Page 35 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

22 Nightmare Japan

particularly those texts created in the tumultuous decades following
World War II. Metaphors of the body, like bodies themselves, are
surprisingly flexible and porous; as Matsui Midori notes, ‘(a)ccording to
each historical application, the return of the repressed Japanese “body”
can be made either regressive or liberating, reactionary or revolutionary’
(2002: 144).
Of course, to contextualise not only the recent ‘explosion’ of
Japanese horror cinema, but also the general popularity of horror films in
Japan over the last fifty years, one cannot underestimate the impact of
such crucial events as Japan’s catastrophic defeat in World War II (and
the subsequent years of foreign occupation), the decades of dramatic
economic recovery and the similarly spectacular financial recession of the
1990s upon both the national psyche and, consequently, the artistic
creations that inevitably emerged. In addition, it is equally essential to
recognise how these larger social transformations inform the shape and
significance of those institutions and behavioural codes central to the
development and preservation of a sense of national and cultural identity.
As Tim Craig notes, large-scale political and economic shifts invariably
produce ‘new social conditions’, including ‘urbanization, consumer
cultures, changing family structures and gender roles, and lifestyles and
values that are less purely traditional and more influenced by outside
information and trends’ (2000: 16). Correspondingly, given the influence
of such novel ‘social conditions’ and transformations upon the cultural
imaginary, it seems only fitting that they would find reflection within the
‘popular culture’ (16) as well.
As a substantial product of Japanese popular culture, horror films
provide one of the more valuable and flexible avenues through which
artists can apply visual and narrative metaphors to engage a changing
cultural terrain. Furthermore, given Japan’s aforementioned complex, and
often contradictory, responses to the ‘permanence of imprints left by the
contact with the West’ (Ivy 1995: 241), the liminal physiognomies that
frequently populate Japanese horror films (be these corporeal formations
traditionally monstrous, phantasmagoric or representations of the human
form dismantled) are ideal models for interrogating Japan’s ‘cultural
particularity’, a malleable ‘relationalism (aidagamshugi)’ (Harootunian