Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 2

Noriaki Tsuchimoto Research Grants

With the donation of Tsuchimoto Noriaki���s papers to Yale, we have put together funds to support research using the collection. If you are pursuing research that would make use, at least in part, of the Papers, please consider applying. These grants will be available next year as well.

Noriaki Tsuchimoto Research Grant

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��The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University invites applications for grants to support research utilizing the Noriaki Tsuchimoto Papers housed in Manuscripts and Archives in the Yale University Library. The collection is currently comprised of 83 boxes containing materials related to the filmmaking and other activities of the Japanese documentary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto (1928-2008), who is most famous for recording the struggles over the Minamata mercury poisoning incident and other environmental hazards. The collection description is as follows:

Mori Tatsuya, the Great Togo, and Research

This is one of the more peculiar ways I���ve gotten ���published.��� Mori Tatsuya, the documentary filmmaker and journalist (A, A2, 311, Fake, etc.), contacted me in December asking for help with a new edition of his book, Akuyaku resura wa warau (The Heel Wrestler Laughs). Published as an Iwanami Shinsho in 2005, it was about a Japanese-American pro wrestler known as the Great Togo, who came to specialize in playing the heel in the ring after World War II, but who also traveled to Japan and was close to Rikidozan, whom he helped manage when Rikidozan toured the West Coast. Just as Rikidozan pretended to be Japanese even though he was Korean, so there were statements that the Great Togo was not Japanese, or that his mother was Chinese, etc. Mori-san published the book in 2005 without having the means or the opportunity to investigate all those stories.��

So that���s why he contacted me this time. Knowing that the Great Togo���s real name was Okamura Kazuo (aka George Okamura), he did some net searching and thought he found phone numbers of relatives. He wondered if I could call those people. Knowing that such free net searches rarely come up with real numbers, I decided to do some searching on my own. (I did call the numbers in the end, and of course they were all disconnected.) Using public databases and databases through Yale, I did a lot of searching on Okamura and quickly found out a lot. (I���ve been doing a lot of genealogy research so many of these databases are familiar to me.) I did ascertain that not only were both his parents Japanese, but also that the US government treated him as Japanese and sent him to the Amache internment camp in Colorado. Perhaps because of his business or his status as a minority, or possibly to��survive�� he did fib a bit, lying about his age on some documents, lying about his wife on a reentry document (he was first married to seemingly a Caucasian woman before divorcing after three years, after which he married a nikkei woman from his home town), and saying he graduated from the University of Oregon with a major in philosophy (I couldn���t confirm that, but couldn���t disprove it either). But it was pretty clear what his ancestry was. What also came out was how difficult his life was before WWII. His father ran a small fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon (a town I���ve been to many times), but the local paper reports both successes and failures���and a childhood accident for George. The paper also reported that he was the first Japanese kid in his elementary school, and that the name George came from George Washington (perhaps chosen in an effort to have him fit in?). His itinerant life as a wrestler���which he started from the late 1930s���is evident from his draft card, with many new addresses written all over the edges. Interestingly, he happened to be touring in Hawaii when the war started, seemingly with his infant son but not his wife (or so says the passenger manifest of the ship).��

Theorizing Colonial Cinema: Japanese Film Theory and Empire

In my research on Japanese film theory, I have always tried to complicate the concept of�����Japanese��� in the name of the topic. I do that not just through critiquing the desire to find the origins of such film theory in supposedly�����traditional��� aesthetics, but also through recognizing that�����Japan��� and the nation were often contested within film theory. If Tsumura Hideo or Sawamura Tsutomu conceptualized cinema in support of Japan���s �����holy war,��� Tosaka Jun critiqued the ideology of Japan while attempting to conceive of film as an alternative way of knowing (his��resistance eventually put him in jail, where he died).��

Yet one of my regrets with the anthology we produced, Rediscovering Classical��Japanese Film Theory, is that we did not include any thinkers writing in Japan���s colonies or colonial spaces. We in effect reproduced the geography of the nation by picking authors who were Japanese citizens writing in Japan and in��Japanese. It is in part regret over that that I did some research on some of the theory that we missed. This was occasioned by a conference that took place at Duke University in November 2016 (I remember the general funk over and the protests against Trump���s victory). My paper was, on the one hand, a continuation of my thinking about the internalization of empire that I explored in my article "Colonial Era Korean Cinema and the Problem of Internalization" (which you can read here). Was film theory in the colonies internalizing the ideologies of Japanese film theory? But on the other hand, it was also an attempt to show that we cannot discuss Japanese film theory without thinking about empire���that empire is part of the�����Japanese��� in��Japanese film theory.��

Sato Tadao sensei (1930���2022)

I opened up Facebook on the morning of March 21 and was sad to a post by Ishizaka Kenji, a professor at the Japan��Institute of the Moving Image and a coordinator at the Tokyo International Film Festival. The announcement stated��that Sato Tadao ������������ had died on March 17, 2022. The Japan Institute of the Moving Image eventually put out an official announcement on its home page, since Sato was both Professor Emeritus and��former president of the Institute.

