AEMS: Publications

Makiko's New World: Reviews

by James L. Huffman: Wittenberg University
This article originally appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 2, May 2000. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Association for Asian Studies.

University of Illinois anthropologist David Plath never has had much patience with plodding, traditional portrayals of elite society. For years, he has given us fresh, sometimes whimsical written narratives of ordinary lives: middles-aged housewives, or urban salarymen seeking entertainment. More recently, that interest in the lives of "real" people has led him into visual narratives, to studying photographic records of both aristocrats and commoners, and to video studies of urban shopkeepers and abalone divers.

Plath has reached a visual peak with his latest production, a fifty-six-minute video of the world of Nakano Makiko, a Kyoto pharmacist's wife whose 1910 journal has won awards as Makiko's Diary (Kazuko Smith, translator, Stanford University Press, 1995). Drawing on Makiko's daily recollections, interviews with Japanese and American scholars, and a great deal of film footage, both archival and contemporary, producer Plath has produced a rich, unusual glimpse into urban life nearly a century ago.

A historian might wish for a fuller sketch of the public world in which Makiko lived. One gets little sense, for example, of why her brother Manzo might be off in Manchuria or what had motivated Tokyo intellectuals to plot an assassination of Emperor Meiji that year. The "big' world of politics and public rarely inserts itself into this account. It would be unfair to quibble about that too much, though. Though a bit more context might slack the scholar's thirst, the sparseness of the comment probably gives us a more accurate understanding of Makiko's life. Her world may have been comfortable and affluent, filled with social and cultural events, but it moved along quite nicely without politics or public policy.

One of the strengths of Makiko's New World lies in a the skillful intertwining of visual images, both modern and archival, of traditional Kyoto: the kitchen of a merchant's house, visits to leading shrines, the construction of an underground water system, family photographs, drinking parties, a wedding at Heian Shrine. The frames may lack the million dollar sophistication of MTV's "real World," but they take us far more honestly--and successfully--into the family quarters of a major Meiji city. For teachers of today's visually minded students, they are a string of gems.

Plath's decision to organize the film topically rather than chronologically makes sense. What we lose in the chronological flow of Makiko's life, we more than gain in the video's usefulness as a teaching tool. Each topic is introduced by graphics and often provocative comments by scholars: Plath; diary translator Kazuko Smith; historian Anne Walthall; Makiko's son, the sociologist Nakano Takashi; and historian Nishikawa Yuko. There are sections on New Urban Lifestyles, the Nakano House, Diaries and Women's Lives, The Tricky Triangle (wife, husband, mother-in-law), Western Food, and The Birth Family, among others.

Walthall's discussion of the contrast between Japanese and Westerner's diaries is typically thought provoking. While the latter use externalities to explore people's inner selves, she says, Makiko uses them to examine the role of self as housewife. This thus becomes much more than Makiko's story; it is a "household diary." In the section of continuities, Walthall points out that Makiko's early difficulty in becoming pregnant was not the crisis we might have expected, because her crucial role was home management, not rearing children. If she failed to give birth, an heir could be adopted. At the same time, Walthall notes in a later section, Makiko's activities--taking excursions, planning menus, visiting theaters, gardens and relatives--do not differ greatly from those of a woman of her class in the United States at the same time.

One of Makiko's greatest delights lies in Plath's eye for whimsical or colorful stories. His comments about the propensity for calling servers in Western-style restaurants "boy-san" whether they were male of female, highlights one of the themes of the video: the unending preoccupation of Kyoto's merchant class with the onrush of Western-oriented modernity. So does the long segment on Makiko's serious row with a Mr. Moriguchi who became angry when she served him Western food, yelling that he would not "touch the stuff!" She cried herself to sleep that night, wrote about it continually for nearly a week, even wished for death over the humiliation-then never mentioned it again. The episode reveals complex layers of experience and meaning, and ought to provoke a similarly lively discussion in the classroom.

