Japan

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Japan

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS
THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE
ERUPTION AND INTERRUPTION OF WAR
THE SECOND GOLDEN AGE
A NEW WAVE
THE LOST DECADE AND A MINOR RENAISSANCE
FURTHER READING

The Japanese cinema was the first of the great East Asian cinemas to make its way out of the local and into the global. As early as the 1930s one finds Japanese co-productions with Germany, such as Atarashiki tsuchi (The New Earth, 1937), while Japanese films were winning awards at the Venice International Film Festival in that same decade. Of course, these co-productions and festival appearances link Japan with its wartime Axis allies. Still, though, it indicates Japanese desires for an international presence in the world of cinema. This cinematic globalism is in keeping with Japan's more sinister and tragic desires for a global presence among the imperialist powers starting in the late nineteenth century. It may be no surprise, therefore, to find that Japan—the first East Asian world power of the modern era—is also the first East Asian world cinematic power. Its interest in competing with the advanced industrial nations for a cinematic presence both locally and globally was very much in keeping with its desires for territories and colonies. It is no coincidence, then, that very early in the twentieth century, a popular subject for Japanese films was the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), and that both documentary and fiction filmmaking were central to Japan's war efforts in the Pacific theater of the 1930s and 1940s, whether celebrating Japan's early victories against the United States or continuing propaganda efforts to convince citizens at home and abroad of the essential justifications for Japan's conquests. At the same time that these cinematic celebrations of war and conquest were being produced, Japan also created a cinema of unique beauty and sensitivity, and it is these films, made just prior to World War II and in the postwar era, for which the Japanese cinema is famously and justifiably celebrated.

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS

As in the rest of Asia, the Japanese were introduced to the cinema through the cameras and cameramen of the globe-trotting Lumière Brothers Company. Film came to Japan in 1897 with the Japanese still flush with victory from the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the first mark that the Japanese campaign of modernization (which meant in some measure increased industrialization and westernization) was working to make Japan an equal member of the European new world order. The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) was the culmination of this initial phase of societal transformation. Along with increased industrialization and the need for Western-style higher education came increased urbanization, an influx of people into Japan's already rather impressively populated urban centers such as Tokyo and Osaka—moves that proved particularly useful for the growth and development of the new urban entertainment form known as the cinema. This introductory phase of the cinema found Japan the object of the Western gaze as the Lumière cameramen turned an Orientalist eye on Japanese life. As the Japanese themselves began to shoot motion pictures—they began their own efforts around 1898 and by 1900 were manufacturing their own projectors modeled on the Edison machines—it seems inevitable that they, too, would shoot with an eye for the exotic, the uniquely Japanese. This seems a twofold strategy: to see themselves through the eyes of the West, to give the West back an image of Japan created in the West's image through its own technology, but also to begin that process of Nihonjinron (the study of the essence of "Japaneseness"), which would culminate in the actual promulgation not only of specific laws regarding the content of film, but actual invocations to create a kind of intrinsic or idealized Japan as the 1930s gave way to the 1940s and the expansion of the Pacific War. Even into the modern era, debates over what is (and what therefore is not) "typically" Japanese have continued to swirl around films and filmmakers working in this contested terrain.

The earliest films of geisha dances, popular street scenes, and other bits of exotica were typically exhibited at fairs or in traditional amusement districts in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. This pattern quickly asserted itself, and by the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, film in Japan had become primarily an entertainment-oriented, commercial enterprise whose appeal was largely to the urban working and lower-middle classes. With the rapid growth of the larger cities during this period, there was an ample audience not only of the working and middle classes, but also of young people. In other words, the movies could not have asked for a more perfect situation in which to insert itself, and indeed, before too long permanent theaters were built to accommodate film, and companies arose that specialized in the production of motion pictures. The Kinki-kan was converted from live theater to film in 1900, while in 1903 the Denki-kan became the first theater built specifically for film. The Yoshizawa Company, which had started as an equipment manufacturer and turned to production with proto-documentaries at the turn of the century, built a film studio in Tokyo in 1907. At this same time, the Yokota Company began its foray into fiction filmmaking, so that by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Japanese cinema was actively engaged in producing and exhibiting films for an increasingly voracious audience. The innovations of the M Pathé Company in 1905—larger theaters, uniformed usherettes, higher admission prices, and the establishment of a trust organization that merged the four top production companies, leading to the formation of Nikkatsu Studios—set the tone for the monopolistic practices that helped the Japanese cinema grow and develop along organized Fordist models of mass production, economies of scale, and contract labor.

Films of this era generally fell into two dominant modes: Kabuki stories and (semior pseudo-) documentaries. The Chinese Boxer Rebellion (1898–1900) and, especially, the Russo-Japanese War gave Japanese audiences a chance to explore the world around them with the satisfied air of newly modernized global citizens. It has been claimed that approximately 80 percent of all films made and released in Japan in 1905 were devoted to the Russo-Japanese War, but as the war faded from immediacy, the number of such films dropped. But it is arguable, too, that they dropped because audiences preferred the increasingly sophisticated storytelling of the Kabuki-derived dramas. Certainly that unique institution of the Japanese cinema, the benshi (or katsuben), derives from this moment with its roots in Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet) theater. Along with the usual musical accompaniment, this narrator, who explained the film, provided live, almost synchronized dialogue, filled in narrative gaps, and otherwise added an audio component to the visuals, giving Japanese cinema a full, multimedia presentation. Kabuki-derived stories gave audiences a chance to see famous actors recreate portions of their well-known roles and even allowed the development of the rensa-geki (chain dramas), which integrated filmed portions into live theatrical entertainments.

If the reliance on rensa-geki was short-lived as films got a bit longer and audiences became more willing to experience film for its own sake, the benshi became virtually institutionalized. Some argue that the relative lateness of sound's arrival in the Japanese cinema (1931) and audiences' willingness to continue to patronize so-called silent cinema was owed to the popularity of the benshi, as well as to their numerical strength. In 1927 there were, for example, over seventy-five hundred registered film narrators—testimony to both their popularity and clout. For commentators as otherwise different as Nöel Burch and Joseph L. Anderson, the benshi is in many ways the primary reason that the Japanese cinema developed unique storytelling procedures, shooting styles, and pacing. Certainly, it endowed the Japanese cinema with an available tradition where psychological realism and tightly controlled plotting give way to a series of intense scenes and revealing moments; of narrative ellipsis; flat staging; and, for all that, longer films that reproduce the pacing and techniques of Kabuki and Bunraku. Naturally, there are other traditions of Japanese art and culture from which the cinema has drawn, including the novel and painting, but some might argue that a good deal of Japanese cinema's uniqueness stems from this theatrical orientation.

The theatrical orientation of early Japanese cinema extended importantly into the 1920s with the rise of the shimpa (new) theater and its frequent adaptation into the cinema. Both Kabuki and shimpa, and so, too, the cinema, relied on so-called female impersonator actors (onnagata) to play women's roles. But such a convention began to break down with the more intimate presentation of the cinema; the gradual introduction of close-ups; and competition, so to speak, from the naturalist theater known as Shingeki (New Theater). The dominant mode of shimpa was the melodrama, a genre that, by definition, may be said to foreground women and women's issues, and so the use of onnagata actors became increasingly untenable. Actor-directors trained in Hollywood, such as Kisaburo (aka Thomas) Kurihara (1885–1926), also helped divorce Japan from this particular theatrical mode, so that after 1922, with the success of Rojo no reikon (Souls on the Road, 1921), the days of the onnagata on film were numbered (though the tradition still continues in Kabuki).

In the early 1920s, Shochiku Studios arose as the primary competitor to Nikkatsu. Relying on Hollywood-style production practices, eliminating the onnagata, and producing shimpa -style melodramas in order to attract working-class and middle-class women, Shochiku took the competitive edge over Nikkatsu, which specialized in Kabuki-derived action and swordplay movies. It might be said that here lie the origins of Japan's two cinematic mega-genres, the jidai-geki (period play) and gendai-mono (modern story), although it is true that the Kabuki theater utilizes the same basic divisions. With stars like Matsunosuke Onoue in the 1910s and, even more importantly, Denjirô Ô kôchi (1898–1962) under the direction of Daisuke Ito (1898–1981) at Nikkatsu and Tsumasaburo Bando (b. 1950) working for Shozo Makino (1878–1929) and his son Masahiro Makino (1908–1993), the jidai-geki became a foundational genre for the Japanese cinema—a status it would retain well into the 1970s.

But it was in the realm of the gendai-mono and its numerous subgenres, such as the tendency film (or keiko eiga, which depicts contemporary social problems and issues treated from a generally leftist perspective), the nansensu (nonsense) comedies, and especially the shomingeki (stories of the lower-middle class), that the Japanese cinema truly flourished, for it was here that most of the great actors, actresses, writers, and directors of the day made their mark on world cinema history.

THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE

Sound came to the Japanese cinema in 1931 with Heinosuke Gosho's (1902–1981) Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbor's Wife and Mine), but other masters of the Japanese cinema continued working in silent film into the middle of the decade. But whether silent or sound, the Japanese cinema of the 1930s marks a true Golden Age where the major studios Shochiku and Nikkatsu, along with Toho, which had joined the ranks of the former two through a series of mergers, relied on contract stars and directors who generally worked within consistent and recognizable genres—much like Hollywood in its contemporaneous Golden Age. Toho relied on popular actors and actresses like Kazuo Hasegawa (1908–1984) (who would make over three hundred films over the course of his career), Takako Irie (1911–1995), Setsuko Hara (b. 1920), and child superstar Hideko Takamine (b. 1924) (whose luster would never fade as she would work well into her sixties). Matched by directors like Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896–1982), Hiroshi Inagaki (1905–1980), and Mikio Naruse (1905–1969), Toho could work in both jidai-geki and gendai-mono to full effect. Shochiku did not have quite the star power of Toho, but its directorial stable is a "who's who" of the Japanese cinema of the 1930s, led by Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963) along with Heinosuke Gosho, Yasujiro Shimazu (1897–1945), and Hiroshi Shimizu (1903–1966). Working at the studio's Kamata branch, these directors made the world of the lower-middle classes the studio's specialty, whether through comedies like Ozu's Otona no miru ehon: Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born But …, 1924), the bittersweet Naruse's Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife, Be Like a Rose, 1935), or the child-centered masterpieces of Shimizu (for example, Kaze no naka no kodomo [Children in the Wind, 1937]).

Some directors managed to work outside of the big three of Shochiku, Toho, and Nikkatsu or to play one against the other. Naruse began at Shochiku but moved to Toho, while Sadao Yamanaka (1909–1938)—whose death in combat in China in 1938 marks the greatest directorial loss of the war years—moved to Toho as well, in his case from rival Nikkatsu. Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956), meanwhile, managed to carve out a nice career working for independent or semi-independent companies such as Dai-Ichi Eiga, where he made his two masterpieces of 1936—Naniwa erejî (Osaka Elegy) and Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion). Independent production was not unknown, either. Most famous among such films is surely Kinugasa's Kurutta Ippeji (A Page of Madness, 1926), an avant-garde film that focuses on a man who takes a job as a janitor in a mental asylum in order to be nearer to his wife, who has been confined after attempting to drown their child, featuring subjective shots of the inmates to the expressionistic locale of the institution itself. The very range of films—anarchic jidai-geki featuring alienated ronin (unemployed samurai), raucous comedies about college youth, tearful melodramas of lost love or bitter poverty, gentle romances, moving dramas of young children, even musical comedies—speaks to the success of the Japanese cinema.

While not, in fact, a major exporter of films (until it would force its films on its occupied territories during the war), Japan's large population could sustain a self-supporting film industry. Attendance by the middle of the 1930s reached 250 million annually. As was the case with Hollywood in this same period, the major studios either owned major theaters outright or controlled most of them through various contractual and legal obligations. Though this made independent production difficult and exhibition even more so (amateur films and documentary films appear with great regularity in this period but remain firmly outside traditional production and exhibition practices and venues), for the commercial filmmaker

YASUJIRO OZU
b. Tokyo, Japan, 12 December 1903, d. 12 December 1963

It is ironic that Yasujiro Ozu's films were once thought to be "too Japanese" for Western audiences to appreciate. This serious misunderstanding of either Ozu's essential universalism or the West's ability to appreciate Japanese culture made Ozu the last major Japanese director of the postwar era to have his films fully distributed in the West. But once his films became fully available (mostly by the mid-1970s), Ozu became the Japanese cinema's most respected director among film critics and scholars, as well as among a whole generation of independent filmmakers in the US and abroad. Once called "Japan's most Japanese director," Japanese critics have rejected this notion, some even claiming he is hardly very Japanese at all. It is clear that Ozu's cinema is deeply rooted in Japanese traditional culture, yet it is equally true that he has a unique approach to the cinema and an unmatched commitment to a personal worldview. His relentless examination of contemporary Japanese life as lived by ordinary people and a film style that provides endless fascination and a wry sense of humor have proven to have universal appeal and tremendous influence.

Ozu is best known for a series of films dealing with the trials and tribulations of the typical Japanese family and the shifts wrought by changes in postwar culture and the inevitability of time's passing. Thus, his families are not only impacted by the shift away from the multigenerational household amidst the continued urbanization of postwar Japan, but also by the simple fact that children grow up, marry, and start their own families. These elements are seen so unforgettably in Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), where the aging parents still living in rural Japan struggle with feelings of disappointment and disillusionment when they visit their seemingly distracted and unloving children in Tokyo. In three remarkable films with essentially the same plot—a daughter's reluctance to get married causes her widowed parent to resort to a veiled threat of remarriage him- or herself to convince the child to wed—Ozu finds his essential theme. Though the father in Banshun (Late Spring, 1949) and Sanma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon, 1962) and the mother in Akibiyori (Late Autumn, 1960) will be all alone (and lonely), the parent must convince the daughter to wed; it is the nature of life, the life cycle in every sense of the term, that parents grow old and children marry so the cycle may begin again.

