Japan hongscreen: Pan-Asian cinemas and flexible accumulation

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 61-82

  Yueh Yu, Yeh ^a   Davis, Darrell William ^b  

^a HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY   (Hong Kong)

^b UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750036581     PISSN: 01439685     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01439680220120291     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an inquiry into the origins of cultural change (Oxford, 1989), pp. 150-158
2. Michael Storper, The transition to flexible specialization in the US film industry: external economies, the division of labour and the crossing of industrial divides, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 13(2) (1989), pp. 273-305. Storper here reviews distinctions between flexible production, flexible specialization, and varieties of post-Fordist industrial organization. For him flexible specialization is the form of production that characterizes Hollywood. It has three characteristics: a wide-ranging product line for differentiated markets; use of general-purpose technology with little separation between conception and execution of designs; and a finely balanced equilibrium between competition, which encourages innovation, and cooperation, which sustains a community of industrial practices thereby encouraging predictability (p. 274)
3. Irene Wing-chiu, Flexible production and the creation of competitive advantage in an Asian newly industrializing economy: organization and dynamics in the Hong Kong electronics industry (PhD thesis, UCLA, 1992), p. 201
4. See Law Kar, The American connection in early Hong Kong cinema, Poshek Fu and David Desser (eds), The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 44-70
5. The inadvertent hilarity of Hong Kong movie subtitles arises from outsourcing. Whereas the big studios (Shaws, Golden Harvest) had their own subtitling departments, since the mid-1970s smaller producers sent this chore out to family-run translation businesses. Provided is an audiotape of dialogue, a few hundred dollars, and a 3-day deadline. Armed with this, students or clerks do the best they can rendering salty Cantonese slang into English. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: popular cinema and the art of entertainment (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 26-27
6. Film historians like Law Kar and Poshek Fu and scholars like Michael Curtin and Steve Fore have conducted in-depth studies on this issue. The catalogue of the 24th Hong Kong International Film Festival, 'Border crossings in Hong Kong cinema' (Hong Kong, Leisure and Cultural Service Department, 2000) is devoted to the history of Hong Kong cinema as a transnational cinema, seeking co-productions and importing talents from other countries in order to retain its competitiveness and a steady stream of production. For related articles, see Law Kar's Introduction for an overview (pp. 9-10) and Crisis and opportunity: crossing borders in Hong Kong cinema, its development from the 40s to the 70s (pp. 116-123)
7. Poshek Fu, Going global: a cultural history of the Shaw Brothers Studio, 1960-1970 (pp. 43-51)
8. Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, Hong Kong and Japan: not one less (pp. 104-110)
9. Michael Curtin, Industry on fire: the cultural economy of Hong Kong media, Post Script 19(1) (1999), pp. 28-51
10. Steve Fore, Golden Harvest films and the Hong Kong movie industry in the realm of globalization, Velvet Light Trap, 34 (1994), pp. 40-58
11. City Entertainment, 569 (2001), p. 62
12. The title is a pun on the word 'onscreen', combining the ideas of screening Japanese material on film or television (or computer screens) with the manner in which Hong Kong cinema imagines, mediates and projects Japan. We are trying to convey notions of Hong Kong filmmakers shaping Japanese material to suit their needs as well as the closely related issue of how Japan may appear to Hong Kong audiences
13. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 159
14. See our study, VCD: a Third World technology?, paper to be presented at SCS, Denver, CO, May 2002. See also D.W. Davis and Emilie Y.Y. Yeh, 'Flexible Accumulation, Flexible Consumption: VCDs and Class Consciousness in Asia Pacific', in Koichi Iwabuchi (ed.), Feeling Asian Modernities: Japanese Television Drama Consumption in East and Southeast Asia (Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming)
