J-horror as national formatting

Fri Jun 9 10:32:06 EDT 2006

There are a lot of ways the history of J-horror could go, I imagine, but I
wanted to get back to the crux of Mathieu¹s original question about the
circulation of the concept of ³J-horror.² The question, as I remember it,
was ³what in the world is specifically Japanese about² the particular kinds
of gothic, spiritualist, and horror elements that are identified in
festivals and in print journalism as J-horror.

I think the etymology is J-horror is really interesting.

My gut feeling is that the ³J² prefix began to convey a marked emphasis on
mass, national aesthetics in a significantly new way in the mid-90s. I think
that the coining of ³J² as a term is just as important as tracking down and
digging up where the generic bodies of horror are buried. I wonder if the
heightened attention to ³J² as a new, edgy, youthful framing mechanism
didn¹t pave over a whole lot of differences that existed in the initial
films. For instance, a kaidan is a ghost story, and has a whole legion of
different antecedents in stage and oral story-telling, and in the print
cultures of Edo Japan, contexts that set it apart from the horror context
where it is typically placed in present-day criticism.

I never thought I¹d be sorry to see the discussion of Japanese
post-modernism fade into the sunset. But it did provoke people who thought
about culture to think about how films are very layered, hybrid things, and
aren¹t organic elements of J-tradition. I  think that because the pomo
discussion was so attentive to shifts in markets and money, and not just to
tradition and style, that is probably useful to keep in mind, as a potential
default to the Œnational cinema¹ model from the early 20th century that so
often dominates discussion of J-horror. Of course, on the other hand, I
think the whole idea of ³national cinemas² is highly useful to
multi-national production companies and studios, as they can keep finding
and trading pure strains of national cinematic production, combing back
through the archives, to excavate new ³influence² back and forth from east
to west, in deals whose special effects really make the contents of the
films pretty pale and disappointing, as I gather from the oft-tragic tone of
much commentary on J-horror.

I wonder, has the invention of ³J-horror² made for better films, or just
neater slots, differences that can be overcome through remakes, and better
deals through the ³discovery² of new pure cinemas, and their global
re-formatting? Maybe another way of asking this is, does J-horror exist if
you are making films outside of a global studio system, or does it make
sense only inside that context?

As for the increased visibility of ³J,² this interest in new native forms
seems pretty periodisable‹how to periodise this, or document when it caught
fire, was the initial question that set this discussion off. I don¹t think
you can set off J-horror from the other new J-markets of the mid-90s, the
new markets and modes of J-pop and J-bungaku‹positioned as edgy, youthful,
auteurist, and national versions of global aesthetics. Pop music in Japanese
had been around for decades complete with swooning teenagers and catchy
melodies and production, yet a new genre and market was formatted as J-pop
in the mid-90s in the context of global distribution. J-pop first became
institutionalised in HMV¹s Shibuya store in 1994, and J-bungaku was
trumpeted in the mid-90s, with writers like Abe Kazushige (Individual
Projection) and Akasaka Mari (Vibrate). They were extremely aware of genre
and the expressive possibilities of different kinds of media, such as
cinema, and gave prose fiction a jolt at a time when ³serious² literature
was seen to be dying, and in danger of becoming a mere subculture. ³J² is
³universally² understandable in the alphabet of markets, standing for
Japan/Japon/whatever other roman letter-based spellings you might want to
suggest, not Nihon.  J-culture seemed to aim to tap into a globalised, if
not a universal, market, in the mid-90s, following the multi-national money..

I¹m not sure ³influence² between Japan and Hollywood tells the whole story
for me. To me, the rise of ³J² is about much more than the nichi-bei
slugfest/lovefest of adaptations between these two bilateral parties in a
postwar relationship marked by treaties in 1945/1952, and all about the
global formatting of cultural products in an era where one man¹s mass
culture in its place of production might be another man¹s subculture a few
time zones away. Making J-horror a mass culture phenomenon, rather than a
subculture phenomenon, also seems part of the mission of ³J,² to me. In my
memory, in the salad days of ³J²-culture, ³J² for ³Japan² was tacked onto
kinds of pop culture that could be globalised, and formatted in their
respective national versions, but that had to be stamped with ³J² as a way
of showing that the product belonged to ³mass culture² (big markets,
nationally formatted and sandwiched between, say, ³I²-pop and ³K²-pop) in
the alphabetic map of markets and not ³subculture² (small markets, often
segmented by sex or other demographic category, for subculture people
perversely indifferent to national belonging). Stamping cultural products
with ³J² for mass, national culture prevented their global reception from
taking place as if they were subcultural objects. Made them accessible to
multiple audiences when they were transferred to other places & contexts, as
something for the masses, for everybody, not select weirdo connoisseurs of a
subculture. In some ways, J- de-exoticised or de-particularised genres (like
horror) that could be potentially hemmed in to subculture status, by racking
³J² up as just one in a series of nationally formatted global projects, in
the alphabet of the market. It seems like a way of preserving at least the
idea of national cinema and national aesthetics. I imagine that the ³J² also
built on the ubiquitous familiarity of the J-league, and its membership in
global sports, and marks a bid for the J-object to seen as a mass culture,
that is to say, a national cultural product with widespread appeal in other
globally linked national markets.

