The Tokyo Summer Games aren’t until July. For the good folks over at Japan Society, this week was still a perfect occasion to announce their Spring program, Aim for the Best: Sports in Japanese Cinema, enlisting a hearty round of more than a dozen titles.
Like cinema, sports have been integral to the development of
modern Japan since the late 19th century when the country opened its borders to the West. Intersecting these two major cultural forces is the multifaceted and ubiquitous sports film, a fluid genre that offers fascinating insight into issues related to Japanese national identity, gender roles and the clash between tradition and modernity. Organized in anticipation of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games, Aim for the Best: Sports in Japanese Cinema celebrates the Japanese sports film in its myriad iterations—covering a wide range of athletic disciplines and filmmaking styles, from wartime Japan to the present—including classics, documentaries, anime and commercial crowd-pleasers.
The series opens on April 10 through 25, starting with a 35mm screening of Masayuki Suo’s award-winning sports comedy Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t, followed by a post-screening Sumo Party with chankonabe (a hearty
stew commonly eaten by sumo wrestlers), drinks, and a sumo demonstration.
Other titles include Takahisa Zeze’s The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine, Akira Kurosawa’s judo pic, Sanshiro Sugata, Kenji Misumi’s postwar kendo classic, The Sword, and many more listed in the gallery at the bottom of the page.
“With the Summer Games in Tokyo on the horizon, this is a perfect opportunity to consider the
longstanding tradition of putting Japanese sports on the big screen,” says K. F. Watanabe, series curator
and Deputy Director of Film at Japan Society. “From sumo to baseball, the intersection of sports with Japanese cinema offers rich insight into some of the most salient issues in Japan’s modern history, including how sports have served to define its social and political values as a compromise between tradition and globalizing change.”
Check out the gallery bekow, and/or click here to view the line-up and get your tickets now.