For all the seeming simplicity of his stories, the complex mechanisms of his narrative procedures and cinematic style endow Ozu's films with a modernist complexity. His use of ellipsis, for instance, tends to de-dramatize the plot. He typically leaves out many would-be important elements—especially in the "wedding" films, where he omits the actual wedding itself. He is also notable for his utilization of 360-degree space, which produces seeming mismatched action, both within the frame and across it. Though Ozu has a reputation for using long takes, it is actually a misperception. Certainly, the contemplative camera positioned just a few inches off the floor and the de-dramatized narratives lend his films a leisurely pace, but there is nothing especially lengthy in his typical shots. Rather, his films unfold at the speed of life and capture it in its essence.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born But…, 1924), Chichi ariki (There Was a Father, 1942), Banshun (Late Spring, 1949), Bakushû (Early Summer, 1951), Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), Higanbana (Equinox Flower, 1958), Ohayô (Good Morning, 1959), Ukigasu (Floating Weeds, 1959), Akibiyori (Late Autumn, 1960), Sanma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon, 1962)

ERUPTION AND INTERRUPTION OF WAR

By 1937, Japan was essentially at war with China. War was inevitable, to anyone with eyes to see, as early as 1931, but by 1937 the military draft and regular excursions into the Chinese heartland indicated that Japan was a nation at war. Cinematic excursions into China became increasingly common as well, with the infamous stardom of Yoshiko Yamaguchi being the most famous instance of the Japanese trying to conquer China on screen and off. A Japanese woman born in Manchuria, Yamaguchi was passed off as a Chinese actress, Li Hsiang-lan, and she appeared in a handful of overt propaganda films inevitably portraying a Chinese woman in love with, rescued by, and otherwise indebted to a Japanese soldier. The effectiveness of propaganda films like Shina no yoru (China Night, 1940) within China is more than questionable, as Chinese audiences wanted no part of such films. On the Japanese homefront, propaganda was the order of the day by 1940, but Yamaguchi-Li's talent and beauty may have overcome the otherwise obvious intentions behind the film.

Government censorship was always a factor in the production of Japanese cinema. As early as 1925, a centralized state censorship board was established to oversee film content, with particular concerns for public security and morality. Leftist filmmaking of the late 1920s and early 1930s (including many documentaries) encouraged further government intervention in the early 1930s, but it was the ever-increasing social conservatism and imperialistic militarism that led to the Pacific War and the virtual nationalization of the film industry and its heavy censorship by 1940. The production of kokusakueiga (national policy film) led to the overtly propagandistic nature of the entertainment cinema, while the government forced the merger of the major studios into three concerns: Shochiku, Toho and Daiei (which had taken Nikkatsu Studios under its new corporate banner). In the early period, from 1937 to 1941, a number of interesting films were produced whose overt propaganda value may be questionable. Films like Five Scouts (Gonin no sekkohei, 1938) and Mud and Soldiers (Tsuchi to heitai, 1939) seem rather grim in their portrayal of ground combat in China, while Airplane Drone (Bakuon, 1939) is a rather charming comedy. Masterpieces like Mizoguchi's Genroku chushingura (The Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin of the Genroku Era, 1941) and Ozu's Chichi ariki (There Was a Father, 1942) similarly show far less overt propaganda content than Hollywood's rabid anti-Japanese, pro-war films of the 1940s, but other, less well-known films take an anti-Western tack. Toho's all-star, big-budget Ahen senso (The Opium War, 1943), directed by the prolific Masahiro Makino and starring Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, for instance, is charmingly propagandistic, with Japanese actors portraying the Chinese and British characters that make up the film. But as the war took a turn for the worse, so, too, the film industry declined—resources becoming ever scarcer and filmmakers ever subject to censorship. Ironically, when the war ended and the US Occupation forces arrived, the film industry was subjected to some of the same rigid censorship codes, though put to different ends.

