About

I’m Perry Constantine, host of the Japan On Film podcast, and I wanted to give you some background on myself and what inspired me to start this show.

I’m an American and I’ve been living in Japan for about ten years. Unlike many others, my interest in Japan didn’t come from anime, manga, or video games. I’d watched, read, and played those, of course, but that’s not what made me the most interested in Japan. For me, it was live-action movies.

When I was a senior in high school, I rented a movie called Seven Samurai and it ended up changing my life. From that point on, I started to develop a keen interest in Japanese cinema that lasted all through my undergraduate years. I rented every single Japanese movie from my local library (and they actually had quite a few). If there was a Japanese movie playing at any of Chicago’s independent theaters, like Facets or the Music Box, I would be in attendance. And some I’d even buy sight-unseen off the Internet just based on reviews.

I’ve always been a film buff, but I’d never really been so focused on the movies of a country outside America. Not to say I refused to watch foreign films, I just never developed a specific interest in the general films of say France or Germany.

During my undergraduate years, I majored in literature and film studies and my plan was to become a teacher. Not long before I graduated, I discovered something called the JET Program, or Japan Exchange and Teaching. It was (and perhaps still is) the largest exchange program on the planet. Run by the Japanese government, the purpose of the JET Program is to hire native speakers from abroad and bring them to Japan to work as assistant language teachers (or ALTs) in Japanese public elementary, junior high, and high schools.

I came to Japan on the JET Program in the summer of 2008, working in a small town in the prefecture of Kagoshima. I taught in elementary and junior high schools until 2014. At that point, I decided to put my days as an ALT behind me and I accepted a position as a small, private school in Kagoshima, and that’s where I still work at the time of this recording.

This school is unique in that it focuses on a year-long intensive English program for its students. All the students are Japanese and they study about Japanese culture, but they do so in English. The idea is to increase understanding among the youth of Japanese culture, but to also nurture their English skills.

With my degree in literature as well as my background as an author, I was hired to teach a class in Japanese literature. And I did that for a few years. But in 2018, something changed. They asked me if I’d like to expand the class. Instead of just focusing on Japanese literature, they wanted to know if I’d be interested in also incorporating movies.

Of course I jumped at the chance and what followed was one of the best years I’ve ever had in my career as a teacher. With the knowledge I’d learned about Japanese culture, history, and society in the years since I’d moved here, I was looking back at movies I hadn’t seen in ten years or more with brand-new eyes. I was learning a lot more about different ideas and themes that were present in those movies and communicating them to my students.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I found I had more to say about the movies we watched in class and I had things to say about many other movies, too. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough time in the schedule to get into everything I wanted to talk about.

So that’s why I decided to start this podcast. I’d attempted a similar one in the past with a co-host, but it unfortunately didn’t work out. Now I’ve decided to give it another shot and try doing it on my own. For the most part, I’ll be hosting these episodes alone, though there may be times when I bring on a guest to discuss a particular movie.

I also want to say that I’m by no means an expert on Japanese history, society, language, or culture. My time here has obviously improved my understanding of these things, and I’ve also done a lot of study in preparation for my classes in order to give reasonably informed impressions to my students. But the purpose of my class is more to encourage them to think about history, culture, and society and challenge some of the things they may have been told to blindly accept. I’m not claiming to be an authority on these movies, I’m just interested in sharing these impressions with others.

Also, I wanted to make a note about the naming convention I’m going to be using on this show. In Japanese, it’s common to list the family name before the given name, so Akira Kurosawa is actually known as Kurosawa Akira when spoken of in Japanese. However, many Japanese do use the western-style naming convention of given name/family name when speaking English, so I’m going to be doing the same on this show.

I hope you’ll enjoy accompanying me on this journey into the world of Japanese film. I’m looking forward to hearing what comments you have on the movies I discuss and I welcome any suggestions you have for movies to spotlight in the future.

Thanks for listening.