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Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968
An Ethnographic Study
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Book Presentation:
Offers the first ethno-historical study of cinema-going and film viewership in Japan
• Introduces an ethno-historical approach to Japanese Film Studies for the first time, in order to bring the rarely-heard voices of everyday viewers into scholarly discourse
• Blends ethnographic and film studies approaches to create a new methodology for visually analysing interview material
• Contributes scholarship on cinema in the Kansai region and neighbouring areas of Western Japan to extant Tokyo-based and national-level scholarship
• Gives an account of regional difference in cinema-going and film-viewing in Japan
Combining film studies and ethnographic research methods within a memory studies framework, Coates examines the impact of cinema cultures on the everyday lives of viewers.
Film Viewing in Postwar Japan draws from four years of interviews, participant observation, questionnaire surveys, and written communications with over 100 study participants in the Kansai region of Western Japan. This is an in-depth study of memories of cinema-going among the generations who regularly attended film theatres between 1945-1968, the peak period of production and cinema attendance in Japan.
Through investigating the role of film viewership, broadly conceived, in the formation of a postwar sense of self, the reader will benefit from rare access to the voices of grass-roots viewers, who often tell a different version of cinema history and its effects than that available in extant scholarship.
About the Author:
Dr Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (2016) and co-editor of Politicizing the Screen: Japanese Visual Media (2021) and Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (2019).
Press Reviews:
It is no longer be possible to talk about ethnographies of film without putting Jennifer Coates’ work at the top of the list. This riveting work makes us feel what the movies of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema meant and how important they were to the people who saw them.
– David Desser, University of Illinois
One of the most personal scholarly books that I have ever read! Expanding the methods of oral history and memory studies, Jennifer Coates weaves an untold story of cinematic experiences in postwar Japan. Her interests are in listening to people and giving voices to their feelings. This is a work of a real humanist.
– Prof. Daisuke Miyao, University of California, San Diego
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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