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In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru
by Edited by Aaron Gerow and Abé Mark Nornes
257 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0042; ISBN 1-55212-640-4; US$25.50, C$29.99, EUR21.00, £14.50
A collection of essays on Japanese cinema. The volume is in appreciation of Makino Mamoru, the authors' colleague, teacher and friend.
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About the Book
In Praise of Film Studies brings together essays by scholars of Japanese cinema from around the world, all of whom have drawn on the collection of Makino Mamoru for their research. Makino Mamoru was a filmmaker and essayist who began assembling an enormous collection of film-related materials. While most collectors concentrate on image-centric items like posters and stills, Makino recognized the importance of books, magazines and other written texts for scholarship. His collection spans the entire history of Japanese cinema, and contains periodicals, books, pamphlets, posters, programs, scripts, diaries, studio records, fan zines, catalogs, textbooks, photographs, newspapers, clipping files, and the personal libraries of a number of film personalities. Makino opened the collection to a variety of film scholars, enabling them to write histories that were otherwise unimaginable. This volume brings together a number of these scholars to honor Makino Mamoru and his dedication to the study of Japanese cinema. (In English and Japanese.)
About the Contributors
Michael Baskett
Michael Baskett is Assistant Professor of Japanese Film and Literature in the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Oregon. His work on imperial Japanese film culture has been published in English, Korean, and Dutch and he is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Attractive Empire: Imagining Asia in Japan‘s Greater East Asian Film Sphere.”Joanne Bernardi
Joanne Bernardi received her doctorate from Columbia University in 1992. She is Associate Professor of Japanese and Film at the University of Rochester. Her recent book is on the pure film movement and screenwriting in Japan during the 1910s: Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Wayne State University Press, 2001).Maureen Donovan
Maureen Donovan is Japanese Studies Librarian at the Ohio State University Libraries, where she holds the academic rank of Associate Professor. Under her leadership their collection has grown from 12,500 volumes in 1978 to its current size of about 70,000 volumes. She holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and cultures and an M.S. in Library Service, both from Columbia University.Jeffrey A. Dym
Jeffrey A. Dym is an Assistant Professor in Japanese and Asian History at California State University, Sacramento. He received his M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Michigan in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Japanese History from the University of Hawaii in 1998. His current research is on the history of the benshi.Fujiwara Toshifumi
Translator and historian of American cinema. Studied film at Waseda University and at the University of Southern California. Books translated to Japanese include The Making of Citizen Kane and Buster Keaton’s autobiography. Currently studying in the Ph.D. program of Waseda University, and preparing a dissertation on the films of Martin Scorsese. Also writes film criticism under the pseudonym of Mizuhara Fumito.Aaron Gerow
Aaron Gerow is an Associate Professor in the International Student Center at Yokohama National University. He has published widely in several languages on Japanese cinema, old and new, and has a monograph on A Page of Madness forthcoming. He manages the KineJapan list and is currently writing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema.Janine Hansen
Janine Hansen studied Japanese Studies at the University of Hamburg, Doshisha University, Kyoto, and Berlin Free University. After graduating in 1996, she worked as a research assistant in the East Asian Department at Berlin Free University until 1998. She is currently with the Fuji Television Berlin Bureau, and working on her dissertation in the field of Japanese film studies.Peter B. High
Peter B. High, after coming to Japan in 1972 and working as a columnist for the Asahi shinbun, is currently Professor in the Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University. His books include An Outline of American Literature and Teikoku no ginmaku, the English version of which is about to be published from the University of Wisconsin Press.Iwamoto Kenji
Iwamoto Kenji was born in 1943 and is currently Professor in the School of Literature, Waseda University, specializing in film theory and history. Books include Shinema rando hyoryu, Kinema no seishun, Nihon eiga to modanizumu 1920-1930, Shashin kaiga shusei: Nihon eiga no rekishi, and Shin eiga riron shusei. His book on magic lanterns will be published shortly.Kawamura Ken’ichiro
