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.
Vernacular Modernism and
and fashions from the United States and avoiding the reduction of such exposure to a universal and trans-historical “Hollywood mode of narration.”
Rather than such a timeless utility, Hansen’s essays insist on linking local cinema to the contemporary experience of actual audiences, exposed to the same forces of global capitalism but in specifi c confi gurations. In Hansen’s argument, for example on Shanghai melodramas of the 1930s, the fi lms both radicalize audience perception of their historical circumstances and confi rm them in a situated, non-cosmopolitan iden- tity. She is more careful than most political economy critics of Hollywood’s international reach to acknowledge the “locally and culturally specifi c aesthetics” of 1930s Shanghai melodramas, at the same time that she recognizes them as a “cultural translation” of the Hollywood model. 53 However, I am not sure they can do both. If fi lm off ers a new matrix of experience that allows audiences to recognize the conditions of their contemporary alienation, including the historical arbitrariness of gender subordination, then it cannot also maintain the cultural traditions that naturalized that hierarchy without producing some form of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps Hansen is too careful to avoid the univer- salizing arguments for classical narration, and too willing to accommodate her analy- sis to local cultural traditions, instead of recognizing that for vernacular modernism to off er the messianic potential for an “alternative public sphere” it must change existing cultural relations.
Reading etymologically, “vernacular” has less to do with local architecture, or even with the creole languages that Hansen emphasizes, than with the verna —Latin for slaves born of slaves brought from outside the slave owner’s domain. An uncomfortable meta- phor, the word points to the violent and appropriative nature of the cinematic “borrow- ing” under discussion here. Hollywood fi lms did not simply dominate Japanese cinema, or Japanese spectators: studios profi ted from distributing prints they had bought free and clear, and only focused more on production when the Hollywood studios sought to take back those rents. Hollywood cinema was ransacked by the new fi lm production, sometimes literally cut up and incorporated into Japanese fi lms. To emphasize materi- ality is to recognize that even when Hollywood fi lm was popular in Japan, most of the profi t was kept by Japanese middlemen. And when the actual imports were substituted by Japanese versions, homage was mixed with parody. As Ozu hints in Woman of Tokyo ( Tokyo no onna, 1933), cinema was always exploitation, of topics and of opportunities for profi t. So how should we understand Japanese cinema’s too-close relation to Hollywood?
In a 1930 issue of Kinema Junpo, Okamura Akira praised Ozu Yasujiro’s Walk Cheerfully ( Hogaraki ni ayume, 1930) for its “portrait of gangsters who are so natu- ral in their actions that it’s as if a gang of ruffi ans from New York’s East Side red light district had immigrated [ iseki shite ] to Japan” and went on to praise the sensibility of Ozu’s set design and camera position that reproduces the American fi lms perfectly. 54 Postwar writer Sato Tadao summarized the common sense among prewar critics when he praised the “peculiar reality” of Ozu’s Th at Night’s Wife, in which “if a young Japanese couple lived on the back streets of New York, this is what they would be like.” 55 Sato’s sup- position expresses a general attitude among Japanese fi lm critics in the period before the
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cultural turn toward militarism sent it underground: not so much lamenting the theft of Japanese cultural patrimony, nor detecting allegories of resistance in Japanese fi lms, but aiming for impossible formulations that point up the instability and humor of the sensory experience the fi lms provide, as a means of lightening the burden of standing on the global periphery.
My name for that sensory experience is “transcultural mimesis.” Transcultural because it entails “translation” or “adaptation” across a marked cultural boundary, something that was always part of the production and reception of these fi lms, and mimesis because the relation of original and copy is ever-present in this “mimetic medium.” Rather than the reductive sense of mimesis as naïve copying, I would like to restore to mimesis some of the complexity of its original uses: in classical Greece, mimesis and its cognates encompassed ritual repetition as a form of ontological re-presencing, the dramatic staple of the parodic stereotype, and the Aristotlian sense of learning by imitation that was revived by Frankfurt School thinkers. 56 Th ere is a “closeness” to mimesis that is not part of all copying, what Michael Taussig calls
“the nature that culture uses to create second nature”—a pre-rational intimacy that Adorno and Benjamin also saw as a way out of the subject-object divide. 57 Th is essay has reread fi lms and the critical discourse on them to discover at least three aspects of the “adaptation” of foreign cinema in Japan: aspects that could be termed homage, parody, and learning. Japanese fi lmmakers were engaged in a practice of transcultural mimesis that aimed, simultaneously, at re-creating Hollywood fi lm in Japan, parody- ing the absurdities of American cinema (e.g., heterosexual romance, strong female characters) in the Japanese context, and even learning from the gap between Japanese and American cinema something of the invisible but nonetheless real “geopolitical incline” between Japan and the United States. Rather than dismiss this complex of impure motivations as derivative or simply “Americanized,” we should recognize it instead as the specifi city of Japanese cinema, or at least cinema on the global periphery, a psychological expression of the material conditions to which East Asian fi lmmakers
“faced up” throughout the studio period. 58
Critics in 1930s Japan seem to have been more ready to acknowledge that complexity than current writers. Film director Yamamoto Kajiro noted in his autobiography that Hollywood was oft en written as “
聖 林
” or “holy wood,” a pun that Yamamoto acknowl- edges but then dismisses by arguing that it was simply a mistake. Mistake or not, it’s funny: the translation resonates with the combination of worshipful respect, absur- dity, and wry acknowledgment of geopolitical unevenness that seems characteristic of peacetime Japanese studio cinema. 59 Not just a code, nor an ideology, we need a broader understanding of the pleasures of this “transcultural mimesis” that acknowledges both the fl uidity it introduces into cultural identity and the multifaceted nature of “imita- tion.” Actual audiences are notoriously opaque, but by paying close attention to the fi lms, the fi lm culture of which they were part, and their popular discursive reception we can at least speculate on the “structure of feeling” of a minimally specifi ed but still real audience that engaged with these fi lms. 6005_Miyao_CH05.indd 115
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Conclusion
How then should we understand the history of shameless adaptation in Japanese cin- ema, made as if the other culture had “immigrated to Japan”? Cinema in Japan was always adaptation: from other media, to particular contexts, and of a foreign form.
