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Graduate Programs in Japanese Film Studies

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:48:19 -0500

It's been another long gap between postings. I've been swamped finishing up some books and revisions. I've finally finished most of that work, but soon we'll be heading into the last weeks of the semester.

Which reminds me it's the time of year that some students have to work on applications for graduate school. I get a lot of inquiries about places to study Japanese film in North America, so I thought I'd present a list here of graduate programs that I've given out on KineJapan before. It is not complete by any means, and each university offers different programs. Some are specialized in East Asian cinema, some are just general film studies or Japan studies programs. Some offer doctoral degrees, some only masters. Basically, the list is composed of those universities with a recognized Japanese film specialist. It can change as new people appear, and others move and fade away. Contact these people and programs if you want to find out more details. (These are in no particular order, other than putting my program first.)

Yale University (we have a separate PhD program in East Asian cinema)

University of Michigan (Mark Nornes)

University of Chicago (Michael Raine)

New York University (Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto)

University of Minnesota (Mark Anderson)

University of Oregon (Daisuke Miyao)

University of Kansas (Michael Baskett)

McGill University (Tom Lamarre, Yukiko Furuhata)

University of Florida (Maureen Turim, Scott Nygren, Joe Murphy)

University of Toronto (Eric Cazdyn)

Carleton University (Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano)

University of Southern California (Anne McKnight, Akira Lippit)

University of California, Irvine (Jonathan Hall)

University of Rochester (Joanne Bernardi)

Arizona State University (Sybil Thornton)

Concordia University (Catherine Russell, Marc Steinberg)

Ogata Ken

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:45:14 -0500

I was sad to see the news on the Mainichi site that the actor Ogata Ken died on the 6th at the age of 71. The cause of death has not been released, but he apparently attended a press conference for a new TV series on the 30th and only recently fell ill.

Ogata was one of the most impressive actors from the 1970s on, something that may have come from the fact that he started out in Shinkokugeki (a more realistic form of swordplay theater founded in 1917 by Sawada Shojiro in the 1920s; the same acting troupe that gave birth to Okochi Denjiro, one of my other favorite actors). Ogata made his film debut in 1960, but did not really make an impact until the 1970s with Imamura Shohei films like Vengeance Is Mine and Narayama Bushiko. He was firmly established as one of the top film and TV actors, appearing in controversial films like Paul Schrader's Mishima (as Mishima), big budget spectaculars like Sato Jun'ya's Oroshiyakoku suimudan, and even action flicks like Ishii Takashi's Gonin 2. His physical presence, unique voice, and original character (shown off most when he wore sunglasses) made an impression in anything he appeared in. Both his eldest son, Kenta, and his second son, Naoto, are actors.

He was too young. There were a lot of good films left in him.

The Place of Oshima

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:37:11 -0400

The New York Film Festival is currently doing a quite substantial retro of the films of Oshima Nagisa, organized by James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario (James edited the nice volume on Ichikawa Kon for which I contributed a piece). Richard Pena, the director of the NYFF, invited me to be on a panel for the retro entitled "The Place of Oshima" that took place on October 1. My fellow panelists were Annette Michelson, who edited the valuable translations (via French, oddly) of Oshima's writings Cinema, Censorship, and the State; and David Desser, author of Eros Plus Massacre, a major work that I still make my students buy. It was a good event, with about 60 people in attendance. Annette talked about the place of Oshima in modernism (noting, quite interestingly, connections with Barthes, Sartre, and Bataille) and David did a great introduction to the reception of Oshima abroad, emphasizing in particular the sad fact that Oshima was mostly discovered abroad through In the Realm of the Senses, well past his peak in Japan (which may explain why no film before that work has come out on DVD in the USA). My talk was a bit too ambitious: I tried to take my research on the Ai no korida censorship case (published in the January 2000 issue of Yuriika) and combine it with an analysis of The Man Who Left His Will on Film via landscape theory (fukeiron), to consider the sexual body in Oshima as a physical form of theorizing, one that intimately ties production and reception and distances Oshima from the poststructuralist theory many Western scholars try to impose upon him. It didn't quite work, but the panel came together well during the discussion. Richard treated us to dinner afterwards, but I ended up getting back home at about 1:30 am. It's been a tiring week!

Keiko McDonald

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:01:01 -0400

In other sad news, I learned on KineJapan that Keiko McDonald, a scholar of Japanese cinema and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, died of an accident on the 14th. She was a most versatile and prolific researcher and her absence will present a significant loss for the Japanese cinema studies community. I hope her last works, a special issue of Postscript and a book on Shimizu Hiroshi, will have no problem getting published.

Gomeifuku o oinorishimasu.

Ichikawa Jun

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:02:22 -0400

News reports related the sad fact that the director Ichikawa Jun suddenly died on the 19th of a brain hemorrhage. He was only 59 and was working on his new film, Buy a Suit, an independent work he had been making with non-professional actors.

Ichikawa was one of a new line of film directors who, like Obayashi Nobuhiko before and Nakashima Tetsuya afterwards, started out making television commercials. (Some can be seen on You Tube here and here.) This was the 1980s, when TV CM's were being celebrated by intellectuals like Yoshimoto Ryumei (Banana's father). Ichikawa debuted as a film director in 1987 with Bu Su.

He was a much better director than the critics and the festivals who defined his international reputation thought. While I didn't like all of his films (he could reiterate his style too insistently), he was always a skilled director and consistently pursued at least two important aesthetic issues: the cinematic rendering of the city, and the aesthetics of the long take. He was one of the central directors in the rise of long shot, long takes in Japanese independent cinema from the 1990s (after Somai Shinji, of course). I also think he was the best director to adapt Murakami Haruki, and it would have been nice to see him tackle him again. He thus had a peculiar but fascinating mix of the old and nostalgic and the postmodern.

