Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 4

Japanese Film Studies on the Yale Repository

Over the years, I have been trying to make available my research to those who need it through various means.��

One is simply this site, which I started not just to opine about this or that subject, but to introduce my research and direct people to where to find it. So the sections on Internet Articles and Interviews feature links to many my pieces that are online.

I also have been making some of what I have written available online in PDF format. I initially started doing that on Academia.edu (here is my page), but not only is that site clunky and hard to use, it is also a for-profit corporation, and I don���t see why I should enable a corporation to make money using my research as one of the products they�����sell.��� Yes, they�����give��� me�����exposure,��� but that can seem not too far��from those companies that ask young artists to contribute their work for free in exchange for getting�����exposure."

So increasingly I have been using the Yale��repository to make my research available. Here is my page there. And here are a few items I posted recently:

Abayo Joe! Shishido Jo: the Movie Star

The great actor Shishido Jo has died. When I was in grad school, he was virtually unknown abroad, but that was because the films of Suzuki Seijun and Nikkatsu Action were��largely ignored in foreign festivals and markets since such supposedly crass popular cinema was not what the gatekeepers liked. When Seijun finally came to be celebrated abroad, Jo started garnering attention, but it is was not because he was an art cinema actor in the line of Nakadai Tatsuya, or a popular film star like Ishihara Yujiro (who is still not well-known among foreign fans of Japanese cinema). He was a unique character who transcended those��cinematic categories. In that way, he somewhat resembled the nonconformist Seijun during his Nikkatsu days, but Jo���s character was his own and was visible in many non-Seijun films.��

Jo was cool. He was cool even when he played the bad guy, which is why his villains were never just bad, but often shared much with the cool hero, especially a certain professionalism. In Plains Wanderer (The Rambler Rides Again, 1960), he does some pretty awful stuff, but you can���t hate him, even before the series narrative demands he team up with the hero at the end. That complexity made it possible for him to be both comedic and tragic, sometimes with a touch of insanity that Seijun brought out well in Branded to Kill (1967). It was rarely realistic, as it was an often self-conscious complexity, with Jo sometimes playfully (Hayauchi��yaro, etc.) or sometimes contemplatively (A Colt Is My Passport) performing the possibilities of the character�����Joe the Ace.��� He was a serious actor, famously even going so far as to implant silicone into his cheeks to better play the part of a��baseball catcher, but that seriousness could��sometimes��mysteriously blend with self-parody. Jo was one of a kind.

Speculating on Murakami Haruki and Cinema

It was an honor to be invited to participate in the��"Colloque international 'Haruki Murakami au pr��sent et au futur��������back in March 2018, which took place in Strasbourg and Paris. Not only was the conference quite stimulating for��someone who is not a Murakami specialist, it was a wonderful opportunity to encounter some new colleagues in the study of modern Japanese literature. It was, in some ways for me, an encore to the quite productive experience of participating in the French symposium on Kawabata Yasunari in September 2014 (from which I ended up publishing articles in Japanese and English). It was also inspiring to see many of the participants engage with Murakami in a deep and often critical manner. This is��not a gathering of Murakami fans.��

It is thus a great pleasure to see that many (though not all) of the papers at the Murakami��colloquium have now been published in Japanese as Bunka hyosho toshite no Murakami Haruki��(������������������������������������ / Murakami Haruki as Cultural Representation) and includes a contribution by yours truly.

Continuing to Theorize the Theory Complex in Japanese Film Studies

As part of my long continuing project to study, appreciate, and disseminate the history of Japanese film theory, I recently penned an opinion piece for the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema at the request of Michael Raine, one of the editors. The result is a kind of sequel to the introduction to the special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society that I edited on Japanese film theory, a piece entitled�����Introduction: The Theory Complex��� (now on the Yale repository). I want to thank Michael for the opportunity to revisit these issues.