Kawamura Ken’ichiro was born in 1943 in Hyogo, Japan. He received his master’s degree from Kyoto University in 1995. Has been Curator of the Audio-Visual section at the Kawasaki City Museum since January 1995.Kobayashi Sadahiro
Kobayashi Sadahiro is working towards a doctorate at the Department of International Communication of Nagoya University’s Graduate School of International Development. He earned an M.A. in International Communication in 1997.Murayama Kyoichiro
Murayama Kyoichiro is a film critic, historian, and translator. He often writes for magazines and newspapers, including the Nikkei shinbun, and is adjunct lecturer at Musashino Art University and other colleges. He has written on film and theater in 1910s Japan in the book Engeki to Eiga, and participated in the translation of Sadoul’s Histoire Générale du Cinéma.Abé Mark Nornes
Abé Mark Nornes is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan's Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Film and Video Program, and has a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. He has forthcoming books on prewar Japanese documentaries and a biography of Ogawa Shinsuke. He is also a founding member and co-owner of Kinema Club and KineJapan.Okumura Masaru
Okumura Masaru is an adjunct lecturer in the School of Human Sciences at Waseda University and in the College of Art at Nihon University. He is also a special researcher at the Kawasaki City Museum.Tajima Ryoichi
Tajima Ryoichi received his master’s degree in literary arts in the Department of Arts at the Graduate School of Nihon University. He is currently a Professor in the College of Art at Nihon University, specializing in film history. He has recently undertaken research on Makino Mamoru.Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Cinema and Culture in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures at Tufts University. She has been writing a book on Japanese film and modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, and has previously published in journals like Film Quarterly, Asian Cinema, Eizogaku, and The Review of Japanese Culture and Society.
Excerpts
Introduction
Abé Mark Nornes & Aaron Gerow
Translations of Makino Mamoru’s Writings
"Rethinking the Emergence of the Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino)"
Translated by Abé Mark Nornes
"On the Conditions of Film Censorship in Japan Before Its Systematization"
Translated by Aaron Gerow
"Chaplin Among the Ashes"
Translated by Joanne Bernardi
"The Establishment of the Study of Visual Philology"
Translated by Michael Baskett
Essays in English
"Tokugawa Musei: A Portrait Sketch of One of Japan’s Greatest Narrative Artists"
By Jeffrey Dym
"Challenges of Collection Research Materials on Japanese Popular Culture: A Report on Ohio State’s Manga Collection"
By Maureen Donovan
"Construction of Modern Space: Tokyo and Shochiku Kamata Film Texts"
By Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
"The New Earth (1936-37)—A German-Japanese Misalliance in Film"
By Janine Hansen
"Ozu's War Movie: Haruka nari fubo no kuni"
By Peter B. High
Essays in Japanese
"On the Chronological History Written by Yokota Einosuke"
By Tajima Ryoichi
"The Films the Meiji Emperor Saw First and Last"
By Iwamoto Kenji
"Another Aspect of Showa-Era Cinema: A Short History of Department of Education (Monbusho) Films"
By Murayama Kyoichiro
"The Relationship Between Japanese Newsreels and German Newsreels in World War II"
By Okumura Masaru
"Onoga tsumi as Three Media: The Correlation Between the Newspaper, Novel and the Moving Picture"
By Kobayashi Sadahiro
"The Benshi Inside the Viewer: Subjectivity and the Family State in the Silent Era"
By Aaron Gerow
Bibliography of the Writings of Makino Mamoru
Compiled by Kawamura KenichiroThis volume is dedicated to Makino Mamoru, his spirit of collegiality and his dedication to quality scholarship. We have borrowed the title of his long-running column in Japan’s most prestigious film magazine, Kinema junpo, whose earliest issues Makino has restored and reprinted. “Gaku no susume” suggests two broad meanings: the author’s best recommendation for recent research and the encouragement of learning. The title was originally used by Fukuzawa Yukichi, the great proponent of enlightenment thought in Meiji Japan. Thus, every edition of his column, gray with text and lacking photographs—just the way Makino likes it—featured a recent conference, book, festival, article, or research presentation that caught Makino’s studious eye. For readers outside of Japan, it represented one of the few hints at what was happening in Japanese film studies. For future historians mulling over the dusty volumes of Kinema junpo—dusty unless a latter-day disciple arrives to reprint them—“Gaku no susume” will constitute one of the few traces of film studies’ ephemeral, non-print existence in the 1990s.
