Ebook: Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: An Ethnographic Study

Offers the first ethno-historical study of cinema-going and film viewership in Japan

• Introduces an ethno-historical approach to Japanese Film Studies for the first time, in order to bring the rarely-heard voices of everyday viewers into scholarly discourse
• Blends ethnographic and film studies approaches to create a new methodology for visually analysing interview material
• Contributes scholarship on cinema in the Kansai region and neighbouring areas of Western Japan to extant Tokyo-based and national-level scholarship
• Gives an account of regional difference in cinema-going and film-viewing in Japan

Combining film studies and ethnographic research methods within a memory studies framework, Coates examines the impact of cinema cultures on the everyday lives of viewers.

Film Viewing in Postwar Japan draws from four years of interviews, participant observation, questionnaire surveys, and written communications with over 100 study participants in the Kansai region of Western Japan. This is an in-depth study of memories of cinema-going among the generations who regularly attended film theatres between 1945-1968, the peak period of production and cinema attendance in Japan.

Through investigating the role of film viewership, broadly conceived, in the formation of a postwar sense of self, the reader will benefit from rare access to the voices of grass-roots viewers, who often tell a different version of cinema history and its effects than that available in extant scholarship.