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Co-producing the Asia Pacific: travels in technology, space, time and gender

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Co-producing the Asia Pacific: travels in technology, space, time and gender

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CO-PRODUCING THE ASIA PACIFIC:
TRAVELS IN TECHNOLOGY, SPACE, TIME AND GENDER

by

Stephanie DeBoer

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES, SCHOOL OF CINEMA-TELEVISION)

August 2007

Copyright 2007 Stephanie DeBoer
ii
Acknowledgements

A PhD dissertation is never finished without substantial emotional,
financial and scholarly support. I have been blessed with all three. This
project has followed me through significant personal, disciplinary, cultural
and geographic journeys. I remain immensely grateful to the number of
people and institutions who have been so generous with their support
and companionship through it all.
Foremost thanks go to my dissertation committee – Professors
David James, Tara McPherson, Priya Jaikumar and Akira Lippit. My
committee has consisted of not only an inspiring set of scholars, but also a
group of people one genuinely enjoys being around. In particular, I
appreciate David James’ support of me throughout my tenure at USC –
his steady and unfailing belief in me, as well has his willingness to “go
with me” as I figured out my path. Tara McPherson’s energetic
engagement with not only an inspiring range of academic pursuits, but
also the business of collegiality is amazing. Priya Jaikumar’s sharp
intellect and graceful way of going about life continues to serve as a
model for me. I also appreciate Akira Lippit’s wholehearted advice
embrace of my academic pursuits, even as he came to USC late in the
later stages of my project. My entry into and departure from Critical
Studies at USC was also influenced by Professors Lynn Spigel and Anne
Friedberg, respectively. While at USC, I received a USC Fletcher-Jones
iii
Fellowship, as well as an Annenberg Communication Pathway
Dissertation Writing Fellowship – my thanks to Critical Studies for
nominating me for both. I also received a Digital Dissertation Doctoral
Fellowship, under the support of USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy.
Working on this digital project while at the same time writing the
chapters contained in this dissertation, while challenging, has helped me
to see new possibilities for my scholarship. I am indebted to the IML in
other ways, as well. In particular, to Holly Willis and Anne Balsamo for
their allowing me a flexible schedule, so that I could write in the mornings
while acting as a program assistant for the USC Multimedia in the Core
program.
Research for this dissertation was supported by a Fulbright-Hays
Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Fellowship, which allowed me to conduct
research in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan libraries and archives. In
particular, I am indebted to the (since renamed) Institute of Socio-
Information and Communication Studies at Tokyo University. Not only
did it prove an amazing location for research, Professor Yoshimi Shunya’s
graduate seminar was basis for insight and growth. While in Tokyo,
Professor Iwabuchi Koichi’s seminars were inspiring, as were talks given
at the Modern Japanese History Workshop at Waseda University. Many
thanks to my fellow participants for their collegiality and insight – an
early version of chapter three benefited greatly from their comments. I
also remain forever grateful to the Cultural Studies Department (and the
iv
Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme, which
supported my stay) at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Professor
Meaghan Morris was particularly inspiring with her energy and intellect,
as well as her generosity with time. Not only an engaging scholar, she is
also a person of great warmth, who knows the importance of sociality to
the academic profession. I benefited from the hospitality of the
department as a whole, as well. In this regard, a special thanks to Siu
Ling Li, Markus Reisenleitner, Lisa Leung and Kimburley Choi. The Hong
Kong Film Archive was also generous with their time and support. My
thanks to Mary Wong for introducing me to the brilliant staff there.
Ramona Curry also put me in contact with staff at the Taiwan Film
Archive. Without the materials I located in these two archives, I could not
have completed much of this dissertation. Fellow Fulbrighters Amy Lee,
Nicole Hess and Gina Marchetti were also brilliant, and my thanks to
Chiachi Wu for a wonderful time in Taipei.
The final push for the completion of this dissertation was enabled
by an SSRC/JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for ABD’s and Recent PhD’s,
under the sponsorship of Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. My debt to
Professor Yomota Inuhiko is great in this respect – for his generosity in
supporting my stay at the time of this writing, as well as allowing me to
sit in on his seminars during my initial research stay in Tokyo in 2003-
2004. Many thanks as well to the members of Yomota-sensei’s graduate
v
film seminar, as well as to Ayako Saito, An Ni, Shimura Miyoko, and
Sharon Hayashi.
My interest in interdisciplinary, intercultural and intermedia
scholarship first took fruit in the East Asian and Comparative Literature
Departments at Indiana University, Bloomington - an incredibly
supportive place for interdisciplinary studies. I can’t imagine what my
experience there would have been like without Professor Yingjin Zhang,
whose courses first inspired me to pursue film studies, and whose
methods in urban culture and visual studies continue to influence me well
into my transition to media studies. Sumie Jones was inspiring in her
unfettered curiosity and willingness to support this same kind of
creativity in her students. And Michael Curtin was helpful in his insight
into communication and studies of global media.
Ultimately, however, this dissertation could never have been
completed without the members of my dissertation-writing group. They
provided invaluable engagement, support and community through a
process that often leaves one alone in a room. Members included Priscilla
Ovalle, Karen Beavers, Mary Jean Willis, Chunchi Wang and Jenny Clark.
My special thanks to Chunchi Wang and Jenny Clark for sticking with me
in my final days in the trenches. My experience in this group has
convinced me of the importance of future collaboration – I look forward
to reading more of your work. Much of chapter three is included in a
forthcoming anthology on Trans-Asian screen culture. My thanks to Chris
vi
Berry and Zhen Zhang for their astute editing comments. An earlier and
abbreviated version of the first two sections of chapter four has also
been published in the Fall, 2007 issue of Spectator. Many thanks to Hyung
Sook Lee for her editing advice, as well.
Most important, however, are family and friends. These are the
people who sit with you through the day-to-day ups and downs of
managing an advanced degree, as well as the unexpected turns of life in
general. I have found a second family in my friendship with Elizabeth
Ramsey. Her gracefulness, presence and emotional tenacity continue to
inspire insight about myself and my place in the world. I am blessed in
having found a lifetime friend in Chunchi Wang, as well. Looking forward
to visiting you on the beach. Support and conversation with Vanessa Lee,
Karen Beavers, Veronica Parades, Mary Jean Willis, Hyung Sook Lee,
Dong Hoon Kim and Heidi Cooley have been invaluable. And I have been
saved more than once by long distance conversations and visiting with
Chad Hildal, Joanne Quimby, Nicole Restrick, Lori Hitchcock, Beth Shields,
Emer O’Dwyer, Hoyt Long and Yumiko Shoji. There are too many friends
to name at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. In particular, sharing
office space with Peter Oleksik has taught me the importance of
frequent bouts of good music, a good movie and a good drink. And last,
but certainly not least, my family – without their love and support I could
not have withstood everything that came along with the dissertation. To
Will and Linda DeBoer, and their unfailing belief and trust in me
vii
throughout the years. Their boundless curiosity, dedication and
willingness to try new things have inspired me as I pursue my own path.
To my brother Doug, who displays an amazing combination of
adventurousness, gregariousness and compassion. And to Tammy, who
joined our family in the middle of my confronting this process, and who
has shown me an amazingly generous spirit. I love you all.

viii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Table of Contents viii

Abstract x

Introduction
Co-producing Across Technology, Space, Time and Gender 1

Methodology: Technology/Gender/Space/Time 9
Chapter Breakdown 15
Introduction Endnotes 27

Chapter One
Co-Producing the Consumerist City in the Asia-Pacific:
Specters of Connectivity and Television Strategy 31

Night in Hong Kong: From International Romance
To the Hauntings of Travel 38
Taiwan/Hong Kong as Market “Place”:
Shifting Desires and Television Strategy 47
Decolonizing Development:
Textual Specters of the Commodified City 56
Chapter One Conclusion 68
Chapter One Endnotes 71

Chapter Two
Technology’s Place in PRC/Japan Co-Productions:
Presence, Location and Memories of Displacement 78

Technology’s Presence in Co-Production History:
Comparisons Along The Silk Road 82
Spatializing Narratives of Displacement:
Relating Across the War Orphan 92
A Son of the Good Earth and the Crisis of Location 101
Chapter Two Conclusion 108
Chapter Two Endnotes 110

ix

Chapter Three
Co-Producing Cross-Border Action:
Technologies of Contact, Masculinity and the Asia-Pacific Border 115

Geographies of Contact I:
Genre, Technology and the Border 119
Geographies of Contact II:
Masculinity, Technology and the Body 128
Masculinity, Technology and the Body: Take Two 138
Chapter Three Conclusion 144
Chapter Three Endnotes 146

Chapter Four
Tokyo on the Move:
Omnibus Asia, Collective Production and the Limits of the LInk 149

Mobilizing Asia/Omnibus:
Technologies of the “Now” 153
Navigating Tokio/Tokyo:
Geography, Gender and the Link 164
Collecting Media Asia:
Technologies of the Future 174
Chapter Four Conclusion 183
Chapter Four Endnotes 185

Conclusion
Notes on Location,
Visibility and Power in Regional Co-production 189

Conclusion Endnotes 195

Bibliography 196
x
Abstract

“Co-producing the Asia-Pacific: Travels in Technology, Space, Time and
Gender” argues that the stakes for Japanese and Chinese language
collaborations emerge at the relationship between gender, technology
and an Asia Pacific constructed at the borders – here, among the media
capitals of Tokyo and Hong Kong, Taipei or Beijing. It thus addresses film,
television and multimedia co-productions from 1961 to 2001 as a lens for
uncovering the power dynamics of regional production. To this end, this
dissertation interrogates the desires for new technology and gender
central to the travel of Japanese media products against a fragmented
history of regional cross-border production. As it addresses not only the
spatial, but also temporal stakes of these desires, “Co-producing the
Asia-Pacific” uncovers the problems of (de)colonization often subsumed
in the promise of technological mobility linked to media collaborations in
the region, while at the same time reconsidering the spatial turn in
recent cultural, media and transnational studies.
Chapters address the entwining desires for decolonizing markets
and (then) new technologies of imaging and transport across a series of
co-productions among Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong in the early 1960s;
technological presence, location shooting and displacement for television
collaborations between Tokyo and Beijing; the centrality of gender –
especially masculinity – as a contact zone for interrogating the
xi
technological discourses produced in cross-border action between
Japanese and Chinese language contexts of the 1960s and 1990s; and
recent omnibus film, video and multimedia practices, as they construct
the region against the disjuncture of the media link. This dissertation
outlines a series of contexts, terms and methods for interrogating
Japanese and Chinese language film and media collaboration against a
wider backdrop of regional production.

1

Introduction
Co-producing Across
Technology, Space, Time and Gender

Technology and global capital bring
futures close at hand, though aura is
always being shed, late and soon, and
traces steadily accumulate and await
recognition.
Rajeev S. Patke

Much has been said, of late, of the importance of the co-production to
the increasingly networked face of Asia Pacific media. Peter Chan, the
producer behind the Hong Kong based Applause pictures, predicted in a
2002 interview that “Asian co-productions are the future of Asian
industries.” Chan had established the production company two years
previous to “foster ties” among media industries in the region.
1
For
industry workers such as him, the regional co-production has been a way
of tapping an increasingly multifarious network of consumption and
production among such centers of capital as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok,
Seoul, Beijing or Taipei. Producers based in Tokyo, as well, have touted
the co-production, and its production across a broad range of media
technologies, as an axis for access to the promise of this emergent Asian
landscape – what a recent Japanese language version of Newsweek
termed the “multinational power” of Asian media.
2
Indeed, as it entered
the new millennium, industry accounts of the future of Asian production

2

have defined it as a media geography of increasing convergence – in a
blurring of distance among not only media technologies but also locations
of production.
3
The regional co-production thus has been touted – across
a wide range of locations and perspectives – as the ideal medium for
negotiating the new geographies and emergent technologies of the Asia
Pacific.
Focusing on co-productions among industries in such Japanese and
Chinese language centers of production as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei and
Beijing, this dissertation approaches regional media collaboration as an
arena for reading not only the promise, but also the problems of Asia
Pacific production. To this end, it argues that the tensions of cross border
media can be interrogated through attention to the dynamics and
ideologies of time and space, as they are expressed in discourses of
technology and gender. Much recent scholarship on the co-production has
tended to foreground it as an “axis of socio-spatial transformation.”
4

Toby Miller et al., for example, have argued the co-production to “mark a
site of transformation in cultural scale, from the local and national to the
regional and global.”
5
Their intervention into the political economies of
transnational production is important, as it posits the co-production to be
a site of contestation, negotiation and process. Yet such exclusive focus
on the socio-economic transformations engendered by the co-production
can also downplay less visible – and often more fractured – ideologies
that also echo across (capitalist) media production. In one of the few

3

scholarly publications explicitly about Asian co-productions to date, for
example, the Pan Asian co-production is examined as significant only in its
recent intensification – as evidence of the transformation of the region
into a new transnational arena, and of an evolving regional consciousness
among media industries.
6
This emergence of the co-production from the
1990s is here only established, however, against a previous postwar
history of collaboration that is deemed intermittent, fragmented and
thus inconsequential to any understanding of truly “trans-regional” or
“transnational” collaboration.
The recent intensification of co-productions notwithstanding, this
dissertation reads the co-production as less evidence of an emerging
region, than a symptom and desire to be interrogated – and one to be
interrogated across a more widely significant temporal frame. Indeed,
the fractured contours of regional cross-border collaboration from the
postwar period might be exactly the right vantage point from which to
read, as Mark Betz has phrased in the context of European production,
the “tensions” of regional (co)production.
7
Rolando Tolantino has
insightfully argued for the ways in which the Asia Pacific and its media
have been constructed in “drives for development and progress”
8
– drives
that echo across (at the very least) the intensifications of global capital
and technologies that ensued in the region from the postwar/cold war
period. For him, film and media function as a symptom of how Cold War
infrastructures – their legacies expressed today in multinationalism –

4

“institutionaliz[ed] a new world order” through the reuse and
dissemination of technologies and information that had originally been
constructed for military use. Here, “the growing prominence of the ‘Asia
Pacific’ as an economic entity” brings with it a challenge to examine and
illuminate “the ways in which the region has been constructed” across
relations of power that are not always immediately visible in its cultural
products.
9
Rather than treating the drive for capital as evidence for the
new face of the region, such production is better read so as to make
visible the structures and geometries of power that produce it.
It is with this impetus for illuminating ideological structures that
both visibly and invisibly construct them that this dissertation examines
Japanese and Chinese language co-productions across a constellated axis
of media practices and temporal frames – moments in film, television and
multimedia collaboration produced from the 1960s to the turn of the
new millennium. Viewed through the lens of (typically progress driven)
geopolitics, this time period brackets the cold war rise and fall of Japan’s
postwar place in the region, even as it platforms China’s “rising”
importance to regional economies and the “new” era of Asia’s so-called
“multinational power.”
10
Yet a more constellated approach to the film
and media co-productions produced against this backdrop offers entry
into an even more contested regional landscape. Anne Friedberg has
argued for what she calls a “stereoscopic” approach to media culture –
one “whereby separate fields of study, objects of vision, historical

5

perspectives, gendered positions” are constellated against one another,
to engender a “more dimensional” understanding of the ideologies that
construct it.
11
Produced across multiple temporal contexts and spatial
practices, the co-production seems the perfect place for this kind of
analysis – and a place where the “drive for development and progress”
often attached to Asian production can be unpacked for the hauntings
and crises that can lie unengaged within it. The overwhelming discourse
through which the film and media co-productions examined in this
dissertation have been promoted has been in their close links to new
technologies and new geographies for the region. Yet the co-production
is not defined simply in its promotional context. Its significance is also,
simultaneously, produced across a range of what Lefebvre has elsewhere
called “spatial practices” – industrial discourses, textual imaginaries,
production contexts and critical strategies.
12
It is at the intersection and
fissures among these practices where we can begin to see what such
repeated concern the “new” or “emergent” or “future” of regional
media can obfuscate.
A “stereoscopic” approach enables a more dimensional reading of
trans-regional co-productions (and the ever present drive for regional
progress attached to them) over not only such practices of space, but also
a constellation of temporal contexts, as well. Indeed, attending in this
way to the fragmented history of collaborative production from the
postwar/cold war can bring to light the tensions of past and present that

6

continue to be produced across an ever “emerging” Asian media. One
central question to recently come out of cultural and media studies
concerned with the Asia Pacific appeared in the first (2001) issue of the
English language journal, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: “How does Asia
mean?”
13
Published out of the University of Tokyo, and reviewed
through a consortium of Asia Pacific critics, this journal often interrogates
the problems of regional sentiment from the perspective of Japan’s place
in the region. What is clear within this debate, as it has been extended
out over subsequent issues of the journal, is that, for cultural products
linked to Japan, at the very least, the desire for an emerging “Asia” is
nothing new. Recent regional production is rather a phenomenon against
which we need to also look to a longer history of Japan’s relationship to
other locations of the region. Not simply emerging in recent
multinational networks, nor even in the cold war power structures of
Tolantino’s analysis, Asia Pacific production in this context also refracts
echoes of colonial and imperial exchange. Indeed, any interrogation of
the co-production in this context must be cognizant of the imperial
“collaboration” through which film and cultural products were produced
in relation to the Japanese empire of the first half of the twentieth
century.
Set against this fragmented history of postwar production, the
regional co-production thus negotiates the promise of development
against legacies of decolonization and cold war relations. This is a spectral

7

landscape characterized by what Rajeev S. Patke, in the context of the
Asian city, has phrased the “partial and uneven overlap between the
postmodern and the postcolonial.”
14
In this sense, a “stereoscopic”
approach to regional co-production also resonates with the ways in which
the city has been taken as a place for reading “the split image of [post]
modernity” – for bringing to light not only its promise, but also its
potential for failure.
15
For arenas such as Japanese and Chinese language
exchange, at the very least, this “split image” must be further reframed
to address the legacies of decolonization that can also under gird (and
sometime erupt across) their landscapes. Patke, for example, has
explicitly suggested what such an urban critic might do were he or she to
turn the contemporary Asian city:
[he might turn], for illustration, to the many Asian manifestations
of the postcolonial. Here, he would make the twofold claim that
the postcolonial experience brings out the disillusionment latent in
the myth of progress, just as the postmodern brings out the
phantasmal that is incipient to the myth of an evenly distributed
access to capital and goods in the era of globalization.
16

Here, in the context of the Asian marketplace, transformations
elsewhere linked to technologies of “the Enlightenment project of
progress” become a place for recognizing the “disillusionment latent in
the myth of [global] progress.”
17
In a similar manner, the futures
envisioned in and around Japanese and Chinese language co-productions
can become a platform for reading how “new” or “emergent”
technologies and geographies of the Asia Pacific always hold (and often
subsume) the potential for catastrophe, failure, crisis, and difficulty.

8

The “futures that technology and global capital” that are
promised in the film and media co-production thus “await recognition” of
the traces – the power dynamics, the latent temporalities, even failures –
they subsume.
18
What should be underscored here is that the “myths”
that can be laid bare in this context are often revealed on the level of
sentiment, in the form of structures of feeling that surround regional
production. Truly attending to the “drive for progress” through which
Asia Pacific (co)production has often been constructed can only be done
by paying attention to the “desires for progress,” and the attendant
temporalities, that accompany them. New technologies and emergent
geographies work to mediate what urban critics have long recognized to
be the “tension between desire and its fulfillment” often resolved in the
commodity form.
19
Throughout this dissertation, I unpack a similar tension
as I attend to discursive “desires,” sentiments and structures of feeling
that surround the media, industrial and commodity culture that make up
the co-production. In so doing, I address not only what is materially
produced – discourses and practices surrounding the films, television
series, multimedia collections that form the body of Asia Pacific co-
production; I also address what is not produced – moments of failure in
this media landscape, of absence, dissolution or latency. It is in this way
that we can begin to adequately deconstruct the “dream” of a future
Asia that converge around its emerging geographies and media
technologies – not only the disillusionment always latent to discourses of

9

progress and development, but also the dynamics that structure the
“myth” of an “evenly distributed access of capital and goods in the era of
globalization.”

Methodology: Technology/Gender/Space/Time

This approach is thus concerned with uncovering power structures – and
unpacking where and how they are located and distributed across a
constellation of cultural and popular regional production among Tokyo
and Taipei, Hong Kong or Beijing. As it addresses not only the spatial, but
also temporal stakes of the desires for development and progress often
linked to Japanese and Chinese language co-production, this dissertation
does two things. On the one hand, as I suggest above, it uncovers the
specters of (de)colonization and dissolution often subsumed in the
promise linked to trans-regional media collaborations from the last four
decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, this project
reconsiders the spatial turn in recent cultural, media and transnational
studies. Debates over how we are to interrogate space, location and
mobility across recent intensifications of global technologies and capital
have appeared in a wide range of disciplines – from critical geography, to
media and film studies, to the re-recognition of such earlier critics as
Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre in literary, area or urban studies. In
this context, I have become convinced of the importance of interrogating

10

regional (co)production across not only multiple media practices and
temporal contexts, but also across a “stereoscopic” field of
methodologies, as well.
20
As the promise of the Asian co-production has
been constructed across the intersecting promise of new technologies
and new geographies, my method engages with a wide range of
disciplinary approaches to the production of location and mobility in a
transnational context.
In particular, I bring to this inquiry an attention to the ways in
which the spatio-temporal tensions of regional production are inflected in
the intertwining dynamics of technology and gender. Doreen Massey has
argued for attending to what she calls the “global sense of place” by
which locations are constructed in the intensifications of capital that have
characterized everyday experience and cultural production over (at least)
the twentieth century.
21
By the time she had coined this phrase, debates
had expanded in the field of cultural geography over the ways in which
the “local,” in the context of global and late capital, is not simply a place
of “authentic” or “native” expression.
22
For Massey, the specificity of
location and its production is better understood within a geometric
dynamic of competing relations – the multiple intersections, processes
and “power geometries” that work to create a sense of place in this
context.
23
Her approach foregrounds the competing dynamics of power
that can construct the “drives” and “desires” for develoment and
progress so often linked to Asia Pacific co-productions. What is most

11

significant here, however, is that for Massey, place or location is not
simply constructed in intensifications of capital, but also produced across
such ideologies as gender. Indeed, gender for her is the central nexus
over which such geometries can be mapped, read, even contested.
Gender is similarly a platform for unpacking the dynamics of
power that construct landscapes produced in and around Asian co-
productions. Paying attention to gender in this context means not only
interrogating the ways in which gendered bodies themselves are “sites
and expressions of power relations,” but also deconstructing the specific
“relationships between bodies – and notions of masculinity and
femininity attached to them – and specific geographies” of Asia Pacific
media.
24
This relationship between gender and location or place resonates
across colonial, cold war and contemporary contexts of regional
exchange. The opening and closing scenes of the 1943 Japan-Taiwan
imperial collaboration Sayon’s Bell (Sayon no kane), for example,
reproduced a common imperial trope – one that Anne McClintock has
elsewhere described as a map constructed in the entwining desires for
gender (here, the female body) and capital.
25
The film begins by
establishing the protagonists’ association with the work of empire, as the
camera travels a series of remote roads in Taiwan in order to link the
labor that she and her fellow villagers perform to the imperial metropole
of Tokyo. It ends with a wide pan of local landscape over which memories
of her (now deceased) figure echo out in a promise for its continued

12

future in the construction of empire. These two scenes are reminiscent of
a range of imperial filmmaking that figured places and locations of Asia,
and the consenting work within them, as exotic, female and held in the
promise of (imperial) development.
26
Against this backdrop, the challenge
for this dissertation is to unpack how seemingly similar gendered
relations and locations are repeated across cold war and more
contemporary visual contexts – yet remain specific to their particular
arenas and contexts of exchange.

In other words, remain attentive to the
full range of relations and crises that can be obscured by such visual and
representational practices – this includes not only a colonial past, but also
a cold war and unevenly global present.
Examining the specific media technologies and practices that
produce these terms for visuality and geography is here the key to
unpacking their particular implications. This dissertation begins its
examination of Japanese and Chinese language co-production at a
moment, in the early 1960s, when film began to inflect the consumerist
culture that accompanied the uneven rise of television in the region. It
then continues to consider other intersections with (then) new
technologies – satellite, video, multimedia and new forms of filmmaking,
as well – into the new millennium. My method thus brings critiques of
transnational and postcolonial space to a more adequate and direct
engagement with the roles that particular technologies can play (or be
mobilized to play) in the production of media culture. Theorizations of

13

space and place in a postcolonial and global context – often coming out of
cultural geography, urban studies, area or postcolonial studies – have
been extremely helpful to the conception of this project. Where these
approaches often fall short, however, is in their inability to address the
specificity of the media technologies that often construct these spaces.
“Media technology” is not a generic term, but rather a category that
contains a range of specific mediums – television, film, digital media, for
example – that are each configured differently in particular moments.
Each are constructed differently in relation to other technologies, and in
relation to specific social, cultural, ideological or geographic contexts.
This close attention to the particular technologies that produce
these co-productions can help us to be more specific about the locations
across which such production is constructed, as well. In this context, and
across these technologies, Asian co-productions are best understood
against a particular cosmopolitan network and geometry of power
relations. In his mapping of Asia Pacific media, Michael Curtin has
suggested the media geography of the region to be constructed across
“media capitals” such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok or Seoul. Curtin
focuses on relations across television industries, yet his analysis is equally
relevant to the cross border production of media and cultural forms such
as film, video, multimedia or animation. Here, a media capital – closely
linked to “particular cities that have become centers for the finance,
production and distribution” of media products – “is a nexus or switching

14

point,” it is a location where complex forces interact and relate “among a
range of flows (economic, demographic, technological, cultural and
ideological)” and dynamics of power.
27
Here, “not simply an
acknowledgement of dominance,” a media capital is rather “a relational
concept” – a category we should understand “in the manner that
geographers like Doreen Massey (1992) and Kevin Robins (1991)
understand cities, as meeting places where local specificity arises out of
migration, interaction, and exchange.”
28
As an arena of “temporal
dynamism and spatial complexity,”
29
a network of competing media
capitals become the backdrop against which the tensions of regional
production might be made visible.
Indeed, as this dissertation focuses on regional collaborations and
co-productions linking Tokyo to Hong Kong, Taipei or Beijing, we
encounter within this network a particular set of spatio-temporal
problems. Here, we return full circle to the spectral approaches to the
Asian marketplace discussed above, and what they can offer cultural
geography or global and Asia Pacific media studies. Curtin’s concern for
media capital resonates with the ways in which Iwabuchi Koichi, in the
context of the recent circulation of Japanese popular culture, has
characterized Japan’s place in regional production in terms of
asymmetrical flows and temporal disjunctures. For him, Japanese
popular culture circulates across the Asia Pacific through uneven flows of
sentiment and feeling – desire and nostalgia that follow the uneven

15

distribution and access to capital that has entered locations of the region
at different rates and moments.
30
At the same time, it is important to
remain attentive to the ways in which the centers of capital across which
these sentiments emanate also refract a recent history of Tokyo’s place
in the region, as it has been negotiated across cold war and variously
imperial networks and dynamics of power. What is necessary to
adequately unpacking the Asian co-production, in its production across
this network of exchange, is not only a history of the media capitals that
provide a supporting network for the production of regional media. We
also need to attend to the hauntings of the very “futurist” discourses of
the co-production, as an idealized media form for an emerging Asia-
Pacific. The “temporal dynamism and spatial complexity” of this arena
must also be an entryway to recognizing the ways in which the past and
present – just as here and there – are simultaneously produced across its
structures.

Chapter Breakdown

Each chapter of this dissertation examines a series of resonant moments
in collaborative exchange among Japanese and Chinese language media
capitals (here Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing), remaining attentive to
the dynamics of particular practices of regional exchange, on the one
hand, yet also reading the spaces in between as they both echo and shift

16

over time, on the other. In particular, I focus on idealized moments of
cross-border co-production – contexts in which collaborative media is
promoted as a new, exemplary or emergent expression of regional
exchange or production. Cross-border production can be defined by way
of a wide range of factors – not simply exchanges in capital, but also the
international travel of stars, collaborations in technology, even simply
support for location shooting. Given this difficulty of definition, we
perhaps have most to learn from the moments when the cross-border co-
production is named, produced and promoted as such. Here, our focus
then becomes less what a co-production may or may not be, than to what
ideological ends the co-production can be mobilized, as well as the
relations that compete across it in particular contexts. To this end, this
dissertation examines these exemplary moments over a constellated axis
of media practices and temporal frames – moments in film, television and
multimedia collaboration produced from the 1960s to the turn of the
new millennium. At the same time, it attends to these contexts as they
both elucidate, and are elucidated by, terms for cross border contact,
exchange and production that have recently emerged in transnational,
cultural and media studies. Theories surrounding the commodity form,
technological presence, the contact zone, the link or collection, as well as
location itself all work to interrogate the spatio-temporal ideologies that
construct the futures of progress often promised by such global and
capitalist production. Yet what the cultural production surrounding the

17

Asian co-production across Tokyo or Hong Kong or Taipei simultaneously
demand of these terms is a reframing that is attentive to the “partial
and uneven overlap” between development and decolonization that is
manifested (at the very least) in media culture of the Asia Pacific.
Each chapter of this dissertation negotiates all four of its central
terms – the dynamics of time and space within discourses of gender and
technology – yet foregrounds a different set of relationships among
them. In so doing, it explicates discourses surrounding the production and
technologies of Japanese and Chinese language media co-productions
against the imaginaries that are constructed in and across them. Its
analysis is thus situated at a matrix of relations across media texts,
promotional discourses, as well as industrial and technological imaginings,
as they are further negotiated among locations and media capitals of the
Asia Pacific. Here, visual tropes such as international romance, the war
orphan, the tourist or migrant, promotions of international development
or the gendered body’s interface with regional locations are constellated
against technological, production and industrial practices and discourses.
These latter practices and discourses include such categories as desires for
regional markets, promotions surrounding “new” technologies, mobile
possibilities attached to location shooting or the promise attached to
transnational media links.
The first chapter interrogates the relationship between the
commodity form and the everyday locations produced in and around film

18

and media – long a concern for critics of spaces of modernity – in the
context of cold war Asia Pacific production. It does so by interrogating the
entwining desires for romance, decolonizing markets and (then) new
technologies of imaging and transport across a series of co-productions
among Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong in the early to mid 1960s. Against
the recent surge in co-productions in the Asia Pacific, the 1960s marks
another heightened moment of trans-regional collaboration. This was a
moment when desires among its centers of capital for an intermittent
and short lived “Film Asia” both responded to and inflected emerging
technologies of vision and consumption – the new forms of visuality that
accompanied television, and the postwar reorganization of capital
around consumption that the dramatic rise in TV sets, leisure and tourist
industries signaled. Yet this specter is further complicated by an even
earlier history of media exchange in Japan’s imperial expansion of the
prewar period. I thus juxtapose this close relationship between romance
and desires for “new” technologies of contact against Japan’s (failed)
colonial desire for the Taiwan market in the early 1960s.
This chapter therefore argues for the need to recognize the
hauntings that erupt against the technological ideals that often construct
media geographies in the (post) postwar region. It suggests that the links
that these popular co-productions construct between an imperial past
and transnational future is best understood as a relation of visibility and
loss – a spectral quality that lurks at the moment of connection across

19

consumer culture. In so doing, it attends to a problem that critics of
space such as Henri Lefebvre have elsewhere noticed. In the 1970s,
Lefebvre was writing, in the context of Western Europe, about the
incipient loss of history that accompanied the region’s increasing
constitution in the globalizing technologies of media and tourism. For
him, this process was less a simple homogenizing of place, than a
production of heterogeneous spatial practices.
31
Such attention to the
multifarious processes that situate postwar electronic culture’s discursive
links to claims of the “end of history,” however, take on decidedly
decolonizing implications in the context of Japan and its relationship to
Taiwan, Hong Kong or the PRC. Here, the co-production negotiates the
region’s imperial past against the tensions of cold war relations.
The second chapter of this dissertation turns our focus more
explicitly to the ideological functions of technology for the trans-regional
co-production. To this end, it interrogates structures of technological
“presence” in collaborations produced among television industries in
Tokyo and Beijing following the realignment of Sino-Japanese relations in
the 1970s. Within Anglo-American TV studies, “presence” has emerged
as a term indicating transnational media’s promise of global
development, proximity and immediacy.
32
This ideal thus also, at the
same time, compensates for a temporal problem of global media – the
disjunctures of experience across transnational distances. Attention to
technology’s “presence” in the production of narratives linking Japan and

20

mainland China can similarly help us to unpack the disjunctures between
past and present often obfuscated by discourses surrounding
transnational collaboration. “Presence” is here a term for accounting for
the double-edged dynamics – as here imperial and cold war pasts are
subsumed in hopes for a multinational future – that often haunt
collaborations between industries in Japan and the PRC.
Attention to debates surrounding media technologies – and their
enabling of access to (heretofore impenetrable) locations of the region –
that have been mobilized around Sino-Japanese co-productions thus help
us to unpack a model through which ideologies of “presence” continue to
construct them. Recognizing its entwining with regional contours of
memory and mobility helps us to engage differently with this term as it
has emerged in global media studies. As with many regional
collaborations, these co-productions have been heavily invested in the
technologies and possibilities of location shooting. As a practice closely
aligned to the access to new geographies that “new” media technologies
can engender, location shooting is a productive place to interrogate the
ways in which ideologies of presence collude with the “desire for
progress” through which such regional collaborations have been
promoted. Further attention to the gendered figures and narratives that
have been linked to these locations – particularly surrounding the war
orphan – reveals the range of crises that can be occluded in the fractured

21

and uneven overlap of development and decolonization that construct
these co-produced locations.
Chapter three foregrounds the function of gender within the
matrixes of emerging technologies and locations that have often
surrounded the regional co-production in this context. In particular, it
examines the centrality of the masculine body as a contact zone for
interrogating the structures of feeling that run across cross-border action
in Japanese and Chinese language collaborations of the 1960s and 1990s.
Here, the masculine body is an interface negotiating the legacies of
decolonization against the technological mobility often promoted in and
around these films. The “contact zone,” as a term, was coined by Marie
Louise Pratt “as an attempt to invoke the spatial, and temporal
consequences of subjects previously separated by geographic and
historical disjunctures and whose trajectories now intersect.”
33
As I argue
in this chapter, “contact zone,” for Japan’s place in Asia-Pacific media co-
productions, is a particular arena of multiplicity and doubles. Taipei is to
Tokyo is to Hong Kong not as some abstracted postmodern convergence
of location, but as a specific referent that implies an imperial past and
decolonizing present. On the one hand demonstrating how market and
technological desires have disempowered the hauntings of history that
continue to structure the region’s inequalities,
34
it also demonstrates how
the masculine body, no less than the cross border co-production in which it
is produced, is doubly constructed. Confounded in a simultaneous desire

22

for travel and “return,” it is a bordered site at which the hauntings of
trauma across the region remain.
Being attentive to the spatio-temporal dynamics that construct
regionally co-produced action is thus paramount, as it is produced at a
nexus of masculine bodies, media technologies and an Asia Pacific
constructed at the borders. The structure of this chapter, as with others,
also foregrounds the importance of reading across different historical
moments in this context. While both mark periods of intensified film and
media collaboration, the 1960s and 1990s also respectively coincide with
moments of rise and decline for Japan’s postwar place in the region.
While the 1990s emerged as a decade of economic recession for Japan
and (by the end of the decade) much of the Asia-Pacific, the 1960s has
been broadly characterized as a moment at the cusp of an economic
recovery and upturn. Indeed, several scholars have talked of late of how,
from the 1960s, postwar and post-imperial memories were gradually
papered over by discourses of modernization, in the future promised by
Japan’s pending model of the economic miracle.

Yet this ever subsuming
of the past – in the case of co-produced action between Japan and
Chinese language industries, at the very least – are also confounded in
the hauntings that trouble regional media production.
Chapter four interrogates collective production and the valences of
the links that construct it – specifically, the function of Tokyo as a
structuring “media capital” for multimedia collections and omnibus

23

production in the Asia Pacific. The omnibus film has often been touted as
a privileged mode of trans-regional collaboration, as the perfect media
platform for a new era of intensified link-up among emerging locations
of the region. Yet this discourse on the promise of regionally collective
media has long been repeated – from the early 1990s to the present, and
across a range of locations and technologies. This chapter thus offers a
more constellated counterpoint to this recent attention to the omnibus. It
examines a moment in the early 1990s, when the omnibus film first
appeared as a mode of production for industries in Tokyo to engage with
the region, and then sets it against other collective modes produced with
a range of other media contexts – here the multi-director video collection
and the multimedia exhibit – into the new millennium.
Discourses surrounding the promise of an increasingly linked and
emerging Asia have tended to accompany collective regional projects
associated with industries in Tokyo. Yet less than pulling together a
coherent geography, the Asian omnibus instead displays the “tensions
and contradictions essential to the mapping” of regional film and
media.
35
Examining what functions as the “link” within the construction
of this mediated “Asia” can thus be useful. A term theorized by
transnational and feminist scholars alike as a site of both potential and
difficulty, it can help us to unpack the tensions of regional collaborations
produced with capital and resources funneled through Japan. For the
collaborative production of this chapter, Tokyo’s central function for the

24

media collection is often structured as absent by the overwhelmingly
promissory discourses that often surround the omnibus collection. Here,
a “media capital” approach to Tokyo and the media collection – one that
conceives of it as a space of temporal and spatial complexity – helps us to
see the dynamics of power (and the very discourses on absence) that
construct them. Finally, as it engages with collaborations that, though
central, are not limited to Japanese and Chinese language contexts, this
chapter also suggests the ways in which collaborations and collections
across Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing spill out to, and are
embedded in, wider networks of collaborative production in the region.
It is with this wider network of regional production in mind that I
end with a few concluding comments on location, visibility and power in
Asia Pacific media. In one sense, the cases and contexts of this
dissertation revolve around Tokyo’s unstable place as a location of
“progress,” and its (contested) symbolic and material relationship to
media production and development in the region. In unpacking its
entwining with other centers of production such as Hong Kong, Taipei
and Beijing, it implicitly suggests that the concerns of these co-
productions are not the property of “Japanese” or “Chinese language
media” per se. Rather, “Tokyo” is a problem that, given imperial legacies
and its close relationship to ideals of economic progress, spills out with
implications over a wide range of locations. The valences of “Asia”
imagined and produced across these co-productions similarly negotiate a

25

range of differently located (and unevenly situated) concerns for regional
production. In this context, the ways in which recent South Korean film
and media signals a refiguring of power relations in the region is a
significant counterpoint and backdrop to the contexts addressed in this
dissertation. It is an arena of production central to the ways in which Asia
Pacific media of late has not only intensified, but is also increasingly
multivalenced in its structures of power. At the same time, to the extent
that the co-production has always signaled a site of negotiation and
contestation, co-productions produced from the turn of the new
millennium continue to be a place for interrogating the crises, latencies
and uneven structures of power often obfuscated in the promotion of
capitalist media production in the region.
The relations, dynamics and hauntings of the collaborative media
production outlined in this dissertation thus must be understood as set in
relief against a broader constellation of locations and media capitals.
Even as it remains specific to negotiations among industries in Tokyo and
Hong Kong, Taipei or Beijing, this project works toward a method that
might also be useful for other networks and contexts of media co-
production – particularly as they are produced in the desires and “drive[s]
for progress” that have constructed much of film and media in the Asia
Pacific from at least the second half of the twentieth century.
36
This
dissertation does not purport to be an exhaustive account of all Japanese
and Chinese language co-productions in these contexts and time periods.

26

Nor does it pretend to provide a structural model for what a co-
production might or might not be. Indeed, as should be come clear
throughout the dissertation, whether a media product “is” or “is not” a
co-production is less important than the ways in which particular media
products are produced, promoted and mobilized as such. Rather, what
this dissertation offers is a series of strategies and contexts for
interrogating the co-production as it has been entwined with the
emergence of an Asia Pacific constructed in an uneven and fractured
overlap between development and decolonization.

27

Introduction Endnotes

1. Jin Long Pao, “The Pan-Asian Co-Production Sphere: Interview
with Director Peter Chan,” Harvard Asia Quarterly VI, no. 3 (Summer,
2002) http://www.asiaquarterly.com/content/view/123/

2. “The Birth of Asiawood: Ajia eiga wa takokuseki jidai (Asian Film
in the Multinational Age),” Newsweek (Japanese version) 6, no. 6 (2001):
64-68. “Takokuseki” is often translated as “multicultural.” But for the
context of this article, and its address of regional production,
“multinational” seems a more fitting and resonant translation.

3. In his recent book on Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins
broadly defines media convergence as “a situation in which multiple
media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across
them. Convergence is understood here as an ongoing process or series of
intersections between different media systems…” Henry Jenkins,
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New
York University Press, 2006), 282. Here, I take his definition of
convergence to more broadly signal the global geographies that often
underpin it. What’s interesting about the discourses to surround Asian co-
production is the ways in which locations are co-opted into a similar
discourse of fluid exchange in tandem with, or alongside these
technologies.

4. Toby Miller, et al. “Co-producing Hollywood,” Global Hollywood
(London: BFI, 2001), 107.

5. Ibid. 87.

6. Dal Yong Jin and Dong-Hoo Lee, “The Birth of East Asia: Cultural
Regionalization through Co-production Strategies,” Spectator: The
University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism
27, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 31-45. Jin and Lee are nuanced in their critique of
the limitations of a regional consciousness in this context. What I object
to, however, is their limitation of the significance of the regional co-
production to production from the 1990s.

7. Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism,
Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura 46,
no. 1 (2001): 11.

8. Rolando Tolantino, “Introduction,” Geopolitics of the Visible:
Essays on Philippine Film Cultures, ed. Rolando B. Tolantino (Manila:
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000), xiii.

28

9. Ibid. xii

10. “The Birth of Asiawood,” 65.

11. This definition of a “stereoscopic” approach is quoted from a
graduate level syllabus on “Visual Culture and its Discontents”
collaboratively taught by Professors Anne Friedberg and Anne Troy,
under the sponsorship of a “Literary, Visual and Material Culture”
initiative at the University of Southern California. Though not coined as
such in these works, this methodology seems to underpin much of
Friedberg’s scholarship on the significance of media and visual culture,
from her Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), to her The Virtual Window: From
Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). As I find the term
productive in its simultaneous address of both temporal and spatial
practices, I have taken the liberty of quoting this syllabus description.

12. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 1991), 33.

13. Sun Ge, “How Does Asia Mean? (Part I)” Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies 1, no. 1 (2000): 13.

14. Rajeev S. Patke, “Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the
Postcolonial City” in Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and
Global Processes, eds. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Wei Wei Yeo (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 288.

15. Ibid. 287.

16. Ibid. 288. Here, Patke is specifically referring to Walter
Benjamin’s work.

17. Ibid. 288.

18. Ibid. 300.

19. Ibid. 296.

20. Michael Dear, “Film Architecture and Cityspace: The Politics of
Representation.” Quoted in Sarah Matheson, “Televising Toronto from
Hogtown to Megacity” (PhD diss, University of Southern California, 2003),
25.

29

21. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

22. Ibid.

23. Indeed, the spectral approaches to the Asian/cosmopolitan
marketplace discussed earlier in this chapter can both benefit from and
contribute to the ways in which “location” and “place” have been
conceived across cultural geography and (global) media studies.

24. Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 218.

25. Anne McClintock, “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of
Imperialism,” Imperial Leather (New York: Routledge, 1995), 21.

26. For a more detailed discussion of this film in this context see:
Stephanie DeBoer, “Sayon no kane/Sayon’s Bell,” in 24 Frames: The
Cinema of Japan and Korea, ed. Justin Bowyer (London: Wallflower Press,
2004), 23-31.

27. Michael Curtin, “Media Capital: Towards the Study of Spatial
Flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 205.
What is significant here is that the power dynamics of Curtin’s “media
capitals” operate a number of levels – local, national, regional, global.
They thus include, but are not restricted to, concerns for the nation.

28. Ibid. 222

29. Ibid.

30. Iwabuchi Koichi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and
Japanese Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

31. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 1991).

32. See, for example, Lisa Parks, “Our World, Satellite Televisuality,
and the Fantasy of Global Presence,” in Planet TV: A Global Television
Reader, eds. Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar (New York: New York
University Press, 2002), 74-93.

33. Marie Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.

30

34. My thanks to Chris Berry for his suggestion of this phrasing.

35. Betz, 11.

36. Tolantino, xiii.

31
Chapter One
Co-producing the Consumerist City in the Asia Pacific:
Specters of Connectivity and Television Strategy

– Featuring the four famous locations of Tokyo,
Taipei, Hong Kong and Bangkok – a free tour!
– And the attraction of three treasured women
of three countries!
– A production reminiscent of Night in Hong
Kong…
Ads for the Tokyo/Hong
Kong/Taipei co-production A Night
in Bangkok, Lianhe News, Taipei,
July 9-29, 1966

The beginning credits for the 1961 co-production Night in Hong Kong
open against the wide technicolor landscape of the city’s harbor, as a
series of wide-screen crane shots displays a landscape of rising
skyscrapers set against idyllic, lush mountains and sampans sailing across
sparkling water. A scene reminiscent of other global, especially
Hollywood takes on Hong Kong at the time,
1
the production and
narrative details of this film place this scenery within the spatial and
temporal problematic of Asia-Pacific media. Collaboratively produced by
Japan’s Toho studio and Cathay’s studio base in Hong Kong with the
intent of creating a regional product, the film’s narrative begins with a
journalist from Tokyo unwittingly en route toward a chance meeting with
his Chinese lover. He had just arrived from a round-the-world tour via a
Pan American stopover to Hong Kong – a location his colleague claims to

32
be, dramatically gesturing to the broad skyline, a “place mixing old and
new, east and west.”
Against the increasing intensity of of film and media co-
productions in the Asia Pacific over the past few years, the 1960s mark
another heightened moment of transnational collaboration and
exchange across the region. Indeed, Japan’s place in the continued
production of regional co-productions throughout the postwar period is
further complicated in an even earlier history of media exchange,
produced across Japan’s imperial expansion of the prewar period. This
chapter examines four of a series of popular co-productions ensuing from
the success of Night in Hong Kong that were produced among the
industries of Hong Kong, Tokyo and Taipei from 1961 to 1966. Their
titles range from Night in Hong Kong (Honkon no yoru/Xianggang zhi ye,
1961) and Star of Hong Kong (Honkon no hoshi/Xianggang zhi xing, 1962)
– the first two of the series initiated between studios in Hong Kong and
Japan – and White Rose of Hong Kong (Honkon no shiroi bara/Xianggang
zhi bai meigui,1965) and Night in Bangkok (Bankok no yoru/Manyue zhi
ye, 1966) – co-productions that reproduced their themes in further
collaboration with Taiwanese industries. These films are linked in their
concerns for genre and global mobility, as they negotiated international
romance and ideal tropes of travel against a shifting media geography in
the Asia-Pacific.
2
Here, the industries and locations of Hong Kong, Tokyo
and Taipei refracted global developments in film and media technologies,

33
even as their collaboration hinted at the legacies of the past, and present
problems of travel inherent to popular cinema across the postwar region.
Media collaboration and exchange among industries in Japan,
Hong Kong and Taiwan in the early 1960s thus negotiated the region’s
imperial past against the tensions of cold war relations. Despite
constraints in access to their previously imperial and occupied markets,
Japanese studios resumed a limited interest in the region in the
immediate postwar period. The first postwar Japanese film to be shot in
Hong Kong was completed in 1953 – the same year that Japan’s studios
were once again allowed, under the restrictive terms of the
Taiwan/Japan Peace Treaty, to resume exporting into the former colony.
The market geographies of the prewar era had been, of course,
significantly reconfigured by new geopolitical (and decolonizing) realities.
Japanese cultural products were banned entry into a sensitive South
Korea. And the post 1949 “loss” of mainland China set Taiwan as a
central regional market for studios based in Tokyo and Hong Kong. The
industrial relations between Japan and Hong Kong were also
characterized by uneven scales of exchange. Japan’s intermittent
location shooting in Hong Kong incited complaints in the British colony’s
Chinese language press of the limited benefits of such one-sided
collaborations. Hong Kong multinationals alternatively utilized Japan as a
“modern” location for shooting, as well as a base from which to gain
access to production methods and technologies that could further

34
“modernize” the appeal of their product. Following their successes in
European film festivals from 1953, Tokyo’s studios presented a central, if
highly contested, model for a modernizing film industry in the region.
3

Against the postwar (and uneven) market shifts, the early 1960s
presented a brief moment in which desires across these regional centers
of capital for an intermittent and short lived “Film Asia” both responded
to and inflected emerging technologies of vision and consumption – the
new forms of visuality that accompanied television, and the postwar
reorganization of capital around consumption that the dramatic rise in
TV sets, leisure and tourist industries signaled. The advertisements for
the last of this series of films, Night in Bangkok, quoted as the epigraph
to this chapter are only a brief example of the ways in which ideals of
travel are often central to regional collaborations linked with Japan.
Advertising a co-production between Tokyo and Hong Kong – one that
also featured locations in Taiwan, and thus could be strategically claimed
to be co-produced by its Film Bureau – these advertisements promote a
global ideal for Asia, as regional media collaboration is linked with the
promise of transnational travel and classed mobility.
4
The stars they
promoted were portrayed as part of a jet set crowd, with access to
international romance and contact with capital and consumer goods.
Pan-American airline’s financial support of this series of co-productions
engendered a textual linking – via wide shots of a Pan-Am jet repeatedly
lifting off and landing in one Asian city after another – of new

35
technologies of the “bright life” (of Japan’s consumption and increasingly
global participation in the production of consumer and electronic goods)
with the ideals of travel and development that unevenly panned out over
Taipei, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong. The advertisement’s “free tour” to
the “famous” cosmopolitan locations of the region play upon a desire for
an interconnected and progressing “Asia” visible and textually signalled
in images and discourses of gendered romance and travel.
Yet, published within a Taiwanese newspaper, this advertisement‘s
image of these ideally liked cosmopolitan centers is troubled by uneven
geometries of power – geometries that take on decidedly decolonizing
implications in the context of Japan’s place in relations among Tokyo,
Taipei and Hong Kong. Here, the relationship among the “postwar,” its
end, and Japan’s burgeoning consumerist rise in the early 1960s are
central to understanding the relationships among locations of the Asia-
Pacific and their refraction of such nacent “global” culture across the
region.
5
The dramatic rationalization of Tokyo’s urban façade, its rapid
consumption of electronic and consumer goods, and the establishment of
highway and bullet train infrastructure that accompanied preparations
for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics imposed new meaning on the previously
coined slogan, “the end of the postwar.” Insomuch as the term had
implied an unspoken imperial past, Japan’s popular and political
sentiments toward the region supplanted this disappearing “postwar”
with a politics and imaginary of international and urban development.

36
Japan’s efforts to show a new and “progressive” face to the world thus
had distinct implications for sentiments surrounding the region. Here, as
cultural memories of colonialism and imperialism – and the recognition of
their impact on Japan’s contemporary place in a largely decolonizing
region – were confounded in a different, if uncanny, embrace of Japan’s
developmental and consumerist role in the Asia-Pacific. Such competing
problems of (post)colonial and developmental history have afflicted many
places. In the 1970s, Henri Lefebvre was writing, in the context of
Western Europe, about the incipient loss of history that accompanied the
region’s increasing constitution in the globalizing technologies of media
and tourism. For him, such processes were less a simple homogenizing of
place, than a production of heterogeneous spatial practices.
6
Lefebvre’s
attention to the contexts and processes that situate postwar electronic
culture’s discursive links to claims of the “end of history,” however, take
on decidedly postcolonial implications in the context of Japan and its
relationship to Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the P.R.C.
This chapter argues that the links that these popular co-
productions construct between an imperial past and transnational future
is best understood as a relation of visibility and loss – a spectral quality
that lurks at the moment of connection across consumer culture. Its
analysis is thus situated at a matrix of relations across representations
(international romance, the locations and cities in which it is produced)
and media technologies and industries (between film and television, as

37
they are further negotiated among industries of Tokyo, Taipei and Hong
Kong). To this end, this chapter reads a wide range of consumerist
objects and discourses to surround these co-productions of the early
1960s – film imaginaries, advertisements, industrial strategies and
negotiations – as they attend to the production, promotional and
representational strategies that engendered them. First outlining the
relationship between transnational romance and travel that structure
these films and their promotion within the hauntings of past and present,
I will then place them within the broader industrial contexts and
technological imaginaries through which they traveled across the region.
Here, as these co-productions were linked with strategies against the
encroachment of television, they reveal the regional market place of this
period to be a double edged site, where a transnational future and
imperial past both reveal and occlude the other. This recognition of the
spectral underpinning of these co-productions will allow me to situate
their textual geographies, produced in close relationship to the aura of
emerging technologies, within a similar play of desire and loss. Arguing
that tensions of visuality can be revealed in a method that attends to the
multiple sites of production for these co-productions, each section
denotes a set of spatial practices that engender both visibility and
invisibility, connectivity and distance, as locations and industries across
Taipei, Tokyo and Hong Kong were negotiated in the tensions of
development and decolonization.

38

Night in Hong Kong: From International Romance to the Hauntings of
Travel

Co-productions mark a site of transference over which heterogeneous
concerns for image production interweave – a switching point of material
and imaginary practices that play out over multiple spatial arenas. The
co-productions of this chapter were produced within an uneven economy
of regional exchange across Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan – one that, in
its reliance upon location shooting, produced similar concerns for
exchange on the level of film representation.
7
As the 1966 film, Night in
Bangkok, was advertised as an experience “reminiscent” of the earlier
1961 Night in Hong Kong, it wistfully signaled an idealized model of
international romance and travel. Produced within a set of generic
conventions then also popularized in Hollywood’s frequent use of the
British colony as a backdrop,
8
this model featured a Japanese man and a
Chinese woman (sometimes a Sino-Japanese woman) in an impossible
romance set over jet-set ideals and locations. Night in Hong Kong
featured this encounter against cosmopolitan and developing locations of
the region – here, Tokyo, Hong Kong, rural Japan and Macau – in a
convergence of interest between Japanese studios (Toho) and
multinationals in Hong Kong engaged in Mandarin-language production
(Cathay). This intertwining of capital exchange and imaginary encounters
is a place for examining the intersection between relations of romance

39
and the hauntings of past and present particular to this context of the
Asia-Pacific.
Ads in Cathay’s promotional magazine, International Screen,
celebrated Night in Hong Kong as “a genuine 50-50 Sino-Japanese
effort.”
9
In comparison to other regional collaborations that had focused
on industry exchanges of stars and production staff, the agreement for
this “true” co-production presented a new model for collaboration on the
basis of equal capital – the financial support for its production and
distribution was evenly meted out between its collaborators. Yet the very
promotion of this equity – also mirrored in the ads of other Hong Kong
studio productions – also suggested the colony’s place in a system of
image production centered around a few (unevenly related) centers of
capital that contended with the multinational desires and terms for
exchange that were intensifying in the region. This agreement between
Tokyo and Hong Kong for Night in Hong Kong marked, in one sense, an
attempt at engaging and competing with the tactics that Hollywood
studios had modeled in the region. Hollywood’s collaboration with Asia
Pacific studios promoted such international collaboration as an ideal of
progress for regional industries. Yet as Tokyo and Hong Kong industries
attempted to produce a truly regional product, they also revealed the
contradictions of the “equity” that had been held up as an ideal of the
multinational production that was to construct the future of the region.
The agreement between Tokyo and Hong Kong for Night in Hong Kong

40
centered around Toho’s primary support for pre production and script
development, production and directing staff, as well as post production
(Tokyo boasted the only regional post production studio at the time).
Cathay, on the other hand, in addition to supporting location shooting in
Hong Kong and Macau and contributing its top star, Yau Min, was
responsible for distributing the film throughout the South East Asia
markets to which Japan did not have easy access in the early postwar
era.
10

The concerns for the region within this burgeoning postwar
multinational collaboration intersect with recent debates on how we
might approach, or even critique, the terms for development promoted
by such transnational configurations of capital. The advertisements for
this series of co-produced films, as they were distributed across not only
Taipei, but also Tokyo and Hong Kong, reflect not simply the intensified
relationship between (Americanist) consumer culture and everyday life in
the region, but also the ways in which each is differently positioned
within the “developing Asia” they configured. The logic of these
advertisements posited international romance as a switching point, a
shared space at which such uneven access to capital could be negotiated.
Ads in Taiwanese newspapers for Night in Hong Kong featured idealized
scenes of international romance (couples embracing or the face of the
female star) against iconically contrasting scenes of idyllic rural
landscapes and cosmopolitan backdrops of Tokyo’s highways and Hong

41
Kong’s rising cityscape. Harry Harootunian has argued for the importance
of locating critique “not inside or outside the ‘West’” (with its assumption
of West as a “dominant geographical concept structuring the non-
West”), but within an everyday life or experience closely related to the
“regime of the commodity form.”
11
At the heart of this global
“everydayness” lies “the figure of uneven development generated by
capitalism as it enters societies at different moments and different rates
of intensity.”
12
Indeed, its placement in Taiwan negotiated these ideals of
interchange within a matrix of competing modernities – Americanist
structures of consumer culture, set in a popular film commodity co-
produced between Hong Kong and its former colonizer of Japan.
Against these same ideal scenes of international romance and
cosmopolitan development, it is useful to observe how the ads for Night
in Hong Kong in Hong Kong and Tokyo situated the locations of these
films, as well. The uneven, even non-reciprocal ways of promoting and
constructing the region represented in these advertisements suggest the
instability of the cosmopolitan routes of travel represented in these co-
productions.
13
Hong Kong’s Chinese press promoted Night in Hong Kong
through the attraction of Tokyo and its sold out theaters. Yet these very
same scenes were deployed in Japanese newspapers to contrast the
“exotic” cosmopolitan landscapes of Hong Kong against the
“unprecedented [developing] scales” of a Tokyo rapidly restructuring on
the eve of the Olympic games.
14

42
The idealized tropes of international romance and travel reflected
in popular Asian co-productions of the early 1960s such as Night in Hong
Kong were similarly figured in the gendered bodies that traveled (or
were imagined to travel) its popular surfaces. These films imagined
largely unattainable consumerist lifestyles – airplanes, fashion, cars, and
the region’s nascent “jet-set” crowd – within a region negotiating cold
war geopolitical interests in the “far east” with the often uncanny
legacies of Japan’s place in its recent past. A 1961 review in the Japanese
Asahi newspaper compared the Japan/Hong Kong co-production, Night in
Hong Kong, with a Hollywood collaboration also produced in the British
colony around the same time, The World According to Suzie Wong.
15
The
relationship that Suzie Wong depicted between an American artist and
an optimistic local prostitute mapped a Hong Kong constructed through
“progressive” ideals of both classed and geographic mobility.
16
As this
man takes her away from Hong Kong poverty, the film worked to
promote Americanist development against all that would topple it in the
region – in the end, Suzy is saved from the squalid conditions of the Hong
Kong squatter settlements that had been built in the upsurge in
migration (and cold war refiguring of the region) following the “loss” of
the P.R.C. to the capitalist world.
Night in Hong Kong similarly entwines international romance with
the developmental promise that geographic mobility offered at this
moment. This co-production provides a hint of this even from the very

43
opening scenes of the film. Its male protagonist is a Japanese reporter
with easy access to the globe. A Pan-Am jet has just rerouted him to his
first stopover in Hong Kong – he had come from Africa and is on his way
to New York. Yet here – in and between the film’s locations of Tokyo and
Hong Kong, rural Japan and Macau – such (then new) technologies of
mobility are confounded in a particular historical problematic of
encounter in the region. The film had been reviewed in the Japanese
popular press as a “generic melodrama of love between a [Japanese]
reporter and a…[half Japanese/Chinese] girl.”
17
As he pursues a
relationship with this woman, his investigative skills take on a concern for
the past and its reconciliation. Here he searches and finds, in rural Japan,
the woman’s Japanese mother, who had earlier left her daughter behind
following Japan’s wartime defeat and retreat from mainland China.
Melodramatic representations of international romance have a
long precedence in Japan’s engagement with Asia – a legacy of
filmmaking that utilized regional locations and transnational romance as
a setting for an earlier mode of imperial relations. So-called
“continental” films (tairiku eiga) of the late 1930s and 1940s had utilized
the occupied landscapes of mainland China as a backdrop for
transnational romances that figured wartime relations through the
idealized configuration of a Japanese man and a Chinese woman. Films
such as China Nights (Shina no yoru/Shanghai zhi ye, 1940) featured the
iconic Li Xianglan, a.k.a. Ri Koran/Yamaguchi Yoshiko – a Japanese

44
national who played the role of a Chinese star in wartime and imperialist
films. In the middle of the 1940 film, she wanders over the desolate and
low bombed out ruins of Shanghai, remembering her old family life in a
flashback to an idyllic Chinese home and garden courtyard. This scene of
nostalgia for the continental landscape – figured in tropes of loss and
trauma – appears just before she gains participation into a new (implicitly
Pan-Asian) family. Here, she falls in love with a Japanese soldier living in
a “household” of Japanese engaged in the work of rebuilding and
civilizing China. Similar narrative strategies were uncannily linked to
Night in Hong Kong. As the Japanese-Chinese female protagonist (played
by Hong Kong star, Yau Min) returns to Tokyo and then to rural Japan to
reunite with her mother, a family “reunion” across Asia’s borders is
enabled through her romantic ties to a Japanese male with similar access
to the terms of mobility throughout the region. This time, however, it is
through a reporter’s access to the increasing global scales of information,
international travel and exchange.
The difficulties of these regional relations, their contradictions
smoothed over in narrative and editing conventions and linked in ideals
of consumer culture (not to mention ideals for international
understanding through an overcoming of the past) reveal an “Asia-
Pacific” constructed in complications of both past and present imperial
relations. Here, in and through popular products linked with Japan,
shifting engagement with cold war geopolitics in the region also enable

45
hauntings of all that would trouble its surface – specters not simply of the
past, but also cold war global relations. Night in Hong Kong ends with the
Japanese reporter dying in on assignment while covering tensions in Laos
– a longstanding “secret war” backed by the U.S. to contain communist
P.R.C. His half Chinese lover learns of the news via a telephone call to her
Hong Kong apartment, just as she is trying on her wedding dress. This
inversion of the typical wedding scene ending immediately falls to
ominous music and horrific cinematography, in a drastically low angled
shot and expressionist long shadows. It then culminates in the film’s final
moments as her despairing image is superimposed with a scene of her
lover running against bombs that erupt from the Laotian landscape.
Postcolonial theorist have frequently termed the unstable boundaries
between past and present as a “haunting” – what Harootunian has
phrased as the “uncanny, out of time, a ghostly repetition that erupts
from the surplus of what had been suppressed to trouble the stable
boundaries between past and present.”
18
If the surface of this popular
and commercial co-production can belie such a haunting, it is multiply
horrific, as the trauma of Americanist cold war presence in the region
masks overtones of Japan’s past imperialist aggression, even as it further
remains complicit in the contemporary cold war policies of containment in
the region.
19

Here, the region is revealed as a mobius strip of not simply the
past in the present, but also the specters of transnational trauma, as it is

46
indelibly intertwined with the locations of the region (here, Laos) that
similarly trouble the image of a progressing and developing Asia-Pacific.
Ideals of heteronormative romance play a central role in constructing
these links between the spatio-temporal contours of the region – not
only in the relations of international love that map these films, but also
the figure of the woman as she embodies the displacement belied by
such romantic ideals.
20
Indeed, such imperialist narratives have always
been linked to capitalist notions of progress. Popular conventions of the
early 1940s mapped the imperial landscapes linked to Japan’s “Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” along a vague trajectory of distance and
proximity to the aura of “civility” and “modernity” centered around
Japan as metropole. The landscapes – and routes of travel – that
provided the template for the romantic relations that emerged in the
regional collaborations of the early 1960s initiated by Night in Hong
Kong, on the other hand, negotiated Japan’s place in the idealizations
that accompanied the burgeoning postwar recovery and development of
these same cities across the region. As these co-productions, and the
“equity” through which they were to have been produced, met the
historical contradictions inherent to Japanese ideals of the “bright life” in
the region, they mapped an Asia-Pacific constructed through unevenly
developing and spectral geographies – as airplanes (and the couples they
carry) traveled between Tokyo and Hong Kong, and out to such places as
Taipei, Honolulu, Bangkok, or Kuala Lumpur.

47

Taiwan/Hong Kong as Market “Place”: Shifting Desires and Television
Strategy

The locations to which these films traveled across the Asia-Pacific mark a
particular set of spatio-temporal dyanamics and problems. Japanese
cinema has often been interpreted within a narrative of decline, even
disappearance over the course of the 1960s. In this account, Japanese
film acquiesced and fell to the globalizing pressures of consumer culture
icons of the “bright life” that had gained strength over the course of the
decade – of television and accompanying new forms of entertainment.
Film audiences had been declining from the late 1950s against a growth
in leisure and tourist industries, and by 1961 were reported to have been
eclipsed by the sharp domestic rise in ownership of television sets. 1962
was the first year of industry-wide decline in Japanese film production.
For Japanese studios of the early 1960s, at the very least, the regional
locations of the co-productions of this chapter – co-productions such as
Night in Hong Kong or Night in Bangkok – marked sites of potential
transformation for its images across the globe. Yet regional markets and
the discourses that surrounded them also become a place for reading the
hauntings of history.
As geopolitical tensions rendered such national markets as
mainland China and South Korea off limits, networked negotiations

48
among Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tokyo served as a central linchpin
through which Japan’s popular film industries engaged an “Asia-Pacific” –
a region increasingly constructed through the stakes of multinational
capital and collaboration. The shifting relations that refigured the terms
for visuality and its production in media technologies across this network
confront us with a problem of space. Or, to be more precise, it confronts
us with a problem of the methodologies we use to interrogate space –
how we reveal its implications within the emerging terms of
multinational production at this moment. Arguments in the field of
cultural geography have recently insisted in “the necessity of rethinking
our sense of place in the context of the transformation and
destabilizations wrought both by the forces of economic globalization
and by the global media industries.”
21
In the face of narratives of film’s
“failure”/“disappearance“ (in relation to TV, and in relation to global or
geopolitical pressures), what this suggests is that we account for not only
practices that engender what is visually mapped but also what is not
within these terms for collaboration and exchange in the region.
22
It is
here, in an interrogation of the very terms that engender (or do not
engender) visibility that the past haunts the transactions over capital and
its commodities, allowing us to address the spectral terms through which
decolonization works in tandem with the increasingly transnational ideals
of the region.

49
Interrogating the Taiwan-Hong Kong market for Japan, as gleaned
in Japanese studio film annuals, is one way to approach these concerns
for the rise and fall, success or failure of media markets within the
decolonizing concerns that haunted Japanese and Chinese language
media collaborations in the early 1960s. Taiwan marks a particularly
difficult, as well as illustrative, site of negotiation within the
multinational desires that worked across regional media at this moment
– particularly as it relates to cultural products linked to Japan. The
Japanese film industry’s “decline/disappearance” over the course of the
1960s was paralleled by a contested “loss” of its former colonial market
by the end of the same decade – such is the account of the film industry
annuals and records of the time.
23
While the former colony was a market
of great hope for Japanese studios throughout the 1950s, by the early
and mid 1960s protectionist market policies and geopolitical tensions
with the KMT government and its censors left the Japanese industry
frustrated in its immanent loss. Zheng Xiujuan has argued for the ways
in which Japan’s position as a former colonizer – and thus its import to
the island’s terms for decolonization – was displaced and negotiated in
the postwar era by the US/China cold war détente through which the
island was to negotiate its place in the globe. Even as Japanese products
retained a contested “ring of modernity” for much of the population, it
was filtered through and subsumed in the colluding modernities of U.S.
consumer culture and national policies of communist containment.
24
The

50
Japanese film industry’s interest in Taiwan also negotiated this shifting
postwar and cold war region, but inflectied this interest with nostalgia
for its former colonial market. Indeed, this sentiment was intertwined
with a concern for the open transnational markets deemed necessary for
Japan‘s popular film products to compete within the increasingly global
terms for consumer culture at the time.
Discussion of the Taipei market played a central role in industry
discourses over the survival of Tokyo’s popular film industries of the late
1950s and early 1960s. Here, concerns for free and “fair” access to
markets conceived as having cultural “affinities” with Japan interlinked
with Tokyo’s efforts to internationalize Japan’s product in the face of
domestic pressures from technologies linked to television. By 1962, long
standing debates over the specific qualities of film had increasingly
revolved around the question of TV. On the one hand, these debates
focused upon television as an aesthetic experience – its status as a new
technology of vision, as its small screen (yet rising ubiquity in the everyday
experience of the home) was to be offset by the width, color and
spectacle delivered by the more expansive scales of film. At the same
time, efforts to differentiate film as a medium within an intensified
consumer market crowded with new developments in leisure activities
also emphasized television’s status as an object that signaled a general
postwar reorganization of capital around consumption. Against the
increasing competition posed by other leisure industries over the course

51
of the late 1950s, film studio consortiums came together to form
committees on “television strategy” (terebi taisaku). By 1958, already
established concerns for Japanese film’s postwar international presence –
inaugurated in its 1953 success in European film festivals – took on new
significance, as transnational collaborations became one strategic tenet
for survival in this new “age of television.”
25

Taiwan’s central place within these annual industry reports on
“television strategy” suggest the region’s significance to Japan’s
navigation of both TV and film, as well as domestic and international
markets.
26
During the transition period of the late 50s/early 60s, as
industry efforts increasingly focused on the multinational terms for film
production emerging out of Hong Kong, the “Asia” that Tokyo’s studios
looked to expand into was configured even more complexly than
suggested in the discussion of co-productions with which I began this
chapter. Here, Hong Kong’s position as a media center of capital and
imaginary for Japanese film collaborations in the region was closely
intertwined with Japan studio’s difficult and ultimately unsuccessful
negotiations with Taiwan. These industry discourses refigure and readjust
the (largely visual and image based) geographies I’ve discussed thus far,
demanding our repainting and revising its contours, retrospectively, in a
more widely shifting geometry of power relations. Although Night in
Hong Kong – a Japan/Hong Kong co-production – had been produced in
1961, it wasn’t imported into Taiwan until 1963, when it was one of

52
thirty-four Japanese films allowed into the republic under its new quota
restrictions for imports of foreign films.
27
What for the Hong Kong studios
had been promoted as a 50/50 Hong Kong/Japan effort – a testament to
Hong Kong’s growing (and thus “equitable”) participation in
multinational production across the region – was, in the context of
Taiwan, part of heated debate over the very uneven terms of transfer
and travel for national cinema.
28
This co-production’s label as
“Japanese,” largely dictated by Japan’s contractual obligation to
distribute it to Taipei,
29
highlights not only the instability of national labels
in these contexts of collaboration and exchange, but also the very
geopolitical and national tensions that often interrupted such negotiation
– tensions only exacerbated as student led demonstrations and domestic
boycotts of Japanese film and cultural products responded to the
Japanese government’s cautious gestures toward closer alignment with
the P.R.C. that same year.
30
Indeed, such shifts had begun well before
1963. Japan had renewed its export of film to Taiwan in 1953, as part of
a broader set of trade agreements that were linked to the reopening of
post-occupation ties in the 1952 Japan/Taiwan Peace Treaty.
31
Studio
focus on Taiwan as a hub for Japanese popular film products in the region
continued throughout the decade, superceded only by efforts to break
into American and Okinawan markets. In 1957, Taiwan held the status as
the largest market in the region for Japanese film exports – a product of
industry focus on markets with linguistic or cultural “affinities” in the

53
first two decades following its colonial occupation of the island. This was
disrupted when Taiwan’s national KMT politics first began to restrict the
import of Japanese products as part of an effort to “resinicize” its
citizens.
32
By 1958, Hong Kong had taken Taiwan’s place as the biggest
importer of Japanese films in the South East Asia region.
The region that Tokyo’s studio and industrial desires thus
configured between Taiwan and Hong Kong was one in which hopes and
assumptions of cultural “affinity” worked in tandem with the ideals of
open and accessible markets deemed essential to multinational exchange
in the immediate postwar period. Even as hand wringing reports
repeatedly agonized over the “Taiwan problem” being “still” unresolved
in the rigidity of Taiwan government policies – a constant deferral of the
former colonial market‘s assumed domestic appetite for Japanese film –
annual industry reports continued to present Taiwan as the regional
market with the most potential well into the early 1960s. Further
restrictions on Japanese cinema in 1963, however, brought relations –
and the import of Japanese films into Taiwan – to a standstill, with film
studios threatening to pull their representatives out of Taipei.
Taiwanese theaters were reportedly only playing “older” Japanese films,
and gridlock in negotiations with KMT censors prevented even the films
that had been recently approved for import to be distributed in Taiwan.
33

Hong Kong, on the other hand, until now categorized as part of “South
East Asia” – if the most “open,” “developed” and thus accessible point of

54
it – was increasingly the recipient of industry-wide focus. By 1963,
industry reports highlighted Hong Kong as the more central location for
filmmaking. Its potential lay not simply in its status as a gateway for
Japanese studios into South East Asia, but also (perhaps more centrally)
in its featuring of large scale studios and “exotic” locations that inserted
themselves well into the then nascently multinational terms for film
production.
34

The discourses that mediated this shift in market forces from
Taiwan to Hong Kong underscore the ways in which developmentalist
ideals and decolonizing sentiments both hide and reveal the other,
working in tandem in postwar negotiations over industrial imaginings of
“Asia” and its locations. Japanese studio concerns for the region’s
promise of cultural proximity were precedented upon a colonial backdrop
– an aura of affinity between colonialism and globalization that Hong
Kong, in its particular status as simultaneously “both” was already
beginning to exemplify for world industries. The opening comment for
Night in Hong Kong – that the city was, for the Japanese protagonist, a
“place mixing old and new, east and west,” is only one symptom of this
sentiment. Against this, Taiwan was increasingly presented only as a cog
in such market ideals that “veiled [its] fulfillment of desire in perpetual
deference,”
35
as geopolitics linked to decolonization (and the nationalisms
that accompanied it) disrupted Tokyo’s studio appeals for “fair” trade. By
1966, despite repeated visits by both studio and government

55
representatives to Taipei, Taiwanese newspapers reported on the KMT’s
refusal, once again, to reconsider the quota limits it had decided upon
three years earlier.
36
The sense of frustration that colored studio reports
of the immanent “loss” of the Taiwan market were echoed in
sentiments over the occasional report of other formerly occupied and
decolonizing locations across the region. South Korea in particular was
similarly described as a market whose linguistic and cultural affinities
with Japan would translate into potentials of market success, “if only” its
restrictive national policies and protections would relax.
37

Here, in mainstream industry descriptions at the very least, Taiwan
is present only as a discourse of anticipation and desire. As its affinities
were naturalized under a discourse of the capitalist market place, it
deferred the implications (and very recognition) of its former colonial
status against the surface rhetoric of progress. It was these very “open
market” and multinational ideals that Hong Kong was increasingly
exemplifying for Japan over the course of the first few post war decades.
Even as the colony’s Mandarin language industries more successfully
focused their energies on Taiwan, as not only a site for location shooting
and market for its films, but also a broad source for the talent that came
to populate Hong Kong’s screens.
38

This brief industry account of shifting negotiations and desires over
Taiwan and Hong Kong is only one exemplary nexus over which Japan’s
difficult place in regional production is signaled. As it negotiated other

56
emerging forms of media technologies over the course of the 1960s, it is
a narrative (and decade) that is easily figured in “decline,” as Tokyo
studios also lost official access to the Taiwan market. In response to
Japan’s aligning itself with the U.S.’s own realignment of the region and
its official recognition of the mainland China government in the early
1970s, the KMT cut off cultural relations and ties with Japan.
39
Yet this
scenario is not simply about, as one scholar has phrased, “a short-lived
story that begins and ends in geopolitics.” Less a scenario of a rise or fall
in Taiwan/Japan or Hong Kong/Japan relations, it is more a matrix for
interrogating Japan’s place against a network of Chinese language media
practices – a place for examining the region’s shifts and reconstitutions
that complicated, and even disrupted, emerging multinational concerns
for commodity and capital. Such mapping foregrounds questions of
visibility and invisibility (what is seen/not seen, produced/not produced)
set in relief against these multiple locations of the Asia-Pacific as both an
imagined and market “place.”

Decolonizing Development: Textual Specters of the Commodified City

The sense of loss that surrounded Tokyo’s popular industry desires for
open access to its formerly occupied, now decolonizing markets belie its
complicity in discourses of progress and development. The reason I
introduced this essay with a discussion of the implications for Japan’s

57
renewed push for an emerging, no longer “postwar” world image in the
early 1960s, is that it avoids simply linking the “crisis” often associated
with this period of rapid development and the modernizing aura of
consumer goods with the material transformations of Tokyo that
accompanied this period of economic rise. Rather, it also embeds Tokyo’s
intensified relationship with capital within the geopolitical ties to the
region that were simultaneously being established at the time.
40
In this
linking lies the city’s inverted relationship to what Rajeev S. Patke has
called the double-edged nature of the postcolonial city. Inherently
constructed in a desire for progress, its very “experience,” negotiated
through traces of past and present trauma, simultaneously “brings about
the disillusionment latent” to its promise.
41
The textual geographies of
the co-productions inspired by Night in Hong Kong address the
simultaneous promise and problem of mobility and its experience, as
bodies are imagined in transit across icons of the consumerist city in the
Asia-Pacific. Here, emerging technologies act as a point of contact and
transfer – the site at which both development and decolonization erupt
at Japan’s negotiation of the region, where loss is figured at the very
promise (and nostalgia) for a connected future.
In these films embodied terms for connectivity (or its lack),
concerns for the past are figured as acts of memory – tropes that
themselves, in their electronic mediation, can both reveal and occlude the
difficulties of its imperial past and transnational future. The 1966 co-

58
production first advertised at the epigraph for this chapter, Night in
Bangkok, features a scene of “return” to Taiwan. The main Japanese
character – a medical researcher flying from Tokyo to Bangkok, toward a
future dedicated to finding a cure for a South East Asian disease – had
rerouted his stopover in Hong Kong to meet his Thai Chinese lover, who
herself has just left Tokyo for Taipei. It is thus for him a journey of desire
that is consummated in their first moonlit kiss. It is also, as we discover
on his plane ride there, and as we are reminded during the couple’s
romantic stroll through a park in Taipei, a travel of return. The now
orphan fondly remembers walking through this very path with his family
when the then Japanese colony had been his boyhood home.
Harootunian, in a different political context, has suggested that the
“postcolonial” is most productively a problem of memory – less an act of
locating that original and traumatic moment of loss, it rather demands
our attendance to its mediation through the concerns and commodities
of the present.
42
This recollection and recognition of a Taipei park – and
the possibility that he had then crossed paths with his romantic partner –
is less a contemporary engagement with the decolonizing terms that
constructed Japan’s place in the region. Rather, it defers the traumas of
an imperial past (and transnational present) in not only the narrative
hope of romance, but also, as Kaplan has elsewhere argued, the
conflation of multiple forms of travel – of “exile, expatriation, and
tourism in the representational practice of cultural production.”
43

59
As material locations of Taipei are mediated through tropes of
memory and media, this slippage toward nostalgia is also embedded in a
narrative progress toward development. This protagonist is, after all,
ultimately on his way to a life dedicated to transforming the region from
a Bangkok-based research center for disease prevention. In the context
of the popular regional co-productions of this essay, modes of both
displacement and mobility are based in a burgeoning professional class in
transit. Night in Bangkok’s depiction of (post/de) colonial return is based
on the protagonist’s access to the technologies of travel – not simply to
the ability to purchase an airplane ticket, but also to a democratized
horizon of possibility for connecting across (even “overcoming”) ruptures
that structure the uneven links between past and present, here and
there. While the women of these romantic relationships are often
female doctors and high class students with diasporic links to Chinese
communities across the Asia-Pacific, this Japanese man often enters the
terms of mobility in the region slightly differently, through his middle
class profession.
44
Sometimes a journalist or a detective or a doctor, he is
also a businessman – an embodiment of the cosmopolitan (read, Tokyo)
lifestyles that new late capital technologies for living could then provide.
In the cultural context of the region, however, such an embodied form of
mobility could also be utilized to invert and transform the traces of a
colonial past that might otherwise imbue the landscapes to which he
travels. Less overtly concerned with its ruin, it is an image through which

60
one could now praise oneself in its (re)development. The ambivalent
sense of loss that pervaded even such idealized forms of travel are here
revealed in “uneven overlap” with the decolonizing experiences that also
structure its spaces of production.
45

The mapping of the region produced in these co-productions’
engagement across these similarly idealized icons of the Asian city is thus
a (here, textual) structure that relies upon “a complicated tension
between space and time,” displaying momentary refractions of
contradiction to its sentiment of progress.
46
Such landscapes are often
“traditional” (and most often Chinese) gardens figured simultaneously as
a timeless site of home and the uncertain possibilities of romance. Night
in Bangkok’s Taipei is largely filtered through the protagonist’s visits to
the richly furbished home of his lover’s ancient uncle. This unspoiled and
unchanging “Chinese” reprieve is just as often occupied by Macau – a
multiply figured location of nostalgia even farther removed from the
modern trappings of capital.
47
In Night in Hong Kong and the
Cathay/Toho co-production to follow it, Star of Hong Kong, Macau is also
a location of ruins, similarly caught in a bind of remove and proximity to
the region’s changing transnational terms. Night in Hong Kong
reformulated the ruins of Macau’s famous St. Paul Cathedral as a site of
tourism, as its Japanese protagonist arranges his companions before its
crumbling stone facade for a posed photograph. It had been built by
Jesuits in the sixteenth century as one of the first European constructions

61
along the Pacific. Now an iconic symbol of the (Portugese) colonial
outpost – indeed, its location was central to advertisements for the film
in the Hong Kong promotional press – the ruin’s intricate carvings had
also, as these particular (textual) tourists learn, been crafted by the
technologies of Japanese Jesuit monks. Here, in popular film’s mediation
of tourism, is a complicated tension among a range of implications for
travel across the Asia-Pacific, as it conflates terms particular to mobility in
the mid twentieth century – multinational capital’s entwining with
decolonization – in traces of pre-colonial travel, exile and displacement.
The experience of mobility engendered over these co-produced
landscapes, situated at a nexus between their occupied links to Japanese
empire and their (no less colonially inflected) “transnational present,” is
thus one that treats the region’s cosmopolitan construction in
multinational capital as simultaneously “rune and ruin.”
48
It is seeped in
the loss, decay and even disillusionment that imbued the optimistic aura
of progress that surrounded new electronic technologies and their
development. Night in Hong Kong features the idyllic hills above the ruins
of Macau as a site of impossible romance, where the woman from Hong
Kong runs away, convinced that no relationship, however romantic, could
bridge the impossible ruptures of history that still trouble interactions
between Japan and China. Yet the couple meet at the beginning of the
following co-production, Star of Hong Kong through the (albeit unstable)
promise of new technologies – Japanese consumer products in specific –

62
for connecting across cultural and national borders. As she returns a
broken Sony transistor radio to its main Hong Kong store to be repaired,
mistaking the Japanese protagonist (a journalist) for a shop
representative, lines of transistor television sets and the latest electronic
products to come out of Japan are set up on background shelves against
a hint of the colony’s most trendy and fashionable district of Shim Tsa
Tsui through the entryway.
A wide range of desire is figured in this concern for technology –
for the consumer object, the modern “cosmopolitan” lifestyle into which
it allows entry, for romance, for the connectivity it implies. But
technology is also, at the same time, the very site at which such desires
for progress and proximity display the most difficulty. As this scene – and
a following one, as he returns the radio to her apartment – centers
around the question of responsibility for the radio‘s broken down state
(was the Japanese product always already so?), this consumer object is
imbued with the “crisis” that is often accompanyies pushes for
development.
49

This new technology – the very object and ideal to which the
“new” image of the nation could link itself – is thus here constructed as
ambivalent, as the promise of this romantic encounter is negotiated
against the possibility of its very disruption and disillusionment. The 1965
co-production, White Rose of Hong Kong sets its couple in a romantic
scene on the balcony of a Hong Kong mansion interrupted by the distant

63
sound of a jet airplane – a faint roar made uncanny in the poetic and
melancholic exchange it inspires. Once he boards that plane (and he will
leave soon), he will never return. The Chinese woman‘s sighing response
is that she, too, will never again set foot on an airplane to return to
Japan. This moment occurs near the end of a narrative that had shifted
back and forth between Hong Kong and Tokyo, tracing routes for drug
smuggling that link the two cosmopolitan centers to the rest of the
region. In this scene, and in the sound of the jet airplane, the impossibility
of international romance – elsewhere made difficult in (history laden)
concerns for nation and geopolitics – signal disillusionment toward the
promise held by new electronic technologies for connecting people across
global distances. Mobility thus becomes melancholic, as this future is
deferred in the uneven development that continued to trouble Japan’s
emerging image of the early 1960s. This image was, to be sure, closely
linked to preparations that accompanied the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Yet
Tokyo’s infrastructure was to be transformed not only through consumer
and electronic goods, but also through the connectivity that television’s
new satellite links would engender, as it broadcast Japan (and its global
event) to the rest of the world.
The televisual has, as Roand Dienst has also argued, frequently
been ideally figured as “always, already the conceptual ‘outside of
cinema’” – a technology of mobility that signals instantaneous
transmission and the abolition of distance.
50
Yet the ideals that

64
frequently supported such a divide between these media also confront
Japan’s own uncertain place in these shifting terms for cultural
production.
51
While Japanese periodicals of the early 1960s generally
celebrated the new “satellite era” as a moment that promised Japan’s
incorporation into a “new age” of global economy and culture,
52
this was
also accompanied by the occasional critique of the contradictions inherent
to this optimism. A February 1963 commentary in the film and (then)
television periodical, Kinema Junpo, reflected upon the state of television
in 1962 against a picture of the first telstar satellite that had been
launched by the U.S. amidst much fanfare and promise for global
connectivity. At the time of this article’s publication, Japan’s participation
in this emerging global ideal was still stuck in industry negotiation and
planning – the first successful trans-Pacific satellite feed wouldn’t link up
until several months later. Even as Japanese industrialists were anxiously
anticipating the 1964 Olympic moment, when the whole world would
watch Japan’s global event through the live connection of satellite, this
article reminded its readers of the wide gaps that remained between
everyday life and advertisements promoting (Americanist) ideals of
television. Against their promise of seemingly unlimited access to the
world through the choice afforded by twelve channels, the age of “one
home two television sets” had not yet arrived for Japan, as it faced the
inhibiting economic and technological scale necessary for TV’s complete
feed around the world, much less Japan’s participation in it. The global

65
aura of the telstar image remained only a potential promise that
lingered, ever deferred against an experience of uneven access to the
capital that structured it.
53

In the context of co-productions such as Night in Hong Kong, Star of
Hong Kong, and White Rose of Hong Kong, film itself, in its interface with
regional locations simultaneously constructed through traces of the past
and the aura of emerging technologies, reveals the difficulties of the
ideals of mobility that were popularly linked with television at this
moment.
54
Here, as the city (and this cosmopolitan version of the region)
is constructed through commodity and electronic culture – transistor
television sets, portable radios, jet airplanes, cars, and fashion – its
surfaces are constantly troubled by the uneven overlaps of decolonization
and development that negotiated Japan’s place in the region. The 1966
Night in Bangkok ends as its Japanese protagonist watches his former
Chinese beloved marry the future leader of Thailand on a black and
white television screen. He then suddenly drives off in (of course) a
fashionable sports car. As he faces forward toward the viewer from
behind the wheel, he looks ahead to a future of continued participation –
his resolve strengthened through the romance he had just sacrificed – in
the development and medical health of this Southeast Asian nation. His
journey had begun in a Tokyo, and Japan, that looked to the rest of Asia
as a site in need of the technical and medical training his education had
afforded him – and as a landscape over which to discover and establish a

66
new vision of his place in the world. In between this journey from Tokyo
to Bangkok, however, lies the specter of Taipei – and the Hong Kong
from which he had diverted his Pan Am stopover to the island. Against his
new resolve that might seem to overcome this reprieve’s promise of
romance across the region, memories of these locations remain a
lingering reminder of the sentiment that continues, in moments, to
structure its landscapes.
It is here where the very surface of Tokyo, in its entwining with
other locations throughout the region, becomes implicated in these
difficulties of mobility and development. The city hints – though only
through moments of memory – to the trauma and displacement belied
by such narratives of colonial return and its overcoming. White Rose of
Hong Kong presents Tokyo itself as a site of decolonization.
55
Accessed as
“an archive of involuntary memory,” its consumer goods and developed
spaces are navigated through traces of past and present trauma.
56
The
1965 co-production, once again, depicts a Japanese detective
investigating a multinational drug smuggling ring that utilized Japanese
businesses as fronts for illegal import into Tokyo via Hong Kong. In
between these narrative routes are long suppressed international family
secrets that can only play out and be revealed over the surface
infrastructure of the two cities. Against a wide picture window displaying
a distant Tokyo cityscape hued in the oranges and reds of a sunset (the
Tokyo Tower in the distance), the woman from Hong Kong anguishedly

67
reveals her family’s dark secret. Her father had been married to a
Japanese woman during the war, who had afterwards returned to Japan
alone with their son. This Hong Kong woman’s now half-brother was
thus left searching for an identity. And he never finds it, as he is shot
dead in the streets of Hong Kong for his links to the multinational gang,
never to return to the Japan that had rejected him.
These familial legacies of a wartime past – or, rather, the
aftermath of dealing with them as they are worked out in an increasingly
“global” present – are also played out over Tokyo’s new highway system,
modern hotels, jazz, and the wide and futuristic Olympic park that had
been an iconic hub for the rapid restructuring of the city in the early
1960s. Against the spaces of development – of the uneven and yet
interconnected surfaces of Hong Kong, Tokyo even Taipei – that are
central to these films, “the hallucinatory element discovered by Benjamin
in the idea of a planned city” is given a decolonizing twist.
57

As White
Rose of Hong Kong suggests, such surfaces are sites deferred, not always
readily admitting to their links to other locations that embed them in an
“Asia” constructed in difficulty. White Rose of Hong Kong, textually set
in negotiation over Hong Kong and Tokyo, was, in the advertisements
linked to Japan, a Japan/Taiwan co-production – what for Hong Kong
would instead be promoted as a three way, Hong Kong/Taiwan/Tokyo
collaboration. Here, the ideological negotiations of “national” categories
are rendered just as unstable as the links among these regional locations.

68

Chapter One Conclusion

The “Asia-Pacific” constructed throughout this essay is a region and
geography structured in fragments – refractions and multiply located
takes on a brief, short lived configuration of Japanese and Chinese
language media collaborations. Other engagements throughout the
1960s were concerned, for example, with an exchange of stars or staff –
the often cited loaning out of Japanese directors like Inoue Umetsugu to
Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers to help “modernize” and “rationalize” their
product is only one example of this. By the early 1970s, Japanese film’s
tenuous links to transnational markets across the region negotiated a
different relationship with media technologies – new configurations of
television and animation that were increasingly a focus for export, even
as Hong Kong’s Run Run Shaw shifted his capital interests to the colony’s
domestic television industry. Yet in these co-productions’ particular
engagement with emerging terms of consumer culture and new media
technologies in the first half of the 1960s, they belied the unevenness
inherent to their ideals – not simply of television’s promise of global
connectivity, but also the promise that co-productions offered for equity
and cooperation across the scales of multinational capital.
I began this chapter by linking advertisements for film’s
cosmopolitan intersection with mobility – with tourism and technology –

69
across the region with concerns for the production of location. For
philosophers of space such as Lefebvre, such commodity forms (as a sign
of increasingly “globalized” experience) signal less a simple
homogenization of place, than a production of heterogeneous and
concrete spatial practices, each historically situated and at different and
varied distances from global capital. The range of desires, experiences
and relationships that navigated and produced (or did not produce) these
co-productions and their locations throughout this chapter underscore an
underlying concern of transnational exchange – the problem of
reciprocity. As the couple of White Rose of Hong Kong remain separated
by the sound of a jet airplane – the very object that was to connect them
in a new “global” age for travel and mobility – commodity promotions of
proximity and reciprocity remain ideals to be deconstructed. These
concerns are also important to the structure of this chapter. In its brief
takes on multiple categories of production – ads for international
romance and its locations, market desires, and narrative‘s grounding in
urban and international development – it reveals a network of spatial
practices that, rather than simply responding to one another, speak (or
do not speak) dialogically across the “power matrixes” that construct
them.
Yet these co-produced intersections are not simply dialogic, but
also spectral – a matrix of decolonization and cold war multinationalism
that intersect and interrupt their popular surfaces. Here, past and

70
present are simultaneously produced, often in fragmented eruptions of
memory, across the uneven geography of an “Asia,” and Tokyo within it,
increasingly constructed in intensified relationship to the commodity form
– what Harootunian has provocatively termed, “one of the principle
agencies of the production of historical formations.”
58

71
Chapter One Endnotes

1. Gina Marchetti has discussed at length the use of such scenes of
Hong Kong in the context of Hollywood narrative, as they “immediately
situat[ed] the stories within a world of both sampans and skyscrapers.
Here, Marchetti is describing the opening shots of two Hollywood films,
Love is a Many Splendoured Thing and The World According to Suzy
Wong. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and
Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 110.

