Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema

Joanne Bernardi, Shota T. Ogawa, Joanne Bernardi, Shota T. Ogawa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315534350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japanese cinema today, through cutting-edge scholarship that reflects the hybridity of approaches defining the field.

The volume's twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four parts, each representing an emergent area of inquiry:

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• "Decentring Classical Cinema"

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• "Questions of Industry"

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• "Intermedia as an Approach"

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• "The Object Life of Film"

This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of 200 years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema's migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty-first century.

This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies, and cultural studies more broadly.

PART I

Decentering classical cinema

Modernity, translation, and mobilization

The six chapters included in this part demonstrate the productivity of revisiting the extensively studied period from the 1930s to the 1960s, particularly for decentering the discourse of modernity that has typically treated Hollywood as the model idiom to be replicated elsewhere. In the past few decades, an increasing number of scholars have sought to reframe cinema as an integral part of urban modernity, drawing inspiration from the seminal observations made by Weimar cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. These ideas that perceive a homology between the birth of cinema and urban modernity, or between film spectators and the urban flâneur, have since been labeled the modernity thesis. As Ben Singer concedes, in what is arguably the most rigorous defense of the modernity thesis, the claim that cinema and urban modernity brought about a new mode of perception characterized by shock, distraction, and mobility is ultimately speculative, unfocused, and unproveable, and yet demonstrably productive and illuminating (Singer 2001: 10; Guha 2015: 8). In the context of Japanese cinema scholarship, the modernity thesis has been particularly useful both in dislocating the view that modernity emanates outward from the West and in denaturalizing the treatment of classical Japanese cinema—one of the world’s largest film industries, defined by a studio system, star system, and robust critical sphere—as a subset of Japanese culture (Russell 2011: xii–xiii, 3). By positioning cinema as a facet of modernity, that is to say, a phenomenon that ought to be studied alongside various adjacent dynamics, including the expansion of a white-collar middle class, the flourishing of consumer culture, women’s education, migration of labor, and capital-intensive urban development such as the reconstruction of Tokyo following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, scholarship on the classical period since the 1990s has opened up new avenues for examining how cinema mediated the everyday experiences of modernity in interwar Japan (e.g., Iwamoto 1991; Wada-Marciano 2008; Yamamoto 2015; Joo 2018).

As the following chapters show, reconsiderations in the rubric of modernity of Japanese cinema’s classical period pose more questions than answers, especially regarding how best to imagine a transnational history of cinema. Consider Miriam Hansen’s seminal concept of vernacular modernism, which helps to disrupt the association between classical Hollywood cinema’s international popularity and the supposed “universal narrative form” it developed. Instead of conceptualizing an unmarked modernist form, Hansen treats Hollywood as a vernacularized “modernist idiom” that recognized how modernity meant “different things to different people and publics, both at home and abroad” (Hansen 1999: 68). In one sense, the concept of vernacular modernism encourages scholars to shift their emphasis from examining the USA as a model case to studying culturally heterogeneous milieus outside the West, such as Shanghai and Tokyo. As a number of critics have pointed out, however, it remains questionable whether Hansen’s model liberates us from the center–periphery model of understanding world cinema in the classical period, or if it even departs from what Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has described as the theory–history dichotomy in which Hollywood’s “modernist idiom” (Hollywood cinema as the dominant mode) registers as a theoretical concern while the contexts of vernacular reception register as historical concerns (Yoshimoto 1991: 252; Hori 2018: 268–269).

Before introducing each of the chapters in this part in some detail, it is useful to briefly summarize how they address the questions raised by and in response to Hansen’s vernacular modernism, and how they contribute to the broader decentering of film history beyond national paradigms. In the first two chapters by Ryoko Misono (Chapter 1) and Hideyuki Nakamura (Chapter 2), for instance, American modernity is interrogated as both a historically particular construct and a highly contradictory phenomenon. Its presentation as anything but a universal model thus turns Yoshimoto’s theory–history dilemma on its head. Misono persuasively demonstrates that a close reading of Ozu Yasujirō’s That Night’s Wife (Sono yo no tsuma, 1930) requires an understanding not only of the codes for the Hollywood genres of the melodrama and gangster film, but also the modern US history of immigration, racism, and puritanical morality informing these genres. Nakamura similarly positions American journalists in early 1950s Japan as historically conditioned film spectators whose outrage at Taniguchi Senkichi’s Akasen kichi (The Red Light Military Base, 1953) attests to both cinema’s international idiom and the culturally specific factors of the Hays Code (the Motion Picture Production Code enforced between 1934–1968) and McCarthyism.

