Tangemania - News and Opinion

Television, Japan, and Globalization

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:04:15 +0900

This is another publication that took a while to come out, but it has been worth the wait: a truly high-level anthology on Japanese television, a still woefully understudied topic in the English literature.

TELEVISION, JAPAN, AND GLOBALIZATION

Edited by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Eva Tsai, and JungBong Choi

Published by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2010.

ISBN 978-1-929280-58-2 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-929280-59-9 (paper)

List Price: $70.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper)

“This book opens a new field of inquiry with untold riches. Long the competitor of cinema--although now a major investor--Japanese television has historically been the bane of Japanese film scholars. No more. TELEVISION, JAPAN, AND GLOBALIZATION collects a powerful set of essays on identity politics, industrial transformations, stardom, media convergence, and diaspora. We have been waiting for a book like this. Now that it is here, the future of Japanese moving image studies has clearly come into view.”

--Abe Mark Nornes, The University of Michigan (Cinema Babel)

TELEVISION, JAPAN, AND GLOBALIZATION is a collection of essays that describe vivid and compelling examples of Japanese media and analyze them with sophisticated theoretical methods. The book makes a stunning contribution to the literature of television studies, which has increasingly recognized its problematic focus on U.S. and Western European media, and a compelling intervention in discussions of globalization, through its careful attention to contradictory and complex phenomena on Japanese TV. Case studies include talent and stars, romance, anime, telops, game/talk shows, and live action nostalgia shows. The book also looks at Japanese television from a political and economic perspective, with attention to Sky TV, production trends, and Fuji TV as an architectural presence in Tokyo. The combination of textual analysis, brilliant argument, and historical and economic context makes this book ideal for media studies audiences. Its most important contribution may be the way these essays move the study of Japanese popular culture beyond the tired truisms about postmodernism and open up new lines of thinking about television and popular culture within and between nations.

Table of contents:

Why Japanese television now? / Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (Kurosawa)
Banishment of Murdoch's Sky in Japan: a tale of David and Goliath? / JungBong Choi (Digitalization of Television in Japan)
"Ordinary foreigners" wanted: multinationalization of multicultural questions in a Japanese TV talk show / Koichi Iwabuchi (Recentering Globalization)
The uses of routine: NHK's amateur singing contest in historical perspective / Shuhei Hosokawa (Karaoke Around the World)
Scaling the TV station: Fuji Television, digital development, and fictions of a global Tokyo / Stephanie DeBoer
The dramatic consequences of playing a lover: stars and televisual culture in Japan / Eva Tsai
Kind participation: postmodern consumption and capital with Japan's telop tv / Aaron Gerow
Revolutionary girls: from Oscar to Utena / Noriko Aso
Dream labor in dream factory: Japanese commercial television in the era of market fragmentation / Gabriella Lukacs
Can't live without happiness: reflexivity and Japanese TV drama / Kelly Hu
Becoming prodigal Japanese: portraits of Japanese Americans on Japanese television / Christine R. Yano (Tears of Longing)
Global and local materialities of anime / Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Nippon Modern)
Becoming Kikaida: Japanese television and generational identity in Hawaiʻi / Hirofumi Katsuno.

My contribution analyses the phenomenon of all those subtitles (more properly called "telop") on Japanese television, especially variety programming, where it seems anything someone says and does is emphasized and interpreted through colorful telop on screen. Critically using Ota Shoichi's work on owarai (especially the boke and tsukkomi in manzai) and Azuma Hiroki's work on database consumption, I argue about how Japanese TV not only reads itself, but encourages viewers to contribute their labor as readers to enhance the value of the televisual commodity.

TELEVISION, JAPAN, AND GLOBALIZATION is published by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, which also put out my Page of Madness and Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies. Their books are a little bit hard to order. You can get them through Amazon (right now, only the hardcover edition is available there) or you can order them directly from CJS: ii.cjspubs@umich.edu

The Borrower Arrietty / Karigurashi no Arietti

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:22:06 +0900

Sometimes smaller is better.

Studio Ghibli, the anime production house of Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao, has often gone for the big message, telling stories of worlds dying out, environments at stake, and elemental forces at play. There are attempts to do the same in The Borrower Arrietty (Karigurashi no Arietti 借りぐらしのアリエッティ), but in this case, they thankfully lose out to less momentous, smaller stories closer at hand.

Based on the tales by Mary Norton, the movie is literally about small things: diminutive people who live underneath the houses of humans, surreptitiously borrowing and fashioning things in order to survive. The 14-year-old Arrietty lives with her father, Pod, and mother, Homily, under the floorboards of an old, Western-style house located in a seemingly forgotten, verdant oasis amidst the Tokyo metropolis. She is coming of age and setting out on her first “hunt” for things in the human residence when her existence is acknowledged by Sho, the sickly 12-year-old grand nephew of the house’s elderly matron who is visiting in order to recuperate. This poses a major threat for the little people, who follow a rule that states that if they are discovered by the humans, they must move. That in fact happened to other little ones in the vicinity in the past, which means that Arrietty’s family now lives all alone in the house. Arrietty resists that imperative and increasingly gets closer to Sho, even as the great aunt’s maid (wonderfully voiced by Kiki Kirin) starts working earnestly to root out the little people.

Miyazaki spearheaded the production of this film, but he concretely only contributed the screenplay, leaving the direction up to Yonebayashi Hiromasa, a young animator known for his fine detail, who is making his directorial debut. It has been the producer, Suzuki Toshio, who has served as the main spokesperson for the film. In the press materials, he outlined two main themes behind the movie: the problem of private property in an era of limited resources, and the question of whether not only the little people but also our species can survive. The argument is that for us to survive, we have to rediscover the notion of borrowing (and eventually, of giving back) what the world makes available, and of working on—not just consuming—what is there through our own labor. Such themes, of course, resonate with the communal, environmentally conscious aspects of Miyazaki’s other works, and even recall his socialist youth.

Yet these themes don’t really work in The Borrower Arrietty. As with the big messages in some other Ghibli films, they can be hampered by their own inadequacies and contradictions. Just as Miyazaki’s nature-focused environmentalism is never fully squared with the industrial nature—now augmented by digital technology—of anime production, nor the shared communalism with the dictatorial nature of Ghibli’s production style (which Oshii Mamoru, among others, has criticized), so here one wonders whether Ghibli has suddenly decided to relinquish its property rights over its films and accept others “borrowing” its movies through file sharing.

