Tangemania

This is not film news per se, but rather a memorial in virtual space for a departed loved one.

Yesterday evening, April 27, our tabby cat, Kojiro, was killed by a speeding car just two houses away from us. It was quite a shock, in part because our life with this mysterious cat was quite short-lived. He just showed up on our doorstop one rainy November night last year, and kept coming back until it seemed he had chosen us for his new family. He stayed indoors for most of the winter, but come spring, he would run outside and sometimes not come back at night. He wasn't the most attractive cat, yet he was very friendly - but he rarely ever purred. A very contradictory creature who was quite an individual. Only a bit over a year old, he left us all too suddenly.

Kojiro came to us like a wandering samurai, so we named him after Sasaki Kojiro, Miyamoto Musashi's legenday opponent popularized in the Yoshikawa novels and in various movies, and played by such cool dudes as Tsuruta Koji and Takakura Ken. (Our cat just did not seem someone we could name Musashi.) There's even an eponymous 1967 Inagaki Hiroshi film on this rather tragic figure starring Onoe Kikunosuke. I wonder whether we shouldn't have given him a more propitious name, although we more often called him by his nicknames Obojo and Obo.

Kojiro had one other media connection: he was an inveterate kotatsu neko. One of my favorite characters from Takahashi Rumiko's Urusei yatsura is Kotatsu Neko, the ghost cat who comes to haunt Ataru's kotatsu because he had been kicked out of a kotatsu when he was still alive. (A kotatsu is a heated table popular during Japanese winters - ours was handmade by Ohdera Yasuo of Jin Woodscapes.) Well, Kojiro loved our kotatsu and spent as much time in - and sometimes half-in and half-out - of that heated space as he could. It is strangely appropriate that he passed away right after we put away the kotatsu for the year. 

Perhaps he will come to haunt us next year? If he does, he will be most welcome. Kojiro was a strange creature, but one who was much loved.

Kotatsu neko Kojiro half out of the kotatsu.

We would call Kojiro "Kanai-san" when he donned this hat. 

Kojiro certainly measured up to the cats I know - on his own individual scale.

Sayonara, Kojiro.

I was invited up to Boston last week to participate in a panel discussion with Yoshida Kiju and his wife Okada Mariko held in conjunction with the Yoshida retro at the Harvard Film Archive. Haden Guest, the head of the Archive, was the chair, with the other panelists being me, Markus Nornes and Roland Domenig. The idea was to have an occasion apart from the usual post-screening Q & A session (where few follow-up questions are allowed), during which we could really pursue some issues in depth. To aid in the endeavor, it was made a small event with a very small audience. This was my second time doing an event with Yoshida-san, the first being the Yoshida Kiju Symposium at Meiji Gakuin some years past.

One hope was to focus more on Okada-san, who unfortunately does not get as many questions in the usual Q & A session as she deserves. She proved quite talkative and her stories ended up taking up nearly half of an event that, going overtime, totalled nearly two hours. One got a strong impression of an actress passionately dedicated to her craft. I asked her about something Yoshida once wrote about the need for actors to be more free, and to exceed the roles given them by the film or director through their bodily presence, but while she voiced her preference for working with a director who thinks that way, she also presented herself as a performer who is well able to negotiate different directorial styles, from the freedom Yoshida provides, to the precise bodily direction Ozu imposed. Okada was most passionate when I, following up on a Markus question, asked her about young idol or tarento performers. While respecting that that they do what they are supposed to do - play themselves, not any character beyond themselves - she strongly voiced her opinion that such performers are by definition not actors.

The content of Yoshida-san's discussion perhaps did not seem too new to those who have heard him talk before or read his books. He again emphasized his belief in the inherent ambiguity or otherness of the image, in a form of human perception (the anarchy of sight) that precedes knowledge or categorization, or in an approach to authorship that refuses to "own" the film. It again reminded me of the parallels between Yoshida and contemporary filmmakers like Aoyama Shinji or Kurosawa Kiyoshi, ones which are not likely defined by a narrative of influence (Aoyama in fact discovered Yoshida after he wrote his manifestoes on a new New Wave centered on treating the image as an other).

What was interesting was the reaction - Markus called it "visceral" - to Roland's question about landscape theory (fukeiron). Yoshida was well aware of the concept - most famously developed by Matsuda Masao in the late 1960s - but intriguingly "misread" it as encouraging narrative more than it really does. This probably signals his strong aversion to the concept, one that, especially when combined with his voiced belief that the 1960s left was supported more by emotion than thought, and thus suffered mass withdrawals whenever death became a real possibility, reflects his complex relation to the New Left.

Afterwards, we had a nice dinner at the Faculty Club where the couple regaled us with tales of their marriage ceremony in Germany in 1964, of Kido Shiro, etc. Okada-san has just finished penning an autobiography, which should appear in Japanese this fall.

Thanks to everyone for the insightful discussion. I look forward to grilling Yoshida-san some more for the film theory book I am writing.

I've been meaning for sometime to add some of my old articles to the site, but have not gotten around to it (sorry!). But I was searching around on the internet for something else and found that one of my first published articles is available online. I have added it to the Internet Articles section. 

The piece is called "The Benshi's New Face: Defining Cinema in Taisho Japan" and it was published in 1994, when I was still a doctoral student. It considers how discourses attempting to define cinematic institutions such as the benshi served not only to articulate the medium, but also to enmesh cinematic practices in the operations of power. It is a foundational article for the thinking that leads up to my book on early Japanese film culture, but it was published in journal with limited circulation, so it is not well known. Iconics is the international edition of the journal of the Nihon Eizo Gakkai (Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences), the main academic society in Japan that includes the study of cinema. I was later editor of that journal, as well as a managing director (jonin riji) of the JASIAS. 

Some of the articles from Iconics are now available online through CiNii, the Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator of Japan's National Institute of Informatics. You can look for other articles in this interesting journal, or use CiNii to search Japanese journals and libraries. It's a valuable resource.