From Imperial Gaze to Consumed Reflection: The Remediation of Akutagawa’s Travels in China in NHK’s A Stranger in Shanghai

Abstract

In December 2019, NHK broadcast A Stranger in Shanghai, the first screen adaptation in nearly a century of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s 1921 travelogue Travels in China. This study examines how the drama remediates the source text and reconstructs representations of Sino-Japanese political history for a contemporary audience. Drawing on postcolonial theory, remediation theory, and Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia, the thesis analyses three dimensions of the adaptation: the construction of the original character Lulu, Akutagawa’s encounters with Chinese political intellectuals, and the intertextual use of Momotarō. The study argues that the drama transforms the retrospectively identified “imperial gaze” of the original text into a more ethically reflective narrative, though this transformation remains uneven and continues to reproduce certain structures of mediation and interpretive dominance. At the same time, the drama offers different forms of emotional and ethical satisfaction to Japanese and Chinese audiences. To describe this strategy, the thesis proposes the concept of “consumed reflection,” arguing that the adaptation packages historical self-critique into an emotionally manageable and culturally consumable form of remembrance.