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Master Thesis D Van Sas 10851631 Final for Library Japan’s Cultural Trauma and Anime of the 80s and 90s Written by Donny van Sas Table of Contents List of Illustrations iii Acknowledgements iv 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. WHAT IS ANIMATION? 4 2.1. Covering Some Ground 4 2.2. Frames and Hands 5 2.3. So What About Movement? 8 2.4. Limitations and Affordances 9 2.5. From Animation to Anime 11 3. TRAUMA – OR IS IT? 15 3.1. Trauma: Individual Beginnings 15 3.2. Trauma and Representation: A Tandem 18 3.3. A Cultural Trauma 21 3.4. Japanese National Trauma 23 4. FROM TRAUMA TO ANIME 27 4.1. Provisional Conclusion 27 4.2. Methodology 28 5. ANALYSIS OF CASE STUDIES 31 5.1. Introduction 31 5.2. Effects: Introduction 33 5.3. Barefoot Gen: Introduction 36 5.4. Barefoot Gen and Effects: A Comparison 37 5.5. Barefoot Gen: Gen and the Bomb 45 5.6. Provisional Conclusion 50 5.7. Akira and the Novum 50 5.8. Provisional Conclusion 57 5.8. Jin-Roh: Concerns Other Than the Bomb 58 5.9. Provisional Conclusion 62 6. CONCLUSION 64 Bibliography 70 Filmography 73 ii List of Illustrations Fig. 1 to 4 Source: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) 34 Fig. 5 to 9 Source: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) 35 Fig. 10 to 11 Source: Barefoot Gen (1983) 37 Fig. 12 Source: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) 38 Fig. 13 Source: Barefoot Gen (1983) 38 Fig. 14 to 15 Source: Barefoot Gen (1983) 40 Fig. 16 to 19 Source: Barefoot Gen (1983) 41 Fig. 20 to 22 Source: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) 41 Fig. 23 to 30 Source: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) 42 Fig. 31 to 34 Source: Barefoot Gen (1983) 43 Fig. 35 to 39 Source: Barefoot Gen (1983) 44 Fig. 40 to 45 Source: Barefoot Gen (1983) 48 Fig. 46 to 49 Source: Akira (1988) 51 Fig. 50 to 55 Source: Akira (1988) 52 Fig. 56 to 57 Source: Akira (1988) 53 Fig. 58 to 61 Source: Akira (1988) 55 Fig. 62 to 67 Source: Jin-Roh (1999) 60 Fig. 68 to 73 Source: Jin-Roh (1999) 62 iii Acknowledgements There is only one person I could possibly start with in thanking. Since this thesis took some time to be completed I needed the patience and understanding of my supervisor, Charles Forceville. I would like to thank him in particular, because he was so kind to invest the time and effort to manage my stubbornness and help me with some thoughtful advice of both an academic nature and of the more personal kind. Secondly I would like to thank Laurents van Twillert, dear friend and fellow student, for his relentless positivity when it came to my thesis, and for his clarifying insights of course. My sister, Roxan van Sas, needs to be mentioned also, for although we are nothing alike she knows me well and has been a great support. Lastly I would like to thank my partner, Bibiane de Graaf, in the first place for simply being there, but more importantly for believing in me. My gratitude. iv Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION There is the strong assumption that Japan’s society even today, 70 years after the event, suffers from the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (hereafter referred to as Hiroshima). The complexity of this assumption cannot be underestimated, although common sense dictates suggests that when a country suffers from such an unthinkable act it is bound to damage the fabric of a society in unforeseeable measure and for an unforeseeable amount of time. Ian Buruma formulates the complexity of the problem as that “all of the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima,” but he argues that in the end “it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil” (1994: 138). Therein lies the difficulty of the issue, because within Hiroshima is folded a large number of related, yet different, events, developments, and sentiments concerning World War II and Japanese post-war society. Symbolising Hiroshima as the ultimate evil also conveys the sense that Japan is a victim culture and it is often proclaimed that Japanese films that try to approach the subject of Hiroshima uncritically reflect that victimology. In the broadest of terms this thesis explores both the assumption that Japan still suffers from the traumatic effects of the war and that Japan’s traumatic status is readily mirrored in Japanese films. Japan’s self-identity gained relevance in an increasingly globalized world. Firstly the economic success from the 1960s onwards offered Japan a stage in the world’s economy. Secondly, and perhaps just as important, with economic success also came cultural relevance on the international stage. The increasingly international