Online Reprint Series----some thoughts

[Mark Nornes]

Hi everyone,

In a few minutes I will be sending you an two announcements about a new 
online initiative at the Center for Japanese Studies Publications 
Program. Please help us by spreading this to any appropriate film or 
Japanese studies lists. We'd really appreciate it. We think it's the 
beginning of a great resource for research and teaching, but it doesn't 
do much if no one knows about it. (And we've put a lot of energy into 
this.)

The announcements are fairly self-explanatory, but I thought I would 
give a little background to everyone on KineJapan. If you're 
interested, and I hope you are because it's pretty slick.

I think the CJS Pubs program is precious. If you're not doing a topic 
with a built-in market, it's getting harder and harder to publish. 
Needless to say, there are fewer and fewer places committed to 
publishing beautiful books as well, proofread (!) hardbacks on nice 
paper with jackets, etc. etc. etc. At the same time, we recognized that 
print-on-demand is on the future. It's already quite possible. Note 
this appears to be how Indiana brought David Desser's Eros Plus 
Massacre back into print, and Aaron and I used a vanity press with 
similar technology for In Praise of Film Studies.

The quality isn't quite where we want it for CJS, but we still wanted 
to position the press for the inevitable day. This all started with an 
idea from John Campbell, which I helped bring into fruition as Bruce 
Willoughby's faculty director.  In looking into things, we discovered 
that Michigan's library is at the cutting edge for online, digital 
publishing. They've already done many large projects for scholarly 
societies, and now they've helped us.

Initially, our main goal was to put the out-of-print books back into 
print through online availability. But it grew from there. In the 
background is an idea we may or may not pursue, a separate electronic 
library housing out-of-print books from other Asian study centers 
around the US (or the world). By the way, if you are connected to one 
of these places and would like to learn more, by all means contact 
Bruce; the entire process is far less expensive than you'd think and 
the possibilities are quite wonderful.

But when we saw what the library's system was capable of doing, I got 
very excited. I've always been interested in the ways online, digital 
technologies can be used for research, especially collaborative 
efforts. Thus, you might have read Yeh Yueh-yu and my "Narrating 
National Sadness". Kinema Club and KineJapan is certainly part of this; 
we've always called the considerable accumulation of KineJapan verbiage 
"publishing," right? At any rate, when I saw the library's stuff, I 
knew I wanted to see what I could do with it. To that end, I suggested 
we create a faculty reprint series that all UM professors could 
participate in freely, uploading materials important to their own 
disciplines.

The most obvious thing was reprinting out of print books that deserve 
to be alive and available to new generations of Japanese film fans and 
scholars. The first two that came to mind were books by Richie and 
Burch. In some ways, Richie made his Japanese Cinema obsolete with his 
new general history, but I still think it remains one of the liveliest 
and readable general histories of Japanese cinema. Donald thought so 
too, and was happy to see it go back into print.

As for Burch, I never thought he got a fair shake and the book's 
advances have often been ignored in the course of the critique. Of 
course, the critiques were solid, but Burch raises many questions that 
have yet to be adequately addressed. I think Burch was a little taken 
aback when I asked him to reprint the book, but I told him why I 
thought it was important and he agreed to go ahead. Harry Harootunian 
graciously agreed to write a new introduction, an introduction that 
covers much of the ground I would have myself but in a far more 
convincing and eloquent way. His new introduction is a must-read, and I 
hope that combined with the reprint it spurs a reconsideration of To 
the Distant Observer.

 From there, I also thought that this could be used to publish unusual 
archival materials. For example, materials connected to one's own book. 
Thus, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki primarily materials are evidence I used 
for the last chapter of my book on documentary.

Similarly, I teamed up with Makino Mamoru to reprint a collection of 
proletarian film movement materials. This is a deep collection, thanks 
to Makino's closets and his kind largesse (he was curious about the 
possibilities as paper reprints are increasingly impossible to do, and 
are now limited to runs of a couple hundred if that). Much of this 
material is included in the paper Prokino reprint. However, we've 
included pretty much all the extant journals from the precursor to 
Prokino, the Federation, as well as more minor groups. One section has 
an astounding collection of billets and posters from various strikes 
and movements, all of which were passed through the censorship process; 
you can see all the markings left by the censors, what they were 
worried about or interested in. This section also puts on display the 
internet's possibilities for moving image dissemination, as you'll now 
be able to see most of the extant Prokino films. They're small 
quicktimes, but that's where the technology is right now. Hopefully, we 
can return to this project in the future and replace them with higher 
quality versions after bandwidth continues its speedy march.

There is more on the way. Sometime in the near future, we'll introduce 
a collection of materials from the Suzuki Seijun Problem. In the mean 
time, if you have ideas let me know. If you have a book project and 
you'd like to include a collection of imagery or documents, let me 
know. We can put something together. Depending on the complexity of the 
thing, you'd be surprised how inexpensive this is. And if you are at a 
Center that has an out-of-print backlist, let us know and maybe we can 
work together.

Finally, if you have a moment after you've seen the site, I'd 
appreciate if you could drop me a note (on or off the list) about your 
thoughts and impressions. Creating this has taken considerable 
financial support from the Center for Japanese Studies, and I would 
like the executive committee to hear some feedback. The more positive 
feedback, the easier it will be to get continued support.

Now check out the next couple email, and check it out. And please send 
those messages off to other lists if you can.

Thanks,

Markus

PS: One last little favor. As you look through pages, please note any 
mistakes and drop me a note off the list. These pages were very 
complex-----there must be several hundred links-----and it's always 
hard to pick up all the mistakes. I can, however, tell you about one 
problem there's nothing we can do about: when you browse through books 
you'll find all manner of transliterations and mistakes. This 
information gets downloaded from public catalogs, so unless we go 
request official revisions there's nothing we can do about it.

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