blacks in Japanese films

Mark Schilling schill
Sat Oct 31 12:05:39 EST 1998


 From: Mark Schilling <schill at gol.com>
> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: Re: blacks in Japanese films
> Date: Sunday, November 01, 1998 


Speaking of blacks in Japanese films, how can we forget Sato Junya's 1977
"Ningen no Shomei," the Kadokawa Haruki-produced hit that featured not only
a half-black, half-Japanese murder victim, but scenes shot on US location
with black characters, including the victim's down-and-out father? Joe
Yamanaka played the victim, while Matsuda Yusaka starred as the detective
who investigates his death. 

Another black character appeared in Teruo Ishii's 1965 "Abashiri Bangaichi
Bokyohen," the third installment in the "Abashiri Bangaichi" series. An
escaped convict, played by Takakura Ken, befriends a half-black,
half-Japanese street boy, played by a Japanese child actor in black-face. 

Mark Schilling
>

----------
> From: Michael Raine <michael-raine at uiowa.edu>
> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: Re: blacks in Japanese films
> Date: Sunday, November 01, 1998 1:19 AM
> 
> Oops, forgot Kiku to Isamu! What I like best about that film is the
> challenge to racial representation in Japan figured in clearly racially
> different bodies with perfect regional (and therefore, in Yanagidan
> fashion, more truly Japanese) accents. Are there any Other films that
don't
> automatically treat blackness as otherness? this issue is much larger
than
> just US-Japan relations of course: think of the place of "nan'yo" in the
> imperial imagination and its postwar nostalgic echo. That's even
satirized
> (I hope!) in films like Kawashima Yuzo's Guramaa shima to yuuwaku [I
think]
> or Imamura's Nishi Ginza eki mae. 
> 
> Michael
> 
> At 09:43 AM 10/31/98 -0600, you wrote:
> >At 7:41 PM 10/30/98, Maureen Donovan wrote:
> >>>From hobbs.35 at osu.edu Fri Oct 30 20:12:30 1998
> >>Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 11:54:36 -0500
> >>From: Ayanna Hobbs <hobbs.35 at osu.edu>
> >>To: NIHONGO at UTKVM1.UTK.EDU
> >>Subject: Re: blacks in Japanese films
> >>
> >>
> >>Does anyone know of any films where blacks (African-Americans) appear
in
> >>Japanese films or in Japanese literature between 1930's - 1970's?   I
think
> >>there is a Japanese film called, "Who's the guy who sang 'Akai
Hankachi'?"
> >
> >There is the Oshima Nagisa film version of _Shiiku_ (The Catch, 1961)
from
> >the original story by Oe Kenzaburo.  There is also Imai Tadashi's 1959
> >_Kiku to Isamu_, about mixed-race Japanese/African-American children.
> >
> >David Desser
> >
> >
> >




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