The Celluloid Drama in Japan (1918) 🇺🇸

Since you ask me, it is my great pleasure to send greetings and good wishes from the friends of Film Fun in Tokyo to all readers of your magazine. There are many of us who wait anxiously for its appearance each month. We are deeply interested in motion pictures here in Japan, and all that relates to film production.

by G. Sasao

I find it difficult to write about producing companies in my country. The pictures I send were taken for you when the company was at work on a play that will soon be finished and may be shown in America. It is called “Samrae.” With us, the dress of an actor indicates the part he plays. With some characters you, too, do this; we do it always. A cowboy, in an American picture, could not be mistaken for any other type. That which you call “wild and woolly” is unreal to us, for the horse is rather a curiosity here, and it is hard for us to follow the play when a number of riders go dashing along the trail. It helps a great deal when we can find the hero, by the garb he wears, and follow him. We like American pictures very much, but, of course, our own are easier for us to understand.

American companies are often to be found at work in Japan, and there are a number of Japanese companies that, like your own, travel about from place to place. It seems to us better to use the real settings where a little extra effort or even hardship will permit. If a part of the action in a Japanese motion picture play takes place in the vicinity of the Nikko Shrine, that most beautiful of all Japan’s beautiful places, then when you see the film you can be sure it is that very shrine, built more than three hundred years ago, and none other, that you see.

There is a wealth of material for picture plays in the legends and folk lore which the Japanese, as you perhaps know, treasure highly. Each man’s aim, whether he be artist or artisan, writer or official, is to add some one thing worthy to endure among his country’s possessions. It is because individuality is fostered in this way that so many examples of “lost arts” make Japan so fascinating to art treasure lovers. And if some sincere seeker will search it out, he will find a surprising storehouse of material in the literature of Japan that will make wonderful pictures which would be popular, I think. You all like “The Bluebird” and mystery plays like that. We like them too, but with us it is one of the usual ways to use symbols in presenting ideas we wish to make permanent. It is so we teach our children, presenting lessons in a form they grasp, as children of all countries grasp at fairy tales. When a boy reaches an age when he is thinking what he will do with his life, we leach him, by the use of the carp for a symbol, that it is his duty now to learn to swim upstream and gain strength by resistance.

There are moving picture magazines published in several cities in Japan. I am myself at work upon the first number of a little periodical. The actors contribute to it, and when you receive the copy which I shall send to you, you may find in it things about which the friends of Film Fun would like to know.

—

M. One, star in “Samrae,” a native screen drama.

Japan Motion Picture • Club, Tokyo, Japan

This Jap actor specializes in “Be Gosh” parts.

This is the Douglas Fairbanks [Douglas Fairbanks Sr.] of Japan.

(Upper picture) A scene from a Jap film showing a surprising situation.

Collection: Film Fun Magazine, May 1918