The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931-1945 9780299181307, 0299181308, 9780299181345, 0299181340

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T H E IM P E R IA L S C R E E N

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PV m .b Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the generous support

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of the Japan Foundation and of the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin- Madison

The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3 Henrietta Street Ix>ndon WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 2003 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved Japanese edition copyright O 1995 by Peter B. High English translation rights arranged with University of Nagoya Press through Japan UNI Agency, Inc..

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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data High, Peter B. [Teikoku no ginmaku. English] The Imperial screen .Japanese film culture in the Fifteen years’ war, 1931-1945 / Peter B. High, pp. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-18130-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-299-18134-0 (pbk.) 1. Motion pictures Japan History. 2. SinoJapanese Conflict, 1937-1945- Motion pictures and the conflict. 3. World War, 1939 1945 Motion pictures and the war. I. Tide. PN2924 H4713 2003

791■43’°952’°9043 d « i 2002

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Introduction Contextualizing the Book Parameters of the Book

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ix xiii xvi xxvii

Prologue Into a Valley of Darkness A Brief Season of Pacifism Censorship a la 1930 Militarism and the Youth Culture Phantom “ Events” and Psychic Holograms: Media in the Thirties The Manchurian Incident as Media Event Step Two: The “ Crisis-Time” Japan Mood The Unsatisfactory Mirror A Matter of Patriotism and Profit Regulating National Life and Controlling the Producers of Culture The Critics and Thought Control The Film Law The Foreign Film “ Menace” The Kondankai System in Practice The Faith of the Reform Bureaucrats The Glory Days of the Kultwfilm News Films and the Outbreak of the “China Incident” Feature-Length Documentaries in the First Year of the China Incident The “ Kamei Fumio Case” Issues Raised by Other Toho Military Documentaries Hopes for Culture Film Inspired by the Film Law v

3 13 13 20 23 26 29 39 51 51 55 62 70 76 82 85 92 92 99 100 114 120

Contents The Makers of Culture Film “ Pure” Science and the Screen of “Ambiguity” The “ Propaganda Problem” And, Finally, a “ Reality Problem” The Film Industry in the China Incident A Conflict of Egos Flickers of Resistance m jidaigeki The Fates o f Three Directors A Troubled Era o f Greatness: Gendaigeki “ Fooling” the Censors Filmworld Individuals in the China Incident War Dramas in the China Incident A “Treason” of the Film Companies Five Scouts: The Beast with Many Bodies Tasaka and the Rejection of History Mud and Soldiers and Legend of Tank CommanderNishizumi The Issue of “ Humanism” in a War Film “ The Time for Rationality Is at an End” The Rise of the Spiritist Film: Sawamura Tsutomu and Kumagai Hisatora Kumagai Hisatora’s The Abe Clan The Naval Brigade at Shanghai A Story of Leadership Other Spiritist Films Spiritist Women and Women of Spirit Sky Above, Death Below China Dreams “ Intractable Footage” and the Anxiety o f Vastness Invitations to a “ Royal Paradise” Ri Koran Depicting the Chinese On the Eve o f a New War 1940: “ Luxury Is the Enemy!” Shortening the Leash on the Film Industry Life Inside the “A BCD Encirclement” The Bizarre Case o f You and Me “ Not One Foot of Raw Film Stock to Spare!” Repression and Internalization of Control No Regrets for Whose Youth?

124 127 133 140 •49 •49 156 ■58 164 ' 7i 180 190 190 192 201 204 217 223 223 226

233 239 246 251 259 265 26^ 268 271 276 286 286 291 295 308 3*4 322 322

Contents

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Iwasaki Akira Goes into the “ Pig Box” Dancing in a Circle of Spearmen The First Year of the Pacific War The Japanese Film World: “ In the Light of a Perfecdy Clear Situation” Films in the Season o f Victory: 1942 Imaging an Alien World “A Lot Easier Than in China!” : Malay War Record and Burma War Record Early Pacific War Drama Films “ In the End, We All Became Servants of National Policy” The New Spiritism —“A Progress of Souls” The Travails of Making a Combat Spectacular The Return of Spiritism in Film The Novice The Trainee The Initiate The Warrior and His Sacred Mission Fulfillment in Extinction Militarist Mothers The Demoted Hero of the Pure Combat Film The Yasukuni Doctrine “There Can Be No Improvement in Production without Improvement in Character” Trends in the Middle Phase Hate the Enemy: A New Role for the History Film “ Liberation” and “Antiliberation” Films Spy Films Tales of Jungle Combat The Late War Period Closing the Lid of an “ Iron Coffin” In the Wake of the Decisive War Emergency Measures The Fate of the Culture Film The Fate of the Cartoon Film Twilight of the Film Critics In the Shadow o f Defeat Raising the Divine Wind The Firestorm Descends

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324 329 343 343 347 353 363 374 376 382 382 385 395 396 397 398 398 399 405 408 411 422 422 432 442 450 458 458 460 465 470 474 478 478 489

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Contents Spiritual Countermeasures Scorched Earth His Majesty’s Voice The Occupiers Arrive Epilogue

49 1 496 499 503 506

Notes English Source Bibliography Japanese Source Bibliography Index of Names Index of Films

517 559 565 573 579

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Ad for a showing at the Denkikan Theater (1905) 2. News footage of maneuvers shortly before the naval victory at Tsushima (1905) 3. The Taishokan Theater in Asakusa, Tokyo 4. Scene from Ushihara Kiyohiko’s The Army Advances (1930) 5. The Asakusa movie district in the early thirties 6. Home Ministry censors screening a film (1936) 7. Scene from Yamanaka MinetarO’s novel Iron Man of East Asia (1932) 8. Yomiuri Shinbun’s gondola descending into the Miharayama crater (1933) 9. Characters in Tagawa Suiho’s Nora Kuro comic strip emulate the Three Human Bomb Patriots (1932) 10. BandO TsumasaburO as Sakamoto Ryoma (1928) 11. Ad for The Great Order (1934) 12. Cartoon showing intellectuals and politicians groping a beast labeled fascism (1932) 13. Cartoon in which Italy, Japan, and Germany “ smash the international Jewish economy” (1943) 14. Film critic and theorist Imamura Taihei (1911 -86) in 1939 15. Director-producer Makino ShOzO (1878-1929) 16. Tatebayashi Mikio surrounded by filmworld personnel (1939) 17. Kikuchi Kan and Karasawa Toshiki (1941 ) 18. Housewives collecting sennin bari for the boys at the front (1937) 19. Director Kamei Fumio (1908-87) 20. Scene from Kamei’s Shanghai (1938) 21. Scene from Kamei’s Fighting Soldiers (1939) 22. Novelist Ishikawa TatsuzO (1905 ) in 1940 23. Ad for The Story o f the Microbes (1941) 24. Tani Masaharu o f the Cabinet Information Bureau (1942) 25. Scene from Yamamoto KajirO’s The Composition Class (1938) IX

4 9 11 17 19 22 25 29 38 45 48 50 57 68 80 83 89 94 104 107 111 117 129 138 141

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Illustrations

26. Scene from Gosho Heinosuke’s The Lady Next Door and My Wife {1931) 27. The Nichigeki Theater in 1937 28. Actor Hayashi Chojuro/Hasegawa Kazuo (1929) 29. Directors Ozu YasujirO and Yamanaka Sadao (1938) 30. Directors Arnold Fanck and Itami Mansaku on location for The New Earth (1937) 31. Scene from The New Earth (1938) 32. Scene from Naruse Mikio’s The Whole Family Works (1939) 33. Scene from Uchida Tomu’s Endless Advance (1937) 34. Director Mizoguchi Kenji and scriptwriter Yoda Yoshikata (1939) 35. Ad for Mizoguchi’s Camp Song (1938) 36. Original cover o f Hino Ashihei’s war reportage novel Barley and Soldiers (1938) 37. Sharing Japanese soldiers in Five Scouts (1938) 38. Smiling soldier from Five Scouts 39. Elite figures of the literary world arrive in Shanghai as members of the “ Pen Battalion” (1938) 40. Director Tasaka Tomotaka (1902-74) in 1937 41. Scene from Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers (1939) 42. Scene from Yoshimura KOzaburo’s Legend o f Tank Commander Nishizumi (1940) 43. Scene from Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers 44. Scene from Kumagai’s Naval Brigade at Shanghai (1939) 45. Scriptwriter Sawamura Tsutomu and director Kumagai Hisatora (1941) 46. Scene from Kumagai’s Story o f leadership (1941) 47. Scene from Abe Yutaka’s Flaming Sky (1940) 48. Finale of Flaming Sky 40. Scene from Suzuki Shieeyoshi’s The Road to Peace in the Orient (1938) 50. Scene from China Nights (1940) 51. Scene from Shimizu Hiroshi’s Sayon’s Bell (1943) 52. Scene from Karl Ritter’s Leave on Word of Honor (1938) 53. Scene from Taguchi Satoshi’s General, Staff, and Soldiers (1942) 54. Meeting between members of the Cabinet Information Bureau and the filmworld executives (1941) 55. Film critic Iwasaki Akira (1903-81) in 1946 56. Scene from Yoshimura KozaburO’s Windfrom the South, Part 2 {1942)

150 153 155 160 162 163 176 179 184 185 193 197 199 205 207 210 214 220 238 240 244 262 264 278 281 284 299 303 317 326 358

Illustrations 57. Scenes from Malay War Record (1942) and in Momotarô, Divine Warrior of the Sea (1944): General Yamashita browbeating General Percival into surrendering Singapore 58. Scene from Malay War Record 59. Scene from Yamamoto Satsuo’s Winged Victory (1942) 60. Scene from Yamamoto KajirO’s Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya (1942) 61. Scene from Tasaka Tomotaka’s Navy (1943) 62. The stalwart “Japanese spirit” remains serenely unmoved by the lies poured forth by the “ demon Roosevelt” (1943) 63. Scene from Watanabe Kunio’s Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky (1943) 64. Scenes from Yamamoto’s Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya 65. Scene from Kinoshita Keisuke’s Army (1944) 66. Scene from Yoshimura Misao’s Last Visit Home (1945) 67. Scene from Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky 68. Scene from Yamamoto Satsuo’s Searing Wind (1943) 69. Scene from Kurosawa Akira’s Most Beautiful (1945) 70. Scene from Makino Masahiro’s Opium War( 1943) 71. Scene from Tsuji KichirO’s Pirate’s Flag Blasted Away (1943) 72. Sugiura Yukio’s cartoon for his essay “ This Is the Kind of Hate-the-Enemy Film We Need” (1943) 73. Scene from Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Forward, Flag of Independence ( 1943) 74. Scene from Imai Tadashi’s Suicide Troops o f the Watchtower (1943) 75. Storyboard card for the “ spy awareness” campaign 76. Scene from Yoshimura Kozaburô’s On the Eve of War (1942) 77. Scene from On the Spy Front (1941). 78. Poster for Abe Yutaka’s Shoot That Flag (a.k.a. Dawn of Freedom) (1943) 79. Ad for Nihon K o’on, manufacturers of 16 mm. projectors ( » 943) 80. Nichigeki Theater, closed for the duration and converted to war production (1944) 81. Scene from Bomb Blasts and Shell Fragments (1944) 82. Scene from Navy Hospital Ship (1944) 83. Single frame cartoon of the character Momotarô (1943) 84. Film critic Tsumura Hideo (1907-85) 85. Scene from a news film (1945) 86. Enomoto Ken’ichi (1904-70), Yamamoto KajirO (1902-91), and Furukawa Roppa (1903-61)

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368 370 379 383 389 391 397 401 403 404 409 417 420 425 429 431

437 441 443 446 449 455 460 462 467 469 473 476 481 495

INTRODUCTION

The Imperial Screen is a study o f the Japanese film industry during the socalled Fifteen Years’ War period, from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 to the surrender in August 1945. On one level, it represents the most thorough-going survey yet published of Japanese kokusaku or “ national policy” films, relating their montage and dramatic structures to the cul­ tural currents, government policies, and propaganda goals o f the era. At the same time, it attempts to provide a detailed account of the fate of artists and intellectuals under the impact o f a totalitarian regime. As I hope to prove, the Japanese film world was a microcosm o f the entire sphere o f Japanese wartime culture, experiencing the same pressures and reacting according to the same pathology as those in other areas of culture endeavor. The issue o f tenko (lit., “ reorientation” )—signifying the recantation and conversion of individuals to the state’s antiliberal, promilitarist standpoint —has long riveted the attention of Japanese scholars. Signif­ icantly, it has been the preoccupation of philosophers even more than of historians. Between 1959 and 1962, the Science of Thought (Shiso no Kagaku) group, centering around the pragmatist philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, brought out their Recantation: A Cooperative Research Project in three weighty volumes. In an introductory chapter, Tsurumi defined the tenko phenomenon as “ a forced change of thought brought about by the powers-that-be, especially the state.” 1 The efforts of the twenty-one writers collaborating on the project were unified by Tsurumi’s dictum to treat the subject in a “ relativistic and pragmatic manner, without selfrighteous moral judgments,” and the work stands as a classic in its field.2 However, while the effort to establish an objective basis for analysis was laudable, the result was, according to one critic, “ little more than a se­ ries o f descriptive vignettes of individual cases, lacking a clear-cut point o f view.” 3 Later in the 1960s, the poet and philosopher Yoshimoto Taka’aki sought to rectify the lack o f a theoretical framework by posit­ ing the notion that most o f the cases shared a common psychological

