Crossing thresholds: women directors making a home in Japanese cinema

ABSTRACT Within many of the works of contemporary Japanese women commercial filmmakers, we see a new vision of home, home spaces, and the act of home making. These depictions diverge from cinematic spaces of and metaphors about the home found in the works of previous directors. While ‘home’ on screen has been shaped throughout Japanese cinema history by dominant gendered narratives that imagine family and the physical house itself as an ideological extension of the state, contemporary Japanese women directors reimagine home as not a physical structure or ‘traditional’ family, but as a matter of repetitive habit expressed through visual and narrative motifs. This creates a sense of ‘at-homeness’ in their films that resonates with how a contemporaneous generation of young people in Japan have also found new definitions of and feelings about home. This article traces both the depiction of home in Japanese cinema and the dominant definitions of ‘home’ in Japanese public discourse from the early 1920s to the early 2000s, before offering a close analysis of two case studies – directors Tanada Yuki and Ogigami Naoko – to show how members of this new generation find an expression of home through the formal craft of cinema itself.