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9063 results in Film

Page 267 of 454

  • Introduction: Why 1997 and Hana-Bi?

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    The cinema of Japan has, over the course of its post-Pacific War history, been an unstable institution. It has been subject to a series of fluctuating fortunes that have in fact contributed significantly to its defining tenets and characteristics, a truly national film industry in that both its fate and its individual products and the characteristics that have defined them have remained closely tied to the sociopolitical flux of the country in which they were made. Of course one could make similar claims about many national cinemas, but in Japan there is a particularly marked sense in which the fortunes of its filmmakers and studios have been both reflected in and predicated upon the fortunes of the nation. Conceptualisations and histories of Japanese cinema, in both Western and Japanese discourse, have tended to replay several well-rehearsed epithets regarding the highs of its golden eras and the attendant lows that have succeeded them, about marked peaks and troughs regarding economic success and stagnation, technological advancement and problems relating to the same (developments such as the Fukushima nuclear reactor). Successive eras of Japanese history – especially its modern, Meiji-era (1868) development and beyond – can likewise be delineated, suggesting a direct correlation that has endured into the new millennium. However this seemingly perennial paradigm did in some ways begin to erode and to change in the years following 1997, and to understand why 1997 was a significant year it is necessary to elaborate a little on the context.

    In many ways the contemporary story of Japanese cinema suggests 1989 as a decisive turning point. Tezuka Yoshiharu (2012) has discussed the late 1980s in Japan as one of three key instances when a national identity crisis resulted from Japan being opened up and/or exposed to the world at large (pp. 9–12). He identifies what has been termed Kokusaika, or internationalisation, as part of Francis Fukuyama's infamous 1992 declaration of the end of history, and analyses how ‘the essential cultural uniqueness of Japan’ began to erode as a result (p. 10). As well as signalling a new social era (the Heisei era), the year 1989 marked an end to a largely stagnant cinematic decade in which hitherto prevalent generic trends (especially yakuza, samurai and shomin-geki films) stalled and Japanese films began to wane on the international stage.

  • 3 - Japanese Horror Cinema

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 63-94

  • Summary

    Of all the commercial genres to have proliferated in modern Japanese cinema, none has achieved the international success and visibility of the horror film. Horror films have long constituted a vital feature of this country's cinema, but since the late 1990s they have become arguably the face of Japanese filmmaking, and furthermore the prevalent image of an increasingly transnational paradigm. There are several key and interrelated means of conceiving of the importance of J-horror. Most saliently it seizes on the recent past as a site of tension and anxiety, a textual shadow or even doppelganger of the present that haunts modernity as a spectral repressed or foreclosed. Moreover, as this latter point implies, psychoanalytical imperatives have been writ large – a veritable matrix of concerns with subject formation and problems therein – as a national adjunct to which it is interesting to note the extent to which several films’ technical methodology, their means of production, becomes a site of narrative discourse and/or semantic signification. Angela Ndalianis (2010) has analysed in detail the horror genre's influence on associative media, on the extent to which its emotional affectivity lends itself to cultural products such as theme park rides, whilst more significantly Mark Cousins (2004, pp. 475–7) has talked of so-called J-horror (which does technically refer to the Japanese horror canon but seems more often to designate its supernatural cinema, thanks largely to producer Ichise Takashige) as one of the key cinematic genres at the close of the twentieth century, precisely because it proliferated at a time when an apparently global pre-millennial fear, even paranoia, became apparent at the same time as traditional celluloid was beginning to give way to digital forms of cinematic expression and projection. There was a sense in some quarters that authentic film was a dying art (Willis, 2005, p. 1), as though cinema's traditional mechanical means, as well as its capacity to designate or extol a specific, phenomenological dimension, a relationship with a perceived real that offers a potentially verisimilar transparency, was disturbed by this ghost of the machine, and as such that individual horror films themselves are in some way working through problems and tensions that are beyond their supernatural narrative concerns.

  • 1 - Jidai-geki and Chambara: The Samurai Onscreen

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 13-38

  • Summary

    The Japanese warrior's powerful hold on the social imagination persists despite the vast and growing temporal, political, and cultural distance between the eras of samurai rule and today.

