Film In Japan Research Articles

Ghost in the Well: The Hidden History of Horror Films in Japan by Michael Crandol

Reviewed by: Ghost in the Well: The Hidden History of Horror Films in Japan by Michael Crandol Lindsay Nelson Ghost in the Well: The Hidden History of Horror Films in Japan. By Michael Crandol. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 272 pages. ISBN: 9781350178748 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). The J-horror genre peaked fairly quickly, beginning in the 1990s and mostly fading from prominence by the early 2000s, but it has left a lasting impact in the form [End Page 165] of aesthetics, character types, and international remakes. Films like Ringu (The Ring; 1998), Ju-on (The Grudge; 2002), and Kairo (Pulse; 2001) have spurred substantial English-language scholarship in film studies, Japanese cinema studies, media studies, and Japanese popular culture studies. Less attention, though, has been paid to the popular Japanese kaiki films from the 1920s to the 1960s, which were often inspired by traditional ghost stories (kaidan) and kabuki or bunraku plays. Michael Crandol's Ghost in the Well: The Hidden History of Horror Films in Japan seeks to fill that gap, presenting detailed historical research on how the changing shape of horror cinema in Japan would eventually lead to the development of J-horror in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s much was written in English on key J-horror films like The Ring and the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Shimizu Takashi, as well as on the subject of "media horror" and the frightening nature of technology, a frequent focus of these films. But this scholarship rarely placed these films or the genre within the context of Japanese cinema history and scholarship, often overlooking the wealth of writing on J-horror by film critics and writer-director-scholars like Kurosawa and Takahashi Hiroshi. It also tended to define J-horror fairly broadly, including films that were never categorized as horror in Japan. In the past ten years, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Chika Kinoshita, and Steven T. Brown, among others, have sought to offer new historical and theoretical contexts for J-horror1 Crandol thus joins a group of scholars who are interested in how Japanese audiences and film critics have conceived of not only J-horror but the idea of horror films since the early twentieth century. While discussions of J-horror's influence on the non-Japanese film world are widespread, Crandol's book is one of the first to examine the influence of English-language horror, particularly early films, on Japanese horror cinema. Ghost in the Well traces the journey of horror cinema in Japan from the late 1910s to the J-horror boom of the 1990s, beginning with the juxtaposition of two images. The first is the familiar figure of Sadako, the vengeful spirit at the center of the Ring franchise, who emerges from a well and then through a television screen. The second is the ghost of Okiku from a fragment of a no longer extant version of the film Banchō sarayashiki (The Dish Mansion at Bancho), likely from the late 1910s, which was based on a famous kaidan tale of a woman who was thrown into a well and who rises every night to haunt her killers. Connecting these two images and their respective historical contexts, Crandol argues that Sadako and the motifs of J-horror films from the late 1990s and early 2000s reflect a wide variety of film, theater, and folk influences. In particular, he aims to "broaden the discussion of Japanese horror cinema via a positioning of American and European horror cinema in the discourse of kaiki" (p. 10). Crandol's focus is less "the history of Japanese horror films" and more "the history of horror films in Japan," examining audience and critical perceptions of the genre in Japan to reveal the "inherently transnational nature of popular commercial film in the global market" (p. 10). [End Page 166] The first chapter begins with an analysis of the many words associated with "horror" in Japanese, including kaiki, which usually means "strange, weird, or bizarre," but has frequently been translated as "horror" (hence, kaiki eiga: horror films). Crandol points out that kaiki eiga were very specific types of horror films, usually those...

A Rose by Any Other Name May Smell Different

Using William Shakespeare’s name is considered helpful for marketing films in English-speaking regions because of the authority that this name wields. This article reveals a different marketing landscape in Japan, where film distribution companies are indifferent to associations with Shakespeare. For example, when Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus (2011) was released in Japanese cinemas, it was retitled The Proof of the Hero; the Shakespearean association was deliberately erased from the Japanese title. Such a marketing policy should be situated within a wider trend of promoting non-Japanese films in Japan. It is possible to point out three major reasons: the unpopularity of American comedy films, the relative unpopularity of theatre, and Japanese distributors’ heavily localised marketing policies, which are often criticised by fans on social media.

