Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926-1945

PROMISCUOUS MEDIA

Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945

Hikari Hori

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Photography’s Aura

2. Contested Motherhood and Entertainment Film

3. The Politics of Japanese Documentary Film

4. The Dream of Japanese National Animation

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure 0.1. Opening shot of Hanako (Hanako san, 1943)

Figure 1.1. Crown Prince Hirohito (postcard)

Figure 1.2. Extant building of hōanden (shrine that specifically preserves the Photograph)

Figure 1.3. Front page of Osaka Asahi shinbun (January 1, 1937)

Figure 1.4. Inter-title of Nippon News, vol. 1 (June 11, 1940)

Figure 1.5. The imperial couple at the ceremony of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary in Nippon News, vol. 23-2 (November 13, 1940)

Figure 2.1. Actress Takasugi Sanae in her Kokufu apron (postcard)

Figure 2.2. Kōzō played by Uehara Ken in 1940 digest version of The Love-Troth Tree (Aizen katsura, 1940)

Figure 2.3. Waka, played by Tanaka Kinuyo, and her son in The Army (Rikugun, 1944)

Figure 2.4. Military women, played by Hara Setsuko and Takamine Hideko in Three Women in the North (Kita no sannin, 1945)

Figure 3.1. Atsugi Taka

Figure 3.2. The opening pages of the Film Law, with Hirohito’s signature

Figure 3.3. Record of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru hobo no kiroku) film advertisement in Eiga junpō (January 1, 1942)

Figure 3.4. Young woman at sewing machine in This Is How Hard We Are Working (Watashitachi wa konnani hataraiteiru, 1945)

Figure 4.1. Perō, the Chimney Sweeper (Entotsuya Perō, 1930)

Figure 4.2. Suppression of the Tengu (Tengu taiji, 1934)

Figure 4.3. Momotaro’s Sea Eagle (Momotaro no umiwashi, 1943)

Figure 4.4. Front page of Tokyo Asahi shinbun (January 1, 1942)

Figure 4.5. Divine Warriors Descend to Kota Palembang (Shinpei parenban ni kōka su, 1942, postcard)

Figure 4.6. Princess Iron Fan (Tie shan gong zhu/Tessen kōshu) advertisement in Eiga junpō (September 21, 1942)

Figure 4.7. Dandelion scene in Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei, 1945)

Figure 4.8. Paratroopers in USSR in Construction (December 1935)

Figure 4.9. Rabbit soldier in Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei, 1945)

Preface and Acknowledgments

I first became interested in researching film by coincidence when I was a graduate student in art history in Japan. Through a casual introduction by a friend, I assisted (in minor ways) the documentary filmmaker Barbara Hammer when she was in Tokyo working on Devotion: A Film about Ogawa Productions (2000), a film about the father of the Japanese documentary, Ogawa Shinsuke, and his production company. It was an unforgettable experience. I was fascinated by filmmaking practices (doing research, interviewing, shooting, editing, and carrying a heavy camera—even though it was digital, still heavy enough—and a microphone). I admired Barbara’s stamina as director and instincts as creator, and learned so much from her perspectives as a veteran feminist and lesbian activist. My dissertation was motivated by my desire to answer her question: Who are the pioneering Japanese women directors? This book, however, travelled much further in terms of the geography I worked on and lived in, as well as the questions I wanted to raise.

My research turns to the wartime era and to films within and beyond Japan. When I did research on the female pioneer Atsugi Taka, who joined film productions in the 1930s, I was drawn to the time period. I met Tokieda Toshie and Kishi Fumiko, who shared with me invaluable stories and insights into film production during the wartime and immediate postwar eras. Documentary director Tokieda was extremely generous about sharing recorded interviews between herself and Atsugi, historical documents, and her own experiences of directing. I was fascinated by these glimpses of Tokieda’s career, which began by joining in documentary filmmaking on May Day in 1950 and being trained as an assistant director at Iwanami studio the following year. Later she became a very unusual Japanese film director, filming the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China. Kishi was very kind and wonderful, too. She was a remarkable person, who worked mostly in dramatic feature film production as a film editor. One of her earliest jobs was working on New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi; directed by Itami Mansaku, 1937). She learned a lot about new techniques of editing from a German female editor who came to Japan with Arnold Fanck to do the German version of the film, titled The Daughter of Samurai. After this film, she moved to Manchuria to work for the Manchurian Film Association (Manshū eiga kyōkai), where she also collaborated with Sakane Tazuko, the Japanese female director. She stayed in China for several years after the war to work in film production, and then came back to Japan to continue her career.

These three practitioners—Barbara, Tokieda-san, and Kishi-san (four, including Atsugi, whom I did not get to know in person)—inspired and encouraged me to think about war; the relations between local and global film cultures; the cross-cultural circulation of texts, ideas, and art forms; artists’ passion for creativity regardless of their political, social, and historical conditions; gender and film; and Japanese imperialism. These topics generated fundamental questions for this book.

My biggest challenge was to craft my questions and exposition to effectively address both Anglophone and Japanese readers. I hope that this book will be like my own approach to film and visual culture: transnational, linking two separate but overlapped fields with nationally defined disciplinary boundaries. I believe that national boundaries do exist in the academy when a discipline is being formed—I became keenly aware of the point when I moved to the United States after my graduate work. Such boundaries are determined by the urgent and immediate social conditions in which researchers are institutionally, psychologically, and linguistically situated. But I hope that this book becomes a link across geographical boundaries, following paths paved by earlier scholars but tying together these separate fields.

Needless to say, I am deeply indebted to numerous friends, colleagues, and institutions that helped me conceive and materialize this project. I am especially grateful to Paul Anderer, Theodore Hughes, Eugenia Lean, Haruo Shirane, and Tomi Suzuki in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University for their support and encouragement for this project. At Columbia, librarians and archivists were also immensely helpful: Karen Green at Butler Library, who is also a renowned comic critic; Sachie Noguchi, Jim Cheng, and Tsuyoshi Harada at Starr East Asian Library; and archivists Miki Masuda and Beth Katzoff at the Makino Mamoru Collection on the History of East Asian Film.

In addition to the members of Modern Japan Seminar and Junior Faculty Writing Workshop at Columbia, Marnie Anderson, Michael Baskett, Hyaeweol Choi, Janis Mimura, Ken Ruoff, and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano read and commented on chapter drafts and conference papers despite their busy schedules, for which I cannot be thankful enough. In addition, Kim Brandt, Jane Gaines, and Greg Pflugfelder were not only wonderful friends and colleagues but also inspiring, knowledgeable, fun to talk with, and keen readers of chapters. However, I am saddened that I am not able to present this book to my dissertation adviser, the late Kaori Chino, and to my mentor, the late Wakakuwa Midori. My very earliest ideas about war, film, nationalism, and gender as research topics were nurtured and encouraged by them.

Generous funds were provided to support my research by the Graduate School of Gakushuin University, the Tokyo Women’s Foundation, the Toyota Foundation, the Ford Associateship of Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia. I also express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. The ideas presented have benefited from discussions in the University Seminar on Modern Japan.

Friends and colleagues who provided me with comments, feedback, encouragement, practical advice, and refreshing intellectual conversation must be noted here. In addition to numerous other friends—I cannot list all—the following have been sources of inspiration and energy: Julia Bullock, Rich Calichman, Yuri Furuhata, Hishinuma Misue, Ikeda Yoshiko, Ayako Kano, Kim Kono, Fumiko Nazikian, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Otsuka Eiji, Marc Steinberg, Karen Turner, Insil Yang, and Toshiko, Ron, and Christine Yamamoto. When I was at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center as a Ford Associate in 2006, I met Neloufer de Mel and Banu Subramaniam, who helped me see various cases of nationalism and experiences of modernity, film production, and feminist discourses beyond East Asia. My friends from the Image and Gender Study Group (Imēji ando jendā kenkyūkai) have been supportive regardless of our different physical locations: Kitahara Megumi, Mori Rie, and Yamasaki Akiko. I am also grateful to the students of my seminars and film classes, with whom I shared films, snacks, and my crude ideas for this project.

I would like to thank two reviewers whose suggestions were immensely helpful and insightful as I revised the manuscript. Also, Ross Yelsey of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and my editor Roger M. Haydon have done so much to see this project materialize; I was extremely fortunate to have them on my side. Their enthusiasm and professionalism have been inspiring and have sustained my writing. Ikegawa Reiko and Tomita Mika have been indispensable friends and film consultants. I was always able to turn to them to discuss any films, ranging from the most obscure Japanese movies to Bollywood hits, and they sent me DVDs and documents without which my research would have been impossible. Ishihara Ikuko, Tsukamoto Yasuyo, and Mizoguchi Akiko have been there from the very beginning of this project.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my parents, Yukiko and Hiroshi Hori, to David Lurie for his support of this project, and to my daughter Chiyo for everything. She suggested that I should consult a list of useful connecting words for writing that she got from her teacher, generously packed snacks for me from her Halloween bucket, and had faith in me continually.

Introduction

FILM AND VISUAL CULTURE: THE EARLY SHOWA ERA, HISTORICAL CONTEXTS, AND NARRATIVE FRAMEWORKS

This book reveals and analyzes contradictions in the discourse of national identity of film and visual culture during the early Showa era in mainland Japan (naichi). The desire to construct a distinct national identity, which has been cross-culturally documented in every modern nation-state, becomes even more urgent during war. It manifests as a constant forging of nationalized idioms, as seen in ideologues’ writings and in legislation but also in popular culture. Examining such manifestations, I point out the futility and ultimate impurity of such discourses of nationalistically defined and exclusive cultural forms and idioms. In contrast, I deploy the word promiscuity to characterize the era’s film and visual culture, a term intended to address the complexity and interpermeability of that culture: intermediality (intersection and interaction between film and painting, between live-action film and animation, and among film, photography, painting, and radio); cross-genre fluidity (between documentary and dramatic films); and the transnational learning and sharing of visual styles and film theories regardless of the political ideologies of their country of origin. Nationally or nationalistically constructed discourse reveals, paradoxically, the failure of attempts to establish national identity as well as the inherent bricolage of political and formalistic manifestations of any such identity.

The early Showa era spans the two decades from Emperor Hirohito’s accession to the throne in 1926 to the end of the war in 1945; this first part of Hirohito’s reign (1926–1989) mostly overlaps with the fifteen years of the Asia Pacific War (1931–1945).¹ Conventional scholarship on Japanese film studies and cultural history tends to treat the cultural products of this era as straightforward reflections of nationalist political ideologies that led to the defeat and catastrophic destruction of the country in World War II. In contrast to this approach, I focus on the complexity of the era. I elucidate the competing claims of nationalist discourses and the transnational medium of film; reveal contradictions between state political ideology and the identity formation of imperial subjects; and demonstrate how the period saw the reconfiguration of female and male gender identities as well as the self and other of ethnic relations. Study of the era’s film and visual culture illustrates that these were complex decades rather than a time of linear, teleological downfall.

Exploring wartime Japanese film and visual culture, this book builds on important work by other researchers. Scholars have provided accounts of the era’s film productions and theoretical debates, of the changing and often contradictory demands placed by government cultural policies on productions, of imperialist filmmaking practices, and of the aesthetic dimensions of film texts.² On the other hand, research on the period demonstrates a tendency, especially in Japanese-language scholarship, to polarize wartime films into two groups: the vast majority of films, often categorized as national policy film, or kokusaku eiga, are treated as outright state propaganda and tools of indoctrination produced under a totalitarian regime, while a handful of other films are seen as resistance because they are humanistic or entertaining and not overtly political. Such claims for resistance are highly impressionistic, but the central problem with this dichotomy lies in the meaning and use of the term kokusaku eiga. To summarize very briefly, the term as currently deployed in film scholarship can be used to refer to any films produced during the wartime. Kokusaku eiga delineates an antagonistic, polarized relation between the state and filmmaking practices, on the one hand, and between state-censored film texts and their viewers, on the other. The presuppositions are that the state controlled the contents of films through regulations and censorship and that viewers were helplessly exposed to the state policies propagated by the films. I avoid the term in this book because I find this usage misleading and problematic. First, it implies that films are necessarily faithful reflections of state ideologies of militarism, colonialism, racism, and so on. Second, it obscures the term’s own historical shifts and discursive implications and establishes a monolithic genre. (I elaborate further on issues of the national policy film later.)

To question a monolithic understanding of wartime film and to focus on the complexities and contradictions of national identity formation, my approach differs from existing scholarship in two ways. First, I am interested in interactions and intersections between film and other media. By other media, for which I often interchangeably use the term visual culture, I mean the visual presentations of postcards, photographs, paintings, magazine illustrations, and even activism on the street. These resonate with and affect both film-viewing experiences and filmmaking practices, and are thus essential to examining the era’s cultural landscape. In this sense, I attempt to draw attention to the relationality of different media and various genres of cultural texts. Second, I set out to provide a narrative of Japanese cultural practices that places them in the broader picture of relations between Japan and other countries. This is a narrative of the national history of Japanese film, but here nationality is understood as relational, as a part of global film culture, and the medium is located in a geographically broader mediascape. The exploration of cultural texts around and beyond film, within and beyond Japan, enriches our understanding of Japanese film culture, but it also allows us to uncover unexpected connections among different media, activities, and creative works—and it is a fruitful and effective way to examine dominant political and cultural discourses that attempt to construct solid identities of culture, film, and nation.³

The Japanese Film Industry in the Early Showa Era, 1926–1945

The early Showa era, the period covered in this book, is an emperor-centered period, in accordance with the modern reign-name system. Because in these two decades the democratic direction of Japanese society was interrupted and state thought control intensified during a series of wars, they are frequently termed a dark valley (kurai tanima). Indeed, any survey of economic, political, and social incidents reveals this to be a very grim period: the amendment of the Peace Preservation Law (1928), adding the death penalty for the violation of the national polity (the emperor’s sovereignty); the Showa economic depression (1930); the Manchurian Incident (1931); a large-scale scheme of assassinations attempted by the right-wing terrorist group Blood Brotherhood (Ketsumei dan) (1932); naval officers’ assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (1932); Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations (1933); an attempted military coup in the February 26 Incident (1936); and then the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945). However, as historian Kenneth Ruoff argues, it is necessary to consider these years as a mixture or symbiosis of light and dark, rather than unquestioningly relying on the dark valley model for understanding the era.⁴

In particular, examination of Japanese film production complicates the general teleological understanding of the era as downfall leading to devastation. For instance, it is noteworthy that, as pointed out by film historian Ginoza Naomi, the society represented in 1930s Japanese film looks peaceful (heiwa ni mieru) if one were to attempt to understand the period solely judging from its representation in contemporary cinema.⁵ Ginoza shows that, without any outside knowledge of political history, it is difficult to detect signs of traumatic events or premonitions of the expansion of war to other Asian and Pacific regions on the film screen.⁶ Of course Ginoza is not saying that the decade was peaceful. Rather, her argument is an important reminder that films do not directly mirror historical incidents and official political ideologies. Furthermore, she suggests that the minimal reference in 1930s films to ongoing warfare is actually a sign of general endorsement by Japanese citizens of their country’s colonialist aggression in China. Disturbing historical incidents and moments and war atrocities were one side of the coin but, for many Japanese people, their dreams and struggles for success in everyday lives were the other.

To see the light sides of the era, it is also important to note that early Showa is marked by the expansion of the Japanese film industry. Tokyo-based studios were recovering from the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, which damaged the film businesses there and forced them to temporarily relocate production to Kyoto. To compete with the financially sound entertainment combine Shōchiku, the Nikkatsu studio purchased the Tamagawa studios from a recently failed independent film production company and secured electricity from a suburban railway; and PCL (which later merged with Tōhō) solidified its financial base by combining multiple sponsors, ranging from a wireless company to a beer manufacturer. The period also saw the birth of the Tōhō studio, originally a Kansai-based company that created the all-female Takarazuka revue troupe before entering the Tokyo film business.⁷ Since then, Tōhō and Shōchiku (founded in 1920) have been the leading studios of the Japanese film industry. Technologically speaking, the 1930s was the decade in which sound film was introduced and movie theaters were modernized—for example, with air-conditioning. For urban dwellers, filmgoing became a casual leisure activity, replacing film’s prior image as a chaotic, disorderly pastime for low-income audiences in sordid areas.

During that decade, film-related regulations were gradually centralized. Important to note is that the film industry was now large enough to become an object of the wartime controlled economy. In the mid-1930s, as with other countries including the United States, the Japanese economy was steadily recovering from the Depression. In this context, records show that the Japanese film industry matched, or potentially even exceeded, Hollywood in terms of the number of film productions. Hollywood produced 527 feature films in 1939, while the number of overall national film productions in Japan in that year was 582.⁸ The Japanese film industry in the 1930s was one of the most vigorous in the world.

Japan was also a country of large-scale film importation. As cultural historian Miriam Silverberg once illustrated through the example of the persistent popularity of Charlie Chaplin before and after 1945, Hollywood was hegemonic. American films were screened right up until the day of the Pearl Harbor attack.⁹ However, I need to stress the wide range of European films, including German and French films, that were also available and very popular in Japan. Films were imported not only from the United States but also from Austria, Czechoslovakia, England, France, and Germany, in response to public demand. Among many titles, the era’s film fans enjoyed, for example, the leftist satire À Nous la Liberté (directed by René Clair, 1931; shown in Japan in 1932), the German operetta film Bombs over Monte Carlo (starring Hans Albers and directed by Hanns Schwarz, 1931; shown in 1934), the monster film The Golem (directed by Julien Duvivier, 1936; shown in 1937), and the British romantic drama Wings of the Morning (directed by Harold D. Schuster, 1937; shown in 1938).¹⁰ The auteur director Ozu Yasujiro’s Only Son (Hitori musuko, 1936) even included a few sequences of the British-Austrian musical film Gently My Songs Entreat (directed by Willi Forst, 1933; shown in 1935), which was a hit in Japan. (As part of a scene in which the protagonist takes his mother to show her typical Tokyoite artsy culture, Ozu cut sequences from the British-Austrian original and embedded them seamlessly in his film.) It is noteworthy, nevertheless, that because of harsh anticommunist censorship and in spite of their dominant presence in contemporary global film culture, only a few Russian films were imported to Japan. For example, one of the most influential films in history, The Battleship Potemkin (directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), was not shown in Japan until 1967.

Though film was the object of regulation from its early days by the Ministry of Welfare—along with public baths and barbers—many sections of the government came to see the medium’s potential for education and propagation of public policies; it was used to advertise postal savings, public hygiene, electoral campaigns, and so on. But the medium was also a commercial product deeply engaged with the everyday life of Japanese imperial citizens from the 1930s through the early 1940s.¹¹ These audiences negotiated their desires, predicaments, and anxieties about their lives through film consumption. Film was a leisure activity primarily for city dwellers, and one should not assume a nationwide, unitary experience of the medium, but I argue that studying it in the context of the wider visual culture provides unparalleled insight into gender relations, ethnic and class identities, public policies and their effects, and the mediascape of society.¹² Film and visual culture served as an important arena for negotiations of national identity formation, for enactment of citizens’ desire and pleasure, and for dialogue between Japanese practices and global cultures.

National Policy Film (Kokusaku eiga) Reconsidered

Despite this large, globally informed heterogeneous Japanese film culture, current scholars tend to categorize wartime films as national policy film, which covers a range from crude early documentaries commissioned by the military to high-profile entertainment war films to government films promoting savings to opportunistic melodramatic romances. The term entered film historical narratives in the 1980s as a means of critically acknowledging Japan’s wartime imperialism, but it originated in the wartime era.

Historically, the term national policy film first emerged in the mid-1930s, when Home Ministry officials were formulating plans to control the film industry. The term derives from the Proposal to Establish National Policies of Film (Eiga kokusaku juritsu ni kansuru kengi), which was accepted by the lower house of the Japanese parliament in 1933. The usage was initially national policies of film (eiga kokusaku, implying state intervention in the film industry), rather than national policy film (kokusaku eiga, films reflecting and promoting national policies). The proposal, made by parliament member Iwase Ryō, was the first public statement that urged the state to intervene in film production and guide the industry to produce appropriate national representations. While travelling in Germany, Iwase had been disturbed to see a film produced by a westerner about half-naked Japanese women dancing; he found it an offense to the country’s dignity and a degradation of Japan’s international position.¹³

Film’s potential contribution to the image-making of the Japanese state was continually and increasingly debated among film critics, filmmakers, and government bureaucrats in the years leading up to the promulgation of the 1939 Film Law (Eiga hō), which was the first national-level legislation on film. By the time the Home, Education, and Welfare Ministries put together the bill of the Film Law and submitted it to parliament in 1939, they had already been working together since 1933 on film policies. Many film professionals expected that the Film Law would be an opportunity to raise the social status of filmmaking, and some expected that the state would protect the industry. The film historian Peter High locates the emerging discourse of national policy film in the formative years of the Film Law, when concerned ministries, studio representatives, and filmmakers discussed how state intervention might promote film production and raise its social status. In addition, as High points out, this discussion of national film policy prompted the participants to speculate about and attempt to define the nationality of the medium: Japanese film (nippon eiga).¹⁴

The Film Law was specifically designed to regulate the film industry, and its first article states that it aims "to serve the progress of national culture [kokumin bunka]."¹⁵ In response, film critics and filmmakers attempted to forge the language of the Japanese national film. They were driven by the following questions: What national characteristics should such a film have? What are the aesthetics and the ethos that manifest unique Japaneseness? Which film genres best articulate the national traits: dramatic or documentary, or stories of history, biography, or war? Most such speculations also provided prescriptions of the way a Japanese film should be.

According to High’s examination, one of the most notable concepts deployed in this context was spiritism, or seishin shugi, articulated and promoted by cultural critic Hasegawa Jozekan, film critic and scriptwriter Sawamura Tsutomu, and film director Kumagaya Hisatora.¹⁶ This abstract notion was proclaimed by Sawamura when he was writing primarily on the role of the documentary film: the filmmaker must dedicate his whole being to the awakening possibilities of our new State. If he does that, works of great strength and beauty are sure to arise from within him and come forth.¹⁷ Sawamura and Kumagaya attempted to materialize spiritism in their film productions, such as the period film Abe Clan (Abe ichizoku, 1938), the combat film Naval Brigade of Shanghai (Shanhai rikusentai, 1939), and the biographical story Navy (Kaigun, 1943). In all these films, they were committed to representing historical fictions and characters’ manifestation of Japanese spirit. With their strong desire to define the nationality of cinema, they arrived at a spirituality that was not visible or figurative. At stake in debates over how films contribute to politics during total war was the definition of Japaneseness; the repeated terms for discussion were the nation (nippon), its nationals (kokumin), and authentic, irreducible Japaneseness.

The term national policy film, or kokusaku eiga, was revived by postwar revisionist scholars such as Satō Tadao in the 1980s as a means of indicating their political stance and criticism of Japan’s wartime imperialism. Contrary to the wartime connotation, the term was chosen out of a sense of ethical commitment to addressing Japan’s war responsibility. Canonical Japanese-language film history surveys by Satō and Tanaka Jun’ichirō often deploy the term, and Anglophone scholarship also maintains the framework that it entails.¹⁸ Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, the wartime era was reconceptualized in historical studies, which influenced other disciplines; scholars questioned the existing emphasis on Japanese citizens’ victimhood in the war against the Allied powers and shifted their emphasis to critique of Japan’s war accountability and its own colonial aggression in Asia. The term national policy film was thus often used along with the term Fifteen Year War, which indicated a longer time span of wars and conflicts, in place of Pacific War, which referred specifically to the war against the United States and thereby obscured the broader historical context and geography of the conflict.

During the new millennium, on the other hand, there emerged a strong trend for the implications of the term kokusaku eiga to become diluted and generalized, and it quickly became a casual category for any films produced in Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. It is this depoliticization of the term that leads me to refrain from using it. In response to this vague and widespread usage, historian Furukawa Takahisa attempted to redefine the term in his Wartime Japanese Cinema: Did People Really Watch National Policy Films? (Senjika no nihon eiga: Hito wa kokusaku eiga o mitaka?, 2003). Furukawa questions broad, inclusive definitions of the term and proposes to rigidly define national policy films as those that were exempt from censorship fees. Such exemptions were granted to those films whose content was explicitly approved by the state.¹⁹

According to Furukawa’s new categorization, dramatic films would be divided into three categories: national policy films, films for the general public (ippan yō eiga) and films not for minors (hi ippan yō eiga; children age thirteen and below were not allowed to see this category). By establishing these new categories, Furukawa goes on to argue that audiences did not actually go to see movies that were permeated by state ideology. He points to the discrepancy between the poor box office receipts of censorship fee–exempted national policy films and the commercially successful not-for-minor films, and concludes that national policy films were what people saw the least during the wartime era.²⁰ His argument offers a new perspective on wartime film studies, as he illustrates the conflict between state ideology and the spectatorship of general audiences. It is also important to note that he is one of the first scholars to address the pleasure of film viewing and the popularity of entertainment film in Japan.

Though I much appreciate Furukawa’s emphasis on spectatorship and the importance of entertainment films as objects of research, I must point out that his notion of resisting spectatorship ironically reinforces the existing dichotomized understanding of wartime films: an opposition between films infiltrated by state doctrines versus films free of ideology. I argue that while we should do away with the overgeneralized model of all films of the period as national policy films, we still must explore examples of complicity (unintended or otherwise) between state policies and film audiences, negotiations between state policies and film productions, and unpredictable interactions between film texts and their audiences. Before providing an example to elucidate this point, I briefly discuss a compelling critique of Furukawa’s arguments.

In The Total Mobilization System and Film (Sōdōin taisei to eiga), a monograph on policies for domestic and overseas film production and distribution, film historian Katō Atsuko notes, A problem remains regarding who decides a film is a ‘national policy film.’ In other words, there are twists. While a filmmaker may not intend to make a work a national policy film, the studio or ministries may decide that it is one and promote it as such. Or, audiences may find a film to be a national policy film when ministries strongly disapprove of it as one.²¹

Katō makes the excellent point that the state itself is not a stable actor and that censors are also spectators.²² She questions the conventional understanding of state policies as monolithic and examines the shifts, complexities, ambiguities, and failures of implementation of a series of Japanese film policies in mainland Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and China. Her historical accounts reveal the state’s strong efforts to indoctrinate national subjects and the struggles and frustration of government officials and their dissatisfaction with the outcome of their interventions. She also highlights how the entertainment industry’s priority was always to launch products that would cater to spectators’ unpredictable preferences and expectations, thereby maximizing revenue; this was never a matter of intense control by the state from above with consequent subjugation of the industry. To emphasize this point, Katō draws attention to a statement made by Kido Shirō, president of Shōchiku studio, who testified as a war criminal in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that the state’s intervention was not always effective or imposing.²³ This means that the studio saw state instructions and censorship as negotiable. Katō confirms that state regulations and policymaking concerning film production and exhibition should be understood as in flux and in a process of constant negotiation.

While Katō correctly cautions against seeing the state as a monolithic, oppressive entity, I add to this critique by arguing that it is important to situate spectatorship in specific historical and political contexts. Here the dramatic feature China Nights (Shina no yoru; directed by Fushimi Osamu, 1940) serves as a compelling example. This not-for-minors film did not receive the censorship fee exemption, and therefore, Furukawa argues, it is not a national policy film. He emphasizes that it was hated and despised by major progovernment film critics and barely passed censorship.²⁴ However, the film narrative was not detached from the state’s political agenda but in fact promoted it. The film would not have been conceived or consumed without the political and historical context of Japan’s occupation of Shanghai as a part of the ongoing war with China. The story is a romance between a Japanese sailor and a Chinese woman, and the romance changes her from anti-Japanese patriotism to a pro-Japanese stance. It must be noted that it is having her face slapped by the Japanese man, an act of violence that awakens the goodness of this rebellious Chinese woman and makes her fall in love with him.

The narrative obviously resonates with contemporary Japanese aggression, in that the heterosexual romance translates the colonial and ethnicized relationship between the two countries. The gender relation of the narrative traces a hierarchical, colonizer/colonized ethnic tie established by violence, so that one might even assume that Japanese ideologues could have written the scenario. Yet the film was neither promoted nor sponsored by the state. Categorically speaking, the film would not be a national policy film if we accept Furukawa’s redefinition, but nevertheless the film narrative strongly resonates with contemporary Japanese state policy. Its representation of colonial relations of gender and ethnicity asserts the Japanese state’s imperialist desire, and it provokes Japanese viewers to fantasize, through the metaphor of the Japanese man obtaining the Chinese woman’s love and trust, about the wealth—acquisition of women, land, luxurious materials—that would be brought about by victory in war.

Furukawa’s restrictive definition of national policy film thus proves unsettling in the sphere of viewers’ textual engagements. Although his shift of focus from production to spectatorship, with attention to popular entertainment film, is crucial, it still brackets the discourse of the wartime state’s colonial and imperialist aggression, which film texts were able to mobilize. To determine whether or not a film text is complicit with state policies also requires examination of the ways its meanings, implications, and connotations are acknowledged and produced by viewers in social contexts. Spectators’ positions were shaped by and were in turn shaping multiple factors, such as social norms, offscreen discourse of politics, and genre expectations.

Inhibition and Pleasure of Nationalist Cinemas

Attempting to provide a narrative framework that maintains the critique of Japanese imperialism originally intended in the deployment of the term national film policy by scholars such as Satō Tadao, I find recent scholarship on German and Italian films during the Nazi and fascist eras quite illuminating. In particular, film historical scholarship on the Third Reich is suggestive for reexamining Japanese films of the early Showa era, in part because the German and Japanese fields of film studies are similarly constructed in the context of their postwar societies’ approach to war guilt.²⁵ Both are deeply embedded in each country’s postwar discourses of war crimes, massacres, memory, and compensation programs, making the visual pleasures of wartime entertainment films extremely difficult to articulate since, unlike in the former Allied nations, the very notion of wartime pleasure had been condemned by the ethical imperative to acknowledge war crimes. Among well-known works of German film criticism, Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) best exemplifies a typical historical narrative that reads Nazi films as evidence of deviation from modernity, symptoms of fanaticism and atrocity, and reflections of oppressive state doxa. This pattern of condemnation can also be found in the dominant narrative in Japanese film studies.

On the other hand, post–Cold War scholarship on cinema of the 1930s and early 1940s departs from such a restrictive narrative and often draws attention to dynamic interactions with hegemonic films from elsewhere, often Hollywood. Works by Linda Schulte-Sasse, Eric Rentschler, and Lutz Koepnick on German cinema, and by Stephen Ricci, Stephen Gundle, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Italian cinema, delineate national cinemas’ internal tensions and antagonisms in the process of indigenization and reveal responses to hegemonic Hollywood as these cinemas promoted mostly nationalist sentiments.²⁶ In essence, they demonstrate the ambivalent national identities of the film medium. Additionally, not only in German and Italian film studies but also in British film studies, scholars such as Andrew Higson and Annette Kuhn provide compelling transnational and comparative perspectives on 1930s and 1940s films.²⁷

This scholarship is illuminating because it complicates notions of nationalistically defined cinemas and of clear boundaries among ideologically segregated nations. For example, in an article titled Visual Pleasure Inhibited, German film scholar Karsten Witte shows how 1930s Third Reich revue films adapted Hollywood musicals.²⁸ Witte connects the choreography of German musicals, which also resonates with Leni Riefenstahl’s aesthetics, to Hollywood, thereby pointing to the promiscuous and transnational nature of filmmaking practices. He also shows how, by restraining themselves from fully adapting the Hollywood genre’s sheer celebration of physicality and gender norms, producers of these musicals attempted to create indigenous idioms in accord with their own social imperatives. Not only does Witte successfully contextualize the Third Reich films in the circulation of global film culture, but his highlighting of the entertainment film is a challenge to the conventions of film studies, which has predominantly limited consideration of European films to auteurism, avant-garde movements, and experimental art house filmmaking.²⁹ (Such customary distinctions between Hollywood and other national cinemas in film studies are familiar in studies of Japanese cinema, too.) Witte’s emphasis on German entertainment film, which was deeply embedded in the political situations of the wartime era, is highly suggestive in its departure from conventional approaches that have located non-Hollywood cinemas as sites of alterity.

Given my interest in wartime Japanese film, I find Witte’s use of the word inhibition in his title especially telling. This can be read as a reference to the limiting stoicism of his own social and political context of German film studies, which is comparable with Japanese scholarship, in which war guilt is also an important issue. Witte successfully critiques Nazi ideologies, but he also points to the cinematic pleasure of the era, in both production and consumption. In the same vein, in my discussion of the complexities of Japanese film history in the early Showa period, I hope to balance ideological critique with acknowledgement of the pleasures provided by the medium. Only by doing so is it possible to grasp the promiscuity and complexity of the reception of cultural production. Informed in this way by studies of other national cinemas, this book discusses Japanese wartime film as a vernacular cinema located amid the global circulation of films and film theories, draws attention to popular works rather than those by canonical directors, and locates cinematic representations in convergence with other contemporary visual experiences.³⁰

Relational and Transnational Film History

To locate Japanese cinema as a part of global film culture and to stress the relationality of film as a medium, I now turn to Alan Tansman’s notion of fascist aesthetics, which has been influential in studies of the cultural history of wartime Japan over the past decade.³¹ Tansman’s study is exceptional for its close linkage of a variety of cross-genre, cross-media cultural texts whose relations are established within a framework of aesthetics. The introduction of the transcultural notion of fascist aesthetics also liberates Japanese cultural production from the confining narrative mode of national history and makes it comparable and coeval with other fascist cultures, in a manner similar to the work of historian Harry Harootunian in his discussion of interwar Japanese intellectual history.³² Nonetheless, I have reservations—in particular for the medium of film—about the project of finding an overarching specific aesthetic, shared among the Axis nations, that permeates Japanese visual culture of the early Showa era.

A review of the historiography of the term fascist shows that postwar Japanese Marxist historians had long used it to describe the wartime Japanese state, although the term was broadly and often vaguely applied and was frequently interchangeable with oppressive to citizens or Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism.³³ In essence, the term fascist was widely deployed as a readily available adjective in Japanese scholarship to refer to any negative elements of wartime Japanese society. It functioned as a strong critique of state war crimes, but it can also be seen as portraying the state and its citizens as monolithic, oppositional entities. However, there were challenges to this overarching notion.