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Success Through Failure: Daiei, Kadokawa, and the Transformation of Japan's Domestic Film Industry

Terry, Patrick
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Abstract
This dissertation concerns Japan’s domestic film industry structure and transformation between 1971-2002. It tracks the generative mechanisms of stasis and change in the major studios’ output of narrative feature films to illuminate an underrepresented history in Japanese cinema and media industries studies. From the bankruptcy and dissolution of Daiei Studios, the emergence of Kadokawa Haruki Office, to the development of international co-productions by Tokuma Publishing this dissertation characterizes the transformation of the film industry from a relative oligopoly of vertically integrated studios to a broader system of interconnected conglomerates, cross-shareholding (keirestsu) companies that integrate media properties across platform while minimizing risk to any individual company. Western scholarship of Japanese cinema has trended toward aesthetic analysis of superlative films, auteur studies, or works that highlight the cultural specificity of Japan. Recent studies of Japanese cinema are beginning to interrogate these former approaches, but often focus this analysis on the immediate postwar period, proliferation of film production in the 1950s and 1960s, or the international re-emergence of auteur directors in the 1990s. How then do we account for the success and failures that characterize major transformations in Japan’s domestic film industry? A media industries analysis offers a means of directly addressing the large-scale developments in the film industry, while not losing sight of specific moments and case study examples that illuminate key points of stasis and change. My project joins a growing body of work that appraises the role of media industries that intersect with national, transnational, and political economy of major film industries.
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Date
2021-12-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Film studies, Asian studies, Daiei, Film Studio, Kadokawa, Kurosawa Akira, Media Industry, Tokuma
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