Asian-oriented scholars have begun, thankfully, to focus more on the classroom in recent years, to give to teaching of both graduates and undergraduates the attention it should have received decades ago. Makiko's New World is an example of the kind of nuanced, graphic, and understandable materials this new approach can give us. It makes the daily world of a rather ordinary Meiji woman accessible to students at all levels, without resorting to cliches or sacrificing analysis.

by Richard Chalfen: Temple University, Japan
This article originally appeared in American Anthropologist, Vol. 101, No. 3, September 1999. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the American Anthropological Association.

David Plath and the Media Production Group at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have done us a great service with the emergence of this film. Makiko's New World presents viewers with an audio-visual version of an extraordinary view of everyday life in 1910 Kyoto, Japan as understood and selectively recorded by the 20-year-old young wife in a 200-year-old merchant household. The original text, its translation and new film are all remarkable documents for several significant reasons.

We are presented with a refreshingly clever relationship of published written material and the subsequent audio-visual version of that material. The original subject matter for this film is a diary written by Makiko Nakano in 1910; the first published pieces of the diary, edited by her son, Takashi (a noted Professor of Sociology, now retired) appeared in 1965. A book-length Japanese edition of the diary appeared in 1981, three years after Makiko dies at the auspicious ages of 88. Then Cornell University's Kazuko Smith translated the diary and published Makiko's Diary: A Merchant's Wife in 1910 Kyoto with Stanford University Press in 1995; and this film appears in 1999.

The skeleton of the film's storyline is sequenced and sutured in a pattern of several layers. This structural strategy includes a rough chronology, regular periodic readings from Makiko's diary, a series of ten topics akin to chapter headings sometimes focused on specific subjects, other times events or topics, e.g. Rescued Memories, Diaries and Women's Lives, Her Birth Family, Western Food, etc. The structure is enhanced by periodic exposition by social scientists Plath and Nakano as well as historians Yoko Nishikawa, Yasuhiro Tanaka and Anne Walthall. We also hear and see comments on Makiko's life by translator Smith. And we hear and see Makiko's niece, Kikuko Matsui as she speaks of her wise and modern Auntie while looking over the pages of a family photograph album. All provide very rich pieces of contextual commentary.

The written diary is referenced many times throughout the film, as we see many reconstructed scenes of kimono-clad Makiko using brush and ink to write her diary with voice-over statements of her own words. The 1910 diary itself provides us with many details of everyday life as seen and recorded by the middle class wife of the head of a Kyoto pharmacy business. This pictorial version brings the material so much to life--contributing new life to an old life in memorable ways.

Minimally we are offered time and opportunity to reflect on the diary as both a symbolic form and a mediated form of communication--certainly not everything is written about, begging attention to historical and cultural variations of inclusion and exclusion. Then we are asked to speculate on what changes might be introduced when cameras, as increasingly popular and available consumer technology, are added to brush and ink as means of depicting and indeed remembering details of everyday life.

Historical lessons are offered as viewers see and hear several people commenting on the diary tradition in Japan, including availability of diary types, ways to interpret such period materials, the general historical context and significance of such diaries and why Makiko Nakano has offered us such an interesting example.

On camera, David Plath makes the point that during this year, the Nakano family bought "a used snapshot camera" for 23 yen. Many such families could then, for the first time, begin to record themselves visually. Nishikawa comments that when publishing houses started printing blank diaries, people started writing diaries in numbers never seen before, and we later hear that diaries became "an instrument of popular education." The implication is that this transition from the verbal/written to the visual/pictorial seemed like such a natural thing to do. Makiko's original diary in fact makes several references to studio and backyard camera-aided events. The important point is that a diary tradition was firmly in place before the availability of mass consumer cameras. We also know that when cameras became available on a popular scale, people started taking pictures, literally and figuratively, like never seen before. Details of how photographs supplement and/or replacediaristic written words remains to be studied.