Anime fandom already exhibits elements of “borrowing” (i.e., fan subs), but this film’s vision of such appropriation is definitely pre-internet. Arrietty’s family enjoy a petit-bourgeois, if not distinctly European life, one of an ambiguous temporality like the world in Kiki's Delivery Service, but clearly one in the already industrial past. The press materials said that Miyazaki asked the animators to focus on depicting labor, but actually little significant labor comes to the screen. The elaborate contraptions constructed beneath the floorboards or inside the walls had all to be products of group labor—as well as, of course, of the industrial capitalism that produced the borrowed things—and depend on Sho’s great aunt being rich enough (she drives a Mercedes) to resist urban transformation (as well as the mundane Japanese life). Now there are no longer the number of little people left to perform such group labor and to sustain such a life. While the film’s charm depends on showing this bourgeois life, logically the family is only left the choice of either returning to the primitive, pre-industrial life of Spiller, the wild “little person” they run into when investigating possible places to move to, or of eking out a more complicated life in the postmodern, postindustrial geography. The film never explicitly explores the more realistic latter option (nor explains, despite Suzuki's statement, exactly why this life is also under threat).

If such big stories (okina mongatari) fall flat, I think the small stories (chiisana monogatari, to borrow Otsuka Eiji’s terminology) of the film, particularly as they are shaped by its play on words, are more compelling. The Japanese word in the title, karigurashi, refers first to living through borrowing (kari 借り=borrow; kurashi=living). But the phonemes “kari” can also refer to hunting (狩り), which is played out in the film through Pod’s hunts for things to borrow, and the figure of Spiller as the primitive huntsman. Borrowing then becomes a more active, if not aggressive endeavor, one that eventually becomes embodied in an Arrietty who refuses just to move away once discovered by Shō, and seeks out a more positive, negotiated existence. Perhaps this makes her more like the Miyazaki shojo heroine, always on the cusp of adulthood, learning to take command. But the “kari” in “karigurashi” can also refer to “temporary” (仮), as if not only their residence, but also the states of being of the little people are provisional. In fact, I think the real emotional center of the film, the beautifully evoked small story of the love between Arrietty and Sho, is that much more powerful because it is transitory from the start. In a worse film, this could really fall into sentimental romanticism, but The Borrower Arrietty manages not to, in part, I think, due to Yonebayashi’s attention to fine, temporary detail—to the impermanent, physical or visual moment.

It is also on this level that the film avoids descending into the nostalgia that repeatedly threatens to flood it (especially when it compares the good old family of Arrietty to the contemporary one of Sho, a comparison too many Japanese films wallow in). This helps The Borrower Arrietty manage to be more contemporary than the “big stories” it tries to flaunt. I could say that it is the life of temporary hunting, of transient borrowing of various things (including, I could add, other Miyazaki movies), that makes Arrietty into the modern bricoleur. But that, in the end, is just probably just another provisional borrowing.

Sometimes it’s better just to keep the analysis small as well.

Film, Benjamin, and Art

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:05:23 +0900

Sorry for the string of publication announcements, but I just had to note two more interesting books that have just come out.

Nakamura Hideyuki, Gareki no tenshitachi: Benyamin kara eiga no mihatenu yume e 『瓦礫の天使たち—ベンヤミンから“映画”の見果てぬ夢へ』(Serika Shobo, 2010)

Nakamura-san is really one of the smartest people writing on film in Japan today and this book, a collection of his previous essays, uses Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault to reconsider the relationship between film and urban space, focusing in particular on Chaplin, Keaton, and King Vidor.

Matsumoto Toshio, ed., Bijutsu x eizo 『美術×映像』 (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2010)

Matsumoto-sensei is, of course, well known to many as the director of Funeral Parade of Roses and of many great experimental films and documentaries, but he is also a major theorist of art and cinema. This is his most recent book, compiling conversations between Matsumoto and some of the major new Japanese media artists such as Kano Shiho, Ishida Takashi, and Maeda Shinjiro. There's also a talk with Japan's most prominent writer on experimental cinema, Nishijima Norio.

Oshima and the Postwar Image

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:34:37 +0900

I've been meaning to mention this for some time, but two books recently came out on postwar Japanese film and media that are worth taking a look at.

Imeji toshite no sengo 『イメージとしての戦後』, eds. Tsuboi Hideto and Fujiki Hideaki (Seikyusha, 2010).

This features articles on a variety of media, but of particular interest are those on Tezuka Osamu (by Tom Lamarre), Ozu Yasujiro (by Dogase Masato), Oshii Mamoru (by Mizukawa Hirofumi), robot manga (by Baba Nobuhiko), and Mizoguchi Kenji's Akasen chitai (by Nakamura Hideyuki).

Yomota Inuhiko, Oshima Nagisa to Nihon 『大島渚と日本』 (Chikuma Shobo, 2010).

This, as the obi announces, questions whether translating the Japanese "to" as "and" is really appropriate for considering Oshima's relation to Japan, and then asks whether "versus" is not a better option. Yomota is arguably the best scholar on Oshima in Japan today.

Two New Japanese Journals

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:27:04 +0900

A number of research chores and a bad cold have kept me out of the blogging loop. The gap, however, did remind me that I have been meaning to mention two new journals that have appeared in Japanese that promise to pursue at least some issues related to film and other moving image media. Both have also recently published reviews of some of my publications (which means they can't be all that bad!).

JunCture 超域的日本文化研究 had its first issue published in January. It is the official journal of the Research Center for Modern and Contemporary Japanese Culture at Nagoya University and should be published once a year (their website has a call for submissions for the next issue). The first one featured the special topic "Deconstructing Japanese Culture" and articles by such well-known culture scholars as Naoki Sakai and Mori Yoshitaka. Among the many articles on various topics, including literature, dance, and ethnography, there are several film-related pieces, including Fujiki Hideaki's examination of the ill-fated National Center for Media Arts (the so-called "Anime no Dendo"), Mizobuchi Kumiko's piece on the use of film in Japanese language education in the 1950s, and Hata Ayumi's analysis of Ogawa Shinsuke's Forest of Oppression. Dogase Masato also contributed a nice review of our Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies. The website tells you how you can get a copy.

ecce エチェ had its second issue published in March. It is being put out by Shinwasha, the publisher that has been releasing the great "Nihon eigashi sosho" series (I have an article in an upcoming volume edited by Fujiki-san). The periodical is being edited by Iwamoto Kenji, Kitano Keisuke, and Akira Lippitt. This issue focuses on the camera eye, with articles on Vertov, Bazin, and Apitchapong Weerasethkul, as well as a continuation of an interview with Sasaki Shiro of ATG. There's also a good review of my A Page of Madness by Hiyama Hiroshi.

Especially with more mass market sites for serious film criticism and discussion largely disappearing, it is nice to see these more academic works trying to take up the slack. I do hope, however, that they do get a larger audience as well.

The Akira Kurosawa Memorial Museum Memorial

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:12:03 +0900

Some may recall that an Akira Kurosawa Memorial Museum was being planned for the city of Imari in Saga Prefecture. Kurosawa himself had picked the location after visiting it during the production of Ran.

Well, the last straw has fallen and the Museum plan has gone kaput. The news services report that the city has demanded return of the money it paid to the Akira Kurosawa Foundation--the foundation in charge of creating the museum which is run by Kurosawa Hisao, Akira's son--for the initial rights to host the museum and use Kurosawa's memorabilia.

This is the result of many months of problems with the Foundation, which has been accused of serious mishandling of money. The Foundation had been collecting donations to build the Museum, which was estimated to cost about 1.4 billion yen. It submitted some reports saying it had collected about 380 million yen, but when forced to submit official accounting it then became apparent it only had about 1.4 million yen in cash on hand: whatever money had been donated had been diverted into running a prefab "satellite studio" in Imari or to other purposes, but that had not been properly reported to the city or the prefecture. Other problems soon came to light: the Foundation had, contrary to law, not held a meeting of its board of directors for 5 years, and thus had not created proper yearly accounting statements; the Foundation publicized that Spielberg, Lukas and Scorsese were official members of the board when they only agreed to be honorary members; etc. There are some related articles in Japanese here and here and here.

In May, the Foundation announced that it was impossible to build the Museum as planned and suggested using the satellite studio as an alternative. The city, having by this time lost all trust in the Foundation, essentially rejected the suggestion and, by asking for the money back, is now basically washing its hands of the whole affair.

Some may remember back in May 2006 that a plan to start a Kurosawa Film School in Japan was abruptly scrapped when some less-than-kosher money issues surfaced. One wonders if this is not endemic to Kurosawa-related projects.

This year, by the way, is the centennial of Kurosawa's birth. This is not the best way to celebrate it.

Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences (JASIAS) 2010

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:57:18 +0900

A few weeks ago I wrote about academic film societies in Japan, and in particular the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences (Nihon Eizo Gakkai 日本映像学会). The JASIAS had its annual conference last weekend at the Arts Faculty of Nihon University in Tokyo, so I thought I'd report on it.

JASIAS conferences can be hit and miss. They are usually held the first weekend in June and schedule is often to have a symposium on Saturday and paper panels on Sunday. The society usually switches back and forth between holding the conference in Tokyo and holding it elsewhere (next year it will be in Sapporo), and the Tokyo sessions are much better attended with many more papers. So this time they had papers even on Saturday. The symposia, planned around a particular topic, are often a mish-mash of honored guests, which sometimes results in a lack of focused discussion. This year's topic was "The Digital and the Analog," but again the guests were too diverse to get a debate going. The famed photographer Hosoe Eiko was there, but his talk about digital as just one new tool in his toolbox did not quite mesh with talks about digital broadcasting. Okajima Hisashi, head of the Film Center and now president of FIAF, gave a needed talk about how bad digital is as a preservation medium, but everyone was too deferential to argue over the another panelist's assertion about improvements in digital archiving.

So this year, as with many years, I focused on the papers. The number of papers delivered has increased over the two decades I've been a member, and those members who make films also present them in a similar format as the papers (25 minutes with 5 minutes discussion). (In the old days, the films/videos were just stuck in another room and repeatedly played to few viewers.) There are not many full professors who give papers anymore: it is largely grad students and younger faculty who need to build up their CV or gyoseki. Not a few are ill-prepared or poorly thought out (one has to apply to give a paper, but not many are rejected), but this year had more gems than lumps of coal (since there were many simultaneous panels, with a total of 64 papers/films, I only caught a small fraction of them).

Of the ones I saw, the ones that particular interested me (this is subjective list) were the following (in no particular order):

Sato Yo gave a historically ground-breaking talk on the incident in the 1950s when the film theorist Imamura Taihei was expelled from the Japanese Communist Party without his knowledge. The topic is quite delicate--as is anything having to do with the JCP--but it is an important first step to thinking about conflicts within the old Left over cinema, ones that often get ignored in celebrations of the New Wave.

Nishimura Tomohiro gave an interesting talk about the concept of "animation" in Japan. First, while he noted the appearance of the term "animation" from before the 1950s--and also mentioned its use with Norman McLaren--he also argued that it was primarily through the popularity of the "Animeshon sannin no kai" in the 1960s that the term became public knowledge and came to denote a genre. His more provocative argument was that animation as a generic concept did not exist in the prewar, in the sense that the genre of manga eiga was not defined by the process of frame-by-frame animation, but by the resulting images, which made it possible for public discourse, for instance, to include live action ningyo eiga (puppet films) or kage'e eiga (silhouette films) in the same category as animated films. He argues the concept of defining the genre by the process, not by the result, is a phenomenon that occurs from the late 50s with the rise of Toei Doga and animators trying to differentiate themselves from that.

Kamiya Makiko talked about the possible references to contemporary labor struggles (such as the Matsukawa Incident) in Makino Masahiro's "Jirocho sangokushi" series (particularly the ninth episode), a series that is usually just considered a bunch of entertainment films.

Morimoto Jun'ichiro speculated about the processes of familiarizing audiences with "the voice" (particular the actor's voice) in the period up to the sound era, focusing on radio, live performances, and debates in the press.
Itakura Fumiaki and Matsuo Yoshihiro gave an interesting talk about restoring tinted and/or toned prints from the silent era. (Some try to print them on color stock, but the best way is basically just to tint and tone them yourself.)

Watanabe Daisuke talked about the film education movement in the early Showa era, focusing in particular on how discourse constructed "school" as a new and different place to view films. (Good old Gonda Yasunosuke, who appears in my new book, showed up in this talk a lot.)

Ushida Ayami showed off a database of film criticism (which I might add is poorly indexed in the Zasshi Kiji Sakuin) published in the 1950s and 1960s. I hope she makes it public.

Okamura Tadachika did a close analysis of Naruse Mikio's postwar films and tried to argue that the peculiar sense that Naruse is both emotional and coolly restrained derives from an editing style that often breaks off the exchange of glances.

These were just some of the many papers (I missed a couple I really wanted to hear). Some of these will probably be published in journals like Eizogaku, the journal of the JASIAS.

Finally, it was nice to see the newly remodeled Arts Faculty. Ogasawara Takao, a professor at Nichidai who was once one of the students involved in the legendary Nichidai Eiken along with Adachi Masao, reminded me that the last time Nichidai hosted the JASIAS conference was 14 years ago. That was actually the time I first gave a conference paper in Japanese. It was in an old room on one of the top floors of the old library. Now none of that is there. It is now a spanking new campus, with lots of technology for the filmmakers, but it didn't look like they put a lot of money into the architecture or creating a sense of warmth. But maybe I'm just getting old.

Censoring The Cove in Japan

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:30:24 +0900

As a scholar who has done a lot of research on the history of film censorship in Japan, I like to remind people that censorship takes many forms and need not all be state centered.

The Asahi reports this morning that one of the theaters scheduled to show the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove has broken under pressure from right-wing organizations and decided not to show the film. The right-wingers, who had threatened to begin protests on the 4th in front of the theater, had already performed loud protests in front of the distributor in April, charging those associated with the film with being "anti-Japanese" and "terrorists destroying the Japanese spirit." Theater N in Shibuya, which is owned by the publishing distributor Nippan, decided after consulting with the police not to show the film for fear something might happen to one of the customers or someone in the building. Cinemart Roppongi, the other theater scheduled to show the film, is considering whether to go on with the screening.

