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Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen ed. by Jennifer Coates and Eyal Ben-Ari (review)

2024; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2024.a918607

1549-4721

Marco Pellitteri,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Reviewed by: Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen ed. by Jennifer Coates and Eyal Ben-Ari Marco Pellitteri (bio) Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen. Edited by Jennifer Coates and Eyal Ben-Ari. Routledge, 2022. x, 222 pages. $170.00, cloth; $52.95, paper; $52.95, E-book. This volume, assembled by Jennifer Coates and Eyal Ben-Ari, stems from a conference at Kyoto University in 2017. Comprised of ten chapters and an introduction, it is essentially a collection of essays on Japanese cinema, arranged into three sections: "Historical Contexts," "Critique, Contestation, and Resistance," and "Creating the Political Subject through Media." The first thing that caught my eye, therefore, is that this book does not encompass "visual media" in Japan. Instead, it is mainly on Japanese cinematography. The one chapter that does not focus on moving images (chapter 4, on an adventure comic book from the 1950s) looks like a beautiful [End Page 267] intruder that could have been hosted somewhere else. To justify its title, the book might have included chapters on video games, graphic design, advertising, illustration, and/or other equally cogent fields of visual media. At the same time, the editors imply a revisable idea that animation (chapters 5 and 8 deal with animated films) or documentary (regardless whether hosted at a theater or on television, see chapter 7) is inherently different from cinema as a medium, a technology, and a form of expression. In my view, the title is partly a theoretical trompe l'oeil. Keeping the keywords of the current title, a better one could have been, for example, "Japanese Moving Images: De/Politicizing the Screens." The prefix "de-" is in the spirit of the book, which was collected with the aim of uncovering and explaining "the ways by which politics is naturalized and denaturalized, and familiarized and defamiliarized" and exploring "the tensions between state actors such as censors, politicized and non-politicized audiences, and visual media creators" (p. i). There is no doubt, however, that the book's scholarly contributions are all of high quality. The array of approaches to Japanese moving images is nicely diverse, thematically and in the choices of films analyzed; and the language and supporting scholarship are systematically generous and rich. This also pertains to Deanna T. Nardy's chapter on the 1951 picture book Shōnen Keniya (Kenya boy), a serial comic in format and appearance. Manga scholar Ryan Holmberg identified this kind of picture book as a potent, peculiar mix between aka-hon (pulp picture book) and e-monogatari (variable grid picture book), calling it e-manga. This vast but almost-forgotten type of manga for youths and adults in 1940s–1950s' Japan was neither manga for children in the manner of Tezuka Osamu nor gekiga (dramatic images) as inaugurated by the group of auteurs led by Tatsumi Yoshihiro in 1957.1 Nardy deals with this adventure picture book through the lens of its representations of "African-ness," "blackness," and (Anglo-Saxon) "whiteness." Her interesting argument, although not supported by a wider sample of manga, may draw attention particularly from those interested in comics and graphic novels and the ways they reveal how popular culture represents certain societal issues or opinions to youths. The heart of the book, and the key reason to buy and read it, is the chapters on cinema. The editors have assembled them, rearranging the rich material of the conference, so that the chapter progression "spans almost a century, from militarizing 1930s Imperial Japan through to the present day" (p. 1), to "demonstrate that processes of politicization and depoliticization [in visual media, the editors imply] should be understood as part of wider [End Page 268] historical circumstances" (p. 2). The most important feat of the volume is its "focus on non-canonical texts … outside the core group of Japanese visual media productions recognized by Anglo-European scholars and critics" (ibid.). One note of caution here: the editors and most of the contributors do not seem to have a thorough knowledge of studies on animated and live action cinema in a variety of European traditions, as there are few original sources cited. A key theme of the volume—alternation of politicization and depoliticization of certain...