these early texts and their legacy reveals J-horror’s trajectory from schoolgirl to nation, just as the previous chapter articulated its trajectory from the nation to Asia and the rest of the world. In keeping with the image of a new aesthetic produced by intensive connections between genres and industries, the final section of the chapter will show how further connections of this sort led to both the dissolution of the J-horror phenomenon and its discursive re-territorialization under the signs of nostalgia and the nation.
the contrary. However, in many ways it did evolve from a Japanese tradition, and historicizing this evolution in a non-essentialist and non-culturalist way reveals how, rather than a simple continuation of the culturally specific blueprint for horror stories in Japan, J-horror was a moment of disruption in the nation’s horror trajectory, and a moment when dominant images of horror were upended and diminished under the hegemony of a new image that formed through the intersection of several forces.
In Japan, classic kaidan-based cinema has, until recently, been categorically distinguished from the genre known as “horaa”. During the postwar Occupation, jidaigeki or period dramas were banned, along with much other work from both Hollywood and the Japanese film industry,120 due to the occupiers’ impression that such films could reignite or fan the flames of Japanese nationalism. While samurai films’ combination of action-oriented thrills and images of a traditional Japan were viewed by the Occupation as a threat, kaidan were seen as harmless enough to avoid censorship,121 and their focus on drama and female agency were more in line with the cinematic themes that the Occupation wanted to flourish in the aftermath of war.122 Due to the popularity of modern drama pictures at this time, the Occupation’s censorship of jidaigeki, and the new importing of Hollywood films, in the years of Occupation (1945-1952), kaidan films were one of the few ways that popular cinema depicted
“historical” or “traditional” images of Japan. While their association with folklore already contextualised them as part of the national imaginary, their presence as bearers of tradition during and after the censorship years may have helped to solidify this image. Kobayashi Masaki’s Kwaidan (Kaidan) was released in 1964, won the Special Jury Prize the next year at Cannes, and was nominated in the Academy Award category of Best Foreign Language Film. In Japan, reviews and other media framed it as both an independent film and a Japanese film, but not a
120 Kitamura, Hiroshi (2012). “America’s Racial Limits: U.S. Cinema and the Occupation of Japan”. The Japanese Journal of American Studies. No. 23. 139-162.
121 Powell, Brian (2002). Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity. London: Routledge. 144.
122 Coates, Jennifer. Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945–1964. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 23.
horror film.123 Internationally, films like Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, Mizoguchi Kenji’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), and Shindo Kaneto’s Kuroneko (Yabu no naka no kuroneko, 1968), were discussed as examples of Japanese cinema and auteur cinema, but were rarely contextualised on the basis of a shared genre.124 Nonetheless, it is tempting to view these films as a shared resource for the aesthetic that developed into J-horror in the 1990s, especially in the visual motifs of the yuurei and the emphasis on drama and melancholy over violence and thrills.
However, during the 1970s and the 1980s, the horror genre firmly established itself, in Japan and many other countries, as a cinema of shocks and violence. Especially when the home video market grew in popularity in the 1980s, the horror genre thrived in the form of low-budget, exploitative films, rarely employing tropes from kaidan and Japanese folklore, focused instead on effects-based scenes of extreme violence. “Horror films” and kaidan films were therefore quite distinct, almost oppositional, in terms of genre and aesthetics, a point which is rarely, if ever, made in contemporary discussions and catalogues of “Japanese horror”.125 Whereas kaidan connoted Japanese folklore, tradition, drama, and spiritual or psychological suffering, “horror films” in the 1980s connoted video cassettes, sadism, excess, and physically violent suffering.
Whereas the kaidan was part of a shared national imaginary, horror films were to be consumed like pornography, in private and removed from the public sphere. Exemplary among these latter films was the Guinea Pig series, started in 1985, which included two films written and directed by Hino Hideshi, an influential horror manga artist who had experimented with grotesque imagery in the 1960s and 1970s. The intersection between non-filmic visual sub-culture and cinema is important here for two reasons. Firstly, it links the exploitation films of this period with ero-guro nansensu, or “erotic grotesque nonsense”, a self-explanatory genre label developed in the Taisho period and later applied to
123 Wada-Marciano (2009), 36.
124 Wada-Marciano (2009), 36.
125 E.g. Murguia, Salvador, ed. (2016), The Encyclopedia of Japanese Horror Films, London: Rowman and Littlefield; Punter, David, ed. (2012), A New Companion to theGothic,Oxford: Blackwell Publishing; Hughes, William, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (2016), The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, Chichester: Blackwell Publishing.
experimental images produced from the 1960s to the present. Secondly, it reveals a little of the under-researched relationship between horror manga and cinema at this time, which is in fact crucial to an understanding of the emergence of J-horror.
