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Aaron Gerow

    East Asian Languages and Literatures
    Yale University
    320 York Street
    P.O. Box 208236
    New Haven, CT 06520-8236 USA
    e-mail: aaron.gerow@yale.edu

Abe’ Mark Nornes

    Film & Video Program
    Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures
    University of Michigan
    2512 Frieze Blg.
    Ann Arbor, MI 49109
    e-mail: nornes@umich.edu

Date: Tue, 20 May 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Suzaku and Zen

Bonjour mes amis,

Not much reaction to my flurry of Cannes articles. Maybe I’m the only one excited. But it is big news in Japan and it’s not everyday when a friend of yours wins a prize at Cannes.

But just to continue on the issue of continuing Orientalism in the reception of Japanese film, I actually looked for reviews of _Moe no suzaku_ in the French papers on the net and found this one in _Liberation_. This is just the beginning:

_Moe no suzaku_ pushes to the length the logic of Zen which is the ideal of absolute void. The radical non-action of its sequences is without equivalent….

Come on! Kawase has absolutely nothing to do with Zen, nor do any of the other young filmmakers like her. One could argue for a larger, cultural influence based in Zen, but I think we all realize how tenuous that is. In addition, describing the “radical non-action” of the film is not only an exaggeration, such parts are actually the least “Kawase-esque” portions of the film.

I make this point not only to show how rampant orientalist visions of Japan still are, how they still affect a lot of what is written about Japan and its cinema, but also to point out that such comments are an insult to the director. Koreeda has spoken about how uncomforable he felt when people abroad started talking about _Maboroshi no hikari_ only in terms of Ozu, of how bad it felt when his film was being praised for all the wrong reasons. Next time I meet Naomi, I’ll ask her about some of the reactions, but I’m sure she’ll not only laugh at the Zen comparisons, but express some consternation over all the fuss. (Her own disappointment over the film was reflected in the fact that she went back to the same location in the mountains around Nara and filmed her own vision of the place in an 8mm documentary called _Sumado monogatari_.)

Insisting on only seeing Japanese film through the narrow looking glasses of Zen, ukiyo-e, kabuki and other “traditional” arts is not only self-delusion (and a problematic form of self-construction), but also a refusal to engage in a dialogue with filmmakers and audiences of other cultures. It is myopic and deeply disturbing.

Aaron

Date: Tue, 20 May 1997

From: (Joseph Murphy)

Subject: Re: Suzaku and Zen

>Insisting on only seeing Japanese film through the narrow looking glasses >of Zen, ukiyo-e, kabuki and other “traditional” arts is not only >self-delusion (and a problematic form of self-construction), but also a >refusal to engage in a dialogue with filmmakers and audiences of other >cultures. It is myopic and deeply disturbing. —Aaron

Sorry about the lack of comments. I don’t know about the rest of you, but as for me, I HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIES and am feeling acutely the pain of being isolated from the metropolitan centers. I think you’re right, though, Japanese film still seems to be a kind of exotic object, a taste to be savored by connoisseurs rather than something that participates in the same world. I’ve been doing a study of sorts on the motif of food in media coverage of East Asia (looking forward to the Nagano Olympics) and its surprising in postwar newspaper reviews of successful Japanese films in Variety, NY Times, etc. how often the experience of Japanese film is described by the critic in terms of the taste of exotic food. This is probably not accidental in terms of orientalism, the act of eating food being the prototypical subject-object relation for Hegel (the object is consumed) on the way to the Master-slave dialectic. i.e., in that reading the persistent appearance of food as a major site of representation of east asia would be symptomatic of an anxiety to maintain the East in a subject-object not a subject-subject relation.

I remember an article in the Asahi Shinbun last year quoting Koreeda (I think) on how strange it was to have Italian critics asking him about the “aesthetics of death” in relation to a film about suicide (read, “Mishima”), so even for readers of mainstream media in Japan, I think there’s a widespread sense that the success of Japanese film abroad says more about the needs of the west than any genuine interest in Japan.

I agree with you, though. That’s also why I’ve been interested in Q. Tarentino’s interest in Kitano Takeshi. I remember an interview on Newstation 10 when Tarentino was in Japan in 1995 and someone asked him who his favorite Japanese director was and it went over really well when he said Kitano and was able to articulate the similarity in their concerns. There’s some anticipation of “Sonatine“ ‘s release in the US in SPIN/Wired type magazines too, and I’ve seen little orientalist cant. I did see “Kid’s Return” though, and worried that it was evidence of a sad decline in Kitano Takeshi’s faculties since the accident (his TV commentary is losing its bite too).

Well, anyway, there are some reactions, far distant from Tokyo or Cannes, down here in the primordial subtropical forests just north of Disney World.

J.M.

Date: Tue, 20 May 1997

From: (Joanne Izbicki)

Subject: Re: Suzaku and Zen

Hi, re Aaron’s comments on Cannes and a Euro-Am gaze,

Like Joe, I haven’t seen most of the films you’ve been talking about (re Cannes and your reviews, too, which are my main way of keeping touch with what’s new in Japanese film these days, gratias), except Maboroshi, but I can relate immediately to the problem of a foreign gaze emanating from film festivals. I think we need to distinguish between film critics, filmmakers, and moviegoers, however. I think Joe may be on the mark when he says it’s a matter of calling critics/judges on “not doing their homework”, that is not working at keeping track of what’s been going on in Japanese cinema and not making an effort to see more Japanese films so that when the big festivals come around the judges have more of a viewing experience than the few films that show up at that one event (I take it the submissions from Japan at a given festival are not numerous?). But to be fair to some writers, at least in English, the Ozuesque-y school of critical approach is what’s been mostly published on Japanese film in English, so even a homework-doing film critic in the US for instance might not have much in the way of resources, at least not as far as Japanese film criticism is concerned. Of course that doesn’t address the issue of why limit the assessment of a Japanese film to the categories/criticism done on Japanese film. Why are they not viewing a Japanese film in terms of whatever criteria they use for judging Euro-Am films? Well maybe they are to some extent and maybe that’s why not the best of Japanese output is being selected. After all, how often is the really best of Euro-Am films honored? Aaron, you’re not only coming from a position of knowing a great deal more about Japanese films (especially contemporary) than the vast majority of the journalistic film critics in the US (and in Europe, too?), but from that of a film scholar with standards for film quality beyond what many in the film or journalism industries will hold to (even if maybe they harbor them deep down).

As for moviegoers, I’m not sure their expectations are the same as the critics. Maboroshi actually showed in this cinematic near-backwater (at a theater that lends screen time to the local film society) and most of the audience at the screening I went to walked out with a ‘say what?’ look on their faces or actually in their comments (I had mixed feelings myself). I don’t think most of them would have known what a description of Ozuesque would mean–which is not a put-down. What I mean is that the moviegoers might be less encumbered cinematically than the critics. The problem with not-so-good or orientalist-satisfying films winning big international prizes is that they are then the movies that get picked up for distribution, thereby limiting what the more open segments of the audience can see.

But that doesn’t exactly address the ‘orientalist’ issue of a ‘western’ gaze. I think Aaron’s right that that there are certain expectations among Euro-Am critics for what a Japanese film is supposed to look like. It’s very possible that Kitano is just too dynamic and current to be molded (distorted) to those expectations and therefore he gets dismissed. I can’t speak about Kawase since I’m not familiar with her work, but perhaps the judges (and subsequent critics) found the film appealing because they could force their orientalist expectations (e.g., Zen) on her work and pursuade themselves that they were calling it correctly–however little she may make her work available to such interpretation. But the zen thing certainly supports your argument, Aaron. But let’s face it, this isn’t just a problem with film criticism, it’s a problem with the overall American gaze toward Japan. I’m thinking of banning the adjective “unique” from discussions and papers in my Japanese history survey classroom this fall. Banning Zen would be a little more problematic, but I wish I could: students grasp for whatever they can from their repertory of knowledge in order to help order their understanding. They simply come to class loaded down with a lot of baggage that’s very hard to shed. Students might have some excuse, since at least their whole raison d’etre for being students is that they still have a lot to learn, but the baggage is the same with film critics–except they ought to know better. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I taped many many hours of US television coverage of Japan–news stories, feature films, variety, sitcoms, etc–whenever I happened upon something and had the time or energy to slip in a tape. Although I wound up never viewing all that stuff systematically, the real touchstone of it all was the coverage of Hirohito’s funeral. Sure, the stuff on the funeral itself was all funnelled through NHK (and therein lies a tale in itself), but the filler wasn’t and it was stuffed with what you might expect: national treasures, crafts, ‘traditions’ and rituals, etc.; or else the “Japanese Version” type of mockery on how the Japanese can’t get ‘Western’ practices, products, philosophies. etc. ‘right’. What Aaron’s bringing up is a problem not confined to the cinema.

But the cinema is what this site is about so the issue just rises again: what do we need to publish to encourage more of a mix? Should we be discussing such an issue (orientalist gaze on Japanese cinema) in a more open forum? Should we start discussions of each other’s work on this closed site? Ouch, that could become rambunctious, but it might be a good way to start a focused inquiry into where studies of Japanese cinema might be heading or channeled and where our own respective work fits–for better or worse– into such studies. Should we be enhancing the Burch file, expanding the problems his work raises to the larger issue of criticism (at least in English) of Japanese cinema–and it’s relationship to the history of scholarship on Japan in general (especially re post-war, occupation-emerged scholars trying to reconcile the US government and public to their former ‘enemy’)? Aaron identifies that the Cannes’ awards do point to a serious problem. Maybe this goes back to the flurry of messages about the Japan film encyclopedia a way back (have we all recoiled in terror over where the time would come for such a worthy project?). There’s a problem out there, and let’s make sure we’re not part of it.

Incidentally, the lack of initial response to your spurt of messages, Aaron, is probably related to many of us just finishing the spring semester. I’m flacid with exhaustion from the last weeks of the semester and did nothing yesterday but read a really bad, old mystery someone gave me called “The Japanese Corpse”–a book that epitomizes the orientalist gaze. But yes now I really can get to that data base list. How are we doing on that?

Does anyone know if any of Takeshi’s films are subtitled in English and distributed in the US at this time? I’ve lost touch with the distributors because the 35mm screening possibilities are limited at WFU, but I’d like to try to get the local film society to show one of his films.

Joanne

Date: Wed, 21 May 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Re: Suzaku and Zen

Joseph wrote,

>Sorry about the lack of comments. I don’t know about the rest of you, but >as for me, I HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIES and am feeling acutely the pain of >being isolated from the metropolitan centers.

Sorry to all of you for spouting so long about films I know you haven’t seen. Heck, they haven’t even started press screenings of _Suzaku_ in Japan yet (the only reason I saw it is because Naomi’s a friend and I saw it at the first screening at the developing lab), so few people have seen it here as well. Still, I just thought I’d give you my opinion in order to bring up the larger issue.

> I remember an article in the Asahi Shinbun last year quoting Koreeda (I >think) on how strange it was to have Italian critics asking him about the >”aesthetics of death” in relation to a film about suicide (read, >”Mishima”), so even for readers of mainstream media in Japan, I think >there’s a widespread sense that the success of Japanese film abroad says >more about the needs of the west than any genuine interest in Japan.

You’re right, there is widespread awareness of the problems in what the West sees in Japanese films, but I think we still see the double-sided nature of the narrative of national identity that I find in 1910s discussions of cinema and the foreign imagination. People are fully aware that Westerners look on Japan either as an exotic object, or as an object of revulsion (the anxieties about Japan bashing), but at the same time, there is a sense that any recognition by the West is something to be thankful for. Everyone still puts in big letters on their posters/ads at what film festivals the film has shown and what foreign prizes it has won. In constructing the Japanese subject through the mirror of the Western gaze, any appreciation is a thankful one and must be appropriated in the construction of the self. I think that’s one reason that it is Japanese cultural institutions themselves that are some of the biggest promoters of Orientalist visions of Japan (Remember that it is often the film companies that choose which films are to be shown at Cannes. Kawase was an exception in this case: Cannes invited that, I heard.) This is part of the fundamental ambivalence in the construction of Japanese modern national identity. National IDs are in a way constructed through the Hegelian master-slave dynamic, but most discussions focus on how the master’s ID is constructed. What is going on with the slave in this power dynamic? Clearly, Japan is still not in a power situation vis a vis the West where it can simply use the West as a mirror: it must, at the same time, play the mirror to the West and produce itself as appropriately “reflective.” As such, Japanese national identity has always involved an element of performance in the international theater. I’m still thinking this through, but this does obviously connect with the issue of the identity of the colonized, although Japan’s case is quite different in certain regards. Anybody else thinking about the same things?

…Still, to get back to the issue, I am painfully aware these days how much “homework” or “viewing context” affects one’s way of viewing films. It’s not simply a question of seeing different things in films, it also means that gaps have been created in one’s discourse on cinema that are not always easy to bridge. Some things I say about Japanese film just cannot be understood by a French critic who only sees one Japanese film a year at Cannes. True, there are always these problems in discourse, but it is precisely these gaps, these divisions between discursive territories, which help reinforce Orientalist visions when they are articulated within discourses of the nation, etc.

>I agree with you, though. That’s also why I’ve been interested in Q. >Tarentino’s interest in Kitano Takeshi. I remember an interview on >Newstation 10 when Tarentino was in Japan in 1995 and someone asked him who >his favorite Japanese director was and it went over really well when he >said Kitano and was able to articulate the similarity in their concerns. >There’s some anticipation of “Sonatine“ ‘s release in the US in SPIN/Wired >type magazines too, and I’ve seen little orientalist cant. I did see >”Kid’s Return” though, and worried that it was evidence of a sad decline in >Kitano Takeshi’s faculties since the accident (his TV commentary is losing >its bite too).

This is the question I wanted to ask, too. True, there is still the rampant Orientalization of Japan through visions of it’s traditional exoticism. But in the West these days, there’s also the boom in anime and manga. Ueno Toshiya has tried to explain that through Morely’s concept of Techno-Orientalism, so maybe we can theorize that. But what of the popularity of Takeshi, not only with QT, but in France and England? In some ways, this also relates (especially in QT and his ilk) with the popularity of Hong Kong action film. How can we explain this? There is a kind of cult culture around this, but why has HK and Takeshi become the object and how does that function within aspects of Western (sub)cultural imagination? Is there a different articulation of orientalism here?

By the way, I personally think _Kid’s Return_ was great, through I prefer _Sonatine_. Instead of a decline, I see a very different perspective. Why did you think it was a decline, Joe?

Aaron

Date: Wed, 21 May 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Re: Suzaku and Zen

Wow!! Great to get long comments from Joanne and Joe!

Joanne wrote:

>I think we need to distinguish between film critics, >filmmakers, and moviegoers, however.

>But to be >fair to some writers, at least in English, the Ozuesque-y school of >critical approach is what’s been mostly published on Japanese film in >English, so even a homework-doing film critic in the US for instance might >not have much in the way of resources, at least not as far as Japanese film >criticism is concerned.

Joanne hit part of the problem right on the button. It is we and our predecessors who have created some of the Orientalist visions of Japanese film. That’s why it’s imperative that, while we will probably never be able to completely confront the problem in ourselves, we must continually address it in our teaching and writing.

>Of course that doesn’t address the issue of why >limit the assessment of a Japanese film to the categories/criticism done on >Japanese film. Why are they not viewing a Japanese film in terms of >whatever criteria they use for judging Euro-Am films? Well maybe they are >to some extent and maybe that’s why not the best of Japanese output is >being selected.

Good point. But, to use _Suzaku_ again, there are some basic lot problems in that film: for instance, a main character dies and then the entire family gathers to watch the 8mm film he made with the camera he “always” carried with him. But no where in the film before that did we see him with that camera: this just comes out of the blue (others have cited the same problem and I have heard that some problems on the set created this and other “errors”). We can argue about how to deal with such problems (whether they can be critically resurrected, so to speak), but I have the sense that a somewhat Orientalist perspective can take what to many Japanese spectators is a mistake and turn it into “Zen” mysticism (though, maybe not necessarily in the case of this error). True, many do look at Japanese film with the same standards they use for Am-Euro films, but there is always the expectation that it will be something “different,” a perspective that can turn even “errors” into “art.”

>What I mean is that the moviegoers >might be less encumbered cinematically than the critics. The problem with >not-so-good or orientalist-satisfying films winning big international >prizes is that they are then the movies that get picked up for >distribution, thereby limiting what the more open segments of the audience >can see.

>But let’s face it, this isn’t just a >problem with film criticism, it’s a problem with the overall American gaze >toward Japan.

Joanne’s right. Personally, I have always thought that my writing about cinema is not simply an intervention in film studies or even Japan studies, but part of a larger effort to change popular Western views about Japan. (Now that I write for a newspaper, I do realize my audience is much broader these days). What we write, what films we add to the canon, what we teach all do contribute to the construction of views of Japan, not only by Americans/Europeans, but also Japanese. (I was recently asked to give a public lecture in Tokyo offering the “foreign” view of Japanese film. I will try to change the talk’s direction.)

>Sure, the stuff on the funeral >itself was all funnelled through NHK (and therein lies a tale in itself), >but the filler wasn’t and it was stuffed with what you might expect: >national treasures, crafts, ‘traditions’ and rituals, etc.; or else the >”Japanese Version” type of mockery on how the Japanese can’t get ‘Western’ >practices, products, philosophies. etc. ‘right’.

Right. This is part of the problem in the Japanese national construction of itself: it is done both in terms of satisfying Orientalist visions of the exotic and in terms of trying to become the same as the West (with a few other contradictions thrown in.) This produces the ideology here that Japanese are “surface” Western, but “Japanese” at the “core.”

>But the cinema is what this site is about so the issue just rises again: >what do we need to publish to encourage more of a mix? Should we be >discussing such an issue (orientalist gaze on Japanese cinema) in a more >open forum? Should we start discussions of each other’s work on this >closed site? Ouch, that could become rambunctious, but it might be a good >way to start a focused inquiry into where studies of Japanese cinema might >be heading or channeled and where our own respective work fits–for better >or worse– into such studies.

I think we should follow Joanne’s proposal to start discussing how we ourselves should shape our own work to deal with these issues. One way is to discuss the canonical work written so far. Another is our own work published so far. Finally, proposals for the future.

Maybe we can make this one of the first topics of discussion for the open list. I have prepared most of the documents that are necessary for the open list and, waiting for responses from Maureen and Markus, we should be able to get started by the end of the month.

>Does anyone know if any of Takeshi’s films are subtitled in English and >distributed in the US at this time? I’ve lost touch with the distributors >because the 35mm screening possibilities are limited at WFU, but I’d like >to try to get the local film society to show one of his films.

Miramax bought _Sonatine_ and, as Joe mentioned, is scheduled for US release (I heard it was the end of May. Any news on that?) Others might have bought rights to his other films (I would not be surprised if _Kids Return_, which is doing good BO in France, was not bought), but I have no info on that. Anyone?

Aaron

Date: Fri, 14 Nov 97 20:18:02 -0000

From: ironhart

Subject: inq: What’s a Zen movie?

Since many new people have joined the circle since I did my first introduction allow me to reintroduce myself.

My name is Paul Tesshin Silverman and I live in Oita Prefecture (kyushu) in Japan. I am currently the Master (jushoku) of the Tetsugyuji Zen Temple here and often run various social & spiritual programs for the public. Before getting involved with this world I was a working theatre/industrial film director in America. Last year (coming on my 10th year here) I decided to combine my various backgrounds and began preparations on my first Japanese feature film. Without any support Ive managed to put together an indie production which this week-end will finish shooting. The title of the film is Hazama Monogatari. Actually we have shot it on Betacam Sp and when the final edit is completed will look for means to transfer it to 35mm. From this point on the post-production process begins. Im expecting all of you critics in this circle to give it big hearty S.O. when ,and if, it ever makes it your local movie house. :)

Im leaving for New York in a few weeks (teaching a workshop at the Japan Society and Juilliard) but I wanted to toss out an inquiry before I go. People often ask me about the relationship between Zen and film making. We all know about the profound affect Zen has had on various arts in Japan but I find it difficult to explain this in terms of film. For me its a very personal process. Last year I attended the American Buddhist Conference in Boston and enjoyed many wonderful workshops. One of which was on Zen and the Japanese Arts< given by John Stevens. During the Q&A I raised this questions and there was total silence in the audience. As if the relationship on an art as modern as film (all 100 years old) had not been considered. So Id like to hear what you all have to say about this. How do you perceive the relationship between Zen and film making? What is a Zen movie!?! How would you define it? Ive seen a few that people recommended and I didnt get it.

As a side note, the now well-known Director Suo did a film several years ago about life in a Zen temple called Fancy Dance. (Actually not only was I in it, I worked as an advisor for the actors. Except for a couple of the large scenes in which monks of the temple were asked to lend their faces<, I was the only Zen priest in the cast). From my perspective, this film although about life in a Zen temple is NOT a Zen movie. What do you think?

Paul Tesshin Silverman

_____________________________________

Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997

From: Josiah Luke Winn

Subject: Re: inq: What’s a Zen movie?

Hello, my name is Joss Winn and I’m a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I study Japanese Buddhism, particularly Zen, and am also a student this semester of Prof. Mark Nornes in his Asian Cinema class (highly recommended!) I follow the discussions of KineJapan quite closely but haven’t had much to contribute until now.

This message is quite long and mostly concerns itself with Buddhism and not film. I do think, however, that it is entirely relevant to the question of a “Zen movie.”

With regards to “What’s a Zen movie?”, we first have to ask “what is Zen?” There is a habit in the West (I don’t know about Japan) to abuse the term ‘zen’ and manipulate it for all manner of enterprises. It has an exotic appeal that is consistently taken advantage of. Of course, we talk of ‘Zen art’, so why not ‘Zen movies’? Well, it depends on what piece of art we’re talking about. If it’s one of Hakuin’s brush paintings, then yes, that is certainly art within the Zen Buddhist tradition. It is ‘Zen art’. I have no problems with the use of the term ‘Zen’ in instances like this. It is when we find such things as ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘Zen and the Art of Making Lots of Cash’ (I made the last one up but have seen these types of books). It is this abuse of the term that has led to the quite common remark, “oh, how very Zen!” which, if we examine what Zen actually was and still is in most instances, this is an entirely ignorant exclamation, drawing not from the Buddhist conception of Zen, but from the Western misconception of Zen that has developed over the last century.

I do not see myself as a Zen purist, nor am I a Zen Buddhist, although I have spent a brief period in Japan training at a Ryutakuji, a Rinzai Zen monastery in Shizuoka-ken. I also attended regular ‘sittings’ and retreats at a Zen temple in London for a few years, so I have had some contact with the tradition beyond books. However, it is to books that we should turn if we want to understand the historical development of the Western conception of ‘Zen’. I think if we do this, it will allow us to consider whether a ‘Zen Movie’ is possible, and if so, what would it be like?

The introduction of Zen in Europe and the USA is due almost entirely to the efforts of DT Suzuki, a name that many people are familiar with. Suzuki wrote dozens of books on Zen in English and provided the foundations for both the popular and scholarly understanding of Zen in the West today. However, in the last decade, Suzuki’s works have come under considerable criticisim for presenting an entirely twisted sense of the Zen tradition’s history, doctrine and practice.

Suzuki’s presentation of Zen rests largely on his position as a scholar during the Meiji and Taisho periods. If we read his works they present the essence of Zen as an experience of ‘satori’or ‘enlightenment’. (There is a problem with talking about an ‘essence’ in Buddhism which, doctrinally, argues there is no essence to anything-so how come, for Suzuki, their is an ‘essence of Zen’?) This over emphasis on satori has been shown, quite convincingly, to derive from Suzuki’s position as a Meiji Buddhist scholar.

During the Meiji period, Buddhism was severely persecuted for being a foreign tradition while the State were attempting to emphasise the indigenous Shintoism as the national ethic. In response, Buddhist institutions realised the need for reform and began to promote a new type of Buddhism, one that was no longer the rich land-owning and rather stagnant tradition that it had become, but rather a vibrant tradition that was immediately relevant to everyone. Part of their efforts were directed towards establishing private Buddhist Universities in order to compete with the new State universities. As a result of this, a new form of scholarship was born: Japanese Buddhology. (Interestingly, it is now the largest body of scholarship on Buddhism in the world). This scholarship followed the Japanese model of Buddhism as being highly sectarian (in no other Buddhist country are different forms of Buddhism defined in terms of their institutional history-usually,in other countries, all types of belief and practice can found within a single monastic copmpound).

Suzuki must be understood as not only a Buddhist scholar, but also a Meiji scholar who was educated in a new system of education, was highly susceptible to Western modes of thinking and whose own understanding of Zen was influenced by Western psychology and philosophy. Prof. Robert Sharf of the University of Michigan has done quite a convincing job of showing where Suzuki was coming from, who his sources of understanding were and why he presented Zen as he did. He shows how Suzuki’s emphasis on satori, or the ‘Zen experience’ is a gross misrepresentation of Zen Buddhism if we examine the history of the tradition itself. In fact, Sharf argues that Suzuki’s emphasis on satori as the quintessential Zen experience is used in the interests of a greater nationalistic discourse. Sharf shows how Suzuki defines satori as uniquely Japanese, and that Westerners are unable to experience it. By interpreting the Zen experience in this way, Suzuki was able to place both Zen and the ‘enlightened’ beneficiaries of that tradition (i.e. the entire Japanese nation) above the increasingly influential Western powers and the threat of imperialism.

From my brief time in a Zen monastery (two months during the summer of 1994) I found that the Zen life (as epitomized by the monastic life),has very little to do with what Suzuki is talking about. Rather, monks are more concerned with learning elaborate ritual techiniques, memorizing scriptures and performing the daily work routine.

Within Buddhism, the monks and nuns are seen as absolutely essential to the continuation of the tradition. The monastic lifestyle provides the perfect example of Buddhist practice, and so I am inclined to think that if we are really to get a sense of what Zen is, then we must understand what is going on in the monastery. This is not to suggest that lay practioners are not practicing Zen correctly or authentically (what is authentic practice anyway?) but that the regulated monastic lifestyle presents the ideal within the tradition of what Zen is. If we are to accept this, then much of the Western understanding of Zen needs to be revised and Suzuki needs to be put back on the shelf only to be reverentially dusted once in a while. Indeed Suzuki was important as the populariser of Zen in the West, and he presented it a way that was very seductive and in terms that were very recognizable. But that is the problem. When Suzuki used terms like ‘the Zen experience’, he was not refering to anything found within the Zen tradition itself, but rather an interpretation unique to him and a few other progressive scholars learned in Western psychology and philosophy. Sharf goes so far to say that ‘Suzuki’s Zen is not Zen at all’. I understand what Sharf is saying, but it requires some elaboration (see above) and also suggests that Zen doesn’t change. Indeed the tradition has changed, and Suzuki’s influence in the West was admired by some Japanese priests who, realising that it was a way of reviving their failing tradition, adopted much of his terminology to explain themselves. However, for the most part, Suzuki did not significantly change the Zen tradition in Japan. The monks might desire satori, but for the most part, they are more interested in learning the professional techniques in order to serve their local community in the form of performing funerary rites.

I do not mean to present a negative image of Zen or Japanese Buddhism. On the contrary, I have a great deal of admiration and interest in contemporary Buddhism in Japan (there is nothing wrong with performing funerary rites!) However, I do think it is important to understand our own misunderstanding of Zen, and realise that when we see a book called ‘Zen and the Art of Making Cash’ it is so far removed from what the tradition is today, that it’s a joke.

I have also wondered about Richie’s questionable interpretation of Ozu when he describes the “empty moments” in his films as examples of “mu, a Zen aesthetic term implying, among other things, nothingness” Without getting into the details of Buddhist philosophy, we should note that as a Zen term, Mu is a strictly soteriological term indeed referring to ‘emptiness’, although not ‘nothingness’. It would appear that Richie is saying that in one sense, Ozu’s films are ‘Zen Movies’, and perhaps Ozu did have an interest in Zen. Yet, it is quite likely that both Richie and Ozu would have received their understanding of Zen from popular books either by Suzuki or by others influenced by him and not from the tradition itself.

So what, if it is possible, is a Zen Movie? Surely not one full of empty moments-that would be a cliche long since given up by contemporary Zen scholars. What is Zen? It’s a Buddhist tradition in which monks (and a few nuns) concern themselves with rituals of some sort or another. They meditate (a ritual), chant scripture, worship the Buddha and a whole lineage of patriarchs going back to the Buddha, they perform funerary rites, go on alms, spend a great deal of time cleaning and maintaining their monastery and provide a center for the local community to practice generosity (by giving gifts to the monks) and learn about the history of Buddhism, and the basic teachings of the Buddha. Occasionally a temple might offer classes in mediation, although this is rare. Zen is also a Buddhist tradition with which the laity might concern themselves when a family member dies, or as a place to go for New Year’s celebrations. Of course, a very small minority of the laity also meditate at home, at a local temple or during week long monastic retreats. Yet most of the time, the lay Zen Buddhist performs daily reverence to the family ancestors at the Butsudan (the domestic shrine) and is not concerned with emptiness or enlightenment.

Aside from studying Buddhism, I am also interested in making films and would love to combine my interest in Zen Buddhism and film-making. To be a Zen film, it would have to be a Buddhist film; that is, it would somehow include themes of suffering, the absence of self, the persistence of life due to past good and bad actions, and the opportunity to stop this continuation of life and simultaneously help others do so too. We may ask, “would it have a happy or sad ending?” Theoretically, it couldn’t possibly have a truely happy ending because the audience would still be left in the theatres as the credits roll, evidence that there are still suffering Beings present in the world. Yet it needn’t have a sad ending either since the fact that Buddhism still exists in the world (testified by the very creation of our Zen film), means that there is still the opportunity for all Beings to attain nirvana/enlightenment. Perhaps there should be no ending to the film, just as there is no ending to the cycle of death and rebirth without enlightenment (I would not suggest that my film could enlighten anyone!) By having no ending, the audience would naturally be frustrated and have the opportunity to reflect on suffering as they watch the credits!

Well, I hope those that have bothered to read this far can understand my irritation with the popular use of the term ‘Zen’. When I first saw “Zen movies”, I imagined empty moments of silence and motorcycle maintenance, and I’m very bored of coming across that.

Joss

p.s. good luck with your film, Paul!

_____________________________________

Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997

From: (Abe-Nornes)

Subject: Re: inq: What’s a Zen movie?

To be honest, I have been waiting for this issue to come up ever since we gathered under the KineJapan banner!

Many thanks to Joss for his very informative post.

Every time I teach Asian cinema, there are students who want to write papers on “Zen films.” I always drill them on what they think this apparent _genre_ is. The logic is inevitably the same: Zen underlies Japanese culture, setting it apart from other nations/Film must been seen as a product of Japanese culture, setting it apart from other national cinemas/If we look hard enough, we’ll find Zen in all Japanese film/…but certain directors like Ozu produce a _stronger_ Zen aesthetic.

This is usually the logic underlying attempts in film studies to link Zen and Japanese cinema, an approach that has largely disappeared in recent years. For good examples, see the Schrader book, bits and pieces of Richie, or Stephen Prince’s article “Zen and Selfhood” (in the database). Some of these writers are Kinema Clubbers; perhaps they could reflect on these methodologies!

David, I seem to remember that an early version of your Eros+Massacre chapter on Ogawa and Tsuchimoto makes connections to Zen, but this gets dropped in the book version. What happened between these two publications?

Also, Joss writes:

The monastic lifestyle provides the perfect example of Buddhist practice, and so I am inclined to think that if we are really to get a sense of what Zen is, then we must understand what is going on in the monastery.

Yes, but perhaps more important for this discussion is the function of Zen in popular culture; this is basically what we are dealing with when it comes to the cinema question. This helps us sidestep questions which you begin to raise on “authentic” traditions. A better approach is to think of practice, its appearance in popular culture being one important form that may have absolutely nothing to do with what goes on in the monasteries.

That’s for the question of film production. As for Western criticism, Joss’ discussion on Suzuki is certainly the basic background for understanding “Why Zen?”, as opposed to one or another of the mish mash of religions from the Japanese mix.

Markus

PS: Here are the articles I mentioned, entries coming from a quick trip to the new Kinema Club database.
 

Author : Schrader, Paul

Journal : Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer

Imprint : (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)

Title : Zen and Selfhood: Patterns of Eastern Thought inKurosawa’s Films

Author : Prince, Stephen

Journal : Post Script

Imprint : 7.2 (Winter 1988): 4-17

Title : Zen and the Art of Documentary

Author : Desser, David

Journal : East-WestJournal

Imprint : 1.2 (1987): 45-59

[you can see some of the work needed on the database entries, missing spaces and punctuation…annotations….]

_____________________________________

Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997

From: (David Desser)

Subject: Re: inq: What’s a Zen movie?

At 11:55 PM 11/15/97, Abe-Nornes wrote:

David, I seem to remember that an early version of your Eros+Massacre chapter on Ogawa and Tsuchimoto makes connections to Zen, but this gets dropped in the book version. What happened between these two publications?

Title : Zen and the Art of Documentary

Author : Desser, David

Journal : East-WestJournal

Imprint : 1.2 (1987): 45-59

The above-named essay was not at all intended to be an examination of Zen or Zen aesthetics in the production of Ogawa’s documentaries. It was, in fact, an attempt at a “catchy” title a la “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” If I had any real notions of linking Ogawa’s practice to Zen (and I didn’t really) it was along the lines of “the Zen of everyday life” wherein one lives fully, in the moment, totally dedicated to whatever it is one is doing. If one knows Ogawa’s documentary practice, one sees a dedication to his subject matter unique in world cinema. While I will stand by this latter notion of Zen, it’s not crucial to the article. A reading of the article shows that I make no great efforts to define Zen or link Ogawa’s important and challenging films to any sort of “Zen” influences. Just a catchy title more than anything else.

David

_____________________________________

Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997

From: (marran)

Subject: Suo/zen

Dear Paul,

I don’t have an opinion on what constitutes a “zen movie;” and yet I feel fairly confident in agreeing with you that Fancy Dance is NOT a zen movie. It is a satirical film that is located in a zen temple. Fancy Dance seems similar in general form to his film on starting a sumo club at a university, Shiko-funjatta. I actually found Suo’s Hentai kazoku a much more inventive, satiirically funny film.

