Journals
2009 EN
David A. Kirsch
Long-term preservation of and access to business records of the sort that business historians have relied upon for decades and that supported the development of applied fields, like business strategy, is increasingly threatened by their growing value. The expansion of entrepreneurial capitalism following the end of the Cold War has produced a new era of business ascendant across much of the globe. At home, we are reminded of President Calvin Coolidge's observation that "the chief business of the American people is business." Not since Coolidge first uttered these words more than eighty years ago have they rung more true. And if the business of America is business, then surely the history of America is the history of American business. Yet, if we have witnessed a new gilded age in American industry, the evidentiary record of these events may disappoint future scholars, policy makers, and the interested public.
Johns Hopkins University Press
Journals
2009 EN
Nicolas Hatzfeld · Alain Michel · Gwenaële Rot
During the 1960’s, while the importance of working class in the French society reaches its peak, the cinematographic representation of workers is significantly transformed. This change occurs in documentary pictures and not in fiction dramas which generally neglect this theme. Some filmmakers develop new techniques based on light cameras and synchronous sound, and use them to capture words directly taken in the filmed scenes. This new way of filming shakes up the documentary tradition hampered by heavy equipments and relatively high costs, thus depending on institutional funds. Until then, the workers served as extras in motion pictures praising the industrial performance of firms. The new documentaries reveal individuals, both common and singular. Their live words, shot in still positively considered automobile plants, cause a strong impression of truth and contradict the enchanted image of the post-war decades. After 1968, a new trend among filmmakers, critics and spectators, tends to present these characters as political figures, giving their expression an anti-establishment role.
Journals
2009 EN
A. Gabriela Ramis
In the context of historical revisionism that characterized Latin American theater in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Milton Schinca wrote Madame Lynch (1989). This essay looks at two political readings of Lynch's marginality in Paraguayan society, and of her relationship to power as a way of highlighting social constructs. It does so by analyzing the deliberate emphasis of the material conditions of Elisa Lynch, the function of her body, her use of visual and linguistic signs, the tension between power and marginality, and how monologues work as an attempt to deconstruct the patriarchal view of Madame Paraguay. This leads to a reading of the playtext as an attempt to reconsider Uruguay's responsibility in the War of Paraguay (1865-1870).
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Journals
2009 EN
Michael Dylan Foster
of Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922), the prolific manga/anime artist famous for his graphic narratives concerning Japanese monsters and spirits known as yōkai. Mizuki is especially well known as the creator of Gegege no Kitarō, which has appeared since the 1960s as a manga and as numerous animated television series, has been adapted for video games, and most recently was produced as a 2007 live-action movie, with a sequel in 2008. In contemporary Japan, Mizuki’s yōkai images are so deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination that you would be hard-pressed to find a child or adult unfamiliar with Kitarō or Mizuki’s other paradigmatic creations. In addition to his creative and narrative work, Mizuki is also a yōkai researcher who has explored religious and secular traditions to illustrate and describe numerous “real” yōkai from around Japan, effectively (re)popularizing supernatural imagery and folk beliefs among a wide readership.1 Another facet of Mizuki’s work stems from his personal experiences as a child growing up in rural Sakaiminato and as a soldier during World War II. In a series of memoirs, both prose and manga, Mizuki’s war experience figures as a terrible trial by fire out of which he emerges reborn and forever Haunted Travelogue: Hometowns, Ghost Towns, and Memories of War
University of Minnesota Press
Journals
2009 EN
Wendy C Goldberg
39 Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka), a film directed by Takahata Isao in 1988 and based on the Naoki Award–winning short story by Nosaka Akiyuki (published 1967), was paired as a double feature with Miyazaki Hayao film, My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro).1 These two films, however, could not be more dissimilar. Miyazaki’s work is a gentle fantasy of childhood imagination in the pastoral setting of 1950s Japan, a time seemingly untouched by war. Grave, on the other hand, set in Kobe 1945, in the waning days of World War II, is a realistic drama, focusing on the suffering and eventual starvation deaths of fourteen-year-old Seita and his four-year-old sister, Setsuko. The film opens with Seita’s sore-ridden, emaciated body falling over in a train station. His voice, emanating from a spirit bathed in red light, tells us that on September 21, 1945, he has died. A worker looking through Seita’s belongings finds a beat-up tin can, which he throws into the bushes. Pieces of bone roll out which turn into Setsuko’s spirit, likewise cast in red light. She sees her brother’s body and rushes to go to him, but she is restrained and then joyfully reunited with his spirit. The film then retraces how the two of them reached their moments of death.
