Expressive Meaning and Historical Grounding
in the Film Music of Fumio Hayasaka and Toru Takemitsu
Timothy Koozin
As an introduction to this volume of the Journal of Film Music devoted to the film scores of
Fumio Hayasaka and Toru Takemitsu, this essay explores Hayasaka’s artistic legacy in
establishing practices that Takemitsu would personalize and extend in his film music.
Hayasaka’s contributions during the interwar and postwar years would help to establish modern
artistic traditions in Japanese music and film that explore boundaries between reality and dream,
provide social commentary on the present through references to past, and express individuality
through the active negotiation of Japanese traditions and global ways of framing knowledge. The
breadth of transhistorical musical styles present within a single film could in itself serve as a
social commentary, refuting the authority implied in the constraints of unified realism. The
notion that music need not conform to the visual narrative of a film, but might instead interject a
counterpoint projecting independent layers of meaning was a working premise in Hayasaka’s
collaborations with Akira Kurosawa that can be traced to early Soviet film, Bertolt Brecht, and
aesthetic principles of traditional Japanese theatre.1 Takemitsu’s film and concert works display
an originality grounded in multiple layers of tradition that directly relates to Hayasaka’s film music
compositional techniques and the mentorship he provided to the younger composer. The artistic
license to explore different pan-cultural styles afforded to both Hayasaka and Takemitsu while
working in collaboration with major Japanese film directors contributed to representations of
modern Japanese subjectivity in film while laying the foundation for musical approaches that
would further develop in the late twentieth century as a form of postmodern musical rhetoric, in
which transhistorical stylistic markers interact as agents of expressive meaning.
It should be clarified from the outset that the focused studies of individual films offered in this
volume are in no way intended to represent any totalizing view of “Japanese Music” or
“Japanese Film,” or, to marginalize the film music of other composers that might be less known
internationally. More work is needed to explore the contributions of composers that have
contributed significantly to postwar film music in Japan, including Akira Ifukube, Yasushi
Akutagawa, Masaru Satō, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Ikebe Shinichiro, and those who collaborated with
Takemitsu: Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi, and Joji Yuasa. The fact that a relatively small
1
Stephen Prince discusses how both Kurosawa and Brecht structured their works as responses to
the problems of war and militarization in The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira
Kurosawa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See p. 36-37 and 100-101. Shinichirō Ikebe, the composer of music for Kurosawa films including Kagemusha and Dreams,
states that Kurosawa often used the Brechtian terms of “alienation” and “assimilation” to
describe the counterpoint of divergent images and music. See the documentary, It is Wonderful
to Create, included on the Criterion Collection DVD, Drunken Angel, directed by Akira
Kurosawa, 1948. Kurosawa stated that a Soviet film released in Japan titled The Sharpshooter
provided a model for effects of counterpoint between sound and image they created in Drunken
Angel. See Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Brock (New
York: Vintage, 1982), 163.
number of the many films with music by Hayasaka and Takemitsu are among the Japanese films
most familiar to international audiences and most represented in works of film criticism available
in English only points to the need for more scholarship illuminating a wider range of films,
composers, and critical perspectives. It is hoped that this volume may contribute to that ongoing
endeavor.
Reclaiming the Past: Hayasaka’s Collaborations with Kurosawa and Mizoguchi
Fumio Hayasaka attained prominence as a composer and began composing for films during the
1930s, a period of dramatic cultural change in Japan. A growing sense of Japanese cultural
identity fostered by patriotic nationalism and the rise of a middle class consumer audience for
music led to renewed interest in indigenous musical traditions that had been excluded from the
Meiji Era cultural policy of promoting Western art music as an emblem of modernization. It is
perhaps ironic that a turbulent social environment of increasingly militarized nationalism
fostered the beginnings of a new period of daring innovation and self-reflective creativity in
music that would have a significant impact on filmmaking in Japan.2
Hayasaka was among a group of intellectuals that protested in silence against the imperialist
military regime during the war. Regarded by younger composers as a musical and spiritual
leader, Hayasaka pioneered an eclectic style that intermingled elements of Japanese Gagaku
music, contemporary French and Russian orchestral music, and elements of jazz and popular
music to realize his conception of an original musical idiom that could embrace cultural
exchange while drawing upon the aesthetic sophistication of Japanese tradition.3 At a time when
German and French music dominated Japan’s musical world and intrinsically Japanese forms of
musical creativity were regarded as a threatening form of nationalism, Hayasaka created unified
compositions that evoked complex mixtures of style that would greatly influence Takemitsu and
other postwar Japanese composers. Judith Ann Herd writes that Hayasaka “demonstrated that
Japan’s modern culture and music should not be broken down into categories of foreign or
traditional, and classical or popular, but recognized for what they are: a complex mixture of
something new, dynamic, and adaptable for the modern age.”4 Hayasaka’s ability to contrast and
interrelate the connotative meanings of musically diverse materials would serve him well in film
music composition and influence a younger generation of composers.
From Hayasaka’s first film in 1939, The Lady Ties a Ribbon (Ribbon o musubu fujin, directed by
Satsuo Yamamoto), through the 1940s, Hayasaka scored films primarily for Toho Company,
producing music for as many as six films each year. Hayasaka and Akira Kurosawa developed a
2
For a study of this period in Japanese music, see Judith Ann Herd, “The Cultural Politics in
Japan’s Modern Music: Nostalgia, Nationalism, and Identity in the Interwar Years” in Locating
East Asia in Western Art Music edited by Yayoi Uno Everett and Everett and Lau (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 40-56. Also see Herd’s “The Neonationalist Movement:
Origins of Japanese Contemporary Music,” Perspectives of New Music, 27, no. 2 (Summer,
1989), 118-163.
3
Luciana Galliano, Yôgaku: Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century, trans. Martin Mayes
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 134-135.
4
Herd (2004), 52-53.
close friendship and began their collaboration with the early noir Yakuza gangster drama
Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) in 1948. In memos published that same year, Kurosawa
admitted that he had been “too casual” with music in the past and consciously sought with
Hayasaka to create “a turning point” in Japanese film music. “Music was considered in the
writing stage, mapped out, and tied to the images and what kind of role it would play.”5 Music
could be viewed as “counterpoint” set in opposition to the image and not just an
“accompaniment.”6 Kurosawa deeply respected Hayasaka’s knowledge and judgment; they
would collaborate on all of Kurosawa’s subsequent films until Hayasaka succumbed to
tuberculosis at the age of 41 in 1955.
Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel, a story of friendship between a diseased gangster and an alcoholic
doctor in postwar Japan, is rich in its use of music as a contesting counterpoint to the visual
action. As in his other films, Kurosawa had specific ideas for music that Hayasaka would realize
as his composer. For Drunken Angel, Kurosawa indicated that he wanted “hopeful” music that
would sound like Debussy’s piano piece, Claire de Lune.7 The orchestral music Hayasaka
composed for this purpose can be heard at several points in the film including the powerful
ending scene, which shifts between Toshiro Mifune’s darkly expressionistic knife battle with the
gangster boss and the sunny brightness of a more hopeful outside world that is removed from the
fight and inhabited by others the gangster now fights to protect. The music helps to express the
binary oppositions in the scene, objectifying the ugly brutality of the violence rather than
romanticizing it. As Mifune struggles with the evil gangster boss, they are entwined as if one in
the same, but the music helps to convey that Mifune’s battle is also with himself as he attempts
to break free from his own identity as a gangster. With its soaring melody, undulating rhythm,
and colorful harmony, the Debussy-inspired music contradicts the darkness of the death struggle,
communicating Mifune’s transfiguration as he achieves freedom from the limitations and
conflicting obligations of his life. While the theme shares traits with Claire de Lune in melodic
contour, rhythm, and harmony, it also bears similarity to the middle section theme from
Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d’un faune. Parallel passages in both Debussy pieces are
marked with brackets in Example 1.8
5
Eiga Shunshu (Films of the Spring and Fall) quoted in Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and
the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, (New York: Faber and
Faber, 2001), 96.
6
Kurosawa (1982), 191-198.
7
Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, third ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996), 53.
8
Musical examples are aural transcriptions rendered by the author.
Example 1. Fumio Hayasaka. Drunken Angel, “Hope” theme
The Debussy-inspired melody heard during the deadly knife battle returns in a setting with fuller
counterpoint in the winds as the film closes on the Doctor walking with the young schoolgirl he
has successfully treated for tuberculosis. Lawrence Kramer has used the term, “expressive
doubling” for parallel musical passages that repeat a pattern in order to “define a cardinal
difference of perspective,” reinterpreting its problematic issues at some deeper level.9 In
Mifune’s death scene, the music distances the viewer from the violence, implying a better,
hopeful life that was tragically just beyond his grasp. Something akin to Kramer’s expressive
doubling occurs through this musical repetition, as that hope for a better life, unattainable to
Mifune’s tragic character, is relocated in the innocent youth of the schoolgirl and the renewed
idealism of the Doctor. While the earlier musical setting invokes a kind of stillness, as if we are
asked to contemplate the gangster’s life and senseless death, the final statement projects a
stronger quality of forward motion and continuation. The recurring music underscores the
Doppelgänger-like relationship of the gangster and the doctor, as well as the dualism of the
gangster’s life cut short and the girl’s restored health.
Two kinds of solo guitar music are used to create another thematic dualism in Drunken Angel.
One serves to connect the filthy and disease-ridden sump pond that dominates the set to the
people that live around it while the other, appropriately named “The Killer’s Anthem,” is played
by the mob boss himself and becomes his leitmotif. With its swing rhythm and easy blues style,
the opening guitar tune (Example 2a) can be heard as a jazzy and melancholy cabaret ballad
infused with traditional Japanese modal elements.10 It is an unadorned melody played by a young
9
Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),
23. Also see Robert Hatten’s discussion of expressive doubling in Interpreting Musical Gestures,
Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), 35-52.
10
Kurosawa had originally wanted to use the suite from Die Dreigroschenoper, particularly the
music of Mackie Messer, but the expense was prohibitive. In addition, the use of German music
in the Japanese setting was not acceptable to the postwar American censors.
guitarist that sits on the bank of the sump pond in the evening. Okada, the thoroughly evil
gangster boss that has returned to reclaim his territory after a stint in prison, takes the instrument
and proceeds to play an old song that was popular when the younger guitarist was “just a kid,”
“The Killer’s Anthem” (Example 2b). Others nearby are filled with dread to hear the dark and
ominous song that announces Okada’s presence.
Example 2. Fumio Hayasaka. Drunken Angel, solo guitar music
a. Opening guitar music (excerpt)
b. “The Killer’s Anthem”
The guitar pieces make use of flatted 2-1 and flatted 6-5 linear progressions related to the
traditional Japanese miyakobushi scale, with its distinctive lowered second scale degree.11 Both
11
Galiano, 35, n. 27. For more on the miyakobushi scale and Westernized harmonic settings of
Japanese folk melodies that feature the half-diminished seventh chord, see David Pacun, “‘Thus
We Cultivate Our Own World, and Thus We Share It with Others’: Kósçak Yamada’s Visit to
the United States in 1918-1919,” American Music, 24, No. 1 (Spring, 2006): 67-94. I am grateful
to David Pacun for sharing with me an unpublished article that further explores this topic.
guitar pieces strongly contrast the orchestral “hope” music, which features the brighter major
sixth scale degree. The half-diminished seventh chord in the orchestral theme moves in a smooth
chromatic line to create Romantic color, recalling ways that Debussy or one of the Russian
composers might have treated the chord. But “The Killer’s Anthem” isolates and makes a parody
of the recurring chord, contesting the tonal profile of the song with jarring dissonances. It has
attributes of a march with its tonic-dominant ostinato bass, dotted rhythm, square phrasing, and
steady walking tempo. The idea that the piece is an “Anthem” adds to its formal and even
militaristic connotations as a grotesque caricature of a march. The song perfectly suits Okada. As
a one-dimensional character completely identified with power, opportunistic greed, and the rigid
hierarchy of gangster society, he represents a dark allusion to the militarist profiteers of an older
generation active during the war.
Music is crucial in expressing a central theme in the film: the struggle to overcome a culture of
war that exploited the idealism and human weaknesses of ordinary people. An element that was
essential in Kurosawa’s depiction of Japan under American occupation in 1947 is his expressed
intention to satire American jazz.12 At one point in a dance club we hear a grotesquely dissonant
jazz swing version of Bizet’s “March of the Toreadors” from Carmen. With the narrative
communicated through body language and music more than dialogue, the framing of action is
almost opera-like, focusing on the interactions of the gangsters with a chorus of their women off
to the side. The effect is to denounce the corrupt gangsters by presenting them as Americanized
caricatures, satirizing through music that the loss of Japanese culture under American occupation
is yet another symptom of disease portrayed in the film.13
A broad shift in mode of signification -- from words to images -- that distinguishes Kurosawa’s
films opened new possibilities for innovative foregroundings of music.14 The musical passages in
Drunken Angel illustrate Kurosawa’s preference for using music strategically to propel the
narrative in scenes with little or no dialogue. Long scenes that unfold with music and no dialogue
are also structured in this manner in Stray Dog (Nora inu, 1949) to follow a detective as he
relentlessly pursues a criminal into a dark urban underworld. Music heightens the immediacy of
expression in these passages while delimiting a temporal space for a scene to develop visually.
As we watch actors perform or react to music, or inhabit a musical environment like a dance
club, we are drawn into an experience of objectified spectatorship. The theatrical framing of
music within scenes interacts with Kurosawa’s innovative visual framings to demarcate a
distanced perspective on historicized events, provoking a reflective critical response to the
cultural tensions projected through music and image. Hayasaka’s involvement in developing this
formal conception of cinematic image and music as a means to engage history and confront
social issues was an important contribution in his postwar collaborations with Kurosawa.
In addition to his music for Kurosawa films, Hayasaka is most remembered for his film scores
for the late works of Kenji Mizoguchi, including Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953), Sansho the
12
It is Wonderful to Create. While Hayasaka composed and supervised music for the film, the
often cited “Jungle Boogie” musical sequence was written by jazz composer Ryoichi Hattori
with lyrics by Akira Kurosawa.
13
Prince, 85.
14
Ibid., 142.
Bailiff (Sansho Dayu, 1954) and Crucified Lovers (Chikamatsu monogatari, 1954). In a letter to
Yoshikata Yoda, the screenwriter of Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi writes:
Whether war originated in the ruler’s personal motive or public concern, how violence
disguised as war oppresses and torments the populace both physically and spiritually!
However, they have to keep living in direct confrontation with this violence. I want to
emphasize this as the main theme of the film.15
Mizoguchi’s transhistorical parable on the moral and social costs of war expresses a major theme
found in Mizoguchi’s films, that the past dark ages of Japan’s feudal order have carried over into
modernity.16 Portraying the human drama in a context of fully detailed historical realism,
Mizoguchi draws the past into the present to depict the tragic consequences of living in
confrontation with the violence of war.
In his article for this volume, David Pacun describes the layering of alternate worlds of reality,
the supernatural, and the historical imagination in Ugetsu. Hayasaka’s music derived from
ceremonial Gagaku theatre music plays a crucial role in creating a rhetorical stance of
detachment as we witness the characters’ choices of action in confronting the turmoil of civil
war. The dual reality of a supernatural ghost tale contrasted against the realistic depiction of a
world at war and the moral crisis it causes is conveyed as much through musical means as
through Mizoguchi’s pioneering camera work and pictorial sense. Hayasaka was very familiar
with music of Debussy and Ravel that utilized musical materials to depict symbolist expressions
of dreamlike states of mind, mythical narratives of eroticism, and nostalgic landscapes. In
Ugetsu, Genjuro’s seduction away from traditional values, in which he forsakes all
responsibilities for illusory passion personified in the evil spirit of Lady Wakasa, is conveyed
through an evocative musical troping of stylized Noh drama devices and French-inspired
orchestral music with harp. Through theatrical distanciation heightened with Hayasaka’s courtly
renderings and ephemeral harp figuration, we cannot help but understand that Lady Wakasa is
pathological, cunning, and not of this world.
