relation to moving image reception, criticism may itself be able to reassert its role as a crucial facet in how viewers critically negotiate with cinema and media.
Notes
1 . It is diffi cult to defi ne fi lm criticism, although many have tried. For convenience, I will follow Dudley Andrew’s distinction between fi lm theory, whose goal “is to formulate a schematic notion of the capacity of fi lm,” and criticism, which is “an appreciation of the value of individual works of cinema, not a comprehension of the cinematic capability” ( Th e Major Film Th eories [ London : Oxford University Press , 1976 ], 5 ). Th is means I will avoid academic fi lm studies. I will also not make a signifi cant distinction between eiga hihyo and eiga hyoron .
2 . See, for instance, Wada Norie , “ Nihon eiga ronsōshi ,” Kinema junpo 156 ( September 15 , 1956 ): 103 ; or Kitagawa Fuyuhiko , “ Nihon ni okeru eiga riron ,” Eiga hyoron 9 . 5 (May 1952 ): 32–36 .
3 . Th e best examples are the kaisetsu of the Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei (Tojusha, 1970–1971);
Iwamoto Kenji’s “ Film Criticism and the Study of Cinema in Japan ,” Iconics 1 (1987):
129–146 ; and a series of articles published in Kinema junpo between May and August 1996.
4 . For more on the problematic lack of fi lm theory in Japanese fi lm writing, see my “ Nihon/
eiga/riron ,” eds. Yomota Inuhuko et al., Nihon eiga wa ikite iru 1: Nihon eiga wa ikite iru , trans. Tsunoda Takuya ( Tokyo : Iwanami Shobo , 2010 ), 159–199 ; and my “ Introduction ,”
Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 ( December 2010 ): 1–13 .
5 . Iwamoto , “ Film Criticism and the Study of Cinema in Japan : A Historical Survey,” 129 . 6 . Togawa Naoki , “ Nihon eiga hihyo hattatsushi 1: Dai ikki, sairento eiga jidai ,” Kinema junpo
1191 ( May 1 , 1996 ): 127 . 7 . Ibid .
8 . Mizusawa Takehiko , “ Yoi shashin to wa ikan ?” Kinema Record 50 ( October 1917 ): 31 . 9 . Tachibana Takahiro , “ Eiga hyoron no hyoron ,” Kage’e no kuni ( Tokyo : Shuhokaku , 1925 ),
114–115 .
10 . For more on the Pure Film Movement and the screenplay, see Joanne Bernardi , Writing in Light: Th e Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement ( Detroit : Wayne State University Press , 2001 ).
11 . Izumi Haruki , “ Eiga hihyo no hyojun: ichi ,” Katsudo kurabu 4 . 6 (June 1921): 20–21 . 12 . “ Eiga hihyo to iu koto ,” Kinema junpo 5 ( August 21 , 1919 ): 1 .
13 . Tachibana , “ Eiga hyoron no hyoron ,” 119 . 14 . “ Eiga hihyo to iu koto ,” 1 .
15 . See Jerry Roberts , Th e Complete History of American Film Criticism ( Santa Monica, CA : Santa Monica Press , 2010 ), 17–20.
16 . Kitagawa Fuyuhiko , “ Eiga hihyo no hihyo ,” Eiga hyoron (February 1948 ), reprinted in Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei ( Tokyo : Tojusha , 1971), 1: 242 .
17 . See Aaron Gerow , Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 2010 ).
18 . Hatano Tetsuro , “ Kaisetsu ,” eds. Ogawa Toru , et al., Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei ( Tokyo : Tojusha , 1971 ), 1: 577 .
19 . Shigeno Yukiyoshi , “ Nihon shashin o hyosuru koto ,” Kinema Record 14 ( August 1914 ): 2 .
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20 . I have argued elsewhere that the “myth of export”—the dream of sending Japanese fi lms abroad—helped fuel reform by imagining the standards used by the Western gaze that should be imposed on domestic cinema. See my “ Narrating the Nation-ality of a Cinema: Th e Case of Japanese Prewar Film ,” in Th e Culture of Japanese Fascism , ed. Alan Tansman ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2009 ), 185–211 .
21 . Noël Burch , To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1978 ), 13.
22 . Kitagawa , “ Nihon ni okeru eiga riron ,” 33 .
23 . Kitagawa, one should note, was a persistent critic of fi lm writers associated with the Japanese Communist Party.
24 . Kitagawa , “ Nihon ni okeru eiga riron ,” 36 . 25 . Kitagawa , “ Eiga hihyo no hihyo ,” 240 . 26 . Hatano , “ Kaisetsu ,” 576, 577.
27 . Iwasaki Akira , “ Niritsusei to iu koto ,” Kinema junpo 485 ( October 11 , 1933 ): 50 .
28 . Ikeda Toshio , “ Marukusu shugi eiga hihyo no kijun ,” Eiga kagaku kenkyu 6 ( October 1930 ): 239–240 .
29 . Karatani Kojin , “ Kindai Nihon no hihyo: Showa zenki 2 ,” in Kindai Nihon no hihyo 1 , ed.
Karatani Kojin ( Tokyo : Kodansha , 1997 ), 157 . 30 . Ikeda , “ Marukusu shugi eiga hihyo no kijun ,” 230 .
31 . Hatano found that even aft er the war, “the word mass ( taishuteki ) roamed through various meanings in concrete cases of criticism, varying from ‘the masses as they should be’ to the
‘the mass in numbers.’ ” Hatano , “ Kaisetsu ,” 581 .
32 . Iwasaki Akira , “ Awanai kagi ,” Kinema junpo 488 ( November 11 , 1933 ): 51 .
33 . Iwasaki Akira , “ Eiga hihyo wa dare ga suru ,” Kinema junpo 489 ( November 21 , 1933 ): 58 . 34 . Gonda in the 1910s argued that with the cinema, the masses became the true subject of
entertainment through their viewing practices. See his “ Th e Principles and Applications of the Motion Pictures (excerpts) ,” trans. Aaron Gerow , Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 ( December 2010 ): 24–36 .
35 . Shirai Yoshio , “ Nihon eiga hihyo hattatsushi 6: Nuveru Vagu, ATG no taito ,” Kinema junpo 1198 ( August 1 , 1996 ): 100 . Shirai was editor of the magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
36 . For a brief history of the theater pamphlet, see Hidenori Okada , “ Kita, mita, kata—eiga panfuretto shoron ,” NFC Newsletter 97 ( June–July 2011 ): 7–9 .
37 . Shyon Baumann’s survey of the use of critical quotations in fi lm advertising discovered that such usage signifi cantly increased at the end of the 1960s in conjunction with the rise of art cinema: “ Marketing, Cultural Hierarchy, and the Relevance of Critics: Film in the United States, 1935–1980 ,” Poetics 30 (2002): 243–262 . My cursory survey of advertisements in the Asahi shinbun supports the view that quotations tended to be used for foreign or art fi lms in Japan, but unlike in the United States, the use of quotations from critics declined starting in the 1970s.
38 . Shinada Yukichi , “ Nihon eiga hihyo hattatsushi 5: Sengo no eiga hihyokai chokan 2 ,”
Kinema junpo 1197 ( July 15 , 1996 ): 89–90 .
39 . Tsurumi Shunsuke , Gokaisuru kenri ( Tokyo : Iwanami Shobo , 1959 ).
40 . Even today, Eiga geijutsu , which is now a quarterly, continues to publish criticism by nonprofessional critics, especially by personnel behind the camera, such as screenwriters, cinematographers, and editors.
41 . Ogawa Toru , “ Hihyo no naimen ,” Eiga hyoron 21 . 20 (October 1964 ): 22 .
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42 . Ibid ., 26 . 43 . Ibid ., 25 .
44 . See Matsumoto Toshio, “A Th eory of Avant-Garde Documentary,” Cinema Journal 51.4 (Summer 2012): Ibid ., 148–154 .
45 . For an analysis of the resonances between Sartre and Yoshida Kiju, see Isolde Standish , Politics, Porn and Protest ( New York : Continuum , 2011 ).
46 . Abé Mark Nornes , “ Th e Postwar Documentary Trace ,” Positions 10 . 1 (2002): 50 .
47 . Matsuda quotes his own article in the October 5, 1968 Tosho shinbun : “ Hihyo no fuzai o megutte ,” Bara to mumeisha ( Tokyo : Haga Shoten , 1970 ), 277 .
48 . Hatano , “ Kaisetsu ,” 590.
49 . Yamane Sadao , “ Kaisetsu ,” eds. Ogawa Toru , et al., Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei ( Tokyo : Tojusha , 1970 ), 3: 550 .
50 . Interview with Hatano Tetsuro, April 20, 2010.
51 . Matsuda Masao , “ Hihyo no rikkyakuten wa nanika ,” Bara to mumeisha ( Tokyo : Haga Shoten , 1970 ), 188–196 .
52 . Iwamoto “ Film Criticism and the Study of Cinema in Japan ,” 141 . 53 . Interview with Yamane Sadao, April 22, 2010.
54 . “It is interesting drawing everything out of the fi lm work, so I rather do not want to know the intentions of the producer or director, or the circumstances of production.” Iijima Tadashi , “ Boku no hihyoshi ,” Eiga hyoron 15 . 6 (June 1958 ): 19 .
55 . Hasumi Shigehiko , Eiga no shinwagaku ( Tokyo : Chikuma Shobo , 1996 ), 51.
56 . Hasumi Shigehiko , “ Eiga to hihyo ,” Eiga: Yuwaku no ekurichuru ( Tokyo : Chikuma Shobo , 1990 ), 353 .
57 . Ryan Cook , “ An Impaired Eye: Hasumi Shigehiko on Cinema as Stupidity ,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 ( December 2010 ): 137 .
58 . Hasumi , “ Eiga to hihyo ,” 357 . 59 . Ibid ., 358 .
60 . Hasumi Shigehiko , Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro ( Tokyo : Chikuma Shobo , 1992 ), 138.
61 . Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto , “ Image, Information, Commodity ,” in In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture , eds. Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder ( Boulder, CO : Westview , 1996 ): 123–138 .
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c re at i n g t h e
au d i e n c e : c i n e m a as p o p u l a r re c re at i o n a n d s o c ia l e d u c at i o n i n
m o d e rn ja pa n
hideaki fujiki
In the 1920s, while Siegfried Kracauer was discussing movie audiences in terms of “ die Masse ” or “the masses,” Gonda Yasunosuke was engaged in a similar discussion, in terms of “ minshu ” or “the people.” Gonda was a prominent social researcher displaying a broad range of scholarship, including on industrial arts, Marxism, and European institutional practices in the media sphere, while serving as an advisor on social education for Japan’s Ministry of Education from 1920 through 1943 (with a gap from May 1923 to September 1927). Both “the masses” for Kracauer and “the people” for Gonda referred to a new class that was being generated by the growth of capitalism. Th ey characterized this class as made up of social subjects who worked in factories and fl ocked to such modern enter- tainment as revues or the cinema. Both thinkers also criticized other intellectuals of the time for not properly understanding the “social reality” of the masses or the everyday practices of the people. Kracauer felt that, despite the fact that the reality of mass audi- ences lay in their inclination to “pure externality,” in that they simply enjoyed a series of impressions and attractions provided by theaters, intellectuals ignored or condemned this tendency while sticking to seeking the aesthetic “truth” in “personality, inwardness, and tragedy.” 1 Similarly, for Gonda, the creation of popular culture (or the culture of the people) resided in the very process whereby they would take pleasure in appropriating the products supplied by a capitalist industry, but those whom he called “the culturalists”
did not appreciate this process and instead wrongly conceptualized popular culture as something better taught by intellectuals. 2 Despite these similarities, however, these two
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thinkers of modernity in Germany and Japan diff er from one another on two signifi - cant points. First, while Kracauer equated the masses going to the theaters with the auto- mated functions of workers in a factory assembly line, Gonda characterized the people’s moviegoing as a learning process through which they unintentionally trained them- selves as social subjects conforming to the current regime. Th is leads to the second point.
Toward the late 1930s, Kracauer had gradually detected the vulnerability of the masses to totalitarianism—a realization shared by Adorno and Holkheimer. 3 However, Gonda increasingly advocated popular recreation as a vital means for educating the people as national subjects serving imperial Japan, as I shall discuss in more detail.