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Introduction

origin the personal need of the tenko-ite to come in from the cold and rejoin the warmth o f the Japanese national polity.4 In other words, he saw it as a last resort adopted by those philosophically out o f step with the times to overcome their personal sense o f alienation. The present study is indebted to a certain extent to the insights pro­ vided by the above thinkers, particularly to their insistence that a far deeper understanding is to be gained from an empathetic approach than a judgmental one. At the same time, I follow a quite divergent line o f inquiry. While the above studies tend to focus on tenko committed by individual intellectuals under extreme duress, my research documents an entirely different kind: the “ mass tenko ” of the nation’s educated elite. The scene o f such political conversions was not the station house or prison cell, but the company conference room or even a posh downtown restaurant. The means used to bring it about were rarely overt threats and almost never actual torture but skillful manipulation o f the subjects’ anxiety, uncertainty, or personal ambition. The wealth o f documentary evidence available to the researcher belies the ur-story Japanese liberal historians often use to explicate the era, which arrays the monolithic brutality of the state on one side against a vast number of hapless vic­ tims, a few opportunists, and a few heroic resisters on the other. The real situation appears to have been far more complex. Opportunism, along with the genuine political convictions of a few individuals, did play a part in the mass collaboration of the intellectuals and artists. There may even have been some few instances o f “ forced” collaboration (film director Yamamoto Satsuo having made this dubi­ ous claim about himself). This, however, misses the point. A key issue addressed in this book is how (meaning, by what process) so many individuals—many o f them as alert, broad-minded, and cosmopolitan as the best o f us today—were induced to put their creative talents and inspiration in service to a regime that utterly rejected the rational ten­ ets they once believed. Belief, in fact, is crucial to an understanding of the tenko moment. The typical “ confrontation” between functionaries of the state and the artist and intellectual amounted to an uneven con­ test between the absolute certainty and often fanatical faith (reinforced by the authority of the state) of the former against the typical anxieties, intellectual vacillations, and uncertain worldview of the latter. This book will provide numerous examples o f just this sort o f confrontation. One o f the peculiarities of Japanese journalism allowing us to “ wit­ ness” the tenko moment—in which artists and intellectuals cave in and often frantically adopt the government position —is the zadankai, or

Introduction

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printed roundtable discussion, a format innovated by the doyen of liter­ ary journalism, Kikichi Kan, who was also a “ gray eminence” o f the film world. Published in dialogue form in the various film monthlies, these zadankai provide dramatically vivid documentation of actual faceoffs between top Control Bureaucrats and representatives (scriptwriters, directors, executives, etc.) o f the film world. Graduates from law depart­ ments of the nation’s leading universities, the bureaucrats emerge as well-informed masters of debate with a clear sense of “ mission” bol­ stered by the confidence to carry it through. The film people were usu­ ally no match for their wiles. In these zadankai, we can actually observe them being manipulated into positions far removed from their original intention. Although the politicians, the military, and the thought police did have their roles to play, it was the elite bureaucrats o f the Home Minis­ try censorship division and of the Cabinet Information Bureau who were most directly involved in the implementation of state film policy. I myself have had a certain amount of contact with the modern version o f the Japanese bureaucrat. As a longtime professor at a Japanese na­ tional university, administered more or less directly by the functionaries o f the Ministry of Education, I have had an opportunity to observe firsthand their modus operandi. Thirteen years practical experience and the fifteen years spent researching this book have made it clear that the purported radical disjunction between the prewar and postwar peri­ ods is, in this case at least, functionally invalid. In a series o f columns for Japan ’s leading newspaper, Asahi Shinbun, I explored the tactics modern bureaucrats use to enforce conformity. Among these is the Linguistic Trap, in which the bureaucratic agency sends down orders for an inno­ vation, phrased in impossibly vague language. Those charged with actu­ ally implementing the innovation —the deans and professors at a na­ tional university, for instance—are left in a quandary. And, in their anxiety to satisfy a demand they never understand in the first place, they forfeit the opportunity to question the correctness of the original Minis­ try directive. In the end, they become zealots for its implementation, re­ gardless of the consequences to themselves, to their students, and, in some cases, to their sense of rationality and equity. As we shall see, war­ time bureaucrats effectively used this same trap. As a result, filmmakers who began by trying to defend a minimal area o f creative autonomy often ended up pleading with the authorities to “ please send a represen­ tative to stand next to my camera and tell me specifically ‘shoot this’ or ‘don’t shoot that.’ ” 5

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Introduction

Contextualizing the Book When The Imperial Screen was originally published in Japanese in 1995, “ epoch-making” (kakkiteki) was an epithet frequendy used in reviews of the book.6 Many of the reviewers expressed surprise, and a few a certain amount o f chagrin, that the first thorough-going study o f Japanese war­ time cinema should have been written by a foreigner rather than a Ja p ­ anese national. On a deeper level, the term “ epoch-making” had a fur­ ther, more troubling significance. The reviewers were indicating, albeit in a largely approving manner, that the work represented a fundamental break with traditional Japanese film research methodology and that it had appeared, quite literally, without pedigree or context. As cultural historian Inose Naoki put it, “ the Imperial Screen is a typical example of U.S. historical scholarship, using original documentary evidence to shore up each and every one o f its analytical conclusions___ It stands as a polar opposite to its counterparts in this country, where impressionism and reliance on intuitive insights tend to predominate.” 7 Needless to say, this gready overstates the case. Significant analytical forerunners to my own study abound. First, I would point to the chap­ ters in the Kinemajunpo History of Japanese Film (1976) dealing with the wartime period, written by Yamamoto Kikuo and Chiba Nobuo.8 Yamamoto’s typology o f several sets of post-Manchurian Incident films, as reworkings o f earlier genre conventions, provided a particularly helpful model as I worked out my own analytical methodology. I am also much indebted to Fujita Motohiko’s pioneering study, Modern Japa­ nese Film History: The Showa Teens (1977).9 His was the first work o f its kind to base itself solidly on original archival research, demonstrating an ap­ proach which, among Japanese researchers at least, only Makino Mamoru and Hirano KyOkO have since surpassed. At the same time, there are key differences between Fujita’s vantage point and my own. Fujita works within the auteurist tradition, and his History is a collection of studies on twelve major filmmakers, whom he treats consecutively and in isolation. Nor does he indicate much inter­ penetration between the film world and the culture or society at large. Except where individual filmmakers fell afoul o f official guidelines, and paid the penalty, the film world is portrayed as largely sui generis, pur­ suing its own professional and aesthetic concerns. Although the inevi­ table references to the oppressive coercion of the era abound, explor­ ing the mechanisms by which it operated lies beyond the scope of Fujita’s book. The Imperial Screen takes an almost diametrically opposite

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approach. My assumptions are that the borders delimiting the film world from other spheres o f domestic cultural activity were almost completely permeable, that the situation o f filmmakers bore striking parallels to that o f writers, painters, dramatists, and intellectuals of the dme, and that influences flowed back and forth in abundance. Further­ more, as I try to demonstrate in chapter i, by the early thirties cinema was interacting vigorously with other media (radio and the newspapers, principally) to generate successive waves of public hysteria and, ulti­ mately, to manufacture the illusion of a vast politico-social “ time of cri­ sis” (htjqji). Therefore, not only was the film world a reasonably faithful replica, or microcosm, o f the cultural whole, it was a hugely important participant in it. Recently, some Japanese historians have begun to view The Imperial Screen (the original, Japanese-language version) in terms of two separate contexts. The first is as a specialized study of an explosive and contro­ versial era of Japanese film history. The second is as an original contri­ bution to the ongoing (and often acrimonious) réévaluation o f the gen­ eral cultural history o f wartime Japan. In the past two or three years, the book has appeared frequendy on lists and in published discussions pro­ claiming the emergence o f a “ new generation” of scholarship on the 1931-45 period—a flattering but rather perplexing development.10 When I began writing this book, I was little aware of being part o f an incipient new wave, nor did I know much about the principle figures in­ volved in it (many o f whom are at least a decade younger than me).11 As I subsequendy explored their work, however, I discovered that their con­ cerns, attitudes, and working premises did in fact closely parallel my own. Most important, perhaps, we share the luxury of being largely free of the intellectual baggage bequeathed by the war. As a U.S. citizen born in the final days of the war, I am of course a complete outsider (ex­ cept through sympathetic intuition) to the guilt feelings, resentment, and bewilderment experienced by those Japanese who lived through it. As for my younger, “ new generation” Japanese colleagues, they were born at an even further historical remove from the events that so trau­ matized their elders. With no axes to grind and no need to rescue our personal reputations from the suspicion o f “ collaboration,” we share a commitment to the establishment of a new, more objective perspective on that much-debated era. In a recent discussion, published in zadankai form, “ new genera­ tion” historian Narita Ryüichi introduced a schematic framework periodizing postwar historical research on the 1931-45 era. I wish to use

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Introduction

this framework to situate my own book in the context o f Japanese scholarship on wartime cultural history. Although Narita makes no specific mention o f film historians in his schema, I find it quite suffi­ cient for accommodating them as well. Narita finds three predominating post-1945 discourses on the era of total war. Although he sees them emerging consecutively, we can fairly assume that they overlap and that older discourses tend to reemerge at later periods. Period one, dating from 1945 to around i960, was charac­ terized by “ a victim consciousness,” with the historical narrative “ tend­ ing to focus on the question o f who was responsible for the catastrophe ‘We Japanese’ [wareware hokumin] had to endure. In other words, who started the war and why couldn’t it have been prevented?” 12 All o f the historians of this period shared vivid personal memories of the national suffering during the war, and, especially in the first half of the period, they tended to write from a strongly Marxist perspective. The supreme example of writing in period one, according to Narita, was the monu­ mental five-volume History of the Pacific War, published in 1953-54 by the Rekishigaku Kenkyukai (Historical Research Association).13 The Japanese film industry at this time was also very active in prop­ agating the same message —that “ We Japanese” were at least as much victims of the war as anyone else. Although the Marxism of the film­ makers was muted for the screen, Until We Meet Again (1950) and Tower of Lilies (1953), both made by Imai Tadashi, a close associate of the Com­ munist Party, along with Sekine Hideo’s Listen to the Roar of the Ocean (1950) are but a few of the more famous examples of this lachrymose subgenre lamenting the victimhood o f ordinary Japanese. While it does not fit very neatly into Narita’s chronological param­ eters, the work of film theorist and historian Iwasaki Akira both repre­ sents this paradigm and transcends it. Iwasaki’s own Marxist creden­ tials date from his involvement in the Proletarian Filmmakers’ League (Purokino) in the late twenties and the publication of his Film and Capi­ talism in 1931. In the immediate postwar period, he strongly urged pur­ suing the issue of “ wartime collaboration responsibility” of individuals in the film industry. He also collaborated with Imai Tadashi to turn out the documentary film essay Japanese Tragedy (1945), condemning both the militarists and the Emperor for bringing on the war. Iwasaki Akira figures large in the pages of The Imperial Screen, both because he was an important participant in the era and because he has left us eyewit­ ness and analytical accounts of it. Chapter 9 quotes a lengthy passage from his memoir, A Personal History of Japanese Film (1977), describing his

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XIX

year-long imprisonment brought on in part by his opposition to the 1939 Film Law.14 The work o f a second writer, Shimizu Akira, makes it clear that film historians, while largely conforming to Narita’s generational paradigm, did not necessarily produce their most representative works within the time frame he spells out. Shimizu, for example, had been an active young film critic during the second half of the Pacific War. However, it was not until 1991, the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, that he began to focus his energies on documenting the wartime era. At the 1991 Yamagata Film Festival, he —along with Yamane Sadao and the young University of Michigan professor Markus Abe-Nornes—mounted the first defini­ tive retrospective of Japanese wartime documentaries. In 1994, Shimizu published his War and Film, expanding on the long essay he had contrib­ uted to the Yamagata festival catalogue.15 His introductory comments for this book place him fairly clearly within Narita’s period-one context: “ I wrote this book because now, more than ever, it is important to under­ stand how painful the war was for our people and how utter their despair in the final days of the conflict. At the same time it is even more impor­ tant to understand the historical conditions which produced that war.” 16 He then goes on to state that his purpose is to document “ the manner in which the film world was manipulated [by the authorities], while weav­ ing in an account of my own personal experiences.” 17 The overview produced by Shimizu is indeed a valuable contribu­ tion to the field, and the present work is greatly indebted to it. Unfortu­ nately, however, he rarely descends from his Olympus of historical “ ob­ jectivity.” Almost never does he redeem his pledge to weave in the personal eyewitness testimony o f the young participant he once was.18 As useful as his overview is, one cannot help but feel it could have been done equally well by an informed scholar o f a later generation. In the two lengthy personal interviews I had with Shimizu, I found him helpful on objective details but clearly reticent to discuss his own experiences, this despite the fact that his own involvement in the era featured nothing he need particularly to have been ashamed of in later years. The tmko research o f Tsurumi Shunsuke and the Science of Thought group was a product o f the transitional period between Na­ rita’s first two periods. As a study o f forced recantation, it has a certain redolence of period one’s “victim” mentality. Period two, according to Narita, was characterized by an objective, nonideological, and nation­ ally self-critical stance, and we find these elements as well in the work of Tsurumi’s group.

