Figure 1.5. Tong Yang-tze, one of the great calligraphers in Taiwan, included a tribute to the fourth-century master Wang Xizhi (right) in her title for Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (Busan, 2003).

Figure 1.6. The tokonoma in Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962) displays a stunning bokuseki, probably written by Teshigawara Sofu. It is the character 喝, or katsu; this is the word Zen masters say—“Ka!”—when they strike a disciple caught sleeping during meditation. Note that in this modernist work, the calligraphy is perfectly centered.

Figure 1.7. Eguchi Sogen, one of the first modernist masters, paints with a fistful of brushes in Peter Alechinsky’s Calligraphy Japonaise (1956).

Figure 1.8. Teshigawara Sofu, the founder of the Sogetsu school of Ikebana, wrote the title calligraphy for Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962).

Figure 1.9. Teshigawara Sofu’s title calligraphy for Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1966) is a stunning riff on clerical style.

Figure 1.10. Hangul calligraphy on a lovely paperscape, from the title of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom, 2003).

Figure 1.11. The title for Kim Ki-duk’s The Bow (Hwal, 2005) uses calligraphic hangul (활). By unconventionally extending the final strokes and painting them in black, they transform into the Chinese character for “bow” (弓).

Figure 1.12. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kawabata Yasunari gifted his own calligraphy for the adaptation of Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1957). The two broad strokes framing character for “country” turn it into a closed, bounded space.

Figure 1.13. Umehara Seizan’s calligraphy for Kagemusha (1980); along with Im Kwon-taek and King Hu, Kurosawa Akira was one of the directors who cared deeply about the calligraphy in his films.

Figure 2.1. At its invention, cinema was seen in relation to popular amusements from traditional storytelling to new technologies of vision like the stereopticon. This stereopticon card shows Osaka’s Dotenburi entertainment district in 1904. The large banners advertise “the world’s longest color film.”

Figure 2.2. The Teikokukan in Kyoto, when it was showing Makino Masahiro’s Chushingura: Heaven and Earth Episodes (Chushingura: ten no maki, chi no maki, 1938). The theater is covered with calligraphy, from the title on the lanterns to the all-star cast above the entrance. Courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan.

Page 36 →Figure 2.3. Spectators at Kyoto’s Teikokukan received programs like this one, which combines calligraphy and lettering. Courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan.

Figure 2.4. Typical calligraphic intertitles for the silent films The Goddess (Shennu, 1934), Chushingura (1903), and A Public Prosecutor and a Female Teacher (Geomsa-wa yeoseonsaeng, 1948). Chushingura courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan.

Figure 2.5. In the silent era, intertitles were brushed on black cards with white ink made from shells. Few of these cards are extant. The top example survived because Kawai Productions in Kyoto used it as a script cover. The bottom example comes from an unknown film and was preserved in an album owned by actor Onoe Monya. An art deco variation of clerical style, it shows the care with which these brush styles were conceived and executed. Courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan (top) and benshi Kataoka Ichiro (bottom).

Figure 2.5. In the silent era, intertitles were brushed on black cards with white ink made from shells. Few of these cards are extant. The top example survived because Kawai Productions in Kyoto used it as a script cover. The bottom example comes from an unknown film and was preserved in an album owned by actor Onoe Monya. An art deco variation of clerical style, it shows the care with which these brush styles were conceived and executed. Courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan (top) and benshi Kataoka Ichiro (bottom).

Figure 2.6. Some titles echoed modernist art movements like art deco and expressionism. Here are Mizoguchi Kenji’s Tokyo March (Tokyo koshinkyoku, 1929) and Futagawa Buntaro’s Orochi (1925).

Figure 2.7. The calligraphic parasol in Shimizu Hiroshi’s The Masseurs and a Woman (Anma to onna, 1938) indicates the hot springs setting and class.

Figure 2.8. In the talkies era, subtitles were brushed on black cards for optical printing. These cards are by Tamura Yukihiko, Japan’s first subtitler. Courtesy of the Toyota City Museum of Local History.

Figure 2.9. Spring of Korean Peninsula (Bando-ui bom, Korea, 1941): Both the scroll (left) and subtitle (right) are brushed, but one is so cursive it is virtually illegible while the other is designed for easy reading. The scroll is in Chinese, suggesting an upper class family, but the subtitle for this Korean film is in Japanese, the language of the colonizer.