ABSTRACT Realities That Matter: The Development of Realist Film Theory and Practice in Japan, 1895-1945 Naoki Yamamoto

2012
My dissertation, "Realities That Matter: The Development of Realist Film Theory and Practice in Japan, 1895-1945," examines the process by which realism became the dominant mode of Japanese filmmaking and criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. Beyond giving an overview of the films or directors already labeled "realist" in general histories of Japanese cinema, it explores how the emergence of the cinematic apparatus at the end of nineteenth century and its subsequent development into a distinct form of art and mass entertainment altered the ways in which Japanese people dealt with the issues of realism at large. Where earlier studies have treated the creation of theory, or systematic knowledge about the given object, as the exclusive domain of the West, I intend to illuminate the work of Japanese critics and thinkers who, like their Western counterparts, strove to theorize their speculations about social, cultural, and perceptual changes engendered by the global circulation of film and its major theories. A blend of archival research and close readings of individual texts, this study mainly considers five types of realismNaturalism, machine realism, textual realism, epistemological realism, and phenomenological realismas they developed with Japanese cinema's long struggle with the truly elusive nature of realism as a critical concept. My investigation into the rich but mostly neglected tradition of Japanese realist film aesthetics provides a critical point of comparison for current scholarship on the historical conjunction between realism and world cinema.

Along the same line, "Realities that Matter" aims to offer a more accurate an dynamic history of cultural exchanges between the West and non-West, a history in which Japanese cinema no longer plays a role of an ideal "Other" of European and Hollywood classical filmmaking. Beginning with the introduction of Naturalism in the 1910s, each chapter reveals how Japanese filmmakers and critics of the following decades developed their own conceptions of cinematic realism in response to the latest trends in critical theories and film practice imported from abroad. In Chapter 2,1 look into the art historian Itagaki Takao's concept of "machine realism," which he proposed in the late 1920s by drawing upon the writings of contemporary European modernists such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier, and Dziga Vertov; Chapters 3 and 4 provide detailed accounts of the reactions of Japanese cinema to the emergence of realist film schools in 1930s Europe, including French poetic realism, Soviet socialist realism, and the British Documentary Film Movement; and Chapter 5 scrutinizes a group of Japanese thinkers of the early 1940s who developed a theory of phenomenological realism under the strong influence of Henri Bergson. Considering these instances in detail, this study presents the historical development of Japanese realist film theory and practice as part of a genuinely modern and global phenomenon of the twentieth century. Japanese cinema's take on the issues of realism was not always on par with its Western counterparts. But as I argue repeatedly in the following pages, such deviations should not be read as Japanese filmmakers and theorists' lack of knowledge about the things happening outside the country but rather as their conscious and critical response to the alleged "universality" of Western discourse.

Realities That Matter: The Development of Realist Film Theory and Practice in Japan, 1895-1945

A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by

Naoki Yamamoto

Dissertation Director: Aaron Gerow

May 2012

UMI Number: 3525380

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 2012 by Naoki Yamamoto All rights reserved.

ABSTRACT Realities That Matter: The Development of Realist Film Theory and Practice in Japan, 1895-1945 Naoki Yamamoto 2012 My dissertation, "Realities That Matter: The Development of Realist Film Theory and Practice in Japan, 1895-1945," examines the process by which realism became the dominant mode of Japanese filmmaking and criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. Beyond giving an overview of the films or directors already labeled "realist" in general histories of Japanese cinema, it explores how the emergence of the cinematic apparatus at the end of nineteenth century and its subsequent development into a distinct form of art and mass entertainment altered the ways in which Japanese people dealt with the issues of realism at large. Where earlier studies have treated the creation of theory, or systematic knowledge about the given object, as the exclusive domain of the West, I intend to illuminate the work of Japanese critics and thinkers who, like their Western counterparts, strove to theorize their speculations about social, cultural, and perceptual changes engendered by the global circulation of film and its major theories. A blend of archival research and close readings of individual texts, this study mainly considers five types of realismNaturalism, machine realism, textual realism, epistemological realism, and phenomenological realismas they developed with Japanese cinema's long struggle with the truly elusive nature of realism as a critical concept. My investigation into the rich but mostly neglected tradition of Japanese realist film aesthetics provides a critical point of comparison for current scholarship on the historical conjunction between realism and world cinema.

iii

Along the same line, '"Realities that Matter" aims to offer a more accurate an dynamic history of cultural exchanges between the West and non-West, a history in which Japanese cinema no longer plays a role of an ideal "Other" of European and Hollywood classical filmmaking. Beginning with the introduction of Naturalism in the 1910s, each chapter reveals how Japanese filmmakers and critics of the following decades developed their own conceptions of cinematic realism in response to the latest trends in critical theories and film practice imported from abroad. In Chapter 2,1 look into the art historian Itagaki Takao's concept of "machine realism," which he proposed in the late 1920s by drawing upon the writings of contemporary European modernists such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier, and Dziga Vertov; Chapters 3 and 4 provide detailed accounts of the reactions of Japanese cinema to the emergence of realist film schools in 1930s Europe, including French poetic realism, Soviet socialist realism, and the British Documentary Film Movement; and Chapter 5 scrutinizes a group of Japanese thinkers of the early 1940s who developed a theory of phenomenological realism under the strong influence of Henri Bergson. Considering these instances in detail, this study presents the historical development of Japanese realist film theory and practice as part of a genuinely modern and global phenomenon of the twentieth century. Japanese cinema's take on the issues of realism was not always on par with its Western counterparts. But as I argue repeatedly in the following pages, such deviations should not be read as Japanese filmmakers and theorists' lack of knowledge about the things happening outside the country but rather as their conscious and critical response to the alleged "universality" of Western discourse.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENS Page

INTRODUCTION: REALISM, JAPANESE CINEMA, FILM STUDIES CHAPTER I. NATURALISM AND MODERNIZATION OF JAPANESE CINEMA Nippon Realism? Naturalism in Modern Japanese Literature New Apparatus, Old Realism Film as a Naturalistic Medium Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and the Cinematizaion of the World

16 16 21 27 35 48

II. EYES OF THE TEWENTIETH CENTURY: MACHINE AESTHETICS AND THE DEBATES ON NEW REALISM 58 The Avant-garde Art Movement in 1920s Japan 61 Itagaki Takao and Machine Realism 70 Kurahara Korehito and Proletarian Realism 82 Anxieties about the Absence of the Human Eye 89 III. DOUBLE MEDIATION: LITERARY ADAPTATION AND TEXTUAL REALISM 1934: The Year of Japanese Neorealismo Anti-Realist Tradition in Japanese Film Theory Literary Films and the Reinvention of Film Author Historical Film and Textual Realism IV. KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH, COGNITION: DOCUMENTARY FILM AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL REALISM Tosaka Jun: Film and Social Epistemology Nakai Masakazu: Toward an Unmediated Collectivity Imamura Taihei: Documenting the War Effort Integrating Fiction and Non-fiction V. EXPERIENCING THE WORLD THROUGH CINEMA: THE NEGLECTED TRADITION OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN JAPANESE CINEMA Phenomenology and Japanese Cinema Sugiyama Heiichi: Film as a Closed Window Nagae Michitaro: The Reciprocal Transformation of Film and Reality BIBLIOGRAPHY

101 103 107 119 142

157 162 179 194 208

216 216 224 240 261

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation could not have been accomplished without the support, guidance, and encouragement I received from a number of scholars, colleagues, and institutions. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Professor Aaron Gerow. Ever since I first took his undergraduate seminar on Japanese cinema a decade ago at Meiji Gakuin University in Japan, Prof. Gerow has been a model for my intellectual activities as well as the most rigorous reader of my scholarly work. I also am grateful to my teachers at Meiji GakuinProfessors Unami Akira, Yomota lnuhiko, SaitS Ayako, and Monma Takashifor their initial and substantive invitations to the world of knowledge. My debt to teachers and fellow students at Yale is equally enormous. Professors Dudley Andrew, John Treat, John MacKay, Christopher Hill, Francesco Casetti, and Brigitte Peucker all provided me helpful suggestions and criticisms with patience at various stages of the writing process; my friends Arthur Mitchell, Ryan Cook, John Graves, Kendall Heitzman, Jennifer Feeley, Wei Yang, Takuya Tsunoda, Rea Amit, and Youn-mi Kim all made my life at Yale more lively and rewarding. In addition, I am deeply indebted to Sam Malissa for his editorial help. Along the way, this dissertation has benefited from many people outside my home institutions. I want to thank Abe Mark Nornes, Thomas LaMarre, Michael Raine, Roland Domenig, Jonathan M. Hall, Joanne Bernardi, William 0. Gardner, Diane Wei Lewis, Pat Noonan, Alex Zhalten, Sharron Hayashi, Furuhata Yuriko, Nakamura Hideyuki, Fujii

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Jinshi, and Hirasawa Go, for their insightful inputs and the animated conversations I had with them at both conference sites and private occasions. My thanks also to Weihong Bao and Jane Gaines for inviting me to give a lecture on my work in progress at their "Sites of Cinema" seminar. Attended by scholars from various areas and fields, the seminar helped me a lot to reshape my argument beyond the reach of Japanese film studies. Research for this dissertation was made possible by the generous support of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale. In addition to various research and travel grants, the Council funded me with the three-year East Asia Prize Fellowship that allowed me to focus entirely on this project after the course work period. I am especially grateful to Abbey Newman, Melissa Keeler Jungeblut, Amy Greenberg, Anne Letterman, and other staffs of the Council for their unfailing generosity and hospitality. I also want to thank the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for funding my summer research at the Pacific Film Archive in 2007. Although my initial interest at the time is barely visible in this finished product, dozens of rare 35mm prints I watched (and touched) there have remained an irreplaceable experience in my life as a film scholar. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my family for their support over many years. Though living on the other side of the Atlantic, my parents have always been ready to give a help whenever I needed it. I also want to thank my grandparents who have long supported my graduate studies financially and emotionally. To commemorate their unflagging love and trust in me, I dedicate this dissertation to them.

INTRODUCTION REALISM, JAPANESE CINEMA, FILM STUDIES

Over the past decades, more than hundreds of books and articles have been written about either realism or Japanese cinema. Nevertheless, realism in Japanese cinema, or more specifically, the ways in which Japanese cinema developed its own theories and practice on cinematic realism during the first half of the twentieth century, seems to have received little attention. This is partly because access to primary historical sources has been limited, especially to those written in Japanese. But the main reason for this neglect, I contend, lies in the common assumption that realism, or the truthful representation of reality, is the exclusive domain of Western art (as in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis)? whereas anti-realism, or the abstraction of reality, is regarded as the domain of Japanese art (as in Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs).2 This schematic dyad between realism/Western culture and anti-realism/Japanese culture remained intact when it was transplanted into the discourse of film studies in the 1970s. Writing under the strong influence of post-structuralism, for instance, Jean-Louis Baudry stressed in 1970 that the sense of visual verisimilitude we find in classical Hollywood or European films still follows the Renaissance model of representation; it conceals the fact that cinema is "an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant

1 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Task (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953). 2

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

ideology" by giving us a "false" impression of occupying the position of the subject.3 Meanwhile, Noel Burch, another famous post-structuralist from the same era, maintained in his 1977 book To the Distant Observer: Forms and Meanings of the Japanese Cinema that the tradition of Japanese theaters like kahuki effectively helped "preserve the Japanese cinema against the ideology of'realism' which rapidly took over the cinema of the West."4 Moreover, in order to emphasize the substantive difference of Japan from the West, Burch went on declare that "the very notion of theory is alien to Japan; it is considered a property of Europe and the West," without questioning his inability to read Japanese-language materials.5 It is obvious that Burch constructed his view of an antirealistic and anti-theoretical Japanese cinema as part of his relentless attack on the truth claims of Western realist filmmaking. However appropriate in motivation, Burch's argument left little room to talk about the actual collaboration between realism and Japanese cinema in their own right. The primary task of this study is to recast this fantasized view of Japanese cinema as an ideal "Other" of Western filmmaking and its theorization by looking at the process by which realism became the central concerns of Japanese film discourse and practice in the first half of the twentieth century. Both films and written documents I collected through archival research clearly tell us that Japanese filmmakers and critics did embrace film as a realistic medium from its inception, and that they have ever since developed their own theories and practice in regards to cinematic realism. Moreover, since the

3 Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974-1975), reprinted in Movies and Methods, Vol.2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 540. 4 Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, rev. and ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 83. 5

Ibid., 13.

emergence of film journalism in the 1910s, the Japanese film world had been marked by its persistent desire to cultivate its own film culture by importing the latest trends from abroad. As a result, all major theoretical texts by Hugo Miinsterberg, Jean Epstein, Bela Balazs. Sergei Eisenstein, and Rudolf Arnheim were translated into Japanese by the mid1930s.6 Similarly, there was virtually no time lag between Japan and the West in their conversion to realism after the coming of sound to film, as Japanese filmmakers and critics of the time lively discussed the future of domestic sound filmmaking in comparison with the rise of such "realist" film schools like the British Documentary Film Movement, French poetic realism, and even Soviet socialist realism. Given these historical backgrounds, I argue through this study that the advent and development of realist film aesthetics in prewar and wartime Japan is inseparable from the global circulation of classical film theory and practice. And if Japanese cinema's take on the issues of cinematic realism appeared different from its Western counterparts, it was precisely because of the conscious attempts of the Japanese to speak back to the alleged universality of Western realist traditions. In this study, however, I will not pursue a project that aims to celebrate the discovery of a distinctively "Japanese" school of cinematic realism. Rather, 1 will explore the neglected tradition of Japanese realist aesthetics in order to address some fundamental problems of film and realism still prevalent in the conventional discourse of AngloAmerican film studies. Topics for the debate include: Why has our general assessment

6 See Hugo Miinsterberg, Eigageki: Sono shinrigaku to bigaku [The Photoplay: A Psychological Study], trans. Kuze Kotaro (Tokyo: Omura Shoten, 1924); Jean Epstein, "Eiga noteki yoso" [an abridged translation of'Le cinematographe vue de I'Etna"], trans. Okada Shinkichi, Eiga orai 24 (December 1926): 34-37; Bela Balazs, Eiga bigaku to eiga shakaigaku [Der Geist des Films], trans. Sasaki Norio (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1932); Sergei Eisenstein, Eiga no benshoho [Dialectics of Cinema, an original anthology of Eisenstein's writings], trans. Sasaki Norio (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1932); Rudolf Arnheim, Geijutsu to shite no eiga [Film als Kunst], trans. Sasaki Norio (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1933).

always treated realism as competing with modernism, as indicated by the opposition between prewar formalist modernism and postwar ontological realism, as well as between postwar ontological realism and post-1968 political modernism? If we are to accept these oppositions as a fait accompli in film studies, how should we address the work of directors like Carl Dreyer, Ozu Yasujiro, and Michelangelo Antonioni who made frequent transitions from one side to another in their careers? How should we deal with the elusive nature of realism as a critical concept, which one critic has once described as "a monster with many heads desperately in need of disentangling"?7 What kind of benefits can we achieve once we get away from the one-sided attack of 1970s poststructuralist film theories that condemned cinematic realism of whatever strip for its ideological backwardness? Finally, how can we dwell on the issues of cinematic realism in non-Western contexts given that the asserted opposition between modernism and realism cannot be applied? In his 1988 article tactfully entitled "The Existence of Italy," Fredric Jameson offers an insightful argument that helps us tackle these questions. Jameson begins by reminding us that there are both epistemological and aesthetic vocations whenever realism claims itself to be the truthful representation of reality. At first glance, the coexistence of such opposing vocations seems to make realism unstable as a critical concept. For one thing, says Jameson, "the attempt to reinforce and to shore up the epistemological vocation of the work generally involves the suppression of the formal properties of the realistic 'text" and promotes an increasingly naive and unmediated or

Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 328.

reflective conception of aesthetic construction and reception."8 At the same time, the opposite is also true, for many aesthetically composed realistic texts in turn tend to suppress their epistemological aspectsa desire to know the truth of the worldby focusing on the creation of the norms and conventions to enhance visual or literary "reality-effects" on the level of representation. Instead of seeking any easy solution, Jameson sees in this very hybridity the theoretical uniqueness and historical significance of realism, insisting that "no other aestheticwhatever its manner of justifying the social or psychological function of artincludes the epistemological function in this central fashion."9 This redefinition of realism enables us to grasp the logic behind its truly elusive nature. If realism drastically changes its connotation according to a variety of adjectives added to it such as "poetic," "social," "socialist," "ontological," and "perceptional," it is precisely because these adjectives point to different parameters between epistemological and aesthetic claims. On the other hand, realism's integration of the epistemological into the realm of the aesthetic has its roots in the unique historical demand of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury modernity, the demand that sought the objective truth of the world around us through scientific findings and technological inventions. Nevertheless, we are so accustomed to the clear-cut distinction between nineteenth-century realism and twentiethcentury modernism that we have conventionally applied the same division even when we talk about realism in cinema, a genuine product of the twentieth century. In order to break with this convention, Jameson suggests that we reverse our general understanding of the

Fredric Jameson, "The Existence of Italy," in Signature of the Visible (New York: Routledge,

1992), 158.
9

Ibid.

terms "realism" and "modernism." The result is that realism reemerges as a "form of demiurgic praxis" that restores "some active and even playful/experimental impulse to the inertia of its appearance as a copy or representation of things"; in turn, modernism becomes a "passive-receptive activity, a discovery procedure like science, a process of attention no less demanding and disciplined than submission to free association."10 Needless to say, what Jameson tries to do here is not to deconstruct the autonomy of the terms per se but to illuminate a certain continuity, if not a full compatibility, between realism and modernism within a broader context of modernity. Indeed, both realism and modernism alternately appeared at given moments in the history of cinema, sharing a similar desire to establish a more trustful way of perceiving and expressing the multiple truths of the modern age. One of the advantages of working on critical discourse in Japan from the first half of the twentieth century is its potential to make more explicit the continuity between realism and modernism. Generally speaking, a non-Western country like Japan is marked by its belated entry into the modern age. For this reason, realism and modernism, or any critical concepts imported from the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, equally yielded a strong sense of the modern, regardless of the conceptual or expressive differences between them. As we will see in the first chapter, for instance, the pursuit of "objective" or "naturalistic" depictions of everyday life in both Japanese literature and film was not a historical given but a genuine product of the modernization (Westernization) of existing local modes of representation. Indeed, the premise of socalled Japanese Naturalism was to describe the world "as it is" (ari no mama), and this

"'Ibid., 162-163.

venture would not have been possible without their innovative use of the genbun itchi, a new writing style invented in the late nineteenth century in order to unify written and spoken language. Likewise, advocates of the Pure Film Movement (fun'eigageki undo) in the 1910s, which aimed to "modernize" Japanese cinema by importing the innovations of Hollywood and European films, openly criticized the domestic film industry not only for its reliance and such extra cinematic devices like the benshi (oral performers who provided live narration for silent films) but also for its lack of serious concern for realism on the level of mise-en-scene. By the mid-1920s, Japanese writers and filmmakers began to experiment with new modes of expression under the direct influence of the European avant-garde art movement. But again, a certain compatibility between realism and modernism was evident here; if there existed what one could call "Japanese modernism" in this period, it encompassed less particular styles or schools formed after Western originals than a diverse range of creative and critical responses of Japanese artists to massive transformations in their everyday environment. As with their western counterparts, Japanese modernist writers like Yokomitsu Riichi "revolted" against the prevalent literary and artistic conventions, in particular those demanded by Japanese Naturalism. However, the major target of this modernist attack in Japan was by no means the premise of realism as such, for Yokomitsu pointedly criticized the ineffectiveness of the genbun ittchi style as a practical means to faithfully depict their own perceptual and bodily experience of modern life. As a result, Yokomitsu, in a 1925 manifesto for his own Shinkankaku-ha (New Impressionist School), declared that his literary experiment would be the conglomeration of "Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, Symbolism,

Constructivism, and some of the realists."11 Thus in some sense, it can be said that Yokomitsu and his colleagues' attempts to develop a "modernist" mode of composing prose fiction was motivated by their profound desire to establish a new realism, insofar as they explored a new way of "knowing" and "depicting" the more complicated and elusive reality of 1920s Japan. Not surprisingly, a similar move was also found in the field of film theory. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, the art historian Itagaki Takao elaborated his theory of "machine realism" (kikai no riarizumu) by drawing upon the work of 1920s European modernists like Le Corbusier, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Dziga Vertov. Seen from the perspective of Western canons, these frequent violations of the boundary between realism and modernism would only prove the shallowness of Japanese critical discourse. To be sure. Japan had no indigenous realist tradition that one could compare with that of France or other European countries. But this same "shallowness" takes on greater importance when it comes to the issue of cinematic realism, for Japan's lack of indigenous realist culture helped Japanese film critics discuss and elaborate new theories of realism according to cinema's own properties, rather than to ready-made definitions of literary or theatrical realism developed in the paste centuries. Indeed, in reading the Japanese debates on cinematic realism, one often encounters the statement that realism in film isor should bedifferent from the realism found in any other forms of art. Of course, this was in part because one of the main goals of classical film theory was to promote film as an independent form of art. Yet a more significant reason is that Japanese film critics and thinkers of the time foregrounded the historicity of the film medium, repeatedly stating that cinema was serving both as a mirror that reflects the
' 1 Yokomitsu Riichi, "Kankaku katsudo," Bungei jidai 2.1(1925), quoted in Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2008), 12.

objective truth of reality of their times as well as an active agent that itself constitutes a new reality of the twentieth century. In his 1936 essay appropriately titled "Eiga no riarizumu" (Realism in Film), the critic Tsuji Hisakazu clarified the general concern underlying prewar and wartime Japanese discourse on realism: Today's artists no longer maintain the fortune that allowed nineteenth-century writers to detect and depict reality under the aegis of Naturalism without casting doubt on their own methods. The term "realism" now becomes subject to each individual's interpretation, and its contested meanings are valid only among those sharing the same interpretation.... The sole principle of realism has disappeared. The twentieth century seemed to begin with this recognition.12 The main goal of this study is to trace how Japanese intellectualsincluding filmmakers, film and art critics, and philosophersattempted to theorize this undoubtedly modern experience of the disappearance of the sole principle of realism through their critical, self-reflective speculations about cinema and its new form of mediation between people and reality. In order to address this complex problem with the necessary precision, I narrow my focus to the first half of the twentieth century. For, as is now clear, this period was marked by the end of the dominance of the nineteenth-century model of realism and the beginning of the institutionalization of realist film theory and practice, which was inaugurated by Andre Bazin's influential theory of "ontological realism" and his beloved Italian neorealist films. With the probable disappearance of celluloid film stock as the material (and ontological) basis of making and viewing the moving image, dozens of film scholars recently attempted re-classification of the issues of cinematic realism. For instance, in her introduction to the 2003 anthology Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, Ivone Margulies proudly states that "the essays [in this volume] focus on issues that had

12

Tsuji Hisakazu, "Eiga no riarizumu," Eiga hyoron 18.7 (July 1936): 96.

become taboo in the 1970s theoretical equation of realism and essentialism." She then draws new attention to Andre Bazin's existentialist take on the "contingency of reality," which is captured by the camera beyond the intention of the filmmakers and itself functions to "flesh out the changeable nature of realism and provide categories in which to consider new emerging representational aesthetics."13 Ian Aitken, in his 2006 book Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth-Century Lukacsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions, pursues a more radical and in some sense essentialist view, as his argument was based primarily on a strong belief that "the origins, objectives and central characteristics of nineteenth-century realism have...not been sufficiently understood within the field of film studies."14 Despite his emphasis on the term "the nineteenthcentury," Aitken is also motivated by his desire to dispel the "specter" of poststructuralist film theory. Indeed, the second half of the book offers a reevaluation of canonical film theorists like Siegfried Kracauer and Bazin by relocating them within a broader context of twentieth-century philosophy. The present study echoes with these recent revivals of realism as a critical concept in the sense that it seeks instructive lessons applicable to today's "crisis of ontological realism" through its exploration of the history of film theory. At the same time, however, my main concern differs from such recent works because I approach the main body of Japanese realist filmmaking and criticism without judging them through the lens of the established notions of cinematic realism given by Bazin or any other acclaimed theorists on this topic. Rather, I aim to listen to what Japanese critics and thinkers tell us through

Ivone Margulies, "Bodies Too Much," in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 5. Ian Aitken, Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth-Century Lukacsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 8.
14

11

10

their own writings, to scrutinize the multiple and at times conflicting definitions they gave to what they considered to be realism in and of cinema. In this regard, 1 hope that my project will be a positive and empirical answer to David Rodowick's call for a new approach to the history of film theory: "we need a more precise conceptual picture of how film became associated with theory in the early twentieth century, and how ideas of theory vary in different historical periods and national contexts."15 But again my emphasis is on the fact that ideas of cinematic realism vary even within the same national and historical context. Chapter 1 lays the ground for our inquiries by looking at the degree to which Naturalism, a literary concept imported to Japan at the turn of the century at the same time as the cinematic apparatus itself was imported, impacted the formation of Japanese discourse on cinematic realism during the first two decades of the twentieth century. My argument is that the translation of Naturalist ideas took place not only when it was transferred from France to Japan in the realm of literature but also when it was transmitted through the different media of literature, theater, and film within their own local contexts. Generally speaking, the historical significance of Naturalism in Japan is in the role it played as a driving force for the modernization of both literary and performing arts. It is thus not surprising that supporters of the Pure Film Movement, the first major reform of Japanese cinema occurring in the mid-to-late 1910s, made some of their basic claims based on the demand of Japanese Naturalism to depict the world "as it is.'" Yet, as we will see, the reformers' "modernized" conception of film as a naturalistic medium became the subject of heated disputes by the early 1920s, as people began to realize that

15

David Rodowick, "An Elegy for Theory," October 122 (Fall 2007): 94.

11

the visual, cultural, and perceptual shocks brought by cinema frequently went beyond the common conception of Naturalist discourse. Chapter 2 examines how cinema's ability to reveal the hidden truths of reality, to make the invisible visible, changed the direction of the Japanese debates over cinematic realism. Here, I draw special attention to the work of the art historian Itagaki Takao, who in the late 1920s sought to detect the primary quality of twentieth-century art by observing the functional beauty of modern machinery, including airplanes, ocean liners, skyscrapers, iron bridges, and cinema. Of greatest interest in Itagaki's writings is that he coined the term "machine realism" to refer to his theory of machine aesthetics, despite his reliance on the work of European contemporaries such as Le Corbusier, Moholy-Nagy, and Vertov, Why is "realism" the term he chose to indicate his undoubtedly "modernist" concerns? I will answer this by locating Itagaki in the specific discursive context of 1920s Japan, or more specifically, by reading his texts against the theory of "proletarian realism," proposed in 1928 by the literary critic Kurahara Korehito. Beyond essential differences in their political perspectives, both men were equally motivated to establish a new social optic that could interpret the reality of their time more accurately than the human eye alone. Indeed, while the former suggested viewing the world through "the eye of the machine," the latter found it imperative to envision the coming of a socialist society with "the eye of the proletarian vanguard." In Chapter 3,1 proceed to investigate the consequence of the technological revolution that sound cinema brought to Japanese film discourse and practice. On the one hand, not a few filmmakers and critics sought the possibility of a cinematic realism based on the medium's extended recording capacity, but this was mostly done in the field of

12

non-fiction. Those involved in the production of fiction film, on the other hand, aimed to establish a different kind of realism, a realism in which a "human" artist discloses his or her critical interpretation of reality beyond the automatism of the cinematic apparatus. Among many attempts to achieve such a "non-ontological" and "human-oriented" realism was the adaptation of literature into sound filmmaking, as discussed in this chapter. The significance of literary adaptation in Japan was thus not restricted to its potential to provide viable models for enhancing the aural verisimilitude (i.e., dialogue) of sound films; instead, literary adaptation was truly important because it helped recast the notion of "film author" (eiga sakka) as such by promoting written scripts as the primary means of subjective expression. Looking closely at several representative works of literary adaptation in mid-to-late 1930s Japan, this chapter also brings to light the revival of Naturalist ideas among Japanese intellectuals. Looking at the same historical moment as the previous chapter, Chapter 4 provides a comparative reading of the work of three Japanese thinkersTosaka Jun, Nakai Masakazu, and Imamura Taiheiwho shared a similar desire to theorize the significant role that non-fiction films played in mediating between people and reality in the context of wartime Japan. Like Itagaki, Tosaka, Nakai, and Imamura all saw cinema as having the ability to reveal the hidden truths of reality. But their approaches were considerably different from Itagaki's, especially because of their mutual intention to socializeor even politicizethis shared capacity from the perspectives of Marxism and socialism. I refer to the realism at work in their theories as "epistemological realism," following the title of Tosaka's key essay "Cinema's Epistemological Value and Its Depiction of Social Customs" (1937). The premise of this realism is that with the

13

accuracy of the camera's gaze, film is able to reflect the objective truth of both natural and social phenomena; and only through the correct cognition of the new vision of reality mediated by cinema, can one conceive of a better world. My main concern here, however, is to look at how this familiar metaphor of "film as a mirror" became problematic when non-fiction films began to serve as a "weapon" of war propaganda. Finally, in chapter 5,1 seek to turn our attention to another significant, yet often neglected, facet consisting of realist film theory and practice: spectator. Most Japanese film critics and thinkers discussed in the previous chapters prioritized the roles of either the camera or the filmmaker, two competing agents both working on the side of film production. In contrast, Sugiyama Heiichi and Nagae Michitaro, two outstanding film theorists of the early 1940s, addressed the issue of cinematic realism through what I call a "phenomenological" approach, focusing on the significance of their own act of viewing, their own experience with the world as it is lived on and through the screen. Throughout the chapter, 1 attempt to specify the historical and cultural conditions that enabled this seemingly unexpected emergence of a Japanese phenomenological film theory before the end of World War II. In the meantime, I also seek a way to read both Sugiyama's and Nagae"s writings in relation to both the legacy of Bergsonian philosophy and the tradition of phenomenology in French film theory. By so doing, this chapter concludes our inquiries with the positive prospect for a truly productive comparative study of Western and non-Western film cultures, one that no longer exploits the latter for the alleged universality of the former. In this way, this study ultimately hopes to illustrate the rise of realist filmmaking and criticism in prewar and wartime Japan as a genuinely modern and global

14

phenomenon of the twentieth centurythat is, the century of cinema. The modernity Japan had experienced in its interwar years was no longer an "alternative" or "derivative" modernity as so defined by Japan's belated entry into the modern age. Rather, it constituted what Harry Harootunian calls a "co-eval" modernity, "inasmuch as it shared the same historical temporality of modernity (as a form of historical totalizing) found elsewhere in Europe and the United States." The advantage of the term "co-eval," says Harootunian, is in its ability to designate both the "contemporaneity of modern experience" beyond the alleged discrepancy between the West and the non-West as well as the "possibility of difference" stemming from each country and area's own cultural, political, and historical contexts.16 Seen this way, both Japan and its Western counterparts simultaneously came to the issues of cinematic realism at given moments in the twentieth century, but the ways in which they actually developed their theories and practice were not always identical, reflecting their own local demands. For this reason, highlighting the neglected tradition of Japanese realist film aesthetics will offer a new perspective from which to consider the question of twentieth-century modernity at large, a perspective that is no longer entrenched in the hierarchical dyads of modern and pre-modern, realism and modernism, the West and the non-West, and universalism and particularism. As Jameson contends, the time is ripe to "learn again, by experience, what genuine realism is."17

16 Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xvi-xvii. 17

Jameson, "The Existence of Italy," 174.

15

CHAPTER I NATURALISM AND THE MODERNIZATION OF JAPANESE CINEMA

Nippon Realism? In his contribution to Koza Nihon eiga, a seven-volume anthology on Japanese film history published in 1985-1988, film historian Sato Tadao coined the term "Nippon realism" (Nippon riarizumu) in reference to the flowering of realist filmmaking in Japan during the mid-to-late 1930s.18 It is true that in this period realism became a dominant concern within Japanese film discourse and practice at large, as suggested by one critic's declaration in 1936: "The direction our contemporary film art should move in is clearly indicated in the word 'realism [riarizumu\.,,,l<) However, the rise of realist filmmaking following the introduction of sound cinema at the turn of the 1930s was by no means unique to Japan. On the contrary, it was a truly international phenomenon that can be observed from Europe to Hollywood to Latin America. And with the emergence of Italian Neorealist films in the mid-1940s, realism became the dominant film aesthetics of the immediate postwar era when, in the words of Francesco Casetti, "this still marginalized request (that the cinema deal directly with reality) became a strong hypothesis, because it was no longer based, as it had been previously, on matters of style or effectiveness, but on an intrinsic necessity."20 Despite these well-known developments in film history, why

18 Sato Tadao, "TokT jidai: Nihon eigashi 3," in Tok.1 no jidai, vol. 3 of Koza Nihon eiga, eds. Imamura Shohei, Sato Tadao, et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986), 30.

''' Kurushima Yukio, "Eiga to riarizumu: Eiga riron no hatten o mezashite," Eiga hydron 124 (July 1936): 48. Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema: 1945-1995, trans. Francesca Chiostri and Elizabeth Gard Bartolini-Salimbeni, with Thomas Kelso (Austin: University of Texas, 1999), 21-22.
20

16

does Sato put emphasis on the advent of a "Japanese" realism in his account? Was there anything particular to Japan's take on cinematic realism in this period? Most importantly, what kind of realism is at work in his conception of "Nippon realism"? One possible response stems from the relative lack of attention that has been paid by international film critics to the tradition of Japanese realist filmmaking. This position would hold that Sat5 is simply advocating for the existence of a distinct realist film school in wartime Japan, one comparable with such internationally recognized schools as the British Documentary Film Movement, French Poetic Realism, and Italian Neorealism Indeed, of the many "realist" films produced in late 1930s Japan, Sato shrewdly focuses on Mizoguchi Kenji's Naniwa ereji (Osaka Elegy 1936) and Ozu Yasujiro's Hitori musuko (The Only Son, 1936) as exemplary of what he calls Nippon realism, drawing on their already-established international fame in support of the high standard of Nippon realism. In contrast to this, I maintain that a more productive way to examine Sato's provocative use of the adjective "Nippon" can be found in the very definition of realism as he understands it. According to Sato, the basic assumption of what he calls "Nippon realism" is to provide a "radical critique of escapist tendencies of the masses by depicting reality as it is [ari no mama] without being manipulated by any ideological ideas."21 It is thus not surprising that Sato gives higher priority to each director's personal attitude toward reality than to particular narratives, styles, and techniques employed in the actual film texts. Consequently, Sato praises Mizoguchi's innovative use of long takes as a means of expressing his indictment of social injustices suffered by the marginalized

21

Sato, "Tokljidai," 30.

17

figure of the prostitute, while at the same time lauding Ozu's famous obsession with lowangle, frontal shots as a way for the director to depict the everyday life of the lower classes with compassion. To justify his undeniably "auteurist" approach, Sato quotes Yoda Yoshikata, a renowned scriptwriter known for several of Mizoguchi's masterpieces, including Gion no kyodui (Sisters of the Gion, 1936), Zangiku monogatari (The Story of Last Chrysanthemums, 1939), and Sansho dayii (Sansho the Bailiff, 1954). Based on his own recollection, Yoda wrote favorably of his long-term collaborator: "Mizoguchi-san always maintained a strongly realist point of view, usually called Naturalism. One can observe this tendency in his portraits [of characters] in films like Tdjin Okichi (Mistress of a Foreigner, 1930) and Shikamo karera wayuku (And Yet They Go On, 1931). In Mizoguchi's films, the naked truth of reality comes solely from the powerful effect of spans of uninterrupted action or facial expressions, and he made intentional efforts to abandon anything artificial like the extensive use of shot-reverse shot."22 Whether one could read the work of Mizoguchi, or any of the Japanese directors included in Sato's formulation of Nippon realism, within a discursive framework of Naturalism does not concern me here (1 will return this in Chapter 3). The question to be asked at this point is why, in Sato's contention, does Naturalism, originally imported from France at the turn of the twentieth-century as a literary concept, serve as the discursive framework of a cinematic realism that is said to be unique to Japanese cinema? Interestingly, Sato is not alone in characterizing the tradition of Japanese realist filmmaking by its indebtedness to Naturalism. In their groundbreaking 1959 book The

12

Yoda Yoshitaka, Mizoguchi Kenji no hito to geijutsu, quoted in Sato, "Tokljidai," 31.

18

Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie give high praise to Tanaka Eizo's 1920 masterpiece Kyoya erimise (The Kyoya Collar Shop) as the film that heralded the so-called "Nikkatsu style," which was marked by its depictions of "realistic stories of the lower class, a subject which other producers rarely touched upon, with the exception of films like Shochiku's Souls on the Road [Rojo no reikon, dir. Murata Minoru, 1921 ]."23 As if responding to this remark, film historian Chiba Nobuo points out that Rojo no reikon was exemplary of what he calls "naturalist realism" (shizenshugiteki riarizumu), a concept that the Shingeki (new drama) playwright Osanai Kaoru brought to the Japanese film world with his participation in the foundation of Shochiku in 1920.24 Then, as the story goes, the later success of a group of directors trained at Nikkatsu and Shochiku further stabilized the influence of Naturalism on the development of Japanese realist film aesthetics: Mizoguchi Kenji began his career as an assistant director to Suzuki Kensaku, another representative director of the Nikkatsu style, whereas such first-class directors as I to Daisuke, Murata Minoru, Shimazu Yasujiro, and Ushihara Kiyohiko all received basic education about filmmaking at Shochiku under the supervision of Osanai. Given these accounts, it seems clear that what the term "Nippon realism" does not signify the specificity of Japanese realist filmmaking per se. Rather, it designates a specific mode of talking and writing about the issues of realism in the context of Japanese cinema in retrospect, a mode that reorganizes the historical development of realist film aesthetics from the fixed point of view of some ready-made concepts like Naturalism.

' Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, expanded ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 45.
24 Chiba Nobuo, "Sei no kagayaki kara Orochi made," in Nihon eigashi: Jissha kara seicho konmei no jidai made, eds., Yamamoto Kikuo, et al. (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 1976), 29.

19

This reductive rewriting of history may be useful when one needs a brief overview of the topic in question. But it is also problematic in its delineation of a teleological narrative that risks underestimating Japanese cinema's long-term struggles with the truly elusive nature of realism as a critical concept, which I will scrutinize in the following chapters. For instance, Sato himself admits that some may find certain realist elements in the socalled keiko eiga (tendency films) of the late 1920s due to their criticism of social inequality from a class-conscious point of view. Nevertheless, he ultimately excludes these films from his framework of Nippon realism because their depiction of reality was undoubtedly motivated, if not deflected, by the ideology of the political left, and thereby not realist enough according to his Naturalism-based definition of realism.25 The aim of this chapter is to historicize Sato's concept of Nippon realism by determining the degree to which Naturalism impacted the formation of Japanese discourse on cinematic realism during the first decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the chapter, my argument will center on what I call "multi-dimensional" translation. The translationor rather, transformationof naturalist ideas took place not only when they came from France to Japan at the turn of the century as the latest trend in the mode of writing; it also occurred in the domestic context when they were transmitted between the different media of literature, theater, and film, producing varying effects and aftereffects in each instance. Generally speaking, the historical significance of Naturalism in the Japanese context lies in its role as a major driving force in the modernization of both literary and performing arts. This was also the case with Japanese cinema insofar as those involved in the mid-to-late 1910s with first major reform of domestic film practice

25

Sato, "Tokljidai," 29-30.

20

known as jun 'eigageki undo, or the Pure Film Movement, made some of their basic claims on the premise of Naturalism. But as I will argue, the reformers' conception of the cinema as a naturalistic medium also became the subject of heated disputes by the early 1920s, especially when people began to realize that the visual, cultural, and perceptual shock the filmic image imposed upon viewers frequently went beyond the vocabularies of literary Naturalism.

Naturalism in Modern Japanese Literature Although Naturalism as a literary movement had already lost its momentum when Auguste and Louis Lumiere held the first public exhibition of their Cinematographe in Paris in December 1895, film producers, especially those in France, were quick to turn to the legacy of Naturalist fictions as a source of profit in this new modern medium. The first film version of Zola's L Assommoir (1877) appeared in 1902, the year of Zola's death, under the title Les Victimes de I 'alcoolisme, and it was followed by dozens of similar adaptations that tended to provide visual renderings of the scandalous events and behaviors portrayed by Naturalist writers.26 A critical shift in the filmic treatment of Naturalism occurred in the early 1910s, when directors like Louis Feuillade and Andre Antoine began exploring a more authentic form of realist filmmaking by drawing on the rich tradition of literary and theatrical realism developed in France during the previous century. In 1911, Feuillade famously declared that his latest Scenes de la vie telle qu 'elle est series would "represent, for the first time, an attempt to project a realism onto the

" 6 Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 302-303.

21

screen, just as was done some years ago in literature, theater, and art."

Behind this

resolution is the fact that the cinema was indeed invented as part of what Richard Abel calls "a late nineteenth-century obsession" which, with the aid of modern recording devices like photography, the phonograph, and film, unabashedly aimed for "the production of a 'true' or 'faithful' analogue to reality."28 Or to put it in Ian Aitken's more specific terms, "it was, precisely, the modern, technological and 'scientific' character of the cinematograph...which led some film-makers and critics back to the Naturalist premises espoused by Zola in the foreword to Therese Raquin (1867), with its explicit endorsement of the scientific method."29 It is tempting to draw a similar historical narrative in which Naturalism had from the outset played a decisive role in the historical development of Japanese realist filmmaking. There are, however, several factors that prevent us from making such simple parallels. First, unlike in France, where generations of directors from Louis Feuillade to Jean Renoir to Alain Resnais would have no problem calling themselves "the children of Zola," Japan's encounter with both realism and Naturalism was deeply marked with the experience of the "foreign," as these European literary trends were introduced to Japan in the mid-to-late Meiji period (1868-1912). As a result, any early attempts to transplant methods of realism onto Japanese soil always involved the Westernization of already existing local practices. Second, reflecting their belated entry into Japanese critical discourse, both realism and Naturalism maintained a strong connotation of the "modern"

27 Louis Feuillade, "Scenes de la vie telle qu'elle est," Cine-Journal 139 (22 April 1911), reprinted and translated in French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988-1993), 1:54-55. 28 29

Richard Able, "Before the Canon," in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907-1939, 1:9. lan Aitken, Realist Film Theory and Cinema, 29.

22

well into the first decades of the twentieth century. This is most clearly seen in the distinction between kyugeki (old drama) and shingeki (new drama) in the field of Japanese theater: the former refers to traditional stage plays like Kabuki and Noh, and the latter a particular form of modern play developed under the direct influence of Western realist theater. Third, as with many concepts imported from the West, the Japanese usage of the terms "realism" and "Naturalism" were not always identical with their originals. This was more so in the case of Naturalism: once assimilated into Japanese discourse, it barely retained the traces of social Darwinism and hereditary determinism so central in Zola's writings. Nonetheless, it is this very process of localization, I contend, that rendered Naturalism indispensable for the modernization of the literary and performing arts in Japan. In the realm of modern Japanese literature, one cannot overlook the singular significance of Naturalism. "If any movement in Japanese literature of the twentieth century can be described as central," says Donald Keene, one of the most celebrated scholars of Japanese literature in the United States, "it is doubtlessly Naturalism (shizen shugi)."i0 The influence of Naturalism on Japanese fiction can first be found in the work of writers such as Kosugi Tengai, Oguri Fuyo, and Nagai Kafu, all of whom wrote in 1902 stories portraying a woman who ends up ruining herself, following the plotline of Zola's 1879 novel Nana.i[ But as Keene also reminds us, "Japanese Naturalism developed along quite different lines from any European example. European Naturalism arose largely as a reaction to the excessive emphasis on the individual in Romantic

Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Fiction (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 220.
31 For a critical account of Japanese Naturalism in general, see Nakamura Mitsuo, "Shizen shugi bungaku gaisetsu," in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1971-1973), 3:513-540.

30

23

literature, but in Japan the most salient feature of Naturalist writing was the search for the individual."32 Following the critical success of Tayama Katai's 1907 semiautobiographical novel Futon (The Quilt), the domestication of Naturalist ideas eventually led to the formation of the so-called "I-novel" (shi or watakushi shosetsu), a confessional or autobiographical mode of writing that became dominant in the Japanese literary world throughout the first half of the twentieth-century.33 It is thus possible to say that what makes Naturalism so central in the history of modern Japanese literature was not the aesthetic achievements of this school per se, but rather its direct and enduring impact on the formation of a particular form of literary enunciation that is said to be unique to Japan. When Naturalism was first introduced to Japan at the turn of the century, the highly stylized fictions of the Ken 'yusha (Friends of the Ink Stone) writers dominated the Japanese literary world. Drawing upon indigenous traditions of gesaku (popular fiction) literature that thrived in the end of the Edo period (1600-1867), Ozaki Koyo, the most successful writer of this school, used much of his energy and talents in refining a particular style called gi-kotenshugi, or Japanese neo-classicism. An ardent champion of Japanese classics, K5yo preferred the traditional literary style (bungotai) to the newly invented colloquial style (genbun itchi) in his fictional writing.34 Although Koyo himself had a keen interest in realistic depictions of everyday life, and he counted among his
12

Keene, Dawn to the West, 221.

" For the institutionalization of the I-novel in the Japanese context, see Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishdsetsu in Early Twentieth-century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishdsetsu as Literary Genre andSocio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1996), and Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
34

Koyo also experimented with the genbun ittchi style in works like Aohudd and Tajd takon (both

1895).

24

disciples prominent Naturalist writers including Tayama Katai and Tokuda Shusei, Koyo is not usually regarded as a "realist" in the general history of Japanese literature because his writing style inevitably brought to light the very materiality of the written language. In contrast, one of the traits of the Japanese Naturalists was their conscious effort to overcome, or at least conceal, the very visibility of Japanese composition by adopting a more objective, if not thoroughly scientific, attitude in their writing, after the manner of portrait painters. In the oft-cited preface to his 1902 novel Hayariuta (Popular Song), the Naturalist writer Kosugi Tengai writes: "When a painter is making a portrait, can he say to the subject, 'Your nose is too long,' and plane it down? The poet, when he is about to set down on paper what he has imagined, must not add even a particle of himself."35 This aspiration towards accurate and objective descriptions of things in reality became more radicalized when critics like Hasegawa Tenkei and Shimamura Hogetsu began to pose their own definition of Naturalism, rather than simply paraphrasing Zola's invocation of social Darwinism. In a series of essays collected in his 1908 monograph Shizen shugi (Naturalism), Hasegawa, for instance, begins his argument by declaring that all kinds of illusions, authorities, and conventions that had grounded the old notion of art were collapsing because of the rapid and bewildering changes occurring in the modern world.36 Hasegawa's emphasis on the break with the past undoubtedly reflects Japan's unexpected victory in the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5) and its subsequent entry into the ranks of the world's great powers. But more crucial to him was the emergence of new modes of perception, or new modalities of being, engendered by the continuous flows of

35 36

Cited in Keene, 226. In this case, the "poet" refers to any types of creative writers. Hasegawa Tenkei, "Genmetsu jidai no geijutsu,'* in Shizen shugi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1908),

1-18.

25

scientific knowledge and technological inventions brought from the West since the Meiji restoration (1867). It is these "impacts of modernity" that led Hasegawa to stress the superiority of Naturalism over other aesthetic concepts, given its purported allegiance to scientific methods. However, his trust in the triumph of science in the modern era was so profound that he goes so far as to deny his fellow Japanese writers any arbitrary or subjective interpretation of the objects they depicted. Just as science itself is indifferent to the values of natural phenomena, Naturalist writers must compose a novel that offers no value judgment. Here is Hasegawa's definition of Naturalism: Put briefly, Naturalists transcribe (utsusu) the truth as they observe it. They care little about whether this particular truth is universal, eternal, beautiful or ugly. They do nothing but describe it as it is (ari no mama).... Because Naturalists only describe nature in a way that they actually experience or observe it, they never present their descriptions as providing the whole picture of nature, the ultimate truth, or any steadfast existence. For this reason, some people began to adopt "no solution" (mukaiketsu) [as the motto of Naturalism],37 The key phrase here is "as it is" (ari no mama). For one, it is this phrase that came to constitute a general consensus among Japanese intellectuals as to the definition of Naturalism, or any type of literary and visual realism associated with the nineteenth century. It is also significant in that Hasegawa and other Japanese Naturalists of the time repeatedly and strategically used the phrase "as it is" to foreground the novelty of their means of productioni.e., languagethat was expected to function like photography in terms of its potential to create a faithful reproduction or even a duplication of reality. Remember that Hasegawa deliberately employed the verb utsusu ("transcribe") in his statement; Japanese speakers also use this verb as part of phrases like "to take a photograph" (shashin o utsusu).

17

Hasegawa Tenkei, "Kinji shosetsudan no keiko," in Shizen shugi, 110.

26

If there was something scientific in the Japanese articulation of Naturalist ideas, it was not a reliance on scientific methods like Darwinism to explain the malfunctions of human nature and social structure, but rather an experiment with the very act of writing, aiming to make language as transparent and objective as possible. This new language was most visibly marked by its exclusive use of the colloquial style of genbun itchi, which literally means "the unification of written and spoken language." Once this writing style proved efficient enough to present the shape and appearance of external reality "as it is," Japanese writers soon began to utilize it to represent the internal reality of a protagonist/author, as demonstrated in the proliferation of the I-novel. Needless to say, the account I have provided so far is too schematic to fully address the variety of writers and texts that constitute the main body of Japanese Naturalism. Still, it is important to note that Hasegawa's emphasis on the objectiveness of Japanese Naturalist writing provides us with a crucial point of reference to which we will frequently return whenever the term shizen shugi and its conceptual equivalent shajitsu shugi ("objective realism," or more literally, "copying-the truth-ism") appear in subsequent Japanese debates over realism. In addition, it also helps us trace the degree to which the medium-specific nature of Japanese literary Naturalism transformed itself when it transferred into other forms of expression such as theater and film.

New Apparatus. Old Realism Having emerged as a medium for the mechanical reproduction of reality in motion, film has, from its inception, evoked countless debates over the unprecedented degree of realism that it unfolds on the screen, or its excessive "reality-effect," to use Roland

27

Barthes's term.38 Although the circulation of the cinematic apparatuswhether it was Edison's Kinetoscope, Lumiere's Cinematographe, or Jenkins and Armat's Vitascope was an international phenomenon that reached most major cities on the globe by the end of the nineteenth century (for instance, they all arrived in Japan the years between 18961897), the astonishment these little optical devices elicited among viewers differed from place to place, and in most cases it was more intensified in non-Western countries because people there often ascribed the medium's stunning, almost uncanny ability to reproduce the precise shape and movement of things laid before the camera to the superiority of Western modernity. Consequently, early Japanese discourse on film revolved around a set of critical terms consisting of realism, the West, and modernity. Japanese newspaper articles reporting the invention and first screenings of motion pictures give us a good view of how the Japanese first encountered and then articulated the novelty of this medium.39 Most of these articles are collected and reprinted in Tsukada Yoshinobu's marvelous book Nihon eigashi no kenkyu (A Study of Japanese Film History), and 1 will not dwell on the content of these reports in full detail, as scholars like Aaron Gerow and Komatsu Hiroshi have already written lively accounts of this early period both in English and Japanese.40 But I should at least bring up that early Japanese commentators on motion pictures, like their Western counterparts, never failed to address what the French film critic Andre Bazin later called "the myth of total

18 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Tsukada Yoshinobu, Nihon eigashi no kenkyu: Katsudd shashin torai zengo no jijo (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 1980).
40 See Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 40-47; Komatsu Hiroshi, "Shinematogurafu to wa nan datta no ka: IdeorogT sochi to shite no eiga," in Eiga denrai: Shinematografu to Meiji no Nihon, eds. Yoshida Yoshishige, et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 103-123.

y>

28

cinema," the myth that this little optical device would soon provide "a total and complete representation of reality'" or "a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color and relief."41 Based on a general consensus that the invention of motion pictures was "a great achievement not solely for the field of photography but also for science in general,"42 the main thrust of these newspaper articles was mostly on this medium's ability to offer visual stimulus that was "no different from seeing the real thing."43 When motion pictures arrived in Japan in 1896-7, neither synchronized sound nor natural color was yet added to the filmic image, let alone three-dimensional effects. Yet for most Japanese promoters and exhibitors of motion pictures, these were nothing but minor problems soon to be solved. As one writer stated in 1897, "If Mr. Edison succeeds in combining the Cinematographe with the color photography that he is said to be currently testing, there will not be a single thing under the sun that cannot be exposed before our eyes."44 There were even those who went so far as to insist that the cinema should make use of recently invented x-ray photography so that it would even reveal the images of the inside of objects.45 Given these wishful expectations, it is tempting to narrate a history in which the arrival of the cinema and the visual and perceptual shock it brought to the viewers instantly changed the direction of Japanese debates over realism. However, as Aaron

41 Andre Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkely: University of California Press, 1967-1971), 1:20. 42 Warabe, "Shashin katsudoki o miru," Mainichi shinbun, January 30, Feburary 2, 1897, quoted in Tsukada, Nihon eigashi no kenkyu, 52.

