Grasping for the Periphery: Ethnographic Imaginaries and Media Ecologies of Place in Late High-Growth Era Japan

Abstract

This dissertation examines how media infrastructure reshaped popular perceptions of distant and peripheral sites in postwar Japan. It explores how media practitioners—across literature, film, television, and print—engaged with these regions to respond to emerging social, cultural, and ecological crises. Focusing on media production in historically “peripheralized” regions and former colonial sites during following the period of high economic growth, I trace how these spaces were materially transformed and mediated as sites of epistemological crisis and national reimagination. Through a close analysis of the “ethnography boom” of the 1970s, I examine how peripheral regions, former colonial holdings, and marginalized communities became focal points within Japan’s national imagination. I argue that these highly mediatized spaces—what I term “media ecologies of place”—played a critical role in shaping evolving notions of identity, space, and belonging. Utilizing a combined approach of structural analysis and close reading within the frameworks of media theory and cultural history, I explore how media creators experimented with ethnographic imaginaries across a wide range of intersecting—and at times oppositional—formats and genres. I contend that these media ecologies offer valuable insight into the emergence of new epistemologies of space, connectivity, national territory, and community. These frameworks continue to shape how “place” is experienced and imagined in contemporary Japan. In each chapter of this project, I attend to the case study of a different kind of “peripheralized site” and core media genre to investigate how ethnographic and structuralist theories of cultural production were taken up by creators working across a variety of mediums to self-reflexively critique the structures of knowledge production at the heart of Japan’s modern consciousness. Chapter 1 examines the transformation of minicomi magazines and regional literature through the work of Kyushu-based writer Morisaki Kazue. Drawing on the structure of ethnographic works by canonical figures of modern Japanese thought, particularly Yanagita Kunio, Morisaki self-reflexively interrogated the intersections of language, cultural ideology, and modern consciousness. In tracing Morisaki’s shifting approach to documentary literature culminating in her 1973 work Gods of the Abyss: A Spiritual History of Coal Mine Labor, I consider how regional print cultures appropriated ethnographic frameworks to challenge dominant narratives of cultural homogeneity and historical continuity. Chapter 2 analyzes the documentary programs and theory of Konno Tsutomu, a co-founder of Japan’s first independent television production company, Terebi Man Union. Examining the breakout documentary travel series I Want to Go Far Away (1970-), I demonstrate how the concept of “place-ticity” (genbasei) emerged as a critical heuristic through which media practitioners responded to the creative and ethical demands of television production amid intense social upheaval, networking the spaces of the living room, the production site, and imagined ethnographic referents into new aleatory configurations. Chapter 3 evaluates the manga works of Mizuki Shigeru and Morohoshi Daijirō, tracing how their visual and narrative experimentation with yokai figures haunting the margins of the koma frame served as a means of creatively adapting and critiquing emerging sensibilities of “ethnographic realism” and the uncanny specters of colonial image culture that formed its roots. Chapter 4 investigates media events surrounding the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japanese administration and responses to these mediatic “calibrations” of cultural alterity. Using the concept of “(im)mobility” as a critical lens, I consider how the film Asia is One (1973) by Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU) and Okinawan playwright Chinen Seishin’s metatextual stage production The Human Pavilion (1976) negotiated the flows and constraints of ethnocultural subjects within an increasingly mediated nation-state, proposing spatial and temporal “counter-networks” to the models of alterity and belonging molded by the postwar state. I conclude with a brief discussion of the (re)institutionalization and operationalization of these ethnographic media imaginaries in the late 1970s, exemplified by the founding of The National Museum of Ethnology, or Minpaku, and the civilizational theories espoused by its first director-general, media theorist Umesao Tadao.