Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926-1945 9781501709524

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PROMISCUOUS MEDIA

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University w ­ ere inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and con­temporary East Asia.

PROMISCUOUS MEDIA Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945 Hikari Hori

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS   ITHACA AND LONDON

Cornell University Press and the author express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. Material in this work was presented to the University Seminar: Modern Japan. The ideas presented in this book have benefited from discussions in the University Seminar on Modern Japan. Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2017 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Hori, Hikari, author. Title: Promiscuous media : film and visual culture in imperial Japan, 1926–1945 /   Hikari Hori. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2017. | Series: Studies of the   Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017029168 (print) | LCCN 2017030101 (ebook) |   ISBN 9781501709524 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501712166 (epub/mobi) |   ISBN 9781501714542 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—­Japan—­History—20th ­century. | Motion   pictures—­Political aspects—­Japan—­History—20th ­century. | Mass media and   nationalism—­Japan—­History—20th ­century. | Nationalism and the arts—­   Japan—­History—20th ­century. | Japan—­History—1926–1945. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.J3 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.J3 H67 2017 (print) |   DDC 791.430952—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017029168 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent pos­si­ble in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-­based, low-­VOC inks and acid-­free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-­free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. Jacket illustration: From “Momotaro, Sacred Sailors” © 1945/2016 Shochiku Co., Ltd. Used by permission.

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowl­edgments

vii ix

Introduction Film and Visual Culture: The Early Showa Era, Historical Contexts,   and Narrative Frameworks 1. ​Photography’s Aura:

1

22

The Modern Emperor and Mass Media 2. ​Contested Motherhood and Entertainment Film

70

3. ​The Politics of Japa­nese Documentary Film

114

4. ​The Dream of Japa­nese National Animation

155

Epilogue

204

Notes Bibliography Index

217 261 279

Illustrations

Figure 0.1. Opening shot of Hanako (Hanako san, 1943)  17 Figure 1.1. Crown Prince Hirohito (postcard)  26 Figure 1.2. Extant building of hōanden (shrine that specifically preserves “the Photo­graph”)  37 Figure 1.3. Front page of Osaka Asahi shinbun (January 1, 1937)  58 Figure 1.4. Inter-title of Nippon News, vol. 1 (June 11, 1940)  61 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)  63 Figure 2.1. Actress Takasugi Sanae in her Kokufu apron (postcard)  78 Figure 2.2. Kōzō played by Uehara Ken in 1940 digest version of The Love-­Troth Tree (Aizen katsura, 1940)  90 Figure 2.3. Waka, played by Tanaka Kinuyo, and her son in The Army (Rikugun, 1944)  99 Figure 2.4. Military ­women, played by Hara Setsuko and Takamine Hideko in Three ­Women in the North (Kita no sannin, 1945)  110 Figure 3.1. Atsugi Taka  115 Figure 3.2. The opening pages of the Film Law, with Hirohito’s signature  128 Figure 3.3. Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru hobo no kiroku) film advertisement in Eiga junpō (January 1, 1942)  139 Figure 3.4. Young w ­ oman at sewing machine in This Is How Hard We Are Working (Watashitachi wa konnani hataraiteiru, 1945)  152 Figure 4.1. Perō, the Chimney Sweeper (Entotsuya Perō, 1930)  162 Figure 4.2. Suppression of the Tengu (Tengu taiji, 1934)  165 Figure 4.3. Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle (Momotaro no umiwashi, 1943)  172 Figure 4.4. Front page of Tokyo Asahi shinbun (January 1, 1942)  174 Figure 4.5. Divine Warriors Descend to Kota Palembang (Shinpei parenban ni kōka su, 1942, postcard)  179 Figure 4.6. Princess Iron Fan (Tie shan gong zhu/Tessen kōshu) advertisement in Eiga junpō (September 21, 1942)  187

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viii Illustrations

Figure 4.7. Dandelion scene in Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei, 1945)  197 Figure 4.8. Paratroopers in USSR in Construction (December 1935)  199 Figure 4.9. Rabbit soldier in Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei, 1945)  200

Preface and Acknowl­e dgments

I first became interested in researching film by coincidence when I was a gradu­ ate 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 c­ areer, 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.

ix

x

Preface and Acknowl­e dgments

She stayed in China for several years a­ fter the war to work in film production, and then came back to Japan to continue her c­ areer. ­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. T ­ hese 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 w ­ ill 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.

­ eedless to say, I am deeply indebted to numerous friends, colleagues, and instiN tutions 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 w ­ ere 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 w ­ ere 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



Preface and Acknowl­e dgments

xi

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 W ­ omen’s Foundation, the T ­ oyota Foundation, the Ford Associateship of Five College W ­ omen’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 W ­ omen’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 w ­ ere 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.

PROMISCUOUS MEDIA

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 1

2 INTRODUCTION

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 impor­ tant 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” b ­ ecause they are humanistic or entertaining and not overtly po­liti­cal. Such claims for “re­ sis­tance” 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 b ­ ecause 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 pre­sen­ta­

Film and Visual Culture

3

tions 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 dif­fer­ ent 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 geo­graph­ic­ ally 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 Japa­n ese Film Industr y 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

4 INTRODUCTION

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 repre­ sen­ta­tion 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 strug­ gles 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. Impor­ tant 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.

Film and Visual Culture

5

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 w ­ ere also available and very popu­lar in Japan. Films w ­ ere imported not only from the United States but also from Austria, Czecho­slo­va­ kia, ­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.

6 INTRODUCTION

“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

Film and Visual Culture

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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 w ­ hole 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 t­ hese 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 war­ time 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.

8 INTRODUCTION

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 P ­ eople ­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 t­ hose 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 t­ hese 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 impor­ tant 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, t­ here are twists. While a filmmaker may not intend to make a work a national policy film, the studio or ministries may

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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 m ­ atter 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 w ­ oman, 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 w ­ oman 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

10 INTRODUCTION

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 con­ temporary Japa­nese state policy. Its repre­sen­ta­tion of colonial relations of gender and ethnicity asserts the Japa­nese state’s imperialist desire, and it provokes Japa­ nese viewers to fantasize, through the meta­phor of the Japa­nese man obtaining the Chinese ­woman’s love and trust, about the wealth—­acquisition of w ­ omen, 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 w ­ ere s­ haped by and w ­ ere in turn shaping multiple f­ actors, such as social norms, offscreen discourse of politics, and genre expectations.

Inhibition and Plea­s ure of Nationalist Cinemas Attempting to provide a narrative framework that maintains the critique of Japa­ nese 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 par­tic­u­ lar, film historical scholarship on the Third Reich is suggestive for reexamining Japa­nese films of the early Showa era, in part b ­ ecause 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

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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 t­ hese 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 cele­ bration of physicality and gender norms, producers of t­ hese 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 Eu­ro­ pean films to auteurism, avant-­garde movements, and experimental art h ­ ouse 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

12 INTRODUCTION

period, I hope to balance ideological critique with acknowledgement of the pleasures provided by the medium. Only by d ­ oing 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 war­ time 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 Japa­ nese 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. On one hand, some 1980s Anglophone historians of modern Japan ­were already skeptical of the notion of fascism applied to Japan. According to them, a charismatic dictator, a one-­party-­ruled parliamentary system, par­tic­ul­ar styles of mass mobilization and motivation, and discontinuity of po­liti­cal institutions and elites between the pre-­and post-­fascist regimes are among the particularities that the Japa­nese state lacked, in comparison

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with Germany and Italy.34 Furthermore, a single overarching notion of what constituted “fascism” was also questioned by historians in the 1990s, who engaged with postmodernist thought and attempted to understand war­time Japa­nese society through a wider variety of analytical categories, such as nation-­state formation, gender and ethnicity, and historical continuities before and a­ fter 1945. I do not intend to address the questions of w ­ hether Japan was a fascist state with regard to its po­liti­cal system, the economy, or the military. Instead, I focus in par­tic­ul­ ar on ­whether the notion of “fascist aesthetics” is useful specifically for studies of film and visual culture. Tansman uses the term to indicate emotionally and po­liti­cally charged cultural artifacts and high-­modernist writings, especially in the 1930s. He explains the core of this aesthetic as follows: “Through appeals to a cultural sublime—to a feeling of reverence for one’s incomparable, immea­ sur­able, timeless heritage—­the state promoted self-­sacrifice in the name of devotion and duty.” Tansman argues that vari­ous cultural texts, ranging from elite writings to government publications to popu­lar films and songs to novels, all beautify the state’s ideologies of nationalism, xenophobia, vio­lence, and imperialism. Based on examination of ­these texts, he characterizes the aesthetics of Japa­nese fascism as beautification with “a melancholy tonality,” which he defines in contrast with the German fascist aesthetics of “sublime grandeur,” a coinage by the renowned critic Susan Sontag.35 As a response to this idea of Japa­nese melancholy tonality imbuing fascist aesthetics, I argue, first, that it is difficult to locate such a unitary character in films of the 1930s and 1940s, in par­tic­ul­ ar in entertainment genres. One example is the musical comedy Sun Wukong (Songokū; directed by Yamamoto Kajirō, 1940), one of the best-­attended popu­lar films of the era—­a huge box office hit embraced by both adults and c­ hildren. This is a free-­spirited adaptation of the Chinese classic vernacular novel The Journey to the West into a nonsensical musical comedy, in which popu­lar comedian Enoken (Enomoto Ken’ichirō) poses as the Monkey King and characters dance and sing operatic songs. (The story itself had been introduced to Japan in the eigh­teenth ­century and had been familiar and popu­lar among Japa­nese since then.)36 In this film, the demons of the original novel are transformed into mad scientists who build a high-­tech laboratory and use a surveillance TV monitor and robots. Twice, Disneyesque dwarves appear and sing and march with the “Heigh-­Ho” song of the animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Contemporaneous filmmakers and critics who attempted to define the films of au­then­tic Japa­neseness in fact dismissed Sun Wukong out of hand. The cinematic text of the film is pleas­ur­able, referring to a Disney film, to sci-fi robot films of late 1930s Hollywood, and to the genre of musical films, while incorporating Enoken’s repertoire of slapstick comedy. Works such as Sun Wukong demonstrates the variety of film and its heterogeneous aesthetics.

14 INTRODUCTION

Second, ­there are prob­lems with the notion of shared aesthetics among fascist nations. Although the term “fascism” suggests commonalities of culture among the Axis countries as well as a stark distinction between them and the liberal demo­ cratic Allied countries, I argue that it is difficult to establish such strong parallels among the film cultures of Germany, Italy, and Japan while maintaining a decisive divide with the other half of a dichotomized world. The structures and scales of the Axis film industries differed from each other greatly. As mentioned briefly above, Japa­nese film production was far more vigorous than that of Germany or Italy. In 1939, for example, Germany produced 107 feature films and Italy made 77 films in total (50 of them features), whereas Japan produced 582. Already in 1933, the numbers of feature productions was 472 in Japan versus 114 in Germany; the overall national production in Italy that year was 26.37 To promote domestic film production, both Germany and Italy protected their film industries. Germany set a quota on Hollywood imports and banned press criticism of domestic productions to protect its own film industry, which resulted in an increase of German productions. Hollywood imports ­were fi­nally banned in 1940. Interestingly, French film production blossomed ­under the German occupation ­because of this trade sanction.38 As for Italian protective mea­sures, a state mono­poly of the distribution system, and the 1937 foundation of the film studio Cinecittà with state subsidies to increase domestic production, forced the Hollywood majors out of the country by the end of 1938, which dramatically increased national production and the box office receipts of Italian cinema.39 ­There was a complex history of bans on foreign films in Japan during this period, but the crucial point is that none of the bans w ­ ere ever aimed at protecting Japa­nese domestic studios from Hollywood films or any other imports; unlike Germany and Italy, Japan’s film industry was not threatened by foreign competition. ­There are some commonalities, however. For example, in terms of international distribution, Germany distributed its national cinema widely in its own allied and occupied nations, and Japan made similar attempts beyond its mainland in the early 1940s. Such practices w ­ ere not limited to the Axis states, however, but ­were pioneered by ­England.40 The most impor­tant commonality among the Axis countries is that their national cinemas formed their local industries and vernacular film languages in competition with the hegemonic film cultures. Filmmakers and critics admired Rus­sian filmmaking and its film theories of the 1920s, which was a hegemonic film culture at that time, and all Axis national cinemas also constructed their national identities in part through their encounters with Hollywood films. Indeed, Hollywood western, noir, and musical genre films ­were enjoyed and adapted by German, Italian, and Japa­nese local productions, despite the fact that the Axis countries greatly differed from each other in regard to the scale and structure of their industries and their domestic genre conven-

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tions.41 This suggests that all Axis national cinemas’ production can be examined in terms of their relations to hegemonic film cultures. However, it must be also noted that such interactions and antagonisms between hegemonic cinemas and local production ­were quite diverse. It is indeed hard to determine ­whether any distinct, communally defined aesthetics of filmmaking practices are shared among Axis film cultures. In this connection, the film historian Michael Baskett’s work is compelling, as it reveals some intra-­Axis sharing of film policies, film market blocs, censorial codes, and interests in colonial film productions. Significantly, however, he describes the failure of a German-­Japanese coproduction caused by conflicting aesthetics.42 In this film, New Earth (directed by Arnold Fanck and Itami Mansaku, 1937), the directors from the two nations collided with each other regarding the repre­sen­ ta­tion of Japan. Their discord resulted in the production of two versions of the film—­Die Töchter des Samurai (Samurai’s ­Daughter) and Atarashiki tsuchi (New Earth)—­instead of a single film. The former explores orientalist exoticism of Japa­nese culture, nature, and ­women, while the latter highlights colonial expansionism in Manchuria and escapes the Western gaze. Thus, the Axis national film cultures failed to create a collective fascist aesthetic identity. However I do believe that ties among dif­fer­ent national cinemas are impor­ tant to note and that they should be explored. In this connection, I turn to the same Sontag essay in which she provides a cata­log of fascist art that is not confined to “fascist nations.” Her discussion of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary films on a Nazi party assembly and the Olympic Games provides a very well-­known characterization of fascist aesthetics: The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of p ­ eople; the turning of ­people into ­things; the multiplication of ­things and grouping of people/ things around an all-­powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. . . . ​ Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, “virile” posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.43 In the context of evaluating how to think about relations between early Showa Japa­ nese film and other film cultures, however, the following lines from right ­after that passage are even more suggestive: “Such art is hardly confined to works labeled as fascist or produced u ­ nder fascist governments. (To keep to films only, Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All ­Here, and Kubrick’s 2001 can also be seen as illustrating certain of the formal structures, and themes, of fascist art.)”44 Sontag’s inclusive usage of fascist aesthetics is impor­tant. Though she did not elaborate further beyond ­these two sentences on the fascistic nature of films by Dis-

16 INTRODUCTION

ney, Berkeley, or Kubrick, the connection is highly provocative. Exploration at a textual level supports ­these connections. Her inclusion of Fantasia reminds us of con­temporary critics’ uneasiness about the emphasized visual sensation of the film’s animation, which could override ­music.45 Such skepticism might have stemmed from reservations about the popularization of artistic form, that is, classical ­music, as well as oversimplified visual narratives that provide new, concrete, and animated interpretation of existing highbrow ­music. Visual sensation, simplified narratives, and emotional—­not logical—­mobilization of the senses are often associated with fascism, but ­here we see them in experimental work by Disney as well. We can also locate the visual aesthetic that Riefenstahl shares with Berkeley’s choreography, not only in colonialist fantasy scenes of The Gang’s All ­Here (directed by Busby Berkeley, 1943), but also in his 42nd Street (directed by Lloyd Bacon, 1933) or Gold Diggers of 1937 (directed by Lloyd Bacon, 1936). In t­ hese films too we see manipulated repre­sen­ta­tion of the masses, cele­bration of the physical beauty of ­human bodies, emphasis on power­ful leadership, and camerawork and film editing techniques calculated to enhance the visual manifestation of integrity, physicality, and collectivity. Berkeley’s films create spectacles with ­human bodies and organic collective, militant, and orderly movement, and they privilege visuality and sensory appeal over narrativity. This reminds us, as Karsten Witte did in his aforementioned article, that Riefenstahl was not isolated from Hollywood filmmaking practices. Also, and importantly, she herself was a dancer who appreciated and understood the manifestation of physicality as expressed through choreographed motion. Though I suspect Sontag’s overarching concept of “fascist” aesthetics is too broad to serve as an analytic frame, her observation is provocative. For she is in essence arguing that par­tic­u­lar art forms can transcend the ideological divides between fascist and liberal-­democratic states, in par­tic­u­lar in the 1930s and the 1940s.46 Though film studies accounts have conventionally divided film cultures of this period according to dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal ideologies, examination of Berkeley’s films along the lines Sontag suggests would place American, British, German, and Japa­nese film cultures in dialogue and establish their relations with regard to the global circulation of the genre.47 While Berkeley films inspired many British and German films in the mid-1930s, one Japa­nese example is found as late as 1943: the opening of the musical film Hanako (Hanako-­san; directed by Makino Masahiro) imitates Busby Berkeley’s signature camera work with a kaleidoscopic vertical shot of dancing w ­ omen (see fig. 0.1). Just as British musicals and German revue films responded to Berkeley films in their own way, Hanako ­adopted them at a time both countries ­were at war. While many Berkeley films embrace consumption and leisure in the New Deal era, the musical film Hanako describes a total war society with a controlled economy, where men have been drafted into military ser­v ice and saving is imperative

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on the home front as part of the war effort. Yet, it also pres­ents desire for consumer goods: a newlywed bride wants to have a nice h ­ ouse in the suburbs, and the protagonist fusses over choosing nice clothes and eating out on special occasions. The consumerist imagination that the film proj­ects is not so much a critique of cap­i­tal­ist consumption as a critique of its lack, as caused by the total war economy. Ultimately, this opening shot is a reminder that war­time Japa­nese film production partook of globally circulated visual and narrative ele­ments of the 1930s and early 1940s, and that it should be understood in terms of promiscuous, heterotopic, and heterogeneous practices, rather than as a medium permeated by a distinctive unified aesthetic. Therefore, I agree with film historian Aaron Gerow’s remark on “fascist aesthetics” and Japa­nese film when he notes, “I deny neither the pertinence of the concept of fascism to war­time Japa­nese cinema nor the real­ity of the nation, in effect deconstructing both into oblivion.”48

One limitation of this book is that, with a few exceptions, it does not address Japa­ nese film distribution, production, and reception in colonial and occupied territories. My focus is on the forcibly constructed war­time discourse of national

FIGURE 0.1.  Opening shot of Hanako (Hanako san; directed by Makino Masahiro, 1943). The shot mirrors typical Berkeley choreography.

18 INTRODUCTION

unity (which has lingering power even ­today), which stressed the identity and purity of cultural production in Japan proper (naichi). I choose to focus primarily on the culture of mainland Japan in order to illustrate the contradictions that ironically dominated and sustained the center of the empire. The core of my argument is the paradoxical transnationality and promiscuity of even the most nationally defined cultural texts; in itself this goes to show how imperial Japan cannot be understood as a monolithic entity, and how that empire was constantly being forged. I must note, nevertheless, that I am deeply indebted to and informed by recent scholarship on imperial Japa­nese colonial film production. Although it has not been pos­si­ble to incorporate the depth and breadth of such scholarship in this study, it has eloquently revealed intricate and tangled power relationships between colonizer and colonized, formations of national and ethnic identities of both filmmakers and audiences, and interactions among con­temporary international, hegemonic, and local film cultures in colonial contexts.49 The perspectives offered by such scholarship are also essential to unpacking the discourses that constructed imperial Japan.

Approaches to Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan Early Showa si­mul­ta­neously saw the expansion of mass media, including the film industry; the buttressing of the monarchy; and the Asia Pacific War. ­Because mass media gradually became subject to state control leading up to the early 1940s, war­ time media is in general understood as a power­ful tool to indoctrinate imperial citizens with national(ist) ideology and identity. However, examination of the film and visual culture of the era demonstrates that the promotion and construction of docile, ideal imperial subjects and a homogeneous society ­were not easy undertakings. Indeed, the vari­ous ele­ments that are taken to characterize society in this period, such as the emperor system, discourses of nationalism, pronatalist ideology, and policies of total war mobilization, did not only configure subjecthood: they ­were also themselves constantly reconfigured at the point of reception when they ­were put into practice. This book aims to illustrate this dynamic through analyses of cultural production and reception. Four areas of exploration represent both purportedly indoctrinating social norms and also the contradictions that prevented nationalistic and unifying identification of imperial citizens with dominant ideologies and discourses: the emperor’s photo­graph portrait (goshin’ei); “woman’s film” (josei eiga); documentary film (bunka eiga); and animation (manga eiga). All four have frequently been characterized as ultranationalist propaganda by scholars who portray them as part

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of an evil and manipulating monolithic entity, and also as lowbrow products heavi­ly affected by fanatical ideologues. ­There is also a tendency to set up oppositions between the state and filmmakers, or between cultural products and their recipients, in ways that suggest that the targets of po­liti­cal and cultural texts ­were often innocents prone to power­ful indoctrination. This book complicates such perspectives while providing a fuller account of each of ­these four topics, none of which has received sufficient scholarly attention. I open in chapter 1 with the introduction of nationwide visual protocols for treating the emperor’s images in mass media. Practices of making and viewing images of the emperor ­were one of the most crucial constituents of visual experience in Japan from the 1920s through 1945. Accordingly, it is impossible to understand the mediascape of the early Showa era without grasping the implications of the repre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor as well as the effects of state-­led and voluntary self-­censorship on its production and reception. The emperor’s portrait photo­graph (goshin’ei) was created to match ­those of Eu­ro­pean monarchs, out of diplomatic necessity, in the 1880s. Then viewing protocols w ­ ere introduced to venerate the portrait without gazing upon it. The imperial portrait was preserved with extreme care in public institutions such as schools, battleships, government offices, and regional military headquarters, and it was crucial for citizens to learn the sacredness of the emperor as well as his portrait through educational, everyday physical and psychological discipline and state censorship. On the other hand, Hirohito was the first emperor whose public appearances ­were covered by multiple mass media, ranging from personalized collectible postcards to the nationwide radio broadcasting network to facsimile photo­graphs. Mass-­produced images of the emperor in newspapers, magazines, and films w ­ ere readily available for scrutiny. ­These contradictory viewing practices, one prohibited and the other accessible, disrupted the emperor-­centered disciplined and nationalized imperial citizens. Chapter 2 discusses “­woman’s film,” or josei eiga, by which I mean a loose genre of films that have protagonists who are ­women and that are intended for a female audience. Exploration of this genre is crucial ­because it reveals that norms of femininity and womanhood can become a stumbling block for nationalism’s promise of putative classless, ethnicity-­less, genderless horizontal unity. On one hand, along with the infamous war­time pronatalist policies that permeated society through slogans, novels, magazine articles, films, and so on, w ­ omen had to be biologically reproductive and confined to the home. On the other hand, the same pronatalist discourses provided a space for w ­ omen to negotiate and gain social visibility and agency, becoming publicly acknowledged members of society by means of participating in the war effort as ­mothers. In this way, the relation between total war and w ­ omen’s entrance into public space is compli-

20 INTRODUCTION

cated rather than straightforward. It is imperative to read repre­sen­ta­tions of ­women—­from ultra-­rightist activism to nationalist ­mothers’ melodramas—­ against the grain; such repre­sen­ta­tions are not simply reflections of state public policies on ­women. In this regard, the ­woman’s entertainment film is particularly revealing, as it illustrates a space of intricate relations among state gender ideologies, studio marketing strategies, and the agency of female spectators. In chapters 3 and 4, I turn to documentary and animation. Antistate female documentarian Atsugi Taka (1907–1998) and pro-­state animator Seo Mitsuyo (1911–2010) serve as guides to the formation and development of t­ hese genres. Their ­career paths and work demonstrate the development of ­these media and show how prac­ti­tion­ers worked within and around official ideologies and the restrictive mediascape. Their works reveal their curiosity about foreign theories and film texts; their artistic creativity; the collisions between abstract ideologies and ­actual filmmaking practices; and the failure of attempts at circumvention of, as well as unintentional deviation from, nationalist norms. Chapter 3 shows how documentary film in the late 1930s was a rich and chaotic site for nationalist, imperialist, and anti-­imperialist experimentation. Atsugi is well known for her translation of the theoretical treatise Documentary Film (1935) by British producer and theorist Paul Rotha. The book attracted an unexpectedly wide audience in Japan, regardless of po­liti­cal ideology, and introduced the term “dokyumetarī” (Japa­nese phonetic transcription of “documentary”). It inspired filmmakers of the newly emerging documentary genre who attempted to define realism, dramatization, and directing in the midst of total war. It also motivated Atsugi herself to materialize Rotha’s arguments in her own production of films in the early 1940s. Her work came from a tangled, complicated site of production where she navigated the gender politics of filmmaking and everyday life, state suppression of socialist and proletarian movements, and the prob­lems of adapting theory to ­actual filmmaking. In chapter 4, I turn to animated film, ­because study of the medium reveals the vari­ous transnational inspirations in its formative years in Japan. Moreover, study of animation also emphasizes the transmedia recursivity of painting, photography, live action film, and animation during total war. By recursivity I mean that several distinct visual motifs, national historical incidents, and narrative molds ­were repeatedly used in dif­fer­ent media in the early 1940s, which sustained the sense of national affiliation of imperial citizens, forged shared emotions and sensitivity, and privileged specific myths, ideas, and aesthetics. In this book, Asian names appear in the main text with the surname (­family name) first and, following convention, with the first name first for bibliographic references in the notes. Most of the films discussed in the book are available on

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21

DVD. I indicate the name of archives for films that are viewable only in their premises. The goal of this book is to understand the medium of film transnationally and relationally. The medium is promiscuous. It is at once transnational and national, an insight that recurs throughout, providing a point of departure for analyses of other visual materials, including photography, painting, illustrated postcards, and even public activism, which I view as a manifestation of visual culture. All ­these are closely tied to the era’s film production, and collectively they constitute an impor­tant mediascape of the early Showa era. Thus this is an interdisciplinary proj­ect that places film studies in conversation with the narratives of gender studies, visual studies, and the cultural history of imperial Japan.

1 PHOTOGRAPHY’S AURA The Modern Emperor and Mass Media

Understanding the distribution, reception, and transformations of repre­sen­ta­tions of Emperor Hirohito (1901–1989, r. 1926–1989) is key to understanding the constellation of mass media in early twentieth-­century Japan. The institution of the emperor played a leading role in the accelerated development of a nationwide information network, determining modes of production and reception of mass media, but it also provided an ambiguous, conflicted space where the identity of imperial, national(ist) subjects was at once constructed and contested. One of the most impor­tant repre­sen­ta­tions of the emperor was his portrait photo­graph, or goshin’ei, hereafter referred to as “the Photo­graph.” The Photo­ graph was preserved at schools, in a separate Shinto shrine on the premises or in a special box made of paulownia kept in a safe place, and also in battleships, in military division headquarters, in local government offices, and at Japa­nese overseas embassies. ­People ­were not allowed to gaze upon it when it was exhibited at a ceremony, and they had to bow to the place or the Shinto shrine that preserved the Photo­graph ­every time they passed by. The emperor’s visual image was not to be gazed at when it was worshipped in this way, and by 1940 the other media, such as radio, newspaper photo­graphs, magazine illustrations, and film, w ­ ere contained or strongly affected by t­ hese veneration practices, in terms of both production and reception. A set of rituals and protocols required a copy of a photo­graph—­a sheet of paper—to be treated as if it ­were the sacred body of the emperor. As a result, starting from the implementation of t­hese veneration rituals in the 1890s, ­there ­were cases in which p ­ eople died to protect the Photo­graph. 22



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23

During the very last year of the Asia Pacific War, at least nine school teachers and principals died in attempts to protect the Photo­graph between April and August 1945.1 One case was a school principal’s death during air raids in Himeji City, Hyōgo Prefecture, which was recorded in an account by a teacher: In the next moment, I found myself in the m ­ iddle of a sea of fire and my ­whole body was on fire. . . . ​When I ran to the principal, Ah, what a dreadful sight! He had received one of the ­enemy’s bullets in his abdomen and another in his chest. I called, “Can you hear me?” and when I tried to raise his body in my arms, I saw that his intestines ­were exposed and the blood was gushing out. Quickly I provided emergency care, and kept calling his name at the top of my lungs, “Hang on, sir!” Gasping for air, he groaned and whispered to me, “Take care of the Photo­graph.” As soon as I heard this, I untied [the box that contained] the Photo­graph from his back, and put it on mine.2 The story describes a patriotic, heroic school principal who died in an air raid while attempting to rescue the Photo­graph, from the perspective of one of his teachers. As portrayed h ­ ere, the principal’s priority was to revere the emperor. But ­there must also have been social pressures, so that he would have wanted to avoid a situation in which he would survive and face accusations surrounding the loss of the Photo­graph.3 Another account is by navy sailor Watanabe Kiyoshi (1925–1981), who joined the navy at age sixteen and survived the sinking of the battleship Musashi in 1944.4 In his autobiography, The End of the Battleship Musashi, he described the Photo­ graph in the battleship. The Musashi was damaged, and inside the sinking ship sailors ­were smashed and mutilated by collapsing walls and heavy loose metal equipment. In the battleship’s final moments, when Watanabe was struggling to escape on a floor slippery with blood, he heard a voice: “­Here is the Photo­graph! The Photo­graph! Move it!” Turning, he saw, Two petty officers, who had huge picture frames wrapped by bleached cotton cloth on their backs and tied across their bodies, w ­ ere coming in my direction u ­ nder the leaning mast, guarded by several officers and led by ju­nior and se­nior sentries who ­were shouting. It looked like they ­were “the Photo­graphs” [goshin’ei]. “The Photo­graphs” ­were originally preserved in the Commander-­in-­ chief ’s office on the upper starboard deck of the Musashi when it was the flag ship. . . . ​However, they w ­ ere moved to inside the controlling room of the main battery, as any damage would be an offense to His and Her Majesties. The room was protected with thick armor and was the

24 CHAPTER 1

safest place in the ship. Now, they ­were being removed from below at the captain’s order. . . . ​Though ­those two petty officers would jump [into the sea to escape] with the heavy glassed-­over frames on their backs, in accordance with ­orders, they would not be able to swim well. Lives which could be saved might not be b ­ ecause of ­these pieces of paper. So, I did not feel like bowing [to the Photo­graphs].5 Both accounts reveal the extreme practices in which subjects ­were situated to prove their loyalty ­under the modern emperor system. The tragic irony was that it is the nature of photography to be mass-­produced, with exhibition value but no cult value, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s terms. The Photo­graph thus went against the specificities of its own medium in being bestowed with such an aura. This chapter examines the mediascape of the modern emperor system, which attempted to exercise peculiar uses of media. Historically, the emperor system became essential for the new, modernized government established in the 1860s to replace the old Tokugawa regime of the previous three hundred years. In the new government, the emperor’s assigned role was to serve as the cultural and po­liti­cal center of the state, and, in turn, the everyday experiences of imperial citizens ­were mediated by images of the emperor with regard to their national(ist) identity formation, consumption and leisure, education, soldierhood, and norms of gender, ethnicity, and religion. In scholarship on modern Japa­nese history, the emperor system has also been one of the most impor­tant topics for studies of politics, international relations, censorship, social norms, and p ­ eople’s everyday lives. Many cultural historians understand Emperor Hirohito as one of the most compelling driving forces for imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and social oppression, in ways that match the preceding episode of death on the Musashi.6 Yet I argue that the relationship between Hirohito and imperial citizens was not as linear—­oppressor versus oppressed, or state ideology versus subservient recipients—as scholars have often assumed.7 The following questions have often been examined: What ­were the emperors like as ­people? How did the notion of lèse-­majesté affect cultural production and suppress ­free speech? Was Hirohito accountable for Japa­nese military aggression? Parliamentary documents, po­liti­cal leaders’ diaries and testimonies, the emperor’s public and private statements, laws and con­temporary publications, and ordinary citizens’ oral histories have been examined to demonstrate how central the emperor system was for modern Japa­nese history. Nevertheless, one area that has not been fully explored is the relationship between the emperors and mass media.8 In this regard, sociologist Yoshimi Shunya provides an insightful remark, arguing that the modern emperor system should be grasped as a system of reception and consumption of hegemonic discourses that converged on the body of the



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emperor. In other words, the emperor was an institution of the mass media rather than a person: “The modern emperor system is nothing other than the configuration of vari­ous media in which the effects of interpretations of the emperor’s body, w ­ hether or not it is pres­ent, converge at the level of the nation (in the nation state). Therefore, the emperor system has no essence outside the nationwide reception of media.” 9 Yoshimi begins his discussion with the construction of an infrastructure for electrical telegraphy in Japan, which occurred in areas that w ­ ere to receive visits by the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito (b. 1852, r. 1867–1912). T ­ hese transmission lines, which w ­ ere constructed for imperial visits in the late 1870s through 1880s, w ­ ere called Lines for His Majesty’s Visit (Go jun’kō sen).10 The emperor’s images w ­ ere the content of media, but at the same time the emperor, as an institution, was a driving force in the introduction and construction of a technological network. The po­liti­cal and cultural centrality of the modern emperor was constructed and reinforced both by everyday practices and by the geographic and technological expansion of information networks. Soldiers had to memorize and recite the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers (Gunjin chokuyu, 1882), and students had to listen to school principals reading aloud the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo, 1890). In addition, a variety of media circulated widely, including school textbooks, postal stamps, postcards, newspapers, magazines, radio programs, film, rumors, and graffiti, which ostensibly formed a unifying, nationalized experience mediated by educational, cultural, and po­liti­cal institutions such as the military, schools, and or­ga­nized local activities. To ensure the circulation of ­these media, the construction of the infrastructure of the nation, including the railroad, electrical transmission lines, and simultaneous radio broadcasting networks, was accelerated. The pro­cess of developing infrastructure configured and confirmed the dichotomized relations between metropolitan and periphery, mainland (naichi) and external territories (gaichi), ethnic Japa­nese and colonial subjects, male and female, and healthy and disabled. Examination of Hirohito’s repre­sen­ta­tion must be situated in this dynamic, since exploration of its mediality reveals imperial citizens’ everyday experiences of the modern emperor system, development and consumption of mass media, and national identity formation. With a focus on Hirohito, this chapter examines the media repre­sen­ta­tion of emperors as one of the fundamental issues of the early twentieth-­century mediascape. Hirohito was born in 1901, ascended to crown regent in 1921 and to the throne in 1926, and reigned through 1989. His early life in the first half of the twentieth ­century, in par­tic­u­lar, paralleled the unpre­ce­dented expansion of media technologies, from the halftone printing technology of newspaper photo­graphs to

FIGURE 1.1.  A postcard of Hirohito, date unknown, but most likely when he was the prince regent in the early 1920s.



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27

the introduction of radio broadcasting (first for domestic, then international, transmissions) to the expanding production of film to the invention of tele­v i­sion and to the introduction of facsimile transmission. Hirohito was a media celebrity. The pos­si­ble cancellation of his engagement was reported as a scandal in newspapers, and high school girls collected postcard reproductions of his portrait (see fig. 1.1). His 1921 visit to Eu­rope was covered by newsreels that ­were enthusiastically received. When the films ­were sent from Eu­rope to Japan, e­ very pos­si­ble combination of routes was examined and explored, by airplanes, Siberian and transcontinental railroads, transatlantic ships, or all together. News about him prompted the deployment of private airplanes for transportation of films, funded by newspaper companies that competed to screen their newsreels faster than their rivals. Newsreels ­were in high demand in the 1920s and 1930s. The film news covered the ­Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, the airship Graf Zeppelin’s arrival in Kasumigaura (Northern Kanto) in 1929, the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1932, and many other events and incidents. Images and conceptions of world geography w ­ ere drastically changing, not only for the viewers of t­hese newsreels but also in the way the film itself was transported. During ­these same de­cades, however, the Japa­nese emperor’s media pre­sen­ta­ tion underwent reconfiguration to prioritize the po­liti­cal dogma of the national polity, or kokutai, which designated the emperor as absolute sovereign, eventually to the degree that even citizens’ suicidal deaths for the Photo­graph became prescriptive in the mid-1940s. This shift contradicted the ongoing expansion of media technologies and cultures. This chapter explores how this conflict between two modes of pre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor, the venerated Photo­graph and the increasingly available mass media, illustrates the interactions of the emperor system, the mediascape, and the lives of imperial citizens in early twentieth-­century Japan.

The State of the Field From the 1950s to the pres­ent, many popu­lar publications and TV programs on the imperial ­family, including Emperor Hirohito, have been produced to cater to a variety of audiences. The publications vary from gossip journalism to right-­ wing tributes to glossy photographic journals to memoirs and personal essays about the imperial ­house­hold written by its former staff members or by journalists specializing in the imperial ­family. Such stories of the imperial ­family are an impor­tant part of the con­temporary Japa­nese media, both online and in print or broadcast, since imperial ­family members are celebrities.11 The difference

28 CHAPTER 1

between the imperial f­amily and other media personalities, though, is that the former are regarded as representatives of the nation. To name a few specific cases, in addition to the well-­known funeral of Hirohito in 1989, in the following years candidates for crown princess fed gossip journalism; the imperial wedding of Crown Prince Naruhito and Owada Masako in 1993 was widely covered and celebrated as its pre­de­ces­sor had been in 1959; more recently, ­there was heated debate over the patrilineal succession of the throne and the possibility of introducing a female emperor; and the 2013 visit by the Heisei emperor and empress to tsunami-­devastated areas in Tōhoku was much appreciated by many residents.12 Contrary to this popu­lar attention, Japanese-­language historical scholarship on the modern emperor system has very often been critical of the institution. Many have pointed out Hirohito’s war accountability, for both Japa­nese and non-­ Japanese, within and beyond Japan. Scholarship on the cultural dimensions of the emperor system has also examined its vari­ous aspects, ranging from thought control to the educational system. The emperor system relied on and at the same time continually constructed the notion of the sacred imperial lineage, ideals of gendered imperial subjecthood (­women as ­mothers and men as soldiers), and social stratification of class and ethnicity. The notion of the sacredness of the emperor was reiterated and reinforced in the everyday life of Japa­nese through language, ranging from using honorific expressions to describe anything related to imperial ­family members that ­people referred to in conversation, writings, or public speech; to ceremonial protocols and laws including the treatment of the imperial portrait photo­graphs; and to the recital and memorization of the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers. Such mechanisms have been thoroughly criticized in par­tic­ u­lar by the generation of Japa­nese historians who experienced the war­time era as ­children. They have regarded ideological constructions as sources of social and po­liti­cal oppression, such as the dogma of the emperor’s body as absolutely inviolable (zettai fukashin), as provisioned in the Constitution of the Empire of Japan or the notion of arahitogami, or godly emperor, which was explicated, for example, in the widely distributed publication Cardinal Princi­ples of National Polity (Kokutai no hongi, 1937). Hirohito survived the US-­led po­liti­cal restructuring of the Japa­nese state during the Occupation period (1945–1952) and remained on the throne u ­ ntil his death in 1989. To examine his reign, scholarship generally maintains a disjunction between pre-­and post-1945, emphasizing the contrast between the war­time cult of the emperor and the postwar emperor system, described as the symbolic emperor system (shōchō tennō sei), in which he was no longer a po­liti­cal actor. However, ­there are two serious prob­lems with this emphasis on discontinuity. First, it occludes the history of changing pre­sen­ta­tions of the emperor prior to



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the mid-1930s. Second, it often relies on a rigid reflection model in which the media faithfully reflect po­liti­cal ideologies that are then accepted by susceptible media consumers. Thus, I have reservations about the idea of decisive historical discontinuity itself in understanding the emperor system.13 Though I agree that the war­time cult of the emperor was a compelling, oppressive force, I also argue that the repre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor must be historicized. Historical examination reveals that the emperor’s repre­sen­ta­tion was not uniform, but highly disrupted from the 1920s through the early 1940s, as media history rec­ords a continual reconfiguration of the repre­sen­ta­tion of emperors rather than a single drastic change.14 Repre­sen­ta­tion was a source of oppression, but at the same time it induced complicit endorsement of the emperor system by imperial citizens. Furthermore, Hirohito’s repre­sen­ta­tion was also situated in a precarious space of reception in which the state’s forcible demands w ­ ere met by disjointed responses from imperial subjects. In this chapter I explore how the emperor’s image was formed and how he was represented in the ever-­expanding mass media in the early twentieth ­century. By “image,” I do not mean an exclusively visual sign, but rather a complex configuration of visual, written, and acoustic signs. The historian Yasumaru Yoshio’s intellectual-­historical analy­sis provides helpful methodological hints in this regard.15 To answer his own question, “What exists between Hirohito as an individual and as an iconic image of authority?,” Yasumaru argues that Hirohito’s image is “a m ­ atter of prob­lems that lie in the pro­cessing of fantasies held by a wide variety of ­people, in­de­pen­dent of what he is.”16 Accordingly, my question is not what Hirohito was but what he was thought to be by imperial citizens. What I should stipulate first in the discussion of the emperor’s image is that ­there was no single concrete, decisive, representative image or portrait of Hirohito from the 1930s through 1945. On one hand, his visual image was vague and ambivalent in Japan. On the other hand, Hirohito was presented as a fanatic, evil dictator in US media, as illustrated in the front cover, color illustration of the weekly news magazine Time (May 21, 1945), though this would be one of the mildest versions of his images. The illustration pres­ents a close-up of Hirohito’s face; he is in a military uniform heavi­ly decorated with gold braids. His eyes do not meet the beholders, which gives a sinister look to his face. The sun and sunbeams are placed in the bright yellow background. A small figure of an oriental deity, naked with headdress, holding a sword, is elegantly descending from the sky. Its sash is fluttering upward. The deity’s face is close to Hirohito’s ear, as if it is whispering to him and he is listening to the divine instructions. The illustration eloquently characterizes Hirohito as a mad, militarist dictator inspired by an oriental, pagan god. He is also similarly introduced as a dictatorial leader on

30 CHAPTER 1

a white ­horse reviewing his troops in Frank Capra’s film Know Your ­Enemy—­Japan (1945). However, such US depictions do not correspond with the images of Emperor Hirohito in the con­temporary Japa­nese media. It is not b ­ ecause US ­depictions framed him from an ­enemy viewpoint. The fundamental difference between American and Japa­nese images was that ­there was no iconic, visual pre­ sen­ta­tion of Hirohito in Japan, ­because ­people ­were not supposed to see him or look at him directly. The circulation of Hirohito’s visual pre­sen­ta­tion in popu­lar media gradually lessened and became limited and highly stylized from the end of the 1930s through 1945. It is in this connection that any dramatization of the emperor was strictly prohibited in film. Therefore, ­there ­were no dramatic films depicting the imperial h ­ ouse­hold u ­ ntil the 1957 Emperor Meiji and the ­Great Russo-­ Japanese War (Meiji tennō to nichiro sensō; directed by Watanabe Kunio).17 ­There was a saying that one’s eyes would be blinded if one saw Hirohito directly. He was meant to be an invisible, unviewable figure for ordinary Japa­nese imperial citizens. Thus, for Japa­nese, the image of Emperor Hirohito was not always visually enhanced and made appealing; it was something at once familiar, ritualistic, and taboo. Since this ambiguity is due in part to the war­time mediascape, which required the imperial citizens to venerate his portrait photo­graph without looking at it, I first introduce the institutionalized veneration of the emperor’s portrait photo­ graph (the Photo­graph, or goshin’ei), which was first implemented in the 1870s. A historical overview of this veneration practice is essential, as its prohibition of visual scrutiny of the emperor’s body was eventually extended to other public media, such as radio, newspaper photo­graphs, and film. Second, I focus on the early media exposure of Hirohito as crown prince in the 1920s, which completely contradicted the ongoing non-­v iewing rituals of the imperial portrait. His appearance was widely appreciated and highly demanded, in part ­because the veneration practices ­were still in the pro­cess of reaching out nationwide, and also ­because Hirohito was still the crown prince and not yet the emperor. Prince Hirohito drew fervent attention from imperial citizens, and his appearance in newsreels guaranteed a ­great turnout. Hirohito’s images ­were also in ephemeral media such as collectible postcards, much in the way that the images of film stars ­were treated. They ­were collected by many middle-­class ­women, who romantically admired him. Such practices of consuming the image of the imperial ­family have not been fully examined in existing scholarship, where they are overshadowed by a conventional view of a monolithic, authoritative image of the emperor extending to the mid-1940s.18 Third, I move on to the era when non-­v iewing veneration was extended to the new medium of radio broadcasting. Radio programs of imperial events in 1928 ritualized veneration of the emperor, similar to the way that veneration of the



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Photo­graph was ritualized. That is, listeners w ­ ere placed in a position to listen to the description of imperial events but not to the a­ ctual voice of the emperor. The corporeality of the emperor was denied, as in the veneration of the Photo­graph. It was around the late 1930s that the information network was fi­nally fully or­ga­ nized in accordance with Photo­graph veneration. As for film, where viewing conditions allowed the audience much more freedom than the coerced mode of reception of the Photo­graph at schools or military division headquarters, pre­ sen­ta­tion of the emperor becomes “Photographic” in the early 1940s, so to speak, in the sense that pre­sen­ta­tion of footage of the emperor is aligned with that of the Photo­graph. Filmic repre­sen­ta­tion and newspaper photo­graphs ­were not completely contained by the protocol of Photo­graph veneration, but their modes of production and exhibition ­were strongly affected by it. Fi­nally, I explore the disruptive forces that arose from contradictions between the po­liti­cal ideologies of the emperor system and the mediascape. Questions, doubts, and opposition regarding the Photo­graph veneration rituals arose not only in colonial and occupied territories but also in mainland Japan, precisely ­because of the contradiction of si­mul­ta­neously not looking at the Photo­graph and viewing photo­graphs of the emperor in film, magazines, and newspapers. The dual system of Photo­graph veneration and the mass media pre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor, however rigid and regulated the latter was to ensure his godly presence, undermined the construction of a unifying, seamless experience of subjecthood for imperial citizens.

The Photo­g raph (Goshin’ei): The Creation of the Imperial Portrait Photo­g raph The veneration of the Photo­graph, or goshin’ei (literally, “true image”), was an institutionalized practice conceived and implemented at the end of the nineteenth ­century. Copies of the emperor’s portrait photo­graph ­were distributed nationwide, primarily to educational institutions, and by 1940 ­there ­were some areas in mainland Japan, such as in Osaka and Kyoto Cities and in Nagano Prefecture, in which 97 to 100 ­percent of elementary schools had received the Photo­graph.19 The distribution of the Photo­graph began by extending from elite institutions in large cities to provincial areas, primarily in mainland Japan.20 From the 1890s, the set of protocols to preserve the Photo­graph properly, established by the Ministry of Education, even led to deaths of both c­ hildren and adults who attempted to protect it out of loyalty and unspoken social pressure. Veneration of the Photo­graph was an essential part of the Japa­nese education system to the end of the war, and it served as a driving force to interweave the

32 CHAPTER 1

emperor system into ­people’s daily lives, particularly ­those of younger generations, and to reinforce a sense of national identity, militarism, and patriotism. Historians, including Satō Hideo, Kagotani Jirō, Iwamoto Tsutomu, Kobayashi Teruyuki, and Ono Masaaki, have examined the veneration rituals, the related laws, the number of recipient schools, and the ­actual experiences of c­ hildren and adults in the era of the Photo­graph.21 My approach, building on their research but departing from its emphasis on the oppressiveness of the system, turns to explore cross-­media relations and the resulting disruption of such rituals in the era of rapidly expanding mass media. In modern Japan, strictly speaking, the Photo­graph, or goshin’ei, refers to portraits of the emperor, the empress, or the crown prince, although the term originally referred broadly to portraits of nobility or prominent Buddhist priests.22 Though goshin’ei is the best-­known and most widely used term, the official designation used by the Ministry of the Imperial House­hold was o-­shashin (the photo­ graph). To examine the rituals as well as the ruptures of the veneration system, I begin by providing an overview of its structure and historical development. To briefly state my conclusions in advance, Photo­graph veneration was a power­ful practice that nurtured loyal imperial subjects, especially youth, so that they would ardently believe in the Japa­nese Empire’s superiority and legitimacy through the narrative of the imperial h ­ ouse’s unbroken lineage, as well as the sacredness of the emperor. But, remarkably, the veneration of the Photo­graph was expanded and elaborated at precisely the time when the mass media and its pre­sen­ta­tion of Hirohito ­were increasingly accessible. Consumption and reception of images of the emperor in Japa­nese media in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury w ­ ere therefore quite complicated. The first attempts by government officials to create and distribute the emperor’s portrait w ­ ere for the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito. It is likely that they w ­ ere inspired by Japa­nese diplomats who had experienced the popularity of cartes de visite and widespread photo­graphs of royalty in Eu­rope. By 1860, a variety of photo­graphs of royalty, individually or with f­ amily, including Queen Victoria, Wilhelm I, and Napoleon III, w ­ ere increasingly available for purchase as collectible souvenirs.23 In contrast with Eu­ro­pean royal portraits, the sale of the Photo­graph was banned, but it often came as a supplement (furoku) included in newspapers and magazines. The format was dif­fer­ent: the pictures of the emperor and the empress in Japan w ­ ere taken separately and exhibited next each other. Copies of the imperial portrait photo­graph w ­ ere initially given to subjects who ­were close to the emperor, including Itō Hirobumi in 1872.24 ­These copies ­were ­actual photo­graphs taken that year, which pres­ent the emperor in traditional attire. Other photo­graphs taken in the same year pres­ent the young emperor in Western military attire. All the prefectural government offices had received cop-



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ies of the emperor’s photo­graph already by 1873. In ­these early years, visits to the prefectural government office to see the photo­graph ­were celebratory occasions, followed by wining and dining.25 Some scholars argue that the distribution of the photo­graph supplemented or in part replaced a­ ctual visits by the emperor to vari­ous areas in Japan, which took place continually from 1872 to 1911, the year before his death.26 ­There ­were several versions of portrait photo­graphs of young Mutsuhito. One, taken in 1872, shows him standing in Japa­nese traditional court attire, and ­others, taken in 1873, show him sitting on a chair in Western military attire.27 The best-­circulated version is a photographic reproduction of a Conté drawing that portrays a dignified, mature, and confident monarch. This was commissioned in 1888 from the Italian engraver Edoardo Chiossone (1833–1898), who also produced portraits of politicians such as Saigō Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi. Chiossone quickly sketched Mutsuhito without being noticed by him and created the Conté drawing portrait, which was then photographed for distribution.28 This portrait photo­graph was produced in 1888, the year before the promulgation of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, which established Mutsuhito as ruler of a modern state. In this portrait photo­graph, the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito is presented in a Western military uniform, sitting with a straight back but somehow comfortably, and gazing directly at the viewer. The medium of drawing allowed maximum idealization of the ruler. The setting is a Western interior. An embroidered drapery covers the ­table on which his right arm and his feathered hat rest. His sofa is wide, with cushioned back and decorative wooden frames. His left hand holds a Western sword whose design is s­ imple but beautiful. White gloves create a graceful contrast with his military uniform, which is ornamented with numerous emblems, medals, and a sash. Resorting to the strong visual language of the Western genre of portrait painting, the portrait highlights a sharp break from the premodern portrait conventions of shoguns, who ­were portrayed sitting in a rigid posture, and it thereby crystallized a vernacular notion of modernity, involving a monarch of Western-­style militarism and virility.29 Selecting the photo­graph of the Conté crayon drawing of the Meiji Emperor for wide distribution was significant. This could have been simply out of con­ve­ nience, since Mutsuhito disliked being photographed. However, the phi­los­o­pher Taki Kōji argued that the government chose the medium of drawing instead of straightforward photography for distribution since the former most efficiently forged an idealized ruler. Whereas a drawing pres­ents a categorical, timeless, idealized image of the ruler, a photo­graph would document the corporeality of the emperor’s body and a specific moment of his life. It was impor­tant to distribute the transcendental drawing widely.30 The drawing was the visual manifestation

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of the newly established government that had replaced the three-­hundred-­year Tokugawa shogunate. The Photo­graph was continually distributed, and a set of protocols for its veneration w ­ ere implemented by the Fourth Ordinance of Ministry of Education (Monbushōrei dai yon gō) in 1891. The ordinance changed the initial way ­people viewed the Photo­graph in open space at prefectural government offices by introducing protocols of public viewing. The ordinance mandated that all primary schools should perform a ceremony on national holidays, consisting of exhibiting the Photo­graph, bowing to it, performing banzai cheers, and reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, in addition to a speech about the emperor by the school principal, all of which was concluded by singing a song.31 One of the provisions of the ordinance detailed the location where the Photo­graph should be placed at the gathering. It also required that the audience members bow at a ninety-­degree ­angle (saikeirei) to the Photo­graph. The Imperial Rescript on Education is a short text of 315 characters that confirms the unbroken, historical lineage of the imperial ­family and expounds the morals that “good, loyal imperial subjects” must observe and exercise. The language stresses the importance of the subject’s filial piety, education and self-­cultivation, and ser­v ice to the state.32 Thus, the ceremony includes (non)visual and written accounts to establish the central myth of the emperor system.33 The schools ­were required to keep the copies of the Imperial Rescript on Education and of the Photo­graph(s) in a safe place on the premises, and p ­ eople had to bow when passing the place of preservation. Some school held regular ceremonies or assemblies in front of the school shrine (hōanden). Walter Benjamin, in discussing the disappearance of the aura in reproducible media, once noted, “It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of traditions. . . . ​ It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones, the cult value of the image finds its last refuge. In the fleeting expression of a h ­ uman face, the aura beckons from early photo­graphs for the last time.”34 Benjamin also acknowledges that religious cults create and preserve the aura, for example, of a painting shown in a dimly lit chapel of the Christian church.35 The Japa­nese imperial portrait photo­graph involves a strange example of Benjamin’s aura. In Mutsuhito’s case, the aura of a drawing was preserved in photography. And, for Hirohito, an aura was created for the photo­graph by ever-­intensifying, non-­v iewing veneration. Similar to an image placed in a dimly lit chapel—in which case, Benjamin notes, the aura is maintained—­the Japa­nese emperor’s photo­graph was exhibited at ceremonies but was not intended to be gazed upon.



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Copies of the emperor’s portrait photo­graph ­were given to overseas embassies, central government bureaus, prefectural government offices, military division headquarters, and battleships, and also to impor­tant politicians, military officers, and foreigners whose works w ­ ere acknowledged by the Japa­nese state. As for schools, the Photo­graph was initially given only to state-­run higher educational institutions, such as the Kaisei School, or Kaisei gakko (­later the Imperial University of Tokyo), which received it in 1874. The schools that received visits from the emperor w ­ ere in a good position to become recipients. Eligible recipients gradually expanded to state-­run secondary educational institutions in the 1880s, and then in 1910 selected private schools became eligible recipients as well. In 1919 special schools for blind and deaf students became also eligible if they fulfilled official scholastic and infrastructural standards. Select overseas Japa­nese schools and schools in colonial territories began receiving the portrait photo­graph as early as 1892. However, it was early in the reign of Emperor Hirohito when all educational institutions, including preschools, became eligible to receive the Photo­graph, which resulted in a dramatic increase of recipient schools.36

Organ­i zing the Nation by Bestowing the Photo­g raph The portrait photo­graphs ­were not given out automatically by the government. A “spontaneous” request was required from each desiring potential recipient. In the case of the school system, a local school would request that the municipal chief appeal to the mayor, and the request would then travel from the mayor to the prefectural governor, from the governor to the minister of education, and fi­nally from the minister of education to the minister of the imperial h ­ ouse­hold. This pro­gress of the request symbolized the hierarchies among the po­liti­cal institutions, prefectures, and schools. In par­tic­u­lar, by placing schools in competition with each other, the system of granting the Photo­graph constructed a sense of national unity and affiliation even in rural areas that had never had a sense of being a part of the state. It served to reinforce the central government and, at the same time, it provided an opportunity for the smallest unit of the state to act as an integral, impor­tant part of the ­whole nation. The system was an impor­tant channel to affirm hierarchical verticality, but it also provided each small administrative unit with an opportunity to be acknowledged as a part of the geo­graph­i­cal horizontality of the ­wholeness of the nation state and to participate as an actor in the empire. Once the request was accepted and the portrait photo­graph was granted, the copy of the portrait had to be delivered to the destination with the utmost

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care, as if the Photo­graph ­were the emperor himself. It was delivered via special transportation arrangements and greeted at the railroad station and on the road to the school. When the Photo­graph arrived at the school, a special ritual took place, installing it in a small shrine specifically designed and built for the purpose, called a hōanden. For example, one of the schools, Toyooka kōtō shogakkō, in Hyōgo Prefecture, or­ga­nized a celebratory event when it was granted the Photo­ graph in 1890. The principal received the Photo­graph at the municipal office and brought it to the school, where it was greeted by seven hundred students singing the national anthem, cued by a gun salute. The Photo­graph was securely placed in a “throne” built at the corner of the school playground. Just over 1,100 students from other schools participated, and 280 honored guests, village assembly members, the village mayor, and two thousand members of the general public came to the ceremony. A ­ fter the ceremony, a field day was or­ga­nized. All the ­houses in town hung a lantern and a national flag, and fireworks w ­ ere set off that night. The following day, the general public was allowed to venerate the Photo­ graph. The total number who came to venerate it came to four thousand.37 In real­ity, the means of preserving the Photo­graphs varied according to the bud­get and size of schools. The portrait was not to be permanently exhibited in school assembly halls, and it was usually placed in a special box and kept in the principal’s office, if not in a dedicated shrine-­style building. The Photo­graph was often wrapped with a cloth and placed in a wooden box, and then the box was placed in a shrine, or elsewhere at school. For example, the novel Nijūshi no hitomi (written by Tsuboi Sakae and originally published in 1952) introduces an anecdote, set in 1928, about a rambunctious boy named Nita in an impoverished small village in the Seto Inland Sea. He insists that the emperor presides not in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, but in a locked built-in cabinet, or oshiire.38 The reason for this, of course, is that that is where his modest school kept the Photo­ graph (see fig. 1.2). On the other hand, for example, Nara ­Women’s Higher Teacher’s College (Nara joshi kōto shihan gakkō, founded in 1908; currently Nara W ­ omen’s University), a prestigious state-­run higher education institution for w ­ omen, built an exhibiting panel in their auditorium in addition to a separate shrine at the main gate. The panel was designed to serve as a throne in the front of the assembly hall and was placed on an elevated podium. The art deco–­style wooden frame was built into the wall, and the panel surface was lined with silk, on which the Photo­graphs ­were hung. A curtain also covered the Photo­graphs. The framed Photo­graphs of the three generations of imperial c­ ouples w ­ ere hung on this silk-­lined panel during the ceremonies, ­after being transferred from the hōanden shrine, the separate building on the premises near the gate. As an additional note, anyone who passed by the shrine at the school had to bow to it, and teachers had to take turns guarding it by



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FIGURE 1.2.  Extant building of hōanden (the shrine that specifically preserves “the Photo­graph”) at Nara W ­ omen’s University, Japan. Photographed by the author.

staying overnight at the school. Manga artist Mizuki Shigeru (1922–2015), who was also a war veteran, recalls that he was once made to stand in front of the principal’s office as a punishment when he forgot to bow to the shrine on his way to class.39 The initial purpose for granting the portrait was to widely inform the Japa­ nese p ­ eople about the new polity that had replaced the Tokugawa shogunate in

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the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury. The construction of the visual image of a new ruler was a crucial method of confirming and visualizing this new Meiji polity. As historian Takashi Fujitani noted, “it was just as necessary to construct an image of him (Emperor Meiji) as a h ­ uman being.”40 While such efforts w ­ ere also reinforced by organ­izing public events such as pageants and imperial progresses, the 1891 ordinance was crucial, as it marked a turn in state treatment of the image of the emperor. The newly implemented guidelines for ceremonial proceedings prevented the audience from admiring or scrutinizing the emperor’s image and aimed to discipline the bodies of imperial subjects and to propagate the centrality, historical lineage, and mythical affirmation of the emperor system. Despite the a­ ctual cultural hybridity of the Japa­nese modern emperor system, which is modeled ­after the Prus­sian and British monarchies, with a ritual format inspired by the Christian Mass, the system claims au­then­tic Japa­neseness, cultural originality, and historicity.41 This should be understood as an “in­ven­ted tradition,” as articulated by Eric Hobsbawm.42 Photo­graph veneration was a newly in­ven­ted ritual that gradually permeated society. Initially t­ here ­were debates about w ­ hether or not one should venerate, and risk one’s life for, a copy of a photo­graph, but by around 1940 the idea of treating the Photo­graph as equivalent to the emperor himself had become an unquestionable norm.

Veneration of the Photo­g raph versus Mass Media Photography The very first patriotic death in an attempt to protect the Photo­graph took place during a tsunami on the Sanriku Coast in 1896, when elementary school teacher Tochinai Taikichi died trying to save the Photo­graph. At the time of the tsunami, he helped his ­family escape from their ­house, and then went to the school to retrieve the Photo­graph. He tied it on his back and tried to escape but was engulfed by the wave. The following morning he was discovered barely alive, half-­buried among the debris, but even ­after being rescued he refused to let go of the Photo­ graph. He died the following day. While most news coverage praised his acts as spiritual and spontaneously loyal, the Kokumin shinbun newspaper founded by the liberal Tokutomi Sohō published an anonymous criticism. The writer pointed out that a ­human life was not resurrected once it was lost, so it was regrettable that one died ­because of a reproducible item. However, this essay was met by strong opposition that advocated for Tochinai’s death as an exemplary, sincere act of true imperial subjecthood.43 Another early case was Kume Yoshitarō, a proud former samurai who served as a school principal. He committed suicide by hara-­kiri, or seppuku, ­because he was deeply ashamed by the destruction of



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the Photo­graph when his school burned down in a fire in 1898. The case was described by his son, the novelist Kume Masao, in an autobiographical essay published in 1916.44 When the first death-­out-­of-­loyalty for the Photo­graph took place, the medium of photography was not yet available for the masses. Though photography was introduced to Japan in the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury, it was not ­until the outbreak of the Russo-­Japanese War in 1904 that newspapers began ­running photo­graphs in their main pages.45 The first newspaper photo­graphs in Japan ­were included in a supplement (furoku) of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun in June 1894: a series of four photo­graphs that captured views of the Korean Peninsula just before the outbreak of the First Sino-­Japanese War. Ten years l­ater, to introduce the Russo-­Japanese War visually, newspaper companies competed over the photo­graphs they included: a photo­graph of the Rus­sian military base in Vladivostok was printed in the Yomiuri, Japa­nese soldiers in the Siege of Port Arthur in Tokyo Asahi shinbun, and Japa­nese soldiers’ portraits in Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun.46 When a newspaper ran photo­graphs of the imperial ­couple in 1913, such practices ­were obviously connected with the pre­sen­ta­tion of celebrities, not with the veneration rituals. A sneak shot of the Taisho Emperor Yoshihito (b. 1879, r. 1912– 1926) and the Empress Sadako (1884–1951), who w ­ ere visiting the tomb of Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito, Yoshihito’s ­father, in Kyoto, was published in the newspapers Osaka Asahi shinbun (October 21, 1913) and Tokyo Asahi shinbun (October 22, 1913). A reporter of the Osaka Asahi posed as an official of the Ministry of Imperial House­hold and entered the area where the emperor’s carriage was parked. From ­there, he took a picture of the royal ­couple. At this point, the notion of lèse-­majesté occurred to neither the reporter nor the newspaper publishers. However, Prime Minister Hara Takashi, himself once a newspaper reporter and the head of the Osaka Mainichi shinbun newspaper, was gravely concerned that to take photo­graphs freely for newspaper publication was an act of lèse-­ majesté that should not happen again. He mentioned this to Taisho Emperor Yoshihito, who was amused and said, “The Home Minister ­will be in trou­ble.”47 Hara’s concern suggests that he understood the medium of photography to be dif­fer­ent than previous visual media such as colored wood block prints (nishiki-­e) and lithographs. A large number of Mutsuhito’s images ­were produced as woodcuts and lithographs in the late Meiji era; both media freely executed and circulated repre­ sen­ta­tions of the emperor, his imperial pro­cessions and pageants, current affairs, po­liti­cal events, and the imperial ­family.48 Interestingly, the pre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor in both prints and lithographs was never seriously regulated by the state, whereas the reproduction and sales of photo­graphs ­were strictly prohibited.49 Though it was impor­tant for the newly established government that the presence

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of the emperor be widely known at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury, photographic reproduction was not welcomed. This is possibly ­because the state officials sensed the dif­fer­ent nature of this new medium. The phi­los­o­pher Taki Kōji pointed out that colored prints and lithographs presented the fictional, fantastical world of the new regime. The woodcuts depicted the experiences, objects, and incidents of the new world one ­after another, serving as a visual newspaper. When depicting the imperial pro­gress (gyōkō), for example, the woodcuts deploy premodern pictorial traditions of decentralized space and arrangement of objects and pres­ent a long, unbroken pro­cession that penetrates the pictorial space. The newly established modern emperor system was, thus, initially introduced in the language of an old and familiar medium. ­Because of the pictorial tradition of this medium, when the Emperor Mutsuhito, f­ ather of Yoshihito, was introduced in prints, he was an indistinguishable part of the imperial pro­gress. Or, he was presented as a remarkable person who had to be known in the same way that kabuki actors ­were apprehended in Edo prints. In this case, Mutsuhito is depicted at the center of events as the superstar of a drama, but e­ ither way this medium was not capable of presenting him as an authoritative, almost intimidating modern ruler.50 Roland Barthes’s discussion of the press photo­graph is illuminating in this connection. He notes that a photo­graph can be understood only when it is given meaning, context, and emotion by the accompanying text in “The Photographic Message.” He explains that, historically, image illustrated words, that is, the image directly communicated its content to viewers. But for the press photo­graphs, it is the accompanying text that constitutes a message to connote the image: “The text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination.”51 Barthes’s discussions are suggestive for understanding the transition forced by the government, from historical images of nishiki-­e pre­ sen­ta­tions of the emperor to the imperial portrait photo­graph. The new po­liti­ cal system required a brand new visual culture, as expressed through departure from the images of a resurrected shogun or a kabuki-­actor-­like secular superstar and transition to a figure that embodied modernity as well as spiritual power of the new polity. To break with nishiki-­e pictorial conventions, the mindset of which was shogunate, the new Meiji government officially created the image of Mutsuhito according to the Western art tradition of portraiture. Also, it provided new “texts” to guide viewers to understand the emperor who had replaced the shogun. The most immediate “text” was the Imperial Rescript on Education, which stressed the unbroken imperial lineage and required loyalty from subjects. The 1891 Ordinance of the Ministry of Education was another text. As it demonstrates, a cue of “Bow!” to the Photo­graph and recital of the Imperial Rescript on Education,



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school principals’ speeches, and songs w ­ ere as necessary as viewing rituals to confirm the centrality and inviolability of the emperor in the nation-­state and to construct the aura of the Photo­graph. Furthermore, an abundant glossary was created to sustain the ritualistic veneration of the Photo­graph. Numerous verbs and nouns with the prefix of hō indicate the most honorific address to the emperor himself. To receive or to be granted upon a copy of the Photo­graph was “to receive in awe” (hō-­tai), to protect or guard it was hō-­go, to exhibit it was hō-­kei, and to store it securely was hō-­an. It is in this context that Prime Minister Hara became concerned about sneak shots of the emperor in the newspaper. He might have felt it necessary to provide more substantial and solid textual infiltration for a wide audience and to load the image of the emperor with the “correct” meanings of the national polity. The first case of newspaper distribution of the imperial portrait was the first issue of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun supplement in July 1888. The portrait was a woodblock print that copied Mutsuhito’s 1873 portrait photo­graph in military uniform. The supplement was highly demanded, and cheap pirate copies circulated widely. The image of the emperor proved an extremely successful means of gaining new subscribers and sponsors, and other newspapers immediately followed this example.52 In the 1900s and 1910s, magazines also started to run photo­graphs of imperial ­family members and aristocrats. It is notable that, in addition to high-­end magazines such as Taiyō and Kōshitsu gahō, ­women’s magazines in par­tic­u­lar, for example, Fujin sekai, extensively included photo­graphs of the nobility. It is also noteworthy that imperial ­family members’ photo­graphs ­were not necessarily treated with care at this point. For example, in the newspaper Kokumin in 1910, the Meiji Empress Haruko’s portrait casually appeared as one of the persons who ­were born in the year of the dog, together with sumo wrestlers and actors.53 In addition, in the 1910s, affordable cameras ­were making photography increasingly accessible to urban residents such as white-­collar workers, shop clerks, and students, to the extent that they formed amateur clubs. This had become pos­si­ble ­because of the advanced development of cameras.54 Historian Hara Takeshi also notes that around 1908, when Yoshihito as crown prince visited the Tōhoku area, several sets of postcards of him w ­ ere officially sold, along with nonofficial versions. It was the first time that an imperial ­family member had appeared in a postcard, which is a commercial and collectible item, at large scale.55 Therefore, Yoshihito’s sneak shot should be also located in the extension of his pop­ul­ar­ized and commercialized appearance in mass media. This demonstrates how the media pre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor was increasingly contradictory, since the development of mass media commercialized the imperial image even when the first death for the Photo­graph had already taken place (in 1896, as mentioned above) and its distribution was gradually expanding.

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Hirohito’s Stardom in Mass Media The 1920s in par­tic­ul­ar saw contradictory modes of repre­sen­ta­tion of the imperial ­family. On one hand, then Crown Prince Hirohito was an extremely appealing young ruler-­to-be and emerging media celebrity. On the other hand, veneration rituals steadily expanded to stress the sacredness of the emperor. For example, the Nagano shinbun newspaper reports that an elementary school principal died to protect the Photo­graph in 1921 in Nagano Prefecture. He rushed into a burning school building to retrieve the Photo­graph from the second floor, ignoring opposition by bystanders, and was burned to death. This tragedy led to heated debates in the newspaper and a special issue of the local magazine Shinshū, with contributions by teachers, principals, administrators of the Ministry of Education, military officers, bankers, and college professors. The opinions split between praise of and objection to such a death. ­Those who attempted to maintain a neutral position did so by suggesting that the Photo­graph should have been preserved in a separate building. While ­those who praised the principal’s action saw it as in the true spirit of protection of national polity, courage, and patriotism, ­those who opposed it insisted that a sheet of paper was not the emperor himself. Though the publication of opposing views confirms that ­there was still room for debate about the nature of the Photo­graph, the volume of patriotic comments demonstrates how its veneration was steadily infiltrating 1920s Japan.56 In another example, cases of teachers who died to protect the Photo­graph at a school in a fire caused by the ­Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 ­were reported in newspapers and praised.57 Since the notion of national polity was extremely complicated and broadly defined, as phi­los­o­pher Masao Maruyama states, it “operates as the clear, forcible power” against ­those who are opposed to national polity but it “does not easily betray its own core ideology.”58 As an example, Origuchi Shinobu’s articulation of divine, superhuman rituals of imperial succession can be seen as an esoteric text on the notion of national polity, while veneration of the Photo­graph was a simpler way to propagate ideology by disciplining citizens’ bodies, spotting antinational po­liti­cal actions, and dissuading citizens from such be­hav­ior through penalties.59 Thus, government officials’ efforts to promote “the national polity” can be seen in the intensification of regulations. In 1921 lèse-­majesté was for the first time deployed to regulate religious organ­izations that did not worship the imperial ancestors, in the case of Ōmoto kyō.60 Also, amendments of the Peace Preservation Law intensified the punishment for violation of the national polity, to the death penalty, in 1928.61 In this po­liti­cal climate, a fascinatingly contradictory development was the cultural phenomenon of Prince Hirohito’s stardom. He was treated as a celebrity by mass media. This corresponds with historian Sandra Wilson’s analy­sis of the 1920s



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as a de­cade in which the Japa­nese public’s participation in official state ideology was “fragmented and contradictory.” Wilson suggests that p ­ eople’s participation in imperial events was also motivated by a desire for consumption and leisure.62 Along with Hirohito’s media exposure, other imperial ­family members’ images ­were also not concealed from the public. Art historian Kitahara Megumi demonstrates that the 1920s witnessed the appearance of the imperial ­family in the mass media. According to her, it was in 1922 that newspapers started to run photo­graphs of the imperial ­family in their New Year’s Day special issues.63 In this context, it is an emerging and expanding ­middle class and its aspirations that propelled consumption of imperial portraits. Historian Andrew Gordon’s discussion of this emerging ­middle class, its consumer culture, and aspirations in relation to media images is useful: Mass media ­were particularly impor­tant in opening to growing numbers the gray zone of vicarious participation in m ­ iddle class life through consuming words and images if not goods; by the 1920s, the goods and practices that defined this life w ­ ere widely recognized and desired, but the gap was large between the 10% and 20% of the population that might fully partake of its pleasures, and the rest of the p ­ eople in Japan and its empire, for whom it remained a world of dreams, desires, and no more than occasional participation, however real it was in their cultural imagination.64 Hirohito’s stardom manifested dazzling modernity, mobility, wealth, and a f­ uture tied to the image of middle-­class life rather than to sacred unattainability, and ­people who dreamed of this life experienced consumption of his image as partial participation in it. One of the most widely publicized and impor­tant public events of the period was Hirohito’s visit to Eu­rope from March to September 1921. He first sailed to Shuri in Okinawa, and then stopped at Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Suez, Malta, and Gibraltar before arriving in E ­ ngland. ­After leaving ­England, he visited France, Belgium, and Italy.65 Two cinematographers from Nikkatsu studio filmed the entire trip and their edited film was shown in Japan that fall. It is noteworthy that the newly emerging film studio sent crews on this trip. For the film industry in the 1920s, the studio system was developing, replacing numerous in­ de­pen­dent micro production companies. Nikkatsu, which l­ater became one of the major studios, began organ­izing the production, exhibition, and distribution of films, aiming at larger, nationwide audiences. Newspaper companies also competed to cover the prince’s visit to Eu­rope, although they saw the films as a promotional tool to sell newspapers. This is the time when Hirohito was introduced to the film screen and became a star.

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The Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun newspaper commissioned the Gaumont Film Com­pany, a prominent French studio, to film Hirohito’s trip, and ­later pioneered public screening by showing their film of the trip in Hibiya Park, near the Imperial Palace. ­After the crew filmed Hirohito’s arrival at ­England on May 8 and 9, they sent the film to Japan via Canada. It arrived in the port of Yokohama on June 6, one week earlier than other companies who sent their film via the United States. The film was developed and edited on that day, shown first to Emperor Yoshihito and Empress Sadako on June 7 and then screened for ­free to the public on the night of June 8. The June 9 morning paper of Tokyo Nichinichi carries a large photo­graph of the crowded park with the screen, with a caption that reads “Storm of cheers, the ­great success of our com­pany’s film screening last night; the image on the curtain [screen] is the scene of His Highness landing at the military port of Portsmouth.” The newspaper article narrates the event: “The film image was very clear. Following the scene of the Crown Prince’s departure from Japan, as soon as the film began showing ‘His Highness in London’ citizens ­were shouting with joy. They applauded e­ very time His Highness made a gracious appearance, cheered banzai ­every time He smiled. Their loud cheering together with shouts of ‘­don’t push!’ reverberated in the night sky of Hibiya.”66 Tokyo Nichinichi’s very first screening at Hibiya attracted 130,000 attendants. For this com­pany’s newsreels alone, the total viewers of the film series of Hirohito’s trip ­were approximately 4,880,000.67 ­People applauded with banzai cheers at the sight of Hirohito’s appearance in a top hat together with a British prince, possibly Prince Edward, in a parade, and they sang the national anthem spontaneously. However, as some newspaper articles betray, the “spontaneity” of banzai cheers and national anthem singing seemed to be guided, at least at certain screenings. The hosts of ­these events cued banzai cheers, and the lyr­ics of the national anthem appeared on the screen. The newspaper com­pany ran screenings in Tokyo, and then its screening units travelled to other areas of mainland Japan as well as to ­Korea and part of China.68 The reported number of spectators is prob­ably exaggerated, but even so, the film was undoubtedly quite popu­lar. Such film screenings by newspaper companies w ­ ere ­free events aimed to raise visibility and increase subscribers. Hirohito’s trip became widely known to Japa­nese not only through films but also through postcards and magazine supplements. The postcards, ranging from black-­and-­white photo­graphs to tinted photo­graphs and to reproductions of colored paintings, portrayed the battleship that accompanied Hirohito, the parade in ­England, his portrait in frock coat and top hat, and him with British politicians and the royal f­ amily. ­Legal scholar Nakamura Akira recollects that he found tinted photo­graphs of Hirohito’s trip to Eu­rope beautiful, which he saw on sale at a stationary store. He emphasizes that this was not out of a sense of patriotism



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or nationalism, but rather ­because he found t­ hese photo­graphs dazzling for their materiality and visuality.69 The Eu­ro­pean landscapes and cities, the British royal ­family and their appearance, dresses, and clothes, and the world beyond Japan—­ these dazzling images unfolded to viewers as Hirohito served as a guide to the West and its modernity. The wedding of Hirohito in 1924 also became an impor­tant celebratory event.70 Film studios such as Nikkatsu and Shochiku as well as newspapers such as Osaka Asahi and Osaka Mainichi competed to cover it, joined by foreign news cameramen. In par­tic­u­lar, ­there was a scandal in the early 1921 when it was suggested by one of the oligarchs (genrō), Yamagata Aritomo, that Nagako, the crown-­princess-­ to-be, should withdraw from the engagement. Though the engagement had been officially announced in 1918, it had just been discovered that Nagako might carry into the imperial lineage potential hereditary color blindness, which posed a serious prob­lem. The po­liti­cal decision making about the potential cancellation of the royal engagement was covered by the newspapers. Politicians, imperial and aristocratic families, and the general public w ­ ere split over w ­ hether it was legitimate to breach the promise, and eventually the engagement was maintained.71 This scandal invoked the romantic imagination of newspaper readers, naturally enhancing the cele­bration of the marriage, as if the readers w ­ ere watching the happy ending of a film story. The newspaper companies Asahi and Mainichi competitions to screen newsreels earlier than each other was very intense, and they relied on fast airplane transportation of film from Tokyo to Osaka. The entertainment value of the marriage was intensified both by the c­ ouple’s long, dramatic engagement and by the major newspapers’ colorful competition for earlier release of newsreels. The subsequent media cele­bration of the marriage even showed a picture of the newlyweds holding hands and walking together (Tokyo Nichinichi, eve­ning edition, August 10, 1924), and once again postcards—in which the ­couple was posed almost as a Modern Boy and a Modern Girl—­were widely circulated. Romantic attraction to Hirohito is also recorded by novelists. The proletarian novelist Nakano Shigeharu depicted the following episode: “The Regent-­ Crown Prince (Hirohito) was somehow popu­lar. . . . ​The postcard shops sold his photograph-­postcards, and young female students bought them a lot. . . . ​Once a ­couple told me a story like this: ‘The prince’s postcards sold so well. Girls bought them one a­ fter another. It was as if girls have treated him as a movie star, which alerted the educators.’ ”72 Another autobiographical account is provided by novelist Kōda Aya: When His Majesty (Hirohito) was still young, I remember that he was quite popu­lar. . . . ​His eyebrows ­were thick, his eye glasses, t­ hose without

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frames in my recollection, w ­ ere stylish, his cheeks w ­ ere firm, and he was very good looking. When girls high school students ­were made to line up in front of the school gate to greet His Majesty passing, ­there was a girl who flushed ­really red and felt so shy as soon as she caught a glimpse of the first bodyguard preceding His Majesty. She was determined to marry a man who resembled His Majesty and quit school to marry him despite her ­family’s strong opposition. Such is one of the amusing stories ­those days. His Majesty was quite appealing.73 It is noteworthy that in both episodes Hirohito was admired predominantly by young schoolgirls and ­women.74 In regard to this gendered audience, the queer film theorist Richard Dyer provides an illuminating analy­sis. He points out that intense star/audience relationships occur among adolescents, w ­ omen, and gay men as “­these groups all share a peculiarly intense degree of role/identity conflicts and pressure, and an albeit partial exclusion from the dominant articulacy of, respectively, adult, male, heterosexual culture.”75 This is very suggestive, since Japa­nese ­women at the time ­were secondary citizens without suffrage, and their social role was limited to the biological reproduction of the next generation. The desire to gain power as consumers and the unrealistic dream for non-­aristocratic ­women to marry a prince ­were projected onto the stardom of Hirohito.76 Crown Prince Hirohito’s trip to Eu­ro­pean countries, his engagement and wedding, and other occasions served to create and reinforce ties between the f­uture ruler and his subjects. In this regard, the media served to facilitate national identity formation of imperial subjecthood. But Hirohito also served as a prompt for imperial citizens’ experience of new mass media, leisure, and consumption. Urban workers in metropolitan cities rushed to the exclusive screenings to enjoy a special outing and a new type of leisure: film viewing. Middle-­class ­women bought and collected postcards of Hirohito. In contrast with “dutiful consumption,” coined by historian Kenneth Ruoff to refer to consumption motivated by patriotic and nationalist sentiments around the time of the 2,600th-­year anniversary in 1940, the 1920 consumption of images of Hirohito was fragmented and sporadic nationalism.77 Film viewing, newspaper reading, or radio listening in the 1920s offered imperial citizens a new realm of daily life experience of information technology and fuelled them with the distraction of fantasies of upward mobility. In the 1920s, the state attempted to increase the mythical and religious dimension of the emperor system by promoting veneration rituals for the Photo­ graph, but the same period saw ever-­increasing media exposure of Hirohito as a celebrity. This illustrates how the late nineteenth-­century implementation of monarchy in Japan met a new era of mass media technologies.



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The Eu­ro­pean monarchies emphasized secrecy, arcane rituals, and connections to the divine to produce a feeling of awe in the public. They produced portraits and or­ga­nized pro­cessions and festivities, all of which the Meiji state also deployed to establish its modern emperor system. Japa­nese policymakers and ideologues in­ven­ted Mutsuhito’s portrait and vari­ous rituals of the imperial h ­ ouse, drafted a myth of unbroken imperial lineage, and forged associations between Japa­nese mythological emperors and Mutsuhito. By the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth c­ entury, however, the Eu­ro­pean monarchies ­were already undergoing demystification, individuation, and “humanization,” that is, greater accessibility of the royal icon in the rise of consumer cultures. Mass-­produced busts, memorabilia portraits, and photo­graphs of monarchs became commercial, collectible items and souvenirs. In the case of Queen Victoria, photo­graphs of her and her royal f­ amily ­were for the first time released as a publication, the Royal ­Album, which was a phenomenal success, though her images had already circulated in popu­lar publications. Wilhelm I even complained about the ubiquity of his photo­graphs and pictures everywhere in restaurants, ­hotels, and bars.78 In Eu­rope, by the end of World War I in 1918, the royal ­houses of Romanov, Austrian Habsburg, and Prus­sian Hohenzollern had failed. France oscillated between the polities of the republic and the empire during the nineteenth c­ entury, but the Third Republic was established from 1870 through 1940. Among the surviving monarchies, Japan chose the British monarchy as a model, which was highlighted by the crown prince’s visit to ­England. In many regards, the path of the modern Japa­nese emperor system traced the models, patterns, and developments of Eu­ro­pean examples, which initially emphasized divine power but then moved ­toward secularization, or “humanization,” which is the coinage historian Eva Giloi uses to describe the Hohenzollern House.79 Coincidently, the term “humanization” is precisely what is used to describe the Japa­nese emperor in the postwar era, when the institution was demystified. A distinctive characteristic of the Japa­nese monarchy, however, is that its mystification pro­cess was led by pro-­state ideologues at the same time that demystification was happening, along with expansion of the accessibility of the emperor’s mass media image. Historian Takashi Fujitani’s articulation of the formative politics of the gaze between Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito and his subjects in the late nineteenth ­century provides a compelling means of elucidating this historical development in Japan. In his examinations of publicized events, national pageants, and imperial progresses, Fujitani coins the term, “Japan’s emperor-­centered society for surveillance.” Informed by the Foucauldian notion of surveillance, but modifying it, Fujitani argues that “in Japan what Foucault called ‘monarchical power’ and ‘disciplinary power’ came together in the same historical moment. Power was not

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anonymous but centered on the figure of the Meiji emperor. The construction of the emperor as the Observer and the unpre­ce­dented visibility of the p ­ eople to power coincided exactly with the new visibility of the modern monarch.”80 The duality of “monarchical power” and “disciplinary power” can be located in the short film Historical Drama: The Farewell Scenes of Kusunoki Masashige and His Son (Shigeki Nankō ketsubetsu), starring Onoe Matsunosuke (1875–1926). The medieval source text narrates the retainer Kusunoki’s loyalty to the emperor, and it was revived in the Meiji era precisely for its po­liti­cal value. It opens with footage of Hirohito visiting the Exhibition of Motion Pictures at the Tokyo Museum, which is an extension of the newsreel, ­Actual Story of His Highness the Prince Regent’s Inspection of the Motion Picture Exhibition (Sesshōnomiya denka katsudō shashin tenrankai gotairan jikkyō, 1921).81 Onoe’s per­for­mance is introduced as a part of Hirohito’s inspection in December 1921. Hirohito’s inspection confirms the dual monarchical and disciplinary powers he exercises. For monarchical power, he presides over the location shooting of a film depicting loyalty to the imperial ­house, and for disciplinary power, his presence as the inspector disciplines imperial citizens, including actors and offscreen viewers, so that they perform loyally to him. Film historian Fujiki Hideaki points out that “the star image and the image of the Imperial House­hold had a mutually advantageous relationship” in this film, as Onoe and Hirohito promoted each other.82 I would elaborate on this point by arguing that by conflating t­ hese two stars, Onoe and Hirohito, the film symbolically points to the rising film industry as well as to the expansion of film spectatorship. On one hand, Onoe was a superstar, who appeared in numerous films as a samurai, gentleman thief, and superhero who transformed himself into dif­fer­ ent creatures, as in Super Hero Jiraiya (Gōketsu Jiraiya, directed by Makino Shōzō, 1921). He was beloved by ­children and working-­class moviegoers. On the other hand, Hirohito achieved the status of media celebrity by the end of 1921, especially for the m ­ iddle class, as a win­dow to the vast world beyond Japan; as the embodiment of Western knowledge, science, and wealth; and as the f­uture of the nation. Hirohito is characterized as a star who introduces Japa­nese viewers to the West and an able young ruler-­to-be rubbing shoulders with Eu­ro­pean nobility and politicians. In the conflation of their star images, lower-­working-­class fans of Onoe and educated middle-­and upper-­class fans of Hirohito w ­ ere drawn together into the same cinematic space, not necessarily physically but socially. As a final note on Hirohito’s stardom, it is impor­tant to return to film theorist Richard Dyer’s arguments. He states that star images function crucially in relation to contradictions within and between ideologies, which they seek variously to “manage” or resolve.83 The consumption of Hirohito’s image managed anx­i­eties and frustration stemming from Japan’s ever more intense involvements



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with international politics, for example, through the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty that forced Japan to reduce its battleships and was felt by many Japa­nese as a humiliation. Other key incidents include the G ­ reat Kanto earthquake of 1923, which shuttered metropolitan Tokyo and affected the national economy; the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, promulgated in fear of communism; and increasing ­labor disputes. Hirohito’s dazzling image of youth and energy would have seemed a bright promise in contrast to the a­ ctual po­liti­cal and economic developments of the time. The two modes of the production and reception of the emperor—­non-­viewing veneration of the Photo­graph and consumption of Hirohito’s images—­also attest to the complexity of building the nation-­state. They reveal disrupted experiences of imperial subjects rather than seamlessly unifying identity formation. ­These two vectors of treatments of photography pose a contradiction. Would it be pos­si­ble to resolve this contradiction between the communal and po­liti­cal roles of photography? From the mid-­to late 1930s through 1945, the state did attempt to dissolve the contradiction by constraining the modes of production and reception of other mass media in alignment with veneration rituals for the Photo­graph.

