Tag: japan

The Myth of the Rashōmon Effect: A Film Misremembered

Jonathan Wilson

If you’ve spent much time thinking about narrative, or about truth-telling in general, you have probably encountered the word Rashōmon.

Cover of the Criterion Collection Blu-ray for the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon.

The 1950 film by that name, directed by Kurosawa Akira, made a deep impression on American storytellers and critics. Not only has it been credited with “effectively opening the world of Japanese cinema to the West,” in the words of Roger Ebert. Its title also has given us an irreplaceable metaphor in English: the “Rashōmon effect.”

Unfortunately, most Americans’ impression of this film is wrong. It contradicts both the details and the argument of Kurosawa’s movie. (Yes, I appreciate the irony.)

The movie definitely has an argument. The director said so. And the film itself isn’t exactly subtle about it. Of course, viewers should form their own opinions about any work of art, and anyone who tries to tell true stories—including a history teacher—may benefit from watching Kurosawa’s classic film for themselves. But if you do that, I recommend trying to experience it without the preconceptions that American popular culture has grafted onto it.

You may find, as I did, that this great work of art speaks to you in ways we have not been led to expect.

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‘Silence’ and Historical Presence: Teaching a Novel in the Survey

Jonathan Wilson

Photo of the book Silence by Shusaku Endo

Speaking of Jesuits, here’s an assignment I used this spring for the first time. In my modern world history course at the University of Scranton, I assigned a short essay about Endō Shūsaku’s 1966 historical novel Silence, a story based on true events (involving Jesuits) in seventeenth-century Japan. It took a long time to work up the nerve.

If the assignment worked, my students would use the novel as a matrix upon which to practice visualizing a real time and place, building empathy with its people. They would also analyze how Silence, as a piece of fiction crafted to resonate with a modern audience, makes it easier to see that all kinds of historical discourse must communicate effectively between different times and places. This assignment would have the additional benefit of connecting the university’s Ignatian heritage with a specific topic already covered in class, in a way that students might find personally relevant and poignant. (I do not assume my students at the University of Scranton are—or should be—Catholics, but most of them do come from a Catholic cultural environment.)

As a history instructor, however, I had three main qualms about my own assignment. As the deadline approached, my apprehension grew.

First, my students needed to use the novel to clarify, not obscure, the relationships between fact and fiction. I didn’t want any confusion about Silence‘s genre, of course, but I also needed my students to grasp the historical-pedagogical purpose of reading fiction at all. This wasn’t supposed to be an arbitrary excursion into make-believe.

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