Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration by Mark R. Mullins (review)

Abstract

via J-horror. The book also reveals how history continues to repeat itself. SCAP censorship of films that featured “backward” themes (and the shifting from supernatural to “psychological” terror) mirrors the Meiji-era shift from entertainment that focused on “backward” supernatural themes to one that focused more on psychological disorders (documented by Gerald Figal and Michael Dylan Foster).7 And the creation of J-horror itself, with its wide range of domestic and international influences and its tendency to focus on both modern media technologies and Edo-period ghost stories, mirrors the birth of kaiki cinema, a mixing of revolutionary technology with the much older art forms of kabuki and ghost storytelling. Traditional and modern, digital and analog, domestic and foreign—Ghost in the Well reveals that the horror genre in Japan is a cycle that both repeats and reinvents, embracing the new while remaining firmly tied to the old.