Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual media took a deep interest in cities and their problems, and what this rapid change meant for the country. In Residual Futures , Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from this intensive urbanization, mapping the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation. Residual Futures examines crucial works of documentary film, fiction, and photography that interrogated Japan's urbanization and integration into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical system. Prichard discusses documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki's portrait of the urban "traffic war" and the remaking of Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics, novelist Abe Kōbō's depictions of infrastructure and urban sociality, and the radical notions of landscape that emerge from the critical and photographic work of Nakahira Takuma. His careful readings reveal the shifting relationships among urban materialities and subjectivities and the ecological, political, and aesthetic vocabularies of urban change. A novel cultural history of critical urban discourse in Japan, Residual Futures brings an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese literary and visual media studies. It provides a vital new perspective on the infrastructural aesthetics and entangled urban and media conditions of the global Cold War. "The first book-length study of the ways in which filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with Japan's urbanization and integration into the U.S. geopolitical system in the 1960s and 70s. The works Prichard discusses in this book tell a story of radical criticism, thought, and cultural practice at a time of rapid change in Japan and across East Asia. In the first chapter, Prichard examines the documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki's engagement with the dispossession effected by the material remaking of Tokyo ahead of the 1964 Olympics. Chapter two undertakes a "topological analysis" of Abe Kobo's late-1960s writings, focusing on the themes of anonymity and urban sociality. In the last three chapters, Prichard explores the critical and photographic work of Nakahira Takuma, who elaborates, along with other critics with whom he enters into dialogue, what Prichard calls "a radical discourse of landscape"-- Provided by publisher In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual media took a deep interest in cities and their problems, and what this rapid change meant for the country. In , Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from this intensive urbanization, mapping the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation.__Residual Futures____Residual Futures__ Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from Japan's intensive urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s. He maps the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation.