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Paper short abstract

A hermeneutic analysis of Togawa Naoki’s 1966 essay on pinku eiga, published in the Polish film journal Film, as a case of the transfer of Japanese film theory into socialist Poland. The paper situates the analysis within the crisis of 1960s cinema and kasutori bunka.

Paper long abstract

In 1966, an essay by Togawa Naoki entitled “Pink Films,” or the Erotic Offensive was published in issue 37 of the Polish film magazine Film, one of the few texts by Japanese film critics to appear in the Polish film press during the socialist period. This short essayistic piece, devoted to the phenomenon of pinku eiga, was addressed to readers largely unfamiliar with both the phenomenon and its author.

Togawa Naoki (Naosuke, 1917–2010) was a key figure in twentieth-century Japanese film culture: a critic and theorist, a long-term contributor to Eiga hyōron, a lecturer at Nihon University, and an active participant in the international circulation of film-theoretical discourse. His essay published in Poland thus represents a compelling case of the transnational transfer of knowledge about Japanese cinema into a media context peripheral to its original cultural milieu.

The paper offers a hermeneutic analysis of Togawa’s text, based on close reading, and situates it within the context of Japanese film culture in the 1960s. The analysis discusses pinku eiga (Sharp 2011; Nornes 2014) and its aesthetic and historical connections to the ero guro current (Silverberg 2006), as well as the broader transformations of Japanese cinema: the crisis of the studio system, often described as the “end of Japanese cinema” (Yomota 2019; Zahlten 2021), and the emergence of alternative models represented by the Art Theatre Guild (Domenig 2005).

The interpretation further considers the wider socio-cultural context of postwar Japan: a normative crisis, the absence of a new moral code, and the liminal condition of a rapidly transforming society—conditions that facilitated the commercialization of corporeality and sexuality within kasutori bunka (Olson 1992; Kapur 2018). Japan’s relationship with the West is treated as ambivalent, functioning as both a driver of modernization and a source of cultural frustration.

Finally, the analysis maintains methodological reflexivity from the perspective of a contemporary Polish researcher, while reconstructing Togawa’s critical position through a comparative reading of the essay alongside other works in which his thought is articulated or referenced (Leslie 1972; Gerow 2012; Kitsnik 2016; Fujiki 2022).

Keywords: Togawa Naoki; Pinku Eiga; Japan; Film; Criticism

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An investigation in the under-researched area of Japanese erotic audio use, specifically the ways in which different genres of erotic voice media have been used since the twentieth century for non-sexual functions such as entertainment, parasocial connection, and wellness or self-care.

Paper long abstract

Scholarly work on erotic audio in both sex work and popular culture has formed a small but diverse international field in sexuality and sound studies since the 1990s, with research on phone sex lines (Hall, 1995) and Japanese adult messaging services (Kashimura, 1989), boys love cassettes and CDs (Ishida, 2019), pornographic “ero-games” (Kikawada, 2020), and narrated erotic fantasies streamed online (Cheng, 2025). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars of "sexy" voice media aimed at women outside Japan have begun to examine the non-sexual functions of such texts, particularly with regard to wellness and self-care (Lee, 2022; Bellas & McAlister, 2023). Japan has a long history of erotic audio, but explorations of its purposes and pleasures outside the realm of sexuality are lacking. This presentation will therefore consider the ways in which various types of Japanese erotic voice media have been co-opted for non-erotic purposes.

I will begin with a brief discussion of an early form of mediated erotic voice, a subgenre of rakugo with roots in the late Edo period known as enshō. In a somewhat similar way to racy American “blue discs” of the same period, its purpose was to simultaneously titillate the audience and make them laugh (Smith, 2004). Released (and frequently banned) since the 1930s on short-playing records, this type of erotic-comic tale could be considered a foundation for subsequent voice media that comprise multiple functions, including arousal, parasocial connection, entertainment, and wellbeing. From ero-cassette tapes of the 1980s featuring the voices of gravure idols, whose often unprofessional performance has been seen as a way of prompting feelings of affection from fans (Yasuda, 2024), to anonymous online amateur recordings that fail to arouse commenters but make them laugh, and more recently commercialised audio streams that act as relaxation aids – engaging the listener as an imagined partner as the performer “makes love” to them and then helps them fall asleep – this presentation traces erotic voice media and its non-sexual functions through the twentieth century to the present. It will conclude with a short consideration of the potential uses of emerging interactive AI voices.

