Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000; Pages: 485

Written by a professor of Japanese, Cinema, and Comparative Literature, "Kurosawa" is a critical analysis of the great director's work, an assessment of that work's place in modern film studies, and an evaluation of the field of film studies itself. It appears that Prof. Yoshimoto has taken on too big a topic to be able to deal with it adequately. There is certain cursory feel to this book despite its length.

The book is roughly divided into two parts, and although I half-expected the first one to be the theoretical exposition that would provide the framework to understand the second, empirical, part, I was wrong. The first 51 pages of the book are simply a long tirade against the uses and abuses of Japanese cinema in American universities. Being a political scientist, this problem, if there is one, is of little interest to me, and I suspect, of even less interest to readers who want to acquire insight into Kurosawa's works.

The author divides the American study of Japanese cinema into three periods. First, the humanistic, or the idea that one "can teach audiences... important moral lessons regarding human dignity, freedom, and the unity of the human race" and that "these universal ideas are most effectively conveyed to audiences when they are represented through the concrete images of a particular nation, history, or culture" (p.10). The author protests against this approach because it relies on an image of Japaneseness that is contrived, simplistic, and concocted by Western observers.

The second period, the theoretical radicalization of the 1970s, is premised on the idea of "essential difference between the dominant modes of Western and Japanese cinema" (p.19). The author criticizes this period on basically the same grounds as the one preceding it: the Orientalist syndrome, or constructing a "model of Japanese culture that is idealized and arbitrary" (p.21). Thus, the new approach ends up being the same old wine in new bottles.

The third period is the one of cross-cultural studies, where "the dichotomy... is established not between theory and history but between the identity of Japanese and that of Westerners" (p.28). In other words, the model is again premised on the idea of different fixed identities.

To me, there is no distinction between the three periods, which, if one is to believe Yoshimoto's caricature, seem to be rehashes of Western prejudice thinly veiled by theory. The author also blames post-World War II power relationship between the US and Japan (which he calls imperialism), and sees some sort of academic conspiracy to stifle interpretations of Japanese culture that are not useful to the State Department. Although there may have been such a bias, I doubt that it was the concerted coordinated effort that Yoshimoto makes it out to be. His second complaint, that scholars of Japanese culture have privileged the classical texts to the detriment of the modern (and hence the exclusion of film studies), seems valid, although one wonders about the reasons for this exclusion.

In the end, this part of the book is hard to follow and quite uninteresting. The writing is typical of the field---replete with useless jargon, marred by poor organization, and parochial argumentation. Only specialists would read this, and only because they would be expected to.

The second part of the book comprises a separate chapter on each Kurosawa film. The chapters vary in length, depth, and interest as well.

March 2, 2001. BLS

@BOOK{yoshimoto-00:kurosawa,
    TITLE     = {Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema},
    AUTHOR    = {Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto},
    YEAR      = {2000},
    PUBLISHER = {Duke University Press},
    ADDRESS   = {Durham, NC},
    ISBN      = {0-8223-2519-5 (pbk.)},
    NOTE      = {Pp. 485}
}