The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. In this comprehensive and theoretically informed study of the influential director s cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto definitively analyzes Kurosawa s entire body of work, from 1943 s Sanshiro Sugata to 1993 s Madadayo. In scrutinizing this oeuvre, Yoshimoto shifts the ground upon which the scholarship on Japanese cinema has been built and questions its dominant interpretive frameworks and critical assumptions.
Arguing that...

The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. In this comprehensive and theoretically informed study of the influential director s cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto definitively analyzes Kurosawa s entire body of work, from 1943 s Sanshiro Sugata to 1993 s Madadayo. In scrutinizing this oeuvre, Yoshimoto shifts the ground upon which the scholarship on Japanese cinema has been built and questions its dominant interpretive frameworks and critical assumptions.
Arguing that...

This collection examines the event of Fukushima in Japan in terms of urban sociology and cultural politics to portray the triple catastrophe of March 2011 as both a planetary event and a dual economic and environmental crisis which indelibly marked Japan and the wider global community. The contributors examine how this new situation has been expressed in particular cultural forms (literature, film), political discourses and urban everyday life in Tokyo and Fukushima, arguing for an imperative need to redefine the national frame of analysis in terms of the concept of the planetary. Building on...