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 Professor of East Asian Cinema and Head of the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her publications include the monograph, Divine Work: Japanese Colonial Cinema and its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-edited works Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema: New Takes on Fallen Women (2017) and International Cinema and the Girl (2015). She is editor-in-chief of The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture.