resisting
this perceived turn to the right. And they are locating their own activism
in this turn to Asia more than anywhere else (as in the locations of old,
such as the emperor system, war responsibility, American bases, etc.).*
It's an attempt to slip into the discourses circulating around "Asia" and
"Japan" and divert attention back to the colonial horrors and/or towards
differences of every kind. So while you may have _Pride_, you also have
_Does the Emperor Have War Responsibility?_. And for all the tabebangumi on
television figuratively consuming Asia, there are just as many news reports
and documentaries on war orphans, comfort women, and war crimes. And
alongside the Asia of _Swallowtail_ there is the Asia of _Tenamonya
Connection_ and _Junk Food_. 

A final thought: Mark downplayed the possibility that the recent symbolic
gestures mean anything, as it's impossible to imagine (as one friend
recently put it) the Japan of the new millenium invading Asia and then
staging a final battle on the Kanto plain to teach those damn
gaijin about Yamato Damashii by trading a few million innocent lives for
more favorable surrender terms. However, gestures and symbols are the stuff
of cinema (even their absence from the screens is important), and just this
year the US demonstrated how governments can wage horrific war abroad with
little consequence when the domestic sphere is apolitical and apathetic. 

Markus

*---We probably need to interrogate our own conceptions of "activism" and
"apoliticality." The former nearly always depends on the old and new lefts
for its measure of meaning. These two wings of the left looked at each
other in stark opposition but look remarkably continuous from today's
perspective. In the same manner, the opposition between the two terms above
disallows any recognition that there is a politics and activism in
filmmaking, film programming and film viewing. Maybe we can start by asking
where _passions_ lie, and "Asia" is certainly one place.