Unfortunately, this colors his discussion of Rotha as well. Kubota had originally intended to structure his entire book around The Documentary film, a measure of Rotha’s prestige and influence over the very conception of nonfiction filmmaking. In the end, he wisely saved the discussion of Rotha for the final chapter. After his careful discussion of the avant-garde, Kubota warns readers that while Rotha has his good points, his vague definition of “dramatization,” bolstered as it is by questionable examples such as Pabst’s Kameradschaft (1931), could lead documentary to stray too completely into the world of fiction.
This represents one typical brand of discussion which was occurring in all sectors of the Japanese documentary world. In actuality, the relatively innocent looking debates about Rotha’s conceptions of “fictionality” and “actuality” veiled struggles over documentary’s function in Japanese society. The written record on this score is decidedly one-sided. Rotha proposed a nationally sponsored documentary film committed to the enlightenment and unification of the citizenry, precisely the kind of cinema necessary for a country deeply imbricated in foreign warfare. However, under the restrictive circumstances of 1930s Japan, many other important perspectives went unrecorded. This aspect of Rotha’s appeal – especially his apparent sympathies for socialism – necessarily had to be concealed from the public sphere; restricted to private discussion, this body of discourse never appeared in the written record, posing a battery of problems for the historian. There are, however, traces remaining which provide access to these the hidden spaces, and in the remaining sections of this essay we will explore their furthest reaches.
Battle of the translators
Like many other (underground) leftists in the documentary film world, Atsugi found Rotha’s writing inspirational. Here was a filmmaker committed to social change, someone who saw cinema as a medium for critiquing everything from class discrimination to totalitarian political systems. Having spent the last decade immersed in Marxism and committing her life to demonstrating its relevance to filmmaking, criticism and translation, Atsugi found a true compatriot in Paul Rotha. Documentary Film became the “hidden sacred book” of filmmakers who opposed the direction their nation and film industry were taking, although they only revealed this publicly after the war was over.
One can feel Atsugi’s intense relationship with Rotha’s book by scanning her personal copies, which she recently donated to the Film center of Japan. Opening their pages provides both a thrill and challenge to the historian. Her 1976 Miraisha version appeared brand new and unopened. Her 1960 Misuzu copy contained only a few penciled-in notes and an inscription inside the cover: “To – Rotha’s and her own translation – are far more intriguing. One can quickly detect a pattern in the highlighted sections. For example, in this time of stricture, she singled out the following sentence with a scratch of a pencil: “There is little within reason and little within the limits of censorship that documentary cannot bring before an audience to state an argument.” [21]
While there can be no doubt why she liked such a sentence, the pages are also filled with more obscure checks, question marks, circles and exclamation points. Strange symbols and many “M.B.”’s lie mute in the margins. Bookmarks sit in curious passages – did she leave them there? We will never know their significance, but three marks stand out among them all for their powerful evocation of what this book meant at the height of the China war. Apparently, Atsugi took her own translation in hand and read it over the space of several weeks in 1939, because she left dates next to three paragraphs. Scratched on the pages at a time when the government was taking steps to convert all documentary into propaganda in support of the emperor’s war, a time when brilliant filmmakers were subverting these efforts with clever editing, and when open resistance meant persecution (Kamei Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers (“Tatakau heitai,” 1939) had just been suppressed and he would be in prison within a matter of months), these three passages make Atsugi’s cathexis with Rotha’s text palpable. For this they are worth quoting in full, with Atsugi Taka’s notes rendered in bold:
Relative freedom of expression for the views of the documentalist [sic] will obviously vary with the production forces he serves and the political system in power. In countries still maintaining a parliamentary system, discussion and projection of his beliefs within certain limits will be permitted only so long as they do not seriously oppose powerful vested interests, which most often happen to be the forces controlling production. Under an authoritarian system, freedom is permissible provided his opinions are in accord with those of the State for social and political advance, until presumably such a time shall arrive when the foundations of the State are strong enough to withstand criticism. Ultimately, of course, you will appreciate that you can neither make films on themes of your own choice, nor apply treatments to accepted themes, unless they are in sympathy with the aims of the dominant system. And in view of the mechanical and hence expensive materials of cinema, it will be foolish of the documentalist if his sympathies do not lie, or at least appear to lie, with those who can make production a possibility. [22] [6.28.1939]
[A critique of Flaherty’s apolitical approach. -AMN]: In every location which he has chosen there have existed social problems that demanded expression. Exploitation of native labour, the practises of the white man against the native, the landlords of Aran, these have been the vital stories, but from them Flaherty has turned away…Idyllic documentary is documentary without significant purpose. It takes romanticism as its banner. It ignores social analysis. It takes ideas instead of facts. It marks a reactionary return to the worship of the heroic, to an admiration of the barbaric, to a setting up of ‘The Leader.’ [23] [7.6.1939]
[A Pudovkin quote on the power of montage. – AMN]: I found the way to build up a dialogue in which the transition of the actor from one emotional state to another… had never taken place in actuality before the camera. I shot the actor at different times, glum and then smiling, and only on my editing table did these two separate moods co-ordinate with the third – the man who made the joke. [24] [7.20.1939]
Atsugi’s handwritten dates – these curt pencil scratches – convert this translation from the public domain to something quite new and contradictory. They act as conduits allowing those resistant discourses retained safely in hidden spaces to leak from between the lines. But this is only half the story, because the criticism and debate surrounding Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film is an instance of oppositional discourses being coded into public view, camouflaged to deflect the threat of reprisals. To render this complicated discourse visible, we must return to the problem of translation. On the one hand, Atsugi weaved her point of view into the very fabric of her translation, both in conscious and unconscious ways. At the very same time, intellectuals from far different perspectives engaged her in a veritable battle of the translators.
In the course of researching the subject of prewar Japanese documentary, I occasionally ran across copies of Atsugi’s translation in used bookstores. Taking one of these volumes in hand, one can come to a material appreciation for the respect with which Rotha was viewed through the high quality of the printing, binding and paper, as well as the book’s beautiful slipcase adorned with elegant handmade paper. Every time I found a copy of the Rotha translation, I pulled it off the shelf to take a peek inside and see if it belonged to anyone I knew from my research. One of these dusty first editions contained quite a surprise: every single page had detailed annotations. Between every single line of the book – cover-to-cover – someone had diligently scrawled corrections to Atsugi’s translation in pencil. Inside the cover, this anonymous editor wrote a message: “This is a surprising book. She can’t understand English. Japanese is pretty bad. Even Ms. Atsugi cannot argue with this. I don’t understand how this person had the guts to translate it. This caused the chaos in this country’s bunka eiga discourse. I’m sorry these corrections are a year late.” The original owner who requested this involved translation check was unclear; outside of this message, there was only an illegible scrawl across the page. (Hereafter, I will refer to this copy of Documentary Film as the “teiseiban,”or corrected version.) [25]
The first edition of the Atsugi translation came out in September 1938, and whoever poured over Atsugi’s work left us only with the message that the translation was so bad its revision took the better part of a year. Actually, the existence of this teiseiban came quietly into public view in January 1940 – fourteen months after the original publication of the book – in a program passed out at Takagiba Tsutomu’s Shinjuku News Film Theater. In addition to advertising the week’s film slate, these pamphlets often turned gray with in-depth essays printed in tiny type. The 18 January 1940 issue contained an article by Sekino Yoshio which asserted that the controversies over Rotha spring primarily from the inexperience of the person who had translated him. Sekino wrote, “Below, let us pick out two or three parts of interest from a corrected text pretty much black with corrections.” [26]
He proceeded to compare passages from Atsugi’s translation with corrections from the teiseiban. (With this in mind the odd pencil slash inside the cover clearly reads “seki” in hiragana with a long tail.)
In the following months, Sekino drew on the teiseiban for a series of lengthy articles in which he attempted to clear up the controversy surrounding Rotha’s book. [27]
These also became the basis for a book entitled, Eiga kyôiku no riron (“Theory of film education”). [28]
The main issues for Sekino revolved around the translation of words like “story-film” and “the dramatization of actuality.” He attempted to contextualize Rotha’s thoughts on documentary in terms of his development as a critic – the differences between Film Till Now and Documentary Film – as well as the vast changes in English society itself. His success in reorienting the debate is difficult to judge, although it appears to have mostly influenced Sekino’s reputation as an authority over the topic. There is a good reason for this. In this series of high-profile articles, Sekino positioned himself less as a critic than as the translator. He gives a discreet nod to the help of the teiseiban, but the substance of his articles is unusual. Rather than provide his own interpretation of Documentary Film, Sekino all but re-translates the book! These articles were basically strings of extended quotes from the teiseiban with short passages of paraphrase inserted in-between. Thanks to the corrections by Sekino’s anonymous colleague, the new translations are quite good – for the most part, they are better than Ueno’s or Toho’s, and certainly better than Atsugi’s. The teiseiban itself, with its rows of exclamation point annotations, remains by far the best translation. However, Sekino ultimately does not offer an actual translation as such, because significant portions of the book are paraphrased or deleted. To be more specific, they are suppressed. Here is a typical, and relatively innocuous, example from Rotha with Sekino’s deletions underlined:
Art, like religion or morals, cannot be considered apart from the materialist orderings of society. Hence it is surely fatal for an artist to attempt to divorce himself from the community and retire into a private world where he can create merely for his own pleasure or for that of a limited minority. He is, after all, as much a member of the common herd as a riveter or a glass-blower, and of necessity must recognize his obligations to the community into which he is born. His peculiar powers of creation must be used to greater purpose than mere personal satisfaction. [29]
Sekino’s reading, or more properly his selective translation, evacuates Rotha’s left-leaning politics and aligns Documentary Film with the dominant ideology of wartime Japan. He effortlessly converts the passage above into an attack on individualism and a call for artists to serve the mission of the national polity. Elsewhere, extremely long series of extended quotations often skip a sentence or two in the middle when Rotha brings in the subject of class or Marxism. The segment of Rotha’s audience to which Sekino belonged was enthralled with the Englishman’s high moral tone and sense of “mission.” Sekino himself was far more than a film critic. After studying art at Tokyo University, he worked at the social education section in the Tokyo metropolitan government. In this capacity he promoted the use of film for education through publications, lectures, study groups like STS [30] and regular Jidô Eigahi (“Children’s Film Days”).[31]
In the latter stages of World War II, Sekino worked at Nichiei as the vice-president in charge of bunka eiga production. Through the sum of these activities, Sekino became a prominent theorist in the education film movement throughout the war; “theorist” in this context meant that the writer was not in the classroom trenches where the real teaching was going on. With his articles on the Rotha controversy, Sekino moved beyond pedagogical issues of the educational front and claimed a position of authority over the Rotha text, and therefore over Japanese documentary film.
The Rotha we encounter through Sekino’s articles speaks of responsible citizenship and the central role of cinema in educating the nation’s populace. Sekino’s Rotha heightens the stakes of these ideas by drawing the readers’ attention to the world-wide sense of crisis – that theme so central to pre-Pearl Harbor Japan – but the English filmmaker’s calls for peaceful settlement of conflict, disarmament, and intelligent social critique are suppressed from Sekino’s blow-by-blow “translation=correction” of Rotha’s book. With these themes purged from the text, one is left with a discourse on propaganda and the necessity for state support of documentary to the end of enlightening its citizenry. It is no wonder that Rotha was attractive to Sekino and the new leadership emerging with the Film Law. A further example of this political reinscription of Rotha is Eiga kokusaku no zenshin (“The progress of national film policy”), a 1940 book outlining the national film policies of all the major Western nations. The latter half of this book covers the situation in Japan, and offers essays on the implications of the new Film Law for various segments of the film industry. Its chapter on the deployment of film as an instrument of state propaganda cites Rotha as the international authority, posing the English filmmaker’s innovations as the proper course for a nationalized film industry. [32]