"Hayadori shasin to sogenki no reng5h5 shinhatsumei," Niigata shinbun, June 26 1891, quoted in Tsukada, Nihon eigashi no kenkyu, 21.
44 Daitoro Shujin, Jido shashinjutsu (Osaka: Osaka Shuppankan, 1897), quoted in Tsukada, Nihon eigashi no kenkyu, 284. 45

43

Tsukada Nihon eigashi no kenkyu, 177-183.

29

Gerow reminds us, it is important to notice that in this early stage of film history there were a considerable number of attempts among the Japanese to explainor even accommodatethe novelty of the cinema by drawing upon existing discourses on protocinematic practices like gento (Japanese magic lantern) and ikiningyd (papier-mache "living dolls'").
<1f\

Exhibited as part of the misemono sideshows popular throughout the

nineteenth-century, both gento and ikiningyd had already developed their modes of realistic representation well before the arrival of the cinema, focusing respectively on the reproduction of animated movements or on visual proximity to living people. Seen in this context, cinema's mechanical ability to make the viewers feel as if they were looking at the real thing would appear not so much as a critical break in the mode of visual perception, but rather as an extension of the existing quest for realism. Thus for Gerow, "The discourses of realism, the West, and the power of sight" prevalent in early Japanese film discourse "are less a unique discursive patterna reflection or discovery of the essence of the mediumthan a continuation of a mode of speaking common to the misemono"47 More importantly, Gerow also stresses that both Japanese critics and government authorities did not pay much attention to the specificity of this new medium until the early 1910s, when famous French crime serials like Zigomar (dir. Victorian Jaseet, 1911) began to cause a series of social problems unique to the cinema as a distinct form of mass entertainment. I intend to use Gerow's emphasis on the temporal gap between the arrival of the cinematic apparatus and the discursive recognition of its medium specificity as a guide of my inquiry into Japanese debates over cinematic realism. Whereas even the earliest
46 47

Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 40-52. Ibid., 47.

30

Japanese discourse on film had made intermittent references to the potential of this medium to radically alter our "normal" sense of the real, it was not until the late 1920s that this unprecedented visual capacity began to serve as one of the theoretical bases of Japanese realist discourse. Of course, there were several attempts before that period to bring some realist ideas and methods into Japanese filmmaking. Yet, as we will see, the definitions that Japanese critics used to address the issues of cinematic realism in the first decades of the twentieth century were mostly borrowed from what I would call the "nineteenth-century model of realism." Of several definitions of realism emerging in the nineteenth-century, I draw attention to the one that developed under the influence of Naturalism. It is, however, arbitrary to call Naturalism a nineteenth-century phenomenon in the Japanese context, for, as I have explained in the previous section, it was not until around 1902 that Japanese novelists began writing prose fiction based on their own interpretation of Naturalist ideas. Despite this, I intend to stick to this arbitrary divide between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries for the purpose of my study. As I shall argue in this and following chapters, from the early 1920s on, quite a few Japanese critics began to question the efficiency of Naturalism for grasping the ever-complicated reality of twentieth-century modernity, markedly calling it a nineteenth-century model of realism. In order to fully understand this dialectical shift, it is necessary to look at how Japanese film discourse had discussed realism in its first years. Having emerged at the end of the nineteenth-century, early Japanese film practice always lingered on pairs of terms such as "fiction" and "non-fiction," "theatricality" and "actuality," and "presentation" and "representation." However, at this historical moment, the emphasis was less on the distinction between them as in the later period than on their

31

coexistence in the same film text. This was already clear in Momijigari (Viewing Scarlet Maple Leaves, dir. Shibata Tsunekichi, 1899), arguably the first "fiction" film produced in Japan. Momijigari was said to be fiction because it depicted the famous story of a female monster popularized through famous Noh and Kabuki plays. The film can also be seen as non-fiction, however, for it was actually a film recording of a live performance played in front of the movie camera by two legendary Kabuki actors of the time, Onoe Kikugoro V and Ichikawa Danjuro IX. Thus, as Abe Mark Nornes nicely puts it, "Kabuki films such as Viewing Scarlet Maple Leaves emphasize both storytelling and the reality of the telling." The non-fictional side of cinematic attractions commanded further public attention around 1904-1905, when Japan's participation in the Russo-Japanese War provided a topical and profitable subject for filmmaking. As film historians tell us, some Japanese film companies like Yoshizawa Shoten sent their cameramen to the battlegrounds to capture and immediately send back visual recordings of the latest battles, similar to the newsreels of later periods.49 Yet at the actual space of exhibition, this "real" war footage was often shown with, or even integrated into, "fake" scenes produced through reenactment or the use of miniature models, thereby blurring, if not completely dissolving, the conceptual opposition between fiction and non-fiction. To contemporary viewers, such a commingling of fictive and non-fictive elements in the same film text would result in weakening the intended effects of either realism or illusionism. According to Komatsu Hiroshi, however, this was not the case for the majority of Japanese filmgoers in the first decades of the twentieth century, when films

48 Abe Mark Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7. 49

See Tanaka Jun'ichiro, Nihon eiga hattatsushi (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1975-1976), 1:114.

32

were mostly produced and consumed within codes of visual and aural perception inherited from nineteenth-century visual practices like the gentd. In this transitional film practice, Komatsu goes on to claim, both "actual" footage and "fake" enactments of the Russo-Japanese war were categorized under the same rubric of "war subject matter" and equally treated as what Komatsu calls a "homogeneous film representation (toshitsuleki no eiga hydsho)."50 This specific mode of representation was able to claim a certain "reality-effect" as long as it functioned as a truthful and animated illustration of the war situation as it was being already circulated through printed media like newspapers and magazines. Instead of ascribing the lack of concern about the "separation of cinematic representation into fiction and nonfiction" to the shortage of actual war footage captured on the front, Komatsu sees it as a distinctive feature of early Japanese film practice up to the mid-to-late 1910s: There of course existed several exceptions, ones which did not succeeded the Japanese theatrical tradition and instead followed the model of Western film.. .but these imitations in no way became the dominant pattern. This was because Japanese cinema, even into the late 1910s, opted to maintain an absolute representationalism that could not be regarded as either fiction nor nonfiction. It did this through continuing to produce films as moving illustrations of wellknown stories, to use intertitles only as the titles of scenes composed at the screenwriting stage, to show an aversion to American cinematic illusionism, and to make the story depend on the patterned acting of the performers and on the detailed narration of the benshi5 One could, as Nornes does, contend with Komatsu's overemphasis on a "homogeneous cinema" by pointing to several examples from the same period that utilized "the special ability of film to record and report actuality thanks to the indexical qualities of the

Komatsu Hiroshi, "Transformation in Film as Reality (Part 1): Questions Regarding the Genesis of Non Fiction Film," trans. A. A. Gerow, Documentary Box 5(15 October 1994). This article is also available online at http://www.yidff.jp/docboxy5/box5-l-e.html
51

50

Ibid.

33

photographic images."52 However, I still find Komatsu's formulation useful in understanding how a different logic of realism was at work in the highly theoretical model of film production and exhibition dominant in Japan in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The majority of Japanese films made in this period, as Komatsu mentions, related stories adapted from Kabuki or shinpa (New School)a genre of Japanese theater that dealt mostly with tear-jerker melodramas set in the contemporary periodin an attempt to provide an experience of the so-called "canned theater" with a lower ticket price. In order to enhance the reality-effect that allowed the viewers to feel as if they were watching real plays, exhibitors of this theatrical model employed many conventions either borrowed from the traditional theater or newly invented for this mechanical reproduction of stage dramas. These conventions included onnagata (male actors playing female roles), kowairo or kagezerifu (a group of benshi that provided the voices of characters on the screen), hydshigi (wooden clappers), doncho (theater curtains), and hyashi or narimono (traditional music used to intensify emotional effects). As part of these devices, the camera was usually placed at a fixed distance, filming the actors in long shots and long takes that constituted life-sized frontal shots of the stage when projected on the screen. Also, techniques such as close-ups and analytical editing were avoided because these would spoil the viewers' receptive sense of watching a "realistic" reproduction of the plays. While Komatsu tends to stress "traditional" aspects of these theatrical films by calling them "Kabuki cinema," I would emphasize their "modern"' aspects as well, following Gerow's redefinition of it as "the spectacle of shadows

52

Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 12.

34

speaking, of the movies imitating theater."53 In other words, even though the attractions of Kabuki cinema derived largely from its visual and aural proximity to the traditional theater, its very theatricality was also grounded by cinema's ability for mechanical reproduction.

Film as a Naturalistic Medium The dominance of the theoretical model in Japanese cinema discussed above became a target of harsh criticism by the mid-1910s, when young intellectuals gathering around the film magazine Kinema rekodo (Kinema Record, initially published as Firumu rekodo [Film Record] in 1913) began to call for the reform of domestic film practice under the banner of the Jun 'eigageki undo, or the Pure Film Movement. Highly influenced by European and Hollywood films of the same period, these pure film reformers attacked the aforementioned features of Kabuki cinema for ruining the autonomy of cinema, and they demanded instead the exclusive use of more "cinematic" innovations such as close-ups, analytic editing, location shooting, and well-written scripts. The reformers' call for a radical shift in film style and mode of production was closely tied with a sea change in the discursive condition surrounding the medium itself. First, from the mid-to-late 1910s, a series of film magazines, including Katsudo shashin zasshi (Moving Picture Magazine), Katsudo no sekai (Moving Picture World), Katsudo gaho (Moving Picture Pictorial), Katsudo hydron (Moving Picture Criticism), and Kinema junpd (Movie Times), began to emerge and form a lively public forum devoted largely to discussions of cinema as a new form of art or mass entertainment. Second, a handful of

51

Gerow. Visions of Japanese Modernity, 100.

35

established figures from other fields of artmost notably the playwright Osanai Kaoru and the novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichirobegan to express keen interest in film and soon became involved in film production in their own right. Finally, government authorities also started to recognize the penetrating effects of moving pictures on the mass public. In 1917, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police issued one of the first regulations on film with the clear intention to treat film practice independently of other misemono sideshows. As many scholars have noted, these changes in Japanese film discourse were most succinctly observed in a shift in the general term to indicate the mediumthat is, a shift from katsudo shashin (moving pictures) to eiga (film/cinema) or eigageki (photoplay).54 What is remarkable about the Pure Film Movement, especially for the purposes of this study, is that the majority of the reformers agreed to promote realism as the foundation of their new conception of cinema. Indeed, in the discourse of film reform, the current status of Japanese cinema was often judged to be "impure" or even "uncinematic," not only for its reliance on such extra filmic devices as the benshi but also for its lack of serious concern about realism on the level of mise-en-scene, a problem most frequently discussed with regard to the existence of onnagata actors. In his contribution to a public forum on the issue of the onnagata, for instance, the film critic Ota Ocho harshly criticized this local practice as it completely contradicted with his definition of eigageki (photoplay): It is realism [riarizumu] that granted the photoplay its foundation and mode of expression.... Thus, making a photoplay with onnagata simply goes against both its essence and the trend of the times. The photoplay must not exist to produce illusionistic images alone; it must contain a penetrating power and authenticity

54

Ibid., 1-2.

36

that facilitate the awakening of the truth through a faithful reproduction of everyday life.55 This seemingly natural association of the terms "cinematic" and "realistic" immediately raises some questions, however. What definition did the reformers use for realism? How was their conception of the cinema as a realistic medium different from existing modes of making and talking about films, especially ones at work in the then-dominant theoretical model? If we consider that the emergence of the Pure Film Movement in the 1910s had a critical impact on the modernization of Japanese cinema, given that most of its "radical" claims became the standards for Japanese film production and reception in the years that followed, what was the movement's contribution to subsequent Japanese debates over the issues of cinematic realism? In reading the debates over film reform in Japan, one often encounters a common attitude that seeks to distinguish cinema from theater by emphasizing the former's close affinity with nature. The film critic Nakagi Sadakazu made a handy comparison between the two by saying, "it is possible to assume that everything in theater is artificial. By contrast, motion pictures can always be seen as natural. That is, if one compares the theater to a bonsai [dwarf tree], motion pictures should be likened beautiful landscapes in nature."56 It was on this alleged difference between the artificiality of theatrical expression and the naturalness of cinematic representation that many reformers called for the elimination of the practice of onnagata, which continued to appear on the Japanese screen well into the early 1920s, especially in the genre of shinpa melodrama. The following remark made in 1919 by another critic named Katano Hakuro gives a good
55 56

Ota Ocho, "Hitsuzenteki ni haimetsu no unmei ni aru," Katsudo gaho 7.5 (May 1923): 38-39.

Nakagi Sadakazu, "Katsudo shashin no geijutsuteki kachi: Gaimenteki keshikiron," Katsudo gaho 5.5 (May 1921): 25.

37

summary of the antipathy shared by the reformers towards this "artificial" convention borrowed from the traditional theater: It is truly regretful that we see in close-ups in Japanese films a rawboned (and expressionless) woman's face. The use of onnagata was in itself no more than a relic of the past around the time of the Meiji Restoration, when the status of women had not yet been recognized. It is thus nothing but awkward if [onnagata] still exists in our modern age where we have things like radiotelephones and airplanes; and even more so if it survives in film, which principally requires naturalistic depictions [shizen bydsha].51 Drawing upon the logic of "historical progression" that equates the artificiality of theatrical expression with anachronism, Katano obviously aimed to place the purported naturalness of cinematic representation on the side of modernity. Yet if Katano and other supporters of the Pure Film Movement were to clarify the novelty of cinema based on its medium specificity, why did they insist on privileging its ability to produce a naturalistic depiction of real life? Why did they not champion other potentialities of the medium that had already been explored by this period, like the delivery of shock, speed, and thrills found in foreign crime serials like Zigomar and The Broken Coin (dir. Francis Ford, 1915), or film's power to transform the viewer's "normal" perception of real space and time experimented through such techniques as extreme close-ups or slow, fast, and reverse motions? Beyond the overarching presence of Naturalist novels, there are two major factors that led the film reformers to conceive of the cinema as a medium of shizen shugi, or what I translate hereafter as "objective" or "naturalistic" realism in order to highlight its conceptual difference from the original definition of French Naturalism. The first is the impact of newly emergent Hollywood films, which inaugurated their full-fledged foray

57 Katano Hakuro, "Nihon eiga to gaikoku eiga no hikaku kenkyu," Katsudd gaho 3.3 (March 1919): 165.

38

into the Japanese market during World War I. As I have argued elsewhere, Japanese filmgoers first expected Hollywood to be a good substitute for then defunct European cinema, and their initial interest accordingly went to the stylistic and thematic similarities between the two found in genres like serial-queen melodramas.58 Yet as the variety and number of Hollywood's products surpassed its European competitors, Japanese critics soon began to discern aesthetic values of American cinema beyond a simple appreciation of its highly systematic and innovative use of continuity ending or other "cinematic" devices later known as the "classical Hollywood" style. This move from film style to aesthetics was not something unique to the Japanese reception of Hollywood films. In his 1924 book Visible Man, or the Culture of Film the Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs also refers to the existence of a group of "American films that can have a powerful effect even though they are no more than the faithful copy of unframed nature 'in itself.'"59 Based on his own fascination with those films, Balazs spells out a higher degree of visual and narrative verisimilitude as one of the distinctive features of Hollywood products from the late 1910s and the early 1920s. Likewise, the main thrust of the Japanese articulation of Hollywood aesthetics mostly revolved around the merit and attraction of this particular realism, for it was thought by many to be an effective antidote to the highly "framed" nature of domestic film practice. Nowhere is this anticipation more evident than in the work of Kaeriyama Norimasa, the most influential leader of the Pure Film Movement. In 1917, a year before he made his debut as a film director, Kaeriyama published a full-length book on film

58 See my article, "Where Did the Bluebird of Happiness Fly? Bluebird Photoplays and the Reception of American Film in 1910s Japan," Iconics 10 (2010): 143-166.

Bela Balazs, Bela Balazs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Sprit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 59.

59

39

titled Katsudo shashingeki no sosaku to satsueihd (The Production and Photography of Moving Picture Drama).60 Though essentially a summary of English-language "how-to" books like E. W. Sargent's The Technique of the Photoplay (1913), the book clearly tells us about Kaeriyama's own conception of the cinema (eiga) that he soon put into practice with his first directorial work Sei no kagayaki (The Glow of Life, 1918), celebrated by many as the first "cinematic" film in the history of Japanese cinema. In this book, Kaeriyama begins a section on film acting by quoting Thomas Ince's well-known maxim: "Movements of actors must always be natural."61 Closely following Ince's own philosophy on filmmaking ("Just as the best actors are the most natural, so the best stories are those which are closest to real life"),62 Kaeriyama gives highest priority to the pursuit of "naturalness" (verisimilitude) in his account of the cinema to come. Of course, Kaeriyama fully acknowledges that giving a natural performance in front of the camera is far from an easy task, especially for those lacking ample experience as professional actors, but he still goes on to offer a clue to solve this problem by citing another giant of Hollywood cinema: D. W. Griffith. According to Kaeriyama, Griffith's creative acumen resides in his ability to elicit very natural facial and bodily expressions from actors by means of his directorial skills. When Griffith needed a terrified face from young Mae Marsh, he secretly asked one of his crewmembers to fire a revolver just a few feet behind

Kaeriyama Norimasa, Katsudo shashingeki no sosaku to satsueihd (Tokyo: Hikosha, 1917). Its expanded edition (1921) is reprinted as Vol. 25 of Nihon eigaron gensetsu taikei, ed. Makino Mamoru (Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 2006). Hereafter I will use this reprinted version. Ibid., 110. Also cited in Kaeriyama sei (Norimasa), "Eigageki to haiyu dosa (1)," Katsudo gaho 3.7 (July 1919): 5.
6 " Thomas Ince, "Writing for Screen," The Moving Picture World (publication date unknown), reprinted in The Editor: The Journal of Information for Literary Workers 52.8 (April 1920): 32. 61

60

40

her, allowing him to capture the exact expression he wanted.63 Such a high demand for natural acting also leads Kaeriyama to insist upon the use of location shooting. He writes: "The proper use of location is extremely important to moving picture dramas, and so one must make the effort to use both actual scenery [jikkei] and real objects [jitsuhutsu] as much as possible."64 Kaeriyama's articulation of both Hollywood films and his own directorial work as a relentless search for naturalistic depictions of real life was so influentialhis Katsudd shashingeki no sosaku to satsueihd went through ten printings between 1917 and 192465that most of his followers came to agree with the new dictum that "photoplay must always be natural."66 The second major factor in the film reformers' pursuit of "naturalness" in cinematic expression is tied to the rise of the Shingeki [New Drama] movement. Originally proposed in 1906 by such prominent playwrights as Tsubouchi Shoyo, Shimamura Hogestu, and Osanai Kaoru, Shingeki called for the reform of the highly conventionalized traditional Japanese theater by staging the work of modern European writers including Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maurice Maeterlinck, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. While its overt reliance on Western texts and methods inevitably caused a sense of "artificiality" or even "exoticism" among its viewers, the Shingeki movement has since distinguished itself for the persistent effort to pursue a higher degree of verisimilitude on the level of mise-en-scene. In fact, it was this movement that made the use of female actors commonplace across the Japanese

63 64

Kaeriyama, Katsudd shashingeki, 107-108. Ibid., 120. 109.

65 Gerow, 66 1

borrowed this phrase from the title of Ono Takeo's article, "Eigageki wa kanarazu shizenteki nare," Katsudd gaho 6.8 (August 1922): 100-101.

41

performing arts, beginning with Kawakami Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako. Shingeki was also central in providing the push for more realistic acting, make-up, elocution, lightning, and stage design. When Kaeriyama began to put his ideas into practice with Sei no kagayaki, there were virtually no Japanese film actors who could meet his demand for natural acting. It comes as no surprise, then, that he decided to collaborate with a group of Shingeki actors including Murata Minoru, Kondo Iyokichi, and Hanayagi Harumi, the last of whom is remembered as one of the first female film actors in the history of Japanese cinema. The influence of Shingeki on film reform, however, was not limited to the participation of these actors in the production of Kaeriyama's directorial work. In 1917, Inoue Masao, an enterprising Shingeki actor who later played the lead in Kinugasa Teinosuke's 1926 experimental film Kurutta ichipeji (A Page of Madness), directed a film entitled Taii no musume (The Captain's Daughter, based on the 1914 German film Gendarm Mobius), remarkable in its attempt to exclude the convention of kowairo narration by using such "cinematic" narrating devices as close-ups, cutbacks, and tracking shots.67 Around the same time, the Shingeki director Tanaka Eizo joined Nikkatsu Muk5jima Studios and began to produce a series of kakushin (innovative) films like Ikeru shikabane (The Living Corpse, 1918, based on Lev Tolstoy's play of the same title). Though still using onnagata actors and kowairo narration, Tanaka's work was notable for his relentless efforts to bring in trends from both Shingeki theater and foreign films, including iris-in and -out, more frequent scene changes, location shots, realistic (sometimes "life-size") stage sets,

67

See Tanaka, Nihon eiga hattatsushi, 1:270-271.

42

and picturesquely designed inter-titles.

68

The transplantation of Shingeki elements into

the Japanese film world reached its apex in 1920, when the newly established Shochiku hired Osanai Kaoru, one of the founders of the Shingeki movement, as the head of its subsidiary school of film acting. At this institution (which soon changed its name to the Shochiku Film Institute), Osanai not only trained prospective Shochiku film stars like Suzuki Denmei and Sawamura Haruko under the Shinkei's realistic acting methods, but he soon engaged in film production himself, starting from co-directing and making an appearance in Murata Minoru's aforementioned Rojo no reikon. Given these significant contributions of Shingeki personnel to the Pure Film Movement, it would be useful to draw a parallel between the reform of Japanese theater and that of Japanese cinema beyond their chronological proximity. In his 1956 book The Kabuki Theater Earle Ernst defines the traditional Japanese theater like Kabuki by its presentational1' character, which marks a sharp contrast with the "representational" mode of Western realist theater.69 Drawing upon this famous formula, Noel Burch, in his study on the form and meaning of Japanese cinema, provides a non-teleological history that praises the enduring presence of local practices like the benshi and onnagata precisely because "They helped to preserve the Japanese cinema against the ideology of "realism* which rapidly took over the cinema of the West."70 We should not take Burch's daring attempt to rewrite history lightly, given his respectable objective of challenging our preconception "that Cinema is One, just as Man is One, that the Hollywood codes are

68 69

Ibid., 275-279.

Earle Ernst, The Kabuki Theatre (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1974), 18-19. This book was first published in 1956 by Oxford University Press.
70

Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer, 83.

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those of Cinema, East and West, the Codes of Man!"71 Nevertheless, the profound interactions between Shingeki and the Pure Film Movement that I described above tells us that there were also different layers within what Burch considered to be an alternative cinema. Even if it is true that the historical development of Japanese theater and cinema can never be summarized by their passive assimilation into Western norms, the denial of presentational theatricality and the pursuit of representational realism beginning in the 1910s clearly marked the modernization of these two forms of performing arts. At the same time, it is also important to specify some constitutive difference between theater reform and film reform. In his recent study on Shingeki realism, M. Cody Poulton points out that the chief innovation of Shingeki playwrights lay in their efforts to transform the stage drama into a literary product, to deliver their subjective commitment to reality through written scriptsespecially those composed in the genbun itchi styleas in the case of Japanese Naturalism. In this scheme, he goes on to say, "the textnow called gikyokuserved not to exalt the personality of the actor who performed it but as a mouthpiece for the playwright's own view of the world."72 This concern of controlling the meaning of visual representation through the written language also came up in Japanese film discourse, but it developed with a quite different temporality. Throughout the silent era, it was benshi who were in charge of both composing and delivering each character's verbal enunciation. Moreover, they would even change the content of a given text according to their own interpretation of the events unfolding on the screen. Considering this hybrid nature of film narration, it is not surprising that the

71

Ibid., 76.

72 M. Cody Poulton, "The Rhetoric of the Real," in Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance, eds. David Jortner, Keiko McDonald, and J. Wetmore Jr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 24.

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written scripts played a relatively marginal role in the production and reception of silent cinema. Although figures like Kaeriyama repeatedly criticized Japanese film producers for their total negligence of screenplays, the objective of his reform project was rather to find multiple (both verbal and non-verbal) ways to prove the authorial power of filmmakers over their end products. The idea of using scenarios (kyakuhon) as a primary means of subjective expression, or the integration of literary elements into the realm of filmmaking, became an urgent topic in Japanese film discourse much later in the 1930s, when the advent of new sound technology finally made possible the synchronization of the dialogue written on the script and the one actually spoken in the film text. Another major difference between theater reform and film reform can be found in their differing attitudes towards realism. While the pursuit of objective realism served as the raison d'etre of Shingeki, the use of realism in the discourse of the Pure Film Movement remained only one of many ways to define the artistic potential of the medium. Appearing as a modern photographic device that captures the shape and movement of real things "as they are," film was thought by many to be the best medium ever invented to fulfill the Naturalist dream of creating a faithful reproduction of reality. Thus, in writing about the emergence of a "new" film style that made the use of this recently discoveredor rather, discursively approvedmedium specificity, Japanese critics were not hesitant in employing terms like shizen shugi or shajitsu shugi. Among the handful of directors from this period, the best example for this matter would be Suzuki Kensaku, remembered today as a mentor of Mizoguchi Kenji. Suzuki's reputation as a "Naturalist" was widely recognized both by his contemporaries and film historians. In 1923, a reporter for Katsudd kurabu jotted down with astonishment that when Suzuki was directing one of

45

his masterpieces Nigenku (Human Suffering, 1923), he did not allow his cast (which included a dog and a mouse!) to eat anything for several days in pursuit of a more realistic expression of starvation.73 Ito Matsuo, in his review of another of Suzuki's representative works, Tabi no onnageinin (The Travelling Female Entertainer, 1923), wrote favorably of its poignant depiction of the human lust for flesh: "I think this is a film thoroughly based on the ideas of shajitsu shugi. It possesses a certain principle of shajitsu shugi that we have never seen before in any domestic films or even hardly in foreign films."74 In commenting on the same film, an anonymous contributor for Kinema junpd openly pronounced his admiration: "I was truly satisfied with this film because it indicated the dawn of a new direction for Japanese cinema.... I was especially happy that it depicted the loneliness common to all human beings, while creating a specific atmosphere unique to Japan"75 As expressed in these reviews, the vocabularies of Japanese Naturalism were marshaled in specifying the innovations of Suzuki's directing, which tried to exclude any sort of theatrical artificiality found in then-popular Kabuki cinema and shinpa melodramas. This association of the terms "naturalistic" and "cinematic," however, was effective only insofar as it yielded a strong sense of "novelty" among the Japanese. In other words, this way of defining the specificity of the cinema as a modern medium still remained tentative and reductive, thus being subject to change in the course of time. Indeed, Japanese film critics were quick to cast doubt upon the dictum of the Pure Film

73 Ide Kurao, "Ra ra Mukojima no hanashi," Katsudo kurabu 6.8 (August 1923): 49. Quoting this famous episode. Sato Tadao refers to Suzuki as "perhaps the first Japanese director to experiment with realism." See his Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema, eds. Aruna Vasudev and Latika Padgaonkar. trans. Brij Tankha (Oxford and New York: Berg. 2008), 8. 74 75

Ito Matsuo, "Tabi no onna geinin hihan," Mukojima 1.6 (June 1923): 14. "Tabi no onna geinin," Kinema junpd 130 (April 11, 1923),8.

46

Movement"Photoplay must always be natural"as soon as a series of post-WWI European films set about exploring different possibilities of filmic expression. The major event in this context was the Japanese release of the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920) in May 1921 at Asakusa's Kinema Kurabu Theater. As one critic pointed out, the film brought to the Japanese film world "a chaos comparable to the one [Darwin's] theory of evolution stirred up in Christianity," because its unabashed tendencies towards anti-realism obliviously ran counter to the "cinema's one and only credo: 'Be natural in every aspect.'"76 Although the impact of Caligari did not lead all Japanese critics to immediately abandon their relentless call for a higher degree of verisimilitude in domestic film practice as they still praised Suzuki's "Naturalist" take on filmmaking as late as 1923, the main thrust of Japanese film discourse in the 1920s gradually shifted from how objectively film could reproduce the impression of external reality to how effectively it could express the articulation of internal subjectivity. Interestingly, this shift from realism to anti-realism can also be found in the writing of Kaeriyama Norimasa. When he published a revised and enlarged version of his aforementioned book in 1921, Kaeriyama cautiously added the following remark: "At present, the easiest and the most democratic form of film practice is no doubt the one based on shajitsu shugi.... Yet what is coming next is the one based either on Symbolism or Expressionism, and the purification of moving pictures should involve the symbolization of every form and action [in a film]."77

Ishii Meika, "Eiga ni okeru hyogen shugi: Eiga geijutsu ni taisuru heken no ittan," Katsudo gahtl 5.6 (June 1921): 29,
77

76

Kaeriyama, Katsudo shashingeki, 21-22.

47

Tanizaki Junichiro and the Cinematization of the World The Japanese film critics' vacillations at this historical juncture as to the definition of the cinema were inseparable from their reductive attitude that had tried to prove the artistic potential of the medium based on concepts imported from other forms of expression like literature and theater. It is here that the discourse of the theatrical model (Kabuki cinema) and that of the Pure Film Movement overlapped: both stressed how the cinema could adjust itself to the existing norms of misemono or Naturalism by using film's photographic nature to create a faithful reproduction of the things laid before the camera. At the same time, however, there were also some Japanese critics who tried to speculate about the potential of the cinema based on its medium specificity as such. This involved cinema's power to alter existing notions of art and its visual capacity to transform the ways in which spectators could imagine, perceive, and understand their very relationship with reality. Among those critics was the novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichiro.78 In 1920, Tanizaki joined the newly established Taikatsu [Taisho Katsuei] studios as a literary consultant (bungei komon) and soon began to devote himself entirely to his collaboration with the director Thomas Kurihara. Tanizaki's participation in film production had a critical impact on elevating the social status of the cinema in Japan, similar to Osanai Kaoru's concurrent joining of Shochiku. Much has been written and studied about this great writer's full-fledged involvement with filmmaking and its influence on such acclaimed literary works as

78 Another example here is the sociologist Gonda Yasunosuke who, in his 1914 book Katsudd shashin no genri oyobi 6yd (Tokyo: Uchida Rokakuho), championed film as a new and distinctively modern form of popular art (taishii geijutsu). For a detailed account of his argument, see Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, especially Chapter 2 entitled "Gonda Yasunosuke and the Promise of Film Study," 66-93. Gerow also provides an abbreviated translation of Gonda's book. See Gonda Yasunosuke, "The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures (excerpts)," trans. Aaron Gerow, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010): 24-36.

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Chijin no ai

(Naomi, 1924), so I will refrain from providing a detailed account of his

cinematic activities.79 Significant to my concern here is that in reading his essays on film, one could never fail to grasp how deeply Tanizaki was fascinated the potential of the cinema to recast our "normar perception of reality. In his famous 1917 essay "Katsudo shashin no genzai to shorai" (The Present and Future of Moving Pictures),80 Tanizaki took a very similar position as the Pure Film reformers in calling for the abolition of the
onnagata

and any "theatrical" elements still found in domestic film practice: "It is not

that I insist that one make huge spectacles with trains colliding or steel bridges collapsing. First and foremost, I would ask for a return to naturalness. And I would ask that one try to depict Japanese customs and manners, simply and faithfully."81 Nevertheless, Tanizaki's interest in film was not limited to its ability to provide a faithful reproduction of reality, and thus he admired the degree to which this little optical device had altered the way he looked at the world surrounding him. For one, this new vision was made possible by newly invented techniques like close-ups, which allowed him to appreciate the attraction of all the minute details of someone's face or the parts of their body, details that he would have been unable to recognize with his naked eye.82 Tanizaki also referred to the durability, reproducibility, and trans-nationality of film products, for these material

See, for instance, Chiba Nobuo, Eiga to Tanizaki (Tokyo: Seiabo, 1989); Joanne Bernardi, Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), especially Chapters 4 and 5; Thomas LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun 'ichird on Cinema & "Oriental" Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2005). Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, "Katsudo shashin no genzai to shorai," in Shinshdsetsu (September 1917), its English translation appears as "The Present and Future of Moving Pictures" in LaMarre's Shadows on the Screen, 65-74. Hereafter 1 use LaMarre's translation.
81 80

79

Ibid., 69.

82 One can find the same fascination with this new "cinematic" vision in his contemporary film theorists from Europe. See, for instance, Bela Balazs, "The Close-up," in Beta Balazs: Early Film Theory, 38-45: Jean Epstein, "Magnification and Other Writings," trans. Stuart Liebman, October 3 (1977): 9-31.

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aspects of the cinema allowed the viewer to appreciate foreign landscapes and customs recorded on the filmstrip, making the foreign more attractive and more familiar than what they observed in their everyday life. In short, Tanizaki's fascination with the cinema derived from what he saw as its ability to make the viewer feel that the world projected on the screen was more real than actual reality. Modeled after Tanizaki himself, the protagonist of his 1923 novel Nikkai (A Lump of Flesh) clearly states this genuinely modern experience: To exaggerate a bit, the entire universeall the phenomena of the world around usis something like a film. Isn't it possible, then, that even though everything changes from moment to moment, the past remains wound up somewhere? Couldn't it be that we are all nothing but shadows that disappear quickly and without a trace, while our reality lives on in the film of the universe? Even the dreams we see and the things we imagine are films of the past projecting light on our minds. For this reason they cannot be mere illusions.... Films are dreams that we see reflected on the screen instead of visualized in our minds. And, in fact, those dreams are the real world.83 Thomas LaMarre rightly refers to what Tanizaki describes here as the "cinematization of the world." And it is in this respect that one could compare Tanizaki and his writings on film with his European contemporaries Jean Epstein, Bela Balazs, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, for they all "shared sense of cinematic experience as one of the collapse of perceptual distance, an experience in which the heightened, too-real quality of the cinematic image forecloses the spectator's ability to see and contemplate the art object, allowing only for a shock to the body."84 There is no doubt that Tanizaki appears to be a good example of how Japanese intellectuals of the time fully embraced and then tried to theorize the social, cultural, and perceptual changes

Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, "Nikkai," in Tanizaki Jun'ichirozenshu (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1982), 9:40-41. I quoted a wonderful English translation of this passage appearing in Bernardi, Writing in Light, 147-148.
84

81

LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen, 9.

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engendered by the cinema in the same manner as their Western counterparts. Still, LaMarre also reminds us of the necessity of reading non-Western figures like Tanizaki in relation to their own domestic contexts. If one is simply satisfied with inscribing Tanizaki's film writing into the canonical history of film theory, then it would end up following the so-called "modernization theory," which tends to downgrade diverse experiences of the modern as a single and linear historical progress moving toward the
Of

alleged superiority and universality of Western modernity. While LaMarre differentiates Tanizaki's take on the "cinematization of the world" by looking into its preoccupation with the "racial dimension" of the cinematic experience, I will confine my attention to the fact that Tanizaki's fascination with the "too-real" quality of the cinematic image derived from his longstanding antipathy to Japanese Naturalism. When he made his debut as a professional writer with short stories like Shisei (The Tatooer, 1910) and Shonen (The Youths, 1911) in the early 1910s, Tanizaki promoted himself as belonging to the "school of aestheticism" (tanbiha), which was marked by its strong "anti-Naturalist" tendencies, as well as its romanticist inclination towards fantasy and imagination. What then became the central concern of the young Tanizaki was the composition of highly decorative and elaborate stories in which a male protagonist became enthralled with his masochistic desire for a majestically beautiful and cruel woman. In order to enhance the "artificial" beauty of his diegetic world, Tanizaki employed a writing style that put more emphasis on what LaMarre describes as "the visual and nonsignifying qualities of language over its verbal and semantic aspects,"86 unlike the ongoing effort of Japanese Naturalists to use the genbun itchi style as an
85 86

Ibid., 15-19. Ibid., 5.

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objective, almost transparent tool to "transcribe" both external and internal reality. Tanizaki's keen concern about the materiality of the medium of his creative activity ultimately led him to single out the medium specificity of the cinema without relying upon existing discourses of literature and theater. Again, Tanizaki admitted in the first place that the cinema's ability to create the most updated, most truthful version of realityeffects rendered this medium "better suited to the times" than other art forms.87 And yet because the emotional shock the cinematic image evoked in the mind of the viewers was so penetrating, sometimes reaching to the point of being uncanny, Tanizaki ultimately declared that film "is better suited than the stage for both realistic and fantastic plays."88 He continued: There is no need to explain why motion-picture theater is appropriate for realistic pieces, but I think that some [fantastic] works, impossible on the stage, would make truly compelling pictures, for instance, Dante's Divine Comedy, ox Journey to the West, or certain stories by Poe, or stories by Izumi Kyoka like The Holy Man of Koya and The Elegant line.... Especially in the case of tales like those of Poe, for example, The Black Cat, William Wilson, and The Masque of Red Death, I feel that pictures would better produce their effect.89 This leap from the real to the fantastic, or the radical diffusion of the two in the cinematic image, is the key to understanding the discursive condition surrounding the issues of cinematic realism in Japan of the late 1910s and early 1920s. At first glance, Tanizaki seemed to speak of his personal inclination for fantastic plays and novels. It is, however, important to note that he saw the potential of the cinema to deal with such "unrealistic" subjects as an expansion of the medium's extraordinary capacity to create

87 Tanizaki wrote: "Even Noh drama, which people today appreciate for the symbolism of its staging, seemed realistic to people of the Ashikaga era. Likewise, just as the more realistic kabuki theater arose in the wake of Noh drama, will not the world of tomorrow come under the sway of the more realistic motion picture? It seems quite likely to me." See his "The Present and Future of Moving Pictures, " 66-67. 88 89

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 67.

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something that is more real than everyday reality, rather than drawing a simple and clearcut division between realism and anti-realism. In other words, Tanizaki's equation of the real and the fantastic in his film theory clearly indicates the emergence of a new "cinematic" perception of reality, a perception that could no longer be fully articulated by the vocabularies of literary and theatrical Naturalism. In a similar manner, the initial responses that Japanese film critics expressed in the years following advent of post-WWI European avant-garde film movements like German Expressionism and French Impressionism came to take on a strong "anti-realist" sentiment, even though one of the main objectives of these movements was indeed to experiment with the viewer's ordinary sense of the real on both narrative (psychological) and stylistic (perceptional) levels. In sum, although most of the polemical claims that the film reformers made to modernize domestic film practice became standardized after 1920 with the advent of such "reformist" companies as Shochiku and Taikatsu, their attempt to set the foundation of the cinema within the discursive framework of Japanese Naturalism eventually lost its impetus in the course of the 1920s. This was in part due to the rise of a different discourse on the legitimacy of film as an art, a discourse that called into question the mechanical nature of the photographic image that no longer presupposed the creative intervention of human artists. At the same time, this new discourse was fostered by a growing suspicion among Japanese filmmakers and critics about the efficacy of having Naturalism as the one and only theoretical framework to define the potential of filmic expression. For instance, the director Murata Minoru already expressed skepticism about his "Naturalist" directing style one year after finishing his acclaimed Rojo no reikon: "Because the photoplay [eigageki] is able to use natural scenery as a backdrop to the

53

story, the viewers accordingly wanted everything in both acting and directing to be naturalistic. However, this was such an 'objective' attitude that it had no philosophical language behind it and was too weak to evoke any dramatic or emotional effects in the mind of the viewers."90 In a similar tone, the film critic Midorikawa Harunosukewho later became known as the principal scriptwriter for Ozu Yasujiro under the name of Noda Kogoalso criticized the dominance of realist discourse in the Japanese film world: "It is very inconvenient if the ideal form of photoplay is restricted only to realism.... If only realists deserve to be great filmmakers, we have to reject films based on either Symbolism or Neo-romanticism. If this is the case, the photoplay must be confined to a position that is not only too narrow but also unnatural."91 Then in 1925, another critic named Mitsuse Sueo acutely declared the complete impasse of naturalistic realism: Both Futurism and Cubism appeared as a determined rebellion against the art of the past (for the most part, against realism). All rebellious movements are always filled with youthful zest as well as with a holy terror that burns down everything. It is thus not surprising that some far-sighted people began to point to the crisis of realism. The crisis of realism? Yes. As long as it remains a habitual and thoughtless realism as it is seen in the film world today, no one could deny the fact that realism is now no match for the dominance of the vibrant and rising Expressionism.92 This passage does not merely imply the passing between trends in critical discourse and art forms. Rather, it designates that the very object of realismrealitywas also in the process of a radical transformation. As in other parts of the world, Japan experienced countless changes in every sector of social, cultural, and political activities during the

90 Murata Mironu, "Hyogenha no eiga no kansh5: Hyogenha to wa nanika," Katsudo no sekai 4.10 (October 1922): 63. 91 92

Midorikawa Harunosuke, "Eigageki gukan," Katsudo kurabu 4.8 (August 1921): 41. Mitsuse Sueo, "Futatsu no izumu," Kinemajunpd 181 (January 1, 1925): 65.

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1920s, especially with the emergence of an urban consumer culture, the saturation of modern technologies and the rapid growth of mass communication industries. And because no one could deny the fact that the cinema came to play an increasingly central role in this twentieth-century mediascape, some far-sighted figures like Mitsuse began to call for a new theory with which to articulate this modern medium's ability to mediate the mass audience and their everyday life. Originally proposed in the late nineteenth century, Naturalism was no longer competent in dealing with the vibrant and chaotic reality of twentieth-century modernity. In the meantime, any alternativeor, so-called "modernist"theories or styles appearing in the 1920s to capture the modern experiences of "disintegration," "fragmentation," and "self-alienation" were usually characterized with their common inclination towards antiNaturalism. As Raymond Williams reminds us, the writers who have been called "modernists" in our conventional discourse "are applauded for their denaturalizing of language, their break with the allegedly prior view that language is either a clear, transparent glass or a mirror, and for their making abruptly apparent in the texture of narrative the problematic status of the author and his authority."93 It is, however, important to note that Mitsuse, echoing Tanizaki's equation of the real and the fantasy, saw this seemingly drastic shift from Naturalism to modernism not as evidence of a paradigm shift but as part of a continuous progression. This is why he wrote: "Here I declare the need for a renaissance of realism despite all possible hardships. The time has come for realism to awaken from its dormant state by putting a new passion and force

91

Raymond Williams, "When Was Modernism?" New Left Review 1.175 (May-June 1989): 49.

55

into its old container.... Is there anyone who will stand at the forefront and sound the horn?"94 Mitsuse says it clearly: realism can be redeemed if one were to come up with a new definition that is no longer shackled by "old" notions of Naturalism. It is in response to this prognosis that critics like Itagaki Takao and Kurahara Korehito began in the late 1920s to promote "new" theories of realism. As we will see in the next chapter, their debates were inevitably colored with both a strong "anti-Naturalist" sentiment and an unmistakable "modernist" sensibility, thereby effectively blurring the alleged opposition between realism and modernism. Additionally, Mitsuse's call for "a renaissance of realism" clearly tells us that in the Japanese context, the term "realism" remained a genuinely elusive conceptwhat one might call un signifiant sans signifie, following Ferdinand de Saussure's semiological terminologyfor capturing the multiple and shifting nature of Japanese modernity. Instead of signifying a fixed way of looking at reality, it radically and continuously changed its meanings in line with the ongoing transformation of Japanese society as such. Some may attribute such discursive confusions about the definition of realism to Japan's anti-realistic literary and theatrical traditions, or to what Noel Burch called the "presentational" mode of Japanese culture in comparison with the "representational" mode of Western realist culture. Seen this way, Sato Tadao's conception of "Nippon realism" would appear as a deliberate attempt to cover up this cultural deficiency, strategically employing the "Japanized" definition of Naturalism as its theoretical basis. In contrast, my aim in the following chapters is to provide a new perspective that goes

94

Mitsuse, "Futatsu no izumu," 66.

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beyond the simplistic but overwhelmingly persistent dichotomy between the original (the West) and imitation (the non-West). Indeed, having no legacy to rely on, Japanese filmmakers and critics were better situated to openly discuss "the crisis of realism," a problem closely connected with the cinematization of the world. From the mid-to-late 1920s, they began to create a diverse set of theoretical speculations about the issues of cinematic realism in parallel withand sometimes even prior totheir Western counterparts. If there is something that we could call "Nippon realism," it should be found somewhere in the remarkable creativity and profound confusions that prewar and wartime Japanese film discourse showed in its relentless search for the "twentiethcentury model" of realism.

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CHAPTER II EYES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: MACHINE AESTHETICS AND DEBATES ON NEW REALISM

In the 1920s, a number of notable film directors and theorists like Jean Epstein, Bela Balazs, and Dziga Vertov strove to conceptualize the new mode of visual perception brought on by the movie camera's mechanical, non-human vision in an attempt to redefine the traditional, human-oriented definition of art in light of the medium's novelty. "This eye [of the camera]," wrote Epstein in 1921, "sees waves invisible to us, and the screen's creative passion contains what no other has ever had before, its proper share of ultraviolet.... The Bell and Howell [a brand of movie camera] is a metal brain, standardized, manufactured, marketed in thousands of copies, which transforms the world outside it into art"95 Or in the words of Balazs: "The lens of the cinema reveals to you the single cells of the vital tissue, it makes you feel the material and substance of the concrete life anew."96 And most famously, Vertov manifested his commitment to filmmaking as follows: "The sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as the

95 Jean Epstein, "The Senses I (b)," trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage 10 (Autumn 1981), reprinted in French Film Theory and Criticism , 1: 244. 96 Bela Balazs, Der sichtbare Mensch (1924), quoted in Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, trans. Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 27. This famous passage from the section titled "The Close-up" is also translated and reprinted in Bela Balazs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Sprit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingston (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 38.1 quote Casetti's translation for its clear and concise wording.

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point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space."97 In reading these and related discourses, film scholar Malcolm Turvey has recently coined the phrase "cinema's revelatory capacity," which he uses to express one of the main thrusts of film theory before 1960a period usually called the "classical" erathat evolved around the singular property of the cinema that "uncover[s] features of reality invisible to human vision."98 Turvey argues that the "nearly-religious" euphoria that the above-mentioned theorists expressed about this capacity was underscored by their persistent desire to distinguish the cinema from the other arts based on the specificity of its medium. But he also adds that it was equally marked by their growing skepticism about the potency of human perception, the skepticism central to many philosophical and scientific writings published in the same period, including Alfred Whitehead's now classical Science and the Modern World (1925)." With its ability to accurately capture the shapes and movements of the things laid before the camera, film was in turn thought to be capable of overcoming the limits of human perception, constituting an entirely new vision that was able to reveal the true nature of reality. Yet because it was based on the camera's non-human gaze, this new vision often evoked a sense of alienation among the producers and consumers of the film image. Nevertheless, those who championed cinema's revelatory capacity, Turvey says, were more than positive about its empowering

97 Dziga Vertov, "Kinoks: A Revolution," in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O'Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 14-15.

Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.
99

1)8

Ibid., 23.

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effect, as they obsessively believed that film could ultimately reconcile us with reality by recasting our imperfect way of seeing.100 This chapter examines how this new mode of visual perception conceived from cinema's revelatory capacity changed the ways in which Japanese intellectuals talked about realism. To address this complex issue with the necessary precision, I will first draw attention to the essays of art historian Itagaki Takao (1894-1966) published in the late 1920s, especially ones collected in his 1929 monograph Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu (Exchanges between Machine and Art).101 In these essays, Itagaki sought to detect the main characteristics of contemporary art through observation of the functional beauty of modern machineryincluding airplanes, ocean liners, iron bridges, skyscrapers, and the cinemathat he believed functioned as the main inspiration of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Futurism and Constructivism. In this regard, Itagaki demonstrates how Japanese intellectuals of the time, like their Western counterparts, were in need of a new theory to give shape to social, cultural, and perceptual changes in everyday life brought about by the saturation of modern technologies and the rise of a mass consumer society in the 1920s. What is of the greatest interest in Itagaki's writings is that he termed his theory of machine aesthetics "machine realism" (kikai no riarizumu). This may sound peculiar, especially given that in his theorization Itagaki made frequent references to such contemporary European "modernists" as Le Corbusier, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Dziga Vertov. Why did Itagaki choose the term "realism" to name his undeniably "modernist" impulse, blurring the alleged opposition between the two? I will answer this by placing
100 101

Ibid., 11. Itagaki Takao, Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1929).

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him within both the foreign and domestic intellectual currents of 1920s Japan. That is, while reading Itagaki and his texts as evidence of the global circulation and translatability of classical film theory, I intend to elucidate how the seemingly universal claims posed in and by Western discourse came to assume a different emphasis as they were assimilated into a local, non-Western discursive context. To this end, I look at the fact that Itagaki coined his neologism "machine realism" as a critical response to the literary critic Kurahara Korehito's highly influential theory of "proletarian realism" {puroretaria rearizumu) proposed the year before.102 Although there were essential differences in their fields of inquiry and political standpoints, the conceptual affinity between the two was unmistakable: whereas Itagaki suggested viewing the world through "the eye of the machine" (kikai no me) to grasp the sprit of the modern age, Kurahara found it imperative to be equipped with "the eye of the proletarian vanguard" {puroretaria zen 'ei no me) to envision the society to come. Closely looking at such urgent calls for a new social optics that sought to see through the reality of late 1920s Japan, this chapter clarifies what was at stake in their prognostic, if not thoroughly Utopian, debates over new realisms.

The Avant-garde Art Movement in 1920s Japan By the time Itagaki Takao began to develop his theory of machine realism in response to the work of European modernists in the late 1920s, Japanese critics and artists had already reached the point where they no longer felt any temporal lags in their knowledge about cultural and intellectual currents in the West. This increasing sense of synchronicity began to be formed as early as 1909, when the novelist Mori Ogai
102 Kurahara Korehito, "Puroretaria rearizumu e no michi," Senki (May 1928), reprinted in Kurahara Korehito shu, vol. 4 of Nihon puroretaria bungaku hyoronsh (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha,1990), 116-124.

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published the Japanese translation of F. T. Marinetti's first Futurist manifesto only three months after the original appeared in the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell 'Emilia and then the French newspaper Le Figaro.m The 1910s accordingly saw continuous publications of books or essays reporting the latest trends in contemporary art, but it was the early 1920s that marked the flourishing of new art forms and discourses influenced by twentieth-century European avant-garde art schools ranging from Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism to Surrealism and Constructivism.104 Needless to say, the history of Japanese reception ofand reactions tothe avant-garde movements is too rich and far-reaching to summarize here, as it spread over the fields of poetry, literature, painting, theater, and photography, and even beyond the influences of German Expressionism and French Impressionism on 1920s Japanese cinema.105 Still, if we skim through the chronology of the Japanese avant-garde movements, we immediately encounter a series of remarkable events that took place in this short period of time, including the first exhibition of the Miraiha bijutsu kyokai (Futurist Art Association, 1920), Hirato Renkichi's street demonstration titled "Nihon miraiha sengen undo" (Japanese Futurist Manifesto Movement, 1921), the foundation of avant-garde artist groups like Akushon (Action, 1922) and Mavo (1923), and the publication of Takahashi Shinkichi's poetry collection, Dadaist Shinkichi no shi (The Poems of Dadaist Shinkichi, 1923).

' o:, F. T. Marinetti, "Menifesto du futurisme," Le Figaro, February 20, 1909, translated by Mori Ogai as "Miraishugi no sengen," Subaru (May 1909). For a detailed account of the Japanese reception of the European avant-garde movement, see Omuka Toshiharu, Nihon no avangyarudo geijutsu: "Mavo" to sono jidai (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2001), Wada Hirofumi, ed., Nihon no avangyarudo (Kyoto: Sekai Shis5sha, 2005). For the influence of German Expressionism and French Impressionism on Japanese cinema, see Yamamoto Kikuo, Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyo: Hikaku eigashi kenkyu (Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1983).
105 104

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One of the major factors that accelerated the proliferation of the avant-garde movements in 1920s Japan was the emergence of more direct and even reciprocal liaisons between the Japanese and European art scenes. On the one hand, during the first few years of the decade, Japan welcomed the visits of Russian Futurists like David Burliuk and Victor Palmov who were travelling across the world at the time to avoid the chaos of the post-Revolution Soviet Union. On the other hand, the economic boom following Japan's successful participation with the Allies in the First World War also facilitated the individual visits of Japanese writers to Europe. Beginning with Mori Ogai, Natsume S5seki, and Nagai Kafu, there were already a generation of Japanese writers and artists traveling to the West during the Meiji period. Yet if the main purpose of this first generationusually called shinkichdsha (recent returnee) to emphasize the singularity of their foreign experiencewas to report with regret on the extent of Japan's cultural backwardness compared to Europe, the second generation of travelers emerging in the 1920s delightfully celebrated a diminishing sense of temporal and geopolitical distance between themselves and those involved in the bourgeoning European avant-garde art. Of these second generation travelers, Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901-1977), leader of the Mavo group, provides us with a glimpse of the cultural milieu surrounding the upsurge of the avant-garde movement in 1920s Japan. In February 1922, Murayama, still a freshman at Tokyo Imperial University, arrived in Berlin where he was supposed to study primitive Christianity. Although his stay there lasted less than a year and he learned nothing from the lectures he attended at the college, Murayama avidly absorbed the latest trends in contemporary European artespecially Expressionism and Constructivismby roaming through theaters and galleries. Through the offices of the guide attached to his

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Japanese friends, Wadachi Tomoo and Iketani Shinzaburo, he soon became acquainted with the Russian sculptor Alexander Archipenko and the Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti. At the same time, he presented his artworks at the International Futurist Exhibition in Berlin and the First International Art Exhibition in Dusseldorf.106 When he returned to Japan in 1923, Murayama soon distinguished himself a central figure in the Japanese avant-garde art movement, effortlessly crossing the borders between different genres of art production. Besides publishing theoretical books like Genzai no geijutsu to mirai no geijutsu (The Art of Today and the Art of Future, 1924) and Koseiha kenkyu (A Study of Constructivism, 1926), he wrote a number of short stories based on his turbulent experience in Berlin; organized "street happenings" or "moving exhibitions" with Mavo members; and designed the "constructivist" set for Hijikata Yoshi's 1924 stage production of Asa karayonaka made (From Morning 'til Midnight, written by the German playwright Georg Kaiser). Not surprisingly, Murayama also made a foray into the field of filmmaking by working as a set designer for Murata Minoru's Nichirin (The Sun, 1926). The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, a disaster that devastated much of the Tokyo and Yokohama areas and killed nearly 100,000 people, also played a significant role in fostering the transplantation of the ideas of the avant-garde into the Japanese soil. What made this "natural" disaster such a significant marker of cultural transformation was the fact that it also involved "human" catastrophes: during the chaos immediately following the earthquake, dozens of social activists and labor organizers as well as
106 For Murayama's activities in Berlin and Tokyo, see Murayama Tomoyoshi, Engekiteki jijoden, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Toho shuppansha, 1970-1977); Omuka Toshiharu, "Murayama Tomoyoshi no ishikiteki koseishugi: 'Subete no boku ga futto suru tameni,'" in Nihon no avangyarudo geijutsu, 49-65, and Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-garde, 1905-1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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thousands of resident Koreans (and other immigrants from the colonized areas) were massacred by the hands of police and vigilantes based on groundless rumors that they had planned to plot against the government. Because of both the human and natural aspects of the disaster, many Japanese commentators likened the physical and emotional shocks generated by the earthquakes to the crisis of human culture that Europeans had experienced through the First World War. The modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi, for instance, openly referred to the earthquake as the main inspiration of his literary experiments: "My prior belief in beauty was completely destroyed by this tragedy.... Then, by necessity, I found it imperative to construct a new set of aesthetics and morals suited to the coming age."107 On a more practical level, however, the destruction of the nation's capital also served to create a unique opportunity to bring art into the space of everyday life. As Gennifer Weisenfeld informs us, a group of enterprising artists, including the famous "modernologist" (kdgengakusha) Kon Wajiro and the members of the aforementioned Action and Mavo groups, immediately began to decorate makeshift "barracks" with abstract and expressionistic designs.108 Consequently, the years following the earthquake witnessed a radical reshaping of the Japanese cultural and urban landscapes. Notable developments included the construction of modern bridges and apartments made of steel and reinforced concrete (1923-1930), the beginning of radio broadcasts (1925), the advent of mass-circulated magazines like Kingu (which sold 750,000 copies with the first issue), the establishment of personal telephone networks (1926), the opening of the first subway line in Tokyo

Yokomitsu Riichi, "Kaisetsu ni kaete (1)," in Teihom Yokomitsu Riichi zenshu (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1981-1999), 13:584.
108 Gennifer Weisenfeld, "Designing after Disaster: Barrack Decoration and the Great Kanto Earthquake." Japanese Studies 18.3 (1998): 229-246.

107

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between Asakusa and Ueno (1927), and the mushrooming of new sites of amusement such as cafes, bars, dance halls, revue theaters, and department stores. With these substantial changes in the sphere of everyday life, the 1920s came to be a pivotal period that opened up a new phase of Japanese modernity. And just as Meiji intellectuals employed Naturalism as a discursive framework to articulate their initial experience of the modern (see Chapter 1), many Japanese writers and artists of the 1920s employed the critical vocabularies of the European avant-garde in their confrontations with this second wave of modernization. Thus, if there existed what one might call "Japanese modernism" in this period, it should not simply be a superficial copy of latest trends in Western art but rather encompass a diverse range of both creative and critical responses that the Japanese made to the massive transformations within their everyday environment. As literally scholar Seiji M. Lippit argues, the term "modernism has also been situated in industrialized, urban environments in this period and has included the emergence of new forms of cultural production and dissemination, the intervention of technology into the experience of everyday life, and the mass commodification of culture."109 This nonrestrictive use of the term "modernism" helps us understand the elusive nature of the Japanese discourse on the avant-garde. Like their Western counterparts, Japanese writers and artists aimed to attack the social and aesthetic institutions of art i.e., the established modes of representation and expressionas clearly indicated in the founding manifesto of the Mavo group: "We are not enchained. We are radicals. We will carry out a revolution. We will advance. We will create. We will ceaselessly affirm, and

109

Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press,

2002), 6.

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ceaselessly deny."110 However, a more pronounced characteristic of the Japanese avantgarde movement was little attention paid to the stylistic, political, and temporal differences between the many modernist schools emerging in Europe. In the words of Aaron Gerow, the Japanese avant-garde "took them all as techniques equally applicable in opposing [the then dominant] artistic naturalism."1" This conglomeration of the various avant-garde schools can be most clearly observed in Yokomitsu Riichi's 1925 manifesto, which he wrote for his own Shinkankakuha, or New Impressionist School: "I recognize Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, Symbolism, Constructivism, and some of the realists as all belonging to the Shinkankaku school."112 From the perspective of Western categories, such an all-encompassing statement would only prove the shallowness of Japanese modernism, which the literary scholar Dennis Keene has once described as "a parody by a school boy."1131 will, of course, not follow Keene's one sided value judgment, as it inevitably ends up reinforcing the institutionalization of European high modernism as the artistic canon. Instead, I interpret Yokomistu's statement as manifesting a different task that he and his Japanese contemporaries imposed upon themselves in their literary or visual experiments with the avant-garde. The key to addressing the deviation of Japanese modernism from the Western original lies in Yokomitsu's deliberate inclusion of "realists" in his conception of New Impressionism. This coincidence of "modernist" and "realist" concerns seems peculiar at first sight, for the conventional conception of aesthetic modernism has always been
110 Quoted in William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 36. 11 '

Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness, 12.

' i;! Yokomitsu Riichi, "Kankaku katsudo," 12.

113

Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Ri'ichi: Modernist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980),

62.

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articulated as a crisis in the established modes of realistic (mimetic) representation and expression. Consequently, many scholars, including Astradur Eysteinsson, author of The Concept of Modernism, have maintained that the term "modernism" has meant "a major revolt.. .against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world."114 As Lippit points out, with New Impressionist colleagues like Kawabata Yasunari and Kataoaka Teppei, Yokomitsu also devoted himself to developing a "modernist" writing style through "the use of unconventional grammatical structures and tropes, including fragmented sentences and montage constructions.""5 Nevertheless, Yokomitsu always saw his literary experiments as inseparable from his own intellectual articulations of sensory reality. In 1928, he went so far as declare: "It is us [New Impressionists] who deserve to be called 'realist' in its strictest sense."116 Thus, for Yokomitsu, realism and modernism were neither at odds with each other nor incompatible as critical concepts insofar as they shared a similar aspiration to establish more penetratingor at least more believabledepictions of the reality of the modern age. In his recent study of Japanese literary modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, Gregory Golley provides an insightful observation about the conceptual compatibility between realism and modernism frequently found in Japanese literary discourse in this period. Looking closely at the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Miyazawa Kenjiall of whom have been labeled "modernist" in their own rightGolley argues that the Japanese modernists' take on realism always appeared in a dialectical

114

Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1990),

2.
115

Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 78.

' 16 Yokomitsu Riichi, "Shinkankaku bungaku no kenkyu," Teihon Yokomitsu Riichizenshu (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1982), 14:312.

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manner. Indeed, the works examined in his study "all stand emphatically at odds with the thematic and stylistic conventions of literary realism; but none of these works opposes realism as an ontological or epistemological disposition." 117 Underlying this rejection of "old" realism (i.e., Naturalism) and the exploration of "new" realism (ontological or epistemological) was the discovery of a new reality that exists beyond the limits of the human sensory apparatus, a reality that could only be grasped through scientific discoveries or the emergent modern technologies. Just as the objective truths of the natural world revealed by chemists or physicists do not immediately invoke a strong "reality-effect" to the eye of the general public, the depictions of reality that the abovementioned writers offered in their literary works would seem "anti-realistic" at first glance. This perceptional detour, as Golley contends, should not be read only on its superficial level for it reflects the Japanese modernists' serious and consistent search for a "higher objectivity," which inevitably "demanded a new way of knowing and depicting the universe" as in the case of modern science.
1 I fi

Although Golley's speculation would be too schematic to cover the wide range of cultural phenomena appearing in 1920s Japan under the influence of the European avantgarde art movements, his emphasis on "the dialectics of realism" at work in Japanese modernist discourse is extremely useful for my inquiry in this chapter. As we will see, both Itagaki Takao and Kurahara Korehito came on the scene in the mid-to-late 1920s by promoting their own theories of "new" realism against the historical and discursive backdrops that I have described so far. The primary purpose of their disputes was not

117 Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 17. 118

Ibid., 20.

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only to integrate the critical vocabularies of 1920s modernism into the realm of realism, but also to present their models as a fundamental critique of "old" definitions of realism developed in past decades. Of course, the visions of both Itagaki and Kurahara as seen in their prolific writings were divergent, reflecting their different attitudes towards reality as such. But for both thinkers, the issue was how one could come up with a new theory of realism that no longer privileges human perception as the guiding principle for approaching the truths of the real world.

Itagaki Takao and Machine Realism Itagaki Takao was born in 1894 to Itagaki Toru, a renowned doctor who later became the vice-director of the Kyoundo hospital in Tokyo's Kanda area. The only son of his family, Itagaki was expected to be a doctor following in his father's footsteps. But by the time he graduated high school, Itagaki had already developed a keen interest in Western painting and architecture, especially those from the Renaissance period, being as he was a constant browser of the foreign book section at the Maruzen bookstore. After studying the history of art and aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University under the guidance of the aesthetician Otsuka Yasuji, Itagaki began teaching as a lecturer at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Nihon University, and Kei5 University. In this early period of his career, Itagaki had no intention of deviating from his academic discipline, diligently producing books like Seiyd bijutsushi gaisetsu (A Survey of Western Art History, 1922), Shin-Kanto-ha no rekishi tetsugaku (Historical Philosophy of the Neo-Kantian School, 1922), and Seiyd bijutsu shucho (Main Currents in Western Art, 1923). In 1923, while launching his career as a specialist in Western art, Itagaki met and married his college

70

classmate Hirayama Nao,119 who from the early 1930s onward became known as one of the most influentialand perhaps most militantfemale literary critics under the penname Itagaki Naoko. i

A critical shift in Itagaki's career occurred in 1924-25, when he made a one-year research trip to Western Europe (France, Italy, Germany) at the order of Japan's Ministry of Education. Unlike Murayama Tomoyoshi and other Japanese who visited Europe around the same time, Itagaki was indifferent or even insensitive to the burgeoning avantgarde art movement. Indeed, so faithful was he to the "official" mission imposed on him that Itagaki spent most of his time at museums and libraries collecting primary materials necessary for his academic research. Yet as he delved deeper into the primary materials of his research, Itagaki gradually recognized that, as a "distant observer" of Western classical art, he would soon have to return to Japan and lose his privileged access to those rare but indispensable documents and manuscripts. It is this genuinely academic dilemma that ultimately caused him to turn his eyes towards contemporary art. In an essay published in 1931, Itagaki openly points to this reason behind his conversion: For those living in the islands in the Far Eastwhere one has no clue other than some insufficient documents one collected with a limited budget and some vague impressions of the original work remaining in one's memoryit is totally hopeless and unrewarding to produce a work based on historical research. Even when I was working on the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French paintings, I couldn't help but feel acutely my geographical distance from Paris where the Bibliotheque nationale and the Musee du Louvre are located.... Once I entered the realm of contemporary art after the World War, however, I found the

Like most of the Japanese female intellectuals of the period, Itagaki Naoko graduated from Japan Women's University. She then met her future husband while attending lectures at Tokyo University as the first female auditor in the college's history. Most of biographical data described here were culled from Yasumatsu Miyuki, "Itagaki Takao Nenpu" in Itagaki Takao: Kurashikku to modan, ed. Igarashi Toshiharu (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2010), 331 336.
120

119

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sun shining brightly. Here we can access as many primary materials as we need unless we fail to prepare ourselves properly.121 Upon his return to Japan, Itagaki thus began accumulating the primary data of what he believed constituted the main body of twentieth-century art. Traversing diverse fields of art such as painting, literature, architecture, photography, and film, this intensive "field research" eventually manifested itself in an astonishingly prolific spurt of activity beginning in 1929. First, in the years between 1929 and 1933 alone, Itagaki published fourteen books in a row, including Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu (1929), Atarashiki geijutsu no kakutoku (The Acquisition of New Art, 1930), Yushiisen no geijutsu shakaigakuteki bunseki (A Sociological Analysis of the Art of Superior Ships, 1930), Geijutsuteki gendai no shoso (Several Aspects of the Aesthetic Modern, 1931), and Kenchiku no yoshikiteki kosei (The Formal Construction of Architecture, 1931) to name a few. Second, in order to showcase his vast and up-to-date knowledge about contemporary arts, Itagaki often collaborated with up-and-coming Japanese artists like the photographer Horino Masao. Under Itagaki's supervision, Horino soon became one of the leading figures in the production of shinko shashin (new photography), extensively featuring the latest techniques of photographic expressions such as photomontage, typo-photo, and constructive compositions. Their collaborations culminated in Horino's 1932

landmark monograph Kamera, me x Tetsu, kosei (Camera, Eye x Steel, Composition),123

121 Itagaki Takao, "Gendai geijutsu kosatsusha no shuki," Shinko geijutsu kenkyu I (February 1931): 208-209. 122 For a concise history of Japanese photography including the historical significance of shinko shashin, see Takeba Joe, "The Age of Modernism: From Visualization to Socialization," in The History of Japanese Photography, eds. Anne Wilkes Tucker, et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 142-183.

Horino Masao, Kamera, me x Tetsu, kosei (Tokyo: Mokuseisha Shoin, 1932). This monograph features the photographs of a transatlantic liner, steel bridges, and urban factories, all taken from a "constructivist" perspective that stresses the functional beauty of those modern constructs.

123

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as well as in their 1931 experimental photo-essay "Dai-Tokyo no seikaku" (Characteristics of Greater Tokyo), which was designed to visualize Laszlo MoholyNagy's 1922 unfilmed script "Dynamics of the Metropolis."124 In addition to these personal activities, Itagaki also took the initiative in stimulating lively debates among Japanese intellectuals over the issues of aesthetic transformations in the twentieth century by launching his own journal Shinko geijutsu (The New Arts, 1929-1930) and its short-lived successor Shinko geijutsu kenkyii (Studies of the New Arts, 1931). Co-edited by leading critics from different fields such as Iwasaki Akira (film), Sakashita Junzo (architecture), Yoshikawa Shizuo (music), and Yoshida Kenkichi (stage design), Shinko geijutsu adopted a truly interdisciplinary editorial policy and made a great contribution to the theorization of what one could call "Japanese modernism." Indeed, topics covered in this journal included montage film theory, Surrealist paintings, Constructivist Theater, industrial design, the "International style" in architecture, and even proletarian literature, markedly demonstrating how Japanese intellectuals of the time tried to articulate these seemingly diverse cultural phenomena as a foundation for the current status of contemporary art in general.125 It is thus not surprising that Shinko geijutsu succeeded in drawing critical attention from a wide range of readerseven from those outside Japan. For instance, Iwasaki Akira's article "Senden send5 shudan to shite no eiga" (Film as a Means of Agitprop, published in the first and

Itagaki Takao and Horino Masao, "Dai-Tokyo no seikaku," Chuo koron 46.10 (October 1931): Appendix 1-20. Moholy-Nagy's "Dynamics of the Metropolis" is reprinted in his Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969), 124-137. For a detailed account of the historical significance of Shinko geijutsu and Shinko geijutsu kenkyu, see Makino Mamoru, " Shinko geijutsu to Shinko geijutsu kenkyu no jidai," in Shinko Geijutsu , Vol. 3 of Nihon modanizumu no koryu, ed. Makino Mamoru. (Tokyo: Yumani shobo, 1990), 157-205.
1-5

124

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second issues) was widely circulated among Chinese readers as it was translated into Mandarin by the acclaimed writer Lu Xun. What makes Itagaki's approach to the issues of twentieth-century art distinct from others is the critical distance he always had with the objects of his speculation. In fact, Itagaki often referred to his stance as "contemplative" (seikanteki), stressing that he was not a "practitioner" but an "observer of contemporary art" (gendai geijutsu kosatsusha). It is this alleged neutral and objectiveor even "realist" if one prefers to call it that attitude that enabled him to investigate politically charged phenomena like proletarian literature without interfering with turbulent party politics. In order to avoid the commonplace disputes caused by one's political background, Itagaki went so far as to clarify his non-interventionist standpoint in his editorial for the inaugural issue of Shinko geijutsu kenkyu: "Shinko geijutsu kenkyu is by no means an organ based on the demands of certain isms or claims. It is nothing but an experiment that aims to understand several aspects of the aesthetic modern as accurately as possible from a purely contemplative perspective."127 Despite its clarity, overtly apolitical statements like this often had a strong political connotation in their original context. As the literary critic Hirano Ken has famously put it, the years around the turn of the 1930s saw a three-sided struggle in the field of literature, involving Naturalists (or "I-novelists" as they were called at this point), modernists (Yokomitsu Riichi's Shinkankaku-ha or those affiliated with a more trendy and commercialized writers guild called the Shinko geijutsu-ha [New Arts school]), and
It seems that Lu Xun had a keen interest in the writings of Itagaki and his colleagues at Shinko geijutsu. In addition to Iwasaki's article, Lu Xun translated Itagaki's 1927 monograph Minzokuteki shikisai o shu to suru kindai bijutsushicho ron (Tokyo: Daitokaku) under the title '"Yi minzu secai' weizhude jindai meishushichao lun." This translation is included in vol. 15 of Lu Xun quanji (Shanghai: Shanghai Lu Xun Quanji Chubanshe, 1938). "Hakkan no ji," Shinko geijutsu kenkyu 1 (February 1931), quoted in Makino, " Shinko geijutsu to Shinko geijutsu kenkyu no jidai," 163.
127 126

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proletarian writers.

I )8

Because they all took different paths in approaching the issues of

art and politics, these three camps had such frequent conflicts with each other that almost no one was able to discuss their work on the same grounds. In order to break into this tense yet quite stagnated situation, Itagaki strategically promoted himself as a specialist of the newly developed machine aesthetics and thereby presented the saturation of modern technologies in everyday life and the subsequent transformations of cultural and artistic values as a key phenomenon to disentangle the chaos widely observed in 1920s Japanese critical discourse. Itagaki's method of using machine civilization as a catalyst to distill the main characteristics of contemporary art was most succinctly demonstrated in the two articles he published in 1929, "Kikai bunmei to gendai geijutsu" (Machine Civilization and Contemporary Art) and "Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu" (Exchanges between the Machine and Art). To begin with, Itagaki confirms the fact that a new sensibility that allows the viewer to see aesthetic values in modern machinery appeared as a genuine phenomenon of the twentieth-century, one that was disseminated through the work and written manifestos of Italian Futurists.129 Consequently, what is usually called "machine aesthetics" as such can serve as a significant cultural marker of the modern age. And yet Itagaki also points out that there was a crucial historical break in the ways that people had appreciated the integration of the machine into art since its inception. Earlier attempts made by Italian Futurists or in Post-Revolution Russia, on the one hand, were generally characterized by their "romanticist" tendencies, as they simply fetishized the superficial

128

Hirano Ken, Showa bungakushi (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob5, 1963).

129 Itagaki Takao, "Kikai bunmei to gendai bijutsu," Shiso 83 (April 1929), reprinted in his Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu, 40-41.

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beauty of modern machinery. An example of this, says Itagaki, was Vladimir Tatlin's unrealized architectural design of The Monument to the Third International (1920). On the other hand, in the 1920sespecially in the second half of the decadepeople witnessed the emergence of a group of new artists who put more emphasis on the inner logic of the machine represented through such terms as accuracy, rationality, progression, collectivity, and functionality. Among these artists are the French architect Le Corbusier, the Hungarian painter and photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Their "anti-romanticist" attitude, Itagaki continues, is most clearly manifested in Le Corbusier's famous dictum: "The house is a machine for living in-130 Itagaki then goes on to examine how and to what extent the rise of the machine aesthetics has changed the traditional notion of the arts in general. It is in this inquiry that the significance of modern architecture in the 1920s comes to the fore because it not only benefits from recent technological and material innovations for constructionmost notably, sheet glass for curtain walls, steel frames for structural support, and reinforced concrete for the interior and exterior supportsbut also begins to embody the inner logic of the machine in its own right. Unlike architects of the past centuries who decorated their works with the already existing criteria of beauty, he says, architects of today like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe design their buildings in search for the most practical form of material-based functionality under the banners "International style" or Neue Sachilichkeit (New Objectivity).131 Thus the beauty of their

i;,() Ibid., 44. Le Corbusier's dictum was first introduced in his 1923 book Ver une architecture, translated as Toward an Architecture, ed. Jean-Louis Cohen, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007). 111

Itagaki, "Kikai bunmei to gendai bijutsu," 44-50.

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works, if it exists, clearly points to something radically new, something that no longer privileges, or draws upon, the genius of individual artists. As a specialist of Western art history, Itagaki finds this self-conscious deviation from the traditional, human-centered notion of aesthetics extremely significant and thus places it as an epistemological break in the historical developments of the arts. With this eye-opening discovery, Itagaki explores further other examples of modern constructs mostly designed by nameless industrial designers and architectsincluding urban factories, skyscrapers, iron bridges, airplanes, and battleshipsto see the degree to which their total devotion to functionalism creates a new form of beauty. It is in this context of the "epistemological break" in the history of the arts that film emerges as the most promising medium ever invented, given its unique potential to disseminate the premises of machine aesthetics throughout the mass public. For one, film is able to open the eyes of the general audience still unaware of the attraction of modern machinery by providing accurate, dynamic, and visually compelling illustrations of the increasing saturation of the machine in everyday life. A prime example of this matter is Walter Ruttmann's 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which Itagaki sees as "depicting the social environment of machine civilization in the most intrinsic way."132 Moreover, with its capacity for mechanical reproduction, film can easily spread this new form of beauty beyond social, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries. Most crucial to Itagaki's appreciation of film as a modern medium, however, is the fact that the cinematic apparatus is itself a machine, so it also teaches the viewers how to look at the world

1,2 Ibid., 63. In contrast, Itagaki repeatedly criticized Fritz Lang's Metropolis ( 1925) as an example of what he called "machine romanticism." As a caption for stills from the film, he wrote: "It is impossible to interpret the 'machine' more anachronistically than this!" See his Kikai to geijutsu to no korvu, 2.

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according to its own logic and modes of visual perception. In other words, film enables us to apprehend the hidden truths of reality that have otherwise been invisible to our "normal" vision. This is exactly what Malcolm Turvey calls "cinema's revelatory capacity" with regard to the work of 1920s European cineastes such as Jean Epstein, Bela Balazs, and Dziga Vertov. Itagaki goes on to provide his own account of this new visual capacity in such a way that is not unlike his Western counterparts: In the past, no one clearly understood the movement of the legs of a galloping horse. Only after it became possible to take photographs in fast motion did factual errors in the horse paintings begin to disappear. Microscopic, telescopic, and high-speed photography all complemented the limited ability of the naked eye. In the meantime, new modes of photographic expression have remodeled the ways we see objects. To put it in Moholy-Nagy's words, "We are now looking at the world with a completely new vision." When it comes to film, one can easily grasp its rapid technological progress only by knowing that the use of close-upswhich had already became a clichewas one of Griffith's innovations. Today, no one could deny that a machine called the "camera" possesses a more acute sensibility and subjectivity than the human's naked eye does.133 Obviously, Itagaki gives higher priority here to the potential of the cinematic apparatus to recast our "imperfect" way of seeing. And if the movie camera's mechanical, non-human gaze has essentially transformed the perceptional and epistemological relations that the viewers have had with reality, it then must be imperative to conceive of a new theory of realism by drawing upon this new vision. This is why Itagaki begins to reorganize his speculations about the machine aesthetics around the term he calls "machine realism" (kikai no riarizumu) in his subsequent essays, "Kikai no riarizumu e no michi" (The Road to Machine Realism) and "Verutofu no eigaron" (Vertov's film theory). As the title of the latter essay clearly indicates, it is Dziga Vertov and his famous concept of "kino-eye" (kinograz) that

Itagaki Takao, "Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu," Shisd 88 (September 1929), reprinted in his Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu, 97-98.

n "'

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informed Itagaki's theorization of a new realism. When he wrote these essays, however, Itagaki had yet to watch any of Vertov's films, including Man with a Movie Camera (1929, released in Japan in 1932). While some leading film critics like Iwasaki Akira, Shimizu Hikaru, and Iijima Tadashi had already begun introducing Soviet montage theory to the Japanese film world since at least 1928, screenings of Battleship Potemkin (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) and other representative works of "revolutionary" Soviet films in Japan were either banned or delayed due to severe state censorship.134 Nevertheless, Itagaki was still certain about the potential of Vertov to be a pioneer of "machine realism" based on his favorable interpretation of the filmmaker's writings. In his daily research on European journals, Itagaki happened to find the German translation of Vertov's 1929 manifesto "From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye," and in the above-mentioned essays he even provided secondhand translation for the sake of his Japanese readers.135 Though only eight-pages in length (in its English translation), this manifesto clearly elucidates what Vertov tried to pursue through his cinematic experiments: "Kino-eye" he writes, "is the documentary cinematic decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye"; it employs "every possible kind of shooting technique" as well as "every possible means in montage" in order to dialectically integrate the movie camera's penetrating gaze and the film director's creative intellect; and, by so doing, it

114 In Chapter 3,1 will provide a more detailed account of the Japanese reception of Soviet films and montage theory in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

According to Itagaki, the German translation of Vertov's manifesto appeared in the July 1929 issue of Die Form. In addition to this, Itagaki also obtained information about Vertov and his work from Leon Moussinac's 1928 book Le cinema sovietique and other German journals such as Das Kunstblatt and Das neue Frankfurt.

135

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ultimately aims for a radical reconceptualization of the term "I see" in both perceptual and epistemological senses.136 Fully impressed by Vertov's bold championing of cinema's revelatory power, Itagaki interprets his cinematic experiments as announcing the birth of a new realism. Concerning Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, Itagaki writes: There is a "new eye" that observes the world as it sees it. This "new eye" is [what I call] the "eye of the machine," which is more perceptive than our naked eye. Only through the eye of the machine will a new realism be born. When used by American capitalists, this mechanical eye is forced to look at heavily made-up actors or to follow run-of-the-mill stories. Otherwise, it might well be exploited along with the talkie and Technicolor in pursing the old, late-nineteenth-century notion of shajitsu [naturalistic depiction] or a more banal concept of "verisimilitude." However, here [in Vertov's work] we witness how the eye of the machine, now freed from all kinds of constraints, begins to establish a new "machine realism."137 It is clear that Itagaki distinguishes his concept of "machine realism" as a radical critique of the centrality of human perception. While Naturalism, or previous definitions of realism developed in the nineteenth century, aimed to develop styles and forms that would generate a higher degree of "verisimilitude" within the visual or literary framework of human-centered positivism, "machine realism" begins with the total negation of these old conventions and seeks instead to reveal a more accurate and objective picture of reality by means of the movie camera's non-human gaze. At first glance, this new way of capturing the world in motion may not yield a strong and instant reality-effect to the eye of the general public. Such a perceptual detour, however, is necessary for anyone trying to come up with a new theory of realism by dialectically integrating both "modernist" and "realist" concerns.
116

Dziga Vertov, "From Kino-Eye to Radio-eye," in Kino-Eye, 87-88.

1:17 Itagaki Takao, "Kikai no riarizumu e no michi," Asahi shinbun, September 10, 1929, reprinted in his Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu, 150.

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For Itagaki, moreover, the merit of "machine realism" lies in its potential to teach us how to envision a more democratic, cost-effective form of society. Unlike the eye of capitalists that always looks for the concentration of wealth, the eye of the machine, says Itagaki, encourages us to see the world from the perspective of the public interest, as it bases itself on "new" and "advanced" social norms like "simplicity, hygiene, system, inexpensiveness, durability, and mass production."138 At the same time, Itagaki recognizes negative aspects of the mechanization of everyday life as well, rightfully citing Marx's famous warning that the machine can also serve as an effective means to exploit human labor when it remains in the possession of capitalists.139 Yet, at least at this point of his career, Itagaki's main concern was to detect the degree to which the advent of the twentieth-century machine civilization could contribute to enhancing the quality of life of the general public. Thus instead of going further into the issues of class struggle, Itagaki ends his speculation on machine aesthetics with the Utopian future promised by the machine: "Upon its discovery by the humans, the 'machine' first appeared as a destroyer of our cultural values. But now it embarks upon a new task, taking the role of a constructor. From antithesis to synthesishere we can also find the profound truth of history."140 Itagaki and his concept of "machine realism" tellingly illustrates the full synchronicity between Japan and the West in their mutual exploration of a new discursive and perceptual framework to embrace the specificityor even the "spirit," to follow Heideggerof the twentieth century. In other words, Japanese thinkers of the 1920s like
138 139 140

Itagaki, "Kikai to geijutsu to no koryu," 73. Ibid., 71-72. Itagaki Takao, "Kikaibi no tanjo," in Kikaigeijutsuron, ed. Itagaki Takao (Tokyo: Tenjinsha,

1930). 2-3.

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Itagaki were no longer living in an "alternative" or "derivative" modernity defined by Japan's belated entry into the modern age. They rather dwelled in what the historian Harry Harootunian calls a "co-eval" modernity, clearly reflecting their experience of "shar[ing] the same historical temporality of modernity... found elsewhere in Europe and the United States."141 The advantage of the term "co-eval," Harootunian argues, is that it allows us to address not only the "contemporaneity of modern experience" beyond the alleged discrepancy between the West and the non-West, but also the "possibility of difference" stemming from each country and area's particular cultural, political, and historical contexts.142 In this respect, it is not correct to treat Itagaki solely as a wellinformed mediator/translator of the latest trends in the European avant-garde art movements. If, as the critic Hanada Kiyoteru reminds us, Itagaki's debut as an advocate of the machine aesthetics stimulated a number of disputes among Japanese thinkers and writers of the time,143 it was precisely because he elaborated his arguments in response to major currents in domestic discourse. What is, then, the local specificity of Itagaki's theorization of machine realism?

Kurahara Korehito and Proletarian Realism As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Itagaki came up with his neologism "machine realism" as a critical response to the Marxist literary critic Kurahara Korehito's influential theory of "proletarian realism." The mutual relationship between the two is most visible in the title of Itagaki's third essay on the issue of machine
141

Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar

Japan , xvi.
142 143

Ibid., xvii. Hanada Kiyoteru, "Kikai to bara," in Avangyarudo geijutsu (Tokyo: K5dansha, 1994), 194.

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aesthetics, "Kikai no riarizumu e no michi" (The Road to Machine Realism), as it was named after Kurahara's 1928 manifesto, "Proletarian rearizumu e no michi" (The Road to Proletarian Realism). Published in the inaugural issue of Senki (Battle Flag), the official organ of the Zen Nihon Musansha Geijutsu Renmei (All Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts, usually called NAPF for short), Kurahara's piece served as a major theoretical framework of the then-burgeoning proletarian literature Movement, whose representative works include Tokunaga Sunao's Taiyo no nai machi (City Without Sun, 1929) and Kobayashi Takiji's Kani kosen (The Cannery Ship, 1929). The impact of "The Road to Proletarian Realism" has been fully recognized by both contemporary critics and literary historians because it was the first attempt "by a writer of the proletarian literary movement to address the problems of creative method in concrete terms."144 Written as a direct refutation of Kurahara's proposal, Itagaki's call for machine realism inevitably came under harsh criticism from proletarian writers. However, it is first necessary to see how Kurahara theorized his notion of proletarian realism. Despite his reputation as the leading Marxist critic, Kurahara had much in common with his "modernist" compatriots like Murayama Tomoyoshi and Itagaki Takao, especially in terms of his closeness to the cultural center in the West. Born in 1902 to the acclaimed educator Kurahara Korehiro, Kurahara grew up in Azabu, one of the most upscale residential areas in Tokyo, and studied Russian literature at the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages. His passion for Russiaor rather, his growing interest in Communismwas so profound that he moved to Moscow in 1925 as a foreign correspondent of the Japanese Newspaper Miyako Shinbun and stayed there for two years.
Mats Karlson, "Kurahara Korehito's Road to Proletarian Realism," Japan Review 20 (2008): 236. Needless to say, this view has also been shared by many Japanese literary scholars including Yamada Seisaburo, Miyamoto Kenji, Hirano Ken, Sobue Shoji, and Kobayashi Shigeo.
144

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Naturally, Kurahara began his career by writing articles on the latest trends in art and political movements in the Soviet Union. His 1927 article entitled "Saikin no Soweto eigakai" (Currents in the Recent Soviet Film World), for instance, was one of the first indepths introductions of post-revolutionary Soviet films to Japan, providing detailed reviews of Battleship Potemkin, The Bay of Death (dir. Abram Room, 1926), and Mother (dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926).145 Upon his return to Japan in November 1926, Kurahara immediately joined the proletarian literature movement and established himself as a specialist in Soviet literary criticism by translating major texts by Georgi Prekhanov, Nikolai Bukharin, and Joseph Stalin. A turning point in Kurahara career came in October 1927 when he published an abridged translation of the Comintern's 1927 thesis, which severely criticized the factional conflicts commonly found among Japanese leftists, especially between theory-oriented Fukumotoism (led by Fukumoto Kazuo) and practicebased Yamakawaism (led by Yamakawa Hitoshi). Using his privileged connection with the Soviet Union, Kurahara assumed a central role in bringing together divided factions like the Nihon Puroretaria Bungei Renmei (Japan Proletarian Arts League) and the Zen'ei Geijutsuka Domei (Vanguard Artists League) under the auspices of the then-illegal Japanese Communist Party.146 Eventually, Kurahara's effort led to the foundation in March 1928 of the united front called NAPF, and since then he remained the chief ideologue of the Japanese proletarian art movement until his arrest in 1932.

145 Kurahara Korehito, "Saikin no Sowet eigakai (1)" Kinema junpd 254 (March 1, 1927): 24; "Saikin no Soweto eigakai (2)," Kinema junpd 257 (April 1, 1927): 30.

Kurahara joined the Communist Party in September, 1929. At the order of the party, he went back to the Soviet Union and stayed there from July 1930 to February 1931, attending the fifth meeting of the Profintern (Red International of Labor Unions).

146

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A similarity between Itagaki and Kurahara can also be found in their methods and terminology. In his "The Road to Proletarian Realism" and other related essays, Kurahara, just like Itagaki, presents his notion of "proletarian realism" to be a fundamental critique of previous definitions of realism developed in the past century. Kurahara begins his argument by saying that French writers usually labeled as "realists" like Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Emile Zola aimed to depict reality as objectively as possible. But the realism at work in their fiction, he contends, had a "historical limitation" that derived from their general tendency to see the world from the perspective of bourgeois individualism. He claims: Here, every aspect of human life is reduced to biological attributes, personal characters, and the hereditary transmissions of human beings. Put differently, the ways they recognize their life and reality always remains unsocial and individualistic. There is no concern in their view about the control and oppression of the life of individuals by social structures. Not only is all emphasis put on individuals, but their subject matter is also restricted to the individual life of human beings.147 Kurahara rightly points out that Zola and his followers applied the work of scientific theorists like Darwin in their search for a higher objectivity. Still, this was not "objective" enough for Kurahara, who saw the Naturalists' failure to grasp the reality of their social environment as rooted in the fact that "while they imposed upon themselves the objectivity of natural scientists, they completely lacked the objectivity of social scientists."148 Kurahara's criticism also goes to the work of a group of writers usually categorized as "social realists." including Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the late Zola. What differentiates these writers from previous
147 148

Kurahara, "Proretaria rearizumu e no michi," 118. Ibid.

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generations, he argues, is their persistent desire to depict stories from a certain social perspective. Nevertheless, most of their attempts ended up seeking humanitarianand often non-committalsolutions, clearly reflecting their "petit-bourgeois" class consciousness. A primary example here is Zola's 1885 novel Germinal (1885). Kurahara admits that this work marked a significant step toward the socialization of literature in its vivid illustration of a miner's strike. Yet the problem for Kurahara is that Zola described this event "not from the perspective of the revolutionary proletariat but from the standpoint of a social reformist."149 In fact, Zola's emphasis was ultimately on the failure of the strike and the disillusionment of the miners for the possibility of a revolution. In this respect, Germinal remains a mirror that simply reflects the existence of social problems alone: although it tells us when and where these problems take place, it does not show how to solve them by thoroughly changing the social structure as such. Accordingly, Kurahara distinguishes his notion of "proletarian realism" from these nineteenth-century definitions of realism. First, in contrast to bourgeois realism's privatization of social problems, it aims to depict "all kinds of individual problems from a social perspective." Second, unlike social realism's cooperative treatment of the status quo, it offers a more dynamic and animated document of the current situation by rearticulating modern human society and its historical deployment as an outgrowth of class struggles. And, most importantly for my argument, Kurahara decidedly states that this dual task of "proletarian realism" could only be accomplished when writers are equipped with the new social optics called the "eye of the proletarian vanguard." It is thus

l4 "lbid

119.

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not surprising that Kurahara resembles Itagaki in his call to recast our "normal" way of seeing: First of all, a proletarian writer must acquire a clear class perspective... To put it in the famous words of RAPP (The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), he must see the world with the eye of the proletarian vanguard and depict what he finds there. Only by acquiring this perspective and putting emphasis on it, can the proletarian writer be a true realist. For, at present, no one except the militant proletariatthe proletarian vanguardcan see the world in its truth, its entirety, and its progress.150 The point here is fairly simple. Believing that the success of the Russian Revolution portended the total collapse of capitalist society, Kurahara finds it necessary to develop a new theory of realism that would enable people to embrace and even participate in this side of historical reality. Aside from its overt ideological investments, the problem with Kurahara's theory of proletarian realism is that he did not provide any concrete and objective criteria with which to judge whether this or that literary work is indeed written through the eye of the proletarian vanguard. Instead, as the literary critic Sobue Shoji points out, Kurahara's argument is often marked by its logical inconsistency, which even includes some essays he published under different pennames like Sato Koichi and Tanimoto Kiyoshi to criticize what he had written before.151 It seems, however, that Kurahara intentionally kept his writing vagueor at least ambiguousbecause his main objective was less to offer a comprehensive analysis of on-going cultural transformations in general than to hold sway over the Japanese proletarian movement by almost endlessly critiquing his fellow writers. Indeed, the rhetoric Kurahara employed was fairly dogmatic and

150

Ibid., 122-123.

151 Sobue Shoj i, "Puroretaria bungaku I," in Kindai puroretaria bungaku, vol. 13 of Iwanami koza: Nihon bungakushi, eds., Subue Shoji and Takeuchi Yoshimi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), 3-55.

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tautological. In his view, the majority of Japanese writers and thinkers, regardless of their political standpoints, were not "proletariat" enough due to their middle-class background. At the same time the masses, or those from the working class, were also problematic because they had yet to be enlightened enough to be a "vanguard" and were therefore still being exploited by capitalists. According to Kurahara and his followers, this political dilemma could only be solved by the intervention of a newly emergent social apparatus: the Communist Party. In his 1930 essay "Puroretaria rearizumu no gendaikai" (The Current Stage of Proletarian Realism), for instance, the literary critic Komiyama Akitoshi identifies the continuous failures of his fellow Japanese writers to fully proletarianize their works, a failure which he attributed to their insufficient allegiance to the Party: "Writers can grasp the faithful, objective, and animated contents of reality first by obtaining the way in which they perceive the world from the perspective of dialectical materialism, and second by acknowledging that their writing activities constitute one significant part of the Party's chain of command."152 When Komiyama proceeds to declare, "Any deviation from the Party's line makes an accurate understanding of reality impossible," he clearly articulates what Kurahara sought to express with his notion of proletarian realism. Like Itagaki's "machine realism," this new realism also appeared to be a solution for the impasse of old definitions of realism, especially the one developed by Naturalists in the late nineteenth century. Where Itagaki praised the movie camera's objective, penetrating gaze as the most effective tool to see through the mechanism of twentieth-century modernity,

152 Komiyama Akitoshi, "Puroretaria bungaku no gendankai: Soshite sorewa ikanaru hoko e susumu beki dearu ka," in Koki puroretaria bungaku hydronshu 2, vol. 7 of Nihon Puroretaria bungaku hydronshu (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1990), 190.

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Kurahara championed the Communist Party's systematic yet still derivative vision for the dictatorship of the proletariat in the effort to conceive of a new reality.

Anxieties about the Absence of the Human Eve Though similarly motivated to establish a new theory of twentieth-century realism, Itagaki found Kurahara's proposal of proletarian realism both theoretically too abstract and ideologically too selective. As a result, Itagaki decidedly elaborated his theory of machine realism as solidly and neutrally as possible, leaving almost no space where volatile human agents could play any positive roles. Itagaki's denial of the superiority of humans over the machine yielded two opposite reactions among his contemporary readers. One the one hand, it served as a theoretical backdrop in advancing a historical shift in the realm of Japanese photography, a shift that the photo historian Takeba Joe calls "a return to a more fundamentally photographic expression that focused on the representation of reality."153 During the first decades of the twentieth century, the major trend of Japanese art photography was to produce a visual imitation of nineteenth-century landscape paintings with the use of such techniques as soft focus and pigment printing. Usually called "pictorialism," this artistic minimization of the camera's mechanical nature became thoroughly anachronistic by the end of the 1920s with the emergence of the aforementioned shinko shashin. Directly influenced by Itagaki, Horino Masao, a leading figure of this new trend, wrote in 1930 that the eye of the camera "has a potential to recast [our vision] and is capable of creating a faithful reproduction of the truth."154

151

Takeba Joe, "The Age of Modernism: From Visualization to Socialization," 144.

154 Horino Masao, "Atarashiki kamera e no michi," in Gendai shashin geijutsuron (Tokyo: Tenjinsha, 1930), 11.

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Likewise, in his monumental 1932 essay "Shashin ni kaere" (Return to Photography), the critic Ina Nobuo candidly expresses his intellectual debt to Itagaki: "Break with 'artistic photographs'! Destroy any ready-made notions of'art'! Down with icons! And become keenly aware of photography's own identity as a 'machine'! The aesthetic of photography as a new art...must be established on these principles."155 In responding to these commentators, Itagaki also began to write extensively about the current status of Japanese photography, becoming a regular contributor for magazines like Foto taimusu (Photo Times) and Asahi kamera (Asahi Camera). In the meantime, Itagaki's exclusion of human agents from his theorization of machine realism elicited numerous disputes among those involved in the proletarian literature movement. One of the earliest responses was made by Kurahara himself, who openly discussed the issue of machine aesthetics from the proletarian perspective in an essay published in December 1929the month when Itagaki's Exchanges between the Machine and Art came out. In most of the essay, Kurahara simply follows Itagaki's articulation of the historical progress in the integration of the machine into art, only adding Russian Constructivism as a forerunner of machine realism.156 While Kurahara admits that the depiction of the machine also begins to constitute a significant part of what he calls "proletarian art," his aim here is to explain how it differentiates itself from other twentieth-century "mechanist" schools like Italian Futurism by rejecting the idea

Ina Nobuo, "Shashin ni kaere," Koga 1.1 (January 1932), reprinted in Nihon shashinshi no shihd: Koga kessakushu, eds. lizawa Kotaro and Kaneko Ryuichi (Kokusho Kankokai, 2005), 5. Kurahara Korehito, "Shin-geijutsu keishiki no tankyu e: Puroretaria geijutsu tomen no mondai ni tsuite," Kaiio (December 1929), reprinted in Kurahara Korehito shu, 235-236. Here, Kurahara refers to Murayama Tomoyoshi's 1926 book Koseiha kenkyu, as it clearly stated that Russian Constructivism based itself on the pursuit of rationality and functionality. I do not know why Itagaki did not mention this study in his argument on machine realism, but perhaps he intended to keep himself away from Murayama's overt leaning toward the proletarian movement.
156

155

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that the machine could serve as a new and superior subjective agency in lieu of human beings. "The machine," he says, "can never be the protagonist of proletarian art. The central figures of proletarian art are always society and human beings. We can appreciate the machine only as the most novel and most important element in the material aspect of this society."157 From this standpoint, Kurahara also adds that proletarian artists must interpret the technological advantage of modern machinery not as the object of fetishism or theoretical contemplation but as a practical means of production. No one could fail to grasp the two major points Kurahara posed in his counterargument: the control of the machine by the human/proletariat and the foregrounding of the social context surrounding the machine. Although Kurahara's essay was not written as a direct refutation of Itagaki, succeeding critics accordingly took issue with the absence of these concerns in his theorization of machine realism. The most scathing attack in this regard came from the novelist Kobayashi Takiji, who wrote in 1930 an article entitled '"Kikai no kaikyusei' ni tsuite" (On the Class Aspects of the Machine). Drawing upon Itagaki's formula, Kobayashi also rejects Futurism and Constructivism as exemplary of "machine romanticism." Unlike Itagaki, however, Kobayashi goes on to emphasize that the problem of these schools lies not solely in their fetishization of the superficial beauty of modern machinery, but rather in their ignorance of the ongoing struggles between capitalists and the proletariat over the possession of the machine. Seen from this social vantage point, Itagaki's contemplative, observational attitude toward the machine aesthetic would appear to be problematic. Kobayashi writes: Most of those interested in the machine only speak about its "rationality" and "dynamics" but never clarify their own positions. I don't know how these people

157

Ibid., 237.

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solved their own "romanticism" toward the machine. Insofar as they continue to ignore its "class aspects," however, their realism remains a bourgeois or petitbourgeois realism that is faithful only to the machine as such.... Only from the proletariat's class perspective, can the machine reveal its true essence. Similarly, another proletarian critic named Kimura Toshimi points to Itagaki's methodological errors in his 1930 book Kikai to geijutsu kakumei (The Machine and the Revolution of Art): Exchanges between the machine and artIf it ends up only addressing how some characteristics of the machine are integrated into art, and how this interaction reflects back upon the transformation of the machine itself, nothing will be gained from this study.... From what class perspective can we properly appropriate the machine for the creation of new art forms? This should be our methodological 159 premise. Needless to say, these statements were meant to be a pure application of Kurahara's concept of proletarian realism: In order for anyone to see the truth of the things in the world, it is first necessary to be equipped with the eye of the proletariat. For those engaged in the proletarian movement, there was of course no exception to this principle, even when it came to the issues of machine aesthetics. But for Itagaki, this political reinscription of his theory was nothing but misleading. First, there was no one among his adversaries who paid attention to Itagaki's cautious citation from Marx on the machine's double nature. Second and more importantly, the proletarian writers' refutations were only possible by shifting the locus of Itagaki's speculation. Whereas Itagaki aimed to detect the degree to which the rise of the twentieth-century machine civilization altered both the mode of human perception and the standard of cultural and

Kobayashi Takiji, '"Kikai no kaikyusei ni tsuite,"' Shin-kikaiha (March 1930), reprinted in Koki puroretaria bungaku hyoronshu 2, vol. 7 of Nihon Puroretaria bungaku hyoronshu (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1990), 68-69.
159 Kimura Toshimi, "Kikai to geijutsu kakumei," in Kikai to geijutsu kakumei, ed. and trans. Kimura Toshimi (Tokyo: Hakuyosha, 1930), 255-256.

158

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artistic values, his opponents reduced the debates to the level of class struggle and obstinately asked who had the power to control the machine according to their own ideological needs. Fully irritated by such miscommunication, Itagaki later justified his standpoint by likening it to historical science: "Because I always draw a clear distinction between political activities and scientific studies, I intended to leave some doubts about the adequacy of [dialectical] materialism and sought to separate my 'document-oriented' historical science from their "ideology-oriented' historical view."160 However, at least around the time of the publication of his monograph, Itagaki was still seeking the possibility of a coalition, which ultimately led him to invite a group of proletarian writers for the inaugural issue of his magazine Shinko geijutsu kenkyii. Despite its apparent ideological bent, the proletarian writers' rejection of Itagaki's theory of machine realism also indicates their collective reaction to a more general experience of self-alienation in modern societies. As many critics have pointed out, the mechanization of everyday life engendered by the saturation of technologies did not always promise a bright future. This radical transformation of human modality has also been marked by negative terms such as uncertainty, dislocation, disorientation, distraction, and fragmentation. By way of compensation for this shared sense of loss, people in the twentieth century have made every endeavor to reunite themselves with their purported totalityeven though the methods or concepts they actually employed often entailed a more absolute experience of dehumanization, as most succinctly exemplified in the case of fascism. In this respect, it is not surprising that Itagaki's confirmation of the superiority of the machine over human beings incited a deep anxiety

160

Itagaki Takao, "Gendai geijutsu koatsusha no shuki," 227.

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among his readers. What is implied in Kurahara and his followers' emphasis on the actual "struggles" taking place in reality is thus not only the victory of the proletariat over capitalists but also that of humans over the machine. The following remark by Kimura is a good example of how they tactfully, if one-sidedly, utilized the notions of the "proletariat" and "communism" as a key to overcoming this double oppression of humanity in modern capitalist societies: Rather, the evil exists in the capitalist mode of production that has made the machine serve to oppress human beings.... The machine is now demanding its proper position, its proper relationship with production, on which it must be placed. Only in the XXXX [communist] society can the machine fully exhibit its extraordinary power and creativity without oppressing human beings. Here the machine serves as a faithful slave of humans, and not vice versa.161 This strong antipathy for the subordination of human activities to the logic of both capitalism and the machine may explain why Itagaki's theory of machine realismand by extension, Vertov's concept of "kino-eye"had relatively limited impact on those involved in film production in Japan at the time. As we will see in the next chapter, the main thrust of Japanese filmmakers and critics throughout the 1920s was to establish the ways in which a human artist could insert his or her own subjective creativity beyond the alleged automatism of the mechanically produced photographic image. Considering this discursive context, the significance of the Soviet montage theory was unmistakable, for many considered it to be an effective tool to create new ideas or meanings on the screen through the combination of two or more successive shots, just as writers compose stories by reassembling words into sentences. Compared to the omnipresence of major figures of montage theory like Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Pudovkin, however, general attention paid

Kimura, "Hashigaki," in Kikai to geijutsu kakumei, 7. Usually called fuseji, the "X"s in this passage indicate the word censored by the government. But because there is a simple and almost automatic rule for this concealment, it is relatively easy to retrieve the original word based on the context

161

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to the work of Vertov seems modest and reserved, if not overtly negative.

Of course,

there was a group of Japanese critics who espoused this cinematic experiment in earnest. Yet their application of Vertov was restricted to the realm of theoretical speculations, and no attempt was made to direct a film based on his unique ideas on montage such as the interval."163 Let us take a look at Japanese reviews of Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to see how an anti-machine sentiment grew among Japanese film critics. Originally made in 1929, the film came to Japan in March 1932 and was released under the title Kore ga Roshia da (This is Russia). Though only three years, the temporal gap between these two release dates is more essential than it appears because the years around 1930 saw radical shifts in both the cinematic apparatus (from silent to sound film) and Soviet state policy toward art (from Constructivism or Formalism to Socialist realism). As a consequence, while many Japanese critics immediately wrote about their encounter with this legendary and long-awaited film, their responses unanimously registered disappointment and disagreement. Just like the case of Itagaki's theory, however, there were some misconceptions that fostered the negative reception toward Vertov and his masterwork. First, deceived by the pretentious tone of the Japanese title, many Japanese viewers expected the film to be a faithful document of the recent developments of the Soviet Union, rather than being what the director called the "sensory exploration of the world through film." As one reviewer says, "No description of everyday life in the Soviet Union is meaningful unless it is closely tied to the Five-Year Plan [for the National

162 Japanese translation and introduction of Vertov, see lwamoto Kenji, "Montaju riron Nihon e," in Roshia avangyarudo no eiga to engeki (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 1998), 305-323.

For his notion of "interval," see Dziga Vertov, "We: Variant of a Manifesto," in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 8.

16:1

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Economy]."164 Second, contrary to Vertov's own conception of "kino-eye" as a synthesis of the camera's revelatory capacity and the director's (and editor's) intellectual rearticulation of reality, not a few Japanese commentators regarded him as a naive opponent of montage theory. This public estimation led one critic to find the film "remaining one step short of the full completion of montage,"165 despite Vertov's insertion of a self-reflective sequence that portrays his wife/editor Yelizaveta Svilova working at her editing table. More critiques, however, concentrated on Vertov's "fetishization" of the cameraeye, which in turn rendered him a servant of the machine. Not surprisingly, this type of argument was mostly made by the sympathizers of the proletarian movement. In his review for Kinema junpd, Wadayama Shigeru argues, "Dziga Vertov is a man who not simply carries the camera but also plays around with this device. What is filmed by this guy is far from a truthful depiction of Soviet Russia."166 A similar criticism is also posed by Kamo Kyoji, who calls Vertov a member of the "technological intelligentsia" and an "anti-subjectivist." He writes: "To negate a scenario that organizes the materials is to banish a plan from film production. It is from this attitude that a path for visual indulgences opens up.... There is no reason that we should purge filmmaking of our artistic perception which involves various aspects of human ideas and emotional processes, technology and nature, political life and production, and individuals and the class struggles."167 Tomioka Sho, himself a scriptwriter and director, offers the most

iM 165 166 167

Wadayama Shigeru, " Korega RoshiadaKinema Junpd, 431 (April I, 1932); 43. Kiuchi Tsuguo, " Korega Roshia daEiga hydron 11.4 (April 1932): 139. Wadayama, " Korega Roshia da," 43. Kamo Kyoji, " Korega Roshia da," Prokino 1.1 (May 1932): 75.

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passionate and controversial commentary. In his view, Vertov is a good example of a "slave of the cinema-machine" (eiga kikai no dorei) who lost himself in his full identification with the eye of the camera. "Because Vertov tried to look at the truth through the camera's mechanical capabilities alone, his film ended up providing a ghost like impression of reality that stripped it of any social facts and filled it with almost nonsensical movements of forms and changes in light."168 Given this statement, it comes as no surprise that Tomioka calls for the re-humanization of filmmaking by subjugating the cinema-machine to human control. But interestingly, he sees this task as only possible with the coming of sound: "Only with the advent of the talkie, can human beings finally become able to reign over the cinema machine; moreover, it also designates a direction towards a talkie realism!"169 These condemnations clearly tell us what was at stake in Japanese critics' antimachine sentiment, which became intensified especially after the introduction of the new sound system. On an empirical level, no one could deny the ability of the cinema to reveal the hidden truths of reality, to expose the unreliability of the human vision, and to recast our imperfect way of seeing. Thus, instead of competing with this little optical device in the realm of visual faculties, they began to resort to language, a device that human beings had long developed and employed to express their critical interpretation of reality. For this reason, the Japanese cinema of the 1930s saw the rise of what I call "nonontological" or "textual" realism, which gave higher priority to filmmakers' (and the scriptwriters') creative intervention in rendering the world on the screen, than to sound cinema's expanded recording capacity.
"'8 Tomioka Sho, "T5kT geijutsu no rearizumu e no michi," Eiga hyoron 14.5 (May 1933): 69.
I6 "

Ibid., 73.

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Primarily privileging active human involvement in the creation of artworks, Kurahara's theory of proletarian realism coincided with this historical shift toward a "human-oriented" model of filmmaking and thus left a more visible impact on the historical development of realist film practice in Japan. Its main practitioners were the members of Nippon Puroretaria Eiga Domei (Proletarian Film League of Japan), known as Prokino for short. Founded in February 1929 as the film unit of NAPF, Prokino produced a number of newsreels and agitprop films, published its own journals introducing the latest film activities in the Soviet Union, and held numerous non-profit screenings in an attempt to ignite social mass-movements. In the history of Japanese cinema, the significance of Prokino is undeniable, and its core members like Sasa Genju, Iwasaki Akira, Ueno Kozd, Kimura Sotoji, and Atsugi Taka remained at the center of both film criticism and production long after the dissolution of the unit in 1934.170 Yet seen from a perspective of "realist" film theory, its importance is relatively limited. To be sure, Sasa's theorization of a small-gauge camerathe 9.5 mm Pathe Babyas a "weapon" for those working outside the capitalist film industry significantly preceded the work of 1960s militant filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Fernando Solanas or of a number of independent video activists.171 Moreover, figures like Iwasaki, Ueno, and Atsugi were all indispensable participants of the late 1930s debates on documentary films, which I will discuss in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, their arguments tended to revolve around each filmmaker's political and artistic stance toward reality, thereby marginalizing the

For a detailed account of Prokino, see Abe Mark Nornes, "The Innovation of Prokino," in Japanese Documentary Film , 19-47.
171

170

Sasa Genju, "Gangu/BukiSatsueiki," Senki 1.2 (June 1928): 29-33.

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question of how the emergence and dissemination of film as a medium altered the sense of the real as such. The debates between Itagaki and the Proletarian writers over the definition of new realisms abruptly came to an end in 1932-33. This was in part because the Japanese government violently oppressed leftist activities in the early 1930s, especially after the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in September 1931. Kurahara was arrested in 1932 and sentenced to seven years in prison for the violation of the Peace Preservation Law (chian ijihd); Kobayashi, on the other hand, was cruelly murdered by the special police immediately after his capture in 1933. Another reason for the discontinuation of the debates was Itagaki's retreat from the issues of machine aesthetics. As anticipated, this decision stemmed mostly from Itagaki's frustration about his contemporary readers1 inability to properly understand his project to distill the main characteristics of contemporary art through observation of the machine civilization. In addition to misguided critiques by the proletarian writers, the publishing industry only expected him to write about the superficial beauty of modern machinery, labeling him the leader of a new aesthetic faction called kikai-ha, or the Machinist School. However, Itagaki himself was not immune to the current of the times, as he also made a reactionary return to the old, human-centered notion of art in the course of the 1930s. As early as 1933, he regretfully looked back at his own obsession with Vertov as an "indiscretion of youth" and in turn sarcastically likened Japanese intellectuals' craze about new theories from abroad to the children's yearning for new toys like yoyos.172 After this, Itagaki's stance shifted to one that dealt with film and other modern cultural phenomena from the

172

Itagaki Takao, "Yoyo to geijutsuron," in Kanso no gangu (Tokyo: Ohata Shoten, 1933), 7-8.

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perspective of an "educator," using his vast knowledge about Western art for the purpose of mass enlightenment.173 Despite such an abrupt ending, Itagaki's theorization of machine realism represents a crucial juncture in the history of film theory. For one, it provides solid evidence of the global circulation and plasticity of classical film theory in the 1920s, effectively blurring the alleged oppositions between the West and the non-West, as well as between realism and modernism. At the same time, it serves as a discursive framework for my inquiry into prewar and wartime Japanese debates over cinematic realism. Whether supportive of Itagaki's (and Kurahara's) prognostic argument or not, anyone involved in the debates from the 1930s on were fully aware of the inefficiency of the "old" notions of realism developed in the past century, and thus called for a new definition of realism more suitable to the more elusiveor even more complicated reality of wartime Japan. As we will see in the next chapter, the search for a higher objectivity through cinema's revelatory capacity was temporarily put aside in the early sound period due to the rise of "non-ontological" realism in the field of fiction filmmaking. Nevertheless, it soon made an impressive comeback to the center of Japanese film discourse and practice with the growing popularity of non-fiction genres like newsreels and documentaries, which was bolstered by the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937.

For Itagaki's later career as an educator, see Iwamoto Kenji, "Kikai bunmei to eiga kyoiku," in llagaki Takao, 15-42.

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CHAPTER III DOUBLE MEDIATION: LITERARY ADAPTATION AND TEXTUAL REALISM

In his celebrated essay "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," the French film critic Andre Bazin begins his argument by asking "if the technological revolution created by the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution."174 Far from drawing upon a simple technological determinism, Bazin is careful enough to point out some close "affinities" between the directors of different decades and thereby brings up a hypothesis that if there is an issue to be concerned in the historical development of film aesthetics, "it is less a matter of setting silence over against sound than of contrasting certain families of styles, certain basically different concepts of cinematographic expression."175 Of these different concepts, Bazin picks up the two major trends that, at least since 1920, have been categorized as the "formalist" and the "realist," respectively. And by focusing on "a level of classical perfection" that both Hollywood and French films of the late 1930s and early 1940s brought into existence, Bazin empirically traces how the advent of sound cinema intensifiednot inaugurateda historical shift toward the realist mode of filmmaking, a mode in which "the [filmic] image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it."176

174 175 176

Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," in What is Cinema? 1:23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 28-30.

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Writing a history like Bazin's that is not always determined by a "technological revolution" is necessary, especially for countries like Japan where silent films continued to be made until around 1938 due to the delay in the implementation of the new sound system on a national scale. This is, of course, not to say that up to that moment Japanese moviegoers had been forced to watch films without sound; on the contrary, nearly all films screened in Japan during its longer silent period were always "dubbed" thanks to the enduring presence of the benshi. Given this localized setting, it is not surprising that not a few Japanese film directors and critics saw the adding of sound to film as a good opportunity to give the right to "speak" back to the hands of filmmakers. To put it more correctly, while the possibility of a cinematic realism based on sound cinema's extended recording ability was explored in the field of non-fiction films like documentaries and newsreels, those involved in the production of fiction films aimed rather to establish a different kind of realism, a realism in which an "human" artist should disclose his or her subjective interpretation of reality beyond the automatism of the mechanically reproduced filmic image. To address this shift toward what I call "textual" and "non-ontological" realism, this chapter examines the phenomenal popularity of a genre called bungei eiga (literary film) in mid-to-late 1930s Japan. As in Europe and the United States, literary adaptation became one of the dominant modes of Japanese sound filmmaking, providing a viable model for composing more lively and plausible spoken dialogue. The significance of literary adaptation in the Japanese context, however, was not restricted to its potential to enhance the aural verisimilitude of sound films; it was truly important because it helped recast the notion of "film author" (eiga sakka) by promoting the written language (i.e.,

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film scripts) as the primary means of subjective expression. While it succeeded in highlighting active human involvement in the course of filmmaking, this adoptionor even appropriationof the literary model for the establishment of the authorial vision of filmmakers inevitably posed an essential question: Who had the right to claim authenticity in providing a cinematic reproduction of reality, now mediated not only through the mechanical gaze of the movie camera but also through the multiple gazes of human interpreters, including at minimum the original writer, the scriptwriter, and the film director? Looking closely at several representative works of literary adaptation in 1930s Japan, this chapter explores the ways in which Japanese filmmakers and critics responded to this vexing problem of film authorship. But let us first look at how the advent of the talkie revitalized realism as one of the main concerns of Japanese film discourse and practice in the early 1930s.

1934: The Year of Japanese Neorealismo In October 1934, Shimazu Yasujio, one of the film directors working at Shochiku since its foundation in 1920, released Sono yoru no onna (The Woman That Night) as his eighth sound film. Loosely based on King Vidor's pre-code sound film Street Scene (1931), the film depicts mundane human dramas taking place during a single day among the common, lower-middle class people living in a small shopping alley called "Imakoji yokocho" in Tokyo. Tanaka Kinuyo, one of the most popular Japanese female movie stars of the period, plays the role of the country-girl heroine who comes up to this alley to become a cafe waitress. Unfortunately, the print of Sono yoru no onna no longer exists in any formata problem that is not uncommon to the main body of prewar Japanese

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filmsand I cannot go further into details. And yet the original reviews tell us first, that the film tried to enhance the verisimilitude of its atmosphere by building a life-size set modeled after a real street corner near Shochiku's Kamata studio, and second, that Shimazu's main focus was to offer a realistic sketch of the everyday life of the neighborhood through his unobtrusive, observational mise-en-scene.177 Perhaps one might find it odd that I abruptly refer to this unknown, almost forgotten film by Shimazu. But there are at least two good reasons that I begin this chapter with this particular film. First, in this transitional period from silent to sound cinema, Shimazu was playing an indispensible role in the development of Japanese talkies. Although the Japanese film industry had already seen since the late 1920s several 17fi attempts to produce sound and talking films, its full conversion to the talkie took almost ten years, as second- or third-rate film companies like Daito continued making silent films until 1938. General histories of Japanese cinema always cite Gosho Heinosuke's 1931 film Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbor's Wife and Mine) as the first successful talkie in Japan mostly because it was made with the domestically developed sound system called Tsuchibashi-shiki Shochiku Phone. Working at the same company that produced this groundbreaking work, Shimazu also embarked on the production of sound films as early as 1931 and soon garnered a high reputation as one of the key figures in "the future development of Japanese talkies" 179 with his sound features like

177

See, for instance, Otsuka Kyoichi, " Sonoyoru no onnaEiga hydron 16:12 (December 1934):

153-154.
178 For instance, Reimei (Dawn), arguably the first Japanese "sound-on-film" directed in 1927 by Osanai Kaoru, was made with Lee De Forest's Phonofilm system. For a detailed account of the early days of Japanese sound films, see Firumu raiburarl kyogikai, ed., Shiryd Nihon hassei eiga no soseiki: Reimei kara Madamu to ny5bo made , vol. 10 of Nihon eigashi soko 10 (Tokyo: Firumu Raiburarl Kyogikai, 1973). 179

Tsuji Hisakazu, "Shimazu Yasujiro: T5kT igo," Eiga hydron 108 (March 1935): 33.

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Arashi no naka no shojo (Maiden in the Storm, 1932) and Tonari no Yae-chan (Our Neighbor Miss Yae, 1934). The second and more important reason I refer to this is that Shochiku promoted Sonoyoru no onna with an eye-catching term neo-rearisumo (New Realism). In their book on the history of Japanese cinema, Anderson and Richie presume, "Shochiku borrowed the English 'realism,' [and] tacked on a 'neo,'"180 but this is not correct according to the actual ads circulated at the time: Shochiku deliberately employed the Japanese phonetic transcription of the Italian term "neorealismo" nearly ten years before the Italians began to use it to indicate the "new realism" of films like Robert Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945).181 But why did this happen? The shortest answer is that Shochiku had already employed a similar advertising strategy several months before, labeling Nomura Hotei's all-star film Chijo no seiza (Constellations on the Earth, 1934) with the French phrase neo-film sans silence. Although the film was not a talkie but a mixture of kagezerifu narrationwhere a group of kowairo benshi gave voice to the characters on the screenand a combination of live music and recorded sound tracks,182 it garnered the highest yearly domestic box office gross of 1934 thanks in part to its 183 pretentious tagline. Thus, it can be said that Shochiku simply aimed to make more profit by stirring up the target customers' "snobbish" yearning for Europe. Even if this was the case, it is worth considering why Shimazu and his company considered Sonoyoru no onna to be a "new" realist film in the Japanese context and how
180 181

Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film, 96. See ShSchiku's full-page ad published in Kinema junpo 520 (October 11, 1934): 96.

182 This film is not extant today either, but I found a brief description of it in Otsuka Kyoichi, "Eiga jihyo: TokT no konponsaku o juritsu seyo," Eiga hihyo 17:1 (July 1934): 23.

Ikeda Terukatsu and Tomoda Jun'ichiro, "1934-nendo gyokai sokessan," Kinema junpo 527 (January 1, 1935): 278.

183

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his contemporary critics reacted to this advertising strategy. Having started his professional career in 1920 as assistant director at the Shochiku Kinema Kenkyujo (Shochiku Cinema Institute), a subsidiary production branch launched by and for the Shingeki playwright Osanai Kaoru, Shimazu was always giving highest priority to shizenshugi (Naturalism) or its conceptual equivalent shqjitsu shugi (objective realism, or more literally, "copying-the-truth-ism") following his mentor's guidance. According to his own recollection, the first task he imposed on himself in directing his early works such as Yama no senroban (Lineman in the Mountain, 1923, adapted from Gerhart Hauptman's short story "Lineman Thiel") and Mura no sensei (Village Teacher, 1925) was "to conceive of a new way of composing film drama by depicting real life."184 Although Shimazu subsequently made more than one hundred features, his basic attitude remained unchanged well into the 1930s. In a conversation with the film historian Tanaka Jun'ichiro, Shimazu explained his method of sound filmmaking as follows: Needless to say, film always requires realistic acting because it is a medium of shqjitsu. The acting in talkies is generated from language, or else it is the attraction of language that yields good acting. So it became mandatory again to collect raw materials from reality. With this in mind, I began to learn how to compose talkie scripts by writing them one after another.185 True-to-life, secular, and observationalthese are key features of the realism Shimazu employed and developed in his long-term career. What is of interest here is the fact that with the release of Sono yoru no onna, this seemingly traditional definition of naturalistic realism suddenly became promoted as a "new" realism for sound filmmaking. To address this abrupt metamorphosis, it is necessary to see how the historical transition from silent

184 Quoted in the memoir of Toyoda Shiro, one of Shimazu's disciples and who later became an acclaimed film director in his own right. Toyoda Shiro, "Shimazu kantoku ni tsuite no jakkan no kansatsu," Eiga hydron 108 (March 1935): 38. IS5

Quoted in Tanaka Jun'ichiro, Nihon eiga hattatsushi, 2:291.

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to sound cinema affected the ways in which Japanese people talked about film and its aesthetics.

Anti-Realist Tradition in Japanese Film Theory As in Europe, the main thrust of Japanese film discourse in the 1920s was to prove that cinema could be a distinct form of art without the aid of adjunct media such as theater and literature. But unlike the discourse of the Pure Film Movement of the mid-tolate 1910s that speculated that the novelty of the cinematic apparatusin particular, its mechanical ability to record, replicate, and disseminate the visual impression of reality could be the basic condition of film art, the direction of general film discourse in the 1920s moved against such a medium specific approach. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener explain it clearly with their reading of Rudolf Arnhem: "If film were to affect the spectator in the same way as a complete sensory encounter with the world.. .then it could not be distinguished from reality itself and would amount to no more than its mechanical double. This duplication could not attain the status of art because artthis was the common argument of the timepresupposes active human involvement and cannot be generated by a machine."186 This skepticism about the mechanical nature of the film medium was already a common knowledge among Japanese critics well before the official introduction of Arnheim with Sasaki Norio's 1933 translation of Film als Kunst (Film as Art).187 As Aaron Gerow points out, it was the work of the German aesthetician Konrad Lange, as well as of his Japanese supporter Nakagawa Shigeaki, with their

186 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 22. 187 Rudolf Arnheim, Geijutsu to shite no eiga [Film als Kunstl, trans. Sasaki Norio (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1933).

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adamant rejection of film as art due to its potential to create an "over realistic illusion that was unmediated by the individual presence of the artist," that remained influential in the Japanese context.188 Consequently, Japanese filmmakers and critics of the 1920s set themselves the task of finding a way in which a "human" artist/filmmaker could insert his or her creative imagination into film beyond the medium's photographic nature. Let us consider an example. In 1927 Kawazoe Toshimoto, known as the translator of V. O. Freeburg's Pictorial Beauty on the Screen (1923), published a book entitled Eigageki gairon (A Survey of Movie Drama), with a firm intention to redefine what he thought constituted the essence of cinema of his time.189 Despite the fact that Kawazoe developed most of his argument by drawing upon Hugo Miinsterberg's 1916 classic The Photoplay: A Psychological Study,190 the definition he offered in this book was considerably different from the one Kaeriyama Norimasa, one of the leaders of the Pure Film Movement, advocated in his Katsudo shashingeki no sosaku to satsueiho published a decade before. Like his contemporaries, Kawazoe declares in the first place that art is the reflection of the "sprit" of individual artists. It is thus not surprising that he sees the possibility of film art lie not in its capacity to duplicate the visual impression of reality, but in its potential to allow for the creative intervention of a film director. From this perspective, Kawazoe criticizes the discourse of the Pure Film Movement, or anyone still
188 Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity , 70. From August 1926, the critic by the name of Horoji began publishing an abbreviated translation of Lange's 1920 book Das Kino in the film journal Eiga orai. 189 Kawazoe Toshimoto, Eigageki gairon: Eizogeki e no "daiichi no mon " (Tokyo: Sun'nansha, 1927). His translation of Freeburg's Pictorial Beauty on the Screen was published as Eigabiron: Skurin jo no bi ni tsuite (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1932).

The translation of Miinsterberg's Photoplay was published as Eigageki: Sono shinrigaku to bigaku , trans. Kuze Kotaro (Tokyo: Omura Shoten, 1924). But it was Kariyama Norimasa, the leader of the Pure Film Movement in the 1910s, who first introduced and made an abridged translation of Musnterberg's writing on film. See a series of his essays entitled "Eiga geijutsuron: Eigageki no kachi," beginning in the January 1920 issue of Katsudo gaho.

190

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believing that film should be naturalistic by reason of its medium specificity, as it draws on a false assumption that mechanical reproductions of reality could automatically claim some artistic values. Interestingly, Kawazoe's reliance on the "old," human-centered notion of art results in leading him to propose a "new" definition of film art: Seen objectively, a film is nothing more than an arbitrary arrangement of photographs. But [through my study] we have learned that it could also have an enormous effect on us if the film director gives it unity, balance, accent, and rhythm, stimulating the viewer's memory and imagination. For this reason, it [the film] is no longer a photographic copy of reality; rather, it creates a totally different world filtered through the sprit of an artist called the "film director," a world that is far distant from our everyday world.191 There is no doubt that in this statement Kawazoe saw the process called "editing" as the most promising means for the creative intervention of a "human" artist. In other words, by privileging the filmmaker's "secondary" re-articulation of the photographic image, he aimed to dispel the traditional aesthetician's doubt on the non-human nature of the film medium. The best example of Kawazoe's definition of film art, I argue, could be the work of French Impressionists such as Abel Gance's La Roue (1923) and Alexandre Volkoff s Kean (1924), with their innovative use of rapid cutting and double (or multiple) exposure as a means of subjective expression of either the main character or the director. It was, however, the introduction of Soviet montage theory in the late 1920s that accelerated the Japanese effort to foreground human active involvement through editing. Despite the state banning of the public screening of Battleship Potemkin (1925) and other canonical works,192 Soviet films and their systematic methods for creating a new meaning

191
192

Kawazoe, Eigageki gairon, 158-159.

Soviet films officially released in Prewar Japan include Storm over Asia (dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928), In Spring (dir, Mikhail Kaufman, 1929), The General Line (a.k.a. Old and New, dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1929), Turksih (dir. Victor A. Turin, 1929), and The Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929).

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through the combination and conflicts of two or more successive shots had a pivotal influence over prewar Japanese film discourse, which saw countless translations of theoretical texts by Lev Kuleshov, Stephen Timoshenko, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov continuously appearing from 1928 to 1941.193 The popularity of Soviet montage theory was so phenomenal that the film historian Sato Tadao once stated, "There was a time when, for people interested in film theory, Eisenstein's and Pudovkin's montage theory covered everything.... Amidst the popularity of film theory that prioritized editing however, the unique aesthetic of Mizoguchi's work, mainly achieved through his camera work, was often criticized without any theoretical analysis or study as oppressively stage-likedespite being lyrically moving."194 Here Sato likely overestimates the impact of montage theory because, by the late 1930s, quite a few Japanese film critics began to question the efficacy of montage theory in sound filmmaking, calling instead for a new film aesthetics based on the use of long takes. Nevertheless, Sato was right in pointing out that the enduring impact of Soviet montage theory on prewar Japanese film discourse derived not so much from its ideological implications (i.e., dialectical materialism) but rather from its emphasis on the "editing process," the process that "increased the confidence of film critics who up until then had easily felt a sense of inferiority toward literature, theater,

"' For a detailed account of the introduction and translation of Soviet film theory into Japan, see Iwamoto Kenji, Roshia avangyarudo no eiga to engeki. Sato Tadao, "Nihon ni eiga riron wa atta ka" in Nihon eiga rironshi (Tokyo: Hyoronsha, 1977), translated into English by Joanne Bernardi as "Does Film Theory Exist in Japan?" in "Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory," ed. Aaron Gerow, special issue, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010): 16,21.
194

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and other arts" by bestowing a practical means of subjective expression to the hands of filmmakers.195 Such a confidence is found everywhere in Japanese writings of the time addressing the merits of Soviet montage theory. For instance, Shimizu Hikaru, one of the most engaged advocates of montage theory in prewar Japan, likened the emergence of this theory to the Copernican turn in the history of Western philosophy. Unlike "old" film directors who strove to enhance artistic values in their work by putting effort into the mise-en-scene of pro-filmic events, directors after montage theory, he argued, found the most important creative moment in filmmaking when the shooting process was done. He writes: The photographic nature of film is of course technical and mechanical, so much so that the process of duplicating or reproducing the world before the lens is inartistic (or rather, non-artistic). If one could boldly assert that photography is totally non-artistic in comparison with the human-centered artistic depiction in painting, film could still be art in its own right. It has already been proved [by Soviet filmmakers] that film does not come into existence through a mechanical arrangement of the photographic image, but it presupposes the intervention of an artist who creates a world in his way by using those images as raw materials. So even if the photographic aspect of film is mechanistic, montage theory still guarantees the freedom of the artist, the realm of his pure and spiritual 196 creations. No one could fail to see the specter of the objections posed by Lange and Nakagawa still lingering in this statement. In order to verify the potential of cinema as an art in the traditional sense, Shimizu does not simply distinguish the "photographic" reproduction of reality from its "filmic" rearrangement, rendering the former the work of a machine and the latter that of human beings. He also interprets montage theory as an effort to

195 196

Ibid.. 19. Shimizu Hikaru, "Eiga to kikai," in Kikaigeijutsuron, ed. Itagaki Takao (Tokyo: Tenjinsha,

1930). 67.

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recognize a new semiotic system comparable to languagewhich is also the product of human activitya system that enabled filmmakers to deliver their authorial visions just as with literature. In this semiotic interpretation of montage theory, there is no space left for the reproductive realism of the film medium to serve as the theoretical basis for any artistic or social values. Indeed, Shimizu goes so far as to declare that the slice of reality captured on celluloid was nothing but a "dead object" for cinema, just as individual words had no literary meaning unless they got reassembled as a sentence.197 As I have discussed in the previous chapter, there was also a group of Japanese theorists who, under the strong influence of Vertov and his famous concept of "kinoeye," praised the mechanical, non-human nature of the photographic image to overturn the traditional, human-centered notion of the arts in general. However, their progressive, if not thoroughly Utopian, theoretical endeavors, inspired mostly by their viewing of or hearing about the latest avant-garde films in Europe and the Soviet Union, had little impact on the actual development of Japanese filmmaking. On the contrary, it was the notion of "editing" borrowed from Soviet montage that became dominant among Japanese filmmakers and critics at large. As Abe Mark Nornes points out, the early 1930s saw the rise in the field of non-fiction films of a genre called henshu eiga (edited films), whose primary objective was to make "a film creatively produced with editing,"198

Shimizu, Ibid., 64. A similar view is also found in the writing by the Marxist critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, who remarked in 1930: "A shot in film corresponds to a word in literature. Just as words in a literary work have no meaning, images on the screen that usually pass before our eyes at the speed of onesixteenth second have no meaning at all. Just as a literary work generates its meaning by arranging those individual words, a film achieves its meaning only through montage." See his "Geijutsu no keishiki to shite no shosetsu to eiga" in Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke ikoshu, ed. Hirabayashi Komako (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1932), 121. Suzuki Shigeyoshi, " Sangatsu toka, Kore issen, Mamore ozora: Henshu eiga no koto," Firumu senta 11 (January 1973): 10, quoted in Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film , 51.
198

197

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foreshadowing John Grierson's famous definition of documentary film as the "creative treatment of actuality." It is against this discursive and historical background that the blast of the socalled "sonic boom" reached Japanese soil. While Japanese filmgoers up to this point had almost never watched silent films without sound thanks to the enduring presence of the benshi, the impact of the talkie was profound enough to change the direction of Japanese film practice and discourse in the 1930s. The first reactions the Japanese showed to early sound experiments in the late 1920s were not so remarkable, as they felt in a similar fashion as European critics like Arnheim that it served only to ruin the aesthetic achievements silent films had accumulated in the past three decades. What seems peculiar to the Japanese reception of sound technology, however, was that many critics there soon began to appreciate its positive aspects, pointing in particular to its promising potential to elevate the quality of domestic film practice.199 Since the mid-1910s, the reformers of Japanese cinema had tirelessly lamented the anomaly of Japanese film productionmarked by the use of onnagata (men playing female roles), traditional acting styles and make-up inherited from Kabuki, immobile and frontal camera positions, and benshi narrationand accused it of spoiling not only the autonomy of cinema but also the possibility of exporting Japanese films abroad. Most of these "local" attributes were replaced with more "universal" ones developed in the West in the course of the 1920s, but the presence and popularity of the benshi remained intact in the Japanese viewing of both domestic and foreign films. Thus on the one hand, the advent of sound films effectively helped expel the local convention of benshi from
For the impacts of the so-called "sound revolution" on Japanese film discourse at the turn of the 1930s, see Mori Iwao, ed., Tokiron (Tokyo: Tenjinsha, 1930); Iwasaki Akira, Eiga to shihonshugi (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1931); lijima Tadashi, TokJigo (Tokyo: Koseikaku Shoten, 1933).
199

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domestic movie theaters, heralding the final elimination of the purported backwardness of Japanese film practice.200 Yet on the other hand, Japanese filmmakers and critics also saw the new language barrier created through the introduction of sound (words) as a good opportunity to turn the eyes of Japanese filmgoers back to their domestic films. In other words, the collapse of the universal language of silent cinema caused by the sound revolution allowed the Japanese to find that the former rulers of the world of silent film Hollywood and Europewere also experiencing the same chaotic situation as theirs. With this new sense of "contemporaneity," they not only developed their own equipment for sound recording such as the Minatokl, the Tsuchihashi system, and the Shigehara system,201 but also embarked on their exploration of a new sound film aesthetics in parallel with, or even prior to, their Western counterparts.202 Of the Japanese critics appreciating the coming of sound at the turn of the 1930s, it was Sekino Yoshio who posed the most rigorous counterargument against the underestimation of the reproductive nature of the film medium prevalent in the 1920s. In a series of essays he published in 1930, Sekino repeatedly stressed that any previous attempts to lay the foundation of film art on the "artificial" distance between reality and its filmic representation was nothing but perverse, or an example of compromise at best. According to Sekino, the historical development of the cinematic apparatus was always
200 Of course, the elimination of the benshi and other performers did not proceed so smoothly on a practical level. For instance, in 1929, a group of musicians working at Hogakuza and Musashinokan in Tokyo held strikes against the theater owners. Also, it took longer for Japan to get recover from the financial recession caused by the Great Depression in 1929, constituting part of the reason why Japan began to invade China and other Asian countries as early as 1931. For these reasons, quite a few movie theaters in Japan (especially those in local cities and colonized areas) continued to use the benshi until the late 1930s and the early 1940s. 201 202

For more on these "domestic" sound systems, see "Shiryd Nihon hassei eiga no soseiki."

For a detailed account of the Japanese reactions to the collapse of the "cinematic Babel," see Abe Mark Nornes, "Voices of the Silents," in Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 89-122.

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motivated by a strong desire to perfect its ability to reproduce the impression of reality as truthfully as possible. Following this teleological "myth of total cinema," which was critically offered later by Andre Bazin,203 early inventors and developers of the medium had long struggled to add color, sound, and even three-dimensional features to the moving images, though most of these attempts were not yet fully accomplished due to technological shortcomings. In retracing this unfinished and ongoing project, Sekino embraced the advent of the talkie as a historical imperative and assuredly called it "a scientific invention as well as an artistic discovery brought by those who have continued make efforts to remedy the deficiency of the cinema."204 Thus, for Sekino, the most significant outcome of the transition from silent to sound, the addition of an aural recording capacity to the film medium, rested in the fact that it encouraged people to rediscover the long-neglected attractions of reality as the main source of filmmaking. "Those who try to negate talkies altogether based on their belief in 'art for art's sake,'" said Sekino, "simply fall into an illusionary idea of creating an artistic world outside of reality. However, the world of cinema only exists inside reality. The fundamental task of [sound] cinema is therefore to provide everyone with the true nature of reality by grasping and reorganizing it from within."205 Sekino's argument clearly tells us that the advent of the talkie came to play a significant role in bringing realismor serious concerns about the relationship between reality and its filmic representationback to the central stage of Japanese film discourse and practice in the decade that followed. However, it is important to note that the revival

201 204 205

Andre Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," in What is Cinema? 1:17-22. Sekino Yoshio, "TokT no ikubeki michi," Eiga hyoron 8.1 (January 1930): 26. Sekino Yoshio. "TokT no ikubeki michi (3)," Eiga hyoron 8.5 (May 1930): 57.

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of realism in sound cinema did not emerge as a linear development of the nineteenthcentury model of realism, which, as I have argued in Chapter 1, developed mostly in the field of literature under the strong influence of naturalism. Rather, it came to the fore only after figures like Itagaki Takao and Kurahara Korehito had already argued about the possibility of the twentieth-century model of realism, as discussed in the previous chapter. This dialectical progress in history resulted in creating a great confusion as to the definition of cinematic realism. While the majority of Japanese filmmakers and critics came to agree by the mid-1930s that realism should be the most promising method for sound filmmaking, they had yet to figure out what kind of realism could be most appropriate for a new realist cinema to emerge. "I was told that 'realism in film is different from realism in other arts,"' murmured one critic in 1934, "but when I asked 'What is realism in film then?' in response, no one has ever explained me fully about its particularity."206 Some may attribute this discursive confusion over the definition of "cinematic realism" to Japan's lack of indigenous tradition of realist culture like Naturalism in France and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany. But I argue that it tellingly reflects the overwhelmingly unstable nature of realism as a concept, one that the literary scholar Kendall L. Walton has once described as "a monster with many heads desperately in need of disentangling" to refer to its multiple, often conflicting connotations determined by adjectives added before the term such as "social," "poetic," and "magical."207 Having little legacy to rely on, prewar Japanese filmmakers and critics were cautious or even dubious about simply adopting "ready-made" notions of realism. And it is their openness toward the multiple definitions of realism, I insist, that renders
~ 06 Shimazu Yu, "Geijutsu shiso no mondai," Eiga hydron 16.8 (August 1934): 59.
207

Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-believe, 328.

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Japan's take on the issues of cinematic realism a significant contribution to the history of film theory. The historical account I have given so far constitutes the context in which Shimazu Yasujiro and Shochiku decided to advertise Sonoyoru no onna as the first Japanese neorealismo film. Appearing in the midst of the transition from silent to sound cinema, the film aimed to promote its naturalistic (shajitsuteki), unobtrusive depictions of the everyday life of the lower-middle class people as a template for the "new" realism in the sound era. To accomplish this task, Shimazu had Tanaka Kinuyo, the heroine of the film, play a role of a curious eyewitness who, just like the viewers, came visit to a small alley in Tokyo from outside, got to know people living there, saw small human dramas take place among them, and left the alley to go back to her hometown at the end of the story. Put briefly, Shimazu's attempt to establish a new mode of realist filmmaking through his objective treatment of everyday life was in resonance with the reconceptualization of cinema as a medium for the truthful reproduction of reality, the idea that had once been negated in 1920s film discourse but became fostered again by sound cinema's extended recording capacity. Despite its high ambition, Shimazu's strategy did not succeed in receiving much support from his contemporary critics. An original review published in Kinema junpd frankly singled out the film's problem: "The new realism posed by this film only attained an artistic attitude that finds satisfaction by 'looking at reality as it is [aru ga mama],' just like the realism in the nineteenth century. What the film provides us is thus no more than an old realism, and one can find the term 'neo-realismo' is completely deceptive."208

208

Henshubu, "Shuyo Nihon eiga hihyo: Sonoyoru no onna" Kinema junpd 523 (November 11,

1934): 101.

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Though acknowledging Shimazu's effort to make the film look "realistic," the reviewer eventually came to a very severe conclusion ("Strictly speaking, I don't see the film as a work based on realism") because what he considered to be a "new" realism in film was completely incompatible with Shimazu's obsession with naturalistic (shajitsuteki) depictions of everyday life. Not surprisingly, such an anti-Naturalist sentiment was not uncommon among Japanese film critics of the time. Hazumi Tsuneo, for instance, wrote in 1935: "Because of the camera's photographic nature, filmmakers today seem to both naively and unconsciously depend on the notion oishajitsu. It is this dependence, I assume, that clogs up our march toward cinematic realism, the Promised Land we will enter only after passing beyond the stage of shajitsu."209 According to Hazumi, the task of filmmakers was not to "copy" but to "construct" reality; only with this enterprising attitude in mind, could one come closer to his esoteric concept of cinematic realism. These criticisms reflect both continuity and discontinuity of Japanese film discourse in its transition from silent to sound cinema. For one, they still held the idea that the potential of cinema to be art lies not in its photographic nature but in the creative intervention of filmmakers. But unlike the critics of the 1920s, they also tried to develop a new film aesthetic by drawing upon the reciprocal relationship between cinema and reality, not by emphasizing the artificial distance between the two. As a result, they began looking forward to the emergence of film directors who could express their critical and subjective interpretation of reality beyond the mechanical, non-human nature of the photographic image. With this anticipation, the film journal Eiga hihyo (Film Criticism) published a special issue in March 1935, dedicated to Shimazu Yasujiro. The general

209

Hazumi Tsuneo, "Eiga riarizumu no teisho," Kinemajunpd 560 (December 1, 1935): 75.

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tone of the essays collected here was supportive of the director's respectable attempts to establish a new mode of sound filmmaking. Nonetheless, most contributors agreed that Shimazu could be more successful as a realist filmmaker if he came up with a more direct way to convey his authorial vision through his film texts.210 However simple it may seem, granting a regulative authority to the film director was far from an easy task to accomplish. Not only did filmmakers have to work with moving images, which have richer but more fluctuating connotations than language, they were always constrained to produce their work under the capitalist demands of the film industry. Furthermore, since the growing concern with realism in sound cinema already called into question montage theory's disregard for the truthful reproduction of reality, filmmakers at this particular historical moment also found it necessary to conceive of a new film style or technique suitable to express their own creative intervention. In order to tackle these predicaments, Shimazu decided to make his next film O-koto to Sasuke (Okoto and Sasuke, 1935) by adapting Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's 1933 novel Shunkinsho (A Portrait of Shunkin). From the mainstream of prewar Japanese film discourse that sought the autonomy of cinema as a distinctive form of art, literary adaptation should have appeared to be no more than a tentative and transient solution. However, its potential to meet the demands of the time seemed so promising that quite a few Japanese directors including Mizoguchi Kenji, Shimizu Hiroshi, Uchida Tomu, Kumagai Hisatora, and Tasaka Tomotaka all turned their hands to literary adaptation.

210

"Tokushu: Shimazu Yasujiro kenkyu," Eiga hyoron 108 (March 1935): 22-73.

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Literary Films and the Reinvention of the Film Author In his study of literary adaptation in the history of Japanese cinema, Eric Cazdyn refers to three major benefits that Japanese sound films gained from adapting recognized literary works: elevation of film's artistic status, a way around tightening censorship, and the implementation of the classical Hollywood style with its emphasis on narrative economy.211 For the purpose of my study, however, 1 focus on the fact that literary adaptation helped recast the notion of eiga sakka (film author) by encouraging filmmakers to use the written scripts as their primary means of subjective expressions. As Cazdyn points out, the key principle in the literary adaptation of the early sound period was to be "faithful" to the original as much as possible, and as such can be categorized as "fidelity-based adaptation."212 But unlike Cazdyn's somewhat reductive assessment that associates this approach with the historical limitations of criticism in 1930s Japan, which he claims privileges the ideologies of "origins," my analysis reveals more nuanced tensions between the original and the adaptation, the scriptwriter and the film director, and the written language and the moving image. At first glance, literary adaptation and montage theorytwo of the most debated topics in 1930s Japanese discourse on fiction filmmakingseem to be incompatible given their opposing emphases on the before

(scriptwriting) and after (editing) of the shooting process. But I argue that in the Japanese debates over cinematic realism, the conceptual difference between the two was smaller than they appear as long as they were motivated by the same "human" desire to tame the alterity of the mechanically produced photographic image.

Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 105.
212

Ibid., 106.

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As a genre, literary filmor bungei eiga in Japaneseusually encompasses films that adapt stories from literary works and as such has a long tradition in the history of Japanese cinema dating back to the early 1910s. In the 1920s, most of the literary texts chosen for screen adaptation were drawn from what was known as taishu bungaku, or popular literature. Penned by such talented and astonishingly prolific writers as Kikuchi Kan, Naoki Sanjugo, Yoshiya Nobuko, Hasegawa Shin, and Hayashi Fub5 (who used two other pennames, Tani Joji and Maki Itsuma, depending on the genre he was writing in), taishu bungaku provided a wide range of readers with lowbrow entertainment, focusing on such diverse genres as romance, mystery, sci-fi, comedy, and historical fiction. One survey from March 1935 informs us that up until that point, 156 films had been based on the work of the five aforementioned popular writers, whereas only fourteen were adapted from the works of canonical, critically acclaimed writers like Natsume Soseki, Mori Ogai, Higuchi Ichiyo, Izumi Kyoka, and Kawabata Yasunari.213 From the mid-1930s on, however, producers of literary films deliberately began to choose original texts from among the more serious and highbrow novels, conventionally categorized as junbungaku (pure literature). Associated with this shift was the increase in critical attention paid to literary adaptation Indeed, the best ten films chosen each year by Kinema junpo clarify that in the 1920s only a handful of films based on literary works ranked highly,214 while films selected in the second half of the 1930s were mostly those adapted from contemporary junbungaku novels, including Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's

Saito Koji, ed., "Sakusha betsu eiga-ka sareta bungei, taishiu, shosetsu, gikyoku," Eiea hyoron 107 (February 1935): 65-82. ~ 14 In these lists, only Kurutta ichipeji (A Page of Madness, 1926, dir. Kinugasa Teinosuke, the original story by Kawabata Yasunari) and Ikeru ningyd (Living Puppet, 1929, dir. Uchida Tomu, the original story by Kataoka Teppei) were the ones categorized as literary adaptation.

213

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Shunkinsho, Ozaki Shiro's Jinsei gekijd (Theater of Life, dir. Uchida Tomu, 1936), Shiga Naoya's Akanishi Kakita (Capricious Young Man, dir. Itami Mansaku, 1936), Yokomitsu Riichi's Kazoku kaigi (Family Meeting, dir. Shimazu Yasujiro, 1936), Muro Saisei's Ani imoto (Brother and Sister, dir. Kimura Sotoji, 1936), Ishikawa Tatsuzo's Sdbd (Common People, dir. Kumagai Hisatora, 1937), Tsubota Joji's Kaze no naka no kodomo (Children in the Wind, dir. Shimizu Hiroshi, 1937), Ishizaka Yojiro's Wakai hito (Young People, dir. Toyoda Shiro, 1937), and Yamamoto Yuzo's Robo no ishi (A Pebble by the Wayside, dir. Tasaka Tomotaka, 1938).2'5 The growing popularity of literary adaptation was not unique to Japan, appearing rather as a global phenomenon that took the place of earlier sound films that drew materials and personnel from theaters and music halls. While Germany and the United States also produced films using the inventory of their "national" literature like Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (dir. Phil Jutzi, 1931) and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (dir. Frank Borzage, 1932),216 it was France that most successfully made use of this new literary mode of sound filmmaking. Beginning with the international success of Julian Duvivier's 1932 screen adaptation of Jules Renard's autobiographical novel Poil de carrot (1894), French filmmakers including Duvivier, Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, Pierre Chenal, and Marcel Carneall of whom would later be placed under the banner of "poetic realism"succeeded in using literary adaptation to bring France back to the center of world cinema during the second half of the 1930s.

215 Needless to say, the original texts for film adaptation in mid-to-late 1930s Japan were not limited to Japanese novels; indeed, Takizawa Eisuke's Sengoku guntdden (The Saga of the Vagabonds, 1937) was adapted from Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers (1781), Yamamoto Satsuo's Den 'en kokyogaku (Pastoral Symphony, 1938) was from Andre Gide's novel of the same title (1919), and Itami Mansaku's Kyojinden (The Tale of a Giant, 1938) was from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862). 216

This film, however, was indeed adapted from the stage adaptation of Hemingway's novel.

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They exported "quality" films that werp adapted from the work of French or Russian canonical novelists like Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or else were based on collaborations with such notable scriptwriters as Charles Spark and Jacques Prevert.217 Always attuned to the latest trends in foreign film practice, Japanese film discourse did not fail to grasp the historical significance of this migration of literary elements into sound films. Indeed, it was a string of French films ranging from Le paquebot Tenacity (S.S. Tenacity, dir. Julian Duvivier, 1934), Le dernier milliardaire (The Last Billionaire, dir. Rene Clair, 1934), Le kermesse heroique (Carnival in Flanders, dir. Jacques Feyder, 1935) to Pension Mimosas (dir. Jacques Feyder, 1936) and Pepe le moko (dir. Julian Duvivier, 1937) that successively won the Kinema junpo's best foreign film awards from 1934 to 1939, although in terms of box office revenue, the Japanese foreign film market continued to be dominated by Hollywood until Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.218 Not surprisingly, producers of these highly appreciated films became the subject of serious study by the Japanese, providing the latter with a feasible model to follow after their feverish excitement about montage theory. The initial attraction of French sound films lay in their ability to translate a certain "novel istic" aesthetic into film language. As a review from Eiga hyoron stated in 1936, "Duvivier succeeded in an experiment of bringing the art of literature into the film world by using completely different elements [than written words] such as 'image,' 'dialogue,'

217 218

For a comprehensive account of French Poetic Realism, see Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret.

The last "Hollywood" films screened in Japan before Pearl Harbor include Dr. Erhlich's Magic Bullet (dir. William Dieterle, 1940), Edison, the Man (dir. Clarence Brown, 1940), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (dir. Frank Capra, 1939). For more on Japan's farewell to Hollywood films, see Tanaka Jun'ichiro, Nihon eiga hattatsushi, 3:65-82.

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and 'sound (music).'... The time is thus ripe for us to extol Duvivier's frontier sprit in talkie filmmaking alongside Clair's and Feyder's auteurist sprit [sakkateki seishin]."219 Another and more significant asset of these French films was their extensive use of original scripts, which Japanese film critics at the time thought was the goal of integrating literary elements into sound filmmaking. In 1935, Kitagawa Fuyuhiko succinctly wrote, "Films should always be based on original scripts. But in reality there are still problems with the quality of scriptwriters, which why people have begun to talk about film adaptations of pure literature." It was with this in mind that, from the

following year, Kitagawa launched what he called the shinario bungaku undo (scenario literature movement). This was an effort to elevate the status of domestic scriptwriters by providing opportunities to write and publish their original scripts in his magazine Shinario bungaku kenkyu (Scenario Literature Studies). A leading film critic as well as a prominent modernist poet in his own right, Kitagawa, like many of his contemporaries, believed that film was at its most artistic when it abandoned its reliance on other art forms like theater and literature. And yet, because his understanding of art was heavily informed by the literary model, Kitagawa could not help but privilege the act of writing as the first and foremost source of artistic creation, even when it came to filmmaking. He proposed that in sound film production everything should be written and designed before the actual shooting process began, which would reduce the freedom enjoyed by film directors on the set, unless they wrote their own scripts. In the essay cited above, Kitagawa tentatively suggested that producers of sound film should first learn how to

2 ' 9 Noguchi

Hisamitsu, "Jurian Dubibie hyoden," Eiga hyoron 18.3 (March 1936): 24-25.

220 Kitagawa Fuyuhiko, "Bungei eiga sakuhin shoken sonota," Kinema junpd 529 (January 21, 1935): 59-60.

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express their authorial visions through written language by adapting literary works. Once they finished their apprenticeships, they would then proceed to using original scripts as the French did, so as to exert full creative authority over the final products. Kitagawa's scenario literature proposal was soon followed by the publication in 1936-7 of the six-volume Shinario bungaku zenshu (Anthology of Scenario Literature). Under the slogan "Make film scripts a literature!" (shinario o bungaku seyo) the anthology collected scenarios of already released domestic and foreign sound films, as well as more than twenty previously unpublished scripts penned by contemporary filmmakers and novelists. The objective in publishing original scripts as a new form of literature was to offer an antidote to the poor quality of domestic sound film production, lijima Tadashi, one of the anthology's core editors, clearly stated this in his introductory essay: "We are so dissatisfied with Japanese cinema that we cannot help but attempt film creation through the printed word."221 And if there were something that film critics like him could do to reform current Japanese sound filmmaking through their writing activities, he continued, it should be the publication of literarily informed film scripts because "the aspect most absent in Japanese talkies is the literary elements represented by the dialogue."222 For lijima, however, the term "literary element" did not simply mean a certain artistic sensibility coming from literature. Rather, it designated medium-specific aspects of literature, aspects through which novelists not only expressed their subjective ideas and opinions with the written text but also preserved them in printed forms. With the coming of soundor more precisely, of spoken dialoguethose in charge of writing

lijima Tadashi, "Shinario bungakuron josetsu," in Shinario taikei, vol. 1 of Shinario bungaku zenshu, eds. lijima Tadashi, Uchida Kisao, et al. (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 1937), 6.
222

221

Ibid.

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scripts became able to convey their subjective ideas and opinions by means of the very same medium for communication as literature: language. At the same time, Iijima also stressed that printed talkie scenarios could function as a faithful documentation of what we saw and heard on the screen, insofar as the dialogue guaranteed a certain "identical" relationship between the script and the film text. In reading these and related propositions, one may speculate that they simply reflect the inferiority complex that Japanese film critics long felt toward the institution of literature. This was true in that major proponents of the literary model of sound filmmaking not only maintained close ties with domestic literary circlesfor instance, both Kitagawa and Iijima were the founding members of the eminent avant-garde poetry journal Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics, 1928-33)but frequently used literary metaphors such as sanbun eiga (prosaic film) to refer to new methods and styles developed in Japanese sound films.224 However, we should also acknowledge that even these literary partisans had no intention of subjugating film to literature, or of completely blending the two together. As Iijima reminded us, the main reason for him to call for the establishment of scenario literature was "not to turn cinema into literature, but to aim for the aesthetic achievement of one specific field [literature] that should be part of cinema."225 Moreover, there were some critics who attributed the popularity of literary film to the decline of literature's cultural capital. According to Imamura Taihei: The real issue behind the boom in literary film is that people are now appreciating the literary image with the guidance of the cinematic image. That people are now reading the original novel through the image given by its film adaptation means nothing but the subjugation of literature to cinema.... To summarize, what the
221 224 225

Ibid., 19-23. See Kitagawa Fuyuhiko, Sanbun eigaron (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1940). Iijima, "Shinario bungakuron josetsu," 6-7.

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literary boom really indicates is that the masses are no longer asking for literature. Instead, they want cinema to have the same consciousness [shiso] as literature.226 The point here is not whether the Japanese mass public actually stopped reading novels in the first place in favor of film adaptations. More important is the fact that Imamura, despite his unabashed desire to proclaim the victory of cinema over literature, still admitted the enduring relevance of "literary" elements in film. Why did the Japanese people of the time still find it necessary to rely on literature? What did the term bungakuteki (literary) signify to them? And how would it have been it possible for cinema to transplant those literary elements to the screen without losing its independence from literature? To answer these questions, we need to look at the specific cultural milieu of Japan on the eve of its full-fledged participation in the wars against China and the Allies. In the mid-to late 1930s, the proliferation of literary elements was not an independent trend that occurred within the realm of sound film production alone, for it was closely tied to the rise of the mass cultural movement known as bungei fukko (literary renaissance). Bolstered by the retreat of the proletarian literature movement in the early 1930s, the term bungei fukko initially denoted the comeback of established novelists such as Nagai Kafu and Shiga Naoya. Yet this modern renaissance of letters soon became a major point of focus for Japanese intellectuals at large, as it effectively functioned to reconcile long-term conflicts between opposing ideas of left and right, modern and traditional, high and low, mass and elite, and even art and politics. These reconciliations took place within the framework of what the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun critically called "literary liberalism (bungakuteki jiyu shugi)" in his 1935 monograph

226

Imamura Taihei, "Bungei eigaron," Bungei 6.11 (November 1938): 161.

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Nihon ideologi ron (On Japanese Ideology). According to Tosaka, the term "literary liberalism" does not mean "a literary consciousness conceived on a foundation of political liberalism, but rather a liberalism conceived on a basis of a literary consciousness," and its followers tended to "explain nature, history, and society only from the perspective of human beings and not vice versa, precisely because it seems more faithful to literature."
997

Given such an egoistic and romanticist emphasis on the

central ity of human beings, Tosaka astutely defined the true nature of bungei fukko as a 998 reactionary revival of "idealist humanism" (kan 'nenteki nigengaku shugi). Though once popular among Japanese intellectuals in the early Taish5 period (1912-26) with the work of the Shirakabaha (White Birch School) writers, idealist humanism was completely rejected in the course of the 1920s with the advent of a more systematic and antihumanist modes of thinking (i.e., Marxism) and production (i.e., Fordism). Appearing as a collective reaction to this modern experience of self-alienation caused by the mechanization of everyday life, the return to idealist humanism around the year 1935 helped form a sense of coalition among Japanese intellectuals who, at least at this moment, were still trying to prevent their society from falling into the hands of fascists. For this reason, postwar critics like Hirano Ken highly valued the sprit of bungei fukko in retrospect, wishfully portraying it as a Japanese version of the Popular Front.229 However, Tosaka's contemporary observation was far more critical and reflective: Not only did he point out that literary liberalists' nonpartisan attitude would end up inviting the participation of reactionary "Japanists" (Nippon shugisha) in their alleged resistance
Tosaka Jun, "Nihon ideologTron: Gendai Nihon ni okeru Nihon shugi, fashizumu, jiyO shugi, shisS no hihan," in Tosaka Jun Zenshu (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1966-1967), 2:368.
228 229 227

Ibid. See Hirano Ken, Bungaku, Showa 10-nen zengo (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjusha, 1972).

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to fascism, he also warned that their ingenuous appreciation of the human agents could easily slip into the lure ofseishin shugi (spiritualism), which he characterized as a core mentality of Japanese fascism. In the end, Tosaka saw the proliferation of bungaku shugi (literaryism) fostered by bungeifukko as signaling Japanese liberals' escapist tendencies. Instead of confronting actual problems in reality with logical thought, they simply indulged themselves in pedantic, yet hopelessly unfruitful, debates over the enigma of the human mind as explored in modern literature. Tosaka deftly took a different path than literaryism through his analysis of film as a medium for social epistemology, which I will discuss fully in Chapter 4. For those involved in the boom in literary films, however, it was precisely the willful, one-sided equating of "literature" and "humanism" that held profound appeals. As I have pointed out, the attraction of such a humanist approach was rooted in their concerns about the specific nature of filmmaking. In addition to the social alienation of individual filmmakers in the capitalist mode of film production, they were also struggling with the mechanical alienation of active human involvement in the creation of the photographic image. Concomitantly, producers of bungei eiga began to take as their sources novels that clearly indicated the existence of a single and visible "author" behind the creation and delivery of the narrative. And, by so doing, they re-discovered the value of the socalled "I-novel" which, originally born out of the rise of Japanese Naturalism in the 1910s, effectively made the readers believe in the coherence between the author's personal life and his or her writing activities through its confessional, single-voiced, and autobiographical mode of writing.230 This habit of reading authorial credibility in the I-

2TO

For a detailed account of the I-novel, see Suzuki Tomi, Narrating the Self.

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novel helps explain the acclaim of Uchida Tomu's 1936 film Jinsei gekijd (The Theater of Life), cited by many as the first critically successful sound film in the genre of literary film. Based on Ozaki Shir5's autobiographical novel of the same title, the film depicts a story about the young boy named Hyokichi who, just like the author himself, goes to Waseda University with the intention of becoming a politician but ends up quitting his studies after his disgust with the injustice and corruption the school's administrators led him to incite a student riot. Then, as the story goes, Hyokichi returns home at the news of his father's suicide and finally makes up his mind to be a novelist. Most of the original reviews praised Uchida's decision to adapt this particular novel as his first talkie film. Aside from the box-office that took advantage of the wide popularity of Ozaki's original,231 Uchida's adaptation appeared to be an opportune testing ground to see if sound film could attain the same transparency as the written language of the I-novel in its delivery of the author's voice. In other words, if the merit of an autobiographical novel like Jinsei gekijd lay in its ability to provide a "truthful human document" (shinjitsu naru ningen kiroku), as noted in one review,232 then the primary task of the director in charge of its adaptation was to examine how he could present the internal subjectivity of the protagonist-author on the screen. Uchida successfully fulfilled this demand by attending to both "fidelity-based" and "transformative" methods, which Dudley Andrew singles out as the two of major approaches in literary adaptation for film.233 The fidelity of Uchida's adaptation was most clearly seen on the level of mise-en-

2,1 Ozaki's Jinsei gekijd was first published in the Miyako shinbun from March to August 1933, but the author continued writing its sequels until 1962, only two years before his death. 232

Eiga bungaku kenkyukai, "1936-nen bungei eiga no oboegaki," Eiga shudan 8 (January 1937):

51.
211

Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 100.

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scene, especially in the way he directed the main actor Kosugi Isamu in the role of Hyokichi. For Uchida, Kosugi was definitely the most reliable and proficient actor, as they had been collaborating since Uchida's debut as a director in the mid-1920s. Kosugi's portrayal in this film of a young man hassled by his carnal desire and youthful ambition reverberated enough that he was praised as having "succeeded in exposing the abundance of the protagonist's humanity."234 Needless to say, the credibility of this humanity was underpinned by the viewers' prior knowledge that the character Kosugi played there was not totally fictional, but a real human figure still living and active in reality. Uchida won more accolades, however, for his ability to transform the "spirit" of the original into his own work of art. According to the film critic Togata Sachio, "Ozaki Shiro's I-novelistic writing style would be boring and uninspiring if one tried to simply copy it on the screen. Though faithful methodologically, Uchida Tomu added his own style to the film by employing his own personality."235 As a critical term for film criticism, the "style" that Togata found in Uchida's adaptation first appeared on the level of the visual image. Indeed, not a few reviewers (including Togata) referred to Uchida's remarkable use of high-angle shots as his attempt to "visualize" Ozaki's original intention of providing an overview of his youthful days. Yet the term "style" here can also be applied to Uchida's decision to set his own work apart from the original. In adapting a lengthy novel into a two-hour movie, Uchida omitted a number of episodes and characters from the original and reorganized the plot structure with the help of his scriptwriter Kameyabara Toku. Moreover, Uchida intentionally replaced the original's

" 34 Eiga bungaku kenkyukai, "1936-nen bungei eiga no oboegaki," 51. In this film, Kosugi also played the role of Hyotaro, father of the protagonist.
215

Togata Sachio, "Jinsei gekijd: Sutairu ni tsuite," Eiga hyoron 119 (February 1936): 143.

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sarcastic and sometimes overtly sentimental tone with a more serious one, reflecting his own attitude toward reality. While most critics showed only negative responses when Shimazu Yasujiro adapted Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Shunkisho the year before, employing the "fidelity-based" approach alone, Uchida's bold "transformation" of the original was in turn welcomed by many as attesting to the existence of his own authorial creativity. Interestingly, the difference in the tone of critical responses to the two adaptations was replicated in the "official" recognition by the authors of the original novels. In an article published in 1935, Tanizaki publicly refused to watch Shimazu's adaptation out of his profound distrust of Japanese filmmakers' ability to "translate" his literary aesthetics onto the screen.236 Ozaki, on the other hand, was said to highly appreciate Uchida's take on his novel, granting that "This [the film] is no longer Ozaki Shiro's Jinsei gekijd but Uchida Tomu's Jinsei gekijd, and that's the way it should be."237 With the success of Jinsei gekijd, Uchida demonstrated not only that sound film could be a reliable medium for "human documents" like the I-novel, but also that producers of sound films could proclaim their active human involvement by adopting the model of individual authorship developed in modern literature. Even if this was the case, there still remained several problems to be solved. First, however skillfully filmmakers translated the written text into the filmic image, they could not declare the independence of film as an art unless they stopped using literature as an original source. As explained above, the crucial point of literary adaptation was not the total unification of cinema and literature but the "borrowing" of certain elements from the latter in an effort to develop a

216 Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, "Eiga e no kanso: Shunkinsho eigaka ni saishite," in Tanizaki Jun 'ichiro zenshu (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1983), 22:317-321. 237

Cited in Kishi Matsuo, Nihon eigayoshikiko (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 1937), 145.

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standard of domestic sound filmmaking. Inevitably, post-Jinsei gekijd discourse became more focused on the creation of films with literary-informed original scripts. The second problem was that even if Japanese sound film production successfully proceeded to the stage of the original script, some questions concerning the ambiguity of cinematic authorship would soon arise. What kind of relationship was possible between the scriptwriter and the director? How could one discern one's contribution from the other's? Who could or should claim the responsibility for the creation of the meaning(s) of the moving image? And how would those involved in the government censorship of film products deal with such a multiple and fluctuating status to film authorship? Reflecting these issues, the mid-to-late 1930s saw the rise of an "auteurist" approach among Japanese film criticism, followed by the publication of monographs like Murakami Tadahisa's Nihon eiga sakkaron (On Japanese Film Authors, 1936) and Otsuka Kyoichi's Nihon eiga kantokuron (On Japanese Film Directors, 1937). However, there was still no consensus or agreement on how to verify the singular authority of Japanese film directors, given their varying involvement with script writing. Having begun their careers as scriptwriters, directors like Ito Daisuke and Itami Mansaku, for instance, always took full charge of their scripts; Shochiku directors such as Shimazu Yasujiro, Shimizu Hiroshi, and Ozu Yasujiro often came up with original stories by themselves and transformed them into scripts with the aid of their fellow writers; and others like Mizoguchi Kenji and Uchida Tomu preferred working on scripts prepared by professional scriptwriters so they could focus on their on-set directorial work. In contrast, the government's understanding of cinematic authorship was more simple and reductive.

218 See Murakami Tadahisa, Nihon eiga sakkaron (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1936) and Otsuka Kyoichi, Nihon eiga kantokuron (Tokyo: Eiga Hyoronsha, 1937).

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With the promulgation of the Film Law in 1939, which made it obligatory for all domestic films to be censored at the level of the written script, the government came to privilege the authorial responsibility of those in charge of writing scenarios for their own final products. This legal enforcement ultimately resulted in upholding the principle of the scenario literature movement, and directors like Kurosawa Akira and Kinoshita Keisuke who appeared on the scene after the Film Law consequently spent their period of apprenticeship writing original scripts. This historical juncture of critical and regulative calls for the legitimate definition of the film auteur also coincided with the apex of Japanese realist filmmaking during the mid-to-late 1930s. Indeed, beginning with Uchida'sJinsei gekijd in February 1936, this short period of time saw the consecutive release of films always described as "realist" in the general history of Japanese cinema, including Mizoguchi's Naniwa erejT (Osaka Elegy, 1936) and Gion no kyodai (Sisters of the Gion, 1936), Ozu's Hitori musuko (The Only Son, 1936), Kumagai Hisatora's Sobo (1937), Yamanaka Sadao's Ninjo kamifusen (Humanity and Paper Balloons, 1937), and Uchida's Kagirinaki zenshin (Unending Advance, 1937). All of these films provided bleak yet intensely revealing depictions of socially marginalized people such as prostitutes, unemployed workers, and rural farmers, all captured through the critical eyes of human filmmakers. It is tempting, as many film scholars from Anderson and Richie to Sato Tadao and Fujita Motohiko have done, to analyze the content and styles of these films from the perspective of social realism or naturalism.239 But this is not the approach I will pursue in this study, as it typically results in judging given texts according to what we consider to be the appropriate definition of
See Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film, 72-125; Sat5 Tadao, "TokTjidai: Nihon eigashi 3," 2-63; Fujita Motohiko, "Bungei eiga to rekishi eiga; Uchida Tomu no Showa 10-nendai," in Nihon eiga gendaishi: Showa 1(1 nen-dai (Tokyo: Kashinsha, 1977), 31-52.

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realism.240 Rather, I find it more productive to disentangle the complex web of historical discourse that celebrated the integration of literary elements into sound filmmaking as one of the most promising methods to achieve cinematic realism. To put it differently, my intention here is to foreground the ideological bent of the rise of what I call a "humanist" model of realism in mid-to-late 1930s Japan, as opposed to Anderson and Richie who found it "singular" and "surprising" that "the rise of realism should have been coincident with Japan's rise to military power, and that 1936, when the movement was at its height, should also have been the year before Japan began its Chinese adventures in earnest."241 Chosen as the best domestic film in Kinema junpo's annual poll in 1937, Uchida's Kagirinaki zenshin is a good case study for looking into the manifold nature of Japan's take on literary adaptation and the application of "humanist" realism in sound filmmaking. The film is a tragicomedy about a middle-aged sarariman (office worker), also played by Kosugi Isamu, who goes insane upon hearing the news that his company, because of a long-term business recession, has decided to fire all employees over the age of fifty-five. Amidst harsh corporate restructuring, he somehow finds himself appointed to the executive board the next morning and happily watches the completion of his new house and the marriage of his daughteryet it soon turns out that all this is nothing more than wishful dreaming. Already living in a world of madness, he calls his ex-coworkers together at a Japanese rydtei restaurant where he delivers an ostentatious retirement speech addressing his "successful" philosophy of life. After all that, he is taken to a
" 40 For instance, Anderson and Richie frequently make this type of value judgment in their historical account of Japanese cinema. According to them, "the main faults of Japanese realism" would be "a tendency to overstatement, which create crude melodrama; and a presentation of social problems without the slightest hint as to how they may be solved." It is clear that their understanding of realism owes much to what is usually categorized as "social" or "critical" realism that was dominant when they published the first edition of their book in 1959. See Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film, 96.
241

Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film, 102.

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sanatorium by his daughter's young fiance who, instead of feeling pity for his mentally deranged father-in-law, cruelly treats our hero as a decrepit, down-and-out loser.242 This brief plot summary immediately allows us to see Kagirinaki zenshin as a "social realist" film for its critical treatment of the issue of self-alienation in modern capitalist society. But it is also important to note that the film became recognized as "realist" in terms of its specific mode of production. It was Ozu Yasujiro who provided the original story; then, Yagi Yasutaro, one of the most prolific screenwriters of the period, transformed it into a film script; and finally, Uchida turned it into a film adding his own interpretation of the written script. This threefold collaboration was remarkable for several reasons. First, it was relatively rare in mid-to-late 1930s Japan that leading directors working at different studios like Ozu (Shochiku) and Uchida (Nikkatsu) would produce a film together less for corporate demands than for artistic solidarity.243 Some critics thus read this project as a critique of the domestic industry's capitalist mode of production, one colored with a poignant commentary on the level of the narrative about the evil effects of capitalism.244 Second, Yagi's script, titled "Tanoshiki kana Yasukichikun" (What a Cheerful Guy, Yasukichi-kun), was published in the August 1937 issue of Shincho as if it were an original novel.245 As I have mentioned with regard to scenario literature, it was already common by this time to publish scripts in the printed form prior

The 35 mm print of Kagirinaki zenshin is preserved at the National Film Center in Tokyo, but this version was heavily re-edited by someone when redistributed in the immediate postwar period, and it abruptly ends in the middle where the protagonist's "happy" dreams all come true.
241 Although this was what most critics of the time believed to be the case, Shdchiku had already begun by this time to offer Nikkatsu financial support in an attempt to buy it out. 244 See, for instance, Mizumachi Seiji, "Shuyo Nihon eiga hihyo: Kagirinaki zenshinKinema junpd 628 (November 11, 1937): 96.

242

Ozu Yasujiro (original story), Yagi Yasutaro (adaptation), "Shinario: Tanoshiki kana Yasukichi-kun," Shincho 34.8 (August 1937): 201-245.

245

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to the films' release, but it was still rare for those texts to appear in prestigious literary magazines like Shinchd. With this pivotal acceptance by the literary world, Kagirinaki zenshin heralded the possibility of making a film full of literary elements without relying on original novels. Thanks to the wide circulation of its scripts, Kagirinaki zenshin also allowed the viewers to discern the different contributions that Ozu, Yagi, and Uchida made respectively in the course of production. According to Hazumi Tsuneo, Ozu's original was written in a more sarcastic and fable-like tone similar to his shoshimin (urban lowermiddle class) films like Umarete wa mita keredo (1 Was Born, But..., 1933), and the protagonist was not seriously ill but playfully moving back and forth between being sane and insane to see how his family members and co-workers would react.246 Yagi and Uchida, however, decided to transform the original into a more serious and severe social criticism by focusing on the depiction of the harsh reality surrounding a modern individual and his gradual loss of sanity. Then there also was a critical difference between Yagi's script and Uchida's film, one that can be most clearly seen at the ending of the story. Written amid the public excitement about the outbreak of the Second SinoJapanese War in July 1937, Yagi's script in effect ends with the young fiance's explicit affirmation of Japan's participation in the war. He declares: By all means, living our life is a struggle.... It is open warfare between different people, societies, nations, races, and even different periods. Though taking different shapes, these struggles are based on the same principlesurvival. In order to survive, we must take part in all types of struggles.... In the world today, no one can stick to a passive way of living. We must deal with everything aggressively. By fighting as aggressively as possible, we live through our lives.247
246

Nanbu Keinosuke, Hazumi Tsuneo, et al., " Kagirinaki zenshin wo megutte," Kinema junpd 628 (November 11, 1937): 12. ~ 41 "Tanoshiki kana Yasukichi-kun," 244.

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Here Yagi, using the young fiance as his mouthpiece, self-centeredly justified Japan's military aggression in China by likening it to his disturbing logic of "survival of the fittest."248 Of course, it might be irrelevant to see one character's speech in fiction as a direct manifestation of the author's political stance. But the contemporary readers might have read it this way insofar as the main goal of scenario literature, as elucidated by Iijima Tadashi, was to use dialogue as a means of subjective expression. In the meantime, Uchida's authorial responsibility as a director was at stake in how he dealt with such a problematic written statement in his screen adaptation. In the end, Uchida filmed the last sequence with the line quoted above, but he then completely cut it out during editing to show his protest against Yagi's conformist attitude. Marked by the mutual and sometimes conflicting commitments of the three leading film personnel on the film, Kagirinaki zenshin became a template for the humanist approach to cinematic realism, which the proponents of bungei eiga sought to establish beyond the alterity of the photographic image. To use Ueno Kozo's words, Kagirinaki zenshin was not only a "genuine realist film" but also manifested the "victory of realism" in its successful attempt to reach the true, or even universal, nature of reality through a painstakingly detailed depiction of modern individuals.249 Likewise, Sawamura Tsutomu began his analysis of the film by emphasizing its "firm grasp of real life."250 Despite these appraisals, however, neither Ueno nor Sawamura were fully content with

borrowed this term from Peter B. High's critical reading of Yagi's script. See his The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 179.
249

248 1

Ueno Kozo, "Sakuhinhyo: Kagirinaki zenshin (Uchida Tomu)," Nihon eiga 3.1 (January 1938):

110.
250

Sawamura Tsutomu, "Tokushu eiga hihan: Kagirinaki zenshinEiga hyoron 142 (December

1937): 106.

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Uchida's "directorial" decision to leave out the young fiance's closing speech. This was in part because they simply shared much with Yagi in their excitement about radical changes in society brought about by Japan's participation in the war. But it also indicated their anticipation of the radical transfer of authorial power in filmmaking from the director to the scriptwriter, as it constituted the most viable and effective way for those in the young generation like Ueno and Sawamuraborn in 1908 and 1915, respectivelyto have their own voices reflected into domestic film production. Indeed, impatient with the long apprenticing period required before becoming a film director within the traditional studio system, Ueno, for one, began to seek the possibility of making his own films in the field of non-fiction, which became a booming business after July 1937 with the growing popularity of the newsreels reporting the ongoing battles in China. In the meantime, Sawamura joined Kitagawa Fuyuhiko's scenario literature movement and eventually became one of the most prominent wartime screenwriters, known for his collaboration with the director Kumagai Hisatora in such "spiritualist" (seishin shugi) propaganda films as Shanghai rikusentai (The Naval Brigade at Shanghai, 1939) and Shield monogatari (A Story of Leadership, 1941 ).251 From the late 1930s on, the idea of using the written script as a primary means of subjective expression became dominant in every sector of Japanese sound filmmaking, regardless of the thematic and methodological difference between fiction and non-fiction. For instance, in making his 1938 documentary Peking, the director Kamei Fumio wrote and published a scenario full of literary expressions in Eiga hyoron before the actual shooting took place. In consequence, Kawaguchi Masakazu, the cameraman sent to

251

For Sawamura's career as a scriptwriter, see High The Imperial Screen, 223-264.

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Beijing for this project, had no freedom to capture what he saw there during his stay, and had to follow Kamei's quite rhetorical and demanding descriptions like this: "After a blast of wind, a small dark spot emerging in the sky grows bigger and bigger, and eventually the entire city becomes enveloped in the gathering gloom.... It would be great if you catch this particular wind around the Qianmen Street." This was surely a tough environment for a director like Uchida, who publicly admitted his unwillingness to write scripts. Still, Uchida himself continued making great contributions to the development of Japanese realist film aesthetics, especially with his 1939 film Tsuchi (Earth). Based on Nagatsuka Takashi's famous peasant novel, the film is notable for its truthful documentation of the harsh life of a rural farming family in the late Meiji period. In order to enhance the visual verisimilitude of the film, Uchida built a life-size open set of the family home and later actually set fire to it to shoot the climactic scene; he even spent a full year shooting scenes so as to synchronize the development of J^ 3 the diegetic time with the changes of the seasons in the actual calendar year. As I have argued elsewhere, however, Uchida's excessive obsession with the "real" was not intended to confront the reality surrounding him, but rather to compromise with it.254 In fact, Yagi Ryuichro and Kitamura Tsutomu, scriptwriters for Uchida's adaptation, intentionally eliminated many important episodes in the original for fear of censorship, especially ones relating to a labor dispute between the landowner and tenant farmers. According to the discourse of literary adaptation we have seen so far, this omission was

~ 52 Kamei Fumio, "Kiroku eiga shinario: P e k i n E i g a h y d r o n 147 (June 1938), 73. For a detailed account of the production history of the film, see Saeki Tomori, et al eds FC 90: Uchida Tomu kantoku tokushu (Tokyo: Tokyo kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan firumu senta, 1992), 37-41.
254 See my "TokT rirarizumu e no michi," in Eigashi oyominaosu, eds. Komatsu Hiroshi, et al., vol. 2 of Nihon eiga wa ikiteiru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010), 211-259.

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nothing but a retreat. Nevertheless, instead of trying to remedy fissures in the narrative by rewriting the script, Uchida decided to cover them up by giving the film a "quasi-nonfiction" look, marked by his extensive use of location shootings (indeed, the spring sequence was filmed in the "real" village where Nagatsuka was born and grew up), uninterrupted long takes, and chiaroscuro lighting faithful to the "darkness" of an undeveloped farming village in the Meiji period. With these visual innovations in film style, Uchida maintained his reputation as a "realist" filmmaker. But ironically, it was only possible with his decision to relinquish his authorial responsibility over the content (scenario) of the film. However prevailing it was, the Japanese attempt to transplant literary elements into sound filmmaking did not signal the total victory of the written word over the moving image, or that of the scriptwriter over the film director, both of which were still at stake in the subsequent debates on cinematic realism. This was in part due to the rise of non-fiction genres like the newsreel and documentaries in the mid-to-late 1930s, which began to promote a new way of mediating reality with an increasing sense of intimacy and immediacy that could no longer be captured by the written language. Another counterargument against the practice of literary adaptation came from cultural elites, who, witnessing the increasing significance of film in mediating the mass public and their everyday life, began to call into question the authenticity of reality depicted in domestic fiction films. This skepticism was of course inseparable from the novelty of cinema as a social medium. Yet it also stemmed from the immaturity of the Japanese film industry at large, whose major participants were relatively young compared to those in other "mature" fields like literature. The question to be asked here is thus not how but who had

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the right to offer a proper interpretation of reality, especially in light of mass mobilization for the war. In the following section, I will address this new set of discourse by looking at the emergence of a new genre called rekishi eiga (historical film). Originally proposed in 1937 as a sub-genre of bungei eiga, this genre took the Japanese debates on "nonontological" and "textual" realism to the next stage with its focus on a more elusive issue: a realistic depiction of the national past.

Historical Film and Textual Realism In March 1938, the director Kumagai Hisatora released Abe ichizoku (The Abe Family). Adapted from Mori Ogai's historical novella of the same title (1913), the film deals with the issue of junshi (ritual suicide), a social custom in feudal Japan that obligated loyal vassals to commit seppuku upon the death of their lord. Given that the original was written under the impact of the ritual suicide of General Nogi and his wife, who killed themselves on the day of the Meiji emperor's funeral ceremonies in September 1912, scholars like Darrell W. Davis read the film as a good example of the glorification of the national past, one that became a driving force in Japan's radical transformation into a totalitarian state around the turn of the 1940s. Missing in his ideological reading of the text, however, is a critical consideration of the fact that Abe Ichizoku appeared as one of the first rekishi eiga, a new mode of historical filmmaking proposed by the film critic Tsumura Hideo the year before. Davis does refer to the emergence of historical film around 1938 and rightly places Abe ichizoku within this genre, but unfortunately his account is both reductive and inaccurate. Based on the wrong information that names Hasegawa Nyozekan as the first advocate of this genreas we

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will see, Hasegawa's essay on historical film was written in 1941 with an overt ideological twisthe comes to the conclusion that the concept of historical film is "the most explicit articulation of nationalism in the cinema" as well as "the most proximate generic norm from which the monumental style came about."255 A careful reading of Tsumura's original argument, however, prompts us to understand the more complex nature of wartime film culture in Japan. Because Tsumura's intention was to expel inaccurate and untruthful depictions of the past from Japanese fiction filmmaking by means of more authentic written accounts of history like Ogai's historical novel, his concept of historical film emerged exactly from where discourses of cinematic realism, literary adaptation, and historical representation in film intersected each other. For a better understanding of Tsumura's call for historical film, it is necessary to provide a brief history of historical filmmaking in Japan. In the early days of Japanese cinema, shinpa (new school) and kyuha (old school) were the two major genres applied to domestic film products. Originally borrowed from the Japanese theater, these two genres distinguished films according to their historical settings, as the former referred to ones dealing with contemporary subjects and the latter to ones set in the period before the Meiji era. Throughout the 1910s, it was kyuha that dominated the industry with the enormous popularity of Onoe Matusunosuke, arguably the "first" movie star in this country. Narrating stories adapted from famous kabuki plays or kodan oral performances, this genre offered the viewers an experience of the so-called "canned theater," whose atmosphere was given by the exclusive use of such "uncinematic" devices as onnagata, theatrical make-up and acting styles, a frontal and immobile camera position, long shots

255

Ibid., 69.

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and long takes, and a group of kowairo benshi that provided the voices of the characters on the screen. The first major reform of Japanese period films took place in the early 1920s, when young filmmakers and scriptwriters gathering at the newly established Shochiku studios began to produce films like Onna to kaizoku (The Woman and the Pirate, dir. Nomura Hotei, 1923) under the banner of shin-jidaigeki (new period drama). This shift from kyuha to jidaigeki meant more than a simple alteration of the term. Indeed, the "newness" of jidaigeki was granted in its firm intention to modernize Japanese historical filmmaking by employing such newly introduced "cinematic" devices as close-ups, parallel editing, flashbacks, actresses, and detailed screenplays, as with the case of the Pure Film Movement. After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake wiped out Tokyo's old

landscape and studios, the center of historical filmmaking moved to Kyoto, the old capital of Japan. Even in this post-earthquake period, jidaigeki remained a testing ground for experimenting with the latest trends in film style and discourse, attracting a number of young and ambitious filmmakers beyond the barriers of film companies. Kinugasa Teinosuke's Reimei izen (Before Dawn, 1931), for instance, is said to be the "first" Japanese film that put into practice Soviet montage theory; Ito Daisuke's Zanjin zanba ken (Man-Slashing, Horse-Piercing Sword, 1929) appeared as a jidaigeki version of keiko eiga (tendency film) with its poignant exposure of social inequalities in feudal Japan; and directors like Itami Mansaku, Inagaki Hiroshi, and Makino Masahiro devoted themselves to developing a hybrid genre called "mage o tsuketa gendaigeki (contemporary dramas with a topknot)" which, following the rise of the highly commercialized modernist

For more on the historical shift from kyuha to jidaigeki, see Kyoto Eigasai Jikko Iinkai, ed Jidaigeki eiga to wa nani ka: Nyu firumu stadizu (Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin, 1997).

256

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culture of Interwar Japan known as ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense), produced a number of nonsensical comedies, love stories, and even musicals all set in the Edo period.257 Not surprisingly, the coming of sound and the subsequent boom in literary adaptation brought a critical shift in the direction of Japanese historical filmmaking. Still colored with a bright and cheerful tone, Itami's first talkie Akanishi Kakita (1936), for instance, took a lead in the adaptation of "pure" literature in the jidaigeki genre, as it was based on Shiga Naoya's short story of the same title. After his infamous participation in the propagandistic German-Japanese co-production Atarashiki tsuchi (The New Earth, 1937, co-dir. Arnold Fanck),258 Itami made frequent shifts between jidaigeki and gendaigeki. However, his keen interest in literary adaptation remained the same, and it ultimately led him to base his last jidaigeki film Kyojinden (The Tale of a Giant, 1938) on Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Another remarkable event to note is the participation of the Zenshinza (progressive theater) troupe in the production of jidaigeki films. Led by two famous "dropouts" from traditional Kabuki families, Kawarasaki Chojuro and Nakamura Kan'emon, Zenshinza gave Japanese period films a more serious look underscored both by their well-trained, professional acting skills as well as by their collective sympathies towards Communism. The best example of the troupe's

For the Japanese interwar culture known as ero guro nansensu, see Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
258 For detailed accounts of Atarashiki tsuchi, see Janine Hansen, "The New Earth (1936/37): A German-Japanese Misalliance in Film," in In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru, eds. Mark Nornes, et al. (Victoria, BC: Trafford; Kinema Kurabu: Yokohama, 2001), 184-198; Michael Baskett, "All Beautiful Fascists? Axis Film Culture in Imperial Japan," in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 212-234; and my own "Fukei no (sai)hakken: Itami Mansaku to Atarashiki tsuchi," Nihon eiga to nashonarizumu: 1931-1945, ed. Iwamoto Kenji (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004), 63-102.

257

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collaboration can be found in the work of Yamanaka Sadao. Adapted from Kawatake Mokuami's well-known Kabuki scripts, Yamanaka's later films such as Kochiyama Soshun (1936) and Ninjo kamifusen (1937) attained a sensibility comparable with French poetic realist films in their murky and pessimistic depiction of the everyday life of lowerclass or unemployed samurai. The significance of both Itami and Yamanaka in the historical development of jidaigeki films is indisputable. As Anderson and Richie's write, "they approached Japanese history as though it were contemporary, looking for values in it that they looked for in their own lives... today, in the films by Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and Yoshimura [K5zaburo], the attitude of Yamanaka and Itami still exists."259 However, the history itself did not proceed linearly. First, both Itami and Yamanaka stopped making films in 1938, with the former suffering from tuberculosis and the latter losing his young life Yamanaka died at the age of twenty-eightduring his military service in China. Second, when they stopped making films, the majority of jidaigeki directors still engaged in the production of "body genre" films such as chanbara (sword fighting), melodrama, and burlesque in response to the high demand of the domestic market for "pure" entertainment.260 And finally, as a reaction to those "popular" jidaigeki films, Tsumura Hideo began to call for a more serious and authentic treatment of the national past under the banner of rekishi eiga. Just as in Yamanaka's later works, the concept of historical film was marked by a strong aspiration for establishing realist filmmaking in the genre of

359 260

Anderson and Richie. The Japanese Film, 95.

For the concept of "body genres," see Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2-13.

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jidaigeki. Nevertheless, there was a striking contrast between the two, reflecting their different understandings of realism in historical filmmaking. Tsumura Hideo first disclosed his idea of historical film in "Kinugasa Teinosukeshi e no tegami: Rekishi eiga no teisho (A Letter to Mr. Kinugasa Teinosuke: A Proposal for Historical Film)"261 published in 1937. This "public" letter begins with Tsumura's confession that he did not seen any of Kinugasa's innovative silent jidaigeki films, including Nichirin (The Sun, 1925, based on Yokomitsu Riichi's modernist novel of the same title), Jujiro (Crossroads, 1928, shown in both Europe and the United States under the title Shadows qfYoshiwara) or Reimei izen. Nonetheless, Tsumura finds in Kinugasa's recent epic Osaka natsu no jin (The Summer Battle of Osaka, 1937) a slight move toward what he considers to be historical film. As a film, Tsumura continues, Osaka natsu no jin was a failure; but it was still remarkable for its relatively undistorted approach to a real historical event,262 an approach that was completely absent in current jidaigeki films. As Tsumura complains, the problem of domestic historical filmmaking lies in its "tendency to take pride in bringing in stories and themes more suitable to gendaigeki, to hunt after popular novelties by having the actors speak the modern language or, even worse, contemporary slang."263 According to Tsumura, this conventional underestimation of historical authenticity is largely due to each director's lack of knowledge about the historical past. But he also sees it as a consequence of the abnormality of the Japanese film industry, one

Tsumura Hideo, "Kinugasa Teinosuke-shi e no tegami: Rekishi eiga no teish5," in Eiga to hihyd (Tokyo: Koyama Shoten, 1939), 115-128.
262 As a historical event, the summer battle of Osaka took place from April to May 1615, ending with the final victory of the Tokugawa Shogunate over the Toyotomi clan.

261

Tsumura, "Kinugasa Teinosuke-shi e no tegami," 118.

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that had long trained directors to be specialists in either period or contemporary dramas. This particular division of labor, which is overlapped with a geographical division of film studios between Kyoto and Tokyo, becomes most apparent when jidaigeki directors get involved in the production of gendaigeki films. Having long engaged in the creation of an imaginary world that is detached from both the past and the present, he says, they lack the ability to deal with the reality of the contemporary world. Consequently, Tsumura goes on to declare that all historical films should be made by the hands of the gendaigeki directors, or at least by those already having sufficient experience in making both period and contemporary films, such as Kinugasa Teinosuke and Mizoguchi Kenji.264 At first glance, Tsumura's demand for more authentic historical representations in film seems to simply reflect the reactionary social discourse of wartime Japan that sought to enhance the dignity of the kokutai (national body) and the emperor system by intentionally and systematically making ambiguous a distinction between myths and historical facts. However, Tsumura's conception of historical film considerably differed from such intentional falsification of the national past in its excessive emphasis on factual accuracy. How could then directors of historical film claim the accuracy of their articulation and representation of history? Tsumura's answer for this was both concrete and idiosyncratic, as he suggested that they use Mori Ogai's historical novels like Abe Ichizoku (1913) and Sansho dayu (Sansho the Bailiff, 1913) as a template for their filmmaking. Born in 1862, Ogai was one of the most canonical figures in the history of modern Japanese literature alongside Natsume Soseki, and he spent the last ten years of his life

264

Ibid., 126.

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from 1912 to 1922mostly writing historical novels. It is not easy to locate Ogai's historical novels within conventional literary genres because they frequently oscillated between historical fiction and critical biography. Still, as Tessa Morris-Suzuki reminds us, no one could fail to find in Ogai's later works the increasing obsession with historical facts, which he culled from his extensive research in rare, hand-written manuscripts made in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868).265 Interestingly, Ogai himself defined his historical novels as a critical response to the rise of Naturalism in modern Japanese literature: First of all, studying historical documents, I began to respect the reality found in them, and became tired of making unnecessary changes. Second, seeing my contemporaries portray their lives as they are, I came to realize that if they could write about the present as it is, it should not be a problem to write about the past as it was.266 The key phrase here is "as it is (ari no mama)." While Japanese Naturalists of the 1910s, or writers of the aforementioned "I-novel," developed this allegedly transparent, unobtrusive writing style by narrowing their scope to what they really experienced in their everyday life, Ogai tactfully adopted it through his decision to add nothing fictional to what he found in the historical documents. It was this "objective" and "neutral" treatment of history that Tsumura thought to be the foundation of historical films. Moreover, because Ogai exhibited his authorial creativity not by modifying the content of historical facts but by rearranging them into the form of narrative, Tsumura also likened Ogai's historical novel to the logic of editing (montage) in the process of filmmaking.267

265 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 47. 266 Mori Ogai, "Rekishi sono mama to rekishi banare," in Mori Ogai zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1951-1956), 23:506. 267

Tsumura, "Kinugasa Teinosuke-shi e no tegami," 126.

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It appears that Tsumura's suggestion did not elicit any favorable response from its original addressee Kinugasa Teinosuke. But it did reach the gendaigeki director Kumagai Hisatora, who in March 1938 released the film adaptation of Abe ichizoku as his first foray into the production of jidaigeki film. Not surprisingly, Tsumura soon responded to this in his subsequent essay on the issue, "Rekishi eiga ni tsuite (On Historical Films)."268 At first, Tsumura openly expresses his gratitude for the emergence of the first historical film. But as he goes into details, he cannot help but disapprove of the film, especially with regard to some necessary changes Kumagai made to Ogai's original. In the course of production, Kumagai publicly announced that his adaptation of Abe ichizoku would be modeled after Jean Renoir's inventive adaptation of The Lower Depths (1936).269 Just as Renoir considerably changed the plotline and characters of Gorky's original according to the reality of Popular-Front France, Kumagai also aimed to make comments on the reality of late 1930s Japan first by adding a pair of new charactersOsaki and Tasukeand second by having his speak of their suspicions about the absurdity of the junshi system. This subtle but unmistakable deviation from the original led some critics to praise the film in a similar fashion to Uchida's adaptation of Jinsei gekijd. For instance, Sawamura Tsutomu willfully read it as Kumagai's subjective commitment to the present situation, wherein people should die not for social honors but for a more meaningful purpose like the prosperity of the Japanese empire.270 Against that, Tsumura read the same deviation as a total abuse of Ogai's respectful resolution to depict history as it was, thereby clearly declaring that "In adapting Ogai's literature, filmmakers must begin by learning his

268 269 270

Tsumura Hideo, "Rekishi eiga ni tsuite," in Eiga to hihyd, 129-157. Kumagai Hisatora, " Abe ichizoku no eiga-ka," Nihon eiga 3.2 (February 1938): 59. Sawamura Tsutomu, " Abe ichizoku o megutteEiga hihyd 146 (April 1938): 61-66.

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reverent and sophisticated way of looking at reality. At the same time, they must notice that their adaptations would be meaningless unless they make efforts to represent the 771 astounding solemnity of the fate (i.e., reality) Ogai depicted in his novels." Given Tsumura's unflinching trust in Ogai as a historiographer, one might think that the original story of Abe ichizoku contains no factual errors or fictional rewriting of a historical event. It is true that Ogai made frequent use of historical documents from the Edo period to provide a truthful account of the last days of the Abe family, which was completely exterminated in March 1643 by their former master Lord Hosokawa of the Kumamoto domain. However, as recent studies by Fujimoto Chizuko and Yamamoto Hirofumi have revealed, the primary source of Ogai's text, Abe chajidan (Tea Conversations about the Abe Family), is far from reliable as an authentic historical document, for it was written almost a century after the actual incident took place and thus relied heavily on fictitious hearsay and rumors. In addition, Fujimoto and Yamamoto also point out that Ogai himself changed the content and timeline of the incident for the sake of narrative development.272 For instance, both Abe chajidan and Ogai ascribe the miserable fate of the Abe family to Lord Hosokawa's enigmatic decision to refuse the petition of Abe Yaichiemon, the head of the Abe family, to commit suicide after his death. However, the official diaries of the Kumamoto domain tell us that Yaichiemon did commit seppuku along with his fellow vassals in 1641, and that the downfall of the Abe family had in fact nothing to do with the junshi custom. Needless to say, such a rigorous textual critique was not yet available when Tsumura proposed his concept of historical

271

Tsumura, "Rekishi eiga ni tsuite," 144.

272 See Fujimoto Chizuko, "Ogai Abe ichizoku no hasso: Sakuhin to jittaiken," Kindai bungaku sfiiron 14 (October 1975): 10-18, and Yamamoto Hirofumi, Junshi no kozo (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1994), 1436.

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film. Yet even if he knew it, Tsumura would not withdraw his contention because what he found most valuable in Ogai's historical novels was their power to generate a strong "reality-effect" based on this writer's social reputation. In film history, the idea of using written texts to enhance the credibility of historical representation is not unique to Tsumura. The film scholar/scriptwriter James Schamus has recently coined the term "textual realism" in his discussion of the work of Carl Dreyer. Just like Ogai, Dreyer is widely known for his obsession with historical documents, and his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1941) were based on the actual records of the witch trials of Joan of Arc and Anne Pedersdotter, respectively. Nevertheless, Tsumura's proposal of historical film considerably differs

from Dreyer's textual realism as well, for it did not grant filmmakerseither directors or scriptwritersthe right to interpret history according to their own archival research or creative imagination. Instead, they were only allowed to create a secondary visual rendition of the past, one that always came after the primary interpretation of it already published in the form of historical novel. This strict restriction also distinguishes Tsumura from the major proponents of literary adaptation. As we have seen, the purpose of the integration of literary elements into sound cinema was to use scenarios as a primary means for the subjective expression of filmmakers. In Tsumura's formula, however, the written language was functioning not to emancipate but rather to regulate filmmakers' authorial creativity. If there was a certain realism at work here, it would be a realism that is faithful not to the reality of feudal Japan per se, but to the written accounts

273

James Schamus, "Dreyer's Textual Realism," in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal

Cinema,

315-324.

152

of the national past already mediated through the attentive eye of more authoritative historiographers like Ogai. Despite his emphasis on the primacy of literature over film, Tsumura was not a typical cultural elite who stubbornly refused to admit the social and artistic values of cinema. Indeed, Tsumura was one of the most influential film critics of wartime Japan. In addition to writing weekly film reviews for the prestigious Asahi shinbun newspaper under the legendary pseudonym "Q," he published numbers of critical essays on film and related issues in prestigious literary magazines such as Serupan (Serpent), Bungei shunju (Literary Seasons), and Bungakukai (Literary World). Through his activity as a prominent film critic, Tsumura was fully aware of cinema's unparalleled potential to penetrate among the mass public. Moreover, he was one of the few Japanese critics who had an acute sensitivity about cinema's ability to capture reality without losing its essential ambiguity. He writes: Mechanical aspects of the talkie make it possible to depict how the external world, consisting of both inevitable and contingent things, surrounds and affects the protagonist. With the aid of techniques such as emphasis or concentration, a talkie artist may portray only what he needs. Yet, as long as his creation is hinged upon the mechanical device called the camera, he can never eliminate all the unnecessary things from the world surrounding the protagonist. The camera somehow captures the residue of reality under any conditions.274 As an individual viewer, Tsumura was not hesitant to appreciate the ambiguity of the filmed reality since it gave him a "freedom" to perceive or interpret things he saw and heard on the screen, as in the case of actual reality.275 Yet as a cultural critic who set

274 275

Tsumura Hideo, "Eiga geijutsu e no danso," Eiga to hihyo, 9.

Here, one could find an intriguing parallel between Tsumura and Bazin for their mutual appreciation of ambiguity in both reality and the filmic image. For a critical inquiry into Bazin's existentialist take on the contingency of reality, see Ivone Margulies, "Bodies too Much," and Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, History, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

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himself the task of enlightening the mass public through his film writing, he was also worried about the instability of the moving image as a messenger of the intended message. Given its mechanical ability to evoke a strong reality-effect in the mind of the viewer, Tsumura saw film as a dangerous medium that could make the viewer believe what it projects on the screen regardless of the accuracy of its content. It was this internal split between his personal taste as a viewer and his official task as a member of the cultural elite that led Tsumura to rely on Ogai's historical novels in his theorization of historical film. If, on the one hand, filmmakers stayed faithful to what they read in Ogai's already canonized written accounts of history, it would dramatically reduce the risk of misleading the viewers. However, equally important for Tsumura was Ogai's particular attitude toward historical writing, the attitude that Tsumura called the "inhuman sprit" (hininjo no seishiri). Unlike the majority of modern Japanese writers who at times sympathizedor even identifiedwith their fictional characters, Ogai always maintained a critical distance from his objects in his description of historical events. "While faithfully observing his protagonist from a historical and social perspective," says Tsumura, "Ogai never intended to cast his subjectivity upon his characters"276 nor to manipulate the reality of the historical past from his modern perspective. Moreover, reflecting his profound obsession with factual accuracy, Ogai intentionally left things unexplained whenever he encountered something enigmatic in his exploration of the primary sources. Tsumura confessed that he did not respect Ogai as a great master of modern literature for this writer's inclination towards trivialism. Nevertheless, Tsumura found in Ogai a perfect archetype of his ideal filmmaker whose task it was to provide the

276

Tsumura, "Rekishi eiga ni tsuite," 136.

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viewers an instructive lesson to learn about the ambiguous nature of reality, tactfully using the modern "inhuman" device called the camera. In retrospect, one could conclude that Tsumura's proposal for historical film was either too subtle or too ambitious to attract his contemporary filmmakers. Indeed, after Kumagai Hisatora's ichizoku, no film adaptation of Ogai's historical novel came

about until Mizoguchi Kenji's Sansho dayu (1954). This is, of course, not to say that the demand for more authentic historical representations in film disappeared in this two decades, but it took a different path than Tsumura's initial intention. Although the term "historical film" was still in use in the early 1940s to designate films like Uchida Tomu's Rekishi (History, 1940), Inagaki Hiroshi's Edo saigo no hi (The Last Days of Edo, 1941), and Mizoguchi Kenji's Genroku chushingura (The 47 Ronin, 1941-41), its connotation became radically different, as clearly expressed in Hasegawa Nyozekan's 1941 definition: "Our nation's historical film must be equipped with an ability to cultivate the emotional pattern and aesthetic sentiment unique to the Japanese."277 Already having lost the impetus for the reform of jidaigeki films, Tsumura kept his distance from this ideological reinscription of his concept. And yet this does not mean that he was immune to Japan's shift toward a totalitarian regime from the late 1930s. As the history tells us, Tsumura eventually became the most rigorous prophet of state control of film practice at large in an effort to cultivate a more efficient way to discipline the mass audience's film literacy. The debates on literary adaptation and historical film that I have argued in this chapter were also faithful to the reality of wartime Japan, wherein seemingly liberal ideas

Hasegawa Nyozekan, "Rekishi eiga no geijutsuteki seikaku," in Nihon eigaron (Tokyo: DaiNippon Eiga Kyokai, 1943), 120.

277

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seamlessly transformed into reactionary ones. In this historical dynamics, not only did the written script, initially believed to be an effective tool to emancipate film directors' authorial creativity, become a means to restrict their directorial freedom, but the premise of "realism" itself changed from an objective analysis or observation of social reality into an ideological blueprint for the reality to come. However, this is still one aspect of the more diverse and complex nature of prewar and wartime Japanese debates over the issues of cinematic realism. I have intentionally avoided talking about a different concept of realism simultaneously developed in the realm of non-fiction filmmaking. In the next chapter, I scrutinize what I call "epistemological" approach by focusing on the works of such distinguished Marxist philosophers as Tosaka Jun, Nakai Masakazu, and Imamura Taihei. My primary task is there to clarify the ways in which they addressed the issue of cinematic realism with their mutual interest in theorizing cinema's mechanical nature from the perspective of dialectical materialism. I will, however, also trace how their "non-humanist" stance ultimately merged into the "humanist" ones, following the dissolution of the gap between fiction and non-fiction at the turn of the 1940s.

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CHAPTER IV KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH, COGNITION: DOCUMENTARY FILM AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL REALISM

One of the most remarkable shifts in the Japanese film world after the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the event initiating Japan's participation in the socalled "Fifteen Years War" against China and the Allies, was the rise of non-Fiction genres. As with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the ongoing events on the battleground provided a topical and profitable subject for news films, stimulating the domestic viewers' desire to witness history in the making. The form of news films released on a weekly basis, or what is usually called "newsreels," became dominant in Japan by 1935, when a group of major newspaper companies such as the Asahi, Yomiuri, Osaka Mainichi, Kokumin, and Domei Tsushin established their own film units and began sending back audio-visual coverage of the latest battles and related social upheavals to the home front. The demand for news films became intensified in the years following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (also known as the China Incident) of July 1937, as it heralded Japan's full-scale invasion of China. During the first half of the 1930s, news films had usually been shown either at outdoor screenings near train stations or as an appendage to the main program at normal movie theaters. By around 1940, however, there existed twenty-three theaters specializing in newsreels and non-fiction films in the Tokyo area alone.278

-?78
95.

. Hazumi Tsuneo, Eiga 50 nenshi (Tokyo: Masu Shobo), quoted in High, The Imperial Screen,

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In this period of social unrest, the government authorities also began to seek a way to exploit non-fiction films as a means of mass mobilization. Until the early 1930s, the general policy of the government toward film had been relatively passive and secondary, aiming for the most part to regulate its negative effects through censorship or by giving recommendations to films for educational purposes. Yet, with the outbreak of the war, administrative agencies like the Ministry of Education and the military proceeded to sponsor and supervise some non-fiction film productions. This move soon resulted in a number of jikyoku (current affair) films that one-sidedly explained the legitimacy of Japan's militaristic expansion, including Hijdji Nippon (Japan in Time of Crisis, 1933, featuring the Army Minster Araki Sadao), Umi no seimeisen (Lifeline of the Sea, 1933, supervised by Naval Officers Taketomi Kunishige and Shibata Zenjiro), and Daigdrei (Great Order, 1934, with Army Lieutenant Machida Keiji serving as a consultant).279 In the meantime, the Ministry of Home Affairs and members of the Diet began to work on legislation concerning the state use of film for mass enlightenment and war propaganda, and their efforts eventually culminated in the enactment of the Film Law (Eigaho) in 1939. Because it aimed to regulate a wide array of issues ranging from censorship, production, distribution, and exhibition to the state registration of "film workers," it is impossible to briefly summarize the impact of the Film Law on the Japanese film world at large. Still, it should be noted here that from 1940 on the law ordered the forced screening (kyosei joei) of "a specific kind of films that contribute to the cultivation of the national sprit or the development of the national intellectual

For more details about these films, see High, The Imperial Screen, 46-50; Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 72-92.

279

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faculties, recognized as such by the Minster of Education."280 With this legal recognition and support, non-fiction filmor bunka eiga (culture film) as it was called at the time came to assume an ever-greater role in literally shaping Japan's wartime "film culture." Despite such aggressive intervention by the government, the actual development of non-fiction filmmaking and its critical discourse was far from monolithic and rife with contradictions. The confusion surrounding the upsurge of non-fiction filmmaking can perhaps be best seen in the multitude of Japanese terms employed to categorize this genre. Beginning with jissha eiga (actuality film) imported to or produced in Japan at the turn of the century, films that were intended as a visual recording of some aspect of reality had been variously described as kiroku eiga (record film), kyoiku eiga (education film), kagaku eiga (science film), nyusu eiga (news film), senden eiga (propaganda film), senki eiga (war record film), and dokyumentari eiga (documentary film). To integrate these subdivisions into one category, people began to use the term bunka eiga from the late1930s on. but it ended up creating more confusion: although it first appeared as the Japanese translation of the German company UFA's scientific and educational Kulturfilm, it transformed into a truly elusive, all-encompassing term when the Film Law designated with it a broad range of films that would benefit the development of "national culture (,kokumin bunka)." As a result, nearly all commentators on this term began their arguments by similarly asking, "What is bunka eigaT and provided very provisional definitions, frequently crisscrossing the borders between art and science, document and propaganda, and even fiction and non-fiction.281

280 Quoted

in Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 63.

281 For these debates, see Fujii Jinshi, "Films That Do Culture: A Discursive Analysis of Bunka Eiga. 1935-1945." trans. Lori Hitchcock, Iconics 6 (2002): 51-68.

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One could also attribute the multi-dimensional characteristics of Japanese nonfiction film to the diversity of people engaged in the production and discussion of this genre. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was members of Prokino, or the Proletarian Film League of Japan, that took the initiative in the use of film for non-fictional purposes. Based on the group's leader Sasa Genju's proposal of using small gauge films like 16 mm and 9.5 mm as a "weapon" to fight back against the capitalist mode of filmmaking, Prokino made a number of newsreels and agitprop films that dealt with demonstrations and workers* strikes. Not surprisingly, such radical activities became subject to a crackdown by the government in the period after the Manchurian Incident, and Prokino was forced to disband in 1934 along with many other leftist groups. After the dissolution, however, most ex-members of Prokino were able to find more officially sanctioned positions within the film industry, especially those associated with the then-bourgeoning non-fiction filmmaking. For instance, Sasa first helped the establishment of the film unit at Rikagaku Kenkyujo (RIKEN, or the Institution of Physical and Chemical Research); then joined the newly established Geijutsu Eigasha (GES) and worked as the editor of the company's journals Bunka eiga (Culture Film) and Bunka eiga kenkyu (Studies of Cultural Film). Thus for those involved in the proletarian film movement in Japan, their serious and long-term commitment to non-fiction filmmaking served for a certain amount of time as a sanctuary against the government's obstinate suppression. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1930s, quite a few "leftist" filmmakers and critics became absorbed into the logic of totalitarianism not only because of their political conversion known as tenko~82 but also because of the exceptional privileges given by the government to their exploration of non-fiction theory and practice.
~ 82 On the issue of tenko, see Patricia Steinhoff, Tenko: Ideology and Societal Integration in

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This chapter examines how Japanese intellectuals embraced this sudden rise of news films and documentary in wartime Japan. To make my argument concise and consistent, I will confine my focus to the work of three Japanese thinkersTosaka Jun, Nakai Masakazu, and Imamura Taiheiwho shared a similar desire to theorize the increasingly significant role that non-fiction films began to play in this period in mediating between the masses and their realities. The merit of investigating these thinkers is that it helps us explore further several key topics on the issue of cinematic realism already discussed in the previous chapters. Indeed, Tosaka, Nakai, and Imamura all grappled with film's ability to reveal the hidden truths of reality, a topic that Itagaki Takao had already addressed in the late 1920s in his theory of machine realism. Yet their speculations on this revelatory capacity considerably differed from Itagaki's, especially in their mutual intention to socializeor even politicizeit from the perspectives of Marxism and socialism. Throughout the chapter, I will refer to the realism at work in their theoretical writings as "epistemological realism," following the title of Tosaka's key essay, "Eiga no ninshikironteki kachi to fuzoku byosha" (Cinema's Epistemological Value and Its Depiction of Social Custom). The premise of epistemological realism is that with the accuracy of the camera's gaze, film is able to reflect the objective truth of both natural and social phenomena; and only through the correct cognition of reality provided by film's mediation, can one move toward the construction of a better world. My main concern here, however, is to look at how this well-known metaphor of "film as a mirror" became problematic when non-fiction films began to assume different and more extensive tasks than providing a truthful representation of reality.

