What Is Japanese Cinema?: A History

2. Editor’s note: Here the author begins comparing film and the various forms of theater in Japan. More detailed discussions appear in the following sections. Oldest is the solemn masked drama Noh and the associated kyōgen comic plays, which became a sophisticated performing art in the fifteenth century and was the theater of the samurai and continued to be the theater of the elite in the modern period. Kabuki and the Bunraku puppet theater (known as ningyō jōruri) came from the Edo period and were the theater forms for the commoner class. In the Edo period, performers of these art forms were of very low status, whereas in the modern period, the status of these performers has risen gradually such that Kabuki actors are now considered theatrical aristocrats. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, various new forms of theater appeared. Shinpa (new-style theater) gained its name in distinction to kyūha (old-style theater), in other words, Kabuki. Shinpa began with the political satire of Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911) as political demonstrations but settled into a kind of melodrama usually showing the conflict between the worlds of geisha and other traditional figures and the lawyers, businessmen, and government officials of the new society. Although Kawakami appeared with his wife Sada Yakko (1871–1946) and toured the world, as shinpa became an established performance form, all female roles in shinpa were played by male onnagata female role specialists and only later did actresses begin to appear as well. Shinpa is crucial to the author’s argument because shinpa not only contributed performers and stories to the film world but also becomes a label for a kind of sentimental, melodramatic mode of storytelling that is not necessarily directly related to the actual shinpa theater. Kami shibai (paper plays) were street performances in which a performer would carry a set of cards with pictures on them and would tell the story and sell candy to the crowd that gathered.

3. Editor’s note: Through the first few decades of Japanese film history, films were shown with a narrator called a benshi who would stand next to the screen and tell the story, often dramatically declaiming speeches for the characters. As a form of vocal performance, benshi are related to many forms of traditional storytelling, which are often musical styles. More detailed discussions of benshi will follow in this chapter and the following chapter.

4. Translator’s note: Batā kusai is a pejorative expression for Japanese works that felt overly influenced by the West.

5. Yasuzō Masumura, “Profilo Storico del Cinema Giapponese,” Bianca e Nero, November–December 1954; Masumura Yasuzō, “Nihon eigashi,” in Eiga kantoku Masumura Yasuzō no sekai (Tokyo: Waizu, 1999).

6. Editor’s note: Rakugo is a form of storytelling usually performed in yose vaudeville halls where a solo performer sits on a cushion and acts out a story distinguishing between characters by turning to one side and another. The stories are usually comic, but the rakugo by San’yūtei Enchō (1839–1900) included many serious stories. One of his long ghost stories, The Peony Lantern (Botan Dōrō, 1884), became a new starting point for literature when a shorthand transcript of his vocal performance was published. Kōdan stories are usually more or less serious and the performer sits at a desk as though reading from some distinguished book. The stories include war tales and adventure stories and many of kōdan’s stories of thieves and wandering gamblers not only became a source of printed literature but also heavily influenced popular theater and rōkyoku ballads and then became a major source of stories for movies.

7. Editor’s note: In Japan, until recently, a distinction has been made between “mass literature” (taishū bungaku) and “pure literature” (jun bungaku). Pure literature is heavily influenced by the ideals of Western fiction. Mass literature draws on the tradition of fiction from the Edo period, and then goes through the transcripts of rakugo and kōdan, but then it grew into the novels of someone like Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) with his famous novel The Golden Demon (Konjiki yasha, 1897) and the novels and plays of his pupil Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939). In time, this developed into a wide variety of popular fiction, much of it serialized in newspapers and magazines.

8. Editor’s note: Jidaigeki is one of the most important terms in Japanese film. It means “period play” and although it can technically be used for a film set in any historical period from ancient times to relatively recent times like the Meiji period, in practice, it concentrates on stories set in the Edo period with samurai and sword fights and wandering gamblers and the like. This is contrasted with gendai geki (“contemporary plays”), which are set in modern Japan (post-1868, when the shogunate was deposed and the emperor was restored to a central position of power).

9. Mizoguchi Kenji, “Genroku chūshingura enshutsuki, 1941” [Notes on directing Genroku Chushingura, 1941], in Mizoguchi Kenji chosakushu (Tokyo: Omuro, 2013).

