"Few books offer such a broad and kaleidoscopic view of the complex and contested society
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reference text, or as an invitation to explore the increasingly diverse range of Japan-related titles
offered by Routledge."
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"This is the first reference work you should pick up ifyou want an introduction to contemporary
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Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney, Australia
I
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Routledge Handbook of
JapaneseCulture
_andSociety
Edited by Victoria Lyon Bestor and
Theodore C. Bestor,
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William H. Coaldrake
Further reading
Buntrock, Dana 2001 JapaneseArchitectureas a CollaborativeProcess:Opportunitiesin a Flexible Construction
Culture.London: Spon Press.
Coaldmke, William H. 1986-87 Manufactured Housing: the New Japanese Vernacular.Japan Architect
352-54, 357. '
The Japan Foundation, and Architectural Institute of Japan 1997 ContemporaryJapanese Architecture,
1985-96. Tokyo: The Japan Foundation.
JSCA 2003 Nihon kenchiku koz6 gijutsukyokai (ed.),Nihon nokozogijutsuokaetakenchikuhyakusen,Tokyo:
Shokokusha.
~ojirn Yiiichiro 1964. Building for the Olympics.Japan Quarterly,11(4): 439-45.
Ota Hrrotaro and Ito Yotaro (eds.) 1971 Shomei. 2 vols., Tokyo: Kajima shuppankai.
Reynolds, Jonathan M. 2006 The International House and the Struggle to Reconcile Tradition with
Modernism in Japanese Architecture. InternationalHouse ofJapan Bulletin, 26(2): 27-39.
Stewart,David B. 1986 TheMaking ofaModernJapaneseArchitecture:1868 tothePresent.Tokyo and New York:
Kodansha International: 186-219.
Tange Kenz6 1985 Recollections: Architect Tange Kenz6. Japan Architect,341, September: 6.
212
17
Japanese film and television
Aaron Gerow
Although the motion pictures and television have sometimes been rivals in Japan, they share a
complex history of shaping and being shaped by struggles over defining a new modem mass
culture in a country that was itself experiencing conflicts over how to delineate the Japanese
nation and its culture within capitalist technological modernity. Even the very definition of these
media - their essence, meaning, and function - was the focus of debates. The question was not
just how film and television should represent - or construct - Japanese culture at a time of
increasing Westemization and a rise in Japanese global power, but also how meaning was to operate
in an age of mass cultural production and consumption. AsJapanese authorities both worried
about and attempted to manage these media and their viewers, foreign audiences appropriated
them, and their asserted difference from norms in the West or the rest of Asia, for their own ends.
This chapter outlines these conflicts chronologically, focusing particularly on cinema.
Introduction
As the first non-W estem cinema to achieve considerable success competing with Hollywood
film both abroad and at home in Japan, Japanese film has been a singular focus of enquiries
regarding the source of its achievement. For American critics like Donald Richie (Anderson and
Richie 1982) or Japanese writers like Sato Tadao (1982), this was due to the difference of
Japanese cinema, which they located in continuities between Japanese film and traditional principles
found in haiku, picture scrolls, noh, kabuki, Shinto, or Zen. Noel Burch (1979) offered
the most potent and stimulating version of this argument, countering teleological histories of
world cinema, which saw more "cinematic" methods replacing the "theatrical" models of early
film by the 1910s, by pointing to a Japanese cinema that he argued maintained aspects of
"primitive" film up through World War II because it had consciously chosen its aesthetic traditions
(the "presentationalism" of theater, the foregrounding of formal play, etc.), over the realist
representationalism of Hollywood film. While Burch saw the difference of Japanese cinema
largely disappear in the postwar, with a few exceptions like Kurosawa Akira, he still valued
Japanese film for showing there were alternatives to classical Hollywood filmmaking that could
exist on a popular level.
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Fans and scholars of cinema have thus sought out alternatives to dominant modes of Western
cinema in Japanese film, but their desire for difference has led many to project their fantasies,
colored sometimes by Orientalism or the politics of film studies, onto Japanese film, reifying it
as a singular entity and ignoring historical divisions within film culture. This is unfortunate not
only because it creates inaccurate histories, but also because attempts to define Japanese cinema
often do not reflect how such efforts, both inJapan and abroad, have operated to foster, manage,
restrict, or liberate cinema and its spectatorship. It is important to remain conscious of the
politics of working with Japanese cinema - and television - when viewing and narrating its
history.
The beginnings of Japanese cinema
Japanese film history can thus be narrated as a series of struggles over its definition, particularly
in relation to society and the nation. From the beginning, cinematographic apparatuses may
have occasionally been billed as examples of Western scientific wonders when they arrived in
late 1896 and early 1897, but they were not always seen that way. When he watched his first
movie, the scientist and essayist Terada Torahiko remarked, "I was not as surprised as the first
time I saw gento." Many thus connected cinema to a series of pre-existing visual entertainments,
including the gento, or magic lantern, which in Japanese hands had developed into a complex
narrative medium with motion effects. As a social or even legal entity, motion pictures in the
first decade were presented and defined as "misemono,"a carnival-like spectacle of oddities and
one of a myriad of sideshow entertainments that date back to the Edo era (1603-1868).