Other chapters more explicitly decenter Hollywood’s dominant position in the transnational historiography of classical cinema by articulating other kinds of international idioms. These include the idioms of the Weimar- to Nazi-era German kulturfilm (Chapter 6 by Anne McKnight); Soviet constructivism and Bolshevization (“popularization” or “massification”) (Chapter 3 by Diane Wei Lewis and Chapter 5 by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano); and queer desire lodged in the transnational-transmedial-translational space straddling Anglophone literature, UFA, and Hollywood (Chapter 4 by Yuka Kanno). Finally, the productivity of translation is a common thread running through the chapters, affirming Naoki Sakai’s observation that translation ought to be considered constitutive of the phenomenon of modernity that entails the meeting of many peoples, industries, and polities (cited in Russell 2011: 3).

Ryoko Misono’s chapter, “Suspense and Border Crossing: Ozu Yasujirō’s Crime Melodrama,” invites us to attentively reread That Night’s Wife (1930), without separating the formalist discussions regarding Ozu’s assimilation of Hollywood’s idiom from the historical discussions of the various facets of modernity. The logic that is key to Misono’s intervention is encapsulated in the opening passage, which analyzes Ozu’s diary entry that poignantly describes a dream he had on a damp barracks cot in rural Mie Prefecture, where he was detained for mandatory military training. In truncated prose peppered with cinematic images and Hollywood references, Ozu describes a virtual flânerie through Ginza’s high street, where he longs to return. The passage affirms the association, espoused by advocates of the modernity thesis, between film spectatorship and the distracted perception of the urban flâneur. Yet the passage also invokes the repressed other of urban flânerie: the large-scale movement of soldiers, workers, and the dispossessed brought about by the imperialist factors instigating (and coeval with) the rise of the imperial metropoles where the flâneurs roamed (Singer 2001: 101–129; Guha 2015: 8–9; Lurey and Massey 1999: 231). Lest we fail to appreciate this ambivalence, Misono calls our attention to another diary entry in which Ozu likens himself—a conscript of the Japanese imperial army—to Tom Brown, the foreign legion character played by Gary Cooper in Joseph von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930). Far from constituting a universal idiom, Hollywood cinema provided Ozu with a framework for articulating the contradictory predicament of being simultaneously a Japanese national, an imperial subject, and a city-dweller who dreams in Hollywood’s vernacular.

The dialectic between geopolitical tension and the transnational flow of cinematic images also figures prominently in Hideyuki Nakamura’s chapter, “Beyond Mt. Fuji and the Lenin Cap: Identity Crisis in Taniguchi Senkichi’s Akasen kichi (The Red Light Military Base, 1953),” albeit in the context of the post-Occupation period that followed the San Francisco Peace Treaty that took effect in 1952. The goal of the chapter is, as Nakamura succinctly puts it, to rescue Taniguchi’s unsung masterpiece from oblivion. This rescue mission does not entail extricating aesthetic debate from the messy controversy that caused the Toho production studio to abruptly pull the film when it was blamed for sensationalizing the volatile issue of the presence of US bases in post-Occupation Japan. What Nakamura seeks to rescue are the intricate lines of communication spanning the nocturnal realm of cinema and the diurnal realm of discourse. Indeed, the chapter deftly moves from the discursive domain of the controversy, cross-examining contemporary reviews of the film in Japanese and English, to the startling observation that the American journalists’ strong opposition to the film was fueled not just by preformulated ideological positions, but also by their own inadvertent and irrepressible emotional identification with the protagonist’s anger across the ethno-nationalist divide.

The remaining chapters explore a more polycentric model of transnational film history that is not exclusively centered on Hollywood or USA–Japan relations. In “Home Movies of the Revolution: Proletarian Filmmaking and Counter-Mobilization in Interwar Japan,” Diane Wei Lewis proposes a transnational cinematic imaginary cohering around international communism. If Hollywood inevitably takes center stage in film-historical discussions of the theatrically released narrative fiction that constitutes the “classics,” Lewis’s study of the Proletarian Film League of Japan (or Prokino, 1929–1934) suggests that when we shift our attention to nontheatrical film practices, an equally influential factor might be the Soviet-led initiative of Bolshevization (“massification”) that sought to increase direct contact between farmers, workers, and activists. In a telling example, Lewis discusses Prokino’s mobile screenings as a countermeasure against state- and capitalist-led cultural programs that were designed to implement their own mode of Bolshevization. Lewis’s readings of Prokino’s own publications suggest Bolshevization might be better understood as a trans-ideological facet of modernity rather than a directive issued by Moscow.

