Nippon Modern is the first intensive study of Japanese cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which the country's film industry was at its most prolific and a time when cinema played a singular role in shaping Japanese modernity. During the interwar period, the signs of modernity were ubiquitous in Japan's urban architecture, literature, fashion, advertising, popular music, and cinema. The reconstruction of Tokyo following the disastrous earthquake of 1923 highlighted the extent of this cultural transformation, and the film industry embraced the reconfigured space as an expression of the modern. Shochiku Kamata Film Studios (1920-1936), the focus of this study, was the only studio that continued filmmaking in Tokyo following the city's complete destruction. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points to the influence of the new urban culture in Shochiku's interwar films, acclaimed as modan na eiga, or modern films, by and for Japanese. Wada-Marciano's thought-provoking examinations illustrate the reciprocal relationship between cinema and Japan's vernacular modernity--what Japanese modernity actually meant to Japanese. Her thorough and thoughtful analyses of dozens of films within the cultural contexts of Japan contribute to the current inquiry into non-Western vernacular modernities.

Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan provides a detailed yet approachable analysis of the mechanisms central to the birth of mass culture in Japan by tracing the creation, production, and circulation of two critically important family magazines: Kingu (King) and Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). These magazines served to embed new instruments of mass communication and socialization within Japanese society and created mechanisms to facilitate the dissemination of hegemonic forms of discourse in the first half of the twentieth century. The amazing success of Kingu and Ie no hikari during the 1920s and 1930s not only established and normalized participation in a Japanese mass national audience – a community which had previously not existed – but also facilitated the rise of Japanese mass consumer culture in the postwar years. Amy Bliss Marshall argues that the postwar mass national consumer in Japan is foreshadowed by the mass national audience created by family magazines of the interwar era. This book narrates the development of such publications, one explicitly capitalist and one outwardly agrarian, based on missions with an overarching desire to create a mass audience. Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan highlights the importance of the seemingly innocuous acts of mass leisure consumption of magazines and the goods advertised therein, aiding our understanding of the creation and direction of a new form of social participation and understanding – an essential part of not only the culture but also the politics of the interwar period.

A re-interpretation of the master of Japanese cinema from a socio-historical perspectiveOne of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and its population. This book offers a new interpretation of Ozus career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozus depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence. Firmly situating him within the context of the Japanese film industry, Woojeong Joo examines Ozus work as a studio director and his relation to sound cinema, and looks in-depth at his wartime experiences and his adaptation to post-war Japanese society. Drawing on Japanese materials not previously examined in western scholarship, this is a ground-breaking new study of a master of cinema.Case studies include:Ozus shAshimin films Ozus wartime films, including the script of The Flavour of Green Tea over RicePostwar script of The Moon Has RisenTokyo Story

Despite the censorship of dissident material during the decade between the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, a number of photographers across Japan produced a versatile body of Surrealist work. In a pioneering study of their practice, Jelena Stojkovic draws on primary sources and extensive archival research and maps out art historical and critical contexts relevant to the apprehension of this rich photographic output, most of which is previously unseen outside of its country of origin. The volume is an essential resource in the fields of Surrealism and Japanese history of art, for researchers and students of historical avant-gardes and photography, as well as forreaders interested in visual culture.

Japan: A Modern History provides a comprehensive narrative that integrates the political, social, cultural, and economic history of modern Japan from the investiture of Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603 to the present.

This book studies the key genres in contemporary Japanese cinema through analysis of their key representative films. It considers both those films whose generic lineage is clearly definable (samurai, yakuza, horror) as well as the singularity of several r

Television, Japan, and Globalization makes a monumental contribution to the literature of television studies, which has increasingly recognized its problematic focus on US and Western European media, and a compelling intervention in discussions of globalization, through its careful attention to contradictory and complex phenomena on Japanese TV. Case studies include talent and stars, romance, anime, telops, game and talk shows, and live-action nostalgia shows. The book also looks at Japanese television from a political and economic perspective, with attention to Sky TV, production trends, and Fuji TV as an architectural presence in Tokyo. The combination of textual analysis, clear argument, and historical and economic context makes this book ideal for media studies audiences. Its most important contribution may be moving the study of Japanese popular culture beyond the tired truisms about postmodernism and opening up new lines of thinking about television and popular culture within and between nations.