The Red Scarf (1964) was a major success in the Asian film industry, winning three awards at the 11th Asia-Pacific Film Festival in 1964. This paper seeks to understand the reasons for the film’s successin the Asian context.

In the first section, I will employ Koichi Iwabuchi’s “Inter-Asian Referencing” approach to demonstrate that the film resulted from director Shin Sang-ok’s active engagement with the network established at the film festival. The second section analyzes how the film constructs the spectacle of war, specifically focusing on the perspective, narrative structure, and re-creation of Western spaces, using the method of text analysis. The third section focuses on the film’s distribution and reception in Asia and argues that the film’s success was due to a combination of cinematic technique and thematic elements of humanity and love. Lastly, the third section also points out that disparities within the Asian region, particularly in how the reality in South Korea and the filmʼs anti-communist values were perceived suggest a crack in the “Free Asia”, a geopolitical division in the Asian region led by the United States and characterized by its strong anti-communist stance. In conclusion, the paper highlights the importance of transnational elements in shaping South Korean cinema and offers some perspectives for further exploration of these elements.

Kôge, an adaptation based on the novel of the same name by Sawako Ariyoshi, is the longest of Keisuke Kinoshita’s works. The entire film is based on the love-hate bond between Ikuyo, a mother who has never been a parental figure in her life, living only for her own desires, and Tomoko, a daughter who is tormented by her mother and who constantly forgives her despite feeling hatred towards her.

This study focused on the relationship between Tomoko and Ikuyo in Kôge, and shed light on the relationship between mother and daughter, a subject which has not garnered much attention in Kinoshita’s works. I first discussed the character of Ikuyo, and pointed out that Kinoshita’s shooting style of tracking shots and continuous use of zooming suggested Ikuyo’s deviation from the “home”. I also discussed the peculiarity of the mother-daughter relationship in Kôge by comparing it with the family images (especially the mother-child relationship) in Kinoshita’s other works. Furthermore, I discussed Kinoshita’s new interpretations of the mother-daughter bond in comparison with the original work.

This paper takes the text and the context surrounding the film Goro Masamune Koshi Den (1915) as a starting point to examine sadomasochistic representations in popular culture in the Late Meiji to early Taisho Period.

In sections 2 and 3, I examine the “stepchild bullying” scene in Goro Masamune Koshi Den and show intertextually that it reflects the prevalence of sadism/masochism representations in popular culture in the Late Meiji to early Taisho Period. In addition, I pointed out colonialist ideas and misogyny in the representation of sadism/masochism, and then I examine the figure of Goro in Goro Masamune Koshi Den as the image of imperial Japan during the formation of the nation-state. Furthermore, I reexamine the problem when women, who bear the brunt of the violence exercised in the representations of sadism/masochism, become the viewers of that violence from the perspective of recent gender politics and point out that those violent representations can be enjoyed as entertainment (as well as by male viewers) by female viewers. In conclusion, I discuss the issue of “melodrama” as an important concept in the representation of sadism/masochism, but also raise some issues for the future.