Cinema did not necessarily offer the shock of the new because it was inserted into a variety
of existing practices that, while accommodating it to Japanese spectators' modes of understanding,
also failed to distinguish it from other misemono. Motion pictures were first exploited by
showmen whose introductory orations were as much part of the show as the pictures, and
shown alongside other misemono in traveling shows or in existing entertainment districts like
Tokyo's Asakusa, where the first movie theater opened in 1903. Cameramen like Asano Shiro and
Shibata Tsunekichi began producing the first Japanese works after 1897, mostly short actualities
or recordings of kabuki scenes like Momijigari(1899), but foreign films would continue to dominate
domestic product until the mid-1920s. The movies enjoyed their first popular success
during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, setting the first of many examples of Japanese
cinema being fostered by war. Crowds flocked to see Japanese victories, but the fact that they
even cheered images from other wars cinematically sold as Japanese triumphs testifies to how
discourses outside the film - for instance, nationalism - were often more important than the
visuals. Profits from war films helped capitalize the industry, which opened more theaters and
built the first movie studios between 1908 and 1910, regularizing production. A sort of "kabuki
cinema" emerged, based on filming scenes from famous plays in a long-shot, long-take style that
replicated the kabuki experience down to the onnagata(men playing female roles) and "voiceimitation"
(kowairo)of stage actors during screenings. Cinema was again wrapped in existing
procedures, but this was less an unbroken continuation of tradition than a practice invented
10 years after the medium first appeared. Film emerged through such redefinitions.
In 1912, four companies merged to form Nikkatsu, Japan's oldest motion picture company,
but their weak attempt at a monopoly soon failed as Tenkatsu emerged as a major rival. Nikkatsu
remained the leader, establishing the industry-wide pattern of making period films (kyugek1)in
Kyoto (under director Makino Shozo, mostly featuring Onoe Matsunosuke, Japan's first
film star) and contemporary films in Tokyo. Unlike American companies, however, which were
primarily producers making products for sale, Japanese studios originated from exhibition
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Japanese film and television
companies making films to supply their own theaters. That partially explains why these companies,
despite utilizing a technology of mechanical reproduction, often made only one print of a
film, sometimes on order from a s~ngle Tokyo theater. This represented both a business practice
in which companies opted to produce more movies over producing more prints, as well as a
culture that privileged the local experience of a film, especially as narrators in the theater, called
benshi, became central to both narrative understanding and the pleasure of watching - or
"hearing" - movies. Each performance could differ, even with the same film. This was a hybrid
experience, as audiences would enjoy Onoe Matsunosuke (complete with kowairo benshi and
kabuki music), an Italian historical epic, and Charlie Chaplin, all in the same program. The
melange of movies reflected what some termed the "obscene" bustle of modern urban spaces
like Asakusa, which mixed neon and elaborately ornate Western theater facades with tatami mat
seating.
To Burch, the benshi was emblematic of a film culture very different from that of Hollywood.
Early films, lacking such devices of visual narration as close-ups, relied on the benshi for narration,
and could not, argued Burch, create the illusion of a self-sustaining fictional world, but
remained a text for the benshi and audience to read. Spectators never "entered" the film, but
experienced it as a live performance in the theater. Some benshi were a greater attraction than
the film, and benshi can be cited as one reason why silent cinema lasted a decade longer in Japan
than in the West. Yet while it is true that some benshi did play with the film text in their
performances, it is debatable whether they disturbed the diegetic illusion as Burch says. Benshi
developed different methods to enhance audience understanding and pleasure. When they were
criticized, it was often for doing what Burch praised them for. Starting in the early 191Os,intellectual
film fans condemned benshi for interfering with the art of foreign films and for becoming
an obstacle to the development of a visual cinematic language in Japan.
In journals such as Kinema Record,critics advocated for the kind of cinema Burch believed
Japanese film was resisting. Loosely called the Pure Film Movement, they envisioned a text free
of the trappings of other arts, such as the theatrical onnagata or benshi. In their more industrial
cinema, the center of meaning production would shift from the space of exhibition, where
the interaction between benshi and audience completes the film, to the space of production,
where directors and stars would author a work on the basis of the screenplay. The text would
become a secure receptacle of meaning received by viewers turned into passive consumers. The
reformist critics' dream of exporting Japanese films helped structure their ideal cinema, as
producing works understandable abroad necessitated formulating a universal text that relied
neither on benshi nor on the live experience. The need for foreign recognition underlines not
only how much overseas film culture, first from Europe and then from America, influenced the
concept of Pure Film, but also how Japanese film, if not Japan itself, defined itself through the
Western gaze.
Another gaze was that of authorities, as the Pure Film Movement intersected with efforts by
public officials to manage the new medium. These first came to a head in 1912 when Tokyo
police banned the phenomenally successful French film Zigomar, claiming that it bred cnme
amongst children. With Zigomar,they sensed something new to this visual medium, something
that demanded new censorship methods like pre-screening films. Public officials not only sought
to regulate content but also demanded that film meaning not change with each performance.
Censors and Pure Film critics thus shared certain goals, in part because of their similar social
concerns. If the Pure Film Movement often represented the hopes of higher social classes, disgusted
by lower-class tastes for hybrid film experiences, so public officials would remain wary of
a medium favored by the new urban masses, especially when they believed that dark movie halls
fostered asocial feelings. That is one reason why authorities, instead of banning benshi, decided
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to train and license them, hoping to stop improper explanation while also promoting the benshi
as the representative of public mindedness in the dark.
The Pure Film Movement became one of several factors outside production that reshaped
cinema. Some critics, like Kaeriyama Norimasa (The GlowofLife [Seinokagayaki,1918]), became
filmmakers, while figures like Tanaka Eizo at Nikkatsu introduced methods from realist
theater. Two companies were formed in 1920, Shochiku and Taikatsu, which declared their
intentions to produce quality films for export. Both companies imported filmmakers with
Hollywood experience and relied on the advice of literary or theatrical elites (including novelist
Tanizaki Jun'ichiro at Taikatsu) in such films as Souls on the Road (Rojo no reikon, 1921) and
Amateur Club (1920). Films now featured more devices like close-ups to visually narrate the
scene, and even the old guard Nikkatsu eliminated onnagata by 1923. Benshi lasted until all films
converted to sound, but it became the norm for them to explain the scenes rather than narrate
them, offering narration that served the text rather than dominating it. The earthquake that
toppled the Tokyo studios in 1923 helped propel further changes by shifting reformers to the
Kansai region, where the period film studios were still intact. Those who had helped create a new
style of contemporary film (gendaigekt)brought along those methods of filmmaking to establish
a fresh kind of period film called the jidaigeki. Makino Shozo himself left Nikkatsu to produce
sword-fighting films (chanbara)defined by speed, visual excitement, and solid scriptwriting, some
of which were directed by his son, Makino Masahiro. Their success was bolstered by the rise of
the star system, which saw the first female stars like Kurishima Sumiko, and such jidaigekistars as
Bando Tsumasaburo and Okochi Denjiro. Films now featured stars with defined personalities
and commodified faces, and star photos became the rage. Their feats helped revive the industry
to the point that, by the mid-1920s, domestic films beat out foreign product in the market, establishing
Japan as one of the few national industries to successfully compete against Hollywood for
over half a century. Stars attempted to get their share of that success by starting their own independent
production companies after 1925.
'These transformations, however, were neither smooth nor uniform. Some old fans lamented
the departure of onnagata, and reports continued of benshi ruining good movies with suspect
narration. Intellectual film critics would continue to criticize the inadequacy of Japanese movies
for decades to come. Film studios were able to prevent chain theaters from showing other studio's
films by block-booking contracts, but had neither the capital nor the personnel to transform
themselves into the modern industry reformers desired. They established vertically integrated
businesses, controlling production, distribution, and exhibition, but were not powerful enough
to prevent the star-centered independents from gaining a hold. Excess production and questionable
business practices (as some exhibitors had ties to yakuza) continued to taint the industry.
While a dominant conception of cinema did emerge by the mid-1920s, not all intellectuals
and reformers could agree with it. Social theorists like Gonda Yasunosuke still tried to imagine
a film experience centered on spectator involvement, while literary figures such as Tanizaki and
fellow novelist Akutagawa Ryunosuke sought new forms ofvisuality through the cinema. The
experimental work A PageofMadness(Kurutta ichipeji, 1926), produced by Kinugasa Teinosuke
with the help of literary modernists like Kawabata Yasunari, surveyed some of these forms, but
also reflected disagreements over whether Pure Film should signify like language but without
use of words, or be free of meaning itself European film movements like German Expressionism,
French Impressionism, and Soviet montage cinema offered stylistic models that Japanese filmmakers
adopted and adapted to varying degrees, creating a sort of modernism on a popular level
that, in an age of "erotic grotesque nonsense" (eraguro nansensu),both reflected and attempted
to come to grips with the trauma of modernity in a non-Western nation. In some cases, these
efforts became political in nihilistic samurai films, left-wing tendency films, or the agitprop
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Japanese film and television
documentaries of Prokino, but such attempts soon ran into the wall of film censorship, which
was nationalized in 1925 and emboldened by the Peace Preservation Act of the same year.
Studio and government control: the 1930s and a hardening of style
The 1930s are often termed the first golden age ofJapanese cinema, but scholars still debate how
much it differed from the Hollywood norm that had come to dominate world cinema. Burch
points to directors like Ozu Yasujiro, Mizoguchi Kenji, Naruse Mikio, and Ishida Tamizo as
exemplifying a film culture that, with the Pure Film Movement, could have opted for the classical
continuity system,1 but chose not to. David Bordwell (1988), however, argues that the
majority of Japanese films from the 1920s and 1930s, save those by exceptional directors like
Ozu (whose editing violates the rules of classical continuity) and Mizoguchi (whose long takes
articulated a different standard for camera movement), did follow the Hollywood code, the difference
in Japanese cinematic style being in the moments of stylistic virtuosity - decorative
flourishes - that directors added to films without changing their fundamental stylistic structure.
Such debates foreground the importance of historically analyzing the struggles over film form in
the spheres of both production and reception, as well as raise issues about how we relate that
form to culture, define industry-wide norms, and compare them to Western cinema.
Some critics did complain about what they saw as needless cinematic virtuosity, fostering
debates that pitted a playful and often hybrid use of film form not completely reducible to meaning
against a structured and Fordist film culture centered on meaning. That these two poles
loosely overlapped with class Oower versus higher) and with attitudes towards modernity (the
former celebrating its disjunctive side, the latter its rational face) underlines how cinema became
a locus for conflicts over defining Japanese identity and modernity. Film in fact came to be
associated with American culture as public officials and intellectuals debated the threat of
"Americanization" at a time when some artists espoused a "return to Japan." In conjunction
with these debates, Japanese cinema saw a "hardening of style," a term Abe Mark Nornes (2003)
has used to describe the establishment of a standard form of narration in contemporary Japanese
documentary film.