THE SECOND GOLDEN AGE

It is arguable that the Japanese cinema of the 1950s is one of the high water marks in the history of world cinema, where Japan achieved a major international presence in film festivals and in art cinemas and solidified a mass audience at home that led to one of the most prolific periods of film production in the world. This Golden Age began innocently enough as, under US Occupation mandate, the Japanese cinema began producing films favoring democracy and women's liberation while rejecting feudalism and militarism. Under such circumstances, the production of jidai-geki took a back seat to films examining postwar realities, though Mizoguchi's take on the famous woodblock (ukiyo-e) artist Utamaro, with his Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna (Utamaro and His Five Women, 1946), managed a deft combination of period exoticism and women's liberation. Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) examined social problems in films like Shizukanaru ketto (The Quiet Duel, 1949), Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel, 1948), and Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949), while Ozu continued to refine his perspective on the Japanese family in the process of solidifying an increasingly unique and challenging film style in his postwar masterpieces Akibiyori (Late Autumn, 1949), Bakushû (Early Summer, 1951), and Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953). Indeed, one reason for the Golden Age of the 1950s was the manner in which 1930s masters like Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, and Gosho were joined by the growing ranks of a new generation of filmmakers led by Kurosawa and supported by the likes of Kon Ichikawa (b. 1915), Keisuke Kinoshita (1912–1998), and Masaki Kobayashi (1916–1996), among others.

A stellar lineup of movie stars began appearing in such genres as the woman's film, especially variations such as the haha-mono (mother stories), out of which Kinoshita's masterpiece Nihon no higeki (A Japanese Tragedy, 1953) emerged, and the bar-hostess film, which eventually led to Naruse's sublime Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, 1960). Musicals reappeared in various forms, led by the extraordinary enka (folk) singer Hibari Misora (1937–1989), who appeared in over one hundred films in the 1950s. Tough-guy action stars in the mode of Elvis Presley, like Yûjirô Ishihara (1934–1987) and Akira Kobayashi (b. 1937), gave Nikkatsu a unique form with their action films. Toho Studios struck gold with the atom-bomb allegories in the form of the kaiju-eiga (monster movie), creating, literally, the biggest star of the decade with Gojira (Godzilla, 1954)—followed by sequels and fellow giant monsters galore. Daiei Studios succeeded in its own way by making films with great domestic box-office appeal while also producing films rather specifically geared for overseas appeal at film festivals and art houses.

Kurosawa's Rashomon (1951), a puzzling film that Toho Studios showed little interest in producing, was made at Daiei to minor recognition at home. But its success at the Venice International Film Festival in 1951 (where it was awarded the Golden Lion) and its Academy Award^® for Best Foreign Film more than made up for any domestic disappointment. The film brought Kurosawa instant acclaim, Daiei a great deal of prestige, and the Japanese cinema the kind of worldwide recognition it had long desired. Daiei embarked on a campaign of producing films with an eye toward film festivals and art theater distribution and met with a good deal of success with Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) and Kinugasa's Jigokumon (Gate of Hell, 1953). This penchant for producing period films for the export market had the unfortunate consequence of keeping many of Japan's gendaimono from receiving the kind of institutional support required to break out of the domestic market. Thus, Ozu and Naruse, for instance, were little known abroad compared to Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Nevertheless, with Daiei leading the way, other studios, too, jumped on the jidai-geki bandwagon so that Kurosawa's Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) and Inagaki's Samurai trilogy (1954–1956) received both international distribution and prize-winning acclaim. These period films may have functioned to help redeem Japan's image from that of an imperialist power that had waged a bloody and frightful war against its Asian neighbors and against Western powers like the United States and Great Britain. Set in the past, the films clearly removed themselves from the recently completed war and presented images of an exotic culture—colorful costumes, mysterious and beautiful women, elegant interiors decorated with painted screens, and graceful Zen gardens. Yet films like Rashomon, Ugetsu, and Gate of Hell in fact clearly speak to the disaster of the Pacific War—the ruination of Japan's cities; the effects on innocent civilians, especially women; and the trauma of loss and defeat.

By displacing the recent war onto the more distant past, the films could be made palatable to both domestic and international audiences. But no displacement, no tricks, no hidden meanings were required to appreciate the obvious artistry on view. Drawing on pictorial traditions as venerable as sumi-e (black and white ink brush painting), yamato-e (landscape painting in the Japanese style), and emaki-mono (narrative picture scrolls), the Japanese cinema was characterized by a pictorial elegance not seen anywhere else in the world. A propensity for long takes and long shots gave many of the films a stately, leisurely, contemplative pacing that appealed to many young film critics and filmmakers. The creation of mood, of tone, was similarly a unique property of the Japanese cinema. Combined with many theatrical elements, the films presented themselves as the product of a culture that seemed far from the one that waged fierce war on the world. The stylistic experiments of Kurosawa (one of the rare directors who were as comfortable with dynamic montage as he was with long takes) and Ozu (a filmmaker virtually unique, but not sui generis, with his graphic matches, narrative ellipses, dramatic deemphases, and singular thematic concern) grew out of a prolific, varied, and exciting cinematic period. One might argue that it was precisely this combination of art film acclaim and domestic box-office appeal that defines this period as not only a Golden Age of Japanese cinema, but a Golden Age of world-class filmmaking.

