On 2003.10.22, at 08:47  PM, Minae Inahara wrote:

> I am having problems to teach film theories to Japanese students.
> There is
> no book on this in Japanese, and I am trying to explore my ways to
> teach it.

Minae is right that there is a dearth of good materials on film theory
in Japanese, but there are some. I've tought film here for over six
years and am on the board of directors of the main film/image studies
society, and I can say there are materials to use. Iwamoto Kenji,
Takeda Kiyoshi and Saito Ayako have put out several volumes of
translations of important works of film theory. It is true that one
problem with the film studies community in Japan is that it has been
French-centered, which means that while quite a number of good books by
Metz and Chion have been translated into Japanese, very few English
book-length works have. Yet some dedicated feminist scholars have
translated Ann Kaplan's or Trinh T. Minh-ha's books. One of Rey Chow's
books has also been done. If you dig into back issues of Gendai shiso
or Yuriika, you can also find some interesting work in translation.

I should also underline that there are many good Japanese scholars who
you can use. Even for classical theory, Gonda Yasunoke was doing great
work on spectatorship in the 1910s and 20s. Nakai Masakazu is simply
one of the best film theorists in the world in the 1930s. When I
arrived in Japan 11 years ago, there was a dearth of work on
spectatorship, partially due to the overwhelming influence of Hasumi
Shigehiko, Japan's most influential post-1980 film scholar, who frankly
does not have a theory of spectatorship. But the work that I and
colleagues have done has brought issues of reception into the fore in
academic film studies here in recent years. Just browse through the
last 5 years of Eizogaku for a sense of what is going on.

You can definitely build a decent film theory course using Japanese and
foreign theorists if you dig around.

> characters.  However, when Japanese spectators watch Hollywood films
> (that
> not many Asians appear, often neither negative nor positive... not like
> African-American (as I remember, bell hook explores negative cinematic
> identification of African-American and their complex spectatorship),
> they
> disidentify themselves from cinematic representations, and turn to be
> voyeurs.  (this comes from my experience of talking to my students).
> I am
> not so sure where this disidentification comes from.  Could someone
> help me?

The issue of how Japanese watch Hollywood films is a big one and you
offer one interesting interpretation, but I would be very hesitant to
generalize reception in this way. There is a long history of resistance
to certain Hollywood films (for instance negative reactions to Hayakawa
Sessue's films in the 1910s), but also of a strong desire that is quite
different from disidentification (note that Hayakawa was nevertheless a
national hero). Look at Tanizaki's writings on Western film actresses,
for instance, and you see a very strong, and very masochistic immersion
in the film image that is not really voyeurism. Japanese reception of
Hollywood films has often been very contradictory, involving both
processes of identification and distance, and has shifted over time.
Frankly, it is problematic to base an assertion of disidentification on
the lack of Asian images in Hollywood film when the boundaries between
Japan and the West, especially surrounding issues of identification,
are fraught with contradiction and full of holes. This is in part
inevitable given a film culture that has a long history of revering
foreign cinema. Your statement below is very interesting:

> I found myself as a Japanese who has the Western gaze when I watch
> English
> speaking films.

But I would argue that not only has this been the case with many film
intellectuals in Japan from the 1910s on (I've written on this), but
also with many young Japanese today as well. With very few young people
watching Japanese movies, they are finding identification in other
cinematic images, ranging from those of Hong Kong and Korea, to US hip
hop culture and Leo-sama (as DiCaprio is known here).

Keep on pursuing this issue, but I suggest keeping in mind the
contradictions and variations in both historical and contemporary
spectatorship.

This said, I should add the proviso that in part because of the
difficulty of teaching film studies in Japan, I have left my position
at Yokohama National University and will begin teaching at Yale
University in January. I do intend to keep writing in Japanese and keep
up my contacts here, however.

Aaron Gerow

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