We frequently hear that Japanese people are famous for a broad range of pictorial productions, both historically and in contemporary times, from representations found in scrolls, to ukiyo-e prints to manga to the films of Kurosawa and Ozu, and now Print Club, just to mention a few. In this context, there are important lessons to be learned and passed on about the creative integration of alternative visual forms. Makiko's New World takes full advantage of the popularity of photographic representation in Japan as we see the inclusion of many studio portraits and informal snapshot-like images. In turn, Plath has supervised the integration and juxtaposition of a rich and beautiful fabric of alternative visual formats. For instance we see the inclusion of old photographs; we are offered aerial and ground level views; we see black and white still images combined with hand-tinted color stills; we find clips of historic black and white footage from before and during World War Two combined with nicely composed original contemporary color footage; we see studio portraits, large exterior group photographs and old family albums; and we see a series of well acted and haze-filtered 1910 reenactments combined with 1998 on-camera posed interviews.

Culture change is also an important theme of Makiko's New World. In addition to providing information on what is old, Plath points out the Makiko's dairy gives us information about what is new at a time when 20th century material culture was rapidly spreading throughout the world. We hear commentary on changes in clothing, house design and furniture, transportation (rubber-tired rickshaws), music, as well as food preparation and presentation and even on changes in light levels produced by the introduction of electricity--reminiscent of Tanizaki's 1933 comments found in In Praise of Shadows. We are even given examples of how diary types and formats have changed during this period.

The visual rendition of this diary material with its impressive visuality of images and accompanying commentary represent major contributions to an enhanced understanding of this time period and cultural setting. Here the film medium offers instructors and students valuable lessons in how the same film can have multiple alternative uses. The film offers important lessons to students of Japanese history and ethnography, visual studies and media practice, visual anthropology, material culture, culture change, narrative studies and life history, and even memory studies. I strongly recommend that Makiko's New World be made available to students for study as part of several screenings. I was even drawn back into Smith's book to review what else has been recorded for specific days cited in the film. These points will be further enhanced by the two study guides currently in preparation.

Such finely crafted examples as Makiko's New World will further a growing attention to the fact that lives come, are given and can be taken in multi-modal ways, and that visual renderings of life find an integrated and meaningful position alongside their previous logocentric models. This film provides a wonderful starting point to substantiate these points. Combined attention to both written and audio-visual renditions of Makiko's Diary will provide many valuable contributions and learning experiences.


	Makiko's New World: Reviews by James L. Huffman: Wittenberg University This article originally appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 2, May 2000. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Association for Asian Studies. University of Illinois anthropologist David Plath never has had much patience with plodding, traditional portrayals of elite society. For years, he has given us fresh, sometimes whimsical written narratives of ordinary lives: middles-aged housewives, or urban salarymen seeking entertainment. More recently, that interest in the lives of "real" people has led him into visual narratives, to studying photographic records of both aristocrats and commoners, and to video studies of urban shopkeepers and abalone divers. Plath has reached a visual peak with his latest production, a fifty-six-minute video of the world of Nakano Makiko, a Kyoto pharmacist's wife whose 1910 journal has won awards as Makiko's Diary (Kazuko Smith, translator, Stanford University Press, 1995). Drawing on Makiko's daily recollections, interviews with Japanese and American scholars, and a great deal of film footage, both archival and contemporary, producer Plath has produced a rich, unusual glimpse into urban life nearly a century ago. A historian might wish for a fuller sketch of the public world in which Makiko lived. One gets little sense, for example, of why her brother Manzo might be off in Manchuria or what had motivated Tokyo intellectuals to plot an assassination of Emperor Meiji that year. The "big' world of politics and public rarely inserts itself into this account. It would be unfair to quibble about that too much, though. Though a bit more context might slack the scholar's thirst, the sparseness of the comment probably gives us a more accurate understanding of Makiko's life. Her world may have been comfortable and affluent, filled with social and cultural events, but it moved along quite nicely without politics or public policy. One of the strengths of Makiko's New World lies in a the skillful intertwining of visual images, both modern and archival, of traditional Kyoto: the kitchen of a merchant's house, visits to leading shrines, the construction of an underground water system, family photographs, drinking parties, a wedding at Heian Shrine. The frames may lack the million dollar sophistication of MTV's "real World," but they take us far more honestly--and successfully--into the family quarters of a major Meiji city. For teachers of today's visually minded students, they are a string of gems. Plath's decision to organize the film topically rather than chronologically makes sense. What we lose in the chronological flow of Makiko's life, we more than gain in the video's usefulness as a teaching tool. Each topic is introduced by graphics and often provocative comments by scholars: Plath; diary translator Kazuko Smith; historian Anne Walthall; Makiko's son, the sociologist Nakano Takashi; and historian Nishikawa Yuko. There are sections on New Urban Lifestyles, the Nakano House, Diaries and Women's Lives, The Tricky Triangle (wife, husband, mother-in-law), Western Food, and The Birth Family, among others. Walthall's discussion of the contrast between Japanese and Westerner's diaries is typically thought provoking. While the latter use externalities to explore people's inner selves, she says, Makiko uses them to examine the role of self as housewife. This thus becomes much more than Makiko's story; it is a "household diary." In the section of continuities, Walthall points out that Makiko's early difficulty in becoming pregnant was not the crisis we might have expected, because her crucial role was home management, not rearing children. If she failed to give birth, an heir could be adopted. At the same time, Walthall notes in a later section, Makiko's activities--taking excursions, planning menus, visiting theaters, gardens and relatives--do not differ greatly from those of a woman of her class in the United States at the same time. One of Makiko's greatest delights lies in Plath's eye for whimsical or colorful stories. His comments about the propensity for calling servers in Western-style restaurants "boy-san" whether they were male of female, highlights one of the themes of the video: the unending preoccupation of Kyoto's merchant class with the onrush of Western-oriented modernity. So does the long segment on Makiko's serious row with a Mr. Moriguchi who became angry when she served him Western food, yelling that he would not "touch the stuff!" She cried herself to sleep that night, wrote about it continually for nearly a week, even wished for death over the humiliation-then never mentioned it again. The episode reveals complex layers of experience and meaning, and ought to provoke a similarly lively discussion in the classroom. Asian-oriented scholars have begun, thankfully, to focus more on the classroom in recent years, to give to teaching of both graduates and undergraduates the attention it should have received decades ago. Makiko's New World is an example of the kind of nuanced, graphic, and understandable materials this new approach can give us. It makes the daily world of a rather ordinary Meiji woman accessible to students at all levels, without resorting to cliches or sacrificing analysis. by Richard Chalfen: Temple University, Japan This article originally appeared in American Anthropologist, Vol. 101, No. 3, September 1999. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the American Anthropological Association. David Plath and the Media Production Group at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have done us a great service with the emergence of this film. Makiko's New World presents viewers with an audio-visual version of an extraordinary view of everyday life in 1910 Kyoto, Japan as understood and selectively recorded by the 20-year-old young wife in a 200-year-old merchant household. The original text, its translation and new film are all remarkable documents for several significant reasons. We are presented with a refreshingly clever relationship of published written material and the subsequent audio-visual version of that material. The original subject matter for this film is a diary written by Makiko Nakano in 1910; the first published pieces of the diary, edited by her son, Takashi (a noted Professor of Sociology, now retired) appeared in 1965. A book-length Japanese edition of the diary appeared in 1981, three years after Makiko dies at the auspicious ages of 88. Then Cornell University's Kazuko Smith translated the diary and published Makiko's Diary: A Merchant's Wife in 1910 Kyoto with Stanford University Press in 1995; and this film appears in 1999. The skeleton of the film's storyline is sequenced and sutured in a pattern of several layers. This structural strategy includes a rough chronology, regular periodic readings from Makiko's diary, a series of ten topics akin to chapter headings sometimes focused on specific subjects, other times events or topics, e.g. Rescued Memories, Diaries and Women's Lives, Her Birth Family, Western Food, etc. The structure is enhanced by periodic exposition by social scientists Plath and Nakano as well as historians Yoko Nishikawa, Yasuhiro Tanaka and Anne Walthall. We also hear and see comments on Makiko's life by translator Smith. And we hear and see Makiko's niece, Kikuko Matsui as she speaks of her wise and modern Auntie while looking over the pages of a family photograph album. All provide very rich pieces of contextual commentary. The written diary is referenced many times throughout the film, as we see many reconstructed scenes of kimono-clad Makiko using brush and ink to write her diary with voice-over statements of her own words. The 1910 diary itself provides us with many details of everyday life as seen and recorded by the middle class wife of the head of a Kyoto pharmacy business. This pictorial version brings the material so much to life--contributing new life to an old life in memorable ways. Minimally we are offered time and opportunity to reflect on the diary as both a symbolic form and a mediated form of communication--certainly not everything is written about, begging attention to historical and cultural variations of inclusion and exclusion. Then we are asked to speculate on what changes might be introduced when cameras, as increasingly popular and available consumer technology, are added to brush and ink as means of depicting and indeed remembering details of everyday life. Historical lessons are offered as viewers see and hear several people commenting on the diary tradition in Japan, including availability of diary types, ways to interpret such period materials, the general historical context and significance of such diaries and why Makiko Nakano has offered us such an interesting example. On camera, David Plath makes the point that during this year, the Nakano family bought "a used snapshot camera" for 23 yen. Many such families could then, for the first time, begin to record themselves visually. Nishikawa comments that when publishing houses started printing blank diaries, people started writing diaries in numbers never seen before, and we later hear that diaries became "an instrument of popular education." The implication is that this transition from the verbal/written to the visual/pictorial seemed like such a natural thing to do. Makiko's original diary in fact makes several references to studio and backyard camera-aided events. The important point is that a diary tradition was firmly in place before the availability of mass consumer cameras. We also know that when cameras became available on a popular scale, people started taking pictures, literally and figuratively, like never seen before. Details of how photographs supplement and/or replacediaristic written words remains to be studied. We frequently hear that Japanese people are famous for a broad range of pictorial productions, both historically and in contemporary times, from representations found in scrolls, to ukiyo-e prints to manga to the films of Kurosawa and Ozu, and now Print Club, just to mention a few. In this context, there are important lessons to be learned and passed on about the creative integration of alternative visual forms. Makiko's New World takes full advantage of the popularity of photographic representation in Japan as we see the inclusion of many studio portraits and informal snapshot-like images. In turn, Plath has supervised the integration and juxtaposition of a rich and beautiful fabric of alternative visual formats. For instance we see the inclusion of old photographs; we are offered aerial and ground level views; we see black and white still images combined with hand-tinted color stills; we find clips of historic black and white footage from before and during World War Two combined with nicely composed original contemporary color footage; we see studio portraits, large exterior group photographs and old family albums; and we see a series of well acted and haze-filtered 1910 reenactments combined with 1998 on-camera posed interviews. Culture change is also an important theme of Makiko's New World. In addition to providing information on what is old, Plath points out the Makiko's dairy gives us information about what is new at a time when 20th century material culture was rapidly spreading throughout the world. We hear commentary on changes in clothing, house design and furniture, transportation (rubber-tired rickshaws), music, as well as food preparation and presentation and even on changes in light levels produced by the introduction of electricity--reminiscent of Tanizaki's 1933 comments found in In Praise of Shadows. We are even given examples of how diary types and formats have changed during this period. The visual rendition of this diary material with its impressive visuality of images and accompanying commentary represent major contributions to an enhanced understanding of this time period and cultural setting. Here the film medium offers instructors and students valuable lessons in how the same film can have multiple alternative uses. The film offers important lessons to students of Japanese history and ethnography, visual studies and media practice, visual anthropology, material culture, culture change, narrative studies and life history, and even memory studies. I strongly recommend that Makiko's New World be made available to students for study as part of several screenings. I was even drawn back into Smith's book to review what else has been recorded for specific days cited in the film. These points will be further enhanced by the two study guides currently in preparation. Such finely crafted examples as Makiko's New World will further a growing attention to the fact that lives come, are given and can be taken in multi-modal ways, and that visual renderings of life find an integrated and meaningful position alongside their previous logocentric models. This film provides a wonderful starting point to substantiate these points. Combined attention to both written and audio-visual renditions of Makiko's Diary will provide many valuable contributions and learning experiences.		In This Section: Learning from Makiko > Chronology: Meiji Period > Essays > Reviews > Suggested Readings > About the Book