Yuta Kaminishi is an assistant professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. His work appears in Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and Screen Bodies. Dr Jeff Kyong-McClain is the director of the Habib Institute for Asian Studies and an associate professor of history at the University of Idaho. He is co-editor of From Missionary Education to Confucius Institutes: Historical Reflections on Sino-American Cultural Exchange (2023) and Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization (2022).

This book contextualizes films from East Asia within a regional, national, and especially planetary context. The chapters shed light on environmental issues that pertain to regions and nation-states in East Asia and issues that extend to the broader scale of the planet in our time, or the “Anthropocene.” This book project felicitously includes a broad range of films that have been little discussed in English, bringing awareness in global film studies to the range of ecopolitical issues within East Asian cinema.

• AcknowledgementsNotes on the ContributorsList of FiguresIntroduction Yuta Kaminishi and Jeff Kyong-McClainPart I Representing Disaster1. The Ecocinematics of Asian Nuclear Disaster: Visualizing Fukushima in the Netflix Series The DaysRachel DiNitto2. The Politics of the Eco-apocalyptic Redirection: East Asian Cinema and Its Representation of Environmental CatastropheAlex Taek-Gwang Lee3. Ecology and Disaster: Korean Society at the End of the World as We Know ItSung-Ae LeePart II Landscape and Energy4. Energy Justice in the Reform Era: On Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Portrayal of Coal MinersXingming Wang5. The Ruins of Diasporic Memories: Remembering Iriomote Coal Mine in Green JailYuta Kaminishi6. Connected through Vulnerability: Chai Jing’s Under the DomeDonghui He7. Cognitive Ambience and the Tourist Gaze: Visual Perception in When Ruoma Was SeventeenXinmin LiuPart III Alternative Sci-fi Imagination8. Embracing a Hybridity of Chinese Sci-fi: On Journey to the West (2021) and its Ecological ImplicationsShuwen Yang9. Falling, Wasting and Commoning: The Afterlives of Space Debris in UFO in Her EyesRui Xie10. Thoughts in the Aughts (Zeronendai), Anime, and EcocinemaAi-Ting ChungEpilogueErin JamesReferencesIndex