Introduction

In Wim Wender’s diary film, Tokyo Ga (1985), the filmmaker searches the city for the cinematic visions that he found so compelling in watching Yasuhiro Ozu’s classic of Japanese post-war cinema, Tokyo Story (1953). Towards the end of the film and somewhat despairing of his search he locates the camera man from Ozu’s last films and asks him to set up a shot with the very same Browning camera that was used in these productions. The long sequence that ensues shows the camera man carefully and lovingly recreating the position of the camera, so that it is just as Ozu would have meant it to be before a shot. It is a touching but ironic sequence because, besides the act of homage, it shows a faith in the capacity of the camera, as a mechanism to accurately re-capture an image of Tokyo and with it Ozu’s own vision.1 The imitative possibilities inherent in Ozu’s camera seem to enchant Wenders and Yuhara Atsuta, for through the functions of its mimetic technology an aesthetic vision of Japan was made visible to the world; a vision that for many is encapsulated in the paradigmatic concept of ma (‘interval’, in time and space).2 Some interpreters of Japan have found in ma an essential cultural category which is reproduced continuously through forms as diverse as architecture, garden design, dance, music and in Ozu’s case the structure of film editing. It is a transferable quality of visual and material expression which those who choose to work in any of these diverse media must invariably learn through a singular educational system based on observation, imitation and constant repetition (Singleton 1998).