A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby

of critical opinion in the West still refused to endorse the attention being extended to Hitchcock and Hawks in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, no one doubted that Kurosawa and Mizoguchi were the authors of their own films. It would have come as a shock to many in the West to discover that Japan, as much as California, had a flourishing studio system, with its own codes, genres, and hierarchy of stars; it was easier to think of films such as Rashomon (Rashōmon, 1950) and Ugetsu (Ugetsu mono­gatari, 1953) as the lofty products of individual genius. In fact, the genius of the system was to allow a significant measure of freedom to individual directors, while providing the backing of substantial capital and resources. Artists such as Mizoguchi, Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, Kōzaburō Yoshimura, and (in the earlier part of his career) Kurosawa flourished not despite but because of this system. Their films would mostly ºhave been inconceivable without the technical resources of the big studios, which enabled their imaginative visions to become concrete reality. Yet until the 1960s, studio bosses were wise enough to know that the creativity of individual artists was their greatest asset.

      In due course, the studio system declined. The major production companies still made films; but their work became increasingly repetitive and derivative. As the products of the major studios grew more routine, a growing number of talented directors, including Nagisa Ōshima, Shōhei Imamura, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Masahiro Shinoda, found that it was more profitable, in creative if not in financial terms, to operate outside the system. This made funding very much harder to obtain. From the mid-sixties onwards, those filmmakers who wished to work creatively often found that they had no choice but to establish independent production companies. Today, many of these directors have become cult figures, admired for their determination as well as for their achievement.

      The 1970s and 1980s are often considered a low point in the quality of the Japanese film. To a degree, this is true. The studios produced more pedestrian work and opportunities to make films outside the studio system diminished. However, the growing availability of 8mm film stock enabled a younger generation of directors to begin to make films for private exhibition. Others trained in television or in the straight-to-video market, and initiatives such as the PIA film festival gave support to promising younger talents. The result was a minor Renaissance in the nineties, when a number of new directors in generic and art house cinema began to stamp their material with personal concerns and individual styles.

      The Japanese cinema, then, in phases both of industrial and independent production, has been a director’s cinema—which is to say that it is a cinema in which individual artists have been able to sustain their creativity and to explore personal concerns. And this creativity has been remarkably robust. Outstanding filmmakers have been at work in Japan from the twenties to the present day; there are periods of more and less consistent achievement, but Japanese directors have succeeded in producing distinguished films in every decade, despite social changes and varying political and economic pressures. Since the majority of this book will consist of profiles of these directors and accounts of their work, it is worth examining the context here. No one imagines that even the greatest artists conjure their work out of thin air; film production can be successfully undertaken only under favorable circumstances. In order to discuss the circumstances that have allowed Japanese filmmakers to produce work of so consistently high a standard, I want to provide a brief history of the development of the Japanese film.

      Film Before the Pacific War: The Birth of a System

      The vitality of the studio system in the period from the 1920s to the early 1960s has already been mentioned, but the existence of such a system was not inevitable. It presupposes that there is capital to make films, a means to distribute them, and an audience to watch them. Japan, from the start, had all three. As early as 1909, the establishment of what was to become the Japan Cinematograph Corporation (Nippon Katsudō Shashin—later shortened to Nikkatsu) gave Japan a production company that owned both studios and theaters; it was thus possible to make and distribute films efficiently. By 1920 Nikkatsu had a major competitor, Shochiku, which entered the film production market after starting out as a Kabuki production company. Like Nikkatsu, Shochiku owned theaters; it also had the advantage of starting with substantial capital to produce and distribute films. In the decade from 1925 to 1935, the number of theaters in Japan doubled from just over eight hundred to well over fifteen hundred; at the same time, audiences steadily increased. The arrival of sound came a little later than in the U.S.A. or Europe, being widely accepted only from about 1935. This perhaps contributed to the smooth transition; sound equipment was by then sophisticated enough to avoid the problems that had beset talkies elsewhere in the world around 1930. Indeed, the early years of sound in Japan, from 1935 to about 1939, were among the richest periods of Japanese film production.

      One of the favorable circumstances, both in the silent and early sound period, was that a ready audience existed for locally made films. In contrast to many countries, where imported films were more popular than domestic productions, the mass audience in Japan favored Japanese films from the start. This meant that the Japanese film industry, which scarcely exported any films in the prewar period, could remain profitable solely on the basis of domestic takings. It also meant that Japanese directors were able to develop a distinct style of filmmaking, different from the styles of the West. It is true that Western culture and Western aesthetics were fashionable in the late Meiji period (up to 1912) and the Taisho period (1912–26) when the Japanese cinema gradually achieved artistic maturity. Foreign productions were appreciated in sophisticated circles; and in the twenties, many critically admired Japanese films, such as Minoru Murata’s classic Souls on the Road (Rojō no reikon, 1921) made for Shochiku, were consciously inspired by foreign literature (Gorky, Ibsen) and foreign cinema (D.W. Griffith). However, this fashionable Westernization was always an elite phenomenon, confined largely to a wealthy, urban milieu. The majority of filmgoers preferred chanbara—period films based on traditional Japanese narratives or historical events, the central attraction of which was slickly choreographed scenes of combat. In general, these films were less advanced technically than the Western-influenced cinema of the period, which tended to use more modern editing techniques and a greater variety of camera positions. But the existence of two traditions—a technically sophisticated, Westernized school of filmmaking and a technically primitive school which drew on native subject matter—paved the way for developments in the last years of the silent era, when techniques initially borrowed from the West were applied to specifically Japanese narratives. By the early thirties, directors such as Ozu, Mizoguchi, Daisuke Itō, and Shigeyoshi Suzuki were making films that were as technically advanced as any in the West, yet which adopted a style and subject matter that were unique to Japan.

      Those years also saw the increasing emergence of different house styles at the major studios: for instance, the home drama or shomin-geki became the specialty of Shochiku, while Nikkatsu became notable for realistic period films (jidai-geki), producing some of the best films of Itō and of wunderkind Sadao Yamanaka. With the coming of sound, Nikkatsu also began to specialize in the junbungaku or “pure literature” film—drama based on respected novels—which was the favored genre of such directors as Tomu Uchida and Tomotaka Tasaka. In 1933, a new studio, P.C.L. (later renamed Toho) was founded specifically to take advantage of sound technology. It also specialized in literary adaptation, generally favoring modern novels, and allowing directors like Mikio Naruse and Sotoji Kimura to direct inventive and experimental films such as Naruse’s early masterpiece, Wife, Be Like a Rose (Tsuma yo bara no yōni, 1935).

      The coming of sound also furthered the evolution of a uniquely Japanese style. In the immediate prewar period, it may be admitted, the development of a particularly Japanese cinema was assisted by the country’s growing political isolation. The general excellence of Japanese films in the late thirties is in sharp contrast to the gradual decline in quality of the cinemas of Germany and Russia, both countries which had produced outstanding films through the late twenties and early thirties. In fairness, the early films of Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierk, as he then was) in Nazi Germany, or the Soviet trilogy about the childhood and youth of Maxim Gorky, made by Mark Donskoi from 1938 to 1940, are evidence that talented directors could continue to produce films that were both stylish and not wholly consonant with the values of totalitarianism. In both these countries, however, creative cinema was increasingly scarce by the late thirties. Japanese directors, by contrast, continued to produce a considerable number of distinguished films. Moreover, the Japanese cinema of the late thirties