Globalism, new media, and the inescapable JapanThe 1990s thus appeared to mark a shift in the history of Japanese film that complicated
the category of Japanese national cinema. There were problems with declaring the end of the
nation or national cinema, however. Not all depictions of heterogeneity, for instance, sufficiently
questioned the ideology of the nation. For instance, I have argued that the multi- lingual and
multicultural near future in Iwai Shunji’s Swallowtail (1996) ultimately reconstructs Japan through
its privileged ability to consume Asia (Gerow 2000); Mika Ko has seen in Miike Takashi’s work,
which often features characters from Asia or of mixed ancestry, the tendency towards “cosmetic
multiculturalism” (2004); and I have shown how Kitano Takeshi’s Brother (2000), his first film
shot abroad, reconstructs Japaneseness through its encounter with the other (Gerow 2007). The
rise of the transnational is itself not a guarantee of the deconstruction of nationalist hegemony,
especially when open borders allow Japan to construct itself as a leader of Asia though its ability
to consume and indigenize capitalist modernity (see Iwabuchi 2006). Japan’s own experience
of being an empire was itself, as Oguma Eiji has shown, a precedent for allowing heterogeneity
within an imperial project (2002).
There is another phenomenon I would like to take up here, which also seems to complicate
any globalist claims to the dissolution of national boundaries—that is, the continued depiction
of a Japan from which it is impossible to escape. This trope, I would argue, intersects with a
number of other tropes centered on closed, often imaginary worlds and complicates not only
the periodization of globalism in Japan, but also a narrative of how to imagine worlds through
new media in contemporary capitalism.
The trope of inescapability has a long history, going back at least into the 1960s and mani-
festing itself in various formulations. The year 1964 saw Yoshida Yoshishige’s Escape from Japan
(Nihon dasshutsu) and Kurahara Koreyoshi’s Black Sun (Kuroi taiyō), both of which presented
characters unable to leave the country. The critic Tanemura Suehiro, writing in 1966, found in
the former film the desire to return to the womb (1997), a metaphor linking that work to what
the film critic Matsuda Masao said of Wakamatsu Kōji’s famous radical pink films in the 1960s
(1970). Observing in characters from films like The Embryo Hunts in Secret (Taiji ga mitsuryōsuru
toki, 1966) such a desire to return to the womb, Matsuda connected this closed room/womb
(misshutsu) with the problem of landscape (fūkei), which, as Yuriko Furuhata (2013) pointed out,
became a central motif for theorizing power in Japanese intellectual circles around 1970. For
Matsuda, the closed room is not a space that Wakamatsu’s young heroes can simply free them-
selves of by escaping into the landscape, because landscape, as an embodiment of social structures
of power, can itself be the closed room.
Such a vision of a closed, virtually inescapable space continued into the 1990s, even as it
became more literally landscape, particularly the beaches and shores of Japan. Even though the
Japanese of the 1990s enjoyed far more opportunities to travel abroad or experience foreign
goods at home than before, the vision of characters unable to leave Japan kept reappearing in
cinema. Miike often depicts characters who are hybrid and in between (Gerow 2009), but that
liminal existence on the border does not enable them to escape Japan. His characters in Ley
Lines (Nihon kuroshakai—Ley Lines, 1999] and The City of Lost Souls (Hyōryūgai, 2000) in fact
desperately try to escape their rather bleak situation, fleeing to the sea or the beach, only to die
there. Death on the beach is also a prominent motif in Takeshi Kitano’s work, such as Sonatine
( Sonachine, 1993), A Scene at the Sea (Ano natsu, ichiban shizukana umi, 1991), and Fireworks
(Hana-bi, 1997) (Gerow 2007). In fact, quite a number of this decade’s works, from Isaka Satoshi’s
Focus (1996) to Gōzu Naoe’s Falling into the Evening (Rakkasuru yūgata, 1998), feature characters
who flee to Japan’s coast and perish.
Sometimes the effort to flee does not end so violently. Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s semi-apocalyptic
film Barren Illusion (Ōinaru gen’ei, 1999) may feature the image of a skeleton on the beach, but its