Notes on Contributors
Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández is a PhD student at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid completing a thesis on female authorship and representation in the films directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. She has been a visiting researcher at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, with the support of the Monbusho Scholarship and the Japan Foundation Fellowship, and at Birkbeck University of London. Her research, teaching, and publications focus on the study of female filmmakers in Japan, gender representations in East Asian cinemas, and transnational film connections between Japan and Latin America.
Kirsten Cather teaches Japanese film, literature, and culture in the Asian Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her PhD in Japanese literature with a secondary specialization in film from UC Berkeley. Her first book, The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, analyzed landmark censorship trials of “obscene” (waisetsu) literature, films, photography, and manga. She is now at work on a book project called Scripting Suicide in Modern Japan that considers how and why individuals write in the wake of suicide.
Marcos P. Centeno Martín is lecturer and coordinator of the Japanese Studies programme at Birkbeck, University of London. Before that, he worked at SOAS where he taught several courses on Japanese Cinema and convened the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. He was also Research Associate at the Waseda University and Research Fellow at the Universitat de València. Centeno has written extensively on the film representation of the Ainu people and his full-length documentary film, Ainu. Pathways to Memory (2014) was translated into various languages and received several prizes by international film festivals and other institutions.
Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the
Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945–1964 and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture. Her current ethnographic research project focuses on early postwar film audiences in Japan.
Ryan Cook received his PhD from Yale University in 2013 and has taught courses in film studies at Harvard and Emory. His research focuses on Japanese and East Asian film history. He has published on film criticism and theory and on the works of individual filmmakers. His most recent articles include “Casablanca Karaoke: The Program Picture as Marginal Art in 1960s Japan” (The Japanese Cinema Book) and “New Wave Home Drama: The Woman’s Film, the Japanese Household, and Queer Family” in Thirst for Love (forthcoming).
Nina Cornyetz is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at The Gallatin School, NYU. Her teaching and research interests include critical, literary and cinematic theory, psychoanalysis, gender, and sexuality, with a specialization in Japan. Her publications includeTraveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone and “Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others: Sexual (in)Difference, The Eye and the Gaze in © “Murakami” in Criticism.
Rayna Denison is Head of Department for, and a Senior Lecturer in, Film Television and Media Studies at the University of East Anglia in the UK specializing in contemporary Japanese cinema and television research. She is the author of Anime: A Critical Introduction, the editor of Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli’s Monster Princess, and has published on Japanese film and television in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Japan Forum, and Velvet Light Trap.
David Desser is an emeritus professor of Cinema Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Illinois. He received his PhD in Cinema Studies from USC with a dissertation, subsequently published as The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa. He is also the author of Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema and editor or co-editor of anthologies such as Ozu’s “Tokyo Story,” Cinematic Landscapes, and Reframing Japanese Cinema and numerous essays on Japanese, Hong Kong, and US cinema.
Aaron Gerow is Professor of East Asian cinema and culture at Yale University. His books include Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925; Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (co-authored with Markus Nornes,); A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan; and Kitano Takeshi. His co-edited anthology Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory –An Anthology (in Japanese) appeared in 2018.
Irene González-López is a postdoctoral researcher at Meiji Gakuin University, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. After living in Japan for
eight years she completed a PhD in Film Studies at SOAS. Her research focuses on Japanese postwar cinema and the representation of gender and sexuality. Publications include Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity (coedited, 2018); “Marketing the panpan in Japanese popular culture: youth, sexuality, and power” (2018); and “The Profound Desire of the Goddess: Sexuality and Politics in The Insect Woman” (2017).
Earl Jackson is Associate Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Professor Emeritus, National Chiao Tung University. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the Korean University of the Arts, and is currently Chair Professor at Asia University, Taiwan. Jackson is the author of Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation; Fantastic Living: The Speculative Autobiographies of Samuel R. Delany; and numerous articles on Japanese and Korean cinemas and gender and sexuality.
Alexander Jacoby lectures on the arts and culture of Japan, including film, manga, and anime, at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors and of a forthcoming monograph on Koreeda Hirokazu, to be published by the BFI and Bloomsbury. His scholarly essays include contributions to Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts and The Japanese Cinema Book. He has curated film programmes at the British Film Institute, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, the Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Griseldis Kirsch is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Culture at SOAS University of London. Her research interests include screen culture and (self-)censorship in Japan, with particular reference to war memory in Japan. She has acted as script consultant for the Amazon Prime series The Man in the High Castle (series 1 and 2) as well as for Giri/Haji (BBC). She is the author of Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen. A History: 1989-2005 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and co-editor of the volume Assembling Japan: Technology, Modernity and Global Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), but she has also published widely on nationalism and identity in the media in Japan and Europe.
Lauri Kitsnik is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Japanese literary and audiovisual cultures. In particular, he has published essays on adaptation, documentary film, screenwriting, and stardom. His writing has appeared in arts, Asian Cinema, Japan Review, Japanese Studies, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Journal of Screenwriting, and several edited volumes.
Mika Ko is an associate professor at the Faculty of Social Science, Hosei University in Japan. Her major publications include Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism,
Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness; “Neo-documentarism in Funeral Parade of Roses: New Realism of Matsumoto Toshio” (Screen); and “Whose song is it? Korean and women’s voice in Oshima Nagisa’s Sing a Song of Sex” (H. Fujiki & A. Philips eds., The Japanese Cinema Book).
Laura Lee is associate professor of Japanese cinema and visual culture in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. Her work on screen technologies and intermedial relations has appeared in numerous venues. She is also the author of Japanese Cinema Between Frames and the recently completed book Worlds Unbound: The Art of teamLab (forthcoming 2021). Her latest project takes up the intersections of social media and art.
Richard J. Leskosky is retired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has formerly served as Director of the UIUC Unit for Cinema Studies and as President of the Society for Animation Studies. His work has appeared in cinema and animation studies publications, journals, and volumes in the natural and social sciences and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.” He continues to write on animated film genres, Japanese animation, and nineteenth century protocinematic devices.
Diane Wei Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in film and media cultures in Japan, with a focus on gender, emotion, and labor. Her essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, positions: asia critique, Feminist Media Histories, and Screen. She is the author of Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan and is currently working on two projects: one on Prokino and one on 1980s discourses on new media, gender, and labor.
Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London and a Research Affiliate at ISCA, University of Oxford. She has written on maritime anthropology, tourism, religion, gender, film, and popular culture in Japan, as well as on women’s football in the USA, documentaries, and humor in science fiction films. Her publications include Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village; Remaking Kurosawa; editor of The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture; and co-editor, Assembling Japan and Persistently Postwar
Jay McRoy is Professor of English and Cinema Studies in the Department of Literatures and Languages at the University of Wisconsin – Parkside. The author of Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema, McRoy is also the editor of Japanese Horror Cinema and the co-editor (with Richard J. Hand) of Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutation in Horror Film and Gothic Film: An Edinburgh Companion
Daisuke Miyao is Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Japonisme
and the Birth of Cinema; Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies; The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema; and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom; Miyao also edited The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema and co-edited Transnational Cinematography Studies with Lindsay Coleman and Roberto Schaefer, ASC.
Laura Montero-Plata holds a PhD in History of Cinema from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has published in journals such as Secuencias, Cahiers du Cinéma España, Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, 24 Monthly, and Con A de Animación. She authored the books El mundo invisible de Hayao Miyazaki (The Invisible World of Hayao Miyazaki) – currently in its eighth edition – and Biblioteca Studio GHibli: La princesa Mononoke (Studio Ghibli Library: Princess Mononoke). She has published various articles in English, French, and Spanish on Takahata Isao, Kon Satoshi, Masaoka Kenzo, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Iwai Shunji.
Chie Niita is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. Her research focuses on American and Japanese media history, with particular interests in sound technology and performance in theatre, film, and radio. Her articles include “Japanese Cinema and the Radio: The Sound Space of Unseen Cinema” in The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
Marie Pruvost-Delaspre is Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis University. Her PhD dissertation, conducted at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, focuses on the history of the Japanese animation studio Toei Doga and the evolution of its production system from 1956 to 1972. She published several articles on anime and the history of animation techniques and co-authored a number of books in French, such as Japanese Animation in France or Grendizer the Never-ending Story. Her first monograph will be The Origins of Anime: Toei Doga Studio (forthcoming, 2021).
Ayako Saito is a professor in the Department of Art Studies at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo specializing in film studies. Her publications in English include “Reading as Woman: The Collaboration of Ayako Wakao and Masumura Yasuzo” in Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film Theory; “Occupation and Memory: The Representation of Woman’s Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema” in The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema; and “Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and Direct” in Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity
Erin Schoneveld is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of the Visual Studies Program at Haverford College. Schoneveld’s scholarship engages with modern and contemporary Japanese art, cinema, and visual culture examining how these methods of cultural production have evolved into unique modes of address and exhibition practices in light of a rapidly globalizing
world. Her writing has appeared in Arts, Verge: Studies in Global Asias and the Journal of Japonisme. She is author of Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-garde
Jasper Sharp received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Sheffield. He is an independent scholar, filmmaker, and curator, known for his work on Asian cinema, and was the co-founder of the Japanese film website Midnight Eye. His books include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film, co-written with Tom Mes, Behind the Pink Curtain, and The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema, and he is the co-director of The Creeping Garden, a documentary about plasmodial slime molds.
Olga V. Solovieva is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and co-editor with Sho Konishi of Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria Press, 2020). Her articles on the Russian films by Akira Kurosawa appeared in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.
Laura Treglia is currently an independent scholar who lectures and researches on gender, film, and Japanese cultural studies. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies and MA in Japanese Studies (both SOAS, University of London) and has taught in British and Qatari universities. Her main research interests include feminist film and media theory; world genre and cult cinema; and Japanese society and culture. Her research appears in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes published by the University of Chester Press, Wiley-Blackwell Film Studies, and Berghahn Books.
Takuya Tsunoda is Assistant Professor of Japanese film and media in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research centers on the interplay between institutions and media, technologies and sociocultural practices, industrial cinema, and a history and theory of mediacentered scientific research in Japan. He is currently working on a study of the history of audiovisual education and its relation to the new cinemas of the 1960s in Japan. His works have appeared in Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Film and the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema among others.
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Transcultural Studies, Kyoto University. She is the author of Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s and Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age; coeditor of Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema and Sengo nihon eiga-ron: 1950-nendai o yomu (Viewing “Post-War” in the 1950s Japanese Cinema); and
editor of Posuto 3.11 media gensetsu saiko (Rethinking the Discourse of Media Post3.11). Her new book No Nukes: Eiga no chikara, ato no chikara (No Nukes: Power of Cinema and Art) is scheduled to be published in 2021.
Junko Yamazaki joined the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA in 2017 after receiving her PhD in the joint degree program in Cinema and Media Studies & East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2016. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the rise and fall of postwar Japanese period film.
Alexander Zahlten is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His work centers on film and media culture in East Asia, with a focus on Japan. His recent work touches on topics such as film’s transition from environment to ecology and “amateur” film and media production. Publications include the co-edited (with Marc Steinberg) volume Media Theory in Japan and his monograph The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies
Introduction
David Desser
Here is the cliché, the received wisdom: Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon was the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. That it won the festival’s grand prize seems in retrospect to be a given: it is one of the finest and most important films ever made, its influence incalculable. So, what was surprising? It was, after all, accepted for the competitive category and therefore should have had as much chance as any other of the 29 films in competition. True, it was up against some stiff competition, with films by well-known directors like George Cukor, Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and up-and-coming filmmakers like Elia Kazan and Robert Bresson. The beginning of the notion of “surprise” winner comes with reportage by film historian Tino Balio, who notes that it “slipped into the festival unheralded” by the festival director to make “the representation as wide as possible. Members of the jury knew nothing about the picture or the director” (Balio 2010: 118). But this brings up another issue: the “surprise” extended not just to the festival-goers who knew nothing about the film or its director, but to the Japanese themselves.
To further understand this, we need turn to the research of Yoshihara Tezuka. He notes that the Japanese were initially loath to send a period film (jidai-geki) to Western international film festivals. They wondered if it would seem retrograde, an image of the old Japan. So how did Rashomon end up being the first Japanese film not just to win a major award at a Western festival, but the first to be shown at any festival in the postwar era? “In fact, it was not a Japanese person who had selected Rashomon for submission, but the head of Italifilm in the Tokyo office, Giulliana Stramigioli” (Tezuka 2012: 41). Stramigioli was a Japanologist who had studied art and religion at Kyoto University in the prewar period. Upon her return to Tokyo as the representative of Italifilm, she was asked by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren) for help in deciding which film to send to Venice. Daiei, the production studio of the film, was indeed reluctant to agree with her choice and even refused to pay for many of the costs (such as subtitling) involved in sending a film to a festival. Kurosawa claims he was not even informed about its submission (which truly would have made the Golden Lion a surprise to
A Companion to Japanese Cinema, First Edition. Edited by David Desser. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
him!) (ibid: 42). And thus it was, as the received wisdom has it, that Rashomon “opened up” the Japanese cinema to the West.
The story does not quite end there, however. How was it that Rashomon proved so influential? There are two aspects to consider here. One is the distribution of Rashomon after its festival award; the other is the flow of Japanese films to international festivals thereafter, and subsequent distribution for many of those films. As for the former – there is no necessary connection between winning the Golden Lion and worldwide or even limited distribution. Take the case of the films of French director Andre Cayette. His film Justice est faite (Justice is Done) won the Golden Lion the year before Rashomon; he won again for Le Passage du Rhin (Tomorrow is My Turn) in 1960. Yet perhaps only a scholar of French cinema knows these films today. Or take the 1954 version of Romeo and Juliet by Italian director Renato Castellani, in English with a number of well-known actors. Its Golden Lion has not prevented it from becoming “largely forgotten,” as one review notes (Kauffman 2011). There are always numerous reasons involved in a film’s distribution and subsequent success (or failure). In the case of Rashomon, it was picked up by RKO, which, Tino Balio reminds us, under the helm of Howard Hughes, “had fallen on hard times during the postwar recession and had shuttered its studio. In need of films for its distribution arm, it went on the hunt for independent products. Taking on a subtitled Japanese film was a gamble…” (2010: 118). It opened at the newly rebuilt Little Carnegie Theater the day after Christmas in 1951. A prestigious venue, a former major studio distributor and superb reviews by the New York dailies made the film an art house hit. Its impact in Asia was similarly felt due to the fact that Rashomon was shown alongside, and treated as equal to, Hollywood films due to its distribution by RKO (Tezuka 2012: 56).
As for the latter – the outflow of Japanese films to the West – again, the standard wisdom has it that Daiei, seeing the success of Rashomon, decided to make “films for export,” meaning festival play and possible distribution thereafter. Here, too, the situation is more complicated than this supposed simple aspiration. First of all, this was not the first time that Japanese industry personnel attempted to export Japanese films. Amidst German, French, and American films, the Venice Film Festival welcomed Kojo no tsuki (Moon Over the Ruins, Sasaki Keisuke) in 1937 and awarded it a Special Recommendation; and, again, in 1938 Tasaka Tomotaka’s extraordinary Gonin no sekkohei (Five Scouts) and the no-less-excellent Kaze no naka no kodomo (Children in the Wind, Shimizu Hiroshi) competed for the Musolini Cup. Even earlier, as Isolde Standish relates, a number of Japanese studios formed a partnership with Universal in the 1920s to distribute Japanese films abroad. However, it was felt that the films, typical jidaigeki being churned out every week, were “simply not of sufficient quality.” Another attempt, this one by Murata Minoru to distribute his Expressionistic 1925 film Machi no tejinashi (The Street Magician) to Germany seems rather like bringing coals to Newcastle (2005: 66–67).
When postwar efforts to distribute Japanese films abroad were begun again in earnest, Daiei studio head Nagata Masaichi, who was almost a one-man band in
trying to export Japanese films in the early- to mid-50s, was also quoted as saying, “It would be a mistake to produce films specifically for export purposes. Rashomon was not made for export. We just have to make films which reflect genuine Japanese spirit and culture” (quoted in Tezuka 2012: 45). Other aspects of the notion of “films for export” include the fact that Daiei was less established than its two major rivals, Shochiku and Toho, and thus had less of a “studio style” and imprint. Period films with a distinctly “Japanese flavor” was one way of branding itself. Similarly, Eiren took the hint from Rashomon and sent a host of period films to Venice, many by master filmmaker Mizoguchi Kenji, including Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of Oharu) in 1952; Sansho dayu (Sansho the Bailiff), which took a Silver Lion in 1954; and Yokihi (Princess Yang Kwei Fei), in 1956. Other period films that played in competition at Venice in the 1950s include Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, released under the prophetic title of The Magnificent Seven), which tied with Sansho and others for the Silver Lion; Kurosawa’s Shakespearean adaptation, Kumonosu-jo (Throne of Blood) in 1957; 1958 saw Inagaki Hiroshi’s Muhomatsu no issho (The Rickshaw Man) take another Golden Lion for Japan, while Kinoshita Keisuke’s stylish Narayama bushi-ko (The Ballad of Narayama) also played in competition that year. This profusion of period films should not suppress festival appearances at Venice by Ichikawa’s profoundly pacifist WWII tale, Biruma no tategoto (Harp of Burma), or Mizoguchi’s final film, the contemporary-set Akasen chitai (Red-light District aka Street of Shame), both in 1956. It is perhaps worth mentioning the showing in competition of Gosho Heinosuke’s melodrama of the postwar era, Entotsu no mieru basho (Where Chimneys Are Seen), which played in competition at Berlin in 1953 and took home a special prize; Ikiru, Kurosawa’s first gendai-geki (modern drama) masterpiece, was shown in competition at Berlin the following year, these two films breaking the model of, for the most part, submitting period films. Perhaps the Berlin festival used gendai-geki to help brand itself in comparison to Venice and Cannes.
The welcoming arms of the Venice film festival and Berlin did not preclude attempts to break into the south of France. In the wake of Rashomon’s success on the Lido, Cannes welcomed no fewer than three Japanese films in 1952, representing a range of settings as well as production studios: Arashi no naka no hara (Man in the Storm, Saeki Kozo) from Toei, Genji Monogatari (Yoshimura Kozaburo) from Daiei, and Nami (Nakamura Noburo) from Shochiku. All of these films were made before or in 1952 and so their submission was hardly based on producing “films for export.” Indeed, Yoshimura’s Tale of Genji boasts an all-star cast, including the newly minted superstar, Kyo Machiko. Perhaps it would have fared better at Venice. In any case, 1953 saw two more Japanese films at Cannes. Genbaku no ko (Children of the Atom Bomb, Shindo Kaneto) was a rare independent film of the period and was absolutely contemporary in its depiction of the suffering and hardships that were the legacy of Hiroshima’s destruction by nuclear arms. Daibutsu kaigen (Dedication of the Great Buddha, Kinugasa Teinosuke) was a blockbuster produced in 1952 featuring, among others, Kyo Machiko and Hasegawa Kazuo. But it
was another pairing of these two made in 1953 that won the hearts and minds of the Cannes’ jury in 1954, netting the Grand Prize (as it was called before the nowfamous Palme d’Or): Jigokumon (Gate of Hell), significantly, the first film produced in Eastmancolor in Japan. Legend has it that, in fact, it was jury president Jean Cocteau who persuaded his fellow jurors to give the prize to Kinugasa’s picture-perfect pastel parade of colors (Tezuka 2012: 53). What other film or films might have moved the other jurors we may never know, but interestingly there were two other Japanese films in competition that year, Imai Tadashi’s Nigorie, winner of Kinema jumpo’s Best One award for 1953 (over Tokyo Story and Ugetsu [!]) and Tanaka Kinuyo’s modern-day melodrama Koibumi (Love Letter), marking not only the debut directorial feature of, arguably, Japan’s greatest actress, but the first time a Japanese film directed by a woman would feature in an international film festival. No Japanese film would score any trophies at Cannes thereafter, despite a handful of entries by the likes of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, until another entry by Kinugasa, this one another now-forgotten film, Shirasagi (The White Heron), getting a special mention in 1959.
It was not only festival play that enabled Japanese films to extend their reach outside of the nation’s borders. For instance, Edward Harrison, the former press agent and publicist for Rashomon in the US, decided to try his hand at foreign film distribution. Harrison released Ugetsu and Gate of Hell within three months of each other in the fall of 1954, arranging a co-sponsorship with the Japan Society in New York that netted a six-page color spread in Life magazine (Balio 2010: 121). Tino Balio goes on to report that,
Having scored two critical successes with films of old Japan, Harrison decided to test the waters with a film having a more contemporary feel. Koji Shima’s Golden Demon (Konjiki yasha) opened at the Guild on January 30, 1956. It was a type of film the Japanese categorized as “Haha no Mono,” which translates as “Things About Mother.” It was called that because “the mere mention of mother brings sentimental tears to Japanese eyes.”
Unfortunately, the film was a flop, certainly not helped by Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times, where the influential critic called it “an outrageous piece of sentimental fiction about love and greed in comparatively modern Japan,” claiming “its main interest to American audiences will be the prettiness of its décor. This seems to be the one distinction we can look for in Japanese films. Goodness knows, Golden Demon has few others” (qtd in Balio 2010: 123).
Opening a film in New York was fraught with peril, given the outsize influence of Crowther. Thus:
Harrison made one final attempt to broaden interest in Japanese films by relying once again on Machiko Kyo, the star of Kenji Mizoguchi’s last film, Street of Shame (Akasen chitai), which appeared in 1956. Harrison avoided the New York gauntlet by
opening the film at the Vagabond Theatre in Los Angeles on February 15, 1957. The timing enabled Harrison to capitalize on Miss Kyo’s starring role in MGM’s Teahouse of the August Moon, which had recently concluded its run in the same city. A Vagabond ad stated, “Machiko Kyo, star of ‘Teahouse’ and ‘Gate of Hell,’ plays a born tramp.” To increase its allure, the film was restricted to “Adults Only.” Street of Shame ran for over five weeks at the Vagabond theater. After playing in San Francisco, Street of Shame finally arrived in New York on June 4, 1959. It played at the World Theater on a continuous basis, with no age restrictions. (ibid: 123–124)
Despite what we might think of as great success on the part of Daiei – a Golden Lion and two Silvers at Venice, an Academy Award, a Grand Prize at Cannes, and worldwide distribution of these prize-winning films – Balio makes the bald claim that “Nagata’s export strategy failed” (124).