A significant factor in this was industrial transformation. One factor that delayed the introduction
of sound technology was an industry that was perpetually underfunded, especially during
the economic depression. The gradual shift to sound- bolstered by the first all-talkie, Madam and
Wife (Madamuto nyobo,dir. Gosho Heinosuke), in 1931, but concluding only at the end of the
decade - effectively pushed out smaller companies like Chiezo Productions, founded by the
jidaigeki star Kataoka Chiezo and home to such innovative directors as Itami Mansaku and
Inagaki Hiroshi. Bulky sound equipment also hindered camera stylists like Ito Daisuke, whose
fast and kinetic camera movements less narrated swordplay than embodied their visual energy.
If sound began to corral stylistic virtuosity, it also signaled changes in business practices because
it was well-capitalized corporations like Hankyu, which founded the Toho film studio, that
could help finance sound films. These promoted a different film culture, favoring top-down
management (the producer system) over the director-centered system at studios like Shochiku.
At the same time, all the studios hardened their own styles, settling on subgenres or series
to serve as brand images in the market, such as the shoshimingekiat Shochiku (tales of the urban
lower middle class combining tears and laughter by directors like Ozu, Gosho, and Shimizu
Hiroshi), jidaigeki and realist gendaigekiat Nikkatsu (by Yamanaka Sadao and Uchida Tomu),
and musical comedies and eventually war films at Toho (Yamamoto Kajiro providing both).
It was government involvement and World War II that did the most to harden Japanese film
style. Concerned about the images of Japan created by Japanese films both at home and abroad,
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government and industry officials formed the Greater Japan Film Association (Dai Nihon Eiga
Kyokai) in 1935 to promote and improve Japanese cinema. Concern for the centrality of film in
a spreading modern mass culture led the National Diet to pass the Film Law (Eigaho) in 1939.
While hoping to improve the quality of films, the laws also instituted pre-production censorship,
requi~ed licensing of film companies and personnel, and gave government the authority to
regulate the industry. Bureaucrats used this not just to regulate content, but also to reshape the
industry to facilitate mobilization for war and nation building. Most films were being made for
theaters still largely concentrated in urban centers, thus preventing government-supported
"national films" (kokumin eiga)from being easily seen by the majority of citizens. Officials forced
the industry to reduce the number of titles, increase the number of prints, and eventually merge
companies, reducing the number of feature film companies to three and distributors to one.
They also mandated the screening of "culture films" (bunka eiga)in theaters, which proved a
boon to documentary filmmaking and helped an animation industry oppressed by Disney
(importation of which was eventually, like most American films, banned after Pearl Harbor),
enabling such technically advanced works as Seo Mitsuyo's two Momotaro features (see Napier,
Chapter 18).
Just as spectator choices were controlled, so censorship was tightened and directors and film
critics like Kamei Fumio and Iwasaki Akira ended up in jail. Movies became the tool of propaganda,
as war films like The Sea Warfrom Hawai'i toMalay (HawaiMareoki kaisen,dir. Yamamoto
Kajiro, 1942) proclaimed the victory of Japanese spirit (and special effects technology), and a
series of movies starring Ri Ko Ran (Li Xianglan, later Yamaguchi Yoshiko) celebrated the colonized
woman appreciating - and falling for - the dominance of the Japanese man (and his
nation). Wartime works such as Mizoguchi's The Loyal 47 Ronin (Genrokuchiishingura,1941-42)
answered the question "why we fight" less by detailing enemy evils than by reconstructing a
national aesthetic, reifying it almost at the expense of the story. Such works remind us that
"traditional" sources for Japanese cinema were often constructed for modern reasons, but they
also sparked debates over what constituted a "national film," or even a national style, when
studios also made musicals like SingingRaccoonPalace(Utau tanukigoten, 1943). Some argued that
works in the classical Hollywood style were more effective at home and in the colonies (and, in
fact, Toho's product increasingly accommodated continuity editing). Many were unsure of
what it meant to make a "national film," but as Peter B. High (2003) has argued, such confusion
only enabled further bureaucratic control as many filmmakers opted to play it safe. This might
also have reflected ambiguities in national ideology, as wartime films could embrace a modern
machine aesthetic while celebrating traditional spirit, or hail the emperor while also offering the
first films of humanists like Kurosawa Akira and Kinoshita Keisuke. In this environment, where
the films themselves could not fully guarantee official meaning, it is not surprising that bureaucrats
talked of "training spectators" as a way of ensuring message transmission.
The postwar cinema boom and the "New Wave"
August 1945 may have marked the end of the war, but it did not constitute a complete break in
Japanese film history. Although Burch argues the Occupation brought Japanese cinema into
Hollywood's orbit, it is more accurate to say that industrial rationalization and reform during the
war years established not only the structure but also perhaps even the style of postwar cinema.
The Occupation also carried on the wartime era in another ironic fashion: by continuing the
basic techniques of censorship, even if for different aims, Allied forces prevented a cinematic
investigation of the state of film during the Occupation, the subjectivity (and responsibility) of
film producers and audiences, and the relationship between the wartime era and the postwar.
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Japanese film and television
Authorities banned films considered militaristic, which limited the number of chanbarafilms
made, and purged industry executives whom they believed had used cinema to wage war.