15. A touch of realism, Asia week, 20 July 2001. [13] Bordwell, p. 150
16. Donald Richie describes this film as 'the worst in terms of social irresponsibility About a girl summering by the seaside with a foreigner, it showed the havoc she introduced into the Japanese family system by having sex with two brothers perhaps simultaneously and certainly repeatedly' (The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, p. 265)
17. Cf. Koichi Iwabuchi's 'Three Cs' of contemporary Japanese exports to Asia: consumer electronics, computer games, comics. Marketing 'Japan': Japanese cultural presence under a global gaze, Japanese Studies, 18(2) (1998), pp. 165-180
18. See Mark Schilling, Encyclopedia of Japanese Popular Culture (Weatherhill, 1997), pp. 230-232
19. See William Gibson, Idoru (Berkeley, 1997)
20. ' "Japan is the only country in Asia right now that is a geniune fashion force," explains Joanne Ooi, CEO of e-tailer Style. Trek.com. "Telling a teen customer than an item is popular in Japan is a huge selling point - it's on par with telling a tai tai (Hong Kong socialite) that John Galliano designed it." ' Kate Drake, Kwest for kawaii, Time Asia, 157(25) (2001), p. 47. One could easily argue that kawai'i is the neo-traditional Japanese aesthetic, just as Red Chinese socialist kitsch works this way on the continent
21. See also Annie Hau-Nung Chan, Middle-class formation and consumption in Hong Kong, in Chua Beng-Huat (ed.), Consumption in Asia: lifestyles and indentities (Hong Kong, 2000), pp. 98-134
22. James L. Watson (ed.), Golden Arches East: McDonald's in E. Asia (New York, 1997)
23. See our Warning! Category III: the other Hong Kong cinema, Film Quarterly, 54(4) (2001) for a survey and history of content regulation in Hong Kong media
24. For studies on media effects, see, for example, Joseph Chan Man, Mass media and socio-political formation in Hong Kong 1949-1992, Asian Journal of Communication, 2(3) (1992), pp. 106-129
25. For studies on Hong Kong identity, see Leung Ping-kwan, Problematizing national cinema: Hong Kong cinema in search of its cultural identity, River City: a journal of contemporary culture, Winter (1996), pp. 23-40
26. Michael Curtin, Sweet comrades: historical identities and popular culture, paper presented at 'In Search of Boundaries: Communication, Nation-States and Cultural Identities', Department of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 25-26 June 1999
27. Eric Kit-wai Ma, Culture, Politics and Television in Hong Kong (New York, 1999)
28. For a resourceful survey on foreign media in Hong Kong, see Paul S. N. Lee, The absorption and indigenization of foreign media cultures: Hong Kong as a cultural meeting point of the East and West, Asian Journal of Communication, 1(2) (1991), pp. 52-72
29. For example, see Michael Curtin, Media capitals: Hollywood, Hong Kong and Chicago, forthcoming)
30. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Paris, 1984), p. xi
31. For studies on the presence and appeal of Japanese culture in the region, see Koichi Iwabuchi's, Japanese cultural industries in Asia, Culture and Policy, 7(2) (1996): http://www.gu.edu.au/centre/cmp/journal.html#two
32. Marketing 'Japan': Japanese cultural presence under a global gaze, Japanese Studies 18(2) (1998), pp. 165-180
33. Complicit exoticism: Japan and its other, The International Journal of Urban Labour and Leisure, 2(2): http://www.ijull.com/vol2.2/000017.htm
34. David Morley and Kevin Robins, Techno-Orientalism: futures, foreigners and phobias, New Formations, 6 (1992), pp. 136-156
35. Law Kar, Hongkong film market and trends in the 80s, Law Kar (ed.), Hong Kong Cinema in the Eighties (Hong Kong, 1991), p. 75
36. Bordwell says Hollywood films claimed over half the box office receipts in 1997, but uncharacteristically does not give any documentation (p. 1). For information on Hong Kong market structure and box office receipts, see Chan Ching-wai, The Structure and Marketing Analysis of Hong Kong Film Industry (Hong Kong, 2000)
37. Cucindo Hung, chairman of the Motion Picture Industry Association of Hong Kong. Japanese idols boost receipts for Hong Kong's box office, The Japan Times, 9 January 2001
38. Derek Elley, Asia to 'Tiger': Kung Fooey; 'Hidden' draggin at the Orient B.O. despite breaking records in U.K., Variety, 7 February 2001. This piece was hotly contested by James Schamus, the screenwriter of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon