JF Waste?

Aaron Gerow aaron.gerow at yale.edu
Wed Nov 4 02:45:16 EST 2009


This is a bit late, but the evening edition of the Asahi on October 31  
reported something about the Japan Foundation (JF) that concerns many  
of us. I wanted to mention this not only because of what was said  
about the JF, but also about the tone of the article, which I found  
disturbing.

As many of you know, the JF is involved a lot with promoting Japanese  
film abroad. They help fund events and festivals and some researchers.  
Some of us take advantage of their "collection" of Japanese films with  
English subtitles to show at our organizations (though with these  
films we still have to pay the copyright owner for each screening),  
and some of us watch films shown at JF offices or Japanese embassies  
abroad.

We have noted in the past problems with the JF, which includes the  
fact that they don't make their list of films public. What the Asahi  
reported seems to concern mainly the cases when the JF has been  
showing films at JF offices and Japanese embassies. The JF has  
contracted with the producers and distributors of hundreds of films to  
show these films a certain number of times at these screenings. They  
make a list of these films and make them available to their offices  
and to embassies to show when they want to. The gist of the Asahi  
article is that some 90% of the films they contract for are not shown  
the contracted number of times before the contract expires, which  
means that money is being paid to distributors for screenings that  
never take place. Some contracts are renewed even though the film has  
not even been shown once. The paper declares this is a waste of the  
taxpayer's money totaling some $900,000.

Most of us can read this article and wonder what is going on at the  
JF: Why not just contract to pay for the times the film is actually  
screened? How much does this have to do with the general secrecy the  
JF has about the films it handles? (Perhaps more offices and embassies  
would show more films if people in the local community actually knew  
what the JF could provide and thus could work with the local office to  
do some good programming.) The article does mention the JF wanting to  
work harder to publicize the films it does contract for, which would  
be a step in the right direction.

But what I found more disturbing was the tone of the Asahi article.  
Apart from being one of those "gotcha" pieces that finds waste without  
asking any questions about its structural background, the article's  
main focus was that most of these films feature sex scenes, yakuza,  
and the grotesque or macabre that seemingly no one wants to see. They  
don't "fit" with the tastes of the communities that live where the  
offices are. Citing unnamed sources, the paper reports that the films  
are picked by experts without taking into account the opinions of JF  
local bureau members or cultural attaches at embassies about "what  
kind of films they want to show to publicize Japanese culture." As if  
victorious, the article ends by saying that the JF has decided to put  
greater weight on what embassy and JF office officials want when  
contracting for films.

In the end, the article is basically complaining that the JF is  
picking films that people around the world don't want to see and which  
put Japan in a bad light. It really stinks of the attitude shown by,  
for instance, the Yubari education board when they refused to fund the  
Kumashiro Tatsumi retrospective at the Yubari Festival some years back  
because they were pink films; or of the conservative critics of the  
Yasukuni documentary, which got some Agency for Cultural Affairs  
money, who thought that it was a waste spending money on a film that  
doesn't present Japan in a good light. One worries that articles like  
this might prompt the JF to stop getting films like Kumashiro's or  
Nakagawa Nobuo's or Kato Tai's because they don't fit the image  
officialdom wants to have of Japan, or what prudish newspapers think  
is an efficient use of taxpayer money. Are we now only going to get  
Tora-san and Okuribito?

My final reaction to the article was this: the reporter failed to ask  
the most important question: Do any of the cultural attaches at  
Japanese embassies or at JF offices have significant knowledge of  
Japanese cinema in order to do programming or explain them to local  
audiences? Have any of them watched any classic Japanese films or  
taken a Japanese film class? My bet is that that almost none of them  
have. It may be partially the fault of the JF for not educating them,  
but the biggest fault lies in the Japanese government and the  
education system. The fact is that it is official government policy to  
promote Japanese cinema these days, but the government doesn't have  
anyone who is expert enough to program and promote Japanese films.  
Most of those in charge come from a generation that never watched  
Japanese films, and of course Japanese universities in general don't  
teach film history.

This issue came up a while ago at the Community Cinemas conference I  
attended. Museums and community cinemas around Japan are trying to  
promote Japanese film, but few of them have experts who can program  
interesting events or provide the background to audiences on why the  
programmed films are important. On a panel, Horikoshi Kenzo of  
Eurospace pressed an Agency for Cultural Affairs official on the need  
for education programs to nurture such experts, but the official's  
utterly meaningless response made it clear the Japanese government has  
absolutely no plan for training such experts--or for education in  
Japanese cinema as a whole.

To me, that's the real story behind this mini-JF scandal, the one the  
Asahi was too ignorant to think about. The problem is not in the JF,  
it is in the contradictory and self-defeating policies of the Japanese  
government about Japanese film and education.


Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
site: www.aarongerow.com



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