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Using my curation of the exhibition “Inside/Out” (Waseda University, 2020–21) as a case, I argue that queer reading can act as detonative curation: a cruising method that follows attraction in the archive to disrupt heteronormative, linear, canon-centered narratives of Japanese film history.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes queer reading as a curatorial method for building a queer film archive and writing queer film history. Within the heteronormative frameworks of Japanese film studies, the imperative to excavate the presence of LGBTQ+ people—and their contributions to the industry, filmmaking, criticism, reception, and archiving—has long been sidelined. This tendency extends to the National Film Archive of Japan, which regularly presents overarching narratives of Japanese film history through collection-based exhibitions. How, then, can we build a queer film archive within—and against—such exhibitionary frameworks in practice? As a film scholar, I examine how queer reading can operate as a mode of curatorial intervention in archival spaces. I argue that queer reading enables curators to renegotiate the meanings and uses of archival materials through exhibition-making by activating the memories, desires, and spectral traces of queer lives that objects and paratexts can carry. The paper is grounded in my experience curating “Inside/Out—LGBTQ+ Representation in Film and Television” at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (Waseda University). Initiated in April 2018 and presented from September 28, 2020 to January 15, 2021, the exhibition traced the postwar history (1945–2020) of commercial and non-commercial queer film and television alongside their reception in Japan, and— to my knowledge—was the first museum exhibition in Japan to do so at this scale. My curatorial method begins by acknowledging my privileged positionality: the access it grants to archival spaces and the authority to select, frame, and display materials. This is not a celebration of archival authority; building on scholarship on queering museums (Sullivan and Middleton 2020), I treat it as a starting point for reading materials against the grain. Crucially, “against the grain” is not only interpretive but methodological: it concerns how one moves through archival space, follows attraction, and stages encounters. Drawing on Damiens (2020), I conceptualize cruising as an unexpectedly erotic curatorial method that disrupts heteronormative temporality in film-historical narration. I show how visceral pulls—through which objects, fragments, and paratexts call for contact across time—are indispensable to queer reading as detonative curation: a practice that ruptures linear, canon-centered narratives through selection, spatial design, and captioning.

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This paper analyses media representations of Ikebukuro since emerging as a hub of queer media fandom in the 2000s. I argue that the region reflects the central role of queerness in influencing how fans, corporations and municipalities interact with and drive changes in the Japanese media sphere.

Paper long abstract

‘Transmitting Anime Ikebukuro to the World’ reads the headline of an October 2023 article in the Asahi Shimbun covering the opening of the city funded Anime Tokyo Station, a then newly opened anime exhibition space in Ikebukuro – a region of north-west Tokyo. Anime Tokyo Station is one example of recent efforts by the local municipality, Toshima, to transform Ikebukuro into an ‘anime city’ that can act as a mecca for fans of Japanese animation. These plans build upon the large female-dominated fandoms for queer media that gather in the region and have grown increasingly prominent in media coverage of Ikebukuro since the early 2000s. Such representations of Ikebukuro as a hub of female fandoms stand in stark contrast to longstanding media depictions of the region as a place of danger represented by black markets, gangs and adult entertainment. This paper discusses the shifting representations of Ikebukuro since the 2000s from an area known for danger to an anime city, considering what the region reveals about the role of the queerness in the Japanese media. I draw on the discourse analysis of representations of Ikebukuro in media such as newspapers and online articles; published interviews with stakeholders in the region; and a discussion of how these connect to municipal policies. From this, I highlight how Toshima and its corporate partners have co-opted queer media fandoms for regional rebranding, using them as representatives of Ikebukuro to shift representations of the region. I further suggest that Ikebukuro has also begun to drive changes in how queer media is consumed in Japan as other regions seek to draw on similar approaches to Toshima to anime fandom. More broadly, Ikebukuro is revealing of the key role that queer media plays in driving media consumption in Japan. The shifting representations of Ikebukuro since the 2000s are simply one reflection of this importance, playing an important role in side-lining uncomfortable histories previously central to narratives of the region in favour of the new ‘anime city’ branding. Far from a niche interest, queerness is central to how fans, corporations and municipalities drive changes in the Japanese media.