University of Minnesota Press
Journals
2009 EN
Marco Pellitteri
robots as alien characters might represent both the totalitarian invaders and the good old American defenders of freedom and justice—is actually evident in more than one anime series of the 1970s. In this essay I will analyze Japanese postwar identity in the 1970s, especially as it emerged in the context of Japan’s complex relationship with the United States, through anime dealing with adventure, technology, and war. I focus on one representative series, UFO Robo Grendizer, which features a giant robot who is a defender of humanity and within which we can see a symbol of Japan’s relationship to the United States and to other countries.1 I will not address the formal elements of the anime but only focus on the structural, narrative, and symbolic elements.2 I argue that in Grendizer the protagonist and his robot are, in the context of Japan’s geopolitical position, an allegory of the relationship between Japan and the United States, in that both its American and Japanese characters are united against totalitarian invaders. The presumed political aspect of the Vegans, the enemies of the protagonist, are not specified as either fascist or communist, because the Japanese in the postwar period have repudiated both totalitarianisms. Yet in the graphic style and character Nippon ex Machina: Japanese Postwar Identity in Robot Anime and the Case of UFO Robo Grendizer m a r C O p e l l i t t e r i
University of Minnesota Press
Journals
2009 EN
Shengmei Ma
talgia,” writes Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia.1 This zeitgeist of looking backwards materializes in Japanese manga and anime as a belated rendezvous with World War II, as a gaze across half a century into the Rising Sun and the invariable averting from the blinding rays of wartime history. Japanese comics’ “return of the repressed” entails a coming to terms with the collective trauma that allegedly ended in 1945, yet this yearning to engage a specific past of great pain is adulterated by the human instinct for pleasure and a withdrawal from pain. After all, any gaze into the sun results in a turning away, lest blindness or madness set in. Instead of staring into the sun himself, Van Gogh lets his sunflowers do that, maintains Georges Bataille. Bataille further casts this paradox of attraction and revulsion of the sun in the image of Icarus: “the summit of elevation is in practice confused with a sudden fall of unheard-of violence. The myth of Icarus is particularly expressive from this point of view: it clearly splits the sun in two—the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s elevation, and the other that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close.” 2 Drawn to the best and the worst of times of Imperial Japan, the three Three Views of the Rising Sun, Obliquely: Keiji Nakazawa’s A-bomb, Osamu Tezuka’s Adolf, and Yoshinori Kobayashi’s Apologia s h e n G m e i m a
University of Minnesota Press
Journals
2009 EN
Tom Looser
Even before the recent Gulf wars brought on talk of a new kind of war without end, war has been a common, even ubiquitous theme in anime and manga. With this perhaps in mind, an interviewer asked an artist involved with the 2005 "Gundam: Generating Futures" exhibition at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum in Ueno Park how the "Gundam generation" could talk about war with "no actual experience of war." The reply was that, simply, "each of us has experienced' virtual war in a variety of ways/'1 It could be interesting to pursue the importance of virtual war (as opposed to "actual" war) in social life, or perhaps of the experience of war within video games (a question, at least in part, of technology). Certainly Oshii Mamoru, the anime director, filmmaker, artist, and novelist, works with each of these themes at different points in his own, typically war-centered, oeuvre. This article, however, takes up a far more generalized statement on how to think about war. In Oshii' s novel Blood: The Last Vampire; Night of the Beasts (2000, Kemonotachi no yoru ), war as it now is configured is presented as part of a foundational logic of contemporary political and social life.2 This is not to say that "war" is merely figurative (or fictional) for Oshii. Blood: The Last Vampire; Night of the Beasts is centered in part on the Vietnam
University of Minnesota Press
Journals
2009 EN
Mark Driscoll
A young “freeter” named Akamatsu Tomohiro shocked liberal pundits in Japan with his short piece published in the Asahi Shinbun’s journal of ideas Ronza in January 2007. Called “Kibō wa sensō” (My only hope is war), Akamatsu’s challenge to informed readers warned that if Japanese youth continue to be robbed of an economic future, they just might turn to the military out of desperation. He darkly suggested that the disappearance of anything resembling equality in neoliberalized Japanese society could very easily be replaced by the leveling effect of a militarized and mobilized Japan. Akamatsu’s challenge was that war stands a better chance of making Japanese society more equitable than any other social force and, for that reason, is more attractive for Japanese young men than out-of-date promises pitched by an increasingly irrelevant trade-unionism. After ten years of startling commercial success that he has leveraged into a central place among political commentators in the Japanese media (and the starring role among contemporary ultranationalists), the manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori doubtless read Akamatsu’s article with glee. “My only hope Kobayashi Yoshinori Is Dead: Imperial War / Sick Liberal Peace / Neoliberal Class War
University of Minnesota Press
Journals
2009 EN
Mark Anderson
75 In foregrounding controversy surrounding the Japanese use of military force, Patlabor 2 (1993, Kidō keisatsu Patoreibaa 2 the Movie) is a work that participated in the widespread early 1990s Japanese questioning of Japan’s postwar settlement with the United States. It specifically raises questions about the qualification of Japanese national sovereignty that flowed from Article 9 and the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty.1 It thus questions Japanese complicity in postwar U.S. “global police” violence (the most immediate context was the Gulf War conducted two years before the film’s release), dramatizing what critics began to suggest was a mistaken conflation of Japanese and U.S. security as institutionalized in the very one-sided U.S.–Japan security relationship. In Patlabor 2, the boundaries of Japanese identity and security strategy appear riven and contested, with a range of conflicting approaches to controlling and resolving these claims depicted. In addition, the film connects analog and digital media to competing perspectives on the status of 1990s Japan as a nation and Tokyo as a globalized city. In sum, Patlabor 2 offers an exploration of the shifting status of media, sovereignty, and warfare in the Pacific in the post–Gulf War era.
University of Minnesota Press