ASCL 69.24 Japan at the Margins: Place and Displacement in Postwar Film and Fiction
This course examines cinematic and literary representations of displaced people living on the margins of Japanese society and of the spaces they are forced to inhabit. Vagabonds, gangsters, sex workers, rogue cops, war widows, dispossessed lovers, abandoned children—these have all been recurring figures throughout Japanese cultural history, but they have a occupied place an especially important place in film and fiction from the late 1940s to the present day. Aesthetic representations of the plight of the displaced challenge the dominant postwar narrative of Japan as a successful liberal democracy and economic superpower.
Instructor
Washburn