Radio Broadcasting as Contained Space of the Photo­g raph Veneration The infrastructure of the medium of radio broadcasting was expanded nationwide, ensuring coverage of the series of Hirohito’s enthronement events. What should be noted for this medium is that, first, its development was state-­led, unlike other mass media such as newspaper, film, and photography, and that, second, its repre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor operated in a very similar manner to Photo­graph veneration, which prevented recipients from having a sense of his corporeality. In this section, I discuss the medium’s early development and its relationship with veneration of the Photo­graph, demonstrating that it served as a forerunner for the reconfiguration and containment of medium specificities in adapting the non-­v iewing rituals of the Photo­graph. Radio broadcasting was founded by civil operations in 1925 in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, in accordance with the standards of the Communications Ministry, or Teishin shō.84 For example, the Tokyo hōsō kyoku, or Tokyo Broadcasting Station, was founded with board members who w ­ ere from newspaper companies, wireless agencies, wireless device manufacturers, and stock exchange companies. The president of the board was Gotō Shinpei, a prominent politician who served as governor-­general of Taiwan, communications minister, mayor of Tokyo City,

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and director of the Tokyo Earthquake Recovery Office (Teito fukkō in).85 In September 1925, the Tokyo radio program started at 9:00 a.m. with a weather forecast and ended at 9:30 p.m. with a preview of upcoming programming. The ­running time was six and a half hours per day, with interruptions. The content included stock market news, cooking, ­music, news, En­glish classes, and lectures. Five-­or ten-­minute stock market reports ­were on the air eight times a day on the Tokyo station, and even more frequently in Osaka and Nagoya. In terms of the content, reports (news, time signal, weather forecast, stock markets) accounted for 20 ­percent, while education (lecture, classes, c­ hildren’s program, cooking) and entertainment (theater, other per­for­mances, Japa­nese and Western m ­ usic) ac86 counted for 40 ­percent each. Though the three stations started operations separately, the Communications Ministry merged them, in summer 1926, to create a wider network: Nihon hōsō kyōkai, currently known as NHK.87 The state’s plan to make Japan a space unified by an information network coincidentally gained traction in December of the same year ­because of Emperor Yoshihito’s illness and subsequent death. Indeed, it was Yoshihito’s illness and death in 1926 that accelerated the development of radio as a power­ful competitor of the newspapers to deliver news. Though initially the radio news simply read aloud newspaper reports on the emperor’s condition, in mid-­December radio became in­de­pen­dent from the newspapers, receiving information directly from the Imperial House­hold Ministry, and broadcasts of news of Yoshihito’s deteriorating health increased.88 This meant that the state recognized the strength of radio for speedy and almost simultaneous coverage, though at that point radio news reached only the Tokyo area, as transmission was not power­ful, and, in any case, receivers w ­ ere owned by only a limited wealthy few. Though Benedict Anderson, in his ­Imagined Communities, used the newspaper and the novel as examples to illustrate Walter Benjamin’s coinage, “homogeneous, empty time,” the radio would be even more appropriate to highlight empty time, “in which simultaneity is, as it w ­ ere, transverse, cross-­time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and mea­sured by clock and calendar.”89 Since the introduction of the radio time signal to Japan in 1925, radio broadcasts of Yoshihito’s death, Hirohito’s enthronement ceremonies, the announcement of the Pearl Harbor attack, and Hirohito’s speech on the termination of the war ­were always marked with precise times, which demonstrated that the listeners psychologically and physically belonged to and moved with homogeneous time.90 Thus, Anderson’s discussion of the consumption of the daily newspaper as an act of imagining as mass ceremony applies quite appropriately to the radio broadcast of the enthronement as a unifying experience of nationalism: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being



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replicated si­mul­ta­neously by thousands (or millions) of ­others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” 91 This communal participation in ceremony and sense of national affiliation are also parallel to the veneration rituals of the Photo­graph in imperial Japan. Radio programs about Yoshihito’s deteriorating health, death, and funeral ­were extremely well-­received by listeners, though their numbers ­were limited. Yet radio subscribers continued to increase rapidly. T ­ here ­were already 222,194 subscribers in August 1926, at the point of the merger of the three stations.92 Subscribers in par­tic­ul­ar skyrocketed from 361,066 (3 ­percent of the population) as of February 1927, at the time of Yoshihito’s funeral, to 564,603 (4.7 ­percent of the population) at the time of Hirohito’s enthronement.93 The rapid geo­graph­i­ cal and numerical expansion of listeners was triggered partially by advertising promoting enthronement-­related broadcasting. The subsequent rapid expansion of radio subscriptions in the early 1930s in connection with the “war fever” following the Manchurian Incident, was, thus, already prepared for in the late 1920s. While the newspapers had been competing with each other over speed in covering events, it was the new medium of radio that won the competition by delivering frequent updates on Yoshihito’s deteriorating condition and being the earliest to announce his death, in the very early morning of December 25—­right ­after the event, at a time when even extras of the newspaper could not be distributed.94 Broadcast coverage of the subsequent funeral pro­cession in February 1927 raised the visibility of the new medium even further. In this context, the enthronement ceremony provided a chance to further test the medium’s potential for the state. A series of enthronement ceremonies (sokui no tairei) consisting of thirty-­one rituals, Hirohito’s travel from Tokyo to Kyoto, and related events, such as special military reviews, ­were broadcast widely. It was precisely for this goal that simultaneous radio broadcasting was made pos­si­ble u ­ nder the supervision of and with pressure from the Communications Ministry. The construction of transmission cables to connect major stations, resorting even to borrowing existing telephone cables from the ministry, was fi­nally completed on November 5, 1928, the day before the start of the series of the enthronement ceremonies. It was the first time in Japan that any event was si­mul­ta­neously broadcast in dif­fer­ent cities, including Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, Sendai, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Kumamoto. Additionally, Sapporo was connected by wireless transmission.95 ­These radio programs on the enthronement ­were successfully broadcast and received enthusiastically. Over a ­little more than one month, ­there ­were a total of twenty-­one nationwide so-­called live reports, or jikkyō, of the ceremonies.96 The “live” broadcasting covered the imperial ­couple’s departure from the Imperial Palace, their departure from Tokyo Station, their imperial train’s arrival in Kyoto,

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their move to the Kyoto Imperial Palace, the enthronement ceremony, and their trip from Kyoto Palace to Kyoto station to Tokyo station and, fi­nally, back to the Tokyo Imperial Palace. Though it was called “live,” the narrator’s manuscripts ­were, in real­ity, fully drafted in advance, carefully using imperial honorific vocabulary and prepared with the aid of the Imperial House­hold Ministry. They ­were read aloud in the news presenters’ rooms in Tokyo and Kyoto. In addition, microphones ­were set to pick up sound in vari­ous designated areas, from which signals ­were sent to the studios as a cue for the presenter to “describe” the activities.97 The presenter spoke as if he was witnessing the events, and in this way radio created a sense of urgency and simultaneity for listeners. The narration forged a strong sense of spontaneity with this combination of narrated scripts and deployment of the sounds of military marching, cannon salutes, pro­cessions, and the noise of spectators on the streets, which impressed the listeners greatly. The narrations of t­ hese “live” reports w ­ ere pressed on phonograph rec­ords to celebrate this historical event, and the rec­ord disc was ­later sold to the public. ­These rec­ord discs w ­ ere also occasionally used to accompany newsreels of the enthronement ceremony.98 As for Hirohito’s radio broadcasting, his announcement of the termination of the Greater East Asia War (Dai tōa sensō) at noon on August 15, 1945, is well known as the moment his ­actual voice was heard for the first time. His Imperial Rescript of Termination of War was recorded on phonograph discs the day before, then played on the radio on August 15.99 It is noteworthy, however, that before this historic broadcast, Hirohito’s voice had once been broadcast live by accident.100 But at any rate, for the seventeen years from 1928 to 1945, lack of the emperor’s corporeality was characteristic of the pre­sen­ta­tion and reception of radio broadcasting of public events. This non-­presentation of the emperor’s voice is found in an account of the ceremony of the purported 2,600th anniversary of Japan in 1940.101 Broadcasting of the ceremony was muted during his recitation of the imperial rescript, which a second grader wrote about: “­After the speech by Konoe san [the Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro], I heard, ‘Now we receive His Majesty’s Imperial Rescript,’ then the program stopped. I thought that it would be so gracious if we could hear His Majesty’s voice. A ­ fter a while, the program 102 restarted.” To return to Hirohito’s enthronement in 1928, vari­ous accounts demonstrate how radio listeners appreciated the broadcasting of the enthronement ceremonies. One of them reads, On the day of the enthronement, all my ­family got together in one room as soon as the after­noon broadcasting began and we listened to the gracious proceeding of the ceremony in awe. At three o ­ ’clock in the after­



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noon Prime Minister Tanaka’s strong voice of banzai cheers was powerfully broadcast, followed by hundreds of officials’ banzai cheers, which ­were also delivered on air. Unintentionally, cheers of banzai! banzai! came out of all of our mouths and we joined them.103 This mode of reception is similar to the rituals of Photo­graph veneration, in which viewers join the gathering, sing the national anthem together, and see each o ­ thers’ disciplined bodies bowing ­toward the Photo­graph without looking at it. The listeners ­were encouraged to imagine the emperor’s authority and glory through the anchor’s narration and description of ritualistic scenes accompanied by acoustic effects, including h ­ orse carriage, footsteps of the accompanying officers, politicians and imperial ­family member, military parades, banzai cheers, the national anthem, and cannon salutes. Thus, all the ceremonial sounds and rituals represented and replaced Hirohito’s voice. Japa­nese listeners understood the presence of the emperor by the silence of the radio receiver, not by any sense of corporeality, which contrasted with King George V’s regular radio broadcasting in ­England. This parallel in the position of the spectators/listeners between Photo­graph veneration and radio listening demonstrates radio’s containment by the former medium. The audience was drawn to radio programs without viewing the events and ­imagined other fellow listeners, and also the new emperor Hirohito—­and, without hearing it, his voice. The radio program, in this case, reveals even more power­ful moments of imagining a uniform community for the nation-­state. Radio’s containment by Photo­graph veneration was made pos­si­ble by the late introduction of the former medium to Japa­nese society, which made radio more susceptible to the prescriptive modes and norms of pre­sen­ta­tion and reception for the emperor’s image. The newborn medium was thus nurtured by the emperor system from its inception.

What P ­ eople Knew about the National Polity (Kokutai) The non-­viewing and non-­listening policies of the emperor’s media pre­sen­ta­tion minimized the sense of corporeality of his body, in association with the ideology that he was the descendant of gods, or arahitogami. But how was this myth taught, and how much of it was understood in the way the state intended? It is noteworthy that in the mid-1930s a number of youths casually expressed indifference to and ignorance of the official ideology of the national polity. A test conducted by an educator revealed that this ideology did not persist in the minds of ­those it

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targeted. Historian Migita Hiroki draws attention to a 1938 research paper written by an educational psychologist, Narazaki Asatarō, who gravely lamented the results of a test given to a total of 3,474 students. They w ­ ere fourth and fifth graders in public ­middle school and fourth graders in girls’ high school in Nagano Prefecture. In ­either case, the students had finished primary education. The test, which was conducted in 1934, first defined national polity, or kokutai, as “the state of Japan is ruled by the emperors who have an unbroken line in history” and then asked questions: for example, “Describe your thoughts if you have had an experience when you ­were grateful for the national polity.” Seventy p ­ ercent of the students answered by checking e­ ither “no such experience” or left the question blank. Also, for the question “Did you learn the graciousness of the national polity at school?” ­those who answered yes ­were, for fifth graders, 4.4 ­percent; for fourth graders, 3.8 ­percent; and for the girls’ high school, 15.2 ­percent. Less than 1 ­percent of students agreed that the veneration of the Photo­graph and the photo­ graphs of the imperial f­amily taught them the importance of the national polity.104 Overall, the students ­were unable to articulate the national polity and at a loss when questioned about it. Migita concludes that this shows the state ideology failed to penetrate the population. It is also likely that, in my view, the students felt able to be honest about their indifference in the mid-1930s, which is unimaginable in the early 1940s. Imperial citizens’ knowledge about the national polity can be also glimpsed in the Ministry of Education’s Survey on the Education of Adult Males, or Sōtei kyōiku chōsa, a set of written exams given as a part of military draft examinations of Japa­nese male youths at the age of twenty. It is a ten-­minute test with ten questions. Created around 1900, the test was given nationwide from 1905, and became standardized at the nationwide level in 1931.105 One of three sections of this test was dedicated to “moral education and social studies” (shūshin and kōmin); it examines knowledge of the emperor system, geography, and science. The 1934 test provides two questions regarding the emperor system. One question asks the imperial year (kōki) of 1934 (“Which imperial year is it this year since Emperor Jinmu’s enthronement? Choose one: 1594, 1934, 2594, 2934”), and another tests the draftees’ knowledge of the wording of the Imperial Rescript on Education. The questions w ­ ere answered correctly by 67.4 ­percent and 70.6 ­percent of the draftees, respectively. The percentages of correct answers ­were lower among ­those who had completed only primary education and higher among t­ hose who had completed secondary education.106 An overview of the questions on the emperor system reveals that three questions ­were repeated: the wording of the Imperial Rescript on Education, the name of the first emperor, and the imperial year. Practical knowledge of festivities of the imperial year, for example, ties them to test takers’ everyday lives, through



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collective, nationalized activities of special meals, putting on clean and fine outfits, cleaning one’s ­house, decorating the gate with the national flag, and so on. The focus on the duty of imperial subjects to serve the emperor’s military as stated in the Imperial Rescript on Education is also appropriate for draftees. ­These questions suggest the national polity was not a philosophy to learn. Instead, one experienced it through radio-­listening, veneration of the Photo­graph, bowing to the shrine of the Photo­graph and in the direction of the Imperial Palace, and daily practices connected to cele­brations of imperial events. The following account by a fourth grader boy elucidates the product of “Japan’s emperor-­centered society for surveillance,” as coined by Fujitani. The boy writes about Hirohito’s visit to Hokkaido, from September 24 to October 12 in 1936. The emperor’s train passed Shiranuka station, twenty-­five kilo­meters from where the boy lived, but Hirohito did not visit his village. My ­father left for Shiranuka town at three in the morning to venerate His Majesty when it was still dark. I ­really, ­really wanted to go with him, but gave it up. . . . ​All of my ­family stopped working and came back home early from the fields around noon. We cleaned both inside and outside our ­house, and put on special clothes. . . . ​Big s­ ister said, “The Emperor’s train ­will pass in three minutes.” With her cue, we prayed facing to the direction of Shiranuka town. Grand­mother loudly chanted, “namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu” (Hail Amida Buddha, hail Amida Buddha) and we bowed deeply. The image of a picture [e in Japa­ nese] that depicted the Emperor’s train with the chrysanthemum’s emblem and His Majesty’s gracious figure came to my mind. (emphasis added)107 As this account reveals, the framework for p ­ eople’s experience of the imperial visit was provided by Photo­graph veneration practices. The boy’s f­ amily bows without seeing the ­actual emperor and imagines him in his train.108 The timetable of Hirohito’s train was made available so that ­people actually went to bow to the passing train at the station, or they bowed in the direction where it was ­running. Also, this account reveals in­ter­est­ing generational differences in receiving the imperial pro­gress. For the boy’s grand­mother, as her Buddhist chanting suggests, the emperor is conflated with indigenous and Buddhist deities. For a younger generation, including the boy and his siblings who bowed, the veneration confirms membership in the modernized state, constructed by nationwide networks of transportation punctually operating minute by minute, and of information that reached out via mass media even to t­ hose who lived in marginal locations of the empire. For both generations, the princi­ple of non-­v iewing belief operates, but for the latter it is firmly embedded in the networks of the imperial rule.

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What should be also noted is the recursivity of the way vari­ous media reverberate and resonate with each other to reinforce non-­v iewing veneration practices of the emperor. It was a “picture,” the boy wrote—­neither a newspaper photo­graph nor the goshin’ei itself—­that gave him a concrete image of the emperor and his special train. In this context, it is very likely that the picture the boy refers to was a reproduction of a painting (often based on the photo­graph) of the emperor and his train, which appeared as a supplement of a newspaper or a magazine such as King (Kingu) for adults, or Boy’s Club (Shōnen kurabu) for boys, or also possibly on a postcard. Such circulating, widely available images facilitated the imperial citizen’s imagination.

Changes and Contradictions of Newspaper Photo­g raphs and Nonfiction Films The emperor’s photo­graphs in mass media and film, which ­were arranged to emulate the conventions of Photo­graph exhibition, still contradicted the convention of non-­v iewing veneration. Unlike radio, ­these ­were “old” media that had already established themselves and that had served to promote the earlier images of Hirohito as a celebrity in the 1920s. In this context, the change of the pre­sen­ta­tional mode of Hirohito from star to god-­emperor was gradual, with a shift taking place around the mid-1930s.109 An immediate impetus to intensify veneration of the emperor was most likely the 1935 debate on the emperor-­as-­organ theory (tennō kikan setsu). The ­legal scholar and statesman Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) was denounced for his concept of constitutional monarchy, in which he held that the state was sovereign and the emperor exercised his authority as the state’s highest constitutional organ. His opponents, who contended that the emperor himself was the sovereign, saw his works as lèse-­majesté and violations of the emperor’s divinity. Minobe resigned from parliament, and his books w ­ ere banned. Among the mea­sures and guidelines the Ministry of Education implemented in response to this po­liti­ cal incident was the compilation of Cardinal Princi­ples of National Polity (Kokutai no hongi). The ministry also intensified the guidelines to preserve the Photo­graph. They advised schools that the shrine should be built of concrete to make it fireproof. Occasional airings ­were suggested b ­ ecause of the humidity retained by concrete. The guidelines also provided tips on how to prevent bugs from eating the Photo­graph.110 It is also noteworthy that the publication of Booklet of the Memorial Tower of Education (Kyōiku tō shi) in 1937, edited by the Imperial Education Association (Teikoku kyōiku kai, established in 1896), commemorated a list of educators who



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died to protect the Photo­graph.111 The booklet was published as a part of a construction proj­ect for a memorial tower, to commemorate students and teachers who ­were killed in the 1934 Muroto hurricane. However, notably, the booklet honored not only ­those who ­were killed by the hurricane, but also included a short history of deaths to protect the Photo­graph. According to the booklet, twenty-­ eight deaths had been caused by attempts to protect the Photo­graph since 1872. The episodes include vari­ous cases: a school principal of a Japa­nese school in Seoul rushed into a burning building to move the Photo­graph and died in a fire in 1918; a young female teacher died in front of a school shrine in a fire caused by the G ­ reat Kanto earthquake in 1923, shouting “The Photo­graph! The Photo­graph!”; and many ­others. The booklet praised ­these as honorable deaths, out of loyalty for the emperor (junshoku; literally meaning “death to honor one’s calling”).112 (See fig. 1.3.) Furthermore, the pre­sen­ta­tion of imperial f­ amily members in the newspapers also became standardized around 1937. Instead of alluding to celebrity photos, the layout of the imperial f­ amily portrait was reor­ga­nized so that newspaper photo­graphs paralleled the exhibiting arrangement of the Photo­graph. The newspaper used the official Photo­graph, goshin’ei, of the imperial ­couple of 1928 and laid it out so that the emperor’s photo­graph was on the left-­hand side of the viewer and the empress’s photo­graph on the right; ­these same photo­graphs ­were used ­every year, whereas the c­ hildren’s photo­graphs ­were updated.113 The emperor and the empress are shown in individual frames separately, similar to the way their portrait photo­graphs ­were exhibited at school ceremonies. Their ­children, too, are individually framed, with few exceptions. This arrangement does not give a sense of an intimate bond or collectivity with the f­ amily, but imitates the exhibition of their photo­graphs at public institutions. The layout of newspaper photo­graphs was arranged so that they mirrored the protocol of Photo­graph veneration in order to encourage the readers to respond to them accordingly, although newspaper readership was more or less a private practice that could not have functioned like Photo­graph veneration, which was conducted in public space. Again, the recursiveness of the veneration rituals in this mass media environment should be noted. An episode offered by historian Iwamoto Tsutomu is suggestive for understanding how newspaper photo­graphs of the emperor had now come to be treated with care. His ­mother, who was the wife of a schoolteacher, clipped newspaper photo­graphs of the emperor and the empress and saved them in an envelope before she disposed of the papers.114 Not every­one would have been this meticulous, but her careful act was not unusual e­ ither, and it documents the prescriptive treatment of the newspaper photo­graphs. Similarly to the newspaper photo­graph, film pre­sen­ta­tion of Hirohito underwent changes to adopt the Photo­graph veneration conventions, albeit with

FIGURE 1.3.  Front page of Osaka Asahi shinbun January 1, 1937.



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difficult contradictions. On the 1928 enthronement of Hirohito, cinematographer Fujinami Takeaki recollects that he was determined to get a close-up of Hirohito ­because, in his view, it had entertainment value. He notes, “I believed that the genre of newsreels should capture His Majesty’s face as large as pos­si­ble and His presence in full.”115 ­There are also several films in which Hirohito is shown as an energetic, friendly, and intimate young emperor, up u ­ ntil around 1930. For example, he is dressed in regular clothes, even with an umbrella in his hand, during his visit to the Kansai region in 1929 (Tennō heika kansai gyōko; 1929, 24 minutes, owned by National Film Center, Tokyo). His pale-­colored tie shows from his coat collar, and he has knickerbockers and a fedora on. He takes his hands in and out of his pockets while walking. In March 1930, when he inspected the most recent developments of the reconstruction of Tokyo, which was recovering from the 1923 Greater Kanto earthquake, he briskly gets in and out of his car and looks around, shown in medium bust shot. Then, he walks smiling ­toward the camera in the Sumida Park (Kagayaku dai Tokyo; 1930, 15 minutes, owned by National Film Center, Tokyo). The pre­sen­ta­tion of such a casual, intimate, engaging, and energetic monarch was quite common in early 1930s films. Among extant films of the emperor, the number of military review films increases over time, especially since the 1931 Manchurian Incident. Yet, even in such footage of military reviews, his activities are captured by cinematographers from a relatively close shooting position; he is shown in a medium bust shot, for example, at a graduation ceremony for the Imperial Japa­nese Army Acad­emy in a newsreel (Yomiuri shinbun hassei nyūsu No. 7, 1937, owned by National Film Center, Tokyo). He is shown as the ruler, but is not yet a godly presence at this point. The decisive change fi­nally took place in film around 1940, when newsreel productions w ­ ere merged and rationalized by the state. To provide a very brief overview, Japa­nese newsreel production had been an unstable and precarious business since the genre emerged in the early 1930s. It was mainly newspaper companies that made an effort to provide newsreels regularly, since the newsreels ­were a venue to promote the visibility of newspapers and increase their subscribers, although the production costs w ­ ere burdensome.116 The war with China in 1937 triggered a newsreel boom, but it was short-­lived. The productions ­were costly not only ­because of the overseas transportation of the prints, negatives, and staff cameramen but also ­because censorship on vari­ous issues, including military classified information and information about the imperial ­house­hold, made prompt and regular distribution difficult. Therefore, the state’s intervention into the business to force companies to merge, establishing the production com­pany Nihon eiga sha to distribute the newsreel Nippon News (Nippon nyūsu), seemed a reasonable solution that would guarantee regular distribution.

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Nippon News began weekly distribution as the sole war­time newsreel, beginning in June 1940.117 Typical issues ran for about seven or eight minutes. According to the 1939 Film Law, screening of this newsreel was mandatory, right before pre­sen­ta­tion of dramatic feature-­length films in movie theaters. The run of the Nippon News newsreel from 1940 to 1945 best illustrates how veneration of the Photo­graph was fi­nally extended to film production and viewing. By then, the Photo­graph was widespread, as it had increasingly been ever since distribution began at the end of the nineteenth ­century. At schools, on national holidays, depending on their size and bud­get, the principal, wearing white gloves, took the Photo­graphs out from their shrine, brought them to the ceremonial hall, and placed them in the front of the hall. The attendants bowed 90 degrees to worship them and made sure to cast their gaze downward and not to look at the Photo­graphs during the ceremony. The Photo­graphs w ­ ere approximately ten by twelve inches (254 × 305 mm) each, and it must have been hard to see them clearly in a large assembly hall, even if one tried.118 Key points to keep in mind are that the Photo­graphs w ­ ere placed at a distance from the attendants and that they showed frontal shots of the emperor and the empress. It was Nippon News that standardized the filmic format to pres­ent Hirohito. In ­these newsreels, the national anthem and an inter-­title ordering viewers to take off their hats invariably precede news of the emperor, whereas t­ hese devices w ­ ere used only sporadically in the other, earlier newsreels of the late 1930s. The first installment of Nippon News, filled with reports on b ­ attles in China and Eu­rope, begins with an entry on an Imperial Pro­gress by Hirohito. The headline of the first episode reads, “Take off your hats, Emperor’s Visit to the Kansai region (Tokyo, Kyoto)” (Datsubō, Tennō heika kansai gojunkō [Tokyo, Kyoto]; Nippon News No. 1, June 11, 1940).119 Entries featuring the emperor ­were always introduced at the beginning of the newsreel, preceded by an inter-­title that commands, “Take off your hats” (Datsubō).120 Extant prints of Nippon News also show that extra blank frames followed the inter-­title, which ­were presumably intended to allow the audience time to prepare for the emperor’s image on screen by straightening their backs and making an appropriate posture.121 This ritualized film viewing was initiated by the “Take off your hats” command, which corresponds to and reiterates the daily practices of imperial citizens, at least in public space. For example, when the emperor was addressed in conversation or speech, both the speaker and the audience, which would ­needless to say already be standing at attention, had to straighten their backs.122 (See fig. 1.4.) Ele­ments of Photo­graph veneration even extended into the mode of production of newsreels. In the first issue of Nippon News, accompanied by the national anthem, the imperial car leaves the Palace for Tokyo Station, where Hirohito boards the imperial train to set out for the Kansai region. ­People on the street,



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including members of a patriotic ­women’s organ­ization, bow to his car at 90 degrees as instructed by protocol. A cannon celebrates this imperial event. The footage ends with the moving train of the emperor accompanied by audacious symphony ­music. This short footage shows that the emperor is the center of the public space, and that his movement should be understood as expansion of the empire. Most remarkably, in this newsreel, what the viewer sees is a car, not the emperor himself, but still the viewer believes or is supposed to understand that the unseen emperor rides within it, as it is indicated by the news title, the announcement of the news presenter, the way ­people bow to it, and the cannon salute. But he does not even greet imperial citizens from the car, and for that ­matter the viewer cannot see if he is ­really inside it. In this way the non-­v iewing princi­ple of Photo­graph veneration was now adapted for pre­sen­ta­tion in newsreels. Similar to this first Nippon News report about the emperor are numerous entries where his presence is suggested but not shown. Even when Hirohito does appear on screen, early 1940s footage mostly pres­ents his body in a rigid manner, very often frontally, with stylized posture and limited movements. He is no longer a vigorous and energetic figure, as he was in 1920s and early 1930s films. The camera employs long shots, which create a sense of distance between the viewers and the emperor and also place him against

FIGURE 1.4.  The inter-­title of newsreel Nippon News, vol. 1 (June 11, 1940), mandates the viewers to take off their hats by noting “Datsubō.”

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the background. No close-up of the emperor was used, and even bust shots ­were almost non­ex­is­tent.123 Overall, rigid frontality as well as static imagery of Hirohito’s body ­were emphasized. The cause of this pre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor through such remote, diminished images has been technically attributed by scholars to censorship and restricted freedom of cinematographers, but the anticipated effect was to create a filmic version of Photo­graph veneration (see fig. 1.5). Technically speaking, Hirohito’s war­time films could have, instead, dramatized his action, presented him fully in motion, and shown his face in close-up by employing vari­ous shooting and editing techniques used by dramatic films. Such techniques w ­ ere widely used to pres­ent con­temporary rulers or religious leaders in a lively, engaging manner in a variety of con­temporary examples, such as Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the W ­ ill (1934), or news footage of F ­ ather Charles Coughlin, or Franklin D. Roo­se­velt in The March of Time (1935–1936). Also, Japa­nese news could have continued to portray Hirohito in a respectful manner as an intimate and casual ruler, as they had earlier, similar to foreign examples such as George VI in the British Movietone newsreels.124 ­These examples reveal vari­ous ways that the film medium presented leadership at the time: leaders gave passionate, vigorous speeches, conversed with the general public in an engaging manner, or presented themselves assertively to viewers. This contrast with the static and “photographic” portrayal of the Japa­nese emperor in the early 1940s is highlighted by a closer look at two non-­Japanese filmic pre­sen­ta­tions using film editing techniques and cinematography to pres­ent leadership and kingship. One is Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the ­Will (shown in Japan in 1942) and the other is an episode (December 16, 1937) of the Movietone newsreel. Triumph of the ­Will was skillfully and aesthetically edited to emphasize the leader’s charm, strength, passion, intelligence, and empathy. The shooting was well planned and prepared, with freedom of cinematography and generous funding given to the production team. In this documentary of the 1934 Party Assembly, Hitler’s body and face are captured from dif­fer­ent directions and ­angles, from the bottom to the top, and from the back to the front, to visualize “charisma” in Max Weber’s sense.125 Logistics, shooting, and editing w ­ ere all maximized to create cinematic appeal. On the other hand, the 1937 episode of the British Movietone newsreel successfully establishes the intimate image of the demo­cratic constitutional monarch. To celebrate King George VI’s birthday, the short news begins with a cannon salute, followed by cuts of him accepting salutes. The last shots show the king walking in casual clothes with citizens and conversing with them. The news presenter solemnly states that he is “the king of the p ­ eople, for the p ­ eople, with the ­people.” This slogan twists words from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (“government of the p ­ eople, by the p ­ eople, for the p ­ eople”), which is prob­ably meant to give a touch of democracy and liberalism to monarchy.



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FIGURE 1.5.  The pre­sen­ta­tion of the imperial ­couple at the ceremony of the Japa­nese Empire’s 2,600th anniversary in newsreel Nippon News, vol. 23-2 (November 13, 1940).

In contrast with such pre­sen­ta­tions of glorified or engaging leadership, Japa­ nese film minimized Hirohito’s corporeality, dynamic movement, and sense of interactivity as a screen character. Early 1940s film pre­sen­ta­tion of Hirohito is “photographic,” that is, very much like the goshin’ei. In other words, it is not the compelling visuality of charisma, but remoteness and unattainability that are emphasized. Ironically, this goshin’ei pre­sen­ta­tion meant that the camera and the film audience had to strug­gle even to differentiate the emperor from the rest of the ­people in the frame. Whereas Triumph of the ­Will fully mobilized film editing and shooting techniques to aestheticize the Führer, Nippon News went against the medium’s capability to create dramatic moments and dynamism. As a result, for example, when the emperor reviews troops with high-­ranking officers, it is hard to single out his body from a distance u ­ nless t­ here is a visual cue for the viewer. One such cue is his white h ­ orse. Japa­nese film pre­sen­ta­tions avoided building any concrete images of Hirohito. This is highlighted when the pre­sen­ta­tions are contrasted with Frank Capra’s nonfiction film Know Your ­Enemy—­Japan (1945), a compilation of confiscated Japa­nese dramatic feature film and newsreel footage that was reedited with a new narration. It explained that Hirohito has the power of the president of the United

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States, the prime minister of G ­ reat Britain, or the premier of the Soviet Union as well as the powers of religious leaders such as the pope, the archbishop of the Canterbury, and the head of the Rus­sian Orthodox Church. In the film, Capra deployed Nippon News footage of Hirohito’s military review, in which he accepts salutes while mounted on his white ­horse. By rearranging the footage and providing his own narration, Capra successfully portrayed Hirohito as a corporeal, power­ful monarch in this film. On the contrary, Hirohito in Japa­nese newsreels is shown as a remote presence, in much the same way his small photo­graph was exhibited at school assemblies for veneration. For example in his military review in Nippon News, vol. 241 (January 11, 1945), he is shown at a distance, and the marching troops that pass by in front of the camera also make it difficult for the spectators to see him. Scholars have argued that such pre­sen­ta­tions w ­ ere caused by the par­tic­u­lar way that military censors required crews to set up their cameras. The cameramen ­were assigned several shooting spots in advance and not allowed to move around as they wished.126 This meant, it is argued, that both the director and the cinematographer did not have mobility and flexibility to materialize a three-­dimensional filmic vision. Yet, just as the goshin’ei photo­graph was not meant to be viewed but to be venerated, so it is with Hirohito’s films. This treatment of his body was closely related to, and defined by, extension of the ritualized space for venerating imperial portraits (see fig. 1.5). When the emperor began regularly appearing in newsreels in 1940, or­ga­nized distribution and veneration rituals of the imperial portrait w ­ ere already stabilized in mainland Japan. The viewers ­were expected to respond to Hirohito on the screen with awe in association with veneration of the Photo­graph, even when the emperor was only seen in the distant background, when only his car was shown, or when marching troops disrupted the view. The mode of filmic pre­sen­ta­tion of Hirohito was, thus, an extension of the veneration of the Photo­graph. However, ­these ­were expectations and protocols, whereas the mode of reception of newspaper photo­graphs and films is another ­matter entirely.

Disruptions and Integration To conclude this chapter, I discuss resistant reactions from imperial citizens, and then briefly touch on the question of the efficacy of the Shinto Directives immediately ­after the end of the war. As I have demonstrated, the mediascape of Japa­ nese society in the twentieth ­century, in par­tic­u­lar from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, was a conflicted one. The rituals of Photo­graph veneration at schools and other public institutions prohibited viewers from looking at the imperial portrait



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photo­graph, a protocol that contained or was extended to other mass media. The radio manipulated the transmission and did not broadcast the emperor’s voice. The pre­sen­ta­tion of newspaper photo­graphs and films was reor­ga­nized in the late 1930s to become an extension of Photo­graph veneration, though the viewing practices and experiences of ­these media ­were not regulated with the same intensity as t­ hose in public institutions. T ­ here was room for taking liberties, for readers and audiences to look at the emperor’s image with a scrutinizing gaze. Nevertheless, even with this kind of leeway, protocols and rituals to ensure the emperor’s sacredness penetrated society during mobilization for total war. The everyday life of imperial citizens, which was situated in this media environment of recursive images and protocols, is well illustrated by the following veteran’s memoir. The navy sailor Watanabe, whose autobiographical account I introduced in the beginning of this chapter, recollected in his memoir Shattered God (Kudakareta kami) his feelings when he actually saw the emperor. When Watanabe served as a ceremonial guard in the year 1943 on the Musashi, Hirohito came to inspect the battleship: “I trembled from an extreme sense of honor and excitement to have a chance to be near to His Majesty’s Jeweled Body, and I thought ‘Now that (I have seen him), I am ready to die anytime without any regret.’ ”127 He describes the excitement and deep emotion of an ideal imperial soldier responding to the emperor’s presence. In the year 1943 ardent, patriotic, and selfless actions to protect the Photo­graph had already become prescriptive and ­were no longer challenged, at least officially speaking. However, the rest of Watanabe’s account is even more illuminating, as it shows the ambiguity of the imperial citizens’ understanding of the emperor. He continues, “The facial features of the emperor w ­ ere very dif­fer­ent from what I i­magined from the imperial portrait. . . . ​ His face resembled that of my village’s municipal accountant, Mr. Tanaka.”128 Watanabe was overwhelmed by excitement but at the same time, his mind rec­ ords his observation of the resemblance between the emperor and another, lowly, ­human. Such conflicted, chaotic, and heterogeneous reception of dif­fer­ent mass media constituted the everydayness of war­time imperial citizens. It could be said that, given such responses, it was the imperial subjects who had dual bodies, or even multiple bodies, in their identity formation. This contrasts with the duality of the emperor’s body, which was explained as at once godly and h ­ uman. As demonstrated above, the veneration rituals of the imperial photo­graph ­were expanded to dif­fer­ent media, reconfiguring their modes of production and reception of the emperor’s image. On one hand, they served to reinforce the formative space of national unity, the subjects’ loyalty to the emperor, and their docile bodies, as existing scholarship has emphasized. On the other hand, a unifying experience of imperial subjecthood was constantly undermined and challenged by at least the following three channels: First, the generational memory of

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Hirohito in the 1920s as an intimate, attractive star. Second, newspaper photo­ graphs and films of the emperor ­were consumed personally or in a dark movie theater, so that they w ­ ere viewable for scrutiny, even though state protocols expected the audience to view them according to the rituals of the Photo­graph. Fi­nally, imperial citizens who resisted and reacted against the state’s protocols for venerating the Photo­graph. Though the role of the Photo­graph in colonized and occupied territories has not been studied fully, a few documents from ­Korea rec­ord such re­sis­tance. A Japa­nese military staff officer, Kanda Masatane, recollects that the condition of school ceremonies around 1931 in K ­ orea was very hostile: “As a ­matter of fact, ­people’s hatred of Japan was per­sis­tent and Anti-­Japan and Pro-­America thought was rapidly spreading, . . . ​fierce graffiti in the school rest­room read ‘we await the outbreak of war between Japan and the US.’ At the school ceremony of Three Major Holidays teachers had to stand amidst the students to prevent incidents of lèse-­majesté, and as soon as we finished singing the national anthem we ended the ceremony.”129 Given how quickly this school ceremony had to be wrapped up, ­under the circumstances described by Kanda it would have been difficult even to keep the Photo­graph safe during the ceremony and it is doubtful that the students bowed to it.130 ­There are insufficient documents to extrapolate from this description to the general conditions of public schools for Koreans, or to investigate how circumstances changed l­ ater, but nonetheless this testimony is suggestive.131 In Japan proper, u ­ nder the category of lèse-­majesté cases, the Special ­Police Monthly Rec­ords (Tokkō geppō) rec­ord vari­ous doubts, resisting voices, and straightforward responses to Photo­graph veneration. For example, a remark made by a thirty-­six-­year-­old man in Amagasaki city who was arrested for lèse-­majesté in 1943 was noted: “Since the newspapers carry many of the emperor’s photo­graphs, it is a futile effort to preserve the imperial portrait photo­ graph. In fact, the imperial ­family does not rely on rationed rice as we do. We are struggling. ­There is no need to preserve the imperial photo­graph.”132 The man’s remark reveals his frustration about the emperor’s privileges, but more importantly it also demonstrates his awareness of the contradictory nature of the Photo­graph vis-­à-­v is newspaper photo­graphs. The cases that the special thought police dealt with varied from graffiti by anonymous writers to free-­spirited remarks by young students to antiwar remarks by an ordinary old farmwoman. The contents also varied from s­ imple, obscene slanders of the imperial c­ ouple to gossip to elaborate compositions filled with leftist language sent to a government office by an anonymous writer and to casual, frank remarks of doubts about current affairs.



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­There ­were also entries on film-­related graffiti in 1943: On the 3rd of July, in Hiroshima city, two lèse-­majesté graffiti (fukei rakugakki) w ­ ere found: “The Empress Nagako . . .” [what followed was not described in the Rec­ord, possibly it was a sexual slander.] One of them was on the mud wall of men’s bathroom, Tōhō movie theater, and another on the wall of the smoking room of the movie theater Tenshi kan.133 A twenty year old male postal delivery man, while seeing Nippon News says on June 27th, “Her Majesty (The Empress) is not pretty, is she?” [and other comments] (Kōgō heika beppin de naide naika [un’nun]) in a Tōhō movie theater, Tokushima City. He was arrested for lèse-­majesté on July 7th.134 Such film-­related entries reveal aspects of the reception of the emperor and the empress that w ­ ere not in accordance with Photo­graph veneration at public institutions, to say the least.135 ­There is also a description of an anonymous letter sent to the Osaka prefectural governor in 1941 with a clipping of a newspaper photo­graph from Osaka Mainichi shinbun. The clipping was of a photo­graph of Hirohito’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, and the letter read as follows: Look at this face. I d ­ on’t know which kind of rice ration tickets he gets, A [kō] class tickets or B [otsu]. Judging from his appearance, fat like a pig, he is surely not eating and drinking only what is rationed. He totally ­doesn’t look like ­those who eat Nanking rice or oats like us. This is the face of one who drinks the national citizens’ blood and eats their flesh. Instead of making this kind of pretentious visit [to the Shrine], stop the war and stop fighting in China right now. Then our taxes w ­ ill decrease and we can eat as much as we like. My son who was killed in the war w ­ ill not be brought back by this bastard visiting and venerating the Yasukuni Shrine.136 It is significant that the newspaper photo­graph provided a space for criticism in this case. The rituals to venerate the imperial portrait photo­graph, goshin’ei, ­were designed to reinforce and imprint the divinity, authority, and dual god/human nature (arahitogami) of the emperor on the imperial citizen’s mind. Its veneration constructed and intensified a sense of the unity of Japa­nese imperial subjects and their loyalty to the emperor. However, it is also the case that the contradictory modes of pre­sen­ta­tion of the imperial portrait could be disruptive and open a

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space of criticism. On one hand, society was saturated with protocols and rituals. On the other hand, the conflicting media environment could undermine the reinforcement of monarchical divinity and power. In par­tic­u­lar, distortion of the specific nature of media is a key to understanding the ambiguities of the construction of the integral views of the emperor. By distortion I mean that the Photo­graph was treated as if it was the emperor himself, despite the fact it was mass-­produced and that filmmaking gave up dynamic filming and editing techniques and ended up producing static “photographic” films. The conflicting modes of pre­sen­ta­tion and reception of the media w ­ ere dissolved at once when the Shinto Directives w ­ ere issued to ban the state religion of Shinto, including goshin’ei veneration, in December 1945, a few months ­after the termination of war. The efficacy of the directives was that it liberated mass media, which was now able to pursue medium-­specific pre­sen­ta­tional techniques and approaches. Thus, the directives freed the mass media to depict the emperor in any way that would enhance his persona in postwar Japa­nese society.137 This eventually made pos­si­ble the advent of the postwar “­People’s Emperor,” to borrow the coinage of Kenneth Ruoff. As a follow-up to the Shinto Directives, Hirohito declared that he was not a god in his Rescript of Humanity Declaration (Ningen sengen) issued on January 1, 1946. This statement was visualized by changes in his public appearance such as wearing a suit instead of the uniform of the supreme military commander, highlighting his casual manner to ­people on the street, and depicting him in his role as an ordinary, though still imperial, male ­family member. Whereas the mid-­nineteenth-­century “humanization” of Eu­ro­pean monarchs had been propelled by the increasing accessibility of popu­lar print media as well as commercial objects featuring monarchs, the postwar Japa­nese monarchy was “humanized” by the Occupation government and subsequent changes of media pre­sen­ta­tion of Hirohito. During the Occupation period, the mass media was saturated with images of the emperor in a suit, visiting—­instead of inspecting—­numerous areas and cities to see his p ­ eople, and being a f­amily member. The abolishment of the Photo­graph amounted to a tremendous boon to the establishment of a new repre­sen­ta­tional strategy of the emperor, b ­ ecause it resolved three sets of ongoing conflicts: first, between the ritualized/invisible (Photo­graph veneration since the end of the nineteenth ­century) and the pop­u­ lar­ized/visible (celebrity in mass media from the 1920s to the early 1930s); second, between ritualized/invisible (Photo­graph veneration) versus ritualized/visible repre­sen­ta­tions (newspaper photo­graphs and films of the emperor from the mid 1930s through 1945); and, fi­nally, between the film medium’s dynamic creation of mobile, three-­dimensional body and compelling visual narratives versus the denial of this media-­specific power from the 1930s through 1945.



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In newsreels, the most drastic change a­ fter the termination of war is in the mode of pre­sen­ta­tion. The command for ritualized viewing was eliminated. Both the order to “Take off your hat” and the national anthem ­were gone, and newsreel entries featuring the emperor no longer appeared first. The introduction of close-­ups of the f­ aces of the emperor and the empress must have been quite striking for viewers, and even for cinematographers themselves, who w ­ ere accustomed to the format of earlier Nippon News. For example, Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako ­were shown in bust shots in postwar Nippon News, vol. 174 (May 10, 1949), celebrating the new constitution of the Japa­nese state. In Nippon News, vol. 176 (May 24, 1949), when they visited an exhibit in Yokohama, they ­were shown in the ­middle of a crowd, and their heads among the crowd are looked down upon from above. Such close-­ups and high-­angle shots, showing them among ordinary p ­ eople, would not have been used during the war. Editing techniques of alternating long shots and close-­ups to enhance the actuality of their presence and to establish the gaze of spectators foreshadow the advent of the postwar, televisual “popu­lar emperor system” (taishū tennō sei). Nevertheless, a close look at the above 1949 newsreel reveals that, though the mode of filmic pre­sen­ta­tion changed, the emperor was not deprived of authority. In the news of the cele­bration of the new, demo­cratic constitution, which was a symbolic event for the new polity of Japan, the emperor and the empress stood on the highest stage in front of Japa­nese citizens, even higher than Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru. The news presenter used honorific language to describe the imperial ­couple, and the attendants also all loudly cheered banzai.

2 CONTESTED MOTHERHOOD AND ENTERTAINMENT FILM

As the film historian Peter High puts it, “one of the strong points of Japa­nese cinema had been its rich tradition of variegated and vivid portrayals of femininity. In the late thirties, especially, the screen had featured an ever-­expanding repertoire of female ‘types.’ ” He also notes that “portrayals of ­women in Japa­nese cinema teemed with vitality.”1 In spite of the richness of portrayals of ­women in films of the era, gender-­focused examination of popu­lar films has been absent from scholarship ­until very recently. This late development of gendered analy­sis of war­time entertainment films can be attributed to three primary ­factors. First, in the broadest context, as the film historian Patrice Petro points out, non-­ Hollywood national cinemas have often been characterized as “alternative” to American entertainment films, and it is the genres of artistic or experimental films and auteur films that scholars have focused on.2 This has often prevented film critics and scholars, in par­tic­ul­ar ­those outside Japan, from looking into Japa­nese entertainment films. Second, war­time films of the Axis powers have long been treated by both domestic and international scholars as monolithic expressions of fanat­i­cism lacking in complexity and therefore unworthy of research.3 Third, the examination of gender in Japa­nese film studies has focused predominantly on the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­women in auteur films, and attention has very often been paid to the Modern Girl, or moga (modan gāru): a media discourse of images of sexually deviant, Westernized ­women who embrace materialism and consumerism in the 1920s. Though the war­time entertainment film has been understudied, and gender construction in cinematic texts has been neglected in Japa­nese film studies, ­these 70

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are impor­tant topics. First of all, ­women in the war­time era is a crucial topic, as the film historian Antonia Lant points out, b ­ ecause “the war machine required images and narratives of total mobilization, in which the word ‘total’ was a euphemism for, above all, the inclusion of ­women.”4 The norms of gender drastically changed from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, contrary to the general view that war­time Japa­nese ­women ­were simply expected to bear and rear c­ hildren for the state, to follow such ideological constructs, and to mobilize for war work. As a few feminist historians have pointed out, on the contrary, state public policies on ­women oscillated between pronatalist ideology and the demands for w ­ omen’s ­labor mobilization, as observed in other war­time nations. It is the genre of “­woman’s film” (josei eiga) that, through its repre­sen­ta­tion of femininities, most articulates the ambivalence and contradictory visions of the state. In this chapter, by “­woman’s film,” I mean inclusively and broadly films that center on female protagonists.5 Popu­lar entertainment films around the time of the 1937 Second Sino-­Japanese War portray a bright picture of modern life, romance, and upward mobility, in which female characters carefully and shrewdly situate themselves, their onscreen fantasy roles balanced with the ongoing reconfiguration of public policies, laws, and gender norms of womanhood. Vari­ous heroines in 1930s films, particularly ­those produced by Shōchiku, one of the major studios, witness and rec­ord an era of change and complexity. ­These heroines range from an el­derly ­mother in love with the ­father of her daughter-­in-­law, in ­Mother’s Love Letter (Haha no koibumi; directed by Nomura Hiromasa, 1935) to a young w ­ oman with a glamorous wealthy upper-­class life in A Lady’s Confession (Aru shukujo no kokuhaku; directed by Hara Kenkichi, 1938) to an extremely in­de­pen­dent and able car saleswoman in ­Woman in Tokyo (Tokyo no josei; directed by Fushimi Osamu, 1939) to a heroine sent to Paris on business in Queen of the Wind (Kaze no joō; directed by Sasaki Yasushi, 1938) to a ­woman ­lawyer in New Dialogue on ­Woman (Shin josei mondō; directed by Sasaki Yasushi, 1939) to a struggling ordinary ­woman from the countryside working in a city in Spring Thunder (Shunrai; directed by Sasaki Keisuke, 1939). The entertainment film had an inexhaustible list of female characters, who provided multiple points of identification for female viewers. Romance between men and ­women was also celebrated in films such as Warm Currents (Danryū; directed by Yoshimura Kōzaburō, 1938), Beautiful Neighbor (Utsukushiki rinjin; directed by Ōba Hideo, 1940), and Let’s Sing Together (Kimi yo tomoni utawan; directed by Hirukawa Iseo, 1941), though screenplays also began incorporating motifs of current events, such as Manchurian settlers (kaitaku dan), raising military ­horses, and increasing ­labor shortages in farming areas and the transportation industry. The diversity of entertainment film, however, dwindles in the last stage of the war.

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In my exploration of the dramatic films of this period, I focus on films that center on ­mothers since the visual and cinematic discourses of motherhood effectively and efficiently illustrate the pro­cess of gender constructions and norms. They also reveal the contexts of both production and spectatorship, concepts that I do not limit to film production or to viewers of specific films, but use to include wider groups of cultural references and media recipients of the era, all of which are implicated in the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­mothers on screen. In this chapter, I begin, first, by introducing the visual cultural discourses of motherhood that the state, suffragists, and patriotic w ­ omen activists participated in and developed during the 1930s based on their own interests. It is necessary to provide a picture of how the discourse of motherhood was accepted and contested in the broader public space to which film culture belongs. Again, Lant’s methodology is illuminating in her examination of postcards, posters, magazine illustrations, films, laws, and the rhe­toric of total mobilization in ­England during World War II: “War­time spectators are mobilized through a host of media and events besides that of cinema ­going; the experience of screen narrative and image is not isolated from experience around and beyond the cinema. This is always the case, but the extreme conditions of war now make it vis­i­ble.”6 The examination of cross-­media intertextuality establishes discursive and visual contexts of film culture and confirms that the notion of motherhood was an arena of negotiation, of conflicts and clashes between state control and ­women’s agency and between prescriptive gender norms and visual and narrative pleasures. Second, I examine two hits of the late 1930s, both of which have ­mothers as protagonists: A ­Mother’s ­Music (Haha no kyoku; directed by Yamamoto Satsuo, 1937) and The Love-­Troth Tree (Aizen katsura; directed by Nomura Hiromasa, 1938). Both films assert ­women’s agency as ­mothers, along with emphasis on the repre­sen­ta­tion of the “modern life” (modan seikatsu) of 1930s consumer culture, as the film historian Ginoza Naomi shows.7 While the newly emerging modernized lifestyle in the late 1920s, including Western-­style residences, expensive order-­ made Western clothes, tennis, radio, and the gramophone, had been available to limited numbers of the wealthy class only, in the mid-1930s a diluted version with downscaled luxury became accessible to a broader group of urban dwellers ­because of economic and industrial development.8 The 1930s modern life retained a touch of Western culture, but it became localized, modified, and relatively affordable for consumers. The image of the Modern Girl, or moga, of the 1920s, who was an icon of the sexualized, aggressive consumer, had by the mid-1930s lost its threatening and dynamic character and become fused with ­women’s urban consumer culture.9 It is in this context that A ­Mother’s ­Music denies the class mobility of the ­mother, and that The Love-­Troth Tree affirms upward mobility. In both narratives, however, w ­ omen are connected

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to more comfortable materialist lifestyles. By examining t­ hese hit films, I explore the relationship among norms of motherhood, the economic boom, imperialism, and the repre­sen­ta­tion of gender. Third, I turn to a group of films from the early 1940s whose protagonists are again ­mothers, including The Army (Rikugun; directed by Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944). The central issue of motherhood in t­ hese films is duty to the state, which is part of a new femininity departing from late 1930s gender norms. The early 1940s films stress the state’s acknowledgement of w ­ omen’s nationalist ser­v ices, since ­mothers are now public actors in t­ hese films. To refer to t­ hese films and their pre­sen­ta­tion of a new femininity, I deploy the term “­mother film.” In film studies, mention of films about m ­ others immediately evokes the “maternal melodrama” genre. In Hollywood, this genre developed based on the influential narrative mold presented by Madame X (directed by Lionel Barrymore, 1929), which highlights the m ­ other’s self-­sacrifice in order to secure her child’s success and financial stability. The genre spans the period from the 1930s through the 1950s. To elaborate on the definition of “maternal melodrama” that Viviani deployed in his analy­sis of 1930s films, the film scholar Mary Ann Doane defines the term: “Maternal melodramas are scenarios of separation, of separation and return, or of threatened separation—­dramas which play out all the permutations of the mother/child relation.” Relying on this definition, I could refer to all the films about ­mothers I discuss in this chapter as “maternal melodrama,” but I refer to such early 1940s Japa­nese films as “­mother films” instead.10 The reason for this choice is that the conventional usage of the term “maternal melodrama” in Japa­nese film history strongly evokes the haha mono (the literal translation is “­mother genre”), whose representative works, Japa­nese variations of Madame X or Stella Dallas, ­were largely produced by a single studio, Daiei, during the postwar era.11 Thus, by using the term “­mother film,” I attempt to avoid conflation of the war­time films on m ­ others discussed ­here with the postwar “­mother genre.” Fi­nally, I discuss the repre­sen­ta­tion of working ­women in the last stage of total war in 1944 and 1945 by examining the auteur director Kurosawa’s Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku, 1944) and the film Three W ­ omen in the North (Kita no sannin; directed by Saeki Kiyoshi, 1945), in which the state’s pronatalist agenda is overshadowed by the image of ­women’s ser­v ice in the public sphere. In my discussion, Mary Ann Doane’s theorization of the 1940s Hollywood maternal melodrama in her Desire to Desire is instrumental for analy­sis of repre­sen­ ta­tions of Japa­nese ­mothers, and British feminist works such as Antonia Lant’s Blackout and the edited volumes by Gledhil and Swanson, Reinventing ­Women for War­time British Cinema and Nationalising Femininity, provide compelling insights in studying Japa­nese films.12 I believe that the reverse is also true: that is, that

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Japa­nese sources also provide insight into aspects of other national film traditions. To discuss Japa­nese war­time films along with studies on Hollywood and British films might seem odd, since it is conventional that one looks at the cultural products of the Axis and Allied countries separately to establish their differences.13 Nevertheless, comparison between so-­called fascist and liberal demo­ cratic states is quite fruitful, b ­ ecause the similar constellations of gender discourses among dif­fer­ent regimes highlights how the relation of gender to modernity—­that is, discourses of the inclusion and exclusion of ­women in the modern nation-­state—is shared by very dif­fer­ent nation-­states. In this chapter I stress the common social interests of dif­fer­ent nations, Japan and Britain in par­ tic­u­lar, in terms of the reconfiguration of norms of femininity within modern nation-­states. In addition to the perspectives provided by studies such as ­those mentioned above, another inspiration for this chapter is a now classic work by the art historian Wakakuwa Midori. Her Sensō ga tsukuru josei zō (The repre­sen­ta­tion of ­women as framed by war) was one of the first works to analyze Japa­nese war­time visual culture with an emphasis on gender and cross-­cultural comparison.14

Public Discourse and Visual Culture in the 1930s Motherhood is a key role assigned to ­women in the pro­cess of including them into and deploying them for nation building. Although the role originated from the earlier ideology of “good wife and wise ­mother” (ryōsai kenbo), which was principally targeted at upper-­and middle-­class w ­ omen in the late nineteenth ­century, the notion of motherhood promoted by the state from the 1930s through 1945 shifted emphasis to a classless vision of biological reproductivity as an crucial ele­ment of membership in the nation.15 A remarkable example is a ­legal mea­sure for population planning, the Outline Policy for Establishing Population Growth (Jinkō seisaku kakuritsu yōkō) of 1941. The outline set numerical objectives to increase the population to ten million in ten years and to lower the average age at marriage by three years. It also promoted an ideal of five ­children per ­couple and emphasized childbearing and rearing as the central issues for girls’ education.16 Already in 1939 the Ministry of Education had begun honoring ­couples with ten ­children and above. State emphasis on w ­ omen’s fertility, in a shift from educating w ­ omen to be “wise ­mothers,” is elucidated very well by the sociologists Nira Yuval-­Davis and Floya Anthias in an examination of gender construction as common denominator of vari­ous nation-­states. They summarize ­women’s roles as biological reproduc-

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ers of ethnic collectivities, maintainers of the bound­aries of ethnic groups, participants in the ideological reproduction of culture, and participants in po­liti­cal pro­cesses.17 In this sense, Japa­nese motherhood discourse can be understood as a variant of the mechanism of the modern nation-­state. The idea of the exemplary Japa­nese ­mother had been promoted since the turn of the c­ entury. The ­Mother of a Sailor (Suihei no haha), among the best-­known stories of such ­mothers, was initially introduced in 1904 in the First Nationally Compiled Textbook (Dai ikki kokutei kyōkasho) for national language, or kokugo, for higher elementary school. It continued to appear in both elementary and higher elementary school textbooks ­until the fifth edition of 1941, which was used through 1945. The story, set during the First Sino-­Japanese War (1894–1895), is about a letter to a sailor from his m ­ other, who is a fisherwoman. She writes of her frustration and disappointment that he has not done anything much in the war and suggests that he must give up his life to repay the emperor’s benevolence. The letter not only moved the sailor but also deeply impressed his superior officer.18 The ­mother’s willingness to surrender her son to the emperor as well as ­women’s role in childbearing and rearing w ­ ere strongly emphasized, and it is likely that the Ministry of Education kept reprinting the story for girls’ education b ­ ecause 19 of this pre­sen­ta­tion of an exemplary ­mother. According to the historian Kano Masanao, already in the early 1930s t­ here was increasing emphasis on the role of the ­mother, both by the state and in popu­lar culture. He points to one official campaign that established “­mother’s day” on March 6, 1931, the birthday of Empress Nagako (1903–2000; r. 1926–1989). The weeks before and ­after this day ­were filled with public events. He also refers to the term ­Mother ­under the Eyelids (Mabuta no haha), which became a popu­lar coinage in the early 1930s b ­ ecause of the popularity of a story written by novelist and playwright Hasegawa Shin (1884–1963). It was also adapted into a film of the same title, directed by Inagaki Hiroshi (1905–1980) in 1931. Inagaki is known for his exploration of modern-­day concerns set in the genre of period film, or jidaigeki. Set in premodern society, in the subgenre of the “travelling gambler,” or matatabi mono, the film depicts the wandering protagonist Chūtarō searching for his ­mother, from whom he was separated when he was very young. ­Every time he meets a ­woman of the right age, he suspects that she could be his m ­ other. When he fi­nally finds her, she is a successful business owner with a ­daughter from her second marriage, and she doubts Chūtarō’s identity and intentions. Through his stepsister’s mediation, Chūtarō and his ­mother are fi­nally re­united in the end. Kano argues that such cinematic and popu­lar cultural texts express nostalgia for the dissolving ie system (a traditional h ­ ouse­hold system with extended families led by a patriarch who secures the f­ amily’s property), in contrast with con­temporary

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highbrow lit­er­a­ture, which illustrates the oppression and conflict produced by this system.20 If so, Chūtarō seems to embody the anxiety of the emerging nuclear ­family in metropolitan areas as well as the alienation of urban workers. Yet I argue that it is more impor­tant that the ­mother must respond to her outlaw son’s needs and attend to his yearning, trauma, and quest for resolution, even at the risk of destroying what she has built up.21 The film makes it clear that it is a ­mother’s duty to be self-­sacrificial, and that she is single-­handedly responsible for her ­children. The discourse of motherhood was also deployed by female po­liti­cal actors. From their own po­liti­cal interests, feminists w ­ ere interested in elaborating on and deploying the notion of motherhood as a stepping-­stone to gain ­women’s suffrage and l­ egal protections of w ­ omen’s health and economic rights. Despite concerted lobbying, w ­ omen ­were denied the vote when universal male suffrage was established in 1925, but feminist activists continued to work to better w ­ omen’s lives through a wide range of efforts, from the introduction of birth control to the improvement of the condition of female workers. One of their activities was to raise the visibility of m ­ others, emphasizing that w ­ omen provide the most impor­tant contribution to the state by bearing and rearing c­ hildren. For example, Yamataka Shigeri (1899–1977) who was an ardent suffragist, journalist, and activist, or­ga­nized in 1934 the Alliance for the Promotion of a M ­ other and Child Protection Act (Bosei hogo hō seitei sokushin fujin renmei, which changed its name to Bosei hogo renmei in 1935). It lobbied the state to provide financial assistance to impoverished ­house­holds of ­women with ­children, in response to a rise in mother-­children double suicides caused by poverty that had been worsened by the Depression. The organ­ization chose the second Sunday of May as a Day of Motherhood Protection (Bosei hogo dē), holding an annual meeting and launching slogans such as “Protect ­Mothers” (Haha o mamore) and “Praise ­Mothers” (Haha o tataeyo), which ­were printed on badges and towels for distribution. The emphasis on w ­ omen’s roles as ­mothers by ­these suffragists conformed with the government’s promotion of w ­ omen’s biological reproductivity.22 Such w ­ omen’s activism was an impor­tant constituent of the visual culture of the era and should be regarded as a form of media, in the classic sense of Marshall McLuhan’s application of this notion to anything from film to clothing. Street activism interacts with and intervenes in the existing public space and challenges and reconfigures it. Gregory Pflugfelder’s arguments are also helpful in this regard. He analyzes po­liti­cal activism, for instance in the case of prewar suffragists’ activities, as cultural repre­sen­ta­tion. Departing from conventional historical analy­sis of written documents to determine the meanings, roles, and goals of activism, he suggests that the new visibility of ­women who spoke on politics in public, distributed po­liti­cal flyers on the street, and vocally expressed their views in

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their own gatherings should be examined as a force that changed masculinist public space.23

Unsettling Patriotism of ­Women As another example of ­women’s activism, the Greater Japan National ­Women’s Defense Group (Dainippon kokubō fujinkai, hereafter the Kokufu) was one of the most impor­tant examples of 1930s visual culture created by ­women to promote motherhood as a venue to access the public sphere. The activities of large nationwide ­women’s organ­izations w ­ ere crucial to the publicization and visualization of motherhood in the 1930s. Kokufu was founded in Osaka in 1932 by Yasuda Sei (1887–1952), a middle-­ aged, childless h ­ ouse­wife, and dissolved in 1942 when it was assimilated into an im­mense state-­led ­women’s organ­ization, the Greater Japan ­Women’s Organ­ ization (Dai nippon fujinkai). Kokufu rapidly expanded nationwide in the 1930s, and its activities peaked around 1937 with the Second Sino-­Japanese War. Before it was disbanded in 1942, the Kokufu’s membership had risen to nine million, often publicly announced as ten million, and the branches kept increasing not only in mainland Japan but also in China.24 The Kokufu’s appeal was its emphasis on classlessness. The admission fee was set very low in comparison with other ­women’s organ­izations, and Kokufu members wore a white smock (kappōgi) and a sash (tasuki) during their activities. This was not only an icon of womanly care and domesticity, but also a uniform that concealed the expensive or inexpensive kimono worn under­neath. A wide variety of ­women joined, ranging from geisha and café waitresses to middle-­class ­house­wives in metropolitan cities to farm ­women in rural areas. The organ­ization emphasized maternal care and love as principal virtues in slogans like “Deep is a ­mother’s love, strong is a ­mother’s power.”25 Especially in the late 1930s, the Kokufu uniform of a white smock with a sash became an icon that penetrated the media pre­sen­ta­tion of the war­time landscape on the street, in newsreels and feature films, and even in photo­graphs of actresses. The white smock was, in borrowing McLuhan, a “nonverbal manifesto of po­liti­cal upset” that marked a strong sense of agency and consolidated and reconfigured dominant discourses on womanhood in feminism, public policy, print publications, and popu­lar films.26 Kokufu ­women ­were ordinary ­women and ­mothers, but they ­were always seen with military ser­vicemen and units, as if they ­were auxiliary units. The white smock saturated the streets, train stations, and ports. In addition, Kokufu actively deployed photo­graphs and films to enhance their visibility. The group’s branches customarily produced their own collective portrait photo­graphs and a­ lbums to

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share with each other, and the group’s headquarters even produced documentary films to rec­ord their activities. This iconic femininity infiltrated the film industry. One hundred and fifty actresses of Shōchiku studio joined the organ­ization and set up a branch in Ofuna in 1937. Stars such as Tanaka Kinuyo, Kuwano Michiyo, and Kawasaki Hiroko ­were leading members of the branch and wore the smock to pose for photo­ graphs.27 (See fig. 2.1.) Kokufu activities w ­ ere incorporated into dramatic films, too. The protagonist’s ­mother is introduced to the narrative in the Kokufu uniform and sash in The Promise of the ­Sisters (Shimai no yakusoku; directed by Yamamoto Satsuo, 1940), which was an adaptation of ­Little ­Women by Louisa May Alcott. Groups of ­women in white smocks see off newly drafted soldiers in Beautiful Neighbors (Utsukushiki Rinjin; directed by Oba Hideo, 1940), ­Mother Never Dies (Haha wa shinazu; directed by Naruse Mikio, 1942), and The Army (Rikugun; directed by Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944). Kokufu was a key actor in establishing the visual icon of nationalized motherhood in 1930s visual culture.

FIGURE 2.1. Shōchiku studio actress Takasugi Sanae poses in Kokufu apron with sash. Date unknown. Postcard.

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Though Kokufu’s slogans and manifestos declared its dedication to Japa­nese womanhood and its virtuous and womanly commitment to the country, their activities did occasionally liberate its members from their ­house­hold chores, which some found refreshing and empowering.28 In her autobiography, the prominent suffragist Ichikawa Fusae rec­ords the assembly of a Kokufu branch in her native village on an August morning in 1937: The invitation was for my ­mother, but I deci­ded to go as this seemed to be a good chance for me to see their meeting. From 15-­or 16-­year-­old girls to 60-­to 70-­year-­old aged w ­ omen, all w ­ ere waiting outside the building in their own small groups, each consisting of several ­women. I heard whispers such as “I have never been to something like this since my umbilical cord was cut.” “I look like a spectacle.” “Do I look a l­ittle prettier in a smock with a sash?” [spoken with a strong local accent]. All of them looked shy but also excited. From the village of about 1,000 families, approximately 700 or 800 w ­ omen came and overflowed the auditorium. This must have been the first such scene the village had witnessed since it was formed.29 The Kokufu’s activities also gave many of the members opportunities to interact with military officers, local politicians, and business o ­ wners, and provided them training for leadership and skills of social and po­liti­cal communication and logistics. The motivation for t­hese ­women’s activities seemed connected to the plea­sure of restructuring their own social positions ­under the name of patriotism. This speculation is backed up by the criticism that was targeted at Kokufu activities by male critics and government officials in the late 1930s. They felt that ­these ­women went out and worked in public too often, when their primary duty was to be at home.30 The notion of patriotism and female gender identity ­were closely connected with the white smock, which was a visual sign of their h ­ ouse­hold work as primary and presented a purportedly harmonious relationship between nationalism and feminine membership in the community. However, what the Kokufu’s activism reveals is that female agency was somewhat in discord with the notion of nationalism. In fact, motherhood discourse became an arena where the appropriation and reappropriation of gender roles took place in a sort of strug­ gle between the state and the w ­ omen who w ­ ere actors and participants in the discourse. The emergence of the discourse on motherhood in the 1930s points to the ongoing pro­cess by which the Japa­nese nation-­state reor­ga­nized social stratification ­under the princi­ples of inclusion and exclusion of minority groups, so that the chain of discrimination was always maintained and reinforced. It secured stratification so as to keep provoking desires for upward mobility: male over

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female, the healthy over the disabled, the ethnic Japa­nese over colonial subjects, colonial male subjects over female ones. In this context, the visibility of Japa­nese ­women’s social position was raised when their fundamental public ser­vice was defined to be that of biological reproducers of the nation. Yet the motherhood discourse of the state was, as I noted above, also being reinterpreted and re­created by feminists of the privileged classes and by patriotic Kokufu w ­ omen. Their unsettling effect on motherhood discourse should be emphasized vis-­à-­v is state ideologies and policies.

A Japa­n ese Version of Stella Dallas: A ­M other’s ­M usic (Haha no Kyoku) The unsettling tensions between ­women’s agency and gender norms with regard to the definition and efficacy of motherhood are well illustrated by two hit films of the late 1930s. In ­these hits, A ­Mother’s ­Music and The Love-­Troth Tree, compelling types of ­mothers are presented; both are unconventionally assertive in their own ways. ­Mothers are customarily depicted as sitting in a Japanese-­style living room with tatami mats, or by the fire in the protagonist’s natal h ­ ouse, a symbolic space for home and domesticity. They are usually conversing with or about ­family members, as seen in I Was Born, But . . . ​(Umarertewa mitakeredo; directed by Ozu Yasujiro, 1932), The Only Son (Hitori musuko; directed by Ozu Yasujiro, 1936), Spring Thunder, and Beautiful Neighbors. Some of ­these ­mothers are workers, not just middle-­class ­house­wives, yet they are always static figures. This kind of role is most concisely summarized by a male protagonist’s remark in The Love Song of Riverside Area (Suigō jōka; directed by Munemoto Hideo, 1937), in which he says that his hometown is a place for which he feels a strong sense of nostalgia, like that he feels for his ­mother (“okāsan mitai ni natsukashii”). Many cinematic ­mothers serve as an emotionally charged, nostalgic location without much character development. A typical m ­ other presides at home to provide material comfort for f­amily members: meals, massages, mended clothes, attention to the sick, reception of phone calls and visitors, or financial support. At most, she serves as an intermediary between her son and her husband who attempts to help them reconcile, or she expresses frustration about her c­ hildren’s marriage, as seen in New ­Family (Atarashiki kazoku; directed by Shibuya Minoru, 1939). Thus, many ­mothers are represented as a nostalgic location or as part of the mise-­en-­scène of the home rather than as dynamic public actors. The two hits ­under discussion depict unsettling ­mothers, contrary to the typical static, comforting ­mothers in many other popu­lar films. One is A ­Mother’s

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­Music, by Tōhō studio, a Japa­nese adaptation stemming ultimately from Stella Dallas, a 1923 novel about a ­mother’s self-­sacrifice for her ­daughter’s ­future by US writer Olive Higgins Prouty. The other is The Love-­Troth Tree, which was an unpre­ce­dented hit that appealed to a predominantly female audience. Released by Tōhō’s rival studio Shōchiku as a two-­part film, The Love-­Troth Tree depicts the unconsummated romance of a working single ­mother. The story was remade several times in film and tele­v i­sion versions from the late 1940s through the mid1970s ­because of its long-­term popularity. Although ­these films have not received much scholarly attention, they ­were highly popu­lar and seen by large audiences.31 They placed their viewers, many of whom ­were w ­ omen, in a space where they negotiated their desires, fantasies, and social norms through the characters on screen. T ­ hese films illustrate two impor­ tant points. First, they provide pictures of how “modern life,” or consumers’ lifestyle, was desired and understood by con­temporary viewers. A strong desire for a better life and upward mobility is inscribed in ­these hit films, while they do not explic­itly refer to the ongoing war against China, which had broken out in the summer of 1937. I agree with Ginoza, who argues that their indifference to the war suggests the audience’s expectation and endorsement of the re­distribution of wealth that the war promised.32 Second, motherhood in t­ hese films is almost indifferent to the state’s pronatalist policies, and asserts a strong sense of ­women’s agency. Similar to the case of Kokufu activism, the discord between state gender norms and cinematic ­mothers’ agency is a stumbling block for nationalist unity. The film A ­Mother’s ­Music is based on a best-­selling novel with the same title written by the popu­lar novelist Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973), which was serialized in the ­women’s magazine Lady’s Club (Fujin kurabu, March 1936–­June 1937). Yoshiya’s novel was an adaptation of the novel Stella Dallas that re-­narrated the story with Japa­nese settings, names, characterizations, and cultural milieu, although Yoshiya’sending is dif­fer­ent from Prouty’s Stella Dallas: she employed the conclusion of the s­ ilent film version of Stella Dallas (directed by Henry King, 1925; released in Japan in 1926).33 Prouty’s version ends when Stella watches her d ­ aughter Laurel through a win­dow from the street when she has been proposed to at a tea party, and then walking away, while the film shows Laurel’s wedding, which Stella watches from the win­dow and then leaves. Thus, the endings of both Yoshiya’s novel and the film A ­Mother’s ­Music repeated, with some modifications, that of the ­silent film Stella Dallas.34 The serialized novel A ­Mother’s ­Music was extremely popu­lar, to the degree that it was said that e­ very single member of a f­ amily could enjoy it. The film, too, appealed to a wide variety of viewers, not just w ­ omen.35 In the film, Oine, a former factory ­woman with a lower-­class background, marries Jun’ji, who l­ater becomes a successful medical professor and researcher. They have a ­daughter, Keiko. As Jun’ji succeeds and their lifestyle becomes that

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of the upper class, Oine’s class difference becomes an obstacle for Keiko’s education and potential marriage. As a former factory w ­ oman, Oine is uneducated and almost illiterate, though she is hardworking, willing to learn, and makes an effort to improve herself. The extant film, which is a digest version instead of the original release, begins when Jun’ji comes back from a long-­term research stay in Berlin and Oine is humiliated by the pompous upper-­class m ­ others at Keiko’s school. Jun’ji runs into his ex-­fiancé, Kaoru, now a professional pianist who is back in Tokyo ­after studying in Paris, by coincidence in a resort h ­ otel. However, he intends to stay faithful to Oine out of gratitude for how she supported him when he was young. A ­ fter several incidents, Oine fi­nally decides to leave her ­daughter to Kaoru’s care so that she could be properly educated and eventually married off to an appropriate person, and Kaoru promises Oine that she w ­ ill see that Keiko becomes a professional pianist and ­will take good care of her. At the end of the film, Oine secretly comes to the building where Keiko’s wedding takes place. B ­ ecause Kaoru has arranged ­matters to make it pos­si­ble, Oine can see her ­daughter unnoticed; she is overjoyed and cries in the rain. Her tears express her triumph, celebrating her own determination to remove herself from Keiko, but also acknowledging the deep sorrow caused by their separation.36 The characters correspond between the American and Japa­nese versions: Stella-­Oine, Laurel-­Keiko, Mrs. Morrison-­Kaoru Fujinami, Stephen-­Jun’ji, and Ed-­Ryūsaku, although their characterizations differ slightly. Comparison between Yoshiya’s novel and the Japa­nese film shows some differences. Yoshiya’s novel refers to imperialist cosmopolitanism, by bringing in references to a Catholic girls’ secondary school in Seoul, a Medical College in Mukden, and study in Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo, but this reference is minimized in the extant version of the Japa­nese film. Also, in contrast to the depiction of Stella’s sexualized class background in the original novel, the American ­silent film, and Yoshiya’s novel, the Japa­nese film instead emphasized puritan views t­ oward the working-­class ­women and men who are represented by Oine and Ryūsaku. Despite some differences, however, A ­Mother’s ­Music is a “maternal melodrama” that parallels what Christian Viviani identifies as the 1930s Hollywood genre. Its narrative formula is tied with the 1920s prototypes Madame X and Stella Dallas: the child often stands for social pro­gress, which is contradicted by the ­mother’s social class and status. The price to be paid for the child’s success is the negation of the ­mother’s identity and her unseen, unrecognized suffering.37 Ginoza adequately delineates a discrepancy between the film’s cele­bration of the consumerist lifestyle, including luxuries such as a huge birthday cake, motorboat riding, resort h ­ otels, and classical ­music concerts, and the rising anxiety and international tensions epitomized by the Anti-­Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan in 1936, as well as the outbreak of the Second Sino-­Japanese

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War. She argues that the deletion of such po­liti­cal tensions from the narrative demonstrates the audience’s endorsement of war and their expectation that it would bring wealth and a better life.38 I argue that we can take this interpretation even further: imperialism is also presented as an essential part of Japa­nese modernity and modern life. In keeping with the uneven formations of modernity, Japa­nese imperialism is shown by the film, as elite Japa­nese characters are trained as students in a Eu­ro­pean metropole and then relocated as teachers to extraterritorial spaces such as Mukden. In other words, modernity is something Japan has to learn from the West. Interestingly, the actress Hara Setsuko, who played Keiko in A ­Mother’s ­Music, had starred in the German and Japa­nese coproduction film New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi; Die Töchter der Samurai; directed by Arnold Fanck and Itami Mansaku), released earlier in the year.39 At the end of New Earth, Hara’s character migrates from Japan to Manchuria as a settler with her husband. She represents the Japa­nese nation in that she was often conflated with nationalized aesthetics and the country’s natu­ral beauty and landscape. Also, her cultural and spatial mobility affirms the importance of the colonialist endeavor of the Japa­nese Empire. Viewers of A ­Mother’s ­Music might have been indirectly reminded of the changing international relations and Japan’s colonial expansionism via memories of Hara’s role as an actress in this other recent film. The display of luxurious goods and ser­v ices in A ­Mother’s ­Music was not in­de­pen­dent from ­actual economic conditions: a temporary economic b ­ ubble had been triggered by the Sino-­Japanese War of 1937. The film industry also benefited from this economic boom. Even in small cities, such as Yonago in Shimane Prefecture, where military industries ­were concentrated, movie theaters ­were newly being built to respond to increasing numbers of moviegoers in 1939. The number of movie theaters peaked in 1941 (2,472 theaters) and the total number of admissions peaked in 1942, at 510,090,000 viewers. Indeed, the number of admissions had kept increasing from 1931 (164,710,000) to 1937 (245,610,000) to 1941 (438,330,000).40 The numbers suggest that moviegoing was an everyday leisure activity for urban dwellers through 1942. In this ­bubble economy, Oine’s motherhood is allowed to be individualistic and indifferent to the state’s prescriptive expectations that motherhood be domestic, fertile, and patriotic. Oine’s ultimate resolution is to secure the upward mobility of her ­daughter. A ­ fter the separation of ­mother and ­daughter, ­there is a scene of a piano per­for­mance by Keiko being broadcast on the radio. In it, closeup shots of Oine and Keiko, both superimposed on a Yamaha piano, alternate on the screen. This visually expresses the ­daughter’s yearning for her ­mother and ­mother’s for the ­daughter, but it also establishes Oine’s identification with her ­daughter: her ­daughter’s success is hers.

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As the historian Sandra Wilson argues, a concern of the state in war­time is that if ­women are too invested in their own families, it conflicts with the state’s interests. Thus, their dedication to their own ­family had to be ­shaped so that it served the state, for example, by raising their sons to become good, loyal soldiers.41 However, A ­Mother’s ­Music encourages ­mothers’ indulgence of ­children’s material comfort and happiness, not the benefits of the state. In contrast with the female Japa­nese settler that Hara Setsuko played in New Earth, Keiko in A ­Mother’s ­Music does ­little that could be seen as a contribution to the state. She debuts as a professional pianist, in conjunction with her personal dream, and in keeping with Kaoru’s promise to Oine. Oine embodies the desire for upward mobility and the anxiety of class conflict, as she herself changes classes both upward and downward. Fi­nally, though, class stasis is secured, since characters return to where they “belong.” This is emphasized t­oward the end of film, when e­ very character praises Oine’s self-­ imposed ostracism. The compliments offered by Jun’ji and a ­lawyer friend of his in par­tic­u­lar conform to what the film scholar Anna Siomopoulos called “liberal empathy” when she described the sympathy shown by Mrs. Morrison in Vidor’s Stella Dallas (directed by King Vidor, 1937), a gesture of admiration without any social or po­liti­cal commitment or action to change society.42 Thus, with the affirmation of class stratification intensified by the addition of liberal empathy, the film narrative confirms the status quo of society and suggests that the working class cannot benefit from the wealth and success that the film unfolds in front of them.

