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Paper short abstract:

This paper focusses on Yoshida Kijū's 'anti-cinema' approach to filmmaking through an analysis of his film Woman of the Lake. Yoshida attempted to incorporate key pillars of New Left thought such as subjectivity into his practice by examining the role of women in 1960s Japan.

Paper long abstract:

The films of Yoshida Kijū are commonly associated with politics as most scholars focus on his pivot into making explicitly political films that addressed the New Left at the end of the 1960s. A few years prior to this, Yoshida made a group of six lesser known films that focussed on the role of the modern woman in Japan. These films were also subversions of the traditional post-war melodrama. Often focussing on the repression of women, traditional melodramas generally remained subdued in their narrative content. On the contrary, Yoshida's films pushed cinematic conventions through representations of women who pursued their inner desires regardless of the consequences.

Focussing on this period of Yoshida's career, this paper will address the formation of his 'anti-cinema' framework and examine its practical implementation in Woman of the Lake - a film loosely based on Kawabata Yasunari's novel The Lake. Drawing from debates on subjectivity as well as ideas of self-negation, Yoshida's film theory was heavily inspired by New Left thought and became explicitly feminist as he shifted his focus onto women. Whilst the film is perhaps not as overtly political as the films made at the end of the 1960s, Woman of the Lake's thematic concerns - autonomy, sexual liberation, and individuality - were core pillars of the New Left, and the film must be analysed with this in mind.

The paper will first offer a definition of 'anti-cinema', examining how it draws from New Left thought and how Yoshida attempted to translate this loose theoretical framework into his filmmaking practice. Following this, the paper will closely examine Woman of the Lake, arguing that it is a subversive take on both its source material and the traditional post-war Japanese melodrama. Kawabata's novel features a male protagonist, but Yoshida switches to the perspective of the novel's limited female point-of-view. In doing so, I argue that Yoshida uses his 'anti-cinema' framework to critique the male gaze and the voyeuristic nature of cinema, all whilst pushing female subjectivity to the forefront with his unique take on the source material.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the 1969 'Tokyo University Incident Trials' as battles over the moral evaluation of the social positions and identity structures of New Left students in a process of challenging and reinforcing what it meant to belong to the Japanese nation.

Paper long abstract:

After the fall of Yasuda Auditorium in January 1969 around 600 student activists were arrested. Of this number, 178 students opted to be tried in small groups and their cases were resolved quickly. The remaining 428 students, however, held out for a unified trial. Against the students' wishes small group hearings started in late May. Chaos ensued. Defendants failed to appear, observers interrupted by chanting slogans, and the defence team repeatedly walked out of the building. In the end, the judges took the unprecedented decision to invoke Article 286 section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Code to try and sentence the students in absentia.

In this paper I focus on the trial as a moral and ethical process through which the social positions and identity structures of New Left students were evaluated in a process of challenging and reinforcing what it meant to belong to the Japanese nation. The trial was more than a formalistic legal process of prosecute and punish as a warning to others: it was also an attempt to dissolve nascent New Left communities to create individuals ready for reintegration into the nation. This process involved prosecutors, the state and even judges themselves constructing narratives of the movement as antithetical to the rights and freedoms guaranteed by Japan's postwar Constitution, while intervening into the emotions of students to re-naturalise the nation as their primary community of belonging. It was a process with eerie historical resonances that called, through the mechanism of confession and repentance, for the students to split themselves in two, drawing a line between the old self who was misled by the movement and a new self who embraced their ascribed position in Japanese society. And as I will show through the letters of activists in detention, student resistance was to the fragmentation of their community and the sense of belonging it produced, and to the imposition of those narratives of redemption and the 'feeling rules' that accompanied them.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the post-war Japanese reproduction discourse from the vantage point of disability and addresses how the presence, participation, and contributions of disabled activists pushed the debate beyond bodily autonomy based on gender and sexuality.

Paper long abstract:

Kick-started by the ūman ribu movement and the debates surrounding the revision of the Eugenic Revision Law, the 1970s enabled the emergence of intersectional discursive spaces on reproduction in Japan within social activism. As disability activists and ūman ribu members came together, not always without conflict, the critique that ribu formed of the proposed expansion of state intervention into women’s bodies and the simultaneous devaluing of disabled life transcended a liberal rights discourse and represented an intervention into Japan’s bio-political order. Following the dissolution of the ūman ribu movement in the mid-1970s, former members continuously carried on this legacy, most prominently Yonezu Tomoko, who I argue took these intersectional ideas into the field of disability activism and reproductive justice through organisations such as SOSHIREN and the DPI Josei shōgaisha nettowāku.

In this paper, I analyse the evolution of disabled women’s activism for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy by mainly following the life and work of activist Yonezu Tomoko and her encounters with the disability movement. Starting with the student movement of the 1960s and the subsequent ūman ribu movement of the 1970s, I make the case that such emancipatory spaces were essential for marginalised groups and radical activists like Yonezu to engage with their own embodiment, a personal self-exploration which ultimately refined their societal critique. Based on this understanding ūman ribu becomes more than a short-lived experiment of radical feminism in Japan as I argue that ribu thought provided a platform for new forms of intersectional activist groups to challenge productivity as the predominant measure of human value in Japan well into the 1990s.

Furthermore, this paper provides an analysis of the post-war Japanese reproduction discourse from the vantage point of disability and addresses how the presence, participation, and contributions of disabled activists pushed the debate beyond bodily autonomy based on gender and sexuality. Thus, my analysis questions the very motivation behind state interventions into bodies and essentially the mechanisms of power, more specifically bio-power.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of Tosaka Jun's everyday-centred philosophy of history and Ōshima Nagisa's film portrait of post-war Japan's history based on the political allegorisation of everyday relationships, being two different expressions of the same New Left ideology.

Paper long abstract:

During the long 1960s, the everyday dimension took political centrality in Japan thanks to the leading role of the New Left movement and its ideology. This went hand in hand with the appreciation of the theoretical approaches by Marxist thinkers hitherto relatively ignored by the institutionalized communist movement such as Tosaka Jun, who saw the quotidian as a fundamental space for historical transformation. We know how Tosaka developed an everyday-centred philosophy of history through his writings, but we know little about how formats other than the written word such as cinema contributed to thinking historical reality from the same ideological approach. To address this gap in our understanding, this paper analyses the intersection between Ōshima Nagisa’s highly paradigmatic film Gishiki (Ceremonies, 1971) and Tosaka’s historical thought.

The paper explores how, in critically thinking the history of post-war Japan, the film in question used the same ideological approach previously developed by Tosaka. If the commodity was for Marx the basic, semi-opaque unit of the capitalist totality demanding to be deciphered to grasp the true nature of the whole system, the everyday was for Tosaka the basic, semi-opaque unit of historical time whose deciphering gives access to the true nature of history. In the same logic, as I will show, Ōshima presented his characters in Gishiki as fundamental units of the whole cinematic narrative, the everyday relationships of whom were portrayed as semi-opaque symbols demanding to be decoded to grasp the historical allegory making up the totality of the film. To better understand the mechanisms of such an ideology, I will compare the way Ōshima and other film directors addressed the everyday dimension in relation to history.