Progress Dismantled: The Uncanny Child in Lost Decade Japanese Horror Film

• In Event: Imagining a “Post-Bubble” Japan in Lost-Decade Cinema

Abstract

In the later years of the first lost decade, the release of the horror film Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998)— which remains one of the most commercially successful horror films ever to be released in Japan—ignited a Japanese cultural obsession with a particular model of the uncanny child. Sadako, the terrible aggressor of Ring, has become one of the most recognizable horror icons of the new century: a strange but telling paradigm for the moment of cultural uncertainty represented by the lost decade, considering that she functions as a harbinger for the collapse of chronological progress. Through an analysis of Ring and other influential J-horror films of the period such as Ju-on (Takashi Shimizu, 2002) and Dark Water (Nakata, 2002), this paper explores the ways in which the uncanny children of lost-decade J-horror express multivalent anxieties about the wavering of national progress. I suggest that central to the unease of the lost decade was a traumatic dissolution of the previously unquestioned ideological braiding of childhood with national identity, the child’s growing up with national progress. The temporally dissonant uncanny child became the figural site of these contortions. The paper discusses how the uncanny children of lost decade J-horror disassemble coherent, progressive time in deeply frightening ways in a Japanese context, particularly because in Japan the child sustains the linear logic at the core of conceptions of modernity and progress. Yet in so doing these figures also challenge long-entrenched fixations with national progress and futurity, opening up a space for the reconsideration of the child’s conceptual function.

Author

• Jessica Balanzategui, The University of Melbourne