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Nippon‘s nostalgic national narrative: ÉIshihara Shintarˉ‘s kamikaze film Ore

Nippon‘s nostalgic national narrative: ÉIshihara Shintarˉ‘s kamikaze film Ore AbstractThis paper explores the context and features of the national narrative aspresented in Ishihara Shintarˉ’s 2007 film Ore wa, kimi no tame ni kososhini ni iku (‘I go to die for you’) about kamikaze pilots in World War II.Paul Virilio has argued that all battlefields are film sets. Most Americanwar films, whether they take place in the Pacific, Normandy, Vietnam,or Iraq, bear out this statement. Clint Eastwood’s 2006 films Flags ofOur Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima follow the same pattern. Ishihara’sOre, in contrast, comprises a set of stories intertwined around awoman, Torihama Tome, a mother figure for four young kamikaze pilots,and it takes place mainly in the private family space of her parlor.Ore replaces a masculine narrative of war, one that relies on writtenreports, with a feminine, oral history, one that hinges on relations to amaternal figure. In terms of genre, the film is a foundling: designed byIshihara as a response to Eastwood’s films, Ore is in fact a televisionfilm, emulating numerous 1960s television serials on memories of wartargeted at housewives. Using Yoshimi Shunya’s idea of television consumptionto a “national timetable” in postwar Japan, this paper arguesthat rather than being purely nationalistic, Ore is largely autobiographicaland nostalgic, and it feminizes the viewer. Ironically, this may alsoexplain its surrender to Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima at the Japanesebox offices. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Japan de Gruyter

Nippon‘s nostalgic national narrative: ÉIshihara Shintarˉ‘s kamikaze film Ore

Heinze, Ulrich
Contemporary Japan , Volume 24 (1): 24 – Mar 1, 2012
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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
« 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin Boston
ISSN
1869-2737
eISSN
1869-2737
DOI
10.1515/cj-2012-0004
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores the context and features of the national narrative aspresented in Ishihara Shintarˉ’s 2007 film Ore wa, kimi no tame ni kososhini ni iku (‘I go to die for you’) about kamikaze pilots in World War II.Paul Virilio has argued that all battlefields are film sets. Most Americanwar films, whether they take place in the Pacific, Normandy, Vietnam,or Iraq, bear out this statement. Clint Eastwood’s 2006 films Flags ofOur Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima follow the same pattern. Ishihara’sOre, in contrast, comprises a set of stories intertwined around awoman, Torihama Tome, a mother figure for four young kamikaze pilots,and it takes place mainly in the private family space of her parlor.Ore replaces a masculine narrative of war, one that relies on writtenreports, with a feminine, oral history, one that hinges on relations to amaternal figure. In terms of genre, the film is a foundling: designed byIshihara as a response to Eastwood’s films, Ore is in fact a televisionfilm, emulating numerous 1960s television serials on memories of wartargeted at housewives. Using Yoshimi Shunya’s idea of television consumptionto a “national timetable” in postwar Japan, this paper arguesthat rather than being purely nationalistic, Ore is largely autobiographicaland nostalgic, and it feminizes the viewer. Ironically, this may alsoexplain its surrender to Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima at the Japanesebox offices.

Journal

Contemporary Japan – de Gruyter

Published: Mar 1, 2012

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