Looking into the rising sun: South Korean cinema’s Japan cycle of the Park Geun-hye era
Creators: name: Edwards, Russell
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 360501
subject: Cinema studies

description: The success of sixteenth-century war epic, The Admiral: Roaring Currents (Kim Han-min, 2014), instigated a cycle of films about Korean-Japanese encounters, released between 2014 and 2017. The film’s depiction of the defeat of a Japanese attack on the Korean peninsula not only became the most successful South Korean film ever but also accentuated South Korea’s fraught historical relationship with Japan. Film cycles typically revolve around a specific genre, but the Rising Sun cycle ranged across multiple genres: thriller, melodrama, biopic, horror and comedy/drama. This ‘Rising Sun’ cycle coincided with a period of rising bilateral tensions between Japan and the administration of Park Geun-hye (2013-2017), an incumbency marked by artistic blacklists, political coercion, and eventual criminal conviction for the President.  Predominantly produced by media conglomerates with close ties to government, these films frequently topped the South Korean box office. Previous scholarship has examined groups of South Korean films between the 1960s and the 2000s that depict the experiences and effects of Japanese colonialism. My thesis advances this scholarship by utilising Klein’s work on film cycles to examine how these Rising Sun films dramatise South Korean attempts to ignore, accept or, most commonly, purge the nation of its Japanese colonial association. In doing so, this multi-genre study accordingly extends Morris’ adaptation of Kang’s postcolonial strategies—forgetting, exorcism, and endurance. The combining of Kang’s postcolonial philosophy with the application of Klein’s work in a new context enhances understanding of South Korean cinema’s engagement with the peninsula’s colonial legacy. Contextualising close textual analysis with contemporary film reviews and news reports, I examine how South Korea’s long-standing anxieties about its relationship with Japan visually and narratively manifest across the Rising Sun films. Despite the Rising Sun cycle’s generic range, I identify multiple shared characteristics and postcolonial tropes. These include repeated use of Japanese icons such as the military-associated Kyokujitsu (also known as the Rising Sun), Japanese villains racially demonised as cloven foot jjokbari, and Korean collaborators known as chinilpa. Often visually associated with physical scars, these representations collectively stand in for persistent national wounds, in films that call occasionally for healing from, but most often expulsion of, these Japanese elements. My analysis also reveals that, aside from predictably negative representations, the cycle includes surprisingly positive representations of Japanese characters, though these are often ambivalently offset through varying processes of erasure. The combination of demonisation and positive representations positions the cycle as an expression of South Korea’s cultural tensions around honouring its troubled history against maintaining a stable relationship with Japan. The cycle unusually includes an independent, arthouse and partially crowd-funded film Spirits’ Homecoming (Cho Jung-rae, 2016), alongside chaebol-backed blockbusters such as Assassination (Choi Dong-hoon, 2015) and The Battleship Island (Ryoo Seung-wan, 2017). This complicates scholarly understandings of film cycles, which are often dismissed as exclusively driven by financial gain. Spirits’ Homecoming presents an alternative to the exorcism strategy that dominates the Rising Sun cycle, instead favouring the strategy of ‘endurance’ which suggests that co-existence with unwanted ghosts can transcend traumatic colonial experiences and heal lingering wounds. The Rising Sun cycle importantly demonstrates that nationalism, domestic politics and geopolitics can influence a cycle’s form and longevity.