The Man Who Calls Going to the Movies His "Last Act of Resistance" Walks You Through 110 Years of Japanese Cinema

Yomota Inuhiko's new book — and his understanding of the field — are both worth a look.

A new book called 110 Years of Japanese Cinema is about to be published. It is a revised and expanded edition of the earlier 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, with new material on where Japanese film has gone since 2000.

The book is scholar Yomota Inuhiko's best-known work. Several universities have adopted it as a textbook, and it has been translated into Italian, German, French, Korean, and Chinese, going through several printings.

At a launch event for the new book, Yomota said: "Japanese cinema isn't only Kurosawa and Ozu. There are also countless unnamed films strung between the masterpieces."

In his preface to the 2004 Chinese edition, he wrote: "Although this book deals specifically with Japanese cinema, I am by no means a cultural nationalist."

Yomota writes about more than Japanese film: Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Israeli cinema as well. Outside film, his work covers comparative literature, manga studies, and semiotics — more than 140 books of cultural studies, among them On Cuteness.

"He is a scholar whose books, stacked up, would stand as tall as the man himself," said Wang Zhongyi, the book's translator and editor-in-chief of People's Magazine.

Born in 1953, Yomota belongs to what he calls "a generation that burned for film." His earliest memory of moviegoing is the crush of the crowd — "grabbing the jacket off the older boy next door and throwing it onto a seat to save a spot." He grew up during the Japanese film industry's second golden age. In the "person I admire and respect most" column of his graduation yearbook, at 12, he wrote the name of Jo Shishido, the actor known for playing "the second-fastest gunslinger in the world." Shishido later appeared on the cover of the first book Yomota published. As he put it: "To have a favorite star as a kid watching movies, and then spend your whole life making film scholarship your work — that makes me very happy."

At a talk on Japanese cinema hosted by New Star Press, the moderator opened by asking the audience to silence their phones: "A phone once went off during one of Professor Yomota's talks. He didn't say a word — he just glared at the man for the rest of the session. When it comes to film, he is very serious."

His passion for Chinese cinema, he said, began in 1986, when he watched Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth in a Tokyo screening room. Once he had found the films of China's Fifth Generation directors, "there really was no turning back."

Whenever people raise "the influence of Japanese cinema on Chinese cinema," he traces the history back to The White-Haired Girl, a Sino-Japanese co-production, and stresses that the influence ran both ways. As he put it: "Now that the hierarchy of how films are appreciated has dissolved, talk of who influenced whom will no longer exist. In the era to come, every director and every film will simply become part of the background against which we discuss cinema."

His interest in the cinema of China and other Asian countries comes from "a shared cultural tradition and background." He believes: "Within that shared culture, we can understand and feel each other's films more deeply and more finely."

Which is why he criticizes the Japanese directors now collecting prizes at Cannes and other festivals by catering to juries and to Western critics: "That is a sign of decadence." He stresses "the cultural soil beneath a country's own cinema" — a film should carry "something that resonates powerfully in its social setting," because "in essence, cinema does not belong to the director or the author. It belongs to the actors."

Pointing to Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing, of China's newer generation of directors, he said: "Chinese cinema has already become world cinema." He hopes Japan's younger filmmakers can move past Japan itself, and past Japan-as-exotic-flavor, and instead "make films on a large scale, films that say something the whole world shares, the way Jia Zhangke or Jim Jarmusch do."

At two book talks in Beijing, Yomota spoke on two themes — "Japanese cinema in the 21st century" and "Nikkatsu action films and Toei gangster films in the golden age of Japanese cinema" — cutting between his remarks and the matching film clips, turning himself into a busy projectionist and narrator at once. The clips he chose were either scenes of daily life thick with detail, such as a young man grilling yakitori in a working-class district of Osaka, or the peak of a story, such as a final one-against-many showdown, or passages full of feeling, such as ethnic Koreans in Japan riding a train back to their home village.

Zhi An said Yomota has "the same power of summing up that Su Shi showed when he judged Tang poetry: 'Meng Jiao is cold, Jia Dao is gaunt; Yuan Zhen is glib, Bai Juyi is coarse.'" His grasp of film, Zhi An added, works on two levels: "a broad view that takes in the whole arc of Japanese cinema, and a foundation of deep, specific understanding of each film and each director."

Today, facing an era of the internet and television in which film news, reviews, and the films themselves are shared everywhere and all at once, Yomota finds himself troubled by a question: "When every work becomes an equal, interchangeable thing, does the experience of watching a film become equal too — and, in the process, dull?"

He still insists on watching films in a theater, and calls the habit "the last act of resistance I have left." He still misses the "shared experience of watching a film" with a roomful of people. This book, for him, "is an attempt to answer what cinema essentially is, by looking again at the era when the Japanese and Japanese cinema had a happy relationship with each other."

Below is a summary of Yomota Inuhiko's remarks at the talks.

Yomota Inuhiko:

Since the start of the 21st century, Japan has been in a kind of bubble in film production. The number of films made has grown fast — Japan now makes roughly 800 films a year. (The country with the highest output in the world is Nigeria, at 1,500 films a year; second is India, at 1,200.) Coming to China this time, I have just heard that China's annual output is now also around 800 films — about the same scale.

I want to share four themes about Japanese cinema since the 21st century began.

First, animation and documentary have both grown explosively in Japan in this century. From Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Your Name, Japanese animation has become an excellent vehicle for depicting the passions of a young girl's inner world.

Also, women directors have become very active in the Japanese film world since 2000. There are many reasons, but one that certainly holds is technology: digital cameras mean that a woman without great physical strength can easily pick up the equipment and finish her own work. There is also the fact that from the 1980s on, film industries across East Asia — mainland China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong — grew up at the same time, independently of one another. In that process, some women in Japan were spurred by the new East Asian cinema and decided they wanted to make films themselves. But there was a larger backdrop inside Japan too: the male-centered studio system that had run the industry until then collapsed at around the same moment.

Second, in documentary and in film more broadly, many fine, committed directors have turned their attention to social problems at the margins, and there are more films and documentaries made on those subjects. Across the long stretch of Japanese society from the Second World War to now, many buried facts and untouchable subjects have become things documentary film faces head-on.

Third, the revolutionary passion and the ideals once held by Japan's young students and intellectuals have gradually given way to disillusionment.

Fourth, the grim reality Japan will still be facing 20,000 years from now — the stories tied to nuclear power.

In March 2011, the leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant was the fourth time the Japanese people were harmed by nuclear power. The first and second were the two atomic bombs the US military dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The third was in 1953, when Japanese boats fishing for tuna in the Pacific were contaminated and injured by American nuclear tests.

Why has Japan suffered nuclear harm four times? The first three the Americans did. The fourth was done by Japan's own nuclear plant. The Japanese government has announced that the Fukushima problem is solved, but it is nowhere near solved — making the nuclear waste completely harmless will take tens of thousands of years.

Fukushima is not only a problem for the Japanese. It is a problem the whole world, all of humanity, faces together.

After Japanese fishing boats were contaminated in the Pacific in 1953, Japan made a film called Godzilla — the story, told from the point of view of Godzilla as a victim of nuclear power, of a monster irradiated by American nuclear tests that then attacks Japan. After the Fukushima accident, a great many documentaries were made, but no feature film. A feature would need not only a major studio's money but also a tacit understanding between TEPCO, the plant's principal investor, and an LDP government that held the Fukushima problem to be solved. Unless both could be made to see something in it for themselves, the film could not be made.

Against that backdrop, Japanese filmmakers borrowed the Godzilla premise to deal with Fukushima. In the new Shin Godzilla, Godzilla is no longer a victim of nuclear power; it stands for nuclear power itself. The Japanese military cannot kill Godzilla. All it can do is freeze the monster at minus 190-some degrees, and the people of Tokyo live beside it every day thereafter. This new Godzilla stands for the fact that the Fukushima plant will coexist with the Japanese people forever.

Japanese filmmakers used an indirect strategy, a story full of allegory, to say something obliquely — and firmly — about a subject that could not be filmed as a feature directly.

Next I want to talk about Nikkatsu action films and Toei gangster films, the two genres that stood for Japanese cinema in its golden age, the 1960s and '70s.

Nikkatsu is short for Nippon Katsudō Shashin, the Japan Cinematograph Company, founded in 1912 — one of the oldest big film companies in the world. After Japan's defeat in 1945 the country was under American occupation, and even after it regained sovereignty in 1952, everything from clothing to popular culture was still soaked in the occupying forces' culture. Hollywood melodramas, comedies, farces, and fight pictures of every familiar kind flooded the Japanese market.

Many Nikkatsu action films were not original. The studio's strategy then was to import material from Hollywood and to borrow plots from French, Italian, and other Western films, then repackage them in a Japanese setting with Japanese stars. Through the 1950s and 1960s Japan paid no attention whatever to copyright, and happily went on rearranging action films to Japanese taste.

In the same period, Nikkatsu's action films were exported across Southeast Asia and widely screened. Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Taipei all had theaters that specialized in Japanese films, and it was common for Japanese directors to be invited to Korea or Hong Kong to shoot. Later, Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong each turned Nikkatsu action plots into local versions — three rounds of imitation, Hong Kong's A Better Tomorrow among them.

Before the Second World War ended, the puppet state of Manchukuo existed in northeast China for twelve years. Manchukuo left behind the largest film company in Asia, the Manchuria Film Association, or Man'ei (the actress Li Xianglan, also known as Yoshiko Yamaguchi, grew up in that soil). After the war, Man'ei's staff went back to Japan and founded Toei.

Until the mid-1960s Toei mainly made period pictures full of samurai swordplay. Then it changed course and began making gangster films whose heroes were the hoodlums and gamblers who had been active in prewar Japan.

The heroes were hoodlums, but they were pulled back and forth between the secular Confucian virtue of "benevolence" and the "righteousness" owed in social ties. They were usually bullied through the whole film by petty, contemptible villains until they could take no more and stepped out for a final duel with the bad guys. These gangster films had a strong anti-establishment, anti-state, anti-authority coloring, partly because the men who founded the studios had lived through the collapse of Manchukuo and the disillusionment that came with it, and so distrusted state institutions deeply.

In the late 1960s gangster films won fervent support from students in the New Left movement, peaking in 1970. The New Left student movement against Japan's Security Treaty, the Anpo, was then at its height, and the organizers and ordinary students marching in the streets saw themselves in these gangster films and their characters, and applauded the figures on screen.

But in 1972 Japan's left-wing student movement cooled and died out, suddenly and fast. Toei's gangster films shifted with it, toward pictures of an underworld with no sense of right or wrong at all — nothing but filthy scheming and killing among gangsters. (Ken Takakura, a Toei star who could not accept the change, began instead playing withdrawn, solitary middle-aged men in films such as The Yellow Handkerchief — and it was that later image that made him famous.)

I am sure you are all thoroughly familiar with Japan's national masters — Kurosawa, Ozu. You may know less about the so-called B-grade popular entertainments I have introduced today, but I can tell you this: in Japan, these are the films with a genuinely broad base, the ones ordinary people really love.

Below: the panel conversation and questions from the audience.

Zhi An: I would like to ask Mr. Yomota how he sees the way we have selectively taken in the influence of Japanese directors. China's Fifth Generation directors, for instance, were heavily influenced by Japanese film (Kaneto Shindo's The Naked Island and Onibaba, say); Jiang Wen's films carry a vitality that comes from Kurosawa; Hou Hsiao-hsien was deeply influenced by Ozu; documentary directors were deeply influenced by Shinsuke Ogawa; and animation was influenced by Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon.

Yomota Inuhiko: To talk about the relationship between Japanese and Chinese cinema you have to start in 1949-1950, when New China's film industry was just getting going. In northeast China, after the postwar collapse of the Manchukuo regime, the staff of Man'ei — the largest film studio in all of East Asia — stayed behind. They protected the equipment, helped train people for New China's film industry, set up a film school, and gave New China's filmmakers a great deal of technical guidance.

Take The White-Haired Girl: the cinematographer, the editor, and the man who made the subtitles were all Japanese staff working under Chinese pseudonyms. Many of them later went home to Japan and joined Toei; others went to Kaneto Shindo's studio. At a time when China and Japan had no diplomatic relations and their ideologies were sharply opposed, a group of Japanese people organized screenings of New China films, The White-Haired Girl among them, as part of a grassroots friendship movement. That mattered a great deal.

When China's Fifth Generation directors rose as a group in the 1980s, it was not only Japan that felt the shock — Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea did too, and each had its own new wave. My own view is that after diplomatic normalization, directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who watched imported Japanese films at the film academy, were not shaped by Japanese cinema itself. They were shaped by China's own problems.

Beyond filmmaking, how audiences receive Japanese film is a question worth asking. In this era you can watch films from any period online. Every director and every viewer can now leap across the gaps in time, so discussing "influence" may not mean much. In theory we can already see every film made anywhere in the world over the past 120 years, and the hierarchy of how film is appreciated has lost its meaning. That change has made the experience of watching films flatter and shallower than it used to be. Saying that this person was influenced by that one no longer holds today; in the era to come, Kaneto Shindo and Chen Kaige alike will simply become part of the background against which we discuss film.

After Chen Kaige, a still younger generation of Chinese directors appeared — Jia Zhangke, Wang Bing. Discussing their work now is not like discussing Chen Kaige's films, where the point was that China had films like this too. It has become a discussion of these as top-tier films within world cinema. There was a time when Japanese viewers had to know the specific circumstances of China at that moment to grasp what a Chinese film's language was carrying. That is no longer necessary, because this newer generation has moved completely past it.

In my own experience as a viewer, Chinese cinema has developed to the point where its characters are no longer confined to China; they have become an expression of something the world shares. Which is to say Chinese cinema is no longer merely Chinese cinema. It is world cinema. That change means a great deal.

For me, the question Japanese cinema has to think about is whether Japan's younger filmmakers can make films on the scale of Jia Zhangke's or Jim Jarmusch's. That is the task facing Japanese cinema next.

Question: You study film and literature both. In your view, can film be understood entirely as something that came out of literature?

Yomota Inuhiko: Fiction, painting, music, film — what they share is story. Film is just a method of telling stories that appeared 120 years ago. Human beings are animals that tell stories and are good at it. The oldest methods of telling are theater and music; then, in the 18th century, the novel became the main way to tell a story. At the end of the 19th century, film appeared.

The wish to tell your own story and to know other people's stories has not changed in thousands of years. To be precise, it is not that film replaced the novel. From a European point of view it would be more accurate to say film replaced opera. Or in Eastern countries like Japan and China, film took over some of the functions of traditional theater and drew audiences off into the movie house. But people did not stop reading novels, and traditional theater did not decline because of it — if anything it grew more concentrated, more advanced.

The difference between countries with a developed film industry and countries with an ordinary one comes down, in my research, to whether that country had a deep tradition of theater or something like it before film arrived — a tradition able to hold up what film would go on to make.

The modern European novel has not been in Japan or China for long. But before the Western novel reached China and Japan, we already had our own very old ways of telling stories. The relationship between the novel and film is, in time, a brief one. The relationship among story, theater, and film is very long and very deep.

Question: Right now, apart from anime, is there anything else from Japan, or East Asia more broadly, that could become a big trend in the West or worldwide?

Yomota Inuhiko: Rather than say I care whether Japanese cinema catches on in the West, I would say I care more whether it wins the favor of Chinese audiences. Why? Rather than chase the attention of countries whose civilizations differ hugely from ours — where the interest is only in the exotic angle — I would much rather Japanese film win the favor of a country like China, which shares a deep cultural bedrock with us. Being able to understand and feel each other's films more deeply and more finely: that experience matters more to me.

For a Japanese filmmaker, putting one over on Western festival juries is not hard. Take a beautiful Japanese actress in a kimono who, on camera, takes off her clothes, stands naked against Mount Fuji, and commits seppuku. I imagine a film like that would win a prize at Cannes easily enough.

Take China instead: film a Lao She novel or a Lu Xun short story carefully and faithfully, and it tends not to win prizes at Western festivals. But turn that around — a work that shows the joys and sorrows of ordinary Chinese lives might strike a deep chord shown in Japan. Chinese and Japanese society look very different now, but we share a cultural ground: Confucian thought, Daoist thought, and the rest. My own view is that melodrama can cross nationality, ideology, and the state. So why should we care so much how Western film critics react to East Asian cinema? Why can't we look among East Asian countries for the subjects that move all of us, make films about those, and pay attention to the films themselves?

Of course, in recent years some Japanese films and directors have kept winning major prizes at Cannes. I won't name them, but it is always the same three directors. What I sense is that they are catering very skillfully to what the Cannes jury wants, making films shallow enough for the judges to follow. I think that is a sign of decadence. If all we do is look at the films Western intellectuals look at, we will never understand the cultural soil beneath our own cinema.

When we discuss Japanese film, then, beyond Kurosawa and Ozu, the films grown purely in Japan's own cultural soil are also Japanese cinema — and the more important part of it. I hope our Chinese friends will not stop at Kurosawa and Ozu, but go one step further and pay attention to the films made for ordinary Japanese people too.

So the last thing I want to say is: thank you all.

Films Yomota Inuhiko screened at the salon:

Helter Skelter, Mika Ninagawa, 2012

"This film shows you something true: beauty, cuteness — once that kind of surface takes one step further, it turns into something extremely cruel."

Akame 48 Waterfalls, Genjiro Arato, 2003

"This young man and woman cannot bear the life they have, and decide to die together at a waterfall. But they fail. The girl goes far away from Osaka and returns to her old trade (prostitution). The two of them part."

Blood and Bones, Sai Yōichi, 2004

"Through the personal story of one ethnic Korean in Japan, this work distills the fate that most of that community lived."

Shin Godzilla, Hideaki Anno, 2016

"What does Shin Godzilla stand for? It stands for the fact that the Fukushima nuclear plant will coexist with the Japanese people forever."

Crazed Fruit, Kō Nakahira, 1956

"A nationalist feeling runs through this film — the sense of a Japanese woman taken from Japanese men by the Americans. On the surface it is a Hollywood-style entertainment made for Japanese audiences, but the story it tells cannot avoid the history of living under American political and military occupation."

Guitar in a Hot-Spring Town, Shū Shin'ichi, 1966

"The hero arrives in Hokkaido and saves a young woman from some bad men, but he cannot stay in one place. Drifting is his habit, so without saying a word to her he moves on, wandering the earth again."

Tale of Japanese Chivalry: Naniwa Chapter, Masahiro Makino, 1965

"The hero (played by Ken Takakura) lives under someone else's roof, has thrown in with a gang of hoodlums, and gets by inside the underworld. When he learns a friend has died in a gang shootout, he sets out on a duel of revenge against the gang."

"Takakura's eyes in this film are extraordinarily grave."

Red Peony Gambler, Kōsaku Yamashita, 1968

"After her father is killed by a gang, Oryu — an ordinary schoolgirl until then — joins the underworld to avenge him, her back covered with a tattoo of a dragon. She searches high and low for her enemy, and when her strength gives out in the final duel, Ken Takakura appears. The two feel something for each other, but neither says it. In the end they part, each going a separate way."

Tattooed Life, Seijun Suzuki, 1965

"The most striking thing about this work is that it brings kabuki elements into film — the color, the rhythm, the sense of space are all handled with a very high degree of stylization. That concentrated aesthetic is deeply connected to Japanese traditional theater; Suzuki Seijun expressed kabuki in the form of film."

Image sources: Douban Movie, Douban Books