Mizoguchi has said, “Comparing today with the Nara (710-794) and Genroku (1688-1703)
periods, I don’t find much difference: women have always been treated like slaves.”17 While the
male characters in Ugetsu display a childishness intended to represent moral emptiness, the
heroines Miyagi and Ohama have no choice but to sacrifice themselves, as they are trapped in
the oppressive social role of Confucian obedience to father, husband, and son. Theirs is not a
passive submission, but a sacrifice that affirms their stoic resistance to the madness of pursuing
15
Yoshikata Yoda. Mizoguchi Kenji no hito to geijutsu (Kenji Mizoguchi: The Man and his Art)
(Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970), 216, quoted in Keiko McDonald, Cinema East: a critical study of
major Japanese film, (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 103.
16
Joan Mellen, The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan through its Cinema, (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1976), 104.
17
Matsuo Kishi, “A Talk with Mizoguchi,” Kinema Jumpo, April 1952, translated by Leonard
Schrader, quoted in Mellen, p. 252.
material gain at any moral cost.18 The expression of this stoic grace, after all the ordeals that
have been experienced, is powerfully realized in the final moments of the film.
Through the presence of Miyagi’s voice as a guiding spirit in death, she attains a spiritual victory
in the end. The filmic placement of the characters both seen and unseen, at the gravesite within a
pictorial landscape of the surrounding rural countryside, invokes a clear association between the
pastoral setting and the spiritual grounding of the villagers. This scene may be regarded as an
expression of mono no aware, the aesthetic quality of regarding life’s mortality with a resigned
sadness imbued with expressive pathos.19 The effect is all the more poignant because we hear
Miyagi answering Genjuro’s spoken prayer but he cannot. We hear her speak from the spirit
world with a contentment that she was not afforded in her difficult life. Music enters into the
scene as if to affirm Miyagi’s presence. The musical tensions of competing stylistic allusions
projected throughout the film are here resolved as well. The double reed hichiriki of Gagaku
supported with low orchestral strings and woodwinds adds to a quality of stability and
groundedness rooted in nature and tradition. Sustained chords played on sho enter in the final
moments, as Miyagi’s child places an offering of rice on her grave, as if to directly acknowledge
her invisible presence. In this privileged moment of transcendence, we understand through the
sound of her words alone and the expressive power of music that she is there to accept this gift.
David Pacun begins his article with a discussion of this powerful final scene in Ugetsu.
Fumio Hayasaka as Mentor
From the gritty cabaret dance music and big band scoring in Drunken Angel and Stray Dog to the
operatic dramatic breadth of Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), and Seven Samurai (Shechinin no
samurai, 1954), Hayasaka’s film music for Kurosawa and his music for Mizoguchi’s late films
display mastery of a broad array of musical styles that would provide Toru Takemitsu with
models for composition that manipulate pan-cultural musical styles as a means to challenge the
18
The complex subjective positioning of men and women in Mizoguchi’s films is explored in
Robert N. Cohen’s “Why Does Oharu Faint? Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu and Patriarchal
Discourse” in Reframing Japanese Cinema, Arthur Nolletti, Jr. and David Desser, eds. (Indiana
University Press, 1992), 33-55. See also Joan Mellen, p. 252-269. Mizoguchi’s treatment of
women has also been critiqued and challenged. Gregory Barrett writes that the forgiving nature
of Mizoguchi’s heroines could also be interpreted as “an idealization of servility of the weak and
oppressed.” See Archetypes in Japanese Film: The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of
the Principal Heroes and Heroines (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1989) 108.
19
Hayasaka himself made frequent reference to mono no aware in his own writings on Japanese
aesthetics. See Galliano, p. 134. Donald Richie discusses mono no aware as an essential aesthetic
concept in Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1971), 69-70. Gregory Barrett critiques Richie’s approach, p. 13-18. David Desser compares and
contrasts the elicitation of aware and cyclical time in the films of Mizoguchi and Ozu. In
discussing the endings of Ozu’s films, Desser explains how Ozu’s film often end with a still life
or coda that alludes to human presence through absence. Imbued with the quality of mono no
aware, these still life ending shots “point to the transitory nature of individuals juxtaposed
against the timelessness of nature, or the Zen-like absence of the human subject within a
humanized context.” p. 19.
imagination. James Siddons writes, “It was Hayasaka who drew Takemitsu to the world of film
music and all the contrasts of realism and dream-like imagination therein that had fascinated
Takemitsu about cinema since his boyhood.”20
Asaka Takemitsu, the wife of the composer, recalls how Toru Takemitsu got his start in the film
industry working as Fumio Hayasaka’s assistant:
Yes, he needed to support himself, so he went to Hayasaka’s house and helped him with
writing scores from early on. He first started with writing the scores of Rashōmon. Later
Toru said that it was a practical learning experience for him. A young composer doesn’t
have many opportunities to have his music performed even if you write an orchestral
work, but film music can become a real sound easily. He wasn’t the one who was
composing, but by writing the scores, he was able to learn how to layer the notes and hear
the real sound later when it was performed. Toru said the real study of music was with
Hayasaka since he didn’t go to music school.21
Fumio Hayasaka had the vision to recognize film as a new expressive medium for music. The
circle of younger composers collaborating in Japan’s film music industry during the 1950s were
strongly influenced by Hayasaka’s mentorship.22 Takemitsu assisted on Hayasaka’s music for
Seven Samurai (1954), for which Masaru Satō provided orchestrations. Takemitsu also assisted
Yasushi Akutagawa, Toshiro Mayuzumi, and Masaru Satō with their film music projects around
this time.23 Takemitsu composed his first film music score in collaboration with Akutagawa for
Salary Man (Mehaku Sanpei, 1955), based on a radio drama that was popular at the time. After
assisting others in smaller non-commercial productions, he collaborated with Satō on Crazed
Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, 1956), which brought Takemitsu recognition in the film industry for the
first time.
