The Museum of Modern Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Members Newsletter.
http://www.jstor.org
The Japanese Cinema
Author(s): Donald Richie
Source: Members Newsletter, No. 8 (Spring, 1970), pp. 5-8
Published by: The Museum of Modern Art
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4380590
Accessed: 16-03-2015 12:42 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
This content downloaded from 147.251.102.99 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:42:53 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Japanese Cinema
The movies came early to Japan. A little more than
twenty years after the West had finally forced open the
long-closed doors of their country, the Japanese
were enjoying the peep-show kinetoscope. By 1897,
the films of the brothers Lumibre were unreeling before
admiring and impressed audiences, and a year later
the Japanese were making their own movies. InJapan,
motion pictures were both popular and considered
respectable family entertainment. The Crown Prince
himself, later the Emperor Taisho, attended the first
Vitascope showing.
This respectability, however, proved a mixed blessing.
While in some countries-America, for examplethe
infant cinema was thought to be disreputable
and was consequently allowed to discover its own way
of telling a story, in Japan the movies were early
forced to adopt the conventions of the drama or the
novel. Itwas not until about 1920 that the cinema
could begin to become itself, creating comedies and
melodramas that were movie-like, and began to
assume the characteristics that we now associate
with Japanese cinema.
In the Japanese film, three separate tendencies
early become apparent: a continuing debt to literary
beginnings, extending to the casting of stage actors
and theatrical troupes; an attitude toward the past
in which history is seen as contemporary; and a fidelity
to things as they are, which has allowed the Japanese
cinema to interest itself in those aspects of life
notoriously disregarded or glossed over in the films
of some other countries.
One of the characteristics of Japanese life is a
preoccupation with the past. What another country
might consider dead tradition is, for the Japanese,
still much alive. The Japanese filmreflected this awareness
of the past and early elevated the historicalfilm
(the jidai-geki) intoan importantgenre of its own.
Such directors as HiroshiInagaki,Teinosuke Kinugasa,
Daisuke Ito,and Sadao Yamanakahelped make the
period filmone of the most importantgenres of Japanese
cinema. Itwas importantprecisely because
historywas regarded as alive, and the events of the
past were shown as though they were contemporary.
At the same time, other types of filmthatare now
recognized as peculiarlyJapanese were evolving.
Importantamong these were the shomin-geki, films
about Japanese lower-middle-class life. These, likethe
period films,were directed witha realism and fidelity
rare inthe cinema of other countries at this time.
Fromthese pictures there emerges an attitudetoward
life that is typicallyJapanese. Itis seen at its best
in the films of YasujiroOzu and in Heinosuke Gosho's
best shomin-geki comedy Madamu to Nyobo (The
Neighbor's Wife and Mine) which, coincidentally, is
also Japan's firsttalkie.
Besides these shomin-geki films,an interest in the
lower classes and the peasantry (sections of society
usually romanticizedelsewhere) manifested itself
in such a realistic filmas Tsuchi(Earth).There are, to
be sure, a numberof Japanese pictures that portray
life as they wouldhave it ratherthanas itis; still,
picture for picture,the Japanese filmexhibits an awareness
of realitythatone does not associate with
world cinema of the thirtiesand forties.
Because of Japanese acceptance of the worldas it
is, the industrydoes not make very good propaganda
pictures. Ittook Japanese filma long time to learn
the falsification that propagandademands. Earlywar
films, such as Gonin no Sekkohei (Five Scouts), are
not propaganda but unsentimentalrecountings of
Tsuchi (Earth).1939. Directed byTomu Uchida
Z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'
41.
This content downloaded from 147.251.102.99 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:42:53 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
what life is like at the front. Though there were a number
of films that the wartime government judged
more successful as propaganda, even in these the
dishonesty was not in the depiction of the enemy as
overly rapacious but, for example, in its indication that
the occupation of a country was really for the benefit
of its natives, or that such an exercise as Pearl Harbor
was merely a job to be done. As the war progressed,
however, the problem of satisfying both the demands
of the government and their own awareness of reality
became too difficult for most directors. The olderamong
them Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Sadao Yamanaka
-retreated into the past or made films about the home
front. The new directors, such as Akira Kurosawa
and Keisuke Kinoshita, attempted fresh approaches to
the past or cultivated new attitudes to the war itself.
