The Japanese Film [long]

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

I was rummaging around the Rudolph Arnheim collection, which is housed at
the Department of Communications at University of Michigan. The collection
consists primarily of books, but I did run across a first edition of _The
Japanese Film_, signed by Richie, with the following mimeographed document
tucked inside. It is a speech Richie gave on the writing of the book, which
the festival obviously felt was interesting enough to self-publish.
(Anderson's version of the same history can be read in: "Tales from
Peripheries: Why Write About Japanese Movies?" _Asian Cinema_ 8.2 (Winter
1996/1997): 9-43.) Since it's such a crucial book for us, I thought
everyone would like to see this, so I worked the document over with my OCR
software. Sorry for any mistakes....

Markus

______________________________________________________________

La Biennale Di Venezia
XXV MOSTRA INTERNAZIONALE D'ARTE CINEMATOGRAFICA

T A B L E   R O N D E
"HISTORIOGRAPHIE DU CINEMA"
30 Aout - 1 er septembre 1964

REPORT BY MR. DONALD RICHIE

The Japanese Film

[page 1]

REPORT BY MR. DONALD RICHIE

THE JAPANESE FILM

An account of the making of the book and an example of the applications of
film history to general cultural history.

When M Anderson and I began our book, _The Japanese Film_, we did not know
what we were doing. At first we thought it would be nice to do a short
article, then a somewhat longer one, then we thought a small pamphlet might
suit our needs. In 1959 we ended up, five years later, with a full-sized
and very substantial book. Part of our initial euphoria in the face of what
turned into very heavy labor indeed, was that we did not know until we
began to write about it, how very vast the material was. The more we
discovered, the more we found that there was to know. 

Part of this was because we had very few secondary sources (the Iijima
history, the Tanaka histories), none in any European language (the
Giuglaris book had appeared but we did not use it) and so had to go to
actual sources for everything: To old newspapers, old magazines, or talk to
the people themselves. Our problem was certainly that we knew too little
when we started out, and that it was in the nature of the material that we
should eventually have far too much. 

I don't think either of us could have done this book alone - I doubt anyone
could have. The way we worked was this. Mr. Anderson reads and writes
Japanese and I do not. On the other hand, I speak Japanese better than Mr.
Anderson does. Therefore, the major part of the research, the searching
through magazines, newspapers, personal papers, was his. But I was, at the
same time, talking to people, usually people of the period we were
studying. Almost every night, I remember, we would compare our mutual
findings, week after week, month after month. He was much the better
scholar than I. I would be quite willing to leave an apparently unprovable
point and move on. Not Joe - a week or two later he would come up a
verification. (All of our material is verified, and the amount of work
doing this was such that our bitterist disappointment was when our
publisher decided not to include in the finished work both our notes and
our really enormous bibliography). And so, month after 

[page 2]

to month, between 1954 and 1959 we amassed more and more material.
Eventually, it came time to put all of this information into some kind of
form, and this task was just as formidable as that of finding the material.
We finally decided to glue the pages of the various Mss. together, making
long rolls of each subject, somewhat like written on toilet-paper. Thus we
had a roll marked 'Nikkatsu - 1916-1929' or The sound Film - beginnings to
1935.' Eventually we had dozens of these rolls. When we started to put the
book together, it was just like editing a film. 

There are a dozen ways to organize history, at least, and all of them
chronological. We were given the problem of showing off our massed material
to the best possible effect. Fortunately, both of us much admired Lewis
Jacob's book on the American film and so we decided to use that as a model,
at the beginning at any rate, and then let the history itself dictate the
form. (The chapter headings with their somewhat self-conscious use of
photographic terms was the publisher's unfortunate idea.) 

Physically, the mere management of our rolls of toilet-paper ms. became
quite difficult. Fortunately I was then living in a house with a large
living room and we unrolled the mss. on the floor, on the stairs, in the
bedrooms, in the kitchen, forbade all friends and acquaintances the house,
and began putting the book together as we had agreed. It took over a week,
just wandering around the house, scissors in one hand, paste in the other,
reading ms. on the stove or the icebox, cutting and pasting. When it was
over I wound the finished ms into a roll and it weighed only slightly less
than I did. Also, I had to cut out enough material for a companion volume.
(Fortunately, much of this found a home in the second part of the book).
Then began the work of rewriting, checking, and adding - all of which I
did, Joe having returned to America. 

I would rewrite a chapter and mail an onion-skin carbon copy to hire. He
would add, subtract, rephrase, cut, or put in and rail it back. In this
way, over a year, the book finally got written. The second half - the
non-historical section- is mainly my work but here too, the ms. passed many
times back and forth across the Pacific. 

Finally, it started coming out in proof (the book ran into four proofs - a
very high number for Japan) and we traded the proofs back and forth, until
the very last minute scribbling additions or making deletions. (Even so,
the book has some errors: on pages 27 and 30 there is a confusion between
the names of Yoshizawa and Yokota, we mistranslated the title of Tanaka's
_Tsuki Wa Noborinu_, as well as forgot to give the Japanese; we
consistently misread Yoshimura's given name, it is Kimisaburo 

[page 3]

instead of Kozaburo; got Shirley Yamaguchi's Chinese name wrong, etc.) Yet,
even as we were doing page-proofs, we discovered that something odd had
happened, something we had not counted upon, but which was to make the book
even better than we had intended. 

When we first began we solemnly decided that, since Japan was so little
known, we would give little explanations along the way which we, as
residents, would know. Every time something came up which we thought might
puzzle, we explained it. When we read the book over in its entirety we
discovered that, in a way, we had written a history of Japan. 

It was a cultural history that we had written and we had done it by
thinking to explain along the way. (In a way, of course, it would have been
strange if we had _not_ written a cultural history - the land, its people,
and its films were so little known.) 

When I look at the book now (which is very rarely indeed) it is just this
aspect of it which I most like. By writing a book from primary sources, by
remembering that people might not understand odd-sounding Japanese ways, we
created a cultural history. And this, of course, is what any art history
(of the films or anything else) ought be. Film is the major art which is
not yet cut off from ordinary life. _Rashomon_ is meant, first and
foremost, to be enjoyed by a Japanese public. This enjoyment is the
function (ostensible or otherwise) of any film and I am proud that we
showed the context from which Japanese film  comes. 

I've often been asked if we really saw all of those films. The answer, of
course, is: no. Put we _did_ see a good ninety percent of them, ferreted
prints out of the hands of collectors, got the museum in Tokyo to lend us
prints, caught tiny one night-only showings in the suburbs, begged,
borrowed, and upon one-occasion stole. (I had not then developed a
technique which I am using in my new book on Kurosawa - which I am writing
while penning these lines - which is to take notes continuously through the
film showing. The reason is obvious. These notes correspond to marking
passages in a novel. After a film is over or a novel is read, nothing
remains but an impression, and a few usually misremembered images - any
valid work in film criticism comes from image/ sound/ context. And it is
just these which one does not remember afterward. If either Joe or myself
while seeing our thousand some films had taken complete notes, what a
record we would have - but we did not.) 

What we did do, however, was to give a particular history (The film) and a
general cultural history (Japan) and I think 

[page 4]

that any film history which manages the first but not the latter had better
be rewritten because film is meaningful only within its own cultural
context. It can be removed and studied, that is true, but then the book
becomes a book on film-structure or film-aesthetics - a film history must
include this living context. (It was just this idea that gave me the
impetus to do my second book: JAPANESE MOVIES (1961) - and, I might add, my
last: I have run out of titles. In that book, which uses very little
material from the first book, but a great deal of the material we had left
over, I am concerned with the delineation of the profile of Japan through
its films.) 

There remains, of course, a lot of work to be done with Japanese film. Our
book includes some errors in judgment which should be set right (we gave
far too much weight to Gosho and Toyoda and not nearly enough to Ichikawa)
and the individual directors all need extensive treatment. I am doing
Kurosawa, and someone, I understand, is doing Mizoguchi - But no one is
doing Naruse, for example. Someone should do a correlative history of
Japanese thought as seen in the films; someone else should see in the
changing fashion of the film, the changing mores of the people. There is no
end of subjects for the enterprising scholar who comes equipped. 

Joe Anderson and I were lucky. We came into Japanese film as Dr. Livingston
went into Africa and, though occasionally lost in the underbrush, we
emerged at last with our booty. When I think of the neat and well-combed
fields of, let us say, French film scholarship, I am delighted it was Tokyo
rather than Paris where we happened to meet. We were even luckier because
ours was a very rare kind of partnership. We agreed about almost everything
and when we had to cut agreed about what to go. I didn't know how rare that
was, then. Joe is back at Ohio State University now and I am still here in
Japan and those five years are history itself now. When I think back I tend
to forget the hours wrestling with the toilet-paper rolls (though not the
month of back-breaking work it took me alone to do the index) and remember
the afternoons when, flushed from our hunt, we would meet and compare
notes, and Joe, with a conspiritorial air, would produce absolute evidence
that it was Kinugasa who started Mizoguchi on his career, or something of
the sort. I realize now what made those months especial, and why our book
is a special book. We were enthusiastic, we were searching, we were finding
out not only about the film but also about Japan. In other words, we were
ourselves learning. 

Donald Richie 
Kagoshima 
Kyushu