A Companion to Japanese Cinema

David Desser
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A Companion to Japanese Cinema
Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas

The Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas showcase the rich film
heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for
what is now known as world cinema whilst challenging Hollywood’s lock on the
popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German, or
Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia,
and Latin America, the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume
include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and con-
temporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and histo-
riography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by
leading experts, they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students,
and general readers.

Published:
A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser
A Companion to Australian Cinema, edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and
Susan Bye
A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, edited by John Hill
A Companion to African Cinema, edited by Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela
Garritano
A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke
A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M.
Hart, and Randal Johnson
A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers
A Companion to Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti,
and Esther C.M. Yau
A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie,
Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner
A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović
A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang
A Companion to East European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre
A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg & Andrea Mensch

Forthcoming:
A Companion to Korean Cinema, edited by Jihoon Kim and Seung‐hoon Jeong
A Companion to Indian Cinema, edited by Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar
 A Companion to
Japanese Cinema
Edited by
David Desser
This edition first published 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Desser, David, editor.
Title: A companion to Japanese cinema / edited by David Desser.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021025947 (print) | LCCN 2021025948 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781118955321 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119692768 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781118955338 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781118955345 (epub) |
ISBN 9781118955352 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures--Japan--History.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.J3 C66 2021 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.J3
(ebook) | DDC 791.430952--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025947
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025948

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgementsxv
Introduction1
David Desser

Section 1 History, Ideology, Aesthetics 25

1 Kyoto – The “Hollywood of Japan” 27
Diane Wei Lewis
2 The Pure Film Movement and Modern Japanese Film Style 49
Laura Lee
3 Shiraito Redux: Text, Body, Desire from Kyoka to Mizoguchi 67
Ayako Saito
4 The Adventures of Uchida Tomu 90
Daisuke Miyao
5 Yoshimura Kozaburo and the Working Woman in the Old Capital 106
Alexander Jacoby
6 Calico-World in Rainbow Colors: The Aesthetics of Gender in 1950s
Toei Jidaigeki 130
Junko Yamazaki
7 Silverscreen Dreamboats and the Polyvocal Address 149
Earl Jackson
8 Mad, Bad, and Beautiful: Revisiting Kurosawa’s Women 174
Dolores P. Martinez
9 Biographies of Loss: The Cinematic Melancholy of Kawase Naomi 193
Erin Schoneveld
vi Contents

10  haping the Anime Industry: Second Generation Pioneers and the

S
Emergence of the Studio System 215
Laura Montero-Plata and Marie Pruvost-Delaspre
11 Shapeshifting in Anime: Form and Meaning 247
Richard J. Leskosky

Section 2 The Old and the New 269

12  inu in Documentary Films: Promiscuous Iconography and
A
the Absent Image 271
Marcos P. Centeno-Martín
13  odernity in Film Exhibition: The Rise of Modern Movie
M
Theaters in Tokyo, 1920s–1930s 294
Chie Niita
14 Female Stardom and National Identity in Postwar Japan 316
Jennifer Coates
15 Wild, Sexy, and Funny: Toei Does “Pink” 334
Laura Treglia
16  ehind the Voice that Brought Peace: The Emperor as Hero in
B
The Emperor in August 352
Griseldis Kirsch
17 Queer Time in Summer Vacation 1999 369
Nina Cornyetz
18  orror Old and New: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998) between
H
J-Horror and Hibakusha Cinema 382
Olga V. Solovieva
19 Youth, Trauma, and Contemporary Japanese Cinema 401
Jay McRoy
20 “Female Director”: Discourses and Practices in Contemporary Japan 421
Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández and Irene González-López
21 The Dying Art of Japanese Cinema 446
Kirsten Cather

Section 3 Intermediality469
22 Before Media Mix: The Electric Ecology 471
Alexander Zahlten
23  osho and the Gagman: Scriptwriting at the
G
Time of the Talkie Crisis 493
Lauri Kitsnik
 Contents vii

24 Inventing Television through Film: Japanese Cinema and TV, 1953–1963 510
Aaron Gerow
25 ’Scope and the City: Reframing a Modern Metropolis 529
Jasper Sharp
26  odies in Motion: Japanese Film of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics
B
Era between Mass Culture, Media, and Memory 547
Ryan Cook
27  daptation as Cinematic Translation: Murakami Haruki and
A
Ichikawa Jun’s Tony Takitani 568
Mika Ko
28  lockbusters in Japan: Hit Film Culture and the Rise of Fuji
B
Television as Commercial Film Studio 591
Rayna Denison
29 Hani Susumu, Nouvelle Vague in Japan and Processive Cinema 612
Takuya Tsunoda
30  he Cultural Turn in Post-3.11 Documentary: Kamanaka Hitomi’s
T
Accented Documentary 639
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano

Index658
 Notes on Contributors

Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández is a PhD student at University Rey Juan

Carlos in Madrid completing a thesis on female authorship and representation in
the films directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. She has been a visiting researcher at Meiji
Gakuin University in Tokyo, with the support of the Monbusho Scholarship and
the Japan Foundation Fellowship, and at Birkbeck University of London. Her
research, teaching, and publications focus on the study of female filmmakers in
Japan, gender representations in East Asian cinemas, and transnational film con-
nections between Japan and Latin America.

Kirsten Cather teaches Japanese film, literature, and culture in the Asian Studies
Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her PhD in Japanese
literature with a secondary specialization in film from UC Berkeley. Her first book,
The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, analyzed landmark censorship trials of
“obscene” (waisetsu) literature, films, photography, and manga. She is now at work
on a book project called Scripting Suicide in Modern Japan that considers how and
why individuals write in the wake of suicide.

Marcos P. Centeno Martín is lecturer and coordinator of the Japanese Studies

programme at Birkbeck, University of London. Before that, he worked at SOAS
where he taught several courses on Japanese Cinema and convened the MA Global
Cinemas and the Transcultural. He was also Research Associate at the Waseda
University and Research Fellow at the Universitat de València. Centeno has writ-
ten extensively on the film representation of the Ainu people and his full-length
documentary film, Ainu. Pathways to Memory (2014) was translated into various
languages and received several prizes by international film festivals and other
institutions.

Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the School of East Asian
Studies, University of Sheffield. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the
 Notes on Contributors ix

Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945–1964 and co-editor of The Routledge Companion
to Gender and Japanese Culture. Her current ethnographic research project focuses
on early postwar film audiences in Japan.

Ryan Cook received his PhD from Yale University in 2013 and has taught courses
in film studies at Harvard and Emory. His research focuses on Japanese and East
Asian film history. He has published on film criticism and theory and on the works
of individual filmmakers. His most recent articles include “Casablanca Karaoke:
The Program Picture as Marginal Art in 1960s Japan” (The Japanese Cinema Book)
and “New Wave Home Drama: The Woman’s Film, the Japanese Household, and
Queer Family” in Thirst for Love (forthcoming).

Nina Cornyetz is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at The Gallatin School,

NYU. Her teaching and research interests include critical, literary and cinematic
theory, psychoanalysis, gender, and sexuality, with a specialization in Japan. Her
publications includeTraveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production:
Two Haiku and a Microphone and “Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others:
Sexual (in)Difference, The Eye and the Gaze in © “Murakami” in Criticism.

Rayna Denison is Head of Department for, and a Senior Lecturer in, Film
Television and Media Studies at the University of East Anglia in the UK special-
izing in contemporary Japanese cinema and television research. She is the author
of Anime: A Critical Introduction, the editor of Princess Mononoke: Understanding
Studio Ghibli’s Monster Princess, and has published on Japanese film and television
in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the International Journal of Cultural
Studies, Japan Forum, and Velvet Light Trap.

David Desser is an emeritus professor of Cinema Studies and East Asian Languages
and Cultures from the University of Illinois. He received his PhD in Cinema
Studies from USC with a dissertation, subsequently published as The Samurai Films
of Akira Kurosawa. He is also the author of Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the
Japanese New Wave Cinema and editor or co-editor of anthologies such as Ozu’s
“Tokyo Story,” Cinematic Landscapes, and Reframing Japanese Cinema and numerous
essays on Japanese, Hong Kong, and US cinema.

Aaron Gerow is Professor of East Asian cinema and culture at Yale University. His
books include Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and
Spectatorship, 1895-1925; Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (co-authored with
Markus Nornes,); A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan; and
Kitano Takeshi. His co-edited anthology Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory –
An Anthology (in Japanese) appeared in 2018.

Irene González-López is a postdoctoral researcher at Meiji Gakuin University,

funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. After living in Japan for
x Notes on Contributors

eight years she completed a PhD in Film Studies at SOAS. Her research focuses on
Japanese postwar cinema and the representation of gender and sexuality.
Publications include Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity (co-
edited, 2018); “Marketing the panpan in Japanese popular culture: youth, sexuality,
and power” (2018); and “The Profound Desire of the Goddess: Sexuality and
Politics in The Insect Woman” (2017).

Earl Jackson is Associate Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz,

and Professor Emeritus, National Chiao Tung University. He has taught at the
University of Minnesota, the Korean University of the Arts, and is currently Chair
Professor at Asia University, Taiwan. Jackson is the author of Strategies of Deviance:
Studies in Gay Male Representation; Fantastic Living: The Speculative Autobiographies of
Samuel R. Delany; and numerous articles on Japanese and Korean cinemas and
gender and sexuality.

Alexander Jacoby lectures on the arts and culture of Japan, including film, manga,
and anime, at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of A Critical Handbook
of Japanese Film Directors and of a forthcoming monograph on Koreeda Hirokazu,
to be published by the BFI and Bloomsbury. His scholarly essays include contribu-
tions to Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts and The Japanese Cinema Book. He has
curated film programmes at the British Film Institute, Il Cinema Ritrovato,
Bologna, the Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, and the Museum of Modern
Art, New York.

Griseldis Kirsch is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Culture at

SOAS University of London. Her research interests include screen culture and
(self-)censorship in Japan, with particular reference to war memory in Japan.
She has acted as script consultant for the Amazon Prime series The Man in the
High Castle (series 1 and 2) as well as for Giri/Haji (BBC). She is the author of
Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen. A History: 1989-2005 (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and co-editor of the volume Assembling Japan:
Technology, Modernity and Global Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), but she
has also published widely on nationalism and identity in the media in Japan
and Europe.

Lauri Kitsnik is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and

Social Sciences, Hiroshima University. His research interests lie at the intersection
of Japanese literary and audiovisual cultures. In particular, he has published essays
on adaptation, documentary film, screenwriting, and stardom. His writing has
appeared in arts, Asian Cinema, Japan Review, Japanese Studies, Journal of Japanese
and Korean Cinema, Journal of Screenwriting, and several edited volumes.

Mika Ko is an associate professor at the Faculty of Social Science, Hosei University

in Japan. Her major publications include Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism,
 Notes on Contributors xi

Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness; “Neo-documentarism in Funeral

Parade of Roses: New Realism of Matsumoto Toshio” (Screen); and “Whose song is
it? Korean and women’s voice in Oshima Nagisa’s Sing a Song of Sex” (H. Fujiki &
A. Philips eds., The Japanese Cinema Book).

Laura Lee is associate professor of Japanese cinema and visual culture in the
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. Her
work on screen technologies and intermedial relations has appeared in numerous
venues. She is also the author of Japanese Cinema Between Frames and the recently
completed book Worlds Unbound: The Art of teamLab (forthcoming 2021). Her lat-
est project takes up the intersections of social media and art.

Richard J. Leskosky is retired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

(UIUC). He has formerly served as Director of the UIUC Unit for Cinema Studies
and as President of the Society for Animation Studies. His work has appeared in
cinema and animation studies publications, journals, and volumes in the natural
and social sciences and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.” He continues to
write on animated film genres, Japanese animation, and nineteenth century proto-
cinematic devices.

