[KineJapan] The Meiji Era through the Dark Valley at NFAJ

[Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum via KineJapan]

Very interesting commentary there Roger. Thank you!

As far as anti-French propaganda is concerned, I think it's worth noting that Japanese forces and Vichy French troops had fought a brief (and undeclared) military conflict in French Indochina in September 1940. Overwhelming Japanese force resulted in the Empire gaining the right to 'station' troops throughout Indochina. Like many of the incidents in the Sino-Japanese War, this action was taken by troops on the ground acting without the authority of their superiors, whom they perceived as being not aggressive enough. The timing of the release in mid-1941 suggests that (like those previous incidents) the government's propaganda machine may have gone into action to retroactively support the aggressive actions of their military, and possibly to support the subsequent full invasion of southern Indochina.

Jim Harper.

On Thu, 3/5/18, Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum via KineJapan <kinejapan at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

 Subject: [KineJapan] The Meiji Era through the Dark Valley at NFAJ
 To: "Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum" <kinejapan at lists.osu.edu>
 Date: Thursday, 3 May, 2018, 7:15
 
 
 
 The Meiji Era through the
 Dark Valley at NFAJ
 
 Dear KineJapaners,
 
 As reported before, the
 National Film Center has now become the National Film
 Archive of Japan -
 NFAJ. The signage inside and out at Takarachō has been
 changed, including the
 directions in the metro station, The website
 now has its own domain, which links to the library
 catalogue, which is, for now, still under the wing of
 Momat.
 
 Some things don’t change so
 fast though.
 There are still worryingly few staff to administer research,
 conservation and
 curation for a major national film archive; there are still
 continuing
 programmes of films at wonderfully low prices; and there are
 still no more than
 two screenings each day in the cinema. Refreshing for those
 increasingly
 blasted by trailers at the likes of the BFI, all films still
 start on the dot
 after precisely fifteen seconds of silent
 darkness.
 
 After a shorter opening
 programme, the
 first major retrospective inaugurating the NFAJ is ‘Meiji
 Period
 in Films’. 2018 is the 150th anniversary of
 the deposition of
 the Shogunate but, since the Emperor Meiji came to the
 throne the previous
 year, one can justify the squeezing in of some civil war
 dramas. As the introductory
 text states, it’s partly an opportunity to show some
 films rarely shown.
 All the films I saw were NFAJ prints, with their original
 ‘NFC’ logos.
 
 Of particular interest to me this
 last
 week has been a strand of films made in the late 30s and
 earlier 40s, which I
 have never had the opportunity to see. As they are all to
 get their second
 screening in the next week or so, I’m flagging them up,
 should someone care to
 read on, with the proviso that anyone who caught the tonnage
 of dialogue that
 passed through this non-linguist’s ears might have heard
 quite different films.
 
 Actually, only one of the six
 films was mostly
 set after the Meiji restoration, and three were set during
 the events leading
 up to it. But what interested me was how history was being
 redeployed and
 re-narrated during this modern era.
 
 The one that was set almost
 completely in
 the Meiji era was Hiwa Norumanton Gō-jiken: Kamen no
 butō, - perhaps
 ‘Normanton Incident Special: Masked Dance - made in 1943
 by SASAKI Keisuke. One
 might reasonably think that the story of criminally racist
 arrogance by the
 British in the actual events of 1881 was bad enough not to
 need embellishment,
 but embellished it was. The surviving Indian cabin boy
 becomes Chinese, all the
 better to show the Japanese supporting him against the
 racism of the British. In
 a long opening section, which introduces life in a
 western-embracing Meiji era,
 a young lawyer leads the push-back.  For
 the 1943 filmmakers, this allows the copious display of
 long-vanished elaborate
 dresses and ball-gowns, whilst also showing disapproval of
 them. The British
 white-wash at the end is emphasized, and becomes here a
 vehicle to show that
 the lawyer, and his firebrand friend, are on the right side
 of history. Their
 expressions of resentment dissolve into a hate-the-enemy
 coda which depicts the
 1940s military destruction of British-occupied urban
 areas.
 
 As one might expect in a 1943
 Japanese
 film, the casting of the westerners’ roles was decidedly
 mixed. Some of these
 actors, by the evidence of these films, had something of a
 living depicting
 wicked foreigners. But earlier in the film, I seem to
 recall, there were street
 scenes of a western circus coming into town. The point here
 was that the
 foreign vagrants were unfairly disrupting the living of
 honest, hard-working
 families, particularly a widow and her two performing
 children. The brash
 circus was very convincing, fronted by a blonde with bare
 limbs and shoulders,
 straight out of Hollywood casting. I’d love to know more
 about where they got
 these players from. Come to think of it, the people of all
 classes in the
 street scenes of 1881 were unrealistically well-clad -
 presumably all the
 better to depict the ‘nakedness’ of the
 westerner.
 
 Seiki no gasshō-ai kuni
 kōshinkyoku -
 Century Chorus - Patriotic March, 1938, was
 a biopic of the musician SETOGUCHI Tōkichi. Since
 he lived on to
 1941, his life, by definition, covered far more than the
 Meiji period, although
 there is a substantial section set in that era. As a naval
 bandsman with
 composing ambitions, we eventually see him get his sea-legs.
 To the sound and
 back-drop of active gunnery in rough seas, he composes his
 Battleship March
 with full notation. To those wary of over-exposure to Gunkan-kōshinkyoku,
 I’d say there are many films of the period that employ the
 tune far more
 blatantly. In the sound-track, we first get it in fragments
 and, indeed, much
 of the sound-track uses a backdrop of silence to illustrate
 the sounds that
 Setoguchi hears and imagines. After his naval retirement
 send-off, to the
 unavoidable accompaniment, we see Setoguchi entering
 civilian life, and hear
 his new world - that of Taishō modernism. Setoguchi’s
 reception during his
 Western tour in this era is off the menu in this film. He
 seems, if I got it
 right, to be living above a record store. This long episode,
 of a
 fish-out-of-water, I found highly imaginative. But the
 authors had their own
 reason. Taishō becomes Shōwa and a new generation enters
 military service.  They are finally able
 to report to his bedside
 that his music is back in fashion, and he’s big - in
 Italy and Germany. We hear Gunkan-kōshinkyoku
 again, which the visuals cut to be an accompaniment of a
 march-past of
 Hitler. Taishō modernism gets to be shown here as a
 historical mistake that has
 been corrected.
 
 More exposure of Gunkan-kōshinkyoku
 could be heard in another ‘naval’ film in the same
 programme, Sugino Heisō-chō
 no tsuma - perhaps The Widow of the Honoured Heiso
 Sugino, 1940.
 Only three of five reels survive. We follow a widow of a
 casualty of the Russo-Japanese
 war as she struggles to bring up three sons. The arithmetic
 of that makes this
 film also a Taishō drama, but set rurally. I didn’t
 ascertain exactly which
 reels survive, but we seemed to get the end, even though I
 didn’t spot the
 ‘end’ character. Perhaps at the beginning of that reel,
 there is an
 extraordinarily beautiful and evocative scene. An elegiac,
 long-phrase
 accompanied song, different from any gidayū I have heard,
 accompanies a slow
 sweep over landscape of considerable beauty. The camera
 eventually pans down on
 a memorial visit to the father’s grave. After the rituals
 are completed, the
 family walk back down the road. The three sons are in naval
 uniform, the mother
 in formal attire. The mood lightens, the pace quickens and
 the four of them are
 marching proudly ahead - to Gunkan-kōshinkyoku.
 This, I
 thought I was being told, was how honourable people had
 spent their Taishō era
 - preparing for the next joyful march to
 war.
 
 There was a fine restoration
 drama, Ishin
 no kyoku - Melody of Restoration, made by
 USHIHARA Kiyohiko in 1942.
 It was the prestige commencing drama of the new conglomerate
 Daiei company with
 an all-star cast and staff. To me, it had something of the
 feel of 1950s epics.
 That might be partly due to the different feel of the grand
 scenes of marching armies
 that punctuated long interior dramatic scenes, seemingly
 made by different
 units. The excellent acting was well photographed. There had
 clearly been a
 move away from the placing of characters in ensemble scenes
 of many 1930s films
 to a style more familiar to modern eyes, of easily readable
 characters in the
 foreground. The print was also in very good condition (it
 does not appear to
 have been preserved via the ‘captured films’), apart
 from a few minutes of
 cyclical lightening, probably at the beginning of the
 penultimate reel, which
 was starting to give me a headache before it
 abated.  Made in Kyoto, it seemed to me that several
 scenes were shot in Nijō Castle’s interior. The music was
 mostly, if not all
 diegetic.
 
 The two other tales of
 restoration were filled
 by the derring-do of the then familiar character of Kurama
 Tengu, the legendary
 man of the people, who had been appearing in films since
 1928. His July 1941
 outing, directed by SUGANUMA Kanji, Satsuma no misshi
 - Envoy of Satsuma
 - is a hate-the-French vehicle, elaborating an attempt at
 that time by French agents
 to arm the Shogunate. Redeploying Kurama Tengu, along with
 his popular star, ARASHI
 Kanjurō (‘Arakan’), who had played this role since its
 film debut, was a
 well-trodden propaganda move. It recalled for me the
 deployment of long-playing
 heroic character, Maxim, in the first 1941 U.S.S.R.
 ‘Fighting Film’, Meeting
 with Maxim, Vstrecha s
 Maksimon. Who
 better to gain quick approval of a patriotic hating of the
 enemy
 than an already well-established popular hero? This is shown
 most obviously in Satsuma
 no misshi in a sequence where the resentful face of
 Arakan gets step
 closing-ups, montaged with step close-ups of the tricolor on
 the French ship
 that was bringing the armaments.
 
 There are overwhelming reasons
 why neither could have
 been a direct influence on the other, and there is also a
 very important
 difference in their contexts. The U.S.S.R. had then been
 invaded, whilst Japan was not at war with France, and would not be so for most of
 the war. It’s also
 worth noting that this anti-Gallican piece appeared just as
 those, I think, of
 more liberal complexion, were extolling all things French in
 journals like Eiga
 Hyōron. I’ll go further: I’d say the scriptwriter
 of Satsuma no misshi,
 MARUNE Santarō, here under the pseudonym, 来栖重兵衛, had the same idea as me that
 interest in  the French was a proxy for a
 wished-for
 opposition. And it’s not just the French who are selling
 the country, but their
 Japanese collaborators, shown in extended scenes of
 wine-drinking, rather than
 cheese-eating. Despite photography by MIYAGAWA Kazuo, it
 looked cheaply made
 with unconvincing sound. The print, a bit flecked, appears
 on the L.o.C. lists
 of captured films.
 
 Kurama Tengu’s
 next outing the following year, still with Arakan, was under
 the script and
 direction of ITŌ Daisuke. This was easily the
 best-preserved print of the set
 and looked as if it had never been through a projector
 before (although
 ja.wikipedia refers to a 2010 NFC screening). In fact, it
 was the best
 preserved print I’ve ever seen, with sparklingly clear
 images and sharp sound
 throughout. As you might expect for a film by Itō,
 there’s a spectacular
 sword-fight, this one being set in a multi-floored,
 brick-built warehouse and
 filmed by a camera that roamed vertically and horizontally.
 As in Suganuma’s
 film, there are nice flashes of light on Kurama’s
 sword-blade, but in this film
 we see it on the revolver, and even, flamboyantly, on the
 point of a pin. That
 pin, belonging to a blinded woman, has strong connotations
 in the plot.
 
 Every
 suspense-and-rescue trope, and then some, is thrown at the
 final denouement.
 The British, and probably others, are linked orally to the
 nefarious arms
 dealers, but the over-whelming direction of hate in this
 film is something so
 deplorable that it should require far more contextualisation
 than that given.
 The arms-dealers are called ‘Jacob’ and have grotesque
 false noses and habits.
 Such gratuitous promotion of anti-semitism, during the very
 maelstrom of the
 Holocaust, surely needs to be overtly acknowledged and
 commented on at any
 screening. The film was projected and billed with its
 original title, Kurama
 Tengu: Kogane Tengu - Kurama Tengu - Golden Hell. I seem
 not to be the only
 one who sees that trope of avarice as part-and-parcel of the
 anti-semitism,
 since, at some point, the film’s title in Itō
 filmographies got changed to Kurama
 Tengu: Yokohama ni arawaru - Kurama Tengu
 Appears in Yokohama. The film does not appear in
 any list of captured films and, at this point, I know
 nothing of its history of
 preservation.
 
 Roger
 
 macyroger at yahoo.co.uk
 
 
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