<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">There is a guy named Minami Ryuta, a theater/Shakespeare scholar from the Nagoya Kyoiku Daigaku who gave a paper at our Film and Media Studies forum last month on the "samurai musical" with Enoken, etc., as precursor to Kitano's Zatoichi closing scene. He has assembled a pretty astonishing archive of scenes and references from the 1920's on. If this is of interest please let me know.<DIV>yours,</DIV><DIV>J. Murphy</DIV><DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On 22 Nov 2005, at 12:22 AM, mark schilling wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: MS Mincho; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>My colleague Roger Garcia of the Udine Far East Film festival is curating a section for next year's edition on Asian musicals, primarily from the 1950s and 1960s. I'm helping him with Japan by screening the films of the usual suspects (Takamine Mieko, Takamine Hideko, Misora Hibari, Kayama Yuzo, The Crazy Cats, Frankie Sakai, Ishihara Yujiro, etc.), but I'm wondering if there are any good books or articles out there, in Japanese or English, I should be mining. There is plenty of writing on music in Japanese films, but I'm more interested in the musical genre per se, or rather the local interpretation of it.</DIV><DIV><FONT face="Arial" size="2"></FONT> </DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV>Mark Schilling</DIV><DIV><A href="mailto:schill@gol.com"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; ">schill@gol.com</SPAN></A></DIV><DIV> </DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>