The Rediscovery, Reconstruction and Public Screening of Chuji Tabi Nikki.

Early on the morning of October 10, 1992, a crowd of people surrounded the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Their number continued to swell as the hours passed, but they seemed slightly different from average museum goers.
Queued up in neat order, they were waiting to attend a film screening in the museum's auditorium. Of course, most of them were from Tokyo and its environs, but there were also a fair number of film fans who had traveled from Kyoto and Osaka, and even as far away as Kyushu and Hokkaido. It would be only a slight exageration to say the crowd was waiting for a legend to become a reality.

The film scheduled to be screened at ten that morning was Daisuke Ito's 1927 classic, Chuji Tabi Nikki (The Diary of Chuji's Travels), a work lost for so long no one believed it would ever be seen again. In the years following its disappearance, the film took on a legendary status as an older generation of film fans and scholars passed down descriptions of the lost masterpiece to younger generations. Its title alone became a symbol of the large number of lost classics from Japan's prewar era, and it was far better known than any of the lost works of Kenji Mizoguchi or Yasujiro Ozu. As a member of the staff responsible for the film from its rediscovery through its reconstruction, and as a Japanese film historian, it si impossible for me to put into words how astonished I felt when I verified the fact that the film I was investigating was indeed Chuji Tabi Nikki.

In his multivolume Nihon Eiga Hattatsu Shi ("A History of the Development of Japanese Cinema"), Junichiro Tanaka described the film as an "unprecedented work of art," that "merged an impassioned lament for the desolate life of the hero, Chuji, with a film structure that came close to perfection." The distinguished left-wing film critic, Akira Iwasaki, praised the film highly in his Eiga Shi (" A History of Cinema"): "the figure of the lone yakuza from the village of Kunisada gradually becomes larger, more poignant, ... reaching the status of a tragic hero from a classical Greek drama."

When Japan's representative film journal, "Kinema Jumpo", published the results of a 1959 survey to determine the ten best films from sixty years of Japanese cinema, Chuji Tabi Nikki had been voted number one. Kenji Mizoguchi's Gion no Kyodai ("Sisters of Gion", 1936) captured second place and Yasujiro Ozu's Umarete wa Mita Keredo ("I was born, but..", 1932) placed third

Chuji Tabi Nikki belongs to the large Japanese genre known as jidai-geki, or period films, and its hero, Kunisada Chuji, was a real-life gambler from the village of Kunisada in Gumma Prefecture. He lived during the turbulent period preceding the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and was executed as an outlaw in 1850. Although his crimes were numerous, he was also known for acts of chivalry that included aiding the poor during a devastating famine. Traditional Japanese storytellers combined tales of Chuji's benevolence with his rebellious stand toward the government and gave birth to a hero with tremendous appeal for the common people.
At the age of 29, Daisuke Ito took Chuji from the realm of oral narrative to visual narratives, imbuing the outlaw's fabled exploits with pathos an decreating a film of such excellence that it catapulted both Ito and his star, Denjiro Okochi, to the top of the Japanese film world. In retrospect, Chuji Tabi Nikki marked the starting point of Ito's career as a master filmmaker and architect of the period film genre.

From its rediscovery to its reconstruction, the work that preceded the film's public screening represents a cooperative effort among the few public film archives that exist in this country. The film was discovered in Hiroshima, a fact that defies belief considering the devastation that resulted during the atomic bombing in 1945. A resident of the city brought an old 35mm film to the Hiroshima City Cinematographic and Audio-visual Library for appraisal, and the Library contacted the Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Art to request an investigation. The investigation confirmed what the Library's staff suspected: the film was a lost masterpiece of prewar Japanese cinema.

The work of preserving the films was entrusted to a highly reliable laboratory with a close relationship to the Film Center. The lab made a nonflammable dupe negative from the original 35mm nitrate, employing wet printing to deal with scratches on the emulsion, and then struck a 35mm positive print. The reconstruction presented far more complex problems since some parts of the film were missing and other parts were excerpts from a completely different film that had been added at a later date.
Efforts to return the film as closely as possible to its original form were further hampered by the fact that no scripts had survived.

Given the corrupt state of the text and the lack of such a primary resource as a script, reconstruction would have been impossible without the cooperation of the Archive and Visual Art Division of the Museum of Kyoto. As you may know, Kyoto was not only the ancient capital of Japan, but it was also an early center of Japanese filmmaking. Chuji Tabi Nikki was shot in Nikkatsu's Taishogun Studio located in the western part of Kyoto. Daisuke Ito spent his adult life in Kyoto, and after his death his large library, along with film related papers and materials, were donated to the Museum of Kyoto, where they are preserved as the Daisuke Ito Collection. It was a series of documents contained in this collection that made it possible to reconstruct the film.

The work involved in the rediscovery and restoration of Chuji Tabi Nikki culminated in a series of special public screenings on October 10 and 11, 1992. The five screenings were attended by 1400 people who filled the 280 seat auditorium to capacity for each show. The screenings were later acclaimed as a "brillant historical achievement" and "an important event in the postwar history of Japanese film". The film was also screened - and well received - in Hiroshima and Kyoto under the auspices of the organizations that helped make the project possible

Tomonori Saiki
(Translated by Lisa Spalding)

Redescubrimiento, reconstitución y proyección de un clásico del cine mudo japonés en el Centro del cine del Museo nacional de arte moderno de Tokio

El 10 de octubre de 1992, un público entusiasta hacía cola delante del Museo de arte moderno de Tokio para ver un mito transformado en realidad: El diario de viaje de Chuyi (1927) de Daïsuke Ito.
Se trata de una película que se creía perdida para siempre, perteneciente à un género muy popular en Japón (el yidai-geki- filme de época), que narra la historia de un yakuza del pueblo de Kunisada.
En una encuesta realizada en 1959, cuyo objetivo era el de identificar las 10 mejores películas de 60 años de cine japonés, la obra de Daisuke Ito figuraba como primera, delante de Las hermanas de Gion (1936) de Mizoguchi y de He nacido, pero... (1932) de Ozu.
El redescubrimiento de esta obra clásica de antes de la guerra constituye un acontecimiento mayor en el Japón, tan solo por el hecho de que la copia ha sido hallada en Hiroshima !