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Abstract
Co-productions are often notoriously difficult, and this was certainly the case in 1936–37 for the most important co-production between Nazi Germany and Japan. What should have been one joint film for the international market turned out to be two different versions: New Earth in Japanese and English by Itami Mansaku and The Samurai’s Daughter in German and Japanese by Arnold Fanck. This article focuses on three filmmakers – producer Kawakita Nagamasa and the directors Fanck and Itami – to better understand the production and reception of the films and what led to the split between the directors. The push for a power axis between Nazi Germany and imperial Japan metamorphosed Kawakita from a cosmopolitan cultural mediator between Japan, Germany, and China to a nationalist film functionary during Japan’s invasion of China and implicated his career in fascist war efforts. The Nazi German-Japanese alliance led the famed mountain film director Fanck to acclimate his film to serve the binational political agenda. But the same push for alliance alienated Itami, whose liberal and anti-authoritarian positions were at odds with the politics of the day. Yet, Itami’s position was not representative of that of imperial Japan, therefore his duel with Fanck and the resultant failed co-production cannot serve as a metaphor for the superficial or ‘hollow’ alliance between Nazi Germany and Japan, as some scholars have claimed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I have not been able to watch Itami’s version, which is only available in archives in Japan. For simplicity’s sake, the article will refer to the Itami version as New Earth and the Fanck version as The Samurai’s Daughter. But the German title Die Tochter des Samurai was not adopted until the German premiere on 23 March 1937 in Berlin. When Fanck’s film premiered in Tokyo in February 1937, it used the same title as Itami’s version, New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, 1937). This co-production has generated a lot of scholarship. It does not happen often that an entire book is devoted to a single film; this co-production, however, has received this honor twice, from Janine Hansen and Iris Haukamp, in addition to a substantial treatment in Karl Sierek’s monograph and discussions in a number of book chapters and articles. Janine Hansen, Christin Bohnke, Karl Sierek, and Iris Haukamp compared the two versions in their work. See Janine Hansen, Arnold Fancks ‘Die Tochter des Samurai’: Nationalsozialistische Propaganda und japanische Filmpolitik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997); Christin Bohnke, ‘The Perfect German Woman: Gender and Imperialism in Arnold Fanck’s Die Tochter des Samurai and Itami Mansaku’s The New Earth.’ Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 33 (2017): 77–100; Karl Sierek, Der lange Arm der Ufa: Filmische Bilderwanderung zwischen Deutschland, Japan und China 1923–1949 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer, 2018); Iris Haukamp, A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan: Representational Politics and Shadows of War in the Japanese-German Co-production ‘New Earth’ (1937) (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). For unknown reasons, Haukamp does not engage with Sierek’s book except in footnote 4.
2 Donald Richie, ‘The Daughter of the Samurai: a German-Japanese co-production,’ Mori Art
Museum. https://www.mori.art.museum/english/contents/tokyo-berlin/about/img/Daughter.pdf.
3 Quoted from James King, Under Foreign Eyes: Western Cinematic Adaptations of Postwar Japan (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012), 21; see also Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) 161; Haukamp 65 and 194–195.
4 King 21; Haukamp 65.
5 Haukamp 63–71.
6 Sierek 302.
7 Haukamp 64–65.
8 Haukamp 150.
9 Poshek Fu, ‘The Ambiguity of Entertainment: Chinese Cinema in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai, 1941 to 1945’, Cinema Journal 37, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 66–84.
10 Michael Baskett argues that the failed co-production, together with another failed co-production between Nazi Germany and Italy, shows the near impossibility of a real collaboration between the Axis powers, who were limited to a surface alliance or a ‘hollow alliance’. Michael Baskett, ‘All Beautiful Fascists? Axis Film Culture in Imperial Japan’, in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 212–34, 214. Following previous scholars, Haukamp also suggests that the failed collaboration serves as ‘a metaphor for Japanese-German wartime relations as a “hollow alliance” between “reluctant allies”, 101.
11 Johanna Margarete Menzel Meskill, Hitler & Japan: The Hollow Alliance (New York: Atherton Press, 1966); Johanna Menzel Meskill, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: The Hollow Diplomatic Alliance, with a new introduction by Thomas Nowotny, Taylor & Francis, 2017.
12 Haukamp 193–201.
13 Haukamp 201–212.
14 Fanck’s 1973 memoir is often unreliable and self-exonerating. Fanck’s claim that his departure from Marseille was delayed for four days because the Propaganda Ministry rejected his request of financial help for hotel expenses, whereas his Japanese contract partners promptly sent him a generous amount (Fanck 1873: 329–30), was made up (Haukamp 58). Haukamp writes, “In retrospect, Fanck inflated a real event in order to contrast Japanese and German support for his project, which would then prove his distance from the German regime” (211).
15 Sierek 31–55; Haukamp 31.
16 Sierek 57–92, 379–381.
17 Sierek 178.
18 Sierek 37.
19 Sierek 270. All translations of Sierek are mine.
20 Haukamp 95–96.
21 Haukamp 48–9.
22 Haukamp 94–96.
23 Hayashi had participated in one of the previous German-Japanese co-productions, Kagami, and had also helped translate Girls in Uniform (Mädchen in Uniform, Seifuku no shojo), which Kawakita Kashiko had liked and brought back to Japan in 1932 to critical acclaim (Haukamp 58). Hayashi would later participate in New Earth as a translator and supervisor for Fanck’s version (Haukamp 42).