I also find the gendering of J-horror interesting, as it is able to reformat
highly gendered conventions for a mass culture audience overseas. To me, it
seems to draw a lot on trad aspects of gothic fiction‹domestic terror,
haunted relationships, spooky family histories, melodrama run amok to a
pitch of hysteria. In lit and film, these are traditionally girly territory..
The suspense of J-horror tends to wallow in emotion and dysfunctional
relationships ragged with ³discommunication²‹I¹m thinking offhand of Ring
and Kurosawa Kiyoshi. That import of the gothic into horror is really
interesting. I wonder if it¹s taken the place of those weepy yakuza films of
the 60s, the ones that use stoicism and style in characterisation in
alternation with the sentimental rivers of melodrama that literally carry
you through the film‹here I¹m thinking of matatabi-mono in general, or the
more globally appreciated Tokyo Drifter. Think of Kill Bill and how it
neutralises those elements of melodramatic tension into ³bang bang, I shot
my lover down,² while preserving the style in the literal mimicking of shots
and the backdrop of a song. Horror, these days, seems more accommodating of
the tension between emotion and stoicism.

The debates on ³cultural essentialism² might, when named by this name, seem
turgid or academic. But I do find these dubious totalities like J-horror to
be a bit unsatisfying because they encourage us to think of genres, which
like ³horror,² are typically made of precipitates and pastiches of radically
different cultural forms from different times, as one organic category whose
beginnings and endings and changes aren¹t even relevant. Obviously, it¹s
hyperbolic, and remote from the original newspaper article that started this
discussion, to compare this to the functions of a term like ³the war on
terror² in a telegraphic way, as I am doing. But the dynamic is the
same‹de-historicise, retro-fit an origin in the natural resources of
³tradition,² remake it, distribute and sell it back as a global commodity. I
guess I¹m interested in how, as a container, J-horror implies a set of
relationships, deals and exchanges, and how those are in dialogue with other
kids of global media formations. What does it mean that horror is so active
in an era where media from micro- to conglomerate are concerned with
processing and distributing fear and suspense, often in very culturalist
terms? 

Thanks for an interesting discussion, so far.

Anne

On 6/8/06 7:48 PM, "Mathieu St-Pierre" <cteve at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Does anybody know where the term "J-HORROR" come from? Because to my opinion
> this thing never really exist... What I mean is Japanese horror movies
> always been around. It only been massively recognized by the U.S. and Europe
> with the arrival of Ring. But the term "J-HORROR" was probably used by the
> movie industry in the u.s. or the DVD industry to sell more easily something
> that was difficult to market at that time. So "J-HORROR" would only be a
> market name so to speak. Maybe the critics started using it afterward. But,
> I may be all wrong. This is just my opinion.
> 
> 
> Mathieu St-Pierre
> 
>> yeah thanks for the article, i am doing my phd on j-horror's influence on
>> hollywood do u have anything else on this subject?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Emma Newbery BA
>> Programme Leader
>> BTEC National Diploma in Media (Moving Image)
>> Blackpool and the Fylde College
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> From: Michael McCaskey <mccaskem at georgetown.edu>
>>> Reply-To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>>> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>>> Subject: Re: J-horror Inquirer article
>>> Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 14:16:08 -0400
>>> 
>>> Many thanks! You all are practically writing my new lecture for me.
>>> 
>>> Michael McCaskey
>>> 
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: Brian Ruh <brianruh at yahoo.com>
>>> Date: Thursday, June 8, 2006 1:12 pm
>>> Subject: Re: J-horror Inquirer article
>>> 
>>>> On 2006.6.8, at 11:17  AM, Michael McCaskey wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Does anyone know about any other non-horror remakes, recent or on
>>>>> the horizon?
>>>> 
>>>> After my previous post I saw the announcement that New Line has bought
>>>> the rights to remake Battle Royale:
>>>> http://www.darkhorizons.com/news06/060608b.php
>>>> 
>>>> == Brian
>>>> 
>>>> Brian's Essential Reading:
>>>> Book:     http://www.oshiibook.com
>>>> Research: http://www.animeresearch.com
>>>> 
>>>> __________________________________________________
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>> 
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