[KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake film versions of Kanto daijinsai

Tue Apr 8 04:48:45 EDT 2014

Yes, the 1923 Kanto earthquake has appeared in cinema quite a few times, largely because for Showa era directors it represented figuratively the turning point between Taisho liberalism and early-Showa nationalism. The Tanaka Noboru-directed Roman Porno Watcher in the Attic (Yaneura no sanpôsha, 1976) is another good example, based on a number of stories by Edogawa Rampo. I'm sure there are many more.As for the 1995 Hanshin earthquake, the only reference I can think of is MizutaniToshiyuki’s J-horror Isola (Isola: Tajû jinkaku shôjo, 2000), about a psychic girl with multiple personalities rescued from its ruins. As the Aum gas attacks on the Tokyo subway occurred within a matter of weeks of this, it was this latter disaster that formed the basis of much of the pre-millennial manifestations of national trauma, felt particularly strongly in films by Aoyama Shinji and Zeze Takahisa.

The Creeping Garden - A Real-Life Science-Fiction Story about Slime Moulds and the People Who Work With them. Currently in production, directed by Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp. 
The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (2011) is out now from Scarecrow Press
Midnight Eye - Visions of Japanese cinema
http://www.midnighteye.com

> Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 16:29:44 +0900
> From: hakutaku at kansaigaidai.ac.jp
> To: kinejapan at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: Re: [KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake film versions of Kanto daijinsai
> 
> Concerning cinema versions of the Kanto daijinsai, I think there are many. Two popular ones are Jissoji Akio's Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (帝都物語, Teito Monogatari, 1988 that has all kinds of detailed models of the city begin destroyed in a fantasy narrative. There is also Fukusaku Kinji's retelling of Yosano Akiko's life in Hana no ran 華の乱 also from 1988 that ends with the chaos of the earthquake. I think there are many more. 
> It is interesting to reflect on the varied treatments like this.
> Paul Berry
> Kyoto
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Ryan Cook <ryancook at fas.harvard.edu>
> To: Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum <kinejapan at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>
> Sent: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 08:58:12 +0900 (JST)
> Subject: Re: [KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake 2011 Av coverage
> 
> 
> Jim,
> 
> This was an issue that came up at times at the Berkeley symposium and was a theme in my own paper which situated 3/11 fiction films in relation to atomic bomb and hibakusha films.  I personally came across an observation that the Kanto and Hanshin earthquakes had received surprisingly little attention from fiction/narrative filmmakers.  I'm not quite comfortable making that claim myself because I haven't followed up on it very much, but Jonathan Abel gave a paper at Berkeley in which he cited an interesting quote from an essay by Yumeno Kyusaku written shortly after the 1923 earthquake.  Yumeno had interviewed an official responsible for film censorship who noted that there had been a lack of screenplays dealing with the disaster submitted for official approval at the time.  The conclusion was that screenwriters had exercised self-restraint at least in the historical moment.  Self-restraint (jishuku) has also been a theme since 3/11, but evidently not to the point of altogeth
>  
>  er preventing films from being made.
> 
> The Wind Rises contains a dramatic depiction of the Kanto earthquake, as someone else just mentioned.  That's interesting in that it is a depiction of the earthquake from a post-3/11 vantage point (at least the film was released in 2013... I don't know when production began), and in that sense it is also a "3/11 film."  Miyazaki of course has publicly come out against nuclear energy, and it seems reasonable to imagine a subtext in all the talk of Japan "exploding" and the persistence of the wind motif in the film, the wind being as ambivalent as the dream of flight, lifting beautiful things into the air, but also spreading fires and poisonous things.  Wakamatsu Koji was reportedly planning an adaptation of the nuclear fallout graphic novel "When the Wind Blows" before his death.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of other dramatic representations of the 1923 earthquake in film, though I'm probably overlooking important examples.
> 
> Ryan
> 
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: kinejapan-bounces+ryancook=fas.harvard.edu at lists.service.ohio-state.edu [kinejapan-bounces+ryancook=fas.harvard.edu at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] on behalf of Jim Harper [jimharper666 at yahoo.co.uk]
> Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 5:34 AM
> To: Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum
> Subject: Re: [KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake 2011 Av coverage
> 
> Forgive me butting in here, but I'm curious about a couple of things.
> 
> a) Has much been written about the presentation and portrayal of disaster in Japanese cinema in general, prior to 3/11?
> 
> b) Have specific disasters- like the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 or the 1995 Kobe Earthquake- been heavily represented in contemporary film, also prior to 3/11?
> 
> Can anyone help? Just a couple of brief answers would be very much appreciated. Thank you!
> 
> Jim Harper.
> 
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