Page 94 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 81

dynamics have not transpired without resistance from Japanese desirous
for a return to what they perceive as – to borrow a term from reactionary
US politicians – ‘traditional family values’. In June 2004, for example,
several government officials proposed constitutional revisions aimed at
reducing the impact of a distorted and US-influenced individualism upon
what was once perceived as a more communal socio-political paradigm.
As such, a recent report on Japan’s morphing social and cultural
landscape drafted by Morioka Masahiro, ‘a ruling party member in the
House of Representatives’ (Makino 2005: para 7), declared that ‘[i]t is
shameful that Japanese people no longer think much of family,
community and the nation, and that some of them even insist on having a
system of retaining separate family names…The constitution must ensure
that protecting family is the foundation of securing the nation’ (para 7).
While Morioka’s contention that Japan no longer perceives value in
social institutions like the ‘family’ or, indeed, the ‘nation’ resounds with a
remarkable degree of alarmist hyperbole, his rhetoric proves illuminating
in that it reveals the extent to which concerns over recuperating a lost
sense of ‘Japaneseness’ inform the larger popular imagination. As well, it
exposes the recurrent allure of ideological configurations that link
conceptualisations of the family as a cohesive social unit with the re-
establishment of a nationalist fervor that was once perceived as vanishing
amidst unrelenting social change.
Here, too, an analysis of recent Japanese horror cinema provides
valuable insights into the assorted perspectives constellating around the
morphing sex and gender roles that accompany a period of economic,
social, and cultural transition. In the following pages, this chapter
analyses two films by the noted Japanese director Nakata Hideo,
positioning these kaidan tales as key texts for mapping crucial socio-
cultural anxieties. Ringu follows the exploits of Asakawa Reiko, a
reporter and recently divorced single mother who briefly reunites with her
former spouse (a university professor) to uncover the secret behind a
cursed videocassette that, once viewed, kills its spectator in seven days. A
similar conceit informs the plot of Nakata’s Dark Water, in which
Matsubura Yoshimi, a mother in the midst of a psychologically trying
battle over the custody of her six year old daughter, must come to terms