Articles by Shota T Ogawa
NonFiction Journal, 2023
Is obsolete media ever really obsolete?
Do we call certain media obsolete when we wish them to b... more Is obsolete media ever really obsolete?
Do we call certain media obsolete when we wish them to be? Does the category of the obsolete help us to deal with ghosts from the past haunting the present, or the anxiety of losing faith in the linear progressive flow of history?
Does it matter whether we ask these questions “in Asia” or elsewhere?
In this short piece, I explore these loosely formulated questions with the help of a very particular set of films that I have spent an unhealthy amount of time researching in the past couple of years: amateur travelogues shot by Japanese tourists in colonial Korea and de-facto colonial Manchuria (Northeast China) using small-gauge film (gauges that are narrower than the theatrical standard of 35mm: in my case most films are in 16mm or 9.5mm).
Transnational Asia: An Online Interdisciplinary Journal, 2023
In March 2022, streaming platform Apple TV+ released Pachinko, a much-anticipated adaptation of M... more In March 2022, streaming platform Apple TV+ released Pachinko, a much-anticipated adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same name that follows a Korean family across four generations to explore the interstices of colonial Korean, Zainichi Korean (literally “Koreans in Japan”), and Asian American experiences. Spearheaded by Asian American executive producers, writers, and filmmakers, and featuring a majority Asian cast primarily speaking Japanese and Korean, the drama has been hailed as the biggest multilingual spectacle (with a per-episode budget estimated at $6.5m), a champion of minority representation in Hollywood, and the latest Korean media content to attain global circulation, but curiously sidelining existing debates on Zainichi screen images in Japan. Taking Pachinko as a case study, this paper examines the challenges and the promises of studying “Zainichi cinema,” or the discursive construct surrounding Zainichi Korean screen narratives, within a global frame. Drawing on the model of transpacific studies, I first historicize the Zainichi cinema debates within the marginalization-in-Japan framework of Japanese studies and the Koreanness-in-dispersal framework of Korean studies before engaging, via Pachinko, with the additional frames of Asian American studies and global media studies. In the second half of the paper, I turn to formal analysis, exploring the series’ unique use of parallel editing and subtitles, which constitutes what I call the cosmopolitan middlebrow style, addressing the globe’s rising middleclass. Ultimately, I argue that Pachinko calls for a global reframing of Zainichi studies, not because of Hollywood’s supposed universal appeal, but because of the multiplicity of reading positions the series addresses, thus effectively rendering every viewer a partial stranger vis-à-vis the story world.
DNP文化振興財団学術研究助成紀要 / The Bulletin of Graphic Culture Research Grants, 2022
映像学, 2022
Although literature on testimony film has traditionally cast the present-tense work of bearing w... more Although literature on testimony film has traditionally cast the present-tense work of bearing witness to historical catastrophes as a counterpoint to the institutionalized mode of historiography rooted in the positivist “archive”, Claude Lanzmann’s two- pronged move to donate and re-deploy the monumental archive of 220 hours worth of “outtakes” from his film Shoah (1985) has spurred an “archival turn” in the field. Through a case study of Resident Korean (Zainichi) author Park Soo-nam’s vernacular archival practices, this article examines the critical questions that arise from the “archi- val turn” specifically in the context of East Asia’s unfinished work of decolonizing. By examining an ongoing project, my study calls attention to the productive slippages that lie between the archive effect and the actually-existing archives, outtakes-as-documents and outtakes-as-films-that-might-have-been, and the “slow catastrophe” of celluloid’s disintegration and the historical catastrophes it records.
16 mm フィルムとオープンリール、そして市民運動に支えられた自主制作・ 自主上映体制を駆使して多様に開花したドキュメンタリー映画の背後にたたず む膨大な尺数の「アウトテイク」素材群の存在が、制作者の老齢化とデジタル 時代の映像保存実践の多元化によって近年顕在化してきた。殊に、証言映画 の記念碑的作品である『ショア』(クロード・ランズマン監督、1985 年)のアウ トテイク素材 220 時間分が、米国ホロコースト記念博物館の映像アーキビスト によってクロード・ランズマン『ショア』コレクションとして整理されたこと を受け、証言映画とアーカイブの入り組んだ関係性をめぐる議論が再燃して いる。本稿は、『ショア』とアーカイブを巡る議論を一つのモデルとして参照 しつつも、東アジアのポストコロニアルな空間で周縁化された語りを 60 年に わたり記録してきた朴壽南(パク・スナム、1935-)の表現活動を取り上げる。 2019 年に始動した「日韓 100 人による歴史の証言映像」デジタルアーカイブ企 画を手がかりに、皇民化教育を受けた在日コリアン二世の作家が、脱植民地化 の文脈で作品創作だけでなくアウトテイク素材のアーカイブ化を位置づけると き、歴史史料と映画素材、アーカイヴとアーカイブ、フィルムと映像など様々 な対立概念をどのように再定義することになるか。モデル未満の不確かさを含 むケーススタディとして模索する。
Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Sep 21, 2014
Media Fields Journal, 2020
In early 1938, the modernist photographer Horino Masao (1907–1998) embarked on a journey through... more In early 1938, the modernist photographer Horino Masao (1907–1998) embarked on a journey through Korea, then in its twenty-eighth year under Japan’s colonial rule. He thus joined a school of filmmakers, artists, and novelists who enlisted their expertise to the imperial project of visualizing Japan’s expanding territories. Horino’s trip was sponsored by the Railway Bureau of the Government-General of Korea, which promptly used some of his photographs for its booklets promoting imperial tourism: Impressions of Korea / Chōsen no inshō, published in March 1938, and Recent Photographs of Korean Peninsula / Hantō no kinei, published in April 1938. The following summer, he undertook another colonial voyage through areas of China that were under Japanese control. The sponsors this time were a consortium of Japanese imperial transit authorities: Mantetsu (South Manchurian Railway Company), Central China Railways, and North China Transport.
The resulting photographs attest to multiple modes of mobility that characterized photography in the era of mass communication: the mobility of Japanese intelligentsia in the colonial spaces; the mobility of photographs that were disseminated to international news services as anonymous stock images; and the mobility of modernist photographers whose output could not be contained in traditional domains of the salons, photographic magazines, and gallery exhibitions. One of the features that defined interwar modernist photography was a non-hierarchical comparison of artistic works and anonymous “practical” photographs made for medicine, advertisement, and journalism. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the images that were disseminated anonymously as stock images of Korea also appeared in photography books published under Horino’s name [...]
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2017
Nothing is more emblematic of the increasingly transnational and decentralized conditions for fil... more Nothing is more emblematic of the increasingly transnational and decentralized conditions for filmmaking in Japan today than Yang Yong-hi’s meteoric rise from a freelance video journalist to a leading minority director in Japan. In just over seven years, Yang has collected awards in film festivals including Berlin, Sundance, and Yamagata with two documentary features and one narrative fiction that she completed with Japanese and South Korean funding. But the cosmopolitan reception of Yang’s works belies the fact that all her works to date have singularly focused on the obstinacy of the national border that has divided her family: her brothers in Pyongyang and her parents in Osaka. This study offers an analysis of Yang’s ‘Pyongyang Trilogy’ comprising Dear Pyongyang (2005), Sona, the Other Myself (2009) and Our Homeland (2012), with a particular emphasis on her creative uses of familial framing, that is to say, snapshots, home videos, and family melodrama. I examine the ways in which ‘family’ functions as a critical third space outside the national paradigm of the diaspora discourse, on the one hand, and the post-sovereign paradigm of independent cinema, on the other hand.
The late auteur Oshima Nagisa might be best remembered for his successful collaboration with Fren... more The late auteur Oshima Nagisa might be best remembered for his successful collaboration with French producers, notably for In the Realm of the Senses (1976). It was Korea, however, that he visited when overseas travel again became possible to the Japanese in 1964, an experience that continued to inform his works both on formal and thematic levels during his most prolific decade of the 1960s. Articulating the centrality of Korea in Oshima's oeuvre is important both from film historical and theoretical viewpoints. From Deep Sea Fish (screenplay, 1956) to Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968), Koreans figured not simply as characters, but as markers of the threshold of representability. This is most evident in Death by Hanging (1968), the first of the critically acclaimed ‘New Wave’ films to come out of ATG (Art Theatre Guild) and a popular reference in the political modernist discourse. That Death by Hanging was not merely about Koreans in Japan (zainichi) but an exploration of the limits of representability was observed by Stephen Heath in his seminal article ‘Narrative space’, as well as by the leading Japanese critic Yomota Inuhiko in his recent Oshima monograph. Uniting their otherwise contrasting readings is their attention to the utopian ‘other space’ that opens up in ‘impossible’ narrative space and defies the panoptic sovereign gaze. I turn to the more ambiguous spaces that are neither completely inside nor outside the sovereign gaze, but offer sites of resistance: the uncanny space haunted by the ‘presence’ of the real-life model, a Korean convict Yi Jin-u; and the theatrical space of the mock-up gallows which was incidentally built inside a disused cinema.
