Welcome to Kinema Club

Welcome to the website of Kinema Club, a long-standing, international but informal group devoted to the study of Japanese moving image media. Kinema Club was started precisely to share knowledge about Japanese cinema, so this site serves both to introduce our activities, such as the KineJapan mailing list and our conferences and workshops, as well promote information and thinking about films, research, bibliography, and education.


Asian Class Gets Eclectic (TIFF '96 The Best of Asian Films)

It is testimony to the rise of Asian cinema on the world scene that sections like The Best of Asian Films at the 1996 Tokyo International Film Festival no longer need to play the role of exclusively spotlighting the neglected cinemas of the East.

With this year’s International Competition and the Young Cinema Competition already featuring a number of powerful works from China,... Read more

A Class to Remember II

Here’s a ‘Class’ That Deserves to Be Skipped

Tora-san is dead and with him, one would think, an era. But don’t pay your last respects just yet.

Even if the popular “Otoko wa tsurai yo” series will end with the unfortunate death of Tora’s talented performer, Atsumi Kiyoshi, the world embodied in... Read more

And the Beat Goes On (TIFF '96 Kitano Takeshi Symposium)

Kitano Takeshi must be scared.

Forced to sit on stage for three hours in a sweltering movie theater packed to the gills with young admirers, the man better known as Beat Takeshi was subjected last Friday night to endless praise and admiration by film critics, a university professor, and even a Cannes-winning film director... Read more

Billiken

It’s ‘Billiken’ to the Rescue

Put a coin in the donation box, rub the soles of his feet, and make a wish. Billiken the god of fortune will make us all happy.

Billiken who? The eponymous star of Sakamoto Junji’s comedy, Billiken... Read more

Tokyo Film Fete Unearths Japanese Classics (TIFF '96 Nippon Cinema Classics)

Stop any Japanese youth on the street and ask him when was the last time he saw a Japanese movie, and he’ll probably utter, “I dunno.” To many of Japan’s youth, Japanese film is dasai, woefully uncool for a generation that only seems to flock to the latest Hollywood blockbuster or arty European flick.

Having seen few Japanese movies, however, they are sadly ignorant... Read more

Kids Return*

Beat’s Bold ‘Return’

When Beat Takeshi’s motor scooter skidded into a telephone pole in 1995, leaving the popular comedian near death, the wideshows may have been concerned about the fate of the myriad of TV shows he hosted. But we in the film business wondered if this one hope of the Japanese film industry would ever return.

As the director of such... Read more

Gama-Getto no hana

Remembering Okinawa

What kind of reckoning of the war is being made amidst all the furor over the American military bases in Okinawa, arising fifty years after the United States invaded Okinawa at the end of World War II? Looking at the media coverage, it seems that everyone is a victim of an injustice perpetrated by two villains: America and the Japanese government.

This tale... Read more

Beyond the Fringes (Image Forum Festival 1996)

It used to be that experimental film lived on the fringes, confined to the margins because it was both uncomfortable and unpalatable to the mainstream. MTV seems to have changed all that. When combined with Madonna or Nirvana, avant-garde imagery is now mass multimedia art, invading the core of even major Hollywood productions like ... Read more

Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment*

Drawn to a Legend

Any red-blooded fan of manga, or Japanese comics, has to have heard of the Tokiwaso. In the minuscule rooms of that rickety wooden apartment house in Tokyo’s Toshima Ward once dwelled some of the greats of postwar manga history, like Tezuka Osamu, Ishinomori Shotaro, Akatsuka Fujio, and the Fujio Fujiko combo.

Drawn... Read more

Sleeping Man*

Oguri’s Deep Sleeper

Oguri Kohei’s Sting of Death (“Shi no toge,” 1991), a masterfully dark portrait of a philandering novelist and his wife he unwittingly drives insane, concludes with the couple slowly preparing themselves for the sleep therapy... Read more

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