XX

Introduction

Narita dates this second period from around i960 to the early 1990s: “ Here we find historical narratives deeply imbued with a consciousness o f We-the-Victimizers [kagaisha/. Whereas period one had focused on the sufferings o f (Japanese) civilians and soldiers during the Pacific War, and the consequences o f defeat at the hands of the Allied Powers, the representative historians of period two explored the significance o f J a ­ pan’s aggression on the mainland (such as Asahi newspaper columnist Honda Katsuichi’s exposé of wartime atrocities in his Trip to China, 1972).” 19 The secret activities of Japanese gas and germ warfare units, the use of Korean and Chinese slave labor, and the surprisingly belli­ cose attitudes o f such home-front groups as the women’s patriot soci­ eties all came in for treatment at this time. Another feature of period two was the emergence of a generation of scholars whose experience of the wartime period had been as pre-draft age youths: “Although their rhetoric superficially resembles that o f the angry victim . . . their real purpose is to expose and analyze the wartime education system.” 20 Chief among these was the group identified with the phrase Bokura Shdkokumin (“ We Little Countrymen,” shdkokumin being the wartime epithet for children).21 The present author is particularly indebted to the work of this group—including Yamanaka Hisashi and Yamamoto Akira—for bringing to his attention the significance of the children’s literature of the early thirties in the promotion of militarist at­ titudes throughout society. Indeed, as I try to demonstrate in chapter 1, the plot structures of some o f the key novels clearly anticipate themes developed in war films half a decade later. The pioneering work o f film theorist and historian SatO Tadao also bears some o f the unmistakable hallmarks of this period. Satò actually began his career as a young member of Tsurumi’s Science o f Knowl­ edge group, for a time becoming coeditor of its famous journal Shisd no Kagaku in the early sixties. O f the same generation as the Bokura Sho­ kokumin group, SatO actually underwent training as a very young cadet pilot in the last months o f the war, and his bitterness about his experi­ ences occasionally seeps into his books.22 In addition to his prodigious and far-ranging output on film, Sato shares with the Shdkokumin group a lively interest in educational issues. His treatments o f wartime film history, however, find him breaking lit­ tle fresh ground. Volume 2 o f his vast culminating work, Japanese Film History (1995), does indeed devote two lengthy chapters (totaling 157 pages) to the period, covering Japanese film production activities in the occupied territories as well as at home.23 But, while factually reliable,

Introduction

xxi

several flaws limit its usefulness to researchers wishing to focus on any particular facet o f the era. First, in pursuing his grand narrative o f the growth and development (meaning “ progress” ) o f Japan ’s cinema cul­ ture, he inevitably treats the wartime period as a digressive stage (albeit one with “ flashes of brilliance” ) in its forward movement as industry and art.24 Needless to say, this tendency is the inherent “ flaw” o f gen­ eral histories of all sorts. More vexing are the flaws that date it as the product o f an earlier period o f Japanese film scholarship. First is the spotty and rudimentary nature o f its footnoting. More often than not the author’s assertions are left undocumented. As with Tanaka Ju n ’ichirO’s equally massive Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi (1957), extended quotes are given brief documentation (usually in parentheses), but there is little or no effort to give subsequent generations o f researchers leads for the verification of most facts or judgments.25 In the case of both authors, there is a tendency to serve up their material ex cathedra. This, according to Japan ’s leading film document archivist, Makino Mamoru, is symptomatic of a continuing trend in Japanese acade­ mia: the tradition o f blindly revering the “ authority” o f the elite Ja p ­ anese scholar. To question him (rarely is it a her) would be rude and disrespectful.26 One other limitation, making it difficult for SatO to break new ground in research on the wartime period, also marks him as a man of his generation. SatO had of course been far too young at the time to have known the critics, filmmakers, and others participating prominendy in wartime film culture. Later, in the postwar years, however, he developed deep, collegial relationships with many of these same individ­ uals. In his 1995 review o f The Imperial Screen, he indirecdy admits that, because of these personal ties, he himself had felt “enryo” (discrete hesi­ tation) at probing too deeply into their wartime pasts.27 Earlier that same year, Sato’s apparent desire to redeem the reputa­ tions o f some of the most overdy collaborationist wartime directors came under assault by Sakuramoto Tomio. In the introduction to his book, Daitoa Senso to Nihon Eiga — Tachimi no Senchu Eigaron (The Greater East Asian War and Japanese Film, 1993),28 Sakuramoto took special exception to the following passage published by SatO in the fourth vol­ ume of the Iwanami Shoten series, Seminar in Japanese Cinema (1986): “ The fact that Japanese film people were never exposed to severe criti­ cism for their war responsibility did not mean that they felt no remorse for their activities. Rather, they turned that remorse into a flood of postwar pacifist films. The only problem was that, like so many other

X X II

Introduction

Japanese, the consciousness of having been victims of the war watered down acknowledgement o f [Japan’s] role in victimizing the peoples of the occupied territories.” 29 While finding himself in emphatic agreement with the latter half of the statement, Sakuramoto expressed “ extreme irritation” with Satô’s valorization o f “ remorse” on the part of the filmmakers: “ His evalua­ tion o f such films as genuine expressions of repentance for the war is highly questionable. There is no way to escape the suspicion that they represent nothing more than a new opportunistic twist, this time substi­ tuting a dubious pacifism for their old bellicosity.” 30 Although one can share Sakuramoto’s skepticism on this point, there is something subtly disturbing about the jihad-like aura surrounding his own work. Sakuramoto is the only member o f the Bokura Shôkokumin group to have produced an extended treatment o f wartime cinema. Widely known for his exhaustive research activities to expose the collaborationism o f Japanese literary figures,31 his single-minded perseverance and pugnacity tend to make him the literary equivalent of Okazaki KenzO, the former Imperial Army private who devoted his entire life to seeking out unpunished war criminals, confronting them, and, sometimes, even physically abusing them as “ retribution” for their crimes (Okazaki was actually jailed for accidentally shooting the son of one of his bête noire military officers).32 In the introduction to his Greater East Asian War and Japanese Film, Sakuramoto makes it abundandy clear that the book rep­ resents a direct extension of his own twenty-year crusade: “ Using my situation as a filmworld outsider (mongaikan), I intend to expose its cul­ pability in the war effort, along with the nonchalance, lack of self­ reflection and ignominious, profit-oriented motivations o f its leading participants.” 33 Unfortunately, his methodology, to say nothing of his undertone of implacable hostility, tends to negate his results. He re­ prints the entire 1939 Film Law along with other official regulations and pronouncements without analysis or even comment. The intention of other great swathes of the book is to connect names—directors, script­ writers, actors, and so on—to the tides of particularly egregious propa­ ganda films. Focusing on critics still prominent after the war, he details the collaborationist projects they undertook during the conflict. In a recent interview on his archival research on wartime literature, Sakuramoto talks extensively about this methodology and the motiva­ tions behind it. Since the interview explores some of the most funda­ mental issues facing researchers dealing with Japanese wartime culture, it seems worthwhile to introduce at some length here the main topics

Introduction

xxm

discussed: “ [Postwar] scholars need to know about the great wealth of wartime material still available today. How these works and their au­ thors should be judged is not my concern. I leave this up to the reader; my job is to dig up and publish the stuff [collaborationist poems, novels, etc.].” 34 Taking into account that so many literary figures, and even a few filmmakers (most prominendy, Imai Tadashi), have systematically attempted to suppress their wartime production, this in itself is a signifi­ cant and worthy function. However, as it turns out, Sakuramoto is not simply proffering the material for objective perusal: “ To put it blundy, I want to make an example [yaridama ni sum] of these high and mighty characters. I intend to condemn them. There’s no way I’ll ever excuse the act of producing collaborationist literature.” 35 Using the poets as an example, he goes on to say, “ My position is not to consider them as poets at all. They were [mere] wordsmiths. Everyone writing in wartime Japan was like this. O f course some were more skillful than others, but that was only in the area of [propagandistic] rhetoric. Their work had nothing to do with art.” 36 Near the end of the interview, Sakuramoto expresses an attitude to­ ward texts produced during the war that is shared (up to a point) by my own book. Working from the premise that the only conscientious option for a writer during the war was to refuse to write anything at all, he dis­ misses the notion o f assigning “ degrees of collaboration” to those who did: “ Tsurumi Shunsuke once said there is a significant difference between walking fifty paces [toward collaboration] and walking a hun­ dred. But I consider this mere sophistry. It’s something like saying that to kill a single person is somehow less evil than killing fifty. They’re both the same crime, right?” 37 With equal vehemence, Sakuramoto rejects a correlative line o f in­ quiry, the thorny issue o f whether we may be allowed to read into some o f the era’s texts certain degrees of covert resistance. Before presenting his argument, however, I should explain my own position on the matter as taken in this book. Throughout the period, filmworld personalities figured large in the public discourse on the war by writing articles and participating in zadankai discussions. As a working premise, I have de­ cided to abjure the attempt to second-guess the ultimate sincerity of their statements and to treat them as if they had been made in earnest (at the time, at least). There is, after all, no sure way to penetrate to the se­ cret regions o f personal motivation. To attempt such would inevitably lead to the fruidess and, at this remove in time, utterly specious activity o f assigning individual blame. And, as I state above, I see my task as that

XXIV

Introduction

of exploring the institutions and tactics used to lead intellectuals and artists into collaborationist postures. My underlying assumption is that all forms of officially sanctioned public activity were de facto imbricated in the totalitarian system. The same refusal to second guess individual motivation also warns me away from the attempt to divine traces o f “ se­ cret resistance” in these statements, an activity I find equally specious. On this point I find myself in complete agreement with Sakuramoto Tomio. Addressing himself to the question o f literary works o f the era, he makes the point that the mere fact of being published gave them the imprimatur of official sanction, thus indicating that the contemporary reader should read them as supportive of the basic tenets o f imperial ideology. In other words, there was a complete absence of a context for reading into a work sentiments running counter to the public discourse. This is the logic behind his assertion that the conscientious writer should have maintained utter silence until the end of the war. Although there appear to have been some few writers who did just this, I find Sakuramoto’s demand psychologically unrealistic.38 As I seek to demonstrate, most of the era’s artists and intellectuals lacked ideolog­ ical certainty and thus were particularly susceptible to the prevailing mood o f anxiety and moral confusion. In the end, common sense, to say nothing of the economic imperative, told writers to continue to write (tailoring their work so as to assure publication) and filmmakers to per­ sist in making films. Sakuramoto’s hard-nosed logic carries him on to another position with which I find myself in complete disagreement: his rejection of analysis. Since, according to Sakuramoto, all published texts are collab­ orationist and since there is no such thing as “ degrees of collaboration,” there is, he believes, nothing to gain from scrutinizing the individual texts. A major purpose of the present work, on the other hand, is to study the manner and effectiveness of certain cinematic texts in carry­ ing out their propaganda tasks. If we were to abide by Sakuramoto’s rule of blanket condemnation, such an undertaking would be rendered utterly irrelevant. The end result would be to leave a vitally important dimension of a highly significant era in darkness. It would be a case of moralism validating ignorance over scholarship. Unfortunately, espe­ cially in the case of film, this has been a prevailing attitude for many decades. Sakuramoto’s passion, his unquenchable anger, thus leads him into a tragic impasse that, in the end, marginalizes his work. The absence of such anger is one of the hallmarks of what Narita Ryuichi terms the

Introduction

XXV

third period of Japanese research on the wartime era, which he sees as rising to prominence around 1995. Born well into the postwar era, these scholars share little affinity with the experiences and subsequent resent­ ments o f their elders: “ In the new period, the self-evidential premise of the previous two periods, that of speaking for and about ‘We Japanese,’ disappears. The very existence of a unified subjective, a ‘we,’ is brought into doubt.” 39 The overriding theme of present-day research is, according to Narita, recognition of the wide diversity of “ memory,” arising from the varied experiences of the witnesses. On the one hand, we find a system­ atic reinvestigation of the era’s basic documents and texts, not for the purpose of condemnation (or exculpation) but for the purpose o f clarifi­ cation. On the other hand, there appears to be a certain consensus that the notion of “ clarification” must itself be treated as provisional. This is one o f the ideas developed in the seminal discussions published under the tide “War and Memory” in the January 1995 issue of Gendai Shiso (Modern Thought). There, the goad of “ clarification” is separated from the (now impossible) task o f providing an overarching, unified narrative of the nation’s wartime experience. Narita takes this a step further by con­ necting the narrative with the rejection of “ we” as the collective sub­ ject of memory: “Attempting to spin the war into a narrative invites its reabsorption (kaishu) into the grand narratives o f ‘nation’ and ‘race.’ Raising the issue of memory is a means of fending off absorption of the [uniquely] individual experience into the master narrative of ‘na­ tion.’ ” 40 In other words, the deeper one probes and the broader one’s range o f sources and witnesses, then what emerges is not a unified image but an ever compounding polyphony. As a result, recent years have seen a host of publications somewhat similar in format to Studs Terkel’s Good War (1997). The publications are collections o f reminiscences by a wide range of ordinary individu­ als: people who had worked as children in factories during the last stage o f the war, soldiers, former enemy POWs, laborers recruited from the occupied territories, and so on. The often quite conflicting narratives are allowed to abide side-by-side in these collections; no ef­ fort is made to cull from them a unified perspective. The sudden prominence in the later nineties o f the ianju (“ comfort women” for­ cibly recruited from occupied populations) forms an especially discor­ dant addition to the discourse on wartime culture. As Ueno Chizuko points out: “ The ianfu's resentment is directed at two objects. First, there is Japan as the ‘enemy country,’ which for fifty years has refused

xxvi

Introduction

to repent or apologize. Secondly, it is directed at their own countries [Korea, etc.] which for so long refused to accept them [as part of the national community]. Therefore, the simple bifurcation of Japan-thevictimizer’ and ‘we-the-victims’ tends to break down.” 41 A further element in this polyphony has been the gradual interna­ tionalization of research on Japanese wartime culture. In the area of film studies, for instance, the work of Aaron Gerow, Markus AbeNornes, and Daryl Davis, along with The Imperial Screen, have been taken seriously by Japanese scholars and have been given a certain amount of prominence. Unfortunately, however, the Japanese film industry (or, at least, the major film companies) has opted to ignore this new perspective, choos­ ing instead to ally itself with an alarming, ultranationalist, indeed re­ vanchist, counter trend. In 1995, for instance, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war was commemorated by the release of such features as Tower of Lilies (Himeyuri no To, Toho, Kamiyama Seijiro, dir.), one of the many remakes of Imai Tadashi’s 1953 “ classic,” this time featuring a scene in which a group of nurses (the central characters) attempt to sur­ render but are driven to suicide when the U.S. troops begin to fire on them. Wings of God (Shochiku, Narahashi Yoko, dir.) and We Won’t Forget You (Kimi 0 Wasurenai, Nippon Herald, Watanabe Takayuki, dir.) both employ present-day pop stars to glamorize the image and the idealism of the kamikaze pilots, without ever calling into question the ideology that spurred them on to fruitless death. Wings, in fact, overtly asserts that modern Japanese youth would unquestioningly emulate the acts of their forebears under similar circumstances. Superficially, these films seem to connect with the “ we-the-victims” mentality of period one, but it is not difficult to detect a certain enemy-baiting message in their emphasis on the cruelty o f the United States. The overall effect is distinctly reminis­ cent of the wartime features treated in this book. More recently, the trend has swung even further to the right with ItO Shunya’s Pride (Puraido: Unmei no Told, Toei, 1998), a film that undertook the enshrinement of Tójó Hideki as a sort of national hero and the deconstruction of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial as a vindictive exercise, pure and simple, in “Victor’sJustice. ” Consciously or not, the films seem to fall into line with the pro­ gram advanced by cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori and the Commit­ tee for Making a New History Textbook (Atrashii Rekishi Kyokasho 0 Tsukurukai), centered around the revisionist historians Fujioka Nobukatsu

Introduction

xxvn

and Nishio Kanji.42 Without going into the details o f their ideological perspective—their denial of the historical validity of the Nanjing Mas­ sacre, their revalorization of the bravery and patriotic motives of the wartime soldiers, and their attempt to revive nationalism and patriot­ ism as a principle aim of history schoolbooks —one can characterize their attitude as the utter rejection of period three polyphony and a resurrection o f “We Japanese” as the assertively indignant party to the debate on the war. Their present strength and prominence is indicated by Kobayashi Yoshinori’s huge comic book-format Sensoron (Theory of War) selling in the millions. The Ministry o f Education, meanwhile, has cleared for use in high schools a revisionist Japanese history text­ book authored by Fujioka and Nishio’s organization.43 Additionally, on a recent (March 2002) visit to my campus (Nagoya University) book­ store, I discovered stacks o f books, most o f them in hypernationalist vein, that were apparently selling well among students. In short, the drama o f Japan ’s coming to terms with the war has heated up, with fiery new voices joining the fray. For a certain faction at least, the fruits o f the new scholarship are to be abjured if they do not conform to the demand for a patriotically satisfying image o f Japan as the “ injured party.”