Diane Wei Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington
University in St. Louis. She specializes in film and media cultures in Japan, with a focus
on gender, emotion, and labor. Her essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, positions:
asia critique, Feminist Media Histories, and Screen. She is the author of Powers of the Real:
Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan and is currently working on two projects:
one on Prokino and one on 1980s discourses on new media, gender, and labor.

Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of

London and a Research Affiliate at ISCA, University of Oxford. She has written on
maritime anthropology, tourism, religion, gender, film, and popular culture in
Japan, as well as on women’s football in the USA, documentaries, and humor in
science fiction films. Her publications include Identity and Ritual in a Japanese
Diving Village; Remaking Kurosawa; editor of The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture;
and co-editor, Assembling Japan and Persistently Postwar.

Jay McRoy is Professor of English and Cinema Studies in the Department of

Literatures and Languages at the University of Wisconsin – Parkside. The author
of Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema, McRoy is also the editor
of Japanese Horror Cinema and the co-editor (with Richard J. Hand) of Monstrous
Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutation in Horror Film and Gothic Film: An
Edinburgh Companion.

Daisuke Miyao is Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and
Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Japonisme
xii Notes on Contributors

and the Birth of Cinema; Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies; The
Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema; and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent
Cinema and Transnational Stardom; Miyao also edited The Oxford Handbook of
Japanese Cinema and co-edited Transnational Cinematography Studies with Lindsay
Coleman and Roberto Schaefer, ASC.

Laura Montero-Plata holds a PhD in History of Cinema from Universidad

Autónoma de Madrid. She has published in journals such as Secuencias, Cahiers du
Cinéma España, Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, 24 Monthly, and Con A de Animación. She
authored the books El mundo invisible de Hayao Miyazaki (The Invisible World of
Hayao Miyazaki) – currently in its eighth edition – and Biblioteca Studio GHibli: La
princesa Mononoke (Studio Ghibli Library: Princess Mononoke). She has published var-
ious articles in English, French, and Spanish on Takahata Isao, Kon Satoshi,
Masaoka Kenzo, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Iwai Shunji.

Chie Niita is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Human and

Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. Her research focuses on
American and Japanese media history, with particular interests in sound tech-
nology and performance in theatre, film, and radio. Her articles include “Japanese
Cinema and the Radio: The Sound Space of Unseen Cinema” in The Culture of the
Sound Image in Prewar Japan (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

Marie Pruvost-Delaspre is Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint

Denis University. Her PhD dissertation, conducted at Sorbonne Nouvelle
University, focuses on the history of the Japanese animation studio Toei Doga and
the evolution of its production system from 1956 to 1972. She published several
articles on anime and the history of animation techniques and co-authored a
number of books in French, such as Japanese Animation in France or Grendizer the
Never-ending Story. Her first monograph will be The Origins of Anime: Toei Doga
Studio (forthcoming, 2021).

Ayako Saito is a professor in the Department of Art Studies at Meiji Gakuin

University in Tokyo specializing in film studies. Her publications in English include
“Reading as Woman: The Collaboration of Ayako Wakao and Masumura Yasuzo”
in Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film Theory; “Occupation and Memory: The
Representation of Woman’s Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema” in The Oxford
Handbook of Japanese Cinema; and “Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and
Direct” in Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity.

Erin Schoneveld is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and
Director of the Visual Studies Program at Haverford College. Schoneveld’s schol-
arship engages with modern and contemporary Japanese art, cinema, and visual
culture examining how these methods of cultural production have evolved into
unique modes of address and exhibition practices in light of a rapidly globalizing
 Notes on Contributors xiii

world. Her writing has appeared in Arts, Verge: Studies in Global Asias and the Journal
of Japonisme. She is author of Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines,
Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-garde.

Jasper Sharp received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Sheffield. He
is an independent scholar, filmmaker, and curator, known for his work on Asian
cinema, and was the co-founder of the Japanese film website Midnight Eye. His
books include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film, co-written with Tom
Mes, Behind the Pink Curtain, and The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema, and
he is the co-director of The Creeping Garden, a documentary about plasmodial
slime molds.

Olga V. Solovieva is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University

of Chicago. She is the author of Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious
Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and co-editor
with Sho Konishi of Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria
Press, 2020). Her articles on the Russian films by Akira Kurosawa appeared in the
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.

Laura Treglia is currently an independent scholar who lectures and researches on

gender, film, and Japanese cultural studies. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies and
MA in Japanese Studies (both SOAS, University of London) and has taught in
British and Qatari universities. Her main research interests include feminist film
and media theory; world genre and cult cinema; and Japanese society and culture.
Her research appears in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes published by
the University of Chester Press, Wiley-Blackwell Film Studies, and Berghahn
Books.

Takuya Tsunoda is Assistant Professor of Japanese film and media in the

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His
research centers on the interplay between institutions and media, technologies
and sociocultural practices, industrial cinema, and a history and theory of media-
centered scientific research in Japan. He is currently working on a study of the
history of audiovisual education and its relation to the new cinemas of the 1960s
in Japan. His works have appeared in Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of
Industrial Film and the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema among others.

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and

Transcultural Studies, Kyoto University. She is the author of Nippon Modern:
Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s and Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age; co-
editor of Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema and Sengo nihon
eiga-ron: 1950-nendai o yomu (Viewing “Post-War” in the 1950s Japanese Cinema); and
xiv Notes on Contributors

editor of Posuto 3.11 media gensetsu saiko (Rethinking the Discourse of Media Post-
3.11). Her new book No Nukes: Eiga no chikara, ato no chikara (No Nukes: Power of
Cinema and Art) is scheduled to be published in 2021.

Junko Yamazaki joined the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at

UCLA in 2017 after receiving her PhD in the joint degree program in Cinema and
Media Studies & East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of
Chicago in 2016. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the rise and
fall of postwar Japanese period film.

Alexander Zahlten is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at

Harvard University. His work centers on film and media culture in East Asia, with
a focus on Japan. His recent work touches on topics such as film’s transition from
environment to ecology and “amateur” film and media production. Publications
include the co-edited (with Marc Steinberg) volume Media Theory in Japan and his
monograph The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media
Ecologies.
 Acknowledgements

Building an essay collection is, as anyone who has done it, more difficult than it
may appear. Authors drop out as their lives take unexpected turns and one’s own
life often gets in the way, even in ordinary times. The present volume took even
longer than expected and hoped for, and much of that was my own fault. So, to the
many authors – major scholars whose own lives are particularly busy and event-
filled – I both apologize and appreciate you sticking with me. And to the people
who joined a bit later, I thank you for the speed with which you developed your
essays and with which you responded to queries. In particular, I want to thank
Junko Yamazaki and Dolores (Lola) Martinez, both of whom suggested authors to
fill in the gaps that arose during the lengthy process of compiling these essays. And
to Lola, in particular, I offer my profound thanks for sending me the names of so
many wonderful younger scholars and her extraordinary generosity in helping
with some of the editing toward the end of the process. I don’t think she expected
any particular acknowledgement for her efforts, but that makes her kindness and
collegiality all the more impressive. I must also thank the many people at Wiley-
Blackwell with whom I have worked over the years. I don’t want to call out specific
names – people who began the project with me and who have since left their posi-
tions and the people who now work at the press. You know who you are and how
much you contributed. I thank you sincerely. Truly, I have been blessed to work
with so many generous, professional, and considerate people. If I ever get over to
England again, I will try to figure out just what The Atrium, Southern Gate,
Chichester, West Sussex can possibly mean and I will deliver my thanks in person.
One of the joys of putting together a book such as this is working with scholars
whom I admire already or whom I have come to know and admire during the
work we have undertaken together. I hope all of the contributors feel that my
efforts as editor have helped make your superb work just a little bit better (work of
such quality that I remain in awe) and that the essays I have managed to compile
complement yours and that you feel as proud as I do of the collection as a whole.
xvi Acknowledgements

To my wife, the extraordinary scholar and teacher, Frances Gateward, whose

own work often took a backseat to my own, I apologize and hope to be able to
make it up to you, somehow. Yet without your help, support, encouragement, and
patience, this project would have died aborning. And to my daughter, Sophie,
thanks for understanding why I spent so much time at the computer and why I feel
guilty and thus continue to feed your boba habit.
David Desser, Los Angeles, CA 2021
 Introduction
David Desser

Here is the cliché, the received wisdom: Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon was the sur-
prise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. That it won the
festival’s grand prize seems in retrospect to be a given: it is one of the finest and
most important films ever made, its influence incalculable. So, what was sur-
prising? It was, after all, accepted for the competitive category and therefore should
have had as much chance as any other of the 29 films in competition. True, it was
up against some stiff competition, with films by well-known directors like George
Cukor, Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and up-and-coming filmmakers
like Elia Kazan and Robert Bresson. The beginning of the notion of “surprise”
winner comes with reportage by film historian Tino Balio, who notes that it
“slipped into the festival unheralded” by the festival director to make “the repre-
sentation as wide as possible. Members of the jury knew nothing about the picture
or the director” (Balio 2010: 118). But this brings up another issue: the “surprise”
extended not just to the festival-goers who knew nothing about the film or its
director, but to the Japanese themselves.
To further understand this, we need turn to the research of Yoshihara Tezuka.
He notes that the Japanese were initially loath to send a period film (jidai-geki) to
Western international film festivals. They wondered if it would seem retrograde,
an image of the old Japan. So how did Rashomon end up being the first Japanese
film not just to win a major award at a Western festival, but the first to be shown
at any festival in the postwar era? “In fact, it was not a Japanese person who had
selected Rashomon for submission, but the head of Italifilm in the Tokyo office,
Giulliana Stramigioli” (Tezuka 2012: 41). Stramigioli was a Japanologist who had
studied art and religion at Kyoto University in the prewar period. Upon her return
to Tokyo as the representative of Italifilm, she was asked by the Motion Picture
Producers Association of Japan (Eiren) for help in deciding which film to send to
Venice. Daiei, the production studio of the film, was indeed reluctant to agree
with her choice and even refused to pay for many of the costs (such as subtitling)
involved in sending a film to a festival. Kurosawa claims he was not even informed
about its submission (which truly would have made the Golden Lion a surprise to

A Companion to Japanese Cinema, First Edition. Edited by David Desser.

© 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2 David Desser

him!) (ibid: 42). And thus it was, as the received wisdom has it, that Rashomon
“opened up” the Japanese cinema to the West.
The story does not quite end there, however. How was it that Rashomon proved
so influential? There are two aspects to consider here. One is the distribution of
Rashomon after its festival award; the other is the flow of Japanese films to interna-
tional festivals thereafter, and subsequent distribution for many of those films. As
for the former – there is no necessary connection between winning the Golden
Lion and worldwide or even limited distribution. Take the case of the films of
French director Andre Cayette. His film Justice est faite (Justice is Done) won the
Golden Lion the year before Rashomon; he won again for Le Passage du Rhin
(Tomorrow is My Turn) in 1960. Yet perhaps only a scholar of French cinema knows
these films today. Or take the 1954 version of Romeo and Juliet by Italian director
Renato Castellani, in English with a number of well-known actors. Its Golden
Lion has not prevented it from becoming “largely forgotten,” as one review notes
(Kauffman 2011). There are always numerous reasons involved in a film’s distribu-
tion and subsequent success (or failure). In the case of Rashomon, it was picked up
by RKO, which, Tino Balio reminds us, under the helm of Howard Hughes, “had
fallen on hard times during the postwar recession and had shuttered its studio. In
need of films for its distribution arm, it went on the hunt for independent prod-
ucts. Taking on a subtitled Japanese film was a gamble…” (2010: 118). It opened at
the newly rebuilt Little Carnegie Theater the day after Christmas in 1951. A pres-
tigious venue, a former major studio distributor and superb reviews by the New
York dailies made the film an art house hit. Its impact in Asia was similarly felt due
to the fact that Rashomon was shown alongside, and treated as equal to, Hollywood
films due to its distribution by RKO (Tezuka 2012: 56).
As for the latter – the outflow of Japanese films to the West – again, the stan-
dard wisdom has it that Daiei, seeing the success of Rashomon, decided to make
“films for export,” meaning festival play and possible distribution thereafter. Here,
too, the situation is more complicated than this supposed simple aspiration. First
of all, this was not the first time that Japanese industry personnel attempted to
export Japanese films. Amidst German, French, and American films, the Venice
Film Festival welcomed Kojo no tsuki (Moon Over the Ruins, Sasaki Keisuke) in 1937
and awarded it a Special Recommendation; and, again, in 1938 Tasaka Tomotaka’s
extraordinary Gonin no sekkohei (Five Scouts) and the no-less-excellent Kaze no naka
no kodomo (Children in the Wind, Shimizu Hiroshi) competed for the Musolini Cup.
Even earlier, as Isolde Standish relates, a number of Japanese studios formed a
partnership with Universal in the 1920s to distribute Japanese films abroad.
However, it was felt that the films, typical jidaigeki being churned out every week,
were “simply not of sufficient quality.” Another attempt, this one by Murata
Minoru to distribute his Expressionistic 1925 film Machi no tejinashi (The Street
Magician) to Germany seems rather like bringing coals to Newcastle (2005: 66–67).
When postwar efforts to distribute Japanese films abroad were begun again in
earnest, Daiei studio head Nagata Masaichi, who was almost a one-man band in
 Introduction 3

trying to export Japanese films in the early- to mid-50s, was also quoted as saying,
“It would be a mistake to produce films specifically for export purposes. Rashomon
was not made for export. We just have to make films which reflect genuine
Japanese spirit and culture” (quoted in Tezuka 2012: 45). Other aspects of the
notion of “films for export” include the fact that Daiei was less established than its
two major rivals, Shochiku and Toho, and thus had less of a “studio style” and
imprint. Period films with a distinctly “Japanese flavor” was one way of branding
itself. Similarly, Eiren took the hint from Rashomon and sent a host of period films
to Venice, many by master filmmaker Mizoguchi Kenji, including Saikaku ichidai
onna (The Life of Oharu) in 1952; Sansho dayu (Sansho the Bailiff), which took a Silver
Lion in 1954; and Yokihi (Princess Yang Kwei Fei), in 1956. Other period films that
played in competition at Venice in the 1950s include Shichinin no samurai (Seven
Samurai, released under the prophetic title of The Magnificent Seven), which tied
with Sansho and others for the Silver Lion; Kurosawa’s Shakespearean adaptation,
Kumonosu-jo (Throne of Blood) in 1957; 1958 saw Inagaki Hiroshi’s Muhomatsu no
issho (The Rickshaw Man) take another Golden Lion for Japan, while Kinoshita
Keisuke’s stylish Narayama bushi-ko (The Ballad of Narayama) also played in compe-
tition that year. This profusion of period films should not suppress festival appear-
ances at Venice by Ichikawa’s profoundly pacifist WWII tale, Biruma no tategoto
(Harp of Burma), or Mizoguchi’s final film, the contemporary-set Akasen chitai
(Red-light District aka Street of Shame), both in 1956. It is perhaps worth mentioning
the showing in competition of Gosho Heinosuke’s melodrama of the postwar era,
Entotsu no mieru basho (Where Chimneys Are Seen), which played in competition at
Berlin in 1953 and took home a special prize; Ikiru, Kurosawa’s first gendai-geki
(modern drama) masterpiece, was shown in competition at Berlin the following
year, these two films breaking the model of, for the most part, submitting period
films. Perhaps the Berlin festival used gendai-geki to help brand itself in comparison
to Venice and Cannes.
The welcoming arms of the Venice film festival and Berlin did not preclude
attempts to break into the south of France. In the wake of Rashomon’s success on
the Lido, Cannes welcomed no fewer than three Japanese films in 1952, represent-
ing a range of settings as well as production studios: Arashi no naka no hara (Man in
the Storm, Saeki Kozo) from Toei, Genji Monogatari (Yoshimura Kozaburo) from
Daiei, and Nami (Nakamura Noburo) from Shochiku. All of these films were made
before or in 1952 and so their submission was hardly based on producing “films for
export.” Indeed, Yoshimura’s Tale of Genji boasts an all-star cast, including the
newly minted superstar, Kyo Machiko. Perhaps it would have fared better at
Venice. In any case, 1953 saw two more Japanese films at Cannes. Genbaku no ko
(Children of the Atom Bomb, Shindo Kaneto) was a rare independent film of the
period and was absolutely contemporary in its depiction of the suffering and hard-
ships that were the legacy of Hiroshima’s destruction by nuclear arms. Daibutsu
kaigen (Dedication of the Great Buddha, Kinugasa Teinosuke) was a blockbuster pro-
duced in 1952 featuring, among others, Kyo Machiko and Hasegawa Kazuo. But it
4 David Desser

was another pairing of these two made in 1953 that won the hearts and minds of
the Cannes’ jury in 1954, netting the Grand Prize (as it was called before the now-
famous Palme d’Or): Jigokumon (Gate of Hell), significantly, the first film produced
in Eastmancolor in Japan. Legend has it that, in fact, it was jury president Jean
Cocteau who persuaded his fellow jurors to give the prize to Kinugasa’s
picture-perfect pastel parade of colors (Tezuka 2012: 53). What other film or films
might have moved the other jurors we may never know, but interestingly there
were two other Japanese films in competition that year, Imai Tadashi’s Nigorie,
winner of Kinema jumpo’s Best One award for 1953 (over Tokyo Story and Ugetsu [!])
and Tanaka Kinuyo’s modern-day melodrama Koibumi (Love Letter), marking not
only the debut directorial feature of, arguably, Japan’s greatest actress, but the first
time a Japanese film directed by a woman would feature in an international film
festival. No Japanese film would score any trophies at Cannes thereafter, despite a
handful of entries by the likes of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, until another entry by
Kinugasa, this one another now-forgotten film, Shirasagi (The White Heron), get-
ting a special mention in 1959.
It was not only festival play that enabled Japanese films to extend their reach
outside of the nation’s borders. For instance, Edward Harrison, the former press
agent and publicist for Rashomon in the US, decided to try his hand at foreign film
distribution. Harrison released Ugetsu and Gate of Hell within three months of each
other in the fall of 1954, arranging a co-sponsorship with the Japan Society in New
York that netted a six-page color spread in Life magazine (Balio 2010: 121). Tino
Balio goes on to report that,

Having scored two critical successes with films of old Japan, Harrison decided to test
the waters with a film having a more contemporary feel. Koji
Shima’s Golden Demon (Konjiki yasha) opened at the Guild on January 30, 1956. It was
a type of film the Japanese categorized as “Haha no Mono,” which translates as “Things
About Mother.” It was called that because “the mere mention of mother brings sen-
timental tears to Japanese eyes.”

Unfortunately, the film was a flop, certainly not helped by Bosley Crowther’s
review in the New York Times, where the influential critic called it “an outrageous
piece of sentimental fiction about love and greed in comparatively modern Japan,”
claiming “its main interest to American audiences will be the prettiness of its
décor. This seems to be the one distinction we can look for in Japanese films.
Goodness knows, Golden Demon has few others” (qtd in Balio 2010: 123).
Opening a film in New York was fraught with peril, given the outsize influence
of Crowther. Thus:

Harrison made one final attempt to broaden interest in Japanese films by relying
once again on Machiko Kyo, the star of Kenji Mizoguchi’s last film, Street of Shame
(Akasen chitai), which appeared in 1956. Harrison avoided the New York gauntlet by
 Introduction 5

opening the film at the Vagabond Theatre in Los Angeles on February 15, 1957. The
timing enabled Harrison to capitalize on Miss Kyo’s starring role in MGM’s Teahouse
of the August Moon, which had recently concluded its run in the same city. A Vagabond
ad stated, “Machiko Kyo, star of ‘Teahouse’ and ‘Gate of Hell,’ plays a born tramp.”
To increase its allure, the film was restricted to “Adults Only.” Street of Shame ran for
over five weeks at the Vagabond theater. After playing in San Francisco, Street of
Shame finally arrived in New York on June 4, 1959. It played at the World Theater on
a continuous basis, with no age restrictions. (ibid: 123–124)

Despite what we might think of as great success on the part of Daiei – a Golden
Lion and two Silvers at Venice, an Academy Award, a Grand Prize at Cannes, and
worldwide distribution of these prize-winning films – Balio makes the bald claim
that “Nagata’s export strategy failed” (124).
Toho also tried its hand at the American market, releasing Inagaki Hiroshi’s
Samurai, Kurosawa’s international version of Seven Samurai, under the title of
The Magnificent Seven, and the monster movie Godzilla. Samurai premiered at the
Vagabond Theatre in Los Angeles in November 1955. “The placement gave the film
exposure in Los Angeles in time for Academy Award consideration [it would go on
to win] and allowed the distributor to test the waters before deciding on a New York
release” (Balio 2010: 124–125). In a deal with Toho, Kurosawa’s The Magnificent
Seven, as it was still known, was released by Columbia Pictures on 19 November
1956. “Columbia decided to go into foreign film distribution in a limited way in
1955 and formed a subsidiary to handle subtitled product that would not pose prob-
lems for the censors” (ibid: 125). Robert Hatch, writing in the Nation, said that The
Magnificent Seven “is much more easily accepted by Western audiences than…any
of the major Japanese films that have been shown here” (qtd in ibid: 126). Despite
many positive reviews, including Variety and the Saturday Review, it performed
poorly at the box office. Apparently, however, calling it a “Japanese Western”
brought it to the attention of Yul Brynner, who thought it suitable for a Mexican
setting (ibid: 126).
Many reasons were offered up to explain the slow going for Japanese films in
the United States. A[kira] Iwasaki, writing in the Nation, blamed the peculiar

narrative style of the films: “Remnants of feudalism are found in every phase of
Japanese life; the feudal elements in pictures are all an inevitable reflection.
This can be seen also in the “style” of the Japanese film. Its most obvious feature is
slowness of tempo, immobility of camera and dull montage. The tempo of a film is
naturally defined by the tempo of the society in which it is made, and there can be
no doubt that our way of life is slower than that of America and Europe.

But there is another factor in Japan worth considering, an ancient artistic tradition
that does not lay stress on dramatic force. The Japanese always valued the subtle
in art; they hated exactness, definiteness. Such was and still is the spirit of the
6 David Desser

old-school Japanese Tanka, Haikkai, and other forms of literature. It is still alive in
the most modern form of art, the film” (Balio: 126–127).
Yet there was one film, at least, whose success was unqualified. As Variety put it:
“Japanese Arties Wow the Critics, but Horror Films Get Coin.” Gojira (Godzilla),
the first Japanese film to go into general release, was acquired by the aspiring
mogul Joseph E. Levine for a mere $12,000. Levine cut it by forty minutes, inserted
new footage of B-level star Raymond Burr as an American journalist on the scene
in Tokyo, and opened it in a dubbed version at the Loew’s State on April 27, 1956,
backed by a massive publicity campaign. It worked (Balio: 127).
Still, “Japanese arties” continued to trickle in, thanks mainly to Thomas J.
Brandon. In an effort to open “a new and eager market for all future Japanese
imports,” Brandon sponsored a one-man Japanese film festival at the Little
Carnegie in late 1959. His plan was to show eight films over two months in order
to reveal “a glimpse of Japan as it is today (at least reflected on film).” His selec-
tions included three early Kurosawa films – The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail,
Drunken Angel, and Ikiru – which Toho produced in 1945, 1948, and 1960 [sic],
respectively. However, the poor critical and audience response forced him to
cancel the festival midway through. Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the most popular in the
series, lived on and enjoyed a three-month extended run at the Little Carnegie
(Balio: 127).
Ikiru, actually released in 1952 and the Kinema junpo Best One of the Year, had,
in fact, in addition to its showing at Berlin, been screened as part of a film series
held at UCLA cosponsored with the Motion Picture Association of Japan (MPAJ)
in 1956. Unlike the majority of festival submissions and Oscar winners, these films
were gendai-geki and were an attempt to demonstrate what Earl Roy Miner called
at the time, “Japanese Film Art in Modern Dress” (Miner 1956). Given the official
participation of the MPAJ, many of the major studios were represented as were
significant directors. Some of the films were given odd or tendentious English-
language titles, reproduced in parentheses here. The films included: Osaka no yado
(An Inn at Osaka, Gosho Heinosuke, Shintoho, 1954); Yama no oto (The Echo, Naruse
Mikio, Toho, 1954); Tokyo monogatari (Their First Trip to Tokyo, Ozu Yasujiro,
Shochiku, 1953); Mugi-bue (Wheat Whistle, Toyoda Shiro, Toho, 1955); and
Kurosawa’s Ikiru under the title Doomed. Though the showing of Tokyo Story hardly
amounts to an inundation of Ozu films, it tends to contradict, at least to a certain
extent, the long-held idea that Ozu was “too Japanese” for Westerners, explaining
why his films were held from festivals until the early 1960s. Miner, reviewing the
series for the Quarterly of Film Radio and Television (the precursor title to Film
Quarterly), said of Tokyo Story: “The film is not one to call great, but it has the sat-
isfying excellence of art of integrity and beauty” (Miner 1956: 359). But if Miner
didn’t quite see the greatness of Tokyo Story, he certainly did not miss the master-
piece that is Ikiru: “the only proper way to describe ‘Doomed’ is as one of the
greatest films of our time” (ibid: 361). As Miner pointed out,
 Introduction 7