-christine marran

_____________________________________

Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997
From: SYBIL THORNTON
Subject: Re: inq: What’s a Zen movie?

My understanding of what Zen is is based on the work of Robert Scharf and especially one paper he delivered at the American Academy of Religion a couple of years ago. To whit, the purpose of studying Zen is to become a Buddha and one’s competence is publicly demonstrated in certain ceremonies involving a sermon delivered by the abbot whose status is indicated by mastery of a particular diction (Zen talk). Zen’s survival into the premodern period was based on its ability to convert its strategies for turning humans into buddhas into a pedagogy for converting apprentices into masters of just about any performing art–flower arranging, calligraphy (just what Zen art is is made clear by going to a museum exhibit of a sumie master with 10 or 20 surviving copies of the same cartoon, performed in the presence of an audience and then presented), swordsmanship, you name it. Thus, I think, we should look at Zen film less from the perspective of the product than from the perspective of its production and reproduction of its tradition. I don’t think there is any such thing as Zen film. There is however a process for training filmmakers and performers characterized by a preconceived model of form and diction and a rigorous apprenticeship under a master.

SYBIL THORNTON

HISTORY-ASU

_____________________________________

From: “Mark Schilling”

Subject: Re: inq: What’s a Zen movie?

Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997

Re the “Zen movie” discussion. One example of an explicitly “Zen” film that comes to mind is “Why Did Bodhi Dharma Go to The Orient?,” which Iwanami Hall screened in 1991. For the curious, here is my Japan Times review:

Why Did Bodhi Dharma Go to the Orient?

By Mark Schilling

Bae Yong-Kyun’s “Why Did Bodhi Dharma Go To The Orient?” takes its title from a koan – a verbal key to unlocking one’s Zen mind. But those who try to grasp the key find it very slippery indeed. Why did a Buddhist monk make the long, hard journey from India to China in the sixth century?

To a historian, the answer may seem obvious; Bodhi Dharma went to the East to spread Buddhism. To a Zen priest, the answer lies beyond logic, historical or otherwise. And yet it is a plain as the nose on your face! To the student earnestly seeking the Way – and desperately racking his brain for the solution to this riddle – it may seem madden ing, this “plainness.”

How much more maddening for a filmmaker, intent on communicating the essence of Zen to an audience! He is faced with a impossible task. And in Korea, where film financing for uncommercial subjects is as hard to find as a rose in a rock garden, he is seemingly defeated from the start.

Bae Yong-Kyun, a university professor, not only made his film, but did it virtually singlehanded; the credits list him as director, scriptwriter,director of photography, art director and editor. Also, the film went on to win the Grand Prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. His is an amazing accomplishment.

The film itself, not surprisingly, is as uncompromising as the old mountain priest who is one of its central figures. He has absorbed Zen into his very bones; the film tries to exemplify it in every frame. The result is similar to a session of zazen; flashes of insight, moments of drowsiness and pain. The film does tell stories, but they are as enigmatic – and tantalizing – as a Zen fable. Why, we wonder, are these people doing these strange things?

Why, for example, does a young man abandon his blind mother and sister to serve as an assistant to the old priest, who lives like a hermit in a remote mountain temple? Isn’t he simply being selfish? Why is he seeking his own salvation when he could be helping others?

He tells himself that Bodhi Dharma followed the same path – and did enormous good. He also tortures himself with the thought that he is an undutiful son and brother.

The film gives no easy answers. Yes, this search- after-wisdom is selfish, it says, but it is also necessary. The young priest can no more abandon his quest – or his teacher – than leap out of his skin. Ironically, it is just this kind of leap that his teacher demands.

There is also another resident at the temple, a boy. Like the two priests, he lives apart from the outside “world of illusion.” But unlike them, he did not choose to come to the temple. He has grown up hearing his elders speak of Zen, but has never consciously sought its truths.

Boy-like, he throws rocks at a flock of birds and injures one. Though he cares for it, the bird dies. As a kind of karmic retribution, the boys falls into a river and starts thrashing for dear life. But, suddenly, he lets himself go and finds that, instead of drowning, he floats. He has learned an important rule of swimming – and life.

The films is filled with similar moments of revelation. Although the young priest questions and the old priest preaches (contrary to the strong, silent stereotype, this Master is as full of pithy wisdom as Barry Fitzgerald), the film presents most of these moments minus dialogue. It is the images, more than the voices, that we remember. The young priest begging silently for alms on a crowded Seoul street, the boy following an ox home through a dark forest, the old priest meditating in the dimly lit temple, his dark form outlined on the glowing shoji.

If anything, Bae is too much in love with his images, not enough with his characters. Frame by frame, the film is a masterpiece of composition and lighting (it would make a lovely book of stills), but it presents its three heroes as Zen exemplars. The actors, all amateurs, are well-suited for their roles and turn in fine performances. But the film gives us only glimpses of them as human beings, as when the old priest laughingly extracts the boy’s bad tooth with a piece of string or the young priest grimly tends the fire that is consuming his master’s corpse.

Perhaps this emotional austerity is necessary to the film’s message, but it is also wearing. We can feel the passion that Bae put into this project (he reportedly spent three years filming and one editing), but we leave it hungry for pleasure. Wrong expectations are to blame; Bae is offer ing us enlightenment, not entertainment. The theater should hire a priest to give worldly patrons a thwack on the shoulder when their attention starts to wander. It would definitely create the right atmosphere for this most meditative of movies.

_____________________________________

Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997

From: Josiah Luke Winn

Subject: Re: inq: What’s a Zen movie?

There is a brief bibliography at the end of my message.

Sybil Thornton wrote:

“I think, we should look at Zen film less from the perspective of the product than from the perspective of its production and reproduction of its tradition. I don’t think there is any such thing as Zen film. There is however a process for training filmmakers and performers characterized by a preconceived model of form and diction and a rigorous apprenticeship under a master.”

It would seem that I am not the only one to consider Robert Sharf’s work on Zen as useful for this discussion (strange,in that he wouldn’t regard himself as a Zen scholar). When I initially responded to Paul’s question, I also wrote that I didn’t think there was such a thing as a Zen film, but then decided to omit this, thinking that I was being a little too hasty.

When I wrote last time, I wanted to detract from the rather crude efforts of a ‘Zen style’ of film that lingers on emptiness and silence, and suggest a ‘fuller’ film style, one that I think reflects more accurately, the zen lifestyle. I should add something at this point following David Desser’s comment: “ ‘the Zen of everyday life’ wherein one lives fully, in the moment, totally dedicated to whatever it is one is doing.” Admittedly this kind of remark is found in every popular book on Zen, yet it is by no means unique to Zen. Every Buddhist tradition would include this as an essential practice. It’s this kind of misunderstanding that we need to be aware of when talking about Zen. There is, in fact, little that distinguishes it from any other Buddhist tradition except for an obsession with it’s patriarchal geneaology and a greater emphasis placed on meditation-although not in all cases.

Clearly, if we are to make a ‘zen film’, we should be aware of what Zen is, and understand the rhetorical moves often found within the tradition. The Zen tradition is fortunate in many ways, that it had such a charismatic spokesperson to represent it in the West (Suzuki). In Japan the situation is different of course. Zen is just another Buddhist sect and far from being the most popular. It’s influence on the arts derives mostly from it’s political connections during the Muromachi period, and not because there is something intrinsically unique to it that defines the Japanese. Much of our understanding of Zen and Japanese culture comes from Suzuki’s book of that title, a book which although still in print, is now the subject of much criticism today among scholarly circles.

My knowledge of art within the Zen tradition is very slim, and although I have criticised the emphasis on Zen emptiness, silence, minimalism, etc. these are features that we can identify in traditional Zen arts. Indeed if one were to go to a Zen monastery one would see that there is very little ornament, especially compared to, say, a Shingon monastery. Yet, minimalism isn’t the exclusive property of the Zen tradition, nor is emptiness. We should remember that Buddhism is an ascetic tradition and that this lifestyle demands a certain amount of minimalism (admittedly few Japanese priests would seem to follow this). The emphasis on emptiness is also by no means exclusive to Zen. It has been the central philosophical doctrine of the entire East Asian Buddhist tradition since it’s arrival in China in the 2nd century.

Obviously there is a Zen aesthetic, yet how we translate that onto film I’m not quite sure. How significant should we deem it anyway? Surely,there would be more to a Zen film that it’s immediate sensual properties. I do remember enjoying Bae Yong-Kyun’s film but am inclined to think that Paul’s original question was referring more to Zen style than a film explicitly about Zen. As I have mentioned, I am more interested in considering what a Zen narrative would consist of, what themes would it address?

With regards to Markus’ comment: “Yes, but perhaps more important for this discussion is the function of Zen in popular culture; this is basically what we are dealing with when it comes to the cinema question. This helps us sidestep questions which you begin to raise on “authentic” traditions. A better approach is to think of practice, its appearance in popular culture being one important form that may have absolutely nothing to do with what goes on in the monasteries.”

To do this we have to consider whether we are talking about Zen in the USA or Zen in Japan. The two are quite different. I’m not sure if I should really attempt to answer how Zen functions in either culture as I have only spent a couple of months in Japan, and most of this was in a monastery. Neither am I qualified to talk much about Zen in the USA, as I’m really only a visitor here. In Japan, there are a few opportunities for the populace to practice Zen meditation outside of the monastery. It is also common for Zen monasteries to encourage companies to send groups of business men to do week long intensive retreats. The retreat I did had twenty or so business men there, most of whom had never meditated before. Their company was also kind enough to provide cakes and buns for everyone each day! Anyway, I will leave Zen and popular culture to someone else for now. It has been my intention to point out the misunderstanding many Westerners (and even some Japanese) have about the term ‘Zen’and to encourage a more ‘enlightened’ (sorry!) perspective. I really think it could be much more interesting than what we have had up to now. It would also allow us to appreciate the richness of the tradition beyond the usual spin on emptiness and minimalism. Unlike Sybil, I do think that a ‘Zen film’ is possible, one that communicates issues found within the tradition without a reliance on overt symbolism and empty imagery and yet offers Zen answers or a Zen perspective on life through the use of narrative in a subtle and familiar way. Since it is a religious tradition, it should be relevant to all aspects of life, offering suggestions and guidance. Neither would the film rest on the pretence of offering the viewer a glimpse of enlightenment (within the Zen traditon, enlightenment is handed down and certified individually from master to disciple, something a film-maker could not do).

Well, if anyone’s interested, I would really love to work on getting a project together…..

Joss

p.s. here’s the brief bibliography:

Faure, B. 1995. ‘The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism.’ Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives. Eds. Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Steven Heine. Albany: SUNY.

• 1993. Chan Insights and Oversights. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• 1991. The Rhetoric of Immediacy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Foulk, T.G. 1988. ‘The Zen Institution in Modern Japan’ Zen Tradition and Transition. Ed. Kenneth Kraft. New York: Grove Press. 157-177.

Ketelaar, James Edward. 1990. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan. Buddhism and its Persecution. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Sharf, Robert H. 1995. ‘The Zen of Japanese Nationalism.’ Curators of the Buddha: The study of Buddhism Under Colonialism. Ed. D. Lopez Jnr. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

• 1994. ‘Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited’ Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyoto School & the Question of Nationalism. Eds. James W. Heisig & John C. Maraldo, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.

Stone, J. 1990. ‘A Vast and Grave Task: Interwar Buddhist Studies as an Expression of Japan’s Envisioned Global Role.’ Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar Years. Ed. Rimer, J.T. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Suzuki, D.T. 1953. ‘Zen: A Reply to Hu Shih.’ Philosophy East and West. 3: 25-46.

Date: Sat, 6 Sep 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Takeshi wins at Venice

This was just reported on the TV news:

Kitano Takeshi’s _Hana-bi_ won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Aaron Gerow

Yokohama National University

Kinema Club:

Date: Sun, 7 Sep 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow Subject: More on the Golden Lion (E+J)

Here’s an article in Japanese from the Yomiuri Shinbun online edition about _HANA-BI_’s win at Venice.

______________________________________

Date: Sun, 7 Sep 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Re: Some Reactions?

Good morning everyone,

I just woke up, got the morning paper (the _Mainichi shinbun_), and there it was: “Director Kitano Takeshi’s _HANA-BI_ wins Grand Prize.” Right on the front page, just below the article on Diana’s funeral.

I wonder whether the press will make as much of a fuss as when _Unagi_ won at Cannes, given that Venice is not as big a festival as Cannes. But it is Takeshi and it is big news, so it was nice to see it on the front page. The _Mainichi_ also ran an article on the _shakai_ page reviewing Takeshi’s directorial career, mentioning the awards at Cannes and Montreal (Ichikawa Jun), and quoting Yamane Sadao, who said “This has been a great year.” He also urged people to have more confidence in Japanese film, given the still reigning opinion that foreign films are better.

Well, we all know the politics of film festivals, but I’d like to ask two things. One, can we now put to rest the opinion still found among foreign viewers that “Japanese film is not as good as it used to be”? And two, does anyone think this and the other prizes this year will change how Japanese view their own cinema? There has been an increase in articles in magazines proclaiming the “rise” of Japanese film. Will Japanese now start going to see their own movies again?

Aaron Gerow

Yokohama National University

______________________________________

Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997

From: EIJA MARGIT NISKANEN

Subject: Re: Some Reactions?

I am pleased with the attention that Japanese cinema is getting at festivals - I hope this will reflect on the research on Japanese cinema as well, that the research will get more attention. What do you people with experience in this field think?

eija

______________________________________

Date: Wed, 10 Sep 97

From: Bill Thompson

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Aaron Gerow wrote: (in reference to Hana-bi’s prize at Venice and other Japanese films which received awards)

>Well, we all know the politics of film festivals, but I’d like to ask two >things. One, can we now put to rest the opinion still found among foreign viewers that “Japanese film is not as good as it used to be”?

I’m certainly glad that these films won their recent prizes. Unfortunately, I feel the answer to this question is no. Why?

When Suo was at the Museum of Modern Art to present Shall We Dansu? at New Directors/New Films this spring, he began his introduction by stating that he thought many people outside Japan had the impression that Japanese comedies were overly heavy and dull, basically that they were quite uninspired. He then went on to say that he agreed with that assessment, and hoped his film would be an exception. Before Shall We Dansu? opened in the US, Miramax sent him around the US, and I imagine he made similar statements to the press in several large cities.

Americans don’t pay much attention to film festival prizes. Also, three awards in one year are nice, but changing impressions requires much more than this. So far films like Unagi and Hana-bi have not received much play outside of Japan, and to really change an impression they need to play widely.

Besides festival and one or two night screenings, what have “foreign viewers” been able to see lately? Let’s look at New York. Shall We Dance? has had a very successful commercial release, and is well on its way to becoming the most popular Japanese film in the US since Tampopo and Ran. However, the only other Japanese offerings to have any sort of a run here this year were a film starring a monster with an iron-shaped head and a revival of Woman in the Dunes, both of which played for two weeks. Last year we were fortunate to be able to see Maborosi, which had a limited but relatively successful run. Also, Tetsuo II and a one-week revival of Seven Samurai; Minbo may have had a very brief opening as well. The “big” film (a run of several weeks) two years was Tokyo Decadence, which certainly didn’t make the impression Aaron desires. Meanwhile, Love Letters and Sonatine have distributors who announced release dates, but then pushed back their releases.

I may have forgotten to include one or two titles, but not enough to contradict my basic point. To change perceptions people need to be able to readily see and be impressed by several titles so they will anxiously anticipate others.

Bill Thompson

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997
From: “Mark Schilling”
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

I agree with Bill Thompson that more Japanese films need to be widely distributed and more grassroots work needs to be done before even cinematically literate Americans become aware that Japan is still making interesting movies. Having said that, I feel that Japanese filmmakers who hope to truly crack the US market must follow Jackie Chan, Ang Lee and John Woo to Hollywood, cast name non-Japanese talent in their films and find a major studio to distribute. Given the provincialism of the average US moviegoer, who gags at the thought of reading subtitles, there just ain’t no other way.

Miramax did a truly excellent job promoting and distributing Shall We Dance and Masayuki Suo did yeoman’s work in selling his film and himself all across the country. The result: an opening weekend that surpassed that of any foreign-language film in recent memory, including Il Postino and New Cinema Paradise. But though Shall We Dance? is warming the hearts of Miramax’s bean counters and seems a good bet to pick up a Best Foreign Film Oscar, it is still being outgrossed by a bomb like Leave It to Beaver in the malls of America. Meanwhile Face/Off has passed the $100 million mark and has established John Woo as an A list director, with all the accompanying recognition and clout.

Is Face/Off a Hong Kong film? No. Is it a John Woo film? Having not see it, I can’t say, but Woo himself, from what I hear, has no plans to return to Hong Kong in disgust after being used and abused by Hollywood. Quite the contrary. He seems to like it there.

What is to stop Takeshi Kitano from making the same leap? He has the talent, the credentials and, from what I understand, the desire. Would the resulting film be Japanese? Perhaps not. But if it succeeds as a Takeshi Kitano film, why should it matter? The record of Japanese directors who shoot films in the US has been, I admit, mostly lamentable. But the time for a breakthrough, I think, is approaching. Otherwise Japanese filmmakers will be forever confined to the margins of the American movie scene.

Mark Schilling

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 11 Sep 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Bill Thompson gave a thorough and convincing account of how the lack of films in the US (or at least New York) is hampering whatever possibility there is of Japanese films enjoying a revival. As David Desser keeps on telling us, the films need to be seen.

But how is the press treating this in the US? Didn’t _Time_ and _Newsweek_ do articles on the Japanese film Renaissance (or were those articles only in the Asian editions)?

And even if the US still has problems (is LA any different?), I was wondering what some of our European participants could tell us about Europe. After all, these Japanese films are mostly winning at European festivals. Is there more of a Japanese film boom going on in Europe than in the US? The reports here in Japan are that Japanese films are the hottest thing on the European festival circuit. How is the press or the audience treating the new Japanese cinema?

Just curious.

Aaron Gerow

Yokohama National University

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 11 Sep 97

From: Bill Thompson

Subject: Some Impressions

I realized this morning that when I listed the films which had opened in NY last year, I forgot to include Ishii’s Angel Dust belated and brief theatrical premiere. Combining Angel Dust, Tokyo Decadence, and Tetsuo II, one sees three films in a pseudo-genre of pop punk/cyber-punk cinema. This is the largest grouping I can make with the few recent Japanese film releases.

Mark Schilling wrote:

>Miramax did a truly excellent job promoting and distributing Shall We Dance and Masayuki Suo did yeoman’s work in selling his film and himself all across the country. The result: an opening weekend that surpassed that of any foreign-language film in recent memory, including Il Postino and New Cinema Paradise. But though Shall We Dance? is warming the hearts of Miramax’s bean counters and seems a good bet to pick up a Best Foreign Film Oscar, it is still being outgrossed by a bomb like Leave It to Beaver in >the malls of America.

Beaver was the big Hollywood bomb both critically and commercially. Shall We Dance? played in art houses. I would guess that the only malls where it might have played were those with “arty” associations. If it gains a broader release, closer to “the malls of America”, we are talking about dubbing, another nasty word.

>Having said that, I feel that Japanese filmmakers who hope to truly crack the US market must follow Jackie Chan, Ang Lee and John Woo to Hollywood, cast name non-Japanese talent in their films and finda major studio to distribute.

Jackie Chan, John Woo, and Tsui Hark were all top Hong Kong action directors known for strong and innovative styles. Which of today’s newer Japanese directors besides Takeshi Kitano might you see making a foreign leap into Hollywood or, like Oshima, it, elsewhere?

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997

From: Alan Makinen

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

To reiterate what Bill Thompson wrote regarding the visibility of Japanese cinema in the US (and the possibility of increased public interest in the work of contemporary Japanese filmmakers), the situation in Chicago is similar to that of New York. Not enough is shown at the cinemas and little is available on video. I keep pretty close track of what plays here and as I recall over the past year or so the only new-ish Japanese films that have had extended runs have been Maborosi and Angel Dust (which played for maybe one or two weeks) and Tokyo Decadence (which had a regular run and then came back for a while as a midnight show). Right now it’s Gamera and Shall We Dance–the last time I checked Shall We Dance was still playing at an art house downtown as well as at a suburban cinema. There many have been one or two others that I either missed or have forgotten.

I can confirm Mark Schilling’s comment about the priming of the US media and movie-goers that Masayuki Suo did for his film. I believe he made appearances at at least three different venues here–the University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at a commercial cinema–to introduce and discuss the film before it was commercially released.

As to Aaron Gerrow’s question about the Newsweek articles, I haven’t checked the library yet, but I did ask one of my friends here who subscribes to Newsweek to look for those articles. She did not find them.

Apparently they were only in the international or Japanese edition.

Japanese cinema was also under-represented at last year’s Chicago International Film Festival. The only Japanese film shown was Sleeping Man! (I should note however that last year’s festival programming overall was substantially pared down.)

On the shelves of franchise video rental stores here, such as Blockbusters or Hollywood Video, Japanese classics by Kurosawa (several) and Ozu (one or two) and sometimes even Mizoguchi may be found. Tampopo and A Taxing Woman are also in circulation. To find much of anything else, it is necessary to go to Facets (a singular phenomenon) or one of the few video shops that specialize in foreign films. Of Japanese films less than 5 or 6 years old one could then choose from:

• Angel Dust
• Hunter in the Dark
• Minbo
• The Mystery of Rampo
• Okoge
• Tokyo Decadence
• Traffic Jam

Japanese anime seems to be available in abundance, usually through comic book stores rather than at video rental shops.

Older Japanese films do periodically get shown at art houses–the Suzuki and Mizoguchi retrospectives were shown at the Film Center here–but screenings of newer films are very rare, and, like the young directors series playing next month, are very brief–each of those films will be screened only once.

Alan Makinen

Chicago

______________________________________

Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997

From: EIJA MARGIT NISKANEN

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

On Thu, 11 Sep 1997, Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow wrote:

>And even if the US still has problems (is LA any different?), I was wondering what some of our European participants could tell us about Europe. After all, these Japanese films are mostly winning at European festivals. Is there more of a Japanese film boom going on in Europe than in the US? The reports here in Japan are that Japanese films are the hottest thing on the European festival circuit. How is the press or the audience treating the new Japanese cinema?

Hi! Being a European and studying now in U.S. I think it is easier to see new Japanese films in Europe. For example 3 Kitano Takeshi films have got commercial distribution in Finland, my home country.

eija

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Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997

From: Abe-Nornes

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Interesting that Suo and Chan get mentioned together in this context. Did anyone notice that the advertising (at least here in Ann Arbor) for Shall We Dance used the strategy deployed by marketers for Chan’s latest films? Basically, they attempt to erase race. All foreign sounding names (like credits) get either left off the ads and posters or reduced to such small sizes that they are illegible without magnifying glasses. While they couldn’t avoid Chan’s Chinese face, they inflected it with internationalizing (Americanizing?) slogans like, “World’s greatest action hero.” As for the Shall We Dance ad, I have one sitting on my desk here that is only two pair of feet and no evidence that it’s a foreign film at all!

If you don’t think this is intentional, well, maybe not. However, because I was curious with the Chan pictures I did some hunting. I found that in the posters at the theaters, credits filled with Chinese names were in colors very close to the background of the image. You could hardly see them unless you moved in closely. In Asian-American magazines, they were in very bright colors that stood out prominantly from the background.

More evidence of the previously mentioned provincialism of the American mall crowd.

Markus

______________________________________

Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997

From: Tommaso Torelli

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Hello to all the people in this list,

Even though I have been in the list since July or so, this is my first posting, the reason being that I am merely an amateur of Japanese cinema, certainly not a scholar. I am a physics PhD candidate at the University of Illinois. One of my goals here is to improve my understanding of modern Japanese society, with particular focus on the historical role of women in such a reputedly male-dominated society. Movies are just one of the ways through which the Western-world stereotypes are mostly abated, but rarely confirmed. That’s it for the intro. I look forward more and similarly interesting discussions on this list. Now a couple of replies:

>>But how is the press treating this in the US? Didn’t _Time_ and _Newsweek_ do articles on the Japanese film Renaissance (or were those articles only in the Asian editions)?

In the US edition of Time, an article was published on April 28 (VOL. 149 NO. 17) with the title: “Return to Greatness: Forget the “big audience”. Upstart independent directors, like the old cinematic masters, are making movies with meaning” by Donald Richie. The article is available on the WWW at the URL:

>>And even if the US still has problems (is LA any different?), I was wondering what some of our European participants could tell us about Europe. After all, these Japanese films are mostly winning at European festivals. Is there more of a Japanese film boom going on in Europe than in the US? The reports here in Japan are that Japanese films are the hottest thing on the European festival circuit. How is the press or the audience treating the new Japanese cinema?

Up to the time I was living in Italy (summer ‘95) scarce attention had been devoted to Japanese films and film makers, but for prize winning ones and a few others already mentioned. The only attempt to widespread diffusion was made by one of the public TV channels, with a retrospective which mainly focused on Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu. Needless to say, the movies were all shown after 10.30pm, so I let you imagine how thin was the following it had.

Tommaso Torelli (henceforth Tommaso)

______________________________________

Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997

From: “Michael J. Raine”

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Tommaso wrote:

Would anyone like to discuss this article? It’s quite clear and points out some of the problems that cinema in Japan faces, as well as some potential solutions. I wonder if it isn’t a bit too optimistic however.

Some of the things I want to know more about: Richie says that the film studios have diversified. this is surely true. Does anyone know of an article (probably in Japanese) that describes the current diversification of the cinema industry. Even better, one that describes that history?

I’m a bit confused about the temporality of the counter-culture in this article. Is it post-68, or was there an active cinema counter-culture back in 1960, when Oshima left Shochiku (in an interview with Shirai Yoshio, Oshima as much as says he jumped before he was pushed).

Finally, the “independents”. How much is this new filmmakers finding ways to make themselves seen outside the system, and how much is this simply a new model of film financing? Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition. Market differentiation, and the articulation of an international stratum of non-mainstream cinema distribution (the dream of art cinema way back in the 50s), may be the last best hope of this new cinema (as Oshima himself has said), but it’s hardly a good sign that filmmakers in Japan are turning to wealthy industrialists for production money.

What do others think?

Michael

______________________________________

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997

From: Anne McKnight

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Hello all,

Following up on Michael’s question about what the word “indies” can signify or smuggle in as a term used by critics or marketers, there are a couple of articles on top of the Time/Newsweek ones worth mentioning on the recent diffusion of Japanese “indies” films in US and other overseas markets.

Aera Article

The first was in AERA (the Asahi weekly magazine) on July 14, in the midst of the Hase Jun-kun coverage (where the 11-year old kid from Kobe was murdered).

The directors (and it is a director-centered piece) it interviews are: Aoyama Shunji, in the context of his upcoming film “Cold Blood” (Tsumetai chi) which concerns the 1972 Asama-sanso incident; Yaguchi Shinobu, who got his start in the PIA film festival with his film “The Secret Flower-garden” (Himitso no hanazono); and Shinozaki Makoto, of “Okaeri.” With a few blurbs from Iwai Shunji thrown in, these are roughly the same people and narratives as in the Newsweek article I read a few weeks back. The other angles I see that keep cropping up are the film-maker as rugged individualist, and the today’s young people are lost and/or cynical narrative. Also worth noting is that none of them I have read so far has interviewed any women.

The AERA article on Kawase Naomi was actually a spotlight on her distributor, Bitter’s End. This was interesting in its explanations of movie-financing tie-up strategies (TV, etc). The AERA focus on pensive-young-men connects, I think, to the questions about feminism in the Japanese film world thread someone brought up earlier, as well as the thread on cryptic film festival selections of rather lusterless Japanese films (e.g. Imamura’s Unagi, Ichikawa Jun’s “Tokyo Nocturne” [Tokyo yakyoku, Shochiku 1997], easily one of the most treacly & dreary melodramas I have seen in recent memory, with the most aggressively bad soundtrack I have ever, I think, heard). What I’ve noticed fairly consistency is the incredible slim pickings of good parts for actresses in these films. In Unagi, one is offed in the first few sequences of the film; the second attempts suicide, is brought around by the strong silent graces of Yakusho Koji and survives to make him a bento, just like his first wife who turned out to be a bad girl.

Tokyo Nocturne’s heroine Tami is also long-suffering, and hardly gets out of the kitchen of her cafe until the last sequence, when she is seen flying along carefree-like on a bicycle in the countryside, a Hallmark kind of ending. And Beat Takeshi’s wife has just come out of the hospital and is mute, in mourning for the child she lost in an accident and hardly speaks, child-like herself. As Dorothy Parker might have said, a repertoire which extends about from A to B.

I would revel in any exceptions to these tin-types, if anyone can suss them out.

Sight and Sound Article

The second article is in the September issue of Sight & Sound (available at the National Film Center or tachiyomi at Tower Records, for those in Tokyo). While it actually concerns the issues facing distributors of “indies” movies and independent distributors – which as Michael pointed out may follow 2 quite different lines of financing, promotion, genre, etc. The central issue being, what will happen to small-fry distributors who have long paid their dues in taking risks with “small” films now that the new Labor government has started to kick in more money for arts funding, including lottery money.

This relates to the Japanese “indies” scene in a funny way. One of the issues distributors are trying to deal with is the amount of labor/cost involved in marketing non-English-language productions. Amazingly the categries of small-budget independent film and “film I have never heard of from place that I can’t quite find on the map” seem to be lumped into one. Thus there is a parallel placement of Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherries (a low-budget feature if I am not mistaken, but please correct if wrong) and Imamura’s Unagi, a Shochiku feature with massive amounts of capital backing it up. That small indies distributors should be losing sleep, worried about bringing Unago to the viewing millions is fairly dispiriting to me.

JISHU-EIGA & DIY (do it yourself)

There is so much interesting stuff going on in the way of narrative and experimental films, not to mention documentary, in Tokyo (sorry, I don’t know much about what’s going on outside of Tokyo, no doubt a symptom of some of the very things I’m talking about, information on de-centralized film scenes quite appreciated…). It seems a shame to short-sell it with Shochiku blockbusters and to go with indies interpreted as *more* rather than indies as a demand for *better.*

It seems that maybe one more term would be useful, which is “jishu-eiga” (self-made film). It seems to me somewhat parallel to the DIY aesthetic of self-financing, getting all your friends to work, developing venues, and self-distributing in music, with which many of the young film-makers are intimately involved in either actually or due to having grown up as “rock shonen” (the rock or punk equivalent of bookworms, I guess…)

Finally, and relating to the recent popularity of Japanese music (largely so-called small-label noise bands like Boredoms, Violent Onsen Geisha, etc as well as DIY types like Haino Keiji etc, the slightly classier Derek Bailey axis, etc) it seems there are huge and amiable numbers of people in their 20s & 30s who are really quite interested in Japanese film purely for the reason that it is an object called “Japanese film.” The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.

Which is why I think it is a double crying-shame for films like Tokyo yakyoku and Unagi to get such the recognition of the film fest star system. It just seems to shut down a lot of possibilities.

Any more thoughts on “indies”?

amck.

______________________________________

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow 

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Michael and Anne have taken the occasion of my query about Japanese film’s reception abroad to ask some broader questions about the Japanese film industry. I’d like to comment on some of what they say.

Michael wrote:

>I’m a bit confused about the temporality of the counter-culture in this article. Is it post-68, or was there an active cinema counter-culture back in 1960, when Oshima left Shochiku (in an interview with Shirai Yoshio, Oshima as much as says he jumped before he was pushed).

At least to Richie, it seems to be the early 1960s, which I think is not unthinkable when you look at the history of Japanese experimental film: Nichidai Eiken beginning in the 1950s and truly radical works like Adachi Masao’s _Sain_ in 1963. There is a lot going on cinematically before 1968, and it was developing into a culture complete with independent distribution, etc.

>Finally, the “independents”. How much is this new filmmakers finding ways to make themselves seen outside the system, and how much is this simply a new model of film financing? Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition. Market differentiation, and the articulation of an international stratum of non-mainstream cinema distribution (the dream of art cinema way back in the 50s), may be the last best hope of this new cinema (as Oshima himself has said), but it’s hardly a good sign that filmmakers in Japan are turning to wealthy industrialists for production money.

I always had the impression that the term “independent” does mean more in Japan than it does in Hollywood now because elements of the studio system which created the old independent/studio dichotomy in the US are still around: block booking and an almost monopolistic control of theaters and the distribution system by the majors. One could define an independent film in Japan as anything that is not distributed via block booking through one of the major studio chains. Note that this is not a question of production: now that the major studios barely make movies any more, most of what they distibute are films produced elsewhere. In terms of production, one can call those films “independent,” but they are usually produced by major corporations, television studios, etc., which have the financial backing to get a good distribution deal. “Real” independent films could be considered the ones that have to open in only one theater in Tokyo and then hope to open in a few more around the country. They are in a vastly different economic position than the studios and are in the majority.

Such independents frankly don’t have money and, unless they have their own distribution company, get little money back at the box office (independent producers get on average 25% of the box office). I personally can’t blame them if they get money from industrialists (is this a comment about Oguri?) or from anyone else who can give them money. It is damn hard to make a film in Japan, and comments about economic purity are rather unrealistic.

Anne wrote:

>It seems that maybe one more term would be useful, which is “jishu-eiga” (self-made film). It seems to me somewhat parallel to the DIY aesthetic of self-financing, getting all your friends to work, developing venues, and self-distributing in music, with which many of the young film-makers are intimately involved in either actually or due to having grown up as “rock shonen” (the rock or punk equivalent of bookworms, I guess…)

This can be a useful term in trying to define “independent,” but I think we should avoid being romantic here. Remember that _jishu eiga_ is a very old notion, going back to the 1960s (and even further, if you include the 1950s old left indies). There was a certain political valence to the term then and in the 1970s which it simply does not have right now in most cases. Since the social meaning of the term has changed, I think we do have to ask ourself what the importance of _jishu eiga_ is in the 1990s. It is all nice and good to say that _jishu eiga_ allows for a “freedom of expression” due to the fact that it not tied into “economic considerations” or distributor deals, but this does not imply the “political freedom” it once did (given the apolitical nature of most contemporary film). _Jishu eiga_ has been a very important training ground for most of the young directors working today and is valubale to the extent that there has been few other avenues by which people can start making films (the studio asst. director system is not what it used to be and film schools are still limited). _Jishu eiga_ has also occasioned many interesting films that could not have been produced otherwise. But I strongly question the notion that this is the way “good filmmakers” (filmmakers we support) should continue making films up until they die.

We may object when a filmmaker starts making films with bigger budgets, saying that they have sold out, but I think we should avoid applying the conception of “selling out” formed in the US to Japan. In a system where they independents have a much harder time than the independents do in the US, I personally can’t blame independent producers for doing all they can to get money.

Remember that two other important training grounds for young filmmakers are very much commercially oriented: pink film and V-cinema. I consider these just as valuable as the realm of _jishu eiga_.

Most of the Japanese studios are creatively bankrupt: heck, Shochiku and Toho can’t stop making Tora-san clones and monster movies. But there have been changes, mostly due to the rise of the young filmmakers and the independents. Shochiku has started the Cinema Japanesque project and Toho the YES project. One can intepret those as efforts by the studios to “buy up” the independents just as Hollywood did, and this is worth researching, but that is not the whole story. First, both projects have produced excellent films which would not have seen the light of day otherwise (CJ: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s _Cure_, or YES: Hashiguchi Ryosuke’s _Like Grains of Sand_). They also represent the fact the studios are finally opening up to change in the industry. Cinema Japanesque is also an alternative to what is one of the worst aspects of the contemporary distribution system: the absence of medium size chains (in Japan, you either release your film in one theater (with a few more to follow), or 150, with nothing in between). The CJ chain allows films to open in 10 to 20 theaters simultaneously across the country, a definite plus for many films that don’t belong in 150 theaters (a reason many of the majors shied away from distributing more difficult indie productions).

CJ films, by the way, are not backed by “massive amounts of capital.” The budgets are small: about 100,000,000 yen on average. And the distribution budgets not much different (_Unagi_ was an exception due to the Cannes prize).

I will certainly continue to be sympathetic to _jishu eiga_ when compared to the latest Yamada Yoji Tora-san clone. But to unquestioningly support _jishu eiga_ and criticize the better funded indies is not only myopic, it simply reproduces the current distribution structure (major vs. indie) that is the problem in the first place. The structure of the industry is very problematic and demands a lot of hard thinking, but as viewers, we can’t complain when indie kings like Kurosawa Kiyoshi are getting decent distribution. The industry needs diversification (not the simple studio/indie binary). Whether or not the current changes will effect that is a matter of concern. But simply valorizing _jishu eiga_ is itself a very old tactic that has seen its day.

A few corrections:

>Aoyama Shunji, in the context of his upcoming film “Cold Blood” (Tsumetai chi) which concerns the 1972 Asama-sanso incident

The English title of Aoyama Shinji’s new film is _An Obsession_ and it has little to do in the end with the 1972 Asama-sanso incident (there are hints about it, but the plot is about a cop who loses his gun to a nihilistic drug addict youth. Kind of _Stray Dog_ for the 1990s). A good film, by the way, but not Aoyama’s best.

>Yaguchi Shinobu, who got his start in the PIA film festival with his film “The Secret Flower-garden” (Himitso no hanazono)

For those of you abroad, the English title is _My Secret Cache_.

Anne noted:

>Also worth noting is that none of them I have read so far has interviewed any women.

The printed press may be amiss, but NHK has been featuring Kawase right and left. She’s been on TV more than these directors combined.

>The AERA focus on pensive-young-men connects, I think, to the questions about feminism in the Japanese film world thread someone brought up earlier, as well as the thread on cryptic film festival selections of rather lusterless Japanese films (e.g. Imamura’s Unagi, Ichikawa Jun’s “Tokyo Nocturne” [Tokyo yakyoku, Shochiku 1997], easily one of the most treacly & dreary melodramas I have seen in recent memory, with the most aggressively bad soundtrack I have ever, I think, heard). What I’ve noticed fairly consistency is the incredible slim pickings of good parts for actresses in these films. In Unagi, one is offed in the first few sequences of the film; the second attempts suicide, is brought around by the strong silent graces of Yakusho Koji and survives to make him a bento, just like his first wife who turned out to be a bad girl.

Tokyo Nocturne’s heroine Tami is also long-suffering, and hardly gets out of the kitchen of her cafe until the last sequence, when she is seen flying along carefree-like on a bicycle in the countryside, a Hallmark kind of ending. And Beat Takeshi’s wife has just come out of the hospital and is mute, in mourning for the child she lost in an accident and hardly speaks, child-like herself. As Dorothy Parker might have said, a repertoire which extends about from A to B.

I would revel in any exceptions to these tin-types, if anyone can suss them out.

This is a very interesting point and worth pursuing. Why, for instance, are so many of the women in the films of indie directors (_Duo_, _BeRLin_, _Okaeri_, etc.) mentally unstable? The turn towards the mental is a prominent feature of 1990s film, but why does it often have to do with women? In an age of unstable identities, does the prospect of comforting a mentally unstable woman (the projection of that instability) provide the male subject with some hope of stability? I want to ask Shinozaki this when I go with him to the States next week.

Note that _Cure_ is one of the few films to center most of this mental instability in men. Again, there is an unstable woman (Yakusho Koji’s wife), but she in some ways becomes the projection of his own instability (his fantasy of her suicide). This is definitely a problematic film worth lots of analysis.

>The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.

I did not understand this point, Anne. Could you explain it?

>Which is why I think it is a double crying-shame for films like Tokyo yakyoku and Unagi to get such the recognition of the film fest star system. It just seems to shut down a lot of possibilities.

Yes, it does. But I don’t think we should close down the possibilities of _Cure_ and _Like Gains of Sand_, either. And we should remember that it was the film fests that recognized Hashiguchi, Kawase, Shinozaki, etc. before many of the older, established critics in Japan did.

Aaron Gerow

YNU

______________________________________

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997

From: “Michael J. Raine”

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Aaron wrote:

>Michael wrote:

>>I’m a bit confused about the temporality of the counter-culture in this article. Is it post-68, or was there an active cinema counter-culture back in 1960, when Oshima left Shochiku (in an interview with Shirai Yoshio, Oshima as much as says he jumped before he was pushed).

>At least to Richie, it seems to be the early 1960s, which I think is not unthinkable when you look at the history of Japanese experimental film: Nichidai Eiken beginning in the 1950s and truly radical works like Adachi Masao’s _Sain_ in 1963. There is a lot going on cinematically before 1968, and it was developing into a culture complete with independent distribution, etc.

Richie was part of this “counterculture” and there are even chirashi from screenings of his own films that discuss it. But I’m not sure that Richie is talking about developments in the small world of independent/experimental film production when he writes the following paragraph:

Japan’s new independent films are quite different from the greats of the old masters. When directors such as Nagisa Oshima broke with the studio system in the early ’60s, the reasons were overtly political. The newcomers wanted to express both themselves and the counterculture flourishing at the time. The films of the ’60s were informed by the example of the Nouvelle Vague, a French political movement inspired by the polemics of the great director Jean-Luc Godard, for whom cinema was politics. In sympathy with the social unrest that so ruffled authority everywhere from 1968 on, Japanese directors of the era formed a loosely organized but highly critical movement that attacked the Establishment head-on. Oshima and a host of others joined poets, playwrights, writers and choreographers in a short-lived, drop-out-join-in counterculture that culminated in both student riots and some of Japan’s most thoughtful political cinema. 

So the counter-culture is “short-lived” but also seems to extend, as a _political_ alternative throughout the 1960s. So what I’m interested in is the possibility that there really was a “political” counterculture (say, coming out of Anpo) that “flourished” in the early 1960s and had a specifically cinema-related aspect.

>>Finally, the “independents”. How much is this new filmmakers finding ways to make themselves seen outside the system, and how much is this simply a new model of film financing? Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition. Market differentiation, and the articulation of an international stratum of non-mainstream cinema distribution (the dream of art cinema way back in the 50s), may be the last best hope of this new cinema (as Oshima himself has said), but it’s hardly a good sign that filmmakers in Japan are turning to wealthy industrialists for production money.

>I always had the impression that the term “independent” does mean more in Japan than it does in Hollywood now because elements of the studio system which created the old independent/studio dichotomy in the US are still around: block booking and an almost monopolistic control of theaters and the distribution system by the majors. One could define an independent film in Japan as anything that is not distributed via block booking through one of the major studio chains. Note that this is not a question of production: now that the major studios barely make movies any more, most of what they distibute are films produced elsewhere. In terms of production, one can call those films “independent,” but they are usually produced by major corporations, television studios, etc., which have the financial backing to get a good distribution deal. “Real” independent films could be considered the ones that have to open in only one theater in Tokyo and then hope to open in a few more around the country. They are in a vastly different economic position than the studios and are in the majority.

>Such independents frankly don’t have money and, unless they have their own distribution company, get little money back at the box office (independent producers get on average 25% of the box office). I personally can’t blame them if they get money from industrialists (is this a comment about Oguri?) or from anyone else who can give them money. IIt is damn hard to make a film in Japan, and comments about economic purity are rather unrealistic.

I don’t think you’re getting my point here. Your definition of “real” independent is quite different from Richie’s, who counts Shall we Dance, Okaeri, and Maboroshi. All have these have benefitted (at some point along their production and post-production history) from tie-ups with the major players in Japanese cinema. So the question is not preserving the distinction between mainstream and independent (my point is the opposite) but that celebrating because major film companies make fewer films and “independent” films win prizes mistakes a shift in film financing strategies for the victory of filmmaker as rugged individualist (as Anne says). It’s not a question of “blaming” Oguri for taking money from an industrialist as pointing out that this is not a stable economic base for an alternative film culture. That alternative depends precisely (as I wrote) on accepting a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream distribution apparatus, inventing “cinema japanesque” style brand-names for both domestic and foreign consumption.

In the rest of your message you go on to point out ways in which independent film production in Japan is becoming more and more like the sub-contracted independent production in the USA. So why do you think that independent means more in Japan than in the US?

Michael

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 97

From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

Michael did make a lot of important points I would like to comment on.

Michael wrote:

>So the counter-culture is “short-lived” but also seems to extend, as a _political_ alternative throughout the 1960s. So what I’m interested in is the possibility that there really was a “political” counterculture (say, coming out of Anpo) that “flourished” in the early 1960s and had a specifically cinema-related aspect.

This is an important topic. Do you want to expand on it? I personally think there was a “political” counterculture, one based on experimental film (Adachi, Matsumoto, et al.) or the writings of Matsumoto Toshio or Oshima, that “flourished” in the early 1960s and had a specifically cinema-related aspect. We can debate what “flourished” means, but many of the issues that did dominate post-68 film culture were introduced in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, I’ve never developed this into a major thesis: this is only my impression from what I’ve read and seen. I’d like to entertain different opinions.

>Your definition of “real” >independent is quite different from Richie’s, who counts Shall we Dance, Okaeri, and Maboroshi. All have these have benefitted (at some point along their production and post-production history) from tie-ups with the major players in Japanese cinema.

How is this the case with _Okaeri_? Of the three films, Shinozaki’s is definitely the one that had the least support from “the major players” (who are you referring to here, anyway?). Heck, the film can’t even get released on video. We have to preserve distinctions here. _Maboroshi no hikari’s_ case is also quite different from _Shall We Dance’s_.

There is a definite problem with the definition of independent here. Richie’s is problematic and so, I think, is any that centralizes _jishu eiga_. One of the reason’s I posed a definition in relation to distribution is precisely to point out the problem in referring to _Shall We Dance_ as independent. But even that is becoming less tenable with the creation of Cinema Japanesque, et al.

>So the question is not preserving the >distinction between mainstream and independent (my point is the opposite) but that celebrating because major film companies make fewer films and “independent” films win prizes mistakes a shift in film financing strategies for the victory of filmmaker as rugged individualist (as Anne says). It’s not a question of “blaming” Oguri for taking money from an industrialist as pointing out that this is not a stable economic base for an alternative film culture. That alternative depends precisely (as I wrote) on accepting a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream distribution apparatus, inventing “cinema japanesque” style brand-names for both domestic and foreign consumption.

You point out extremely well the ironies Richie does not see. But you certainly were not specific in first post about “accepting a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream distribution apparatus, inventing ‘cinema japanesque’ style brand-names for both domestic and foreign consumption.” At best, you spoke of, and I quote,

>Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition.

This may be the case with Hollywood, but it is not applicable to Japan–not yet. That you must realize. The situation is changing, as I pointed out (with the creation of Cinema Japanesque, et al.), but it is very important to maintain these distinctions when discussion the specific problems the Japanese industry is facing now. Right now, there are still the issues of block booking, maeuri, studio run distribution arms, etc., that do make it meaningful, at least temporarily, to discuss the specific problems non-studio producers have in producing and distibuting films.

You seem to speak as if having independents accept a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream cinematic apparatus is the basis for an alternative cinema (an interesting, if not ironic point), but what I am wondering about is the possibility of an industry which cannot be easily considered as having a “mainstream cinematic apparatus.” This is certainly a pipe dream, but I do want to emphasize an industrial differentiation which undermines the old notions of mainstream/alternative. That, I believe, must involve a kind of industrial hybridity which involves both stable and unstable modes of financing stemming from a variety of different sources, as well as a variety of modes of production.

>In the rest of your message you go on to point out ways in which independent film production in Japan is becoming more and more like the sub-contracted independent production in the USA. So why do you think that independent means more in Japan than in the US?

You missed my point. As I said above, it means–or increasinly I should say “meant”–more in terms of an industry structure where majors still have a dominant, monopolistic power. But as both you and I said, this is rapidly changing given transformations both in the majors and in how independents do business. So it is the case that the term “independent” itself becomes problematic. This was exactly my point. But I think a provisional and strategic usage of the term is still important within a rapidly changing situation where power is still on the side of the three major studios and their corporate partners. At the same time, we have to avoid any romantic notions, ones still espoused by Richie, of the good indies vs. the bad majors. It is all much more complicated than that, which I think you, Anne, and I can all agree on.

Aaron Gerow

YNU

Date: Tue, 16 Sep 97

From: Sarah Elizabeth Teasley(GENDER)

Subject: Re: Some Impressions?

>In the rest of your message you go on to point out ways in which independent film production in Japan is becoming more and more like the sub-contracted independent production in the USA. So why do you think that independent means more in Japan than in the US?

It might be interesting here to look at parallels in the Japanese popular music industry, where “indies” refers as much to a sound and style aesthetic (the Shibuya-kei of Pizzicato Five, Cornelius and a slew of photographers) as to specific modes of production and distribution, where “indies” gods like Cornelius emphasize in interviews (Tokyo Journal, Aug. 1997) that their labels are affiliated to major industry labels (and hence not truly “independent”), and where the word “indie” itself is perhaps used most often by marketers trying to sell product to a self-consciously hip and fashionable crowd of young urbanites. North American “indie rock” and “indie pop” too have a fairly definable sound (college radio), sometimes develop distribution agreements with major labels after start-up, appear on MTV in special “indie” slots, have an extremely strong market strategy based on cult musicians, label recognition and “difference” to mainstream music and have definitely been co-opted as youth-oriented marketing slogans by wily label execs. Yet while I may simply be caught up in the romance of resistance it offers, North American “indie” music still seems more rough-edged, low-budget and plainly messy to me than its nominal Japanese twin. And where North American “indie” labels and musicians fight to maintain their image as the “rugged individualists” of the previous film discussion, Japanese “indie” artists seem to want to pop that image as hard as they can.

So I’m not sure after all whether you can say that Pizzicato Five = Unagi and have it over with, and the real question for both music and film may be, as I believe Aaron is suggesting, where and how the lines delimiting “indie” and “independent” are drawn in the first place. Or, more precisely, how big you can get and still keep within them.

Sarah Teasley

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997

From: Birgit Kellner

Subject: Indies, music & film

Joseph Murphy wrote:

>There’s a panel proposal for the 1998 AAS conference on contemporary Japanese popular music. I wonder if they’ll get this far into it.

>By the way, site managers, sorry for getting off the subject of film, but I think several of these responses have pushed for a cross-fertilization between the independent film and music scenes in Japan, and I would like to hear a little more about that.

Perhaps this, together with Aaron Gerow’s reminder of how some recent Japanese “independent” films have only become recognized in Japan after having been on the film-fest circuit, is the right time for the following question: Is good press, popularity and circulation abroad relevant for the independent status of either Japanese film or pop-music at home? One could pursue this question along two axes, firstly, whether reception abroad significantly influences the economic situation of the work or artist in question in Japan, secondly, whether the fact that a particular filmmaker/pop-musician has been well-received abroad influences the image their work has for the general Japanese audience.

As far as my knowledge of the music-scene is concerned, there seems to be little of such influence on the image-side, at least as far as more experimental bands such as the Boredoms, Merzbow or the Ruins are concerned. I also can’t recall having seen any fliers for their concerts where they were praised as “now internationally known” or “recently played in New York”, but then, I live in the province.

I would certainly like to know more about any “cross-fertilization” between independent film and music scenes here. The only (not particularly interesting) example that springs to my mind is the Yen Town Band, and Chara, whose promotion seems to be almost exclusively based on their presence in Iwai Shunji’s _Swallowtail Butterfly_. Would anybody know whether any other, preferably “more independent” Japanese bands have been involved in (feature or animation) filmmaking recently? This strikes me as particularly interesting on the background that so many European and American films nowadays rely on the vast storehouse of pop past & present for their soundtrack (Quentin Tarantino’s plundering through the ages, Trainspotting, Angus, Romeo & Juliet, etc.) - any noticeable parallels in Japan?

Birgit Kellner

Department for Indian Philosophy

Hiroshima University

______________________________________

Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997

From: Joseph Murphy

Subject: Re: Indies, music & film

Birgit Kellner wrote:

>I would certainly like to know more about any “cross-fertilization” between independent film and music scenes here. The only (not particularly interesting) example that springs to my mind is the Yen Town Band, and Chara, whose promotion seems to be almost exclusively based on their presence in Iwai Shunji’s _Swallowtail Butterfly_. Would anybody know whether any other, preferably “more independent” Japanese bands have been involved in (feature or animation) filmmaking recently?

Well, rather than a transposition of the trendy-drama/million-seller pop-group marketing strategy to the “rugged” world of independents, I understood the suggestion about the Tokyo scene to be that filmmakers and musicians ran to a degree in the same social circles and drew on each other’s formal strategies, etc., even if they kept their art separate and did not collaborate, or alternately evinced a similar sort of “low resolution” (in the narrative and technical sense) sensibility in their work by virtue of being immersed in Tokyo suburban culture.

Maybe it goes back to what Anne wrote:

>it seems there are huge and amiable >numbers of people in their 20s & 30s who are really quite interested in Japanese film purely for the reason that it is an object called “Japanese film.” The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.

I’m very interested in what you said here, Anne, can you keep going with it? Are the “huge and amiable numbers” to be understood as young people in Tokyo in general as a kind of collective urban dreamworld, or as the set of potential filmmakers? How about the formal parallel between narrative and melody, about people being used to music not making sense? That’s extremely interesting and suggests an affinity at the level of sensibilities. I got a similar sense in watching a fairly comprehensive PIA Film Festival retrospective last summer in Tokyo (very self-consciously billed as “independents,” in katakana), that fairly traditional narrative setups were continually bumped off track and that filmmakers allowed them to devolve without resolution. Of course, to bring it back to nationalism, this may just be repeating the “novel without plot” debates of the 1920’s.

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997

From: “Mark Schilling”

Subject: Re: Indies, music & film

A few observations on indie films in Japan:

1. The definition of “independent film” has become so vague as to be almost useless. If size of budget is a criteria, then nearly all films made in Japan, with the exception of a handful of effects shows, are “independent” by Hollywood standards. Non-effects films with big name talent and big company money behind them rarely cost more than Y500 million to make, which at current exchange rates amounts to $4.2 million. The budget of most films, even by name directors, are far lower.

   Other, perhaps more useful, criteria are sources of funding and release patterns. Generally, if major distributors, TV networks, ad agencies and publishers are putting up the money and the Big Three (Shochiku, Toho, Toei) are releasing in their hoga chains, the filmmakers are no longer “independent”; i.e., they must place the needs of the mass audience and the interests of their corporate sponsors first, their creative vision second. Often the film itself is merely a link in a multimedia chain that empasses books, manga, computer games, TV shows, you name it.

2. The exceptions to the above rule are growing, as more media companies realize that Japanese movies, particularly Japanese movies by young, hip directors, are becoming popular again with the same under-25 trendies who have driven the local pop music and fashion industries to such incredible heights. Young directors who might have had to scrape and struggle to get their films made ten years ago, are finding it much easier to get funding and, if their films do well, get wider releases and bigger budgets. Shunji Iwai is perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon, soaring from “independent” obscurity to mass media stardom on the success of “Love Letter” and “Swallowtail Butterfly.” Is he still an “independent director”? Was Spike Lee after he hit with “Do the Right Thing”? A question to which I have no clearcut answer, though to strict constructionists, for whom commerial success is an automatic disqualifier for “independent” status, the answer would, in both cases, be “no.”

   Among the companies backing “indie” films are Pia, Ace Pictures, Wowow, Toho, Shochiku and, most recently, Pony Canyon and Hakuhodo, which are financing the PeacH project of “Swallow Butterfly” producer Shinya Kawai. Their numbers will no doubt grow as the digital satellite TV platforms come on line with more than 300 channels, many of which will be devoted to movies.

3. Music is a tremendously important element in the success of both “independent” and mainstream films. In announcing a new Japanese film, producers usually put the the ongaku tanto near the head of the list, together with the names of the director and main cast. Also, among the tarento kantoku of the past decade are more than a few pop singers and composers, including Southen All Stars’ Keisuke Kuwata (Inamura Jane) and Kome Kome Club’s Tatsuya Ishii (Kappa). Pop stars have also starred and performed in several recent films, including Masayoshi Yamazaki in “Tsuki to Kyabetsu” and Ryoko Hirosue in “20 Seiki Nostalgia” (though Ms. Hirosue is more of a model and TV drama tarento than singer, as the film makes obvious).

   Another illustration of the importance of music to Japanese movies. Why do you think audiences here sit patiently to the end of the credit crawl? To read the names of the caterer and best boy? They are, of course, listening to the tema songu. After the show, more than a few run out to buy the CD. This linkage between movies and music can only become stronger.

Mark Schilling

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997

From: Anne McKnight

Subject: Re: Indies, music & film

Hello,

To clarify and respond to Joe’s question, the part of the youth audience I was referring to as smitten with narrative opacity, learning the coordinates of a set of musical objects at the same time as ones coded with the traces of cultural alterity ( for lack of a better term), was US audiences, actually, not Tokyo. For instance, those who picked up the Boredoms when they hooked up and toured on the Lollapalooza rock&roll/grunge circuit a couple of years back. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that Tokyo audiences would be intrigued by that particular kind of self-referentiality of naming itself both objects and subjects of “Japanese film,” but it would be interesting to unpack that. Especially given the current crises in historiography like the “textbook problem” of revisionist history, and the pedagogy of a film like the recent Mononoke Hime, with its representation of Muromachi multiculturalism and exiled communities…Hmm.

In dishing out a musical example about illegibility, I was trying to respond to the part of this thread that is quite conscious of the role played by people who are both officially in the “industry” and those on the fringes as “knowledge workers” of some sort, in the possible re-scripting of symbolic worlds which include both capital and desire (to consume, produce, interpret).

The discussion began by taking up the weekly magazine pieces from Time & Newsweek, essentially tracking the bringing into discourse to a “popular” (yeah, a provisionally flung-out term here which would have to be hashed out…) audience of a lot of terms that allow people to get some kind of traction on what “Japanese film” is or might be in the age following the fade-out of the “great masters,” as I believe the narrative often goes. In other words, what is at stake in the side-by-side development of international recognition and international transmission in circuits of capital.

So I got to wondering about how enthusiastic youth audiences got traction on what they were hearing. I also got to wondering, if everything is “new,” what is the place of an avant-garde, other than breathlessly trying to be more newly new than street fashion, or how do we also re-think the notion of an “avant-garde”? Thus the jishu-eiga, which I think I was using in a different way than the genealogy of 50s and 60s films Aaron filled out. This way is perhaps specific to the 90s or the part of the 90s that I know. I was thinking of directors like Yamaziki Mikio and Yamada ***, (sorry I forget his first name) who are happiest when working with small constituencies, where they can control the means of production and distribution. (Not unlike riot grrrls, but without the gender consciousness!) I don’t see this relation to tethering conditions of labor and representation as “romantic,” but as trying to work in a different, perhaps oblique angle, with conditions it seems like you have to reckon with when making things & getting people to see them. It’s possible that jishu-eiga is undergoing re-signification as a category, and I wanted to leave room critically for that, and for things that frankly are going on “out there” that I don’t know about, and/or that may be impossible to systematize in the critical rubrics/discourses with which we often operate. Obviously, this small-scale operation ain’t for everyone, but I think it’s possible some people currently making films don’t really care about the star system of distribution, and might be quite content to work with small, labor-intensive audiences.

Anyway these jishu-eiga I was perhaps cryptically referring to tend not to be so keen on narrative. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with respect to “indies” film, they still shoot “stories” don’t they?

The cropping up of Japanese underground music, in its versions from “noise” to improv klezmer, to hard-core, struck me as an extremely active place to look in thinking about how differnt kinds of legibility (of the object and of the discourse) are or are not operating. Partly because of the fact that Japanese underground music has been picked up largely by a youth market (perhaps due to college radio & tours of college towns, tho no doubt there are other reasons) which mingles genres in a fell swoop. Which is to say, not picked up by the more segmented markets of people who listen to free jazz, improv stuff like Haino (please see Yegulalp Serdar’s succinct description a couple days back), and who I think tend to be older in Tokyo (I dunno about the rest of Japan) and perhaps in the US & elsewhere too.

I’m guessing that Joe M’s bringing up of the novel without plot debates (between Tanizaki & Akutagawa) of the 20s, is a reminder to keep off of a rhetorical move which is, now that I think about it, not unlike Noel Burch’s. Which is to oppose the formal traditions and composition of Japanese film to what he thinks of as the hegemony of classical Hollywood cinema & cinematic narrative. The reading to avoid would thus celebrate anything which is not a three-minute pop song because it would seem to represent some kind of categorical and redemptive space of otherness or utopia through its formal structures (the notorious romance of resistance). Is this a fair representation?Å@Hmm, the “movie without plots” debate, whe re could we take that…? If we were to speculate around this argument, I think it would be pretty important to leave room for how 90s nationalism vis-a-vis internationalization, is different from 20s or 30s nationalism, and the roles nationalism(s) did or didn’t play with respect to cultural production. (As a side note, Murakami Ryu does take this discourse of unifying form, content and political revolution, of a very sinister sort, in interesting directions in his novels about image-fascism.)

OK, check, back to the Boredoms. One thing that struck me about the unlikeliness of future Boredoms stardom, was a link between music consumption and other kinds of labor (or lack of it). Which is, listening to the Boredoms, or any other group which places vistas of distance between what goes in the amp and what comes out of it, takes a lot of work. One example might be any free jazz-based icon, such as Abe Kaoru (*the lived-fast, played-gorgeously, died-young saxaphonist hero depicted in WAKAMATSU Koji’s 1995 adaptation of *Endless Waltz*. He was played by MACHIDA Koh, formerly Machida Mastuzo, leader of the legendary Osaka punk band Inu, and recent candidate for the Akutagawa-sho, how’s that for cross-over?!?). Finding the stuff, listening to it, keeping up with information, listening again. Maybe I’m describing a dynamic which is pertinent to any kind of fan, but this use of time and labor itself, as something which attempts to re-signify an economy of the way it spends its time critically, seems to me quite interesting. It’s also interesting to me to hear accounts of people who used to be habitues of jazz kissa & film in the 60s, how these allocations of time & influence stack up on one another.

These questions about formalism, capital and spectatorial desire all made me want to sit down with a copy of Dick Hebdidge’s Subculture (very confident about the possibility of a liberatory spectatorial politics with respect to musical youth in London, the ways that skinheads/rockers and reggae fans use music as strategies for getting through daily life and/or politics). And the real cranky stuff that Adorno wrote about jazz, and how it is always already sold-out due to collaborating with the culture industry.

It seems the false-consciousness debate about the transcendence of form has been kicking around as long as Marxism & capitalism have been kicking at each other, and as long as people have been slagging each other about “real” punk in the pages of Melody Maker. This seems to leave a pretty long trail of pressures to produce “the political,” and all the kinds of performance anxieties that would ride along in that unenviable task. Sometimes I think the pressure to make films “mean” politically, where politics is an identifiable referent of a 60s or 70s “jiken” or “toso,” makes it hard to read the ways the films might be “political” in other more oblique ways, or the way in which “political” might be a term with some blind spots of its own that would be interesting to think through.

To respond to a question about information and context of the musician I cited, so far as what I’ve come across, the best writing in English I have come across on Japanese underground music comes in 2 forms: 1, the archival, or collections of stuff and information which is more about collecting and presenting than analysing. If you go down to your local weirdo video store & look at the ‘zines, chances are a bunch of the ones on music will feature some story by a band member who writes about on “my cool friends from Japan who passed through Buffalo on their nation-wide tour.” The magazine *Ongaku otaku*, put out in SF, billing itself I believe as about “independent” music. It tends to be a large collection of short reviews, very useful for getting your ears and hands on things. 2) is more analytical/meditative stuff. Rather than the US music press, which seems to recycle the same old stuff from what I’ve read lately, more the British x-music press seems interested in putting in the legwork necessary to do good reporting. (Again, a question of labor). Examples include Resonance (an excellent special issue a couple years back, put out by the London Experimental Musicians’ Collective) . More notably, which is to say regularly, The Wire and Straight No Chaser, along more jazz-based angles, do cover the “Japanese scene”. The latest The Wire had a couple of interesting things, along the lines of “bringing things into discourse,” (the attempt to talk about jazz kissa in an article about Masaki Batoh of Ghost was particularly humorous) and they consistently review Japanese stuff in their review section. A lot of this is DIY; its route of distribution might best be described as “over the transom.” A lot of really lovely things fall into those pages, often contextualized in Euro-American improv and experimental vocabularies. With respect to film, The Wire did a weird little piece on Japanese film music recently, which I could only read as a bit of critical melancholy for the days when Japanese studio films actually *had* good music; the hero was Takemitsu Toru, natch.

I don’t know why contemporary film soundtracks don’t seem to stand out, or why it hasn’t been an element of the film that recent indies directors have really gone to town on. (Clarification: In my earlier post, I wasn’t so much suggesting that people who make music & film are connected by common modes of hanging out, or actual human contact, but that they by virtue of having common modes of engagement with modes of mechanical reproduction – record-buying, radio, etc. I could give “empirical” source on this but this is probably a level of detail that would only serve as ballast to an already long post…) The upshot being my surprise at the lameness of contemporary soundtracks & sound in general in film.

Anyway I’ll end on a note about sound-tracks, circling back to Birgit Kellner’s comment on “Quentin Tarantino’s plundering through the ages.” It seemed to me that rather than the hoohah about Tarantino’s screenwriting genius, his real knack was to pick up the delirious noir of the west coast surf sound, and use it to punctuate his drama, in such a way that a theatre-viewing experience became theatricalized in a very idiosyncratic way, tapping into fantasy-symbolic structures that the visuals alone might not have allowed. It struck me that somebody could do something really weird & interesting with whoever the enka equivalent of Link Wray/whatever dark surf/rockabilly sound pleases you, and make a very acoustically interesting film.

Anyway, the discussion of crossover indies seems like a huge ball of very interesting wax, or worms, to me. Perhaps one way to re-frame it in such a way that is more explicitly pertinent to a discussion of straight-up film, would be to talk about what’s at stake for a discussion/critique of nationalism(s) or imperialism(s) in terms of cinematic representation, in this day-and-age of the 90s. Working on postwar fiction, primarily with an author (Nakagami) who throws the entire family romance structure of nuclear family & family-as-nation-state-metonym to the wind, the possibilities of how these discourses may or may not emerge, flummox me all the time.

amck.

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997

From: Yegulalp Serdar

Subject: RE: Indies, music & film

I think most of the sense of what make a given director “independent”, both Japanese and otherwise, is more attitudes and perception than many other things. It’s also generally used as an index of how they got started, what route they chose to take, etc. – but what’s the opposite of “independent”, and how would you classify it?

The best general rule seems to be: any director who got their start in filmmaking outside the confines of the studio system. The Japanese studio systems used to be some of the most hierarchical and rigid places to try and get behind a camera; today, I don’t know if it’s the same in *corporate* filmmaking (maybe that was the distinction I was looking for) – but judging from the messages, it’s certainly become easier to pick up a camera, spend a few thousand, and get noticed, because channels exist to bring such achievments attention now, whereas they didn’t before….

______________________________________

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997

From: Alan Makinen

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Indies, music & film

Joseph Murphy wrote:

>Can you situate these groups on the U. S. popular culture landscape that you and Anne obviously know very well? I mean vis a vis Shonen Knife, who are known even to casual observers of the scene. Are they getting airplay on college radio, or would you have to find out about them through more esoteric outlets? Would mainstream publications like Rolling Stone or Spin or Wired mention them, or would you have to go to more specialized magazines? If I referred to them in class, would my students likely have heard of them (let’s say they’re just medium cool)?

I discussed these questions with one of my friends who writes about music for the Chicago press and who keeps up with Rolling Stone and Spin. We agreed that the Japanese music groups who’ve gotten the most US media notice would be Cibo Matto, Pizzicato Five (who, by the way, performed at Metro last Saturday), and Shonen Knife. Noise projects like the Boredoms and Merzbow definitely have a more select appeal, although you can find their CDs at big stores like Tower and Crow’s Nest in Chicago; the Bordeoms are carried by Reprise, after all. I’d say the ineffable Haino Keiji would likely be unknown to “medium cool” students; but even his CDs are to be found out there in the import bins and at specialty CD shops.

Anne McKnight wrote:

>The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.

I would agree that the Boredoms are quite good at making a different kind of musical sense; I think some of their work might be better thought of as sound art. Has anyone seen what, if anything, the Boredoms have done in the realm of music videos–or concert/performance films? Any evidence that their approach to music and sound has been carried over into the film and video?

>If you go down to your local weirdo video store & look at the ‘zines, chances are a bunch of the ones on music will feature some story by a band member who writes about on “my cool friends from Japan who passed through Buffalo on their nation-wide tour.” The magazine *Ongaku otaku*, put out in SF, billing itself I believe as about “independent” music. It tends to be a large collection of short reviews, very useful for getting your ears and hands on things.

Another California magazine along similar lines is Giant Robot, published by Eric Nakamura. I’d expect GR would seek to elude being defined, but for the purposes here I’ll venture this description: Giant Robot attempts to cover popular culture from a trans-cultural and pan-East Asian perspective; it has a DIY feel and an attitude that is rooted in punk; lots of short music and zine reviews; summer issue features an interviews with Tsui Hark and Cibo Matto. Also, GR was a sponsor of Asian American Showcase, a music, film, and art event held in Chicago this past spring. The Giant Robot web site: .

Alan Makinen

Chicago, IL 60657

______________________________________

Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997

From: Joseph Murphy

Subject: Re: Indies, music & film

>Correct me if I’m wrong, but with respect to “indies” film, they still shoot “stories” don’t they?

Right, that’s why I was having trouble placing your potential for “all sorts of inventive things” in a U. S. context, and assumed you meant Japan.

Date: Wed, 27 May 1998
From: (Abe-Nornes)
Subject: Godzilla

I know, you’ve been dreading this post, but here are some thoughts on the new Godzilla that appeared on the Screen-L list from an anonymous “John”: This post will not give away the entire plot (as if there was much to give), however, if you don’t want to chance it, please avert your eyes. Anyway, I would like to bring up several issues with the new Godzilla film in hopes that some of you will chime in with your opinions.

1. The film uses French atomic testing as its scapegoat. What are the implications of steering atomic mutations away from Americans and other countries who tested in the South Pacific? Like the extremely jingoistic film Independence Day, this film turns into a patriotic diatribe.
2. The original godzilla was a tool to protest atomic weapons on a universal plane„ and in a sense this film does as well. But this film clearly does not turn into the voice against American Imperialism that the later Japanese films did (not all of them, mind you). In fact, this film goes so far as to suggest (in a subliminal way) that only Americans can destroy the beast. Do a camparison with the original films and this one, the tone would seem to suggest that in the prior films the Japanese were inept while the Americans are the ones you’re gonna call when you want the job done right.
3. This film is full of pop-cultural references: several members from The Simpsons cast have parts, the mayor of NYC looks like Roger Ebert and his assistant’s name is Gene (they do several thumbs-up signs through the film), just name a couple. Although this does not approach the sheer campiness that the later Godzilla films exhibited, it is clear that this film tries to be something for some people.
4. What are the pros and cons of the design of the new Godzilla? I ring in with a “Hated it!” This film ends up looking nothing more than a rehash of Jurrasic Park and The Lost World. I lament the overuse of computer generation. The older films had that certain je ne sais quois to them, an element that this one does not have.
5. Is Matthew Broderick forever to be playing Ferris Bueller? Just some thoughts. I do not even suppose that I have definitive answers. I hope that others will present other questions. We are at the dawning of the Summer blockbusters, and it looks like there are to be a few more effect laden films in the coming (Don’t even get me started about Deep Impact).

john

Date: Wed, 27 May 98
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow

Subject: Fwd: Recent Godzillas

This was recently posted on H-FILM:

I recently published an article on Godzilla and related kaijyu eiga (mysterious creature films) in *The World & I* (May 1998), pp. 182-193. It does not cover the most recent, American, Godzilla which I haven’t seen because he still hasn’t stomped his way to Hiroshima. My article, however, does offer a great deal of new information and ideas about these films, which will be very useful information to anyone studying the subject. At the risk of hyping myself too much, I also have an article coming out in the June issue of *Literature and Medicine* on what I call Atomic Bomb Cinema. The June issue is devoted to film and the medical humanities. My article looks at relevant American and Japanese films. Most sincerely,
********************************************************************
Jerome F. Shapiro, Ph.D.
Hiroshima University, Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences ********************************************************************

Date: Thu, 28 May 98
From: Aaron Gerow
To: “KineJapan”
Subject: Re: Godzilla

Markus introduced, through a cross-post, a lot of good questions about the new “American” _Godzilla_. Since I haven’t seen it, I can’t say much about it myself, but I am also intrigued about how the film is sparking the creation of discourses about national identity. After all, Godzilla is a “Japanese” star who has “made good” in Hollywood, and has thus fulfilled the dream narrative constructed for a lot of Japanese cultural items: full recognition by the Other. Even today, there are still lots of stories about Komuro, Seiko (who just got remarried, if you didn’t know), Ishibashi Takaaki, etc. making it “over there.” The Nomo, Ishii, and Irabu phenom fits into this narrative as well. Much of the discourse in Japan about the American Godzilla is thus tinged with this sense of national pride.

But at the same time, it is a case of appropriation–of the Other/Hollywood making Godzilla by itself. It is no longer a Japanese product, but an American one. And thus I think you do see a bit of hesitation about recognizing it. When the film opened in the U.S., the wide shows and papers here covered it heavily, with full page spreads and live TV reports, but you also had a lot of critical comments mostly focusing on the difference between the American and Japanese Godzilla. Interestingly, most of these criticisms rather directly translate into attempts to construct national identity–not for monsters, but for humans. It is as if Godzilla is the trope for defining the national self.

Thus one saw many comments like this: the Japanese Godzilla destroys, but would never do something so cruel as eat someone. It is a monster with a heart, not a beast; a being with a mission, not a random destroyer, who can be on the side of humanity. The American Godzilla, however, is simply an alien beast, a creature of pure violence who has no purpose other than to wreck havoc.

Implied in these comments–and sometimes directly stated–is that this reflects the fact Japanese themselves have more of a heart, have a better relation with nature, etc. Americans, however, can only see monsters as alien beasts, in part because they themselves are so violent. I haven’t read everything written on the subject, so I suppose there is a large variety of discourses operating here, but I do have some questions for people:

1. Has anyone also paid attention to these discourses in Japan? What impressions have you had?
2. Are similar discourses operating in the U.S.: i.e., is there an attempt to distinguish the American and Japanese Godzillas in terms of discourses of national identity? How are the differences being articulated? This includes what the film is doing, but it is as much a question of how it is being discussed.
3. Finally, just how has the original Godzilla operated in terms of constructing Japanese national identity? The thesis that Godzilla represents resentment and fear about the nuclear age is not off the mark, but I think the series gets more complicated as it moved on. Any thoughts?

Aaron Gerow

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Date: Mon, 25 May 1998
From: “DEF”
Subject: RE: Godzilla

I see the Making-off of new Godzilla (?) movie. The FX will be good but the new look of Godzilla is so bad. The worst of this making-off was a interview with the Director and his stupid words “This Godzilla is best that any Japanese Godzilla”. There are a spanish sentence that say “For the mouth dead the fish”, and this director is so haughty. I not need remakes of Jurassic Park and luckily in Spain, Filmax HomeVideo is released a Kaiju-Eiga collection in remastered version. Actually the tittles availables are: Gojira,1954 (Japan version) Mosura tai Gojira,1964 San Daikaiju Chikyu Saidai No Kessen,1964 Gojira tai Mekagojira,1974 Daikaiju Gamera,1965 Daikaiju ketto Gamera tai Barugon,1966 Not so bad! I buy all.

DEF

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Date: Fri, 29 May 1998
From: “Peter B. High”
Subject: Re: Godzilla

[As for Aaron’s questions…] Not having seen the American Godzilla I can make no comment other than–assuming Markus’ report to be right, that it is another tub-thumper for Military America a la Independence Day–it sounds pretty grim. In reference to the Japanese Godzillas, I must say I largely agree with Aaron’s suggestion that they tend to serve as “trope[s] for defining the national self.” In agreeing, however, I must add the qualification that in dealing with such works as the stream of Godzillas (or Rambo, etc.) we must not try to get a direct “reading” of a national “psyche.” They are by nature corrupt and almost infinitely corruptable texts, which provide commentators with free-floating, protean metaphors for social “insights” they probably developed elsewhere.

Such seems to have been the case of Godzilla (especially the initial Honda Inoshiro, 1954 version) in Japan. There is a tendency here for some prominent critic to render the “established interpretation” (teisetsu) or meaning of a work, which is then loosely followed by subsequent critics and commentators. In a “taidan” for the 3/’56 issue of Eiga Geijutsu, Izawa Jun and Tsurumi Shunsuke establish the enduring “teisetsu” for Godzilla. Under the sub-heading of “The Philosophy (shisousei) of Godzilla,” Tsurumi compares Godzilla favorably with Kurosawa’s Record of a Living Being, as the ultimate cinematic lesson about the horrors of of The Bomb. Godzilla provides, he says, a “graspable metaphor” unattainable through “intellectualization (kannen)”–“The very young and those out in the rural areas unaffected by the war have no real sense of what really happened; and so they can’t grasp the significance of the anti-war and anti-Bomb movements…Therefore, rather than hearing arguments about imperialism or pacifism, they see a monster born of the Bomb and visibly pock-marked through the effects of radiation– a graspable image of the effects of ash which a few years ago rained down on us from the Bikini A-Bomb tests.”

One wonders how many ordinary contemporary Japanese viewers, untutored by Izawa and Tsurumi’s analysis, saw the film in this light. In many ways, Tsurumi’s comments tell us more about his own political views and aspirations at the time than it does about the film. Still, we do see this “teisetsu”–that Godzilla is an important anti-Bomb film–at work in much subsequent commentary (that of Communist Yamada Kazuo, not the least). As late as 1982, Arai Katsuro pays back-handed homage to the power of the interpretation by attempting to debunk it in his coverage of the film in the Kinema Jumpo 200 Best Japanese Films (1982).

A different sort of stab at Godzilla interpretation was taken in in a book called Bokutachi No Gojira (the young author’s name escapes me for the moment), published about six years ago, which I reviewed in my old Yohaku Orai column for Asahi Shimbun Yukan. I don’t have the column ready-to-hand and can’t quite recall the books line of argument off the top of my head–the author held, somewhat feebly I seem to remember, that there was a connection between Japan’s postwar “minshushugi shisou” (democratic thought) and the beleaguered image of Godzilla.

The problem with many of these interpretations is the tendency to find essentialist messages, whereas in the film itself these messages are actually terribly garbled, at best. Part of it comes from the limitations of the old critical language still used by many commentators in Japan, which encourage the search for meanings encased within “metaphors.” In his list of queries above, this is something Aaron avoids by employing the verbiage of “trope” and “discourse.” Positioning myself within the discourse of “discourses,” I’d like to hazard a few small theses of my own about Godzilla.

First, I would suggest that the Godzilla phenomenon should be placed within the context of those elegiac portrayals of Japanese sufferings during the war which were pouring out of the studios just then, in the early fifties–Sekikawa’s Listen to the Voices of the Waves(1950), Shindo’s Children of the A-Bomb (1952), Imai’s Himeyuri No To (1953), Kihnoshita’s Twenty Four Eyes (1954–the same year as Honda’s Godzilla), etc. Arriving half a decade or so after the trauma of the War Crimes tribunals, these films represent a general turning away from the theme of national self-disgrace (as seen in Kamei’s documentary Japanese Tragedy, 1946, and continuing in a way up through Yamamoto’s Barren Zone, 1952). The elegiac films, to put it baldly for the purposes of this line of argument, wash away the issue of national guilt in a flood of self-pitying tears. All the suffering portrayed is Japanese suffering. All the “sins” imputed by the films are committed against Japanese people. In some cases (24 Eyes, etc) the “perpetrators” are also Japanese–the largely undepicted Military/Government Establishment or the Militarist Mindset–but in most cases those who have inflicted the suffering are the Faceless Enemy, American bombers, etc. The general message is that the Japanese (people, at least) were at least as much victims of the war as anyone else. This theme of the victimization of innocents by a faceless Other verges on–indeed I was assert it actually enters–the realm of the persecution complex: forces outside us are waging a relentless campaign of punishment against us.

Enter now Godzilla, born of the sins of others, American atomic testing. He attacks Japan and Tokyo is (again) destroyed. The film is also elegiac and features an actual funeral hymn to the the devastated metropolis. In other words, the more-than-semi-persecution complex dramatically evolved in the elegiac “anti-war” films is inherited by the Godzilla films. In the early versions of both the elegiac films and in Honda’s original Godzilla, there is no overt display of antipathy against the pain-inflicting Other, but the potential for such is there already. Proof of this assertion comes in the recent, rather vile remakes of Himeyuri and Listen to the Sound of the Waves. We find it too in many of the subsequent Godzillas–in one, made in the early-mid eighties, the American military wants to drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo to destroy the big…because they are afraid it will go after their Japan-side bases! In another version–I forget which or when–Godzilla goes to Okinawa. He is finally beaten by Japanese intervention, but only after Olkinawan local culture is displayed as ridiculously impotent. Lest I fall into the very metaphor-hunting I dismiss above, I would have to deny that Godzilla represents some definable essence of the Japanese national identity. Indeed, Godzilla is the perfect floating, empty metaphor. He is at once a product of the Other and a projection of the national self, the destroyer (tragically) fore-doomed to be grandly (or pathetically) destroyed, the tainted one and the one who purifies, perpetrator and–somehow–victim. I could go on, but the night deepens and I have other things to do.

One other motif in Godzilla which I will only introduce without developing , is the evolving manner in which the (Japanese) military is depicted. In the original two Godzillas, the Army trundles out a host of cannons and tanks to do battle with the monster. But these are wilted like frail plastic under the fiery breath of G. The police too are helpless and in hysterical disarray. The ones who destroy the monster are the only part of the Japanese Establishment unimpugned by direct war responsibility–civilian scientists. In later Godzillas, we see a return of the heroic and ultimately effective Japanese military. In other monster films–I’m thinking here of anime–we see the emergence of the Monster Destroying Specialist–quasi-military elite units, openly motivated by the same Spirit-ist ethos we find in Pacific War films. In other words, seen as a series, the Godzilla films transform away from anti-military/authority motifs and slowly revalorize Authority and the elite military unit. Well, its time for someone else to have a say, so good night.

Peter B. High Nagoya University -

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Date: Sat, 30 May 1998
From: (Abe-Nornes)
Subject: Re: Godzilla

Certainly one significance between Japan and US reception, not to mention sequel/remake production, is the poaching on the Japanese side. I’m thinking of the way fan cultures in the US poach Star Trek or X-files to create their own narratives, art, etc. There are what you could call Godzilla otaku here in the trash film scene, but they’ve got to be extremely few in number (just consider the toys on shelves and the internet sites). In Japan, the kaiju eiga poaching get elaborate, such as the “Biology of Godzilla” book. This would be an interesting place to go to to think about Aaron’s questions. The film is just as nationalistic as Independence Day, only is considerably more indirect about it. First, the decision to make Godzilla an iguana on nuclear steroids has the effect of detaching Our Godzilla from the Japanese version. Lost World showed more “debt” to Godzilla than the current remake, just for that parodic scene of Japanese tourists running down the street. You’d think they’d at least give us a Japanese Raymond Burr! Second, the handling of the nuclear issue shows a typical trope from the rhetoric of American nationalism: or basic problems get projected on other nations. Much of the problem here is with those damn French. Sure, we have incompetent politicians and generals, but the French do nuclear testing in the Pacific, the Ruskies’ second rate reactors melt down, and our bombs work just fine thank you (we just need help aiming them). What a different representation of American power this film would have if one of those generals decided the only way to take care of those mini-Godzillas infesting Madison Square Garden was to nuke New York! As it is, Godzilla is a vague foreign threat, and thank God for, as they say on X-files, the American Military Industrial Entertainment Complex. We could be on the verge of some bad shit in South Asia, but I seriously doubt spectators in the States are watching Godzilla with this in mind.

Markus

**************************************************

Date: Sat, 30 May 1998
From: (Abe-Nornes)
Subject: Re: Godzilla

Peter’s take on Godzilla was really interesting. I have a question about the teisetsu, though. Considering how widely spread it has become, even if the films are “garbled” doesn’t this teisetsu become a reading protocol? In turn, does it become a framework for sequel production throughout the permutations you point to? In short, can we dismiss it so easily?

Markus

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Date: Sun, 31 May 1998
From: “Peter B. High”
Re: Godzilla

Markus wrote: I have a question about the teisetsu, though. Considering how widely spread it has become, even if the films are “garbled” doesn’t this teisetsu become a reading protocol? In turn, does it become a framework for sequel production throughout the permutations you point to? In short, can we dismiss it so easily? Markus

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Yes, I would say the teisetsu most certainly does become a reading protocol. In recent years it seems to have weakened somewhat, perhaps reflecting the relative decline of the high-brow film journals in Japan (the critical “superstars” known now better via “tankobon,” or small format paperbacks). Partly it is an aspect of canonization-a-la-japonais –informing the viewer WHY he likes the Tora-san series or weeps at (or is expected to weep at) the “peace” films of Imai Tadashi. One ruling teisetsu about Ozu was that he was “uniquely Japanese,” which in turn bred the one-time Western teisetsu that Ozu was “about” Zen and wabi/sabi etc. (the view Hasumi Shigehiko so furiously refutes).

As far as I know (or have thought through, in any case), the teisetsu operates in the region of reception rather than production. Although it is not always the case, the teisetsu often contributes to the circumscription of readings within established categories or even the obfuscation of readings. Sometimes it invades film history–as seen in the manner in which the wartime war films of Tasaka Tomotaka and Yoshimura Kozaburo have become indelibly imprinted with the label of “humanist warfilms,” implying a secret, and non-existent, content questioning the war.The teisetsu circumscribing readings of the original versions Listen to the Sound of the Waves and Himeyuri No To, as”anti-war” masterworks, has long disguised from view other aspects of their latent thematic content–allowing their villainous, recent remakes to pass among many viewers as genuine wear-hatred pieces. Now I know analogius fiorces are at work in the West as well. The difference, I think, is to be found in the way the Japanese teisetsu Endures. But perhaps because Western opinionating tends to be more iconoclastic, established readings, I think, have shorter life spans. I’m not sure what you Markus means by “dismissing” the teisetsu. In fact I see it as a major primal force in criticism here. Whether it has direct or even substantial indirect influence on sequel production is open to question and probably very difficult to verify. One arrant case is the way it has worked (here in Japan, at least) in reference to the so-called “peace” ideology of Imai Tadashi’s films.

– Peter B. High

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Date: Sun, 31 May 1998
From: “Peter B. High”
Subject: benshi on radio

This is not directly related to Markus’ query, but, while investigating very early days of radio in Japan, recently, I came across an intersting sidelight to the history of the late-era benshi.which I’d like to share here. I deliover it to you in the form of a snippet (a few paragraphs) from a piece I’m working on right now: Radio broadcasting entered Japanese national life in March 1925, the amateur radio boom and the dozens of tiny, unregulated “stations” having already sprinkled the nation with twenty thousand receiving sets. Thereafter, the number of radios compounded at about the same rate television sets did in the early sixties. By 1926 there were 200,000 home radios and thousands more set up in tea rooms and lower class eateries to lure in customers. By 1932 the government had stopped counting, assuming there was at least one set in every household that could afford one. The early content of the programs directly reflected government ownership: lectures on radio technology, health, traditional culture, speeches on spiritual uplift, and news. For entertainment, there were popular songs, rather crudely produced radio plays and humorous rakugo narrations, the Edo era art of the raconteur thus receiving a new lease on life via the wireless.

Less successful were the experiments using benshi, seen as practitioners of an allied art form, who attempted to perform segments form popular films sans the visual. As one listener wrote in, “Its as irritating as listening at the door of a movie theater without being able to get in.” The rakugo artists meanwhile became the first prima donnas of the airwaves and when they complained they couldn’t hit their stride in front of an impersonal microphone, the station staff had to troop in to provide him an audience. After listeners wrote in querying the ghostly bursts of laughter, the staff men used pillows to smother their guffaws. Coverage of boxing and sumo matches did much to spread the popularity of radio in the same way cinema popularized itself among the masses with its Veriscope “illustration” of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight in 1897. Egi Ri’ichi’s Radio Calisthenics had almost a million families stretching and bending before breakfast. At first Egi did his show clad only in shorts and running shirt, but when it became known Imperial Prince Terunomiya and his wife were also devoted listeners, he was ordered to change to formal tuxedo. –well, for whatever its worth…

Peter B. High Nagoya University

Date: Sun, 31 May 98
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow
Subject: Re: Godzilla

Peter offered some great comments on the new and old Godzillas. I’d like to add some comments interspersed between his:

I must say I largely agree with Aaron’s suggestion that they tend to serve as “trope[s] for defining the national self.” In agreeing, however, I must add the qualification that in dealing with such works as the stream of Godzillas (or RAMBO, etc.) we must not try to get a direct “reading” of a national “psyche.” They are by nature corrupt and almost infinitely corruptable texts, which provide commentators with free-floating, protean metaphors for social “insights” they probably developed elsewhere.

Peter is very right here and I thank him for providing the Izawa/Tsurumi citation. Part of the reason I focused on discourses on the film instead of the discourse of the film is precisely because I think the texts are so “corruptible.” As such, they do not reflect any national essence unless they are read as such within certain reading formations. My interest is then in how these readings have been formed and changed. With regard to reception, Peter asks an interesting question:

One wonders how many ordinary contemporary Japanese viewers, untutored by Izawa and Tsurumi’s analysis, saw the film in this light.

I wonder if anyone has done any research on the reception of the original _Gojira_. Izawa/Tsurumi offer one form of reception, but were there others? With regard to the new Godzilla, I do think we see the operations of certain established reading formations trying to use the film to articulate national identity. Just yesterday, I was watching “Osama no buranchi” and noted two very typical responses:

The host gave the old celebratory tone: “Isn’t great that a Japanese star can be given this kind of treatment by Hollywood!”

The reporter, in explaining the difference between the old and new Godzilla: “The American Godzilla has a body closer to that of Westerners since it has long legs.” Anyone seen any other comments like these?

A different sort of stab at Godzilla interpretation was taken in in a book called Bokkutachi No Gojira (the young author’s name escapes me for the moment), published about six years ago, which I reviewed in my old Yohaku Orai column for Asahi Shimbun Yukan.

The author is Sato Kenji. I like Peter’s reading of the original _Gojira_ in terms of the victimization complex and would like to expand on his last comment:

One other motif in Godzilla which I will only introduce without developing , is the evolving manner in which the (Japanese) military is depicted. In the original two Godzillas, the Army trundles out a host of cannons and tanks to do battle with the monster. But these are wilted like frail plastic under the fiery breath of G. The police too are helpless and in hysterical disarray. The ones who destroy the monster are the only part of the Japanese Establishment unimpugned by direct war responsibility–civilian scientists. In later Godzillas, we see a return of the heroic and ultimately effective Japanese military. In other monster films–I’m thinking here of anime–we see the emergence of the Monster Destroying Specialist–quasi-military elite units, openly motivated by the same Spirit-ist ethos we find in Pacific War films. In other words, seen as a series, the Godzilla films transform away from anti-military/authority motifs and slowly revalorize Authority and the elite military unit.

I think there are two points that need to be stressed here: First, that the Godzilla series definitely changes over time. We all know some of the changes: from films aimed at adult audience to mostly youth audiences, with a corresponding shift from a complex, monstrous Godzilla to Godzilla the friend of children (by the late 60s). Thus while I think Markus is right in asking about the perpetuation of certain reading protocols for Godzilla (they are real historical phenomena and are part of the larger text “Godzilla”:

Peter’s take on Godzilla was really interesting. I have a question about the teisetsu, though. Considering how widely spread it has become, even if the films are “garbled” doesn’t this teisetsu become a reading protocol?

In turn, does it become a framework for sequel production throughout the permutations you point to? In short, can we dismiss it so easily? To relate this to the production situation also demands we relate Godzilla to other discourses in production. The primary one and one closest to _Gojira_ is Toho tokusatsu film. There I do think one sees, as Peter notes with Godzilla, an increasing move to revalorize authority and the military elite. In fact, I think the central text here is _Kaitei gunkan_ (1963) in which the Earth must call on a former Imperial Navy ship and its technology to save the day. Looking at that film and many others in which the Japanese (even in the guise of the world defense force) military saves the day, I get the impression that many of the Toho tokusatsu films are fantasies about Japan winning WWII (the fact that such fantasies are still common in video games and book fiction confirms the depth and longevity of such fantasies). These discourses I think influence the later Godzilla and undermine their status as a pure expression of horror and anxiety about nuclear war.

Aaron Gerow YNU

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Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998
From: “Mark Schilling”
Subject: Re: Godzilla

I’ve been reading the posts on Godzilla with interest, especially Aaron’s reports on the wide shows. But though complaining that Hollywood has trashed a Japanese icon may make a good talking point for a wide show tarento, Toho expects the film to do enormous business here. The following is an excerpt from a marketing campaign report I wrote recently for Screen International that attempts to explain why.

Toho, which killed off its own Godzilla in the 22nd installment of the series – the 1995 Godzilla vs. Destroyah – and is distributing Roland Emmerich’s replacement in Japan, is convinced that none of the critical carping will matter at the box office. “It’s going to be the event movie of the summer,” says Toho publicist Masahiko Suzuki, “We’re projecting film rentals of Y10 billion ($73 million), or about the same as The Princess Mononoke and Titanic.” To achieve this figure, Toho is mounting what Suzuki describes as “an orthodox campaign” that bears only a passing resemblance to Sony’s year-long promo blitz. The company has hung a poster on a twin tower that is a Ginza landmark saying that Godzilla is “as tall as this building,” but has not plastered Tokyo with posters saying that “size does matter.” “The Japanese already know how big Godzilla is,” says Suzuki. “We don’t have to spend a lot of money reminding them.”

Working with a relatively small promotional budget compared with its US counterpart, Toho is saving its big guns for the month before the film’s July 11 opening, when it will saturate the market with TV and print ads, as well as posters in trains and train stations. The target of this campaign will be a wide demographic, including young adults in their twenties and thirties that are the core movie audience in Japan. To accommodate the expected crowds, Toho is opening Godzilla on 400 screens – its widest release ever. Many of the screens will be in Warner Mycal, UCI and other multiplexes that are rapidly reviving the Japanese exhibition business. “We are not limiting ourselves to our own circuit,” says Suzuki. “We want to get this film into as many theatres as possible. Hard-core fans may say that this Godzilla is not the real thing, but we think ordinary moviegoers are going to love it.”

Before dismissing Toho’s box office projection as hype, remember that they erred on the conservative side in forecasting the take of The Princess Mononoke; Toho thought it would earn about Y40 billion in film rentals, but it ended up clearing more than twice that. If they are right and Godzilla becomes a Titanic-sized hit here, I suppose we can say that snazzy CG effects outweigh any fan loyalty to a local idol. Given that sequels to the US Godzilla are already in the works, the Japanese Big G may be forced into a long retirement and become even more of a nostalgia item – the Japanese equivalent of Mickey Mouse – than it is already. I also think, though, that Toho will bring Godzilla “back home” someday, thunder thighs, rubber suit and all. But will anyone over the age of 12 still care?

Mark Schilling (schill@gol.com)

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Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998
From: gstarr@gol.com (gregory starr)
Subject: Re: Godzilla

Mark, Good luck to Toho and their marketing campaign. But after seeing it at their premiere screening, I personally think they might have some difficulties reaching their goals. Setting aside the entire Japanese Godzilla vs. U.S. Godzilla lip-flapping fest (which, if anything, might stimulate people to go see what the fuss is about), I think this film lacks the broad appeal of a Mononoke or any other of the big box office leaders . Most of them had legs that resulted from strong word of mouth as well as promotion–and enjoyed an audience that ranged from schoolkids to the graying set. This film doesn’t offer much of value for anyone over 12–there’s no campiness, no charm, no plot. There’s a big CG iguana, but the kids have seen a lot of good CG on their video screens these days. I’ll be surprised by any longevity in this Godzilla. But I guess we should never underestimate the power of marketing. Cheers, Greg Starr

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Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998
From: “Mark Schilling”
Subject: Re: Godzilla

Having not seen the US Godzilla, I have no argument with Greg’s observation that the film lacks camp and charm, characters and story. I also admit that I was surprised by Toho’s prediction that the film would earn more than Y10 billion in rentals. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Toho does not always overhype their forecasts (though the one I quoted for PM should have had a period between the “4” and “0”), so I thought that they must have their reasons, though it wasn’t my brief in the marketing piece to speculate on them. On reflection, though, here are a few reasons why, despite poor reviews and a disappointing opening weekend in its home market, Godzilla might still do well here:

1. All of Toho’s Godzilla films released in the nineties have earned more than Y1 billion in rentals, with two, Godilla vs. Mothra (1993) and Godzilla vs. Destroyah recording Y2.0 billion or more. Given the strength of the franchise, a Godzilla movie made with 10 times the budget and vastly superior effects compared with earlier entries is almost certain to improve on their numbers.
2. A bad critical rap and disappointing numbers in the States does not mean that an action film, especially, will also perform poorly here. Case in point is Speed 2, which was trashed by US critics and ignored by US audiences, but still managed to become the fourth highest-grossing film of the year in Japan.
3. Toho is not only the most successful distributor but the biggest exhibitor in Japan – and Godzilla is their baby. A big reason for PM’s success here last year was solid backing from Toho, which opened it wide in their best theaters. Godzilla is opening much wider and, in many markets, will be the only show in town. Despite the incredible legs of Titanic and the arrival of challengers like Deep Impact, it is unquestionably the summer movie to beat – and will have to bomb spectacularly indeed to lose..
4. A US industry analyst said that Godzilla would get zero repeat business from anyone over fourteen – a fatal black mark, in his opinion. In Japan, of course, the Godzilla films have always primarily targeted a low demographic, but the young adults have come anyway. I’d rather not comment on audience mental age vis a vis Japan and the US, but that fact remains that the core audience here – teens and young adults – will turn out in large numbers for big effects shows, even ones aimed at 12-year-olds.

Still, I doubt that Godzilla will be able to put up PM- and Titanic-sized numbers. As Greg mentioned, it would have to draw the same wide demographic and the same number of repeaters and, in my opinion, it ain’t going to happen. Even so, I can see it approaching the take of Emmerich’s last film to open in Japan, Independence Day, which lacked Godzilla’s hometown-boy-makes-good appeal, but still managed to clear Y6.65 billion in rentals. My own best guesstimate, given the film’s bad advance vibes: Y5.0 billion.

Mark Schilling

Date: Sat, 16 May 98
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow 
Subject: People’s Daily on Pride

It was also reported in the papers that the Chinese _People’s Daily_ published an editorial article on the 14th severely criticizing the production of _Puraido: Unmei no toki_, the Toei-released film that focuses on Tojo Hideki and the Tokyo war crimes trails. The film, which opens on May 23rd, has already sparked criticism inside Japan for reportedly depicting Tojo favorably.

The Chinese paper declared (translating from the Japanese) that “fabricating this kind of movie is a threat to the people of Asia and a challenge against international society.” Entitled “The Beautification of War Criminals Cannot Be Excused”, the article said that “the filming of _Pride_ is not an accident, but a product of the expansion of right-wing forces in Japanese society.”

While I haven’t seen the film, the fact that one of the first previews was for LDP members and that the print ads basically construct Tojo as a Japanese Jefferson Smith (the top blurb: “Tojo vs. America: A sole individual’s fight with a nation’s pride at stake”; and the “quote” from Tojo: “I will fight. At this rate, Japan and the Japanese will be rendered the worst of nations and peoples.”), my impression is that the People’s Daily is not too far off the mark.

Anyone (such as Mark) seen the film yet?

Aaron Gerow

YNU
 
 

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Date: Sun, 17 May 1998
From: “Jean W. Williams”
Subject: RE: People’s Daily on Pride

It will also be interesting to follow what Chinese filmmakers may have to say on the topic. Xie Jin, for example, previously in _People’s Daily_, has spoken of what he perceives as Japan’s “cultural impotence”.

Jean Williams

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Date: Sun, 17 May 98
From: David Hopkins
Subject: RE: People’s Daily on Pride

Well, I told you about this movie when I first joined back in February. I haven’t seen the finished movie, but I have a copy of the final draft of the script, which I’ll be happy to copy for you if you’ll send me your address and, say, 1000 yen of bookstore coupons.

I would say it’s just as bad as the worst you can imagine. On the other hand, I can’t imagine it being popular with young people, who would be the only group unlikely to have a formed opinion on the topic.

The Wall Street Journal already covered it, too, on April 30th, and although the article seemed to be based more on the press conference announcing the movie than on the movie itself, they got it about right, I thought. Bizarrely, they said that Tsugawa Masahiko was the “Robert DeNiro of Japan,” while I think of him as a hack TV actor. Does he have any fans?

Anyway, free publicity is what the filmmakers want and need, so I say, ignore it. If you do go to see it, I’m the handsome middle-aged American officer behind the witness stand who is giving the finger to the camera all the time.

David Hopkins in Tenri

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Date: Sun, 17 May 98
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow 
Subject: RE: People’s Daily on Pride

Thanks to David Hopkins for his post on _Pride_. I agree with him that, as consumers, we would be best off ignoring _Pride_, as scholars, there are still some issues we might want to pursue further.

The Mainichi this morning ran a rather long special report on the controversy. While covering both sides of the argument, the piece, in summarizing the movie, says, “The film, taking the point of view of Tojo, emphasizes that Japan was forced into fighting World War Two in order to defend itself and to liberate Asia from colonialism, and that the treatment of the Nanking Massacre in the Tokyo Trials was based on rumor and exaggeration and used by the Allies to censure Japanese militarism.”

