The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japanese cinema today, through cutting-edge scholarship that reflects the hybridity of approaches defining the field. The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four parts, each representing an emergent area of inquiry: "Decentring Classical Cinema" "Questions of Industry" "Intermedia as an Approach" "The Object Life of Film" This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of 200 years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty-first century. This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies, and cultural studies more broadly.

This book provides a multifaceted single-volume account of Japanese cinema. It addresses productive debates about what Japanese cinema is, where Japanese cinema is, as well as what and where Japanese cinema studies is, at the so-called period of crisis of national boundary under globalization and the so-called period of crisis of cinema under digitalization.

Over the last 20 years, ethnic minority groups have been increasingly featured in Japanese Films. However, the way these groups are presented has not been a subject of investigation. This study examines the representation of so-called Others – foreigners, ethnic minorities, and Okinawans – in Japanese cinema. By combining textual and contextual analysis, this book analyses the narrative and visual style of films of contemporary Japanese cinema in relation to their social and historical context of production and reception. Mika Ko considers the ways in which ‘multicultural’ sentiments have emerged in contemporary Japanese cinema. In this respect, Japanese films may be seen not simply to have ‘reflected’ more general trends within Japanese society but to have played an active role in constructing and communicating different versions of multiculturalism. In particular, the book is concerned with how representations of ‘otherness’ in contemporary Japanese cinema may be identified as reinforcing or subverting dominant discourses of ‘Japaneseness’. the author book also illuminates the ways in which Japanese films have engaged in the dramatisation and elaboration of ideas and attitudes surrounding contemporary Japanese nationalism and multiculturalism. By locating contemporary Japanese cinema in a social and political context, Japanese Cinema and Otherness makes an original contribution to scholarship on Japanese film study but also to bridging the gap between Japanese studies and film studies.

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: · Theories and Approaches · * Institutions and Industry · * Film Style · * Genre · * Times and Spaces of Representation · * Social Contexts · * Flows and Interactions

The largest, most complete English language listing of contemporary Japanese films. Every major theatrical film released in Japan between 1965-1998 is listed along with capsule reviews, background information, director and cast credits, and alternate titles.

This Handbook is an interdisciplinary resource that focuses on contemporary Japan and the social and cultural trends that are important at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In A New History of Japanese Cinema Isolde Standish focuses on the historical development of Japanese film. She details an industry and an art form shaped by the competing and merging forces of traditional culture and of economic and technological innovation. Adopting a thematic, exploratory approach, Standish links the concept of Japanese cinema as a system of communication with some of the central discourses of the twentieth century: modernism, nationalism, humanism, resistance, and gender. After an introduction outlining the earliest years of cinema in Japan, Standish demonstrates cinema's symbolic position in Japanese society in the 1930s - as both a metaphor and a motor of modernity. Moving into the late thirties and early forties, Standish analyses cinema's relationship with the state-focusing in particular on the war and occupation periods. The book's coverage of the post-occupation period looks at "romance" films in particular. Avant-garde directors came to the fore during the 1960s and early seventies, and their work is discussed in depth. The book concludes with an investigation of genre and gender in mainstream films of recent years. In grappling with Japanese film history and criticism, most western commentators have concentrated on offering interpretations of what have come to be considered "classic" films. A New History of Japanese Cinema takes a genuinely innovative approach to the subject, and should prove an essential resource for many years to come.