In his authoritative study of early Japanese cinema, Visions of Japanese Modernity:
Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925, Aaron Gerow accepts Yamamoto’s observations on the “infl uence” of foreign cinema but makes a “strategic move” to ignore it. 38 Focusing on the early period in which the institutional and nar- rational structure of Japanese cinema was still in fl ux, he argues that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defi ned. Both progressive critics of the “pure fi lm” move- ment and more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema’s informal exhibition contexts. In this and in other work, Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure fi lm movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the “theft ” of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representa- tions of Japan in Western fi lms by exporting a Japanese cinema “reformed” to emulate the international norm.
In earlier work, Gerow saw the paradoxes produced by the pure fi lm movement—
a domestic cinema that required foreign approval; a Japanese cinema that rejects
“Japaneseness”; an authentic cinema for which “the people are missing”—as resulting in a sense of shame. 39 Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano responded to that work by asserting the presence of an active resistance to Western cultural imperialism in the “middle class”
( shoshimin ) fi lms at Shochiku’s Kamata studio, a form that she called “Nippon Modern.”
Wada-Marciano emphasizes the parodic aspect of the fi lms, arguing that Shochiku
05_Miyao_CH05.indd 110
05_Miyao_CH05.indd 110 10/30/2013 5:25:34 PM10/30/2013 5:25:34 PM
cinema was a cultural nationalist cinema that made modernity safe for Japaneseness, resisting the power of Hollywood and by extension the United States. 40 She gives as an example the insertion of a two-minute sequence from the Betty Boop cartoon Ha! Ha!
Ha! ( Betti no warae warae in Japan), produced by the Fleischer Brothers in 1934, into Shimazu Yasujiro’s early talkie My Neighbor, Miss Yae ( Tonari no Yae-chan, released June 28, 1934). By incorporating this citation into the subtle comedy of misplaced desire, and preceding an extended montage of “modern” entertainments that ends pointedly with the father at home cooking Japanese food, Wada-Marciano claims that Shimazu has
“reasserted a national identity through the domestic image.” 41 Th is reading, however, seems too exclusively oedipal and symbolic: the cartoon Ha! Ha! Ha! is one of the fi nest examples of Fleischer’s refl exive sense of humor and almost surreal sensibility. It fea- tures live action of Fleischer himself drawing Betty and talking with her, then a laughing gas sequence that ends with an anarchic, modernist vision of the whole city intoxicated, things as well as people. Th e short passed censorship on May 9, so would have been fresh in audience memories when Shimazu not only incorporated a fi lm within a fi lm, but a fi lm that itself incorporated jokey refl exivity within its own mode of representa- tion. Surely viewers could take more pleasure in this sequence than simply feel shame at the borrowing, or relief that they could eat Japanese-style fi sh aft erward. Th e fi lm fore- grounds an interplay of agency: Shimizu pays homage to Fleischer’s awareness of the comic possibilities of the medium at the same time that he asserts a similar conscious- ness, on behalf of himself and his cinephile audience. It is not simply without shame but actively shameless, a citation (of almost half the fi lm!) that is also a commentary.
Th at complex mixture of local and global reference extends to the term shoshimin itself.
Although the shoshimin fi lm became Shochiku’s defi ning genre, as Wada claims (p. 125), that fact still points to Shochiku’s program of emulating foreign cinema: the phrase shoshimin eiga was fi rst used by Iwasaki Akira to describe the Lloyd-Chaplin-Keaton comic strain of American fi lm. 42
In the “strategic move” of Gerow’s Visions of Japanese Modernity, the problem of national “shame” is displaced in the text by the emphasis on distinctions of class, gender, and social power within Japan. 43 Gerow is surely correct that power oper- ates within as well as between polities, and we should be wary of the tendency to reify national cinemas as unitary entities: there is great value in recognizing how the struggle over the defi nition of cinema mobilizes an internal politics based on class and gender even before we consider the role of cinema in representing the nation. Nonetheless, I think we should recognize the global imbalances of power—what I am calling the
“geopolitical incline”—that subtended all fi lm production in Japan even if the forms of agency that result from that imbalance are less predictable than some center-periphery models would imply. For example, the critics quoted by Yamamoto Kikuo were shame- less : self-conscious humor or appreciation is at least as prominent as a sense of pain- ful inferiority in the criticism published in newspapers and studio magazines. In the December 1932 issue of Kamata, a magazine for fans of Shochiku’s modern-day fi lms, Shimazu Yasujiro’s fi rst talkie, First Steps Ashore ( Joriku daiippo, 1932), is described as a “splendid imitation” ( rippa na mosha ) of Sternberg’s silent classic Docks of New York
05_Miyao_CH05.indd 111
05_Miyao_CH05.indd 111 10/30/2013 5:25:34 PM10/30/2013 5:25:34 PM
(1928), while Kishi Matsuo praises the “pleasurable Americanism” ( kimochi no ii ameri- kanizumu ) of Naruse Mikio’s Chocolate Girl ( Chokore-to ga-ru, 1932), a fi lm sponsored by the Meiji candy company that illustrates the close tie-up between cinema and other aspects of contemporary consumer culture. 44 Yamamoto’s book, too, is fi lled with pass- ing references to wasei (made in Japan), mojiri (parody), and moho (imitation), or monomane (mimicry), more oft en with a sense of humor than of shame.
Yamamoto describes Shimazu Yasujiro’s First Steps Ashore as an “adaptation” ( hon’an ) of Docks of New York into a play and then a fi lm script by Kitamura Komatsu, noting Shimazu’s ambition to make an “imitation work” ( moho sakuhin ) that “took the origi- nal and made it Japanese.” Kishi Matsuo found fault with the imitation (Oka Joji is no George Bancroft ; the fi lm is pure melodrama, not a tragic vision of a man and a woman doing their best in an impure world), but he does not criticize the strategy itself. 45 Films with such clear Hollywood intertexts were produced not only at the Shochiku Kamata studio noted for its American-style modernism: “Jack” Abe Yutaka’s Special Guard ( Hijo Keikai, 1929) was made at Nikkatsu’s Uzumasa studio in Kyoto, which aft er the 1923 earthquake had become the “Hollywood of Japan.” Th e fi lm was noted for lead actor Asaoka Nobuo’s resemblance to Bancroft (again) and for scenes that critic Tanaka Tetsunosuke described as “not so much ‘stinking of butter’ [i.e., Westernized] as a lit- tle American action fi lm in its own right” in which audiences “hallucinate” scenes from famous American fi lms such as Underworld (1927) and Th e Dragnet (1928) as a Japanese fi lm. 46 Murata Minoru’s Skyscraper ( Matenro, 1930) was also made at Nikkatsu Uzumasa, and particularly highly praised for its “skillful translation” of the tempo of Docks of New York . 47 Critics even saw the infl uence of Docks of New York on period fi lms such as Kingire’s Banishment ( Kingire tsuiho, 1930), made at Shochiku’s Kamata stu- dio: Tomoda Jun’ichiro praised the acting but wrote, “I wish they had imitated Bancroft and [Betty] Compson even more closely.” Similarly, top period fi lm star Hayashi Chojiro (later known as Hasegawa Kazuo) was praised for his “mimicry of Bancroft ” in A Wolf Howling in the Blizzard ( Fubuki ni sakebu ookami, Shochiku Kyoto, 1931). As Yamamoto goes on to point out, the “Underworld” ( ankokugai ) series of fi lms (e.g., Scarface, 1932, known in Japan as Boss of the Underworld [ Ankokugai no kaoyaku ]), and the “Dragnet”
( hijosen ) series (named aft er another Bancroft -Sternberg collaboration, Th e Dragnet ), spawned a genre of Japanese gangster fi lms in the early 1930s, from Capone Returns ( Capone saigen, 1932) at the short-lived Tokatsu studio in Kyoto, to Ozu Yasujiro’s Dragnet Girl ( Hijosen no onna, 1933) at Shochiku Kamata. 48
Yamamoto’s research on the relation between Japanese and foreign cinema is invalu- able. However, comparing his understanding of that relation to the tone of the 1930s journals reveals a slight diff erence of emphasis. Although there had been fi lm studies classes in Japanese universities even before World War II, Yamamoto belongs to the gen- eration of scholars that established fi lm studies as an academic discipline in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. With Sato Tadao and other postwar critics, Yamamoto insisted on the distinction between Japan and the United States as a means of highlighting Japan’s cultural specifi city: the “incomplete modernity” that resulted from the failure of the People’s Rights movement in the late nineteenth century and the postwar struggles for
05_Miyao_CH05.indd 112
05_Miyao_CH05.indd 112 10/30/2013 5:25:34 PM10/30/2013 5:25:34 PM
democratization. 49 Given the legacy of the occupation, and wars in Korea and Vietnam, these critics were particularly sensitive to the role of the United States in sponsoring Japan’s compromised political institutions, and looked to the cinema as a site of cultural resistance to American power. Th at resistance is a symptom of the leveling of the “geo- political incline” between Japan and the United States, itself a consequence of the grow- ing contradictions between claims for American exceptionalism and the realpolitik of the United States’ postwar involvements. Th e change became particularly clear aft er the
“oil shocks” of the 1970s and Japan’s emergence as a global economic power by 1983, when Yamamoto’s book was fi rst published. 50
Perhaps for those reasons, Yamamoto insists on adaptation—essentially, Japani- fi cation—as a necessary intertextual translation of specifi c scenes and characters, because the mass audience would not tolerate direct transcriptions of Western fi lms.
Yamamoto’s evidence, however, does not fully support his argument: Japanese fi lm crit- ics around 1930 seem far less disturbed by the corrosive nature of cultural adaptation than later critics. Instead, cinephile critics writing in popular magazines found a kind of giddy hilarity in recognizing the absurd “localization” of foreign modes and genres with Japanese characters (Oka Joji as George Bancroft , Mizukubo Sumiko as a Western-style ingénue) and settings, something that comes to the fore again in the Nikkatsu studio’s popular “fi lms without nationality” ( mukokuseki eiga ) and Toho studio’s musicals of the 1950s and 1960s. Th e wry acknowledgment of the insuffi ciency of Japanese fi lm vis-à- vis Hollywood cinema, as well as the bold declarations for a future cinema that could overcome it, are less an early-Foucauldian disciplinary discourse than a means of “light- ening the burden” of being on the global cinematic periphery—a cinephilic combina- tion of longing, parody, and a pointed awareness of geopolitical hierarchies that we can recognize as a form of knowledge.