Prewar Japan (New York: Garland. 1991); Shiso no kagaku kenkyukai, ed., Kyodo kenku: Tenko, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1967).

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Tosaka Jun: Film and Social Epistemoloev Unlike in the United States and Europe, the major suppliers of newsreels in 1930s Japan were not film but newspaper companies. Similarly, favorable comments about the attraction of this new form of visual journalism were first brought up by non-film specialists. Among such commentators was Terada Torahiko (1878-1935), who wrote in 1933 a short but lucid essay titled "Nyusu eiga to shinbun kiji" (News Film and Newspaper Article). Terada was an established physicist as well as a prolific

essayist/poet trained under Natsume Soseki who frequently wrote essays on cinema for prestigious journals like Shisd. The main focus of his film writings was to prove the medium specificity of film from both scientific and aesthetic perspectives. In essays like "Eiga no sekaizo" (Cinema's World View) and "Eiga geijutsu" (Film Art), Terada repeatedly emphasized cinema's unprecedented ability to "subvert our common view of the world" by referring to its reduction of three-dimensional images to two-dimensional ones, its violation of temporal irreversibility, and its capturing of minute details of natural objects that had long been invisible to our naked eyes.284 At the same time, Terada often criticized his contemporary film critics for their tendency to treat films within the conventional framework of "modern art" alone. He thus devoted a good amount of his writings to the exploration of the structural affinity between haiku and montage theory, following Sergei Eisenstein's famous remark on Japanese culture. Accentuated with his high reputation as a public intellectual and his idiosyncratic approach to the object,
Terada Torahiko, "Nyusu eiga to shinbun kiji," Eiga hyoron (January 1933), reprinted in Terada Torahiko zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1960-1962), 7:49-53. Terada Torahiko, "Eiga no sekaiz5," Shisd (February 1932), reprinted in Terada Torahiko zuihitsushii, ed. Komiya Toyotaka (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1947-1948), 3:133-141; "Eiga geijutsu," Nihon bungaku (August 1932), reprinted in Terada Torahiko zuihitsushii, 3:201-238.
284 281

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Terada*s film essays became an oft-cited source of inspiration especially for those arguing the potential of non-fiction film to resolve the alleged opposition between art and science. In "Nyusu eiga to shinbun kiji," Terada applies the same logic of differentiation by looking at the substantial difference between news films and newspaper articles as a tool of mass communication. The main purpose of newspaper articles, he argues, is to provide factual information of the "Five Ws" (who, what, where, when, and why) about a particular event. And in order to avoid unnecessary confusion as much as possible, they heavily utilize cliches and conventions developed in the world of print journalism. However effective it is, this mode of address gradually makes the act of reading dull and impassive, as it requires no intellectual activities on the side of the readers. In contrast to this, Terada defines news film as a medium of discovery, still immune to such conventionalization. "When watching a news film that deals with trivial things in our daily life," he says, "all of us, adult and even children, often make an extraordinary 'discovery'' in it.... In some sense, film is an concrete expression of things as such and contains a bottomless treasure box filled with hidden truths to be uncovered."285 What makes possible this intellectual discovery is the camera's (and microphone's) ability to capture things or events as they happen without any prejudice or abstraction. Thus for Terada, the attraction of news film does not lie in its supposed function to supplement or visualizethe latest events covered by the newspaper. Rather, it rests on its potential

285

Terada, "Nyusu eiga," 52.

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to revitalize human faculties, to encourage the viewers to look at the world anew by serving as a "new organ of cognition" (<atarashii ninshiki no kikan).
286

Terada's fascination with the novelty of news film was as insightful as it was naive in its overemphasis on the freedom granted to the viewers. While those familiar with film theory and its scholarship would recognize a certain similarity between Terada and Andre Bazin for their mutual appreciation of the contingent reality inscribed on the filmstrip, we still need to take into account the different historical settings separating these two figures. As Nornes points out, Terada's essay was written just "before documentary's particular set of codes was complete."287 Although Terada was cautious enough to mention the possibility that some arbitrary, man-made formula would sneak into non-fiction, he nonetheless considered it secondary for this genre based on the films he could actually watch before his death in 1935. However, such a "primitive" mode of representation soon disappeared from news film and other documentary forms during the second half of the 1930s. This was mostly due to the persistent calls from both producers and critics for a "hardening of style" in non-fiction filmmaking, which resulted in a more standardized use of techniques like montage and voice-over narration.288 Terada would have changed his attitude had he lived a little longer. Still, his wishful commentary on news film, and especially his theorization of it as a "new organ of cognition," foreshadowed the main thrust of the subsequent debates over the autonomy of non-fiction genres. Beyond bringing light to the wonders of the natural world, the objective accuracy of the camera-eye was now applied to see through the reality of wartime Japan.
286 287

Ibid., 53. Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 55.

288 1 borrow the phrase "hardening of style" from the title of Chapter 3 of Nornes's Japanese Documentary Film, 48-92.

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The idea of using film as a new cognitive faculty was taken up by Tosaka Jun (1900-1945), a Marxist philosopher widely acclaimed today for his bold and profound critique of the cultural logic of Japanese fascism in books like Nihon ideologl ron. As with many leading Japanese philosophers of the time, Tosaka was trained at the Department of Philosophy of Kyoto Imperial University, where he got acquainted with a number of notable mentors and colleagues such as Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Watsuji Tetsuro, Miki Kiyoshi, and Nakai Masakazu. Because of these personal ties, Tosaka is often regarded as a member of the Kyoto School {Kyoto gakuha) of philosophy, which was formed around the figure of Nishida. Nevertheless, Tosaka's intellectual activities were distinguished by their total deviation from the mainstream of the school. Where Kyoto School scholars aimed to enhance the authenticity of their work by drawing upon the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia, Tosaka diligently looked for the accuracy and logical consistency of his theory based on his inborn interest in modern
-jon

science.

It is this purely intellectual impetus that eventually brought him to Marxism.

Unlike many of his contemporaries who expressed nearly religious euphoria about the prospect of a socialist society presented by Marx and the Communist Party,290 Tosaka came to favor Marxism precisely because it provided him with the most sophisticated and comprehensive system of thought for analysis of social issues. In October 1932, Tosaka launched the Yuibutsuron Kenkyukai (Society for the Study of Materialism, known as Yuiken for short) with people like the scientist Oka

:89 For his intellectual activities and personal ties with the Kyoto School, see Tanabe Hajime, et al. Kaiso no TosakaJun (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1976); Kozai Yoshishige, Senjika no yuibutsuronja lachi (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1982); and Yamada Ko, TosakaJun to sono jidai (Tokyo: Kadensha, 1990).

Indeed, Tosaka never became a member of the Japanese Communist Party; instead, he joined the Social Masses Party ( shakai taishuto) in 1937.

2)0

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Kunio and the philosopher Saigusa Hiroto. The official mission of the society, as manifested in its bylaws, was to "study materialism in philosophy as well as in both 701 natural and social science without being disengaged with actual problems." But on a more practical level, it intended to preserve a liberal public sphere for Japanese intellectuals by strategically using its organizational devotion to theoretical and academic research as a shield against the watchful eyes of the government. Upon its foundation, Yuiken gathered some forty scholars from diverse academic fields, including Hasegawa Nyozekan (journalism), Shimizu Ikutaro (sociology), Hani Goro (history), Hayashi Tatsuo (philosophy), and even Terada Torahiko. Although Yuiken was a legally established organization, any collective activities like this came under police scrutiny in the course of the 1930s, and many of the above-mentioned members left the group by the end of 1933. Despite this hardship, Tosaka and the remaining fellows never lost the group's momentum during its six years of activity. In addition to holding public lectures, workshops, and roundtables, Yuiken published its monthly journal Yuibutsuron kenkyu (The Study of Materialism) and semimonthly pamphlet Yuiken nyusu (Yuiken News) as well as more than sixty guidebooks under the title of Yuibutsuron zensho (The Anthology of Materialism). The books published under this anthology included Tosaka's own Kagakuron (On Science, 1935) and Ninshikiron (On Epistemology, co-written with Yamada Sakaji, 1937), Moriyama Kei's Bungakuron (On Literature, 1935), and most notably Iwasaki Akira's Eigaron (On Film, 1936). A leading Marxist film critic and an ex-member of Prokino, Iwasaki played an important role in bringing Tosaka into the field of film theory. After the dissolution of

291

Quoted in Yamada, 75.

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Prokino in 1934, Iwasaki joined Yuiken and led its members in a weekly study group on the history of film theory. In May 1936, he launched the film magazine called Eiga sozd (Film Creation) with other ex-members of Prokino, strategically changing his primary means of protest from direct activism to theoretical writings. Consequently, Eiga sdzo

formed a public forum through which members of Prokino and Yuiken met together and held debates over political, social, and philosophical aspects of filmmaking and viewing. Within this memorable collaboration of the two Marxist groups, Tosaka Jun's presence was unmistakable. Not only did two of his essays on film appear in the first and last issues of Eiga sdzo, it was him who set up a theoretical framework for the central topic of their debates: cinema's epistemological value. Eiga sdzo survived little more than a year and half under the growing pressure of Japan's wartime militarism. However, as the film historian Makino Mamoru maintains, it occupies a pivotal position in the history of Japanese cinema, serving as the "final fortress" of those associated with the political left.293 Tosaka's writings on film were limited in numberhe published only a handful of essays on this topic in the years between 1934 and 1938but they formed a major contribution to his broader project of establishing a theory of social epistemology. For Tosaka, epistemology meant a process of critical thinking to see, consider, and understand the objective truth about things and phenomena in the world. What is remarkable about his approach is that he used this branch of philosophy to address the rise of mass culture and its impact on the formation of everyday life. To put it in the

" 92 As Nornes points out. of thirty-seven coteries of the magazine twenty-two were the exmembers of Prokino. See his Japanese Documentary Film, 132. Makino Mamoru, "Kiroku eiga no rironteki doko o otte 16," Uni tsiishin (3 March 1977), quoted in Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 132.
2<n

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words of Harry Harootunian, "More than any other thinker of the age, he viewed his present as a philosophical problem that needed to be interrogated, when others merely assumed its phenomenality as a given."294 In order to put this mission into practice, Tosaka paid special attention to what he called fuzoku, a broad range of social customs that constituted the everyday life of the masses, including the latest trends in fashion and hairstyle, various forms of leisure and amusement, and hectic shifts in the norms of both public and private behavior. As he clearly indicated in the opening chapter of his 1936 book Shiso to fuzoku (Thought and Custom), Tosaka treated fuzoku as a catalyst to distill the actual conditions of contemporary Japan, thoughtfully likening it to a "social physiognomy" or a "symptom with which to diagnose the essence of society."295 But the problem in dealing with fuzoku as the object of speculation is that it is by nature an ephemeral and dispersive phenomenon. Both journalism and popular literature (taishu kungaku) had long tried to capture and record juzuku\\xs\ as it emerged, but their attempts always came late and indirectly due to the intervention of language. It is in this context that Tosaka came to realize the great but still unexplored possibility of cinema as a medium of social epistemology. In his seminal essays like "Eiga no shajitsuteki tokusei to taishusei" (Cinema's Realistic Property and Its Popularity, 1936) and "Eiga no ninshikironteki kachi to fuzoku byosha" (1937), Tosaka provides an empirical account for the philosophical superiority of the cinema over other art forms. Like many of his predecessors, Tosaka singles out the jisshasei, or the camera's ability to provide a truthful recording of reality, as the key factor for his speculation. This ability,

294

Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 11 8.

"' 5 Tosaka Jun, Shiso to fuzoku (Tokyo: Mikasa Shob5, 1936), reprinted as "Shiso to fuzoku," in Tosaka Jun zenshu, 4:274.

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he declares with a direct reference to Terada's earlier writings, exhibits great facility in dealing with the optical truth of the natural world: Of course, I don't forget that cinema's artistic value contains theatrical and literary moments. But in order for these moments to be realized, we must privilege the jisshasei [of the film medium], its ability to reproduce actual reality. At any event, it is this jisshasei itself that grants film a particular artistic value.... Speaking of its treatment of natural phenomena, the screen teaches humans about the goodness of materiality, the delight of the movement of matters in this world. These are the things we usually see in our daily life, but we haven't recognized their virtues until they appear on the screen. Needless to say, this is a pure appreciation of cinema's revelatory capacity. For Tosaka, however, depicting natural phenomena is just one example of the application of the jisshasei. The attraction of watching films, he continues, can be far more intense when they capture and display social phenomena with the same visual capacity. News films and "ethnographical" documentaries like Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran (1934), for instance, allow the viewers to see the hitherto unknown lifestyles or cultural values of the people living in different parts of the globe. At the same time, Tosaka extends the social function of the camera-eye to fiction films or non-fiction films set in contemporary Japan as well, for they still make visible the fabric of a society by tirelessly offering both concrete and up-to-date specimens offuzoku. According to Tosaka, there are at least at least two different layers at work in film's engagement with reality on the level offuzoku. As a Marxist, Tosaka always treats "reality" as material conditions that determine the substance of given objects, following Marx's emphasis on the base over its superstructure in his analysis of the reality of modern capitalist societies. Tosaka then goes on to assert that traditional art forms like

Tosaka Jun, "Eiga no shajitsuteki tokusei to fuzokusei oyobi taishusei," in Tosaka Jun zenshu, 4:285-286. This article originally appeared in Eigasozo 1.1 (May 1936) as "Eiga no shajitsuteki tokusei to taishusei."

2%

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painting and theater also have their own realities, insofar as they have to obey some fundamental conditionsa motionless image on the canvas or a limited space and time in the theaterthat determine their modes of representation and consumption. These are what Tosaka calls "aesthetic" realities, and the autonomy of the traditional arts has long been rooted in their physical distance from the "actual" reality of the real world where people go about their daily life. But in watching films, he contends, the viewers often witness these different realities coalesce into the same category.297 On the one hand, this is because the material base of the film mediumphotographyestablishes an indexical relationship between the sign (representation) and its referent (reality), thus providing the most irrefutable proof or even imprint of the physical presence of the real things laid before the camera. On the other hand, film also shares with actual reality a similar set of social and perceptual norms that determine the pattern of characters' behavior, the development of plotlines, the audio-visual presentation of space and time, the inclusion of contingency, and even the modes of production and consumption. As Tosaka points out, any optical tricks in cinematography would lose their attraction unless the viewers take them as a violation of these presupposed conditions. It is on this dual penetration into the realm of everyday life that Tosaka finds the innovation of the film medium: "Film's particular realism lies in where the actual reality of the real world becomes the aesthetic reality of the medium as it is.... Particular attractions of film are thus derived from a simple fact that on the screen we are able to see the world in the same manner as we observe it in reality."298

297 298

Ibid., 284. Ibid.. 289.

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Given his emphasis on the capacity of the film medium to depict reality "as it is,'* one might assume that Tosaka was simply following the Naturalist definition of realism. Interestingly, Tosaka would not deny such a criticism, but it is only to the extent that he was one of the few Japanese critics of the time who openly attacked the failure of Japanese Naturalists to properly develop the original aims of Naturalism.299 In Tosaka's view. Naturalism emerged in late nineteenth-century France as a movement for both literary and social reforms and was markedly distinguished for its preoccupation with "scientism" (kagaku shugi) and "intellectualism" (shuchi shugi). These features, however, did not take root in Japanese soil because people there adopted Naturalism as a means to modernize and individualize the form and content of Japanese literary practice at large, as it eventually led to the formation of the "I-novel" (shishdsetsu) in the 1920s.300 This insightful observation stemmed from Tosaka's persistent critique of "idealist humanism," which he saw serving as the precondition for the vulnerability of Japanese intellectuals and liberalists against the illogical logic of fascist ideologies.301 At the same time, it enabled Tosaka to address the subsequent deviation of Japanese modernism from the Western original, a deviation that I have specified in Chapter 2 with phrases like "the dialectics of realism" or "the coexistence of modernist and realist concerns." Tosaka wrote: "In reaction to the tradition of such a humanistic Naturalism.. .modernism came to promote machinism [kikai shugi], although this was in effect one of the fundamental

" ,9 For instance, the literary critic Nakamura Mitsuo likewise criticized the Japanese "faulty" reception of Naturalism, but he did it only in the postwar period. See his Fuzoku shosetsuron (Tokyo: Kawade shobo, 1950).
500 Tosaka Jun, Shiso to shite no bungaku (Tokyo: Mikasa Shobo, 1936), reprinted as "Shiso to shite no bungaku," in Tosaka Jun zenshii, 4:91-95.

For his criticism of the alliance of idealist humanism and Japanese fascism, see his "Nihon ideologTron: Gendai Nihon ni okeru Nihon shugi, fashizumu, jiyu shugi," in Tosaka Jun zenshu 2:223-438.

101

171

elements of original Naturalism."

From this perspective, Tosaka maintained that the

main problem of Japanese modernism was not its overt appreciation of the new roles or functions that the machine came to play in shaping the modality of modern life, but rather its lack of serious concern with the social impact caused by this radical shift. With this in mind, Tosaka set himself the task of recasting Japanese modernists' pursuit of a new mode of visual perception on the basis of social epistemology. Tosaka embarked on this enterprise by cleverly shifting his focus from the machine itself to the level of its reception. Unlike Itagaki, or many advocates of machine aesthetics in the 1920s, Tosaka was totally indifferent to the discourse of technological determinism, which unabashedly lauded the superiority of the "eye of the camera" at the risk of nullifying the role of human perception. In contrast, Tosaka's emphasis was always on the potential of this non-human gaze to expand the ways in which human beings perceive and reflect on the complex mechanisms of the world. Or, as he repeatedly stressed in his essays, one could never take full hold of the real virtue of film experience without considering its extraordinary power to make people think. This is why Tosaka, following Terada's earlier writings, defined cinema as "a modern method of cognition" and highlighted its collaborative nature between human and non-human agents.303 Tosaka never denied the fact that "the eye of the camera" had an extraordinary ability to capture the hidden aspects of natural and social phenomena as they were, but these uncovered aspects had yet no epistemological values without the active involvement of spectators, who strove to articulate the meanings of the new images laid by the camera before their

302

Tosaka Jun, "Shiso to shite no bungaku," 92-93. Tosaka Jun, "Eiga no ninshikironteki kachi to fuzoku byosha," Nihon eiga 2.6 (June 1937): 14.

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eyes. In other words, the camera's mechanical and penetrating gaze, at least for Tosaka's critical inquiry, was at once the subject and the object. Perhaps one could better grasp Tosaka's writing by comparing it to that of Walter Benjamin. In his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," which was also published in 1936, Benjamin coins the term "optical unconsciousness" to designate the new vision engendered by the cinematic apparatus.304 What Benjamin aims to clarify with his borrowing of a psychoanalytical term is not limited to the camera's visual capacity to reveal some optical truths about natural phenomena that had previously been invisible to our naked eyes. Rather, he is more concerned with the fact that film itself can be a manifestationor even an embodiment of the cultural logic and social concerns that constitute the reality of the twentieth century as a historical period. As Thomas Y. Levin remarks, Benjamin found in film an exemplary model of a "materialization of the new perceptual conditions of modernity."305 Yet as in the case of the instinctual unconscious, which involves the psychiatrist's careful "reading" of the bodily and mental symptoms the patient presents before him, what the optical consciousness reveals to us should be taken as the objective truth of a historical reality as such. The truth is already captured there, but it is still waiting to be decoded by the viewers. And only through a proper articulation of the "work" of film culture at large, can one proceed to reach a conclusion that "The way in which human perception is

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)," Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap and Harvard University Press, 2008), 37.
305

Thomas Y. Levin, "Film," in The Work of Art, 316.

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organizedthe medium in which it occursis conditioned not only by nature but by history."306 Tosaka was also aware of such a diagnostic aspect of the filmic representation. He went on to explain this in his last film essay, "Eiga geijutsu to eiga: Abusutorakushon no sayo e" (Film Art and Film: Toward the Operation of Abstraction). It is important to note that the essay was written in December 1937, several months after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Accordingly, Tosaka begins his argument by referring to the rise of a non-fiction genre that he saw clearly reflected the social demand of this particular historical moment: bunka eiga. For Tosaka, the term bunka eiga does not simply signify "films filled with 'cultural' contents but rather ones used as a means of the government's cultural policy."307 Needless to say, films made for this purpose are usually called "propaganda film," but bunka eiga tactfully conceals its ideological functions by giving it the neutral and trustworthy look of "educational film" or "science film." For this reason, Tosaka never trusts hunka eiga as a film genre, openly casting doubt upon its truth claims. Nevertheless, he also finds it important to critically reflect on bunka eiga as a cultural phenomenon, as it clearly indicates the government authorities' recognition of the possibility of the film medium to manipulate the public discourse through a sophisticated use of the factuality of the photographic image. A similar symptom can also be found in the sudden popularity of news films, especially those serving as war reportage. Given the influx of visual spectacles peppered with nationalistic sentiments and the actuality of the battlefield, he argues, there begins to emerge "some stupid people

106

Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 23.

,n7 Tosaka Jun, "Eiga geijutsu to eiga: Abusutrakushon no say5 e," Eiga sozo 3.1 (December 1937), reprinted in Tosaka Jun zenshu, 4:465.

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who insist that the war produces a new beauty, and that war news is transforming into a new art."308 In these instances, films are no longer functioning as a translucent mirror that reflects the true nature of reality. How does then Tosaka deal with this pressing problem? At the very end of "Eiga Geijutsu to Eiga," Tosaka abruptly poses a new concept that he calls "abstraction" (abusutorakushon) as a key to recognizing the epistemological function of the film medium. This suggestion may seem strange at first sight, for both in this and other film-related essays, Tosaka prioritizes the camera's ability to capture and give shape to intangible social phenomena like fuzoku. Nevertheless, abstraction is one of the most fundamental operations in his theory of epistemology, and it penetrates all kinds of representation that appear as a result of the process of cognition. While people tend to think that abstraction is the exclusive domain of science as manifested in chemical formulas and mathematical theorems, Tosaka rather sees art as the most abstract form of expression because "without it, style in art would be meaningless and painting would never come into existence." He continues: The difference in the degree of abstraction makes distinctions between science and art, between different genres of art.... However, abstraction is not simply beneficial in discerning differences between various modes of cultural production (or modes of cognition). This is to say that the operation of abstraction itself is grounded in the method and function of cognition. Thus cinema as a method and function of cognitionand not necessary "cinema" as a mode of cultural productionmust have its particular form of abstraction. And perhaps this will be the medium through which we associate cinema and other methods of .. 1QQ cognition. Dense and complicated, this is not an easy passage to digest. In addition, Tosaka does not give any further explanation in the present essay, except that he promises the reader that he will come back on this issue "at some other occasion." Despite such an open ending, it
108 309

Ibid., 466. Ibid., 469.

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is still possible to apprehend what Tosaka tried to elucidate with the concept of abstraction if we look at another statement he made around the same time. In his 1937 essay "Ninshikiron to wa nani ka" (What is Epistemology?), Tosaka offers a hint about why he had to change his scope at the very end of his last film essay. The realization of mimetic representation [mosha] is by no means the result of direct, natural, and unconditioned reflections, but always involves the process of exerting endless mediation. Thus, in this case, mimetic representation is never like what one thinks of as a passive and contemplative mirror; it is an actual relation that goes beyond such a metaphoric argument. The mirror metaphor [that has long been in use in the discourse of philosophical materialism] is therefore nothing but a sign that indicates the goal of cognition gained through mimetic representation.310 What Tosaka calls "the process of exerting endless mediation" (kagirinai baikai no rosaku no katei) here is equivalent to the actual operation of abstraction. That is, in order for things or phenomena to be cognized (or represented) in a concrete form of expression, they must adjust or be transformed according to both material conditions and discursive norms surrounding the specific medium or genre in which this very cognitive process takes place. It is now clear why Tosaka was so attracted by film as a medium. His initial fascination came from its potential to exclude the operation of abstraction, to achieve a direct and unmediated representation of reality. For this very reason, Tosaka considered film to be "a big challenge for epistemology."311 This potentiality should not be abandoned insofar as the material condition of the mediumphotographypresupposes an indexical link to the external world. Yet as he watched more actual film texts, or more precisely, as he witnessed the fact that non-fiction films or bunka eiga were by no means
310

Tosaka Jun. "Ninshikiron to wa nanika," in Ninshikiron, ed. Tosaka Jun and Yamagishi Tatsuzo (Tokyo: Mikasa Shobo, 1937), reprinted in Tosaka Jun zenshu 3:444.
311

Tosaka, "Eiga no Nishikironteki kachi," 18.

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immune to conventionalization, Tosaka nonetheless realized that for cinema, too, the mirror metaphor was no more than "a sign that indicates the goal of cognition," pointing only to the basic principle on which any kind of film practice should be established. In most of his film essays, Tosaka intended to bring his readers' attention back to this primordial state of the film medium since he was completely annoyed by the futility of the contemporary debates over film as an art. "The fundamental question," he said, "is not whether or not film is art, or what kind of film could be an art. Rather, it should involve our actual analysis of the roles that cinema as a method of cognition plays in the history of human cognition."312 After writing essays devoted to this philosophical issue, Tosaka now found it necessary to shift his focus from principle to praxis, to begin specifying the "rules" governing cinema's particular forms of expression and its modes of production. To put it in Andre Bazin's maxim, at this moment Tosaka also became aware of the fact that "On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language."313 In reality, however, Tosaka never had a chance to develop his argument on cinematic abstraction. By the end of 1937, Tosaka was banned from writing by the special police and then, a year later, he and the core members of Yuiken were arrested for the violation of the Peace Preservation Law. Tosaka spent much of his time between 1938 and 1945 in prison. Still imprisoned, he died of malnutrition on August 9, 1945, less than a week before Japan's surrender to the Allies. Nonetheless, Tosaka's theorization of cinema's epistemological value did evoke lively discussions among contributors to both
312

Tosaka, "Eiga geijutsu to eiga," 468-469.

Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What Is Cinema? 1:16. My comparison of Tosaka with Bazin here should be relevant, given their theoretical speculation about the indexical ties between the photographic images and the real world. Moreover, it is said that this famous phrase did not appear in the original version of the essay (originally published in 1945) but was added later when Bazin was compiling the manuscript for his four-volume Qu 'est-ce que le cinema, just a few years before his premature death in 1958.

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Eiga sozo and Gakugei (a short lived successor of Yuibutsuron kenkyu), constituting what came to be known as the "film epistemology debate" (eiga no ninshiki ronso). But as Nornes informs us, the debate itself turned out to be unfruitful because most comments made by the participants of the debate were based on a misunderstanding of Tosaka's theory.314 For instance, Ueno Kozo, an ex-member of Prokino, and who published a book titled Eiga no ninshiki (Film Cognition) later in 1940, harshly criticized Tosaka for subjugating art to science. According to Ueno, Tosaka treated epistemology as the exclusive domain of modern science and tried to judge the value of art solely from scientific cognition; as a result, Tosaka disregarded the actual process of art making, in which an artist expresses his or her creativity not on the level of cognition but that of representation.315 Needless to say, this criticism completely missed the point.316 As we have seen, Tosaka's main purpose was to prove that both art and science, as well as both high and popular culture, equally possess particular significance as methods of cognition. And if Tosaka prioritized scientific methods in his philosophical writings, it was precisely due to his profound critique of the reactionary cultural milieu of late 1930s Japan, which shamelessly downplayed the virtue of logical and critical thinking in favor of irrational and spiritual ideologies. Seen in retrospect, the singularity of Tosaka's intellectual activities should be located in his tendency to go against the political and social tides of the time. Unlike his

114 315

Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 135-137.

Ueno K5zo, "Geijutsuteki ninshiki ni tsuite," Eiga sozo 3.1 (December 1937), reprinted in Eiga no ninshiki (Kyoto: Daiichi Geibunsha, 1940), 22-46. ' I6 After the publication of Ueno's essay, Tosaka immediately wrote a brief counterargument against Ueno, directly pointing to the latter's inability to grasp his theory of epistemology. See Tosaka Jun, "Ueno Kozo-shi ni taisu," Yuikennyusu 86 (January 1, 1938), reprinted in Tosaka Jun zenshu: Bekkan (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1979), 303-305.

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contemporary Marxists, Tosaka refused to join the Communist Party and instead cultivated his own ways of putting into practice what he learned from Marx and dialectical materialism. Unlike his contemporary philosophers, he never fell for the lure of Heideggerian hermeneutics, which served as an ideological apparatus for Japanese fascism. And unlike his contemporary intellectuals, he never committed tenko (political conversion), even though it ultimately brought about his premature death. These episodes effectively granted Tosaka a legendary position in Japanese intellectual history, as one critic favorably called him "a robust leader climbing up the long and rugged path toward progress and freedom during that dark period."317 However, if we situate Tosaka in the history of Japanese film theory, then we soon find that his theoretical writing shares much with the major currents in prewar and wartime Japanese film discourse. Beyond his direct and indirect references to figures like Itagaki and Terada, Tosaka was not alone in socializing cinema's revelatory capacity in relation to the growing popularity of nonfiction films. Among these theorists was Nakai Masakazu (1900-1952), who, along with Tosaka, has been regarded by many as one of the most respected public intellectuals during wartime Japan for his resistance to Japanese fascism through the idea of the Popular Front.

Nakai Masakazu: Toward an Unmediated Collectivity Born in 1900, Nakai Masakazu also came from the Department of Philosophy of Kyoto Imperial University, where he studied neo-Kantian aesthetics under the guidance of Fukada Yasukazu. While continuing his study at graduate school, he was appointed to

,i7

Kozai Yoshishige, "Tosaka Jun to yuibutsuron," in Kaiso no Tosaka Jun, 164-165.

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the editorial staff of Tetsugaku kenkyu (Philosophical Studies), the official journal of the department. Through his editorial work, Nakai established a close relationship with the core members of the Kyoto school, including Nishida Kitaro, Kuki Shuzo, and Tanabe Hajime. As a fellow alumnus of the department, Nakai also became a friend of Tosaka, with whom he had many intense but always pleasing arguments whenever they met on the streets or at some professor's house.318 From the beginning, these two up-and-coming philosophers shared as many similarities as they did differences. Although both were keenly aware of the necessity to socializeor even secularizetheir philosophical activities by addressing the issues of the masses and everyday life, they disagreed with each other about the method of working on this project, in particular regarding the acceptance of Marxism. When Tosaka radicalized his inclination toward dialectical materialism after his move to Tokyo, Nakai continued to stay in Kyoto and put into practice his idea of non-Marxist socialism by being involved with the consumer's union movement. By the mid-1930s, however, Nakai's interest in cooperative socialism led him to adapt the concept of the Popular Front against the rise of Japanese fascism, almost in parallel with Tosaka's activities with Yuiken. By launching the magazine Sekai bunka (World Culture, 1935-37) and the weekly newspaper Doyobi (Saturday, 1936-37) with his colleagues, Nakai took the lead not only in introducing the latest trends in the anti fascist movement in Europe, but also in forming small circles of resistance among people living in Kyoto.319

318

See Nakai Masakazu, "Tosaka-kun no tsuioku," in Kaiso no Tosaka Jun, 97-98.

For his commitment to the popular front movement, see Banba Toshiaki, Nakai Masakazu dcnsetsu: Nijiiichi no shozo niyoru yuwaku (Tokyo: Potto Shuppan, 2009), 103-225. For the expansion of the idea of the popular front into the realm of literary circles, see Richard Torrance, "The People's Library: The Sprit of Prose Literature versus Fascism," in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 56-79.

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One can also find interesting similarities and dissimilarities in their film essays. Nakai's engagement with film was no doubt longer than Tosaka's, as it spanned from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Moreover, Nakai's fascination with this optical device was so profound that he even tried his hand at amateur filmmaking in the early 1930s with the intention of making avant-garde "cine-poems" using a fish-eye lens and color film.320 However, Nakai's theoretical activities remained very consistent and sometimes repetitive throughout his twenty years of activity, frequently turning back to the same ideas and issues despite a sea change occurring in actual film history. Like Tosaka, Nakai set himself the task of clarifying the essence of cinema from his philosophical standpoint and thereby attacked his contemporaries for their ignorance of the primary property of this modern medium. In an essay published in 1936, he wrote: The greatest function of cinema is that it has an ability to capture the fact through the lens and reproduce it on film without losing its temporality. Of course, human beings can add many humanistic features in the process of reproduction. But this process itself still holds singularity because in it things are passed from the fact to the film, from one physical matter to another physical matter. Thus film has its own logic and film art must have its own roots in this particular logic.... However, the so-called "cinema" that appears before us is mostly restricted to theatrical films, especially ones that aim to bring laughter and tears to the masses.... In this sense, today's cinema is like a shallow and flattened theater. To be sure, cinema is something gigantic, but it has yet to realize its full potential.321 Here, Nakai clearly states that all films must be documentary. And only by doing so, can cinema recognize its significance as a modern cultural phenomenon, as well as its task to address the reality of the twentieth-century modernity from which it emerged. At this point, no one could fail to notice a similarity between Tosaka and Nakai, especially in
For Nakai's own account of his experiment with filmmaking, see "Shikisai eiga no omoide," Eiga no tomo (September 1951), reprinted in Ikiteiru kukan: Shutaiteki eiga geijutsuron, ed. Tsujibe Seitaro (Tokyo: Tenbinsha, 1971), 107-111. His films are also discussed in Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 143-147. Nakai Masakazu, "KontinuitT no ronrisei," Gakusei hyoron (June 1936), reprinted in Ikiteiru kukan, 88-89.
321 ,2

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their mutual decision to discuss cinema's promising potential based on its most fundamental, yet long neglected, attributes. However, there still exists a substantial difference between their theoretical treatments of the "essence" of film. While Tosaka put emphasis on the indexical ties between the photographic image and the external world, Nakai looked more into another significant facet of filmic representation: montage. Nakai* s basic stance in his film theory is best represented in "Kabe" (Wall) and "Utsusu" (Reflect/Project), a series of short essays published in the June and July 1932 issues of the photography magazine Kdga (Picture of Light). Nakai begins his first essay by pointing out the fact that walls have long served as a medium of image projection through which people in different eras tried to see the reality of their times. From ancient to medieval times, people have projected the vision or trace of their lives on the surface of walls, whether it was the animals they hunted or the kingdom of god promised by their religion. Nakai asks himself: "When the machine and the apartment complex and the co op are to be the basis of the life of the masses, what kind of meaning do walls pose before us?"322 Reflecting these fundamental shifts in the material and technological condition of the living environment, walls in the modern age are now becoming an open and transparent architectural support consisting of glass, steel, and concrete. Through the surface of this "glass wall," modern people are observing what he calls the "picture of light" (kdga) that projects a slice of everyday life in the form of "an animated wall painting, a painting scroll that unfolds itself with no limitation, and a revolving lantern that never repeats itself as time flows."323 As is clear in his emphasis on the characteristic feature of kdga that captures the forward and irreversible movement of modern times,
,22

Nakai Masakazu, "Kabe," Kdga 1.3 (July 1932), reprinted in Kdga kessakushu, 31 .

'"ibid., 31.

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Nakai is speaking here of cinematic experience. But at this moment, his glass wall metaphor likens film to a "window open onto reality," which gently, if not passively, invites us to see the world around us. To address the more active side of cinematic experience, Nakai's second essay examines the etymology of the Japanese word "utsusu" as it is generally employed to explain the attributes of representational art. In its everyday usage, the word "utsusiT signifies multiple meanings including "to reflect," "to project," "to copy," "to transfer," "to infect," "to transcribe," "to reproduce," "to photograph," and "to film." Underlying this seemingly manifold assemblage of meanings is a split between passive (transitive) and active (intransitive) functions of the verb that moves back and forth between reflection and projection. Naturally, Nakai finds that this bidirectional signification is also at work in the very mechanism of the cinematic apparatus. Aside from the selection of angles or the lengths of shots decided by the cameraman, the function of the movie camera is first and foremost passive since it automatically records the traces of the light reflected or emitted from the object without the skill or intent of a particular artist. But when it comes to the stage of projection, the same apparatus suddenly takes up an active role by throwing out those captured images on the screen.324 Moreover, between these two opposite instances of utsusu exists the possibility of inserting human creativity by means of editing. This is why montage becomes the central concern for Nakai's film theory. Serving as a nodal point that unifies human and non-human apparatuses, montage is capable of transforming film representation from a mere mechanical copy of the external world to a more meditated articulation of its historical reality. As Nakai argues,

124

Nakai Masakazu, "Utsusu," Koga 1.4 (August 1932), reprinted in Koga kessakushu, 40-43.

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the essence of montage lies is in its potential to alter the act of utsusu from a reflection of a mirror to the picture of light.325 Despite its seeming clarity, it is necessary to specify what Nakai meant by the term "montage" in his film essays. And this helps us to know what he really expected cinema to project on the screen by transforming itself into the orchestration of light. As I have argued in the previous chapter, nearly all the major writings of the Soviet montage school were translated into Japanese by the time Nakai began writing about film in the early 1930s. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the pages of Bi-hihyd (Beauty/Criticism, 1930-1934). a coterie magazine Nakai edited with his Kyoto friends like Tokunaga Ikusuke and Tsujibe Seitaro, were filled with favorable comments on the revolutionary work of Soviet filmmakers. Nevertheless, Nakai's use of the term "montage" had less to do with Pudovkin's and Eisenstein's dominant writings, which primarily intended to establish a new semiotic system able to deal with abstract ideas like ideology through dialectical association or visual conflicts between two or more successive shots. Rather, Nakai was more attached to Vertov's less known take on montage, although his interpretation was not always precise due to the limited access to the actual work of this renowned filmmaker. With the exception of Itagaki Takao's secondhand translation of "From Kino-eye to Radio-eye" (from German to Japanese) and the belated release of Man with a Movie Camera in 1932, relatively little effort was made to introduce Vertov's film theory in its original form. Certainly, Vertov was very famous and ignited many heated debates among Japanese film critics of the 1930s, but their arguments were based largely on the

125

Ibid., 44.

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secondary literature published outside the Soviet Union. The most influential of this kind was Leon Moussinac's 1928 book Le cinema sovietique, which was translated in 1930 by the leading critic Iijima Tadashi.326 In this book, Moussinac describes Vertov not as a pioneer in documentary films but as an absolute formalist experimenting with what one would call "rhythmic" montage. By mathematically calculating the length of every shot and musically arranging its emotional effects, he argues, Vertov's oeuvre ultimately becomes "a pictorial record of rhythm" (<rizumu no kiroku sareta e).i21 Of course, we should acknowledge that Moussinac wrote this before the release of Man with a Movie Camera, and that it had no reference to Vertov's other, more nuanced concepts of montage like the "interval."328 Yet his characterization of Vertov as a practitioner of rhythmic or mathematical montage was so pervasive among his Japanese readers that people like Nakai began to make more unrestrictive, imaginative use of the term "montage," rather than confining its meaning solely to a "dialectic approach to film form."329 Nakai revealed his speculations about what he considered to be Vertov's montage theory in his 1931 essay "'Haru' no kontinyuitf' (The Continuity of In Spring).'" Having yet no access to Vertov's own films, in this essay Nakai looked instead at In Spring, a recently released Soviet film by Mikhail Kaufman, the younger brother of Vertov, known

3 ~ 6 Moussinac's Le cinema sovietique was translated into Japanese by Iijima Tadashi as Sovieto Roshiya no eiga, shinema no tanjo, eiga gijutsu no mirai (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1930). As the title suggests, this book contains an abridged translation of Moussinac's earlier book, Naissance du cinema (1925). 327 328

Ibid., 121.

For his notion of "interval," see Dziga Vertov, "We: Variant of a Manifesto," in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 8.
3 ~ ) I borrowed this phrase from the title of Eisenstein's famous essay, "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" (1929), in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 45-63.

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for his appearance as the heroic "cameraman" in Man with a Movie Camera. Nakai and his Bi-hihyd friend Tsujibe were so attracted by the film that they not only watched it many times but even went on to count the number and length of every shot in the film with a stopwatch. The result of this statistical experiment was something like a mathematical chart filled with numbers and letters, which graphically represents the atypically fast pace of cutting and the accentuation of rhythm provided by Kaufman's extensive use of montage. This chart, on the one hand, provided Nakai with good evidence to prove that Kaufman/Vertov's film aesthetics was based on "the musicalization of associative thoughts and the mathematization of literature and poetry."330 On the other hand, it also made him realize that the attraction of In Spring was inseparable from its ability to equip the viewers with "a new sensory composition" (atarashii kankakuteki kosei), which effectively goes beyond the limits of our normal perception. When the rapid succession of moving images no longer allows us to grasp and articulate the meaning of what we see on the screen, he continued, our cinematic experience transforms itself from the visual to the temporal one, since what the film shows us at this extreme moment is nothing but the crystallization of the flow of time, as in the case of music: "Beyond the camerawork of the kino-eye, it [In Spring] shows us the beauty of time... by cultivating a special form of temporal perception."331 It is in this context that Nakai's definition of film (koga) as a means of capturing time takes on greater importance. For one, Nakai was fully aware of cinema's mechanical capacity to record the fleeting moments passing before the camera without losing their

1,0

Nakai Masakazu, " Haru no kontinyuitT," Bi-hihyd (February 1931), reprinted in Ikiteiry kukan, Ibid.. 85.

81.

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contingency and duration. As Mary Ann Doane tells us, this capacity is premised on the "indexicality of the cinematic sign" that "appears as the guarantee of its status as a record of a temporality outside itselfa pure time or duration which would not be that of its own functioning."332 And it became the technical and theoretical basis for the attraction of a particular genre of the early cinema known as "actualities," which obsessively archived seemingly random moments in everyday life such as a train arriving at a station or workers leaving their factory. However, more crucial to Nakai's concept of cinematic time was film's ability to invite us to seeor to experiencethe world through its own temporality, a temporality that is represented by optical techniques such as fast cutting, slow motion, and high-speed cinematography. Like his understanding of montage, the key factor here is the synthesis of human and non-human sensory organs. In writing about one of the UFA's culture films, The Power of Plants (dir. Wolfram Junghans, 1934), for instance, Nakai stressed how the film succeeded in combining "plant time" and "human time" by "shooting the sprouting of a bud with dropped frames over a long period time, and then reproducing it in a talkie of twenty-four frames per second." In this instance, he continued, the representation of time was freed from the restraints of human temporal perception because it directly "penetrated into the plant's time with the flexibility of the lens and film."333 In the end, Nakai concluded his observation by reaffirming his particular definition of montage: "Montage [montieren] does not simply mean an operation based on acetone and a pair of scissors. It must be the mediation of physical objectivity that makes possible the combination, imitation,

132 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23. m

Nakai, "KontinuitT no ronrisei," 94.

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penetration, and reconciliation between the logic of natural phenomena and the logic of human phenomena."334 This confirmation inevitably leads us to ask some fundamental questions: How is it possible to integrate human and non-human perception on the basis of Nakai's notion of montage? What can we gain from looking at the world through cinema's own temporality? And most importantly, what kind of role can or should nonfiction film play in this "mediated marriage of human judgment and physical order"? Nakai answered these questions in his 1932 essay "Shisoteki kiki ni okeru geijutsu narabi ni sono dok5" (Art and Its Tendency in a Time of Intellectual Crisis), the most significant of Nakai's writings on film published in the prewar period. To begin with, Nakai, like many of his contemporaries such as Itagaki Takao and Tosaka Jun, points out that the twentieth century is marked by "the mechanization and popularization of culture."335 Yet his account is different from others in that he tries to argue about this modern phenomenon in light of broader historical shifts in the modes of artistic and cultural production, ranging from Ancient Greece to the Romantic school. In the former, he says, the work of art was premised on concepts like techne and mimesis, as it always aimed to be a faithful representation (imitation) of the natural world that provided a model for beauty, truth, and the good. In the latter, however, these concepts were replaced with a different set of ideas like genius and creativity, and thereby the work of art became a sole domain of individual activities as manifested in Oscar Wilde's dictum

" 4 Ibid., 95. Nakai Masakazu, "Shisoteki kiki ni okeru geijutsu narabi ni sono d5ko," Risd (September 1932), in Nakai Masakazu zenshu (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha, 1964-1981), 2:43. Nornes also provides a close reading of this essay, but he inaccurately asserts that it was published in 1936. Perhaps this is due to his desire to make a direct comparison between Nakai and Benjamin, two of the most celebrated "media" theorists in prewar Japan and Germany. See his Japanese Documentary Film, 138-141.

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"Art does not imitate nature, but nature imitates art."336 What characterizes the production of arts and culture today, Nakai continues, is a dialectical return to the Greek model. Not only does it prioritize the specialized skills of technicians, it also develops numerous technologies for mechanical reproduction. Moreover, the highly developed logic of modern capitalism goes so far as to integrate individual artists and thinkers as part of its larger system of profit making. As Nakai nicely puts it, in this highly capitalized mode of production "the genius itself becomes commodified as a star and vanishes into the constellation of the masses." At stake in this twentieth-century mode of artistic and cultural production is what Nakai calls shudansei, or a modern sense of collectivity. Instead of pursuing the noble solitude of Romanticists, people in the twentieth century, in Nakai's view, become part of social institutions such as companies, schools, the military, the co-op, and political parties, as they begin to find a new form of beauty in their active participation in these organizations. As a handy example of this collective sensibility, Nakai refers to modern people's enthusiasm for team sports like rugby and regatta. "The attraction of modern sports," he said, "lies in this aesthetic sense of organization.... Its greatest pleasure must stem from the beauty of conformity that underlies each player's own experience." Without hesitation, he then proceeds to apply the same logic of shudansei to his account of the mechanization of everyday life: When we look at the machine, it is not an individual who is standing before it. Instead, we stare into the control of the organization of the machine as an elementor more precisely, as being its tissue cellof a larger group. The sense of organization found here is the protoplasm of our new pleasure. By
" 6 Nakai quotes this phrase from a book of his mentor, Fukada Yasukazu. For Wilde's own description, see his "The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue," The Nineteenth Century 25 (January 1889): 35-56. Nakai, "Shisoteki kiki ni okeru geijutsu," 51.

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incorporating the concept of the machine into the realm of aesthetics, we must set up this sense as a basis of the functional beauty that reveals equivalent relations among the different layers of [today's] phenomena. It is important to note that Nakai thinks this "sense of organization" is acquired only through our bodily experience: "Just as the internal stimuli of muscles becomes the source of individual satisfaction, the social structure itself brings pleasure to people as a community."339 According to Nakai, in the modern age the machine no longer appears as a medium that draws a clear distinction between the subject and the object. Rather, it serves as a mittle, which allows for a more direct, empirical, or even unmediated form of mediation.340 Having developed as a genuine product of the twentieth century, cinema, Nakai believes, must come into view as the most significant and legitimate machine for this modern logic of shudansei. First, making films require a series of collaborations among people across different sectors of the film industry. It is hardly possible that one single person, however much a genius, could have a full authorial responsibility over the end product unless he or she is working in the field of amateur or experimental film. Second, the structure of a film itself is fundamentally collective, as most famously expressed in Eisenstein's definition of the shot as "a cell for conflicts." In most cases, the meaning of a single shot is determined by its relations with shots both preceding and following it, not to mention many other visual and aural elements constituting the complexity of cinematic enunciation. Third, the reception of cinema should always be understood as a group
" 8 Ibid.. 57.
09

Ibid., 57.

340 For the difference between "medium" and "mittle" in Nakai's argument, see Kitada Akihiro, "An Assault on 'Meaning': On Nakai Masakazu's Concept of'Mediation,'" trans. Alex Zahlten, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010): 88-103. As a specialist ofNeo-Kantianism, Nakai often uses Japanese transliterations of German terms like "mittle," "geworfen," and "entwurf."

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activity. Not only does an audience member share his or her viewing experience with people attending the same screening, this local experience can also be disseminated among different social groups as the film gets circulated across the globe. Given these distinct features, Nakai defines cinema as "the internal gaze of a group" (shudan no naimenteki shikaku) that at once witnesses and embodies the historical shift toward social collectivism.341 This gaze, he continues, exerts the most crucial impacts on society when used in the form of documentary: The realism at work in the group organization must be distinguished from the realm of Naturalism and its followers.... Here, documentation yields the best results not through the hands of so-called artistic specialists, but with the correct and responsible editing by the committee [tadashiki iinkaiteki sekinin henshu] that makes use of all kinds of reports from the mass technicians. The future of what is called documentary in the motion pictures is only meaningful as this kind of group structure, and it has a vast potentiality.... At the basis of this /actuality lies the dialectical system that makes historyor the factsan objective cosmos at its most fundamental level. And as a trace of its operation, it must contain the sense of touch that enables us to realize that the entirety of reality is grasped here.. .to feel the heavy hand of history behind every single incident happening in this world.342 For Nakai, film's ability to "document" is not restricted to its mechanical capacity to record and archive whatever is laid before the camera; documentation also indicates cinema's potential to materialize the dynamics of history in the making, the shifting reality of the twentieth century as such, through its collective modes of production, expression, and consumption. The significance of montage in his film theory should also be understood in this context. For Nakai, film's ability to "montage" is not restricted to the delivery of ideas through constructive editing; it also indicates its potential to connect people to the machine, people to people, and people to their own historical time.
141 Nakai Masakazu, "Butsuriteki shQdanteki seikaku," Bi-hihyd (May 1931), reprinted in Nakai Masakazu zenshu, 3:160.

' 4;i Nakai, "Shisoteki kiki ni okeru geijutsu," 58-59.

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Before concluding our observation, we have to contextualize of Nakai's film theory by addressing one remaining question: What underscored his championing of shudansei as the cultural logic of the twentieth century? Given his commitment to the consumers' union movement in the 1930s, and considering his optimistic view on the role of the "committee" (iinkai) in his blueprint of the future society, it seems that Nakai's intellectual venture was always based on his sympathy for socialism. And, as many commentators have pointed out, it is this undeniable leftist sentiment that ultimately led him to protest against Japanese militarism through the notion of the popular front. Such a seemingly straightforward speculation, however, immediately raises some problems since Nakai was also known for his antipathy toward Marxism. If it was not the Communist Party, who should then hold control over the committee or other modern forms of collective activities? Nakai's answer would be "the masses," yet he could say so with confidence only in the postwar period and his political standpoint kept vacillating during the wartime period.343 Indeed, when he published his famous but truly controversial essay "Iinkai no ronri" (The Logic of the Committee) in 1936, Nakai was standing on a tightrope between Utopian socialism and vulgar totalitarianism.344 Remember that 193637 was a pivotal period when the Japanese government began calling for mass mobilization. In this historical dynamic, Nakai's notion of shudansei came to coincide
,43 In the postwar period, Nakai developed his famous idea that unlike verbal language, film lacks the copulaa verb or a verb-like word that connects the subject of a sentence and its predicatein its enunciation, and that this gap is only filled by the desire of the masses to read or create a meaning in the film image. While Nakai had already recognized the particular characteristic of filmic enunciation in his prewar essays like "Butsuriteki shudanteki seikaku" and "KontinuitT no ronrisei," I think it is important to emphasize the fact that these essays did not privilege the role of the masses over other novel elements constituting the "mechanism" of film practice. Put differently, Nakai's "discovery" of the masses in the postwar period should be read as a self-criticism of his own inclination toward the logic of Japanese fascism in the early 1940s. See, Nakai Masakazu, "Film Theory and the Crisis in Contemporary Aesthetics" (1950), trans. Phil Kaffen, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010): 80-87.

Nakai Masakazu, "Iinkai no ronri: Hitotsu no soko to shite," Sekai bunka 1-3 (January-March, 1936). reprinted in Nakai Masakazu zenshu, 1:46-108.