24 Haukamp xvi and 94; Haukamp’s timetable lists the date as March 20, 1934.
25 Haukamp 51.
26 Haukamp 53.
27 Haukamp 56.
28 Haukamp 93, n. 7.
29 Haukamp 89–90.
30 Haukamp 90.
31 Sierek 270–278, 294; Hans-Joachim Bieber, ‘“Die Tochter des Samurai”: Deutsch-japanische Filmproduktionen in der NS-Zeit,’ in Kultur, Politik und Öffentlichkeit: Festschrift für Jens Flemming, ed. Dagmar Bussiek and Simona Göbel, 355–77 (Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2009), here 358–361; Haukamp 58; 90; 95–96.
32 Haukamp 25–52.
33 Haukamp 21.
34 Haukamp 26.
35 Haukamp 52; 163.
36 Haukamp 27, 85–86.
37 Haukamp 59; she put the 18 films in Appendix 1.
38 Haukamp 18.
39 Haukamp 8, 23, 89.
40 Haukamp 31-42.
41 Fanck 1973: 342; cited from Haukamp 15.
42 Haukamp 87–88.
43 Haukamp 179–181.
44 Haukamp 160.
45 Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich, ‘Introduction—from “German Measles” to “Honorary Aryans”: An Overview of Japanese-German Relations until 1945’, in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion, ed. Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich, 1–18 (New York: Routledge, 2006): 11.
46 Haukamp 179, 193–201.
47 Haukamp 159.
48 Haukamp 130. Haukamp does not list Bohnke’s essay in her bibliography.
49 Haukamp 159.
50 Haukamp 165.
51 Haukamp 167. Fanck’s film does not include two scenes that appear early in Itami’s version and depict Teruo and Mitsuko as a couple in love. Compared to the Japanese film, the German version presents Teruo’s marriage to Mitsuko as the fulfillment of a duty and not as an expression of romantic love. See Bohnke 91–92.
52 Bohnke 81; Haukamp 162.
53 Haukamp 177–179. Bohnke notes that Gerda might be American or British: ‘In Itami’s version, the American and British flags are foregrounded in the ship scene between Gerda and Teruo…. In addition, Gerda speaks English instead of German, suggesting that she might be American or British’ (81).
54 Haukamp 164, 181, and 196.
55 Haukamp 209.
56 “[A]uf den Wunsch meines Führers und im Interesse seiner Außenpolitik auf diesem vorgeschobenen Posten zu stehen” (Fanck, “Die Tochter des Samurai,” 10, qtd. in Hansen 40). My translation.
57 Hansen 26; Bieber 360.
58 King 22.
59 King 21.
60 Weinstein, Valerie. ‘Reflecting Chiral Modernities: The Function of Genre in Arnold Fanck’s Transnational Bergfilm, The Samurai’s Daughter (1936–1937)’, in Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia, ed. Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 34–51, here 44.
61 Bohnke 81
62 Sierek 370.
63 Haukamp 4.
64 Itami’s version uses English dubbing, which is uncharacteristic of Itami since he usually adheres to ‘acoustic authenticity’. Thus, Haukamp suggests that Itami himself did not shoot this scene (163).
65 Sierek 358–367; Haukamp 183–191.
66 Haukamp 161, 185, 189.
67 Haukamp 88.
68 Haukamp 216; 198–199.
69 Baskett 227.
70 Bohnke 95; Haukamp 78.
71 Sierek accuses Fanck of plagiarizing from a novel of the same name by Sugimoto Etsu Inagaki (298, 334). However, Hans-Joachim Bieber points out that the similarity goes no further than the title, and the publisher did not take any action because sales of the book benefited from the film’s publicity (366).
72 Bieber 364–365; Hansen 62–86; Sierek 367–376; Haukamp 5, 71–79.
73 High 163; Bieber 366.
74 Haukamp 217.
75 Bieber 367; Hansen 40, 44, 194; Sierek 374; Haukamp 91.
76 Sierek 373–375; Haukamp 91–92.
77 Sierek 275–277.
78 Sierek 286.
79 Hansen 2.
80 Sierek 396; Fu 68.
81 Sierek 379.
82 Haukamp 79.
83 Sierek 516; Haukamp 205.
84 Sierek 402.
85 Fu 69.
86 Sierek 477.
87 Sierek 402.
88 Sierek 402.
89 Sierek 403.
90 Fu 73.
91 Fu 80.
92 Sierek 531–542; Haukamp 93.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Qinna Shen
Qinna Shen is Associate Professor of German at Bryn Mawr College. Her research focuses on twentieth-century German culture, with an emphasis on visual studies, GDR studies and Sino-German relations. She has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her book entitled The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films was published in 2015 by Wayne State University Press. She is currently working on two book projects: Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion: A Chinese-German Cultural Encounter and Film and Cold War Diplomacy: China and the Two Germanys, 1949–1989.