A Historiography of Japanese Screenwriting

Why do screenwriting histories almost never get written? What is screenwriting’s place and function in general film histories? What is the relationship between film history and screenwriting manuals? In order to address these issues, this chapter delineates a string of efforts since the late 1950s to write a history of Japanese screenwriting. This involves examining both overall histories and autonomous attempts at historiography from the point of view of screenwriting, the latter culminating with the screenwriter-director Shindō Kaneto’s two-volume History of Japanese Screenwriting (1989), a groundbreaking contribution on a global scale. While charting various ways of structuring history, this chapter explores how these historiographical attempts ultimately underline both national and personal time frames. The case of Japan presents an instructive example on how to identify and employ screenwriting as an alternative focal point from which to (re)organise film history and draw attention to the work of several generations of writers.