The Japanese Film Series was the first such event in this country, perhaps anywhere
in the world: the first coherently chosen body of Japanese films, the first group
shown to an audience not primarily of Japanese descent, and the first group of
modern films on modern Japanese life to receive such attention in this country. It
was, then, a historical event. (363)

But while the films in this well-chosen series have transcended their time, the
manner in which they were introduced has faded into obscurity.

Forming A Canon

Writing in 1953, famed scholar of the Japanese cinema Joseph L. Anderson made
the claim that Japan was the only “non-Occidental” nation whose films equaled
those of the West (Anderson 1953). Based as he had been in Japan, Anderson was
privy to a host of films unavailable to those not living in the once-struggling nation
of the postwar period. For those outside of Japan who had been able to see merely
a handful of films, such a claim was open to question. Now of course, his
assessment is unassailable. But how did it come to pass that sufficient films came
to be seen in order for others to render such a judgement?
Critics and scholars often speak of a “gatekeeper” function when it comes to
which films are shown where and how, at least in the first instance. We can expand
that notion slightly in the case of the Japanese cinema. First came the letting out, a
function largely performed by Eiren, which chose the Japanese films to submit to
festivals – the very organization that was reluctant to send Rashomon to Venice.
Then came the letting in, the function performed by Venice and Cannes. These
initial gatekeeping functions would be expanded to the distributors and exhibitors.
But it is those initial functions which were, and to a large extent, have remained
the province of Eiren and film festivals, over the years expanded to Berlin and
other prize-giving European festivals (Locarno, Karlovy Vary). In the 1960s this
expanded to the prestigious, but non-prize giving New York International Film
Festival, while both in the early 1950s and, especially later, Asian festivals, such as
those held in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Busan, South Korea, became a significant
way to expand knowledge and interest in Japanese cinema across the globe
Yet the letting out and the letting in tell half the story of what remains. And this
is the function of critics and scholars. Their power to form a canon, though cer-
tainly understood in the decades since the institutionalization of Film Studies, has
been even more prevalent when it came to Japanese cinema. This canon formation
coalesced in a handful of film journals, the two most important being Film
Quarterly and Cahiers du Cinema. This has to do largely with the terms in which
Japanese cinema was accepted, the level, so to speak, from which it was discussed.
Let us take the lengthy review of Rashomon that appeared in Film Quarterly in 1952.
8 David Desser

First came the notion of difference: “But Rashomon, a Japanese film which has
had considerable success in several American cities, comes as a distinct surprise; its
techniques in …acting and telling a story are so new to us that its success is a real
tribute to its brilliance” (Rowland 1952: 48). Of course, difference can always be
recuperated, but for the Japanese cinema it has remained at the very forefront of
its appeal to critics. Rowland continues: “Then there is the acting, which is vio-
lently theatrical by our standards. But the film’s most unfamiliar quality is its
philosophical content; like jesting Pilate, it asks us ‘What is Truth?’; you may come
away without an answer, but you will know more about the subject than you did
before…” (ibid).
Rowland is no less sensitive to film form than he is to acting or philosophy,
deftly discussing Kurosawa’s varied use of camera:

The camera is used sometimes with great freedom, as it rushes through the forest
with the woodcutter or looks through the leaves full into the sun so that the forest
and light and air become palpable; at other times it is used with severely stylized
restraint, as at the police station, where the audience becomes the jury, as it were, and
confronts the witness baldly against an unchanging background of sun-struck court-
yard with the other witnesses immobile against a white wall. This formally repeated
pattern begins each episode and has odd power to rivet the attention, against which
the extravagance and disorder of the forest with its erratic bird cries come as a pas-
sionate interruption. The rigidity is daring and brilliant, as is the abandon of the
scene in which the dead husband testifies through a medium. (ibid: 49)

After continuing to discuss both difference, owed to Japanese traditions, and simi-
larity to some Western precursors, Rowland ultimately concludes that, “one need
know nothing about Japanese art to be able to perceive that here is a film of depth
and richness and distinctive style, directed by Akira Kurosawa with sure artistry
and real concern for its intellectual content” (ibid: 50). Not only, then, did Rashomon
achieve the kind of acclaim that has kept it in the canon of Japanese cinema (it is
hard to argue with such an inclusion), but the manner in which it is discussed
retains continuity.
One can easily assert both that the canon of Japanese cinema was solidified by
Noel Burch in 1979 and that membership was a function of difference. For Burch,
Japanese cinema provides a “thorough-going critique of the dominant modes of
Western cinema,” one “inscribed in seventy-five years of film practice in Japan”
(Burch 1979: 17). This filmic practice is owed to the artistic practices of the Heian
era, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, during which

the pertinent traits of Japanese aesthetics were defined almost entirely…a rejection
of the sacrosanct nature of the Western text; a thorough anti-centrism, especially
anti-anthropocentrism; a preference for presentation over representation; a critique
of realism (e.g., the transparency of the signifier); a critique of Western individu-
alism; and an ingrained awareness of surface and form. (ibid: 25)
 Introduction 9

Compare this to the highly influential work of David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson in their early work on that most canonical of Japanese directors, Ozu
Yasujiro:

Speaking generally, Ozu’s films diverge from the Hollywood paradigm in that they
generate spatial structures which are not motivated by the cause/effect chain of the
narrative…Narrative causality is relegated to the status of only one ‘voice’ in a
polyphony that gives an equal role to purely spatial manipulations…We expect
[Noel Burch’s] forthcoming book on Japanese cinema will complement our
argument in this essay. (Thompson and Bordwell 1976: 45; 46, note 2)

Note, again, how it is difference – in Burch’s example, rejection of Western individ-

ualism, representationalism, realism, or Bordwell and Thompson’s deviations by
Ozu from the Classical Hollywood cinema – that characterizes the Japanese
cinema. Though much more specific and thoroughgoing than Rowland’s appraisal
of Rashomon, the difference is still one of cinematic style.
Even earlier than Burch or Bordwell and Thompson, it was a different kind of
difference that characterized Japanese cinema, yet the canon at the time was
remarkably similar. This difference was one of “national character” that was
revealed by the Japanese cinema’s “film style” – thus creating the title of Donald
Richie’s sensitive solely authored Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character
(1971). Markus Nornes notes how it was important for Richie to make such a
claim for Japanese cinema at this time: “Richie was writing at the formative
moment for film studies, when cinema was seen as the expression of national
character and/or the genius of exceptional artists” (Nornes 2007: 87).
The notion of “exceptional artists” extends the question of difference to author-
ship. Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the question of cinematic
authorship as introduced and propounded by the writers at Cahiers du Cinema coin-
cides with the introduction of Japanese cinema to the West. Of course, this is not
to deny the importance on nascent discussions of film authorship of, for instance,
Italian neo-Realism, the dissatisfaction with contemporary French cinema, and the
young writers’ desires to become filmmakers of a certain sort in honor and imita-
tion of a group of maverick Hollywood directors. Nevertheless, the introduction
of Japanese cinema – in particular, the films of Mizoguchi Kenji – was pertinent to
the development of the politique des auteurs. Let us briefly turn, then, to the intro-
duction of Japanese cinema in France and to debates around authorship that sur-
rounded these films.
It was the Cinémathèque Française that reflected and contributed to the
growing interest in Japanese cinema following the successes of Rashomon, The Life
of Oharu, and Ugetsu at Venice. Programming at the Cinémathèque late in 1953
indicates this promulgation of Japanese cinema in its screening of the two
Mizoguchi films that had been included in the official competition at Venice, along
with Gosho’s Where Chimneys Are Seen (Kriege-Nicholas 2016: 33–34). Interestingy,
10 David Desser

Kawakita Nagamasa, perhaps the most important figure in the dispersal of

Japanese cinema into Europe, also brought Inagaki Hiroshi’s sword drama, Sengoku
burai (Sword for Hire) to Berlin, along with Gosho’s gendai-geki. Inagaki’s film failed
to make it into the festival’s competitive section. As for Gosho, one could note the
early effort of Anderson and Richie (1956) to slot him into the canon and the thor-
ough and sensitive monograph devoted to him by Arthur Nolletti, Jr., much later.
Still, he remains the province of the specialist.
In 1960, in collaboration with The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo,
Kawakita along with his wife, Kashiko, established the Japan Film Library Council
(originally the Japanese Cinematheque), an association inspired by the model of
the Cinémathèque Française and dedicated to collecting, preserving, and distrib-
uting Japanese cinema around the globe (Kriegel-Nicholas 2016: 35). Mrs Kawakita
became friends with both Lotte Eisner, the beloved scholar and archivist of the
Cinémathèque Française, and its influential and equally beloved programmer,
Henri Langlois. In 1956, Langlois desired to program a “25 Years of Cinema” in
conjunction with its Japanese counterpart. Its exhibition catalogue noted:

With the help of the Japanese Cinematheque, Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, we
would have liked to open the window, to project the hundred or so movies necessary
to illustrate the development of Japan’s cinematographic art, but there is hardly
anything left: war and fire have left a gap in Japan, and their best films, produced for
the last fifty years, no longer remain in the hands of those who wanted to preserve
them. (Kriegel-Nicholas 2016: 39)

To make up for this perceived lack of sufficient films to illuminate the growth
and development of Japanese cinema, the program decided to offer a tribute to
the works of Kurosawa, the bulk of whose cinema was extant: “It makes sense on
the occasion of the Cinémathèque’s 20th anniversary, that, with the help of the
Japanese Cinematheque, the Cinémathèque should try to compensate for this
shortcoming by making the nearly complete works of Kurosawa available to all
those who were dazzled by Rashoomon and Seven Samurai” (ibid: 39-40). The
catalogue pays tribute to Rashomon while still lamenting France’s lack of exposure
to earlier Japanese cinema (ibid: 40). Included among the screenings were Judo Saga
(Sugata Sanshiro), The Men Who Trail on Tiger’s Tail (Tora no owo fumu Otokotachi), No
Regret for My Youth [sic] (Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi), Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi),
and Living (Ikiru). Finally, it showed the first part of The Idiot (Hakushi) [sic] (ibid:
40-41). Following this season of films, the first book on Japanese cinema in any
Western language appeared, Le cinema japonais 1896–1955, written by husband-and-
wife team of Shinobu and Marcel Guiglaris. The book is both a survey history and
an encyclopedia, interestingly already calling the first half of the 1950s “L’âge d’or
du cinéma japonais.” It is hard to judge the impact of this book in France or else-
where, but it certainly indicates the seriousness with which French cinephiles took
the emergence of Japanese cinema in Europe.
 Introduction 11

