越境するポピュラー文化と＜想像のアジア＞ ： August 2008アーカイブ

Hi, everyone, I would like to thank Hiroshi for organizing the workshop. I'm proposing to work on the relationship between Hong Kong cinema and Japanese manga by focusing on those films based on Japanese comics. Examples include “Dragon from Russia” (1990) based on “Crying Freeman” (Kuraingu furîman); “The Wicked City” (1992) on Yôjû toshi; “Story Of Ricky” (1992) from “Rikki-O”; “City Hunter” (1993) based on ShitīHantā; “Love on Delivery” (1994) based on Takashi Hamori’s King of Destruction; “A Battle of Wits” (2006) based on Hideki Mori’s Bokkō; “Initial D” (2005) adapted from Inisharu Dī by Shuichi Shigeno; and “Shamo” (2007) adapted from the manga with the same title. I believe they are not simply escapist products, but by appropriating the manga aesthetics, these movies attempt to reimagine Hong Kong identity in the postcolonial era and some of their cross-racial impersonation of one Asian national as another also produces some sort of otherness that offers a different perspective to reflect on the formation of identity itself.

Look forward to meeting you all in October.

K.C.Lo, from Hong Kong

Looking good thus far! With Kwaicheung and Masaki's self-intro at hand, let us start up our setup discussions on our more overarching theme to look into, while I will ask our secretary, Maki Satoh, to assist you with each of your travel plans!

Cheers!

Hiroshi

This is Laikwan from Hong Kong. I am proposing to discuss in the workshop issues related to transnational cinema, and specifically I will examine a project called "Focus First Cut" (2006), which includes 6 films of 6 new directors, who are all ethnically Chinese but coming from different places: mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. "Focus First Cut" represents a trend of similar film projects seen in recent years. These projects are producer-based, supervised by a strong and experienced producer, but featuring a combination of new directors from different Chinese cultural backgrounds. The specific director-producer package is characterized by an interesting set of tensions and collaborations between the two roles. The directors are young and fresh, often below thirty years old, and they tell stories around their own experiences, with a microscopic tendency exploring the everyday lives of a particularly group of people, sometimes even in a deliberately parochial sense. The producers, on the other hand, are experienced, cosmopolitan, and have elaborate finance and distribution connections. I would like to examine how such combinations fit into a specific transnational mode of production, and how the concept of "New Asian Cinema" is constructed accordingly.

Laikwan Pang, Professor, Dept of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (email: lkpang@cuhk.edu.hk)

Dear Fellow Participants, 

My name is Gavin Whitelaw. I will be taking up an assistant professorship at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo this September. Currently, I am in the last hours of a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Reischauer Institute.

My research interests are particularly focused on contemporary Japanese and American society, commerce, work, material culture, food, and globalization. For my doctoral dissertation, I conducted 18-months of "observant" participation as a convenience store clerk in Japan. In my subsequent writings based on that research, I have sought to describe the lifeworld of these stores and understand their cultural significance as industrial system, social arrangement, and personal practice.

I am very much looking forward to meeting all of you this October.