The post-Aum films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi

The films of Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi in the late 1990s and early 2000s capture the malaise of the ‘lost decade’ (ushinawareta jû-nen) of the 1990s, a period characterized by the end of an economic boom that propelled Japan through two decades of unprecedented prosperity. Facing the decline of high-growth, the country for the first time in two decades could no longer ignore the things that it had suppressed to realize progress: the failure of Japan's radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s and their de-evolution into extremism. As the haze of prosperity dissipated in the early 1990s, Japan was again stunned by a violent uprising more than two decades after the collapse of the student movements – the Tokyo subway gassings in 1995, an event that many associated with the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The attacks served as a reminder of the deep-seated social dissatisfactions that existed among the activist generation and the violence that results from extremism. Utilizing trauma theory, this paper will examine the way Japan's radical past is re-experienced in Kurosawa's films in the years following the gassings. Through an analysis of the cinematic style of Charisma (Karisuma 1999 Karisuma, 1999. DVD. Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi. Nikkatsu Studio. [Google Scholar]), Pulse (Kairô 2001 Kairo, 2001. DVD. Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi. Tokyo: Daiei Studio. [Google Scholar]), and other cinematic works in light of their narrative references to radicalism, this article will flesh out the layered process through which Kurosawa's films engage the past while coping with the trauma of post-Aum Japan.     

The National Polity and the formation of the modern national subject in Japan

This article analyses how the concept of Kokutai, or the National Polity, emerged and developed in the course of Japanese modernisation. The National Polity was the central principle that underpinned the mystic and divine authority and sovereignty of the Japanese Emperor (Tennō), and played an ideological role during the Asia Pacific War. Nevertheless, the definition of the National Polity was highly ambiguous and there was no dominant interpretation of the National Polity even in the wartime period from the 1930s to 1940s. In this article, I shall put forward the view that the 1930s and 1940s discourse of the National Polity involved logical or rational ideas that have commonly been thought to be antagonistic to the National Polity; therefore the discourse became complex, ambiguous and paradoxical. This article will elucidate how the discourse of Taishō Democracy, which has been perceived as a major critique of the National Polity, also contributed to the mass-based ideology of the National Polity. In order to examine this problem comprehensively, I will explore various strands of the National Polity debates from the early Meiji period to the 1940s, such as the thought of Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Tetsujirō, Hozumi Yatsuka, Uesugi Shinkichi, Minobe Tatsukichi, Yoshino Sakuzō and Miki Kiyoshi.