Parameters o f the Book Since an important purpose of the book is to explore the interaction between national policy films and their extrafilmic context of historical developments and shifts in governmental policy, I generally follow the chronological structure of a straight history. In this sense, The Imperial Screen can be read as a cultural history of wartime domestic Japan, as seen from the perspective of the film world. The word “ domestic” here also delimits its sphere o f coverage. Film production under Japanese leadership was in fact also carried out in other parts of the Empire. In Manchukuo, for instance, there was the Japanese-financed (and largely staffed) Manchurian Film Company (Man’ei). Similar companies were also established in such places as Shanghai, Canton, and Jakarta. Ade­ quate treatment o f these activities requires a book o f its own, and I touch on them here only when they are relevant to the domestic Ja p a ­ nese situation. I must also ask the reader’s indulgence on several additional points. W^ile I do engage in detailed analyses of a number of films —some of

XXV111

Introduction

them widely considered “ classics” of the Japanese screen —my main purpose is to elucidate the manner in which they carry out their political (i.e., propaganda) purpose. While I am personally sensitive to their aes­ thetic merits (or failings), I leave such judgments to other analysts operat­ ing with other purposes. The reader may also be disturbed by the use of unfamiliar or archaicsounding terms for places or periods. Instead of the Sino-Japanese War (1937 45), I use the term “ China Incident” since, in fact, there was no declaration of war, and it was in this linguistic form, suggesting a tempo­ rary aberration in the relationship between the two countries, that it was presented to the Japanese public at the time. Just as it would be anach­ ronistic to refer to fourth-century Persia as “ Iran,” I use the designations “ Burma” and “ Dutch East Indies” instead of their present names. The English translations of the names of various government agen­ cies and films o f the era also present a problem. Where possible, I try to keep in line with the translations already provided by Richard H. Mitch­ ell and Ben-Ami Shillony for the names of the agencies (although they sometimes contradict each other) and with Donald Richie for the names of films. For culture films (documentaries), I have stayed in communica­ tion with Markus Abe-Nornes, an expert in the field, in order to coordi­ nate the translation of their titles. With the purpose of having the era “ speak for itself,” I use quotes voluminously from various documents of the period —newspapers, nov­ els, journals, memoirs, diaries, and so forth. Although I have taken pains to ensure the accuracy of the translations, I do take certain liberties with the form {never the content) o f the original. Where the writer repeats himself in longer passages, I will omit a sentence without actually not­ ing the omission (footnotes of course serve to direct the reader to the original). The reason for this is, because of the sheer volume of the ma­ terial quoted, I fear the reader will be distracted beyond endurance from the flow of the commentary. While this is not the best pure aca­ demic form, it is my intention to make the book as approachable to the common reader as to the specialist. The reader should also know that while The Imperial Screen was origi­ nally published in 1995 in Japanese (as Teikoku no Ginmaku), the present volume in no way represents the mere “ English-ing” o f the Japanese version. Over the past five years, I have had the opportunity to rethink the basic theses o f the book, taking into account many of the points raised in the responses to the Japanese version. The Imperial Screen, while originating as Teikoku no Ginmaku, in many ways stands as a new work or,

Introduction

XXIX

at the very least, a work situated several stages of development beyond the original. Producing this book has taken well over a decade and a half, during which time I received the advice and kindly assistance of numerous in­ dividuals. In the preparation of the Japanese original, the late Professor Yamamoto Kikuo of Waseda University served as my confidant and in­ spiration throughout the entire process. Waka Koji, among the very last o f the true benshi, gave unstintingly from his personal reminiscences, materials, and extensive private film collection. Mr. Saeki Tomonori, of the Kindai Bijutsukan Fuzoku Film Center in Tokyo was also my faith­ ful ally as I struggled to collect scarce materials and to view equally scarce films. Film director Okamoto Kihachi, screenwriter Yoda Yoshikata, culture historian Yamamoto Akira, and film historians Sato Tadao and Shimizu Akira each contributed in various ways to the realization of the project. During the arduous task of publishing the English version with Uni­ versity of Wisconsin Press, I was most especially helped by University of Wisconsin professor Vance Kepley. Literally sentence by sentence, he combed through the English text, pointing out arguments that needed bolstering and additional explanations that needed to be made in order to make the book accessible to non-Japanese readers. If the English ver­ sion is indeed an improvement on the original, it is largely thanks to the patience, effort, and encouragement of this man. After the publication of the Japanese original, I came to know Makino Mamoru, Japan ’s leading archivist of documents on film culture. Through discussions over the course of several years, Mr. Makino guided me ever deeper into the terrain covered by the book, and the En­ glish version has benefited greatly from this experience. I wish also to heartily thank Professor Iwamoto Kenji of W'aseda University for the helpful hints he provided me in the past several years. Film researcher Tanaka Masasumi was yet another individual who contributed gener­ ously from his store of knowledge and film documents. University of Michigan professor Markus Abe-Nornes, an expert on Japanese docu­ mentary film, also provided invaluable assistance. I wish also to acknowl­ edge the support of University o f Wisconsin professor David Bordwell for recommending my book to his university’s press and for personally seeing to it that it was scheduled for publication. John Williams, the film­ maker, read portions of the manuscript and gave valuable advice for sty ­ listic improvement.

XXX

Introduction

Finally, I wish to thank the two individuals who so many years ago first stimulated my interest in Japanese cinema: screenwriter Leonard Schrader, who first set me on the path that led to my career as a film his­ torian, and Donald Richie, whose unflagging friendship and encourage­ ment time and again brought me back to that career in times of per­ sonal doubt. To these two gendemen, and to my wife, the poet Ayako E. High, I wish to dedicate this book.

T H E IM P E R IA L S C R E E N

Prologue

With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, movie camera­ men from around the world converged on the battlefields of northeast Asia. Although cinema was still in its infancy, coverage of international conflicts—or more precisely, its cinematic exploitation for commercial or propaganda purposes was already an established tradition. As early as 1898, the Hearst organization had recognized the propaganda value of film and advanced capital to the Edison and Biograph companies to hype the war with Spain.1 Documentary reels of the “ treacherously sab­ otaged” battleship Maine and others “ reenacting” victories on land or sea reached U.S. screens in large numbers. Papers at the time noted that “ the patriotic feelings o f the audience invariably get plenty of fresh ma­ terial for frequent outbursts.” 2 The Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion also received ample coverage, which was often used for similar partisan purposes. When the Japanese went to war with Russia, U.S. filmmakers set right to work, turning out one- or two-reel battlefield dramas informing their public that “ the plucky little Japanese” were the good guys in the conflict. At Biograph, Billy Bitzer made The Hero of Liao-Tang( 1904) only a month after reports of the actual batde appeared in the U.S. press. Still in excellent condition today, the film centers on the exploits of a Japanese military scout: his capture, his escape by feigning death, and the eventual completion o f his mission amid salvos o f bursting shells. Shot in either New York or New Jersey, it features a number of actors who are clearly Japanese. Although their names are not revealed, they should probably be counted among the very first Japanese “ movie ac­ tors” in history. The Japanese themselves were o f course the chief purveyors and consumers of Russo-Japanese War features. A steady supply of footage, much of it fresh from the front, had been drawing massive crowds eager to glimpse “ the true situation” in those faraway places where friends and family members had been sent. In fact, a rudimentary’ debate was 3

4

Prologue

Ad for a showing at the Denkikan Theater, with footage o f the fall of Port Arthur and POWs “ Scenes o f POXVs and of the wounded at citadel” (MchiNichi Shim bun, 28 May 1905).

springing up about how best to use film in the war eflort. In October of 1904, Asahi Shinbun appealed to cameramen for films that “ imbue the minds of the young with a military spirit and a true appreciation of what the nation requires of them in its hour of need.” 3 The material inspired the patriotic emotions of the public, whether shot by foreigners or Japanese nationals. “At the final performance last night,” Osaka Mainichi reported on 6June 1904, “ one could see a human wave of patrons trying to press into the Shinseikan Theatre. The police had to throw a cordon around the place to keep more from getting in.” 4 Street sellers in front of theatres showing war footage did a brisk business in little Rising Sun Hags and buttons reading “ Victory is sure.” The staves o f two big national flags would be crossed over the

Prologue

5

entranceway. Inside, showings almost invariably became scenes of frenzied patriotic demonstrations, the crowds often being urged on by the benshi who narrated the films. Kobe Shimbun described a show put on by the benshi at the Daikokuza Theatre in late 1904: “After he blows his whistle, the lights are doused, plunging the hall into almost total dark­ ness and the band hidden behind the screen strikes up a martial tune. ‘The films you are about to see,’ he announces, ‘are not filled with the eight hundred lies o f charlatans and fortune hunters. Every foot was shot at the actual places sanctified by the blood of our countrymen. Therefore, when you see our soldiers marching into battle, I want you to shout banzai to cheer them on!” ’5 The footage, still available for viewing today, shows endless lines o f marching soldiers and brief glimpses of camp life. The infamous Ridge 203 is the dominant image of the front. Located just outside of Port Ar­ thur, it was the scene of much carnage amongjapanese troops who for many months tried, and failed, to storm the formidable Russian de­ fenses on its heights. Litde footage of an actual assault remains today, but we do have extensive shots o f huge siege artillery being serviced by gun crews and belching great clouds of smoke. Sometimes on the dis­ tant upper slope, we see the smoke of a shell burst.6 Footage purporting to depict naval action also survives in some quantity. One sequence shows a Japanese squadron firing guns and launching torpedoes. In other shots, huge geysers rise from shells ex­ ploding in the water. None of these were actual battle sequences, since the navy forbade the presence of film crews aboard warships at the time; however, cameramen were occasionally allowed onboard to record training exercises. Another breed of “ naval combat” film, which seems not to have survived, incorporated staged pieces using models, shot on the primitive lots of such companies as Pathe and Urban. In Au­ gust 1904, the Kobe Shimbun provided an extended description of such fare: “At the Daikokuza, there was recently a show promoted under the name ‘Cinematic,’ offering nothing more than toy batdeships maneu­ vering in a small pond by the means of threads. Pistols were fired to rep­ licate the belching of naval guns and even the moon was a mere electric light. In a scene purportedly shot at night, there is a battleship still flying its flags as if it were daytime, and another ship moves through the water with no smoke coming out o f its stacks. Childish flim-flammery of this sort convinces no one, and so the show had a bad reputation.” 7 While undiscriminating audiences in the provinces may have found such films acceptable, the sophisticated audiences in the big cities especially in

6

Prologue

the Tokyo Asakusa region, which as the nation’s premiere film-viewing venue had the sawiest clientele o f all—would occasionally howl them off the screen.8 Domestic and foreign-made reenactments o f land battles, purport­ ing to be the real thing, often roused similar indignation. In March 1905, Osaka Mainichi reported that “ a steady stream of spurious foreign con­ coctions, using Frenchmen or Americans as Japanese soldiers, has been entering the country of late. Only a few of them actually fool audiences into believing they are authentic. Such fare insults the intelligence of the viewer.” 9 The emergence of attentive watchers of the screen, from the ranks of ordinary filmgoers as well as journalists, came only seven years after the arrival of cinema toJapan. Although it was still too early to consider them “ film buffs,” let alone “ critics,” there was already a vociferous mi­ nority who knew exactly what they wanted from film. Having achieved a loss of that innocence which a few short years before had allowed filmgoers to accept virtually anything thrown on the screen as an amusing novelty, they were moving toward a new critical consciousness, an awareness of themselves as film consumers. During the Russo-Japanese War, this consciousness demanded “ truth in cinema” in its most literal sense. The rather crude criterion, which was to last well into the war’s aftermath, tended to label such purely cin­ ematic developments as special effects or trick photography, as either “ for kids” or worse, as “ deception.” While not always fair, it was a first step toward mature, objective appraisal. We see this criterion at work in the following review, written for the Kobe Shimbun in June 1905: Unlike the false “real footage” pouring into the country nowadays, this was definitely shot on the actual batdefield and is of extraordinary interest. For all its on-the-spot origin, the images are bright, dear and well developed. The fact that it isn’t organized into any clear sequence, like the phony footage, makes it all the more moving. A real batdefield seethes with confusion and is apparendy without any logic. The tragic scenery unfolds before our very eyes, albeit without sound or color. This is truly something worth viewing as soon as possible.10 A remarkable element about these early “ news” features was the deep emotional reverberation they set up within Japanese viewers. We see here the beginning of a two-faceted process, one in which similar footage of the first world war would go far to complete. First, there was the awakening o f the public to a sense of “ world citizenship” stretching