AKIRA KUROSAWA
b. Tokyo, Japan, 23 March 1910, d. 6 September 1998

Akira Kurosawa was a child when the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 leveled the sprawling city of Tokyo. Thus, Kurosawa grew up in a new, modern Tokyo, but one that never lost sight of its past. This struggle between the modern and the traditional is one of the hallmarks of his films—both in terms of the director's veering between period films and modern stories and the way he highlights the need for certain traditional values within modern society; at the same time he brings a distinctly modern perspective to the venerable period film.

It would be hard to imagine the modern American cinema without Kurosawa's palpable influence, whether in the action staging of Sam Peckinpah, Walter Hill, and Martin Scorsese or the distinctive editing patterns that so clearly set off the films of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. And this is no less true of his influence on internationally acclaimed directors ranging from Italy's Western auteur, Sergio Leone, to Hong Kong's master of balletic violence, John Woo. The strategic use of slow motion, the transformation of Sergei Eisenstein's handling of crowd scenes, the use of jumpcuts on movement, the intermixing of long takes and montage, have all entered the lexicon of the modern action cinema.

It is likely that Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) is the single most remade and reworked film in all of world cinema, from Hollywood to Bollywood; Rashomon (1951) is as responsible for the modernist move in world cinema as Bergman's Sjunde inseglet, Det (Seventh Seal, 1957), Fellini's La Strada (1956), or Antonioni's L'Avventura (The Adventure, 1960); and Yojimbo (Yojimbo the Bodyguard, 1961) may fairly be said to have relaunched the Western in the 1960s. Similarly, Kurosawa's Shakespearean adaptations—Kumonosu jô (Throne of Blood, 1957), Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), and Ran (1985)—are generally acknowledged as among the finest filmic transformations of the Bard's classics, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, respectively.

Within the strictly Japanese context, Kurosawa has been one of the few filmmakers willing to tackle an issue generally suppressed in Japanese public art—the atomic bomb. Handled typically by allegory (e.g., Godzilla, 1954) or via the fantastic world of anime, the Bomb has been largely taboo in Japanese cinema. Yet in the middle of his career, with Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being, 1955), and near the end, with Hachigatsu no kyôshikyoku (Rhapsody in August, 1991), Japan's best-known filmmaker squarely confronted Japan's most traumatic experience. Kurosawa's willingness to confront tradition, criticize modernization, and tackle taboo subjects made him the leading filmmaker of his generation, and his unequaled command of cinematic language made him one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of the cinema.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Sugata Sanshiro (Judo Saga, 1943), Waga seishun ni kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth, 1946), Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949), Rashomon (1951), Ikiru (To Live, 1952), Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), Kumonosu jô (Throne of Blood, 1957), Yojimbo (Yojimbo the Bodyguard, 1961), Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low, 1963), Akahige (Red Beard, 1965), Kagemusha (Kagemusha the Shadow Warrior, 1980), Ran (1985), Madadayo (1993)

A NEW WAVE

Some recent critical work has come to question the perhaps too easy and quick assignation of the term "New Wave" (Nuberu bagu, nouvelle vague) to a group of filmmakers who directed their first efforts at Shochiku Studios around 1960, in particular Nagisa Oshima (b. 1932), Masahiro Shinoda (b. 1931), and Yoshishige Yoshida (b. 1933). With some stylistic and thematic similarities to the French and Polish New Waves of this period, such a comparison made sense, if only from the

perspective of public relations and pop journalism. Still, by adding in the contemporaneous efforts by the likes of Shohei Imamura (b. 1926) and Susumu Hani (b. 1928), one can safely claim a historical moment of a clear confluence of interests revolving around the political alignment of Japan with the United States; the alienated state of postwar youth; continued discrimination against Koreans, burakumin (untouchables), and the working poor; women's liberation; and the freeing of film form from the Classical and Postwar masters. And while it has been common to claim this New Wave as cresting in 1960, greater historical distance may reveal that a more interesting and truer "wave" of radical filmmaking came about at the end of the decade, not at its beginning.