While Sekino performed an intentional mistranslation of Documentary Film in a manner analogous to Atsugi before him, the differences between their actual texts are even more revealing. Documentary Film straddled the space between the hidden and the public discourses, and the multiplicity of readings this position implies was built into all of the translations. The following example reveals how the differences between Atsugi and Sekino play out in their translations. This is one of Rotha’s numerous digs at the powers that be, followed by its extant translations (emphases mine):
Rotha: Every day I come across persons who manifest increasing anxiety not only at the growing complexity of political and social problems, but at the patent inability of those in power to find adequate solutions. [33]
Atsugi: Mainichi ni sakusô suru seijiteki, shakaiteki mondai ya, sore ni tekitô na kaiketsu o miidashi enai jiko no munôsa ni kokkoku fuan o kanjite iru hitobito ni deatte iru. [34]
Ueno: Mainichi watashi no au hitobito ga seijimondai ya shakai mondai no shinkokuka suru fukuzatsusa ni tsuite fuan o kataru bakari de wa naku,jibunra ni tadashii kaiketsu o miidasu nôryoku no nai koto o gaitan suru no de aru. [35]
Sekino: Taezu watashi wa, seijiteki, shakaiteki na jyaku mondai ga masumasu fukuzatsusa o mashite kuru koto ni taishite nominarazu, torô no hitobito ga sore e no tekitô na kaiketsu o miidashi enai to iu meihaku na muryokuburi ni taishite mo, fuan ga kuwaete iku bakari da to tansaku suru hitotachi ni ikiatte iru. [36]
Teiseiban: Mainichi watashi wa, seijiteki, shakaiteki mondai ga masumasu sakusô suru shite kuru koto ni tai shite bakari de naku, kenryoku no chii ni aru mono ga, sore ni taishite tekitô na kaiketsu o miidashi enai to iu akiraka ni munôryokusa ni taishite masu bakari da to tansaku suru hitobito ni deatte iru.
Rotha’s original text sets up a relatively straightforward contrast between, on the one hand, common people who find themselves bewildered by the complexity of the world on the verge of war, and on the other hand those in power who seem too incompetent to deal with the situation. Here Rotha’s critical spirit comes out in force, but he is writing things that landed people in prison in 1939. All of the translators seem to deal with this problem of potential censorship or reprisals in their own way; everything from vocabulary choices to mistakes reveal the ideological undergirding of their respective translations. The teiseiban provides the best, most straightforward, translation of the quotation’s most problematic phrase, “those in power”:”kenryoku no chii ni aru mono / “people in positions of (political) power”. However, Sekino strays from the guidance of his teiseiban and substitutes this with the rather vague torô no hitobito /”authorities, intellectuals,” deflecting the criticism into ambiguous territory. His other decisions further weaken Rotha’s criticism, as a rendering of this phrase back into English reveals: ” . . . but at the clear powerlessness of authorities/intellectuals in finding appropriate solutions.”
Both Atsugi and Ueno completely erase “those in power” from the sentence; the effect is to create a single group of common people who feel anxiety about the world’s complexity and their inability to affect change. We might assume that the translators expunged Rotha’s attack on the powerful to preempt punishment by their own authorities. Without more documentation, the case of Ueno is difficult to judge; however, Atsugi produced a postwar version of Documentary Film when threats of reprisal were not an issue. In the 1960 translation she significantly revises the text with the help of two young scholars, [37] and while this sentence was completely rewritten Atsugi retains the mistake. Even the 1995 “refurbished edition” (shinsôban)remains unchanged. In other words, Atsugi simply didn’t understand the meaning in the first place. [38]
At the same time, Atsugi’s word choice is still significant. Ueno’s exasperated, anonymous masses are literally the people Rotha has met on the street (“jibunra ni tadashii kaiketsu o miidasu nôryoku no nai koto o gaitan suru no de aru“), but the Marxist Atsugi does not shirk social responsibility and uses the much stronger language “jiko no munôsa“, which places the burden of history on herself and the reader — it is the difference between “their own inability” and “our own incompetence.”
