Landscape and the crisis of representation in Nakae Yūji’s Panari nite (1986)

ABSTRACT In Japan, the ideological implications of landscape were hotly discussed throughout the 1970s. In his response to this discussion, the film scholar and critic Hasumi Shigehiko characterized ‘landscape’ as a cultural apparatus that dictates one’s perception of the physical world. A comparable view on landscape can be found in Panari nite (On an Offshore Island, Nakae Yūji, 1986), which evinces a critical engagement with landscape through drawing on the mythologized life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. As with the Dutch artist, who sought an imagined Japan in southern France, the film’s protagonist, a painter from Tokyo, carries along his fantasies when he comes to an island in subtropical Okinawa, where he confronts the devastating gap between reality and representation. Through analysis of the film, I will assess Hasumi’s formative influence upon Nakae, arguing that the film employs Hasumi’s critical approach to landscape in order to counter the dominant stereotype of Okinawa as an exotic Other within Japan’s national boundary.