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Oct 6, 2014
Yoru o Kakete/Through the Night (2002) at first seems like a paradigmatic co-production if we sim... more Yoru o Kakete/Through the Night (2002) at first seems like a paradigmatic co-production if we simply acknowledge its large budget, international cast of Korean and Japanese stars and the timing of release that coincided with FIFA World Cup in 2002 co-hosted by Korea and Japan. Yet the film was a precarious venture led by a group of Zainichi Koreans (Koreans in Japan) with minimal experience in film production: the theater director Kim Sujin, the entrepreneur Kwak Choon-yang and the novelist Yang Sogil. Rather than an international consortium of corporations that carefully spreads the risk and profit, the film was backed by Kwak, a first-time film producer, and his small publishing house that specializes in photography books, children's books and publications related to Korean culture. Despite these idiosyncrasies, I argue that Through the Night should be studied within the rubric of East Asian co-production, since it offers a unique case study that critically engages with existing scholarship on transnational film production that has tended to focus on major film studios, television stations and cultural policies on national and regional levels. By exploring the rich accounts given by each of the three Zainichi Korean talents, I discuss the anxious efforts of diasporic Koreans to position themselves vis-à-vis the increasingly influential South Korean media; as consumers, objects of representation and cultural interpreters.
Book Chapters by Shota T Ogawa
Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, 2020
Perspectives on Oshima Nagisa, edited by Mark Roberts. Tokyo: University of Tokyo UTCP (2015), 2015
As an icon of Shochiku Nouvelle Vague and the cultural landscape of the ‘60s, Oshima Nagisa’s wor... more As an icon of Shochiku Nouvelle Vague and the cultural landscape of the ‘60s, Oshima Nagisa’s works have been discussed primarily in the synchronic framework; in relation to contemporaneous socio-political events. My thesis is that the concept of retrospective is as important as that of contemporaneity in understanding Oshima’s works, and conversely that Oshima provides a unique perspective onto the discourse of retrospectives. I define retrospectives historically and theoretically as a mode of revalorizing films in the humanistic framework based on the art historical notion of an artist’s corpus. Oshima was at once implicated in and critical of films’ ability to attain an “afterlife” in archives, museums, and the media contents market. Oshima resisted the abstraction of the “aura” of each film in retrospectives by vocally raising objections. His voice marked the excess corporeality of the director which clashed with the totalizing “corpus” that retrospectives generate. The same clash of the two bodies features prominently in his “compilation” documentary Daitōa Sensō (1968) which treated Nihon News footage as at once historical documents (the “corpus” of military Japan’s image archive) and relics (the excess corporeality of the past). What are the meanings of Komatsu Hōsei’s re-enacted speech of Daihōnei statements, Kishi Nobusuke’s signature on the title card, and the cross-cutting of Nihon News and US Signal Corp footage? Through a close reading of Daitōa Sensō I study the mise-en-scene of excess corporeality that is sustained through the use of voice, music, the title card, and montage.
日本語要約（拡大版）
大島渚作品の読解にはまず共時的な枠組みが必要だ。しかし共時的な考察だけでは個々の作品で展開される歴史性（通時性）への言及がされにくく、通時的な視点の欠如はとくに大島作品の鑑賞が回顧的になされるのが前提となった今日において特に問題だ。昨今内外で展開されている大島レトロスペクティブの流行を踏まえ、小論では回顧上映という現象を映画の二次的価値（映画の余生）という原点に遡って考察を試みたい。結果、大島作品と共時性との間には必ずしも絶対的なつながりはなく、大島代表作である『日本の夜と霧』や『愛のコリーダ』に関しては共時的鑑賞が困難であったり、創造社体制のピークにあたる1968年に制作公開された長編テレビドキュメンタリー『大東亜戦争』では映像継承の問題が正面から扱われていたり、大島を「同時代性作家」と規定する言説の問題とその言説が常に大島作品の集大成化（コープス化）を抑圧する中で保たれていたことが顕著化する。小論では、大島を狭義な映画監督としてではなく映像作家及び批評家として捉え、彼の作品や言説の根底にあるのは映像の身体性（集大成あるいは「コープス」という概念は作品に作家とは別の身体性「コーポリアリティ」を与える）ではないかと示唆する。
Book/Art Reviews by Shota T Ogawa
Trans-Asia Photography Review, 2020
A contribution to "Ten Years of the Trans Asia Photography Review / Notes from the Field"
REAR 44号 , 2020
『あいちトリエンナーレ2019』「Y/Our Statement〔私（たち）の声〕」 企画に寄せた短文
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2018
InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, Apr 21, 2015
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Articles by Shota T Ogawa
Do we call certain media obsolete when we wish them to be? Does the category of the obsolete help us to deal with ghosts from the past haunting the present, or the anxiety of losing faith in the linear progressive flow of history?
Does it matter whether we ask these questions “in Asia” or elsewhere?
In this short piece, I explore these loosely formulated questions with the help of a very particular set of films that I have spent an unhealthy amount of time researching in the past couple of years: amateur travelogues shot by Japanese tourists in colonial Korea and de-facto colonial Manchuria (Northeast China) using small-gauge film (gauges that are narrower than the theatrical standard of 35mm: in my case most films are in 16mm or 9.5mm).
16 mm フィルムとオープンリール、そして市民運動に支えられた自主制作・ 自主上映体制を駆使して多様に開花したドキュメンタリー映画の背後にたたず む膨大な尺数の「アウトテイク」素材群の存在が、制作者の老齢化とデジタル 時代の映像保存実践の多元化によって近年顕在化してきた。殊に、証言映画 の記念碑的作品である『ショア』(クロード・ランズマン監督、1985 年)のアウ トテイク素材 220 時間分が、米国ホロコースト記念博物館の映像アーキビスト によってクロード・ランズマン『ショア』コレクションとして整理されたこと を受け、証言映画とアーカイブの入り組んだ関係性をめぐる議論が再燃して いる。本稿は、『ショア』とアーカイブを巡る議論を一つのモデルとして参照 しつつも、東アジアのポストコロニアルな空間で周縁化された語りを 60 年に わたり記録してきた朴壽南(パク・スナム、1935-)の表現活動を取り上げる。 2019 年に始動した「日韓 100 人による歴史の証言映像」デジタルアーカイブ企 画を手がかりに、皇民化教育を受けた在日コリアン二世の作家が、脱植民地化 の文脈で作品創作だけでなくアウトテイク素材のアーカイブ化を位置づけると き、歴史史料と映画素材、アーカイヴとアーカイブ、フィルムと映像など様々 な対立概念をどのように再定義することになるか。モデル未満の不確かさを含 むケーススタディとして模索する。
The resulting photographs attest to multiple modes of mobility that characterized photography in the era of mass communication: the mobility of Japanese intelligentsia in the colonial spaces; the mobility of photographs that were disseminated to international news services as anonymous stock images; and the mobility of modernist photographers whose output could not be contained in traditional domains of the salons, photographic magazines, and gallery exhibitions. One of the features that defined interwar modernist photography was a non-hierarchical comparison of artistic works and anonymous “practical” photographs made for medicine, advertisement, and journalism. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the images that were disseminated anonymously as stock images of Korea also appeared in photography books published under Horino’s name [...]
Book Chapters by Shota T Ogawa
日本語要約（拡大版）
大島渚作品の読解にはまず共時的な枠組みが必要だ。しかし共時的な考察だけでは個々の作品で展開される歴史性（通時性）への言及がされにくく、通時的な視点の欠如はとくに大島作品の鑑賞が回顧的になされるのが前提となった今日において特に問題だ。昨今内外で展開されている大島レトロスペクティブの流行を踏まえ、小論では回顧上映という現象を映画の二次的価値（映画の余生）という原点に遡って考察を試みたい。結果、大島作品と共時性との間には必ずしも絶対的なつながりはなく、大島代表作である『日本の夜と霧』や『愛のコリーダ』に関しては共時的鑑賞が困難であったり、創造社体制のピークにあたる1968年に制作公開された長編テレビドキュメンタリー『大東亜戦争』では映像継承の問題が正面から扱われていたり、大島を「同時代性作家」と規定する言説の問題とその言説が常に大島作品の集大成化（コープス化）を抑圧する中で保たれていたことが顕著化する。小論では、大島を狭義な映画監督としてではなく映像作家及び批評家として捉え、彼の作品や言説の根底にあるのは映像の身体性（集大成あるいは「コープス」という概念は作品に作家とは別の身体性「コーポリアリティ」を与える）ではないかと示唆する。
Book/Art Reviews by Shota T Ogawa
Do we call certain media obsolete when we wish them to be? Does the category of the obsolete help us to deal with ghosts from the past haunting the present, or the anxiety of losing faith in the linear progressive flow of history?
