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"Nippon Modern" is the first intensive study of Japanese cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which the country's film industry was at its most prolific and a time when cinema played a singular role in shaping Japanese modernity. During the interwar period, the signs of modernity were ubiquitous in Japan's urban architecture, literature, fashion, advertising, popular music, and cinema. The reconstruction of Tokyo following the disastrous earthquake of 1923 highlighted the extent of this cultural transformation, and the film industry embraced the reconfigured space as an expression of the modern. Shochiku Kamata Film Studios (1920-1936), the focus of this study, was the only studio that continued filmmaking in Tokyo following the city's complete destruction. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points to the influence of the new urban culture in Shochiku's interwar films, acclaimed as modan na eiga, or modern films, by and for Japanese.Wada-Marciano's thought-provoking examinations illustrate the reciprocal relationship between cinema and Japan's vernacular modernity - what Japanese modernity actually meant to Japanese. Her thorough and thoughtful analyses of dozens of films within the cultural contexts of Japan contribute to the current inquiry into non-Western vernacular modernities.
- Sales Rank: #2211044 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Univ of Hawaii Pr
- Published on: 2008-05-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.90" h x .50" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 185 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Devastated by the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo re-built itself in symbiosis with an image of modernity concocted by its own film studios. Nippon Modern renders that image, aspect after fascinating aspect, in sharp detail." -- Dudley Andrew
"Nippon Modern will be recognized as one of the core books of Japanese film studies." -- Abe Mark Nornes
From the Back Cover
"Devastated by the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo re-built itself in symbiosis with an image of modernity concocted by its own film studios. Nippon Modern renders that image, aspect after fascinating aspect, in sharp detail. Scores of films make up that image, a few resurrected in this volume for intense and delightful analysis. A sensitive viewer and an honest resourceful historian, Wada-Marciano lays out what she's found in relation to other studies of this precious period, and she does so without hyperbole and without a glaring agenda. She makes you understand how, after Tokyo would again be devastated in 1945, these `modern' films could become objects of nostalgia. Such is the care she gives her subject and such the fragility of that subject." --Dudley Andrew, Yale University
"Nippon Modern will be recognized as one of the core books of Japanese film studies, a must-read for anyone interested in Japanese cinema. Because it brings Japanese cinema study into dialogue with important debates in history, area studies, and post colonial studies, it should have a wide and heterogeneous readership that will be attracted to its compelling analysis of important films and straightforward narration of biographies and studio history." --Abé Mark Nornes, University of Michigan
About the Author
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano is assistant professor of film studies at Carleton University, Canada.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Nostalgia for the Japanese Modern
By Etienne RP
"Natsukashii: how nostalgic!" This is how the author's mother reacted to viewing an old movie produced by the Tokyo studio Shochiku Kamata during the interwar period. Shochiku stands for "pine and bamboo", the first two Chinese characters of the founders's surnames, and Kamata is the ward on the outskirts of Tokyo where the studio relocated following the 1924 Great Kanto Earthquake. From that date and until 1936, when it moved to Ofuna, Shochiku was the only production facility in Tokyo and it reigned master over the gendaigeki or contemporary film genre, whereas its competitors had relocated to the Kanto area and concentrated on jidaigeki, or period movies. Shochiku movies from the Kamata period therefore came to embody a distinct brand of modernism, at once nourished by Western influences and distinctly Japanese; and it is this "nostalgia for the modern" that contemporary viewers still experience. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano wrote Nippon Modern in order to come to terms with her own family background and to understand the feeling of nostalgia that her mother had experienced while viewing a movie produced long before her birth.
