Definición de conceptos operacionales

While the content of Night and Fog in Japan is political and aesthetically subversive, it is somewhat bizarre that a film that focused more on the sectarian conflicts within the student movement itself, and not political oppression by the state, would have been deemed worthy of censorship at all. On the other hand, the portrayal of marriage, however allegorical, came at a time when the institution of marriage itself was being questioned as an instrument of patriarchal oppression¹⁶⁵ and when the imperial family enjoyed reinvigorated interest thanks to a shift to the

165 Such questioning of marriage has a long history in Japan, for example, Miyamoto Yukiko’s Nobuko, written in 1925. In the postwar, there was gaining consciousness that marriage could serve as an oppressive tool to relegate women to the home.

During the 1950s, a coalition of labor and women’s rights during the 1950s, demanded of unionization and the right to work after marriage. Workers from the mi Silk Reeling Company as well as nurses and hospital workers in Tokyo, had notable success, with rights granted in 1959 and 1960. Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan From Tokugawa Times to the Present. New York: Oxford Universtiy Press, 2003, pg. 275.

next generation: the Crown Prince, the young Akihito, needed a bride. For years, the Imperial Household Agency had been on a hunt to find a match suitable for Akihito, although perhaps the standard of “suitability” was conceived in relation more to the imperial household than the young prince. His engagement in 1958 to Shoda

Michiko, the daughter of an executive of Nisshin Flour Company with a Catholic school education, was widely popular because it was perceived as a “love match”

between Akihito and a commoner (however elite her background), a veritable modernization of the values of the imperial family.

The “Mitchii boom” in the media, which obsessed over every detail of the match—from discussions of “modern love” to the implications of someone from outside the court performing the intricate duties of (wifely) palace rituals—

culminated with the royal wedding on April 10, 1959, broadcast to the nation on live television. The broadcast was unprecedented, reaching a viewership of fifteen million, which put the imperial family at the center of a shared experience that produced the ability to imagine oneself as belonging to the nation.¹⁶⁶ It marked not

166 NHK confirms this production of nationality while documenting the statistics of the Royal Wedding coverage on their website in a section subtitled, “Sharing the experience”: “In 1959, the betrothal of the Crown Prince to Shoda Michiko, a commoner, sparked the so-called "Michi boom," and generated an eagerness to watch the royal wedding that significantly accelerated the spread of TV in Japan.

Coverage on the wedding day was Japan's largest-ever live relay, mobilizing a total of 100 cameras and 1,000 personnel from both NHK and commercial broadcasting companies. Around 15 million Japanese are said to have watched the royal wedding, making this the first occasion on which the entire nation was able to share an

experience through television.”(my italics). NHK, “Discovering TV’s Potential: 50s.” 50

only changing perceptions of the imperial family, but the role of new media in the dissemination of information.¹⁶⁷ As Aaron Gerow notes, the event bolstered

ownership of televisions and provided an opportunity to improve perception of the medium “by wedding itself to the nation.”¹⁶⁸ This representation of the imperial family, perhaps a welcome diversion for the Imperial House Agency from the politically fraught figure of Hirohito, was contemporaneous with growth of the protest movement over Ampo; new modes of understanding were inseparable from new modes of representation. Television was as important for disseminating the apolitical representation of the imperial family as it was for debating Japan’s rapid remilitarization, and allowing the nation to witness the violence of, for example, Asamuna’s assassination, before its eyes in live time. Meanwhile, shima Nagima, Years of NHK Television. Published April, 2003. Accessed May 20, 2013.

[http://www.nhk.or.jp/digitalmuseum/nhk50years_en/history/p07/]

167 For Matsushita Keiichi, the “love match” of Akihito to a “commoner” transformed the image of the emperor system away from that of political authority—something to be feared—to something domestic and accessible, to be “loved” (keiai sareru,

akogare). Just as Sakaguchi had compared the emperor to celebrity, Matsushita saw the imperial family becoming “stars” (sutaa-ka sareta kōshitsu). His famous essay,

“Taish tennōsei-ron” [Emperor System of the Masses] was published in 1959, but given that this transformation in the perception of the emperor system was clearly already recognized in the late 1940s by Nakano and Sakaguchi, as I have discussed, he was not the first to have this thought. Moreover, although Matsushita’s intent was to critique the emperor system, his analysis also confirms and reproduces a central tenet of the postwar narrative, promoted by Kanamori especially, that the emperor was in fact the center of affection for the Japanese people (kokumin no akogare no chūshin). I find it more productive to demonstrate the very divisiveness created by the emperor system in postwar discourse. See, Matsushita Keiichi, “Taish tennōsei-ron” [Emperor System of the Masses]. ennōsei Ronshū. ed. Kamishima Jiro and Kuno Osamu. Tokyo: Sanichi shobō, 1974, pg. 8 -290

168 Gerow, Aaron. “Japanese Film and Television.” Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society. Theodore Bestor, ed. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011, pg. 222.

who was turning film into a radical and revolutionary mode of political expression, protested the censorship of Night and Fog in Japan not merely for its suppression of political content, but for the active “massacre” of the medium itself.

This complex web of events and their representations in 1959 and 1960—

protests, revolution, remilitarization, assassinations, weddings, censorship, new media—created a discursive space in desperate need of critical reflection and

theorization, or at least, problematization. In taking these very elements, juxtaposing and inverting them, I believe that Fukazawa Shichirō’s work, Fūryū Mutan, forces a reconsideration of both temporality and the symbolic nature of the postwar emperor system. In doing so, he transgressed the most potent of taboos: representation of the present emperor system and imperial family. He offended and delighted readers, often both at the same time, and produced his own violence of representation by depicting the very objects (and symbols) that were supposed to be off limits.