Significantly, the majority of the Cahiers critics came to acclaim Mizoguchi at

the expense of Kurosawa (Kriegel-Nicholas 2016: 42). Such was their fierce
advocacy and growing influence that in 1958,

the Cinémathèque Française validated Cahiers’ preference…by organizing an

“Homage to Mizoguchi” which included the screening of Osaka Elegy (Naniwa Elegy),
Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi), A Portrait of Madame Yuki (Yuki Fujin Ezu), Lady
Musashino, The Life of Oharu, Ugestu, A Story from Chikamatsu (Chikamatsu Monogatari),
The Woman in the Rumor (Uwasa no onna), [and] Princess Yang Kwei-Fei. (ibid: 42)

Note that with the showing of Osaka Elegy (1936), French cinephiles got their first
exposure to prewar Japanese cinema since screenings in Paris in the 1930s. It was at this
time, in early 1958, that not only was Cahiers’ preference for Mizoguchi over Kurosawa
enshrined, but came the proclamation that Mizoguchi was one of the greatest auteurs
in history (ibid: 43). Jean-Luc Godard, as polemical and opinionated as any of the
Cahiers coterie, decried that, “On 24 August 1956 the greatest of Japanese film-makers
died in Kyoto. Or, quite simply, one of the greatest of film-makers, as has been proved
by the Cinematheque Francaise’s retrospective devoted to his work (Godard 1986: 70).
Godard placed Mizoguchi in the pantheon of directors, proclaiming that:

Kenji Mizoguchi was the peer of Murnau, of Rossellini. His oeuvre is enormous.
Two hundred films, so it is said. No doubt there is a good deal of legend about this,
and one can be sure that future centuries will bring quite a few Mizoguchi
Monogatari. But there is also no doubt that Kenji is extraordinary, for he can shoot
films in three months that would take a Bresson two years to bring about. And
Mizoguchi brings them to perfection. (ibid)

Virtually simultaneous with the Cinemetheque Francaise, American Thomas J.

Brandon (1908–1982), who, as we saw above, had tried theatrical distribution of
Japanese films in the late 1950s, began to collect and distribute films in the 16 mm
format. Founding his own company, in November 1950, Brandon Films soon owned
the largest collection of 16 mm films available for general release in the United
States (Balio 2010: 99). In 1968, Brandon sold his company to Macmillan; the new
entity became known as Audio-Brandon, later Macmillan Audio-Brandon. It was
during the 1960s (and well into the 1970s) that Brandon specialized in nontheatrical,
16 mm rentals. The largest market for such films was college and university film
classes and clubs. In this way, present and future film fans, teachers, and scholars
were exposed to a number of foreign films, including Japanese movies, which did as
much as anything to form and solidify the canon of Art cinema in the US.
The Macmillan Audio-Brandon films were organized into a catalogue by
country of origin but oftentimes came with suggestions for film societies to
program festivals based on the company’s holding. For instance,

The… (circa 1962) catalogue offers thirty-five films from eight countries outside the
United States: Argentina, England, France, West Germany, Japan, Italy, India, and
12 David Desser

the Soviet Union. Films produced outside Europe account for only four of the thirty-
five featured films: The World of Apu representing India, The Men Who Tread on the
Tiger’s Tail (1945) and Ikiru (1952) by Akira Kurosawa, and the 1959 Argentine film
End of Innocence. (Goldman 2017: 135)

Goldman points out that “it is … surprising to observe now-canonical directors

such as Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini, staples of introductory film history
curricula, positioned significantly further back in the book. Reading this
catalogue now illustrates the contingency of reputations and how they have
changed over time within a particular market” (Goldman 2017: 136). Maybe so,
but it is not surprising to imagine how much more difficult the canonization of
these, and other directors, would have been lacking any representation in
Brandon’s selections.
Another important exhibitor and distributor of Japanese cinema was Janus
films. The partnership of two Harvard students began at the famed Brattle Theater
in Cambridge, MA, in 1953, followed by the formation of Janus Films in 1956, and
later expansion to New York with the acquisition of the well-placed 55th Street
Playhouse. The founders sold the company in 1965 and its new partners began
their acquisition of foreign films to the point where they have long been the most
significant force in keeping Art cinema alive, especially with their acquisition of
the Criterion Collection and the subscription streaming service, the Criterion
Channel. Among their earliest acquisitions in the mid-1960s was a deal they made
with Daiei for a slate of titles including Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Ichikawa’s Fires on
the Plain, and Ozu’s Floating Weeds ( Janus Films). The apotheosis of Janus’ canon-
building and maintenance came with the release of an expansive (and expensive)
box-set of DVDs under the collective title “Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus
Films” released through the Criterion Collection.
For anyone at all familiar with the history of Japanese cinema and its scholarship
in English, the question must have already arisen: where in this discussion of the
formation of the canon are the films of Ozu? Now the most canonical of Japanese
directors, including and perhaps especially in Japan, his culmination was late – a
matter of the films little seen and known outside of his home country. The most
feted of Japanese directors – six of the prestigious Kinema Jumpo Best One and two
at #2 and the most influential among Art filmmakers of the new millennium – his
films were not offered to the most prestigious of the film festivals during his life-
time. The cliché was always that he was “too Japanese” for Westerners. When asked
by Jasper Sharp “When did the West become aware of Ozu’s films,” Donald Richie
answered:

I think it was in 1958 when an enterprising entrepreneur had a screening in London

of “Their First Trip To Tokyo” as it was called then, or Tokyo Story. This excited
interest in certain film critics and so the reputation started then, and it stopped right
then, because nothing happened after that. The next chance Europe had to see Ozu
was my doing. I talked Shochiku into letting me take five Ozu films to the Berlin
 Introduction 13

Film Festival in 1963. And then at the festival they were seen by a number of people
who hadn’t seen them before, and they were all sold, which was an encouragement.
This allowed me to make a much larger retrospective so I took them to other festi-
vals, and that’s how it all started. (Sharp 2003)

As we have seen above, Tokyo Story, under the title “Their First Trip to Tokyo,” was
first shown at the UCLA/MPAJ festival held in Los Angeles in 1956. The positive
note in the Quarterly of Film Radio and Television apparently did not extend to other
film critics, leaving it, as Richie has it, to “certain critics” in London to begin the
task of putting Ozu at the top of the pantheon of Japanese auteurs.
This process actually began with Anderson and Richie’s classic history, The
Japanese Film: Art and Industry, originally published in 1959. It may be a coinci-
dence, but publication in 1959 was right before the stunning Japanese New Wave
that introduced a host of new directors and revolutionized Japanese cinema. In
their original edition, Anderson and Richie proposed nine major directors, justi-
fying their choice of filmmakers and the seemingly small numbers, as follows:

The nine directors to be treated in this chapter obviously did not singlehandedly cre-
ate the art of the Japanese film, but they have certainly contributed more to it than
anyone else. Viewing their work as a whole, one is continually impressed by its orig-
inality, its freshness, and its excellence. Each of these men has created a world of his
own, one governed by the laws of his own personality. Each is, in his own way, the
best that Japan has produced. (1959: 350)

The nine directors, in order of their listing and discussion in the book (they are
listed in birth order, oldest to youngest, though for some reason Kinoshita Keisuke,
born 1912, appears before Kurosawa, born 1910 and Yoshimura Kimisaburo, born
1911), are: Mizoguchi, Gosho, Ozu, Naruse Mikio, Toyoda Shiro, Kinoshita,
Kurosawa, Yoshimura, and Imai Tadashi (ibid: 351–391). These men were all born
between 1898 and 1912 and began their careers either in the silent era and continued
into the postwar period, or during the Pacific War. Note that Anderson and Richie
have no directors whose major achievements occurred before the Pacific War. They
justify the exclusion, for instance, of Yamanaka Sadao, and presumably others (e.g.,
Shimizu Hiroshi, Shimazu Yasujiro), on the basis that they have been dead so long
that their achievements are visible only in archives, if there (ibid: 350). By the same
token, they have no directors of the postwar generation of the 1950s (e.g., Kobayashi
Masaki, Masumura Yasuzo, Kawashima Yuzo). However, this is no place to carp
about their selections or their snubs – the book is, after all, still a masterwork.
As for Ozu, Anderson and Richie note the extremely high critical reputation
that he already had in Japan (a reputation that was not increased thereafter, how-
ever, as no film of his from 1959 onward garnered significant domestic acclaim)
but wonder if this has “had the added effect of keeping his films off the interna-
tional market: the Japanese themselves are very afraid that his excellence will not
14 David Desser

be recognized abroad and, in true Japanese fashion, prefer not to try rather than
fail” (ibid: 359).
Donald Richie became something of a one-man band on Ozu’s behalf, offering
up further insistence on his importance in his Japanese Movies (1961), a populariza-
tion for the Japan Travel Bureau. In reviewing this book Ernest Callenbach noted
how the section on Ozu “is the most richly and closely analytical in the book”
(Callenbach 1962: 58). In 1963, Richie broached a subject that would later became
the warp-and-woof of Ozu’s academic appeal in “Yasujiro Ozu: The Syntax of His
Films” (Richie 1963: 11–16) while in 1974 he made the case for Ozu’s importance
in the first full-length study to appear in any language.
Besides Richie’s intelligent observations and behind-the-scenes insights into
Ozu’s working methods, Paul Schrader, soon to be an important screenwriter
(Taxi Driver, 1976) and director (American Gigolo, 1980), published his MA thesis
from UCLA as Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer in 1972. Though it
has been subject to reams of critique it nevertheless had a perhaps incalculable
impact, first through its close attention to matters of style and second to linking
Ozu to world cinema. One problem with Schrader’s work was that it focused not
merely on postwar films, but only a handful at that. Schrader, therefore, did not
account for the prewar films that do not rely on many of the predominant features
of transcendental style or the postwar films that feature the style without the
transcendental themes. Nevertheless, the book, for all its brevity and elisions,
marked, along with Richie’s work, the foundational canonization of Ozu.
It was Audie Bock, a Harvard graduate student with a great deal of experience
living and working in Tokyo – along with the ability to speak and read Japanese
– who first canonized a more expansive group of filmmakers than Anderson and
Richie were able to in 1959. Among this group of ten filmmakers were carry-
overs from The Japanese Film (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Kurosawa, and Kinoshita)
and the addition of filmmakers who rose to fame in the 1950s and, slightly later,
in the New Wave of the 1960s. Ichikawa Kon and Kobayashi Masaki comprised a
group Bock termed “The Postwar Humanists” along with Kurosawa and
Kinoshita. And she added, as the major figures of the New Wave, Imamura
Shohei, Oshima Nagisa, and Shinoda Masahiro. Although it was no stretch to
include Ozu at the time of publication, Bock’s work, unlike that of Schrader’s,
included his prewar films and, unlike Richie’s work, contained references to
Japanese sources. Bock made no claim for the superiority of either the prewar or
the postwar work, but at least she does not pretend that the prewar work does not
exist or give it short shrift.
It was Noel Burch’s much discussed and much criticized To the Distant Observer
that allowed Ozu pride of place in the pantheon of Japanese film directors. What
Burch brought to the table was the most detailed and systematic analysis of shots,
editing patterns, and spatial construction. In doing so, Burch defined what he
called Ozu’s “systemics,” one feature of which was “incorrect” eye-line matches
and reverse fields. This method
 Introduction 15

challenged the two basic principles of the dominant Western mode of representa-
tion. [Ozu] challenged the principle of continuity, for the “bad” eyeline match pro-
duced a “jolt” in the editing flow, a moment of confusion in the spectator’s sense of
orientation to diegetic space, requiring a moment’s readjustment…. Even more fun-
damentally, by undermining the verisimilitude of face-to-face reverse-field situations,
Ozu challenged the principle of the inclusion of the viewer in the diegesis as invisible,
transparent relay in the communion of two characters. (ibid: 159; emphasis original)

