Japanese Cinema, film studies, Asian Studies

[j.izbicki at att.net]

Dear Aaron or Markus:  if this message is too long, please feel free to edit.

I second Michael Wood's suggestion that the subscribers of KineJapan pursue a discussion of some very important 
issues implied in the "provocative series of messages" recently, if accidentally, posted concerning "In Praise of 
Film Studies."   Such a discussion, apart from being of basic interest to many of the list's subscribers, would be 
particularly apt given the recent announcement of a second KineJapan conference to be held next June in Hawaii. 
Personally, I would also find it of interest as someone who is institutionally defined as a historian of modern 
Japan.  In that capacity, my work is regularly linked, if not relegated, to Asian Studies so I am especially 
interested in links, interactions, overlaps, digressions, blurring between Asian/Japanese studies and film 
studies.  The following is in the hope of getting the ball rolling…
East Asian Studies intertwines with any academic discipline that categorizes its studies -however temporarily or 
expediently-into national arenas identified China, Japan or Korea: film studies, history, art, architecture, 
comparative literature or EALL, etc.  Having been mostly outside of teaching for the last two years I am returning 
to the classroom this fall.  Although I am in a History department, my general life and my particular educational 
experience have mitigated against my fully identifiying as a historian-it is often too confining for my interests 
and my pedagogical inclinations.  Since one of the courses I will be teaching this year is "Japan in History and 
Film" and since my conception for the course is that it primarily be neither a history nor a film course but 
rather, a course that develops perspectives and skills for assessing popular cultural products that purport to 
present the past (and Japan) in some way, every decision I make about texts, writing assignments, film selection, 
study & discussion questions seems to bump up against larger theoretical problems concerning history as a 
discipline, film studies, and Japanese Studies.  So, a discussion on these issues would be of great interest to me 
not only from a theoretical perspective as an academic, but from the practical, political, and even ethical/moral 
issues raised in the course of pedagogy.

Perhaps such a discussion can begin by addressing issues and arguments raised in "In Praise of Film Studies" and 
in Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's "Kurosawa."  For instance, Yoshimoto comments toward the end of his book that "a study of 
Kurosawa and Japanese cinema in general must be conducted in such a way that it reveals how the institutional 
limits of established disciplines make them unable to deal with fundamental questions of Japanese cinema 
productively." (p. 376)  Might not "Japanese cinema" be substituted by "Japanese studies" or any other 
institutionally derived 'studies' program that has not emerged from the educational conventions of academe?  His 
'must' aside for the moment, what does this injunction to reveal mean or entail?  And if one agrees that such an 
exposure should be pursued as part of such a study, is the pursuit to be overt or subvert?  Did film studies and 
area studies (and women's studies, Asian-American studies, etc) already reveal by their initial formation the 
limits of the established disciplines?  Namely, such studies programs developed as supplements to an academic 
structure unable and/or unwilling to incorporate new media, marginalized social groupings, and non-Euro-American 
peoples as necessary, vital components of the learning agenda; so does their very presence in the curriculum serve 
as witness to the shortcomings of liberal education? 

Today 'Studies' programs are fairly securely ensconced in higher ed (but remain subject to various currents-a kind 
of last hired/first fired existence, perhaps) in part because in many ways they have indeed been coopted.  Has 
their basic structure developed very differently from the mainstream disciplines?  I don't ask this rhetorically: 
 if anyone out there feels her or his 'studies' program seriously diverges from the disciplines in research 
structure and pedagogy, please respond.  Even if the research of individual professors and grad students in some 
of the studies programs goes against the main grain, is the work so radical in methodology, ideology, and topic as 
to subvert (dare I say oppose?) the central core?  The continued existence of studies programs testifies that they 
still maintain a 'supplemental,' not a central, position regardless of whether members of the academic institution 
sincerely regard their role to be significant in the learning experience of undergraduates.  The studies programs 
might prod the established disciplines into somewhat new topics or approaches, but they do not seriously threaten 
the accepted concept of a liberal education.  Perhaps I should say they cannot so threaten because of the 
basically marginal position they still hold as add-ons to the conventional disciplines.  Does their creation, 
however much the result of painfully waged struggles, help hold up the original core?-rather like flying 
buttresses, actually critical for maintaining the structure but still not part of the nave?  (Of course an 
underlying question here is whether those involved in area or other specialized studies programs wish to be part 
of the core structures of academia or see themselves as oppositionists, loyal or not.  Not a parenthetical, 
really, but there it is.)

