Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Filmworkers' Journeys

Notes

170 Japanese Cinema Goes Global the relationship between the Japanese and Hong Kong film industries changed between the 1960s and the 1990s. As the economic recession continued, the major Japanese media companies turned away from risky overseas projects and became less involved with regionalization processes despite the rising trend of China-centred regional co-productions in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, I have argued in this chapter that underneath the surface, the experiences of individuals in the Japanese filmmaking community, particularly the independent filmmakers and film students, are increasingly enmeshed and framed by the networking effects that spread beyond national borders. In other words, Japan is inescapably a part of a hybrid form of regionalism that is presently underway in East Asia. Thomas Tang, who taught Chinese to numerous well-known Japanese actors and Japanese to Chinese actors, finds that Asian actors are keen to learn each other’s languages and he himself started learning Korean recently. He states: I taught Japanese to the Taiwanese actor Chen Bo-lin. He wanted to work in Japan because if he became popular in Japan, it would help his popularity in Korea. And if he becomes popular in Japan and Korea, he will be an ‘Asian’ star and Hollywood may take notice of him. I taught Chinese to the Japanese actress Rena Tanaka who had a similar idea and wanted to work in Chinese film. They all want to work in other Asian countries. (Tang interview 2006) In the cultural geography in which “Japan” is no longer above “Asia”, “Asia” is simply bigger than any one nation-state and its market. And for those ambitious individuals in the media industry, becoming “Asian” is perceived as a step closer to becoming “Global”. Histrocally, the sense of Japanese national identity was sustained by its unique and privileged position between the “West” and “Asia”. Post-war Japanese cinema and industry also defined itself as “different ” from the West, but “above” Asia. This ideological double-bind was internally challenged in the 1960s and 1970s by filmmakers such as Oshima, who highlighted the unresolved issues of Japanese imperialism . But it was the series of events in the 1980s and 1990s, especially following the end of the Cold War, that finally brought a conclusion to the socio-economic conditions that had underpinned this constitutive double-bind of Japanese identity. The interviews with Japanese filmmakers/producers who were actively engaged in the internationalization and transnationalization of filmmaking practices gave us insights into the ways economic globalization shaped them into “actually existing cosmopolitans” of one kind or another. Their experiences have shown how what Ulrich Beck (2002) called “banal cosmopolitanization” created conflicts of interests, and even ethical dilemmas, within their personal and professional lives, perturbing the sense of their national belonging and feelings. However, it is not my intention at all to draw conclusions from these case studies and claim that banal cosmopolitanism is simply “displacing banal nationalism” (Beck 2002: 28). On the contrary, what I believe these case studies show is the complexity and uneven nature of the process of cosmopolitanization. Banal cosmopolitanism and nationalism are in dialectical relation: they are mutually constitutive both within the individual self and constitution of society. Thus the rapid and thorough transnationalization of life worlds could intensify both banal cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Epilogue 172 Epilogue The potential for banal cosmopolitanization to produce the agents (or “subjects” as Castells calls them [2004: 10; italics in original]) of social change is certainly not denied. However, my empirical research into the Japanese film industry suggests that Project Cosmopolitans are individualistic. Thus, the likelihood of Project Cosmopolitanism developing into a collective form so as to become the agent (subject) of wide social change is limited to very exceptional historic conjunctures. Project Cosmopolitans tend to carve out their niche within the existing structure. Having said this, however, repercussions and side effects of these seemingly minor isolated alterations to the social conditions cannot be overlooked in their potential contribution to overall structural change. As I discussed in these chapters, one way to analyze the process of cosmopolitanization is as a transition of value systems and forms of living — from national to transnational ones; but it is also important to remember that this transition was a transition from being a “citizen” within a nation-state to being a “consumer/producer” in the global economy. For a civil society to function, the distinction between having a sense that one is...