Mutual Images is an annual, double-blind peer-reviewed and transcultural research journal, established in 2016 by the scholarly, non-profit and independent Mutual Images Research Association (MIRA), and registered under the ISSN 2496-1868. Its field of interest is the analysis and discussion of the ever-changing, multifaceted relations between Europe and Asia, and between specific European countries or regions and specific Asian countries or regions. A privileged area of investigation concerns the mutual cultural influences between Japan and other national or regional contexts, with a special emphasis on visual domains, media studies, the cultural and creative industries, and popular imagination at large.
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A Living Space Under the Sign of the Rhythms of Nature: Kyoto in The Old Capital by Kawabata Yasunari
Yasunari Kawabata’s The Old Capital offers a profound meditation on the relationship between nature, tradition, and the human spirit. Set in Kyoto, the novel transforms the city into a symbolic and aesthetic landscape through which themes of impermanence, seasonal rhythm, and cultural identity are explored. The present study tries to emphasize the way in which, out of the desire to lament the loss of tradition, in his novel whose original title is Koto, Yasunari Kawabata creates an idealized image of the old imperial capital, giving it the value of a keeper of the most authentic values of the Japanese ethos as well as that of a symbol of aesthetic concepts such as mono no aware, the fleeting beauty, wabi sabi, the rustic, imperfect and desolate beauty, or ma, the beauty of the empty space, which were generated by a deep awareness of the transient beauty of nature. The vegetal element that perhaps best characterizes the Japanese identity always tried hard by the forces of nature occupies a central place in Kawabata's novel, encompassing its tradi-tional meanings as a symbol of renewal, but also that of the impermanence of beauty and fragility of life. By analysing key motifs such as seasonal festivals, natural imagery, and spatial motifs, this paper argues that tradition in The Old Capital is not portrayed as rigid or static. Rather, it emerges as a fluid and evolving presence, continuously reinterpreted through individual memory by the novel’s characters acting like true keepers of tradition. It also puts forward an interpretation that aligns with Rodica Frentiu’s analysis of Kawabata’s poetic sensibility, where nature, seasonality, and the aesthetics of impermanence become part of a lived experience rather than abstract symbolism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sabina Maria Sava https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cherry Blossoms and Sweet Sentimentalism: The Sakura Song Boom in the 2000s and its image of Japaneseness
In the 2000s, Japan experienced a major trend in pop music known as the ‘Sakura Song Boom,’ featuring songs associated with cherry blossoms (sakura). Even 20 years later, these songs remain popular. This essay examines four songs from this boom and the cultural phenomenon itself, analysing two commercial web articles that emphasise the image of cherry blossoms, strongly linked to Japan and its people. The essay explores the supposed Japaneseness and nation-alism in these articles. By examining song lyrics, advertising, and circulation, this study investi-gates whether a collective image of cherry blossoms exists in these songs and their social function. The essay also explores why cherry blossoms became popular in the 2000s. Cherry blossoms sym-bolise changes and transitions in contemporary Japanese society due to their association with spring events, such as the start of the fiscal year, school terms, and graduation ceremonies. The songs depict protagonists’ sentimental emotions triggered by these changes. The essay reveals how the songs and the boom conveyed common performances of sentimental emotions and col-lective identities, reinforcing Japaneseness and nationalism featured in the articles.