While not prolific as a genre in itself, various acclaimed and influential manga such as Umezu Kazuo’s The Drifting Classroom (Hyōryō Kyōshitsu, 1972-1974) have retrospectively been classed as “horror”, though again, their contextualization at the time of writing would more likely have simply been
“shōnen”, or, “for boys”. The gendering of manga into shōnen and shōjo, for boys and for girls, remains a hugely influential discursive framework within which texts are produced. While this gendered division of popular culture texts is arguably only a more explicit version of the similar framework that exists in the popular cultures of countries like the U.S.A., the concomitant aesthetic divide is noteworthy here. Shōnen works typically favour dynamic and action-oriented narratives over character development, whereas shōjo works typically favour emotional and drama-oriented scenarios in which introspection is dominant in relation to narrative development.126 There are of course many works which challenge these simple binary conditions, and much has been written about how power expresses itself within this gender-genre system of production and categorisation. As horror narratives were primarily classified as shōnen manga, their style naturally adhered to the “adventure” or action-oriented framework in their depiction of scary events. The use of horror as expressive and violent is also seen in manga artists such as Maruo Suehiro, who continued the ero-guro tradition of combining the carnivalsque and the exploitative, for example in his manga Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show (Shōjo Tsubaki, 1984), an appropriation of the Showa era stock character “camellia girl” (shōjo tsubaki) which charts her descent from abject poverty into nightmarish exploitation and humiliation.
At the same time, shōjo horror manga began to take form, but its expressions were muted and few at this time, presumably because girls did not seem like a financially viable target demographic for horror. Shōjo had found a
126 Saitō, Minako (2001). Kō itten ron [A Discussion on a Splash of Crimson].
Tokyo:
Chikuma shobō.
corollary in cinematic horror in a very limited number of films, such as 1977’s Hausu, which had a script inspired by conversations between director Obayashi Nobuhiko and his adolescent daughter. In the same year, Dario Argento’s Suspiria became a hit in Japan, and while its aggressively garish colour pallets and scenes of violence might seem to align it more with the more prolific sub-culture horror films of the 1980s, Stéphane du Mesnildot believes the film’s Japanese success was due to its setting (a girls’ dance academy) and narrative structure, which develops “like a shōjo”.127 Nonetheless, these rare intersections between the shōjo aesthetic and horror cinema did not increase throughout the 1980s.
Just as the advent of DVD technology would later facilitate the emergence of J-horror, in the 1980s the advent of home-video technology created a market for low-budget exploitation cinema that could make a profit through rentals and sales rather than at the box office. Video production allowed filmmakers to produce work with historically low budgets, in small and private spaces, and without previously essential components including equipment and scripts. The conditions were therefore ideal for pornography and graphic horror, which both began to proliferate as part of the new media. In Japan and other countries such as the United Kingdom, the new forms of availability of graphic or controversial visual media became a much-debated topic within popular media itself, instigating moral panic over what, in the U.K., the press dubbed “video nasties”.
In Japan, this controversy came to a head following the widely publicised murders in 1988 and 1989 of four young girls by a serial killer who was found to have a large collection of graphic videos. Dubbed the “otaku killer” by the Japanese press, the negative image that this media event ascribed to the “otaku”
identity in Japan has had a long-lasting effect, and in this context has been of interest to researchers of Japanese popular culture.128
However, its relation to the horror genre has also been pivotal. In the first case, the image of the video tape as both capable of containing horrific content and also being a source of horrific events (i.e. real-life violence) no doubt
127 Du Mesnildot, Stéphane (2011). Fantōmes du Cinéma Japonais. Rouge Profond, Pertuis.
128 Azuma (2009), 4.
lingered in the popular imagination and found its cultural expression in Ring, first in the 1991 novel and later in the 1998 film (non-Japanese films such as Videodrome [1983] and American Psycho [2000] also thematized the anxiety of the video tape moral panic of the 1980s). The bad reputation of video had a less obvious effect on Japanese horror due to another significant event of 1989: the studio Toei released the first direct-to-video films in Japan, heralding in a new era of “V-Cinema” which legitimized and integrated video into the film industry as all major film companies began producing and distributing direct-to-video films.129 One of these companies, Japan Home Video (JHV), had distributed many of the gory horror films that were found in the serial killing case, and was thus in a position where, on the one hand, it was reluctant to distribute graphic or violent films, but on the other hand eager to distribute low-budget, newly-made genre films. Given these cultural and industrial pressures, one might have expected the horror genre to fade or diminish in the wake of other, less controversial genres. Instead, thanks to a new JHV production called Honto ni Atta Kowai Hanashi (Scary True Stories), the genre underwent a radical transformation by reinventing itself under the sign of shōjo horror.
