American movies in Japan

[Mark Nornes]

This is something I'm researching for various regions of the world, but 
with special attention to Japan for obvious reasons (mainly that I can't 
read other languages). My impression at this point is that the choice to 
use subtitles or dubbing was an economic one played against local 
government predilection. For a very brief moment, multiple language 
versions appeared to be the solution to the translation problem. For 
those unfamiliar with MLVs, they would take the script for a given film 
and shoot it in various languages with new actors on the same sets. This 
is why there is an English AND Spanish language Dracula. This was most 
common in Europe, and gave rise to new international film stars who 
could speak in multiple languages (Maurice Chevalier, Greta Garbo, 
Adolphe Menjou, Claudette Colbert, Anna May Wong, et al). Hundreds of 
these were produced up to 1932, when dubbing or subbing became the 
standard. Dubbing became technically possible at this point, making MLVs 
prohibitively expensive.

Dubbing itself is far, far more expensive than subtitling, and so the 
latter was the natural choice for most places. However, this was not 
possible for largely illiterate audiences. Also, certain countries 
actually legislated the use of dubbing, usually to preserve the purity 
of the language in the cinemas and prophylactically protect their people 
from foreign contact---the countries under fascist rule like Germany, 
Italy, and Spain. Needless to say, the choice to dub also required a 
mass audience to ensure profitability, so I guess it's not surprising 
that it's more common in Europe. I've also heard stories (which I've 
been unable to confirm) that the American government agencies rebuilding 
Germany after WWII, in collaboration with Hollywood), kept dubbing the 
standard there to ensure the there was no linguistic difference between 
Hollywood product and German domestic films; the last thing they wanted 
was for the competition to rebuild.

So why subbing in Japan? Well, if you read the books on subbing in 
Japanese you'll usually find the same explanation: Japan is a "jimaku no 
kuni" and so it has some kind of mystical, organic relationship to the 
Japanese soul. I suspect it was mostly economic rationalization, 
particularly since the slow transition to sound meant that the potential 
mass audience for (expensive) dubbed foreign film wasn't completely in 
place until 1936. I have more work to do on this, tho.

You'll have to tell me more about those 1950s discussions sometime!

Markus





On Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 01:00  PM, Michael Raine wrote:

> 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.
>>