日本映画と哲学を語り尽くした一日A Day of Talking Cinema and Philosophy

Yesterday was consumed by a dialogue that spanned from dawn until dusk. I spent the day with a friend, a researcher of Japanese cinema, discussing a labyrinth of topics: film, philosophy, culture, history, and the trajectory stretching from Japan’s present condition into the near future. When one looks back upon the history of Japanese cinema, which began in 1897, one cannot overlook a singular existence that irrevocably altered its course. That existence is Yamanaka Sadao (1909–1938).

While names such as Kurosawa Akira, Ozu Yasujiro, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Oshima Nagisa are widely recognized across the globe, Yamanaka Sadao rarely bathes in the spotlight. This discrepancy exists because, whereas the titans of Japanese cinema—Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi—were able to flourish from the pre-war era well into the post-war period, Yamanaka Sadao never returned to the film world after the war. Yamanaka’s career began in 1927, when he entered Makino Productions, the studio that built the era of Japanese silent film. His first directorial work was released in February 1932, before the war intensified. Upon seeing the work of this unknown director, a prominent film critic of the time was so struck by its impact that he contributed a laudatory essay to a film journal. With this, the name Yamanaka Sadao became known instantaneously.

From that point on, he produced a succession of ambitious works throughout the 1930s, cementing his status. However, in August 1937, during the filming of Humanity and Paper Balloons [人情紙風船], the Second Sino-Japanese War began, triggered by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Yamanaka and his fellow filmmakers spent their days in anxiety, fearing they too would be conscripted. Amidst this disquiet, barely managing to release the film on August 25th, a draft notice arrived. Crushed by the regret of being unable to create cinema, Yamanaka landed in China in October. Tragically, he would never return to Japan; on September 17, 1938, he died of illness in China at the young age of twenty-eight. Hearing this obituary, his close friend Ozu Yasujiro was struck silent, and those in the industry who had seen the future of Japanese cinema in Yamanaka were left in a state of profound despondency.

Yamanaka Sadao sent twenty-six films into the world during an activity period of merely five years. In truth, a vexing problem in the history of Japanese cinema had already begun in correspondence with this era. That problem is the physical existence of film. In those days, there were no methods for decentralized management via digital data as there are today; without the physical object of the film reel, one could not view the cinema. Furthermore, as the era was also that of the fierce battles of the Second World War, the military leadership, having seized actual power in Japan and begun their reckless run, considered cinema to have no use other than as an excellent ideological apparatus for brainwashing the citizenry. Here, the possibilities held by cinema were narrowed to the extreme; information control subjected all works to minute censorship, and the thought control of creators was thorough. Consequently, before creators could even turn their minds to the preservation and management of film reels, they were focused entirely on how to obtain military permission to release their works. As a result, no attention was paid to preservation or management.

Additionally, the Manchukuo Film Association had been established on the Manchurian side, which was then occupied by the military, and Japanese films were frequently screened there for the soldiers deployed to the region. In a certain sense, these screenings in Manchuria resulted in a form of decentralization, though the people of that time had no way of knowing this. Then, as the war situation deteriorated, allied air raids on the Japanese mainland continued day after day, turning urban areas into burnt ruins. The studios, storage facilities, and movie theaters across the regions that bore the burden of film production were burned down one after another. The air raids on Tokyo, in particular, caused the loss of a colossal number of pre-war film reels and related materials.

However, while the film reels in Tokyo and Osaka were entirely incinerated during this time, a considerable number of reels remained in Kyoto, due to the absence of air raids there and the fact that film production studios had existed in Kyoto since before the war. Yet, the final blow was dealt to the Japanese film world in the post-war year of 1950. The vast quantity of pre-war films that had survived the war and were stored in the Kyoto studios began to undergo a self-decomposition reaction due to the relentless summer heat, generating intense heat. Triggered by this, they ignited and burned explosively, causing a massive fire at the Shochiku Shimogamo Studio in Kyoto. Here, the immense collection of pre-war films was entirely lost to the flames, and due to this event, the majority of pre-war cinema became impossible to view for all eternity.