Toho also tried its hand at the American market, releasing Inagaki Hiroshi’s Samurai, Kurosawa’s international version of Seven Samurai, under the title of The Magnificent Seven, and the monster movie Godzilla Samurai premiered at the Vagabond Theatre in Los Angeles in November 1955. “The placement gave the film exposure in Los Angeles in time for Academy Award consideration [it would go on to win] and allowed the distributor to test the waters before deciding on a New York release” (Balio 2010: 124–125). In a deal with Toho, Kurosawa’s The Magnificent Seven, as it was still known, was released by Columbia Pictures on 19 November 1956. “Columbia decided to go into foreign film distribution in a limited way in 1955 and formed a subsidiary to handle subtitled product that would not pose problems for the censors” (ibid: 125). Robert Hatch, writing in the Nation, said that The Magnificent Seven “is much more easily accepted by Western audiences than…any of the major Japanese films that have been shown here” (qtd in ibid: 126). Despite many positive reviews, including Variety and the Saturday Review, it performed poorly at the box office. Apparently, however, calling it a “Japanese Western” brought it to the attention of Yul Brynner, who thought it suitable for a Mexican setting (ibid: 126).
Many reasons were offered up to explain the slow going for Japanese films in the United States. A[kira] Iwasaki, writing in the Nation, blamed the peculiar narrative style of the films: “Remnants of feudalism are found in every phase of Japanese life; the feudal elements in pictures are all an inevitable reflection.
This can be seen also in the “style” of the Japanese film. Its most obvious feature is slowness of tempo, immobility of camera and dull montage. The tempo of a film is naturally defined by the tempo of the society in which it is made, and there can be no doubt that our way of life is slower than that of America and Europe.
But there is another factor in Japan worth considering, an ancient artistic tradition that does not lay stress on dramatic force. The Japanese always valued the subtle in art; they hated exactness, definiteness. Such was and still is the spirit of the
old-school Japanese Tanka, Haikkai, and other forms of literature. It is still alive in the most modern form of art, the film” (Balio: 126–127).
Yet there was one film, at least, whose success was unqualified. As Variety put it: “Japanese Arties Wow the Critics, but Horror Films Get Coin.” Gojira (Godzilla), the first Japanese film to go into general release, was acquired by the aspiring mogul Joseph E. Levine for a mere $12,000. Levine cut it by forty minutes, inserted new footage of B-level star Raymond Burr as an American journalist on the scene in Tokyo, and opened it in a dubbed version at the Loew’s State on April 27, 1956, backed by a massive publicity campaign. It worked (Balio: 127).
Still, “Japanese arties” continued to trickle in, thanks mainly to Thomas J. Brandon. In an effort to open “a new and eager market for all future Japanese imports,” Brandon sponsored a one-man Japanese film festival at the Little Carnegie in late 1959. His plan was to show eight films over two months in order to reveal “a glimpse of Japan as it is today (at least reflected on film).” His selections included three early Kurosawa films – The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, Drunken Angel, and Ikiru – which Toho produced in 1945, 1948, and 1960 [sic], respectively. However, the poor critical and audience response forced him to cancel the festival midway through. Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the most popular in the series, lived on and enjoyed a three-month extended run at the Little Carnegie (Balio: 127).
Ikiru, actually released in 1952 and the Kinema junpo Best One of the Year, had, in fact, in addition to its showing at Berlin, been screened as part of a film series held at UCLA cosponsored with the Motion Picture Association of Japan (MPAJ) in 1956. Unlike the majority of festival submissions and Oscar winners, these films were gendai-geki and were an attempt to demonstrate what Earl Roy Miner called at the time, “Japanese Film Art in Modern Dress” (Miner 1956). Given the official participation of the MPAJ, many of the major studios were represented as were significant directors. Some of the films were given odd or tendentious Englishlanguage titles, reproduced in parentheses here. The films included: Osaka no yado (An Inn at Osaka, Gosho Heinosuke, Shintoho, 1954); Yama no oto (The Echo, Naruse Mikio, Toho, 1954); Tokyo monogatari (Their First Trip to Tokyo, Ozu Yasujiro, Shochiku, 1953); Mugi-bue (Wheat Whistle, Toyoda Shiro, Toho, 1955); and Kurosawa’s Ikiru under the title Doomed. Though the showing of Tokyo Story hardly amounts to an inundation of Ozu films, it tends to contradict, at least to a certain extent, the long-held idea that Ozu was “too Japanese” for Westerners, explaining why his films were held from festivals until the early 1960s. Miner, reviewing the series for the Quarterly of Film Radio and Television (the precursor title to Film Quarterly), said of Tokyo Story: “The film is not one to call great, but it has the satisfying excellence of art of integrity and beauty” (Miner 1956: 359). But if Miner didn’t quite see the greatness of Tokyo Story, he certainly did not miss the masterpiece that is Ikiru: “the only proper way to describe ‘Doomed’ is as one of the greatest films of our time” (ibid: 361). As Miner pointed out,
The Japanese Film Series was the first such event in this country, perhaps anywhere in the world: the first coherently chosen body of Japanese films, the first group shown to an audience not primarily of Japanese descent, and the first group of modern films on modern Japanese life to receive such attention in this country. It was, then, a historical event. (363)
But while the films in this well-chosen series have transcended their time, the manner in which they were introduced has faded into obscurity.
Forming A Canon
Writing in 1953, famed scholar of the Japanese cinema Joseph L. Anderson made the claim that Japan was the only “non-Occidental” nation whose films equaled those of the West (Anderson 1953). Based as he had been in Japan, Anderson was privy to a host of films unavailable to those not living in the once-struggling nation of the postwar period. For those outside of Japan who had been able to see merely a handful of films, such a claim was open to question. Now of course, his assessment is unassailable. But how did it come to pass that sufficient films came to be seen in order for others to render such a judgement?