Nostalgia is a deeply ambivalent feeling. It separates the past from the present and functions as a link to a longed-for community, yet this past and this community are always imagined and never experienced as such. It is a sad and bittersweet feeling, and yet there is a distinct pleasure in remembering days of bliss and happiness. In the context of Japan, nostalgia is a cultivated collective emotion linked to national identity and reflecting a certain time and space. It is planted in people's minds from an early age, as when schoolchildren are taught to long for a furusato or rural hometown with which most city dwellers have no connection. It is a inherently political feeling, as the claim that “the past was better” has always been made by conservative forces, and yet it depoliticizes the present by projecting social conflict onto the plane of sentiments and aesthetics. By nurturing a longing for the authority of the head of the extended family in a present characterized by the extension of the nuclear family, it supported the emergence of new forms of patriarchy and authoritarianism based of the power of the Emperor, the military, and otherstate apparatuses. Nostalgia acts as a kind of collective amnesia: it ignores the unresolved issues of Japanese imperialism and militarism that loom so large in Japan’s relation to its past.
One has to be careful, however, not to attribute to past viewers feelings and emotions that one experiences in the present. As an example, the use of space by Ozu Yasujiro, with his long shots of landscapes, empty rooms, or other actionless spaces, has often been read as a signature stylistic trait opening the narration to pauses devoid of any informational value. This is doubly wrong. First, this technique of temporal and spatial pauses is not limited to Ozu’s movies and finds precedents with other directors associated with the Shochiku Kamata studios, such as Gosho Heinosuke, Naruse Mikio, Shimizu Hiroshi, and Shimizu Yasujiro. Second, these empty spaces had a narrative function: to the film audiences of the interwar period, they made Japanese modernity literally visible. They signaled an urban, middle-class, salaried way of life to which most publics aspired to or identified with. Such images of urbanity were disseminated throughout the nation, in both city and countryside, and they confirmed popular notions among the Japanese of how the modern city space should appear. The nationalization of urban space was a political project aiming at fostering a stable class structure unified in a single collective identity. These screen shots were also a familiar technique for the genre of shoshimin eiga, or middle-class film. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano notes, it was easier to film landscapes shots and outdoor scenes in low-density suburbs than in crowded downtown Tokyo.
Parallel to the sanctuarization of domestic space and the expansion of suburbia, popular culture participated in the invention of the hometown as a nostalgic space. Elementary schoolchildren were taught to sing the song “furusato”, an elegy about “the mountain where I chased after rabbits and the river where I caught little carps.” The interwar films made good use of this nostalgic space in the 1920s and 1930s, soothing middle-class anxieties in a period of intense social change. By reading Gosho Heinosuke’s 1933 film version of The Izu Dancer alongside Kawabata’s short novel, Wada-Marciano shows that the film substitutes a language of nostalgic country space to the social critique hinted by the novel. The film is less concerned with the class difference between the university student and the country girl than it is with the display of pastoral sceneries and rural landscapes, reflecting the modern experience of city dwellers making excursion trips to the countryside. We notice here again the depoliticizing force of nostalgia, which substitutes a moral economy of sentiments and aesthetics to the political economy of modern capitalism.
The history of Japanese cinema is often told with a focus on great auteurs and their oeuvres. Kurosawa Akira, Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro and Naruse Mikio are all considered great Japanese directors, and their works have shaped perceptions of Japanese film history. But the focus on auteurs and their distinctive styles narrow the scope of that history. It leaves movies or directors that do not fit into the mold either as precursory works, declinaisons of the same theme, or irrelevant entries that can easily be ignored. Wade-Marciano shows that each movie has to be positioned in a field of competing forces and structural oppositions: between hoga (Japanese films) and yoga (Western films), between jidaigeki and gendaigeki, among studios such as Shochiku and Nikkatsu, and along the many genres and subgenres that anchored the expectations of the public. Analyzing Japanese movies with the categories and schemes of perception shaped by Hollywood can be misleading. For example, “samurai movies” had no cultural currency in the lexicon of Japanese filmgoers, who referred to the mega-genre of jidaigeki (not necessarily staging samurai warriors) or to indigenous categories such as shinpa (theatrical film style), chambara (sword films), or rekishi eiga (historical films).
