Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During and After the Cold War

Description

Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan examines how the performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped and been shaped by the political and historical conditions experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry, probes the interrelationship that exists between the body and the nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan over a duration of dramatic change. Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan explores issues of discrimination, marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict.

Adam Broinowski is Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.

Ambitious in scope ... Throughout the book, Broinowski draws on an encyclopaedic knowledge of films, books and performance pieces, interpreting them ... with rich references to historical context. * Journal of Contemporary Asia * Each individual aspect of this book is solid and persuasive, but taken as a whole, the project holds true importance ... The work is valuable to a wide audience, as well, speaking as it does to issues of history, geopolitics, exploitation, theatre, cinema, occupation, and resistance. * Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies * Introducing discourses of colonization and semi-colonialization to his interpretation, Adam Broinowski provides a way to understand Ankoku Butoh as a reaction to the condition of occupation, conceived broadly as a condition suffered by those who are the targets of concerted state violence, spanning from concentration camps, civilian bombing, and the atomic bombs, to the war on terror, and mass surveillance of the contemporary moment. Himself a performer, Broinowski's interpretive paradigms are especially valuable not only in suggesting sources of Butoh's global relevance but also in attending convincingly to the specificities of performative experience and their significance. It is one of the few historical treatments which appears adequate to the profundity and idiosyncrasy of Butoh performance itself. * Justin Jesty, University of Washington, USA * Adam Broinowski's insightful book examines the evolution of the performing body in Japan's nontraditional performing arts ... Broinowski's knowledge of Japanese cinema is also impressive and this book could serve as a thoroughly researched resource for the study of Japanese films of the early Cold War. The author reveals a deep understanding of butoh's evolution from the nearly "dadaesque" experiments of its origins to the strictly choreographed, though still emotionally raw, works of Gekidan Kaitaisha and beyond. * TDR: The Drama Review *