Ca’ Foscari Japanese Studies

Shokutaku Jigoku

Visions of Family Meals in Japanese Cinema

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Abstract

Cooking and dining scenes have been a ubiquitous presence in Japanese cinema since its inception, and the relationship between Japanese people and food has been frequently exploited to play out family dynamics, rites of passage, etc. Therefore, the dining room often becomes the place where drama unfolds in striking contrast with this supposedly safe environment. This paper focuses on three films where dining scenes are particularly relevant – Ozu Yasujirō’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Morita Yoshimitsu’s The Family Game (1983) and Miike Takashi’s Visitor Q (2001) – in order to analyse how Japanese cinema has documented the transformation of family relations in time.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: June 10, 2021 | Accepted: July 13, 2021 | Published Dec. 22, 2021 | Language: en

Keywords Dining scenes • Ozu Yasujiro • Miike Takashi • Traditional family • Morita Yoshimitsu

Copyright © 2021 Eugenio De Angelis. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-559-9/013


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