    (Mason, 2011, p. 68)

    In 2013, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Japan Foundation's annual UK touring programme of related Japanese films that have not been granted widespread distribution, a catalogue of works collectively entitled ‘Once upon a time in Japan’ was put together to be played throughout the UK. Concerned with films set in and reflective of a variety of historical periods, this collection underlined what has become an increasingly prevalent feature of contemporary Japanese cinema: namely a pervasive looking back, a re-viewing of the past, with a concomitant sense of the futility that such an undertaking may carry within it, the sub-textual concern with the present as a question as much as an answer. In other words, the past is opened up in many modern Japanese jidai-geki for a number of contrastive reasons – in order to reflect on the present and also to probe the past as part of a variously self-reflexive or even subversive discourse on modernity and postmodernity as cultural modes. As such the prominent return to the historical drama that characterises modern Japanese cinema, most often in the guise of the samurai film, frequently engages with a cinematic history as much as (if not more than) a social one, a lineage of the past onscreen rather than a window onto any empirically viable or objective past, and a consideration of the discursive practices of historicity and historiography in place of narrative or generic transparency. Even those films that do not dwell on history as spectacle nonetheless retain a subtly trangressive imperative wherein they deny or frustrate any simple or unitary diegtic suture or illusionist realism. They are often about the respective limits and the possibilities of cinema as an agent for transmitting or representing what Robert Rosenstone terms ‘the burden of the past’ (1995, p. 4), and as such have broader ramifications for a study of the jidai-geki and its popular and populist face in the chambara (swordplay) film.

  • 4 - Visibility

  • Peter Marks
  • Book:
    Imagining Surveillance
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 83-103

  • Summary

    Surveillance is about seeing things and, more particularly, about seeing people. (Lyon 2007: 1)

    For simplicity I have arranged this [classification of surveillance] largely in a series of discrete either/or possibilities (e.g. visible or invisible, gathered by a human or a machine). But there may be continuous gradations between the extreme values (e.g. between the visible and invisible). (Marx 2002: 14)

    If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door to an alter house without breach.

    But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besź, and at the end of the hall come back exactly (corporally) to where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home. (Miéville 2009: 86)

    Visibility is a central concept in surveillance studies, built into the very roots of the defining term that fuses the French ‘sur’ (‘over’) and ‘veiller’ (‘to watch’). The opening sentence of David Lyon's Surveillance Studies: An Overview, cited above, states this with definitional clarity, and the three parts of his synoptic account – ‘Viewpoints’, ‘Vision’ and ‘Visibility’ – underscore the significance of vision and visibility to surveillance scholars. Utopian works from Utopia to Nineteen Eighty-Four depict scenarios where diverse forms of vision and visibility enable distinct types of monitoring, whether the absence of private meeting places in More's text, Bentham's Panopticon, the identity cards in A Modern Utopia, maternal over sight in Herland, worksite screens in Modern Times, genetic and peer monitoring in Brave New World or behaviourist scrutiny in Walden Two. These forms can be malignant or benign, either in intent or operation, and individuals, groups and societies accept or reject (successfully and otherwise) the control they exercise.

Imagining Surveillance
  • Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film
  • Peter Marks
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015
  • How might we grasp the scope and variety of contemporary surveillance, its possibilities and threats? How have scholars addressed the topic? How has surveillance been understood in the past, and what can this awareness tell scholars and the public about the shape of things to come? Monitoring the Future addresses these questions by critically considering the utopian and dystopian literature and film that for decades has supplied provocative and illuminating depictions of surveillance, and responses to it. It goes beyond Orwell and Snowden to speculate on the shape of surveillance to come. Key Features:The first sustained account of the representation of surveillance in eutopian and dystopian literature and film * Charts surveillance's historical development and creative responses to that development * Provides a detailed critical account of the ways that surveillance studies has utilised utopias to formulate its ideas * Offers new readings of literary texts and films from More's Utopia through George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to Margaret Atwood' Oryx and Crake; and films from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Neil Blomkamp's Elysium and beyond.

Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
  • Adam Bingham
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015
  • Updates the story of Japanese cinema for the 21st century. Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi is the first study of the significant developments in Japanese genre filmmaking since the turn of the new millennium.This book explores the key films, filmmakers, themes and genres in post-1997 Japanese cinema, during fifteen years in which productivity in the Japanese film industry has reached a higher peak than at any time since the 1950s and a dialogue with earlier traditions of Japanese cinema has been firmly established. Key Features: * Considers films and filmmakers that have yet to feature predominantly in western discourse on Japanese cinema * Analyses in detail the dialogue that can be seen between new Japanese cinema and the significant trends and practices of past generations * Includes a discussion of the modern state of the Japanese documentary feature, based on interviews with some of its leading practitioners * Includes a review of Japanese-language criticism and a consideration of how the country's cinema has been perceived within Japan

  • 5 - Spaces

  • Peter Marks
  • Book:
    Imagining Surveillance
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 104-123

  • Summary

    The spirit of community has long been held as an antidote to threats of social disorder, class war and revolution violence ([Thomas] More pioneered such thinking). Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls), internalise surveillance, social control, and repression. (Harvey 2000: 170)

    Compound people didn't go to the cities unless they had to, and then never alone. They called the cities the pleeblands … it was best for everyone at OrganInc Farm to live all in one place, with foolproof procedures.

    Outside the OrganInc walls and gates and searchlights, things were unpredictable. (Atwood 2004: 33–4)

    Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. (Gibson 1995: 67)

    If surveillance involves the monitoring of people, it necessarily requires monitoring the spaces and places that people inhabit. Utopian texts have inherent spatial concerns, the root word ‘topos’ designating a ‘place’ to which might be attached prefixes with positive or negative connotations. This variety can extend across the many texts understood as utopian, but variations also can occur within individual works. For several centuries, utopian texts tended to depict relatively defined places, sometimes islands or hidden worlds. Especially over the last century, particularly in the shadow of works of H. G. Wells, such places are more likely to be global or planetary in extent. Within these capacious boundaries exist nations or superstates or enclaves, and at times, the explicit, hidden or developing tensions and divisions between these places require specific surveillance protocols and technologies. Boundaries are monitoring pinchpoints where designated groups and individuals can be included and excluded, although clearly surveillance can and does take place within those boundaries. At a more abstract level, comparisons between the world depicted within utopian texts and the worlds lived in by respective readers or viewers are built into the dynamic of any utopian work. Both the projected place of the text and the place occupied by readers and viewers are themselves open to multiple interpretations, reminding us that while some characters can find a space dystopic, others (sometimes the majority) within the same text will treat it as eutopian, or as something less like hell.

  • Traditions in World Cinema

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp xi-xii

  • Summary

    General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

    Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

    Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study of more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

    The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found-footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).

    Textbooks and monographs include:

  • • An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination

  • • A concise history of the regional, national or transnational cinema in Question

  • • A summary of previous published work on the tradition

  • • Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical conditions of production and reception

  • • Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches

  • • Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies).

  • 2 - Surveillance Before Big Brother

  • Peter Marks
  • Book:
    Imagining Surveillance
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 36-61

  • Summary

    And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31)

    Every house has a front door to the street and a back door to the garden. The double doors, which open easily with a push of the hand and close again automatically, let anyone come in – so there is nothing private anywhere. (More 2002: 46)

    Looking Backward provoked News From Nowhere, which in turn provoked A Modern Utopia. What George Orwell called ‘the chain of utopias’ was strengthened with every addition of a link, whether this took strictly a utopian or an anti-utopian form. (Kumar 2000: 253)

    Dating the birth of the utopian genre is simple enough – Thomas More's Utopia (1516) gives us the name and the model for innumerable later speculations. Dating the birth of utopian thinking is far more contested. Krishan Kumar (Kumar 1987) argues forcefully that discussion of utopias should be confined to the period from More's work onwards. Yet the titles and contents of authoritative studies such as Utopias of the Classical World (1975), Utopian Thought in The Western World (1979) – the first part of which details ‘The Ancient and Medieval Wellsprings’ – or the anthology Utopia: The Search for the Ideal in the Western World (2000), with chapters on ‘Ancient, Biblical and Medieval Traditions’, and Plato, all suggest a far longer historical pedigree. Utopian authority Lyman Tower Sargent notes in his contribution to Utopia: The Search for the Ideal that ‘while More invented the word utopia and the literary genre, utopianism as social dreaming long predated the book’. He concedes the difficulty of ‘specifying the first appearance of utopianism’, but observes that ‘early expressions are found on Sumerian clay tablets, in the Old Testament, and in the poetry of Hesiod of the eighth-century B.C.E., and utopian speculation played a central role in the philosophic and political debates of fifthcentury B.C.E. Athens’ (Sargent 2000: 8). In their sweeping account of utopian thought in the Western world, Frank and Fritzie Manuel note the resilient connections between utopia and paradise:

    Though utopia proper remains the creation of the world of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the visions of two paradises (Eden and the World to Come) … have so tenacious a hold on Western consciousness that they are a constant presence – in multiple variations – in all utopian thought. (Manuel and Manuel 1979: 33)

  • 8 - Things to Come

  • Peter Marks
  • Book:
    Imagining Surveillance
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 155-171

  • Summary

    There will be many Utopias. (Wells 1994: 220)

    ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN. (Eggers 2013: 67)

    What does a baby computer call its father? … Data. (Jonze 2013)

    The twenty-first century has not begun well. H. G. Wells in the quotation above argues at the beginning of the twentieth century for a world that places freedom at its core and envisions never-ending technological and creative advances constructing a modern utopia. A century later Michael Marder and Patrícia Vieira introduce the collection Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thinking with an almost despairing cry:

    Is there still any space, whether conceptual or practical, for the thinking of utopia – which from the outset announces a certain negation of place, topos – in a world marked by a chronic dystopian outlook? After more than a hundred years of what Nietzsche first diagnosed as ‘European nihilism’, dystopia has now firmly established itself as the current Weltanschauung, a lens through which we filter reality. In the West, the sense that all viable alternatives for a different organization have been exhausted led to widespread voter apathy, resignation and nonparticipation in the political sphere. Aesthetically, this dystopian mood has given rise to countless novels and films, the most emblematic of which is perhaps George Orwell's 1984. (Marder and Vieira 2012: ix)

    An almost despairing cry, because the new perspectives on utopian thinking promised in the title indicate that such thinking has not disappeared, and indeed might be useful and necessary in a world in which alternatives otherwise seem foreclosed. The label ‘existential utopia’ admits the need for grounded proposals that take account of realities while offering imaginative and progressive options, Robert Albritton describing his contribution as ‘A Practical Utopia for the Twenty-First Century’ (141–56). Typically, Marder and Vieira rate Nineteen Eighty-Four as symptomatic of this chronic dystopian outlook. Chapter 3, however, argues that Orwell's novel need not be dismissed as a purely negative and despair-inducing text. In terms of its depiction of surveillance, the novel presents a more variegated representation than is often acknowledged, and its warning against the excesses of state (and by extension, commercial) monitoring has made it an important activator of public and academic awareness on the topic.

  • 1 - Surveillance Studies and Utopian Texts

  • Peter Marks
  • Book:
    Imagining Surveillance
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 12-35

  • Summary

    Orwell's ‘Big Brother’ and Foucault's understanding of the Panopticon should be in no sense thought of as the only, let alone the best, images for yielding clues about surveillance. Powerful metaphors lie relatively unexamined in various films as well as in novels such as Franz Kafka's The Castle or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. (Lyon 1994: 78)

    Benjamin Goold's acknowledgement of Nineteen Eighty-Four's immense historical importance to public and academic imagination of surveillance, noted in the Introduction, comes with a sting in the tail. Accepting that Orwell and Michel Foucault ‘have been instrumental in shaping the way many criminologists and social theorists now think about questions of surveillance and its role in contemporary society’, Goold, a self-confessed empiricist, advises those criminologists and social theorists to concentrate their research on the actual rather than on the imagined world. He warns the alternative might be that the ‘theoretical literature of social control will become increasingly divorced from reality’ (Goold 2004: 212). Goold's point is entirely valid methodologically, but does not seem to have been honoured by some of his fellow social scientists. As well as numerous references to Orwell, a brief survey of works published after Goold's advice quickly discloses an array of works where utopias are referenced: seven chapters in The New Politics of Surveillance (2006); five chapters in Theorising Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (2006); the chapter ‘Surveillance, Visibility and Popular Culture’ in Lyon's Surveillance Studies: An Overview (2007); four chapters in Surveillance: Power, Problems and Politics (2009); John McGrath's and Dietmar Kammerer's respective contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (2012), and the more recent examples mentioned in the introduction from Lyon and Bauman in Liquid Surveillance, among others. Goold himself is not averse to others examining surveillance through cultural lenses. In New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy (2009), he and co-editor Daniel Neyland introduce Mike Nellis's ‘Since Nineteen Eighty-Four: Representations of Surveillance in Literary Fiction’ (Nellis 2009: 178–204) with a brace of questions: ‘we have the opportunity to ask whether writing about futures of surveillance can be seen as one of the sets of resources through which readers of texts orient their contemplation of surveillance activities? Through fiction can we see the ways in which surveillance concepts are becoming part of the world?’ (Neyland and Goold 2009: xxiv).

