Paper short abstract:

This paper examines two Japanese hit films as collaborations between extremist novelists and 'innocent' filmmakers. Both films shift the window of discourse; these collaborations take extremist rightwing novels out of the fringe and, remade in a less objectionable filmic form, into the mainstream.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese film industry, like others worldwide, is laudable for being deeply collaborative in nature. But there is a darker side of collaboration in contemporary Japanese film: the process by which the work of controversial novelist-politicians like Ishihara Shintarō and Hyakuta Naoki, rendered into film by allegedly apolitical movie-makers, converts their extremist views into socially acceptable and indeed seemingly mainstream opinions.

This paper examines two influential twenty-first century Japanese blockbusters and the effects of their collaboration between extremist novelists and 'innocent' filmmakers. These films, For Those We Love (2007) and The Eternal Zero (2013), are very similar in tone, narrative structure, content and message, which is no accident; both are collaborations to take the work of extremist rightwing novelists out of the fringe and, repackaged in a less objectionable filmic form, into the mainstream.

These films do something the controversial novels on which they are based cannot: free consumers from the social desirability bias. By working to push Japan's national discourse on the wartime past from its spiral of (vaguely ashamed) silence into vocal pride, they offer 'low-information viewers' a tantalizing spectacle of a wartime past of which they can and should be publicly proud rather than ashamed. 'Mainstream' viewers are free publicly to commend the films without suffering the negative consequences of professing love for the original novels. The films, which thanks to their collaborative nature have been purged of the polarizing taint of the right-wing extremist novels on which they are based, assuage such viewers that things were better before, and only by spiritually returning to the past can Japan be made great again.

If such collaborations between fringe ultranationalist novelists and reputable movie studios continue, they will further shift the (Overton) window of discourse, normalizing an extremist right-wing vision of the once and future Japan. Another generation of young, impressionable viewers might conclude—shielded by the collaboration nature of the film projects from suffering the negative consequences of association with extremism, or indeed from ever even knowing the extremist origins of the stories they watch—that Japan's only way forward is to retreat into the beautified past.