Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen: A History, 1989-2005

About the Author Christopher Gerteis is an historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, UK and The University of Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who during the 1950s militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles. His second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (forthcoming), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who engaged in political violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'. Dr Gerteis is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012) and is Founding Series Editor of the Bloomsbury series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary. He also served as Chief Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Japan Forum from 2014 through 2019. Product Description Japan and China look back on a history of friendship as well as friction, particularly in recent decades. As the People's Republic of China's economy began to grow in the 1990s, so did its political weight within Asia and its economical relevance for Japan. Covering the years from 1989 to 2005, this book looks at Sino-Japanese relations through film and television drama in the crucial time of China's ascent to an economic superpower in opposition to Japan's own ailing economy. It provides an overview of how Japan views China through its visual media, offers explanations as to how oppositions between the two countries came to exist, and how and why certain myths about China have been conveyed.Griseldis Kirsch argues that the influence of visual media within society cannot be underestimated, nor should their value be lessened by them being perceived as part of 'popular culture'. Drawing on examples from a crucial 16 years in the history of post-war Japan and China, she explores to what extent these media were influenced by the political discourse of their time. In doing so, she adds another layer to the on-going debate on Sino-Japanese relations, bringing together disciplines such as media studies, history and area studies and thus filling a gap in existing research. Review “This is a long-awaited book that comprehensively examines Japan's media representation of China. Griseldis Kirsch superbly elucidates the continuity and change of historically constituted Japan's ambivalent desire for China through the analysis of TV and film representation in the post-cold-war context of China's rising economic power. It offers us a precious historical account of the current predicament of Japan's relationship with China.” ―Koichi Iwabuchi, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Director of Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Australia“With clarity and erudition, Griseldis Kirsch provides us with a close reading of Japanese film and television productions since the late 1980s as they refer to Asia, and China in particular. Outlining surprising historical continuities in the entangled and fraught ways that characterise modern Japan's relation to and imagination of Asia, Kirsch gives a fascinating account and a deep theoretical reading of the grand narrative that seems to underlie small and big screen productions: What evolves is an ever shape-shifting but tenaciously persistent nihonjinron. A must read for anyone interested not only in media, film and television studies in Japan but in the wider question of cultural and political relations in the changing economic landscape of East Asian nations.” ―Andrea Germer, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, Japan Book Description A history of contemporary Sino-Japa