There is also a short article in Japan Today.

While it is hard to ask businesses to stick to their guns when right-wingers come out with their huge sound trucks blaring threats at rock-concert levels, but giving in to their pressure only encourages them. The theaters who stuck it out when the right wing threatened to stop the release of Yasukuni ended up getting very good business.

I might add that we should also remember that accepted consensus opinion can also be a form of censorship. It is interesting coming to Japan from America and seeing how dolphin and whale hunting, which are "obviously" wrong to most Americans and their media, are now seen as "obviously" right to most Japanese and their media. Some might say that is because the Japanese media is censoring other opinions, but Japanese would say the same thing of Americans. One of the important experiences in living multi-culturally is seeing how what is considered "natural" and "obvious" in one country is not considered that in another. It makes you realize how much the "obvious" is a cultural construction and is only possible by censoring the other as "obviously" wrong. I as a whole object to whale and dolphin hunting, but I don't think it is obvious. Those who think their side is obviously right are more often than not engaging in a kind of self-censorship that, while not involving obnoxious sound trucks, can sometimes be as odious. I think The Cove should be shown in Japan not because it will show the Japanese what the "truth" is, but because it will introduce the other into a situation where only the self reigns and start undermining the "obvious." Occasionally that needs to be done in America as well. Only then can real debate begin.

A Retrospective on Japanese Retrospectives

Tue, 18 May 2010 12:24:14 +0900

It's been about half a year since the Tokyo FILMeX took place, but my article on their 2009 retro, "Nippon Modern," is finally out in the most recent edition of Undercurrent, the online journal of FIPRESCI, the international film critics organization. I'd like to thank the editor, Chris Fujiwara (author of the very tempting new book on Jerry Lewis), for inviting me to write.

In the piece, entitled "A Retrospective on Japanese Retrospectives," I use the retro - and its unfortunate lack of a published catalog - to discuss the problem of "film thinking" in Japan, particularly the way the long and rich history of "film theory" in Japan has tended to be forgotten. I particularly focus on the work of Sato Tadao, a stimulating and complex thinker who is one of the few to really try to remember this history, but in ways that, somewhat symptomatic of the whole situation, do not always support the project of film theory itself. These are problems that I believe are endemic to the way Japanese cinema has been defined in Japan. The article contains some of the thinking that forms the undercurrent (forgive the pun) of my current book project, a history of Japanese film theory.

Touring Japan, and Finding Cinemas in Unusual Places

Mon, 17 May 2010 21:38:01 +0900

My excuse for the long break between posts is that I was on a tour of Japan. I wish it was to promote my new book, Visions of Japanese Modernity, but authors of obscure academic texts do not get book tours. Rather, I was serving as a study leader on a tour of Japan organized by a division of the Association of Yale Alumni called Yale Educational Travel. They basically organize tours all around the world that are led by Yale professors, who give lectures along the way. They can be a great way to do more than just sightsee, and they help keep alumni in touch with the university's educational mission and remind them about their alma mater (it does not take a genius to figure out why many major universities organize such things).

This was the second time I have done this tour. It basically involved doing a circular trip around Japan, mostly on a cruise ship called the Clipper Odyssey, starting in Tokyo, moving to Sado Island, Kanazawa, Matsue, Hagi (and then a brief trip to Korea to clear Japanese carriage law), Hiroshima, Miyajima, Kurashiki, and then ending in Kyoto. To fill the ship, other institutions such as Princeton, Stanford and the Smithsonian also participated, and so I shared lecture duties with such fine people as David Leheny, Mark Peattie, and Marjorie Williams. I talked about the historical geography of play in Tokyo, representations of the atomic bomb in popular culture, and the Kyoto's centrality to Japanese film culture.

Such tours can be a fascinating but also somewhat surreal experience. Tourism can be out of this world (or at least the everyday world), which I strongly felt whenever I tried to find a newspaper at the tourist spots (they can't be found). There is much that can be said about the politics of tourism, but such educational tours can, with the right study leaders, provide an opportunity to be self-conscious of that. For me, it is great to get out of the academic world and talk to people I normally do not teach (which is a learning experience for me as well). We had a very inquisitive group, with many different perspectives (Hiroshima is difficult to teach when almost everyone is over 65), although the cost of the tour made it demographically less diverse. I enjoy these tours a lot (and with the clout of their money, they can do some things I could not do alone even after all the time I have lived in Japan), but they are a lot of work.

As usual, I cannot travel without thinking about movies in one way or another. This time, I noticed some movie theaters in peculiar, if not also ominous places.

The first was in Matsue Castle. Like many castles in Japan, the floors to the top often contain a variety of exhibits about the locality. Matsue's has several models showing this small, rural city in different decades. I could not help but take a photo of the model of downtown Matsue in 1959, during the heyday of the moving picture business, showing some of the theaters such as the Matsue Toei, the Toei Daigeki, and the Matsue Nikkatsu. I think the Boatopia Matsue, a betting parlor for the boat races, is now where the Matsue Toei used to stand.

The second was in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which memorializes the dropping of the atomic bomb. It is hard to think about movies in such circumstances (although, as I emphasized in my lecture, portions of which were based on my article in In Godzilla's Footsteps, the cinema has been an important means of thinking through the bomb), but wartime Hiroshima, like any other Japanese city of the time, had movie theaters. In a large plaque at the end of the exhibit, you can see the city layout and thus notice that there was one movie theater, called the Showa Shinema (formally called the Sekaikan), which was probably only about 500 meters from the hypocenter. I believe it was located right about where the Cenotaph in the Peace Park is now. I highlighted and inserted a detail for the photograph I took. You can see Motoyasu Bridge on the top left of the photo.

So in one case, a cinema is replaced by a boat racing betting parlor; in another, by a monument containing the names of the dead. History moves in unusual, ironic, and also sometimes tragic ways.

Gokan no Hiroba

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:52:25 +0900

As part of my current research in the history of Japanese film theory and criticism, I met with the great film critic, Yamane Sadao, last week. Since I had just watched a press screening of Sakamoto Junji's new film, Zatoichi, the Last, we met in a cafe in Hibiya.

Since I had a bit of time between the screening and the meeting time, I wandered around Hibiya. That area around Chanter is basically Toho territory, developed in the 1930s by Kobayashi Ichizo of the Hankyu Railway (now all part of the Hankyu Hanshin Toho Group) . The home office is there, as are some Toho theaters and corporately related theaters (such as the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater). Even Chanter, a shopping center, is owned by Toho.

In front of Chanter is a square that in Japanese is called the "Gokan no hiroba" (合歓の広場), which roughly translates as "Entertainment Square" ("gokan" is a rarely used word meaning communal enjoyment). Since this is Toho terrain, there is a statue of Godzilla and bronze hand prints (in relief) of some famous movie stars. Most of the stars are Toho veterans, such as Mifune Toshiro, Morishige Hisaya, Frankie Sakai, Yamaguchi Yoshiko (Ri Koran), Ueki Hitoshi, Nakadai Tatsuya, Tanba Tetsuro, Kayama Yuzo, Takamine Hideko, Ikebe Ryo, etc. But there are other stars such as Misora Hibari and foreign stars like Jackie Chen and Tom Cruise. In addition to the hand print, for each one there is usually a signature and a comment.