Critical interest in the reconfiguration of modernity’s social relations also informs Yuka Kanno’s chapter, titled “When Marnie Was There: Female Friendship Film and the Genealogy of Queer Girls’ Culture.” Kanno investigates “girls culture” (shōjo bunka) and the technique of queer reading that it encourages, as a facet of modernity made possible by the emergence of all-women schools for higher education (1899–) and magazines such as Shōjo sekai (Girls’ World, 1906–1931), Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend, 1908–1955), Shōjo gahō (Girls’ Graphics, 1912–1942), and others. These publications targeted both the new female readership and the translational space that encompassed literature, revue, and cinema. As a particularly interesting example, Kanno cites the work of Yoshiya Nobuko, Japan’s first professional female writer and the pioneer of the “girls’ fiction” genre who was also an avid reader of translated English girls’ stories and supervised the Japanese translation for the 1933 Hollywood adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women that made Katharine Hepburn into a queer icon. Kanno’s elliptical genealogy of “girls’ culture” stretches from the 1910s to the present, but her study confirms the productivity of revisiting the “classical period,” notably, the thriving translational space of the 1930s when iconic images of Dietrich, Garbo, and Hepburn in “drag” circulated alongside images of all-female Shochiku and Takarazuka revues, spurring lively discussions in the male homosocial milieu of film criticism as well as the reading public of girls’ culture.

Translation also figures prominently in Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano’s chapter, “Making Sense of Nakai Masakazu’s Film Theory, ‘Kino Satz’.” As with Misono’s treatment of Ozu, which resists dichotomizing stylistic and historical analysis, Wada-Marciano examines Nakai Masakazu’s writings on montage as both historical and theoretical matter. Her positioning of Nakai’s theory in the intellectual milieu of Kyoto, where translation held a special place as a creative process, is crucial to this dualistic approach. For example, Wada-Marciano discusses Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), not only as a precursor to Nakai’s theoretical work (mass spectatorship was a vital part of both writers’ interests) but also in relation to Kyoto’s vibrant translational culture, to which Nakai belonged, and where philosopher Tanigawa Tetsuzō’s Japanese translation of Münsterberg (1924) circulated together with Tanigawa’s translations of Kant and Simmel. On the one hand, this chapter aims to clarify distinctions between Nakai’s concept, Kino Satz (cinematic language) and other montage theories proposed by his contemporaries (not least Dziga Vertov’s Kino Glaz [Cinematic Eye], which directly inspired Nakai’s term) as well as 1970s formalist debates. On the other hand, the chapter seeks to liberate Nakai’s writings on film from the narrow context of film theory. Contextualized as an integral part of Nakai’s work as an aesthetic theorist, his film theoretical writings and his amateur filmmaking begin to resemble a parallel project of Kyoto School philosophy, namely, a bold attempt to open aesthetics to the contingent dynamics of interwar Japan.

The part closes with Anne McKnight’s “Geysers of Another Nature: The Optical Unconscious of the Japanese Science Film.” McKnight offers a critical survey of the theorization and production of kagaku eiga (science film) in Japan from the late 1920s through the early 1970s that is attentive to the inherent contradiction in the scientific wonder that the genre sought to convey. That is, the genre’s celebration of modern science was tinged with vestiges of a pre-modern, subjective, and curiosity-driven quest to visualize the unseen world (also see Gaycken 2015). Departing from previous scholarship that centers on films produced in conjunction with university laboratories, McKnight traces an alternative genealogy rooted in the milieu of popular education outside the school system. Harada Mitsuo, a self-educated impresario of popular science whose product line included commercial science magazines (e.g., Kagaku chishiki and Kagaku gahō), sponsored science films, and science experiment kits, is a central figure in McKnight’s alternative genealogy. Echoing Kanno and Wada-Marciano’s observations on the productive space of translation that flourished in 1930s Japan, McKnight’s discussion of UFA’s kulturfilm centers on the playful commentary provided by the famous benshi lecturer (or narrator) Tokugawa Musei (see also Chapter 12 by Kyoko Omori), which vernacularized the wonder of scientific observation. McKnight’s attention to verbal commentary allows her to critically examine wartime bunka eiga (cultur...