Tracing Japanese filmworkers’ journeys to “the global”
Sung Kyung KIM
Abstract Yoshiharu Tezuka’s Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Filmworker’s Journey attempts to analyze the history of Japanese cinema in relation to its generalized other, “Hollywood” with two theoretical frameworks: that is, globalization, especially economic globalization, and cosmopolitanism. Bringing his personal experience of being a Japanese filmworker as well as rich research data, the author persuasively argues that Japanese filmworkers as cosmopolitan subjects have managed to engage in the new circumstances of the film industry including not only transnational opportunities, but also neo-liberal limitations, and this has meant that their subjectivity is constantly reshaped by transnational experiences and structural changes. With the detailed analyses of several Japanese films, the book provides a pleasure of understanding the perspectives of actual agencies in the Japanese film industry that are hidden mechanisms behind scene, possibly actual forces of Japanese cinema’s transformation over time.
Keywords: Japanese Cinema, Japanese filmworker, Hollywood, Cosmopolitanism, Globalization
Author’s biography
Sung Kyung Kim (PhD, University of Essex) is a Humanities Korea Research Professor in the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sungkonghoe University. Her research interests are Asian popular culture; political economy of cultural industry in Asia; and mobility in Asia especially North Korean defector. Her recent publications in the fields of Asian mobility, North Korean defectors, migration studies, and cultural industry are found in North Korea Review, Development and Society, Korea Sociology and so on. She is currently working on the issue of multiculturalism, cinemagoing practices and shopping mall in South Korea as well as gender and sexuality issue of North Korean mobility.