Critics and scholars often speak of a “gatekeeper” function when it comes to which films are shown where and how, at least in the first instance. We can expand that notion slightly in the case of the Japanese cinema. First came the letting out, a function largely performed by Eiren, which chose the Japanese films to submit to festivals – the very organization that was reluctant to send Rashomon to Venice. Then came the letting in, the function performed by Venice and Cannes. These initial gatekeeping functions would be expanded to the distributors and exhibitors. But it is those initial functions which were, and to a large extent, have remained the province of Eiren and film festivals, over the years expanded to Berlin and other prize-giving European festivals (Locarno, Karlovy Vary). In the 1960s this expanded to the prestigious, but non-prize giving New York International Film Festival, while both in the early 1950s and, especially later, Asian festivals, such as those held in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Busan, South Korea, became a significant way to expand knowledge and interest in Japanese cinema across the globe
Yet the letting out and the letting in tell half the story of what remains. And this is the function of critics and scholars. Their power to form a canon, though certainly understood in the decades since the institutionalization of Film Studies, has been even more prevalent when it came to Japanese cinema. This canon formation coalesced in a handful of film journals, the two most important being Film Quarterly and Cahiers du Cinema. This has to do largely with the terms in which Japanese cinema was accepted, the level, so to speak, from which it was discussed. Let us take the lengthy review of Rashomon that appeared in Film Quarterly in 1952.
First came the notion of difference: “But Rashomon, a Japanese film which has had considerable success in several American cities, comes as a distinct surprise; its techniques in …acting and telling a story are so new to us that its success is a real tribute to its brilliance” (Rowland 1952: 48). Of course, difference can always be recuperated, but for the Japanese cinema it has remained at the very forefront of its appeal to critics. Rowland continues: “Then there is the acting, which is violently theatrical by our standards. But the film’s most unfamiliar quality is its philosophical content; like jesting Pilate, it asks us ‘What is Truth?’; you may come away without an answer, but you will know more about the subject than you did before…” (ibid).
Rowland is no less sensitive to film form than he is to acting or philosophy, deftly discussing Kurosawa’s varied use of camera:
The camera is used sometimes with great freedom, as it rushes through the forest with the woodcutter or looks through the leaves full into the sun so that the forest and light and air become palpable; at other times it is used with severely stylized restraint, as at the police station, where the audience becomes the jury, as it were, and confronts the witness baldly against an unchanging background of sun-struck courtyard with the other witnesses immobile against a white wall. This formally repeated pattern begins each episode and has odd power to rivet the attention, against which the extravagance and disorder of the forest with its erratic bird cries come as a passionate interruption. The rigidity is daring and brilliant, as is the abandon of the scene in which the dead husband testifies through a medium. (ibid: 49)
After continuing to discuss both difference, owed to Japanese traditions, and similarity to some Western precursors, Rowland ultimately concludes that, “one need know nothing about Japanese art to be able to perceive that here is a film of depth and richness and distinctive style, directed by Akira Kurosawa with sure artistry and real concern for its intellectual content” (ibid: 50). Not only, then, did Rashomon achieve the kind of acclaim that has kept it in the canon of Japanese cinema (it is hard to argue with such an inclusion), but the manner in which it is discussed retains continuity.
One can easily assert both that the canon of Japanese cinema was solidified by Noel Burch in 1979 and that membership was a function of difference. For Burch, Japanese cinema provides a “thorough-going critique of the dominant modes of Western cinema,” one “inscribed in seventy-five years of film practice in Japan” (Burch 1979: 17). This filmic practice is owed to the artistic practices of the Heian era, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, during which the pertinent traits of Japanese aesthetics were defined almost entirely…a rejection of the sacrosanct nature of the Western text; a thorough anti-centrism, especially anti-anthropocentrism; a preference for presentation over representation; a critique of realism (e.g., the transparency of the signifier); a critique of Western individualism; and an ingrained awareness of surface and form. (ibid: 25)
Compare this to the highly influential work of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in their early work on that most canonical of Japanese directors, Ozu Yasujiro:
Speaking generally, Ozu’s films diverge from the Hollywood paradigm in that they generate spatial structures which are not motivated by the cause/effect chain of the narrative…Narrative causality is relegated to the status of only one ‘voice’ in a polyphony that gives an equal role to purely spatial manipulations…We expect [Noel Burch’s] forthcoming book on Japanese cinema will complement our argument in this essay. (Thompson and Bordwell 1976: 45; 46, note 2)
Note, again, how it is difference – in Burch’s example, rejection of Western individualism, representationalism, realism, or Bordwell and Thompson’s deviations by Ozu from the Classical Hollywood cinema – that characterizes the Japanese cinema. Though much more specific and thoroughgoing than Rowland’s appraisal of Rashomon, the difference is still one of cinematic style.
Even earlier than Burch or Bordwell and Thompson, it was a different kind of difference that characterized Japanese cinema, yet the canon at the time was remarkably similar. This difference was one of “national character” that was revealed by the Japanese cinema’s “film style” – thus creating the title of Donald Richie’s sensitive solely authored Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (1971). Markus Nornes notes how it was important for Richie to make such a claim for Japanese cinema at this time: “Richie was writing at the formative moment for film studies, when cinema was seen as the expression of national character and/or the genius of exceptional artists” (Nornes 2007: 87).
The notion of “exceptional artists” extends the question of difference to authorship. Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the question of cinematic authorship as introduced and propounded by the writers at Cahiers du Cinema coincides with the introduction of Japanese cinema to the West. Of course, this is not to deny the importance on nascent discussions of film authorship of, for instance, Italian neo-Realism, the dissatisfaction with contemporary French cinema, and the young writers’ desires to become filmmakers of a certain sort in honor and imitation of a group of maverick Hollywood directors. Nevertheless, the introduction of Japanese cinema – in particular, the films of Mizoguchi Kenji – was pertinent to the development of the politique des auteurs. Let us briefly turn, then, to the introduction of Japanese cinema in France and to debates around authorship that surrounded these films.
It was the Cinémathèque Française that reflected and contributed to the growing interest in Japanese cinema following the successes of Rashomon, The Life of Oharu, and Ugetsu at Venice. Programming at the Cinémathèque late in 1953 indicates this promulgation of Japanese cinema in its screening of the two Mizoguchi films that had been included in the official competition at Venice, along with Gosho’s Where Chimneys Are Seen (Kriege-Nicholas 2016: 33–34). Interestingy,
Kawakita Nagamasa, perhaps the most important figure in the dispersal of Japanese cinema into Europe, also brought Inagaki Hiroshi’s sword drama, Sengoku burai (Sword for Hire) to Berlin, along with Gosho’s gendai-geki. Inagaki’s film failed to make it into the festival’s competitive section. As for Gosho, one could note the early effort of Anderson and Richie (1956) to slot him into the canon and the thorough and sensitive monograph devoted to him by Arthur Nolletti, Jr., much later. Still, he remains the province of the specialist.
In 1960, in collaboration with The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Kawakita along with his wife, Kashiko, established the Japan Film Library Council (originally the Japanese Cinematheque), an association inspired by the model of the Cinémathèque Française and dedicated to collecting, preserving, and distributing Japanese cinema around the globe (Kriegel-Nicholas 2016: 35). Mrs Kawakita became friends with both Lotte Eisner, the beloved scholar and archivist of the Cinémathèque Française, and its influential and equally beloved programmer, Henri Langlois. In 1956, Langlois desired to program a “25 Years of Cinema” in conjunction with its Japanese counterpart. Its exhibition catalogue noted:
With the help of the Japanese Cinematheque, Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, we would have liked to open the window, to project the hundred or so movies necessary to illustrate the development of Japan’s cinematographic art, but there is hardly anything left: war and fire have left a gap in Japan, and their best films, produced for the last fifty years, no longer remain in the hands of those who wanted to preserve them. (Kriegel-Nicholas 2016: 39)
To make up for this perceived lack of sufficient films to illuminate the growth and development of Japanese cinema, the program decided to offer a tribute to the works of Kurosawa, the bulk of whose cinema was extant: “It makes sense on the occasion of the Cinémathèque’s 20th anniversary, that, with the help of the Japanese Cinematheque, the Cinémathèque should try to compensate for this shortcoming by making the nearly complete works of Kurosawa available to all those who were dazzled by Rashoomon and Seven Samurai” (ibid: 39-40). The catalogue pays tribute to Rashomon while still lamenting France’s lack of exposure to earlier Japanese cinema (ibid: 40). Included among the screenings were Judo Saga (Sugata Sanshiro), The Men Who Trail on Tiger’s Tail (Tora no owo fumu Otokotachi), No Regret for My Youth [sic] (Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi), Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi), and Living (Ikiru). Finally, it showed the first part of The Idiot (Hakushi) [sic] (ibid: 40-41). Following this season of films, the first book on Japanese cinema in any Western language appeared, Le cinema japonais 1896–1955, written by husband-andwife team of Shinobu and Marcel Guiglaris. The book is both a survey history and an encyclopedia, interestingly already calling the first half of the 1950s “L’âge d’or du cinéma japonais.” It is hard to judge the impact of this book in France or elsewhere, but it certainly indicates the seriousness with which French cinephiles took the emergence of Japanese cinema in Europe.
Significantly, the majority of the Cahiers critics came to acclaim Mizoguchi at the expense of Kurosawa (Kriegel-Nicholas 2016: 42). Such was their fierce advocacy and growing influence that in 1958,
the Cinémathèque Française validated Cahiers’ preference…by organizing an “Homage to Mizoguchi” which included the screening of Osaka Elegy (Naniwa Elegy), Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi), A Portrait of Madame Yuki (Yuki Fujin Ezu), Lady Musashino, The Life of Oharu, Ugestu, A Story from Chikamatsu (Chikamatsu Monogatari), The Woman in the Rumor (Uwasa no onna), [and] Princess Yang Kwei-Fei. (ibid: 42)
Note that with the showing of Osaka Elegy (1936), French cinephiles got their first exposure to prewar Japanese cinema since screenings in Paris in the 1930s. It was at this time, in early 1958, that not only was Cahiers’ preference for Mizoguchi over Kurosawa enshrined, but came the proclamation that Mizoguchi was one of the greatest auteurs in history (ibid: 43). Jean-Luc Godard, as polemical and opinionated as any of the Cahiers coterie, decried that, “On 24 August 1956 the greatest of Japanese film-makers died in Kyoto. Or, quite simply, one of the greatest of film-makers, as has been proved by the Cinematheque Francaise’s retrospective devoted to his work (Godard 1986: 70). Godard placed Mizoguchi in the pantheon of directors, proclaiming that:
Kenji Mizoguchi was the peer of Murnau, of Rossellini. His oeuvre is enormous. Two hundred films, so it is said. No doubt there is a good deal of legend about this, and one can be sure that future centuries will bring quite a few Mizoguchi Monogatari. But there is also no doubt that Kenji is extraordinary, for he can shoot films in three months that would take a Bresson two years to bring about. And Mizoguchi brings them to perfection. (ibid)
Virtually simultaneous with the Cinemetheque Francaise, American Thomas J. Brandon (1908–1982), who, as we saw above, had tried theatrical distribution of Japanese films in the late 1950s, began to collect and distribute films in the 16 mm format. Founding his own company, in November 1950, Brandon Films soon owned the largest collection of 16 mm films available for general release in the United States (Balio 2010: 99). In 1968, Brandon sold his company to Macmillan; the new entity became known as Audio-Brandon, later Macmillan Audio-Brandon. It was during the 1960s (and well into the 1970s) that Brandon specialized in nontheatrical, 16 mm rentals. The largest market for such films was college and university film classes and clubs. In this way, present and future film fans, teachers, and scholars were exposed to a number of foreign films, including Japanese movies, which did as much as anything to form and solidify the canon of Art cinema in the US.
