Japanese Women, Hong Kong Films, and Transcultural Fandom
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SOME OF US ARE LOOKING AT THE STARS: JAPANESE WOMEN, HONG KONG FILMS, AND TRANSCULTURAL FANDOM Lori Hitchcock Morimoto Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication and Culture Indiana University April 2011 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee _______________________________________ Prof. Barbara Klinger, Ph.D. _______________________________________ Prof. Gregory Waller, Ph.D. _______________________________________ Prof. Michael Curtin, Ph.D. _______________________________________ Prof. Michiko Suzuki, Ph.D. Date of Oral Examination: April 6, 2011 ii © 2011 Lori Hitchcock Morimoto ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii For Michael, who has had a long “year, two at the most.” iv Acknowledgements Writing is a solitary pursuit, but I have found that it takes a village to make a dissertation. I am indebted to my advisor, Barbara Klinger, for her insightful critique, infinite patience, and unflagging enthusiasm for this project. Gratitude goes to Michael Curtin, who saw promise in my early work and has continued to mentor me through several iterations of his own academic career. Gregory Waller’s interest in my research has been gratifying and encouraging, and I am most appreciative of Michiko Suzuki’s interest, guidance, and insights. Richard Bauman and Sumie Jones were enthusiastic readers of early work leading to this dissertation, and I am grateful for their comments and critique along the way. I would also like to thank Joan Hawkins for her enduring support during her tenure as Director of Graduate Studies in CMCL and beyond, as well as for the insights of her dissertation support group. Bonnie Clendening and Kathy Teige were unfailingly helpful in keeping me abreast of deadlines, requirements, and paperwork, and I am grateful for their time and efforts on my behalf. Warm appreciation and affection go to my friends and colleagues who read pieces of writing, discussed theoretical minutiae, and generally helped to keep my spirits afloat throughout the writing of this dissertation; in particular, I would like to acknowledge Jonathan Nichols‐Pethick, Suzanne Enck‐Wanzer, Stephanie DeBoer, Bjorn Ingvoldstad, Sherra Schick, Bertha Chin, Jeeyoung Shin, Patti Kameya, Joanne Quimby, Mary O’Shea, and Colleen Laird. In Japan, I am grateful to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for the research scholarship through which I conducted fieldwork for this dissertation. Warm affection goes to Prof. Inuhiko Yomota of Meiji Gakuin University for sponsoring my research and enfolding me within the film studies community in Tokyo. v Prof. Ayako Saito of Meiji Gakuin University and Prof. Aaron Gerow of Yale University kindly sponsored my membership in the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, in addition to offering useful and constructive feedback during the fieldwork phase of my research. Prof. Koichi Iwabuchi of Waseda University generously discussed his own work with me and provided multiple opportunities to present my research while in Tokyo. I would also like to thank the staffs of the Tokyo Branch of the Hong Kong Tourist Association and the Oya Soichi Library for their research assistance. I am particularly grateful to the many fans who shared their thoughts and experiences with me during my Tokyo sojourn. Special thanks go to my ‘Japanese family’ in Nanbu‐cho, Iriguchi Sachiko, Yamamoto Naomi, and Itai Takashi, for their moral support while I conducted fieldwork in Japan. Michael Morimoto has been a helpmate in every sense of the word, selflessly offering humor and encouragement, debating and discussing my ideas through his own ‘old‐school’ anime otaku lens, and meeting the demands of caring both for small children and a distracted partner. Molly and Clint provided amusement, affection, and challenges that served as a daily touchstone throughout the writing process. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Linda and Woody Hitchcock, for seeing this through to its conclusion. Although I’m sure they had no idea where the journey would take me when they relocated our family from Connecticut to Hong Kong in 1977, they have been an unfailing source of love, comfort, and support from before that day until today. vi Lori Hitchcock Morimoto Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars: Japanese Women, Hong Kong Films, and Transcultural Fandom This dissertation offers a historical materialist perspective on the Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong stars that arose in the mid‐1980s and peaked in the late 1990s. This fandom was unique among non‐diasporic, transnational audiences of Hong Kong cinema for