The promotion of democratic themes encouraged new topics in film - including Japan's first
screen kiss in 1947 - but Itami Mansaku was one who criticized the industry's abrupt shift from
military nationalism to democratization without proper introspection into filmmakers' own war
responsibility. Hara Setsuko, who starred in such fascist films as the German-Japanese coproduction
The New Earth (Atarashikitsuchi,1937), suddenly became the goddess of democracy
in Kurosawa's No Regretsfor Our Youth (Wagaseishunni kui nashi,1946) and Imai Tadashi's The
Blue Mountains (Aoi sanmyaku, 1949). Directors on the left attempted to pursue this problem in
a limited fashion (often by hiding their own wartime collaboration), but when right-wing politicians
succeeded in pressing General Headquarters (GHQ) to ban Kamei Fumio's A Japanese
Tragedy(Nihon no higeki,1946), a documentary arguing for Emperor Hirohito's war responsibility,
such cinematic discussions were impaired. With the Occupation's reverse course, the labor
strikes at Toho were forcibly suppressed, and a "red purge" of purported communists was
undertaken, not long after the purged "militarists" were reappointed. This forced the left to
pursue its polemical filmmaking in the 1950s through independent companies that, because of
oligopolistic agreements between the majors, had little access to regular theaters. In the end, the
Occupation's tendency to treat audiences as immature viewers in need of management differed
little from that of wartime officials.
Nonetheless the motion picture industry experienced a postwar boom that would establish
the 1950s as the second golden age. With television developing later than in the United States,
cinema served as Japan's primary source of entertainment in the first 15 years after the war.
Postwar inflation helped the industry finally spread nationwide, as investors bought into
cash-rich theaters. Restrictions on foreign movies, designed to prevent the flow of yen abroad,
protected the domestic industry. A new film company, Toei, successfully reintroduced double
features in 1954, and with its productions of slick swordplay and bright musical entertainment,
became the top industry player. The victory of Kurosawa Akira's Rashomon at the 1951
Venice Film Festival helped introduce Japanese cinema to the world. As foreign observers
like Donald Richie began their efforts to explain Japanese cinema, usually through the lens of
traditional culture, the industry again attempted to make films with export in mind, citing these
same foreign visions of traditional Japan in films like Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari,
1953).
With production centers finally taking control of an industry long dominated by exhibition
forces, the studio system was at its peak and companies reconfirmed their styles through mass
production of genre films and series. Top-level directors also had the means to support their art.
A kind of domestic humanism took center stage as Ozu and Kinoshita tracked the travails of
middle-class families, Mizoguchi and Naruse focused on the problems of women, and Kurosawa
wove tales of student-teacher relations and individual human action. On a popular level, movies
became a central medium for Japanese to represent themselves: melodramas like What Is Your
Name? (Kimi no nawa, dir. Oba Hideo, 1953-54) and Daiei "mother films" (hahamono)aestheticized
and personalized Japan's wartime and postwar suffering, selectively constructing Japan as
the victim; and special effects films like Godzilla (Gojira,dir. Honda Ishiro, 1954), with defeat
and the atomic bomb still difficult to portray in film, represented instead genuine fears of atomic
war and the Cold War, while sometimes also forgetting Japan's atrocities in Asia. (Honda's
Atragon [Kaiteigunkan, 1963] would in fact imagine Imperial Japan defending humanity.) Leftwing
independent filmmakers like Imai and Yamamoto Satsuo made acclaimed films protesting
the war or social injustices, but by reproducing the film style of the majors, failed to make aesthetics
or spectatorship a political issue. Critical voices, if not also techniques, may have been
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most audible in black comedies by directors like Kinoshita, Ichikawa Kon, Kawashima Yuzo,
and Okamoto Kihachi.
Movements arose in the late 1950s that attempted to break through this industrial monolith.
The rise of a consumer-oriented leisure lifestyle centered on youth, coupled with trends in mass
media representation (like weekly magazines and television), marked the emergence of new
realities that a family-centered humanism had difficulty representing, ones that initially came to
public consciousness in taiyozoku or "sun tribe" literature and films. Young "modernist" directors
like Masumura Yasuzo at Daiei (Kisses[Kuchizuke, 1957]) and Nakahira Ko at Nikkatsu (Crazed
Fruit [Kurutta kajitsu, 1956]) reacted against the melodramatic resignation and "naturalism" of
their elders, which not only imposed a dominant, humanistic perspective on reality, but also
encouraged acceptance of this status quo as "natural." Masumura valorized active individuals
who stood out by being "unnatural." Young assistant directors at the time, like Oshima N agisa at
Shochiku, praised these attempts, but worried about their effectiveness. One consequence of
such filmmaking was Nikkatsu Action cinema, which tried to imagine a free individual played
by such stars as Ishihara Yujiro and Kobayashi Akira, but could do so only by rendering Japan a
fictional "nationless" (mukokusekt)space.
With the tumultuous and massive political protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty in
1959-60, a "New Wave" in Japanese cinema emerged centered on filmmakers like Oshima
(Cruel Story of Youth [Seishunzankoku monogatari,1960]), Yoshida Yoshishige (Good-For-Nothing
[Rokudenashi, 1960]), Shinoda Masahiro (Dry Lake [Kawaita mizuumi, 1960]), and Imamura
Shohei (PigsandBattleships[Butatogunkan, 1961]). This wave was in part brought about by crises
in the industry. Although the fact that young filmmakers were allowed to experiment was a sign
of the studio system's wherewithal, it was a system showing cracks due to overproduction (few
studios other than Toei were making money), the rise of television, and demographic shifts such
as the rise of suburbia, which took audiences further away from urban theaters. Film attendance
would peak at 1.127 billion tickets in 1958 and then drop by three-fourths within a decade.