The film was made for a very large budget of 1,500,000,000 yen to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Higashi Nippon Hausu, a housing company based on Morioka. HNH paid for 90% of the budget with Toei, which is distributing the film, covering only the remaining amount. HNH’s former chairman, Nakamura Isao, is the chair of the right-wing political party, “Seinen Jiyuto,” and started the “Gyokakai” in order to “rethink Japanese traditional culture and maintain pride in our history.” The film’s production committee is headed by the noted right-wing foreign policy expert, Kase Hideaki. The president of HNH, Asano Katsuaki, said that “We thought we had a duty to transmit a correct historical consciousness and to bring back pride in being Japanese.”

However, when Toei’s labor union read the script, it declared that the film “makes a hero out of Tojo and warps history.” Getting support from the industry wide labor union, Eiga Engeki Rodo Kumiai Sorengo, the union gained supporters from various fields and launched on April 20th the “Society to Criticize the Film Pride” which has called on Toei to cancel the release of the film.

Director Ito Shunya has defended himself by saying that “I am neither on the right nor the left. The Tokyo Trials were a continuation of the war after the war, and I depicted Tojo from the perspective that he was the one who best fought that battle.”

The Mainichi underlines in a sidebar that films like _Pride_ are a manifestation of the weak position of the film industry. Despite hits last year like _Paradise Lost_ and _Evangelion_, Toei revised its projected profits for this year down from 1.8 billion to 800 million yen. In such a state, the industry is more likely to rely on films largely paid for by outside sources. Thus Toei released one film last year paid for by the dubious religous cult, “Kofuku no Kagaku,” and this year opened an animated film paid for by the Otani-ha of Jodo Shinshu. Such films make economic sense for Toei: they obtain films for their theaters with little risk and often get the producing side to buy up the required number of advance tickets. In the case of _Pride_, HNH bought up 900,000 advance tickets (which it will presumably sell (or force on) its business partners and employees), so that there is absolutely no chance the film will not be a box-office success. (This is another reason to question the advance ticket system.)

Aaron Gerow

YNU

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Date: Mon, 18 May 1998
From: David Hopkins 
Subject: RE: People’s Daily on Pride

Actually, my sister-in-law works for a plastics company that sells flooring and wallpaper to Higashi Nihon House and they were pressured to buy half-price tickets for all of their employees as a show of corporate loyalty. In the last few weeks, HNH stock has declined from 650 to around 570. Maybe they blew too much money? There is no reliable info available from companies that trade over-the-counter, only insiders have info.

David Hopkins

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Date: Mon, 18 May 1998
From: “Peter B. High” 
Subject: RE:Toei’s Pride

Pride is not the first example of a postwar Japanese film sponsored by a political pressure group, since both the left (perhaps especially the left and the right have been in the background of numerous films. On the right, the Shin Toho spectacular Emperor Meiji and the Russo Japanese War (Meiji Tenno To Nichiro Dai Sensou, 1957), directed by the rightist-leaning Watanabe Kunio, springs to mind as one significant example. In addition to its nearly hagiographic portrayal of the Emperor himself, the film resurrects several of the “bidan” (or “tales of military virtue”–in this case the stories of Lt. Col. Hirose and Corporal Sugino) which had been featured in the pre-war and wartime National Language (Kokugo) and Ethics (Shushin) textbooks and which had been expurgated under the direct orders of SCAP. One apparent parallel between the MEIJI film and Pride is that they both were made by production companies facing severe economic difficulties (although MEIJI was a major hit, Shin Toho bellied up four years later), receiving important funding from non-film industry, politically- motivated sources.

As far as I know, however, Pride presents the most overt postwar example of a tendency which was very common during the 1930s–the direct sponsoring by a rightwing pressure group of a film to promote its political ideals and/or program. In the thirties such films tended to be “documentaries” (but there were dramas, or at least “dramatizations,” as well). Of course in those days, the government itself eagerly pushed the major film companies to turn out features which propagated official thinking on domestic and international issues, something they did by providing often lavish financial backing. But since the regular film companies contained few ideologues of either the right or the left, the direct influence of pure ideology on their films, even in those days, can probably be discounted. Patriotic themes–usually set in the context of war films— tended to be exploited commercially until they were played out, whereupon they were dropped.

Occasionally, the Army or Navy would hire a production company outright to make a propaganda picture. As experienced moulders of public opinion, the film units connected with the major newspapers were often favored. For example, the Army hired Mainichi to make Defend Manchuria (Mamore Manshu, 1932), a film of documentary footage interspersed with dramatized sequences which argued that Manchuria was part of Japan’s “lifeline” (the latter being a key phrases of the era). General Araki Sadao (leader of the radical Kodo-ha or “Imperial Way” faction inside the Army) used non-official funds to commission one of the most famous, the part-talkie Crisis-Time Japan (Hijoji Nippon, 1933), also produced by the Mainichi film unit. There, Araki appears on screen in full military uniform to lecture the nation on “the truth about Japan’s present-day situation at home and abroad.” What follows is a long, high-blown oration on the divine mission of the nation’s military. Oover a dozen years later the film would be introduced as “evidence” at the Tokyo War Crimes trial. Quite apart from such officially- and quasi-officially-commissioned propaganda pieces, “civilian” political pressure groups (the pre-war equivalents of the Nakamura Isao’s present-day “Seinen Jiyuto”) did manage to have their say as investors in specific film projects. Their impact was comparatively great in the case of small, “independent production” companies; many of them, like Taiheiyo or Akazawa Kinema, were quite tiny indeed. Independent production companies centered around a single star, such as Arashi Kanjuro or Bando Tsumasaburo, were particularly favored for the production of drama films. But these were often relationships fraught with discord, since the stars usually refused to become mere puppets.

Such was the case of Bando Tsumasaburo and his company. In February 1931, a public mudslinging contest broke out between the Kokusuikai (National Essence Society) and the infamous Kokuryukai (Black Dragon Society) over which of the two factions had the controlling interest in the company. Bando insisted that neither of them did. Howling with injured dignity, the Kokuryukai leveled a blast at him through the newspapers: “Bando owes our society a great debt of gratitude. After his resignation from Shochiku, we invested seventy throusand yen in his new company with the understanding that it would exert itself in the task of national education through films made in line with Kokuryukai principles.” At least part of the problem was that Bando’s popularity was sagging badly and he was having serious difficulty making any films at all.

By the late thirties, with the China Incident now in progress, the “itaku” (commissioned) film went into decline, partly because of the 1939 Film Law, partly because of the enforced “consolidation” of documentary film companies in 1940 and partly, quite simply, because the public never responded very favorably to them in the first place. In the case of Gen. Araki’s Crisis-Time Japan, the public responded with a sneer. The very term “Crisis-time” became the butt of numerous jokes, one of them running thusly: Question: What time is it? Answer: It’s Crisis-time!”

It seems to me that the production background of Pride can be seen in the context of this 1930s pre-war phenomenon. Certainly it provides an interesting precedent. Whether it signifies a serious revival of the ultra-right is still open to question. Still, there are worrisome straws in the wind. One of these is the steadily growing influence of Fujioka Nobukatsu’s “Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho o Tsukuru Kai” (the Society for the Preparation of New History Textbooks”), a vocal group seeking to eliminate most references to the worst abuses during Japan’s aggressive-militarist past on the grounds that it signifies a peurile form of “self-maligning” (jigyaku). In much the same vein as Nakamura Isao, they call instead for school textbooks which “rethink Japanese traditional culture and maintain pride in our history.” Especially now that the New History Textbook Society has gained the fervent backing of the extremely popular maverick manga-artist Kobayashi Yoshinori (of “Goman-ism” fame), the numerous books put out by the Society line the shelves of university bookshelves and the buzz word “jigyaku” is known to most students. Mercifully however, it too has become the occasional butt of wry humor (sot of like “Crisis-time”), especially since “jigyaku” partakes somewhat in the significance of the English term, “self-abuse.”

Clearly, PRIDE shares to a great degree in this “self-consolation” form of national history.

Peter B. High
Nagoya University

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Date: Tue, 19 May 1998
From: “Mark Schilling” 
Subject: Re: Pride

I went a screening of Pride today and had the sense, for once, to arrive early. The Toei screening room was packed with not only the usual industry types, but visitors in reserved seats who looked to be of the WWII generation. I’ll post my Japan Times review later, but as for first impressions: the film is surprisingly well-made, with a strong performance by Tsugawa Masahiko as Tojo, and not as crudely propogandistic as its origins would suggest. Much of it consists of courtroom and other scenes that are taken directly from the films of the Tokyo tribunal and otherwise follow the historical record fairly faithfully. (The operative word in this sentence is “fairly.”) .

The main objects are to, first, humanize Tojo as a self-sacrificing patriot, good family man and all-round decent, if deeply conflicted, guy and, second, justify Japan’s wartime policy as contributing to the liberation of Asian peoples, mostly notably Indians, laboring under the colonial yoke, while minimizing Japan’s wartime atrocities and maximizing the misdeeds and hypocrisy of her conquerors. The historical viewpoint is highly selective and, especially for the majority of younger Japanese who know next to zilch about their country’s recent history, highly misleading.

Is the film, as are so many maeuri ken eiga, a turkey that, without its corporate life support, would be DOA at the box office? The Westen media reports I’ve seen finesse this question, because most of the reporters who wrote them (1) did not see the film or (2) have no idea of how the market works in Japan. My own guess is that, though the film’s core audience is the same crowd that worships at Yasukuni Shrine – i.e, over fifties who lived through the war and its aftermath – it is also going to draw more than a fewer younger Japanese who buy Kobayashi’s “Gomanism” paperbacks, with their revisionist arguments against the “official” history of the Nanjing Massacre, and dig Beat Takeshi’s sneers at craven politicians and bureaucrats who suck up to their American overlords and crawl before Asian professional victims.

Far from being only the expensive hobbyhorse of a wacko rightist businessman, “Pride” expresses sentiments that are gaining ground here among not only ranters on sound trucks, but otherwise ordinary Japanese.

After seeing the film, I asked a friend in the Toei Kokusai-bu if Toei had any intention of selling it abroad. The answer, as one might expect, was a resounding “no,” though he said he would be glad to oblige anyone interested in screening it. A middle-management type who is not in the company union, he said emphatically that he “is not ashamed” of the film and thinks it will “do well in the Japanese market.” He also added, half-jokingly, that rightists were “protecting the company” from assault, though I didn’t notice any khaki-clad punch perms anywhere near the building.

Was Toei driven to investing and distributing the film by balance sheets woes? Perhaps the lure of quick yen in tough times made the greenlight decision easier, but Toei has an industry rep as a “yakuza” company with right-wing tendencies. Their 1995 film commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of WW II, “Kike Wadatsumi no Koe” (Last Friends) was the most blatantly nationalistic of any of the war movies of that year. President Tan Takaiwa told me in an interview that he viewed the film as a message to younger generation aimed at making them better understand the glorious sacrifices of their forebearers. No wonder Toei is presenting “Pride” with pride.

Mark Schilling

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Date: Fri, 22 May 1998
From: “Peter B. High” 
Subject: Re: Mainichi’s Review of Pride

Pride, the Toei film which apparently sings the praises of wartime leader Tojo Hideki (unfortunately I haven’t seen it yet), has come up for discussion several times so far. In today’s (5/22) Mainichi Shimbun (evening edition) it was reviewed by critic Nojima Koichi and I thought readers would be interested to see an example of how the Japanese media views this film/phenomenon. Roughly translated, Nojima writes:

************************************************************************************* 

Pride - An Undeniable Sense of Awkwardness Even before its release, Pride came under attack from both the Chinese press and Toei’s own trade union. Of course this is because it has former PM and Class A War Criminal Tojo Hideki, probably the most widely-reviled Japanese individual ever, as its main character. The film itself features a scene in which Tojo’s grandson is forced to stand in front of his elementary school teacher and hear his grandfather condemned as “worse than a thief.” Not only did Tojo pull Japan into a miserable, losing war, he failed to die when he shot himself in a suicide attempt. Clearly the purpose of the movie is to use the Tojo story to shore up the opinion that “Japan was not the only villain of the war.”

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, in which the Allied forces try the Class A War Criminals, dominates the film. Before seeing the film, I wondered why the filmmakers felt it necessary to dramatically re-enact the trial, since we already have so much documentary footage available and since Kobayashi Masaki’s feature-length documentary, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial [1983.see Note A below], gives us such a detailed account. As it turns out, the trial comes across as a far more powerful sense of drama than we get from [Kobayashi’s] carefully edited documentary footage.

Scott Wilson, as Prosecutor Kenan, puts in a very convincing performance, as does Tsugawa Masahiko as Tojo. Kenan asks Tojo, “Do you think that what you did was right?” to which the defendant replies, “Most certainly.” Next Kenan demands, “And would you do it again if you are acquitted?” The highpoint of the film is where he thunders this line. Still, taken as a whole, the film gives a certain sense of awkwardness. This probably comes from the maladroit attempt to intertwine the themes of the Indian independence movement [see Note B] and the Trials itself. Apparently the original plan was to focus on the independence movement and it was the director, Ito Toshiya’s idea to incorporate the Trials. As it turns out, the center of the film has shifted to the trial, and the Indian independence motif gets enveloped in a mist. It probably would have been better boldly to sieze on the Trials as the film’s only subject. That way, it could have delved more deeply into the issue of Prosecutor Kenan.

Throughout the trial Tojo maintains a combative stance. When the issue of the Nanjing Massacre is raised, he responds, “It is inconceivable that the Imperial Army could have carried out such an act.” Thus, in this way, the film presents in a very straight manner Tojo’s own viewpoint. In ordeer to get a more balanced fix on the latter issue, viewers might do well to see NANJING 1937. The film is two hours and forty-one minutes in length.

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Note A: Kobayashi apparently took quite a number of years to work his documentary material into a sort of private “thesis” film concerning their Trials. The point he makes is that they were an emotionalized farce in which very little in the way of “actual war crimes” was proven. Personally, I was shocked by his bold intercutting of footage from the My Lai massacre and of the atomic bombings to demonstrate that America was just as “guilty” as Japan. While I agreed that the A-bombing was a serious mistake and American actions in Vietnam utterly reprehensible, I felt that Kobayashi was consciously attempting to obscure the issues of the Trials and to create an apologia for wartime Japan. Just a year before Kobayashi’s film came out, psychologist/pop essayist Kishida Shu published his famous collection of essays, Monogusa Seishin Bunseki, where in one essay he roundly condemns the Trials in a similar manner. In a style of foaming-at-the-mouth with righteous indignation (in many way he was a fore-runner of Kobayashi Yoshinori’s “goman-ism”), he “psychologically analyzes” America as a nation shot through with “giman” (self-deception), a condition which causes it to believe that its “rhetoric and idealism” makes it in fact morally pure, while in fact, from the days of the Puritan’s Pequoit War, it has consistently engaged in loathsome, genocidal activities. The Trials, he says, were a perfect example of this “giman.” He ends his essay with the ringing line, “Until America becomes ashamed of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials and until America returns the land it has stolen from the Indians, I will never trust an American.” The book stayed in print until 1991.

Although Kobayashi’s America-phohobic stance is far more muted in The Tokyo War Crimes Trials, the underlying logic has close similarities.

Note B: The issue of Japan’s sympathy with and fostering of the Indian independence movement became the subject of a major film during the Pacific War–Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Advance, Flag of Independence (Susume Dokuritsu Ki, Toho, 1943–available unsubtitled on video), a syrupy semi-“spy” drama set in 1939 Japan and featuring Hasegawa Kazuo as an Indian independence activist refugeeing in Japan. The character he plays expresses awe and adoration for Everything Japanese, looking to Japan as the potential savior of his people. When he is kidnapped from a Tokyo street by the nefarious British ambassador (Saito Tatsuo) and held captive in the British embassy, he commits suicide. Pro-Japanese real-life Indian independence leader, Chandra Bose, makes a brief appearance in the Toho war documentary Malayan War Record (Maraya Senki, 1942) in the section depicting the All-Asian Conference called together in Tokyo by Tojo Hideki.

Peter B. High
Nagoya University

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Date: Sat, 23 May 1998
From: “Mark Schilling” 
Subject: Re: Mainichi’s Review of Pride

Here, for the curious, is my Japan Times review of “Pride,” which will appear in the Tuesday, May 26 edition.

Most Japanese movies slip in and out of the theaters while registering barely a blip on the mental radar screen of the local foreign community. I wish I had Y100 for every glazed look I’ve encountered when I mention “Mononoke Hime” (The Princess Mononoke), the Hayao Miyazaki animation that shattered all Japanese box office records last year – I could buy a ticket to “Titanic,” which recently surpassed it as Japan’s biggest-ever box office winner. One recent Japanese film, however, is getting the plenty of attention from outlanders – nearly all of it negative. That film is “Pride – Unmei no Toki” (Pride – The Fatal Moment), a biopic that focuses on the wartime career and subsequent war crimes trial of former prime minister Hideki Tojo. When I first heard about the production of the film, underwritten by a home developer whose chairman is a notorious rightist, I thought it was sick joke, comparable to an aging German industrialist with neo-Nazi sympathies financing a Broadway revival of “Springtime for Hitler”

But no, the makers of “Pride” are in deadly earnest and, far from being a cheap whitewash, their film is a lavish big-budget production with elaborately realistic period sets (including the gallows from which Toho and his six fellow war criminals swung), location scenes shot in India with thousands of extras, and an all-star cast headed by Masahiko Tsugawa, who pulls out all stops as Tojo. This formidably gifted veteran, who is best known abroad for his work in the comedies of Juzo Itami, also bears a strong physical resemblance to the late wartime leader and has gone on the promo campaign trail to plump for the film’s historical accuracy, while excoriating his countrymen for losing their Yamato damashi (Japanese spirit) and forgetting Bushido (the way of the samurai). Clearly for Tsugawa, as well as for director Shunya Ito and others involved in the production, “Pride” is not a straight soul-for-cash deal with the devil, but a labor of conviction, even love.

What is that conviction? To put it simply, it is that, far from being the horned arch-demon of Allied wartime propaganda, Tojo was a staunch patriot, able leader and warm-hearted family man who personified the samurai spirit of loyalty and self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, the film presents the Tokyo Trial, at which an international panel of judges heard the cases of 28 defendants charged with war crimes, as a little more than vehicle for victor’s revenge, whose death sentence for Tojo was a foregone conclusion. It also makes the claim that Japan was fighting, not for its own aggrandizement, but to free the subject peoples of Asia, particularly Indians, from the yoke of their white colonial masters.

Though I sat through “Tokyo Saiban” (Tokyo Trial), Masaki Kobayashi’s exhaustive, if exhausting, four-and-a-hour 1983 documentary, I cannot claim to be an expert on either Tojo or his trial. What I can say, after rummaging through yellowed clips and poking about World War II tomes to refresh my memory, is that the film is not totally off the mark. Tojo did have more than a few admirable qualities, including a rock-solid integrity of a kind in short supply among today’s bureaucrats and politicians, and a razor-sharp mind that tore many of his prosecutors’ ill-informed arguments to shreds. Also, the film’s portrayal of his trial is, as far it goes, faithfully follows the outline of the historical record, including the refusal of GHQ authorities to permit publication of the minority opinion of Indian jurist Rabhabinod Pal, the only judge to find the defendants innocent of all charges (and who is, not incidentally, the film’s sole non-Japanese hero).

“Pride” is not content, however, to correct errors and distortions that have crystallized, over the decades, into received opinion. Instead, it presents a one-sided view of its hero and his deeds that may have many cinematic precedents – the Japanese film industry has been releasing nationalistic war films for decades – but goes beyond most in its unapologetic revisionism. Given that growing numbers of Japanese are subscribing to that revisionism, thanks in part to Ministry of Education censorship that has made proper instruction in World War II history all but impossible, “Pride” is a film that deserves serious attention, not casual dismissal.

One could take issue with the way the film massages its depictions of events to fit its particular mold. More important, however, are its glaring omissions. The film presents Tojo as the embodiment of traditional Japanese virtue, who stoically undermines his own defense to save his Emperor. We never see the blinkered, rigid ultranationalist who failed to fully calculate the costs of the war or the chances of success, to the grief of millions. It portrays chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan as an arrogant, ignorant, politically motivated score settler whose case against Tojo depended on fragmentary anecdotes and baseless insinuations. It conveniently omits testimony by prosecution witnesses, including eyewitnesses to the Rape of Nanjing, that offered irrefutable evidence of Japanese aggression and brutality.

It gives us scenes of pure-hearted Japanese soldiers and their Indian allies, led by Subhas Chandras Bose, advancing gloriously against the British imperialists on the India-Burma border in 1944. It does not show us the outcome: confused retreat, despite direct orders from Tokyo to hold ground, followed by disease, suicide, and a complete breakdown in discipline. It also does not present the fruits of Japanese “liberation” in Asia – a hatred and distrust of Japan that endures among survivors and their descendants to this day. What is really needed to counter “Pride,” however, is not outraged reviews in English-language newspapers, but a film that presents the whole truth about Tojo and his co-defendants, that effectively revises the revisionists. But who would finance it and film it, especially to the tune of “Pride“ ‘s Y1.5 billion? Hard to imagine anyone being so foolish, isn’t?. There’s a market for “Pride,” but not a nation’s shame.

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Date: Sat, 23 May 1998
From: Lawrence Marceau 
Subject: Pride

The CNN website carried an item from the AP wire service on the film “Pride” today. I guess we can’t ignore it, even if we wanted to. (I hope AP doesn’t sue me for quoting the article…)

Film depicts Tojo, Japan’s WWII leader, as a hero

May 23, 1998

TOKYO (AP) – A Japanese movie that stirred controversy for depicting Japan’s most notorious war criminal as a hero was released Saturday throughout the country amid protests from neighboring Asian countries.

The film, “Pride,” about Japan’s wartime leader Gen. Hideki Tojo, has provoked harsh criticism from China and North Korea. But the movie had a quiet start in Tokyo, where no protests were held and theaters had empty seats.

So far, the Japanese public has largely ignored the movie. Aside from one small campaign against it by a labor union, there have been no major demonstrations.

But in Beijing, the state-run Xinhua News Agency again attacked the film Saturday calling it “reactionary,” saying it “turns history upside down” and sought to beautify Japan’s wartime actions.

At Marunouchi Toei theater in Tokyo’s posh Ginza shopping district, only the first showing – which was preceded by greetings from the film’s stars – was nearly full. The other three viewings had plenty of empty seats, the theater said.

The film opened at some 140 other theaters around the country.

Toei, the studio that made “Pride,” said viewer reaction has been good at special screenings before Saturday’s release. Some people were deeply moved, and others left feeling proud of being Japanese, Toei said.

Tojo was hanged 50 years ago after being tried as a Class-A war criminal at the Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo.

Tojo, who served as prime minister from 1941 to 1944, gave the go-ahead for the attack on Pearl Harbor. In one scene in the film, Tojo refuses to believe that Japanese forces carried out the Nanjing Massacre in China. The filmmakers defend the scene as faithful to Tojo’s personality.

In announcing the film earlier this month, Toei, said the company wanted to correct the perception imposed by American victors that Tojo was a militarist aggressor.

“Pride” cost $11 million to make, three times Toei’s usual budget.

The film suggests Tojo was actually a peaceful man who took Japan to war in self-defense and to liberate Asia from Western colonialism – a popular view among Japanese ultra right-wing activists and politicians who defend Japan’s wartime role.

Last week, China expressed “shock” at the way Tojo was portrayed in the film, and North Korea called it “shameless.”

Fending off growing international criticism, Foreign Ministry pokesman Sadaaki Numata said Friday: “Whatever may be contained in this film in no way reflects the position of the government of Japan.”

Lawrence Marceau

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Date: Sun, 7 Jun 98
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow 
Subject: Rightist attack

Rightist Slashes Theater Screen

Just after noon on the 6th, a 27-year old self-proclaimed rightist slashed the screen of Yokohama’s Shinema Beti theater, which that day was beginning its run of the Hong Kong-China co-production, _Nanking 1937_ (a 1995 film directed by Ziniu Wu). The film is a dramatic recreation of the Nanjing Massacre. A letter had arrived from a right wing group on the 5th calling for a cancellation of the showing and right-wing promotional trucks had made the same call on the 5th and 6th. Perhaps as a precaution, the Isezaki Police Station had sent an officer to the theater, and thus the slasher was immediately arrested.

The theater was able to tape up the screen and continue that day’s showings.

Aaron Gerow

Yokohama National University
KineJapan list owner

Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998
From: David Hopkins 
Subject: TV in Japan

Anybody care to declare with no qualifications that there are “good” TV shows in Japan and name them and sign your real name? Interesting, significant, worth studying don’t count. Definitions of “good” are acceptable.

David Hopkins, who can’t name one.

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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 98
From: Aaron Gerow
Re: TV in Japan

David Hopkin’s challenge:

>Anybody care to declare with no qualifications that there are “good” TV shows in Japan and name them and sign your real name? Interesting, significant, worth studying don’t count. Definitions of “good” are acceptable.

I must admit I sympathize with the feelings behind this challenge. When I came to Japan in 1992, I watched TV quite studiously, even looking at the first episode of all the new dramas or each cours so I could make sure I was not missing anything. It was a worthwhile experience, and not only in an academic sense. One could at first get into even trendy dramas like _Tokyo Love Stories_ or _Asunaro hakusho_ no matter how cliched their production was. But I gradually stopped watching dramas. Partially it was because of the dissertation, the film festival, marriage, and a new job, but it was also because it frankly became less enjoyable. The acting, screenwriting, and direction was often so cliched and conventional that I could not help laughing. Even _Futarikko_, which my wife and I religiously watched and which was one of the better asaren in a while, had a script full of holes (I can’t believe it won most of the TV scriptwriting awards that year–are standards that low?) There was little there that could stimulate me like the best of US or British TV (though I think the latter are not that much better). There really wasn’t anything “good” on.

But I have not given up on TV for several reasons. First, because I do think that if you search for a while and give some programs a chance, there are still quite a few that are enjoyable. TV Tokyo, for instance, regularly does special late night half-hour dramas directed by the feature film directors whose films we laud: Shinozaki Makoto, Mochizuki Rokuro, Kazama Shiori, et al. Right now, they are doing a series of adaptations of the manga of Tsuge Yoshiharu on Monday nights. (By the way, did anyone tape the episode directed by Mochizuki? I missed that.) Obayashi Nobuhiko still does TV work and that is always worth watching.

_Shinseiki Evangelion_, for all its problems (ideological, gender-wise, etc.), was still a compelling and engrossing anime that rightly caused a national sensation.

One of the recent trends in TV has been to have talento put their bodies on the line taking on challenges that are then recorded in a kind of documentary fashion. _Denpa shonen_ is the primary example of this, but _Urinari_ (done by the same producer) is less exaggerated and often more compelling. While recently it has become more of an example of how to manipulate the consumer behavior of the audience (e.g., Black Biscuits and save Vivian Su), some of the episodes, like shako dance and Dover Odanbu, have moments of “realism” (however constructed they are) which are refreshing. When the Dover Odanbu in one episode basically criticized the producer and the demands the program made on them, we were seeing a side of the process which is not usually revealed.

Some TV news can be good, like Tsukushi Tetsuya. I wish there was more activist political and investigative journalism, but even a light show like _Uwasa no Tokyo Magazine_ can sometimes do some hard-hitting reports.

As for TV game shows, while I don’t watch it myself, _Shiawase no kazuko keikaku_ was recently selected the best TV game show at a major TV festival in Europe–the first time any Japanese TV program has won a prize. It has been so well received abroad, it is being copied right and left.

I mentioned Ninety-Nine in a previous post. My wife and I regularly watch their programs because we do think they are two of the funnier comedians on TV today (I’ve liked them since _Kishiwada shonen gurentai_, which is a very good movie). While _Guruguru_ and _Mecha2_ have more misses than hits, there are some shows which are hilarious and reveal their comic talent.

Comedy is thus worth a try. We also check out _Karakuri terebi_ because Nakamura Tamao can sometimes pull off some brilliant gags that make the whole show worthwhile. There are many talented comedians on TV, from Takeshi to Utchan Nanchan, and their style of ad-lib gag comedy can often provide a good time.

As a long-time fan of comedy, however, I cannot say I am satisfied with TV comedy here. There is little of the well-scripted, well-acted TV comedy one saw on _Monty Python_, _Mary Tyler Moore_, _Murphy Brown_, or _Seinfeld_. They can’t have that because of the production process here. When Takeshi does 10 programs a week and Ninety-nine four or five, they neither have the time nor the energy to make a good script and rehearse it. One reason well-scripted comedy is lacking on TV in Japan is because TV is dominated by manzai and other vaudeville styles that stress ad-libs, slapstick, and repeated gags. There is a long tradition of that kind of comedy, but one must also emphasize that such comedy exists on TV not merely because “Japanese” like it (for some “cultural” reason), but also because it best fits the mode of production (fast, cheap and in quantity) that dominates TV. Looking at cinema, there is a lot of well-scripted comedy out there, but little of it has moved to TV.

But this is not a reason to give up on TV comedy. One of the clues of watching Japanese TV is to try to find how best to watch it. I think this is a major point, for in the end - and please excuse me, David - I have problems with the attitude that damns all of Japanese TV. First, I think it can easily align with a classic form of Orientalism: the Japanese make “bad” and “primitive” TV while we in the West do it much better (I’m not saying this is what David is declaring, but we all know this attitude exists). It degrades Japan in order to make the West a model for it to copy.

Another problem with damning Japanese TV is that it damns the tens of millions of people who watch it and think its good. One can argue that they are all ignorant and don’t know what’s good, but I can’t side with that kind of elitism. One of the issues is to find out how people enjoy TV. My wife insists, for instance, that most people who watch TV dramas do not watch them seriously: they watch them parodically, making fun of them as much as they get into them (and the producers know this, she claims–most of what is excessive in these shows is there on purpose). While I don’t fully buy that, it does pose the possibility that Japanese TV cannot be evaluated simply by its form and content: we must take how it is watched into account. _Plan 9 From Outer Space_ may be an awful film, but in the right viewing mode, it is great. Maybe many Japanese TV viewers are also, in their own way, making Japanese TV good and worth watching. They are thus smarter than “we” think and “we” should do our best to try to appreciate those modes of viewing. (In that spirit, I have tried to rethink my attitudes towards ad-lib, slapstick comedy, for instance).

You can disagree with what I think is “good,” but arguing over taste is an often fruitless endeavor. More interesting is thinking about how taste is produced and shaped and how it functions–or can be strategically used–in popular culture.

One final point. Despite my urge that we do not throw out Japanese TV, I still do think we should look at this historically. While I have still not seen anywhere near enough, I do get the impression from my limited viewing that Japanese TV was better than it is now. With scriptwriters like Kuramoto So, Yamada Taiichi, and Mukoda Kuniko, dramas were well-written and often featured top actors and directors. Check out _Kizudarake no tenshi_ or even _Taiyo ni hoero_ on video and you can see a more complex, existential–dare we say “real”–attitude towards the story than we see today. There was also a lot of formal experimentation: Jissoji Akio’s _Ultra Seven_ shows were better than most of the avant-garde films of the day. Even kids manga like _Umi no Toriton_ and _Yokai ningen Bemu_ had a dark, tragic tone to them that touched the heart of children more than the fake heroism of _Dragon Ball_. Much of this was due to the times: manga in those days was also more complex, I would argue. But we should also look to see how modes of production and viewing have changed since then, especially in relation to shifts in leisure patterns and the structure of the viewing space, to understand why TV has followed a different road.

Damning TV reminds me too much of the old damning of popular cinema. It wasn’t art so it was not worthing looking at, much less studying. Changes in attitude–in particular a critique of both the high art/low art division and the belief that only “art” is worth studying–were crucial in bringing popular cinema back into the spotlight. I think this is necessary with Japanese TV as well.

Aaron Gerow

YNU

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Date: 27 Aug 98
From: “Michael Badzik” 
Subject: Re: TV in Japan

I wasn’t going to respond to the dare that started this thread. But then Aaron wrote a very insightful response to it that I would like to make a few comments on:

>But I gradually stopped watching dramas. … The acting, screenwriting, and direction was often so cliched and conventional that I could not help laughing.

This is true more often than not. But not watching means missing the exceptions like _Aoi Tori_, _Aishiteiru to Ittekure_, _Age 35, Koishikute_, _Furuhata Ninzaburou_, to name a few.

>Even _Futarikko_, which my wife and I religiously watched and which was one of the better asaren in a while, had a script full of holes (I can’t believe it won most of the TV scriptwriting awards that year–are standards that low?)

Aaron, you wrote about how we must pay attention to modes of viewing; I certainly watch NHK morning dramas differently than I would an evening drama or a movie, and suspect a lot of other longtime viewers do too (and so am curious as to how it was received by your wife). I have long imagined that inside NHK was a check list of requirements that any story considered for the morning drama series must have (e.g. young female hero, either she or her parents work in a “traditional” Japanese field, despite continual obstacles and adversity success is found through working hard and never giving up, and in the end realizing that the traditional Japanese ways are the best). So one has to look past these obligatory inclusions to see what the story is really about; I see here a story that often questions tradition and satirizes Japanese society in a gentle way (something also done in _Otona no Otoko_, the other Oishi Shizuka written drama on the air here now). From one perspective one certainly could bemoan the cliches, from mine I am impressed at how many it avoided.

>As for TV game shows, while I don’t watch it myself, _Shiawase no kazuko keikaku_ was recently selected the best TV game show at a major TV festival in Europe–the first time any Japanese TV program has won a prize. It has been so well received abroad, it is being copied right and left.

Japan also produced _Naruhodo the World_ - an absolutely brilliant concept as well as one of the best game shows ever. It was also copied right and left, and you can still see the influence it had in other game shows. It had an impact on society as well during its fifteen year run that was both significant and fascinating.

>As a longtime fan of comedy, however, I cannot say I am satisfied with TV comedy here. There is little of the well-scripted, well-acted TV comedy one saw on _Monty Python_, _Mary Tyler Moore_, _Murphy Brown_, or _Seinfeld_.

One of the funniest shows that I have ever seen, and one of the few Japanese shows that might be classed as a sit com, was the Furuhata spinoff/takeoff _Imaizumi Shintarou_ starring Nishimura Masahiko and written by Mitani Koki. It is available on video if you have never seen it.

