Paper short abstract:

This videographic presentation illustrates how contemporary Japanese women directors depart from the physical stage of the house and compositions of “traditional” families to find a sense of “home” as a matter of repetitive habit expressed through visual and narrative motifs.

Paper long abstract:

Home is the heart of Japanese cinema. In over one-hundred years of cinema history, there are genres and sub-genres of domesticity in Japanese film, including haha mono (mother films), tsuma mono (wife films), homu dorama (home dramas), kateigeki (household dramas), and shōshimingeki (working-class films that feature home life). Movies about home and the family form the very pillars of Japan’s film history including the first full-sound film The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, Dir. Gosho Heinosuke, 1931) and the first color film Carmen Comes Home (Karumen kokyō ni kaeru, Dir. Kinoshita Keisuke, 1951), as well as the postwar works of acclaimed directors like Ozu Yasujirō, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Naruse Mikio through to the movement of J-Horror directors of the late 1990s who reimagined the Japanese home as decidedly uncanny. Given this legacy, perhaps it is unsurprising that within many of the works of contemporary Japanese women commercial filmmakers, we see an emphasis on home, home spaces, and the act of home making. However, these depictions diverge from previous generations’ cinematic depictions of the home.

In this videographic presentation, I argue that contemporary female directors tend to reject nation-state ideologies of the home and kinship to reshape family as community bonds and the home as an experience of familiarity. While “home” on screen has been shaped throughout Japanese cinema history by dominant gendered narratives that imagine family and the physical house itself as a ideological extension of the state, contemporary Japanese women directors reimagine home as not a physical structure or “traditional” family, but as a matter of repetitive habit expressed through visual and narrative motifs. This creates a sense of “at-homeness” in their films that resonates with how a contemporaneous generation of young people in Japan have also found new definitions of and feelings about home. Through the juxtaposition of image and sound, my video essay explores the depiction of home in two exemplary case studies—the works of directors Tanada Yuki and Ogigami Naoko—to show how members of this new generation find an expression of home through the formal craft of cinema itself.