Daisuke Miyao

Invisibility and Hypervisibility: Hitchcock in Japan

Daisuke Miyao
Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who was obsessed with the sense of vision. In Japan, the visibility and invisibility of Hitchcock and his films was strongly related to geopolitics and technology from the period of the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s to the advent of television in the 1960s. In the 1930s-40s, as ultranationalist and militarist ideologies gained strength, the number of foreign films was limited and consequently not many Hitchcock films were screened (there were only three). Thus, Hitchcock’s films were mostly invisible while those three released films were highly praised as representative of British national cinema and the thriller genre. During the Cold War from 1945 to the 60s, Hitchcock’s Hollywood films, which had been banned by the Imperial Japanese government, became finally visible but were received ambivalently, often criticized for their sensationalism. The postwar Allied Occupation took the political and economic initiative to reconstruct Japanese society quickly, and their film policy tried not to interfere with that project. Lastly, aided by the rise of television, the figure of Hitchcock, including his massive but charming body, became much more visible than his films (“hypervisible”) and was turned into an icon of commercialism. A Toyota ad in the 1990s was a typical example. Thus, this talk critically traces the discursive history of Hitchcock and his films in Japan, examining how his visibility—and invisibility—reflected broader cultural, political, and media shifts across several decades.

About
Daisuke Miyao is Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Miyao is the author of Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema (2020), Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies (2019), The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (2013), and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (2007). He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (2014) and the co-editor of The World of Benshi (2024) with Michael Emerich, and Transnational Cinematography Studies (2017) with Lindsay Coleman and Roberto Schaefer.