Home Is Where the Heart Is: Family Melodrama and Taiwan’s Anti-Japanese Films, 1972-1982

• In Event: From Resentment to Alternative Cooperation: Imagining the Intimate Other in Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese Cinema

Abstract

This paper examines the trope of home in Taiwan’s anti-Japanese films from the 1970s. In respond to Japan’s decision to break off its diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1972, the film industry of Taiwan produced at least one anti-Japanese war film every year for the rest of the decade. While these films are often coded as a masculine genre, they also adopt emotional excess and heightened dramatization typically associated with melodrama and women’s pictures. Furthermore, the spatial integration of domestic space with the battlefield becomes a common representation in these films. Drawing on melodrama theories, this paper explores the sub-theme of root-seeking and homecoming under the films’ antagonistic narrative with the examples of Liu Jia-chang’s Victory (1976) and Hsu Chin-liang’s Gone with Honor (1979). These films’ construction of home shows that family issues are often employed to enhance the external complications, melding the familial with the national in Taiwan’s anti-Japanese films from the 1970s. Through close analysis of the two films, the paper investigates the role of parental figures in representing the imaginary national tradition and reinforcing the strong longing for “a sense of place.” Ultimately, it argues that in addition to recuperating the nation’s anti-Japanese ideology, these anti-Japanese war films actually reveal the KMT government’s fear of displacement and growing diasporic anxiety in the 1970s.

Author

• Mei-hsuan Chiang, University of South Florida