Wade-Marciano analyzes several such genres: the shoshimin eiga or the middle-class film, the wakamono supotsu eiga or youth sports film, and various brands of women’s movies. She shows that Japanese genre formation allowed for discontinuity and fragmentation, differentiating themselves from one another or mixing together into new combinations, not unlike modern manga series which serious fans can always locate into categories combining subgenre, stylistic performance, author’s signature, and publishing house’s distinct identity. Indeed, there is a strong parallel to make between sport movies and sport manga series. Both are concerned with the display of the individual body and the creation of a unified national body, often emphasizing Japanese singularity and graphic opposition to the West. As the author notes, the sport movie “provides a body perfectly suited to modern life as an imaginary solution for relieving the audience’s real-life anxieties over modernity’s hectic pace of change.” In a close reading of the film Wakamono yo naze naku ka (Why Do the Youth Cry?), she reveals star actor Suzuki Denmei’s sexual ambiguity as a desired Other combining feminine and Western features. Homoerotic overtones both sustained and subverted the national ideology of rising militarism that the movies of Leni Riefenstahl also thematized in interwar Germany.
The middle-class film genre is interpreted by the author as a reflexive discourse on the experience of Japanese modernity, which is both culturally specific and globally influenced. The interaction is not simply that the image of urban middle-class modernity was embedded in such films; the films themselves shaped the image of modernity in the popular imagining. The Japanese culture of the Taisho period was highly exposed to Western modernity, and the extreme Westernization of that epoch has often been cast as trivial and transient. But Wada-Marciano shows that Japanese cinema, especially the woman’s film, merged the Hollywood influence with a sense of authenticity drawn from the audience’s everyday life. The figure of the modern girl or “moga” emerged as a social phenomenon through its representation in movies and fashion magazines, with trademark star actresses such as Tanaka Kuniyo and Okada Yoshiko playing as role models for an entire generation. Whether she was used as an affirmation or a mockery of the Japanese embrace of the West, the image of the modern girl always served to refigure and reestablish Japanese national identity. As the author shows, the offscreen image of star actresses often influenced the way their onscreen characters were perceived by the public, sometimes subverting the ideological message of the movie plot.
Japanese family melodramas and light comedies have often been interpreted as fundamentally apolitical and even depoliticizing. But Nippon Modern shows that movies from the interwar era had profound ties with the political. First, many directors from the Shochiku Kanata studio inherited from a wave of politically and socially conscious films that flourished during a brief period from 1929 to 1931. These tendency films or keiko eiga focused on the working class and adopted techniques from agitprop theater. Although they eschewed the controversies of the political left, the middle-class genre films retained their inspiration from social realism and often presented an ambivalent view of modern life. Second, gendaigeki movies were a venue through which Japanese culture negotiated its relationship with the West. Western actors and scenes from overseas almost never featured in Japanese movies; but the presence of the West was conspicuous in the consumer goods, the domestic space, and the borrowed words from English. Third, as mentioned, cinema helped to create a modern national subject, at once protected from state interference in the domestic sphere and aligned with the ideological imperatives of the regime. The political nature of Japanese cinema is illustrated in the conclusion of the book tracing the ideological itinerary of film critic Tsumura Hideo who transformed himself from prewar liberal journalist to wartime ultranationalist and to postwar specialist of film aesthetics.
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano argues that Japanese cinema must be analyzed on its own terms, not necessarily using the genres and categories of Hollywood filmography. She uses the works and ideas of Japanese critics, read in their original language, in addition to classical references of American film studies, noting in passing several misconstructions and misperceptions in the scholarly analysis of Japanese movies. But in her attempt to distance herself from American scholarship, she conflates Westernization with Americanization, and foreign cinema with Hollywood. She notes that in literature and in the field of culture, European influences were felt very strongly, with Japanese authors differentiating themselves according to the foreign language they learned, be it French, German, British English or Russian. I suspect there may have been European influences in cinema as well, even though the end-1920s and 1930s were a golden era for Hollywood movies. Indeed, as noted, the youth sport movie was constituted as a genre in Germany, with the work of Leni Riefenstahl playing first as actress and then as director. The middle-class film genre may also owe as much to French social realism as to the American slapstick comedies of Buster Keaton. In her attempt to differentiate Japanese cinema from Hollywood influence, Nippon Modern overlooks the global nature of the movie industry, in which Europe also plays a part.
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