I took a photo of the plate for Mihashi Tatsuya, first because people probably don't photograph it that much, and second because he appeared in Dolls, by Kitano Takeshi (subject of my first book). Mihashi was a Toho stalwart in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Kurosawa Akira's High and Low and also the Kokusai himitsu keisatsu series, two films of which ended up as Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily?. At the end of his career, he appeared in such films as Shinozaki Makoto's Not Forgotten, for which he won some awards. The aphorism he used on his plate is "Yuku ni komichi ni yorazu" (which roughly means "never take the back road," or "always go on the straight and true").

Some (Re)Visions of Japanese Modernity

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:55:39 +0900

It took a while, but I am very glad to announce that my new book, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925, is finally out and available at booksellers like Amazon (you can also get it straight from the press). I would like to thank everyone, including those at the University of California Press, for their patience and support.

This took a while to realize. The first version was my dissertation, submitted over a decade ago. A lot has happened since then, including three other books and multiple jobs, but this work continued to change and evolve. Some of the original chapters got published elsewhere and disappeared from the manuscript (the one on novelizations and film criticism ended up in Word and Image in Japanese Cinema; the section on national cinema ended up spread out between A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan and The Culture of Japanese Fascism); remaining chapters were refined, revised, and updated. It's inevitable that an author thinks more could have been done here and there, but people have waited long enough, and sometimes you just have to let your baby leave the nest.

The title changed too. I must confess I am not wholly satisfied with いt. It seems that publishers of Japan-related books think "modernity" sells, so that word is ending up on a lot of book covers these days. There are some in the field who even mistakenly think that is what the field is about (the review of my Kitano Takeshi book in the Journal of Asian Studies makes that mistake). My new book, in fact, is partially a revision of that view - or at least to its tendency to focus on only a certain narrative of modernity - even if the title doesn't express it as well as it could. It is essentially a discursive history, one clearly influenced by Foucault, which tries to understand the first thirty years of Japanese film history neither as a tale of a foreign modernity entering Japan and changing the culture, nor (à la Burch) as a case of film being inserted into and being shaped by a long-standing traditional culture. Rather, it is a more complex history of the concrete historical struggles that defined the medium and its cultural importance not only through the way films were made (a practice hard to judge these days since very few of the films remain) but also through how they were talked and written about in film criticism, scholarship, exhibition practices (such as the benshI), and even censorship. Such discursive actions have the power to articulate, shape, even create the object. Not only cinema, but "modernity" itself were not given phenomena, but were born of this struggle, one that was intimately tied to conflicts involving both class and nation in a transforming Japan. That is why I do not talk about "modernity" but different "modernities" that were promoted or demoted by different forces in discourse in an effort to define what Japan and its cinema should or should not be. The "visions" in the title, then, is not a presumption that modernity was inherently visual and that such a "visual culture" shaped modern Japan. Rather, given that there were other modernities (and cinemas) that were not visual but bodily, the "visions of modernity" are rather those of figures such as the pure film reformers of the 1910s who worked to define cinema and its modernity as visual - in part so as to suppress that bodily form of cinema. By looking at these complex, and often contradictory struggles, I believe we get not only a richer notion of early Japanese film history, but also a better understand where the cinema (and modernity) that came afterward, came from. We also get a better sense of the historical contingency of some of what we assume about the cinema, such as its visual modernity.

On another note, while title was not the best, the book cover was. California did a great job with it. I had found this image on the net, but it took a while to find a copy that I could use for publication, which I finally did at the Edo-Tokyo Museum. The designers at the Press then transformed it into an excellent cover.

Anyway, I hope you can take a look at this product of many years of hard work. For your information, here is the table of contents:

0. Introduction

1. The Motion Pictures as a Problem

2. Gonda Yasunosuke and the Promise of Film Study

3. Studying the Pure Film

4. The Subject of the Text: Benshi, Authors, and Industry

5. Managing the Internal

Conclusion: Mixture, Hegemony, and Resistance

Theater Kino in Sapporo

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:55:59 +0900

I was surfing the internet the other day and found myself. My wife and I visited Theater Kino in Sapporo at the beginning of the year (my wife is from Hokkaido) to watch Waltz With Bashir (which by the way should have won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, not Departures). Theater Kino is Sapporo's only real independent mini-theater showing alternative and art house movies. The first Theater Kino was founded in 1992 and only had 29 seats; the new one started in 1998 and has two screens, one with 63 seats, the other with 100. It is now located on the second floor of a newly built office building.

It has a nice atmosphere (here's the Cinema Street introduction), if only because the lobby is covered with graffiti written by many of the big people in Japanese independent film (and some foreigners too). It's fun just to find and read what's written there. They also have set up a used book corner, which provides the warmth of printed paper. Plus they have Billiken (from Sakamoto Junji's film) protecting the theater:

My wife and I both know the owner, Nakajima Yo, who came over to talk with us as we waited for the movie. Nakajima-san is one of the leading figures in the mini-theater world--which in Japan is now sporting the name "community cinema." Things are tough for such cinemas. My wife and I went to a symposium about such cinemas in the fall (which was where we last ran into Nakajima-san) and heard many tales of losing customers to cineplexes, of distributors refusing to rent films to such small places, of young people stopping viewing anything but mainstream films. On the surface, the Japanese film industry is doing well, but that hides a warped situation where only a couple major companies are doing well, while most everyone else is in trouble. The Japan Community Cinema Center is trying to support such small theaters, which not only show a variety of films, but present films that are otherwise unavailable outside Tokyo and Osaka.

Anyway, Nakajima-san had us fill out his "people visiting Kino" questionnaire, which he gives out to "VIP" guests (my impression is he wanted my wife, who was a coordinator at the Yamagata Film Festival and now makes DVDs like The Roots of Japanese Anime, to fill it out. But she made me do it). I gave Nakajima-san the form and he took our picture. Since he didn't seem to happy to get the form from me, I thought that was going to be it, but it seems he put it on the net anyway. I should have guessed it, since he put me on the net for a much earlier visit.

Anyway, I do recommend a visit to Theater Kino if you are in Sapporo.

Nishikawa Katsumi

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:40:45 +0900

The news services report that Nishikawa Katsumi, the director of many of the great postwar youth films, died on April 6, 2010, of pneumonia. He was 91.