Outraged Critics: The Love-­Troth Tree (Aizen Katsura) and the Discourse of the Shōchiku ­Woman’s Film The Love-­Troth Tree was the best-­selling film from the late 1930s and an impor­ tant example of unsettling motherhood, though it has escaped careful examination by scholars. The film is a melodrama of romance, released in two parts in September 1938. The original story was written by Kawaguchi Matsutarō and serialized in the ­women’s magazine Lady’s Club (Fujin kurabu, January 1937–­ May 1938), the same journal that serialized A ­Mother’s ­Music. ­Because of the extreme commercial success of the first two-­part installment of the film, two sequels ­were immediately produced. The second installment, “The Love-­Troth Tree 2” (Zoku Aizen katsura), was released in May 1939, and the third, “The Love-­Troth Tree: Conclusion” (Aizen katsura Kanketsu hen), in November of the same year.43 Then, fi­nally, the studio released an edited version, put together primarily from

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the first and second installments, The Love-­Troth Tree: The Re-­edited Version (Aizen katsura Kaishū hen), in summer 1940. It is from this version that the extant eighty-­eight-­minute “complete version” (sōshū hen) must have been edited.44 My analy­sis of shots from the film below refers to this extant “complete version,” since it is the only available print. The protagonist of the film, Takaishi Katsue, is a working single ­mother with a five-­year-­old ­daughter. Katsue works as a nurse in a large hospital while her older ­sister takes care of her ­daughter, whom Katsue had with her deceased husband. She meets the son of the hospital owner, a young, successful pediatrician named Tsumura Kōzō, and they fall in love. One day, Kōzō asks Katsue to vow to a tree, as ­there is a legend that lovers who do so ­will never part; it is this tree’s name that the film title refers to. However, the class difference between the ­couple is a major obstacle for their romance. Kōzō’s young ­sister treats nurses as if they ­were her servants. In fact, the nurses could even be seen as maids, since the narrative does not address their medical professionalism and sharply delineates the class difference between them and upper-­middle-­class young w ­ omen. Nevertheless, ­because of Katsue’s class mobility, the story depicts a strangely classless world. Late in the first installment, a musical composition by Katsue, ­Mother’s Love (Haha no ai), wins a rec­ord com­pany competition, and she debuts as the singer of her own song. Obtaining fame and wealth, she improves her social and financial conditions. However, she sings in her white nurse’s uniform at her debut concert, proudly exhibiting solidarity with her former colleagues.45 The film portrays Katsue as a very strong, in­de­pen­dent young ­woman. Her identity as a m ­ other is clever camouflage for her success, class mobility, strong-­ willed character, and romantic feeling for Kōzō, in ways that are reminiscent of the Kokufu members’ agency in white apron and mobility u ­ nder the guise of motherhood. She composes and sings a song that expresses maternal affection for ­children, and playing this ideal gender role justifies her egalitarian dream of marrying up and her newly acquired material comfort. Consumer goods and leisure activities are displayed in the film, first as objects for the viewer’s aspiration and Katsue’s acquisition, including choco­late as a treat for kids on a picnic, glamorous Western dresses, a trip to Kyoto, a resort ­hotel with golf courses in Atami, and study abroad (one character is a wealthy young ­woman who comes back to Japan on vacation from studies at Prince­ton University). The unpre­ce­dented success of the film soon led to it being targeted for criticism by both censors and male critics. On July 20, 1939, the eve­ning edition of the newspaper Tokyo Asahi shinbun ran an article titled “Censorial Body Is on the Alert! Films Are Forgetting the State of Emergency,” (Ken’etsu tōkyoku no me wa hikaru! Jikyoku o wasureta eiga), which includes a Home Ministry censor’s warning. The censor notes that he expects more educational content in film and

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criticizes the dominance of too many frivolous and silly female characters in recent romance-­centered films. Despite such public warnings, Shōchiku studio kept releasing sequels. The third installment of the film also sold well and infuriated critics again. In this installment, Katsue travels in China as a singer to look for Kōzo, who works as a military propagandist. ­After some more obstacles, eventually they get married, and t­here ­were no more sequels. The setting of the third installment was possibly a flirtatious alibi by which the studio attempted to mitigate conflict with state expectations. It was in the following year, in October 1940, that the Film Law was promulgated, one of the intentions of which was to promote the “proper content” of film. The studio released the reedited version (kaishū hen) in July 1940, right before the law’s promulgation. In spite of the inclusion of China as an impor­tant setting in the third installment, however, the 1940 reedited version was compiled from the first and second installment, according to advertisements for it. It is noteworthy that the studio’s marketing strategy to make the digest version appealing excluded the scenes in China and made the film’s setting very domestic, except for references to the United States as an icon of wealth, knowledge, and cultural refinement. This decision most likely drew on understanding of viewers’ responses to the earlier installments. All three installments proved to be extreme commercial successes, and Shōchiku’s revenue for 1939 was 50 ­percent more than that of the previous year.46 The films enthralled primarily female viewers, both in Tokyo and in other, smaller, cities. One description of a scene in a Fukuoka theater reported that “seventy ­percent of the seats ­were occupied by cheerful ­women who cried, laughed, and sighed in response to the screen. This movie is r­ eally a monster!”47 One article notes that police officers had to be mobilized for three days to or­ga­nize the crowds who came to see the film in the Kokusai gekijō theater in Asakusa, Tokyo, which had 4,059 seats.48 The film appealed especially to female moviegoers. One theater in Ginza, Tokyo, reports, “The theater is filled with a peculiar intensity accompanied by the odor of make up powder and perfume.”49 The film text offered a dominant female gaze, showcased w ­ omen’s mobility and solidarity, displayed vari­ous objects of desire, and presented a fantasy world where one might have a concrete turn for a dif­fer­ent, better life. What has to be noted is that the film’s huge success enraged the majority of male critics, who called it “a tear-­jerking film” (sairui eiga) and “outrageously stupid” (do o koeta guretsu sa).50 Such a hysterical reaction by male critics to the unpre­ce­dented popularity of this par­tic­u­lar film deserves attention, especially since they did not respond in this way to other tear-­jerking films such as A ­Mother’s ­Music. What r­ eally upset them is very likely the power­ful sexualizing gaze of both the heroine and the film audience, the film’s strong sense of

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female mobility and agency, and the success and happiness the heroine attains with the support of ­women’s community and sheer luck. Scholars vaguely and conventionally agree that Shōchiku was the studio of “­woman’s film,” or josei ega, but neither the history of the studio’s production of this genre, nor the definition of the genre itself, have been fully examined in existing scholarship.51 Indeed, Shōchiku’s rival Tōhō made the aforementioned maternal melodrama hit A ­Mother’s ­Music and a number of other films that feature female protagonists, but Tōhō was never associated with the genre. I argue that it is Shōchiku studio’s success with The Love-­Troth Tree, as well as self-­promotion by the studio president, that established, from around 1939 through 1941, the strong association between this studio and the genre in the discourse of Japa­nese film history. Interestingly it was in the Occupation era that Shōchiku’s association with “­woman’s film” was publicly acknowledged. The studio was commissioned by the US Occupation government during the immediate postwar period (1945–1952) to produce promotional dramatic films about gender equality (danjo dōken). As one of the Occupation government policies was to improve ­women’s social status in Japan, this suggests Occupation censors believed that Shōchiku was good at ­women’s themes.52 The 1956 autobiography by Shōchiku President Kido Shirō (1894–1977) further confirmed this Occupation film policy, that is, the studio’s corporate identity as josei eiga maker. It is highly likely that Kido’s claims ­were motivated by two considerations: one to distinguish the studio’s own history of the genre from the Daiei studio’s huge box office success with maternal melodramas at that time, and another to remind readers that another hit Shōchiku melodrama, What Is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa; directed by Ōba Hideo, 1953), was part of the studio tradition.53 Such postwar developments have led to scholarship and film criticism assuming that the genre actually was a studio tradition since its inception in the 1920s. In his autobiography, Kido notes his three strategic views as a pioneer producer of this genre, which he called “films for a female audience” (josei muki no eiga). First, it is impor­tant to praise ­women’s and, in par­tic­u­lar, ­mothers’ virtues (since this appeals to ­women). Second, ­women, unlike men, are dominated by emotions, and films should appeal to this aspect of their nature (to maximize the admissions). And, third, w ­ omen go to movies with siblings or friends, never alone, and additionally encourage ­others to go, which also helps increase the admissions.54 It is particularly impor­tant that t­ hese claims are in fact a recap of war­time essays Kido wrote to respond to the harsh dismissal of The Love-­Troth Tree by major critics. Kido’s two essays, “The Most Impor­tant Mission of Film Is the Nation’s Entertainment” (1939) and “Do Not Forget Female Audience!” (1941) are impor­ tant in this regard.55 In t­ hese essays, he defends his studio’s hit films, but stresses

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that the first and second installment of The Love-­Troth Tree are about praiseworthy motherhood, which serves the audience as a model for good womanhood. He contends that the absolute support from the viewers (­women) demonstrates that critics’ dismissive views are irrelevant. He even implies that the value of film is determined by the box office sales. It is clear that his memoir of 1956 rephrased his war­time advocacy of The Love-­Troth Tree, and in so d ­ oing it originated the association between the studio and the genre in Japa­nese film history. Importantly, Kido’s promotion of “­woman’s film” was a business effort to understand and cultivate ­women as potential consumers, where the film industry found potential for expansion. It is hard to get a sense of the gender proportions of film audiences in this period. The historian Furukawa suggests that a quarter of movie admissions was minors ­under fourteen years old in the mid-1930s, and the majority was youths in their twenties.56 Statistics for gendered moviegoers is scarce, but one report of 1941 demonstrates that if 40 to 45 ­percent of a film’s viewers w ­ ere w ­ omen, it was considered to be popu­lar among w ­ omen.57 This suggests that w ­ omen viewers made up, very roughly speaking, on average one-­third or less of movie admissions. The immediate postwar statistics do show that more men saw movies than ­women in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The majority of ­women who went to see films at this time w ­ ere students and single working ­women, most likely ­because they had more ­free time and available funds.58 Thus, it is safe to assume that ­women viewers ­were in the minority throughout ­these de­cades. The Love-­Troth Tree series was obviously an exception. It also seems that many ­women saw the film two or three times, judging from the wording of some film advertisements. Though I have thus far emphasized that the film appealed to ­women, it is noteworthy that the studio targeted an even broader viewership. Some critics noted that it appealed to the masses, or taishū, suggesting that an unexpected number of men ­were attracted to the film, too. The newspaper advertisements of the reedited version in July 1940 point out that “This is an unrated film [ippan eiga]. [Therefore,] the ­whole ­family should come and enjoy!” “­Children welcome!” and emphasize that the theaters are air-­conditioned for ­those who want to escape from the heat.59 In The Love-­Troth Tree, Katsue, the heroine, shows how a ­woman can acquire wealth, comfort, and romantic love without being socially punished. If she is not born into such circumstances, she achieves them through luck. Katsue’s musical talent seems, in fact, extremely con­ve­nient for the plot, but then luck might visit anyone. Katsue does not aggressively pursue material and monetary comfort. She follows, con­ve­niently for the plot, where her emotions and affections go. Yet, she does not express materialist desires as a Modern Girl, or moga might, for example, in auteur Mizoguchi Kenji’s ­Sisters of Gion (Gion no kyōdai, 1936) or Naniwa

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Elegy (Naniwa erejī, 1936). In Mizoguchi’s films, which won recognition and praise from critics but did not reach wide audiences, the young w ­ omen Omocha and Ayako are clearly descendants of the images of the 1920s moga, whose promiscuous sexuality and threatening materialism w ­ ere hyped by media discourse. Omocha does not hesitate to trick, lie, and beguile men out of money and goods. Ayako found it easier to get money by becoming her boss’s mistress than by diligently working as a clerk. They are punished at the end of the films ­because of their naked desires for the material and financial comforts typically associated with moga. One is badly injured and confined to bed, and the other is forced out of her comfortable life and into the streets. However, it must be noted again that Mizoguchi’s condemnation films w ­ ere appreciated by critics, who ­were predominantly male, but not by female viewers. Along with a variety of objects of consumer desire displayed in The Love-­Troth Tree, what is most objectified and commodified is Katsue’s love interest, Kōzō. This is reinforced by the Shōchiku star system, by which an emerging, sweet-­ looking young male star Uehara Ken (1909–1991), as Kōzō, was paired with the veteran actress Tanaka Kinuyo (1909–1977) as Katsue. While Uehara had become popu­lar ­after a recent appearance in the box office success Three Young Men Who Are Engaged (Kon’yaku sanba garasu; directed by Shimazu Yasujirō, 1937), Tanaka Kinuyo, who had debuted in 1924, was already one of the most established Japa­nese actresses and had been cast as a wide range of characters. Tanaka’s established stardom empowers the character of Katsue to assert her agency and to become the subject of gaze directed at Kōzō/Uehara, who is presented to Katsue, and to female film viewers, as a desirable and accessible “object.” (See fig. 2.2.) One shot in par­tic­u­lar establishes Kōzō as an object of desire in a sequence when the two lovers see each other a­ fter a separation. Katsue’s desiring gaze, that is, her subject shot, depicts him with a soft-­focused medium bust shot. This shot is introduced when she has finished her first successful concert and has come back into her dressing room with huge flower bouquets in her arms. She raises her eyes and unexpectedly finds him ­there. She is shown in a slightly off-­centered medium shot, which is followed by a frontal bust shot of Kōzo, who slightly leans against the dressing ­table with one hand resting on the back of a chair. The frame includes neatly arranged and decorated ornaments and objects in the dressing room together with him. This establishing shot of Kōzo places him as the object of a sexualizing gaze among the comfortable, luxurious goods and setting. In turn, Katsue asserts herself as a desiring subject in this scene. The casting of Tanaka Kinuyo in this role was significant. The Japa­nese characteristics which w ­ ere associated with her star persona and appearance, such as a somewhat small figure with round shoulders, w ­ ere a stabilizing f­ actor to raise the credibility that such a romance could happen to any Japa­nese female viewers and

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FIGURE 2.2   The protagonist’s love interest Kōzō (played by Uehara Ken) in the digest version of The Love-­Troth Tree (Aizen katsura; sōshuhen, 1940).

to confirm the character’s ordinariness as a good ­woman, and her modest social class. Also, as the literary scholar Carole Cavanaugh points out in her discussion of a dif­fer­ent film that starred Tanaka, part of female spectators’ plea­sure lay in their temporary identification with the fantasized per­for­mance of multiple roles that actresses offer on the screen, when ­women ­were in real­ity offered only very limited and prescriptive roles by society.60 ­Because Tanaka was already known for the vari­ous types of ­women she had played, the multiplicity of her star persona made it easier for viewers to accept Katsue’s sudden transformation from nurse to popu­lar singer, and the viewer’s identification with the actress made it easier to fantasize about the parallel world that the film unfolds. In sum, the ­woman’s film The Love-­Troth Tree drew a huge number of female viewers whose presence changed the movie theater from a male-­dominated to a female-­dominated space. This space, foregrounded by the enraged male mainstream critics’ ridicule and harsh dismissal, was enabling, as it secured ­women’s visual plea­sure and the female gaze at on-­screen objects of desire. This space was not limited to the physical movie theater alone, but included fandom and shared conversation about the film, as Kido noticed, wherein conventional visual and narrative space was questioned, problematized, or overturned.

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Of course, this space, nevertheless, was also a compelling force for the formation of national identity, as seen in its demonstration of indifference to the warfare that the state of Japan had imposed on China. The film advertisement I quoted above also included a reference to an accompanying ­music event to celebrate the third anniversary of the Second Sino-­Japanese War. In spite of such reminders, the viewers and fictional characters travel freely for romantic pursuits in China, where in real­ity Japa­nese aggression was killing soldiers and local residents. Katsue’s femininity and motherhood deviate from the dominant norms of Japa­nese society and her class and physical mobility ­were liberating for ­women, but her identity was also ­shaped by the war-­related economic boom as well as the carefree incorporation of China, fictionally and sociopo­liti­cally, as an extension of Japan.

The ­M other Film: Militarist and Nationalist Motherhood in the Early 1940s Doane points out how the narratives of Hollywood maternal melodrama changed in the 1940s. ­Because of the war­time reor­ga­ni­za­tion of gender roles and the introduction of ambivalence about mothering when w ­ omen ­were also mobilized for traditionally men’s work, the 1940s American maternal melodramas witnessed a number of aberrations and lost integrity as a genre. According to Doane, while ­mother and child remain together as a demonstration of the unity of the home front, the ­mother’s obligation to surrender the son is merged with anti-­isolationist politics. Thus, “[a] careful balancing of closeness and distance within the nuclear ­family is crucial to the maintenance of demo­cratic nationalistic ideologies” (italics added).61 This formulation is also quite valuable for understanding the repre­ sen­ta­tion of ­mothers in early 1940s Japa­nese film. A large number of films centered on ­mothers appeared around 1942. This must have stood out, since this was a moment when Japa­nese film production was declining. The number of film productions had once even matched the level of Hollywood, in the mid-1930s, but it fi­nally began to decline in 1941. Supplies of film stock came ­under state control that year—­a section director of the Information Bureau threatened that t­ here would be “not one foot of raw film for the private sector”—­but the studios managed to keep producing entertaining films in spite of material and censorial restrictions. Nonetheless, production dropped from 500 to 250 films in 1941, and kept decreasing.62 Unlike Oine in A ­Mother’s ­Music, ­mothers in early 1940s films are highly motivated by nationalist and militarist ­causes, and their primary concern is to raise their ­children, especially sons who ­will serve the state as soldiers. The role of a ­woman is clearly defined as bearing and raising as many ­children as pos­si­ble, but

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not only that: she also should be hardworking and willing to teach her ­children how to properly serve the emperor and the state. I ­will refer to this group of films as “­mother films.” They can be seen as part of the broadly and inclusively defined genre of “maternal melodrama,” but in the m ­ other film, the m ­ others’ separation from their sons is a norm instead of virtuous choice, in contrast to the melodramatic formula of works like Madame X, Stella Dallas, and A ­Mother’s ­Music. The melodramatic moments of the ­mother film are, instead, condensed and emphasized in the bond between, rather than the separation of, m ­ other and son. As the historian Ikegawa Reiko points out, the emergence of ­mother films was very likely triggered by a literary group’s proj­ect to run a series of essays about praiseworthy m ­ others for newspaper readers.63 The members of the Greater Japan Patriotic Literary Organ­ization (Dai nihon bungaku hōkoku kai; established in June 1942) deci­ded to produce a series of essays titled ­Mothers of Japan (Nihon no haha) as their first collective proj­ect. The group selected forty-­nine unsung ­mothers from Sakhalin to Okinawa, and member novelists and poets visited them to collect stories. One by one the essays appeared in the newspaper Yomiuri shinbun, from September to October 1942, and ­were then reprinted as a book the following year.64 The writers included Sato Haruo, Kawabata Yasunari, Takamura Kōtarō, Tsuboi Sakae, and Okada Teiko. Many ­mothers featured in the essays ­were hardworking widow-­farmers raising c­ hildren on their own. Their ­children, mostly male, joined the military. T ­ hese ­mothers calmly accepted the deaths of their husbands and sons and ­were proud that ­these men had proved their loyalty to the country. T ­ hese serialized essays promoted an image of a redefined “wise ­mother” and effectively narrativized the concepts of the emperor system, ­women’s gendered duty of childbearing and rearing, and nationally unified war effort. This promotion of unsung ­mothers seems related to the newly implemented state pronatalist policy, titled the Outline Policy for Establishing Population Growth (Jinkō seisaku kakuritsu yōkō) and promulgated in 1942. Already by November 1940, ­mothers with more than ten ­children (of which 65 ­percent ­were from farm families) ­were rewarded for their contribution to the state as a part of vari­ous government-­sponsored promotional events in conjunction with the policy that was eventually expressed in the outline. The policy was also introduced in vari­ous media and slogans, such as “Propagate and multiply” (Ume yo fuyase yo) or “­Children are trea­sures and having them is ser­v ice to state” (Kodakara hōkoku).65 Evaluating the emerging theme of nationalist m ­ others in film, High states that this pre­sen­ta­tion of war­time ­mothers is monotonous a­ fter the rich variety of womanhood depicted in 1930s Japa­nese cinema.66 In con­temporary film scholarship, this is a common judgment. However, I argue in response that this repre­

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sen­ta­tion of a new femininity was not simply a product of ever-­increasing censorship codes and a cinematic reflection of the state ideologies. It also contains ambivalence and complexity as a site of newly forged idioms of nationalized and militarized w ­ omen. The ambiguities in the repre­sen­ta­tion and characterization of ­mothers in ­these films are tied to the contradictory forces that emerged in engendering the notion of national(ist) identity. As existing scholarship on gender history establishes, the war­time Japa­nese state did not aggressively recruit w ­ omen as a replacement for the male l­abor 67 force or for military ser­vices. Historian Thomas R. H. Haven concludes that the state elected to sanctify motherhood (affecting not only a­ ctual m ­ others but also married w ­ omen who might have c­ hildren and w ­ omen of marriageable age), and avoided fully mobilizing the ­labor of w ­ omen. He points out that between 1940 and 1944, factories continued to prefer male l­abor: 75 ­percent of workers in manufacturing and construction w ­ ere male in 1930 and 76 ­percent in 1944. ­Women constituted 35 ­percent of nonmilitary workers in 1930, 39 ­percent in 1940, and 42 ­percent in the census of 1944. This can be contrasted with the dramatic deployment of ­women in war­time production in other countries. Even with l­abor conscription, the statistics show that the female workforce increased by less than 10 ­percent from 1940 to 1944, which was far less than in Britain, Germany, or the United States.68 The state of Japan was ready to acknowledge w ­ omen’s contribution to the total war society in their capacity of biological reproduction. Conversely, bearing boys for military ser­vice was the very limited channel through which w ­ omen could serve the state and gain public recognition. Thus, motherhood was, from a ­woman’s viewpoint, a means to demand public and social acknowledgement in war­time Japan. As Lant argues in her analy­sis of vari­ous British cultural repre­ sen­ta­tions of ­women’s war­time mobilization in posters, magazine illustrations, ­women’s conscription, and cinema, w ­ omen went “from being inessential to national identity, to being central to it, to threatening it.”69 This coincides with my earlier analy­sis of the patriotic ­women’s organ­ization Kokufu, and also my interpretation of the rise of the ­mother film. The promotion of motherhood expresses dif­fer­ent desires depending on who is involved; for the state it was a means of confining ­women to secondary citizenship, while for ­women it was a way to claim public recognition as a potential path to full citizenship. It is in this context that the large number of ­mother films should be examined. A glance at early 1940s film titles reveals that m ­ others are impor­tant characters in their mission to bear and rear men useful for the state, especially for films from Shōchiku studio, such as ­Mother Never Dies, The M ­ other of Japan (Nihon no haha; directed by Hara Kenkichi, 1942), ­Mother’s Map (Haha no chizu; directed by Shimazu Yasujirō, 1942), and ­Mother’s Wedding Anniversary (Haha no

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kinenbi; directed by Sasaki Yasushi, 1943). T ­ here are also other films, such as Our Planes Fly South (Aiki minami e tobu; directed by Sasaki Yasushi, 1943) and The Army, whose content stresses ­mothers’ presence. This, in turn, gives a strong sense of agency to determined, able, and wise ­mothers, which is in stark contrast with the subdued, forgiving, and static ­mothers in earlier 1930s films. Though High describes militarist ­mothers as “ste­reo­typical mannequins who mouth the appropriate phrases and apparently actually feel the officially prescribed emotions,” which is a generally accepted view, the pre­sen­ta­tion of emotions of militarist and nationalist ­mothers in ­these films is actually far more complicated.70 The content of what ­these ­mothers say to their ­children in ­these films can be as predictable as High suggests. However, how the ­mothers are presented and how the cinematic narratives construct mother-­son relationships must be more fully examined. First, the narrative device of separation between m ­ other and child(ren), an impor­tant component of the genre of maternal melodrama, is replaced by emphasis on the mutual affection and inseparable bond between ­mothers and sons in the war­time m ­ other films, when the voluntary surrender of sons to the state was a norm. Second, the settings and characterization of the stories bestow social power on ­women in public and professional positions. In some cases, this depiction of ­women even extends to portraying gender-­bending, masculinized ­mothers. Arguments made by the literary scholar Sharalyn Orbaugh on the mother-­son relationship in the paper theater (kami shibai) production The Unsung ­Mother (Mumei no haha, undated) are illuminating in this regard. Emerging in the 1930s, the paper theater was an entertainment targeted at urban ­children. A man set up a boxlike miniature theater, which he carried around on a bicycle from one open space to another, and narrated stories accompanied by sets of illustrated cards. Money was made by selling candy to the c­ hildren who gathered to hear (and view) the stories. The medium has a strong connection with film. Some kami shibai men ­were formerly benshi, oral narrators for s­ ilent films, who became unemployed ­after the introduction of sound. Many films ­were adapted and abbreviated for kami shibai, and some film scriptwriters wrote original stories specifically for the paper theater medium.71 Hayashida Oito, the Unsung ­Mother of the paper theater story, is an uneducated but hardworking ­widow in a small town. She joins her ­daughter to work in an aircraft factory a­ fter closing her own store. She is resolved to help her son, now stationed as a soldier in the South Pacific, by working hard in the factory, and her resolution even more deeply moves him, though he already admired her for her hard work raising him. In the end, even ­after being informed of her son’s death, she returns to the factory to continue working. Judging from the references to the South Seas, demand for aircraft, and female workers in an aircraft factory, the

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work presumably dates from around 1943 to 1944. Orbaugh makes the excellent point that this story, like many other war­time ­mother stories, confirms that the ­mother knows that she has her son’s love, that she is the most precious presence to him. In other words, nationalist/militarist motherhood is driven by “intensely personal and familial” motives.72 The genre guarantees that the ­mother’s love is not self-­sacrificing but rewarded. It is returned by her son without failure, which provides a strong contrast to the unacknowledged sacrifice in the formula exemplified by A ­Mother’s ­Music. This promise of the son’s love and affection for his ­mother is repeated in dramatic films. In The Navy (Kaigun; directed by Tasaka Tomotaka, 1943), the protagonist, an officer in the Pearl Harbor attack, dwells on his memories of his ­mother with ­great appreciation and fondness. He is from a ­family of a ­mother and two siblings, which barely makes ends meet. For him, even g­ oing to military school required support from his other siblings to make up for the loss of his income. According to him, when he broke his shoulder as a child, his m ­ other said, “I cannot regret it enough if I allow him to become disabled, as he is a precious child entrusted to me by the Emperor.” This praise for his m ­ other’s exemplary remark in the fictional film is obviously scripted according to the po­liti­cal ideology of the emperor system; it resonates with the textbook story Sailor’s ­Mother. However, it is noteworthy that the film pres­ents the relationship between this officer and his ­mother as very intimate and affectionate. At home, since his childhood, the protagonist has always put extra rice in his ­mother’s bowl, making sure that she gets a lot. The ­widow ­mother and son have a joke about her extra scoop of rice, which they constantly remind each other of even ­after he leaves home for military school, and when he is back the son continues the ritual, which amuses his ­mother. An additional episode skillfully emphasizes their strong emotional bond. It is a scene when he comes home in uniform during a vacation from military school. He is now much taller than his ­mother. When he enters their ­house, the ­mother admires her son. Then, instead of looking down on her from his height, he lowers himself to her level and gazes into her eyes for a moment. She is overwhelmed with emotion and bursts into tears. This mutual exchange of love is highly choreographed and contrasts with the scripted lines of an exemplary m ­ other sacrificing her son that are spoken in the film. Again, to borrow Orbaugh’s words, it is an “intensely personal and familial” exchange that characterizes the mother-­son relationship of the m ­ other film. In addition, the mutuality of intense emotion between the nationalist/militarist ­mother and her son could be a consoling promise for sons as well. Boys became eligible to enter military preparatory school at the age of fourteen, and by late 1944 many of them ­were on duty ­after an abbreviated training period. Also, all

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youth at schools ­were mobilized for war production by Mobilization of Students (Gakuto kinrō dōin) of 1944. As a youth the novelist Yamanaka Hisashi was an ardent reader of the original novel The Navy, which was serialized in the Asahi shinbun newspaper with phonetic transcriptions (rubi) accompanying all Chinese characters so that ­children could read and enjoy the episodes.73 Some films depict ­mothers who per­sis­tently support their husbands and sons and guide their lives so that they ­w ill serve the country, as in ­Mother’s Map or ­Mother Never Dies. The former is about a ­mother who never gives up supporting her eldest son, who eventually succeeds in Manchuria, a­ fter many failures that drive the rest of ­family into poverty. At the end of the film, she decides to join her son in Manchuria. Earlier she gave up the ­family’s luxurious residence in Nagano to move to a small apartment in Tokyo, and now she is leaving Tokyo for Manchuria, which she knows only from a map. The latter film is about a ­father who attempts to raise his son properly. His wife killed herself to avoid burdening her husband and their small son when she found that she had cancer. She left a letter to her husband in which she asks him to raise the son properly, and the ­father does so in accord with his wife’s moral code.74 She is presented as the female embodiment of traditional Japa­nese spirit and values as a descendant of warrior (bushi) class. ­Mothers in the early 1940s films are no longer a meta­phor for the home or a nostalgic location. Instead, they are often in charge of a fatherless ­house­hold, as seen in ­Mother’s Wedding Anniversary. This film foregrounds a ­mother’s dedication and contributions to the state as both a m ­ other of five c­ hildren and a medical doctor. The wife of a pioneering explorer who settled in Java thirty years earlier, she returned to mainland Japan without her husband to educate her five ­children ­there. She then studied to become a doctor of obstetrics and pediatrics and now works in a hospital. She is hoping to practice in Java eventually, to help both local ­people and Japa­nese settlers in the region. Professionalism, spatial mobility, and leadership are now impor­tant constituents of the new femininity of imperial subjecthood. Each of her ­children illustrates aspects of the expansionist Japa­nese Empire. Her eldest son is a bilingual radio anchor in Tokyo who broadcasts Javanese-­language propaganda about the invincible Japa­nese military and the ideals of the Greater East Asian Co-­Prosperity Sphere. Her other sons are an aspiring pi­lot and a settler trainee preparing to go to Manchuria, while her ­daughter marries a disabled engineer who works in armament development. The plot revolves around her relation with a prodigal son, her second, who now hopes she w ­ ill accept him back, which she does a­ fter he begins working as a decent factory laborer. Interestingly, the m ­ other’s superhuman abilities as both a professional doctor and a wise m ­ other of five c­ hildren prevent the film from establishing paternal au-

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thority. Her husband is still alive, and they are simply separated as a temporary arrangement, but she dominates the ­house­hold. ­Here the home front is a completely self-­sufficient effeminized space, to the extent that her presence is “threatening,” as Lant notes, to the idealized f­amily hierarchy and the conventional male lineage. This threatening presence of the ­mother at the command post, so to speak, demonstrates the united home front as an autonomous, effeminized space and shows how war­time gender roles ­were changing. As a final example, I discuss The Army, which has often attracted attention from film scholars. As High notes, the final sequence, in which the ­mother runs next to a marching military unit to see off her older son, is “among the most celebrated in Japa­nese film history.”75 Conventionally, postwar critics and scholars have interpreted the scene as a rare expression of antistate sentiment, reading it as a confrontation between a ­mother unwilling to separate from her son and the state that has drafted him.76 Such a reading is pos­si­ble, but I argue that it was not simply the ­mother’s suffering that is presented in the scene. The focus is on the exchange of affection between ­mother and son in a forceful melodramatic mode, manifested similarly as such scenes in paper theater The Unsung M ­ other and film The Navy. The original story of The Army was a novel by Hino Ashihei (1907–1960) serialized in the Asahi shinbun newspaper. Directed by Kinoshita Keisuke (1912– 1998), who debuted in 1943, the film centers on three generations of the Takagi ­family, whose male members had served in the emperor’s military since 1868, in the Boshin War, the civil war in which the Meiji government established its sovereignty by suppressing the forces of the previous Tokugawa shogunate. Tomohiko, the second-­generation patriarch, was not healthy enough to serve in the front lines and had to leave the army at the time of the Russo-­Japanese War (1904–1905), which he remains ­bitter about for the rest of his life. His wife Waka, an intelligent and determined ­woman who was formerly a servant of the ­family, assures him that she ­will make sure their sons become good soldiers, which they believe is the most honorable calling for a man. This f­ amily saga is crammed with affirmations of the historical significance of the emperor system and references to the rising tensions in international politics and foreign affairs that led Japan to warfare. Though the story is ostensibly about the ­father’s dream of making his son(s) serve in the army and its realization, the theme is the war­time good wife and wise ­mother, whose character is almost overwhelming in her superhuman abilities and resilience. According to a review published during the film’s production, “The script is very good; I must say that it is a masterpiece of recent years. . . . ​The most impor­tant role is Waka, the m ­ other. . . . ​I believe that the film completely pres­ ents the exemplary ­mother of Japan.”77 In the film, Waka, the “­mother of Japan,”

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disciplines her elder son Shintarō strictly, forcing him to be brave, competent, well-­mannered, and physically fit. While supporting her husband, who tends to be introverted and antisocial, she also helps run the ­family business, attends to ­house­hold chores, educates her sons, and occasionally intervenes in conflicts between f­ ather and son. When Shintarō passes the physical exam for military conscription, she is pleased: “I am relieved. I feel that a load has been lifted from my shoulders. I ­wouldn’t have known what to do if he had failed, ­after I worked so hard to raise him properly for the past twenty years. Boys are entrusted by the Emperor.” As seen in ­these lines, she is portrayed as a dedicated and determined ­woman who represents official po­liti­cal ideologies, but she is always shown as caring and nurturing, not dogmatic. ­After training at military school, Shintarō is scheduled to be sent to the front line at the outbreak of the Shanghai Incident in 1932. In the last scene of the film, his unit marches to the train station. On the morning of their departure, Waka initially thinks of staying at home and explains to her neighbor that she would cry and her nose would redden, which would embarrass her son (as it did in an earlier farewell). By this line, the viewer is informed that she cried before and ­will cry again when she sees her son off: she is an emotional, caring ­mother. However, when she hears the marching trumpets from home, she suddenly runs out into the street to see Shintarō off. A long shot follows her and shows that she is anxious and gradually becoming frantic, in the midst of other p ­ eople who are hurrying to see the troops. She runs to the main street where her son’s unit is marching out to the station. Pushing through many o ­ thers who are t­here to see them off, Waka seeks her son amid the marchers. Her dark-­colored plain kimono contrasts with the white smocks of Kokufu ­women cheering for the soldiers at the side of the street. A combination of crane shots, long shots, and tracking shots repeatedly stresses the long line of Kokufu ­women, waving their flags and shouting at the soldiers, emphasizing the patriotic excitement of ­people on the street. Historically speaking, the Kokufu had not yet been founded at the beginning of 1932. Therefore, the portrayal of the organ­ization in this last scene is the director’s anachronistic creation. A lengthy tracking shot also fixes on Waka in the center, anxious to find her son and r­ unning alongside the rows of marching soldiers. The overwhelming emotional charge of this scene was noted by the scriptwriter Inomata Katsuhito (1911–1979), who retrospectively noted that “I would not have liked being smothered with her pestering, motherly love.”78 However, this does not bother Shintarō, who understands and appreciates her affection (see fig. 2.3). When Waka fi­nally finds her son, their eyes meet and he smiles at her. She nods to him, and he says something inaudible and nods back to her. The shot/reverse shot repeats to show their ­faces alternately to the viewers, which intensifies the

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FIGURE 2.3.  Waka (played by Tanaka Kinuyo) bids farewell to her son, and he smiles back to her in The Army (Rikugun, 1944).

exchange of their farewell. Tears run down the ­mother’s cheeks while she runs alongside her son’s marching unit, and her son turns his pleasant smile to her. Again and again, they exchange smiles and nods. The long tracking shot, in which the camera never lets go of Waka, alternates with a bust shot of her son, u ­ ntil fi­ 79 nally she falls and loses sight of him. Writing ­after the war, Shimizu Akira, who had been a film magazine editor and critic since the late 1930s, recollected the film and praised it as rebellious to war­time state ideology: The Army centers on the sorrow of the ­mother who accompanies her son on his way to the frontline. The last scene, with the long moving shot conveying their reluctance to part, appears in the scenario in just one line: “The m ­ other accompanies him to the station.” The scenario passed the censorship before shooting, but at the time of the shooting, this line became a scene full of emotion in the typical style of the director Kinoshita Keisuke; it almost gives rise to anti-­war feelings.80 As if endorsing Shimizu’s postwar recollection, High introduces a rumor that an army officer was outraged by the film in the premier viewing for military personnel.81 In fact one con­temporary film review complains that “the figure of the

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­ other, ecstatic, half crazy when seeing her son off, was in its exaggeration and m lack of common sense a highly deplorable and unnecessary stain on an other­wise fine film.” The review points to the ­mother’s actions unfavorably and sees them as deviant from the proper be­hav­ior of the good imperial subject-­mother.82 The novelist Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013), who himself served in China briefly, watched the film much ­later, in the late 1990s and stated, “The pre­sen­ta­ tion of the ­mother was too moving, and I suppose that the military had to let it go. I was stunned by the superb skill of the director and drawn to the scene.”83 The scene is indeed composed with superb skill, making it fruitless to attempt to definitively determine ­whether or not it is an antistate rebellion. It is inherently ambiguous. A ­ fter Waka falls and loses sight of her son, she stands up and prays ­toward the camera with her head down. She might be praying for her son’s survival, which could be seen as antistate re­sis­tance, or she might be worshiping the soldiers as gods-­to-be with appreciation, which might be read as a pro-­state gesture. In fact, High also acknowledges, a­ fter his previously quoted comment, that ­there was a critic who praised the scene for its “stirring propaganda effect.”84 What I find more intriguing, however, is the scene just before this famous last sequence. It deserves exploration as it elucidates the tangled relationship between Waka’s war­time national(ist) and gendered identities. In this scene, Waka recites the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers (Gunjin chokuyu), which was promulgated by the Meiji Emperor and memorized by imperial soldiers. Early 1940s films very often show imperial soldiers reciting it, for example in The Flaming Sky (Moyuru ōzora; directed by Abe Yutaka, 1940) or Kato Falcon Fighters (Kato hayabusa sentō tai; directed by Yamamoto Kajirō, 1944). The recital of the Rescript in ­these films serves as an expression of intense loyalty to the emperor, or as a sign of spiritism (seishin shugi), which High defines as a kind of philosophy of self-­cultivation and nurturing of the interior strength of each individual soldier.85 Interestingly and uniquely, Waka, too, recites it from memory, as if she herself w ­ ere a soldier. This is a masculinized image of womanhood, even more so than that of the m ­ other of ­Mother’s Wedding Anniversary who leads the ­house­hold by replacing her husband. In the penultimate scene, she is attending to h ­ ouse­hold chores when she feels suddenly dizzy and sits down. Then, she starts to recite the Rescript in an almost inaudible murmur. Her face is captured in a frontal close-up that reveals her intense emotion. The automatic, spontaneous recital of the Rescript pres­ents the ­woman’s aspiration to become a soldier, a full member of society, more than just her identification with her son. Thus, the close-up reinforces the extremity of Waka’s psy­chol­ogy, which exceeds socially assigned domesticity and motherhood. However, this gender-­bending moment is disrupted and reappropriated by the marching scene that follows, which relocates her as a ­woman who watches the real, ­actual male soldiers. This reappropriation is further reinforced by the shots

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in which the son’s calm smile is received by that of the emotional ­mother, which reestablish Waka as a soldier’s ­mother and not a soldier herself. The Army reveals ­women’s unsettled positions within the nation-­state. Total war reconfigures the existing hierarchy of citizens, secondary citizens, and noncitizens, and the deployment of ­women for the war effort was, as in the other countries, central to this reconstruction of society. But through the encouragement of ­women’s public contributions to the war­time nation-­state, conflicts arise: If soldier-­hood is an honor associated with full citizenship, can w ­ omen, too, deserve it? If ­women serve in the military, can they bear many ­children? What distinguishes the border between the home front and the front line if w ­ omen are in the front line? If a narrative grants spiritual and moral supremacy to w ­ omen over men and has a w ­ oman ­running a h ­ ouse­hold, what do men do for the state? ­Women’s military ser­vice, real and i­ magined, and war­time production work w ­ ere major changes in the total war socie­ties. Indeed, Waka’s momentary identification with soldier-­hood is materialized within a year in the film Three ­Women in the North (Kita no sannin; directed by Saeki Kiyoshi, 1945), which I discuss below. In early 1940s m ­ other films, class difference and social hierarchy are minimized in the narratives. The ­mother’s class often changes, ­either downward or upward, for example in ­Mother’s Map and The Army, respectively. ­Women’s resilience and competency are highly praised. Even though the state repeated its public policy princi­ple that ­women should be “staying-­at-­home-­mothers” (kyotaku shugi), the cinematic ­mothers ­were unconfined to their homes in their willingness and ability to serve the state.86 In this sense, the war­time m ­ other film was threatening to the existing social order, as it complicated the modes of ­women’s identification with public space and disrupted the state’s indoctrination of gendered imperial subject-­hood. The genre’s narratives occasionally aspire to a horizon of w ­ omen’s expectations dif­fer­ent from the one the state prepared for them. Thus, the 1930s cinema characterization of the m ­ other as a nostalgic location, a comforting static figure, or at most an intermediary between male characters was reconfigured by the early 1940s so that ­women became active participants in the nation-­state by occupying the social position of ­mother. It is not a coincidence that Doane’s analy­sis of the 1940s American maternal melodrama is helpful in elucidating its Japa­nese counterpart. This is precisely the historical moment of total war for both countries. Doane describes the way Hollywood maternal melodrama loses force when identification of the country with “the ideal wife and ­mother allows a po­liti­cal discourse to expropriate an entire constellation of connotations associated with the maternal—­comfort, nurturance, home, containment/stasis, community, closeness, affect—in the ser­v ice of a nationalistic cause.”87 This can be observed in the Japa­nese case as well, where ­women are sites of ­great ambivalence and mobility.

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­Women’s Work in Public Space In the last sections of this chapter I analyze two films that focus on the mobilization of w ­ omen for total war: Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku; directed by Kurosawa Akira, 1944) and Three ­Women in the North (Kita no sannin; directed by Saeki Kiyoshi, 1945). ­These films illustrate a newer femininity: that is, masculinized gender norms of w ­ omen’s mobilization for the workforce during the very late stage of the war. The former film depicts female factory workers; the latter, female soldiers whose mission was not fully materialized in real­ity but presented as a suggestive fiction. Most Beautiful, directed by auteur director Kurosawa, has been regarded as a straightforward “propaganda” film, a term that connotes a lowbrow film of poor quality. Kurosawa’s directorial debut was Sanshirō in 1943, in which a youth seeks mastery of jūdō, representative of Japa­nese martial arts. A box office hit, it was followed by his second film, Most Beautiful, a dramatic film about members of the ­Women’s Volunteer L ­ abor Corps (Joshi kinrō teishin tai) at a factory for optical lenses for armaments. It depicts a group of young ­women who strug­gle to overcome vari­ous hardships—­including fatigue, loss of friends, and loss of Japa­nese military in the front lines and to sickness—to achieve production increases ­under the kind and patient guidance of their dorm matron and male factory supervisors. In the end the moral and psychological strength of the individual ­women and their collective efforts enable the production increases. The film deserves examination in connection with two points. First, it is noteworthy that it bears a strong sense of realism characteristic of documentary film, which suggests the transformation of the dramatic film during total war. Second, it pres­ents a new femininity in which girls are no longer forced into motherhood or the norm of childbearing. While the film continues to emphasize the m ­ other’s role to guide youth (in this case, girls) to serve the state, girls themselves are appreciated for their work rather than for domestic contributions. In this pro­cess, female gender identity is reframed as oscillating between conventional and new gender norms. The girls in the corps are led by an able, responsible ­woman, Watanabe Tsuru, who is referred to as taichō (squad leader), a title associated with military rank. To respond to the Production Increase Period, the members of the corps have deci­ded that they want to try to achieve at least a two-­thirds increase, over and above the originally assigned 50 ­percent increase for ­women. ­Because men ­were supposed to double their production, they want to prove that w ­ omen are competent, too. By foregrounding the w ­ omen’s camaraderie and commitment to work, the film pres­ents the female workforce as a community that stands in for the conventional f­amily. ­Under guidance by male factory supervisors and their dorm matron, the factory and the dorm become surrogate homes for the ­women.

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The release of the film was clearly connected with changing state ­labor policies of drafting ­women for war production. The ­Women’s Volunteer ­Labor Corps was conceived to place ­women in factories to solve the prob­lem of ­labor shortages caused by male conscription. In 1937, 3 ­percent of the nation’s male population had been sent to the front, and by 1941 this figure had swelled to 7 ­percent (2,390,000) and continued to grow.88 To respond, a series of mea­sures ­were implemented to deploy ­women in industrial ser­v ice, starting with the 1941 Ordinance for Cooperation of the National L ­ abor Patriotic Corps (Kokumin kinrō hōkoku kyōryoku rei), which made it pos­si­ble for the state to draft ­women to do thirty days of factory work a year. Then, the Announcement on W ­ oman’s L ­ abor Mobilization (Joshi kinrō dōin ni kansuru ken) of September 1943 urged ­women to form volunteer l­abor corps. However, t­ hese mea­sures ­were not seriously enforced, and they ­were not responded to well by most ­women. For example, by April 1944, only 5,023 w ­ omen had responded to a voluntary conscription letter that was sent to 69,838 w ­ omen.89 At this point, when Most Beautiful was made and released, the state had not yet succeeded in organ­izing w ­ omen, ­because the draft was on a voluntary basis. The film therefore aims to promote the idea of the corps rather than to rec­ord its ­actual activities.90 Nonetheless, Most Beautiful creates a strong sense of realism and documentation. Although it is a scripted drama performed by actors and actresses, critics have associated this film with documentary filming technique. The con­temporary film critic Iijima Tadashi noted, “The only way to make a film like this is to make it like a Culture Film [bunka eiga; documentary].” The postwar critic Donald Richie also states in his monograph on the director that “Kurosawa wanted to make a ‘documentary’ and that is precisely what the film is.” He calls the film “Japan’s best documentary.” On the other hand, High is correct when he states that “the film’s pathetically upbeat conclusion fails to mask the desperation overtaking the real home-­front situation.” 91 It is the case that hunger, fatigue, illness, physical abuse, and harassment permeated ­women’s workplaces in late 1944 factories. Though ­these aspects of the factory experience ­were not fully addressed in the film, my concern ­here is not to focus on the issue of such “facts” that the film could or should have recorded, but rather to question its easy association with the documentary genre. As Iijima and Richie suggest, t­ here ­were ele­ments of the proj­ect that one would typically find in documentary filmmaking. The shooting took place in an a­ ctual factory, and a­ ctual workers appear in the film. A ­ ctual posters, flyers, and announcements of the production objectives of the time ­were on the walls of the canteen. Even the Japa­nese military’s ­actual losses are reported in the story. When the corps members learn of a Japa­nese military defeat in the South Seas by reading the news on a bulletin board, the soundtrack plays “If You Go to the Sea” (Umi

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yukaba). This song customarily accompanied such news in radio broadcasting at the time, and the resulting sense of the gravity of death makes the film seem realistic. Lant’s discussion of British cinema during World War II is illuminating in this connection. She points out an “intermarriage of style and address” of the genres of documentary and dramatic films: “War blurred the distinction between documentary and feature filmmaking in an economic as well as an aesthetic sense. . . . ​ The war also caused film’s entertainment and information roles to merge. Many feature films as well as documentaries contained instruction on how to ‘carry on,’ and emphasized the need for increased effort and sacrifices.” 92 This applies very well to Most Beautiful, which can be better understood by delving more deeply into the arguments of the two critics quoted above. Iijima Tadashi, writing at the time of the film’s release, felt that he himself could not have envisioned presenting the work’s theme in any other way than by documentary filmmaking. The film’s narrative seemed to him descriptive and faithful to real­ity. It is set in Hiratsuka, a city connected with Tokyo through a trunk road and dense with military factories of ammunition, aircraft, and other armaments. A ­ fter the release of this film, the city was in fact bombarded several times, and 80 ­percent of it was destroyed by air raids in July 1945. In the film, the young w ­ omen in the factory are conscripted from dif­fer­ent regions of Japan, placed together in the factory, and ­housed in a common dorm, so that their collectivity portrays national unity. They also symbolize cross-­class unification, as suggested by the dif­fer­ent outfits they wear. For example, one of the ­women in the film always wears a school uniform (with a design reminiscent of a sailor’s uniform) as a top, which indicates that she must have joined the corps in the ­middle of her education, while the clothing and characterization of other young ­women suggests they had not continued their schooling beyond compulsory education and ­were already factory workers when they ­were integrated into the corps. Kurosawa initially wrote a scenario titled The Gate Opens Wide (Mon wa mune o hirogeteiru) on a similar topic: ­women’s work at an armament factory around late 1943. This scenario was about class confrontations between “female students and female factory workers.” 93 The idea of confrontations between two social groups of ­women is in­ter­est­ing and quite plausible, and if this scenario had been materialized in the film, it would have added another layer of real­ity. However, it was merely hinted at in Most Beautiful. In contrast to Iijima, Donald Richie explores the stylistic ele­ments of documentary in the film and draws attention to the global film culture that was addressed and integrated into Kurosawa’s oeuvre. Richie suggests the influence of German and Rus­sian techniques in the film: scenes backlit in the German man-

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ner and analytical montage in a volleyball scene, in which close-­ups of girls’ ­faces are juxtaposed in a series of shots to create a dynamic portrayal of youth, intense movement, and energy. He cites Berlin: The Symphony of the G ­ reat City (1927), by Walter Ruttmann, and the Rus­sian film Arsenal (1928) by Alexander Dovzhenko (though this is not a documentary). He also suggests influence from Triumph of the ­Will (1934) by Leni Riefenstahl, pointing to Kurosawa’s long shots of still images of p ­ eople or objects that stop the flow of a par­tic­u­lar sequence or heighten its effects. The montages of workers, machines, and p ­ eople’s ­faces in the factory and canteen do indeed suggest strong affinity with the Rus­sian avant-­garde pre­ sen­ta­tion of the communal spaces of ­labor and industry. This kind of conflation between dramatic and documentary films also stood out in the con­temporary filmmaking in liberal nations.94 In par­tic­u­lar, the British film Millions Like Us (directed by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, 1943) makes an illuminating comparison with Most Beautiful: both are ­women’s total war mobilization films set in a factory, and unexpectedly, given their disparate origins, they are similar in many ways.95 ­These films share multiple thematic ele­ ments: deployment of ­women in factories; reconfiguration of female gender norms; class issues; and w ­ omen’s resilient patriotic spirit. They also have numerous motifs in common: singing a song together to reinforce a sense of unity and nationalist spirit; flyers stating war production objectives posted on the canteen wall; and discouraging and disheartening losses by their own militaries. In addition, technically they both evoke documentary films. I am not suggesting that Kurosawa directly learned from the British film. Instead, their vari­ous affinities suggest the common effects of total war on gender construction, illustrating the tensions and conflicts between w ­ omen’s lives and state policies regardless of dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal ideologies. Celia, the protagonist of Millions Like Us, is a young ­woman deployed to an aircraft factory who leaves her home to live in a factory dormitory, where she meets a variety of ­women: college-­educated Gwen, wealthy upper-­middle-­class Jennifer, and so on. When Celia initially reports to the office of the Ministry of ­Labor and National Ser­vice, she is extremely disappointed to be placed in an aircraft factory since she hoped to join the W ­ omen’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).96 Instead of the military uniform of the WAAF that affirms ­women’s national ser­ vice, Celia must wear a huge apron on top of her civilian clothes. At the factory she meets Fred, a radio operator in the Royal Air Force, and they get married, but he is killed during a mission over Germany before they ­settle into their own apartment. Though devastated by the news, Celia continues to work. The film closes with her singing the popu­lar song “Waiting at the Church” together with other ­women in the factory canteen, while RAF aircraft are flying over the factory on their way ­toward Germany. As she sings, Celia’s facial expression betrays an

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intense but benumbed state of mind. She might be nostalgically remembering Fred, or she may be determined to avenge his death by turning her attention to the victory of her country. Both Most Beautiful and Millions Like Us introduce changing socie­ties where ­women leave home for war-­related work and join a classless community, marked by value of their competency, concern over the death toll of the ongoing conflict, and showcasing of songs and m ­ usic that unite w ­ omen. Most importantly, both films stress the redefinition of w ­ omen’s work and life and gender norms as a crucial aspect of the total war society, increased production, and accompanying shifts in morality.97 To elaborate on Lant’s aforementioned remark, that total war entertainment films contain information and instructions about how to carry on, it is not only with entertainment films such as Millions Like Us that genre distinctions are blurred by the inclusion of documentary footage. The British documentary film of the era also gradually developed the genre of “story-­documentary,” which increased the degree of dramatization typically associated with documentary techniques of montage construction, location shooting, and the use of nonprofessional actors.98 For example, They Also Serve (directed by Ruby Grierson, 1940) is dedicated to “the House­wives of Britain” and shows a day of a “­Mother” in war­time Britain. Her duties are attending h ­ ouse­hold chores, taking care of a young neighbor whose husband is away on the front line, and looking a­ fter her husband and her ­daughter who is deployed for war work. She also offers tea and refreshments for ­those who lost their ­houses in an air raid. Such a depiction of a middle-­class ­mother at work would be easily transferrable to Japa­nese screens. Also, Night Shift (directed by J. D. Chambers, 1942), said to serve as the basis for Millions Like Us, portrays female armaments factory workers who are “as good as” men at what they do. Such film narratives are dramatizations of exemplary attitudes about the war and also compilations of information about the war effort. Amateur acting and prepared scripts in documentaries w ­ ere also deployed to realize their film99 makers’ visions and goals. In Kurosawa’s Most Beautiful, genre fluidity is reinforced by the deployment of military songs that the characters are constantly singing, since some of ­these songs are from con­temporary hit films, both military documentaries and dramatic features.100 In fact, the film characters sing individually and collectively so often that one might propose the term “song film” (kayō eiga) as a genre that introduces and foregrounds numerous songs. The favorite song in Most Beautiful is the Meiji military song “Mongol Invasions of Japan” (Genkō), which is associated with the First Sino-­Japanese War of 1894. The young w ­ omen play the song together in a band and sing it constantly, collectively and individually, in their dorm and their workplace.

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Singing of popu­lar military songs ties the fictional characters to offscreen viewers and renders the film more realistic, but that is not all. I argue that the pre­sen­ta­tion of girls singing military songs also emphasizes the gender-­bending by ­these working ­women, since the first-­person narrator of military songs is explic­itly male, such as “the brave Kamakura warriors” (Kamakura danji) of their favorite. By singing ­these songs, ­women assume a cross-­gender identity. Young ­women constantly manifest their gender identity as male through retelling and identifying with war stories and warriors’ emotions in the form of ­these incessantly repeated military songs. This melding of w ­ omen’s lives and work to ­those of military ser­v icemen resists attempts by paternalistic male factory supervisors to code them as feminine and, therefore, psychologically and physically vulnerable. Despite the young w ­ omen’s orchestration of masculinized identity, the cinematic text re-­centers their femininity by emphasizing Watanabe’s vulnerability. The last scene of the film stresses her identity as female. She learns that her ­mother is on her deathbed, but refuses to go home, explaining that “­Mother said, I must never shirk my duty to go home, no m ­ atter what.” She returns to her desk and keeps working at a microscope she is using to calibrate a lens. The lens ­w ill be used to shoot down the ­enemy airplanes. It is her job to check the lens through the microscope, but her tears make it impossible for her to see anything. The entire scene is shown in one scene-­one shot, in a relatively long take of about ninety seconds, with the camera fixed on a close-up of Watanabe, who cannot look into the microscope ­because her tears keep flowing, and she keeps wiping her eyes and cheeks with her hands. This shooting technique stresses her vulnerability in a way unlikely to be tolerated for a male character.101 This scene is accompanied by the very soft, consoling tones of a song celebrating the season of spring, “New Leaves” (Wakaba, composed in 1942). This very last song in the film pres­ents a stark contrast to all the other songs, which are military: its lyr­ics address nothing but growing young leaves, and its melody has no marching beats. The new life and the beauty of nature that are celebrated in this song point to Watanabe’s youth and resilience and at once resonate with her deeply personal and uncontrollable emotions for her ­mother. The film is a rare example of the portrayal of a mother-­daughter relationship, since the dominant repre­sen­ ta­tion of parent-­child(ren) relationships during total war is that of ­mother and son. While mother-­daughter relationships are unitary and continuous, as both of them belong to private space and are expected to bear and raise ­children, the mother-­son stories are about their separation and, paradoxically, their psychological unity, as seen in The Army. In this sense, even the mother-­daughter relation in Most Beautiful seems standardized and touched by the dominant total war narrative formula.

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What should be noted further is that Watanabe’s ambivalent gender identity serves her as a dual strength—in both the masculine sense of responsibility and commitment to work and the feminine sense of nurturing spirituality shown to her peers and juniors—­that is greatly valued in the film. She does not go home to replace her ­mother, but she stays in the factory and keeps sitting at her work desk. She cultivates caring and nurturing attitudes ­toward the other female workers, but this is a necessary part of her leadership.

The Motherless World of Military ­Women and the End of the War Most Beautiful is prob­ably the best dramatic film about war­time ­women’s work. It articulates the strength of state interest in a female l­abor force, suggesting a new direction for femininity regardless of reluctance about the deployment of ­women for work and the lack of effective mobilization strategies for them. It also reveals the nature of the cinematic text as multilayered, with cross-­genre references to non-­Japanese documentary film traditions and with acoustic ties to offscreen spectators through popu­lar songs and con­temporary cultural practices and events. On the other hand, Three ­Women in the North (Kita no sannin; directed by Saeki Kiyoshi, 1945) embodies an intriguing futuristic vision that transcends even Watanabe’s gender ambiguity. It was the last dramatic film produced in war­time Japan, opening on August 5, 1945, ten days before Hirohito’s radio announcement of the termination of war.102 It is ironic that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan only three days ­after the film’s release, ­because the “north” of the title refers to Japan’s defense of its northern borders with the Soviet Union. I call it futuristic ­because the film narrative envisions the instantiation of ­women’s military conscription, which historians generally agree was not actually put in place by the state of Japan before the end of the war. An Ordinance of the ­People’s Patriotic Volunteer Corps (Kokumin giyūheieki hō) was issued in June 1945, aiming to conscript w ­ omen between ages seventeen and forty, but it exempted “­women pivotal to the home.”103 Given the domestic role played by the majority of ­women in this demographic, this exemption in real­ity amounts to a failure to actually institute female conscription. Contrary to this real­ity, Three ­Women in the North pres­ents female telecommunication operators as well as female members of an antiaircraft unit who have the honor of ­dying on their military mission. It is true that total war had forced the state of Japan to increasingly deploy ­women as part of the workforce, but this was in smaller proportions than

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in the United States and Britain, and the film’s pre­sen­ta­tion of w ­ omen becoming a vital part of Japa­nese imperial military significantly exceeds the a­ ctual circumstances at the time. In this sense, the film is comparable with the Allied counterpart films on ­women’s military ser­v ices, including Gentle Sex (directed by Leslie Howard, 1943, E ­ ngland), So Proudly We Hail! (directed by Mark Sandrich, 1943, United States), ­Here Comes the WAVES (directed by Mark Sandrich, 1944, United States), and Keep Your Powder Dry (directed by Edward Buzzell, 1945, United States). Three ­Women in the North was completed during a time when increasing air raids ­were destroying Japa­nese cities, which makes it difficult to speculate about its viewership. It was nearly impossible for the film to reach audiences in the major cities, and at this stage of the war, it is not clear how active state-­sponsored travelling film screeners w ­ ere in rural areas. Yet the film manifests its own vision of a near ­future of ­women’s military ser­v ice; a ­future that did not actually materialize in Japan ­until 1968, almost a quarter-­century ­later.104 The story features three female wireless communication operators who assist in the operation of military transport aircraft, both on board the planes and on the ground in northern Japan. They trained together but are now stationed separately in airbases in Aomori, Hokkai (currently Iturup, Kuril Islands), and Chishima (currently Shumushu, Kuril Islands). They work together with male soldiers, wearing uniforms of a jacket and trousers. Ueno, who once ended a relationship with a man ­because she did not want to leave her job, is a competent communications operator stationed in Aomori. As a proud pioneer ­woman in this profession, she wants to prove that female operators are competent and able to fully serve the state. Matsumoto, Ueno’s former classmate (dōki), is now on her way to Hokkai on an urgent mission and stops over in Aomori b ­ ecause her plane has mechanical prob­lems. Though she was not originally assigned to work on this aircraft, she took over the mission when the male radio operator fell ill and is determined to finish it successfully. Matsumoto passionately declares to her friend Ueno, “I w ­ ill do it! I w ­ ill hang in t­ here even if it costs my life! D ­ on’t you think that it is our duty to complete this mission? Remember, American ­women operators are working together with the male crews in the B29 bombers that are now bombing our land!” ­Whether or not US ­women ­were in fact assigned to such missions does not ­matter much in the narrative. The focus is on the importance of Japa­nese ­women participating on the front lines to fight in the war. Matsumoto’s male superior accepts her with l­ ittle hesitation; he even tells a male pi­lot that “anyone who doubts the ability of female radio operators is simply ignorant [ninshiki busoku].” (See fig. 2.4.)

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Gotō, the radio operator at the Hokkai base, also trained together with Ueno and Matsumoto. In spite of unexpected midair combat between fighter airplanes above the base, accompanied by bombing, Gotō remains in the communication center to guide her former classmate Matsumoto’s aircraft in. Matsumoto’s plane lands successfully on the half-­destroyed base, and an injured Goto receives and congratulates her. The end of Three ­Women in the North shows Matsumoto working at wireless devices in an aircraft as one of the onboard crew members, sitting ­behind the pi­lot. The story is about the professional competency, commitment, and military comradeship of the female radio operators. Although the male supervisors in Most Beautiful hovered around and evaluated the young ­women as if they ­were their guardians, in this film the ­women operators are in­de­pen­dent. They are appreciated as highly competent—­albeit less experienced—­colleagues. The film could be said to depict a near ­future scenario of conditions if the war had continued beyond August 1945. The young ­women of the antiaircraft task force sing a military song, as in Most Beautiful. This time it is one of the best-­known such songs, “Cherry Blossoms from the Same Class” (Dōki no sakura; ­here “the same class” refers to classmates

FIGURE 2.4. ­Women in military uniform (played by Hara Setsuko and Takamine Hideko) who serve the nation in Three ­Women in the North (Kita no sannin, 1945).

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from the same military school who become comrades in the same airborne unit). The song famously begins, “You and I are cherry blossoms from the same trunk” (kisama to ore to wa dōki no sakura), using the explic­itly masculine pronouns kisama (you) and ore (I). It is unsettling to hear it sung by young girls who are stationed on a mountain to watch for approaching e­ nemy aircraft. Nonetheless, the “you and I” of this military song effectively communicates that the film is about the female version of the homosocial bond between soldiers who face death together on active duty. Female wireless telecommunication operators did actually exist in Japan during the war. The W ­ omen’s Legion of Wireless Communication Operators (Joshi tsūshintai), founded in 1943, was a rare example of Japa­nese auxiliary military work assigned to w ­ omen. ­These operators w ­ ere dressed in a uniform of a white shirt, double-­breasted jacket, and pleated skirt, with laced boots. (It is noteworthy, however, that in the film the female radio operators wear more practical and mobile pants.) The insignia on the chest of this uniform was an ea­gle on a globe bearing the character “protection” (or “defense”), and another insignia on the arm shows a cherry blossom surrounded by two leafy branches. The military headquarters of the Eastern Region (Tōbu gun) deployed around 400 ­women, the Central Region (Tōkai gun) 300, and the North Region (Hokubu gun) 262.105 Their training was shown in a newsreel, Nippon News, vol. 154 (May 18, 1943), with footage showing them swearing an oath of ser­v ice, working, and marching. Their uniform is depicted in g­ reat detail, with a close-up of the insignia on the chest, another shot of the insignia on the arm, and then a slow pan from laced-up boots to box-­pleated skirt to jacket and to female face. The emphasis on the uniform is impor­tant since, except for nurses, ­women rarely ­were given uniforms, which separated them from volunteer workers and acknowledged their contribution to the state. The Kokufu ­women wore white aprons over their casual kimono, and in Most Beautiful ­women wore civilian clothes while male workers wore uniforms. To conclude the (black-­and-­white) newsreel, the voice-­over narrator describes the color of the uniform as the “color of national defense,” or kokubō shoku, that is khaki, which was used for the uniforms of the military and of conscripted male civilian laborers.106 ­Women drilling with bamboo spears are the best-­known image associated with this last stage of total war mobilization, but they bear no resemblance to the military ser­vicewomen depicted in Three ­Women in the North, whose professional abilities and national ser­vices are fully acknowledged by the state through their military uniforms.107 If Most Beautiful suggests a new femininity of 1944 in the cross-­gender identity of young female workers who sing military songs to assert their resolution to catch up with their male counter­parts, then Three ­Women in the North develops an even newer femininity for 1945. The narrative confirms that romance is not

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to be consummated, and marriage is neither a duty nor a priority. Ueno already broke up with her boyfriend to continue her military duties, and although Gotō has a subtle romantic moment with a male meteorologist, t­here is no sign that they w ­ ill pursue a relationship. The film completely departs from the con­temporary ideologies of female gender roles of reproductiveness and domesticity. The female operators risk death on their missions just like their male colleagues. As Ikegawa suggests, it epitomizes an emerging, newer femininity that ­women are granted the honor of being killed on a military mission.108 I would extend her analy­sis by pointing out that they are no longer expected to become ­mothers ­either. Three ­Women in the North leaves far ­behind the pronatalist policies that prevented the state from rigorous deployment of ­women and ­wholehearted female military conscription, even in 1945. W ­ hether or not honorable death as a soldier is a desirable goal of gender equality for ­women is debatable, but it can be seen as one of the egalitarian opportunities for ­women that the modern state might offer. The type of gender equality the film depicts provides a kind of conclusion to the varying gender norms that the film industry deployed during the war, ranging from ­women as nostalgic location to agents of consumer culture to masculinized ­mothers. Three ­Women in the North makes an in­ter­est­ing contrast with the Shōchiku film Flames of Passion (Jōen; directed by Shibuya Minoru, 1947), which was produced to promote the idea of gender equality during the US occupation ­after the end of the war. Replacing the imperial constitution, the new Japa­nese constitution became effective in 1947. The Occupation government assigned three major studios, Tōhō, Daiei, and Shōchiku, to produce a film each to promote a key concept of this new constitution: respectively, democracy, civil rights, and w ­ omen’s liberation. According to the synopsis of Flames of Passion, it is about a ­couple who feel their marriage is a failure but decide to stay married at the end, ­after the husband realizes his wife’s dedication to his parents and himself and appreciates her anew.109 Ironically, this diminished vision is intended to articulate a notion of “­women’s liberation” for the era in which ­women actually ­were first granted suffrage. Over the period discussed in this chapter, the repre­sen­ta­tion of femininity shifts from its 1930s association with consumption to nationalist motherhood and then to the even newer femininity of war production and military ser­v ice. ­These films depict visions and fantasies of w ­ omen’s position in society, which involve issues that are still debated ­today. Film articulates, deflects, and reconfigures con­temporary po­liti­cal ideologies, incidents, and economic conditions. As my examination of war­time “­woman’s films” reveals, one can read in ­these works negotiations, agreements, and disagreements between the film industry and state

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attempts to enforce its own agenda, as well as tensions between the producers and consumers of media. To conclude, Japa­nese war­time films w ­ ere not simply a unitary discourse. Their repre­sen­ta­tion of gender varied. They w ­ ere open to cross-­ genre stylistic experiment and narrative ambiguity, and offered unexpected pleasures and points of identification for female audiences.

3 THE POLITICS OF JAPA­N ESE DOCUMENTARY FILM

War­time nonfiction films such as newsreels and documentary films are often treated as direct reflections of state policies and ideologies. They are frequently used as visuals to illustrate historical narratives, but with few exceptions they are not themselves closely examined. However, I believe that documentary filmmaking in war­time Japan contradicts ste­reo­typical characterizations of the genre and reveals most effectively the complexity of an era in which ideas and ideals of liberal democracy, communism, and fascism chaotically fused in cinematic texts and discourses. To illustrate this point, this chapter looks at documentary filmmaking practices from the 1930s through 1945, which ­were supported by a generation of Japa­ nese filmmakers. They experienced the rise of democracy and Marxism in the 1920s, continued to live and make films while they witnessed the subsequent suppression of f­ree speech, and changed their views or adjusted their modes of expression to survive the war­time regime. In par­tic­u­lar, this chapter highlights works by Atsugi Taka (1907–1998), a female “scenario writer” and film critic, as examples that illustrate the historical trajectory of documentary filmmaking: from the emergence of the Proletarian Film League of Japan, or Prokino (Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei, abbreviated as “Purokino” in Japa­nese) at the end of the 1920s, to the rise of the culture film, or bunka eiga (documentaries produced by small and medium-­size studios in the late 1930s, especially ­after the 1937 beginning of the Sino-­Japanese War), to the expansion of the state-­dominated genre at the stage of total mobilization in the early 1940s.1 This attention to Atsugi also brings forward questions of gender and filmmaking in war­time Japan (see fig. 3.1). 114

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FIGURE 3.1.  Atsugi Taka, date unknown. Courtesy of Hishinuma Misue.

The era is conventionally referred to as the “dark valley” in historical narratives, as it was between the two dif­fer­ent experiences of democracy by citizens of the prewar and postwar eras. The 1928 amendment of the Public Peace Preservation Law was an early and very power­ful mea­sure that eliminated diverse po­liti­cal views and reduced civil rights in Japa­nese society.2 It was in this context that Prokino was founded and began publishing its periodicals, Newly Emerging Film (Shinkō eiga) and then Proletarian Film (Puroretaria eiga).3 Prokino was an in­de­pen­dent film production group—­one of vari­ous cultural umbrella organ­izations of the Japa­nese Communist Party—­that nurtured film theorists and filmmakers, many of whom survived the war and became influential in the early postwar era in Japan. Greatly inspired by Soviet film theories and films, as was common globally at that time, the organ­ization presented ideas of the elimination of class difference, cele­bration of the working class, promotion of ­women’s ­labor, modernization of agriculture and rural areas,

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and attention to the strug­gles of colonized Koreans. Atsugi Taka was a supporting member in the last phase of Prokino, before it was disbanded in 1934. The state’s crackdown on communist intellectuals and activists was gradually and steadily intensifying in the early 1930s. For example, Prokino member and film critic Iwasaki Akira recollects several periods of imprisonment during his Prokino years, and similar experiences ­were abundant among leftist (meaning communist and sympathizer) filmmakers, students, and intellectuals.4 Yet the “dark valley” did not necessarily mean an absolute before-­and-­after discontinuity of thoughts, intellectual activities, and filmmaking. A limited number of Marxist publications ­were available u ­ ntil the late 1930s, for example the Materialism Study Society (Yuibutsuron kenkyūkai), led by Tosaka Jun, was organ­izing meetings and publishing journals and translations ­until 1938. Therefore, the ideological strug­gles of leftist filmmakers and reverberations of the Marxism that had been pop­u­lar­ized earlier as a cultural trend ­were still occasionally vis­i­ble in film discourse even at the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. In this chapter I begin by briefly introducing the life of Atsugi Taka. Then I discuss war­time documentary filmmaking by highlighting the Proletarian Film League’s activities around 1930, the publication of Atsugi’s translation of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film in 1938, and her war­time works, with an emphasis on her 1942 film Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher. ­These historical moments, revolving around impor­tant works of Atsugi, uncover the global circulation of Rus­sian filmmaking practices that Japa­nese attempted to participate in, the popularity of British documentary film theories in Japan, and the contested space for gendered filmmaking during war­time total mobilization.

Atsugi Taka (1907–1998): Translator, Practitioner, and Activist As is the case with many other w ­ omen film professionals, Atsugi Taka has been scarcely discussed in the mainstream narrative of Japa­nese film history.5 Most often her name is mentioned as the translator of the British filmmaker and producer Paul Rotha’s book Documentary Film (1935). Though Atsugi has been discussed primarily in this connection in the existing scholarship, she was also a practitioner who was committed to issues of ­women’s ­labor throughout her ­career as a filmmaker, producer, scenario writer, and critic. Atsugi’s ­career as a film professional began when she joined the communist filmmaking movement Proletarian Film League of Japan in 1931. The name Atsugi Taka was, in fact, a pseudonym that she came up with on the spot when she was interrogated by police on the street a­ fter attending the first Proletarian Film Night

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(Puro kino eiga no yūbe) in 1930. It was a common practice for leftists to use several pseudonyms for underground publications or other endeavors, at a time when such po­liti­cal activities ­were officially suppressed. Remembering her colleague’s advice to tell the police a pseudonym, she created this name and ended up continuing to use it for the rest of her life. She explained, “[the name] had no meaning whatsoever, which was good.”6 Her act of naming herself is noteworthy. Unlike many other ­women of that era, and even ­today, her name was not affected by her two marriages nor other familial arrangements. Atsugi was born in 1907 in Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture, to the Okada f­ amily and given the name Matsue. She was ­adopted by her ­mother’s childless cousins and raised ­under their ­family name, Fukamachi, in the Tokyo and Yokohama areas. ­After graduating from the En­glish Department of Japan ­Women’s University, she taught En­glish at a w ­ omen’s high school affiliated with the university to support her m ­ other and herself, as her f­ather had passed away while she was in college. She minimized her involvement in po­liti­cal activities, despite her strong interest in Prokino, ­because she was afraid ­these pursuits could cost her job and trou­ble her ­mother at the end of her life. She was the breadwinner of the h ­ ouse­hold. ­After her ­mother’s death in 1930, she married Mori Kōichi, a member of the Materialism Study Society, and also became an active member of the Tokyo office of Prokino in 1931. One of her tasks was fund-­raising, which was often assigned to young ­women.7 She favorably recollected that Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933), a novelist who was ­later tragically killed by the police, donated the large sum of twenty yen to the organ­ization.8 ­After Prokino was wiped out by the government in 1934, Atsugi, through a connection with the novelist and entrepreneur Kikuchi Kan (1888–1848), gained entry to PCL (Photo Chemical Laboratory); a forerunner of Tōhō, which ­later became one of the three major Japa­nese studios, where she worked as a screenwriter for dramatic films. The Japa­nese translation of Rotha’s 1935 Documentary Film by Atsugi was titled Bunka eiga ron (Treatises on Culture Film) and published by the Kyoto-­based publisher Daiichi geibun sha in 1938. The publisher suggested that the title should be “culture film” or bunka eiga, which was one of the better-­known terms for nonfiction films in Japan.9 However, despite the title of the book, Atsugi per­sis­tently used the word “dokyumentarī” (the Japanese-­ language phonetic transcription of the En­glish term, “documentary”) in the main text, showing, I suggest, that she distinguished Rotha’s ideas about documentary filmmaking from the pop­ul­ar­ized term of bunka eiga. It was via her translation of Rotha that the term “dokyumentarī” spread widely in Japan.10 In 1939, Atsugi moved to GES (Geijutsu eiga sha), an in­de­pen­dent studio known for high-­quality, artistic documentary films. ­There she worked as a scenario writer on the productions of three or four films with the theme of working ­women. One of her films,

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Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru hobo no kiroku, 1942) was critically acclaimed for its innovative, spontaneous style. ­After the end of war, Atsugi became one of the founding members of the ­Women’s Demo­cratic Club (Fujin minshu kurabu) along with the novelist Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) and other ­women. This organ­ization was founded with the support of Lieutenant Ethel B. Weed, US information officer of the Occupation government. Atsugi also served as an or­ga­nizer of the ­woman’s section of a ­labor ­union and continued to be active in filmmaking u ­ ntil her last production, the 1975 We Are Watching: Yokosuka, the Nuclear Base (Ware ware wa kanshi suru, kaku kichi yokosuka). Through journalistic research and per­sis­tent surveillance, she managed to rec­ord on film that US aircraft carriers regularly brought nuclear weapons to Japan despite the Three No-­Nuclear Princi­ples (Hikaku san gensoku; a parliamentary agreement that Japan would neither possess nor manufacture nuclear weapons, nor permit them to be brought into Japa­nese territory). She worked on more than twenty films throughout her c­ areer (at least seven of them are extant), during an era when t­ here ­were very few w ­ omen in the film industry. Atsugi’s primary interest was always in the genre of documentary film, for which she wrote scenarios, did research, produced, and codirected. As her writings reveal, her sources of inspiration ranged from the Rus­sian film director Vsevolod Illarianovich Pudovkin (1893–1953) to the German socialist August Bebel (1840–1913) to Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986).11 Close friends who influenced and interacted with her life and work included Kikuchi Kan, the phi­los­ o­pher Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945), and the communist novelists Miyamoto Yuriko and Sata Ineko (1904–1998). She was strongly committed to filmmaking, l­abor issues, feminism, and peace activism. It is not only the discipline of film studies that has been unable to find her a solid location in Japa­nese film history. Interestingly, she summarized her own life history as disjointed (hikisakareta jibun shi). She explained that she felt torn among dif­fer­ent kinds of activities and social identities, such as a filmmaker, leftist, and feminist activity or­ga­nizer, in addition to being a wife and a w ­ oman.12 It might have been a disjointed life in her view, but I believe it was a rich one. It indicates how w ­ omen’s position in society can involve detours, a sense of dislocation, and strug­gles, instead of linear development. The variety of works Atsugi created throughout her ­career consistently depicted working ­women with active lives, and she continued to explore the daily life and experience of working ­women. However, this chapter is limited to discussion of only a few of her earlier works.

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The Prokino (Proletarian Film League of Japan) in Japa­n ese Film History Prokino was an in­de­pen­dent film production group that was unique and impor­ tant in Japa­nese film history for numerous reasons: its po­liti­cal activism; its mobility in covering current affairs, made pos­si­ble by the Pathé Baby small camera; and its organ­ization of film screenings and travelling film exhibits. The organ­ ization was formed in 1929 and forced by the state to dissolve in 1934 ­after a series of arrests of its members.13 The film activism of Prokino was originally conceived and initiated by Sasa Genjū, who filmed a May Day march in 1927 on 9.5 mm small-­gauge film with a Pathé Baby camera. Indeed, such film activism became pos­si­ble at the specific moment that such small-­gauge film became widely available. The Pathé Baby camera was mobile and handy, and, in addition, development and projection w ­ ere easier than with conventional devices. Amateur filmmaking clubs ­were formed in Japan by as early as 1926, for example, and guidebooks for amateurs w ­ ere published in the 1930s. The popularity of amateur filmmaking is captured best in Ozu Yasujiro’s dramatic film I Was Born, But . . . ​ (Umaretewa mitakeredo, 1932), when the employer of the protagonists’ ­father has a party at home to screen his own films.14 Sasa was convinced that the film medium was extremely useful for activism: to inform a wide audience of ­labor disputes, to raise workers’ consciousness of economic rights, to draw attention to colonialism, and to introduce scenes of demonstrations.15 The goal of Prokino was to appeal to workers and farmers through revolutionary films of class strug­gle, which meant that its members looked up to Soviet models for their filmmaking. The impact of Soviet avant-­garde filmmaking practices in the 1920s and early 1930s was not limited to Eu­rope, but affected Japan as well. Furthermore, in this period, the notion and technique of montage w ­ ere vigorously introduced to Japa­nese filmmakers regardless of their genres of filmmaking or po­liti­cal beliefs. Iwasaki Akira notes that his translation of Semyon Timoshenko was the first introduction of Soviet montage theory to Japan.16 Soon, translations of Pudovkin and Eisenstein ­were published ­there as well. Thus, as in other countries, by the early 1930s Japa­nese filmmakers in general, including director Kinugasa Teinosuke, ­were fascinated by and learning from the editing theories of Timoshenko, Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein. Though their availability was limited, and imported films w ­ ere censored and often greatly reedited, some Rus­sian films and other documentary films ­were shown in Japan. Kitagawa Tetsuo (1907–1992), a film critic who was one of the found­ers of Prokino, recollected that they ­were inspired by some Kinoks films: according to Kitagawa and other former Prokino members, Soviet avant-­garde films shown in Japan included Man with a Movie Camera (directed by Dziga

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Vertov, 1929), General Line (directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1929), and ­Mother (directed by Pudovkin, 1926).17 Storm over Asia (directed by Pudovkin, 1928) was shown in 1930,18 Turksib (directed by Victor A. Turin, 1929) in 1932,19 and Earth (directed by Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930) in 1931.20 In addition, Road to Life (directed by Nikolai Ekk, 1931), In Spring (directed by Mikhail Kaufman, 1929), A ­Simple Case (directed by Pudovkin, 1932), and Sniper (directed by Timoshenko, 1932) ­were also screened in Japan, though the screening years are not known.21 Former Prokino member Takahashi Nobuhiko recalls that when he was arrested and taken to his prison cell, he imitated the gesture of a boy from Storm over Asia, which was immediately understood as taken from the film by other communist inmates.22 It is a g­ reat irony that the rhe­toric of liberating Asian ­people from the West that was romanticized and promoted by this Pudovkin film coincidentally resonates with the Japa­nese imperialist ideology of the Greater East Asia Co-­ Prosperity Sphere, which dominated l­ater Japa­nese po­liti­cal ideology. Despite the variety of such films that ­were seen in this period, it should be noted h ­ ere that Sergei Eisenstein’s very famous Battleship Potemkin was not screened in Japan ­until spring 1959.23 Prokino members ­were interested in producing newsreels and animated film. ­These choices reflect the emerging interests of the broader film industry, but they ­were also a ­little ahead of their time in their rigorous practices. According to Kitagawa, one of the members, Prokino’s interest in the medium of newsreel was inspired by Dziga Vertov.24 The group released their newsreel Prokino News (Purokino nyūsu) from 1931 to 1932. One of their short documentaries was General Line (Zensen, 1931), which called all workers of the Tokyo City Transportation Union for a general strike. To see the broader context of newsreel production, it was only in 1930 that Shōchiku, one of the major studios, had just begun a weekly newsreel, Shōchiku News (Shōchiku nyūsu).25 Conventionally, the film genre that covered events of the time was called “current affairs” (dekigoto) or “filming the ­actual events” (jissha); such films ­were produced by major newspapers and in­de­ pen­dent production companies, instead of major film studios. For the newspaper companies in the 1920s, their news films ­were “viewable newspapers” (me de miru shinbun) that ­were shown ­free of admission to raise the companies’ visibility and increase the number of newspaper subscribers. Another genre of production that Prokino took an interest in was animated film (which I discuss in chapter 4). The late 1920s and the early 1930s witnessed the emergence of experimental works by vari­ous animators, but on a very small scale. Animation was deployed for commercial advertisements, and sometimes for educational purposes, in the 1920s, mostly in the form of shorts of a few minutes that ­were screened primarily at schools. In this context, Prokino’s interest in

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the medium for education and promotion of their beliefs was in tune with the time. To Atsugi Taka, public Prokino screenings ­were truly inspirational. Though she was already interested in working with film somehow, it was such a screening that made her determine to join the organ­ization. She recalled that she saw a poster for the first Proletarian Film Night at a bookstore where she bought Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Treatise on Film Directors and Scenarios (Eiga kantoku to kyakuhon ron), translated by film critic Sasaki Norio and published in 1930.26 A glance at other translations by Sasaki reveals some of the other works of Eu­ro­pean film theory that ­were available to Japa­nese critics and filmmakers in the early 1930s. They include Sergei Eisenstein, Dialectics of Film (Eiga no benshōhō, a collection of essays translated into Japa­nese and published in 1932); Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (original in 1932; Geijutsu to shite no eiga, translated in Japa­nese in 1933); and Raymond Spottiswoode (1913–1970, British documentary producer), A Grammar of the Film: An Analy­sis of Film Technique (1935; Eiga no bunpō: Eiga gikō no bunseki, published in Japan in 1936). Sasaki ­later wrote on German cultural policy and translated such works as Joseph Goebbels, Diary of Victory (Shōri no nikki, 1941). Such works ­were translated one ­after another from En­glish, French, and German quite rapidly, generally with a time lag of only a year or so ­after the original publication.27 The first Proletarian Film Night was held in 1930 at the Yomiuri Hall, Tokyo, showing three original films by Prokino in addition to two ­others. The former Prokino member Namiki Shinsaku noted that the production expenses of their films ­were barely covered by donations from a variety of supporters, not limited to leftist intellectuals but also including directors of dramatic film such as Itō Daisuke, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Ushihara Kiyohiko, the Shōchiku screenplay writer Noda Kōgo, and Shōchiku stars Suzuki Denmei and Okada Tokihiko.28 Such wide support should be understood in the context of the popularity of “tendency films” (keikō eiga), a group of works that, while not necessarily subscribing to Marxism, depicted the predicaments of protagonists suffering the prob­lems of poverty, triggered by the commercial success of the dramatic film What Made Her Do It? (Nani ga kanojo o sōsasetaka; directed by Suzuki Shigeyoshi, 1930).29 The hall for the Proletarian Film Night event was capable of accommodating 450 viewers, but the police limited attendance to only 225; they also searched all attendees at the entrance. The works by Prokino w ­ ere three s­ ilent nonfiction films: Sumida River (Sumida gawa; directed by Sasa Genjū), ­Children (Kodomo; directed by Takita Izuru), and The Eleventh May Day (Dai jūikkai mēdē; directed by Iwasaki Akira).30 Additionally, two other films w ­ ere also shown. One was a feature-­ length American comedy set in World War I, titled ­Behind the Front (directed by A. Edward Sutherland, 1926; Japa­nese title Yajikita jūgunki), whose inclusion was

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l­ater heavi­ly criticized for its “bourgeois” contents, and another was the antiwar animation Perō the Chimney Sweeper.31 ­Because of the police’s prohibition of any oral explanation at the Prokino screenings, the exhibitors played rec­ords of German ­labor songs to replace the narration by oral performers, or benshi, that generally accompanied screenings of s­ ilent films. In spite of this arrangement, the viewers ­were excited, which led them to engage in a large, spontaneous demonstration on the streets of Ginza afterward. At the end of the screening, before intervention by the police, the exhibitor replayed the May Day film, which was met by the attendees’ singing of the Japa­nese “May Day Song” (Mēdē ka) and the “Internationale.”32 With the enormous success of the first event, the second Proletarian Film Night was held in mid-­June 1930 in Hōchi Hall (Hōchi kōdō), with eight hundred seats. It was a full h ­ ouse.33 For this second event, the first issue of the newsreel Prokino News (Purokino nyūsu) and Sergei Eisenstein’s Conquest of Hollywood (Hariuddo seibatsu; original title unknown) ­were added to the previous program. It seems that the latter was a short film that depicted e­ ither the acting for or a screening of another film titled The Conquest of Hollywood. A certain Higo Hiroshi attended an international in­de­pen­dent film conference held in La Sarraz, Switzerland, in 1929, where Eisenstein, Balázs Béla, and Ruttmann improvised a story in which an army of anticommercial film fought against mediocre American commercial films. The Conquest, filmed by Eduard Tisse, jokingly showed Sergei Eisenstein riding on a spear to liberate a muse of film from Hollywood commercialism. Higo used his Cine-­Kodak to film ­either the acting of such scenes, or a projection of the Tisse film itself, and brought this footage back to Japan.34 The Prokino screenings increased their followers within a short period. The third Proletarian Film Night was held in November for six days in the Tsukiji Small Theater (Tsukiji shō gekijō), Tokyo, and attracted more than two thousand viewers in total. Prokino screenings w ­ ere additionally held in vari­ous cities in the Tōhoku area, and in Sapporo, Hakodate, Chiba, Saitama, Kyoto, Osaka, and other locations. Screenings ­were run by local organizers, to whom the Tokyo office sent the projector and films. In rural areas where ­people ­were not used to motion pictures, they ­were enthusiastically welcomed as katsudōya, or movie exhibitors, rather than as communist organizers. However, by 1932 such screenings ­were banned by police and became illegal activities.35 The leftist novelist Matsuda Tokiko recalls her own Prokino viewing experience. Around 1932, two ­women in their mid-­twenties who ­were Prokino members rented a room in an area with many factories. They hung a white curtain as a screen, onto which they projected films. The films w ­ ere in poor condition and ran for about twenty minutes. The organizers invited c­ hildren and ­women with ­children to the screening. Joining the screening with her own child, Matsuda was

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very much moved by the films. She never asked the names of the ­women, not even their pseudonyms, according to a rule of activists intended to prevent revelation of such names to police ­under torture.36 Prokino was responding to a strong sense of anxiety and desire for change in Japa­nese society at a time of po­liti­cal upheavals. Its activity initially focused on publishing the film journal Shinkō eiga, in 1929, then it was expanded to include new forms of film production and viewing experience.37 Their film screenings ­were a useful means to reach out to a wide audience to mobilize them for public protests, although it was only for a few years that they consistently or­ga­nized such screenings. The significance of Prokino in Japa­nese film history is marked not only by its deployment of film to connect with citizens who shared the same po­liti­cal concerns and hope for social changes; the organ­ization also nurtured film professionals who ­later worked not only in documentary but also more widely in the film industry, during both war­time and postwar periods. Prominent members include Atsugi Taka, Iwasaki Akira (film critic), Matsuzaki Keiji (producer of Tōhō Studio, then the Japan-­China cosponsored China Film Com­pany, or Chūka den’ei), Okada Sōzō (Yamanouchi Hikaru, actor and producer), Seo Mitsuyo (animator), and Ueno Kōzō (film critic, filmmaker).

The Rise of Culture Film (Bunka Eiga) and Newsreels While Atsugi was working with Prokino, she still kept her daytime job of teaching. By early 1934, when she could fi­nally look forward to leaving her job and joining the organ­ization full time, Prokino’s activities ­were no longer pos­si­ble ­because of suppression by police and the arrests of many members. At the advice of Kikuchi Kan, who also provided a reference letter, Atsugi started work at PCL, as one of several former Prokino members hired by that studio. PCL started as a laboratory to provide sound film equipment, but became a film studio in 1933. It recruited a number of prominent figures: Kimura Sotoji, a former Prokino director who ­later moved to the Manchurian Film Association in 1941; the comedian Enomoto Ken’ichirō; Yamamoto Kajirō, a director from Nikkatsu who ­later produced a series of navy aviation films in the 1940s for Tōhō; and Naruse Mikio, a director at Shōchiku.38 The director Kamei Fumio, who studied in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1931, also joined PCL in 1933.39 The studio merged in 1937 with the Kyoto-­based studio J.O. and other firms and became the Tōhō studio, led by Kobayashi Ichizō, founder of the Hankyū Railroad and the Takarazuka Revue. Before the merger, PCL had already begun establishing sponsorship from the Ministry of Education, the Governor-­General’s

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Office of K ­ orea, the Manchurian Railroad, Meiji Confectionery (known as a manufacturer of choco­late), Dai Nippon Beer, and other companies in the mid1930s. ­After the merger, PCL became the Culture Film Department of Tōhō and produced high-­quality films, both as in­de­pen­dent works and as sponsored films. Among them, Through the Raging Waves (Dotō o kette; PCL, 1937), directed by Culture Film Department member Kamei Fumio, was a huge commercial success. This eight-­reel feature-­length film presented the navy battleship Ashigara’s journey to ­England and Germany and return to Japan. As the battleship received the news of the outbreak of the Sino-­Japanese War en route, the film’s release at the Nihon gekijō theater in central Tokyo was quite timely and attracted a large crowd.40 The “culture film” (bunka eiga) is a nonfiction film genre that explored specific themes with a medium or feature-­length r­ unning time. It emerged in the early 1930s, at a time when production was propelled by military sponsorship, according to film historian Tanaka Jun’ichiro. Tanaka sets this development even earlier than the 1937 outbreak of the Sino-­Japanese War.41 Departing from s­ imple coverage of current affairs, films like Yokohama shinema studio’s The Lifeline of the Ocean (Umi no seimei sen, 1933) and Japan’s Advance to the North (Hokushin nihon, 1934), both sponsored by the navy, drew favorable attention from critics. Both provided narrative integrity and attractive scenery as a result of long-­term shooting on location. The former film introduces the South Pacific islands, and the latter shows northern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. An animated map effectively introduces viewers to unfamiliar geography, and compelling narration asserts the impor­tant relationship between t­ hese regions and Japan’s national defense strategies. The films ­were praised for being aesthetically appealing as well as informative. In addition to the military, the South Manchurian Railroad was also an impor­tant sponsor and producer of the “culture film” genre. In 1935 a film distributor of imported feature films, Tōwa, founded a “department of culture film” (bunka eiga bu) to import and distribute foreign documentaries, but the demand was still very small: a single film travelled to only five or six theaters per year.42 Tōwa had been importing Eu­ro­pean films since 1929, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Spione, Josef Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, and Leontine Sagan’s Madchen in Uniform. At the creation of its “department of culture film,” Tōwa showed the British documentary Man of Aran (directed by Robert Flaherty, 1934) in Japan in 1935. The distributor matched the timing of the film screening with the publication of shooting documents translated by the prominent film critic Iijima Tadashi, a marketing strategy targeted at the intellectuals and students that was successful for a two-­week exhibition of the film.43 At this point, the documentary film was not for wide theatrical distribution, but for more targeted screenings, unlike dramatic entertainment films.

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The distribution system, as well as film viewing practices, was gradually changing in the mid-1930s. One representative development is the emergence of specialized “newsreel theaters,” such as The First Basement Theater (Daiichi chika gekijō) in Tokyo. This was a converted basement space in Japan Theater (Nihon gekijō) that served as a multifunctional theater with a fifty sen admission fee. What should be noted is that the Daiichi chika gekijō, as film historian Fujioka Atsuhiro illustrates, aimed to show not just newsreels but also short films in general. Indeed, the programs of ­these new “newsreel theaters” included imported animation such as Popeye, Betty Boop, and Mickey Mouse, and some short documentary films, such as Marvelous Skills in Skiing or The Past and Pres­ent of Italy, in addition to newsreels.44 Unlike programming at conventional movie theaters, which usually ran for three to four hours and consisted of a double feature of full-­length films together with shorts, the newsreel theaters limited the program duration to about one hour, and tickets ­were much cheaper—­ten to twenty sen—­which made moviegoing a very casual, con­ve­nient leisure for urban dwellers, similar to ­going to a coffee shop.45 Film culture in the mid-1930s gradually became more accessible for urban dwellers and workers through this type of new venue, though the number of such theaters remained limited. What made the nonfiction film become a more familiar and accessible medium for the general public was the dramatic surge in popularity of newsreels triggered by coverage of the Sino-­Japanese War from its outbreak in summer 1937. Newsreels ­were not only informational updates about the war, but also served as spectacles that provided a communal and nationalized viewing experience. Media historian Takeyama Akiko highlights newsreels’ role as an attraction accompanied by lectures or in­de­pen­dent events sponsored by vari­ous firms. Organizers and sponsors varied, from a patriotic w ­ omen’s organ­ization collecting donations for the military to a cosmetics manufacturer to a railroad com­pany.46 The Osaka Asahi Shinbun newspaper reported on July 19, 1937, that Hanshin Densha, a local railroad com­pany, set up a huge screen in the Kōshien baseball stadium on the previous night: “­After sunset, the event began. The world’s largest screen was dragged on a rail that was set up in advance between the outfield and the infield bleachers, reaching a position between the second and home bases. The screen surface was fifty square feet; instead of cloth it was made of pieces of thin iron plate. The appearance of this gigantic screen, set up with the support of a thirteen-­ton iron structure placed on sixteen wheels, greatly impressed [dogimo o nuku] the viewers.”47 The heightened, fervent demand for newsreels in this period, as seen at such large-­scale events, helped depoliticize the atrocity of warfare. The surging demand for newsreels demonstrated that nonfiction film could be entertaining and expanded the number of viewers of the nonfiction genre.

