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Heroine of the East China sea, 1959
1 2018-07-11T16:30:10-04:00 David Ambaras 1337d6b66b25164b57abc529e56445d238145277 2 1 Poster for the 1959 Shin Tōhō film Higashi Shinakai no joketsu, based on the short stories "Minami Shinakai" and "Higashi Shinakai" by Koizumi Yuzuru plain 2018-07-11T16:30:10-04:00 David Ambaras 1337d6b66b25164b57abc529e56445d238145277This page is referenced by:
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2018-04-23T13:40:21-04:00
The transwar romance of "Japan-China goodwill"
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2018-08-31T16:52:32-04:00
David R. Ambaras
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.
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.
