Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2

By Intellect Books Ltd

Building on and bringing up to date the material presented in the first installment of Directory of World Cinema: Japan, this volume continues the exploration of the enduring classics, cult favorites, and contemporary blockbusters of Japanese cinema with new contributions from leading critics and film scholars. Among the additions to this volume are in-depth treatments of two previously unexplored genres—youth cinema and films depicting lower-class settings—considered alongside discussions of popular narrative forms, including J-Horror, samurai cinema, anime, and the Japanese New Wave.Accompanying the critical essays in this volume are more than 150 new film reviews, complemented by full-colour film stills, and significantly expanded references for further study. From the Golden Age to the film festival favourites of today, Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2 completes this comprehensive treatment of a consistently fascinating national cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: Jan 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781841505985

Book preview

Volume 11

DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA

JAPAN2

Edited by John Berra

First Published in the UK in 2012 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2012 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Publisher: May Yao

Publishing Manager: Melanie Marshall

Cover photo: Shimotsuma Monogatari, Nakashima, Tetsuya, 2004. Amuse Pictures/The Kobal Collection

Cover Design: Holly Rose

Copy Editor: Heather Owen

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

Directory of World Cinema E-ISSN 2040-7971

Directory of World Cinema E-ISSN 2040-798X

Directory of World Cinema: Japan2 ISBN 978-1-84150-551-0

Directory of World Cinema: Japan2 eISBN 978-1-84150-598-5

CONTENTS

DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA

JAPAN2

Acknowledgements

Introduction by the Editor

Film of the Year

Sawako Decides

Festival Focus

JAPAN CUTS

Industry Spotlight

Interview with John Williams

Cultural Crossover

Japanese Cinema and Bunraku Puppetry

Japanese Cinema and Photography

Scoring Cinema

Kikujiro

Stardom and Cinema

Kinuyo Tanaka

Directors

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Tetsuya Nakashima

Naoko Ogigami

Hiroshi Shimizu

Shuji Terayama

Alternative Japan

Essay

Reviews

Anime / Animation

Essay

Reviews

Chambara / Samurai Cinema

Essay

Reviews

Contemporary Blockbusters

Essay

Reviews

J-Horror / Japanese Horror

Essay

Reviews

Jidai-geki / Period Drama

Essay

Reviews

Nuberu bagu/ The Japanese New Wave

Essay

Reviews

Seishun eiga / Japanese Youth Cinema

Essay

Reviews

Shomin-geki / Lower Class Life

Essay

Reviews

Yakuza / Gangster

Essay

Reviews

Recommended Reading

Japanese Cinema Online

Test Your Knowledge

Notes on Contributors

Filmography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This second volume of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan is the result of the continued commitment of academics, critics, industry affiliates and the staff of Intellect Books to this pioneering film studies series. As such, I would like to take this opportunity to thank a number of people who have contributed to the volume, both internally and externally. The hard work and helpful assistance of these collaborators, colleagues and contacts is evident in the pages of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2, while I also to wish to acknowledge the continued efforts that have been made to increase academic and general awareness of the first volume since it was published in February, 2010.

I would like to thank Masoud Yazdani and May Yao at Intellect Books for the opportunity to edit this particular volume in the Directory of World Cinema series, publishing house staff James Campbell, Melanie Marshall and Holly Rose for your contributions to the production and promotion of the series, Matthew Blurton at Mac Style and everyone involved in the Directory of World Cinema series at University of Chicago Press. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed content to this volume and further details of these contributors can be found in the Notes on Contributors section. I hope that readers will use these biographical entries to become familiar with the work of these academics and film critics beyond, and in relation to, this project. In addition to writing essays and reviews for the Directory of World Cinema: Japan, these contributors have spent the past two years completing PhDs, teaching courses, organizing academic conferences, organizing film festivals, editing or writing books, maintaining websites, making films, reviewing films for print or online media, and various other activities associated with the field of film studies.

With regards to increasing awareness of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan, I would like to thank Alexander Zhalten, Mayu Sugaya and the staff of Nippon Connection who made me feel most welcome as a guest speaker at the 2010 festival. I would also like to thank Junko Takekawa of the Japan Foundation and Bill Lawrence of the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield, for offering me the opportunity to introduce screenings of films included in the Girls on Film: Females in Contemporary Japanese Cinema tour that was organized by the Japan Foundation in 2010. In terms of providing further engagement with those at student level, I must thank Spencer Murphy of Coventry University, Colette Balmain and the members of the Coventry University East Asian Film Society, with whom I collaborated on the Asia Exposure: East Asian Cinema in a Global Context symposium at Coventry University in February, 2011.

I would also like to thank my editors at various publications and websites who have provided a regular forum for the critical and cultural discussion of the cinema of East Asia, enabling my ongoing role as editor of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan to crossover with online and print media assignments. I am particularly grateful to Electric Sheep editor Virginie Selavy, Film International review section editor Liza Palmer, The Big Picture editor Gabriel Solomons and VCinema producer Jon Jung and his podcast co-hosts Josh Samford and Rufus L de Rham. I would also like to thank Chris MaGee and the writers of the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow for supporting the volume through their website and related networks.

At industrial level, I would like to thank Adam Torel of Third Window Films, Joey Leung of Terracotta Distribution and the Terracotta Far East Film Festival, and Andrew Kirkham of 4Digital Asia and Silk Purse Enterprises. I would also like to thank writer-director-producer and 100 Meter Films CEO John Williams for not only being especially helpful with regards to my research of his fascinating film Starfish Hotel (2006) but also for taking the time to complete the insightful interview that can be found in the Industry Spotlight section of this volume.

On a very personal note, I would like to thank my lovely wife Meng Yan, parents Paul and Janet, my sister Becky, brother-in-law Neil, niece Evie, and my in-laws, Meng Zhao-quan and Wang Tieli. Finally, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to Professor Lu Xiaoping of Nanjing University, who has made me feel very welcome as a Lecturer in Film Studies with the School of Liberal Arts since my appointment in September, 2010.

John Berra

INTRODUCTION

BY THE EDITOR

At the time of writing this introduction to the second volume of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan, I am half-way through teaching an introductory-level Japanese Cinema course at Nanjing University. The course is rather ambitious in that it aims to cover the essential aspects of Japanese cinema in a largely chronological manner, an aim that is assisted by the generous eighteen-week teaching schedule. As the course is chronological, I have so far covered the silent era and the post-war period, with an emphasis on the films of Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi, and discussion of the genres of samurai, shomin-geki and yakuza with reference to their industrial prominence as the primary products of such major studios as Toho, Shochiku, and Nikkatsu. After assessing my students on this part of the course with an assignment based on Kurosawa’s post-war classic Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi, 1948), I am about to embark on educating the class about the experimental – yet also commercially viable – endeavours of the Nuberu bagu (Japanese New Wave), arguably one of the most aesthetically invigorating movements in the history of cinema, not to mention one of the most fiercely charged in terms of its social-political content. This is, of course, a period of Japanese cinema that encompasses the works of such prolific mavericks as Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, Kaneto Shindo and Hiroshi Teshigahara, with the occasional intersection of such studio contract stalwarts as Kinji Fukasaku, Kon Ichikawa and Seijun Suzuki transporting the stylistic innovations of the movement into the mainstream with their artistic integrity intact. Revisiting these films – for teaching, research or just out of sheer enthusiasm for the movement – inevitably leads to the debate about the current state of independent cinema in Japan, and whether the directors of the digital underground or those operating on the fringes of the studio system are in any way comparable to the Nuberu bagu trailblazers.

As with many other cinematic revolutions, the Nuberu bagu was actually sponsored by the studio system; if the structure of the Japanese studio system was modelled on that of Hollywood, indicating Japan’s reliance on the West in terms of creating its own corporate culture, then the investment in the formally–experimental and socially-incisive films of the Nuberu bagu shows the progressive potential of the Japanese film industry. With sufficient funds being allocated to enable director such as Imamura, Oshima, Susumu Hani and Toshio Matsumoto, these film-makers were able to shoot quickly and cheaply, relatively free from executive interference and able to move organically from project to project so that their creativity did not stagnate due to any prolonged development process. Oshima’s tremendous output in 1960 – Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun zankoku monogatari), The Sun’s Burial (Taiyô no hakaba) and Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri) – was made possible by the resources offered by Shochiku, who were seeking to capitalize not only on the burgeoning youth market but also to reach those socially-conscious audiences that enjoyed European imports and would also be receptive to Japanese equivalents to such ideologically provocative material. Further support to these film-makers was offered by the Art Theatre Guild, which was initially a distributor of imported art films, but became involved in independent Japanese cinema by releasing Teshigahara’s Pitfall (Otoshiana, 1962). The first co-production of the Art Theatre Guild was Imamura’s A Man Vanishes (Ningen Johatsu, 1976), followed by Oshima’s Death by Hanging (Kôshikei, 1968) and Boy (Shônen, 1969), thereby maintaining the pace of production while providing exhibition through their theatre chain, with the flagship being the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka in Tokyo. In contrast to the studios, who would pull a Nuberu bagu film from cinemas within its opening week if it was not immediately attracting audiences or, as in the case of Night and Fog in Japan, causing political problems, the Art Theatre Guild house rule was that all films would be screened for a full month regardless of the level of attendance. This policy ensured that independent films of the period would eventually reach at least a modest audience.

If the film-makers associated with the Nuberu bagu were operating at a time that is synonymous with economic acceleration and the swift assimilation of Western values in Japanese culture and industry, those working within the current Japanese independent sector are dealing with a severe slowdown. Although the economy of Japan is currently the third largest in the world – behind the United States and China – it is still in a state of prolonged recession following the Tokyo Stock Exchange crash of the early 1990s and, after stabilizing, is growing at a significantly slower rate than other major economies. The term ‘Lost Decade’ has often been used to evoke the Japan of 1991–2000 that dealt with this gradual economic collapse and was forced to return to the traditional Japanese values of frugality and long-term savings following the excess of the 1980s, during which Japanese consumers – many of whom were highly intelligent university graduates in enviable corporate positions – splurged on luxury items and lived beyond their arguably ample means by relying on credit to supplement their annual income. However, the slowness of this economic recovery has meant that the ‘Lost Decade’ has been extended into the New Millennium, with the addition of the years 2000–2010 now constituting a period that can be referred to as the ‘Lost Decades’ due to the extended severity of Japan’s debt burden. While the economic crisis of the 1990s would seem to offer socially-relevant subject matter to film-makers from the independent sector seeking to comment on the state of the nation through narrative cinema, few films of this nature emerged due to the manner in which the financial failings of Japan had undermined the film industry. Independent production was less centralized than in the heyday of the Art Theatre Guild, meaning that, although independent directors of international significance – Hirozaku Kore-eda, Shunji Iwai, Takeshi Kitano, Akihiko Shiota – won recognition with such films as Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari, 1995), Swallowtail Butterfly (Suwarôteiru, 1996), Hanabi (1997) and Moonlight Whispers (Gekkô no sasayaki, 1999), their successes represent examples of individual excellence and arguably do not constitute the collective impact of the Nuberu bagu.

The most visible investment in Japanese cinema during this period came in the form of the construction of many multiplex cinemas: multi-screen developments designed to international standard that could attract couples, families, students, teenagers and anyone else who still had some disposable income and the urge to spend it on cinematic escapism. However, this meant that such cinemas were not intended to showcase Japanese studio product alongside expensive Hollywood imports – not the work of the independent sector. Directors who had the desire to work quickly and largely free from corporate influence or interference found themselves operating within the V-Cinema sector, shooting low-budget features for the video market. Although this production sector enabled such directors as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike and Takashi Shimizu to build reputations as innovative purveyors of original – and often extreme – genre fare, their respective outputs during this period are somewhat undermined by the need to cater to a particular market with the development of thematic concern sometimes being secondary to the delivery of the core product. In this respect, the V-Cinema sector reflects the economic conditions of the Japanese film industry in the 1990s and the early 2000s in that the social polemic of the Nuberu bagu has been replaced by shocking depictions of sex and violence, and a general concession to the most basic needs of the perceived audience as opposed to genuinely challenging the status quo. Although the sector is widely referred to as ‘V-Cinema’, hence the use of the term here, it is more accurately described as Original Video, with animation and other genres also being produced for small-screen consumption. V-Cinema is actually the name of the label that was established by the studio Toei for their straight-to-video output, but the adoption of the name of this label as a means of describing an entire sector of production is indicative of the market-orientated nature of most of its product, although it admittedly provided an excellent training ground for directors who would later reassert the position of Japanese cinema on the world stage once they moved on to making theatrical features.

With the V-Cinema sector revolving around genre material, those looking for social commentary in Japanese cinema need to navigate the fringes of the industry, and even delve into the digital underground as a means of finding films that document current conditions with an incisiveness that is free from the requirements of the cost-return ratio. The ruptured economy of Japan has caused employment problems for those entering the employment market since the 1990s, leading to the widespread use of the term ‘freeter’ to refer to part-time workers of job-hoppers who struggle to survive without a steady income or lack sufficient professional motivation due to the lack of some sense of career direction. The term ‘freeter’ has some desirable, or even glamorous connotations; it is similar to the American term ‘slacker’ in that it suggests a young person who has the ability to undertake a proper job and earn a high-level of income but shuns the salary-man lifestyle in favour of more personal pursuits and a rejection of capitalist ideology, thereby encouraging the image of a youthful alternative culture that is over-educated yet under-motivated. Yet the harsh reality is that a rapidly-growing number of Japanese graduates cannot find suitable employment, and that juvenile crime is also steadily increasing. This is where the independent sector is as vital as the Nuberu bagu in terms of documenting the manner in which young people deal with, or fail to deal with, these pressing problems, presenting the freeter culture at a variety of budgetary levels, from no-budget to low-budget to mid-budget, and by offering a mixture of documentaries and narrative features. Mainstream productions have not entirely ignored the issue of financial instability – it functions as a plot device for such franchise-entries as Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (Kaiji: Jinsei gyakuten gêmu, 2009) and Liar Game: The Final Stage (Raiâ gêmu: Za fainaru sutêji, 2010), thereby instigating high-stakes confrontations between increasingly-desperate characters but not serving as social commentary – but it is the independent directors who have tackled the recession as a generational problem rather than those who have used it as a mechanism that have made significant contributions to contemporary Japanese cinema.

This freeter culture can be found in films as charming as Satoshi Miike’s Adrift in Tokyo (Tenten, 2007) and as challenging as Hiroki Iwabuchi Freeter’s Distress (Sōnan furītā, 2007), with the latter being one of many examples of Japanese youth picking up video cameras to document their existence and experience rather than waiting for film-makers to examine their plight within the parameters of narrative cinema. This video diary approach is, of course, an evolution of the first person film-making pioneered by Kazuo Hara in his remarkable Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974, 1974), with the relative affordability of digital cameras making it possible for even those on limited living budgets to buy, or at least borrow, the equipment and shoot sufficient footage to complete their projects. In this sense, the process of film-making is as liberating and rewarding for the film-maker as any future exhibition or acclaim of their efforts, as it is clear that compiling the footage that would form Freeter’s Distress provides Iwabuchi with the motivation to get up in the morning, a basic reason for getting on with the business of living that is not offered by his monotonous and low-paying job at a Cannon factory, or the work he undertakes on the side for extra income, or even the demonstrations that he participates in alongside other frustrated freeters. Of course, digital film-making should not be entirely equated with social polemic, as such recent films as Tetsuaki Matsue’s Live Tape (Raibu têpu, 2009) celebrates the simple joys of urban life by following a musician around Tokyo en route to a performance with his band, documenting his journey in a single shot. The downside of this digital revolution – and not one which is related in any way to the quality of the films or the subject matter covered by them – is the lack of distribution. While many of the films of the Nuberu bagu occupied a fascinating middle-ground between arthouse activity and narrative accessibility and, as such, could be shown in commercial cinemas, the digital underground remains just that: a movement that is restricted to the theatrical fringes, relying on festival screenings followed by availability through DVD or internet streaming.

