American movies in Japan, subtitles in Europe

[Jasper Sharp]

Also remember the smaller European countries, such as those in Benelux and
Scandinavia do not dub. Belgium show films with two sets of subtitles -
French and Flemish. I believe Finland is the same, with Finnish and Swedish
subs.

Of course its cheaper to subtitle - you don't have to pay a cast of voice
actors for a start. Subtitling is far preferable in that whilst both for
subbing and dubbing you do lose a lot of the nuance of what is actually
being said, in the case of subbing you are not actually covering up the
original soundtrack, so that those that do understand the original language
still have the option to either listen or read the subs (and a good
opportunity to learn a new language too.)

As Mike points out, it does look like a lot of films from Japan were
post-dubbed in Japanese, and I'm pretty sure its not just pinku. This
actually seemed to be the case in a lot of other non-English speaking
countries, especially when the film was being targetted for foreign markets,
and up until fairly recently too. "Tombs of the Blind Dead" was mentioned,
which is a perfect case in point - a Spanish film that played throughout
Europe and had an English language soundtrack post dubbed. You see it a lot
in European exploitation films, for example the work in the 70s and 80s of
Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci - in the days before Hollywood really got a
strangle hold on the distribution of every individual country's market. A
lot of these films made in Italy played in the UK and the US, no doubt a
bigger audience than the domestic one. These were often made with
"international" casts, where Italian actors would play alongside American
"name" actors such as Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Franciosa and John Saxon, so
in one respect, it was a purely practical decision. (this was in the heyday
of Italian studios such as Cinecitta)

Moreover, as anyone who has been involved at any level in film production
would tell you, it is a lot cheaper to post-dub sound. Not only do you not
have to go through the palaver of lugging around sound equipment and the
relevent staff on the shoot nor bother trying to frequency match the
different sound sources in post production (the acoustics of the recorded
sound are going to vary depending on the location, so you have to smooth
over the edges in post-production so the edits don't draw attention to
themselves), but it also means you don't have to worry about so much in the
editing room in terms of synching the original recorded soundtrack with the
different angle shots of the same scene.

Susanne's hypothesis that Japanese audiences felt "very awkward feeling
seeing Western foreigners speaking fluent Japanese" is born out by Donald
Richie's Japanese Film: Art and Industry book which says the same thing. I'd
imagine this is why the slapdash post-dubbing approach utilised in these
European horror movies led most native English speakers to believe that
these films were cheap and shoddy, and looked rather silly compared with
American films where the sound was recorded live, and hence the declining
market share of Italian produce outside of Italy (the quality of  films such
as Doctor Butch MD, Endgame and Zombie Creeping Flesh probably didn't help
much either).

Mind you, how about Japanese films made with non-Japanese casts - I'm
thinking of films like Susumu Hani's Africa Story with James Stewart, and
that American set film about a rowing team by Harada? These all show
foreigners "speaking Japanese"!