Whatever the consequences of  the (x)-studies programs (including co-optation), these studies forced a space open 
for teaching and research that the academy would not at the time have permitted within its basic curriculum.  The 
thing is, they're still not within the basic curriculum, in my view.  Personally, I think area studies, film 
studies, African-American studies, women's studies, et al, have provided a much needed space for research, 
activism, and the encouragement of new generations to explore and rally for the needs of communities and interests 
that the mainstream disciplines simply cannot absorb without imploding.  The studies programs have provided 
funding, time, and legitimation for groups and issues and new arenas that would have been even further 
marginalized if kept out of the academy entirely (I'm not sure in whose eyes they are legitimized, however).  They 
have also provided, at least in my experience, exciting opportunities for crossing or blurring disciplinary 
boundaries.  But that crossing and blurring occurs mostly outside the disciplines, leaving them basically in tact 
while the explorations and adventures occur in tangential spaces.  One of the questions suggested, at least in my 
reading, by Yoshimoto's book is why have the disciplines been so successful at resisting the pressures that should 
have been felt from the studies programs?  Why haven't  the disciplines imploded?  (or exploded-I'm not trying to 
be literarily coy here).  Why have the studies programs continued to co-exist with the disciplines rather than 
making inroads or tunnels into the structure that keeps them supplemental?  

Some reasons are purely practical or opportunist; studies programs have provided a lot of new positions for PhDs 
who might otherwise be unemployed (and I don't necessarily mean that cynically); they've provided the funds and 
arenas for studying and promoting alternative issues and agendas, for students and faculty alike; they provide 
publishing categories for academics whose approaches and topics might not satisfy the publishing parameters of a 
conventional discipline.  And even if the existence of such programs still marks them as 'other' in the academic 
establishment, today's curricula indicate a much more inclusive array of topics within the disciplines as well.  
Can an America history course be taught today without regard for African-American involvement or across the color 
spectrum, women's involvement, for example?   Without the continued visibility of studies programs, how 
consistently would such regard occur?  Would it ever deepen and become more complex?  Besides, can the complexity 
of African-American or any (x)-American experience be adequately addressed simply by being made an explicit part 
of disciplinary courses?  

In a very material way, film studies comes closer to being a discipline in the conventional sense (although maybe 
I'm assuming too facilely that there is a conventional discipline) than area studies do.  At least that seems to 
be the goal of many institutions that insist on viewing film studies as emerging from communications degrees (as 
opposed to degrees in literature), but it does seem more susceptible to having rather stringent research criteria 
imposed upon it.  Yoshimoto's study of Kurosawa resists that kind of stringency, but to do so, Yoshimoto is faced 
with being expected to identify with a national cinema (i.e., Japanese cinema, not just a cinema produced in 
circumstances particular to Japan at different times in its history).  I read his dilemma as that of  avoiding the 
confines both of film studies (e.g., auteurism as a critical category and methodology) and area studies (Kurosawa 
as a Japanese director, not just a director who's life is experienced as a particular Japanese over many decades).

I take Michael Wood's call for discussion as a call to examine the ideological and political implications of being 
involved-particularly in academia-in the study of cinema made in Japan.  Are there particular goals to accomplish 
with such study?  If no specific goals, are there pitfalls to avoid?  To what extent are these questions 
extensions of the ideological and political implications of participating in higher education in general?
I've gone on too long so will stop.  I hope to read many responses to Michael Wood's suggestion.

Regards,
Joanne Izbicki
j.izbicki at att.net