I remember seeing a press screening of his Tokiwa-so no seishun at a preview room in Kyobashi, a marvelous film about the young manga artists who congregated around Tezuka Osamu in the 1950s. While the film covers Akatsuka Fujio, the Fujiko Fujio pair, etc., its focus is on Terada Hiroo, an artist who got left behind because his manga did not follow Tezuka's more "cinematic" style which breaks up space with the equivalent of editing. His manga was in fact closer to Ichikawa's style, so what you saw here was a loving match of Ichikawa's cinema and Terada's manga, one which nostalgically made you think about the two media. Tezuka's wife was at the screening and asked me afterwards on the street what I thought of it. I said it was great, but I couldn't manage to tell her that this film, in its essence, was enamored of another kind of manga than her husband's. Yet the application of that in cinema was yet again something new.

A sad loss.

Japan Foundation, National Film Center, Government

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:46:18 -0400

The KineJapan list recently finished a very lively discussion on government film policy, focusing especially on the role of the Japan Foundation and the National Film Center in promoting not only Japanese movies, but also research on those movies. There is a general feeling that government film policy is not supporting researchers. While it was a long and involved discussion, I thought I would introduce some of the things I talked about.

The Japan Foundation, as many know, has been quite instrumental in introducing Japanese film abroad, helping lend out prints from their collection and even publicly showing films in some of their offices. But the JF is not always so open about what they have in their collection, and they are not really set up to help individual researchers who want to watch films. But they are quire helpful if you want to show rent films for public screenings.

Yale has done a series of films through the JF practically every semester since I have come here. We have had a good relation with the NY office, who have been quite cooperative. Since they don't consider the films in their collection "theirs," they will not tell you outright what they have, but if you give them a list, they will tell you if they have it or not. Since I have a long relationship with the JF, I know a lot of what they have already, but the NYC people have helped me when I have searched for other things.

The main problem these days is the copyright holders. Some are wonderful. We showed Boryoku no machi last year and the copyright holder was so thrilled he let us show it for free. Some, like Toei, are recently coming under the mistaken impression that since the "contents industry" is big these days that can ask $900 to screen a 35mm print of a film completely unknown abroad in an educational setting with no attendance fees. More reasonable places charge $300 to $500 for 35mm screenings in our case, since most will cut off a bit of the rental fee if we tell them we don't charge admission.

I have suggested to the JF that they should put in a word or two with the copyright holders, since if they keep insisting on such rates, people will stop showing the films and that will put a damper on the growth of an audience for Japanese films or DVDs. But many in the Japanese film industry these days seem to be either ignorant or short-sighted, only looking at revenue in the short term and not thinking of long-term ways of building up their business. It can be quite frustrating dealing with such people who don't care enough about their business or the movies to pursue a long term vision.

Such comments really got people going, as many lamented their dealings with Japanese companies that only seem out to get a quick profit and not take the time or care needed to slowly develop interest in different Japanese films through promoting screenings or research. The question then was why public institutions like the JF, the National Film Center, or the Agency for Cultural Affairs don't step in and direct the industry to treat film culture more wisely. That would be hard for the JF would do, since it is associated with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and is supposed to promote good will for Japan abroad, not necessarily the Japanese film business. The NFC, which I'll talk about later, is primarily directed towards preserving Japanese film and publicly showing it, not promoting research and study.

The impression that some had that the Japanese government has not been promoting film is not correct. As I have discussed on Midnight Eye and elsewhere, the Japanese government as a whole has been actively involved in film promotion in the last few years. The Agency for Cultural Affairs, especially when Terawaki Ken was there (and Saeki-san is still there, by the way; Aoki Tamotsu, the current chokan, is also not unsympathetic to film), was engaged in a number of projects. The Film Center has been the clearing house for several of these, which include promoting subtitling and preservation. The Japan Film Commission Promotion Council is located inside the Film Center. I had written a lot a few years ago on KineJapan about the committees set up to promote film culture.

There are thus some things going on, but my complaint is that film policy is now largely swayed not by cultural but by economic policy, and the hand of METI is apparent. When culture and economics thus clash, it is usually economics that wins out. In this age, that economy is the "contents industry" and, according to a current interpretation of that industry, much is geared towards creating contents and preserving property rights over them. Cultural rights over film are mostly irrelevant in this economy, except maybe when pop culture is used to promote the nation (and that is where Aso Taro often comes in). As I wrote in Midnight Eye, this economy can be linked to the impending death of film criticism in Japan and the lack of interest in film studies. The economy demands consumers - who at most may write one sentence good or bad comments on the internet - not active readers.

Personally, I think this economic policy is short-sighted because, unlike fashion and cell phones, where obsolescence is planned, "contents" are really valuable to the degree they have a long shelf life. Companies don't buy back catalogs unless they expect that people will continue to want to view them. But Japanese companies these days mostly don't realize that sometimes it is in their interest to promote cultural policy and to slowly but steadily spread their goods in order to develop an audience that will pay for not only new contents, but old ones as well. Such long-term planning is important in the contents industry, but they don't get it. And METI and others don't seem to be pointing them in the right direction. Especially the overpromotion of intellectual and digital property rights has the great potential of killing not only film culture, but even the contents industry itself.

I definitely realize the problems with arguing in this way on behalf of a contents industry, but I still think there can be strategic linkages between companies and festivals and academia and audiences that are not all about the latter three paying the former. There can be mutual benefits here that are not reflected in the "new economy." I just wish someone - not just in government, but in power - had some vision and clout in this regard.

We should not paint the Japanese film industry in one color. There are many smaller companies that are cooperative. And even amongst the majors, there are differences. One thing that I had to be reminded of when I did a lot of interviews in the industry last year was that these companies are made up of individuals, some of whom are great film fans who do their best for the movies. The head of the services division at the Toho Studios, for instance, is a classmate of Kurosawa Kiyoshi and thus a Rikkyo/Hasumi film product; another fellow in the Toei marketing division is a deshi of Sakamoto Junji who worked on many of his films. Even the president of Toho is a nice guy (he always writes me back personally by e-mail). It is important to combine an institutional critique with an awareness of difference and even occasional individual "resistance" within these institutions.

The discussion then moved towards the National Film Center, as many complained about the lack of help there for researchers. Its practice of charging researchers to view films, and not making available prints for viewing on flatbeds, is not helpful and unusual for a major national archive.