Gonda was not alone in linking movie audiences with the concept of the people or minshu , a fashionable term during the so-called Taisho democracy, which lasted from 1905 to 1931. 4 Bureaucrats from the Ministry of Education (including such fi gures as Norisugi Kaju, Ehata Kiju, and Nakata Shunzo) and advocates of “popular recreation”
or “ minshu goraku ron ” (they included Tachibana Takahiro, Obayashi Soshi, and Gonda himself) shared this confl ation of audiences with the people. 5 Obviously, the term is not neutral. Rather, it is historically contingent and has changed, depending on who used it and how it was used. Indeed, their “people” diff ers from the same term as used in “the people’s history” or “ minshu-shi ,” a term that experienced a boom in the aca- demic fi eld of modern Japanese history in the 1960s and 1970s. As the historian Carol Gluck argues, what the minshu-shi historians (such as Irokawa Daikichi, Kano Masanao, and Yasumaru Yoshio) called minshu was usually farmers and peasants living in rural areas. Th e scholars portrayed the people as the protagonists in their stories of Japanese history—countering the dominant elite-and-ruler-centered history. 6 By contrast, “the people” the bureaucrats and intellectuals of the 1920s discussed usually designated those who conspicuously aligned themselves with rising capitalism, which was fuelled by a series of wars (the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, and World War I from 1914 to 1918). Th ey were also thought of as urban residents.
Moreover, the word evoked those who took part in labor disputes, riots, and political movements and partook of such modern amusements as cinema.
Yet, both the 1920s’ and 1960s’ concepts of “the people,” as well as Kracauer’s “the masses,” share the same ground in that they are defi ned vis-à-vis dominant or elite classes. However closely the people were examined and described—and even though this research remains unquestionably valuable—they could not evade becoming an imagined concept through which observers referred to an unspecifi ed sector of an anonymous public from a third person’s vantage point. Hence, it is little more than a category used by socially privileged persons to make sense of the greater public through the lens of their historical conditions. In the 1920s, the bureaucrats and social research- ers conducted fi eldwork and statistical research into the conditions of the people’s labor and leisure, but their reports cannot precisely refl ect what these conditions were. On the contrary, because such statistical data appear refl ective of the true conditions investi- gated, it creates the risk of eff acing the fact that “the people” is an unavoidably idealized or abstracted concept. It should also be noted that nowadays movie audiences are no longer referred to as the people or minshu , and the word itself is rarely used to refer to
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contemporary social subjects. Th is succinctly indicates the extent to which “the people”
is a discursive and historical construction.
In this chapter, I will analyze the discourse surrounding, as well as the policies impact- ing on, social education and popular recreation as articulated by the bureaucrats and associated intellectuals of the Ministry of Education in the 1920s and aft erward. In so doing I will discuss what constituted their imagined concept of the people, in what sense they identifi ed the people with movie audiences, and what social issues this identifi ca- tion involved within its historical context. I will examine the era stretching from the Taisho democracy until the total war regime of the 1930s and early 1940s. Th e social education and popular recreation of the time have been examined extensively, but, as education scholars have dealt with the former and sociologists and historians with the latter, the themes have tended to be explored only separately. 7 Th is tendency thus has left unexplored the crucial reality that the Ministry’s policy of social education positioned the people, cinema, and audiences on the intersection of education and amusement. 8
As early as the 1910s and 1920s, when the Japanese policy of social education was estab- lished and developed, it refl ected attempts to incorporate in education new types of amuse- ments, like cinema, that had become prevalent in the social space that shaped the public’s everyday lives. It follows that the Ministry strove to organize the production and distribu- tion of cinema so as to serve education. Bureaucrats and intellectuals regarded as immature the people who typically fl ocked to such amusement sites as movie theaters. But, at the same time, the intellectuals associated with the Ministry thought that if the people could come to appreciate educationally improved amusements or movies, this would enable them to develop willingly—not forcibly—into the ideal subjects of a harmonious society that would uphold the imperial state. It is at this junction that movie audiences came to be seen as “the people,” and this view was retained in the fi lm policy of the total war regime in the 1930s and early 1940s. Yet, we should also keep in mind that the genealogy of the social education policy in the 1920s and later years was neither simply a linear progression nor a reactionary regres- sion, but rather it was a complex process entailing contradictory social and political relations.
As many scholars have explored, movie audiences are confi gured by their direct inter- action with fi lms, screen images, movie theaters or other sites of viewing, technologies, geography, and other physical, sensory, and/or signifying conditions. But it is equally important to acknowledge that they are always being defi ned and redefi ned by a variety of discourses that relate to and negotiate with each other in intricate ways. My argument is an attempt to grasp movie audiences as a discursively constructed social category and to examine it in relation to its historical context by investigating Japan’s policy of social education in the interwar era as a case study.