Paper short abstract:

1868 looms large both in Japanese history and in the history of Japanese cinema. It is the supposedly firm dividing line between period dramas and present-day dramas. However, in this paper, I will analyze a few key films which challenge this boundary, with important implications for us today.

Paper long abstract:

Among scholars of Japanese history, one of the most widely accepted temporal boundaries is 1868, the supposed dividing line separating pre- or early modern Japan from the Meiji-era project of modernization. From the 1910s and especially after 1923, once Japan's film industry began the large-scale production of films which attempted to represent the country's past, that date of 1868 was used as an ostensibly firm boundary between 'present-day dramas' (gendaigeki) and 'period dramas' (jidaigeki). Standard film histories typically claim, with some justification, that any film purporting to show Japan's premodern or early modern history, by definition, was a period drama, subject to the institutional strictures of that genre, and similarly, films whose focus was on the contemporary world were made in a manner different from those period dramas: the two genres had, it is often said, entirely separate production facilities, crews, and cast members, with little to no mixing between the two. They were even separated geographically, with films about contemporary times being made in Tokyo while films about the past were made in Kyoto. Given these conditions, it certainly seems as though both moviemakers and, presumably, moviegoers in twentieth-century Japan accepted 1868 as a stark boundary between the premodern and the modern, thereby implicitly accepting the Hegelian logic of linear progress through time.

In this paper, I will illustrate the many ways this neat typology of films obscures other views of history, and introduce a few key films which took a more skeptical view of 1868 as a 'divide' and instead straddled both sides of this boundary. In particular, wartime film producers, under increasing pressure to abandon 'frivolous' or nostalgic celebrations of the Edo period and focus on the modern world, were forced to break all the rules the industry had established, mixing casts, crews and storylines from both genres to create what I call 'trans-Restoration' films. The existence and popularity of such films suggests viewers at the time had a more nuanced understanding of historical progress than is commonly assumed—and if they were willing to question 1868 as a firm boundary, perhaps we in 2016 should also.