Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto - Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema

Kurosawa Akira secured his position as a representative Japanese film director in Japan and abroad when his Rashomon won a Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Kurosawa is undoubtedly the most widely known and popular Japanese director perhaps even the most famous Japanese outside Japan. Without the international success of Kurosawa, it would have taken much longer for Japanese cinema to achieve the status of a recognizable national cinema for the non-Japanese audience and academics. Because of the success of Rashomon abroad, the Japanese themselves realized the significance of the international film market. The worldwide acceptance of Kurosawa gave them an opportunity to rearticulate consciously what constituted the national and cultural specificity of Japanese cinema. Both in and outside of Japan, the imagining of Japanese cinema as a national cinema has been intricately intertwined with a critical reception and consumption of Kurosawas films.

Despite his importance and popularity, however, if we examine the images of Kurosawa more closely, their clarity starts to dissipate. In fact, the position of Kurosawa in various critical discourses on Japanese cinema is even more problematic than that of such directors as Ozu, Mizoguchi, or Oshima. For instance, how Kurosawa is treated by Noel Burch, who reinvigorated an academic study of Japanese cinema in the late 1970s, is emblematic of a certain critical difficulty surrounding not only Kurosawa and his films but also Japanese cinema in general. Even though the prewar films of Mizoguchi and Ozu to a large extent have the greatest use value for Burchs avant-garde project, the pivotal figure for the projects overall coherence is neither Mizoguchi Yet in the end, Burch does not satisfactorily explain how these two contradictory images of Kurosawa can be reconciled.

Kurosawas position as a filmmaker in Japan has not been secure and unambiguous, either. The Japanese images of Kurosawa are at least as complex and contradictory as the Western images. By many Japanese, Kurosawa is regarded as the most Westernized Japanese director. As a testimony to this view, we can point out that Kurosawas name is often written in katakana, a type of Japanese syllabary usually used to write Japanese words of foreign origin. The non-Japaneseness of Kurosawas image is reinforced by the adjective world-famous, which is commonly used with his name written in katakana: sekai no Kurosawa. At the same time, the Japanese media have invented a nickname that is antithetical to his de-Japanized image. Kurosawa is often referred to as tenno, (Japanese) emperor, for his allegedly authoritative behavior. Surprisingly, these two conflicting images are simultaneously present even in a single piece of criticism whose author is oblivious to an inherent contradiction of his or her argument.

In both Japanese and Westerners construction of images of Kurosawa as a film director, there is a certain sense of anxiety, an apprehension about the validity of the critical concepts and frameworks they employ. I would argue that Kurosawa, who occupies a central position in the study, consumption, and construction of Japanese cinema, arouses the feeling of anxiety in Japanese and Western critics because his films problematize Japans self-image and the Wests image of Japan. To the extent that his films reveal the existence of a geocultural fantasy in a seemingly neutral critical language of film criticism, Kurosawa can be understood as a symptom of Japanese cinema as it is perceived as a national cinema. A careful analysis of the films of Kurosawa and discourses surrounding his work will illuminate, among other things, the basic assumptions underlying the critical conceptualization of Japanese cinema as a national cinema. This book tries to reexamine widely circulating cliches about Kurosawa and his films not as nonsensical misconceptions but as discursive reactions to real sociocultural contradictions, institutional dilemmas, and disciplinary formation and constraints in the university.

Thus the choice of Kurosawa as the focus of this study is a strategic one. The book is not just intended for fans or aficionados of Kurosawas samurai films or his gripping contemporary dramas with serious moral messages. Nor is it written for scholars in film studies or Japanese studies who are interested simply in learning more about Kurosawas films. While it closely examines the specificity of Kurosawas cinema, this study also tries to shift the basic ground on which the scholarship on Japanese cinema has been built and to problematize this scholarships dominant interpretive frameworks. No matter how sophisticated it might be, a study of some particular critical or historical problem that can be easily appropriated as another fine addition to the field of Japanese cinema studies would not achieve my goals. The sheer accumulation of empirical evidence and new historical information would not by itself change the image of Japanese cinema exchanged and circulating on the academic market. This study of Kurosawas cinema is based on the belief that one of the most effective ways to contest the axioms of a particular field of study or discipline is to take up a subject that is not necessarily new but already accepted as a canonical material. Given the central position he occupies in the reception of Japanese cinema, Kurosawa is a logical choice for an intense critical scrutiny and rethinking of the disciplinary formation and configuration of Japanese cinema scholarship.