Graduate School of International Culture and Communication StudiesWaseda University

Faculty

YOSHIMOTO, Mitsuhiro

  • TitleProfessor
  • DegreePh.D. in Comparative Literature (University of California, San Diego)
  • Directed ResearchVisual Culture
  • Research FieldMedia and Cinema Studies

Biography

I have been working at Waseda University for a little over ten years. Before moving to Waseda, I taught at New York University and the University of Iowa for nearly twenty years.  

 My research covers a wide range of topics and issues. First of all, I am a film scholar. My first book Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2000) examines all feature-length films of the director Kurosawa one by one in separate chapters. My essays on Japanese film have also appeared in such edited volumes as Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (Norton, 2005/2013), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (Routledge, 2007), and Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 1993). In addition to Japanese cinema, I have written extensively on contemporary Hollywood cinema in various journals and in my two books Empire of Images and the End of Cinema (『イメージの帝国/映画の終わり』以文社2007) and Spectacle of Conspiracy (『陰謀のスペクタクル』以文社, 2012).  

The second area of my research interest is Japanese popular culture and cultural criticism. The book I co-edited with Christophe ThounyPlanetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and another co-edited book (with Eva Tsai and JungBong Choi), Television, Japan, and Globalization (University of Michigan, 2010) fall into this category. In addition to journals and magazines, my writings on Japanese television, Disneyland, and popular culture can be found in such edited volumes as Disney Discourse (Routledge, 1994) and In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture (Westview Press, 1996).  

Throughout my academic career, I have been thinking about and writing on the politics of academic institutions, disciplines, and discourses. Part one of my Kurosawa book deals with the questions of film studies and Japanese cinema extensively. I also wrote about the discursive politics of such concepts and topics as “comparative film studies,” “film studies in Japan,” and “trans-Asian cinema” in various edited volumes and academic journals including boundary 2South Atlantic Quarterly, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. My Japanese book, Site of Resistance (『抵抗の場へ:あらゆる境界を越えるために マサオ・ミヨシ自らを語る』洛北出版2007), which is based on my interview with Masao Miyoshi, also belongs to this category of research.  

 My most recent publications include such articles and essays as [1] “Fredric Jameson: A Marxist Who Keeps Pursuing the Possibility of History,” in Junji Hori and Keishō Kihara, eds., Adventurers in Film Theory (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2021) [「フレドリック・ジェイムソン:歴史的可能性を問い続けるマルクス主義者」、堀潤之、木原圭翔編『映画論の冒険者たち』東京大学出版会 2021]; [2] “The Age of Allegory,” Transcommunication(2021) vol. 8, no. 2[3] “The Anthropocene and the Apocalypse of Cinema” in Hyōshō 14 (「人新世と映画のアポカリプス」『表象142020).  

 The main focus of my current research is anime. Recently, with my colleague Bryan Hartzheim, I co-organized two anime-related events: [1] the international symposium Theorizing Anime: Invention of Concepts and Conditions of Their Possibility” in 2019 and [2] the webinar titled Suspensions of Concentration: Kimetsu no yaiba and Blockbuster in the Year of the Global Pandemic in 2021. I’m planning to finish a book manuscript on anime within a year or so. 

  

Major Works / Publications Awards

https://w-rdb.waseda.jp/html/100001082_en.html

 

Directed Research 

In my MA seminar, students will explore visual culture from a variety of theoretically informed perspectives. Types of visual culture to be studied include film, television, photography, painting, anime, manga, video games, architecture, and images for surveillance, security and social control, etc. We will examine the meanings and value of visual images, the political implications of looking at images/being looked at as images, and the possibilities of visual culture studies as an academic discipline. The main purpose of the seminar is to help students refine their ability to think about the question of visual culture critically and prepare for their professional careers or further research at a doctoral level.  

 Through a combination of closely supervised tutorialscourse work, and informal study groups (研究会), students in my Ph.D. seminar will pursue an advanced study of visual culture within the broader context of media studies, film studies, cultural studies, and other emerging fields of interdisciplinary inquiries.

We will systematically examine the formal and historical specificity of different types of visual culture in relation to economic and socio-political issues not as a supplementary context but as the fundamental conditions of its possibility. Students are expected to not only work on their dissertation research but also develop a competency in a well-defined academic field in preparation for careers in academia. 

Inquiry for Prospective Applicants (not for current students)

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