Introduction
1. Great Kanto Earthquake Documentary Films and the State
2. The Testimony of the Body
3. “Realism” and Modernity
4. Desire and Identification
5. Intimacy and Alienation
6. Expressive Excess
Afterword
Fußnoten
“Meijoyū o yumemite, Kamatae oshiyoseru iede onna,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, evening edition, April 28, 1928, 2; “Naraku no dontei e, mizukara shizumu joyū shigansha no mure, sore ni shitagau hanzai no iroiro,” Nikkatsu gahō (October 1926), 52–55.
Matsumoto Yoshirō, “Itamashiki kana, joyū shigansha no mukuro,” Nikkatsu gahō (August 1926), 16.
Matsumoto, “Itamashiki kana,” 16.
Matsumoto, “Itamashiki kana,” 17.
Matsumoto, “Itamashiki kana,” 17.
For a discussion of Meiji modernization and the limits of liberal philosophy and democratic thinking in Japan, see Mackie, Creating Socialist Women, 24–30.
For examples, see Maeda, “Development of Popular Fiction”; Sato, New Japanese Woman, especially chap. 3; and Aso, Public Properties, chap. 5.
See Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, especially 11–13. Sato’s New Japanese Woman includes extensive discussion of Hirabayashi and other intellectuals’ perceptions of female consumers and mass culture.
Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.
Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 29.
For example, the decline of photochemical celluloid cinema and the rise of the digital has occasioned a resurgence of interest in cinematic realism and a reevaluation of the work of film theorists who framed realism in terms of cinema’s analog relationship to the profilmic. Since the digital turn, the field has witnessed a revival of interest in key concepts inherited from classical film theory, such as the notion of the photographic image as an indexical sign. See, for instance, Bazin, What Is Cinema?; Andrew
See Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.
For example, Studlar, “Visual Pleasure and the Masochistic Aesthetic.”
See, for instance, Doane, Desire to Desire; Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map; or Hansen, Babel and Babylon. For a general consideration of the importance of theories of spectatorship and subjectification for “New Film History,” see Parikka, “Media Archaeology of the Senses: Audiovisual, Affective, Algorithmic,” chapter 2 in What Is Media Archaeology?
See Bao, Fiery Cinema, as an example.
Berlant, Female Complaint, x.
Although I sometimes use the word affect to distinguish general states of arousal and inchoate feeling from “emotions,” which are more easily identified with particular psychological states and concepts, I use these terms interchangeably unless indicated otherwise. Important touchstones for my approach to affect and emotion include Deleuze, Francis Bacon; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; and the work of Silvan Tomkins and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, as well as Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 45.
Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 66–67.
Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars,” 13, 12, 12.
Bao, Fiery Cinema, 16.
See Gunning, D. W. Griffith, and Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 153.
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion.
Hansen, “Mass Production of the Senses,” 60.
On the use of conventional narrative patterns to create moral clarity in melodramas about the Great Kanto Earthquake, see Bates, Culture of the Quake, chap. 4. Weisenfeld’s Imaging Disaster provides extended analysis of how Japanese and Western image-making traditions shaped representations of the Great Kanto Earthquake.
See Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, chap. 3. For an analysis of postearthquake issues of mass-circulated women’s magazines and their emotive address, see Kitahara, “‘Kanjō’ no media.”
Ōsawa, “Kantō Daishinsai kiroku eigagun,” 48.
Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 86.
See, for instance, the discussion in Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster, 60–61.
In “Kantō Daishinsai kiroku eigagun,” Ōsawa offers the most comprehensive study of existing film prints, accompanied by thoughtful discussion of issues pertaining to the identification of earthquake documentary films. Ōsawa examines the percentage of overlapping footage among eight extant earthquake documentary films in the National Film Archive of Japan collection. The percentage is taken as the number of shots out of the total number of shots in the existing print that match footage found in one or more
The film I focus on in the last section of this chapter is the Ministry of Education and Tokyo Shinema Shōkai film Actuality of the Great Kanto Earthquake and Conflagration (Kanto Daishin taika jikkyō, 1923). Although it does not survive in its entirety, the extant film likely reflects the carefully constructed documentary. Only 3 percent of the shots in the existing film print overlap with other surviving earthquake documentary films, suggesting that this documentary does not contain the most commonly included footage, but it was one of the most widely screened and best known earthquake films.
Noda, Nihon dokyumentarī eiga zenshi, 11. For more on Japanese documentary film, see Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film.
Kamiya, “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” 35.
See Kamiya, “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” 42.
Kamiya, “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” 36 and 52.
For a list of known screenings of fifteen films related to Hirohito’s travels that were screened from June to December in Japan, see Kamiya, “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” 40. It is not known how many unique films were made. Announcements of these screenings did not always list the manufacturer, and it is possible that the same footage was screened under different titles. It also appears that in some cases Japanese film companies exhibited footage they had purchased from foreign film companies (39).
Kamiya, “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” 38.
In “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” Kamiya describes a softening of filming restrictions after Hirohito’s trip. For instance, after his return it became permissible to film the prince walking, which had previously been forbidden. She notes that non-Japanese cameramen in England were seemingly less inhibited than Japanese cameramen, encouraging the prince to smile and take off his glasses. Still, she notes, the location and number of cameras filming his “welcome” event was specified by the government—seven cameras on the wharf, seven cameras in front of Numazu Station, and three cameras on the water—indicating an ongoing desire to control filming conditions, including the angles from which the prince regent was seen (38).
In the Edo period, Yushima was an important site for bussankai, or academic exhibitions where scholars and collectors displayed their specimens. The site was absorbed by the Ministry of Education when the ministry was founded in 1871. The establishment of the central state museum can be traced to the ministry’s first exhibition, the Ministry of Education Exposition (Monbushō Hakurankai), at Yushima in 1872. Items from this exposition remained on display for viewing on a limited basis after the exposition had officially closed. In 1900, the museum was renamed the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum and came under the control of the Imperial Household Ministry, where it remained until its transfer during the US Occupation in 1952. As Aso notes in Public Properties, this change of hands from the Ministry of Education to the Imperial Household Ministry was accompanied by “a series of structural as well as surface changes that promoted the interests of the imperial family as a distinct entity” and public institution
These films were usually shown together, and their footage may have been combined and screened as a single film. For more on these films, see Itakura, “Shigeki Nankō ketsubetsu.”
In “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” Kamiya observes that this could also be considered a reenactment of the Matsunosuke film Shigeki Nankō ichidaiki, released by Nikkatsu on June 19, 1921 (45). However, it should be noted that even though Nikkatsu cameramen were dispatched to Tokyo for the Motion Picture Exhibit, Taikatsu was given sole permission to film this portion of the prince regent’s inspection. See Itakura, “Shigeki Nankō ketsubetsu,” 47.
For analysis of the significance of Hirohito’s copresence with Matsunosuke in this film, see Itakura, “Shigeki Nankō ketsubetsu”; Kamiya, “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” 44–46; and Fujiki, Making Personas, 81–86.
The titles and content of these films are unclear. See Murayama, “Mō hitotsu no Shōwa eiga,” 179–80. On Taishō-era films about the imperial family, see also Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film, 12–14.
Murayama, “Mō hitotsu no Shōwa eiga,” 178; Nishimoto, “Eiga to Monbushō,” 271. For more on the Committee for Social Education and its film activities, see Fujiki, Making Personas, 80.
As Schencking points out, most estimates of the earthquake’s magnitude range from as low as 7.9 up to 8.2. “Catastrophe, Opportunism, Contestation,” 833.
Schencking, “Great Kanto Earthquake,” 296. As many as 134 separate fires were recorded. See Borland, “Capitalising on Catastrophe,” 880.
These approximate figures are taken from the statistics in Matsuo, Kantō Daishinsai to kaigenrei, 1.
Schencking, “Catastrophe, Opportunism, Contestation,” 833. For more on the state of the Japanese economy at the time of the earthquake, see also Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity. In Great Kantō Earthquake, Schencking notes that in the seven most affected prefectures, 2.5 million became homeless as a result of the earthquake (38).
Schencking, “1923 Tokyo,” 113.
Schencking, “1923 Tokyo,” 114–15.
Schencking, “Great Kanto Earthquake,” 296.
See Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 59–67, for more on challenges pertaining to food and water distribution after the earthquake.
See also Ryang, “Great Kanto Earthquake,” and Allen, “Price of Identity.”
According to Yamada Shōji, rumors began spreading September 1 and the massacres began that night, although the violence was especially frequent from September 2 onward. “Kantō Daishinsai to gendai,” 11. According to Matsuo, despite the imposition of martial law, the massacres in Tokyo continued unchecked until September 4, at which point a ban on citizens carrying arms was declared (Kantō Daishinsai to kaigenrei, 3).
For an examination of the causes and responsibility for the massacres, including discussion of the role played by police and government officials, see Yamada, Kantō Daishinsai ji.
Mack, Manufacturing Modern Japanese Lit er a ture, 56.
Borland, “Capitalising on Catastrophe,” 886; Schencking, “1923 Tokyo,” 119.
Bates, “Authentic Suffering, Anxious Narrator,” 360.
Data from Fujisawa Morihiko and Bureau of Social Affairs Home Office, The Great Earthquake of 1923 in Japan (Tokyo: Naimushō-Shakaikyoku, 1926), cited in Bates, Culture of the Quake, 8.
Bates’s book Culture of the Quake provides a detailed exploration of the divisions in Japanese society at the time of the quake, examining how these inequalities were addressed in postearthquake literature, film, and other forms of narrative. His analysis provides important context for the increasing interest in cinema’s mass address, its realism, and its persuasiveness. A basic desire to appeal to the masses and resolve deep societal fissures can be seen in many of Bates’s examples. For instance, two imperial rescripts were issued in the months following the quake. These were printed in mass-circulated newspapers and had commentary so that ordinary Japanese could understand their difficult language. Bates argues that the rescripts reflected the state’s interest in overcoming social divisions and mobilizing the people for nation-building projects. As he observes, the rescripts referred to the public as kokumin (the national people), implying an address to the entirety of the nation rather than just earthquake survivors (12–13). The Ministry of Education’s earthquake documentary similarly provided a clear and easy-to-understand narrative of the disaster and reconstruction—one that even illiterate viewers could understand. It also included images of the prince looking at and gesturing toward the camera, creating a direct link between state authority and the people via the medium.
Okutani Fumitomo, “Kantō no daisaigai wa ikanaru shin’i ka,” in Michi no tomo, no. 401 (1923), 15, quoted in Borland, “Capitalising on Catastrophe,” 889.
Horie Kiichi, “Tōkyō-shi no saigai to keizaiteki fukkōan” [Tokyo’s disaster and economic plan for reconstruction], Chūō kōron 38, no. 11 (1923), 50–52, quoted in Schencking, “Great Kantō Earthquake,” 306.
Schencking, “Great Kanto Earthquake,” 306.
In Great Kantō Earthquake, Schencking suggests that tenbatsu discourse did not so much fade as transform, since popular mobilization efforts increased and moral rhetoric played an important role in earthquake reconstruction. His argument draws on historian Sheldon Garon’s pathbreaking work on moral suasion campaigns in interwar Japan for support. See Garon, Molding Japanese Minds.
Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 81.
Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 83.
Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 80–81.
Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 82–83.
“Daishinsai katsudō shashin,” Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 3, 1923, extra, n.p.
Advertisement, Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 7, 1923, morning edition, 2; advertisement, Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 23, 1923, morning edition, 7; “Honsha shinsai eiga, Manshū kakuchi no juneizō tei” [Plans to show our company’s earthquake film all around Manchuria], Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 20, 1923, evening edition, 2.
Advertisement, Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 9, 1923, evening edition, 3.
The Masa Shōkai film Teito Daishinsai [Great Earthquake in the Imperial Capital] (1,200 feet) was filmed on September 1 and 2. Advertisement, Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 16, 1923, morning edition, 7. Konishi Film Production Studio and Yagi Yosaburō Shōten made a fifteen-hundred-foot newsreel with plans for a second, advertised in the Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 7, 1923, evening edition, 3. According to censorship records from 1927, the Hayakawa Art Film Production film was 393 feet on two reels (21 minutes at 16 fps). See Tochigi and Tsuneishi, “Jōei eiga kaisetsu,” 14.
Wang, “Kantō Daishinsai to koku shashin,” 165.
Wang, “Kantō Daishinsai to koku shashin,” 157.
For these and other photographs of the Great Kantō Earthquake, see Kitahara, Shashinshū: Kantō Daishinsai.
Nihon eiga nenkan [Japanese film yearbook], 3. According to the monthly timeline of events published in the yearbook, on November 1, 1923, the Kyōchōkai collected film scripts on “mutual love and cooperation.” On November 4, under the sponsorship of Kokugakuin University, a huge event with “comfort films” (ian eiga) was held in the Meiji Shrine outer garden. Waseda University sponsored a screening of comfort films at the Asakusa Kannon temple on November 21. The following day there was a screening of comfort films at the Imperial University auditorium, followed by screenings at Aoyama Gakuin and Azabu Middle School on November 23 ( 4–5).
“Eigakai” [Film world], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 4, 1923, evening edition, 3.
“Baka keiki wa kinmotsu de, katsudō ya shibai ga futaake, sokujitsu kaijōshite sashitsukaenai to keishichō no oyurushi ga deta” [Films and plays open but funny business is forbidden, barring unforeseen circumstances, police allow entertainment to resume], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, September 30, 1923, evening edition, 2.
An earthquake exhibition sponsored by the Tokyo metropolitan government in 1924 and held at the Jichi Kaikan and a nearby hall in Ueno was similarly mobbed by huge crowds that caused chaos. See Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster, 246.
“Shinsai eiga wa kinshi, shinai kakukan e totsuzen no gotasshi, jinshin anteisuru made” [Abrupt directive to every theater in the city, shinsai eiga are forbidden, until the public settles down], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 5, 1923, evening edition, 2; and “Shinsai eiga jōjō o yurusaru” [Shinsai eiga screenings permitted], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 9, 1923, evening edition, 3.
Advertisement, Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 12, 1923, morning edition, 3; advertisement, Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 15, 1923, evening edition, 1. In fact, footage shot by Shirai Shigeru for Nikkatsu was partially confiscated by an army officer and later temporarily banned because it would “destabilize the populace.” Screenings of this documentary only resumed after footage of troops sent to reinforce martial law was cut from the film. See Bates, “Wrath of Heaven,” 41.
Advertisement, Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 16, 1923, morning edition, 2.
See “Shinsai eiga wa kinshi,” and “Baka keiki wa kinmotsu de.”
“Taishō jūsannendo Nihon eigakai” [The 1924 Japanese Film World], in Nihon eiga nenkan, 1.
“Taishō jūsannendo Nihon eigakai,” in Nihon eiga nenkan, 1; see advertisement in Tokyo asahi shinbun, October 3, 1923, evening edition, 3. According to this ad, the Nikkatsu film is eight reels long.
See Kirihara, Patterns of Time, 41–43, and Fujita, Gendai eiga no kiten, 39–49.
Tanaka Saburō, “Kinji shikan” [A personal view of recent events], Kinema junpō ( January 1, 1924), 25.
According to statistics from the online Nihon Eiga Database [Japanese film database], http://jmdb.ne.jp. Thanks to Michael Raine for aggregating this data.
There is some discrepancy among accounts. For instance, in a postwar memoir, Tanaka Eizō says that the Mukōjima glass stage “collapsed violently” in the earthquake. “Nikkatsu Mukōjima jidai (yon)” [The age of Nikkatsu Mukōjima (Four)], Shinario [Scenario] 11, no. 5 (May 1955), 36.
Kozono Suenori, “Daishinsai to Mukōjima satsueijo,” Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 6.
Nikkatsu shijūnenshi, 47. See also “Baka keiki wa kinmotsu de,” 2.
Negishi Kōichi, “Daishinsai kyōkō no hōshin ni tsuite” [Regarding future policy after the Great Earthquake], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 2.
Nikkatsu shijūnenshi, 47.
Nikkatsu shijūnenshi, 47.
Ōsawa, “Kantō Daishinsai kiroku eigagun,” 59. The surviving print is sixty-four minutes long.
Murayama, “Mō hitotsu no Shōwa eiga,” 180.
Ōsawa, “Kantō Daishinsai kiroku eigagun,” 59.
Ōsawa, “Kantō Daishinsai kiroku eigagun,” 59. According to Murayama in “Mō hitotsu no Shōwa eiga,” Actuality of the Great Kantō Earthquake and Conflagration was shown at ninety venues (180).
Tochigi and Tsuneishi, “Jōei eiga kaisetsu,” 11. For more on Shirai’s footage of the Great Kantō Earthquake, see Bates, “Wrath of Heaven,” 41.
Shirai’s original film is nonextant, but his footage was purchased by the Ministry of Education. See Bates, “Wrath of Heaven,” 41.
It is worth noting that many earthquake documentary films compiled footage from other earthquake documentary films. It was not uncommon for films to reproduce footage from other earthquake films without permission. See Ōsawa, “Kantō Daishinsai kiroku eigagun,” on the complexity of properly identifying these documentary
Tsuneishi, “ 1923–nen no ‘gekishin,’” 204. There is some question as to whether Ina’s film was released publicly at the time of the earthquake because of the extreme nature of its imagery. According to Ōsawa in “Kantō Daishinsai kiroku eigagun,” the existing print shares many shots in common with other surviving earthquake documentaries (forty-eight out of ninety-six). Judging from this and the design of the film’s intertitles, Ōsawa believes it is very likely the film was screened in 1923 (54).
Advertisement, Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 8, 1923, evening edition, 2.
See Crary, Techniques of the Observer. For the relationship between the railroad, early cinema, and traveling shots, see Schivelbusch, Railway Journey; Kirby, Parallel Tracks; and Gunning, “Before Documentary” and “‘Whole World Within Reach.’” On the moving panorama, see Huhtamo, “Peristrephic Pleasures.”
Burch, Theory of Film Practice. For an elaboration on Burch’s concept of presentational film style with reference to Japanese cinema and its difference from Western mainstream film, see Burch, To the Distant Observer.
Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 66, 67. See also Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions.”
Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 67. For more on the benshi and Japanese silent film narration, see Dym, Japanese Silent Film Narrators.
It is unclear whether these are deputized police. The intertitle refers to these men as jikeidan or “vigilantes.”
In “‘Kōtaishi toōeiga’ to Onoe Matsunosuke,” Kamiya suggests that this strategy is also apparent in Shigeki Nankō ketsubetsu, in which the presentation of the prince’s viewing of Matsunosuke’s performance automatically aligns the spectator with Hirohito’s point of view (46).
Hori, Promiscuous Media, 53.
Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, 59. This aspect of earthquake representations is also explored by Weisenfeld in Imaging Disaster. For Bruno, this lurid fascination with looking, with establishing knowledge of and wielding power over bodies, reveals film as one “instantiation of a discourse on sexuality and sexual difference” (64).
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 16.
Actors at Nikkatsu’s Mukōjima film studio, located across the Sumida River from Asakusa in the eastern part of the city, described Tokyo’s churning ruins as “warped and contorted like expressionist stage sets.” See Koizumi Kasuke, “Ichi nichi osokattara inochi ga nai” [One day later and I would have perished], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 21, and Kito Shigeru, “Sono hi no omoide: Kyofu ni ononoku Sakai no Mei-chan” [My memory of that day: Sakai Mei-chan trembling in terror], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 30. Painter and poet Takehisa Yumeji, who before the earthquake had published a series of drawings from his viewings of the German expressionist film
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 17.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 15.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 16.
Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 87.
Schencking, Great Kantō Earthquake, 88–89.
Kozono Suenori, “Daishinsai to Mukōjima satsueijo” [The Great Earthquake and Mukōjima studio], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 7.
Negishi Kōichi, “Daishinsai kyōkō no hōshin ni tsuite” [Regarding future policy after the Great Earthquake], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 5.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 7.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 7.
Kozono, “Daishinsai to Mukōjima satsueijo,” 8.
Nihon eiga nenkan, 2–3.
Nihon eiga nenkan, 2.
Nikkatsu shijūnenshi, 47. See also Nikkatsu gojūnenshi for more on the establishment of the company and its first fifty years.
Kurume Miyoji, “Nyūrakugo no Mukōjima sakuhin ni nozomu” [Hopes for Mukōjima films after the transfer to Kyoto], Nikkatsu gahō (May 1924), 65.
For more on Kyoto’s modernization and the early history its film industry, see Tomita, “Eiga toshi Kyōto,” and Lewis, “Kyoto—The ‘Hollywood of Japan.’”
Yamamoto Rokuha, “Shishin” [Personal message], Kinema junpō (April 11, 1924), 4.
Tanaka Saburō, “Kinji shikan” [A personal view on recent events], Kinema junpō ( January 1, 1924), 25.
Yamamoto Rokuha, “Shimogamo yori” [News from Shimogamo], Kamata (October 1923), 47.
Nihon eiga nenkan, 4. At least eleven fictional films were made about the earthquake, but none survive today. See Bates, Culture of the Quake, 81.Bates provides detailed plot descriptions of many of these films in “Wrath of Heaven.”
Bates, Culture of the Quake, 3.
“Shinsai eiga: Daichi wa yuragu” [Earthquake film: The Earth Shakes], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 40–42. See also Bates’s discussion of The Earth Shakes in Culture of the Quake, which analyzes the plot as an example of tenken or tenbatsu discourse, 133 35. In “Wrath of Heaven,” Bates offers a reading of the films’ melodramatic structures that differs from what I argue here. According to Bates, the narratives shifted blame away from frivolous leisure culture and onto the excesses of the wealthy in an attempt to alter the terms of tenken discourse, which was critical of cinema and consumer culture, and win greater legitimacy for the film industry. In contrast, I am primarily interested in how melodramatic narratives provide a structure for identification and rememoration, allowing audiences to read their own—and others’—experiences into the templates provided by the films.
Reviewed by Tanaka Saburō in Kinema junpō (November 21, 1923), 11. For further discussion of In the Face of Death, see Bates, Culture of the Quake, 80–88. Bates’s sources describe the father and daughter’s tale as the central narrative, the framework for the other characters’ stories. This is likely a more accurate reflection of how the film was structured, as opposed to the “compilation” format that Tanaka’s review suggests.
Advertisement, Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 24, 1923, morning edition, 1.
Advertisement, Tōkyō asahi shinbun, May 15, 1924, evening edition, 2.
Advertisement, Tōkyō asahi shinbun, June 5, 1924, evening edition, 2.
Two examples of extended melodramatic narratives are the novels Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (père), which were made into lengthy, multipart films by Henri Fescourt in 1925 and 1929, respectively. In this chapter, I am generally thinking about melodrama in the terms described by Peter Brooks in Melodramatic Imagination.
See Flatley, Affective Mapping, 7.
See especially Flatley’s discussion of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in Affective Mapping, 98–99.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 88.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 89.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 89. Giuliana Bruno dramatizes this process in her book Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, which examines the lost films of pioneering early Italian filmmaker Elvira Notari. As Bruno notes, one of the results of “feminism as scholarship” has been a “historical change in the authorial scene,” which includes the process of attributing authorship as well as its definition. As a result, “women, historically excluded from authorship, have become authors by writing about other women” (235). Anticipating Flatley’s arguments, Bruno suggests that the shifting authorial scene and analysis of lost texts foreground the acts of “imagination and imposition” (Flatley, Affective Mapping, 89) that are always involved in positing significance and authorial intention. In contrast to the Oedipal scenario described in Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” in which reader-son kills author-father in the act of liberating meaning from the tyranny of authorial intention, Bruno describes a “mother/daughter and author/reader” relation that is an “interchangeable relation … where alternatively all positions may be occupied by, and shifted between, two female subjects” (Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, 24). In other words, her analysis foregrounds the role of intersubjectivity and transference in reading. See also Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, 234–40.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 102.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 92–93.
Flatley, Affective Mapping, 90.
The special earthquake issue of Nikkatsu gahō was not published until November 15, 1923. Publishing companies and bookstores in Tokyo were hit much harder than were film companies. Most of the September issues of Tokyo-based journals had already been printed and mailed out for distribution by September 1, but fires caused by the earthquake in Kanda, Hongō, Nihonbashi, Kyōbashi, and neighboring areas in the Shitamachi caused most of the publishers and an estimated 80 percent of bookstores to burn down. The Ōsaka asahi shinbun raised concerns over whether October issues would
Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 38.
See also Bates’s discussion of this magazine issue in Culture of the Quake, 82–84.
Bates, Culture of the Quake, 74.
Bates, Culture of the Quake, 76.
Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure?,” 273.
Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 28.
In Making Personas, Fujiki suggests that an emphasis on psychology and technique over bodily realism and raw physical expressivity becomes stronger throughout the decade, with intellectual critics also urging audiences “to keep a certain emotional distance from the performers” (147).
Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom,” 417.
Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom,” 418–19.
Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom,” 423.