I do think we should hold back a little on bashing the NFC. For a research guide Markus and I are working on, I went to the NFC this summer to specifically talk to them about their rules for usage. One thing that is clear is that they are very conscious of their bad reputation and want to change it. As one curator said, "This will be a 'Film Center that you can use' not a 'Film Center that you can't use.'" And things have gotten better. It is easier to request screenings. I did for my class this summer and it cost about $100 to show 2 hours worth of pristine archive prints of rare films for my students in a theater. Note that this is a reduced rate for academic institutions. (The NFC is thus one place that does promote research financially by reducing or, sometimes in the case of stills, eliminating fees for academic researchers.) Certainly it is not like the Library of Congress, where you can see films for free by yourself on a Steenbeck, but it is getting better. They do have films to watch on video and viewing booths by the way (although for some bad reason they still charge you the same as a film screening). One thing I like about the new Film Center is the Kodomo eigakan, which is a set of screenings they do during school vacations for kids. Great films, often with benshi and live music, for next to nothing. I take my son and his friends whenever I can. It is precisely these kind of events that are necessary to build up interest and appreciation of not new things like Ponyo, but of the whole history of cinema. There is still room for improvement, particularly the need to change the NFC charter to make it a research institution, not just a film preservation one, but the NFC is trying.

But the fact is that both the government and major public institutions, from academia to the press, remain ignorant about film studies and do little to promote it. That ignorance was reflected in an Asashi editorial that came out just during our debate. It was utterly boring! It could have been written 20 years ago. And it probably was. It says nothing new. And actually it is somewhat off the mark calling for film education, because if there is one thing that the government has been promoting, it is the building up of film production programs at university. Those have greatly increased in the last decade. The problem, which the Asahi is too ignorant to point out, is that this is never tied to film education in general: the education of the general populace - or even of college students - about film history and culture. Again, the same old vision focused only on creating contents, not on how they are read, preserved, used and discussed.

So this vision is not applied to the NFC from above. People should realize that the NFC has been the subject of high-level discussions about its role and future. In fact, there was a government committee set up a few years ago just to investigate what to do about it, focusing in particular on whether to make it independent of MOMAT. You can look at the final report of that committee here:

www.bunka.go.jp/1bungei/pdf/filmcenter_dokuritu.pdf

If you read it, you can see that they are fully aware that the NFC does not compare well with other institutions abroad. But, and I need to stress this time and time again, they have little vision of film research. To the committee members, the NFC exists priarily to preserve films (in part because of the contents industry) and to show them. If you look at the minutes of the meetings, there were some members who called for improvements in the ability of researchers to see films there, but all that got left out of the final report. In the report, research is mentioned only in relation to using the library, or seeing public screenings, and that's it. There is no vision of the larger role of research in film culture or of the NFC's place in that. I think much of that stems from continued ignorance in official culture about film studies and/or prejudice over the place of film in intellectual life. Just look at the members of this committee:

http://www.bunka.go.jp/1bungei/filmcenter_meibo.html

Mostly industry people, with the only academic being Yokokawa Shinken, a Nichidai professor (70 years old) who is not exactly in the forefront of film studies. Much of what was to be discussed was determined when the members was decided, and one can see in that selection where government priorities are placed.

And even these priorities are not a priority, since a significant part of even what this committee recommended has not been acted upon.

It is not very encouraging...

Ozu Yasujiro Retrospective at Yale

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:20:31 -0400

Sorry again for the lack of posts. Classes have finally started at Yale, but I have been mostly consumed finishing up a guide to studying Japanese film with Markus Nornes. We finally turned in the manuscript this weekend. This semester I'm teach the intro to film studies course and Japanese film after 1960 and it looks like I have a good bunch of students in both.

This semester will not be as full of events as with my summer class in Tokyo, but we are doing an Ozu retro this fall. This is nothing groundbreaking, but after a couple semesters programming great films that few people know about (and which thus unfortunately don't bring many people), I thought we should sit back a bit and look a bit more at a classical director. It it will be nice to bring in a larger audience to think about some superb Japanese films.

Here is the announcement:

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the Cinema at the Whitney are pleased to present

OZU Yasujiro Retrospective

Universally considered to be one of the great masters of Japanese (or any) cinema, Ozu Yasujiro had a remarkable career that crossed five decades. This weekly retrospective, co-sponsored by the Cinema at the Whitney, will provide a rare opportunity to see films from all periods of Ozu's career, drawing attention to his playful humor as well as his formal genius and profound understanding of shifting family relations. All films will be screened in new 35mm prints.

All screenings are at the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall Street.

Opening night Friday, September 19th

7:00 PM Early Summer / Bakushu (1951, 112 minutes)

A Straightforward Boy / Tokkan Kozo (1929, 14-minute short, silent)

9:00 PM Make Way for Tomorrow, Director Leo McCarey (1937, 91 minutes)

Thursday, September 25th

8:00 PM Late Autumn / Akibiyori (1960, 125 minutes)

Thursday, October 2nd

8:00 PM The Lady and the Beard / Shukujo to hige (1931, 76 minutes, silent)

9:15 PM I Flunked, But... / Rakudai wa shita keredo. (1930, 64 minutes, silent)

I Graduated But... / Daigaku wa deta keredo (1930, 11 minute fragment, silent)

Thursday, October 9th

8:00 PM Walk Cheerfully / Hogaraku ni ayume (1930, 90 minutes, silent)

9:15 PM The Only Son / Hitori musuko (1936, 87 minutes)

Thursday, October 23rd

8:00 PM There Was a Father / Chichi ariki (1942, 92 minutes)

9:30 PM A Hen in the Wind / Kaze no naka no mendori (1948, 85 minutes)

Thursday, October 30th

8:00 PM Tokyo Story / Tokyo monogatari (1953, 132 minutes)

Thursday, November 6th

8:00 PM Tokyo Twilight / Tokyo boshoku (1957, 140 minutes)

Thursday, November 13th

8:00 PM Good Morning / Ohayo (1959, 94 minutes)

For a complete program, visit: http://research.yale.edu/eastasianstudies/events.php

If you are near New Haven, please drop by!

Kurosawa Kiyoshi

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:44:30 -0400

The second director to come to my summer class was Kurosawa Kiyoshi. Kurosawa-san and I go back a couple of years: we were first introduced by Aoyama Shinji, but I only had a real talk with him when I interviewed him after Bright Future. He kindly came to Yale in March 2006 when we hosted Kinema Club and gave a workshop on film (he mostly discussed other directors) and commented for a panel on Japanese horror. I think this was the first time I've seen him since then. We showed Cure and again went out drinking afterwards (this time to a better place).

