Divine Work, Japanese Colonial Cinema and its Legacy

Kate Taylor-Jones is Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at The University of Sheffield, UK. She has published on topics including colonial Japanese and Korean cinema, cinema and landscape in East Asia, and domestic violence and the sex trade. She is author of Rising Sun, Divided Land: Japanese and South Korean Filmmakers (2013); and editor-in-chief of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. She is co-editor with Fiona Handyside of International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (2015).

Concise, lucid, and deeply researched, Divine Work shows the historical roots of contemporary contours of globalization in East Asia. Kate Taylor-Jones makes a qualitative leap by working from the transnational perspective of the empire rather than a Japanese national one. Her prodigious excavations in far-flung and not always easily accessed archives produce a true revelation for her readers – we see Japanese colonial cinema in a whole new way. Investigating how colonized and colonizer worked together in complex relationships under conditions of subjugation and exploitation, she looks at films made by Koreans, Chinese and other subjects and citizens to show how they imagined gender, modernity, landscapes and more. The second half the book demonstrates that this repudiated project has contemporary legacies, ranging from Pan-Asian cinematic projects to the contentions over the Nanjing Massacre.

• Introduction Part One: Colonial Cinema and the Imperial MachineChapter One Constructing the Cinematic Japanese Empire: Taiwan and KoreaChapter Two Nation’s in Harmony: Imperial cinema Chapter Three Landscape and the space of the colonial moment Chapter Four Army Recruitment Films Chapter Five Imperial Women Part Two: Contemporary Manifestations and the Legacy of EmpireIntroduction to Part TwoChapter Six Legacy of Empire Chapter Seven Japan Remembers, Japan Forgets Chapter Eight Remembering Nanjing Chapter Nine Transnational Legacy and ConclusionBibliographyFilmography