Ahen sensô (The Opium War, 1943) was produced as one of the wartime propaganda films justifying Japan’s war for the purpose of “liberating asia,” simultaneously agitating the audience’s hostility toward Western colonial powers by telling a story about Britain’s brutal invasion of China. More intriguing, however, is the fact that cinematically Ahen sensô is heavily influenced by Hollywood, particularly in its consisted adaptations from several Hollywood films. In my essay I will focus on how Ahen sensô adapted the Hollywood historical disaster films in order to create its anti-Western propaganda. In the last sequence of Ahen sensô, for instance, British warships burn Canton city to ashes. The sequence offered an unprecedented scale of Hollywood-style spectacle in Japanese cinema, one that relied heavily on cribbed footage from In Old Chicago (1937).

While Ahen sensô tried to represent “universal” entertainment for “the Greater East Asian” audience by combining a spectacle of catastrophe with melodrama, Hollywood disaster films were adopted as the proper model. But Ahen sensô’s climactic catastrophe sequence differs significantly from Hollywood’s historical disaster films in that it lacks a cathartic moment where the catastrophe turns into a happy ending and the evil old metropolis is replaced by the new utopia. This does not mean, however, that Ahen sensô lacks a utopian vision. Under the wartime Japanese propaganda code, the plight of Asia under Western colonialism could only be rescured by the Japanese imperial military. In the film Ahen sensô, the Chinese people could not be saved from catastrophe because this film lacks a Japanese protagonist, and the cathartic moment is transformed to the real world where the Japanese military would “liberate” these victims by defeating the Western colonial powers and constructing “the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” in the future.