Images of the city in literature and film help constitute the experience of modern life. Studies of the Japanese city have focused on Tokyo, but a fuller understanding of urban space and life requires analysis of other cities, beginning with Osaka. Japans merchant capital in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial centerthe Manchester of the Eastinto the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyos. It therefore represents a critical site of East Asian modernity. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular culture from the 1920s to the 1950s, a city that betrayed the workings of imperialism and asserted an urban identity alternative toeven subversive ofnational identity.
Osaka Modern brings an appreciation of this imagined citys emphatic locality to: popular novels by Tanizaki Junichiro, favorite son Oda Sakunosuke, and best-seller Yamasaki Toyoko; films by Toyoda Shiro and Kawashima Yuzo; and contemporary radio, television, music, and comedy. Its interdisciplinary approach creates intersections between Osaka and various theoretical concernseveryday life, coloniality, masculinity, translationto produce not only a fresh appreciation of key works of literature and cinema, but also a new focus for these widely-used critical approaches.
