Time out of Joint: Shohei Imamura and the Search for an "Other Japan"

Abstract

This chapter deals with three documentaries made by Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) for Tokyo Channel 12 between 1971 and 1973. Each of the three documentaries investigates how Japan's relations with South-East Asia was deformed by the ruse of memory, and the unfinished history of the Pacific War: a war that is not a problem of yesterday but of the today. In his documentaries, Imamura investigates how the spectre of the war lies heavy on the present, not only for the Japanese people, but also for the peoples who inhabited the regions occupied by Japan that became the bloody battlefields of the Pacific War.