The comedy dramas written by Mitani that I have seen (_Furuhata Ninzaburou_ and _Ousama no Resutoran_) were quite good as well.

>While I have still not seen anywhere near enough, I do get the impression from my limited viewing that Japanese TV was better than it is now.

This does seem to be the conventional wisdom, and it might even be true. But it is also true that an awful lot of the Japanese television that I saw ten or twenty years ago wasn’t very good or original. A good case could be made that the variety segment is actually improving. You rightly point to the (critical) failure of the television adaptations of manga author Saimon Fumi’s _Tokyo Love Story_ and _Asunaro Hakusho_, but I found the adaptation of her _Age 35, Koishikute_ to be entertaining and provocative. _Aoi Tori_ had a famous writer, very capable actors, and lot to say. Mitani’s works are the most sophisticated comedies I have seen on Japanese television (for anyone who can’t lower themselves to watch television at least rent his movie _Rajio no Jikan_). So even if it is true that television is not as good as it used to be, there are still things on that are worth watching.

Michael Badzik

mike@vena.com

Date: Fri, 28 Aug 98
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow 
Subject: Re: TV in Japan

Thanks to Michael for his comments:

>Aaron, you wrote about how we must pay attention to modes of viewing; I certainly watch NHK morning dramas differently than I would an evening drama or a movie, and suspect a lot of other longtime viewers do too (and so am curious as to how it was received by your wife). I have long imagined that inside NHK was a check list of requirements that any story considered for the morning drama series must have (e.g. young female hero, either she or her parents work in a “traditional” Japanese field, despite continual obstacles and adversity success is found through working hard and never giving up, and in the end realizing that the traditional Japanese ways are the best). So one has to look past these obligatory inclusions to see what the story is really about; I see here a story that often questions tradition and satirizes Japanese society in a gentle way (something also done in _Otona no Otoko_, the other Oishi Shizuka written drama on the air here now). From one perspective one certainly could bemoan the cliches, from mine I am impressed at how many it avoided.

You are very right. In fact, we watched _Futarikko_ precisely because it avoided many of the cliches which usually make us give up on the asaren. Well, not quite. We first caught on simply because of Mana-chan and Kana-chan, and then got hooked by the oldest of narrative cliches: the underdog who succeeds against expectations story. What clinched things was that it was a woman trying to succeed in the all-male world of shogi. But while that part was progressive in terms of gender, we were totally turned off by the story of the other sister: her character was sloppily written, the acting bad, and her capitulation to patriarchy at the end totally unbelievable (if not annoying). Frankly, we watched mostly for elaboration of characters, but found a few too many of them lacking motivation for their actions. Maybe we did not watch it the way it was supposed to be watched, but that’s because we expected something different: _Futarikko_ delivered in some ways, but missed out in a lot of others.

By the way, I watched Sakamoto Junji’s _Ote_ again the other day for the first time after seeing _Futarikko_ and was amazed at how much _Futarikko_ owes to that movie. Some of the same situations, some of the same locations, some of the same actors, etc. Frankly, it made me look down on Oishi some more. (Sakamoto’s Osaka films are all worth second viewings.)

>One of the funniest shows that I have ever seen, and one of the few Japanese shows that might be classed as a sit com, was the Furuhata spinoff/takeoff _Imaizumi Shintarou_ starring Nishimura Masahiko and written by Mitani Koki. It is available on video if you have never seen it.

>The comedy dramas written by Mitani that I have seen (_Furuhata Ninzaburou_ and _Ousama no Resutoran_) were quite good as well.

I should have mentioned Mitani in my original comment: his comedies are definitely the best scripted around. But I do have a problem with the direction: everything seems to be overdone and, while that works for the first few episodes (the parodic element), it begins to grate halfway through. I wish there was a more subtle director who could handle Mitani’s scripts.

Bringing up Mitani also should remind us that the “auteur” in Japanese TV is often still considered the scriptwriter. Stars of course are important for ratings, but one of the best ways to select shows is to focus on scriptwriters you like. It would be interesting to find out how this came about.

Aaron Gerow

YNU

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Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998
From: “S.A. Thornton” 
Subject: Re: TV in Japan

I have been paying attention, if only a little, to the discussion on TV and I would like to point out what I consider to be a problem: the disparaging and excuse me ethnocentric condemnation of Japanese cliches in Japanese TV shows.

I’d like to make two points. Cliches are the core of the narrative strategies and attention has to be paid to them: what do they mean? how are they used? what is their value in terms of performance and production as well as reception?

Just because these narrative strategies are not American does not mean that they have no value in their own culture. I thought that the prupose of studying Japanese film/TV was to figure out what the Japanese were doing? The American model has to be addressed and then dropped. Japanese cultures and traditions get ignored by American specialists/scholars of Film/tv and we all lose by it.

SAT

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Date: 28 Aug 98
From: “Michael Badzik” 
Subject: Re: TV in Japan

S. A. Thornton wrote:

>… I would like to point out what I consider to be a problem: the disparaging and excuse me ethnocentric condemnation of Japanese cliches in Japanese TV shows. >I’d like to make two points. Cliches are the core of the narrative strategies and attention has to be paid to them: what do they mean? how are they used? what is their value in terms of performance and production as well as reception? >Just because these narrative strategies are not American does not mean that they have no value in their own culture. I thought that the purpose of studying Japanese film/TV was to figure out what the Japanese were doing? The American model has to be addressed and then dropped. Japanese cultures and traditions get ignored by American specialists/scholars of Film/tv and we all lose by it.

It’s not often I get called ethnocentric (well, actually never). I have been watching Japanese television for almost thirty years now, and as I have said here before, I do enjoy it. I watch for my own enjoyment, no one pays me for my opinions on television or film (I earn my living as an engineer), and I have no scholarly reputation to uphold. Over these nearly thirty years I have watched how Japanese television has evolved, watched trends come and go, seen what has been well received and what has failed.

Now, if by cliches being the core of narrative strategies you are referring to what I would call the native symbolic language of the medium (or the shared nonverbal language of a culture, if you prefer), then we may just have a definition problem here. I am a fan of the _Otoko wa Tsurai Yo_ movie series and have never viewed it as cliched; although it does use a lot of the same elements in every story they work to strengthen the meaning of the story as a whole (or the series, actually).

But when “cliches” are used to avoid having to write good dialog, or to attract attention in the way a game show might hire a young woman to just stand there and be beautiful, or so that the writer or viewer doesn’t have to do a lot of thinking, than I think that there are legitimate grounds for complaint. My remarks on cliches were in regards to the NHK morning dramas; for a perspective from a Japanese writer on the subject consider the following by Sata Masunori (from “A History of Japanese Television Drama”, edited by Masunori Sata & Hideo Hirahara; Tokyo, Japan Association of Broadcasting Art, 1991):

The decline, however, can also be attributed to the changes in the quality of television drama itself. NHK’s morning Television Novel still has a high rating. Although the stories are different for each novel in the series, there is a tendency to follow the same formula, and it cannot be denied that the program does seem to exist as a convenient “clock for telling the time” in the morning with audiences watching the series from force of habit. The same may also be said of the Television Saga series, in order to make the tale interesting to and provide suspense, the plot tends to fall into cliches that rely upon technique only.

Further evidence that the Japanese don’t like cliches any more than anyone else can be found in the morning drama ratings (in Japanese only), where you can see a year-by-year decline in ratings until the big jump up when _Futarikko_ was shown.

I am in complete agreement that Japanese television has to be judged as a distinct medium - and have said so here before. And yes, its meanings are tightly bound with the culture, which is part of why I also see television as a real anthropologist’s playground.

Michael Badzik

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Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998
From: “S.A. Thornton” 
Subject: Re: TV in Japan

I certainly appreciate your considered remarks.

If I might respond:

>Now, if by cliches being the core of narrative strategies you are referring >to what I would call the native symbolic language of the medium (or the shared nonverbal language of a culture, if you prefer), then we may just have a definition problem here. I am a fan of the _Otoko wa Tsurai Yo_ movie series and have never viewed it as cliched; although it does use a lot of the same elements in every story they work to strengthen the meaning of the story as a whole (or the series, actually).

Technically speaking, and I do mean technically speaking, the “cliches” in Yamada Yoji’s films and those in the TV shows and dramas are all formulas. Somebody like Yamada makes a reputation specializing in a specific repertoire of or even creating formulas. Both are determined by the need to perform (or produce) and some are under heavier demands than others. The question is neither of degree or kind. The question is whether or where the culture (or market) will support it.

>But when “cliches” are used to avoid having to write good dialog, or to attract attention in the way a game show might hire a young woman to just stand there and be beautiful, or so that the writer or viewer doesn’t have to >do a lot of thinking, than I think that there are legitimate grounds for complaint.

Again the issue is pressure to produce. We see the same problem here that we see in all private, mass market, consumer oriented production: the lowest quality for the greatest number. The question has been haunting us for years: where does quality fit in? Not only that, but how do we determine what quality is? I assure you that most of the stuff on American and European TV is just as bad.

>My remarks on cliches were in regards to the NHK morning dramas; for a perspective from a Japanese writer on the subject consider the following by Sata Masunori (from “A History of Japanese Television Drama”, edited by Masunori Sata & Hideo Hirahara; Tokyo, Japan Association of Broadcasting Art, 1991):

>The decline, however, can also be attributed to the changes in the quality >of television drama itself. NHK’s morning Television Novel still has a high >rating. Although the stories are different for each novel in the series,

>there is a tendency to follow the same formula, and it cannot be denied that the program does seem to exist as a convenient “clock for telling the >time” in the morning with audiences watching the series from force of habit. The same may also be said of the Television Saga series, in order to >make the tale interesting to and provide suspense, the plot tends to fall >into cliches that rely upon technique only.

>Further evidence that the Japanese don’t like cliches any more than anyone else can be found in the morning drama ratings(in Japanese only), where you can see a year-by-year decline in ratings until the big jump up when _Futarikko_ was shown.

>I am in complete agreement that Japanese television has to be judged as a distinct medium - and have said so here before. And yes, its meanings are tightly bound with the culture, which is part of why I also see television as a real anthropologist’s playground.

Oh, I do sincerely agree. And I think that the cliche of the fast talking male “presenter” and his purely decorative and adoring female sidekick has a long history in Japanese folk and folk religious performing arts, not to mention monologue conversation patterns. These cliches, as the path of least resistance in production, are Japanese culture. If the Japanese themselves don’t like it anymore, then that means that something is happening to change the tastes of the Japanese. What I find disturbing, more in the scholarly literature, which I have been looking at recently and not just amongst ourselves, is that the choice of what and how to discuss Japanese film and TV seems to be circumscribed by Euro-American assumptions of what quality, film, TV –and yes, even scholarly methodologies–ought to be, and less by an interest in what makes the production and reception of media in Japan work. If reception of Japanese TV (ratings) is on the decline, why isn’t this getting back to the producers? Is there a buffer between the two that makes production independent of the real/perceived audience? To what do we attribute the decline in ratings? The rejection of the audience or the availability of other forms of amusement ?(music, for example, has really suffered here in the US due to the rise of the computer).

I’ve seen Japanese TV productions I’ve adored and lots I’ve hated. When push comes to shove, there just isn’t the production power to produce the amount needed to feed the available hours of broadcast time. But that was more than apparent 13 years ago when I was last in Japan. I really am glad I am not a professional anthropologist: as interesting as I might be in TV, I couldn’t stand watching it all day every day. I can’t say I’ve seen more than a couple of Japanese films in the last ten years. I am a medievalist. Do you want to talk formulas in epic in the sixteenth century? It’s pretty awful then, too. If you think formulas awful. Maybe it’s Zen: formulas as a way to perform without thinking.

S.A.T.

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Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998
From: Chalfen 
Subject: TV Discussion

To add to the interesting TV discussion, I want to endorse and restate some of the very important points made by S.A. Thorton in a recent post.

In part some of those statements refer to what I meant previously by being careful about ethnocentric judgments. And this speaks to alternative models of criticism, of approaching any product seen in the context of cultural representation. Only in limited cases is it significant to ask if one can name any decent Japanese TV show. “Decent” or “really good” according to whom and in which schema of evaluation? Or are we dealing with a universally recognized and accepted set of criteria? How might a scheme of aesthetic judgments be connected to a kind of technological determinism?

More to the point, I feel, is to ask which Japanese shows/programs are favored and disfavored in the context of Japanese production and reception. As stated by SAT: >> I thought that the purpose of studying Japanese film/TV was to figure out what the Japanese were doing? <<

For instance, jumping to film for a moment, if we are interested in a Top Ten List in a particular time frame, can we get lists from several Japanese film critics? Can we get a list of the most “popular” films in terms of attendance figures in Japan?

Another example might be to ask how a favored model of narrative style is connected to other narrative structures, to other modes of communication found in the culture.

Admittedly there is nothing very special about these directions and questions – and they should not be imposed as the only kinds of questions to be asked. I just happen to think they are interesting and worth pursuing.

Dick Chalfen

P.S. I have just received a post from Michael Badzik that seems to agree with some of these assertions, namely: >> I am in complete agreement that Japanese television has to be judged as a distinct medium - and have said so here before. And yes, its meanings are tightly bound with the culture, which is part of why I also see television as a real anthropologist’s playground. << While an anthropology of mass media is much less well developed than other components of the discipline, things are changing – and television becomes less a playground and more a serious field of work. Who knows – attention to home media might be next!

P.P.S. And another post in from S.A. Thornton which seems to resonate nicely with a point above, namely >> And I think that the cliche of the fast talking male “presenter” and his purely decorative and adoring female sidekick has a long history in Japanese folk and folk religious performing arts, not to mention monologue conversation patterns. These cliches, as the path of least resistance in production, are Japanese culture. << I think that when one starts looking for these cross-media connections, the stated awfulness is transformed into something else, something “better.” Try looking at 400 hours of home movies…

Richard Chalfen
Professor of Anthropology
Temple University - Harbour Campus

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Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1998
From: lc
Subject: RE: TV Discussion

Excuse me for jumping in here, I confess I haven’t been following this thread very closely at all (not for lack of interest but lack of time) and this may well be utterly irrelevant (or redundant?) but can’t help recalling and reporting my single most shocking experience watching television in Japan. The setting was the kotatsu / living room of an extended family in rural Japan (my inlaws at the time), four generations, all eyes glued to the screen (around 1986?). The program was (my recollection was that Takeshi was involved but could well be wrong) replays of excerpts from Gekko~ Kamen series of 20 (30?) years back. No commentary, No funny subtitling or other tampering. Just the excerpts straight. And the effect was totally ludicrous (and exacerbated by the absence of commentary), uncanny in fact. There was a strange nervous silence in the room because (so I assumed) at least two of the generations present had once watched these programs with a kind of awe or at least in all seriousness and now, just 2 (3?) decades later the sheer act of putting them on the tube was enough to achieve a sublime degree of humor (or ridicule?) Is there I wonder a word for this form of irony?

I’d assume that the easiest criterion for measuring the worth of a TV program is can you imagine enjoying watching it twice? But I guess that goes without saying.

LC

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Date: Mon, 31 Aug 98
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow 
Subject: Re: TV in Japan

Wow! Suddenly a lot of discussion on TV! While most of it is not approaching specific shows or genres, it is bringing up the basic issue of how to discuss Japanese TV that I brought up a long time ago.

But since the discussion of “cliches” in part refers to my posts, I guess I should make myself clearer.

>I’d like to make two points. Cliches are the core of the narrative strategies and attention has to be paid to them: what do they mean? how are they used? what is their value in terms of performance and production as well as reception?

I’m afraid SAT, as Michael seems to emphasize, is confusing terms here (or at least is using a very different definition from mine) and I think we need to clarify the difference between such terms as “cliche,” “formula” “strategies,” and “convention” before we proceed any further.

Cliche is, by most usage (including my own), an overused device, one that is so recognizable it stands out as such and in some ways has lost its semiotic power. The use of the term can be academic (referring to a certain historical moment in the use of a narrative style), but it is most often evaluative.

A cliche is not a formula, though it may be what a formula turns into. A formula is a set of strategies which work, either to ensure narrative or box office success. Usually, the conception is that if a formula becomes cliched, it no longer works. Formulaic is often an evaluative term, but formula usually is not.

Technically, formulae and conventions are different. The latter refers to a contract between the sender and receiver of a message in which they agree on what signs or sign structures are to denote/connote what meaning. The implication, as with the notion of a conventional language, is that conventions establish artificial sign-meaning relationships. A formula is less a question of semiosis than effect: a combination which produces a bang. Cliches are definitely conventions, but one could argue that they are ones that have lost a substantial amount of “receiver” agreement as to their operation. Not all conventions are cliches. When we discuss any form of semiotic production that involves conventions (and all do) we are in general NOT talking about cliches. These are very different issues.

Michael uses the term “language” which in use is often close to that of convention. However, given the definitions often used of language (for instance, Metz in his consideration of whether film is a language), it might be better to distinguish between the terms convention and language.

That, however, is a LONG argument which I don’t want to get into here.

I hope my understanding is clear (though please correct me if it’s not).

Thus I would disagree with SAT’s statement that cliches are at the core of narrative strategies. I would agree that conventions are, but that is an entirely different issue. Perhaps it would be best to argue that cliches appear when narrative strategies are beginning to break down. SAT’s call for us to consider how these strategies are used is right on the mark. I would just never use the word cliche in that context without clarifying its meaning.

>Just because these narrative strategies are not American does not mean that they have no value in their own culture. I thought that the prupose of studying Japanese film/TV was to figure out what the Japanese were doing? The American model has to be addressed and then dropped. Japanese cultures and traditions get ignored by American specialists/scholars of Film/tv and we all lose by it.

I wholly agree with this, and I hope my previous messages have shown this. I don’t think, however, I have ever once argued that these narrative strategies have no value because they are not American. I have argued the opposite. However, the citing of cliches brings up issues which can be completely different than the issue of ethnocentrism which SAT is right to be concerned about. Again there are problems with her use of the word cliche, but I do want to consider what it would mean to have a Japanese term Japanese TV cliched. Certainly this could not be reduced to an East-West issue. It would rather indicate that there exist evaluative strategies that are in opposition to certain narrative strategies dominant in a genre. Dare I say that it means that one is witnessing competing Japanese cultures? That is why I have a problem with another of SAT’s comments:

>These cliches, as the path of least resistance in production, are Japanese culture. If the Japanese themselves don’t like it anymore, then that means that something is happening to change the tastes of the Japanese.

Apart from the repeated problem with the term cliche, I always get the feeling it is not very useful talking about Japanese culture. There are Japanese cultureS. “The Japanese” is also a problematic concept which, with the critiques of nihonjinron, etc., should also be used with care. I think the issue of the cliche is crucial because it shows how narrative strategies are both historical and particular, that they change over time and rarely have hold over an entire “culture.” When someone calls something cliched, they are asserting their culture against another. I just want to emphasis that this occurs between Japanese as much as it does between Japanese and Westerners and we should never lose sight of this.

SAT is right to point to the issue of change, but we should start thinking about our model of culture and the nation. Are we talking about a single entity that metamorphized like a caterpillar, or are we talking about multiple cultures within a national sphere that are competing for hegemony?

This relates to one of Dick’s points:

>P.P.S. And another post in from S.A. Thornton which seems to resonate nicely with a point above, namely >> And I think that the cliche of the fast talking male “presenter” and his purely decorative and adoring female sidekick has a long history in Japanese folk and folk religious performing arts, not to mention monologue conversation patterns. These cliches, as the path of least resistance in production, are Japanese culture. << I think that when one starts looking for these cross-media connections, the stated awfulness is transformed into something else, something “better.” Try looking at 400 hours of home movies…

I like Dick’s emphasis on cross-media connections. They certainly are worth investigating and, if not helping make something look “better,” can at least help us understand the intertexts that many readers are using to understand or appropriate works. SAT’s example is one, but we should again be aware of the complex and varied nature of reading through intertexts. Some viewers may read the newscaster structure in terms of the traditions SAT cites, but many who are unfamiliar with those traditions do not. Even those, like feminist critics, who know such traditions, look at that structure in relation to other cultures which make it seem “cliched.”

What then does it mean when I use the term “cliche”? Certainly I must beware of an ethnocentric attitude and I thank SAT for warning me about it. I do defend any non-evaluative use I was making of the term: I think it is important to point out the fact that some television conventions are “tired” because underlines the existence of other strategies. Noel Burch may argue that Japanese art valorized repetition over originality, but even if that it was valid for the pre-Meiji, it certainly was not the case for Japanese film criticism after 1920, which has laid a heavy emphasis on originality. Thus the citation of “cliches” has been an important part of the struggle over taste and culture in the 20th century. Filmmakers themselves, by polemically opposing their styles to others, are often also complaining about the cliched nature of other directors (e.g. Masumura or Oshima critiquing Ozu and Kinoshita) in order to found a “new” style. If we follow Juri Lotman, the history of cinema is defined by the conflicts.

However, I was also using the term in an evaluate sense. There certainly is a problem if I am solely using Western standards of evaluation (though, I must stress, those are also plural and in conflict), but, as Michael said himself, I think I have been studying Japan long enough to say that my reference points are more complex. I am also in the peculiar position of being a critic who writes in both English and Japanese for a varied audience. I have to evaluate, and so I try to do it from multiple angles while still emphasizing the polemics I value. It’s a very difficult position and clearly full of pitfalls (which I have fallen into more than once), but having committed myself to being an academic and critic in Japan, I see no reason why I should abandon a polemical stance.

Still, I encourage warnings and criticisms.

This relates to Dick’s warning that there are only limited times we should talk about whether there are any decent Japanese shows. I wholly agree (and I hope my post reiterated that I find arguments about taste unproductive), but I do want to add a comment to the following:

>More to the point, I feel, is to ask which Japanese shows/programs are favored and disfavored in the context of Japanese production and reception. As stated by SAT: >> I thought that the purpose of studying Japanese film/TV was to figure out what the Japanese were doing? <<

If one is confining one’s study to Japanese reception, I would agree, but I want to stress here that the study of Japanese TV is not restricted to the study of Japanese reception (I would thus hesitate to say “the purpose of studying Japanese film/TV was to figure out what the Japanese were doing”). First, there are many non-Japanese who watch TV in Japan. Second, “the Japanese” is a problematic concept: what about women, men, the young, the old, regional differences, etc.? Third, there are many non-Japanese who watch Japanese TV outside of Japan, either off of satellite or through sold programming (remember _Oshin_ has been seen in dozens of nations). We can try to separate these points of reception, but they do remind us that Japanese TV is an international phenomenon operating within global capitalism. Think of this: would anyone ever try to restrict the study of Super Mario to Japan just because Nintendo made it? One can study Super Mario’s reception in Japan, but that has to include a discussion of the internationalization of Japanese culture. Frankly, Michael, David, and I are all examples of this internationalization. While it may sound conceited, to completely ignore us in the pursuit of some “pure Japanese” reception is problematic.

In the end, however, I prefer arguments about how and why over what’s good and bad. That’s the sense I think I get from others, so maybe we can start moving the discussion there.

Aaron Gerow

YNU

P.S. Sorry for the rambling comments. While I have a deadline tomorrow, I thought I should say something soon.

*******************************************

Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998
From: “S.A. Thornton” 
Subject: Re: TV in Japan

Aaron, thanks for your comments. I would like to respond to a few:

>I’m afraid SAT, as Michael seems to emphasize, is confusing terms here (or at least is using a very different definition from mine) and I think we need to clarify the difference between such terms as “cliche,” “formula” “strategies,” and “convention” before we proceed any further.

>Cliche is, by most usage (including my own), an overused device, one that is so recognizable it stands out as such and in some ways has lost its semiotic power. The use of the term can be academic (referring to a certain historical moment in the use of a narrative style), but it is most often evaluative.

>A cliche is not a formula, though it may be what a formula turns into. A formula is a set of strategies which work, either to ensure narrative or box office success. Usually, the conception is that if a formula becomes cliched, it no longer works. Formulaic is often an evaluative term, but formula usually is not.

>Technically, formulae and conventions are different. The latter refers to a contract between the sender and receiver of a message in which they agree on what signs or sign structures are to denote/connote what meaning. The implication, as with the notion of a conventional language, is that conventions establish artificial sign-meaning relationships. A formula is less a question of semiosis than effect: a combination which produces a bang. Cliches are definitely conventions, but one could argue that they are ones that have lost a substantial amount of “receiver” agreement as to their operation. Not all conventions are cliches. When we discuss any form of semiotic production that involves conventions (and all do) we are in general NOT talking about cliches. These are very different issues.

This is a semiotic interpretation. In oral tradition studies (Parry/Lord/Foley) cliche is a pejorative word for formula that comes out of Victorian criticism and the favoring of “originality” over other, traditional forms of narrative. The question is not whether one likes it but whether it works in constructing and performing the narrative. “Formula” and “formulaic” are both technical terms without evaluative connotations.

The question is when and why and for whom the formula “no longer works.” It obviously works for the producer as performer of the particular TV broadcast. It doesn’t work for certain segments of the actual if not perceived or intended viewing audience, including westerners and critics heavily influenced by western narratives/narrative theory and convinced of their superiority. I think we are both agreed that changes have occurred in the Japanese audience as demographic group–whether the producers of TV shows want to acknowledge that is a different matter. Perhaps the developments in media reflect not a change in the audience but a resistance to it.

>Thus I would disagree with SAT’s statement that cliches are at the core of narrative strategies. I would agree that conventions are, but that is an entirely different issue. Perhaps it would be best to argue that cliches appear when narrative strategies are beginning to break down. SAT’s call for us to consider how these strategies are used is right on the mark. I would just never use the word cliche in that context without clarifying its meaning.

Again, I would say that “cliche” is evaluative; it indicates a resistance to the culturally determined tradition of narrative and performance. I am not saying that I like them any more than you do: but I recognize that my inability to like Japanese TV is the based on the same fact as that for my inability to like American TV: I am not part of the projected audience, the market. I understand the narrative strategy; I just don’t like it. Again, however, since I regard “cliche” as a pejorative for those units of performing, transmitting, and storing narrative, formulas, they are the core of narrative strategy, technically speaking, in oral tradition studies.

>>Just because these narrative strategies are not American does not mean that they have no value in their own culture. I thought that the prupose of studying Japanese film/TV was to figure out what the Japanese were doing? The American model has to be addressed and then dropped. Japanese cultures and traditions get ignored by American specialists/scholars of Film/tv and we all lose by it.

>I wholly agree with this, and I hope my previous messages have shown this. I don’t think, however, I have ever once argued that these narrative strategies have no value because they are not American. I have argued the opposite. However, the citing of cliches brings up issues which can be completely different than the issue of ethnocentrism which SAT is right to be concerned about. Again there are problems with her use of the word cliche, but I do want to consider what it would mean to have a Japanese term Japanese TV cliched. Certainly this could not be reduced to an East-West issue. It would rather indicate that there exist evaluative strategies that are in opposition to certain narrative strategies dominant in a genre. Dare I say that it means that one is witnessing competing Japanese cultures? That is why I have a problem with another of SAT’s comments:

>>These cliches, as the path of least resistance in production, are Japanese culture. If the Japanese themselves don’t like it anymore, then that means that something is happening to change the tastes of the Japanese.

>Apart from the repeated problem with the term cliche, I always get the feeling it is not very useful talking about Japanese culture. There are Japanese cultureS. “The Japanese” is also a problematic concept which, with the critiques of nihonjinron, etc., should also be used with care. I think the issue of the cliche is crucial because it shows how narrative strategies are both historical and particular, that they change over time and rarely have hold over an entire “culture.” When someone calls something cliched, they are asserting their culture against another. I just want to emphasis that this occurs between Japanese as much as it does between Japanese and Westerners and we should never lose sight of this.

I am in perfect agreement. I think it important to trace more precisely and correlate resistance to certain media with demographic, social, economic, and especially educational background. I wouldn’t depend entirely on the critics to represent “the Japanese audience.”

>SAT is right to point to the issue of change, but we should start thinking about our model of culture and the nation. Are we talking about a single entity that metamorphized like a caterpillar, or are we talking about multiple cultures within a national sphere that are competing for hegemony?

>This relates to one of Dick’s points:

>>P.P.S. And another post in from S.A. Thornton which seems to resonate nicely with a point above, namely >> And I think that the cliche of the fast talking male “presenter” and his purely decorative and adoring female sidekick has a long history in Japanese folk and folk religious performing arts, not to mention monologue conversation patterns. These cliches, as the path of least resistance in production, are Japanese culture. << I think that when one starts looking for these cross-media connections, the stated awfulness is transformed into something else, something “better.” Try looking at 400 hours of home movies…

>I like Dick’s emphasis on cross-media connections. They certainly are worth investigating and, if not helping make something look “better,” can at least help us understand the intertexts that many readers are using to understand or appropriate works. SAT’s example is one, but we should again be aware of the complex and varied nature of reading through intertexts. Some viewers may read the newscaster structure in terms of the traditions SAT cites, but many who are unfamiliar with those traditions do not. Even those, like feminist critics, who know such traditions, look at that structure in relation to other cultures which make it seem “cliched.”

Here I would make the same point. It doesn’t matter whether one knows the history of Japanese performing arts to understand the function of “the formula.” One has only to see it often enough to understand how it works. And there are repetitions and replications enough to learn and to understand the formula in one medium. One doesn’t have to go far to find the “extended text.”

>What then does it mean when I use the term “cliche”? Certainly I must beware of an ethnocentric attitude and I thank SAT for warning me about it. I do defend any non-evaluative use I was making of the term: I think it is important to point out the fact that some television conventions are “tired” because underlines the existence of other strategies. Noel Burch may argue that Japanese art valorized repetition over originality, but even if that it was valid for the pre-Meiji, it certainly was not the case for Japanese film criticism after 1920, which has laid a heavy emphasis on originality. Thus the citation of “cliches” has been an important part of the struggle over taste and culture in the 20th century. Filmmakers themselves, by polemically opposing their styles to others, are often also complaining about the cliched nature of other directors (e.g. Masumura or Oshima critiquing Ozu and Kinoshita) in order to found a “new” style. If we follow Juri Lotman, the history of cinema is defined by the conflicts.

But film criticism is not “the audience.” There has always been a tension–or disconnect– between what the mass audience expected and what directors wanted to produce. Before proceeding with any discussion of “the audience,” I want to see not only the film criticism, which is primarily western-derived, but the box-office receipts, the fan letters, etc.

I fully agree that there are many audiences–both the fragmented Japanese audience and the non-Japanese. The question is whether the producers know or care.

>In the end, however, I prefer arguments about how and why over what’s good and bad. That’s the sense I think I get from others, so maybe we can start moving the discussion there.

One thing I should like to add. Pleasure is present in an experience in which one’s skills are in direct correspondence with the demands of the task at hand. . We’re just plain overqualified for the task at hand.

And one last question. Just how do we determine which films/TV shows are worth watching, i.e., good?

This has been fun. Haven’t had much time to join in the conversations before. Hope some of this is comprehensible.

*******************************************

Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998
From: David Hopkins 
Subject: TV one more time

Well, that was a lot of fun to read on my return from a few weeks away! Don’t want to gloat about “winning” my challenge, but do appreciate comments that quality does matter. After all, we don’t have to make excuses for studying great movies (art, books, music, etc.), only for the weaker ones.

I’m more of a generalist than many on this list (and I also don’t give a tinker’s dam about my academic reputation) and I wanted to comment on the interesting fact that the lack of quality on TV due to commercial factors is anomalous in mass/commercial culture because there is no “minor league” for TV. Major record companies can and do make small quantities of interesting, high quality music, major publishers can put out books that are great but won’t sell, magazines can search for niches, etc. Even late night TV doesn’t offer this chance.

In the early ‘90’s I was part of a series of music video magazines (Oh! Moro) that we made with one camera, one editing deck, no scripts, and a staff of three. (no pay, of course) A fan at KTV Osaka wanted to do a similar thing for a late night documentary. This was with no sponsor, but still KTV provided a staff of about ten! Including a writer, two 3-man camera crews, makeup, all sorts of stuff. Incredible waste of money and manpower, for a late-night show with no sponsor. We all got paid. (This can be seen in a bootlegged version at some alternative video shops in the US.) The felt need to script the damn thing was a big hindrance to content. I think this shows the skewed values of the TV world in Japan. They really didn’t have a clue how to make a simple documentary about underground music, even after watching one. Overstaffing and underconceiving.

“Good” means well-conceived and well-executed (and well-finished). Professional staff execution isn’t necessarily good execution, but poor conception is the kiss of death. Unfortunately, the business is run by making proposals to a committee of businessmen for approval of allocation of budgets. Music business is only like this at the bestseller/big-promo-push level.

Pretty rambling, sorry. I’m just having coffee now.

I thought about TV more. Hotch Potch Station is a good TV show in Japan. Inai Inai Ba is also quite good. And, as everyone said, there are good parts here and there.

David

PS You got to be brave to admit in front of all these intellectuals that you watch Mecha Ike! I’m far too conservative culturally (not politically, though) to be able to stand the lowjinks.

This is an issue that touches not only on televisual culture, but also on the nature of personality in modern Japanese culture, but what do people think of the hubbub over Nomura Sachiyo? The whole thing, which started over complaints that Nomura Sachio, the wife of the Hanshin Tigers manager and a “jukujo” (mature woman) talento in her own right, was rude, not paying back debts, and fond of borrowing things without giving them back, has utterly dominated the wide shows and the weekly magazines for over three and a half months and has progressed, with accusations that she falsified her educational credentials when she ran for the Diet a few years ago, into a criminal investigation and a debate in the Diet.

True, there may be some “truth” behind all the accusations, but factual reality does little to explain how the topic has completely dominated the media for such a long time, escalating into what some fear is a witchhunt or at least a coordinated and violent (in the sense that the TV camera is always violent) attack on an individual person. I have read articles in the paper speculating that the fact the Satchi affair has dominated the media just as the Diet is dealing with legislation that significantly changes postwar Japanese society such as the guidelines law, the flag and national anthem designation, etc., with little media attention is not a coincidence. Even if we don’t accept such conspiracy theories, why is the media so interested in this topic at this time? Why are viewers? How is the Satchi affair functioning ideologically in contemporary media culture?