About nine years have passed since that introduction, so this was a chance to consider the recent surge in research on Japanese theory, in both its positive and��negative aspects. Here is the abstract for the opinion piece:

The recent surge in studies of Japanese film theory can be seen as an
aspect of efforts to counter Eurocentrism in film studies and the
aversion to theory in Japan studies. It could also help scholars think
through the problem of utilizing theory in East Asian studies. Yet even
if knowing the film theory of an era can help us understand the context
of the films of that era, it should not simply serve as a sort of local
informant for the foreign theorist. Just as there are problems in only
rooting Japanese film theory in an age-old traditional aesthetics, there
are issues in valuing that theory only to the degree it resembles
Euro-American theory. That can lead to forms of theoretical
ventriloquism or projected translations that only reinforce the
geopolitics of theory centered in Europe. This can be a particular
problem with Japanese film theory because it was caught between Japan���s
imperial aspirations and Japan being subject to Euro-American
neo-colonial influences. This ���theory complex��� can teach us much about
the geopolitics of theory. Exploring Japanese film theory as a ���minor
film theory��� may eventually even help ���provincialize theory.���

In the same issue, there is another opinion piece by Daisuke Miyao on conceiving the transnational in Japanese cinema studies, a special section of articles on refugees, mothers, and children in Korean film, and (speaking of theory!) a translation of a 1941 article by Im��Hwa (about whom I���ve written in an upcoming article).

Supporting the Kawasaki City Museum and Its Archive

There was much loss of life and property when Typhoon Hagibis hit the Kanto region of Japan in mid-October 2019, but one piece of news that greatly affected me personally was the report that the vaults storing the valuable collections of the Kawasaki City Museum had been flooded in the storm. The Museum collection features not only��archaeological artifacts from the region, but given the Museum���s long-standing commitment to preserving, studying, and displaying modern popular culture, one of the country���s best collections of film and manga. The Museum, which has had such film scholars as Makino Mamoru and Okumura Masaru on its curatorial staff, has a significant film collection. As we described in our Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (and its Japanese update and translation), it is particularly strong in documentary, news films, video art, and TV commercials, and features the personal collections of Kumashiro Tatsumi and Kimura Takeo, among others. It would be a tremendous blow to Japanese film��history if any of these materials were lost.��

Eiga Kagaku Kenkyu and Film Studies in Japan

When it comes to old magazines, Japan is still a reprint (fukkokuban) culture. The North American libraries I used in grad school mostly had microfilms or microfiches of old journals, but Japan didn���t really get on the microfilm bandwagon, at least��in a broad, commercial fashion. Old periodicals were made available to lots of institutions by reprinting them. With some reprints even reproducing the original colors, they were far better to look at than microfilms but they tended to be quite expensive. Still, it was thanks to such reprints that more libraries now have copies of prewar film magazines such as Kinema��junpo, Kinema Record, Kokusai eiga shinbun, or Nihon eiga.��The only reprints I���ve been involved in before were reprints of old film books, such as the Nihon eigaron gensetsu taikei��series��(Yumani Shobo), for which I contributed commentaries on Gonda Yasunosuke or the Film Law.��

Whenever I go to the annual Association for Asian Studies conference, I make a point of visiting the publishers��� booths, in part to find out what reprints have been recently published. Mostly of the reps of the Japanese publishers know me, so in our conversations, I am��occasionally asked what should be reprinted next. Given my current research on Japanese film theory, I often suggest some of the prewar film theory or film studies journals.��

Aoyama Shinji���s ���Nouvelle Vague Manifesto��� Revisited

I am back at Yale after a summer in Japan, and one of the pleasant surprises awaiting me when I returned was a copy of issue 6 of the magazine Nang. Nang is a magazine focused on Asian cinema that is only available on paper in expertly designed printed editions. Published twice a year by editor-in-chief Davide Cazzaro, it will continue for a total of ten issues, with each issue focused on a theme and supervised by a guest editor. Issue 6 was dedicated to the subject of�����Manifestos��� and was guest edited by Darcy Paquet.

