Visit to the Kamakura City Kawakita Film Museum (4/100)

Screenshot courtesy of the Kamakura City Kawakita Film Museum

 

Last month, I returned to Kamakura for the first time in (I think) 15 years. I used to visit Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine annually to wish for a prosperous year when I lived in Yokohama. I thought I remembered how crowded it could get, but, boy, was I mistaken. This time, it took twice as long to reach my destination, and the crowd was so overwhelming that I skipped visiting the shrine entirely. The real reason for my 460 km journey to Kamakura was to attend an exhibition at the Kamakura City Kawakita Film Museum titled "The Art of Film Subtitle Translation — Infusing Magic into 4 Characters per Second." 

Though 90% of my current work involves Japanese to English subtitle translation, I started my career translating from English to Japanese. Subtitling English videos into Japanese involves strict rules, the most significant being the limitation of "four characters per second." The exhibition provided a fascinating glimpse into the history of Japanese subtitling, featuring commentaries from renowned subtitle translators like Natsuko Toda. I was particularly captivated by the hand-written translation scripts and the notes scribbled in the margins by the translators. Before the digital era, when films were the norm, subtitles were superimposed on tiny copper sheets, which were also on display. These sheets, barely readable to the naked eye, were presented with magnifiers for visitors to examine.

I began studying subtitle translation in 2013 when digital formats were the norm, so the exhibition's video on the traditional subtitle creation process was particularly enlightening. It highlighted the painstaking accuracy required in the analog days— a single numbering error could lead to an entire film going to scrap. The video, produced in 1990, illustrated the dramatic changes in the field over a relatively short period.

Some of the exhibition’s highlights included:

• A comment from Yoko Matsuoka about her work with films shown at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Seeing a reference to Yamagata in a place so far from home was a pleasant surprise.
• Insights from Rie Harada, who handled the subtitles for the French movie "Mommy." Incidentally, a Chilean filmmaker friend once told me I reminded him of the main character—a comparison I'm still not sure how to feel about. 
• A harrowing account by Sayuri Inada, who lost her nearly completed translation when her computer crashed, sent shivers down my spine—this chilling reminder of the vulnerabilities we face as translators left a huge impact on me.

The museum was once the residence of Masanaga Kawakita and his wife, Kashiko, both key figures in the Japanese film industry. Learning about their contributions to the film industry was the perfect highlight of an enlightening experience.