Capture Japan: Visual Culture and the Global Imagination from 1952 to the Present 9781350186798, 9781350186811, 9781350186781

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on text and translation
Introduction
Part I: Signs
Introduction to Part I: Signs
Chapter 1: Le Samouraï: Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinematic Japan
Chapter 2: Dreaming of Mexico: Japanese artists discover the Other
Chapter 3: Re/placing Barthes in the post-bubble era: Youthful disaffection, online fandom and the reoriented visions of ‘Japan’ in Iwai Shunji’s All about Lily Chou-Chou
Part II: Myths
Introduction to Part II: Myths
Chapter 4: The ‘Last Japanese Soldier’: Putting the nation into play
Chapter 5: Sugimoto Hiroshi and the emergence of a geopolitical ‘Japanese style’
Chapter 6: Japan as an ‘erotic paradise’ in the Sino-Japanese mobility context: Ethnographic encounters
Part III: Ruins
Introduction to Part III: Ruins
Chapter 7: Shadows of the atomic bombings in The Family of Man: The American photographic exhibition tour of Japan in the post-occupation period
Chapter 8: Fractured land, then and now: The resurgence of ruins in the 1996 Japan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale
Chapter 9: Burnt dresses left for the future: Ishiuchi Miyako’s photographic series ひろしま/hiroshima (2007–present)
Part IV: Transformations
Introduction to Part IV: Transformations
Chapter 10: Representing Japan: Stereotyping and self-stereotyping in the many careers of Yamaguchi Yoshiko
Chapter 11: Myth, manga, technology and gender: Chobits and the post-war Pygmalion
Chapter 12: Personal connections and global relations: Staging ‘Japan of the imagination’ in the 1980s
Index

Citation preview

Capture Japan

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Capture Japan Visual Culture and the Global Imagination from 1952 to the Present Edited by Marco Bohr

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection and editorial material © Marco Bohr, 2023 Individual chapters © his authors, 2023 Marco Bohr has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xvi–xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Topographical Healing, 1995, conceptual model © Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8679-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8678-1 eBook: 978-1-3501-8680-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

I am dedicating this book to Patricia, the love of my life.

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Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Note on text and translation

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Introduction  Marco Bohr 1 Part I  Signs Introduction to Part I: Signs  Marco Bohr 15 1 2 3

Le Samouraï: Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinematic Japan  Daisuke Miyao 18 Dreaming of Mexico: Japanese artists discover the Other  Ramona Handel-Bajema 36 Re/placing Barthes in the post-bubble era: Youthful disaffection, online fandom and the reoriented visions of ‘Japan’ in Iwai Shunji’s All about Lily Chou-Chou  Man-tat Terence Leung 57

Part II  Myths Introduction to Part II: Myths  Marco Bohr 85 4 5 6

The ‘Last Japanese Soldier’: Putting the nation into play  Martin Picard and Martin Roth 87 Sugimoto Hiroshi and the emergence of a geopolitical ‘Japanese style’  Marco Bohr 107 Japan as an ‘erotic paradise’ in the Sino-Japanese mobility context: Ethnographic encounters  Jamie Coates 130

Part III  Ruins Introduction to Part III: Ruins  Marco Bohr 155 7

Shadows of the atomic bombings in The Family of Man: The American photographic exhibition tour of Japan in the post-occupation period  Takenaka Yumi Kim 158

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Fractured land, then and now: The resurgence of ruins in the 1996 Japan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale  Carrie L. Cushman 179 Burnt dresses left for the future: Ishiuchi Miyako’s photographic series ひろしま/hiroshima (2007–present)  Hagiwara Hiroko 199

Part IV  Transformations Introduction to Part IV: Transformations  Marco Bohr 221 10 Representing Japan: Stereotyping and self-stereotyping in the many careers of Yamaguchi Yoshiko  Jennifer Coates 224 11 Myth, manga, technology and gender: Chobits and the post-war Pygmalion  Selma A. Purac 245 12 Personal connections and global relations: Staging ‘Japan of the imagination’ in the 1980s  Melissa Miles 269 Index

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Figures 0.1 Protest against the Japan–US Security Treaty and the visit of US president Dwight Eisenhower, rally on 18 June 1960 in Tokyo. © The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images 0.2 Sakai Yoshinori lights the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics on 10 October 1964. © Kyodo News Stills via Getty Images 0.3 Japanese foreign minister Komura Masahiko and Japanese popular cartoon characters Doraemon and Nobita-kun attend the Anime Ambassador inauguration ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 19 March 2008 in Tokyo. © Kimura Junko via Getty Images 0.4 Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no shōjo haiji) © Fuji TV, 1974. Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo 0.5 Domon Ken, The Actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko, 1952 © Ken Domon. CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo 0.6 Suzuki Shin´ichi, Actor in Samurai Armor, 1870s, Albumen silver print from glass negative, 24.6 x 18.9 cm (9 11/16 x 7 7/16 in.). © Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images 1.1 Jef (Alain Delon) is lying on a bed in his New York-like apartment. Le Samouraï, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville © Filmel 1967. All rights reserved 1.2 Jef has a special relationship with his little bird. Le Samouraï, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville © Filmel 1967. All rights reserved 1.3 Jef looks into a mirror. Le Samouraï, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville © Filmel 1967. All rights reserved 2.1 Okamoto Tarō, Myth of Tomorrow (Asu no Shinwa), Tokyo. Photograph by Ramona Handel-Bajema © The author 2.2 Okamoto Tarō, Myth of Tomorrow (Asu no Shinwa), Tokyo. Photograph by Hamano Hideya 2.3 Okamoto Tarō, Tower of the Sun, Osaka, Japan. Photograph by Ramona Handel-Bajema © The author 2.4 Okamoto Tarō, Tower of the Sun, Osaka, Japan. Photograph by Ramona Handel-Bajema © The author

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3.1 Yuichi’s encounter with his idol in the form of MTV footages. All about Lily Chou-Chou (Rirī Shushu no Subete), dir. Iwai Shunji © Rockwell Eyes Inc. 2001. All rights reserved 3.2 Yuichi staring at ‘Lily Chou-Chou’ outside the concert stadium. All about Lily Chou-Chou (Rirī Shushu no Subete), dir. Iwai Shunji © Rockwell Eyes Inc. 2001. All rights reserved 3.3 Yuichi’s romantic delusions of Yōko after the rape incident. All about Lily Chou-Chou (Rirī Shushu no Subete), dir. Iwai Shunji © Rockwell Eyes Inc. 2001. All rights reserved 3.4 Hoshino’s tormented feelings of profound solitude and frustration in contemporary Japan. All about Lily Chou-Chou (Rirī Shushu no Subete), dir. Iwai Shunji © Rockwell Eyes Inc. 2001. All rights reserved 4.1 Gameplay scene in ‘THE Last Japanese Soldier’ (Tamsoft) © D3 Publisher, 2007 4.2 Gameplay scene in ‘THE Battleship’ (Tamsoft) © D3 Publisher, 2004. All rights reserved 4.3 Stage selection menu in ‘THE Battleship’ (Tamsoft) © D3 Publisher, 2004. All rights reserved 4.4 The wartime code tora tora tora introduces the action in the stage ‘Battle off the coast of Hawaii’ in ‘THE Battleship’ (Tamsoft) © D3 Publisher, 2004. All rights reserved 5.1 Sugimoto Hiroshi, Polar Bear, 1976, Gelatin silver print, 16–15/18 × 21–3/8 in./42.1 × 54.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Sugimoto Hiroshi 5.2 Sugimoto Hiroshi, Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, 1980, Gelatin silver print, 47 × 73 in. /119.4 × 185.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Sugimoto Hiroshi 5.3 Sugimoto Hiroshi, Carpenter Center, Richmond, 1993, Gelatin silver print, 16–1/2 × 21–1/4 in./41.9 × 54 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Sugimoto Hiroshi 5.4 Sugimoto Hiroshi, Sea of Buddha 001, 1995, Gelatin silver print, 46.8 × 58.7 in./119 × 149.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Sugimoto Hiroshi 7.1 The Family of Man at a venue in Tokyo, March 1956. Courtesy of Takashimaya Archives © Takashimaya Archives 7.2 The installation of Yamahata Yosuke’s photographs in The Family of Man at a Tokyo venue, March 1956. Courtesy of Takashimaya Archives © Takashimaya Archives

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7.3 Kitajima Munehito ed., Kiroku Shashin Genbaku no Nagasaki (Tokyo: Daiichi Shuppansha, 1952), no page number. Photograph by Takenaka Yumi Kim © Takashimaya Archives 7.4 Genshiryoku Heiwariyo no Shiori (exhibition pamphlet), no publisher, no date. Photograph by Takenaka Yumi Kim © Takashimaya Archives 8.1 Topographical Healing, 1995, conceptual model © Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates 8.2 Floor installation for the Japan Pavilion at the Sixth International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 1996 © Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates 8.3 Installation view of the Japan Pavilion, the Sixth International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 1996, Miyamoto Ryuji © 1996/Miyamoto Ryuji 8.4 Tsukuba City Center. Photograph by Carrie L. Cushman © The author 9.1 Ishiuchi Miyako, ひろしま/hiroshima # 9, donor: Ogawa, R., 2007 © Ishiuchi Miyako. Image courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya, Osaka 9.2 Ishiuchi Miyako, ひろしま/hiroshima # 43, donor: Yamane, S., 2007 © Ishiuchi Miyako. Image courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya, Osaka 9.3 Ishiuchi Miyako, ひろしま/hiroshima # 8, donor: Sawamoto, N., 2010 © Ishiuchi Miyako. Image courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya, Osaka 10.1 Promotional materials featuring Ri Kōran and Hasegawa Kazuo. Author's private collection. Photograph by Jennifer Coates © The author 10.2 On-set photographs of Ri Kōran and Hasegawa Kazuo in various Man-ei-Tōhō collaboration films. Author's private collection. Photograph by Jennifer Coates © The author 10.3 A scrapbook created by a fan, featuring promotional photographs of Ri Kōran and Hasegawa Kazuo, a miniature reproduction of the poster for China Nights, and a photograph of Hasegawa Kazuo performing as an onnagata kabuki female role-player. Author's private collection. Photograph by Jennifer Coates © The author 10.4 Still photography from a scrapbook created by a fan, featuring Ri Kōran and Hasegawa Kazuo. Author's private collection. Photograph by Jennifer Coates © The author

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11.1 Chobits by CLAMP © Kodansha Comics 2000. All rights reserved. Photograph by Selma A. Purac 11.2 Chobits by CLAMP © Kodansha Comics 2000. All rights reserved. Photograph by Selma A. Purac 11.3 Chobits by CLAMP © Kodansha Comics 2000. All rights reserved. Photograph by Selma A. Purac 12.1 Christopher Köller, Untitled from the series Zen Zen Chigau, 1984, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy of the artist 12.2 Christopher Köller, Untitled from the series Zen Zen Chigau, 1984, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy of the artist 12.3 Christopher Köller, Untitled from the series Zen Zen Chigau, 1984, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy of the artist

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Contributors Marco BOHR is an associate professor in visual communication at Nottingham Trent University. He has been the recipient of a Japan Foundation Fellowship and a JSPS Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. With Basia Sliwinska, Marco co-edited the volume The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self (2020). Jamie COATES is a senior lecturer in East Asian studies at the University of Sheffield. Trained as an anthropologist, he uses ethnographic, historical and media-based approaches to explore the relationship between technology, mobility, identity and imagination in transnational Asia. Jennifer COATES is a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (2016) and Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 19451968: An Ethnographic Study (2022) and co-editor of Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen (2021) and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (2019). Carrie L. CUSHMAN is the Edith Dale Monson Gallery director and curator for the Galleries at the University of Hartford. A specialist in Japanese photography, her writings appear in edited volumes, international exhibition catalogues and scholarly journals, including the Review of Japanese Culture and Society and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. HAGIWARA Hiroko, born in 1951, is an emeritus professor of Osaka Prefecture University. She authored titles on gender, race and visual arts in Japanese. Her English essays were published in Disrupted Borders (1993), Imagination without Borders (2010) and Mirror Reflecting Darkly (2021). She has contributed to Third Text, Positions and n.paradoxa. Ramona HANDEL-BAJEMA received her doctorate from Columbia University in modern Japanese history in 2012. She is currently the chief program officer at

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Japan Society in New York City. She is the author of Art across Borders: Japanese Artists in the United States before World War II (2022). Man-tat Terence LEUNG received his PhD degree in humanities and creative writing in 2014 and taught in the College of Professional and Continuing Education at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Several of his manuscripts on film and comparative literature have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Partial Answers and Cinéma & Cie. He is currently working on his first monograph tentatively entitled ‘Dialectics of Two Refusals: Cinema, China, and the Affirmative Counter-Politics of May ‘68’. Melissa MILES is a professor of art history based at Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Her research explores the interdisciplinary qualities of photography and its movement across art, law and politics. Her books include Photography, Truth and Reconciliation (2019) and Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia-Japan Relationship (with Robin Gerster, 2018). Daisuke MIYAO is a professor and Hajime Mori chair in Japanese language and literature at the University of California, San Diego. Miyao is the author of Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema (2020), Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies (2019), The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (2013) and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (2007). He is also the editor of Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (2014) and the co-editor of Transnational Cinematography Studies (2017), with Lindsay Coleman and Roberto Schaefer. Martin PICARD is a research associate at Leipzig University. His teaching and research interests cover Japanese video games and cinema, as well as video game history and aesthetics. He published articles in journals such as Game Studies and New Media & Society, and chapters in anthologies such as The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014) and The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2009). Selma A. PURAC is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Her interdisciplinary work in word-image relations allows her to bridge her interests in literary theory, art history and cultural studies. These interests have influenced

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both her scholarship and the course that she teaches, which focus on media as varied as advertising, film, music videos and manga. Martin ROTH is an associate professor at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, and a research fellow at Stuttgart Media University. He works on video games and digital culture, with a regional focus on Japan. His first monograph, ThoughtProvoking Play, is available in open access from ETC Press. TAKENAKA Yumi Kim is a professor of art history and visual cultural studies at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. She is the author of Bigaku to gendaibijutsu no kyori [The Distance between Aesthetics and Contemporary Art] (2004) and the co-editor of Fūkei no ningengaku [An Anthropology of Landscape] (2020).

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for their support, providing me with the opportunity to embark on a post-doctoral fellowship at Ritsumeikan University in 2017. At Ritsumeikan I would like to give a special thanks to Takenaka Yumi Kim, who supported my application, functioned as my academic host and has since become a friend. While based in Kyoto I had a number of inspiring discussions with colleagues which directly contributed to the shape of this book. These colleagues include Jaqueline Berndt, Jamie Coates, Jennifer Coates, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Kondō Ryosuke, Paul Dumouchel, Stevie Suan, Takeuchi Mariko, Ingrid Hoelzl, Nakama Yuko, Daniel Palmer, Yoshida Hiroshi and many others. It is during this intense period of the fellowship that the foundations of this book started to emerge. A special thanks also to my friend and colleague Basia Sliwinska, whose comments and feedback on the book proposal helped me tremendously. The support, guidance and advice from David Bate is also much appreciated. Timon Screech, and his inspirational style of teaching, also impacted a number of ideas for the book. Thank you to the publisher Bloomsbury for all their help and support in getting the book off the ground. Thank you to Diana Perry Schnelle for her expert support in the latter stages of this project. During the editing process I never lost sight of the fact that this is a gigantic team project. Therefore, a very big thank you goes to all the contributors who have so generously dedicated their time to write their chapters, get image permissions and all the other ‘bits and bops’ associated with working on such a large project. It is due to their dedication, commitment and professionalism that this book came together. Thank you to Jamie Coates, Jennifer Coates, Carrie L. Cushman, Ramona Handel-Bajema, Hagiwara Hiroko, Man-tat Terence Leung, Melissa Miles, Daisuke Miyao, Martin Picard, Selma A. Purac, Martin Roth and Takenaka Yumi Kim. Thank you for all your hard work. Thank you to my parents Madeline and Stefan as well as my brother Nico and his family for their love and support. Thank you to my friends Murota Haruna, Miyamoto Kōta as well as the Miyamoto family. Finally, I would like to thank the love of my life and best friend Patricia, and my three children, Cleo, Maxine and Runa. They have been there since the very inception of the book, when the five

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of us were living in Kyoto’s Hanazono Danchi. On so many occasions Patricia has taught me how to see the world from a different perspective and I am forever grateful for providing me with much-needed strength, encouragement and guidance. Whether it is coming up with the title of the book or the innumerable conversations that ultimately shaped my ideas, Patricia has had a major impact on every aspect of this project. I dedicate this book to her.

Note on text and translation In this book Japanese names appear in the order they would appear in Japan, that is surname followed by the given name. However, there are some significant exceptions to this rule, for example for individuals of Japanese heritage. Where a Japanese author has published the majority of their work in the English language, or a preference for western naming convention has been established through previously published work, we have respected this preference where applicable. This volume also includes the exceptional case of a Manchuria-born Japanese actress who is known under a variety of different names and who thus used different naming conventions. In Japan the modern era is divided into periods in accordance with the length of an emperor’s reign: Heisei period (1989–2019), Shōwa period (1926–89), Taishō period (1912–26), Meiji period (1868–1912) and so on. While official documents and newspapers in Japan use regnal years (for example Heisei 1), in research on contemporary Japanese art, culture and society, the use of regnal years is rare and I have therefore opted to use the Gregorian calendar system. To provide clarity, when an emperor’s reign is mentioned, this is followed by Gregorian calendar years in brackets. To indicate long vowels in Japanese words or names, diacritical marks called macrons are placed above a letter. Exceptions are made for those words standardized in the English language, for example Tokyo and Kyoto, or in rare cases in which individuals have previously indicated a long vowel in their name with the letter ‘h’ or ‘u’, for example Hosoe Eikoh. Some authors referenced in this book have also opted to exclude macrons with their names, and this choice is respected by likewise not including macrons in such instances. Japanese words such as manga appear in italics using the modified Hepburn romanization system. Japanese kanji have been retained where pertinent. If the meaning of a Japanese loan word differs from the language it is derived from, it is also written in italics. Non-English terms that have been assimilated into Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, such as ‘vis-à-vis’, have not been italicized as per the Bloomsbury House Style. Translations are conducted by a case-by-case basis in the chapter and the name of the translator is mentioned where available in brackets in a footnote.

Introduction Marco Bohr

This book is concerned with the way that visual culture creates, drives and transforms perceptions about Japan. Borrowing from Edward Said’s concept of ‘imaginative geographies’, the book’s ambition is to show the profound impact that visual culture has had in shaping perceptions about Japan and how these perceptions have, in turn, informed cultural, political and historical discourse. I am purposefully referring to visual culture as a science that is concerned with the interpretation and analysis of the social significance of images. In this book such images include photography, video games, film, manga and anime, and extend to three-dimensional works such as installation art or sculpture. While the main focus of the case studies presented in this book is primarily imagebased, interdisciplinary research methods brought a variety of contributors into areas of discussion that investigate other non-visual discourses. One of the fundamental questions that this book seeks to address is how images have shaped ideas and perceptions about Japan, and how these ideas are directly related to the cultural, political and historical contexts these images have been created in and crucially for whom they have been created. In sum, the book is concerned with the specific contexts that gave rise to certain images which shaped and transformed perceptions about Japan. Although contributors were welcome to reference previous historical periods in their chapters, the main time frame for the case studies presented in this book ranges from 1952 to the present, thus covering about seven decades. The year 1952 is significant for a number of reasons. The 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, also referred to as the Treaty of Peace with Japan, came into effect in 1952 and marks the re-establishment of peaceful relations between the Allied Powers and Japan. In parallel to the Treaty of San Francisco and as a condition of ending the US occupation, the US–Japan Security Treaty also came into force in 1952. The US–Japan Security Treaty was a remarkably short text, consisting of only five articles, and it effectively dictated to Japan to grant the United States the territorial means to establish a military presence in the country. The United

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States resisted calls for a revision of the treaty, in part to allow sufficient time to build up a significant military presence in Japan, and it was not until the far more comprehensive 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, colloquially known as Anpo, that Japan’s position vis-à-vis its former occupying power was formalized. However, Anpo was fiercely protested in Japan: iconic images of mass protests at the National Diet Building in Tokyo in 1960 allude to the increased tensions that the continued presence of US military in Japan has caused. In order to provide a historical framework for this book, I am using the year 1952 as a key landmark for the complex power relations that emerged between Japan and the United States – a geopolitical axis that has shaped the post–Second World War era globally (Figure 0.1). Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, and despite increased protests and tensions, the United States became the preeminent hegemonic power in Japan. This alliance was not entirely one-sided: it afforded Japan access to nuclear power, facilitated access to global capital and investment and helped to create one of the greatest economic comebacks ever experienced. While, on the one hand, Japan provided the United States with strategic military positions in the Asia-Pacific sphere, so crucial during the Vietnam War for instance, on the other hand, the United States also provided Japan with prosperity, security and geopolitical power on the world stage. The Tokyo Olympics in 1964 marked another major turning point for Japan which was now in a position to advertise a modern, forward-looking and welcoming image to the world (Figure 0.2). By 1974, Japan secured a position in the ‘Group of Five’, also known as the ‘Library Group’, which was the precursor to the annual G7 summit of leading industrial nations. From Japan’s surrender in 1945, the country has emerged as one of the world’s leading and fastest growing economies. This is relevant because when we speak of Japan it is very difficult to apply a rigid East/West binary to the power dynamic that emerged in relation to Japan’s rapid rise on the world stage. Japan is geographically located in the Far East, yet even though it is separated by thousands of miles from any other G7 nation, ideologically Japan is fully integrated into the US-lead security sphere that has underpinned Western capitalist structures in the post–Second World War era. Japan’s rise in such a relatively short time period required a major re-calibration on how the country is represented in a variety of media. US military propaganda films during the war years tended to depict Japan in a way that is menacing, vicious or cowardly, often with very strong racist undertones. Though as Japan emerged as a military and economic ally to the West after the Second World War, depictions of Japan started to change with these times. Japan

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Figure 0.1  Protest against the Japan–US Security Treaty and the visit of US president Dwight Eisenhower, rally on 18 June 1960 in Tokyo. Photo by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images.

in the global imagination did not represent a military foe or enemy any longer but a country that the West would be curious about, would want to engage in, appreciate its rituals and customs and so forth. From a very early stage, both the United States and Japan understood the major role that visual culture, and

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Figure 0.2  Sakai Yoshinori lights the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics on 10 October 1964. Photo by Kyodo News Stills via Getty Images.

art more specifically, can play in restoring Japan’s image on the world stage and thus legitimize US efforts to establish Japan as its key ally in Asia. Celebrating the signing of the Peace Treaty, the de Young Museum in San Francisco hosted the special exhibition ‘Art Treasures from Japan’ in 1951, displaying major works of art loaned to the museum. Reflecting on this exhibition, Life magazine reported: The art of Japan is generally tranquil, not often tragic or violent. It reflects religious traditions and most of all the Japanese love of homeland and countryside. Scrolls, screens and wood-block prints, all highly decorative, are done with meticulous care, formalized refinement of detail and delicate beauty of color which place Japan’s among the great art of the world.1

A reader’s letter published three weeks later, which criticizes Life for the ‘gross oversimplification of the true facts’, illustrates how the media’s attempt to frame Japan in this new light did not come without its tensions. It would therefore be incorrect to assume that Japan’s rapid transformation on the geopolitical stage, from foe to ally, represents a one-directional change in perception, nor

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is it all or primarily driven by the United States. Rather, as the chapters in this book will show, Japan in the global imagination underwent a series of different transformations – these depend very much on the historical contexts, from where they originate and crucially, which audiences were meant to be reached. The cultural diplomacy that transformed Japan’s image in the early parts of the Peace Treaty was predominantly driven by traditional Japanese art forms. However, as Japan emerged as a major technological innovator, other more contemporaneous forms of visual culture were incorporated into efforts to figuratively and indeed literally paint a new picture of Japan. There was also a considerable lag between US-led efforts to drive new perceptions about Japan as early as 1951, compared to countries in East Asia where memories about Japan’s brutal imperial wars were still fresh and painful. It was, therefore, not until much later that Japan embarked on cultural diplomacy with countries in Asia. By an act of the National Diet in 1972, the Japan Foundation was formed to promote Japanese culture and language internationally. The organization grew rapidly though engagement with Asian countries throughout much of the 1970s was still rather tentative. Apart from government-led programmes, which would be seen with a sense of suspicion in Asia, Japan soon recognized the critical role that Japanese popular culture can play in contributing and indeed shaping relations in Asia and the rest of the world. The anime family comedy television series Doraemon (1979–2005), for instance, marked a very clear effort to promote a more friendly image of Japan through colourful images, humour and fast-paced animation mainly targeted at children (Figure 0.3). Shows like Doraemon built on the major success that anime programmes such as Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no shōjo haiji, 1974) or 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (Haha o tazunete sanzenri, 1976) had across the world. Translated into dozens of languages and licensed to be shown on TV channels from the Middle East to South Africa, during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an entire generation of children, myself included, grew up with the main protagonists of these anime as well as the idyllic representations of the imaginative geographies these anime depict: in the case of Heidi this is the beautiful landscape of the Swiss Alps (Figure 0.4), and in the case of Marco – the main protagonist in 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother – it is the bustling harbour city Genoa in Italy. In this context we need to consider a fascinating slippage between perceptions about a place and from where these perceptions originate and how and by whom they are produced. Even if they are derived from Swiss and Italian literature, in the anime versions Heidi’s ‘Switzerland’ and Marco’s ‘Italy’ are highly imaginative constructs, though they become palpably

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Figure 0.3  Japanese foreign minister Komura Masahiko and Japanese popular cartoon characters Doraemon and Nobita-kun attend the Anime Ambassador inauguration ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 19 March 2008 in Tokyo. Photo by Kimura Junko/Getty Images.

Figure 0.4  Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no shōjo haiji) © Fuji TV 1974.

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‘real’ in the imagination of a child. The other element that requires emphasis is that these imagined spaces were constructed by and through Japanese forms of visual expression. The enormous ‘soft power’ that Japanese anime studios can now exert on a country, including on its own country, was starting to be recognized in the upper echelons of Japanese anime studios, TV companies and media organizations. A case in point is the animator and director Miyazaki Hayao, who worked on Heidi as a young man, and who grew to become one of Japan’s best-known film-makers, internationally celebrated for his mythical and fantastical depictions of Japan. The severe economic crisis of the 1990s, on the one hand, yet the continued popularity of Japanese cultural products across the world, on the other hand, represented a fork in the road for the country. In addition to being an economic superpower, Japan recognized the enormous potential of becoming a cultural superpower, much of it driven by Japanese visual culture. In 2002 the phrase ‘Japan’s Gross Domestic Cool’ was getting significant traction, echoing the excitement and sense of optimism brought about by ‘Cool Britannia’ in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. By 2005 ‘Cool Japan’ (or ‘Japan Cool’) emerged as official government policy in Japan. Crucially for this book, it was not government ministries concerned with domestic affairs but it was Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs MOFA that was mainly in charge of driving this nation branding. In other words, ‘Cool Japan’ and the ‘soft power’ associated with it is primarily focused on perceptions from outside of Japan, or Japan in the global imagination. This form of cultural diplomacy, much of it relying on visual means, sought to depict Japan as a welcoming, creative and technologically advanced country. In recognition of the powerful institutions that drive Japan’s image globally, this book contends that in order to better understand how Japan’s image has changed over the decades, we must ask whose interests this image supports, which stakeholders stand behind it and how it fits into larger more structural geopolitical shifts. The chapters in this book show a deep awareness of the dynamics and the colonial legacy of Orientalism and the hegemonic framework through which Japan has been and continues to be viewed. In order to understand perceptions about Japan, we must also understand the profound and long-lasting impact that Orientalist discourses have had on the way that Japan has been historically perceived in a global context. Japonisme, aestheticization, exoticization, stereotypes, clichés and essentialisms are all deeply ingrained in a variety of visual discourses which are discussed in this book. However, the book also presents convincing case studies whereby the dynamics of Orientalism have

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been inverted, utilizing specific discursive formations to present a self-image that suited particular agendas at particular moments in history. To that end, the book complicates our understanding of Orientalism: rather than reducing it to something that the West superimposes onto a Japan, the book provides plenty of evidence where this power dynamic is undermined, subverted or reversed. Further to this, the book also questions the East/West binary-ism historically associated with Orientalist discourses by, for example, examining the role of countries such as China, Mexico and Australia. While the US/Japan axis is one of the more dominant ones in the post–Second World War era, and many chapters indeed refer to this power dynamic, it is clear that as the geopolitical landscape changes, other perceptions about Japan too will emerge. Inasmuch the book questions rigid binaries between the East and West, the book also questions strict definitions of what constitutes Japanese and nonJapanese visual culture. Featured in this book are examples of representations of a female actor of Japanese descent born in Manchuria and a Japanese-born photographer living the vast majority of his life in New York (Figure 0.5). The question of who and what exactly is Japanese is therefore rather ambiguous, thus feeding into the overall argument of the book that constructions about Japan in the global imagination are highly fluid and that they very much depend on the institutional, political and ideological framework that these were created within. The book also provides examples where perceptions about Japan are formed not in direct reference to the country or to its people, but more indirectly through the inclusion of what are presumed to be ideas about an imaged Japan. In other words, perceptions about Japanese visuality or Japanese style in the global imagination are so powerful that they take on their own form of visual expression as a type of visual lingua franca. This book aims to analyse, interrogate and question some of these tendencies in a wide variety of different visual contexts. All chapters in this book have in common that they focus on Japan in the global imagination and how this space is shaped by very specific and observable visual attributes. Further to this, all contributions in this book have in common that they write about images, not as simple by-products of society but as an active tool involved in the shaping of a variety of discourses which extends from identity, sexuality, gender, politics, ideology to history. Our understanding of these discourses is not only dependent, but it is constructed through, by and with images we have of others and of ourselves. This is an important point to bear in mind because not only is this book concerned with the analysis of these images, it is also concerned how images themselves have contributed and in many ways shaped the way Japan is perceived and how it perceives itself in the global imagination.

Introduction

9

Figure 0.5  Domon Ken, The Actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko, 1952.

The word ‘capture’ in the title of the book references a level of dominance, even aggression with regard to images and their colonial legacies. ‘Capture’ recognizes that historically Japan has been ‘captured’ by Western technologies such as

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Capture Japan

Figure 0.6  Suzuki Shin´ichi, Actor in Samurai Armor, 1870s, Albumen silver print from glass negative.

early photographic experiments. Yokohama Shashin is an entire photographic genre established in the 1860s that focused on aestheticized and exoticized depictions of Japan by Western photographers operating in Yokohama and other rapidly expanding port towns in Japan. This way of ‘capturing’ Japan was then adapted by Japanese photographers whose work catered to the burgeoning tourist market (Figure 0.6). The focus in much of this work is to depict people or sceneries that are in themselves ‘captivating’ and would gain the viewers’

Introduction

11

attention. The complex and often troublesome relationship between imagemaking, colonial legacies and the construction of a visual spectacle for specific political, ideological or economic interests is recognized, from a multiplicity of perspectives, throughout this book.

Note 1 ‘A Great Delicate Art’, Life, Asia Special Issue, 31 December 1951: 67.

12

Part I

Signs

14

Introduction to Part I Signs Marco Bohr

The title of the first part of this volume, ‘signs’, is a reference to the influential book Empire of Signs (L’Empire des signes) by the French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes. The book is the accumulation of short but poignant critical inquiries which Barthes made while based in Japan in 1966 in his capacity as visiting professor. Published in the French language in 1970 and released in the English language in 1982, Empire of Signs had a profound impact on French literary circles and public perceptions about Japan more broadly. Crucially for this part of the book, Barthes declares from the very outset of Empire of Signs that rather than analysing the signs and symbols of a real country, his descriptions of culture and customs are derived from a ‘fictive nation’ with an ‘invented name’ which he calls Japan. One of the main arguments Barthes developed in the book is that much of Japanese customs, art and culture more broadly function without clearly defined centres. Barthes’ principal thesis is derived from his observation that the grounds of the Imperial Palace situated in the centre of Tokyo represent ‘an empty centre’. According to Barthes, this type of centrelessness translates into a wide variety of different cultural forms of expression: from food to traditional Japanese theatre. Not surprisingly, over the years Barthes was heavily criticized for promoting an exoticized version of Japan – much of it relies on a comparison to Western standards or misconceptions about a country that Barthes only briefly visited a few times. Far from being empty, the relative scarcity of buildings on the grounds of the Imperial Palace, or the lack of depictions of this space on maps, is in itself a signifier for the reverence, respect and political sensitivity (both historic and contemporaneous) in relation to the emperor. In other words, the emptiness observed by Barthes is a space laden with history, identity, nationhood and politics – even if this is not ‘visible’. Barthes was criticized for superimposing his Western worldview on Japan, finding delight in various aspects of Japanese culture because they represented