Copyright (c) 2025 Teppei Fukuda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sonic Seasons: Musical Representation of Nature in Tōru Takemitsu’s Film Music
Japanese seasonal culture, rooted in natural environment and artistic traditions, perme-ates daily life and art forms, including the film music of Tōru Takemitsu (1930–1996). A nature enthusiast, Takemitsu themed nearly half of his works—including his nearly 100 film scores—around seasonal imagery. Seasonal elements in his film music extend beyond titles and scenes to metaphoric narrative functions. This paper analyses how seasonal culture shapes Takemitsu’s compositional techniques (texture, harmony, timbre, orchestration) and his use of music to depict seasons on screen. Focusing on four films—A Song of Early Spring (1969), Dear Summer Sister (1972), Glowing Autumn (1973), and Winter (1972)—it applies film music theory and Japanese seasonal aesthetics, with detailed analysis of “Dear Summer Sister”. The study reveals Takemitsu’s unique integration of seasonal symbolism into cinematic storytelling.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mohan Xie https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Subversive imagology of the ecoscape: an ecocritical analysis of Ibuse Masuji’s Kakitsubata (1951) and Taguchi Randy’s Zōn ni te (2013)
The relationship between Japanese people and nature is one of a strong bond in sev-eral respects. On the one hand, the symbiotic relationship between the Japanese and Japan's nat-ural environment has shaped cultural aspects of the philosophical and religious matrix, such as the Shintō and Buddhist rituals. On the other hand, the unpredictable character of nature manifests in earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods that have characterized the country for centuries. Eventually, in the global imagination, Japan is associated with cherry blossoms or autumn foliage, expressing an aesthetics of life’s fragility in its fleeting passage. This image metaphorically describes nature as both friendly and hostile. What happens when this image is subverted by anthropogenic inter-ference that corrupts the ecosystem and its connection with human beings? Radioactive contami-nation has troubled Japan twice. First, the double atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki annihilated the topography of the two cities. More recently, the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi turned a flourishing agricultural region into a graveyard of radioactive waste. Neverthe-less, literature gives us evidence of nature fighting back. In Kakitsubata (1951), Ibuse Masuji por-trays a crazy iris, blooming out of season. With Zōn ni te (2013), Taguchi Randy presents a revital-ized nature, more thriving than ever, despite the soil contamination surrounding the nuclear power plant. This contribution adopts an ecocritical perspective to analyze an alternative view of the Japanese seasonal imagery depicted in literature. The aim is to investigate how the imagology that associates Japan with a sublime, untouched country (jitsuzō) is far from the truth of a contam-inated environment (jittai) which struggles to restore its unspoiled sublimity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Veronica De Pieri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dressed by Nature, Adorned by Design: Seeing and reading the Seasons with Kimono
Various studies of Japanese arts and crafts have brought evidence that objects designed in Japan materially and aesthetically reflect the characteristics of the country’s climate and its peo-ple’s appreciation of nature. The kimono is no exception, with numerous demonstrations showing that in its very conception, modes of production as well as in the way it is coloured and patterned, Japanese nature is present, through a literal or symbolical connection with the seasons. By looking at specific modes of kimono production as well as pattern designs that match the iconic “four sea-sons of Japan”, artistic inspirations and newly “imported” seasons, this article proposes to visually survey the different ways seasons are harmoniously or at times paradoxically expressed in kimono design. In addition, poems and passages from novels that have a connection with kimono will be examined, furthering the deep connections between design, Japanese culture and the life of the people who are “seasoning the seasons” in and with kimono.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucile Druet https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Echoes of Nature: Exploring Sensibility Across Japanese Culture, Literature and Artistic Expression
This volume of Mutual Images Research Journal is a collective analysis of seasonal im-agery in Japanese society. As we witness the shifting landscapes and moods mirrored in nature’s transformation, we are reminded of the profound parallels between the sea-sonal cycle and the transience of life. In embracing the beauty of each season, from the cherry blossoms (sakura) marking the arrival of spring, to the role of haiku and visual and performing arts in conveying Japanese sensibility towards nature, the present vol-ume intends to showcase the Japanese worldview through the spectrum of nature. In Japan, the changing seasons hold [...]
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodica Frentiu, Florina Ilis, Oana Birlea, Ciliana Tudorica, Ioana Toșu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dear readers, Welcome to Mutual Images Research Journal, no. 12, our yearly collection of academic writings that in every issue focus on one or, sometimes, two themes, developed in an array of coordinated articles. We enjoyed titling this instalment “New season(s) for Mutual Images Journal” playing on the fact that, on the one hand, this issue really marks a new beginning of sort for the journal, as we briefly explain in the following lines of this Editorial; and also because, on the other hand, the entire issue hosts the proceedings [...]
Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Pellitteri, Maxime DANESIN, Manuel HERNÁNDEZ-PÉREZ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre – Peter ECKERSALL, Barbara GEILHORN, Andreas REGELSBERGER & Cody POULTON (eds)
Since emerging on the scene in the 1990s, influenced especially by the work of Hirata Oriza, playwright Okada Toshiki has written dozens of works, a selection of which have toured throughout the world. Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre tells the reader that “he is the only Japanese theatre artist of his generation to have a significant international career and his work is known widely in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia” (1). Okada’s work encompasses colloquial yet troubled language, slowed tempos coupled with abstract physical scores, rich visual and aural designs and collaborations, and close engagement with events such as the Iraq War, precarious employment, the 2011 disasters, and post-Anthropocene modes of dramatic exploration. The book [...]
Copyright (c) 2024 Justine Wiesinger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformation – Tze-yue G. HU, Masao YOKOTA & Gyongyi HORVATH (eds)
Tze-yue G. Hu, Masao Yokota and Gyongyi Horvath edited an impressive anthology in 2020, Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformations, to examine the relationship between the concept of “the spirited” (or “the spiritual”) as part of our essence as humans and humanistic productions, especially all aspects of animation industries. T.-y. G. Hu is an independent educator and scholar-author based in Northern California with book publications such as Culture and Image-Building (University of Hong Kong Press, 2010). Her background in the healing arts programme provides [...]
Copyright (c) 2024 Fanhao Zhan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tobacco Packaging Design in China, Thailand, and New Zealand: A Comparative Study
Packaging design has received much interest from the academic and industrial worlds. Numerous studies have shown that packaging significantly impacts purchase intent, product satisfaction, and repeat purchases. However, to some extent, tobacco packaging is not used to fulfil its consumer target’s demands or increase the repeat purchase rate. By contrast, it has the official duty to discourage tobacco use, as it is a highly regulated business. Nevertheless, tobacco manufacturers do their best to find the last opportunity to advertise on tobacco boxes because the packet is their final or only marketing or advertising tool in many countries. Thus, tobacco packaging design could be the most challenging advertising practice in many nations because two contradicting advertising contents (persuasion and dissuasion) emerge in one medium simultaneously. In this paper, I comparatively content-analysed 65 popular cigarette brands from China, Thailand, and New Zealand to find out how tobacco companies use cigarette packaging to communicate with their customers. The results suggested that Chinese tobacco packaging is highly market-oriented and emphasises the use of traditional Chinese cultural elements. Conversely, tobacco packaging in Thailand and New Zealand focuses on health communication. But warning labels in the two countries are platitudes. The results also indicate that although policy factors have had a positive impact on tobacco packaging in terms of its discouraging function and contributing to tobacco control over the past decades, there is a need for policies to be tailored to the socio-cultural context. Efforts should focus on improving tobacco packaging from the perspective of smokers’ psychology. This adjustment is deemed necessary due to the declining effectiveness of current tobacco packaging control policies in reducing smoking rates in recent years.
Copyright (c) 2024 Xiaolong Zhang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Horror and the Cube Films: An unlikely medium for the negotiation of Nationalist-Cultural ideologies
Over the past several decades, scholarship has come to recognise the unexpected significance of horror cinema ventures as both culturally and politically relevant. One of Canada’s greatest horror film successes was Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 psychological thriller Cube that metaphorically explores the suffocating nature of vocational social relations under the conditions of a patriarchal military-industrial capitalism. So innovative was its premise that US interests quickly acquired the rights to produce and distribute Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and Cube Zero (2004), but they were just as quick to reformulate the most subversive critique of the original film. Two decades later, in 2021, Japanese producers released a remake of the original film (which was so popular there), although it also re-coded the thematic critique, just as the American sequels had done. With this group of films across three national production traditions arises an opportunity to “detect shifts in the ideological constellation”, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, by “compar[ing] consecutive remakes of the same story” (2011, p. 61). Following primarily Herbert Marcuse’s understanding of political repressive tolerance, this article demonstrates the way in which constructions of cultural identity are negotiated across national traditions in the age of globalisation. Cube and its follow-ups demonstrate the nationalist-inflected limits of critical expression in the way that each subsequent film attempts to re-focus and re-code the horrors of the narrative machine in order to assert their own nationalist sensibilities threatened by the cultural levelling effect of globalisation in an age of transnational cinema distribution.
Copyright (c) 2024 David Christopher https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The bias on characters’ visual traits in Japanese animation and the misconceived “transnationality” of anime
In the dynamics centred on East Asian cultural output, a special place is occupied by Japan’s production (namely, comics and animation, or manga and anime respectively) and the distribution and widespread consumption of this vast output around the world. Despite the interpolations many anime series or films faced when exported, a specificity of the medium was/is usually recognised by foreign audiences. However, issues often unfold in the reception of anime’s visual codes, which entail problematical aspects in the grasping of the narratives and an underlying dimension of what I shall here call “graphic politics”. Today, the visual-narrative logics of anime characters’ physiognomies, and therefore, the motivations and intentions of their creators, are still largely misinterpreted based on culturally-inflected interpretations; this gives us clues on what the audiences of anime are, what they expect and draw from anime’s stories, and what this means for a global politics of anime as a medium of expression and a creative output. In this article, through the description of visual examples and established, or, at times controversial, scholarship in the field, I discuss the persistence of wide misunderstandings in the cultural politics of anime’s design and its impact on the reception of anime’s intentions globally. Among the collateral effects of this misunderstanding, a technical and moral justification to call (or imply as) “anime” animations designed and produced outside of Japan by non-Japanese authors seems to be emerging in the global discourse, thus privileging a fabricated idea of anime as just a “form” over anime as also and mainly a Japanese cultural artefact, in a momentous process of progressive dilution of the Japan-embedded characteristics of the animations made in Japan.
Copyright (c) 2024 Marco Pellitteri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Be a part of the narrative: How audiences are introduced to the “free choice dilemma” in the interactive film Bandersnatch
The first major interactive film on Netflix with live-action scenes was Bandersnatch, released in December 2018. Bandersnatch offers viewers a unique viewing experience distinct from traditional cinema, as it provides the viewer with multiple choices within the narrative trajectory. Digital interactive media technologies have become increasingly popular due to public demand for interactive engagement and a democratisation of text control. There is a social desire to deprive the author of total control over the story; to co-create stories using imagination while adhering to formal limitations and structures; to play with the text as an incomplete form; for the ability to rearrange the story’s order, alter its quality, and other such things. These meet the audience-creative user’s needs and satisfaction (Cover, 2004). Where personal emotions can be invested and free choice can be exercised in cyberspace, the emergence of interactivity as a kind of audience engagement is a robust culturally rooted desire. This article attempts to understand and analyse the uses and gratifications experienced by the audience during the interactive viewing process. However, digital participation proves to have limitations. Through a case study of the interactive film Bandersnatch, this paper explores how the interactivity and the features of video games can be used to give users so-called “free choice,” but that can actually be frustrating and ultimately offer only the illusion that the audience has any significant control over the story. In the end, the decisions made by the audience offer some relevant affordances to the interactive user but eventually proceed to reinforce the ideological control from the production team.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hanxue Zhang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Video Gaming and Narratives of Love as a potential stance of cultural-political meaning in current societies: A study of It Takes Two, 2021
In 2021, arriving shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing it required, a creative co-op video game, It Takes Two, created by Swedish developer Hazelight Studios and published by American gaming giant Electronic Arts, gained huge popularity on a global scale, including unexpected success in the Chinese market. Although the game is not officially available in China, has no publishing license, and no official promotions, still half of its sales come from China. The game is based on a divorce-themed story, and by integrating cooperative gameplay mechanisms, it enables players to engage in constructing their own “narrative of love” that reflects and coincides with specific cultural indicators. Bringing the dynamics of marriage and divorce to the forefront, the game has generated enormous discussion in mainstream Chinese online platforms, and drew attention to political-cultural notions of what it means to be married and then to struggle and go through the (emotional, practical, and legal) divorce process. The aim of this article is to approach video games such as It Takes Two as a cultural form that should be understood as part of our politics as citizens and individuals in a broad sense, and as part of a wider and more complex connection we have with each other and with society (Street, 2007). Drawing on an analysis of the function of gameplay mechanics in relation to video game setting and structure, this study provides a discussion of the visual and narrative representations of an ostensibly “typical” universal love and divorce issue within the sociocultural context of a Western family, and examines how Chinese audiences make sense of such “lessons” and ideology, and how they work (or might not work) for them. It Takes Two raises awareness of and questions about how games can elicit emotional responses and deep reflection in real life for its players about the vicissitudes of marriage (and love relationships in general) and the culturally specific, at times legal, and broadly visual political implications of their successful or disastrous unfolding.
Copyright (c) 2024 Xin Yao https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction – On politics of visual media
"The visual" is the dominant social mode of modern media in what some have come to call the “post-literate age” of international mass media distribution and cultural hegemony. Media images are suffused with culturally-inflected visual meaning at both their points of production and moments of reception. But their very ubiquity, or mere “commonality”, often results in the dismissal of their political significance. In terms of [...]
Copyright (c) 2024 David Christopher, Marco Pellitteri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Dungeons & Dragons to Dragon Quest: Cultural dialogue and material shifts
Arguably one of the most popular genres in today’s video game market is the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG). The distinguishing traits of the genre are often a matter of debate. The final decision on whether something is a JRPG usually relies more on general feelings than on rigid criteria (Mallindine 2016). However, one shared trait among the exponents of the genre is that they find its roots in Western tabletop role-playing games, such as Dungeons&Dragons (1974). As a matter of fact, Dungeons&Dragons served as an inspiration for many other role-playing games (RPGs). One such example is Wizardry (1981), which, together with Ultima (1981), was among the most successful computer role-playing games of its time (Barton & Stacks 2008). The two games served as the beginning for long-spanning series, which enjoyed wide success in Japan (Adams 1985), where the RPG genre as a whole was soon integrated, through various platforms, into the local media ecology (Steinberg 2015). Wizardry in particular was also among the games which influenced Horii Yūji (Horii 2018a. 2018b) to create Dragon Quest (1986), one of the earliest examples of JRPG. This article seeks to draw a connection between Dungeons&Dragons and the early JRPGs. First, I compare Dungeons&Dragons, a tabletop RPG, to its most well-known digital counterparts of the time, Wizardry and Ultima. By doing this, I expose the differences between ‘pen and paper’ and ‘screen and software.’ Then, I observe the differences between Wizardry, Ultima, and Dragon Quest in terms of both aesthetics and gameplay, in order to understand how Japanese developers and distributors negotiated the concept of RPG for the Japanese market. In both comparisons I consider how characters, avatar, gameplay, and narrative are mediated by the platform and the cultural milieu hosting them.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrea Mariucci https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Composer Kajiura Yuki and neo-medieval anime soundtracks
This study semiotically interrogates the historical imaginary evinced in the neo-medievalist musical topoi found in Kajiura Yuki’s distinctive music for anime, which is easily recognised by its eclectic mix of sounds and styles gathered from across the globe. Her early scores employed a compositional method practised in Japanese popular music since the 1990s, which treated the creative act as a process of musical curation. This technique is evident in Kajiura’s handling of medieval Gregorian chant, which - as she has explained in interviews - she did not learn from studies in music history but rather from the German band Enigma and their hit album MCMXC a.D. from 1990, where samples of chant were mixed with Euro dance pop and French rap. The anime Noir from 2001 contains an excellent example of her approach, combining chant-based vocal tracks with energetic dance rhythms. Enigma used chant to call on modern neo-medieval tropes that highlight the pleasures of mysticism, religious devotion, and sexuality freed from morality, and Kajiura has replicated this imagery in Noir, making chant the symbol of an ancient criminal order that both worships and overtly sexualises femininity as embodied by the main female characters. Kajiura’s later style expands the technique of the Gregorian chant-influenced sound she developed in her earlier works: shifting away from Latin lyrics to her invented nonsense language of “Kajiurago” (literally “the language of Kajiura” in Japanese), with her ethereal chant delivered primarily by female voices. This shift is partially due to her collaboration with FictionJunction and Kalafina and is also a reflection of the strong female anime protagonists. Her signature sound enlivens the soundscapes of both Fate/Zero (2011) and the blockbuster anime, Demon Slayer (2019). The track “Brace up and run!” opens each episode of the latter, highlighting female voices chanting Kajiurago as a musically haunting reminder of the otherness of the past.
Copyright (c) 2024 Stacey Jocoy, Heike Hoffer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial – Continuing research in a time full of sound and fury
Dear readers, students, fellow scholars, welcome to this eleventh instalment of Mutual Images Journal, titled “On politics of visual media” after the main section of this present piece. If only we had known [...]
Copyright (c) 2024 Maxime Danesin, Manuel Hernández-Pérez, Marco Pellitteri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Joy Hendry is today a leading Japanese studies scholar and anthropologist, recompensed with the Order of the Rising Sun, who founded and presided over several major research associations over the past decades. However, at the time this story starts (as it is a story Hendry is writing in this book), she is a young woman starting her fieldwork for a doctorate. She had mastered the Japanese language already, but many aspects of Japanese daily life, especially in a retired rural area such as the small village of Kurotsuchi (Kyushu), elude her – as it did for most foreign academics in the 1970s. Written during lockdown due to the pandemic, Hendry narrates [...]
Copyright (c) 2022 Aurore Yamagata-Montoya https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age – Hoyt Long
The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age by Hoyt Long (Columbia University Press, 2021) sets out with two aims: to ask what computational methods might bring to the acts of reading and studying Japanese literature; and to open up the Digital Humanities, which in the United States have been dominated by the English language, to alternative insights, challenges, and solutions that arise when the objects of analysis are Japanese texts. The book’s opening sets [...]
Copyright (c) 2022 Vicky Young https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
When the World Laughs. Film Comedy East and West – William V. Costanzo
While film genres have risen or declined along with the times and its trends, according to Aldredge (2019), comedy has remained steady in high popularity through all the years since 1910, which is practically to say throughout the whole history of cinema as an industry. Furthermore, it can be said that comedy stands as the second genre in the number of films produced. Furthermore, it can be said that comedy stands as the second genre in number of films produced when considering only a single genre tagging. However, [...]
Copyright (c) 2022 Jose Montaño https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia – Nana Sato-Rossberg & Akiko Uchiyama (eds)
Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia is the 27th volume in the Peter Lang series New Trends in Translation Studies. While each chapter in Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia independently bears fruit to the particular facet of translation studies that it examines, as a whole this edited volume reads as one sweeping encapsulation of contemporary East Asian translation studies that demonstrates the depth and potential of the field. It engages [...]
Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia
Copyright (c) 2022 Jamie Tokuno https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
What is visual Vaporwave? Vaporwave arts and their history and position in China
By Vaporwave we refer to a digital-born electronic music genre and a trend in visual aesthetics. It emerged in some US-based online communities in the early 2010s, and now its visual expressions are in vogue in Chinese visual media context. In this article, Vaporwave’s aesthetics are discussed through three stages of analysis. In the first part, the paper outlines relevant theories and general features of Vaporwave’s (both visual and musical) aesthetics; next, the paper focuses on Vaporwave's visual characteristics, and, to provide a deeper understanding of its visual aesthetics, I discuss a school of painting derived from early twentieth-century Italy—Metaphysical art. In the second part, the article discusses why and how vaporwave aesthetics are inseparable from some Japanese visual characteristics and how it is represented in China, with particular reference to examples of Japanese comics from the 1980s/early 1990s and one popular Chinese video-focused social media TikTok in recent years. In the third part, the article focuses on illustrating Vaporwave's visual features in the Chinese context in recent years, and several examples are provided.
Copyright (c) 2022 Xiaolong Zhang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Journeying to the actual World through digital games: The Urban Histories Reloaded project
The paper aims at reflecting on the potential of digital games to convey meaning, tell stories and, most importantly, become a tool to discover and experience the actual world. Using as a case study the experience of the Urban Histories Reloaded. Creatività videoludica per azioni di cittadinanza (Urban Histories Reloaded. Digital Game Creativity for citizenship actions) project (UHR), we will discuss the role digital games can play in activating territorial processes, by favouring the engagement with the actual world as well as with playful approaches to city living. In particular, we will focus on the artist residency for game designers, game artists, and game programmers held in Padua between September and October 2020 within the frame of the project and on its main outcome, the mobile game MostaScene. MostaScene consists of a fifteen-minute mobile game set in District 5 Armistizio-Savonarola of Padua. Both its design and its overall content have intertwined with the urban space since the very beginning. Above all, we will inspect the use of digital games for city-making actions via two different paths: on the one hand, through the involvement of stakeholders (public institutions and specific groups, but also and most importantly citizens) as co-designers; on the other hand, using digital games as non-functional experiences that may encourage innovative interpretations of the urban space for player. From a theoretical perspective, this research requires us to look at digital games as both fictional worlds that involve imagination and interpretation, as well as digital worlds that are experienced as part of reality in a phenomenological sense. Once this is acknowledged, we can provide an overview of how games can tackle reality and engage with the actual world.
Copyright (c) 2022 Stefano Caselli, Farah Polato, Mauro Salvador https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Ipar Haizearen Erronka: A boat trip from the Basque Country to Newfoundland
The nature of animated cinema involves the creation of any realistic or fantastical characters, places, and situations. Animation can be used to take characters far from their hometowns on believable journeys without big budgets used on location shooting. The Basque animated feature film Ipar Haizearen Erronka (The Challenge of the North Wind), directed in 1992 by Juanba Berasategi, illustrates how animation can represent a journey and a historic reality in a plausible way. The movie depicts a Basque whale hunting vessel travelling to the wild coast of Newfoundland, Canada in the sixteenth century. Typically, Basque live action movies in the 80s would recreate foreign locations with nearby settings. Ipar Haizearen Erronka avoids this problem by showing America through drawings. In this paper, we will use the movie Ipar Haizearen Erronka to interpret how animation uses backgrounds and objects to represent a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and determine the realistic accuracy of the social and historical moments represented in the movie. We will also see how this journey embodies the characteristics of the literary genre of Bildungsroman, as well as the narrative structures pointed out by Vladimir Propp’s folktale and Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The study also focuses on how the film depicts the most representative characteristics of the journey, and how they are used as filming narrative resources. A closer look will be taken into the main vessels, the captain's logbook, the map, the historical context of the sailing of the ship, the maritime laws where sexism is abundant, the financing of the trip, and the work on board.
Copyright (c) 2022 Maitane Junguitu Dronda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Anime tourism in Italy: Travelling to the locations of the Studio Ghibli films
Film-induced tourism, intended as travelling to places where films and TV series have been shot or set, has been extensively studied in the last two decades in several disciplinary fields. For example, the term ‘media pilgrimage’ emerged in media sociology to highlight the sacred dimension these practices may assume, while fan studies have focused on the narrative of affection built upon specific places. Calling forth the relationship between film and landscape, these phenomena have been also explored in the light of film semiotics and media geography. In the past decade, the representation of landscape and the construction of the sense of place in animation benefited from increased scholarly attention; however, the links between tourism and animation still appear under-explored. Japanese animation, because of its prominent use of real locations as the basis for the building of its worlds and the tendency of its fanbases to take action (even in the form of animation-oriented tourism), is an especially promising field, in this respect. In the last fifteen years, a debate on ‘content(s) tourism’ has involved the Japanese government as well as academic scholarship, referring to a wide variety of contents, from novels to films and TV series, anime, manga, and games. The article presents a case study: a discussion of the experience of anime tourists who visited the Italian locations featured in the films by the world-famous animator and director Miyazaki Hayao, especially in Castle in the Sky (1986) and Porco Rosso (1992). The experiences of anime tourists were collected from images and texts shared through the social network Twitter.
Copyright (c) 2022 Giulia Lavarone, Marco Bellano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Immersed, yet distant: Notes for an aesthetic theory of immersive travel films
The purpose of this article is to highlight a few stylistic and aesthetic principles, common to the genre of the travel film (both documentary and fictional), as employed by immersive media and devices from the twentieth century – such as the Hale’s Tours of the World, Todd-AO, and Cinerama – up to today’s digital systems like Virtual Reality and 4D Cinema. I will discuss how the different experiences of simulated travels, proffered by those media, are all related to a broader aesthetic tendency in creating what I label as enveloping tactile images. Such images are programmed to surround the viewer from every side, thus increasing their spectacular dimension, but at the same time they strive to temper and weaken the haptic solicitations aroused in the viewer by the immersive apparatus itself. In this sense I propose that the spectator of immersive travelogue films is ‘immersed, yet distant’: she is tangled in the illusion of traversing an enveloping visual space, but the position she occupies is nonetheless a metaphysical one, not different from that of Renaissance perspective, because even if she can see everything, the possibility to interact with the images is denied, in order to preserve the realistic illusion. By analysing the stylistic techniques employed to foster the viewer’s condition of non-interactive immersion in the enveloping world presented by the medium, I will consequently address the topic of the conflict that such immersive aesthetics establish with traditional forms of audiovisual storytelling.
Copyright (c) 2022 Nicolas Bilchi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bodies in motion and image recomposition in the early 20th Century
The question of the appearance of the body surges in a play of overwhelming forces, and its register in artworks assumes different shapes as their representation spreads towards other mediums. Firstly, following Aby Warburg’s thought, this article will analyse the process of the survival of bodies as potential motion in images. Warburg proposed an Iconological approach where the analysis of potential movement in the image yielded a formula for its analytic recomposition. Furthermore, he captured the transition at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the body representation moved to media that allowed movement reproduction, such as animation and cinema. The bodies' survival or capture contained an animist belief that gained propulsion with the first apparatuses and optical toys that allowed movement and live-action recording. This movement allowed for the production of a simulacrum of the living body and the power to recompose it in space. Therefore, this article will focus on the evolution of body representation and its survival to understand how images from the early twentieth century shaped and traveled around the world.
Copyright (c) 2022 Angela Longo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In the steps of the Prophets: The dissemination and reinterpretation of David Roberts’ Holy Lands sketches through the Shows of London
The body of drawings and sketches created by the Scottish painter David Roberts (1796-1864) during his expedition to the Holy Lands in 1838-9 marked the high point of his professional career. This paper will look at the period after his return to Britain in July 1839, particularly to 1842. It will suggest that although Roberts was no doubt influenced by his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, religious faith was not as central to his trip as has often been supposed. It was instead through the business acumen of his publisher F.G. Moon that this body of work came to be regarded not merely as an aesthetic achievement but as a cause célèbre. A skilful and coordinated marketing campaign elevated these drawings to the status of a pilgrimage; a contemplative journey through the sites of biblical antiquity. Through detailed analysis of contemporaneous accounts it will show how one of the costliest publications of the era was disseminated, passing from prestigious galleries and the libraries of a wealthy elite through a continuum of public art exhibitions and popular media including panoramas, dioramas and the newly-emerging field of dissolving views. This will provide a rare case study into the interconnectedness of London’s exhibition culture in the 1840s.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jeremy Brooker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Undermining the gendered genre: Kabuki in manga
According to Jaqueline Berndt, Thomas LaMarre, and other critics, manga is a highly participatory media form. Narratives with vibrant characters and creative inconsistences in the plotline encourage the reader to recontextualise the text, create new contents and unfold activities which go beyond reading (such as fan art and CosPlay). Recent popularity of manga about Japanese traditional arts – for example, Kabuki – further expanded the potential interaction with manga and other popular media to include (re)discovering traditional Japanese culture. Examples, such as Kabukumon by Tanaka Akio and David Miyahara (Morning 2008-2011), or Kunisaki Izumo no jijō by Hirakawa Aya (Weekly Shōnen Sunday 2010-2014) and a variety of other manga, anime and light novels exemplify this tendency. Consequently, influential franchises, such as Naruto and One Piece boast adaptations as Super Kabuki stage-plays. Furthermore, Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto observes how thematic and stylistic overreaching in contemporary manga further distort the notions of the gendered genre that lays at the foundation of the manga industry. In this case, Kabuki theatre as a theme employs a variety of gender fluid characters and situations. For this purpose, Kabuki manga utilise cross-genre narrative and stylistic tropes, from overtly parodying borrowed tropes, to homage, and covert inclusions. On the example of Kabuki-manga I will explore a larger trend in manga to employ elements of female genres in male narratives, thus expanding the target readership. My paper explores specific mechanism that facilitates reading manga cross-genre, I also inquire what novel critical potential thematic and stylistic exchange between audiences may entail.
Copyright (c) 2022 Olga Antononoka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0