Takashi Miike’s The Great Yokai War

During the second sequence of Black Rainbow (1990), an undeservedly neglected film written and directed by Mike Hodges, one character notices the devastating architectural changes affecting a small town in North Carolina. He compares it to a “lobotomy gobbling up your past like a plague of locusts, a national lobotomy.” His remarks also apply to dominant tendencies in British and Western European culture that now eagerly abandon past traditions for the dubious benefits of a global economic postmodernist era. Fortunately, this is not the case in Japanese cinema. During 2005, Takashi Miike’s The Great Yokai War appeared. It received great acclaim in national and international festivals. Like veteran director Seijun Suzuki’s Tanuki-Goten/ Princess Racoon (2005) and the younger generation Pang Brothers’s Re-Cycle (2006), The Great Yokai War promotes reverence and respect for Japanese popular culture desiring to preserve it for present and future audiences without denying the importance of new technological developments that transmit past traditions in novel ways. All these films represent different types of warnings about losing valuable traditions in a developing Asian world rapidly moving into the 21st Century and in danger of eliminating valuable elements from a supposedly redundant past.