Book Description

"This book explores the hundred-year history of the relationships between Japanese media and social subjects through an analysis of the connections between cinema audiences and five significant discursive terms in the Japanese language: minshåu (the people), kokumin (the national populace), tåoa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishåu (the masses), and shimin (citizens). Roughly speaking, as far as their relations with cinema are concerned, the term "the people" circulated from the 1910s through the 1920s, "the national populace" from the 1930s through the 2010s and even to the present day, "the East Asian race" from the late 1930s up to the mid-1940s, "the masses" from the late 1920s to the present, and "citizens" from the 1960s through the present. The overlap between the terms indicates that the history of Japanese social subjects has unfolded not in a linear, but in a multilayered manner. Each period has also been bound up with various political and economic issues which have impacted on that very history. These include the presence of capitalism, total war, imperialism, democracy, social movements, post-Fordism, neoliberalism, the network society, and the risk society. In each context, such terms as "the people," "the national populace," "the East Asian race," "the masses," and "the citizens" have not necessarily been deployed in terms of a set of lexically defined, fixed, and stable meanings; rather, they all have entailed certain discrepancies and contradictions among a diverse range of standpoints, while at the same time changing their different interpretative valence according to historical context. In addition, these concepts have sometimes been used to define the self and at other times to define a given other. Moreover, the terms have not only been enunciated through discourses; they have also been enacted by physical bodies. The overall purpose of this book, therefore, is to empirically and analytically elucidate a dynamic, multi-layered history of cinema audiences in Japan as part of a larger relationship between media and social subjects and examines cinema audiences as simultaneously shaped by and shaping social history. In so doing, it brings a new perspective to the history of Japanese society and culture in its global context from the early twentieth century up to the early twenty-first century"--