  • 3 - Nineteen Eighty-Four

  • Peter Marks
  • Book:
    Imagining Surveillance
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 62-82

  • Summary

    Whatever sociologists have to say, it would be foolish to ignore the one name that is always invoked in surveillance studies: George Orwell. His novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its monstrous anti-hero, Big Brother, have become bywords within the surveillance genre. (Lyon 2003: 9)

    I do not believe that the kind of society I have described necessarily will arrive, but I believe … that something resembling it could arrive … (Orwell 1998g: 135; original emphasis).

    She would not accept as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. (Orwell 1997b: 142)

    David Lyon's qualified and slightly defensive 2003 validation of Nineteen Eighty-Four above foreshadows Benjamin's Goold's somewhat reluctant acceptance in 2004, quoted in the introduction to this study, about the novel's undeniable impact on half a century of popular and academic imagination. A decade after Lyon's observation, John Gilliom and Torin Monahan are more openly dismissive in their comment that:

    Big Brother, from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is probably the most famous bogeyman and symbol of surveillance society … [but] doesn't really make sense of our world …. Much of the surveillance in our lives is nonthreatening – hardly the sense we get from Orwell's classic dystopia. (Gilliom and Monahan 2013: 20–1)

    They have good reason to be sceptical: Facebook did not even exist when Lyon wrote his assessment, nor Google Maps, Twitter, Instagram or the game-changing iPhone, along with other technical inventions and social innovations that have transformed how an exponentially increasing number of Internet users communicate, find information, organise their finances, connect with and perform themselves to their real and virtual ‘friends’. The new reality – that all these activities leave digital traces that are collected, sorted and utilised by countless public and private agencies and corporations – reconfigures notions of identity, privacy, society, threats real and potential in ways that would probably surprise the David Lyon of 2003, let alone the George Orwell of 1949. Certainly they mark out a world very different from that imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

    Instances such as the Edward Snowden revelations or WikiLeaks disclosures play to more traditional ‘Orwellian’ fears about despotic totalitarian forces at work within and between Western states. Gilliom and Monahan, however (and they are not alone), simply make the reasonable observation that Nineteen Eighty-Four does not really make sense of our world in all its digitised novelty.

  • 7 - Modern Japanese Female Directors

  • Adam Bingham
  • Book:
    Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 October 2017
    Print publication:
    23 June 2015, pp 171-202

  • Summary

    Across the history of the cinema in Japan images and stories of women have remained salient, if not central, to numerous films, filmmakers and genres. The prevalence of female-centred narratives can be traced back to the country's earliest films; this was even the case when women were officially prohibited from acting on the screen (as they had similarly been prohibited from appearing on stage), when the theatrical figure of the onnagata, or female impersonator, predominated in lieu of any actual female performers. However, this pervasive interest in and recourse to onscreen narratives anchored by women has traditionally not found a correlative in women behind the camera. There have traditionally been few opportunities for female filmmakers to work within Japan's studio system, and prior to the 1990s there had been only a small number of women working as directors. This despite the fact that women writers have for centuries held a pre-eminent position as authors, with some of the most celebrated titles in the Japanese canon – including Genji monogatari/The Tale of Genji and Makura no sōshi/The Pillow Book – being written by female writers (Murasaki Shikibu and Shonagon Sei, respectively).

    Japan is, and always has been, a markedly patriarchal society. In the immediate post-war years (following a 1946 decree), there was an enforced move to guarantee gender equality and women's rights constitutionally, and thereafter the rapid development of Japan's bubble economy helped to bring into focus ongoing issues and problems surrounding what Vera Mackie has termed ‘the politics of everyday life and everyday relationships’ (2003. p. 1). It has been a protracted and difficult process; women's liberation only began as a visible movement in the 1970s, whilst statistics even in the 1990s and later suggested that gender inequality in the workplace was still a problem, with Japan ranking fifty-fourth in a 2009 United Nation's poll on this very subject. Furthermore, as Kumiko Fujimura- Fanselow has discussed in detail, whilst the early 1990s in particular had been seen by some as an era of and for women – Onna no jidai – such thinking did not remain viable or its results a practical reality beyond this decade (2011, p. 17).

Page 267 of 454