Yamanaka Sadao and the Pathology of Japanese Cinema Studies

Yesterday was consumed by a dialogue that spanned from dawn until dusk. I spent the day with a friend, a researcher of Japanese cinema, discussing a labyrinth of topics: film, philosophy, culture, history, and the trajectory stretching from Japan’s present condition into the near future. When one looks back upon the history of Japanese cinema, which began in 1897, one cannot overlook a singular existence that irrevocably altered its course. That existence is Yamanaka Sadao (1909–1938).

While names such as Kurosawa Akira, Ozu Yasujiro, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Oshima Nagisa are widely recognized across the globe, Yamanaka Sadao rarely bathes in the spotlight. This discrepancy exists because, whereas the titans of Japanese cinema—Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi—were able to flourish from the pre-war era well into the post-war period, Yamanaka Sadao never returned to the film world after the war. Yamanaka’s career began in 1927, when he entered Makino Productions, the studio that built the era of Japanese silent film. His first directorial work was released in February 1932, before the war intensified. Upon seeing the work of this unknown director, a prominent film critic of the time was so struck by its impact that he contributed a laudatory essay to a film journal. With this, the name Yamanaka Sadao became known instantaneously.

From that point on, he produced a succession of ambitious works throughout the 1930s, cementing his status. However, in August 1937, during the filming of Humanity and Paper Balloons [人情紙風船], the Second Sino-Japanese War began, triggered by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Yamanaka and his fellow filmmakers spent their days in anxiety, fearing they too would be conscripted. Amidst this disquiet, barely managing to release the film on August 25th, a draft notice arrived. Crushed by the regret of being unable to create cinema, Yamanaka landed in China in October. Tragically, he would never return to Japan; on September 17, 1938, he died of illness in China at the young age of twenty-eight. Hearing this obituary, his close friend Ozu Yasujiro was struck silent, and those in the industry who had seen the future of Japanese cinema in Yamanaka were left in a state of profound despondency.

Yamanaka Sadao sent twenty-six films into the world during an activity period of merely five years. In truth, a vexing problem in the history of Japanese cinema had already begun in correspondence with this era. That problem is the physical existence of film. In those days, there were no methods for decentralized management via digital data as there are today; without the physical object of the film reel, one could not view the cinema. Furthermore, as the era was also that of the fierce battles of the Second World War, the military leadership, having seized actual power in Japan and begun their reckless run, considered cinema to have no use other than as an excellent ideological apparatus for brainwashing the citizenry. Here, the possibilities held by cinema were narrowed to the extreme; information control subjected all works to minute censorship, and the thought control of creators was thorough. Consequently, before creators could even turn their minds to the preservation and management of film reels, they were focused entirely on how to obtain military permission to release their works. As a result, no attention was paid to preservation or management.

Additionally, the Manchukuo Film Association had been established on the Manchurian side, which was then occupied by the military, and Japanese films were frequently screened there for the soldiers deployed to the region. In a certain sense, these screenings in Manchuria resulted in a form of decentralization, though the people of that time had no way of knowing this. Then, as the war situation deteriorated, allied air raids on the Japanese mainland continued day after day, turning urban areas into burnt ruins. The studios, storage facilities, and movie theaters across the regions that bore the burden of film production were burned down one after another. The air raids on Tokyo, in particular, caused the loss of a colossal number of pre-war film reels and related materials.

However, while the film reels in Tokyo and Osaka were entirely incinerated during this time, a considerable number of reels remained in Kyoto, due to the absence of air raids there and the fact that film production studios had existed in Kyoto since before the war. Yet, the final blow was dealt to the Japanese film world in the post-war year of 1950. The vast quantity of pre-war films that had survived the war and were stored in the Kyoto studios began to undergo a self-decomposition reaction due to the relentless summer heat, generating intense heat. Triggered by this, they ignited and burned explosively, causing a massive fire at the Shochiku Shimogamo Studio in Kyoto. Here, the immense collection of pre-war films was entirely lost to the flames, and due to this event, the majority of pre-war cinema became impossible to view for all eternity.

In fact, of Yamanaka Sadao’s twenty-six works, only three exist today in a nearly complete form. Similarly, the majority of pre-war works by the renowned Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji have been lost and cannot be seen. Evaluating film history is difficult with only the few surviving works; however, fortunately, Ozu and Mizoguchi were active in the film world after the war, making a certain degree of evaluation possible, which became a factor in the rapid rise of their international reputation from the 1950s onward. In Yamanaka Sadao’s case, however, he was active before the war and died in the process of the war just as he was about to flourish. Regrettably, he rarely became a subject of research, and the surviving films remain only The Million Ryo Pot [丹下左膳餘話 百萬兩の壺] from 1935, Kochiyama Soshun [河内山宗俊] from 1936, and Humanity and Paper Balloons [人情紙風船] from 1937.

Nevertheless, there were two major events that offered hope against the tragic war and the post-war fires that plagued the Japanese film world. The first was that the vast collection of films stored by the Manchukuo Film Association was seized by the Soviet army, which advanced into Manchuria upon Japan’s defeat. These were transported to Gosfilmofond, the national film archive, where they were preserved in a high-quality environment for many years. Then, from the 1990s through the 2000s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of these films seized from Manchuria during the war were returned to Japan, providing an opportunity to lay eyes on many films that were thought to have been lost.

This grace was also bestowed upon Yamanaka Sadao’s 1935 work, The Million Ryo Pot. The GHQ, which occupied post-war Japan, in order to brainwash Japan into Western democratization, strictly restricted scenes of samurai fighting—swordplay—which had been a popular subject in traditional cinema. They imposed thorough censorship on post-war Japanese film expression, replacing the wartime military. As a result, the climax scene of Yamanaka’s work, which had been released before the war, was viewed as problematic, and the film was physically cut and discarded. For a long time, the work was broadcast in a state where the climax was absent, not as a complete piece.

However, as a result of collating the prints returned from Russia’s Gosfilmofond with positive films newly excavated domestically and abroad, the restoration of the discarded scenes succeeded. Through this, what was once an approximately 80-minute version was resurrected and released in January 2023 as a 92-minute version, quite close to its original form. Furthermore, regarding the 1936 Kochiyama Soshun, although it originally existed in Japan, the mainstream version was a copy with rough image quality and a dark screen. However, as a result of excavating 35mm prints returned from Russia and high-quality materials from archives related to the Manchukuo Film Association, digital restoration was performed based on these. Moreover, for his final work, the 1937 Humanity and Paper Balloons, the prints remaining domestically were severely degraded; however, due to the excellent preservation environment under the seizure and management of the Soviet army, the quality of sound and image recovered dramatically, receiving great benefit upon its return.

Thus, Yamanaka Sadao’s works—which were previously difficult to see, or existed only in significantly degraded versions—have become viewable in a state of high quality. Consequently, a rapid re-evaluation has begun to advance over these past few years.