Prologue

7

beyond the confines of their island nation. Second, was the creation of a true Japanese “viewing public” in the modern sense of the word. Perhaps because o f the limited scope of the coverage, being mostly views from the Japanese side o f the conflict, there was very little in the way o f hate-the-enemy material. Audiences glimpsing for the first time their countrymen treading on foreign soil are reported to have reacted with curiosity verging on incredulity.11 The reaction was perhaps not unlike that of Onoue Matsunosuke, Japan ’s first “ film star,” when he saw himself on screen for the first time: “ It was as if I were able to watch my own face while I was asleep!” 12 To the Japanese, these reels must have provided a similar “ sleeper’s” view o f themselves, one that so engrossed them that there was hardly any room for hatred o f the enemy. Amazingly, this quality of wondrous self-contemplation would remain largely unchanged even in the movies made during the second world war. The “ demon Russian” of 1904 -5 was an abstraction, mosdy limited to the realm of verbal rhetoric. What struck audiences about the “ real live” Russians they saw on screen were their obviously human qualities, as people not so very different from themselves. The pathetic sight of dead and wounded enemy troops, while hardly inspiring love, did stir a degree of genuine pity. For the most part, however, audiences were transfixed by the “ sleeper’s view” o f their own alienated selves—the Russians, like the foreign landscapes, serving only to emphasize the alienness of the expe­ rience (“ and our men are really there!” ). Since the existence o f the men was beyond doubt, the palpable reality of the foreign country (and by extension o f foreign countries) was also reinforced. This elementary re­ alization may seem to the modern cosmopolitan mind hardly worth mentioning, but it must be remembered that until a few decades before this period, it took a tremendous leap of faith for a Japanese actually to accept the reality o f a world lying beyond the closed borders of his or her isolationist country. And, it was only the boldest, most advanced minds that dreamed of ever going there. The approving attitude Japanese audiences took upon seeing the good treatment of Russian POWs is also significant. Aside from the con­ tinuing Japanese obsession with how they look to foreigners, it repre­ sented an opportunity to move from a passive hostile relationship with foreigners to one of reciprocity. Several months after the end of the war, such sentiments solidified into action when the first film images of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake stirred both government agencies and

8

Prologue

ordinary citizens to extend their sympathy and tangible aid to the stricken U.S. citizens far across the sea. The Japanese now had some­ thing to give the outside world—compassion in this case. It represented an investment in the commonwealth of humanity and was popularly recognized as such. When the first footage o f the war in Europe reached Japan in 1914, featuring scenes of fleeing Belgian refugees, the process was taken a step further. The Japanese found themselves caring deeply about people with whom they had no contact at all. Showings of war footage in these early days therefore had the para­ doxical result of broadening the mental horizons o f the Japanese people and o f breaking down ancestral barriers to the outside world. In this pe­ riod at least, successful participation in war represented successful par­ ticipation in the community of nations. It was a heady, but sobering and maturing experience. The first real Japanese “war drama” —filmed by M. Pathe (no rela­ tion to the French company) a few years later—was steeped in a pro­ found sense of the universal pathos of war. The film, Cherry Blossoms of Japan (Tamato £ akura, 1909, lost?), was, according to its cameraman Iwafuji Shisetsu, “ an amazingly simple story. A Kyushu man is called up to military service and is cheered off by the other villagers. Soon he is on the batdefield near Port Arthur and is sent up the slopes o f dreadful Ridge 203. The fighting is horrendous and the soldiers look completely real as they struggle to carry up their artillery. Firecrackers are used to recreate the bursts of smoke from fired rifles. The hero dies in the attack and is cremated while a Buddhist priest reads sutras over him.” 13 Brief but straight to the point, its stark motif as a requiem for the “ litde peo­ ple,” caught in the teeth o f a war far beyond their comprehension, apparendy rang true with the audiences. Up to the eve o f the Manchurian Incident o f 1931, films tended to vacillate between this sort of pacifism and pictures celebrating Japan ’s age-old “ military spirit.” In the years immediately following the RussoJapanese War, there was a pervasive feeling that the country had been cheated o f the full fruits of its victory. Reaction was deepening on the domestic front, with many calling for a renewed “ steeling” of the Jap a­ nese spirit in preparation for some inevitable decisive conflict. In this view, the nation had to be converted to a “ cult of heroism” with each individual contributing his or her own “ superhuman effort.” The boys’ magazine World o f Adventure (Boken no Sekai) expressed this idea forcefully in a 1908 article titled “A Warning to Japan” : “ In our recent war with

Prologue

9

News footage o f m aneuvers shortly before the naval victory at Tsushim a (1905). N o cam eram an covered the actual battle.

Russia, were we not crowned with victory through the superhuman ef­ forts of such heroes as Admiral Togo and Gen. Nogi? Youthful readers! Know that those who curse our glorious heroes or fail to reverence them curse the very nation itself. At this time our country has more need for a single man of resolve than for a thousand mediocrities. Only the single man of heroism can establish Japan's place among the firstclass nations.” 14 The first filmmaker to respond to this new mood was the directorproducer Makino Shozo, who launched Onoue Matsunoke asjap an ’s first jidaigeki superstar. Makino abandoned his early infatuation with Kabuki-derived material, which, despite its standard heroics, was often the celebration o f human frailties and moral weaknesses. He turned in­ stead to the Kodanbon, the books of romanticized historical narrative greatly in vogue among the children and working-class adults of the pe­ riod. In the early Meiji period the Kodanbon tales once had an ardently democratic motif. But now, their content had turned conservative, with feudal-era heroes demonstrating “ modern” devotion to the emperor and the divinely originated state. From the Kodanbon treasure trove came

10

Prologue

a new set o f stories to fill the screen great Loyalist wanderers like Mito Komon, morally purtyakuza gangsters, the Robin Hood like Kunisada Chuji, and a host o f magical ninja spies. In the comparatively mild political environment o f the Taish 5 Pe­ riod, modern war stories and military dramas remained a rather unpop­ ular theme in Japanese cinema. Bloodshed and carnage were confined to ihejidaigeki, where they were the result of tests of individual prowess in a world where the samurai hero’s private sense of justice was pitted against small groups of malefactors. In the closing years of TaishO, however, we see war films beginning to emerge in a format that would be further refined in the thirties. Shi­ mizu Akira tells of a film called Last Stand at Nikolaevsk (Jiko Saigo no Hi, Nikkatsu, 1920), which he calls “ the first of an endless flood of films made on the spur of the moment, based on events still hot news in the papers.” 15 Directed by Tasaka Tomotaka, it is the story of the massacre by Bolsheviks o f 122 Japanese prisoners (many o f them civilians) at Ni­ kolaevsk, during theJapanese-Siberian Intervention of 1919. Films about modern military heroes, such as General Nogi, began to be made in this period as well. A more sinister development was the in­ creasing use of cinema to propagate the military spirit. Around 1919, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Ministry of Education began to advance the idea of using film as part of its social education program aimed at staving off the domestic “ Red Menace,” which included the “ disloyal sedition of pacifism.” 16 Thereafter, the Teikine and Nikkatsu film companies began turning out films with a military message. One such film was Nikkatsu’s A Brave Sailor (Yukon naru Suihei, 1924), detailing a military man’s glorious death in batde. More popular than straight combat features, however, were films lauding the military’s role as a benefactor in civilian life. In 1924, Teikine and Nikkatsu both made films based on the “ Exemplary Tale of the Rice Planting,” an appar­ ently real incident in which a company of soldiers visits the home o f a former comrade who had been wounded in the war. They roll up their sleeves and set to work planting the wounded man’s rice fields, complet­ ing the entire project in a single day. The two versions were Japanese Spirit (Tomato Damashii, Shochiku, 1924) and The Rice Planting Brigade (Taue Chutai, Teikine, 1924). Another film, Imperial Favor (Ko-on, Nikkatsu, 1927, Mizoguchi Kcnji producer), a melodrama based on the 1920 version of Henry King’s Over the H ill, portrayed the army as the “ savior.” A poverty-stricken mother is saved from her wretchedness by the sympa­ thetic concern of her son’s military commander.

Prologue

11

T he Taishokan Theater in Asakusa, Tokyo. M arquee announces footage from the Great War in Europe.

In 1928, Nikkatsu tried its hand at a full-fledged military spectacular, The World Turns (Chikyu wa Mawaru). The experiment was a tripartite omnibus directed by Tasaka Tomotaka, Abe Yutaka, and Uchida Tomu. Starting with the premise that “ war has been the human condi­ tion for tens of thousands o f years,” it hypothesizes a war on the Asian mainland. Conflicts of the past, present, and future are treated in alter­ nating segments (much like Griffith's structuring for Intolerance). In the “ future” segment, directed by Uchida, an unnamed country from the

12

Prologue

east (the United States?) suddenly assaults Japan by air. Osaka is devas­ tated by a rain of bombs, but superior air defenses wipe out the attack­ ing force. The Japanese tank corps, along with the film’s two heroes, swifdy carry the batde to the enemy homeland. Although the heroes are bitter rivals in love and business in the “ present” segment, the batde teaches them to reconcile their differences. At the very end of the film, this “ future” segment is revealed to have been merely a cautionary tale for the two rivals. Back in the present, they dedicate themselves to weap­ ons research and look hopefully toward the brighter day that is sure to dawn.17 Despite the film’s star-studded cast and impressive corps o f directors—even Mizoguchi Kenji is included as “ advising director” — the film sank into almost instant oblivion. It rates no mention in stan­ dard film histories, and only detailed program notes and a few stills re­ main today. In general, there was very little in the Japanese cinema o f these pre­ war years comparable to Hollywood’s fascination with military combat and the “ hardware” of war, batdeships, and planes. In the new era about to begin, however, war, war machines, and war spirit would be­ come an important motif indeed.

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Into a Valley of Darkness

A Brief Season o f Pacifism Ushihara Kiyohiko’s The Army Advances (Shingun, Shochiku) opened to a capacity audience at the Tokyo Teikokukan on 18 March 1930. The crowd, busding into the cavernous theater, included a large number of young urban sophisticates, dubbed mobos (modern boys), with their sleekly outfitted moga girlfriends. Once inside, they would have to separ­ ate, the men sitting in the right row and the women in the left, for segre­ gation of the sexes in movie theaters would not be abolished until the following January. For them, The Army Advances was a film of romance and fashion, the militarist theme suggested by the tide being mosdy con­ fined to a thirty-five minute segment in the last half. War was just a new backdrop for the ongoing screen flirtation of the nation’s top box office duo: Suzuki Denmei and Tanaka Kinuyo. Suzuki, with his slicked back hair and Hollywood good looks, was an icon of the new mobo-moga sub­ culture. Tanaka Kinuyo, who had recendy displaced Kirishima Sumiko as the nation’s sweetheart, represented the traditional ideal of the de­ murely sweet girl-next-door. In this sense, she was in sharp contrast to her counterpart, Clara Bow’s peccandy feisty girl-next-door in William Wellman’s Wings. The latter film was at once the model for The Army Ad­ vances and a heart-rending reminder that the only real-life mogas and mobos dwelt in pristine, tree-lined suburban paradises far across the sea. Tanaka in any case had not yet evolved into a moga, although three years hence she would come perilously close as Ozu’s cigarette-puffing “ Dragnet Girl.” Her “ modernity,” if indeed it was such, was still cir­ cumscribed within Kido ShirO’s formula for his girls at Shochiku’s Kamata Studios: “ sprightly, brave, optimistic, and forward looking.” Together, Suzuki Denmei and Tanaka Kinuyo represented the whole­ some side of the 1930 Japanese glamour spectrum: athletic young men with the smooth, sharply defined features of a Charles “ Buddy” Rogers and kimono-clad girls with tiny mouths, wide expressive eyes (but never 13

14

Into a Valley of Darkness

so bold as those of Clara Bow), and broad, intelligent foreheads. Both stars were regularly featured in ads for health drinks, cosmetics, fashion wear, and a host of other products in the mass-circulation magazines— Denmei grinning toothily and usually shot in broad sunlight, Kinuyo lu­ minous in gauzy soft focus; theirs were the faces known in virtually every household in the nation. A second set o f viewers pressing in to see The Army Advances was an unusually large contingent of youngsters in their early and mid teens. Less interested in the love romance than the military hardware, many were like the film’s central character, serious builders o f model airplanes and readers o f Asahi’s Aerial Navigator, Sea and Sky, and assorted other youth-oriented magazines on modern science and military technology. Army's array of precision-built war machines skillfully operated by war­ rior technicians had brought them out in droves to see their favorite warplanes and to judge the authenticity of the aerial combat sequences. Although the production of talking pictures had begun seriously in the United States three years earlier, The Army Advances was a silent film. The entrenched resistance of the powerful benshi film narrators union and the unwillingness of the theater-owning companies to take the mas­ sive financial plunge of replacing all their old projection equipment would delay the advent of Japan’s first real talkie for another two years. Yoshimura KozaburC, who had just become assistant director at the Kamata Studios and who would direct an enormously popular war film at the end o f the decade, recalls that “ in 1930, only a tiny number of theaters showed the foreign talkies. Silents could be unreeled at seven­ teen or eighteen frames per second and therefore didn’t really need to be electrically powered. Talkies, however, demanded a precise projec­ tion of twenty-four frames per second and this meant they had to be motor driven. Although the ultramodern movie palaces rising in the larger cities had all the electrical amenities, some even boasting air con­ ditioning, projectionists in many rural movie houses would still have to crank the reel through by hand.” 1 The Army Advances was clearly patterned after the two great U.S. war film sensations of the mid twenties. King Vidor’s Big Parade (1925) had provided the general plot structure and the visual mood o f the ground combat sequences. But it was the thrilling aerial dogfight scenes in Wellman’s Wings (1927) that provided the standard by which audiences would be judging Army. Yoshimura, who attended the spectacular open­ ing for Wings, remembers it as a triumph of end-of-the-silent-era sound effects: “ The dialogue was of course provided by the benshi. But for the

Into a Valley of Darkness

15

aerial combat sequences, Paramount had provided a gramophone record with sounds as realistic as on the radio. This was supplemented by a full orchestra with an assortment o f clanging cymbals and the ter­ rific rumble of quivering sheet metal. It made your head swim.” 2 The sound effects used for the Ushihara film were probably largely the same, with the possible exception of the gramophone record. The Army Advances was actually the seventh in a hugely successful se­ ries o f eight Ushihara pictures featuring Suzuki and Tanaka. Its central motif o f a handsome young man in his flying machine was surely the most glamorous o f the lot. Puppy love, a romantic triangle, and the in­ fatuation of an earnest youth with aircraft dominate the film’s first half. In the second half, however, the world situation grows tense as the in­ sulting behavior of an unnamed nation (clearly China) makes warfare inevitable. The young Japanese military fliers had not hoped for this conflict, but now that it has come they seem willing to accept the fate awaiting them. Yet, behind the cheerful banter and brave talk, they con­ front the coming war with heavy hearts. When Suzuki tells his parents that he is about to depart for the front, his mother clutches him to her breast, sobbing with unendurable grief. Even his father, who sits some­ what removed from the two, stealthily wipes tears from his eyes. In their clear hatred of war, these parents differ completely from the fathers and militarist mothers who would joyfully celebrate their sons’ call-up notice in the films o f a somewhat later era. Even in the ensuing battle se­ quences, Army fails to conform to the patterns that quickly would fossi­ lize into clichés in the host o f military features produced during the Manchurian and then the China Incidents. After an extended episode at the army air base (Japan was never to have an independent “ air force” ), we see the planes rise into the sky with “ the army advances!” superimposed repeatedly on the screen. The actual battle opens with a montage of troops, tanks, and planes surging toward the enemy. With the exception o f this first sequence -in which the terrain behind the tanks and the soldiers varies so much as to give the montage a disjointed feel —Ushihara’s use of montage is surprisingly deft. As a director specializing in melodrama and senti­ mental romance, fast cutting was never his métier. Clearly, his use o f it here was intended as a modernist touch, highlighting the subject mat­ ter o f ultramodern warfare. The prestige o f Soviet montage —with its masses o f men and machinery—was just then in its heyday among in­ tellectual circles and in the film journals. Critical commentary on Army pointed out that Ushihara tended toward the Pudovkin method of

