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Ex(or)cising the Spirit of Japan: Ringu, The Ring , and the Persistence of Japan

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01956051.2011.562934

1930-6458

Nicholas Holm,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Abstract Abstract In the adaptation of non-English language cinema for the American and global markets, studios often endeavour to excise alien cultural elements to endear texts to their new audiences. The example of Hideo Nakata's Ringu films and their American counterparts, The Ring series, illustrates the manner in which such adaptations can give form to normally unarticulated assumptions about national cultures, which can reemerge in extratextual criticism and positioning. The understanding of Japan implied in these instances of adaptation is investigated through a comparative analysis and argued to be indicative of the persistence of an Orientalist vision of Japan, which is symptomatic of the historical role of Japanese cinema in the context of film studies. Keywords: adaptationAmericanizationfilm studiesJapanese cinemaOrientalism The Ring Ringu Notes 1. Barthes asserts that conceptual neo-logisms are as inevitable as they are almost inevitably unlovely (121). In that spirit, henceforth, Japaneseness will not be contained within scare quotation marks. 2. Although, in the case of Ringu, there is at least one recorded instance where the American remake was lauded as superior to the Japanese original, ironically published in The Japan Times (Stringer 302). 3. Wider theoretical objections aside, the invasion and occupation of Japan by American forces in the wake of World War II complicates any belief in an unbroken native aesthetic or narrative tradition. Following the postwar occupation by the American army, Japan was not simply exposed to U.S. culture, it was force-fed it. Great efforts were expended on the part of the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers to "rebuild" Japanese culture, not least the film industry, through a regime of censorship and the promotion of suitably "escapist," nonnationalist films that "did not merely offer a new imagined world. [But] also made things disappear" (Dower 426–32). This sustained effort on behalf of the occupying powers to inculcate the American values of "democracy" and "liberty" is widely considered, both in lay and scholarly understandings, to have led to a perceptible shift in Japanese cultural production and consumption (Hirano 1–2; McRoy, Japanese 78–79). 4. Several in-depth breakdowns of the various versions of the cursed videotape are available online at the time of writing. Two of the most thorough can be found at and .