In 1893, Edison invented the kinetoscope—a machine into which one person at a time can peek to watch moving photomechanical images. Three years later, in November 1896, the kinetoscope first came to Japan and was set up at an inn in Kobe. To give these “dancing photographs” some dignity, the armaments magnate Takahashi Nobuharu even sought out viewers from the imperial family, beginning with Prince Komatsu Akihito. On November 25, it opened to the general public in Kobe. Soon after, it became possible for many viewers to see images at the same time. In February 1897, the first public screening of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph, which had been imported by the industrialist Inabata Katsutarō, took place in Osaka. The form of this screening was the same as that for contemporary cinema. Images were projected from behind viewers in the back of a room against a wall in the front. The screening was accompanied by a cameraman from Paris, who also filmed Kabuki actors in Kyoto and took the footage back with him to France. The first screening of the vitascope—a kinetoscope retooled to project—took place in March of that year in Tokyo, and the vitascope soon won out. Such newfangled imported devices quickly became such a hot topic among a Japanese population obsessed with new technologies that by April 1897 an introductory text, The Technology of Automated Photography (Jidō shashinjutsu), was published in Osaka.
The writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, though only a boy of twelve when the first screening took place in Tokyo, would later recall an early film screening at the Kinkikan Theater in Kanda: “It was a whole variety of different things—simple photographs of real things and trick movies, all played in a loop in which the ends of a single roll of film were connected together so that the same footage was projected repeatedly.”1
That Tanizaki, who was so fascinated by cinema as a boy, would eventually come to be involved with the film industry in the early 1920s when the world of Japanese cinema needed a breath of new life.
What was Japan like in the 1890s, when cinema first appeared? Thirty years had passed since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and Japan was already showing astonishing strides as a modern state, trying to modernize and Westernize with a policy of trying to separate from the supposed backwardness of Asia. It was an age in which the growth of nationalism following Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War occasioned high praise for “things Japanese.” It was an age that awoke to the possibilities of culture as a support for the nation-state. There were re-evaluations of Japan’s traditions, like Shiga Shigetaka’s On Japanese Landscape (Nihon fūkeiron), which was published in 1894. It was also at this time when the concept of “Japanese painting” or nihonga,2 creating new paintings using “traditional” methods and themes, was established out of the shock provoked by the arrival of Western painting. In the world of literature, Ozaki Kōyō dominated, while his pupil, Izumi Kyōka, had just debuted.3 Kyōka’s novels provided the source for many shinpa plays, and these works would create the foundations for Japanese film melodrama.
Cinema was imported as the latest technology from the West during this period. Along with the modern novel, it was symbolic of the most contemporary Western culture. In 1898, footage shot by the Lumière cameraman of Japanese street scenes was publicly screened in Japan. For the first time, Japanese people could see themselves from an outside perspective, objectified in the images of their own country by the gaze of the French cameraman. Cinema would go on to become fully entwined with nationalism in the 1900s. This connection with nationalism, however, was not just a matter of defense and celebration of land and borders—it went to the nature of the gaze itself. This screening marked the moment when Japanese people unconsciously started to learn to regard themselves through the colonialist and imperialist gaze of modernity, a gaze that grasps something different as an object that is labeled “foreign.”
It was no coincidence that the birth of Japanese cinema coincided with the colonization of Taiwan. Just as the cameraman from the Lumière Company visited Japan, Japanese people in the first decade of the twentieth century traveled from Taiwan and Thailand to Singapore with camera and projector in hand and made the people of those countries aware of the existence of cinema. The Chinese shot their first movie in Beijing in 1905, Koreans shot their first movie in 1919, and the Taiwanese shot their first movie in 1925. As I will detail in chapter 5, these countries started much later than Japan. This temporal lag in film loosely corresponds to the lag of these countries in modernization based on the Western model.
