A Study On The Death Aesthetics Of Japanese Youth Films

Death,as the end of life,has been the ultimate proposition of people’s repeated thinking and research since ancient times.Whether Confucianism,Buddhism,Taoism or Christianity,they all express their attitudes and concepts towards death between lines.Japan is one of the countries with the strongest expression of death culture and death aesthetics.Extreme intense and aesthetic mourning of death are reflected in Japanese cultural works.Among them,the huge contradiction and contrast between the vigor and vitality of youth and the image of death in Japanese youth movies are the focus of attention.Therefore,this paper also takes Japanese youth movies which won the Japanese Tenth Newspaper Award as the main research object,and uses content analysis method to study the aesthetic expression of death in their image narration.This paper starts with the causes of death aesthetics in Japan and studies the influencing factors of death culture.Secondly,the author briefly combs the changes of death theme in Japanese youth movies,and draws a conclusion that the expression of death aesthetics in Japanese youth movies in the 1980 s and beyond is richer and more diverse,ranging from life-and-death resistance,confusion and sadness to transcending rebirth and other diversified themes.Furthermore,the author studies the image characteristics and changes of Japanese youth movies with increasingly rich expression of death aesthetics,and understands the construction of death aesthetics in Japanese youth movies.Finally,the author explores the causes of the contradiction between youth life and death images in Japan.On the one hand,it is due to the infiltration of death culture,on the other hand,it is due to the concern for youth issues.Through the above research,the author believes that Japanese culture,especially death culture,has far-reaching influence on Japanese youth movies,which is embodied in the creative ideas of the creators,specifically on the theme of death,plot and sense of ritual.Throughout the development of Japanese youth movies,we can find that the specific death images in the theme of death are weakening,the environment of death tends to industrialize,and the sex of death is gradually balanced.From this we can see that the aesthetic presentation of death in Japanese youth movies is influenced by both Japanese culture and Japanese society,thus affecting the narrative of death in Japanese youth movies,so that Japanese youth movies can reflect social problems to a certain extent,especially the problems of teenagers.