character of Japanese society raised questions about its national identity and about how the Japanese differentiate themselves from the West in particular. This process has been double-sided in that it was not only a matter of self- definition, but also a matter of expressing that identity to others, as is evidenced in cultural exports that evoke that identity. Japan’s cultural identity is thought to be intimately related to the identity Japan constructed from the meaning of events of World War II. The argument goes that Japan in fact suffers from a cultural trauma in which its identity to a large extent follows from the defeat in the war. A so-called foundational trauma lies at the core of post-war Japanese society. The aim of this thesis is to study Japan’s foundational trauma and how anime in 1 particular deals with this issue. In a period, roughly between the 1960s and 1980s, when Hiroshima’s symbolism assumed a central role in defining the attitude and experience of the Japanese regarding World War II, anime emerged as a specific mode of expression and it became a major cultural export. Anime’s propensity towards narratives of annihilation and images of apocalypse has not gone unnoticed, and the link between Japan’s experience of war and anime’s expressions has often been made, but it has not sufficiently been fleshed out. Even today the legacy of the war is problematic with politicians openly denying any wrongdoing, the public split between fervent nationalism or nostalgia and those cautious about such sentiments, and the recurring discussion about revising the constitution implemented by the Allied forces and its Article 9 that prohibits Japan from waging war. If “Hiroshima” indeed encapsulates all that suffering at once then it runs the risk of functioning as a totalizing symbol devoid of any nuance. In order to arrive at my concluding remarks about how anime offers a perspective on Japan’s cultural trauma1 this thesis is divided in three main chapters each of which aims to answer a number of pertinent subquestions. After the present introduction the two following chapters provide an overview of the relevant literature. Chapter 2 on animation offers just that, but with the aim to arrive at a definition of what anime is and what anime and animation fundamentally share as their defining aspect. As the theory on the subject of trauma applied to a nation, a culture, or a collective usually departs from an understanding of what trauma means in the case of the traumatised individual, chapter 3 will follow a similar trajectory in order to clarify what is meant when one claims that a nation, or its culture, suffers from a trauma. As such it offers a description of the relevant approaches to cultural trauma. Chapter 3 will also highlight the complexity of the meaning of the war in Japan, since the insights offered by Shipilova show that, at least according to some theories, the meaning of Hiroshima and all that is associated with it is contested, fluid and far from homogeneous. Chapter 4 contains a provisional conclusion and functions as a bridge between the sociological character of the theory on cultural trauma and the analysis of anime titles. The chapter argues for a detailed analysis of four case studies, since one should be able to locate the 1 The terms cultural trauma and national trauma are both used to refer to the same phenomenon. Most scholars agree that the theoretical difference between the pair is minimal and negligible. 2 assumption or actual existence of a cultural trauma in examples of one of Japan’s dominant modes of expression. The choice for the first case study, a documentary called The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946), is given specific attention, since in terms of genre and mode of representation the film differs from the other examples in the thesis insofar it is the only live-action film in the corpus. Each following chapter focuses on a different film or makes a comparison between films regarding the structure and narration of the cinematic examples. Although concerned with the content of the films, the analysis focuses specifically on the function and the depiction (or lack thereof) of the references to the nuclear bombing and on the way that both cinematic and animetic devices narrate these events before relating these to cultural trauma discourse. In the conclusion I will revisit a number of key questions by means of a summary, and argue for the unique quality of Japan’s ongoing struggle with its past and for the claim that anime as such a defining product of contemporary post-war Japan is symptomatic of this struggle.
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