In this arena, Makino is a constant presence that has unquestionably enriched film studies in Japan, and considering what he has accomplished, that influence will likely be felt in perpetuity. This is because Makino Mamoru has been instrumental in building the bibliographic foundation upon which we all stand as Japanese film scholars. This is not only because of his tremendous efforts to collect and preserve film-related print materials such as books, magazines, scripts, pamphlets, and leaflets—some of which, like company documents, are often just thrown away in Japan—but also because of his dedication to making these available to scholars and researchers. When most film-related collectors in Japan have considered their collections as investments (a potentially profitable one, considering the high prices some materials can earn) or as their private domain (which only they can use for research),1 Makino has opened his doors to those who want to use his collection and has actively tried to make what is important to Japanese film studies a public, not private resource by supervising reprints of materials in his own collection and those of others. His own prolific research on a variety of cinematic issues has also avoided the conceit of offering the final word on a topic, and has instead attempted to bring more documents to scholarly attention so that others can examine them themselves. When the Japanese academic world and cultural institutions have tended to look down upon the motion pictures as lowly, if not annoying entertainment, or, when those who at least value the cinema often reject the rigorous analysis of its intertextuality and historicity in the name of “cinematic specificity,” Makino has dedicated much of his life to “recommending” the broad-based but thorough study of film.
Born in 1930 in the northern island of Karafuto in a small town adjacent to the Soviet border, Makino developed an early love of the movies—surely something we all can identify with. One of his most exciting, early encounters with the cinema was getting the autograph of actress Okada Yoshiko, who stopped in his home town on her way to exile in the Soviet Union in 1938, a shocking incident in the prewar Japanese moviedom. Had his brother not destroyed the autograph for fear of the police who were on her trail, this surely would have become item number one in the massive Makino Collection. For reasons unclear to this day, Makino’s father moved the family to Tokyo shortly thereafter. This was one of two narrow escapes for Makino, since the Russians over-ran his hometown when World War II ended in 1945 and the surrender coincided with his arrival at draft age.2
After the chaos of the war settled down, he studied literature at Bunka Gakuin College in Tokyo, but quit before graduation and entered the film world. The era after the occupation was a rich one for independent production companies, and Makino quickly found work as an assistant director. He worked with the theater troupe Mingei under director Uno Jukichi, and was assistant director for Kamei Fumio, Japan’s most important documentary filmmaker. In 1957, he mounted the television wave, joining KRTV (the forerunner of TBS), and then the new Nihon Kyoiku Terebi (“Education Television of Japan,” or today’s TV Asahi). At this point in the late 1950s, he also went freelance, establishing a career in production planning, directing, and scenario writing. He worked on documentaries for Mainichi Eigasha, Nichiei Shinsha, Yomiuri Eigasha, Gakken Eigasha, Asahi Eizo (part of TV Asahi), and Kyodo Eigasha (part of Fuji TV). His most important films are Gekido no niju-seiki (“The Turbulent 20th Century,” released by Toei in 1965) and Seiki no kizuato (“The Scars of the Century,” released by Shochiku in 1967), and he won a number of awards for his filmmaking.
Throughout this period Makino worked as an independent scholar. In the 1960s and 1970s, he did his research quietly in the background. Only in the mid-1960s did he publish regularly under his own name—apparently, he was writing under pseudonyms. His activities as a scholar have gradually increased, both in profligacy and variety, and by the late 1990s one could say his activities reached fever pitch. While his only institutional position as a scholar was as a special researcher (shokutaku kenkyuin) in the film section of the Kawasaki City Museum—and this only started in 1988 when the museum was founded (he retired from this position in 1999)—he has become one of the most prolific film researchers in Japan by anyone’s measure.