The very success of the mainstream Japanese cinema of the 1950s enabled studios like Shochiku, especially, but also Nikkatsu, to allow a greater sense of directorial freedom of expression and the breakdown of classic genres. This was exacerbated when the industry began a steep decline after 1963 due, mostly, to the introduction of television. This new medium rather quickly took away one of the industry's stalwart audiences: middle-class women. One way to try and hold on to their remaining audience was the turn to younger directors and their favored theme of youth. With films like Seishun Zankoku Monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth, 1960), Furyo Shonen (Bad Boys, 1961), and Buta To Gunkan (Pigs and Battleships, 1961), among others, something like a new wave appeared. Alienated youngsters rebelling from middle-class society or unable to enter into the promise of economically resurgent Japan, and a film style characterized by neo-documentary techniques, hand-held camerawork, a rejection of the pictorial tradition, all sifted, many times, through a darkly comic lens, certainly marked a break even from those 1950s youth films that are the clear predecessors of the 1960s new wave. But as the decade wore on and the industry could no longer support the radical efforts of younger filmmakers, and as mainstream audiences continued to desert the Japanese cinema, the industry had reached a crisis by the late 1960s. The Art Theatre Guild (ATG) came to the rescue of many of the new wave filmmakers, introducing new production and distribution patterns into the Japanese cinema. It must be beyond coincidental that the best films of Hani, Shinoda, Yoshida, and even Oshima were made at the ATG, and that even most of their subsequent films take a backseat to the truly original works made there.

The ATG began in the early 1960s primarily as an exhibitor of foreign films—though it did produce Otoshiana (The Pitfall) in 1962, the first film of acclaimed independent filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001). The distribution and exhibition by the ATG of Oshima's Ninja bugei-cho (Band of Ninja) in 1967, produced by Oshima's own Sozosha Corporation, was something of a surprise hit. Oshima used no live action film footage, but "animated" actual manga (comic books/graphic novels) panels by enlarging, shrinking, and superimposing or merely through fast editing of stills. The fact that the audience was that greeted this film enthusiastically was largely young should have been a wake-up call to film producers everywhere, but the ATG was the first to heed it. At this same time, the already well-established Shohei Imamura co-produced Ningen Johatsu (A Man Vanishes, 1967) with the ATG. The film was a modest success—again with a young, restless audience very much ready to embrace underground art, theater, and cinema. By 1968 the ATG would provide that in abundance. Films like Oshima's Koshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968) and Gishiki (The Ceremony, 1971) hit at the heart of Japan's social and familial institutions; his Shinjuku dorobo nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, 1968) captured the Japanese 1960s as no other film; and Shinoda's Shinju ten no amijima (Double Suicide, 1969) and Toshio Matsumoto's (b. 1932) Bara no soretsu (Funeral Procession of Roses, 1969) and Shura (Pandemonium, 1971) combined the most traditional of Japanese arts—Bunraku and calligraphy, among others—with a decidedly Modernist approach to film.

The importance of the New Wave in the 1960s should not diminish the significance of more mainstream genres, in particular the male-oriented films directed at young and working-class men. If women had abandoned the cinema in favor of television and the overall more home-centered lifestyle mandated in economically successful Japan, filmmakers turned to the samurai film in increasing numbers. Under the impetus of director Kenji Misumi (1921–1975) and star Raizo Ichikawa (1931–1969), a new youth orientation was introduced into the already nihilistic tale of a possessed ronin in Daibosatsu Toge (Satan's Sword, 1960) and two sequels (1960, 1961). This same story would be stylishly engaged later in the decade by Tatsuya Nakadai under the sure-handed direction of Kihachi Okamoto (1923–2005) in a version known as Dai-bosatsu tôge (The Sword of Doom, 1966). Akira Kurosawa contributed to this newly anarchic and violent tendency of the genre turn with Yojimbo (Yojimbô the Bodyguard, 1961) and Sanjuro (1962), with Toshiro Mifune (1920–1997) as the samurai-with-no-name. The star, Shintaro Katsu (1931–1997), would similarly bring a new dimension to the samurai film, appearing in over twenty films in the decade as the wandering, blind, masseur-master swordsman, Zatoichi. This new-style samurai film prospered into the early 1970s, but by then overexposure on television, the aging of the samurai stars, and the continued decline of the mainstream film industry put a halt to the routine production of these often startlingly original, beautifully realized, artistically surprising genre entries.