Does it matter whether we ask these questions “in Asia” or elsewhere?
In this short piece, I explore these loosely formulated questions with the help of a very particular set of films that I have spent an unhealthy amount of time researching in the past couple of years: amateur travelogues shot by Japanese tourists in colonial Korea and de-facto colonial Manchuria (Northeast China) using small-gauge film (gauges that are narrower than the theatrical standard of 35mm: in my case most films are in 16mm or 9.5mm).
16 mm フィルムとオープンリール、そして市民運動に支えられた自主制作・ 自主上映体制を駆使して多様に開花したドキュメンタリー映画の背後にたたず む膨大な尺数の「アウトテイク」素材群の存在が、制作者の老齢化とデジタル 時代の映像保存実践の多元化によって近年顕在化してきた。殊に、証言映画 の記念碑的作品である『ショア』(クロード・ランズマン監督、1985 年)のアウ トテイク素材 220 時間分が、米国ホロコースト記念博物館の映像アーキビスト によってクロード・ランズマン『ショア』コレクションとして整理されたこと を受け、証言映画とアーカイブの入り組んだ関係性をめぐる議論が再燃して いる。本稿は、『ショア』とアーカイブを巡る議論を一つのモデルとして参照 しつつも、東アジアのポストコロニアルな空間で周縁化された語りを 60 年に わたり記録してきた朴壽南(パク・スナム、1935-)の表現活動を取り上げる。 2019 年に始動した「日韓 100 人による歴史の証言映像」デジタルアーカイブ企 画を手がかりに、皇民化教育を受けた在日コリアン二世の作家が、脱植民地化 の文脈で作品創作だけでなくアウトテイク素材のアーカイブ化を位置づけると き、歴史史料と映画素材、アーカイヴとアーカイブ、フィルムと映像など様々 な対立概念をどのように再定義することになるか。モデル未満の不確かさを含 むケーススタディとして模索する。
The resulting photographs attest to multiple modes of mobility that characterized photography in the era of mass communication: the mobility of Japanese intelligentsia in the colonial spaces; the mobility of photographs that were disseminated to international news services as anonymous stock images; and the mobility of modernist photographers whose output could not be contained in traditional domains of the salons, photographic magazines, and gallery exhibitions. One of the features that defined interwar modernist photography was a non-hierarchical comparison of artistic works and anonymous “practical” photographs made for medicine, advertisement, and journalism. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the images that were disseminated anonymously as stock images of Korea also appeared in photography books published under Horino’s name [...]
日本語要約（拡大版）
大島渚作品の読解にはまず共時的な枠組みが必要だ。しかし共時的な考察だけでは個々の作品で展開される歴史性（通時性）への言及がされにくく、通時的な視点の欠如はとくに大島作品の鑑賞が回顧的になされるのが前提となった今日において特に問題だ。昨今内外で展開されている大島レトロスペクティブの流行を踏まえ、小論では回顧上映という現象を映画の二次的価値（映画の余生）という原点に遡って考察を試みたい。結果、大島作品と共時性との間には必ずしも絶対的なつながりはなく、大島代表作である『日本の夜と霧』や『愛のコリーダ』に関しては共時的鑑賞が困難であったり、創造社体制のピークにあたる1968年に制作公開された長編テレビドキュメンタリー『大東亜戦争』では映像継承の問題が正面から扱われていたり、大島を「同時代性作家」と規定する言説の問題とその言説が常に大島作品の集大成化（コープス化）を抑圧する中で保たれていたことが顕著化する。小論では、大島を狭義な映画監督としてではなく映像作家及び批評家として捉え、彼の作品や言説の根底にあるのは映像の身体性（集大成あるいは「コープス」という概念は作品に作家とは別の身体性「コーポリアリティ」を与える）ではないかと示唆する。
The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four parts, each representing an emergent area of inquiry:
"Decentring Classical Cinema"
"Questions of Industry"
"Intermedia as an Approach"
"The Object Life of Film"
This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of 200 years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty-first century.
This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies, and cultural studies more broadly.