This chapter examines the transnational and transmedia strategies that were implemented by the Japanese film industry to create the early youth icons of late 1950s and early 1960s. They illustrate how the very term “Japanese cinema” is increasingly outdated and needs to be revisited. Thus, the main objective is to problematize the paradigm of “national cinema” not only through its national affiliation, but also its form as media, and in relation to the historical context in which it is defined. The analysis focuses on two case studies: Ishihara Yūjirō as the protagonist of taiyōzoku films and Kobayashi Akira as the hero of the Wataridori series of “Japanese westerns,” a genre of “film without nationality” (mukokuseki eiga). The chapter contextualizes these Japanese films within the global flow of images, trends and media languages. Additionally, it demonstrates how the Cold War created not only a political and economic context but also a cultural environment that conditioned these transcultural and transmedia interactions.

Introduction: Transnational transmediality: The end of “Japanese Cinema”?

Western literature devoted to Japanese cinema proliferated in the 1970s, and in the following decades, scholars engaged in projects examining the apparent singularities of this film culture, seeking to demonstrate how it provided an alternative to the dominant modes of representation that had been developed in the West (Bordwell and Thomson 1976; Burch 1979). These approaches often regarded Japanese films as products of the Japanese aesthetic and philosophical tradition. I have explored elsewhere how this limited understanding of Japanese cinema as a film culture confined to its national borders was sparked by specific films that were exported to European film festivals from the 1950s onwards (Centeno-Martin 2019). A group of jidaigeki (period dramas) starting with Kurosawa Akira’s Rashōmon, and followed by the films of Mizoguchi Kenji, Kinugawa Teinosuke, Imai Tadashi and Takizawa Eisuke, played a key role in fostering this early understanding of Japanese cinema. They triggered the so-called “kimono effect” (Weinrichter 2002): the astonishment of western audiences at the exoticism projected in these films featuring characters wearing the kimono.

However, this “discovery” of Japanese cinema was misleading for several reasons. First, it neglected the complexity of these films’ transcultural interactions.