日本映画の歴史のはじまりHow the History of Japanese Cinema Began

Japan is one of the great film nations, but how did its history begin? Go back to 1891, when Thomas Edison in the United States completed a prototype of the Kinetoscope. It was shown at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and made public commercially in New York in 1894. The Vitascope, based on the Phantoscope, was announced in 1896, and in 1895 the Lumière brothers in France had presented the Cinématographe.

The history of how these technologies, born in the West, were brought into Japan is tangled. Going by various records, one account holds that the Kinetoscope was shown in 1895 at the Nanchi Enbujo in Namba, Osaka, and this is known as Japan's first screening site.

Another account says that in 1897 a Kobe trader named Shinji Takahashi imported it and showed it in Osaka and Asakusa. The Vitascope was also shown in Tokyo in 1897, and that same year, a Kyoto merchant named Katsutaro Inabata brought the Cinématographe to Tokyo.

At this stage of importing the technology, foreign engineers who could handle the equipment were of course needed. Once they were called to Japan with the equipment, a move naturally arose not only to show works shot in the West but to film Japan's landscapes and culture.

For that purpose cameras were imported for the first time, and the first is thought to have been brought in by Rokubei Konishi of Tokyo. He later became the de facto founder of the famous Konica Corporation, known for releasing Japan's first mass-produced camera in 1903 and its own photographic film in 1929.

Konishi then ran a medicine wholesaler begun by his great-grandfather, but at twenty-five he was moved by photography, sensed great possibility, and began handling photographic equipment apart from his main business.

He is said to have imported filming equipment from the French firm Gaumont and, using a foreign engineer who had come to Japan, to have shot for the first time. The result was poor, however, and it was not released.

The first important turning point came in 1898. Tsunekichi Shibata, who worked in the photography department of the Mitsukoshi department store, and Shiro Asano, who worked under Konishi, used this imported equipment and succeeded in shooting for the first time.

But knowledge was still short, filming and developing were extremely difficult, and it is said to have ended incomplete. The film was bought in 1899 by the advertising agency Hiromeya and shown in June at the Kabukiza using a Vitascope.

The records say the subjects were Tokyo sights such as Ginza and Asakusa. Seeing their own streets on screen for the first time, audiences were delighted, and the showing was a complete success. Sensing the possibility of the moving image, Hiromeya that same year, 1899, had Asano shoot and produced Japan's first dramatic film. It took a real crime as its motif.

In 1882 Sadakichi Shimizu committed more than eighty robberies in Tokyo and killed five people, shaking society as Japan's first pistol robber. That an incident sixteen years old, about to vanish from people's memory, was first depicted in a film has influenced Japanese cinema greatly up to the present (the film does not survive).

The same year, Yoshizawa Shoten filmed grand sumo in Tokyo. It was shown in July, and because the popular sumo could be seen on screen, it seems to have done very well.

Then on November 28, 1899, the oldest surviving film footage in Japan was shot. It was the Kabuki play Momijigari (Maple Leaf Viewing).

The cameraman again was Tsunekichi Shibata. At the time, however, among the leading figures of the Kabuki world, film as a new entertainment was strongly disliked, in the name of pride in traditional culture. In fact, this conservative movement of some famous Kabuki actors, their dislike of film (a refusal of the new), would come to carry important meaning for later Japanese cinema.

Because Kabuki is strictly protected by the house system, there were many capable actors whose chances never came however talented they were. For them, wanting to move their stage of activity to film was a natural course.

That movement grew in the 1920s, but then Kabuki forbade its actors to appear in films, and an actor who appeared in a film was regarded as a heretic and not allowed to return to Kabuki afterward. A representative figure is Gennosuke Sawamura.

In 1899, though, such a large movement had not yet arisen. Ichikawa Danjuro IX and Onoe Kikugoro V, then the leading Kabuki actors, were persuaded, because it was wanted so badly to preserve them on film, and permitted shooting on condition that it not be shown to the public in their lifetimes. The shooting was done in 1899, but the public showing took place in 1903.

From the move of these leading figures, there were Kabuki actors then who took an active attitude of wanting their own stages filmed, and as a result many Kabuki films followed.

So the films of Kabuki represented by Momijigari are works better called the stage photographed as it was than cinema. Yet through filming sumo and Kabuki, the Japanese gradually gained the technique of making moving images, and in time a great rise of film came.