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The resulting expansion of nonfiction film production was further supported by subsequently promulgated state legislation that mandated the screening of culture films. The late-1930s culture film departed from the ­simple filming practices of existing news coverage and explored the pre­sen­ta­tion of thematically unified subjects. The expansion of nonfiction filmmaking also led filmmakers to seek for appropriate methodology. It is at this moment that Atsugi’s translation of Paul Rotha, who was a British documentary film producer and director, was introduced to Japan in September 1938. ­After the disbanding of Prokino and her hiring by PCL, Atsugi actively published film criticism, her own screenplays, and her translations of articles from overseas trade magazines—­including the World Film News of the documentary’s founding figure John Grierson—in the film journal Eiga sōzō in 1936 and 1937. In Tōhō, Atsugi was assigned to the screenplay department. This is when Tōhō producer Kondaibō Gorō suggested that she should translate Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film. He told Atsugi that the Tōhō Kyoto branch staff needed some kind of theoretical guidance and wanted to use the translation for a study group.48 It is highly likely that Kondaibō saw documentary film as a genre that had g­ reat commercial potential. As Iwasaki Akira notes, at the time ­there was fervent promotion of the genre in the film industry.49 Documentary Film reviewed Soviet avant-­garde films, German and Italian documentaries, and the British documentary film movement, and discussed aspects of productions: directorship, sound, visuals. While German UFA kulturfilm was welcomed in Japan, due in part to the Nazi connection, the book helped Japa­nese readers get a broader picture of documentary filmmaking in connection with social reform and class issues, and in contrast and association with theories of conventional dramatic films. Film critic Tsumura Hideo recounts an episode that shows how wide the book’s appeal was, even among non-­film professionals.50 According to him, an old friend who was a m ­ iddle school teacher deep in the countryside, two hours by train from Sendai City, was extremely impressed by the book. It astonished Tsumura that the reputation and influence of such a specialized translated book could reach so far.51

What Is Bunka Eiga? Before discussing the implications and impact of the Rotha translation, it is necessary to briefly clarify the term bunka eiga. In addition to using the literal meaning of the term, “culture film,” in this chapter I also tentatively translate it as “documentary” or “nonfiction film,” treating ­these as more or less interchangeable. The term bunka eiga has been understood in the existing scholarship as con-

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nected with the con­temporary German nonfiction genre called kulturfilm. But the Japa­nese term was variously defined and broadly inclusive. To begin with, bunka (culture) was casually and randomly used as prefix to refer to something new and unconventional, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, bunka jūtaku ­were h ­ ouses that combined Western-­style rooms and rooms with conventional Japa­nese tatami mats. In this case, the connotation is that the h ­ ouse is Westernized but retains original Japa­nese ele­ments. But the novelty did not have to be Western if the item was innovative in its own way; ­there ­were bunka donburi (rice dish), bunka sarumata (men’s underwear), and so on. The term “culture film,” or bunka eiga, became pop­u­lar­ized around the time of the outbreak of the 1937 Sino-­Japanese War. One such example is the naming of Tōhō studio’s newly established department of culture film. The term was spread even further by the title of Atsugi’s translation of Rotha’s Documentary Film: Bunka eiga ron (Treatise on Culture Film). However, the definition of the term was in flux and continually debated among film critics of dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal beliefs. Film critic Iwasaki Akira was perceptive when he stated, in 1939, “The first question raised in any discussion of bunka eiga, is always ‘What is bunka eiga?’ ”52 (See fig. 3.2.) The urge to clarify the nature of the genre was presumably heightened by the introduction of the Film Law, the outline of which was first published in newspapers in December 1938, nearly a year before it became effective in October 1939. This was the first national-­level legislation that regulated the exhibition and distribution of the film industry. It required film professionals to pass an official test and to register according to their job title, limited the number of foreign films that could be exhibited, and, importantly for this chapter, mandated the screening of bunka eiga to accompany dramatic feature films.53 In this law, bunka eiga was defined as follows: “specific kind of films which are beneficial for national education” (Article 15; kokumin kyōiku jō yūeki naru tokutei shurui no eiga). The term is elaborated on, but again vaguely, as “films that cultivate the national spirit and nurture the national intelligence, excluding dramatic feature films” (Article 35 of the detailed enforcement regulations; kokumin seishin no kanyō matawa kokumin chinō no keibai ni shisuru eiga, gekieiga o nozoku). The ­legal definitions are prescriptive rather than descriptive. To expound the new law at the time it went into effect, a guidebook titled Quick Guide to Film Law (Hayawakari eigahō kaisetsu) was published for the film industry. It notes that bunka eiga excludes newsreels, has to be nondramatic, and must be useful to enlighten and cultivate the national intelligence in such fields as military affairs, industry, education, science, and so on.54 To elaborate on the ­legal definition, the film critic Imamura Taihei states that culture film (bunka eiga) is a subgenre of documentary (kiroku eiga), and it provides “the description of

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FIGURE 3.2.  The opening pages of the Film Law with Hirohito’s signature. National Archives of Japan Digital Archive.

natu­ral and social sciences in the style of documentary film [kiroku eiga].”55 For examples, he explains that the UFA production documentary Green Drifters (directed by Wolfram Junghans, 1933), which depicts the spread of dandelion seeds, and the Japa­nese film A Village without a Doctor (Isha no inai mura, directed by Itō Sueo, 1940) are culture films. In his view, however, the following films should be regarded not as culture films but as artistic documentary films (geijutsu eiga toshite no kiroku eiga): Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934, shown in Japan in 1935), Kamei Fumio’s Shanghai, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938, shown in Japan in 1940), since they do not provide narratives of natu­ral or social sciences.56 Yet, his genre definition was not widely ­adopted when the bunka eiga genre was dramatically expanding and could include any nonfiction films. To understand this, a description by another critic, Tsumura, of the disorderly employment of the term, is useful. According to him, “It [bunka eiga] includes tourist film, educational film, scientific film, documentary film [kiroku eiga] and government promotional film.”57 My understanding is that the term bunka eiga invoked a loose, inclusive film genre that was not limited to German UFA kulturfilms. It excludes feature films and periodically distributed newsreels, and it was treated and received ­under this label within the con­temporary distribution and exhibition system. Thus, I deploy vari­ous translations of the term bunka eiga to maintain its ambiguity rather than proposing a more restrictive definition.

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The Impact of the Translation of Paul Rotha’s Documentar y Film in Japan Paul Rotha’s primary argument is efficiently summarized by the two quotes he used as epigraphs: “Art cannot be non-­political,” by the Soviet theater actor, director, and producer Vsevolod Meyerhold; and “I look upon cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist; and this I put unashamedly b ­ ecause, in the still unshaven philosophies of cinema, broad distinctions are necessary,” by the Scottish filmmaker and producer John Grierson, who coined the term “documentary.”58 In writing, Rotha repeatedly emphasizes the social and po­liti­cal ­causes that film should pursue. In this connection, it is noteworthy that he remarked, “I came nearest to becoming a Socialist in my Documentary Book.”59 Documentary Film introduces a wide variety of “propaganda” film. By “propaganda,” Rotha means a strong message of social critique and reform, and he identifies himself as a propagandist, educating and informing about social prob­ lems. His examples of such propaganda films are Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and G. W. Pabst’s Comradeship (1931), which is in­ter­est­ing since, while both strongly raised social issues, they should be categorized as dramatic features.60 He criticized Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) for its indulgence in the drama of ­family members and of b ­ attles between h ­ uman beings and nature. For Rotha, the idyllic stance of this film is devoid of social analy­sis and understanding that “the success of science and machine-­controlled industry has resulted in an unequal distribution of the amenities of existence ­under the relationships of the pres­ent economic system. Side by side with leisure and well-­being ­there is also unemployment, poverty and wide social unrest.” While acknowledging the director’s editorial skills, Rotha was also skeptical about Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a ­Great City (1927), as it does not examine the prob­lem of man’s place in society.61 Atsugi’s translation of the book was influential for a wide range of readers, and the book sold very well for its type of publication.62 It was a rare comprehensive book that discussed the documentary in broad social, geo­graph­i­cal, and historical contexts. The essence of its appeal is most concisely addressed in a remark by Akimoto Ken, who had left the major studio Shōchiku ­after working ­there for seven years and was now at Tōhō. He said the translation was “the best map we have; no one has provided a better guide for us”; the remark was part of a roundtable discussion on “Japa­nese Culture Film from Early Times to T ­ oday” (Nihon bunka eiga shoki kara kon’nichi o kataru zadankai) published in 1940 in the film journal Bunka eiga kenkyū (Studies of Culture Film).63 This roundtable shows how Atsugi’s translation of Rotha’s Documentary Film was an impor­tant topic for leading directors of culture films, including roundtable participants Akimoto, Tanaka Yoshitsugu, Ueno Kōzō, Ishimoto Tōkichi, and Kamei Fumio.

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Akimoto Ken introduced himself by saying that he was always interested in filmmaking as a means of expressing his own views of nature and society. Tanaka Yoshitsugu was an amateur of small-­gauge film and a former animator of Dōeisha who had had a strong personal connection with Prokino. He had also worked closely with the German director Arnold Fanck and was greatly influenced by Fanck’s observation of natu­ral and ­human life. Ueno Kōzō was a former Prokino member, and Ishimoto Tōkichi was trained in dramatic features as an assistant director to prominent auteur directors Ito Daisuke and Mizoguchi Kenji. A ­ fter directing some of his own dramatic films, he joined the newly established film production com­pany GES. By the time the roundtable was published, he had completed the critically acclaimed documentary Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1939). He also had produced his own personal translation of Rotha’s book, which he shared with the critic Iwasaki Akira.64 The wide variety of the participants’ backgrounds, training, po­liti­cal beliefs, and filmmaking experience suggests how the genre appealed to and attracted a range of filmmakers. Indeed, their profiles resonate with Rotha’s description of mid-1930s British documentary filmmakers, whose backgrounds also varied widely.65 ­These Japa­nese participants ­were members of a small coterie of filmmakers who w ­ ere committed to the formation of the genre at a time when a large number of self-­proclaimed culture film producers had sprung up, aiming to profit from the demand the Film Law created by requiring their screening. Thus, the 1940 roundtable illustrates that Japa­nese documentary filmmakers ­were intensely seeking theoretical and technical languages to articulate the genre, and looking to reexamine their own approaches and themes in comparison with other countries’ practices.66 In this roundtable, Kamei was respected by the o ­ thers as an early bunka eiga filmmaker. In keeping with Erik Barnouw’s notion of “parallel developments,” Kamei, who had studied in the Soviet Union, understood that the genre of documentary film was si­mul­ta­neously emerging globally.67 Learning how the documentary was growing si­mul­ta­neously in Britain and other countries outside Japan gave him, he remarked, a sense of assurance about his own filmmaking, which he would other­wise have felt to be a solitary practice. All of the roundtable participants w ­ ere very much appreciative of Rotha’s book. The strong sense of identity as filmmakers of an emerging genre that Kamei and other filmmakers repeatedly express at the 1940 roundtable can be seen in the way they claim a tie between Rotha and themselves as prac­ti­tion­ers. When Kamei stressed that t­here was currently no other theoretical book on documentary available and that it was more impor­tant to learn from Rotha rather than to criticize him, this was most likely a response to con­temporary criticism

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of Rotha, and of Japa­nese filmmakers who attempted to materialize Rotha’s methodologies, by the prominent film critics Tsumura Hideo and Iwasaki Akira.68 Though both focused on the term “creative dramatization of actuality” (genjitsu no sōzō teki gekika), which was the most discussed and explored notion of Rotha’s book in Japan, their ideological and aesthetic standpoints w ­ ere dif­fer­ent. The pro-­state Tsumura, in “Criticism of Paul Rotha’s Treatise on Film” (Pōru rūta no eigaron hihan), criticized Rotha’s rejection of conventional narrative modes of dramatic film and illusionism, as well as his advocacy for social messages. On the other hand, Iwasaki, a former Prokino member, argued in “Treatise on Culture Film” (Bunka eiga ron) that the Japa­nese reception of Rotha’s notion of “creative dramatization of actuality” was problematic and superficial.69 Tsumura strongly argues that “dramatization of actuality” is fully materialized only in the cinematic illusionism of fictional films, for example, Maria Chapdelaine (directed by Julien Duvivier, 1934) and ­Grand Illusion (directed by Jean Renoir, 1937).70 He openly voices his contempt for the reflexivity of dramatized documentary filmmaking ­because “such techniques fully disclose to the viewers the backstage and the mechanism of a trick and totally destroy the illusion. . . . ​ Propaganda is worthless if the populace realizes that is what it is.”71 Tsumura’s disapproval of some documentaries’ filming and editing styles is nevertheless fundamentally related to Rotha’s po­liti­cal views about the mission of documentary film. His disagreement is due to Rotha’s documentary method being itself  “tinted” by socialism. In Tsumura’s view, film should not and cannot become social policy. But what he r­ eally disapproved of was socialist policy, since he himself was one of the planners of film policy in war­time Japan. He promoted “national films” (kokumin eiga), which the Film Law prescribed, and wrote books titled Film Policy (Eiga seisaku ron, 1943) and Film War (Eigasen, 1944), in which he made suggestions for, expounded on, and discussed Japa­nese government film policies. On the other hand, in Iwasaki’s view, Rotha’s term “creative dramatization of actuality” was repeatedly deployed to justify the simplistic fictional construction of realistic scenes in Japa­nese culture films. He discusses several British documentary films that did not necessarily resort to dramatization. They presented very ­little acting of characters to construct scenes and messages, an ele­ment that some Japa­nese filmmakers believed that Rotha encouraged.72 Iwasaki heavi­ly criticized a part of Kamei’s Fighting Soldier (Tatakau heitai, 1939) in which a commander at his post and his subordinates in the front line played themselves in a dramatic reconstruction of a b ­ attle scene.73 He is critical of what he saw as a trend in which many filmmakers abused “dramatization” (a term that had become almost a “slogan”), freely deployed acting, and claimed the method as “the new school of culture film” or “the spirit of documentary.”

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Iwasaki attempted to bring to the reader’s attention the distinction, in understanding the term “dramatization,” between the British documentary movement and its Japa­nese counterpart.74 On dramatization, Rotha in fact discusses the importance of actors in threading together the multiple ele­ments and topics of documentary by noting, Documentary’s task . . . ​is the dramatisation and bending to special purpose of actuality, a method that demands time for thought and time for se­lection.75 . . . ​­There must be establishment and development of character. . . . ​Your individuals must be of the audience. They must be familiar in type and character. They themselves must think and convey their thoughts of the audience, ­because only in that way ­w ill documentary succeed in its so­cio­log­i­cal or other propagandist purpose. Documentary must be the voice of the p ­ eople speaking from the homes and factories and fields of the ­people.76 Despite his criticisms, Iwasaki also stresses that the purpose of dramatization is to introduce voices of p ­ eople and social issues. Iwasaki furthermore argues that culture film has to advance to become “argumentative” (shuchōsei) and “ideological” (shisōsei) by departing from merely filming and recording its subject ­matter. Beyond just reporting information, it has to grow to a level of “argument film” (giron eiga) and “thought film [shisō eiga] which make the audience think and persuade them.” To Iwasaki, “­actual social themes include urban housing reform prob­lems, the improvement of life and culture in rural farming areas, and the promotion of public hygiene. They are questions regarding how we should construct better lives and create a better society, and they are waiting to be treated by culture film.”77 Thus, Iwasaki’s primary argument was to direct the readers’ attention to “socialist” aspects of the book, borrowing Rotha’s own word, which Atsugi, the translator, would have agreed with in princi­ple. Atsugi’s translation of Documentary Film triggered responses from vari­ous groups: cinephile general readers, filmmakers, former Prokino film professionals, and pro-­state film policy advisors. The translation enthralled ordinary readers who w ­ ere interested in film cultures beyond Japan. It provided Japa­nese filmmakers a comprehensive survey of methods of Eu­ro­pean and Rus­sian filmmaking practices. For critics and theorists, it offered a space to discuss questions regarding the role, message, and meaning of documentary films in society. Also, the discussion around the book illustrates a moment when the discursive arena of po­ liti­cal beliefs had become increasingly and steadily exclusive b ­ ecause of intensifying state thought control.

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In­d e­p en­d ent Documentar y Studio GES (Geijutsu Eiga Sha) Atsugi left Tōhō and joined GES in January 1939 at the invitation of a member of the studio a while a­ fter her publication of Rotha’s translation. The GES studio was founded in 1935 by Ōmura Einosuke, a former Communist Party member who had been arrested several times before briefly working for PCL.78 A number of former Prokino members joined GES, including animator Seo Mitsuyo, cinematographer Lee Byoung-­woo (a.k.a. I­ noue Kan), and Atsugi Taka. Around the time Atsugi joined, GES was a successful emerging in­de­pen­dent studio that had produced critically acclaimed films one a­ fter another, including Snow Country (Yukiguni), Young Flying Corps (Sora no shōnen hei), and the animated film Ant (Ari chan). The documentary Snow Country (directed by Ishimoto Tōkichi, 1939) introduced snowy regions of northern Japan such as Hokkaidō, Tōhoku, and Hokuriku, which the film claims occupied “half the land of Japan.” In cooperation with the Japan Folk Crafts Association (Nihon mingei kyōkai) and a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the film depicts ­people’s strug­gle with snow, technologies that they came up with to deal with it, the very short and intense farming seasons, and slices of everyday life effectively depicted in the ordinariness and intimacy of private spheres of c­ hildren and f­amily. A vague but strong sense of regionalism is created by this image of snowy lands, but it is used to construct a sense of the oneness of the nation. The constitutive emphasis on peripheral rural areas vis-­à-­vis affirmation of the center and urbanity as one of the themes of documentary film is articulated well by film critic Tsumura: The implications and influence of China War are multiple and serious, but what should not be overlooked in par­tic­u­lar is the nation’s interest in “rural areas” and “­people of rural areas.” For the system of total war and the state of highly advanced national defense, every­thing inevitably points to issues of how to deal with rural characteristics, how to develop them in a way pertinent to the course of destiny of the entire state, and how to ensure their organic relationship with urban society.79 Such rhe­toric of depicting idiosyncratic rural areas or regional particularities in Ishimoto’s Snow Country is paralleled with other countries’ total mobilization films, such as the British documentary Midsummer Day’s Work (directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, 1939) and Triumph of the ­Will (directed by Leni Riefenstahl, 1934).80 In each case, the pre­sen­ta­tion of rural areas is implicitly tied to reference to the center, to which the former is subjugated.

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Another major success by GES around the time of Atsugi’s arrival was Young Flying Corps (cinematographer and editor, Lee Byoung-­woo, 1941). Selected as the best of the top ten films of the year in the film magazine Kinema junpō, Young Flying Corps was shot and edited by a Korean cinematographer who had worked also as one of the cinematographers of Ishimoto’s Snow Country. The film introduces a navy aviation preparatory school where training is under­gone by young students whose age varies from fifteen to nineteen.81 Editing is skillful, and inter-­ titles and voice-­over narration are minimized. For example, in scenes in which students are allowed to fly an ­actual airplane a­ fter about three years of training, and when they fi­nally fly alone, the editing effectively communicates to the viewers, without voice-­over narration, the attachment, anxiety, pride, excitement, and seriousness of the boys and their teachers. The camera carefully depicts the ­faces of the youths by showing them individually in close-­ups that betray tension, intensity, and a sense of achievement. Nevertheless, the film also efficiently and cinematically connects the training with ­actual warfare. For instance, one sequence consists of a double exposed transition from boys ­running with a rugby ball to them ­running with a gun with a long barrel. The cinematography excels in creating affect, not in an overdramatized approach but while recording objects and landscapes. A sequence shows that a pi­ lot who was allowed to fly solo relishes the flight and takes delight in it. From a subject shot from the sky, the pi­lot sees a schoolyard full of p ­ eople far down below and a ­running, long locomotive, which his aircraft easily passes, then his eye catches a glimpse of another, fellow aircraft b ­ ehind his. The sense of control, superiority, and solidarity is shared with his fellow young pi­lots, who are also in the sky in dif­fer­ent aircraft. T ­ hese sights that only pi­lots had been able to see are now shared with and experienced by the viewer. Not surprisingly, this film indeed motivated many school boys to apply to the navy aviation preparatory schools.82 The narrative culminates at the very end of the film when it shows the trainees’ aircraft firing at a target in the air and then bombs dropping. The last bombing shots taken from midair are reminiscent of familiar newsreel footage of ­actual bombing to Chongqing, China, and thus a­ ctual warfare is conflated with training, at which point the words “the end” appear on screen. ­These GES documentaries are aesthetically and stylistically superior in comparison with many other con­temporary films.

Gender and Filmmaking Now I would like to draw attention to an in­ter­est­ing remark Atsugi made regarding her choice of ­career, which was that she thought she would be able to get a

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job in Prokino despite being a w ­ oman.83 Though communist activism was not necessarily egalitarian in gender terms, it tended to accommodate ­women better than other public spaces. To contextualize Atsugi historically in the Japa­nese film industry, I would like to explore the relationship between female professionals and the industry. This perspective on gender and filmmaking is especially crucial ­because Atsugi’s films centered on ­women’s issues throughout her c­ areer.84 Currents of Motion Picture “Film” Censorship (Katsudōshashin ‘fuirumu’ ken’etsu jihō), a publication compiled by the Police Department of the Home Ministry, includes statistical research on studios and their employees from 1935 to 1942. This data lists job titles, such as actor, director, cinematographer, finisher (shiage kakari), tool person (dōgu), and office worker. It also rec­ords the gender ratio of ­these jobs. The accuracy of ­these figures might be questioned to some extent, but they provide at least a rough overview of the female workforce in the industry. The gender ratio of directors is not specified from 1935 to 1938. From 1939 to 1942, the number of w ­ oman directors is recorded as zero.85 (The categories of statistics w ­ ere modified according to the 1939 Film Law.) The number of script writers was 7 ­women versus 189 men in 1939, and 2 ­women and 69 men in 1942; as for editors, 62 ­women and 213 men in 1939, and 120 ­women and 187 men in 1942. Actors are 489 ­women versus 1,011 men in 1935, and 680 ­women and 902 men in 1940. Except for scriptwriters, the number of female workers increased during this time, whereas the number of men decreased, presumably b ­ ecause of military conscription. Also, actresses outnumbered all the other female film professionals, with editor coming in second place as the largest population of ­women in the studios. Another source that shows aspects of the industry from the perspective of ­women is a special feature in the magazine Film ­People (Eigajin) in 1939, in which three essays w ­ ere contributed by female scenario writers.86 The first essay, by Moriyama Noriko (Shōchiku studio; ­later ­career and life unknown), points out the dilemma of a female creator who is born and located in a world where female gender is an entity to overcome: “A ­woman is required to be a ‘­woman’ before she is a writer. And the lives of a ‘­woman’ and a writer, more or less, conflict each other.” She discusses how female gender is the object of gaze on-­screen but is not regarded as a subject of artistic creativity. The dilemma Moriyama repeatedly described in her essay illustrates the difficulty of being a female professional. It was already not easy for ­women to enter the industry, and ­women writers ­were seen as inferior to the men. Her statement is significant, as it conveys a sense of strug­ gle and confusion that would be seen only in ­women writers. To approach such conflicts as a writer’s gender identity, the arguments of the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock are illuminating. Pollock points out that the system of assessment and aesthetics in art relies on standards based on the

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assumption that creators are all male. She proposes, therefore, that the existing evaluation system as well as aesthetics have to be overturned.87 Moriyama, instead of taking such a deconstructive perspective, concluded that she should attempt to be a “true w ­ oman writer,” to overcome femaleness, and then to learn femininity by abandoning it. This means, in my reading of her essay, that she believed that ­there are experiences that only w ­ omen writers could express. However, she also believed in a universally acceptable artistic or literary quality that was not female gendered. To achieve the level of true artistic skill, she should be able to write as true (male) writers would. Moriyama’s contradictory statements are strongly reminiscent of what film theorist Teresa de Lauretis once called “a twofold pressure, a simultaneous pull in opposite directions” on ­women’s cinema, its politics, and its language. De Lauretis’s argument centered on feminist theory in 1970s and 1980s Anglophone academia, a world far from that of Moriyama. Despite this difference, however, t­ here are shared contradictions constitutive of ­women’s practices of cultural production.88 The second writer, Suzuki Noriko, is much more straightforward. She was the writer of the hit entertainment film Choco­late and Soldiers (Chokorēto to heitai; Tōhō studio, 1938).89 Suzuki stated, “Even though female scenario writers are identical to men in making contracts with studios in the same way and in writing scenarios, some excellent and some terrible, I won­der why it is that ­there are always only one or two of them in the entire film industry. The reason seems to be the vague feudal atmosphere that saturates the studios.” 90 Suzuki provides the reader with a humorous portrayal of male executives’ re­sis­tance to investing in ­women’s talent. She writes that she hopes t­ here ­will be at least four or five female scriptwriters in each studio in the f­ uture, and that they w ­ ill create works that only ­women can. The third essay writer in this special issue was Atsugi Taka. Unlike the other two ­women, who worked for major studios, she was from an in­de­pen­dent documentary film studio. She points out that a sense of inferiority, restriction, and limitation is sometimes internalized by w ­ omen themselves in the deepest part of their minds. W ­ omen strug­gle not only against the norms of society, but also against their own internalized thoughts, which cause suffering. In order to illustrate the point, she quotes communist writer Nakano Shigeharu’s novel In the Train (Kisha no naka; originally published in the magazine Kaizō, October 1939). The following dialogue is between a man and his pregnant wife. The wife speaks, “­There are several points in an individual’s development when the person grows very much, a­ren’t t­here? Leaping moments. W ­ omen cannot leap at ­these points as men do. Men simply advance one step forward. It is very natu­ral to them. I wish I ­were a man! ­There are

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occasions when w ­ omen wish so. Would this happen to men? I wish I ­were a man! I am so frustrated b ­ ecause ­women are unable to do this! Do you have such moments?” “Umm. I d ­ on’t think so.” “See? W ­ omen have ­these moments you never have. I want a baby boy and that’s why.” “I see . . .” I replied that I understood, but ­there was nothing I could do. I guessed that we have to re-­organize society.91 In this era, ­women had to face vari­ous obstacles and institutional demerits, including no suffrage, no equal status in marriage and in the ­house­hold registration, or koseki, system, and of course lower wages. T ­ hese made some w ­ omen feel envious of men and frustrated with themselves. The wife in the novel acutely feels that such frustration permeates the female gender, and her husband won­ders ­whether society would have to become totally dif­fer­ent to respond to her deep disappointment. And yet, in the essay in which she quoted this passage, Atsugi claimed that ­there was no gender discrimination in the lively working environment at her studio, GES, which was devoted to the newly emerging film genre of bunka eiga, and stated that her male coworkers w ­ ere “gentlemen with healthy, new ideas.” In fact, when she joined Prokino at the beginning of the 1930s, she thought, “Only with the Prokino, if I am physically fit and able, I should be able to learn the skills of filmmaking even though I am a w ­ oman.” 92 Her experience with Prokino and GES suggests that it was in marginalized filmmaking environments that it was pos­si­ble for ­women to work with more freedom. Thus, her argument about internalized gender norms that torment w ­ omen might seem to be her observation of ­others, rather than a description of her own strug­gle. However, twenty years ­later, in 1959, an interview with Atsugi was run in a special feature titled “Postwar Experience in Documentary Filmmaking” (Kiroku eiga no sengo taiken) in a film magazine. T ­ here she specifically discussed ­women’s issues: ­ ntil the end of the war, I feel that I attempted to escape from my “beU ing a w ­ oman” [onna de aru koto] and tried not to think about it. . . . ​I dove into and grappled with this inescapable issue ­after the war, and determined to create my own work in the ­middle of this strug­gle. “­Women’s Issues” are tied to the deepest root of t­ oday’s social prob­lems. I have deci­ded to connect the issue of my own subjectivity with them and locate myself [amidst ­these prob­lems]. . . . ​In par­tic­u­lar as a member of w ­ omen’s organ­izations, I am among ­women who experience suffering that men ­haven’t yet understood. This made me motivated to

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work together along with them. This is my postwar life and where I stand. I am ­going to make films in this context.93 Under­lying ­these comments was the real­ity that the film industry did not open up to hiring female professionals during the early postwar era.94 Though Atsugi says in the 1959 interview that she became conscious of gender issues in the postwar period, the primary theme of her work was always working ­women, even during the war: the 1942 Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru hobo no kiroku); a film on war­time farmer ­women (date not known); Transformed Factory (Tenkan kōjō, 1944); and This Is How Hard We Are Working (Watashi tachi wa konnani hataraiteiru, 1945).95 ­After the end of war, she worked on ­Women of Tomorrow (Asu no fujintachi; made during the Occupation era, details unknown); Statements of Young ­Women (Shōjo tachi no hatsugen, 1949); ­Mothers’ Bus Trip (Ofukuro no basu ryokō, 1957); Grand­mothers’ Class (Obāsan gakkyū, 1959); and Hopes of Sayo and ­Others (Sayo tachi no negai, 1960). Her filmography is not complete due to the loss of prints and rec­ords, but a glance at any list of her films clearly indicates that she focused on ­women’s issues throughout her ­career. The topics vary from farm w ­ omen who took over men’s work during war to young female workers at a war­time military uniform manufacturing factory to w ­ omen’s liberation to the postwar ­women’s ­labor movement to middle-­ aged and aging working ­mothers.

Rec­o rd of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru Hobo no Kiroku) While observing work on vari­ous GES productions such as Snow Country and Young Flying Corps, Atsugi set out to work on her own proj­ect, which was about a daycare center. Unlike Snow Country, Young Flying Corps, and Ant, Atsugi’s 1942 film Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher was not a commissioned film. It was funded and sponsored by the studio rather than by any governmental bodies, which means that the studio had confidence in the content and creativity of the film (see fig. 3.3). Among Atsugi’s films, Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher was highly praised by her contemporaries. It garnered a g­ reat deal of attention, and ticket sales w ­ ere 96 good. Among film magazines, Nippon eiga devoted a section of reviews to it, Bunka eiga ran several articles about it, and Eiga junpō published reviews in two separate issues. The reviews ­were quite favorable. They described the film as “viewable with plea­sure,” “filled with so many jewel-­like beautiful scenes,” and “making us burst into laughter ­because of c­ hildren’s innocent be­hav­iors and ­faces.” 97

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FIGURE 3.3.  Advertisement for documentary film Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru hobo no kiroku, 1942) in the film magazine Eiga junpō (January 1, 1942).

The film reviews praised the beauty of scenes, the liveliness of the ­children, and the cele­bration of beautiful moments of everyday life. The voice-­over narration, provided by one of the Togoshi daycare teachers, introduces daily life at the center, which was located in Kawasaki, a city near Tokyo, in an area where factories and small businesses concentrated. Unlike the Ministry of Education–­supervised kindergartens, or yōchien, where middle-­class ­children ­were sent for a privileged early childhood education, daycare centers, or hoikusho, ­were ­under the supervision of the Ministry of Health and Welfare and ­were often safety nets or charities for the ­children of low-­income families.98 The Togoshi daycare center was attended by c­ hildren whose parents both worked in the area. It was opened in April 1939 by Ōmura Suzuko with the support of the Society for Childcare Studies (Hoiku mondai kenkyūkai), an organ­ization stemming from the Proletarian Childcare Movement (Musansha takuji undō) of the early 1930s. The society incorporated progressive childhood education methods of the Soviet Union as well as US kindergarten curriculums into their child-­ care practices, and its meetings ­were attended by teachers of both kindergartens and daycare centers. It was fi­nally forced to disband by the state in 1943 as a result of the arrests of several members for violations of the Peace and Security Law.99

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Atsugi was credited as “scenario writer” (kyakuhonka) in the advertisements and film reviews, though it was unusual for a writer’s name to be listed in this manner. By the time the film was released, she was already very well known for her translation of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film and for her published articles and other translations in film magazines. Thus, the film was often regarded as her work and as an application of Rotha’s theories.100 It should also be noted that by then she had already acquired a fair amount of experience in filmmaking, through her participation in Prokino activism and her training in screenwriting for dramatic features at Tōhō, where she was assigned to write scenarios for novels by popu­lar novelists Kikuchi Kan and Yoshiya Nobuko.101 Her reading and translating left her well informed on current trends of Eu­ro­pean filmmaking practices, and in addition, she belonged to a relatively fortunate generation that was still able to see a wide variety of American and Eu­ro­pean films, before the import of foreign films was dramatically reduced in 1938 and again in 1940. Her task as a scenario writer included preliminary research, building a trusting relationship with the subjects of the film—in this case, daycare center teachers, c­ hildren, and m ­ others—­giving an overall structure to or­ga­nize episodes, and writing up a detailed scenario that had to be submitted to censors. The director Mizuki Sōya explained Atsugi’s role as follows: “The scenario writer did not simply write the scenario, but was on location as a member of the production throughout the filmmaking. It is generally held that the participation of the writer on location is not necessary, but I think that is essential.”102 In my examination of Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher, I first summarize the film and then examine its methodological approach to the theme of child care and emphasis on the relationships between teachers and m ­ others. Key issues include its connections with Rotha’s treatise and resonance with the 1935 British documentary film Housing Prob­lems, and the prob­lem of to what degree it incorporated antistate re­sis­tance. Atsugi began gathering materials for the proj­ect in the spring of 1940. Her scenario, titled Daycare Center Teacher (Hobo), which anticipated a seven-­reel film, was published in October of that year in the film magazine Culture Film Studies (Bunka eiga kenyū); the crew began shooting that month. The film was completed in the fall of 1941 and released in early 1942 with the new title Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru hobo no kiroku).103 As the Film Law that went into effect in October 1939 mandated the submission of film scenarios for preproduction censorship, film productions ­were censored in both pre-­and postproduction. This required production companies to prepare documentary scenarios for submission in advance. However, Atsugi’s scenario was obviously prepared not only to fulfill censorship, but also to manifest studio GES’s new, in­de­pen­dent, and experimental film production. Ishimoto, the GES director of Snow Country, made a statement at the aforementioned 1940 roundtable discussion on documentary

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film, which can be read as a preview for A Daycare Center Teacher and a rationale for Atsugi’s involvement in the production: “This year’s new trends show that to create a scenario for a documentary film is impossible without actually travelling to the location and having direct contact with and experience of the place. This is called scenario scouting [shinario hantingu, literally “script scouting”; possibly the coinage refers to “location scouting”].”104 Unfortunately, the film is extant only as a shortened version. While the original film was about fifty-­three minutes, according to con­temporary reviews, the extant version is only a l­ittle over thirty minutes.105 The reediting was done a­ fter the war, possibly during the Occupation era to meet the new censorial standards of the Occupation government.106 The extant film opens with the beginning of a day in the Togoshi area. The street is getting busy in the morning. ­Children are taken to daycare one a­ fter another. The first one is with a m ­ other, then another arrives on a f­ather’s bicycle. One m ­ other with a child on her back comes to inquire w ­ hether or not ­there is an opening at the center, but is reminded that her child has to be at least three years old. The passing of a year is suggested by a sequence in the garden, where a teacher and a group of c­ hildren are planting flower seeds, and c­ hildren are looking forward to their blooming in fall. Inside the building, one group of ­children at a ­table is drawing pictures and cutting a piece of paper with scissors, and another group is sitting on ­little chairs in a circle and singing a song. At mealtime, they clumsily eat rice and side dishes with good appetites. In the after­noon, they run around in the playground, and the younger ones take a nap. By showing dif­fer­ent age groups and their activities, the film also rec­ ords ­children growing up. At night, teachers occasionally visit ­children at home after-­hours, speak with their ­mothers, and get a sense of their daily lives. ­There are also scenes in which m ­ others gather to mimeograph a newsletter at the daycare center, attend a study group with a researcher and teachers, and enjoy themselves with ­children on a field day (undōkai). The highlight of the film is t­oward the end, when it depicts the field day. ­Children show off per­for­mances of movement ­under a decoration of international flags and compete with each other in a race in a small field. A child who has stumbled in a race has a temper tantrum and refuses to get up, sitting on the ground stubbornly crying. Unlike the typical war­time portrayal of hardworking, obedient, cheerful attitudes of youth, this stubborn child’s be­hav­ior reads as very natu­ ral and endearing. A ­mother is shown smiling and showing to the camera a large daikon radish, the first prize from an obstacle race. The ending scene shows families ­going home. Altogether the film is a lively portrayal of a busy daycare center, of the activities of ­children, and of the everyday lives of their families. The director’s filmmaking method was widely admired and called the “snap shot method” (sunappu shugi). Some spontaneous and natural-­seeming scenes

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­ ere, nevertheless, a reconstruction taken from the scenario, based on something w that had actually happened in the past but was acted out for the film. For example, the ­mother who came to inquire about the vacancy was actually playing herself. While acting, she started to remember many rejections she met with and spoke energetically, almost as if in the hope of actually finding a space for her baby so that she could go to work.107 As discussed above, such deployment of amateur actors, originally understood in Japan as promoted by Soviet directors such as Pudovkin and Eisenstein, was practiced as part of Rotha’s reception. In the end, the mixture of amateur acting and recorded spontaneity invested the portrayal of everyday life at the daycare center with a ­great sense of real­ity and plea­sure in the eyes of enthusiastic film critics. It is noteworthy that Atsugi remarks in her essays on Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher that “the daycare center teachers replace the camera.” The idea of a masculinist “camera eye” promoted by avant-­garde filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov is reversed ­here. The ­women’s eyes as a camera for film recording ­were the crucial concept of her scenario. According to her, the film was about the close tie among working w ­ omen: teachers, m ­ others, and herself; between the teachers and ­mothers; and between the ­mothers. Thus, the film was permeated by “­women’s eyes” (onna no me).108 In this connection, one of the most impor­tant sequences, whose removal from the original film Atsugi was poignantly aware of, was precisely one that, in her view, eloquently presented ­these ­women’s solidarity and their “eyes.” It is a scene in which ­mothers are working at sewing machines on the second story of the daycare center, chatting with the teachers, and both occasionally look down to ­children who are playing at being a train and marching in the courtyard with a musical accompaniment.109 The m ­ usic was by the British composer Edward Elgar, known for his patriotic “Land of Hope and Glory.” Since the sequence was not included in the scenario, it must have been filmed on location spontaneously.110 Atsugi also recalls that the daycare center owned three sewing machines, which ­mothers used to mend clothes for their con­ve­nience when dropping off and picking up their c­ hildren. This was also a time when w ­ omen chatted about their jobs, ­children’s health, and so on.111 The extant film emphasizes the cuteness and f­ ree spirits of very young c­ hildren and it looks very peaceful, devoid of any implication of war. This gives viewers a strong impression that the film is about ­children, their sweetness and adorable mischief, but in fact, when the extant film was reedited ­after the war, some impor­tant scenes and ele­ments w ­ ere removed. Although I do not suggest that the content of her scenario was completely reflected in the final product released during the war­time era, I believe that the original scenario gives a sense of the removed shots and episodes, which Atsugi initially found crucial.

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One aspect of t­ hese missing ele­ments was attention to working-­class issues such as unemployment, unhygienic living quarters, poor working conditions, low wages, and lack of balanced nutrition. A glance at Atsugi’s original scenario reveals ­these Prokino-­oriented motifs. She notes shots of factories, workers entering them, and a job announcement flyer on a lamp post. Her scenario also emphasizes the living environment of the c­ hildren: they frequent a paper theater per­for­mance where they buy cheap candy, and put their hands into a street drain while playing. ­There was ­little sense of hygiene, knowledge of contagious diseases, or ability to deal with pests like bed bugs, which could easily spread to the ­whole community. Atsugi makes special notes in her scenario that shots of the many smoking chimneys and roadside gutters in the neighborhood should be included.112 Another ele­ment stressed in her scenario but absent from the extant, truncated version of the film is the agency of m ­ others as workers and individuals, as in the case of the sewing machine sequence. The original, published scenario includes multiples scenes where m ­ others are presented as active participants of the community, all of which ­were removed from the extant film. ­Mothers speak to each other and to the daycare teachers. For example, one of them tells the teachers about her wet and cold experiences working in an ice cream factory. One proudly tells a teacher that she has fi­nally started to earn twenty yen bimonthly.113 In fact ­there are numerous conversations about money, including how much c­ hildren spend on candy and an extra ten sen (0.1 yen) the ­mothers have deci­ded to collect in addition their ­mothers’ meeting membership fee, to acquire pres­ents for the ­children on special occasions at the center. This talk about money efficiently portrays the working and living conditions of ­mothers and ­children, including the kind of housing they can afford, eating and shopping, and their sense of nutrition. In the scenario, ­mothers also actively participate in an or­ga­nized lecture by a male scholar, making straightforward comments and asking questions freely, although in the extant film they are only shown obediently listening to him. Interestingly, the awareness of social and class issues in urban settings that Atsugi displayed in her scenario resonates with a famous 1935 British documentary, Housing Prob­lems (directed by Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey). In this now-­canonical fifteen-­minute film, the dreadful conditions of slum housing are introduced by residents themselves, who speak directly to the camera. The similarities are prob­ably coincidental, since Atsugi never saw Housing Prob­lems, although the film is mentioned several times in Rotha’s book. On the surface t­ hese works do not have much in common. One was produced u ­ nder a totalitarian Axis regime and the other in a liberal, Allied country. One pres­ents a daycare center and progressive, liberal experiments in child care, and the other focuses on the topic of slum clearance. While Atsugi’s film was financed by the studio

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itself, Housing Prob­lems was funded by the British Commercial Gas Association. However, the technical and thematic commonalities are striking, in a way that further confirms Barnouw’s notion of the global “parallel development” of documentary film.114 First, voice-­over narrations are provided by authority figures in both films. In Atsugi’s case, by a teacher who was presumably well educated, with a middle-­class background, and in Housing Prob­lems by Councillor Lauder and an anonymous man speaking with the received pronunciation. Second, nevertheless, the speakers, ­mothers and slum dwellers, provide authenticity and an urgent sense of real­ ity within the films as they play the role of themselves and speak about their own views in their own manner. Also, their speech provides a strong sense of the ordinariness of their lives. In A Daycare Center Teacher, ­mothers seek a vacancy in the center and explain a child’s health to a doctor. In acting to reconstruct their own experiences, they become genuinely animated and engaged in their action and speech. A ­mother at the annual checkup says to the doctor, “This kid occasionally and all year round catches colds!” The illogicality of this remark was spontaneous.115 In Housing Prob­lem, when a ­woman narrates the size of rats and roaches and the prob­lems they cause, her animated description, rehearsed or not, pres­ents a lively and horrifying picture for viewers. In this connection, Elizabeth Cowie provides an illuminating account of the meaning of the films’ emphasis on ordinary ­people’s speech, though she specifically refers to Housing Prob­lems and not to its Japa­nese counterpart: “The films rec­ord and observe but also enable a sense of the social actors, allowing them to have their say as well as to speak to us through their gestures and actions and by the intonations and characteristics of their speech. In this, the films engage us with ­people not as ‘victims’ but just as ordinary, yet also in its pre­sen­ta­tion in each film, it is an ordinariness that touches us poetically.”116 The p ­ eople in ­these two documentaries are indeed portrayed as straightforward and ordinary citizens. They are dignified and, as Cowie suggests, they are not presented victims of social and economic conditions. This may be another reason that Atsugi’s film was embraced so widely. Third, as an additional note, ­women played an impor­tant role ­behind the scenes in both films. Atsugi conducted preliminary research at the daycare center for six months before shooting began, and conceived the film. Therefore, when she returned to the center with the film crew, the c­ hildren ­were used to her and she facilitated communication between the crew and the locals. In the British documentary, it was Ruby Grierson’s ability to “win ­people’s confidence” that “gave a spontaneity and an honesty to the ‘interviews.’ ” Her name was not credited in the opening title, but nevertheless she was an indispensable staff member, according to Rotha in a ­later version of Documentary Film.117

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Cross-­cultural commonalities of documentary filmmaking in Japan and Britain, such as a commitment to address problematic social conditions, might be explained by Rotha’s influence on Atsugi. However, I argue that both of them also shared the global form of the documentary, which was informed by the circulation of Soviet films, theories of amateur acting, voice-­over narration, and newly emerging works by Robert Flaherty. Termed “film of advocacy” by Barnouw, such works ­were concerned with social prob­lems.118 At the time of preproduction censorship, a censor complained to Atsugi, “Your scenario is not of the slightest use for educating about war­time childcare,” and she was instructed to add scenes of ­children giving thanks to soldiers and of teachers encouraging ­children to become glorious soldiers who would serve the emperor, as was common practice in many kindergartens and daycare centers.119 Although she d ­ idn’t intend to send overt militarist messages, she did ensure that her scenario would pass the censors by adding a shot of ­children rejoicing at the sight of the Japa­nese flag. This scene was actually taken of ­children who ­were merely excited by the energetic flapping of the flag, possibly when the venue for the field day was decorated with multinational flags (even including an American one). The insertion of this scene (which does not remain in the extant version) was something that Atsugi intensely regretted.120 Another scene in the extant film, in which all the ­children stood in rows and stretched both arms to mimic airplanes, might also be seen as a touch of military education. When interviewed by the documentary female filmmaker Tokieda Toshie in 1986, Atsugi recalled ambiguous, conflicting feelings as a filmmaker whose choices ­were limited by working ­under the pressure of the censors. Even at companies like GES, we had to make films with military ­content. . . . ​In t­hose cases, as much as pos­si­ble, we did the absolute minimum of what the military wanted, all the while avoiding attacks from them. . . . ​You see, we ­were working with the attitude that we would make films on our own terms, thinking that even if we w ­ ere terribly poor it would be an honorable poverty. We worked with a sense of commitment, but ­great ner­vous­ness as well. . . . ​Clearly indicating that we ourselves ­didn’t want to make such movies and somehow ­going at it in our own way while convincing the censors to let us through—at the very least, we made something ambiguous that could be taken in a variety of ways; this was what a lot of ­people w ­ ere thinking about ­doing. But living conditions ­were terrible, and, well, it was very hard. . . . ​​ You send the movie out with the hope that the viewers ­will understand what you are ­doing. And that was, well, I won­der how much force for re­sis­tance ­there was in that. . . . ​As much as pos­si­ble, in Rec­ord of a

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Daycare Center Teacher, we refused to let them bring swords and sabres and such into the daycare center.121 Atsugi was particularly proud of the soundtrack for a sequence that cuts from a scene of c­ hildren taking a nap at the daycare to shots of their ­mothers working in a small factory and a store. It was from Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, ­music from a communist country. Atsugi laughed, “I figured that both the police and the military police knew nothing of ­music, so I thought I would amuse myself and put it in.” She got away with it.122 Was the filmmakers’ re­sis­tance successful? To put it differently, how should we think about such re­sis­tance? To understand conflicts between the dominant state discourse and Atsugi’s moments of re­sis­tance, we can turn to published blurbs for the film. On one hand, some versions of the film advertisements are phrased to emphasize the useful role of the daycare center for the war­time total mobilization. For instance, “Properly raise the next generation of our nation” (Dai ni no kokumin o tadashiku sodateyo) was a phrase used in one of the advertisements. ­After all, the Ministry of Education rated it as “recommended.”123 A short promotional film review that was part of an advertisement notes, “The meaningfulness and sincerity this film possesses is very respectable from the viewpoints of the state and the individual national subject.”124 ­These phrases responded to the timing of the film’s release, right ­after the Pearl Harbor attack, and to the nationalist goals promoted by the Film Law. In t­ hese same advertisements, however, Atsugi repeatedly and loudly raised class issues, resonating in typical leftist language, as a message from the scenario writer: “Working ­people form the foundational class of the nation” (Eiga junpō, September 1, 1941) and “­Children at T daycare center are full of a brightness that is characteristic of working class ­people” (Eiga junpō, January 1, 1942). ­These disjointed promotional blurbs illustrate an ideological b ­ attle even between the studio’s promotional appeals to state ideology and Atsugi’s own beliefs. In the 1986 interview, Atsugi retrospectively reconsidered her war­time strategy of making her po­liti­cal claims somewhat ambiguous, for example by adding pro-­state shots. Well, at the time, I was proud to be ambiguous, and I carefully appealed to the general audience with that ambiguity. I avoided getting in trou­ ble and, well, it was prob­ably better than not having made anything at all . . . ​but, it was a kind of r­ unning away. And the t­ hing about ambiguity is that it can be found out by the authorities, as with works like t­ hose by Kamei Fumio. For t­ hose reasons, I think that the next time I encounter that kind of prohibition of forbidden phrases, I ­shouldn’t be happy to keep myself safe by being ambiguous.125

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This is very stoic self-­criticism, as the promotional blurbs phrased with typical war­time mobilization language demonstrate the overwhelming power of the dominant discourse to co-­opt opposing views and voices. The cinematic text of Rec­ ord of a Daycare Center Teacher could have been read and understood within the war­time state ideology, which attempted to mobilize ­every single individual. That is, it could be taken as claiming that even ­children from low-­income families w ­ ill become useful to the state in the end if they are raised properly. This power­ful, overwhelming inclusiveness of state discourse is further illustrated by Atsugi’s 1945 film This Is How Hard We Are Working, which I discuss l­ater. Yet, I argue that ­there is still a strong ele­ment of insubordination in the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­women in Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher, which is unique in its quiet but per­sis­tent questioning of the war­time gender norms promoted by public policy and official discourse. Located in the context of the con­temporary mediascape, Atsugi’s depiction of ­women contradicts dominant images promoted by the state in three ways. First, the film does not embody state-­promoted middle-­ class ­house­wife motherhood, whose primary role is childbearing and rearing. Second, the film never addresses the state gender norm of female reproductivity. Third, w ­ omen’s work in the film is not due to the deployment of w ­ omen as a temporary workforce mobilized for the total war. The film is about working-­class ­women, not about the highly publicized promotion of middle-­class ­women’s war efforts. The prevailing and prescriptive gender norms from the 1930s to the early 1940s are closely tied to middle-­class motherhood: w ­ omen who stay at home for their ­family. Prime Minister Tōjo Hideki once commented that “the most beautiful aspect of the Japa­nese ­family system” is the ­mother who stays at home who rises early to run h ­ ouse­hold chores and take care of her f­amily. This kyotaku shugi (women-­at-­home ideology), however, contradicted the real­ity of the majority of ­women. Publicized feminine norms w ­ ere extremely unrealistic for working ­women, who ­were a ­little more than 50 ­percent of the Japa­nese female population at the time.126 As for female reproductivity, it was already being emphasized and praised by the state in the late 1930s. The intensity increased with the objectives of the 1941 public policy document, the Outline for Establishing Population Growth Policy (Jinkō seisaku kakuritsu yōkō, promulgated in 1942) which stated that the state aimed to increase the total population of seventy million to one hundred million in the mainland by 1960; marriageable age should be lowered by three years; the number of c­ hildren should be at least five per c­ ouple; and mea­sures to decrease the infant mortality rate should be implemented. To increase the population in order to expand both the military and the workforce, according to the state policy planners, the major target for improvement was ­women’s decreasing birthrate

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and higher age of marriage. Among other promotional films, a short newsreel entry titled Internship of Childcare (Ikuji jisshū; Nippon News, vol. 78, December 1941) is illustrative of the outline. A male narrator explains that “­these days, female students are taking internships at daycare centers or newborn wards of hospitals in Tokyo to learn to care for babies and raise c­ hildren as preparation for their ­future duty for the state to become ­mothers [kodakara hōkoku]. Leaving classrooms and seeking real life textbooks, students are working full of energy and with hearts full of expectation and joy to experience the day of becoming a ­mother.” In contrast, the issue of womanhood is very differently handled by Atsugi’s film. The film mentions no childbearing but examines the science of child care; it introduces the schedule and daily activities of daycare, the importance of socialized childrearing, including regular medical check-­ups for ­children and teachers’ communication with the guardians, and a study group consisting of researchers, daycare teachers, and working ­mothers. And obviously, child care is provided by daycare in the film, contrary to the idealized image of stay-­at-­home motherhood. The image of working ­women was not a popu­lar theme in war­time visual culture. As for productions of nonfiction films, t­ here is only one film on w ­ omen in 127 fisheries, and three on nurses, between 1941 to 1943. This number of women-­ centered titles is very small, given that at least two hundred nonfiction films w ­ ere produced from 1942 to 1943. The media did not report on the real­ity of deteriorating working conditions for workers in general, nor on the predicament of extended hours of l­abor by middle-­aged or aging female workers and minors. Instead, what the media usually portrayed was mobilized temporary young female workers and their earnest, cheerful war effort. The most publicized images w ­ ere ­those of female students who ­were mobilized to work in factories for war­time production. In this line, the newsreels around 1943 to 1944 provided some entries on the Female Youth Volunteer Corps (Joshi teishintai), who ­were mobilized to replace male workers. As sociologist Ueno Chizuko pointed out, the Japa­nese state’s public policies did not conscript ­women for soldiering and maintained gender segregation of work, restricting w ­ omen to the home front u ­ ntil the very last stage of the Asia Pacific War.128 In this context, Atsugi’s choice to portray working-­class ­women is noteworthy. Her film Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher is about working-­class ­women, who had been working since the prewar era and would continue to do so ­after the war, so therefore their work was not mobilized for recent war effort. The theme of working-­class w ­ omen was not only a unique theme for media of the war­time era, but it served also as a reminder of the sexism within communist activism itself. The above-­mentioned sequence using Shostakovich is a scene in which w ­ omen (­mothers) are engaged in their own wage work. One is shown in a small shoe fac-

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tory, another is cooking in a food pro­cessing store. Furthermore, as Atsugi states, the film examined the profession of daycare teacher, or hobo, in par­tic­u­lar ­those with a philosophy that stemmed from the proletarian movement. Thus, Atsugi’s portrayal of w ­ omen resisted the dominant state ideology of motherhood and war­time deployment of a female workforce. Atsugi presented unconventional images of w ­ omen that deemphasized the reproductivity of ­women’s body and celebrated working-­class w ­ omen with the implication of a quietly continuing proletarian movement. The original title of the film was Hobo (the literal translation is just “daycare center teacher”). As the final film title too suggests, the daycare teacher’s role is impor­tant. They ­were activists and provided narration that embraced vari­ous issues the film presented: the science of child care, affection for ­children, and the community of w ­ omen.

­Women’s War ­t ime ­L abor in This Is How Hard We Are Working (Watashitachi Wa Konnani Hataraiteiru) In March 1945, five months before the war ended, Atsugi completed a film, This Is How Hard We Are Working, that introduced young workers of the Female Volunteer Corps (Joshi teishintai) at a naval uniform manufacturer in Tsujidō, Fujisawa City. The navy officially commissioned the film, perhaps partly in response to an incident in which female volunteer corps workers at the factory who had just heard of the fall of Saipan in July 1944 cried out in vexation, “Why w ­ ere all the Japa­nese soldiers killed on Saipan Island when we are working so hard?”129 Although it was not necessarily understood by the general public, the fall of Saipan marked the last stage of the war, since the island provided US bombers with an air base in range of the Japa­nese main islands. Consequently two Imperial Rescripts of l­abor conscription w ­ ere promulgated and went into effect in late August. One was to conscript students for ­labor, which replaced academic subjects of the educational system (Gakuto kinrō rei), and another conscripted ­women for l­abor (Joshi kinrō teishin rei). For the former, the youn­gest targeted group was students of the upper division of elementary school and ­middle school, who ­were mobilized for the war effort for up to one year. With the latter, ­women from ages twelve to forty became targeted for ­labor conscription. For the first time, punishments ­were applied to any female objector. At this stage, total mobilization had reached youths and redefined childhood. At the navy’s request, Atsugi and other crews from Asahi Film Production (Asahi eigasha) went to the naval uniform manufacturer in Tsujidō. By then, ­because of the state-­led rationalization of the film industry, GES had been

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dissolved and Atsugi had joined Asahi. Atsugi recollects that they began shooting the film in fall 1944.130 Upon entering the premises, the air raid siren roared, and they jumped into bomb shelters. ­After that, the crews worked ­under occasional air raids, which had begun with the US occupation of Saipan. It is pos­si­ble that a short newsreel entry of working girls in that same factory was one of the f­ actors that inspired navy officers to commission a film about the Female Volunteer Corps and this uniform manufacturer. The entry was in the war­time newsreel Nippon News (vol. 212, June 22, 1944): its pre­sen­ta­tion was extremely similar, not only in its intensity but also in its editing technique, to the completed version of Atsugi’s film. The Military Department’s interest in producing this sort of promotional film was also a response to the promulgation of the aforementioned Imperial Rescript of Female Volunteer Work Force (Joshi kinrō teishin rei) of August 1944. Atsugi wrote a scenario for the film and assisted shooting. Her attention was immediately drawn to the outrageous working conditions at the factory, which she described as “war­time insanity.” The ­needles of the sewing machines ­were moving incredibly fast, and rows of long t­ ables for cutting the cloth occupied a huge room. Atsugi stated that the young female workers’ desperate question hung over the frenzied room, “Why are we losing the b ­ attles when we are working so hard?”131 The film opens with a young girl ­running back and forth from one edge to another edge of the long t­able to make layers of cloth, with girls at the both sides of the ­table straightening it out. Other girls are ­running on dif­fer­ent ­tables, too. Then they start to cut the layers of cloth according to patterns drawn on them, using a heavy electric cutter. The female voice-­over narration explains that ­these are girls who once cried when Japan lost Saipan, and says that they no longer whine, since “this is a b ­ attle field given to us.” The sewing machines are their weapons now, and they are fighting their own ­battles. While Kurosawa Akira’s dramatic feature film on the Female Volunteer Corps, Most Beautiful (1944), emphasized ­women’s spiritual and psychological intensity, what permeates this documentary film is the physical strength and frenetic activity required of them. The film historian Ikegawa Reiko correctly calls the film “a power­ful action film.”132 It is physical action that dominates the film: girls ­running on the ­tables, sports during break time, and frantic sewing. For example, ­women at sewing machines are shown in faster motion, with an image that looks fast-­forwarded, achieved by shooting with a reduced number of frames per second. It is at an incredible speed that they are sewing straight and curved, pulling the cloth forward and backward. The exaggeration is clever and skillfully contrasted with other tasks of cutting cloth or collecting the finished uniforms, which are shown in normal speed. Only the ­women who are at sewing machines are shown in faster motion, thereby implying superhuman intensity and machinelike productivity in their work. At least

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one-­third of this eighteen-­minute film is devoted to showing w ­ omen at sewing machines in this manner, recreating the frenzy that Atsugi had witnessed. The original title the film crew gave to the film was Although We Are Working So Hard (Watashi tachi wa konnani hataraiteiru noni), a quote of a worker’s desperate remark upon hearing Japan’s loss of Saipan. However, the censorship altered the title to This Is How Hard We Are Working (Watashi tachi wa konnani hataraiteiru) and the original thirty-­minute footage was shortened to about eigh­ teen minutes ­after the omission of censored footage. This drastic reformatting caused by censorship required that the crew replace the sound completely. The film had to be completed in order for the studio to be paid by the Navy Department, but director Mizuki Sōya abandoned the job by removing himself from the film, and the assistant director was drafted on the morning of the recording. Atsugi supervised the completion of rerecording and reediting on her own and was fully responsible for the finished product. The film crew refused to include credit titles, as the film had been completely altered by censors from its initial form.133 The film narrative of the finished version is very smooth, and the editing is skillful, which made it a superb “propaganda” film, what­ever the intention of the filmmakers was. The reediting procedure was conducted at the time when Japa­nese cities w ­ ere heavi­ly bombarded by the United States, and at the night of recording, Tokyo was again attacked by air raids.134 The female narrator’s voice, which replaced the original voice-­over narration, is sometimes teary, frail, and high-­pitched in an innocent, feminine manner. It matches the high-­spirited, action-­oriented depiction of war­time total mobilization. T ­ oward the end of the film, in the last stage of making uniforms, the young ­women sew buttons by hand, not by machine, as if they tried to pour their souls into each uniform. Both the makers and the wearers of ­these uniform ­were very young, often minors.135 The ­woman’s narration establishes the affinity of ­these girls’ workplace with the front line by referring to “roars of sewing machines whose sound is like machine guns” and young w ­ omen who never waste a second “in their own battlefield.” They cut the cloth, sew, repair sewing machines, attach buttons, and collect finished uniforms. During the break they play jump rope, tennis, and ­ride on a swing, but as soon as they hear the bell they dash back to their work room with diligence and obedience similar to that of a military unit r­ unning to a designated location. Their footsteps entering the factory sound like marching military boots, and soon their steps are replaced by roaring sewing machines. The film is saturated with action and sound of activities and machines. The ­women are guided by a middle-­aged paternal figure who jokes in a speech in the canteen that “the year 1945 does not have a calendar. So, you ­don’t age. You ­don’t become twenty year olds who ­will get married, so please make all efforts to keep up production.” What he says makes the girls laugh, and the atmosphere is

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very intimate. However, the weight of his speech, which confines all of them in the frozen time and space of war production, is overwhelming. Especially since their factory was in an area where military ammunition factories concentrated, which was heavi­ly bombarded by the air raids, it was indeed pos­si­ble that the girls would not survive to become older. This man also provides pseudo-­ military physical training to teach them how to salute, march, and pose correctly, which, the narration explains, the girls appreciate. Nevertheless, in real­ity Atsugi witnessed him frequently slapping the girls’ f­ aces. She urged the cinematographer to rec­ord this secretly so that one day she could use the footage to document the physical vio­lence this man freely exercised. Though she hid the film print of this footage in their studio shelter, it was destroyed in an air raid.136 Any depiction of physical abuse by this man is, of course, not included in the extant film (see fig. 3.4). The film’s ending sequence is compelling. One ­after another, close-­ups of frantically working girls appear. All are working with speedy, exaggerated motions and tense ­faces, looking like living sewing machines. This could be seen as a grotesque caricature of Taylorist production, presenting h ­ uman bodies that exceed

FIGURE 3.4.  An image of a young working ­woman sewing military uniforms in the documentary This Is How Hard We Are Working (Watashitachi wa konnani hataraiteiru, 1945).

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even mechanical precision and power. Atsugi recollects in her autobiography that this was precisely the way she wanted to rec­ord the atrocity of the total war mobilization. However, it is an irony that this film also served as a military promotional film lauding admirable w ­ omen’s war­time ser­v ices to the state.

­ omen’s Vision as the Kino-­E ye W of Japa­n ese Documentar y Film As I have shown, despite the widespread image of war­time documentary films as a tool to propagate state ideology, examination reveals that documentary filmmaking theories and practices provided a complex site of strug­gles between communist activism and state suppression, between socialist and totalitarian po­liti­cal ideologies, and between the state’s prescriptive gender norms and their insubordination. Furthermore, examination of film texts themselves and of discourses of documentary film complicates the idea that films can be categorized according to po­liti­cal ideologies. On the one hand, advocacy for improvement of working and living conditions could be called communist, judging from the po­liti­cal theories that the filmmakers adhered to. However, as Atsugi’s Daycare Center demonstrated, leftist intentions of social critique at the production of the work could be reconfigured by the dominant reading and viewing practices of the society to cater to the policies of the war­time Japa­nese regime. Atsugi’s textual strategy through making films of, by, and for working-­class p ­ eople was to some extent appropriated, reinterpreted, and re-­presented by the war­time anticommunist state. On the other hand, the theme and the methodology of filming and editing in totalitarian Japan could easily coincide with ­those of the 1930s British Documentary Movement, with its idealization of liberal democracy. Thus, I argue that documentary filmmaking was a chaotic arena where competing claims collided, both po­liti­cally and formally, with one another. As the interests of both filmmakers and the state came into contact, leftist po­liti­cal ideology was appropriated, and yet the dominant state discourse was also questioned. In sum, the trajectory of Atsugi Taka’s works is crucial b ­ ecause it highlights, and is intertwined with, impor­tant moments in the history of Japa­nese documentary film. She discovered film activism through Prokino, which she joined; she worked for PCL, whose culture film production was expanding, and then for Tōhō, where she was trained in dramatic screenwriting; she introduced the representative book of the British documentary film movement, which became influential in Japa­nese film discourse regardless of its advocates’ po­liti­cal beliefs; and she joined GES to work on one of the most celebrated war­time documentaries, the 1942 Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher. Although existing scholarship has

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emphasized state control of the film industry and its artistic creativity during the war­time era, by incorporating Atsugi’s oral history and writings as well as con­temporary film discourse, I have illustrated how her works w ­ ere situated in a much more complicated arena of filmmaking and discourse. Among the multifaceted activities and achievements of Atsugi Taka, I stress that her sense of re­sis­tance was always tied to her cinematic repre­sen­ta­tion of ­women. Her pre­sen­ta­tion of ­women was unconventional in the context of the state-­promoted idealized and politicized images of motherhood and womanhood. Her gender politics went against prevailing social norms, including t­ hose of her own activist community. The insubordination of her images of w ­ omen, which was inherent in feminist consciousness, and her per­sis­tent examination of the gender in­equality of society—­these are what Atsugi brought, not only to war­time visual culture, but also more generally to social perceptions of gender and class. Atsugi’s interest in ­women’s work and working ­women never ceased, as can be seen from her postwar endeavors. To her, gendered identity was tightly intertwined with working experience and cultural production. She maintained the identity of a working person, specifically a female-­gendered one. And it was always from this perspective that she approached po­liti­cal activism, w ­ omen’s issues, war­time total mobilization, and filmmaking.

4 THE DREAM OF JAPA­N ESE NATIONAL ANIMATION

Japa­nese filmmaking underwent an intense strug­gle to forge a national style of animation during the Pacific War (1941–1945). Since the emergence of the medium in the 1910s in Japan, Japa­nese animators developed their techniques by encountering and studying Eu­ro­pean animation and American cartoon films. Support by the military fueled and expanded Japa­nese animation-­making in the 1940s, which made it pos­si­ble to secure new exhibition venues and to employ larger crews of animators. This in turn enabled the introduction of division of ­labor in producing animated films, a departure from the conventional business model of the medium, which had been an atelier-­style craftsmanship. At the same time, the medium was given a po­liti­cal position, with the mission of embodying the nation of Japan. With the ongoing wars against the United States and other nations in Asia, animated films not only had to pres­ent nationalistic content but also had to become a culturally distinctive Japa­nese cinema. This obviously posed a challenge to animators, in par­tic­u­lar to Seo Mitsuyo (1911–2010), who had ­shaped his work ­under heavy influence by American cartoon films.1 He was commissioned by the navy to produce a film to celebrate its operations, and in so ­doing he sought to create a truly Japa­nese form and style of animation. At a roundtable discussion, including film producers, critics, and animators, titled “The Rise of Japa­nese Animated Film” (Nihon manga eiga no kōryū) and published in the May 1943 issue of the film journal Eiga hyōron, Seo stated that “the form of American cartoon film—­the cartoon film genre established in the U.S.—­has ceased being imported to Japan. This provides a g­ reat opportunity for animation film-­makers. I believe that the time has come for us to establish the 155

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form of Japa­nese animation. A time like the pres­ent is when we all should get together and work to establish [Japa­nese] animated film.”2 When this roundtable discussion was published, Seo’s first feature-­length animated film, Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle (Momotaro no umiwashi, 1943, 37 minutes), had already been released two months earlier. It was a huge hit, especially among ­children, and attracted film critics’ attention. Also, at the time of publication, Seo was about to leave GES (Geijutsu eiga sha), a middle-­sized, in­de­pen­dent documentary studio, to join one of the major studios, Shōchiku. He was commissioned by Shōchiku and the navy to make another animated film, which was even longer than the previous one: Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei, 1945, 74 minutes).3 This departure meant that his work unit, which had previously consisted of only a few crew members at GES, acquired access to a larger bud­get, more equipment, and greater manpower, approaching the model of the Disney production system. As his statement reveals, Seo was seeking a representative form of Japa­nese national animation by breaking f­ ree from the world’s standard language of American animation filmmaking. Was he successful in this endeavor? In the end, he was unable to break away completely from the form of American cartoons. Sacred Sailors (1945), the production he began a­ fter he made the above statement, reveals how he strug­gled to conceive a nationalized language of animation. He attempted to blur the bound­aries of two genres—­dramatic entertainment film and a newly emerging documentary genre, culture film (bunka eiga)—to create an appealing animation that provided a sense of historical real­ity, evoked the heroism of the model soldier, and extolled the ideals of the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken). However, examination of Seo’s purported new, nationalized language of animation reveals, ironically, its interaction with and incorporation of vari­ous non-­Japanese cross-­media cultural products. Seo’s putatively Japa­nese national animation thus proves to be an excellent example of animated film as a heterogeneous, transnational cultural production.

Prob­l ems of the Recently Emerging Discourse on the “Pacifism” of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no Shinpei) I ­will begin by briefly discussing a recent, problematic discourse in Japan that involves arguing that Momotaro, Sacred Sailors is pacifist. Although such a cinematic text is of course open to revisionist readings, it should be historicized in the context of its genre conventions, other con­temporary texts, and the norms of cultural expression of the time. Sacred Sailors portrays a successful operation of

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the Imperial Japa­nese Navy in Sulawesi (formerly Celebes) of the Dutch East Indies in January 1942, featuring an attack by paratroopers. The film was targeted at adults as well as ­children, but most of the characters ­were presented as animals, a genre convention of many animated films not only in Japan but also in the United States. Sponsored by the Navy Ministry and produced by one of the major studios, Shōchiku, the film may have been intended for viewers in Southeast Asia as well as in Japan. It was completed in December 1944 and released on April 12, 1945, four months before the end of the war. ­Because of ever-­deteriorating living conditions and intensifying US air raids, which led to relocation of c­ hildren to rural areas and decreasing numbers of movie theaters, it is likely that the film did not reach the wide audience for which it was originally intended. The print was believed to have been lost, but the negative was rediscovered in a studio ware­ house in 1982. Since its rediscovery, Sacred Sailors is prob­ably the most frequently discussed war­time animated film, as it is often cited in narratives of film history, animation, and popu­lar culture as a technical masterwork of Japa­nese animation in that period.4 Responding to this rediscovered film, the prominent manga artist and animator Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989) claimed, already in the mid-1980s, that it included “antiwar” ele­ments. He openly acknowledged his admiration for Seo’s Sacred Sailors and stated that it had inspired him to become an animator when he saw it in a movie theater as a youth during the war.5 Tezuka’s remark was specifically in response to an episode of censorship, in which a sequence depicting a soldier’s memorial ser­v ice had been edited out. (Seo had mentioned this in a roundtable discussion in 1984.) Tezuka suggested that Seo’s original inclusion of the sequence could be read as a critique of warfare. Given Tezuka’s fame and prominent cultural role as the founder of postwar manga and anime, his suggestion has been influential.6 A similar claim was presented again in 2000, this time by film and manga critic Ono Kōsei (b. 1939) appearing in a TV documentary on Sacred Sailors. Ono argued that contempt for war was unmistakably presented by the animators in the film. According to him, the animators ­were dedicated to creation of an unpre­ce­ dented, high-­quality artistic expression. They w ­ ere driven merely by creativity but not motivated by the war effort. He lauded their extremely painstaking effort and remarkable skills, for example in a depiction of cards falling from a ­table, which took three months as animators studied the movements of ­actual cards and worked out how to re-­create them realistically. Ono insisted passionately that the animators must have been fed up with war and simply wanted to make good animation.7 His remarks overlap in part with the view offered by John Dower, who noted that “the film itself was highly romantic; and such obliviousness to the ­actual war situation at the time it was produced conveys a sense of men who ­were

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now truly living in a world of fables and fantasy.”8 This portrayal of the animators as a group of romantic, self-­absorbed artists isolated from the real world reflects a modernist notion of the artist who transcends the actuality of life and society. I do not deny that ­there must have been moments of sheer excitement, plea­ sure at creative work, and fascination with the medium’s possibilities in which the animators immersed themselves. Nevertheless, in real­ity, the number of animators Seo supervised, trained, and worked with was diminishing as they ­were steadily drafted and left the studio. His unit started with seventy to eighty staff members in 1943, but by December 1944 only three or four male members out of fifty w ­ ere left, and fifteen out of thirty female members w ­ ere still working with him. The men ­were drafted and the ­women ­were conscripted for factory work, and Seo himself escaped from the draft only b ­ ecause of the navy’s support of his work, much as was the case with Disney animators in the United States.9 The film was completed at the end of 1944 in spite of t­ hese hardships of staffing, as well as shortages of materials and resources. The studio’s animation department was burned down by air raids right before the end of war. The artists might have been immersed in their creative work, but they w ­ ere also deeply situated in the deteriorating conditions of the war in ways that they could not have ignored. It seems futile to argue about w ­ hether or not the animators w ­ ere pacifist. I believe that it is crucial to emphasize that Sacred Sailors was strongly marked by the war­time aggression of the Japa­nese state, even if the animators ­were not entirely happy with their mission to support it. The film production aligned with the con­ temporary Japa­nese state ideology of imperialism and colonialism, as both film critics and scholars have demonstrated within and outside Japan. My primary concern is not to dichotomize war­time cultural production between dogmatic propaganda and a secret message of pacifism.10 In the study of cultural production, it is not unusual that the label of “propaganda” allows texts to escape in-­depth analy­sis. Indeed, existing scholarship has often failed to provide textual and historical examinations of Japa­nese war­time animation.11 Therefore, this chapter closely analyzes the “world of fables and fantasy” that the animators created and projected onto the screen, and unpacks the discourse of nationality of cultural production by locating the film in the context of the history of early Japa­nese animation, con­temporary global film culture, and the early 1940s Japa­nese mediascape. To discuss the conflated discourse of the national(ist) and the artistic, the following questions guide this chapter: Does a Japa­nese war film necessarily embody national Japa­nese traits? What textual ele­ments affirm and constitute the national identity of animation? By examining the historicity of the medium’s production, I reveal the constructedness of national identity in Seo’s animated films and demonstrate its incompleteness or impurity.

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I begin with an overview of the development of Japa­nese animated film prior to the 1940s, and then focus on works by Seo Mitsuyo, specifically Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle (1943) and Sacred Sailors (1945). T ­ hese two are impor­tant not only ­because at the time they ­were the longest feature-­length animated films yet made in Japan. ­Whether labeled as militarist and ultranationalist or excused as secretly pacifist, they have largely escaped analy­sis, but I argue that they are compelling examples for understanding Japa­nese animated film in the 1930s through the early 1940s in terms of transnational visual cultural history. Examination of t­hese works also reveals that they embody responses to, translation of, and allusion to Chinese animation, American cartoon films, and the con­temporary Japa­nese painting and photography. By discussing the relationship of Seo’s works with the Chinese animated film Princess Iron Fan (Tie shan gongzhu; directed by Wan ­brothers, 1941) and Fantasia (produced by Walt Disney, 1940), I argue that his animation-­making was deeply situated within cross-­cultural, cross-­genre, and cross-­media interconnections. Close reading of t­ hese cinematic texts as well as exploration of con­temporary visual and film culture elucidates the aesthetic bricolage in which the animated film was engaged. Though animators, critics, and state officials sought for and i­magined a pure Japa­nese identity—­especially for Sacred Sailors—it is crucial to recognize that such efforts at identity construction are constantly contravened by and interconnected with otherness. In the context of the making of Sacred Sailors in par­tic­u­lar, by otherness I mean the voices of the colonized, the signifying system of the e­ nemy country—­the United States—­ and also other genres of media.

Early Animation in Japan Histories of animation in Japan typically list three animators active in the late 1910s as Japa­nese pioneers.12 Shimokawa Ōten (1892–1973) and Kōuchi Jun’ichi (1886–1970) ­were initially manga artists, while Kitayama Seitarō (1888–1945) was a producer of inter-­titles. Animation filmmaking was initially not a profession that one might earn a living from, but rather a venue for artistic experiments. The distribution of early Eu­ro­pean and American animation in the 1910s seems to have served as incentives for ­these first Japa­nese animators to create their own works in the new visual form. In the early years, only a small number of animated films ­were produced per year, and each was one reel, r­ unning around five minutes at most.13 Animated film was called by vari­ous names: dekobō shingachō (“new picture book of a boy with big forehead,” a reference to a popu­lar character of the early French animator Émile Cohl), manga (comic or cartoon), or senga (line picture).14 The term dekobō shingachō dis­appeared ­later, but senga came to refer

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specifically to graphs and charts inserted into films, with manga referring to animated cartoon films.15 Manga eiga was the term used during war to refer to dramatic animation. It is noteworthy that animated film attracted attention in both commercial and public sectors as a useful promotional and educational tool from its inception. Already in the 1920s, the topics of animated films varied from education about contagious diseases to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pany ads to promotion of politicians and parties, although works in the medium w ­ ere generally positioned as trivial 16 supplements to feature-­length films. The titles of animated films in the 1920s show the range of topics, although the films themselves are not extant. For example, Kitayama, who founded Japan’s first animation atelier in 1921, produced a wide range of works, from stories based on folktales, including Momotaro (1918); to science films such as The Earth (Chikyū no maki, 1922) or Physiology and Ecol­ogy of Plants (Shokubutsu seiri seitai no maki, 1922); to the governmental promotional film What to Do with Your Savings (Chokin no susume, 1917), commissioned by the Ministry of Communications; to an advertisement for a detergent manufacturer, Oral Hygiene (Kōkū eisei, 1922).17 On the other hand, the existing titles of Kōuchi’s works show that he received commissions primarily from po­liti­cal parties. For example, one such title, Gotō Shinpei, the Center of Popularity (1924), is obviously a promotion of the ubiquitous politician Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), who was a central figure in Tokyo city planning ­after the 1923 ­Great Kanto earthquake and also became the president of the first radio broadcaster, Tokyo Broadcasting Com­pany (Tokyo hōsō kyoku), in 1924. Kōuchi’s works also include Voters, Wake Up! (Sameyo yūkensha, 1925), Bringing Ethics to Politics (Seiji no rinrika, 1927), and Animated History of Universal Suffrage: The Special Session of the Parliament (Fusen manshi tokubetsu gikai, 1928; fusen manshi is the abbreviation of futsū senkyo manga shi).18 The titles suggest that the implementation of universal male suffrage in 1925 was the occasion for t­ hese commissions. It was not only the state that saw the medium’s potential for po­liti­cal education and mobilization. The Proletarian Film League (Prokino), an art organ­ization led by Marxist activists, also engaged in animated filmmaking for a short period in the beginning of the 1930s.19 The Prokino’s animation filmmaking is especially relevant for two reasons. First, its investment in animation shows that other­wise oppositional po­liti­cal entities, namely the state and antistate leftists, both agreed that animation was a power­ful medium for disseminating po­liti­cal knowledge and ideas. Second, ­because Seo Mitsuyo, the director of Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle and Sacred Sailors was one of Prokino’s animators. A native of Himeji city, Seo first studied painting in Tokyo. While painting a billboard for movie theaters in Asakusa to earn extra money, he saw a toy store

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that was selling manual projectors for toy film (omocha eiga) along with toy films of animation. Toy films, sold in the 1920s and 1930s for home use, w ­ ere very short 35 mm films, ­running from twenty seconds to a few minutes, shown on small projectors. The diverse toy film repertoire included foreign and Japa­nese films, live-­ action films, animation including Disney or Fleischer b ­ rothers’ cartoons, dramatic films, and newsreels. Many of them ­were pirated versions of popu­lar films.20 Seo saw some animated toy films and started to make his own cutout animated versions of Japa­nese stories for the medium, which sold very well. In order to continue making animation films, he joined Prokino. In 1932, ­after its dissolution was caused by official suppression, he fled to Kyoto and apprenticed at a workshop run ­there by Masaoka Kenzō (1898–1988). A ­ fter studying celluloid animation and talkie technology at Masaoka’s workshop, Seo moved back to Tokyo to set up his own studio at the end of 1933.21 Prokino saw animation as appealing to a wide audience for the promotion of workers’ rights, class strug­gle, re­sis­tance to the cap­i­tal­ist social system, and anti-­ imperialism. Their representative animated film is the silhouette animation Perō the Chimney Sweeper (Entotsuya Perō), which was shown at Prokino’s first Proletarian Film Night screening in Tokyo in 1930. In spite of its attribution to Prokino, the film was produced by an amateur animated filmmaking group based in Kyoto, Dōeisha, one of whose members knew someone in Prokino, through whom the film was included in the screening.22 Founded in 1929 and dissolved in 1932, Dōeisha consisted of about ten members who w ­ ere also members of Kyoto Baby Cinema Club (Kyōto bebī shinema kyōkai), an amateur club of filmmaking and showing of small-­gauge film, or kogata eiga. This new medium of small-­ gauge film came to be used by amateurs in the 1920s ­because of its handiness for filming and projection.23 The 1920s witnessed, on one hand, the formation of the studio system in the Japa­nese film industry, which secured large capital and infrastructure, or­ga­nized a nationwide distribution and exhibition system, and built a star system. On the other hand, at the same time the emergence and availability of media such as toy film and small-­gauge film provided new opportunities and experiences for private film viewing and low-­cost in­de­pen­dent filmmaking. The technical development of the medium became accessible for amateurs. This meant that filmmaking expanded into a middle-­class leisure pursuit, but it was also ­adopted by groups of activists, such as Dōeisha and Prokino—­although ­these two groups had dif­fer­ent goals and visions. This was the de­cade in which the medium of film gradually became intimate for p ­ eople both as viewers and makers. Perō the Chimney Sweeper, which was Dōeisha’s third film, runs twenty-­one minutes and ends with a strong antiwar message. It was im­mensely popu­lar among ­children, the targeted audience. One of Dōeisha’s screenings for c­ hildren recorded

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1,350 attendants.24 The members of the group had no previous experience in animated filmmaking, but they had heard about silhouette animation and deci­ded to try it for themselves. The film that inspired them is very likely to have been The Adventures of Prince Ackhmed (German; directed by Lotte Reiniger, 1923– 1926), which was shown in Japan in 1929.25 The musical accompaniment for screenings of the animation was usually Amaryllis, a seventeenth-­century air composed by Louis XIII of France, but it concluded with the “Internationale” of the Soviet Union.26 This se­lection of ­music strongly suggests a demand for or cele­bration of po­liti­cal change, from monarchy to communism. At any rate, if the audience knew the songs, this would likely be their interpretation (see fig. 4.1). Prokino soon discovered, by observing the general audience fascination with Perō at their screenings, that animation was not only a medium for c­ hildren but was also appealing for adults.27 This discovery propelled the group to produce their own animated films, such as Ajita and Purokichi: Story of a Consumer’s Union (Ajita Purokichi shōhi kumiai no maki; directed by Nakajima Shin) adapted from a cartoon in the Proletarian Newspaper (Musansha shinbun). In the newspaper cartoon, two male activist workers, Ajita and Purokichi, print and put up fliers

FIGURE 4.1.  Silhouette animation from Perō, the Chimney Sweeper (Entotsuya Perō, 1930; produced by Dōeisha).

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on walls, on the street, and even on the back of a policeman; join in demonstrations; and remind readers of the March 1 Korean In­de­pen­dence movement as well as the other anti-­imperialist messages. The names Ajita and Purokichi stem from the Japa­nese transcription of the term “agitprop,” or agitation and propaganda, which was also made into the verb aji-­puro suru. (Use of the word is found in writings by proletarian writers from the end of the 1920s to the early 1930s, such as novelist Miyamoto Yuriko [1899–1951].) Prokino members had no previous training in the medium and w ­ ere self-­ taught, but they made at least three other animated films: Slaves’ War (Dorei sensō), Ajita and Purokichi, A Story of Unemployment (Ajita Purokichi shitsugyō no maki), and Sankichi’s Flight (Sankichi no kūchū hiko), although none of ­these prints are extant. Seo assisted in making both Slaves’ War and Sankichi’s Flight. Slaves’ War was a historical narrative of revolution in China, presented in the mixed media of drawing, live action, and cartoon, much like early Fleischer ­brothers films.28 It is not known w ­ hether Seo was interested in the par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal beliefs advocated for by Prokino, or if he was just looking for a place to pursue his artistic interests. At the time it was not unusual for youth to subscribe to Marxism, which was very trendy in 1920s Japan and elsewhere. Around the time of Prokino’s disbanding in 1933, as in many other countries, exhibitions of animated film in Japan ­were dominated by American talkie films such as Fleischer b ­ rothers and Disney films, which w ­ ere enthusiastically received. Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse became the names of cafés. Betty Boop appeared on a ­children’s coloring book wearing a kimono whose pattern combined the swastika, the emblem of Italian National Fascist Party, and the Japa­nese flag to suggest the Axis pact. Mickey Mouse was printed on New Year’s greeting cards in 1936, which was a year of the mouse in the traditional zodiacal calendar.29 ­These characters ­were also incorporated into Japa­nese animated films. For example, Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop w ­ ere included among the applauding crowd, when the boy protagonist Mābō, won races in the Olympic games, in the one-­and-­a-­ half-­minute animated short Mābō’s Big Race (Mābō no daikyōsō, 1936). This does not mean, however, that non-­American animation or other genres of animation ­were not also appreciated in Japan. German silhouette animation attracted audiences and inspired artists. For example, Kalif Storch (directed by E. M. Schumacher, 1923) opened in 1924 in Japan, and the aforementioned The Adventures of Prince Achmed (directed by Lotte Reiniger, 1923–1926) was shown in 1929. Oskar Fischinger’s Studies series was also screened in Japan, in addition to Rus­sian puppet animation by Ladislas Starevich (1882–1965).30 ­These Eu­ro­pean animations undoubtedly inspired Japa­nese. But the American animated sound films w ­ ere the most popu­lar, and they ­were shown up ­until the outbreak of the Pa-

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cific War in 1941. While con­temporary American films ­were already talkies and in color by the late 1930s, Japa­nese animated films w ­ ere still ­silent and in black and white. Emerging Japa­nese animators ­were caught between financial instability and the desire to create something fancier in the mid-1930s. Their strug­gle was expressed, for example, by Seo, who bitterly insisted in 1936 that “we can never make good animated films,” since it is not a profitable business at all.31 The roundtable discussion he participated in reveals the conditions of early animation production. If Japa­nese animation workshops hoped to produce a film for regular movie theaters, the cost of celluloid and sound recording ­were too expensive for them. Their primary exhibitors ­were elementary schools, which ­were not equipped to show a sound film and asked for ­silent 16 mm film. Therefore, if the workshops wanted to show a sound film in regular movie theaters with a sound system, they would have to prepare two sets of one film, one for schools and another for regular movie theaters, which would have been even more costly and increased their rental fees. Regular movie theaters would rather pay for Mickey Mouse films ­because they ­were in fact cheaper than Japa­nese animated films. The workshops could make money only through rental fees and had to take the risk of bearing the production cost. They also did not have the means for effective advertisement or distribution. All the workshops w ­ ere run by small crews, and each animator had his own technique that he was reluctant to share with o ­ thers. Such atelier-­ style business practices did not provide a financially stable structure to fund productions and exhibitions or to allow occasional production of experimental, high-­profile works. Though the earlier business model was thus quite limited, nonetheless the mid1930s witnessed the increasing production of remarkably humorous and entertaining animated masterpieces.32 Among many examples of work from the 1930s, Suppression of the Tengu (Tengu taiji, 1934) by Ōfuji Noburō (1900–1961) is an in­ter­est­ing example that reveals the heterotopic practices of Japa­nese animation of the time, embracing and freely playing with dif­fer­ent cultural references. Ōfuji is well known for his 1920s technique of cutout animation made by decorated paper, or chiyogami eiga, in which he cut body parts of characters out of patterned and colored paper and arranged them to pres­ent movement by shooting frame by frame. He placed the body parts to make them look as if a character ­were in action. While the genre creates a graceful appearance for characters and adds an elegant and soft touch to its settings, it lacks spatial depth and dynamic movement. However, Ōfuji also a­ dopted the dominant technique of celluloid animation-­making in the 1930s.33 (See fig. 4.2). Suppression of the Tengu is a story about a samurai who fights against tengu, half-­human, half-­bird demons who have killed his ­uncle and abducted his cousin,

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FIGURE 4.2.  Suppression of the Tengu (Tengu taiji, 1934; directed by Ōfuji Noburō).

a young ­woman. The face of the samurai resembles that of Betty Boop in its square shape, eyes, and eyelashes. A STOP sign, in En­glish, is hung from his h ­ ouse. His ­uncle is killed by tengu demons and flattened on the ground. Unlike typical cartoon film characters, the ­uncle does not revive and resume his shape but stays flat like a piece of paper. When the tengu demons abduct the protagonist’s cousin and run away, he takes out a gun from his kimono sleeve, instead of his sword (the expected weapon of the samurai) and shoots at them as if he is in a Hollywood noir film. He vows to the now paper-­flat, dead body of his ­uncle to avenge him and picks up his body, folding it into a hat, or kabuto, as if making origami paper craft. ­After he puts the hat on his head, he poses like a Kabuki actor to acknowledge the audience before moving to the right to make his exit. The setting of this mise-­en-­scène is indeed staged as in traditional Kabuki theater, as a ­little dog character creates a cracking sound with wooden clappers typical of the genre. The mixture of references to American cartoon films—­the flattened ­human body, guns, En­glish signs, and Betty Boop—­together with the parodied Japa­neseness of the Kabuki theater, folktale character tengu demons, and typical revenge story plot, is vividly presented by the free-­spirited animator and brings laughter and excitement to the screen.

