Images of the city in literature and film help constitute the experience of modern life. Studies of the Japanese city have focused on Tokyo, but a fuller understanding of urban space and life requires analysis of other cities, beginning with Osaka. Japan s merchant capital in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial center the Manchester of the East into the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyo s. It therefore represents a critical site of East Asian modernity. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular culture from the 1920s to the 1950s, a city that betrayed the workings of imperialism and asserted an urban identity alternative to even subversive of national identity.
Osaka Modern brings an appreciation of this imagined city s emphatic locality to: popular novels by Tanizaki Jun ichiro, favorite son Oda Sakunosuke, and best-seller Yamasaki Toyoko; films by Toyoda Shiro and Kawashima Yu zo; and contemporary radio, television, music, and comedy. Its interdisciplinary approach creates intersections between Osaka and various theoretical concerns everyday life, coloniality, masculinity, translation to produce not only a fresh appreciation of key works of literature and cinema, but also a new focus for these widely-used critical approaches.
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Michael P. Cronin is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the College of William and Mary.