144

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with the official discourse of wartime Japan, given its unabashed preoccupation with the genius of the system that effectively exploits the masses/individuals for the benefit of a larger unit/community. The result of this coincidence cannot be overemphasized. Like Tosaka, Nakai was arrested in late 1937 for the violation of the Peace Preservation Law. Nevertheless, he had no difficulty proving his "innocence" thanks to his detachment from Marxism, and he was able to survive the rest of the war years outside of jail by apotheosizing "the dissolution of individuals into the massive structure of the state" as a core element of Japanese fascism.345 In sum, Nakai's theoretical writing is marked by its tendency to privilege the "essence" of the phenomenon appearing before our eyes. Instead of explaining why and in what context this or that particular event was taking place, he tended to limit his interest in mapping out the structure and inner logic of the object, as manifested in his "anatomy" of Kaufman's In Spring. Thus Nakai's film theory appears more descriptive than prescriptive, more inward than outward, and more conformist than reformist, especially when we compare it with Tosaka's bold attempt to use cinema as a practical means for social change. However, this is not to say that Nakai was less influential than Tosaka among their contemporaries. Just as Nakai's notion of shudansei coincided with the official discourse of Japanese fascism, his anticipated future of cinemawhere all films must be documentaryalso resonated with the growing demand for non-fiction film in the period following Japan's full-scale invasion of China. Nakai himself did not write about the rise of news films or bunka eiga, as he was in the prison from November 1937 to August 1939. Still, his theorization of film as a mediumor rather "mittleto
Nakai Masakazu, "Kantanshi no aru shiso," Gakkai 2.3 (May 1945), reprinted in Nakai Masakazu hyoronshu, ed. Nagata Hiroshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 212. For Nakai's " tenko see Kinoshita Nagahiro, Nakai Masakazu: Atarashii "bigaku" no kokoromi, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2002).
145

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use Nakai's own termof shudansei had a critical impact on Imamura Taihei, arguably the most influential and certainly the most vocal theorist of documentary film in wartime Japan. When he wrote a kaisetsu (exegesis) for Nakai Masakazu zenshu (Complete Works of Nakai Masakazu) in 1964, Imamura was not hesitant to express his indebtedness to Nakai, favorably calling this Kyoto philosopher "the possessor of true ideas."'346 Yet as Sugiyama Heiichi, biographer and longtime friend of Imamura, later pointed out, Imamura's description of Nakai as a militant leftist thinker concealing his ideological beliefs under the guise of "theory" should better be read as a self-justification of Imamura's own activities during the wartime period.347

Imamura Taihei: Documenting the War Effort In the history of Japanese cinema, Imamura Taihei (1911-1986) has been distinguished from other domestic critics for his persistent effort to establish his own film theory in a way comparable with major Western figures like Hugo Miinsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, and Bela Balazs. In his 1977 book Nihon eiga rironshi (The History of Japanese Film Theory), Sato Tadao wrote: "In Japan, unfortunately, very few individuals can be called film theorists. Imamura Taihei...is about the only person who has consistently worked as a film theorist, writing several theoretical books on film."348 Similarly, Sugiyama Heiichi remarked in his 1990 biography that at a time when most critics were still writing impressionistic film reviews, Imamura appeared as "our nation's single, extraordinary film critic" who strove to construct more serious film criticism
346 147

Imamura Taihei, "Kaisetsu," in Nakai Masakazu zenshu, 3:323-324. Sugiyama Heiichi, Imamura Taihei: Koko dokuso no eizo hydronka (Tokyo: Riburopoto, 1990),

185-186.
148

Sato, "Does Film Theory Exist in Japan?" 14.

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based on his theory.349 For the most part, these favorable comments stemmed from Imamura's astonishingly prolific and systematic writing style: in the years between 1938 and 1945 alone, he published ten monographs, including Eiga geijutsu no keishiki (The Form of Film Art, 1938), Eiga to bunka (Film and Culture, 1940), Kiroku eigaron (On Documentary, 1940), Manga eigaron (On Animation, 1941), and Sensa to eiga (War and Film, 1942), to name a few. Yet, as with the case of film practice, Imamura's privileged position in the history of Japanese film discourse is closely tied with the issue of international recognition. In fact, Imamura was one of the first Japanese film theorists introduced to the West, with his essay "Japanese Art and the Animated Cartoon" translated and published in the September 1953 issue of The Quarterly Review of Film, Radio, and Television
350

As if to revitalize this memorable but long-forgotten encounter,

scholars like Mark Driscoll, Abe Mark Nornes, and Furuhata Yuriko have recently published an essay or a book chapter on Imamura's writings.351 While fully acknowledging the importance of Imamura as a bridge between Japanese and Anglo-American film discourses, I have no intention of dwelling on the legacy of his intellectual activities as a whole. My aim here is to historicize the alleged originality of Imamura's film theory by situating him within the specific discursive context of wartime Japan. More specifically, I will read his texts against the theoretical frameworks Tosaka and Nakai had already developed through their speculation about the

349 ,5

Sugiyama, Imamura Taihei, 1.

Imamura Taihei, "Japanese Art and the Animated Cartoon," trans. Tsuruoka Furuichi, The Quarterly Review of Film, Radio and Television 7.3 (September 1953): 217-222.
151 See Mark Driscoll, "From Kino-Eye to Anime-eye/a\: The Filmed and the Animated in Imamura Taihei's Media Theory," Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 269-296; Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 94-106; Yuriko Furuhata, "Rethinking Plasticity: The Politics and Production of the Animated Image," Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6.1 (2011): 25-38.

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promising but unexplored potential of non-fiction genres. Like Tosaka and Nakai, Imamura strongly believed that the essence of cinema should be its ability to provide more concrete and compelling "documentations of the facts" (jijitsu no kiroku) than any other language-based media.352 Moreover, he elaborated his argument on the superiority of cinema over other art forms by shrewdly integrating Tosaka's and Nakai's philosophical definitions of the medium, namely, film as a medium of modern cognition (Tosaka) and a film as a medium of cooperative production (Nakai). Such an intriguing correspondence notwithstanding, Imamura was not simply following the steps of his forerunners. One particular difference was that Imamura, despite adopting Tosaka's Marxism and Nakai's socialism, was able to keep publishing his books until the end of the war and, as a consequence, became one of the most authentic commentators on the Japanese government's propagandistic use of non-fiction films. Tracing the trajectory of Imamura's theory of documentary and the realism it promised to the viewers, therefore, helps us elucidate the perplexing nature of wartime Japan wherein seemingly liberal ideas seamlessly transformed into reactionary ones. Unlike the majority of the Japanese intellectuals of his times, Imamura came on the scene as a fully self-taught critic with no special academic background. After leaving junior high school due to his father's death, Imamura held a succession of jobs to make his own living. While working at a postal insurance company, he became involved in organizing a labor union and was arrested in 1932 on suspicion of being a sympathizer of the then-illegal Communist Party. Upon his release after a month of interrogation, he was put on probation and eventually lost his job. It was during this period of unemployment
See, for example, Imamura Taihei, "Atarashii geijutsu no yokubo," Eiga sozo (July 1936), reprinted in Eiga geijutsu no keishiki (Tokyo: Oshio Shorin, 1938), 214. In 1991, Yumani Shobo reprinted the ten monographs Imamura published before 1945 under the title Imamura Taihei eizo hydronshu.

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that he began watching films seriously and on a regular basis. However, he had so little money to spend for this amusement that he always went to second- or third-late theaters, where he was able to watch one-hour programs composed of news films and animation for a lower ticket price. As Imamura later reminisced, this atypical exposure to film culture was decisive because these two then-marginalized genresnon-fiction and animationbecame central concerns of his film theory.353 Then, from the beginning of 1935, he began sending his essays to Kinema junpd, one of the most prestigious Japanese film magazines of the period. In these earliest essays, Imamura set himself the task of "clarifying the reciprocal relationship between a certain form of society and a certain form of art," of specifying the base and its superstructure in the realm of popular art, following Russian literary critic Vladimir Friche's 1926 book The Sociology of Art.m While his Marxist-infused contributions were well received by both the editors and readers of the magazine, Imamura needed more space to elaborate his thought on contemporary film culture at large. So in the summer of the same year, Imamura launched his own magazine Eiga shudan (Film Collective) with fellow contributors to Kinema junpd and members of college film societies in the Tokyo area. Like Tosaka's Yuiken and Nakai's Sekai bunka group, Imamura and his fellows at Eiga shudan organized a number of public lectures, study groups, and roundtables featuring coterie members, but their collective activities soon came under police scrutiny. 355 The

353 354

For a detailed account of Imamura's youth, see Sugiyama, Imamura Taihei, 21-38.

For Imamura's preoccupation with Friche, see Makino Mamoru, "Eiga shudan ni tsuite," in Eiga shudan: Jo, vol. 9 of Semen eiio riron zasshi shusei, ed. Makino Mamoru (Tokyo: Yumani shobo, 1989), 1-9. Friche's The Sociology of Art was translated into Japanese by the leading Marxist literary critic Kurahara Korehito as Geijutsu shakaigaku no hohoron (Tokyo: S5bunkaku, 1930). Notable coteries of Eiga shudan included Sugiyama Heiichi and Sawamura Tsutomu (film critics) as well as Kawashima Yuzo and Kuwano Shigeru (film directors)
355

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magazine itself, however, survived until 1940 by changing its name to Eigakai (Film World) in July 1938, and by the time he published his first monograph Eiga geijutsu no keishiki several months before this modification, Imamura had already earned fame as "the best film scholar of our time who has most beautifully proved the theoretical character that we could expect of the Japanese."356 At first glance, it would seem odd that non-fiction and animated films could equally constitute the core element of Imamura's film theory. For this reason, Mark Driscoll goes to great lengths to assert that in Imamura's view "Animation is positioned as the dialectical obverse of documentary film" by looking into the different relationships these two genres had with the logic of capitalism.357 Although Driscoll's intellectual effort to promote Imamura's work as "the earliest attempt to think through the difference between film and animation in any language" should not be underestimated, it is completely misleading to assume that Imamura actually drew a clear-cut distinction between non-fiction and animation, or that there was a significant temporal or dialectical gap between his writings on each genre.358 The fact is that far from being a new topic emerging after the Second World War as "the historical winner in the race of aesthetic genres,"359 animation had been central to Imamura's critical thinking from the very beginning. Indeed, his first monograph Eiga geijutsu no keishiki opens with an essay

' 56 This line is quoted from Okuma Nobuyuki's blurb for Imamura's Eiga geijutsu no keishiki, cited in Sugiyama, Imamura Taihei, 11. Okuma was one of the most renowned "liberal" economists in prewar Japan and frequently wrote about film.
157

Driscoll, "From Kino-eye to anime-eye/ai" 279.

' 58 The most obvious problem of Driscoll's argument is its historical inaccuracy; for some reason, he assumed that Imamura's book on animation came out in 1948, but the book he is referring to was the reprint of Manga eigaron originally published in 1941. In addition, Driscoll's quotation of Imamura's texts is so overwhelmingly filled with his "wishful" misinterpretation and rewritings that it is almost impossible to collate his English translation with the Japanese original.
359

Driscoll, "From Kino-eye to anime-eye/ai," 287.

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titled "TokT mangaron" (A Theory on the Animated Sound Film),360 followed by those on documentary and other topics. In any case, for Imamura, the difference between the two was "razor thin," to put it in Abe Mark Nornes's words.361 And, as one would expect, the professed originality of Imamura's film theory has been premised on this coalescence of seemingly disparate genres. When he began writing about film, Imamura was fully annoyed by his contemporaries' futile attempts to prove cinema's aesthetic values based on the "readymade" notions of art imported from outside film. Subsequently, Imamura's writings tended to single out the medium specificity of cinema, privileging certain genres and forms of expression still underdeveloped in other traditional art forms like literature and theater. It is in this context that non-fiction and animation emerged as the most relevant and meaningful genres, given their capacity to most effectively reveal how the very conception and practice of art had changed in the twentieth century in light of cinema's own properties. For instance, Imamura's theory of animation had less to do with its fantastic deviation from the laws of physical reality than with the mechanical aspects of its image production. At times he celebrated Disney's and Max Fleisher's innovative use of rotoscoping, a technique in which animators trace over a live-action film frame by frame, as it substantially transformed the animated image from a mere imagination to "an mechanical analysis of the secret of movement by the lens."362 On the other hand, if one

,6 " This essay has recently translated into English. See, Imamura Taihei, "A Theory of the Animated Sound Film," trans. Michael Baskett, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010): 44-51. 161

Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 101.

,62 Imamura Taihei, "Eiga geijutsu no seikaku: Geijutsu no kodokusei no hitei," Bungei (September 1938), reprinted in Eiga geijutsu no seikaku (Kyoto: Daiichi Geibunsha, 1939), 2. Imamura often referred to The Country Cousin (dir. Wilfred Jackson, 1936) as his favorite example of the photography-based animated film.

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turns the same visual capacity of the camera to social phenomena, it then begins to serve as the basis of the attraction of documentary films. Drawing upon Tosaka's earlier essays on film and fuzoku, Imamura maintained that the greatest task of non-fiction genres is to encourage the viewer to know the social fabrication of the world through direct observation of people, landscapes, languages, appearances, fashions, habits, and manners from all over the globe.363 Equally expressed in both cases was Imamura's oft-cited dictum: The essence of cinema is the documentation of the fact. Another important factor that he saw as distinguishing cinema from other traditional arts was its total negation of the individual mode of production and consumption prevalent in the past centuries. As a successor to Nakai's Utopian socialism, Imamura dealt with this issue by drawing a parallel between the twentieth-century and the ancient times. And just like Nakai's earlier attempt, his argument also brought light to the concept of shudansei as the key to both cinema and primitive art. In the ancient times, he says, all members of a society followed the principle of cooperative production and distribution because there had yet been no division between individuals and their community. People in the remote past accordingly did not make a clear distinction between artists and manual laborers, or between the production of art and their daily activities. They were, in some sense, at once producers and consumers of art and artifact, and their works were always conceived through a collective perspective.364 Having developed at the height of the concentration of capital and the division of labor in the modern times, cinema makes an intriguing return to this highly socialized, cooperative

,6 ' Imamura Taihei, "Monogatari keishiki kara kiroku keishiki e," Eiga sdzd (December 1937), reprinted in Eiga geijutsu no keishiki, 269. ,M Imamura Taihei, "Geijutsu keishiki to shite no eiga: Sono genshisei no k5satsu," Eiga kenkyu 3 (March 1938), reprinted in Eiga geijutsu no keishiki, 129-137.

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mode of production. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mass-production of animated films at major studios like Disney. Imamura observes, "animated sound films require painters to become technical by shifting their creative approach closer to a mechanical mode of production." And as a result of this procedure, "Drawings grow into a large-scale industrial collective project involving several hundred people."365 At this point, however, an animation still remains a series of still frames or frozen images; in order to animate these images, it requires the active participation of the viewers who not only create the optical illusion of motion through the persistence of vision, but also keep the industry moving through their persistent desire to consume new products. With the viewers' cooperation, film becomes a concrete "documentation" of the modern logic of shudansei, which ultimately unifies the act of production and the act of reception. What is striking in Imamura's film theory is that he expanded on the issue of shudansei in terms of the socialization of this medium as a means of mass communication. Anticipating the work of later scholars like Benedict Anderson and Marshall McLuhan, Imamura astutely argued that the major operation of modern media like newspaper, radio, and film was to generate the sense of connectedness, one through which people in the twentieth century were assured that they were belonging to their own times and communities. Needless to say, these modern media were not invented to deliver gossip or fictional narratives alone. They took on particular importance when they widely and simultaneously circulated the latest news from all over the world. "In feudalistic societies consisting of small and dispersed self-contained communities," said Imamura, "there was no need for these forms [of mass communication]. As individuals

365

Imamura Taihei, "A Theory of the Animated Sound Film," 48.

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became integrated into the worldwide web of the division of labor, and thereby all forms of production became totally socialized, we begin to realize that we are always and invariably connected to the world."366 It is in this absolutely modern, twentieth-century mediascape, that news films began to assume an increasingly significant role in mediating between the masses and their everyday life. For one, film had more potentiality than language-based media like radio and newspaper because it could offer universally legible and concrete images of ongoing events beyond any national and cultural boundaries. However, Imamura's promotion of news film as a medium of mass communication was more radical and progressive. As if to reverse Benjamin's famous remark that "Any person today can lay claim to being filmed'' thanks to the advent of news films,367 he dreamt of a world in which everyone became the producer of news films with the dissemination of small and portable movie cameras. In his 1940 book on documentary, he wrote: When documentary films make full scale progress, everyone will carry a movie camera like a pen and keep records with film just as they do with a pen. Of course, this means the individualization of cinema, but such individualization would never be possible without a far-reaching socialization of cinema.... Truly objective news films will be premised on this socialization of the camera. Higher manufacturing capacity will spread the cinematic apparatus more thoroughly than today's radio or still cameras.... As the [movie] camera becomes popularized, a multitude of people will shoot the same incident, inevitably adding more diversity and objectivity to its coverage. What is implied here is that we are no longer outside of news films; we are now participating in the production of the news.368

366 367 368

Imamura, "Geijutsu keishiki to shite no eiga," 152. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 33. The emphasis is in the original.

Imamura Taihei, "Kiroku eigaron," Kinema junpd (April 1, 1940), reprinted in Kiroku eigaron (Kyoto: Daiichi Geibunsha, 1940), 36-39.

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Beyond its undeniable affinity with Alexandre Astruc's postwar notion of the ""camerastylo,"369 it is possible to read this statement as foretelling today's saturation of video camcorders, cell phones, and other portable devices equipped with cameras. Yet just as our daily experience of mass media is not freed from the logic of late capitalism, it is necessary to uncover the power politics and historical dynamics concealed behind this sort of seemingly ideology-free proposal. On the one hand, Imamura's stance here seems very akin to the "do-it-yourself' sprit of the Prokino leader Sasa Genju, who, as I pointed out at the outset of this chapter, suggested the use of the small-gauge camera like the 9.5 mm Pathe Baby as a "weapon" to disseminate the news captured by the eye of the proletariat. On the other hand, it can also be read as a logical extension of Nakai's blueprint for the future of documentary, in which all films would be edited by the collective opinion of the committee. In either case, the question we should ask is in what kind of society this socialized vision of mass media would be make possible, and, by extension, who would hold sway over the multiple visions and voices informing this highly collaborative nature of film production. Imamura's attitude regarding this issue radically changed along with the progress of the war. At the beginning of his career, Imamura was tempted to champion cinema's revelatory capacity, which autonomously exposes some objective truths about reality regardless of the original intention of the filmmaker. "Despite its pursuit of commercial fiction," he wrote in 1936, "the cinematic expression [developed in Hollywood cinema] is the self-revelation of American culture."370 And yet as he witnessed the growing

369 Alexandre Astruc, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera Stylo," in The New Wave: Crliical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 17-23. 370

Imamura Taihei, "DoramatsurugT to shinematsurugT," in Eiga geijutsu no keishiki, 238-239.

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popularity of news films after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, he began to expect film to assume a more active role by providing "a document of the fact that the world is now moving forward with a historical necessity" beyond its function heretofore as a mirror of modern capitalist society. To this end, Hollywood-made newsreels like Paramount News and Fox Movietone News were insufficient. While they gave viewer a good glimpse of the world in motion with their immediate coverage of the latest news, their seemingly non-selective, weekly-based arrangement of historical events often ended up presenting the world as if it were full of contingency, still waiting to be articulated by a third party. Unlike earlier supporters of news films like Terada Torahiko and Tosaka Jun, Imamura was no longer in a position from which to celebrate this freedom of interpretation as the source of cinema's epistemological value. Instead, he repeatedly suggested a more systematic use of montage, considering it to be the best method to put things in order, to visualize the logic of history in the making. In Imamura's view, the term "montage" does not simply mean the editing process that takes place only after the shooting is done. It also signifies all kinds of subjective, aesthetic, and ideological intervention by people in their capture of the events occurring in front of the camera. For this reason, Imamura likened the operation of montage with that of human cognition, thereby proposing another oft-cited dictum of his film theory: "To document is at once to cognize."371 There is no doubt that Imamura came to this phrase under the direct influence of Tosaka's theorization of film as "a modern method of cognition." Indeed, in the above-mentioned book on documentary, he also emphasized the novelty of cinematic cognition/documentation by foregrounding the collaboration

,7t

Imamura, "Kiroku eigaron," 26.

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between human and non-human sensory apparatuses: "To document on film means to express only through film, to think only through film."372 Nevertheless, Imamura was different from Tosaka in his tendency to define cinematic cognition not as the process but as the result of cognitive activity. Instead of asking how the cinema's penetrating gaze has changed the ways we viewers reflect upon the world around us, he treated film as a mirror reflecting how its producers interpreted reality through their own eyes: The idea that a record can express something makes everyone involved in the production of news films and documentaries more conscious and responsible. It is no longer possible to produce dull and thoughtless documentaries like one makes a carbon copy. It is also wrong to assume that news films are always boring and conventional. They are by no means mere documents; they can express fully how the documentarist cognize the situation. If we find differences in news films reporting the same incident, it is exactly because they express (record) the personality of each news filmmaker.... Documentary is not a mere document of the external world but must be a record and expression of human cognition.373 This passage clearly illustrates that Imamura's main focus has already shifted from the camera's revelatory capacity to the filmmaker's spontaneous articulation of the world. Put differently, objective accuracy was no longer the center of his concern but rather the subjective authenticity of the depiction of reality. This move, for one, gets Imamura closer to the discourse of literary adaptation and scenario literature, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, also prioritized the filmmaker's critical interpretation of reality by using written texts as a primary means of expression. It is, however, important to note that Imamura never disposed of the idea that film is able to reflect and represent the object "as it is," always privileging the indexical quality of the photographic image that endorses non-fiction film's particular realism. The difference is that he tactically changed the object to be captured by the camera's objective gaze from an external reality to the
372

Imamura Taihei, "Eiga kirokuron," Eigakai (July 1940), reprinted in Kiroku eigaron, 92.

Ibid., 86-87.

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internal reality of filmmakers, so that documentary as a genre could explore more diverse forms of expression without losing its basic principle. "It is entirely possible," he wrote elsewhere in the same book, "that documentary as a record of the fact differentiates into various artistic genres. This is not an expectation; it already becomes reality."374 A prime example of what Imamura thought to be an "aesthetic documentary" is Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 film Olympia. Like many of his fellow Japanese critics, Imamura favorably received this famous Nazi propaganda. Yet his fascination came not so much from its ideological message but from its potential to be a model for his idea of cooperative filmmaking: Although its entire progression is based on a real event, the elements that constitute it [the film] are an entirely new objectivity that no single subject has ever seen before, an objectivity achieved only through the collaboration of many subjectivities. To look at one event from a variety of perspectives like this is not yet available in other art forms. In integrating the diverse observations culled from dozens of camera, Olympia proves again the supremacy of cinema's 17 cooperative vision over the solitary vision [of traditional art].

The focus of Imamura's statement here was not "cinema's cooperative vision" per se because he had already argued a similar division of labor and its integration in his analysis of Disney's highly corporatized, quasi-Fordist mode of production. Instead, he was more enthralled by the fact that the film indicated the possibility of cinematic cooperation outside the logic of capitalism. While his earlier writings sought for this possibility by drawing upon the purely socialist model of production developed in the Soviet Union, now he discovered a promising alternative in Nazi Germany's national socialist model, which conflicted less than the former with Japan's own shift toward a

374

Imamura, "Kiroku eigaron," 47.

" 5 Imamura Taihei, "Minzoku no saiten," in Kiroku eigaron, quoted in Sato, Nihon eiga rironshi,
202.

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totalitarian regime. Indeed, Imamura's review contains his unabashed appraisal of Germany's nationalization of the film industry: "Being nationalized and socialized without any concerns for profit-making, documentary will be able to surpass today's fiction films.... This is what we learned from the particular attraction of Olympia,"376 Around the time Imamura was writing this review, the Japanese government was making a move toward state control of the film industry with the enactment of the Film Law in 1939. Unlike in Germany, however, Japanese film companies were not entirely nationalized until the end of the war, although from 1941 on the government forced the industry to consolidate ten feature film companies into three, more than two hundred news and short film companies into four, and a dozen distributors into one. Thus, put in this context, Imamura's admiration of Olympia can be read as a pointed criticism of the Japanese government's lack of a clear prospect for the nationalization/socialization of film-based mass communication. In other words, his "progressive" vision of a world of information in which all members of a society become both producers and consumers of news films had virtually no conflict with the total mobilization of both human and material resources for the war effort. This is how Imamura conformed himself to the official discourse of wartime Japan without losing a firm grip on his idea of shiidansei. By restricting his argument to the development of non-fiction genres, he was able to maintain a critical posture against the backwardness of the domestic film industry. Moreover, by being critical to the government's passive intervention in his own right, he was also able to divorce himself from the guilty conscience prevailing among those who committed tenko, or political

376

Ibid., 201.

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conversion. Sato Tadao argues that Imamura's seamless and successful transition from the left to the right, from an opponent to a collaborator of Japan's militarism, was grounded in his adoption of what he calls "productivist theory" (seisanryoku riron), which appeared around 1940 as a discursive tool to mobilize Japanese intellectuals. According to Sato, The "lure" of this theory was its ostensible affinity with socialism; it stressed that the nationalization of the domestic economy and its means of production ultimately led to the emergence of a new "anti-capitalist" society comparable with the Soviet Union.377 Whether or not Imamura believed in this theory on its ideological level is unclear. But he clearly noticed that it would not only protect him from the watchful eyes of the police but also enhance the productivity of his own writing.

Integrating Fiction and Non-Fiction The adoption of productivist theory had a decisive impact on Imamura's film theory. Of notable difference is that he began to admit the integration of fictional elements into the realm of non-fiction. As Nornes points out, from the beginning Imamura had intended to "bring fiction and documentary into increasingly close contact."378 However, whereas his earlier writings were largely motivated by his desire to subvert the conventional hierarchy between fiction and non-fiction in art by highlighting cinema's own properties (this is why he often declared that "all future art would be predicted on a documentary quality"),379 this time Imamura necessitated the power of fiction in order to assign non-fiction film a new task to engage in the shifting reality of

377 178 179

Sato, Nihon eiga rironshi, 200-204. Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 99. Ibid.

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wartime Japan. The best place to see the transfiguration of Imamura's film theory is his 1942 book Senso to eiga (War and Film). Published a year after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the book reveals how Imamura tried to exploit film's "make-believe" ability in support of the construction of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. At this point, the once-neglected "film as a mirror" metaphor makes a comeback almost with a vengeance: rather than projecting the promising future of a new Asia that had yet to exist, it reflects the sinister face of Japan invading Asia for its own survival. To begin with, Imamura discloses his belief that what news films present is the transcendent singularity of history, the irreversible succession of time that can never be repeated on its own. Consequently, news filmsespecially those reporting ongoing battles in the warhave captured many solemn moments in modern Japanese history, ranging from the deaths of nameless Japanese soldiers to the rapid expansion of the Japanese Empire in South-East Asia. Nevertheless, Imamura is not satisfied with current news films because they tended to use these memorable events merely as materials for immediate coverage. He proceeds to suggest the aestheticization of news films so that they could be watched time and again even after they lose their initial news values: "For our politics, the emphasis should always be on the effects of the news. It is thus mandatory for us to present those singular and precious moments more real than reality, more compelling than hundreds of spoken words."380 Imamura's suggestion stems directly from his viewing of a news film covering the Fall of Singapore in February 1942. Due to the shortage of portable sound equipment, the film was shot silent and missed the opportunity to record in full the historical moment in which the British Lieutenant-

Imamura Taihei, "Nyusu eiga to seiji," Kanzei gakuin shinbun, June 20, 1942, reprinted in Senso to eiga (Kyoto: Daiichi Geibunsha, 1942), 41.

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General Arthur Percival officially declared, "I surrender." Imamura ascribes this "misfortune" to the small budget and lack of concern paid to the aesthetics of news film production. Considering the increasing importance of news films, he goes on to demand the abolition of any distinctions between news and fiction films: Thinking this way, we find no necessity to distinguish news films from fiction films. In covering all kinds of incidents, news films can also observe a variety of people and depict their human feelings. From this perspective, we demand that news film should be made under the same condition as fiction films. If we make news films using the same camera, microphone, lighting, and, most importantly, well-planned "decoupage" as fiction films, it would be possible to elevate these documents of facts to the level of art.381 According to Imamura, the aestheticization of news films meant incorporating such basic techniques and devices as editing, mise-en-scene, synchronized sound, different shot sizes and durations, changes in angles, and, if necessary, detailed storyboards prepared in advance. Needless to say, this would be a violation of the autonomy of non-fiction genres that had long informed the alleged originality of Imamura's film theory. Why did he find it necessary to make a concession to fiction? To put it in a nutshell, the main impetus behind Imamura's proposal was the pressing need to export Japanese films to the newly occupied areas in the South East Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Historically, people in these areas had been familiar with Hollywood films. Yet as the emperor's army marched into their territories, the Japanese film industry began to make enormous effort to expand its sphere of influence, aiming to replace Hollywood's domination with its own products. In the meantime, both Japanese film critics and government authorities engaged in almost endless debates over the possible ways to make

181

Ibid., 44-45.

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the export of Japanese film culture successful, though most of their propositions proved a total failure. Imamura joined this debate as a specialist in non-fiction film. On the one hand, he strongly believed that film could be the best medium to "enlighten" a billion of people newly added to the Japanese empire given its mechanical reproducibility and the universal legibility of the filmic image. One the other hand, he warned that current Japanese news films were not able to attain the international appeal in their current state because they mostly served as a visual illustration of the news already covered and circulated through the printed media like newspaper. Given the locality and passivity of domestic news films, Imamura came to stress the need for enhancing the efficiency of their visual storytelling and suggested the adoption of the norms and conventions developed in fiction films. Moreover, he added that politicians, military officers, or anyone who make frequent appearance on these news films should be more conscious of how they look on screen, noting how Hitler and Stalin succeeded in creating their "respectful" public images through films.382 In Imamura's scheme, reality must be constructed like a film and people must behave like film actors for the sake of the international success of Japanese non-fiction films. This seems totally absurd but it is not the end of the story. Another remarkable phenomenon occurring in relation to such a "cinematization of the world" was the influx of non-fiction or documentary elements into the realm of fiction film. Beginning with Tasaka Tomotaka's celebrated war film Gonin no sekkdhei (Five Scouts, 1938), works like Shanhai rikusentai (Naval Brigade at Shanghai, dir. Kumagai Hisatora, 1939), Nishizumi senshacho den (Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi, dir. Yoshimura

382 Imamura Taihei, "Eiga no sendenryoku," Miyako shinbun, February 7-9, 1942, reprinted in Senso to eiga, 1-15.

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Kozaburo, 1940), Moyuru ozora (Flaming Sky, dir. Abe Yutaka, 1940), and Hawai Mare oki kaisen (The War at Sear from Hawaii to Malaya, dir. Yamamoto Kajiro, 1942) made extensive use of both pro- and post-filmic techniques and conventions borrowed from documentary filmmaking including location shooting, handheld or non-stationary camera positions, long shots and long takes, non-professional actors and non-Japanese extras, and voice-over narration.383 Needless to say, this sweeping shift in style was also evident in films dealing with the everyday life of the home front. In talking about Kojima no haru (Spring on Leper's Island, dir. Toyoda Shiro, 1940), a film based on a real story of a woman doctor who dedicated her life to the treatment of quarantined leprosy patients, the film critic Aikawa Haruki made the following remark: This film was born out of the impasse of fiction filmmaking. The poverty of fiction film directly leads to the poverty of theater, as they both are grounded on the naivete of everyday life inseparable from the trivial decadence of theatrical realism. However, the film skillfully redeemed its fundamental shortcomings as a fiction film by foregrounding its documentary aspects. This was a risky enterprise, and many of us witnessed there the severe confrontation between fictional and non-fictional elements.384 Aikawa did not praise Kojima no haru as a success; he took it instead as evidence of the final victory of non-fiction over fiction as the dominant genre of Japanese filmmaking at large. In the end, Aikawa also found it more effective to work on the confluence of fiction and non-fiction from the latter's perspective, suggesting the need to categorize such fictionalized non-fiction films under the all-encompassing term "bunka eiga" (cultural film).385

183 384

For a detailed account of these films, see High, The Imperial Screen.

Aikawa Haruki, "Bunka eiga e no rohyo," in Bunka eigaron (Tokyo: Kasumigaseki shobo, 1944), 67. Before starting his career as a film critic, Aikawa was a member of Tosaka's Yuiken.
,85 In Aikawa's view, the definition of bunka eiga was "to stage the truth as a 'narrative' by using faithful documents of the society and facts." Ibid., 53. Of course, this definition was no more than one of "many" definitions posed by the Japanese film critics of the time. Indeed, Imamura always insisted that

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The confluence of fiction and non-fiction in 1940s Japan was not restricted to the matters of film style or genres. More than anything it constituted an ethical problem. I am not simply referring to the phenomenon of the so-called "fake" documentary, which had been practiced since the days of the Russo-Japanese War. Rather, I am speaking of a Japanese war film that went as far to cross the final taboo in fiction filmmaking, that is, killing real people in front of the camera to enhance its reality-effect. The film in question here is Shogun to sanbo to hei (General, Staff, and Soldiers, dir. Taguchi Satoshi), released in 1942. According to Peter B. High, the film was initially planned as a Japanese version of Operation Michael (Unternehmen Micael), Karl Ritter's 1937 UFA film on one of the most deadly battles during the First World War, with the intention of setting the story as close to the frontline as possible. This plan was rejected by the Army's Information Section, and most of the scenes were filmed in a "safer area," as was done with many other war films in the past. Still, the director Taguchi and his staff were

allowed not only to follow the Japanese army as it deployed in China's Shaanxi Province, but also to use Chinese POWs captured by them as extras. As expected, the climax

comes near the end of the film where we see a heavy exchange of artillery fire and bombings that lasts more then twenty minutes. The spectacle of the battle is so real that we even witness the Japanese soldiers mercilessly bombarding Chinese fortresses with enemies still inside, sniping Chinese soldiers hiding behind the ruined buildings, and

bunka eiga should only mean non-fiction films with educational or scientific purposes, as in UFA's original Kullurjilm.
386

High, The Imperial Screen, 298-305.

187 According to Imamura, films like Senyu no uta (War Comrade's Song, dir. Richard Angst, 1939) and Ydsukd kantai (Yangste River Fleet, dir. Kimura Sotoji, 1938) also used Chinese POWs as film extras. See, for instance, Imamura Taihei, "Senso eigaron," Domei grafu (June 1942), reprinted in Senso to eiga. 135-136.

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opening hostilities against a crowd of unarmed soldiers running from their attacks. Given such an excessive documentary quality, the viewers may assume that the scene is composed entirely of the footage taken from the actual military actions on the battlefield. And yet there was also a possibility that Taguchi set up the scene from scratch, using those captive Chinese soldiers as targets to be shot to death before the eye of the camera. Unfortunately, there is no way to prove this speculation. Whatever the case, it cannot be denied that in the film we see real people being shot to death, and this particular, undeniable death is effectively mobilized to dissolve the ontological distinction between fiction and non-fiction, narrative and history, and, most importantly, film and reality. In his excellent study of film culture in wartime Japan, film historian Fujita Motohiko harshly criticizes the confluence of fiction and nonfiction that became dominant in the early 1940s, calling it "the process in which documentary's techniques and methods became integrated into the structure of the political system as such." What lay at the end of this process, he continues, was nothing but "the total collapse of Japanese cinema."388 Though originally written thirty-five years ago, Fujita's criticism is still effective in revealing the ideological bent of Imamura's (and to some text, Nakai's) obsession with technological determinism, especially his overemphasis on the potential of cinema to "create" a new reality according to its own properties. My concern here, however, is not to simply replicate Fujita's poignant impeachment. Rather than onesidedly accusing Imamura and his fellow critics of collaborating with Japanese fascism, 1 find it necessary to learn from their faulty attempts to reform the society through their theoretical, yet still speculative fascination with the power of cinema to construct a new

388 Fujita Motohiko, "Bunka to kiroku no aida: Kamei Fumio to sono rekishikan," in Nihon eiga gendaishi, 60.

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reality. In this respect, I am tempted to turn back to the legacy of Tosaka's social epistemology. As we have seen, he emphasized that some objective truths about society and its historicity do not automatically appear on the surface of cultural phenomena, like trends in film style and genres do, but are always imbricated with the social discourses surrounding them. Most importantly, it is ultimately our responsibility to encode such tangles of practice and discourse in order to better understand the reality of what we call history. This epistemological attitude is mandatory when we deal with film culture in specific political contexts like wartime Japan where all types of representation should always be addressed critically and reflectively.

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CHAPTER V EXPERIENCING THE WORLD THROUGH CINEMA: THE NEGLECTED TRADITION OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN JAPANESE CINEMA

Phenomenology and Japanese Cinema In the previous four chapters, we have approached the prewar and wartime Japanese debates over the issues of cinematic realism through the perspective of either the cinematic apparatus or filmmakers. This is necessary because Japanese intellectuals' struggles with the "crisis of realism" during the first half of the twentieth century have to a large extent developed in a dualistic manner, moving back and forth between human and non-human sensory apparatuses, between subjective and objective articulations of reality, and between the acts of expression and perception. The discursive emphasis given by the Japanese to the coexistence of the two competing agentsthe camera and the filmmakercan itself foreground what Francesco Casetti calls the "oxymoronic quality" of the cinematic gaze, which is "capable of operating on opposing fronts, and at times collapsing them" in its perpetual negotiations with the different, and mostly conflicting, needs of twentieth-century modernity.389 But if we consider the development of intellectual movements to be not simply dualistic but rather dialectical, then it is necessary to address the third camp that aimed to synthesize the alleged rivalry between photographic-based ontological realism and text-based non-ontological realism from a new perspective.

189

Casetti, Eye of the Century, 3.

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In this chapter, I will explore the dialectical nature of Japanese film theory by turning our attention to another significant, yet often neglected, facet consisting of realist film theory: spectators. More specifically, I will provide a comparative reading of the two Japanese film theoristsSugiyama Heiichi and Nagae Michitarowho, from the late1930s to the early 1940s, addressed the issues of cinematic realism through what I call a "phenomenologicar approach. As we have seen, most of the Japanese thinkers discussed in the previous chapters prioritized either the camera's ability to reveal the hidden truths of reality, or the intervention of filmmakers in articulating the reality inscribed on the filmstrip. While figures like Terada Torahiko and Tosaka Jun referred to the significance of reception by redefining cinema as a modern medium of cognition, their argument on the role of the spectator was sporadic and not fully developed to the point that one could call it a theory. In contrast, both Sugiyama and Nagae elaborated their theoretical writings through observation of how cinema functions, focusing on the psychological effects that the moving images projected on the screen evoked in the mind of the spectator. Unlike the term "machine aesthetics" with Itagaki Takao or "epistemology" with Tosaka Jun, my use of''phenomenology" here will remain tentative, as neither Sugiyama nor Nagae employed it to indicate their speculation about the film experience. Still, there are both theoretical and historical reasons that I look into this branch of philosophy to address the work of these two Japanese film theorists. Since the early 1990s, phenomenology has been the focus of more attention from film scholars. This was in part due to the popularity of Gilles Deleuze's two-volume book on cinema, which provided new paradigms for addressing the film experience through his

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critical rereading of Henri Bergson's philosophy and C. S. Pierce's semiology.390 However, at least in the context of Anglo-American film studies, Vivian Sobchack's 1992 book The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience also made a significant contribution to the field, especially for her intention to establish a solid theoretical framework for the issue of film and phenomenology in general.391 Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack specifies the potential of phenomenology to be a countercurrent in the history of film theory, a countercurrent that no longer reduces actual works of the cinema to its material pre-condition or ideological surroundings. Schematically divided into formalist (idealist) and realist (materialist) traditions, classical film theory has tended to presuppose a binary opposition that "has argumentatively and analytically severed expression from perception in its inquiries into the 'true nature' or ontology of the cinema."392 The formalists, one the one hand, have defined film as a medium of "expression" by foregrounding the artist's creative ability to frame the world according to his or her internal vision. The realists, on the other, have

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). For more on current scholarship on film and phenomenology in the Anglo-American context, see Allan Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Towards a Realist Representation of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008); Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagner, "Cinema as Skin and Touch," in Film Theory, 108-128. For the French tradition of phenomenological film theory, see Dudley Andrew, "The Challenge of Phenomenology: Amedee Ayfre and Henri Agel," in The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 242-253; "The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory," Wide Angle 2.2 (1978), reprinted in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 625-632. Needless to say, I borrowed the subtitle of this chapter from Andrew's last article.
w Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 15. This division between "formalist" (formative) and "realist" traditions in classical film theory was already found in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality (New York Oxford University Press, 1960). It then became widely known among film scholars with Dudley Andrew's The Major Film Theories. Andrew recently revisited this division in his What Cinema Is!: Bazin's Quest and Its Change (Maiden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 391

390

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defined film as a medium of "perception" by privileging the camera's mechanical ability to reflect the world without losing its wild meanings. In contrast, the phenomenologists distinguish themselves by focusing on the significance of their own act of viewing, their own experience with the world as it is lived on and through the screen. Their primary task is "to describe the origin, locus, and existential significance of cinematic vision and the film experience,"393 and through this process of reflection, Sobchack, herself taking the position of a phenomenologist, shrewdly redefines cinema as "an expression of experience by experience."394 As we will see, both Sugiyama and Nagae shared a similar desire to elucidate the singularity of the film experience by shifting the focus from the side of film production to reception. Moreover, they equally sought to answer the question "What is cinema?" on its most fundamental level, strictly refraining from relying upon any external or secondary conditions surrounding the medium. This is the first reason I intend to call them "phenomenologists," despite the absence of the term "phenomenology" itself from their writings. In the meantime, there still remain several questions to be asked before moving onto their writings. How is it possible to dig into the "neglected tradition of phenomenology" in Japanese film theory before 1945, given our presumption that what we could call a phenomenological film theory in France or anywhere did not emerge until the end of the Second World War?395 Is there any possibility that Sugiyama and Nagae became familiar with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre? And if both Sugiyama and Nagae adopted their

'19"' Ibid., xviii.

194

Ibid., 3.

' ,5 Andrew, "The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology," 628-631.

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phenomenological stance not by coincidence but by design, what can we learn by putting them back in the actual context of wartime Japan? To answer these preliminary questions, we have to briefly look at the way in which phenomenology became integrated into Japanese critical discourse. What is remarkable in the Japanese reception of phenomenology is that it was closely tied with the increasing synchronicity between the West and non-West during the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, phenomenology was one of the first branches of Western philosophy directly transplanted into the Japanese soil without any significant temporal lag. As discussed in Chapter 2, the economic boom following Japan's "successful" participation in the First World War increased the number of trans continental voyages of Japanese to Europe, dramatically accelerating the global (or at least "the East-West") circulation of the latest trends in avant-garde art and cultural production. This was also case in the field of philosophy. For instance, Tanabe Hajime, a core member of the Kyoto School of Philosophy, spent two years as a governmentsponsored scholar in Germany studying first at Berlin University and then at the University of Freiberg. At Freiberg, Tanabe was under the tutelage of Husserl and Heidegger, with the latter working as his personal tutor. Upon his return to Japan in 1924, Tanabe immediately began to disclose what he learned in Germany. Most notably, he served as one of the earliest and enthusiastic supporters of Heideggerian "existential"" phenomenology, which he thought was capable of overcoming the impasse of neoKantianism, by writing an article entitled "Genshogaku ni okeru atarashiki tenko: Haidega no sei no genshogaku" (A New Turn in Phenomenology: Heidegger's

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Phenomenology of Life).396 For Tanabeas well as for Heideggerthe problem of neoKantianism rested in its futile pursuit of a lifeless, formalistic abstraction detached from actual life and experience. He thus favorably promoted phenomenology as a new academic doctrine that brought philosophy back to "the things themselves," helping it clarify the ontological meaning of "being-in-the-world." In this way, phenomenology became very popular among Japanese intellectuals by the mid-1920s, significantly marking a paradigm shift in philosophical discourse from idealist (formalist) norms to existentialist (realist) ones.397 Another notable figure in this direct liaison between Japanese and European philosophers was Kuki Shuzo, one of Tanabe's colleagues at Kyoto University. Kuki stayed in Europe for seven years (1922-1929)an exceptionally long period among his Japanese compatriotsboth attending and giving lectures at Heidelberg, Freiberg, Marburg, and the University of Paris. During this extended stay he became acquainted with a number of acclaimed European phenomenologists including, Husserl, Heidegger, Oskar Becker, Henri Bergson, and the young Jean-Paul Sartre.398 As Leslie Pincus reminds us, what united Kuki and these figures was a shared desire "to salvage a domain of authentic experience from what was seen as an increasingly defiled everyday life."399 Through his stay at Freiberg, Kuki was fully aware of the promising potential of phenomenology to fulfill this historical demand, but he also celebrated Bergson for his
Tanabe Hajime, "Genshogaku ni okeru atarashiki tenko: Haidegga no sei no tgenshogaku," Shiso (October 1924), reprinted in Tanabe Hajime zenshu (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1963-1964), 4:19-34. For Tanabe's intellectual activity, see Takeuchi Yoshinori, Muto Kazuo, and Tsujimura Koichi, eds., Tanabe Hajime shiso to kaiso (Tokyo: Chikuma shobS, 1991). ' 197 See, Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 70-71.
198 w

Ibid., 54-60. Ibid., 55.

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earlier attempt to establish a philosophy of life and experience. In Kuki's view, the era of neo-Kantian domination in Japan came to end with the first translations of Bergson's work in 1910, for they taught him and his Japanese colleagues that "To philosophize means to place oneself, through an effort of intuition, right in the center of concrete reality.'"400 Although what Bergson meant by "reality" was restricted to an inner, subjective reality that could be seized only from within, his unmistakable desire to return the actual condition of existence through experience (intuition) inevitably placed him as a forerunner of phenomenology. "In any case," wrote Kuki in 1928, "we in Japan had been led from neo-Kantianism to 'phenomenology' by way of Bergsonian philosophy."401 This brief account of the Japanese reception of phenomenology helps us specify the cultural and discursive context from which Sugiyama and Nagae's works emerged. Given the tireless effort of Japanese philosophers to bring phenomenology to the mainstream, it is unlikely that Sugiyama and Nagae had not read any of the works by or which were at least related to the thinkers mentioned above. At the same time, I argue that their interests in phenomenology, if any, should remain on the level of its methods and not its actual application process known as hermeneutics.402 That is, I am referring to the substantial difference between a phenomenological film theory and the theory of phenomenology in general, and it is this difference that I consider to be the real reason behind the unexpected emergence of the "phenomenologist" camp in Japanese wartime film discourse. On the one hand, Japanese thinkers like Kuki employed phenomenology

Kuki Shuzo, "Bergson au Japon," Les Nouvelles Litteraires (December 1928), reprinted in Kuki Shied zenshu, eds. Amano Teiyu, Omodaka Hisayuki, Sato Akio (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980-82), 1:260, cited in Pincus, Authenticating Culture, 68.
401

400

Ibid., 69.

402 For Japanese phenomenoiogists' inclination toward cultural hermeneutics, see Pincus, "Hermeneutics; Or, Culture Repossessed," in Authenticating Culture, 140-181.

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to elucidate the essenceor the authentic form of the beingof such abstract phenomena as the Japanese spirit. In his masterpiece "Iki" no kozo (The Structure of Edo Aesthetic Style, 1930) and related essays, Kuki, as Pincus nicely puts it, devised a narrative in which "minzoku [ethnic group] played the role of a collective existential subject, culture served as the intended content of consciousness, and Japan became a world of its own."403 At this level of investment, phenomenology no longer functioned as a purely philosophical, ideology-free method to describe the subjective experience of perception and consciousness, or to understand man and the world relying solely upon their "facticity."404 Rather, it served as a powerful discursive tool to generate a self-contended nationalistic sentiment, uncannily foretelling Heidegger's conversion to Nazism. Sugiyama and Nagae, on the other hand, came to phenomenology around 1940 precisely because it helped them shy away from ideological charges of the nationalist discourse of wartime Japan. As phenomenologists, they found it necessary to place themselves right in the center of concrete reality. However, the reality they dealt with was strictly restricted to the internal reality of the film medium, their conscious and perceptual experience of the medium's expression. In other words, they consciously chose to speak only about the essence of cinema, putting aside its potential to be used as a weapon for, or as a critique of, the external reality that surrounding them, the reality in which Japanese cinema and its industry and personnel were all mobilized for the war effort. Because they made nearly no critical commentary on the "reality" of the government's cultural policy and its suppression of the freedom of expression, both Sugiyama and

401 404

Ibid., 70.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). vii.

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Nagae were able to survive the wartime years by standing on the side of conformists. However, one can also read their recourse to phenomenology as a sign of silent resistance. In fact, Sugiyama's Eiga hyoronshu (Essays on Cinema, 1941)405 and Nagae's Eiga, hydgen, keisei (Film, Expression, and Formation, 1942)406 were two of the last books on film published in Japan before 1945 without publicly announcing the authors' commitments to Japanese militarism407 Whichever the case, the emergence of phenomenological film theory in wartime Japan was firmly grounded in a specific historical moment wherein minor and non-Western intellectuals self-consciously made use of to the alleged "universal" claims of Western critical discourse in order to cope with the "particular" demands of the local.

Sugiyama Heiichi: Film as a Closed Window Born in 1914, Sugiyama Heiichi is not only the youngest of the Japanese theorists discussed in the present study but the only one still alive (!) as of 2012. Throughout his life, Sugiyama has established fame as both a poet and a film critic and always kept the two fields in close contact. As a poet, Sugiyama belonged to the Shiki-ha (Four Seasons School) founded in the early 1930s by the poets Miyoshi Tatsuji, Hori Tatsuo, and Maruyama Kaoru. His first poetry collection, Yagakusei (Night Student), was published in 1943 and awarded the Bungei Hanron poetry prize in the following year for its emotive
405 Sugiyama Heiichi, Eiga hyoronshu (Kyoto: Daiichi Geibunsha, 1941; repr. Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 2003). 40( 'Nagae Michitaro, Eiga, hydgen, keisei (Kyoto: Kyoiku Tosho, 1941; repr. Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 2003).

Indeed, if you browse the bibliography of Japanese film books, then you will soon find the years between 1941 and 1945 filled with titles like Hazumi Tsuneo, Eiga to minzoku [Film and Race] (Tokyo: Eiga Nihonsha, 1942); Imamura Taihei, Senso to eiga [War and Film] (Kyoto: Daiichi Geibunsha, 1942); Okada Shinkichi, Eiga to kokka [Film and Nation] (Tokyo: Seikatsusha, 1943); and Tsumura Hideo, Eigasen [Film War] (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1944).

407

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lyricism embellished with compassion.408 As a film critic, Sugiyama started his career in 1934 by contributing film reviews to Kinema junpo, a route followed by many of his contemporaries. While still a student of aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University, he continued to send the magazine film reviews on a regular basis and soon became acknowledged by his fellow "amateur" contributors like Imamura Taihei and Sawamura Tsutomu. In 1935, Sugiyama became a founding member of the coterie magazine Eiga shudan, edited and published under Imamura's leadership. Thereafter Sugiyama and Imamura held a lifelong friendship until the latter's death in 1986, despite the unmistakable differences between their approaches to cinema and its relation to reality.409 As we have seen in the previous chapter, Imamura put emphasis on the potential of film to construct a new reality according to its properties as a medium of documentation. Sugiyama, by contrast, saw film as the concrete expression of the world itself, the expression that gently invites us to experience it through the senses. When Sugiyama came on the scene in the mid-1930s, Japanese film journalism was rife with lively discussions about the rise of literary adaptation in sound filmmaking. Naturally, he joined the debates with his dual interest in film and literature, but his main purpose was to criticize the thoughtless unification of the two from a phenomenological perspective. According to Sugiyama, both film and literature share the same task of delivering stories and thoughts but are premised on completely opposite modes of enunciation. The pleasure of reading a novel, he says, lies in the fact that it one-sidedly

408 For his activity as a poet, see Sugiyama Heiichi, Sugiyama Heiichi zenshishu, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Henshu Kobo Noa, 1997), Sako Yuji, Shijin Sugiyama Heiichi ron: Hoshi to eiga to ningen 'ai to (Kyoto: Chikurinkan, 2002). 409 For his career as a film critic, see Makino Mamoru, " Imamura Taihei: Koko dokuso no eiga hydronka to chosha Sugiyama Heiichi no iso," Eizogaku 45 (1991): 59-84; Tanaka Masasumi, "Eiga hyoronka to shite no Sugiyama Heiichi," in Sugiyama Heiichi, Eiga hydronshu, repr., 331-342.

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discloses ideas, characters, and situations that the author has already conceived in advance, thus imposing a certain kind of patience on the side of the reader. In watching a film, on the other hand, the spectator is in the first place thrown into the external environment filled with concrete things, and only retrospectively can he speculate about the author's intention through his own viewing experience. Furthermore, because in film this process of signification always takes place on the level of the image whose meaning (referent) as a sign is far richer and more ambiguous than words, "spectators can not only participate in the creation of the author's spiritual life but also live their own lives."410 Sugiyama's criticism is directed less at the superiority of cinema over literature than at the general attitude of advocates of literary adaptation and scenario literature. With evident sarcasm, he writes: "Interestingly, these people are speaking only about written scripts; alas, they never look at what appears on screen!"411 Sugiyama then attacks his contemporaries for their inconsiderate attempts to bring in the "ready-made" definitions of realism developed outside film practice. Like many of his predecessors, he refers to the photographic nature of the film medium as the basic condition for film art. Here, again, Sugiyama makes a comparison between the languagebased medium (literature) and the image-based medium (film), focusing on their opposite lines of conduct. In both cases, the primary task of realism is to reproduce the world as faithful as possible. The only, yet absolutely significant, difference is their disparate forms of expression. Where literature enhances its reality-effect through the composition of believable episodes and fragments culled from everyday life, film uses as its own expression "the mechanically accurate physical reflection of reality" (kikaiteki ni seikaku
410 411

Sugiyama Heiichi, "Bungaku e no sekkin no mondai," Eiga shudan 4 (December 1935): 9. Ibid.