I contributed to the issue through the republication of my English translation of Aoyama Shinji���s 1997�����Nouvelle Vague Manifesto; Or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel.��� I had previously published that online in Adrian Martin���s journal��Lola, where you can still read it here. I had supplied an introduction to that��manifesto (seen here), one that worked a lot off of my essay on Aoyama in Yvonne Tasker���s Fifty Contemporary Film Directors (I have posted that on the��Yale repository here). For Nang, Darcy was hoping that several of the persons involved could revisit the��manifesto from today���s perspective, but Aoyama-san was just too busy to write something, and I felt someone else should offer a more novel view. So I just provided a new one-page introduction, and my former student Ryan Cook of Emory wrote up a quite interesting analysis that��reconsiders Aoyama���s relation to Hasumi Shigehiko.��

Movie Tourism: The Tora-san Museum and the Yamada Yoji Museum in Shibamata

There is much discussion these days about anime tourism such as��seichi junrei, in which fans visit the locations of their favorite anime, especially when those anime took the pains to locate scenes and events in actually existing spaces.��

Tourism based on moving images is nothing new, however. Postwar film series such as Nikkatsu���s Rambler (Wataridori) series or Shochiku���s Tora-san (Otoko wa tsurai yo) series featured roving heroes in part so that each film would be set in a different place and spark tourism to that location. The Taiga Drama series on NHK is famous for generating tourism to the locations the actual history depicted in the drama took place.

In going to the Tora-san Museum the other day, right after visiting the Ichikawa��Kon Memorial Room, I could see a facility that attempts to generate tourism about a film series that itself attempted to generate tourism. In this case, the entire area around the museum has become part of tourist double mirror.

The Tora-san series, largely created and directed by Yamada Yoji, features the itinerant peddler Kuruma Torajiro.��Forty-eight films were made in the series while the actor Atsumi Kiyoshi, who plays Tora-san, was still alive, making it one of the most��successful film series in Japan, if not the world. In every film, he has to return home once or twice, and that home is in Shibamata,��Katsushika-Ku, Tokyo. And that, naturally, is where the Museum is located.

Conversations in Silence 6: Kinugasa Teinosuke���s Crossroads (Jujiro)

We had a good turnout in June for the fifth edition of Conversations in Silence at Haremame, where we showed the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Kataoka Ichiro was decked out in his frock coat (which he only��wears for Caligari), and Kikuchi Naruyoshi set the mood using mostly German music from Stockhausen to body music. The talk afterwards was great, especially as Kikuchi-san talked at length about the difficulties of adding music to Japanese vs. European films.

The next film in the series might be a test of Kikuchi-san���s skills, since we will be showing Kinugasa Teinosuke���s experimental jidaigeki Crossroads (Jujiro) from 1928. We showed Kinugasa���s Page of Madness (about which I have written a book) for the first edition of the series, and Crossroads was the director���s attempt at experimentation subsequent to that, after having returned to mainstream filmmaking for a few years. It is quite unusual compared to the jidaigeki of the time, both for its noirish lighting and tale of love and blindness, but also for the fact it was one of the first period films not to have a sword fight, which was a defining feature of jidaigeki. A master director of jidaigeki, Kinugasa was��bending genre rules and aiming for something else. I wonder how Kikuchi-san will interpret this film that is neither European nor clearly fitting the rules of a Japanese jidaigeki.

Ichikawa Kon Memorial Room

Having published on Ichikawa��Kon before (see my article here), I���ve been meaning to do it for some time, but I finally made the trek to visit the Ichikawa��Kon Memorial Room (������������������). It is a small museum in Shibuya dedicated to the illustrious filmmaker Ichikawa Kon and his scriptwriter wife, Wada Natto.��

The museum itself is��in Nanpeidaicho��about a fifteen minute walk from Shibuya Station. It is located where Ichikawa and Wada had their house. The house was torn down and an apartment building built on the site in 2015. The first floor is where the Memorial��Room is located.

It is not that large. The walls in the entrance hall are full of introductions to all of Ichikawa���s feature films. The main room is devoted to exhibits (see the photo below). On the walls are exhibits featuring��some of his major films:��Harp of Burma,��Enjo, Her Brother, Ten Dark Women, Tokyo Olympiad, and The Makioka Sisters. They feature copies of the scripts, storyboards, press materials, and other items. Ichikawa was a very diligent and meticulous man, and he made colored charts for the productions of his films that are also on display. He was one of the first Japanese feature film directors to emerge from the world of animation, so his storyboards are quite delightful. Some of his last efforts at animation���cut out animation���are also on view, as are some materials from his TV work and a number of his awards. There are also his personal 35mm camera and Steenbeck editing table.