We can think of these activities as resting on four pillars, only two of which are adequately represented in the extensive bibliography at the end of this book. The first “pillar” is actually more of a “floor” or, better yet, a “foundation” since it is not always visible to the eye. This is the astounding Makino Collection of film-related materials. Makino Mamoru has the collector’s intense passion for acquisition. On recent trips to China, Korea, and the United States, Makino has always returned with heavy luggage and even heavier boxes of books sent by ship. When he visited the University of Michigan for a workshop on Japanese film studies in 1999, we took him on a tour of Ann Arbor’s used book store scene. In each shop he found four or five books that he just had to have. Curious, we picked a book at random and said, “This one’s interesting.” It is now somewhere in the depths of the Makino Collection.
Hopefully, Makino himself will forgive us for both this little experiment and for recording the anecdote here for posterity. Actually, the story is ultimately misleading because it suggests Makino lacks discrimination. Quite the contrary, Makino Mamoru has carved out a unique role in the preservation and facilitation of film history writing and pedagogy. From the beginning of his collecting days, he restricted himself to the items being ignored by both libraries and fellow collectors. As for the latter, they tend to fixate on the ephemera that best capture the seductive aura of their favorite stars and films. For this reason, their objects of choice are highly visual—stills, posters, film prints, and the like—and have none of the textual density that appeals to the historian in Makino. As for the libraries, few have taken popular art seriously enough to establish holdings with any depth. This was particularly true at the beginning of Makino’s project, when the stuff of film culture seemed in the precarious position of being lost forever and our sense of its history of being frozen in the image of a handful of books (most of which were not written with a dedicated use of primary materials, and virtually none of which contain even footnotes). The attitude of academic libraries is changing slowly, although an unreasonable burden rests on a handful of collections, such as the National Film Center of the Museum of Modern Art, Waseda University’s Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, the library of the Art Faculty at Nihon University, the research collections of the Kawasaki City Museum and the Museum of Kyoto, and the Makino Mamoru household.
Therefore, from the late 1950s until the present day, Makino has haunted the furuhonya (used books stores), visited countless book fairs, and poured over the indexes published by booksellers. Along the way, he established a thick network of collectors and book store owners who all know who to call when something unusual pops up. In this patient, semi-methodical manner, Makino has amassed a collection as good or better than any of the best libraries. It covers the entire one hundred year history of cinema with surprising depth, including full runs of all the major magazines, most of the minor ones, and many of the small, self-published zines called dojinshi. He acquired the personal collections of a number of important film people, including the critic and screenwriter Kishi Matsuo and the director Inoue Kintaro, and this has even put studio records and once-secret government publications in his hands. Makino’s shelves overflow with innumerable pamphlets, fliers, photographs, audio taped interviews, books, textbooks, film dictionaries, scripts of every kind, memo collections, personal diaries, and fan zines from as early as the Meiji era. “Innumerable,” we write . . . perhaps this is hyperbolic, as his own rough count puts it at 70,000 items, but for any historian who has used the collection the feeling is one of bottomlessness. When most film scholars or collectors in Japan have exhibited the tendency to artificially bracket off cinema as the object of their interest, Makino, always aware of the social and historical construction of the movies, even actively collects books on theater, social and political movements, literature, television—anything which could be of use to a film scholar truly attempting to understand the complex and multiple articulations of cinema. Now, having “conquered” the whole of Japanese film history (with the nagging exception of those maboroshi numbers from obscure film journals), Makino has recently turned to adjacent national cinemas. While only a recent development in the life of his collection, he has already established a considerable sub-collection in Chinese and Korean languages, and primarily materials relating to the colonial cinema under Japan’s wartime subjugation of Asia.
Starting from this foundation and its ongoing construction, Makino has concentrated his energies on three other “pillars.” First, he has attempted to preserve some of the most fundamental parts of his collection and those of others, and simultaneously provide global access to it, through republication. This long-running project began with his participation in the group of former members of the Proletarian Film Union of Japan (Prokino) who reprinted the movement’s journals (see Makino’s own essay in this volume on the complicated politics of this publication). After this, he took this work into his own hands, drawing in part from the depths of the Makino Collection. In this manner, he produced handsome reproductions of Japan’s most important prewar film periodicals on acid-free paper, such as Katsudo shashinkai (“Moving Picture World”), Kinema Rekodo (&# 147;Cinema Record”), and Eiga nenkan (“Film Annual”). Thanks to this effort, a small, but solid core of Japanese film criticism and theory has been deposited in libraries the world over. A considerable and perilous amount of this material survives in the original only on Makino Mamoru’s book shelves.