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na genjitsusei no han ei) captured by the camera and microphones.412 Sugiyama admits that in making films, too, filmmakers should use the scenario as a blueprint of the world they intend to depict. Yet once the shooting process begins, they must always negotiate with the existential power of physical reality that compellingly and continuously speaks back to the author's imaginary conception of reality. At first glance, this remark on film as a medium for mechanical reproduction might seem to tell us nothing new. However, Sugiyama's argument differs from others in that he quickly proceeds to explain the psychological effects of the physical reflection of reality inscribed on the filmic image by reflecting upon his own viewing experience. In watching films like G. W. Pabst's Du haut en has (High and Low, 1933) and Ozu Yasujiro's Tokyo noyado (An Inn in Tokyo, 1935), he found that there was a symptomatic dissociation between the filmmakers' creative intentions and what the films actually displayed on screen. As directors of fiction film, both Pabst and Ozu aimed to depict stories by following generic conventions of either romantic comedy or melodrama. Nevertheless, Sugiyama could not help but feel a strong sense of realism in both films, for the accurate gaze of the camera at work there "brought out numerous truths from each filmed object" beyond the directors' storytelling skills.413 Based on this actual sensation, he came to a conclusion that the proper definition of cinematic realism should base itself on the potential of film (and not filmmaker) to use the world as its own concrete expression, and that its perceptual "reality-effect" should always be generated where the gazes of film and spectator meet through the act of viewing.

4I "

Sugiyama Heiichi, "Kyamera no soshitsu to shite no shajitsu," Eiga hyoron 18.7 (July 1936): Ibid.

71.
411

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Eventually, Sugiyama's theoretical writings culminated in Eiga hyoronshu, his first monograph published in November 1941. Despite its modest title (Essays on Film), the book can actually be read like a systematic account of the phenomenon called cinema. Indeed, the topics covered in this 200-page contemplation include frame, editing, screen, narration, sound, color, close-up, actors, props, self-referentiality ("film-in-a-film"), and realism, followed by the short reviews he kept writing since 1934. As he declared in the preface, Sugiyama was fully aware of the task he imposed on himself: "These [essays] were written as my painstaking attempt to clarify the essence of film art. Accordingly, I could have simply given each essay numbers like 1, 2, 3, and 4; but being ashamed that they are not yet systematic enough, I just put the adequate titles instead."414 His humbleness here is no exaggeration. Despite his ambition, some sections remain brief commentaries that last little over a few pages. So rather than tracing his ideas on cinema as a whole, I will confine my focus to key concepts of his theory, especially those related to what I call a phenomenological approach to the film experience. Sugiyama begins his argument by mobilizing two commonplace metaphors: "film as a mirror" and "film as a window." The technological development of the cinematic apparatus, he says, has always been based on the persistent desire to be an equivalent to a mirror, its aspiration to reflect our everyday life as faithfully as possible 415 While this technological impulse should be the foundation of all kinds of film art, it should remain a starting point and never be treated as the final goal. The main purpose of film art is not to create a perfect duplication of reality but to make use of reality as its own expression. In order to clarify the difference between these two modes of representation, Sugiyama
414 415

Sugiyama, Eiga hyoronshu, i-ii. Ibid., 1-2.

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brings to light the significance of "framing" in filmmaking. By "framing," however, he does not mean the efforts of the formalists to reconstruct a non-existential reality by breaking up the indexical ties between the photographic image and its referent. Rather, he assumes it to be the process of providing points of reference from which to revitalize our inborn curiosity about the world around us, just as the frame of a window gives a new look to otherwise banal and monotonous landscapes. He writes: When riding a bicycle or walking down the street, children do not pay much attention to the landscape surrounding them. Yet once on a train, they compete with each other to look out the window. The only difference is whether there is a simple and rectangular window frame. Framed by the window, the landscape, as well as its movement and transformations, can initially impress those young minds.... If we are to liken film to that train widow, this train must be running through the world, from cities and the countryside, mountains and valleys, skies and oceans, to inside houses of the rich and the poor. With the same impulse that propels children to crawl up to the window, millions of people now go to movie theaters.416 Beyond its implicit reference to the primordial attraction of the moving images, this passage helps us understand Sugiyama's basic attitude toward the film experience. First, unlike the frame of a painting or a photograph, the cinematic frame does not function to "freeze" the images inside it. On the contrary, it serves as something like scale marks, making it easier for us to perceive and visualize the world in motion by accentuating the endless flow of time. Second, in Sugiyama's formula there is no ontological difference between reality and cinematic images. The latter is a physical extension of the former but still able to take a form of expression when it is articulated by spatial, temporal, and semantic frames. Third, film is a medium that encourages us to look at the world anew by constantly changing our points of view. Thus the primary task of filmmakers in his film-

416

Ibid.. 5-6.

as-a-train-window metaphor is not to set up illusions outside the window, but rather to keep the train running so that its passengers/viewers can make new discoveries. In order to expand on this last point, Sugiyama discloses his profound discontent with alleged efficacy of Soviet montage theory. The main target of his refutation is Pudovkin, whose 1926 book Film Technique was widely read and remained highly influential among Japanese filmmakers and critics following its first translation in 1930.417 In this book, Pudovkin proudly refers to the experiment with which he created a more "cinematically" spectacular explosion on the screen by editing unrelated shots composed of a blasting dynamite, flashes of magnesium flares, and rapids of a river. Another example is a scene of "a motor-car accidenta man being run over."418 Since it was impossible to actually kill a man for the sake of a fiction film, Pudovkin breaks the scene into "flashes," or a series of shots of brief duration, composed of close-ups of the face of the startled chauffeur, the face of the victim opening his mouth, the braking wheels of the car, etc. Sugiyama sees these as a mere escape from reality, and decidedly critiques the commonplace attitude that tends to treat montage as the foundation of filmmaking: That Pudovkin was unable to achieve a satisfactory result by plainly filming the explosion of dynamite is not a definitive phenomenon applicable to all cases. The foundation [of filmmaking] should be grounded in an intention to record an actual explosion. It would be better if one could plainly film a real huge explosion. There is no reason to escape from it and rely instead on creation by montage. Because it was impossible to film a real scene of a man killed by a car accident, Pudovkin created an editing technique based on flash cuttings. In any case, these are nothing but escapist tactics called in to fulfill a need.419
417 See Vsevolod Pudovkin, Eiga kantoku to kyakuhonron [On Film Director and Film Scripts, translation of Film Technique ], trans. Sasaki Norio (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1930).

Vsevolod Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, rev. ed., trans, and ed. Ivor Montagu (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 95.
419

418

Sugiyama, Eiga hydronshu, 9-10.

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In the history of Japanese film theory, Sugiyama was not the first to challenge the premise of montage theory as the foundation of filmmaking. For instance, his Eiga shudart fellow Sawamura Tsutomu also tackled with the same issue in a 1936 essay "Eiga no hyogen" (Expression in Film). Writing after the coming of sound, Sawamura criticized montage theory for its ineffectiveness as a "method for the direct description of thought" (shiso no chokusetsuteki jojutsu shudan).420 But as a supporter of the scenario literature movement, he simply stressed the superiority of word over image, suggesting a more extensive use of characters as a mouthpiece for the filmmaker or scriptwriter. In contrast, Sugiyama's critique was more subtle and profound, as it was based on his own viewing experience. Most problematic to him was that montage obstructs the "physical reflection of reality," the property of the cinematic apparatus on which he thought all kinds of film practice should be established. Sugiyama then went on to single out two techniques that could enhance the reality-effect of the film image. The first is the long take, which, as I have argued elsewhere, became dominant among Japanese filmmakers during the late 1930s and 1940s, frequently used by directors like Mizoguchi Kenji and Uchida Tomu.421 Preceding postwar film semioticians like Christian Metz,422 Sugiyama explained his preference of the long take over montage in sound films by using a metaphor of sentence composition: "The Kuleshov school's idea of treating a shot as a word has already been proven false by the fact that the shot in today's films begins to contain rich meanings

4-0

Sawamura Tsutomu. "Eiga no hyogen," in Eiga no hyogen (Tokyo: Suga Shoten, 1942), 226.

421 For instance, Uchida made frequent use of long takes in his 1939 masterpiece. According to my own measurement, the average shot length in the first three scenes of the film was thirty-two second, with the longest lasting for eighty-eight seconds. See my, "TokT riarizumu e no michi," 230.

For his argument on the shot as a sentence, see Christian Metz, "The Cinema: Language or Language System?" in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 31-91.

422

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comparable with a short story and no longer with a word."423 With this recent proliferation of the long take, he continues, the cut to the next shot should happen only when the first shot reaches its limit in holding as much temporal and semantic tension as possible, as if to receive what is about to overflow from the previous shot.424 Equally important to Sugiyama's counterargument to montage theory is what he called the "shot-in-depth" (okuyuki no aru gamen) technique,425 an equivalent of the technique widely known today as deep focus through Orson Wells's 1941 film Citizen Kane. Remember that Sugiyama was writing in the same year as Citizen Kane was released in the United States, and that the film was not officially released in Japan until the 1960s due to the war against the Allies. Nevertheless, Sugiyama was still able to recognize the advent of this particular technique through his viewing of both foreign and domestic films. Not only did he refer to Jean Renoir's Les bas-fonds (The Lower Depths, 1936) as a prime example that "puts characters and dramatic interrelationships in both fore- and back-grounds" of a single short,426 he also contended that the Japanese director Yamanaka Sadao had frequently used the same technique since his debut in 1932, probably under the influence of Hiroshige's famous wood-block prints
427

For Sugiyama,

the shot-in-depth technique has two advantages over montage: first, it allows the film image to enhance its reality-effect by developing actions taking place within the frame of a single shot rather than between different shots; second, it is capable of fulfilling our desire to "see as many things as possible at one and same time" and thereby makes the
423 424 425 426 427

Sugiyama, Eiga hyoronshu, 9. Ibid., 17-18. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 124. Ibid.

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film experience phenomenologically closer to the way we perceive things and events in
n o

our everyday life. Given these remarks, one could not fail to find a striking similarity between Sugiyama and Andre Bazin in their theoretical approach to perceptional realism in the film experience. Perhaps a "similarity" is too weak here, as I had a sense of deja vu when I read Sugiyama"s text for the first time due to my previous knowledge about Bazin's film theory. In his luminous writings collected in his posthumous four-volume Qu 'est-ce que le cinema (1958-1962), Bazin developed metaphors and concepts similar to Sugiyma's. Bazin argued that the realism of the film image is inherently grounded in its ontological, photo-chemical bond to physical reality;429 a frame in cinema is by nature "centrifugal" and not "centripetal" as in painting;430 montage is no longer the foundation of filmmaking in the sound era and it must be prohibited especially when it obstructs the viewer's sense of the "homogeneity of space";431 and as alternatives to montage, he also celebrated filmmakers who made innovative use of the long take and the so-called "depth of field" shooting, ranging from Renoir, Welles, to the Italian neorealists.432 Like Sugiyama, moreover, Bazin always "begins with the most particular facts available, the film before his eyes, and through a process of logical and imaginative reflection, he arrives at a general theory,"433 as Dudley Andrew has noted.

428 429 430 4.1 4.2 433

Ibid., 17. Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," 9-16. Andre Bazin, "Theater and CinemaPart Two," in What is Cinema? 1:95-124. Andre Bazin, "The Virtues and Limitation of Montage," in What is Cinema? 1:41-52. Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," in What is Cinema? 1:23-40. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories, 136.

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Implied in Sugiyama and Bazin's mutual interest in describing the peculiarity of "the film before his eyes" is their intellectual indebtedness to phenomenology. Born in 1918, four years after Sugiyama, Bazin and his film theory, as discussed by Andrew and others, were profoundly imbued with the Bergsonian heritage in French thought as well as with the bourgeoning existential phenomenology posed by figures like Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.434 It comes then as no surprise that Bazin was one of the central players in the formation of the "phenomenologist" camp in 1940s and 1950s France, which remained highly influential until the emergence of semiological or structuralist approaches in the 1960s.435 Writing in wartime Japan, Sugiyama had no access to this postwar development. However, he was still able to elaborate his phenomenological approach through his reading of Bergson, who had been popular among Japanese intellectuals since the 1910s. Indeed, in one of the essays collected in Eiga hydronshu, Sugiyama referred to the death of this great French philosopher in 1941, and through his own interpretation, he even pointed to the possibility of applying the Bergsonian notion of "duration" to the vital aspect of the film experience.436 It is thus no exaggeration to say that Sugiyama's film theory, however temporally and geographically detached, developed in full synchronicity with its French counterparts, sharing nearly identical motivations, aesthetic sensibilities, and critical vocabularies. This, in turn, explains why in the postwar period Bazin and his colleagues at Cahiers du cinema favored Mizoguchi Kenji over other Japanese filmmakers. Sato Tadao, in his book on the history of Japanese film theory, argues that Sugiyama was one of the few critics in

434 435 436

See, for instance, Dudley Andrew, Andre Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Andrew, "The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology," 628-631. Sugiyama, Eiga hydronshu, 32-42.

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wartime Japan who strove to provide a theoretical account for Mizoguchi's aesthetic experiments with the long take in films like Zangiku monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, 1939).437 If this is the case, it can be said that what Cahiers critics discovered in Mizoguchi's later work was not a mysterious master from the Orient devoting himself to a visualization of indigenous culture of his country, but a shrewd and cognizant filmmaker working on the same premise of phenomenological realism. Despite these synchronicities, it is still necessary to specify the substantial difference between Sugiyama and Bazin. Most notably, Sugiyama differs from Bazin in his lack of knowledge about existentialism as well as in his overreliance on the traditional, human-centered notion of art. Unlike Bazin, Sugiyama did not see cinema's aesthetic values as stemming directly from its mechanical capacity to capture both the necessary and the contingent in reality without making any artificial or secondary judgments. Rather, he strongly believed that in order for film to be an art, it must always be under the control of human vision. As a result, his theory tended to exclude any unnecessary ambiguity from the film image for the sake of the totality of an artwork.438 Sugiyama's emphasis on human vision, however, should not be read as a return to the formalist discourse. Where the formalists privileged the filmmaker's capacity to impose a new meaning on the world through montage and other devices, Sugiyama set filmmakers a different task of uncovering the true meaning of the world through artistic intuition. To him, filmmakers, as long as engaging in the production of art, should work to explore the ways through which to directly reach the essence of the "things themselves," the essence that cannot be reduced to the laws of logic and reason. Such an idealistic, almost
417 418

Sato, Nihon eiga rironshi, 130-152. Sugiyama, Eiga hybronshu, 14-15.

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transcendent notions of art and artist must come from Sugiyama's own creative activity as a poet. But how is it possible to get such a direct, intuitive experience of the world in filmmaking, given its perpetual negotiation with the mediation of the camera's nonhuman gaze? Sugiyama tried to answer this by drawing upon the Bergsonian notion of intuition. To begin with, he asserts that science and art have developed two different ways of seeing the truths of the world. The former, generally called the "objective" or "rational" gaze, looks at things from the outside so that one can grasp the substance of the object (matter) in question on the level of concrete and tangible data such as shape, color, materiality, and other physical features. The latter is what one could call the "subjective" or "intuitive" gaze, which aims to directly seize the essence of things from inside, by entering into or becoming part of them through sympathy.439 Sugiyama then goes on to apply these opposite gazes to explain the substantial difference between the primary functions of the eye of the camera and that of human beings: The eye of the camera is the first gaze. It is the purification of this objective gaze with its single perspective, rectangular frames, and monotonous vision. There is no other way than this to grasp the shape of things. But even if the camera presents us with different and multiple perspectives, it is still unable to reach the essence of the things themselves. As a spectator, however, I am able to feel the life of the things already captured on the screen by the lens. These things still lack color, smell, and the sense of touch, but I can freely know them by intuition.440 Insofar as he is speaking about his own viewing experience as a spectator, Sugiyama's stance here is hardly different from that of the French phenomenologists. Nevertheless, the problem is that he quickly moves on to exploit this alleged supremacy of human vision as a benchmark to judge each film's artistic values: "Although the foundation of
439 440

Sugiyama, Eiga hydronshu, 27-29. Ibid., 29.

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film art should be located in the lens, any footage filmed without human intervention cannot be a film. Realistic aspects of the film do not immediately yield artistic values."441 Sugiyama admits that in the creation of the film image, both human (artistic) and nonhuman (scientific) visions coexist, but in order for film to be an art, the former must always have power over the latter; only when film is organized in a way compatible with how our naked and intuitive eye works, can it transform itself into a lived experience. Sugiyama's insistence on the dominance of human vision is problematic for at least two reasons. First, despite his emphasis on active human involvement, he seldom considers the ideological aspects of the film language and techniques by which filmmakers express his or her artistic vision. In Sugiyama's model, the communication between an auteur and an audience becomes either purely esoteric ("When the author grasps a totality [the integrated life] based on his naked eye, the moving image begins to harmonize with the viewer's mental picture and thereby creates an artistic moment that unifies matter and mind"442) or absolutely deterministic ("However spontaneous they seem, human characters, wind, and props appearing on the screen all move and develop according to the director's rules."443) What is missing here is not only the fact that making films requires a series of collaborations among those working in different sectors in the studio; it also neglects the basic assumption that meanings in the moving images are mostly conveyed through a "system of signs" that, like a language, is shared both by producers and consumers of film texts.444 It should be noted, however, that Sugiyama's

441 442 443 444

Ibid. 12. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 11. See Metz, "The Cinema: Language or Language System?"

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ignorance of the system (film language) is a common denominator of phenomenologists. As Andrew reminds us, "even Merleau-Ponty, despite his vast knowledge of linguistics, emphasized the language event or 'gesture of the mind' that transcends the language system which conveys it."445 Yet I argue that this phenomenological attitude proves effective only when we apply it to describe our psychological reactions to what we see and hear on the screen. Otherwise, one would simply end up mistaking what Bazin called the "genius of the system" in classical filmmaking for that of individual filmmakers446 Another and more significant problem is that Sugiyama deliberately avoided taking into account the potential of cinema to be an "eyewitness" of his times, actually functioning in a particular social and historical setting like wartime Japan. This may seem natural because the aim of his writings was not to comment on film culture in general but to clarify the essence of what he considered to be film art. But the problem is that Sugiyama always put more emphasis on "art" than on "film," deliberately removing from view all other possibilities that film could perform as a modern medium. Moreover, as a student of aesthetics, he devoted himself to proving the legitimacy of film as an art form, rather than rewriting the old conception and practice of art in light of cinema's own properties. It is thus not surprising that in his book Sugiyama rarely talked about the rise of non-fiction genres in Japanese cinema after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. And even when he did, his focus was strictly restricted to whether or not producers of news films and documentaries "perceived life with their own eyes."447 In any case,

445 446

Andrew, The Major Film Theories, 250.

Andre Bazin, "La Politique des auteurs," Cahiers du cinema 70 (1957), cited in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 4.
447

Sugiyama, 64.

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Sugiyama's film theory is marked by its tendency to reduce the film experience to a closed and imaginary communication between an ideal filmmaker and an ideal spectator. By limiting his writings to the transcendental experience of art, Sugiyama implicitly redefined film as a window that never opens outward, a window that protects him from facing the brute reality of wartime Japan. In his commentary on the 2003 reprint of Eiga hydronshu, the film historian Tanaka Masasumi also points out the ambivalence of Sugiyama's film theory. While it is easy to criticize Sugiyama for his romanticist, "art for art's sake" attitude toward the film experience, we should acknowledge that he was writing in a specific cultural milieu where all liberal or leftist discourses had already been suppressed. Read in this particular context, his decision to exclude all external factors constituting what we normally call "film culture" appears as both a realistic and strategic choice to keep writing about cinema without overtly supporting the government's propagandistic use of the medium. For this reason, Tanaka stresses, "Sugiyama's film theory was always detached from the 'ultra-nationalistic' emphasis given to terms like nation-state, ethnicity, and tradition."448 And if, as we have seen, Sugiyama's writing now serves as a critical point of reference for the international development of phenomenological film theory from the 1940s onward, it is precisely because of his inclination toward the issues "essential" and "universal" to the film experience. This is, however, not to say that all film theorists interested in phenomenology ought to limit their argument to transcendental values of film art, following Sugiyama's step. It is still possible for them to "describe" the more essential functions of cinema by looking at how it mediates between the spectator and the

448

Tanaka Masasumi, "Eiga hydronka to shite no Sugiyama Heiichi," 341.

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world. This is exactly what Nagae Michitaro pursued in his 1942 book Eiga, hydgen, keisei, another fascinating example of phenomenological film theory in early 1940s Japan.

Nagae Michitaro: The Reciprocal Transformation of Film and Reality Of the Japanese film theorists discussed in this study, Nagae Michitaro (19051984) is perhaps the least known but certainly the most innovative. When he published his first and only monograph in 1942, Nagae was by no means alone in his attempt to clarify the true potential of cinema. Yet while many of his contemporaries ended up talking about either the future of film art or the increasing significance of non-fiction genres under the wartime regime, he aimed to bring the debates back to the most fundamental yet hardly solved question: What is cinema? (eiga to wa ittai nan de aru no ka).44i> More peculiar than his rigorous resolution to start all over again was the very answer he gave to this frequently asked question. Nagae saw the potential of cinema lie in its ability to capture a vital and reciprocal relationship between human beings and the world in motion. More specifically, he redefined film as a medium most suitable for presenting the duration of time, thereby putting more emphasis on the viewers' direct experience of the moving images project on the screen than on the continual but immobile frames inscribed on the filmstrip. In short, Nagae's philosophical articulation of the film experience shows an unmistakable affinity with the legacy of Bergson's philosophy in film theory, particularly evident in the work of French thinkers such as Jean Epstein, Andre Bazin, and Gilles Deleuze.

449

Nagae, Eiga, hydgen, keisei, 1.

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Despite its singularity and thoughtfulness, Nagae's Eiga, hydgen, keisei has earned little, if any, critical attentions from both its contemporary readers and film historians.450 This is in part because the book was originally published by a local publishing house based in Kyotothereafter, it remained out of print for more than sixty years, until its reprint finally became available in 2003. But the more plausible reason for this neglect is Nagae's own decision to live in the margin of the Japanese cinema world. Instead of writing film reviews on a regular basis or making comments on the latest trends in domestic film practice, Nagae, from the beginning, preferred to develop his own system of thought by shutting himself off from the hustle and bustle of the world around him. Indeed, he spent more than three years to complete his first monograph, and despite its publication in 1942, the book rarely touches upon issues relating to Japanese militarism and the on-going wars against China and the Allies. Such a transcendent attitude was no doubt out of synch with his times. And perhaps knowing this, Nagae gradually stepped aside from the field of film criticism after the war and decided instead to live the rest of his life as an obscure poet.451 Consequently, virtually no one except his close friends remembered his solitary attempt to answer the question "What is cinema?" which he made amid the national craze about Japan's expansion in Asia and beyond.452 In

4,0 For instance, Sato mentions Nagae in his book on the history of Japanese film theory, but it is only once and just in passing. See his Nihon eiga rironshi, 8.

Besides writing poetry, Nagae worked as a full-time staff member at Eirin, the industry's film rating board. For his biographical information, see Makino Mamoru, "Nagae Michitaro eiga riron kenkyu shoryo," in Nagae, Eiga, hydgen, keisei, repr., 335-337; Shika jinmei jiten, rev. and 2 nd ed. (Tokyo: Nichigai Asoshietsu, 2002), 489-490. Recently, Aaron Gerow gave a presentation on Nagae's film theory, entitled "The Loneliness of the Leftist Theorist: Nagae Michitaro and the Cinematic Everyday" at the 2011 AAS-ICAS Joint Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. I thank him for sharing his manuscript. In 2010,1 also gave a talk on Nagae at the XVI International Film Studies Conference in Udine, Italy. My manuscript is now available under the title "Experiencing the World through Cinema: Nagae Michitaro and the Bergsonian Approach to Film in Wartime Japan," in Datl "inizio, alia fine: Teorie del cinema in prospettiva, eds. Francesco Casetti, Jane Gains, Valentina Re (Udine: Forum Editrice Universitaria Udinese, 2010), 571-576.
452

451

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an attempt to remedy this long and undeserved neglect, I begin by briefly illustrating Nagae's earlier activities up to 1942 and then move on to the details of his film theory. Born in 1905, Nagae was a graduate of Kyoto Imperial University where he studied literature. After graduation, he launched the film magazine Eiga geijutsu (Film Art) with his college friend Shimizu Hikaru. By that time Shimizu had already established his fame as a specialist of montage theory and machine aesthetics, whereas Nagae was said to be involved with the then-illegal Japanese Communist Party and was once arrested for organizing people working at film studios in Kyoto. Given Shimizu and Nagae's mutual interest in the arts and politics of the Soviet Union, it is no coincident that the magazine was filled with introductions to the revolutionary work of Russian filmmakers, including Nagae's own translation of Vertov's writing entitled "Kino-ki to sono riron" (The Kino-Eye and Its Theory).453 Though circulated only in and around the Kyoto area, this small piece soon led him to get acquainted with Nakai Masakazu, an alumnus of the same college and another enthusiastic devotee of Vertov. This seemingly natural encounter between the two should not be overlooked. Beyond their common strategies to use "theory" as a means to implicitly disseminate their leftist beliefs among the readers, Nakai's observation of the dual nature of the cinematic gaze projective/reflective, transitive/intransitive, human/non-humanhad a decisive impact on Nagae's speculations about the singularity of the film experience. In 1933, Nagae, still based in Kyoto and working as a "planner" (kikaku) at Shochiku's Shimokamo studio, became a coterie member of Eiga hydron (Film

Makino, "Nagae Michitaro," 335. Unfortunately, I was not able to access this rare copy of Eiga geijutsu, so I cannot specify here which essay by Vertov Nagae actually translated.

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Criticism), a prestigious theory-oriented film journal published since 1926.454 Like Sugiyama, Nagae came to the world of film criticism as an opponent of the boom in literary adaptation of the mid-1930s. He then attacked those who one-sidedly imposed on cinema the laws taken from outside (literature) without making effort to develop a theory from what they actually saw on the screen. The main target of Nagae's refutation was Murayama Tomoyoshi, who, in 1934, wrote a provocative essay titled "Eiga no genkaisei" (The Limits of Cinema).455 Throughout the 1920s, Murayama played the central role in advancing both avant-garde and proletarian art movements, showing a fair amount of interest in cinema. In this essay, however, Murayama totally dismissed the possibility of cinema ranking with other art forms because of its persistent dependence on visual elements, even after the coming of sound. "In this world," says Murayama, "there is a truth that can never be represented with visual expression. The more it touches upon a profound and inner truth, the further it goes beyond the reach of visual methods."456 As Nagae rightly interpreted, what Murayama stressed here was the superiority of the word over the image as a medium to express some truths induced through logic and reason.457 In other words, Murayama was simply repeating the age-old rejection of film's artistic values posed by traditional aestheticians, who relentlessly attacked the mechanical aspect of the photographic image.

454 455

See, "Eiga hihyoka oyobi kenkyuka retsuden," Eiga hydron 16.2 (February, 1934): 163.

Murayama Tomoyoshi, "Eiga no genkaisei," Kinema junpd 507 (June 1, 1934): 67-68. Not surprisingly, Sugiyama also made a counterargument against this essay. See his "Murayama-shi no 'eiga no genkaisei' kara," Kinema junpd 509 (June 21, 1934): 66-67.
456

Murayama, "Eiga no genkaisei," 67.

457 Nagae Michitaro, "Kino: Dai-issho: Murayama Tomoyoshi 'Eiga no genkaisei' o kien to shite," Eiga hydron 16.9 (September 1934): 66.

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Nagae agreed with Murayama that film is a form of expression based exclusively on visual perception, but he did so only to positively expand on this basic premise. In order to orient himself, Nagae referred to Bela Balazs's Visible Man (1924) as his theoretical standpoint. As is widely known, in this book Balazs declared that the emergence of cinema and its rapid development into a mass entertainment tellingly indicates the historical shift from the era of-"a legible spirit" to that of "a visual sprit," with the birth of "the first international language" consisting of "gestures and facial expressions."458 Though fully acknowledging that the advent of sound cinema would lead to the collapse of such a Utopian notion of the cinematic Babel, Nagae still read Balazs's concept of the "visible man" as explaining the core element of the film experience. In watching films, says Nagae, viewers are encouraged to interpret a direct expression of the "things themselves" without the aid of verbal language. He then goes on to elucidate the substantial difference between verbal expression and cinematic expression, stressing the promising but unexplored potential of the latter: What film has tried to do so far is not to make an expression out of written sentences but to directly express something that exists before language. The task of language is to signify this something, to translate it into words as signs based on certain rules. It is thus unlikely that words can become a direct expression of vague and unstable feelings in mind, or of some ideas floating inside this emotional ambience. If someone says that "literature can directly delve into these things themselves," we must declare that film, especially film art, has been offering us better and more direct expressions of them with a new language that is no longer a language [of words].459 Insensitive to such a fundamental difference in verbal and cinematic signification, Murayamaand, by extension, anyone blindly insisting on the integration of literature

458 459

Bela Balazs, Beta Balazs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Sprit of Film, 14. Nagae, "Kino: Dai-issho," 67.

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and filmappeared as "an illiterate who can only read the old language."460 On the other hand, Nagae set himself a task of grappling with the "non-linguistic language" (kotoba de wa nai kotoba) at work in cinema in order to clarify its perceptional, communicative, and semiological functioning. At first glance, Nagae's stance seems akin to that of film semioticians in the postwar era. But his main concern was less to explain actual codes and norms constituting the cinema's language-like signification system than to reflect on the true meaning of its emergence and development in the twentieth century. In this regard, Nagae was still a phenomenologist rather than structuralist. Why, then, did it matter to him that cinema has its own form of expression and communication? Interestingly, Nagae answered this by channeling his argument to the ongoing debates over cinematic realism. According to Nagae, there are at least three different ways to deal with this topic: the first is to argue about what is reflected on the screen, focusing on the camera's ability to provide a truthful image of reality; the second is to foreground the creative intention of filmmakers by looking at how they articulate issues culled from the real world.461 To put these into Vivian Sobchack's formula that I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, they correspond respectively to the "realist" and "formalist" camps with their contrasting emphases on the "perceptive" and "expressive" nature of the film medium. The third approach, which Nagae adopts as his method, investigates "the relationship between the real and its expression" from the perspective of the viewer.462 That is, it seeks the true condition of the historical reality in

460 461 462

Ibid. Nagae Michitaro, "Hyogen no ronri: Dai-issho," Eiga hyoron 18.7 (July 1936): 30. Ibid., 32.

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which he lives by directly observing actual phenomena occurring in the realm of artistic perception and expression as such. In Nagae's view, one such phenomenon is the increasing separation between language and the human mind, one that is most clearly seen in the work of modernist writers like Yokomitsu Riichi. However artificial or unrealistic it may seem, Yokomitsu's modernist fiction should not be read in terms of the simple realist/anti-realist divide. Rather, as Nagae stresses, it should be read as the writer's serious attempt to create a new language that could express his own perceptual experience of everyday life more faithfully than the seemingly objective, transparent language that was developed since the Meiji period by the hands of Japanese Naturalists. Similarly, the new form of nonverbal expression developed in and by cinema appears to Nagae as another, far more significant, evidence of an increasing distrust of the alleged omnipotence of verbal language as a device to mediate between human beings and the world. Thus, for Nagae, to address the logic of cinematic expression means to clarify the actual condition of the perceptual reality of his times. He writes: I don't say that this phenomenon in literature can be applicable to cinema as it is. In some cases, the situation might be opposite. If we are to be honest, we must (?) call to mind several moments when we were at a loss to confront a cinematic expression that was irreconcilable with the logic of thinking. Like verbal expression, cinematic expression must have its own rhetoric. But what is implied in our experience of bewilderment is that the logic (rhetoric) of cinematic expression contains something new, something that differs from the logic of our conventional way of thinkingthat is, the logic of language.463 What is at stake in this statement is that "the situation might be opposite" in the case of cinema. While literary expression functions as a record of the ongoing struggles of human writers, cinematic expression appears before humans as an embodiment of the

4W

Ibid.

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new logic of the twentieth century. In other words, in the case of cinematic expression it is not filmmakers but the world itself that uses cinema as its own expression. This is how Nagae frames his speculation about the actual functioning of cinematic expression within the discourse of realism. For Nagae, again, most crucial is neither the photographic nature of the medium nor the creative intervention of filmmakers, but cinema's ability to let the viewers "live" the world it presents on the screen according to its own logic. Toward the end of the 1930s, Nagae became ill for some time, and the number of his contributions to Eiga hydron drastically decreased. The period of recuperation that followed, however, gave him ample time to slowly but painstakingly develop his theory into a book manuscript. Published in September 1942, Nagae's first and last monograph Eiga, hydgen, keisei seems to stand alone as "a flower that bloomed out of season"464 for its single-mindedness and detachment from worldly concerns. Unlike most of the filmrelated books published during this period, Nagae's was a kakioroshi, composed of previously unpublished essays systematically structured around the central issue of cinematic expression. Moreover, it rarely makes references to actual film texts or their reviews made by contemporaries; it reflects the author's resolution to elucidate the essence (honshitsu) of cinema through his own experience and critical reflection on it. As declared in its preface, the book only addresses "the fact that cinema is nothing other than cinema" (eiga wa mazu eiga de aru jijitsu), and in order to keep focused, Nagae deliberately set himself apart from ongoing debates on "film as art" or "film as a means of mass enlightenment." 465 Certainly, Nagae was an "essentialist" in motivation, but his

1 borrowed this expression from Karatani Kojin's description of Natsume Soseki's 1907 book Bitngakuron (Theory of Literature). See his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans, and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 11.
465

464

Nagae, Eiga, hydgen, keisei, ii.

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theory was far from deterministic because it defined film as a medium of duration, destined to the endless process of becoming. Nagae begins his argument by criticizing nearly all the major film theorists before himincluding Miinsterberg, Arnheim, and Balazsfor their common attempts to define film as an art form.466 The problem of this dominant approach, he says, is its tendency to limit our scope to one aspect of the medium before our eyes, judging its essence with standards borrowed from outside. Similarly, it is also misleading to foreground the medium's social or political functions alone because what is needed is a standpoint from which to describe the full potential of cinema in its totality. In order to consider cinema as "nothing other than cinema," Nagae goes on to define it as a genuine form of expression comparable with more basic, essential tools for communication such as sign, sound, and drawing. For this reason, Nagae places the origin of cinema not in the late nineteenth century when people like Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Thomas Edison experimented with proto-cinematographic devices, but, surprisingly, in the Paleolithic era when early people living in Altamira first attempted to capture and preserve the shape and movement of wild animals in the form of cave painting.467 Appearing as the latest invention in this genealogy of the human desire for visual reproduction, cinema distinguishes itself from all preceding means and forms of expression for two reasons: the camera's mechanical gaze and its capacity to represent time.468 Consequently, the central concern of Nagae's inquiry is to clarify how the effects and functioning of these features constitute the singularity of cinematic expression.

466 467 468

Ibid., 8-9. Ibid., 9-14. Ibid., 24-29.

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Given his initial interest in Vertov, it is not surprising that Nagae draws on the concept of "kino-eye" to inaugurate his discussion about the camera's mechanical gaze. The merit of Vertov's theory, says Nagae, lies in its full recognition of the independent existenceor the "being"of the camera as a machine. As vividly manifested in Man with a Movie Camera, the eye of the camera ("kino-eye") is by no means identical with that of human beings; it has its own "will" to look at the world more accurately than our imperfect way of seeing. Based on this well-known definition, Nagae provides his own account for cinema's revelatory capacity: It would be unnecessary to repeat here how the eye of the camera in photography and film has made possible our new discovery of the world.... This revelation used to be the property of the "eye of art." But what opens our eyes today is not the human eye but the eye of that new being. At stake in the eye of art was how it could symbolize nature, or in some sense, how it could get away from reality. On the contrary, the task of this new eye is to reconcile us with reality, to bring our i 1 469 eyes back to nature once again. In Nagae's view, expression should always be differentiated from perception with its addition of a "meaning" to the things perceived. The new visibility of the world brought by cinema's revelatory capacity is thus not an example but the precondition of cinematic expression; in order for it to be an expression, it always requires the active participation of the viewersincluding filmmakers checking their footagewho find some meanings in there by looking back at what the camera shows them on the screen, or by changing the trajectory of the movie image from reflection (passive "utsusu") to projection (active "utsusu").470 Unlike Sugiyama, Nagae does not prioritize the superiority of human vision. More essential to him is the fact that the cinematic apparatus always allows for the

469 470

Nagae, Eiga, hyogen, keisei, 126-127.

Here, Nagae refers to Nakai Masakazu's 1934 essay "Utsusu" (Reflect/Project). As we have seen in the previous chapter, in this essay Nakai also reflected upon the multiple meanings of the verb "utsusu" in relation to the dualpassive/activefunction of the cinematic apparatus.

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coexistence of two different eyes, thereby anticipating the exchange and reversibility between subject and object, perception and expression, and human and non-human visions. Or as Nagae himself describes, "Just as cinema become us, we must become cinema."471 Nagae expands on this collaboration by exploring the actual condition in which these two different visions meet and work together. The question he asks at this point is, "What constitutes cinema as a concrete thing?" or more simply, "Where is cinema?" As expected, his answer is neither materialistic (the filmstrip) nor idealistic (the mind of the filmmaker). Instead, he locates cinema in the virtual yet intimate perceptual relationship we as the spectator have with the moving images appearing on the screen by virtue of the projector.472 Here, Nagae speaks of the dissolution of strict spatial relations in the experience of the moving image. For one, by using multiple point-of-view shots or by editing shots filmed in different places at different times, film is able to create a purely imaginative space on the level of narrative that is no longer confined to the laws of physical reality. At the same time, it can also diminish, if not completely eliminate, the mental distance between the spectators and the screen. On the material level, says Nagae, the screen exists before us as a white rectangular plane, as in the case of a canvas for painting. In order for it to play its given role, however, the screen has to deny its own material existence, or "to stop being the screen" as soon as the moving images begin to be projected on its surface
473

The disappearance of the screen in the darkness of the

movie theater does not only help us indulge in the world being unfolded before our eyes,

471 472 473

Nagae, 149. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 144.

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it also helps cinema break with the tradition of the plastic arts (zokei geijutsu) whose autonomy has always been premised on the ontological stability of its medium, or on a clear-cut division between the subject seeing and the object being seen. Freed from its material and spatial constraints, cinema presents itself as an amorphous, non-ontological being, destined to put in the state of constant flux the things it reflects and projects.474 What, then, do we share with cinema by using the screen as a meeting point? Nagae's answer is both short and cogent: time. And it is here that Nagae discloses his reliance on Bergsonian terminology, although throughout the book he makes no direct reference to Bergson himself. In some sense, it is important to keep this silence in mind because Bergson himself adamantly refused to see film as an adequate medium for representing time. For Bergson, time is always an indivisible whole or a "succession without distinction" that seamlessly connects the past with the present and the future. But because what cinema shows us is no more than an illusion of movement created through the rapid succession of frozen frames, he coined the term "cinematographic quality" to designate our inaccurate understanding of the true nature of duration
475

Despite

Bergson's own denial, the Bergsonian notion of "time as a duration" had an enduring impact on the historical development of film theory, especially on those who strove to explain cinema's potentiality in light of the viewers' perceptual experience of the time and movement rendered on the screen.476 One such theorist is Jean Epstein. In an essay

474 475

Ibid., 161-170.

My understanding of the Bergsonian notion of duration and its application to the moving image derives from Mary Ann Doane, "Zeno's Paradox: The Emergence of Cinema tic Time" in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 172-205; Malcolm Turvey, "The Revelationist Tradition: Critique," in Doubting Vision, 49-78; and lan Aitken, Realist Film Theory and Cinema, 172-177. See, for instance, Andre Bazin, "A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery," in Bazin at Work: Major Essay and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, ed., Bert Cardullo (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 211-220, and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I and2.
476

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published in 1935, Epstein defined film as a medium able to complement "man's physiological inability to master the notion of space-time" precisely because "the specific quality of this new projected world is to make another perspective of matter evident, that of time."477 Likewise, Nagae highlights the ability of film to provide visual recordings of fleeting moments. In writing about The Power of Plants, the UFA film already discussed in the previous chapter with regard to Nakai Masakazu, he favorably states that the film succeeded in "visualizing time itself' with its innovative use of time-lapse photography.478 However, what interests Nagae is less the epistemological value of this revelation process than the virtue of experiencing the new temporality brought forward by the camera's mechanical gaze. In order to address this, Nagae, like Sugiyama, turns to "intuition," another key concept of Bergson's philosophy. As I have mentioned earlier, intuition is an absolute or immediate way of reaching the "things themselves" by entering into or becoming part of them. By capturing an object without losing or freezing its vital movements, film allows viewers to directly understand the life of the "other" as their own. According to Nagae's own description, cinematic intuition functions like this: Filmed in the continual movement of time, the shots must be considered in the form of the continuity.... Each time it is projected on the screen, the picture inscribed on the filmstrip as a mold always comes into being as the moving image of the present. This is to say, the moving image can only exist here and now.... And if we perceive a flower depicted in film as more characteristic and beautiful than the one we find in nature, it is precisely because there is no difference between the time lived by the moving image and the time lived by our visual experience.... By using our visual experience as mediation, that filmed flower begins to have an intimate relationship with us. At this moment, a new life is born

Jean Epstein, "Photogenic and the Imponderable" (1935) in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, vol. 2, 1929-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 189.
478

477

Nagae, Eiga, hydgen, keisei, 265.

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between the flower and us. We can even say that the flower is living inside us in 479 its true sense. Given this powerful statement, it is no exaggeration to say that Nagae was more "Bergsonian" than his Western counterparts writing around the same time. Where others end up celebrating the film medium's mechanical capacity to capture time as it flows, Nagae candidly asserts that the duration of time as a vital force of life can never be grasped without the spectator's perceptual capturing of filmed time as his or her own lived experience. Nagae then goes on apply the same logic of cinematic intuition to reflect on the actual relationship between the spectator and the world mediated through the film experience. It is through this topic that we can think of Nagae's film theory in relation to the issue of cinematic realism. But again, Nagae's stance here shows a stark contrast with both the "realist" and "formalist" camps for his indifference towards both the indexicality of the photographic image or the creative intervention of filmmakers as the foundation of cinematic realism. The problem with these camps, if we read it from Nagae's formula, lies in their tendency to reduce the potential of cinema to its passive state alone. That is, they tend to use cinema only as a device to reflect the things "out there," whether it be the brute reality of the external world or the creative mind of filmmakers. For Nagae, the merit of cinema is found nowhere other than in its ability to allow spectators to experience things "from within" by directly connecting human beings and the world through its mediation. This is, however, not to say that cinema provides a carbon-copy or simulacra of the world in which we the viewers can indulge; rather, it brings reality back to us by separating it from its seemingly dormant state.

479

Ibid., 132-134.

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The logic Nagae employs here is therefore both dialectic and self-reflective. Just as time became visible and accessible by dividing its indivisible whole into the rapid succession of still frames, so the world itself becomes visible and accessible by detaching it from its normal status, by presenting it in the form of expression developed in and by cinema.480 At the same time, remember that we human beings are an indispensable element of the world that cinema uses as its expression. Thus to look at the expressive world of cinema is to look back at ourselves from cinema's own perspective. In watching cinema, we see ourselves seeing, experience ourselves experiencing. This communal and dialectic self-reflection is the key to Nagae's phenomenological notion of cinematic realism. He contends: With a new reality that entails natural beings inside it, the world expressed by cinema addresses our selves. [In the movie theater] we first become an emptied self because our viewing environment detaches ourselves from the real world; but by virtue of this new reality, we can retrieve our standpoint and thereby return to a new self.... Through the movement of the other, the self revitalizes itself as an active player, becoming simultaneously other-moving and self-moving.481 Nagae's last task is to clarify what kind of new reality we could envision by becoming part of the world expressed by cinema. In order to address this, Nagae digs further into the issue cinema and time. According to him, there are at least four different types of time involved in the film medium: diegetic time, running time, expressive time, and environmental time.482 While the first two seems self-evident, the latter two might require a brief explanation. Expressive time refers to the transition or compression of time represented on the screen through techniques such as wipe, dissolve, flashback, fastand slow-motion, and so on. Environmental time means the historical moment in which
480 481 482

Ibid., 161-170. Ibid., 278-279. Ibid., 260-261.

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each film is situated and encompasses the external relationship of cinema with the real world that surrounds it. Of these cinematic times, I draw attention to environmental time because it helps us not only distinguish Nagae's embodied vision of phenomenology from Sugiyama's transcendental vision, but also historicize Nagae's film theory in its own cultural and discursive contexts. Repeatedly, Nagae maintains that the moving image exists only here and now, however before it might have actually been filmed. Thus, whenever it is projected on the screen, each film acquires a new life as though it lives the eternal present, and this is part of the reason that we assume everything in cinema is alive. Nevertheless, Nagae is also aware of the fact that individual films easily get obsolete, as we feel a sense of nostalgia when we watch films made decades ago. This, he argues, is mostly due to the technological innovations continuously added to the cinematic apparatus itself, as well as to the trends in editing, camerawork, mise-en-scene, and all other things relating to "film style."483 Seen this way, cinema is undeniably vulnerable to the march of time. However, the antiquation of individual films has no negative implication to Nagae because he, as a Bergsonian, strongly believes that cinema partakes in the process of creative evolution, in the endless stream of becoming, in parallel with human beings and their ongoing history. At the end of his book, Nagae writes with excitement: At present, our cinema is becoming the eye that witnesses the solemn moment in which our soldiers are fighting at the risk of their lives. On the other hand, it also is becoming the eye that patiently observes scientists' experiments. The concept of cinema found in these instances becomes considerably different from the cinema of yesterday. It is as if cinema becomes a new and different cinema. Cinema is now becoming conscious of its own being. In the meantime, the cinema of yesterday becomes revitalized as a new cinema. This awakening of cinema must be based on the self-awareness that cinema is neither a mere apparatus nor a

481

Ibid., 287-291.

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product for companies, but a living form of expression that is deeply connected with human beings by means of bodily perception. In any case, cinema must be cinema by itself.484 As striking as it is paradoxical, this unabashed championing of the cinema of "today" (i.e., the cinema of 1942) simultaneously points to the virtues and limitations of Nagae's film theory. For one thing, it strongly encourages us to embrace the perpetual changes occurring to the mediumincluding the probable disappearance that we face of celluloid film stock as the material condition for filmmaking and viewingas a constitutional feature of what we affectionately call "cinema." With this positive mind, it would be possible to address the rise of digital and 3-D images as well as of different viewing environments and interfaces in the cinema of "today" (i.e., the cinema of 2012) more productively, rather than one-sidedly lamenting the death of the cinema of yesterday. At the same time, the statement above clearly tells us that Nagae was not freed from his own historical consciousness. Beyond his brief reference to war documentaries, the very idea of the eternal evolution of cinema and human beings is hardly separable from the public discourse of wartime Japan. For this reason, I argue that no attempt to celebrate the singularity of Nagae's film theory would be successful unless we take into account the temporal distance stretching out between his times and our times. What then can we learn from putting him back to the actual reality of his times? As mentioned earlier, Nagae was formerly a student of Kyoto Imperial University, the home institution of the Kyoto School of Philosophy. Formed around the figure of Nishida Kitaro, the school was composed of a group of leading Japanese philosophers of the time including Watsuji Tetsuro, Tanabe Hajime, and Kuki Shuzo; and its main

484

Ibid., 308-309.

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purpose was to construct a uniquely "Japanese" system of thought by dialectically integrating Western critical discourse and intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia. Of the Western philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century, the influence of Bergson on the school's intellectual activities was unmistakable. In 1910-1911, when the first translation of Bergson's work came out in Japan, Nishida immediately wrote two essays "Beruguson no tetsugakuteki hohoron" (Bergson's Philosophical Methods) and "Beruguson no junsui jizoku" (Bergson's duree pure) to express his interest in this French philosopher, which ultimately helped him theorize his "pure experience" of the nothingness in Zen Buddhism.485 Kuki, who actually met Bergson during his stay in Europe, published an essay "Bergson au Japon" (1928) in French, stating that Bergson's call for the return to "concrete reality" through experience encouraged a generation of Japanese intellectuals to look into their own historical and cultural heritages as the object of their philosophical inquiries.486 As time went by, however, the school's pursuit of the cultural and geopolitical particularity of Japan as a collective subject, which was premised on its own "experience" of the things Western and non-Western, gradually, and quite effectively, began to serve as a discursive tool for the self-justification of Japan's militaristic expansion. Indeed, Nishitani Keiji, another key figure of the Kyoto School, declared at the now famous 1942 roundtable entitled "Kindai no chokoku" (Overcoming Modernity) that the ultimate aim of Japan's war against the Allies was to establish a new world order as an inevitable corollary of the evolution of world history in the modern era. According to Nishitani, the European model of modernity had already come to an

Nishida Kitaro, "Beruguson no tetsugakuteki hoh5ron," Geibun 1.8 (August 1910); "Beruguson no junsui jizoku," Kyoiku gakujulsukai (November, 1944), reprinted in Nishida Kitard zenshu, eds. Abe Yoshinari et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965-66), 1:317-326, 1:327-333.
486

485

Kuki Shuzo, "Bergson au Japon," 260.

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impasse, and it had no clue as to how to overcome it. On the other hand, Japanand only Japanwas able to open a new chapter of world history because it now reached the position from which to both empirically and dialectically synthesize the difference between the West and the non-West, the colonizer and the colonized, and even the past and the future.487 Nagae's Bergsonian approach to the film experience would take on a different meaning if we read it against this local context. Despite his physical proximity to the center of the Kyoto School of Philosophy, Nagae was far from being an ideologue of Japanese militarism as in the case of Nishitani. Nevertheless, his interpretation of Bergsonian terminologies shows an uncanny similarity with his domestic contemporaries, especially in his emphasis on the potential of cinema to construct the "new world order" according to its singular properties. One could better understand this by replacing the term "Japan" with the term "cinema" in Nishitani's aforementioned formula. That is, for Nagae, it is cinemaand only cinemathat was able to open a new chapter in world history because it now reached the position from which to both empirically and dialectically synthesize the difference between expression and perception, human and non-human gazes, and the spectators and their historical reality. As we have seen, Nagae kept his argument focused solely on the phenomenon of the film experience in general and never prioritized "Japanese" cinema over other national cinemas. Yet let us not forget that in Nagae's observation, cinema can become conscious of its own beinga medium designed not as a form of art or mass entertainment but for mediating human beings and the world at its most fundamental levelonly with a radical reshaping of the actual
487 Nishitani Keiji, "'Kindai no chokoku' shiron," in Kindai no chokoku, ed. Chiteki ky5ryoku kaigi (Tokyo: Sogensha, 1943). For details of this roundtable, see Harry Harootunian, "Overcoming Modernity," in Overcome by Modernity, 34-94.

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environment surrounding domestic film practice. Behind this reshaping was of course the increasing and more visible intervention of the Japanese government in the production, distribution, and consumption of cinema at large. Moreover, Nagae made an arbitrary distinction between films made before and after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 because while the former would soon or later become the object of nostalgia, the latter just began to assume the role of being a direct expression of the new world coming
iOO

after the collapse of Western hegemony. Such a small, but no less significant, commitment to the sprit of wartime Japan inevitably illuminates the necessity of refraining from any either/or fallacy in writing about Nagae as a historical subject. First, Nagae's self-detachment from the mainstream of domestic film discourse now enables him to reemerge a major point of reference in the international development of phenomenological film theory. Second, his reliance on the seemingly universal claims made in and by Western critical discourse was in effect summoned to cope with the particular demands of the local context in which he lived. Third, and most importantly, although Eiga, hydgen, keisei ended with a positive affirmation of the cinema of 1942, his own theory did not allow cinema to stay in that intermediate status. As a medium destined for eternal self-transformation and the dialectical mediation between man and nature, the cinema of tomorrow must negate its current status as a servant of Japan's totalitarian regime. In this way, Nagae, like Sugiyama, left the room for us to read his text as a "silent protest" against his times, even though it is hardly possible to prove his original intention due to the lack of Nagae's own comments on his long-forgotten activities as a distinctive film theorist.

488

Nagae, Eiga, hydgen, keisei, 293.

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What I have tried to do in this chapter is to describe such a complex, and at times perplexing, nature of the neglected tradition of phenomenology in Japanese film theory. The value of this alternative approach to the film experience is not restricted to its conscious attempt to overcome the alleged opposition between the realist (materialist) camp and the formalist (idealist) camp in classical film theory. With its persistent call for the return to the "things themselves," it also makes us self-reflective about the object of our inquiries as such. In order to understand the actual existence of what one could call "realist film theory" in Japan, it is not sufficient to listen to what a generation of Japanese theorists tells us about the relationship between film and reality. Rather, we are equally required to clarify why this or that theory came into being at given historical moments and how it actually functioned in its own right, just as Sugiyama and Nagae did in their grappling with the question "What is cinema?" And only after this preliminary but mandatory procedure is done, can we proceed to rewrite a more accurate and dynamic history of film theory without mobilizing any hierarchical dyads between modern and pre-modern, realism and modernism, the West and the non-West, and universalism and particularism.

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