Feeling Together: Pornography and Travel in Kazoku Cinema and Asako in Ruby Shoes

This chapter explores the pornographic logic of the tourist imaginary and the reformulation of transnational intimacy in Korea and Japan’s cinema of postcolonial reconciliation under new cultural liberalization policies from 1998 to 2002. It focuses on the joint film productions Kazoku Cinema (Park Chul-soo, 1998) and Asako in Ruby Shoes (E J-yong, 2000) in relation to an intercultural exchange of ethnographic exhibitions showcasing everyday life in the two countries that opened simultaneously in Seoul and Osaka in 2002. The chapter argues that redressing a history of conflict between the two nations, the cinematic medium in these co-productions, with its emphasis on pornography, functioned as a more revealing extension of the tourist gaze, and the thematic of tourism intervenes to break down geographical and visual boundaries in a move toward attempted resolution, one that finds its limit, however, in its uncanny reproduction of colonial structures of exploitation.