Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen: A History, 1989–2005 by Griseldis Kirsch (review)

As Michael Baskett showed so well in The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), Japanese films were shot in China from the 1920s. He examined Japanese perceptions of Asians and brought to our attention continuities in the way Japanese have represented Asia. For Japan, there were many Chinas. On the one hand, the Japanese acknowledged that China had been a major influence on Japanese society and culture. On the other hand, China seemed in the early twentieth century to be a backward nation not worthy of emulation. Baskett showed that Japanese filmmakers drew on a range of stereotypes of China. In the closing pages, he discusses the 1998 film Puraido: unmei no toki (Pride: the fateful moment) and how it constituted an attempt to revive Japan's pride in its wartime past by sympathetically portraying Tōjō Hideki, denying the Nanjing Massacre, and repeating old arguments that Japan was defending itself and seeking to liberate Asia.¹ In this way, Baskett showed that Sino-Japanese relations continued to shape what Japanese saw on the screen even to the present day.

As Asian countries, especially China, have become so important to the global film market and world economy, we see increasing inclusion of Asian actors (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) in Hollywood films, the rise of Asian coproductions, and more Japanese films with story lines that include Chinese characters and settings. While Baskett focused on imperial Japan, the final pages of his book set an agenda for scholars such as Koichi Iwabuchi and Griseldis Kirsch to explore more recent decades in much more detail.

In a 2010 article, Iwabuchi views China as having been "a significant imaginative geography for Japan." He sees China as coming to signify "a capitalist Asian dreamworld" especially since the 1990s. As China has become more of a threat politically and economically, Japan is increasingly feeling challenged and overwhelmed. It is no surprise that mutual perceptions between the two countries have been worsening and that this has been reflected in popular culture. As he argues, China has evoked "desire, yearning, respect, and comradeship as well as disdain, hostility, fear, and the enigmatic."²

In her new book, Kirsch effectively maps out how an imagined China was constructed by sampling films and television dramas since 1989. She traces how Japan increasingly looked to China for ways to revitalize its economy. She also examines the construction of Japanese and Chinese identities in the films and dramas, identifies patterns of representation, and interprets them in terms of what meaning they have for our understanding of Sino-Japanese relations.

Although she does provide an epilogue with comments on recent productions, most of Kirsch's analysis and sampling ends in 2005. The period covered by the book coincides with Japan's growing interest in its Asian neighbors. Kirsch focuses on discourses about Japan's changing relationship with China during its rise to economic power in the region. She is particularly interested in representations of contemporary China and Japan rather than those set in the past or future. As all film historians and cultural studies scholars will understand, the lack of availability of material on video or DVD served as a further constraint on sampling (p. 9).

In chapter 1, Kirsch provides a brief outline of Sino-Japanese relations in order for us to understand how Japanese viewed China in the past. By the end of the cold war, when her study begins, things Asian had become more popular in Japan and Japan participated in the Asian Values Debate that occurred in the 1990s. Since the late 1990s, China has overtaken the United States as Japan's most important trade partner with Chinese students and tourists increasingly attracted to the country. Kirsch makes the observation that Taiwan represents a "safer, less anti-Japanese China" (p. 22) which is distinct from the mainland. Likewise, Hong Kong is also...