In fact, of Yamanaka Sadao’s twenty-six works, only three exist today in a nearly complete form. Similarly, the majority of pre-war works by the renowned Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji have been lost and cannot be seen. Evaluating film history is difficult with only the few surviving works; however, fortunately, Ozu and Mizoguchi were active in the film world after the war, making a certain degree of evaluation possible, which became a factor in the rapid rise of their international reputation from the 1950s onward. In Yamanaka Sadao’s case, however, he was active before the war and died in the process of the war just as he was about to flourish. Regrettably, he rarely became a subject of research, and the surviving films remain only The Million Ryo Pot [丹下左膳餘話 百萬兩の壺] from 1935, Kochiyama Soshun [河内山宗俊] from 1936, and Humanity and Paper Balloons [人情紙風船] from 1937.

Nevertheless, there were two major events that offered hope against the tragic war and the post-war fires that plagued the Japanese film world. The first was that the vast collection of films stored by the Manchukuo Film Association was seized by the Soviet army, which advanced into Manchuria upon Japan’s defeat. These were transported to Gosfilmofond, the national film archive, where they were preserved in a high-quality environment for many years. Then, from the 1990s through the 2000s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of these films seized from Manchuria during the war were returned to Japan, providing an opportunity to lay eyes on many films that were thought to have been lost.

This grace was also bestowed upon Yamanaka Sadao’s 1935 work, The Million Ryo Pot. The GHQ, which occupied post-war Japan, in order to steer Japan toward Western-style democratization, strictly restricted scenes of samurai fighting—swordplay—which had been a popular subject in traditional cinema. They imposed thorough censorship on post-war Japanese film expression, replacing the wartime military. As a result, the climax scene of Yamanaka’s work, which had been released before the war, was viewed as problematic, and the film was physically cut and discarded. For a long time, the work was broadcast in a state where the climax was absent, not as a complete piece.

However, as a result of collating the prints returned from Russia’s Gosfilmofond with positive films newly excavated domestically and abroad, the restoration of the discarded scenes succeeded. Through this, what was once an approximately 80-minute version was resurrected and released in January 2023 as a 92-minute version, quite close to its original form. Furthermore, regarding the 1936 Kochiyama Soshun, although it originally existed in Japan, the mainstream version was a copy with rough image quality and a dark screen. However, as a result of excavating 35mm prints returned from Russia and high-quality materials from archives related to the Manchukuo Film Association, digital restoration was performed based on these. Moreover, for his final work, the 1937 Humanity and Paper Balloons, the prints remaining domestically were severely degraded; however, due to the excellent preservation environment under the seizure and management of the Soviet army, the quality of sound and image recovered dramatically, receiving great benefit upon its return.

Thus, Yamanaka Sadao’s works—which were previously difficult to see, or existed only in significantly degraded versions—have become viewable in a state of high quality. Consequently, a rapid re-evaluation has begun to advance over these past few years.

Regarding what made Yamanaka Sadao so magnificent, as I discussed at length yesterday, my friend and I were of the same opinion: had he not died during the war and had he returned to filmmaking after the war, the history of Japanese cinema would have changed significantly. Personally, I believe that if Yamanaka Sadao had lived and returned, the style of Kurosawa Akira, the giant of post-war Japanese cinema, might have changed drastically. This is because, even in the pre-war period, Yamanaka was dealing with films featuring samurai or ninkyo (yakuza), and his manner of portraying them was simply too brilliant. It was not a matter of beautifying the samurai by making the fighting scenes—called chanbara at the time—look flashy as mere performance, nor was it a matter of inciting nostalgia to increase popularity; there was no such servile pandering to the audience. His method of portrayal was that of a singular existence who magnificently expressed these psychological aspects through imagery from a deeply philosophical and cultural perspective.

I consider the greatest characteristic of Yamanaka Sadao’s cinema to be found in the concept of "Nasake" (compassion, pathos, the turn of the human heart). The concept of Nasake is one of the most troublesome to discuss among Japanese concepts; it is one of those things that cannot be understood through words but has no method other than to be embodied. However, as can be understood by looking at the title of Yamanaka’s final work, Humanity and Paper Balloons ([人情紙風船] Ninjo Kami Fusen), this Ninjo [人情] is "the Nasake [情け] of people." In other words, with the perception that "the Nasake of people" is like a "paper balloon," Yamanaka independently visualized the concept of the wavering of the heart—a concept that is delicate yet profound. Observing the movements of the hearts of people from various backgrounds depicted in the work, and the movement of their Nasake [情け], Yamanaka Sadao stood alone in his ability to visually express this emotion and sentiment.

If he had lived in the post-war era, it is personally very interesting to consider how he would have reinterpreted this perspective of Ninjo through his war experience and projected it into Japanese cinema. Had that happened, there is a possibility that Kurosawa Akira’s samurai films, which appeared spectacularly after the war, or the ninkyo (yakuza) film boom that rose from the mid-1960s, would have changed significantly. That is how shocking the death of a single film person was.

Another point of interest in the conversation with my friend was hearing at length that the academic society of Japanese film research finds itself in a situation that can be called a negative microcosm of Japanese society. In Japan, when a field of study is conceived, there is a strange tendency to worship the single founder of that study. This inevitably births enormous factions, falling into a meaningless trend completely unrelated to the essence of research, where no dissent is permitted. A typical example is Folklore Studies. Because a single individual, Yanagita Kunio, opened the field of Folklore Studies, the history of Japanese Folklore Studies has not, in fact, been conducted as a scholarly discipline; rather, it has been a closed system continued with the deeply erroneous attitude that those who follow Yanagita’s opinions do so only to protect Yanagita’s opinions, accepting no other dissent. Therefore, one cannot call such study Folklore Studies; rather, I consider it to be "Yanagita-ology."

In contrast, there were conscientious folklorists such as Orikuchi Shinobu and Tsuboi Hirofumi who continued their own research from a critical standpoint, arguing that such a thing is not Folklore Studies but merely the personality cult of Yanagita. Naturally, the Folklore Studies (Yanagita-ology) Society viewed their opinions as heresy and did not accept them at all. Nay, even now, their opinions are hardly accepted and continue to be ignored. The problem is that this is not limited to Folklore Studies; such things are occurring omnidirectionally across academia as a whole. To give another example in Japanese Linguistics, since the appearance of Tokieda Motoki, a scholar of Japanese linguistics at Tokyo Imperial University, Japanese Linguistics has become "Tokieda-ology." Those who followed did not research Japanese Linguistics as a discipline but merely performed the act of protecting Tokieda’s tone of argument. As a result, things that are not the Japanese language came to be positioned as the Japanese language. In short, it is not scholarship, but camouflage.

These same phenomena are practiced in various directions, and the world of film research is exactly the same. Particularly in the world of film research, since the genre and discipline of film research did not exist in the early stages, it relied heavily on amateur criticism. In the movement called the Nouvelle Vague originating in France, there was a major current of creators who had never existed before—those who both critiqued and made films—stemming from the critical perspective that critics did not know how to make films. Receiving this flow, young talents such as Oshima Nagisa, Yoshida Kiju, and Matsumoto Toshio appeared one after another in Japan entering the 1960s, and they actually engaged significantly in both film production and criticism.

Here, the figure who reigned as an absolute existence was Hasumi Shigehiko. Hasumi Shigehiko is an absolute presence in the world of Japanese film criticism; later, he became a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Tokyo discussing film, where he established the foundation of film research by advocating the so-called "Representation Culture" theory [表象文化論]. In fact, my friend mentioned yesterday that there is a tacit law that all researchers conducting film research in Japan must belong to this Association of Representation Culture led by Hasumi Shigehiko. One can see the movement where Hasumi Shigehiko moved to fix film criticism independently as an academic discipline.

However, the very name "Representation Culture" feels disagreeable to me. In the first place, I believe that what is called "Representation Culture" is not cinema; these are merely the frolics of people who can see nothing but the signified. Moreover, in a sense, it is a folly akin to declaring that they view only the signified as culture. If one looks at cinema from such a perspective, it is natural that the axis of evaluation changes drastically.

