How Japanese Art Inspired a Polish Cinema Legend: Andrzej Wajda at 100

A Japanese print in a city under occupation

The story begins not in a cinema but in a gallery in Kraków in 1944. Poland was under German occupation. Andrzej Wajda, a young man drawn to painting, encountered Japanese art from the collection of Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński at the city’s Cloth Hall. The encounter remained vivid enough for Wajda to recall it decades later at a Japanese awards ceremony.

An account published by the Embassy of Japan in Poland names the images that stayed with him: Hokusai’s Great Wave, Utamaro’s portraits of women and Hiroshige’s sudden shower over the bridge at Atake. The paintings and prints did not, by themselves, explain the films he would later make. But the encounter brought an extraordinary visual language into the life of a man who would spend his career asking how history could be seen.

On November 10, 2026, a Waseda University exhibition opens in Tokyo to mark the centenary of Wajda’s birth. A two-day international symposium follows later in the month. The occasion invites a deeper question than what a famous Polish director thought of Japan: how did a private memory become a durable public institution linking the two countries?

An artist of the unfinished past

Wajda (1926–2016) made cinema out of his country’s conflicts with itself. His early films A Generation, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds challenged comfortable ways of remembering war and its aftermath. Their characters are neither simple national monuments nor uncomplicated villains. They must act under pressures that are political, moral and deeply personal.

His later Man of Marble and Man of Iron explored labor, power and the machinery of public narratives. Man of Iron won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1981. In 2000, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Wajda for his decades of filmmaking. These international distinctions explain his reputation, but not the full reach of his work.

Wajda was also a director of theatre, an interpreter of literature and an artist preoccupied with images and evidence. The Waseda project treats that breadth seriously: cinema is placed in conversation with painting, performance, archives and political memory rather than isolated as a self-contained art form.

The collector behind the meeting

The Japanese prints in wartime Kraków had their own history. Feliks Jasieński, a Polish collector whose nickname “Manggha” reflected his attachment to Japanese art, gave more than 15,000 objects to the National Museum in Kraków in 1920. Yet owning a collection was not the same as providing a permanent public home for it.

Part of the collection was displayed at the Cloth Hall in 1944, creating the unlikely encounter with Wajda. The fact that the art survived in museum holdings but was not always easily available to the public would later become central to his ambitions.

The lesson extends beyond one director’s biography. Collections depend on curators, donors, storage, conservation and access. The museum built in Wajda’s name arose from a problem that generations of cultural institutions confront: how to ensure that an extraordinary body of art can be encountered, rather than merely counted and stored.

The Kyoto Prize became a beginning, not an entire building

In 1987 Wajda received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, recognizing his achievements in film and theatre. He and his wife, the stage designer Krystyna Zachwatowicz, decided to devote the award money to a foundation that could create a home in Kraków for Jasieński’s Japanese art.

The Embassy of Japan in Poland reproduces an account by the couple giving the award amount as $450,000; some other historical descriptions approximate it as $400,000. The difference is a reminder to distinguish documented award figures from rounded retellings. More importantly, neither figure came close to representing the eventual full cost of establishing the museum.

What the couple proposed was more than a storage building. It would be a place for Japanese works to be studied and seen, and for new artistic encounters to take place. The gesture transformed the recognition of a filmmaker into a commitment to future audiences.

Japan’s citizens helped make the museum possible

The Kyoto–Krakow Foundation pursued Wajda’s idea with an unusually broad circle of supporters. Japanese film exhibitor Etsuko Takano, associated with Iwanami Hall, helped build interest in the project. Japanese railway workers and other donors participated in fundraising efforts. Accounts published by the Japanese embassy describe contributions collected at stations and extensive cooperation among supporters in both countries.

The building itself was designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki working with local collaborators, including Krzysztof Ingarden. Its architecture beside the Vistula River brought Japanese and Polish design sensibilities into a shared civic space.

The Manggha Centre of Japanese Art and Technology opened in Kraków on November 30, 1994. It subsequently evolved into the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, with exhibitions, educational work and cultural programming. That outcome is often summarized as “Wajda donated his prize money to build a museum.” The fuller story is both more accurate and more interesting: the award started a transnational effort that many people sustained.

The relationship ran in both directions

Japanese audiences had encountered Wajda’s cinema long before the museum opened. Screening institutions such as Iwanami Hall helped bring Polish films into public view. Etsuko Takano’s advocacy connected audiences and artists across linguistic and political distance.

Wajda also worked directly with Japanese theatrical forms. In Nastazja, adapted from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the kabuki performer Bandō Tamasaburō played two central roles. The collaboration crossed conventions of gender, acting, language and national stagecraft. It later had a film version released in 1994.

The director’s relationships with Japanese creative figures, among them Akira Kurosawa and architect Arata Isozaki, matter because they resist a one-sided story of “influence.” Cultural contact was not simply Wajda looking eastward for beautiful images. Artists, exhibitors and audiences in Japan also shaped the exchange.

Why the project is called After Images

Waseda’s title, WAJDA AFTER IMAGES, is deliberately expansive. It suggests images lingering in the mind long after the screen goes dark, but it also invokes the continuing life of cinema in theatre, galleries, publications, archives and digital culture.

Wajda’s films were never only vehicles for plots. They staged disagreements about how a nation remembers itself, sometimes using newsreel textures, literary sources and theatrical symbolism in the same work. A film created amid one political crisis can be read differently by people decades later. Its images acquire new responsibilities.

That makes a university exhibition of posters and archival material particularly apt. A poster turns moving images into an arresting still. A programme, script or production record reveals the choices behind what viewers think they remember. Studying these objects is not a substitute for watching the films; it makes the afterlife of their images visible.

What visitors can see at Waseda

Waseda’s November 4 update schedules a modest archival exhibition for November 10–13 at Waseda Gallery, basement level of the Ono Memorial Hall, Building 27. The published hours are 10 a.m.–6 p.m., with important exceptions: the exhibition is due to open at 3 p.m. on November 10 and close at 5:30 p.m. on November 13. The university labels these arrangements tentative.

The press invitation also describes Polish film posters from the collection of the Museum of Cinematography in Łódź and names artists including Waldemar Świerzy, Wojciech Fangor and Rafał Olbiński. The complete list of objects and final installation layout have not been independently established. Readers should consult the organizers’ latest programme before travelling.

Polish film posters are an important subject in their own right: an artist can respond to the mood or ethical conflict of a movie without reproducing a scene. Their presence, if confirmed as announced, would offer a vivid way into a symposium dedicated to the movement of images between media.

The symposium in Tokyo

The international symposium is scheduled for November 21 and 22 at the Main Auditorium of Waseda University’s Okuma Auditorium. Waseda Institute for Advanced Study is the organizer, with the Manggha Museum and the Polish Embassy in Tokyo as co-organizers. The National Film Archive of Japan is among the supporting institutions.

English is the primary conference language, although Japanese presentations are allowed with English-language summaries or handouts. The emailed invitation describes hours of noon–5 p.m. on Saturday and 11 a.m.–6 p.m. on Sunday, with free admission. Session details and access arrangements should be checked against the final organizer programme.

The event is aimed at an academic audience but its underlying questions reach well beyond film studies. How do societies preserve contested historical memory? How can archival materials change the interpretation of an artist? What survives when cinema moves into museums, theatre, books or new digital environments?

A journey that brought an image home

The timeline is striking: 1944, a Japanese art exhibition in occupied Kraków; 1987, the Kyoto Prize; 1994, the Manggha Museum’s opening; and 2026, a reassessment in Tokyo. It would be tempting to tell these dates as a seamless story of friendship. Real history is harder. War, authoritarianism, public funding, preservation problems and the patient work of organizers all stand between them.

The young Wajda’s discovery was personal. Turning it into a museum required his wife, Polish colleagues, Japanese supporters, architect and craftspeople, and generations of curators who continue to preserve and interpret the collection.

At Waseda, that movement comes full circle. Japanese art once transformed what a young Polish painter imagined was possible. Its influence traveled through films and a museum built beside a European river. Now Japan is being asked to examine not only the director’s masterpieces but the institutions and relationships that allow art to endure.