Revisioning Cinema: The History of Japan on Screen

Dear Colleagues,

The scholarly study of Japanese cinema in English has entered something of a renaissance over the last fifteen years. High-quality works from monographs (such as Zahlten’s 2017 The End of Japanese Cinema, to give just one example of many) to edited volumes (Daisuke Miyao’s 2010 Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, Lee and Stringer’s 2014 Japanese Cinema, Raine and Nordström’s 2020 The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan, O’Reilly’s 2026 The Advent of Sound in Japanese Cinema: a Handbook, etc.) and to articles (too numerous to mention) have appeared one after another, with most of them focused on a specific aspect of cinema.

The Special Issue of Arts that I hereby propose is also devoted to a particular aspect of cinema, namely the tendency towards revisionist depictions of Japanese history on the silver screen. While this topic has occasionally been touched upon in the growing body of Anglophone work on Japanese cinema more generally, it has not been addressed in a systematic manner, so a Special Issue devoted solely to revisionism in Japanese film will serve as a timely intervention in the field.

I seek contributions from the scholarly community relating to the topic of historical revisionism in Japanese cinema. Contributions from anyone, from graduate students to established scholars, are welcome, and while topics tightly focused on the issue of revisionism (for example, articles which address wartime depictions of earlier eras in Japanese history or denialist right-wing cinema of the late 20^th or early 21^st centuries) will be given priority, secondary topics closely related to the issue of revisionism in Japanese cinema will also be given due consideration.

I request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–400 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor (seanoreilly@aiu.ac.jp) or to the Arts Editorial Office (arts@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References: 

Lee, Nikki J. Y. and Julian Stringer, eds. (2014). Japanese Cinema. New York: Routledge.

Miyao, Daisuke (2010). Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

O’Reilly, Sean, ed. (2026). The Advent of Sound in Japanese Cinema: a Handbook. New York: Routledge.

Raine, Michael and Johan Nordström, eds. (2020). The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Zahlten, Alexander (2017). The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies. New York: Columbia University Press.

Prof. Dr. Sean O'Reilly
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Japanese cinema
• revisionism
• film history
• denialism