Nostalgia (hometown/big city follow-up)

[Ken Shima]

Thank you Faith, Melek, Roger and others who responded to my initial  
inquiry regarding the idea, appearance and use of nostalgia.  
Yamanaka's row-houses in "Nijou Kamifusen" is indeed an interesting  
portrayal of Edo community to a possibly nostalgic early Showa  
audience. Having pointed me in the right direction regarding pre-war  
history of nostalgic motifs for the countryside in film and  
literature, I wonder if might shift the discussion a bit, specifically  
to the post-war.

If we see the portrayal of the countryside as a nostalgic motif common  
to Japanese art and cinema (and arguably in other countries as well),  
how do we see the use of nostalgia change in the postwar, in the  
1960s, 80s, and now? For Yamada Yoji, "Tora-san" was more-or-less  
portraying a remaining pocket of shitamachi in Tokyo. The significance  
seems to be that he was emphasizing/fantasizing a temporally co- 
existent patch of culture and while it is difficult to judge how  
nostalgic audiences of the 1960s felt toward the urban shitamachi  
community of Shibamata, it seems safe to say that Tora-san now seems a  
campy, stylized Shochiku world and definitely a cinematic artifact to  
current audiences.

What happens when this once contemporary cinematic world of the Showa  
30s is revived as a popular historical destination in recent years?  
Especially, when a historical-visual relationship to the past is now  
understood through cinema of the time? With the recent increase in  
popularity of portrayals of the 1960s, a decade I am particularly  
interested in, I wanted to toss this out there for some your thoughts.

So, what makes postwar nostalgia different, what makes this more  
recent portrayals of nostalgia distinct?

Thank you very much for your help,


Ken



Ken Shima
Nihon Daigaku, Literature Theory Dept.




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