Atsugi’s misprision circulates in a gray area between Rotha’s original English text and its dim representation in Japanese – the latter reflects a conception of documentary combining Rotha’s thinking with that of Atsugi’s own filmmaking community of leftist filmmakers who restrict their politics to hidden spaces in the teeth of power. [39]
Rotha himself said that “I came nearest to becoming a Socialist in my Documentary Book.” [40]
This was not lost on the filmmakers who found themselves in a forest of pressure, many of whom had recently spent time in the so-called “pig box” (butabako, or “slammer”) for their filmmaking activities in Prokino. For some filmmakers, Rotha’s book simply confirmed the direction they were taking nonfiction film already, and knowing that someone outside of Japan thought the same way gave them a measure of confidence. [41]
However, many others had a far deeper, hidden relationship to Documentary Film. Kuwano Shigeru worked at Dômei Tsûshin’s film unit before becoming the section head in charge of Nippon News as Nichiei, and was probably the second person in Japan to read The Documentary Film, having received it from Imamura Taihei, himself a Marxist critic. In a 1973 book on documentary, he left a reminiscence about his own wartime encounter with Rotha:
This book, for me, was a shock. He was choosing his words extremely carefully, but this is clearly what Paul Rotha was saying: The duty of documentary filmmakers was to somehow replace today’s rotting capitalist society and construct of a new socialist society, and indicate the clear, social scientific analysis of it (capitalist society) by the emergent classes – the proletariat and the farmers. There was no question that the so-called documentary, which started out as the news film, would become a strong weapon of the movement for social revolution. This has been evidenced by the Soviets. Even in Japan, which was under the violent oppression of a militarist government, each and every cut of the news film preserved a fragmentary “truth.” Therefore, if we consciously shoot that at the location, and if we edit these scenes purposefully, the “truth” of modern-day Japanese society – the anguish of the people, the necessity of collapse because of those contradictions – we could precisely indicate this to the people of the emergent classes of Japanese society. However, even though we can do this, what are we Japanese documentary film producers – no, what am I doing right now?! [42]
As a filmmaker working in what were basically semi-governmental agencies (Dômei Tsûshin and Nichiei), Kuwano was extremely limited by the form of the newsreel. He did try to include subversive moments in his films to direct spectatorial readings in directions against the grain. For example, he recalls inserting a funeral pyre of some fallen soldiers with melodramatic narration such as, “Even now, the soldiers’ souls return to their hometowns, where wives and children quietly wait.” However, this was inevitably snipped by the censors, leaving Kuwano clinging to the hope that his documentary images of the fighting retained some grain of truth. [43]
Filmmakers in the budding field of bunka eiga had far more latitude in coding multiple readings into their films. This is the issue running quietly behind many of the debates over fiction in nonfiction film between 1939 and 1942. Filmmakers were working out the nature of this new brand of fictionality. Rotha was, in the end, exceedingly vague on this point; Japanese filmmakers, on the other hand, were looking for prescription. Shirai Shigeru spoke of Rotha’s influence on documentary production, but had he not seen six or seven of the British school films at the Education Ministry (including Drifters and Night Mail) he would have had no idea what Rotha meant by “dramatization of actuality.” [44]
Certainly the filmmakers who did not attend those screenings were handicapped in their reading of Documentary Film and the massive discourse it generated. Many articles discussed the definitions of Rotha’s terminology and its translation, [45] but the bulk of the writing was a continuation (and vulgarization) of earlier Yuiken debates concerning the epistemology of cinema – “documentary as art” or “documentary as science.” [46]
This itself, as Ueno Kôzô has suggested, was a structural continuation of earlier struggles over whether film was art; the aesthetic domain simply migrated from “Cinema as art” to “Talkie as art” to “Documentary as art.” [47]
However, in one of Atsugi’s best articles responding to her critics, we find the best hint at the core issue:
In order for documentary film to have a meaningful existence as art, we must correctly recognize the essential meaning of this “fiction.” This is what I want to state over and over again. To this same end . . . filmmakers’ efforts must be more than the turning of the camera as it has been up to today. There needs to be more care for “working” on works, more intensity, more like throwing one’s entire soul into the hardships of a novelist. “Poetry is more philosophical than history.” – Aristotle. Today we can find the meaning of this saying if, while native born to the turbulent breath of history, we seek in documentary film the possibility of finding poetry (fiction) in the very center of that history (actuality). [48]
In the midst of the spectacular war films of the day, a new kind of documentary emerged from this group. While other filmmakers were locating their filmmaking practice at the sites of greatest power — the military, the bureaucracy – these filmmakers were endeavoring to produce a new documentary film that (indirectly) pointed to the backwardness of the nation, and to the sheer poverty and suffering in everyday life. [49]
For their producers, these films were the finest examples of documentary being made. Ishimoto Tôkichi’s Snow Country set the pattern, spending nearly three years recording the fight between Yamagata villagers and their fierce winters. Snow Country was unusual for its long-term study, foreshadowing the Yamagata films by the most important postwar documentarist, Ogawa Shinsuke, in the 1970s and 1980s; Tanikawa Yoshio goes so far as to say Snow Country marked the start of Japanese documentary film. [50]
Other films include Atsumi Teruo’s People Burning Coal (“Sumiyaku hitobito,” 1940/1) and Village Without a Doctor (“Ishi no inai mura,” 1939). The latter, Itô Sueo’s first film, shows the terrible health conditions in village Japan, and the government’s obvious inability to provide adequate health care for all its people. Kyôgoku Takahide’s Village of Stone (“Ishi no mura,” 1941) shows the severe manual labor at a rock quarry, and his Field Diagnosis Boat (“Hômensen,” 1939) follows a medical group traveling the Sumida river to treat river workers. Imaizumi Yoshitama turned his camera to the rough life of train workers in Train C57 . Ueno Kôzô’s The Ama of Wagu (“Wagu no ama,” 1941) contrasts the hardships of life for female shell divers (including steep pay inequities in comparison to men) with stunning underwater sequences that aestheticize the work itself. Mizuki and Atsugi’s Record of a Nurseryshows the cooperative work between working mothers and nursery school teachers to raise healthy, educated children. This impressive body of work arose from the competing claims over the significance of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film.
Although they were all inspired by Rotha, these filmmakers took varying positions vis a vis the use of reenactment and screenwriting in documentary. What they hold in common is a striking exclusion of the war hysteria and its rhetoric and a focus on the difficult life of Japanese citizens, a socially conscious documentary that resisted the temptations of explosions and exotic locales. In this way, the filmmakers encode to various degrees the discontent usually restricted to hidden spaces into their very public media. The filmmakers perceived their efforts to be interconnected and bringing documentary to an unprecedented level of excellence. While they never gave themselves a collective name or identity, they did consider their combined efforts to be akin to a “documentary movement.” [51]
Their films constitute the finest of the prewar documentary cinema, and an instance of theory and practice finely tuned and in thorough interaction.
Originally published in Cinema Journal 38.3 (Spring 1999): 91-108.
Footnotes:
[21] Rotha (1935), 156.
[22] Atsugi Taka’s personal copy of Rotha, Paul. Bunka eigaron (“On culture film”), 1st Japanese ed., trans. Atsugi Taka (Kyoto: Daiichi Geibunsha, 1938), 150-152. [Atsugi Taka collection, National film center of the National museum of modern art, Tokyo.] Original text is Rotha (1935), 135-136
[23] Ibid., 132. Original text is Rotha (1958), 108.
[24] Ibid., 198. Original text is Rotha (1958), 143.
[25] I have deposited this book in the Makino collection.
[26] Sekino Yoshio, “Tadashiki ‘documentary’ riron no ninshiki no tame ni,” (“For the correct recognition of ‘documentary’ theory”), Bunka nyûsu weekly 110 (18 January 1940): 1. (Makino collection) The Makino collection holds quite a few issues.
