This is a video about aspects of present-day Japan that are seldom seen in other films about the society. It is now rather dated, but it remains for me a very thought-provoking documentary about Japan. Alvarez and Kolker are award-winning professional video producers, with little background in Japan or Japanese studies. However, they took seriously their curiosity about the society, and spent a lot of time there before and during filming. They brought to the project considerable cinematographic skills and also experience in documenting various aspects of contemporary American culture and institutions. ["American Tongues," a brilliant portrait of the varieties of English language in the US, is an earlier video of theirs.]
Japanese and foreigners alike persist in imagining Japan as an isolated and introverted island society. To my colleague Dick Samuels, an MIT political scientist, the full mantra is "small-island-trading-nation-precariously-dependent-upon-raw-materials-cut-adrift-in-a-hostile-world"! (cited in Steven Reed, Making Common Sense of Japan, 1993, p. 157). This documentary, however, is further evidence of the complex relations that Japan has had with the outside world over many centuries.
This indeed was the producers' initial interest: what happens to American mass culture when it is imported to Japan? What they discovered is what I hope you will come to appreciate. This is no simple process of imitation. Foreign ideas, institutions, and individuals have been borrowed, incorporated, domesticated, and--in the process--thoroughly transformed. Japan is indeed a fully "modern" society, but what that teaches us is that modernity is a global condition that is always and everywhere distinctively localized."Popular" culture in Japan, as most everywhere in the world today, is highly commodified and thoroughly commercialized. Mass media are new, potent forces in twentieth-century Japanese society, although they profitably and playfully meld real and imagined "traditions" from Japan's past with importation of foreign fads and forces. The documentary shows, for example, that weddings were now highly commercialized in late twentieth-century Japan, and it suggests that a dichotomy of tradition vs. modern has assigned "Shintô" weddings to the former category (as the traditional, Japanese custom) and "Christian" weddings to the latter (as the modern, Western innovation). However, it is important to remember that the "traditional" Shintô wedding was invented only in 1900, on the occasion of the marriage of the then-Crown Prince, later the Emperor Taishô (who was the current Emperor Heisei's grandfather). At the time, the Japanese imperial family wanted to emulate the elaborate rituals of European royalty, although in a Japanese idiom. Because Meiji oligarchs had by then thoroughly Shintô-ized the imperial institution, the marriage ceremony was designed along those lines. Its form quickly spread downward through the population.
Alvarez and Kolker began their project with a seemingly simple question: what happens when American popular culture comes to Japan? "We wondered," they say, "if their passion for modern things mean that they were losing their traditional culture." This led them to an "onion" model of discovery. Their first impressions were of "Japanese" culture everywhere; then they began to recognize "American" elements wherever they turned; and finally, they came to realize just how changed were these "American" phenomenon, in form and function. Mass culture in Japan has been Americanized but then this Americanized mass culture has been re-Japanized.
The body of the documentary is composed as a loose assemblage of nine segments, presented with minimal editorializing:
The documentary includes some archival footage from the nineteenth century (Commodore Perry, Emperor Meiji), the early twentieth century (baseball, Western clothes), and the immediate postwar to argue that "shopping around" has a long pedigree in Japanese history. Also interspersed among these segments are short commentaries and responses from Japanese and foreigners about Japanese propensity to borrow and adapt. The critic and playwright Donald Richie opines that the Japanese don't much distinguish items as "foreign," but "think of all of this as Japanese." Richie likens Japan to the cuckoo, a bird which sits in others' nests and hatches their eggs. At another point, he argues that the Japanese are working for endless choice, perhaps a legacy of the want and deprivation older Japanese experienced in the Depression and wartime of their youth. Ian Buruma, on the other hand, claims that the Japanese take only the forms of foreign objects and icons and don't even try to understand their substance. I myself am not persuaded by their explanations, and in class, I want to interpret some of the materials of the documentary in terms of a concept of "indigenization." For an even harsher appraisal of the documentary, please see the comments of Professor Henry D. Smith III, a distinguished historian of Japan at Columbia University.
But as for the documentary itself, it is hard not to be moved to both laughter and indignation, although we are often not sure whether to laugh or shout—and at whom!