Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

This paper looks at the intersection between the representation of Chinese immigrants and the urban imagination of Tokyo in the 1990s Japanese transnational cinema. Analyzing two films that highlight the lives of Chinese immigrants in specific locations—namely Arakawa and Roppongi—of Tokyo, this paper uses liminality as a central concept to unveil the tension and dynamic interactions between the cinematic landscape of Tokyo, the social mobility of the global city, and the fixation and potential transgression of the image of Chinese immigrants in Japan’s popular discourse. This paper calls attention to the location shift from Arakawa to Roppongi as the imaginary living sphere of the Chinese immigrants in the 1990s Tokyo in About Love, Tokyo (Yanagimachi Mitsuo, 1993) and Tokyo Skin (Hanawa Yukinari, 1996). By comparing the kōgai (a Japanese concept that deviates from its English translation ‘suburbia’ or French counterpart ‘la banlieue’) space of Arakawa and the central districts of Roppongi in Tokyo, it suggests the changing popular perception of the Chinese immigrants with the rise of xenophobia in the Japanese society. Moreover, the shared liminal spatiality depicted through these two locations reveals the emergence of a gloomy vision out of the seemingly promising social mobility of the global city of Tokyo in the 1990s. Nevertheless, by scrutinizing the grassroots collaboration between the Japanese crew and the actual Chinese immigrant-actor in both films and its influence on the films’ representation, this paper further elaborates on the critical potential of the transnationally co-constituted image of Tokyo. As the city’s liminal spatiality could also serve as a concrete site to bridge the gap between liminal experiences of various historical and social contexts in the post-Socialist PRC and post-bubble Japan.