Nishikawa was born in 1918 in Tottori and graduated from the Arts Faculty of Nihon University before entering Shochiku in 1939. The war interrupted his career - an experience he would later write about - but he returned to being an assistant director to Shibuya Minoru and Nakamura Noboru before directing his first film in 1952. He switched to Nikkatsu in 1954 when it resumed production, making films in a number of genres - including action movies - but it was his youth films starring Yoshinaga Sayuri (Nikkatsu's eternal virginal star, with fan sites here and here) or Takahashi Hideki that proved to be big hits. He moved to television when Nikkatsu turned to Roman Porno, but he returned to film in order to shoot youth films starring Yamaguchi Momoe (the enigmatic idol star of the 1970s: see here and here and here) and Miura Tomokazu (whom Momoe-chan would later marry), including such movies as Izu no odoriko (The Izu Dancer) and Eden no umi that he had shot at Nikkatsu before.

I have seen some film scholars talk about Japanese "youth films" (seishun eiga) but end up only speaking about New Wave cinema. The truly popular youth films, however, were those directed by Nishikawa and his brethren. A real study of these still has not been done in English.

There are some books on or by Nishikawa in Japanese, however:

Nishikawa Katsumi and Gondo Susumu. Nishikawa Katsumi eiga shugyo. Waizu Shuppan, 1993.
Nishikawa Katsumi. Izu no odoriko monogatari. Firumu Atosha, 1994.
Nishikawa Katsumi. Shiroi karasu: Ikinokotta heishi no kiroku. Kojinsha, 1997.

Iconics 10 and Academic Film Societies in Japan

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 17:17:58 +0900

Film studies has had a hard time developing as an academic discipline in Japan. There are many reasons for that, but one has been the lack of a strong film studies society. Such societies can be problematic in the way their power can be used to define the discipline, but when the discipline is in the minority, they can be strategically important in coordinating activities, promoting communication and networking, consolidating power, and providing legitimacy.

The Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences (Nihon Eizo Gakkai 日本映像学会) has valiantly tried to create such a society in Japan, but it has not been easy. Academic societies in Japan need a university to back them, but the JASIAS's backer, Nihon University, insisted from the start that film was insufficient for an academic society and forced the founders to make this an eizo gakkai not an eiga gakkai. The JASIAS is still hampered by having a membership that is too diverse, spanning film academics to filmmakers, from educational media consultants to people who make video projectors. The film studies people, however, long ago "took over" the two journals the JASIAS publishes - Eizogaku and Iconics - and now these two can offer some of the best examples of academic film scholarship in Japan. (I have been a member of the JASIAS for about twenty years, including several years serving on the board of directors, and many years working on various committees, including the editorial boards of the two journals.)

There are other societies in Japan that profess to include film, but the Hyosho Bunkaron Gakkai is largely a product of Tokyo University's peculiar conception of "Culture and Representation" and seems to feature less and less film, and the Nihon Eiga Gakkai was what Kato Mikiro formed when the JASIAS expelled him for various misdeeds (I would not touch it with a ten-foot pole).

This is all basically a long introduction to an announcement that the JASIAS has just published the 10th issue of Iconics: International Studies of the Modern Image (ISSN 1345-4447). Iconics is published once every 2 years as the international journal of the JASIAS and introduces articles in English, French and German on cinema and other modern image media. The Society also publishes the journal Eizogaku twice a year in Japanese. Iconics features refereed submissions from JASIAS members and invited articles by major world scholars. I am currently on the editorial board of Iconics and used to be the editor.

The new issue features several fine articles on Japanese film, including Jonathan Hall's provocative piece on the neglect of psychoanalysis in Japan film studies, Kano Yuka's rethinking of Hara Setsuko's significance, Okubo Ryo's investigation of combinations of film and theater in early cinema, Naoki Yamamoto's groundbreaking work on why Bluebird films were so important in Japanese film history, and Ryan Cook's deft analysis of the peculiar connections between Oshima and Hasumi regarding sex and cinema. (Naoki and Ryan are my students at Yale.) Each issue of Iconics features one translated article that was selected by the editorial board as the best piece published in the previous two years in Eizogaku: Okubo Ryo's article is that piece in Volume 10.

Here is the table of contents:

Pragmatism and the Interpretation of Films (Martin Lefebvre)
La Fin du Grand Sommeil de l'Introuvable Dame du Lac (Marc Cerisuelo)
Liquid Cinema and the Watery Substance of Vision (A. L. Rees)
Kinodrama and Kineorama: Modernity and the Montage of Stage and Screen (Okubo Ryo)
The "Eternal Virgin" Reconsidered: Hara Setsuko in Contexts (Kanno Yuka)
Strange Bedfellows: Hasumi Shigehiko and Oshima Nagisa on Sex, Censorship and Cinema (Ryan M. Cook)
Where Did the Bluebird of Happiness Fly?: Bluebird Photoplays and the Reception of American Films in 1910s Japan (Yamamoto Naoki)
Kneeling on Broken Glass: Psychoanalysis and Japan Film Studies (Jonathan M. Hall)

For a list of the contents of previous issues of Iconics, please consult the JASIAS website. You can download some, but not all of the articles from previous issues on the CiNii website.

Inquiries about acquiring single issues of Iconics or starting a subscription, or about joining the JASIAS, can be addressed to the JASIAS office: jasias@nihon-u.ac.jp

Kimura Takeo

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:20:08 +0900

The Asahi reports this morning that the illustrious art director, Kimura Takeo, passed away on March 21, 2010, of pneumonia. He was 91.

Kimura is most famous for his collaborations with Suzuki Seijun, but KImura had already worked in the industry for over 20 years before he first joined Seijun on Akutaro in 1963. Kimura entered the Nikkatsu Tamagawa studio in 1941, but debuted as an art director at Daiei (which took over Nikkatsu's production division during the big wartime mergers) in 1945. His first well-known works were literary adaptations such as Gan (1953) or family dramas such as Keisatsu nikki (Police Diary, 1955). He returned to Nikkatsu when it resumed production in 1954. He was central in helping create the "mukokuseki" or "nationless" feel of Nikkatsu Action films, creating a unique world mixing the imaginary and the real, foregrounding style and color. That in some ways culminated in his work on Seijun's Tokyo Drifter (1966).

That was not his only style, however, as he also worked on the social realist films of Kumai Kei such as Shinobugawa (1972) and Umi to dokuyaku (Sea and Poison, 1986). His most famous work was probably Seijun's Zigeunerweisen (1980), but other well known films include Itami Juzo's Tampopo (1985). He won a prize at the 1990 Montreal Film Festival for his work on Shikibu monogatari. As a footnote, Kimura was one of the eight people (including Sone Chusei, Yamatoya Atsushi, etc.) who participated in the scriptwriting for Seijun's films at Nikkatsu under the name Guru Hachiro.

Kimura returned to the news in the last few years for taking up the megaphone, helming the short Mugen Sasurai in 2004 and the feature films Yume no mani mani (2008) and Ogonka (2009), making him one of the oldest "new directors."