2. Other films of this series include Three Gentlemen from Tokyo
(Shachô yôkôki/San shenshi yanyu 1962) and Tokyo, Hong Kong, Hawaii
(Tokyo, Honkon, Honoruru/Xianggang, Dongjing, Xiaweiyi, 1963).

3. Indeed, Japanese studios’ establishment of the Asian Film
Festival (also in 1953, with significant support from Hong Kong) set a
similarly uneven stage for regional collaboration and competition against
Hollywood’s global tactics and the scales of production appearing in
European festivals.

4. Newspapers, films and other popular media in Taiwan and Hong
Kong at the time featured stories and scenes of the possibilities of air
travel, often linking female stars with inaugural flights to new routes and
destinations.

5. A wide range of scholarship has addressed this from a range of
perspectives. One example is Komori Yoichi’s critique of the postcolonial
within the context of Japan. See Komori Yôichi, Posuto koroniaru
(Postcolonial) (Tokyo: Iwanami Press, 2001).

6. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 1991).

7. My thanks to Anne Friedberg for her suggestion of this phrasing.

8. Films such as Love is a Many Splendoured Thing, for example, set
the spaces of Hong Kong against the impossible romance between an
American man and a Eurasian woman.

9. Guoji dianying (International Screen) 71: 22.

10. Eiga Nenkan: 1962 (Film Annual: 1962) (Tokyo: Jiji tsûshin sha,
1962), 116.

72

11. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural
Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 41.

12. Ibid. 57. This recognition of the shared yet uneven space
inflected through structures of global capital offers, for Harootunian, an
“occasion for dialogic encounter” between West (North America) and
East (Japan) of the postwar and interwar periods. Yet his challenge to
the positionality of Japan and its cultural products is perhaps even more
necessary within the context of the region.

13. Addressing earlier attempts toward a similarly short-lived
“Film Europe,” Tim Bergfelder has commented on the frequency with
which themes of travel also appeared in the films co-produced across
Europe in the 1920s and 30s. To the extent that they simultaneously
reflected themes and modes popularized by Hollywood, Bergfelder
suggests the ways in which such tropes of travel – particularly as they
were embedded in the gendered and exoticized body of Anna May Wong
– were differently inflected across particular discursive contexts of
Western Europe. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting the terms of
exoticism promulgated by Hollywood around her “Chinese” figure,
European discourses on Anna May Wong displayed a wide range of
differently located relationships to Hollywood capital and ideology,
reconfiguring her image in particular European (German, French, etc.)
inflections of “exoticism” – themselves influenced by a variety of
historical relationships to European colonialism and travel. Tim
Bergfelder, “Negotiating Exoticism: Hollywood, Film Europe and the
Cultural Reception of Anna May Wong,” in Film Europe and Film America:
Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-1939, eds. Andrew
Higson and Richard Maltby (Devon: Univerisity of Exeter Press, 1999),
312-324.

14. Asahi Shinbun (Asahi News), July 3, 1961.

15. “Honkon no yoru ôuke: Chûgokujin ga betahome, Sûjî Wan no
Sekai ijô, Nihon no keshiki ni me o hosomeru” (Night in Hong Kong’s
Good Reception: Chinese Praise More Highly than The World According to
Suzy Wong) Asahi shinbun (Asahi News), Oct. 8, 1961.

16. This is also reminiscent of what Klein has called “cold war
orientalism.” Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the
Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003).

73

17. “Shinsen na merodorama: Honkon no yoru (A Fresh New
Melodrama: Night in Hong Kong)” Asahi shinbun (Asahi News), July 10,
1961.

18. Harootunian, 49-50.

19. Nobori, Amiko. “Japan’s Reconciliation with Southeast Asia:
The Case of North Vietnam.” Asia Papers (June 2002),
http://www2.gwu.edu/~sigur/AsiaPapers/nobori-02.htm.

20. In later co-productions such as Star of Hong Kong (1962), the
female protagonist is fully Chinese; her status as an orphan who had lost
her parents in Japan’s previous war of aggression sheds doubts on the
couple’s repeatedly deferred ability to consummate such international
intimacy.

21. David Moreley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity,
(London: Routledge, 2000), 5.

22. Henri Lefebvre argues that social space is produced through
concrete and heterogeneous historical practices that constantly shift and
negotiate in and through constructions of global capital. While much
recent discussion on the links between geography and media
technologies are based in the belated “discovery” of Lefebvre by the
English language academy, one central argument often missed in his The
Production of Space is his suggestion that not all spatial practices are
actually visually “productive.” Not all “succeed” in the competing cultural
and economic powers they must negotiate. Lefebvre’s insight is not a
simple location of sites of “resistance” in a global economy – in the
context of Japan’s variously imperial links to the region, at any rate, this
would be misguided – but rather that he shifts our focus of analysis to the
multifaceted negotiation over space itself.

23. In addition to newspaper accounts, the main source for my
account in this section is the Eiga Nenkan/Film Annual – an annual bound
report published through a consortium of Japanese studio
representatives.

24. Zheng Xiujuan, “Taiwan no bunka shijô ni okeru “Nihon” no
rekishiteki kôchiku (The Historical Construction of Japan in Taiwan’s
Cultural Market),” Shisô 933 (2002): 268-288.

25. The periodical, Television Age/Terebi jidai began publishing in
Tokyo in the early 1960s.

74

26. Here, sections dedicated specifically to “Taiwan” as a central
location and market set apart from “South East Asia” (into which Hong
Kong was considered a primary gatekeeper).

27. Eiga Nenkan: 1965 (Film Annual: 1965) (Tokyo: Jiji tsûshin sha,
1965), 137.

28. Quotas that Japanese producers and distributors hotly disputed
as “unfair” against the wider access allowed to Hollywood and Hong
Kong cinema. Ibid, 380.

29. Eiga Nenkan: 1963 (Film Annual: 1963), (Tokyo: Jiji tsûshin sha,
1963), 102. Hong Kong was responsible for distributing to the rest of
Southeast Asia.

30. Zheng, 276.

31. Nihon eigashi taikan: eiga torai kara gendai made – 86 nenkan
no kiroku (Japanese Film Encyclopedia: From the Import of Film to the
Present: ’86 Annual Record), ed. Matsu’ura Kôzô (Tokyo: Bunka shuppan
kyoku, 1986), 150.

32. Zheng, 272.

33. Eiga nenkan: 1965, 380.

34. Eiga Nenkan: 1965, 379. Certainly, Hong Kong - Japan co-
productions had been made throughout the 1950s, as well. However,
here, I am talking about discourses of market desires that are
constructed in these film annual accounts – shiftings in Japanese studio
industrial market discourse toward the colony (and the region).

35. Rajeev S. Patke, “Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the
Postcolonial City,” in Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and
Global Processes, eds. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo (New
York: Routledge, 2003), 287-302. This quote is made in relation to
Benjamin’s notion of the city, and its relevance for the postcolonial city –
here, I assume such a statement could also be made more in general
about the notion of capital and modernity, as it confronts the context of
decolonization.

75

36. “Ripian shuru pei’e: chuli banfa jueding (Japanese Import
Quotas Decided Upon)” Zhongyang ribao (Zhongyang News), July 1, 1966.
There were, of course, conflicting views on what should be done about
film imports in Taiwan, as well. For example, a 1963 Lianhe News
editorial argued that such protectionist policies against Japanese film
really had little impact, good or bad, on the domestic film industry.
“Ripian bu jinkou: pianshang wu yinxiang (No Import of Japanese Films,
No Impact on the Film Market),” Lianhe bao (Lianhe News), June 12,
1963.

37. While there are a number of notable exceptions to this, (a
number of co-productions that were produced from the 1970s, for
example), such hopes for collaboration and exchange largely had to wait
until South Korea’s partial lifting of a ban on Japanese film products in
1998.

38. Yeh, Yueh-yu, “Taiwan: The Transnational Battlefield of Cathay
and Shaws,” The Cathay Story (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive,
2002), 142-149.

39. This cultural access didn’t officially return until the ROT’s lifting
of martial law in 1993.

40. For example, through such international development
organizations as JASCO.

41. Patke, 295, 288.

42. Harootunian, 53.

43. Caren Kaplan has argued Renato Resaldo’s often cited
distinction between “the common form of nostalgia linked to childhood
experiences and the cultural expression of dominance he terms
’imperialist nostalgia’” are centrally linked to questions of travel.
Revolving around a paradox – “somebody deliberately alters a form of
life and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to
the intervention” – its engenders particular formations of mobility that
require, as Caren Kaplan has also argued, “the conflation of exile,
expatriation, and tourism in the representational practices of cultural
production.” Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses
of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 34-35.

76

44. Mary Wong, “Women Who Cross Borders: MP & GI’s Modernity
Programme,” The Cathay Story (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive,
2002), 162-175. I would also comment here on the centrality of her
figure to discourses on “modernity” within Hong Kong cinema practice.

45. Patke, 389. Patke argues for “cities of contemporary Asia to
be sites for particular and uneven overlap between postmodern and
postcolonial space.”

46. Kaplan, 35.

47. In Night in Hong Kong, and the Cathay/Toho co-production to
follow it, Star of Hong Kong, this (ironically colonial) outpost is also a place
of unchanging time, where the Chinese woman retreats to her uncle’s
home to escape the stresses of her international love affair – though it is
never too far away, as he always manages to pursue her there.

48. Patke, 289.

49. This is reminiscent of a wide range of North American and
European theory that explore the “economic miracle as crisis” or
“modernization as crisis.” Patke phrases its relationship to postcolonial
contexts best, though: “The postcolonial experience brings out the
disillusionment latent in the myth of progress, just as the postmodern
brings out the phantasmal that is incipient to the myth of an evenly
distributed access to capital and goods in the era of globalization” (288).
Yet this crisis is further complicated as Hong Kong becomes the platform
through which the tensions linked with Japan’s emerging and new “post
postwar” image of development is negotiated.

50. Quoted in Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles:
Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002), 5.

51. This parallels the ideals inflected in the industry discourses of
the previous section of this chapter.

52. This frontier moment of technological mobility was promoted
in such periodicals as Television Age/Terebi jidai, for example.

53. Shiozawa Shigeru, “1962 nen terebikai kessan (An Account of
the 1962 Television World),” Kinema Junpo 2.2 (1963): 150-152. Note
that what the “world” means here was largely Western Europe and
North America.

77

54. Recently, there has been much academic talk of the culturally
“odorless” products that Japanese marketers and producers have
promoted throughout Asia (technologies, hardware, “cool” culture, etc.).
In the article cited in this chapter, Zheng suggests the ways in which
Japanese technologies of culture, particularly in the context of Taiwan,
are actually laden with historical contradictions, and argues for the
historical resonances that Japanese products have had and continue to
have in the context of Taiwan. Here, as this nascent moment displays
such concerns for technologies as ideology, I agree with Zheng.

55. “Through this period of almost two hundred years, the city has
first survived as the focal point for the interaction of empire and colony,
and then grown into the site for the interaction between globalization
and the new nation.” Patke, 290.

56. Patke, 292.

57. Patke, 291.

58. Harootunian, 53.

78
Chapter Two
Technology’s Place in P.R.C./Japan Co-productions:
Presence, Location and Memories of Displacement

In an era when internationalization of
images are progressing…collaboration
with Asian countries is especially
important. By holding this Asian Film
Festival through the co-production of
films…we would like to contribute to the
development and progress of the Asian
broadcasting culture.
NHK President, Asia Film
Festival ’95

Co-productions between industries in Japan and continental China
present a different, yet no less contested nexus for postwar Asia-Pacific
production. In this context of media collaboration, television technologies
have been foregrounded as a medium around which tension continues to
be constructed between the progress of development and the legacies of
the past. This chapter addresses this tension through a comparison of two
“exemplary” co-produced TV series produced in the decades to follow the
realignment of relations between Japan and the PRC. in the early 1970s.
It interrogates A Son of the Good Earth (Daichi no ko/Da di zhi zi) – a TV
series co-produced between Japan’s NHK (Japan Public Broadcasting) and
the PRC.’s CCTV (China Central Television) in 1995 – against the media
collaboration of the 1970s and 1980s it purports to address and
overcome. The Silk Road has long been touted as a landmark in

79
transnational cooperation, as the first true collaboration between NHK
and CCTV. It worked to (re)discover ancient trade route links between
Japan and China through years of collaboration across the PRC’s, until
then, impenetrable (to global capital at least) Western region in the late
1970s and early 1980s. Promoted as a more equitable transnational
exchange, A Son of the Good Earth nonetheless represented a more
obviously contested history of trans-regional encounter. Focusing on the
story of a war orphan, its narrative instead figures cold war displacement
and orphanage as a central trope for mobility and contact in the region.
Produced across the memory-laden geopolitics of PRC-Japan
relations, these two co-produced series are suggestive of the ways in
which the mobility of transnational media technologies is often entwined
with mobilizations of the past and its legacies. This chapter thus
interrogates co-productions between Japan and continental China in
relation to ideologies surrounding technology and its presence. A term
situated in a wide range of critical contexts, “presence” is useful in
approaching transnational co-productions, regardless of medium, within
which global media cultures meet the lingering legacies of the past.
Anglo-American television studies has recently begun to address
television as an apparatus of “travel and global mobility.”
1
Here,
“presence” has emerged as a term indicating transnational media’s
promise of global proximity and immediacy.
2
This ideal thus also, at the
same time, compensates for a temporal problem of global media – the

80
disjunctures of experience across transnational distances. In the context
of Japanese and P.R.C. co-productions of the past few decades,
promotions of its industries as emerging in a “progressing” and
increasingly “proximate” transnational arena of economic exchange have
often been produced with a simultaneous concern for memory – the
present’s own links, and even proximity to the specters of the past.

Attention to technology’s “presence” in the production of narratives
linking Japan and mainland China can similarly help us to unpack the
disjunctures between past and present often obfuscated by discourses
surrounding transnational collaboration.
What is significant here is the ways in which “positivistic…linear,
even developmental” discourses of media technology are often
foregrounded in promotions of regional co-productions.
3
The NHK
president’s comment quoted at the epigraph to this chapter suggests the
ways in which regional collaborations continue to be a locus for discourses
on the promise and problems of trans-regional exchange. Here, legacies
of imperial and cold war relations that have remained a sticking point for
negotiations across the Japan Sea are set against the region’s promise of
an increasingly “global” future. His comment was made upon the 1995
launch of the Asia Film Festival – a Tokyo based venue supported by NHK
and the Japan Foundation that has continued to support regional films
for transnational consumption. The “drumbeat of Asia” theme of the
’95 festival had been produced through a model of regional collaboration.

81
NHK was to provide capital for film projects and directors emerging from
the region’s participation in an age of “progress” in the
“internationalization of images.” Here, media collaborations were set
against the growing prominence of “Asia” as an economic entity – one
evidenced in intensified exchanges of regional travel, technology and
capital over the previous few decades. The model for collaboration
through which this festival was produced thus marked the importance of
“reacknowledg[ing]” and “deepening our understanding towards Asia”
at a moment when television’s multinational (and multimedia) reach
could contribute to, in his words, “the development and the progress of
Asian Broadcasting culture.”
4

A comparative look at A Son of the Good Earth and The Silk Road
allows us to instead interrogate the “desire for progress” through which
such regional collaborations have been promoted.
5
Together, these two
series provide a mutually enlightening space in which the images, and
technologies utilized to produce them, can be read to reveal the
difficulties and dynamics of this promotional ideal. While both have been,
to differing effects, promoted as transformative moments of
cooperation within a history of Sino-Japanese exchange, these two TV
collaborations are also linked in their shared concern for location
shooting. An imaginary enabled in collaboration among media
technologies and industries, location shooting is thus a productive place to
unpack the discourses of “presence” that mediate the relationships

82
(across Japan and China, past and present) negotiated in these co-
productions. Attention to debates surrounding media technologies that
have been mobilized around The Silk Road thus help us to unpack a model
through which ideologies of “presence” continue to construct recent Sino-
Japanese co-productions. Its entwining with regional contours of memory
and displacement help us to engage differently with this term as it has
emerged in global media studies. Indeed, further attention to the
gendered figures and narratives that have been linked to these locations
– here, exemplified in Son of the Good Earth’s foregrounding of the war
orphan – reveals the range of crises that can be occluded in this conflation
of space and time. “Presence” is thus a term for accounting for the
double-edged dynamics – as here imperial and cold war pasts are
subsumed in hopes for a multinational future – that often haunt
collaborations between industries in Japan and the PRC.

Technology’s Presence in Co-Production History: Comparisons Along The
Silk Road

Since the late 1970s, the dominant discourse that has surrounded Sino-
Japanese TV co-productions has been its signaling (or, alternatively,
failure to signal) increasingly close relations across the Japan Sea.
6
A
problem with this discourse is the ways in which it posits such production
in terms of two simple binaries – its overcoming the past, or its

83
overcoming transnational distance. A more nuanced approach would turn
our focus to the wider tensions and dynamics of power at play in their
construction as media products. One way of doing this is to parse out the
ideologies through which these collaborations were linked to promotions
of the advancing presence of media technologies over geographies of the
region. This link between continental locations and the progress of
television can be traced to one of the first co-productions between CCTV
and NHK to follow the realignment of relations between the two, The
Silk Road. Produced over several years of location shooting in mainland
China in the early 1980s, this documentary series worked to uncover the
PRC’s portion of the ancient trade route through close collaboration
between the two stations. While only the NHK edit of this footage
engendered global distribution, it was widely hailed, as in the words of
one critic, as “the most successful Sino-Japanese cultural exchange in
postwar history” for its overcoming of heretofore limits of technology
and cold war geopolitics.
7
Yet, at the same time, this collaboration was
also contested – debated for the uneven visual terms through which it
depicted the western Chinese landscapes of the series. As The Silk Road
allows us to interrogate the problems of technology’s presence particular
to recent Japanese and Chinese co-productions, location shooting – its
technologies, image and discourses – mediates contradictions between
space and time, between the past and the present.

84
Since the realignment of Sino-Japanese relations in the 1970s, both
CCTV and NHK have embedded their participation in exchanges of media
in the frontiers promised by new technologies. For NHK in particular, the
production of The Silk Road continues to be touted as the culmination of
a series of celebrated moments for Japanese television’s “collaborative”
presence in – and thus mobility across – a P.R.C. landscape refigured in the
gradual breakup of the cold war. The series’ inauguration of new forms
of cooperation across PRC and Japanese television technologies have thus
been promoted as enabled by the opening of cold war links between the
two. The 1974-75 NHK special Legacy for a Future – a documentary that
traveled the globe to survey the state of preservation for the world’s
ancient cultural treasures – had requested, and been denied, permission
to film locations in what was then considered the “hinterlands” of
mainland China’s western interior.
8
After years of negotiation and
planning for The Silk Road, NHK’s official procurement of access to these
landscapes in 1979 set the stage for the station’s claim to overcoming
both technological and geopolitical difficulties to finally, as NHK continues
to phrase, “penetrate the remotest regions” of this ancient trade route.
It was a landmark achievement for NHK at a moment when the PRC was
“reopening” to transnational capital.
9

The iconic trailer for NHK’s global release of the series featured a
long camel caravan slowly trailing into a vast yellow desert landscape and
disappearing against a low, hazy sunset. Set against the haunting (and

85
then new age) synthesizer music of Kitaro, this image was, and continues
to be, central to promotions of the documentary series. For NHK, the
production behind these scenes had helped to “transform television” on
both a technological and geopolitical scale.
10
The “penetration” of the
region that was promoted around The Silk Road thus relied upon a
fetishization of media technologies, and the ways in which they enabled
new ways of viewing, even engaging with, the region. On the one hand,
promotions set up these technologies as uniquely able to reveal an
ancient past that lay in palimpsest below the landscapes of Western
China. Film, as opposed to video alone, had been deemed by TV producers
as the only shooting medium sufficient to capturing the PRC portion of
the geographic Silk Road. This choice did not simply advertise film’s visual
capacity – its (then) ability to better capture the subtle colors of China’s
wide western deserts. It also posited film as a medium particularly set to
reveal invisibilities – to capture traces of an earlier history of
transnational exchange embedded in these landscapes of camel
caravans.
11
Indeed, the aesthetic of the final edit of the series mirrored
this discourse, as the camera lingered statically over windswept scenes of
desolate ruins and desert dunes, as if its very presence would reveal the
traces of previous encounter over its surface.
Against the discovery of the (transnational) past and its traces that
was promised by this aesthetic choice in medium, it was its relationship to
advancements in TV technologies – their increased mobility, and thus

86
ability to support the remote location shooting required by the series –
that was central to the transformative claims of The Silk Road. It was only
through the refiguring of film within emerging, more “globally” mobile
technologies that this medium’s access to the distant landscapes of the
series was deemed possible. Press reports on The Silk Road highlighted its
inaugural use of a new, more immediate form of film processing that had
recently been developed by NHK, as film footage could now, for the “first
time,” be directly, from location, sent electronically across satellite links
to cosmopolitan centers such as Beijing or Tokyo.
12
In this sense, media
exchange and collaboration was touted as a platform for the region’s
advancement into a global arena of broadcasting.
13
Indeed, NHK
histories link the very inception of The Silk Road to negotiations arising
out of the station’s live satellite coverage of the first postwar visit to
Beijing by a Japanese prime minister in 1972.
14
Technological
advancement was thus the central means through which film could
“penetrate” a landscape that cold war geopolitics had deemed
inaccessible – beyond or even below – the reach of a burgeoning
multinational media culture.
The landscapes that were produced in these increasingly mobile
technologies, thus, mediate a temporal tension – between a desire for a
transnational past and a hope for a multinational future. Here, an
understanding of the ideologies of “presence” that can work to construct
media technologies and the images they produce is useful. In her

87
discussion of the visual and discursive terms of “presence” that often
accompany television in the age of satellite coverage, Lisa Parks has
argued for the importance of unpacking the particular temporality that is
often linked to media technologies when they are produced as global.
For the largely Euro-American contexts of her inquiry, claims for
television’s immediate mediation of world events and locations were
made through promotions of what she calls a “global now.” For Parks,
this imagined global presence of television can work to bind the world
together into one overarching present – one indistinguishable from
“Western discourses of modernization…which classified societies as
traditional or modern, called for urbanization and literacy in the
developing world, and envisioned mass media as agents of social and
economic change.”
15
Yet, as discourses surrounding such media products
as The Silk Road suggest, the temporalities that Parks insightfully links to
transnational production are less a discourse specific to the “West” per se
than one more broadly linked to ideals of global culture commonly linked
to media across the Asia Pacific.
In this context, however, the discourses of television technology
and its presence that surrounded the location shooting for The Silk Road
demand our also paying attention to the function of the “global then” –
this ancient transnational past of the region that The Silk Road tried to
uncover – that is subsumed within Parks’ notion of the “global now.” One
dominant way of interrogating the ideologies through which The Silk

88
Road visually captured the Western landscapes of China has been to look
for oppositional alternatives. Critique of the series and its production
within the mainstream Chinese press and critical community, for
example, centered on the very question of time. In preparation for the
series, three teams consisting of cinematographers from both CCTV and
NHK had traveled to China’s Western regions to shoot on location, with
each station reserving rights to edit this footage for their own markets.
Against this, and over the course of the production of the series, press
reports frequently featured accusations against the Japanese staff for
filming a “backward” or “old” China.
16
A typical description that
continues to be reproduced in Chinese language accounts of the
production of The Silk Road critiques NHK cinematographers’ preference
for shooting the setting sun. Indeed, this preference was to have later
been highlighted in NHK’s edit of the footage, as well as the
advertisements that NHK used to promote the series – the images of a
camel caravan disappearing against a desert landscape falling into a
fading sun.
17
According to the contrastive logic of this critique, Chinese
cinematographers were to have preferred to shoot a rising sun – an
image that was to have contained within it the future of the PRC.
Indeed, critical communities in the PRC took up these accounts of the
production of The Silk Road to debate the “realism” of the documentary
form, as “exotic” places of China were depicted for transnational
audiences. Here, the series’ frequent shooting the local color of China’s

89
Western and largely minority region was criticized for displaying China’s
landscapes as underdeveloped, backward and in the past.
18

Yet such binaried and culturalist debates over perceptions of
China’s place against the so-called “advancement” of global culture and
media that gravitated around The Silk Road tell us little about what is at
stake in the ideologies through which the global edit of the series was
promoted. They tell us little about what is obfuscated and made absent
from its foregrounding of what mobile media technologies could reveal.
What these debates instead tell us is the ways in which discourses
surrounding location shooting for this series – regardless of their place in
the PRC or Japan – attest to the ways in which the postwar mainland
Chinese landscape is often made visible in the “either/or” logic of
progress and development. As the NHK edit of the series oscillated
scenes of discovery of the ancient history of this trade route against
scenes of the “local color” of people now living along it, it promoted the
timeless quality of this ancient route – one that was conflated with the
equally timeless quality of the day to day lives of the peoples that
populated it at the time. Indeed, the voiceover narration’s conflation of
these two temporalities was the very means through which the
landscapes of the series were to have been linked to a cosmopolitan
viewer. Yet mainland critical comments are also, just as much, a reflection
of the ways in which minority landscapes of the PRC’s Western interior –
its landscape often no less exotic to cosmopolitan cultural critics in the

90
PRC – have been utilized within dominant Chinese discourses as a space
over which anxieties about mainland China’s uneven relationship to
global capital and the world has been worked through.
19

In the context of The Silk Road, focusing on the discourses
surrounding media technologies can better tell us of the stakes of this
temporality. What is thus a more productive object of our criticism is the
ways in which discourses on “timelessness” became the ideology of
presence for this series. Such an inquiry would bring to Parks’ notion of
the overarching present of “presence” – one indistinguishable from
“discourses of modernization which classified societies as traditional or
modern” – a recognition of the multiple valences of history and the past
that are subsumed within it.
20
NHK advertisments for its global release
themselves utilized The Silk Road’s opening scenery of the camel caravan
fading off into a desert sunset to promote the series as bringing the
“timelessness of [Western China’s] long lost trade routes” closer to urban
and modern TV viewers.
21
“Timelessness,” in a wide range of
publications linked to the series, thus worked as a kind of ideological and
aesthetic signal of television’s mobility across global and capital culture. It
was the very term through which television could bring these distant
landscapes in close proximity to viewers in cities such as Beijing or Tokyo
or New York.
22
On the one hand, this “timelessness” was thus entwined
in ideals of media technologies that situated China’s Western landscapes
within a scaling of access, dependent upon categories of development.

91
As this discourse set the landscapes of The Silk Road within a past that
could only be recovered in the advancement promised by media
technologies, media production was mobilized to mediate the uneven
relationship between cosmopolitan centers of China or Japan, and rural
or “third world” locations. At the same time, however, media
technologies – and the act of imagining them in a collaborative context –
also mediate other legacies of transregional encounter.
What is thus also important to this inquiry is being cognizant of the
histories of transnational encounter that undergird – and are often
obfuscated in – the ideals of proximity frequently mobilized by discourses
surrounding television technologies. For The Silk Road, the overarching
“timeless” temporality that was linked to the collaborative production of
media technologies incorporated into it a recreated transnational past.
Indeed, for NHK’s promotion of the series, this “timelessness” was to
have gradually revealed “how ancient Japan was influenced by the other
cultures along the Silk Road.”
23
As these ideals of mobility enabled by
technologies (and here their overcoming of geopolitical rifts) were linked
to a visual rhetoric that collapsed ethnographic travel with the discovery
of ancient history, they were thus produced with a particular (and
present) goal in mind. Conflated in the “timelessness” of The Silk Road is
not simply the unevenness of capital – the rhetorics of media “presence”
that naturalize another country’s location into the past, to tradition, etc.
Here, in the mediating presence of new technologies, contemporary

92
hopes for multinational exchange and production are also entwined with
a desire for recovering a past of transnational exchange. The encounters
that The Silk Road worked to uncover for the present, however,
sidestepped a more recent, and troubled regional dynamic. The
conflation of an ancient past terms for transnational exchange that of
today’s is a rhetoric that obfuscates more difficult realities – a more
recent past of imperial and cold war encounter.