Th is chapter has been about that last kind of adaptation, of Hollywood cinema itself as a powerful cultural other. Surely there is something “punctual” about the late 1920s, just as Japanese fi lm production was establishing its dominance, that makes adapta- tions of Hollywood cinema particularly pointed. But that concern extends through- out the studio period, even at the height of the “cultural war” against the West. For example, when Japanese critics debated what the new “People’s Film” ( kokumin eiga ) should be in the early 1940s, the dominant understanding of the task became not how to produce an ethically and aesthetically Japanese cinema but how to replace Gone with the Wind for citizens of a pan-Asian empire that preferred Hollywood to Japanese fi lm. 61 Th e most successful of the new People’s Films were action fi lms with clear ref- erences to foreign sources such as Stagecoach and Olympia, and even Ri Koran, the biggest of the wartime pan-Asian stars, followed a trail of celebrity blazed by Deanna Durbin in Japan. 62
Even more explicitly, the “cinema of high economic growth” of the 1950s and 1960s both copied directly and commented on its relation to American cinema and culture.
Toho’s musical fi lms starring pop singer celebrities such as Misora Hibari and Yukimura Izumi constantly tweaked the substitutability of these “imitation” ( monomane ) singers and their Western models. Th e stars’ transmedia celebrity and the fi lms’ cultural pro- miscuity were vehicles for the thoroughgoing exploitation of a popular culture that at fi rst glance seems to originate in the West. Even the song tunes were copied from foreign originals, leading Kawakita Kashiko, the doyenne of fi lm exporters, to say she would love to show the fi lm to foreigners as an example of Japanese cinema now—but it would be too expensive to clear the copyrights. 63 Aft er the ANPO protests of 1960, those refer- ences became more cynical, even in the seemingly popcorn musical genre. For example, Young Season ( Wakai kisetsu, 1962), the fi lm adaptation of a TV drama series played almost entirely by pop singers, is an “industrial competition” ( sangyo kyoso ) musical comedy set among cosmetics companies competing for foreign technology to develop
“drinkable foundation” (drink it and become white). Th e fi lm dramatizes a post-ANPO resentment toward the “geopolitical incline” by dissolving it in absurd comedy at the same time as preserving a pointed critique of global racial politics. How much more knowing can the cinema be? Enough to also claim, in another throwaway line, that these days “the copy is better than the original.” Th at cynicism is foregrounded, too, in the notorious “fi lms without nationality” of the early 1960s, in particular the “wan- dering outlaw” series starring Kobayashi Akira. Th e fi lms have a reputation as straight imitations of the western “singing cowboy” genre, but as Watanabe Takenobu astutely observes, the central character Taki Shinji carries the traumatic history of World War II along with his guitar, and the genre is characterized by an absurd overlay of western
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genre conventions, including wide-open landscapes, and touristic Japanese locations where it is always “the day of the festival” when Taki comes to town. 64 Th e fi lms are not stable allegories but ambivalent fantasies—of beating up hairy foreigners in bars, for example, while at the same time siding with the Ainu against predatory Japanese developers.
