Exploring the earliest motion pictures of any country is relatively difficult. They were printed using nitrate-based film stock, which was not only highly perishable but also highly flammable – so much so that an old nitrate film sealed in a canister for long enough can, at sufficient temperatures, spontaneously and explosively combust. Being a projectionist used to be a considerably more dangerous job than it is today. It is not an exaggeration to say that people have died attempting to manufacture, exhibit and store nitrate films.

There is also the issue that, once synchronised sound was successfully implemented and colour film stock along with it, silent black and white films became less and less relevant to movie-going audiences. They were not seen as having much worth, and certainly few people either producing motion pictures or watching them put much value on such old, outdated forms of screen media.

Put these two factors together – it’s dangerous to keep the old films, and nobody cares about them anyway – and it’s easy to understand why so much of movie-making history was never saved. A 2013 survey by the USA’s Library of Congress found that approximately 70 per cent of all American silent films have been lost.

The situation in Japan, however, is significantly worse. It too faced issues of dangerous nitrate film and a public that grew disinterested in silent movies with the advent of sound and then colour. On top of that there was the issue of humidity: much higher than in the USA or Europe, and much more likely to degrade and irreparably ruin film prints unless they are stored very carefully.

Then there was the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. It remains the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history, and asides from causing the deaths of an estimated 140,000 people it also levelled most of Tokyo’s film warehouses. Most of the warehouses that survived the actual earthquake were later burned to the ground in subsequent fires.

Of the films that survived the humidity, the earthquake and the fires, most were destroyed during the American Air Force’s fire-bombing of Tokyo (a series of aerial attacks from 1942 that caused more immediate deaths than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Once World War II had ended with Japan’s surrender, an American military occupation banned all Japanese films depicting strong ideals of nationalism or feudal loyalty. There was a list prepared of 13 banned subjects, and a film featuring any one of those subjects could be pulled from release and even destroyed.

From the late 1890s to the early 1930s, it is believed that Japanese filmmakers produced approximately 7,000 narrative films. As of the time of writing, there are about 70 of those films left in reasonably complete condition. That’s a proportion of just one per cent.

Pickings, therefore, are rather slim for the 21st century viewer. The more nationalistic or subjectively Japanese the film, the less likely it is that it will have survived. The older the silent film, the less likely it is that it will have survived.

The early Japanese experience of motion pictures is a very different one to that of other countries and cultures, such as the USA or France. Cinema as we know it is, of course, a French invention. It was invented by the Lumiere brothers and toured around the world by their father at sideshows and expositions from 1895. While motion pictures existed in one form or another prior to that year – indeed, the pinhole camera was invented in the early 11th century – it was the Lumieres who developed a system of taking a sequence of photographs in rapid succession and then projecting those photographs in similarly rapid succession for a viewing audience.

Motion pictures were, in essence, a progression of photography. That technology was also developed in France, with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre’s invention of the daguerreotype in 1822. Over the course of the 19th century, the technology and materials used to create the photograph were developed and refined, and ultimately led to a popular and accurate method of reproducing images of family, significant events and the world at large.

Photography was a game changer for fine art, since up to the point of its invention there had been a general and centuries-long push within Europe towards a realistic mode of painting. Once the photograph perfected the realist reproduction artists was suddenly free to explore non-realist forms of art. Put all of these successive inventions into order, and you can see a slow, inevitable movement in Europe (and, subsequently, America) from the Middle Ages through to the late 19th century away from abstract expression to realistic reproduction.

Now consider Japan.

 In 1895, when the Lumiere cinematograph was invented, Japan had been grudgingly open to Western visitors for 42 years. The country still operated under a feudal monarchy. The Emperor Meiji, who had come to power following the Shogunate’s abdication of authority in 1866, oversaw a rapid advancement in Japan’s technology and culture, yet ruled the nation with absolute authority and was widely believed to have descended from godhood. The Lumieres’ cinematograph was first presented to audiences in Tokyo in early 1897. A shizoku noble in his mid-50s watching one of the Lumieres’ films would still be able to remember being a sword-wielding samurai when he was in his 20s.

When cinema came to Europe and America, it followed a long progression of increasingly realistic art forms: realistic paintings, realistic theatre, increasingly sophisticated photography, and so on. When cinema came to Japan, it arrived at a culture where abstracted, stylised art was the norm, where theatre forms such as noh, kabuki and bunraku were heavily codified and aggressively non-realist, and where even the natural landscape was cultivated and simplified before it could be appreciated.

Photography was a heavily ingrained and accepted part of Western culture by the time the motion picture became a commercial and artistic concern. As a result, the earliest films in France and the USA were documentary in nature: depictions of ordinary day-to-day life. In Japan, by sharp contrast, the earliest films were silent reproductions of traditional Japanese theatre. As with live theatre, women did not perform in motion pictures; it was not until 1911 that female actors started to appear on-screen.

Intertitles, frames of text used in Western films to further the narrative, were not utilised in early Japanese cinema. Instead a professional storyteller (known as a ‘benshi’) would recount the narrative to a live audience, with the film simply presenting individual scenes in chronological order. So popular were the benshi that they were generally credited on movie theatre posters above the names of the film’s actual stars. Benshi schools were set up by the most popular performers, to train the next generation of storytellers. Their continued popularity also ensured that in Japan the silent film continued as a popular art form well into the late 1930s.

