Speaker:
Tomoyuki Sasaki, Professor of Japanese Studies, College of William & Mary
Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, February 26, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm/Feb 25, Virginia/U.S.A.)
Venue: On Zoom
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Japan experienced an unprecedented level of economic growth, transforming itself from a war-devastated country to a global economic power. Our image of postwar Japan has been shaped by this event, and we tend to see its history as a story of great national success. In his newly released book Cinema of Discontent: Representations of Japan’s High-Speed Growth, Dr. Sasaki challenges this view and details the tensions generated by massive and intense capitalist development through analyses of popular cinema produced during the era of high-speed growth. In this talk, he focuses on industrial spy films made by Daiei during the 1960s, examining how the films of this genre in general, and Black Weapon (Kuro no kyōki) specifically, represented popular anxiety about mushrooming corporate society and its increasing control over working people’s everyday lives.
Tomoyuki Sasaki is a Professor of Japanese studies at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. He earned his PhD in history from the University of California, San Diego. He has held his current position since 2016. He specializes in history, cultural studies, and film studies. He is especially interested in the issues of high-speed economic growth, inequality, uneven development, democracy, military bases, and their representations in popular culture. He is the author of Cinema of Discontent: Representations of Japan’s High-Speed Growth (SUNY Press, 2022) and Japan’s Postwar Military and Civil Society: Contesting a Better Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). His articles include “Shimizu Elegy: Capital, Patriarchy, and Desire for Freedom in Naruse Mikio’s Yearning (1964)” in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema (2023).
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