It has been argued that the struggles for independent film-makers in Japan today are associated with Japan’s general aversion to risk-taking, meaning that the industry is reliant on tried-and-tested products or safe commercial bets, hence the large volume of commercial releases that are based on existing multi-media properties (comic books, novels, television series) or are intended to start new franchises by using easily-identifiable elements. It can also be argued that the rare example of risk-taking associated with the Nuberu bagu was not particularly risky in that investment in alternative cinema was based on a tangible market for films that tackled society in a manner that was either artfully abstract or determinedly head-on. However, I am confident that, when I reach the final part of the Introduction to Japanese cinema course and cover the current independent sector in Japan, the films that I show to my students will interest them just as much as those of the Nuberu bagu as they are equally brave and relevant, even if the commitment of their directors has not been matched by the investment of the industry, or the screen space offered by exhibitors. It is difficult – if not impossible – to say which of the current crop of directors will stand the test of time and be included on such a course in twenty or thirty years as a means of exemplifying a certain wave of national cinema, but of the independent films covered in the Alternative Japan section of this volume of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan, Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka (Yûrika, 2000), Ryuichi Hiroki’s It’s Only Talk (Yawarakai seikatsu, 2005) and Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori, 2009) will surely be the subjects of further discussion. It is also hoped that two recent digital productions included in the same section – Takuya Fukushima’s Our Brief Eternity (Awa buriifu etanitei, 2009) and Kota Yoshida’s Yuriko’s Aroma (Yuriko no Aroma, 2010) – will receive attention beyond the festival circuit for, respectively, their formal eccentricity and frankness of discourse. Due to the various factors discussed here, the current Japanese independent sector may not be comparable to the Nuberu bagu, but it is equally relevant and therefore thoroughly deserves consideration within both film courses and the pages of a series such as the Directory of World Cinema: Japan.

John Berra

Sawako Decides, Third Window Films.

FILM OF THE YEAR

SAWAKO DECIDES

Sawako Decides

Kawa no soko kara

konnichi wa

Studio/Distributor:

Avex Entertainment

Euro Space

Imagica

PIA

Tokyo Broadcasting Co

Tokyo Broadcasting System

USEN

Director:

Yuya Ishii

Producers:

Mayumi Amano

Toshiyuki Wake

Screenwriter:

Yuya Ishii

Cinematographer:

Yukihiro Okimura

Art Director:

Tatsuo Ozeki

Composer:

Chiaki Nomura

Editor:

Koichi Takahashi

Duration:

112 minutes

Cast:

Hikari Mitsushima

Kotaro Shiga

Ryo Iwamatsu

Kira Aihara

Year:

2010

Synopsis

Sawako relocated to Tokyo five years ago. She is now employed in her fifth job, and is dating her fifth boyfriend, Kenichi, who she has met through work. Kenichi is a divorcee with a young daughter, Kayoko, from his previous marriage; Sawako struggles to connect with Kayoko and feels frustrated in her ‘career’, which remains on the lower rung of the ladder. When she receives news that her father, Tadao, has fallen seriously ill, Sawako decides to return home; her father owns a freshwater-clam-processing business, and Sawako quits her job in Tokyo in order to take care of the operation. Kenichi, who has also quit his job, goes with Sawako and brings Kayoko along, but there are some surprises in store for him with regards to his girlfriend’s past – and the reason for her relocation to Tokyo – once the makeshift ‘family’ arrives in Sawako’s hometown. Taking on the day-to-day responsibilities of running her father’s company, Sawako has to deal with the disgruntled attitude of her father’s employees, who do not see her as a suitable replacement even in a temporary capacity, while a rift develops between her and Kenichi due to meddling of a former love rival who still bears a serious grudge. When the family business is threatened with closure, Sawako rallies her resources to keep it running, while developing a more maternal relationship towards Kayoko despite the differences that have developed between her and Kenichi.

Critique

‘I’m very much a sub-middling woman. Men always end up dumping me. It’s because I don’t have big breasts, like melons. So, without melons, I can’t ask for too much.’ Such is the outlook on life of Sawako (Hikari Mitsushima), a lowly Tokyo office worker who explains her acceptance of her social status to her similarly ‘sub-middling’ colleagues while sitting on the staff toilet, struggling with recurrent bouts of constipation. It takes a winning actress to pull off said toilet scene – not to mention two visits to a colonic irrigation clinic – within the first ten minutes of a film, and Sawako Decides has such a star in Mitsushima. Following strong showings in Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi, 2008) and Kakera – A Piece of Our Life (Kakera, 2009), Mitushima takes centre stage here, which is fortunate as Yuya Ishii’s comedy-drama requires a leading lady of considerable charisma to make its rather ’sub-middling’ message – that it is perfectly acceptable to aspire to be nothing more than resolutely average – sufficiently uplifting for a fairly mainstream audience. Sawako Decides is not a film that seeks to criticize the social order of post-bubble Japan, but it certainly comments on its class system. The social-economic hierarchy of Japan consists of five tiers: ue (upper), naka no ue (upper-middle), naka no naka (middle-middle), shita no naka (lower-middle) and shita (lower). Those who fall into the tiers of lower-middle and lower exist on incomes that are around half that of the national average, which allows for little social mobility and almost no political influence.

Sawako Decides, Third Window Films.

The lower-middle class is the tier to which Sawako belongs, a position that she accepts without complaint; ‘But there’s no other choice’ and ‘It can’t be helped’ are often-uttered responses to inconvenience or misfortune, suggesting that she is getting on with life without getting anything out of it.

As is often the case in Japanese cinema, it is a family crisis that instigates change, causing Sawako to not only quit her thankless city job and return to the home town that she fled five years before, but to realize previously-untapped potential. However, it takes some time for her to find her footing as manager of Kimura Shellfisheries, and Ishii delights in showing Sawako struggling to adapt to the daily routine; the singing of the company song in the morning fails to raise the spirits of the workforce, as they are clearly aware that the business is on the rocks, while Sawako’s attempts to ‘pitch-in’ are not appreciated and socialising with factory employees proves to be especially awkward since one was once involved in a physical relationship with her father and another is a former classmate with a long-standing grudge regarding a ‘stolen’ boyfriend. Gossip is a part of life in both the big city and Sawako’s home town but, while such idle chatter in the corporate world consists of a couple of co-workers ridiculing her choice of boyfriend, it seems as if the entire workforce at the family factory not only knows everything about Sawako but can barely-suppress their opinions about her ‘chequered’ past and recent return to the fold. Sawako at first responds to such treatment by slouching around in an apathetic manner and drowning her ‘sub-middling’ sorrows with cans of cheap beer, dealing with problems at home in the same way that she dealt with disappointment in Tokyo. Yet she begins to come out of her shell after reconnecting with her father, with Ishii offering the otherwise pent-up Mitsushima a much-deserved opportunity to cut loose in a stand-out scene in which Sawako delivers a belated riposte to her employees: ‘I’m just a lower-middling woman, right? But who here can claim any better?’

Sawako Decides has a healthy sense of humour which results in both low-key amusement and laugh-out-loud moments. The latter mostly occur in a sub-plot involving a local fisherman’s fling with a research student who finds the sight of someone doing physical, rather than theoretic, work to be, ‘really cool’. Whether the comedy undercuts the life lessons or vice versa depends very much on the individual viewer due to the deft touch with which Ishii directs his screenplay. Sawako does not change her outlook on life but asserts her ‘lower-middle’ attitude in a manner that serves to pull together both her makeshift family unit and discontented workforce. ‘It can’t be helped’ is replaced by the more optimistic, ‘All I can do is my best’, while she sends Kayoko off to the local school with the advice, ‘You’re nothing special, either, you’ll just have to tough it out’ and has the factory workers singing a new company song with the lyrics, ‘Our work is tedious and boring, Because we’re only lower-middles, But we enjoy our lives, We are all very happy.’ For a film about a character at the crossroads, Sawako Decides ends appropriately with a desperate cry for guidance which subsides into a glimmer of resolve or even hope – a moment that speaks volumes about Mitsushima’s ability as an actress. Surprisingly popular at the Japanese box office, Sawako Decides can be considered a commercial breakthrough for both Ishii – who already has five features to his credit including Rebel, Jiro’s Love (Hangyaku Jiro no koi, 2006) and Girl Sparks (Gâru supâkusu, 2007) – and the Pia organization, whose films have always appealed to festival audiences but have invariably floundered whenever they have received any kind of general release. The success of Sawako Decides proves that, during a particularly difficult period for the Japanese independent sector, it really is best to just ‘tough it out’.

John Berra

Actor and musician Daichi Watanabe (center). Photo © Ayumi Sakamoto.

FESTIVAL FOCUS

JAPAN CUTS

My initial experience with New York City’s historic Japan Society came in 2005, two years before the organization celebrated its hundredth anniversary. It was for a special film series curated by photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto entitled The Moving Image of Modern Art. This series, held in conjunction with the artist’s Japan Society Gallery exhibit History of History, featured a diverse line-up of films produced between 1933 and 1973, including titles such as Blind Beast (Môjû, 1969), The Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1966), Tokyo Drifter (Tôkyô nagaremono, 1960), The Water Magician (Taki no shiraito, 1933) and The World of Geisha (Yojôhan fusuma no urabari, 1973). Sugimoto himself contributed live benshi narration to portions of Kenji Mizoguchi’s late silent film The Water Magician upon the theatre stage, a space that was shared with the society’s other programmes spanning Performing Arts, Education and Lectures, through the years hosting such iconic figures as Kazuo Ohno, Tadao Ando, Yoko Ono, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Tadanori Yokoo and Koichi Makigami. This multidisciplinary embrace of a relationship – a dynamic as that which exists between the people of America and Japan would ensure my regular attendance over the following five years. During this time I became familiar with the vibrant culture of film attendees and staff members by which this non-profit organization grew and is sustained: artists, businesspeople, film industry professionals, curators, academics, casually-interested viewers or fanatic evangelicals. Given this fertile environment balancing contemporary and traditional arts and New York’s status as a hub for film exhibition and production, Japan Society would seem the perfect place for a festival of contemporary cinema.

The history of the Japan Society Film Program (known for a time as the Japan Film Center) effectively charts the history of Japanese film in the United States. The first film screening sponsored by the Society occurred in 1922 (a four-reel record of Crown Prince Hirohito’s visit to Europe one year earlier), but the real story begins in the early fifties when the success of two films at the Venice Film Festival and America’s Academy Awards – Rashômon (1950) and Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953) – provided foreign audiences with an introduction to Japanese cinema. In 1954, the Japan Society sponsored US premieres of Ugetsu and Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, 1953), and by 1972 regular film programming began in the organization’s newly-constructed Midtown Manhattan exhibition space and offices. Highlights throughout the years include a 1981 retrospective of Akira Kurosawa’s films (complete at the time) with an opening attended by Kurosawa, and introduced by Francis Ford Coppola following the success of Kagemusha (1980), produced by Coppola and George Lucas) and a full retrospective of the extant films of Yasujiro Ozu. Actors have also been celebrated, with a retrospective of the work of Toshiro Mifune, with the actor in attendance, while there also have been prescient series on the history of animation and horror films in Japan and Critic’s Choice series by Donald Richie and Susan Sontag.

As a component of Japan Society’s centennial celebration, JAPAN CUTS was established in 2007 by then Film Programme Officer Ryo Nagasawa under the supervision of Artistic Director Yoko Shioya with the tagline, ‘Bringing a Sizable Slice of Japan’s Dynamic Contemporary Film Culture to New York City’. This summer festival remains the largest North American festival devoted to Japanese cinema, complementing the two to three retrospectives and monthly programmes it holds regularly throughout the year in addition to special engagement premieres. Held from 5–15 July, the first instalment offered 17 features, the majority of which were international, American or New York premieres. The festival also offered a programme of shorts including selections of video art, a special evening for New York- and Japan-based film-makers and a programme compiled by the Nippon Connection festival of Frankfurt, Germany. Among the titles in the initial JAPAN CUTS line-up, Shinya Tsukamoto’s first Nightmare Detective (Akumu Tantei, 2006) was of particular note, along with Masao Adachi’s return to directing after a hiatus of over 30 years with Prisoner/Terrorist (Yûheisha – terorisuto, 2006). Miwa Nishikawa joined as special guest to present Sway (Yureru, 2006), as did Sion Sono for Exte: Hair Extensions (Ekusute, 2007) and Naoko Ogigami for Kamome Diner (Kamome shokudô, 2005). From the start, JAPAN CUTS has enjoyed mutually-beneficial collaboration with the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), co-presenting a number of titles with this excellent summer festival, organized by Subway Cinema since 2002.

The 2008 edition of the festival ran from 2–13 July, and presented 19 features and over 60 shorts. Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori, 2007) opened the festival, with the director in attendance to introduce this and a handful of her personal documentary shorts. In its second year, the breadth of the selection as curatorial intent became apparent, presenting independent features such as Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army (Jitsuroku rengô sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi, 2007), more broadly-popular pictures like Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (Always zoku san-chôme no yûhi, 2007) and challenging documentaries such as Li Yang’s Yasukuni (2008). The 2009 edition ran from 30 June to 12 July, and brought 17 features to New York City as well as collected shorts by the animator duo known as UrumaDelvi, who also provided the festival with its animated trailer. Popular in his first appearance in 2007, Sion Sono returned to the festival as special guest, this time presenting Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi, 2008) and Be Sure to Share (Chanto tsutaeru, 2009). Other highlights included Jun Ichikawa’s final, handmade film, Buy a Suit (Sûtsu wo kau, 2008), followed by a conversation with actress Momoko Mieda. Gen Takahashi attended to present festival favourite Confessions of a Dog (Pochi no kokuhaku, 2006) and Kazuyoshi Kumakiri presented his wonderful Non-ko (2008). 2009’s instalment marked a development in the festival’s format in reaction to New York audiences’ preference toward feature-length films, cutting down on programmes of shorts to focus on a balance of traditional genres and budgets, engaging special guests and film-themed after-parties. 2010’s festival would continue this shift toward an industry focus while expanding considerably in scale.

Actor Tatsuya Fujiwara. Photo © Ayumi Sakamoto.

I am happy to have contributed to the Japan Society Film Program’s 2010 season of retrospectives as well as the fourth annual JAPAN CUTS Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema, temporarily acting as Film Programme Assistant in support of the Society’s small but resilient staff. The latest edition was in many ways the largest to date, presenting 24 feature films, three after-parties and numerous special guests between 1 and 16 July. Tetsuya Nakashima’s Confessions (Kokuhaku, 2010) opened the festival and proved to be one of the most popular films in the line-up. The festival closed with Hitoshi Yazaki’s charming Sweet Little Lies (Suîto ritoru raizu, 2010), starring Miki Naka-tani, Nao Omori and Juichi Kobayashi. Yazaki introduced the film and stayed for what became the longest Q&A session of the festival, at one point removing a teddy bear from his pocket like those created by Nakatani’s character and introducing him as ‘Mars’, named after the God of War for the many battles he helped him fight during production. By this point, the festival had been in operation long enough to have seen the return of a number of films by the same film-makers and sequels of previously-screened titles. This past year’s festival welcomed Shinya Tsukamoto’s Nightmare Detective 2 (Akumu Tantei 2, 2008), the precursor to which had been screened at the first JAPAN CUTS and Miwa Nishikawa’s Dear Doctor (Dia dokuta, 2009), following the screening of Sway in 2007. Nishikawa’s recurring presence is evidence of the rising stature of female directors in the industry, and dual entries by Yuki Tanada in the 2010 festival, as well as Satoko Yokohama’s wonderfully-idiosyncratic Bare Essence of Life: Ultra Miracle Love Story (Urutora mirakuru rabu sutôrî, 2009) serve as examples of this trend, while also being some of the strongest pictures in the line-up.

Isao Yukisada presented his latest, Parade (Parêdo, 2009), along with actor Tatsuya Fujiwara, while Toshiaki Toyoda also joined the festival as a special guest, introducing his earlier film as well as the latest, Blood of Rebirth (Yomigaeri no chi, 2009), an 83-minute psychedelic-rock period film set in the middle ages and shot after a four-year hiatus in what the director describes in the film’s press release as ‘10 days of venting energy.’ As an end-of-the-decade commemoration, the festival’s regular programming of films from the past few years was supplemented by a sidebar of films from the past ten years which have not received a commercial US release, including Yukisada’s Crying out Love, in the Centre of the World (Sekai no chûshin de, ai o sakebu, 2004), Hanging Garden (Kûchû teien, 2005) and Memories of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no isshô, 2006). Samuel Jamier, Senior Film Programme Officer at Japan Society who now curates the festival, suggests that future instalments will continue to reflect a broadening of the Asian sphere in terms of collaboration in production, diverse funding and a shared market among neighbouring countries, noting that future programming sidebars may make note of this shift.

Joel Neville Anderson

Starfish Hotel, 100 Meter Films.

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WILLIAMS

As a Westerner making a living in Japan through film-making and related media activities, John Williams is the exception rather than the rule. After spending much of his childhood in Wales, Williams studied French and German Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then worked as a French teacher in a comprehensive school in North London for two years, before relocating to Nagoya in 1988. His career in film production in Japan developed steadily through short films and documentaries, leading to a move to Tokyo in order to venture into the world of feature films. Williams has written and directed the features Firefly Dreams (Ichiban utsukushî natsu, 2001) and Starfish Hotel (2006) and, at the time of writing, has completed principal photography on his third, Sado Tempest (2012). He was nominated for Best New Director by the Directors Guild of Japan for Firefly Dreams and now develops projects through his production company, 100 Meter Films, which also offers such services as line producing and translation for scripts and subtitling. While his work seems to be infused with the spirit of great Japanese film-makers and novelists – Firefly Dreams recalls the family dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, while Starfish Hotel echoes the fiction of Haruki Murakami – a detailed discussion of these films reveals that they represent a synthesis of Williams’ personal interests and obsessions with his genuine appreciation for Japanese culture and an understanding of its cinematic and literary traditions.

You moved to Nagoya in 1988 and you are currently based in Tokyo. Why did you originally relocate to Japan, and how did you come to be still based there, making feature films and offering production services for commercials and television programs, two decades later?

When I graduated from University in 1984, I tried to get into the UK film industry, but at that time it was still a closed shop and there was little of the film-making training that is now available. Also, it was a very bad time for production, with few films getting made, so I ended up teaching in a comprehensive school in London. I originally planned to come to Japan for a year or two only, write a couple of scripts, save some money and go back to the UK to go to film school; but as soon as I got to Japan, I started making short films and writing scripts with Japanese settings. After a couple of years, I thought of going to film school in the US, but I was already very rooted in Japan and all my story ideas had Japanese settings, so I decided to spend the money that I had saved to make a first feature here instead. That was Midnight Spin, which I made in 1994. It was not quite feature length, which was a problem, but it had a really good reception in Nagoya and at the Raindance Film Festival, which was encouraging. Because of that film, I got a lot of backing from friends and supporters in Nagoya to make another feature and that turned out to be Firefly Dreams. Despite being released theatrically, Firefly Dreams was not really noticed much in Japan by people in the industry, though it was very well received by the public, especially when it came out on DVD. During the post-production of the film, I decided to move to Tokyo, which is the real centre of production in Japan. Firefly Dreams was a strange film in the sense that it was completely developed and produced locally. In order to produce my second feature, I had to develop the company a little, so it seemed natural to go into line producing, but the reality is that we have focused more on development work.

Are there many other British film-makers working prominently in Japan, or are you something of an exception to the industrial rule?

As far as I know, there are no other UK directors working here professionally. There is an American, Michael Arrias, who directed a great animation, Tekkonkinkreet, and made a Japanese live-action language feature, Heaven’s Door. An Australian, Max Mannix, who wrote the script for Tokyo Sonata, and directed Rain Fall, an English-language Japanese feature with Gary Oldman, but I think that’s about it.

Firefly Dreams, 100 Meter Films.