Kimura won many awards during his long career involving over 230 films. He won the Yamaji Fumiko Culture Award in 1991, and the Mainichi Art Award in 2006. He also served as the head of the Nikkatsu Visual Arts Academy. He wrote a number of books about his career and art directing, including Waga honseki wa eigakan (1986), Eiga bijutsu (2004), and the recent Urabanashi hitotsu eiga jinsei kyujunen (2009).

He was arguably the original and prominent of Japanese art directors (though note my post about Muraki Yoshiro) and he will be missed.

Here's an updated rendition of the song "Tokyo Drifter" providing glimpses of some of Kimura's great work on that film:

Osu in Nagoya

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:13:36 +0900

Last weekend I made a brief trip to Nagoya to attend a workshop headed by Fujiki Hideaki of Nagoya University. It was a preparatory workshop for one of the upcoming volumes in Shinwasha's Nihon eigashi sosho series, which will focus on audiences. I talked about the issue of theory in the history of Japanese film criticism. All the papers were interesting and this looks like it will be a great volume.

Even though this was only my third of fourth time in Nagoya, Nagoya holds a special place in my heart since it placed a significant role on the history of Kinugasa Teinosuke's A Page of Madness, and thus appears a lot in my book on the film. In what Makino Mamoru calls "Nagoya modernism," film fans in Nagoya not only wrote a lot about that film in dojinshi such as Chukyo kinema (one example of which I translated in my book), but arranged for special screenings in the city.

With that knowledge in mind - and my general interest in movie theater districts - I decided to spend some of my extra time by going to Osu, which used to be the main place to see movies in prewar and immediate postwar Nagoya, a time when there were over a dozen cinemas in the district. Centered on a Kannon temple, Osu resembled Asakusa in certain ways, with a pleasure quarters nearby, lots of entertainment venues, and a plebeian culture (here are some photos of remnants of that atmosphere). Osu also somewhat suffered the fate of Asakusa, which in the postwar lost its place as the entertainment center of Tokyo (if not of Japan) to more upscale neighborhoods like Ginza, Shinjuku and Shibuya. But unlike Asakusa, which still has a number of movie theaters in the Rokku district, there are none left in Osu. I was hoping I could find some small traces of those theaters (like one or two converted into other businesses) like I did in Kyoto's Shinkyogoku, but if there were any, I missed them. (Chitose Gekijo, which was one place where A Page of Madness played, was a little bit north of Osu in Hirokoji, but I didn't have time to go there.) The only trace of that old entertainment center is the Osu Engeijo, which still programs rakugo and other traditional vaudeville.

Unlike Asakusa, however, which is still trying to find some way (other than tourism) to return to the successful days, Osu impressed me by its vitality. Colleagues have told me that Osu declined in part due to bad city planning, as big avenues were constructed in Nagoya after the war that cut the district off from the flow of people, but it seems that Osu has come back to life in part by catering to more "marginal" crowds that prefer places that are cut off. Essentially, Osu is now home to otaku (with a large electronics store district, it shares elements with Akihabara), youngsters (there are a lot of small hip clothing stores), and foreigners (especially people from Brazil and Asia who work in the local factories). I did go there on a Sunday, however. I wonder what it is like on weekdays.

I also made two finds I would like to report on:

First, I found another good used bookstore (one not listed in our Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies) with lots of film related materials - and which was not that expensive: Kaiseido Shoten, which is right near Kamimaezu Station.

And second, I saw that there is a small Kitano Shrine there (I tried to pray for the success of my book on Kitano Takeshi, but I think it's too late):

Studying Film in Japan

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:07:06 +0900

I often get mail from students who are hoping to study film in Japan (I have an old, somewhat out-of-date post about studying Japanese film in North America). There are a variety of opportunities, but they can be divided according to whether you want to do film studies or filmmaking.

Film Studies:

One of the sad facts about Japanese film culture is that Japan does not value that culture much. There is little government support for film culture and education (except when it can immediately turn a profit or build some box as a payoff to construction industry friends), and universities have long ignored film studies as a discipline. The ignorance the average Japanese has of his or her own film culture can be appalling at times. But there have been a few universities that have valiantly pursued film studies and sport excellent scholars. Some have very good libraries (which you can learn more about in our Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies). I definitely recommend that anyone seriously studying Japanese film spend at least a year in Japan partially associated with a university. It is a great way to meet scholars and students, attend some special classes, and gain access to university collections. The value of doing a degree in Japan, however, is debatable. It could possibly help your resume to add a masters from a Japanese institution to a PhD from a North American university, but frankly PhDs in film studies from Japanese universities have a very hard time finding a job in Japan, let alone elsewhere. The job situation may be different outside North America or the English-speaking world, so you should get a lot of advice from knowledgeable academic advisors before taking the plunge. The sad fact, however, is that Japanese institutions as a whole are not highly regarded world-wide. This is unfortunate because there are a number of Japanese scholars who are doing some of the best work on film in the world; ignoring that is often just part of Eurocentrism. Yet the current institutional fact is North American institutions are just better funded and managed. It is still advisable to attend a PhD in North American program like the one at Yale, and spend a year or two in Japan as part of the program.

That said, the best graduate programs in film studies in Japan tend to be the following in alphabetical order:

Kyoto University (Human and Environmental Studies): Has produced some great scholars, but the current faculty is problematic, so I don't recommend this strongly.

Meiji Gakuin University (Geijutsugaku): I used to teach here, with colleagues such as Yomota Inuhiko, Saito Ayako, and Monma Takashi. It has a lot of ryugakusei and kenkyusei from abroad.

Nagoya University: Peter B. High helped build this up and Fujiki Hideaki is maintaining it well.

Nihon University: On old program which has tended to lean towards production more than film studies, but still has some very good scholars.

Rikkyo University: A newer program featuring strong faculty like Nakamura Hideyuki.

Tokyo University: Hyosho was best when Hasumi Shigehiko was around, but it now does not have anyone totally dedicated to film.

Waseda University: The most solid of the programs. The Engeki Eizo course features Takeda Kiyoshi, Komatsu Hiroshi, and Fujii Jinshi. Other great people interested in film, such as Hase Masato and Toeda Hirokazu, can be found elsewhere on campus. Of course the Engeki Hakubutsukan is heaven on earth for the film researcher.

Filmmaking:

First, I should note that studying filmmaking in Japan is rather unrealistic. Some people have the illusion that they can somehow get into Japanese film culture or the Japanese film industry by studying filmmaking in Japan, or start making their own ninja movies if they come here. But the fact is that most filmmaking programs in Japan are undergraduate, and thus you have to be committed to studying for four years in courses all held in Japanese - if you can get through exam hell first. There is only one real grad program and it is very hard to get into. Also, I should note that going to a film school in Japan will not guarantee you entry into the Japanese film industry. Television studios are now the major producers of film in Japan and they get their talent from the four-year colleges, and not necessarily film departments. Connections (kone) are still one of the best ways to get into filmmaking in Japan, and non-Japanese don't have them. (Some write to me asking for help getting internships on the set, but I'm afraid those are hard for even me to get.)

