Query re Ikeru Ningyo

Wed Sep 17 11:30:10 EDT 2003

An anthropologist friend specializing in doll culture in Japan asked me this question.  Any help would be most appreciated.

I'm trying to track down information on the 1929 film by Uchida Tomu, "Ikeru Ningyo" (The Living Doll). Do you by any chance know
anything about it?   I don't even know the plot, or if the film is still extant, but I keep running across references to it. I'm tracing doll symbolism from the 1920s through the war period, as dolls are gradually militarized, and I'm intrigued by the movie's title.

Hotaru (Firefly) is based on a widely believed story that the soul of a dead kamikaze came back as a firefly the night after he died, to the cafe where he'd spent his last night of life. The director, for various interesting reasons, decided to merge this with a true story, that involved a different pilot, who was secretly Korean, and who 'came out' as it were the night before he died to his friends by singing a Korean folk song. 

Thanks!
Matthew Bernstein
Emory University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20030917/87e922d6/attachment.html 