국민의 경계, 신체의 경계 : 구로사와 아키라와 오시마 나기사의 ‘전후’

Abstract

At San Francisco, on 8 september 1951, Japan was reborn as independent country. The same year, Rashomon won a prize at Venice International Film Festival and next year, won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The two events happened to occur at almost the same time. What does this coincidental conjunction mean? First, I argue how was post war Japan as a homogeneous nationformed through some (or new) universality, by focusing Akira Kurosawa’s films, Rashomon(1950) and Ikiru(1952). Humanism of Kurosawa’s works is very popular. The approach of autherism defined the humanism as Kurosawa’s quality. But I argue Kurosawa’s humanism as relation of post war Japan. It is a new universality asked for “new Japan”. Second, I changed 1950’s Kurosawa’s work into 1960’s Nagisa Oshima’s work. And I argue how cracks appeared in the universality of new Japan. Oshima’s Forgotten Japanese Soldier(1963) is a strong example of the crack. The first scene of Forgotten Japanese Soldiers shows how intolerable the life and existence of a disabled veteran was in 1963, the year leading up to the Tokyo Olympics. A blind man wearing black sunglasses is begging passengers for money inside a crowded train. He is an ethnic Korean who served in the imperial Japanese army. It seems clear that this short 25-minute long documentary represented one of the turning points in Oshima’s career. The cruel logic underlying both the limitations of Japanese citizenship as well as the ‘giving of blood’ that is embedded within the relationship between state and citizenship is eloquently articulated through the overall physical presence of the former ethnic Korean members of the Japanese army. Their appearance also evenly captures both sides of the problems that ensue from colonized lands, the two post-war ‘citizen-states’ and the cold war systems that shaped these states.