New Faculty Publication
Professor Tomoyuki Sasaki recently published his book Cinema of Discontent: Representations of Japan’s High-Speed Growth. This book looks at films made during Japan’s period of High Economic Growth (kōdo keizai seichōki), discussing genres such as industrial spy films that depict the ruthless competition of corporate culture or that era, using said films to analyze the growing influence (and intensity) of this style of work culture and management society in Japan during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
Professor Sasaki argues that these films express another, less commonly acknowledged dimension to the popular image of Japan’s economic ascendance during the postwar decades, particularly in how they reveal a growing economic inequality in Japan even as a new type of middle class and expectation of material abundance was taking root in the popular consciousness. Many of these films (including those from Daiei studio’s “Black Series,” made between 1962 and 1964) used satirical and suspenseful depictions of corporate work culture, offering narratives centered around plots of corporate subterfuge and negative advertising campaigns to portray an intense, competitive world of capitalist growth that demanded more and more from its work force.
A historian by training, Professor Sasaki also contextualizes these films within wider currents of Japan’s radical transformation during this period, such as how economic and social precarity grew within the shadow of the familiar narrative of growth and thriving business, as well as how Japan was transforming into a more managed type of social configuration, with corporate life, political bureaucracy, and the looming Cold War project of militarization shaping the lives of ordinary people in unexpected ways that they increasingly had little control over.
Cinema of Discontent is available from State University of New York Press as part of their “Horizons of Cinema” series.