Clearly some of it has to do with the circulation of personality within the mass media. The media destruction of Nomura Sachio, who herself was purely a creation of the media (with no “talent” per se), is proof of the power of the media, as well as indication that the content of mass media is merely a circulation of signs that only refer to one another and not to any “reality” (the “news” reported is only the “news subjects” the media itself creates and makes important). But there is obviously a lot of other things going on involving the definition of motherhood (Satchi came to fame as a hardnosed older woman who told off the younger generation), wifehood (why isn’t her husband getting dragged down in this affair?), “normal” behavior, privacy, media violence, voyeurism, etc.

Any thoughts?

 

Aaron Gerow

Yokohama National University

KineJapan list owner

___________________________________________________

Kinema Club: 

Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 18:00:15 PDT

From: “Julie Turnock” <jturnock@hotmail.com

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

I’m glad this has been brought up, because the intense interest in the whole Satchi affair has mystified me. I hope that others have insight on this. Since I have been in Japan, I’ve been intersted in the love/hate fascination Japanese women have for “pushy women,” both in the workplace (including mine) and in the media. While men often dismiss (or worse) this outspoken kind of woman, many women I know are at the same time provoked by and envious of pushy womens’ willingness to speak their minds strongly and without equivocation. Since most TV media coverage of Satchi I’ve seen is on afternoon shows, it seems that the story plays most strongly to the middle-aged and older, non-working woman. Perhaps the most interested people in this affair are those who don’t feel able to exercise such strong-willed behavior, and are deeply interested in those who do and the consequences visited upon them.

Also what to think about the Satchi merchandising that goes along with this? She’s appearing as mobile phone mascots and stickers, along with other totems of high school girl life. In what way are people buying these things identifying with her?

What has also surprised me, since I can’t read Japanese well enough to follow it very well in Japanese papers myself, is how absent the issue has been in the English-language press. From TV and Japanese friends, I understand how prevalent Japanese media coverage has been, but I’ve seen almost nothing in English about it. Granted, I primarily read the Yomiuri, but why is it assumed that English-language readers will have NO interest in this issue?

Any other thoughts?

Julie Turnock

Hamamatsu, Japan

___________________________________________________

From: Eija Margit Niskanen <eija@tkf.att.ne.jp

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

I think it was also primaraly set as a “war between women”, since for a couple of months the programs were always titled as Satchi vs. Mitchi (Channel 4 morning show) , their photos side by side, underlying the “common knowledge” that women always fight with other women. Since the media, I guess, could not get enough out of this war angle in the long run ( as I have understood, Satchi has refused to discuss the matter with the press -am I right?), the media turned to other people and issues in order to keep the show running. I guess it has been going on for 3 months now….

eija

___________________________________________________

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 00:15:50 EDT

From: GavinRees@aol.com

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Satchi, the media, and the Tokyo film festival

It has been interesting to read the recent thread on Satchi san.

Julie Turnock wrote:

What has also surprised me, since I can’t read Japanese well enough to follow it very well in Japanese papers myself, is how absent the issue has been in the English-language press. From TV and Japanese friends, I understand how prevalent Japanese media coverage has been, but I’ve seen almost nothing in English about it. Granted, I primarily read the Yomiuri, but why is it assumed that English-language readers will have NO interest in this issue?

I have to admit that I have been caught by surprise by the whole issue too.

Several months ago I disconected my tv set from the aerial and plugged it

into my editing deck. And resultingly for that period I became blissfully unaware of everhthing that was going on on Japanese television. The first I got wind of the Satchi issue, was a month ago, talking to the regulars in a local bar. One woman in the bar asked me what kind of women I found attractive, and so I said strong women who know what they want in life. She looked at me slightly disapprovinly, and said that nice Japanese women don’t ever speak their minds until they get married. The other people at the table also looked mildly perplexed. Then a thought occured to her: “Perhaps

Satchi-san is your type then.” Everybody laughed, except, that is, for me.

When I heard Satchi san, I was convinced she wasÅ@actually talking about Margeret “Thatcher” the former, (and in my neck of the woods), much disliked UK primeminister. And so for a good 3 minutes, before the confusion was sorted out, I too defamed poor Satchi-san with the most virulent Japanese

I knew how to muster.

Obviously, as Mark wroteÅAthe Satchi coverage points at all sorts of half-submerged issues connected to gender, which even after a year here I am still totally baffled by. And if anybody has any thoughts on it, i would love to hear more.

More importantly, I think there is a connection between Kaminsky’s article on the Tokyo film festival, English Language Newspapers in Japan, and the Japanese media. They are all institutions run from the top down and the people working in them are primarily interested in reproducing news as a form of currency which represents the interests and concerns of their own dominant group. All the English Newspapers here, (apologies to Mark Schilling, whose reviews I do enjoy reading.) are absolutely awful. News is not really about the outside world. Truth and analysis don’t seem to be really that important; what matters if you are a newspaper man here is going through the motions, and having “copy” that you can ceremoniously circulate rather like the tribal exchange systems that link some pacific Islands. The act of printing seems to be more important than the aim of conveying information. I am sure that this is an incredibly contentious thing to say, but the more I read the papers here, the more I suspect that they are a very expensive form of vanity publishing.

Anybody who needs accurate information about developments in foreign countries ÅAor indeed Japan itself, must be reading the Tokyo edition of the FT. And if anybody who doesnot read Japanese wants to know more about pop culture, well tough! (However, most of the gaijin here which the newspapers seem to be aimed at, are financial types who probably have no interest in contemporay Japan anyway!)

Tv here is obviously different, in that most of the wide shows, and comedy shows are produced by young, and often aggresively innovative producers. (Mostly male of course.) And some Japanese tv, the stuff which is often lampooned in the West as trash, is trash of a very high degree of sophistication. My personal perception that disposabe Japanese tv is a lot better, and more interesting than disposable tv elsewhere. However, the bounds of what people can talk about and write about are clearly delineated from above.

I spent a very depressing afternoon talking to my Japanese boss at a small Tokyo based production company, when he listed all the programmes he wanted to make when he was young that he knew he would never be able to broadcast.

If you want to make a programme about religious spiritualists in India , forget it. If you want to make a programme about the prison system, forget that too. In fact don’t even dream of making any indepth analytical programme about the workings of the Judiciary or the funding of political parties. You can make any programme you like about prostitution, as long as you dont ask any questions about the working conditions of the women involved. Titillation is fine, but analysis is forbidden.

In other words you cant make the sorts of programmes that would constitute a good 30 percent or more of the current affairs / documentary output in the UK.

The problem with the Tokyo film festival, too, I think is that everybody is very “tight at the top”, and it is largely about the institutions that sponser it then the people who want to participate. Thankfully, though, there are different kinds of festivals here, which give great oppurtunities for young people and people living in local communities to participate in.

I hope I am not the only person out there who holds these views. I am not trying to burden other list members with a solipsistic rant.

All the best,

Gavin Rees

 ___________________________________________________

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 14:15:05 +0900 (JST)

From: Peter Durfee <durfee@japanecho.co.jp

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi, the media, and the Tokyo film festival

At 00:15 -0400 99.7.22, GavinRees@aol.com wrote:

I hope I am not the only person out there who holds these views. I am not trying to burden other list members with a solipsistic rant.

No, I don’t think these are your views alone, and even if this was a rant, at least it was a fun one to read : ). I did want to comment on the following, though:

 

Anybody who needs accurate information about developments in foreign countries ÅAor indeed Japan itself, must be reading the Tokyo edition of the FT. And if anybody who doesnot read Japanese wants to know more about pop culture, well tough! (However, most of the gaijin here which the newspapers seem to be aimed at, are financial types who probably have no interest in contemporay Japan anyway!)

 

First of all, I think that anyone relying on overseas papers for news on Japan will have their information limited to sparse, spotty stories; often sensationalistic (not to the extent that Zipangu would have us believe, but certainly less than balanced) and all too often reported by people who cannot read or speak the language. I get the sense that Japan is a plum assignment on the foreign correspondents’ circuit, and the people who get posted here are quite accomplished as reporters, but this has little to do with their familiarity with Japan’s language or culture. Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times is one example.

 

I do think many of your comments on the nature of newspapers in this country were spot-on, but I would recommend against giving up on them as a source of information. Whether or not they adhere to the same journalistic standards as the top papers in the West, they are realistically the only game in town if you need to keep up with a broad range of domestic issues–as well as the Japanese take on foreign affairs. An inability to read Japanese will cause a Japan observer to miss out on much more than just pop culture.

I am unsure about the “gaijin whom the papers are aimed at” statement–does this refer to international papers like the FT and IHT, or the domestic

English rags? I have heard (rumor alert) that the Japan Times has more

Japanese subscribers than non-Japanese. And I know plenty of people–myself

included–who read the English dailies for information to be put to use in

communications or education, not the financial sector. (I also know that any

worker in the financial field with “no interest in contemporary Japan” will

very quickly be out of the know, and thus out of a job.)

 

Yours,

Peter Durfee

P.S. All I know about Satchii is that some angry, noisy men in gray buses are unhappy with NTV’s treatment of her story … My ears are still ringing from my walk this afternoon in Kojimachi.

 ___________________________________________________

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 99 10:47:22 +0900

From: Aaron Gerow <gerow@ynu.ac.jp

To: “KineJapan” <KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

Yesterday, the Hinomaru/Kimigayo bill passed the Lower Diet and Eto Jun committed suicide, and still the morning wide shows all opened with Satchi…

 

What has also surprised me, since I can’t read Japanese well enough to

follow it very well in Japanese papers myself, is how absent the issue has

been in the English-language press. From TV and Japanese friends, I

understand how prevalent Japanese media coverage has been, but I’ve seen

almost nothing in English about it. Granted, I primarily read the Yomiuri,

but why is it assumed that English-language readers will have NO interest in

this issue?

 

I think part of the issue is not simply English language press vs. Japanese language press, but rather the definition of “news” that operates within different media organizations. The major papers and TV news orgnizations like NHK as a rule do not consider celebrity news and gossip as news and frequently ignore stories that fill up space and time in weekly magazines and wideshows. There are some differences (the Mainichi tends to cover geino news more often than the Asahi), but there is still a hierarchy within journalism over what is “really news.”

Satchi is one of the few cases (Aum and the Miura/LA jiken are others) where stories that originated in the wideshows and weeklies made their way into “respectable” journalism, but even then, the reporting on the Satchi affair in the major papers has still been very minimal.

This does raise issues of gender and audience. Since wideshows mostly have a female viewership, it is as if “news” for them is defined as Satchi, while “real news” is reserved for evening shows when the men come home (shows which don’t cover Satchi (especially if it’s NHK))–as if women would have no interest in learning about the Hinomaru issue in an afternoon show. How is celebrity culture as a whole in fact “feminized” through such standards? How does this relate to the “male” version of gossip found in weekly magazines like Asahi Geino, which are tied into late night TV culture of sexy idols (which we could call male celebrity culture). Since this also revolves around issues of citizenship (the press and the public sphere), how does TV celebrity culture define Japanese citizenship and thus the nation across gender lines? (Satchi is interesting in this regard since the issue directly involves political qualifications.)

Just some more questions.

Aaron Gerow

Yokohama National University

KineJapan list owner

___________________________________________________

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 15:36:56 +0900

From: David Hopkins <hopkat@sa2.so-net.ne.jp

To: “’KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu’”

<KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Satchi and “Female”

I think you know the basic contempt I have for (Japanese) TV in general. I

have even greater contempt for the whole wide show scene (I can’t believe an

intellectual like you-know-who would admit to watching “all the morning wide

shows”!). However, gender issues are very interesting and important, so I

can only offer an interesting observation from the Asahi Shinbun, which is

generally considered to be the left limit of dominant ideology. I didn’t

clip it, unfortunately, but they recently announced a new e-magazine to be

called Female, with the information that it would feature news about fashion

and dieting. That really burned me up. Obviously, in this society, education

issues and investments should be the “serious” issues for women, even if

they also imply some stereotyping.

 

David Hopkins

Tenri University

 

___________________________________________________

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 99 15:59:56 +0900

From: Aaron Gerow <gerow@ynu.ac.jp

To: “KineJapan” <KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi and “Female” 

(I can’t believe an intellectual like you-know-who would admit to watching “all the morning wide

shows”!)

Aaargh! I have been unmasked!

 But no, I actually don’t watch all the morning wide shows. (I have

morning classes to teach and a son to take to day care). But on some

mornings when I’m not taking Ian the Norimono Hakase off to day care, I

have about 10 or 15 minutes after 8:30 (the start of some of the morning

wide shows) to flip through the channels and check out what’s going on.

The show I actually prefer is Hanamaru Market (TBS’s alternative to the

wideshow), but then that depends on their topic of the day….

But it is interesting I feel like I have to defend myself. Has my

masculinity been challenged? My status as an intellectual?

Ah, there are so many meanings attached to involvement in popular

culture….

Aaron

___________________________________________________

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 09:17:23 -0400 (EDT)

From: Kevin Alan Martin <martink@umich.edu

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Prosecutors accept complaint against Sachi (Sachiyo Nomura) (fwd)

Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.10.9907230914430.13661-100000@frogger.rs.itd.umich.edu

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

 

This is *greatly* off topic, but for those of you shaking your head and

wondering what all of the fuss is about, read on.

 

Again, apologies to those who are fed up with this.

 

Kevin

 

___________________________________________________

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 09:19:46 +0900

From: Ken-chan <ken-chan@mui.biglobe.ne.jp

Reply-To: geinou@mla.nifty.ne.jp

To: Geinou ML <geinou@mla.nifty.ne.jp

Subject: [geinou] #458: Prosecutors accept complaint against Sachi (Sachiyo

Nomura)

 

——————————————————–

CAUTION:

If you’re not interested in Sachiyo Nomura, please skip

this news mail. Since the news mail could make you feel

unpleasant, you’d better avoid reading unless you’re

patient. Ken (me) and Mainichi Daily News do not

guarantee the accuracy of the original articles.

——————————————————–

 

brief description of Sachiyo Nomura bashing by the press:

As you may know, since 3 months ago,

Sachiyo Nomura (aka Sachi), a 67-year-old arrogant woman TV personality

and wife of Katsuya Nomura, has been criticized by the media for

her rude behaviors and a lie. Many entertaiment news programs feature

the arrogant woman almost everyday, and are investigating what she has

been doing during the past few years.

 

Sachiyo Nomura has been criticized in several points:

– Vainglorious woman Nomura told a lie when runing in the 1996 House of

Representatives election. She insists she graduated from Columbia University

in the United States about 45 years ago, but many people believe it’s

highly doubtful.

– Nomura hasn’t returned money she has to pay yet. A travel agency

staff asked her to pay the money, but she still ignores it.

– Nomura carelessly described clebrity actress Mitsuyo Asaka as a person

who won fame for the name of Sachiyo Nomura. Asaka got very angry,

and filed a complaint to The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office (see

below).

– Nomura carelessly described ex-Olympic figure skater Emi Watanabe as

an ugly pig woman. The former figure skater is very angry now.

– Actress Hanako Tokachi pointed out she was given a card in the 1996

election, adding Nomura wrote there wrong educational background.

Tokachi wanted to file a complaint to a prosecutors office to accuse

Nomura of telling a lie, but gave up doing it because a lawyer advised

Tokachi not to do it in order to avoid being involved in a big trouble.

– Nomura beated and bullied boys of her baseball team, and even

beating their parents.

 

To our great surprise, Nomura released on July 20 a rap-oriented new

CD single titled “Such a Beautiful Woman.” In this song, she insists,

“Everyone has to follow social rules.” and “I don’t mind if it’s a pig

or something.” When hearing the song, Emi Watanabe, the TV personality

described as a pig, lost her words. For more, see below.

 

————————————————————————

Data Source: Mainichi Daily News

July 23, 1999

(c) Mainichi Shimbun

Entered manually by Ken

————————————————————————

Prosecutors have accepted a complaint filed by actress Mitsuyo

Asaka against television personality Sachiyo Nomura on suspision

of violation of the Public Offices Election Law by falsifying

her educational background, Asaka official said.

The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office told a lawyer for

Asaka on Wednesday that they accepted the complaint.

Asaka is ready to coorporate if requested to by prosecutors.

Asaka alleges that Nomura falsely stated she studied at

Columbia University in the United States, when she ran in the 1996

House of Representatives election on a ticket for the now-defunct

Shinshin-to.

 

————————————————————————

memo:

Shinshin-to = a policitians party

 

[reference article on Sachiyo Nomura]

In order to understand the background of the Sachiyo Nomura bashing,

you need to read the article shown below.

————————————————————————

Data Source: Mainichi Daily News

May 30, 1999

(c) Mainichi Shimbun

written by Michael Hoffman

downloaded by Ken-chan from a pay-database of NIFTY-Serve

————————————————————————

 

67 05/31 13:06 WAIWAI

 

Face of the Weeklies

 

If you had chanced to drop into a certain Osaka sushi restaurant

during the early evening of May 15, you would have seen, says Shukan

Gendai (6/5), a well-dressed elderly woman sitting at the counter and

directing passionate imprecations at the TV screen. The broadcast was

a baseball game, Chunichi Dragons vs. Hanshin Tigers. “Go, go!” she

cried when the Tigers were at bat. “Damn!” she muttered whenever

Chunichi scored a run, her face turning positively frightening in

its anger.

Meet (though surely you already have) Sachiyo Nomura, wife of

Tigers manager Katsuya Nomura – which domestic detail is only a

very small part of her notoriety.

Who is Sachiyo Nomura? Lecturer, actress, personality – better

ask who she is not, for of late she is, at 67, ubiquitous, spoken of

when not seen, bashed when not bashing. You don’t like her? She can

live with that. “I am the notorious Sachiyo Nomura,” was how she

introduced herself at a recent lecture, according to Shukan Taishu (6/7).

The audience ate it up. Her schedule is booked till autumn. No sooner

does one sponsor drop her like a hot potato than another one picks her

up like a diamond in the rough.

It’s all trivia, huffs Shukan Post (6/4), nonetheless devoting

a page and a half to “Sachi.” Her enemies call her a bully and a

loudmouth. Those and similar epithets have swirled about her since

actress Mitsuyo Asaka, with whom Nomura was to appear in a historical

TV drama series last year, bowed out of the project, publicly

complaining that her co-star was impossible to work with. Was that

the first episode of “Sachi-bashing”? Not really. That just got it

onto the TV Waido shows. The subterranean grumbling has been there

all along. Shukan Gendai quotes a Hanshin Tigers source as saying

that when it comes to team management, “She does the talking, while

her husband goes ‘Mm, right.’ “

For the famous, hatred is a kind of love. A TBS program on which

Sachiyo is a regular panelist maintains audience ratings in the 15

percent range. At the latest outburst of Sachi-bashing, over her

abrupt cancellation on May 16 of a scheduled phone-in appearance

on a TV show hosted by moderator Akiko Wada, TBS was inundated,

says Shukan Taishu, with 6,000 phone calls saying, in effect, Leave

Sachiyo Alone!

Bet on it that that’s exactly what they will do. (MH)

 ___________________________________________________

Date: 23 Jul 99 20:35:32 -0700

From: “Michael Badzik” <mike@vena.com

To: “KineJapan” <KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi 

This thread really has generated a lot of interesting words, hasn’t it?

There is a lot that I would like to comment on but for now will keep it

to two things:

 

Aaron wrote:

 

 Satchi is one of the few cases (Aum and the Miura/LA jiken are others)

 where stories that originated in the wideshows and weeklies made their

 way into “respectable” journalism, but even then, the reporting on the

 Satchi affair in the major papers has still been very minimal.

 

Could this come from, at least in part, a belief that their hands would

be dirtied by touching something that the “gossip hounds” and “scandal

mongers” first handled? It does seem, also, that the “hard news” people

are a bit more willing to report on hanky-panky in the political arena,

so perhaps there is a feeling that lax morals in its public servants is a

matter of public concern, but that the privacy of ordinary citizens is

something to be respected. Or perhaps not.

 

 Since wideshows mostly have a female viewership, it is as if “news”

 for them is defined as Satchi, while “real news” is reserved for evening

 shows when the men come home (shows which don’t cover Satchi

(especially if it’s NHK))–as if women would have no interest in

learning about the Hinomaru issue in an afternoon show.

 

You are going to need better evidence to convince me. There are “real

news” shows on during the day so any housewife who wishes to can keep

up with the “important” events. But then who am I to say what is

important for the largely female daytime audience, the spirited

discussions inspired by the Satchi affair often seem to be fueled by

issues of morality, proper behavior of a Japanese woman, privacy, and

the conduct of the press. These may be far more important subjects to a

wideshow audience than much of what is on the respectable news

programs, and I will bet that a lot of them will tell you that these are

issues with much greater impact on their lives than, say, the suicide of

Eto Jun.

 

I’m sure Aaron already knows this, but for the benefit of others I will

close with my first rule of Japanese television: Never underestimate the

intelligence of the audience - no matter how simple-minded the

programming may look to you. Come to think of it, Aaron has to agree with

this, given some of the shows he admits to watching!

 

Michael Badzik

mike@vena.com

 

___________________________________________________

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1999 13:38:17 +1000

From: “Barbara Hartley” <hartleyb@jedi.cqu.edu.au

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

It seems to me that the whole Satchi thing is comparable to the press

coverage of Hayashi Mayumi after the curry jiken last year.

Bizarre though the incident was it was nothing like the press coverage that

followed. I was travelling in Japan on work at the time and can’t actually

recall any other current event that occurred since every time I turned the

tv on there was nothing but saturation coverage of Mayumi higaisha on

absolutely every station. There’s undoubtedly a gender factor at work - and

a certain glee in dealing brutally with women who have stepped outside

defined parameters. The political demonisation is confirmed by candid shots

of the women looking stressed and tired and generally pretty dreadful, thus

‘legitimising’ the manner in which they are dealt with by the media as

deviant.

Not that I’m, advocating in any way for bumping off people who give you the

cold shoulder with a bowl of pesticided curry, or for not paying your bills

or whatever. But compare the press treatment of both Mayumi and Satchi with

the piddling little bit of coverage given to all those blokes who have been

involved in mega frauds and other scandals over the past few years. A bit of

a glimpse of them looking vaguely remorseful sandwiched in between two other

blokes in the back of a police car and that’s about it. And with respect to

the unfortunate Satchi, how much more worthwhile had the media decided to

have a closer look at the bewigged chappy raking in a bucket by doing nips

and tucks, to say nothing of the whole cosmetic surgery industry in general.

 

By the way we’ve just had an incident in Australian where a prominent woman

politician, Carmen Lawrence - touted in the early nineties as a future prime

minister - has been the subject of a political witchhunt which resulted in

her being prosecuted for perjury. She was acquitted on Friday by a jury

which took less than an hour to make its decision. However, much of the

mainstream press (media and print) ran stories about her being ‘let off’ by

the judicial system and implying that she was undoubtedly guilty. The

hysteria is of a different tenor to that associated with Satchi. But the

message is the same. Beware if you’re a women who is perceived as

transgressing.

 

And with regard to the boredom factor. You might get bored the with hard

sell coverage, but the manner in which that coverage is being orchestrated

is surely a topic that calls for inquiry and comment.

 

Barbara Hartley

 

___________________________________________________

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1999 05:33:07 +0900

From: shh@gol.com

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi 

To loop back into film a bit, as for how stong-willed and outspoken

women are covered in the Japanese press, does anyone have any ideas of

how femme fatale Matsuda Seiko has been treated over the years?

 

Sharon Hayashi

University of Chicago

___________________________________________________

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 01:45:55 +0900

From: “Peter B. High” <j45843a@nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi 

Carole and Sharon’s invocations of Akutagawa’s pre-war suicide as a potential

context/contrast for considering the significance of Eto’s suicide reminds me that we

can find similar antecedants to the “Satchi affair” in that period as well.

Three examples spring immediately to mind (and off the top of my head, I might

add–meaning that I may have some of my details muddled). All three examples feature

prominent women who were pilloried in their era’s press as sexual adventuresses (or

ogresses) and yet, after burning for a time in journalistic perdition, were then

redeemed by having the nature of their “crimes” transformed into something

…”allegorical.” Exploring these examples might just conceivably provide a

prognostication as to if and how Satchi will be redeemed for her own “crimes.”

 

The first example is the public uproar and wide commentary on the open “furin”

relationship between Shimamura Hogetsu and the legendary actress Matsui Sumako at the

end of the Meiji period. Both were married elsewhere and while for men extramarital

affairs were de rigeur, for women it was seen as a sacramental desecration challenging

the very foundations of society. Some time after Hogetsu’s death and an unsuccessful

attempt to keep together the theatre troup she had started with Hogetsu, Sumako

committed suicide. The conservative press at the time commented that her death was a

natural atonement for her “sinfulness,” but subsequently it became (indeed, has become)

seen as the affirmation of a brave and true love transcending social taboo. Both

Kinugasa and Mizoguchi played on this moral theme in their 1947 films about her.

 

The second example is the Abe Sada murder incident, which also has received several

cinematic treatments (at least three, I think), including Oshima’s pornographic *Realm

of the Senses*. Unlike Sumako, Abe had been a “nobody,” a hotel maid, before

accidentally strangling here lover in bed and then making off with his severed penis in

1938. This last horrific detail, the castration, put her on the front page, and kept

her in the public eye for months. From early on, the press demonstrated awareness of

the dual significance of the incident and the its coverage had a distinctly Janus-faced

quality.On the one hand, the press played up the inevitable fear and repulsion of a

large section of its male redership. Compounding matters was–as it continues to be–a

kind of Queen Bee Complex, involving fear of and erotic attraction to the (potentially

lethal) sexual domination of women–a favorite topic,incidentally, of Shindo Kaneto

throughout most of the fifties and then of Imamura Shohei in the sixties and seventies.

Contemporary accounts of Abe’s ultimate arrest, meanwhile, introduced the second

perspective. Standing in the doorway of her hotel hide-away, she meekly surrendered to

the arresting officers amid a crowd of flashbulb popping reporters. In her hand, still

carefully wrapped in a bloody handkerchief, was her lover’s severed penis. The

photograph of her kimono-clad figure and bewildered, sad and vulnerable-looking

expression became a much reprinted icon of the era. Needless to say, the photographs

were sans the grisly artifact. Within this other perspective, the Abe incident opened

the profoundly a-moral dimension of sexual passion to public meditation. Part of the

problem had to do with the manner in which the press had to report (and thereby publicy

acknowledge) the “porno”-graphic details, including the titillating issue of finding an

appropriate expression for “male member.” In other words, the sensational impact of the

scandal came from its revelation, along with the details, of hithertop repressed

subject material. Significantly, all of this came amidst the aftermath of the “2-26”

Incident (the attempted coup-d’etat by young army officers in Feb. 1938)–in an era

characterized by “thought police” and the repression of public discourse on social and

political matters. In his book of essays about Abe Sada, the incident and his movie,

Oshima makes the point that in times of political crisis, the (Japanese) government

encourages the “liberation” of the sexual as a means of diverting attention from the

political arena. I am not sure that the government–even that of the thirties–was

ruled by the kind of monolithic logos Oshima posits or had this kind of immediate

access to the switches of such subtle and yet direct psychological/political

manipulation. However, if we can find such a tendency in history–and I think we

can–more than likely it was a sudden, independent eruption which took the bureaucratic

“control” officials by surprise and toward which they intinctively turned a blind eye.

 

The third “case” is that of the actress Okada Yoshiko, who “defected” to the Soviet

Union that same year. Since it had strong political overtones, the authorities of the

time made sure that little more than the bare details of the incident reached the

public. On January 3, 1938, stage and screen favorite Okada crossed the border on

Karafuto (Sakhalin) into Soviet teritory in the company of her lover, left-wing

dramatist Sugimoto Kenkichi. To this day, the issue of “Why Did She Do It?” continues

to intrigue Japanese film and social historians (in fact, recent years have seen the a

modest “Okada Yoshiko” boom, with the publication of articles and even a few books

about her). From the beginning of her stage career in the pre-Quake era of the

twenties, Yoshiko had developed a reputation for herself as a “flaming woman” who took

new bed partners before discarding old husbands. The press’ discovery of her in one of

her “love nests” with an illicit paramour led to a much-publicized cancellation of her

contract with one film coimpany and her being temporarily banned from appearances in

other pictures. Still, she managed to continue a prominent stage and screen career

despite the pungent smell of sexual scandal which persistently surrounded her. Okada’s

“defection” therefore came as a major shock/sensation and dominated the press during

the entire 1938 New Years season. Thereafter, however, the subject was allowed to lapse

into obscurity–in terms of direct press treatment, in any case. Reading various film

articles and round-table discussions of the era one gets the impression that the

incident had struck deep into the sensibilities of the film community (and presumably

the “public mind” as well). Oblique references to the incident (such as references to

“the one who ran away”) tended to emerge for years afterward.

In probing the psychological effect of the Okada/Sugimoto defection, one need only

recall the oft-invoked cliche of the era–“Japan has no Switzerland”–meaning that

since there was no convenient foreign country capable of providing political asylum,

one had best stay at home, cope, and where necessary compromise and collaborate. While

the official line was that Okada had violated the sacred national boundary and had

engaged in an act of treason, one gets the feeling that in the popular mind her act had

stirred a certain amount of envy and even “respect”–this, despite the fact that even

today social and film historians regularly refer to it as an act of “folly.”The first

in-depth treatment of the incident was done by Kishi Matsuo in his 1960s volume NIHON

EIGAJIN-DEN, where the defection is explained (away) as the result of sexual

infatuation. Okada had no political opinions, Kishi holds, and it was a spur of the

moment decision, apparently an act of “affirmation” of the opinions of her lover. As

far as I know, Okada herself has never really explained the reason for her defection.

Therefore, unlike either Matsui Sumako or Abe Sada, the enduring meaning of the Okada

Yoshiko incident has remained inchoate–reflected perhaps in the fact that there have

appeared no Okada Yoshiko movies.

In the late 1980s, the prelude period to Okada’s much-publicized nostalgic journey home

from the USSR was characterized by an outpouring of sentimentalism and “forgiveness.”

Part of it was clearly the sense of closure implied by her return after so many years

to the homeland. The defection was coming full circle, the final development in an

incident spanning the fifty years of the wartime and postwar eras. Now, ten years on,

however, one gets the feeling that it also marked the beginning of the present era in

which significant sectors of Japan are unilaterally “forgiving” and absolving the

wartime generation for excesses on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

 

The element linking the “heroines” of the three incidents was the unselfconsciousness

with which they transgressed the boundaries which hemmed in other, more ordinary women

of their era. In the cases of Matsui Sumako and Okada Yoshiko, at least, we see the

peculiar phenomenon of women of great daring, talent and audacity positioning

themselves in opposition to a male-dominant social context and thrusting upon that

society the responsibility of finding a means to accomodate them. In all three

instances, too, we see how flexibly and subtly Japanese society can move to create a

space to accomodate such unique individuals and their iconoclasm. All three ultimately

achieved acceptance and even a certain amount of esteem from their contemporaries and

their posterity. The rule seems to be that truly outrageous individuals, as long as

they have the perseverence to tough it out, will eventually be awarded a niche–often

a prominent one–of their own. This quality is equally apparent today, as in the case

of Mikawa Ken’ichi, who is regularly featured as “one of the women” in panel discussion

shows today, neatly eliding all (or most) references to his/her real identity as a

transvestite male.

 

Although the phrase seems now to have gone out of currency, “pushy” and/or unattractive

upper-middle aged women were were for a time regularly referred to as “obatarion”–a

uniqely Japanese neologism compounded from “oba” (aunt) and the title of the cult

horror movie *Battalion* in which dead flesh is revived v (via a gas, was it?). The

almost violent disgust implied in the phrase continues to be reflected in such tv ads

as the one in which a young man recoils in horror as he is about to acidentally kiss

one of these “obatarion.” A couple of years ago, Tonneruzu tv star Ishibashi Takaaki

(whom I heartily detest) was almost embroiled in a law suit when he lured another such

woman out on stage dressed only in bra and panties and then began to revile her for her

ugly body. This is the hostile context in which Nomura “Satchi” emerged as a

sharp-tongued, admittedly talentless “tarento.” For a time, this brassy (and, frankly,

utterly UTTERLY unattractive) woman seemed successful in her out bid to stake out her

own niche in the brutal world of “geinokai” television. Somehow, by pushing her own

“obatarion” pugnacity into the face of viewers and fellow-panelists alike, she actually

gained a certain amount of authority–MORAL authority, as shown in the shows where she

appeared as a panmelist lecturing frivolous young couples on the errors of their ways.

As in the case of the three women depicted above, the oppressive walls of social

opprobrium seemed to be moving back to accomodate this one outrageous “exception.” Such

as we now see was not to be the case.

 

The ingredient to be found in the cases of three pre-war woman but missing in that of

Satchi was catastrophe, tragedy, the completely unremediable screw-up. They had to

descend into the cauldron of infamy and then be resurrected, not through their own

efforts but through a reinterpretation (or universalization) of the significance of

their folly. Even Mikawa Ken’ichi had to drop into oblivion before being resurrected as

a “lovable” sage of popular tv.

Well, Satchi now has her seemingly unremediable screw-up. (As I write this, late night

television is reporting that her case has now come out onto the floor of the Diet!)

Satchi herself alternates between silence and defiance, just the right attitude to

stimulate the pundits. Will she be consigned forever to popular odium? Somehow I think

not. The dramatic structure seems to be in place for some sort of reversal–although

just how this would be achieved I have no idea. The game is afoot. Or, to use another

metaphor, the concentrics are spreading out across the surface of national

consciousness. We must wait and watch to see what they ultimately configure.

Peter B. High

Nagoya University

___________________________________________________

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 99 16:10:53 +0900

From: Aaron Gerow <gerow@ynu.ac.jp

To: “KineJapan” <KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

Message-ID: <199907260701.QAA25860@app2.ipch.ynu.ac.jp

Mime-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”US-ASCII”

 

Michael wrote,

 

There are “real

news” shows on during the day so any housewife who wishes to can keep

up with the “important” events. But then who am I to say what is

important for the largely female daytime audience, the spirited

discussions inspired by the Satchi affair often seem to be fueled by

issues of morality, proper behavior of a Japanese woman, privacy, and

the conduct of the press. These may be far more important subjects to a

wideshow audience than much of what is on the respectable news

programs, and I will bet that a lot of them will tell you that these are

issues with much greater impact on their lives than, say, the suicide of

Eto Jun.