From copy to adaptation—the pleasure of these fi lms seems something like the Benjaminian vernacular modernism analyzed by Miriam Hansen. Not simply a matter of refl exivity but a taking up of social reality in the mode of play . 65 Like Benjamin on the power of cinema, these fi lms value playing at being American, though they never forget that the border exists. Th e fi lms remind us that Americanization is more com- plicated than the language of “cultural fl ow” allows: they ambivalently engage in and expose the growth of an “Americanization without America,” which challenges the reduction of cultural forms to economic interests. Regulatory barriers lead to a kind of “cultural quantum tunneling” in which particles of foreign fi lms seen only by an educated, cinephile minority (including fi lmmakers) appear in popular Japanese cin- ema, despite barriers caused by quotas, subtitling, and cultural distance. Th ose regu- lations reduced the trade defi cit, but they did not preserve a hermetically “Japanese”
cultural zone. Instead, a large fraction of Japanese studio cinema is distinguished by a baroque fascination with its Western parallel—a fascination that extends to the explicitly nationalist gangster fi lms of the 1960s and the countercultural porno-period fi lms (clearly modeled on blaxploitation) of the 1970s. We cannot understand fi lms, or the debates around them, without recognizing that dual orientation of Japanese fi lm and fi lm discourse: toward the authority of Western cinema and toward the project of making it “Japanese.”
Vernacular cinema comes into being in acts of violent appropriation, and is not simply the result of cultural colonization. But the agency does not lie simply with cre- ative reception either, even when conceptualized as labor-power: vernacularization leaves no layer unturned. 66 Tradition and the past become topics of debate within vari- ous modernities that cannot be disciplined solely by geography. 67 Writing the history of audiovisual adaptation, at least in the relatively successful capitalist modernization of East Asia, calls for a theory of transnational cinema in which geopolitical uneven- ness is measured by the specifi cs of regulation and institution, and actual textual fi guration, as much as by the “logic” of late capital. Cinema is not simply “remade in Japan”—instead of indulging in horizontal wishful thinking we should consider how “facing up” to Hollywood engaged all the modes of transcultural mimesis. 68 From the introduction of cinema until the 1970s, cinema in Japan, even when it dominated the domestic box offi ce, was haunted by foreign, especially American, fi lms. Th at intertext was both a model and a threat—and an interpretive horizon. As the geo- political incline levels out we risk losing sight of how cinema in Japan was a form of adaptation: not only from theater and literature but from something closely iden- tifi ed with the West into something more ambiguous that could split the diff erence between homage and parody, and sometimes even become an instrument of refl exive understanding.
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Notes
1 . See, for example, Hortense Powdermaker , Hollywood: Th e Dream Factory ( Grosset
& Dunlap , 1950 ) on fantasy; Ruth Vasey , Th e World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 ( Madison : University of Wisconsin Press , 1997 ) on international trade; and of course Christian Metz , Th e Imaginary Signifi er ( Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 1982 ) on absent objects.
2 . Th is was recognized early by Walter Benjamin in his famous article “Th e Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , vol. 2 ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2005 ).
3 . For the idea of heterotopia as an “other space” that juxtaposes incompatible spaces and incompatible dimensions, see Michel Foucault , “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 ( 1986 ) . Foucault’s idea is valuable precisely because it is abstract and not formal: it is neither positive nor negative, not tied to a particular defi nition of medium, and points to the way that spaces of illusion can destabilize social life outside them in the way that I am describing here. Cinema is both heterotopic and heteronomic: it gives access to other spaces, but at the same time exerts power over the perceiving subject.
4 . For some sophisticated examples, see the essays in Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman , eds., World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives ( New York : Routledge , 2010 ).
5 . Th e classic statement of the problem is Armand Mattelart’s infl uential How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic ( New York : International General , 1975 ) . See also Toby Miller , “Cinema Studies Doesn’t Matter: Or, I Know What You Did Last Semester,” in Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies , ed. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo ( London : Routledge , 2001 ) . Aspects of the argument are echoed in Mette Hjort , “Th emes of Nation,” in Cinema and Nation , ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie ( London; New York : Routledge , 2000 ) , and Yomota Inuhiko , Ajia eiga no taishuteki sozoryoku ( Tokyo : Seidosha , 2003 ).
6 . Yamamoto Kikuo , Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyo (Th e Infl uence of Foreign Film on Japanese Films) ( Tokyo : Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu , 1983 ).
7 . See Steven Croft s , “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14 , no. 3 ( 1993 ) for a rejection of Hollywood as the “Big Other.” Against that rigidity, Th omas Elsaesser argues for the signifi cance of foreign fi lm to the constitution of a national cinema in New German Cinema ( New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press , 1989 ) . In an essay full of spatial metaphors, one more at the margin: we should recognize a
“non-commutative cultural distance” that makes Japan further from the United States than the United States is from Japan.
8 . See, for example, Jenny Lau , Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia ( Philadelphia : Temple University Press , 2003 ) ; Kinnea Shuk-Ting Yau , Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries: Understanding the Origins of East Asian Film Networks ( London; New York : Routledge , 2011 ) ; Dina Iordanova , Cinema at the Periphery ( Detroit : Wayne State University Press , 2010 ) ; Fredric Jameson , A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present ( London; New York : Verso , 2002 ) ; and Harry Harootunian , Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2001 ).
9 . For the critique of received opinion that is “agreeable to reason” see Charles Peirce , Collected Papers 2.166 ( Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press , 1932 )
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