The net result of Ozu’s particular, and peculiar, style is “to offer a discreet but dev-
astating critique of the fundamental tenets of the dominant cinema” (ibid: 160).
Burch also highlighted and defined Ozu’s approach to screen direction and posi-
tion, in which the director uses the 180-degree match (what David Bordwell would
later call 360-degree space) and Ozu’s approach to “cutaway still-lifes.” The latter
“suspend the diegetic flow.” Burch would call these “pillow-shots,” a term that
would continue to be utilized thereafter, save for those who came to follow
Bordwell and his notion of intermediate spaces (ibid).
Burch’s eye for screen detail and the extensive reproduction of film stills certainly
separated him from much earlier criticism. Yet, where he was truly radical, outside of
his claims for the alterity of Japanese cinema compared to the West, was his conten-
tion that Ozu’s cinema following Chichi ariki (There Was a Father) in 1942, which he
claims is “his last masterpiece,” is merely the “frozen academicism” of the remaining
films of the director’s career. For Burch, the postwar films are nothing other than “the
history of a gradual fossilization” (ibid: 277). There is some irony, then, that at the
very moment when a great deal more of Ozu’s postwar work was becoming avail-
able, Burch made recourse to the then little-seen prewar work as Ozu’s finest. Without
belaboring this discussion of Ozu, let us note that it was the monumental effort of
David Bordwell in his Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988) that erased a notion of a
break in Ozu’s cinema, whether between silent and sound or pre- and postwar and
that brought a solidity of analysis to the style and themes of Ozu’s cinema.
Outside of strictly academic circles, Ozu’s reputation grew, not surprisingly, with
an increase in the availability of his films. Yet, writing in the New York Times in 1994,
Mindy Aloff attributes the ever-growing interest in Ozu not to the burgeoning
home-video industry, but to good old-fashioned movie theaters. She states:

The current Ozu renaissance is also a cumulative result of periodic mini-rediscover-

ies that have taken place in Europe and in the United States since the late 50’s, when
his films first began to be shown outside Japan. A number of New York venues have
been crucial to Ozu’s growing prestige: the Museum of Modern Art, various revival
houses (notably the old New Yorker Theater, now gone), the Japan Society and Film
Forum. Movie theaters of one sort or another, not home video, have kept Ozu alive
in this city, and continue to keep him alive. Although a handful of his films are avail-
able on video, all of them date from after World War II and give a limited perspective
on his emotional range, his world of character types and, especially, his sly humor,
in literary as well as visual terms. (Aloff 1994)
16 David Desser

Yet, just as Anderson and Richie published the first edition of their Japanese Film
right before the New Wave crested, so, too, Aloff could not know that very soon
DVD technology would constitute a new wave of home video that would eventu-
ally lead to the remarkable availability of Ozu’s prewar films, whether from
Shochiku Studio’s own versions for pan-Asian consumption or the higher-quality
Criterion Collection and its neoacademic approach to DVD production and distri-
bution. And although essays in the present volume that deal with other directors
make no claims for canonization, perhaps increased attention (and a hoped-for
availability in subtitled formats) might permit entry into the canon of quality that
has thus far eluded them.

Intermediality

While the term intermediality may be relatively new, its centrality to Japanese
cinema is not. As Joseph L. Anderson notes in his appended essay to the expanded
edition of Japanese Film: Art and Industry, “Looking back, it is clear that one of the
distinguishing traits of the Japanese film is its extraordinary integration with other
arts” (1959: 444). These arts include literature, theater, and painting, though cer-
tainly music and vocal performances must also be included. We can deal only
briefly with some of them.
A critic quoted by noted Japanese film scholar Keiko McDonald, opined,

“Japanese film, from the outset, tried to enhance its artistic quality, resorting to liter-
ature, as if the new rich were anxious to wed aristocracy. Under the name of ‘Film
Version of Great Literary Work,’ it drew sources from works by master writers—old
and new—such as Akinari Ueda, Roka Tokutomi and Soseki Natsume. They were
used to attract film-goers just like ‘decoys.’” (anon. qtd in McDonald 2000: ix)

While wondering about the aptness of the notion of “decoy,” McDonald goes on
to claim that “the Japanese [cinema] is unique in its closeness, early and late, to the
nation’s literature.” This term bungei-eiga eventually came to be applied specifically
for the adaptation of a “literary” work (ibid) Naoki Yamamoto notes that early
adaptations were drawn from the genre of “popular literature” (taishu bugaku), but
from the mid-1930s onward Japanese filmmakers began to adapt more stories from
the genre of pure literature (junbungaku), “giving their enterprise a new name
called ‘literary art film’ (bungei eiga)” (Yamamoto 2020: 84). The enterprise was
more intermedial than mere adaptation, for the bungei eiga “yielded immediate suc-
cess in the early sound period both at the box office and in critical terms” (ibid). In
this respect, Yamamoto notes that this was not unique to Japan, but he goes on to
insist on the “local specificity” of these adaptations. One such specificity was the
practice of publishing scripts prior to the release of the completed film. On
 Introduction 17

occasion, such scripts would appear in literary magazines, such as the famous script
for Kagirinaki zenshin (Unending Advance, 1937), with its original story by Ozu and
its transformation into a scenario by Yagi Yasutaro (ibid: 88). It was around this
time that questions of film authorship began to be debated and preference fell on
the side of scenario writers, including and perhaps especially, directors who wrote
or co-wrote the scripts for their films.
Most writing, especially in English, has tended to focus on adaptations of
Japanese literature into film, save for the work of Kurosawa Akira, whose adapta-
tions of Japanese literature, especially popular literature, are understudied. Yet in
the formation of Japanese cinema in its first decades, adaptations of Western liter-
ature were equally central. Works from Russian, French, German, and to a lesser
extent, English and Spanish were significant. Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection was
adapted and reworked as often as Chushingura, for instance. Gerhart Hauptmann
and Victor Hugo were also popular fodder for early film while Shakespeare, too,
was no stranger to the Japanese cinema (Pinar 2019). Even so famous and well-
studied a film as Mizoguchi’s Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion, 1936) is something
of an adaptation from the Russian Aleksandr Kuprin’s Yama (The Pit, serialized
1909–1915) (acknowledged on the IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/name/
nm0475520/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) but otherwise not mentioned, say, on the JMDb
(http://www.jmdb.ne.jp/1936/bl004200.htm). Indeed, a director most com-
monly associated with a “pure” Japanese cinema in his work in the 1930s – Noel
Burch’s discussion of Sisters of the Gion does not mention any connection to
Kuprin, though he does claim that by this time, Mizoguchi had, like Ozu, his own
“systemics” (1979: 222 and passim) – was also, according to Pinar, the director who
made the largest number of Western literary adaptations in the 1920s and 30s
(2019: 92).
While McDonald (2000) focuses on adaptations from Japanese literature and
Pinar (2019) on early cinema’s adaptations from Western literature, even most of
those lightly familiar with Japanese cinema will think immediately of the inter-
textual and intermedial relations to Japanese theater. For most, this theater com-
prises the Classical Japanese theater of Noh, Bunraku (the puppet or doll theater),
and Kabuki, and we will deal with that briefly. But first, the modern, post-Classi-
cal theater.
The modern Japanese theater known as shingeki (new theater) was almost
entirely a movement that relied on Western theater for its model, especially
Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg – precisely those playwrights who revolution-
ized the modern European theater. In fact, the home of shingeki, the Tsukiji
Shogekijo (Tsukiji Little Theater), built in the wake of the disastrous 1923 Great
Kanto Earthquake, “was a one-story Romanesque-Gothic structure, purely
European. It seated 499 people and was equipped with a kuppelhorizont, a sky-
dome for indirect lighting. It was, in short, the first theatre in Japan con-
structed specifically for the purpose of producing European plays” (Goodman
1971: 155).
18 David Desser

Though certainly not alone in creating the modern Japanese theatre, the Tsukiji
Little Theater and its co-founder, Osanai Kaoru, would have an immediate and
lasting impact upon Japanese cinema. Shochiku Studios, the most interestingly
“progressive” and would-be “modern” studio in the prewar period, established an
acting school in 1921 headed by Osanai (McDonald 1994: 35; Standish 2005: 37). It
was under the influence of the shingeki theater that Shochiku produced Shima no
onna (Island Woman) in 1920, a rather melodramatic but experimental film that is
credited with introducing actresses into the Japanese cinema as compared to the
onnagata (men who play women’s roles) of both the Kabuki and newer style shimpa
theaters (McDonald 1994: 36). The first appearance of an actress in Japanese
cinema is often credited to Shochiku’s Rojo no reikon (Souls on the Road, 1921), a
much more commercially successful film than Island Woman, but, as McDonald
relates, it was also in 1921 that Shochiku’s Henry Kotani had employed an actress,
Kurishima Sumiko, in Gubijinso (The Poppy) who became perhaps the first female
movie star (ibid; Anderson and Richie 1959: 42).
Although the impact of shingeki upon Japanese cinema is profound, more casual
observers have been fascinated by the links between traditional theater and film.
Keiko McDonald approvingly quotes Donald Richie as claiming, “‘from the first
the cinema [in Japan] was regarded as an extension of the stage, a new kind of
drama, and not as in the West a new kind of photography.’” She then goes on to
claim herself that, “Indeed, early Japanese cinema was greatly indebted to formal
properties of the classical stage, especially Kabuki, and also to the Kabuki/
Bunraku repertoire” (1994: 9). (Interestingly, McDonald notes that the links to lit-
erature are more extensive, a subject she would take up in a later book as we have
seen above.) Thus, one might very well be surprised to learn from Richie and
Anderson, writing in 1958, that “The truth is that the traditional theater in Japan
has given almost nothing to the films….It is from the story-telling art of the kodan
[historically based stories with which Kabuki shares much material] that the
Japanese film takes much of its material” (2–3). An exception, they note, is
Chushingura (The Loyal 47 Ronin), of which numerous productions have been
made. “Yet anyone seeing any of these film versions…is not likely to confuse it
with the traditional theater.” This is because, they claim, the films are “rigidly real-
istic” (5). Perhaps, at best, one may find a modified mie (the facial pause for effect
in the theater). Another reason for the lack of influence from the Kabuki is the fact
that the acting is “too big” for film (ibid). They speculate that the reason that critics
mistake the overall impact of theater on film is due to a reliance on a limited cor-
pus, including works from Kurosawa, Yoshimura, and Kinoshita. “[A]ll three direc-
tors have pointed ways in which the Kabuki could actually enrich the film and
make ‘Kabuki influence’ more than an empty critical phrase. Still, however, no one
follows their lead” (ibid: 7). Other theatrical forms, they claim, have had even less
influence, including Noh, shimpa, and shingeki.
Their survey of “influence” actually comes down mostly to a survey of adapta-
tions as much as anything and is, in any case, ahistorical. That there were moments
 Introduction 19

when each of the theatrical forms had their impact is of little concern. So, we
learn that, “Originally the Japanese screen was cluttered with filmed Shimpa but
nowadays, though the Shimpa attitude of sentimentality for its own sake has
found a secure place for itself in the Japanese films, relatively few pictures use
Shimpa stories” (ibid: 8). That shimpa was crucial for Mizoguchi in the 30s – films
that have stood the test of time –cannot be dealt with in their essay – for either
polemical reasons or lack of availability.
Yet, just one year later, now writing as Anderson and Richie, the authors note
the significance of perhaps the most spectacular and long-lived of Japan’s native
cinematic traditions: the katsuben, or benshi. They write, “The benshi was so
important to the early films and has played…a major role in the history of the
films in Japan, his [sic] influence continuing even to this day” (1959: 23). If that is
the case, that the influence of benshi continues even to this day, then surely its
appearance in Japanese cinema marks a crucial tradition and influence. And where,
of course, did the benshi originate? Anderson and Richie tell us:
Historically, the antecedents of the benshi have a very definite place in Japanese
theatrical history. Both the Kabuki and the Bunraku, or doll-drama, have joruri or
nagauta, a form of musical accompaniment or commentary consisting of reciters
and musicians who sit upon platforms at the side of the stage, explaining, interpo-
lating, and vocally acting out the play. There are also the traditional theatrical story-
tellers who still exist in the yose, the indigenous form of vaudeville. (ibid)