With that proviso, here are some of those undergrad programs:

Kyoto Zokei Geijutsu Daigaku: Instructors include Hayashi Kaizo and Ito Takashi.
Musashino Bijutsu Daigaku: Strong in experimental film with teachers like Kurosawa Keita, etc.

Nihon University (Geijutsu Gakubu): One of the oldest programs with grads such as Ishii Sogo.

Osakai Geijutsu Daigaku: This has produced recent filmmakers like Yamashita Nobuhiro, Kumakiri Kazuyoshi, and Hashiguchi Ryosuke.

Rikkyo University (Gendai Shinri Gakubu): An odd place to put filmmaking, but Shinozaki Makoto and Manda Kunitoshi are professors there.

Ritsumeikan University (Eizo Gakubu): A new program that has links to Shochiku.

Tama Bijutsu Daigaku: Especially strong in experimental film with instructors like Hagiwara Sakumi, Hoshino Akira, etc.

Tokyo Zokei Daigaku: The current university president is the director Suwa Nobuhiro.

This is the sole dedicated graduate program:

Tokyo University of the Arts: The only masters program in filmmaking at a national university. The professors there are Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Kitano Takeshi.

Then there are a number of private film academies, three of which are worth noting. Don't expect scholarships from these institutions. The first and the last are just continuing education institutions and thus wholly depend on tuition and probably can't help you get a visa:

The Film School of Tokyo: Instructors there include Aoyama Shinji, Shiota Akihiko, Zeze Takahisa, etc.

Japan Academy of Moving Images: Founded by Imamura Shohei and featuring graduates like Miike Takashi, this three-year academy is planning to become a four-year college in 2011.

Image Forum Eizo Kenkyujo: Focuses on experimental film, but has graduates like Mochizuku Rokuro.

Minakata Eiji

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:09:24 +0900

The news services are reporting that the great comedian, Minakata Eiji, a member of the slapstick team the Chanbara Trio, passed away on February 26, 2010, of cirrhosis of the liver. He was 77.

Minakata actually started out in real chanbara films at Toei in the 1950s, usually playing the guy who gets cut up. In 1963 he formed the Chanbara Trio with some of the other "kirareyaku" at Toei, including Yamane Shinsuke. Members changed over the years, but their schtick usually involved them running around on stage in samurai attire with Minakata slapping one or another with a huge paper fan (harisen).

I have a special place in my cinematic heart for Minakata because he played the hitman in Kitano Takeshi's Sonatine (which I will actually be showing at the Athenee Français next week). It's a great role, and also reveals Kitano's genius in casting a comedian as a killer. Minakata appeared closer to home with other Trio members in Kitano's Getting Any?.

He was a great performer and will be missed.

Here is the Chanbara Trio doing their version of Kunisada Chuji. Munakata, of course, is the one with the fan.

Relocating Ozu Yasujiro

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:03:16 +0900

I just made a quick trip to the United States - four days and three nights - to attend a quite stimulating conference entitled Relocating Ozu: The Question of an Asian Cinema Aesthetic at the University of California, Berkeley.

The usual ways to explore such a question would consider how Ozu's cinema manifested some basic Asian aesthetic principles, or how he was the source or the subject of Asian cinematic influences. The problem with the former method is that in the past it has tended to either be subject to Orientalist fantasies or, especially in the case of Japanese pan-Asianism, conceal an inherent nationalism in which Japan claims to best manifest Asian values or that it is meant to lead a united Asia. The latter method is difficult, first practically because it is hard to determine when and where Ozu might have seen many other Asian films (a rather unlikely possibility) or how much Asian directors might have seen Ozu (a more likely prospect but still hard to pin down); and second theoretically because even showing the fact of contact or of similarities is not enough to prove the cause and effect narrative of influence.

The very fact that this conference on a Japanese film director was initiated by the Center for Chinese Studies, however, signaled that things would be different and that the question of Ozu in Asia would be subject to not only more stringent evaluation but also to more complex refraction and mediation.

There were attempts to map out possible routes of influence and common principles, but this time seen through more precise lenses. Jinsoo An, for instance, laid the foundation for considering Ozu's influence on Korean cinema by reviewing the role the Asia Film Festival and the Pusan Film Festival played in presenting Japanese film in postcolonial Korea at a time when it was officially banned. Jason McGrath took on the daunting task of evaluating the possibility of an Asian cinematic aesthetic by considering the commonalities between so-called traditional principles and modernist questions.

A number also tried to lay the groundwork for "relocating" Ozu by loosening his ties to Japanese soil. David Desser questioned perceptions that tended to downplay such "frivolous" films as Ohayo, and Daisuke Miyao focused on the dark urban lighting in That Night's Wife to argue not only Ozu's ambivalent relation to Japanese specular modernity, but also his resonances with German cinema. Michael Raine put forward the notion of "transcultural mimesis" to claim Ozu's strong relation to Hollywood film in the way he recreated, parodied, learned from, and mastered that cinema while still remaining aware of the inequalities between Japan and the USA. And Kirsten Cather considered whether Suo Masayuki's "Ozu-as-pink-film" work Abnormal Family can help us see Ozu in a new light.

Many of the participants did try to link Ozu to other Asian films and filmmakers, but less directly than through common grounds and common "others" such as Hollywood. Xinyu Dong, for instance, linked Ozu and Zhu Shilin by considering how their varied appropriations of the "Lubitsch touch" complicated their wartime films. Jinhee Choi related Ozu to Korean directors such as Shin Sang-ok and Lee Bong-rae by considered the parallels between the "shoshimin" and the "sosimin" genres and their visions of the salaryman father.

For several papers, Hou Hsiao-hsien was the preferred object of linkage (the conference encouraged this by showing his City of Sadness). James Udden made it clear that such links are problematic given the stylistic differences between Ozu and Hou, even though he tried to find ways of joining them in "spirit." My paper considered less how Ozu influenced Hou than how an image of Ozu, one created by the influential Japanese film critic Hasumi Shigehiko, could connect with Hou in the way Hasumi's vision of what cinema is - one shaped by his encounter with Ozu - determined how he introduced Hou to Japan. Guo-Juin Hong tried to align Hou with Ozu by using David Bordwell's notion of a cinematic poetics to consider the historical formation of Hou's cinema. And Chika Kinoshita, without needing any claims about influence or direct adaptation, made much of the remarkable parallels between Cafe Lumiere and Tokyo Twilight as "pregnancy films."

The range of methods - even the mobile range of perspectives - could not help but make me think that there was not some kind of parallel between the way we were looking at Ozu and the "cruising" spectators in Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which Dan O'Neill discussed in the last paper as promoting an "aesthetics of slowness" that could connect with Ozu as well.

It all reminded me of how rich Ozu's cinema is to sustain such varied approaches, as well as how complicated Ozu's connections are to such polysemic terms as "Japan," "Asia," and "modernity." I hope to see more of such conferences in the future. Thanks to Andrew Jones, Alan Tansman, and all the others who made this a reality.