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The list of titles of 1930s animated film also reveals a subgenre of war and military-­related stories, such as Norakuro the Second Private (Norakuro nitōhei; directed by Murata Yasuji, 1933), Monkey Sankichi: The Attack Unit (Osaru Sankichi totsugekitai no maki; directed by Seo Mitsuyo, 1934), and Mābō, the Youth Airborne Pi­lot (Mābō no shōnen kokūhei; directed by Sato Ginjirō, 1936). Another Norakuro film, titled Second Lieutenant Norakuro: Sunday Magic (Norakuro shōi, Nichiyōbi no kaijiken; director and production year unknown), deserves par­tic­u­ lar attention. Norakuro is the name of the protagonist, a dog whose name would be literally translated as “stray Blackie.” The story was based on a very popu­lar comic (manga) of the same title by the manga artist Tagawa Suihō (1899–1989), serialized in the boy’s magazine Shōnen kurabu from 1931 to 1941. Over this de­ cade, Norakuro joined the military, starting as a second private, and was eventually promoted to captain. In the one-­and-­a-­half minute short film Sunday Magic, he chases ­after spies who have stolen Dr. Dekoboko’s military invention, a “Magical Ball” that can be transformed into anything, from a huge magnet to a cannon to missiles to a smoke screen. The fast-­paced narrative development, nonsensical gags, and magical transformation of objects provide the typical visual pleasures that the animation medium offers to audiences. On one hand, the undying, flexible, and anarchic bodies of characters are ­those of American animation counter­parts. On the other hand, some scenes include speech b ­ ubbles in addition to conventional inter-­titles to guide the viewer. It is likely that the animator deci­ded to insert the b ­ ubbles since the original medium of the story was manga, and it was natu­ral and effective to keep them, both for the animators and the viewers. This arrangement shows, first, the close tie between ­these two media and their interdependent consumption, and second, the mixture of the standard animation language and manga’s par­tic­u­lar mode of pre­sen­ta­tion, which was defined by the intertextuality of con­temporary popu­lar culture. Both Suppression of the Tengu and Sunday Magic are compelling examples of late 1930s Japa­nese animation that demonstrate the adaptation of an American cartoon language. The works consist of ­simple narratives, and the characters’ bodies are elastic, easily smashed but resuming their shapes, and freely move in midair. But ­these works also deploy local traditional arts and popu­lar cultural texts, including revenge plots, kabuki setting, origami, and manga, which points to the medium’s cultural hybridity.

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Seo’s Works at GES (Geijutsu eiga sha): From Duck’s Army Troop (Ahiru Rikusentai) to Momotaro’s Sea Ea­g le (Momotaro no Umiwashi) Seo and his animators joined the midsize Tokyo-­based documentary film ­studio GES (Geijutsu eiga sha) around October 1940.34 The studio had been founded in 1935 by Ōmura Einosuke, the son of a power­ful politician who had been a communist activist in college, and it was well known for its experimental, award-­winning documentary films. That Seo’s animation workshop was accommodated within a documentary film studio is not surprising, as both documentary and animated films ­were relatively new media in the film industry and ­were often shown in newsreel theaters or venues such as schools or ­temples. Practically speaking, documentary films sometimes needed to include maps, graphs, or charts, which ­were provided by animators. As an additional note, it is pos­si­ble that Seo was taken in by the studio through his connection with the Proletarian Film League, as GES was known for hiring former Prokino members. Seo and his animators worked on creating illustrations of weapons or strategic maps as a part of military training films the studio was commissioned to produce. Apart from such work, at GES Seo produced at least two films intended for ­children and commissioned by the Ministry of Education. One is Duck’s Army Troop (Ahiru rikusentai, 1940, 13 minutes) and another is Ant (Ari chan, 1941, 11 minutes). The former is a story about a fight between ducklings and frogs. In the ­battle they deploy machine guns, cannons, and a battleship, much like boys playing soldiers. However, the vivid depiction of vari­ous weapons and the intensity of the conflict between the two sides are not entirely innocent, and the vio­ lence of the film is striking. Yet, the drawing is relatively rough, the voice acting is awkward, the m ­ usic is not synchronized throughout the narrative, and the depth of space is not well articulated when the camera zooms in or shows a character’s movement from the foreground into the background. Contrastingly, Ant is a far more refined work. Seo deployed a four-­level multi-­ plane camera for making Ant in 1941.35 The multi-­plane camera was introduced by Disney, in such films as The Old Mill (1937) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937; not shown in Japan ­until 1950) to enhance the cinematic illusion of space. It employs a structure with several shelves on which animation cells are placed, creating spatial depth with a sense of background, m ­ iddle ground, and foreground: landscapes, objects such as ­houses, trees, and vegetation, and characters are arranged in layers and shot frame by frame. This camera also creates smooth and convincing movements of the characters in space. Since the introduction of this invention by Disney, the technology had been admired and studied

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by Japa­nese animators.36 Seo was notably ready to experiment with and adapt new technologies. Seo’s Ant narrates the adventurous day of an ant. Though the gender of the protagonist is unclear, I w ­ ill tentatively treat the ant as female, b ­ ecause ­there are ele­ments of the film that suggest it is portrayed as an innocent girl. While Duck’s Army Troop clearly marks its intended audience as male in its pre­sen­ta­tion of an intensified version of boys playing soldiers, Ant depicts a relatively domestic world. The ant takes a violin from the garden of a violinist’s ­house without knowing what it is. A ­ fter carry­ing it around for a while, she learns it is a musical instrument. But it is not u ­ ntil she encounters a group of musicians with string instruments led by a conductor that she fi­nally realized that she cannot play the instrument without a bow and should return it to the owner. In the end, ­after returning it, she goes home and is tightly hugged by her ­mother, who was anxiously awaiting her return. The story is a one-­day adventure of the ant, showing how she unintentionally ­causes a series of incidents, with a happy ending. The film portrays the beauty of classical ­music, a child’s adventurous day, and a peaceful world (with the implication, however, that this peace is volatile, as it could be v­ iolated and destroyed any moment by a h ­ uman child). What the film reveals is not only the enhanced spatial effects made pos­si­ble by the multi-­plane camera, but the director’s interest in developing coordination between m ­ usic and animation. The film effectively pres­ents the interplay between ­music and on-­screen action, which points to Seo’s keen interest in and aspiration to match Disney’s advanced coordination of m ­ usic, animated motion, and storytelling. The director’s major breakthrough was the animated film Momotaro’s Sea Ea­ gle, which was commissioned from GES by the navy sometime in 1942 and released in March 1943. This was a thirty-­seven-­minute film—­the longest dramatic animation to date in Japan—­and it was an unpre­ce­dented box office success that was enthusiastically received by c­ hildren. But Seo l­ ater noted that his working conditions at GES had been extremely difficult and unsatisfying, since only a few staff animators had to cover all the work of production: script writing, directing, drawing, and photographing.37 He was given six months to complete the work and, ­because of the insufficient number of trained animators, the style of drawing was inconsistent, much to his dismay.38 The story is straightforward, but the character action is entertaining, and some scenes are remarkably nuanced and beautifully depicted. Momotaro is the name of a popu­lar folklore hero whose archetype already existed in the premodern era, but the best-­known version of the story became widely known in the modern era through elementary school textbooks and picture books from the end of the nineteenth c­ entury.39 The folktale begins when an old w ­ oman goes to the river and finds a big peach floating ­toward her. She picks

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it up and brings it home to share with her husband. When they are about to cut the peach open, a baby boy springs out of it. He is named Momotaro, the literal translation of which would be “peach boy,” and is raised by the el­derly, childless ­couple. When he grows up, he decides to fight against ogres who regularly assault his village, in order to repay his parents’ care and love. Momotaro recruits a monkey, a dog, and a pheasant as followers in exchange for millet dumplings, and they travel to suppress the ogres, who live on Ogre Island. The theme of the youth who suppresses enemies to save his old parents and fellow villa­gers was recurrent in propagandist visual images and storytelling during the war, which historian John Dower calls the “Momotarō paradigm.”40 A song version, “Momotaro,” was also taught and sung in territories occupied by Japan in the early 1940s.41 Some extant animated films reveal an in­ter­est­ing change around 1930, when Momotaro becomes associated with war. One of the earliest examples of animation of the story is Momotaro, the Best of Japan (Nippon ichi Momotaro; animation by Yamamoto Sanae, 1928), which faithfully renders the traditional story of Momotaro from his birth to his conquest of Ogre Island, including a scene of Momotaro’s el­derly foster ­mother making him millet dumplings. In this film, some architectural motifs of the ogres’ palace suggest that they could be Chinese, but other­w ise ­there are no signs of updating. However, soon a­ fter the protagonist becomes a war hero in Momotaro of the Sky (Sora no Momotaro; animation by Murata Yasuji, 1931) and Momotaro of the Sea (Umi no Momotaro; animation by Murata Yasuji, 1932), which show international tension and pres­ent the logistics of modern warfare, with the e­ nemy as the United States or the West in general. In Seo’s Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle (1943), Momotaro is a captain and his subordinates are dogs, monkeys, and pheasants. The story is about the successful attack by Momotaro’s airborne troop on Ogre Island, which is a retelling of the Japa­nese Imperial Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The difference with preceding Momotarō films was first and foremost that Sea Ea­gle pres­ents a specific military operation rather than a typified or abstract portrayal of war, as seen in the two aforementioned Momotaro films and Seo’s own Duck’s Army Troop. Also, the film was an animated counterpart of the live-­action dramatic film Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya (Hawai marē oki kaisen; directed by Yamamoto Kajirō, 1942), which also retold and commemorated the attack and was released to celebrate its anniversary in December 1942.42 As mentioned earlier, Seo’s Sea Ea­gle was a huge success: it is recorded as the second-­best-­selling film of the year 1943. The first was Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya.43 Sea Ea­gle opens with clouds moving from left to right and a strong sound of wind, indicating potential difficulties for completing the mission. Out of the clouds, wind, and waves, an aircraft carrier appears. On board, Momotaro is

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shown as leader of the troops, who instructs his subordinates to attack Ogre Island. Momotaro, whose voice actor was a boy, is the only character who speaks; the rest of the characters are all animals (rabbits, dogs, monkeys, pheasants, birds) who do not speak but make sounds. The map of the island he shows to his soldiers is that of O‘ahu. He concludes his speech with a remark, “I, the Captain, ­w ill wait for your return.” As this remark promises, the film concludes with a happy ending in which three fliers in a missing airplane are revealed to be safely on their way back to the carrier, while in real­ity the Japa­nese forces that attacked Pearl Harbor had fifty-­six casualties and one captured. What is immediately apparent is the film’s homage to the Fleischer ­brothers’ Popeye the Sailor series. A soldier (a nameless monkey) in an airplane eats millet dumplings and flexes his arm muscle, just as Popeye does when he eats canned spinach. A US sailor who looks like Bluto whines in unintelligible En­glish and desperately climbs up the mast of a sinking ship. This version of Bluto is totally opposite to the original characterization of him as obnoxious and aggressive and serves as a parody. In addition to t­ hese obvious references to the animated film Popeye the Sailor, the overall visual language of Sea Ea­gle was undoubtedly distinctly American. By visual language I mean that h ­ uman or animal forms freely expand, shrink, and flatten; they do not die; machines and objects are personified while living creatures are shown as mechanical forms; and vari­ous emotions (surprise, excitement, despair, and happiness), gags, walking movements, and gestures are stylized to the degree that a system of codes has been established. The film was executed in the style many Japa­nese artists already saw as the default language of animation, which they had learned by watching movies of Popeye, Betty Boop, and Mickey Mouse.44 In par­tic­u­lar, it pres­ents the characters’ undying bodies and anarchic physicality. For example, soldiers (monkeys) descend from and ascend to their Japa­nese fighter airplane without parachutes. They land on O‘ahu by using a ladder made of their own bodies hanging from a transport airplane. One by one, a monkey descends on top of the other, their tails straightened horizontally so that the other monkeys grab them to go lower. For returning to the plane in the air, they repeat to make a ladder again in the opposite direction from the ground. In another scene, one monkey chases a­ fter a torpedo by transforming himself into a watercraft, using his own arms as propellers, then rides on the torpedo to navigate it to attack a battleship. Upon the explosion of the torpedo, his body flies into the air and neatly lands in his own airplane. Also, a monkey is shown jumping from one plane to another by moving in midair. Lines or smoke are drawn b ­ ehind to stress characters’ speed and intense movement, which is also very typical of cartoon film language.

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Thus this commercially successful first feature-­length Japa­nese animation was heavi­ly informed by the visual language of American cartoon film. This was very ironic, as one of the advertisements for the movie declared “Destroy American animation film!” (Meriken sei manga eiga gekimetsu!), depicting Popeye, Betty Boop, and o ­ thers drowning in the sea together with sinking US battleships. Actually, it is tempting to think that the box office success of Sea Ea­gle was due to its combination of American form with the content of Japa­nese victory. A remark by the film critic Hazumi Tsuneo aptly shows how American cartoon films ­were overwhelming for Japa­nese audiences and film professionals. A ­ fter seeing a screening of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in Shanghai, he proclaimed, “I cannot hate the dreams of Snow White even though I hate the violent country of Amer­i­ca” (Bōgyaku amerika o nikundemo, “Shirayukihime” no yume wa nikumi kirenai) in a 1942 film magazine.45 This remark effectively captures the impact of American animated filmmaking in Japan from the late 1920s and its continued influence even ­after the outbreak of the war.

The Template Created by Sea ­B attles of Hawaii and Malaya (Hawai Marē Oki Kaisen) Sea Ea­gle relies on memories of a recent victory.46 By the time the animated film opened, a sense of doubt about the war was rising, especially ­after Japan’s loss in the ­Battle of Midway (June 1942), although that defeat was never accurately reported in the media. Therefore, emphasis on Pearl Harbor, a victorious ­battle in the near past, was useful for the state to carry on the war. In examination of Seo’s Sea Ea­gle and its follow-up, Sacred Sailors, it is crucial to consider the live action dramatic film Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya (Hawai marē oki kaisen; directed by Yamamoto Kajiro, 1943) ­because it provided a template for the depiction of the Pearl Harbor attack that permeated Japa­nese war­time visual culture. For example, Sea Ea­gle provides a detailed, realistic depiction of the aerial view of Pearl Harbor, whose outline suddenly becomes vis­i­ble in the midst of clearing clouds (see fig. 4.3). It is quite scenic and dramatic. In subsequent scenes, several US battleships are anchored in a row of side-­by-­side pairs in the port. ­These scenes of Pearl Harbor stand out, as their refined drawing is at odds with other scenes that have a more typically cartoonish pre­sen­ta­tion. In contrast with this elaborate, pictorial pre­sen­ta­tion of Pearl Harbor from the air, the US air force base that the monkey soldiers ­later land on and set fire to is very schematic and drawn with very s­ imple lines. It is highly likely that Seo was familiar with, and potentially even

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FIGURE 4.3.  Pearl Harbor attack in Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle (Momotaro no umiwashi; directed by Seo Mitsuyo, 1943).

traced over, the live-­action dramatic narrative sequence of the attack from Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya. ­Because of its importance as a visual source for films and other media, at this point I turn to a brief analy­sis of Sea ­Battles. It was commissioned by the navy to commemorate the successful attacks and was released to celebrate their first anniversary. The first half of the film revolves around the story of an aspiring youth who is trained in the navy preparatory school to become a pi­lot, and the second half is dedicated to a reconstruction of the Japa­nese military’s attacks on Hawai‘i and on a British battleship at Malaya, presented with advanced special effects. The film has almost no narrative or character development, and only a rudimentary plot. Its appeal is largely thanks to the special-­effect-­enhanced spectacle of the attack sequences. The miniature reconstructions of fighter planes, ships, and Pearl Harbor itself ­were produced by the special effects specialist Tsuburaya Eiji (1901– 1970). His reputation is often tied to the work he did on the postwar monster film Godzilla (Gojira; directed by Honda Ishirō, 1954), but his ­career was already well ­under way by the late 1930s, and his characteristic techniques w ­ ere manifested in war­time works.

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The impact of Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya was related to the reception of the attack on Pearl Harbor a­ fter its occurrence in December 1941. Importantly, no visual information about the attack was available to ordinary Japa­nese citizens for almost three weeks. Newspaper photo­graphs as well as documentary footage taken by navy officers from a bomber w ­ ere publicly released for the first time to intensify the celebratory reception of the attacks on January 1, 1942, an auspicious New Year’s Day. In other words, for quite some time a­ fter the first announcement of the attack, by radio broadcasting at 7 a.m. on December 8, information about it was largely provided by written newspaper reports and radio broadcasting.47 Thus, initial popu­lar understanding was ­shaped by narrated and written accounts and was not visual. The first images of the operation w ­ ere, therefore, much anticipated, but they had already been framed by narratives of victory, glory, and excitement. For example, two large photo­graphs ­were released on the first page of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun newspaper, January 1, 1942 (see fig. 4.4). One is looking from midair straight down on US battleships lined up in a row, and the other is an overview shot of the harbor taken from an approaching aircraft. Smoke is rising from one of the US ships. ­These images ­were transferred to cinematic rendition in Sea Ea­gle and Sacred Sailors. At the same time, though, film recordings of the attack ­were quite unsuccessful. As a counterpart of newspaper extras, a special report, “­Great Attack at Hawaii,” (Hawai dai kūshū) of the newsreel Nippon News (vol. 84) also opened to ­eager audiences si­mul­ta­neously in nationwide theaters on January 1, 1942, at the same time as the release of the still photo­graphs in the papers. This newsreel drew a huge number of viewers.48 It begins by introducing sailors and pi­lots on a carrier on their way to Hawai‘i, who look cheerful and proud. Then it shows very brief footage of the ­actual attack, followed by detailed description of what it achieved, deploying still photo­graphs, drawings, inter-­titles, and voice-­over description. The narration basically confirmed information that was previously reported in other media. Remarkably, the ­actual film of the operation itself was pathetic. It was extremely short, about thirty seconds, and shot by the shaky hand of an amateur cameraman. It momentarily captures the bombarding of the harbor, and then the camera turns upside down, shaken and out of focus, affected by the aircraft’s motion. It is an unintelligible and bewildering image for a viewer without detailed prior knowledge of the attack. ­There was no professional cinematographer on the mission, and the only extant moving images w ­ ere taken by a navy communications officer.49 Thus, it is likely that the navy’s ­later commissioning of a dramatic film to commemorate and reconstruct this operation was triggered by the fact that it had missed the chance to produce spectacular moving images that satisfactorily recorded the ­actual attack.

FIGURE 4.4.  The front page of Asahi shinbun (January 1, 1942) reports the Pearl Harbor attack.

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The Pearl Harbor sequence in Sea B ­ attles of Hawaii and Malaya shows a formation of bombers leaving a carrier and flying in bad weather. However, when they approach O‘ahu, all of a sudden the clouds clear above the harbor and the pi­lots are able to see the port looming in front of them. The formation is depicted first flying by a mountain. Since, geo­graph­i­cally, ­there was no mountain of such size, it is likely that h ­ ere the cinematography follows genre conventions of aviation films such as Night Flight (directed by Clarence Brown, 1933; shown in Japan in 1934) or Miracle of Flight (directed by Paul Heinz, 1935, Germany). The bombers approach the harbor and begin bombarding the US battleships. The ­water splashes with bombs, and one a­ fter another the ships burst into flames, explode, and sink. The live-­action film Sea ­Battles opened on December 3, 1942, to celebrate the anniversary of the attack, and this dramatization and visual reconstruction of the operation replaced the meager newsreel images as the historical truth. The special effects of Sea ­Battles impressed the audience and cemented a strong sense of historical documentation.50 Yamamoto Kajirō, the director of the film, recollected, however, that the navy was totally uncooperative for fear of letting out any classified information. ­Because of their secretiveness, this most celebrated special effects scene in Japa­nese film history was based on the very brief, almost unviewable footage from the newsreel, some still photo­graphs of the attack, and visuals from the US magazine Life. As the navy did not allow the production to study or photo­graph their fighter planes or the carriers, one of Yamamoto’s staff fi­nally dug up three recent editions of Life magazine that including pictures of the interiors and exterior details of aircraft carriers. Yamamoto had to reconstruct a Japa­nese carrier based on ­these pictures, which depicted the US carriers Saratoga and Lexington.51 This wrong nationality of the carrier was, though, noticed on the day of viewing by the Navy Censorship Board by a department head of the Information Bureau: “A voice rang out in the darkened basement screening room. ‘What’s this? It’s an American carrier, ­isn’t it? Burn this disgraceful film!’ ”52 Despite this angry response, the film passed the censors, was widely shown, and became a huge hit. Now I would like to return to Seo’s animated film Sea Ea­gle. I emphasize that the realistic pre­sen­ta­tion of Pearl Harbor in the animation is almost certainly a faithful reconstruction of Sea ­Battles’ repre­sen­ta­tion of the b ­ attle. This borrowing by Sea Ea­gle was not unusual. As film historian Peter High points out, the image of the attack of Pearl Harbor in Sea ­Battles was repeatedly deployed and referred in war­time films. Direct references or adaptations are found also in Navy (Kaigun; directed by Tasaka Tomotaka, 1943), Malay War Rec­ord (Marē senki; edited by Iida Shinbi and Miki Shigeru, 1942), Katō Falcon Fighters (Katō hayabusa sentōtai; directed by Yamamoto Kajirō, 1944), and Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Seo Mitsuyo’s follow-up to Sea Ea­gle, 1945).53

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The impact of the special effects was not limited to filmmaking. A painting titled Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941 by Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968), which was exhibited in 1942 at the ­Greater East Asia War Art Exhibition (Dai tōa sensō bijutsu ten; the first exhibition was or­ga­nized to commemorate the anniversary of outbreak of war on December 8), was also impossible for the artist to complete without relying on the film’s reconstruction.54 The composition of the painting is based on a newspaper photo­graph, but director Yamamoto Kajirō recollects that Fujita religiously came to the film studio to study the miniature set of Sea ­Battles. The film set was created on the premises of Tōhō studio, Tokyo, and took six months to build; shooting the attack scene took four months. Dragonflies, which ­were close to the size of the models of Japa­nese bombers, ­were flying around the set and laying eggs in the pool where two-­meter US battleships ­were anchored.55 Fujita’s paint­erly creativity was greatly enriched and supplemented by this miniature film set. The Pearl Harbor attack was the very first and one of the few victories during the war, and its cinematic commemoration was crucial for creating the foundational image and narrative of a holy war. The dramatic film was widely screened not only for regular moviegoers but also for or­ga­nized school trips and groups of factory workers.56 In sum, the importance of Sea ­Battles is that, first, it forged a definite visual narrative of the attack that other films and media relied on. Second, this film production is an example of how the theme of warfare forced filmmakers to envision a film that integrated the documentary and dramatic film genres. This mission of the visual inter-­articulation and merging of the genres of fiction and nonfiction challenged writers, artists, and filmmakers during the war­ time era of total mobilization. Initially, the navy instructed the studio producer to make “a documentary film faithful to historical facts,” but the Tōhō producer said to Yamamoto, “Let’s make an extravagant dramatic film!” Yamamoto was challenged by the idea of creating a film that accommodated the putatively polarized genres of fiction and documentary.57 This task was shared by the animation director, Seo, as well. In his writings, Yamamoto did not elucidate exactly what he did to merge t­hese two genres, but the minimal h ­ uman drama and interaction among characters, strong reference to newsreel narrative and editing styles, and the “truthful” but imaginative reconstruction of the attack by special effects ­were his answers to the prob­lem. Now, before moving on to examine how Seo grappled with a similar task in Sacred Sailors, his follow-up to Sea Ea­gle, I discuss how a few specific visual images permeated the culture during the years of the Pacific War in Japan.

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The Circulation of Three Images in Photography, Film, and Painting In the early 1940s, renditions in visual media closely referenced each other by deploying the same historical incidents, narrative patterns, and visual motifs and compositions. In addition to the Pearl Harbor attack, two other images ­were repeatedly depicted as decisive historical moments across dif­fer­ent media. One is an attack by paratroopers on Indonesia and another is the conference between General Yamashita Tomoyuki and Lieutenant-­General Arthur Percival at the fall of Singapore, both of which took place in early 1942. As was the case with the Pearl Harbor attack, dif­fer­ent media shared ­these images to nurture communal affect, to consolidate memories of specific historical moments, and to affirm a sense of timelessness. All of ­these images w ­ ere incorporated into Sacred Sailors. Paint­ers such as Fujita Tsuguharu, Tsuruta Gorō (1890–1969), and Miyamoto Saburō (1905–1974) devoted themselves to depicting war themes, varying from battlefields to the home front, in a genre called “campaign documentary paintings,” or sakusen kiroku ga.58 Artists accompanied soldiers on the front lines, but not all the paintings w ­ ere based on sketches drawn from a­ ctual battlefields. Similar to the aforementioned example of Fujita’s Pearl Harbor painting, it is likely that many of ­these works ­were greatly informed by photo­graphs and films. The general public would see successive similar images of the same events in dif­fer­ent media, beginning with newsreel and newspaper photo­graphs, then documentary films and paintings, and fi­nally dramatic live-­action and animated films. An oil painting titled Divine Warriors Descend to Kota Palembang (Shinpei parenban ni kōka su, 1942) by Tsuruta Gorō demonstrates the paint­er’s awareness and even competition with other media.59 The theme of the painting was a landing by Japa­nese Army paratroopers on Kota Palembang in Sumatra in February 1942. The painting was exhibited in the First Greater East Asian War Art Exhibition in December 1942 at Tokyo Prefectural Museum, along with Fujita’s Pearl Harbor painting. Tsuruta’s remark on his conceptualization of the painting is illuminating. [When I arrived t­here in May, three months ­later that the operation,] no paratrooper was ­there. No equipment was left for me to study. I had one parachute which I found discarded on the ground and picked up for myself. No doubt it was difficult to produce a pictorial rec­ord ­under ­these circumstances, with scarce materials of the operation remaining. However, now that I had come to see the landscape of Kota Palembang, which I had to imagine in my mind when I was in mainland Japan, and

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now that I heard [about the troops] in precisely this location, that is most impor­tant for me. Based on this, I came to envision one clear composition [massugu no hitotsu no kōsei] in my mind.60 As film director Yamamoto did, Tsuruta also f­ aces the question of documenting the war without firsthand knowledge of it. What was this “one clear composition,” and how did it come to his mind as if it ­were a divine revelation, even though he did not see even traces of the operation? He was confident that his belated but ­actual visit to Kota Palembang was sufficient for him to “rec­ord” the operation. In real­ity, though, even without seeing the ­actual military operation or even its immediate impact, he had already gained some sense of it through newsreels and newspaper photo­graphs. The “one clear composition” Tsuruta envisioned was almost certainly informed by newsreels, specifically, Surprise Attack on Celebes: First Time Operation by Paratroopers (Serebesu kishū sakusen rakkasan butai hatsu shutsudō) in Nippon News (vol. 88), released on February 9, 1942, and Army Paratroopers in Action! (Rikugun rakkasan butai shutsudō!) in Nippon News (vol. 89), released on February 17, 1942. Among vari­ous reports on operations in Southeast Asia in early 1942, t­hese two newsreels specifically introduced paratroopers, whose activities had been classified u ­ ntil the attack. The first introduced navy paratroopers who landed on Celebes, an operation l­ ater portrayed in Seo’s animation Sacred Sailors. The narrator of the newsreel stressed that the film was shot by the newsreel production com­pany’s cameraman, who had joined the naval operation. Unlike the Pearl Harbor attack, t­hese visuals ­were taken by a professional and portrayed the event successfully.61 In Tsuruta’s painting, three soldiers are placed in the extreme foreground, so that their presence is almost invading space conflated with that of the viewers (see fig. 4.5). The soldiers are in profile, and all of them face the left of the frame, the direction of the undepicted ­enemy. One is placed in the lower left corner of the canvas, pointing a gun to the left. His body shows he is in motion, advancing. The second soldier, a ­little closer to the viewer, holds a hand grenade in the stylized pose of a shot-­put thrower, reminiscent of the athlete’s posture in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary film Olympia (1938; shown in Japan in 1940). His right knee is down, and his left leg is thrown forward but firmly rooted on the ground, with his upper body and head bent slightly backward as he prepares to throw the grenade. The third soldier is placed even closer to the viewer, in the extreme foreground. Occupying the lower right register of the canvas, he is crouching with his left hand and right knee on the ground, holding a gun in his outstretched right hand, steadied by balancing it against his body.

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FIGURE 4.5.  The oil painting Divine Warriors Descend to Kota Palembang (Shinpei parenban ni kōka su, 1942) by Tsuruta Gorō was also available and circulated as a postcard.

­ here is no one in the ­middle ground. In the background, numerous parachutes T are descending, one ­after another. The white color of parachutes is striking against the brightness of blue sky and resonates with off-­white clouds. The numerous, fully opened parachutes are filling the sky, which conveys a strange sense of temporality. One would expect, if it had been a snapshot by a camera, that t­ here would have been opening and semi-­opened parachutes in the upper sky, and then fully opened ones would have been recorded in the lower register of the painting. However, the painting pres­ents almost all parachutes fully opened, steadily descending in midair. This pictorial arrangement of confused temporality stresses their conquest of the sky and the absolute success of their landing. The temporal confusion is also found in the intense depiction of soldiers in the foreground. Seemingly, ­these soldiers have already landed while the rest of the troop continues to land. However, t­ hese soldiers could also be t­ hose who are descending in the parachutes. If so, their consecutive actions of landing and fighting are condensed within the one plane of the painting. At a glance, the painting seems to crystallize a definitive moment of the military operation. However, as a painting, the medium could accommodate the dif­ fer­ent temporalities of paratroopers’ descent and their post-­landing actions. This paint­er’s experiment with temporality was motivated by his interest in cinematic pre­sen­ta­tion of time, which is confirmed by another of Tsuruta’s remarks about

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this painting: “For my ‘Kota Palembang,’ I had a prob­lem with it. The scenes when paratroopers jump from the aircraft, the parachutes open, they land, they go into combat—­I wanted all of ­these. Unlike a film, all cannot be accommodated within one plane of a painting.”62 The painter discusses the film’s medium-­specificity, which captures a sequence of movement with transitions in ­actual time, and then he speculates about how the cinematic temporality might be transferred and condensed onto a canvas. Indeed, his painting seems as if it ­were a paint­erly imitation of film editing. Rather than presenting a photographic snapshot, Tsuruta’s painting attempts to convey analy­sis of temporal arrangement, implying multiple spatial and temporal perspectives so as to highlight the action of the soldiers and the dominance of the Japa­nese forces. It aims to or­ga­nize a pictorial plane in a way that conflates spatiality and temporality and compresses filmic time. Total war provided an opportunity for high art such as painting to be exposed to a wider and larger audience, prob­ably for the first time, which urged paint­ers to compete with mass media. This painting demonstrates their pursuit of pictorial expression to document a definitive historical moment vis-­à-­v is film.63 While Tsuruta’s Palembang painting shows his competition with the film medium, nevertheless, he had other sources of inspiration. As art historians Bert Winther-­Tamaki and Kuraya Mika argue, many of the campaign rec­ord paint­ers carefully studied the Eu­ro­pean art tradition. For example, Winther-­ Tamaki points out that the pictorial composition of Attack on Nanyuan (1941) by Miyamoto Saburō (1905–1974) is informed by Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the P ­ eople (1830), in the way in which Miyamoto’s soldier in the ­center is raising his left arm and leading his fellow soldiers. The genre of history painting was studied by war­time Japa­nese paint­ers ­because of its authoritative, solid composition and dramatic pre­sen­ta­tion of events. Kuraya also draws attention to writings by the art critic Yanagi Ryō, who studied in 1930s Paris and actively published in leading art journals in Japan. Yanagi discussed formal compositions and techniques desirable for Japa­nese war paintings by pointing to power­ful compositions by Andrea Mategna, Georges Seurat, and Delacroix. Kuraya suggests that Yanagi’s writing was influential as a guide to con­ temporary paint­ers, including Tsuruta. In this sense as well, the paint­erly commemoration of nationalist glories was affected by the transnational learning of Japa­nese artists.64 The third repeated image is of the Yamashita-­Percival conference as the climactic moment of the fall of Singapore. The conference was held between General Yamashita Tomoyuki and Lieutenant-­General Arthur Percival to confirm the latter’s surrender. Photo­graphs of this meeting ­were released in the newspapers, in newsreels, and in a best-­selling documentary film.65 ­Later, Miyamoto Saburō

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also painted the conference, based on a photo­graph. His painting was exhibited in the same art exhibition with Fujita and Tsuruta in December 1942, won awards, and was considered a masterpiece of the war­time era.66 The anecdote, ­whether truth or fiction, that General Yamashita urged Percival to surrender, saying “Yes, or No? Please make it clear!” was widely enjoyed in Japan. ­These three decisive moments of late 1941 and early 1942—­the attack on Pearl Harbor, paratroopers over Indonesia, and the Yamashita-­Percival conference—­ were circulated and reiterated ­until the end of the war, and even beyond it.67 In each case, radio and newspaper extras announced the news first, followed by visuals such as newspaper photo­graphs and newsreels. ­Those moments w ­ ere continually commemorated in dif­fer­ent media such as popu­lar songs, postcards, illustrations and photo­graphs in magazines, feature-­length and animated films, paper theater productions (kami shibai), and paintings. This reiteration promoted a sense of documentation and authenticity of t­ hese events for a variety of recipients in mainland Japan, regardless of age, gender, social class, or geo­graph­i­cal location. Visual repre­sen­ta­tions and cross-­media circulation of such moments by repetition in dif­fer­ent media established historical memories and evoked in viewers a compelling sense of shared affiliation and unitary community.

What Is National Animation? ­ hese recurrent and timeless images of victory from January and February 1942—­ T the paratroopers, Pearl Harbor, and the Yamashita-­Percival conference—­ converge in one film, Seo Mitsuyo’s Sacred Sailors (1945). The incorporation of all three images suggests that Seo’s intention to “rec­ord historical facts” was similar to that of other cultural producers. As noted earlier, the film retells the navy paratroopers’ successful landing on the Dutch East Indies, Menado, Celebes. At Shōchiku studio, Seo’s film received a bud­get of 270,000 yen, and seventy animators ­were hired to work on this lavish proj­ect, which was the most high-­profile animation production to date.68 Seo, together with painter Miyamoto Saburō, who was also commissioned to produce Navy Paratrooper’s Surprise Attack to Menado (Kaigun rakkasan butai menado kishū, 1943), persuaded the secretive, uncooperative navy to allow them to join training for one week to conceive the script.69 Completed in December 1944, the animated film was released shortly before the conclusion of the war. As Seo’s statement at the roundtable discussion in 1943 shows, the film was conceived u ­ nder cultural pressure to create a national form of Japa­nese animation. In fact, this cultural pressure was linked to the grim outlook of conditions of warfare that year, as the Japa­nese Army lost the ­Battle of Guadalcanal in February, and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku was killed in April. The

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excitement of the early victories the previous year was overshadowed, and therefore the film needed to inspire and encourage the nation. The creation of a new style necessitated departure from the visual language of Disney and the Fleischer b ­ rothers, in addition to catering to the navy’s demands about desirable narratives, state ideologies, and censorship. How does Sacred Sailors materialize the quest to create national identity as a film form? How should the novelty, experiments, and tensions of identity construction be understood in this context? Is the film actually a documentary film, as the critic Otsuka Eiji contends, based on its editing style?70 If so, what defines documentary film in the early 1940s? To illustrate the director’s filmmaking practices, I locate them in the dynamics of transnational cultural production, showing the constructedness of nationally defined cultural products. In this connection, I also examine the film in the context of the reception of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Fantasia (1940) in East Asia, specifically in China and Japan. The extant version of Sacred Sailors is a dramatic feature-­length film of seventy-­ four minutes. It was the longest animated film produced to date in Japan, and the pre-­censored version was even longer. It required fifty thousand cells.71 Though Seo was well provided for by the studio, working conditions deteriorated steadily from the fall of 1943 through the end of 1944. B ­ ecause of military and civil conscription, animators left one by one. Male animators ­were replaced with ­women. Fifty male animators ­were reduced to three or four, and thirty female animators decreased to fifteen.72 To sustain a seventy-­four-­minute animated film, which was more than twice as long as Seo’s previous Sea Ea­gle, a very dif­fer­ent level of logistics and workload was demanded for the production. The team was required to create a solid scenario, produce a large number of cells, create sound effects, coordinate with ­music composers and singers, work with voice actors, and edit smoothly. In many senses this new proj­ect was unpre­ce­dented in the history of animation in Japan. The film consists of five loosely associated parts. It opens with a scene in which four soldiers on leave come home to the countryside. They are a monkey, a dog, a pheasant, and a bear. Throughout the film, the only ­human figure is Momotaro, the unit leader, as was the case in the earlier Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle. The highlight of this hometown scene is that a l­ittle monkey, Santa, is rescued from drowning by the concerted effort of Monkey, Dog, and the young animal ­children of the village. The second part of the film is set on a nameless southern island, where Japa­nese soldiers (rabbits) supervise local animals constructing a base. Momotaro’s unit arrives and descends from an aircraft. Relying on photo­graphs taken and brought to the base by their surveillance aircraft, Momotaro’s unit leaves for Ogre Island, which represents Menado, Celebes. The third part opens with a sequence of silhouette animation that introduces the history of the colonization of

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Indonesia and ends with a prophesy that Japan would be its liberator. This scene alone is accompanied by a voice-­over narration and shown in the silhouette animation style. It is followed by the fourth part, which begins with the Momotaro troop’s departure from the island, seen off by the local animals, and proceeds to their successful landing on Menado, Celebes. When the transport airplane approaches Menado, the film pres­ents again the Pearl Harbor landscape revealed by clearing clouds. ­After suppressing the British Army, this part ends with a conference between Momotaro and a British general at a ­table, which is the familiar image of General Yamashita and Lieutenant-­General Percival. The fifth, concluding, part returns the viewer to the countryside again, where the l­ittle monkey, Santa, is determined to become a brave soldier and conquer the United States. The opening inter-­title of the film Sacred Sailors claims that the narrative is based on stories told by the soldiers who participated in the attack on Menado. This firmly positions the film as a documentation of the operation grounded in oral testimony. It avoids creating strongly individualized characters. The unit leader Momotaro does not exercise leadership, and his role is rather symbolic. The characters’ personalities are generic. The Monkey could be the stand-in for ­those who provided oral testimonies of the operation, since he appears in many scenes and also witnesses the conference of the British surrender, but he does not stand out as a hero. The film narrative does not have much plot development, ­either. In contrast with Sea Ea­gle, which included comprehensible, dramatic development despite its simplicity and limitations, as well as an exciting climax and narrative catharsis, this film does not pres­ent a single, integrated storyline. Another immediate and obvious change in Sacred Sailors in comparison with Sea Ea­gle is, with rare exceptions, the disappearance of the visual language of stylized, cartoonish gags, movements, and actions of the characters. As discussed above, in Sea Ea­gle, the characters’ bodies are immortal and anarchic, to enhance the comical action. They freely fly in the air and float on the ­water, and they are cute animals who do not speak and who behave as animals rather than as soldiers: monkeys run on four legs, a dog licks its own body. Contrastingly, in Sacred Sailors, although they are in the guise of animal forms, the characters’ humanness and ordinariness are emphasized. They are mortal and are shown deep in thought, speaking, teaching, rescuing ­others, and attempting to communicate with other characters and with the viewers through their unspoken words or engaging gazes. The characters are also designed quite differently. A certain degree of individuality is given to the four main characters of Monkey, Dog, Pheasant, and Bear; and, in turn, the anonymity of other characters is an indicator of lower military and social rank.73 Whereas all the animal soldiers in Sea Ea­gle are identical, Sacred Sailors establishes hierarchies among the animal characters. Rabbits in uniform who are stationed in the southern island Japa­nese military base are lower-­ranking

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soldiers, and a variety of tropical animals who represent indigenous ­people are depicted as naïve and uneducated.

The Translocal Intervention: Wan ­ Brothers’ Princess Iron Fan (Tie Shan Gong Zhu/Tessen Kōshu) Sacred Sailors is characterized by the elimination of the hegemonic visual language of anarchic bodies, gags, and narrative closure, which Sea Ea­gle heavi­ly relied on. This departure was presumably prompted by competition with the Chinese animated film Princess Iron Fan (Tie shan gong zhu, in Chinese; Tessen kōshu, in Japa­nese; directed by Wan b ­ rothers, 1941). The attempt to create a national style of animated film vis-­à-­v is American cartoon film was not unique to Japan. As the film historian Sano Akiko has shown, the importance of Princess Iron Fan has escaped attention in scholarship on Japa­nese animation history. She argues that the Chinese animated film provided an alternative model for Japa­nese film professionals who ­were seeking for their own national animation. Princess Iron Fan pres­ents self-­orientalizing efforts to create a distinctively Chinese story by the incorporation of a story from the Chinese classic novel The Journey to the West, the choreography of Beijing Opera, and the artwork of ink painting.74 The Wan ­brothers demonstrated their own approach to creating a Chinese national animation, while also ardently studying and admiring Disney and Fleischer ­brothers’ films. Thus, in the quest for an original language of animation, Seo was in indirect dialogue with Wan Laiming (1899–1997) and his twin ­brother Guchan (1899– 1995). However, Seo’s response to the cinematic text of Princess Iron Fan was not to adopt its approach. Except for an image of Mount Fuji, which was also the Shōchiku studio’s logo, few traditional motifs of ste­reo­typical Japa­neseness are employed in Sacred Sailors. But before exploring Seo’s response in more detail, I discuss the Wan ­brothers and their work. Wan Laiming and Guchan ­were raised in Nanking and studied and worked in Shanghai; they began animation filmmaking in 1925.75 Their commercial shorts for Chinese typewriter and soda companies ­were shown as accompaniments to dramatic features in movie theaters. Their 1926 Commotions in a Studio, which presented the interaction of real life and cartoon characters, was inspired by the Fleischer ­brothers’ Out of the Inkwell series. In 1932 they started to work for the Lihua studio to produce anti-­Japanese animated short films, in response to the 1931 Manchurian Incident that marked the outbreak of increased Japa­nese aggression in China. In the following year, they joined the Mingxing studio and created films on vari­ous themes, from education about hygiene to anti-­Japanese

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productions to adaptations of Aesop’s fables; most of ­these combine animated and live-­action characters. This combination, as well as their deployment of a bouncing ball to teach audiences how to sing the words of a song in a film, suggests their fascination with Fleischer films.76 Their first talkie animation, The Camel Dance, was made in 1935. It was based on one of Aesop’s fables and included recordings of m ­ usic and audience laughter as a sound track.77 In 1936, while working for the Mingxing studio, they published an essay indicative of their sources of artistic inspiration and their filmmaking philosophy. They acknowledge being influenced by Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse and Fleischer films, and refer to the high quality of German and Rus­sian films, but they argue that, in a Chinese film, “one o ­ ught to have a story based purely on real Chinese traditions and stories, consistent with our sensibility and sense of humor.”78 This notion of a nationalized animation film was already being formed and gradually materialized in their works. ­After the outbreak of the Second Sino-­Japanese War in 1937, Wan Laiming, Guchan, and their third ­brother, Chaochen (1906–1992), continued animation filmmaking while the youn­gest b ­ rother, Dihuan (b. 1906/1907?), ran a photo studio. The three older ­brothers then joined the animation section of the Nationalist Party organ­ization in Wuhan. ­There they worked on a series of animated films that aimed to teach viewers songs of re­sis­tance. For example, one of them, An Old Chinese War Tale (Man chiang hung), was based on a poem by the famous twelfth-­century patriotic general Yue Fei (of the Song dynasty). The En­glish title appears beneath the Chinese title in the opening credits. (The literal translation of the original title is “the river is red with blood.”) In the story, Yue Fei confronts a Japa­nese warrior with whom he swordfights. The hero wins back China from Japan, and the shaded area of a map of China, which indicates an occupied area, is scraped away to show the original terrain. For the re­sis­tance song, a white bouncing ball jumps from word to word of the lyr­ics at the bottom of screen to guide the viewers so that they can sing the song together. According to the film scholar Ono Kōsei, the background artwork incorporates a touch of Chinese ink painting as well as some Western and exotic ­Middle Eastern motifs. Based on his own interview with Wan Laiming, Ono argues that the b ­ rothers built on this film to create their ­later Princess Iron Fan, which was thematically and stylistically intended to be a national animation of China.79 They worked for the Nationalist Party ­until 1939, when they returned to Shanghai. ­There Wan Laiming and Guchan joined the Xin­hua United China studio to found its animation department, where they started work on a feature-­length animated film in 1940.80 The studio was located in the French Concession, which was sheltered from Japa­nese military attack ­because of extraterritoriality ­until Pearl Harbor. Surrounded by both the Japa­nese navy and army, the Shanghai

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foreign concessions ­were similar to islands, where anti-­Japanese activism flourished and ­people had access to a wide variety of information and media. In addition to ten dif­fer­ent Chinese-­language newspapers, British, American, French, German, and Rus­sian papers ­were also available. Weekly and monthly periodicals and radio broadcasts disseminated opinions critical of Japan. B ­ ecause of the presence of US studio representatives in Shanghai, most Hollywood films ­were imported and screened in the foreign concessions, including Gone with the Wind (1939), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Citizen Kane (1941). A small number of French and German films w ­ ere also screened, and several Rus­sian films w ­ ere shown annually.81 Disney’s first Technicolor feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), opened in Shanghai in early 1940 and was an unpre­ce­dented hit.82 Inspired by the film and also encouraged by investors, the Wan ­brothers deci­ded to make their own feature-­length film.83 They selected a story from the Chinese classic The Journey to the West, following Walt Disney’s choice of a German folktale with a vaguely premodern Eu­ro­pean setting. Instead of naming the film The Journey to the West, they gave it the title Tie shan gong zhu (Princess Iron Fan) to resonate with Bai xue gong zhu (Princess Snow White). The ­brothers began working in June 1940 and completed a nine-­reel work in November 1941. The film was first screened in Shanghai on November 19, 1941, and then in Chongqing, Singapore, and in Indonesia.84 The film critic Hazumi Tsuneo and film director Uchida Tomu saw it together in Shanghai. Fascinated, they visited the Wan ­brothers and enjoyed the meeting, which Hazumi reported on in a Japa­nese film journal.85 The film also opened in Japan, on September 10, 1942 (see fig. 4.6). Princess Iron Fan was the third Chinese film that was imported and publicly shown in Japan. The other two ­were Camille (Cha hua nu; directed by Bu Wancang, 1938), distributed by Tōhō studio and shown in Tokyo in 1938, and Mulan Joins the Army (Hua Mulan; directed by Ma Chucheng, 1939), distributed by Kawakita Nagamasa’s China Film Com­pany in Japan in 1942.86 Princess Iron Fan was dubbed by Japa­nese voice actors including the benshi film narrator Tokugawa Musei and shown as a double bill with the documentary film Divine Warriors of the Sky (Sorano no shinpei; directed by Watanabe Yoshimi, 1942) in October 1942. The double bill was arranged according to the Film Law promulgated in 1939, which mandated that a dramatic film had to be accompanied with a documentary film, or bunka eiga. The accompanying documentary film became well known for its song, which was mentioned earlier in connection with Tsuruta’s painting of the army paratroopers’ descent to Kota Palembang. Box office sales ­were the fifth highest in the first half of the fiscal year.87 The animated film Princess Iron Fan narrates a well-­known episode from the sixteenth-­century vernacular novel The Journey to the West. Tripitaka (Xuanzang)

FIGURE 4.6.  Advertisement for Princess Iron Fan (Tie shan gong zhu/Tessen kōshu) in the film magazine Eiga junpō (September 21, 1942). The film was dubbed, and one of the voice actors was the famous benshi Tokugawa Musei.

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and his three disciples, the Monkey King (Sun Wukong), Pigsy (Zhu Bajie), and Sandy (Sha Wujing), encounter flaming mountains in a village and find that they can pass only if they subdue the fire with the magical fan of Princess Iron Fan. ­After being defeated by her in a fight, Monkey transforms himself into a ­little bug, enters her stomach in her tea, and threatens her to get the fan. The transformation of his appearance is comical. First he becomes tiny, widens and enlarges his stomach, elongates his limbs, and changes his face. Such transformation of characters’ body parts frequently adds humor to the narrative, for instance when Pigsy’s protruding nose is often dented into his face and he has to pull it back out, or when the face of the Bull Daemon King’s lover turns from a fox to a Betty Boop–­like coquettish w ­ oman. In the end, with the help of villa­gers, the three disciples capture the Bull Daemon King and obtain the fan.88 The film portrays an action-­oriented adventure and was faithful to the code of standard Disney/Fleischer animation, which stresses anarchic bodies of characters and nonsensical gags. In addition to characters’ transformations, Monkey flies like the wind in midair, and when Sandy is flattened and killed, he is resurrected by his body being inflated with Pigsy’s breath like a balloon. The occasional graceful movements of characters created by rotoscope, the technique deployed in Disney’s Snow White, accentuate more cartoonish motions and add another layer of visual plea­sure to the film. The film was advertised in summer 1942 in Japa­nese film magazines. The advertisements introduced the character designs, the synopsis, photo­graphs of the Wan ­brothers, and their pro­cess of animation-­making. An advertisement in the July 11 issue of the film journal Eiga junpō claimed, “Genius b ­ rothers have appeared from the film industry of the Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere! The Wan ­Brothers have materialized their dream of The Journey to the West by spending three years and mobilizing two hundred paint­ers [gaka].” A film review stated that, according to the producers, two years and a half w ­ ere spent and two hundred animators (mangaka) w ­ ere mobilized, and that three hundred background illustrations, nine thousand sketches, and 150,000 sheets of ­human figures ­were created.89 It was indeed an eighty-­five-­minute large-­scale production, the first feature-­length animated film in Asia. The film was a commercial success in Japan, and it also impressed Japa­nese film critics. For example, the film critic Imamura Taihei says, “Its achievement makes the ­faces of Japa­nese film industry ­people pale.” 90 Some Japa­nese writers criticized the overall awkwardness of the motion in this film, as well as the too-­ obvious influence of Fleischer b ­ rothers’ drawing lines, while some praised it for “skilful narrative development” that was lacking in Japa­nese film in general.91 Some also favorably praised its “Chineseness.” A film critic notes, “Though the work is in fact influenced by American animation, some concepts and movements

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are quite typically Chinese. More than anything ­else, it manifests cinematic dynamism and offers the spectators superb cinematic plea­sure in contrast with Japa­nese films based on the same material—­though it is not fair to discuss a live action film in comparison with an animated film.” 92 The author does not explain what he means by “concepts and movements,” but Sano points to another film review by Imamura Taihei that helps elaborate on this review.93 Pigsy takes out his rake and crosses the screen by d ­ oing somersaults. ­These stylized movements are quite beautiful, typically reminiscent of Chinese theater. Also, the way he walks while waving his long sleeves is also a masterpiece, a typical Chinese humorous way of carry­ing oneself. This tells us that animated pictures, ­because of the medium’s artificiality, are able to pres­ent movements inherent to each nation much more clearly than in photo­graphs. It is quite exciting to imagine the ­future of animation film in the East Asian Co-­Prosperity Sphere.94 Critics praised the Wan b ­ rothers’ intentional, conscious effort of constructing cultural identity of Chineseness. The body movements of characters in some scenes ­were drawn by studying actors of the Beijing Opera. The background art is painted with delicately shaded tones of gray, reminiscent of ink painting. ­Needless to say, the story is based on a Chinese classic. However, such praise cannot be taken at face value. Both the blurb of the above advertisement and Imamura’s remark clearly indicate that the praise is conditional. Ironically, the self-­ orientalizing, self-­proclaimed Chinese cultural specificity was appropriated by Japa­nese film discourse con­ve­niently to reinforce the ideologies of the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere, the notion of a multicultural empire led by Japan.95 Yet Princess Iron Fan was also impressive to many film professionals. One of its strengths was that it demonstrated a skillful storytelling technique, as seen in the “cinematic dynamism” and “plea­sure” admired by the critic. Sano correctly points out how the editing of the climactic scene is well structured. Cross-­cutting between two parties’ actions—­the villa­gers’ concerted effort to tear a huge tree open and hold its parts apart to make a trap, and Monkey chasing the Bull Daemon King—­creates increasing tension and intensifies the spectators’ expectation of dramatic closure. Then, fi­nally, the Bull Daemon King is chased into the villa­ gers’ trap, which concludes the chase with the spectators’ catharsis. The editing successfully presented a climactic moment and intensified action, and created a strong sense of three-­dimensional space in which characters freely move up and down with ­great speed.96 While it is deities who suppress the Bull Daemon King in the original story, The Journey to the West, in the film it is the villa­gers and Tripitaka’s disciples who fi­nally get rid of the monster. In par­tic­u­lar, emphasis is placed on the villa­gers’

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concerted effort and collectivity by the cross-­cutting editing of the climax. The villa­gers split into two groups, possibly referring to the Second United Front of Nationalist Party and Communist Party Alliance, to hold the tree to trap the monster. Instead of being depicted as individuals, the villa­gers are drawn as a collective, especially when they line up like one strong rope and are together pulling hard on the tree branches. The suppressed Bull Daemon King alludes to the state of Japan, and the villa­gers’ victory can be taken to be that of the Chinese. Wan Laiming ­later stated that he had to edit out Pigsy’s song, “­People Rise and Fight ­until Victory” and had to remove an inter-­title at the ending that said “Win the ultimate victory of re­sis­tance.” 97 A further suggestion of the film’s anti-­Japanese sentiment is provided by Ono, who introduces an episode in which the production staff making a Japanese-­language version of the film noticed a white circle on the Bull Daemon King’s chest armor and saw it as the symbol of the sun of the Japa­nese national flag, which made the film strongly anti-­Japanese in his eyes.98 The introduction of Princess Iron Fan informed Japa­nese film professionals of an attempt by Chinese filmmakers to create their own national style of animation, which paralleled their Japa­nese counter­parts’ similar efforts. Both Chinese and Japa­nese animators demonstrate their responses to, translation of, and departure from the hegemonic American style of animation. In the case of the Chinese animators, the effort was twofold: to produce a film resisting Japan’s colonialist aggression and to forge an idiom for Chinese national animation. ­Whether or not this double re­sis­tance was successful, this tangled relationship was also shared by Seo’s Sacred Sailors. Seo’s mission was to produce a non-­ American visual language of animation, in par­tic­ul­ ar since that country was now the ­enemy of his own.

Disney Formula for Japa­n ese National Animation Japa­nese film critics and animators might have been dismayed that it was Chinese filmmakers who first advanced in their effort to forge a form of national animation, whereas the ideological expectation was that they w ­ ere to be guided by the Japa­nese as subordinate members of the Co-­Prosperity Sphere. But the dif­ fer­ent approaches to national animation between Princess Iron Fan and the Momotaro films must be noted. Though Seo no doubt saw Princess Iron Fan in the early stages of his production of Sea Ea­gle (1943), self-­orientalizing signs are scarce in the latter, except for some obvious icons such as a rising sun on the soldier’s headband in the film.99 Both Sea Ea­gle and Sacred Sailors deploy the folktale character Momotaro, but he is not a central figure in e­ ither.

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It was a­ fter the release of Sea Ea­gle that Seo spoke of his intention to create a form of Japa­nese national animation. In September 1944, while it was still in production, Seo introduced his new film Sacred Sailors: “To an extent, the film is ­going to incorporate the sense of documentation [jisshōsei] of documentary film [bunka eiga]. However, if it greatly lacks entertainment ele­ments it loses the essence of animated film. The skillful fusion of ele­ments of entertainment and documentary films mediated by artistry should, I hope, yield a new type [of film].”100 He also noted that Disney had shifted from folktale-­based stories, such as Gulliver’s Travels, Snow White, and Pinocchio, to dif­fer­ent types of narratives, such as Dumbo and Bambi.101 It is very unlikely that he saw the latter two films, but it is notable that he was keeping up with the trends of the Disney Studio and, ironically, trying to follow them. Avoiding the deployment of dramatic folktale stories was one of his responses to the Wan ­brothers’ film. Seo continues, “Film advances together with war, and it intermittently creates a new direction by war.”102 For him, “the new direction” was to create an entertainment-­documentary film. The differences between Princess Iron Fan and Sacred Sailors are quite indicative of the dif­fer­ent directions that Chinese and Japa­nese artists took to create their own vernacular cinemas. Princess Iron Fan re-­created Chinese traditions of art and lit­er­a­ture, whereas Sacred Sailors sought the form of entertainment-­documentary film. Indeed, Seo must have been aware that both Princess Iron Fan and Sea Ea­gle ­were deeply sustained by American cartoons’ representative syntax of anarchic bodies and nonsensical gags, though they presented indigenous themes on the surface. Nevertheless, despite Seo’s intended departure, I argue that Sacred Sailors as well is still clearly imprinted with the Disney formulae. The most Disneyesque scenes in Sacred Sailors are also the most notorious scenes, which have never escaped attention in film reviews and scholarship. Set on an anonymous southern island in the Dutch East Indies, they strongly suggest the ideological construct of the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere and the forced Japanese-­language education of the period as a part of imperial education (kōminka kyōiku). In par­tic­ul­ar the following two sequences are illustrative: one shows how local islanders (animals such as rhino, leopard, elephant, leopard, squirrel, deer, and so on) cheerfully construct a Japa­nese military base and welcome Momotaro’s arrival, and another pres­ents a Japa­nese soldier (a dog) teaching islanders the Japa­nese alphabet. The first infamous sequence of Sacred Sailors begins by showing vari­ous local animals ­under the supervision of Japa­nese soldiers (rabbits) cutting trees, carry­ ing them, and constructing a Japa­nese military base with the accompaniment of a song about the plea­sure of ­labor. When the base is completed, Momotaro’s airborne unit of the Japa­nese Navy arrives at the island, and he and his unit appear from one of the bombers. The local monkey, orangutan, and baboon observe him

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and sing. ­These three are the only local animals who speak, who are capable of expressing themselves verbally, and, therefore, they represent colonial elites. They sing, “­Here they come! Who are they? They are very strange and foreign.” When Momotaro, the unit leader, descends from the plane with his subordinates, the song continues, “A distinguished man has come. How mysterious and marvelous! Their ­faces even resemble ours a ­little bit.” The song points to the physiognomical resemblance between them and the Japa­nese, which emphasizes the friendly reception of the latter b ­ ecause of ethnic affinity. Nevertheless, a hierarchy is clearly established between the locals and Japa­nese. Whereas the locals are reduced to signs of primitiveness, natu­ral resources, and docility, the signs of civilization, such as technology, clothing, linguistic skills, and disciplined body movements, are all associated with the Japa­nese, who in turn “naturally” subjugate the locals. The song scene effectively summarizes the Japa­nese ideological meta­phor of kinship between Japan and other Asian countries as a part of a discourse in which Japan emancipates them from Western colonialism as their awaited leader. The sequence of Japanese-­language instruction takes place a l­ ittle ­later. In this scene, Dog stands in front of the blackboard in a clearing, teaching the Japa­nese alphabet through singing to make it easy for the locals to learn the signs. The local students cannot even speak, but groan and howl, freely move around their desks, and cannot sit still. But with the help of the Japa­nese alphabet (a-­i-­u-­e-­o) song and accompanying ­music, they began learning. The letters appear on-­screen one by one with ­music, as if they are to be memorized by singing the song, both by the islanders in the film and by viewers outside Japan.103 The Japa­nese language, representative of teaching Japa­nese culture and spirit in a broader sense, shapes a disciplined imperial subjecthood in the film. Indeed, songs such as the folk song of Momotaro and “Patriotic March” (Aikoku kōshin kyoku) w ­ ere deployed as a part of Japa­nese culture and language instructions, or kōminka kyōiku, in occupied areas in Southeast Asia.104 The variety of local characters, including the hamadryas baboon, rhino, tiger, leopard, kangaroo, elephant, deer, and squirrel, is a showcase of exotic animals that animators fantasize as tropical inhabitants. However, elephants, deer, squirrels, and ­little birds are Disneyesque characters rather than exotic inhabitants. As Susan Napier correctly points out, “all cute animals” in Seo’s Momotaro films are “clearly influenced by Disney’s fantasy iconography.”105 The exoticism of the South Seas can also be traced back to ste­reo­typical repre­sen­ta­tions, for example in The Adventures of Dankichi (Bōken Dankichi), serialized illustrated stories by Shimada Keizō (1900–1973) in the boys’ magazine Shōnen kurabu from 1933 to 1939.106 ­These stories are about a Japa­nese boy who drifts to Barbarian Island in the South Seas and becomes a king of the natives. The story was adapted for short animated film. According to the literary critic Kawamura Minato, the South Seas ­were a sign

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of savagery that became an essential oppositional counterpart for Japan to form its national identity as civilized.107 Thus, Dankichi’s island is a vessel filled by Japa­ nese imagination and fantasies about their own superiority and the vast primitive terrain available for them to conquer. However, the repre­sen­ta­tion of southern islands in Sacred Sailors, in par­tic­u­ lar in the silhouette animation sequence, conveys a far more realistic touch than in Dankichi. A map of the Dutch East Indies is shown when the silhouette animation sequence narrates the Eu­ro­pean colonial dominance in the region. By the time of the production of Sacred Sailors, the name of Menado was already more or less known to the general public as an ­actual place through vari­ous reports of the Japa­nese paratroopers’ successful attack in 1942.108 In fact, the silhouette animation sequence provides a specific geo­graph­i­cal and historical account of Eu­ ro­pean colonialism in Gowa, Celebes. A departure from the Dankichi narratives is clear. While Dankichi stories vaguely construct the southern islands as exotic savage tropics, Sacred Sailors attempts to produce knowledge about a specific region and propagate Japa­nese colonial discourse as the liberator of Asia to both Japa­nese nationals and residents of the Southeast Asia. The film was explic­itly intended for export to Southeast Asia as well as the domestic market. A roundtable discussion in a 1942 film journal, which consisted of both film industry ­people and government officials, portrays the industry’s interest in film exports to Southeast Asia: Imamura: I believe that newsreels and animated films should be the first genres that are introduced to the South. Chikushi: I agree. Imamura: Also, I hear that Southern ­people like ­music. Inada: Mr. Ōfuji Noburō is proposing that we should export silhouette animation instead of regular animated film. As film The Rec­ord of Visiting Dutch East Indies [Ran’in tanbō ki; Kaida Yasukazu, 1941] shows, for example, Javanese have performed shadow puppet theater from olden times. Ōfuji believes that silhouette animation is the best for the South. So, he seems to be working on it. Murakami: It seems effective for regions including Java, Burma and India. Mitsuhashi: . . . ​With that kind of animated film, it would be r­ eally ­great to enlighten and propagate, targeting at not only young citizens [shō kokumin] in Japan but also dif­fer­ent ­people of the East Asian Co-­ Prosperity Sphere.109 ­Later, in 1944, Seo confirmed, “With the goal to entertain and educate the young citizens in our country first, then to contribute the Southern film world,

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we are currently working on Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei).”110 Both the earlier roundtable discussion of 1942 and this remark explain the inclusion of the genre of silhouette animation sequence in Sacred Sailors. (Strictly speaking, the sequence is not cutout animation but was drawn on the cells.) Also, Imamura’s reference to ­music as an attractive ele­ment for viewers is impor­tant. Sacred Sailors’ songs of working animals and language instruction can be understood in this context, too. On the other hand, the infamous musical and song scenes could not have been designed simply to make the film a better export. Skillful coordination of animation and ­music had long been one of Seo’s strong interests, as demonstrated in his earlier attempts in Ant as well as Sea Ea­gle. He must have agreed with Imamura, who elsewhere spoke of his ­great admiration of Disney’s successful integration of ­music, which he regarded as the essence of the studio’s power­ful, seductive films. Imamura even argued that all animation films should be musicals.111 In this connection, and due to other strong affinities, I suggest that Seo turned to Disney’s Fantasia (1940) to create the musical and song scenes in Sacred Sailors. Fantasia was not distributed in Japan ­until the 1950s but it was shown to animators and other film and media professionals, including Seo, by a section of the Japa­nese Army General Staff Office in Tokyo, possibly in late 1943.112 In Fantasia, Walt Disney aimed to provide viewers with the experience of “seeing ­music and hearing pictures.”113 Released in 1940, the film pres­ents eight pieces of classical m ­ usic accompanied by animated images. The film is a combination of live action and animation. It begins by showing members of an orchestra coming to the stage and getting ready for the concert, and then the w ­ hole film is introduced by Deems Taylor, a popu­lar musicologist and radio personality, who also reappears before each segment. The reels w ­ ere designed to be somewhat interchangeable, which suggests that the film is conceived of as a collection of in­ de­pen­dent segments rather than as an integrated story.114 Whereas Snow White (1937) was earning box office revenues that would make it the highest-­grossing film in history (though ­later surpassed by Gone with the Wind [1940]), Fantasia was a flop and produced a loss for the studio.115 Although it was Snow White that the Wan ­brothers responded to in forging their vernacular idiom, it was Fantasia that Seo studied to create his form of Japa­nese national animation. I argue that Seo turned to Fantasia, a very dif­fer­ent creation from Snow White in terms of Disney’s artistic ambitions, in order to compete with the Chinese animation Princess Iron Fan. The southern island sequence in Seo’s Sacred Sailors, which previous scholarship has emphasized as manifesting the state’s imperialist and colonialist ideology, bears an especially strong affinity with ele­ments of Fantasia. At least three stylistic and technical ele­ments link ­these two films: the Disneyesque characters,

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their racial typification, and the pre-­scoring filming technique. First, as noted above, the overall design of animal characters in a tropical island is informed by Disney iconography. Second, the racialized animals on the southern island resemble the stereotyping mode of the Chinese dance scene from the Nut Cracker in Fantasia. The Chinese characters ­were mushrooms in Fantasia: huge caps allude to Asian hats, a sign of the Far East; thin lines in the face are Asian eyes; and awkward bowing and a funny way of walking are also ste­reo­typical ways Asians carry themselves. The mushroom dancers are also all identical, according to the cliché that Asian p ­ eople all look alike. This mode of repre­sen­ta­tion of racial otherness in Fantasia resonates with Sacred Sailors’ tropical animals, ranging from ­those who provide physical ­labor and study the Japa­nese language to ­those who represent colonial elites and already understand Japa­nese. Fi­nally, as Seo himself stressed as an impor­tant technique of Sacred Sailors, the images ­were drawn according to existing ­music, which is the pre-­scoring technique (puresuko in Japa­nese) that was a crucial part of Fantasia.116 In that film, except for a single Mickey Mouse segment, the animation was created entirely according to well-­known pieces of classic ­music. Moreover, ­there are three other similarities between Fantasia and Sacred Sailors. First, they share a similar format, consisting of loosely associated segments. Second, both pres­ent a self-­referential history of the medium. The opening orchestra scene in Fantasia shows the orchestra members in silhouette lighting, in a way reminiscent of early silhouette animation. Then the film pres­ents Eu­ro­pean nonrepre­sen­ta­tional animation by German artist Oskar Fischinger, and a self-­ referential Mickey Mouse sequence. Similarly, Sacred Sailors includes silhouette animation in the narration of Western colonialism, and also typical cartoon language (other­wise avoided in the film) in the rescue scene of a drowning monkey, in which characters’ bodies are interchangeable with machines and f­ree from natu­ral laws. Third, both US and Japa­nese directors shared a quest for an “artistic” animated film. Film scholar Moya Luckett argues that, judging from publicity and marketing, the Disney Studio was trying to raise the social status of animation to that of an elite work of high art.117 Even with the success of Snow White, animated films still attracted predominantly ­children, and short animated works ­were treated as light entertainment that accompanied dramatic features. In par­tic­u­lar, the last segment of Fantasia attempts to demonstrate the medium’s ability to pres­ent profound emotional and spiritual depth by animating the Biblical world with Schubert’s Ave Maria as background ­music. The Greek mythological segment also tries to give the medium of animation a sense of cultural authenticity as it inserts itself into Western literary, cultural, and religious history. Disney chose to animate classic ­music and attempted to prove that animation is an art, as capable of presenting transcendental, sensorial experiences as classical m ­ usic is.

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Seo’s quest for artistic expression involved an approach dif­fer­ent from Disney’s. As mentioned above, for Seo the “artistic” (geijutsusei) seems a mode of expression and technical engagement that has a par­tic­u­lar function to serve as an intermediary between entertainment and documentary ele­ments. To locate the “artistic” in Sacred Sailors, I turn to two par­tic­u­lar scenes. One is the part of the hometown sequence in which Monkey admires floating dandelion fluff, and another is the sequence right before and during the moment of the paratroopers’ descent to Menado. ­These two scenes suspend the narrative with subdued beauty and lyricism, despite the fact that their connotations are closely tied to gruesome warfare. They also provide nonverbal articulation of intense internal reflection. Such reflection, however, does not ask ontological questions but dwells on moments of anxiety, tension, excitement, and attachment. T ­ hese are moments of emotion, but not of speculation. Both scenes are an extension and elaboration of a few scenes from Sea Ea­gle that ­were praised by critic Imamura, such as a scene of a quietly moving w ­ ater surface, ­water’s reflection sparkling on the iron surface of a battleship, and then seagulls that look up as they become aware of the attack of Momotaro’s airborne unit.118 The natu­ral objects and birds’ movements are depicted without par­tic­u­ lar messages, but their pre­sen­ta­tion creates an affect, encouraging viewers to identify with ephemerality. Such sequences do not paraphrase or clarify the textual intention. While they are transitional sequences, from an editing perspective, they heighten the narrative’s emotive moments and mediate between the moments of drama, the actuality of historical incidents, and characters’ actions. The first scene is the one in which Monkey is looking at the dandelions. This is when he and his ­little ­brother Santa take a walk in a field. The multi-­plane camera effectively introduces a tracking shot, with an indication of the spatial depth of the field of flowers and grasses, which represents the idealized peace and beauty of the countryside. While Santa is chasing a hat blown by the wind and ­running around with childish excitement, Monkey notices that wind-­blown dandelion fluff is floating in the air, and he admires it. A shot of the ascending dandelions, which is the object of his gaze, is followed by an extreme close-up of his face from a low ­angle. His face follows the movement of the fluff. When the film cuts back from dandelion to Monkey, his eyes are gradually closing. At this moment of his sheer plea­sure in admiring nature, a beeping noise rings sharply in his mind, and Monkey’s captain Momotaro’s voice is heard signalling paratroopers to jump from their aircraft. The close-up and slow motion asserts the intensity of Monkey’s appreciation of ephemeral beauty and also his commitment to his mission. In the following scene, the viewers are shown the dandelion seeds filling the screen and quietly descending. The sequence ends without returning to Monkey’s face, and the screen remains filled with elegantly descending dandelion fluff.

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The role of the Monkey h ­ ere is to prepare connections for movie spectators between the dandelions and the paratroopers’ descent that appears ­later in the film. The pre­sen­ta­tion of the dandelion fluff emphasizes an idyllic moment of life by crystallizing the beauty of its delicate, soft movements. The aesthetics overwhelms the individualized thought of the characters and their personhood, though this moment of indulgence is disrupted by the captain’s voice, a reminder of warfare. Moreover, the momentary introspection is very brief. It is almost impossible to detect any kind of private thoughts or emotions of Monkey in this brief sequence, and the scene cuts quickly from him to the dandelion fluff. The viewer is, therefore, invited to gaze into the air filled with dandelion seeds with a mountain in the background (see fig. 4.7). Since the camera does not return to Monkey, his soldier-­hood, patriotism, and loyalty are implied but not verbally or visually asserted. The overwhelming visuals suggest the ambivalent ordinariness and everydayness of the scene. The second scene is a relatively long sequence of the paratroopers sitting in the transport aircraft and then fi­nally jumping from it to descend to Menado. Instead of stressing the efficacy of the attack, the film spends quite a long time showing the paratroopers’ bodies negotiating their ner­vous­ness, tension, and eagerness

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

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in the transport. A paratrooper (a bear) opens and closes his hands a few times. It is as if he is overwhelmed by his willingness to go into ­battle, but it is also a moment of intense tension. One by one the paratroopers get ready for the jump by hanging the hooks of their static lines from the bar at the door of the transport aircraft. Then, they jump, and the initial movement of descent suspends all the turbulent emotions of the characters and viewers—­and the descending parachutes are beautiful, elegant, and vulnerable, just like the dandelion fluff in the early scene. ­After a brief silence, ­music begins at the point when the paratroopers have jumped and are descending in midair. It is slow, soft, and pastoral ­music, the same as that used in the earlier hometown dandelion scene. This is a skillful device to fuse the paratroopers’ ­actual descent to Menado with the earlier lyricism of the dandelion fluff. The film viewers are placed in the position that Monkey held earlier in the film, as admirer of the dandelions, and are visually captivated by the slowly descending paratroopers accompanied by pastoral m ­ usic. The popu­lar culture critic Otsuka Eiji argues that the overall visual aesthetics of Sacred Sailors are informed by early 1930s Soviet avant-­garde photo­graphs from the graphic journal USSR in Construction, as well as its Japa­nese counterpart, FRONT, which was heavi­ly influenced by it.119 He points out that distorted perspectives, overemphasis of the foreground, and repeated deployment of low-­angle shots in the film resonate with the visual composition of Rus­sian photog­raphers, including Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). ­Whether the film was in direct conversation with globally circulating Rus­sian avant-­garde photography or ­whether the influence was via its Japa­nese counter­parts is not easy to determine, although this is another example of cross-­media sharing of visual themes and arrangements. On one hand, borrowing from Rus­sian photography or its imitation by animated film confirms the transnationality of the medium. On the other hand, such a phenomenon stresses the intensifying dominance of par­tic­u­lar aesthetics in popu­lar cultural production (see fig. 4.8). FRONT (1942–1945) was a large-­sized graphic journal produced by Tōhō-­sha, funded and supported by the Army General Staff Office.120 The staff members included leading figures in photography, design, and documentary film. A leading photographer of the time, Kimura Ihei (1901–1974), served as the head of the Photography Department and documentary filmmaker Kamei Fumio (1908–1987) and documentary film cinematographer Miki Shigeru (1905–1978) wrote scenarios as external editorial staff. In the seventh volume of FRONT in 1943, dedicated to paratroopers in par­tic­ul­ar, one of the photo­graphs, portraying a shot of numerous white dots of paratroopers in blue sky viewed from the ground, is obviously inspired by USSR in Construction. In fact, Sacred Sailors pres­ents similar shots in the scenes of the dandelion and the paratroopers’ descent. However, the “artistic” quality of the scenes of the animated film is conceived differently from

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FIGURE 4.8.  Paratrooper’s special issue of USSR in Construction, En­glish edition (December 1935).

the aesthetics of force in ­these photo­graphs. Seo chose an everyday weed, the dandelion, instead of frequently used meta­phors of gorgeous flowers and white roses (dairin no hana and shiro bara), and replaced Wagner with pastoral m ­ usic.121 It is pathos that Sacred Sailors emphasizes. In addition to the scenes of Monkey’s admiration for dandelion fluff and the descent of the paratroops, other emotive moments in the film provide a sense of disjunction to the narrative through their intensity and pathos. One example is a scene of mourning and loss acutely felt by two pi­lots whose fellow pi­lot was killed during their reconnaissance flight mission. A ­ fter their report to the captain, the pi­lots are standing next each other. They are contained in the same frame and shown frontally by medium shot. They exchange glances and turn back to the camera, and then the shot cuts to the damaged plane in close-up, from which oil is still dripping, as if alluding to their tears or their fellow pi­lot’s blood. This exploration of characters’ interiority is very dif­fer­ent from what the film historian Peter High summarized as a “new spiritism” of Japa­nese war­time film in the early 1940s. High explains the psychological framework of most dramatic films, including The Sea B ­ attles of Hawaii and Malaya (Hawai marē oki kaisen), Decisive ­Battle in the Sky (Ōzora no kessen e; directed by Watanabe Kunio, 1943),

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or Army (Rikugun; directed by Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944): “War is a spiritual exercise in which the only true ­enemy resides within oneself, as the doubter, the desirer of physical comforts, the weakener of one’s fighting spirit.”122 The spirit carried by a pleasant, energetic youth in other live-­action films is not found in Sacred Sailors. In Sacred Sailors, the well-­choreographed, emotive moments operate to emphasize the inaccessibility of characters’ individual psy­chol­ogy, personal associations, or introspection, in contrast with patriotic pleasantness of “spiritism” in live-­action films. As if they attempted to conceal the vacancy of complicated thoughts or heroic spiritism, the scenes of the animated film are heavi­ly invested with sets of painstaking and time-­consuming drawings. As mentioned above, a paratrooper opens and closes his fists repeatedly in an attempt to release his tension in the transportation aircraft, or a pi­lot (who is l­ ater killed) removes his right glove first by tugging with his mouth and then pulling with his left hand, and then lets his pet bird perch on his right hand, showing his g­ reat tenderness. All the rabbit soldiers salute to Momotaro, and their f­ aces follow his movement in unison. ­These motions are carefully created in full animation, which is an extremely labor-­intensive production pro­cess for animators. As they are drawn with g­ reat care and attention, t­hese depictions of smooth, elaborate motion enhance the

FIGURE 4.9.  A rabbit soldier salutes to Momotaro in Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei, 1945).

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humanness and ordinariness of characters. ­These moments of the film operate as “artistic,” removing any socialized or personalized introspection from individual characters to the degree that they become aesthetic, and also linking everydayness with warfare (see fig. 4.9).

The Emergence of Animation Filmmaking as an Industry The quest for “Japa­nese” national animation film and its conception proved to be paradoxical from its inception. Japa­nese animation filmmaking had been inspired by the hegemonic American cartoon film since the early years. As historian Victoria de Grazia pointed out, Hollywood’s hegemonic power is based in part on “the industry’s capacity to create a transnational taste culture much in the way it had created an all-­American movie culture.”123 Tested and marketed for a vast domestic market stratified by class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and other ­factors, American films ­were ­shaped as a power­ful transnational export.124 This is the product, in par­tic­ul­ar as produced by Disney and the Fleischer ­brothers, that Japa­nese animators w ­ ere attracted to and strug­gled to depart from. It was primarily the outbreak of the Pacific War (1941–1945) that forced animators like Seo, who had heavi­ly deployed the American visual language, to seek a new direction and to engage with the identity politics of the medium. Seo’s attempt to depart from American cartoons was redirected in part by his competition with, reference to, and rejection of the Chinese animation Princess Iron Fan. The Wan b ­ rothers attempted to ethnicize and nationalize their animation by foregrounding their own cultural heritage of lit­er­a­ture, performing arts, and painting vis-­à-­v is American cartoon film by the Fleisher ­brothers and Disney. Such efforts, and the eventual reception of their film, w ­ ere also entangled with Chinese anti-­Japan discourse, as well as, ironically, Japan’s promotion of the multicultural imperial ideology of the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere. Seo, who was fully aware of this Chinese counterpart, approached the nationalization of his work differently. Though the text of Sea Ea­gle resorted to the code of Disney/Fleischer cartoons that also sustained the narrative of Princess Iron Fan, it was the sequel that materialized the Japa­nese animator’s experiments. In Sacred Sailors, Seo sought a new mode of narrative that was neither as dramatic as Princess Iron Fan nor as nonsensical and comic as his own Sea Ea­gle. He attempted to create an entertaining and artistic documentary film, deeply interwoven with cross-­references to the Japa­nese war­time mediascape, including photography, newsreels, and paintings. Nevertheless, and most ironically, this purportedly national form of Japa­nese animation strongly shows a fascination with Disney’s

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Fantasia. This director’s quest for purely and essentially Japa­nese national animation actually demonstrated that national identity construction is inevitably a promiscuous, heterogeneous pro­cess. The proj­ect of creating a Japa­nese national style of animation was conceptually impossible, a conclusion I believe would apply to any attempt to create a pure national cinema. Princess Iron Fan, Sea Ea­gle, and Sacred Sailors are examples of transnational reception of and vernacular responses to hegemonic American cartoons by Chinese and Japa­nese filmmakers. Both Chinese and Japa­nese cinematic texts reclaim local conventions of visuality and lit­er­a­ture vis-­à-­vis American animation. In addition, Chinese and Japa­nese vernacular forms ­were in translocal conversation with each other in their similar efforts to revolt against the hegemonic form and within the po­liti­cal and social conditions of war. Their translocal and transnational relationships ­were even more complicated when Japan entered in the war with the United States and, therefore, the hegemonic form became the form of the ­enemy, something that had to be excluded from Japa­nese local culture. Though the creation of a form of national animation failed, the war­time state’s support of the medium laid a solid foundation for the postwar Japa­nese animation industry. As Seo lamented in the film journal, his first feature-­length film, Sea Ea­gle, was made by only a few animators ­because of Japa­nese business conventions, and the studio was initially planning to screen it only in rural areas, as it did not have any distribution network for regular movie theaters. Then, the navy deci­ded to fund a hundred prints of the film and secured distribution to regular movie theaters. This was unpre­ce­dented: it was the most support a Japa­ nese animated film had ever received.125 Funding and manpower for the sequel, Sacred Sailors, was even more generously provided. With the support of the navy, at the major studio Shōchiku the film was initially provided with seventy staff members (though thirty of them ­didn’t have prior experience in animation filmmaking). Additionally, twenty to thirty coloring staff members w ­ ere relocated from the other department of the 126 studio. This made Seo’s animation production system somewhat closer to the division of ­labor of the Disney Studio, which Japa­nese animators and film critics had looked on as an invincible business model since the 1930s.127 In other words, the war­time state’s investment in animated film made it pos­si­ble to establish a large-­scale production system in Japan as a business model; to establish division of ­labor in animated filmmaking (animators, tweeners, and director of animation), replacing conventional small ateliers; and to train a large number of animators. The navy and army ministries both began to fund animation filmmaking around the same time, and sponsored ten animated films between 1942 and 1945. ­These films, together with other short animated films released during t­ hese years, meant that the early 1940s witnessed dramatic expansion and increasing public

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recognition of the medium.128 In the mid-1930s, the venues of Japa­nese animated films ­were limited to ­either outdoor screenings or school assembly halls at best, while foreign animated films ­were shown in movie theaters. Therefore, the war­ time change of exhibition practices was also satisfying for animators and improved the status of animation in the film industry. Fi­nally, the state’s support provided an opportunity to train a large number of animators, also in the genre of the military education film. This is hardly surprising: during war­time, Disney also followed a similar path and increased its production dramatically by catering to military educational films.129 According to film historian Yukimura Mayumi, the Japa­nese military’s attention was directed at producing a large number of animated films for military training purposes, such as the operation of machineries and weapons and instructions on how to drop bombs and navigate aircraft, ships, and submarines, and so on. Two animation production units w ­ ere expanded for this purpose: one was a section of Tōhō studio that employed a staff of three hundred, and another was a department of the Navy Ministry with around sixty workers. Such work required the artists to primarily draw lines, instead of creating characters. Nevertheless it is undeniable that it produced a large number of trained animators, who continued to work in the industry ­after the war.130 One such case is animator Yamamoto Sanae, who already owned his own workshop in the early 1930s and who Seo had once hoped to apprentice with (but was turned down). Yamamoto was also hired by the Navy Ministry department of animation during the war.131 In this way the military’s investment in animation filmmaking streamlined in­de­pen­dent small ateliers, which w ­ ere not competitive business entities, and absorbed them into a Taylorist-­militarist business model. A ­ fter the end of the war, Yamamoto visited the Motion Pictures section of the Occupation government and obtained the US Occupation government’s support for a newly created animation film production com­pany. This time his goal was to propagate US democracy.132 Upon approval, he placed a classified ad in December 1945 and recruited about a hundred animators to start the New Japa­nese Animation Studio (Shin nihon dōga sha), many of whose animators eventually joined Tōei Animation (Tōei dōga), which remains one of Japan’s most established animation studios even t­ oday.133

EPILOGUE

This book located dynamic and power­ful forces that formed discourses of national identity, unity, and authenticity in the early Showa era, from the 1920s through 1945. Cultural texts such as film and other visual materials, which such discourses revolve around, implicitly or explic­itly, are illustrative of everyday experiences of and reactions to laws and public policies, economic planning, and state po­liti­cal ideologies. They are illustrative, but they are not ­simple reflections, and so examination of cultural production and consumption is crucial, as it reveals pro­ cesses of identity formation that are forceful but, at the same time, impure. Although the works considered h ­ ere are often—in contemporaneous discourse or in existing scholarship—­conceived of as pure, essential, singular, and au­then­tic, they are a heterogeneous and heterotopic bricolage of vari­ous discourses and texts, a condition I describe as being promiscuous. In discussing the portrait Photo­graph of the emperor (goshin’ei), ­woman’s film, the documentary, and animated film, I placed them in the social, cultural, and historical contexts of media’s expansion, of drastically changing gender norms during the total war, and of global film cultures and cross-­media references. Throughout I emphasize the intermediality, transnationality, and intertextuality of cultural production. I briefly describe the fate of t­ hese media and film genres in the early postwar era. To begin with, the genre of ­woman’s film most visually recorded the termination of war as a sense of backlash. ­Women’s public and social ser­v ices, and ­women’s importance for the state as workers and soldiers, which w ­ ere promoted in 1944 and early 1945, quickly became minimized. In real­ity, the l­egal status of ­women was improved by newly granted suffrage and by the new civil law. Accord204

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ingly, the theme of w ­ omen’s liberation was promoted by the Occupation government, and can indeed be found in vari­ous films in the immediate postwar period. For instance, a remark by a character played by actress Hara Setsuko in a scene in Early Summer (Bakushū; directed by Ozu Yasujiro, 1951) is telling. When her older b ­ rother complains that w ­ omen have become impertinent a­ fter the war, she immediately c­ ounters him by saying, “That is nonsense. At last t­ hings are the way they should be. Men have been too impudent to w ­ omen.” A series of maternal melodramas by Daiei studio, around 1950, ­were phenomenal hits, as was a film by Shochiku on an unconsummated romance, What Is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa; directed by Ōba Hideo, 1953); both of t­ hese deserve feminist analy­sis. But it is doubtful that the postwar Japa­nese cinema ever became empowering for female spectators in the sense that it guaranteed egalitarian social, emotional, or po­liti­ cal positions for them in subsequent de­cades. Atsugi Taka continued her work on documentary films and involvement in issues of working w ­ omen. The genre of documentary was more accommodating to ­women than dramatic feature filmmaking, and nurtured female directors such as Tokieda Toshie (1929–2012), Haneda Sumiko (b. 1926), and o ­ thers from the 1950s on. But the gendered structure of the industry did not change rapidly, and female directors ­were continually assigned more feminized themes, such as child care, care for the el­derly, or ­women’s involvement in local politics, while male directors received commissions for larger bud­get documentary works for corporations about dam construction, steel manufacture, national railroad workers, and so on. Seo Mitsuyo mostly withdrew from the industry a­ fter the war, but its war­time restructuring had laid a foundation for the postwar expansion of the medium. The war­time era offered vari­ous stylistic and artistic innovations and elaboration of animation drawing and storytelling. A well-­known anecdote is that Tezuka Osamu, who was fascinated and inspired both by Princess Iron Fan (1943) and Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (1945) as a young viewer in movie theaters during the war, went on to become the “­father” of manga and animation in postwar Japan. But war­time also led to streamlined business practices, shifting from small atelier craftsmanship to a division of ­labor of animation-­making, with more centralized capital and a secured distribution network. T ­ hese changes made pos­si­ble the postwar animation industry in Japan. Discourses forming nationalist and imperialist identity might no longer be manifest in ­these genres and media in the early postwar era, but they did not dissolve with the termination of war in 1945. For instance, the image of the emperor continued—­and indeed continues ­today—to serve as one of the most impor­tant constituents of nation and nationalism in postwar Japa­nese culture. It is highly suggestive, in this connection, that the iconoclast avant-­garde film director

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Oshima Nagisa (1932–2013) presented the Photo­graph (goshin’ei) in a scene of his The Ceremony (Gishiki, 1971) as one of the representative ceremonial objects and practices that carried atrocious war­time legacies and therefore begged ­destruction. To conclude this book I briefly examine the case of Hirohito’s immediate postwar media repre­sen­ta­tion, as it confirms this historical continuity, particularly with regard to the per­sis­tence of the monarchical and disciplinary power of the emperor. In other words, examining this ­later moment of repre­sen­ta­tion demonstrates how cultural practices of the 1930s and early 1940s ­were reconfigured and survived in postwar society. For this purpose, I choose the famous double portrait photo­graph of Emperor Hirohito with General Douglas MacArthur. Scholars have often treated the Hirohito-­MacArthur double portrait as a manifestation of historical discontinuity, but I argue, on the contrary, that the make­ over of the emperor at the end of the war should not be regarded as a sign of the fundamental change of his role in the society. The Hirohito-­MacArthur photo­ graph was published on September 29, 1945, in major Japa­nese newspapers. It was taken by photographer Gaetano Faillace on September 27, as originally ordered by MacArthur.1 At this point, ordinary Japa­nese had very vague ideas about MacArthur’s po­liti­cal, social, and cultural roles as the supreme commander for the Allied powers in the General Headquarters of the Occupation (SCAP/GHQ), and did not know what to expect of the coming years. In the photo­graph, the emperor stands next to the US general. The emperor is short, and the American is tall. The American is relaxed, casually posed in a military uniform unbuttoned at the neck, whereas Hirohito is, in contrast, formally dressed in an immaculate suit, but not in his usual supreme commander’s uniform. He is unarmed, and awkwardly rigid in his posture. ­Because of the scarcity of good quality paper and other printing needs, the ­actual image of the photo­graph as seen at the time was much less clear than its numerous ­later reproductions in books and scholarly articles. While I agree that the double portrait photo­graph was indeed symbolic of the beginning of a new era, confirming Japan’s defeat, I also argue that it did not fully depart from the conventions of the Photo­graph, or goshin’ei, in the way in which it was presented and received in 1945. Before exploring this issue further, I briefly introduce arguments about periodization and historical continuity involving the notion of the “transwar,” which are relevant to my discussion. As an argument for historical continuity before and a­ fter 1945, the book Total War and “Modernization,” edited by Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Ryūichi Narita, pres­ents an illuminating discussion of how the mobilization for total war in the 1930s and the 1940s laid the foundation for the po­liti­cal and economic organ­ ization of postwar society.2 The notion of transwar-­ness—­continuity in the

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structure of society in pre-­and postwar Japan—­has been further articulated by historians such as Andrew Gordon and Nakamura Masanori. Gordon identifies the 1920s through the 1960s as the “transwar” era in his study of the rise of mass-­consumer society, the development of the m ­ iddle class, and the spread of commercialized leisure:3 “The transwar structure of difference is one in which only a minority, although a growing one, claims even a foothold in the material world of the modern m ­ iddle class. The majority shares only in the cultural imagination of modern consumer life and leisure. . . . ​The dynamic of change across the transwar era is one in which the gap closes, fueled in part by the pro­cess of coping with depression and mobilizing for war, and then recovering from war.”4 He sees the 1960s as the moment of transition from “transwar” to “postwar” Japan, when social structures of difference and discrimination w ­ ere fundamentally transformed. It was at that point that the majority incorporated their lives the daily routines of modern middle-­class consumers. On the other hand, Nakamura proposes that the notion of transwar-­ness illuminates a series of reconfigurations and rearticulations of the war memories of Japa­nese nationals as well as of o ­ thers in post-1945 Japa­nese society. Contrary to some who see the Japa­nese postwar era ending by the mid-1970s or with the end of the Cold War, he argues that unfinished compensation for former “comfort ­women” symbolically confirms that Japan is still in the “postwar” era, in the sense that the state is still accountable for its war crimes. I understand the sense of his use of the term “postwar” as meaning something other than that Japan overcame the war­time era and entered into peacetime. Instead, this “post-” is a counterpart of postcolonialism, in the sense that postcolonialism discusses the effects and legacies of colonialism. Thus, Japa­nese postwar society must be continuously situated to deal with war memory and war­time legacies in its domestic and international relations. To Nakamura, transwar-­ness is not a time frame but a perspective that enables historians to examine Japa­nese con­temporary society with regard to world history ­after the termination of wars in 1945.5 I find ­these arguments by Gordon and Nakamura compelling, and equally useful for me h ­ ere, as I argue for the importance of the emperor’s image a­ fter the end of war, since that image has served to reconstruct and reinforce a sense of national unity and national belonging. To me, Gordon’s transwar time frame is instrumental, since it overlaps with the expanding accessibility of mass media and the public’s contact with repre­sen­ta­tions of the imperial ­family. Gordon sees the 1960s as culminating with the availability of middle-­class consumer culture to the majority, but this also corresponds with the nationwide expansion of mass media, exemplified by the golden era of Japa­nese cinema as well as the introduction of tele­v i­sion as a new popu­lar media in the 1950s. The 1959 wedding of Crown Prince Akihito, Hirohito’s son, was particularly crucial in this regard.