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a cultural Other to France. Though as critical one can be about Empire of Signs, the book alludes to the profound tensions that arise from analysing signs and how such analysis contributes as well as shapes perceptions about a country, to the point of creating an entirely imagined space. The profound implication of Empire of Signs for this volume is that the experience of a cultural space is not just framed, but that it is driven by images as well as perceptions of these images. Methodologically, too, Barthes is very relevant for this volume: partially as a result of his book Camera Lucida, published in 1981 (first published in French as La chambre Claire in 1980), semiotics is considered to be one of the foundational methodologies in photography studies and has had a very strong impact on visual culture more broadly. In Camera Lucida, Barthes distinguishes between ‘studium’, that which creates interest in a photograph, and ‘punctum’, that object or part of the image that jumps out at the viewer: ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’, Barthes famously writes.1 It is in reference to Barthes’ ability to highlight as well as question the relevance of the image in society and how it contributes to spaces of the imaginary that this part of the book is called ‘signs’. Daisuke Miyao’s chapter on the 1967 neo-noir film Le Samouraï by the French director Jean-Pierre Melville provides a poignant case where impressions about presumed Japanese mythology and aesthetics have been incorporated into the language of cinema. Although the film makes strong allusions that are specific to Japanese culture, reinforced by cinematic techniques such as long takes or extreme close-ups, none of the characters in the film are Japanese nor is the film set in Japan. In other words, the ‘Japan’ that is created in this film is very much based on mythological conceptions about an imagined space. In his analysis, Miyao incorporates Barthes’ Empire of Signs, pointing out a rather important example where conceptions about the void are constructed through the cinematic text, reinforcing the notion that the void is in itself a deeply political space. The fact that Le Samouraï predates Empire of Signs by about three years is an indication of how powerful conceptions about Japan were at this moment in time in France. Miyao’s chapter alludes to the power of signs and symbols and how they can impact the reading of a film. While Miyao draws a trajectory from France to a mythologized and imagined Japan, the chapter by Ramona Handel-Bajema focuses on an example where mythology and folklore were the driving factors that brought the internationally acclaimed artist Okamoto Tarō from Japan to Mexico. Okamoto’s interest in Mexican art was in part provoked by a 1955 exhibition held in Tokyo which was received to wide public acclaim. As Japan’s economy developed, artists like

Introduction to Part I

17

Okamoto sought an escape from the never-ending economic progress promoted by the Western capitalist paradigm. Mexico’s ancient folkloristic rituals, so rich with signs and symbols, provided a much longed-for counterbalance to narratives about Western modernity. Handel-Bajema’s chapter complicates any presumptions about East/West binaries, emphasizing the profound impact that Mexican folk art has had on one of Japan’s best-known artists. Indeed, the chapter puts to question to what extent we can categorize artists and their visual style in relation to their nationality if we consider the transcultural dimension of signs and symbols in Okamoto’s work. The final chapter in Part I by Man-tat Terence Leung argues that ‘the very subversive potentials of Barthes’ deconstructive project in Empire of Signs were far from fully actualized or exhausted’. To drive this point, Leung’s chapter reveals a number of rather surprising links between Barthes’ thesis and All about Lily Chou-Chou (2001), an influential and technologically innovative film by director Iwai Shunji, which focuses on idol and youth culture in Japan. In his analysis, Leung points to a number of cinematic elements made more powerful when viewed through a Barthesian lens. In addition to analysing Japanese cultural trends at the turn of the millennium, Leung’s chapter provides a framework to view and deconstruct the film as a series of symbols situated in a global image economy. In his reading of All about Lily, Leung’s chapter foreshadows a world that is driven by technology as well as the signs, symbols and icons that this technology prioritizes.

Note 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

1

Le Samouraï Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinematic Japan Daisuke Miyao

Introduction ‘There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle . . . . Perhaps . . . (Bushido: The Life of Samurai).’ The French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville began his acclaimed 1967 film Le Samouraï with this epigraph. While Melville listed the source, we cannot find an exact line in the 1905 book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, by the Japanese diplomat Nitobe Inazō, or in the 1716 book Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, by the Japanese samurai Yamamoto Tsunemoto. Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists that Joan MacLeod’s novel The Ronin (ronin translates the masterless samurai) is what Le Samouraï is based on, but neither myself nor the film historian Ginette Vincendeau, who has written a book-length study of Melville, has found any evidence that this novel ever existed.1 So it is most likely that the epigraph was not a quote but Melville’s invention. How did he come up with this Japan-inspired epigraph? In spite of what the title and epigraph might suggest, Le Samouraï is not a jidaigeki (period drama) set in Japan. Rather, Le Samouraï is a story of a contract killer called Jef Costello and played by the French actor Alain Delon and is set in Paris in the 1960s. No historical samurai character appears in the film. Why, then, did Melville call this film Le Samouraï? If Jef Costello is the character that Melville considered to be a samurai, how did he visualize his image of a samurai with him? To that end Melville told the film critic Rui Nogueira a curious anecdote about the time when Delon wanted Melville to read to him the screenplay for The Samouraï: The reading took place at his [Delon’s] apartment. . . . Alain listened without moving until suddenly, looking up to glance at his watch, he stopped me: ‘You’ve

Le Samouraï

19

been reading the script for seven and a half minutes now and there hasn’t been a word of dialogue. That’s good enough for me. I’ll do the film. What’s the title?’ ‘Le Samouraï,’ I told him. Without a word he signed to me to follow him. He led me to his bedroom: all it contained was a leather couch and a samurai’s lance, sword and dagger.2

For both Melville and Delon, silence is a key characteristic of a samurai. Moreover, Delon had already been attracted to the image of the samurai before Melville contacted him about the film. Melville also said, ‘[T]here was something Japanese about him [Delon].’3 Even though he did not explain, Melville connected the images of Delon and a Japanese samurai. What exactly was his conception of a samurai? By focusing on the opening scene of Le Samouraï and deconstructing the scene analysed later in the following paragraphs, I try to answer what Melville’s allusion to the samurai seeks to signify. Referring to the romantic – not necessarily historically candid – notion that Japanese people had a particular philosophical and moral code called bushido, or the code of samurai, handed down through generations, Nitobe constructed ‘an essential of Japanese character’ in his book Bushido written in English. Nitobe wrote, ‘What [the samurai] carries in his belt is a symbol of what he carries in his mind and heart – loyalty and honour.’4 Confronting Western imperialism and rapid Westernization of Japan, Nitobe strategically used the ahistorical idea of bushido for his foreign readership. He attempted to connect the purposefully chosen past and the modern Japanese nationalism by emphasizing bushido – codes of loyalty and filial piety – as ‘the formative force of the new era’.5 The first edition of Bushido had modest sales in the United States, but when a revised version was released by Putnam in July 1905, the book received much favourable publicity at the high tide of interest in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905. Bushido was translated into Polish, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Chinese and then in 1908 into Japanese. In this sense, the concept of bushido was first approved by foreign readers before being accepted back in Japan and naturalized as the essence of the Japanese spirit. No matter how imaginary it was, the Western recognition of the exotic beauty of Japanese art had an important impact on the formation of Japanese national identity. Melville’s conception did not only descend from the long history of Japonisme in France since the nineteenth century but existed in the specific context of post–Second World War France. The introduction of Japanese cinema in the global film market for the first time had a huge impact on

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the renewed interests in the image of Japan in France. Nitobe’s strategy was repeated after the Second World War when Japan tried to reconstruct its national image. Japan chose to display the cultural identity of Japan in the form of the traditional, classical artefacts from Japan’s past. After the success of Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira, 1950) at the Venice International Film Festival, the strategy to appeal to international audiences was an emphasis on such cultural motifs as noh and kabuki drama, Zen Buddhism, geisha and samurai, which were self-consciously marked as traditional Japanese. To be more specific, as I will argue, in addition to Nitobe’s Bushido, the cinematography of Miyagawa Kazuo in Rashomon and the literary work by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, whom Miyagawa often referred to, all seemed to play significant roles in the formation of the imaginary Japan in Melville’s mind when he directed Le Samouraï. As such, this chapter’s contribution to the studies of the films of Melville is that his conception of the samurai in Le Samouraï existed in such a complicated historical and cultural context of post–Second World War France. Jennifer Coates convincingly argues elsewhere in this volume that the role of stereotyped images of Japan and Japanese people in popular media after the Second World War and the subsequent Allied occupation of Japan demonstrated how the unequal geopolitical relations between the United States and Japan influenced an image of the country and its people that lives on in global imaginaries. My own chapter examines a similar time period and offers a critical perspective on different geopolitical as well as cultural relations between France and Japan. Images of Japan in the context of French cultural history since the nineteenth century may not simply be a ‘stereotype’ if that term is defined as a ‘controlling image’ as is in Coates’ chapter. Instead, what this chapter suggests is dialogic images of Japan, with which a French film-maker and his audience both define sociopolitical relationship between France and Japan on one hand (as does a ‘stereotype’) and expand their imagination on the country and its people as well as their own culture of France in the post–Second World War era on the other. It is true that my main focus in this chapter is on the authorial perspective that is observable in the opening scene of Le Samouraï. But at the same time, this chapter pays attention to issues around historical specificity that often lack in auteur criticism. In short, in this chapter, in order to overcome the ahistorical tendency of auteur criticism and to expand the scope of national films studies (French cinema, in this case) to a global context, I demonstrate how the film Le Samouraï represents Japan in a very specific cultural, geographic and historical context.

