Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 17

Television, Japan, and Globalization

TELEVISION, JAPAN, AND GLOBALIZATION

Edited by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Eva Tsai, and JungBong Choi

Published by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2010.

ISBN 978-1-929280-58-2 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-929280-59-9 (paper)

List Price: $70.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper)

"This book...

The Borrower Arrietty / Karigurashi no Arietti

, the movie is literally about small things...

Film, Benjamin, and Art

Sorry for the string of publication announcements, but I just had to note two more interesting books that have just come out.

Nakamura Hideyuki, Gareki no tenshitachi: Benyamin kara eiga no mihatenu yume e 『瓦礫の天使たち—ベンヤミンから"映画"の見果てぬ夢へ』(Serika Shobo, 2010)

Nakamura-san is really one of the smartest people writing on film in Japan today and this book, a collection of his previous essays, uses Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault to reconsider the relationship between film and urban space, focusing...

Oshima and the Postwar Image

I've been meaning to mention this for some time, but two books recently came out on postwar Japanese film and media that are worth taking a look at.

Imeji toshite no sengo 『イメージとしての戦後』, eds. Tsuboi Hideto and Fujiki Hideaki (Seikyusha, 2010).

This features articles on a variety of media, but of particular interest are those on Tezuka Osamu (by Tom Lamarre), Ozu Yasujiro (by Dogase Masato), Oshii Mamoru (by Mizukawa Hirofumi), robot manga (by Baba Nobuhiko), and Mizoguchi Kenji's Akasen chitai...

Two New Japanese Journals

JunCture 超域的日本文化研究 had its first issue published in January. It is the official journal of the...

The Akira Kurosawa Memorial Museum Memorial

Some may recall that an Akira Kurosawa Memorial Museum was being planned for the city of Imari in Saga Prefecture. Kurosawa himself had picked the location after visiting it during the production of Ran.

Well, the last straw has fallen and the Museum plan has gone kaput. The news services report that the city has demanded return of the money it paid to the Akira Kurosawa Foundation--the foundation in charge of creating the museum which is run by Kurosawa Hisao, Akira's son--for the initial...

Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences (JASIAS) 2010

wrote about academic film societies in Japan, and in particular the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences (Nihon Eizo Gakkai 日本映像学会). The JASIAS had its annual conference last weekend at the Arts Faculty of Nihon University in Tokyo, so I thought I'd report on it.

JASIAS conferences can be hit and miss. They are usually held the first weekend in June and  schedule is often to have a symposium on Saturday and paper panels on Sunday. The society usually switches back and...

Censoring The Cove in Japan

As a scholar who has done a lot of research on the history of film censorship in Japan, I like to remind people that censorship takes many forms and need not all be state centered.

The Asahi reports this morning that one of the theaters scheduled to show the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove has broken under pressure from right-wing organizations and decided not to show the film. The right-wingers, who had threatened to begin protests on the 4th in front of the theater, had already performed...

A Retrospective on Japanese Retrospectives

Chris Fujiwara (author of the very tempting new book on Jerry Lewis), for inviting me to write. 

In the piece, entitled "A Retrospective on Japanese Retrospectives," I use the retro - and its unfortunate lack of a...

Touring Japan, and Finding Cinemas in Unusual Places

My excuse for the long break between posts is that I was on a tour of Japan. I wish it was to promote my new book, Visions of Japanese Modernity, but authors of obscure academic texts do not get book tours. Rather, I was serving as a study leader on a tour of Japan organized by a division of the Association of Yale Alumni called Yale Educational Travel. They basically organize tours all around the world that are led by Yale professors, who give lectures along the way. They can be a great way...