"The Heroine of the East China Sea"
1 2020-04-30T18:06:26-04:00 Kate McDonald 306bb1134bc892ab2ada669bed7aecb100ef7d5f 35 2 Poster for Higashi Shinakai no joketsu [The heroine of the East China Sea] (1959, dir. Onoda Yoshiki). Based on the short stories "Minami Shinakai" and "Higashi Shinakai" by Koizumi Yuzuru. (c) Kokusai Hōei/国際放映. plain 2020-10-05T01:20:34-04:00 Kokusai Hōei 1959 Kokusai Hōei/国際放映 Used with permission. David R. Ambaras image/jpeg DRA-0041 Still Image Kandra Polatis 4decfc04157f6073c75cc53dcab9d25e87c02133This page is referenced by:
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2020-04-30T18:05:22-04:00
The transwar romance of "Japan-China goodwill"
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Ideological representations of a feminine China falling in love with a masculine Japan.
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2021-10-12T11:01:36-04:00
1940-1959
David R. Ambaras
Shina no yoru
The Heroine of the East China Sea
In contrast to the inverted gender-national relations depicted in the accounts of abducted women in Fuqing, the wartime imperial state worked to promote a popular cultural image of “Japan-China goodwill” in which a masculine Japan overcame the ill-founded resistance of a feminine China—often by slapping or otherwise manhandling her—to realize a true romance between nations and prevent its sabotage by communists/agents of foreign powers. The film Shina no yoru (1940) typifies this genre.
These desires for Japanese-Chinese goodwill and romance persisted across the 1945 divide. For example, “The Heroine of the East China Sea” (1959), a swashbuckling adventure about a Japanese naval officer and a Fujianese woman pirate chief who fall in love and escape to Japan in the chaos at the war's end, represented a similar effort to consummate the turbulent relationship on Japanese terms (Ambaras 2018, 211-13).
Such fantasies faded, however, with the rupture in Sino-Japanese relations and Japan's full integration into the US-dominated Pacific and Cold War regime. The ideational distance between the two countries was reinforced by modernization theory, which celebrated Japan's “successful” non-communist development in contrast to the chaotic failures of China's communist revolution.
