Divine Work, Japanese Colonial Cinema and Its Legacy

For many East Asian nations, cinema and Japanese Imperialism arrived within a few years of each other. Exploring topics such as landscape, gender, modernity and military recruitment, this study details how the respective national cinemas of Japan's territories struggled under, but also engaged with, the Japanese Imperial structures. Japan was ostensibly committed to an ethos of pan-Asianism and this study explores how this sense of the transnational was conveyed cinematically across the occupied lands. Taylor-Jones traces how cinema in the region post-1945 needs to be understood not only in terms of past colonial relationships, but also in relation to how the post-colonial has engaged with shifting political alliances, the opportunities for technological advancement and knowledge, the promise of larger consumer markets, and specific historical conditions of each decade.

Kate Taylor-Jones is Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at The University of Sheffield, UK. She has published on topics including colonial Japanese and Korean cinema, cinema and landscape in East Asia, and domestic violence and the sex trade. She is author of Rising Sun, Divided Land: Japanese and South Korean Filmmakers (2013); and editor-in-chief of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. She is co-editor with Fiona Handyside of International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (2015).