Kitō Shigeru, “Sono hi no omoide: Kyōfu ni ononoku Sakai no Mei-chan” [My memory of that day: Sakai Mei-chan trembling in terror], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 30. Many accounts played up the humor of actresses caught in incongruous costumes or their overdramatics. At Shōchiku’s Kamata film studio, the earthquake interrupted the filming of a prison scene with actresses playing inmates in an Ushihara Kiyohiko–directed film. The actresses were in prison uniforms when the wardrobe building collapsed, burying their regular clothing in the rubble. In his memoir, Ushihara recounts, “In the midst of incessant aftershocks, they were in hysterics, tearfully begging to be allowed to go home. With all this confusion and the rolling shockwaves, I was reduced to the single concern of getting my ladies clothed!” Quoted in High, “Japanese Film and the Great Kantō Earthquake,” 8.
Kitō, “Sono hi no omoide,” 31.
Koizumi Kasuke, “Ichi nichi osokattara inochi ga nai” [One day later and I would have perished], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 21.
Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 36.
Tarō [Anonymous], “Aru hi no koto” [What happened that day], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 37.
Senō Matsuko, “Gojikan o mizu no naka ni” [Five hours in the water], Nikkatsu gahō (November 1923), 23.
For examples, see Kōno, “Shinsai to kōkishin.”
“Abikyōkan no teito o jūō ni chikushite mawatta honsha Yoshida tokuhain no shisatsuki” [Eyewitness account of our special correspondent Yoshida, who rushed all around the imperial capital as it shrieked in agony], Ōsaka asahi shinbun, September 3, 1923, morning edition, 2.
LaCapra, “Holocaust Testimonies,” in Writing History, Writing Trauma. LaCapra points out that these two forms of traumatic memory are never mutually exclusive, although one hopes that traumatic reenactment will eventually give way to working through and reflection: “When the past becomes accessible to recall in memory, and when language functions to provide some measure of conscious control, critical distance, and perspective, one has begun the arduous process of working over and through the trauma in a fashion that may never bring full transcendence of acting out (or being haunted by revenants and reliving the past in its shattering intensity) but which may enable processes of judgment and at least limited liability and ethically responsible agency” (90). These forms of traumatic memory—compulsive repetition and conscious recall—cannot be dichotomized, for they overlap. LaCapra writes, “In memory as an aspect of working through the past, one is both back there and here at the same time, and one is able to distinguish between (not dichotomize) the two. In other words, one remembers—perhaps to some extent still compulsively reliving or being possessed by— what happened then without losing a sense of existing and acting now. This duality (or double inscription) of being is essential for memory as a component of working over and through problems” (90).
See Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, and Keil and Stamp, American Cinema’s Transitional Era.
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 79.
Aaron Gerow describes a crucial shift occurring in the concept of the spectator in 1920s Japan. Rather than the construction of consumer subjectivity, he focuses on the question as to whether individuals could be held accountable “to the external hierarchies of public consciousness and social surveillance, or to hierarchies internalized in the family-state at home and the self-regulation of desire in the individual” (Visions of Japanese Modernity, 219). He argues that the existence of cinema was ultimately useful for positing a subject who could (potentially) process images and information in accordance with internalized values. He calls this concept of subjectivity the “interiorized subject.” For Gerow, this involved the emergence of a “transcendental spectator”—in his words, “an abstract citizen—a mass of homogenized film consumers—that would now be the object of protection and correction” (Visions of Japanese Modernity, 197). See Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 191–221.
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 78.
On the rise and fall of the store theater, see Paul, When Movies Were Theater.
See Schencking, chapter 4 in Great Kantō Earthquake, “Admonishment: Interpreting Catastrophe as Divine Punishment,” and Borland, “Capitalising on Catastrophe,” especially 887–91.
In Advertising Tower, Gardner provides a brief, useful overview of definitions of “the crowds” (gunshū), “the people” (minshū), and “the mass” (taishū) in the 1920s, or what he calls Japan’s “new media age” (7). His analysis of subjectivity, the masses, the city, and modern culture in the modernist writings of Hagiwara Kyōjirō and Hayashi Fumiko reminds us that conceptions of the crowd were not only shaped by authorities but also central to the rising avant-garde as well as proletarian literature and arts. As Gardner points out, the events of Great Kantō Earthquake radicalized Tokyo’s urban intelligentsia, especially its modernist writers and artists. His analysis of urban modernity and subject formation in modern literature focuses mostly on “the self.” Still, his discussions of Hayashi’s modernism and mass culture, and Hagiwara’s “physiological, proto-cybernetic view of the self and the environment, transplanted onto the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘society,’” suggest a multitude of frameworks for thinking about intersections between subjectivities, bodies, affect, media culture, and urban environments of the 1920s (92). For more on the rise of mass culture after the 1904–05 RussoJapanese War and the Great Kantō Earthquake as “the moment of emergence of modern Japanese mass society” (29), see also Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.
For more discussion of the cultural politics of changing film representation practices, see also Lewis, “Blood and Soul (1923).”
Wakayama Osamu, “Shokan danpen” [Some thoughts], in Kakushinseru Mukōjima satsueijo, 5.
For an excellent discussion of the increasing emphasis on the actor’s physical body in the 1920s, plus ambivalence toward this emphasis on physical sensuality rather than craft, see chapter 6, “Replacing the Onnagata,” in Fujiki, Making Personas.
Suzuki Kensaku, “Onnagata ni tsuite” [Regarding the onnagata], in Kakushinseru Mukōjima satsueijo, 14.
For more on this bulletin, see Lewis, “Blood and Soul (1923).”
Ōi Tadasu, “Mondaigeki to kibungeki” [The problem drama and the mood drama], Mukōjima ( June 1923), 20.
Yamamura Fuyuo, “Randamu inpuresshon” [Random impressions], Mukōjima (June 1923), 19.
Mikoshiba Morio, “Minshū geijutsu to shite no eiga no kachi” [The value of film as the people’s art], Nikkatsu gahō (March 1925), 3–4.
To raise just two examples: in the November 15, 1923, special earthquake issue of Nikkatsu gahō, Negishi’s endorsement of cinema: “in order to appreciate other entertainments some amount of cultivation is necessary, but films can be enjoyed without any kind of preparation” ( 4–5). In “Katsudō shashin no hanashi” [Discussion of motion pictures] in the August 1926 issue of Nikkatsu gahō, pioneering director Murata Minoru wrote: “Despite the fact that the essence of cinema remains a very difficult subject, there is nothing so easy to become quickly familiar with as the cinema, and so anyone can easily review films…. For this very reason, it is a truly democratic [demokuratikku na] misemono [attraction]. One could say, ‘Until now, I have never seen a film because I
Mori Iwao, “Geijutsu ka geijutsu de nai ka” [Is it art or not?], Kinema junpō (April 1, 1922), 7.
Mikoshiba, “Minshū geijutsu to shite,” 3.
Mikoshiba, “Minshū geijutsu to shite,” 3.
Mikoshiba, “Minshū geijutsu to shite,” 4.
Mikoshiba, “Minshū geijutsu to shite,” 4.
Mikoshiba Morio, “Yakusha shosei tetsugaku” [Philosophy for the actor], Nikkatsu gahō (October 1926), 36–37.
Mikoshiba, “Yakusha shosei tetsugaku,” 36.
Ishikawa Hakuchō, “Kamakura kara Kamata e kaette” [Returning to Kamata from Kamakura], Kamata (October 1923), 39.
Ishikawa, “Kamakura kara Kamata e kaette,” 39.
Ishikawa, “Kamakura kara Kamata e kaette,” 39–40.
Ishikawa, “Kamakura kara Kamata e kaette,” 40.
Schencking, “1923 Tokyo,” 115.
Bates, “Fractured Communities,” 36–37.
The 1925 figure is based on research conducted between August and October 1925 for the Nihon eiga jigyō sōran, 129. The count from 1922 is taken from Bates, “Fractured Communities,” 36–37.
Komatsu, “Foundation of Modernism,” 364.
Publishers were sustained by an enormous demand for books after the earthquake destroyed libraries, private collections, and the standing supplies of Tokyo booksellers. Subject matter expanded in both directions, with increasingly specialized titles catering to niche audiences vying with the newfound popularity of sōgō zasshi, or general interest magazines. See Mack, Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature, 64–65. According to Silverberg in Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, between 1918 and 1932 the number of current registered periodicals increased from 3,123 to 11,118 (24).
Bates, “Wrath of Heaven,” 39.
