Ranging from Godzilla to Evangelion, Miyazaki Hayao to Kore-eda Hirokazu, and blockbuster disaster movies to somber documentaries and dreamy melodramas, Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema is a diverse, thought-provoking, and endlessly fascinating exploration of how environmental catastrophes have haunted, incited, and inspired Japan’s filmmakers and animators. Theoretically sophisticated but thoroughly accessible, this compact volume is a rich resource for scholars, a perfect text for use in film, environmental, and Japanese studies classrooms, and an eye-opening read for all fans of Japanese cinema and popular culture.
— William M. Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind and Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization

Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema is an exemplary collection of essays that takes us into a fascinating spectrum of film genres, prompting us to rethink, expand, and redefine the scope of ecocinema in both Japanese and broader global contexts. It also serves as a very timely contribution to the growing field of environmental humanities, engaging closely with some of its most pivotal concepts—from the slow violence of nuclear disasters, the giant monster as a hyperobject, to the vital materiality of toxic waste.
— Kiu-Wai Chu, Nanyang Technological University

A remarkable volume covering nearly seventy years of Japanese cinematic production. A most welcome and timely addition to Japanese studies, environmental humanities, and film studies, Eco-Disasters brings together exceptional scholarship on films the clear focus of which is environmental trauma and on those where environmental themes are more nuanced but no less important. A must read for students and scholars alike!
— Karen Thornber, Harvard University

A timely edited volume that addresses and responds to the rise of eco-cinema studies in recent years.
— Winnie L.M. Yee

A significant addition to Japanese cinema studies and will likely become required reading in many classrooms as the wider field of Japanese studies begins to reckon more seriously with the realities of climate change and environmental degradation. It will also hopefully inspire a new generation of scholars to question in what ways their objects of study—whatever form of media they may be—are both of and about the material world around them.
— Jon L. Pitt

Rachel DiNitto is a Professor of Japanese literary and cultural studies at University of Oregon, with a focus on the nuclear environmental humanities. She researches contemporary cultural production (literature, film, manga) about the 2011 triple disaster in Japan. Her book, Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title in 2020. She has published on the films of this disaster and postwar Japan. See her work in The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Forum, and her chapter “Toxic Interdependencies: 3/11 Cinema” in The Japanese Cinema Book. She is working on a new environmental humanities monograph titled "Environmental Echoes and Nuclear Traces" that pairs post-Fukushima fiction with novels and short stories from earlier eras of environmental and nuclear harm.

Contents

Introduction — Rachel DiNitto

Toxicscapes

1. Temporality and Landscapes of Reclamation: Johnny Depp Goes to Minamata — Christine L. Marran
2. Hedorah vs. Hyperobject; or Why Smog Monsters Are Real and We Must Object to Object-Oriented Ontologies — Jonathan Abel
3. The Toxic Vitality of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma — Rachel DiNitto
4. Plastic Garbage in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll — Davinder L. Bhowmik

Contaminated Futures and Childhoods
5. Environmental Anxiety and the Toxic Earth of Space Battleship Yamato — Kaoru Tamura
6. Miyazaki Hayao’s Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema: Rereading Nausicaä — Roman Rosenbaum
7. You Can (Not) Restore: Ecocritique and Intergenerational Ecological Conflict in Evangelion — Christopher Smith
8. Jellyfish Eyes (2013) and the Struggle for Reenchantment — Laura Lee

Nuclear Anxiety and Violence
9. The Reimagination of Godzilla: The Concealment of Nuclear Violence — Shan Ren
10. The Walking Nuclear Disaster: Nuclear Terrorism and the Meaning of the Atom in The Man Who Stole the Sun — Eugenio De Angelis
11. Representing the Unrepresentable: Hibakusha Cinema, Historiography, and Memory in Rhapsody in August — Adam Bingham
12. Hibakusha Film as Genre, and the Slow Violence Depicted in Morisaki Azuma’s Nuclear Gypsies — Jeffrey DuBois
13. Nuclear Visuality and Popular Resistance in Kamanaka Hitomi’s Eco-Disaster Documentaries — Andrea Gevurtz Arai

Ruined and Apocalyptic Landscapes
14. Diverging Imaginations of Planetary Change: The Media Franchise of Japan Sinks — Hideaki Fujiki
15. Technology, Urban Sprawl, and the Apocalyptic Imagination in Hiroyuki Seshita’s BLAME! (2017) — Amrita S. Iyer
16. Stranded among Eternal Ruins: Three Films about “Fukushima” — Aidana Bolatbekkyzy
17. Disaster and the Landscape of the Heart in Asako I & II (2018) — Dong Hoon Kim

List of Films Discussed in This Volume

About the Editor and Contributors