The opinions of the hapless protagonist of Stephen Frears’ film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity (1995) often set him up for ridicule, particularly those opinions, such as the above, that are shared by his arrogant friend and co-worker. At the same time, it’s hard to argue with the sentiment at work in the claim above. From the position of the audience for Frears’ film, which we may guess to include viewers who have chosen to engage with a film, based on a novel, about the formative role of music in one man’s life, it would be difficult to argue that these things definitively don’t matter. Yet Frears’ protagonist misses the point by assuming that the popular culture materials that a person surrounds themselves with can tell us some fundamental truth about that person. Rather, this book argues that it is the way that people choose to represent their interest in these materials and their experiences of engagement with cinema culture that gives us some insight into how they build a public-facing self. Examining how people talk about cinema shows us how people use popular culture to communicate personal information such as personality, politics and formative anecdotes.

It may seem a little odd to begin a chapter on cinema viewing in postwar Japan with a quotation from a contemporary North American film adaptation of a British novel. As the following chapters will show, the idea that film connects viewers to worlds apart from their own was a central theme in research participants’ accounts of their relationship with cinema culture in Japan. Film was seen by many as a means of engaging with other geographical locations and historical periods, and in this spirit many participants in this study were keen to emphasise their regular viewing of European and American cinema, as well as a tendency to keep up to date with contemporary films.