Japan's growing cinematic regard for reality as the
Japanese understand it was somewhat imperiled but
by no means extinguished.
When Japan unwillingly opened its doors in the
1860s, it was inundated by a flood of Western accoutrements-railroad
trains, the telegraph, eventually
electric lights and the telephone-which soon revolutionized
the look of the country. After the defeat of
1945, the country was again deluged, this time by a
full-scale occupation and all sorts of ideas new to
a society that had managed to remain feudal. Such
American ideas as democracy, equal rights for women,
the notion of the individual as an ideal, were all novel
to the large majority of the Japanese. They were,
however, embraced-just as the religion, art, and manners
of the T'ang court had been embraced a little
over a millennium earlier. Postwar films soon reflected
these changes in Japanese life. The pictures of
Kurosawa would probably have been about individuals
anyway, but now they were about individuals learning
the responsibilities of individuality. Mizoguchi, long
interested in the Japanese woman, now saw in her a
symbol of the newly liberated person. The more
traditional directors-Ozu, for example, or Mikio Naruse
-continued their interest in social units such as the
couple and the family, but this was now interpreted by
a new audience, interested (as, indeed, these directors
had always been) in the members of the unit rather
than merely in the unit itself.
The war and defeat had left Japan poor. The Japanese
film, like the Italian, made this circumstance
into a cinematic virtue by portraying the poverty which
in Italy earned the name "neo-realism" but which in
Japan went unremarked. Among the reasons for this
was the existence of several traditions that led to
the same kind of honesty for which the postwar Italian
film was rightly famed. One was an aesthetic-manifested
in things as apparently dissimilar as the
Utamaroo Meguruno GoninOnna(Utamaroand His Five
Women). 1946. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Sugata Sanshiro (Sanshiro Sugata). 1943. Directed by
AkiraKurosawa
Nigorie (Muddy Waters). 1953. Directed by Tadashi Imai
TokyoMonogatari(Tokyo Story). 1953. Directed by YasujiroOzu
This content downloaded from 147.251.102.99 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:42:53 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Japanese house, Zen philosophy, judo, and ink-painting
-that insisted upon the sober, the economical, the
severe. Another was that within the Japanese film (an
art as rigidly categorized as other Japanese arts)
the shomin-geki had long existed as a genre that had
shown poverty as a part of life. This postwar period
produced some of the finest, such as Ozu's Tokyo
Monogatari (Tokyo Story) and Gosho's Osaka no Yado
(An Inn in Osaka). Other directors as well-Tadashi
Imai and Kinoshita among them-brought to their
pictures a sense of the very qualities of Japanese life
during this most interesting period: poverty, pride,
good will, and durability.
One way of defining the Japanese film might be that
if the American film is strongest in action, and if the
European is strongest in character, then the Japanese
film is richest in mood or atmosphere, in presenting
people in their own context, characters in their own
surroundings. Man and his surroundings-this is
the continual theme of the Japanese film, and the Japanese
himself regards his surroundings as extensions
of himself. On film this creates the palpable atmosphere
associated with the Japanese cinema. But such
surroundings are temporal as well as spatial, and
one of the results is the importance of the jidai-geki,
that genre which reveals the peculiar and rewarding
attitude of the Japanese people toward their past.
This, indeed, is to be expected in a country at ease both
with surrounding nature and human nature itself,
more concerned with the actuality of being than with
the promise of becoming. The historical films of
Mizoguchi, of Kurosawa, and of Kinoshita are examples
of an attitude that predicates the present securely
upon the past. A decade after the war that period, too,
had became history, and directors such as Naruse
and Kon Ichikawa showed its role in creating the
present. At the same time, others-Ozu and Shiro
Toyoda among them-were showing how postwar
attitudes, both good and bad, were likewise created
by a continued and living past.
