Imagining a “Post-Bubble” Japan in Lost-Decade Cinema

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel examines cinematic responses to Japan’s “lost decades” of the 1990s and 2000s, a period characterized by economic decline, the downgrading of Japan’s international position, the growth of a disaffected youth culture, and other national and social crises. While previous studies examine the lost decades mainly through economic and social perspectives, this panel makes the case for the importance of film in portraying “post-bubble” malaise and envisioning a future beyond it. Bridging the divide between popular media and films with high-art aspirations, lost-decade cinema taps into the social and cultural anxieties of post-bubble Japan while visualizing a horizon beyond the stagnation of the 1990s and 2000s, due to the ability of the cinematic medium, according to critic Giles Deleuze, to offer new ways of imagining the dynamism of life other than narrative models that synthesize events into linear progressions. The papers in this panel will examine two contrasting impulses in lost-decade film, one that compulsively, and even comically, revisits the traumas of the last two decades and another that seeks to reject and even revitalize the narrative trajectories that sustained the country up until the 1990s, visualizing new perspectives on Japan’s future. Bringing together five scholars from a variety of national traditions who engage contemporary cinematic treatments of post-bubble Japan through the interdisciplinary lens of political science, adaptation studies, and media arts, the panel will closely engage lost-decade film in an effort to better understand the vision of a post-bubble Japan emerging in contemporary culture.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Marc Yamada, Brigham Young University

Chair

• Marc Yamada, Brigham Young University

Individual Presentations

• Aesthetics of Realism in Chikuma Yasutomo’s Now, I… and The Ark in the Mirage - Luke Cromer, Waseda University

• Progress Dismantled: The Uncanny Child in Lost Decade Japanese Horror Film - Jessica Balanzategui, The University of Melbourne

• Cautious Optimism in Ninagawa Yukio’s Hebi ni piasu - David Holloway, University of Rochester

• Coming of Age in the Cinema of the Lost Decades - Marc Yamada, Brigham Young University

Discussant

• Astrid Lac, Yonsei University