Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 13

Harada Yoshio Passes Away

I just saw this on the net, but the great actor Harada Yoshio passed away today, July 19, of complications from pneumonia as he was fighting cancer. He was only 71.

Harada was clearly one of the most important actors in post 1970 Japanese cinema, starring in many of the great independent films directed by such masters as Terayama Shuji (Den'en ni shisu), Suzuki Seijun (Zigeunerweisen), Morisaki Azuma (Ikite iru uchi ga hana nano yo shindara sore made yo to sengen), and Mochizuki Rokuro (Onibi). He was a regular in films directed by Kuroki Kazuo (Ryoma ansatsu) and Sakamoto Junji, and appeared in Koreeda Hirokazu's recent movies like Still Walking and I Wish. His last starring film will be Oshika-mura sodoki, which opened in theaters only a few days ago. Harada appeared in a wheelchair in front of cameras to make the stage greeting on opening day.

Some don't realize that Harada was the product of the last years of Nikkatsu Action, establishing his image there of the young, rebellious outlaw in such films as Hangyaku no merodi. As part of that image, he appeared in a lot of independent films, especially those of ATG, while also making a name for himself on television. In recent years, he has become an essential by player in films by many young directors like Miike Takashi, Toyoda Toshiaki, Shinohara Tetsuo, Ishii Katsuhito, etc. He could do comedic and gangster roles with equal ease. He won numerous awards as both best lead and supporting actor.

His was a powerful presence who will be sorely missed.

Here is the trailer for Oshika-mura sodoki, his last film.

Review: Ghibli's From Up on Poppy Hill

For much of
the postwar, it seemed that all too many Japanese cultural products were
attempting to forget WWII, to hide either the trauma of defeat or aspects that
were inconvenient to Japan's emerging national narrative. Now a good 65 years
after the end of the war, with the real trauma having faded - or the war having
too effectively been forgotten – it today seems that it is the postwar that is
the object of selective remembering and forgetting. As I argued in a recent article in Japan Focus, Yamato's gruesome depiction of the war that functions
to forget the postwar, or Always: Sunset on Third Street's remembering the
postwar through rose-colored glasses, are two sides of the same cultural effort
to avoid dealing with what the postwar, and its history of the Cold War,
American dominance, economic growth and its cost, and political turmoil, have
meant for Japan.

The new
Ghibli film, From Up on Poppy Hill (Kokuriko-zaka kara コクリコ坂から), is set around the same
time as Always, in the years just preceding the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This does
a better job than that film at attempting to mix its nostalgia with the effort
to remember history. Yet in the end it is an earnest but middling work that still
somewhat selectively forgets the past.

Scripted by
Miyazaki Hayao and directed by his son Goro, the film features several parallel
stories, most of which focus on issues of memory and identity. The heroine, Umi,
helps manage a small rooming house in Yokohama for her busy mother, while
attending a nearby high school. Having lost her sea captain father during the
Korean War, she raises signal flags every morning to pray for the safe passage
of all the ships in the bay below. One who sees those flags is Shun, a year
ahead of her in high school, who travels to school on a tug boat. It is their
blossoming love – and the problem of their parentage – that serves as the
central story.

The other
main story is the effort of Shun and his classmates, including eventually Umi
and her friends, to preserve the school's old clubhouse, a once fine Meiji-era Western-style
mansion, from demolition. Their rallying cry, uttered by the school council
president, is the argument that tearing down historical artifacts is tantamount
to erasing history.

For someone
who has seen Japanese cities destroy much of their post-Meiji architecture,
including many splendid old movie houses, I couldn't agree with the sentiment
more. A cultural policy that preserves pre-Meiji buildings while largely
ignoring more modern artifacts has long been a means to define Japaneseness through
tradition and thus as transcending – and in effect irrelevant to – the modern. That
renders the modern unimportant to the nation, something that can be forgotten.

It is nice
to see a film trying to defend something other than "good old Japan." But if
this is one of the messages of the film, it is an inconsistent one. From Up on
Poppy Hill tries to preserve another historical relic: the student protest. But
Miyazaki Hayao, who had contemplated filming the original manga for years, only
decided to do it now because, as he says in the press notes, enough time had
passed to enable depicting school protests through nostalgic eyes. This
indicates that the preservation of history here is less an encounter with what
is other to the present – that which can relativize and critique our world - than
a present-day invention of the past through a projection of our images on
history.

This
becomes evident in the Yokohama presented here. While From Up on Poppy Hill has
some of the attention to detail that made Arrietty memorable (see my review), that
detail does not come down to the level of history. When I taught at Yokohama
National University, I took my students on historical tours of Yokohama and
always reminded them that this city and its port was strongly colored by an
American military presence up until at least 1970. Yet none of those details
appears in the film, as America is this film's absent other (or absent father?).
Talking of preserving a Western-style house in the midst of the Cold War
without mentioning America is a serious case of denial.

The US-Japan
Security Treaty (Anpo) protests (the subject of Linda Hoagland's new documentary) took place only a few years before this story,
but only the attentive viewer will find mention of them in the film - in the scrapbooks
visible in the bookcases in the school newspaper office. Locating history then becomes
a pursuit of trivia little different than finding the "Ghibli" name on one of
the ships.

This is
thus an antiseptic, sterilized history. It is tellin that, as the press notes
declare, the film owes much of its vision of history to referencing Nikkatsu
youth films from the early 1960s. Umi, it seems, is Yoshinaga Sayuri. From Up
on Poppy Hill thus less preserves history as it really is, than offers an image
of an image of history.

Such an
overtly ideological reading of this film may rub some Ghibli fans the wrong
way. Why not talk more about the animation? In some ways, this reading is
necessary, given how too many readings of Miyazaki have attempted to emphasize
his progressive politics, when in fact his films are more complex and
contradictory – often to their benefit. But an ideological critique also seems
warranted because the film emphasizes its romantic narrative over its status as
animation. To put it differently, it is a story that could have as easily been
told in a live action film. The fact it was not, however, is significant. True,
animation does sell better in Japan, but in addition, I would argue that the
narrative would have seemed less believable if its actors and locations were
real. The disjuncture between its history and our reality would have been too
much to sustain, so animation functions to ameliorate that gap.

Perhaps I
am being harsh towards what is a reasonably pleasant, though ultimately undistinguished
film. But choosing animation over live action was, I contend, itself an
ideological choice, one that has the effect of rendering this version of history
more palatable. There is a paternalist attitude in this, and I cannot but help
tie it to the search for the lost father in the film, to the desire for a
father figure who, like the chairman of the school board who steps in in the
end, will solve the complex and contradictory nature of Japanese postwar
history and identity by offering a consumable narrative backed by a strong, but
benevolent authority – that is Japanese, not American.

One wonders
if that father figure is what Miyazaki Hayao has become to many Japanese. (And
what that means for Goro, who has yet to step out from under his father's
shadow, is another story.)

Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan

Arguably the period of current greatest interest in Japanese film studies is the 1960s. Many scholars, young and old, are working on the period, especially if you expand it to include the late 1950s and the early 1970s. It was of course the time of the first "modernists" such as Masumura Yasuzo and Nakahira Ko; the beginnings of experimental cinema; the Japanese New Wave of Oshima, Imamura, Yoshida, et al.; a political pink cinema; the breakdown of the studio system; the rise of a new documentary; and the flourishing of independent film. An exciting period with much to research.

David Desser's Eros Plus Massacre - already over 20 years old! - is still a very useful introduction to the period. But it is testimony to the richness of the time that there is so much that Desser does not deal with. Much attention has been given to the theoretical context in these years (Yuriko Furuhata's dissertation, etc.) and to more marginal genres like documentary (Markus Nornes's work on Ogawa), pink film (Jasper Sharp's book and an upcoming anthology), and experimental cinema (including recent ATG retrospectives and attention to Matsumoto Toshio).

Miryam Sas's new book, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return, is a welcome addition to this proliferation of research, focusing not just on experimental cinema, but its larger milieu of the experimental arts, especially post-shingeki theater, butoh dance, and photography. The section on Terayama Shuji is a nice compliment to Steve Ridgely's new book on that poet, playwright, and filmmaker. 

All very exciting, but as I advise my grad students, there are also many other rich periods of Japanese cinema to study. I look forward to seeing more of such work as well.

War, Nationalism, and Forgetting the Postwar in Yamato

After moving my office and then moving myself to Japan for the summer, I can finally update the blog for the first time in a couple of weeks.

My announcement today is that Japan Focus has published another article of mine (previous ones were on recent fantasy war films and Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films). This is a much shorter version of a long piece that I wrote for the forthcoming Distorted Lens anthology, which is based on a conference at Stanford in December 2008 and which is being edited by Chiho Sawada and Michael Berry. 

The longer version looks at a number of recent films made about kamikaze missions during WWII and compares them to earlier examples from the 1950s to the 1970s. Most discussions of Japanese war films have considered them in terms of how they warp, gloss over, or forget the problems or traumas of the war, but I analyze them in terms of how they work to forget the problematic history of postwar Japan. My main text is Sato Jun'ya's Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato, 2005). I particular argue that the film's use of what I call vicarious trauma in depicting the demise of the young recruits on the Battleship Yamato functions to erase postwar trauma, an operation that I consider to be the other side of the same coin to the nostalgic depictions of 1950s and 1960s Japan in films such as Yamazaki Takashi's Always--Sunset on Third Street (Always--Sanchome no yuhi).

Here is the reference:

Aaron Gerow, "War and Nationalism in
Yamato: Trauma and Forgetting the Postwar," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,
Volume 9, Issue 24, No. 1, June 13, 2011.

Nagato Hiroyuki

The news sites report that the actor Nagato Hiroyuki passed away on May 21 at the age of 77. 

To talk about Nagato is in some ways to talk about the Makino dynasty in Japanese film history. Nagato's grandfather was Makino Shozo, the Kyoto theater manager who "discovered" Onoe Matsunosuke and made him the first big film star in the 1910s. He went off to start his own production company, Makino Productions, and fostered many of the great jidaigeki stars such as Bando Tsumasaburo, Kataoka Chiezo, and Arashi Kanjuro. He also helped up and coming directors such as Kinugasa Teinosuke, the director of Page of Madness. He is widely known as the father of Japanese cinema.

Shozo's son was Makino Masahiro, one of the greatest Japanese film directors (who unfortunately is largely unknown abroad). Shozo's daughter was Makino Teruko, an actress who, after actually having once eloped with Tsukigata Ryunosuke (who played the villain in Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata), ended up marrying the actor Sawamura Kunitaro. He is most memorable for playing the bumbling but affable samurai searching for a pot in Yamanaka Sadao's wonderful Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo. Kunitaro was the brother of Kato Daisuke, a Kurosawa favorite and one of the Seven Samurai, and of Sawamura Sadako, herself a famous actress. 

It was Teruko and Kunitaro who became the parents of Nagato Hiroyuki and Tsugawa Masahiko, both of whom became well-known actors in film and television. Nagato himself can symbolize much of Japanese film history. As a child actor, he appeared in The Life of Matsu the Untamed, the original 1943 version of "Muhomatsu no issho" directed by Inagaki Hiroshi that is a masterpiece of pre-1945 cinema. When he grew up, he became a crucial actor in the postwar transformation of Japanese cinema, starring in such works as the taiyozoku film Season in the Sun and Imamura Shohei's New Wave masterpiece, Pigs and Battleships. He has continued to play a variety of odd and interesting roles in the films of many directors, such as Miike Takashi's Gozu.

Tsugawa also appeared in some crucial Oshima Nagisa films as well as in Crazed Fruit. In recent years, he has taken up the megaphone and directed a number of films using the name Makino, such as Wakeful Nights.

Both of the brothers married famous actresses. Nagato married the wonderful Minamida Yoko (who passed away in 2009, after a long illness during which Nagato took care of her - a role that earned him increased media attention in the last few years) and Tsugawa wedded Asaoka Yukiji. 

Now that Nagato has passed away, it seems like a large chunk of Japanese film history has gone with him. One of the Makinos (Masahiro's son) runs the Okinawa Actor's School, but there is not really anyone young in the family on the small or big screen anymore (except for maybe Mayuko, Tsugawa's daughter). 

I wonder if Nagato will be buried in the family plot, located in the Tojiin temple graveyard in Kyoto. There's a huge statue of Shozo there, because one of his studios was actually on the temple grounds. Matsunosuke's grave is in another Tojiin graveyard inside the Ritsumeikan University grounds. Perhaps I will do ohakamairi the next time I am in Kyoto. 

Film Art and Academic Study of Cinema in Japan

The newest issue of Eiga geijutsu (映画芸術 Film Art, number 435, Spring 2011) features a special section on cinema in the classroom. In addition to roundtable discussions (zadankai) featuring Suwa Nobuhiro, Hayashi Kaizo, Tengan Daisuke, Mukai Yosuke and Matsue Tetsuaki, as well as an essay by Terawaki Ken and a questionnaire on whether film can be taught in school, there is a zadankai entitled "Film Studies: Its Presence and Direction" (Eigagaku, genzaisei to hokosei) featuring Tanaka Masumi, Tsuchida Tamaki, Izuno Chita, and yours truly. It was a quite fruitful discussion, recorded the night before the earthquake, and nicely balanced opinions both positive towards and critical against the development of academic film studies in Japan. 

I should note that the issue also features essays in honor of the recently deceased director Ikeda Toshiharu and an introduction to Sakamoto Junji's new film, Oshikamura sodoki. 

You can purchase the issue through the Japanese Amazon.

Opening Bazin and Japan

It just so happened that the Yale faculty vote to give me tenure was on the same day as a reception for the publication of the anthology Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, edited by my former teacher and current colleague Dudley Andrew. I actually heard the results of the vote just before the reception started. The coincidence was quite appropriate because it was in fact a paper using Andre Bazin to analyze Richard Lester's Superman III, written for John Belton during a summer course at Columbia back in 1983, which probably got me started on this career in film studies. Everything somehow comes back to Bazin.

The anthology is a marvelous revisiting of Bazin's work, one spurred by Dudley's herculean effort to gather all of Bazin's writings, not just the ones canonized in a few books. These writings, and the dozens of essays in the book, provide a much more complex and fascinating vision of Bazin's thought.

I mention this here in part because there are two essays in the book that talk about Bazin in relation to Japan. First, Nozaki Kan, in "Japanese Readings: The Textual Thread" (pp. 324-329) discusses how Japanese thinkers read and digested Bazin. And second, my student Ryan Cook writes about Bazin's discussions of Japanese film in "Japanese Lessons: Bazin's Cinematic Cosmopolitanism" (pp. 330-334). 

I encourage everyone to check out this important book.

Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin, eds. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-973389-7

Tsuchimoto's Documentaries on Afghanistan

In the last of my "reports" on the trailers I made for the Documentaries of Noriaki Tsuchimoto series (one for Minamata, the other for On the Road), i wanted to mention the ones that I put together for his two films on Afghanistan before the Taliban, Another Afghanistan: Kabul Diary 1985 and Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988. 

Tsuchimoto was of course famous for his penetrating documentaries on Minamata disease, but he worked on many other subjects, ranging from student radicals in the 1960s (e.g, Prehistory of the Partisans) to a biography of the poet Nakano Shigeharu. Some films were extensions of the issues raised in the Minamata series, looking for instance at other forms of pollution like nuclear radiation, or at the oceans. He was always concerned with the oppressed and the marginal and read profusely, compiling dozens and dozens of scrapbooks (which his wife Motoko, with whom I experienced the earthquake, showed me once). 