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Vertigo, shadow of a doubt, and the bird The opening scene of Le Samouraï begins with Jef lying on a bed and smoking a cigarette. It is ‘Saturday, April fourth, six o’clock in the evening’, according to the superimposed caption. The first image of this scene is a long, fixed shot of a grey, barren room. It is dark. Dim light comes only from the two sash windows at the back. The walls and the ceiling seem to be white originally but have turned into almost black because of years of dust. Only a few pieces of furniture are visible: a white bed with black dots on the right side of the frame, a birdcage at the centre of the décor in front of the two windows, in which a bullfinch chirps steadily but softly, an old chest and a worn armchair on the left.6 The room looks used and old and does not look updated at all, but it does not look messy but rather tidy. Jef is lying on the bed. Even though it is dark, it is visible that he is in a clean suit. Flutters of smoke from his cigarette float in the air. The sound of cars passing outside in the rain can be heard (Figure 1.1). At initial glance, the opening shot appears as an objective or even detached observation of a man in a dim-lit room. But if being looked at and listened to closely, it reveals its expressive quality in at least three ways. First, after a while, suddenly, the shot begins to tremble at the rhythm of a strange pulsation that distorts the plane. The room appears to swell and retract. The dolly seems to track in and out and the lens looks to zoom in and out several times. This is very similar to a Dolly Zoom Effect, which Alfred Hitchcock used arguably for the

Figure 1.1 Jef (Alain Delon) is lying on a bed in his New York-like apartment. Le Samouraï, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville © Filmel 1967. All rights reserved.

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first time in Vertigo (1958). Thus, there is clearly the authorial presence in this shot. It is not a neutral but meaningful shot. Such distortion of reality could be an expression of Jef ’s inner state. The film critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret argues that this opening shot indicates ‘a sense of spatial and mental uncertainty’.7 As Thoret suggests, the Dolly Zoom Effect emphasizes the collapsing of Jef ’s apparent tidy presence and positions him in an unsettling space. The viewer is immediately put into a state of unease. But still, it is not clear to the viewer what kind of inner state Jef has. In other words, with the use of the Dolly Zoom Effect, the ‘samurai’ in this film is clearly represented as an ambiguous character existing in a rather unusual space. Second, there is another visual trait in this opening shot that also indicates the authorial presence and puts the apparent objective perspective into question. What we see in the two sash windows is a black-and-white photo or picture of brownstone buildings typical in New York. The viewer starts doubting if this is a story set in Paris. The black-and-white image of pseudo-New York in the windows enhances the notion of uncertainty inside of and surrounding Jef. The black-and-white graphics on the two windows have a visual resemblance to the shoji sliding doors in a Japanese-style room. The graphics look like shadow images on white papers, and the camera exposes the interior space of the room, which has the effect that the backlit windows are white. With the title and the epigraph of this film that refer to Japan, the overall darkness of the image could remind the viewer of the Japanese novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s famous writing, In Praise of Shadows (In’ei raisan, 1933–4). Tanizaki argued that Japanese aesthetics was ‘inseparable from darkness’.8 In a section in which he discussed Japanese architecture, Tanizaki wrote: A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is darkest. . . . An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness.9

In Praise of Shadow was not yet translated into French when Melville directed Le Samouraï, but the influence of Tanizaki’s essay was already delivered to France by way of the work of the cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo. As a cinephile, Melville was likely exposed to the work of Miyagawa. Miyagawa was the cinematographer for many of the post–Second World War Japanese films awarded prizes in international film festivals, including Rashomon (Venice Golden Lion in 1951), Mizoguchi Kenji’s Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953; Venice Silver Lion in 1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, 1954;

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23

Venice Silver Lion in 1954). These films with Miyagawa’s cinematography represented the Japanese cinema for many international audiences. The authenticity of representation of Japan in In Praise of Shadow as well as in Miyagawa’s work is doubtful. It is true that Miyagawa explained his cinematographic style in close connection to the culture of Kyoto, the old capital of Japan. Miyagawa said in an interview: [In my house in Kyoto] there was a backyard right behind a completely dark kitchen. The sunlight came through a window on the ceiling, which made only the well bucket in the backyard shine. Such a view that I saw when I was a child left an unexpectedly strong impression on my mind . . . even though I was one of those children who were so shy that they would not go outside but stayed in a dark corner of the house.10

However, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Miyagawa was not aiming to capture the lighting of Kyoto architecture and to call it Japanese beauty. Miyagawa learned how to place and move cameras from Hollywood films. When Miyagawa talked about the dark tones that he preferred, it was not the lighting of Kyoto but that used by such German film-makers as F. W. Murnau. If that was the case, the connection among Miyagawa, the traditional culture of Kyoto and Japanese beauty was formulated in accordance with the post–Second World War policy of Japanese cinema. After the success of Rashomon at the Venice International Film Festival, international distribution of films became a prevalent aspiration for the Japanese film industry. A major strategy taken by Japanese film companies to appeal to international audiences was to emphasize such cultural motifs as noh and kabuki, Zen Buddhism, geisha and samurai that were self-consciously marked as traditionally Japanese. Exotic Japaneseness was sold as a commodity to foreign audiences and publicized as a symbol of the national identity of Japan to be approved internationally. Daiei studio (Dai Nippon Eiga Seisaku Kabushiki Kaisha), where Miyagawa worked, initiated the exoticization of Japanese cinema under Nagata Masaichi, the president. As I discussed elsewhere, the appreciation of shadows was applied to Miyagawa’s work with reference to the architecture and culture of Kyoto in this context.11 Even Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadow was not exactly based on the actuality of the Japanese architecture of the time. Tanizaki wrote In Praise of Shadows, Japan was in the midst of a flourishing culture of electrical light and was leading the world in the vogue of neon signs. Tanizaki fully understood the formidable attraction of such modern technology as electric lighting. Simultaneously, he was aware of the material limitations in Japan. With In Praise of Shadows,

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Tanizaki attempted to invent a tradition by arbitrarily selecting some moment in the past. Experiencing the surging popularity of a certain type of Japanese cinema in post–Second World War Europe, Melville imagined the space for Jef as the dark ambience and shadows. If the darkness is placed in the context of Tanizaki’s invented tradition and Miyagawa’s self-exoticization of Japanese culture, the ambiguity of the space (whether New York, Paris, or Japan) is further enhanced. In sum, the ‘samurai’ room in the opening shot is formulated by Melville as an ambiguously hybrid space of America, France and Japan in the global imagination (Figure 1.2). Third, there is the bird. The sound of the bullfinch dominates the audio space of the opening scene. The bird not only refers to Jef ’s inner state but adds to his connection to the image of Japan. Following the opening long shot, Jef stands up from the bed and caresses the bars of the birdcage with a bundle of half-torn banknotes possibly from his previous hit job, which he then hides in the fireplace. The viewer does not understand what the torn banknotes are and why he hides them. But the tear in the banknotes alludes to a level of violence and aggression that the ‘samurai’ has gone through before the narrative of this film begins. Hiding the banknotes also alludes to the secrecy and the mysteriousness of the main character. Moreover, Jef uses the banknotes to flip against the cage of the bird, as if he is using the money to converse with the bird. In fact, through conversing with the bird, Jef comes to know what is going on. After the police place a microphone in Jef ’s room during his absence, the bird chirps differently to Jef. Jef manages to

Figure 1.2  Jef has a special relationship with his little bird. Le Samouraï, dir. JeanPierre Melville © Filmel 1967. All rights reserved.

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disconnect the microphone. When the henchman hides at Jef ’s apartment, the bird chirps again so that Jef notices the man hiding. Do the bird and Jef have rather telekinetic relationship? Or, is the bird ‘the transmitter’ for Jef and ‘their frequencies are intimately conjugated’, as the film critic Xavier Canonne puts it?12 The unique relationship between Jef and the bird can be located in the context of the French fascination with Japanese naturalism during the Japonisme vogue. As the art historian Mabuchi Akiko suggests, European visitors to Japan in the late nineteenth century were surprised that Japanese people had shown profound affection to the nature and expressed it in their art. In particular, according to Mabuchi, European visitors to Japan, including merchants, diplomats and adventurers, were stunned by ‘the appreciation, observation, and expression of the nature in kachoga (pictures of flowers and birds)’.13 The Swiss diplomat Aimé Humbert, who visited Japan in 1863–4, for instance, wrote in his travelogue, Le Japon Illustré, which was published in Paris in 1870 and widely read by French people, observed the special connection between Japanese people and birds. Humbert wrote: The most beautiful bird among the ones that live and act alone is the white heron. It peers at the transparent waves and patiently aims at its game. It stands on one leg, folding the other leg under its wing. . . . Its instinct and solitary character always look for being blended into the nature. . . . Most of the Japanese people who reside near the coast live lives almost exactly like that of the bird.14

Jef is depicted in this opening scene as living like a bird. He lives and acts alone. Lying on the bed, Jef patiently aims at his game. All he does in the opening shot is to wait for the right moment. Jef stands up silently, hiding his thoughts and emotions under his skin. The solitary character connects to the nature rather than to other humans. The relationship between Jef and the bird is even identical. What the bird sees is what Jef knows. The ‘samurai’ is the bird. The three elements, the vertigo effect, the shadows and the bird, have the combined effect of creating a scene that is unsettling and ambiguous while also foreshadowing the dynamics explored later on in the film. Most importantly, Melville uses these audio-visual effects as building blocks that allude to an imagined ‘Japanese’ state of mind signified by the ‘samurai’.15

Body double Jef is a loner and speaks little and changes his countenance little. We could even say that he is characterized not only as a bird but also as even like an object, not

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as a human with emotions. In this opening scene, right before Jef leaves his room to go on another assignment, he puts on a trench coat and a felt hat and looks into a mirror. A medium close-up captures his face from the side of the mirror. Jef runs his fingers along the brim of his hat. Jef ’s background is pitch black in this close-up. Only the sidelight from the upper left illuminates Jef ’s head. Half of his face is in shadow. It even looks as if Jef were the object that emits the light in the dark. This hard low-key lighting of the close-up was adopted by Henri Decaë, the cinematographer of this film. The lighting emphasizes that Jef does not display any thoughts or emotions in an expressive manner. The same countenance is repeated shortly after. Jef sneaks in a Citroën DS parked on the street of Paris and attempts to start the engine using a bundle of ignition keys. He does not look at the keys but keeps his face straight up. A close-up captures his face from the outside of the windshield where the rain is streaming. This time, his background is rather being white-out while his face is in a shade because it is backlit. Because of the rain on the windshield and the backlit effect, it is difficult to see any thoughts or emotions in Jef ’s facial expression again (Figure 1.3). This film’s obsessive focus on Jef ’s non-human-like countenance that does not display any thoughts or emotion connects Melville’s ‘samurai’ to the first Japanese star of Hollywood cinema, Sessue Hayakawa, who played the role of the samurai a number of times in his career. When Hayakawa first spoke about his performance style, it was in relation to his family history: ‘“When I act,” he said, “I don’t try to show my emotions with my face. In fact, I try to keep my face absolutely impassive. That was my training as a boy of the Samurai class in Japan.

Figure 1.3  Jef looks into a mirror. Le Samouraï, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville © Filmel 1967. All rights reserved.

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In that caste it is considered disgraceful to show your emotions.”’16 Hayakawa became an overnight sensation because of his astounding performance as a sexy villain in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915). When he had to leave Hollywood in the 1920s because of the heightened anti-Japanese sentiment in California, he moved to France, where audiences were still enthusiastic about him. Hayakawa appeared in a number of films and played samurai-like characters in such films as La Bataille (The Danger Line, E. E. Violet, 1923) and Yoshiwara (Max Ophüls, 1937) in France. As a cinephile himself, it is most likely that Melville watched these Hayakawa films. The close-up of Jef looking into the mirror in the dark could be reminiscent of the signature shot that captured Hayakawa in his films. As I have discussed elsewhere, in many films for Hayakawa after The Cheat, one prop became a crucial onscreen entity: the mirror.17 The non-white characters played by Hayakawa look into mirrors quite often in them. Thematically, Hayakawa’s Asian character reflects himself on the mirror and contemplates on his racial identity as non-white living in the West. Stylistically, the mirror emphasizes his physical body, often in close-ups. The Man Beneath (1919) is a good example of this. In the midst of the film, Hayakawa in a role of Dr Ashuter, a young and successful Hindu scientist, looks intensely into a mirror in his dark room. He has just received a letter from Kate, a white woman he loves. She writes to Ashuter, ‘Racial differences and racial hatred exist, in both the East and the West. A love that goes against social beliefs is egotistical and brings unhappiness to those who break this law. It also brings disaster and tragedy to innocent offspring.’ It is so dark in the background of Ashuter in the mirror that the brightness of his face clearly stands out. In a close-up, with his eyes wide open, Ashuter’s double in the mirror recklessly grips the flesh of his right cheek with his left hand. He grabs the skin so strongly that we see some bloody spots on his face when he releases the skin from his hand. Then, Ashuter’s double desperately but implicitly curses his non-white skin colour. Significantly, it is Ashuter’s double that does all of these violent physical and verbal actions – probably for the sake of the narrative of this classical Hollywood film. But we do not see Ashuter himself in the close-up. We see a part of the mirror’s frame in the shot, which reminds us that what we are watching is not Ashuter himself but his double. When we see Ashuter and his reflection in the mirror in a long shot, he is a man who does not display his thoughts or emotions as he has always been and always will be. As I have suggested in my book on Hayakawa, the close-up of his face redefined the existing vocabulary of acting with inscrutable facial expressions.18 An article in Current Opinion in 1918 quotes Cecil B. DeMille’s commenting on

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Hayakawa’s performance in The Cheat and enhances the novelty of Hayakawa’s acting styles. DeMille is quoted, ‘I don’t understand it [Hayakawa’s acting style]; it is new and strange, but it is the greatest thing I ever saw.’19 Hayakawa’s face, such as the one framed in the mirror in The Man Beneath is not simply expressionless. Here, the close-up of his face in the mirror freezes an action in clear and intense ambiguity. This is exactly what happens in Jef ’s close-up captured in the mirror. Jef ’s inscrutable presence in the name of the samurai has close proximity to Hayakawa who played samurai many times. Contrary to Hayakawa’s character in a film like The Man Beneath, Jef does not contemplate on his racial identity when he reflects himself on the mirror. Yet, the close-up of Jef ’s face in the mirror freezes an action that emphasizes the inscrutability of the character because of Delon’s performance. The moment of restraint, or repression of emotions or motivations, is simultaneously that of being exaggerated. Both Hayakawa’s and Delon’s faces captured in the close-ups go beyond the narrative requirements. Their close-ups were treated as the phenomenal effect that is difficult to inscribe. On the close-ups of Hayakawa, the French drama critic Louis Delluc argues: The beauty of Sessue Hayakawa is painful. Few things in the cinema reveal to us, as the lights and silence of this mask do, that there really are alone beings. I well believe that all lonely people, and they are numerous, will discover their own recourseless despair in the intimate melancholy of this savage Hayakawa.20

The ‘solitude’ in the epigraph of Le Samouraï is rephrased to the ‘pain’ in Delluc’s claim. This echoes what film critic Pierre-Marie Déniel argued on Delon’s performance in Le Samouraï: This elegant loner’s meanderings express a sort of existential void. Through the sublimation of the ephemeral instant in which this mentally distressed man pays attention to his gestures and clothes, his meanderings convey the feeling that his death may be imminent, and by the same token that his struggles against his own fears may soon come to an end. The film does not clearly address its spiritual dimension. But because of what is shown on screen and the music, one can feel the emotions that engendered his metaphysical doubts.21

Déniel tries to interpret Jef ’s ‘meanderings’ with his ‘death’ drive, ‘fears’ and ‘metaphysical doubts’. All is true, probably, but is also false because the point is that Melville’s samurai is clearly characterized as ‘inscrutable’, the adjective often used to describe Japanese people in the Western context to feed well into the fascination with the exotic other.

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Lastly, speaking of Jef ’s death drive, the image of a Japanese culture in which there is an approval of suicide and self-sacrifice has been widely approved in the West. If Jef is aware of his own death looming, he is essentially self-sacrificing himself like a samurai in the Western imagination. Seppuku (suicide with swords) of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze (self-sacrificing attack) of Japanese military aviators near the end of the Second World War, which was only twentytwo years before the film was released, enhanced such a stereotypical image of the samurai spirit. The famous work of American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), gave a certain reasoning to such a fantastical connection between the samurai and the self-sacrifice. Benedict wrote, ‘Though every soul originally shines with virtue like a new sword, nevertheless, if it is not kept polished, it gets tarnished. This “rust of my body,” as they [Japanese people] phrase it, is as bad as it is on a sword.’22 Thus, the reflection of Jef ’s face in the mirror in the opening scene emphasizes his ambiguous actions and non-humanely countenance. Moreover, it may serve to imply Jef ’s death drive, which is a highly stereotypical image of the selfsacrificial Japanese samurai.

The photogenic samurai The French theorist Roland Barthes wrote a book about Japan, Empire of Signs (L’Empire des signes), in 1968–9, right after Le Samouraï was released.23 The book was published in 1970. Like Le Samouraï, the textual Japan presented in Barthes’ book was seemingly based on Japan but at the same time not quite Japan. As Melville addressed his authorial presence in his view on his samurai from the start by the conspicuous use of the Dolly Zoom Effect, Barthes revealed his selfreflexive thoughts on an imagined Japan at the very beginning of his book. As the literary critic Lucy O’Meara suggests, Barthes’ use of a hypostatized ‘Japan’ to discuss ways of thinking unfamiliar to the West was shared by many French theorists, including Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers and members of the leftwing journal Tel Quel (1962–80) at that time as a means of critique of the West.24 Barthes’ central argument using Japan in Empire of Signs was to question Western metaphysics, or dialectics between mind and matter. To do so, Barthes did not fully examine the complexities of Japanese history and culture, but instead he reduced them to the ‘void’. Strategically along with the tradition of exoticism in French thought, he considered untranslatable ‘emptiness’ to be the

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signifying system called Japan, as does Melville samurai to be only ambiguity, uncertainty or emptiness in his countenance. It is noteworthy that Barthes particularly referred to the Japanese theatrical face in contrast to ‘the truly expressive value of the Western face’. Barthes’ focus was on make-up, but it was also applicable to facial expressions. He wrote: Reduced to the elementary signifiers of writing – the blank of the page and the hollows of its incisions – the face banishes all the signified, that is, all expressivity: this writing writes nothing (or writes: ‘nothing’). Not only does it not ‘lend’ (naively accountable accounting word) itself to any emotion, to any meaning (not even that of impassivity, of inexpressivity), it copies no characters.25

Barthes’ claim almost exactly described the countenance of Jef. For both Barthes and Melville, Japan was useful to critique the unilateral signifying system of the West, whether it was language and literature or cinema. In fact, the pursuit of inexpressivity by way of a Japanese actor’s face preceded Barthes and Melville in French film theory. Already in the 1910s, during the late period of Japonisme, French theorists critiqued the signifying system of Western films by formulating the concept of photogénie based on the face of Sessue Hayakawa. Following the release of The Cheat, Jean Epstein, a film critic who had worked for the Lumière brothers and would become a film director in 1922, coined the phrase ‘photogénie, cadenced movement’ to describe Hayakawa’s face in close-ups.26 Epstein argued that the photogénie would change real into something inexpressible without eliminating the realness using the camera/screen. It was a ‘utopian vision of an originary, phenomenological plentitude of perception, preserved and extended by the cinematic apparatus’.27 In the concept of photogénie, the text went beyond a signifying process (‘what it means’) and turned into inexpressive materiality of the image. Referring to Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘mimetic faculty’, the film historian Jennifer M. Bean argues on the spectators of early films with stars: ‘Mimesis stresses the reflexive, rather than reflection; it brings the subject into intimate contact with the object, or other, in a tactile, performative, and sensuous form of perception, the result of which is an experience that transcends the traditional subjectobject dichotomy.’28 Even if the idea of photogénie originated in exoticism and primitivism, its agenda was not only touristic or ethnographic. It pursued a universal language of cinema that would, at least for those French theorists, become possible by critiquing the Western signifying system.

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Melville’s samurai in 1967 In this chapter, by focusing on the opening scene of Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Le Samouraï, I have examined how Melville’s visualized his image of a samurai in the historical context of 1967 France. Melville’s allusion to the samurai certainly was certainly influenced by the romantic notion of bushido, or the code of samurai, that Nitobe Inazō strategically constructed as ‘an essential of Japanese character’ in his 1905 book Bushido and that was revived in another strategic invention of a tradition during the post–Second World War reconstruction of Japanese cultural image through cinema for international audience. Jef ’s grey and shadowy room with black-and-white graphics on its windows could be reminiscent of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s conscious appraisal of Japanese shadow aesthetics and its realization on the screen by cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo in such films as Rashomon and Ugetsu. Jef ’s ambiguous actions and non-human-like countenance is emphasized in close-ups and the film’s almost-silent audio-scape and is connected to the performance of Sessue Hayakawa, which led French film critics and theorists to formulate the concept of photogénie. Jef ’s countenance may express his death drive, which also connects the character to the stereotypical image of self-sacrificial Japanese samurai. Melville’s authorial presence behind such apparent connections that could be made between onscreen images and contextual information is justified by the noticeable use of such an expressive cinematic technique as the Dolly Zoom Effect. The arguable resemblance of Melville’s cinematic imagination of the samurai with Roland Barthes’ hypothesized ‘Japan’ locates Le Samouraï in the discursive contexts of the time among French theorists as a means of critique of the West. Both Melville and Barthes, as well as earlier film theorists, read untranslatable emptiness or ambiguity into their conception of Japan and formulated the theory of photogénie in order to critique, among others, the dialectic thinking between mind and matter, or soul and body. Consciously or unconsciously referring to the close-up of Sessue Hayakawa, Melville tried to represent photogénie, the image that goes beyond a signifying process, in the expressionless face of Alain Delon and his ambiguous action. Thus, the opening scene of Le Samouraï, particularly Melville’s emphasis on the ambiguity of the space and the inscrutability of the protagonist, indicates a Japan of the imagination – specific to the political, historical and cultural context of Paris in the late 1960s – which simultaneously functions as a critique to Western ideology.

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Notes 1 Ginette Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris (London: BFI, 2003), 211. 2 Rui Nogueira, Melville on Melville (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 128–9. 3 Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville, 178. 4 Nitobe Inazō, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900; Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002), 118. 5 Ibid., 141. 6 In his email to the author on 9 May 2019, Marco Bohr pointed out that the golden/ black armchair in the bedroom has an uncanny resemblance to the Japanese maki-e (scroll painting) lacquerware. 7 Jean-Baptiste Thoret, ‘Poétique de la télépathe. À propos du Samouraï, du Cercle rouge at de Un flic’, in Riffs pour Melville, ed. Jacques Déniel and Pierre Gabaston (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2010), 84. All translations in this chapter from non-English texts are by Miyao. 8 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (1977; London: Vintage, 2001), 17. 9 Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 20–1. 10 Ota Yoneo, ‘Monokuromu no jidai’ (The period of monochrome), in Hikari to kage no eiga shi: Satsuei kantoku Miyagawa Kazuo no sekai (Film history of light and shadow: The world of cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo), ed. Uekusa Nobukazu (Tokyo: Kinema Junpo sha, 2000), 18. 11 Daisuke Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 260. 12 Xavier Canonne, Requiem pour un homme seul: Le Samouraï de Jean-Pierre Melville (Morlanwelz: Les marres de la nuit, 2011). 13 Mabuchi Akiko, Japonisumu: Genso no Nippon (Japonisme: Imaginary Japan) (Tokyo: Brücke, 1997), 40. 14 Aime Humbert, Anberu bakumatsu Nihon zue (Humbert’s illustrations of Japan in the late Edo period), trans. Takahashi Kunitaro (1870; Tokyo: Yushodo shoten, 1969), 68–9. 15 ‘Focalization’, which the literary theorist Gérard Genette coined in 1972, might be a useful concept to explain the New York photograph/painting on the windows and by the Dolly Zoom Effect in this opening scene – a selection or restriction of narrative information by the author in relation to the experience and knowledge of the character. Genette distinguishes three types or degrees of focalization – zero, internal and external – and explains his typology by relating it to previous theories: ‘The first term [zero focalization] corresponds to what English-language criticism calls narrative with omniscient narrator and Pouillon “vision from behind,” and which Todorov symbolizes by the formula Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more

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17

18 19

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than the character, or more exactly, says more than any of the characters knows). In the second term [internal focalization], Narrator = Character (the narrator says only what a given character knows); this is narrative with “point of view” after Lubbock, or with “restricted field” after Blin; Pouillon calls it “vision with.” In the third term [external focalization], Narrator