10. Translator’s note: Yomota draws attention to two additional links between cinema and theater. One is the use of the word koya (小屋, literally, “a hut”). In theater, it means “playhouse,” but it remains in use within the film industry as another word for movie theater; another is the use of “such and such-za” (座) in naming, which is close to the English “company.” There is no real English equivalent to these terms, but in Japan, they demonstrate the ways that, even in language, theater has contributed greatly to cinema.

11. Editor’s note: The term jidaigeki (“period play”) is used in both Kabuki and Japanese film with a slight but important difference. In both cases, censorship by the government meant that to deal with contemporary issues, especially those concerning the governing class, it was necessary to set stories in the distant past. Because Kabuki flourished during the Edo period, the plays had to be set before that period to avoid antagonizing the Shogunate. The vast majority of film jidaigeki are set in the Edo period. So what would have been gendaigeki (contemporary plays) for Kabuki are now jidaigeki for film.

12. Editor’s note: The puppet theater known as ningyō jōruri (puppets and narrative music) or Bunraku, after the name of the last troupe in the Edo period, performs sophisticated, adult plays with large puppets with three puppeteers capable of very detailed movement. The repertory of the theater, of course, has contributed to the cinema, but what is more important for the author is the consideration that having a major form of theater in which the visual channel and the audio channel are physically separated on stage and having a narrator who describes the scene and speaks for the characters is quite similar to the role of the benshi in early Japanese cinema.

13. Editor’s note: Here, two more genres of theater are introduced. Shingeki is the modern theater movement that began after the opening of Japan. The repertory of this theater began with the Western classics: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekov, and the contemporary European writers that the Japanese pioneers in shingeki experienced when they went to Europe. Shin Kokugeki was a popular theater movement that specialized in plays with swordfights. It had a much more masculine emphasis than shinpa and its style of fighting was influential in the film world.

14. Editor’s note: As mentioned earlier, even though shinpa continued to emphasize onnagata, Sada Yakko, the wife of the beginner of shinpa, ran the first school for actresses in Japan and often is considered to be Japan’s first modern actress.

15. Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

16. Editor’s note: “Chain dramas” (rensa geki) were a type of performance in early cinema that alternated between scenes on film and scenes acted out live on stage.

1. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “Yōshō jidai” [In My Youth], in Tanizaki Jun’ichrō zenshū, vol. 17 (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1972).

2. Editor’s note: Nihonga are paintings in traditional styles, but they also include more contemporary paintings that largely use traditional media or subjects and are consciously “Japanese” in style in contrast to Western painting.

3. Editor’s note: Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) was a writer whose most famous novel was The Golden Demon (Konjiki yasha, 1897). It featured two young people in love—a student named Kan’ichi and a girl named Omiya. Omiya is forced to become the mistress of a usurer, and when Kan’ichi learns this, he angrily rejects her in a fight on the beach at Atami. Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) was Ozaki’s pupil, and although his fantastic stories are most popular today, in his lifetime, he was best known for novels that became shinpa plays like The Water Magician (Taki no Shiraito, 1895) and The Nihonbashi Geisha District (Nihonbashi, 1914).

4. Komatsu Hiroshi, “Shinematogurafu to Nihon ni okeru shoki eiga seisaku” [The Cinematograph and Early Film Production in Japan], in Hikari no tanjō: Ryumie-ru! [The Birth of Light: Lumiere!] (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun, 1995), 38.

5. Editor’s note: Sōshi shibai (plays of gallant citizens) were plays in the late-nineteenth century in favor of the campaign for voting rights. Eventually, this is another of the streams leading into shinpa.

6. Editor’s note: This is a film version of a story by Izumi Kyōka that was quite famous in shinpa. A performer of “water magic” (making spouts of water appear from fans and many objects) named Taki no Shiraito becomes the benefactor of a young law student. She is eventually forced to steal and kill to continue her contributions. At her trial, the student she helped is her prosecutor. After convicting her, he shoots himself.

7. Editor’s note: Here the author is reemphasizing that although much of early Japanese film was derived from Kabuki, it usually was not a direct borrowing, and the actual Kabuki world mostly kept its distance from the film world.

8. Lu Xun, “Tokkan Jijo,” in Lu Sun zenshū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Gakushū kenkyūsha, 1959), 10–11.

