[KineJapan] Orochi

Tue Jul 26 08:26:32 EDT 2022

 Roger, no worries about any delay in responding! Your notes are an excellent, highly insightful coda to my discursive query, especially nailing the source of the Youtube vid -- the 'talking silents' videos from Digital Meme -- and the Benshi narrator. I hope to access and view them via interlibrary loan. 

Thank you, too, for underscoring the critical distinction between class struggles and biblical parables as depicted (or not) in Orochi. I would question Jacoby's observation about any 'lack' of political implications in the script, that's a question of authorial intentionality which is very difficult to nail down with confidence. I may be missing something but Orochi is a samurai who is disgraced, therefore, the 'social injustices' he experiences cannot result from class differences, exploitation or struggle. This suggests more diffuse, apolitical social processes at work. 

My reference to the Matthew Effect comes from a paper by the late Columbia sociologist Robert Merton, The Matthew Effect in Science, first published in 1968 in Science magazine. Merton was concerned with describing cumulative advantage in the diffusion of scientific citations. Merton's paper originated in the work of the late, great Yale historian of science, Derek de Solla Price, work which has been extended in recent decades by network scientists such as Alberto Barabasi, which you correctly identify as preferential attachment. To risk another cognitive bias, Merton's paper may have 'anchored' me too narrowly on that single parable. Your comments widened the aperture into other frameworks which seem just as relevant. 
The question that continues to interest me concerns originary East Asian cultural analogues which predate these Western biblical parables and constructs, Orochi the film is just a foil or point of reference for that query. For example, does karma have relevance here? Or is it a question of honor and Orochi's fall from that? another socially defined process of great significance for Asian cultures. 

In any case, thank you so much for these very helpful suggestions and thoughts!

Best regards,
Thomas

    On Sunday, July 24, 2022 at 06:31:36 PM EDT, Roger Macy via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:  

Sorry for the delay in our responding, Thomas; perhaps youhave had some responses off-line.  I’veonly just had a chance to look at the film thru the link you gave – something Iwanted to do, as my only viewing of the film had been a fairly disastrous onein Paris with french subtitles,japanese benshi and a grand piano with open top that drowned half of it out.

Yes, it is a wonderful benshi narration on the Youtube recording, by awholly uncredited SAWATO Midori. Since the uploader has blatantly uplifted therecording from ‘Talking Silents 3’, complete with Matsuda’s and DigitalMeme’s logos at start and finish, the least they could have done was creditthe benshi. She is really good, with incomparable voice-colouring. Speaking of‘colouring’, I wonder whether the film would originally have been tinted, tosignify less ambiguously night and day.

You focus on cognitive biases and ask whether there are analogousJapanese concepts that predate them. Given that cognitive biases are generallyculturally neutral, and that psychology as a discipline was in its infancy inthe 1920s, - and given the silence from the list – I think it unlikely.  I have not checked whether the authors of allthose biases are all, say, American, or all German, but it should not nationalizethem, whether or not any of the authors were Japanese.

In particular, you pick up the words of the narration at the verybeginning and end of the film, about the rich and powerful accumulating morewealth and power. The phrase, ‘Matthew Effect’ does indeed have considerablecurrency. The problem with that name, I contend, is that it’s not the message areader of Matthew’s Gospel would be likely to summarise that work as a whole;and the Parable of the Talents, which triggered it, appears in several sourcesand is usually used to make a quite different message about husbandry. At anyrate, I would definitely not call it a “biblical interpretation”. Still,preferential attachment is an undeniable social phenomenon and is heavilylarded into the framing commentary of Orochi, as noted.

But a point I think worth noting isthat it is only  in thecommentary. Alexander JACOBY, in his Handbook, thought it “lacked Itō’s depth ofpolitical implication, the hero’s sufferings being more the result of hard luckthan of social injustice,” I would go further – if you found yourself in theunplanned experiment in Paris that I was thrown into, only having the visualnarrative of the film to go on, youmight see the same account of a self-destructive loser with anger managementproblems.

So, the scriptwriter, SUSUKITA Rokuhei (寿々喜多呂九平), failed to visualize, or BANDŌ Tsumasaburōrode roughshod over, the intention to portray class exploitation. Susukita wasa much-admired and prolific scriptwriter of this period and as Clément RAUGER,of La Cinémathèque française, in the page in the book of the Paris programme, 100 ans de cinémajaponais, says, he wasoriented on the extreme left. So, the conceptual origin of the attack on classexploitation in Orochi may owe more to Marx than Matthew. It looks as ifSusukita hasn’t really been ‘done’.

I hope you can take away something from this, which is all I can offer.

Roger

    On Tuesday, 12 July 2022 at 19:33:54 BST, Thomas Ball via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:  

 Buntarô Futagawa's 1925 film is a deserved classic of Japanese silent cinema. IMDB's thumbnail description of it states, "The story of a decent samurai who is widely considered a scum and a criminal. His bad luck and numerous misunderstandings drag him down the social ladder straight to the gutter." 

This Youtube version of the film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC2mWJfd6vA&t=222s has wonderful Benshi narration to go along with the English subtitles. The voiceover intonations greatly clarify the latent meaning of the action. 

Even in translation, the subtitles are stark in their depiction of Orochi's predicament, "Fair or not, this is a world of classes. If you don't toe the line, they will crush you...There's nothing wrong with me. Even if I did what I was told not to do, it was a matter of honor...Is there no justice in this world?  It makes no sense at all...One day you'll know the real me." 
A biblical interpretaion of Orochi's sense of injustice would typify it as a manifestation of the "Matthew Effect", the Gospel parable summarizable as "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer."

Related to the Matthew Effect is psychologist Edward Thorndike's 1920 paper about the halo effect, "the name given to the phenomenon whereby evaluators tend to be influenced by their previous judgments of performance or personality.” The halo effect, which has a counterfactual in the 'devil effect', is one of the few law-like regularities posited by the psychological sciences that has been replicated so often, many today aren't even aware of its origins in Thorndike's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect  

More recent behavioral scientists might classify Orochi's predicament based on heuristics and biases such as anchoring, the bandwagon effect or confirmation bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases  

While a modern economist such as Thomas Piketty might describe it as a variant of wealth inequality. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674273559
However, these are all Western descriptions of what is clearly a cross-cultural, trans-temporal constellation of human behaviors and phenomena. 

Is there an original Japanese concept analogous to, but predating these Western frameworks? 

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