[27] Sekino Yoshio, “Kyô made no eigato ashita no eiga (1)” (“Film Till Now and the films of tomorrow (1)”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 2 (February 1940): 8-11; Sekino Yoshio, “Kyô made no eiga to ashita no eiga (2)” (“Film till now and the films of tomorrow (2)”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 3 (March 1940): 58-60; Sekino Yoshio, “Kyô made no eiga to ashita no eiga (3)” (“Film Till Now and the films of tomorrow (3)”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 4 (April 1940): 109-112; Sekino Yoshio, “Kyô made no eiga to ashita no eiga (4)” (“Film Till Now and the films of tomorrow (4)”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 5 (May 1940): 176-179; Sekino Yoshio, “Dokyumentariiron kentô no tame ni (1)” (“For an investigation into documentary theory (1)”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 6 (June 1940): 236-239; Sekino Yoshio, “Dokyumentariiron kentô no tame ni (2)” (“For an investigation into documentary theory (2)”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 7 (July 1940): 304-307; Sekino Yoshio, “Dokyumentariiron kentô no tame ni (3)” (“For an investigation into documentary theory (3)”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 10 (October 1940): 563-567. The other major series of articles by Sekino is: Sekino Yoshio, “Pôru Rôsa: dokyumentarii eiga no sonogo no shinten 1” (“Paul Rotha: documentary film and progress since then 1”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 7 (July 1940): 22-29; Sekino Yoshio, “Pôru Rôsa: dokyumentarii eiga no sonogo no shinten 2” (“Paul Rotha: documentary film and progress since then 2”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 8 (August 1940): 68-73, 120; Sekino Yoshio, “Pôru Rôsa: dokyumentarii eiga no sonogo no shinten 3” (“Paul Rotha: documentary film and progress since then 3”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 10 (October 1940): 72-77, 14.
[28] Sekino Yoshio, Eiga kyôiku no riron (Theory of film education), (Tokyo: Shôgakkan, 1942).
[29] Rotha (1935), 66; Sekino (1942), 163. By way of contrast, Ueno’s translation is complete and correct in Rotha, trans. Ueno, Eiga kenkyû 1, 79.
[30] STS, or the “Square Table Society,” was an influential study group composed of a variety of intellectuals interested in film education. They published their own dôjinshi: Eiga Zehi and Eiga Dai-issen . For a history, see Makino Mamoru’s column in Unitsûshin between 26 Sept 1977 to 21 November 1977.
[31] For an extensive discussion of Sekino’s Children’s film days, see Gonda Yasunosuke, Minshugorakuron (“On popular entertainment”), (Tokyo: Ganshôdô Shoten, 1931), especially 309-328. Gonda sandwiches this between chapters on kyôiku eiga and dedicated children’s theaters. In the 1930s, one of the main pedagogical struggles was over the manner in which cinema was used in education. In the course of much debate, educators narrowed the conditions of projection down to two possibilities: assembly screenings (kôdô eishakai ) and classroom screenings (kyôshitsu eishakai ). Assembly screenings would bring an entire school into one big hall where the principal or some other official would provide the context for viewing the films through formal speeches and rituals like singing the national anthem and paying respect to the emperor. Classroom screenings would take place in the classroom where students received the substance of their education. In this latter case, how the film was contextualized would be entirely left to the individual teacher. Although this will require further research, it appears that conservatives with nationalistic politics favored the assembly screening, as its “total education” and “group training” offered complete control over the film and conditions of reception. However, teachers with more liberal attitudes opposed the assembly screening because it replicated the structure of the nation, or more specifically, attempted to unify and control the thought of people. At the very least, the classroom screening narrowed film education to localized issues: “this is how a volcano forms,” etc. This is yet another example of the battles taking place between totalization and difference as the public transcript became more oppressive. Those interested in pursuing this topic should start with the extended historiography of the film education magazines in Suzuki Kiyomatsu, Eiga kyôikuron (“On film education”), (Tokyo: Shikai Shobô, 1941).
[32] Yamada Hideyoshi, Eiga kokusaku no zenshin (“The progress of national film policy”), (Tokyo: Koseisho, 1940), 216.
[33] Rotha (1935), 48.
[34] Rotha, trans. Atsugi (1938), 34.
[35] Rotha, trans. Ueno, Eiga Kenkyû1 , 56.
[36] Sekino (1942), 136.
[37] One was Asanuma Keiji, who is Japan’s best known film semiotician.
[38] Further evidence that Atsugi did not recognize the mistranslation may be found in the various copies she deposited at the Film Center. None of them contains any corrections here, although she did underline the adjacent sentence in her 1960 edition.