Spatializing Narratives of Displacement: Relating Across the War Orphan

The problems of regional exchange both signaled and obfuscated in The
Silk Road have been touted as answered by more recent media
collaborations between Japan and the PRC. Produced a decade later, A
Son of the Good Earth, for example, engaged with a more contested
moment of encounter between Japan and mainland China. Featuring a
narrative of a war orphan, his representation was promoted as closely
linked to advances in modes of media collaboration. What this 1995 co-
production instead provides, however, is an arena for unpacking the ways
in which ideologies of presence continue to persist in trans-regional
collaborations. What has been repeatedly celebrated by the producers of
A Son of the Good Earth is its status not simply as a “collaboration,” but
rather as a “first” in a truly equal and even “cooperation.”
24
This was not
simply an exchange of actors or staff across transnational boundaries, nor

93
was it simply support for location shooting – there had been many such
examples in Sino-Japanese media. Rather, while The Silk Road had also
been produced by a multinational (and multilingual) cast and crew
comprised from both stations, A Son of the Good Earth’s financial
obligations were to be split evenly in half. This new mode of co-
production was thus to be a model for a future of more transnationally
“equitable” negotiations of capital.
25
Frequently set in flashbacks, this
series follows the life of its war orphan through the chaos immediately
following the end of the Pacific War, the upheaval and isolation of the
PRC’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1974), and the fits and starts of
development that was to follow the reengagement of continental China
to the multinational interests of Japan, and thus the world, in the 1970s
and 1980s. As the war orphan became the representative figure around
which discourses on media collaboration and co-production were set, he
thus negotiated these multinational ideals of Pan-Asian exchange against
a recollected past of cold war displacement.
Yet it is the very ideologies of memory through which A Son of the
Good Earth sets up its narrative that cue us into the dynamics of presence
that continue to construct the (here, representational) landscapes of the
region. The drama series begins as its protagonist suddenly wakes from a
dream. Against the faint yet idyllic memory of his childhood in a
settlement with his mother – a moment just before the hasty retreat of
the Japanese colonists from Manchuria at the end of the war had

94
orphaned him and his sister to China – his dreary surroundings remind
him that the year is 1966, and that he is still confined to a PRC work camp
for the affront of his Japanese ancestry against the isolationist decade of
the Cultural Revolution. Just before the drama’s epic music swells for the
opening credits, he peers through the slats of his cramped hut,
wondering, in voiceover, where his family might be located over the
mainland landscape revealed in the rising sun before him. Having begun
with a memory and quest for family, A Son of the Good Earth ends in
1985 with a choice – in which father, and thus which history/nation, will
the protagonist choose to locate his future? Having been abandoned on
the continent by Japan’s imperial aggression, and having struggled
through mainland China’s history to the point of its reengagement with
the capitalist world, will he return to Japan with his new-found Japanese
father? Or will he stay in his adopted China to build its future? In the end,
however, his decision attempts to sidestep this geopolitical choice. He is
neither Japanese nor Chinese, but will rather remain, as the title of the
drama suggests, a “son of the earth.”
Approaches in television studies are full of models for excavating
the psychic and gendered terms through which this largely father-son
melodrama is played out. Yet placement of such a drama within a trans-
regional arena demands that we also attend to these problems of
gender and family (and transnational melodrama in general) as a spatial
and temporal problem. Cultural critic Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has argued

95
that melodrama’s often-cited links to history have been lost as
“melodrama as a genre has, practically speaking, disappeared.”
26
Less a
claim for its disappearance as an aesthetic or commercial form, what
Yoshimoto instead deems missing is melodrama’s capacity for offering a
space for historical critique – for him, a consciousness of the
“contradiction between modernity and modernization” that had once
been located in the use of the popular genre within Japan before its
(filmic) “demise” in the development that ensued from the mid-1950s.
27

What is significant in this context is less the generic concerns of
melodrama itself than the spatio-temporal terms that undergird
Yoshimoto’s assertion about it – the ways in which this “disappearance”
of the genre points to the ways in which transnational mobility is linked
with the problem of memory often associated with media technologies.
Here, the loss of potential for reflection on the contradictions of
modernization within popular culture is entwined with the ways in which
everyday life has been recognized to be “deterritorialized” in its
intersection with global and consumer capital.
Indeed, this sense of loss – and the loss of memory’s potential in
particular – within this deterritorialization of everyday space has been a
critical concern over a wide range of locations in the Asia Pacific over the
past few decades. At the time of Yoshimoto’s writing in 1992, critics
were, in some cases critically and in others nostalgically, commenting
upon what it meant for Japan’s cultural landscape to have been

96
increasingly constructed through the seemingly globalizing structures of
consumer culture – what Kitada has linked to the “advertising society”
that emerged out of Tokyo’s intensified relationship to multinational
capital over the course of the previous decades.
28
Around the same time,
a set of mainland Chinese cultural critics was also beginning to voice what
was in the process of being “lost” in the PRC’s more recent opening of its
doors to global culture and capital. Against a 1980s cultural landscape
that was remembered as a time in which one could truly engage with the
“politics” of culture, the 1990s seemed, to many of these critics, a
popularized landscape in which the space for “humanist” (read,
“intellectual”) critique or reflection seemed nearly irrelevant to its
intensified capitalist construction for tourism, film or television.
The range of media discourses to surround the war orphan within
this co-production suggests the ways in which such arguments sidestep a
more nuanced engagement with the dynamics of what is actually
territorialized and produced in such intersections of media technologies
and what several critics have termed the “global popular.” My intention
here is not to redeem this representation of the war orphan, but rather
to adequately recognize the dynamics of what is being constructed in and
across it. This discourse of memory and its recuperation is less a way of
solving (or not solving) a problem of regional space, than an ideology
itself to be unpacked. Industry and popular press reports of viewership of
A Son of the Good Earth have, throughout its multiple broadcasts,

97
repeatedly positioned the series as connecting a “forgetful”
contemporary moment to the “realities” of a “tragic” past.
29
In a typical
account, NHK’s media magazine STERA touted this co-production’s war
orphan as a revival of one of the region’s “deepest scars.”
30
Here, the
war orphan was to have acted as an embodiment of the trauma,
constructed in the legacies of imperial and cold war relations, that
continued to disrupt a long established history of Sino-Japanese
exchange. The narrative of this series configured this scar in a continuous
crisis of displacement, as he is caught in between his tenuous links to two
families across the Japan Sea. This series is full of scenes of transnational
angst and reunion, repeated again and again over locations in a postwar
and developing China and Japan.
Yet to fully understand the significance (and problems) of media
products such as A Son of the Good Earth, we must understand this
representation in relation to its production contexts, as well. What is
significant here is the ways in which multiple spaces that worked to
produce A Son of the Good Earth – the narrative relations that were
negotiated in the war orphan, entwined with the series’ collaborative
terms for production – all converged to figure the mediation of the war
orphan as a switching point, a nexus at which disjunctures of the past are
conflated in the promising future of transnational media.
31
Within this co-
production, the war orphan’s embodiment of the legacies of the past
intersects with the intensifications of multinational production across

98
both Japan and the P.R.C. in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the war
orphan’s final decision that he is a “son of the earth” suggests, after all
that a consummation of such development is the ending toward which A
Son of the Good Earth works. In the wider context of the Asia-Pacific,
Rolando Tolantino has argued for the importance of the “migrant’s vital
emplacement” within the rise in multinational production that emerged
over the last few decades of the twentieth century.
32
For him, this figure,
and the “quest for home and family” often associated with it, mediates
the problems of the “transnation” – as identities are “imagined and
actualized elsewhere” at a moment in which “the nation is no longer
constitutable within the nation space.”
33
Bilateral agreements over war
orphans had been initiated between Japan and the P.R.C. in the 1970s, as
a central point of negotiation for the realignment of postwar relations
that had been initiated in the early 1970s. Having largely been forgotten
in the geopolitics that had structured the cold war Asia-Pacific, this
particular migrant – constructed in the legacies of Sino-Japanese relations
– thus returned as a site for not simply engaging with the past, but also,
and perhaps more overtly so, for reconstructing a future of transnational
contact.
In these ways, the war orphan literalizes an ideology of “presence”
for this regional co-production – one that conflates past (and troubled)
terms for exchange within the “global present” of “modernization”
promised by Lisa Parks’ notion of televisual presence. Here, the war

99
orphan embodies a paradoxical relation between space and time – one
that is mediated in the promise of transnational media and its
technologies. For A Son of the Good Earth, the mediation of these
valences of space and time across these straights have been located in
the promise, development and promotion of broadcast technologies. The
co-production’s 1995 depiction of the life of this war orphan renewed a
story through which NHK, for example, continues to promote itself as
having first broken in 1981. NHK had popularized images of the return
of the war orphan in a series of specials throughout the 1980s that
followed a number of orphans as they searched for their long-lost
relatives across Japan. Advertised as exemplifying the “best” of “what
TV can achieve,” NHK’s depiction of these war orphans set them against
a regional backdrop of emerging development.
34
Here, as Chinese war
orphans “now had arrived in Japan to search for relatives without the
faintest idea of who they might be,” their journey toward their links to
the past was set against a trajectory of opportunity promised by Japan’s
place in the region’s then (unevenly) developing landscapes – from China
to Japan, and from Japan’s rural to urban locations.
35
The reemergence
of the past into media’s present territorialization of the region thus
emerged not only in a realignment of geopolitics, but also the progress of
media systems and technologies.
In these hopeful statements on a future made possible in media
collaboration, this co-production thus intersects with the problems of

100
technology that have more widely emerged against television’s
encounter with the uneven terms for global exchange belied in these
statements. Indeed, concerns for televisual presence are nothing new to
discourses on technology in Japan. In one of the first (and few) Japanese
language journal issues to be devoted to the question of television,
Shimizu Kitaro wrote in 1958 of the medium’s enabling of “direct
presence” – the sense of proximity, even intimacy with events and
experiences beyond one’s particular location that was to have been
enabled by the televisual image.
36
In his concern for Japan’s particular
relationship to the expanding mobility then signaled by television,
Shimizu highlighted the specifically transnational disjunctures that under
gird electronic media’s terms for contact at this moment. On the one
hand, television’s expanding “presence” and potential enabling of
intensified proximity to other locations echoed contemporary euphoria
that looked to this (then) new medium as an object of global promise.
The U.S. launch of the telstar satellite in 1958, for example, was met with
excitement in popular and industrial periodicals of the time, as they
anticipated electronic media’s potential for facilitating Japan’s closer links
to a world that promised more “democratized” access to a global
modernity of progress, development and intensified exchange.
37
Yet
television’s global potential was also, for Shimizu, limited in the
contradictions of this idealized transnational arena.

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Shimizu’s interrogation of media technology’s problematic place
within ideals of mobility and global proximity focused upon Japan’s
uneven relationship to a cold war Americanist arena. Thus, he did not
address the legacies of the past that are simultaneously central to
understanding the regional significance of relationships between Japan
and such formerly imperial or occupied locations as Manchuria – the
locations over which much of A Son of the Good Earth, not to mention a
wide range of other recent collaborative productions, has been set. Yet
his unpacking of the conflations of space and time that often structure
the promise of technology’s transnational “presence” remains productive
– so long as it is expanded to factor in the specters of the past that are
often subsumed in such regional media products. Here, we must find
ways to recognize the ways in which the “global” promise of the region
and legacies of decolonization unevenly overlap over its locations.

A Son of the Good Earth and the Crisis of Location

The figure of the war orphan – and his links to the narrative geographies
of Son of the Good Earth – refracts the ideologies of technological
presence that had been established in the location shooting for such early
Sino-Japanese television co-productions as The Silk Road. Indeed, like
many recent PRC-Japan co-productions, promotions surrounding A Son of
the Good Earth also emphasized the importance of location shooting to
producing the narrative landscapes with which the war orphan was so

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closely linked. A central point of promotion for the co-production, for
example, was its one hundred twenty-eight days of location shooting –
and the series’ status as a televisual event set across major cities and
landscapes of mainland China.
38
Indeed, it was the very necessity of
engaging in location shooting to produce the landscapes of the series that
was to have enabled A Son of the Good Earth’s status as an
“advancement” in modes of collaborative media. Yet the discourses to
surround the locations of the 1995 co-production can also be a place for
reading the split image of this ideal – for its uneven overlap and
entwining of decolonization with development. Interrogating the
narrative landscapes of the series against the discourses that surrounded
its location shooting – the image in relation to the contexts through which
it was produced – is thus one way to shift our attention to what is
occluded in the “desire for progress” that continued to surround such
media collaboration.
39
Less about debates as to whether or not a co-
production such as A Son of the Good Earth signals a new mode of image
making, this juxtaposition between the image and its production is rather
a nexus for seeing the range of crises that can be subsumed within the
ideologies of presence that frequently surround Sino-Japanese media
collaborations.
Here, The Silk Road’s image of the camel caravan, disappearing
into an alternatively setting or rising sun, meets the final scene of A Son
of the Good Earth. As with co-productions before it, the visual terms of

103
the 1995 series is also heavily mediated through the concerns of location,
and the possibilities of mobility across it. As the war orphan chooses at
the end of the TV narrative that he is “a son of the earth,” his statement
is also set against a visual rhetoric of landscape. The war orphan has
traveled with his newfound Japanese father on a boat tour through the
Three Gorges area of the Yangtze River. This is the location where he
will make the final choice that the series, indeed its title, had set up for
him: After years of displacement, will he return to Japan with his
Japanese father? Or will he stay in China with his adopted family? The
orphan’s response, however, is suspended until the moment when he
(and the camera) can gaze out from the deck of the boat onto the lush
green slopes that angle up from both sides of the wide river. The vast
western deserts of The Silk Road had been seeped in discourses of
“timelessness” – an ideology of television’s presence that had conflated
hope for a multinational future with a desire to recover and “penetrate”
an ancient past of cross border exchange. A Son of the Good Earth’s use
of this (at first glance natural, lush and similarly vast) landscape before
him displays a similar spatio-temporal dynamic – this time seeming to
more overtly suggest, however, the uneven overlaps between
development and decolonization.
A Son of the Good Earth, and the war orphan’s relationship to this
landscape, is thus a place for reading a much wider geometry of what can
be obfuscated within the (progressive) ideologies of landscape and

104
location important to many recent Sino-Japanese co-productions. Against
the overarching ideologies of presence – the desires for progress and
modernization – that surrounded them, the competing temporalities
subsumed in the landscapes of A Son of the Good Earth can be made
visible in a juxtaposition between the narrative image and the material
contexts for its location shooting.
40
Many of the Chinese cities and
landscapes over which A Son of the Good Earth was shot were locations
that had once been occupied by the Japanese empire. In this context, an
understanding of how “presence” under girds this visual rhetoric might
be further helped by arguments for television’s organization around
“catastrophe” or “crisis.” Theorized in relation to U.S. television over a
decade ago, catastrophe is suggestive of the link between the promise of
technology and “its potential collapse” – the ever present possibility of
“the failure of technology and the resulting confrontation with death”
that are subsumed in such ideologies as presence, flow or global
exchange.
41

Indeed, it is at this nexus where these landscapes can also reveal
the potential “failure” and “collapse” of catastrophe that is often
subsumed within the progressive terms through which the series was
produced and promoted. The choice that the war orphan makes at the
end of the series – his decision that he is “a son of the earth” – is a choice
that emplaces his future in the progress of mainland China. Indeed, this
narrative moment’s production at the Three Gorges area of the Yangtze

105
river sets it against not only an imperial past, but also a landscape rapidly
disappearing in the PRC’s intersection with multinational development.
At the moment when production for A Son of the Good Earth began in
locations across the mainland China in 1994, construction began in the
Three Gorges area of the river for the largest scaled hydroelectric project
in the world. A half mile wide and over six hundred feet high, the Three
Gorges Dam holds the monumental (and controversial) intention of both
powering and symbolizing China’s central place in Asia, if not the world.
42

What has challenged the rhetoric of economic promise of the project,
however, is also the criticism that has surrounded its displacement of 1.2
billion people, as is to flood nearly four hundred miles of reservoir land by
2009.
43

The spatio-temporal tensions revealed in this interrogation of
media’s presence across this production and its locations – as well as the
crises that lie buried in them – also help us to read more adequately the
narrative stakes through which A Son of the Good Earth sets up its past
and future. Here, the drama’s narrative landscapes are set in interface
with a material location held in the ideologies of progress promised by
technologies of development. The very choice this war orphan makes in
this scene is one that looks to the future development of China. As such,
it similarly subsumes within it the potential for “collapse” and
disillusionment – it buries the catastrophe that might otherwise inflect
this landscape. Yet, even as the 1994 camera of this scene pans this

106
location, the narrative of A Son of the Good Earth places its desires for
development in nostalgia for the moment at which the drama ends in the
mid 1980s. Indeed, any dealing with the contemporary landscape of the
1990s is deferred and held in abeyance – set in the 1980s promise for the
mainland continent’s (then) multinational future to come.
44
Indeed, this
promise for economic development is also paralleled in hopes for media
development. The 1980s was a moment that looked hopefully toward a
future of increased multinational engagement – for the promise of the
PRC’s future in media industries and media collaborations. The Silk Road’s
production in the early to mid 1980s, for example, coincided with bilateral
agreements on co-productions made upon the PRC’s “opening” to the
capitalist world from the 1970s, paving the way for the official
establishment of co-production ties between mainland China and Japan
in 1984.
Here, relations of gender, and its intertwining with geography, can
also be a place for further reading the decolonizing terms that ideologies
of technology and progress occlude in these media landscapes. In tandem
with the central figure of the war orphan, A Son of the Good Earth is also
structured in another kind of mobility – the mobility of the businessman,
as he returns to mainland China. The opening sequence of the first
episode – following the war orphan’s looking out to the P.R.C. landscape,
wondering where his family is – soon cuts to his (forgotten) Japanese
father. Long an employee of the Toho steel industry, he sits on an

107
airplane on his way back to China to re-establish business ties, and to co-
produce the mainland’s first top grade steel factory. This is, in a way, a
postcolonial return, as he had been part of the capitalist enterprise on
the continent during and before the Pacific War. Ostensibly a return
imbued with melancholy and loss, it is also about, in the logic of colonial
nostalgia, Japan’s praising oneself in the continent’s “reconstruction.”
45

These two forms of masculine mobility meet midway through the
narrative of A Son of the Good Earth, and their intersection reinforces
the importance of being attentive to what lies buried in these media
landscapes. In her insightful introduction to imperial narrative, Anne
McClintock unpacks the gendered construction of an imperial map. In her
example, masculine journeys of discovery and profit are engaged over
the geographies of a map that traces the curves of the female body.
Follow her contours and you’ll get to the treasure.
46
At the intersection
of the war orphan’s walk toward a bright future and his father’s walk
toward reconstruction is also situated, or lies buried, the figure of a
woman. The war orphan finally meets his businessman father over the
body of the sister/daughter for whom they had both individually been
searching. A war orphan herself, she had long been lost to both of them.

But by the time the two men finally recognize each other, she had just
died – her identity embedded in the impoverished rural Chinese
landscape where she had been left behind.

In the context of Japan,
viewers generally understood this TV series to signal an overcoming of

108
the past, and a moving toward a future of increased exchange between
Japan and China.
47
To do this narratively, however, A Son of the Good
Earth has to (quite literally) bury the past. Bury the scars this woman
carries from her childhood, a faint reminder of the trauma of wartime
and imperial aggression. Memory, mediated by the technologies of this
drama, is more like forgetting. Just as with the significance of the Three
Gorges Dam to this series, the workings of gender here also work within
a logic of disappearance. In this case, the future of Asia lies in masculine
ties, technological and teleological ties, ties of presence.

Chapter Two Conclusion

Attention to discourses of TV technology and its presence – here by way
of the practices of location and location shooting – can be an act toward
recognizing not simply that we have a transnational past. But that, as
any location mired within the legacies of imperialization or
decolonization must come to terms with – that past always constructed
over the fractured overlaps between postmodern and postcolonial
experience. As these Sino-Japanese TV co-productions point toward the
ways in which mobilizations of the past are often confounded in the
ideals surrounding the mobility of TV, they suggest the ways in which the
pasts’ terms for transnational exchange are conflated with today’s hopes

109
for a transnational future in the region. And it is from there that we can
talk about what histories, and what locations get left out in the equation.

110
Chapter Two Endnotes

1. Mimi White, “Flows and Other Close Encounters with
Television,” in Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. Eds. Lisa Parks and
Shanti Kumar (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 107.

2. See, for example, Lisa Parks, “Our World, Satellite Televisuality,
and the Fantasy of Global Presence,” in Planet TV: A Global Television
Reader, eds. Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar (New York: New York
University Press, 2002).

3. Mark Williams, “History in a Flash: Notes on the Myth of TV
‘Liveness,’” in Collecting Visual Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines and Michael
Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 296.

4. Asian Film Festival ’95 (Tokyo: Bunshôdô: 1995), 1.

5. This is a term I coin in the introduction of this dissertation, based
in Rolando Tolantino’s argument that the Asia Pacific and its media is
constructed in a “drive for development and progress.” Rolando
Tolantino, “Introduction,” Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine
Film Cultures, ed. Rolando B. Tolantino (Manila: Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2000), xiii.

6. Silk Road’s production coincided with bilateral agreements on co-
productions made upon the P.R.C.’s “opening” to the capitalist world in
the 1970s and early 1980s. It is thus has been touted, and is easily read,
as paving the way for the official establishment of co-production ties
between mainland China and Japan in 1984.

7. Shiba Ryotaro, quoted in “The Silk Road,” 50 Years of NHK
Television: A Window on Japan and the World, ed. Ishimura Eijiro (Tokyo:
NHK, 2003), 20. Also, a similar discourse under girds the description of
the series in a recent reissue of the Silk Road DVD box set, as “the first
co-production of china Central TV and the outside world” to follow the
breakup of the cold war.

8. Note that this is the story one receives from NHK’s own
published histories. Nijusseiki hôsôshi 2 (History of Twentieth Century
Broadcasting) (Tokyo: NHK, 2001), 135.

9. “The Silk Road,” 50 Years of NHK Television: A Window on
Japan and the World, ed. Ishimura Eijiro (Tokyo: NHK, 2003), 20.

111

10. “Shiruku rôdo o sôkatsu suru (Summarizing the Silk Road),”
Hôsô bunka 35, no. 12 (1980): 9.

11. Ibid. 10.

12. “Gijutsu: Dai san no eizô shisutemu ga tônyû sareta
(Technology: Investing in the “Third Image” System),” Hôsô bunka 35,
no.12 (1980): 24. See also Nijusseiki hôsôshi 2 (History of Twentieth
Century Broadcasting 2) (Tokyo: NHK, 2001), 305.

13. According to NHK (promotional) histories, Silk Road was
predictive of a “new age” of Asia-Pacific television that would soon be
assured in NHK’s ownership and test of its first satellite in 1984. “A New
Age of Scale and Diversity” and “New Programs for Changing Times,” 50
Years of NHK Television, 18, 19.

14. “The Silk Road,” 50 Years of NHK Television, 20. This followed
Nixon’s visit several months earlier.

15. Lisa Parks, “Satellite Spectacular: Our World and the Fantasy of
Global Presence,” Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005), 23.

16. Zhongguo dianshi shi (History of Chinese Television), ed. Zheng
Tianzhi (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1997), 159.

17. Ibid.

18. Zhong guo jilupian fazhanshi (A History of the Development of
Chinese Documentary), ed. Fang Fang (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe,
2003), 313.

19. Indeed, the debates surrounding the films of Zhang Yimou in
the early 1990s within mainland China are also in some ways a reflection
of this discourse.

20. Lisa Parks, “Satellite Spectacular,” 23.

21. “The Silk Road,” 50 Years of NHK Television, 20.

22. Essays featured in a special issue of NHK’s media magazine
STERA devoted to Silk Road featured prominent film producers and critics
demonstrating the range of readings possible for this “timelessness.”
“Shiruku rôdo o sôkatsu suru” (Summarizing the Silk Road), Hôsô bunka
35.12 (1980): 9.

112

23. “The Silk Road,” 50 Years of NHK Television, 20.

24. Okazaki Sakae, Producer, NHK Enterprise 21, interview with
author, Tokyo, August 2004. A Son of the Good Earth was initiated by
NHK to be produced upon the event of the seventieth anniversary of
broadcasting in Japan – celebrations over which the conglomerate
highlighted its ever emerging global and technological reach. NHK
Nenkan: Radio and Television Yearbook ’96 (Tokyo: NHK, 1996): 109.
CCTV’s collaboration in the co-produced series also intersected with the
P.R.C. station’s own transformation into a multi-channel, multinational
platform.

25. Indeed, as was emphasized to me by the producer of the
program, there are two words for co-production in Japanese that
emphasize either its “even” exchange or “uneven” (in this case, NHK
dominated) exchange. A Son of the Good Earth was to be a rare example
of an even “kyô-dô seisaku.” This is a model that NHK strives for as an
institution, in its regional and culturalist mandates.

26. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Melodrama, Postmodernism, and
Japanese Cinema,” in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal
Dissanayake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121.

27. Ibid.

28. Kitada Akihiro, Hôkoku toshi: Sono tansei to shi (The Birth and
Death of the Public City) (Tokyo: Kôsaidô, 2002)

29. NHK audience interviews, made upon the rebroadcast of A Son
of the Good Earth (Tokyo: NHK, 2000). My thanks to Yumiko Shoji for
helping me to locate these materials.

30. “Nicchû kyôdô seisaku: Nokosareta ko to nokoshita chichi no
gendai shi chô daisaku dorama Daichi no ko (Sino-Japanese Co-
Production: the Large Scale Drama, A Son of the Good Earth and the
History of a Father and the Son He Left Behind),” STERA 823 (1995): 8.

31. Indeed, A Son of the Good Earth ‘s collaborative terms for
production were repeatedly promoted by its producers as, in the phrasing
of the Chinese director to sign onto this co-produced series with CCTV,
Pan Xiaoyang, “marking a first step toward a new kind of exchange
between China and Japan.” Asahi shinbun (Asahi News) September 8,
1994.

113

32. Rolando B. Tolantino, “Introduction,” Geopolitics of the Visible:
Essays on Philippine Film Cultures. (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University
Press, 2000), xvii.

33. Ibid.

34. “A New Age of Scale and Diversity,” 50 Years of NHK
Television, 18.

35. Ibid.

36. Shimizu Kitaro, “Terebijion jidai (Television Age),” Shisô
(November 1958), reproduced in Shisô 956 (2003): 8.

37. Regarding this, see my description of the following article at
the end of chapter one of this dissertation. Shiozawa Shigeru, “1962 nen
terebi kai kessan (Account of the 1962 Television World),” Kinema Junpô
2.2 (1963): 150-152.

38. Asahi Shinbun (Asahi News) April 23, 1994. See also: “Nicchû
kyôdô seisaku,” 8.

39. Once again, see my introduction for an explanation of this
term, “desire for progress,” as I adapt it from Rolando B. Tolantino’s
work.

40. This reading is informed by Michael Dear’s suggestion that the
interface between “geographies and technologies of seeing” is the
intersection where the meanings of place can be revealed, contested or
obscured. Michael Dear, “Film Architecture and Cityspace: The Politics of
Representation.” Quoted in Sarah Matheson, “Televising Toronto from
Hogtown to Megacity” (PhD diss, University of Southern California, 2003),
25.

41. Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics
of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1990), 229.

42. It also promises a (controversial) 18.2 gigawatts of power.

43. Dai Qing, The River Dragon has Come! The Three Gorges Dam
and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People, eds. John G.
Thibodeau and Philip B. Williams (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998).

114

44. Here, the ‘’crisis” that is often linked to economies of the
“economic miracle” – as landscapes are traumatically transformed
through forces of multinational capital – is reflected in media
technologies. Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality
and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002).

45. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of
Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 34-35.

46. Anne McClintock, “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of
Imperialism,” Imperial Leather (New York: Routledge, 1995), 21.

47. NHK audience interviews, made upon the rebroadcast of A Son
of the Good Earth (Tokyo: NHK, 2000). Similar audience responses may
be found in local newspapers: “Hôsô igi ôkî Daichi no Ko ni kandô
(Impressed by the Significant Broadcast of A Son of the Good Earth),”
Tokyo shinbun, December 27, 2000.

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Chapter Three
Co-Producing Cross-Border Action:
Technologies of Contact, Masculinity and the Asia-Pacific Border

It seems like the Japanese have lost
their interest in their own cities and
their own country…they seem to have
become numb…Taipei looks like Tokyo in
the 1960s and 70s. The people look
more alive, more human. Tokyo isn’t a
place you can stay... Everybody in Japan is
thinking, ‘there should be somewhere
we have to return.’
Miike Takashi, on his 1997
film, Rainy Dog

Cross-border action, a prominent genre within co-productions among
Japanese and Chinese language industries, is one place where not only
the promise but also the problems of regional production emerge –
across both postwar and contemporary contexts. On the one hand held in
advancing economic markets and media technologies, Asia Pacific
production, and production linked to Tokyo in particular, also hints at the
legacies of decolonization that remain in the region. The quote at the top
of this chapter was made in 1997 by Miike Takashi in an interview about
his Rainy Dog: Gokudo kuro shakai – a gangster road movie that travels
from Tokyo to Taipei, and was produced with Japanese and Taiwanese
capital and staff. His reading of this film demonstrates a problem
particular to Japan’s place in popular media in the Asia Pacific. Miike’s

116
view of 1990s Taipei through the lens of an impossible return to Tokyo’s
1960s past is indicative of a structure of seeing and feeling by which
Japanese popular culture has tended to look to other locations of East
and Southeast Asia. Already well critiqued, the sentiment of return that
it enables is linked to a geopolitical arena across which regional locations
look, imagine and produce over technological and economic disjuncture.
Yet for all its nostalgia, Miike’s reading of the links between the 1990s
and 1960s simultaneously refers to another moment of intensified
collaboration between Japanese and Chinese language contexts. The
1960s was a moment when “action” emerged in cross-border films
produced among Tokyo, Hong Kong and Taipei – as an arena frequently
gendered in a particular way, as unstable masculine bodies travel across
the borders of a cosmopolitan Asia-Pacific.
Not simply pointing to the existence of this collaborative history,
Miike’s quote should remind us of the importance of being attentive to
the spatio-temporal dynamics that construct regionally co-produced
action, as it is produced at a nexus of masculine bodies, media
technologies and an Asia Pacific constructed at the borders – at locations
of transit between Japan and Hong Kong, Taiwan, or (more recently) the
PRC. The “contact zone,” as a term, has emerged “as an attempt to
invoke the spatial, and temporal consequences of subjects previously
separated by geographic and historical disjunctures and whose
trajectories now intersect.”
1
“Contact zone,” for Japan’s place in Asia-

117
Pacific media co-productions, is a particular arena of multiplicity and
doubles. Taipei is to Tokyo is to Hong Kong not as some abstracted
postmodern convergence of location, but as a specific referent that
implies an imperial past and decolonizing present. It contains a long
legacy of Tokyo’s shifting relationship with other “emerging” locations of
the region. Kim Soyoung has argued that spaces of contact within the
non-West (for her, the interface of Korean action genres and the Asia-
Pacific) must be read with a “double consciousness” – with an eye toward
seeing what she terms the “haunting apparatus that plague the space
divided by the (former) colonizer and colonized.”
2
This haunting
structure, for Kim, marks the body in a specific way, as it resonates across
genre as a place of contact in the region. Here, masculine bodies are
traumatically marked in resonance with other action genres and locations
of the Asia-Pacific – from Japan’s blind swordsman, to Hong Kong’s one
armed swordsman, to South Korea’s one legged man.
The co-produced cross-border action films addressed in this chapter
– as they set their protagonists to traveling a cosmopolitan and cold war
region – suggest that these hauntings can be both revealed and
subsumed within particular production, representational or geopolitical
contexts. While both mark periods of intensified film and media
collaboration, the 1960s and 1990s also respectively coincide with
moments of rise and decline for Japan’s postwar place in the region.
While the 1990s emerged as a decade of economic recession for Japan

118
and (by the end of the decade) much of the Asia-Pacific, the 1960s has
been broadly characterized as a moment at the cusp of an economic
recovery and upturn. Critical geographers such as Doreen Massey have
argued for the ways in which gendered bodies, “are sites and expressions
of power relations” that are “spatially constructed…in and through
particular social spaces.”
3
In this more geographic understanding of the
body, masculine bodies are here constructed in relation to media spaces
that are continually in flux. Indeed, several scholars have talked of late of
how, from the 1960s, postwar and post-imperial memories were
gradually papered over by discourses of modernization, in the future
promised by Japan’s pending model of the economic miracle.

Yet this ever
subsuming of the past – in the case of co-produced action between Japan
and Chinese language industries, at the very least – are also confounded
in the hauntings that trouble regional media production.
The contact zone allows us to interrogate a cultural history of
cross-border co-productions in fragments, as they are produced at
different historical moments and across production, textual and
promotional contexts linked to Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong and (more
recently) the P.R.C. This chapter is thus structured as three short takes on
a wider field of co-produced action in the region, as it is produced at a
matrix of masculine bodies, media technologies and regional geography.
It focuses on two cases of action collaboratively produced between
Japanese and Chinese language industries in the early and mid 1960s –

119
the 1962 Taiwan-Japan co-production Storm Over Kinmen Bay, and the
1966 Hong Kong-Japan co-production Asiapol Secret Service – as well as
their legacies within collaborations linked to Miike Takashi in the 1990s.
The multiple timeframes and locations of this chapter require a bit of
multifaceted reading. On the one hand demonstrating how market and
technological desires have disempowered the hauntings of history that
continue to structure the region’s inequalities, it also demonstrates how
the masculine body works as a kind of contact zone, at different
moments revealing the ambiguities of the technological ideals within
Asia Pacific popular media culture. What these readings suggest is the
ways in which the masculine body, no less than the cross border co-
production in which it is produced, is doubly constructed. Confounded in a
simultaneous desire for travel and “return,” it is a bordered site at which
the hauntings of trauma across the region occur.

Geographies of Contact I: Genre, Technology and the Border

Cross-border action’s emergence as a co-produced genre among Japan,
Hong Kong and Taiwan in the early 1960s was set against a backdrop of
emerging film and media technologies, as they were negotiated across
these same locations. Occurring on different spatial registers, the
narratives of co-produced action converged with the ideals of mobility
that surrounded the film technologies that produced them, as they both
imagined a region produced in cross border contact and collaboration.

