Sinfonia Gojira: Ifukube Akira’s Musical Narratives of Nationalism and Anti-Modernity in Godzilla Films discusses the Japanese composer Ifukube Akira (1914-2006) and explores how his philosophies of Japanese/Asian nationalism and anti-modernity are made manifest in his musical works, especially his original scores in daikaijū eiga, or Japanese giant monster films, such as Godzilla (1954) and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962). Through his daikaijū eiga music, Ifukube asserts himself beyond the role of a mere provider of passive “background music” and engages as a self-determined auteur, an active commentator who employs an array of carefully curated musical techniques and signs—an aesthetic practice I refer to as the primordial-folkloric—to articulate within his monster movie scores his philosophies of nationalism and anti-modernity.

In Ifukube’s auteurist musical narration of these films, what I designate as his practice of interventional narrative commentary, he links monsters like Godzilla to his conception of Japanese and Asian ethno-cultural purity and thus recharacterizes them from invasive, malevolent creatures to deity-like beings—protectors—that seek to halt Japan’s misguided march toward postwar modernity and the resultant erasure of indigenous cultural identity. The composer’s ultimate goal, therefore, is to employ his musical scores to provoke or indeed manipulate his audiences into viewing—or more precisely, hearing—daikaijū eiga in a nationalist context, to perceive the monsters as representative of national ethos. Through Ifukube’s interventional narrative commentary, daikaijū eiga consequently transform into cultural productions that advocate for Japanese nationalist and anti-modern ideals in the tumultuously transitional postwar/post-Occupation era.

By engaging with daikaijū eiga through a variety of academic frameworks such as film studies, musicology, and semiotics, Sinfonia Gojira argues that the cinematic composer must be situated as one of the many auteurs responsible for the production of a film. By emphasizing and examining the auteurism of a film’s composer, cinematic productions are consequently (re)positioned to be analyzed and interpreted using the musical score, imbued with the philosophical and political concerns of its composer, as a point of departure for novel hermeneutic praxes, thus revealing urgent and exciting new insights into how films may be conceptualized and read as truly audio-visual media.

My dissertation explores transmedia adaptations of Chinese antiquity, including the fictional, televisual, musical, and video adaptation of China’s dynastic past in modern China. My dissertation intervenes into the field of media studies by breaking up the border between different media genres via the twofold implications of the “transmedia adaptation”: the translation of the same stories from one medium platform to another and the transgression of the medium convention in the process of adaptation. Accordingly, the four chapters of my dissertation are divided according to the established genres—televisual drama, fan fiction, cover songs, and fan video remakes—to investigate how each genre translates the stories of the past to fit into the artistic context of its specific medium. However, my dissertation also addresses each genre’s transgression of its own medium convention by incorporating the aesthetic signature of the source text from which it is adapted and anticipates the target text into which it will be adapted. The first chapter studies the extensive use of side light in historical TV drama to construct perceptual depth, yet it also occasionally frames its image as a pictorial scroll of a traditional Chinese painting that refutes light and shadow for surface effect. The second studies the negative recursion of online fan fiction, as opposed to the linear narration in TV drama from which it was adapted, yet its emphasis on the light and shadow in descriptive passages exceeds the convention of verbal narration and betrays the influences of televisual aesthetics. The third chapter explores cover songs adapted from online fan fiction, with the looping structure that dominates musical composition and lyrical prose, and its melodramatic tonality and love motif made it readily adaptable to fan videos. The last chapter studies fan videos made to reassemble the footage found in TV dramas, combined with a cover song as its background music, to narrate the plot of a work of fan fiction. As an aggregation of heterogeneous medium components, the fan video does not create its medium specificity via a coherent definition but rather establishes its potential of self-differentiation in its transgression of medium convention.

In the early twentieth century, the Japanese empire colonized extensive regions in East Asia and the Pacific, while its state government simultaneously sponsored and managed Japanese immigration to Brazil. Despite the continuity between these imperial expansionist practices, dominant historical narratives do not usually portray Japanese immigration and imperialism in connection with one another. The discrepancy stems largely from disciplinary boundaries based upon geopolitical divisions of the world that separate Asian and Latin American concerns from one another. However, Transpacific Anomalies and Alterities: Decolonial Possibilities through Japanese Brazilian Literature addresses this oversight by examining Japanese Brazilian literature within the context of Japanese imperialism and illustrating how certain literary texts illuminate the veiled links between immigration and empire. The dissertation engages a transpacific vantage point grounded in feminist and decolonial analytics to read a multilingual archive that juxtaposes 20th century Japanese Brazilian prose fiction with dominant sociopolitical discourses found in Japanese and Brazilian newspapers, migration advertisements, and government reports. It unpacks how the literary stories—in comparison with the dominant accounts—provide an alternative picture of Japanese immigration to Brazil by calling attention to the racialized, gendered, and sexualized dynamics of the Japanese state-managed, settler colonialist system. In particular, it focuses on literary texts that follow the experiences of queer and female subjects “anomalous” to the traditional heteronormative, male-centered immigrant narrative, as well as texts that detail encounters between Japanese immigrants and racialized figures of “alterity” like Afro-Brazilians, Native Brazilians, and Okinawan immigrants. Through utilizing an intersectional lens, Transpacific Anomalies and Alterities unpacks the incommensurate experiences of power at the limits of the Japanese Brazilian community between anomalous subjects just inside its imagined boundaries and subaltern subjects outside them. The comparison between these various positionalities, as argued in the dissertation, brings into focus the multiple modes of accountability required to address Japanese imperialism’s mutual constitution by heteropatriarchy and colonial racial capitalism and make strides toward decolonial liberation in the transpacific.