Your first feature, Firefly Dreams, is set in the countryside and deals with the notion of returning to traditional values in the face of the uglier aspects of urban life. Were there parallels between your upbringing in Wales and your experiences in Asia which informed your screenplay?

The film started with a very simple desire to explore my own guilt about not talking to my grandfather more when I was an adolescent and he was dying of cancer. At the time, I was too immature to realize what I was missing out on. He had been all over the world as a merchant seaman and one day, shortly before he died, he showed me a photo of himself with a good-looking woman in Germany. I was too shy, or too embarrassed to ask about the photo. Now I’ll never know. This memory stayed with me, and when I came to Japan I noticed how little inter-generational communication seemed to be taking place here. Japanese adolescents, bombarded with consumer goods, struggling to keep up with the next cell phone, seemed to have no time to talk their grandparents. Since that generation was also the last generation to experience war, this seemed doubly dangerous. When I started to write a script about a selfish young girl and her encounter with an older woman, I wanted somehow for her to make a better decision than the one that I made, and in that sense I was writing both about my own adolescence in Wales and about Japanese society.

The film is quite nostalgic, and often ignores the harsh aspects of rural life in favour of a more lyrical quality. Why did you decide to present the Japanese countryside and the characters that inhabit it in this way and not make a social-economic critique?

I didn’t want the film to become a nostalgia piece, but in the end I think the beauty of the landscape and the place itself became another character in the film, and this makes the film very lyrical. Nostalgia is always dangerous and, in Japan, its use, even in cinema, is political. There has been a wave of Japanese war films recently, mostly dangerously rightist, and a ‘Showa Nostalgia’ boom. Post-war Showa was much more complex, dark and conflicted than depicted in these films. I was very aware of the dangers of nostalgia and wanted to go against the grain in many ways. There are small subversions throughout the film, perhaps invisible to most Western viewers. Mrs Koide drinks beer, the old Uncle smokes and talks about how he couldn’t court Mrs Koide because of her ‘reputation’ and Naomi has sex in the old theatre. All of these scenes are probably not what you would find in a pure nostalgia piece. But, I admit that what began as a much more rational film about the girl, her mother and the old lady, did during the shooting take on a lyricism of its own because of the beauty of the landscape.

Most films set and shot in Japan by directors who are not Japanese, such as Lost in Translation (2003) or Babel (2006), focus on what the film-maker perceives to be the strange aspects of a foreign culture and the differences between East and West. As your films feel as if they could have been made by a Japanese film-maker, how do you feel about such exotic travelogues, and would you ever consider adopting the perspective of the Westerner abroad in order to lend your work greater international accessibility?

I think it would be easier for me to write a film about a Japanese traveller in Europe or Asia, than to write an outsider-in-Japan story, since I have now lived in Japan for twenty years. I did spend three years working on a Japanese horror film script with a central Western character, based in Japan, but the project fizzled out when the J-Horror wave passed. English language films are more marketable generally, so you need the Western characters if you want to make a Japanese film that will truly become an international theatrical film, but unless there is a compelling reason for these Western characters to be in the story, I find it hard to write these kinds of stories. As for the ‘exotic’ aspect of Japan, the country is no weirder than anywhere else on the planet but, on a superficial level, it looks quite different, so that makes people, especially film-makers, jump to some strange conclusions about the exotic otherness of the place. If someone asked me to direct a script about a Westerner abroad in Japan, I wouldn’t reject the idea out of hand, but I wouldn’t want to deal with material in which the Japanese characters were stereo typed, and I’d want to really use Japan as more than just a backdrop. There are a whole slew of clichés to avoid: rational West and intuitive Japan, empty West and deep Japan, conversational Westerner and silent Japanese, Western male and female Japanese. These clichés are hard to avoid at times, but they are still clichés.

Starfish Hotel has many themes that are universal and obviously personal to you. How do you translate your vision, literally and artistically, to your Japanese collaborators?

I’ve no idea how other directors work, but I talk a lot about the script with all the heads of department. I also prepared about twenty pages of Director’s Notes which we talked through at a preliminary creative meeting. Starfish Hotel was much more complicated as a script than Firefly Dreams, which is a relatively straightforward story, so we just talked and talked and talked. One of the interesting discoveries for me, and I’m sure more experienced directors already know this, was that every member of the crew can make the film better. For example, the Production Manager, who I had worked with before, went out of his way to suggest interesting locations that would work in the script to save us building sets, and bring down the budget. His input was hugely creative in that sense.

Sexual desire is a prominent theme in Starfish Hotel in that it deals with a married man who has had an affair with a beautiful younger woman, and significant scenes are set in and around a fetish club. However, the movie is not particularly explicit, favouring seductive atmosphere over onscreen eroticism. Did you make a conscious decision to avoid the graphic sex scenes that many Western viewers, perhaps incorrectly, associate with Japanese media?

Though Japan has the reputation of producing extremely explicit films and being a sexually-explicit society, it is in fact very conservative, highly moralistic and policed by a culture of ‘wholesomeness’ that is endorsed by the big media companies. It is difficult to get a top actor to do an explicit sex scene and actresses are even more problematic, as they are often under contract to advertising companies that specifically prohibit them from doing nude scenes. The sexually-explicit Japanese cinema that is better known in the West is a very marginal cinema here in Japan. However, Starfish Hotel is supposed to be more about sex in the imagination than sex