What Is Japanese Cinema?

Philip Kaffen is assistant professor of comparative literature and East Asian Studies at NYU. His work has been published in positions and other scholarly journals.Yomota Inuhiko is an acclaimed Japanese essayist, cultural critic, and poet, the author of dozens of books on a wide range of subjects. He taught film studies and comparative literature at Meiji Gakuin University.

Philip Kaffen is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Culture Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Dudley Andrew, Yale University:
A famously rambunctious critic, Inuhiko Yomota proves to be an even better pedagogue. He deftly organizes Japan’s kaleidoscopic genres and film fashions into a totality you can grasp. Auteurs and stars sparkle above an omnivorous industry that metabolized traditional theater, popular manga, and Hollywood techniques into unmistakably Japanese forms. A swift, truly satisfying summary, What Is Japanese Cinema? is also just as vibrant and searching as its title, because its author is clearly in the thrall of his marvelous subject.

Paul Anderer, author of Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films:
No living scholar-critic of Japanese movies possesses Yomota Inuhiko's encyclopedic range and sheer passion for film. What Is Japanese Cinema? is a tour de force of filmic history: a concise and spirited account of how Japanese film came to be, illuminating carryovers from native theatrical traditions and the tensions lining the political history of modern East Asia. That Japanese cinema has all along been local, and—in its imperial ambitions, aesthetic power, or moral force—global in its reach, is a matter that this insightful book brings remarkably to light.