The Yanai Initiative

UCLA + Waseda University
reimagining the Japanese humanities
for the world

Open Talk: What Novelists Heard in Silent Cinemas: Sound Culture in Japan

The lecture will focus on the early days of cinema experienced through Japan’s great literary writers who lived at the time when movies first arrived in Japan. These writers reacted to cinema in various ways: some wove cinema into their literary works, others recorded their thoughts only in their journals and letters, and a few even shunned cinemas entirely.

A poster by Kamijō Takahisa from The Poster Project (2017)

In 2017, the Yanai Initiative worked with eleven major Japanese designers to reimagine a legendary series of posters created in 1982

One of two kyogen masterclasses with Nomura Mansai and Ishida Yukio held at UCLA in 2017

Designated holders of Important Intangible Cultural Property Nomura Mansai and Ishida Yukio each held one free masterclass for participants from UCLA and the broader Los Angeles community