This disregard for realism even extended to early Japanese newsreels, where the latest news stories from around the world would be enhanced with specially shot scenes of actors playing out the described events. It was not a matter of fiction getting in the way of the facts; for the early Japanese movie audience there wasn’t necessarily a difference.

One of the earliest Japanese films that is still available to watch – at least in part – is Shozo Makino’s 1921 fantasy film Jiraiya the Hero. It is one of several early adaptations of the early 19th century folk tale The Tale of Gallant Jiraiya, although the other versions (dating as early as 1914) are no longer believed to exist.

Jiraiya was a ninja warrior with magical shape-shifting powers that enabled him to transform into a giant toad. His adventures were first written down in a lengthy 43-instalment novel, written by several authors over a period of decades. Legendary playwright Kawatake Mokuami adapted the early portions of the novel into a popular kabuki drama, which premiered in Edo (now Tokyo) in 1852. The character of Jiraiya has remained a perennial favourite in Japanese folklore and popular culture; even as recently as 2000, when he was incorporated into the popular children’s manga Naruto.

Jiraiya the Hero sees the titular ninja rescue a prisoner from a group of samurai, fighting them off with a combination of his martial arts prowess and magical talents. He challenges a local warlord. He fights a group of samurai in the snow, transforms into a giant toad and eats several of them. It is, all told, a rather frustrated viewing experience, as a few of the original film’s scenes appear to be missing, and of course there is no benshi to help guide the modern viewer through the story. What the film does provide, however, is a valuable insight into just how dynamic and inventive the earliest Japanese cinema was.

The acting is highly stylised, drawing heavily on the performance style of traditional kabuki. This is unsurprising: the film’s lead actor was Matsunosuke Onoe, and was already a successful kabuki performer by the time he was poached by Japan’s nascent film industry in 1909. He appeared in more than 1,000 films – including shorts and features – before his death in 1926, aged 50.

It was not just the lead actor with a background in traditional theatre: Jiraiya the Hero was directed by Shozo Makino, who used to own the kabuki theatre in which Matsunosuke Onoe performed.

If Onoe was Japan’s first motion picture movie star, then Makino was Japan’s first significant film director. He was born in Kyoto in 1878, into a family already heavily involved in the theatre. When Japan’s earliest film producers came to the family’s theatre seeking help in staging period films, Makino was inspired to work in the rapidly growing industry himself.

Makino’s directing career began in 1908, where he worked at a furious pace. For the bulk of his career he worked on single-reel short features, shooting each production in a three-day period. Most of his films were drawn from popular kabuki dramas, and Makino regularly directed them without a screenplay. Instead he would call out the plot and dialogue from behind the camera, and his actors would simply perform whatever it was that Makino told them to do.

In a career spanning 21 years from 1908 to his death in 1929 Shozo Makino directed almost 250 films, and established many of the stylistic tropes that came to define Japanese cinema over the ensuing decades. He regularly used static cameras placed well away from the actors, and recorded entire scenes in lengthy takes. These long takes, later refined and perfected by other directors (notably Kenji Mizoguchi), have become a hallmark of traditional Japanese cinema.

Makino did not just leave a legacy of his own: he fathered an entire dynasty of Japanese filmmakers. His sons Sadatsugu and Masahiro Makino both followed in his footsteps as film directors, while his grandson Masayuki Makino founded the noted Okinawa Actor’s School. Two grandsons via his daughter Tomoko Makino became popular screen actors: Masahiko Tsugawa (Crazed Fruit, Tampopo) and Hiroyuki Nagato (Pigs and Battleships, The Insect Woman).

Jiraiya the Hero is not, as I have mentioned, the easiest watch. It does boast some wonderful action sequences, and the visual effects – charmingly naïve by today’s standards – are rather impressive when viewed within their original context. Jiraiya’s transformation into a frog is of particular interest, of course, as it will not be the only time Japanese audiences are thrilled by the sudden appearance of a giant monster.

The film is largely shot on location, and makes good use of early 20th century castles, temples and parks to recreate period Japan. It also gives the film a much more expansive look and feel than if it had simply been shot on a soundstage like its American and French contemporaries. There are strong technical similarities between what Makino has directed here and what other directors had been producing in France.

Jiraiya the Hero is what was described at the time as a ‘trick film’. The form was famously typified by French filmmaker Georges Méliès, who used an array of innovative and experimental techniques to create charming magical acts and moments on-screen. Specifically the trick film did not rely on conventional stage magic – it was the use of newfound film technology that marked out the genre for what it was. In a sense, the trick film is the direct ancestor of the modern visual effects blockbuster.

The influence of French culture on turn-of-the-century Japan was significant. Certainly it was early French cinema, not its American equivalent, that most inspired its own screen industry’s origins. Films such as Jiraiya the Hero stand as proof. There is more than a whiff of Georges Méliès in Jiraiya’s transformations and disappearances. 

From the outset of narrative cinema, Japanese audiences keenly wished to see Japanese stories on the big screen. In early films such as this we can see kabuki theatre and traditional folklore take centre stage, and almost a century later those elements and themes continue to be exploited by filmmakers again and again for successive generations of Japanese viewers.