As some students noted, on a personal level Kurosawa-san is a marked contrast from Hiroki-san. They are about the same age (Hiroki-san is one year older), but whereas Hiroki-san wears funky t-shirts, hangs out with young people, jokes around, and quickly answers questions, Kurosawa-san wears conservative clothes, tends to be serious (without being stiff and formal), and thinks very carefully before answering. In terms of translating, Kurosawa-san is a lot easier to interpret for because he is quite measured in his speech.

Still, I remember going out drinking with Kurosawa-san after the screening of Loft at Yale. I think he was quite nervous before the screening about how the audience would react, but the good comments he got (one of my students made a great observation about the "anxiety of influence" in that film), coupled with the two-foot tall glass of beer he had, made him visibly relieved. It was nice to see a looser Kurosawa-san that time.

I think he was also quite relaxed this time around too. He confessed he had not talked about Cure in a while, so he could not answer every question the students had, but I think he, like with Hiroki-san, did make them think a lot about how to create cinema that does not ram explanation down the throats of the audience. He was especially interrogated about the scriptwriting process and his relations with producers. He emphasized his belief that the ambiguity in his films stems not only from his own, honest inability to provide clear answers, but also from a central ambiguity in cinema compared to the novel. I then queried him about the novelization of Cure that he wrote, noting, for instance, that the end is "clearer" in the novel than in the film. He laughed, and commented how novels allow you to lie better than cinema does.

It was nice to have these two directors come to class. I can occasionally rope in a visiting director or two when I am at Yale, but teaching in Japan allows for a lot more contact with filmmakers and the industry. The summer class this year was pretty tough (it was too hot to lead students around on field trips!), but quite rewarding.

Hiroki Ryuichi

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 08:10:31 -0400

Sorry for the lack of posts. The summer class was frankly one of the toughest classes I have taught, not because of the students--who were great--but because of the time involved. My last post was written during the last week of class, after which I had grading, a trip to Hokkaido, cleaning up and packing, and the plane back to the States. Now I am back in Connecticut.

But my class was graced with some nice guests in the last few days. The first one was the director Hiroki Ryuichi. I've known Hiroki-san for some years, since when I first met him at the Tokyo Film Festival after a screening of I Am an SM Writer (he kindly said he had read my review of Night Without Angels). I had more opportunities to talk with him when we were both invited to the Dejima Film Festival and later to Nippon Connection. It was he who kindly gave me a birthday cake during a Q and A session after one of his films at Dejima and joked about making a movie called "Tokyo Ramen Baby" about a traveling ramen stand in Europe with me in a side role as a crazy customer. Hiroki-san is a nice guy, though we somewhat live in different worlds.

This was Hiroki-san's first visit to one of my classes and we showed Vibrator and had a great discussion afterwards. It was the first time many of my students had met a director and talked to him about a film he had made and some were quite inquisitive. What I am glad got out was the degree to which Hiroki-san refrains from explanation in his films, preferring long takes to cut-ins and close-ups. He even related a time in Sundance when Robert Redford noted that of his work and Hiroki-san took that as confirmation that his way of making films was OK. I've always thought about Hiroki-san in the same line as Matsuoka Joji as a director who uses what I call the "detached style" more from his guts, or from a both intuitive and professional sense of what cinema is, than from an intellectual stance like Aoyama Shinji or even Kurosawa Kiyoshi. And unlike Kitano, who can also think from the gut, Hiroki-san and Matsuoka-san do this without foregrounding an auteur style, presenting instead their long take, long shots as the accumulated knowledge of a craftsman.

We went out drinking afterwards (I have to apologize to Hiroki-san about the choice of restaurants), and "Hiroki-san-rashiku" he brought a young actress with him.

I saw Hiroki-san's Kimi no tomodachi after his visit to class and I was quite impressed. In this day, when there are still tons of Japanese tear-jerkers out there where one side of a couple dies, this was one film without cheaply obtained tears. Again using long-shot, long takes for much of the film, Hiroki-san makes us work hard to get close to the characters. When something sad happens, we thus cry (and I cried a lot!), not because we have been manipulated to cry, but because we have made that effort to try to learn about these people.

Here's a shot of Hiroki-san's tasteful t-shirt.

Akatsuka Fujio

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:10:29 -0400

This may not be that directly related to film, but one of my favorite manga artists (and one of the favorites of my son), Akatsuka Fujio, died on the 2nd at the age of 72. Akatsuka was one of the famous residents of Tokiwa-so, the rundown apartment where many of the postwar manga greats like Tezuka Osamu, Ishinomori Shotaro, and Fujiko F. Fujio lived. Akatsuka worked in a variety of genres, including shojo manga (his Himitsu no Akko-chan was a big hit as an anime), but his genius lay in gag manga, creating such great works as Osomatsu-kun, Moretsu Ataro, and especially Tensai Bakabon, the masterpiece that deconstructs, if not destroys the very premises of manga. He never quite surpassed such a devastating and brilliant work, but his experimental and playful verve continued, as he made some silly movies in the late 1970s like Shimooichiai yakitori mubi and Akatsuka Fujio no poruno gyagu. He was on good terms with the comedic fringe (he's famous for supporting Tamori when he was starting out), and also had connections with the radical left (the only time I ever met him was at the party for Adachi Masao when he got out of jail). His gags became popular phenomenon, and even Godzilla was once caught doing a "shey" (the body gesture Iyami always did in Osomatsu-kun).

Being a fan also of Sugiura Shigeru (note my article on him and Godzilla in In Godzilla's Footsteps), the great gag manga artist of the 1950s, I was impressed when Akatsuka, on the occasion of Sugiura's death, declared "I never met Sugiura, but he was my teacher." To me Sugiura, Akatsuka, and Sasaki Maki (another experimental manga artist greatly influenced by Sugiura), form a very significant and alternative line in Japanese manga history.

Gomeifuku o inorimasu na no da!

