[KineJapan] Toho Sogi Gallery Talk's Explosive Ending

[Markus Nornes]

The National Film Archive has been doing these nice gallery talks up on
their 7th floor on the first Saturday of every month. Yesterday, I attended
one by Honchi Haruhiko on the Toho Strike just after WWII. This was Part 2,
continuing a previous gallery talk. It was so packed they had to snake
around the lobby and put up a monitor for people in the back around the
corner.

Honchi is a collector-researcher, kind of like Makino Mamoru. And anyone
familiar with his 『日本映画雑誌タイトル総覧』, which lists over a thousand first issues
of Japanese film magazines, knows that he has a completionist bent. This
definitely came out in the talk, which walked us through each phase of the
strike in remarkable detail. It was overwhelming, actually.

Basically, anything having to do with the JCP has to deal with the dynamic
between organizational structures—their transformations specifically—with
personal politics and personalities. I found this out as a PhD student
trying to figure out the history of Prokino. That chapter of my Japanese
Documentary Film book is probably deadening with TMI.

Anyway, the Toho Sogi was no different and Honchi has spent years figuring
it out, reading several bookshelves' worth of titles on the JCP and
conducting a deep dive into the archive—particularly the Miyajima Yoshio
collection at the NFAJ. Miyajima was, of course, the top cinematographer
for the likes of Abe Yutaka, Imai Tadashi, Kobayashi Masaaki and Tanaka
Kinuyo. But he also helped form the Toho labor union in December 1945 and
was its leader throughout the strike until the occupation threw "everything
but the battleships" at it in 1948.

Honchi spent a good 90+ minutes walking us through the multiple *bunretsu *of
the union and the complexities of the interpersonal relationships behind
the scenes—all built on various documents from his own and
Miyajima's collections. It was a strong demonstration of serious research
in the archive.

As he drew to a close, Honchi announced he had one more bit to cover. He
pulled out three bound volumes of handwritten and mimeographed documents,
explaining that he had just come into possession of these items and hadn't
had a chance to do a proper job of analyzing them. But he wanted to show
them publicly for the first time.

They were collections of memoranda and reports from the police! So far, the
story of the Sogi has always been told through interviews, memoirs and
documents produced by the communist activists. But here were documents that
promised a glimpse into the other side of the barricades.

Honchi didn't go into much detail, but he made one thing clear through a
number of documents. They included an internal union memo that's also in
the Miyajima collection, a map of Toho Studios showing where all the
barricades and defenses were setup (and apparently weak points, too), and a
long list of union members to be arrested.

In other words, it was clear that the police had a spy on the inside of the
union, and someone with access to lots of important information! The police
knew everything.  The audience was dumbfounded.

Honchi said he didn't know who it was, but you could tell he wanted to
hypothesize that it was Miyajima (especially based on how he pitched the
history up to the conclusion).

It was a wonderful afternoon demonstrating the power of historical
documents and the archive...at the Archive.

I'm looking forward to the next one!

Markus

---

*Markus Nornes*
*Professor of Asian Cinema*

Department of Film, Television and Media, Department of Asian Languages and
Cultures, Penny Stamps School of Art & Design




*Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nornes/
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nornes/>*
*Department of Film, Television and Media*
*6348 North Quad*
*105 S. State Street**Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20230903/5502bdf8/attachment-0001.html>