"The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai" at Pole Pole

[Aaron Gerow]

On 2005.12.4, at 12:39  PM, M Arnold wrote:

> Japan's self-proclaimed biggest movie otaku (yes, that one) asked me 
> why foreign film fans and researchers (don't worry, I won't name 
> names) are always so interested in the Japanese pink movie genre

That's a rather disingenuous question, I would say. I think many 
foreign fans and researchers are attracted to pink films because many 
Japanese film fans and critics are attracted to them. When little 
critical acclaim is given to soft or hard porn in American or European 
film circles, it does strike researchers as curious--perhaps another 
one of those Japanese differences--that major Japanese film critics and 
intellectual fans have been praising some pink films from the 1960s on 
(even though, as the unnamed otaku (!!) says, the grand majority are 
not very good). This attention is perhaps justified by industrial 
realities: by the fact that for many years from the mid-60s on, over a 
third of the films made in Japan were pink films; by the fact that the 
oldest studio in Japan, Nikkatsu, changed over to making higher-class 
versions of pink films; and by the fact that, with all the critical 
acclaim, many pink filmmakers have gone on to become the major 
commercial filmmakers of the day (still making pink an acceptable place 
to train as a filmmaker). Perhaps one should rather ask why so much 
critical acclaim has existed in Japan, or why the industry could focus 
so much on it.

That does not mean that the question about foreign researchers should 
be ignored, but I think it is a question that should be related to much 
larger questions about the image of Japan in the age of anime, manga, 
and Miike--what kind of Japan is being constructed by fans and 
researchers of those phenomenon? What desires are being fulfilled by 
that image?

One issue that concerns me is why Japanese and foreign film 
critics/researchers so often focus on the "critically acclaimed" pink 
films, or use auteurist arguments to justify focusing on pink cinema. 
If one wants to make a large cultural argument about the status of pink 
cinema in Japan, one would think it necessary not to look at the 
exceptional films, but rather the average ones without all the cachet. 
This is still a problem with studies of Japanese film genres like 
anime, horror or action: the tendency to still use rather old notions 
of film art and auteurism to look at genre films, thus ignoring the 
entire problem of popular genre. Then there's the problem that those 
who avoid that trap tend to fall into another one: studying genre film 
through a purely reductionist model that reduces every film to some 
socio-political or psycho-cultural pattern, thus utterly ignoring 
what's particularly cinematic about them (much written on recent 
Japanese horror film falls into this trap). How do we weave our way 
between these two traps?


Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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