Japanese Cinema Goes Global

JapaneseCinema Goes Global: Cosmopolitan Subjectivity and the Transnationalizationof the Culture Industry Yoshiharu Tezuka Department of Media and Communications Goldsmith College, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 1 Declaration I declare the work presented in this thesis is my own. 2 Abstract This thesis investigates the Japanesefilm industry's interactions with the West and Asia, the development of transnational filmmaking practices, and the transition of discursive regimes through which different types of cosmopolitan subjectivities are produced. It draws upon Ulrich Deck's concept of "banal cosmopolitanization" (2006) - which inextricably enmeshesthe everyday lives of individuals acrossthe industrialized societieswithin the global market economy. As has often been pointed out, modem Japanesenational identity since the 19th century has been constructed from a geopolitical condition of being both a "centre" and a "periphery", in the sensethat it has always seenitself as the centre of East Asia, while being peripheral to the flow of Western global processes.Contrary to the common belief that defeat in the war sixty years ago radically changed the Japanesesocial structure and value system, this sense of national identity and of Japan being "different from the West but above Asia" was left intact if not ideologically encouraged by the American Occupation policy through the preservation of many pre-war institutions (cf., Dower 1999; Sakai 2006). In a world that was to become dominated by a hierarchical logic of "the West and the rest" established against the backdrop of the Cold War, Japan and its culture effectively found itself in a privileged but ambiguous position as part of but not part of the `West', something which was solidified by the international success of Japanese national cinema in the 1950s. But all this was to change with the process of globalization in the late 1980s and 1990s. 3 The main goal of this thesis is to analyse the ways in which globalization brought about a historic rupture in a national filmmaking community and discover the significance of this process. It shows how economic globalization undermined the material and discursive conditions that had sustainedthe form of national identity that had resulted from the process described above and gave rise to forms of cosmopolitan subjectivity which reveal a very different way of thinking about both Japan's position in the world and the senseof identification that younger filmmakers have towards it. This is illustrated through extensive interviews conductedwith many filmmakers and producers in the Japanesefilmmaking community. 4 JapaneseCinema Goes Global: Cosmopolitan Subjectivity and the Transnationalizationof the Culture Industry Table of Contents Abstract 3 Table of Contents 5 Acknowledgement 9 Note on Romanization and Translation 10 Preface 11 Introduction 16 PARTONE LITERATUREREVIEW AND METHODS Chapter One: From Cultural Imperialism to Cosmopolitanism via Globalization -The Spread of Modernity and Neo-Liberal Hegemony Introduction 26 From Cultural Imperialism to Cultural Globalization 29 Modernity and New Global Structure of Common Difference 43 Banal Cosmopolitanism and New Global Bio Politics 59 Two: Cinema Transnationalized Chapter National Identity and - Different Types of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanisms Introduction 70 Cosmopolitanism vs. Nationalism 78 5 Globalization and Cosmopolitanization of National Cinema 92 Formation of Different Types of Cosmopolitan Subjectivity 103 Chapter Three: Research Method and Epistemological Issues- Where and How to begin Investigating the Cosmopolitanization of Reality? Introduction 121 Where and How to Begin? 124 Method of Data Gathering and Interpretation 126 Library Research 136 A Final Comment 139 PART TWO JAPANESE CINEMA GOES GLOBAL Chapter Four: Internationalization of Japanese Cinema - How Japan was Different from the West and Superior to Asia Introduction 141 The Occupation, JapaneseNational Cinema and Industry 148 A New Setof Lies - The Post-warNational Subjectivity 156 Legitimizing Cosmopolitanism and Self-Orientalism 163 Technology and Japan's Oriental-Orientalism in Asia 181 The Golden Age of Hong Kong-JapaneseCinematic Interchange 192 The Emergenceof ResistanceCosmopolitanism 202 Conclusion 212 Chapter Five: The Globalization of Film Finance - The Actually Existing 6 Cosmopolitanisms of Japanese Film Producers Introduction 216 Banal Cosmopolitanization and the Mini-Theatre 224 Globalizing JapaneseCinema - Reticent and Ambivalent Legitimizing Cosmopolitanism 236 The PrecariousLife of a JapaneseResistance Cosmopolitan in Europe 249 JapaneseAlternative Cinema and Cosmopolitanism 258 Conclusion 270 Chapter Six: Global America? -American-Japanese Film