Noodle Soup for the Consumer Soul: The Professional Amateur and Self-Analysis as Spectacle in Itami Jūzō’s Media Practice, 1975-1985

This talk traces how filmmaker Itami Jūzō developed a sociologically invested film practice through his intermedial work in commercial publishing, advertising, and television in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before achieving international success with The Funeral in 1984 and Tampopo in 1985, Itami fashioned himself as a “professional amateur” —a self-reflexive media persona blurring the line between consumer and critic, expert and layperson— working across a wide range of media genres. Through his work in lifestyle magazines, “how-to” literature, and television, Itami crafted this persona as both a media commodity and a prescriptive model of popular spectatorship, merging amateur psychology/anthropology with mass entertainment. Drawing on Itami’s collaborations with psychoanalyst Kishida Shū in lifestyle magazine Mon Oncle (1981), call-in “documentary” programs like Asahi TV’s Afternoon Show (1981), and over a decade of experimental CM works, I trace how the professional amateur emerged as a key subject for sociological introspection in late 20th-century Japan. Through these projects, Itami cultivated a commercial documentary aesthetic that staged self-study and ethnographic observation as consumer pleasures, fusing the intimacy of the talk show, the authority of documentary reportage, and the visual grammar of advertising into a new model of media expression. In this perspective, print media, television and CM served as a key aesthetic and structural laboratory that informed and evolved in conversation with Itami’s cinematic practice, extending the commercialization of reflexive media expression in 1980s Japan.