Page 38 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 25

end of US military occupation, and which would eventually – and
perhaps inevitably – culminate with the devastating recession of the
1990s. To this day, metaphors of both corporeal integrity and imperiled
social bodies permeate the Japanese cultural imaginary, a discursive
phenomenon best evidenced when one considers how the demands of an
increasingly global economy at once conditions and perpetually threatens
to collapse the always already illusory notion of a discrete and
homogenous national identity. In this sense, then, Japan resembles ‘many
modern nation-states in that it [Japan] has to construct a model of a
unitary identity shared by all citizens’ (Martinez 1998: 10). Such a
paradigm depends on ‘the wider construct of the imagined national
community’ (10), a form of nationalism linked with the content and
circulation of filmic and other popular culture texts. Hence, ‘while the
logic of capitalism (late or otherwise) demands diversification, the
underlying logic of one identity (the Japanese) as different from that of
their neighbors…remains crucial to the nation state’ (14). In the turbulent,
yet economically productive decades following the end of World War II,
this seemingly paradoxical drive to establish an imagined homogeneity in
an increasingly global arena is marked by concurrent drives to repress or
forget a pre-modern past in favor of a postmodern global community and
to rescue vanishing or abandoned traditions in what H.D. Harootunian
describes as ‘a relentlessly obsessive “return” to “origins”: an
orchestrated attempt by the state to compensate for the dissolution of the
social by resurrecting “lost” traditions against modernism itself’
(Harootunian 1989: 66). 6 Indeed, if we understand the ‘discursively
constructed’ corporeal and social body in late capitalist Japan as a
‘central site for the reconfiguration of Japan’s national image’ (Igarashi
2000: 13), it is then possible to read the violated and violating

6
In light of Japan’s political and cultural climate since the Meiji restoration, Rey Chow’s brief
essay, ‘Film and Cultural Identity’, offers a compelling introduction to the complex, and
explicitly modern, relationship between the photographic image (including, but not limited to,
film) and “cultural identity”. Chow argues that the complex “multiple significance of filmic
visuality” in numerous non-Western cultures must be understood within a postcolonial
framework “in which to become ‘modern’ signifies an ongoing revisioning of indigenous
cultural traditions alongside the obligatory turns towards the West or ‘the world at large’. In
this light, it is worth remembering that film has always been, since its inception, a
transcultural phenomenon, having as it does the capacity to transcend ‘culture’” (172).