Blacks in Japan: The Portrayal of Africans in Japanese Cinema
By: John
The remarkably controversial “Black Snow” by Tetsuji Takechi, which was deemed obscene and refused to be shown by Japanese authorities. Nagisa Oshima and others came to the defense of the film.
This is Arrow, the boxer from Shunji Iwai’s masterpiece, Swallowtail Butterfly, played by Shiek Mahmud-Bey.
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Bedtime Eyes (1987)
dir: KUMASHIRO Tatsumi
This is based off the short debut novel by Amy Yamada, an author whose books usually deal with interracial relationships.
And possibly the most famous in this genre: a film which strangely hasn’t been added to MUBI yet (because I haven’t done so), Nagisa Oshima’s The Catch, based on a short story by Kenzaburo Oe.
Being African-American myself and an avid Japanophile (cinema, at least, not so much traditional culture), I always take special curiosity in the way blacks are portrayed within the Japanese film industry. Contact between the two groups goes back very far. There is speculation by anthropologists that Polynesian blacks had migrated to Japan thousands of years ago, and were soon absorbed into the population. As evidence, they cite the look of some of the Southern Japanese, especially the residents of Kyushu Island. Anyone who has read Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro can remember the protagonist’s classmates referring to him as a “Kyushu black man.” The Chinese also refer to the Taiwanese aborigines using the same term.
Towards a more familiar era, there was further contact once the idea of “Africa” had been created by Europe. In the 16th century, when the tiny country of Portugal was given authority by the Catholic Church to take over the world, the priests brought black slaves with them as they travelled Japan. Some of these slaves even took Japanese wives, and one, who was renamed “Yasuke,” was presented to ODA Nobunaga, upon which Yasuke was trained and made a retainer. Yasuke even defended Nobunaga from his opponents and fought bravely when many were killed. He was captured and returned to the Jesuits, instead of being executed, because he was not Japanese.
The most extensive contact, of course, was in World War II, with the arrival of American soldiers. The majority of the cinematic representations I will note come from this era, and its legacy. As in Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships, black and white soldiers are frequently shown abusing the Japanese during the Occupation, and there seems to be a special fear of their relations with prostitutes. After the war, the bulk of understanding in visual culture seemed to come from the American mainstream media. Because of America’s influence, mass media images of blacks are seen all over the world, and this is regrettably restricted to musicians and athletes. So from those two professions, including the occasional American soldier, we see the bulk of representation. I include the entire African diaspora, as some recent films have picked up on African immigration into Japan, especially Nigeria and Egypt.
And also of note, the first Japanese film to be directed by an African-American, The Hariyama Bridge, was recently released. The filmmaker is Aaron Woolfolk.
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01Shôhei Imamura
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02Sion Sono
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03Shunji Iwai
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04Toshio Matsumoto
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05Kazuo Hara
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06Seijun Suzuki
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07Ryuichi Hiroki
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08Akira Kurosawa
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09Takashi Miike
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10Shôhei Imamura
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11Kô Nakahira
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12Shôhei Imamura
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13Koreyoshi Kurahara
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14Koreyoshi Kurahara
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15Masaki Kobayashi
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16Seijun Suzuki
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17Ryû Murakami
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18Kô Nakahira
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19Kô Nakahira
