Chapter Two Internationalization of Japanese Cinema How Japan Was Different from the West and Above Asia Before Globalization

ChapterTwo Internationalization of Japanese Cinema

How Japan Was Different from the West and above Asia before Globalization

With the end of the war — which to the Japanese of that period really meant the end of a way of life — the coming of the Occupation, the resultant restrictions, and the related difficulties within the industry, one might think that the films of the period would have, at best, merely reflected the confusion of the era. That they reflected something much more is another proof of the often amazing resilience of the Japanese people and of their ability to fashion something uniquely Japanese from the most diverse of foreign ideas. (Anderson and Richie 1982 [1959]: 174)

Two days after the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, on
10 September 1951, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the grand prize (Golden Lion) at the Venice Film Festival. This victory came as a big surprise to American-occupied Japan (Anderson and Richie 1982 [1959]: 233) and when the news spread Kurosawa became a national hero overnight. This was a key event, which helped to restore national confidence among the war-defeated Japanese (Sato 1995b: 233). Rashomon was internationally distributed by RKO, a major Hollywood company, and received an American Academy Award the following year. Most importantly, this event symbolized Japan’s return to the international community, and kick-started a phase of internationalization of Japanese cinema and the Japanese film industry.
The international success of Rashomon put Japanese critics under pressure to explain why this film, largely ignored by domestic audiences and critics alike, was so highly praised in the West. Donald Richie (1972: 93) states that Japanese critics “decided” that Rashomon’s success was due to its “exoticness” and that it was this that “foreigners” liked

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Japanese Cinema Goes Global

to see in Japanese films, though in his analysis he implies that mere reference to “exoticism” is not a satisfactory explanation.
Evaluating the artistic merits of Rashomon is not my goal here.
Rather, the points I want to make are: firstly, the success of Rashomon not only made Japanese filmmakers/producers very self-conscious about the Western gaze, but also made them increasingly aware of their standing among neighbouring Asian countries. The export potential of Japanese films was dramatically enhanced by Rashomon’s success and it also extended Japan’s sphere of influence within East and Southeast Asia; secondly, it urged notable Japanese filmmakers/producers, such as Masaichi Nagata, the president of Daiei, the company which produced Rashomon, consciously to pursue self-Orientalist strategies.
Many writers have pointed out that consciously representing and constructing the self as essential otherness against the West has been the core strategy which has constituted Japanese cultural and national identity in the modern age (e.g., Sakai 1989: 115–6; Ivy 1995: 48; Iwabuchi 2002: 7). For example, Iwabuchi writes that:

Japan is represented and represents itself as culturally exclusive, homogeneous and uniquely particularistic through the operation of a strategic binary opposition between two imaginary cultural entities, ‘Japan’ and ‘the West’. This is not to say that ‘Asia’ has no cultural signiﬁcance in the construction of Japanese national identity. Rather, the complicity between Western Orientalism and Japan’s self-Orientalism effectively works only when the Japanese cultural power in Asia is subsumed under Japan’s cultural subordination to the West; i.e., when Japan’s peculiar position as the only modern, non-Western imperial/colonial power tends to be translated with a great skew towards Japan’s relation with the West. (2001: 203)

While Japan’s construction of its national identity through an unambiguous comparison of itself with ‘the West’ is an historically embedded project, Japan’s modern identity has, he cogently argues, always been “imagined in an asymmetrical totalizing triad between ‘Asia’, ‘the West’ and ‘Japan’” (ibid.). In other words, it was this double bind of being “both a centre and a periphery” (Sugimoto 1999: 86) that historically shaped and constituted the Japanese subject position.

