Japanese Cinema as the Manyoshu in Moving Images｜Following the Kokugaku Scholars in Search of "the Japanese Heart"

It strikes me once again what a strange country Japan is. Nothing captures that strangeness better than the way Japan, after film technology first arrived in 1896–1897, became one of the world’s great film nations almost overnight. Our predecessors wrestled with equipment they had never seen or handled and with the very principles of the moving image, and yet in no time they grasped film, absorbed it, and opened up a form of cinematic expression that was uniquely Japanese.

Six years ago, when I was absorbed in the Confucian learning and Kokugaku of the Edo period, I was thinking hard about “the Japanese heart.”

Japan was historically shaped by Chinese culture, by Buddhism before the Edo period and by Confucianism during it, and its scholars had a habit of taking China as their model at every turn. Then a group of people appeared who felt uneasy about this reverence for the foreign and wondered whether the very gift for receiving foreign culture and blending it into something of one’s own had not come from the Japanese themselves in the first place. These were the Kokugaku scholars.

Rather than turning to the scriptures of Buddhism or Confucianism, the Kokugaku scholars set out on a thoroughgoing struggle to explore “the Japanese heart,” and they found the truth in the Manyoshu and the Kojiki. The work that followed over some two centuries, reading the Kojiki by way of the Manyoshu, became a great achievement that truly deserves to be called “an archaeology of the Japanese heart.”

Turning to the present, some 160 years after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, we have a habit of taking Europe and America as our model at every turn. Someone who felt uneasy about this reverence for the foreign, who wondered whether the very gift for receiving foreign culture and blending it into something of one’s own had not come from the Japanese themselves in the first place… That someone is me.

Yet while the Kojiki is one thing, the Manyoshu is utterly beyond us. We have already lost “something,” so much so that we can no longer sense the heart of the Manyo age. And it is plain that crying out for a return to the Kojiki and the Manyoshu now would accomplish nothing.

After a great deal of thought, I found “the Japanese heart” in Japanese cinema, just as the Kokugaku scholars once found it in the Manyoshu and the Kojiki. Because the moving image by its nature engraves its era onto film, a rich movement of the heart comes through in it, and by this magic of the moving image, we can touch the ways in which the Japanese of the past once acted.

For the Japanese, cinema may in a sense have been the Manyoshu rendered in moving images. In the six years since, I have steeped myself in Japanese films almost every day, and I have come to be certain that what I sensed back then was right.

Akira Kurosawa, who became the emblem of postwar Japanese cinema, said in his final testament that “if we can keep making films for another 400 years, we will surely be able to bring peace to the world.” Film is entertainment, too, but it holds a power beyond mere consumer culture, and Kurosawa saw in it the power to bring about peace.

Absurd, everyone will think, a pretty platitude. But I, captivated by the magic of film, am now as convinced of it as he was.

Just as the Kokugaku scholars once drew “the Japanese heart” out of their study of the Manyoshu, I draw “the Japanese heart” out of my study of Japanese cinema and set it before you.

I do so in the belief that this is how I can show my respect and gratitude to those who have woven films in Japan before me.