Japanese film and the political right

[Sylvia Chong]

Just some general comments on the ensuring discussion:

>>I believe J. film took a disastrously wrong turn in the early seventies
>>when it turned heavily to manga for story ideas. Although we don't see
>>this so much anymore, there is still a stylized, two-dimensional quality
>>to many film characters, a lack of interiority which seems to date back
>>to the manga influence. Can we not say that the (apparently) apolitical
>>void in whcih so many films are set reflects a similar in the typical
>>manga?
>
>Or perhaps this is a result of the hollowing out of the Japanese filmgoing
>audience in the seventies, with the audience becoming much younger, and
>its older members much more likely to be male. The sort of audience
>usually offered up cute animals and cartoon characters for its younger
>members, nudity and guns for the older ones, and neither one thought to
>need a lot of character development. Manga or not, the stories were
>destined to become less complex in this scenario.

I wonder if it is fair to characterize the turn from "depth" and "realism"
in Japanese cinema as necessarily a degeneration of quality, or even, as I
think is being implied, weakening recent films or anime's capacity for a
being "political." As someone who has only recently began to consider
popular culture as a topic of study, I have to remind myself not to assume
that psychological depth, complexity, or even realism are universal
indicators of artistic value or merit. At least in Western literature, this
model of "realism" rose simultaneously with the advent of the novel as the
bourgeois literary form of choice, which makes it only 150 years old or so.
Far from universal, in my opinion.

There is so much manga and anime in Japan that you can find all sorts of
"political" meanings in a particular text. Popular culture, being popular,
is susceptible to the charge of being complicit with the dominant values in
a society, but one can read these text very creatively if one tries.  I
don't just mean critics, but the consumers as well. Even from the most
popular titles being exported to the U.S., I see all kinds of subversive
elements popping up.  Ok, so "Urotsukidooji" is not exactly Mark Twain or
even "Bulsworth", but it comments on a lot of deeper issues: male impotence
and class anxiety, apocalyptic warfare and utopian futures, female power
and its inherent destructiveness. What does it say about Japanese family
structures and gender roles when a little baby girl is the Overfiend and
her papa runs about destroying the human realm with his atomic penis?

Science fiction in the U.S. also suffers from a reputation for being
apolitical, escapist, or just plain reactionary. I think these people are
still stuck reading books that are 40 years old and mistaking them for the
contemporary state of things.

Comments?

Sylvia Chong
UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Dept.
schong at hooked.net

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Sylvia Chong
schong at hooked.net

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