The Living Sea: Okinawa, 1958 and the postwar media Dispositif

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on Hani Susumu's The Living Sea (1958), a short film that depicts the story of a group of Okinawan boys who win a study trip to Tokyo as a prize. While the educational short is charged with an expansionist perspective that supposedly reinforces a hegemonic mainland imaginary of post-occupation Japan, the film rather points toward the heterogeneous topography of Okinawa and the process of its mediation. The essay examines The Living Sea from the perspectives of a genealogy of the so-called audio-visual education movement in Japan, the film's techno-infrastructural intersections with an emerging colour broadcasting system, and the development of postwar aquariums. This study also draws upon Hani's deep involvement with the so-called ‘montage debate’ in the late 1950s in an attempt to highlight the importance of film form and its political implications, in particular a set of distinctive representational syntaxes and shot compositions. The purpose of this essay is less about exploring problematic representations of Okinawa per se but rather about identifying the shifting positions of Okinawa and the geopolitical functioning of power by analysing the way in which cinema serves as a historically-marked media environment for the viewer's socio-technical life.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational film
• useful cinema
• Okinawa
• Hani Susumu
• postwar Japan
• documentary

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Ma Ran, Kosuke Fujiki, and an anonymous reader for their supports, suggestions, and comments at the various phases of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The organization first started as Zen Nihon Katsuei (motion picture) Kyōiku Kenkyūkai and was renamed as Zen Nihon Eiga (film) Kyōiku Kenkyūkai in 1933. Please see Inada 1962, 156. The majority of historical accounts refer to the organization as Zen Nihon Eiga (film) Kyōiku Kenkyūkai without distinguishing the difference. The Association still exists as Japan Audio-Visual Education Association (Nihon Shichōkaku Kyōiku Kyōkai).

2 These entries were authored or compiled often in response to or in conjunction with the Research Conference for the Thirtieth Anniversary of Visual Education (Shikaku kyōiku 30-shūnen kinen kenkyū taikai), which was organized by Japan Film Education Association, the postwar re-establishment of the National Film Education Research Association.

3 Hani's early documentaries known as the ‘classroom trilogy’ – Children in the Classroom (Kyōshitsu no kodomotachi, 1954), Children Who Draw (E o kaku kodomotachi,1955), and Twin in the Class (Sōseiji gakkyū, 1956) – were, for instance, all theatrically released by Nikkatsu.

4 I am grateful for the reviewer's crucial reference to the possibility of USCAR's involvement with the film.

5 My argument here is strongly influenced by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky's studies. Please see Skvirsky 2020.

6 Pratt's use of the term ‘contact’ also derives from its use in linguistics, which enables her to study improvisational and interactive dimensions of such contacts and to inquire about the formation of ‘pidgins,’ or common languages spontaneously developed to communicate among speakers of different languages. Please see Pratt 1992, 1–37.

7 The series of essays, with the first one published in the no.9 issue of Cinema 57 (Shinema 57) in 1958 (publication month is not indicated), was titled ‘Toward the Establishment of New Montage.’ [Atarashii montāju no kakuritsu o mezashite].

8 For a succinct yet excellent reference to Aikawa's analysis of Yamanaka Sadao's films, please see Kinoshita 2011.

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Takuya Tsunoda

Takuya Tsunoda is an assistant professor of Japanese cinema and media in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His primary research centers on the interplay between institutions and media, technologies and socio-cultural practices, various modes of reflexivity, science and material culture, and representation and knowledge formations. He is currently working on a book that examines the history of audio-visual education and its relation to the new cinemas of the 1960s in Japan.