120
Action films mapped the Asia-Pacific through the possibilities of
masculine and technological mobility, as they featured stars from Japan,
Taiwan and Hong Kong in new modes of transport (the jet plane,
satellite, developmental ideals) across cosmopolitan locations of the Asia
Pacific. At the same time, discourses surrounding media technologies and
their development envisioned the region as an emerging arena for
transnational production. New widescreen film formats in particular –
and the forms of collaboration produced across them – were widely
promoted as a central palette for the larger scale of production required
for an “Asian” cinema to compete globally. The geographies produced in
this interface between action genres and new technologies suggest the
contradictory terms for mobility in this arena of the region, as
disjunctures of experience among Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong were
subsumed in the promise of cross-border cinema.
Cross-border action and its media technologies here meet at the
borders of a trans-regional arena, as these problems of past and present
were set against an intense interplay of global and regional influences.

In
this particular context of the Asia Pacific, the co-produced cross border
film is crowded by Japanese, Hong Kong and Taiwan action, as they
emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s, translating global genres from
Hollywood and Europe for local and regional consumption. The Japanese
label, “Mukokuseki Action” – action without nationality or borders – was
first coined in the early 1960s.
4
Since the late 1950s, b-grade gangster

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films had often set their characters and production team to traveling in
degrees of distance from cosmopolitan locations such as Tokyo –
throughout Japan and out into the globe. When this structure of
wandering was produced in regional co-productions, their travel through
the Asia Pacific brought them in contact with other industry translations
of popular action. Taiwan and Hong Kong had already produced films
inspired by the wandering genres of Japanese gangster films. And from
the mid 1960s, studios in Hong Kong produced several series of action
films that translated James Bond to local contexts. These films –
themselves, as Paul Fonoroff has noted, influenced by “Hollywood, French
New Wave and Japanese gangster movies” – also set their production
staff and characters to traveling across Asian networks, and over borders
of the Asia-Pacific.
5

In particular, discourses surrounding the technologies used to co-
produce cross-border action highlight both the promise and problems of
mobility through which this cinematic region was figured. Promotion
surrounding the promise of widescreen film formats were closely
entwined with the power dynamics that constituted the region at this
time, as studios located in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Taipei looked to the
potential of a cross-border and regional cinema that could appeal to
global markets. Promotions for the 1962 Taiwan-Japan co-production
Storm over Kinmen Bay (Kinmon to ni kakeru hashi, Haiwan fengyun)
featured its shooting locations in Tokyo, Taipei, and especially Kinmen

122
(Quemoy or Jinmen) island. More specifically, advertisements in Taipei
and Tokyo alike promoted these locations through the new wide screen
film technologies that mediated them. 1962, the year Kinmen Bay was
produced, was touted in a popular Japanese film journal as a year of the
“expansion” of cinema.
6
Published in 1963, this article was well aware of
the fact that 1962 had been the first year of market decline in postwar
Japanese film, as the domestic box office had been subsumed against a
sharp rise in television sets and accompanying leisure industries from the
late 1950s. This promotional language thus did not indicate a growth of
the industry per se. Rather, this label referred to the expansive vision
enabled by widescreen film formats. Kinmen Bay was one of a long list of
Cinemascope films produced in relation to Japan that year. As
advertisements for the film featured, audiences could now, as never
before, access the true scale and span of its action and locations.
What is notable is that the majority of this 1962 list of widescreen
films were co-productions engaged in location shooting throughout the
region. Indeed, popular cross-border films of the 1960s refracted this
close link between media technologies and regional geographies in their
common use of the cinematic map – a wide view of the Asia Pacific that,
mediated in film, displayed anxieties about technology’s close links to the
cold war construction of the region. Storm over Kinmen Bay opens with a
wide parchment map overview of East and South East Asia. Its locations
were labeled in English block letters to address a broader regional and

123
global market, and an audience beyond the limits of Japanese or Chinese
language. Yet this labeling was also indicative of the power dynamics
that structured this area of the globe. Narrowing and entering deeper
into this map, the film places us at the straights between Taiwan and
Mainland China, en route to Kinmen Island to the eastern edge of it. Only
kilometers off the PRC coast, Kinmen was the central locus for cold war
and anti-communist tension over the straights that divided the two
“Chinas,” as it continued to be occupied by Taiwan and “protected” by a
U.S. headed coalition. The narrative of Kinmen Bay also opens at this
place at the limits of where multinational forces could travel in the region
at this time. A single ship makes its way through a broad span of water,
having just entered the Taiwan Straights. The protagonist’s status as a
doctor – one of a Euro-American and Japanese crew of relief workers,
who would later fight communist forces threatening the island – brings
him to one of the most sensitive locations of the cold war region.
Regional co-productions, in their construction of an “Asian”
product, were often promoted as a negotiation, even overcoming of the
geopolitical tensions that troubled relations throughout the region.
Alongside Kinmen Bay, the article discussed above listed another Taiwan-
Japan co-production, The First Emperor (Taishiko, Qin shihuang). A large-
scale narrative account of the first emperor to unite China, it was the
second seventy-millimeter film to be produced between Japan and
Taiwan, utilizing Japanese technology and Taiwanese locations. In the

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postwar period, Taiwan had allowed Japan (its former colonizer) only
limited access to its cultural markets. Following the realignment of
relations between Taiwan and Japan in the 1952 Taiwan Peace Treaty,
Taiwan had placed restrictions on the import of Japanese film products,
and from the late 1950s had refused to expand the scope of Japanese
film quotas.
7
Yet for collaborations with Japan of this scale, the KMT
government (and its film bureau) had supported Taiwanese involvement,
providing staff support and permission for location shooting. The
Japanese press touted the Daiei studio president as having utilized his
close ties with Chiang Kai Shek to procure access to the thousands of
extras from the Taiwanese army needed to fill its massive battle scenes.
It was through these means of production that this epic story could be
made at a scale that was to impress, in what one promotional article
described as both “developed nations” and “the world.”
8
Indeed, even
against First Emperor’s failure in European festival markets, Hong Kong’s
popular press echoed this sentiment, as it highlighted how this (Japanese)
film attested to the ways in which large-scale film technology was a
platform through which regional media industries could link up, share the
high costs of production associated with them, and appeal to regional or
global (by which they meant US and European) markets.
9

Discourses surrounding the expanded views of the region through
widescreen, and the spectacle of action enabled across it, were implicitly
linked to a hope – however troubled among the industries of Tokyo,

125
Taipei or Hong Kong – for the potential of the Asia Pacific as a platform
for transnational production. An opinion review in the Taiwanese United
Daily News celebrated Storm over Kinmen Bay as a model for the ways in
which films could, or rather should be co-produced across the region.
10

Films such as First Emperor had repeated the ways in which Taiwan was
often utilized, in postwar co-productions with Hollywood, Hong Kong or
Japan, as only a primitive or “traditional” location to be shot over.
Kinmen Bay, however, was produced equitably across the board, as it was
created with a Japanese and Taiwanese director, Japanese and
Taiwanese scriptwriters and a multinational acting crew and staff. Yet
beyond its collaborative context, this article claimed that it was the
contemporary nature of the narrative – and its refraction of cold war
battle scenes – that demonstrated its potential. The problems of previous
co-productions notwithstanding, the film’s liberal use of the Taiwanese
military to populate cold war battle scenes and manage explosives for its
spectacular action only intensified, for this writer, the possibilities that
film technologies and their collaborative forms of production held for
addressing Taiwan’s place in the potential economies of trans-regional
cinema.
In all these accounts of widescreen film’s negotiation between
Taiwan and Japan, the promise of contact that accompanied emerging
media technologies was fetishized over the disjunctures of an Asia-Pacific
geography both made possible and limited by cold war geopolitics. Hong

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Kong and Japanese studios had, from the late 1950s, long collaborated in
co-productions produced in Cinemascope, or in Japanese patents on the
widescreen format. By the mid 1960s, Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers studio,
in particular, was advertising the expansion of its own production studios,
and the accompanying developments of its own film (especially
widescreen and color) technologies and patents.
11
The 1966 Hong Kong-
Japan co-production, Asiapol Secret Service (Ajia himitsu keisatsu, Asia-
Pol) was one such production.
12
Advertisements for Asiapol featured its
male stars poised on the cusp of action, gun in hand, against a backdrop
of regional locations mediated by Shawscope. Producing, as the Hong
Kong studio advertised, “three different versions for international
release: Chinese, Japanese and English,” the collaboration was promoted
as an equitable “hand in hand” co-production bound for transnational
markets. This promise was underscored in the film’s representation of an
Asia Pacific constructed in the promise of technologies.
13

For Asiapol, contextual discourses on the promise of cross-border
collaboration are also reflected in its narrative – one that underscores the
temporal stakes of the technological mobility that constituted this
cinematic Asia. Like Kinmen Bay, and many regional action films at this
moment, Asiapol also begins by situating Hong Kong and Tokyo within a
cold war regional map. This time, however, from the credits, computer-
like dotted lines and arrows trace their way from South East Asia, up
through Burma, into China, down to Hong Kong and Taiwan, to then end

127
in Japan. This opening map sequence sets up the narrative to follow, as
futuristic communication and transportation technologies catapult the
protagonist – an agent of Asiapol Secret Service – throughout
cosmopolitan locations of the region, beginning from Japan, and on to
Hong Kong and Macau. Both Hong Kong and Japanese studios had
already produced films reconfiguring the Bond narrative for their local
and regional markets. Asiapol locates Bond’s typically unfettered global
travel – staged across cold war and anticommunist routes – to the
geopolitical contexts of the Asia Pacific. In Kinmen Bay’s wide opening
view of the Asia Pacific, mainland China could only be represented as a
place desired for at the edge of the Taiwan Straights; the P.R.C. was also
a market that popular films of the region could not consider, much less
penetrate. Following the animated and computerized dotted line of the
map that introduced Asiapol, on the other hand, technology could be
imagined to cross and even overcome the geopolitical barriers of the cold
war.
In this border crossing enabled by new technologies, Asiapol
envisions not only a desire for mobility in the region, but also the very
future of it – the kinds of links that both regional action and its
technologies at the time often promised. As with the case of Kinmen Bay,
as well as other contemporary co-productions, widescreen had been a
technology for expansion, for indicating the possibility of a regional
cinema. Its large scale and often collaborative terms for production were

128
a way of situating the region and its locations on a global cinematic map.
Yet here, this promised (market) access is further imagined in the
mobility of the smaller scaled gadget, and its suggestion of the emerging
possibilities of media and communication routes. Throughout Asiapol,
action characters traverse locations of Tokyo, Hong Kong and Macau
through a steady stream of wireless phones and remote television
monitors. Satellite is the unspoken under girding of their linking across
this arena. The first satellite to cross the Pacific had connected U.S. and
Japanese industries in 1963 in preparation for the broadcast of the Tokyo
Olympics. Yet while the potential for global contact enabled by this link
up was optimistically celebrated in periodicals of Japan, Hong Kong and
Taiwan alike, everyday interaction with these technologies was uneven,
at best.
14
Against this interplay of global and regional influences,
discourses that converged around cross-border action continued to
envision a region enabled in the mobility of film and media technologies.

Geographies of Contact II: Masculinity, Technology and the Body

At this interface between media technologies and Asia Pacific cold war
geography, the body stands – or rather moves – as a central linchpin for
reading not only these technological futures, but also the geopolitical
legacies often subsumed in them. The action stars featured in these co-
productions, especially Ishihara Yujiro (Japan) and Jimmy Wong (Hong
Kong), present us with bodies that, in both on-screen narratives and off-

129
screen star discourses, negotiate the problems and promise of mobility
within these media collaborations. Masculine routes of co-produced cross-
border action are thus also doubly constructed, but reflect more explicitly
the temporal legacies that haunt this cinematic region. In his discussion of
Italian cinema’s encounter with the rapid developments in technologies
that accompanied the country’s economic miracle, Angelo Restivo has
discussed the ways in which “discourses and practices of modernization
traverse the physical body.”
15
For him, the interface between bodies and
new technologies within cinema refracted a nation splintered across
experiences of regional development. Traveling the borders of a similarly
disjunctured Asia-Pacific, the masculine body here further negotiates
legacies of imperial contact between Japan and cultural China. The
technological mobility of co-produced action is thus also troubled by
narratives of rootlessness and orphanage that plagued the postwar
region. Manifested differently across Japanese and Chinese language
contexts, this simultaneously cosmopolitan and orphaned figure is not
simply mobile, but also uprooted – caught in a structure of feeling
displaying, as Kim has noted for the contact zone, the “hauntings…that
plague the space divided by the former colonizer and colonized.”
In promotions surrounding the regional co-production of the early
1960s, Ishihara Yujiro’s masculine image was linked to cosmopolitan
ideals of modernity and mobility. The Shaw Brothers publication,
Southern Screen, published in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, featured

130
Ishihara’s visit to Taiwan for his location shooting for Storm over Kinmen
Bay.
16
Focusing on the moment when he steps off the plane to wave to a
crowd of fans, the article pictures the Japanese star standing at the open
door of a jet airplane. The Hong Kong and Taiwanese press had linked
stars to inaugural routes across the Pacific since the first direct jet flight
between Tokyo and Taipei had been established. The female, and largely
Chinese, stars promoted in these accounts, were included in an idealized
jet set crowd, as they promised the “fashionable” possibilities of
cosmopolitan mobility.
17
Ishihara’s male (and Japanese) body expanded
these possibilities of border crossing to a more explicitly global level – the
popular article describes him as visiting Taiwan from the “modern life”
he led in his “half Western, half Japanese” house in Tokyo.
18
Speaking to
Japan’s domestic context of the late 1950s, Michael Raine has described
the ways in which Ishihara’s early image was closely linked to the body, as
popular discourses “talked about his ‘un Japanese’ strong physique, his
long legs, his taiyozoku [youth and Western oriented] clothes.” While at
first threatening, by the early 1960s, Ishihara’s powerful image was
domesticated to ideals of Japan’s then “speed up economy.”
19
What was
promised in Ishihara’s stopover in Taipei, as he was promoted to
Taiwanese fans as standing in between West and East, between Tokyo
and Taiwan, was access to the development and modern technologies
that got him there.

131
Storm over Kinmen Bay – the film for which location shooting he
had traveled to Taiwan – also begins by situating Ishihara at the border.
Setting him within the film’s opening span of water between Japan,
Taiwan and the cold war globe, however, this narrative makes explicit
the spatio-temporal tensions that constructed border spaces in the Asia
Pacific. It thus opens the door for what sits on the other side of this
promotional link between masculinity and technological mobility –
disillusionment with Tokyo and all it promised. Immediately following
Kinmon Bay’s widescreen map, Ishihara leans over the railing of the ship,
gazing melancholically into the distance, requisite bottle of whisky in
hand. His voiceover tells us that he is traveling the straights between
Taiwan and the PRC en route from his global travels, and on his way back
to Japan. He’s been away from Japan for three years, and this island at
the center of cold war tensions is the last stop for him before his return.
Thus situating him at this geographic border, the film then temporally
displaces him through a flashback sequence that is no less structured in
geopolitical tensions. The film cuts to a long, extended flashback account
of memories of four years earlier, when he had been a doctor treating
casualties shipped to Japan from the Korean war. A series of political set
backs and personal incidents in Tokyo sets him to wandering the globe,
working on an international relief ship as a doctor, to then stand on its
deck gazing out toward an ocean that leads to Taiwan.

132
As his rootless transnational wandering remains caught in
memories of the past, Ishihara’s place at this border space is constructed
in a particular structure of feeling – a restless longing located between
the possibilities of travel and the (impossible) desire for somewhere to
return. As Ishihara’s gaze makes clear, this sentiment is closely allied with
a structure of seeing that was linked to Tokyo and directed toward
locations across the region, here Taiwan. Yet the stakes of this
restlessness are expressed in a set of bodily encounters – encounters that
traverse, and are traversed by, the geopolitics that structured the
(cinematic) region enabled by his gaze. Indeed, this introductory moment
on this ship is a precursor for the gendered relations that link Ishihara to
the geographies beyond the horizon toward which he is traveling. His
wandering is situated, in a common trope of cross-border films, between
two women of the two locations across which he travels. When he leaves
Tokyo, Ishihara leaves behind his Japanese suitor, and all the trappings of
social status and upward advancement she (and her father) signals. Yet
he also leaves behind memories of a Taiwanese woman he meets in this
city, as well. She had come to Tokyo to mourn the death of her brother in
the Korean War. It is her figure toward which he is ultimately traveling in
his return to Japan – he finds her again on Kinmen Island.
As it revolves around this 1962 co-production, Ishihara’s body –
negotiated across these relations among Tokyo, Taipei and the (cold war)
globe – moves as a contact zone, as his restless mobility reroutes him to

133
the problems of memory that had been the impetus for his journey in the
first place. The promise of technological and cosmopolitan contact that
was earlier signaled in Ishihara’s star image at the jet plane is reminiscent
of what Yoshikuni Igarashi has termed the postwar “hygienic“ body.
20

Here, Japan’s rapid push for (Western modes of) modernization of the
1950s and 60s rendered popular bodies “sanitized” or “hygenicized” of
the traces of empire that had, in the prewar period, structured Japan’s
links to the region. Regional co-produced action is one place where the
traces of this past haunt the popular body, if only in their movement
across an unsettled Asia-Pacific.
21
Here, rootless wandering and travel
away from Tokyo is a conduit through which traces of Japan’s previous
imperial trajectories return – but only as they can be managed through
contemporary cold war encounters. Ishihara’s inevitable fight against PRC
forces that attack Kinmen Island promises, within this narrative, to
overcome the father of this woman’s distrust of all things Japanese. The
impasse between past and present that confounds this transcendent
gesture, however, is underscored in a following common trope of
collaborations between Japan and cultural China. As his future lover is
killed by PRC forces, all potential ties to this place to which he had
traveled are lost, and Ishihara is left to return to ship and continue his
restless travel toward Japan.
The longing for return attached to this rootless traveling had been
a search for home, for a sense of belonging. In Kinmen Bay, Ishihara’s

134
ability to leave Tokyo had been tied not only to his access to technologies
of travel, but also to his own lack of family there – his status as an
orphan, without close family ties to Japan. Restlessness, rootlessness and
its predication in orphanage can thus solve the problem of relating and
contact across the region. Mediating, as Caren Kaplan has elsewhere
noted for rootless traveling figures, “the paradoxical relationship
between space and time in modernity,” it here promises a mobility to
negotiate the legacies that continue to structure relations between
Japan and previously occupied locations of the Asia Pacific.
22
Orphanage is
itself a common trope across a wide range Asia-Pacific film and media in
the wake of the postwar.
23
For the 1966 co-production Asiapol Secret
Service, as for much of cross-border action produced between Japanese
and Chinese language contexts, orphanage is more explicitly
foregrounded. In this later film, the orphaned body works in tandem
with the sentiment of return previously produced in Ishihara’s interface
with regional collaborations. Traversing the borders of the Asia Pacific in
close proximity to the technologies that were imagined to enable the
mobility of cross-border action, this rootless figure itself becomes an
interface for mediating the contradictions of past and present relations
among Japan and cultural China.
Promotions that surrounded Jimmy Wong Yu for the 1966 Asiapol
capitalized on the ways in which mobility had already been linked to his
image in Hong Kong cinemas. By this time, Wong was an easily

135
identifiable poster boy for the Hong Kong film industry’s shift to more
action oriented and masculine narratives – and a central face within the
spate of Bond-inspired films that had erupted across regional movie
screens. Wong was featured on the February 1968 cover of Southern
Screen, his white suit a stark contrast to the black gun angled against his
shoulder, as he glances up to his left beyond the limits of the page.
Against the static glamour shots typical of covers for this periodical in the
1960s, Wong’s gaze and stance, signaled a readiness for action already
established in the poses in which stars were featured in advertisements
for Asiapol. Promotional posters for the film depicted Wong and his
nemesis, Japan’s then premier action star Jo Shishido, with guns cocked
and bodies angled in opposite directions, ready to spring against a
backdrop of high rises and helicopters. Indeed, Wong’s pursuit of Shishido
over these cosmopolitan locations through a seemingly limitless range of
technological fantasies – miniaturized gadgets of surveillance,
communication, imaging and transport – is not simply a refraction of
Bond mobility. Rather, as they are structured across relations of Tokyo,
Hong Kong and Macau, masculine encounters in Asiapol simultaneously
play on a different kind of mobility and relatedness – one rooted in the
legacies of relations among Japan and cultural China.
What is significant here is that it is at the orphan’s close interface
with technology where the contradictions of mobility in trans-regional
media emerges. For Asiapol, it is not only the body, it is also identity itself

136
that is imagined to be situated at the border spaces of the region. In
contrast to his Hong Kong star status, Jimmy Wong is first introduced in
the film as a Japanese agent for Asia-Pol Secret Service. But that is only
half the story. Wong, in this narrative, is not simply Japanese, but rather
an orphan caught between Japan and cultural China. And the first time
we learn of Wong’s “true” (onscreen) identity is by way of the latest
technologies of imaging and surveillance. Over the course of his
investigation of Jo Shishido’s crime syndicate, he recognizes traces of his
father in a surveillance photograph. Wong had been raised by Japanese
nationals after (what we learn to be) his Chinese father’s disappearance.
In and with his occupational globetrotting, this moment of seeing across
communications technologies instigates a simultaneous impetus for
travel – his concurrent pursuit of family roots also catapults the
protagonist from Tokyo to Hong Kong. Here, in the context of cross-
border action, developments in technology do not render the trans-
regional body devoid of links to past or present geopolitics. Rather, it is
the very apparatus through which a whole range of other relations are
revealed – in the potential of family, of a past, and of relations across the
region.
Rootless mobility – and its links to Tokyo – can also, however, work
to mediate the disjuncture between past and present often suggested in
the routes of travel in cross-border action. Having solved, in the end, the
intrigue of his family, Wong also returns to the promise for technological

137
mobility that his star image had promoted. At the end of the 1967
collaboration, Jimmy Wong’s character boards a jet plane to return to
Tokyo. And why wouldn’t he? Tokyo was a place, for regional and
traveling co-productions of the time, of economic promise, of a “global”
and technological future. Yet this structure of feeling – this promise of
travel and return – here brings us to the limits of popular representation.
The film ends in a common trope of cross border film at this time – on the
image of Wong’s plane flying away into an open sky. Here, Tokyo
remains only a promise – an image beyond the horizon toward which one
constantly travels. Kinmen Bay had ended, as Ishihara returns to his ship
for another bout of restless wandering, with the suggestion that Tokyo
might not be a place to which one can return. Looking out from Hong
Kong, the final cut to the airplane at the end of Asiapol similarly
substitutes the realization of this cosmopolitan location with the act of
moving toward it. The promise of Tokyo thus lay not the sense of
belonging – of home and return – that it could offer. The promise of
Tokyo is rather the mobility it enabled – a rootlessness that could both
enable or confound recognition of the problems of decolonization that
remained in the region.

138
Masculinity, Technology and the Body: Take Two

As the quote by Miike Takashi at the beginning of this chapter suggests,
cross-border action produced between Japanese and Chinese language
contexts from the 1990s are one place where this sentiment of return,
and the rootless figure often attached to it, reappears. Film and video
productions linked to Miike across the Asia Pacific are often considered
exemplary of the recent transnational face of regional production – one
mobilized in (what is now often considered mundane) intensifications of
technological exchange. Yet, even in their continued cross-border
mobilization of the masculine body, Miike’s regional collaborations
simultaneously map the fractures of this mediated region. What the
trans-regional travel of such figures as Ishihara and Wong had suggested
were possibilities for recognizing traces of imperial and cold war
encounter that haunt an Asia-Pacific imagined at the cusp of economic
emergence. In this more contemporary interface with the technologies
and geographies of cross-border action, Miike’s masculine bodies remain
in a similar bind. They remain caught between the promise of the region
as an arena for contact, on the one hand, and the constant threat of its
disillusionment, on the other. Toggling orphanage and uprootedness
against the threat of economic recession that variously beset locations of
the Asia Pacific throughout the 1990s, these recent bodies suggest the

139
temporal stakes of not only of mobility, but also immobility for cross-
border collaborations between Japanese and Chinese language media.
Miike’s situating the Taipei of his 1997 Rainy Dog within a desire
for return to Tokyo’s 1960s past highlights the sense of impossibility
through which his masculine figures traverse, and are traversed by, an
unsettled region. For Rainy Dog’s (then largely video) action star Aikawa
Sho, and his depiction of a rootless yakuza gangster hiding out in Taipei,
return to Tokyo is never a possibility. Aikawa is, in the end, shot dead on
its streets. Yet even here, this restless figure remains linked to
orphanage – this time, by way of a Taiwanese boy he inadvertently
adopts during his reprieve in Taiwan. One generation removed from
restlessness, the boy mediates a seeming future with no future – he is
left to carry on the memory of Aikawa’s death into a Taipei that is
depicted as dilapidated and in a constant downpour. In the context of
South Korean cinema, Kyun Hyun Kim has argued for the ways in which
“the recuperation of male subjectivity was [deemed] necessary in order
to cope with a rapid shift in modern, industrial, urban and global
nationhood.”
24
For the trajectories of travel so important to cross border
action produced between Japanese and Chinese language contexts,
masculinity is less recuperated than doubly constructed. On the one hand,
these co-productions often embrace mobile identities in the links they
make among cosmopolitan locations of the region. Even as Taipei’s
relation to Tokyo is structured across obvious regional disjunctures, travel

140
between them is enabled in pursuit of either a sense of possibility or
feeling of (often familial) belonging. At the same time, however, this
same act of travel is also where these identities threaten to dissolve.
Here, the sense of possibility or belonging that might otherwise
imbue cross-border collaborations is confounded in the trauma that
continues to trace the bodies that travel across them. Promotions of the
genre linked to Miike in the 1990s are suggestive of the bodily stakes
through in which media technologies are often imagined to traverse the
region in tandem with cross-border action. A well circulated trailer for
Miike’s 1997 Shinjuku Triad Society intercuts a quickly cut montage of the
film with a series of hard hitting title frames for the locations across
which this film plays – Shinjuku (an area of Tokyo associated with a non-
Japanese underworld) and Taiwan.
25
Separated by a shot of the low
underbelly of an airplane roaring off into the sky, Tokyo and Taipei are
envisioned in close proximity to one another – editing can now work to
configure regional locations to occupy nearly the same space. Yet this edit
across the routes of travel within this film also a place for reading the
traumatic terms that often accompany technologies linked to cross-
border action. Intercut between these location labels are scenes of
extreme masculine violence, abuses of boyhood sexuality, and the scenes
of blood and bodily fluids by now deemed typical of Miike’s style. Indeed,
within this trailer’s montage of the locations of this collaboration, the
relationship between Tokyo and Taipei is structured in the trafficking of

141
human organs, of kidneys and corneas (harvested, in one scene, from the
bodies of children) for a global medical market. Bodies are traumatically
dismembered and thus become a commodity to be exchanged – unevenly,
of course – over the borders of the Asia Pacific and beyond.
For the rootless masculine bodies of cross-border action, the
trauma often associated with transnational exchange is also filtered
through the legacies of contact between Japan and China – legacies that
are repeated against the dissolution of Tokyo and its place in the region.
26

The trailer for Shinjuku Triad ends with the final scene of the film, as its
protagonist looks back at the viewer, the screen awash in blue, and then
turns to disappear into a Tokyo crowd. At first glance, he had been a
detective working to penetrate this ring of regional organ traffickers.
Yet at the same time, he is implicated in the underworld he is supposed
to be investigating – he’s a corrupt cop. In typical generic fashion, his
temptation toward corruption comes about in his hopes for the possibility
of upward mobility, the future acquisition of a home and thus of middle
class affluence. These aspirations remain, throughout the film, impossible
for him – not simply for his underclass status, but also for the ways in
which his identity is caught in mobilizations of the past. The protagonist
is a child of a war orphan – of formerly Japanese, now largely culturally
Chinese, refugees that had been left on the mainland following Japan’s
retreat from it after the Pacific war. In the 1980s, following the
normalization of relations with the P.R.C., the war orphan had been

142
reported as returning to Japan to find long lost family members, with the
simultaneous hope of participating in its then booming economy. For the
generation to follow in the 1990s, the possibilities linked to return – and
hope for belonging within it – is disillusioned. When the trauma that
under girds the rootless masculine figures of this genre is foregrounded,
the wandering that had been the solution for Wong and Ishihara of the
1960s is no longer an option. All that remains to negotiate the
contradictions of past and present is immobility – here, disappearance
into Tokyo.
The stasis often attached to bodies in Tokyo, for 1990s versions of
regional cross border action, is the underside of promotions that continue
to figure other locations of the region – here, mainland China – as a
market and landscape of possibility. The release of Miike’s The Bird
People of China was accompanied by the publication of a travelogue – a
record of the production crew’s itinerary and their sentiments during the
film’s eighteen days of location shooting on the mainland.
27
The 1998 film
depicts a Japanese businessman traveling, alongside a wandering yakuza,
from Tokyo to a remote village in Yunan province located at the Chinese
border with Myanmar. What attracts them to this village are reports that
its inhabitants had found the secret of human flight. As they find in their
quest, this legend of flying is precedented upon the ruins of a fighter
plane that had crashed near the village during World War II. The
(impossible) mobility that is sought in this narrative is thus predicated on

143
the links this place maintains to a recent history of regional geopolitics.
Indeed, the film’s promotional travelogue similarly works to mediate
disjunctures between past and present, as a distance of “192 hours and
11 minutes” marks the time it takes them to travel the space between
Tokyo and this village across a series of airplanes, trains and trucks. For
the production crew of Bird People, travel to mainland China is structured
across the links that only media and its production can enable.
Against promotions of the film’s mobility, however, remains the
impossibility for Bird People’s masculine protagonist to negotiate these
technological and geographic distances in anything but memory. In the
final scene of the film, he reflects, in voiceover, upon his life since his
return from the hinterlands of mainland China. Following a slow motion
take of a plane landing on an airstrip, and over a fade to black, his
voiceover self-reflexively states that “its been thirty years since then,”
only for the following shot to display him standing on a Tokyo commuter
train, appearing exactly the same age as when he had first left for China.
Tokyo is here a place filmed in desaturated tones, as nondescript
buildings pass out beyond the metallic grays of the train’s interior. He
soon disembarks onto a platform and then disappears into a crowd of city
workers. Against the lush green memories of the village to follow this
image, the developed surfaces of Tokyo are constructed within a matrix
of technology transfers, regional locations and masculinity. Despite
Tokyo’s technologies, or rather because of them, Tokyo is no longer a

144
place one can stay. Yet as the memory of this protagonist suggests, one
still remains stuck there. When Tokyo becomes sterile – an alienated
space of transfers and traffic flows – the desire for other locations can
often confound its very experience.