Internationalization of Japanese Cinema

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Bearing the above in mind, the first task of this chapter is to show how people in the Japanese film industry reacted to defeat in the war and the subsequent American Occupation, and to examine how these experiences shaped their sense of national selfhood and, by extension, their attitudes towards otherness qua cosmopolitan. It is the commonly accepted view that defeat in the war and the resultant American Occupation was the most radical change the Japanese people had experienced since the opening of the country in the mid-nineteenth century. The shift from pre-war militarism to post-war democracy was no doubt a radical change. However, there remains a crucial question about the residual continuity of the pre-war social structures and mentality in post-war Japan. Did the Occupation really create such a significant historic disjuncture as is commonly believed? Was it really “the end of a way of life” as Anderson and Richie suggest in the epigraph to this chapter?
I will argue against this common assumption. Although the defeat and the Occupation did, indeed, inscribe an indelible mark on the Japanese psyche, I argue that the industrial structures and the mentality of the people in the post-war Japanese filmmaking community exhibited a strong sense of continuity from those of the pre-war period.
What was radically different for Japan as a result of the Occupation and consequent developments was that the country was inserted into the new symbolic order that was emerging in the context of the cold war: now, Japan was part of the free and democratic “West”. According to Jacques Lacan, human subjectivity is split and any unified identity is illusory: “Because identity depends for its unity on something outside itself, it arises from a ‘lack’, that is a desire for a return to the unity with the mother which was part of early infancy but which can only be illusory … The subject still longs for the unitary self and the oneness with the mother of the imaginary phase, and this longing, this desire, produces a tendency to identify with powerful and significant figures outside itself” (Woodward 1997: 45). Perhaps this Lacanian theory could be applied to a nation and a national identity, and could therefore be deployed to explain how “America” became symbolic of Japan’s constitutive “lack”, in the terms described above.
By examining some cases of early Japanese international coproductions in the 1950s, such as Toho’s Madam Butterfly (Carmine

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Gallone, 1954), it will be seen how the impulse for self-Orientalism was inscribed and made irresistible to this generation of Japanese producers. Rey Chow’s (1995) account of self-Orientalism is useful here. She explains how non-Westerners who have been the objects of the Western gaze return their “to-be-looked-at-ness”, not in passive form, but as a form of self-affirmation. I combine this analysis with a case study of the internationalization strategy used by Masaichi Nagata, the president of Daiei, who produced Rashomon. It will be seen how the relationships he established with the American and Asian film industries (both in political and psychological terms) reveal how his Legitimizing Cosmopolitanism was inextricably enmeshed within a sense of selfOrientalism directed towards the West, as well as a Japanese Oriental Orientalism directed towards Asia. (Iwabuchi points out that “Japan constructed an Oriental Orientalism against an ‘inferior Asia’” as it was “necessary for Japan to be able to construct its national identity in a modern and West-dominated world order” [2002: 8]).
The international success of Rashomon whetted Nagata’s appetite and he sent his filmmakers to learn about the latest filmmaking technologies in the US. He imported the latest colour filmmaking technologies for Jigokumon (The Gate of Hell, Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953) with the explicit goal of winning prizes, and he succeeded in winning the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival 1954. Jigokumon was then an early example of the conscious hybridization of local media “content” with global technological “forms” and, as such, provided a formula for other internationally successful Asian films in the coming years.
I shall also discuss how Nagata and the Japanese film industry in general sought to regain a position of leadership amongst the East and Southeast Asian film industries using their Euro-American success as leverage. I argue that this apparent resurgence of Japanese cultural influence and power in East/Southeast Asia⁴was not so much to do with the revival of Japanese imperialism but more to do with the US administration’s integration of Japan into its anti-communist strategy. The old constitutive double bind of Japanese national identity — being different from the West and above the rest of Asia — was maintained, if not reinforced, by the constellations of power that emerged out of Cold War politics in the pre-globalization world.

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Masaichi Nagata and the Shaw Brothers’ Run Run Shaw established the Federation of Picture Producers in Asia, and they launched the Southeast Asian International Film Festival in 1954. Run Run Shaw was very keen to modernize the Hong Kong film industry using Japanese technologies, and hired many Japanese directors and technicians to work in their Hong Kong Studios in the late 1950s and 1960s. The film historian Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting calls this period “the golden age of Hong Kong-Japanese cinematic interchange” (2003). However, this interchange between the two film industries was generally not spoken about, and was perhaps even hidden, until recently. Most of the Japanese filmmakers involved worked under Chinese names, and it was difficult for them to talk about this aspect of their work before the advent of globalization in the late 1980s as, within the paradigm of national cinema and Legitimizing Cosmopolitanism, a stigma was sometimes attached to such transnational practices.
At this time the Legitimizing Cosmopolitanism of Japanese filmmakers operated in such a way as to allow them to occupy a particular position within the international order of the pre-globalization world, and the internationalization of Japanese cinema was very much a part of the post-war national rebuilding project. I shall begin by posing a question about the putative rupture between pre- and post-war Japan and the Japanese film industry. My contention is that the pre- and postwar Japanese film industries were very much continuous but that they became discontinuous as a result of the transformation of subjectivity and the concomitant structural changes, which occurred as part of the globalization process in the latter part of the twentieth century.

The Occupation, Japanese National Cinema and Industry

The Japanese were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle. In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking. (Benedict 1989 [1946]: 1)

Measured by the standards of modern civilization, they [Japanese people] would be like a boy of twelve as compared with our

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development of forty-ﬁve years. (The General Douglas MacArthur, cited in Dower 1999: 550)

During the Occupation, Japan was in no position to determine its own future without negotiating with the overwhelmingly powerful Other. Still, American domination was not entirely one-way, and did not always have the intended effects, as John W. Dower (1999) demonstrated in his Pulitzer Prize-winning account Embracing Defeat. We should understand the design and re-building of post-war Japan in the Occupation period as more akin to the collaboration between administrators and occupied people.
The regulation of the production and distribution of ﬁlms was central to the General Head Quarters/Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers’ (GHQ/SCAP) mass re-education programme (Tanigawa 2002: 6); and cinema was a key instrument in making this unlikely “collaboration” between those who occupied and those who were occupied possible.
A purported goal of the Occupation was to re-educate the Japanese population and to liberate them from a “feudal” and militaristic mentality — and ultimately to rebuild Japan as a democratic country. Therefore, the production of traditional sword plays — chanbara — and period dramas in general, was banned more or less altogether because they were seen as a symbol of the Japanese feudal mentality. The GHQ’s ﬁlm policy operated through a three-tier system which consisted of:

a) The supervision and pre-production censoring of film scripts by the Civil Information & Education (CIE) office which aimed to encourage the Japanese industry to produce films that promoted democracy, individual freedom and human rights.

b) Censorship of unsuitable films by the Civil Censorship Division (CCD). Unsuitable films included: 1) films which encouraged militaristic tendencies; 2) films which related to revenge; 3) films which related to statism; 4) films which related to patriotism and exclusionism; 5) films which distorted historic facts; 6) films which condoned racism and religious persecution; 7) films which praised feudalistic loyalty and belittled human life; 8) films which condoned suicide, directly or indirectly; 9) films which condoned the repression and exploitation of women; 10) films which praised brutal violence; 11) films which condoned the exploitation of

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children; and, 12) ﬁlms which violated orders of the GHQ and the Potsdam declaration.

c) The dissemination of suitable American ﬁlms by the Central Motion Picture Exchange (CMPE) (Sato 1995b: 163–70).

These are “the resultant restrictions, and the related difficulties within the industry” mentioned in the epigraph to this chapter by Anderson and Richie. But what they did not mention was that the Japanese film industry had been controlled even more tightly by the Japanese military regime before the end of the war. Under the Film Law of 1939, all film scripts were censored, and the military authority rationed film stock, thus cooperation was compulsory if filmmakers were to keep working. During the war, the majority of liberal and leftwing filmmakers had been converted and worked on military propaganda (cf., High 2003: xiii–iv; Sato 1995b: 45–107).
As a result, self-control had already been institutionalized and deeply internalized by Japanese filmmakers well before the Occupation army arrived. Therefore, for this generation of Japanese filmmakers, there was nothing really new about the strict supervision and control that was imposed by the GHQ. Nevertheless, what was radically different about the American regime was that now the same Japanese filmmakers were pressed to make films about democracy and individual freedom, instead of about Japanese spirituality and patriotism. In practical terms, the most difficult constraint for Japanese filmmakers was that they were no longer allowed to make chanbara (sword plays) or period dramas.
According to the Japanese film historian Kyoko Hirano, who has examined the depth and extent of the effects of the GHQ’s film policies, the CIE believed that the Japanese war-time propaganda machine had maintained an effective hold over the Japanese population (1998: 41–2). Hence, the GHQ was keen to utilize the pre-existing structures and resources of the Japanese industry for the post-war re-education programme; they thought outcomes were likely to be far more effective if the voices creating them came from inside Japan, so that the process was not seen as an imposition from the outside; and this plan went ahead for exactly the same reasons as the GHQ decided to preserve the role of the Emperor. Therefore, the CIE, and particularly David Conde

