Japanese Film Workshop

[Naoki Yamamoto]

Dear Kine-Japaners,

Please join us for the first meeting of the Japanese Film Workshop on  
Thursday, October 1, 7PM, at Meiji Gakuin University, Shirokane  
campus. The venue is called the Kyozai junbi sitsu (教材準備室), a  
room next to the office of the Department of Art Studies (芸術学科)  
on 6F of the main building. The Japanese Film Workshop is open to all,  
and directions to Meiji Gakuin can be found at:

http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/access/index.html

Unburdening Zainichi Films

Oliver Dew - PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, London and JSPS  
research fellow at Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo.

Critics have long recognised that films depicting traumatic historical  
events have a privileged access to public memory forming. All too  
often though the critic of the zainichi film is caught in a dilemma:  
how to engage with the film’s claim to represent diasporic Korean  
histories and identities, yet at the same time avoid sliding into the  
“historical scorecard” approach to criticism, which repeatedly  
asks, “is this depiction realistic?” This approach implies that  
historical verisimilitude rendered in the realist mode is the only  
appropriate way to tell these stories. This can only reproduce the  
burden of representation that zainichi films carry.

To move beyond this concern over whether the details of plot are  
factually verisimilar, yet still be able to interrogate the films’  
politics, I argue for a closer attention to these films as rhetoric,  
as specifically cinematic interventions in a debate that is conducted  
across TV variety shows, weekly opinion magazines, long-form essays,  
celebrity memoirs, internet blogs, and other popular media. To this  
end I will focus in this presentation on the narrative figure of  
“coming out” as zainichi, first seen onscreen in the mid-1970s,  
most notably in the early film roles of Johnny Ōkura. Since the  
success of the Kaneshiro Kazuki’s novel Go in 2000, and its film  
adaptation a year later, this has become a recurring motif. The  
heightened, manichaean terms in which this narrative figure is so  
often staged are at odds with the main features of “post-zainichi”  
writing: calls to go beyond a fixed ethnic identity on the one hand,  
and the strategic deployment of prosaic, de-dramatised ordinariness on  
the other. But the critical preoccupation with whether, say, the  
Pacchigi films’ depiction of inter-ethnic relations is  
“representative” too often forecloses the question of mediation: in  
this case, the extent to which audiences are appreciative of dramatic  
license and the highly codified imperatives of melodrama that are  
operative in Pacchigi.

For more information, please contact naoki.yamamoto at yale.edu

Best wishes,

Naoki Yamamoto (Coordinator)
PhD Candidate
East Asian Languages and Literatures/Film Studies
Yale University