Global cyberpunk

This article examines the connections between 1960s student protests, particularly the occupation of the University of Tokyo in 1968-9, and 1980s cyberpunk film in Japan. I argue that these films, while critical of the student movement, aim to reclaim and transform the utopian spirit that motivated them. Using the global 1960s framework, I situate Japanese cyberpunk film within the wider debates of this decade, particularly those concerning personal liberation and affluence. Using Tom Moylan’s concept of the critical dystopia, I demonstrate that utopian thinking does not disappear after 1968 in Japan but undergoes metamorphosis in these films.

Circulation of Medical Knowledge and Techniques through Film in Japan, 1929–1941

Several historians have analyzed the various uses of medical films and have examined how cinematography changed the epistemology of medical doctors, or how governments and private companies utilized moving pictures for promoting ideas of hygiene among the general public. But historians have paid little attention to those medical films that were circulated in Japan. Some Japanese surgeons recorded their operations and screened surgical films in academic meetings to convey their techniques effectively. Others used moving pictures to educate medical students, who had limited opportunities to observe professors’ skills in schools. In 1929, this type of medical film began to circulate in Japan: a pharmaceutical company imported German medical films while one film company collaborated with a medical professor to record the first surgical film in the country. The 1930s witnessed the wide dissemination of medical films that followed the introduction of small-gauge film to Japan, and a flourishing medical film production continued until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. This article examines why and how these medical films were domestically circulated in Japan and internationally screened outside Japan by looking at not only how medical practitioners used films but also how they successfully cooperated with a pharmaceutical company, filmmakers, technicians, and government.

Inside a frame, behind a glass. A preliminary inquiry on law and film in Japan

ABSTRACT This paper provides both lawyers and cinema experts with some insights about the depiction of law and criminal justice in films in Japan. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest of the Japanese movie industry towards ‘courtrooms drama’, i.e., films set in tribunals and having lawyers, judges, and prosecutors as main characters: a small ‘Golden Age’ of law as depicted in Japanese cinema. This paper (co-written by a comparative lawyer and a film studies specialist) will address this phenomenon from two perspectives: one from a legal studies and popular culture framework, analyzing how such movies reflect – and at the same time shape – the ‘legal imagination’ in Japan. The other, from film studies, focuses on technical, directorial aspects, to emphasize how authors intend to depict the law and its actors.

What’s the Use of Culture? Cinematographers and the Culture Film in Japan in the Early 1940s

In the early 1940s Japan, cinematographers and critics feverishly discussed the notions of immediacy and authorship in relation to documentary practices. The status of cinematographers as the authors of the images that they shot was particularly questioned in those conversations due to the mechanical nature of the motion picture camera. This article mainly focuses on the discussions in the journal Eiga Gijutsu (Film Technology) in 1941–1942 over the notion of culture, and examines how cinematographers imagined their new roles in documentary practices in the cinema.

PR映画に描かれる原子力―1950年代末葉から1960年代の「平和利用」「科学技術」「近代化」

PR映画に描かれる原子力―1950年代末葉から1960年代の「平和利用」「科学技術」「近代化」

Franchising and Film in Japan: Transmedia Production and the Changing Roles of Film in Contemporary Japanese Media Cultures

Franchising practices in Japan are controlled by production committees that are collapsing the boundaries between media productions as Japan’s media industries work in collaboration to create large transmedia intertexts. This article examines the promotional discourses circulating around Japanese franchise fi lm releases to understand how these new franchising practices are affecting the roles and status of popular cinema in contemporary Japanese culture.

Imagining Reality as a Set of Chinese Boxes: An Interview with Matsumoto Toshio

In this interview the Japanese avant-garde filmmaker and scholar, Toshio Matsumoto, discusses his creative practice, as well as his ideas about the complexities of representing reality, memory, and time. He has numerous short experimental works to his credit, and four feature-length narrative films including Bara no soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969), Shura (Demons, 1971), Juroku-sai no senso (The War of the Sixteen-Year-Olds, 1973), and Dogura magura (Dogra Magra, 1988). He has contributed significantly to the critical study of film in Japan as well, writing among things Eizo no hakken (Discovery of the Image, 1963/2005), Hyogen no sekai (World of Expression, 1967), and Genshi no bigaku (Aesthetics of Illusion, 1976). Despite these many accomplishments, Matsumoto has gone largely unrecognized in US scholarship. The conception and representation of reality, memory, and time are significant tropes in Matsumoto's films. Bara no soretsu, for instance, set in the gay district of Tokyo, freely shifts between various points in time, mixes narrative fiction and documentary, and allows for the intermingling of the actors' own personal memories and the memories of the characters that they are playing. Each actor effectively plays a character that is modeled after his or her own life. The film is loosely adapted from Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour and appropriates many of the elements in it, including, most significantly, haunting flashbacks from a repressed traumatic memory. It is also a recasting of the Oedipus narrative, which to one degree or another is also about memory. In all of Matsumoto's feature films, a character suffers from some form of delusion and/or trauma that materializes in a surging pulse—the spectral return of the repressed—and this manifests not only as plot elements but also in cinematic form (e.g., flashbacks, non-linear narrative structures, overlapping editing). Although certainly not the first to reconceptualize narrative temporality, Bara no soretsu confounded film critics at the time; many assumed that Matsumoto didn't even know how to tell a story or how to edit a film. Audiences today, however, are quick to accept the playful interventions in narrative form. This interview introduces this filmmaker/scholar who, in many respects, was far ahead of his time, to the English-speaking world.

