Tazuko Sakane

Tazuko Sakane (December 7, 1904 – September 2, 1975) was a Japanese film director. She was Japan's first female director, followed by Kinuyo Tanaka. While growing up, her father, a wealthy businessman, often took her to the cinema. She graduated from Nikkatsu Uzumaki girls school in 1929.

After four years in an unhappy marriage, Tazuko Sakane's father paid her husband in exchange for Sakane's freedom. With the help of her father, she managed to get a job at the Nikkatsu Studio in Kyoto. She started out as an assistant director's assistant, and spent her time running errands and proving her worth in the industry.

Tazuko Sakane was introduced to Kenji Mizoguchi by her father. Impressed by Sakane's sensible character, Mizoguchi hired her as a script girl. Under Mizoguchi's patronage, Sakane became Japan's first and only female film director in the prewar period. Although she is not given credit, she entered into a collaboration with Mizoguchi on the film The Foreigner's Mistress(1930). After that, she continued to work with Mizoguchi on multiple projects such as Yet They Go (1931) and The Man of the Moment (1932) as a screenwriter and an assistant director, although only receiving credit for her position as an assistant director. Denied work after the war (on the ground that she had to have a college degree to be a director), she was forced, at age forty-two, to return to Mizoguchi as a script girl.

She further moved to Manchuria to work as a director at the Manchuria Film Association (Manshu eiga kyokai). During the war, she went to Manchuria for three years where she made 10 documentary films about the conditions in war torn Northeastern China. Only one of these films is known to be extant.

Her desire to direct films was made possible during the war, when she identified herself with the policies of colonialism. The social norms of women’s professions and creativity were so limiting that reinforcing colonial discourse was one of few ways for Tazuko to stay in the industry.

Going back to Japan in 1946, she was hired to an assistant position of continuity keeping and editing at Shochiku studio, where she remained until she retired in 1962. She was 46 years old when she retired.

Before the 1980s, the hierarchical corporate structure of the major studios was a major barrier to women entering the industry in a creative capacity, with the scant handful of those who did direct hailing from an acting background, barring the freak exception of Japan's first woman director, Sakane Tazuko who made one feature, 1936's "Hatsu Sugata". Unfortunately, no prints of the film exist.

Interestingly enough, the first Japanese women to make films came from the circles around well-known male director Kenji Mizoguchi whose many films tended to centre on heroines. Mizoguchi and his films about suffering women connect with current discussions about “women’s directors” and women directors. When dealing with this most patriarchal of national cinemas and its “feminine” qualities, questions of sexual politics arise. Take Mizoguchi’s unmentioned (in the text) relationship with Tazuko. Under his patronage, Sakane became Japan’s first and only female film director in the prewar period. Denied work after the war (on the ground that she had to have a college degree to be a director), she was forced, at age forty-two, to return to Mizoguchi as his script girl.

Her surviving production memos, scripts, and correspondence were donated to the Museum of Kyoto in 2004 in commemoration of the centennial of her birth. In the Sakane collection's file for The Downfall of Osen, roughly half of her records and Mizoguchi's one-page scribble of the sequence order survive.

Situated as a minority in the film industry, Sakane was nevertheless a privileged majority member of wartime society, as a Japanese national, and as a person who had some control over the mass media.

At age 20, she entered into an arranged marriage with a doctor, but it quickly ended in divorce. After the marriage ended, she decided to obtain a job instead of getting remarried.

She cut her hair short and wore masculine clothing in order to fit into her "male" occupation.

One of the problems that she confronted upon working was clothing. Instead of the traditional women’s clothes, the kimono, she had to instruct a tailor to create a pair of pants, which were absolutely new as women’s clothes those days, though necessary for her as they would allow her mobility in film shooting. She also cut short her conventionally long hair. Her appearance might have been seen as resembling the 1930s metropolitan fashion of the modern girl, which consisted of westernized clothing and short bobbed hair and was associated with feminine sexual deviancy. However, Sakane did not fit within this image of excessive femininity because of her pants. In fact, with her combination of pants and short hair, she was often referred to as a cross-dresser (danso; literally, male-clothing). Her appearance and working style (traveling and working irregular hours as the only woman among crews, when filmmaking was already regarded as a sordid profession) caused a sense of gender nonconformity.

When appearing in the media in 1930s and the early 1940s, she was treated as an exceptional case of a “woman director” and was always requested to speak about her “feminine” sensitivity or her “difference” from male director. Her presence as a director, her works, and her private life were reduced to the question of whether she had insufficient or excessive femininity.

Director

• 1936 New Clothing (Hatsu Sugata) Japan's first feature film directed by a female. The film was about the naïve, premature emotions between a young geisha-to-be and a youth destined for Buddhist priesthood; it concluded with their separation. It was not a box office success, and Sakane never had a chance to direct a feature film again.

Sakane directed a total of 14 Non-fiction films, including:

• 1942 Working Women (Hataraku Josei)
• 1943 Brides on the Frontier (Kaitaku no Hanayome)
• 1944 Gardening in Spring (Shitsunai Engei)

Assistant Director/Second Unit Director

• 1930 Tojin Okichi (assistant director)
• 1931 Shikamo karera wa yuku (assistant director)
• 1932 Toki no ujigami (assistant director)
• 1933 Gion matsuri (assistant director)
• 1934 Jinpu-ren (assistant director)
• 1934 The Pass of Love and Hate (assistant director)
• 1935 Orizuru Osen (first assistant director)
• 1935 Maria no OyukiI (assistant director)
• 1935 Poppies (assistant director)
• 1938 Roei no uta (assistant director)
• 1938 Aa kokyo (assistant director)
• 1939 The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (assistant director) directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Editor

• 1933 Taki no shiraito directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and Takumei Seiryo
• 1935 Poppies
• 1936 Osaka Elegy directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
• 1936 Sisters of the Gion directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
• 1937 The Straits of Love and Hate directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
• 1948 Women of the Night directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

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Daniels, Gordon (2005). Hiroko Tomida, ed. Japanese women : emerging from subservience, 1868–1945. Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental. ISBN 1901903184.