The year 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Although efforts to commemorate and re-examine the war have never ceased across various spheres in Asia, the anniversary itself triggers a sense of urgency that demands renewed critical perspectives for studying the changing historical and geopolitical entanglements among (East) Asian countries and regions since 1945. The entanglements among the three Chinas – namely the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan and Hong Kong – and Japan are of particular interest.

Griseldis Kirsch's monograph Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen, although not necessarily intended for the anniversary of the Second World War, is a timely and valuable contribution to a series of recent studies (in English, Japanese and Chinese) in the fields of cinema, media and cultural studies that seek to comprehend and rethink Sino-Japanese connections by focusing on how popular culture genres such as television dramas and films, produced respectively in Greater China and Japan or as Japanese–Chinese co-productions, tend to represent, mediate and reflect upon such transnational relations. Kirsch carefully frames her historical inquiry over the period spanning from 1989, the year signalling the end of Cold War, to 2005, emphasizing the PRC's rising trajectory as one of the world's leading economic powers. Relying on an outstanding and rich body of data consisting of TV dramas (one-offs and series) and films (mainly fictional) produced by Japanese media entities and filmmakers during the specified time frame, Kirsch examines how these cultural texts discursively imagine the three Chinas (mainly the PRC) and engage with their Otherness.

According to Kirsch, further analysis regarding the imaginaries of today's China and Chinese identities (including subjects from Taiwan and Hong Kong) in contemporary Japanese media productions begs an in-depth review of how Japan has historically negotiated its positioning in its tripartite connections with China, other Asian countries and even the West culturally, politically and economically. The first chapter of Kirsch's work contextualizes the troubled Sino-Japanese relations by foregrounding Japan's colonial past and the Japanese empire's once-ambitious project of the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,” a discourse that is constantly interrogated and related to the author's reading of contemporary media texts.

Leveraging the theoretical lenses of post-colonialism and identity politics, especially feminism, Kirsch has basically formulated her interpretative framework by dichotomizing the positions of Japan and its Chinese Other within the power structure. Particularly, reworking Werner Faulstich and Knut Hickethier's theory on the cultural representation of the Other (pp. 28–29), the author categorizes the Japanese media texts into four disparate yet occasionally overlapping patterns; she elaborates on each of these patterns in chapters two to five. For Kirsch, each representational pattern connotes a specific hierarchical positioning between China and Japan, which also indexes the shifting socioeconomic and geopolitical realities that have gradually redefined Sino-Japanese connections throughout the decades. The book starts with a pattern in which the Chinese are represented as the marginalized group in need of help and support, and the Japanese are portrayed as mentally mature and economically superior (p. 53). A second media trope tends to foreground China as the “vision of horror” (p. 55) and highlight evil, materialistic Chinese characters in crime genres, which directly articulates the popular perception about foreign criminality in Japan. The third pattern, however, responds to the PRC's miraculous economic growth and Japan's economic downturn in the 1990s, which in turn registers China and its tradition as the source of salvation and energy. A fourth pattern of transnationalization/internationalization examines characters who are of rather mixed ethnic/national identities and whose international background could potentially create heterogeneous cultural space for Japanese society. As rightly pointed out by the author, the changing imaginaries of China and other Asian foreigners in these Japanese TV dramas and films not only highlight how Japan copes with the challenges brought by the trends of internationalization and the influx of aliens upon the essentialized notion of Japanese identity and ethnic homogeneity, these tropes also speak of how modern Japanese society engages with its own historical baggage since the end of the Second World War.

Kirsch has clarified that within her neat, quadripartite generalizations of the representational patterns, variations and exceptions do exist. However, by constructing discursive tropes based upon power relations such as those of the colonizer vis-à-vis the colonized, the central vis-à-vis the peripheral and so forth, the textual analysis in some ways has failed to address the nuances and ambiguities in the cultural representation adequately, despite a chapter tackling the more controversial issues of identities and identification on screen. Such interpretative strategies may have left less space for further discussions apropos of Sino-Japanese film co-productions such as Sleepless Town (1998) or Last Love, First Love (2003). Furthermore, it might be true that these Japanese media texts have proffered stereotypical, oversimplified portrayals of the three Chinas. Nevertheless, this book could have provided more incisive critiques of these imaginaries by contextualizing and differentiating between Japan's engagement with the various manifestations of the “Chineseness” and rethinking its historical twists and geopolitical significance, which would then enrich the discussions of Sino-Japanese relations occurring on-screen.