Shinoda and Takemitsu: The Radicalization of Japanese Modernity
If Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu draws spectatorship into the film through its theatricality, offsetting and
resisting the illusory mimesis of realism, then Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (Shinjū Tenno
Amijima, 1969) thematicizes and actively explores the theatrical frame of spectatorship as a
means to radically juxtapose the modern and premodern. In her article for this volume, Yayoi
Uno Everett explains how an expressive framework of modern subjectivity in Shinoda’s film
draws upon narrative strategies and formal designs inherent in the Bunraku puppet theatre play
20
James Siddons. Toru Takemitsu: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001),
6. Siddons draws from Takemitsu’s 1975 essay, Ki no Kagami, Sogen no Kagami (Mirror of
Tree, Mirror of Grass) in which Takemitsu contrasts the influences of Kiyose and Hayasaka on
his development (Tokyo: Shincho Sha, 1975), 71-73.
21
Mitsuko Ono and Tomoko Isshiki. Interview with Asaka Takemitsu, trans. Tomoko Isshiki
with David Pacun, 2010. Manuscript kindly provided by the authors.
22
Galliano, 133.
23
Jun Kobayashi. Nihon Eigaongaku no Kyoseitachi (Mega stars of Japanese film music), vol. 1
(Tokyo: Hiraisha, 2001), 144. I thank Yayoi Uno Everett for invaluable help in translating
passages from Kobayashi’s book.
on which it is based. Boundaries between the real and unreal are thematicized in the film, as the
audience views puppeteers (kurogo), hooded and dressed in black, that watch the film’s action
with their detached gaze and gradually participate more actively as the narrative unfolds. The
puppeteers mediate between the boundaries of the filmic and external world. Like us as film
viewers, they are spectators. Their embodiment as witnesses draws us into the film, just as
objectified spectatorship provides an essential component of ritualized theater in Noh, Gagaku,
and traditional Bunraku.24
The modern cinematic rendering of an Edo-period oppositional space expresses Shinoda’s selfconscious rejection of realism on political and aesthetic grounds. As David Desser explains,
“The use of theatrical conventions within the cinematic context ‘defamiliarizes’ both theatre and
cinema and highlights them. The effect of this strategy is to ‘make strange’ the manner in which
social roles and socially defined habits exert an ideological force on the individual.”25 This
process of defamiliarization is enacted through the interplay of Takemitsu’s diverse musical
materials that accompany filmic representations of the real and unreal. Solo biwa music and
electronically altered percussion sounds comment on the primal emotional impact of the action
almost like a musical narrator. Non-Western musical materials expressing premodern ritualistic
refinement (Balinese gamelan, Bunraku chanting, Turkish nei) are juxtaposed with source
sounds of nature (water and wind), enlisting premodern sensibilities to depict a modern human
struggle poised on the boundaries between life and death. In this way, the filmic and musical
treatment enlists pan-cultural elements to project an emergent meaning that signifies a
radicalized interpretation of Japanese modernity.
Masahiro Shinoda was among the Japanese filmmakers and playwrights in the 1960s identified
with the New Wave (nuberu bagu) movement that repositioned the traditions of Noh, Kabuki,
and Bunraku within new contexts in order to achieve a break from both the present and the
past.26 New Wave filmmakers in Japan sought to radicalize their own traditions by directly
invoking the shamanistic roots of the pre-modern imagination as an essential expression of
Japanese identity. Unlike predecessors before the war that drew from traditional theatre as a form
of institutionalized official culture, they sought to reject the restrictive ideological confinement
implied in realism through a more direct dialectical engagement with the premodern past. This
provided a creative means to resist the confining values of materialism and anti-individualism
that were entrenched in modern Japanese culture during the Cold War era, while the difficult
economic climate actually favored independent filmmaking. Commercial film studios, including
24
Noël Burch contrasts the presentational modes of Japanese theatre and film with Western
modes of representation in To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 67-74. Drawing on Bertolt Brecht and Roland
Barthes, he aligns traditional Japanese modes of theatrical presentation with modern ideologies
that resist Western institutionalized modes of representation. For a detailed reading of the kurogo
in this film, see Keiko McDonald, Japanese Classical Theater in Films (Rutherford, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), p. 208-223.
25
David Desser. Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema
(Indiana University Press, 1988), 178.
26
Ibid., 174. Desser also discusses Shohei Imamura, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa, and Satoh
Makoto in this regard.
Shochiku, Toho, and Toei, experienced a decline in film audiences after reaching a peak in the
late 1950s, due primarily to the encroachment of television. As production at major studios
declined, independent partnerships for exhibition of international art films and production of new
Japanese films were formed, most importantly, the Art Theatre Guild. Roland Domenig explains
that the ATG did not really compete with Toho and the other studios, but instead provided an
experimental environment for fostering talent:
Experiments made possible by ATG were unthinkable within the structure of the studio
system, especially in times of dwindling attendance and decreasing revenue. The studios
preferred to let others worry about the unprofitable auteur films and concentrate instead
on the rather more lucrative genre cinema. To a certain extent, however, the studios
supported independent productions such as ATG’s because their experiments were
considered an important source of innovation. From 1968 onwards, ATG was the major
experimental laboratory of Japanese film.27
Activist avant-gardism and an environment that fostered independent filmmaking contributed to
a period of intense creativity in Japanese film that enlisted the talents of Japanese composers.
Toru Takemitsu composed music for numerous ATG films in addition to Shinoda’s Double
Suicide.28 Many other internationally known Japanese composers composed music for ATG
films, including Toshiro Mayuzumi (A Man Vanishes, “Ningen Johatsu,” 1968, dir. Shohei
Imamura), Joji Yuasa (Funeral Parade of Roses, “Bara no Sōretsu,” 1969, dir. Toshio
Matsumoto), and Toshi Ichiyanagi (Eros plus Massacre, “Erosu purasu gyakusatsu,” 1969, dir.
Yoshishige Yoshida).
Kurowsawa’s Ran: A Lament on the Loss of Modernist Idealism
Kurosawa would answer the developments of the New Wave experimentalists with a grandly
expressionist work of experimentation, Dodes’ka-den (1970), the first of his two films with
music by Takemitsu. If Kurosawa’s earlier High and Low (1963) contrasts a perfect “high”
world as a fortress shielding the privileged from the “low” world of the inner city, then
Dodes’ka-den goes further to depict an industrial wasteland of poverty, where the only comfort
is found in the non-linear experience of hallucinatory dreams and eccentric visions.29 This
27
Roland Domenig. “The Anticipation of Freedom; Art Theatre Guild and Japanese Independent
Cinema” (2004). Translation of “Art Theatre Guild: Unabhängiges Japanisches Kino 19621984,” the catalogue of the ATG retrospective, Vienna, October, 2003.
http://www.midnighteye.com/features/art-theatre-guild.shtml. Retrieved March 28, 2010.
28
Takemitsu also composed music for Nagisa Oshima’s ATG films, Tokyo senso sengo hiwa
(The Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970), Gishiki, (The Ceremony, 1971), and Natsu no
imoto (Dear Summer Sister, 1972). He would again collaborate with Shinoda for the ATG film,
Himiko (1974). Takemitsu also composed music for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s ATG film, Otoshiana
(Pitfall, 1962) and Susumu Hani’s Hatsukoi Jigokuhen (Nanami: The Inferno of First Love,
1968).
29
In opposition to the abject misery of life depicted in the slum town of a Tokyo garbage dump,
Takemitsu’s music for Dodes’ka-den portrays the endearing warmth and humor of characters
sustained by their dreams. Music in a popular style with folk-like melody and straightforward
renunciation of the modern world continues in Ran (1985), a transcendental lament in which the
destructive actions of humanity are presented as if viewed from heaven. The late films represent
Kurosawa’s increasingly dark personal worldview, as destructive social forces in the world
accelerate to a point where an ethical individual is powerless to effect meaningful change.
Stephen Prince writes that this represents in Ran and other late films since Dodes’ka-den, “a
negative inversion of the terms by which the early films sought to grasp and change the world.
Free choice, once the measure of heroism and the means of freeing oneself from the demands of
the environment, has become severely restricted and, when exercised, perverted.”30 In Ran, the
social idealism underlying heroic struggle is replaced with a metaphysical lament on the
consuming evils inherent in human nature, depicting it on an epic scale that expresses the
technological and social amplification of violence deeply rooted in humanity.
Kurosawa links patterns of ambition and betrayal characteristic of Japan’s feudal civil wars to
Shakespeare’s King Lear, creating a transhistorical parable of humanity’s self-destructive
impulses. Kurosawa’s initial inspiration for the screenplay came from the legend of Motonari
Mori (1497-1571), whose three sons are admired in Japan as an ideal representation of family
loyalty. James Goodwin explains that the connections to plot elements and metaphors in King Lear
became apparent to Kurosawa as he developed his conception of “an inversion to Japanese ideals
of family and political loyalty. ” 31 Always interested in the counterpoint of music and the visual
image, Kurosawa describes in his screenplay the chaos of human violence that culminates in
Hideatora’s fall into a hell he has brought about through his own cruelty. With horrific images
structured like a hellish picture scroll, Kurowawa’s stated goal for the music was to interject a
dimension that transforms the terror of human destruction into a transcendental lament, as
witnessed from the heavens by the sorrowful Buddha:
Hideatora, his strength drained from his body, slips and tumbles down the stairs
like a dead man falling into Hell.
A terrible scroll of hell is shown depicting the fall of the castle. There are no real
sounds as the scroll unfolds like a daytime nightmare. It is a scene of human evildoing,
the way of the demonic Ashura, as seen by Buddha in tears.
The music superimposed on these pictures is, like the Buddha’s heart, measured
in beats of profound anguish, the chanting of melody full of sorrow that begins like
sobbing and rises gradually as it is repeated, like karmic cycles, then finally sounds like
the wailing of countless Buddhas.32
tonal harmony is used to represent Rokuchan, a mentally handicapped boy who spends his days
driving an imagined trolley. It may be that uncomplicated music featuring solo melodic
instruments (including trumpet, harmonica, woodwinds, guitar, and percussion) was a practical
choice, as the film was shot in just 28 days on a very limited budget. Music more like the
evocative chamber music Takemitsu composed during the 1970s is heard during the imaginings
of the beggar man and child as they mentally construct a fantastic dream house they plan to
build.
30
Prince, 288.
31
James Goodwin. Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), 196-197.
32
Akira Kurosawa, Ran, trans. Tadashi Shishido. (Boston: Shambhala, 1986), 46, quoted in
Prince, 287-288.