 

Trying to be neutral yet provoke discussion, I haven’t really put forward

my views of wideshows, but the general tone of my language probably

belies a general dislike of the format. While I can watch them and not

infrequently see interesting stories (if not intellectually interesting

cultural problems), stories like the Satchi affair still make me worried

about the power of the media, their definition of privacy, the morality

of journalism, and the construction of subjectivity. Frankly, I found

the scenes of reporters hounding Satchi around the train station

offensive and repulsive and a clear demonstration of the dangers of the

violence of the camera (which any good documentarist from Hara to Koreeda

is conscious of). I question the morality of anyone who makes such

things and who likes watching it. Koreeda and others on the production

side have been trying to warn people a lot lately about the complete lack

of action on media ethics within the TV industry in Japan (as Koreeda

said in a Doc Box interview I did with him, every time a scandal occurs,

nothing is solved), but we also have to wonder about the viewer culture

that supports these problems.

 

This is my emotional response, and feel free to analyze it if you want,

but Michael thankfully does remind me that both the situation and my

reaction to it are more complex. There are actually features to the

wideshows which I actually liked. Before the demise of the TBS

wideshows, the morning show reserved from 30 minutes to an hour on

Fridays just to discuss contemporary issues in often interesting ways.

Wideshows, I should remind people, did some of the better and earlier

reporting on the AIDS scandal. And as Michael emphasizes, quite a few

still devote a lot of time to discussions of social, famialial, and moral

issues.

 

But there are still many problems worthy of discussion. First, while it

is clear we cannot easily divide TV news into afternoon and evening

formats, there nonetheless are distinctions in the way news is defined

and delivered on TV. While in the afternoon, hard news is offered on NHK

and the 11:30 news sports and in market news on TV Tokyo, the way these

programs are constructed, their tone, point of view and content all

differ from the news breaks seen on some of the afternoon shows, or on

the actual programming of the wideshows. Not all can be reduced to a

male vs. female audience, but many shows very literally present their

news as “okusama no tame ni” and construct it according to their views of

what this audience is and wants. As I discuss below, the problem arises

when these definitions of viewership are not merely passive responses to

actualy viewer desires, but serve to shape those desires–and

subjectitivites–themselves.

 

Second, as we can tell from the kind of responses to the Satchi affair

seen on this list, there is the fear that whatever issues are discussed

on the wideshows are often presented in a conservative way which

reinforces dominant ideologies. Much of the time the discussions reveal

major fissures in such ideology (e.g., the simultaneous love and hate of

bossy women), but there is the fear that the “consensus” over what is

“natural” and “common sense” (something very evident in the Satchi

affair) is a mode of power and social control.

 

I’m sure Aaron already knows this, but for the benefit of others I will

close with my first rule of Japanese television: Never underestimate the

intelligence of the audience - no matter how simple-minded the

programming may look to you. Come to think of it, Aaron has to agree with

this, given some of the shows he admits to watching!

 

Actually, Michael, I’ve said the same things many times on this list.

But I do think we in Japanese TV and film studies still have a lot of

work to do on audiences, industry, and ideology. We are all aware of the

Fiskean, cultural studies point of view which emphasizes how audiences

appropriate and use popular cultural texts for their own ends. There are

clear cases where audiences do take “dominant ideological” texts and

effectively rework them according to their needs, making them important

to their lives. There is more than a strong possibility many wideshow

viewers are critically working with the texts in ways we should not

desparage.

 

But at the same time, there are many people in cultural studies who

remind us that texts contain many devices which, if not forcing, at least

encourage “proper” readings. My research on prewar film reception

indicates that there is a long history of efforts to promote, control,

and regulate the kinds of meanings people produce from movies. Without

having to follow Adorno precisely, we also have to recognize there are

industrial factors which encourage companies to find means to prevent

alternative readings and uses of its cultural products. With this

historical, cultural, and industrial background, we have plenty of

evidence to lead us to conclude that many wideshows (as well as many

shows in general, and many films) are constructed to prevent a critical

response/use on the part of the audience and that most audiences follow

along with that. It is there when the issues of ideology and control

arise.

 

Clearly neither extreme is right, but there remains a lot of work to be

done in work on popular culture in Japan to understand that culture as

neither liberatory nor oppressive, but as a complex struggle over meaning

and power which involves dominant corporate and state structures as well

as amorphous spectator fields and reception contexts. I’ve only started

thinking about it, but looking at the ease with which the

Kimigayo/Hinomaru, defense guidelines, and wiretapping legislation passed

the Diet without any discussion, I tend towards the skeptical side.

Any comments?

 Aaron Gerow

YNU

___________________________________________________

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 18:49:21 -0400

From: Joseph Murphy <jmurphy@aall.ufl.edu

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi 

This will eventually get to the question of image-media.

Peter B. High wrote:

Carole and Sharon’s invocations of Akutagawa’s pre-war suicide as a potential

context/contrast for considering the significance of Eto’s suicide reminds

me that we

can find similar antecedants to the “Satchi affair” in that period as well.

Three examples spring immediately to mind (and off the top of my head, I

might

add–meaning that I may have some of my details muddled). All three

examples feature

prominent women who were pilloried in their era’s press as sexual

adventuresses (or

ogresses) and yet, after burning for a time in journalistic perdition,

were then

redeemed by having the nature of their “crimes” transformed into something

…”allegorical.”

 

Barbara Hartley’s juxtaposing the press treatment of the female defendant

in the recent “Karei jiken” to the vilification of Satchi Nomura brings to

mind another antecedent for the way the mass-media siezes on these strong,

transgressive women, and possibly for the wide-show format itself, namely

the “poison woman” genre of serial fiction popular in the 1870’s when

Japan’s mass journalism was just establishing itself . These stories

weren’t really fiction but fictionalized accounts of actual news events

(jitsuroku shosetsu). A single incident would kick off a rash of competing

serials in different newspapers, to be bound and sold as books afterward.

The most popular kind featured as their heroine the “dokufu” or

poison-woman, i.e. a woman who had committed a rash of sensational, usually

violent crimes. To get an idea of the tenor, behind “Takahashi Oden yasha

monogatari” was the true story of a woman who conned her own relatives in a

land scam in the mid-1870’s, wandered the Kanto plain for a while with a

man, then lured another man back to her room and killed him for his money.

She was sentenced to death January 31st, 1879. As soon as the sentence was

handed down at least fournewspapers rushed out competing serializations of

the story, mixing fictionalized accounts of her exploits as well as

transcripts of Oden’s own self-defense plea, etc. This is by no means the

most lurid.

It’s not such a stretch to the current discussion both for the similarity

in mass-media format and the consistent content of the fantasies being

circulated. The phenomenon (of the “true-account” genre) occurs during

the initial sorting out period for Japan’s mass journalism. They were

consumed in intallments each day like the wideshow, and competing versions

appeared in different newspapers (channels). Fiction is still serialized

in Japanese newspapers today, but as newspapers gained in respectability,

the basis in factual events and unseemly scramble to get out the quickest

account was expunged, and by the 1890’s newspaper serial were “pure”

fiction. Where you have to go these days to get the jitsuroku presentation

of the latest sensational real news event is the despised genre of the

wideshow. Its like within the phenomenon of mass-media, the general format

switched from print to visual media . Second, the hybridity and free

combination of fact and fiction in the jitsuroku shosetsu (What I know

about this I learned from the work of the early-Meiji scholar Kamei Hideo,

from his book Kansei no henkaku and from talks he has given here) was

instrumental in establishing conventions of realism, and not coincidentally

conventions for image-ing women that made possible the “birth” of the

modern novel a decade later and clearly the fantasy of the woman who “won’t

give way on her desire” still circulates meaningfully today.

For those who haven’t followed it (you couldn’t help be exposed if you’ve

been in Japan anytime in the last two years), the “curry incident” was a

spectacular mass- poisoning where several people died after eating the

curry rice from a stand at a neighborhood festival in Wakayama ken (correct

me on the details, please„ those who’ve followed it more closely). The

incident unraveled in a fascinating way over its first few days, beginning

with the mysterious deaths, the pinpointing of the curry-rice as the

source, the identification of quantities of arsenic in the curry, the

arsenic traced circumstantially to Hayashi Masumi, a local housewife who it

was found in the last several years had taken out large insurance policies

on other people who had “accidents” and whose husband showed clear symptoms

of long-term, low-level arsenic poisoning. The police had no witnesses or

hard evidence linking the suspect to the poisoning, hence they had to

release Ms. Hayashi to her home, presumably waiting for her to crack under

the pressure. We know that’s what the police are doing because we’ve all

read Dostoyevsky and seen it a dozen times in detective novels and at the

movies. However, Hayashi (yogisha?) did not crack, and what elevated it

from a good summer read to wide-show media frenzy seemed to be the repeated

images of her “hansei-free” comings and goings from her rather

well-appointed suburban house.

This brings up the question of whether the representation of these women is

“attractive” or not. It seems like a presumption of the commentary that

the Japanese media presents these women as “unattractive,” to coincide

with the moral case, but I wonder if that’s how it works. Those sorts of

judgements of course involve projection on the part of the beholder, but

with the proviso that they can be organized and manipulated, insofar as the

production of Hayashi is going to follow this well-established “poison

woman” schema she has to be allowed the same kind of magnetism (of the

woman who refuses to give way on her desire, and will not back down).

Hayashi is full-figured, with a no-nonsense contemporary hairstyle and a

warm, open face, and shows remarkable composure in the face of the camera

onslaught. One of the most repeated images on the wideshows is of Hayashi

out washing her car and then turning her garden hose on the phalanx of

photographers catcalling her, literally hosing one especially persistent

cameraman off of his perch on her fence. Its a beautiful image (sun

shining, just a hint of a rainbow in the spray) and a truly elegant

response to the media frenzy. Aaron’s term “violent” is probably a good

description of the way the wideshow paparazzi pursue their subjects, its

too invasive to be voyeuristic, and anyone who watches the wideshows

probably experiences a sense of guilt about their complicity in these

invasions of privacy. Yet the US testosterone-driven celebrity response of

punching the camera simply reverses the violence. This image of Hayashi

sprinkling these intrusive photographers with a sudden shower, a gentle

baptism that ruins their cameras allows a very easy identification on the

part of the guilty viewer, and if one isn’t careful this might then just

slide to some fantasies about what you’d like to do to those nosy neighbors

of yours, or how you might like to get that aging, belching beer-drinking

spouse of yours out of the way…

What is ugly about the Satchi affair is that it entirely lacks the

novelistic element of the “Wakayama Curry Incident.” It’s just an ugly,

pointless story. Hence where Hayashi is shown hosing off the scum of the

earth on a sunny day, we are treated to daily, mean-spirited and very

unattractive pictures of Satchi Nomura rummaging around the trash in front

of her house, or cleaning up behind her dog on a walk.

There were personal tragedies in the Wakayama curry incident, many of the

victims who did not die are still suffering debilitating effects from the

poison, but the question is of why and how the media fixes on certain

events and not others, and the “literary” expectations the viewers bring to

these media events seems to really shape the spectacle.

J. Murphy

 

___________________________________________________

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 13:55:13 +0900

From: “Peter B. High” <j45843a@nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

Joseph Murphy wrote:

 

 Barbara Hartley’s juxtaposing the press treatment of the female defendant

 in the recent “Karei jiken” to the vilification of Satchi Nomura brings to

 mind another antecedent for the way the mass-media siezes on these strong,

 transgressive women, and possibly for the wide-show format itself, namely

 the “poison woman” genre of serial fiction popular in the 1870’s when

 Japan’s mass journalism was just establishing itself .

 It’s not such a stretch to the current discussion both for the similarity

 in mass-media format and the consistent content of the fantasies being

 circulated…

 

 

In our two postings, I think both Joseph and I have been groping toward the realization

that the Japanese media tends to orchestrate its “incidents” according to certain

dramaturgical patterns (“ur-stories” perhaps?) and that it may be possible to track these

patterns back into earlier historical periods. I first came upon this notion when I was

writing an essay abpout the Japanese press during the Manchurian Incident of 1931. In

hindsight at least, reportahge during the “prelude” period leading up to full-scale

intervention–featuring assassinations of Japanese individuals and even a massacre of

Japanese residents in Manchuria–seemed to me to be following the classic plot development

pattern of the *matatabi*-style jidaigeki (samurai film). First there is the the series of

one-sided outrages carried out by a sinister enemy whose “true shape” and motives remain

obscure. The hero (the ronin, the yakuza, or in this case, the Japanese army) stoically

endures the provocations, holding to priniciples of decorum and morality utterly

incomprehensible to the villain(s). Of course, the reader/viewer knows that eventually the

hero’s endurance will snap and that he will launch against the enemy a jihad of righteous

fury (the “*nagurikomi*/i.e. full-scale military action) in which the perfidy is requited

in a bloddbath and the villains abashed.

–Parenthetically and for what its worth, the “co-star” in the Satchi drama, Asaka

Mitsuyo, is known to the Japanese public for her stage work in old-time *Onnna

Kengeki*–samurai dramas enacted by all-women troups. On stage, she presumably played the

righteous samurai doing to death all sorts of villains preying upon the hapless public.

 

Now, returning to the 1930s– For the subsequent Shanghai Incident of spring 1932, which

developed into military conflict too quickly for the press to emplot it in the above

manner, the incident was given “transcendent” significance by digging out extraordinary

examples of self-sacrificial valor displayed by individuals or small groups of military

men involved in the fighting there.The narrative category for such exemplary incidents is

as ancient as the medieval era *senki-mono*, such military histories as the *Taiheiki*

etc. This was the BIDAN (lit. “beautiful tale”). Before coming upon the single ideal bidan

for the Incident, we find the press almost daily putting forward various candidates in the

form of little front page accounts of “brave deaths” on the battlefields to the north and

west of the city. The one they finally settled involved three youing men who died while

trying to blow up enemy barbed wire defenses. Tokyo Nichinichi immediately dubbed them

“Our Three Human Bomb Patriots” (Bakudan Sanyushi), while ASsahi used the term “Three

Flesh-bullet Patriots” (Nikudan Sanyushi); it is usually under the latter name that they

are referred to in the history books. Within weeks, the Flesh-bullet Three became the

subject of radio plays, “quickie” (kiwamono) movies, rakugo routines and even full-scale

stage plays.

 

One of the remarkable aspects of the above incidents was the manner in which the national

press would throw up one real-life “candidate” after another (in the form of

“provocations” and then of valorous deaths in action) in an open attempt to find just the

right material to fit a pre-determined narrative model. This, naturally, would lead to the

impression on on the part of the public spectator of similar incidents “clustering”–in

other words, the instinctive perception of “crisis”. It seems to me that we continue to be

exposed to this sort of serialized reportage today–the North Korea-related stuff, the

scandals in the economic world, etc. etc. Interestingly enough, once the sense of “crisis”

has been set a-brewing in the…”MEGA-sphere,” can I say?–the arenas of politics, high

finance, government and similar areas of High Historico-social Import–the media then sets

to work creating minor key counterpoints, public or personal scandals clearly unrelated

in their details to the “crisis” of the MEGA-sphere and yet, on some virtually

subliminal level, vibrating to the same rythm. This of course is today the dimension

worked by the Wideshow and the shukanshi.

For example, returning to our early thirties parallel, we find the great Lovers’ Suicide

Rage of 1932-34. On May 10, 1932, the newspapers reported the suicide of Chosho Goro, a

Keio University student, and his sweetheart Yaeko. The two had met at a Christian

fellowship meeting and fallen in love, but because of class differences, marriage had been

forbidden by both sets of parents. The means of death they chose was both romantic and

striking. They jumped into the Sakatayama volcano above the beach at Oiso. The day after

the initial news report, all of the national papers published their suicide note, in which

they told (the entire nation, as it turned out) that they had died “pure in body and

spirit.” At Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, the copy editor had the inspiration to play up the

Christian connection, publishing the note under the headline “A Love That Reached

Heaven”. It was the headline’s brilliant balance of spirituality and barely suppressed

eros, more than the actual event, which created the greatest sensation and set off the

subsequent chain of events. Within days, the suicide was being re-enacted as a play by

various small stage troupes using the headline as their title. Radio too picked up the

story, first in editorial commentary and then as a radio drama. Record producers released

a number of sentimental ballads extolling the pure love of Goro and Yaeko, and Shochiku

film company announced it would produce *A love That Reached Heaven*, with Gosho Heinosuke

as director.By this time, the surge of copy-cat suicides (i.e. the “clustering effect”)

had begun . From mid-May, several couples a day were climbing the slopes of Sakatayama to

throw themselves into the volcano . Now, with the movie, their numbers doubled. At the

movie theaters, usherettes had to patrol the aisles as young couples had taken to drinking

poison during the showing. By the end of the year, there had been hundreds of

suicides.After a brief lull, the Lover`s Suicide Rage flared anew. On January 9 (1933), a

pair of school girls climbed Miharayama volcano on Oshima Island, a short ferry trip from

Tokyo, and, holding hands, jumped in. The first copy-cat suicides began three days later.

As before, the press reacted with sensationalist irresponsibility. Pictures of young

lovers creeping up the slope arm-in-arm were published with syrupy thanatopic

captions.When the rage finally subsided for good in March, a total of 944 young people had

perished in the Miharayama crater ( Kato Hidetoshi’s count).

 

Certainly, on the surface, the two levels of “incidents”–those of the mega-sphere and the

counter-pointing minor-key Lovers’ Suicide incident–had nothing to do with one another.

Yet, clearly, they were all sagas of death, and were therefore thematically linked. To

recognize this, we need only realize that the issue of Fascism (“fassho”) was just then

dominating public discourse. The connection , I think, was made most apparent in a comment

by German director Karl Ritter a few years later, about the intention of his own

fascist/Nazi films: “I want to impress upon our youth the transcendent value of apparently

meaningless death.”

For those who feel it inappropriate to suddenly drag in evidence from a foreign source,

one could re-explain the issue within a purely “native” context. The Lovers’ Suicide Rage

became a successful minor key counterpoint incident by being “sublimed” (in both the

alchemical and the literal sense) into a parable of surpassing “beauty.” And, to continue

the alchemical metaphor, the Philosopher’s Stone was the early-on Nichinichi Shimbun

headline: “The Love that Reached Heaven”…and that patriotism was seen as another form of

that same vaulting love.

 

This brings us to Aaron’s repeated query in reference to the Satchi affair–what is its

significance in the context of major events in the mega-sphere (centering on the Diet

resolutions and debate about defense/the flag and the national anthem)? By implication at

least, he is asking whether we can perceive an aspect of direct manipulation or

re-direction of public consciousness away from the truly important to the trivial.

Certainly this appears to be the effect. Personally–and, as with the example I developed

in my previous posting about the Abe Sada affair and its virtual concurrence with the

February 26 Incident of 1938–I find it difficult to locate the subjective (i.e. the

“willing”) element which does the “re-diriecting” of public consciousness. That is also

why I have trouble with Noam Chomsky’s fascinating studies on American politics and the

press. Observations couched in this sort of “anthropomorphizing” mode of expression may

work well as a kind of short-hand, in other words as a means of cutting to direct

observations of the phenomena, but there is a clear tendency for the

anthropomorphized/short-hand unit (the Press, the Government, the Power Elite, Them) to

stand up and begin to walk around by itself.

What I would like to posit here is possibility that there is no subjective or “willing”

element to be found, rather that at some refined meta-level “real” events and their

representation in the media interact according to certain naturally-arising patterns and

that they produce “products” (incidents, scandals etc) which send out ripples through both

dimensions:

Query #1: Cannot these patterns be considered either as a.) universals (i.e. part of the

phenomenon of our present day planet-girdling media news coverage and/or, more distantly,

arising from the ancient structures of human story-telling ) and also as b.) determined by

the narrative modes peculiar to a specific culture, with its roots thrust deep into that

culture’s own sentimental, historical and story-telling traditions? In reference to a.),

we could hypothesize that the CNN format may be a hybrid spawn of the Hollywood narrative

tradition which, since Griffith at leasst, developed techniques for universal transparency

and “reader friendliness.” (So what do we make of CNN’schief rival, BBC?–is it so

substantiallyy different?) Queries about b.) will be covered below.

 

Standing in the way, I think, is the comparatively recent history of modern media

themselves and the manner in which they tend to compound, interact, and mutually

reinforce–via music, sound (effects), the oral word, written word, the visual image,

etc–to create the illusion of “crises” et al–in Japan, I of course locate its inception

in the early thirties. In the past hundred years, the very sense of a publicly-shared Now

has undergone tremendous change–starting with “recently”/in the past several days or

weeks (via newspapers) to the Now we experience today–“just now”/ a few hours ago/ a few

minutes ago/ “developing on your screen RIGHT NOW!” Another problem is that new dimensions

keep being added to the mass media. For example, I can’t think of a single 1930s example

comparable, in immediacy at least, to the image Joseph Murphy talks about so

eloquently–Hayashi Masumi hosing down the press. Also, I remember a personal conversation

with Markus (Nornes) in which we tried to list up some of the “iconic photo images” which

have encapsulated our impression of impportant moments of the twentieth century–the

explosion of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the burned Vietnamese village girl…But even

these have a different, far more limited range of sensibility than that green Bagdad sky

we all saw on CNN the moment the Gulf War began. More striking than its composition and

direect visual impact was the eerie you-are-there/yet-aren’t-there, vicarious immediacy

provided by satellite tv. Its a visual icon of a quite different sort. Photographs are

always “then.”

 

Query #2: Returning to hypothesis b.)–about media coverage being determined by the native

narrative patterns of a particular culture, I wonder if other readers would agree that the

historical antecedant line opened by Joseph and myself has merit. The idea, as I see it

anyway, is that the culture has, ready-to-hand, a complex set of (what I call) ur-stories

and thayt modern mass media constantly fishes down among these stories, not only to find

an appropriate “shape” for casting an already-unfolding story, but on a more instinctive

level, for types of new stories to pursue (or, maybe, invent?). And, that the

story-tellers–tv, the papers, shukanshi,etc. etc.–are not consciously in conmtrol of

this rummaging.

Sub-query a.) What would these stories be and how could we identifyu them?

In the Japanese context, Japanese historians seem to make the task easy by plotting out

their historical accounts popular culture cultural history along a time line of

consecutively occurring incidents and fads. These latter form the dots of the line. The

spaces between, representing various mini-eras in the life of Japanese mass society, are

given substance by invoking the buzz words, slogans (inspired by the government or

advertising), popular songs and memorable visual images of the period. All of my examples

from the 30s figure large in most such accounts.

Sub-query b.) Okay, this might possibly be true for Japan, but can we say if its equally

true for other cultures? And what of such “international” media as CNN? Should we only

look into American lore for its ur-stories?

Sub-query C.) What, if anything, does this tell us about the Satchi affair? Can we place

it as a projection of one or another of these ur-stories?

 

Although I feel I have lots more to say about the matter, I think I’ll stop here to see

if there is any reaction. Thqat’s the great thing about lists like this. Its not necessary

to develop a notion in complete isolation.

To quote Sitemaster Aaron, “Any comments?”

 

Peter B. High

Nagoya University

 

___________________________________________________

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 99 15:29:54 +0900

From: Aaron Gerow <gerow@ynu.ac.jp

To: “KineJapan” <KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

 

Glad to see that the Satchi affair has produced such long, thought-out,

and downright juicy responses. Don’t have time to be juicy myself, but I

think there are some basic issues that need review.

 

Peter wrote,

 

What I would like to posit here is possibility that there is no subjective

or “willing”

element to be found, rather that at some refined meta-level “real” events

and their

representation in the media interact according to certain

naturally-arising patterns and

that they produce “products” (incidents, scandals etc) which send out

ripples through both

dimensions:

 

Actually, this is basically the definition of power we see dominating

much cultural studies since Foucault and, as a postscript, was in some

ways the definition I was trying to invoke when discussing wideshows and

power. It would be amusing to think Obuchi is calling up the wideshow

producers and telling them to attack Satchi, but no one seriously

believes that. We can, however, consider the question of power without

having to think of subjects wielding it for specific purposes. Power can create subjects, mold behavior, etc. through various technologies and

apparatuses, but no one need be at the wheel.

 

Basically, this is the view of subjectivity since structuralism, and

especially with Peter’s “ur-stories,” it struck me that Peter is offering

us a good and specific example of a structuralist analysis of modern

Japanese culture. Here people do not make (speak) structures, they are

made (“spoken”) by them.

 

But while I think Peter’s ur-stories have a lot of promise and can be

utilized quite fruitfully, I wonder if we should be wary of such stories

for the same reason there were problems with structuralism. There is the

tendency to see them as “natural,” which often leads to a kind of

functionalism; they become “defined” (often though a central binarism) in

ways that occlude the fissures and deferrences of signification; they

focus on texts and signification at the expense of reading; they tend to

write out the messiness of historical moments in favor of longue durees;

etc. (others can add to the list).

 

My references to the issue of power in this discussion have mostly been

in relation to a continuing concern of mine: the relation of text and

reception in signification within historical contexts interlaced by power

concerns. A central question of power is whether or not a text like a

wide show has the authority to enforce “its” meanings or ideologies on

its viewers/readers. Much poststructuralist work on reception has

focused on how readers have the power to resist and rewrite the

ideologicical structures contained in the text. This, to put it

simplistically, is the vision of a free and often critical reader. Since

Michael seemed to be invoking such a reader in his note, I cited the

theoretical basis while also warning that we have to recognize that there

are many elements in popular culture which work to train readers/viewers

to receive texts “the way they should.” When they do that, they are in

effect in the power of the text. Of course, no one need be “at the

wheels” controlling the texts for a purpose (though moments like war make

this more possible), but there is still a power relationship being

created (and not just by textual producers: by subjecting themselves to

the power of the text, readers create certain pleasing forms of

entertainment).

 

My central question then had less to do with who was “using” these texts

for what purpose, but rather with how we should theorize cultural

signification in Japan in terms of power. This does relate to issues of

politics, industry, gender, class, nation, economy, etc., but not always

in direct ways. The Satchi affair is not being used by any to divert the

Japanese people away from the Japanese Diet debates. Rather, what I fear

is that certain historical practices regarding signification,

intersecting with structures of textual power, mold subjects who

precisely don’t have as much “freedom” to read as some scholars hope.

Such subjects also end up being those who are less critical of political

texts, which is one way these issues of signification also relate to the

political field.

 

Again, these are issues I am still working on, but I still wonder what

people do think of the the intersecting issues of power, signification,

and reception within Japanese popular image culture.

 

Aaron Gerow

YNU

 

___________________________________________________

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 21:06:05 +0900

From: “Peter B. High” <j45843a@nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp

To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi

 

Aaron Gerow wrote:

 

 But while I think Peter’s ur-stories have a lot of promise and can be

 utilized quite fruitfully, I wonder if we should be wary of such stories

 for the same reason there were problems with structuralism. There is the

 tendency to see them as “natural,” which often leads to a kind of

 functionalism; they become “defined” (often though a central binarism) in

 ways that occlude the fissures and deferrences of signification; they

 focus on texts and signification at the expense of reading; they tend to

 write out the messiness of historical moments in favor of longue durees;

 etc. (others can add to the list).

 

As often happens among scholars whose point of view and/or area of interest

tend to coincide as closely as Aaron’s and mine, we often feel the need

to interject a “yes, but…” in order to stake out our own territory, and

insights. This I believe is what Aaron is doing in the paragraph above; and

quite rightly so. However, since I feel the above paragraph contains a key

misconstruing of what I said (mea culpa, indoubitably), I want to see if I

can set things right.

 

I am of course aware of the rebuttal of the structuralist position Aaron

refers to here and believe it is well taken. However I am not aware of how

this very good advice relates directly to what I said. I am also not quite

clear about what he means by “functionalism” and am therefore equally

unclear about why I need to be wary of that frumious bandersnatch. In

other words, while Aaron warns that my idea of “ur-stories” may be caught

up in the Structuralist Fallacy, I must complain that I am being subjected

to the debater’s categorical fallacy (in other words, that I have been

thrust into the wrong “ism” box).

 

The key element of Aaron’s criticism (of the structuralists) is that “they

tend to write out the messiness of historical moments in favor of longue

durees; etc.” This of course reflects the anti-historical bias of their

discipline and would signify a grave failing in any historian.

 

The point I want to make here is a tricky one since I have to recycle some

of the very terms Aaron uses, but in a different context. I am suggesting

that these ur-stories represent (archetypical?/traditional?) forms

pre-provided within a specific culture for the casting, as news and/or

entertainment, developments of the day. In fact they do function to “write

out the messiness of historical moments,” since they represent patterned

forms of representation. I would add that they also tend toward an

essentially conservative interpretation of the world and therefore , by

implication at least, have a role to play in signification. However, since

the content is invariably “current events” taking place within the

radically different circumstances of each era, ideology included, they also

completely vulnerable “defferences of signification.” Take for example the

American “Horatio Alger” ur-story. We can find it at work in contemporary

accounts of the life of Thomas Edison, up through the twenties. On the

other hand, it turns into a parodic weapon to be wielded against Dick Nixon

in the late sixties and early seventies. We even find it in the background

sketches of the rise of Apple Computors. Complicating matters is the fact

that ur-stories can intertwine in the same account–Apple was even more

often cast as David in combat with the IBM goliath.

 

In any case, I don’t think it is any more tenable to hold that ur-stories

characterize any particular era than it is to attempt a similar

characterization by simply invoking its incidents, scandals and what-not.

The latter are indeed “messy,” being subject to constant reinterpretation

as to their facts and significance. But we must also recognize that as

patterned forms of representation purveyed to the public, ur-stories seem

to have a life and career of their own in the real world. Why was America

swept up in grief at the death of JFK,jr.? Why, because he was the last

prince of “Camelot” of course!

 

Actually, the line of inquiry which fascinates me most is the way in which

the narratives of what I called the MEGA-sphere (of politics and other

events of High Historico-social Import) tend to be “counterpointed” by

stories (scandals, affairs etc) in the minor key, spawned by the popular

media dimension. As I have already pointed out, the Manchurian Incident was

quickly followed by public fascination with the Lovers’ Suicide Rage; the

Feb. 26 coup incident was counterpointed by the Abe Sada Incident. Now, in

the midst of millenialist fears and all the stuff going on in the Diet,

millions seem more concerned with the Satchi affair. My hypothesis is that

the counterpointing (popular press) stories, while clearly unrelated in

their details to the “crisis” of the MEGA-sphere, still, on some

virtually subliminal level, vibrate with an allied significance. Both the

*bidan* tales of valor spewed out on the front page during the Manchurian

Incident and the lovers’ suicides were all sagas of death, and therefore

thematically linked–the region where they interpenetrated being the issue

of Fascism (“fassho”) which was just then dominating public discourse.

 

So what would be the significance vibration shared by Satchi and the major

domestic news issues of the moment? The flag and anthem issues arise amidst

a wider, and increasingly nationalist, discourse about Japan and the War

(guilt/responsibility/factuality), Japan as an “independent, full-fledged

nation” and the sense that Japan must re-emerge on the international stage

as a full-fledged national entity. At the fringes of this discourse is the

persistent debate about Japan having lost its identity, its old values and

traditonal virtues of straightforwardness. One of the most prominent

incarnations of Satchi herself was as the sharp-tongued moralist, attacking

members of the loose-living younger generation. At the same time, she

represent(ed) a travesty of the old,traditional image of the proper,

selkf-effacing “obasan.” Enter Asaka Mitsuyo, the proxy representive of the

good old (semi-mythical) world of chambara drama (she was an *onna kengeki*

actreess). ASsaka proceeds to publicly prosecute Satchi for her duplicity

(her distortion of factuality) and lack of “common-sense” (she borrowed

things and failed to return them–a nearly unforgivanble sin in the old

moral order). Seen this way, motifs of both the MEGA-sphere and the

counterpoint clearly intertwine, or “vibrate” as I have been putting it.

Quintessentially, we find vaguely analogous issues of identity–who are

you? who are we? Also there is the very Japanese iassue of “midare wo

tadasu” (correcting things out of order/ finding and adopting the correct

forms).

 

Once again, any comments?

 

Peter B. High

Nagoya University

 

___________________________________________________

Date: 27 Jul 99 20:58:13 -0700

From: “Michael Badzik” <mike@vena.com

To: “KineJapan” <KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: Re: Satchi 

I have been considering all through this discussion how similar the

Satchi affair has been to a number of recent news events (with the

emphasis on “event”, not “news”) here in the US, most recently with

the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. Our televisions screens were continually

filled with every bit of rumor, innuendo and gossip that could be found,

and then repeated a hundred times over. The media seemed to be caught

in a positive feedback loop as the stories fed from one medium to the

next until arriving back at the first, only to repeat the circuit again,

gaining “importance” and “credibility” from each pass. Coverage grew

far more rapidly than public demand for it appeared to. And of course

we heard very little about the real issues that needed addressing in

Washington. There were calls for a return to the (reputed) high morals

of the past. But after all was said and done (or not done), the general

public ended up fully understanding the (in)significance of the whole

affair, showing a much better sense of perspective than the media

pundits. The press, already suffering from a large decline in respect

from the public at large, ended up with even less. It will be interesting

to see if the Satchi affair ends up playing out this way, as I expect it

will (“Never underestimate the Japanese television viewer.(IS)

 

So now, considering the above in light of Peter High’s intriguing

comments on possible origins of these stories, I would certainly think

that there is then a dominant universal aspect, that these circuses can

and will occur in any sufficiently developed land. There is probably

also a local aspect though, as I am not sure American’s attention could

be held with the not very outrageous surface issues of the Satchi affair.

But I wonder how much of the striking similarity between the Japanese

and US media coverage (ignoring the question of origin, which seems

even more difficult) is rooted in the structure and delivery of modern

media, and how much is in the “ur-stories” which do seem to travel

across cultures quite well, as mythologist Joseph Campbell was always

pointing out. A difficult and complex problem it would seem.

 

Michael Badzik

mike@vena.com