Counter-Culture and Counter-Media in Postwar Japan

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel presents nuanced understandings of postwar Japanese counter-culture by examining the vibrant histories of popular media that variously sang, laughed, fought and photographed the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 70s in Japan. By demonstrating how counter-cultural production interacted with dominant cultural forces, global capital flows and other social changes, we intend to challenge the conventional binary that opposes mainstream culture to counter-culture. In particular, this panel explores the counter-media where counter-culture not only arose in opposition to the established values of society but also negotiated new critical perspectives on dominant values and discourses. By looking at the changes in the media histories of cinema, television, music and photography in this period, we seek to better understand how counter-culture was created, practiced, accepted, contested and transformed in relation to domestic and international historical forces.

Jun Hee Lee discusses how Utagoe, a choral movement in association with Japanese Communist Party, negotiated its identity in relation to American folk music. Seong Un Kim interrogates divergence and convergence of differing ideas of audience participation in television and its democratic value. Igarashi Yoshikuni follows the transition of the yakuza film genre in the context of its cinematic conventions and social transformations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, Franz Prichard focuses on how photographer and critic Nakahira Takuma developed a counter-cultural perspective in relation to Japan’s Cold War urbanization.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Seong Un Kim, University of Chicago

Chair

• Seong Un Kim, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Heroes in Crisis: The Transformation of Yakuza Film in Early 1970s Japan - Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University

• Counter-Cultural Critique and the Remaking of Urban Japan during the 1960s and 70s - Franz Prichard, Princeton University

• Music for the Youth: American Folk Music's Impact on 1960s Utagoe - Jun Hee Lee, University of Chicago

• Performing Democracy: Audience Participation in Postwar Japanese Television - Seong Un Kim, University of Chicago

Discussant

• Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Meiji University