Shooting support of Indian films in Japan

Shooting support of Indian films in Japan

The Colonial and Transnational Production of Suicide Squad at the Watchtower and Love and the Vow

This article places two Japan-Korea collaboration films produced during the Pacific War— Suicide Squad at the Watchtower ( Bōrō no kesshitai , 1943) and Love and the Vow ( Ai to chikai , 1945)—within the broader colonial and transnational context of filmmaking. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship of these films to the careers of their co-directors, Imai Tadashi (1912-1991) and Ch'oe In-gyu (1911-1950?). At the same time, the article shows how cinematic and cultural conventions such as the bildungsroman and the "Victorian empire film," which are more commonly associated with cultural production in the modern West, can, with appropriate adjustments, be fruitfully used to understand the power and entertainment value of these films. Suicide Squad at the Watchtower portrays a joint Japanese-Korean police squad controlling the border between Manchuria and Korea and its service to the Japanese empire; Love and the Vow is a story about a Korean orphan boy who, after interviewing the family of a kamikaze pilot, is inspired to become an imperial soldier himself. These two films were joint projects between Tōhō Film in Japan, where Imai was employed, and the Korean Motion Picture Production Corporation, the only film production company in colonial Korea (and the company into which all Korean film production companies had been absorbed during the war).

Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 (review)

Reviewed by: Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 Ronald P. Loftus Aaron Gerow Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 University of California Press, 2010; 323 pages; paperback; $24.95 Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 is a book not so much about film as about the discursive history of film in the context of Japanese modernity. There are times, he writes, when “what is not said—and what is not allowed to be said—can be just as important as what is [said]” (35). This statement suggests two points. The first is that what was said and written about Japanese film had a significant influence on how future audiences and critics would receive and understand it, for Gerow recognizes, drawing upon Michel Foucault, that discourses “systematically form the objects of which they speak” (7). The second point is that from quite early on, there were concerns in Japan about the impact of this new medium on social values and conduct, and this sparked an interest in regulating film, culminating in national state censorship in 1925. Therefore, one of the central objectives of the book is to “consider how the definition of the motion pictures itself helped mold not only a film culture but also a populace compatible with an authoritarian state” (15). [End Page 26] “Cinema did not become a problem,” suggests Gerow, “because it was modern and visual; it became modern and visual through the process of being defined as a problem, one dialectically intertwined with many other facets of what was seen as modern“ (65). So, what could be done about this problem? Why, research it of course! Enter the efforts to understand the place of film in everyday Japanese life made by indefatigable researcher, Gonda Yasunosuke (1887–1951), a topic Gerow takes up in Chapter 2. Gonda is a fascinating figure who sought to explore the concept of new forms of leisure or “play” in his 1914 book, The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures. A 454 page tome, Principles was among the first books of its kind to appear anywhere in the modern world. In Gerow’s words, Gonda “not only uses cinema to conceive of culture as a construction of the new modern masses but also attempts to present in practice a form of film study that embodies the notion of productive play” (73). Gerow discovers, however, that Gonda was deeply ambivalent. He wanted to sing the praises of this new art form that could celebrate the role of the masses in modern society and mobilize them; but he also was aware that cinema presented a social problem for Japan that needed to be controlled, which means that his book had a role in “structuring film studies as a mode of correction” (93). It is worth noting that Gonda’s writings have also attracted the attention of two other important scholars of modernity in Japan: Harry Harootunian and the late Miriam Silverberg. I find it intriguing when books speak to one another and there is an interesting “conversation” about modernity that can be found when reading Visions of Japanese Modernity alongside Overcome by Modernity (Harootunian), and Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Silverberg). Central to Gerow’s study is his Chapter 2 examination of the role of the Pure Film Movement, a group of writers, filmmakers and critics who believed that they could raise the status of film in Japan. In particular, they wanted to see Japanese film evolve beyond the mere filming of theatrical productions and create instead works that took full advantage of the power of this new medium. But Gerow underscores that from early on the discourse on film portrayed the medium as a problem in need of a solution. Theaters were dark, smelly and unhygienic places. Moreover, films might include scenes of song, dance, music or speech that were contrary to “public morals” (69). Even more threatening to the state, perhaps, was that spectators sitting in these darkened theaters were processing images in an unmediated manner, creating an “interiority” that might not be so easily be regulated. The...

Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960): The Trans-Pacific American Film Entrepreneur – Part Two, Taking A Trip Thru China to America

AbstractPart One of this essay traced a biography for Benjamin Brodsky and revealed surprising facets of the production of his 1916 feature-length travelogue A Trip Thru China. Part Two addresses the film's genre inscription and cinematic qualities and relates its embedded values to its enthusiastic reception across America 1916-18. Although the ethnographic documentary pays admiring tribute to laboring men and women throughout China, it also valorizes the moribund Chinese empire, as embodied in Brodsky's ultimate patron in China, President Yuan Shikai. While fully eschewing the "Yellow Menace" U.S. discourse of its period, Trip humorously delineates the East and West as essentially different. The rare work's exceptional critical and popular success from California to New York City points to Brodsky's skilled showmanship and ability to engage the support of independent movie distributors and investors. Why, then, the essay considers in conclusion, did Brodsky's subsequent experiences after his shift in 1917 to making films in Japan, including the feature-length travelogue Beautiful Japan (1918), so diverge in its outcome from his early filmmaking career in China?

Night and Fog in Japan: Fifty Years On

In this article I argue that Ōshima Nagisa's 1960 film Night and Fog in Japan was a pivotal film in Japanese cinema history, because it not only marked Ōshima's departure from the Shōchiku Studios and the Japanese studio system of film production, but was also one of a handful of films that marked the beginnings of a political avant-garde cinema movement that reached its apotheosis in the mid to late-1960s and early-1970s. 2010 marks fifty years since the aborted release of the film in Japan and is therefore an appropriate historical juncture to reassess this landmark film and to reconsider the institutional links between the nascent avant-garde movement and the independent distribution (and later production) company Japanese Art Theatre Guild (ATG).

Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi

In the summer of 2006, Sabu Kohso, an independent writer, translator, and activist, and Harry Harootunian, a historian at New York University, interviewed the prominent filmmaker and political activist Masao Adachi. The occasion for the interview was the completion of his first film in Japan after years of imprisonment in Lebanon and Japan. Adachi's career and activities spanned the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the most intense period of radical protest in Japan's postwar period. His experimental work constituted a significant intervention in these years of revolutionary promise and failure. After the failed revolution in Japan, he spent almost a quarter of a century in exile in Lebanon and Palestine, often working for Palestinian organizations.

Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan Patricia E. Roy Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan. Frederik L. Schodt. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2003. Pp. 432, illus. US$39.95 cloth, US$19.95 paper This is an unusual book about an unusual man, Ranald MacDonald, who has a cult-like following in 'Friends of MacDonald' societies in the United States and Japan. MacDonald was born in 1824 in Astoria, Oregon, the grandson of Chief Comcomly, a Chinook, and the son of Archibald MacDonald, a Hudson's Bay Company trader. He was educated at the Red River Academy. After a brief, unhappy stint of clerking in St Thomas, Canada West, he joined an east coast whaling ship. His chief claim to fame, however, was his ten months in Japan, after which he claimed to have been 'the instigator of Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan' (17). After travelling through parts of Asia, Australia, and Europe, he returned to North America where he engaged in a variety of endeavours in British Columbia before retiring to the Colville Valley of Washington State, where he had spent part of his childhood. As a mixed-blood, he initially identified as a 'white,' but in his old age he considered himself an American 'Indian' (21). Frederik Schodt, the author of this biography, suggests that MacDonald's discovery that he was of mixed blood (his mother had died shortly after his birth), may have influenced his decision to go to Japan. The book is unusual because the author intersperses a scholarly narrative of MacDonald's life with stories of encounters with MacDonald's 'fans' at MacDonald monuments and on field trips. As Schodt admits, it is not a full biography since it passes over MacDonald's little-known career in Australia and his longer time in British Columbia in order to provide 'detail on the environments that helped propel him on his course in life' (xiii). In fact, Schodt uses MacDonald's story as a peg [End Page 621] on which to hang gossipy biographical sketches of his contemporaries and descriptions of the histories and settings of places that MacDonald visited in North America, Hawaii, and Japan, and of the adventures of others there. Among such events, which were at best peripherally associated with MacDonald, was the 'Dickson Filibuster.' A madman persuaded some young men of Red River, but not MacDonald, to join a ragtag expedition whose goal may have been to take California from the Mexicans. Schodt admits no one knows what Ranald thought of the event, but without providing direct evidence, suggests that Archibald MacDonald may have viewed his son in the same disdainful way as did the parents of the young lads who fell for Dickson's scheme. Yet Schodt dispels myths that have arisen around Ranald MacDonald. He tells, for example, the story of the three 'kichis,' Japanese sailors who accidentally drifted across the Pacific to be rescued by the Makah people and who have become the subjects of a novel and film in Japan and a musical in the United States. Though fiction writers have linked them with MacDonald, Schodt, after extensive research, found no evidence that they ever met. The book was written for American readers. To cite a simple example, it informs readers that the British Columbia Archives are in Canada. Despite Schodt's extensive research in the Hudson's Bay Company and other archives and careful attention to separate the many myths about MacDonald from reality, Canadian students of the fur trade are unlikely to learn little that is new. Japan, and its limited contact with foreigners before Perry, however, is the centrepiece. There, despite being imprisoned, as was common for foreigners who strayed into Japanese territory, MacDonald reached an accommodation with his captors. He taught conversational English to some of the official interpreters at Nagasaki who needed that knowledge to deal with the increasing number of British and American vessels that, despite exclusion laws, were entering its ports. Canadians will find this lively and nicely illustrated adventure tale and historiographical detective story to be an entertaining entrée...

Applications of polyimide films to the electrical and electronic industries in Japan

The development of polyimide films in Japan is discussed. The chemical structure of the films and their polymerization mechanisms are described. Types of polyimide films are identified, and their characteristics are examined. Special attention is given to their thermal and chemical properties and their radiation resistance. Applications of polyimide films to rotating machines, integrated circuits, tape-automated bonding, flexible printed-circuit boards, electric wires, aerospace and nuclear equipment, and recording devices are discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Molecular engineering in Japan—A prospect of research on Langmuir-Blodgett films

The present status of research on Langmuir Blodgett (LB) films in Japan is outlined in relation to molecular engineering. Stress is laid on the fundamentals of LB films: synthesis of novel films, advances in preparation techniques, and characterization of molecular domains. The novel LB films developed recently include those with high conductivity, those of wholly aromatic compounds, those of photoconductive dyes and those having a triad of three different functional groups. The preparation techniques include horizontal lifting, a method of depositing monolayers with the minimum shearing stress, the formation and deposition of supermonomolecular layers, and secondary treatments for modifying the properties of films. The advances in characterization are exemplified by the introduction of Penning ionization electron spectroscopy, the utilization of synchrotron radiation and analyses using the electron spin resonance technique applied to dye LB films and conducting LB films. The prospects for molecular engineering in the near future are briefly discussed. The significance of the LB technique as a tool for fabricating test structures is pointed out together with the increasing importance of theoretical guidelines.

Freedom of Information and the Evidentiary Use of Film in Japan: Law and Sociopolitics in an East Asian Democracy

This study sets forth the post-1945 development and present status of Japanese constitutional and procedural law on court-mass media relations, while analyzing aspects of the interaction between law and sociopolitical thought and behavior. A recent and dramatic illustration of the issues is provided by the Hakata Station Film Case: A Fukuoka court'ssubpoena(August 29, 1969) for newsfilm taken during a student-police encounter occasioned conflict between Japan's mass media and courts; the dispute was resolved by a film seizure (March 4, 1970) three months after the Supreme Court had upheld thesubpoena'sconstitutionality. The media maintain that Article 21 of the Constitution (freedom of expression) gives them the right to determine when their used or unused television film or still photographs may be employed as court evidence, even in the absence of privileged communications. This and other court cases considered, arising from Japan's perennial demonstrations, illustrate a strong tendency toward in-group unanimity, new problems in news and evidence gathering, and the operation of a non-Western legal system influenced by Japanese, European, and American traditions.

Studies of Thin Films in Japan

Studies of Thin Films in Japan