Clashing with studio executives over form and content, New Wave directors left the studios
to independently produce films, eventually distributing them through new venues like the Art
Theater Guild. Their efforts to combine an alternative politics with an alternative filmmaking
occurred just as experimental cinema was emerging (e.g. the Film Study Group at Nihon
University) and theorist/filmmakers like Matsumoto Toshio were endeavoring to meld avantgarde
film form with documentary. Documentarists like Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa
Shinsuke explored means to represent perspectives suppressed by the modem capitalist metropolis,
not only filming the Minamata mercury poison incident or the farmers protesting the building
of Narita Airport, but involving their subjects, if not also their spectators, in the process.
Some veterans of experimental cinema began working in "pink cinema" (pinku eiga),a form of
soft-porn filmmaking that came to prominence from the mid-1960s when marginal theaters,
suffering from declining business, latched onto sex as a survival strategy. Directors like Adachi
Masao, Wakamatsu Koji, and Takechi Tetsuji used the genre as a form of political and aesthetic
protest. When Takechi's Black Snow (Kuroi yuki, 1965) was cited for obscenity, one of several
major film censorship cases in the 1960s and 1970s, not only sexual expression, but in some cases
sexual violence, came to be viewed as a site of radical political struggle.
Censorship battles centered not just on sexual expression: even as the total audience declined,
the 1960s saw the burgeoning of a celebration of spectatorship and interpretation. As New
Wave directors pursued aesthetic strategies attempting to free viewers of conventional or "naturalized"
readings of narrative, spectators themselves ranged over films and genres with a degree
of hermeneutic freedom, going to underground films in Shinjuku one night and cheering
Takakura Ken's tradition-loving yakuza when they killed modem capitalist gangsters in Toei's
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yakuza films the next. While such interpretations were often political, this was also the start of a
cinephile culture, as cine clubs arose to praise the stylistics of directors like Suzuki Seijun and
Kato Tai. Film viewing could be bottom up, resisting the tendency to nationalize media and
reception. This was possible in part because the studio system was breaking down and did not
have the power to control the market or the consumption of its own product.
The rise of television
As the studios declined and the movies ceased to be a medium viewed on a mass scale, television
rose to replace it as a national medium, presenting media events consumed by the citizenry in a
presumably uniform fashion that helped further the postwar image of a country that was "all
middle class." There were experiments in television technology and even test broadcasts before
the war, but regular broadcasting would not begin until 1953, with two stations, first NHK
(Nippon Hoso Kyokai), the public channel, and then NTV (Nihon Terebi Hosomo), a commercial
channel. They established two basic industrial modes for television: one centered on
receiver fees and thus on the number of televisions, the other on selling commercial time if not
the act of viewing itself; one emphasized the spread of the medium and the top-down transmission
of nationally valuable ideals (while remaining politically neutral), the other focused on
increasing viewers, structuring them as consumers of products and television. Thus while NHK
was hampered in the early years by the prohibitive cost of television sets, NTV could function
by setting up sets in public spaces, multiplying the number of viewers per set through mass
viewing of national spectacles such as the pro wrestler Rikidozan defeating American opponents.
Commercial television was thus not innocent of nationalism.
At the beginning, television had to rely on previous media, in part because of technological
restrictions, but also, as with film, because it had yet to be defined. Television sets in public
spaces replicated the mass viewing of movies, while movie studios provided some of the first
television personnel. Cinema helped define the nascent medium, not only by providing standards
of directing and scriptwriting, but also, in films like Godzilla, by portraying television as a visual
and simultaneous imagination of the national community, or, as in GoodMorning(Ohayo, 1959),
as a manifestation of mass consumer culture invading and reshaping the postwar home. Yet if the
film industry allowed television a live quality it had largely abandoned with the benshi, it resisted
television's encroachments into cinema's territory, and so in 1956 it began restricting movie
broadcasts and contract players' television appearances. Such moves had ironic consequences.
First, they helped define the medium by forcing television to develop its own talent and styles
(for instance, a visual grammar centered on close-ups), as well as to seek out programming from
America. American shows like I Love Lucy and Ben Casey had a profound effect on not only
Japanese television, but also on Japanese imaginations of family, suburbia, and America itself
Second, cinema's resistance to television only hurt the studios themselves when Shintoho's
bankruptcy caused the release of its catalog for broadcast, opening the floodgates and leaving
the studios ill prepared. Some like Toei (jidaigeki,anime, and superhero team shows) and Daiei
(detective series and home dramas) significantly impacted television, and famous directors like
Kinoshita Keisuke became big names on the small screen. Nevertheless, the lines of influence
would reverse and, starting with directors like Gosha Hideo and Jissoji Akio, television personnel
would enter film.
Cinema's definitions of television meshed with those of other discourses. While dramatic
programs like I Want toBe a Shellfish(Watashi wa kai ni naritai,1958) garnered critical appeal, the
culture critic Oya Soichi, citing vulgar variety programming, worried that television might lead
to "a nation of a hundred million idiots." Like film before it, television was gaining an identity
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through negative appraisals (Chun 2007). If the cinema's threat was that private feelings would
gain free rein in public spaces, television's was that public space would break down asJapanese
became atomized in their homes, beholden to their basest desires. Like the movies before it,
television eventually improved its image by wedding itself to the nation. This was most evident
in its coverage of Crown Prince Akihito's marriage to the commoner Shoda Michiko in 1959,
an event that bolstered television ownership. Television wore the mantle of the nation, getting
closer to the Japanese imperial family than cinema did during the war.