Coincident with the new-style samurai film was another male-oriented genre, often filled with more graphic violence than the samurai film. (Though few films can top the Kozure Okami series [Lone Wolf and Cub, 1970–1972] for sheer swordplay mayhem.) Known as the yakuza (gangster) genre film, it became the staple of Toei Pictures, formed in 1951. A complex morality, sometimes seen as conservative—feudalistic notions of duty, honor, and loyalty predominate—merges with a truly nihilistic flavor, as all values except male bonding and camaraderie are called into question by the time of the (inevitable) violent showdown. The superstar Ken Takakura (b. 1931) is a key figure in the genre, especially with his eighteen-part Abashiri Bangaichi (Abashiri prison series, 1965–1972), as is Bunta Sugawara (b. 1931), especially as guided by the wily veteran director Kinji Fukasaku (1930–2003) in the multi-part Battles without Honor and Humanity series (Jingi naki tatkai, 1973–1974). By the middle of the 1970s, overproduction, aging stars, and declining production values, as well as yakuza series on television, sheathed the sword of the gangster as it had the samurai earlier.

THE LOST DECADE AND A MINOR RENAISSANCE

The film industry in Japan began a decline in the early 1960s that was staved off by the occasional blockbuster hit; the long-running film series (for example, It's Tough To Be a Man [Otoko wa tsurai yo, 1969–1995]); or the intervention of independent financing, such as that of the ATG. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 1970s, the Japanese cinema was a shell of its former self, more footage being devoted to the genre of the roman-poruno (romantic-pornography) than all other genres combined. In the late 1960s a group of younger filmmakers, such as Koji Wakamatsu (b. 1936), utilized the genre to inject the youthful politics of the New Wave into films like Violated Women in White (Okasareta byakui, 1967) or Tenshi No Kokotsu (Ecstasy of the Angels, 1972). Nagisa Oshima took the genre to its logical heights of hard-core pornography with Ai no Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses, 1976), whose graphic imagery and challenging sexual politics netted the film worldwide acclaim and controversy. The rare breakout hit from the roman-poruno world and the occasional film by Kurosawa, Imamura, and Shinoda could hardly lay claim to being any further Golden Age or New Wave–like excitement, while only a small handful of new directors emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to launch the Japanese cinema into any new areas, to find new audiences, and to garner much new respect. The situation in the 1980s was so very dismal that critics have come to call this the "lost decade" of the Japanese cinema.

TOSHIRÔ MIFUNE
b. Qingdao, China, 1 April 1920, d. 24 December 1997

If Akira Kurosawa is generally credited with introducing Japanese cinema to the West with his Rashomon in 1951, perhaps Toshirô Mifune should be credited with making it welcome. He was to the Japanese cinema what Marlon Brando was to Hollywood in the postwar era, a dynamic force to be reckoned with, and it is perhaps this resemblance to Brando—in spirit and dynamism—that enabled films like Rashomon and Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) to win popular acclaim and Academy Awards^®.

Mifune is most associated with Kurosawa, though he was a favorite actor of other major Japanese filmmakers, especially Inakagi Hiroshi. Still, it is undeniable that the sixteen films he made with Kurosawa have entered the annals of world film history as an unmatched body of collaborative work. He rocketed to stardom in Kurosawa's Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel) in 1948 and then appeared in every Kurosawa film from 1949 through 1965, save for the subtle Ikiru (To Live, 1952). While perhaps best remembered for the boisterous, youthful energy displayed in films like Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949), Rashomon, and Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), or the complete power and command he shows in films like Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (The Hidden Fortress, 1958), Yojimbo (Yojimbo the Bodyguard, 1961) and Sanjuro (1962), his range as an actor might be unsurpassed in the entire Japanese cinema. He could play a mature doctor as early in his career as 1949 with Shizukanaru ketto (The Quiet Duel) or as late in his relationship with Kurosawa as Akahige (Red Beard), released in 1965. He is desperately romantic and helpless in Donzoko (The Lower Depths, 1957); aging, weak, and tortured in Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being, 1955); a successful businessman who loses everything in Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low, 1963); and as a tormented and remorseful man in the Hamlet-derived Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), not to mention being acclaimed as one of the finest incarnations of Macbeth in Kumonosu jô (Throne of Blood, 1957).

With appearances in Hollywood films like Grand Prix (1966) and Red Sun (1971), it seems that Hollywood was trying to create its first Japanese star since Sessue Hayakawa in the silent era. Mifune's poor English perhaps got in the way (his voice is dubbed in the Word War II epic Midway, 1976), but it is also likely that his portrayal of a taciturn warrior capable of incredible and explosive violence paved the way for another Asian star, Bruce Lee, to break through into the American market just a year or so later. Over the course of his fifty-year career, Mifune appeared in over 180 films, a testament to his neverending hard work and timeless appeal.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Rashomon (1951), Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), Miyamoto Musashi (Samurai, Part I, 1954), Muhomatsu no issho (The Rickshaw Man, 1958), Yojimbo (Yojimbo the Bodyguard, 1961), Akahige (Red Beard, 1965), Grand Prix (1966), Red Sun (1971), Midway (1976)