Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema
Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema, By Jasper Sharp, Scarecrow Press, 2011, 564 pages, ISBN-10: 0810857952, £59.95
Review by Roger Macy
Let me introduce you to a cultural curiosity: the book. It has no links, it can’t be updated , it’s bulky and heavy, and is pretty much all the work of one person. Scarecrow Press have published scores of imprints in their “Historical Dictionary” series, many of which are on the subject of a national cinema or other art-form. In the internet era, with many specialist databases thriving alongside general encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, it shows considerable courage in to invest in a single-shot print publication of a dictionary or encylopedia, which needs to be authoritative, but which presents itself with thousands of opportunities to get things wrong or out of date. “Thousands” is a considerable understatement of the risk of error. Of the 520 pages in Sharp’s volume on Japanese cinema, some 320 are devoted to selected main entries, and the remainder to the appendices. The appendices include over a hundred pages of listings of organizations, individuals, films and terms– each first in English rendering with Japanese script and romaji [Japanese expressed in the Latin alphabet] alongside. Finally, there is a 98-page bibliography. My back-of-envelope calculation suggests the opportunities for error-in-detail are of the order of 100,000, nearly all of which have been avoided.
But for all the nobility of such a pains-taking cause, a reviewer has to ask, in the third millennium, as to whether a Historical Dictionary in print-form can ever again serve a scholar. For printed listings, they can only serve in the way the editors choose to sort and display them. No listing here is indexed back to the main text. Companies and organisations are listed in alphabetical order of their romaji renderings (and the wall-to-wall capitalisations do not help readability). Films are listed alphabetically by their translated titles. If the referenced director has a main entry, all well and good but otherwise it’s just an orphaned listing. Actually, they work better as an index to another Stonebridge publication, Alexander Jacoby’s A Critical Handbook of Japanese Directors which, as a sister old-fangled book, has excellent filmographies for 150 directors, but no way in, if you don’t know the film’s director.
The listings of individuals have their own peculiarity. Whilst none are indexed to the main text, someone has gone to the trouble of excluding those individuals with a main entry without explaining this. It would also have been helpful for the pages to be headed “Directors,” “Performers” or “Other figures,” so that one doesn’t conclude a false negative. Each of these points can be rectified, by another piece of old-technology – writing annotations on the book. I would suggest that an owner will need to overcome that taboo, to get full value from this publication. That is particularly true for the bibliography. Whilst it is organised into some twenty categories, the bulk of the references relate “Particular Films / Filmmakers,” etc, but these entries are listed alphabetically by author of the commentaries. That makes eminent sense in a monograph where names and subjects are indexed, but leaves these pieces virtually unfindable unless the work is already known. That seems to me to be a lost opportunity. Indexing commentaries by film would have filled a real gap.
Many of these quibbles clearly relate to common organisational themes of the series and cannot be ascribed to the author. Areas where Sharp has clearly deployed his considerable knowledge to effect is the listing of “Other figures.” For instance MORI Iwao (森岩雄) is “Toho production head,” MORI Masayuki (森昌行) is “Producer” but MORI Katsuyuki (森且行) is “Former SMAP member.” That last meant nothing to me, but “SMAP” duly gets its own entry. I learnt which talent agency developed this aidoru group, who the members are, and how their careers were developed. That’s the kind of detail that doesn’t appear in other English-language books.
It is probably in the show-business history that Sharp’s contribution is most valuable. He has devoted entries to some of the more famous ‘classic’ directors but the format doesn’t allow him to say anything new, and doesn’t point towards any key works by others. Actors and other personnel, on the other hand are much better served here than by other English language publications, particularly for the current generation. But, alas, it seems Japanese media companies are still charging too much for simple still photos for reference books to be appropriately illustrated.
Another strength of Sharp’s Dictionary is censorship. Not only is there a main entry of some length, numerous figures who have run up against Japanese film censorship have entries. These figures do not only relate to Sharp’s previous volume on ‘pink’ films, Beyond the Pink Curtain, but also to various political disputes of the twentieth century. So I was disappointed that Sharp could not find space to address the most controversial topic, the routine portrayal of rape as entertainment in a large sector of the Japanese film industry. That seems to me to be a much more relevant subject than the arid business of the non-portrayal of pudenda. For ‘pink’ film subjects in general, I would refer the reader to Sharp’s ‘Pink’ book, where a larger budget allowed filmographies to be better organised. Too often, in the Historical Dictionary, an entry reads like a list in prose-form, which would be far more readable, and usable, as a list.
It certainly can’t be easy to freeze content into a book that has to serve a range of readers, some who might come to it with a surface interest in film but little knowledge of Japanese history, and others who might be historians with little experience of film. So, how to mention the war? A twelve-page entry certainly doesn’t shirk the subject. Since there’s also a specific 4-page bibliography on the same subject of “War and Film,” my previous quibble about lack of referencing doesn’t apply here, although it would have been more friendly for one to refer to the other. It’s a lot of facts at varying levels to follow one another without subdivision or indexing, and I would recommend a student to go to original essays on the subject, many of which are listed. Specifically, if there were such a complete absence of anti-Soviet battles or war films, it would have been notable, but there are examples of both; and “umiwashi” needs to be rendered in English as “Sea Eagle.” There is also no mention of the theatrical antecedents for many war-time films mentioned. A neglect of writers can be seen elsewhere, for example on Atomic Bomb cinema – the “dramatic reconstruction” in 1995 of decision-making on the Japanese side before Hiroshima was the work of scriptwriter Ishidō Toshirō. The important entry for the ‘Manei’ company provides further war-time details but, as for the statement, “much of its local output was destroyed during the Soviet invasion, with what remains in China’s Film Archives or at Changchun Studio, thereby essentially lost to Japanese researchers” – that needs qualification in respect of the recoveries from Gosfilm, listed in the NFC newsletter number 61 of 2005.
The policy on rendering Japanese into romaji is explained and consistent. I soon got used to seeing all names with macrons, and all places without. The accuracy is generally far beyond my level of detection, although I believe Ishihara Yūjirō should have two macrons.
Jasper Sharp has worked assiduously in an unyielding format and you would have to be very well-read not to mine new information from this resource.