Preface and Acknowledgments

doi:10.21313/hawaii/9780824831820.002.0005

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Preface and Acknowledgments

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https://doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824831820.002.0005

Pages

vii–x

Published:

January 2008

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My interest in this project on Japanese cinema in the 1920s and 1930s has a personal side connected with my father. In 1992, my father passed away rather unexpectedly at the age of sixty-one. He was born in 1931, when Shochiku Kamata films reigned in Japan. With his death I sensed that I had also lost an experiential link with the Japanese past, and I pondered how such links with cultural experience remain so volatile and elusive. One day I experienced an unforgettable moment while watching a Shochiku Kamata film on video with my mother. Although I have already forgotten which film it was, I clearly remember her saying, “Wow! It’s so nostalgic!” But of course it was impossible for her to have seen the film in its original release. And strangely enough, I also had the sense of nostalgia. It occurred to me then that this feeling of nostalgia surrounding film might lead me to an understanding of the past and perhaps of my father’s life. I was curious as to how the films were able to retain their nostalgic power and whether it stemmed from a specific cultural formation or a more universal sense of the poetic quality of life’s ephemera. Thus, the sense of nostalgia comprising a cultural memory is actually a key aspect of this project and a rather personal one as well. With the death of Atsumi Kiyoshi, the star of the quintessentially nostalgic Tora-san series, in 1996, and the recent closing of Shochiku’s last full production studios in Ofuna in 1999, Shochiku’s films have merged even further with the past, existing now only in acts of elegiac recovery. There is also a lot at stake here when one considers the issue of the intrinsic qualities of the filmic experience versus the more personalized commodification of the filmic image on video and DVD—that is, nostalgia reminds us of questions surrounding the structure of cinema, which always requires a viewing subject. Indeed, postmodern claims concerning the end of history have a self-fulfilling quality in that the new visual technologies allow us a simulation of the earlier experience without its underlying cultural context. The difficulty in understanding recent history lies in our tendency to conflate the nostalgia we experience in the present with the experience of the past to which the film first belonged.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

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