Makino’s second “pillar” of activity has been his writing, and here he has concentrated on three areas of study while most of us struggle to master a single field. They include documentary (particularly that of the prewar left), prewar censorship, and bibliographic studies (or the intertwining history of publishing and criticism/theory). Three of the translations offered in this volume are representative of these arenas of scholarship. They are also excellent examples of his writing style, which features a rather unique strategy that overlaps with the reprinting activities described above. In most of his articles, Makino includes what would generally be considered excessively long quotations. However, it is best to think of these as another form of reprinting, of making available rare documents for the use of other scholars.
He chooses this unusual form of dissemination of his collection for a number of reasons. Little of the primary materials he draws on are publicly available, if held at all. Most are on acidic paper and on the verge of turning into dust. Considering the economy of scale involved in the reprinting business, and the general lack of a market for microfilming in Japan, most of his collection is probably doomed to oblivion if it is not replicated by other means. Finally, he is operating in an institutional field—which includes both the academic libraries and the very field of film studies as it is configured in Japan—that has traditionally undervalued the collection and study of primary documentation, placing emphasis on the "films themselves" and not on the texts around them which are also fundamental to the world of cinema. His strings of extended quotes point to a rich resource that too many people writing on film ignore.
In recent years, Makino has supplemented his writing with exhibitions of film materials (the most memorable of which was the Kawasaki City Museum’s commemoration of the centennial of cinema in 1995—the only major exhibition of its kind in Japan) and a constant slate of appearances on panels and symposia. He is celebrating the new century with publication of his hefty study of the prewar Japanese film censorship system (by Pandora Press) and the first installment of his complete index to pre-1945 film periodicals, a sorely needed work that, when most publications in that vein have been produced by teams of researchers, has been painstakingly compiled by Makino himself for over thirty years.
The final pillar in Makino’s house is the one all of the authors and translators of this volume perch on: this is his generous support of film learning by opening his famous closets to outside researchers, filmmakers, and programmers. Makino has been particularly supportive of those coming from abroad, where similar institutional circumstances have meant an all but total vacuum of Japanese film materials in the original language. In this respect, it is no exaggeration to say that his influence has had an international reach. Those lucky enough to work with him are not the kind of intellectuals content to work only with the comparatively rarified world of the film itself. Have a problem with the intertext?—Makino always seems to hold the solution squirreled away on one of his deep book shelves, and he is quick to stack it up on a corner of his kotatsu for investigation. In this respect, Makino is far from the insular subjectivity of the otaku. Makino’s spirit of collegiality is truly a “Gaku no susume.”
This volume offers the reader a variety of forms of scholarship. The translations and bibliography are intended to spread awareness of Makino’s work, in an extension of his own project of making available the core materials for film studies. The essays, most of which concentrate on the prewar period that is often the focus of Makino’s own research, are both evidence of the research made possible by Makino’s efforts (some are based on materials from his collection) and examples of the wide variety of scholarship his spirit has supported and inspired. This is one way we can carry on his work and recommend to all the pleasures of learning about Japanese film. Thus, we offer this volume in praise of Makino Mamoru, for his prodigious writing, for his preservation of what other people threw away, for his generous sharing, and for his hearty friendship.
Yokohama/Ann Arbor 2000
Notes
1. For a discussion of the state of collecting in Japan and its affect on academic study, see Aaron Gerow, “Japan at Present: Study Abroad and Material Culture,” Yokohama Kokuritsu Daigaku Ryugakusei Senta kiyo 6 (1999): 4-14. Makino is presented in the essay as a positive alternative to the problems discussed.
2. While twenty was the age for being drafted in the army, fifteen was the age when young Japanese men could be forcibly conscripted as “volunteers” (shiganhei) or as “student soldiers” (gakutohei) who worked in factories.