For a country that birthed its modern society by the rise and re-form from Western colonialist invasion, the Meiji era is the prologue and also the synopsis of contemporary Japan: constituting strength through struggle. Humanity’s salvation through damnation in Japan’s apocalyptic imaginary — one I would call as ‘downtown in distress’ — is exhibitive yet therapeutic, particularly for its post-war consumers, as cataclysms are detonated and thus desensitised at a secure imaginative distance. Few nations have a history of vulnerability and a culture of anxiety imprinted so profoundly like Japan does, hence “doom-laden dream” is able to act as a

Continue readingReading Response: William M. Tsutsui

The title of this article shows up to suggest Japan’s current circumstance. Utilizing a grave and wild eyed tone, the maker passes on how the country is encountering a crisis as its city has been destroyed by a mental aggressor ambush. As the visual culture, the animal film can totally reflect Japan’s traumatic history, particularly the two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In these motion pictures, the animals start off with less puzzling focuses of intrigued but gotten to be more characterized as the plot spreads out. The term “secure horror” is utilized to depict how the gathering of individuals is able to come across a certain level of frightfulness though watching these motion pictures, but in the long run the frightfulness is brought underneath control and pulverized. These movement pictures can as well serve as a source of reassurance for Japanese individuals, appearing that inside the event of an attack, their country has the capacity to bring the circumstance underneath control. Hong Kong building in addition has various characteristics. Hong Kong building remains the British fashion and

Continue readingReading Response: Abbas, M. A. & Tsutsui W.M.

On ‘Oh No, There Goes Tokyo: Recreational Apocalypse and the City in Postwar Japanese Popular Culture’ Tsutui’s essay speaks to the way the destruction of the cityscape has been harnessed in Japanese popular culture- especially in the genre of kaiju eiga- and can be read as a desire for societal reset, safe spectacle, and yet still a faith in the city’s reconstructive abilities. The choice of buildings that are used in montages, paths of destruction or under direct assault in the various Godzilla or King Kong iterations are deliberate choices. These buildings or clusters of iconic sites are often a

Continue readingReading Response: William M. Tsutsui

In the essay, Tsutsui discussed the role of film and film characters in relation to the local culture and society, or Japan in particular.   During recent centuries, Japan went through some of the most destructive disasters. These include the fire in the 1600s to the 1800s, the major earthquake in the Kanto region, and the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with some other natural disasters, all of which destroyed the cities and left numerous people homeless. In a highly pressurized society in Japan, some films would “distract people from the terror” while others may “normalize the

Continue reading[Reading Response: Tsutsui W.M.]