Past Special Events: Mariko Okada & Kiju Yoshida

Director Kiju Yoshida and Actress Mariko Okada are two of the most important figures in postwar Japanese film. Yoshida, along with Nagisa Oshima, led the New Wave breakout in the 1960s, and Okada is perhaps the most celebrated actress still working in Japanese film today, having performed for nearly every major director of the postwar era. From November 6-8, 2003, these living legends make a rare visit to Ann Arbor for a series of public events.

Akitsu onsen (1962)
Friday, October 31
7:00- 9:00 P.M.
Lorch Hall Auditorium, University of Michigan, 611 Tappan Street, Ann Arbor

Parking is free after 6:00 p.m. at the University parking structures on Church Street and Hill Street.

Screening of the 1962 film, An Affair at Akitsu directed by Kiju Yoshida and starring Mariko Okada. An Affair at Akitsu is the story of a student, emaciated and starving from the ravages of WWII who interrupts his wanderings at the village of Akitsu, to be nursed back to health by a beautiful young girl. When they hear Japan has lost the war, both enter into a suicide pact, but their fumblings and gropings toward death are futile and they decide to live and build a new life together. (In Japanese with English Subtitles, 113 min., print courtesy of The Japan Foundation)

Book Reading, Signing & Reception for Yoshida's new book, Ozu's Anti-Cinema
Thursday, November 6
4:00- 6:00 P.M.
Shaman Drum Bookshop, 311-315 S. State Street, Ann Arbor

The Center for Japanese Studies Press is publishing Kiju Yoshida’s award-winning Ozu's Anti-Cinema, and we will celebrate its release with a reading at Shaman Drum Bookshop. Yoshida's book starts with a story about his trip to fellow director Yasujiro Ozu's deathbed. Yoshida writes that a dying Ozu whispered to him twice, as if speaking to himself, "Cinema is drama, not accident." These cryptic last words troubled Yoshida for decades, and throughout this book he examines Ozu's films and tries to uncover what Ozu really meant. The book's main discussion concerns Ozu's films, but it is also Yoshida's manifesto on films and filmmaking. In other words, this book is Yoshida's personal journey into Ozu's thoughts on filmmaking and, simultaneously, into his own thoughts on the nature of cinema. Every page displays the sensibility of one artist discussing another—this is probably a book that only a filmmaker could write. Within Yoshida's luminous prose lies a finely tuned, rigorous analysis of Ozu's films, which have rarely been engaged as closely and personally as here.

Kagami no onnatachi (2002)
Friday, November 7
7:00- 10:00 P.M.
Lorch Hall Auditorium, University of Michigan, 611 Tappan Street, Ann Arbor

"Do I really have the right to talk about the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima? This subject has haunted me for more than half a century. Something within me urged me to talk about Hiroshima yet, at the same time, I felt a certain reticence. This dilemma arose from my very vivid memories of the fear of war. Through this fiction projected onto a film screen, each audience member will be able to reconsider the Hiroshima they carry within them and freely establish a dialogue in this communion with the deceased victims. Being Japanese, I immediately think of the atom bomb."
-Kiju Yoshida

Screening of the 2002 film, Women in the Mirror, directed by Yoshida and starring Okada, with an introduction by Yoshida and Okada and followed by a Q&A session. It touches on the reunion of three women: an elderly woman who was in Hiroshima at the time of the atomic bomb, her daughter who lost her memory and disappeared, and her grandchild. (In Japanese with English Subtitles, 129 min.)

Talk Show: Ozu's Anti-Cinema
Saturday, November 8
3:00- 5:00 P.M.
C. C. Little Building, Room 1528, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Mariko Okada appeared in Yasujiro Ozu's last two films, and can speak about Ozu’s peculiar approach to filmmaking from personal experience. Kiju Yoshida was an assistant director at Shochiku at the end of Ozu’s career and one of the New Wave filmmakers that criticized Ozu in order to renovate the Japanese cinema. He is also author of an award-winning book on Ozu entitled Ozu’s Anti-Cinema. The University of Chicago’s Michael Raine, a specialist in postwar Japanese cinema, will lead a discussion with Okada and Yoshida about the career and cinema of Yasujiro Ozu on this, the year of the director’s 100th birthday.

Upon graduation from Tokyo University with a degree in French literature, Kiju Yoshida took the entrance exam for Shochiku Studios and was hired as an assistant director. This put him in a generation of Shochiku directors that would shake up the film world shortly thereafter, including Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, and Shohei Imamura. In 1962 he directed Akitsu onsen (An Affair at Akitsu), a movie that starred his future wife Mariko Okada. After going independent in the mid-1960s, he has made many films and television documentaries; his most celebrated is Eros Plus Massacre. He is also the author of a number of books. This fall the Center for Japanese Studies is publishing the English language version of his Ozu's Anti-Cinema.

Mariko Okada was born in Tokyo, daughter of the great star Tokihiko Okada. She studied acting at the Tokyo Performance Research Center, and entered Toho directly from there. She moved to Shochiku Studios in the late 1950s, where she starred in the last two films Yasujiro Ozu directed, Late Autumn and An Autumn Afternoon. She went independent in the 1960s as the film industry restructured, starring in many independent films and theater productions. She is also a producer of some reknown, something unusual for women in the Japanese context. Japanese cinema fans know her from any number of stirring performances in a string of classic films; everyone else probably remembers her teaching young women how to eat spaghetti in the proper Western way in Tampopo. She has worked with many of the greatest directors of Japanese cinema including Mikio Naruse, Kon Ichikawa, Shiro Toyoda, Minoru Shibuya, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Tadashi Imai. Women in the Mirror is Okada's 154th film.

Sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies, with support from the University of Michigan's Humanities Institute, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, International Institute, and the Program in Film and Video Studies.