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Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. By Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. ix, 200 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $27.00 (paper)

2009; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s002191180999132x

1752-0401

Yuki Takanami,

Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics

In Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano studies the not yet fully explored field of Shōchiku cinema during the interwar period. Important works have been already published, centering on some single directors: for example, David Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988) and Arthur Nolletti's The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter through Tears (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). However, taking into consideration that Shōchiku cinema played a significant role in the contemporary mass culture, an investigation of the dynamics between films and their social, political, and cultural contexts—particularly in terms of “modernity”—has been wanting until now.As a studio established to produce “modern” films in contemporary settings in Japan, Shōchiku Kamata Studio depicted the newly emerging social reality of modernity, such as the urban space, the salaried man, and the modern girl, or moga. Yet what should be noted is that, rather than simply regarding a film as a reflection of these social realities, Wada-Marciano's critical approach is to interrogate how filmic representation presented social reality in a particular manner through which audiences were allowed to relate themselves to social reality—especially this new social reality of “modernity.” In this sense, Shōchiku cinema was an “active agent” (p. 20) of modernity, and Wada-Marciano's intention is to problematize these “performative aspects” (p. 6) of Shōchiku cinema. Schematically, the problem that Wada-Marciano delineates concerning Shōchiku cinema and modernity is as follows: originating in the West, modernity contained both an appeal and a threat for the Japanese; therefore, modernity had to be “translated,” or “appropriated,” and Shōchiku attempted such a project.The individual chapters focus on various issues of translation and appropriation. Chapter 1 foregrounds the topos of space, asking how films not only represent the urban space but also construct the image of furusato (hometown). Chapter 2 interrogates the genre system in Japan, centering on shōshimin eiga (the middle-class film), the genre defined as depicting ordinary people in the urban area. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the issue of the (male) body in sports film and the figure of the moga in women's film, respectively. Chapter 5 presents a critical view on the so-called Kamata-cho, the cheerful and light mood characteristic of Shōchiku cinema, and its ideological implications.Each of these topics pinpoints the concerns of Shōchiku cinema, but what makes Wada-Marciano's discussion genuinely intriguing is her close analysis of the films both at the level of narrative and of shot-by-shot structure, which carefully traces how a filmic text works. For instance, when discussing how moga embodied modernity within the contemporary discourse in Japan, Wada-Marciano draws attention to how moga were treated in films. Appearing frequently in Shōchiku's love-triangle stories, the moga character is pitted against a more traditional woman and, in the end, loses out. Wada-Marciano analyzes this narrative manipulation as a symptom of Japanese anxiety toward modernity (pp. 88–89). Another brilliant analysis can be found in her discussion of My Neighbor, Miss Yae (Shimazu Yasujiro, 1934). In one sequence, the characters go on an excursion in the Ginza downtown area. They watch a Betty Boop cartoon in a movie theater and enjoy window shopping. What is projected on the screen is a sequence of dizzying images of the entertainment distinct, the bustling quality of which is even augmented by the movement of the camera; thus, the film blurs the distinction between the characters' experience of modernity and that of the audience. Finally, after a long sequence that renders a modern subjectivity as the audience's own experience, the director inserts a shot of Japanese food, which functions to “reassert a national identity through the domestic image” (p. 124).I would like to add several comments of my own to Wada-Marciano's insightful analyses. First, Wada-Marciano, in drawing a comparison with the misfit figure of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd in American college comedy, foregrounds the distinctiveness of Shochiku's sports films, which she argues present an idealized “national body” through the well-suited figure of Suzuki Denmei (pp. 66–68). I think, however, that William Haines makes a more apt figure for comparison, in that his Brown of Harvard (Jack Conway, 1926) is a more direct model of Suzuki Denmei's films. Second, in the film-within-a-film scene in Woman of Tokyo (Ozu Yasujiro, 1933), where the characters watch Lubitsch's part of the omnibus film If I Had a Million (James Cruze et al., 1932), Wada-Marciano reads a political allegory of “mastering modernity,” arguing that the Japanese spectators in the theater occupy the subject position in relation to the Hollywood film (pp. 88–95). However, I would like to reemphasize Ozu's cinephilic inclination, especially considering that the part Ozu quotes is a scene in which Charles Laughton opens numerous doors repeatedly and that a door is a privileged device in Ozu's film. Rather than the gaze structure of subject–object relation, Ozu's practice in this scene is based on his specific understanding of what cinema is.In conclusion, Wada-Marciano lucidly presents an analysis of Shochiku cinema as an agent of Japanese modernity, and Nippon Modern is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Japanese cinema and modern culture—as well as modernity at large.