For Japanese film releases, see the table “Taishō jūsannendo Nihon eiga fūkirisū ichiran” [Number of Japanese films released in 1924 at a glance], in Nihon eiga nenkan, 458. For foreign film releases, see the table “Taishō jūsannendo gaikoku eiga fūkirisū ichiran” [Number of foreign films released in 1924 at a glance], 456–57. In late 1927, Kinema junpō estimated the daily number of admissions nationwide at 431,193. This would put admissions at nearly 130 million per month in 1927. See Komatsu, “Foundation of Modernism,” 364.
See Kinema junpō (February 1, 1927), 6.
See Gardner, Advertising Tower; Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque; Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense; and Mack, Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature.
Some date the emergence of Japanese educational filmmaking even earlier. Peter High points out early film entrepreneur Umeya Shōkichi’s success with news actualities, hygiene and science films, and travelogues in the period 1906–11. According to High, “In late 1906, Umeya decided the hallmark of his promotion-distribution enterprise [the
Standish, New History of Japanese Cinema, 134.
In Japanese Cinema between Frames, Laura Lee argues that “tricks such as the substitution splice were introduced as constitutive ingredients of a more modern, Western, and cinematic film practice” (37). Nevertheless, she also points out, “reformers more or less unanimously detested Makino and Matsunosuke for representing everything backward in Japanese cinema” (32–34).
Standish, New History of Japanese Cinema, 65.
Kasza, State and Mass Media in Japan, 72.
Kasza, State and Mass Media in Japan, 56.
See Kato, “Taisho Democracy as the Pre-Stage.”
See Takemura, Taishō bunka.
For more on wartime film policy, see High, Imperial Screen, and Baskett, Attractive Empire.
Gordon, Modern History of Japan, 11.1
Gordon, Modern History of Japan, 118.
Gordon, Modern History of Japan, 131.
Gordon, Modern History of Japan, 132. For more on the 1905–18 riots and contradictions at the heart of Japan’s imperial democracy, see Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy.
Tōkyō shinsairoku, 12.
Schencking, “Great Kantō Earthquake,” 303.
See Schencking, “Great Kantō Earthquake,” 297. Schencking’s book Great Kantō Earthquake is a far-ranging examination of the factors shaping reconstruction.
Matsumoto Yoshirō, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru, kanashiki joyū shigansha!” [Miserable aspiring actresses lured by the hell of vanity!], Nikkatsu gahō (February 1926), 12–15.
On lasting associations between acting and prostitution, see Kano, Acting Like a Woman, 24–27 and 42–43; Fujiki, Making Personas, 196–200, 202, and 210.
This is also noted by Anselmo in the US context in “Made in Movieland,” 150. She describes the negative rhetoric surrounding female film fans’ imitative behavior as the industry’s “equivocal response” to an increasing dependence on teenage girls, as paying customers and as film workers, during a transitional period characterized by the rise of the star system (134).
See Lewis, “Kyoto—The ‘Hollywood of Japan.’”
This is the context in which Stamp discusses Traffic in Souls, The Inside of the White Slave Traffic, and other films pertaining to the 1910s white slavery craze. She examines how the American movie theater was linked to thrilling forms of spectatorship and
Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 94.
See Kano, Acting Like a Woman.
The article “Teikoku Joyū Yōseijo setsuritsu” [Establishment of Imperial Actress Training Center] announced that the center would open on September 1, 1908. Trainees would study literature, arts, and proper makeup application, among other subjects. Women who were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five and who could be vouched for by two persons residing in the city of Tokyo were eligible for admission. Upon graduation, the women would undertake a two-year practicum at the Imperial Theater, although with the school’s permission they might be allowed to perform at other theaters. See Tōkyō asahi shinbun, August 7, 1908, morning edition, 7. The earliest ad for the school in the Asahi shinbun I have seen is July 31, 1909.
“Tōkyō no onna, onna yakusha no gakkō” [Women of Tokyo, school for female players], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, September 5, 1909, 5. The article “Tōkyō no onna, risōteki shinjoyū” [Women of Tokyo, the ideal new actress] profiled one of the trainees. Tōkyō asahi shinbun, August 30, 1909, 5.
See “Shinjoyū (1), yakusha ni naritai onna ga shidai ni ōkunaru” [The new actress (1), more women want to become players], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, November 13, 1912, morning edition, 6.
In the seventh part of the series, the paper compares various actresses who passed Shōchiku’s entrance exam and concludes that those from the Tokyo area are preferable to those from Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, and other Kansai cities: “For the new actress of the new age, girls who live in the city and breathe the Tokyo air are best—maybe it’s hereditary.” Of the 123 applicants from Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nagoya, Nara, Okayama, and Wakayama, only 20 girls got callbacks. By comparison, more than half of the girls from the Tokyo region got callbacks. “Shinjoyū (7), Kansai chihō no joyūnetsu, Shōchiku Kaisha no shinboshū” [The new actress (7), actress fever in the Kansai region, Shōchiku company’s new recruitment], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, November 19, 1912, morning edition, 6.
“Kyoei no yume kara, ochiyuku onna jigoku, appare sutā ni narisokone ukikusa no yō na onna no mure,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 3, 1925, morning edition, 7.
“Joyūnetsu no futari shōjo, tomete kudasai to kōban e,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, August 1, 1927, morning edition, 7.
“Joyū shigansha o kankinshite bōkō, Gojō yūbinkyoku no aku shoki, Shōchiku no kippu nukitori kara roken” [Corrupt clerk at Gojō Post Office who trapped and assaulted aspiring actresses exposed by stolen Shōchiku tickets], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 24, 1923, morning edition, 2.
“Joyū shigan no musume, nijūhachi na taburakasaru, Dai Ichi Kokusai Eiga Kaisha to nanori, kyōhakushite wa ryokan e” [Twenty-eight young aspiring actresses swindled, forced to go to inn by so-called First International Film Company], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, September 30, 1926, morning edition, 7.
“Eiga joyū boshū de onnatachi o tsuru akkan, sanzan na me ni atta onna futari, ma no te o nogarete sa mayō,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, May 31, 1929, evening edition, 2.
“Kyoei no danjo o tsuridashita, shinema-dan no shōtai, Dairen ni naku joyū Nemoto Midori kara oyamoto ni kita sukui no denpō” [The true nature of cinema troupe that lured vain men and women, parents receive telegram for help from actress Nemoto Midori crying in Dairen], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 3, 1925, morning edition, 7.
“Sashidashinin fumei de, kita shibō denpō, Manmō shisatsu no ue sharei no kōkoku ni tsurareta, Dairen de taoreta Kiyoshi no jikka,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 3, 1925, morning edition, 7.
“Manchō chihō de shirareta ratsu’ude, danchō Kanda Hiderō no sosei, tsuma wa Shōchiku joyū Takakura Kaneko,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 3, 1925, morning edition, 7.
“Eiga no sutā o kokorozashite, mi o horobashita wakai musume, oya ni somuite mudan de jōkyō, umauma satsueijochō ni uritobasaru, me ga samete umi no namida,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, December 25, 1925, morning edition, 7.
“Takumi na kōkoku de, chihō no onna o tsuru, karera no yariguchi ni chūiseyo (Suzuki hoan buchō no dan)” [Watch out for the methods of those who lure country girls with clever advertisements (a discussion with security chief Suzuki)], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, December 25, 1925, morning edition, 7.
Matsumoto, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru,” and Matsumoto, “Naraku no dontei e, mizukara shizumu joyū shigansha no mure, sore ni shitagau hanzai no iroiro,” Nikkatsu gahō (October 1926), 52–55.
Matsumoto, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru,” 12.
Matsumoto, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru,” 12.
Matsumoto, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru,” 12.
Matsumoto, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru,” 15.
Matsumoto, “Naraku no dontei e,” 54.
Matsumoto, “Naraku no dontei e,” 54.
Matsumoto, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru,” 14.
Matsumoto, “Kyoei jigoku ni akogareru,” 14.
Fujiki, Making Personas, 142, 149.
Fujiki, Making Personas, 148.
Fujiki, Making Personas, 249.
Anselmo, “Made in Movieland,” 147.
“joyū shigansha no wakaki onna ga Kamata kenbutsu no shuki, sono jōnin ni okutta tegami yori,” Katsudō sekai (July 1924), 108–11, 116.
“joyū shigansha no wakaki onna,” 109.
“joyū shigansha no wakaki onna,” 109.
Anselmo-Sequeira, “Screen-Struck,” 15.
Anselmo-Sequeira, “Screen-Struck,” 16.
Anselmo-Sequeira, “Screen-Struck,” 17.
