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Ambivalent Violence: Toei Studios’ Masking Strategies in the 1960s and 1970s
Okuyama, Chika
Okuyama, Chika
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Abstract
This thesis investigates the function of the institutions, particularly one of the major film studios in Japan, Toei Studios, and how it deployed cinematic violence in the 1960s and 1970s not merely as entertainment, but as a strategic institutional response to the crises of postwar Japan. Focusing on the violent film cycles such as ninkyo, jitsuroku, and Pinky Violence, the project argues that Toei Studios used violent masking strategies to displace anxieties about social changes, gender and ethnicity onto marginalized figures in order to misdirect the audiences from the crisis of institutions, aiming to preserve both institutional and national stability during a period of intense social fragmentation of the time.
Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality to demonstrate the vulnerability of institutions for being contingent and that require violence to maintain and expand itself, the thesis conceptualizes Toei Studios not simply as one of the major film studios and producer of popular film series, but as one of cultural institutions. Toei’s violent film cycles operate on ambiguity: while appearing to challenge social norms through depictions of rebellion and excess, it ultimately reasserts institutional control by aestheticizing and containing instability. By studying Toei’s violent film cycles through socio-economics, industrial, and aesthetics I argue that these films perform an institutional self-preservation.
Through analyses of films such as Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973), Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972), and Nihon Jokyoden Gekito Himeyuri Misaki (1971) the thesis demonstrates how ambivalent violence functioned to mitigate crisis in postwar Japan and aims to demonstrate historical changes that cannot be discussed textual analysis alone.
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2025-01-01
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Film studies, Asian studies, Asian history, cinematic violence, gender and ethnicity in film, institutional power, Japanese Cinema, postwar Japanese society, Toei Studios