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- Convenors:
-
Mats Karlsson
(The University of Sydney)
Alexander Jacoby (Oxford Brookes University)
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- Stream:
- Media Studies
- Location:
- I&D, Piso 4, Multiusos 3
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel shows how three key 1950s Japanese films by respected but non-canonical directors employed the theme of labour to reveal shifts in the postwar social fabric, analysing changing patterns of work and relating them to a broader contemporary context of class, gender and modernisation.
Long Abstract:
The 1950s are widely recognised as the Golden Era of Japanese filmmaking. In the West this phenomenon has usually been approached from a purely artistic viewpoint with a focus on the second blooming of directors Ozu Yasujirō and Mizoguchi Kenji as well as the rise to prominence of Kurosawa Akira. However, this artistic aspect only represents a small fraction of the output of a booming commercial film industry that peaked with 1.1 billion admittances in 1958, before rapidly losing ground to the new medium of television.
While such celebrated directors mostly focused on dealing with universal themes in either premodern or somewhat abstract settings, or worked in the home drama genre (shōshimingeki) with its relatively narrow domestic focus, a number of other filmmakers sought to investigate, with a more direct and critical eye, the rapid changes in contemporaneous Japanese social life, then undergoing a comprehensive transformation in the aftermath of war and Occupation and in the context of burgeoning economic growth. The three papers in this panel each focus on films by such directors who employed the theme of labour to reveal shifts in the social fabric while engaging with the conventions of popular genres. The screen works discussed here represent only a few examples of how commercial cinema can engage with topics of precise social relevance.
In modes ranging from literary adaptation to semi-documentary to melodrama, these films, by respected but non-canonical directors Kinoshita Keisuke, Shindo Kaneto and Yoshimura Kozaburō, explore different working milieux, ranging from traditional arts and crafts to manual labour, and focus on issues that were to the fore in postwar, post-Occupation Japan: evolving patterns of labour, social inequality and alienation, the changing roles of women, and the influence of the outside world on Japan. Combining close formal analysis with broad socio-political contextualisation, this panel will explore how concepts of authorship, star image, film style and cinematic space intersect fruitfully with questions of class, gender and modernisation in a key moment of Japanese social and cinematic history.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Mats Karlsson (The University of Sydney)
Paper short abstract:
This paper treats aesthetic and thematic aspects of Kinoshita Keisuke's controversial 1958 film The Eternal Rainbow. Shot on location, the film explores in a semi-documentary mode the ambition and alienation of workers at a steel mill, yet evades the implications of the problems that it uncovers.
Paper long abstract:
Largely forgotten today although popular on its release, the 1958 film The Eternal Rainbow (Kono ten no niji) stands out in the oeuvre of renowned director Kinoshita Keisuke. Set on location at the huge Yahata Steel Works plant in Kyushu and shot in a semi-documentary mode, the film explores the lives of workers at the plant and their families living in the affiliated company housing. The historic moment of the film is the very onset of Japan's economic miracle, immediately before various problems associated with the income doubling and GDP-boosting polices came to the fore, when the pillars of smoke from the chimneys of the plant were still perceived as a sign of hope and prosperity. The film exposes the conflict between privileged regular employees at the plant and workers with no privileges, mirroring a basic social inequality that has resurfaced with full force during Japan's recent 'lost decades'. A further theme running through the film is that of alienation, or the existential question of the meaning of wage labour as a means of livelihood, a question that would continue to resonate in post economic boom circumstances. In foreshadowing and privileging problems that would be identified with social maladies of decades to come, the film reminds us that Japan's narrative of discontent might not be such a recent phenomenon after all.
At the time of its release the film was both praised for its ambitious semi-documentary approach and innovative exploration from the inside of the microcosm of life at a steel works; as well as heavily criticized for its propagandistic features that were perceived as toeing the company management line, and for its non-committal attitude towards the social conflict foregrounded by the film. While discussing its aesthetic and thematic features, this paper explores critical responses to the film in mainstream newspapers and film publications, as well as in an outpouring of real time commentary by workers and others in minor non-academic journals. The paper argues that the controversial aspects of the film stem not from what it tells but from what it does not.
Alexander Jacoby (Oxford Brookes University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the representation by director Yoshimura Kozaburo in two postwar films film of women working in traditional professions in Japan's old capital of Kyoto, suggesting how tradition opens up potential spaces for female self-determination.
Paper long abstract:
"In societies that are changing very rapidly," Hanna Papanek observes, "ambiguous signals are presented to women [...] They become the repositories of 'traditional' values imputed to them by men in order to reduce the stresses men face." Yet Japanese tradition, and women's role within it, is more nuanced and ambiguous than this formulation implies. This paper will discuss the representation in postwar Japanese film of women working in traditional professions in Japan's old capital of Kyoto, using as a case study a sequence of films directed by Yoshimura Kozaburo in the years 1951-60. Dramatising women in a range of occupations and social circumstances, ranging from geisha to kimono designer to sweetmaker, these films, made in the wake of the dramatic social and legal changes ushered in by the US Occupation, present nuanced and multi-faceted images of Japanese tradition, exposing its restrictive and repressive aspects, but highlighting its potential for liberation.
This talk will focus in particular on the last two films in the sequence, Night River / Undercurrent (Yoru no kawa, 1956) and A Woman's Uphill Slope (Onna no saka, 1960), exploring how they dramatise the position of women in small-scale traditional industries in relation to broader social and political issues. In Night River, the role of artist and designer opens up possibilities of self-determination for heroine Kiwa (Yamamoto Fujiko) in both professional and personal terms. In A Woman's Uphill Slope, the liberated heroine (Okada Mariko), a postwar "modern girl", again finds self-determination when she accepts the leadership of a family-owned sweet-making business in the old capital, in a film which weighs positive and negative constructions of tradition through the contrasting life courses of two women. Beyond this, the films link the experience of the heroines to wider transformations: the establishment of a new economic model based around industrial labour and corporate capitalism; the existence of organised radical politics; the changing urban landscape of Japan.
Johan Nordström (Tsuru University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation explores how in the 1950s dominant narratives of Japan’s postwar high economic growth, salaryman job security and modernization were reinforced through cinema, especially in the ‘salaryman-films’ of the studio Toho, such as their popular ‘Company President’ (Shachō) series.
Paper long abstract:
The 1950s is considered the second golden age of the Japanese film industry. The six main film production companies - Shochiku, Toho, Shintoho, Daiei, Toei (from 1951) and Nikkatsu (from 1954) - released two films per week, 50 weeks a year, annually producing more than 500 works, and the number of theatre attendees steadily increased throughout the 1950s. Although, during this golden age, many of the great pre-war auteurs like Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Gosho experienced a second blooming, while younger directors such as Kurosawa and Kinoshita attained maturity, this period also saw the birth of many of Japan's most popular long running series of light entertainment.
This presentation explores how in the 1950s dominant narratives of Japan’s postwar high economic growth, salaryman security and modernization were reinforced through cinema, especially in the ‘salaryman-films’ produced at Toho, such as their popular long running comedy ‘Company President’ (Shachō) series, produced from 1956 until the 1970s, and other musically infused salaryman comedies. These films focused on the average salaryman, and came to reflect white collar workers' frustration over the rigidly hierarchical Japanese workplace and its incompetent bosses, as well as anxieties surrounding the rapidly changing society of the postwar period, traditional values, and rebellious youth culture.
This presentation investigates the form, content, and in a wider sense, meaning of these early films that garnered immense popularity as they helped to create a vision of the modern white-collar worker in post war Japan.