American movies in Japan

[Michael Raine]

Hello Markus,

Can you say something about how the factors you list below played out for
early sound cinema in Japan? Were Hollywood studios opposed to dubbing (I
can't think why!)? Do you think that economic or other, perhaps cultural,
arguments had more force? One thing I've never been able to understand is
the argument that dubbing was difficult -- it seems to me that much of the
sound on Japanese film at least through the 1950s was post-recorded. If you
look at production diaries the last days of the shoot always seem to be
involved in looping dialogue. So I don't understand why it would have been
so difficult to do this for foreign films. I think your argument about the
need (at least for those with the power to make the decision) to keep the
Japanese and foreign semiotically distinct is persuasive, though I indicated
in another message that I don't think it was universal.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
[mailto:owner-KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu]On Behalf Of Mark H
Nornes
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2002 8:13 PM
To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: American movies in Japan


This is probably the reason you'll hear most often for why Japanese
audiences prefer subtitles for their movies (except for tv, as Aaron
notes). However, Aaron also hints that there are conventions as play, and
I think he's absolutely correct. I've looked into the history of
subtitling a bit, and it is clear that a wide variety of reasons were at
play in the choice between subbing and dubbing at the transition to sound.
They include the relative power of American studios, economic
rationalization, size of the target (linguistic) market, government
regulation (and thus politics...fascist regimes prefered dubbing, for
example), and by extention the relationship to the other. There are others
as well.

You can find some of the fruits of this research, both historican and
theoretical, in my article "For an Abusive Subtitling," which was
published in Film Quarterly. I should add that subsequent research hints
that it's a bit more complicated than rendered here, something further
confirmed by a fascinating story Chika Kinoshita told me at SCS last week.
Anyway, the article is online at:

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1070/3_52/54731368/p1/article.jhtml

Best,

Markus




On Sun, 2 Jun 2002 Beeswax20 at cs.com wrote:

> So the reason why most movies are subbed isn't because the Japanese want
to
> hear and appreciate it in its original form? I know I hate watching
foreign
> films dubbed. It loses something in the transition. I figured the Japanese
> society felt the same way, thus watching subs.
>