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Scrutinizing the Transnational in East Asian Cinema
Organizer and Chair: Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University, Canada
This panel examines the concept of “transnational” and its usage in the studies of East Asian cinema. “Transnational cinema” or more specifically the unified “East Asian cinema” stands as a convenient example of a shared cultural sphere in the age of globalization. Both terms, however, have escaped qualification in terms of their actual meanings and causalities. Does the expansion in the multi-national and multi-ethnic production, distribution, and consumption of films automatically guarantee the cinema as transnational? Is there no strategic localization or regionalization among those filmmakers, distributors, and consumers? Moreover, the problem with the usage of those concepts stems from its political neutrality and historical amnesia. Our panel examines the meaning of the “transnational” in visual, imaginable, political, and discursive levels. Jung Bong Choi scans the Korean Japanese images in Japanese cinema, analyzing the visual codification of minorities within Japanese cinema’s “armchair engagement” with Korean culture. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano examines “popular Asianism” particularly the increase in seemingly “transnational” Japanese films, and she investigates how the idea of “transnational culture” has taken hold in juxtaposition with ongoing nationalism in Japan. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park explores the new South Korean-China relationship on the cultural level to distinguish the greater issue of cultural affinities that continues to unite the two countries despite their political bifurcation. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto assesses contemporary terms such as globalization, transnational flows, and cross-cultural comparison in discussions on East Asian cinema to reveal how the scholarship on East Asian cinema buttresses institutional power in the academic discourse.
Metonymic Being: Korean Japanese in Japanese Cinema
Jung Bong Choi, New York University
The study queries into the recent surge of Korean Japanese (Zainichi Kankokujin) images in Japanese cinema, a phenomenon resultant of the cultural détente in the post-Cold war period in East Asia. Curiously, however, the presence of Korean Japanese in Japanese cinema is often allegorically alluded to or vaguely inferred with a collection of typified metonymies such as kimchi (spicy Korean pickle), chima-jeogory (traditional Korean female clothing), hot temper, last name, slit eyes, etc. This metonymic presentation of Korean Japanese in fact corresponds to the existential obscurity of Korean Japanese, who, like phantoms, are much talked about but rarely visible in social spheres, owing to the combination of a) discrimination-cum-assimilation policies of Japanese government; b) willing and forced compliance of Korean Japanese with the assimilationist policy; and c) practically indistinguishable physical attributes between Korean and Japanese. This visual codification of Korean Japanese stands in sharp contrast with the overtly glamorized and unabridged imagery of Korean pop idols, which tends to flood Japan’s media-sphere. The study teases out the asymmetrical presentations of Korean Japanese in Japanese cinema vis-à-vis Koreans in imported Korean media products to probe the cultural contradiction of the post-Cold War period in East Asia.
Thinking of Japan in Vladivostok: Finding Nation in “Transnational” Cinema
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University, Canada
This essay focuses on “popular Asianism,” in Koichi Iwabuchi’s term, particularly the increase in “transnational” Japanese films. The film The Hotel Venus (2004), for instance, was shot with a multi-national cast, multi-languages (Korean, English, and Japanese), entirely on location in Vladivostok, USSR. If the transnational is defined in Elizabeth Ezra’s and Terry Rowden’s sense, in their book Transnational Cinema, as “the global forces that link people or institutions across nations,” this seems to be a transnational film. However, does the mere difficulty of assigning a fixed national identity to a film in this age of dissolution of any stable connection between a film’s place and its production, exhibition, and distribution, automatically qualify a film as transnational? Indeed, across the spectrum of Japanese popular culture, there is an intensified interest in the idea of transnationalism, a movement away from the long-held notion of Japanese singularity. My essay examines how the idea of “transnational culture” has taken hold in Japanese cinema, particularly in juxtaposition with what I identify as ongoing currents of nationalism in Japan. How does the Japanese cinema reconcile the contradictory desires towards the national and the transnational?
Crossing the Yalu River: Korean Cinema's Reengagement with China
Aaron Magnan-Park, University of Notre Dame
Much has been said about the humanization of North Koreans in such films as Shiri and Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War—a narrative possibility that was forbidden during the censorship regime that dominated Korea after the Korean War. However, the 38th Parallel is not the only Cold War legacy of division that separates South Korea from its greater East Asian connections. The Peoples' Republic of China, an adversary in the Korean War and the key sponsor of North Korea represents a greater historical Communist threat to South Korea. Nevertheless, hallyu has also become big in mainland China and a number of film co-productions unite the film industries of South Korea and the PRC. This paper investigates this new South Korea-China relationship on the cultural level to discern the greater issues of cultural affinities that continues to unite the two countries despite their political bifurcation. Film under discussion will include Failan, The Myth, Musa: The Warriors, and others.
The Banality of Being Transnational: Can East Asian Cinema Save Area Studies?
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, New York University
This paper examines some of the basic terms of discussions on East Asian cinema and the critical assumptions underlying them. The emergence of East Asian cinema as a desired object of academic conferences and research is certainly a result of real changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of films in the East Asian region since the 1990s. At the same time, hardly a simple reflection of the new socio-cultural reality engendered by East Asian cinema, it is closely tied to the transformation of the university and the end of an intellectual paradigm based on the centrality of the nation-state. Nevertheless, for the most part, the study of East Asian cinema has not been able either to articulate distinct intellectual agendas or to make a case for its own critical relevancy, and such key concepts as globalization, transnational flows, a shared popular cultural sphere, a regional aesthetic style, and cross-cultural comparison are often used as transparent ideas that do not require any serious critical scrutiny. It is therefore important to examine how the scholarship on East Asian cinema actually functions in the institutional space of academic discourse. I will argue that regardless of its explicit intention, the academic study of East Asian cinema has so far contributed most to area studies’ attempt to refashion itself in the post-Cold War era, and that East Asian cinema can emerge as a genuinely exciting topic of discussion only when the connection between the existing scholarship and area studies is rigorously criticized.