Patrick Chimenti

Patrick Chimenti is a scholar of modern and postwar Japanese literature, film, and media. His research and teaching interests include regional media production in modern and postwar Japan; ethnographically informed media and cultural theory; cinematic and televisual approaches to recording and documentary realism; popular culture (particularly television, anime, and manga); and theories of media reflexivity, intermediality, and adaptation. His current book project, tentatively titled Grasping for the Periphery: Ethnographic Imaginaries of Place and Media Production in Post-High Growth Japan, explores shifting media practices surrounding historical and geographical “peripheries” in and around Japan in the transitional period of the late 1960s and 1970s. Grasping for the Periphery challenges the frequent narrativization of the 1970s as a cultural and political decrescendo following the global 1960s by considering how media imaginaries surrounding historically peripheralized sites and populations across the archipelago laid the foundation for a new grassroots cultural politics—a movement that ultimately informed and reshaped popular social imaginaries of cultural particularity and theories of ethnogenesis, media-based imaginaries that continue to inform cultural narratives surrounding Japan today. By tracing the rise of ethnographic and structuralist thought across a diverse range of media formats including literature, television, manga, film, and national cultural institutions, the book recasts the 1970s as a critical moment of epistemic reorganization, the legacy of which continues to shape contemporary media imaginaries of Japan.

Chimenti is also in the early stages of research for a future book project on the work of actor, writer, and director Itami Jūzō and Japan’s evolving media landscape from the 1970s to the 1990s. This project examines how images of cultural particularity were integrated into mass consumer culture through commercial film, advertising, and lifestyle/self-help media, as Itami and his extensive network of collaborators engaged with themes such as social pathology, vanishing customs, and the dissolution of family structures in late 20th-century Japan. While Itami serves as the project’s central figure, this book situates his work within a broader network of collaborators across literature, publishing, television, film, and advertising, exploring how the mediated “self” in the lifestyle, self-help, and amateur movements of the 1980s and 90s opened a contentious space for the reconfiguration of Japanese cultural identity.