16

Into a Valley o f Darkness

using montage to advance the story action, rather than Eisenstcin’s ab­ stract, dialectic style for intellectual commentary.3 The very next sequence, which shows the troops advancing into a woods, is clearly a modified version of The Big Parade’s Belleau Woods scene. The carnage in The Army Advances lacks the eerie mood and utter ghastliness o f Vidor’s strongly pacifist original, and this seems to indi­ cate Ushihara’s own ambivalence on the subject. Is he truly a war-hater or simply a sentimentalist? Still, the slaughter is terrific. We see the enemy, in the German-style helmets of the Kuomintang army, hunched behind machine guns spew­ ing lead at the advancing Japanese troops. As the latter rise out of their trenches, they topple over in clumps. Next come the war machines. Planes swoop over the heads of the Japanese on bombing sorties over enemy lines. Cut to a swarm of tanks smashing through barbed wire, followed by a flood of infantrymen. The air combat sequences reportedly disappointed many o f the young connoisseurs in the audience. By mobilizing all o f the camera­ men at its Kamata Studio and with the lavish backing o f the army, the Shochiku Company had done its best to rival its American model, Wings. But the actual footage, made up of daring aerial acrobatics, is often interspersed with shots using models obviously made of balsa wood and paper. Planes are hit and drop abrupdy out o f frame, a clear give away that they are flimsy models. Still, judged by the standards of Japanese cinema at least, these scenes would remain unrivaled until Abe Yutaka’s film Burning Sky, in 1940. In The Army Advances the hero’s plane crashes behind enemy lines, and the copilot is seriously injured. The remainder o f the combat por­ tion of the film depicts their escape across the battle-ravaged landscape, first by motorcycle, then by horse, and finally on foot. The film’s combat segment concludes with the two men in a field hospital where they find their wounded and dying commander. In later war films, such as Burning Sky, death scenes become ritualized. The code required the dying man to apologize for being unable to carry on. Often a cigarette is lit for him, and he takes a single puff. When he is assured his wounds are slight, he shakes his head, whispering he knows his end is near. Then, as his com­ rades tenderly prop him up, he would cry out Tenno Heika Banzai! (ten thousand years to the emperor!) before expiring. None of the above, except for the proffered cigarette, appears in The Army Advances. The death o f the officer lacks the stereotypical over­ tones o f officially prescribed nobility. His is an individual death, not the

Ushihara Kiyohiko’s The Army Advances (Shochiku, 1930). Father and mother weep as their son departs for war.

national rite it will become in the case of his counterparts in later films. The tears his comrades shed are for the loss of a friend, not tears of admiration for a magnificently performed, soldierly death. The film’s finale, coming soon after this scene, sets the film even further apart from the militarist ideology of the subsequent ones. A title reading “ and then . . . ” flashes on screen. Suzuki, his lover Tanaka Kinuyo, and their families are reunited, and all set out on a semisymbolic train ride, presumably heading into a peaceful future, free o f any whisper of war. In the films of the Manchurian Incident (1931 33), the hero and his family are typically reunited at his grave marker, the mother’s eyes glowing with pride. With the coming of the China Incident (after *937)> every suggestion of a peaceful and happy denouement of the conflict is abolished. After each victorious battle, ineluctably, another one awaits. War becomes the universal human condition. Peace is but a respite, a corridor leading to even more climactic warfare. The superficial antiwar motif in The Army Advances reflects the fact that in 1930 leftist rhetoric still dominated the discourse o f intellectual and artistic circles (including the film world). The brutal red purges of

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Into a Valley o f Darkness

the 1928 29 period had all but destroyed the Communist Party, and most of the true Reds were now behind bars, or dead. But many big-name leftist writers were still at large, quite a few continuing to publish muted versions o f their Marxist social critiques. Furthermore, the progressive intellectual journal Kaizo and a small coterie o f others still appeared regularly on the stands featuring hyperacademic articles on marukusushugi (Marxism),yuibutsuron (dialectical materialism), and pacifism.4 Developments in the film world shadowed the political trends of so­ ciety at large. The Purokino (Proletarian Kino) documentary film movement, loosely affiliated with the Communist Party, continued to operate in spite o f the mounting police repression, which would finally stamp it out in 1934. The muted—or, to put it more severely, the heav­ ily commercialized —version of cinematic leftism, the “ tendency film,” was still thriving in 1930. In fact, 1930 saw the release o f the most out­ standing example o f this “ tendency,” Suzuki jQkichi’s What Made Her Do It? {Nani ga Konojo 0 Sou Saseta ka, Teikoku Kinema), a social con­ science, naturalist piece about a girl driven to arson by social adversity. The film, which pits the essential goodness of the girl victim against the hypocrisy of its rather stereotypical bourgeois villains, became a popu­ lar sensation. It played for an unprecedented five weeks at theaters in the Asakusa entertainment district of Tokyo, where working-class view­ ers reportedly stamped their feet in thunderous appreciation and stu­ dents shouted revolutionary slogans.5 The tide phrase—What made her do it?—was used widely in magazine articles and even in advertis­ ing slogans. The obvious irony of the latter inspired a writer for the Japan Times to apply the label of “ capitalist-leftist photoplays” to the tendency genre.6 Nor did the committed left think much of these com­ mercial exploits. In late 1929, Murayama Tomoyoshi would comment acidly that “ we have entered an era when you will not make money if you do not make a few dangerous things.” 7 As for the genuine social convictions of the tendency film directors, critic Sato Tadao makes the point that, “ Suzuki Jukichi [the director of What Made Her Do It?] went on to direct two documentary propaganda features in 1933, one for the Army (May Tenth) and the other for the Navy (This One Battle). If we ac­ cept the film as a work of genuine leftism, we can only marvel at the speed o f his political conversion. But, as is more likely the case, if we see it merely as a rather extreme expression o f social do-goodery, the question o f political conversion is reduced to virtual irrelevance.” 8 Other luminaries of the movement would display a similar penchant for political chameleon-ism.9

Into a Valley of Darkness

19

The Asakusa movie district in the early thirties (Tokyo Annai, 1932)

Such vestigial elements of high-brow leftism, which still permeated much of the public discourse in 1930, only partly explain why Ushihara Kiyohiko decided to cast The Army Advances in an ostensible antiwar mold. A further and far more immediate reason was that, among most Japanese filmmakers and many viewers, this stance had come to be identified as one of the dominant features of the genre itself. In 1930, “ superior” war films were supposed to condemn war. From the earliest days o f cinema, the world's film-producing nations often turned out jingoistic military features and, for this very' reason, they rarely appeared on Japanese screens. When they did, they pro­ voked a negative reaction. Such was the case in 1930 when a French film, identified only as The Great Battle of the Western Front, was reviewed in hinema Junpo magazine: “ One grows weary at such empty heroics. Self-adulating military features no longer have the power to pull in large audiences as they once did. It’s a new era.” 10 The new era, then, seemed to call for war films deeply hued with pacifism. While one might question the pacifist sincerity of Wings, it did succeed in taking on this aura through its association in the public mind with the genuine war hatred in Vidor’s Big Parade. Although Milestone’s

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Into a Valley of Darkness

A ll Quiet on the Western Front would not appear in Japan until very late 1930, its ideological orientation and worldwide prestige were well known long before its arrival. It then went on to win the 1930 Kinema Junpo “ Best One” award for foreign features, the Remarque novel hav­ ing topped the nation’s bestseller list for 1929. G. W. Pabst’s talkie Westfront ig i 8 (1930), with its horrific depiction of trench warfare and the plight o f civilians, arrived around the same time as A ll Quiet. It therefore made sense for Ushihara to conform to the thematic pat­ tern of these “ modern classics.” By setting their film within this context, he and his scriptwriter Noda Kógo were able to provide audiences with thrilling battle sequences and still align themselves with the (superficial, at best) discourse condemning war. If this strategy seems patently cyni­ cal, it was probably no more so than similar marketing strategies em­ ployed by the Hollywood moguls.

Censorship á la 1930 Was there really an antiwar consensus among the Japanese public in 1930? Except for those influenced by the rhetoric of sentiment, the spec­ trum of public opinion seems to have run from apathy to nationalism. Referring to the audiences for Wings and The Big Parade in 1929, Yoshimura’s impression was that, “ aside from a tiny, tiny minority, the aver­ age viewer had been drawn to the show for the spectacle. Almost no one had any particular antiwar convictions. Quite simply, in that era, war was not seen as an evil.” 11 In the popular journalism that formed the opinions of the man in the street —in the pages of Mainichi Shimbun and o f the leading middle­ brow, mass-circulation magazine, Kingu—there was little to indicate an antiwar consensus. The political content o f radio, still in its infancy as an opinion-forming medium, was almost completely in the hands of the government. And, as we shall see, the ideological content o f the major children’s and youth magazines was overtly bellicose. Since Meiji times, the public had been trained to look at the phe­ nomenon of war in a paradoxical manner. School textbooks reveled in the nation’s glorious victories in the relatively recent wars against the Chinese and the Russians, while tempering such exultation with poig­ nant descriptions o f the sacrifices and pathos of combat. The yearning for a world without war, and resignation to the fact that it was both inev­ itable and, in its way, “ soul-enriching,” was not seen as a contradiction by most or even many Japanese. When A ll Quiet on the Western Front

Into a Valley of Darkness

21

opened in October 1930, its great universal theme was perfectly com­ prehensible to those who saw it, and they responded appropriately, with tears. But Japan had not yet experienced the vast destruction of a world war, nor did it yet know the spiritual “ wasteland” that followed in its wake and which formed the psychological background for the U.S. and European films. In 1930Japan, there was neither the ideological nor the existential basis for widespread, deeply rooted pacifism. Still, to the Censorship Division bureaucrats, lodged in their cramped offices in the Home Ministry, pacifism was all part of that larger menace that obsessed the entire Ministry: Dangerous Thought. The June 1930 issue of their discretely circulated Censorship Review com­ plained that “ film has hitherto been a fairly innocuous medium dwell­ ing on relatively harmless issues, but now it has embarked on a con­ certed effort to influence the thinking of society in general.” More than pacifism, their immediate concerns were probably the tendency films whose soft-core radicalism, while presenting no overt revolution­ ary threat, were having a subde influence on the political mores of “ so­ ciety in general.” 12 The Regulation for Motion Picture Censorship, passed by the Fiftieth Diet in 1925, moved responsibility for contain­ ment o f such influences from the National Police Bureau to the Home Ministry. In late 1926, the Ministry inaugurated the new era of thought control for cinema by suppressing Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Sun (Mchirin, Shunkisha/Makino Eiga, 1925, lost?) on the unfamiliar charge of “ blaspheming the national essence.” 13 But the ground had not yet been sufficiendy prepared to justify such charges in the public perception. To many journalists following the sen­ sational Sun case, the Ministry censors seemed merely capricious. The howl of protest they sent up daunted the officials, and for the next few years they moved cautiously, alternately cowing and courting the movie community. In 1927, for instance, they turned down the demand of the governor o f Gumma Prefecture to ban Ohan and Choeimon on the grounds of its purported “ suggestions of adultery.” 14 By 1929, with their self-confidence restored by a series of ever more detailed rules and reg­ ulations passed by the Diet, they were ready to impose the Ministry’s will on film policy with renewed vigor. In the first two decades o f cinema in Japan (1897-1917), the author­ ities had thought they could neutralize politically dangerous cinema simply by checking the film’s story line or by demanding alterations to the benshi narrator’s script. The flaw was that they were still equating fil­ mic “ content” with its verbal content, as they had been doing with stage

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Into a Valley of Darkness

Home Ministry censors screening a film (Eiga,\'enkan, 1936).

plays for a generation. As Aaron Gerow points out, after the notorious ll£igomar incident” of 1912, it became clear that a film's visual content could be as “ socially disruptive” in its visual content as its verbal mode. Slowly, it seeped in that the censor would actually have to view the film before passing it. By the late twenties, movie companies were being re­ quired to send their films to the Home Ministry office in Tokyo (or its branch office in Osaka) for censorship review. By 1930, the censors themselves had become quite sophisticated in analyzing the ideological content of a film’s visual mode.15 When A ll Quiet on the Western Front arrived in Japan in the fall of that year, the censors knew how to nullify its inconvenient visual message. Their solution was radical mutilation. The film was cut in a total of 280 places, about 20 percent of its total length. Scenes depicting death in battle were slashed. Also cut were those where the wounded scream in pain, and in which the poilu are mowed down by machine gun fire, along with the piteous scene in which the hero bayonets a French soldier and then grieves over his action. On the eve of Japan’s great military adven­ ture on the continent, and only half a year after The Army Advances, the censors were signaling to the domestic film industry that it should veil from the public the horror and disintegration of human dignity on the battlefield.

