Kashiko Kawakita｜The Towa Intermediary Who Carried Japanese Cinema to the World's Film Festivals

As a rule, the only names a film leaves behind are those of the people who make it and the people who shoot it. And yet there is one person of whom it is still said that, without her, no one in the world would ever have seen Japanese cinema.

Film is a medium like any other, so there are those who convey it and those who receive it. The subject of this installment is the person who stood between the two. She was neither a director nor an actor, nor even a screenwriter. Still, no one did more to quietly hold up the framework of Japanese film history and build what we have today. Her name was Kashiko Kawakita.

If actors like Koji Tsuruta and Ken Takakura, whom I wrote about last time, were the symbols of Toei’s era of ninkyo, or chivalrous yakuza, films, who played out the “form” that the young people of their day were seeking, then Kashiko Kawakita was someone who gave her whole life to being the vessel that carried that “form” itself out into the world.

She never produced a single film, and she never appeared in one. Even so, filmmakers trusted her and loved her more than anyone, and she pressed on to the end of her life without ever growing vain. However busy she was, she kept watching Japanese films, by famous and unknown makers alike, and to anyone who showed promise she built bridges that opened up endless chances. What sustained her was a single wish that has been lost in Japan today, the wish to pass on what is good.

A great many filmmakers became known to the world thanks to the hand Kashiko Kawakita held out to them, and it was she who opened up the opportunity and the possibility for Japanese cinema to be recognized internationally.

Born in 1908, Kashiko Kawakita studied at Bunka Gakuin, the school founded by Isaku Nishimura, Akiko Yosano, and others, and she was a woman with an international education that was rare for her time. Then came the event that drew her into the film world. In 1929, she married Nagamasa Kawakita.

Nagamasa’s father, Daijiro, was an army officer in the mold of the tairiku ronin, the Japanese adventurers who sought their fortune on the Asian continent, and he fell in China with his ambitions unfulfilled. Nagamasa himself spent his boyhood in China, studied at Peking University, and spoke fluent Chinese. In 1928, the year before he married Kashiko, he founded Towa Shoji. The company survives today as Toho-Towa, a subsidiary of Toho. From its founding, Towa’s business never changed. It selected first-rate works of art from among European films, imported them into Japan, and distributed them.

The idea of the “art film” that Towa brought with it became the driving force that planted in Japanese audiences a new aesthetic sense, the thought that film might be an art as well as an entertainment. In the language of film history, such devoted viewers are called cinephiles, and the couple who nurtured the cinephiles of prewar Japan were the Kawakitas. Kashiko Kawakita was no mere wife of Towa’s president, either. She was a partner in running the company who combined practical work with aesthetic judgment, skilled in languages, gifted with an eye for choosing films, weighing every subtitle, and polishing the words of the publicity.

Yet for her talent to serve the world and other people, Japan first had to be burned to the ground. Right after the defeat, Towa threw itself once more into bringing the world’s films to Japan, but as chance would have it, what carved her name into film history was the traffic in the opposite direction. She came to be remembered not for bringing foreign films into Japan but for carrying Japanese films abroad.

It began with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which in 1951 became the first Japanese film to win the Golden Lion, at the 12th Venice International Film Festival. The person who set its entry in motion was Giuliana Stramigioli of Italiafilm. After graduating from the University of Rome in 1936, she came to prewar Japan as an exchange student, studied Japanese and the history of Buddhist art at what is now Kyoto University, and during World War II worked at the Italian embassy in Japan, among other posts.

As her friendship with Stramigioli deepened, Kashiko came to feel that her calling was to open a path for Japanese films to enter the world’s festivals, and drawing on the connections that her learning had brought her, she began to carry many of Japan’s film talents out to the world.

Through Kashiko Kawakita’s efforts, Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) won prizes at Venice one after another, and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (1953) took the Grand Prix at the 7th Cannes Film Festival in 1954. While the filmmakers grew vain over these achievements, Kashiko Kawakita alone held herself in check. She chose each film one by one, added the subtitles, negotiated with the festivals herself, and traveled abroad at the directors’ side, keeping her eyes to the very end on “one single person” and serving with all her heart.

She became the person whom Western filmmakers trusted above all others, and she was loved by them as Madame Kawakita. The Japanese studios, too, came to rely on her as a formidable woman of whom they said, “If we leave it to her, nothing can go wrong.” An intermediary trusted at home and abroad alike is the most important figure of all.

Kashiko Kawakita went further still, sending out into the world, one after another, directors who had been overshadowed by internationally acclaimed figures like Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi and who drew no attention at all. Among those who became known abroad through her hands were Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse.

In film as elsewhere, the work of an intermediary is not simply a trade in imports and exports. To convey a film is to translate, offer up, and pass on literally everything a country has carried with it, its history, culture, sensibility, spirit, and philosophy, and that demands an extraordinarily refined skill.

Having fulfilled that role, Kashiko Kawakita went on connecting Japan to the world, and at the same time she set to work on something vital that no one in Japan was paying attention to then, the preservation of film. In the midst of all this, “one more thread” that came to symbolize her life became deeply entwined with the art-film screening movement that Towa carried forward. I will tell you about it next time.