Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode • Marcos Centeno and Michael Raine Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode
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Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode • Marcos Centeno • Marcos and Michael Raine Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode Edited by Marcos Centeno and Michael Raine Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Arts www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode Editors Marcos Centeno Michael Raine MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade • Manchester • Tokyo • Cluj • Tianjin Editors Marcos Centeno Michael Raine Department of Cultures and Film Studies Program, Languages, Birkbeck, Western University University of London Canada UK Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Arts (ISSN 2076-0752) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special issues/developments japanese documentary mode). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Volume Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03943-913-3 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-03943-914-0 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Komura Shizuo. © 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Editors .............................................. vii Preface to ”Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode” .................. ix Marcos P. Centeno-Mart´ın and Michael Raine † Tracing Tendencies in the Japanese Documentary Mode Reprinted from: Arts 2020, 9, 98, doi:10.3390/arts9030098 ....................... 1 Jinshi Fujii Yanagita Kunio and the Culture Film: Discovering Everydayness and Creating/Imagining a † National Community, 1935–1945 Reprinted from: Arts 2020, 9, 54, doi:10.3390/arts9020054 ....................... 17 Daisuke Miyao What’s the Use of Culture? Cinematographers and the Culture Film in Japan in the Early 1940s Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 42, doi:10.3390/arts8020042 ....................... 33 Koji Toba On the Relationship between Documentary Films and Magic Lanterns in 1950s Japan Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 64, doi:10.3390/arts8020064 ....................... 43 Marcos P. Centeno Mart´ın Legacies of Hani Susumu’s Documentary School Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 82, doi:10.3390/arts8030082 ....................... 53 Justin Jesty Image Pragmatics and Film as a Lived Practice in the Documentary Work of Hani Susumu and Tsuchimoto Noriaki Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 41, doi:10.3390/arts8020041 ....................... 65 Miyo Inoue The Ethics of Representation in Light of Minamata Disease: Tsuchimoto Noriaki and His Minamata Documentaries Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 37, doi:10.3390/arts8010037 ....................... 83 Lauri Kitsnik Record. Reenact. Recycle. Notes on Shindo¯ Kaneto’s Documentary Styles Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 39, doi:10.3390/arts8010039 ....................... 95 Bill Mihalopoulos Documenting a People yet to Be Named: History of a Bar Hostess Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 44, doi:10.3390/arts8020044 .......................107 Jennifer Coates Blurred Boundaries: Ethnofiction and Its Impact on Postwar Japanese Cinema Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 20, doi:10.3390/arts8010020 .......................117 v About the Editors Marcos Centeno is a lecturer in Japanese Studies and coordinator of the Japanese programme at Birkbeck, University of London. Before that, he worked for the department of Japan and Korea at SOAS where he taught several courses on Japanese Cinema and convened the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. Centeno Mart´ın was also a Research Associate at Waseda University and a Research Fellow at the Universitat de Valencia.` His research interests revolve around Japanese documentary film, Hani Susumu, film theory, transnationality, postwar avant-garde, and representation of minorities. Michael Raine is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, Canada. He has written widely on Japanese cinema, with an emphasis on the transmedia transition to sound in prewar Japan, wartime image culture, and the postwar ‘cinema of high economic growth’. He has published most recently on the Japanese musical, Imamura Shohei’s¯ The Insect Woman, and wartime cinema in Occupied Shanghai. His anthology, The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan (co-edited with Johan Nordstrom),¨ 2020 is published by Amsterdam University Press. vii Preface to ”Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode” Writing on Japanese cinema has prioritized aesthetic and cultural difference, and obscured Japan’s contribution to the representation of real life in cinema and related forms. Donald Richie, who was instrumental in introducing Japanese cinema to the West, even claimed that Japan did not have a true documentary tradition due to the apparent preference of Japanese audiences for stylisation over realism, a preference that originated from its theatrical tradition. However, a closer look at the history of Japanese documentary and feature film production reveals an emphasis on actuality and everyday life as a major part of Japanese film culture. That ‘documentary mode’—crossing genre and medium like Peter Brooks’ ‘melodramatic mode’ rather than limited to styles of documentary filmmaking alone—identifies rhetoric of authenticity in cinema and related media, even as that rhetoric was sometimes put in service to political and economic ends. The articles in this Special Issue, ‘Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode’, trace important changes in documentary film schools and movements from the 1930s onwards, sometimes in relation to other media, and the efforts of some post-war filmmakers to adapt the styles and ethical commitments that underpin documentary’s “impression of authenticity” to their representation of fictional worlds. Marcos Centeno, Michael Raine Editors ix arts Editorial Tracing Tendencies in the Japanese Documentary † Mode Marcos P. Centeno-Martín 1,* and Michael Raine 2 1 Department of Cultures and Languages, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, UK 2 Department of English and Writing Studies, Western University, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] † The Japanese names in this Special Issue follow the Japanese convention (family name first name). Received: 29 July 2020; Accepted: 29 August 2020; Published: 21 September 2020 1. Introduction The documentary mode has not had the recognition it deserves in the western historiography of Japanese cinema. The ‘discovery’ of that cinema at film festivals in Europe and the United States in the 1950s, and the growth of academic and popular writing that followed, prioritized aesthetic and cultural difference and obscured Japan’s contribution to the documentary mode. Canonical authors such as Donald Richie, who was instrumental in introducing Japanese cinema to the West, even claimed that Japan did not have a true documentary tradition due to the apparent preference of the Japanese audience for stylisation over realism, a preference that originated from its theatrical tradition (Richie 1990, p. 60). And yet, over 130,000 documentary films were made between 1945 and 2010 (Murayama 2010, pp. 240–46), and postwar Japanese documentary films regularly won prizes at specialist film festivals.1 Beyond documentary film production itself, a closer look at the history of Japanese feature film production also calls Richie’s assertion into question. “Semi-documentary” and “documentary touch” were clichés of postwar feature film criticism, in response to a renewed emphasis on actuality and ordinary life in at least one strand of Japanese studio and independent production. This special issue, Developments in Japanese Documentary Mode, seeks to challenge the predominance of fiction film in the literature on Japanese cinema, and in particular the assumption of a stylised Japanese aesthetic. It reveals a broad sense in Japan of the film medium as connected to material and phenomenological authenticity, even as that rhetorical effect was sometimes put in service to political and economic ideologies. As Bill Nichols has argued, film as “document” is an inherent power of this apparently automatic medium, visible in its early uses as a scientific recording apparatus, an exhibitionist purveyor of “attractions”, and in the earliest actualities. But, Nichols continued, in order to become a genre, that documentary aspect of film had to be supplemented by the subjective intentionality of filmmakers (what John Grierson called the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 1933, p. 8)). Those filmmakers crafted their material into stories, as part of a group of practitioners supported by institutions, making films that helped organize the ambitions of fellow filmmakers and the expectations of audiences. At the same time, that narrative aspect of documentary film opens the door to its apparent other: the fiction film. If documentary must employ storytelling in order to tell us about our world, the fiction film can draw on the documentary’s “impression of authenticity”