This volume brings together the papers presented at the international symposium Rethinking Nature in Contemporary Japan: Facing the Crisis held at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in March 2015, as the last of a three-years research project on post-Fukushima Japan funded by the Japan Foundation. The book focuses on Religion and Thought, Fine Arts, Music, Cinema, Animation and Performing Arts (Theatre and Dance), from a multidisciplinary perspective.

In the last thirty years, starting from the collapse of the bubble economy, the long period of economic and political crisis defined as the ‘lost decades’ has resulted in a strong social impact with a severe fallout in particular on the younger generations that have followed since that moment. For them, it has been lacking the solid structure characteristic of the previous decades thanks to which, starting from the period of school education, it was possible to aspire in the future to a certain profitable job, therefore with the possibility of creating a family and harmoniously inserting themselves into a given social structure. Many elements of maladjustment, in some cases even pathological as in the case of hikikomori or the frequent perpetrators of ferocious criminal acts, have obviously been re-proposed by cinema, an art that is always sensitive to contemporaneity. This essay, therefore, offers an overview of the main film trends developed in the archipelago in the last thirty years and linked to the world of the youngest and their widespread sense of existential emptiness.

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