In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across
Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the
archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual
media took a deep interest in cities and their problems, and what this
rapid change meant for the country. In Residual Futures, Franz
Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from this
intensive urbanization, mapping the ways in which Japanese filmmakers,
writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the
entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation.
Residual Futures examines crucial works of documentary film, fiction,
and photography that interrogated Japan's urbanization and integration
into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical system. Prichard discusses
documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki's portrait of the urban
"traffic war" and the remaking of Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics, novelist
Abe Kōbō's depictions of infrastructure and urban sociality, and the
radical notions of landscape that emerge from the critical and
photographic work of Nakahira Takuma. His careful readings reveal the
shifting relationships among urban materialities and subjectivities and
the ecological, political, and aesthetic vocabularies of urban change. A
novel cultural history of critical urban discourse in Japan, Residual
Futures brings an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese literary and
visual media studies. It provides a vital new perspective on the
infrastructural aesthetics and entangled urban and media conditions of
the global Cold War.
