American movies in Japan

[Aaron Gerow]

>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.

This is definitely the case, even though as early as the late 1910s, some 
reformist critics were wondering why distributors couldn't just translate 
the intertitles and get rid of the benshi.

Much can be said about the popularity of the benshi, but the fact that in 
the late 1910s and early 1920s this was still a low cost industry in 
which there were usually only one or a couple of prints of foreign films 
made the costs of redoing the print problematic.

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171