Aaron Gerow's Blog

With the extraordinary success of Shogun at the Emmys, I thought I should finally post about the podcast I did on the show. (Part of the delay in posting was due to problems with my web software.) Having both read James Clavell���s Shogun��and��watched the 1980s miniseries based on it when I was a teenager, I was intrigued and not a little worried about the new adaptation, given the long history of orientalist depictions of Japan. I decided to put off watching it until it came out on DVD or something like that.

But when the folks at the Moving Histories podcast, Kim Nelson, Robert Burgoyne, and John Trafton, contacted me about doing an episode on the series, I bit the bullet and watched the entire series. The first episode did not bode well. Beyond the cruelty I found gratuitous, the depictions of samurai obsessed with suicide were ridiculous.��

When Yabushige falls into the sea, for instance, he starts flailing around with his sword. My Japanese partner and I were really wondering what he was doing.��

I have been thinking a lot about Japanese comedy these last few years. It started not just with watching lots of film comedy, but also with going frequently to comedy halls in Japan, from yose vaudeville��halls to theaters that feature manzai acts or even stand-up comedy. I taught a course in Japanese comedy in 2022, I put on a live comedy��event called Verbal Arts of Japan in 2023, and even did a review of a recent book on rakugo for Monumeta Nipponica.��

My most recent endeavor has been to program a series featuring some of the great works of Japanese film comedy. This was not easy to do. While comedy has been a central genre in Japanese film history, few foreign festivals have programmed��it and not many scholars have studied it���why is an interesting problem���so there are actually not many English subtitled film prints. The National Film Archive of Japan had a pretty good collection of prewar films, but I had to rely on the Japan Foundation for postwar films. Even then, some of the legendary series like the�����Irresponsible��� series featuring the Crazy Cats could not be shown because there are no subtitled prints. We also had problems with one of the film companies, which did not give us permission in time, so we had to cancel an Enoken film. Still, we came up��with a pretty good set of films.��

One movie theater I want to go to, but have not yet visited, is the Motomiya Movie Theater in Motomiya, Fukushima. Built in 1914, it was originally created as a space for stage plays and public meetings, but was then transformed into a movie theater during the war. Before closing in 1963, it showed a wide��variety of movies, many of the B-movie���or lower level���variety. What is fascinating is that the building has not been torn down and is actually still maintained as a movie theater, occasionally showing films and doing special events. It is also��supposedly the only theater left in Japan that shows films with a carbon arc 35mm projector. Especially with a very active social media presence (see their Facebook page), the Motomiya Movie Theater still garners a lot of attention, being the subject of documentaries, news reports, and even a book: Basue no shinema paradaisu. It suffered storm damage a couple of years ago, but successfully sold T-shirts to help with repairs (I bought one, of course).

When Markus Nornes and I published the Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies in 2009 (a Japanese translation came out in 2016), we tried to offer in one section a comprehensive guide to facilities for pursing research on film in Japan. A good number of them we regularly utilized, and thus offered our hands-on experience with how to use them, while others we researched by visiting or through other means. As with any synchronic record of the state of a field, a list of such facilities can soon begin to age, as institutions change, appear, or disappear. Some of the places we described sadly no longer exist, but thankfully new institutions have been founded as well. The possibility of a new edition of the Research Guide is very much on our mind, so we regularly visit new places when we can. I sometimes write about them on this blog, such as when I introduced the Ichikawa Kon Memorial Room a while back.��

So when I visited Hokkaido this summer, I made a point of scouting out the Sapporo Film and Video Equipment Museum (that's my translation of ���������������������������). Originally created in Noboribetsu by a former film cameraman, Yamamoto Bin, it moved to Sapporo last year into a nondescript building in a nondescript section of town in the Shiroishi neighborhood. Not all of it is organized but I tend to agree with the museum head that there is really nothing like this in all of Japan. There are just hundreds of examples of film and video equipment, from cameras, film viewers, editing machines (Steenbecks, etc.), and projectors, to sound recorders, video cameras, and editing decks. There are so many 8mm cameras they are literally in a pile. One of the largest items is a Panther crane. Many of the main items have display descriptions (though in Japanese) to help the visitor understand their significance.

I am in Japan for the summer doing research and preparing for future projects. As I mentioned when advertising the Verbal Arts in Japan event at Yale, I have been seeing a lot of rakugo in��Japanning recent years, especially at yose, the vaudeville halls that feature rakugo in addition to��other entertainments such as magic, juggling, voice impersonation, etc. Even though I���ve been going to yose from before COVID, it is possible some of my current attraction is due to the desire to re-experience a communally shared present/presence in physical proximity. But there are research reasons as well, as I have been teaching and researching Japanese comedy as a whole.

It was interesting, however, to see that my interest in film and yose found an object in common this summer: not only the presentation of films in yose, but screening of them with a film benshi. The benshi Sakamoto Raiko, whom I���ve worked with before, joined one of the main rakugo organizations, the Rakugo Geijutsu Kyokai, as an iromono (those who are not rakugoka and appear in yose). I attach his GeiKyo profile above.��

As some of you know, rakugo���Japan���s�����sit-down��� form of comedic storytelling���has become one of my passions in recent years, as I have frequently been going to yose and other rakugo events whenever I am in Japan. I���ve been to all the main Tokyo yose and even Osaka���s sole yose and have enjoyed performances from a wide variety of rakugoka. The thought��occurred ro me about four years ago that I might want to bring some of these brilliant comedians to Yale. Well, after a four-year wait, they are here and will perform on March 30, 2023, at the 53 Wall Street Auditorium at Yale University.��

With the splendid assistance of Momoe Melon, who also produced the various editions of Conversations in Silence (here, here, here, and here), we invited some of the top performers in rakugo���plus one of the stars of rokyoku, a sung-form of oral storytelling���to perform in New Haven. After a performance at Yale, the group will do a tour, first going to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and then Dickinson��College.��

For one reason or another, I have participated in several projects focused on the novelist Murakami Haruki. After being one of Murakami���s hosts when he was given an honorary doctorate at Yale in 2016, I was invited to participate in an international symposium in France in 2018, which then became a book in Japan in 2020 (a French version is supposed to come out, but there���s been no recent news on that). So I was not completely surprised when a curator at Waseda University���s Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (fondly known as the Enpaku) asked me to write something for the catalog of an exhibition they��were planning on Murakami���s relation to cinema.��

Most of Murakami���s long novels have not been made into films, yet there are some splendid cinematic��adaptations of his short stories, ranging from Yamakawa Naoto's A Girl She Is 100% (1983) and Ichikawa Jun���s Tony Takitani (2004) to Lee Chang-dong���s Burning (2018) and Hamaguchi Ryusuke���s Drive My Car (2021). What not every Murakami fan knows, however, is that, in addition to inserting a myriad of cinematic references in his novels, Murakami was actually a film studies major at Waseda in college, with plans to become a��scriptwriter. He apparently spent a lot of time in the Enpaku reading scripts and even wrote a senior essay on the motif of travel in American cinema. His��career eventually moved in a different direction, but he has never strayed too far from cinema.

Ever since the director Obayashi Nobuhiko visited Yale in 2015, I���ve been significantly engaged with his cinema in one form or another, from curating a Japan Society retro to starting a book project (which occasioned an Obayashi workshop earlier this fall). This has recently extended to helping out with Blu-ray releases.��Adam Torel of Third Window Films asked me last year to pen a piece for the booklet accompanying his release of Obayashi���s Anti-War Trilogy, and then this year asked for help with his release of four Obayashi films from��the director's years working with Kadokawa Film. That has now come out in a box set titled Nobuhiko Obayashi���s 80s Kadokawa Years.

There is still relatively little written about Kadokawa in English (Alex Zahlten���s The End of Japanese Cinema is one significant exception), even though the films produced by Kadokawa Haruki���as well as his industrial strategy���helped define Japanese cinema in significant ways from the 1980s on. Given the image of Obayashi as an aesthetic rebel, established through the wild cinema evident in Hausu, it may seem peculiar that Obayashi not only made four films with Kadokawa, but got along with the eccentric producer quite well. Those films might challenge the Obayashi Hausu-image��because most were idol movies and, like The Island Closest to Heaven, could have little of the "anything goes" film craft that supposedly defined Obayashi. As such, the Blu-ray releases might help take apart that image and spread understanding of Obayashi as a director of many faces and film styles.��

It���s taken a while to announce this publication, but it took even longer for it to appear. Wiley-Blackwell���s A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser, was finally published earlier this year, with a piece by me on the relation between cinema and television in the first decade after the start of public broadcasting in Japan. Editing these kind of general handbooks is not an easy task, so I��salute David for not only inviting me to participate, but for also managing thirty people writing on very different topics. The list of contributors is like a��who���s who of Japanese film studies.

My chapter is a continuation of a number of articles I have written on the early years of television in Japan, particularly my piece "From Film to Television: Early Theories of Television in Japan��� in��Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten���s Media Theory in Japan. If that focused on early theorizations of television in Japan, arguing that efforts to distinguish television often forgot, while also reproduced, some of the claims made about cinema in its first decades, this contribution considers how film was actually a key means by which television was constructed. Pushing back against the often-told��history of the film industry���s antagonism against television once broadcasting began in 1953, I show how the industry was not only actively involved in TV, even helping found some of the key networks, but was only antagonistic to the degree television became too much like cinema. The film industry was thus accepting TV as long as it was not a threat, and thus was deeply involved in attempting to form TV as difference. I continue my previous work on TV theory by also arguing that theorists such as Iijima Tadashi, Sasaki Kiichi, and Okada Susumu similarly tried to conceptually police the border between film and television, especially when it came to the practice of using film to make TV programs (a practice called��terebi eiga at the time). Distancing myself from claims that the appearance of television led to the conceptualization of�����eizo��� as modern technological moving images transcending media specificity, I point to Okada���s theorization of TV as ���half-image��� (han-eizo) as one example of how eizo was repeatedly theorized through difference and distinction. I conclude by speculating about how these attempts to invent television were also efforts to create a new synthetic media which would, at the same time, enable new forms of cinema.

This last weekend, we held a workshop on the film director Obayashi Nobuhiko at Yale. This was part of a project Aiko Masubuchi, formerly of the Japan Society in New York, and I have been pursuing to publish the first book-length��anthology on Obayashi in English. We had a public call for papers and invited those whose proposals were chosen to come to Yale to discuss their papers. It was in the format I like a lot: instead of people just reading their papers, the drafts were distributed beforehand and time was mostly used for discussion. Befitting a director who worked in so many media and genres, there were papers on many different topics by people of quite different backgrounds, with mine focusing on��Obayashi���s work in television commercials. Contributors will now re-work their papers and turn in final drafts in the spring.��

The workshop was closed to the public, but as its public facing aspect, we screened Obayashi���s TV movie Reibyo densetsu (������������: which we provisionally translated as The Legend of the Beautiful Ghost Cat), which he made in 1983 for the Tuesday Suspense Theater slot. The film has come out on DVD in Japan, but it has likely never been shown abroad, so��several of us split up the work and made some very rough English subtitles. Obayashi Chigumi, the director���s daughter, was a guest at the workshop, and she made a few comments after the film. It was interesting to hear that the house used in the film is actually the Obayashi family home in Onomichi.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takako_Irie