Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

Conclusion

131 Conclusion In this book, I have focused on the shift in cinematic modes from the film studio era to the post-studio period, particularly as they relate to the recent developments in digital technology. Another transformation is in the critical framework from the national to the transnational cinema. To what extent, then, has the national cinema truly become the transnational? How should a film scholar forge ahead, if indeed technology has so transformed film’s material reality as to render all such guideposts— national or transnational—equally untenable? It is tempting to see a parallel between the two dichotomies—studio/poststudio production modes and the national/transnational aspects of cinema— since the parallel thereby compartmentalizes cinema’s recent development. I doubt, however, that the unambiguous structural equalities between the national cinema and the studio system or between the transnational disposition and the post-studio production mode are viable, because this neat compartmentalization masks the fact that Japanese cinema has been historically diverse and in cultural flux throughout both the studio period and the poststudio era. In my previous work, Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, I advanced the manifold identity of the cinema, the idea that the 132 CONCLUSION interwar Japanese cinema received significant influence from Hollywood cinema, and all the while the film studios created their own classical cinema through negotiations with both the external influences and the demands from the Japanese audiences—that is, the cultural agents of that time.1 Therefore, a study on the studios is indispensable, rather than simply focusing on auteurs such as Ozu, Kurosawa, and Mizoguchi, in order to understand the vernacular cinematic modes and norms, the infrastructure of the cinema. The film studio system in Japan was established in the 1920s, led by the studio Shochiku Kamata (1920–1936), but half a century later this system collapsed altogether. I assert that equating the fifty-year Japanese film studio era with national identity puts us into a conventional structure of knowledge, one constructed among U.S. academics through the postwar U.S.–Japan relationship. The postwar historical narrative of Japan has often been built upon the dichotomy of American universalism and Japanese particularism. This pattern of knowledge reveals, as Naoki Sakai stresses, “the postwar bilateral and co-figurative relationship between the U.S. and Japan.”2 Japan’s particularism has been discursively constructed in both American and Japanese academies and has already reached the level of ideological belief in Japanese society. One finds a belief in Japanese particularism in, for instance, the Japanese area studies of scholars such as Robert N. Bellah in the 1960s and Kevin M. Doak in the early 2000s and in the numerous nihonjin-ron discourses by Japanese scholars such as Kato Shuichi in the 1950s, Nakane Chie in the 1960s, and Doi Takeo in the 1970s.3 In 2000, while historian Amino Yoshihiko’s work, What Is “Japan”? (“Nihon” towa nani ka), radically questioned historical “facts” regarding Japanese particularism, mathematician Fujiwara Masahiko’s ideological tract, The Dignity of the Nation (Kokka no hinkaku), reasserted the uniqueness of Japan and became a best seller in 2005.4 America’s universalism and Japan’s particularism have cohabited with each other, creating a complicit relationship throughout Japan’s postwar history . More to the point, Japanese cinema studies have been influenced by that complicity. It is perhaps a truism that in order to publish, we academics tend to find a cohesive object to analyze and diagnose its characteristics against the “universal” standard, with which we can take the position of a distant observer toward a particular observed, and, moreover, the result seems reasonable for the majority of readers. Another reason that I distrust such explicit structural equalities is that one can also find historical evidence, on the one hand, of an estranged relation between the cinema in the studio system period and the nation-state, and on the other, of the strong connection between the cinema in the poststudio era and the national. Until very recently in Japan, there has been a CONCLUSION 133 lack of governmental support for either film production or academic research. The Japanese government never subsidized the major film studios, such as Shochiku, Toho, and Toei. It has chosen to rescue major heavy industries and banks with bailouts, but this policy was never extended to struggling film companies like Daiei or Nikkatsu. The Japanese government’s designation of culture has long been...