In her article for this volume, Tomoko Isshiki traces the artistic and aesthetic sources for Toru
Takemitsu’s music in Ran, focusing on two types of music prominent in the film: the solo flute
music derived from Noh drama that is associated with Tsurumaru’s soul and emotions and the
Mahler-like orchestral music composed specifically at Kurosawa’s request. Incorporating
melodic material derived from Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Das Lied von der Erde,
Takemitsu’s orchestral setting conveys a timelessness that complements the cinematic treatment
of a battle gazed upon from the heavens. In describing this music, Donald Richie writes, “The
Mahleresque music speaks of the misery of all people, the hopelessness of the human state. The
following silence is no less eloquent a generalization.”33 The quality of timeless in the music and
the powerful silence that it frames serves to distance and objectify the view of carnage on the
battlefield, resonating with Buddhist conceptions of nothingness while conveying a modern
nihilistic despair that underscores the tragic folly of war. Takemitsu’s film score eloquently
expresses timeless to complement Kurosawa’s vision of humanity hopelessly mired in the cyclic
repetitions of history.
Ghosts in the Machine: Technology and the Decentered Subject in Akira Kurosawa’s High
and Low and Philip Kaufman’s Rising Sun
Like the other films examined in this volume, Philip Kaufman’s Rising Sun (1993) with music by
Takemitsu also thematicizes spectatorship, beginning as it does with a filmic pun that draws a
movie within a movie into the action at a Karaoke bar -- a Japanese invention that is perhaps the
quintessential modern medium for drawing audience members into a ritualized mode of
performance. In Rising Sun, intermingling references to the bushidō samurai code of honor, the
cowboy’s Code of the West, and the camaraderies of the crime drama genre collide with
American fears of Japanese economic power that reached a peak in the during the 1990s. An
American politician caught up in the murder incident seems to be patterned after Senator Paul
Tsongas, who famously said during the presidential campaign of 1992, “The Cold War is over, and
Japan won. ” 34 In a Kurosawa-like moment of objectified cinematic framing, the scene changes
from the film’s senator character on television, to Japanese executives in a Los Angeles boardroom
viewing the program, and then to the apartment of the murder victim where she and her lover (the
prime murder suspect) also have the TV program on, while a commentator on the program accuses
the senator of “trying to say America is looking for a new enemy now the Cold War is over: a
new Evil Empire to replace the Russians.” We hear Takemitsu’s shimmering music for flute,
harp, low winds, and strings during the exchange, charging the politics and intrigue of the
moment with irony and a deeper sense of cultural conflict. It is as if the interplay of visual
framing and music is projecting its own narrative, asking us to deduce from the framings of
image and sound who the “new enemy” really is. The television video image and music form a
counterpoint that moves through the discontinuity of the scene changes in a way that privileges
the illusion of the talking head on the reflective television screen -- the ghost in the machine -while distancing our involvement with the actions of “real” people in their different scenic
locales. The scene then suddenly changes to an opulent party with accompaniment provided by a
33
Richie (1996), 218.
For more on anti-Japanese rhetoric in American politics, see the 1992 article in Time
magazine, “Japan Bashing on the Campaign Trail” (February 10, 1992) by Walter Shapiro. The
character of Senator John Morton in the film is played by Ray Wise.
34
live Taiko drum ensemble that dominates the gathering while a murder ensues. The result is a
filmic rendering of ritualized observation that fuses elements of Japanese tradition and modernity
to represent an “occupation” of Japanese cultural space in modern-day Los Angeles that is both
intriguing and, in the views of many Americans at that time, potentially threatening.
The ways in which the plot revolves around reflected images captured through sophisticated
Japanese imaging technology thematicizes the threat of Japanese technological modernization
while also paying homage to Akira Kurosawa’s long-time fascination with objectified framing of
images that explore the boundaries of reality and illusion. While Rising Sun makes direct
reference to Kurosawa’s samurai epic, Yojimbo (1961) in the opening Karaoke sequence, the
greater parallel may be with Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama, High and Low. As Stephen Prince
writes, High and Low “is about seeing and not seeing, and the irony that is implicit in the use of
surveillance and communications technologies is that they serve to conceal rather than reveal
social reality.”35
Objectified representations of music and source sound are crucial in both films. The opening
music by Masaru Satō in High and Low presents a rapid succession of musical and source sounds
to form a kind of Klangfarbenmelodie of recurring musical allusions: gritty saxophone, siren-like
wordless female vocalise, bongos, harp glissando, muted trumpet, actual sirens from the urban
waterfront, dark low winds, and the clanking rhythmic sounds of trolleys and trains that all fuse
together to represent the “low” depths of society. For the first half of the film, the perpetrator of a
kidnapping is never seen; we only hear his filtered voice, recorded onto a tape recorder as he
speaks his ransom terms over the telephone. Later, we see police detectives film the ransom
payoff from a moving train with an 8-mm camera and then watch as they view this evidence
back at the police station. While the characters try desperately to glean clues from the images
and sounds filtered through these framing devices, we as viewers experience a detachment from
the unfolding of events and can focus instead on their emotional impact and the moral dilemmas
they raise. When Schubert’s Trout Quintet is heard from a tinny sounding radio at a decrepit
storefront while the detectives seek the perpetrator, the scene suddenly shifts to the kidnapper’s
apartment, where he also is hearing the Schubert on the radio. The effect of Schubert’s music
migrating through the scenes creates an ironic projection of “high culture” that renders the
pathetically dismal world inhabited by the kidnapper all the more bleak. The music directly
contests the impoverishment that is visually rendered, but the comfort of Schubert’s strains is
attenuated, as if heard from a faraway place from which the kidnapper is excluded. This
provokes empathy for the kidnapper; while he may be a deranged criminal, he is still a human
being living a tortured existence. At the same time, Kurosawa creates one of his many musical
puns in the film. Like the fisherman in Schubert’s Die Forelle, the kidnapper has caught an
innocent victim; now he has been “baited” into action by the police and will soon be caught.36
35
Prince, 188. Kurosawa’s interest in objectifying the framing of cinematic space continued in
his 1990 film, Yume (Dreams), in which a character literally enters the world of a Van Gogh
museum painting. See Martin Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape in Film” in Landscape
and Film, ed., Martin Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2006). 31-33.
