The film critic Tsumura Hideo has been described as totalitarian in his outlook. It was Tsumura who was responsible, in part, for the Japanese goverment’s film regulation policy during World War II. Nevertheless, Tsumura’s interpretive attitude with regard to films cannot be understood entirely in terms of a totalitarian stance. Tsumura criticized the commercialism of film companies in general, as well as the producer-centered production system of the film industry. He advocated instead a director-centered system of production. Tsumura was also critical of the artificial tone that characterized Hollywood-style films made in Japan. Such criticism is evidence that he anticipated French New Wave-style films, in which ordinary scenes displace the specctacular, dramatic scenes typial of the Hollywood mode. Tsumura’s libertarian sympathies may be deduced from these critical position.

In this essay I will describe how Tsumura’s libertarian tendencies gave way to a totalitarian outlook. I suggest that Tsumura downplayed his libertarian sympathies because of his excessive concern for the authorical autonomy of film directors. I argue that Tsumura’s concern to protect film directors from the pressures of the film companies’commercialism, and to release them from technological constraints, led him to support a policy of govermental control over films. It also informed his support for the production of films concerned with the promotion of national policy.

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Bunka Eiga/Culture Film has usually been regarded as a synonym for documentary film, and while the category was highly influential in Japanese cinema during 1935-1945, its accurate meaning has yet to be defined. My paper will clarify the functions of Bunka Eiga through analyzing its historical discourses. Bunka Eiga needs to be elaborated from its four aspects: First, many of the filmmakers and critics associated with Bunka Eiga aimed at improving their institutional status by asserting the importance of recording “facts” on film. Second, Bunka Eiga was always discussed in relation to “kagaku/science.” Bunka Eiga’s emphasis on science allowed for the covert use of Marxist principles, thus mitigating the lingering guilt of the Bunka Eiga filmmakers and critics, many of whom had been forced to renounce Marxism. Third, as a result of this connection with “kagaku/science,” Bunka Eiga could act as a means of mediating between individual objects and the universal laws underlying them. Fourth, the abstractness of Bunka Eiga helped the Japanese to disavow the overwhelming threat from the U.S. Even at the outbreak of the war, Bunka Eiga assuaged Japanese with a self-aggrandizing vision of their own “high” culture.

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A dilemma for studies of Japanese cinema is that many scholars, who analyze it from a distance, adopt linear, evolutionary narratives derived from the Enlightenment history or in other words, a colonial model of history with the West as subject and central force of progress. Japanese cinema is seen in these narratives as a belated national cinema following the trajectory of Hollywood in its various stages of development. A reevaluation of historical approaches is necessary to address this imbalance. We must research a greater variety of films, since they can serve as primary historical texts, along with other historical records. My paper will offer an account of the relationship between modern mass culture and nationalism, via an analysis of a Shochiku Kamata-cho (a filmic optique of the 1920’s and 1930’s) film. This study will focus mainly on the director Yasujiro Shimazu, whose oeuvre remains largely unresearched, in spite of the fact that he was one of the founding contributors to the style. The paper will be divided in two sections, which will examine in turn how ideas of modernity and nationalism impacted on Shimazu’s work and the style in general.

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  It is rather surprising to know today that Japan's Films Act of 1939 had anarticle about the film conservation. This law was not just a simple set of regurations to control the film industry, as we generally consider now, but contained many positive points for the promotion of japanese film. And there were many intellectuals who supported this law and wrote about the relation between cinema and the State. This phenomena is international at that period in the history of cinema. In this text, I would like to situate this law in the context of the film history of the world.

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The aim of this paper is to align Kyo Machiko's performance style as a vamp actress with the history of Japanese cinema, and explore postwar public consciousness and desire through her star persona. The voluptuous Kyo Machiko made her film debut in 1949 and went on to become one of the leading actresses of the postwar generation. Her rise to stardom was closely related to many of her roles that embodied social phenomenon amid a trend for kasutori culture, in the sexually liberated climate following the Second World War. In contrast to the intense characters on screen, she portrayed herself as modest and graceful, which enabled her to convey multiple messages within the context of her fame. She depicted a dual-star persona as a result of the contrast between her vamp characters in films and her modest, feminine personality in fan magazines; accordingly, she gained fame as a star across generations. Through the 1950s, she appeared in works by some of the greatest Japanese filmmakers, which catapulted her to international stardom. She was sometimes referred to as "the Grand Prix actress." Following the success of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), a growing tendency to promote Japanese cinema overseas emerged, eliciting the gaze of Orientalism from Western spectators. International stardom led to an even more complicated gaze on Kyo Machiko's body. Star/Celebrity studies have developed certain methodological frameworks since Richard Dyer's Stars. From a theoretical perspective, this paper focuses on the film star Kyo Machiko as a cultural text, and analyzes how fans or critics viewed both her cinematic persona, performing acts of violence on screen, and her own persona, which represented traditional Japanese imagery in fan magazines. This research concludes that Kyo Machiko's cinematic body became a national body and functioned as an esthetic vehicle, reflecting both the desire of a trans/national identity and the desire to localize her star image for Japanese spectators.

