American movies in Japan

[Chika Kinoshita]

This is just a piece of information about the possibly first American film
dubbed in multiple voices in Japanese.
Fox dubbed Raoul Walsh's The Man Who Came Back (the Japanese title is Saisei
no minato), a Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrel vehicle, and released it in
December 1931. So it's after Morocco's use of subtitling. (For Morocco, see
Mark Nornes' article.) The point is that the dubbing was done not in Japan
by Fox's Japanese exhibition company, Fox Japan, but in LA. A Japanese
professor at USC at the time supervised it, and Japanese Americans in LA
contributed their voice performance. Yet, it wasn't well received by
Japanese film critics. The general audience might have been delighted, but
unfortunately my research doesn't indicate anything about it. Film critics'
complaints about the film are tinted by disturbing nationalism. I came
across a number of comments saying: I don't want to hear Janet Gaynor and
Charles Farrel talking in the Hiroshima dialect. Hirosima is the region from
which many Japanese Americans came.
I'm not sure as to whether this "failure" was fatal to the dubbing as the
standard practice of film translation in the early sound period. But I just
thought it's interesting. I haven't seen this film. Does anyone know if the
Japanese-dubbed version survives?

As for the dubbing in the single benshi voice, Paramount and Universal
invited benshis, Matsui Suisei and Komai Tetsu (?) respectively to Hollyood
to serve as the "masters of ceremony" for their review format musical films,
Paramount on Parade (released in Japan in 1930) and King of Jazz (1931). Don
Crafton's book The Talkies briefly touches on Paramount's case.

As for the translation of silent films, film critics' comments from
1929-1931 suggest that the foreign silent films' intertitles in the silent
ear were not replaced by Japanese subtitles, as was the case in Europe, but
translated/interpreted by the benshi. I haven't done archival research on
the benshi in the silent era, but Yoshida Chieo's well-documented (in my
view) book on benshi, Mou hitotsu no eiga shi: Katsuben no jidai seems to
confirm this.

Chika Kinoshita

on 06/05/02 8:22 AM, Mark Nornes at amnornes at umich.edu wrote:

> 
> On Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 06:49  PM, drainer at mpinet.net wrote:
>> The general consensus is that something is lost in dubbing, which is
>> true.
> 
> And it is also true that there are important "losses" in subtitling.
> Even if you have the original soundtrack intact with a subbed film
> (dubbing usually retains the music and sound effects tracks), you can't
> get around the fact that it's still a translation. We must be careful
> about obsessing about loss to the exclusion of gains and new pleasures
> in the translation. I've been flying in the face of nature----my
> conventionalized preference for subtitled foreign films---and have been
> choosing the English soundtracks on DVDs recently. I'm no longer
> completely confident that subtitling is _naturally_ better than dubbing!
> 
> Michael also asked about the translation of silent films. This is
> something I want to research in depth next year. Hearsay suggests that
> the benshi eliminated the need for translating new intertitles. Does
> anyone know this for a fact? Even high-prestige blockbusters by the
> majors were shown this way? Assuming no one on this list was around
> those days, perhaps someone has come across hints in the journals?
> 
> Markus
> 
>