The respect of the Japanese for reality does not,
however, imply complacency about society, nor does
their reverence toward history indicate an unquestioning
acceptance of ideas or institutions inherited
fromthe past. There has always been a livelyelement
of social criticism inJapanese cinema and an attitude
of, at the least, ambivalence towardsuch elements
of the past as feudalism, for example. The warand
Japan's firstmilitarydefeat led many artists-directors
certainly included-to scrutinize Japanese society,
past and present, and to criticize both its lacks and its
excesses. Mizoguchi'slast fiIm,Akasen Chitai
(Red-Light District), was an attack upon legalized
prostitutionthat hastened the end of that institution.
Kurosawa'sviews of the past have long questioned
the validityof bushi-do, or "theway of the warrior."
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~4~f4^
A~~~~~~A
Nogikuno GotokiKimiNariki(She Was Likea WildChrysanthemum).
1955. Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita
I.
Voruno Tsuzumi(Night Drum).1958. Directed byTadashi Imal
Enjo (Conflagration). 1958. Directed by Kon Ichikawa
Kohaiyagawakeno Aki(The Endof Summer).1961. Directed by
YasujiroOzu
This content downloaded from 147.251.102.99 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:42:53 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Imai'sattitude amounts to a downrightcondemnation of
Japan's completely feudal past and partiallyfeudal
present. Since the Japanese more than most men
regardtheir surroundings as an extension of themselves,
they retaina full rightto do something about
them, and about themselves.
The Japanese filmindustry,whose pictures were
among the last to attain an individualflavor,remains the
last to retainthis individuality.Not only does it make
more films a year than almost any other national
filmindustry,but it is the only movie industrytotally
supported by the home audience. This goes fartoward
explaining the Japaneseness of the Japanese film,
which-for better or worse-continues to be an intelligible
expression of the people. The Japanese movie
continues to show, for all who care to see, the most
perfect reflection of a people in the historyof world
cinema. Seventy years after its firstfilms-scenes
fromthe Kabuki,adaptations fromTolstoy-the Japanese
filmhas manifestly changed; yet to a degree
not found in other countries, cinema in Japan has also
remainedtrue to those tendencies one remarksin
its early history.Some degree of reliance on literary
sources still continues, but inthe filmsof a director
such as Ichikawa,the postwar interest inthe individual
and his problems is clearly reflected. There have
been correspondingly fewer period films, butthose of
Kinoshitaand MasakiKobayashi have continued the
vein of social criticism that by now has become part
of the Japanese historical perspective. Ingeneral,
indeed, the past decade has seen a remarkablecontinuationand
increase of the social criticism film,
which, although always present, came to greater
prominence directly after the war.This can be seen
most clearly in the workof directors such as Hiromichi
Horikawa,KanetoShindo, Tadashi Imai,TomuUchida,
and Yasuzo Masumura,and inthe workof such
younger directors as HiroshiTeshigahara, Nagisa
Oshima,Susumu Hani,MasahiroShinoda, and
Shohei Imamura.
Conversely, those filmsthat showed Japan as it is,
withoutfurthercomment than a meticulously realistic
rendering,became fewer duringthis decade. With
risingaffluence the shomin no longer exists, and hence
there is no more shomin-geki. Withthe death of Ozu
in 1963, and with his last great filmSamma no Aji
(An Autumn Afternoon), the quiet realism that pleads
no cause came to an end in Japanese cinema. Continuing,
however, in the workof the newer directors is
the same concern withthings as they are thatanimated
their predecessors. Atmosphere-the feel of a
place, of a time, far beyond the limitsof the motion
picturescreen-remains the salient qualityof the
Japanese film.Seven decades of cinema attest this
meticulous devotion to the world as it appears, the
worldas it is; and this, perhaps, is the mainattribute
of cinema itself.
-Donald Richie
VisitingCurator,Departmentof Film
The Japanese Cinema. Directed by Donald Richie. Through
July 22. Auditorium
Ansatsu (Assassination). 1964. Directed by Masahiro Shinoda
Joiuchi (Rebellion). 1967. Directed by MasakiKobayashi
Aet
Akanegumob (Sun et u 1 D e - M
Akanegumo(Sunset Clouds). 1967. Directed by MasahiroShinoda
This content downloaded from 147.251.102.99 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:42:53 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions