Yuka Hasegawa (International Christian University)
This paper studies the Japanese television drama Boku tachi no Sensō “Our War” (2006) and the animated drama Kimi no Na wa “Your Name” (2016) to study the coevalness of two protagonists who switch bodies so that each becomes the other. In “Our War,” a lazy millennial Kenta who works part-time while living with his parents changes bodies with Goichi, a student at an Imperial navy training course preparing for a suicide attack during World War II. Similarly in “Your Name,” a female protagonist Mitsuha who lives in a slow-paced rural Hida region of Japan changes bodies with a boy named Taki who lives in the fast-paced city of Tokyo.
I study the body-switching bamen, a Japanese term that may be translated as a “scene” or a “situation” in these two films. The men (面) in bamen refers to a mask, which is often used in Asian theater where it “calls attention to the often ambiguous play between self and other involved in its alchemical procedures” (Emigh 1996: xviii). By studying how the bamen reveals the dreamlike and other-worldly dimension of intermediality or “the mental space that may be best described as in-between realities” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006: 11), I ask how body-switching problematizes the conventional roles ascribed to family members and how the bamen in these films reify self-reflexive moments that also show a family-in-transition in contemporary Japan.
Yuka Hasegawa received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Her dissertation studied the civic co-production of Creative City programs and events in Yokohama city, Japan, through which she became part of the city’s globalization as an American educated Japanese citizen. Her research interest covers globalization of Japanese cities, East Asian regionalization, Japanese policy of cultural affairs, representations of WWII in Japanese popular visual media, pedagogical practices in multicultural classrooms, civil society, and the self. She is currently a part-time lecturer at the International Christian University and the University of Maryland University College Asia.