As a popular medium that defined the previous century, cinema at best oscillates between the industrial imperative to provide entertainment for mass audiences and the imaginative impulse to employ the very same appeal to forge a more critical stance towards ideological trends in the society it seeks to depict. In Japan, this double movement is particularly fascinating when observed during certain periods in the nation’s history as it underwent a rapid shift towards a new socio-political order, whether descending to military totalitarianism in the late 1930s or embracing free-market capitalism in the late 1950s.

Arguably, it is precisely by working within the confines of the studio system and in the mold of es-tablished genres that individual filmmakers were able to make forays into laying bare contempora-neous discourses. By taking popular genre film as a yardstick, this panel is invested in exploring the various ways that Japanese filmmakers sought to overcome the boundaries imposed by the industry standards and genre conventions in order to make a critical contribution by displaying and dis-cussing societal issues commonly averted in popular entertainment. At the same time, the capacity for intervention of such approaches will have to be carefully balanced by an acknowledgment of its limits and potential pitfalls. This panel seeks to address some of these questions and more by ac-commodating four papers that range from prewar cinema to the peak of the studio system and present a number of cases of popular genres meeting often radical political agendas on the screen.

The Boundaries of Radicalism: Itami Mansaku’s Trajectory from Nonsense to Hu-manism in Transwar Japan

Iris Haukamp（Tokyo University of Foreign Studies）

Jidai eiga, period films, were an integral part of Japanese popular culture from the birth of cinema in Japan until the genre’s gradual decline in the postwar era. Set before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, by implication these films depicted an imagined Japan free of foreign influence. The adven-tures of their charismatic heroes, beginning with Japan’s first film star Onoe Matsunosuke, and the spectacular climactic sword-fight made them immensely popular with children and adults alike.

From the late 1920s, director and scriptwriter Itami Mansaku (1900-1946) quickly made his way to becoming one of the most highly regarded creatives in the genre. Paradoxically, however, he voiced a continuous criticism of jidai eiga, and his films deviated from the genre’s previous permutations. In line with the tradition of using the past to critically comment on present conditions and through his detached but humorous style, they questioned social trends that Itami was suspicious of.

This paper considers Itami’s simultaneous disdain and pursuit of the genre in the context of increas-ing nativist/militarist discourse from the 1930s. His films, popular because of their “nonsensical” (nansensu) appearance, contained a radical potential precisely because of their lack of an overt message, and Itami re-reads the term into the radicalness of the erotic-grotesque-non-sense triptych of the Taishō period. However, with the official discourse’s radicalization, Itami’s cinematic means of expression became limited. Arguably, Itami’s work delineates both the drive to and the boundaries of radicalism in the popular culture of transwar Japan.

In the Shadow of the Sun: Backlight (1956) and the Taiyōzoku Film

Alo Jõekalda（Meiji Gakuin University）

The taiyōzoku (sun tribe) film, a short-lived cycle of youth films produced, mostly, in the summer of 1956, is often cited as a major turning point in postwar Japanese cinema. Indeed, the immense popularity of the adaptations of Ishihara Shintarō’s novels depicting reckless youth marked several important shifts in cinematic expression, from a newly discovered fascination with aggressive mas-culinity — taboo since the end of the war — to a general loosening of onscreen morality and exper-imentation with film style, all of which signified the beginnings of the Japanese New Wave.

My focus, however, is on a film generally excluded from discussions on taiyōzoku film. Based on the writings of Iwahashi Kunie and marketed as the female version of Ishihara’s Season of the Sun that had initiated the cycle three months earlier, Backlight (1956, Furukawa Takumi) admittedly does not have much in common with Ishihara's masculine visions. The film features a female pro-tagonist whose rebellion is largely directed against gender inequality, and instead of aimless bour-geois youth spending their time at beach houses and nightclubs, Backlight is populated with work-ing students who flirt with Soviet culture and frequent the politicised spaces of utagoe kissa. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at Backlight's various historical contexts and reframe the taiyōzoku cycle in light of this oft-neglected film, arguing that it merits further attention precisely because of its departures from the earlier formula.

No Subjectivity for an Itinerant Filmmaker: Studio System and Labour Relations in Guys of the Sea

Lauri Kitsnik（Kyoto University / Hiroshima University）

At Yokohama harbour, a rebellion breaks out among underpaid Japanese dock workers while un-loading a foreign cargo ship. This is a brief summary of Guys of the Sea (1957), a little-known film which marks the only collaboration between the independent film director Shindō Kaneto and one of Japanese cinema’s most enduring stars, Ishihara Yūjirō. While being part of Nikkatsu’s youth film and action genres, Guys of the Sea also manages to address societal issues such as labour rela-tions and by so doing implicitly draws parallels with the agency of the filmmaker within the Ja-panese film industry itself.

This paper seeks to contextualise Guys of the Sea within the early careers of both its director and star, while remaining attentive to its genealogies in film history. For Ishihara who was at the verge of becoming the biggest-grossing actor in Japan, this film points at star image in transformation from a bourgeois rebel to a working-class hero. For Shindō, a filmmaker known for his leftist leanings, the thematic focus resonates with his independently produced work while underlining his often self-referential mode. Besides its gritty albeit somewhat schematic depiction of labour relations, Guys of the Sea is also notable for placing this in a markedly international context. In particular, it is the multinational ship crew that contributes to decentring the perception of foreigners as a homogenous mass during the period of enhanced American presence in Japan, thus effectively undermining any neat separation between the oppressor and the oppressed.

Dismantling the Politics of Ageing and Family in Kinoshita Keisuke’s Films of the 1950s

Yutaka Kubo（Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University）

Sociologist Amano Masako has argued that an embodiment of the imagination for a longer life course became possible in Japanese cinema only after the end of World War II. As exemplified by Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story (1953), the representation of ageing and aged characters indeed started to appear more frequently on the screen from the late 1940s and proliferated in the 1950s. Reinforc-ing ideals of marriage and family, the body of such films illustrates the Japanese film industry’s re-sponse to the public’s desires for longer, prosperous lives, establishing a new genre called home drama. This genre became one of the hallmarks for the Shōchiku Studios and notably included films of Kinoshita Keisuke who offered various forms of ageing through the representation of the family on the screen.

This paper focuses on Kinoshita’s cinematic exploration of ageing in his 1950s films as a response to socio-economic changes in Japan that allowed individuals to seek ways to fulfill the life course. By examining Kinoshita’s popular film adaptations of novels and newspaper articles such as Times of Joy and Sorrow (1957), this paper will analyse Kinoshita’s careful rendering of desires for ageing found in the original works as it evokes affective experiences of the audiences as a marketing strat-egy. Moreover, in order to bring this study to the intersection of queer film studies and ageing stud-ies, this paper will also investigate effects of Kinoshita’s parodying of the home drama / family melodrama conventions as a critique of the heteronormative society.