How big tobacco bought the big screen

[Jonathan M Hall]

Dear All,

I enjoyed Paul's posting a week or so ago.  Smoking was not always  
glamor, it could also be a cultural weapon.  Perhaps most memorable  
is the image of Ayako spitting out her cigarette when she's returned  
home at the end of Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy.

The best writing in English on the Japan tobacco monopoly and health  
industry in English is work by Roddey Reid, a literature and science  
studies scholar at UC San Diego.
I recommend his wonderful Globalizing Tobacco Control: Anti-smoking  
Campaigns in California, France, and Japan.  In addition to the  
cultural studies and policy analyses in the book, Reid also spent a  
lot of time looking at historical representations of smoking  
especially in film; I helped him with that work when I was a grad  
student in Tokyo.  It was fascinating to construct, as we did  
informally, a short history of smoking in Japanese cinema.  I bet  
there's a great article waiting to be written there ...

With best wishes to all,
Jonathan
UC Irvine


On 26 Sep 2008, at 09:59, Anne Ishii wrote:

> could this have simply to do with japanese tobacco being a state- 
> run monopoly through the 80s?
> and if it's film of the 40s, the very same government was tightly  
> monitoring film content for militarist incongruence, right?
>
> On Sep 26, 2008, at 12:43 PM, Paul Roquet wrote:
>
>> I have been thinking about cigarettes in Japanese film as well,  
>> after watching Shina no Yoru (China Nights, 1940) earlier this  
>> week. Every time Hasegawa and Ri Koran look all ready to kiss, out  
>> comes the box of cigarettes instead, with Ri seductively striking  
>> a match and lighting her man's tobacco. I'm not sure if they were  
>> sponsored to light up, but it certainly seems like an effective  
>> way to add to add to the allure...
>>
>> Come to think of it, Yamaguchi/Ri Koran's character slides into  
>> femme fatale mode for at least the middle part of the film -  
>> perhaps that's where she picked up the habit.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>> On Sep 26, 2008, at 1:47 AM, Roger Macy wrote:
>>
>>> Does anyone know if there is any smoking gun connecting the  
>>> tobacco industry with Japanese cinema?
>>> I noticed this report about Hollywood in the Guardian on-line
>>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/26/tobaccoindustry.smoking
>>> and it is, doubtless, reported elsewhere.
>>>
>>> I've been watching as many films as I can of the 'Japan in Black'  
>>> season here at San Sebastian.  The 'noir' elements of many of the  
>>> films are debatable (as the organisers readily admit).  Femmes  
>>> fatales are passing rare, along with private detectives, etc.  
>>> etc.  Train scenes figure strongly and memorably, but all the  
>>> films share two elements: they were popular films that featured  
>>> well-photographed scenes of stars, smoking (or was it " stars'  
>>> smoking ").
>>> Roger
>>
>

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