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209 the rules of the world japanese ecocinema and kiyoshi kurosawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tim palmer Crucial to Japanese cinema’s global identity is how it represents the Japanese environment, the physical entity of Japan itself. To take a representative recent example, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma (1999) provides a poignant set of ecological anxieties. Heavily allegorical, the film opens as a burnt-out policeman, Yabuike (Koji Yakusho), negotiates with a gunman holding a hostage in an isolated office. The man wordlessly hands him a note stating simply, ‘‘Restore the Rules of the World.’’ Before the message is relayed, however, the police intervene disastrously and both gunman and hostage are killed, traumatizing Yabuike, who flees the city to a remote forest wilderness. There, though, he is drawn into more hostilities, this time among rival groups of scientists and ecoterrorists clashing over a rare, fragile tree, nicknamed Charisma. One faction demands Charisma’s protection as a unique part of nature; another declares the tree a pollutant and seeks its destruction ; another wants to profit from its value to collectors as a commodity. The film ends as Charisma is symbolically burned but apparently not quite killed, and an alienated Yabuike heads home. But in the film’s strangely abrupt closing sequence, an extreme long shot reveals the city consumed by flames and devastation, in the throes of an unknown apocalypse. With such forceful, provocative ecological analyses, Charisma embodies not only Kurosawa’s body of work but also a major discourse of Japanese film, both past and present. At stake is the cinematic self-portrait designed by Japan for international consumption. The main issues coalesce around the portentous yet cryptic note that Kurosawa’s protagonist , Yabuike, struggles to understand. What, in Japanese terms, are the rules of the world, and how have they been broken? Or, more specifically, how are the ecological conditions of Japan depicted and exported by its cinema? In a modern framework, Kurosawa pursues this agenda through a peculiar fusion of familiar, popular genres—typically the police procedural thriller and/or horror—and the more exacting features of 210 Tim Palmer international art cinema. In effect, the tastes of local and global audiences are simultaneously targeted, an approach shared by Kurosawa’s highest-profile contemporaries, notably Takashi Shimizu (creator of the Ju-on/The Grudge series, begun in 2000 and recently reincarnated with a 2009 video game installment) and Hideo Nakata (director of the Ringu/ The Ring franchise, spanning a decade of films, radio, manga, and television series from 1998 to date). Based upon this trio’s work,∞ and their regular producer Taka Ichise, recent Japanese film has gained international attention by reinventing mainstream materials with challenging , sometimes radical elements: open-endings, ambiguous narratives, complex intertextuality, opaque protagonists, and, most glaringly, sinister social diagnoses. From this formal hybridity emerges a major motif of contemporary Japanese cinema: inexorable catastrophe manifesting on-screen through curses, virulent plagues, natural or supernatural contaminants, urban degeneration, and violent social breakdown. Of course, Japan has not always been projected this way; its on-screen environmentalism has altered drastically over time. To study the neglected phenomenon of Japanese ecocinema, this essay will explore the environmental perspectives conveyed by Japanese film in its two most widely traveled historical moments: initially, during the emergence of its classical cinema, as was belatedly celebrated by the West during the 1950s and 1960s; and then again during the contemporary renaissance unfolding in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the first phase of its international recognition, I will argue, Japanese film’s reputation hinged upon its treatment of Japan as a lush garden paradise, in which the (screened) landscape was used as an idyllic mise-en-scène for the narrative formulae of the jidei-geki, or historical-set melodrama. The natural primacy of this classical Japanese cinema, as we will see, arose from a combination of careful studio policies tailored to foreign film audiences, a skilful use of location shooting, and the bravura techniques of directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. In my second section, I use the case study of Kiyoshi Kurosawa to contrast this classical blueprint with modern Japanese film, which has once again emerged on the global stage—through international festivals, Hollywood studio remakes, and foreign distribution—as a dynamic commercial cinema , but one linked now to more experimental features and a dystopian representation of Japan. Whereas it was once disseminated on-screen as an unspoiled, verdant natural preserve, Japan is now presented through...

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