The Macmillan Audio-Brandon films were organized into a catalogue by country of origin but oftentimes came with suggestions for film societies to program festivals based on the company’s holding. For instance,
The… (circa 1962) catalogue offers thirty-five films from eight countries outside the United States: Argentina, England, France, West Germany, Japan, Italy, India, and
the Soviet Union. Films produced outside Europe account for only four of the thirtyfive featured films: The World of Apu representing India, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945) and Ikiru (1952) by Akira Kurosawa, and the 1959 Argentine film End of Innocence. (Goldman 2017: 135)
Goldman points out that “it is … surprising to observe now-canonical directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini, staples of introductory film history curricula, positioned significantly further back in the book. Reading this catalogue now illustrates the contingency of reputations and how they have changed over time within a particular market” (Goldman 2017: 136). Maybe so, but it is not surprising to imagine how much more difficult the canonization of these, and other directors, would have been lacking any representation in Brandon’s selections.
Another important exhibitor and distributor of Japanese cinema was Janus films. The partnership of two Harvard students began at the famed Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA, in 1953, followed by the formation of Janus Films in 1956, and later expansion to New York with the acquisition of the well-placed 55th Street Playhouse. The founders sold the company in 1965 and its new partners began their acquisition of foreign films to the point where they have long been the most significant force in keeping Art cinema alive, especially with their acquisition of the Criterion Collection and the subscription streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Among their earliest acquisitions in the mid-1960s was a deal they made with Daiei for a slate of titles including Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, and Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Janus Films). The apotheosis of Janus’ canonbuilding and maintenance came with the release of an expansive (and expensive) box-set of DVDs under the collective title “Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films” released through the Criterion Collection.
For anyone at all familiar with the history of Japanese cinema and its scholarship in English, the question must have already arisen: where in this discussion of the formation of the canon are the films of Ozu? Now the most canonical of Japanese directors, including and perhaps especially in Japan, his culmination was late – a matter of the films little seen and known outside of his home country. The most feted of Japanese directors – six of the prestigious Kinema Jumpo Best One and two at #2 and the most influential among Art filmmakers of the new millennium – his films were not offered to the most prestigious of the film festivals during his lifetime. The cliché was always that he was “too Japanese” for Westerners. When asked by Jasper Sharp “When did the West become aware of Ozu’s films,” Donald Richie answered:
I think it was in 1958 when an enterprising entrepreneur had a screening in London of “Their First Trip To Tokyo” as it was called then, or Tokyo Story. This excited interest in certain film critics and so the reputation started then, and it stopped right then, because nothing happened after that. The next chance Europe had to see Ozu was my doing. I talked Shochiku into letting me take five Ozu films to the Berlin
Film Festival in 1963. And then at the festival they were seen by a number of people who hadn’t seen them before, and they were all sold, which was an encouragement. This allowed me to make a much larger retrospective so I took them to other festivals, and that’s how it all started. (Sharp 2003)
As we have seen above, Tokyo Story, under the title “Their First Trip to Tokyo,” was first shown at the UCLA/MPAJ festival held in Los Angeles in 1956. The positive note in the Quarterly of Film Radio and Television apparently did not extend to other film critics, leaving it, as Richie has it, to “certain critics” in London to begin the task of putting Ozu at the top of the pantheon of Japanese auteurs. This process actually began with Anderson and Richie’s classic history, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, originally published in 1959. It may be a coincidence, but publication in 1959 was right before the stunning Japanese New Wave that introduced a host of new directors and revolutionized Japanese cinema. In their original edition, Anderson and Richie proposed nine major directors, justifying their choice of filmmakers and the seemingly small numbers, as follows:
The nine directors to be treated in this chapter obviously did not singlehandedly create the art of the Japanese film, but they have certainly contributed more to it than anyone else. Viewing their work as a whole, one is continually impressed by its originality, its freshness, and its excellence. Each of these men has created a world of his own, one governed by the laws of his own personality. Each is, in his own way, the best that Japan has produced. (1959: 350)
The nine directors, in order of their listing and discussion in the book (they are listed in birth order, oldest to youngest, though for some reason Kinoshita Keisuke, born 1912, appears before Kurosawa, born 1910 and Yoshimura Kimisaburo, born 1911), are: Mizoguchi, Gosho, Ozu, Naruse Mikio, Toyoda Shiro, Kinoshita, Kurosawa, Yoshimura, and Imai Tadashi (ibid: 351–391). These men were all born between 1898 and 1912 and began their careers either in the silent era and continued into the postwar period, or during the Pacific War. Note that Anderson and Richie have no directors whose major achievements occurred before the Pacific War. They justify the exclusion, for instance, of Yamanaka Sadao, and presumably others (e.g., Shimizu Hiroshi, Shimazu Yasujiro), on the basis that they have been dead so long that their achievements are visible only in archives, if there (ibid: 350). By the same token, they have no directors of the postwar generation of the 1950s (e.g., Kobayashi Masaki, Masumura Yasuzo, Kawashima Yuzo). However, this is no place to carp about their selections or their snubs – the book is, after all, still a masterwork.
As for Ozu, Anderson and Richie note the extremely high critical reputation that he already had in Japan (a reputation that was not increased thereafter, however, as no film of his from 1959 onward garnered significant domestic acclaim) but wonder if this has “had the added effect of keeping his films off the international market: the Japanese themselves are very afraid that his excellence will not