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The Kawakita Diaries 1932
Uploaded 15 January 2024
In April 1993, I was invited by my colleague (and now long-time friend), Hisashi Okajima of the Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, to give the opening lecture for their three-month film program, “American Films – The Little Known.” I had brought with me from the George Eastman Museum a group of silent films by Thomas Ince and Cecil B. DeMille, starring the Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, including The Wrath of the Gods (1914), The Typhoon (1914), The Cheat (1915), and, most importantly, Hayakawa’s own production, The Dragon Painter (1919), none of which had been seen in Japan since their original release. While in Tokyo, we also began negotiating an exchange of these films, which, though made in America, constituted an important element of Japanese national patrimony. I already knew what I hoped to get in trade: unique German silent films, only to be found in the Film Collection, including Lupu Pick’s masterpiece, Sylvester / New Year’s Eve (1924), a film Lotte Eisner discusses extensively in her The Haunted Screen. Unfortunately, I was told the deposit terms to the Museum were that these films could never again leave Japan. I also heard about another large collection of German and European films in Tokyo’s National Film Archive, the Kawakita Memorial Film Collection., and had vague memories of Madame Kawakita attending a FIAF conference.
I had no idea how German films had gotten to Japan or anything more specific about Kawakita. I did come across the name again when I curated a Dr. Arnold Fanck exhibit at the Munich Film Museum since Fanck had directed The Daughter of the Samurai (1937). Now, the Danish film journal, Kosmorama, has published in English an essay by Wayne E. Arnold and Adrian Wood on a unique diary by Kashiko Kawakita of her and her husband’s honeymoon to Germany in 1932, which reveals the extensive relationship the Kawakitas had to the German film industry: https://www.kosmorama.org/artikler/kashiko-kawakita?fbclid=IwAR07esRMb9LZimnnShMO0UtoBVbcQxEhOdau_8O5EpzRw0i7z9NLAmyJq6w
In October 1928, Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–1981) established the Towa Shoji Goshi Kaisha (Towa Trading Partnership Company) to export German films to Japan, since he, like many in the Japanese film industry was worried about the growing dominance of American films and wanted to create a counterbalance by introducing more European films. In 1932, Kawakita, after marrying his secretary, Kawakita Kashiko (1908-1993), traveled to Berlin, in the hopes of negotiating a trade agreement with UFA. It was not Kawakita’s first trip to Germany. Speaking nearly perfect German, which he had learned while studying in Germany in 1923-24, Kawakita returned in 1927, to negotiate distribution deals for German films, while working for other companies. During their 1932 trip to Berlin, the Kawakitas were mostly interested in German sound films and German sound film technology, since until 1935, the great majority of films produced without sound in Japan. Indeed, in 1933, 81% of Japanese films were still silent, even though Heinosuke Gosho had directed the first talkie, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1931).
Having previously visited Italy and Switzerland, the couple was made aware of considerable anti-Japanese sentiment in Berlin, given Japanese imperialist activity in Manchuria and Shanghai. Nevertheless, with the help of Japanese intermediaries and Hans Fitzke, the German representative of Towa in Berlin, they were able initially to meet the UFA’s head of foreign distribution, Wilhelm Meydam, and tour the Afifa film laboratories, one of the largest in Europe. One of the first films they screened was Leontine Sagan’s Girls in Uniform (1932), which would become a huge hit for Towa in Japan, although Nagamasa was initially unenthusiastic about the film’s prospects in Japan, and had to be convinced by Kashiko to purchase the Japanese rights. The annual UFA convention was taking place in Berlin at the time, allowing the Kawakitas to meet numerous UFA luminaries, including Erich Pommer, Conrad Veidt, Renate Müller, and Will Fritsch, while also attending screenings of UFA’s famous film operettas, Her Grace Commands (1931, Hanns Schwarz) and The Congress Dances (1931, Erik Charell). In total, the Kawakitas viewed an amazing 65 films during their stay in Berlin from 19 July to 23 August, of which 21 were eventually imported to Japan, including the previously mentioned films, as well as Bombs Over Monte Carlo (1931, Hanns Schwarz), Emil and the Detectives (1931, Gerhardt Lamprecht), Niemandsland (1931, Viktor Trivas), L’Atlantide (1932, G.W. Pabst), and Vampyr (1932, Carl Dreyer). That more films were not imported to Japan had to do with the weakness of the Japanese Yen.
As Arnold and Wood also note, Kashiko and Nagamasa were also intensely interested in sound film technology and new dubbing technology, in particular. To that end, they set up a dubbing session into Japanese for Dreyer’s Vampyr, utilizing the Tobis-Polyphon-Film at the Afifa labs. They also met and became friends with Dr. Guido Bagier, a German sound film pioneer at the Tobis Company, responsible for the first German sound films in 1930, but who by 1932 was experimenting with color. Finally, the Kawakitas developed a close personal and professional relationship with the couple, Karl Koch and Lotte Reininger (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926); Koch would direct the German version of the first Japanese talkie to be exported to Europe by Towa, Nippon (1932).
“Kashiko Kawakita and the 1932 Shoji Film Diary,” goes into much more detail than can be related here and makes a fascinating read for anyone interested in the mostly still little-known relationship between the German and Japanese film industries before World War II.
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