One topic of interest was Afghanistan and he ended up making three films on that country, based on the footage he was able to take during several trips as one of the few foreigners allowed to film in the nation in the 1980s, before the Taliban took power. I think part of his interest stemmed simply from his leftist sympathies, as he genuinely hoped that the socialist regime in those days would do a better job than some other socialist experiments. Another Afghanistan and Traces could be said to lack the critical eye that his Minamata works show, but they are by no means propaganda: just as Tsuchimoto genuinely cares for the Minamata victims through his camera, he goes beyond politics to express an affection for the everyday lives and culture of Afghanis. The resulting films are not as powerful as the Minamata films - Traces is closer to a documentary on art history (though one every art history department should have!) - but they serve both as irreplaceable documents of Afghan life and history (much of which is now gone or profoundly transformed) and as testimony to Tsuchimoto's unending efforts to understand others through film.

The tragedy with Another Afghanistan and Traces is that their original sound was lost by the production company. Tsuchimoto thus had to rework them in 2003 by adding music and voice-over narration. The sense of being on the side of his subjects, which Tsuchimoto usually conveys, is harder to get here. The films then also seem more conventional.

The narration then made it hard to piece together these trailers. Unlike the previous two, where I could take music and then edit together some good shots, I could not recombine sound and image in significant ways. The result is a bit stilted. But the films are better than the trailers!

Another Afghanistan: Kabul Diary 1985
Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988

Sakagami Jiro Flies Away

This news got lost amidst the deluge of the earthquake and tsunami, but I wanted to mention that the great comedian and actor Sakagami Jiro passed away on March 10, 2011, the day before the disaster. He died of a cerebral infarction at the age of 76.

Like Kitano Takeshi after him, Sakagami trained as a comedian on the stages of Asakusa, working in between strip shows. It was there that he met Hagimoto Kin'ichi and the two formed Konto 55-go, a duo that specialized not in manzai talks, but skit comedy (called "konto" in Japanese, from the French "conte"). From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, they ruled the small screen and even had their own film series. The skits were the center of their TV comedy, but their "yakyuken," in which guests would do janken (rock-scissors-paper) with Sakagami, with the loser forced to take of a piece of clothing, earned the wrath of the PTA, but also helped transform variety programming into the game-filled, participatory space of "friends" that it is today (as I talk about in my article about telop/subtitles). Hagimoto (known affectionately as Kin-chan) went on to become the king of TV in the late 70s and 80s, but whereas his was always a clean TV, Jiro always had a touch of the strip halls in his comedy.

Sakagami appeared in many films, but foreign viewers might remember him as the old, doddering Inoue Genzaburo in Oshima Nagisa's Taboo (Gohatto). Oshima's aim in the casting was to have the Shinsengumi, who in reality were mostly in their 20s and early 30s, played by actors in their 50s and 60s, with Sakagami being the oldest. This not only emphasized by contrast the two young lovers, but really transformed the drama within the Shinsengumi into a generational conflict, one not unrelated to that of the postwar Japanese left. It was a stroke of genius and Sakagami made it work.

Sakagami was famous in part for the gag phrase "fly away, fly away!" (tobimasu, tobimasu). So we can say now, "Fly away Jiro."

Here's a short konto from one of their old shows. Jiro is the flustered waiter and Kin-chan the sly customer.

Tanaka Yoshiko

In somewhat shocking news from the world of entertainment, the wire services are reporting that the actress and singer Tanaka Yoshiko has passed away at the age of 55 of breast cancer. Tanaka, known to fans first as Su-chan, first came to fame as a member of the Candies, one of the big idol groups in the 1970s. After they broke up, she became an actress and appeared in many famous films such as Imamura's Black Rain (for which she won several acting awards), Poppoya, Yoshida's Women in the Mirror, etc. She also appeared a lot on TV. Ironically, her husband was the older brother of Natsume Masako, the idol star who tragically died of leukemia at a young age. Su-chan was too young as well.

Here is one of my favorite Candies songs (Tanaka is the one on the right).