For many in Japan, and subsequently in film history in the West, the issue of ben-
shi revolved around how severely the institution limited the development of
Japanese film technique, especially in the indigenous cinema’s ability to narrate for
itself. The benshi, by perpetuating in film the formal conventions that isolate nar-
rative voice from stage action in traditional theater, effectively neutralized the
spectator’s illusion of absorption into the diegesis, or “story space,” of the film. By
not allowing the film to narrate for itself and by forbidding diegetic absorption,
the benshi either “held back” the development of the Japanese cinema vis à vis the
West or led, in Noel Burch’s formulations, to the radical alterity of the Japanese
cinema. In either case, the theatrical roots of the benshi of the Classical theater
carried over directly into the cinema and created at least a few decades of a unique
national tradition, with marked propensities visible into the twenty-first century.
The benshi, or katsuben, is referred to as a “commingled” artistic practice by
Joseph L. Anderson, who uses the term in a way that might be called “intermedial”
today. While he notes that Japanese aesthetic traditions often revolve around sim-
plicity, he also points to “an opposing aesthetic tendency [toward] extreme com-
plexity and heterogeneous, often redundant elements brought together to form a
work. The result is as commingling or a mixing of media rather than adherence to a
rigidly defined pure and narrow medium” (Anderson 1992: 262). Anderson notes the
combining of written words with narrative painting, “where neither words nor pic-
tures alone tell the whole story….The most familiar commingling picture-and-word
20 David Desser

forms are certain narrative emakimono” (ibid). The commingling of the katsuben
involves a vocal performance, the film (silent in the pre-talkie period) and musical
accompaniment with different instruments for a Japanese film and a Western one.
And, again, classical Japanese theater provides an “obvious” precursor of the
katsuben, in this case the Bunraku theater.

The puppets of bunraku are silent artifacts like a film. They (and their silent manip-
ulators) occupy center stage. A joruri chanter or two and shamisen musicians sit on
stage to the audience’s right. Unlike the Japanese dramatic forms of Noh and
Kabuki, which mix speaking narrators with speaking actors, the entire vocal burden
of bunraku rests on the joruri artist who narrates the drama and performs all of its
dialogue. (ibid: 265)

One final point is worth stressing for the manner in which katsuben aided the
filmed entertainment even before talkies at least had intertitled dialogue. And that
is, that “in Noh and most Kabuki plays, major vocal passages focus on narrators
when the aural emphasis converges on their description of characters’ emotions
rather than the actors enacting those emotions” (ibid: 266; emphasis original). In
this way, a film actor would be part of the pictorial tableau and the narration
would be handled by the katsuben. The propensity for Japanese cinema to be a pre-
sentational one, then, may be laid at the feet of the benshi.
In other aspects of theater’s impact on film, there are certain explanations for a
major tendency of the Japanese cinema to represent what is now called “slow
cinema.” Sato Tadao argues that the one-scene-one-shot technique is connected to
“the traditionally slow tempo to be found in Japanese dance, puppet drama [or] the
music of Noh” (Hanley 2012). Such a sentiment is questionable – might there be
other explanations for the tendency toward long takes or the plan sequence that the
French love so well? Peter Morris, for instance, suggests as an alternative to Sato
that in the case of Mizoguchi, the main source of his method is the director’s
background as a painter (ibid). Some support for the intermedial relation of
painting to film can be gleaned from Daiei’s notion of the artistry of Kinugasa’s
Cannes-prizewinning film of 1953: With Gate of Hell, Daiei explained that it had
attempted to show “12th century Japan as a series of prints to foreign audiences.”
And indeed, Cahiers’ critics noted that the film effortlessly integrated Japan’s paint-
ings and woodprints on screen (Cahiers 34, 36–37, qtd in Kriegel-Nicholas 2016: 89).
In fact, painting is often invoked as an intermedial connection. Noel Burch
notes the “hand-scrolls” as:

remarkable examples of an art in which the narrative dimension is…circumscribed

and isolated. Each scroll is related to some pre-existing text, of oral or literary
origin…The scrolls are both autonomous and redundant with respect to narrative
text; they depend upon their audience’s supposed familiarity with the literature and
oral tradition of their culture…It is the heritage exemplified by these practices that
determined the rapid rejection of the linear narrative codes of the West by the
Japanese film-going public. (1979: 99)
 Introduction 21

Later, Burch will make explicit reference to “the painted hand-scroll (e-makimono)”
in Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion. In the opening shot, a lateral track through the
bankrupt merchant’s shop while an auction is taking place, “the pro-filmic organi-
zation of architectural space is such that the passing lens produces successive tab-
leaux which appear as both discrete and inter-penetrating. This is the major effect
of the e-makimono” (1979: 228–229). And, further on, he relates what he takes to be
Mizoguchi’s “most remarkable” of his “scroll shots,” that in Zangiku monogatari
(The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, 1939). Burch is struck by the fact that, “It is
characteristic of the scroll-like nature of this shot that the characters never occupy
more than the lower third of the frame…” The shot is, according to Burch, some
seven and a half minutes in length, and consists of two characters walking, halt-
ing, talking, followed by a dollying camera (ibid: 234).
Cynthia Contreras, in her acutely observed examination of the use of
Cinemascope framing in Kobayashi’s masterful Seppuku (1962), notes how the
“Asian visual legacy is decidedly different from the framing traditions [of] the
European Renaissance.” In Japan, stories, especially those focusing on groups,
have “long been told on horizontal scrolls” as well as on byobu (folding screens) and
fusuma sliding screens that, she discerningly notes, “have prepared both set
designers and cinematographers” (2000:243). While Kobayashi has little choice
but to rely upon aspects of Western linear perspective (built into the apparatus
itself ), “he also explores the steeply angled perspective of the bird’s-eye shot and
oblique angles generally associated with Japanese paintings” (ibid: 248). As
Mizoguchi does in the garden sequence in the Kutsuki Mansion in Ugetsu (not
mentioned by Contreras), Kobayashi also relies on shots called fukinuki yatai (lit.
“blown off roof ”) where the camera peers into rooms from a 45-degree angle as if
the roof is missing (ibid).
A comparison to Mizoguchi may also be made in the quality of the
black-and-white cinematography in portions of, for instance, Ugetsu, which recall
(deliberately) sumi-e (black-ink; sometimes called Zen) landscape paintings, such
as in the picnic scene following the hot springs bath between Genjuro and Wakasa.
Contreras quotes Alain Silver who describes the duel between Tsugumo and
Omodaka on the plain of Goyu-in as possessing “the pen-and-ink simplicity of ter-
rain, a fondness for mists, and line drawings characteristic of traditional Japanese
landscapes” (qtd in ibid: 256). (For further examples of the relationship between
Japanese cinema and Japan’s artistic traditions see Ehrlich and Desser 2000.)
A theoretical notion of intermediality goes well beyond the question of adaptation.
Though we may note, for instance, the 50 or more film versions of Chushingura (The
Loyal 47 Ronin) over the years or the flurry of adaptations of Nakazato Kaizan’s
lengthy serialized novel Daibosatsu Toge (The Great Boddhisatva Pass) in the period
1957–1966; we may make generalizations about the plotlessness of many films as a
derivation of the shi-shosetsu (I-novel), or the prevalence of “atmosphere” over
character; or we may speak of television’s baleful influence on movie attendance. A
fuller appreciation of intermediality recognizes the interpenetration of media forms
or even the manner in which one medium defines itself against and expands its
22 David Desser

boundaries by recourse to another. Here it is fair to say that the present volume makes
a significant intervention within the larger terrain of “Media” studies. In particular,
questions of “media ecology” are addressed in a programmatic effort.
One example includes the manner in which Japanese cinema not only “lost” its
audience to television, but the way in which both media defined and refined them-
selves in a discourse, a dialogue, as early as the 1950s and, arguably, is still ongoing.
Much previous discussion of the impact of television in Japan has been content to
demonstrate the havoc it wreaked on the cinema. Ozu’s poke at television in his gently
satirical Ohayo (1959), where the idea that the new medium will create “100,000,000
idiots” (the population of Japan at that period) came at a time when film had achieved
new heights of audience appeal. A mere four years later, at the time of the great direc-
tor’s death, television may or may not have created idiots out of Japan’s highly literate
population, but it surely had devastated audience numbers. As Joseph Andersons
notes, “the highest annual movie attendance in history was reached in 1958 at the 1,127
million level. Two years later the total number of theaters peaked at 7,457… This was
also the year feature production hit its postwar high: 547. By 1963, theater attendance
was down to 511 million” (Anderson and Richie 1959: 456). Yet at the same time, and
even earlier, cinema came to be (re)defined against television and vice versa. Today,
directors whose early work was in television, such as Kore-eda Hirokazu, effortlessly
made the transition to theatrical film; even earlier, directors like Oshima and Imamura
had worked in television in the midst of ongoing film careers. All of this is to say that
notions of the canon and of intermediality are intertwined and interwoven in ways
that the present volume, while also detailing new aspects of Japanese history, over-
looked films, filmmakers, and film audiences, looks at how the medium of cinema –
one of Japan’s greatest contributions to world culture – is continually redefined.

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July): 277–290.
Anderson, Joseph L. (1992). “Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or, Talking to Pictures:
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Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Anderson, Joseph and Donald Richie. (1956). “The Films of Heinosuke Gosho.” Sight and
Sound, 26 (Autumn): 77–81.
Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie. (1959). The Japanese Film: Art and Industry.
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Balio, Tino. (2010). The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973. Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Bock, Audie. (1978). Japanese Film Directors. New York: Kodansha.

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Burch, Noel. (1979). To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema.
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 Section 1
History, Ideology, Aesthetics
 1
Kyoto – The “Hollywood of Japan”
Diane Wei Lewis

On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake and ensuing fires and violence
engulfed Tokyo in a storm of destruction. The disaster wiped out nearly 70% of
all structures in the city and left more than 1.5 million homeless (Schencking 2006:
833). Tokyo alone suffered an estimated 91,000 casualties. Overall, there were
nearly 120,000 missing or dead in the seven prefectures affected by the quake. The
catastrophe dealt a decisive blow to Japan’s film industry. Due to the disaster, the
two largest film companies in Japan, Nikkatsu and Shochiku, were forced to leave
the capital. Although Nikkatsu’s Mukojima studio and Shochiku’s Kamata studio
suffered only minor damage, Tokyo’s infrastructure was crippled and basic neces-
sities were in short supply. Both studios temporarily closed their doors and moved
production to the Kansai region. Shochiku quickly repaired and reopened its
Kamata studio in January 1924, but Nikkatsu closed Mukojima and did not reopen
a Tokyo studio until 1934. For the next ten years, Shochiku was the only major
company operating a studio in Tokyo.
Prior to the earthquake, the film industry was divided between Tokyo in the
east and the Kansai area in the west, where most film activity was concentrated in
Kyoto. When Tokyo film workers moved to Kyoto after the disaster, it was the first
time that film production was concentrated in one region of Japan. Thus, in the
1920s, during Tokyo’s reconstruction, Kyoto became known as the “Hollywood of
Japan.” This centralization hastened the modernization of the industry, leading to
the formation of new professional organizations and technological innovation at
brand-new production facilities.
This chapter will examine developments in the Kyoto film industry from the
turn of the century through the 1920s, focusing in particular on the early
development of Kyoto film studios and discourse on Kyoto as the “Hollywood of
Japan.” In the earlier part of the century, the film industry benefitted from Kyoto’s
conscious efforts to modernize and reinvent its image. In the 1920s, studio

A Companion to Japanese Cinema, First Edition. Edited by David Desser.

© 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
28 Diane Wei Lewis

expansion strengthened associations between Japanese cinema and modernity in

the Kansai region. Post-earthquake film magazines played up the connections bet-
ween film and middle-class leisure, showcasing film studio tours and social visits
to stars’ homes. This publicity reinforced film’s growing connections with respect-
able middle-class tastes and pastimes. A new “behind-the-scenes” culture helped
film studios strategically manage the public perception of industry secrets and
scandals.
Filmmaking played an important role in Kyoto’s modern history, and the post-
earthquake era marked a new and distinct period in the industry. As Japanese
cinema transitioned from being a low-class attraction to a widely consumed form
of popular entertainment, behind-the-scenes culture helped the industry promote
itself through journalism on film studios and film celebrities’ lifestyles.
Nevertheless, there remained deep ambivalence toward the rapid social and
cultural transformations accompanying modernization. Discourse on Kyoto as
the “Hollywood of Japan” reflects complex attitudes toward American-style
modernity in Japan.

The Early Period: The Founding of Kyoto Studios

By the time of the 1923 earthquake, Kyoto already had a long history of pro-
moting local film production as a new, modern industry. Kyoto was the imperial
capital of Japan from the beginning of the Heian period (794–1185) continuously
through the end of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) and the Meiji Restoration
of 1868. In 1869, the imperial capital was moved to Tokyo, which (as Edo) had
been the home of the bakufu (shogunate) and was now the seat of the new central
government. With the relocation of the imperial family and the remaking of
Japanese politics and society, Kyoto was faced with reorganizing its local economy
and reinventing its image. City renewal projects led to the widening and paving of
city streets, improvement of waterways, installation of electric street lighting, and
introduction of new forms of transport such as city trams. Railways were extended
between Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara, and to other major cities across Japan.
Regional industry and tourism increased, and by the time of the Great Kanto
Earthquake, Kyoto had successfully reinvented itself as a modern tourist city by
promoting its traditional landmarks, entertainment, and manufactures (Kaizuka
1979–1994).
The Kyoto film industry emerged out of these Meiji-period (1868–1912)
transformations. The early film entrepreneur Inahata Katsutaro (later head of
the Osaka Chamber of Commerce) was one of many Japanese sent by the Kyoto
Prefectural government to study abroad in Europe during the Meiji years. After
studying European chemical dyes at Lyon’s polytechnic institute La Martinière
Monplaisir, Inahata returned to Kyoto to introduce improvements to the local
textiles industry. On a subsequent visit to France, Inahata learned that a former
Another random document with
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dear, dear lord, that most generous friend, how good he has been to us all! I do love him,
though I never have seen him. Oh, how I wish that I could do something, were it ever so
little, to show him how very, very thankful I am."

The desire to show her gratitude in something more than words had taken strong hold of
the loving heart of the child. Grace sat for more than an hour thinking and thinking what
she—even she—could do for the merciful lord of the manor.

"I should like to make him a nosegay of all the best flowers in my garden; I would strip off
every blossom," said the child to herself. "But flowers die so soon; and then the gardens
round the Castle hold flowers a hundred times prettier than mine. I am afraid that the rich
master would scarcely look at my nosegay. I should like to work from morning till night to
make something fit to give him; but I am little, and cannot work well;—I do not see what I
could make. But oh, I must find some way of letting the generous lord know how grateful I
am for his goodness!"

In the midst of her perplexity, the eye of little Grace rested on her white dove. This was
her greatest treasure, the one thing which she valued beyond all others.

"I wonder if the great lord would accept Heartslove," murmured the child. "I should not
indeed like to lose my dear dove; but I have nothing else worth offering to the friend who
has saved my father. The bird is my own, my very own; I may give it to any one that I
please; and shall I grudge it to him to whom we owe everything that we have?"

There was a little struggle in the mind of the child, but it ended in her resolving to offer
her pet bird to the lord of the manor.

Full of her grateful design, Grace put her dove into a little woven basket, with open work
on the lid, and lined the basket with moss, that her favourite might take no harm by the
way. Grace then wont and asked her father to carry her dove to the great and good lord at
the Castle.

"I am far too busy to do any such thing," said Seele, who was just about starting off to
make a new purchase of cows for his dairy, with the money advanced by his kind
benefactor. "Go you up to the Castle, child, and take your present yourself."

Grace was afraid to go up to the Castle, though she knew the road to it perfectly well, for
she had often gathered acorns under the great oaks of the park while the lord of the
manor had been absent. But though feeling timid and shy, Grace was too anxious to offer
her humble gift to be easily put aside from her purpose.

"I will just venture as far as the outer gate," she said to herself, "and give the basket to
one of the servants, and beg him kindly to take it to the generous lord."

So Grace put on her little bonnet and cloak. In vain she tried to get one of her brothers or
sisters to go with her—they too said that they were too busy: not one seemed to think that
it was in the least needful to show gratitude, or even to feel it.

So Grace set out quite alone. Ofttimes on her way, she raised the lid of the basket a little
to take a last peep of her pet.

"I shall miss you, but I do not grudge you, my little beauty!" said the child. "I am sure that
so kind a lord will be gentle and good to my bird. He will not despise or hurt you; and
when he hears your soft note in the morning, he will know that you are cooing the thanks
of a little child for what he has done for us all."
But when Grace reached the large gate beside which hung the great iron bell, she had
hardly courage to ring it. After all, thought she, might not so grand a nobleman think it
presuming in her to come even to offer a gift? Was the bird, though it was her all, worthy
to be placed before him? Should she not rather carry Heartslove back to her home?

While Grace stood hesitating and doubting, with her small hand raised to the bell handle,
which she did not venture to pull, a man of a noble appearance, who was walking within
the Castle grounds, came up to the gate.

"What do you want, little girl?" he inquired in a tone so gentle, that even timid Grace was
not afraid to reply to the question.

"O sir, I am the child of Ernst Seele," she replied with a blush. "The lord of the Castle has
been good, oh, so very good to my father, and I want to give him my dove, just to show
how thankful I feel."

"Do you think that the lord of the Castle would value your bird?" asked the stranger,
smiling kindly down on the child.

"I dare say that he has many more, and perhaps prettier birds," said poor Grace, and she
looked wistfully at her covered basket as she spoke; "but Heartslove is so tame, so gentle
—she will come at my call, and eat crumbs from my lips—he cannot have a more loving
little dove. And then, sir, she is all that I have to give; so, perhaps, the great lord will not
despise her."

"No; I will answer for it that the lord of the Castle will prize your bird dearly," answered the
stranger, and his voice sounded so tender and loving that it seemed to Grace as if a father
had spoken. "Give me your basket, my child; I will see that the dove reaches safely him to
whom you would give it—he will most surely accept and value it for your sake."

Grace opened the basket, and pressed down her rosy lips to give one parting kiss to her
Heartslove. She then closed down the lid, and with simple trust handed the basket to the
stranger, who had opened the gate to take in her little present. The child then, after
thanking him and dropping a curtsey, turned away from the gate.

Grace felt pleased to think that she had done what was right, that she had at least proved
her wish to be grateful; and the remembrance of the noble stranger's smile lay warm at
the little girl's heart. She liked to recall his words, "I will answer for it that the lord of the
Castle will prize your bird dearly."

During the rest of that day Grace never spoke of her dove, though she thought of it often.
Her parents were far too much occupied with their business to think of it at all, and, what
was far more strange, not a word of gratitude towards their most generous benefactor was
heard either from Seele or his wife. In the greatness of his gift, they seemed quite to have
forgotten the giver. Grace alone resolved in her heart that not a morning or evening should
pass without her blessing the name of the friend who had saved them all from ruin; and
she smiled to herself as she thought of her gentle white dove nestling upon his bosom.

On the following day, as the family sat round the table at breakfast, talking over the
purchases which Seele had made through the help of the lord of the manor, there was
heard the tap of a bill at the window.

"Oh! It's my dove—it's my own Heartslove; she has flown back again to her old home!"
exclaimed Grace, starting up from her seat, and running to open the window.
The child took the bird in, kissed and fondled it. Pleasant it was to her to stroke again the
downy plumage, and to hear the coo of her pet.

"Look there, Grace!" exclaimed her father, "There seems to be something white tied under
the wing of the bird."

There was indeed a small strip of paper, fastened with a bright thread of gold. Grace very
eagerly untied it, wondering what kind of message her bird could have brought.

"There is something written, but I cannot read it. Please, father, tell me what it is!" cried
Grace.

There was silence round the table, as Seele read aloud the contents of the paper to the
circle of curious listeners. The writing was as follows:

"The child who gave this dove will be welcomed,

if she come alone to the Castle at noon."

Grace to go to the Castle—Grace to be expressly sent for by the lord of the manor! Father,
mother, brothers, and sisters all wondered at the message sent to the child. There could
be no mistake about it; the lord's own signature was at the end of the note. It was read
and re-read a dozen times over. Grace said less than did any one else, though she thought
far more than them all.

"Won't you be afraid to go alone into the presence of the lord of the manor?" asked one of
her sisters.

"I should be very, very much afraid," she replied, "only he has invited me to come."

"And what will you do when you see him?" inquired a brother.

"I will just give back Heartslove to her master," simply answered the child.

But very fast beat the heart of Grace, and her courage almost failed her when she had to
pass alone the great iron gate, and walk up the stately avenue to the marble steps that led
up to the Castle. She wished that she could have held her father's hand, or had her mother
beside her. One thought, however, gave her strength to go forward. "The master has
written that I—even I—shall be welcome. I have his own express invitation, so why should
I fear to appear before him!"

So, with Heartslove, not now in a basket, but held in her bosom, the poor little grateful
child drew nigh to the lord's magnificent home.

Grace was met by a kind-looking servant. "My lord has sent me to bring you to him," said
the man. "Do not tremble, little one; my lord is very fond of children. See! He is coming
down the marble staircase to receive you himself."

Grace eagerly, though timidly, raised her eyes to catch the first sight of her great
benefactor, the mighty lord of the land. She had felt afraid to enter his presence, but all
her fear passed away when she saw in the form advancing towards her, the same gentle
stranger who had met her before at the gate, and who had taken charge of her dove.

"Did I not tell you that the lord of the Castle would prize your bird dearly?" he said, as he
stooped and lovingly laid his hand on the head of the child.
Grace was then led by him through the Castle, its splendid galleries, its beautiful halls,
where there was everything that could delight the eye of the beholder. In one apartment,
she found a new dress awaiting her, spotless and white. She was left alone for awhile to
put on the dress, and was then called to a rich feast spread out in a lofty hall. Grace, poor
child as she was, then was allowed to sit down with the lord at his table, and to be helped
to whatever she liked by his own princely hand.

Nor was her friend's kindness to end here. That most happy hour was but the first of many
which Grace was to pass in that beautiful place. With the full consent of her parents, the
lord of the Castle adopted the little girl as his own, and brought her up as his daughter. He
lavished freely upon her every token of love, gratified every wish, and made the life of
Grace so joyful, that every day seemed more bright than the last. And much did the lord
value the bird which had been her first token of grateful affection; of all his treasures,
none was more prized than the Heartslove of the child.

Shall I leave my young readers to find out for themselves the meaning of my little parable,
or help them to trace out the lesson which it contains?

There is not one of them that has not a great Benefactor, to whose free bounty they owe a
million times more than Grace and her family owed to the lord of the manor. Have they
received all His benefits without a word of thanks, without a thought of grateful devotion?
Have they offered nothing to their Heavenly Lord, who has freely forgiven them all their
great debt, and loaded them with blessings day after day?

But perhaps a child may reply, "I have nothing to give to the Lord, no money with which to
help His poor, no power of working for Him." This may be so, but oh, remember that you
have still one offering which you can make; you have your Heartslove to lay at the feet of
your Heavenly Friend. Be assured that the Lord will prize your love dearly, far, far more
than all the earth's treasures of silver and gold. No being that has offered Heartslove in
simple, grateful homage to his Saviour, but will be welcomed by Him to a glorious home in
heaven, not to be received as a passing guest, but as a dearly beloved child, adopted into
His family, and made happy for ever and ever with Him!
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