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114 Ethnic Cinema in the Japanese Cultural Imagination 5 The zainichi Korean (Korean resident of Japan) filmmaker Sai Yoichi’s film Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004) garnered major film awards in 2005 in Japan.1 The film centers around a zainichi Korean man, Kim Shunpei (Kitano Takeshi), and his family’s lives as oppressed ethnic minorities in Japan from the 1920s to the early 1970s.2 As the novelist and the film’s screenplay writer Yan Sogiru (Yang Seok-il) describes it, Sai expressed no interest in making Blood and Bones a “minor” film targeting the Korean minorities in Japan, but rather he wanted a “major” one.3 Indeed, the film’s success with critics and at the box office in Japan signals a triumph of sorts for ethnic cinema in Japanese film history. All factors of the film, both its narrative and production process, reflect the potential cultural “traffic” between Korea and Japan, and even with the worldwide market: the film is adapted from the zainichi Korean writer Yan’s best-selling novel; the director Sai shot the film’s last sequence on location at the thirty-eighth parallel between North and South Korea; and the film casts internationally acclaimed Japanese director and star Kitano Takeshi in the leading role.4 Variety’s article captures the film’s ethnic heterogeneity as “a kimuchi (a traditional Korean fermented dish)-flavored, Nipponese blend of The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola) and East of Eden (1955, Elia Kazan).”5 While the film deals ETHNIC CINEMA IN THE JAPANESE CULTURAL IMAGINATION 115 with difficult subjects of the diasporic Korean family in Japan and their unbearable lives with the violent and dictatorial father Shunpei, Japanese domestic audiences warmly accepted the film, and critics generally offered high praise for the realism of Kitano’s performance as the brutal character. Curiously, however, Blood and Bones has had little impact outside the Japanese domestic market. The film was first released in Japan on November 6, 2004, and since then it has not been screened theatrically abroad except in South Korea.6 The film was officially entered in the seventy-eighth Academy Awards in the United States, but it was not selected as a nominee. Tartan Video, the London-based DVD distributor, initially picked up the film’s DVD distribution rights for their label “Asia Extreme” and released the DVD in September 2006.7 The DVD became available in North America through relatively minor distributors: Seville Canada in August 2007 and Kino International in November 2008. Critically the film met with indifference, despite Kitano Takeshi’s international star power—all of which indicates that the film is a difficult product for the distributors to market outside of Japan. The film’s length (144 minutes) is one of the reasons, but the crucial aspect for the film’s marketing failure abroad is more likely due to the difficulties non-Japanese audiences have in understanding zainichi Korean culture and history in Japan—namely the ethnic dimension of the violence and the required cultural knowledge—which directly associates with Shunpei’s image as a zainichi subject within the reservoir of popular culture in Japan. This chapter seeks to understand the Japanese attraction to Blood and Bones by examining the connection between the cinematic affect, such as violence, and its relation to cultural knowledge associated with ethnic minorities in Japan. The cultural knowledge has been nurtured by such disparate discourses as Korean or zainichi Korean images in Japanese cinema, the star discourse of Kitano Takeshi, television family dramas in the 1970s, and the zainichi Korean professional wrestling hero Rikidozan. Is the naturalized connection between violence and zainichi Koreans presented in Blood and Bones different from other ethnic films in Japan? Recalling the director Sai’s ambition to reach a wider audience, how does the film enact the contradiction of the ethnic desire, being “minor” in its social status yet “major” in its aspirations? I argue that Blood and Bones is strategically targeted to the domestic audience through the Japanese “cultural imagination” that can only be sustained by differentiating the cultural sphere from something else, which in this film’s case is to differentiate Korean and zainichi Korean culture from the dominant Japanese culture.8 I will elaborate on the film’s cinematic affect and how this is wrapped up with the cultural knowledge drawn upon by the film. I first discuss the novelty of Blood and Bones within the historical context of Japanese [18.119.107.96] Project MUSE (2024...

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