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January 17, 2023

Memories of Cinema--Going in Postwar Japan, Jennifer Coates at Sophia U., Jan 25th

From: David H. Slater <dhslater@gmail.com>
Date: 2023/01/13

The Institute of Comparative Culture invites you to a special lecture 
Memories of Cinema-Going in Postwar Japan: An Ethno-history
With Jennifer Coates (Professor, University of Sheffield)

Jan 25, 2023, 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM (Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo)

Hybrid (In-person and on Zoom)
For venue info and zoom link please register from here:  
https://forms.office.com/r/bMLe69Nfeu
Poster here: https://www.icc-sophia.com/post/memories-of-cinema-going-in-postwar-japan-an-ethno-history

From the beginning of the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP GHQ) identified the cinema as a means to reshape popular attitudes, re-educating Japanese citizens away from the nationalist ideologies that had characterized wartime. This talk presents material from an ethnographic study of cinema-going in postwar Japan that began with the simple question, "Can cinema content change social attitudes?" Over four years of fieldwork in the Kansai region of Western Japan (2014-2018), this study evolved into a consideration of the role of cinema-going and film viewership, broadly conceived, on the formation of a sense of self in the generation that grew up under Occupation. Focusing on the discourse around cinema, rather than a close reading of cinema texts, this project reveals the usefulness of taking talking about cinema seriously as a mode of exploring difficult historical issues.

Jennifer Coates is Professor of Japanese Studies at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (Hong Kong University Press 2016) and Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: An Ethnographic Study (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters on cinema and audiences in postwar and contemporary Japan. Jennifer is a AHRC Innovation Scholar and recipient of the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts.

This talk is organized by David H. Slater (FLA, Sophia University)
Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture: https://www.icc-sophia.com/

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David H. Slater, Ph.D.
Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Faculty of Liberal Arts, Graduate Program in Japanese Studies
Sophia University, Tokyo

Approved by ssjmod at 05:06 PM