Are We There Yet? Travelling Toward the Self in Contemporary Japanese Cinema

This paper presents the relationship between travel and self-discovery in contemporary Japanese cinema, and suggests that this relationship grows from an existing tradition of literary and poetic travel writing in pre-modern Japan. However, while the pre-modern tradition focussed on travel away from the urban, daily world of the travelling poet, contemporary cinema presents the urban world as the location for travel and its attendant recuperative functions. Urban travel becomes a process by which an alienated individual may overcome his or her social, cultural, and personal alienation.