In Popular Culture
In Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition (film series) (1959) Kaji, the main protagonist, is a labor supervisor assigned to a workforce of Chinese prisoners in a large mining operation in Japanese-colonized Manchuria.
Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 film, The Last Emperor, presented a controversial portrait of Manchukuo through the memories of Emperor Puyi, during his days as political prisoner in the People's Republic of China.
Haruki Murakami's 1995 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle deals greatly with Manchukuo through the character of Lieutenant Mamiya. Mamiya recalls, in person and in correspondence, his time as an officer in the Kwangtung Army in Manchukuo. While the period covered in these recollections extends for many years, the focus is on the final year of the war and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
The 2008 South Korean western The Good, the Bad, the Weird is set in the desert wilderness of 1930s Manchuria.
Read more about this topic: Manchukuo
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)