Tsuchimoto Noriaki Memorial Service

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:22:26 -0400

I have been incredibly busy with my Japanese cinema class in Tokyo, so sorry for the lack of updates.

I did want to write about the memorial service for Tsuchimoto Noriaki last Saturday. We arrived early at the Josui Kaikan in Jinbocho because my wife had been asked to help at the reception desk. And then more and more people arrived. In the end, the hall was packed with about 500 people and many had to stand. (See the photo in the lobby below.) Pretty much everyone in the documentary, and many in the fiction film world was there.

It was a nice service. Tsuchimoto's daughter showed photos of his last days, staff members like Otsu Koshiro talked about his work, and his elder sister made everyone laugh by kindly suggesting that there might have been a little exaggeration here and there in his description of their childhood life. Hani Susumu gave the toast at the end. At the event, they were selling copies of Tsuchimoto's last book, Dokyumentari no umi e, which is a thick interview book done with Ishizaka Kenji. Chock full of pictures and information, it is a must for anyone who wants to know about postwar Japanese film.

Tsuchimoto-san did not want a religious service and he preferred if we drank and laughed rather than prayed and cried. But his ashes were there in front of that famous shot of him on the sea. I brought my son and we lined up in front of Tsuchimoto-san's ashes. My son had only met Tsuchimoto-san when he was really small, but he put his hands together too. I thanked him for the wonderful and powerful work he left us.

Kamakura

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:07:18 -0400

I will be taking my class to Kamakura on Thursday, so I ventured down there with my family yesterday to check on a few things. My old colleague at Yokohama National University, Professor Yamada, kindly met us at Kita Kamakura Station and we ventured around in the intense heat.

Being "eiga mania" in some respects, I usually visit the graves of old film people when I travel to such places to thank them for the great movies they gave us. Yesterday was no exception, and we got off at Kita Kamakura precisely to start with Engakuji. Most people know that is where the grave of Ozu Yasujiro is, but there are a lot of others interred there as well. Ozu's grave is on the right halfway up the side of the hill after the stairs to the Okane and before you reach the Somu Honbu. But Kinoshita Keisuke's is about 4 meters away from Ozu's, right where the stairs reach that level. In a separate section, inside the Shoreiin, there are also the graves of the actors Tanaka Kinuyo and Sada Keiji. This temple is usually closed and we had to get special permission to enter. Tanaka's grave, complete with a bronze bust of her, was erected by her cousin, Kobayashi Masaki (director of Kwaidan, Harakiri, etc.), and has his posthumous name inscribed on it even though it seems his main grave is in Shimonoseki (perhaps they divided his ashes?). Sada's grave is just a few feet away from Tanaka's and inscribed with his family name: Nakai (his son, Nakai Kiichi, is very active as an actor).

We ventured to other spots as well, but we made a point of going to Myoryuji near Kamakura Station, which has a monument erected to Maruyama Sadao, the shingeki and film actor whose troupe was unluckily in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. Shindo Kaneto made a film about that tragedy entitled Sakura-tai chiru (1988). A couple of years ago at Yale we showed Kimura Sotoji's great prewar version of Muro Saisei's Ani imoto (1936) which stars Maruyama. Although Maruyama's body was apparently lost in the confusion after the bomb, and thus the monument is not really a grave, I wanted to pay my respects to a great actor.

For lunch, we stopped at Kinema-do, a small eatery/bar run by an old book collector and film fan right off Wakamiya Odori. The food was not the best in the world (though my son liked the Kinema-don), but it was full of great old film books and posters and the music of Ishihara Yujiro. The books are for sale, and he runs a web shop as well.

Denkikan

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:58:18 -0400

On Thursday, I took my class to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which is a nice introduction to Tokyo history in the last 400 years. My main aim, however, was to show them the models of the river-side, temporary theaters in the Edo era, and the model of the Denkikan they have in their modern section (which also features a model of Ryounkaku, or "Twelve Stories," that reaches the ceiling). I had shown them where the Denkikan used to be in Asakusa, but it was nice to show them what it looked like in the mid-1910s. The colorful painted scenes from the movies showing, the excessive decoration, the statue on top--all communicate the cacophony of stimuli that was the thrill of Asakusa, while also rendering it out of this world. The model shows it when it was showing Marcantonio e Cleopatra, a 1913 Italian historical epic directed by Enrico Guazzoni that was a big hit in Japan. Somei Saburo, the great benshi at the Denkikan, made a name for himself narrating this film.

Miike at Yasukuni?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:22:03 -0400

I took my class to Yasukuni Shrine on Tuesday, but while we were in the Yushukan, I noticed that they were showing an animated film directed by Miike Takeshi entitled Heiwa e no ukei (A Vow for Peace). Searching on the net, it seems that while a DVD is available, about the only place it is being sold is Yasukuni. One should be suspicious of anything at Yasukuni (the controversial shrine celebrating Japan's soldiers, including its war criminals) as well as at the Yushukan (their museum celebrating the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers but failing to mention who they killed). One should also beware of their definition of "peace", since in most cases it is merely rhetoric justifying the pursuit of war. But I do wonder what kind of film this is. I found one right-wing blog praising it, but little else. I didn't have time to watch it (even though it is a little under an hour), and I don't like spending money at Yasukuni, so I didn't buy the DVD. It is apparently in two parts, one about the origins of the Yamaga Lantern festival, the other about Matsuo Keiu, who attacked Sydney Harbor in a midget submarine during WWII. I sent a post to KineJapan to see if anyone else knows about it.

Kurosawa Akira Symposium

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 04:13:57 -0400

To commemorate ten years since the death of Kurosawa Akira, Rikkyo University, which has recently developed a film studies program inside their College of Contemporary Psychology, held a symposium on July 12 at their campus in Shiki.

The first half was devoted to a talk with Nogami Teruyo (Kurosawa's long-time scripter and later production manager) and Kurosawa Kazuko (his daughter and now a prominent costume designer for films such as Kitano's Zatoichi), with Maeda Hideki (dean of the College) and Shinozaki Makoto (director of Okaeri and now professor at Rikkyo) serving as questioners. The talk was quite congenial and it was nice to see Nogami-san after several years (she kindly gave us a gift when our son was born). Shinozaki-san also mentioned to me that he had just finished filming a 2-hour TV movie. I look forward to that.