9. Editor’s note: The puppet play The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon chūshingura) dramatized a true incident at the beginning of the eighteenth century when Asano Takuminokami, the lord of the small domain of Akō in what is now Hyōgō Prefecture suddenly attacked a high-ranking shogunal official named Kira Kōzukenosuke in the shogun’s palace. Asano was sentenced to commit ritual suicide that day, and his clan disbanded. After nearly a year of hardship, forty-seven of Asano’s former retainers avenged their lord’s death by attacking and killing Kira. In the Edo period, censorship by the shogunate meant that in the puppet play, the names of the historical figures were disguised. The lord is called Enya Hangan; the man he attacked is called Kō no Moronō; and Ōishi Kuranosuke, the senior retainer who led the vendetta, is called Ōboshi Yuranosuke. The puppet play was an immediate success and was soon copied in Kabuki, but it also inspired all kinds of collateral stories, mostly totally fictional, such as the stories of members of the vendetta who do not appear in the play. The film versions rely on this rich collection of source material but use the actual historical names of the characters.

10. Makino Masahiro, Eiga jiden [A Life in Film], 2 vols., ed. Yamane Sadao and Yamada Kōichi. Masahiro changed the Chinese characters for his name three times: 正博, 雅裕, and 雅弘.

11. See Jacob Raz, Yakuza no bunka jinrui gaku [A Cultural Anthropology of Yakuza], trans. Takai Hiroko (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996).

12. Editor’s note: The author will go into more detail about this film about Emperor Meiji in chapter 7.

13. Editor’s note: Kachūsha was an attempt to share in the success of the shingeki stage version of the play starring the phenomenal actress Matsui Sumako (1886–1919). Matsui has become the iconic figure of the scandalous image of early actresses, especially because she committed suicide at the grave of her lover, the head of the shingeki troupe, after he died from influenza. Although the play is an iconic one for actresses, in the film version, her role is taken by an onnagata as in shinpa. She recorded the theme song for the play, The Song of Kachūsha, and it became one of the first great hits in popular music history. She recorded another theme song, The Song of the Gondola, for a stage performance the following year, in which the first line is “Life is short, so love while you can, young girl.” This is the song that Shimura Takashi sings at the end of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) as he sits on a swing in the park he has succeeded in building and dies in the snow.

14. Editor’s note: Rakugo and kōdan are storytelling styles in which a single performer describes the scene and plays all the roles. Kawachi ondo is a style of singing for the group dances of the Obon season. The singer alternates narratives of old stories with songs. What the author is emphasizing is not that any one tradition led directly to the benshi (although that is undoubtedly true for individual performers) but that the benshi is related to a rich tradition of storytelling and narrative singing that made the presence of the benshi seem perfectly natural to audiences accustomed to this tradition.

1. Editor’s note: Shingeki also emphasized actresses instead of onnagata—the men playing female roles in Kabuki, shinpa, and early film. In fact, using real women in female roles is one of the major characteristics of shingeki.

2. Editor’s note: Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) was an influential member of the second generation of shingeki. He traveled extensively in Europe and first started experimenting with translated plays performed by Kabuki actors; he started a pure shingeki troupe with the founding of the Tsukiji Little Theater (Tsukiji Shōgekijō) in 1924.

3. Découpage is often described in English as “continuity.” It is the final scenario with all the information needed for filming. Images often are included of the shots to be taken. For those watching, this shows the fundamental elements of the structure of the film. In Japanese it is referred to variously as satsuei daihon (shooting script) or enshutsu daihon (production script), or during actual shooting as just hon (book). In English, the word that is often used is “storyboard.”

4. Translator’s note: Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) was a major writer and poet during the eighteenth century. His most well-known work, a collection of supernatural tales entitled Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari, 1776), was famously adapted by the director Mizoguchi Kenji in 1953 as Ugetsu.

5. Aaron Gerow, “Writing a Pure Cinema: Articulations of Early Japanese Film” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1996), 300.

6. Editor’s note: Orochi means “serpent.” The original title of the film was Buraikan (Vagabond/Outlaw), but this title alarmed the censors, who forced a title change and imposed additional extensive cuts, amounting to approximately fourteen hundred feet of film.

7. Translator’s note: As suggested earlier, it was these stars—including Bantsuma, Arakan, Chiezō, and Utaemon—who followed Makino’s lead and started their own production companies. Most were short-lived, but they constituted one of the first waves of independent production.

8. Editor’s note: Hasegawa Shin (1884–1963) was a playwright who established a new genre of popular theater that became a major source of stories for film, matatabi-mono, which deals with gangsters and gamblers who must constantly be on the move but who long for stable relationships. For example, In Search of Mother (Mabuta no haha, 1932) features a petty gambler who longs to find his mother, but he finds her only for her to reject him because his presence might ruin her daughter’s chances for marriage. The protagonist says that he only has to close his eyes to see his ideal mother on the inside of his eyelids.

9. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Unexpected,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1977), 18–27.

1. Editor’s note: See note 2 in chapter 2 on Osanai Kaoru.

2. Translator’s note: Yamada Kōsaku (1886–1965) was a famous composer and conductor who studied in Germany and worked briefly in the United States. He wrote many orchestral works, operas, and songs. He also introduced many famous orchestral works to Japan by Debussy, Gershwin, Strauss, and others.

3. Editor’s note: Taii no musume is part of the repertory of shinpa, and Mizutani Yaeko I (1905–1979) began as a shingeki actress and went on to become the first important actress in shinpa.

4. Translator’s note: This is a case in which the English translation of the film’s title—The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine—does not do justice to the original. In Japanese, the distinction is between “madame” (i.e., a more sophisticated, exotic, European-sounding word for wife) and “nyōbō,” which is a more usual, family-oriented, domesticated word. The Japanese title reflects the cultural and political tensions that run through the film.

5. Editor’s note: “Chanbara” is the common word for jidaigeki that was used to emphasize sword-fighting scenes. There are many theories about the origin of the word, but it is generally taken to be an abbreviated form of chanchan barabara—an onomatopoeia for swords clashing (chan) and the movement of bodies scattered (bara) during chaotic fighting scenes.

6. Editor’s note: “Chindonya” are the Klezmer-like bands that go through the streets, playing for the opening of new businesses and other occasions. The name comes from the sound, with “chin” representing the clang of cymbals and “don” the boom of a drum. Although rare, they still exist today.

7. Itami Mansaku was the father of Itami Jūzō, whose works such as Tampopo (1985) and The Funeral (Osōshiki, 1984) are well known in the West. For more about Itami Jūzō, see chapter 10.

8. Translator’s note: In the late 1930s, jidaigeki were attacked by some for taking a frivolous attitude toward Japan’s past. Rekishi eiga (history films) were presented as an alternate ideal. Closely aligned with an emergent “realist” orientation, these films aimed to capture the fine grain of historical detail rather than offer more sword-fighting spectacle.

9. Editor’s note: Yamada Isuzu (1917–2012) had a shinpa onnagata as a father and a geisha as a mother. From the days of silent film, she worked in all genres and with nearly all the top directors, in addition to appearing on stage and television almost until her death. She is perhaps most familiar to Western viewers as the character corresponding to Lady Macbeth in Kurosawa Akira’s Throne of Blood (1957).

1. Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

2. Translator’s note: The ABCD (American/British/Chinese/Dutch) line refers to a set of embargoes placed on the selling of raw materials—such as iron ore and oil—to Japan in an effort to curtail its militarism.

3. Editor’s Note: “Manchukuo” is the name of the ostensibly independent puppet state set up by Japan in Northeast China and Inner Mongolia. The author intentionally uses the language of the time to give a sense for how things were described during the war years.

4. Tanaka Masasumi, Ozu Yasujirō shūyū (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2003), 228.

5. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

6. Tsumura Hideo, “What Is to Be Destroyed?,” in Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan, trans. Richard Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 115–127.

7. Translator’s note: These include Miyamoto Musashi: Dai-ichi-bu: Kusawake no hitobito, Dai-ni-bu: Eitatsu no mon (1940); Miyamoto Musashi: Dai-san-bu—Kenshin ichiro (1940); and Miyamoto Musashi: Ichijōji kettō (1942).

1. Editor’s note: “Homeland” or “naichi” is the word for the main part of Japan and shows the subordinate political and cultural position of the colonies. The author uses the term in an ironic way, placing it in quotation marks to show the language of the time.

2. Editor’s note: One characteristic of Chinese characters is that they can be pronounced in many different ways depending on the dialect of Chinese and also are pronounced differently in the various Asian languages that use Chinese characters. In this case, the actress Ri Kōran, a Japanese woman who was born in China, went by her Chinese name (using the same characters), Lǐ Xiānglán. The decision to conceal her Japanese origins was made so she could represent China in colonial and propaganda films. Once the war ended, she used her given Japanese name, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and later appeared in Hollywood films as Shirley Yamaguchi. More detailed discussion of Ri Kōran will follow later in this chapter.

3. Translator’s note: A traditional performing art combining singing, theater, narrative, and poetry. A performance includes a singer, who tells stories using different voices for different characters, and a drummer who, in addition to offering rhythmic accompaniment on a single drum (buk), also interjects words of encouragement.

4. Yi Yon Il, “Nittei shokuminchi jidai no chōsen eiga” [Colonial Korean Cinema During the Time of the Japanese Empire], in Koza nihon eiga, vol. 3, trans. Takasaki Sōji and ed. Satō Tadao et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986), 321.

5. Editor’s note: Amakasu Masahiko (1891–1941) is a controversial figure in Japanese history. After the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, he supervised the extrajudicial execution of anarchists Ito Noe and Ōsugi Sakae, as well as their six-year-old daughter, and was imprisoned for a short time. Eventually, he became the head of Man’ei. He committed suicide in Manchuria when Japan’s defeat was announced.

6. Translator’s note: The author places the date of this film as 1943, but as the production process began in 1942 and it was released in 1944, I have changed the date to 1944.

1. Editor’s note: Conventionally, the American Occupation government is called GHQ, which is short for “General Headquarters.”

1. Editor’s note: In English, “program picture,” when used at all, refers to the second feature in a program or the “B picture.” The author uses this term for all major studio films, denoting primarily entertainment and genre films.

2. Editor’s note: In the classical Noh theater, there is a type of story called “mugen” (phantasmal) Noh in which a traveling priest comes to a place famous for some person or event and hears these stories of the past from a local person. The local person turns out to be the ghost of that historical figure and then reappears in his or her true form to tell their story.

3. Editor’s note: Nihonjinron is a genre of Japanese writing that tries to delineate the essence of the Japanese people.

4. Translator’s note: The 180-degree axis (or line) refers to an imaginary line that runs between the characters (or objects) in the scene, framing their relationship to the space so that viewers can orient themselves clearly to them. Typically, the camera is supposed to stay on one side of the 180-degree line. When it crosses this line (reverse cut), it can be disorienting. Some directors break it for effect, but Ozu broke it regularly. There has been considerable scholarly debate around Ozu’s willful eschewal of classical (Hollywood) film grammar.

5. Nakahira Kō, “Nihon eiga no suijun wa takai, kōgyō keitai no atsui kabe” [The Level of Japanese Cinema Is High, the Thick Walls of Box Office Form], Eiga geijutsu [Film Art], April 1960, cited in Nakahira Mami, Burakku shiipu: Eiga kantoku Nakahira Kō den [Black Sheep: The Story of Filmmaker Nakahira Kō] (Tokyo: Waizu shuppan, 1999), 189.

1. Cinemascope is a type of widescreen format developed in the United States in the 1950s (although other, similar technologies were developed as early as the 1920s). It uses an anamorphic lens when projecting to stretch out the image horizontally. A standard size image has an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. When cinemascope was initially introduced, it had an aspect ratio of 2.66:1, about twice the width of the standard image. The lenses developed for cinemascope enabled this expansion with no distortion to the picture. Today (often shortened to “scope”), it is used somewhat more loosely, often referring to aspect ratios of 2.35:1 or wider.

2. A widescreen format of 1.66:1 or 1.85:1 was developed by Panasonic but does not use anamorphic lenses. In Japan, the 1.85:1 aspect ratio is used most often.

3. Editor’s note: In both of these series, each title inserts some word in the title, for example, Japan’s Irresponsible Period (Nippon musekinin jidai, 1962) and The Sexiest Man in Japan (Nippon ichi no iro otoko, 1963).

4. Mishima Yukio (in conversation with Ōshima Nagisa), “Fashisuto ka kakumeika ka” [Fascist or Revolutionary?], January 1968, in Mishima Yukio eigaron shūsei (Tokyo: Waizu shuppan, 1999), 639.

5. Translator’s note: Kengyō is the highest of the official ranks for the blind in old Japan and zatō is the lowest rank. Ichi is the name of the character. Thus, Zatoichi means something like “Ichi of the lowest rank.”

6. Editor’s note: This series dominated postwar Shōchiku. A fuller discussion can be found in chapter 9.

7. Translator’s note: Gekiga are comic books (manga) often drawn in a more realistic or rough-hewn style and dealing with more specifically adult themes. The name gekiga literally means “dramatic pictures” and was posed as an alternative to regular manga (“playful pictures”). The term was coined in the late 1950s by the artist Tatsumi Yoshihiro.

8. Editor’s note: The aesthetic sense that Suzuki displayed in his studio pictures came to the fore in his later playful and experimental independent films, including what is sometimes known as the Taisho Trilogy—Zigeunerweisen (1980), Heat Haze Theater (Kagerō-za, 1981), and Yumeji (1991).

9. Translator’s note: My Sin, written by Kikuchi Yūhō, was a novel serialized in the Osaka Mainichi newspaper in 1899. Its first cinematic adaptation was in 1908, and since then, it has been adapted in cinema more than twenty times.

10. Translator’s note: The Ryōzanpaku is the name of a martial arts school or dōjō where numerous eccentric but powerful and highly skilled fighters gathered. The name comes initially from the character Liang Shanbo in the Chinese novel The Water Margin.

1. The title here refers to the Italian term Anni di Piombo (years of lead)—a period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s in Italy associated with social turmoil and numerous acts of political violence from the left and the right.

2. The term “Roman Porno” is slightly misleading insofar as the films, although sex films, are not “pornographic” (they do not feature explicit, nonsimulated sex scenes). Although Nikkatsu borrowed the term “porno” from a contemporary film series at rival studio Tōei, “roman” seems to refer either to “romantic” or to the French word for novel, roman. In either case, the idea was to produce adult-oriented films (taking advantage of the flourishing Pink Film market; see chapter 8), while giving them a certain respectability and sophistication to set them apart. They were among the most critically acclaimed films of the 1970s and 1980s.

3. Editor’s note: Maruhi is written with the word for “secret” in a circle and means “top-secret,” giving an air of sensationalism to the movie.

4. In Geinōshi no shinsō [Deeper Layers in the History of the Arts] (Osaka: Kaihō Publishing, 1997), a collection of talks with Mikuni Rentarō, the comparative culture scholar Okiura Kazuteru, after discussing the historical significance of street entertainers, such as yashi and gōmune (operators of stalls selling things at festivals and at other marketplaces who are often related to yakuza or to groups that were once considered outcasts) and their relationship to Kuruma Zenshichi (the head of Tokyo’s primary outcast organization), points out that Tora-san’s name probably became Kuruma Torajirō because the director Yamada Yōji, who also penned the script, was aware of the significance of yashi. To all intents and purposes, film historians have ignored the history of representation of outcasts (hisabetsu burakumin) in Japanese film history, and the analysis and research on secret messages in cinema, including those of Toei’s ninkyō films, will be a major task for future scholarship.

5. Editor’s note: Minamata disease is considered to be one of the four big pollution diseases of Japan and is a severe neurological disease caused by mercury poisoning. It was discovered in 1956 in Minamata City in Kumamoto Prefecture where a chemical company named Chisso had been dumping industrial wastewater into Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea from 1932 to 1968. Although it was discovered in 1956, it was not until 1968 that the government recognized the causes of the disease and progress could start to be made in treatment and compensation.

6. Editor’s note: Originally the international airport in Tokyo was Haneda, close to central Tokyo, but noise and congestion started to become a problem in the 1960s with the use of jets. In 1965, a plan to build an airport in the villages of Sanrizuka and Shibayama in neighboring Chiba Prefecture was announced. But this involved taking the land of the farmers there and inspired anger because they had not been consulted. This resulted in 1966 in an alliance of local residents, student activists, and left-wing political parties that resisted the building of the airport with such tactics as building towers to prevent the runways from being used. This delayed the opening of the airport until 1978, and for many years after it did open, even casual visitors had to undergo strict security checks.

1. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009). See, in particular, “William Wyler: the Jansenist of Mise-en-scène,” 45–72, as well as the translator’s twenty-page note on the term “découpage.”

1. Editor’s note: In the 1990s, mass media began to spotlight young people with supposedly stunted social skills who referred to other people with the old-fashioned locution of otaku instead of “you” and who found pleasure only in encyclopedic knowledge of trivia about some field. The term is contested, but it has loosely come to mean someone with an unhealthy or obsessive love of some aspect of culture or subculture.