Transpacific Convergences , livre ebook

Transpacific Convergences
STUDIES IN UNITED STATES CULTURE
Grace Elizabeth Hale, series editor
Series Editorial Board
Sara Blair, University of Michigan
Janet Davis, University of Texas at Austin
Matthew Guterl, Brown University
Franny Nudelman, Carleton University
Leigh Raiford, University of California, Berkeley
Bryant Simon, Temple University
Studies in United States Culture publishes provocative books that explore U.S. culture in its many forms and spheres of influence. Bringing together big ideas, brisk prose, bold storytelling, and sophisticated analysis, books published in the series serve as an intellectual meeting ground where scholars from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives can build common lines of inquiry around matters such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, power, and empire in an American context.
Transpacific Convergences
Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II
Denise Khor
The University of North Carolina Press    CHAPEL HILL
© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services
Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Complete Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2021054804 .
ISBN 978-1-4696-6796-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-6797-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-6798-0 (ebook)
Cover illustration: International Theatre in Los Angeles, 1907. Courtesy of Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
Chapter 4 was previously published in a different form as “ ‘Filipinos Are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies’: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films, 1924–1948,” Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 3 (2012): 371–403.
For my family
Contents Author’s Note Introduction CHAPTER ONE Owned, Controlled, and Operated by Japanese Racial Uplift and Japanese American Film Production, 1912–1920 CHAPTER TWO Moving Screens Theatrical and Nontheatrical Film Exhibition by Japanese in the United States CHAPTER THREE Audible Divides Japanese Americans and Cinema’s Sound Transition CHAPTER FOUR Filipinos Always Welcome Japanese-Owned Theaters and Working-Class Migrant Culture Epilogue Coda Acknowledgments Appendix I. Japanese American–Produced Films before World War II Appendix II. Benshi in the Continental United States before World War II Notes Bibliography Index
Illustrations and Maps
ILLUSTRATIONS
Photograph of Los Angeles’s Fuji Kan in 1939       2
Japanese American protest of The Cheat       28
Advertisement for The Birth of a Nation       29
Photograph of Yamato Graph Motion Picture founder Toyoji Abe, ca. 1909       37
Article featuring producers and cast of The Oath of the Sword       39
Advertisement for The Oath of the Sword       40
Film stills from The Oath of the Sword       42
Film still from The Oath of the Sword       43
Trade press image from The Oath of the Sword       47
Photograph of Bankoku-za in Los Angeles       59
Photograph of Bungoro Tani       60
Advertisement for Iwata Opera House       61
Photograph of Nichibei Kogyo Kaisha       69
Advertisement for Nichibei Kogyo Kaisha featuring benshi       73
Invoice from Nichibei Kogyo Kaisha       74
Show schedule for Takeshi Ban       79
Takeshi Ban’s “Japanese Racial Culture” lecture       81
Letter from Takeshi Ban to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 30, 1937       82
Advertisement for Asian American actor in the sound era       88
Photograph of Suisei Matsui in Hollywood       90
Publicity spread for Japanese version of Paramount on Parade (1930)       91
Publicity photograph for Eddie Holden (a.k.a. Frank Watanabe)       97
Advertisement for Captain Nakamura       114
Advertisement for Gonnin no sekkohei       115
Advertisement for “Filipinos Always Welcome”       121
Advertisement for Hayashino’s neighborhood theaters       122
Advertisement of “Filipino Show Parade”       125
Advertisement of films from Mexico at the Imperial Theatre       125
Advertisement for The Rose of Manila       127
Advertisement promoting Tagalog talkies       129
Advertisement for midnight exhibition of Filipino films       132
Advertisement for Zamboanga       134
Ink portrait of Shigeaki Hayashino       136
Photograph of Nichibei Kinema banner       141
MAPS
Little Tokyo and film industry in Los Angeles, California       7
Film businesses in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles       8
Author’s Note
A substantial part of this book is derived from research conducted in historical archives of Japanese American materials. In direct quotes and as appropriate, this book preserves the conventions in the source materials. Modified Hepburn romanization without macrons is otherwise applied in the book. While the book discusses many individuals who were born in Japan and led transnational lives in the United States, it generally follows the name order convention observed in the English-language archive: given name before surname. Certain Japanese proper nouns do not have uniform English translations in the historical documents. I have adopted the English that appears most commonly in the archive or else the translation closest to the Japanese where the Japanese naming is consistent. While every effort has been made to match Japanese film titles mentioned in the English-language historical documents to titles of known films in Japanese-language databases, some titles have eluded confirmation due to variations that make the films difficult to identify or else because data about the films were not found.
Introduction
A photograph of the Fuji Kan in Los Angeles displays film posters and advertising banners hanging under a whimsical facade of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji. It is a brightly lit marquee, and the building itself appears nestled between storefronts, restaurants, and a bustling boulevard. Fuji Kan was first built in 1925 at 324 East First Street, in the heart of Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. It was among at least four theaters operated by Japanese in Los Angeles before World War II. At the Fuji Kan, the latest films from Japan were projected on-screen. Often these films were accompanied by musical instrumentation and a benshi , who provided live narration or commentary. It was the benshi with whom audiences identified and whom they longed for, their names publicized in local papers as prominently as the film titles and stars. Fuji Kan employed a cadre of benshi, each of whom brought his or her own style and performance to a given film show. Such dynamics made the filmic experience contingent, variable, and differentiated. While it was true that audiences in Los Angeles could now view the same films as audiences in Tokyo, the live performative elements at the Fuji Kan presented a view of cinema at once localized and irreproducible.
Operating at a pivotal time for Japanese in the United States, the Fuji Kan was more than a venue for commercial entertainment. When they moved across the cities and towns on the Pacific coast, many Japanese confronted a color line stretching from housing restrictions to the spaces of public accommodation. Against these exclusions, the Fuji Kan was something of a refuge, an untethered space that catered to its audiences. Throughout the decades, Japanese-owned theaters in the United States served a multiplicity of usages. Beyond offering film shows, they served as places of gathering, assembly, and collectivization. In conjunction with film screenings, they often held performances, lectures, sermons, rallies, community gatherings, or fund-raisers. Often located in urban centers, these spaces were even reconfigured at crucial moments to serve the barer necessities of housing and sustenance.
Even the screen at the Fuji Kan projected a plenitude of media across varying format, content, and genre. American feature films were the standard fare in the earliest days. When films from Japan began to be exhibited more regularly in the mid-1920s, they were most often coupled with short features ranging from travelogues, educational or industrial shorts, and, as the Sino-Japanese War escalated, propaganda films. Additionally, the Fuji Kan on several occasions exhibited local films , depicting views of the neighborhood and commercial streets as well as community activities, such as swimming competitions and judo matches. Showing local views and recognizable places, these films appealed to audiences’ desires for self-recognition or “seeing oneself on the screen.” 1 For Japanese excluded from political participation in the United States (as determined by law until 1952), local films presented the audience with an alternative form of public affirmation and recognition.
Photograph of Los Angeles’s Fuji Kan in 1939. Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library.
Providing a central gathering place for many Japanese, the Fuji Kan drew together an ever-widening public. Junko Ogihara was among the first to write about the theater and the film culture of Japanese in Los Angeles in the article “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles during the Silent Film Era” (1990). The early days of the theater were influenced by the city’s fluctuating population. “ ‘[Japanese] families rolled in from the outlying farms in their Model T’s’ to dine and shop in Little Tokyo,” according to one account, “[and] ended the night at the Fuji-kan, the local movie house showing Japanese silent films, complete with a silver-tongued benshi with shamisen accompaniment.” 2 Like the city itself, the Fuji Kan was tied to migration and the growing cycles of agricultural fields, its audiences expanding and contracting with the centripetal movements characteristic of the developing Pacific coast of the early twentieth