This is because, in essence, films are evaluated based on a mere listing of signifieds that are easy for anyone’s eyes to see. Consequently, the cultural-spiritual aspects unique to Japanese culture, such as the Nasake possessed by Yamanaka Sadao in the past, are completely ignored and discarded as invisible things. This is because these elements operate while chaining as signifiers, but the Hasumi faction (the de facto world of Japanese film researchers) needs to follow Hasumi Shigehiko’s Representation Culture theory and, in effect, accepts no other dissent. That is to say, they have fallen into a state where research is not advancing at all. The debt left by Hasumi Shigehiko (who is still alive) has caused a problem that creates a deviation in the researchers who followed and were influenced by him. That is Film Fundamentalism.

As a result of the mass production of incompetent researchers who see only the signified due to Representation Culture theory, they exercise violence against culture by having the researchers, not the creators, decide the framework of cinema. A strange, or rather absurd, idea is rampant: that only that which uses film is cinema, and digital is not cinema. Indeed, as long as the collection of film involves physical objects, there are various difficulties such as aging and technical understanding; however, the perspective that ignores digital formats is far too foolish and is merely repeating the mistakes of the film era.

Cinema, in particular, must be converted to a special digital format upon screening. For example, if we take a photograph now, most of the image data will be JPEG; however, if a new format becomes standard in 100 years, the unimaginable number of image data files stored in JPEG today will be, factually, nothing more than the information trash of the past. In other words, we hardly think about formats, and perhaps we are merely continuing to generate vast amounts of information trash.

To deify such a single absolute existence is an individual's liberty, but by positioning it as scholarship, the critical spirit vanishes, the next path becomes closed, and we enter an inverted state where one gains social status merely by obeying and maintaining what those people say. I view this as causing extreme exhaustion across all academic domains in Japan, but I did not know that film research also harbored such problems.

Cinema contains an abundance of things that cannot be perceived or discussed by those who can only see the signified; rather, in visual media such as cinema, I believe those unperceived elements are stronger. Discussing the meaning of the signified is meaningless; it is an attitude that mocks the creator. Instead, the attitude of a true researcher should lie in how to grasp and scoop up the sentiment and emotion—such as Nasake in the case of Yamanaka Sadao.

This inversion can be understood from the fact that the criticism regarding Ozu Yasujiro discussed by Hasumi Shigehiko is extremely miserable, filled only with the enumeration of signifieds. He merely continues to explain endlessly that this costume in Ozu’s film is like this, the construction of this house is like that, or the scene of this cut is like this; he discusses nothing of Ozu Yasujiro’s cinema.

On the other hand, the film director Yoshida Kiju, who appeared suddenly in the era of the Nouvelle Vague, did not agree with this view of Hasumi Shigehiko and wrote a book on Ozu Yasujiro independently. Inherently, film creators know best that it is extremely difficult to discuss other film directors, especially those called masters. This is because they know better than anyone that cinema is not something to be discussed unequivocally, and further, they know the limits that make discussing another’s film impossible.

However, amidst this, the cinema of Ozu Yasujiro discussed by Yoshida Kiju is magnificent. In a sense, he discloses that the form of cinema exists in a place that is not the Representation Culture theory advocated by Hasumi Shigehiko, and it is brilliant that he refers to this as "Anti-Cinema". I am moved by this expressionist with a rebellious spirit raised in the atmosphere of the 1960s. However, the "Anti-Cinema" used here by Yoshida Kiju does not mean a reaction against cinema itself; rather, it indicates a stance of "Anti-Cinema" against the film interpretation in the Representation Culture theory preached by Hasumi Shigehiko, who arbitrarily defines "Cinema." It captures the view that Hasumi Shigehiko is merely discussing things that are "not cinema."

Yoshida Kiju’s thought proposed a doubt against the era: that researchers must not discuss without respect or love for cinema as they please, and certainly must not be subordinate to the opinion of one person. We must look more into the hearts of the film people.

When I look back at Yamanaka Sadao’s works, I feel that a person who visually expresses Nasake to this extent will never appear again. Simultaneously, I am overcome by a strange feeling that if he had returned to the post-war film world, the history of Japanese cinema would have been considerably replaced.