Chapter Three Conclusion

Harry Harootunian has suggested that, in the context of global culture,
the commodity form is “one of the principle agencies of the production of
historical formations.”
28
Against the continued desire for regional cinema
– here, as an economic entity constructed in media collaborations and
technological exchange – methodology can work to either recognize or
obfuscate the temporalities that traverse cross-border action in the Asia-
Pacific. This chapter has approached cross border action as a media
geography constructed across not only production, but also
representational and promotional practices. Here, celebration of film
and media’s enabling of contact and collaboration work in tandem with
narrative trajectories leading elsewhere – together, they suggest not
only the promise, but also the problems of mobility and exchange across
the borders of Japanese and Chinese language media.
The masculine body is one central interface for understanding the
hauntings that often accompany collaborative media and its technologies
in these contexts. As he traverses and is traversed by an unsettled region,

145
this figure negotiates the Asia Pacific in a structure of feeling – a
rootlessness that ever longs for, as Miike notes, “somewhere we have to
return.” Manifested differently over disjuctures of exchange – across
Japanese and Chinese language contexts, across moments of the 1960s
and 1990s – the regional co-productions of this essay can all be linked not
only through genre, but also through the very links that they make.
Media technologies, regional geography, and masculinity become
“contact zones” – border places, places of meeting and transit. What I’ve
suggested is that attention to the terms for mobility among them, and
the kinds of hauntings and temporal references that spin out at that
moment of encounter, can help us to see what traces of this memory,
however fractured, might remain. Yet even here, the hauntings that
arise at the border and contact zones of popular cross border action are
not always complete – eruptions of memory are often fractured. And
they can be just as nostalgic, as they are occasionally profound.

146
Chapter Three Endnotes

1. Marie Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.

2. Kim Soyoung, “Genre as Contact Zone: Hong Kong Action and
Korean Hwalkuk,” in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination
in Action Cinema, eds. Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan
Ching-kiu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 100.

3. Don Mitchel, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), 218-219. Here, Mitchel is referring to such scholarship
as Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994).

4. Koi Eisei, Den Nihon eiga no ôgonjidai (The Golden Age of
Japanese Film) (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjû, 1989), 290.

5. Paul Fonoroff, Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong
Cinema: 1920-1970 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1997), 72.

6. Takahashi Hidekazu, “1962 nen hôyôga gyôkai kessan (An
Industry Account of 1962 Japanese and Western Films),” Kinema Junpô 2,
no.1 (1963): 60-68.

7. The reasoning for this ranged from a protection of local film
industries to anti-Japanese policies established by the KMT government,
in its efforts to “resinicize” the former Japanese colony.

8. Îda Shinbi, “Taishiko to 70 miri no iryoku (Last Emperor and the
Power of 70 Millimeter),” Kinema Junpô 328 (January 1962): 80.

9. Nanguo dianying (Southern Screen) 58 (December 1962): T11.

10. Dong Yi, “Kan Haiwan fengyun: Tan Zhongwai hezuo paipian
(A Look at Storm over Kinmen Bay: Discussing Taiwan/Foreign Co-
productions),” Lianhe ribao (United Daily News), August 28, 1963, 8.

11. “The New Look of Shaw’s Movie Town,” Nanguo dianying
(Southern Screen) 71 (Jan 1964): 40. “…It was Shaw’s Studio that
initiated Hong Kong’s movie industry into the many-splendoured ‘colour
age,’ and it was Shaw’s again that led Hong Kong filmdom in a stride to
the production of Shawscope, arc-form, wide-screen pictures.”

147

12. Storm Over Kinmen Bay (Dir. Matsuo Akinori, Pan Lei) was a
collaboration between Japan’s Nikkatsu studio and Taiwan’s Central
Motion Picture Company. Asiapol Secret Service (Dir. Matsuo Akinori)
was a collaboration between Japan’s Nikkatsu studio and the Shaw
Brother’s studio in Hong Kong. Matsuo was a staple director for action
genres at Nikkatsu throughout the 1960s, and went to Hong Kong to
direct a number of action films for Shaw Brothers at the end of the
decade. Pan Lei was listed as a collaborative director only in Chinese
language advertisements. Japanese posters singled Matsuo as the sole
director.

13. Nanguo dianying (Southern Screen) 106 (December 1966): 20.
Storm Over Kinmen Bay was also produced with Japanese and Chinese
versions.

14. Taiwan’s TTV was founded in 1962 as the first commercial
broadcast in Taiwan. In 1967, TVB was Hong Kong’s new start-up
terrestrial broadcaster. While television was more established in Japan by
this time, critics there were still painfully aware of the technological limits
to their place in relation to this (often global) ideal of television. In this
regard see page 63 of this dissertation for a brief description of these
sentiments, as expressed by a Tokyo based critic. Shiozawa Shigeru,
“1962 nen terebi kai kessan (An account of the 1962 television world),”
Kinema Junpô 2.2 (1963): 150-152.

15. Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and
Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002), 77.

16. “Yujiro Ishihara in Taiwan,” Nanguo dianying (Southern Screen)
58 (December 1962): T8.

17. Much ado had been made of Ishihara’s female co-star, Zhang
Meiyao, donning the latest fashions upon her own visit to Tokyo. “Storm
Over Kinmen Bay,” Nanguo dianying (Southern Screen) 58 (December
1962): T2.

18. Ibid.

19. Michael Raine, “Yujiro: Youth, Celebrity, and the Male Body,” in
Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, eds. Dennis Washburn and Carole
Cavanaugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 211, 218.

148

20. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in
Postwar Japanese Culture: 1945-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 13.

21. Igarashi is insightful. I just object to his strict periodization.

22. Caren Kaplan Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of
Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 35.

23. Hong Kong screens of the time for example, were filled with
narratives of uprootedness and dislocation predicated in wartime
legacies, as well as its location as a hub for migrants from the PRC and
region.

24. Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculization of Korean Cinema
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 8.

25. This trailer for Shinjuku Triad Society may be found, for
example, on Tartan Video’s 2003 DVD release of the film.

26. Here, I am indebted to E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang’s overview
of approaches to trauma, as they signal trauma to be “a debilitating kind
of memory…The event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the
time, but only belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who
experienced it.” E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, “Introduction,” Trauma
and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban
Wang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 5.

27. Chûgoku no toribito hikô kiroku (Bird People of China
Travelogue) (Tokyo: Purojekuto Media, 1998).

28. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural
Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 53.

149
Chapter Four
Tokyo on the Move:
Omnibus Asia, Collective Production and the Limits of the Link

The 21
st
century is the age of Asia. SKY is
linking up with Asia.
SKYcorp advertisement

Sure, it’s exciting to [contribute to an
Asian omnibus] for the first time. …Yet,
whether it’s an omnibus production,
produced in Vista, or a short or long film,
I’m just making my film.
Dir. Slamet Rahardjo Djarot,
on his participation in the
omnibus film, Southern
Winds

The past few years have witnessed an increase in regional omnibus
production in the Asia Pacific – across such centers of media capital as
Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok or Seoul. Accompanying this production,
producers and distributors have touted the promise that collective media
production holds for the region. At the time of Peter Chan’s prediction
that “Asian co-productions are the future of Asian industries,” quoted in
the 2002 interview in the introduction to this dissertation, he was looking
forward to producing a series of omnibus films.
1
His 2003 Three and soon
to follow Three…Extremes were both feature length films made up of
three shorter segments, each produced with a different director and
across a different location of the region. The latter example utilized the

150
media capital promised by such prominent figures as Miike Takashi
(Japan), Park Chan-Wook (Korea) and Fruit Chan (Hong Kong) to map and
promote a regional product. As it collected together prominent directors,
stars and staff from Tokyo, Hong Kong or Seoul, the omnibus was to be
uniquely situated, according to Chan, to sustain local industries in its
appeal to an “Asian” market. Yet less pulling together a coherent
geography, the Asian omnibus, as Mark Betz has also argued in the
context of European co-productions, displays the “tensions and
contradictions essential to the mapping” of regional film and media.
2

This chapter offers a counterpoint to this recent attention to
omnibus production. It examines a moment in the early 1990s, when the
omnibus film first appeared as a mode of production for industries in
Tokyo to engage with the region, and then compares it to other collective
modes produced with a range of other media technologies – here video
and multimedia – into the new millennium. A advertisement produced by
Skycorp in the 1990s – a Tokyo based agency that sought to promote
stars and co-productions across Asia – is typical of the discursive logic that
was to surround regional media collaborations linked to Japan at this
time. As the full poster ad boldly promises, “The 21
st
century is the age
of Asia. SKY is linking up with Asia.” Written in Japanese, English and
Chinese, this headline sits above an abstracted map, the countries of East
and Southeast Asia displayed across the page above their respective
global cities and media companies. It is a map that reinforces the subtitle

151
of the ad to follow. “SKY,” as the caption further states, “firmly believes
that there are no borders to art.” As it spatializes the region as a
constellation of media capitals, “Asia” is less a geography of national
borders than an array of urban centers, media conglomerates and
potential marketplaces. And they are ever ready for link-up and
mobilization into the future millennium – a twenty-first century of
“amazing economic[al] development” and the “blossoming” of an Asian
art and entertainment industry.
3

This poster serves as a backdrop for thinking about the ways in
which regionally collective media projects linked to Tokyo have been
imagined over the past decade or more. The early 1990s marks a
moment when the omnibus was touted as a “new” technology and a
“new” mode of production for Japanese capital to engage with Asia.
Moreover, the Asia with which it was to engage was a region, as
exemplified by this ad, imagined at the cusp of global development. Here,
Rolando Tolantino’s argument for the ways in which the Asia Pacific, and
its media production, has been constructed in what he terms a “drive for
development and progress” becomes once again significant.
4
Indeed,
what was deemed strategic and “new” about omnibus collaborations at
the time was the ways in which media production, form and content
converged to perfectly address the emergence of an “Asian” media
culture across the growth of capital in such locations as Bangkok, Taipei,
Hong Kong or Manila. The omnibus attested to the possibility of a new

152
era of increased mobility and linkage across the borders of an emerging
Asian media culture.
This discourse of an increasingly linked and emerging Asia has
tended to accompany collective regional projects associated with
industries in Tokyo. Examining what functions as the “link” within the
construction of this mediated “Asia” can thus be useful. It can help us to
unpack the tensions of regional collaborations produced with capital and
resources funneled through Japan. Asia Pacific and feminist studies alike
have conceptualized the transnational link as a place for interrogating
the disjuncture, or the difference, of cross border exchange. For
transnational feminist scholars such as Caren Kaplan and Interpal Grewal,
for example, collaboration (or linking) across transnational experiences of
gender require our recognizing the different concerns and located
histories that are negotiated across, for them feminist, coalitions.
5
A
similar approach can be found in recent scholarship on Japanese popular
culture. Here, against accounts of its increased circulation across the
region over the past few decades of the twentieth century, Japanese
media culture is often presented as a medium for linking experience
across the Asia-Pacific. It becomes a kind of “regional everydayness”
across which disjunctures of experience might be unpacked.
6

This chapter addresses a range of collective regional production –
the omnibus film, the multi-director video collection and the multimedia
collection. Their ability to connect across the borders of an emerging Asia

153
Pacific – and to do so by way of increasingly mobile media technologies –
has been the central discourse through which such production has been
promoted. Yet this ideal needs to be tempered by attention to the
problems of difference that also run across it. Difference has long been,
for postcolonial theorists, a term for recognizing the ambivalence, the
sense of uncertainty, that is produced within dominant modes of cultural
production.
7
Yet less an oppositional binary, recent collective “Asian”
media is better understood in the ways in which cultural geographers
have argued global locations to be constructed across a dynamic of
competing relations and ideologies.
8
This chapter thus interrogates
collective regional production in order to unpack the tensions that trouble
a recent history of omnibus production associated with Tokyo.

Mobilizing Asia/Omnibus: Technologies of the “Now”

Two regional multi-director projects produced in collaboration with
producers and capital based in Tokyo – Southern Winds (1992) and Asian
Beat (1991-1992) – together provide a field for interrogating collective
Asia Pacific production produced by way of Tokyo in the early 1990s.

These two projects attest to a range of contexts for collaborative
regional production – over a wide range of geographic locations, as well
as both film and video, festival and popular production. They also make
clear the ways in which the producer is often central to the

154
conceptualization of an omnibus project – a mode, in these two cases,
that collected and mapped regional production as a network of local and
national media signifiers, such as shooting locations, directors and stars.
The four episodes of Southern Winds were produced in collaboration with
established filmmakers of Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia,
and it continues to be shown in film festivals linked to the Japan
Foundation. Asian Beat was geared toward more popular and video
markets, and advertised itself as having been produced with emerging
directors and staff across a more expanded arena of Japan, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Cultural
geographers such as Michael Dear have suggested that it is at the
intersection between geography and technologies of seeing whereby
“meanings of place are made, legitimized, contested and obscured.”
9

Here, the tensions of the omnibus emerge at the fault line between
media technologies and imagined geographies – a fault line over which
regional omnibus have been spatially and temporally collected, produced
and promoted.
For producers and distributors centered around Tokyo in the early
1990s, the Asian omnibus was touted as uniquely configured to make
transparent a particular view of the Asia Pacific. As it brought its
industries and locations together under the umbrella of the region, it was
to have revealed to viewers it’s sharing of a common temporality. What
omnibus films such as Southern Winds promised, as the promotional book

155
on its making advertised, was our ability to finally “come to see” the
“now” of Asia.
10
Homi Bhabha has argued for the ways in which
discourses often provide closure – and are made transparent – by way of
an explicit “disclosure of its rules of recognition.” For him, these rules of
recognition often “cohere in the address of authority of the ‘present.’”
11

The temporality of Asia through which omnibus produced in relation to
Tokyo were to link the region together was further explicit in its
conflation of this “present” with ideals of progress. In the reportage and
promotion to surround the film, much was made of the ways in which the
episodes of Southern Winds were to reveal the rapidly “changing” and
developing face of Asia. In this account, the Asia Pacific was a coherent
landscape linked in its shared concern for the effects and ideals of
development. The omnibus’ central theme of a “changing Asia” had
come about as a result of intense preproduction debate among the four
directors of the project. Yet these promotions emphasized the ways in
which this initial discord was to have resulted in a shared contemporary
geography – one reflected in the promotional stills that continue to
accompany the travel of Southern Winds. These stills display a series of
urban and modern scenes juxtaposed against rural or “traditional”
landscapes – the lush Indonesian plains of Slamet Rahardjo Djarot’s
Mirage, the neon of Manila in Mike de Leon’s Aliwan Paradise, the Thai
marketplace of Cherd Songsri’s Tree of Life and the company festival of
Shoji Kokami’s Tokyo Game.
12

156
Understanding how this series of landscape and film stills might be
promoted to be linked, however, depends upon an understanding of the
tensions of the transnational collection. One advantage of conceiving of
the omnibus film as a collection, according to David Scott Diffrient’s
seminal work on episodic cinema, is the ways in which it signals its
disparate episodes to be “at once unified and fragmented, singular and
multiple.”
13
Yet, as discourses surrounding Southern Winds remind us,
there is always a politic to its seeming inclusiveness. Indeed, it was the
very inclusiveness of the omnibus film that was to have allowed it to
address the contemporary face of the Asia Pacific. For an interview
featured in the promotional book for Southern Winds, connecting across
its episodes was dependent upon a recognition of “the distinct measures
of time” particular to each of their locations, as they developed at
different rates in relation to Tokyo.
14
Everyday experience in such places
as Bangkok or Manila was being transformed in relationship to
intensifications of global capital. Yet these urban centers were also
developing at different rates in relation to the model of modernization
that was, for these interviewees, signaled by the space in Japan from
which the omnibus film was produced. Indeed, within the logic of “Asia
now” so central to the promotion of Southern Winds, the rise of capital in
the region became the link – and limiting logic – through which the
disparate perspectives of the omnibus were to have been enabled.

157
Tokyo, in this sense, was thus central to these discourses on the
temporality of Asia. It was the structuring space around which the Asian
omnibus – and other locations of media production in the region – was
produced. Benedict Anderson has critiqued of the ways in which
ideologies of difference often work within transnational structures of
capitalist production. Here, global production is understood to work in
serial form, as it is reproduced across a constellation of geographic
locations. Within this serial form, “systemic relations of social
interdependence” work to set up a “single global space of coexistence in
which differences are allowed to subsist.”
15
For the promotions that
surrounded the Asian omnibus in this context, the temporalities and
logics of media capital associated with Tokyo was the model upon which
the multiple views of the Asia Pacific were dependent. Indeed, this
structure was translated to the formal structure of the omnibus, as well.
From the debut showing of Southern Winds, producers and distributors
have consistently arranged the omnibus film as beginning with its Tokyo
episode, and then continuing on to its segments of Indonesia, the
Philippines and Thailand. In the question and answer implied by this
moving out from Tokyo, other locations and industries of the region are
recognized only in their difference – the ways in which they provide an
alternative view from Tokyo, and the desire for progress associated with
it.

158
A closer look at the range of voices that competed across the
production of the omnibus film, however, challenges the binary relations
of difference that have been naturalized in these promotions. Tokyo is
thus a space of production across which the dynamics of power hidden by
these promotional “rules of recognition” might also be read. An
interview conducted upon the release of Southern Winds in Tokyo, for
example, suggests some of these tensions. Here, the director of the
Indonesian episode of the omnibus film, Slamet Rahardjo Djarot, was
interviewed by a representative of the Japan Foundation – a central
producer behind the project. In keeping with the discourses on difference
that surrounded the Asian omnibus in Tokyo, much of the interview
detailed for a Japanese public the social conditions for film in Indonesia.
Yet near the end of the interview, the interviewer turns the discussion
toward Slamet’s participation in the omnibus film:
Interviewer: This is your first time to contribute to an omnibus film,
and your first time to work with Vista film technologies, isn’t it?
Not to mention your first time to direct an international co-
production.

Slamet: Sure, it’s exciting to experience all this for the first time.
But whether its an omnibus production, produced in Vista, or a
short or long film, I’m just making my film.
16

In this interview, Slamet’s participation in the omnibus film is framed
within the promotional discourses of Southern Winds, as the omnibus was
to have allowed for a more progressive, even “developed” kind of
filmmaking. Slamet’s response, however, refuses to fit into the
‘transparent’ discourse into which the omnibus was to work.

159
Slamet’s disavowal of the terms through which the Southern Winds
project had been promoted brings into relief the terms through which it
was serialized and collected – as well as the regional legacies that are
structured as absent in this discourse. What is important to notice within
this exchange is the ways in which the omnibus was discursively
dependent upon a belief in the possibilities of regional exchange enabled
by the emergence of media industries and technologies in the region. It is
here where attention to the intersection between geography and
“technologies of seeing” becomes useful for understanding the ways in
which meanings of mobility can be constructed across collaborative
production. The region that omnibus such as Southern Winds were to
have revealed relied upon a narrative of the development of media
industries across a recent history of the region. For the producer of
Southern Winds, the very inception of the Asian omnibus came about by
way of his gradual linking of two emergent categories – the emergence
of regional film industries on the one hand, and the cultural and economic
emergence of a postwar “Southeast Asia” on the other. This gradual
connection was to have culminated in the omnibus film – indeed Southern
Winds was advertised as the first omnibus film between Southeast Asia
and Japan.
17
Here, the omnibus film was a kind of new technology ideally
configured to connect among film industries and their representations
across the region.
18
What remained a structured absence within the
producer’s narrative, however, was Japan’s previous imperial presence in

160
filmmaking throughout Southeast Asia. It was against this backdrop that
the omnibus worked as a medium to compensate for the legacies of this
imperial past – through a rhetoric of emerging media made mobile by
way of Tokyo.
These links between “Asia now” and the mobility of not simply
new, but rather newly configured media technologies continued to be
important to the packaging of a wide range of omnibus projects in the
early 1990s. The 1991-92 Asian Beat, for example, explicitly
foregrounded these links between mobility and media in its promotional
campaign. The headline of the project, “Asian Beat: Now, Asia on the
Move,” made clear the emergent quality of the region that this
production was to reveal. Its producer, Hayashi Kaizô, made a point of
what his decision to select young, largely unknown directors from across,
once again, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia
and Thailand would do for the project. They were to produce popular
films demonstrating the contemporary, the up and coming, the “beat” of
Asia. Production discourses surrounding Southern Winds had touted the
omnibus film as signaling the establishment of production across the
region. This project had utilized well known film directors – auteurs with
established reputations in film festivals – to reflect the coming of age of
Asia Pacific film and media. In contrast, Asian Beat’s use of up and coming
directors emphasized the continued emergence, and future, of Asia
Pacific media and its landscapes. Indeed the travel of these young

161
directors was argued by its producer as a perfect agent for this new
promise for exchange and mobility that was attached to regional
production.
19

The dynamics of the mobile Asia signaled by Asian Beat can be
further examined in a return to its links to the collection. Naomi Schor has
argued that serials depend upon the “superimposition of order in time
and space” as they “(re)map distinct episodes or objects under the self
contained, self referential context of the collection itself.”
20
On the one
hand, “collection” underscores the ideologies that accompanied the
formal construction of Asian Beat. While it has most often been labeled
an omnibus project, Asian Beat, in the strictest sense, is a related yet
similarly episodic category – what Mark Betz has called a “multi-director
collection.”
21
Asian Beat consists of a series of six full feature length films,
as opposed to the short episodes that comprise a single omnibus film such
as Southern Winds. Yet it emphasizes a similar problematic to the
omnibus film, as directors were utilized as a representative sign for the
disparate landscapes of the media project. Mark Betz has also
emphasized the frequent strategy of utilizing the director – and
especially the art cinema auteur – to constructing and promoting the
significance of the European co-production.
22
While this strategy is in
some ways reflected in the promotional use of directors for the more
explicitly festival driven context of Southern Winds, the Asian omnibus at
this time was also promoted through a much more simplistic link

162
between director and nation – one made clear in popular press accounts
that surrounded Asian Beat. What was repeatedly stated as the
significance of this project was its status as a “multi-country collection,” in
which each directorial point of view is made to signal a particular
(national) perspective.”
23
Here, each episode – signaling the perspective
from Indonesia, the perspective from Taiwan, the perspective from Hong
Kong, etc. – was to have provided the viewer a different take on the
project’s over arching theme of an emergent region.
Yet, not simply a reflection of directors and the landscapes they
were to be attached to, this “Asia on the Move” is perhaps better
interrogated by an examination of mobility and exchange itself. As such
collective production sits at a fault line between media technologies and
geography, its interrogation is better situated within the kinds of
connections that new configurations of media and technology were
deemed to enable across the region. Here, not simply film, but also film’s
relationship to video becomes significant. Video, of course, was not a
particularly new technology at this time of Asia Pacific production. By the
end of the 1980s, the medium had often been chosen to support large-
scale projects for its cost effectiveness and portability. Indeed, the
producer of Asian Beat had chosen the medium for these very reasons.
Not simply working to stretch the project’s limited budget, the use of
video, for him, even encouraged an aesthetic about mobility in the
individual episodes of the collection. Yet what video also enabled for

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collaborative media products at this time was a new way of packaging
and collecting media – of explicitly linking and bringing together into one
set a wide range of regional production. As they had been produced
across 1991 and 1992, the episodes of Asian Beat had each been
individually shown at film festivals or on television stations across the
globe. Yet it was really only in its release in video – its release as a box
set in 1993 – where Asian Beat was significantly brought together as one
coherent regional project.
24

Asian Beat’s packaging in the video box set underscores the
“problems of containment and regulation” through which omnibus
collections were constructed at this moment. Indeed, the temporal
construction of this video collection returns us to the centrality of Tokyo
as an organizing principle – the link, the arena for production – through
which this collection was “contained and regulated.”
25
Even a surface
level reading of the organization of this box set against the production
context serves to demonstrate this. The timing of production for each of
the episodes of the multi-director collection had depending upon a wide
range of staff schedules, industry conditions, permissions, etc. Thus, the
first episode to be produced of for Asian Beat was set in Thailand. Yet
the video jackets for the video release of this multi-director collection
were ordered in a particular way – numbered from one to six, and
beginning with the Tokyo episode. As Tokyo and its media technologies
remains the spatial construct against which industries and locations across

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the region were to be showcased, it shows us what is absent in these
promotions of the promise of regional production that was to have been
revealed in the Asian omnibus. And it demonstrates a need for a method
that attends to the dynamics of power that are obscured and made
absent in discourses surrounding regional collaboration and collection.

Navigating Tokio/Tokyo: Geography, Gender and the Link

This problem of structured absence is evident not only in the promotions
and production contexts of these omnibus projects, but also across their
textual and visual content. The episodes of a multi-director project are
rarely linked by the discrete categories through which we’ve been trained
to look at film and media within the tradition of film and media studies.
The span of an omnibus will attest to a wide range of narrative and visual
styles, a wide range of genres, as well as, for transnationally co-produced
projects, a wide range of cinematic traditions and histories. For scholars
of episodic film, the formal inclusiveness of the omnibus has been a
grounds for “complicating rigid [disciplinary] paradigms,” for challenging
traditional modes of film scholarship.
26
Yet the challenge most imperative
to the Asia Pacific context is the grounds of comparison – how one might
unpack interrelations across the collection in a manner that is cognizant
of the ways in which promotions touted Tokyo as the structuring link
through which the episodes of the Asian omnibus are contained, yet at

165
the same time does not acquiesce to this containment as a determinate
lens. In his mapping of the cultural geography of Asia Pacific media,
Michael Curtin has suggested that “media capitals” such as Hong Kong or
Tokyo – with their close access to routes of capital and exchange – are
“not simply an acknowledgement of dominance.” Rather, a media capital
is “a relational concept” – a site of competing dynamics of power and an
“arena of temporal dynamism and spatial complexity.”
27
Less a container,
Tokyo is here an arena against which the tensions of regional production
might be made visible – across geography, across media and across
gender.
Examining the films of the Asian Beat omnibus intratextually – and
paying attention to the moments of relating across them – is one way of
attending to the dynamics of power that can run across such regional
production. The Tokyo episode of Asian Beat was widely constructed, in
every step of its production, as setting up a horizon of meaning for the
rest of the project. Only one stipulation had been required of Asian Beat
directors and scriptwriters by the producers of this project – that they
each feature the Japanese star Nagase Masatoshi and portray him as a
Japanese man, named Tokio, traveling through Asia.
28
He was to travel
through the region in search of the people who had killed his parents, or
the woman who would give him clues to finding them. The first film of
the Asian Beat collection thus ends with Tokio/Nagase leaving Japan with
no passport, and thus, supposedly, no nationality. He is a supposed blank

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slate. As the remaining episodes of the omnibus took up this figure of
Tokio, he was, according to the central producer of the project, to have
presented an opportunity for seeing Asia through a different lens, even
an alternative lens, from the view of the region one usually obtained
from Tokyo.
29

Yet, less providing a purely oppositional point of view, Tokio’s
traveling figure is one across which a wide range of temporal and spatial
complexities compete. David Scott Diffrient has noted “episodic
cinema’s uniquely flaneurial approach to narrative.” For him, the serial
structure of an episodic film or set of films often supports what he calls a
“situational” modality – one that encourages a continual repetition of
chance encounters.
30
Asian Beat sets this serial and situational structure
within an overarching narration of travel, as Tokio’s wander through the
region brings him to a series of unanticipated meetings. In this respect,
the use of Nagase Masatoshi in this multi-director collection is rather
strategic. And it is suggestive of the ways in which his travel and mobility
was the nexus across which competing geometries of power intersect
across its episodes. By the early 1990s, Nagase was widely recognized as
a traveling star wandering out beyond the borders of Japan. Upon the
release the Asian Beat video collection, much was made in the popular
press of his earlier appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 Mystery Train. An
article announcing the near completion of the Asian omnibus made a
point of setting stills of Nagase at work in such shooting locations as

167
Tokyo and Singapore against scenes of his time in the Memphis of the
1989 film. Indeed, his travel across this mediation of a North American
city was to have uniquely prepared the star for his role in Asian Beat.
31

Nagase’s status as a traveling star repeatedly reinventing his relationship
to the world was to have made him the perfect medium, according to
such promotions, for establishing new encounters across the borders of
Asia.
32

Yet not simply negotiating transnational borders, placing our
attention to the fault line between gender and geography allows us to
see the problems of these ideals of the collection. The chance encounters
and meetings that recur over the episodes of Asian Beat are most often
gendered in a particular way. As Tokio travels through Asia in search of a
particular woman, he, of course, meets many others along the way. A
scene from the Singapore edition of Asian Beat, Love from Temasek, is
exemplary of a situation that recurs throughout the episodes of the
omnibus project. Sitting at a table with his soon to be romantic
counterpart, Tokio protests, “Michelle, I’m not Tokyo, I’m T-o-k-i-o.”
Michelle had just pronounced his name as if it were the city, and despite
his protests seems unable – or perhaps unwilling – to pronounce it
correctly. This exchange is repeated again and again across the omnibus
project. In episodes set in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and
Thailand, Tokio is repeatedly made to protest that he is not Tokyo. From
the perspective of omnibus production, the episodic structure of this

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collection – capitalized upon here in a narrative of encounters and chance
meetings – is an arena whereby this traveler is made to disavow any links
to the implications that Tokyo might have in structuring his movement
throughout Asia. He is an individual, not a place, and thus is not caught in
the same structures of power that might otherwise make up the city’s
place in the region. Yet against this, and at the same time, his romantic
counterpart refuses to recognize or validate, even strategically ignores,
this disavowal.
It is in this moment of encounter over the distinction between
Tokio and Tokyo – and its foregrounding of the slippage between this
gendered body and this geographic place – where the tensions of the
Asian omnibus collection are revealed. In this sense, representational
strategies, here the repeated exchange between Tokio and the women
he is set to meet, as it is depicted in episodes produced and set in
Singapore, Taiwan or Malaysia, can tell us something about the power
dynamics that often run across omnibus projects linked to Tokyo at this
time. Michelle’s refusal to recognize Tokio’s disavowal is easily missed – it
is only a moment within the already momentary structure of the episodic
collection. Yet her refusal to recognize Tokio’s protests is a strategy that
reroutes our attention to what is unsaid in Tokio’s disavowal: the logic
that continues to link Tokio, the person, to Tokyo, the place. Indeed,
Tokio easily fits into the ideology of time, the “Asia now,” through which
omnibus projects were to link Tokyo to other locations of the region in

169
the early 1990s. “Tokio” is a name connoting temporality – the very
word “toki” means time. When one adds the masculinizing “o” at the
end, Tokio can be read as a “time boy.”
33
Tokio’s travel throughout the
locations of this omnibus project thus can be read in a purely imperialist
sense – as creating and confirming a regional geography constructed in
the dominant discourses – the “Asia now” – through which the omnibus,
the multimedia collection was promoted in Tokyo. Within the narrative
of Asian Beat, however, this logic is made visible only in the strategies
that the episodes of the collection use to depict their relationship to
Tokio’s travel. As Michelle is depicted to ignore his refutation, she brings
to light the power dynamics that undergird his movement through Asia.

This slippage between Tokio/Tokyo is thus a space over which
disparate strategies, here of narration, compete across the Asian
omnibus. In her interrogation of colonial narrative and popular
production, Anne McClintock has underscored the ways in which the
figure of woman continues to be conflated with landscapes of – often
masculine, and often colonial – exploration.
34
The most widely known of
the films of the Asian Beat collection, the 1992 Autumn Moon, directed
by Clara Law, suggests how these (postcolonial) terms of travel might be
made visible in the context of contemporary film, particularly as it is
primarily analyzed through the lens of its global circulation. Autumn
Moon opens with the roar of an airplane and Tokio, this time a tourist
who has just arrived in Hong Kong, stepping out of a taxi. In this episode,

170
he is carrying a video camera and looking at Hong Kong through its lens.
As the taxi then traverses the city’s highway infrastructure, Tokio’s
camera pans tall buildings and wide underpasses, as well as pedestrians
walking its streets in the distance. In visual terms, this scene presents
Hong Kong as an abstracted space – the images that the camera captures
are washed in blue-green and are often filmed much too close, or in
other cases much too far away, to be easily recognized. Yet over this
mediation of Hong Kong is a voiceover narration. Here, Tokio recites a
long list of differences and similarities between here and there, between
Hong Kong and Tokyo. Following a list of comparisons in time,
temperature and humidity between the two locations, his narrative ends
with the following monologue: “Girls in Hong Kong…have the same long
hair as girls in Tokyo. I wonder which lasts longer…a first love in Hong
Kong or Tokyo…” His narrative thus ends as gender becomes the
grounds of comparison between the two cities.
Rather than viewing the film through a lens dictated by borders –
for example, of Tokyo and Hong Kong and the difference or similarity
between them – attention to the function of gender in this geography,
indeed the function of gender as geography, allows us to see the
(postcolonial) dynamics entwined with the touristic surface of this scene.
Autumn Moon is testament to the ways in which the different episodes
of an omnibus or multi-director collection will often have a life outside
the confines of the project that produced it. The significance of Autumn

171
Moon has been most commonly analyzed in its global circulation as a
Hong Kong film. As Stephen Teo notes in Senses of Cinema, “Autumn
Moon (1992) is one of those flurry of second-generation Hong Kong New
Wave works…that found their way into the collective consciousness of
world cinema in the early '90s.”
35
Having won awards at the Locairno Film
Festival, Autumn Moon was distributed by companies specializing in Hong
Kong film and video for world markets. Yet focusing exclusively on this
particular route of travel for this film ignores other routes through which
it was produced and distributed. Indeed in Teo’s analysis, the film’s
significance as a co-production, and thus its place in the Asian Beat
collection, is mentioned only in passing. For him, its narrative’s
engagement “with a Japanese male traveler's somewhat obtuse
relationship with a Hong Kong girl” only “perhaps echo[es] the
production circumstances of this Japan-Hong Kong co-production.”
36
Teo’s
comment privileges a reading of this film in the context of its more global
contexts of circulation. Yet to ignore other regional routes – indeed, to
ignore its very contexts for production in the region – is to miss the full
extent of meaning for travel, the problems of mobility in this film.
The opening scene of Autumn Moon might thus also be read for
the dynamics that remain unsaid – the legacies structured as absent – in
its voiceover repetition over the abstracted space of Hong Kong. Rajeev S.
Patke has argued that “the cities of contemporary Asia are the sites for
a partial and uneven overlap between postmodern and postcolonial”

172
experience.
37
Here, the overlaps between postcolonial and postmodern
experience explode beyond even Patke’s doubling. The narrative of
Autumn Moon is set in a moment of diasporic angst in Hong Kong, as the
girl’s family is set to move to Canada before its impending (1997)
handover to the PRC. Such a thematic is easily, for Stephen Teo,
incorporated into what he calls the film’s “globally postmodern” style –
an art cinema style “complete with ruminations on postmodern urban
sterility, immigration, and the transience of life.”
38
Yet the terms for
travel in Autumn Moon are much wider and more contested than Teo’s
comments might imply. There is nothing new about treating the city in
the way that Tokio’s narrative over Hong Kong treats it in this opening
scene. There is nothing new about linking women to the city in this way,
either. These are often the dominant tropes through which the city is
viewed in “globally postmodern” film and video concerned with urban
space. Yet simultaneously read in the context of regional production,
Tokio’s travel over Hong Kong refracts a complex and long legacy of
relations among Tokyo and masculine figures signaled to travel out from
it.
39

Elsewhere in this collection, such relating is figured as a haunting –
traces and links that spill out of the relationships set between Tokio and
the women he meets, and the love stories that extend out from them.
The Singapore edition of the collection, for example, refracts such a
relation in a juxtaposition between its title and its narrative. Its title, Love

173
from Temasek, indicates the pre-colonial name of Singapore – it implies a
moment beyond the influence of Western/global capital, beyond the
occupation of Japanese forces, and the legacies they imply. Yet the love
story that occurs there extends across capital, colonial and pre-colonial
temporalities. The contemporary love story between Tokio and this
woman in Singapore – this woman who refused to acquiesce to Tokyo’s
disavowal of his link to the structuring of Tokyo for his travel in the
region – brings us to another relationship, suggesting a longer history to
undergird his mobility throughout Asia. Michelle’s grandmother had had
a long forgotten romance with a Japanese soldier. All this occurs in a
contemporary story of love and regional travel.
The juxtaposition between regional geographies and technologies
of seeing is a nexus at which power dynamics are both made transparent
and hidden. Attending to the hauntings that linger in these interfaces
doesn’t redeem them – indeed, this is not the intent of my analysis.
Rather, attention to absence and haunting can tell us something about
the complexity of the power dynamics – and thus more accurately tell us
of the problems – of this kind of representation as it circulates in (closely
entwined) global/regional spaces of production and distribution. The
overwhelming discourse that had surrounded the promotion of the
omnibus touted its ability to make “transparent” an emerging media
Asia. It also underscored a confidence that the omnibus could reveal the
region as linked across this promise of emergence. Yet such surface

174
“transparency” can also be resourced as a negative – a negative here
made visible through the technologies of reversal, repetition,
enlargement or imaging.

Collecting Media Asia: Technologies of the Future

These tensions and absences within “new” forms of collaboration in Asia
Pacific media appear at the interface between new technologies and
emergent geographies. In this context, the multimedia collection offers a
productive counterpoint to the omnibus film and multi-director video
collection of the early 1990s

.
40
Beginning from the end of the decade, a
series of multimedia shows, collected by a consortium of regional curators
and artists brought together by producers in Tokyo, introduced an
emerging Asian media at the cusp of the next millennium. Yet they were
only the latest in a series of collaborative forms linked to the media
capital to be positioned to reveal the new face of regional production.
The “now” of Asia promoted in omnibus collections at the beginning of
the decade had been about film, about video, and the “borderless”
mobilities that new configurations of each medium had engendered. The
multimedia collection, on the other hand, linked discourses on the
increasingly borderless face of Asian production with a simultaneous
convergence of media technologies. Here, a blurring of difference
among modes of expression such as video, film or photography was

175
entwined with a shortening of distance among locations of media
production in the region. It is within this context of converging
technologies and geographies, where an aesthetic of absence itself has
been foregrounded as the link to connect Asian media. Critical acts of
recognizing this aesthetic, however, is not a catchall for solving the
problems of Asian media. Absence can also be an ideology to be
unpacked – here, as it has been used to render invisible the collection’s
continued structuring in the media capital of Tokyo.
These multimedia collections were presented, initially to a Tokyo
public, across a geometry of competing discourses by producers, curators
and artists. For the organizations that financially supported them, such
collections were to have reflected a region in the making, redefined in its
relationship to emergent twenty-first century media. The promotional
description of the 2000 Exhibition, Serendipity is exemplary of the
convergence of media technologies and Asia Pacific locations through
which the multimedia collection was to be framed:
As our first exhibition of the new millennium, the Japan Foundation
Asia Center is pleased to present…the first exhibition organized by
the Asia Center to specifically showcase the photography, video, and
experimental film of Asia. Interest in photography, film, and video as
visual arts is growing rapidly throughout the world in tandem with
advances in media technology and the spread of globalization…
Together with visitors to the gallery, we look forward to exploring the
possibilities of a new visual art in the Asia of today.
41

Curating together photography, video, experimental film and multimedia
installation from Asia, the very possibility of this “first exhibition of the
new millennium” was dependent upon an emergence of new media

176
technologies – a process itself dependent upon forces of economic
globalization that were to be intensifying in the region.
The open possibilities of a new Asian media was thus deemed by
these promotions to have been enabled within a particular technological
and geographic context – the convergence of digital technologies with
what the Japan Foundation termed “the economic progress achieved by
Asian countries in the 1990s.”
42
While certainly not the exclusive medium
showcased by these multimedia collections, digital technology, and its role
in constructing emergent geographies in the Asia Pacific, is the medium
through which the promotional conception of these exhibitions have
discursively depended. Holly Willis has outlined the ways in which debates
surrounding digital cinema lay bare the blurring of boundaries among
critical disciplines, artistic mediums and contexts for media exhibition.
43

What promotions surrounding recent “Asian” multimedia exhibitions
further expose is the ways in which such blurring is often supported – and
frequently contained – by discourses on the potential of geographic and
media borderlessness. Indeed, a 2004 exhibition also produced by the
Japan Foundation Asia Center explicitly linked the “development of
digital media” to the freedom enabled by border crossing in the region.
New media technologies enabled the expansion of a media Asia created
across the “greater opportunities for free artistic expressions that
crosses the borders between countries.”
44
Presenting “artworks tied to
these rapid changes in technology and media” chosen by young curators

177
from China, Korea and Japan, the media and criticism collected by this
exhibit was to express an “understanding of the present age unfettered”
by heretofore restrictive categories of geography, technology, history or
art.
45

Against these producer driven discourses of an “unfettered age”
of media exchange and production in the region, curators presented a
more contested picture of the Asian multimedia collection. The central
curator of the 2000 Serendipity, Minato Chihiro, for example, argued the
fetishized links between media technologies and regional geographies
described above to be the very problem that these collections were
address. For him, adequately interrogating contemporary Asian media
demands that we instead “approach these art forms without reference
to geography or technology.” Indeed, “geography is history” – a
statement he had taken from an advertisement he had seen in Phnom
Penn – is instead the phrase he uses to explain his curation of the
exhibition. This statement, in other contexts and for other critics, might
be argued in a double sense – to situate the ways in which, in the context
of global culture, an expanded sense of geography can simultaneously be
the very means through which one might read the dynamics of power
that construct new (and often virtual) media landscapes. For Minato,
however, “geography” and “technology” are too often attached to
progress driven discourses of global and capital advancement, and can
thus only limit the emergent possibilities of new Asian media. Indeed, it

178
was the very absence of geography that would “deconstruct the linear
conception of time” so often linked to regional media, as it is constructed
through such terms as the nation or transnation. In his search for “a
dimension of media art that is, if not Asian, at least non Western,”
Minato thus looks for alternatives.
46

Curatorial discourses surrounding the multimedia collection have
thus instead posited Asian media to be connected in a shared aesthetic of
absence and invisibility. Indeed, the 2000 exhibition title of Serendipity
illustrates the function of “absence” that constructs much discussion of
collective Asian new media of late. Serendipity, as a term, denotes “a
fortunate discovery by accident” of what lies in shadow within dominant
modes of cultural expression. Elsewhere in the exhibition, curator and
critic Yi Won Kon had argued Korean media art to be constructed
through a principle of shadows and shamanism. This aesthetic strategy is
to work to make present alternative – often “magical” or “pre-modern”
– contours within what he calls the “realities of global culture.”
47
In the
context of the Asian multimedia collection as a whole, this theory of
shadows was then extended to define a strategy of regional production
in general. It was the aesthetic through which Asian production was to
be linked, and a way of knowing that could pave a way of “creating an
alternative history.” Indeed, the origin of “serendipity” is linked to a turn
on local knowledge within colonial rule. As the curator describes: “A
form of knowledge that could be traced back to ancient times in Asia

179
unexpectedly became a tool of individual identification for the purposes
of colonial administration. Serendipity, ‘the wisdom of reading signs,’ was
transformed into a tool for ruling and managing the people who had
originally developed this knowledge.”
48
Here, the multimedia collection
was to have recaptured this inductive way of knowing, as it now became
a method for “recognizing innumerable alternatives to official history.”
49

Serendipity here then denotes not just any discovery, but a politic
of reading and witnessing – of attending to alternatives, as well as what
lies in between, global media culture. This breakdown of geography is
thus not simply a question of deconstructing time, but also about a
breakdown of space. Minato, for example, conceives of regional
production in terms of the Invisible City:
The spatial dimension of history is also being broken down. The
structure of the city, formerly based on the accumulation and
movement of physical objects, is being transformed by the creation
of high-level information systems. Information systems, operating
at the speed of light, eliminate the meaning of distances that were
previously determined by the time required to move physical
objects.
50

This quote in many ways simply repeats the promotional discourses that
frequently surround digital technologies – indeed, the very multimedia
collection itself – as the region becomes more closely connected in
intensifying forces of capital and information. The challenge within this
for Minato, as for many curated collections, however, is how one locates
other experiences and other memories within this context. Minato’s
rather unproblematic belief in the idea that “geography is history”

180
notwithstanding, a strategy of reading and witnessing connotes exactly
this: the need to dig for memory and its experience – even, or perhaps
especially, in the increasingly virtual spaces constituted by media
technologies.
For the Asian multimedia collection, collaboration has been
privileged as one way to literally excavate for this experience that lies
below, or in between, the surface of an Asia Pacific constructed in
intensified links of capital and technology. Indeed, a central curator for a
later 2003 exhibition pronounced that the potential of constituting and
approaching Asian media lies in the very “Possibility of a Collaborative
Space.”
51
The pamphlet to accompany the exhibit displayed its
installations and artworks as spread across a map of the region. Here,
each of the locations from which media of the collection was curated was
represented by a figure of a man in a hardhat digging. Here, these
figures construct in unison an Asian media that was still, as the title of
the collection advertised, a project Under Construction. Against Minato’s
call for the end of geography, this representational strategy is indicative
of the ways in which new geographies of the Asia Pacific have often been
deemed the platform for the reorganization of a different media
landscape – the possibilities of which can be made visible by the
collaborative work of the regional collection.
This reconstruction of media space across the region went hand
and hand with the changing face – disappearance, even – of traditional

181
spaces for the exhibition of media art.

The 2004 collection, Out the
Window: Spaces of Distraction also emphasized the significant changes in
these sites and spaces – and explicitly linked this new unfettered
landscape to the very need for collaboration in its practices of not only
curation, but also display:
The sites where art is shown are moving away from the practices
of the conventional museum system…and pursuing possibilities of
alternative, experimental forms of expression. Since 1990, the Asia
Center has organized programs that introduce contemporary
Asian art and culture in Japan, but there have never been greater
possibilities or the simultaneous creation of contemporary forms of
art in the different regions of Asia.
52

Here, new spaces of exhibition for media art are deemed dependent
upon a changing media landscape in the Asia Pacific. And their
possibilities were to be tied less to physical spaces themselves than to
points of access and link up on a virtual map – all working in perfect
tandem with the collaborative possibilities of the region.
It is at this foregrounding of the transformation and dispersal of
spaces of exhibition and production, however, where we can begin to see
the problems with the regional landscape constructed by recent critical
takes on the Asian multimedia collection. Here, Tokyo – the capital
context around which these collections were curated – is a structured
absence within its very discourse on absence. Its function is made invisible
in the discourses of international and intermedia production that have
surrounded the multimedia collection in this context. Minato Chihiro had
argued that terms such as “geography” and “technology” are no longer

182
helpful to defining the distinct contours of Asian media. What I would
argue, and what these multimedia shows tell us, is less the need to
configure “geography as history” in the sense that Minato understands it
– as something disappeared. But rather, that we might redefine our very
understanding of how geography works – not simply as the tool of a
linearly progressing Asia that remains touted in many promotional
discourses, but also as constructed across what Michael Curtin has termed
the “relational concept” of the “media capital” – a site of competing
dynamics of power and an “arena of temporal dynamism and spatial
complexity.”
53
Attention to geography in this sense lays bare the limits of
some of the discourses that have surrounded this strategy of absence or
invisibility. While certainly an aesthetic approached by many artists in the
region, we must also be cognizant of the ways in which collaboration,
collection and curatorial discourses themselves then utilize this absence
for particular contexts. When we view Tokyo as the stage for these
exhibitions, we can begin to interrogate them as places of relating across
a wider range of power dynamics and constellations. Paying attention to
Tokyo’s link in the chain as a “media capital” is central to understanding
the dynamics of these collections – both intertextually (across the
elements of the collection) and intratextually (in relation to the larger
definition in which they are packaged). It is the latter that curators and
critics tend to miss.

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Chapter Four Conclusion

This chapter began with a description of the promise that the omnibus
film has held for producers in the region of late, as it has been touted as
the perfect platform for a new era of mobility and link-up among
locations of the region. Yet this discourse on the promise of trans-
regional collective media has been repeated from the early 1990s to the
present, and across a range of locations and technologies. In attending to
a wider set of collective production – to the omnibus film, the multi-
director video collection and the multimedia collection – this chapter
offers a counterpoint to such narrow attention to the omnibus film. What
is at stake here is not simply a question of film or video per se, but rather
how each medium inflects differently a wider set of questions – the ways
in which collaborative media technologies become entwined with
discourses and ideologies of an ever emergent and dynamic Asia Pacific.
We need to find ways to read such collective productions so that their
fissures and tensions are laid bare, even as we remain cognizant of the
temporalities and structures of power that can, at the same time, work
to contain them. Attention to “media capital” is one way of doing this. In
the context of this chapter, paying attention to the dynamics of Tokyo’s
status as a “media capital” – and Tokyo as a space for collecting and
linking across locations of the region – can place in relief the structures of

184
power that remain invisible to the surface contours of co-productions in
the Asia Pacific.

185
Chapter Four Endnotes

1. Jin Long Pao, “The Pan-Asian Co-Production Sphere: Interview
with Director Peter Chan,” Harvard Asia Quarterly VI, no. 3 (Summer,
2002) http://www.asiaquarterly.com/content/view/123/.

2. Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism,
Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura 46,
no. 1 (2001): 11.

3. Sky Corporation, Ltd. Poster Advertisement (Tokyo: Sky Group,
1997). My thanks to Dr. Luk Van Haute for sharing this poster with me.

4. Rolando Tolantino, “Introduction,” in Geopolitics of the Visible:
Essays on Philippine Film Cultures (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University
Press, 2000), xiii.

5. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational
Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity,” in Scattered
Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed.
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), 19.

6. See, for example Iwabuchi Koichi, Toransunasionaru Japan: Ajia
o tsunagu popyurâ bunka (Transnational Japan: Popular Culture Linking
Asia) (Tokyo: Iwanami Press, 2001), Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering
Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2002), and Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet:
Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

7. Homi Bhabha’s seminal work is one such example. Homi K.
Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and
Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” The Location of
Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 102-122.

8. See, for example, Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,”
Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994), 146-156.

9. Michael Dear, “Film Architecture and Cityspace: The Politics of
Representation.” Quoted in Sarah Matheson, “Televising Toronto from
Hogtown to Megacity” (PhD diss, University of Southern California, 2003),
25.

186

10. Promotional jacket for Sazân Uinzu: Ajia eiga no atsui kaze
(Southern Winds: Hot Winds of Asian Film), ed. Gaifu Press (Tokyo: Gaifu
Press, 1992).

11. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 110.

12. These stills continue to appear in Japan Foundation promotions
of Southern Winds. See, for example, the Japan Foundation, Tokyo
website: http://www.jpf.go.jp/j/culture_j/topics/movie/se_fes03_b.html.

13. David Scott Diffrient, “ Episodes and Infinities: Critical
Approaches to Anthology, Omnibus, Portmanteau, and Sketch Films”
(PhD diss, University of California Los Angeles, 2005), 624.

14. Ibid. 20-21.

15. This description of Anderson’s argument, in his article “Specters
of Comparison,” is quoted from Pheng Cheah’s “Grounds of Comparison:
Across the Work of Benedict Anderson,” Diacritics 29, no. 4: 14.

16. Hayashi Kaizô, interview with author, Los Angeles, CA, May,
2005.

17. Southern Winds, 42.

18. Indeed, these connections were to be made complete when its
four episodes were displayed as a full-length film in 1992, at the
inaugural Southeast Asian Film Festival in Tokyo – a venue that garnered
support from the Japan Foundation, as well as the local ASEAN regional
center.

19. Hayashi Kaizô, interview with author, Los Angeles, CA, May,
2005.

20. Naomi Schor, “Collecting Paris.” Quoted in Diffrient, 53.

21. Mark Betz, “Film History, Film Genre, and Their Discontents:
The Case of the Omnibus Film,” The Moving Image 1, no. 2 (Fall, 2001):
80.

22. Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title,” 11.

23. “Ajian Bîto purojekto shûryô ni yosete (The Asian Beat Project
Nears its End),” Kinema Junpô 1102 (March 1993): 212.

187

24. “Ajian Bîto,” 212-213.

25. Diffrient, 557.

26. Diffrient, 53. Mark Betz also makes a similar claim in both of
his articles quoted in this essay.

27. Michael Curtin, “Media Capital: Towards the Study of Spatial
Flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 205.

28. Hayashi Kaizô, interview with author, Los Angeles, CA, May,
2005.

29. Ibid.

30. Diffrient, 29.

31. “Ajian Bîto,” 212-213.

32. Ibid.

33. My thanks to Akira Lippit and Michiko Suzuki for reminding me
of the significance of this structure.

34. Anne McClintock, “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of
Imperialism,” Imperial Leather (New York: Routledge, 1995) 21.

35. Stephen Teo, “Autumn Moon,” Senses of Cinema (January
2001)
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/12/autumn.html

36. Teo, “Autumn Moon.”

37. Rajeev S. Patke, “Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the
Postcolonial City.” in Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and
Global Processes, ed. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Wei Wei Yeo (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 288.
38. Teo, “Autumn Moon.”

39. See the third chapter of this dissertation for a reading of one
aspect of this history and its critical implications.

40. A large percentage of these collections have been produced
under some form of affiliation with, or support from, the Japan
Foundation.

188

41. Yochô: Ajia no eizô geijutsuten / Serendipity: Photography,
Video, Experimental Film and Multimedia Installation from Asia (Tokyo:
Japan Foundation, 2000), i.

42. Ibid.

43. Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image
(London: Wallflower Press, 2005).

44. Auto za uindô / Out the Window – Spaces of Distraction (Tokyo:
Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2004), ii.

45. Ibid.

46. Minato Chihiro, “Where the Invisible Lives,” in Yochô: Ajia no
eizô geijutsuten / Serendipity: Photography, Video, Experimental Film
and Multimedia Installation from Asia (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 2000),
119.

47. Yi Won Kon, “Korean Video Art and Shamanism,” in Yochô:
Ajia no eizô geijutsuten / Serendipity: Photography, Video, Experimental
Film and Multimedia Installation from Asia. (Tokyo: Japan Foundation,
2000), 133. He describes one work of the exhibition in these terms: “The
space where the performance was held was turned into an interspace, a
boundary zone between the world where the physical bodies of the
viewers were located and the extraordinary world of the spirits.”

48. Minato Chihiro, 118.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid. 119.

51. Furuichi Yasuko, “Asia: The Possibility of a Collaborative
Space,” Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art (Tokyo: Japan
Foundation Asia Center, 2002), 13.

52. Auto za uindô, ii.

53. Michael Curtin, “Media Capital: Towards the Study of Spatial
Flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 205.

189
Conclusion
Notes on Location, Visibility and Power in Regional Co-production

The growing prominence of the “Asia
Pacific” as a cultural and economic entity
challenges one to examine the ways the
region has been constructed by outsiders
and the ways the region constructs itself.
Rolando Tolantino

A 2001 edition of the Japanese language version of Newsweek worked
to emphasize the importance of Tokyo’s place within the impending rise
of the “multinational power” of Asian media – a power, as the headline
of the article pronounced, that was to promise “The Birth of Asiawood.”
In its use of this term, this article suggests the logic by which the region
becomes necessary in a moment of media globalization, as it works as a
category for countering and competing against (or rather by way of) the
strategies and modes of dominant, here Hollywood, production.
1
As, as
the article further promised, the “trend for cross border co-productions
sets its sights first on Pan Asian and then global markets,” Asiawood
becomes a means for transforming industries and media products of the
region to more globally appropriate scales.
2
This “transformative”
emergence – from the local or national, to the regional and then the
global – has been central to the discourses through which the co-
production has been touted as a vanguard for regional production across
a wide range of contexts. This dissertation has sought to provide a set of

190
contexts and methodologies for interrogating the crises and uneven
structures of power often obfuscated in this mobilization of collaborative
media production as a gateway to the emergence of Asian media.
Implicit to its approach has been an insistence that the tensions
subsumed within such idealization of the co-production must be
addressed with attention to not simply the promise of this discourse, but
also the problems that lie latent within it – not only visibility, but also
invisibility, mobility as well as immobility, production and its lack or
failure. It has sought to reveal this by way of wider, more constellated
examination of film and media co-production over a matrix of temporal
contexts – a series of resonant moments in collaborative regional
production – and spatial practices – as they are negotiated across
imaginary, promotional, technological, industrial and critical contexts. The
paginated layout of the Newsweek article above can be read in a similar
manner, and to a similar end, as it displays still scenes of the filmed
locations of the co-productions it foregrounds against its textual account
of an emergent and increasingly networked Asian media. Set against
reportage on the rising importance of the co-production to networks
among Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Thai contexts, the layout of the article
begins and ends with the 2001 Korea-Japan co-production, Rush!.
3
The
first page of the article is a full page still of three main actors of the film
– the Korean star Kim Yoon-Jin and two Japanese male co-stars – looking
back at the camera as they run off into a road that disappears into the

191
distance. The “rush” toward the path ahead suggested in this choice of
opening image is then further underscored in the final quote of the
article. Against Kim’s comment on her surprise at being received so well
in Japan, the report ends with the promise that the world will likely
receive her soon, as well.
Yet what remains unsaid, and thus implicit, to this Newsweek
article is just as important as what it foregrounds. In one sense, the
framing of the article is an acknowledgement of South Korean film and
media’s significant role in a recent refiguring of media geographies in the
region. Here, production in the Asia Pacific is deemed as not only rising in
intensity, but also increasingly multi-valenced and multi-centered. Yet, as
this actress and the production linked to her is mobilized as a sign of
Asian film and media’s emergence into a bright, new and global future,
gender continues to be a lens into the power dynamics at play in its
production. Indeed, to the extent that the co-production has always been
a site of negotiation and contestation, it continues to be a crux for
interrogating the latencies and crises often obfuscated in capitalist media
production in the region. What remains unsaid within this article is an
explanation of the reasons why this shift in relation might seem
unbelievable to Kim. The sudden burst in co-productions between Tokyo
and Seoul that is celebrated alongside the rise in production of other
regional industries subsumes within it a not too distant geopolitic. What
is also obfuscated in this account is the ways in which such recent

192
production stands on the shoulders of South Korea’s 1998 partial lifting
of its longstanding postwar ban on Japanese cultural and film products.
This tale is not a simple account of the emergence of a regional field of
production, but also contains within it a fractured history of seemingly
“unproductive” (though by no means absent) media relations.
Certainly, the networks of regional collaboration I discuss in this
dissertation provide only a partial view – yet it is a view already
embedded and implicated within a broader, and much more perspectival
context. Rolando Tolantino argued at the turn of the millennium that the
very “prominence of the ‘Asia Pacific’ as a cultural and economic entity
challenges one to examine the ways the region has been constructed by
outsiders and the ways the region constructs itself.” His use of
“insider/outsider” might here cue us less to the boundaries of the Asia
Pacific (who is a member, who is not), than suggest and indicate a
constellation of players and practices situated at different rates and
distances from one another. What his comment points us toward is how
the region is constructed across locations and production contexts that do
not work on their own, but rather in constant relationship with one
another.
4
While this dissertation spirals out from Tokyo to interrogate
relations across Chinese language centers of media production and
capital, other studies might instead (and in some cases already have) set
their address from other vantage points and networked combinations. In
this sense this dissertation constitutes one part of a larger project – one

193
that is deeply perspectival, broadly implicated, yet grounded in
relationships among particular locations of media production.
Given the multivalenced construction of the “Asia Pacific” and its
media within a global context, such a project must itself must be
collaborative. What such a project can do – what is possible – is provide a
set of methodologies and contexts for interrogating the uneven contours
of media production and practice in the Asia Pacific, as they are
constructed in desires and “drive[s] for development and progress.”
What I have sought to do is provide a method – one specific to a
particular set of shifting relations revolving around Tokyo, Hong Kong,
Taipei and Beijing, but that might also be useful to a range of other
locations of media production in the Asia Pacific. I have also sought to
link this production to theoretical debates on space, place and mobility.
Paying attention to ideologies of space, time, gender and technology, this
dissertation is ultimately concerned with how, as Harry Harootunian has
also suggested, “past and present are not necessarily successive but,
instead, are simultaneously produced…just as the here and there of
modernity are coeval, even though the latter is often forgotten in the
narrative of the former.”
5
We need to link histories transnational
production in the region (here, for example, as it is exemplified or
foregrounded in the co-production) to a series of methods that
interrogate them not simply for their connection but also for their
fissures.

194
In this context, the co-production can serve as a node, as one place
of convergence in flows of capital, technologies, ideologies, etc. And as
any scholar of convergence culture understands, its study is most
effective and insightful when it works to dissect and unpack the
intersecting technologies, discourses and practices that come together
under its sign. For the contexts of the co-production for this dissertation,
at the very least, it is also where the medusa headed specters of the past
and elsewhere can be examined, considered and revealed.

195
Conclusion Endnotes

1. In this sense, though my project deals more exclusively with film
and media practices and technologies, Leo Ching’s observation at the turn
of the millennium that the region is a necessary component of
globalization (and thus not an inherently oppositional structure beyond or
below it) still resonates. Leo Ching, “Globalizing the Regional,
Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late
Capital” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 233-257.

2. “The Birth of Asiawood: Ajia eiga wa takokuseki jidai (Asian Film
in the Multinational Age),” Newsweek (Japanese version) 6, no. 6 (2001):
64-68.

3. Here, I return to the importance of interrogating moments
when the co-production is named and promoted as such. The most
significant collaborative component of this co-production is simply the
presence of the Korean star, as she is set against a mainly Japanese case
and crew.

4. While his project is more concerned with “Japanese film,” as
well as with the discipline of “film studies,” per se, Scott Nygren’s
recently published Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of
History (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007) makes a
similar statement on “Japan” – describing it as a location always already
produced in relation. (See in particular pages 4-6). As I deal with regional
production, and seek to address debates in global media and cultural
geography, this relational aspect is foregrounded even more strongly in
my study.

5. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural
Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. (New York: Columbia UP,
2000).
196
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Asset Metadata

Creator DeBoer, Stephanie (author)

Core Title Co-producing the Asia Pacific: travels in technology, space, time and gender

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/29/2007

Defense Date 05/25/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Asia Pacific,Chinese cinema,co-production,Japanese cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest,Tokyo

Place Name Asia (continents), Beijing (city or populated place), China (countries), Hong Kong (city or populated place), Japan (countries), Tokyo (city or populated place)

Language English

Advisor James, David E. (committee chair), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email sdeboer@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m714

Unique identifier UC1451348

Identifier etd-DeBoer-20070729 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-541905 (legacy record id),usctheses-m714 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-DeBoer-20070729.pdf

Dmrecord 541905

Document Type Dissertation

Rights DeBoer, Stephanie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu