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3 Negation of the Negation: Tracking Documentary Film Theory in Japan

      Naoki Yamamoto

       University of California

Rotha, Japan, and Documentary Theory

Aside from its well‐known tradition in fiction filmmaking, Japan has a long and vibrant history of nonfiction or documentary film practice. Catalyzed by and emerging in resistance to Japan's sudden rise to imperial power, the history of Japanese documentary film was marked by a number of signal events: the formation of the Proletarian Film League in Japan (known as Prokino for short) in 1929; the banning of Kamei Fumio's “antiwar” documentary film Fighting Soldier (Tatakau heitai, 1939) and his subsequent imprisonment; the enforcement in 1939 of the Film Law that mandated the screening of bunka eiga (culture film), or any kind of cultural, educational, and propaganda films contributing to war effort. In the postwar period, one could witness the emergence of experimental documentary filmmakers such as Hani Susumu, Kuroki Kazuo, and Matsumoto Toshio in the 1950s, and then the development of a new form of political documentary – represented by Ogawa Shinsuke's Sanrizuka series (1968–1977) and Tsuchimoto Noriaki's Minamata series (1971–1987) – that required the director's joint struggle with the filmed subjects through surprisingly long‐term and devoted commitments. Finally, the Yamagata International Film Festival has served as a major hub for documentary filmmakers from Asia and beyond since 1989. This tradition has continued unabated in the new millennium, as witnessed by the continuous production of numbers of documentary films dealing with the ongoing nuclear disaster in Fukushima and beyond.¹

Given the depth and breadth of these activities, it seems natural to assume the existence of a great corpus of writing that might be called Japanese documentary film theory. It is true that Japan has a long history of publications dedicated to nonfiction film practice, an archive that includes some outstanding manifestos and theoretical essays such as Sasa Genjū's “Camera: Toy/Weapon” (Sasa 1928: 29–33), or Tosaka Jun's “Cinema's Epistemological Value and Its Depiction of Social Customs” (Tosaka 1937: 13–19). However, we must acknowledge that any ethnocentric desires to single out the uniqueness of nation‐based theories and practices often distract us from actual conditions that informed these activities' emergence at a specific moment in history. In fact, what has characterized Japanese film journalism from its inception in the early 1910s is its perpetual openness to intellectual and aesthetic trends from abroad. Consequently, the general readership of this local critical tradition not only became familiar with the names and achievements of the latest film stars and directors, but actively participated in the international debates about what is now called “classical film theory.” Indeed, all the major texts by Hugo Münsterberg, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and members of the Soviet montage school were translated into Japanese by the mid‐1930s. This particular constitution of the local critical discourse proves the impossibility of the existence of a purely “Japanese” film theory, revealing instead the inherently hybrid nature of local film criticism and practice in Japan.²

The Japanese debates on the Griersonian conception of documentary are perhaps the most intriguing example of the interplay between the global and the local (and not the unidirectional influence from the former to the later) at work in the history of Japanese cinema. Here I use the term Griersonian in order to illuminate Japan's peculiar, if not thoroughly unorthodox, adoption of the British producer's conceptions of documentary film. For neither John Grierson's own writings nor the films he supervised at the E.M.B. or the G.P.O. film units had palpable impact on the Japanese film world. Instead, it was Paul Rotha's 1936 book Documentary Film that first introduced the term documentary to Japan and then ignited surprisingly fierce and long‐lasting debates among its local readers. According to Abé Mark Nornes, whose account of this cultural encounter remains the finest and most informative to date, this book's popularity was so enormous that it went into third printings immediately after Atsugi Taka's Japanese translation was published in the fall of 1938.³ Moreover, as the book gradually earned a reputation as the “Bible” for documentary filmmakers, Rotha's name began to appear everywhere in the history of Japanese critical writings on cinema, achieving similar esteem to the likes of Balázs, Arnheim, and Eisenstein (Nornes 1999: 94–95). Such an unmistakable visibility of Rotha in the Japanese context is particularly startling when we compare it to his minor presence in the Anglo‐American discourse. In Britain and the US, Rotha is remembered primarily for his humble or secondary contribution to the foundation of the British documentary film movement from the late 1920s through the 1930s (Petrie and Kruger 1999).

Behind Rotha's unexpected popularity in wartime Japan was the Japanese government's increasing interest in the potential use of film as a practical tool for war propaganda, which culminated in the enforcement of the Film Law. But one could also speculate that the book's success rested in its peculiar structure consisting of Rotha's self‐satisfied admiration for the British model of state‐sponsored film production, his relentless attack on the then dominant mode of profit‐oriented filmmaking, and his unabashed celebration of the dialectical approach to film composition which he learned from Eisenstein. In reading his ostentatious treatment of these complex and conflicting issues, Japanese readers of the time saw Rotha as offering a timely but double‐edged lesson, which could be useful both for those who openly support the government's hardline tactics and those who tried to implicitly insert social criticism in their seemingly neutral educational or P.R. films. As Nornes points out, what we can observe in this self‐contradictory, multi‐faceted readership is far from a passive or even submissive adoption of Grierson's original ideas, but rather a series of contingent transformations of them through a series of linguistic and cultural translations (Nornes 1999: 93–94).

      In what follows, I also examine the Japanese reception of Rotha's Documentary Film but from a very different perspective. First, unlike Nornes' marked emphasis on the role of the translators, I look closely at what the Japanese readers of the time actually read and responded to in Rotha's documentary theory. To bracket possible issues posed by translation, I choose to illuminate a specific kind of reader who was