Nature, gender, and the production of framed spaces: an ecomedia analysis of Ozu Yasujiro’s The Munekata Sisters

This paper challenges simplified interpretations of Ozu Yasujiro's The Munekata Sisters (1950) as a cliché representation of the binary opposition between tradition and modernity. Applying an ecomedia analytical framework, the study examines how the film engages nonhuman nature not as a static cultural code or passive mise-en-scène prop, but as a dynamic, embodied, and sensory medium. Through close readings of lighting, shadow aesthetics, and visual-auditory framing, this paper demonstrates how contrasting cinematic spaces – the traditional Kyoto temple and the modern Ginza bar – are artificially constructed and how abstract Japanese ‘secondary nature’ is juxtaposed with shadowy, colonial flora to demonstrate the inescapable ‘sense of planet’. Furthermore, by analyzing human-nonhuman affective encounters and the spatial mobility of the sisters alongside the structural parallels of postwar masculinity, the paper demonstrates how Ozu's spatial worldmaking articulates a nuanced interpretation of Japanese female subjectivity and national identity. The Munekata Sisters provides a way of understanding how Ozu's cinema is rooted in ideals of ecology and environment that have been naturalized in specific ways and how it frames a world in which both human and nonhuman animals, plants, and the physical setting interact and interconnect, contributing to the coherent ecological worldmaking in cinema.