Co-Production From Shogun (1980) to Grudge 2 (2006) via Lost in Translation (2003) Introduction 273 The Production of Shogun (1980) 283 The JapaneseLine Producer of Shogun - Hiroaki Fujii 287 The Production of Lost in Translation (2003) 292 Line Producer Lost in The Japanese of Translation - Kiyoshi Inoue 296 Comparing the Two Films and Two JapaneseLine Producers 300 Remaking Global Hollywood - Synopticon Control of Locals 306 Conclusion 315 Chapter Seven: Pan-Asian Cinema? - The End of Japan-Centred Regional Cosmopolitanism Introduction 316 The Japan-HongKong Interaction Since the Late 1980s 327 7 The Undercurrent of Japan-ChinaInteraction 340 Conclusion 353 Conclusion 355 Afterthoughts 361 369 List of RecordedInterviews References 371 Acknowledgements It was not possible for me to complete this researchproject without an environment that my wife and son - Midori and Mafuyu Tezuka - provided for me. I am grateful to them for having offered me an understanding and an encouragementfrom the day I decided to pack up our businessand become a PhD student at the age of forty five, and tolerated me for four years to complete this project. 9 Note on Romanization and Translation. In the thesis, Japanesenames are put in the Western order, i. e. given name first then family name, since it is customary to put names in this order in English writing in Japan. Chinese, Korean and other Asian names are put in the usual East Asian format, i. e. family name, then given name, unless someone is well known by the Westernorder of names. I have adopted the Hepburn System for romanization of Japanese.All translations of Japanese materials are mine, unless stated otherwise in the bibliography. 10 Preface This researchconcerns the cultural consequencesof economic globalization and the emergentcosmopolitan subjectivity, or, what is sometimes referred to as "really" or "actually existing cosmopolitanism" (cf., Malcomson 1998; Beck 2006) in the context of Japanesefilmmaking communities. The questions raised by this process touch me personally and I would like to explain what motivated me towards undertaking this research. I am a Japanesenative and I arrived in Britain in 1984 to be trained as a filmmaker at the National Film and Television School. After graduation, I remained basedin London and I have worked in both the Japaneseand British film, and TV and advertising industries. The mid-1980s to 1990s was a period of economic and cultural globalization, which radically stretchedthe sphere of individual experiencesvirtually and physically. I was often making TV documentaries about Japan, its people and culture etc, for British television at a time when Japan's economic power was becoming a source of bewilderment and anxiety for the Western public in the late 1980s.Then, after Japan's economy faltered in the late 1990s, I was often producing TV commercials in Eastern Europe for Japaneseclients who loved locations with a high European feel and low production costs - an unbeatable combination for Japanese advertising projects. My moves between Japan and the West were motivated by economicas well as cultural considerations.I had been spending much of my time chasing commissions and jobs throughout these years, but I 11 decided Twould like to pausefor a while and to make senseof theseexperiences. Bruce Robbins (1998) draws our attention to the first entry under "cosmopolitan" in the Oxford English Dictionary. It begins with a quote from John Stuart Mill's Political Economy and says: "`Capital, ' Mill wrote in 1848, `is becoming more and more cosmopolitan'. Cosmopolitanism would seem to mimic capital in seizing for itself the privilege (to paraphraseWall Street) of `knowing no boundaries'." (1998: 248) The complicity of cosmopolitanism with capitalism has been an age old truism and in the latest round of globalization, it was again "capital" or neo-liberalism which propelled globalization and a certain kind of cosmopolitanism. Though it was not my personal aspiration to be a "capitalist cosmopolitan" (Calhoun 2002: 103), I was fully aware that I was searching for opportunities in the capitalist system as it was rapidly globalizing. I left Japanfor a British film school becausethe conditions in the Japanese film industry appearedgrim, and the future looked much brighter in the West. The Japanesestudio production systemshad collapsed in the 1970s,and, there were a few years in the early 1980s when the independent sector was invigorated by young filmmakers. In this short period I worked on numerous low or no budget independent films as a cinematographer.The working conditions on such independentfilms were usually harsh. Safety regulations were barely observed and production companies often had no insurance, but this didn't worry me until

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