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This chapter traces the development of film institutions within the formal colonies of Taiwan and Korea and its extension to the semicolonial film market of Manchuria. It examines how legislation, production, exhibition, and reception conditions differed in each territory and considers salient shifts in official and popular perceptions by Japanese film journalists and filmmakers. It considers the ways in which the colonial government used film education programs to assimilate indigenous Taiwanese populations while combating the undermining influence of Chinese films. It also explores the role of colonial film censorship in the struggle to maintain social order in Korea, along with popular Japanese perceptions of the Korean film industry in the domestic Japanese market. Finally, it analyzes the film Vow in the Desert (Nessa no chikai, 1940) and how ideology shifted away from organized institutional concepts of Japanese empire to the more indeterminate idea of the Greater East Asian Film Sphere.

The introductory chapter clarifies the goal of the book, which is to question the monolithic understanding of wartime film and to focus on the complexities and contradictions of national identity formation of cultural texts in this period. The chapter begins by providing a brief summary of the era’s film industry. Then, it introduces the state of research of wartime Japanese film studies through an examination of the definition of ‘national policy film’ or kokusaku eiga. Finally, it underlines the significance of interdisciplinary and relational approaches to wartime Japanese film by discussing the methodologies and narratives of other national film histories that have informed this project. (105 words)

This chapter examines Japan's struggle to create and define its empire as a unique entity vis-à-vis the West. It first considers how Japan clashed with Hollywood for market domination and the “hearts and minds” of Asians and how the rise of the Japanese empire in Asia threatened American film dominance there, triggering a film war. Japan restricted access to Asian markets, censored or banned American films, and finally conducted a comprehensive embargo on all Hollywood films. This prohibition led to secret meetings among Japanese film industry representatives, Hollywood representatives, and the U.S. Department of Commerce in which the United States threatened to stain Japan's national reputation by making Japanese villains in American films. The chapter analyzes Japan's paradoxical status as a member nation of the Axis at a time when it was preaching anti-Westernism throughout Asia. It also discusses the interactions among the cinemas of imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy on the legislative, distribution, and exhibition levels.

This chapter examines how Japanese film culture engaged parallel forms of media to create imperial subjects by focusing on manga or comic books, popular music, and film magazines. It first considers the ways in which images of Asia represented in manga, illustrated novels, and animated films were used to transform young, predominately male audiences into obedient imperial subjects. It then turns to stories about heroes in exotic outposts of the Japanese empire that were published in response to a sense of inner duty and market demand. It also explores the use of popular music in animated films and the growth of film publications. The chapter shows how film magazines, popular music in films, and comic strips all interacted dynamically, both expanding the audience base for film while inviting the viewers' and readers' vicarious participation in the imperial project through their consumption.

This chapter examines the connections between pre- and post-imperial Japanese film culture with regard to a longing for empire. Japan's surrender to the Allies in 1945 marked an end to the physical reality of Japanese empire, but Japanese filmmakers continued to struggle with the loss of empire in the years after World War II, and especially wrestled with the question of how the newly decolonized Japanese nation fit in Asia. This chapter considers how Japanese filmmakers and their audiences often turned to the past in an attempt to reclaim their empire onscreen time and again. It looks at the emergence of a film genre known as the “postwar antiwar film.” The combination of guilt and nostalgia in these films created a formula that was very similar to that of the films produced before the war. The chapter analyzes two films produced after 1945 and set in the final days of empire that replicate verbatim the structure of the imperial era “goodwill” films.

Modernist noh, including Pound’s mis-translations and Ito’s translation of Hawk’s Well, influenced scholarship and performance in Japan. Tracing this circular cultural exchange demonstrates the inadequacy of most accounts of Japanese modernism and its opposition to the traditional arts.

This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.

In the Japanese language, kuro or koku shares similar meanings with the French word noir, such as the visual absence of color, black, dark, and shadowed as well as the metaphorical associations with emptiness, mystery, and evil. The complex aesthetic history of Japanese filmmaking, however, reveals not only its adaptation of proto-noir and noir techniques, but also the development of its own noir sensibility. Shifting values of modernism, existential angst and paranoia, crises of socio-economic identity, sense of doom, pervading neurasthenia and resignation to failure, skeptical views of progress as well as ambivalent views of the past, the penchant for violent and sexual narratives, and the creation of chiaroscuro aesthetic that mirrored psychological and ethical problems—these certain tendencies of film noir were already ingrained within the Japanese literary and artistic consciousness. While early Japanese filmmakers, very much like their American counterparts, relied upon modernist technological, narrative, and aesthetic experiments from Europe, they did so by adapting and transforming them into a 20^th century Japanese art form. Both proto-noir and early Japanese noir reveal a cultural fascination for modernity and its re-evaluation of social and gender roles for those struggling at the margins of contemporary urban life.

This book examines the collective significance and cumulative impact of Japanese imperial film culture—defined as an integrated system of film-related processes including legislation, production, distribution, exhibition, criticism, and reception—on the creation of a transnational empire in Asia as an ideological construct. It traces the colonial roots of imperial Japanese film culture in Asia in Taiwan and Korea and describes its semicolonial markets in Manchuria and Shanghai, as well as the occupied territories of Southeast Asia. The book argues that the Japanese film industry was integral to Japan's imperial enterprise from 1895 to 1945 and that Asia was central to the construction of Japan's collective national identity. This introduction provides an overview of the South Korean film 2009: Lost Memories in order to highlight the cultural legacy of Japanese imperialism. It also discusses the role of the transnational film in the promotion and expansion of the Japanese empire in Asia from 1896 to 1945, along with the historiography of Japan's cinema of empire.

This book examines Japanese cinema during the 1920s and 1930s, and more specifically how Japanese modernity took shape in the film culture of the period. It considers film genres that highlight modern subject identity and contain the discourses of Japanese modernity, along with the heterogeneous norms of the Japanese national cinema. It looks at one preeminent studio of the 1920s and 1930s, Shochiku Kamata Film Studios, and how it established norms for a classical Japanese cinema. Shochiku was the only studio that continued production in Tokyo throughout this period of early development of the Japanese film industry. The book thus explores the ways in which Tokyo, and by extension Shochiku, became both the center of modern film production and the cultural hub of Japanese modernity itself. It also investigates how modern Japanese subjectivity was materialized by the Japanese themselves through cinema and how the classical Japanese cinema gave rise to a fictive Japanese national identity.

This chapter continues the discussion on yôkai in mass media, and explores the yôkai boom that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. It begins with a section on the J-horror genre, which are composed of Japanese horror films that entered the global market during the late 1990s. It notes that while these J-horror characters became popular internationally, the more traditional yôkai continued to be nostalgic icons of the hometown or furusato. It then introduces the yôkaigaku, a multidisciplinary humanistic study that draws on the various fields of literature, history, and art, to name a few. This chapter also examines some of the famous yôkai characters in media, such as Sadako and the Pokémon (pocket monsters).

This chapter discusses the censorship trial of Nikkatsu Roman Porn, a Japanese porn film industry ran by the Nikkatsu studio. It particularly examines the predicaments of the defendants: three directors, three Eirin inspectors, and three film studio executives. Each group of defendants retained its own legal counsel, and one of the directors appointed his own, resulting in an unwieldy total of four lawyers representing nine defendants. To make matters worse, one of these defense lawyers was appointed by the Nikkatsu labor union, which lurked in the background of the trial as a not-so-silent player and aligned itself with the state prosecutor as well as with the Japanese Communist Party. The defendants were charged under article 175 for “making male and female actors enact poses of sexual intercourse, raping women, girl-girl sex play” accompanied by frank facial expressions, vocalizations, and the like.

This chapter discusses the historical development of cinema in Japan and Korea. In Japan, Shiro Asano imported the first motion picture camera in 1897 and the medium was quickly embraced by the whole population and over the next decade became a popular method of entertainment. The first cinema was opened in 1903 and the first Japanese production company was established in 1908. In Korea, cinema was first introduced to the general public in 1903. The Korean film industry, however, had a difficult start and it struggled to emerge from under the control of the Japanese. As a result the first Korean film was not actually produced until 1919.

This chapter discusses Japanese director Kawase Naomi. It begins with an overview of women in Japanese cinema, and since cinema cannot be seen as separate from the culture it springs from, it also incorporates a brief overview of the social and historical status of women in Japan. It then focuses Kawase who was born in Nara in 1969. She is the only Japanese female director who has achieved sustained acclaim on the international circuit. Her film Moe no Suzaku won the Caméra d'Or at the 50th Cannes Film Festival in 1997, making Kawase the first Japanese and youngest ever director to win this award. In 2011 Kawase directed Hanezu no tsuki. Premiering at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, this film is set in the Asuka region of Japan and is a meditative focus on the interconnectedness of people and the natural environment that surrounds them.

This chapter analyzes Inagaki Hiroshi's 1931 film Mother under the Eyelids—an example of the fascist moment's diffusion into mass culture because of its very popularity. It deployed (unknowingly) a fascist aesthetic while entertaining its audience with the cliché of the wandering gambler searching for his lost mother. That it bears comparison with the elite, quintessentially modernist, hermeneutically difficult, and even opaque writing of a work such as Yasuda Yojūrō's “Japanese Bridges”, which is due to the common fascist thread running through these two radically different cultural expressions.

This chapter discusses Japanese director, editor, writer, and producer Kitano Takeshi. Born in 1947 in Tokyo, Kitano grew up in a lower-class neighborhood where he developed an understanding and appreciation for those that were marginalized and excluded from mainstream society. Kitano first emerged on Japanese television as part of a manzi comedy duo known as “The Two Beats,” which offered audiences chaotic, often highly offensive comedy routines. In his debut film Violent Cop (Sono otoko, kyobo ni tsuki, 1989), Kitano took on the joint role of lead actor and director. The film dealt with the key themes of violence and hostility. Films such as Zatoichi (2003), Dolls (2000), and Hana-bi (1997) feature Japanese locations, arts, and traditions, offering international audiences a notion of Japan as a national space while simultaneously disavowing the notion of “Japaneseness”.