Tangemania

I am trying to catch up on my blog announcements after encountering a server problem that prevented me from updating the site for several months. So here is post about a book I contributed to that appeared last year.

I am not sure if it is a trend in the academic publishing industry, but there is a spate of handbooks and introductory anthologies that has been appearing, even in the relatively small field of Japanese film studies. Oxford was first in 2014 with the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Daisuke Miyao (I have a piece in there on the history of Japanese film criticism). Last year the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema came out, edited by Joanne Bernardi and Shota Ogawa (Routledge approached me about editing such a collection, but I didn’t take them up on the offer). Blackwell has another such collection in the works, edited by David Desser, which hopefully should come out soon (I have a contribution about the early relationship between TV and cinema in Japan). 

Another such collection is The Japanese Cinema Book, which was published through the BFI and edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alasteir Phillips. Pam Cook’s The Cinema Book, published by the BFI in 1985, was the key reference book for us studying for exams during grad school, so it was a pleasure to be able to participate in this project. I contributed a piece (which you can access here) on Morita Yoshimitsu’s Family Game for Alastair and Julian Philips’s Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts; and published the Japanese version of my article on Japanese film criticism in Kankyaku e no apurochi, which Fujiki edited.