![]() ![]() Drawing on Hoeckner’s insights into film music and memory and Herzog’s notion of the musical moment, this chapter analyses musical moments in Passion without End and Fragrance of the Night in order to interrogate the historicity of early post-war Japan that the symptomatic reading of the same films forecloses. Rather than masking the musical cinema’s penchant for structural and cultural repetitions, and hence its conservative tendency, the musical moment, Herzog contends, thrives on its capacity to ‘make palpable’ the tension between a ‘tendency to reproduce, standardize, and codify certain cultural fictions’ and ‘a transformative drive toward the not-yet-imagined’ ( 2009: 8, 14). In her seminal monograph Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film, Amy Herzog writes that ‘the musical moment’ in the cinema presents ‘configurations of time and space completely unlike those found in other filmic works’ ( 2009: 2). 4 Ichikawa nonetheless skilfully incorporates these songs into the films’ narratives about the fate of wartime romance, replaying them to trigger the affective past in the characters’ post-war present. Affective commodities par excellence, the popularity of these melodies was something that a newly established Shin Toho Studio (1947–1961) could capitalise on. ![]() Passion without End’s and Fragrance of the Night’s intertextual relationship to continental films and their replay of continental melodies are further complicated by these melodies’ narrative function. But does the repetition of the embodied practices of watching and singing necessarily produce nostalgia? How did early post-war Japanese cinema engage audiences in the drastically transformed socio-political environment by replaying wartime cinema’s erotic fantasy? Drawing on familiar tropes and motifs of wartime cinema, argues Baskett, Japanese cinema of the early 1950s ‘helped revive nostalgia for the Japanese empire by taking audiences back to the pre-war era, not to commiserate or atone, but rather to watch and sing’ (137). ‘he trope of miscegenetic melodrama’, for instance, continued to be deployed to eroticise and fantasise the empire on the post-war screen, obscuring the brutal realities of Japan’s imperial rule in Asia. Moreover, wartime imperial audiovisual culture began to fill the post-war screen in place of the lost empire. 3 With no responsibility to engage post-liberated Asian audiences, Japanese filmmakers portrayed Japan’s empire as a mere background against which ‘a new Japanese history of the war’ can be projected (ibid). ![]() By 1950, the Japanese empire returned onscreen with ‘a post-defeat spin’ (Baskett 2008: 137). shifted its strategic policy towards Japan (known as reverse course policy), moving priority away from the democratisation of the country towards turning it into a critical logistical base for the U.S. As the Cold War and the nuclear arms race intensified, the U.S. occupation (1945–1952) was not accompanied by a critical engagement with the country’s imperial ventures in Asia. Baskett argues that Japanese filmmakers’ denouncement of the war during the U.S. Film scholar Michael Baskett writes that ‘the continuity in representations of Japan’s empire in Asia did not end with what Japan scholars have termed the “collapse of empire”’ (Baskett 2008: 144). Understandably, the afterlife of ‘continental films’ in early post-war Japan has been the subject of critical suspicion. The two films are noteworthy for their intertextual relationship to the so-called continental films ( tairiku eiga), a popular film genre during the Pacific War that featured ‘the romantic adventures of Japanese people in China’ (Raine 2018: 165), particularly in their use of popular songs known as ‘continental melodies’ ( tairiku merodei) composed by Hattori Ryōichi. While his lesser-known, lower-budget films from a slightly earlier period, Hateshinaki jōnetsu ( Passion without End, 1949) and Ieraishan ( Fragrance of the Night, 1951), do not engage the war directly, they offer fresh insights into the ways in which popular cinema in early post-war Japan addressed the physical, psychological, and social wounds of the war that were still fresh in audiences’ minds. 1 The former was voted the fifth best film of the year by the major film magazine Kinema Junpō and won the San Giorgio Prize at the 1956 Venice Film Festival, and the latter was voted second best film of the year in Kinema Junpō’s 1959 annual poll and won the Golden Sail at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1961. In the 1950s, Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008) directed a few critically acclaimed war films, among which are film adaptations of Takeyama Michio’s children’s novel The Burmese Harp (1956) and of Ōoka Shōhei’s semi-autobiographical novel Fires on the Plain (1959). ![]()
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