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who was in charge of the cinema and theatre section, was compelled to nurture the Japanese film industry in order to produce “democratic” and “enlightened” indigenous films instead of flooding the market with American products (Hirano 1998: 18, 60–7).
In her study, Hirano was interested to find out whether, and how, the social and cultural values portrayed in Japanese films changed before and after the war and throughout the Occupation period. She concludes from her analysis that the values and outlooks expressed in Japanese films changed only superficially despite the radical changes in the political context of production; the “essential values” underlying the characters and narratives didn’t change very much. Moreover, she finds that Japanese films made both during the war and in the Occupation period are “surprisingly apolitical” (1998: 20–1).
In most Japanese wartime propaganda films, functionally essential components of normal propaganda was often obscured or entirely absent. The information they contain (largely limited to saying who the enemy is and the threat they constitute, and little rationalization about why Japanese people must fight), would be barely enough to constitute effective propaganda in the Western sense. The tone of the films is hardly jingoistic, nor are the soldiers heroic in any usual sense of the word. Instead, the Japanese propaganda works on an emotional level by showing soldiers suffering and making sacrifices for the emperor and his national community (ibid.: 20; cf., Sato 1995b: 7–8).
Similarly, most post-war “democracy films” failed to portray what constitutes “democracy” in any substantial way (cf., Standish 2005: 165–8). This includes a widely acclaimed masterpiece Waga seishun ni

kuinashi (No Regrets for My Y o uth, Kurosawa, 1946). This ﬁlm depicts

two central characters, an aging university professor and his daughter, who resist repression under the pre-war military regime. They suffer greatly but never yield to the pressures of militarism — this was emotionally appealing filmmaking for the Japanese population by the very skilful director with the scenario that is so obviously a mere “wishful fantasy” (High 2003: 322).
In both wartime propaganda and post-war “democracy” films,
Japanese filmmakers invested much more in the emotional content of the drama than in conveying a political message. The romantic emphasis on the irrational rather than rational aspects of the human condition

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in Japanese cinema was consistent, as were the apolitical and subservient attitudes of Japanese filmmakers towards the dominant authorities. For Hirano (1998), this constitutes the “essence” of Japanese cinema, and it did not alter despite the radical change of the political context and social values. At its core, there is a deep sense of political resignation tacitly expressed in both pre- and post-war Japanese films.
The continuity of the pre- and post-war Japanese cinema and film industry is also clearly evident from a structural viewpoint. Unlike in Germany, no Japanese studio executives or filmmakers were expelled permanently from the industry for their wartime activities. Thirty-one wartime studio managers and company executives were temporarily banned from working in October 1947 by the agent of the Japanese government (Chuo koshoku tekihi shinsa iinkai — The central committee for the investigation into the suitability to public posts) formed under the GHQ. However, many of them were treated “lightly”, for example Masaichi Nagata, the president of Daiei, soon lodged a successful appeal to be allowed to return to work and the ban against him was lifted in May 1948. Other studio executives’ expulsion orders were lifted in October 1950 (Tanaka 1975c: 221–2). Therefore, it was the case that the same filmmakers under the same executives in the same studios who had been making war propaganda were making “educational” and “democratic” films after the war. The issue of the responsibility of individual members of the film industry during the war years was never vigorously pursued (High 2003: 506–7).
Still, some Japanese film workers took post-war ideals more seriously than others. Some of them even adopted philosophical attitudes to their own wartime pasts. In his autobiography, Akira Kurosawa states his thoughts and feelings:

I was not against militarism during the war. To my shame, I wasn’t brave enough to actively protest against it … It is really embarrassing but this is something I have to admit … Thus, I am not in a position to criticize matters relating to the war. And I am very aware that postwar democracy and freedom were not something we fought for and won, but they were given to us. Therefore, I thought we needed to re-learn and to re-start, in earnest, in order to be worthy of these ideals … Traditionally, we Japanese were taught to be selﬂess; being selﬂess was a virtue and to think about the self was vice. We were accustomed to this traditional thinking