The phenomenon of death in japanese popular culture: Contemporary Japanese cinema

In this study, the phenomenon of death in Japanese contemporary cinema, which is an element of Japanese popular culture, is analyzed with, using quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. Analyzing the importance of the phenomenon of death in traditional and popular Japanese culture, this study focuses on the themes and discourses of death in movies released from the early 1990s to the present. In the first part of the study, the definition of culture and popular culture also the social impacts of cinema were explained, in the second part, death as a sociological issue, the place of death in contemporary Japanese cinema were investigated. The sample of research of the thesis is Maboroshi (1995) and After Life (1998) films by Hirokazu Koreeda and Departures (2008) film by Yojiro Takita. These films, which containing themes such as mourning, afterlife and funeral ceremony, are analyzed with, using critical discourse analysis in the context of death as passage from this world to the other world, death as a source of pain, the equality of death and the importance of death in the place of birth. In this thesis conducted by categorical content analysis method and film analysis method, the keywords related to death, keywords related to the funeral ceremony, keywords related to someone who died and the keywords related to life after death were analyzed quantitatively.