| Research Abstract |
In the essay (1), Peter High discloses how Kikuchi Kan adapted into his novels the newspaper reports about the Zigomar incident, which occurred in 1910s. In the essay (3), High argues that during the war Kikuchi led to organize the mass, playing a role in mediating the film industry and the literature society. In relation to these discussions, High, with assistance of Fujiki and others, investigated and analyzed documents of early Japanese cinema, and published three issues of the bulletin titled "Kinemaroku," in order to enhance the study of Japan's early films. Moreover, High revised his book, Teikoku no ginmaku, which is written in Japanese, and then published an English version of this book. In the essay (4), Fujiki discusses how Onoe Matsunosuke, who started his career as a low-rank kabuki actor, became socially distinguished in relation to the socio-historical circumstances and the industrial institute. In the essay (5), Fujiki paid attention to the historical situation in which
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the American film star Clara Bow, whose visual images were massively imported into Japan in the late 1920s, induced debates on education, morality, and aesthetics among cultural critics. In so doing, he points out that the debates involved the formation of the values and codes in modern Japan. In the essay (6), Fujiki discusses that, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the replacement of the onnagata with female actresses was sustained by the three kinds of ideologies : the desire to essentialize the film medium, the assumption about the reflection of sex in film images, and Euro-America-centric colonialist aspiration. Including these essays, his volume conducted an extensive analysis on the formation of films stars in the 1910s and 1920s, and the historical vicissitudes from the emergence of early Japanese film stars, through the rise of American film stars, to the growth of a new type of Japanese film stars. At the same time, he discusses how individual stars differently involved cultural meanings, values, sensibilities, and politics under the modern imperial society. Less
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