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This new-­generation imperial ­couple was covered by gossip magazines and tele­ vi­sion programs, which reached an unpre­ce­dented number of p ­ eople si­mul­ta­ neously. According to the sociologist Yoshimi Shunya, the televised wedding was one of the strongest impetuses to reor­ga­nize hitherto localized tele­v i­sion broadcasts into a newly established national network.6 This is a close parallel to the way in which Hirohito’s enthronement events made it pos­si­ble to or­ga­nize nationwide radio broadcasting in the late 1920s. Although she had a wealthy, privileged background, the new crown princess was not from an aristocratic lineage. Her introduction as an “ordinary” young ­woman, so to speak, implied a demo­cratized monarchy, which was new for Japa­nese citizens. The marriage was covered in the mass media as an exemplary middle-­class ­union rather than as an event in the privileged and luxurious life of the imperial ­house­hold. Curiously, the overall media coverage of this imperial event was reminiscent of 1920s repre­sen­ta­tions of the imperial household—in par­ tic­ul­ar, of the newlywed Hirohito and Nagako, who appeared in stylish Western clothes as celebrities and icons of a dreamed-of desirable lifestyle. In 1959, the images of their son’s marriage w ­ ere this time designed to fuse with the lifestyle of, rather than be aspired to by, the middle-­class majority. Nakamura’s perspective on transwar-­ness is equally impor­tant for examination of Hirohito’s media pre­sen­ta­tion and its relation with narratives of war memory. The end of the war is typically narrated through stories of ­people listening to Hirohito’s radio broadcast of the Imperial Rescript of Termination of War (Shūsen no shōchoku), or gyokuon hōsō on August 15, 1945. Instead of the official date of termination of war, which is September 2 (when Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru signed the Japa­nese Instrument of Surrender on the USS Missouri), it is August 15, the date marked by the broadcast, that has been commemorated in Japan, down to the pres­ent day.7 Postwar society is thus remembered to have begun with the emperor’s voice, as if it w ­ ere an act of his benevolence to end the citizen’s sufferings. In the context of the postwar mediascape in Japan, the Hirohito-­MacArthur double portrait is a variation of goshin’ei. Curiously, no concrete historical documents explain how the double portrait of Hirohito and MacArthur reached the major newspapers Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri. This could suggest that the photo­graph was not seen as problematic for publication by the Japa­nese newspapers, if they w ­ ere not ordered to publish by the Occupation government. T ­ here ­were three shots of the double portrait: one with Hirohito’s mouth half-­open and another with his mouth closed; the third shot, with MacArthur’s eyes closed, was not circulated. The one with the emperor’s mouth closed was published in the Japa­nese newspapers in 1945, but both versions (mouth opened and mouth closed) have been published in both the United States and Japan since then.8

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As mentioned above, the portrait is very often used by historians to illustrate what is seen as a decisive change in the Japa­nese polity. For example, Herbert Bix states, “The emperor in the photo­graph was not a living god but a mortal h ­ uman being beside a much older ­human to whom he was now subservient. He perfectly exemplified the defeated nation, while MacArthur’s relaxed pose projected the confidence that comes from victory. With that one photo­graph a small first step was taken in displacing the emperor from the center of the Japa­nese collective identity and freeing the nation from the restrictions of the past.” 9 The sense of historical discontinuity seen h ­ ere is often accompanied by the belief that this “wedding” photo of Hirohito and MacArthur greatly shocked Japa­ nese citizens.10 Indeed, some con­temporary accounts suggest that intellectuals ­were especially shocked or appalled by the photo­graph. For example, the novelist Takami Jun (1907–1965) noted in an entry in his diary, “The newspaper ran a photo­graph that showed His Majesty standing together with General MacArthur. Such a photo­graph is historically unpre­ce­dented. . . . ​This is unimaginable from what had been ‘common sense’ up u ­ ntil now. All the p ­ eople of Japan must have 11 been taken by surprise.” Poet and psychiatrist Saitō Mokichi (1882–1953) also noted with indignation in his diary, “The paper ran a photo­graph that was taken when His Majesty visited MacArthur. That rotten MacArthur!”12 The impact of such anecdotes has been reinforced by a widely cited story that the Cabinet Information Bureau (Naikaku jōhō kyoku) banned the circulation of the newspaper issues ­because of the lèse-­majesté of the photo­graph, which was quickly overturned by SCAP advocating for f­ree speech. At this point, in late September 1945, the Cabinet Information Bureau still controlled the police and practiced prepublication censorship, in cooperation with the Home Ministry. I argue, however, that it is impor­tant not to exaggerate the impact of the photo­graph at the time of its release. To begin with, the media historian Ariyama Teruo has undermined the story of the Cabinet Information Bureau’s reaction to the photo­graph. He points out that the bureau’s ban was not targeted at the photo­ graph itself, but at the emperor’s remarks quoted in an interview with a US correspondent that was published right next to the double portrait. Ariyama points to documents of the Home Ministry that recorded that their target was an interview of Hirohito by Frank L. Kluckhohn of the New York Times. This was a translation of Kluckhohn’s report, sent via wireless to the New York Times and published in the late edition of the September 25 paper; the headline reads, “Hirohito in Interview Puts Blame on Tōjō in Sneak Raid; Says He Now Opposes War.”13 Within the Japa­nese government at the time, some—­for example, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru—­were strongly opposed to the emperor blaming former Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki as the person primarily responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack. Shigemitsu was gravely concerned that this could arouse

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severe criticism of Hirohito by Japa­nese citizens. However, the Imperial House­ hold Ministry believed that such an appeal to US readers and policymakers was crucial to protect the throne. Shigemitsu resigned as of September 15, and the new foreign minister, Yoshida Shigeru, and ­others prepared answers that Kluckhohn received and published. However, the ministers felt that the content of the interview should not be released in Japan. As a result, the bureau allowed Japa­ nese papers to report only that the interview took place on September 25.14 Nevertheless, Japa­nese newspapers had prepared to publish a full report, based on a translation of the New York Times article, when they received the content of this interview from foreign news agencies. This made the bureau ban the circulation of the newspapers, though the banning was swiftly lifted by SCAP. Actually, a case can be made that it could even have been beneficial for the bureau if citizens’ attention was overwhelmed and distracted by the photo­graph. Other­wise, Hirohito’s blame of Tōjō in Kluckhohn’s report would have stood out more, suggesting that the emperor was now betraying his loyal subordinate, who had even attempted suicide two weeks earlier, at the time of his arrest. To further question scholars’ overemphasis of the photo­graph as an icon of change, Ariyama points out that the bureau allowed the same photo­graph to be published in the Nihon sangyō keizai newspaper on September 29, when the district police agency of Chiba Prefecture discussed it with the Home Ministry as a part of the prepublication censorship pro­cess. A memo written by Chiba police attached to the official communication between the ministry and Chiba police agency noted: “[According to the ministry, the bureau] executed the banning of Asahi, Yomiuri, and Tokyo newspapers ­because they combined the photo­ graph and the report, or b ­ ecause the photo­graph they used was blurry. Yet, [the ministry] replied to us that although it was not the case that ­there was no prob­lem with publishing the photo­graph by itself, they would overlook the Nihon sangyō keizai newspaper’s publication of it.15 Although one reason given for the banning of the circulation of Tokyo shinbun newspaper was the quality of the photo­graph, this Chiba memorandum reveals that although the Home Ministry was not happy with the photo­graph in the Nihon sangyō keizai, it did not attempt to stop its circulation at all.16 In other words, the iconography of this double portrait was tolerable for the ministry. In addition, the memo indicates that the combination of the photo­graph and the report was a prob­lem. It is pos­si­ble that the Home Ministry was afraid that the photo­graph would be framed by Kluckhohn’s report and that, as a result, it would look as if the emperor had sold out his loyal subject. What is most in­ter­est­ing about this incident of bureau censorship is that its action has been almost univocally interpreted as showing its strong concern for the photo­graph’s lèse-­majesté in the existing scholarship. The shock of the dou-

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ble portrait has been repeatedly stressed in connection with the bureau’s censorship in historical studies. I do not mean to suggest that the photo­graph had no impact, but the aforementioned shocked response described by Takami and Saitō was not necessarily typical in Japan at the time of its release. For example, according to Tottori Prefectural Special Police reports on the general public’s reaction to the emperor’s visit to General MacArthur, “the majority sympathized with His Majesty’s gracious intention and they w ­ ere deeply moved.”17 It is likely that reactions differed between city-­dwellers and ­people in the countryside, and depended also on citizen’s po­liti­cal ideologies and educational backgrounds. It is true that an immediate sense of awe that citizens ­were supposed to feel in reaction to the emperor’s newspaper photo­graph was what Japa­nese visual culture had been attempting to evoke among viewers since the mid-1930s. Standing next to the victorious US general, the image of the emperor became approachable and identifiable as a ruler, rather than detached and mystified as in the previous official photo­graphs. But a closer look at the overall context reveals unexpected continuities with the imperial portrait photo­graph (goshin’ei). As John Dower notes in his discussion of nationwide imperial tours from 1946 to 1954, Emperor Hirohito “became an intimate symbol of the suffering and victimization of his p ­ eople.”18 ­People’s sympathy for the emperor’s endurance and his cooperation with the Occupation government can be located as an extension of their reactions to the double portrait photo­graph. In this connection, it is impor­tant to remember the intermediality and intertextuality between the Hirohito-­MacArthur portrait newspaper photo­graph and the radio broadcast of August 15, 1945, on the one hand, and between the Hirohito-­MacArthur photo­ graph and the conventions of the Photo­graph, on the other. Hirohito’s radio broadcast of the Imperial Rescript of Termination of War, or gyokuon hōsō, which took place on August 15, already began staging him as a symbol of endurance, marking a decisive transition from war to peace. This surrender broadcast aired within and beyond the Japa­nese mainland, “from tropical jungles in South East Asia to rural settlements in Manchuria, from the colonies of ­Korea and Taiwan to metropolises in occupied China,” to borrow Daqing Yang’s eloquent description.19 What made this broadcast pos­si­ble was the expansion of the radio network, which had been propelled by a series of imperial events. To start with, as discussed in chapter 1, broadcasts of Hirohito’s enthronement ceremonies in 1928 w ­ ere crucial. Dalian Radio Station (JQAK) was already established in 1925, but the openings of Seoul Radio Station (JODK) in 1927 and Taipei Radio Station (JFAK) in 1928 w ­ ere prompted by pressure to broadcast the enthronement events. ­These new stations enabled radio programs to be relayed from Japan to Manchuria, ­Korea, and Taiwan.20 In the 1930s, the overseas radio communication network expanded in due course with Japa­nese colonialist

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expansion in Asia, but also as a part of the medium’s global expansion. For example, the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games made Japa­nese listeners sleep-­deprived, ­because they ­were listening to live reports aired from Germany regardless of the time difference.21 The 2,600th anniversary of the purported foundation of the nation, in 1940, was also impor­tant. The simultaneous live broadcast of the cele­bration reached 105 million imperial subjects throughout the empire, including the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, and Manchuria.22 The Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro gave the banzai cheer, “Long live His Majesty,” at 11:25 a.m. on November 10, in front of the emperor and the empress in a ceremony that took place in a huge space adjacent to the Imperial Palace, the Kȳujōmae hiroba (approximately 465,000 square meters/115 acres). It was heard through radio broadcast, at the same time, outside mainland Japan.23 Cheering was joined in by about fifty thousand guests of honor who w ­ ere actually gathered t­here, and the ceremony also included t­hose who ­were not physically pres­ent but connected by the broadcast. The gradual but steady technological development and distribution of radio receivers and transmitters, which was accelerated by the series of imperial events and warfare, eventually created the conditions that made the 1945 broadcast widely accessible. And it is b ­ ecause of this broadcast that August 15 has been remembered in Japan since then to commemorate the end of war, suffering, starvation, and air raids. I agree with Dower’s observation that Hirohito’s radio broadcast was “in effect, a stage cue that set in motion a grandly choreographed strategy by court and government to ‘preserve the national polity.’ ”24 In par­tic­u­lar, I connect this “stage cue” with the Hirohito-­MacArthur photo­graph, ­because of the way it provided Japa­nese citizens a point of empathy with the emperor. It was also a cue to reestablish the relationship between citizens and the Photo­graph (goshin’ei). But what exactly ties goshin’ei conventions with the double portrait photo­graph of Hirohito and MacArthur? The historian Ono Masaaki provides impor­tant historical research on the Imperial House­hold’s plan to continue the distribution of the Photo­graph ­after the end of the war, a plan that was approved by SCAP. To summarize Ono’s research, the existing photo­graphs at schools ­were collected and sent to each prefectural government headquarters by order of the Ministry of Education in December 1945. The rituals to send off the Photo­graph when it was removed from schools ­were conducted in a solemn manner, similar to the way the schools had originally received the Photo­graph, and its transportation was occasionally accompanied by police officers to ensure a safe trip. Once the Photo­graphs ­were collected in each prefectural government office, they w ­ ere carefully burned. In some schools, teachers burned the Photo­graphs even before the ministry’s order, out of fear that Americans might vandalize them.25

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213

For the Japa­nese government, this retrieval was the first step in replacing the existing Photo­graph with a new version. The conceptualization of this new version was assisted by the British citizen and professor of lit­er­a­ture Reginald Horace Blyth (1898–1964), of Gakushuin University, who served as a liaison between the imperial court and the Civil Information and Educational Section (CIE) of SCAP. The Imperial House­hold Ministry issued new guidelines for the Photo­ graph in April 1946: they stated that the emperor in his portrait photo­graph should be revered as the loving f­ather of the nation. SCAP agreed to the re­ distribution of the imperial portrait photo­graph as long as the veneration rituals ­were abolished and the portrait was exhibited in an intimate, approachable setting for citizens. In the new goshin’ei photo­graph, Hirohito wore a morning coat instead of a military uniform. Though full nationwide re­distribution of this Photo­graph did not materialize, according to Ono, t­ here ­were several cases of public institutions requesting a copy of it in the late 1940s. Also, ­there was a case in 1952 when a private school in Akita Prefecture became the first school to request and receive it in the postwar era ­after the end of the Occupation. Their motive was to obtain the photo­graph of the pacifist emperor as a symbol of the school’s peace education.26 I argue that the double portrait was actually the first postwar goshin’ei: it was created by MacArthur but quickly found to be useful by Japa­nese government officials. As I discussed in chapter 1, the war­time Photo­graph demanded a twisted viewership from citizens. On one hand, the viewers w ­ ere strictly prohibited from gazing upon the emperor himself as well as his portrait photo­graph. The 1930s laws and protocols ensured the prohibition of the citizen’s gaze, the ritualized veneration of the Photo­graph, and the mystification of the emperor: they attempted to create an aura for photography. And such viewing protocols ­were even imposed on production and reception of the filmic repre­sen­ta­tion of the emperor. On the other hand, ­because of the expansion of mass media, it was inevitable that ­people would see the emperor in mass-­produced newspaper photo­graphs and newsreels without public rituals. Yet the production of ­these media was heavi­ly challenged by the non-­viewing protocols of the Photo­graph. In newspaper photo­ graphs, the emperor was often in frontal view in a detached manner, as an icon for veneration, or shown with stylized poses in a static manner. Contrary to its own medium-­specific strength of creating dynamism of personhood, movement, and enhanced visual narratives, film did not pres­ent him fully in motion, show his facial expressions, or employ vari­ous shooting and editing techniques to assert his lively, engaging presence as an individual. Both mass media ­were deprived of their expressiveness and identificatory appeal to viewers b ­ ecause of the restricted mode of pre­sen­ta­tion.

214 Epilogue

However, the Hirohito-­MacArthur double portrait photo­graph was the first postwar goshin’ei, which freed the emperor’s image from ­these previous limiting protocols for image-­making. The emperor was still shown in frontal shot, and he still maintained the rigidity and stasis of the Photo­graph. Yet, he was in a suit instead of a military uniform, and, as the emperor, was presented in relation with another person. The newspapers soon began introducing a series of photo­graphs of the emperor, starting from one in which he was shown spending time with his ­family, in a relaxed pose, on January 1, 1946. This repeated the prewar and war­ time convention that the emperor’s photo­graph was released in newspapers on ­every New Year’s Day.27 As for filmic pre­sen­ta­tion, the emperor had previously been presented in war­time newsreels according to the Photo­graph protocols, in which film editing technique was not allowed to enhance the dynamism, emotion, and power of his image. However, departing from t­hese restrictions imposed on filmmaking, newsreels now began showing him in close-up, from above, and with o ­ thers. Thus, beginning with the introduction of the double portrait photo­graph, repre­sen­ta­tional techniques and strategies for Hirohito ­were freed from the restrictions of goshin’ei veneration. He became an intimate, approachable ruler harking back to his 1920s stardom; a man who walked with his ­daughter, spent time with his ­family in their living room, and travelled to see his ­people. The renewed editing techniques served to reestablish his rulership for the new era. In contrasting, the nation had not been freed from the restrictions of monarchy and the state’s surveillance. One example is the fate of the documentary film Japan’s Tragedy (Nihon no higeki, 1946), directed by Kamei Fumio and produced by communist film critic and former Prokino member Iwasaki Akira. By deploying a compilation of footage, the film examines the atrocity of war as the nation’s tragedy, triggered by a group of militarists and greedy cap­i­tal­ist conglomerates, or zaibatsu. The most controversial scene was when Hirohito was explic­itly illustrated as the most responsible of the war criminals. He was shown in a series of dissolving shots transitioning from the authoritative ruler in military attire into a man in an ordinary suit. The editing suggested that he was transforming himself, evading war accountability, and trying to pretend to be an ordinary citizen. The scene greatly offended Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, and he requested that SCAP officials reconsider their approval of the film’s distribution. Kamei and Iwasaki conceived the film together with David Conde, a leftist censor of the Civil Information and Educational Section, who passed the film. Then, for the next step of the two-­part censorship pro­cess, the film was examined and passed by censors of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) in June 1946 with some mandatory revisions. The film opened in some in­de­pen­dent theaters in July. However, it was then banned in August by the CCD, who cancelled their initial

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approval. They deci­ded that the problematic editing of Hirohito’s image could upset the social order.28 The visual and cultural image of the emperor continues to be a crucial issue, and it has remained both a taboo and an icon of national unity in Japan even a­ fter the Occupation period was over in 1952. His pre­sen­ta­tion in newspapers, TV programs, magazines, gossip journalism, and artworks has been handled with extreme care and self-­imposed censorship, down to the pres­ent. Such inhibition has frequently collided with and suppressed the notion of ­free speech. Numerous incidents have occurred in which literary, artistic, and po­liti­cal messages have been forced to be withdrawn from publication b ­ ecause they ­v iolated imperial taboos in postwar society. In 1960, when the magazine Chūō kōron published a Fukazawa Shichirō novel that depicted the beheading of the crown prince and princess, an ultra-­rightist minor attempted to kill the president of the publishing ­house, and did kill one of his domestic employees. In another case, an exhibition cata­log of the Toyama Prefectural Art Museum that included a series of photo collages of Hirohito by the artist Ōura Nobuyuki was burned by the museum in the 1980s when the images w ­ ere criticized by a Liberal Demo­cratic Party member. T ­ here are numerous other similar cases.29 The double portrait photo­graph of Hirohito and MacArthur serves as one of the best examples of historical continuity in the field of visual culture, showing how 1930s and early 1940s practices survived the end of the war, reestablished the monarchy, and renewed the emperor’s repre­sen­ta­tional politics for post-1945 society. ­Whether or not the iconography was as shocking as some claim, Hirohito represented the state and society and, for many citizens, themselves as Japa­ nese nationals, when the double portrait was released. ­Later, the double portrait became an icon of the end of the war and the beginning of the postwar era in historical and popu­lar discourse. To conclude, the force of national(ist) identity formation is thus observed not only in war­time society and culture during the early Showa era. It operates also in the postwar, peacetime era, sustaining a nation-­ state whose membership requires imagining of a shared national language, a strong sense of national affiliation, and a communal memory, along with unequal treatment of citizens.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. In recent scholarship, the term “Asia Pacific War” (Ajia taiehiyō sensō) has begun to replace the earlier “Fifteen Year War” (Jūgonen sensō) to cover the time from 1931 to 1945. The “Fifteen Year War” refers to the period starting from the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and ending with the termination of war in 1945. This terminology was originally suggested by the phi­los­o­pher Tsurumi Shunsuke (1922–2015) in 1956; he l­ ater elaborated it further in 1982. He contended that t­hese fifteen years should be understood as a series of wars triggered by Japa­nese colonialist aggression in China, followed by Japan’s war against the US and Allied powers and expansionism in Southeast Asia. See Shunsuke Tsurumi, “Chishikijin no sensō sekinin,” Chūō kōron (January 1956): 57–63; Shunsuke Tsurumi, Senjiki nihon no seishinshi, 1931–1945 nen (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1982) (En­glish translation: An Intellectual History of War­time Japan, 1931–1945 [London: KPI, 1986]). The term “Asia Pacific War” stresses the Japa­nese state’s aggression in Asia during ­these fifteen years, but it also aims to expand analy­sis to the impact and aftermath of war in post-1945 Asian socie­ ties, whereas the term “Fifteen Year War” implies a sense of discontinuity and termination of anything war-­related in 1945. The economic historian Mori Takemaro argues, with reference to work by historian Yamanouchi Yasushi, that the po­liti­cal and economic system established during the total war era affected and was carried over into the postwar era, in both Japan and its colonized and occupied territories. See Takemaro Mori, Ajia taheiyō sensō (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1993), 13–16; Yasushi Yamanouchi, “Senjidōin taisei no hikakuteki kōsatsu,” Sekai (April 1988): 81–100; Takemaro Mori, “Sōryokusen, fashizumu, sengokaikaku,” in Naze, ima, ajia, taiheiyō sensō ka, ed. Ryūichi Narita and Yutaka Yoshida et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005), 125–160. However, the time frame of the “Asia Pacific War” is not unanimously agreed upon. While Narita replaces “Fifteen Year War” with the new term, Yoshida dates the “Asia Pacific War” from December 1941 to September 1945. See Ryūichi Narita and Yutaka Yoshida et al., eds. Naze, ima, ajia taiheiyō sensō ka (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005); Yutaka Yoshida, Ajia taiheiyō sensō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2007). 2. In addition to Tadao Satō’s numerous monographs, including Kinema to hōsei: Nicchū eiga zenshi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004), and the edited volumes by Kenji Iwamoto, Eiga to dai tōa kyōeiken (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004) and Nihon eiga to nashonarizumu, 1931–1945 (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004), I am indebted to the following Anglophone works: High’s Imperial Screen provides a comprehensive, nuanced overview of film history during the war­ time era. Davis identifies a “monumental style” in historical films, or jidaigeki, which emerged from the end of 1930s through 1945. He examines auteur director Mizoguchi Kenji’s works in par­tic­ul­ar and argues that the monumental style stages the narrative of the traditional f­ amily system and social values that provoke nationalist discourse, and that it also “resisted classical Hollywood technique at the level of form for the crucial war­time purpose of renewing the audience’s perception of the Japa­nese cultural heritage.” Norness, in his historical survey of documentary film, highlights genre formation, film theoretical debates, and filmmakers’ negotiations with state censorship. See Peter High, The Imperial Screen: Japa­nese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Darrell William Davis, Picturing Japa­neseness: Monumental Style, 217

218 NOTES TO PAGES 3–5

National Identity, Japa­nese Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Abé Mark Nornes, Japa­nese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 3. For this interdisciplinary approach, I am particularly informed by Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: ­Women and Melodramatic Repre­sen­ta­tion in Weimar Germany (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1989), and Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing ­Women for War­time British Cinema (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1991). To understand the cross-­media textuality of the era, the consumption of novels and reading practices are also very impor­tant, since reading was the leading leisure activity for the majority of the population. On this topic, see Takahisa Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga: Hitobito wa kokusaku eiga o mita ka (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2003), 199–200; Sarah Frederick, “Novels to See/Movies to Read: Photographic Fiction in Japa­nese ­Women’s Magazines,” positions 18, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 727–769. 4. Kenneth Ruoff, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The War­time Cele­bration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 12. 5. Naomi Ginoza, Modan raifu to sensō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2013), 5. 6. I agree that some films do look peaceful in the late 1930s, at the beginning of total war. However, the emergence of a body of B films on war from around 1931 through the early 1940s should be also noted. The war against China was narrativized and presented on-­screen from the time of the Manchurian Incident. Some such films ­were serious dramas or glorified tragedies of war and some ­were comedies, according to rec­ords. For example, numerous versions of an episode of three soldiers’ suicidal mission ­were produced, such as Three H ­ uman Bomb Patriots (Nikudan sanyūshi) in 1932. See, Tadao Satō, Nihon eiga shi, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), 426–430. 7. Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japa­nese Film: Art and Industry (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1982), 72–125. 8. The numbers of national production are compiled from the following sources: Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: Amer­i­ca’s Advance through 20th C ­ entury Eu­rope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 326; Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 20–21; David Welch, Propaganda and German Cinema, 1933–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 160; Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 70, 127. On Eu­ro­pean film industries and their strug­gle to protect their domestic markets, see, De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 322–324, 329. I should note that, unlike American or German counter­parts, Japa­nese film was not distributed widely beyond its national bound­aries ­until the early 1940s. 9. See, Miriam Silverberg, “Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western ­Woman: A Picture Story,” positions 1, no. 1 (1993): 24–76. On the reception of Hollywood, t­here is a confusion in existing scholarship that I would like to clarify briefly at this point. Some note that Hollywood film was banned in Japan in 1938, similar to Germany and Italy, but this is a misunderstanding that presumably arose from the temporary banning of foreign film imports in 1937. In July 1937, the Ministry of Finance announced that it banned the import of foreign films by applying the Foreign Exchange Control Act. A year and a half ­later, in 1939, the ministry set a quota and permitted imports to resume. In July 1941, the Japa­nese state froze US assets in Japan, including sales offices of Hollywood majors, and then the outbreak of war caused a complete ban on screening of Hollywood pictures. See, Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon eiga hattatsu shi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1980), 358, and Nihon eiga hattatsu shi, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1980), 69, 77–78. 10. Tōwa no 40-­nen henshūshitsu, ed., “Tōwa no 40-­nen,” in Tōwa no 40-­nen 1928– 1968 (Tokyo: Tōwa kabushiki gaisha, 1968), 1–4.

NOTES TO PAGES 5–8

219

11. The Japa­nese film production gradually decreases: ninety-­six films in 1942, sixty-­ three in 1943, forty-­six in 1944, and thirty-­five in 1945. Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 20. 12. State-­sponsored travelling film programs started to reach an increasing number of rural residents in 1943, in the late stage of the war. The Travelling Film Association (Idō eisha renmei), founded by the state in summer 1943, was still showing films to one million viewers per month in early 1945 and was particularly active in rural areas. However, in princi­ple, film was part of urban consumer culture. Half of all Japa­nese theaters w ­ ere concentrated in the seven prefectures where major urban centers w ­ ere located. Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 21, 210. 13. Yasuhiro Okudaira, “Eiga no kokka tōsei,” in Kōza nihon eiga, vol. 4: Sensō to nihon eiga (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1986), 238–255; Kenji Iwamoto, “Nashonarizumu to kokusaku eiga,” in Nihon eiga to nashonarizumu (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004), 7–27. 14. Peter B. High, “Japa­nese Film Theory and the National Policy Film Debate: 1937– 1941,” Kokusai kankei gaku kiyō 2 (1986): 133–149; Okudaira, “Eiga no kokka tōsei,” 238–255. 15. The law required the industry to request approval for production and distribution, mandated workers to pass evaluations and register according to their job titles, elaborated the censorship pro­cess, and reduced foreign film programs. On the Film Law, see Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 234–240; Nornes, Japa­nese Documentary Film, 61–66; High, Imperial Screen, 70–91. 16. High, “Japa­nese Film Theory,” 140–148. 17. Quoted by High, “Japa­nese Film Theory,” 138. 18. It is impor­tant to note the strong tie between Marxist and film historians of the era, who share similar perspectives. One of the most influential and prominent film historians, Satō Tadao (b. 1930) was an editor of the radical, influential, cross-­disciplinary magazine Science of Thought (Shisō no kagaku), which was established in 1946 (and continued to 1996) by intellectuals including Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) and the phi­los­o­pher Tsurumi Shunsuke (1922–2015). Satō emphasizes state control of overall film production u ­ nder the Film Law by positing a genre of “film controlled by the state.” See, Tadao Satō, “Kokka ni kanri sareta eiga,” in Kōza nihon eiga 4: Sensō to nihon eiga, ed. Imamura Shōhei et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1986). In addition, the term “national policy film” is casually employed in the canonical film history survey book by Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon eiga hattatsu shi, vols. 2 and 3 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1980). In a similar vein, Davis (1996), High (2013), and Nornes (2003) also stress the prevailing power of the state over the film industry. 19. Conventionally, educational films and government promotional films ­were exempt, but the 1937 revision of film censorial codes expanded the eligibility for exemption to include the genres of documentary and dramatic films. Thus, documentary films w ­ ere mostly exempted from fees if the film content was “worthy to contribute to the promotion of the notion of national polity, or kokutai, the establishment of national morality, the correction of understanding of current affairs within and outside the state of Japan, the promotion of vari­ous government administrations such as military, industries, education, anti-­disaster, and hygienics, and tending to increase the public interest.” ­Under the revision, dramatic feature films became eligible for exemption when they ­were produced with ministerial sponsorship and guidance, or with a recommendation from the Police Department of the Home Ministry (Naimushō keiho kyoku). Censorial code quoted by Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 5. 20. Furukawa points out that many war­time hits w ­ ere not-­for-­minors films (hi ippan) despised by film critics as vulgar and ridicu­lous, such as the period drama A Man Who

220 NOTES TO PAGES 9–12

Waited (Matteita otoko; directed by Makino Masahiro, 1942) or the travelling gambler genre film Kantarō of Ina (Ina no kantarō; directed by Takizawa Eisuke, 1943). Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 146–149, 170–171, 185–188. 21. Atsuko Katō, Sōdōin taisei to eiga (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2003), 6. 22. As an additional note, Aaron Gerow’s article discusses film critics as spectators. See his “Tatakau kankyaku,” Gendai shisō 30, no. 9 (2007): 136–149. 23. Katō, Sōdōin taisei to eiga, 269–270; Shirō Kido, Nihon eiga den (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū shinsha, 1956), 216–217. 24. Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 125–132. 25. On the Germany-­Japan comparison, see, Carol Gluck, “The ‘Long Postwar’: Japan and Germany in Common and in Contrast,” in Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, ed. Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 63–78. 26. Eric Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm,” New German Critique 51 (1990): 137–161; Linda Schulte-­Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Lutz P. Koepnick, “Siegfried Rides Again: Westerns, Technology, and the Third Reich,” Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (1997): 418–442; De Grazia, “The Star System” in Irresistible Empire, 284–335; Ricci, Cinema and Fascism; Stephen Gundle, Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (New York: Berghahn, 2013); Ruth Ben-­Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 27. Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), especially chapter 4, on British and Hollywood musical films; Annette Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 28. Karsten Witte, “Visual Plea­sure Inhibited: Aspects of the German Revue Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (1981/82): 238–263. 29. Patrice Petro, “Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popu­lar,” New German Critique 74 (1998): 41–55. 30. The term “vernacular cinema” is a coinage of the film theorist Miriam Hansen, who proposed a heuristic narrative framework for transnational film history. Modeled on the linguistic term, “vernacular cinema” refers to a non-­hegemonic national cinema that competes with, aspires to, or attempts to negate a hegemonic film culture, such as that of Hollywood. The term also emphasizes the national cinema’s autonomy, locality, and its own conventions, which are mobilized to form its indigenous film idioms. In her comparison of Chinese and Japa­nese film of the 1930s, Hansen locates similar patterns and motifs of femininities shared by ­these two national cinemas, and points out that their similar gender repre­sen­ta­tions articulated the common anx­i­eties and predicaments brought to ­these socie­ties by modernity and modernization, in spite of the fact that t­ hese nations w ­ ere po­liti­cally and commercially divided by war. See, Miriam Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspective, ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 287–314. 31. Alan Tansman, ed. The Culture of Japa­nese Fascism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japa­nese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 32. The historian Harry Harootunian criticizes the location of belatedness, imitation, and alterity as characteristics of non-­Western nations’ modernity and emphasizes their con-

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temporaneity with differences. To highlight modernities’ coexistence and coevalness, he examines the writings of Japa­nese intellectuals vis-­à-­v is Western writers to show affinities, common sentiments, and similar articulations. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), xvi–­xvii. 33. One of the most influential advocates for the notion of Japan as a fascist state was Masao Maruyama, whose essays are translated into En­glish as Thought and Be­hav­ior in Modern Japa­nese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 34. Peter Duus and Daniel I. Okimoto, “Comment: Fascism and the History of ­Pre-­War Japan: The Failure of a Concept,” Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (1979): 65– 76; Gavan McCormack, “Nineteen-­Thirties Japan: Fascism?” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14, no. 2 (1982): 20–33. The notion of fascism involves numerous debates in the spheres of po­liti­cal theory, economics, and intellectual history: ­whether or not fascism is a variant of or a deviation from modernity; what the criteria are to determine that Japan was a fascist state similar to Germany, Italy, or Spain; the question of the degree to which Germany and Italy (and o ­ thers) ­were equally fascist. Relevant though they are, t­ hese questions are beyond the scope of this book. 35. Tansman, Aesthetics of Japa­nese Fascism, 12, 15; Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975, http://­www​.­nybooks​.­com​/­articles​ /­1975​/­02​/­06​/­fascinating​-­fascism​/­, accessed January 7, 2017. Her essay was primarily a critique of Leni Riefenstahl’s con­temporary photography. 36. On Japa­nese reception of the novel, see Ruan Yi, “Nihon jin to saiyūki,” Nihongo nihon bungaku 23 (2013): 29–46. 37. The numbers of national production are compiled in the following sources: De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 326; Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 20–21; Welch, Propaganda and German Cinema, 1933–1945, 160; Ricci, Cinema and Fascism, 70, 127. 38. On Eu­ro­pean film industries, see, De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 322–324, 329. 39. On Italy, De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 319; Ricci, Cinema and Facsism, 70. 40. For the German Third Reich film distribution in Eu­rope, see, Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, ed., Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Also, see, Aboubakar Sanogo, “Colonialism, Visuality and the Cinema: Revisitng the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment,” in Empire and Film, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 227–245. 41. Koepnick, “Siegfried Rides Again,” 418–442; Lutz P. Koepnick, “Unsettling Amer­ic­ a: German Westerns and Modernity,” Modernism/Modernity 2, no. 3 (1995): 1–22; Ben-­Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema, xix. 42. Michael Baskett, “All Beautiful Fascists?: Axis Film Culture in Imperial Japan,” in The Culture of Japa­nese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 212–234. On New Earth, also see, NHK shuzai han, ed., “ ‘Atarashiki tsuchi’ no oshieta mono,” Puropaganda eiga no tadotta michi (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1995), 136– 158; Janine Hansen, “Celluloid Competition: German-­Japanese Film Relations 1929–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch (Basingstoke, UKPalgrave Macmillan, 2007), 187–197. 43. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.” 44. Ibid. 45. Moya Luckett, “Fantasia: Cultural Construction of Disney’s ‘Masterpiece,’ ” in Disney Discourse, ed. Eric Smoodin (London: Routledge, 1994), 214–236, especially 222. 46. Yamanouchi Yasushi questions the modern historical narrative of confrontation between fascism and the New Deal and argues that the differences between the two o ­ ught to be considered as an internal issue subordinate to the social reor­ga­ni­za­tion brought about

222 NOTES TO PAGES 16–24

­ nder total war systems. Yasushi Yamanouchi, “Total War and System Integration: A Methu odological Introduction,” in Total War and “Modernization,” ed. Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Ryūichi Narita (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1998), 2. 47. The following works discuss war­time Japa­nese musical films and argue for their relation and shared aesthetics with Hollywood musicals: Hana Washitani, “The Opium War and the Cinema Wars: A Hollywood in the Greater East Asian Co-­prosperity Sphere,” Inter-­ Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 63–76; Makiko Kamiya, “ ‘Hanako san’ (1943, Makino Masahiro) no ryōgisei: ‘Meirō’ na sensō puropaganda eiga,” Bigaku 63, no. 1 (2012): 109–120. 48. Aaron Gerow, “Narrating the Nation-­ality of Cinema,” in The Culture of Japa­nese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 205. 49. To note selected examples, see Freda Freiberg, “Genre and Gender in World War II Japa­nese Feature Film: ‘China Night’ (1940),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Tele­vi­ sion 12, no. 3 (1992): 245–252; Kwang Woo Noh, “Formation of Korean Film Industry ­under Japa­nese Occupation,” Asian Cinema 12, no. 2 (2001): 20–31; Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); Dong Hoon Kim, “Segregated Cinemas, Intertwined Histories: The Ethnically Segregated Film Cultures in 1920s ­Korea u ­ nder Japa­nese Colonial Rule,” Journal of Japa­nese and Korean Cinema 1, no. 1 (2009): 7–25; Kinnia Yau Shuk-­ting, Japa­nese and Hong Kong Film Industries: Understanding the Origins of East Asian Film Networks (London: Routledge, 2010); Takashi Fujitani, “The Colonial and National Politics of Gender, Sex, and ­Family,” in Race for Empire: Koreans as Japa­nese and Japa­nese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Kuei-­Fen Chiu, “The Question of Translation in Taiwanese Colonial Cinematic Space,” Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 1 (2011): 77–97; Takashi Fujitani and Nayoung Aimee Kwon, eds., “Transcolonial Film Coproductions in the Japa­nese Empire: Antinomies in the Colonial Archive” (special issue), Cross-­Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 2, no. 1 (2013); Jie Li, “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Com­pany, 1932–1940,” positions 22, no. 2 (2014): 329–369. 1. PHOTOGRAPHY’S AURA

1. Tsutomu Iwamoto, ‘Goshin’ei’ ni junjita kyōshi tachi (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1989), 253. 2. Quoted by Iwamoto, ‘Goshin’ei’ ni junjita kyōshi tachi, 255. 3. Historical documents also show that a number of ­children ­were killed in their duties to guard the Photo­graph shrines during air raids or their work related to construction of the shrines. Hideo Satō, ed., Kyōiku: Goshin’ei to kyōiku chokugo, vol. 1 (Zoku gendaishi shiryō, vol. 8) (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1994), 349. 4. John W. Dower introduces Kiyoshi Watanabe and his other biographical account, Shattered God (Kudakareta kami) in Embracing Defeat (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 339–345. 5. Kiyoshi Watanabe, Senkan musashi no saigo (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1971), 282–283. The abbreviated version is available on The Japan P.E.N. Club Digital Library (Nihon pen kurabu denshi bungei kan), from which the quotes are taken. http://­bungeikan​ .­jp​/­domestic​/­detail​/­846​/­, accessed on December 30, 2016. 6. On Hirohito’s biography, see Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan: A Po­liti­cal Biography (London: Routledge, 1992); Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). Also, the following references are helpful for understanding the modern emperor system: Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Kenneth J. Ruoff, The ­People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japa­nese Monarchy, 1945–1995 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-

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sity Asia Center, 2001); Ben-­Ami Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japa­nese History (Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2005); Ben-­Ami Shillony, ed., The Emperors of Modern Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 7. ­There are a few exceptions. For example, John W. Dower examined rumors and graffiti in the last stage of war that revealed doubts and criticism from the citizens against the state. In this case, rumors and graffiti should also be understood as media, but created by nonstate actors. See, Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 130–138. 8. Two exceptions are the following works: Morris Low, Japan on Display: Photography and the Emperor (London: Routledge, 2006); David C. Earhart, Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japa­nese Media (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2008). 9. Shunya Yoshimi, Karuchuraru tān, bunka no seijigaku e (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 2003), 239. 10. Yoshimi, Karuchuraru tān, 235–236. 11. Ruoff, The ­People’s Emperor, especially chapter 6, “The Monarchy for the Masses,” 202–253. 12. On ­these topics, see Takashi Fujitani, “Electronic Pageantry and Japan’s ‘Symbolic Emperor,’ ” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (1992): 824–850; Jan Bardsley, “Japa­nese Feminism, Nationalism and the Royal Wedding of Summer ’93,” Journal of Popu­lar Culture 31, no. 2 (1997): 189–205; Jan Bardsley, “Fashioning the P ­ eople’s Princess: ­Women’s Magazines, Shoda Michiko, and the Royal Wedding of 1959,” US-­Japan ­Women’s Journal, En­glish Supplement 23 (2002): 57–91; Jan Bardsley, “­Women, Marriage, and the State in Modern Japan: Introduction,” ­Women’s Studies 33, no. 4 (2004): 353–359. 13. Case studies on the historical continuity of society during and a­ fter the war are found in Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Ryūichi Narita, eds., Total War and “Modernization” (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998). On the continuity of the imperial ­house­hold as celebrities, see Hiroki Migita, “Masu media no nakano teishitsu: Senzenki ‘taishū tennō sei’ no keiseiktei ni kansuru rekishishakaigaku teki kōsatsu” (PhD diss., Kyoto University, 2006). 14. See, Hikari Hori, “Film Censorship and the Emperor: The Case of the Shōwa Emperor in Nippon News,” in Censorship, Media and Literary Culture in Japan (bilingual edition), ed. Tomi Suzuki, Hirokazu Toeda, Hikari Hori, and Kazushige Munakata (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2012), 153–160. 15. Yoshio Yasumaru, Kindai tennō zō no keisei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992). 16. His book focuses on the late nineteenth ­century, the Meiji era, and the founding of the modern emperor system, but it is applicable to an examination of Hirohito. See Yasumaru, Kindai tennō zō no keisei, 10–11. 17. On restrictions on filmic repre­sen­ta­tion, see Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 64. For the first cinematic dramatization of an emperor, see Kenji Iwamoto, “Emperor Meiji and the ­Great Russo-­Japanese War: Nostalgia and Restoration in Ōkura Mitsugu’s ‘Emperor Film,’ ” trans. Dariko Kuroda-­Baskett, Review of Japa­nese Culture and Society 21 (2009): 33–49. 18. The exception is a series of works by Migita Hiroki. For example, besides his dissertation, see Hiroki Migita, “Senzenki ‘taishū tennō sei’ no keisei katei,” Soshioroji 47, no. 2 (2002): 37–53. 19. Jirō Kagotani, “Goshin’ei,” Iwanami tennō, kōshitsu jiten, ed. Takeshi Hara and Yutaka Yoshida (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005), 139. 20. Information about Photo­graph veneration in ­Korea, Taiwan, Sakhalin, a part of Manchuria, and the South Sea Islands is provided in Teruyuki Kobayashi, “Kyū nihon shokuminchika shōgakkō eno ‘goshin’ei’ kafu (I),” Shinshū daigaku kyōiku gakubu kiyō 66

224 NOTES TO PAGES 32–34

(1989): 59–68, and “Kyū nihon shokuminchika shōgakkō eno ‘goshin’ei’ kafu (II),” Shinshū daigaku kyōiku gakubu kiyō 67 (1989): 109–117. 21. Numerous articles and book chapters have been written on the Photo­graphs, or goshin’ei, from which I select the following representative works: Jirō Kagotani, “Wagakuni gakkō ni okeru ‘goshin’ei’ ni tsuite (jō),” Nihonshi kenkyū 159 (1975): 1–32, and “Wagakuni gakkō ni okeru ‘goshin’ei’ ni tsuite (ge),” Nihonshi kenkyū 160 (1975): 66–80; Iwamoto, ‘Goshin’ei’ ni junjita kyōshi tachi; Hideo Satō, ed., Kyōiku: Goshin’ei to kyōiku chokugo, vols. 1–3 (Zoku gendaishi shiryō 8–10); Masaaki Ono, Goshin’ei to gakkō: ‘Hōgo’ no hen’yō (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2014). I am very grateful to Professor Ono Masaaki, who generously shared an early draft of his book manuscript with me. 22. One of the significant novelties of the Photo­graph was that it presented the empress as a monogamous, significant partner of the emperor. The emperor’s photo­graph was always hung next to that of the empress’s, and they ­were preserved together. However, memoirs and oral history accounts often associate goshin’ei solely with the emperor’s photo­ graph, and the loyal deaths are exclusively tied with the emperor. The empress’s image served as an icon of the exemplary m ­ other and wife, and it was feminine domestic duties that primarily determined her position, instead of the divinity assigned to the emperor. 23. See, Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 242–251. 24. Kagotani, “Goshin’ei,” 137. 25. Taki points out that the early celebratory reception of the emperor’s pro­cessions and the veneration of the portrait photo­graph should be understood as occasions when ­people experienced the presence of the ruler, who was traditionally not active or vis­ib ­ le beyond the imperial palace. Kōji Taki, Tennō no shōzō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988), 122–125. 26. For the imperial visits, see Takeshi Hara, Kashika sareta teikoku (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 2001), 28, 189. 27. See, Suguru Sasaki, Bakumatsu no tennō, Meiji no tennō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005), 149–151. 28. Sasaki points out that Chiossone first had his own portrait photo­graph taken as he posed in the emperor’s military uniform. Therefore, in the portrait of Mutsuhito, the face is that of the emperor but the body is that of Chiossone. According to the Western tradition of portrait painting of royalty, it was common to use a model who had similar physical constitution with the sitter and wore the same clothes, so the portraits would r­ eally depict just the face of the sitter. See, Sasaki, Bakumatsu no tennō, Meiji no tennō, 257–263. 29. Giloi argues that the portrait of Wilhelm I of Prus­sia in military uniform suggests a historical change of repre­sen­ta­tion of the monarch. The departure from lavish and impractical court dress to a military uniform indicates that the monarch’s position is now the working head of the nation-­state. See, Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture, 17. 30. Taki argues that the Chiossone portrait successfully conveyed an image of an established, dignified monarch since the painter was familiar with the Western tradition of portrait painting. Most impor­tant was Chiossone’s ability to produce an abstract image. In contrast, the emperor poses differently, revealing the vulnerable physicality of his body, which failed to create the transcendental qualities of the ruler in the earlier photo­graphs taken of him by Japa­nese photographer Uchida Kuichi. See, Taki, Tennō no shōzō, 152, 167, 183–184. 31. The ordinance was issued in accordance with the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1891. At this point, the song was not the national anthem. The ordinance is reprinted in Satō, Kyōiku, vol. 1, 67–68. The singing was added to the proceeding in 1900. Satō, “Kaisetsu,” in Kyōiku, vol. 1, 32–36. 32. The text of the Imperial Rescript on Education is included in Satō, Kyōiku, vol. 1, 25. Also, a phonograph rec­ord of the Imperial Rescript was sold so that the school princi-

NOTES TO PAGES 34–39

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pals would be able to read the text properly. Chinese, En­glish, French, and German translations became available in 1909. See, Satō, Kyōiku, vol. 1, 460–468. Already in 1891, Uchimura Kanzō, a Christian, refused to venerate the copy of the Rescript at the elite secondary educational institution in Tokyo (Daiichi kotō chūgakkō) where he worked as a teacher. He was fired for lèse-­majesté. See, Satō, Kyōiku, vol. 1, 129–170. 33. Historian Satō Hideo suggests that it was Mori Arinori (1847–1889), minister of education, who initially conceived this format, inspired by Christian church ser­v ices. The introduction of a song as a part of the ritual was very new to existing Japa­nese ritual practices. Satō, “Kaisetsu,” in Kyōiku, vol. 1, 33–34. 34. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 104, 108. 35. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 106. 36. Kagotani, “Goshin’ei,” 137–140. 37. Nobuyoshi Yamamoto and Toshihiko Konno, Kindai kyōiku no tennōsei ideorogī (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1973), 72–73. 38. I am grateful to Kitamura Yuika, who drew my attention to this description. Sakae Tsuboi, Nijūshi no hitomi (Tokyo: Popura sha, 1979 [1952]), 41–42. 39. Shigeru Mizuki, “Sensō rakugo ‘Tennō heika banzai,’ ” in Tennō hyakuwa, vol. 1, ed. Shunsuke Tsurumi and Roppei Nakagawa (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1989), 605. 40. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 161. 41. Satō, “Kaisetsu,” in Kyōiku, vol. 1, 33–35. 42. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–2. Yet, t­ hese creations are not completely devoid of indigenous traditional ele­ments. For example, the preservation of the emperor’s portrait might be inspired by the way in which Buddhist religious relics ­were preserved and venerated. The emperor’s pro­cession and pageants w ­ ere also extended from Tokugawa shogunate pro­cessions of retainers. The term goshin’ei itself also has its own tradition prior to the modern emperor system, as aforementioned, when it could refer to portraits of Buddhist priests. 43. Iwamoto, ‘Goshin’ei’ ni junjita kyōshi tachi, especially 20–33. 44. Iwamoto suspects the motive of his suicide was not the destruction of the Photo­ graph. Historical documents suggest, according to Iwamoto, ­there was no connection between Kume Yoshitarō’s suicide and the fire, since the Photo­graph was not destroyed. However, the story of his suicide was repeated both in war­time and postwar literary circles and became widely known, down to the pres­ent. Iwamoto, ‘Goshin’ei’ ni junjita kyōshi tachi, 54. 45. Itsuya Matsumoto, “Shinbun no sensō shashin,” in Shashin Meiji no sensō, ed. Kenji Ozawa (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2001), 120–122. 46. The printing of the photo­graphs was made pos­si­ble by the technological innovation of the halftone photo­graph, which was first introduced in 1880 in the New York Daily Graphic. The technique was introduced to Japan by Ogawa Isshin, who was trained in the United States and created halftone screens for Tokyo Asahi shinbun. Matsumoto, “Shinbun no sensō shashin,” 120–121. 47. Keiichirō Hara, ed. Hara Takashi Nikki, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Fukumura shuppan, 1981), 350. 48. The colored woodblock prints, or nishiki-­e, pres­ent a variety of aspects of modernization to inform ­people of new social, technological, and po­liti­cal developments: new Western buildings, railroads, social incidents, wars, and the emperor’s activities. The circulation of nishiki-­e in the first thirty years of the Meiji era equals the total circulation of prints over two centuries during the Edo period. Hiroshi Higuchi, ed. Bakumatsu Meiji no ukiyoe shūsei, expanded and revised edition (Tokyo: Mitō shooku, 1962), quoted by Taki, Tennō no shōzō, 92–93.

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49. Already in 1874, even before the goshin’ei veneration was established, the Tokyo prefectural governor banned the sale of reproductions of the emperor’s photo­graph. Taki, Tennō no shōzō, 106–107. 50. Taki, Tennō no shōzō, 99. 51. Roland Barthes, Image M ­ usic Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 25–26. 52. Migita, “Masu media no nakano teishitsu,” 18. 53. Migita proposes the term “Prewar Pop­u­lar­ized Emperor System” (senzen taishū tennō sei), borrowing the coinage by Matsushita Keiichi, “Pop­ul­ar­ized Emperor System,” or taishū tennō sei (1959) of the postwar emperor system. According to Matsushita, the latter was sustained by media commercialism as it was seen in the late 1950s popularization of the imperial f­amily, which culminated in the coverage of Crown Prince Akihito’s marriage. Building on Matsushita’s discussion, Migita’s argument is that such commercialized and pop­u­lar­ized consumption of the imperial ­family is located even in the prewar era, contrary to the general belief that the prewar emperor system was monolithic, authoritative, and straightforwardly oppressive. See, Hiroki Migita, “ ‘Kōshitsu gurabia’ to ‘goshin’ei’ senzenki shinbun zasshi ni okeru kōshitu shashin no tūijiteki bunseki,” Kyoto shakaigaku nenpō 9 (2001): 91–101. 54. Kerry Ross, “ ‘­Little Works of Art’: Photography, Camera Clubs and Demo­cratizing Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-­Century Japan,” Japan Forum 25, no. 4 (2013): 425. 55. Takeshi Hara, Taishō ten’nō (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 2000), 147–148. 56. Satō, Kyōiku, vol. 1, 352–371. 57. Iwamoto examined the case and uncovered that the teacher’s cause of death was not determined at that time. However, ­because the Photo­graph was burned and destroyed, the school forged the honorable story to escape accusations of negligence. Iwamoto, ‘Goshin’ei’ ni junjita kyōshi tachi, 127–152. 58. Masao Maruyama, Nihon no shisō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1961), 33. 59. For a very concise reference to Origuchi Shinobu in this connection, see Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 157–158. 60. For the Ministry of Education policies to promote the notion of national polity, see Nobuyoshi Yamamoto and Toshihiko Konno, Taishō shōwa kyōiku no tennōsei ideogogī (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1976), 456–464; Terumichi Morikawa, Kindai tennōsei to kyōiku (Matsudo, Chiba: Azusa shuppansha, 1987), 22–23. For the case of the lèse-­majesté on Ōmotokyō, see Shigeyoshi Murakami, Tennōsei kokka to shūkyō (Tokyo: Nihon hyōronsha, 1986), 254. 61. Yasuhiro Okudaira, Chian ijihō shōshi (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1977), 101. 62. Sandra Wilson, “Enthroning Hirohito: Culture and Nation in 1920s Japan,” Journal of Japa­nese Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 323. 63. Kitahara, in an impor­tant study of the imperial photo­graph in the newspapers, pointed out that the New Year’s Day photo­graph continued to appear u ­ ntil 1945. Megumi Kitahara, “Shōgatsu shinbun ni miru ‘ten’nō goikka’ zō keisei to hyōshō,” Gendai shisō 29, no. 6 (2001): 230–254, and “Gantan shimen ni miru tennō ikka zō no keisei,” ed. Miho Ogino, “Sei” no bunkatsusen (Tokyo: Seikyū sha, 2009), 21–55. 64. Andrew Gordon, “Consumption, Leisure and the M ­ iddle Class in Transwar Japan” Social Science Japan Journal 10, no. 1 (2007): 2. 65. Masaru Hatano, Hirohito kōtaishi yōroppa gaiyū ki (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 1998), 64–144. 66. The film was also shown to six thousand invited guests in Osaka on the same night. Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun, June 6, 1921; Akiko Takeyama, “Media ibento to shiteno nyūsu eiga,” 75. 67. A Lüshun City screening is reported in newspaper Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun, July 3, 1921. For the Tokyo Nichinichi newsreels, twenty-­seven screenings ­were held in Osaka, which attracted 700,000 viewers. A total of at least 919 travelling screenings ­were held, and

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total viewers came to 4,876,750. See, Mainichi shinbun 130-­nen shi kankō iinkai, “Mainichi” no 3-­seiki: Shinbun ga mitsumeta gekiryū 130-­nen (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 2002), 404–405. 68. Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi (Tokyo: Kagyūsha, 1979), 44; For banzai cheers, Osaka Mainichi shinbun, June 12, 1921, and for the karaoke singing, Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun, July 3, 1921. 69. Akira Nakamura, “Tennōsei no ketten,” Ryūdo 3, no. 10 (1971): 256, quoted by Migita, “Mass media no nakano teishitsu,” 67. Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture, 251–253. 70. Hirohito also appeared, inspecting the disaster, in nonfiction films of the Kanto earthquake (1923), though his appearance was not central, since the gravity of the disaster itself was, so to speak, the appeal of ­these films. 71. See Bix, Hirohito, 96–99. 72. Shigeharu Nakano, “Sono mi ni tsuki matou,” in Teihon Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1996), 200–201. 73. Aya Kōda, “Yoki goshuppatsu,” Kōda Aya zenshū, vol. 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), 169. 74. Hirohito and the imperial ­family w ­ ere often popu­lar topics of gossip among ­women of dif­fer­ent classes. See, Robert John Smith and Ella Lury Wiswell, The ­Women of Suye Mura (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1982), 11–15; Seiko Tanabe, “Naniwa kara mita tennō san,” Bungei shunjū 67, no. 3 (1989): 128–134. 75. Richard Dyer, Stars, new edition (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 32. 76. Even the death and the funeral pro­cession of Hirohito’s ­father, the Taisho Emperor Yoshihito, was covered fervently in 1927. The route of the pro­cession, the timetable, the illustration of the pro­cession, and the participants’ titles, as well as suggested places where the general public should stay, ­were publicized by newspapers in advance. The Tokyo Asahi newspaper had held a screening of film of the pro­cession as early as the after­noon of the following day, February 8. Tokyo Asahi shinbun, February 9, 1927, quoted by Akiko Takeyama, “Media ibento to shiteno nyūsu eiga,” in Senjiki Nihon no media ibento, ed. Toshihiro Tsuganesawa and Teruo Ariyama (Kyoto: Sekai shisōsha, 1998), 77. Tokyo Asahi shinbun (February 7) also reports that forty thousand passengers ­were arriving from northern parts of Japan at Ueno Station for this event, and groups and ­people totaling another forty thousand from southern Japan arrived at Tokyo Station on February 6. 77. Kenneth J. Ruoff, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The War­time Cele­bration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 79–81. 78. John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 144; Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture, 245. 79. Giloi, Monarchy, Myth and Material Culture, 17. 80. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 145 81. Abé Mark Nornes, Japa­nese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003), 13–14. 82. Hideaki Fujiki, Making Persona: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 81–86. 83. Dyer, Stars, 34. 84. The Communications Ministry outlined some guidelines, including no commercial broadcasting and restricted entertainment programs, as well as preproduction censorship from the inception. Kasza, State and the Mass Media, 73–79. 85. Akiko Takeyama, Rajio no jidai (Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2002), 31. 86. Nihon hōsō kyōkai, ed., Nihon hōsō shi, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Nippon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1965), 82–83.

228 NOTES TO PAGES 50–56

87. For the prehistory of regular radio broadcasting, such as amateur wireless transmission and vari­ous exhibitions and demonstrations of radio broadcasting, see Shunya Yoshimi, “Koe” no shihonshugi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995), 200–210. 88. Tokyo Asahi shinbun, December 14, 1926. 89. Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 24. 90. Takeyama, Rajio no jidai, 46. 91. Anderson, ­Imagined Communities, 35. 92. Nihon hōsō kyōkai, ed., Nihon hōsō shi, vol. 1, 117. 93. “Gyōmu tōkei yōran,” in Nihon hōsō shi, vol. 1, ed. Nihon hōsō kyōkai (Tokyo: Nippon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1965), np. 94. Takeyama, Rajio no jidai, 76. 95. Ibid., 119–120. 96. Ibid., 123–126. 97. Nihon hōsō shi, vol.1, 234–236. 98. Takeyama, Rajio no jidai, 130, 138. 99. Though August 15 has been commemorated as the date of the end of the war, strictly speaking, the termination of the conflict was formalized on September 2, when the Instrument of Surrender was signed by Japa­nese representatives. The commemoration of August 15 points to the impact of the announcement made by Hirohito at the time. Also, for the phonograph recording, see Sōichi Ōya, trans., Japan’s Longest Day (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1968). 100. The voice of the new emperor, reading aloud an imperial rescript, was accidentally broadcasted during one of the ceremonial events. Despite the excitement of listeners, the broadcasting of his voice was banned, and it never happened again u ­ ntil 1945. A ­ fter the accident, the microphones w ­ ere carefully turned off at the time of the emperor’s recital of imperial rescripts. See, Yomiuri shinbun, December 4,1928. 101. For the program of the 2,600th anniversary cele­brations, see Ruoff, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith, 15–18. 102. “Kigen nisen roppyaku nen hōshuku kinen bunshū: teigakunen,” edited by Tokyo shi seishi jinjō shōgakkō, 1940, quoted by Takeyama, Rajio no jidai, 154. 103. Tokyo chūō hōsō kyoku, “On tairei hōsō no kansō” (Nihon hōsō kyōkai kantō shibu, 1929), 28, quoted by Takeyama, Rajio no jidai, 132–133. 104. Quoted by Migita, “Masu media no nakano teishitsu,” 144–145. 105. Previously, the Ministry of Education provided the tests but not all the prefectures deployed them ­until 1931. Yoshizō Kubo, “Kaisetsu,” in Sōtei kyōiku chōsa gaikyō, reprint, vol. 1, ed. Ken’ichi Matsumura (Tokyo: Senbundō shoten, 1973), 1–4. For example, to understand the matrix of the test takers, I note that the populations of twenty-­year-­old males in Japan w ­ ere 634,759 (in the year of 1932), 654,283 (1934), 633,576 (1937), and 664,680 (1941). “Shōwa 16 nen do sōtei kyōiku chōsa gaikyō,” in Sōtei kyōiku chōsa gaikyō, reprint, vol. 4, ed. Ken’ichi Matsumura (Tokyo: Senbundō shoten, 1973), 14. 106. “Shōwa 9 nen do sōtei kyōiku chōsa gaikyō,” in Sōtei kyōiku chōsa gaikyō, reprint, vol. 2, ed. Ken’ichi Matsumura (Tokyo: Senbundō shoten, 1973), 39, 49. 107. Shin Kushiroshi shi, vol. 3 (Kushiro: Kushiro-­shi, 1972), 916–917. 108. Historian Hara Takeshi argues that the emperor’s numerous inspections and visits ­were essential for nation-­state building in Japan, and critiques Anderson’s notion of imagination. However, this boy’s account highlights the importance of imagination even accompanying ­actual visits, since interactions of the emperor with imperial citizens w ­ ere highly limited, and it was as a passing train, if at all, that many p ­ eople experienced contact with the emperor. See, Hara, Kashika sareta teikoku. 109. Though one might argue that the increasing divine and mystical dimension of the emperor system was triggered by Hirohito’s ascension to emperor in 1926 from the status

NOTES TO PAGES 56–60

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of regent-­crown prince, I agree with Sandra Wilson, who questions the notion that Hirohito’s ascension to emperor was the direct seed of the ensuing militarization and colonial aggression of the state of Japan, epitomized by the 1931 Manchurian Incident. See Wilson, “Enthroning Hirohito,” 289–323. Migita further emphasizes the relative indifference of citizens’ understanding and commitment to the po­liti­cal ideology of national polity and other ideologies by providing vari­ous examples. Hiroki Migita, “Reconsideration of Con­ temporary Meanings in Souvenirs of Modern Japan’s Imperial Festivals Viewed through ­People’s Experiences,” Shakai keizaishi gaku 79, no. 1 (2013): 101–116. 110. Masaaki Ono, “1930 nen’dai no goshin’ei kanri genkakuka to gakkō gishiki,” Kyōikugaku kenkyū 74, no. 4 (2007): 116–126. 111. Kyōikutō o kangaeru kai, ed., Kyōiku no “Yasukuni” (Tokyo: Kinohanasha, 1998), 19. 112. Historian Iwamoto Tsutomu points out that some cases ­were rather distorted to create such honorable stories. Tsutomu Iwamoto, “ ‘Junshoku’ kyōshi to kyōiku tō,” in Kyōiku no “Yasukuni,” ed. Kyōikutō o kangaeru kai (Tokyo: Kinohanasha, 1998), 147–199. 113. Kitahara Megumi argues that this annual pre­sen­ta­tion of the imperial ­family was a device for affirming the ­family state ideology, in which the relations between the emperor and the imperial subjects are that of the f­ amily, and the c­ hildren should act with filial piety ­toward the emperor. Megumi Kitahara, “Gantan shimen ni miru tennō ikka zō no keisei,” 35–41. 114. Iwamoto, ‘Goshin’ei’ ni junjita kyōshi tachi, 8–9. Scholar and writer Tsurumi Yoshiyuki also notes that ­people w ­ ere not supposed to use the newspapers including emperor’s photo­graphs as wrapping or for other daily uses. See, Yoshiyuki Tsurumi, “Goshin’ei kara ningen tennō e,” Chūō kōron 73, no. 7 (1958): 220. 115. Takeaki Fujinami, Nyūsu kameraman: gekidō no Shōwa shi o toru (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1980), 66. 116. For the history of newsreels, see, Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi (Tokyo: Kagyūsha, 1979); Roger W. Purdy, “Nationalism and News: ‘Information Imperialism’ and Japan, 1910–1936,” Journal of American-­East Asian Relations 1, no. 3 (1992): 295–325; Roger W. Purdy, “Hakkō Ichiu: Projecting ‘Greater East Asia,’ ” Impressions 30 (2009): 106–113. 117. The newsreels are now accessible on the Internet: http://­cgi2​.­nhk​.­or​.­jp​ /­shogenarchives​/­jpnews​/­list​.­cgi. Nippon News was produced from June 11, 1940, through December 27, 1951. See, Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi, 197. Also, see, Motoo Ogasawara et al., eds., Bessatsu ichiokunin no shōwashi, Nippon nyūsu eigashi (Mainichi shinbunsha, 1980). The primary three categories of items related to the emperor in the war­time Nippon News include visits to military schools, military reviews, and visits to Yasukuni Shrine. In other words, he is often shown as the subject of leading, viewing, and praying. 118. According to Oshashin roku (The Rec­ord of the Photo­graph) of the Ministry of Imperial House­hold, documents on requests for the imperial portrait photo­graph, from the Taisho period (1912–1926) the size was yotsu giri, which is 254 × 305 mm. 119. The other entries of the first installment are “Glamorous Festival of Youth: The East Asian Games,” “Crossing the Han River: Rapid Advance and Fighting in Central China,” “Germany’s Victory in ­Battle: Fierce Attack on a British Fleet,” and “Fierce Aerial and Naval ­Great ­Battles in the North Sea.” 120. It is an order directed to the audience, and it began sporadically appearing in newsreels around 1937, for example in Asahi Sekai News No. 185 (Asahi sekai nyūsu; owned by National Film Center, Tokyo), when it introduces Hirohito at a special parliament assembly. 121. It was common practice that whenever someone mentioned the emperor in conversations, speeches, or o ­ rders, she or he would say, first, “osore ōkumo” (we are in deep

230 NOTES TO PAGES 60–66

awe) and then continue “tennō heika” (His Majesty). Therefore, upon hearing “osore ōkumo,” the listeners have to stand at attention and wait for “tennō heika.” Thus, the emperor’s presence, sovereignty, and authority is repeatedly experienced through the imperial subjects’ disciplined bodies. See, Mizuki, “Sensō rakugo,” 605. 122. In an interview with documentary filmmaker Tokieda Toshie (1929–2012) in summer 2011, she recollected that commuter trains slowed down when passing the Imperial Palace. Also, according to documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki, whose elementary school was near the Imperial Palace, he often saw the emperor on the side of street. Since he had to bow deeply, he never saw the emperor’s face. Quoted by Toshifumi Fujiwara, “Ten’no/ Nichirin/Kagami, soshite eiga,” in Eiga no nakano tennō, ed. Kenji Iwamoto (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2007), 294. 123. One exceptional close-up is noted by Iwamoto Kenji in a documentary of the 2,600th anniversary cele­bration. See, Kenji Iwamoto, “Fuzai to sūhai no hazama de,” in Eiga no nakano tennō, ed. Iwamoto Kenji (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2007), 31–32. 124. The entries of British Movietone are accessible on http://­www​.­aparchive​.­com​/­. 125​.­S. N. Eisenstadt, ed. Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 126. For the restrictions posed on cinematographers, see Hiroshi Inagaki, Hige to chonmage (Tokyo: Chuōkōron sha, 1981), 53–54; Shigeru Shirai, Kamera to jinsei (Tokyo: Yuni tsūshinsha, 1983), 104. 127. Kiyoshi Watanabe, Kudakareta kami: Aru fukuinhei no shuki (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004 [1977]), 41. 128. Watanabe, Kudakareta kami, 41. 129. Masatane Kanda, Military Staff Officer of Korean Military, “Ōryokukō” (Yalu River) written in 1950 in Sugamo Prison, reprinted in Gendaishi shiryō 7 Manshū jihen, ed. Kobayashi Tatsuo and Shimada Toshihiko (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1964), 465. 130. Whereas the majority of mainland Japa­nese schools ­were granted the Photo­graph by 1940, in colonial K ­ orea only 1.1 ­percent of primary schools for Koreans (28 out of 2,509 schools) had received it by 1937. The schools in K ­ orea w ­ ere mostly segregated by ethnicity between Japa­nese and Koreans during Japan’s colonial rule (1910–1945). The number of Photo­graph recipients is larger for ­middle schools for Koreans: 66.7 ­percent (eigh­teen out of twenty-­seven) in 1937. The number of granted Photo­graphs peaked in ­Korea in 1937. Though statistics for the 1940s are not available, it is hard to assume that the slogan “Japan and ­Korea as One,” or Naisen ittai, was fully materialized in the distribution of the imperial portrait photo­graph to primary schools for Koreans. See, Kobayashi, “Kyū nihon shokuminchi ka shōgakkō e no ‘goshin’ei’ kafu (II),” 109–117. 131. The under­lying dilemma is connected to ideologues’ strug­gle to reconceptualize the po­liti­cal and spiritual position of the emperor outlined in the Imperial Rescript on Education. The need to explicate the emperor system to nonethnic Japa­nese and to transplant it to colonial territories was urgently felt, generating debate among ideologues. Instead of emphasis on linear, historical genealogy (bansei ikkei) as the source of the authority of the imperial f­amily, for example, the phi­los­o­pher ­Inoue Tetsujirō proposed in 1919 to shift emphasis to the benevolence that historical emperors maintained as rulers. In his view, the introduction of this Confucian notion of benevolence would make the Japa­nese emperor system more accessible for Koreans. His proposal was indeed to create a dif­fer­ent version of the Imperial Rescript on Education to provide the colonial subjects, with a reformatted notion of an emperor whose unbroken po­liti­cal power was sustained and justified by his benevolence, rather than by the mythological lineage. He thought the reformatted version would be more rational, or gōriteki. However, this proposal was not accepted. See, Takeshi Komagome, Shokuminchi teikoku nihon no bunka tōgō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996), 199–207.

NOTES TO PAGES 66–71

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132. Naimushō keiho kyoku hoanka, Tokkō geppō, August 1943, 27. 133. “Nagako kōgō heika un’nun.” What was written is not recorded, however, it is pos­ si­ble it was sexual. Tokkō geppō, July 1943, 31. 134. Tokkō geppō, July 1943, 31. 135. The slurs targeted at Empress Nagako ­were often sexual, while ­those aimed at Hirohito ­were mostly about doubts about the imperial ­family’s ethnic origin, war accountability, and privileges, according to entries of Tokkō geppō. This very strong sense of misogyny in the citizen’s treatment of the empress deserves discussion elsewhere. 136. Tokkō geppō, May 1941, 29–30. 137. It is noteworthy that some citizens’ minds w ­ ere not as quick to change as the shifts in media repre­sen­ta­tion of Hirohito. For example, ­there ­were official plans to distribute a new version of the Photo­graph as of January 1946. See, Masaaki Ono, “Goshin’ei shinkaku ka no katei,” Nihon no kyōikushi gaku 34 (1991): 78. Also, Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru tried to maintain the provisions for lèse-­majesté in the revised criminal code in December 1946. See, Ruoff, The ­People’s Emperor, 55. 2. CONTESTED MOTHERHOOD AND ENTERTAINMENT FILM

1. Peter High, The Imperial Screen: Japa­nese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931– 1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 252. 2. Patrice Petro, “Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popu­lar,” New German Critique 74 (Spring-­Summer, 1998): 44. 3. In addition, Japanese-­language scholarship often polarizes war­time films in terms of propaganda versus re­sis­tance, without close analy­sis of cinematic texts and filmmaking practices, although exceptions can be found in High’s work (which was originally published in Japa­nese in 1995) and also that of Makiko Kamiya: “ ‘Meirō’ jidaigeki no poritikkusu: ‘Oshidori utagassen (1939, Makino Masahiro) o chūshin ni,” Engeki eizōgaku 2011 1 (2012): 129–145. In contrast, Anglophone scholars have been more attentive to textual analy­sis instead of dichotomized evaluation. For example, Davis examines the styles of period films, or jidaigeki, around 1940 to locate the totalitarian aesthetics that permeated the Japa­nese Empire, which he calls the “monumental style.” However, in an examination of Naruse Mikio’s works, Russell argues that this monumental style has more to do with par­tic­u­lar directorial styles than with war­time aesthetics in general. See Darrell William Davis, Picturing Japa­neseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japa­nese Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: ­Women and Japa­nese Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 4. See Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing ­Women for War­time British Cinema (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 63. The greater inclusion indicated by “total” is not limited to w ­ omen but extended to marginalized social groups, in the case of Japan, such as burakumin (outcast ­people) and ethnic groups of the Ainu and the Okinawans, and to colonial subjects, as well as ­people in occupied territories. This term “inclusion” is strongly ironic b ­ ecause categorical bound­aries and differences are actually maintained in the pro­cess of inclusion in the war effort. 5. I am aware that “­woman’s film” has been the term of vigorous debates in feminist film studies. It is often regarded as a patriarchal genre that Hollywood produced especially in the 1940s to target female audiences (according to Mary Ann Doane, for example), and is contrasted with “­women’s cinema,” which refers to films directed by ­women with feminist visions. On the other hand, Judith Mayne proposes using the term “­women’s cinema” to refer to both, to maintain open bound­aries between production and consumption, and between directors and other members of film crews. Though I am aware of t­hese theoretical debates, I tentatively deploy the term “­woman’s film” in parallel with Doane’s delineation of a group of 1940s Hollywood films as a historically specified product. See, Mary

232 NOTES TO PAGES 72–74

Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The ­Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Claire Johnston, “­Women’s Cinema as ­Counter Cinema,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1973]), 22– 33; Judith Mayne, “The W ­ oman at the Keyhole: W ­ omen’s Cinema and Feminist Criticism,” in Re-­vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane et al. (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1984), 49–66. 6. Lant, Blackout, 11. 7. Naomi Ginoza, Modan raifu to sensō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2013), 3–7, 67–68. 8. Hiroshi Minami, ed. Shōwa bunka: 1925–1945 (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 1987), especially 54–72; Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japa­nese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), especially 12–24. Incidentally, this mid-1930s economic recovery was due to large military expenditures according to Minami, Shōwa bunka, 71. This was typical of economic recovery in the United States, too, which provided the background for the popularity of Hollywood maternal melodramas. John A. Garraty, “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the G ­ reat Depression,” American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (1973): 907–944. 9. For early 1930s contrasting repre­sen­ta­tion of moga in film, see Mitsuyo Wada Marciano, Nippon Modern (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). 10. Christian Viviani, “Who Is Without Sin: The Maternal Melodrama in American Film, 1930–39,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Tele­vi­sion Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 168–182; Doane, The Desire to Desire, 73. 11. The most well-­known genre of maternal melodrama in Japan is a group of thirty-­ one works starring actress Mimasu Aiko that w ­ ere released by Daiei Studio from 1948 through 1958, during the immediate postwar years. Most of them depict a m ­ other’s sacrificial actions for the sake of her child’s f­uture, which is reminiscent of A ­Mother’s ­Music. Other studios also released films with similar motifs, hoping to emulate the unpre­ce­dented box office receipts of the Daiei productions. Kiseko Minaguchi, Eiga no bosei: Mimasu Aiko o meguru hahaoyazō no nichibei hikaku (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2005), 30–31, 62. 12. Doane, The Desire to Desire; Lant, Blackout; Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson, eds., Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996). 13. I do not disagree that t­here are commonalities among the Axis countries. For example, overt pronatalist policies are one of their strong similarities. See Claudia Koonz, ­Mothers in the Fatherland: W ­ omen, the F ­ amily, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled ­Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 14. On theoretical articulations of the relation between gender and nation state, see Sylvia Walby, “­Woman and Nation,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), 235–254; Yūko Nishikawa, “Japan’s Entry into War and the Support of ­Women,” US-­Japan ­Women’s Journal En­glish Supplement 12 (1996): 48–83; Nira Yuval-­ Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997). For the comparative frameworks of gender and nation, see Midori Wakakuwa, Sensō ga tsukuru joseizō: Dainiji sekaitaisen ka no nihon josei dōin no shikakuteki puropaganda (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1995); Ida Bloom, “Gender and Nation in International Comparison,” in Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth ­Century, ed. Ida Bloom et al. (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 3–26; Jacqueline A. Atkins, ed., Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain and in the United States, 1931–1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). 15. See Shizuko Koyama, “Domestic Roles and the Incorporation of ­Women into the Nation-­State: The Emergence and Development of the ‘Good Wife, Wise ­Mother’ Ideol-

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ogy,” in Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan, ed. Andrea Germer, Vera Mackie, and Ulrike Wöhr (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014), 85–100. This does not mean that all w ­ omen ­were treated equally regardless of their class. ­Labor laws ­were not particularly protective for working w ­ omen’s health conditions through the end of war. Also, the laws reveal that upper-­and middle-­class ­women w ­ ere exempt from war production. Sachiko Hori, “Jūgonen sensōka no joshi rōdō,” Rekishi hyōron 407 (1984): 14–29; Yūko Suzuki, Shinban feminizumu to sensō (Tokyo: Marujusha, 1997), especially, 209. 16. Yoshiko Miyake, “Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and ­Women’s Factory Work ­under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Recreating Japa­nese ­Women, ed. Gail Lee Bern­stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 279–280. 17. Nira Yuval-­Davis and Floya Anthias, eds. ­Woman, Nation, State (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1989), 7. 18. Another well-­known story of this genre was Hello-­o, Ichitarō (Ichitarō yāi), though it appeared only in the third compilation of the national textbook (1918–1932) and was not used again. During the Russo-­Japanese War, an el­derly ­mother shouts to her son aboard a ship that is leaving the port, “Do not worry about the ­family. Serve His Majesty well!” See, Toshio Nakauchi, Gunkoku bidan to kyōkasho (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988), 64–72. 19. Nakauchi, Gunkoku bidan to kyōkasho, 63–64. 20. Masanao Kano, Senzen, “ie” no shisō (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1983), 178–203. 21. Alan Tansman reads the film as a manifestation of fascist aesthetics. See, “Sentimental Fascism on Screen: M ­ other u ­ nder the Eyelids,” in Aesthetics of Japa­nese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 169–193. 22. See, Shigeri Yamataka, Boshi fukushi yonjū nen (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2001), 34, 45; Vera C. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment, and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 105. 23. Gregory Pflugfelder, “Fujin sanseiken saikō,” in Kakudai suru modanitī, ed. Shunʾya Yoshimi et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 75–76. 24. On Kokufu, see Tadatoshi Fujii, Kokubō fujinkai: Hinomaru to kappōgi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1985); Sandra Wilson, “Mobilizing W ­ omen in Inter-­War Japan: The National Defense W ­ omen’s Association and the Manchurian Crisis,” Gender and History 7, no. 2 (1995): 295–314. A Manchurian branch was established in 1938, according to Dai nippon kokubō fujinkai sōhonbu, ed. Dainippon kokubō fujinkai jūnenshi (Tokyo: Dainippon kokubō fujinkai, 1943), 524–540. The following articles are among the very rare studies on this branch: Jinghui Liu, “ ‘Manshūkoku’ ni okeru fujin dantai,” in Shokuminchi to sensō sekinin, ed. Hayakawa Noriyo (Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2005), 101–113; Masanao Kuranashi, “Sensō chū no shinbun nado kara mieru sensō to kurashi: Chūgoku sensen ni okeru kokubō fujinkai, josei no sensō kyōryoku,” Peace Aichi Mail Magazine, vol. 30 (May 26, 2012), http://­www​.­peace​-­aichi​.­com​/­piace​_­aichi​/­201205​/­vol​_­30​-­9​.­html, accessed August 14, 2015; Masanao Kuranashi, “Sensō chū no shinbun nado kara mieru sensō to kurashi: Kokubō fujinkai in nyūkaishita baishunfu tachi,” Peace Aichi Mail Magazine, vol. 31 (June 25, 2012), http://­www​.­peace​-­aichi​.­com​/­piace​_­aichi​/­201206​/­vol​_­31​-­9​.­html#top, accessed August 14, 2015. 25. Quoted by Kano, Senzen “ie” no shisō, 102. 26. Marshall McLuhan, “Clothing,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 121. 27. See the eve­ning edition of Asahi shinbun, July 15, 1937. Shōchiku theater actresses also formed their own branch in Kyoto in 1937. Kokuritsu gekijō chōsa yōseibu, Kindai kabuki nenpyō: Kyōto hen, vol. 10 (Tokyo: Yagi shoten, 2004), 209. 28. Numerous oral histories on Kokufu activities reveal that many members enjoyed and ­were proud of their new experiences of leadership, interactions with public figures

234 NOTES TO PAGES 79–84

and military personnel, and strong sense of achievement. See, Mikiko Kōjiya, Sensō o ikita onna tachi: Shōgen Kokubō fujinkai (Tokyo: Mineruva shobō, 1985); Sōka gakkai fujin heiwa iinkai, Kappōgi no jūgo (Tokyo: Daisan bunmeisha, 1987). 29. Ichikawa also notes that the group’s gathering could be seen as an embodiment of ­women’s liberation (fujin kaihō). See Fusae Ichikawa, Ichikawa Fusae jiden: Senzen (Tokyo: Shinjuku shobō, 1974), 435. 30. Fujii, Kokubō fujinkai, 130–132, 204. 31. The historian Furukawa Takashisa provides rare research and analy­sis that is most informative for understanding t­hese hits. See Takahisa Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga: Hitobito wa kokusaku eiga o mitaka (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2003), 86–94. 32. Ginoza, Modan raifu to sensō, 220. 33. The original novel was already translated into Japa­nese in 1928 by Mori Iwao, who becomes a Tōhō producer of A ­Mother’s ­Music. See Iwao Mori, ed. Sutera darasu/ra boēmu (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1928). 34. It is unlikely that the filmmaking of A ­Mother’s ­Music has much to do with the con­ temporary Hollywood hit Stella Dallas (directed by King Vidor, starring Barbara Stanwyck, 1937), since the Japa­nese film was released in December 1937 but Vidor’s version was not released in Japan ­until 1938. 35. Takeda discusses readers’ enthusiasm based on analy­sis of the letters to the magazine. See Shiho Takeda, “Sannin no musume to rokunin no haha: ‘Sutera darasu’ to ‘Haha no kyoku,’ ” Gakushūin daigaku nihongo nihon bungaku 8 (2012): 55–56. Also, director Yamamoto recollects that he saw ­people who came to see the film surrounding the building of the four-­thousand-­seat Nihon gekijō theater in three rows. He also recalls that while he was occasionally interrogated by the special thought police b ­ ecause of his communist po­liti­cal inclinations, the officer immediately treated him differently as soon as he found out that Yamamoto was the director of this film. This interrogator told him that he ­couldn’t help crying and had already been to see the film twice. Satsuo Yamamoto, Watashi no eiga jinsei (Tokyo: Shin nihon shuppansha, 1984), 63–65. 36. In contrast with somewhat harsh descriptions of Oine’s sloppiness and accent by Yoshiya, in alignment with the original novel, Oine in the film is depicted as a demure, vulnerable ­woman. As for the m ­ usic referered to in the title of the novel and the film, Oine’s ­music is popu­lar songs or naniwabushi, in contrast with the classical ­music of Kaoru and Keiko in Yoshiya’s novel. However, the m ­ usic (kyoku) of the film title also clearly refers to Felix Mendelssohn’s “Venetianisches Gondellied,” which Keiko plays and Oine appreciates and recognizes. 37. Viviani, “Who Is Without Sin,” 176–177. 38. Ginoza, Mondan raifu to sensō, 146–155. 39. For the film, see, Janine Hansen, “Celluloid Competition: German-­Japanese Film Relations 1929–1945,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 187–197; Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 126–131. 40. Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 20, 86. 41. Sandra Wilson, “­Family or State? Nation, Wars and Gender in Japan, 1937–45,” Critical Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2006): 209–238. 42. Anna Siomopoulos, Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams (New York: Routledge, 2012), 62. 43. Though the first installment was based on a popu­lar novel serialized in a ­woman’s magazine, the script for the second installment was written by Shōchiku staff writers so that the sequel was made quicker. Shirō Kido, Nihon eiga den (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū shinsha, 1956), 174.

NOTES TO PAGES 85–92

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44. According to an advertisement in the newspaper Asahi shinbun (July 4, 1940), the kaishūhen ran 2.5 hours. 45. The studio director Kido recollects that the uniform was modeled ­after the one in St. Luke’s International Hospital (Seiruka kokusai byōin) in Tokyo, which was seen favorably by the viewers. Kido, Nihon eiga den, 172. The film exploits and fetishizes the nurse’s uniform, but it also vaguely brings into it an image of a Westernized, desirable outfit for a working person, especially for ­women, by introducing this par­tic­u­lar hospital. 46. Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 94. 47. “Eigakan keikyō chōsa,” Kinema junpō, December 21, 1939, 88. 48. “Eigakan keikyō chōsa,” Kinema junpō, May 21, 1939, 95. On Kokusai gekijō, Takeomi Nagayama, ed., Shōchiku hyaku nen shi, honshi (Tokyo: Shōchiku kabushiki gaisha, 1996), 226. 49. “Eigakan keikyō chōsa,” Kinema junpō, June 21, 1939, 95. 50. Hideo Tsumura, “Shōchiku eiga ron,” Kinema junpō, May 10, 1939, 10–11; “Eigahyō,” Kokumin shinbun, November 18, 1939, quoted by Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 93. 51. For the further elaboration on the term’s history, see Hikari Hori, “Gender and Sexuality,” in Japa­nese Cinema Book, ed. Hideaki Fujiki and Philip Alastair (London: British Film Institute, forthcoming). 52. Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japa­nese Cinema ­under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1992), 170. 53. Kido, Nihon eiga den. 54. Kido, Nihon eiga den, 53–54. 55. Shirō Kido, “Eiga no saidai shimei wa kokumin goraku,” Kinema junpō, September 1, 1939, 8–9; Shirō Kido, “Fujin kyaku o wasureruna,” Eiga junpō, January 1, 1941, 30–31. 56. Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 21. 57. A poll taken in Tokyo at theaters in Shibuya and Ginza for a certain Shōchiku film shows the female viewer’s percentage of the audience as 41.1 ­percent and 45.67 ­percent, respectively. The analy­sis states, “The peculiar tendency of this exhibition is the definite predominance of female viewers” (kono kōgyō ni mirareta tokushuna keikō wa fujin kankyaku no danzen yūsei). See “Kankyaku dōtai chōsa,” Eiga junpō, December 1, 1941, 54–56. 58. See, Hikari Hori, “Eiga o mirukoto to katarukoto: Mizoguchi Kenji ‘Yoru no onna tachi’ (1948) o meguru hihyō, jendā, kankyaku,” Eizōgaku 68 (2002): 55. 59. For example, Asahi shinbun July 4, 1940, eve­ning edition. 60. Carole Cavanaugh, “Unwriting the Female Persona in Osaka Elegy and The Life of Oharu,” in Mizoguchi the Master, ed. Gerald O’Grady (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 1996), 64–65. In the context of Hollywood film, Jackie Stacey’s examination of female audiences’ fascination with actresses is illuminating and resonates with Cavanaugh’s arguments. See “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in Star-­Audience Relations,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 196–209. 61. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 78–81. 62. The number of film productions kept decreasing from 500 (1941) to 250 (1941), then 96 (1942), 63 (1943), 46(1944), 35 (1945), and 67 (1946). The numbers of film attendances ­were also decreasing, from 510,090,000 (1942), to 342,260,000 (1943) and to 315,070,000 (1944). See Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 20. 63. Reiko Ikegawa, “ ‘Seisen’ ronri no kōchiku,” in Hito wa naze chibusa o motomerunoka, ed. Akiko Yamasaki et al. (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2012), 104. 64. Nihon bungaku hōkokukai hen, “Kaisetsu,” in Nihon no haha (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 2005 [1943]), 4.

236 NOTES TO PAGES 92–97

65. See, Miyake, “Doubling Expectations,” 277–281. The population policy is also elucidated in nonfiction film genres. For example, The Song of Marriage March (Kekkon shingun fu; produced by Dentsū eiga seisakusho, 1943, preserved in Tokyo National Film Center) gives a concise view of the state policy. The film opens with a map of East Asia and scenes of military aircraft. It introduces marriage counseling ser­v ices and encourage ­simple, economized wedding ceremonies. The film speaks to both genders, and the female director of a marriage counseling ser­v ice tells a ­couple in the film, “It is not [a] good idea to get married late. . . . ​We are fighting a war. . . . ​It is a citizen’s duty to get married even if it is not con­ve­nient for you.” The film ends with a shot of a m ­ other pig whose numerous piglets are suckling at her breasts, accompanied by the narration, “It is the path of ser­v ice to the state to bear five ­children.” 66. High, Imperial Screen, 251. 67. Thomas R. H. Havens, “­Women and War in Japan, 1937–45,” American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (1975): 913–934; Ueno suggests that France, Germany, Italy, and Japan shared efforts to segregate w ­ omen from the workforce and military ser­v ices for the state pronatalist interests during World War II. See Chizuko Ueno, Nashonaraizumu to jendā, new edition (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998), 57–67. 68. The total number of working w ­ omen r­ ose by 50 ­percent in the United States. The ­women in the civilian workforce ­rose from 38 ­percent in 1940 to 53 ­percent in 1942 in the Soviet Union, and from 37.4 ­percent in 1939 to 52.5 ­percent in 1944 in Germany. The most systematic l­abor conscription of Britain made w ­ omen between twenty and fifty years old liable for civilian war ser­v ice, and 2.2 million of the 2.8 million new British workers during the war ­were w ­ omen. Thomas R. H. Havens, “­Women and War in Japan,” 917–918. 69. Lant, Blackout, 11. 70. High, Imperial Screen, 252. 71. On the paper theater, also see Taketoshi Yamamoto, Kamishibai: Machikado no media (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2000); Kōji Kata, Kamishibai Shōwa shi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004); Eric P. Nash, Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japa­nese Paper Theater (New York: Abrams, 2009); Sharalyn Orbaugh, Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen Year War (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 72. Sharalyn Orbaugh, Japa­nese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 266–271. 73. Hisashi Yamanaka, “Kaigun shikan e no akogare: Iwata Toyoo ‘Kaigun’,” in Kachinuku bokura shōkokumin: Shōnen gunji aikoku shōsetsu no sekai, ed. Hisashi Yamanaka and Akira Yamamoto (Kyoto: Sekai shisō sha, 1985), 209. Takano Etsuko (1929–2013), one of the found­ers of Tokyo W ­ omen’s Film Festival (1985–2012), also recalls that she was led to aspire to serve the country as a soldier by reading a novel. She memorized the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers (gunjin chokuyu) and hoped to enter military training school. Etsuko Takano, Watashi no shinema raifu (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1987), 36. 74. In this connection, ­father films, so to speak, such as ­There Was a ­Father (Chichi ariki; directed by Ozu Yasujiro, 1942) and ­Mother Never Dies, are examples of a gender-­ bending variation of the ­mother film in which ­fathers raise their sons properly as a single parent. I am grateful to Ikegawa Reiko for drawing my attention to this twist. 75. High, Imperial Screen, 402. 76. Freda Freiberg, “Genre and Gender in World War II Japa­nese Feature Film: ‘China Night’ (1940),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Tele­vi­sion 12, no. 3 (1992): 247–248; Akira Shimizu, “War and Cinema in Japan” in Japan/America Film Wars: World War II Propaganda and Its Cultural Contexts, ed. Abé Mark Nornes and Yukio Fukushima (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1994), 47; Shōtarō Yasuoka, Watashi no 20-­seiki (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1999), 152; Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 99. 77. “Gekieiga kikaku shōkai,” Nihon eiga, October 15, 1944, 463.

NOTES TO PAGES 98–105

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78. The depiction of difficult parting from Waka’s side resonates with ­mother’s sacrifice and suffering that are conventions of the genre, but the scene is structured so that the pathos was not central to the ending. Katsuhito Inomata, Nihon eiga meisaku zenshi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Shakai shisōsha, 1974), 159. 79. The colonial Korean film Straits of Chosun (directed by Park Ki-­chae, 1943) created a similar sequence, in this case with marching Korean soldiers. Though it is hard to establish the interaction between this film and Kinoshita’s directorship, it is worth noting the striking parallel. Park’s film aims to promote the draft of Korean males into the Japa­ nese military by deploying a f­amily melodrama. A prodigal son of a Korean respectable ­family marries a w ­ oman of lower social rank, but he decides to prove himself by joining the Japa­nese military. When the protagonist marches to leave for the station to be sent to the front line, his wife sees him off holding her baby in her arms and tries to walk alongside the march on the crowded street without being noticed by him. 80. Shimizu, “War and Cinema in Japan,” 47. Though both Shimizu and director Kinoshita recollect that the original scenario written by Ikeda Tadao was one sentence and the director created a nine-­minute sequence, the scenario describes the scene with more details in two pages. See, Hideo Osabe, Tensai kantoku Kinoshita Keisuke (Tokyo: Shinchō sha, 2005), 160–161. 81. High, Imperial Screen, 402. 82. Nihon eiga, quoted by Shimizu, “War and Cinema in Japan,” 47. 83. Yasuoka, Watashi no 20-­seiki, 152. 84. “Saikin eiga hyō,” Nihon eiga, January 1945, 8; quoted by High, Imperial Screen, 402. 85. High, Imperial Screen, 393. 86. Kano, Senzen “ie” no shisō, 199. 87. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 79. 88. Kentarō Awaya, Jūgonen sensōki no seiji to shakai (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1995), 158. 89. Nobuhiko Murakami, Nihon no fujin mondai (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1978), 176– 177; 7 ­percent in May 1944, see Miyake, “Doubling Expectations,” 289, n. 50. 90. Due to the in­effec­tive­ness of the 1943 ordinance, the Ordinance of the ­Women’s Volunteer Corps (Joshi teishintai rei) was introduced in August 1944. The new ordinance implemented penalties for ­those who refused to join the corps and targeted ­women from ages twelve to forty. However, the ambiguous exemption of w ­ omen who are “pivotal to the home” (katei seikatsu no konjiku) remained in effect through the end of the war. Yōko Sasaki, Sōryokusen to josei heishi (Tokyo: Seikyū sha, 2001), 39. 91. Tadashi Iijima, Senchū eiga shi, shiki (Tokyo: MG Shuppan, 1984), 292. Though the notion of “culture film” (bunka eiga) is complicated, I ­will tentatively use “documentary film” as a translation for it in this context. For further discussion on the term, see chapter 3 of this book. Also see, Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 26; High, Imperial Screen, 421. 92. Lant, Blackout, 34. 93. Iijima, Senchū eiga shi, shiki, 275. 94. Other examples include Gentle Sex (directed by Leslie Howard, 1943, UK), on Auxiliary Territorial Ser­v ice in E ­ ngland; Keep Your Powder Dry (directed by Edward Buzzell, 1945, USA), on the W ­ omen’s Army Corps; Stage Door Canteen Stage (directed by Frank Borage, 1943, USA), shot in the famed New York City restaurant and nightclub for US and Allied ser­v icemen. 95. Although in terms of the box office it was not a huge commercial success, the film was received favorably, according to Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 223–224. 96. Contrary to the poorly or­ga­nized w ­ omen’s corps in Japan, ­these British auxiliary forces w ­ ere structured according to the existing organ­ization of the military. The female

238 NOTES TO PAGES 106–114

officer’s uniforms of the Wrens, for example, w ­ ere based on t­ hose worn by their male officer equivalents. They had a total of ninety ratings and fifty officer levels, and at the peak seventy-­five thousand ­women served by the late 1940s. Carol Harris, ­Women at War: In Uniform, 1939–1945 (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2001), 94. 97. To add a note, ­there are also similarities between war­time ­England and Japan socie­ ties to make the comparison of their films compelling. For instance, the British royal and Japa­nese imperial families serve as symbols of the unity of the state. The participation of female royalty in war efforts encourages and honors the work of ­women in ­England. An oral history rec­ords how the members of the Auxiliary Territorial Ser­v ice ­were encouraged and felt proud of their work when Princess Elizabeth joined the ser­v ice. See, Harris, ­Women at War, 45–50. In Japan, princesses often served as honorary presidents of w ­ omen’s national organ­izations, for example, Princess Higashikuni served as the Greater Japan Federated W ­ omen’s Association (Nippu). On the other hand, a key difference is that ­England is known for its early and efficient deployment of w ­ omen during World War II, enabled by the pre­ce­dent of ­women’s voluntary military work during World War I. 98. Higson, Waving the Flag, 204. 99. A similar conflation of the genres is also noted by Ruth Ben-­Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 76. 100. One of the songs is “Young Ea­gle’s Song” (Wakawashi no uta) from the 1943 film ­Toward the Decisive ­Battle in the Sky, which topped the charts. Yoshihiro Kurata, Nihon rekōdo bunkashi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006), 249. 101. To balance off the masculinization of female characters, US and British mobilization films deploy romance between ­women and male soldiers. By the emphasis on heteronormative relations in the narrative, conventional (domestic and subservient) femininities are ensured. 102. Reiko Ikegawa, “ ‘Kita no sannin’ kō,” Jinbun shakaigaku kenkyū nenpō (Keiwa gakuen daigaku) 10 (2012): 47–59. 103. Sasaki, Sōryokusen to josei heishi, 38–39. 104. The National Police Reserve (Keisatsu yobitai), which was the pre­de­ces­sor of Japan Self Defense Forces (Jieitai), employed w ­ omen as nurses already in 1950. Female officers ­were introduced in 1968. Fumika Satō, Gunji soshiki to jendā: jieitai no joseitachi (Tokyo: Keiō gijuku daigaku shuppankai, 2004), 104–106, 121. 105. Ikegawa, “ ‘Kita no sannin’ kō,” 57. 106. “­Women Communication Operators in Action” (Katsuyaku suru joshi tsūshintai in) in newsreel Nippon News, vol. 154 (May 18, 1943). 107. It was not u ­ ntil 1945 that the Japa­nese state conceived of w ­ omen as combatants, as materialized in the ­People’s Patriotic Volunteer Corps (Kokumin giyu heiho, June 1945). This was targeted at ­women ages seventeen to forty, but no arms or food rations or uniforms ­were provided, except for a six-­by-­seven-­centimeter white cloth with the letter “war,” which was meant to be worn on civilian clothes. This absolute minimalism showed the desperation attendant on the presumed forthcoming US landing on mainland Japan. Sasaki, Sōryokusen to joseiheishi, 139; Ikegawa, “ ‘Kita no sannin’ kō,” 56–57. 108. Ikegawa, “ ‘Kita no sannin’ kō,” 56–57. 109. A plot summary is included in Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo, 170–171. 3. THE POLITICS OF JAPA­N ESE DOCUMENTARY FILM

1. The term “scenario writer” is an En­glish literal transcription of shinario raitā, the title ­adopted in Japa­nese filmmaking to refer to a screenplay writer in both dramatic entertainment film and documentary film. For the case of Atsugi, the job includes conceiving a documentary film, scriptwriting, researching on the topic of the film, and assisting

NOTES TO PAGES 115–119

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location shooting. Although the Japa­nese abbreviated name by which the Proletarian Film League was known is correctly “Purokino,” to be consistent with established usage in Anglophone scholarship it is rendered h ­ ere and below as “Prokino.” 2. For the importance of the law and the impact of amendments to it, see Yasuhiro Okudaira, Chian ijihō shōshi (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1977). 3. Shinkō eiga introduced a variety of issues, from reviews of Eu­ro­pean and American films to discussions of “­Women and Soviet Film” and censorship to reviews of what was called “tendency film” (keikō eiga). 4. Akira Iwasaki, Nihon eiga shishi (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1977), 2. 5. It is Kamei Fumio who is canonized as the representative Japa­nese documentary filmmaker of the era. Atsugi is briefly mentioned in surveys of Japa­nese documentary film history: Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi (Tokyo: Kagyūsha, 1979); Shinkichi Noda, Nihon dokyumentarī eiga zenshi (Tokyo: Shakai shisōsha, 1984); Tadao Sāto, Nihon eiga shi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995); Peter B. High, Imperial Screen: Japa­nese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Abé Mark Nornes, Japa­nese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Atsugi’s works are examined extensively in the following: Hikari Hori, “Atsugi Taka to Aru hobo no kiroku: Senjikano ‘hataraku josei’ tachi to teikō no hyōgen o megutte,” Eizōgaku 66 (2001): 23–39; Ronald Loftus, “Depicting ­Women: The Memoirs and Documentary Films of Atsugi Taka,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 7 (March 2002), http://­intersections​.­anu​.­edu​.­au​/­issue7​ /­loftus​.­html, accessed January 19, 2017; Hikari Hori, “Karada de kaita shinario,” ed. Ayako Saitō and Inuhiko Yomota, Eiga to shintai/sei (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2006), 111–135. 6. Taka Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo no kaisō (Tokyo: Domesu shuppan, 1991), 9–12. 7. Atsugi Taka was interviewed by documentary filmmaker Tokieda Toshie in August and September 1986. I am grateful to the late Tokieda Toshie, who kindly shared with me the recorded tapes and allowed me to transcribe them. The entire transcription is included as an appendix to my dissertation, “Engendering Japa­nese Film History: ­Women’s Activism, Expression, and Re­sis­tance from the 1930s to the 1990s” (PhD diss., Gakushuin University, 2004). 8. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo, 97. 9. According to the Atsugi/Tokieda interview, the title was given by publisher Daiichi geibunsha. It published numerous film-­related books. For the transcription of the Atsugi/ Tokieda interview, see Hori, appendix of “Engendering Japa­nese Film History,” 55–131. 10. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo, 1991, 143. 11. For Atsugi’s discussion of ­women and work, see Soredemo nao watashi wa hataraku (Tokyo: Meijitosho shuppan, 1966). 12. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo, 244. 13. For a detailed account of Prokino and its orga­nizational structure, see Nornes, Japa­ nese Documentary Film, 19–47. 14. On the small-­gauge film, see, Mika Tomita, “Aspects of Small-­Gauge Film in Interwar Japan” (in En­glish), in Kyoto imēji: Bunka shigen to kyoto bunka, ed. Tomita Mika et al. (Kyoto: Nakanishiya shuppan, 2012), 223–239. 15. Though the complete Prokino films are not extant, a collection of archival footage, Purokino sakuhin shū (DVD), is available with commentaries by Abé Markus Nornes et al. from Rikka shuppan, 2013. Tadao Sāto also introduces the topics of Prokino News (Purokino nyūsu), vol.7 in Nihon eiga shi, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), 307–308. 16. The Japa­nese translation was based on the German translation of the original. Iwasaki’s translation appeared first in the film magazine Kinema junpō, and then was published together with other works in his Eiga geijutsu shi (Tokyo: Geibunshoin, 1930).

240 NOTES TO PAGES 120–121

17. Man with a Movie Camera was shown in the 1930s, according to Taihei Imamura, Sensō to eiga, reprint (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 1991), 156 (originally published in Kyoto: Daiichi geibunsha, 1942). 18. Shinsaku Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi (Tokyo: Gōdō shuppan, 1986), 67. Also an announcement of the film was run on the back cover of the September, October, and November/December 1930 issues of the periodical Puroretaria eiga. 19. Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 151. Turksib was also advertised in the October 1930 issue of Puroretaria eiga. 20. Hisaji Sawa, “Kōshūkai deno deai,” in Shōwa shoki sayoku eiga zasshi bekkan, ed. Purokino o kiroku suru kai (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981), 53; Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 150. 21. Atsugi’s translation suggests that A ­Simple Case was shown in Japan, as the film was introduced with a Japa­nese title as Ningen banzai (See, Taka Atsugi, trans., Paul Rotha, Bunka eiga ron, [Kyoto: Daiichi geibunsha, 1938], 139). One of the former Prokino members, Kataoka, notes that he or­ga­nized screenings of Soviet films in Kōchi Prefecture, such as Storm over Asia, Turksib, and In Spring. See Kaoru Kataoka, “Kōchi no purokino,” in Shōwa shoki sayoku eiga zasshi bekkan, ed. Purokino o kiroku suru kai (Tokyo: Senki fukkokuban kankōkai, 1981), 43. Sōshichi Tomita also notes that he saw Potemkin, Ekk’s Road to Life and Kaufman’s In Spring. See “Korekara no koto,” in Shōwa shoki sayoku eiga zasshi bekkan, ed. Purokino o kiroku suru kai (Tokyo: Senki fukkokuban kankōkai, 1981), 60. However, Potemkin was not screened in Japan ­until 1959, so I suspect that Tomita’s memory is not correct regarding this film. For Sniper, it was shown and popu­lar in Japan according to Iwasaki. See Iwasaki, Nihon eiga shishi, 55. 22. One of the former members Takahashi was also supposed to translate the inter-­ titles for Earth (directed by Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930), as he had studied Rus­sian in college. However, he found out at the last minute that the print they had received was in Ukrainian, so he made up his own inter-­titles. Anyway, the film was heavi­ly reedited by censors. Nobuhiko Takahashi, “Purokino no omoide,” in Shōwa shoki sayoku eiga zasshi bekkan, ed. Purokino o kiroku suru kai (Tokyo: Senki fukkokuban kankōkai, 1981), 56. 23. See Kazuo Yamada, “Kankyaku undō toshiteno ‘Senkan pochomukin’ jōei undō,” Kiroku eiga (October 1959): 26–29. 24. Taka Atsugi et al., “Zadan kai purokino no katsudō,” Kikan gendai to shisō 19 (1975): 99–100. 25. Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi,71–72. 26. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 89. In two of his books, Film Technique (1933) and Film Acting (1935), written for Soviet film classes and initially published outside the Soviet Union in 1929, Pudovkin explained his princi­ples of screenplay writing, directing, acting, and editing. Kitagawa recalls that Pudovkin’s theory was very influential among the Prokino members. See Atsugi et al., “Zadan kai purokino no katsudō,” 99. 27. Additionally, Eu­ro­pean and American trade magazines and film journals and general magazines ­were subscribed to and circulated in Japan. Atsugi recalled that she and her friends from her college summarized a variety of American ­women’s magazines for Kikuchi Kan. See Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 78–79. Kitagawa subscribed to the following periodicals: from the United States, the communist The New Masses and Experimental Film (this might be Experimental Cinema: A Monthly Projecting Impor­tant International Film Manifestations, Philadelphia, Penn.); from Germany, Film und Folk (unknown), Arbeiterbühne und Film, and the German edition of USSR Neue Russland (unknown). He added to the list another communist publication, Jugend International (unknown), from which Kitagawa remembered one of the writers proposing the deployment of small-­gauge cam-

NOTES TO PAGES 121–124

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eras, at a time when Prokino already used them. See, Tetsuo Kitagawa, “Kokusai rentai no koto nado,” in Shōwa shoki sayoku eiga zasshi bekkan, ed. Purokino o kiroku suru kai (Tokyo: Senki fukkokuban kankōkai, 1981), 45. As another example, film critic and Asahi shinbun journalist Tsumura Hideo demonstrates his reading of the US trade paper Motion Picture Herald. See Hideo Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō (Tokyo: Koyama shoten, 1940), 147. 28. Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 80. 29. Tendency films such as Mizoguchi’s Metropolitan Symphony (Tokai kōkyōgaku, 1929) and What Made Her Do It? (Nani ga kanojo o sō saseta ka) are reviewed in the Prokino journal as follows: Fusao Hayashi et al., “Tokai kōkyōgaku,” Shinkō eiga (January 1930): 112–127; Tomoyoshi Murayama et al. “Gappyō Kanojo,” Shinkō eiga (March 1930): 134–143. 30. Sumida River portrayed p ­ eople who lived on the river in the time of economic depression, and ­Children captured working-­class c­ hildren’s play time. Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 81, 84. 31. Vari­ous memoirs of this event interestingly omit the Hollywood film, excepting Namiki. Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 87–88. On the animation, see Tomofumi Yoshimi, “Kage’e animēshon ‘Entotsuya Perō’ to purokino: 1930 nendai no jishuseisaku animēshon no ichi kōsatsu,” Ritsumeikan gengo bunka kenkyū 23, no. 3 (2012): 32, n. 20. 32. Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 87. As the additional note, the “May Day” song’s lyric was famous for the opening phrase, “Listen, workers of the world” (Kike bankoku no rōdōsha), created by ­labor ­union member Oba Isamu. However, it was ironically sung in the melody of an existing military song. Nobuo Komoda, Nihon ryūkōka shi (Tokyo: Shakaishisōsha, 1970), 51, 247. 33. Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 88. 34. Hikaru Yamanouchi, “ ‘Hariuddo seibatsu’ no sunappu shotto ni tsuite,” Shinkō eiga (June 1930): 27–78; Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 88–89; Tetsuo Kitagawa, “Kokusai rentai no koto nado,” 46. 35. See, Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi, 115; Sāto, Nihon eiga shi, vol. 1, 306–307. 36. Tokiko Matsuda, Kaisō no mori (Tokyo: Shin nihon shuppansha, 1979), 162–163, 170–171. 37. The Prokino members studied Soviet film theory, along with information from Okada Sōzō (a.k.a. Yamanouchi Hikaru) and film director Kinugasa Teinosuke, who travelled to Rus­sia and became familiar with directors such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin and their works. They nurtured an ideal for their own work inspired by the USSR directors. Teinosuke Kinugasa, Waga eiga no seishun: Nihon eigashi no ichi sokumen (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1977), 101–116. 38. Sāto, Nihon eiga shi, vol. 1, 379–394. 39. Fumio Kamei, Tatakau eiga: Dokyumentarisuto no Shōwa shi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), 11–20. Atsugi was impressed by him, but judging from her memoir she d ­ idn’t work closely with him. On Kamei, see also Nornes, Japa­nese Documentary Film, 148–182. 40. Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi, 106–107. 41. Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi, 77–79. 42. Tōwa shōji gōshi gaisha shashi, Tōwa shōji gōshi gaisha, 1942, 12, quoted by Jinshi Fujii, “Bunka suru eiga: Shōwa jūnendai ni okeru bunka eiga no gensetsu bunseki,” Eizōgaku 66 (2001): 6. 43. “Tōwa haikyū sakuhin risuto, 1928–1968,” in Tōwa no 40-­nen, 1928–68, ed. Tōwa no 40-­nen henshūshitsu (Tokyo: Tōwa kabushiki gaisha, 1968), 4–18; Tōwa shōji gōshi gaisha shashi, 61–62, quoted by Fujii, “Bunka suru eiga,” 20, n. 5.

242 NOTES TO PAGES 125–129

44. Atsuhiro Fujioka, “Nyūsu eiga kan ‘tanjōki’ no kōgyō to sono kinō,” Eizōgaku 68 (2002): 30, 34–35; Tanaka, Nihon kyōiku eiga hattatsu shi, 135; Akimitsu Yoshimoto, “Hokushin jihen to rajio to shinbun to tōkī nyūsu,” Kaizō (September 1937): 113–121. 45. Fujioka, “Nyūsu eiga kan,” 44, n. 10. Also, a popu­lar hit song of 1937 sung by Fujiyama Ichirō and composed by Koga Masao includes a phrase, “when we have tea or see the news(reel)” (ocha o nondemo, nyūsu o mitemo), which treats ­these pastime activities in parallel. 46. Akiko Takeyama, “Media ibento to shiteno nyūsu eiga,” in Senjiki nihon no media ibento, ed. Toshihiro Tsuganesawa and Teruo Ariyama (Kyoto: Sekai shisō sha, 1998), 84–87. 47. Quoted by Takeyama, “Media ibento to shiteno nyūsu eiga,” 86. 48. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 103. 49. Iwasaki, Eiga to genjitsu (Tokyo: Shun’yōdo shoten, 1939), 29–30. 50. Tsumura was in charge of an Asahi shinbun film column ­under the pen name of Q. In addition to publishing numerous film reviews and essays, he was also one of the participants in the famous roundtable on “overcoming modernity” (kindai no chōkoku) and a pro-­state critic. 51. Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō, 110. 52. Iwasaki, Eiga to genjitsu, 33. Abé Mark Nornes points out that the term appeared as early as 1933. See, Abé Mark Nornes, “Pōru Rūta/Paul Rotha and the Politics of Translation,” Cinema Journal 38, no. 3 (1999): 92. Film scholar Fujii Jinshi also pres­ents the discursive constellation of the deployment of the word. Fujii, “Bunka suru eiga,” 5–22. 53. Atsuko Katō, Sōdoin taisei to eiga (Shin’yōsha, 2003), 50–52. 54. According to the guidebook, if a film’s structure requires the deployment of actors and dramatic per­for­mance in part, the production com­pany could still identify it with the category of bunka eiga. See, Tōka Kuwano, Hayawakari eigahō kaisetsu (Tokyo: Dōmei engei tsūshinsha, 1939), 91. 55. Taihei Imamura, Kiroku eiga ron (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 1991), 62–63 (originally published in Kyoto: Daiichi geibunsha, 1940); Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō, 121. Both agree that “documentary film” can be translated as kiroku eiga (recording film), rather than as bunka eiga. 56. Imamura, Kiroku eiga ron, 53, 55, 73, 86; “Tōwa haikyū sakuhin risto, 1928–68,” in Tōwa no 40-­nen, 10, 17. 57. Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō, 121. 58. Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), no pagination. Since I was not able to access the 1935 edition of the book, I consulted the 1939 edition. 59. Rotha’s letter to Erik Knight, November 8, 1938, quoted by Nornes, “Pōru Rūta/ Paul Rotha,” 101. 60. Pabst’s Comradeship was screened in Japan in 1932. On the screening of the film in the context of Prokino production, see, Kōmei Amemiya, “Kaigai tankō eiga kara no shiten: Kameradeschaft ron,” Ritsumeikan gengo bunka kenkyū 22, no. 2 (2010): 46, n. 1. The conflation of the genre identities of documentary and dramatic films by Rotha is telling, as war­time British documentary films incorporated dramatization with acting. Examples include Night Shift (directed by J. D. Chambers, 1942), produced by Rotha, and They Also Serve (directed by Ruby Grierson, 1940). According to Higson, this conflation of genres was intentional and was explic­itly promoted by Rotha in war­time Britain. See, Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 218. 61. Rotha, Documentary Film, 1939, 117–119, 124. 62. As a former Prokino member and a student of Marxism, Atsugi had to pi­lot her works so that she would not invite intervention from the special police, as she was already ­under surveillance due to her own po­liti­cal stance and that of her close friends, such as

NOTES TO PAGES 129–131

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novelists Miyamoto Yuriko and Sata Ineko. See Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo, 105–110. Nornes provides a careful and insightful examination of vari­ous translations of Rotha’s book, which appealed to ­people of very dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal inclinations, from the leftist Atsugi to Sekino Yoshio of the Tokyo city government. In par­tic­ul­ar, the dif­fer­ent wordings of the Atsugi and Sekino translations reveal their dif­fer­ent social and ideological standpoints. See, Abé Mark Nornes, “Pōru Rūta/Paul Rotha,” 91–108. 63. Kamei et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kyō o kataru zadankai,” Bunka eiga kenkyū (February 1940): 20. 64. Kamei et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kyō o kataru zadankai,” 17–18. Also, see Iwasaki, Eiga to genjitsu, 41. Though they ­were not included in the roundtable, ­there ­were other documentary filmmakers whose names should be noted, even though they are not necessarily associated with readership of Rotha: Akutagawa Kōzō, who directed films for Manchurian Railroad Com­pany, was a writer and amateur filmmaker; Shimomura Kanefumi, who directed One Day in a Tideland (Aruhi no higata, Riken studio, 1940), was a photographer, and Sakane Tazuko was director of the dramatic film New Clothing (Hatsu sugata, Daiichi eiga, 1936) and the nonfiction Fellow Patriots of North (Kitano dōhō, Riken studio, 1942). See Sāto, Nihon eiga shi, vol. 2, 89–90. 65. Rotha, Documentary Film, 1939, 195; Atsugi, trans., Bunka eiga, 223. 66. Kamei’s “cameraman-­v iewfinder debate” (kyameraman rūpe ronsō) with cinematographer Miki Shigeru is an example of filmmakers’ quest to establish the genre and its theories and practices. In the roundtable, Kamei agreed with Rotha’s claim (Rotha, Documentary Film, 1939, 154–155/Atsugi, trans., Bunka eiga, 174–175) that the director is responsible to produce the final product by taking up the task of editing and finishing a film, and stressed the importance of directors over cinematographers. Documentary filmmaking conventions in the late 1930s did not necessarily require the director’s presence for location shooting, especially when overseas. The outline of film was planned in advance in the studio, a rough scenario was written, and the cameraman was supposed to collect footage by following instructions. However, this practice was rapidly changing around the time that Kamei participated the above-­mentioned roundtable. Not only directors, but scenario writers as well ­were sent on location overseas, such as in Manchuria or Taiwan. It is ­under ­these circumstances that Kamei advocated for the director as the ultimate creator of film production and argued against Miki’s emphasis on the importance of the cinematographer. See, Kamei et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kyō o kataru zadankai,” 24. On the “cameraman-­v iewfinder debate,” see High, “The ‘Kamei Fumio Case,’ ” in Imperial Screen, 100–114; and the chapter on Kamei Fumio in Nornes, Japa­nese Documentary Film, 148–182. 67. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-­Fiction Film, 2nd. revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 131; Kamei et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kyō o kataru zadankai,” 16–17. 68. Kamei et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kyō o kataru zadankai,” 19. 69. Iwasaki, Eiga to genjistu, 29–45; Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō, 107–168. 70. Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō, 151. 71. Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō, 150–151. 72. Iwasaki’s comments ­were based on his viewing of six titles: ­Under the City (directed by Arthur Elton, 1934), Weather Forecast (directed by Evelyn Spice, 1934), London on Parade (directed by Marion Grierson, 1935), Key to Scotland (directed by Marion Grierson, 1935), Beside the Seaside (directed by Marion Grierson, 1936), and The En­glish Navy (directed by Stuart Legg, 1939). The films w ­ ere screened at the British embassy in Japan in 1939, and Atsugi and ­others (not including Tsumura) ­were also invited. ­Under the City, Weather Forecast, and Key to Scotland ­were briefly mentioned in Rotha’s book, but the embassy’s screening did not include the heavi­ly discussed BBC: The Voice of Britain (directed

244 NOTES TO PAGES 131–135

by Stuart Legg, 1935), for example. Nor did it include representative works such as Drifters (directed by John Grierson, 1929), Housing Prob­lems (directed by Arthur Elton, 1935), or Shipyard (directed by Paul Rotha, 1935). Iwasaki found the screened films quite mediocre, though he was aware that they w ­ ere not representative of the British documentary film movement, and the other attendees felt the same way. The se­lection of the six films was presumably made by the embassy to provide a general introduction to present-­day London and sightseeing spots in Britain. Four out of the six films w ­ ere works by w ­ omen directors, such as Marion Grierson and Evelyn Spice. It is hard to believe that the presence of w ­ omen filmmakers went unnoticed by Atsugi, who, as mentioned, was also invited to the embassy screening. Reviews of ­these films ­were published in film journal Bunka eiga kenkyū, and among the six, Evelyn Spice’s Weather Forecast was most appreciated. One of the anonymous reviewers comments that, despite the technical immaturity of the filmmaking, it successfully pres­ents the job of weather forecaster and its importance for dif­fer­ent workers on the sea from a humanist perspective—­a comment I cannot help imagining could have come from Atsugi. The other anonymous reviewer was impressed by the sound recording and its cinematic effects in the film, noting that Alberto Cavalcanti was in charge. Iwasaki, Eiga to genjitsu, 40–41; Taka Atsugi et al., “1934–6 nendai no eikoku bunka eiga,” Bunka eiga kenkyū (July 1939): 270–272; Tsumura, Zoku eiga to hihyō, 112. 73. Iwasaki, Eiga to genjitsu, 39. He was generally critical of Kamei for his Nanking and Fighting Soldier. However, Kamei in the 1940 roundtable denied Rotha’s influence on t­ hese films, which he directed before he had read the translation. Kamei et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kon’nichi o kataru zadankai,” 19. 74. Iwasaki, Eiga to genjitsu, 39. 75. Rotha, Documentary Film, 1939, 91. 76. Rotha, Documentary Film, 1939, 128; Atsugi, trans., Bunka eiga, 142–143. 77. Iwasaki, Eiga to genjitsu, 41–44. 78. It is pos­si­ble that GES received commissions from governmental bodies, even though the founder was a former communist, ­because of the connections of his ­father, Ōmura Takuichi, who was the former president of the Manchurian Railway Com­pany. See, Sachiko Iwai, “Atsugi Taka san ni kiku: Senji ka no dokyumentarī,” Kikan joshi kyōiku mondai 17 (1983): 64; Fujii, “Bunka suru eiga,” 14. 79. Tsumura, Eiga to kanshō, 21–22 80. Similar examples of early 1930 Italian dramatic films are discussed in Ruth Ben-­Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, Italy, 1922–45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 80–81. 81. Lee is credited for satsuei and henshū (cinematographer and editor) in the opening credits, in which no director is credited. I am very grateful for Insil Yang, who shared her insights and discoveries about Lee with me. 82. The trainees w ­ ere called “Kaigun hikō yoka renshūsei,” abbreviated as Yokaren. I would like to stress that most of ­these trainee pi­lots ­were minors, in that they ­were ­under twenty years old, the age of military conscription. That is why they ­were called shōnen hei (literally translated as “boy soldier”), though the idea was that they would be twenty by the time they finished their training. In 1943 military recruitment dramatically increased, and the training period was shortened. Eventually many young pi­lots ­were sent on suicide missions. 83. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 98. 84. Though ­there are some writings by and about directors and oral histories concerning them, scholarly publication on ­women’s filmmaking in Japan has been scarce; exceptions include Hikari Hori, “Atsugi Taka to Aru hobo no kiroku” (mentioned above); Hikari Hori, “Migration and Transgression: Female Pioneers’ Documentary Filmmaking in Japan,” Asian Cinema Journal 11 (2005): 89–97; Reiko Ikegawa and Julian Ward, “Japa­nese ­Women Filmmakers in World War II: A Study of Sakane Tazuko, Suzuki Noriko and Atsugi

NOTES TO PAGES 135–138

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Taka” in Japa­nese W ­ omen: Emerging from Subservience, 1868–1945, ed. Gordon Daniels and Hiroko Tomida (Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2005), 258–277; Hikari Hori, “Karada de kaita shinario” (above-­mentioned); Reiko Ikegawa, “Senjika nihon eiga no joseizo: Chokorēto to heitai saikentō,” Rekishi hyōron 708 (2009): 46–60; Reiko Ikegawa, Teikoku no eiga kantoku Sakane Tazuko: Kaitaku no hanayome, 1943, Man’ei (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2011). I am indebted to the following works for the example of the narrative and theoretical frameworks they use to discuss female directors from the perspectives of sexuality, gender, po­liti­cal ideologies, class, and war: Judith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994); Karen Turner, “War’s ­People: Through a ­Woman’s Lens,” in Even the W ­ omen Must Fight (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998), 39–50; and Karen Turner, “Shadowboxing with Censors: A Viet­nam­ese ­Woman Directs the War Story,” in Cinema, Law and the State in Asia, ed. Corey Creekmur and Mark Sidel (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 101–120; Yau Ching, Filming Margins Tang Shu Shuen: A Forgotten Hong Kong ­Woman Director (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004). 85. This is in fact strange, as Sakane Tazuko (1904–1975) was registered as a director in 1939, according to Emiko Ono, “Eiga zukuri yonjūnen,” in Kikigaki onna tachi no kiroku (Kyoto: Seizansha, 1999), 66. Sakane was a former assistant director to prominent dramatic feature film director Mizoguchi Kenji, and became a director at the documentary film studio Riken from 1940 to 1941 in Japan and at the Manchurian Film Association, or Man’ei, in China from 1942 to 1945. See, Ikegawa, Teikoku no eiga kantoku Sakane Tazuko, for Sakane’s directorship. 86. Taka Atsugi et al., “Nyonin shinsei,” Eigajin, October 15, 1939, 9–10. I must point out that a copy of this issue was discovered among the possessions of the late Sakane Tazuko, the pioneer female film director of the 1930s and 1940s. I am grateful for Ikegawa Reiko who discovered it and shared this information with me. 87. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). 88. Teresa de Lauretis, “Rethinking ­Women’s Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory,” in Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson et al. (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994), 140. 89. The film is about a caring f­ ather who collects choco­late wrapping papers in the front line for his son. His son is collecting them ­because the choco­late com­pany w ­ ill send back a package of choco­lates bars in exchange for a sufficient number of them. The boy receives the gift from the com­pany at the same time he hears of his f­ather’s death. The film was highly praised in Japan, and was studied, for example, by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict as a means of understanding the e­ nemy’s psy­chol­ogy and culture. Suzuki was also a scriptwriter for kamishibai (paper theater) during the war. Reiko Ikegawa, “Senjika nihon eiga no naka no joseizō,” 46–60. 90. Atsugi et al., “Nyonin shinsei,” 9. 91. See, Shigeharu Nakano, “Kisha no naka,” in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1977), 402. 92. Atsugi et al., “Nyonin shinsei,” 9; Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 98. 93. Taka Atsugi, “Hitotsu no kansō,” Kiroku eiga 2, no. 8 (1959): 14–15. 94. During the immediate postwar period, the prominent actress Tanaka Kinuyo (1909– 1977) did direct six dramatic feature films. But on the other hand, the veteran director of Manchurian Film Association (Manshū eiga kyōkai), Sakane Tazuko, was rejected by Shōchiku, one of the most prestigious studios, when she sought a position ­there ­after the war. The newly established documentary film studio Iwanami eiga seisakusho hired Tokieda Toshie (1929–2012) as the first female film director of this genre in the postwar era, and then it also offered directorship to Haneda Sumiko (b. 1926), who was working in the publishing department of the com­pany. Since then, ­there have been more female

246 NOTES TO PAGES 138–140

directors than in the prewar and war­time eras, but most of them have been in documentary filmmaking. One of the reasons for the employment of w ­ omen as documentary directors could be that the genre is generally regarded as second rate compared with high-­profile dramatic filmmaking; its production bud­gets are also generally modest. The marginality of the genre and its directorship might make it easier for ­women to obtain a position. “Tokieda Toshie, Interviewed by Imaizumi Ayako,” (Documentarists of Japan, #19) Documentary Box 21 (Tokyo: Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Organ­ izing Committee, 2003); http://­www​.­y idff​.­jp​/­docbox​/­21​/­box21​-­1​-­1​-­e​.­html, accessed on October 20, 2015. 95. As for the film on war­time female farmers, the title and the details of the production are not known. It was about farm ­women in Tochigi Prefecture whose workload was doubled ­after men w ­ ere drafted. They took up cultivation using cows and ­horses. Conventionally, this was a two-­person job: one directed the cow or h ­ orse from the front and another made sure the plough properly worked in the soil and slid forward. However, this became primarily a job for individual young ­women. Atsugi recalled that she tried to help with the plough and c­ ouldn’t ­because of its weight and the difficulty of maneuvering it in the soil. See Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto,131–132. As for Transformed Factory (Tenkan kōjō), it was about the war­time transformation of a silk-­reeling factory into an optical devices manufacturer and the female workers of the factory. See “Bunka eiga no kessen taisei: Tenkan kōjō,” Nihon eiga, April 15, 1944, 19. 96. ­Under the Film Law, the documentary film (bunka eiga) was, most of the time, paired with a dramatic feature film in theaters. Still, some theaters noticed that Atsugi’s film itself was positively accepted. One theater in Nagoya reports, “For a culture film, it is an excellent film as the unique examination of the object creates dramatic effects. . . . ​Such strong ­factors made it sell very well.” The other, in Osaka, comments, “More than expected, [the film is] attracting movie goers.” See, “Kōgyō gaikyō,” Eiga junpō, March 1, 1942, 40–46; and “Fūkiri eiga kōgyō kachi,” Eiga junpō, March 11, 1942, 56–61. 97. Nobuo Ishimori, “Nerai dokoro no yosa,” Nippon eiga (October 1941): 59; Akira Shimizu, “Hobo,” Eiga junpō, October 21, 1941, 39; Yūichi Take, “Aru hobo no kiroku,” Eiga junpō, February 21, 1942, 49. 98. The Ministry of Health and Welfare (Kōseishō) was then newly established in 1938, based on the reor­ga­ni­za­tion as an in­de­pen­dent ministry of the Hygiene and Social Ser­v ices Departments of the Home Ministry. See, Taigakai, ed., Naimushō shi, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Chihō zaimu kyōkai, 1971), 223–224; Kōseishō kōshū eiseikyoku, ed., Ken’eki seido hyakunen shi (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 1980), 64. 99. Iwai, “Atsugi Taka san ni kiku,” 64; Taka Atsugi, “Kiroku eiga ‘Hobo’,” Bunka eiga kenkyū (October 1940): 552; Tokyo hoiku mondai kenkyūkai, ed., Hoiku no genba kara (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 1980), 16. 100. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 119. 101. Her role was to assist and learn from veteran scenario writers. She worked for Kikuchi Kan’s Shojo hanazono, whose scenario was written by Tanaka Chikao. Atsugi’s name is credited as Fukamachi Matsue. For Yoshiya Nobuko’s Haha nareba koso (directed by Kimura Sotoji, 1936), it was Miyoshi Jūro who wrote the scenario. See, Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 102; Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan, Nihon eiga jōhō shisutem (Japa­nese Cinema Database), https://­www​.­japanese​-­cinema​-­db​.­jp​/­Details​?­id​=­23560, accessed on November 18, 2014. 102. Sōya Mizuki, “Seisaku hōkoku Hobo,” Bunka eiga (August 1941): 62. On an additional note, attempts to decentralize the politics of filmmaking took place not only between the director and the screenplay writer but also between crew members and the purported subjects of the filming, including the teachers, ­children, ­mothers, and center janitors. The teachers participated in the creation of the scenario, too. See, Atsugi, Josei

NOTES TO PAGES 140–146

247

dokyumentaristo, 114; and Taka Atsugi, “Tokushū kaisetsu Hobo shinario yodan,” Bunka eiga (August 1941): 57. 103. Taka Atsugi, “ ‘Hobo’ no seisaku ni tsuite,” Nihon eiga (October 1941): 53–54. 104. Kamei et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kon’nichi o kataru zadankai,” 24. 105. Take, “Aru hobo no kiroku,” 49; “Bunka eiga shōkai, Hobo,” Eiga junpō, October 1, 1941, 93. 106. The reediting was done without the consent of original film crew members, including Atsugi. Iwai, “Atsugi Taka san ni kiku,” 65; Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 1991, 212. 107. “Sakka hyōden Mizuki Sōya,” Bunka eiga (November/December 1941): 65; Atsugi, “ ‘Hobo’ no seisaku ni tsuite,” 56. 108. Atsugi, “Kiroku eiga Hobo,” 540; Atsugi, “ ‘Hobo’ no seisaku ni tsuite,” 54; Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 119. 109. Examination of con­temporary reviews indicates some other impor­tant scenes are missing, including a sequence where a camera crew visited a tailor’s ­family. “Bunka eiga shōkai, Hobo,” Eiga junpō, October 1, 1941, 93; Yuriko Miyamoto, “ ‘Hobo’ no inshō,” Nihon eiga (October 1941): 63; Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 120. 110. The m ­ usic was played by rec­ord, according to the description of one of the reviews. “Bunka eiga shōkai, Hobo,” Eiga junpō, October 1, 1941, 93. The song was titled Kikansha (the Locomotive), according to Atsugi. It is noteworthy that the British ­music passed the censorship unnoticed, which must have amused Atsugi greatly. But also it is pos­si­ble, particularly b ­ ecause of the c­ hildren marching with enhancing m ­ usic, that the scene was removed in the postwar reediting to meet the Occupation censorship requirements to remove anything reminiscent of war­time militarism. The British ­music could be interpreted as an anti-­Axis gesture in Atsugi’s mind, but it could also serve as a vehicle of Japa­nese militarism. 111. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 120. 112. Atsugi, “Kiroku eiga Hobo,” 543, 550, 553–555. 113. Forty yen per month is not much when compared with Atsugi’s monthly salary, which was fifty yen when she started work as a high school teacher in 1929, eleven years before this scenario was written. See, Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 81. 114. Barnouw, Documentary, 131. 115. When producer Ōmura viewed the rushes, he responded to this spontaneity resulting from ­mothers acting as themselves by jokingly telling Atsugi, “No scenario writer would be able to write such a good line.” See, Atsugi, “ ‘Hobo’ no seisaku ni tsuite,” 56. 116. Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Real­ity, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 84. 117. Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (London: Faber, 1952), 195. 118. Barnouw, Documentary, 131. 119. Taka Atsugi, “Kiroku eiga, Kyōiku eiga ni okeru ‘kurai tanima’ no omoide,” Kiroku eiga (December 1958): 9; and Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo, 111. With the 1939 Film Law, which aimed to “improve quality of film and assure the development of a healthy film industry in order to contribute to the pro­gress of national culture,” the studio had to submit the scenario for preproduction censorship ­under the supervision of the Home Ministry. ­After its approval and the a­ ctual film’s completion, the finished film was again censored by several censorial bodies, according to its content, from the Home Ministry to the Military and Ministry of Education. 120. See Atsugi, September 1986 interview by Tokieda. See, Hori, Appendix, in “Engendering Japa­nese Film History,” 91. 121. Atsugi, September 1986 Interview by Tokieda. See, Hori, appendix in “Engendering Japa­nese Film History,” 102. 122. Iwai, “Atsugi Taka san ni kiku senjika no dokyumentarī,” 63.

248 NOTES TO PAGES 146–156

123. It was the fifth ministry-­recommended film for GES. The other four are Snow Country, Economy in South China (Nanshi keizai), Young Flying Corps (Sora no shōnenhei), and Locomotive C 57 (Kikansha C57). See, also an advertisement for Hobo, Eiga junpō, October 1, 1941, no pagination. 124. Hisatoshi Kikuta, no title, advertisement, Eiga junpō, October 1, 1941, no pagination. 125. Atsugi, August 1986 interview by Tokieda. See, Hori, appendix in “Engendering Japa­nese Film History,” 80. 126. Tōjo quoted by Yūko Suzuki, Shinban feminizumu to sensō (Tokyo: Marujusha, 1997), 151. The wording of kyotaku shugi was used by a committee member in the House of Commons, quoted by Masanao Kano, Senzen “ie” no shisō (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1983), 199. For the statistics, Asao Mizuno, “Joshi rōdōryokuritsu no chōki hendō (1890–1980),” in Keizia sofutoka jidai no josei rōdō (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1984), 4. 127. ­These titles are from the list of released works in the war­time film magazine Eiga junpō. Many of the films are lost, and it is very difficult to have accurate data of the films of that era. Still, it is safe to say that film titles devoted to w ­ omen’s issues ­were quite rare. 128. Chizuko Ueno, Nashonarizumu to jendā (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998), 68–69. 129. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentarisuto, 137. 130. Ibid., 137–139. 131. Ibid., 138–139. 132. Ikegawa and Ward, “Japa­nese ­Women Film-­Makers,” 271. 133. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo, 140. 134. Ibid., 141. 135. The narration emphasizes that the girls’ hands and hearts are devoted to finishing up the uniform for young navy trainees, or yokaren boys. 136. Atsugi, Josei dokyumentaristo, 139–140. 4. THE DREAM OF JAPA­N ESE NATIONAL ANIMATION

1. It is not my intention to pres­ent Seo as the most typical or representative of war­time Japa­nese animators. Other impor­tant animators w ­ ere also active and had dif­fer­ent ­career paths during war, including Ōfuji Noburō (1900–1961), Mochinaga Tadahito (1919–1999), and ­others. I choose to focus on Seo b ­ ecause of the large circulation of his films—­far more than any other animators’ works—as a result of the capital and cultural investment they received. Early Japa­nese animated film became widely accessible b ­ ecause of the release of the following DVDs: Nihon āto animēshon eiga senshū (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2004); Japa­nese anime classic collection (Taiwan: Digital Meme, 2007); The Roots of Japa­nese Anime u ­ ntil the End of WWII (Hamden, Conn.: Zakka Films, 2008); Momotaro, Umi no shinpei (Tokyo: Shōchiku, 2014). 2. For Seo’s statement, see Kenzō Masaoka et al., “Zandankai Nihon manga eiga no kōryū,” Eiga hyōron (May 1943): 19. I translate manga eiga and manga as “animated film” or “animation” depending on the context, and manga sakka as “animators.” In this journal article, the roundtable presenters mixed Japa­nese and En­glish words; for instance, Disney animation is referred as “Dizunī manga” (19) and manga sakka as “animētā” (13). The meaning and deployment of the term manga and its connotations beg exploration and historicization in the context of the history of animated film, but this is beyond the scope of this chapter. 3. Though the film has customarily been called Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei) since con­temporary newspaper advertisements in 1945 through its release on VHS in 1999 and recently on DVD in 2014, the title in the opening credits is simply Sacred Sailors (Umi no shinpei), without “Momotaro.”

NOTES TO PAGES 157–159

249

4. References to this film are found in the following, arranged chronologically: John W. Dower, War without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 253–255; Scott Nygren, “The Pacific War: Reading, Contradiction and Denial,” Wide ­Angle 9, no. 2 (1987): 63; Hajime Komatsuzawa, “Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle,” in The Japan/America Film Wars: World War II Propaganda and its Cultural Contexts, ed. Abé Mark Nornes and Yukio Fukushima (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1994), 191–195; Peter High, The Imperial Screen: Japa­nese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 472–474; Fred Patten, Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2004), 269; Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, ed. “Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors,” in The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japa­nese Animation since 1917 (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2001), 259–260; Minato Kawamura, “ ‘Kichiku beiei’ ron,” in Iwanami kōza ajia taiheiyō sensō 3, ed. Aiko Kurasawa et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006), 301–306; Tomoya Kimura, “Animēshon eiga ‘Umi no shinpei’ ga egaita mono,” in Sensō no aru kurashi, ed. Yoshiko Inui (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2008), 131–158; Tze-­Yue G. Hu, Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-­Building (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 73–75; Thomas Lamarre, “Speciesism, Part II: Tezuka Osamu and the Multispecies Ideal,” Mechademia 5 (2010): 57; Jonathan Clements, Anime: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2013), 64–67. 5. Con­temporary reviews of the rediscovered film ­were not necessarily favorable. For example, Nygren is skeptical and suggests that the theatrical release and the promotion of film by the studio could be seen as part of historical amnesia of war accountability. See, Nygren, “The Pacific War,” 63. 6. See, Mitsuyo Seo et al., “Zadankai: Maboroshi no nihon hatsu no chōhen animēshon “Momotaro no umi no shinpei”o kataru,” FILM 1/24 32 (1984): 78. Film historian Kimura Tomoya argued against Tezuka’s suggestion by pointing out that t­ here ­were sufficient examples of war films of the time including the death and mourning of fellow soldiers that ­were nevertheless being accepted by censors. Kimura, “Animēshon eiga ‘Umi no shinpei’ ga egaita mono,” 140–142. 7. NHK documentary TV program, “Sonotoki rekishi ga ugoita,” broadcast on June 28, 2000. 8. John Dower, War without Mercy, 254. 9. Richard Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio during World War II (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 36; Mituyo Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” in Yume o tsumugu, ed. Hotsuki Ozaki (Tokyo: Mitsumura tosho, 1986), 224. 10. As surveys of Japa­nese animation history, two books are most comprehensive: in Japa­nese, Katsunori Yamaguchi and Yasushi Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi (Osaka: Yūbunsha, 1977); and in Anglophone scholarship, Jonathan Clements, Anime. 11. The exceptions include works by Kimura, “Animēshon eiga ‘Umi no shinpei’ ga egaita mono,” 131–158; Eiji Otsuka, “An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney: The Fascist Origins of Otaku Culture,” Mechademia 8 (2013): 251–277; Eiji Otsuka, Mikkī no shoshiki: Sengo manga no senjika kigen (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 2013). 12. Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 9–10. See, also Nobuyuki Tsugata, “Research on the Achievements of the Japa­nese First Three Animators,” Asian Cinema 14, no. 1 (2003): 13–27; Nobuyuki Tsugata, Nihon hatsu no animēshon sakka, Kitayama Seitarō (Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 2007). 13. Mayumi Yukimura, “Sensō to animēshon: Shokugyō toshiteno animētā no tanjō purosesu nitsuiteno kōsatsukara,” Soshioroji 52, no. 1 (2007): 88. 14. One of the earliest examples of the deployment of the term manga is associated with satirical and comical sketches produced by the early nineteenth-­century woodblock print illustrator Katsushika Hokusai. Ibaragi suggests that at the turn of the ­century Kitazawa Rakuten began using the term as a translation of the En­glish “comics,” which spread widely.

250 NOTES TO PAGES 160–164

See Masaharu Ibaragi, Media no naka no manga: Shinbun hitokoma manga no sekai (Kyoto: Rinsen shoten, 2007), 57–58. 15. Tsugata, Nihon hatsu no animēshon sakka, 58–61. 16. Akiko Sano, “1928–45 nen ni okeru animēshon no gensetsu chōsa oyobi bunseki” (Tokuma kinen animēshon bunkazaidan, Heisei 16 nendo josei kenkyū; proj­ect report, 2004), 11. 17. Nobuyuki Tsugata, “Research on the Achievements of the Japa­nese First Three Animators.” Asian Cinema 14, no.1 (2003): 19–21. 18. Tsugata, “Research on the Achievements,” 16–18; Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 15. 19. For Prokino, see Mark Nornes’s pioneering work on it in chapter 2 of his Japa­nese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 20. See the Toy Film Proj­ect of the Osaka University of Arts, http://­osaka​-­geidai​-­tv​.­jp​ /­toy​/­, accessed on May 19, 2015. 21. See Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 216–218. Masaoka was an art student who was briefly trained by painter Kuroda Seiki (1866–1824) and then became interested in animation filmmaking. He set up his own studio, Masaoka Film Production (Masaoka eiga seisakujo), in Kyoto and obtained commissions for producing talkie animation from Shōchiku studio in 1932. Similar to dramatic feature filmmaking of the time, animation was heading in the direction of the new sound technology. Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 28–30. 22. Tomofumi Yoshimi, “Kage’e animēshon ‘Entotsuya Perō’ to purokino: 1930 nendai no jishuseisaku animēshon no ichi kōsatsu,” Ritsumeikan gengo bunka kenkyū 23, no. 3 (2012): 23. 23. The most widely available example is Fashizumu to bunka shinbun “Doyōbi” no jidai: Sen-­kyuhyaku-­sanjū nendai Nose Katsuo eizō sakuhinshū (Tokyo: Rikka Shuppan, 2012; DVDs and a brochure). 24. Yoshimi, “Kage’e animēshon ‘Entotsuya Perō’ to purokino,” 21–33, especially, 31–32, n. 18. 25. Tōwa no 40-­nen henshū shitu, ed. “Tōwa haikyū sakuhin risuto 1928–68,” Tōwa no 40-­nen, 1928–1968 (Tokyo: Tōwa kabushiki gaisha, 1968), 4. 26. Yoshimi, “Kage’e animēshon ‘Entotsuya Perō’ to purokino,” 24. 27. One Dōeisha member recollects his amazement at the stark contrast between their own screenings of the animation and that of Prokino. Unlike their own screenings for ­children, who genuinely enjoyed the dramas of the film, Prokino screenings w ­ ere ­under surveillance by the police and had an atmosphere of contained excitement by viewers. When the “Internationale” was played, it was soon joined by workers’ whistles and, subsequently, by the police officers shouting “Stop the screening!” (Jōei chūshi!). In addition, Prokino added their own inter-­titles of fierce antiwar phrases to the original animation. See, Yoshimi, “Kage’e animēshon ‘Entotsuya Perō’ to purokino,” 26–27. 28. Shinsaku Namiki, Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (purokino) zenshi (Tokyo: Gōdō shuppan, 1986), 143–144, 221–222; Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 29. 29. Tatsushiko Shigeno, “Shirī shimufonī,” Eiga hyōron (April 1933): 91; Eric P. Nash, Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japa­nese Paper Theater (New York: Abrams, 2009), 187; Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 23–24, 34–37. 30. Sano, “1928–45 nen ni okeru animēshon no gensetsu chōsa oyobi bunseki,” 12, 20–22. 31. Tatsuo Inada et al., “Manga eiga zadankai (zoku),” Eiga kyōiku December (1936): 21. The 1936 roundtable consisted of elementary school teachers, animators, and a member of the board of education of Tokyo City.

NOTES TO PAGES 164–173

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32. For the technological development and other works of the 1930s, see Clements, Anime, 35–52. 33. See, Sano, “1928–45 nen ni okeru animēshon no gensetsu chōsa oyobi bunseki,” 26–27. 34. Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 38. 35. Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 226. For the experiments to deploy multi-­plane cameras prior to and for this film, see Clements, Anime, 62–64. 36. Already in 1938 the technique was introduced in a film journal. Kiyohiko Shimazaki, “Shirayuki hime to maruti puren kyamera,” Eiga to gijutsu (August 1938), quoted in Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 63. 37. Kenzō Masaoka et al., “Manga eiga hatten no tameno shomondai,” Eiga hyōron (September 1944): 38. 38. Masaoka et al., “Zadankai nihon manga eiga no kōryū,” 12. 39. The story was introduced in elementary school textbooks from 1887 to 1945. See, Shin Torigoe, Momotaro no unmei (Tokyo: Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1983), 3. 40. Dower, War without Mercy, 251. Torigoe pointed out that the story was one of the most published folktales for c­ hildren in Japan u ­ ntil 1945. He discusses the history of how Momotaro was adapted for dif­fer­ent ideological constructs, varying from proletarian movement to militarist regime and postwar society. Torigoe, Momotaro no unmei, 4. 41. Hiroyuki Miyawaki, “Maraya, Shingapōru no kōminka kyōiku to nihongo kyōiku,” in Iwanami kōza kindai nihon to shokuminchi Vol. 7: Bunka no nakano shokuminchi, edited by Minato Kawamura et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), 198. 42. Mitsuyo Seo, “Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle,” in The Japan/America Film Wars: World War II Propaganda and Its Cultural Contexts, edited by Abé Mark Nornes and Fukushima Yukio (Langhorne, Pa.: Harwood Academic, 1994), 193–194. 43. The total box office receipt of Sea ­Battles was 620,000 yen; for Sea Ea­gle it was 570,000 yen. The admission for ­children, who ­were the majority of the viewers of Sea Ea­ gle, was half the adult charge, so the total number of ­people who saw Seo’s animated film was larger. See Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 40; Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 220. 44. ­These titles w ­ ere imported to Japan between 1933 and 1938. See, Sekai eigashi kenkyūkai, ed., Hakurai kinema sakuhin jiten: Nihon de senzen ni joei sareta gaikoku eiga ichiran, vols. 1–4 (Tokyo: Kagaku shoin, 2011). A telling anecdote of Japa­nese animators’ fascination with American cartoon films is recollected by an animator of the Yokohama Cinema Studio (Yokohama shinema shōkai): he and his colleagues obtained a print of I Never Change My Attitude and closely examined it frame by frame. Sano, “Manga eiga no jidai: Tōkī ikōki kara taisenki ni okeru nihon animēshon,” in Shinema stadīzu no bōken, ed. Mikirō Katō (Tokyo: Jinbun shoin, 2006), 110. Also, the voice of “Bluto,” who is r­ unning around ­after the attack, was taken from Bluto’s voice in this Popeye print, according to Seo. Seo, “Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle,” 194. 45. Tsuneo Hazumi, “Shanhai eiga nikki,” Shin eiga (May 1942): 42. 46. The movie advertisements of Sea Ea­gle repeatedly emphasized in their headlines that the story was a retelling of the Pearl Harbor attack: for example, “Big attack on the Ogre Island by Momotaro’s unit in the Showa Era, Ogre Island is Hawaii! Red ogres! Blue ogres are Americans and Britons!” (Showa no Momotaro butai/Onigashima daibakugeki/Onigashima wa Hawai da! Aka oni! Ao oni wa bei’ei da). See Kazufumi Suzuki, “Ajia taiheiyō sensōki nihon no sensō suikō ni taisuru gōikeiseino yōsō—­animēshon eiga ‘Momotaro no umiwashi’ to ‘Momotaro, Umi no shinpei’ no kōsatsu,” in Hyōsho, teikoku, gender (Proj­ect Report of School of Humanities and Social Science, Chiba University, 2008), vol. 175: 56–58. 47. Nihon hōsō kyōkai, ed. Nihon hōsō shi, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Nippon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1965), 521–522.

252 NOTES TO PAGES 173–180

48. “Kōgyō seiseki kessan,” Eiga junpō, February 1, 1943, 31 49. Akira Shimizu, “War and Cinema in Japan,” in The Japan/America Film Wars, ed. Abé Mark Nornes and Yukio Fukushima (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1994), 46. 50. For example, novelist Kobayashi Nobuhiko recollects he enjoyed the viewing in Kobayashi, Ichi shōnen no mita “seisen” (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1998), 62–64. While major film critics praised the film, ­there ­were dissenting views too. For example, Murano Ryōichi, who was a local postmaster of Hachiōji city, went to see the film twice, once with his colleagues and the second time with his d ­ aughter and son. He thought the documentary Divine Warriors of the Sky (Sora no shinpei) was better, as he felt the “tricks” diminished the urgency of the documentary film. See “Murano Ryōichi nikki.” 51. Kajirō Yamamoto, Katsudōya suiro (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1965), 214, 217. 52. Yamamoto, Katsudōya suiro, 223. 53. High, Imperial Screen, 367. 54. ­After he lived in France, Fujita returned to Japan in the 1930s and produced numerous paintings as a government propaganda artist through the end of war. On his war­time works, see Bert Winther-­Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment: Japa­nese Painting during the Fifteen-­Year War,” Monumenta Nipponica 52, no. 2 (1997): 145–180; Mark H. Sandler, “A Painter of the ‘Holy War’: Fujita Tsuguji and the Japa­nese Military,” in War, Occupation, Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960, ed. Marlene Mayo et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 188–211. 55. Yamamoto, Katsudōya suiro, 223–224; Tsuburaya Eiji tokusatsu sekai (Tokyo: Keibunsha, 2001), 18–19. 56. The box office receipts ­were three times as much as for a usual hit, though the morning screenings w ­ ere reserved for or­ga­nized groups with discount rates. See “Kōgyō zatsudan,” Eiga junpō, January 1, 1943, 75–77. The film was also shown to approximately one million viewers in ­Korea. The con­temporary article suggests that ­these viewings ­were mandatory and f­ree. See “Chōsen ni okeru ‘Hawai marē oki kaisen’ ‘Marē senki’ kankyaku dōinsū,” Eiga junpō July 11, 1943, no pagination. 57. Yamamoto, Katsudōya suiro, 199. 58. On this genre, see Winther-­Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment,” 145–180; Akihisa Kawata, “ ‘Sakusen kirokuga’ shōshi, 1937–45,” in Sensō to bijutsu, 1937–1945, ed. Hariu Ichirō et al. (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 2007), 153–162; Akihisa Kawata, “Sensō bijutsu to sono jidai, 1931–1977,” in Gaka tachi no sensō, ed. Jirō Kōsaka et al. (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2010), 92–109. 59. The first paratrooper operation was that of the navy in January, in Celebes, but the oil field of Kota Palembang was ­later occupied by army paratroops. Fujita Tsuguharu and Miyamoto Saburō also painted the same theme in 1942. ­These paintings ­were also widely available as postcards. 60. Gorō Tsuruta, “Rakkasan butai kōka genchi,” Shinbijutsu, February 1943 issue, quoted by Mika Kuraya “Senjika no yōroppa bijutsu kenkyū,” in Sensō to bijutsu 1937– 1945, ed. Hariu Ichirō et al. (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 2007), 170. 61. For the army paratroopers, news focused more on training. On the other hand, the newsreel of the navy’s landing on Celebes was mostly aerial shots from one of the aircraft, which was accompanied by Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. The parachutes are described by the narrator as gorgeous flowers. The Kota Palembang operation was also included in the live-­action dramatic feature Kato Falcon Fighters (Katō hayabusa sentōtai; directed by Yamamoto Kajirō, 1944). 62. “Rikugun haken gaka nanpō sensen zadankai,” Nanpō gashin, Rikugun bijutsuka kyōkai, 1942, quoted by Kuraya, “Senjika no yōroppa bijutsu kenkyū,” 171.

NOTES TO PAGES 180–184

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63. As an additional note, Tsuruta’s bright color scheme of white and blue corresponds with the lyr­ics of the theme song, a hit popu­lar military song, or gunka, of the documentary film The Divine Troop of the Sky (Sora no shinpei) in its crystallization of the image of parachutes as the beautiful, large, full-­bloomed flower. The film introduced the training of army paratroopers and was released in September 1942. Art historian Tanaka Hisao recalls that in his boyhood the song had a strong association with Tsuruta’s painting in his mind. See, Hisao Tanaka, Nihon no sensōga: Sono keifu to tokushitsu (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1985), 164–165. The lyr­ics begin, “Vast sky bluer than indigo blue, hundreds and thousands immediately opening, flower patterns of snowy white r­ oses.” 64. Winther-­Tamaki, “Embodiment/Disembodiment,” 153. Kuraya, “Senjika no yōroppa bijutsu kenkyū,” 172. 65. For example, a large photo­graph of the conference ran on the first page of Asahi shinbun, February 20, 1942. The news was also covered by and shown in newsreel Nippon News, vol. 90, February 23. The documentary film, Malay War Rec­ord (Marē senki; edited by Iida Shinbi, 1942) also included this very famous conference footage. It was one of the most commercially successful films of the year. The film gained the second-­highest box office reciepts during the year 1942 (from the first week of April to the third week of December 1942). The highest-­grossing film was Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya. See, “Sakuhin betsu zenkoku fūkiri seiseki jun ichiranhyō,” Eiga junpō, February 1, 1943, 33. 66. Keizō Sawada, “Miyamoto Saburō, Yamashita Pāshibaru ryōshirei kaikenzu,” in Sensō to bijutsu 1937–1945, edited by Ichirō Hariu et al. (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 2007), 210–211. 67. For example, Tsuburaya reused the Pearl Harbor attack scene in his postwar war film Ea­gle of the Pacific Ocean (Taiheiyō no washi; directed by Honda Ishirō, 1953). 68. Seo recalled that the GES provided “[horrible working] conditions beyond imagination in the light of the film industry’s work model.” Masaoka et al., “Manga eiga hatten no tameno shomondai,” 38. He left GES and joined Shōchiku studio in the summer of 1943 on an invitation from his former teacher, Masaoka. Shōchiku founded the animation department in May 1941, with twenty-­four staff members, and recruited Masaoka as the head of the department. Importantly, this made it pos­si­ble for animated films to be distributed through the studio’s exhibition network of movie theaters. Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 39, 42–43, n. 87; Dower, War without Mercy, 422. 69. Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 221. 70. See, Otsuka, “An Unholy Alliance,” 272; Eiji Otsuka, Mikkī no shoshiki, 244. He also sees the defining ­factor of documentary as the introduction of realism, though I have reservations about this. As I have pointed out, paint­ers and dramatic film directors, too, introduced a sense of realism in their own way into their works. The question of realism should be, therefore, discussed in connection with the entirety of war­time cultural production and the recursivity of specific images in the mediascape. 71. Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 227. Seo et al., “Zadankai,” 78. 72. Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 212, 224. 73. Cultural critic Ueno Toshiya argues that the narrative pres­ents the three tiers of the social hierarchy in which the emperor was represented by Momotaro, the imperial subjects by the animal soldiers and the tropical animals, and otherness by Westerners with horns. The three tiers also suggest a racial hierarchy of ethnic Japa­nese, the colonized, and the ­enemy. ­Either way, Momotaro serves as an iconic figure to sustain the authenticity and unity of Japan as a nation-­state. Toshiya Ueno, “The Other and the Machine,” in The Japan/ America Film Wars: World War II Propaganda and Its Cultural Contexts, edited by Abé Mark Nornes and Fukushima Yukio (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1994), 86–88. 74. Sano, “1928–45 nen ni okeru animēshon no gensetsu chōsa oyobi bunseki,” 33.

254 NOTES TO PAGES 184–189

75. For biographical information on the Wan b ­ rothers, see Kōsei Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon: Chūgoku bijutsu den’ei hattenshi (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1987), 10–16. Ono bases his introduction on Wan Laiming’s autobiography, dictated to his son, titled “I and Sun Wukong,” which was distributed to the participants (Ono himself was one of them) at the sixtieth-­anniversary cele­bration of the founding of Wan B ­ rothers Animation, which took place in 1986 in the Shanghai Animation Studio. See also Marie-­Claire Quiquemelle, “The Wan ­Brothers and Sixty Years of Animated Film in China,” in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, ed. Chris Berry, Cornell University East Asian Papers No. 39 (1985), 47–96. 76. The Wan b ­ rothers closely examined Fleischer prints, which they borrowed from theaters. Disney prints ­were more protected and harder for them to borrow. See, Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 37. 77. Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 18–20. 78. Quoted by Quiquemelle, “The Wan ­Brothers,” 51. 79. For the description of the film, see Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 22–25. 80. Quiquemelle, “The Wan ­Brothers,” 52. Zhang Shankun registered the com­pany as a US corporation in 1940 to avoid Japa­nese interference. Zhang was a competent businessperson who produced a number of anti-­Japan dramatic films in the late 1930s, including Mulan Joins the Army. He also agreed to export Princess Iron Fan to Japan. The Japa­nese distributor was Kawakita Nagamasa, the director of China Film Com­pany (Chūka den’ei funko yūgen kōshi), which was established in 1939 primarily as a distributor of Chinese film within occupied territories in China and in Japan. It was ­later merged in 1943 into a com­pany that dealt with production, distribution, and exhibition. See, Hisakazu Tsuji, Chūka den’ei shiwa: Ichi heisotsu no nitchū eiga kaisōki: 1939–1945 (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 1998), 145. 81. Quiquemelle, “The Wan ­Brothers,” 52; Tsuji, Chūka den’ei shiwa, 65–66, 72–76, 95, 148–149. 82. Tsuji, who was a communication officer, recalls that when he accompanied a documentary film shooting unit in Hankou, now a part of Wuhan, he went to see Snow White ­every day for several days in the fall of 1941. Tsuji, Chūka den’ei shiwa, 149. 83. Quiquemelle, “The Wan ­Brothers,” 52. 84. Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 27–29. 85. Hazumi Tsuneo kankōkai, ed. Hazumi Tsuneo (Tokyo: Hazumi Tsuneo kankōkai, 1959), 194. 86. Tsuji, Chūka den’ei shiwa, 55, 79–88. 87. Akiko Sano, “Manga eiga no jidai,” 112. The existing print of the Japanese-­language version, preserved by the Tokyo Film Center, is about twenty minutes shorter than the original, which suggests a large portion was edited out. 88. This film greatly inspired Tezuka Osamu, who produced a feature-­length animation, The Journey to the West (Saiyūki, 1960). See Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 40. 89. Minoru Sawada, “Chūgoku saisho no chōhen manga eiga ‘tessen kōshu’ o megutte,” Eiga hyōron (April 1942): 96; Ono, opposing the exaggerated advertisement, pointed out that the number of staff members was eighty-­five or so, and it took one and a half years, instead of three years. See Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 30. 90. Taihei Imamura, “Manga eiga hyō,” Eiga junpō, October 1, 1942, 39. 91. Kōzō Ueno, “Manga ‘Saiyūki’ gappyō: Seo Mitsuyo shi o kakonde,” Eiga gijutsu (October 1942): 65–66, quoted by Sano, “Manga eiga no jidai,” 125. 92. Kyoichi Otsuka, quoted in Sano, “Manga eiga no jidai,” 113. I believe that the Japa­ nese live-­action film this article refers to must be Sun Wukong (Songokū) directed by Yamamoto Kajirō in 1940. It is a very free-­spirited musical comedy adaptation and parody of The Journey to the West, starring the popu­lar comedian Enomoto Ken’ichirō, or Enoken. As an example, to show how f­ree an adaption it was, one of the episodes was science-­ fictional. Monkey and Pigsy are captured by ­brothers of a monster who runs a science labo-

NOTES TO PAGES 189–192

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ratory where robots work and a surveillance camera operates. With magical smoke, they transform Monkey and Pigsy into opera singers. The film was an enormous hit but infuriated major film critics, who found it absurd. See Takahisa Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 2003), 146. 93. Sano, “Manga eiga no jidai,” 114. 94. Taihei Imamura, “Manga eiga hyō,” 39. 95. Tze-­Yue G. Hu translates a letter by the Wan b ­ rothers addressed to Japa­nese film critic Shimizu Akira, which is currently preserved in the archives of the Kadokawa Culture Promotion Foundation. The letter emphasizes the animators’ belief that “the Eastern art of filmmaking should embody Eastern color and taste, and it should not imitate and follow wholly the style of Hollywood. Thus, based on this creative aspiration, as seen from the characteristics of Princess Iron Fan, in the areas of make-up, fashion, action and line-­ drawing, they all yield originally to traditional Chinese art.” Quoted and translated by Tze-­ Yue G. Hu, appendix in Frames of Anime, 171. See also, Tze-­Yue G. Hu, “Reflections on the Wan B ­ rothers’ Letter to Japan,” in Japa­nese Animation: East Asian Perspectives, ed. Masao Yokota and Tze-­Yue G. Hu (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 34–48. 96. Sano, “Manga eiga no jidai,” 116–117. 97. Quoted by Quiquemelle, “The Wan B ­ rothers,” 52. See, also Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 29. 98. Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 34. 99. Sea Ea­gle opened on March 24, 1943. As it took six months to complete, according to Seo, he must have begun the production of Sea Ea­gle around the time when Princess Iron Fan opened in Japan, on October 18, 1942. See, Masaoka et al., “Zadankai Nihon manga eiga no kōryū,” 12, 14. 100. Masaoka et al., “Manga eiga hatten no tameno shomondai,” 39. 101. The print of Gulliver’s Travels was imported and a film review was published. However, due to the outbreak of the Pacific War, the film was not actually shown during the war. See Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon eiga hattatsu shi, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1980), 78; and Ono, Chūgoku no animēshon, 35. In July 1937, the Ministry of Finance announced that it had banned the import of foreign film by the application of the Foreign Exchange Control Act. One and a half years ­later, in 1939, the ministry set a quota and permitted imports to resume. In July 1941, the Japa­nese state froze US assets in Japan, including sales offices of Hollywood majors, and then the outbreak of war caused a complete ban on screening Hollywood pictures. See Jun’ichirō Tanaka, Nihon eiga hattatsu shi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1980), 358, and vol. 3 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1980), 69, 77–78. 102. Masaoka et al., “Manga eiga hatten no tameno shomondai,” 39. 103. A newsreel introduced that this song was used in instruction in some places in China and Southeast Asia, which Seo saw and incorporated into his film. Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 228. 104. As a part of the1937 National Spirit Mobilization Movement (Kokumin seishin sōdō in undō), the state called for lyr­ics for a national song (kokumin kayō). Among many entries, “Patriotic March” (Aikoku kōshin kyoku) was selected and ­music was composed for it, with the intention that all Japa­nese would sing it together. Hiroyuki Miyawaki, “Maraya shingapōru no kōminka to nihongo kyōiku,” 198. 105. Susan Napier, “Manga and Anime: Entertainment, Big Business, and Art in Japan,” in Routledge Handbook of Japa­nese Culture and Society, ed. Victoria Lyon Bester, Theodore C. Bestor, and Akiko Yamagata (New York: Routledge, 2011), 227. 106. Excerpts from The Adventures of Dankichi are translated by Helen J. S. Lee in Michele M. Mason and Helen J. S. Lee, eds., Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 245–270. See, also Robert

256 NOTES TO PAGES 193–194

Tierney, Topics of Savagery: The Culture of Japa­nese Empire in Comparative Framework (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 295. 107. Kawamura Minato points out that Dankichi illustrates well that Japa­nese ­participated in the circulation of the Eu­ro­pean discourse of forging otherness. Minato Kawamura, “Popu­lar Orientalism and Japa­nese Views of Asia,” in Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique, ed. Michele M. Mason and Helen J. S. Lee (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 271–298. 108. Some films about Japa­nese military operations in Southeast Asia became hits, including two versions of Malaya War Rec­ords ([Marē senki]; Shōnan’tō tanjō, directed by Miki Shigeru, and Shingeki no kiroku, edited by Iida Shinbi, 1942); Sea Ea­gle (Umiwashi; directed by Lee Byoung-­woo, a.k.a. ­Inoue Kan, 1942), on the airborne unit of the Navy; and Divine Warriors of the Sky (Sora no shinpei; directed by Watanabe Yoshimi, 1942) on the training of army paratroopers. 109. Taihei Imamura et al., “Manga, kage-­e, hōmu gurafu, sumō eiga o kataru,” Eiga junpō, July 21, 1942, 295. The members are film critic Imamura Taihei; censor of the Home Ministry, Chikushi Yoshio; affiliate of Tōnichi newsreel studio, Inada Tatsushi; social eduation officer of the Ministry of Education, Mitsuhashi Hōkichi; and animator Ōfuji Noburō. The Rec­ord of Visiting Dutch East Indies (Ran’in tanbōki, 1941) is a documentary film by Tōhō studio. Film historian Michael Baskett also points out the con­temporary film discourse on m ­ usic in film as a vital component to transcending national bound­aries, suitable for Japa­nese exports to the South Seas as well as Manchuria. See Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 52. The navy also commissioned animator Ōfuji Noburō to produce The Sea ­Battle of Malaya (Mare oki kaisen). This three-­reel silhouette animation opened in 1943. Unlike Sea Ea­gle, the film did not deploy animal characters and provided realistic description of military personnel such as Yamamoto Isoroku, according to Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 230. 110. Masaoka et al., “Manga eiga hatten no tameno shomondai,” 39. 111. Imamura et al., “Manga, kage-­e, hōmu gurafu, sumō eiga o kataru,” 294. Imamura’s writings have been translated into En­glish: Taihei Imamura, “A Theory of the Animated Sound Film,” and “A Theory of Documentary Film,” trans. Michael Baskett, both in “Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japa­nese Film Theory,” special issue of The Review of Japa­nese Culture and Society 22 (2010): 44–51, 52–59; Taihei Imamura, “Japa­nese Cartoon Films,” trans. Thomas Lamarre, Mechademia 9 (2014): 107–124. 112. Seo regarded Fantasia as one of the best Disney films. See, Seo et al., “Zadankai,” 80–81. As for Fantasia, in a well-­known episode, auteur-­director Ozu Yasujiro also had a chance to see confiscated Hollywood films, including Fantasia, in 1943 when he was drafted and relocated to Singapore. He notes, “While I was watching Fantasia, I thought, ‘It is bad, this is not a good adversary. Japan has picked a fight against a ­giant.” See, Yasujiro Ozu, “Jisaksu o kataru,” Kinema junpō, December 10, 1960, quoted by Nobuo Chiba, Ozu Yasujirō to 20-­seiki (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2003), 217–218. Tagawa Seiichi, FRONT art designer, recollects that the editorial staff of the magazine FRONT borrowed the prints of Fantasia and Gone with the Wind from Section Eight of the Imperial Japa­nese Army General Staff Office for viewing. He states that the prints ­were confiscated in Singapore, so it is likely that the prints are what Ozu saw in Singapore. See, Seiichi Tagawa, Yake ato no gurafizumu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005), 49. For the screening of Fantasia, see Sōji Ushio, Tezuka Osamu to boku (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 2007), 193–195. As an additional note, the story and visuals of Fantasia ­were introduced in the film magazine Eiga hyōron in a format of serialized essays from June to September 1941. See Hikaru Shimizu, “ ‘Fantajia’ shōkai,” Eiga hyōron (January 1941): 38–42; Dīmusu Tairā, “Uoruto dizunī no fantajia,” trans. Ōta

NOTES TO PAGES 194–202

257

Kunio, Eiga hyōron (June 1941): 48–56;(July 1941): 32–42; (August 1941): 48–58; (September 1941): 98–105. 113. The quote is from the Fantasia Souvenir Booklet, quoted by Moya Luckett, “Fantasia: Cultural Constructions of Disney’s ‘Masterpiece,’ ” in Disney Discourse, ed. Eric Smoodin (London: Routledge, 1994), 223. 114. The film’s Souvenir Booklet states, “From time to time the order and se­lection of compositions on this program may be changed”; quoted by Luckett, “Fantasia,” 229. 115. John Culhane, Walt Disney’s Fantasia (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983), 11. 116. Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 226. 117. Luckett, “Fantasia,” 226. 118. According to Imamura, “This animated film stands out, since the directing is well thought out in a way that is unpre­ce­dented in Japa­nese animated films, and it is notable that a nuanced mood is being created.” What Imamura describes as “nuanced mood” was novel in comparison with the majority of the con­temporary Japa­nese animated film, whose narratives emphasized movements with a s­ imple story line. One of the film’s innovations is the emotive pre­sen­ta­tion of objects, fleeting attentions of characters, and skillful technique to capture reflection of light. See, Taihei Imamura, “Saikin no manga eiga,” Eiga junpō, February 28, 1943, 26–27. 119. Otsuka, “An Unholy Alliance,” 309–310. 120. FRONT was A3 sized, with color front cover, and the first volume was published in fifteen languages, including Chinese, En­glish, and Rus­sian. A total of ten volumes w ­ ere published from 1942 to 1945, aimed at non-­Japanese nationals. At least sixty-­nine thousand copies of the initial volume, “The Navy,” w ­ ere printed, but the method and quantity of the journals’ distribution are unknown. Some anecdotes suggest copies ­were available in China and Rus­sia. See, Kenko Kawasaki and Kenʾichi Harada, Okada Sōzō eizō no seiki: Gurafizumu, puropaganda, kagaku eiga (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2002); Seiichi Tagawa, “FRONT no seisaku genba,” in “Kaisetsu III” section, in FRONT, reprint (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1990), 8–12. With regard to the emphasis on photography and its aesthetics, FRONT is the counterpart of German Signal and US Life magazine. See, Andrea Germer, “Adapting Rus­sian Constructivism and Socialist Realism: The Japa­nese Overseas Photo Magazine FRONT (1942–1945),” Zeithistorische Forschungen, no. 2 (2015), http://­www​.­zeithistorische​ -­forschungen​.­de​/­2​-­2015​/­id%3D5224, accessed on December 17, 2016. The similar promotional photographic journal NIPPON (1934–1944) is better known in existing Anglophone scholarship. 121. As aforementioned, paratroopers w ­ ere introduced with Wagner’s m ­ usic in a newsreel, and its dynamism and powerfulnesss was depicted as gorgeous flowers in previous documentaries. 122. High, Imperial Screen, 391. 123. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: Amer­i­ca’s Advance through Twentieth-­ Century Eu­rope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 300. 124. A comparison of the numbers of movie theaters strongly suggests the huge domestic market of the United States, whose marketing strategies and distribution system, along with large capital investments, nurtured power­ful film production: in 1930, the United States had 18,000 movie ­houses, compared with 2,400 in France, 3,730 in Germany, about 3,000 in ­Great Britan, and 1,449 (in 1931) in Japan. See De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 305; Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 20. 125. Seo, “Yonjūnen me no saikai,” 220; Komatsuzawa, “Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle,” 193. 126. Seo et al., “Zadankai,” 74. 127. On Imamura’s other reference to Disney production style, Taihei Imamura, “Saikin no manga eiga,” 26; Masaoka et al., ‘Zandankai Nihon manga eiga no kōryū,’ 12–14; Masaoka et al., “Manga eiga hatten no tame no shomondai,” 40.

258 NOTES TO PAGES 203–208

128. The navy funded at least eight animation titles: Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle (1943), Sea ­ attles of Malaya (Mare oki kaisen; directed by Ōfuji Noburo, 1943), Banzai to Japan (NipB pon Banzai; Yoneyama Tadao, 1943), Monkey Sankichi’s Fighting Submarine (Osaru Sankichi tatakau sensuikan; Kataoka Yoshitaro, 1943), Mabo’s Paratrooper’s Unit (Mabo no rakkasan butai; Satō Ginjirō with Yoneyama Tadao, 1943), ­Little Fuku’s Submarine (Fuku chan no sensuikan; Maeda Hajime, 1944) and We Are the Navy Volunteer Soldiers (Bokura wa kaigun shiganhei; Seo Mitsuyo, 1944); the army funded two titles: Potatoes and Soldiers (Imo to heitai; Kataoka Yoshitaro 1942) and Absent-­Minded Doctor (Uwano sora hakase; Asano Kei, 1944). See, Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animēshon eiga shi, 226–233. 129. Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up, 67–77. 130. Yukimura, “Sensō to animēshon,” 87–89; Clements and Ip provide an informative examinatiaon of military educational film production department of Tōhō studio. See, Jonathan Clements and Barry Ip, “The Shadow Staff: Japa­nese Animators in the Tōhō Aviation Education Materials Production Office 1939–1945,” Animation 7, no. 2 (2012): 189–204. 131. Yukimura, “Sensō to animēshon,” 96–97. 132. Sanae Yamamoto, Manga eiga to tomo ni (Tokyo: Anidou, 1982), quoted by Yukimura, “Sensō to animēshon,” 98. 133. In the context of the expansion of postwar Japa­nese animation as an industry, the legacy of Princess Iron Fan should also be noted. Tezuka Osamu, the so-­called founder of Japa­nese manga and TV animation, who was inspired by Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, was also deeply impressed by the Wan ­brother’s animation and ­later created the film The Journey to the West (Saiyūki; directed by Tezuka Osamu, 1960) and the manga My Sun Wukong (Boku no songokū, 1977). EPILOGUE

1. Dower notes that it was MacArthur’s idea to have their photo­graph taken. See John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton/ New Press, 1999), 293. 2. Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Ryūichi Narita, ed., Total War and “Modernization” (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998). 3. Andrew Gordon, “Consumption, Leisure and the ­Middle Class in Transwar Japan,” Social Science Japan Journal 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–21. His work on the distribution of the sewing machine in Japan also highlights this historical periodization. See Andrew Gordon, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 4. Gordon, “Consumption, Leisure and the ­Middle Class,” 18. 5. Masanao Nakamura, Sengoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005), 280–286. 6. The wedding of the ­future Heisei Emperor Akihito (b. 1933; r. 1989 to the pres­ent), at the time the crown prince, took place in 1959, and its media coverage, readership, and TV viewership coincide with the transition from transwar to postwar Japan in Gordon’s sense. Emperor Meiji and the G ­ reat Russo-­Japanese War (Meiji tennō to nichiro daisensō; directed by Watanabe Kunio, 1957), the first cinematic dramatization of an emperor in Japa­nese film history and a legendary box office success, had already been produced in 1957 and serialized ­because of its im­mense popularity. It was also in 1959 that one of the longest-­lasting TV programs in Japan, The ­Album of the Imperial F ­ amily (Kōshitsu arubamu), began airing. Introducing the activities and daily lives of the imperial f­ amily, it continues to be produced and broadcast t­oday. The phenomenon of the embrace of the emperor system by the masses was dubbed “taishū tennō sei” by the po­liti­cal theorist Keiichi Matsushita, in his “Taishū tennō sei ron,” Chūō kōron 74, no. 4 (1959): 30–47. See also, Kenji Iwamoto, “Emperor Meiji and the ­Great Russo-­Japanese War: Nostalgia and

NOTES TO PAGES 208–212

259

Restoration in Ōkura Mitsugu’s ‘Emperor Film,’ ” trans. Dariko Kuroda-­Baskett, Review of Japa­nese Culture and Society 21 (2009): 33–49; Jan Bardsley, “Fashioning the ­People’s Princess: ­Women’s Magazines, Shoda Michiko, and the Royal Wedding of 1959,” US-­ Japan ­Women’s Journal En­glish Supplement 23 (2002): 57–91; Shunya Yoshimi, “Media toshite no tennō sei: Senryō kara kōdo seichō e,” in Tennō to ōken o kangaeru 10: Ō o meguru shisen, ed. Yoshihiko Amino et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 183–221; Shunya Yoshimi, “Media ibento to shiteno goseikon,” in Sengo nihon no media ibento 1945–1960, ed. Toshihiro Tsuganezawa (Kyoto: Sekai shisōsha, 2002), 267–287. 7. Media historian Satō Takumi illustrates the repeatedly reinforced commemoration of August 15, since that day to the pres­ent. Takumi Sāto, Hachigatsu jūgonichi no shinwa: Shūsen kinenbi no media-­gaku (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2005). 8. On vari­ous examples of such publications, see Megumi Kitahara, “Hyōshō no torauma—­tennō/makkāsā kaiken shashin no zuzōgaku,” in Torauma no hyōshō to shutai, ed. Shigeyuki Mori (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2003), 99–105. 9. Herbert Bix, “Inventing the ‘Symbol Monarchy’ in Japan 1945–52,” Journal of Japa­ nese Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 324. 10. The description of the photo­graph as a “bourgeois wedding” photo is Harry Harootunian’s, “Hirohito Redux,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no.4 (2001): 621. 11. Jun Takami, Takami Jun nikki, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 1965), 338. 12. Mokichi Saitō, Saitō Mokichi zenshū, vol. 50 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1955), 362. 13. The documents of the Home Ministry specifically point to the interviews between Emperor Hirohito and US correspondents: quoted in Teruo Ariyama, Senryōki media shi kenkyū (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 1996), 181–182. This point is in fact confirmed and stated in Yomiuri and Mainichi newspapers on the following day. The New York Times (September 29, 1945) also confirms, “The Supreme Allied Commander took his forceful action within a few hours a­ fter the Home Ministry has seized all copies of newspapers publishing accounts by American correspondents of interviews with Emperor Hirohito.” 14. The preparation of Hirohito’s answers was also approved by SCAP. See, Ariyama, Senryōki media shi kenkyū, 173, 175, 177–182. 15. A part of the memorandum is reprinted. See, Kentarō Awaya, ed., “Shiryō 105, Tennnō kankei kiji hakkin rei (1945.9.27-9.30)” in Shiryō nihon gendaishi, Vol. 2: Haisen chokugo no seiji to shakai (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1980), 370. 16. The bureau banned the Tokyo shinbun newspaper that carried the photo­graph in their eve­ning edition the previous day, September 28, due to the poor quality of the photo­ graph, as noted in Ariyama, Senryōki media shi kenkyū, 180–181. This can be interpreted as the bureau’s interest in preventing lèse-­majesté. However, it is noteworthy that the purportedly “shocking” iconography of the Hirohito-­MacArthur photo­graph was not perceived as such by many readers. 17. Kentarō Awaya, ed., “Shiryō 73 Heika no Ma gensui gohōmon ni kansuru ippan no hankyō Tottoriken tokkōka (1945.10.1)” in Shiryō nihon gendaishi, Vol. 2: Haisen chokugo no seiji to shakai (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1980), 296. Kitahara quotes police reports that p ­ eople felt grateful to the emperor in the photo­graph for his decision to end the war and introduce a new era. See, Kitahara,“Hyōshō no torauma,” 110–111, and n. 28. 18. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 331. 19. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japa­nese Expansion in Asia, 1883–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 2. 20. Jun Satō, “Higashi ajia rajio kanren nenpyō,” in Sensō, rajio, kioku, ed. Toshihiko Kishi et al. (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2006), 318–320. 21. The radio stations in Manchuria, including Changchun, Mukden, Harbin, and Dalian, became subject to the newly established Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Com­pany (Manshū denshin denwa) in 1933, which was funded by both Manchuria and

260 NOTES TO PAGES 212–215

Japan. See, Nihon hōsō kyōkai, ed., Nihon hōsō shi, vol.1 (Tokyo: Nippon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1965), 404–412; Satō, “Higashi ajia rajio kan’ren nenpyō,” 320. On the Berlin Olympic Games, see Nihon hōsō kyōkai, ed., Nihon hōsō shi, vol.1, 298–299. 22. Kenneth J. Ruoff, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The War­time Cele­bration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 15, 17. As of the fiscal year 1940 (April 1940–­March 1941), multilingual radio programs ­were created and transmitted from Japan to overseas cities and territories including London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Hawai‘i, Beijing, Nanking, Guangdong, Sydney, Singapore, Saigon, Bangkok, Langoon, and Java. See Nihon hōsō kyōkai, ed. Rajio nenkan Showa 17 nen ban, reprint (Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 1989), 188–196. 23. Takeshi Hara, Kōkyo mae hiroba (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2007), 9. 24. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 287. 25. Masaaki Ono, Goshin’ei to gakkō: “Hōgo” no hen’yō (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2014), 319–326. 26. Ono, Goshin’ei to gakkō, 344–356. 27. See, Megumi Kitahara, “Shōgatsu shinbun ni miru ‘Tennō goikka’ zō no keisei to hyōshō,” Gendai shisō 29, no. 6 (2001): 240–245. 28. Hirano provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the censorship and intervention by SCAP into this film. See chapter 3 “The Depiction of the Emperor” in Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japa­nese Cinema ­under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1992), 105–145; See also, Abé Mark Nornes, Japa­nese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 184–190. 29. On censorship in lit­er­a­ture, see John Whittier Treat, “Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure in Con­temporary Japa­nese Lit­er­a­ture,” PMLA 109, no. 1 (1994): 100–115. On art, E. Patricia Tsurumi, “Censored in Japan: Taboo Art,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 26, no. 3 (1994): 66–70; Nancy Shalala, “Censorship Silences Japa­nese Artists,” Asian Art News (September-­October 1994): 62–67; Toyama kenritsu kindai bijutsukan mondai o kangaeru kai, ed. Toyama kenritsu kindai bijutsukan mondai zenkiroku: Sabakareta tennō korāju (Toyama-­shi: Katsura shobō, 2001).

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Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to illustrations. Abe, Yutaka, 100 Abe Clan (Abe ichizoku, 1938), 7 ­Actual Story of His Highness the Prince Regent’s Inspection of the Motion Picture Exhibition (Sesshōnomiya denka katsudō shashin tenrankai gotairan jikkyō, 1921), 48 The Adventures of Dankichi (Bōken Dankichi), 192–193, 256n107 The Adventures of Prince Ackhmed (1923–1926), 162, 163 Ajita and Purokichi, A Story of Unemployment (Ajita Purokichi shitsugyō no maki), 163 Ajita and Purokichi: Story of a Consumer’s Union (Ajita Purokichi shōhi kumiai no maki), 162–163 Akihito, Crown Prince, 207–208, 226n53, 258n6 Akimoto, Ken, 129–130 Akutagawa, Kōzō, 243n64 Albers, Hans, 5 Alcott, Louisa May, ­Little ­Women, 78 Alliance for the Promotion of a ­Mother and Child Protection Act (Bosei hogo renmei), 76 amateur filmmaking, 106, 119, 130, 142, 145, 161, 173 American film industry: and animation, 159, 163–164, 166, 170, 171, 184, 188, 191, 201; distribution beyond national bound­aries, 5, 186, 218n8; domestic market of, 201, 257n124; and films as transnational export, 201; and ­women’s military ser­v ices, 109. See also Hollywood film industry Anderson, Benedict, 50, 228n108 animation (manga eiga): and aesthetic bricolage, 159; context of, 204; distribution of, 203; early animation in Japan, 159–166; emergence as industry, 201–203, 205; as heterogeneous, transnational cultural production, 156, 202, 204; and indoctrination of social norms, 18–19; and Japa­nese use of multi-­plane camera, 168, 251n36; national style of, 155, 158, 181–184, 190–202; and newsreel theaters, 125, 167; in postwar

period, 202–203, 205, 258n133; and Prokino, 120–121, 160, 161, 162–163, 250n27; and sound film, 164; topics of animated films, 160; and toy films, 161; transmedia recursivity of, 20 Announcement on ­Woman’s ­Labor Mobilization (Joshi kinrō dōin ni kansuru ken), 103 À Nous la Liberté (1931), 5 Anstey, Edgar, 143 Ant (Ari chan, 1941), 133, 138, 167, 168, 194 Anthias, Floya, 74–75 Anti-­Comintern Pact, 82 anticommunism, 5, 49, 116, 153 Arendt, Hannah, 12 Ariyama, Teruo, 209–210, 227n76 The Army (Rikugun, 1944): High on, 200; Kokufu in, 78, 98; ­mother as protagonist of, 73, 94, 97–101, 99, 107, 237nn78, 79 Army Paratroopers in Action! (Rikugun rakkasan butai shutsudō!), 178 Arnheim, Rudolf, 121 Asahi Film Production (Asahi eigasha), 149–150 Asia Pacific War (1931–1945): complexity of era, 1–2; and expansion of mass media, 18; Fifteen Year War terminology compared to, 217n1; and Hirohito’s reign, 1; and protection of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 23; ­women’s role in, 148 Atarashiki tsuchi (New Earth, or Die Töchter des Samaurai), 15, 83–84 Atsugi, Taka: on American ­women’s magazines, 240n27; on ­career choice, 134; and documentary film, 20, 114, 116, 118, 137–138, 205, 239n5; ­family background of, 117; as filmmaker, 135, 136–138, 154, 246n96; and fund-­raising, 117; and GES, 117, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 145, 149–150, 153; Grand­mothers’ Class, 138; Hopes of Sayo and ­Others, 138; ­Mothers’ Bus Trip, 138; photo­graph of, 115; and Prokino, 114, 116–117, 121, 123, 126, 135, 137, 140, 143, 153, 239n1; Rec­ord of a Daycare Center

279

280 INDEX

Atsugi, Taka (continued) Teacher, 116, 118, 138–149, 139, 153, 246n96, 247nn106, 109, 110, 115; re­sis­tance of, 146, 154; as scenario writer, 114, 117–118, 140–141, 143, 150, 238–239n1, 247n115; Statements of Young ­Women, 138; This Is How Hard We Are Working, 138, 147, 149–153, 152, 246n95, 248n135; Transformed Factory, 138, 246n95; translation of Rotha’s Documentary Film, 20, 116, 117, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 140, 145, 153, 240n21, 242–243n62; ­Women of Tomorrow, 138; on working ­women, 118, 135, 137–138, 142, 147, 148–153, 154, 205, 246n95 Austrian films, 5 Bacon, Lloyd, 16 Bambi, 191 Barnouw, Erik, 130, 144–145 Barrymore, Lionel, 73 Barthes, Roland, 40 Baskett, Michael, 15, 256n109 ­Battle of Guadalcanal, 181 ­Battle of Midway, 171 The Battleship Potemkin (1925), 5, 120, 129 Beautiful Neighbors (Utsukushiki rinjin, 1940), 71, 78, 80 Beauvoir, Simone de, 118 Bebel, August, 118 ­Behind the Front (1926), 121–122, 241n31 Beijing Opera, 184, 189 Béla, Balázs, 122 Benedict, Ruth, 245n89 Ben-­Ghiat, Ruth, 11, 238n99 Benjamin, Walter, 24, 34, 50 Berkeley, Busby: choreography of, 15–16, 17; The Gang’s All ­Here, 15, 16 Berlin (1927), 129 Berlin Olympic Games (1936), 212 Betty Boop, 125, 163, 165, 170, 171, 188 Bix, Herbert, 209 Blood Brotherhood (Ketsumei dan), 3 Blyth, Reginald Horace, 213 Bombs over Monte Carlo (1931), 5 Booklet of the Memorial Tower of Education (Kyōiku tō shi), 56–57 Borage, Frank, 237n94 Britain: auxiliary forces in, 105–106, 109, 237–238n96; film industry of, 14, 16, 257n124; rhe­toric of total mobilization in, 72; royal ­family of, 238n97; and total war mobilization, 109; working w ­ omen in, 93, 236n68, 238n97

British films: and genres of documentary and dramatic films, 104–105, 106, 131, 132, 133, 237n94; and idealization of liberal democracy, 153; Japa­nese importation of, 5; and motherhood, 73; and romance, 238n101; scholarship on, 11 British Movietone News, 62 Brown, Clarence, 175 Bu, Wancang, 186 bunka eiga (documentary film): and Atsugi, 20, 114, 116, 118, 137–138, 205, 239n5; clarification of term, 126–128; context of, 204; cross-­genre fluidity with dramatic films, 1, 102, 103, 104–105, 106, 108, 113, 237n91; defining of, 182, 253n70; distribution of, 124–125; experimentation in, 20; and Film Law, 127, 130, 131; and gender relations, 137, 205, 245–246n94; and indoctrination of social norms, 18–19; integration with dramatic films, 176; Iwasaki on, 126, 127, 131–132, 243–244n72; and Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 176, 182, 191, 196, 201; and Most Beautiful, 102, 103, 104–105, 106, 108, 237n91; and national policy films, 6, 7; paired with dramatic films, 186, 246n96; rise of, 114, 123–126; Rotha on, 20, 116, 117, 126, 127, 129–132, 133, 140, 142, 143–145, 153, 242n60, 242–243n62, 243n66, 243–244n72; and state censorship, 140, 145–146, 151, 219n19, 247n119; and state ideologies, 114; Tsumura on, 128, 131, 133 burakumin (outcast ­people), 231n4 Buzzell, Edward, 109, 237n94 Cabinet Information Bureau (Naikaku jōhō kyoku), 209 The Camel Dance (1935), 185 Camille (Cha hua nu, 1938), 186 campaign documentary paintings (sakusen kiroku ga), 177 Capra, Frank, 30, 63–64 Cardinal Princi­ples of National Polity (Kokutai no hongi, 1937), 28, 56 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 133, 244n72 Cavanaugh, Carole, 90, 235n60 censorship. See state censorship The Ceremony (Gishiki, 1971), 206 Chambers, J. D., 106, 242n60 Chaplin, Charlie, 5 Chikushi, Yoshio, 193, 256n109 ­Children (Kodomo), 121, 241n30 China, 9–10, 201 China Film Com­pany, 186

INDEX 281

China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940), 9–10 Chinese animation, 159, 184–190, 191, 201 Chinese films, 220n30 Chiossone, Edoardo, 33, 224nn28, 30 chiyogami eiga, 164 Choco­late and Soldiers (Chokorēto to heitai, 1938), 136, 245n89 Cinecittà studio, 14 Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), 214–215 Clair, René, 5 Clements, Jonathan, 258n130 Cohl, Émile, 159 comfort ­women, 207 Commotions in a Studio (1926), 184 Communications Ministry, 49–50, 51, 227n84 compensation programs, 10 Comradeship (1931), 129, 242n60 Conde, David, 214 Constitution of the Empire of Japan, 28, 33 consumerism: in Japa­nese film culture, 17, 72, 81, 85, 89; and mass media, 46, 49; of ­middle class, 43, 207; in urban areas, 5, 125, 219n12 Conté, 33 Coughlin, Charles, 62 Cowie, Elizabeth, 144 Currents of Motion Picture “Film” Censorship (Katsudoshashin ‘fuirumu’ ken’etsu jihō), 135 Czech­o­slo­vak­ian films, Japa­nese importation of, 5 Daiei Studio: and maternal melodramas, 73, 87, 205, 232n11; and Occupation period, 112 “dark valley” (kurai tanima), 3 Davis, Darrell William, 217n2, 219n18, 231n3 Decisive ­Battle in the Sky (Ōzora no kessen e, 1943), 199 de Grazia, Victoria, 201 dekobō shingachō, as term, 159 Delacroix, Eugène, Liberty Leading the ­People, 180 de Lauretis, Teresa, 136 Depression, 4 Disney, Walt: Bambi, 191; coordination of ­music, animated motion, and storytelling, 168, 191; Dumbo, 191; Fantasia, 15, 16, 159, 182, 194–195, 201–202, 256n112; and fascist aesthetics, 15–16; Gulliver’s Travels, 191, 255n101; multi-­plane camera introduced by, 167–168; Pinocchio, 191; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 13, 167, 171, 182, 186, 188, 191, 194, 195

Disney animation: in China, 184; as “Dizunī manga,” 248n2; in Japan, 163, 201; and military educational films, 203; production system of, 156, 158, 203; and toy films, 161; visual language of, 182, 191–202; and Wan ­brothers, 188 Disney Studio, 191, 195, 202 Divine Warriors Descend to Kota Palembang (Shinpei parenban ni kōka su, 1942), 177–180, 179, 186, 253n63 Divine Warriors of the Sky (Sora no shinpei), 186, 252n50, 256n108 Doane, Mary Ann, 73, 91, 101, 231n5 documentary film. See bunka eiga (documentary film) Dōeisha, 161–162, 250n27 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 105, 120 Dower, John W., 157–158, 169, 211–212, 223n7 dramatic films: and Atsugi, 140; cross-­genre fluidity with documentary film, 1, 102, 103, 104–105, 106, 108, 113, 237n91; documentary film paired with, 186, 246n96; Furukawa’s categories of, 8; imperial ­house­hold not depicted in, 30; integration with documentary film, 176; Kokufu activities represented in, 78; and toy films, 161; ­women working on, 138, 245–246n94 Duck’s Army Troop (Ahiru rikusentai, 1940), 167, 168, 169 Dumbo, 191 Duvivier, Julien, 5, 131 Dyer, Richard, 46, 48 Ea­gle of the Pacific Ocean (Taiheiyō no washi, 1953), 253n67 Early Summer (Bakushū, 1951), 205 Earth (1930), 120, 240n22 educational films, 5, 219n19 Education Ministry: on exemplary ­mothers, 75; and film regulation, 6; films commissioned by, 167; kindergarten’s supervised by, 139; and national polity, 54, 56; and population planning, 74; protocols for preserving emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 31, 34, 42, 212; and Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher, 146, 248n123 Eisenstein, Sergei, 5, 119–122, 129, 142, 241n37 Ekk, Nikolai, 120 The Eleventh May Day (Dai jūikkai mēdē), 121 Elgar, Edward, 142 Elton, Arthur, 143 emperor-­as-­organ theory (tennō kikan setsu), 56

282 INDEX

Emperor Meiji and the ­Great Russo-­Japanese War (Meiji tennō to nichiro sensō, 1957), 30 emperor’s portrait photo­graph (goshin’ei): abolishment of, 68; in battleships, 22, 23–24, 35; ceremonial protocols for, 28, 34, 36–38, 55; ­children killed in guarding of, 31, 222n3; context of, 204; and contradictory viewing practices, 19; deaths in protection of, 22, 23, 31, 38–39, 41, 42, 56–57, 58, 222n3, 225n44, 226n57, 229n112; dimensions of, 60, 229n118; distribution of, 31, 32–33, 35–38, 41, 64; in educational institutions, 22, 23, 31–32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 42, 64, 212, 213; and emperor system, 27, 32; and empress’s image, 224n22; and facsimile photo­graphs, 19; in government offices, 22, 35; and Hirohito-­ MacArthur double photo­graph, 206, 208–209, 211, 212–214; hōanden at Nara ­Women’s University, Japan, 36–37, 37; and indoctrination of social norms, 18–19; in Japa­nese overseas embassies, 22, 35; in military division headquarters, 22, 31, 35; and Mutsuhito, 32, 33–34, 40–41, 47; and national unity, 207; non-­v iewing veneration, 30–31, 34, 49, 53, 55, 56, 60–61, 64–65, 213; and personalized collectible postcards, 19; in postwar film, 205–206; preservation in hōanden shrines, 22, 36, 37, 56, 225n42; and singing, 34, 224n31, 225n33; veneration practices for, 22, 28, 30, 31–35, 36, 38–41, 42, 46, 49, 51, 53, 55–57, 59–68, 69, 213, 224n25, 225n32, 229n120, 229–230n121; visual protocols for, 19, 22, 57, 226n49 emperor system: central myth of, 34, 38, 46, 47, 53; cultural dimensions of, 18, 28, 38, 97, 225n42; and expansion of information networks, 25, 46; and historical discontinuity, 28, 29; history of, 24, 226n53; and imperial citizens, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 53–56; and interpretations of emperor’s body, 25; and mass media, 24–25, 27, 31, 46; monarchical and disciplinary powers, 47–48; and motherhood discourse, 92; po­liti­cal ideologies of, 31, 95; popu­lar emperor system, 69; and radio broadcasting, 53; and sacred imperial lineage, 28, 32, 38, 42, 46, 47, 53, 65, 228–229n109; symbolic emperor system, 28; and wood block prints, 40 Enoken (Enomoto Ken’ichirō), 13, 123, 254n92 entertainment war films: gendered analy­sis of, 70–71; and Japa­nese imperialism, 83; and motherhood, 80–84; and national policy film, 6; popularity of, 8; romance between men

and ­women in, 71, 84–91; and war crimes, 10; ­women in, 70–71 ethnic identities: in colonized and occupied territories, 230n130; and emperor system, 28; and Japa­nese film industry, 5, 9–10; in Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 191–192, 253n73; and total war mobilization, 231n4 Eu­ro­pean animation, 155, 163 Eu­ro­pean monarchies, 47, 68 Eu­ro­pean royal portraits, 32, 47, 224n28 Faillace, Gaetano, 206 Fanck, Arnold, 15, 83, 130 Fantasia (1940), 15, 16, 159, 182, 194–195, 201–202, 256n112 fascism: comparison with New Deal, ­221–222n46; conceptions of, 12–13, 14, 221n34; and gender discourses, 74; of Japa­nese state, 12, 13, 221n33 fascist aesthetics: in Japa­nese film production, 16–17, 233n21; and Japa­nese melancholy tonality, 13; of Riefenstahl, 15; Sontag on, 15–16; transcultural notion of, 12–13, 14, 16 February 26 Incident (1936), 3 Felix the Cat, 185 Female Youth Volunteer Corps (Joshi teishintai), 148, 149, 150 feminism, 76, 154 feminist theory, 136, 205 Fifteen Year War (1931–1945), 7, 217n1 Fighting Soldier (Tatakau heitai, 1939), 131, 244n73 film critics: on The Army, 99; and defining of Japa­nese film, 7; on The Love-­Troth Tree, 85–87; on Mizoguchi’s films, 89; on Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 182, 191, 249n5; on Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle, 196; on Most Beautiful, 103–104; on A ­Mother’s ­Music, 86; and national policy film, 9; on Princess Iron Fan, 188–189; on Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher, 138–139, 246n96, 247nn109, 110; on Sea B ­ attles of Hawaii and Malaya, 252n50; on Seo’s animation, 156 Film Law (Eiga hō) of 1939: and categories of statistics, 135; and documentary film, 127, 130, 131; and documentary film paired with dramatic films, 186, 246n96; nationalist goals promoted by, 146; and newsreels, 60; opening pages of, 128; and preproduction censorship, 140, 145, 219n15, 247n119; and “proper content” of film, 86; regulation of film industry, 6–7, 219n18

INDEX 283

Finance Ministry, temporary banning of foreign film imports, 218n9, 255n101 First Greater East Asian War Art Exhibition (December 1942, Tokyo Prefectural Museum), 177 First Nationally Compiled Textbook (Dai ikki kokutei kyōkasho), 75 First Sino-­Japanese War (1894–1895), 75, 106 Fischinger, Oskar, 163, 195 Flaherty, Robert, 124, 128, 129, 145 Flames of Passion (Jōen, 1947), 112 The Flaming Sky (Moyuru ōzora, 1940), 100 Fleischer ­brothers, 161, 163, 170, 182, 184, 185, 188, 201 Foreign Exchange Control Act, 218n9, 255n101 Forst, Willi, 5 42nd Street (1933), 16 Foucault, Michel, 47 Fourth Ordinance of Ministry of Education (Monbushōrei dai yon gō), 34, 40, 224n31 French Concession, 185–186 French film industry, 5, 14, 186, 257n124 FRONT, 198, 256n112, 257n120 Fujiki, Hideaki, 48 Fujinami, Takeaki, 59 Fujioka, Atsuhiro, 125 Fujita, Tsuguharu, 176, 177, 181, 252nn54, 59; Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941, 176, 177 Fujitani, Takashi, 38, 47, 55 Fukamachi, Matsue, 246n101 Fukazawa, Shichirō, 215 Furukawa, Takahisa, 8–10, 88, 219–220n20, 234n31 Fushimi, Osamu, 9–10, 71 The Gang’s All ­Here (1943), 15, 16 Gaumont Film Com­pany, 44 gender equality: and communist activism, 135, 148–149, 153; and dramatic films, 87; as obstacle for ­women, 137; and Three ­Women in the North, 112 gender norms: and duty to state, 73; in Hollywood film industry, 11; and motherhood, 73, 147; and pronatalist policies, 19, 71, 73, 112; and Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher, 147; and romance, 238n101; war­time reor­ga­ni­za­tion of, 91, 97, 102, 204; and ­women’s agency, 80; and working ­women, 102–108, 135, 137–138 General Line (Zensen, 1931), 120 ­Gently My Songs Entreat (1933), 5 George V (king of ­England), 53 George VI (king of ­England), 62

German film industry: adaptation of Hollywood genre films, 14–15; distribution beyond national bound­aries, 14, 186, 218n8; domestic market of, 257n124; and Japa­nese coproduction, 15; production capacity of, 14; quotas on Hollywood imports, 14 German films: choreography of musicals, 11; entertainment films, 11; kulturfilms, 126, 127, 128; popularity in Japan, 5; scholarship on, 10, 11; and Wan ­brothers, 185 Germany: banning of foreign film imports, 218n9; as fascist regime, 13, 221n34; film culture of, 14; working ­women in, 93, 236n68 Gerow, Aaron, 17 GES (Geijutsu eiga sha): and Atsugi, 117, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 145, 149–150, 153; commissions from government bodies, 168, 244n78, 248n123; and documentary film, 133–134, 167; and Seo, 133, 156, 167–171, 253n68 Gilliat, Sidney, 105 Giloi, Eva, 47, 224n29 Ginoza, Naomi, 4, 72, 81–83 Gledhill, Christine, 73 Godzilla (Gojira, 1954), 172 Goebbels, Joseph, 121 Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936), 16 The Golem (1936), 5 Gone with the Wind (1940), 194, 256n112 Gordon, Andrew, 43, 207, 258n3 Gotō, Shinpei, 49–50, 160 government promotional films, 5, 219n19 Graf Zeppelin, newsreel coverage of, 27 Grand­mothers’ Class (Obāsan gakkyū, 1959), 138 “­Great Attack at Hawaii” (Hawai dai kūshū), 173 Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken), 96, 120, 156, 188, 189, 190, 191, 201 Greater East Asia War (Dai tōa sensō), 52 Greater East Asia War Art Exhibition (Dai tōa sensō bijutsu ten), 176–177 Greater Japan Patriotic Literary Organ­ization (Dai nihon bungaku hōkoku kai), 92 Greater Japan ­Women’s Organ­ization (Dai nippon fujinkai), 77 ­Great Kanto earthquake (1923), 4, 42, 49, 57, 59, 160, 227n70 Grierson, John, 126, 129 Grierson, Marion, 244n72 Grierson, Ruby, 106, 144, 242n60

284 INDEX

Gulliver’s Travels, 191, 255n101 Gundle, Stephen, 11 Hanako (Hanako-­san, 1943), 16–17, 17 Haneda, Sumiko, 205, 245n94 Hansen, Miriam, 220n30 Hara, Kenkichi, 71, 93 Hara, Setsuko, 83–84, 110, 205 Hara, Takashi, 39, 41, 228n108 Harootunian, Harry, 12, 220–221n32, 259n10 Haruko (empress of Japan), 41 Hasegawa, Jozekan, 7 Hasegawa, Shin, 75 Haven, Thomas R. H., 93 Hazumi, Tsuneo, 171, 186 Health and Welfare Ministry, 139, 246n98 Heinz, Paul, 175 Heisei emperor and empress, 28 Hello-­o, Ichitarō (Ichitarō yāi), 233n18 Higashikuni, Princess, 238n97 High, Peter: on documentary film, 103; on national policy film, 6, 7, 219n18; on portrayals of femininity, 70; on Sea B ­ attles of Hawaii and Malaya, 175, 199; on spiritism, 199–200; on war­time Japa­nese film history, 217n2, 231n3; on war­time m ­ others, 92, 94, 97, 99–100 Higo, Hiroshi, 122 Higson, Andrew, 11, 237n95, 242n60 Hino, Ashihei, 97 Hirohito (emperor of Japan): as crown prince, 26, 27, 30, 41, 43–44, 46; double portrait photo­graph with Douglas MacArthur, 206, 208–215; enthronement ceremonies of, 50–53, 59, 208, 211; Eu­ro­pean visit of 1921, 43–44, 46, 226n66; film repre­sen­ta­tions of, 31, 57, 59–64, 68, 69, 214, 229n117, 230n123; funeral of, 28; imperial tours of, 211; mass media coverage of public appearances, 19, 27, 32, 42–49, 56, 66, 226–227n67, 227n70; newspaper photo­graphs of, 31; postcard reproductions of portrait, 26, 27; public’s romantic attraction to, 45–46; reign of, 1, 25, 28; relationship with imperial citizens, 24, 29, 30, 55, 60–61, 65–66, 223n7, 228n108, 229n113; repre­sen­ta­tions of, 22, 25, 27–31, 206, 214, 215; role of, 24, 206; speech on termination of war, 50; as unviewable figure, 30, 34; US correspondents’ interviews with, 209, 259n13; and US-­led po­liti­cal restructuring of Japa­nese state, 28; war accountability of, 28; wedding of, 45. See also emperor’s portrait photo­graph (goshin’ei); emperor system

Hirukawa, Iseo, 71 Historical Drama: The Farewell Scenes of Kusunoki Masashige and His Son (Shigeki Nankō ketsubetsu), 48 Hitler, Adolph, 62, 63 Hobsbawm, Eric, 38 Hollywood film industry: distribution of, 186; gender norms of, 11; genre films of, 14–15; Germany’s quotas and bans on imports, 14; hegemonic film culture of, 11, 220n30; Japa­nese film industry’s production capacity compared to, 4, 91; Japan’s complete ban on screening of Hollywood films, 5, 14, 218n9; and Japan’s temporary banning of foreign film imports, 5, 140, 218n9; maternal melodramas of, 73, 82, 91, 101, 232n8; and nationalist cinemas, 11; and romance, 238n101; and “­woman’s film,” 231n5; and ­women as spectators, 235n60 Home Ministry: and national policy film, 6; recommendations on film production, 219n19; reor­ga­ni­za­tion of, 246n98; and state censorship, 85, 209, 210, 247n119, 259n13 Honda, Ishirō, 173, 253n67 Hopes of Sayo and ­Others (Sayo tachi no negai, 1960), 138 Housing Prob­lems (1935), 140, 143–144 Howard, Leslie, 109, 237n94 Hu, Tze-­Yue G., 255n95 Ibaragi, Masaharu, 249–250n14 Ichikawa, Fusae, 79, 234n29 Iida, Shinbi, 175, 253n65, 256n108 Iijima, Tadashi, 103–104, 124 Ikeda, Tadao, 237n80 Ikegawa, Reiko, 92, 112, 150 Imamura, Taihei, 127–128, 188, 189, 193–194, 196, 240n17, 256nn109, 118 imperial citizens: and emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 38, 42; and emperor system, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 53–56; gendered imperial subjecthood, 28; ideal imperial subjects, 18, 19; identity construction and contestation, 22; identity formation of, 2, 24, 25, 46, 49, 65; and Japanese-­language education, 192; national affiliation of, 20; and national polity knowledge, 53–56, 229n109; relationship with Hirohito, 24, 29, 30, 55, 60–61, 65–66, 223n7, 228n108, 229n113, 229–230n121; resistant reactions from, 64–69 imperial education (kōminka kyōiku), 191, 192

INDEX 285

Imperial Education Association (Teikoku kyōiku kai), 56 imperial f­ amily: in mass media, 27–31, 208, 258n6; photo­graphs in newspapers, 39, 43, 57, 226n63, 229nn113, 114; postcards of, 41; practices of consuming image of, 30; as symbol of unity of state, 238n98 Imperial House­hold Ministry, 32, 39, 50, 52, 210, 212, 213, 229n118 Imperial Rescript of Female Volunteer Work Force (Joshi kinrō teishin rei), 149, 150 Imperial Rescript of Termination of War (Shūsen no shōchoku), 52, 208, 211, 228nn99, 100 Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo), 25, 34, 40, 54–55, 224n31, 224–225n32, 230n131 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers (Gunjin chokuyu), 25, 28, 100, 236n73 Imperial University of Tokyo, 35 Inada, Tatsushi, 193, 256n109 Inagaki, Hiroshi, 75 Indonesia, attack by paratroopers, 177–178, 181, 252n59 Information Bureau, 91, 175 Inomata, Katsuhito, 98 ­Inoue, Kan (a.k.a. Lee, Byoung-­woo), 133, 134, 244n81, 256n108 ­Inoue, Tetsujirō, 230n131 In Spring (1929), 120 Instrument of Surrender, 208, 228n99 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 9 Internship of Childcare (Ikuji jisshū, December 1941), 148 In the Train (Kisha no naka, October 1939), 136–137 Inukai, Tsuyoshi, 3 Ip, Barry, 258n130 Ishimoto, Tōkichi, 129–130, 133, 134, 140–141 Italian film industry, 10, 11, 14–15 Italy: banning of foreign film imports, 14, 218n9; as fascist regime, 13, 221n34 Itami, Mansaku, 15, 83 Itō, Daisuke, 121, 130 Itō, Hirobumi, 32 Itō, Sueo, 128 Iwamoto, Tsutomu, 32, 57, 225n44, 226n57, 229n112, 230n123 Iwanami eiga seisakusho, 245n94 Iwasaki, Akira: on documentary film, 126, 127, 131–132, 243–244n72; The Eleventh May Day, 121; Japan’s Tragedy, 214; on montage

theory, 119, 239n16; and Prokino, 116, 123; on Soviet films, 240n21 I Was Born, But . . . ​(Umarertewa mitakeredo, 1932), 80, 119 Iwase, Ryō, 6 Japa­nese Army General Staff Office, 194, 198 Japa­nese citizens, 4, 5, 18, 19, 20. See also imperial citizens Japa­nese Communist Party, 115, 133 “Japa­nese film” (nippon eiga), defining of, 6–7 Japa­nese film industry: adaptation of Hollywood genre films, 14–15; centralized regulation of, 4; colonial contexts of, 18; and decentralization of politics of filmmaking, 246n102; decrease in war­time production, 91, 219n11, 235n62; distribution beyond national bound­aries, 14, 17, 218n8; domestic market of, 257n124; in early Showa era, 3–5, 10; educational films, 5, 219n19; emergence of B films on war, 218n6; expansion of, 4, 18, 48; gender repre­sen­ta­tion in, 19–20, 70, 220n30; and German coproduction, 15; government promotional films, 5, 219n19; and Hirohito’s Eu­ro­pean trip of 1921, 43; and national policy film, 6–10; regulation of, 5, 6–7, 9, 219n15; state rationalization of, 149–150, 154; studio system in, 161; ­women working in, 135–138, 245–246n94 Japa­nese film studies, 10, 11–12 Japa­nese imperialism: and entertainment war films, 83; and Japa­nese film production, 18; and national policy film, 6, 7, 9–10; and Prokino, 162–163; state ideology of, 158 Japanese-­language education, 191, 192, 255n103 Japa­nese movie theaters, 4, 83, 219n12 Japa­neseness, 7, 13 Japan Folk Crafts Association (Nihon mingei kyōkai), 133 Japan Self Defense Forces (Jieitai), 238n104 Japan’s Tragedy (Nihon no higeki, 1946), 214–215 J.O. studio, 123 The Journey to the West (Chinese novel), 184, 186, 188, 189, 254–255n92 Junghans, Wolfram, 128 Kabuki theater, 165 Kagotani, Jirō, 32 Kaida, Yasukazu, 193 Kalif Storch (1923), 163

286 INDEX

Kamei, Fumio: and documentary film, 130, 146, 198, 239n5; Fighting Soldier, 131; Japan’s Tragedy, 214–215; Nanking, 131; and PCL, 123, 124; and Rotha’s Documentary Film, 129–131, 243n66, 244n73; Shanghai, 128 Kamiya, Makiko, 231n3 Kanda, Masatane, 66 Kano, Masanao, 75–76 Kantarō of Ina (Ina no kantarō, 1943), 220n20 Katō, Atsuko, 8–9 Katō Falcon Fighters (Katō hayabusa sentōtai, 1944), 100, 175, 252n61 Katsushika, Hokusai, 249n14 Kaufman, Mikhail, 120 Kawabata, Yasunari, 92 Kawaguchi, Matsutarō, 84 Kawakita, Nagamasa, 186, 254n80 Kawamura, Minato, 192–193, 256n107 Kawasaki, Hiroko, 78 Kido, Shirō, 9, 87–88, 90, 235n45 Kikuchi, Kan, 117, 118, 123, 140, 246n101 Kimura, Ihei, 198 Kimura, Sotoji, 123, 246n101 Kimura, Tomoya, 249n6 King, Henry, 81 Kinoshita, Keisuke, 73, 78, 97, 99, 200, 237nn79, 80 Kinugasa, Teinosuke, 119, 241n37 Kitagawa, Tetsuo, 119–120, 240n26, 240–241n27 Kitahara, Megumi, 43, 226n63, 229n113, 259n17 Kitayama, Seitarō, 159, 160 Kitazawa, Rakuten, 249n14 Kluckhohn, Frank L., 209–210 Know Your ­Enemy–­Japan (1945), 30, 63–64 Kobayashi, Ichizō, 123 Kobayashi, Nobuhiko, 252n50 Kobayashi, Takiji, 117 Kobayashi, Teruyuki, 32 Kōda, Aya, 45–46 Koepnick, Lutz, 11 Kokufu (Greater Japan National ­Women’s Defense Group): in The Army, 78, 98; and Shōchiku theater actresses, 233n27; and social class, 77, 80; white aprons of, 77–78, 78, 79, 85, 111; and ­women’s agency, 77–79, 81, 85, 93, 233–234n28, 234n29 Kokumin shinbun, 38, 41 Kondaibō, Gorō, 126 Konoe, Fumimaro, 52, 212 ­Korea: March  1 Korean In­de­pen­dence movement, 163; role of emperor’s portrait photo­graph in, 66, 230n130

Koschmann, J. Victor, 206 Kōuchi, Jun’ichi, 159–160 Kracauer, Siegfried, 10–11 Kubrick, Stanley, 15–16 Kuhn, Annette, 11 Kuleshov, Lev, 119 Kumagaya, Hisatora, 7 Kume, Masao, 39 Kume, Yoshitarō, 38–39 Kuraya, Mika, 180 Kuroda, Seiki, 250n21 Kurosawa, Akira, 73, 102–106, 150 Kuwano, Michiyo, 78 Kyoto Baby Cinema Club (Kyōto bebī shinema kyōkai), 161 Lady’s Club (Fujin kurabu), 81, 84 A Lady’s Confession (Aru shukujo no kokuhaku, 1938), 71 Lang, Fritz, 124 Lant, Antonia, 71, 72, 73, 93, 97, 104, 106 Launder, Frank, 105 League of Nations, 3 Lee, Byoung-­woo (a.k.a. I­ noue, Kan), 133, 134, 244n81, 256n108 lèse-­majesté: cases on veneration of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 66–67, 231n137; in colonized and occupied territories, 66; effects of, 24, 225n32; and emperor-­as-­organ theory, 56; and Hirohito-­MacArthur double photo­graph, 209, 210–211, 259n16; and newspaper photo­graphs of imperial ­couple, 39; and worship of imperial ancestors, 42 Let’s Sing Together (Kimi yo tomoni utawan, 1941), 71 liberal democracies: British idealization of, 153; fascism compared to, 16, 74; and gender discourses, 74, 91; rise of, 114 Liberal Demo­cratic Party, 215 Life magazine, 175 Lihua studio, 184 Lincoln, Abraham, 62 lithographs, 39–40 Louis XIII (king of France), 162 The Love Song of Riverside Area (Suigō jōka, 1937), 80 The Love-­Troth Tree (Aizen katsura, 1938): ­mother as protagonist of, 72, 80, 81, 84–91; and nurse’s uniform, 85, 235n45; and romance, 85, 88–91, 90; sequels to, 84–85, 86; and state censorship, 85–86; and upward mobility, 72, 81, 85 Luckett, Moya, 195

INDEX 287

Ma, Chucheng, 186 Mābō, the Youth Airborne Pi­lot (Mābō no shōnen kokūhei, 1936), 166 Mābō’s Big Race (Mābō no daikyōsō, 1936), 163 MacArthur, Douglas, 206, 208–209, 210, 211–215 McLuhan, Marshall, 76, 77 Madame X (1929), 73, 82, 92 Makino, Masahiro, 16, 220n20 Makino, Shōzō, 48 Malay War Rec­ord (Marē senki, 1942), 175, 253n65, 256n108 Manchuria, 233n24 Manchurian Film Association (Manshū eiga kyōkai), 123, 245nn85, 94 Manchurian Incident (1931): as beginning of Asia Pacific War, 217n1; effects of, 3, 218n6; and film repre­sen­ta­tions of Hirohito, 59; and Hirohito’s ascension to emperor, 229n109; and radio broadcasting, 51; and Wan ­brothers, 184 Manchurian settlers (kaitaku dan), 71 manga (comic or cartoon), and early animation, 159–160, 166, 205, 258n133 Man of Aran (1934), 128, 129 A Man Who Waited (Matteita otoko, 1942), 219–220n20 Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 119–120, 240n17 March 1 Korean In­de­pen­dence movement, 163 The March of Time (1935–1936), 62 Maruyama, Masao, 42, 219n18, 221n33 Marxism, 114, 116, 121, 160, 163 Marxist historians, 12, 219n18 Masaoka, Kenzō, 161, 250n21, 253n68 Masaoka Film Production, 250n21 mass media: accessibility of, 207; Benjamin on aura in reproducible media, 34; and commercialization of imperial image, 41; coverage of Hirohito’s public appearances, 19, 27, 32, 42–49, 56, 66, 226–227n67, 227n70; and cross-­media intertextuality, 72, 211; cross-­media relations, 32, 204; and emperor system, 24–25, 27, 31, 46; expansion of, 18, 213; and gossip journalism, 27, 28; in postwar period, 208–209; relationality of, 3; repre­sen­ta­tion of Hirohito in US media, 29–30; role of rumors and graffiti created by nonstate actors, 66–67, 223n7; state control of, 18; and transmedia recursivity, 20, 57, 65, 68, 181; and veneration of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 32, 38–41, 49, 68 Mategna, Andrea, 180

Materialism Study Society (Yuibutsuron kenkyūkai), 116, 117 maternal melodramas, 73, 82, 87, 91, 92, 94, 101, 205, 232nn8, 11 Matsuda, Tokiko, 122–123 Matsushita, Keiichi, 226n53, 258n6 Matsuzaki, Keiji, 123 Mayne, Judith, 231n5 Mendelssohn, Felix, 234n36 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 129 Mickey Mouse, 125, 163, 164, 170, 185, 195 ­middle class: and consumption of imperial portraits, 43; and early childhood education, 138; and Hirohito as media celebrity, 48; and transwar period, 207 middle-­class ­women: exemption from war production, 233n15; and “good wife and wise ­mother” ideology, 74, 147; and postcards of Hirohito, 30, 46 Migita, Hiroki, 54, 226n53, 229n109 Miki, Kiyoshi, 118 Miki, Shigeru, 175, 198, 243n66, 256n108 militarism: and “­mother films,” 91–101; and veneration of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 32 military educational films, 167, 203, 258n130 Millions Like Us (1943), 105–106, 237n95 Mimasu, Aiko, 232n11 Mingxing studio, 184, 185 Minobe, Tatsukichi, 56 Miracle of Flight (1935), 175 Mitsuhashi, Hōkichi, 193, 256n109 Miyamoto, Saburō, 177, 180–181, 252n59; Attack on Nanyuan, 180; Navy Paratrooper’s Surprise Attack to Menado (Kaigun rakkasan butai menado kishu, 1943), 181 Miyamoto, Yuriko, 118, 163, 243n62 Miyoshi, Jūro, 246n101 Mizoguchi, Kenji: and Modern Girl (moga), 88–89; monumental style of, 217n2; and Sakane, 245n85 Mizuki, Shigeru, 37 Mizuki, Sōya, 140, 151 Mochinaga, Tadahito, 248n1 Modern Girl (moga), 70, 72, 88–89 modernity and modernization: and emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 33; and entertainment war films, 83; and fascism, 221n34; Harootunian on, 220–221n32; in Japa­nese films, 72, 220n30; and mass media repre­sen­ta­tions of Hirohito, 43, 45; and Modern Girl (moga), 70, 72, 88–89; and transcendence of artists, 158

288 INDEX

Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi no shinpei, 1945): dandelion scene in, 196–199, 197; and Disney formula, 191–202; as documentary film, 176, 182, 191, 196, 201; and ethnic identities, 191–192, 253n73; Fantasia compared to, 194–196, 201–202; film critics on, 182, 191, 249n5; and Japanese-­language education, 191, 192, 255n103; Momotaro, Sea Ea­gle compared to, 183–184, 196, 201; ­music and song scenes in, 192, 194, 195, 198; and national identity, 159, 181–184, 191–202, 253n73; pacifism of, 156–159; and paratroopers, 177, 178, 181, 183, 196, 197–198, 199; and Pearl Harbor attack, 175, 177, 181; production of, 157, 158, 182, 202; role of Momotaro as character, 182, 190; and spiritism, 199–200; title of, 248n3; visual aesthetics of, 198, 200–202, 200; and Yamashita-­Percival conference, 181 Momotaro, the Best of Japan (Nippon ichi Momotaro, 1928), 169 Momotaro folktale, 168–169, 190, 251nn39, 40 Momotaro of the Sea (Umi no Momotaro, 1932), 169 Momotaro of the Sky (Sora no Momotaro, 1931), 169 Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle (Momotaro no umiwashi, 1943): and American animation, 170, 171, 202; distribution of, 202; Momotaro, Sacred Sailors as follow-up to, 176; Momotaro, Sacred Sailors compared to, 183–184, 196, 201; ­music in, 168, 194; and national identity, 191; and Pearl Harbor attack, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 251n46; role of Momotaro as character, 168–170, 182, 190; success of, 156, 168, 169, 171, 251n43; and transnational visual culture, 159; visual language of, 170, 171 Monkey Sankichi: The Attack Unit (Osaru Sankichi totsugekitai no maki, 1934), 166 Mori, Arinori, 225n33 Mori, Iwao, 234n33 Mori, Kōichi, 117 Mori, Takemaro, 217n1 Moriyama, Noriko, 135–136 Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku, 1944): and documentary film, 102, 103, 104–105, 106, 108, 237n91; and military songs, 106–107, 110, 111; and pronatalism, 73; and working ­women, 102, 103, 104, 105–106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 150–151 mother-­children double suicides, 76 “­mother films”: and militarist and nationalist motherhood, 91–101; and new femininity, 73

motherhood: discourse of, 72, 74–77, 79–80, 91–92, 93, 101, 147, 149, 154, 236n65; and entertainment war films, 80–84; and gender norms, 73, 147; and maternal melodramas, 73, 82, 92, 94, 232nn8, 11; ­mothers as protagonists, 72–73, 80, 80–91, 92, 94, 95, 97–101, 99, 107, 232n11, 237nn78, 79; and suffragists, 78 ­Mother Never Dies (Haha wa shinazu, 1942), 78, 93, 96, 236n74 The ­Mother of a Sailor (Suihei no haha), 75, 95 ­Mothers’ Bus Trip (Ofukuro no basu ryokō, 1957), 138 ­Mother’s Love Letter (Haha no koibumi, 1935), 71 ­Mother’s Map (Haha no chizu, 1942), 93, 96, 101 A ­Mother’s ­Music (Haha no kyoku, 1937): ­mother as protagonist of, 72, 80–84, 91, 92, 95, 232n11; and upward mobility, 72, 81, 82, 83, 84 ­Mothers of Japan (Nihon no haha), 92 ­Mother’s Wedding Anniversary (Haha no kinenbi, 1943), 93–94, 96–97, 100 ­Mother ­under the Eyelids (Mabuta no haha, 1931), 75–76, 233n21 Mulan Joins the Army (Hua Mulan, 1939), 186 Munemoto, Hideo, 80 Murano, Ryōichi, 252n50 Murata, Yasuji, 166, 169 Mutsuhito (emperor of Japan), 25, 32, 33–34, 39–41, 47 Nagako (empress of Japan), 45, 67, 69, 75, 208, 231n135 Nakajima, Shin, 162 Nakamura, Akira, 44–45 Nakamura, Masanori, 207–208 Nakano, Shigeharu, 45, 136 Namiki, Shinsaku, 121, 241n31 Napier, Susan, 192 Napoleon III (emperor of the French), 32 Narazaki, Asatarō, 54 Narita, Ryūichi, 206, 217n1 Naruhito, Crown Prince, 28 Naruse, Mikio, 78, 123, 231n3 national identity: in animation, 155, 158, 181–184, 190–202; bricolage of po­liti­cal and formalistic manifestations of, 1–2, 7, 204; and communal memory, 215; film and visual culture as arena for, 5; mass media’s role in formation of, 46; and Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 159, 181–184, 191–202, 253n73;

INDEX 289

motifs of, 184; and veneration of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 32 Nationalist Party, 185 National Police Reserve (Keisatsu yobitai), 238n104 national policy film (kokusaku eiga), discourse of, 2, 6–10 national polity (kokutai): imperial citizens’ knowledge of, 53–56, 229n109; po­liti­cal dogma of, 27, 42 National Spirit Mobilization Movement (Kokumin seishin sōdō in undō), 255n104 Naval Brigade of Shanghai (Shanhai rikusentai, 1939), 7 The Navy (Kaigun, 1943), 7, 95–96, 97, 175 Navy Censorship Board, 175 Navy Ministry, 157, 168, 172, 173, 175, 176, 181–182, 202–203, 258n128 Navy Paratrooper’s Surprise Attack to Menado (Kaigun rakkasan butai menado kishu, 1943), 181 Nazi films, 10–11 New Deal, 16, 221–222n46 New Dialogue on ­Woman (Shin josei mondō, 1939), 71 New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, 1937), 15, 83–84 New ­Family (Atarashiki kazoku, 1939), 80 New Japa­nese Animation Studio (Shin nihon dōga sha), 203 Newly Emerging Film (Shinkō eiga), 115 newspapers: Anderson on communal participation of, 50–51; on deaths in protecting emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 38, 42, 57, 58, 226n57; and Hirohito-­ MacArthur double photo­graph, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 259n16; and Hirohito’s Eu­ro­pean trip of 1921, 43, 44; and Hirohito’s interview with US correspondents, 210; and Hirohito’s wedding, 45; and newsreel screenings, 45, 51, 59, 120; and Pearl Harbor attack, 173, 181; photo­graphs introduced in, 39, 40, 225n46; photo­graphs of emperor’s portrait photo­graph in, 41; photo­graphs of imperial f­ amily in, 39, 43, 57, 226n63, 229nn113, 114; and veneration of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 65, 66, 67; and Yamashita-­Percival conference, 180, 181; on Yoshihito’s funeral, 227n76 newsreels: and animation, 125, 167, 201; on Celebes attack, 178, 181; Hirohito as subject of, 27, 30, 44, 45, 48, 59–60, 63–64, 69, 214, 226–227n67; of Hirohito’s enthronement, 52, 59; on motherhood discourse, 148;

newspapers’ competitions for early screenings, 45, 51, 59, 120; on paratroopers, 178, 252n61, 257n121; and Pearl Harbor attack, 173, 175, 181; popularity of, 125; pre­sen­ta­tion of imperial ­couple at ceremony of Japa­nese Empire’s 2,600th anniversary, 62, 63, 230n123; and Prokino, 120, 122; and Second Sino-­Japanese War, 125, 134; and state ideologies, 114; state rationalization of, 59–60; and toy films, 161; and veneration of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 60–61, 61, 69, 229n120, 229–230n121; and ­women’s military ser­v ice, 111; and working ­women, 148, 150 newsreel theaters, 125, 242n45 NHK, 50 Night Flight (1933), 175 Night Shift (1942), 106, 242n60 Nihon sangyō keizai, 210 Nikkatsu studio, 4, 43, 45 NIPPON, 257n120 Nippon eiga, 138 Nippon News (Nippon nyūsu), 59–61, 61, 63, 64, 69, 111, 150, 173, 178, 229n117 Noda, Kōgo, 121 Nomura, Hiromasa, 71, 72 Norakuro the Second Private (Norakuro nitōhei, 1933), 166 Norness, Abé Mark, 217n2, 219n18, 243n62 not-­for-­minors films (hi ippan eiga), 8, 9, 219–220n20 Nygren, Scott, 249n5 Ōba, Hideo, 71, 78, 87, 205 Occupation period (1945–1952): and animation production companies, 203; censorial standards of, 141, 247n110; and film repre­sen­ta­tions of Hirohito, 214; and film studios’ subject ­matter, 112; and Hirohito-­MacArthur double portrait, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213; and repre­sen­ta­tions of Hirohito, 68; and Shōchiku studio’s association with “­woman’s film,” 87; and ­women’s liberation, 112, 205 Ōfuji, Noburō, 164, 193, 248n1, 256n109 Ogawa, Isshin, 225n46 Okada, Sōzō, 123 Okada, Teiko, 92 Okada, Tokihiko, 121 Okinawans, 43, 92, 231n4 Ōkubo, Toshimichi, 33 An Old Chinese War Tale (Man chiang hung), 185 The Old Mill (1937), 167

290 INDEX

Olympia (1938), 128, 178 Olympic Games, Los Angeles (1932), 27 Ōmura, Einosuke, 133, 167 Ōmura, Suzuko, 139, 247n115 Ōmura, Takuichi, 244n78 The Only Son (Hitori musuko, 1936), 5, 80 Ono, Emiko, 245n85 Ono, Kōsei, 157, 185, 190, 254n75, 254n89 Ono, Masaaki, 32, 212–213 Onoe, Matsunosuke, 48 Orbaugh, Sharalyn, 94–95 Ordinance for Cooperation of the National ­Labor Patriotic Corps (Kokumin kinrō hōkoku kyōryoku rei), 103 Ordinance of ­People’s Patriotic Volunteer Corps (Kokumin giyūheieki hō), 108, 238n107 Ordinance of the ­Women’s Volunteer Corps (Joshi teishintai rei), 237n90 Origuchi, Shinobu, 42 Osaka Asahi shinbun, 39, 45, 58, 125 Osaka Mainichi shinbun, 39, 45, 67 Oshima, Nagisa, 206 Otsuka, Eiji, 182, 198, 253n68 Ōura, Nobuyuki, 215 Our Planes Fly South (Aiki minami e tobu, 1943), 94 Outline Policy for Establishing Population Growth (Jinkō seisaku kakuritsu yōkō), 74, 92, 147–148 Out of the Inkwell series, 184 Owada, Masako, 28 Ozu, Yasujiro, 5, 80, 119, 205, 256n112 Pabst, G. W., 129, 242n60 Pacific War (1941–1945): and Japa­nese style of animation, 155; outbreak of, 3; use of Fifteen Year War compared to, 7; visual culture of, 176, 177–181, 201 pacifism, of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 156–159 paper theater (kami shibai), 94, 143, 181, 245n89 Park, Ki-­chae, 237n79 Pathé Baby small cameras, 119 “Patriotic March” (Aikoku kōshin kyoku), 192, 255n104 PCL (Photo Chemical Laboratory) studio, 4, 117, 123–124, 133, 153 Peace Preservation Law, 3, 42, 49, 115 Pearl Harbor attack: and American film industry, 5; and French Concession, 185; and Kluckhorn’s interview with Hirohito, 210; and Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 175, 177, 181;

and Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 251n46; quality of film of, 173, 178; and radio broadcasting, 50, 173, 181; and Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher, 146; and Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya, 169, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176; and Tokyo Asahi shinbun, 173, 174 Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941 (Fujita), 176, 177 Percival, Arthur, 177, 180–181, 183, 253n65 period films (jidaigeki), 75, 231n3 Perō the Chimney Sweeper (Entotsuya Perō), 122, 161–162, 162 Petro, Patrice, 70 Pflugfelder, Gregory, 76 photography: and affordable cameras, 41; Barthes on, 40; Benjamin on, 34; communal and po­liti­cal roles of, 49; halftone photo­ graphs, 225n46; as manifestation of visual culture, 21, 39, 201; as mass-­produced, 24; reproduction of, 39–40; Rus­sian avant-­garde photography, 198; of Yamashita-­Percival conference, 177, 180–181, 183, 253n65. See also emperor’s portrait photo­graph (goshin’ei) Police Department of the Home Ministry, 135, 219n19 Pollock, Griselda, 135–136 Popeye, 125, 170, 171 Popeye the Sailor series (Fleischer ­brothers), 170, 251n44 postcards: and emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 19; of Hirohito’s Eu­ro­pean trip of 1921, 44–45; of Hirohito’s marriage, 45; of imperial ­family members, 41; as manifestation of visual culture, 21; middle-­class ­women’s postcards of Hirohito, 30, 46 Princess Iron Fan (Tie shan gong zhu/Tessen kōshu, 1941), 159, 184–190, 187, 191, 194, 201, 202, 255n95, 258n133 Prokino (Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei): and animation, 120–121, 160, 161, 162–163, 250n27; and antiimperialism, 162–163; and Atsugi, 114, 116–117, 121, 123, 126, 135, 137, 140, 143, 153, 239n1; as in­de­pen­dent film production group, 115, 119–120, 130; and newsreels, 120, 122; and public screenings, 116–117, 121–123, 161, 241n31; and Seo, 123, 160, 161, 163, 167; and Soviet film theory, 241n37 Prokino News (Purokino nyūsu), 120, 122 Proletarian Childcare Movement (Musansha takuji undō), 139

INDEX 291

Proletarian Film (Puroretaria eiga), 115 Proletarian Film Night, 116–117, 121–123, 161, 241n31 proletarian movements, 20, 149 Proletarian Newspaper (Musansha shinbun), 162 The Promise of the ­Sisters (Shimai no yakusoku, 1940), 78 pronatalist policies: of Axis nations, 232n13; and gender norms, 19, 71, 73, 112; and motherhood, 81, 92; policies of, 18 Proposal to Establish National Policies of Film (Eiga kokusaku juritsu ni kansuru kengi), 6 Prouty, Olive Higgins, 81 Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarianovich, 118, 119–120, 121, 142, 240n26, 241n37 Queen of the Wind (Kaze no joō, 1938), 71 Quick Guide to Film Law (Hayawakari eigahō kaisetsu), 127, 242n54 radio broadcasting: as contained space of veneration of emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 49–53; expansion of, 211–212, 259–260n21; and Hirohito’s enthronement, 50–53, 208, 211; of Imperial Rescript of Termination of War, 211; introduction of, 27, 49–51, 53; of Japa­nese Empire’s 2,600th anniversary, 212, 260n22; and non-­presentation of emperor’s voice, 52–53; and non-­v iewing veneration of emperor, 30–31, 49, 53, 65; and Pearl Harbor attack, 50, 173, 181; state-­led development of, 49, 53; on Yoshihito, 51 Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher (Aru hobo no kiroku, 1942), 116, 118, 138–149, 139, 153, 246n96, 247nn106, 109, 110, 115 The Rec­ord of Visiting Dutch East Indies (Ran’in tanbō ki, 1941), 193, 256n109 Reiniger, Lotte, 162, 163 Renoir, Jean, 131 Rentschler, Eric, 11 Rescript of Humanity Declaration, 68 Ricci, Stephen, 11 Richie, Donald, 103–105 Riefenstahl, Leni: aesthetics of, 11, 15, 16; Olympia, 128, 178; Triumph of the ­Will, 62, 63, 105, 133 Rodchenko, Alexander, 198 Roo­se­velt, Franklin  D., 62 Rotha, Paul, Documentary Film, 20, 116, 117, 126, 127, 129–132, 133, 140, 142, 143–145, 153, 242n60, 242–243n62, 243n66, 243–244n72

Ruoff, Kenneth, 3, 46, 68 rural areas, 133, 219n12 Russell, Catherine, 231n3 Rus­sian film industry, 14, 186 Rus­sian films, 5, 116, 119, 185 Russo-­Japanese War (1904), 39, 233n18 Ruttmann, Walter, 105, 122, 129 Sadako (empress of Japan), 39, 44 Saeki, Kiyoshi, 73, 101, 102, 108 Sagan, Leontine, 124 Saigō, Takamori, 33 Saipan Island, 149, 150, 151 Saitō, Mokichi, 209, 211 Sakane, Tazuko, 243n64, 245nn85, 86, 94 Sandrich, Mark, 109 Sankichi’s Flight (Sankichi no kūchū hikō), 163 Sano, Akiko, 184, 189 Sasa, Genjū, 119, 121 Sasaki, Keisuke, 71 Sasaki, Norio, 121 Sasaki, Suguru, 224n28 Sasaki, Yasushi, 71, 94 Sata, Ineko, 118, 243n62 Satō, Ginjirō, 166 Satō, Haruo, 92 Satō, Hideo, 32, 225n33 Satō, Jun’ichiro, 7 Satō, Tadao, 7, 10, 217n2, 219n18 Sawamura, Tsutomu, 7 scenario writers, 114, 238–239n1 Schulte-­Sasse, Linda, 11 Schumacher, E. M., 163 Schuster, Harold D., 5 Schwarz, Hanns, 5 Science of Thought (Shisō no kagaku), 219n18 The Sea B ­ attle of Malaya (Mare oki kaisen), 256n109 Sea B ­ attles of Hawaii and Malaya (Hawai marē oki kaisen, 1942), 169, 171–176, 178, 199, 251n43, 252nn50, 56, 253n65 Sea Ea­gle (Umiwashi, 1942), 256n108 Second Lieutenant Norakuro: Sunday Magic (Norakuro shōi, Nichiyōbi no kaijiken), 166 Second Sino-­Japanese War (1937–1945): and documentary film, 127; and economic conditions, 83, 91; and entertainment war films, 71, 82–83, 91, 124; and newsreels, 125, 134; outbreak of, 3, 218n6; and ­women’s activism, 77 Sekino, Yoshio, 243n62 senga (line picture), 159–160

292 INDEX

Seo, Mitsuyo: on American cartoon film, 155–156, 201; animation staff of, 158; Ant, 133, 138, 167, 168, 194; artistic development of, 160–161, 205; circulation of films of, 248n1; on conditions of early animation production, 164; Duck’s Army Troop, 167, 168, 169; and GES, 133, 156, 167–171, 253n68; on Japa­nese form and style of animation, 155–156, 181, 191, 194, 201–202; Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 156–159, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181–184, 190, 191, 248n3, 249n5, 253n73; Momotaro’s Sea Ea­gle, 156, 159, 168–172, 172, 175–176, 182, 183, 184, 190, 191, 201, 251nn43, 46; Monkey Sankichi, 166; and Prokino, 123, 160, 161, 163, 167; as pro-­state animator, 20; and toy films, 161 Seurat, Georges, 180 Shanghai (1938), 128 Shibuya, Minoru, 80, 112 Shigemitsu, Mamoru, 208–210 Shimada, Keizō, 192 Shimazu, Yasujirō, 89, 93 Shimizu, Akira, 99, 237n80 Shimokawa, Ōten, 159 Shimomura, Kanefumi, 243n64 Shinkō eiga, 123 Shinto Directives, 64, 68 Shōchiku studio: actresses joining Kokufu, 78, 233n27; animation department of, 158, 253n68; and entertainment war films, 71, 86, 234n43; and Hirohito’s wedding, 45; and Kido on state regulation of film production, 9; as leading studio of industry, 4; and Masaoka, 250n21; and “­mother films,” 93–94; newsreels of, 120; and Occupation period, 112; production of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, 157, 158; and Seo, 156, 158, 181, 182, 202, 253n68; star system of, 89; and “­woman’s film,” 87–88, 205; ­women working for, 245n94 shoguns: modern emperor system replacing Tokugawa shogunate, 24, 34, 37–38, 225n42; premodern portrait conventions of, 33 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 146, 148 Showa economic depression (1930), effects of, 3, 4 Showa era: conceptions of, 3–4; as emperor-­ centered period, 3, 18; expansion of mass media in, 18; Japa­nese film industry in, 3–5, 10; promiscuity in film and visual culture of, 1, 12, 17, 18, 204 silhouette animation, 162, 162, 163, 183, 193, 194, 195

Silverberg, Miriam, 5 A ­Simple Case (1932), 120, 240n21 Singapore, fall of, 177 Siomopoulos, Anna, 84 Slaves’ War (Dorei sensō), 163 small-­gauge film (kogata eiga), 130, 161 “snap shot method” (sunappu shugi), 141–142 Sniper (1932), 120, 240n21 Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1939), 130, 133, 138, 140 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), 13, 167, 171, 182, 186, 188, 194, 195 Society for Childcare Studies (Hoiku mondai kenkyūkai), 139 Sontag, Susan, 13, 15–16 Southeast Asia, 178, 192–193, 255n103, 256n108 Soviet films, 119–120, 240n21 Soviet Union, 236n68 Spain, as fascist regime, 221n34 spectatorship: and agency of female spectators, 20, 72, 86–88, 90, 205, 235n57; ­factors shaping, 10, 19, 235n62; historical and po­liti­cal contexts of, 9; and repre­sen­ta­tion of ­mothers, 72, 86 Spice, Evelyn, 244n72 spiritism (seishin shugi), 7, 100, 199 Spottiswoode, Raymond, 121 Spring Thunder (Shunrai, 1939), 71, 80 Stacey, Jackie, 235n60 Stanwyck, Barbara, 234n34 Starevich, Ladislas, 163 state censorship: and animation, 157; and anticommunism, 5; and censors as spectators, 9; and documentary film, 140, 145–146, 151, 219n19, 247n119; and emperor’s portrait photo­graph, 19; and feature films, 219n19; and Japa­nese cultural policies, 85, 217n2, 219n19; and national policy film (kokusaku eiga), 2, 9; as negotiable, 9; and Occupation period, 141, 247n110 Statements of Young ­Women (Shōjo tachi no hatsugen, 1949), 138 Stella Dallas (film, 1937), 84, 92, 234n34 Stella Dallas (Prouty), 73, 81, 234n33 Stella Dallas (­silent film, 1925), 81, 82 Storm over Asia (1928), 120, 240n18 Straits of Chosun (1943), 237n79 suffrage and suffragists: universal male suffrage, 160; for ­women, 72, 76–77, 78, 79, 137, 204

INDEX 293

Sumida River (Sumida gawa), 121, 241n30 Sun Wukong (Songokū, 1940), 13, 254–255n92 Super Hero Jiraiya (Gōketsu Jiraiya, 1921), 48 Suppression of the Tengu (Tengu taiji, 1934), 164–165, 165 Surprise Attack on Celebes: First Time Operation by Paratroopers (Serebesu kishū sakusen rakkasan butai hatsu shutsudō), 178 Survey on the Education of Adult Males, 54, 228n105 Sutherland, A. Edward, 121 Suzuki, Denmei, 121 Suzuki, Noriko, 136, 245n89 Suzuki, Shigeyoshi, 121 Swanson, Gillian, 73 Tagawa, Seiichi, 256n112 Tagawa, Suihō, 166 Takahashi, Nobuhiko, 120, 240n22 Takami, Jun, 209, 211 Takamine, Hideko, 110 Takamura, Kōtarō, 92 Takano, Etsuko, 236n73 Takarazuka revue troup, 4 Takasugi, Sanae, 78 Takeda, Shiho, 234n35 Takeyama, Akiko, 125 Taki, Kōji, 33, 40, 224n25 Takita, Izuru, 121 Takizawa, Eisuke, 220n20 Tamagawa studios, 4 Tanaka, Chikao, 246n101 Tanaka, Hisao, 253n63 Tanaka, Jun’ichirō, 7, 124, 219n18 Tanaka, Kakuei, 53 Tanaka, Kinuyo, 78, 89–90, 99, 245n94 Tanaka, Yoshitsugu, 120, 129–130 Tansman, Alan, 12–13, 233n21 Tasaka, Tomotaka, 95, 175 Taylor, Deems, 194 tele­v i­sion, 27, 207–208, 258n6 tendency films (keikō eiga), 121, 241n29 Teruo, Ariyama, 209 Tezuka, Osamu, 157, 205, 249n6, 258n133 They Also Serve (1940), 106, 242n60 This Is How Hard We Are Working (Watashi tachi wa konnani hataraiteiru, 1945), 138, 147, 149–153, 152, 246n95, 248n135 Three ­Human Bomb Patriots (Nikudan sanyūshi), 218n6 Three No-­Nuclear Princi­ples (Hikaku san gensoku), 118

Three W ­ omen in the North (Kita no sannin, 1945): and military songs, 110–111; and ­women’s military ser­v ices, 73, 101, 102, 108–113, 110, 238n107 Through the Raging Waves (Dotō o kette, 1937), 124 Time, represention of Hirohito, 29–30 Timoshenko, Semyon, 119–120, 239n16 Tisse, Eduard, 122 Tochinai, Taikichi, 38 Die Töchter des Samurai (Samurai’s ­Daughter, 1937), 15, 83. See also Atarashiki tsuchi; New Earth Tōei Animation (Tōei dōga), 203 Tōhō studio: and Atsugi, 140, 153; distribution of, 186; and documentary film, 127, 176; as leading studio of industry, 4; and military educational films, 203, 258n130; and Occupation period, 112; and PCL, 117, 123–124; and repre­sen­ta­tion of motherhood, 81, 87 Tōjō, Hideki, 147, 209–210 Tokieda, Toshie, 145–146, 205, 230n122, 239n7, 245n94 Tokugawa, Musei, 186 Tokugawa shogunate, modern emperor system replacing, 24, 34, 37–38, 225n42 Tokutomi, Sohō, 38 Tokyo Asahi shinbun: distribution of imperial portrait, 41; halftone photo­graphs introduced in, 225n46; and Pearl Harbor attack, 173, 174; photo­graphs of Russo-­Japanese War in, 39; and state censorship, 85; on Yoshihito’s funeral, 227n76 Tokyo Broadcasting Station, 49–50 Tokyo Earthquake Recovery Office, 50 Tokyo Film Center, 254n87 Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun, 39, 44, 45, 226–227n67 Tokyo shinbun, 210, 259n16 Tomita, Sōshichi, 240n21 Torigoe, Shin, 251n40 Tosaka, Jun, 116 totalitarianism, 12, 153 Tōwa, 124 Toyama Prefectural Art Museum, 215 toy film (omocha eiga), 161 traditional ­family system, 217n2 Transformed Factory (Tenkan kōjō, 1944), 138, 246n95 transnational film history: Hansen on, 220n30; and relationality of film as medium, 12–18, 21, 204

294 INDEX

transnational film theories, 1, 11 transnational visual styles, sharing of, 1, 11, 12, 159, 170, 171, 180, 182, 202, 204 transwar-­ness, 206–208 Travelling Film Association (Idō eisha renmei), 219n12 “travelling gambler” (matatabi mono), 75 Treatise on Film Directors and Scenarios (Eiga kantoku to kyakuhon ron), 121 Triumph of the ­Will (1934), 62, 63, 105, 133 Tsuboi, Sakae, 36, 92 Tsuburaya, Eiji, 172 Tsuchimoto, Noriaki, 230n122 Tsuganesawa, Toshihiro, 227n76 Tsuji, Hisakazu, 254nn81, 82 Tsumura, Hideo, 126, 128, 131, 133, 242n50 Tsurumi, Shunsuke, 217n1, 219n18 Tsurumi, Yoshiyuki, 229n114 Tsuruta, Gorō, 181, 186; Divine Warriors Descend to Kota Palembang (Shinpei parenban ni kōka su, 1942), 177–180, 179, 186, 253n63 Turin, Victor A., 120 Turksib (1929), 120 Uchida, Kuichi, 224n30 Uchida, Tomu, 186 Uchimura, Kanzō, 225n32 Uehara, Ken, 89, 90 Ueno, Chizuko, 148, 236n67 Ueno, Kōzō, 123, 129–130 Ueno, Toshiya, 253n73 United States: and Depression, 4; economic recovery of mid-1930s, 232n8; and total war mobilization, 109; working w ­ omen in, 93, 236n68 The Unsung M ­ other (Mumei no haha, undated), 94–95, 97 Ushihara, Kiyohiko, 121 USSR in Construction, 198, 199 Vertov, Dziga, 119–120, 142 Victoria (queen of ­England), 32, 47 Vidor, King, 84, 234n34 visual culture: and discourse of motherhood, 72, 74–77; and gender norms, 74; historical continuity in, 215; intermediality in, 1, 2–3, 204, 211; and Kokufu, 77–78, 78, 79; of Pacific War, 176, 177–181, 201; and transmedia recursivity, 20; transnational cultural production dynamics, 1, 11, 12, 159, 170, 171, 180, 182, 202, 204; transnational history of, 159; types of, 2–3, 21, 39; and

woodcuts, 39–40, 225n48; and working ­women, 148. See also photography; postcards; war­time Japa­nese film and visual culture Viviani, Christian, 73, 82 Von Sternberg, Josef, 124 Wagner, Richard, 199, 252n61, 257n121 Wakakuwa, Midori, 74 Wan, Chaochen, 185–186, 188–189, 194, 201 Wan, Dihuan, 185–186, 188–189, 194, 201 Wan, Guchan, 159, 184–186, 188–189, 194, 201 Wan, Laiming, 159, 184–186, 188–190, 194, 201, 254n75 Wan ­brothers: The Camel Dance, 185; Commotions in a Studio, 184; An Old Chinese War Tale (Man chiang hung), 185; Princess Iron Fan (Tie shan gong zhu/Tessen kōshu, 1941), 159, 184–190, 187, 194, 201, 202, 255n95, 258n133 war crimes: and fascism, 12; postwar discourses of, 10, 214; and transwar-­ness, 207 Warm Currents (Danryū, 1938), 71 war memory, 10, 207–208 war­time Japa­nese film and visual culture: High on, 217n2, 231n3; intermediality in, 1, 2–3; Japanese-­language scholarship on, 2; and mediascape of society, 5; and national unity discourse, 17–18; promiscuity in, 1, 12, 17, 18; theoretical debates of, 2 Washington Naval Treaty, 49 Watanabe, Kiyoshi, 23–24, 65 Watanabe, Kunio, 30, 199 Watanabe, Yoshimi, 186, 256n108 We Are Watching: Yokosuka, the Nuclear Base (Ware ware wa kanshi suru, kaku kichi yokosuka), 118 Weber, Max, 62 Weed, Ethel B., 118 What Is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa, 1953), 87, 205 What Made Her Do It? (Nani ga kanojo o sōsasetaka, 1930), 121 Wilhelm I of Prus­sia, 32, 47, 224n29 Wilson, Sandra, 42–43, 84, 229n109 Wings of the Morning (1937), 5 Winther-­Tamaki, Bert, 180 Witte, Karsten, 11, 16 ­Woman in Tokyo (Tokyo no josei, 1939), 71 “­woman’s film” (josei eiga): context of, 204; and female protagonists, 71; and feminist film studies, 231n5; and indoctrination of social norms, 18–19; and nationalist

INDEX 295

maternal melodramas, 20; in postwar era, 204; and Shōchiku studio, 87–88, 205 ­women: and biological reproductivity, 74–75, 76, 80; comfort ­women, 207; in dramatic films, 72; in entertainment war films, 70–71; and “good wife and wise m ­ other” ideology, 74; Hirohito’s popularity with, 45–46, 227n74; military ser­v ices of, 73, 101, 102, 108–113, 110, 238n107; nationalist ser­v ices of, 73, 93, 236n67; patriotism of, 77–80; state emphasis on fertility of, 74–75; suffrage of, 72, 76–77, 78, 79, 137, 204; and total war mobilization, 71, 73, 93, 101, 102–109, 147–153, 154, 231n4; working ­women, 73, 93, 102–108, 110, 111, 118, 135, 137–138, 142, 147, 148–153, 154, 204, 205, 233n15, 236n68, 237n90, 238n97, 246n95, 247n113. See also motherhood ­Women of Tomorrow (Asu no fujintachi), 138 “­women’s cinema,” 231n5 ­Women’s Demo­cratic Club (Fujin minshu kurabu), 118 ­Women’s Legion of Wireless Communication Operators (Joshi tsushintai), 111 ­Women’s liberation, 205, 234n29 ­Women’s Volunteer L ­ abor Corps (Joshi kinrō teishin tai), 102, 103 wood block prints (nishiki-­e), 39–40 working class: lower-­working-­class fans of films, 48; lower-­working-­class ­women, 233n15; and Rec­ord of a Daycare Center Teacher, 143, 146, 147, 148–149, 153 World War I, 47 Xin­hua United China studio, 185–186 Yamagata, Aritomo, 45 Yamamoto, Isoroku, 181

Yamamoto, Kajirō: Katō Falcon Fighters, 100, 175, 252n61; and PCL, 123; Sea ­Battles of Hawaii and Malaya, 169, 171–176, 178, 251n43, 252nn50, 56, 253n65; Sun Wukong (Songokū), 13, 254–255n92 Yamamoto, Sanae, 169, 203 Yamamoto, Satsuo, 72, 78, 234n35 Yamanaka, Hisashi, 96 Yamanouchi, Hikaru, 123 Yamanouchi, Yasushi, 206, 217n1, 221–222n46 Yamashita, Tomoyuki, 177, 180–181, 183, 253n65 Yamataka, Shigeri, 76 Yanagi, Ryō, 180 Yang, Daqing, 211 Yang, Insil, 244n81 Yasuda, Sei, 77 Yasukuni Shrine, 67 Yasumaru, Yoshio, 29, 223n16 Yasuoka, Shōtarō, 100 Yokohama Cinema Studio (Yokohoam shinema shōkai), 124, 251n44 Yomiuri shinbun, 92 Yoshida, Shigeru, 69, 210, 214, 231n137 Yoshida, Yutaka, 217n1 Yoshihito (emperor of Japan), 39–40, 41, 44, 50–51, 227n76 Yoshimi, Shunya, 24–25, 208 Yoshimura, Kōzaburō, 71 Yoshiya, Nobuko, 81–82, 140, 234n36, 246n101 Young Flying Corps (Sora no shōnen hei), 133, 134, 138, 244nn81, 82 Yue, Fei, 185 Yukimura, Mayumi, 203 Yuval-­Davis, Nira, 74–75 Zhang, Shankun, 254n80

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University Selected Titles (Complete list at: http://­weai​.­columbia​.­edu​/­publications​/­studies​-­weai​/­) Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan, by G. Clinton Godart. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Vio­lence, by Sheena Chestnut Greitens. Cambridge University Press, 2016. The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four, by Alexander C. Cook. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Po­liti­cal Economy of Redemption ­After Empire, by Yukiko Koga. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers, by Yoshikuni Igarashi. Columbia University Press, 2016. The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China, by Dorothy Ko. University of Washington Press, 2016. Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Ser­vice in Nineteenth-­Century Japan, by D. Colin Jaundrill. Cornell University Press, 2016. The Red Guard Generation and Po­liti­cal Activism in China, by Guobin Yang. Columbia University Press, 2016. Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability in Japan and South K ­ orea, by Celeste L. Arrington. Cornell University Press, 2016. Negotiating Rural Land Owner­ship in Southwest China: State, Village, ­Family, by Yi Wu. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia, by Kathlene Baldanza. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West, coedited by Ben Hillman and Gray Tuttle. Columbia University Press, 2016. One Hundred Million Phi­los­o­phers: Science of Thought and the Culture of Democracy in Postwar Japan, by Adam Bronson. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016.

Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng ­Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c. 1620–1720, by Xing Hang. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics, by Li Chen. Columbia University Press, 2016. Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the ­Human in Modern K ­ orea and Japan, by Travis Workman. University of California Press, 2015. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, by Akiko Takenaka. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015 The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China, by Christopher Rea. University of California Press, 2015 The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, by Federico Marcon. University of Chicago Press, 2015 The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952, by Reto Hofmann. Cornell University Press, 2015 The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964, by Jessamyn R. Abel. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015 Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920, by Shellen Xiao Wu. Stanford University Press, 2015 Casualties of History: Wounded Japa­nese Ser­vicemen and the Second World War, by Lee K. Pennington. Cornell University Press, 2015 City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions, by Chuck Wooldridge. University of Washington Press, 2015 The Proletarian Wave: Lit­er­a­ture and Leftist Culture in Colonial ­Korea, 1910–1945, by Sunyoung Park. Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Strug­gle Over China’s Modernity, by Sean Hsiang-­lin Lei. University of Chicago Press, 2014. When the F ­ uture Dis­appears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial K ­ orea, by Janet Poole. Columbia University Press, 2014. Bad ­Water: Nature, Pollution, & Politics in Japan, 1870–1950, by Robert Stolz. Duke University Press, 2014. Rise of a Japa­nese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972, by Eric C. Han. Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan, by Louise Young. University of California Press, 2013. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo, by Ian J. Miller. University of California Press, 2013.