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As I showed in a former article (Eizogaku No. 66, 2001), the abstractness of bunka eiga/culture film helped Japanese disavow the increasing threat from their actual situation after the “China Incident.” But shooting a film itself inevitably forced them to come to face with reality. In this paper I will show how the discourses of bunka eiga avoided this critical phase. A well-known conflict between Kamei Fumio and his cameraman Miki Shigeru exemplified two different attitudes toward reality. In filming Fighting Soldiers, Kamei captured a Chinese boy and ordered Miki to shoot his face, but Miki was unable to do so. While Miki could not help recoiling from the violent sight, Kamei regarded the boy as just “material” for his film. In the discourses of bunka eiga, the Kamei-like attitude toward reality remained dominant over the Miki-like one, and this dominance resulted from the avoidance of a confrontation with the “relative Other,” such as the Chinese, compelled by the China Incident. Between the Incident and the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Japanese, by discussing bunka eiga without facing the relative Other, fried to avoid looking squarely at reality.

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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.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate how post-war Japan promoted national reconstruction and modernizatron in the light of the continuity or discontinuity of the discourses on America between war period and the Occupation period. Eto Jun pointed out that the censorship by GHQ/SCAP drastically transformed the traditional values of the Japanese, and he designated the Occupation period a “sealed linguistic space,” but the discursive space of the Occupation period should be taken as both liberated and constrained.

“Overcoming the Modern” (Kindai no chōkoku), a round-table talk held in 1942, discussed how to overcome western modernity, but it curiously left the central problem of American modernity almost untouched, simply repeating the widely held assumption that American culture was materialistic and degenerate. On the other hand, several books on American literature published in 1941, unanimously stated that the Japanese should study and recognize American history and culture through reading American literature. This assertion was reiterated in books on American literature published in the Occupation period, except that the authors now identified the future of postwar Japan with that of the developing American literature and culture.

But some Japanese modernist authors―such as Haruyama Yukio (1902-94), Ijima Tadashi (1902-96) and Shimizu Hikaru (1903-61)―who were active in the 1930’s and had faced restrictions on their intellectual freedom and expression, perceived the essence of the problem from a different angle. For them, the Occupation period was not necessarily synonymous with a closed linguistic space. They were well aware that postwar Japan had to take a detour to reexamine the possibilities and limits of the Western modernism, instead of simply seeing Americanization equating modernization.

Simizu was a scholar of American literature and visual culture who believed in “mechanical beauty” (kikai bi). In 1920s and 30s he published books and articles on cross-genre studies between American literature and cinema and photography, and in the Occupation period he edited two magazines in Kyoto: Eiga Geijutsu (Cinema Art, first published in 1946) and Amerika Bungaku (American Literature, 1948-49). Amerika Bungaku was charactertzed by its perspective of American literature as spreading beyond the boundaries of its original culture. From 1920s to 30s, the poet and translator Haruyama Yukio edited two famous modernist magazines: Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetics) and Serupan (Serpent). He applied the editing policy of Serupan to Ondori Tsushin (Cock Report, 1945-51) and made the latter one of the most popular general magazines in the Occupation period. He was maintained his pre-war transatlantic viewpoint of American culture and his political stance of non-communism and liberalism.

These modernists, confronting problems Kindai no chōkoku neglected or made light of, regarded American popular culture as a “negative medium” (in Hanada Kiyoteru’s words) and questioned what kind of modernization postwar Japan needed while it lay in America’s shadow. When Haruyama was forced to resign as chief editor in 1946 on account of the purge of public service personnel by SCAP and Shimizu’s Amerika-Bungaku ceased publishing, the linguistic and literary space in Occupied Japan, devoid of its post-modern possibilities, was partially closed in a manner that was different to Eto’s view.

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