Sato was one of the greatest and most influential film critics and scholars in Japan. He was always a bit different from other critics and academics, in part because he never went to college. As he always said, cinema��to him��was his school. He was born in 1930, and his real name is Iiri Tadao. While working at various jobs, including at the national rail company and an electronics factory, he began writing film reviews and got involved at Shiso no kagaku, an intellectual association led by Tsurumi Shunsuke, which helped define his life-long focus on the popular dimensions of modern entertainment. Working as an editor at Eiga hyoron and other publications, Sato became an extremely prolific writer, publishing over a hundred books on topics not just related to film, but also including manga, education, theater, democracy, war, literature, etc. He also wrote books for younger readers. With his wife, Sato Hisako,��who was a strong presence in his work, he founded the film historiographical journal Eigashi kenkyu in 1973, and as a historian, eventually published a monumental four volume history of Japanese film (cover above). As an educator, he began teaching at Imamura Shohei���s film school, which later became the Japan Institute of the Moving Image. Sato eventually became president of that institution. He actively engaged with foreign cinema and critics, attending film festivals and conferences around the world, and serving as director of the Focus on Asia film festival in Fukuoka, helping introduce other Asian cinemas to Japan. He received numerous awards, including the Person of Cultural Merit from the Japanese government in 2019. He is the Japanese film critic who has arguably been translated the most into English, with Currents in Japanese Cinema (1982) and Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema (2011) being two book-length translations.

Writing on Obayashi Nobuhiko���s Anti-War Trilogy

Although I never intended to become an Obayashi Nobuhiko expert, I have nonetheless developed a significant connection with that utterly unique Japanese film director. It started when we invited him and his family to Yale, after which I programmed a��retrospective of his work at the Japan Society. He later asked me to contribute to one of his��books, and it was��only a day or two after he treated my family to dinner in Tokyo that he found he had cancer. We did get to meet him and his wife Kyoko again before he passed away in 2020. I then moderated a commemorative panel discussion on him for Japan Cuts, and have begun putting together an anthology on him with Aiko Masubuchi, the former Japan Society film programmer.

So it was perhaps destiny���as well as quite a pleasure���to get a request from Adam Torel at Third Window Films to pen an article for their BluRay release of Obayashi���s anti-war trilogy, composed of Casting Blossoms to the Sky (2011), Seven Weeks (2014), and Hanagatami (2017).��

As I did when announcing the Blu-Ray for Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, here is the first��paragraph of my essay:

Bunka Eiga Kenkyu, Prewar Japanese Documentary, and Film Theory

Bunka eiga kenkyu, the third in my series of reprints of prewar film studies/film theory journals at Yumani Shobo, has been published. This follows the reprints of��Eiga kagaku kenkyu��(see my introduction��here) and Eiga geijutsu kenkyu (see my introduction here).

Bunka eiga kenkyu is a bit closer to Eiga kagaku kenkyu than to Eiga geijutsu kenkyu in that it is less a film theory journal, like the latter, than a periodical by filmmakers attempting to understand their art and practice. It was��actually not my first choice to do for the third reprint. The plan was to do��Eiga zuihitsu, the legendary coterie magazine published in Kyoto in the late 1920s that was core to what Makino Mamoru later called the Kyoto Eiga Gakuha. But that journal is so rare, Yumani could not gather enough original issues to serve as the basis for the reprint. So I was asked to identify a substitute and had to do it quickly. I picked��Bunka eiga kenkyu because, of the prewar journals that had not been reprinted and that could be reprinted without too much difficulty, it was probably the most��consequential, especially in the field of documentary and debates about film realism. Yumani insisted we had to keep to the same timeline, so that did not leave much time for me to prepare materials and write a commentary. We also found out that Makino had been in discussions with another publisher about reprinting��Bunka eiga kenkyu, although that��publisher had done little to bring the plan to fruition. We got the okay to reprint the journal, and I asked two of the young scholars who were helping Makino���s project, Sato Yo and Morita Noriko, to collaborate by writing commentaries. So unlike the first two reprints, which just included my commentary, this one sports three. In the end, we dedicated the reprint to Makino Mamoru.��

Fireside Chat about the YIDFF, Japanese Documentary, and Hanzo

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival was held online last fall due to the continuing pandemic. That was unfortunate, but as I had previously written about film during the COVID era (here), the pandemic had also opened up��opportunities to watch Japanese film and other entertainment media remotely. The YIDFF has now jumped on the bandwagon and is running an online series of some of the best Japanese documentaries in the 30+ years since the festival began in 1989. The platform is DAFilms, which also managed the Flash Forward series, and it is offering the first week free (afterwards, I think you have to be a subscriber). Check it out here.

To go along with the series,��the folks at the YIDFF have asked some involved in the festival to look back on those thirty years. Markus Nornes has written a series of illuminating pieces on the YIDFF Facebook page. The film directors Oda Kaori and��Dwi Sujanti Nugraheni also recorded a conversation about the trials and tribulations of making indie docs in Asia, which is now available on the YIDFF��YouTube channel (here).��

Somai Shinji���s Sailor Suit and Machine Gun

I���ve long thought that Somai Shinji is the key filmmaker for understanding Japanese cinema after 1980. If long shot long takes came to dominate Japanese art films from the nineties on, it had less to do with Mizoguchi than with Somai, himself a master of the form. His cinema also left an indelible impression on me. The first of his films I saw, Moving (Ohikkoshi, 1993), left me stunned, and I still believe��Typhoon Club (Taifu kurabu, 1985) is one of the best Japanese films ever. Yet in part because his early movies were categorized in the idol genre, the gatekeepers of Japanese film in the eighties did little to promote his films and even today few of his dozen or so works are��available on disc with English subtitles. There have been retrospectives, some of which I was involved in. I did a panel on Somai at the 2005 Jeongju International Film Festival (my contribution to the retro catalog can be found here), and I gave a talk on the director at the Deutschen Filmmuseum in Frankfurt in 2015. These were occasions for me to think about Somai, but I still don���t feel I have a��complete grasp of him. Access to his cinema remains woefully limited��outside Japan.

Flash Forward Panel Discussion

A lot has been going on recentl, which I will be announcing in the��next coming weeks.��

To start with, I wanted to let everyone know about an interesting film series being screened online though the Japan Society in New York entitled�����Flash��Forward:��Debut Works and Recent Films by Notable Japanese Directors��� that will run from December 3 to 23, 2021. It is co-presented by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs in conjunction with the Visual Industry Promotion Organization. The series is quite unique in that it presents the work of six filmmakers lesser known in the United States by showing their debut films and then a more recent film.��Some of the six are better known than others: Kawase Naomi is well-known in Europe and Suo Masayuki had a hit in the USA with Shall We Dance?. But even Kawase has had little exposure in America. The other four directors are Sakamoto Junji, Shiota Akihiko, Nishikawa Miwa, and Okita Shuichi. Since I���ve had Sakamoto and Shiota come to my classes before���here���s an old report on one of Sakamoto���s visits���and since I���ve known Kawase since her debut, the selection was a bit like a stroll down memory lane.��

Eiga Geijutsu Kenkyu and Film Theory in Japan

The second in my series of reprints of prewar film studies/theory journals at Yumani Shobo has come out. This follows the reprint of Eiga kagaku kenkyu, the late 1920s and early 1930s journal which featured filmmakers studying what cinema is (see my introduction here).��

Eiga geijutsu kenkyu (Studies in Film Art) was a more heavily theoretical and academic journal, which ran for two and a half years from early 1933 to late 1935. It stood out for its quite long articles investigating conceptual topics ranging from film aesthetics to psychoanalysis and cinema. While it also devoted many pages to translations of both famous and less famous foreign theory, it was a journal that showed the confidence of its often quite young writers in��critiquing that theory and composing their own ideas. That said, the journal was not necessarily revolutionary in its stance towards film theory. As I wrote in the commentary, the leader of the journal, Sasaki Norio,��still had one foot in German romantic aesthetics, which rejected standard forms of cinematic realism, even as he began exploring a more sociological approach to cinema. Still, new writers such as Sugiyama Heiichi began pointing to new theoretical directions.��Eiga geijutsu kenkyu was in many ways a transitional journal, indicating the shift in aesthetics as film realism came to the fore in the late 1930s.��