SOAS Research Online

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Abstract

Japanese visual culture offers countless examples of mutable corporeity and metamorphosis processes, which often imply internal as well as external changes in characters, with which the Japanese notion of “body” (shintai) certainly acquires distinct connotations when compared to the fixed sense of the European one (soma). This essay deals with the physiological and symbolic transformations of the body as represented in the teen cinema stemming from the so-called taiyōzoku (literary tribe of the Sun) phenomenon of summer 1956. It tries to describe processes of body westernization, the new gender role and the function of physical and pseudo-phantasmagorical bodies on the screen. The text focuses on the two earliest films of the genre, Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu, Takumi Furukawa, 1956) and Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, Ko Nakahira, 1956) but also provides a context with references to the following youth cinema of the late fifties. The analysis deals recent discussions and also updates those which took place in Japan at that time.