Into a Valley of Darkness

23

Militarism and the Youth Culture While the government censors were engaged in suppressing seditious at­ titudes toward war, militarism, the Imperial family, or the still vaguely defined idea of “ national essence,” various interest groups were at work creating a specifically promilitary, national expansionist ethos. Gaining ground among many disparate sectors of society, the right-wing ideo­ logues were particularly successful in permeating the burgeoning youth culture of early Showa Japan. Throughout the thirties and early forties, the “ mania” of a large seg­ ment of the era’s urban, middle-class youth for tanks, for warplanes, and especially for battleships spawned a huge number of magazines and novels. The novels, which hypothesized (or “ prophesied,” as their advertisements put it) future warfare with some “ unnamable” but easily recognizable adversary, drew heavily on the technical data published in such semispecialist magazines as Umi to Sora (Sea and Sky) and the vastly popular Kodomo no Kagaku (Children’s Science). The novels, usually serial­ ized first in Shdnen Kurabu (Youth Club) magazine before being reissued in book form, tended to dominate the reading diet of an entire generation of Japanese boys and were often of reasonably high literary quality. The titles of some of the these works— The Invisible Airplane (1934), The Floating-Flying Island (1937), and Regimentfrom Mars (1938) —suggest an ex­ travagance of imagination similar to that found in U.S. science fiction thrillers o f the thirties; although the most effective stories stayed well within the bounds of reasonable scientific speculation. Not only did they influence the oudook of the very generation drafted to fight the Pa­ cific War, they seemingly had at least an indirect influence on the war films o f the latter thirties and early forties. Hirata Shinsaku, an arch Americaphobe, was particularly fond of packing his “ prophetic warfare” stories with a Dick Tracy-like assort­ ment of scientifically possible superweaponry: rocket-propelled subma­ rines, silent machine guns, and intercontinental heavy bombers. His Showa Commandos (Shówa Yügekitai, 1934) describes in precise detail a cli­ mactic battle with a country identified as “A” near an island called Mid­ way. The sea fights occur between opposing warships bearing the names and armament specifications of actual vessels in the Japanese and U.S. fleets of the time. The ship with the superior fire power usually wins. Showa Commandos, which was so popular among youngsters that many are reported to have memorized whole passages of it, opens with an ominous

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Into a Valley of Darkness

note from the author: “This is a novel. But it is not simply a novel. The facts and events written about here may, when you youthful readers have grown into fine examples of Japanese manhood, already be reality.” 16 In his explicidy tided novel Record of the ComingJapanese American War (.Nichibeisen Miraiki, 1934), Fukunaga KyOsuke goes beyond Hirata’s cal­ culations, sketching in remarkable detail the grand strategy of a naval war between the two nations. For the Japanese side, he concludes, the best strategy would be to lure the U.S. forces into a final all-or-nothing batde. In fact, this was exaedy the course chosen by the Military High Command in the last stages of the war (one hesitates to speculate on the possible influence of the former on the latter). The leading writer of the genre was Yamanaka Minetaro, whose forte was fictions about the Japanese military spirit. His hero, Major Hongo, is a young martial arts master who speaks fluent English and Chinese. In Yamanaka’s The Cavern Fortress (Gan/cutsujima), published middecade, Hongo infiltrates the huge base of a sinister Western power, hidden in the bowels of an island. The cave is equipped with the gadgetry o f a futuristic technology—automatic doors, televisions, robots, and helicopters. Staring down on this dazzling array, Hongo’s face re­ mains composed, “ radiating the awesome power residing within him.” When Hongo becomes the temporary captive o f the enemy, he is sub­ jected to their haughty derision: “ In your country, do you have even a tenth o f the equipment you see around you here?” Hongo replies coolly: “And do you suppose it is through gadgetry that wars are won or lost? The single greatest secret weapon o f our nation and people is yamato damashii [the indomitable Japanese spirit].” 17 Unlike Hirata, who sincerely believed in the triumph of technology, Yamanaka was an ad­ vocate of the invincibility of “ spiritism,” the semimystical doctrine of the militarists and superpatriots. Hongo’s tactics to defeat the enemy have a judolike quality. He uses the enemies’ own initiadves against them to bring about their defeat. In Cavern Fortress, for instance, he destroys the enemy by turning their greed for even more superweapons against them. The author maintains a kind of realism by ensuring that everything Hongo does is “ reasonable” : hu­ manly possible and therefore convincing. His is the “ magic” of superior spiritual training, a theme that came to dominate Japanese films from about 1940 on. Hirata and Yamanaka, therefore, represented a polar opposition in Japanese thinking about the nature o f modern warfare—war as a con­ test of technologies versus war as a contest of “ spirit.” Japanese war films

Into a Valley of Darkness

25

M ajor Hongo (1.) faccs clown a sinister Western adversary in Yam anaka MinetarO’s novel Iron Man o f East Asia {Shorten h'urabu, M ay 1932).

from the China Incident onward can also be categorized by the positions they represent within this polarity. For instance, we find a Hirata-like ob­ jectivity in Taguchi Satoshi’s Staff, Generals, and Soldiers (1942). I'he latter depicts war as a matter of organization and superior firepower, rather than of spirit. Other films, especially those scripted by Sawamura Tsutomu (Story of leadership and Navy), align themselves with the Yamanaka doctrine of “ spirit over matter.” In Sun of the Eighty-eighth hear, for in­ stance, workers are inspired by the spiritist doctrine to complete con­ struction on a destroyer in a fraction of the normal time. Yamanaka's novel Studentsfrom the Stars (Hoshi no Seito, 1934), an inspirational portrait of the spiritist training given to a military cadet, anticipates such films as The Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya (1942) and Navy (1943). In 1930, however, Yamanaka was just turning from fables o f the Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches sort to military topics, and it would be another year before his talcs of Major Hongo would begin to appear in print. The pages of Shonen h'urabu and similar publications were still crammed with the tales o f feudal warriors, army scouts of the Russo-Japanese War, and First World War stories depicting the valor of soldiers of both sides. It took the events o f 1931 to achieve the

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final reorientation o f youth culture, and o f popular culture at large, toward the affirmation of ultranationalism and aggressive militarism.

Phantom “ Events” and Psychic Holograms: Media in the Thirties Radio broadcasting entered Japanese national life in March 1925, for the amateur radio boom and the dozens of tiny, unregulated “ stations” had already sprinkled the nation with twenty thousand receiving sets. Thereafter, the number of radios compounded at about the same rate television sets did in the early sixties. By 1926 there were two hundred thousand home radios and thousands more set up in tea rooms and lower-class eateries to lure in customers. By 1932 the government had stopped counting, assuming there was at least one set in every house­ hold that could afford one. The early content of the programs direcdy reflected government ownership: lectures on radio technology, health, traditional culture, speeches on spiritual uplift, and news. For entertainment, there were popular songs, rather crudely produced radio plays, and humorous rakugo narrations, the Edo era art of the raconteur thus receiving a new lease on life via the wireless. Less successful were the experiments using benshi narrators, seen as practitioners o f an allied art form, who at­ tempted to perform segments from popular films sans the visual. As one listener wrote, “ It’s as irritating as listening at the door of a movie thea­ ter without being able to get in.” 18 The rakugo artists meanwhile became the first prima donnas of the airwaves, and when they complained they could not hit their stride in front of an impersonal microphone, the sta­ tion staff had to troop in to provide them an audience. After listeners wrote in querying the ghostly bursts of laughter, the staff men used pil­ lows to smother their guffaws.19 Coverage o f boxing and sumo matches did much to spread the pop­ ularity of radio in the same way cinema popularized itself among the masses with its Veriscope “ illustration” of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight in 1897. Egi R i’ichi’s Radio Calisthenics had almost a million fam­ ilies stretching and bending before breakfast. At first Egi did his show clad only in shorts and running shirt, but when it became known Impe­ rial Prince Terunomiya and his wife were also devoted listeners, he was ordered to change to formal tuxedo. The emergence of radio did more than thicken the mass-media and mass-culture stew that had been boiling up over the past several

Into a Valley o f Darkness

27

decades: It brought it to explosive, “ critical mass.” In the 1880s, the ad­ vent o f mass-circulation newspapers had created a sense of nationwide, cultural homogeneity and, more significantly, a certain sense of “ cur­ rent events” immediacy. But the impression they provided of a univer­ sally shared moment involved a certain time lag—it was “ nowadays,” or at best, “ this week,” the past several days. The new shared moment, born with the radio, was the thoroughly modern, instantaneous now. The igniting of this “ critical mass,” just as Japan was entering the thirties, radically transformed the dynamics of Japanese media. In the new era, the various media began to interact vibrantly, even competi­ tively. As a result, objective news events were given an immanent threedimensionality unachievable before. One could see and hear the actual Manchurian Incident, via photojournalism, film, and radio, while pon­ dering the facts and their deeper significance by way of the printed newspaper page. Beyond the realm of “ hard” news, the media interacted to produce phantom events with all the palpability o f the real—a host o f scandals, “ sensations,” rages and eerie bouts o f mass hysteria. Mass culture of the early thirties seems to have been particularly susceptible to these (largely media-generated) holograms of the mass psyche. To this day, Japanese social historians tend to sketch out the course of 1930s cul­ tural history along a time line o f consecutively occurring incidents and fads. These latter form the dots o f the line. The spaces between, repre­ senting various mini-eras in the life of Japanese mass society, are given substance by invoking the buzz words, slogans (inspired by the govern­ ment or advertising), popular songs (the phonograph record also being considered a major mass medium), and memorable visual images of the period. One of the greatest of these phantom “ events” was the Lover’s Sui­ cide Rage o f 1932-33. Based on an actual incident, it was dramatically reworked, first by the press and ultimately by cinema, into a mass hys­ teria phenomenon of almost majestic proportions. The consequences it activated in the real world were incomparably more horrific than its rough equivalent, Orson Wells’s “ Martian Invasion” panic in the United States in 1938. Since the Lover’s Suicide Rage provides an apolitical ex­ ample o f the strikingly similar method by which mass media interacted during the Manchurian Incident, it deserves attention here. In both cases, their compounding dynamism did much to summon up, almost out o f thin air, a far-reaching and radically new psychic mood among the public.

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On 10 May 1932 the newspapers reported the suicide of Chosho Goro, a Keio University student, and his sweetheart Yaeko. The two had met at a Christian fellowship meeting and fallen in love, but be­ cause o f class differences, marriage was out of the quesuon. The means of death they chose was both romantic and striking. They jumped into the Sakatayama volcano above the beach at Oiso. The day after the in­ itial news report, all of the national papers published their suicide note, in which they stated (to the entire nation, as it turned out) that they had died “ pure in body and spirit.” At Tokyo MchiMchi Shimbun, the copyed­ itor had the inspiration to play up the Christian connection, publishing the note under the headline “A Love That Reached Heaven.” It was the headline’s brilliant balance of spirituality and barely sup­ pressed eros, more than the actual event, that created the greatest sensa­ tion and set off the subsequent chain of events. Within days, the suicide was being reenacted as a play by various small-stage troupes using the headline as their tide. Radio too picked up the story, first in editorial commentary and then as a radio drama. Record producers released a number of sentimental ballads extolling the pure love o f Goro and Yae­ ko. Shochiku film company announced it would produce A Love That Reached Heaven, with Gosho Heinosuke as director. Meanwhile, immediately after the funeral—which press coverage made almost as tumultuous as Valentino’s —events took a bizarre, ma­ cabre turn. Yaeko’s body disappeared from the double grave. “ Who Stole It?” the papers demanded. Speculation dominated the nation’s breakfast table conversation, fanned by hearsay and false reports over the radio. Editorialists, clearly inspired by the gothic fantasies of Edogawa Rampo (“ the Japanese Edgar Allen Poe” ), pictured a love-starved ghoul embracing the cold, young corpse to consummate the act Goro had foregone in life. As it turned out, the culprit was none other than the elderly cemetery caretaker. What he did with the body was left to the (now lurid) public imagination. On 10 June Shochiku’s much anticipated film version opened with lines around the block. By this time, the surge of copycat suicides had begun. From mid-May, according to social historian KatO Hidetoshi, one or two couples a day had been climbing the slopes of Sakatayama to throw themselves into the volcano. Now, with the movie, their num­ bers doubled. At the movie theaters, usherettes now patrolled the aisles, for young couples had taken to drinking poison during the showing. By the end of the year, there had been hundreds of suicides.20

Into a Valley of Darkness

29

Yomiuri Shinbun crew’s gondola descending into the Miharayama crater (Yomiuri Shinbun, 29 M ay 1933).

After a brief lull, the Lover’s Suicide Rage flared anew. On 9January *933 a Pa*r ° f school girls climbed Miharayama volcano on Oshima Island, a short ferry trip from Tokyo, and, holding hands, jumped in. The first copycat suicides began three days later. As before, the press re­ acted with sensationalist irresponsibility. Pictures of young lovers creep­ ing up the slope arm-in-arm were published with syrupy thanatopic captions. In February, a Yomiuri news crew rigged a gondola down into the crater to decide once and for all the question, “ Did They Crash on the Rocks or Did They Plunge to the Molten Bottom?” What they did find was the broken hitherto unnoticed body of a boy. When the rage fi­ nally subsided for good in March, a total of 944 young people had per­ ished in the Miharayama crater.21

T he Manchurian Incident as Media Event The outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in September 1931 antedates the above events by more than half a year, and the subsequent ongoing military conflict vied with the Lover’s Suicide Rage for front-page space. As it was to unfold before the public, the Incident its prelude,

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actual combat, and aftermath was also a fully orchestrated media event. The prelude, lasting several months, featured a montage o f “ Chi­ nese-inspired incidents” reported by the newspapers in headlines that quivered with indignation. The pattern was to last throughout the thir­ ties, each incident being presented as “ unprovoked” and therefore in­ explicable in terms of rational, historical causes. The “ outrages” worked as building blocks in a dramatic structure resembling the se­ quence of events in a standard jidaigeki samurai drama: a villainous enemy, for reasons known only to himself, commits an escalating series o f outrages against the forbearing hero. It was a dramatic sequence most ordinary citizens could recognize as moving toward an inevitable denouement —the hero’s forbearance would eventually snap, and he would launch a crusade of bloody retribution. Another aspect of this drama of incidents, direcdy relevant to the development o f the war film in this period, was the way each incident quickly became encrusted with vignettes o f individual heroism and pa­ thos. Popular journalism in most countries tries to give its readers the sensation of a privileged “ peek behind the headlines.” In the case of the Japanese press, the “ peek” took the form of a story of exemplary martial bravery, a bidan. After being worked up for its sensationalist value by the newspapers, the bidan would receive its definitive rendering in the pages of the mass-circulation magazines. Often this included such pseudonovelistic embellishments as the story of the hero’s spiritual “ career” from childhood and, even, his “ thoughts at the moment of death.” Once a bidan vignette established its commercial value, it was then taken over by the entertainment industry for exploitation in the form o f serialized novels, radio dramas, stage plays, and movies. The “ assassination” of Colonel Nakamura ShintarO and his com­ panions as they carried out their duties near Mukden was the culminat­ ing incident of the prelude period. The 18 August papers stated flatly that the provocation had been carried out by the local Chinese troops. Asahi's evening edition detailed the atrocity under a series o f front-page headlines: “ Bodies Plundered of their Possessions: Bodies Partly Burned to Hide the Evidence!” Under the heading “A Brilliant Young Officer,” the hagiography of the new martyr emerged.22 Within a few months, the Nakamura story became the subject of several reasonably successful films, the most famous being Nakano Eiji’s Ah! Captain Nakamura (Aa Nakamura Taii, Shinko Kinema, 1931, lost?).

