Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character

by Donald Richie

Introduction to the Michigan Electronic Reprint

by Donald Richie

History, Signs, and Difference

For this online edition of my 1971 Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, I have decided to leave the book as it is. It contains no major errors that I know of and its methodology represents its time—thirty-three years ago. I would write it differently now—in fact, I have, in A Hundred Years of Japanese Films (2001). Now, my ideas of film style have broadened and I am no longer so confident that such a thing as national character can be said to exist. Nonetheless, this book still has its uses. Some of the information is repeated nowhere else, much of the emphasis is convincing today, and I believe that, despite the continuing erosion of traditional values in Japan, my "admittedly somewhat artificial spectrum" is still useful. This catalogs ("from right to left") directors "concerned with traditional values, those concerned with a questioning of these values, and those with other values entirely." Traditional has changed and the questions have changed but this broad sequence of related qualities is, I believe, still there.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Japan, Japanese Literature

261 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Donald Richie is an American-born author who has written about the Japanese people and Japanese cinema. Although he considers himself only a writer, Richie has directed many experimental films, the first when he was 17. Although Richie speaks Japanese fluently, he can neither read nor write it.

During World War II, he served aboard Liberty ships as a purser and medical officer. By then he had already published his first work, "Tumblebugs" (1942), a short story.

In 1947, Richie first visited Japan with the American occupation force, a job he saw as an opportunity to escape from Lima, Ohio. He first worked as a typist, and then as a civilian staff writer for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. While in Tokyo, he became fascinated with Japanese culture, particularly Japanese cinema. He was soon writing movie reviews in the Stars and Stripes. In 1948 he met Kashiko Kawakita who introduced him to Yasujiro Ozu. During their long friendship, Richie and Kawakita collaborated closely in promoting Japanese film in the West.

After returning to the United States, he enrolled at Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1949, and received his Bachelor's Degree in English in 1953. Richie then returned to Japan as film critic for the The Japan Times and spent much of the second half of the twentieth century living there. In 1959, he published his first book, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, coauthored with Joseph Anderson. In this work, the authors gave the first English language account of Japanese film. Richie served as Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art from 1969 to 1972. In 1988, he was invited to become the first guest director at the Telluride Film Festival.

Among his most noted works on Japan are The Inland Sea, a travel classic, and Public People, Private People, a look at some of Japan's most significant and most mundane people. He has compiled two collections of essays on Japan: A Lateral View and Partial Views. A collection of his writings has been published to commemorate fifty years of writing about Japan: The Donald Richie Reader. The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 consists of extended excerpts from his diaries.

In 1991, filmmakers Lucille Carra and Brian Cotnoir produced a film version of The Inland Sea, which Richie narrated. Produced by Travelfilm Company, the film won numerous awards, including Best Documentary at the Hawaii International Film Festival (1991) and the Earthwatch Film Award. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992.

Author Tom Wolfe describes Richie as: "the Lafcadio Hearn of our time, a subtle, stylish, and deceptively lucid medium between two cultures that confuse one another: the Japanese and the American."

Richie's most widely recognized accomplishment has been his analysis of Japanese cinema. From his first published book, Richie has revised not only the library of films he discusses, but the way he analyzes them. With each subsequent book, he has focused less on film theory and more on the conditions in which the films were made. One thing that has emerged in his works is an emphasis on the "presentational" nature of Japan's cinema, in contrast to the "representational" films of the West. His book, A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film includes a helpful guide to the availability of the films on home video and DVD mentioned in the main text. In the foreword to this book, Paul Schrader says: "Whatever we in the West know about Japanese film, and how we know it, we most likely owe to Donald Richie." Richie also has written analyses of two of Japan's best known filmmakers: Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa.

Richie has written the English subtitles for Akira Kurosawa's films Kagemusha (1980) and Dreams (1990)[8].

In the 21st century, Richie has become noted for his erudite audio commentaries for The Criterion Collection on DVDs of various classic Japanese films, notably those of Ozu (A Story of Floating Weeds, Early Summer), Mikio Naruse (When a Woman Ascend

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much of its time & inevitably "national character" is refracted through a Western lens, but within that framework Richie writes very sensitively about the individual auteurs & films he surveys. It still works very well as a broad overview & introduction to a number of filmmakers that are still not well known in the West.

[Daniel Warriner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although released in 1971, this book still has a lot to offer anyone interested in Japanese cinema and its golden age. Richie had an extraordinary knack for analyzing and understanding film and Japanese culture, and how the two are interrelated and interact. At a rough guess, I’d say he discusses 300 to 400 movies here, with a focus on Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Gosho, Shiro Toyoda, Kon Ichikawa, a few others, and then Kurosawa to end the book. Since I’ve only seen about a quarter of these, I’ve now got a fresh list of films I hope to watch.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrif!