Write a 4 to 5 page paper on one of the topics below. You must incorporate one source from your reading material, in addition to an outside scholarly resource.

1. Discuss the significance of tuberculosis in Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel [clip 1, 2]. In what ways are the characters Matsunaga and the young woman different? In what ways are these characters representative of conflicts in postwar Japan?

2. Familial life becomes a microcosm for all of Japanese society for Ozu. Discuss how the figure of the (unmarried) daughter is situated as a ‘hope for a new Japan’ in the postwar era. In Ozu’s Early Summer, Noriko, seems to be held up as the obvious representative of the ‘new Japan.’ Discuss the significance – in Ozu’s Early Summer – of the ‘new female’ in postwar Japan. Discuss how sexuality and marital relations perhaps come to represent wider issues about the changes taking place in Japan during the postwar era.

3. In Hara Kazuo's Yuki Yukite Shingun (1987) [The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On], the director violently confronts history (untold history, history that is suppressed), discuss the ways in which Hara's style matches the confrontational nature of the film's subject. Discuss the selected clip. (For a transcipt of the selected sequence click here.)

4. The struggle for individuality, within the mass of society and societal conventions, seems to be the overriding concern of Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes [clip 1, 2]. Discuss how the various figures in the film (e.g., the sand, the pit, the villagers) are used as representative of the supposed ‘conflict between society and the individual.’

5. Matsumoto is an important figure when considering the theoretical issues pertaining to ‘documentary realism.’ Nornes comments that, the “shifting attention to [the cinematic] surface, process, and detail may well embody the qualities Matsumoto called for in evoking the unheimlich [uncanny] lurking beneath the sure surfaces of documentary realism.”1  Although not a documentary per se, discuss how Matsumoto seems to employ these ideas to Funeral Parade of Roses [clip 1, 2]. If it is useful compare the selected clip to the opening of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour.


6. Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses [clip 1, 2, 3]is clearly meant to be erotically provocative. However, while the eroticism of the narrative commands the viewer’s attention, it seems that Oshima is also confronting Japanese history. Discuss how Oshima confronts Japanese history in his film.  

7. Just as with In the Realm of the Senses, the sexually provocative nature of Gohatto [Taboo] commands the spectator’s attention. However, running through these provocative narratives Oshima seems to be commenting on the problematic nature of Japanese history. Discuss the selected clip from Gohatto, what is the significance of each character’s role, especially with respect to hierarchies, and the Shinsen gumi’s code of conduct? Who in this case is the ‘agent of conservatism’ (i.e., doesn't’t want to see Japan changes its ways)? And how might sexuality be situated within the historical context (e.g., the move from the Edo era to the Meiji period)?

  1. Abé Mark Nornes, “The Postwar Documentary Trace: Groping in the Dark,” positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 53.

Second Paper CINE 401 National Cinema Japan

Choose any of the questions below. Write a 4 to 5 page paper. Regardless of your chosen topic, your paper must have all of the following:

1. Use course material (i.e., the assigned readings).
2. One outside scholarly reference.
3. Proper citations (citing paraphrased material, and quote references); use the Chicago Manual of Style, click here for instructions.
4. For citations use footnotes (or endnotes); look under the INSERT menu option at the top of your Word processing program. There should be an option for footnotes.
5. Bibliography (listing all the research material you looked at in preparation for your paper – including the material you might’ve not used).
6. Material found on the web DOES NOT count as research.
7. We are not interested in plot summaries.
8. Address the selected video clips.


1. Susan Napier notes that animated features such Barefoot Gen “attempt to ‘speak for history’ in a personal voice that, through the power of vivid images of suffering, destruction, and renewal, becomes a collective voice of the Japanese people.”1  Using the selected clip, what are the possible advantages of this? What might be some of the drawbacks? What can be said of Japanese historical discourse in the context of this ‘personal voice’ as it is presented in Barefoot Gen?

2. Susan Napier says that, “science fiction, in its insistent concern with difference (in terms of ‘alien’ versus ‘normal,’ or ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’), is a genre fundamentally involved with the problem of identity.”2  Discuss the issue of identity, and the problems associated with it, as presented in Akira (same scene slowed down). Demonstrate how the selected sequence from Akira attempts to deal with the problems of Japanese identity. How might the hallucinatory images (or premonitions) pertain to issues of Japanese identity and/or history?

3. Despite its many contradictions, Butoh might be described as an artistic practice that could only develop in Japan, especially postwar Japan. Alexandra Munroe says, “The West was … attacked for imposing the modes of industry and technology that had disrupted the ‘sacred bond’ between the Japanese people and nature, contributing to a widespread sense of alienation, dehumanization, and loss of self-identity.”3  How does Butoh attempt to combat this sense of alienation, dehumanization and loss of identity? How does Tsukamoto Shinya adopt the aesthetics and themes of Butoh in Soseiji [Gemini] to seemingly address this “sense of alienation, dehumanization, and loss of self-identity”?

For a possible point of comparison you might want to address the selected clip from Tetsuo: Iron Man.

If you choose this prompt – one of the first places to start looking for research material might be The Drama Review volume 44, no. 1, (Spring 2000), which is accessible through the Project Muse database.

4. Discuss how certain anxieties about the female gender are dealt with in Japanese ghost stories such as found in Ringu. Discuss the setting, the characters, and how these might reflect some of the attitudes towards women, the female body and the role of woman in Japanese society. What is the significance of the female ghost/monster?

5. Compare the selected clip from Ozu Yasujiro’s, Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953) to the selected clip from Koreeda Hirokazu’s Dare mo shiranai (Nobody Knows, 2004).

6 . “‘Superflatness,’ is an original concept,” Murakami Takashi proclaims; where Japanese people “have been completely westernized.”4  Murakami’s theory of Super flat is at once an embrace of Japanese historical/cultural discontinuity, and at the same time an attempt to construct an unbroken nexus of Japanese history and culture. How does Anno Hideaki’s Love and Pop fit within Murakami’s conception of Super Flat?

For a possible point of comparison see the following clip from Ozu’s Early Summer.
For a possible point of comparison see the following clip from Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion.


1. Susan Napier, “No More Words: Barefoot Gen, Grave of the Fireflies, and 'Victim's History'," in Anime: from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 161 – 162.

2. Susan Napier, “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (Summer 1993), 330.

3. Alexandra Munroe, “Revolt of the Flesh: Ankoku Butoh and Obsessional Art,” Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 192.

4. Takashi Murakami, “Superflat Manifesto,” Superflat, exhibition catalog (Tokyo: MADRA publishing, 2000), 5.