Asian Invasion

[Aaron Gerow]

>I'm suggesting that, whether 
>conscious or not, "Asian invasion" is shorthand for cinema from newly 
>ascendant economies.

I think Joe's onto something very interesting here, but there are two 
short comments/questions I have.

One is that, during a conference in Fukuoka I was attending, Madhava 
Prasad from India was trying to argue in a panel on Asian film melodrama 
that melodrama was a local imagination in some ways resistant or 
alternative to the more colonialist currency of realism (for example, the 
Hollywood code of realism).  If we accept that argument, what does the 
American appropriation of Asian melodrama imply?

Second, what is also interesting is that Japanese film, if it is being 
consumed in the United States, is being consumed precisely as that 
"postindustrial, postmodern" culture represented by anime and other cult 
movie appropriations.  We can ask why Kehr (whom I fondly read way back 
in the mid 1970s when he wrote for the Chicago Reader) did not include 
this obvious popular invasion.  But we can also ask what different 
processes are involved in this other kind of appropriation of Japan as 
subculture.  This is precisely the question I raised back in November, 
but no one responded (shiku shiku...).  Any one care to respond now?

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171