Television's definition of the nation and the public sphere, however, was different. If prewar
officials attempted to meld, from top down, the spectators in the theater space as public citizens,
or if 1960s radical :6.lmmakerslooked to alternative exhibition practices as means of sparking a different,
participatory public sphere, television viewers would watch, and not go to, national spectacles
from their homes, becoming part of a nation of viewers, but with fewer forms of public and
social interaction. Viewers could now consume the nation like they did the ads on TV, while
national messages could now enter the home without the mediation of public spaces. The home
and the family in fact became the central topoi for the televisual nation: as the Japanese imperial
family came to represent the bourgeois nuclear family at home, so television programs, from Father
Knows Best to the "home dramas" that came to dominate Japanese :fictionprogramming, concentrated
on visions of home life that projected imaginations of postwar transformations in the family
(seeWhite, Chapter 10). The programming schedule accommodated patterns at home, with short
NHK "television novels" before the family headed out, "wideshow" talk shows in the afternoon
for the housewife, and late-night news or sports programs for salarymen after work. Television
incorporated patterns of home life into the visual style itself, developing repetitive forms of narration
that could accommodate the distracted viewing practices of the housewife, and shaped behavior
in the home, from how families held their meals to the layout of living spaces.
Television quickly developed national networks from the initially scattered local stations and
asserted a national, more homogenous visual culture centered in Tokyo that ostensibly bridged
regions (urban and rural), dialects, and classes. This bolstered the belief that Japanese were all
middle class, one that was played out through rituals of uniform viewing, as some shows, ranging
from yearly national rites like the Red and White Song Competition (Kohaku utagassen), held
each New Year's Eve, to hit dramas like Oshin, could boast a viewership of over half the nation.
Live events like the 1972 Asama Sanso incident, in which United Red Army members held a
woman hostage in a mountain cottage, could affect or even traumatize the nation. In this environment,
overtly political programming sometimes met with disfavor, as prominent cases of
political suppression of fiction shows or documentary programming in the late 1950s and early
1960s set a pall over subsequent television culture.
The construction of television as a national institution did not mean that programming was
uniform. First, there was the difference between NHK's official educational culture and the
commodi:6.ed culture of commercial television. Even the latter could offer the politically
informed documentaries ofUchiyamaJun'ichi, Oshima Nagisa, Imamura Shohei and TV Man
Union, the experimental style ofJissoji Akio (UltraSeven), or the ribald space oflate-night programming.
As :fictional programming privileged interpersonal drama, screenwriters like Mukoda
Kuniko, Kuramoto So, and Yamada Taiichi became central, branding the top television dramas
of the 1970s and 1980s with their individual styles. While "wideshow" programming was often
accused of tabloid journalism, even the nightly news on commercial channels would allow
anchors to comment in a way unseen in American network news.
The pillars of television would be commercials and the tarento (talent) system. Commercial
programming - by definition created for the advertising - and television stations devised a variety
of techniques, such as abruptly interrupting an action midstream (and repeating it after
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the break), to focus attention on the commercials; but from the late 1960s ads themselves
became as or more interesting than the programming. Advertisements moved beyond selling the
product to selling a style or even a narrative, progressing to the point that major intellectuals like
Yoshimoto Takaaki would celebrate commercials in the 1980s for becoming an art in themselves,
divorced from capitalism, and open to free interpretation. Commercials and their viewers,
however, were never free from economies of attention and personality. In fact, commercials
became a central means of creating television personalities, asJapanese ads did not simply take
advantage of existing fame (most famously of Hollywood stars), but also created it, particularly
for young female idols or for the songs used. Commercials thus formed an important sector of
the tarento system, which Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (1996) has termed the "currency" of Japanese
television. There the worth of a show is determined not just by ratings, but by its array of tarento,
whose fame is derived less from talent than exposure. Yoshimoto has described the tarento
system as a kind of low-tech participatory media in the postmodern age, as viewers become
involved not only in identifying the myriad of tarento, but in creating and sometimes destroying
them. From star search shows like A Star Is Born (Sutii tanjo) in the 1970s to program-planned
idol groups in the 1980s, the construction of idols was both a central business and pleasure of
television. The election of tarento to political office is testimony to the centrality of personalities
and television in Japanese society.
With transformations in television comedy sparked by the manzai boom in the 1980s, variety
programming as a whole, as Ota Shoichi argues, created a space of "friends" which invited the
viewer into the televisual space through inside jokes and amateur participation. A comedic
stance that was both knowing and uncritical, both delivering the joke and evaluating it externally,
produced spectators who were a combination of what Ota termed audience and viewers,
both part of the space of"friends" and outside it. Such a cynical stance could allow audiences to
consume supposedly serious drama as comedy, but also support the rise of so-called "trendy
dramas" at the end of the 1980s as spectacles of consumption and sensationalism, a postmodern
surface of fashion, music, and conventionalized emotion (Ota 2002).
One can debate how much viewers really bought into these spectacles, but televisual style
worked to bring these modes of viewing into the economics of attention. The appearance of the
VCR and other media made the mass viewing of programs a relic of the past, but the late and
limited shift towards a multichannel industry meant that programming after the 1980s was still
relatively uniform and consumer choice restricted. Within this industrial context, some criticized
television for pursuing excessive explanation, not only through non-fiction programming that
provided surplus commentary - something augmented from the 1990s in variety programming
by subtitles that doubled the dialogue - but also by a visual style that, despite the occasional
visual flourish, was wedded to an obviousness of narration reminiscent of classical Hollywood
cinema. This may have supported distracted viewing in the age of channel zapping, but the spectacular
nature of narration - such as the visual style and use of titles - sought to bring viewer
eyes back to the set. To some culture critics, television became a monolithic apparatus enveloping
the viewer in a comfortable, pre-digested world bereft of alterity (Abe 2005). With no real disagreements,
the distinction between subject and object is lost, and all within the televisual realm
is absorbed in an all-encompassing, homogeneous identity. There is no other in this space, for
television ultimately refers only to itself.
