Trans-National Screenplays in Japan, Theory and Practice.

The title of our presentation was Transnational Screenplays in Japan, Theory and Practice.  Dr. McAulay presented on the theoretical aspects of scriptwriting by foreign screenwriters for Japanese language feature films or English language films set in Japan and I talked about my own process and experience in writing my first Japanese feature film, Firefly Dreams (Ichiban Utsukushi Natsu, 2001). McAulay argued that the Japanese film industry was becoming more open and that the presence of foreign scriptwriters had changed the nature of “trans-national” scriptwriting. Previously scripts written by foreigners in Japan had been either part of a more internationalized film industry structure, where American scriptwriters worked on films set in Japan, but increasingly resident foreigners (such as myself) are making films in Japanese for Japanese audiences and changing both the nature of trans-national cinema and the Japanese industry. I am not convinced that the change is so big, as there are not very many foreign writers working in Japanese cinema and I think that the norm is still foreign productions set in Japan, rather than indigenous hybrid cinema. Within the context of his argument I framed my own scriptwriting process as a kind of personal “crossing” into Japanese film, through the parallel between the story of Firefly Dreams, in which a young girl crosses into the life of an older woman and my own experience in writing and making the film. The film was both about Japanese contemporary society, but also personal in that it paralleled my own decision to cross into Japanese language cinema and based on a conscious attempt to become a “Japanese” filmmaker and not a foreign resident filmmaker in Japan. Ultimately through this presentation and reflecting on the process of writing the script for the film I realized that the specificity of “place” has a special function in the creation of a screenplay for me and that, in a sense, the film was less “trans-national” and more of a “regional” film. I concluded that the specificity of location and regional identity and culture gave the film its universal appeal, not the fact that the director was a foreigner working in Japan, and that in this sense the film was actually “anti trans-national” or anti-global in its stance.

Panel Session at the 11^th Scriptwriting Research Network (SRN) Conference in Milan, at the Catholic University of Milan on September 15^th of 2018. Joint presentation with Dr. Alec McCaulay from Yokohama University.