For an analysis of American fan magazines and their inscription of a female reader who is at once “distanced, skeptical, and active as well as … relational, intimate, and empathetic” (269), see Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure?”
Stamp, “Wages and Sin.”
Stamp, “Wages and Sin,” 99.
Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map.
Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, 51.
See also Hansen’s argument in Babel and Babylon that women’s participation in mass culture led to the consolidation of Hollywood’s textual and industrial practices during the 1910s by promoting the commodity form of spectatorship. She argues that mass consumer culture transformed women’s relationship to the public sphere by blurring the demarcations between public and private and dismantling the stark categories of gender, class, and ethnicity that had limited women’s social horizons. Yet Hansen points out, “For middle-class women this meant a liberation from the narrow confines of domestic space, but also, in the long run, the surrender of a traditionally female sphere of influence to the corporately organized sphere of mass consumption” (116). Not only that, women’s investments in mass culture were often attacked or disparaged.
Anselmo-Sequeira, “Screen-Struck,” 23.
Anselmo-Sequeira, “Screen-Struck,” 1.
In Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, Silverberg argues that the regional unevenness of interwar Japan has been greatly exaggerated, as the growth of the mass media in the 1920s helped foster a shared modern imaginary that overcame regional differences. She contends that film, radio, magazines, and the recording industry created a “marketplace of mass culture” in which images of modernity were equally available to Japanese in country and city alike (27).
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 2.
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 2.
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 49.
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 5.
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 63, 190.
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 31. For more on the relationship between colonial policies and the regulation of deviance in Japan, see Frühstück, Colonizing Sex.
The term “permanent film theater” is frequently used to describe venues that specialize in film exhibition and feature architectural elements that lend themselves to this specialization, whether or not these spaces were purpose-built to do so. As the name sug
See Ueda, “Eiga jōsetsukan no shutsugen,” and Ueda, Nihon eiga sōsōki.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 55.
For more on cinema and children in this period, see Salomon, “Movie Attendance of Japanese Children.”
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 54.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 57–58.
“Jigoma (1): Jigoma to wa nanzoya, katsudō shashin no firumu ni arawareta hanzai kosuinetsu” [Zigomar (1): Just what is Zigomar? Fervor for criminal genius revealed by motion picture film], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, October 5, 1912, morning edition, 5.
“Hatabi no hanzai, hito no atsumari wa hanzai o umu” [Weekend crimes, gatherings of people spawn crimes], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, November 8, 1911, morning edition, 5; emphasis added.
For more on ryōki, see Angles, “Seeking the Strange.”
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 50.
Ambaras, Bad Youth, 67.
For more on degenerate schoolgirls and moral panics on the perceived threat of urban culture, see the chapter “The Lure of the Modern: Imagining the Temporal Spaces of City and Countryside,” in Karlin, Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan.
“Onna dōshi jōshi o hakaru, ichinin wa jūshō ichinin wa buji, koko ni mo hisomu darakusei no zaiaku,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, May 6, 1909, morning edition, 5.
Taking refuge at or wasting time in the cinema is cited as evidence of delinquency in articles such as “Denniku kiri no hannin wa jūrokusai no shōnen, umaretsuki no shikijōkyō” [Criminal who slashes victims’ buttocks is a sixteen-year-old boy, naturalborn sex maniac], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, December 9, 1913, 5. Other articles describe criminals finding their victims at the movies, such as “Manto akushōnen no ōkō (49), Shitaya Asakusa no jitsurei (zoku), kodomosarai no mokuteki” [Juvenile delinquents rampant throughout the entire city (49), real cases from Shitaya Asakusa (continued), intention to kidnap], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, April 15, 1910, morning edition, 6, which describes children at the Denkikan and Sanyūkan being tricked out of their money or lured away with sweets. In an earlier installment (part 47), the head of a girls’ school discusses the many love letters sent to the school’s twenty or thirty students: over 100 love letters in one year. According to the school, eight or nine out of ten of these letters are invitations to meet in the darkness of a movie theater. “Manto akushōnen no ōkō
“Manto akushōnen no ōkō (50), Shitaya Asakusa no jitsurei (zoku), shinkyo Asakusa shochō no dan, katsudō shashin torishimari no konnan” [Juvenile delinquents rampant throughout the entire city (50), real cases from Shitaya Asakusa (continued), new police chief speaks, the difficulty in regulating moving pictures], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, April 16, 1910, morning edition, 6.
The chief seems to be responding directly to part 41 in the series, which deals with juvenile delinquency in Hongō ward, in which a school principal expresses concern that the majority of victims in movie theater crimes are young girls. The principal demands gender-segregated seating and suggests that children be forbidden from going to the movies. Despite the geographic focus of the article (Hongō ward), the principal gripes about “places like Asakusa” (Asakusa-tō). See “Manto akushōnen no ōkō (41), Hongō no jitsurei, katsudō shashin no torishimari” [Juvenile delinquents rampant throughout the entire city (41), real cases from Hongō, regulating motion pictures], Tōkyō asahi shinbun, April 7, 1910, morning edition, 5.
“Manto akushonen no ōkō (50),” 6.
“Manto akushonen no ōkō (54), tōkyokusha no dan” [Juvenile delinquents rampant throughout the entire city (54), authorities speak], in Tōkyō asahi shinbun, April 22, 1910, morning edition, 5. See the chapter “Civilizing ‘Degenerate Students,’” in Ambaras, Bad Youth, for a discussion of different types of Meiji-period delinquents, their dress, and their habits as described by contemporary observers and sensationalized in the popular press.
Hur, Prayer and Play.
See, for instance, Yoshimi, Toshi no doramaturugī and Media jidai no bunka shakaigaku.
One of Yoshimi’s best examples in Toshi no doramaturugī is the kankōba, or modern bazaar. He describes the turn of the century as the height of the kankōba age. Shopping became a form of spectating when the first kankōba, a precursor to the department store, was established in connection with the First National Industrial Exhibition of 1877. In the kankōba’s long stalls, goods were placed on view with price tags visible, allowing visitors to browse without assistance and thus encouraging a completely new kind of visually oriented consumption. By 1902, there were nearly thirty kankōba in Tokyo, approximately one-quarter of which were in Ginza (149, 151). Other locations included Ginza, Kyōbashi, Jinbōchō, Nihonbashi, and other commercial neighborhoods. The most famous of these, the Teikoku Hakuhinkan, once boasted nearly 70 shops (151). In “Dawn of Cinema in Japan,” High offers another perspective on the theater-building boom. According to High, the entrepreneur Tahata Kenzō heard a rumor that Tokyo city officials were going to limit film theaters by restricting permits to one per city district. Tahata quickly formed a company with his uncle in order to buy up property, clear the land, and claim the permits. Each plot was staked with a sign that said “A Fukuhōdō movie theater is being constructed on this spot.” Although Tahata planned to sell the land and permits to existing Tokyo film companies for exorbitant prices once the ordinance went into effect, the ordinance never
Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 121.
Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23.
Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” 76.
Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 12.
Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 11.
Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 12.
Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 20.
Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 22.
See, for instance, Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination. Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro writes that while “melodrama articulates the conflict between the old and new social structures and modes of production” (34), rather than essentializing melodrama, it is more useful to historicize the genre and remember that “any generic category is neither more nor less than [a] theoretical construct and that the ultimate purpose of generic criticism is to deconstruct the illusion of the completeness of the genre and to analyze the layers of sedimented ideologemes constructed into a seemingly distinct genre” (33–34). Yoshimoto, “Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Japanese Cinema.”
Russell, Cinema of Naruse Mikio.
See Yamamoto Kajirō, Katsudōya suiro.
Essential references on Mavo include Weisenfeld, Mavo; Omuka, Nihon no avangyarudo geijutsu; and Omuka, ed., Taishōki shinkō bijutsu.
For more on Kikuchi and his magazine Eiga jidai, see Lewis, “Kyoto—The ‘Hollywood of Japan’”; on Gonda and early film study, see Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity; on Tanizaki and his film activities, see Lamarre, Shadows on the Screen.
For instance, see the zadankai (roundtable discussion) of the twentieth joint review meeting of Shinchō and its remarks on shinshin sakka (new authors) in the January 1925 issue of the magazine, or the zadankai of the twenty-second meeting (March 1925) and its discussion of the popular novel and newspaper literary columns. Other major articles on the new age of popular culture and the bundan include a special edited section featuring nine contributors on the theme “Tsūyoku shōsetsu o donna hyōjun de eramu ka” [What is your criterion for the popular novel?] (June 1925) and essays such as “Bungei no tokushuka to tsūzokuka: Tsūzoku shōsetsu to kongo no bundan” [The rarefication and popularization of literature: The popular novel and the future of the bundan], by Kawaji Ryūkō (Kawaki Makoto) ( June 1925).
Takizawa, “Avangyarudo no ‘seikatsu’ to ‘sakuhin,’” 112–13
Takizawa, “Avangyarudo no ‘seikatsu’ to ‘sakuhin,’” 113.
Angles, “Seeking the Strange,” 101–2.
Omuka, Nihon no avangyarudo geijutsu, 7.
Hagiwara, “Berlin 1922,” 44.
Jinno, “Murayama Tomoyoshi no dōga,” 50.
Hagiwara, “Berlin 1922,” 24.
For more on the 1922 congress and the debates on constructivism, see Stephen Bann’s introduction to Tradition of Constructivism, xxv—xlix.
Murayama, Engekiteki jijōden, 2:101; quoted in Hagiwara, “Berlin 1922,” 28.
See Hagiwara, “Berlin 1922.”
Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden, 2:116.
For an account of the play’s initial publication and early performances, see Schinnerer, “History of Schnitzler’s Reigen.”
It is unclear where Murayama saw the play, but it was performed by various companies in Bonn and Paris in February, Christiania in March, Neumünster in June, and Dresden in July 1922. In August, the Kammerspiele of Hamburg toured Holland with the play, where it was censored in several Dutch cities. Despite public denunciations, audience disturbances, stink bombs, mobs storming the theater, and arrests at Viennese performances in 1921, the play was staged without incident in Vienna in March 1922. See Schinnerer, “History of Schnitzler’s Reigen,” 850–54 and 856.
Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden, 2:122.
Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden, 2:122.
Hagiwara, “Berlin 1922,” 41.
Bahr, Master, 27.
Bahr, Master, 28.
Bahr, Master, 87–89.
Bahr, Master, 88. Ellipses in the original.
Note: Duhr was called “Arthur” in the American stage adaptation. I am quoting Glazer’s translation, which I have checked against Bahr’s original text, but using Bahr’s original characters’ names.
Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden, 2:121.
Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden, 2:122.
Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity,” 37.
Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity,” 36.
Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity,” 37.
Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity,” 36.
Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity,” 38.
Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity,” 38.
According to Brian Massumi in “Autonomy of Affect,” if feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social and affects are prepersonal. Massumi suggests that affects are experienced as intensities rather than qualities or categorical states (e.g., “happiness” or “anger”). Affects are unformed and unstructured, and they may be (but not always) precognitive and/or prelinguistic (88–89). Several theorists suggest that affect is closer to “the body” than intellection and more like sensation—for example, a certain affect may arise when blood suddenly flushes the skin or when one shudders involuntarily. For instance, see Tomkins, “What Are Affects?” in Shame and Its Sisters.
Murayama, Rensa shinzō kigeki.
Murayama, Rensa shinzō kigeki, 22.
Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden, 2:124.
Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden, 2:124.
Murayama, “Rensageki,” 46.
Iwamoto has examined the links between these forms in his essay “From Rensageki to Kinodrama.”
Murayama, “Rensageki,” 6.
Murayama, Rensa shinzō kigeki, 5–6.
Murayama, Rensa shinzō kigeki, 17–18.
Nomoto Satoshi, “Jii to sentan: ‘Mavo’ to sono shūken” [Masturbation and the avant-garde: ‘Mavo’ and its contexts], Ritsumeikan Gengo Bunka Kenkyū [Ritsumeikan studies in language and culture] 22, no. 3 ( January 2011), 60. Cited in Takizawa, “Avangyarudo no ‘seikatsu’ to ‘sakuhin,’” 91.
Takizawa, “Avangyarudo no ‘seikatsu’ to ‘sakuhin,’” 88–93.
See Masaki, “Tamashii no hōyō.”
Murayama, Rensa shinzō kigeki, 17–18.
Kinoshita, “Mise-en-scène of Desire,” 120.
The company remained intact until 1929, when an internal rift split Tsukiji shōgekijō permanently into two companies. As theater historian Brian Powell suggests in “Japan’s First Modern Theater,” 1926 marked the end of the theater’s ascendancy and the close of an era.
For instance, see Itō Kōichi’s criticism of the use of film projection in the plays R. U. R. and Nebeneinander at Tsukiji shōgekijō in “Gekijō eiga kō” [A consideration of films for the theatrical stage], Tsukiji shōgekijō 5, no. 3 (1928), 50–52.
Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars,” 11–12.
Takizawa, “Avangyarudo no ‘seikatsu’ to ‘sakuhin,’ ” 87.
Takizawa, “Avangyarudo no ‘seikatsu’ to ‘sakuhin,’ ” 87.
For example, see Lewis, “Media Fantasies.”
See, for instance, Ito, Age of Melodrama; Coutts, “Imagining Radical Women”; Karlin, Gender and Nation. As Hansen argues in “Fallen Women, Rising Stars,” in silentera Japanese cinema and Shanghai cinema, “As in other silent cinemas (Russian, Scandinavian, German, French), the contradictions of modernity are enacted through the figure of the woman, very often, literally, across the body of the woman who tries to live them but more often than not fails, who has to become a corpse by the end of the film. As in many nineteenth-century literary traditions, women function as metonymies, if not allegories of urban modernity, figuring the city in its allure, instability, anonymity, and illegibility, which is often suggested through juxtapositions of women’s face and bodies with the lights of Shanghai, abstracted into hieroglyphics. In more narrative terms, female protagonists serve as the focus of social injustice and oppression; rape, thwarted romantic love, rejection, sacrifice, prostitution function as metaphors of a civilization in crisis” (15). See also Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism.”
For more on Hirabayashi and the “feminization of culture,” see Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, especially 11–13, and Sato, New Japanese Woman, especially 22–25, 39–43, 48, 61, 74–75, and 106–7.
Quoted in Satō, “Kingu” no jidai, 28.
For a more thorough discussion, see Mack, Manufacturing Modern Japanese Lit er a ture.
Sato, New Japanese Woman, 34.
In New Japanese Woman, Sato notes a few exceptions, such as Chiba Kameo, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (who popularized the phrase “the feminization of culture”), and Nii Itaru (61).
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 91.
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 93.
For another approach to the repetitive use and excessive coding of female bodies in Japanese cinematic texts, see Coates, Making Icons.
For instance, in “Imagining Radical Women,” Angela Coutts groups together a variety of visual representations of women in the Japanese proletarian magazines Bungei sensen [Literary front], Senki [Battle flag], and Fujin senki [Women’s battle flag] during 1923–31, which she identifies as carrying negative connotations.
For more on the massification debates, see for example, Shea, Leftwing Lit er a ture in Japan; Karlsson, “Kurahara Korehito’s Road to Proletarian Realism”; and Sugino, “Nakano Shigeharu (jō)” and “Nakano Shigeharu (ge).” For an excellent introduction to Nakano, see Silverberg, Changing Song.
For an introduction to Prokino, see Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film; Namiki, Nihon Puroretaria Eiga Dōmei; and Makino, “Rethinking the Emergence.”
Quoted in Frederick, Turning Pages, 152.
For an analysis of this story, see Karlsson, “Thirst for Knowledge,” 346–48.
Coutts, “Gender and Literary Production,” 180–83. For more on Nyonin geijutsu, see Coutts, Nyonin geijutsu.
See, for instance, Mackie’s discussion of the “malestream” proletarian movement’s belated recognition of women’s interests and the subordination of those interests to Comintern policy in Creating Socialist Women in Japan, especially chap. 5. Coutts explores this problem in “How Do We Write a Revolution?”
Mackie discusses these debates in Creating Socialist Women, 86–93.
Sato, New Japanese Woman, 19.
For more on Kurahara Korehito’s essay “Geijutsuteki hōhō ni tsuite no kansō” [Thoughts on artistic method] in the context of his 1928 to 1932 essays on proletarian realism, see Karlsson, “Kurahara Korehito’s Road to Proletarian Realism.”
Bergstrom, “Revolutionary Flesh,” 332–34, 338.
Bowen-Struyk, “W(h)ither the Nation,” 390.
Bowen-Struyk, “Introduction,” 257–58.
See Bowen-Struyk’s reading of the story in “W(h)ither the Nation,” 382.