In 1897, Asano Shirō, who was employed at the Konishi camera shop in Tokyo, became the first Japanese to shoot footage. In the following year, 1898, Asano shot two shorts: Bodhisattva in Disguise (Bake jizō) and Resurrecting the Dead (Shinin no sōsei). In the latter, as two people are carrying a coffin, the bottom falls out and the corpse drops from it, shocking the dead person back to life. Although crude, the seeds of trick photography were already evident.4 In 1899, Asano shot three geisha dancing at a restaurant in Shinbashi. But why geisha? Of course, we can guess that ordinary women might not be eager to be filmed, and at the time, star geisha were popular enough that this could attract viewers and make the film economically viable. Here, however, we must not forget that there was also an internalized Orientalism. At the time, around the world, Japonisme was in full flower, and ukiyo-e pictures were lionized in Paris. There was international demand for footage of geisha, and when Asano’s camera captured the geisha on film, he was appropriating and mimicking the Western gaze. Although Asano was probably unconscious of this problem, many years later, this question of the power relationships inevitably connected with the gaze of the camera would seriously trouble Japanese directors standing on the international stage. How can one represent “things Japanese” using Western technology while avoiding an Orientalist gaze?
At the time, many people were needed to project the footage, and the screening itself invariably took on the feeling of a spectacle. Cinema was often one event within a chain of other kinds of sideshow entertainments (misemono) and political performances related to the quest for voting rights and other political movements of the time (sōshi shibai).5 At the beginning of Mizoguchi Kenji’s Water Magician (Taki no shiraito, 1933),6 a sideshow performance of an attractive woman with a water spectacle is depicted with profound feeling. Even many decades after this stage in cinema history, the unconscious memory of cinema’s origins make the scene pulse with powerful emotion.
The theatrical genre that first actively tried to cultivate a relationship with cinema was shinpa (“new wave”). As the name suggests, shinpa began as a reform movement within theater in the 1880s in contrast to Kabuki (kyūha or “old wave”) and rose to the top of modern Meiji society as vernacular melodrama for the masses. It is difficult to speculate about what shinpa was actually like on stage during the Meiji period, especially because shinpa today is only a pale shadow of what it once was. But it is probable that in contrast to the sedate melodrama that shinpa has become today, it must have been full of energy. It was a new theater, even avant-garde, and for the people in it, it must have been close in spirit to the underground theater of the late 1960s.
One of the film screenings held in Tokyo in March 1897 was at the Kawakami Theater, which had been built in Kanda the previous year. In April, the Seibikan (founded by Ii Yōhō) staged an experiment to incorporate a movie screening among new shinpa works, and this was a tremendous success. As part of this trend, the first feature film in Japan, Shimizu Sadakichi: Pistol Thief (Pisutoru gōtō Shimizu Sadakichi, 1899) was filmed by Komada Kōyō, making use of shinpa actors. In it, a detective and a police officer discover a thief hiding behind a tree in the garden of the house and arrest him. The entire film is only one shot, and no more than a single, seventy-foot reel, but when we consider the interwoven relationship between theatrical genres and cinema that followed, its significance is considerable.
When it emerged during the seventeenth century, Kabuki was the ideal theatrical form for representing the worldview of townspeople during the Edo period. But in the modern era, by the end of the nineteenth century, Kabuki had come to take on the feeling of classical texts for the elite. Thus, unlike shinpa, Kabuki took a disdainful view of cinema and tended to resist cooperation. Because films were shot outside on the ground rather than on the cypress wood stages of Kabuki, Kabuki actors contemptuously referred to films as “mud plays.”
The oldest extant Japanese film, Viewing Scarlet Maple Leaves (Momijigari, 1899), filmed by Shibata Tsunekichi of the Mitsukoshi photography group, emerged from these conditions of Kabuki’s contempt for film and ignorance of it. Two hundred feet of film document two of the most famous Kabuki actors of the time: Ichikawa Danjūrō IX, as a beautiful princess who is actually a demon, and Onoe Kikugorō V as the man who fights the demon. Of course, neither of the two Kabuki actors understood the meaning of cinema in the slightest. As a result, when Danjūrō accidentally dropped his fan, it apparently never occurred to anyone to reshoot the scene, something unthinkable today.7 Incidentally, at this point, Noh theater, which represented the worldview of the samurai class, had no exchange with cinema at all.
Momijigari (dir. Shibata Tsunekichi, 1899).