The Asahi Shinbun corporation had published a manga of the same name in 1987. What’s more, the success of schoolteacher Tsunemitsu Toru’s collection of ghost stories published as Gakkō no Kaidan (“School Ghost Stories”) in 1990 showed that there was an audience for student-centred spooky tales.130 Tsuruta Norio took the Honto ni Atta Kowai Hanashi title and literary format, an omnibus of ghost stories in the style of urban legends, and adapted them in his V-Cinema collection of horror vignettes released on video in 1991 and 1992. His scriptwriter was Konaka Chiaki, who had previously penned an unusual horror film called Jaganrei in 1988, which employed found-footage and documentary styles and focused on ghost-haunted media rather than violence – some commentators have called it “the first J-horror”.131 However, while Jaganrei
129 Mes, Tom (2014). “The V-Cinema Notebook: Part 1”. Midnight Eye.
<http://www.midnighteye.com/features/the-v-cinema-notebook-part-1/>
[04/02/2017]
130 Kalat (2007), 55.
131 E.g. Scherer, Elisabeth (2016). “Well-Travelled Female Avengers: The Transcultural Potential of Japanese Ghosts”. Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and
remained obscure, the new project of Tsuruta and Konaka which would prove to be more influential. In contrast to the “hard” masculine image of fast, graphic violence and physical brutality that horror had been associated with in the 80s; it was now rebranded under a feminine image of “soft” atmospherics and slow, psychological fear, in which both protagonists and antagonists tended to be female. The lack of onscreen violence in these short horror vignettes allowed JHV to distribute the videos without an age restriction, and to have them placed on
“respectable” shelves in video shops where they could reach their target audience of schoolgirls.132
By shifting the genre radically away from the image of masculinity and violence, Tsuruta and Konaka effectively circumvented the public outcry against horror videos and exploited a niche in the market which had been present for some time: “horror for girls”. What’s more, the blueprint for shōjo horror already could be found in the realm of manga and literature where it had always existed in the shadow of shōnen horror. Ito Junji, who became the world’s most internationally renowned horror manga artist by the 2000s (and whose work would later be adapted for many J-horror films, including the Tomie franchise), emerged at this time, publishing his work in Asahi’s “Halloween shōjo comics”, a horror supplement for girls which lasted from January 1986 to December 1995.
The videos of Honto ni Atta Kowai Hanashi (hereafter “Kowai Hanashi”) were the filmic expression of shōjo horror, separate from the onscreen horror genre as it existed at the time. Despite the focus on ghosts and human relationships, there were no strong connections to the classical kaidan films, either – these shorts were not nostalgic and aestheticised, but notable instead for the mundane urban environments in which strange events occurred. Ghosts and the supernatural emerged subtly in the day-to-day lives of contemporary teenage girls, in settings such as schools, homes, friends’ houses, and so on. The videos were a hit, creating a template that, due largely to their lack of violence, became popular in Japanese television programming (and remains so to this day), allowing the new style of horror to reach a much wider audience.
Beyond: Narratives, Cultural Contexts, Audiences. Ed. Peter J. Bräunlein and
Andrea Lauser. Leiden: Brill. 74.
132Zahlten, Alex and Kimihiko Kimata (2005). “Norio Tsuruta”. Midnight Eye.
<http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/norio-tsuruta/> [02/04/2017].
The videos also opened up a new field of experimentation for many independent directors who could begin their careers by gaining experience in the “low culture” productions of V-cinema. The vignette format of Kowai Hanashi was especially suited to new directors, allowing them the chance to hone their skills by producing shorts that would only last around five minutes. Many of the later auteurs of J-horror, such as Ring’s director Nakata Hideo, began their careers by directing vignettes for Tsuruta’s successful series, and have recognized Kowai Hanashi as the first iteration of a new type of film.133 From this we can see that J-horror emerged largely as the result of the industry and cultural positioning of horror as a genre only fit for inexperienced filmmakers, but also as a result of the gendered distribution of styles in shōnen and shōjo manga being applied to low-budget genre cinema. Both the success and defining characteristics of J-horror make sense in light of its original conception as
“horror for girls”.