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""The Cinema of Naruse Mikio" presents not only a deft and subtle run-through of the world of an important auteur, but also a virtual encapsulation of the intellectual history of Japanese cinema during its most important period, the 1930s-60s. Catherine Russell contextualizes Naruse in the commercial situation in which he worked and in the historical, social, political, and intellectual project of mid-twentieth-century Japan. I came away firmly believing that Naruse was more attuned to how modernity was leaving its indelible marks on Japanese women than any other director of classical Japanese cinema. For students of feminist film criticism, Russell's book is an absolute must."--David Desser, author of "Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema"

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The Cinema of Naruse Mikio

Duke University Press

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................ixPREFACE........................................................................................xiINTRODUCTION: The Auteur as Salaryman..........................................................11 The Silent Films: Women in the City, 1930-1934..............................................392 Naruse at P.C.L.: Toward a Japanese Classical Cinema, 1935-1937.............................813 Not a Monumental Cinema: Wartime Vernacular, 1938-1945......................................1314 The Occupation Years: Cinema, Democracy, and Japanese Kitsch, 1945-1952.....................1675 The Japanese Woman's Film of the 1950s, 1952-1958...........................................2266 Naruse in the 1960s: Stranded in Modernity, 1958-1967.......................................315CONCLUSION.....................................................................................398NOTES..........................................................................................405FILMOGRAPHY....................................................................................431BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................435INDEX..........................................................................................447

Chapter One

As the global system reconfigures and the contradiction between the national and the transnational comes into greater relief, connections between Japanese film and the world will appear less as esoteric deviations than as the passkeys that allow entrance to a whole new series of productive questions and problems. -ERIC CAZDYN

Naruse's silent films were produced at the end of a period known as the modan years in which modern men and women, known as moba and moga (for "modern boys" and "modern girls"), commodity culture, and mass culture flourished on the streets of Japan's cities. The "flamboyant," rapidly paced style of these films is emblematic of the dynamic modernity of the times, capturing its spirit of excess, fragmentation, and mobility. Yet the narrative material remained embedded in the sentimental melodramatic mode of shinpa tragedy. The director's women-centered films are thus very much a hybrid of the new and the old, the foreign and the familiar, and they therefore embody the contradictions of Japanese modernity as it was constructed during these crucial years.

Shochiku was the only major studio operating in Tokyo from 1923 to 1934, a period in which the city underwent significant reconstruction and expansion following the 1923 earthquake. Modern transportation systems of streetcars, trains, roadways, and bridges were installed; department stores and hotels were erected; and old neighborhoods were completely transformed. At its Kamata studio, Shochiku specialized in gendai geki, or films with contemporary settings, leaving the Kyoto-based studios to concentrate on jidai geki or period films. The specific style associated with Shochiku-Kamata, sometimes abbreviated as SKS, tends to be identified with Ozu Yasujiro, who began directing there three years before Naruse. However, in addition to these two directors, the SKS style was developed within an industrial mode of production and included several other directors, including Shimizu Hiroshi, Gosho Heinosuke, Shimazu Yasujiro, and Ushihara Kiyohiko. Studio head Kido Shiro is also generally recognized as playing a major role in the development of SKS, as it developed into the dominant mode of gendai geki in Japanese cinema. Kido in fact scripted Naruse's first film, Mr. and Mrs. Swordplay (Chanbara Fufu, 1930), a twenty-one-minute domestic comedy that was shot in thirty-six hours straight. It concludes with the husband going out to see another Shochiku feature at a movie theater.

Filmgoing is a favorite occupation of the characters in the Shochiku-Kamata movies, reflexively situating the cinema among the many everyday rituals and customs depicted in the films. In her analysis of SKS, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano argues that the studio's extensive output during the formative years of the late 1920s and early 1930s constitutes a cornerstone of modern Japanese mass culture. Not only did the studio exploit the locations of the burgeoning metropolis, it bridged the transition from silent to sound cinema and established the stylistic ingredients for a national cinema. It was responsible for providing the dominant imagery of metropolitan life for a nation that was still in fact largely rural and unevenly modernized. SKS combined the novelties of modern urban experience, heavily influenced by Western customs, iconography, and technologies, with a nostalgic portrayal of community. The dynamic configuration of everyday life in the city was counterbalanced by an image of the family, neighborhood, and "hometown" that was increasingly threatened by the fragmenting effects of urban life.

The audiences of these films were primarily the new urban middle class of salaried office workers and their families. Women were especially targeted as potential audiences, and it was an important venue for both wives and "office ladies," or unmarried women holding clerical jobs, to go out in public. Kido Shiro understood that women did not go to movies alone but would always be accompanied by friends or relatives and were therefore a doubly lucrative market. He also perceptively claimed that "the fact that the old moralistic ideas have a repressive stranglehold on women presents opportunities for us to create various theatrical stories for our films." The woman's film thus "solidified the studio's production system" and, as Wada-Marciano argues, "served both to configure a female identity as consuming subject and to provide material for her consumption."

Shochiku-Kamata style involved a hybridization of Hollywood-inspired film techniques with the aesthetics of shinpa theater. Conventional film histories suggest that in the 1920s the "pure cinema" movement dispensed with the accoutrements of Japanese theater in order to hone a more modern and "realist" aesthetic based on the Hollywood model. The realism of SKS was, however, largely indebted to shinpa aesthetics, which were an early and important feature of Japanese modernity. Wada-Marciano argues that shinpa "formed the narrative core of the SKS film," particularly in its emphasis on the woman's film. Although by the late 1920s the notion of shinpa had fossilized into an aesthetic that is considered to be highly static, formal, and antirealist, in the 1900s it corresponded to a variety of styles. Shinpa theater, or "new school drama," emerged as a theatrical movement after 1888 and originated as an oppositional form. Utilizing contemporary settings and costumes and addressing issues of modern life, shinpa represented an important antidote to the archaic language of kabuki and the formalism of no theater in Meiji Japan. As a theatrical movement, it reached its height during the Russo-Japanese War, when current sociopolitical issues of the day were staged. As early as the 1890s, shinpa theater used actresses rather than oyama and developed stories from serialized novels with female protagonists. Above...