The second half was devoted to papers and discussion. Yomota Inuhiko talked about the problems of Kurosawa's last films while emphasizing the influence, especially in Asia, of The Seven Samurai. Hase Masato, who's translating my Taisho cinema book, tried to contrast the usual discussion of the free and dynamic body we are used to seeing through Mifune's acting in Kurosawa, by considering the restricted body in works like High and Low, especially how the two function in films of strategy where fakery plays a central role. Finally, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto argued that the impossibility of showing the "awakening" of Watanabe or its inheritance in Ikiru can be seen as an allegory for the difficulty of considering the brilliance of Kurosawa or his legacy.

The issue of legacy carried on into the discussion. I had a point to raise about that, but decided not to because there was not enough time and it would have been disruptive (Hase-san, when he heard it after the symposium ended, likened it to overturning the chabudai table at a family gathering). But basically, one can argue that Kurosawa's legacy in the last two years or so in Japan is largely the following:

1) Remakes. Recently we have seen first Sanjuro and then Hidden Fortress remade. Putting aside whether these are good films or not, it is a shame that young people in Japan are not seeing the real Kurosawa, but rather imitations. As all the panelists said at the symposium, a few years ago, you could count on a few Japanese students in class having seen Seven Samurai, but now you can't. Maybe these remakes will spark a few people to seek out the originals, but with very little effort being put into film history education in Japan, there is no concerted effort there.

2) TV commercials, pachinko and other forms of licensing. Those of you in Japan might have noticed some recent TV commercials for a new pachinko game put out by the company Fields called CR Seven Samurai. Some of the commercials, which star Asano Tadanobu, redo scenes from Seven Samurai, sometimes shot for shot with amazing accuracy, to the Stones' "Satisfaction." Is that a satisfactory legacy?

3) Copyright. As I have reported on KineJapan, Kurosawa has been used by Toho to argue that films made before 1954, which should now be public domain according to current copyright law, are still under copyright if the director died after the law came into effect. Courts have already repeatedly declared films made before 1954 to be in the public domain and thus have okayed cut-rate DVD producers like Cosmo. Toho sued Cosmo for putting out cheap DVDs of Kurosawa's pre-1954 films by suing under the old copyright law, which technically still is in effect if the copyright lasts longer than under the new law (instituted in 1971). The old law states that films "with originality" are to be treated differently from those without originality. The latter is only protected for 10 years, but the former enjoys a longer period. The law states only that films "with originality" are treated in one of two ways: either copyright will be for 38 years after the death of the author or for 38 years after it was released in the case of works with corporate copyright. It does not make clear which is to be applied in which cases (I do not know court precedent in this regard). Toho, as well as all the other film companies, have long argued that the copyright resides in the corporation, and that in fact is how the new copyright law changed things: it eliminated the ability of individual authors in a studio production to claim copyright and made copyright reside in the company, thus "clearing up" the ambiguities of the old statutes at the expense of film directors et al. Toho also historically has been the studio that, forwarding the producer system, downgraded the role of the director. Toho however realized that its films before 1954 are in the public domain, and now argues that Kurosawa is now really the author of these films (and that Toho deserves to be paid for use of them). Toho won the first round in courts (which may open up a Pandora's box if the families of directors like Kinoshita, Imai, Taniguchi, etc. start insisting they have copyright and should be paid), but Cosmo is appealing. The effect of all this is not only an assault on public domain (I remember reading reporters in Kinema Junpo saying there is no reason public domain should exist), but also a further strengthening of the stranglehold of copyright. That was symbolized by the fact the symposium organizers declared at the start that the clips--and these were only clips--used at the symposium were cleared with Toho, Shochiku, etc. Such a procedure, if it was demanded by the companies, not only violates the academic right to quotation, which Japanese courts have confirmed in recent cases with other media like manga, but it establishes a dangerous precedent. Will scholars or teachers no longer be able to even show one minute from a Japanese film in class or in an academic talk unless they pay the company or get clearance (which might involve getting clearance on the content of the talk)?

I again believe that excessive enforcement of copyright is one of the biggest threats to current Japanese film culture. Is that the legacy we want Kurosawa Akira, the Japanese film director who really belongs to the entire world, to have?

Asakusa

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:44:11 -0400

My summer class started this week and it has kept me busy. We went to Kabuki on Tuesday and saw versions of Izumi Kyoka's Demon Pond and the Saint of Mt. Koya, both supervised by Bando Tamasaburo (recalling of course Tamasaburo's appearance in Shinoda Masahiro's Yashagaike, though Tamasaburo only appeared in Koya hijiri this time). We had a special screening at the National Film Center on Wednesday, seeing A Page of Madness, Ito Daisuke's An Unforgettable Grudge (1926), and an M. Pathe film from 1908 The Tenth Act of Taikoki. It was interesting seeing some of the same kinds of techniques as A Page of Madness in Ito's film of the same year, helping confirm my sense that Kinugasa's work was less qualitatively than quantitatively different from its contemporaries.

Today we went to Asakusa, which was quite busy with the Hozukiichi. But our aim was less "traditional" Asakusa, than the history of modern entertainment that was near its core. We of course went to Rokku, which used to be the movie theater capital of Japan, but with the Asakusa Toei and the Asakusa Toho gone, there are not many theaters left: just the Chuei Gekijo (foreign rep theater), Meigaza (old yakuza films)--see the intro to these two at Cinema Street--Asakusa Shingekijo (old Japanese films, mostly yakuza), and the Asakusa Seikaikan (old pink films). The Asakusa Toho building still has a sign up front saying "Bright and fun Toho movies!" But there are no such films there, only pachinko, as Toho has mostly abandoned its large urban halls for multiplexes (the Toho Koraku I saw in Kyoto is probably not long for this world). Much of Suwa-san's Hanasareru Gang was shot in Asakusa around 1984 in spots like Hanayashiki and the intersection behind where the Denkikan and the Tokyo Club used to be. The old movie district ironically--and perhaps appropriately--gave the film a Parisian and thus Godardian air.

