The Transforming Mediascape in Postwar Japan: A Media History of Oshima Nagisa

Abstract

This dissertation traces a history of the transforming mediascape in postwar Japan by focusing on the trajectory of Oshima Nagisa’s multimedia collaboration. The project has two discrete but intertwined objectives. One is to detail the historical conditions of the transforming mediascape from the late 1950s by changing the way to historicize Japanese cinema and media industries from a cinema-centered history to a history of hybrid media relationships. The other is to portray Oshima not only as a film director who made a number of provocative and political works but also as a multimedia collaborator who engaged with progressive individuals and diverse media in searching for novel production systems, new audiences, and innovative ideas. Each chapter covers the emerging moment of new mediascape in roughly chronological order, from a subgenre created by journalistic media and a film studio in a time of crisis, to early TV documentary series and the debate about the political possibility of TV, to independent productions in the art theater movement, to international co-productions with emphasis on female reception, to midnight TV as a new platform for media intellectuals. Describing the above moments of transformation in tension with the existent industrial structures and the ways multimedia collaborations provided Oshima with new frontiers, this dissertation argues that the struggles to shape an alternative system in the capitalist mediascape were political practice in the media history of postwar Japan. For Oshima who started his career as a film director at the beginning of the decline of the studio system, it was an urgent task to form and develop new production systems through traversing multiple media industries. Reframing the history of the postwar Japanese mediascape through Oshima’s multimedia collaboration demonstrates that artistic creation and its political significance must be understood through not only completed works but also through the collaborative process between individuals, artworks, and media industries in the search for new communication.