[39] This is not the only place where Atsugi’s misprision reveals the nature of her (mis)reading of Rotha. Her translation (in all editions) provides many examples. Most critics refer only to how “bad” it is. For example, in the afterward to his Introduction to Film Theory Imamura Taihei points out how thankful we should be for the work of translators like Iijima Tadashi, Sasaki Norio, and Atsugi Taka. He also warns the reader to be cautious when it comes to trusting translation; ultimately they must refer to the original, as Imamura has. He cites one example of misprision, and he singles out Atsugi: Rotha refers to some “modern authorities” who call dialectical materialism “out-of-date,” but Atsugi translates this saishin/”latest,” “brand-new.” While Imamura picks a good example of mistranslation he – like everyone else – does not ask what factors led to this particular misreading. It does seem rather obvious. Rotha (1935), 182; Rotha, trans. Atsugi (1938), 270; Imamura (1952), 184.
[40] Paul Rotha, Letter to Eric Knight, dated 8 November 1938, (2001 Box 26, Paul Rotha Collection, UCLA).
[41] This is how Kamei Fumio described his own relationship to Rotha’s book. Various people had criticized Fighting Soldiers claiming that Kamei was Rotha’s disciple. However, Akimoto Takeshi introduced the original book to Toho studios when Kamei was in China shooting the film. Rotha was less a guidebook than inspirational, especially in the second half of the book on practical matters (this was the section translated and circulated within Toho). Kamei Fumio, Akimoto Takeshi, Ueno Kôzô, Ishimoto Tôkichi, Tanaka Yoshiji, “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kyô o kataru zadankai” (“Zadankai to talk about Japanese culture films from the early period to today”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 2 (February 1940): 16-27.
[42] Kuwano Shigeru, Dokyumentarii no sekai – sôzôryoku to hôhôron (“The world of documentary – creative power and methodology”), (Tokyo: Simul Shuppankai, 1973), 201-202. On Kuwano: “Kuwano Shigeru,” Bunka eiga 1, no. 6 (June 1941): 70.
[43] Ibid., 201.
[44] Shirai (1988), 73.
[45] See Takagiba Tsutomu,” Dokyumentarii firumu no oboegaki” (“A memo on Documentary Film“), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 4 (April 1940): 112-113. Atsugi Taka, “Story-film no yakugo ni tsuite” (“On the translation of story-film”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 4 (April 1940): 118-119. Takagiba Tsutomu, “Eiga no honshitsu ni kan suru ronmo” (“Discussion regarding the essence of cinema”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3.10 (October 1940): 577-580. Kubota Tatsuo, “Gekiteki yôso to kirokuteki yôso” (“Theatrical elements and documentary elements”), Bunka eiga kenkyû 3, no. 10 (October 1940): 575-576.
[46] See, for example, Ueno Kôzô, “Eiga ni okeru geijutsu to kagaku – bunka eigaron no kisoteki mondai 1” (“Art and science in cinema – the fundamental problem for culture film theory 1”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 2 (February 1940): 24-35. Ueno Kôzô, “Eiga ni okeru geijutsu to kagaku – bunka eigaron no kisoteki mondai 2” (“Art and science in cinema – the fundamental problem for culture film theory 2”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 3 (March 1940): 25-35.
[47] Ueno Kôzô, “Eiga ni okeru geijutsu to kagaku – bunka eigaron no kisoteki mondai 1” (“Art and science in cinema – the fundamental problem for culture film theory 1”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 2 (February 1940): 33.
[48] Atsugi Taka, “Kiroku eiga no kyokô -’jijitsu’ wa sono mama ‘shinjitsu’ de wa nai” (“Fiction in documentary film – ’actuality’ as it is not ‘truth’”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 2 (November 1940): 82.
[49] Atsugi discusses this phenomenon in her translator’s afterward to the 1960 edition of Documentary Film (332). Atsugi Taka, “Yakusha no atogaki” (“Translator’s afterword”), in Paul Rotha, Dokyumentarii eiga (“Documentary film “], trans. Atsugi Taka (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobô, 1960), 329-334.
[50] Tanikawa, 195.
[51] See Kamei Fumio, “Bunka eiga geppyô” (“Monthly culture film criticism”), Nihon eiga 5, no. 12 (December 1940): 24-26. Kamei Fumio, Akimoto Takeshi et al., 16-27.