In 1903, Yoshizawa Shōten, a company in Asakusa, built the first theater dedicated exclusively to cinema. Asakusa is a shitamachi neighborhood of Tokyo that was home to the theater district in the late Edo period. In the modern period, the area was filled with movie theaters and other entertainment places that have continued to operate until quite recently. Asakusa is a place of continuity with the entertainment world of the Edo period and was also central to the creation of Japan’s modern popular culture.
Promotional flyer for Asakusa Entertainment Hall (1910s).
Throughout the twentieth century, many of Japan’s representative comedians have come out of Asakusa, from Enomoto Ken’ichi, “Enoken,” the superstar musical comedian of the early twentieth century to Hagimoto Kin’ichi, who presented sketch comedy on television in the 1970s and 1980s. The last of these is Kitano Takeshi, who was a comic performer under his stage name of “Beat Takeshi” before he was a film director.
In 1904, with the rise of the Russo-Japanese War, the Yoshizawa Shōten studio went to the battlefields on the Asian continent, shooting war footage and then bringing it back to Japan where such screenings were enormously popular. Although the techniques were crude, the films used trick photography, tracking shots, and even restaging events on site and presenting them as documentary footage. What is fascinating about these wartime documentaries is that, along with the footage shot of Lieutenant Shirase’s Antarctic expedition, cinema ceased to be merely the latest sideshow entertainment and instead took on a more serious role as a medium for representing society in a way that promoted the ideology of nationalism. Incidentally, at this time the Chinese novelist Lu Xun was going to medical school in Sendai and would later recall his profound shock when he saw news films showing Japanese soldiers beheading his compatriots.8 Furthermore, it is no coincidence that it was in the same year that the cultural polemicist Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) published The Awakening of Japan (Nihon no kakusei), using Japan as a basis for his theory of civilization. Cinema had finally shown its true colors as a cultural apparatus in service to the nation-state.
To this point, what I have written has centered on Tokyo, but let’s look at what was happening in Kyoto, which, along with Shanghai and Manila, later became an anchor of East Asian film in the interwar period.
Unlike Tokyo, Kyoto did not undergo rapid urban changes of modernization. Blessed with an abundance of shrines and temples, Kyoto was like Rome and possessed ideal conditions for filming jidaigeki outdoors. It was there in 1908 that Makino Shōzō (1878–1929) shot his first major work, Battle at the Honnōji Temple (Honnōji kassen), about the final battle of the warlord Oda Nobunaga for the Yokota Shōkai Company. Setting the narrative in Kyoto was to have a decisive influence on the subsequent direction of Japanese cinema.
Makino is the first person in Japan who could be called a real film director. Coming from a family that owned a small ningyō jōruri puppet theater and as the stage manager of that theater, Makino was backed by a long, continuous tradition throughout the Edo period of popular theater in Kansai that was heavily based on the jōruri repertory. The legend is that Makino never used a script while shooting. Because the director and the actors knew the stories of the jōruri tales that were the source material of his works so thoroughly, Makino was able to direct the scenes just by giving his actors their lines verbally. When Makino discovered Onoe Matsunosuke and put him on screen, Japan’s first star was born. Known as “Eyeballs Matsu” (Medama no Matchan) because of his strikingly large eyes, Matsunosuke starred in more than one thousand films in a seventeen-year period.
Chūshingura (dir. Makino Shōzō, 1910).
In 1910, Makino shot Chūshingura, an eighty-minute feature-length film with Matsunosuke. Based on an actual historical event, Chūshingura is a tale of revenge among the samurai class at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Originally written for the puppet theater and soon adapted to Kabuki and inspiring all kinds of related tales, it is an epic poem that has retained its popular appeal even into the twenty-first century.9 Even among the more than eighty versions of Chūshingura (130 if we include spinoffs), Makino’s film could be called the most monumental version in the early days of cinema. We can still get a good sense of what the film must have been like, although in the print we have today missing scenes have been supplemented with later footage from a different version of Chūshingura made by Makino. Filmed entirely in medium shot, each shot lasts one or two minutes on average, giving the impression that the film is an extension of the Kabuki stage. At the time, no clear boundary existed between the actors and the roles they played, and it did not seem to bother Matsunosuke that he was playing three major roles, including that of the main protagonist and the enemy. When Ōishi Kuranosuke is leaving Akō Castle, he never breaks his frozen posture. As I will explain, this use of an empty screen would allow room for the benshi, so he could fully exploit his rhetorical skills. In his later years, Makino gave himself the name Griffiths Makino, from the director of Intolerance (1916), D. W. Griffith, taking the name as a badge of honor.
Nonetheless, cinema continued to occupy a low position within society. In his autobiography, Makino Shōzō’s son, Makino Masahiro, writes about his frustration in being treated with contempt by his elementary school peers as a “riverside beggar.”10 It was also not unusual to have local yakuza mixed in with the film industry. Japanese cinema and gangster morality have lived together inseparably.11 Cinema has been protected (or exploited) by yakuza and profited by it, and in turn, real yakuza modeled their lives on the image of yakuza in the movies. Yakuza were part of everyday life for Makino from his childhood days. Furthermore, Nagata Masaichi, the producer who gave the world Mizoguchi Kenji, was a young member of the Senbon yakuza clan with an interest in socialism. It is true that cinema was initially brought to Japan with the imperial family in attendance; however, it never became a pastime of the elite classes and has long maintained its position as entertainment for the masses, centered on children and laborers.
It was primarily the affluent who watched imported films from the West, but those who watched Japanese films were the lower classes. This relationship of class identity and film in Japan would be ripe for analysis by the sociologist of culture, Pierre Bourdieu.
The Emperor Meiji, nicknamed “The Great,” died in 1912. Unlike European royalty and heads of state, he held a unique philosophy about the reproducibility of photographic imagery and refused to allow his photographic likeness to appear on films, currency, or stamps. But at the end of the 1950s, this man, who did not want unauthorized use of his name, was the subject of a film by the Shin Tōhō studio, where he was played by jidaigeki star Arashi Kanjūrō. The film was a phenomenal success.12
Also in 1912, four small film companies combined to form a trust and launched the Japanese Motion Picture Corporation (Nihon katsudō shashin kabushiki gaisha or Nikkatsu for short). No longer based on the conventional cottage industry mode of production, it was the first authentic film studio in Japan. This was the same period in which the companies that became Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers were established. Nikkatsu constructed its studios in the Mukōjima area of Tokyo and in Kyoto under the western turret of Nijō Castle. In Tokyo, they produced what they called shinpa, and in Kyoto, they produced what they called kyūgeki. The cinematic opposition between Tokyo and Kyoto that would continue for the next fifty years begins here. Shinpa came to be called gendaigeki (“contemporary pieces”), and kyūgeki came to be called jidaigeki (“period pieces”).
Of course, until the mid-1910s, both types of films were still derivative of theater; neither had yet created a distinctly cinematic space.
Nikkatsu’s shinpa films were tearjerkers: melodramas about the separation of mother and child, or love between different classes, or the fall of a young woman who loses her virginity. Some films among them seemed to anticipate Henry King’s 1925 Stella Dallas. Hosoyama Kiyomatsu’s Kachūsha (1914) was an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), but it was turned into an absurd narrative by adding a sequel in which the protagonist, a young aristocrat, visits the Sengaku Temple in Edo and becomes friendly with Ōishi Kuranosuke, the leader of the forty-seven rōnin in the famous Chūshingura story.13
Needless to say, no one was conscious of the distinction between shot and scene in such films, except when trying to hide the immaturity of a performance. In film, actresses simply did not exist yet. They were replaced by female impersonators—onnagata—a tradition carried over from Kabuki and shinpa. Hybrids of theater and film called “chain dramas” (rensageki) featured shinpa troupes that performed the indoor scenes live on stage, while the outdoor scenes were shown on film. This trend was wildly popular. Thus, at this point, film could be thought of only as a supplement to theater.
In bringing this chapter to a close, I must discuss the characteristic that most distinguishes Japanese cinema from other cinemas (at least for its first thirty-five years): the existence of benshi, or professional explainers.
Records indicating the existence of explainers appear as early as 1886, when magic lanterns showing slides were popular in Japan. Therefore, at the point when cinema first appeared, audiences were already accustomed to the existence of benshi and did not see them as anything unusual or strange. Benshi would, for example, dress in frock coats and silk hats, like consummate Westerners, and explain the moral significance of the film before the screening with solemn authority. During the middle of these screenings, their voices rose up in the darkness, filling blank spaces with the art of kowairo (imitating the voices of famous actors) guiding the audience with rhetorical flourish.
In the West, the so-called period of early cinema ended by the middle of the 1900s, and when cinema began offering real narratives, lecturers were provisionally placed in theaters to assist viewers confused by movies with more complicated stories than they had been accustomed. That arrangement, however, disappeared after a few years. Live music had always been performed together with benshi, but when the Western benshi disappeared, musical accompaniment continued, even in the absence of a performers specializing in vocal and narrative arts who belonged exclusively to certain theaters.
But in Japan, not only did benshi relay the narrative of a given film, they were performers in their own right, shaping and even changing the story to suit their talents. The length of a film showing might differ greatly depending on the benshi’s narration, and standing at a meta-level, benshi were able to provide critical commentary on the narratives of the films for viewers. Especially in the most extreme cases, depending on the skill and the conception of the film held by the benshi, the viewer’s film experience might be completely different. Audiences often went to movies not because they wanted to see a specific director or actor, but rather to see the performance of a particular benshi. As a result, especially popular benshi could even influence the shape of a film at the stage of production, making requests so that the movie could be best suited to their narrative. For such benshi, films were but raw materials for their own performances.
For a benshi, the stronger and more effective his performance, the better. This often meant getting a reaction with highly provocative rhetoric. In Korea, which was then a colony, there were cases in which benshi suddenly began to speak in Korean, inciting audiences by evoking nationalist sentiment. To prevent such “deviance,” the rhetoric of benshi came to be regulated by the state, which imposed a licensing system.
Among Japanese film critics, some have given the mistaken explanation that benshi developed in Japan alone because audiences were ignorant of Western customs. The real reason is that Japanese people received cinema as a Western import and unconsciously regarded it within the context of Japanese theater. In Japanese theater, there is no necessity for a character to appear as a unified subject of visible body and audible voice. When we look at the chanting by the jiutai chorus in Noh, or gidayū chanting in Kabuki, or jōrūri chanting in puppet theater, it was completely common for the body of a character to appear in one place, while the voice was handled by someone else in another place. To understand this process, we undoubtedly need to consider such sophisticated monolog vocal performances as rakugo or kōdan or the oratorio tradition of multiple voices in the folk song tradition of Kawachi ondo. 14 It was within such a cultural context that benshi were brought to cinema as “voices from the outside.” Consequently, viewers were able to enjoy cinema as an extension of popular theater. Other viewers the world over believed in cinema as a largely visual medium, but the Japanese alone experienced it as the completely natural mixing of sight and sound.
Film journalism was established in the 1910s, and it is easy to imagine the reasons that those critics who argued for a pure essence of film would criticize the benshi. One major reason for this criticism is that it would be impossible to determine a unified meaning for a film if any improvised explanation could be added to it, and the experience of the film would change depending on the benshi and other circumstances of each showing. Although critics took exception to benshi, the benshi were overwhelmingly supported by the masses. In the 1930s, when talkies began to spread, the figure of the benshi disappeared, quickly relegated to the status of anachronism.
Even after the passing of the benshi, we can discover their traces all over contemporary Japanese cinema. The long shot frequently taken as a particular characteristic of Japanese cinema or the preference for long takes were prepared specifically to provide extended breaks for benshi’s narration, and the distinct conclusions provided by a sentimental narrator also could be a trace of the benshi’s art. It is undeniable that some complex cinematic techniques were delayed on account of the benshi. However, to state this only as a criticism is fundamentally based on the premise that Hollywood is the only standard. What we should also say is that precisely because of the existence of the benshi, it was possible for Japan to develop its own narrative techniques without surrendering unconditionally to American cultural imperialism. No matter which of these views we take, it is impossible to grasp the foundations of Japanese cinema without addressing the place of the benshi.
