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4 Japanese Cinema Goes Global conglomeration of media corporations and the era of a global culture industry — what Miller et al. have called Global Hollywood (2001). By juxtaposing these two historic events and the case studies of individual players who were involved in them, I will show why and how globalization in the 1990s was qualitatively a very different phenomenon for Japanese filmmakers and the Japanese film industry to the internationalization of the 1950s. In other words, I will be arguing that the process of globalization involved a historic rupture, and brought about new and unprecedented conditions for individuals in the Japanese film industry, which gave rise to a different type of cosmopolitan perspective. As numerous historians and cultural theorists have pointed out, modern Japanese national identity was produced under the geopolitical condition of being both “centre and periphery” (Sugimoto 1999) through the Westernization and modernization process from the midnineteenth century onwards. For a long time, “Japan has been the only non-Western country that has achieved and even surpassed the level of economic and technological development attained by industrialized Western countries” (ibid.: 85). Contrary to the common belief that the defeat in the war changed Japan’s social structure and cultural value system radically, the fundamentals of national identity (especially the idea of Japan being “different from the West but above Asia”) was kept intact, if not reaffirmed, by the American Occupation policy, which preserved many pre-war institutions (cf., Dower 1999; Sakai 2007). The discourse of Japan’s cultural uniqueness and superiority over other Asian countries was ideologically encouraged in order to maintain the appearance of Western “democracy” in the East and Southeast Asia regions in the context of Cold War politics. The international recognition of Japanese national cinema — following the success of Rashomon — effectively re-established the Japanese film industry’s leading role in Asia and its privileged position as the only producer of the “alternative to Western aesthetic” with the Western technologies in the world dominated by the logic of “the West and the rest”. However, all this was to change in the process of economic globalization and consequent cosmopolitanization. The core of the argument I will put forward through these case studies is that the process of globalization changed the material and discursive conditions that had underlined the essentialist discourse Introduction 5 of Japanese cultural uniqueness and identity. Now, as we enter the twenty-first century, it is important for Japan and others to recognize this change. I will show the ways in which numerous individuals in Japanese filmmaking communities are variously linked to transnational networks, and how they profess their cosmopolitan views and values in a world in which Japan is no longer the only exception of the Western universalism. Chapter One maps out the theoretical terrain of the research and discusses cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization. I shall explore the difference between the normative philosophical cosmopolitanism of the Kantian tradition and the contemporary approach to cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, which is variously referred to as “discrepant” (Clifford 1997, “actually existing” (Robbins 1998) or “really existing” (Beck 2006) cosmopolitanism.2 Then, I shall move on to develop distinctions between different types of “actually existing” cosmopolitan subjectivity by adopting Manuel Castells’ distinction between “three forms and origins of identity building” (2004: 7). Castells defines three different ways collective identities can be formed in relation to the dominant social power. Social actors can either legitimize or resist the dominant social power to form an identity or, alternatively, they can invent a new category to provide a third way. In Castells’ classification, these three forms of identity formation are named as Legitimizing, Resistance, and Project Identity. By following Castells, I shall develop concepts of Legitimizing, Resistance and Project Cosmopolitanism as tools to analyze how cosmopolitan subjectivity is formed in relation to the dominant national power and identity. Chapters Two to Five are concerned with empirical research into the Japanese film industry. Chapter Two investigates Japan’s interaction with the West (mostly America) and Asia in the pre-globalization phase from 1945 to the 1970s. Through case studies of filmmakers, firstly, this chapter aims to demonstrate how the American Occupation and the post-war re-modernization process renewed and inscribed in Japan its own otherness against the West on the one hand, and a superiority complex over its Asian neighbours on the other. Encouraged by the international success of Rashomon, the producer of Daiei Co., Masaichi Nagata, initiated the formation of the “Federation of Motion Picture [3.140.242...

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