Late twentieth-century transformations
With television becoming the dominant medium, film history after 1960 featured a variety of
reactions to television and the forms of spectatorship it offered. Mainstream commercial cinema
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Aaron Gerow ·
explored various types of representation, from widescreen to big-budget spectacle, to distinguish
itself from the small screen, but in many ways it ended up abandoning the mass audience.
Popular series like It's Tough Being a Man, featuring an itinerant peddler named Tora-san, still
brought in family viewers, but most films increasingly targeted young male viewers with sex and
violence unavailable on television. The industry, however, suffered such a plunge in attendance
that several major studios (Shintoho and Daiei) went bankrupt, and one, Nikkatsu, abandoned
regular film production for adult movies. With older companies in disarray, the publisher
Kadokawa Haruki intervened in the 1970s with a new strategy promoting big-budget spectacle
through a multipoint media strategy that included television. Increasing budgets in a declining
industry led to committee film production, with outside players such as ad agencies, publishers,
and increasingly television stations sharing the load. Yet with the poor domestic reputation of
the resulting works, the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao and others were in some years the
only Japanese box office hits. Exacerbating this situation was an uneven industrial structure in
which the majors, having largely given up producing films on their own, had turned into distributors
and exhibitors controlling the majority oftheaters showing Japanese films, leaving the
independents, who now made the majority of films, able to show in only a small number of
theaters. Market share for Japanese films dropped from a high of78.3 percent in 1960 to 27.1
percent in 2002.
With the majors mostly abandoning their role in training and investing in new film talent and
facilities, new filmmakers emerged from alternative circles such as 8 mm filmmaking or pink
films. Following such events as the Asama Sanso hostage incident, these filmmakers shared the
larger cultural disillusionment with politics. Against the rise of television, influential critics like
Hasumi Shigehiko promoted a cinephilia that, in the lighter, more postmodern 1980s, helped
found the cinematic pastiches of Morita Yoshimitsu, Itami Jiizo, and Obayashi Nobuhiko, or
the virtuosic use of the long take by Somai Shinji, who explored the unsteady connections
between adolescence and mortality. It was only at the end of the 1980s that a more concerted
film stylistics emerged, with what I call a "detached style," to combat a sort of tyranny of knowledge
represented by television, using devices such aslong shots and long takes to strip the image
of excess explanation, encourage viewers to read the film on their own, and allow the "others"
in the film to subsist in their alterity. Especially after the burst of the bubble, the Aum Shinrikyo
sarin gas incident, and widespread disillusionment in social institutions such as the family, the
company, and the school, many directors sought a "real" free of the postmodern fictions of the
1980s, one from which interpersonal relations could be rebuilt from zero.
At the same time, the Japanese film industry was also transforming, but not always in positive
directions. The popularity of horror cinema helped spur a revival of live-action films not only
at the domestic box office, but also abroad. Asia was the first market success, and that occurred
at the same time Japanese trendy dramas were becoming a hit on Asian television screens.
Hollywood discovered "]-horror," creating a series ofremakes at a time when the popularity of
anime and Japanese games was generating a fashion for "Cool Japan" amongst foreign youth.
Japanese film and television increasingly had to think globally, and the meanings of these texts,
and their spectators, could no longer be simply managed domestically. The influx of multiplex
theaters, some foreign-owned, loosened the majors' stranglehold on distribution and exhibition,
and allowed some medium-sized companies to make a mark. With the additional success of
melodramatic love stories, in which one partner inevitably dies,Japanese cinema topped foreign
films at the 2006 box office, a feat few other countries could boast. The benefits of this, however,
were mostly enjoyed by Toho, which commanded over 50 percent of the Japanese film
pie, and by television stations, which after 2000 became the dominant player in the film industry.
The success also caught the eye of the government, which enacted policies not only to
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promote domestic production and film education, but also to utilize "Cool Japan" to elevate
Japan's standing in foreign opinion and in the world contents industry. Thus, despite the apparent
liberalization and revival of Japanese film, voices continue to warn of collaborations between
media conglomerates and government, in which Japanese cinema, absorbed by the television
industry, becomes merely one "content" amidst the anime, manga, and trendy dramas that.are
being marketed for consumers both at home and abroad. In this situation, the struggle over
defining these media and their spectators will continue.
Note
1 A system of film editing associated with classical Hollywood films that creates seamless continuity of
space and time between shots.
Further reading
Anderson, Joseph, and Donald Richie 1982 TheJapaneseFilm. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.
Clements, Jonathan, and Motoko Tamemuro 2003 The DoramaEncyclopedia.Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge
Press.
High, Peter B. 2003 The ImperialScreen:JapaneseFilm Culturein the FifteenYears' War. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
N ornes, Abe Mark 2003 JapaneseDocumentaryFilm: The MeijiEra throughHiroshima.Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Sato Tadao 1982 CurrentsinJapaneseCinema. Gregory Barrett, trans. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro 2000 Kurosawa:Film Studies andJapaneseCinema. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
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