Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments This book project started with my teaching at Carleton University. The topics emerged in classroom discussions with my students and conversations with my colleagues. I express my thanks to them all. I am especially grateful to my colleague André Loiselle throughout those years. My discussions with André, a specialist on Canadian horror film, have enabled me to grasp the attraction and depth of such genre films. My former students Murray Leeder and Christopher Rohde gave insightful input to this book as well. My current book received benefit from more than a few fellowships. When I first arrived at Ottawa, Canada’s capital, I complained about the long winter, but I am now grateful for the nation’s financial support for academics, particularly the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The fellowship not only provided sufficient funding for my research, but its rigorous assessment aided my planning in bringing this project to completion. Many of my colleagues at Carleton supported me during the application process : Charles O’Brien, Carol Payne, Ming Tiampo, William Echard, Lauralee Raffelsieper, and Darlene Gilson. Andrea Fowler looked after me throughout the fellowship period with her swift work on monetary issues. Carleton University also supported me with a half-year teaching release by granting viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS me the Research Achievement Awards. I thank the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, especially John Osborne, for that generosity. Finally, the one-year fellowship from the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan, helped me to turn this book into a Japanese version. My stay in Japan from 2010 to 2011 expedited the translation process, and the Japanese edition was published unexpectedly prior to this current English edition in December 2010 by Nagoya University Press. I deeply appreciate my Japanese editor Tachibana Sogo’s advice and continuous support. Since I have already made another set of acknowledgments for people involved with the Japanese version, I will not repeat it here. In the process of producing Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age, I have published sections of this book in some journals and an anthology. I want to thank the editors of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, William C. Wees, Charles Acland, and Catherine Russell, and the outstanding contributors for the issue I guest edited, William Gardner, Aaron Gerow, and Daisuke Miyao. I am very honored that the late film scholar, Keiko McDonald, invited me to contribute to her special issue of Post Script. Jinhee Choi and I coedited our anthology, Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema for Hong Kong University Press. My interest in J-horror was considerably enlarged from this experience. I thank Jinhee for her patience and friendship, and my gratitude also goes to other contributors for their thoughtful works. The press editor for the anthology, Michael Duckworth, was steadfast with his encouragement . The chapter on transnational cinema owes a great deal to a workshop on transnational Asian cinemas organized by Tonglin Lu and Meaghan Morris. The attendees at the workshop, including Chris Berry, Catherine Russell, and Jung-Bong Choi, offered me productive suggestions for revision. This book would never have been possible without in-person dialogues with filmmakers. I started interviewing directors in 2006, and regrettably I could not include all of these valuable conversations in this edition. My gratitude goes to Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Shimizu Takashi, Kore’eda Hirokazu, Kawase Naomi, Yamamura Koji, Shinkai Makoto, Matsue Tetsuaki, Terada Yasunori, Tezuka Yoshiharu, Kato Harue, Ishibashi Yoshimasa, and Yokohama Satoko. Meeting with actual filmmakers, intriguingly, made me a very sympathetic viewer of their work, but not only that, I was able to sense how dramatically digital technology has been changing their filmmaking process . In conducting a number of interviews, my good friend Kawaguchi Misa always welcomed me to stay with her in Tokyo. Many thanks go to Patricia Crosby, my editor. Your constant support has led me to this book. Also, I would like to thank from my heart Carole Cavanaugh and Darrell William Davis for their helpful suggestions for ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix revision. Darrell’s book, East Asian Screen Industries, coauthored by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, was particularly beneficial, a benchmark work in film studies. Along the same line, Abé Mark Nornes’ work on postwar documentary film, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary, was indispensable in my writing of chapter 2. Simon Nantais’ and Lee S. Motteler’s assistance in editing my writing was...