its female composition and its star‐centeredness, which together constitute an alternative lens through which to comprehend the meanings and implications of transcultural media fandom. Employing contemporaneous fan‐produced writing, film criticism, journalism, and promotional literature for films, media technologies, and transnational travel to Hong Kong in the reconstruction of its discursive surround, the dissertation interrogates the dialectical relationship between fan practices and subjectivities. Through examination of the media discourses that produced this fandom in the Japanese popular imagination, the material means by which fans pursued their interest in Hong Kong stars, and the intersection of fan affect and transnationally‐situated experience, the dissertation makes the case for a pragmatics of transcultural fandom that accounts for not only its transnational socio‐political context, but also the gender and popular/fan cultural contexts through which it was experienced and understood. _______________________________________ Prof. Barbara Klinger, Ph.D. vii ________________________________________ Prof. Gregory Waller, Ph.D. ________________________________________ Prof. Michael Curtin, Ph.D. ________________________________________ Prof. Michiko Suzuki, Ph.D. viii Table of Contents Introduction: Japanese Women, Hong Kong Star(s) 1 Chapter One: ‘Fashionable’ Hong Kong Film (Fandom) in Japan 34 Chapter Two: The Everyday Life of Transcultural Fandom 92 Chapter Three: When Worlds Collide: Transcultural Fandom in Transnational Context 148 Conclusion 203 Appendix One: Hong Kong Film Titles in Chinese and Japanese 217 References 222 ix INTRODUCTION JAPANESE WOMEN, HONG KONG STAR(S) January 28, 1997 – Osaka Festival Hall. Thanks to a fortuitous connection with a local ticket retailer, I had obtained front‐row seats to the Osaka leg of Leslie Cheung’s 1997 World Tour. My companion, a widowed mother of three from the countryside, and I wound our way through a lobby crowded with fans buying “R.E.D. Mission”1 postcards featuring Cheung’s visage, the proceeds of which were intended for the Hong Kong Children’s Cancer Foundation. As we made our way inside the auditorium and settled in our seats, I had the chance to observe some of my fellow fans: to the right, members of the unofficial Leslie Cheung Japanese fan club, Tsubasa no kai, were passing around photocopied lyric sheets with a Japanese transliteration of Cheung’s song “Jui” (Chase) in preparation for a little live karaoke; to my left, an elderly woman dressed in formal Japanese kimono sat quietly awaiting the start of the concert, hands folded neatly on her lap; behind me, a twenty‐something disabled woman who had arrived by wheelchair was being helped to her seat by her mother. Less a congregation of spoiled ‘parasite singles’, meddlesome obatarian, oversexed hitozuma,2 or any of the myriad personae assigned to women in the Japanese mass 1 “R.E.D. Mission” was Cheung’s charity project to raise funds for the Hong Kong Children’s Cancer Foundation, named after his 1995 album “Red.” R.E.D. stood for “Regain, Extend, Dream.” 2 The term “parasite single” was coined in 1999 by Tokyo Gakugei University professor Yamada Masahiro in reference to the growing number of unmarried women and, to a lesser extent, men who had returned to their parents’ homes in their twenties to work while, arguably, pocketing their salaries for personal use. “Obatarian” refers to domineering middle‐aged women; “hitozuma,’ literally meaning “someone’s wife,” popularly refers to married women on the prowl for extramarital sexual liaisons. 1 media,3 the mostly female audience gathered there that night embodied a cross‐ section of fans that was especially interesting for its diversity. Indeed, as one fraction of a group of Hong Kong star fans that had garnered no little attention within the Japanese mass media, this audience was extraordinary in its ordinariness. In the context of the larger female fandom of Hong Kong popular culture4 that thrived in Japan from the late 1980s through the end of the 1990s, these women represented a substantial departure from their depiction – by both proponents and critics of the phenomenon alike – as driven by “their modish and sophisticated tastes”5 in Hong Kong stars and movies. While there were undoubtedly members of the audience who attended Cheung’s concert primarily on the basis of his well‐known and critically acclaimed work in films such as Wong Kar‐wai’s Days of Being Wild or Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine, the sheer effort involved in concert preparation and attendance on the part of Cheung’s fans – ranging from flier preparation (and transliteration) to the act of attendance by a wheelchair user in a country only beginning