I specialize in Japanese film and media, with a specific focus on media’s articulation of shifting economic structures and ideas of nation across mid-20th century East Asia. I am currently working on a book manuscript concerning the figure of the salaryman, or male white-collar worker, staged across mass media in Japan’s era of high economic growth (1954-1971).
Using a transmedial approach that draws together studio film with archival material such as serialized fiction, advertising, popular social science texts and management literature, I argue the salaryman emerged as the dominant figure through which political and cultural transformations concerning labor, class, gender, and national identity were mediated in postwar Japan. My research interests also include recession-era media cultures, travel film, and media theory.
