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Title: | Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, "2 + 1 Travelogues: Memories from the Empire of Japan"Finished |
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| Date: | 17:30-19:30, Friday, April 19, 2013 |
Place: | Bld. 18, Collaboration Room 3 (4F), The University of Tokyo, Komaba |
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"2 + 1 Travelogues: Memories from the Empire of Japan"
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Carleton University)
Moderator: M. Downing Roberts (UTCP)
17:30 - 19:30, Friday, April 19, 2013
Collaboration Room 3, Bld. 18, The University of Tokyo, Komaba
Language: English | Admission Free | No Registration Required
Abstract
This project analyzes rare home movies, elucidating the time when two "cultured figures" [bunka-jin] — Katsuo Nose, a jurist and editor of the newspaper Doyobi (Saturday), and the Japanese-style painter Kansetsu Hashimoto — filmed them in the 1930s. The Great Japanese Empire expanded its territory through the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Japanese people crossed national borders to observe "new" territories, and they left their memories as travelogues. It is apt for us to think that the late 1930s were the time of political darkness, economic chaos, and cultural gloom, but the images that these cultured authorities captured are unexpectedly bright with hope and humor. My presentation will examine this gap between the images in the actual footage and historical preconceptions, by applying the philosopher Tetsurô Watsuji’s Fûdo (Climate and Culture) as “+1” travelogue, which is a product of his 1927 visit to Germany.
Biography
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano is Associate Professor of Film Studies in Carleton University (Canada). Her research interests are Japanese cinema, especially its relationship to Japanese modernity, the impact of digital technology on cinema, and East Asian cinema in global culture. She is the author of Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008); the Japanese translation was published by Nagoya University Press in 2009. She is also the co-editor of Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (Hong Kong University Press, 2009). Her latest publications are Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age from University of Hawai‘i Press (2012; in Japanese, Nagoya University Press, 2010) and the edited book Viewing “Postwar” in the 1950s Japanese Cinema (in Japanese, Seikyusha, 2012).