For an alternative reading of this story, see Bowen-Struyk, “Sexing Class.” Whereas my interpretation focuses on the narrator’s conflicting feelings of identification and desire, which together produce his split-subjectivity, Bowen-Struyk’s reading depends on what she argues is the narrator’s desire and misrecognition of the “prostitute,” which she uses as grounds to criticize the gender politics of the text. While I generally agree with Bowen-Struyk’s persuasive reading, I am interested in something different: the narra
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 56.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 57.
Original editors’ note to the Rogers translation published in Bowen-Struyk and Field, For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution, 59: “This sentence contains the first of four excisions in the text as first published and the only time the type was simply effaced and not replaced with the customary Xs or Os. For that reason, we have struck through the twelve Xs inserted in postwar editions.” As Bowen-Struyk and Field explain, publishers often practiced self-censorship, obscuring potentially objectionable words and phrases by substituting characters with Xs and Os ( fuseiji ). In some cases, the context and the number of fuseiji allowed the reader to guess what words had been removed. In the case of this quoted passage, however, the original text was completely redacted, and although many censored publications were published with the redacted text restored in the postwar, elided text in “The Prostitute” was represented by fuseiji in postwar editions.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 59–60. I have made some modifications to Rogers’s translation with reference to the original Japanese text, Hayama, “Inbaifu,” 172.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 62.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 67.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 67.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 68.
Hayama, “Prostitute,”62. I have made some slight modifications to Rogers’s translation based on the original Japanese text, Hayama, “Inbaifu,” 174.
Emphasis added.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 64–65. I have modified Rogers’s translation with reference to the original Japanese text, Hayama, “Inbaifu,” 177.
Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”
Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 155. Original emphasis.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 65.
Bergstrom, “Revolutionary Flesh,” 336.
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 67.
Abbas introduces the idea of critical proximity in his discussion of Hong Kong filmmakers who work within commercial genres even as they explore the disorienting effects of the 1984 Joint Declaration that stipulated Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997. In “New Hong Kong Cinema” he writes, “From what vantage point can the filmmaker describe this cultural space and sick eros? Certainly not from the outside, from a privileged critical distance…. The position of the Hong Kong filmmaker, then, is what we might call a position of critical proximity, where one is always a part of what one is criticizing…. Given commercial pressures, it is understandable that even the most independent of filmmakers find themselves working with popular genres like the gangster (or ‘hero’) film, the ghost story, and the kung fu movie. What is remarkable, however, is that these filmmakers produce some of their best work within these genres (this is an example of what I mean by critical proximity)…. By no means parodies of their respective genres, these films use the limits of genre as a discipline and a challenge
Hayama, “Prostitute,” 68.
See Fujita, Gendai eiga no kiten.
Fujita, Gendai eiga no kiten, 127.
Fujita, Gendai eiga no kiten, 98. Fujita’s account is somewhat misleading. Beginning in 1928, Sasa Genjū, a member of the Sayoku Gekijō (Left-Wing Theater) trunk theater began using a Pathé Baby 9.5 mm camera. He made films of events such as the 1927–28 Noda soy sauce company strike and the 1928 May Day. Some of the films he made in 1928 were shot on 16mm. By 1930, in accordance with policy that embraced political organizing and “bringing politics into the everyday” (nichijōteki mochikomi), Prokino members traced the origins of the organization to Sasa’s film activities (which took place more than two years before Fujita dates Prokino’s first public screening), not the leftist criticism and film theory being produced at Eiga kōjō [Film factory] and Eiga kaihō [Film emancipation]. It is also worth noting that Prokino made a clear distinction between mobile projection unit screenings in farming villages and workers, which Sasa practiced as early as his first films, and “public screenings” for general audiences in theaters or lecture halls.
Fujita’s Gendai eiga no kiten is an excellent reference for information on these and many lesser known productions that critics regarded as tendency films.
Iwasaki’s article originally appeared in the June 1930 issue of Sekai no ugoki [Movement of the world] and was reprinted in the compilation of his writings Eiga to shihon shugi.
Iwasaki, “Keikō eiga no mondai,” 252.
Iwasaki, “Keikō eiga no mondai,” 258–60.
Kasza, State and Mass Media in Japan, 62.
Kasza, State and Mass Media in Japan, 66.
Anderson and Richie, Japanese Film, 68.
Quoted in Fujita, Gendai eiga no kiten, 109.
Fujita, Gendai eiga no kiten, 109.
“Gappyō Nani ga kanojo o sō saseta ka” [Joint criticism: What Made Her Do It?], Shinkō eiga, March 1930, 134–43.
Fujimori, Nani ga kanojo o.
Kimura and Satō, “‘Keikō eiga’ kara Man’ei e,” 246.
Kimura and Satō, “‘Keikō eiga’ kara Man’ei e,” 246.
Barker, Tactile Eye, 3.
For instance, see Bordwell’s characterization of “flamboyant style” in “Visual Style in Japanese Cinema,” as well as Gerow’s discussion of Kinugasa Teinosuke’s neo perceptionist film Kurutta ichi peiji (A Page of Madness, 1927), its avant-garde construction, its exhibition with benshi narration, and its reception as a conventional melodrama in Page of Madness.
Kimura and Satō, “‘Keikō eiga’ kara Man’ei e,” 247.
See Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, and Kinoshita, “Mise-en-scene of Desire.”
Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 29.
See Coutts, “Imagining Radical Women.”
Hayama, “Inbaifu,” 172.
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 6; original emphasis.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 8.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 197. In some ways Gerow’s description of the interiorized subject echoes Christian Metz’s definition of the “transcendental spectator,” whose interiority, suspension of disbelief, and sense of identity (which makes possible their capacity for subsequent identifications) makes cinematic signification possible:
“In the cinema the subject’s knowledge takes a very precise form without which no film would be possible. This knowledge is dual (but unique). I know I am perceiving something imaginary (and this is why its absurdities, even if they are extreme, do not seriously disturb me), and I know that it is I who am perceiving it. This second knowledge divides me in turn: I know that I am really perceiving, that my sense organs are physically affected, that I am not phantasising, that the fourth wall of the auditorium (the screen) is really different from the other three, that there is a projector facing it (and thus it is not I who am projecting, or at least not all alone), and I also know that it is I who am perceiving all this, that this perceived-imaginary material is deposited in me as if on a second screen, that it is in me that it forms up into an organised sequence, that therefore I am myself the place where this really perceived imaginary accedes to the symbolic by it inauguration as the signifier of a certain type of institutionalised social activity called the ‘cinema.’
“In other words, the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as a pure act of perception (as wakefulness, alertness): as the condition of possibility of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject, which comes before everything there is.”
Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 48–49; original emphasis.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 206.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 160.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 160.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 205–6.
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, esp. 226–29.
See also Christine Marran’s caution against reading sensational media representations of rebellious women and their aberrant expressions of gender and sexuality as necessarily transgressive in Poison Woman.
Rebecca Wanzo’s work on both the invisibility and hypervisibility of black women’s suffering in The Suffering Will Not Be Televised is an important example of a critical exploration of these issues in another context.
See Weisenfeld’s overview of visual representations of the earthquake and reconstruction in Imaging Disaster.
For one analysis of how Japanese filmmakers’ consciousness of these deficits shaped Japanese film aesthetics and critical discourse, see Miyao, Aesthetics of Shadow.
See Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 2, and Kaigo, “Social Media in Japan.”
For discussions of social media and 3/11 that focus on information dissemination and social infrastructure, see Kaigo, “Social Media in Japan”; Bestor, “Disasters, Natural and Unnatural ”; and Hjorth and Kim, “Good Grief.”
Kaigo, “Social Media in Japan,” 67.
“About JDA,” http://jdarchive.org/en/about/about-archive, accessed April 1, 2018.
“About JDA,” http://jdarchive.org/en/about/about-archive, accessed April 1, 2018.
See for instance Karlin, “Precarious Consumption After 3.11,” and Fujiki, “Networking Citizens through Film Screenings.”
A short list of works that have influenced my thinking in this regard includes Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl; Allison, Millennial Monsters and Precarious Japan; Fujii, “Intimate Alienation”; Azuma, Otaku; Zhang, “Fashioning the Feminine Self”; Galbraith and Lamarre, “Otakuology”; and Lukács, Scripted Affects, Branded Selves. These texts informed this book as well as the research and writing for two essays on Japanese media, emotional regulation, and immaterial labor in more recent times: “Shiage and Women’s Flexible Labor” and “From Manga to Film: Gender, Precarity, and the Textual Transformation of Air Doll.” These essays were written as I completed this book.
Bao, “Trouble with Theater,” 363.