36
The radio again provides ironic commentary at the moment the kidnapper is caught in a police
stakeout. An instrumental bossa nova version of the Neapolitan song, “’O Sole Mio,”
popularized by Elvis Presley as “It’s Now or Never,” plays on the radio as the kidnapper walks
The Schubert heard on the radio also happens to be in the key of D major, the principal tonality
of music in the film. Recurring musical figures and non-musical pitched sounds such as trolley
bells, train whistles, and boat horns are heard at junctures between scenes, projecting
associations of pitch and timbre that help articulate the narrative structure of the film. An
experience of objectified spectatorship results as we watch the police detectives listen for clues
in the sounds they encounter. A trolley sound heard over the phone is a crucial clue leading the
police to the kidnapper. This underscores the close association between musical sounds, nonmusical sounds of the city, and the unfolding of the drama.
Rising Sun contrasts the dark urban landscapes of inner-city Los Angeles against the its highrise
fortresses of multinational corporate power, much in the same way that Kurosawa depicts the
bifurcated structure of wealth and poverty in High and Low. In both films, the site of modern
economic power and privilege is depicted in isolation on high, like a modern Edo castle. The
theme of the samurai as a noble anachronism in a new age of impersonalized war with firearms
is recalled in both films, as heroic individuals of integrity and tradition seem obsolete, running
against the powerful currents of modernization in a culturally fractured society. The article on
Rising Sun in this volume explores how Takemitsu’s music provides a means historicize cultural
tensions in modern-day Los Angeles. Part of the pleasure in viewing the film is in the very clear
self-reflective play of allusions and styles as Kaufmann and Takemitsu use the detective genre to
interrogate and engage with history and culture on filmic and musical levels. Takemitsu’s
expressed intention to parody clichés of Japanese music in the film in order to effect an ironic
reversal of stereotypes is all the more powerful because of the detached framings of space that
link the film to Kurosawa’s art and to the tradition of theatrical detachment in Japanese theatre as
well. The references to Noh drama and Taiko drumming are rich and ironic because they connect
syntactically with the other modes of ritualized observation foregrounded in the film.
Conclusion
The challenging political and economic environment in postwar Japan fostered creativity and
experimentation in filmmaking that inspired new approaches to content, structure, and
expressivity in music. Postwar Japanese filmmakers creatively explored ritualized modes of
theatrical spectatorship as a means to align modernist subjectivity with deeply rooted cultural
traditions. This quality of objectified spectatorship, without reliance on exposition through
dialogue and the mimesis of realism, opened possibilities for music to more independently
project layers of meaning in film. Akira Kurosawa has stated, “When I start on a film project… I
first imagine how I would shoot it if it were a silent film.” It is better to express the story without
explanatory dialogue in order that “The viewer should engage their imagination.”37 This allows
the film to express rather than describe. A conception of images that develop without dialogue is
remarkably close to Takemitsu’s comments on understanding film musically. He has said that
even when in a foreign country with an unfamiliar language, he is drawn to go to the cinema. He
into the trap the police have prepared. The entrapment of the kidnapper in a sunlit garden
connects with both the Italian and English lyrics to form a counterpoint of dark humor.
37
It is Wonderful to Create.
states, “As I watch the images on the screen, even without language, I feel that I can understand
them. A musical way of understanding.”38
Any cultural artifact that has the well-worn familiarity of cliché has a history of use that points
back to some past time when it was new. To the modern listener, Hayasaka’s Gagaku renderings
or his impressionistic orchestrations of pentatonic melody may at times seem to evoke musical
clichés or stereotypes, even while these materials contribute powerfully to the expression of
meaning in his films. It might be said, then, that Hayasaka created a legacy in projecting the
symbolic power of music into Japanese film that Takemitsu and other later composers would
then carry further artistically.
The elements of Japanese tradition projected in Hayasaka’s film music have lived on in a cultural
residue of clichés over the past half-century. The first and last articles in this volume complete
the full circle of this relationship. The Hollywood film, Rising Sun is a self-conscious parody on
those very same clichés of Japanese musical tradition that Hayasaka helped to establish. Where
David Pacun’s article deals with Hayasaka’s artistic use of transhistorical Japanese musical
topics in an incipient form, my study of Rising Sun explores Takemitsu’s transformation of wellworn musical and cinematic topics as postmodern parody. Expressing individuality through the
compositional play of diverse musical styles, Toru Takemitsu projects a broadly humanistic and
subtly subversive stance that resists narrowly prescribed authoritarian modes of expression. In
this way, he building upon the musical innovations, historical traditions, and aesthetics of
modernist idealism he inherited from his mentor, Fumio Hayasaka.
38
Music for The Movies: Toru Takemitsu, directed by Charlotte Zwerin. Sony, 1994.
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