Asakusa is definitely cleaner and livelier than I recall from the mid-1990s, but especially around Sensoji Temple this has been accomplished by trying to emphasize a "traditional" facade. Yes, there are signs marking Asakusa's core place in Japanese entertainment history in the Rokku district, but facilities like ROX have mostly covered over that history. Japanese authorities have made no effort to preserve Japan's old movie theaters, which is another sign how many try to define Japanese history through "traditional" Japan separated from modern existence (ironically thus often confining that traditional life to museums), and forget its modern history (no wonder many young Japanese don't know about early or mid-20th century history). As far as I know, the only theater designated a bunkazai (cultural property), and this only a local one, is Wakimachi Gekijo in Mima City in Tokushima.

But history still lingers on, sometimes in ironic ways. In Asakusa, old theater names like the Taishokan still live on (that is now a taishu engekijo, on the same spot where the cinema used to be). There is even a office building called the Denkikan, on the spot where the Chiyodakan and the Denkikan used to be. The Denkikan was the first dedicated movie theater in Japan, from 1903, and became a name many theaters across the country adopted. Now you can spot it on this building. I wonder how many passersby know what it means.

President Suwa

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:28:26 -0400

I was having lunch today with Kanai Katsu, and mentioned that I was going to the National Film Center to see Hanasareru Gang, a film that Suwa Nobuhiro, the director of such films as Duo, M/Other, and H-Story, had made in 1984 when he was still a student. The NFC is now doing a retrospective of the Pia Film Festival and is showing many of the award-winning 8mm films of directors who are now prominent in the film scene, such as Ishii Sogo, Nagasaki Shun'ichi, Ogata Akira, Inudo Isshin, Shiota Akihiko, etc. Well, when I mentioned that, Kanai-san said that he had taught Suwa-san when he was a student at Tokyo Zokei University, and that Suwa-san had recently become president of that university.

"What?" I said, not believing my ears. A filmmaker just a bit older than me who is now president of one of the major arts universities in Japan? I remember having Suwa-san come to my class when I taught at Yokohama National University and comment on how hard it was to make a career out of making difficult films.

But when I checked the Zokei site, there he was. Even though he only started teaching there in 2002, he became president of the university on April 1, 2008. Speed shusshin!

Suwa-gakucho, omedeto gozaimasu.

By the way, Hanasareru Gang was quite fun: a lot of Godard, but also a lot of elements you later see in Duo.

Shochiku Otani Library

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:54:37 -0400

For a project I am working on, I visited the Shochiku Otani Library for the first time since it moved into the new building. It used to be located in the old Shochiku headquarters, which were even further down Harumi-dori from the Kabuki-za and the Shine Patosu. Shochiku, suffering through hard times at the end of the nineties, sold the land to the ad company ADK, which redeveloped it and now Shochiku rents some space in the new building for the Otani Library. The Shochiku headquarters are now across the street above the Togeki Theater. You can see the front of the ADK Shochiku Square building with a sign for the Library in the photo below.

The Library is focused primarily on theater and film (remember, Shochiku, the studio that gave us Ozu, Kinoshita, and Tora-san, is also a theatrical company, owning the Kabuki-za and a number of other kabuki and legit theaters). The main reason to go there is to view the scripts for theatrical and film productions, especially those of Shochiku. In some cases, they have not only several generations of the script of a single film, but also the press book, theater programs, stills and the poster. This is the place to come if you are studying a Shochiku film (though they have materials on other studio films as well).

What it does not have much of, unfortunately, is internal studio documents, which are essential for understanding not only how the company works, but the corporate happenings behind the production of a specific film. Most Japanese studios treat these either as secret documents or they throw them away.

A couple of years ago, Tasogawa Hiroshi wrote a book on the making of Tora Tora Tora entitled Kurosawa Akira vs. Hariuddo, which won several awards in Japan. Everyone praised it, but forgot to mention the irony that it only could be written because US studios donated all these internal documents to archives. Little of such important research can be done in Japan.

The other problem with the Otani Library--although this is a problem shared by most Japanese archives--is that they have become overly protective of copyright, usually under pressure from the major studios. Don't expect to photocopy a full script here. Don't expect to use any of the stills here (you have to get permission from the studio, which in most cases will not make a distinction between a commercial book and a research article--it will still ask you to pay a couple hundred dollars). I've written this before in several places, but the recent over-protection of copyright--and the lack of insight to promote fair use or scholarly research--is strangling film studies, if not also film culture, in Japan.

Tsuchimoto Noriaki

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:38:20 -0400

John Junkerman reported on KineJapan that the great documentary filmmaker, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, has passed away. A search of the news serviced confirms the bad news. He died today (June 24) of lung cancer. He was 79.

Matsumoto Toshio had mentioned to me at the JASIAS meeting that Tsuchimoto-san was not doing well. I was very sad to see this was true.

Along with Ogawa Shinsuke (the subject of Markus Nornes's great Forest of Pressure), Tsuchimoto was the most important postwar Japanese documentarist, famous for his films covering the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata like Minamata: The Victims and their World (1971). He produced many other great works such as PR films like Document: On the Road (1964) or An Engineer's Assistant (1963) and the radical documentary Pre-Partisan (1969). His filmmaking was quite partisan, as he would take the side of the victims in the Minamata incident, quite powerfully, for instance, filming them as they press their case at the Chisso stock holder's meeting at the end of the first documentary. But he also kept his camera back, letting the subjects tell their story as Tsuchimoto, sometimes on screen, sat beside them listening. He even showed them edited versions to ask for their impressions and suggestions.

I had the privilege of meeting Tsuchimoto-san many times, the most memorable being when Yasui Yoshio (of Planet) and I traveled to Minamata to interview Tsuchimoto-san for Documentary Box. Tsuchimoto-san not only showed us around Minamata, including taking us to the showroom of Chisso (I was surprised they didn't block him at the gate!) and sitting down with us to talk on tape for four hours. Yasui and I spent a long time editing that 4 hour discussion into a reasonable length, but when we sent the text to Tsuchimoto-san, it came back half-rewritten. I would joke in later years that this interview with a documentary filmmaker was not much of a document, but his rewrite was a labor of love. He wanted to include more about Segawa Jun'ichi, his cameraman who was on his death bed at the time. In particular, he wanted to include Segawa's discussion of the famous Lupe debate between the documentarist Kamei Fumio and Miki Shigeru (cameraman for directors like Mizoguchi, Kamei and others), which sprung from a time when Miki refused to film a child who had just escaped a burned out Chinese village in WWII. To Segawa, as with Tsuchimoto, documentary -- if not cinema -- was a profoundly moral endeavor. The rewritten interview was Tsuchimoto's last tribute to Segawa, one of his teachers. I heard that he put a copy of the magazine in Segawa's casket.

You can see a trailer for Fujiwara Toshifumi's TV documentary on Tsuchimoto, which includes scenes from several of his films, here. The trailer for Fujiwara's theatrical documentary on Tsuchimoto, Eiga wa ikimono no kiroku de aru, contains several scenes from Victims and their World, such as when a victim's mother confronts the president of Chisso.

I should note that you can purchase a two-hour, English-subtitled VHS version of Minamata: The Victims and their World from Siglo.

Women's Action!

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:40:40 -0400

Meiji Gakuin University, which has one of the better film studies programs in Japan, will be holding its annual film symposium this Saturday (June 21) at the Shirogane Campus in Tokyo. This year's topic will be "Women's Action in Japanese Cinema," with papers on such topics as Misora Hibari (who often dressed as a man in her films), Oryu (Fuji Junko's character from the Hibotan Bakuto yakuza series), Yasuda Michiyo (now Okusu Michiyo), Shihomi Etsuko, pinky violence, etc. It starts at 10 am in Room 2301. Here is the announcement in Japanese.

The Meigaku symposium has been a feature in the Tokyo film studies scene for over a decade, and several of the symposia have resulted in books. The first book, for instance, was on Mizoguchi (I have a piece in that), and others have been on Ri Koran, Yoshida Kiju, Yamaguchi Momoe, etc. I'm still hoping they put out a book from the Nikkatsu Action symposium: it was a lot of fun doing a talk on stage with Shishido Jo!

Kitano at Moscow

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:03:02 -0400

The wideshows this morning were showing Kitano Takeshi at the Moscow Film Festival, where he is receiving a lifetime achievement award. He was joking that usually "jiji" ("grandpas") win such awards at the end of their careers. He certainly deserves it, but it reminded me of the problem I faced when writing my book on him: ideally, this is something to write when his career is over, but since I completed my manuscript, he has released one film and is about to release another. The book's not selling enough--and his most recent films have not been successful enough--that I think I'd be asked to write a second edition. Probably my career with him is over, but I hope his continues.

The Moscow Film Festival, by the way, seems to have changed. It used to be the place where the old left filmmakers in Japan used to show their independent works and win awards: Shindo Kaneto won a ton of awards there, and other social realists like Yamamoto Satsuo, Kumai Kei, and Oguri Kohei were often featured. Now everyone looked so glitzy on TV.

Toho Studio

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 05:16:21 -0400

I will be taking my students in the Yale Summer Session class to the Toho Studios, so I went there today to discuss the visit with the studio officials. They were quite open, friendly, and cooperative, so I really look forward to the tour. I got a mini-version today, seeing both the oldest stages (the first stages from 1932 when the studio was started as PCL--you can see an old aerial photo here, at the bottom of the page) and the newest ones. As with the Yachiyo-kan, it was nice to see old film buildings still surviving--they really smelled of history!--but the story is that the old stages--now Stages 1 and 2--are probably not long for this world.

I arrived early and walked around the studio a bit. It is located in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward, about a 10 minute walk from Seijo Gakuenmae Station. Next to the studio proper is the Toho Nichiyo Daiku Center (literally: the Toho Sunday Carpenter's Center), which is basically a big hardware store. It reminds you how the studios branched off into different businesses when the movie biz was not going well (apparently there was a bowling alley located there before--another business many film companies tried). The Sengawa River runs through the studio, lined with cherry trees which are quite a sight in the spring. They also have placards on the railings, like the one below. The Sengawa was the river that ran by the village in The Seven Samurai.

Underground Theater

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:07:43 -0400

Since I will be taking the students in my Summer Session course to see Kabuki, I traveled to the Ginza yesterday to buy tickets. I decided to take a shot of one of the more peculiar movie theaters in Tokyo--at least location-wise--the Ginza Shine Patosu (Cine Pathos). It is just down the street from the Kabuki-za, but it is literally under that street. It used to be a rep house, but is now a three-screen theater that shows an odd mix of the commercial and the artistic. Sokurov's The Sun opened here (I have a piece on that film in the official book), and this is where I saw Matsumoto Hitoshi's Dai Nihonjin. The first film may fit this underground space, given how much of it takes place in an air raid bunker, but the second is rather insistent upon rising above the ground, even if in somewhat parodic a manner.

Below is the photo I took. To the left is Harumi-dori (the Kabuki-za is a couple hundred meters further on). To the right is the entrance to a tunnel that goes under the road and comes out the other side. In that tunnel is the theater plus a couple of eating establishments. You can check out another introduction to this theater on the Cinema Street site.

Hello

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:47:07 -0400

I arrived in Japan last week for the summer. As usual, I will be doing research on my various current topics (contemporary Japanese film, Japanese film theory, etc.), but I will also be teaching a course on Japanese cinema for the Summer Session at Yale. The class will be held at the University of Tokyo.

Upon arriving, I pretty much immediately headed off to Kyoto for the annual conference of the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences (Nihon Eizo Gakkai), the main academic society doing film studies in Japan. This year's event was hosted by Kyoto Seika University. It was like every other JASIAS meeting: a number of misses, but some good papers by young scholars.

Since Kyoto was the "Hollywood of the East," hosting many of the film studios that made the great jidaigeki movies, I always check out something film related whenever I visit. Because my hotel was on Kawaramachi, I went out back to Shinkyogoku, which was the old movie theater district, to search out ancient theaters. I noticed that the Yachiyo-kan, an Art Deco theater from the 1920s, has been renovated into a used-clothing store. Given how insistent much of Japan is on destroying its cinematic architectural history, it was at least nice to see the building is not completely gone. Here's a site in Japanese that introduces it during its last years as a pink film theater.