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ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the aftermath of WWII in the emerging Cold War context of Japan’s compromised sovereignty, members of the intellectual group Science of Thought (Shisō no kagaku) sought possibilities of ‘thought’ (shisō) in ‘the people’ and turned their attention to the production and reception of mass culture. Jidaigeki (Japanese period films) presented a unique challenge for envisioning postwar modernity and democracy in Japan. US Occupation censors and progressive Japanese critics alike regarded jidaigeki with suspicion, calling into question its relationship to the past. This paper focuses on the group’s founder Tsurumi Shunsuke’s review of 1952 jidaigeki The Mad Woman in Kimono (Furisode kyōjo) and examines his populist defense of jidaigeki. Born into one of Japan’s most politically and intellectually prominent families and educated in the philosophy department at Harvard, Tsurumi struggled to define the significance and political utility of jidaigeki by negotiating his own position in relation to not only ‘the people’, but also with regard to the compromised sovereignty of occupied and post-occupation Japan. By unpacking interrelated negotiations in Tsurumi’s review and the film itself, I argue for the utility of jidaigeki as an analytical lens through which we begin to understand the dynamic historicity of postwar Japanese cinema.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Torquil Duthie, Katsuya Hirano, William Marotti, and Mariko Takano for their feedback on the colloquium talk I gave at the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, Los Angeles, February 2017. Special thanks to John Person, Michael Raine and an anonymous reader for critical readings and suggestions at the various stages of this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Junko Yamazaki received her PhD in the joint degree program in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2016. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Asian Languages and Cultures Department at UCLA and is working on a book manuscript on the rise and fall of jidaigeki films in postwar Japan.
Notes
1 Ibid. ‘Sōshite, ima aru mama no jinsei ni, sonomama nagasarete ikukoto ni, neuchi o mitsukete yuku yō ni shimukeru’.
2 For an excellent study of Repast and its reception, see Russell (Citation2008), especially chapter 4, ‘The Occupation Years: Cinema, Democracy, and Japanese Kitsch, 1945–1952’.
3 Although it does not undermine Tsurumi’s argument, Repast was as ‘popular’ (commercially successful) as The Mad Woman in Kimono between April 1951 and March 1952. It was the twelfth most commercially successful film that year with a haikyū shūnyū (box-office gross minus exhibition cost) of 66,947,912 yen.
4 Recent Japanese film historiography has generally accepted the claim that the shift from the classification according to the pre-existing dramatic forms (kyūgeki versus shinpa, i.e. old versus new) to the one characterized by historical periodization (jidaigeki versus gendaigeki, i.e. past versus present), if not itself a sign of ideological significance as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano suggest, was indeed a significant part of the larger transition that the Japanese film industry went through from the early to mid-1920s. My larger research project concerns the question of how jidaigeki engaged the new temporal order brought about by the ‘post-war’.
5 For an excellent historical analysis of Science of Thought in English, see Bronson Citation2016. I will be drawing on his work throughout this essay.
6 ‘Doko ni shisō no konkyo o okuka’ [Where Should the Basis of Thought be Located?] is the title of the 1967 debate between Tsurumi Shunsuke and the poet and philosopher Yoshimoto Takaaki.
7 For a more comprehensive historical analysis of Science of Thought in English, see Bronson (Citation2016).
8 Tsurumi was the grandson of Gotō Shinpei, a Meiji/Taisho physician-turned-bureaucrat, an influential engineer of colonial policies in Taiwan and the first director of the South Manchurian Railway; he was the son of Tsurumi Yūsuke, a liberal politician and bestselling writer.
9 In Kitai no kaisō (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1997), Tsurumi claims Quine individually tutored him on Peirce’s work, but Ralph Barton Perry, who wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning biography of William James, was more likely the supervisor for his BA thesis on William James. See, for instance, Harada (Citation2001).
10 Tsurumi Shunsuke was among the two Japanese citizens and one American citizen of Japanese descent who were interviewed by the daily student newspaper the Harvard Crimson one day after the Pearl Harbor attacks. Concerning the possibility of his internment, Tsurumi is reported to have ‘adopted the philosophical attitude’ and said, ‘If it has to be done, I shall resign myself to it willingly, and I am willing to take whatever comes’. Sixty-five years later in 2006, the Crimson reports that Tsurumi was interrogated by FBI agents and asked if he supported the U.S. or Japan in the war. He was not available for comments, but the Crimson refers to his response from the interview published in the Japan Foundation newsletter: he told the FBI that he was an ‘anarchist’ and supported neither side.
11 Bronson regards the early 1950s as a turning point for members of Science of Thought. The rise of McCarthyism had a more direct impact on the members’ intellectual activities than on those of Japanese intellectuals in general. Bronson, for instance, notes that The Rockefeller Foundation stopped providing financial support to their projects on the ground that the group is a Communist front. The Journal Science of Thought ceased publication in April 1950 due to financial difficulties until it was relaunched with a new title and a new editorial vision in 1953. The new journal placed more emphasis on circle activities and grassroots movements in the countryside than introduction of American research methods. See Bronson (Citation2016), especially the final section of Chapter 3, ‘Political Polarization and the Inertia of Everyday Life’.
12 Kōdan refers to ‘historical tales and legends, recited by professional storytellers, that were very popular (as were rakugo) in the late Edo period and in the Meiji era’. (Japan Encyclopedia s.v. ‘kōdan’).
13 Tsurumi published a three-part review of Santayana’s work in the Shisō no kagaku from 1946 (August and December issue) to 1948 (January issue).
14 Hanada (Citation1956). Hanada went so far as to endorse Tsurumi’s analysis regardless of the quality of the film that he had not yet seen himself. But his interest in jidaigeki as a popular art form, but also in its political nature, was probably genuine: when he started publishing fiction in the early 1960s, he turned to period drama (jidai-mono). E.g. The Tale of Animal Caricatures (Chōjū giwa).
15 For a more detailed discussion of the debate and of Hirano’s misogynistic understanding of the interwar proletarian movement, see, for instance, Bourdaghs et al. (Citation2017).
16 For an instance of their ‘pairing,’ see for instance, Hasumi Shigehiko, Ueno Kōshi, and Suga Hidemi in the roundtable ‘“1968-nen” towa nandatta/nandearu noka?: 1968-nen no kyōhaku’ [What was/is ‘1968’?: The Threat of 1968] in 1968, ed. Suga Hidemi (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2005).
17 Yoshimi’s work in this area is extensive. Here I only name a few: (Citation1998, Citation2003); Yoshimi Shun’ya with Kitano Keisuke in the roundtable ‘Kitaru beki karucharu sutadhizu no tame ni’ [For Cultural Studies to Come] in the May 2014 issue of the journal Shisō [Thought], 7–38.
18 On the other hand, the audience research surveys conducted by the Shisō no kagaku do indicate that they were interested in differentiating audience by age, gender, region etc. Two of their famous projects – the ‘Life Writing Movement’ (Seikatsu tsuzurikata undō) and the oral history project of ‘conversion’ or ‘political apostasy’ (tenkō) – focused on the experience of two distinctive groups of subjects: underprivileged children and those who committed political apostasy (tenkō-sha).