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The awaited denouement of the prelude period drama came on the evening of 18 September. The news wire service Dentsu set telegraphic receivers chattering in Tokyo and Osaka newspaper offices: “ Ten thirty' last evening, violence-prone elements of the Chinese Army bombed the South Manchurian Railway line in outskirts of Mukden . . . heavy fight­ ing now in progress.” 23 With bulletins pouring in all night, the papers had to stop the presses several times to reset their headlines. When the first press reports reached the streets, their sketchy ac­ counts of the fighting were already four or five hours old since the pub­ lic had already heard the news on the radio. N H K had launched its broadcast day at 6:00 a.m . with reports fresh from the wire. Throughout the day and on into the next, radio continued to scoop the newspapers. Patriotic interest remained at a fevered pitch as the days passed. The great newspapers, meanwhile, grew dismayed at losing to radio their traditional position as the nation’s main news source. Prestige no less than profits were on the line. In the early afternoon of the nineteenth, “ extra” editions became available at train stations and on street corners, featuring a spread of pictures showing citizens lining up at Tokyo recruitment centers, along with stock photos of Mukden, pulled from newspaper files. By late after­ noon, Asahi's “ Extra, Part Two” edition hit the streets with the first ac­ tion shots from the front. The other major dailies, finding themselves at a competitive disadvantage, scrambled to establish their own air links with Manchuria. The contest to put out the most spectacular spread of combat photos became frantic. Pictorial coverage not only increased the profits of the papers but demonstrated to the public a function that could never be filled by the radio. Newspapers could become the eyes of the public, if no longer its ears. The manner in which objective reportage lost out to the frenzy of the moment set the pattern of news journalism throughout the entire Fifteen Years’ War. Reporters took their cue in selecting and interpreting the content o f war news from the public information branches of the various armed services (eventually to be unified under the High Military Command). The media, including the cinema, recognized its role as the supplier o f creative packaging for this interpretation. Henceforth, most war news would either be patriotically satisfying or it would not be re­ ported at all. Overt government news control and manipulation was still a thing of the future. The intense commercial pressures of the moment were to prove at least as compelling as the totalitarian arm-twisting of

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later times. Furthermore, government circles in the early stages of the Incident were sorely disunited, often as dependent as the general public on commercial news services. Film entered the wartime era as part of the escalating melee between radio and the newspapers, as well as between the newspapers themselves. Asahi was probably the first to field a motion picture camera crew at the front. By the end of September, the Asahi Culture Halls in both Osaka and Tokyo were mounting shows of freshly processed footage from Man­ churia. Hard on their heels came crews from the other established newsfilm makers. Both Dentsü and Kokumin News had for the past several years been supplying weekly news features to the theaters.24 Two months into the Incident, Asahi Shinbun began to run a series of articles describing the “ gold-rush atmosphere” in Manchuria as newsfilm companies converged from all over the world to cover the action: The weather in Manchuria is already ferocious, with temperatures plunging to twenty or thirty below. And yet they come pouring in, from Hollywood as well as Tokyo, with the sole purpose of providing eyes and ears to the worid in order witness these sensational events. Shochiku is here with three camera crews in the three main combat zones. So is Nikkatsu. The United States’ Paramount is here too with especially elaborate equipment for their specialty, Talkie News. The desolate Manchurian plains will also be the backdrop for numerousJapanese military films already in production. Even the worid’s movie capital, Hollywood, has announced plans to use Manchuria for location shooting.25 The feature films that Japanese companies began to churn out were immediately disparaged by discriminating viewers as kiwamono, topical features rushed into production before the incidents upon which they were based faded from the public mind. The phrase kiwamono came to characterize the bulk of those uninspired wartime pictures, which the industry continued to toss off well into the thirties. The smash box-office success o f Nakano’s Ah! Captain Nakamura had opened the way for a host o f other bidan and kiwamono quickies. By Ja n ­ uary 1932, Yomiuri was reporting that “ for an industry suffering from an impasse o f bad scripts and declining fortunes, these kiwamono features are a godsend.” 26 With big profits in the offing, Nikkatsu, Shochiku, and Shinko were all busy in Manchuria. “ The battle footage is often sent back undeveloped the very day it is shot,” Mainichi reported. “At the studio, another staff, often with another director, is responsible for

Into a Valley of Darkness

33

working up the material dramatically. Studio shots are then interwoven with the real footage.” 27 Reverting to the mass-production techniques of an earlier era, companies were putting two, three, or even four “ direc­ tors” to work on separate phases or segments of the same feature.28 The term “ human bullet” (nikudan, literally “ flesh bullet” ) had long been popular in the pages of Shorten Kurabu and was used to indicate an instance o f suicidal valor which usually turned the tide of a batde. The self-sacrificial bravery o f a Lieutenant Yamashita, who went down de­ fending his divisional flag, became the subject o f both the Shinko and Shochiku versions of The Manchurian March (Manshu. Koshinkyoku). The tide o f these last two films came from a song that had taken the country by storm in late October 1931. Its patriotic lyrics—boasting, among other things, that Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War had made it the rightful owner of Manchuria—had been scripted by members of the Osaka Asahi Shinbun staff. The two film versions returned the favor by saluting both the heroism of the soldiers and the sacrifices o f the newsmen who followed them into batde. Combat cinematographers tended to portray themselves as swash­ buckling heroes in their own right. “ W'e grab our equipment in one hand and our lives in the other, and plunge in on the very heels of the troops,” boasted location director Ide Kinnosuke.29 He reported that while fielding a crew for Tokatsu one morning, most of his extras had to gallop off to fight a party o f anti-Japanese guerrillas (inevitably called “ bandits” by the press). “ It’s a common belief here,” wrote Asahi News cameraman Higashi Kenju, “ that less than forty percent of our number will return from assignment alive.” 30 He was, o f course, exaggerating grossly. Chinese resistance was not the only threat to the cameramen. There was also the weather. With the fighting moving northward during the steadily deepening Manchurian winter, their sufferings became so se­ vere that their complaints could be heard back in Tokyo: “All the im­ pressive technical advances in cinematography made since the Great War were designed for peacetime conditions,” wrote one cameraman. “After lugging our equipment on foot for days at a stretch, through sandblasting winds and minus thirty or forty degree temperatures, it’s no wonder even the best stuff breaks down.” 31 Film tended to freeze in­ side the camera and the slightest turn of the crank made it splinter and clog the works. Lenses frosted over and turned opaque, at least until someone enterprisingly found the solution of coating them with tobacco juice. Fingers froze inside gloves and many cameramen complained that

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their foreheads had become frostbitten simply by making contact with the metal viewfinder. Equipment placed on the ground often became frozen in place and had to be abandoned. During the winter months, the army surged forward to gobble up most of Manchuria. Meanwhile, preparations were being made for the launching (on i March) o f the new, “ independent” state of Manchukuo, and the commercial film industry was called upon to mount a public re­ lations offensive to influence foreign as well as domestic opinion. The Tokatsu documentary Justice Is Strong (Seigi wa Tsuyoshi, 1932, lost?) was released in early February as a major part of this campaign. Actual combat footage was interwoven with “ reenactments” —such as the in­ itial railway bombing incident—with the obvious purpose of counter­ acting the army’s poisonous image in the overseas press. At the specific request o f General Sugiyama, Shinko Kinema re­ leased The Dawn o f Manchuria (Manmo Kenkoku no Reimei, 1932, lost?), a melodrama touting the altruism o f the Japanese military clique that en­ gineered the Manchurian takeover. It starred Nakano Eiji and screen siren Irie Takako, who plays a Mata Hari-like spy. Mizoguchi Kenji, who had just moved from Nikkatsu after suffering a scare at the hands of the police as a “ left-leaning” muckraker, was the director. Based on a novel by Mikami Otokichi and Naoki Sanjugo, both of whom had con­ verted recendy to the far right of the literary world, Mizoguchi would remember the film as a “ a nightmare born from a political idea rather than an artistic one.” 32 Mizoguchi managed to bungle every promilitarist film he made in the wartime era, yet he gave them all a sincere effort. Uchida Tomu, an­ other first-rate director, made Asia Cries Out (Sakebu Ajia, Nikkatsu, 1933) a year later with about the same results. In January 1932, the “ Shanghai Incident” was launched as another media event apparendy designed to divert international attention from the last phase of die Manchurian conquest. Local hostility against Jap a­ nese residents had been sputtering into random violence for months and this was illustrated at home by newspaper photos of the expatriates crouching with hunting rifles behind barricades “ for self protection.” Shanghai, with its many foreign concessions, was an ideal site for a media diversion designed to avert world attention from the aggression in Manchuria. In order to follow the same prelude scenario as the Man­ churian main event, all that was needed was a press-worthy outrage. And, for the secret operatives of the Japanese Army, creating pretexts was standard operating procedure on the mainland.

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On 11 January, the press had a story. Several Japanese Buddhist priests had been murdered “ by unknown parties” as they strolled along a Shanghai street. The purported “ outrage” was followed by the land­ ing of a Japanese naval brigade, which then triggered fierce street fight­ ing throughout the city. While the incident had negligible military re­ sults, it did provide the backdrop for the single most famous bidan vignette o f the pre-Pacific War era—the legend of the “ Three Human Bomb Patriots.” Before the furor subsided, this particular media­ generated image would leave an indelible impression on the course of war film and help transform the mass psychology of Japan itself. On 20 February, a general assault was in progress against wellentrenched Chinese regulars north of Shanghai. In one sector, two small suicide squads were deployed against the enemy’s barbed-wire de­ fenses. Charging across the no-man’s-land, each three-man squad hefted a long bamboo cylinder stuffed with explosives. Both squads suc­ ceeded in detonating their bombs, but only one group managed to re­ turn to base. The other squad had disappeared in the explosion that blew a hole in the enemy defenses. Newspapers had been reporting the desperate activities o f similar squads from the beginning of the Shanghai Incident and were clearly groping for some act of martial heroism that could give transcendent patriotic meaning to the incursion. On 23 February', both Asahi and Mainichi put the exploit o f the three sappers on the front page. At this point, they were still anonymous, and the description of their deed sim­ ply followed the pattern of previous stories o f batdefield courage. On the twenty-fifth, however, they were back on page one, their photo­ graphs appearing under the headline, “ The Last Moments of Our Three Human Bomb Patriots.” The story set off a frenzy o f hysterical, death-worshiping “ patriot­ ism.” In March, the nation began to experience a rash of patriotic Human Bomb Patriots-related suicides. A nineteen-year-old schoolgirl in Gifu Prefecture drowned herself in a nearby lake. The papers quoted the note she left behind for her two brothers about to go to the front: “ With tears of admiration, I am following the path of the Three Human Bomb Patriots and I beseech you to do likewise by expending yourselves to the utmost in service to the nation.” 33 A “ condolence sub­ scription,” launched by Asahi Shinbun, with the collection activities mosdy carried out by school children, brought in huge sums of money to raise a bronze statue to the three martyrs and to ease the lives of their parents. Actors, directors, and other Shochiku studio personnel

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came up with the substantial sum o f sixty yen on the very first day of the drive, and an anonymous patriot sent in the staggering sum of one thousand yen.34 The sudden apotheosis o f the Three Human Bomb Patriots came as a windfall for the nation’s traditional performing arts. Their fortunes had been sagging badly under the triple impact o f radio, film, and bad economic times. In the month of March alone, there were reenactments o f the Human Bomb story by bunraku puppet theaters, Shimpa drama troupes, and rakugo monologuists. The two greatest Kabuki actors of the day, Kikugoro and Ganjiro, took to the boards in one or another of the hastily scripted productions. Often the new tale was put on a program also featuring excerpts from Chüshingura, thus indicating that the three new heroes were to be seen as part o f the hallowed tradition o f the fa­ mous Forty-Seven. Vast “ patriotic” profits were reaped as the legend continued to snowball into a public obsession. It made its way into radio plays, novels, many feature films, innumerable “ documentaries,” and several years later a major entry in the new, officially authorized ele­ mentary school reader. Asahi Shinbun, which had led the way in launching the legend, was quick to recognize its cinematic possibilities. “ These deaths have a gran­ deur hitherto witnessed only on the silver screen and which is virtually unknown in the everyday world,” 35 it noted in an early report on the three. Therefore, it came as no surprise when on 25 February, the very day the nation learned the names of the three martyrs, the Tokatsu Film Company announced that Ah, Valorous Glory! The Three Human Bomb Patri­ ots (Aa Chüretsu Ktkudan Sanyüshi) was already being scripted and that a film crew was on its way to Kyushu to do location shooting. Within the week, five other companies had joined the bandwagon. The first film ac­ tually to reach the screen appears to have been the Kawai Company’s “ factual and straightforward” Loyal Spirits of the Three Human Bomb Patri­ ots (Chúkon Nkudan Sanyüshi), directed by Kishi Toichiro and a team of five other directors. Since conflicting versions of the legend had been circulating from the start—disagreeing, for instance, as to whether they had strapped individual bombs to their backs or had together carried a single big bomb —films purporting to be “ authoritative” vied for the commercial edge. The youth magazine Shorten Club had sparked the issue when the cover illustration for its February issue incorrecdy depicted each of the trio as carrying his own bomb. By way of apology, its March issue featured a huge four-page foldout showing the Patriots hefting the

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officially verified single bomb. Almost a million boys are reported to have tacked the foldout to their bedroom walls. The month of March saw the release of five new Human Bomb Patriot features.36 Most of the film critics of the day managed to keep their heads amid the deluge, dismissing the entire crop of Sanyushi films as “ little more than celluloid rubbish made up of grainy, antique war footage and wooden reenactments.” 37 Since only one o f them survives today, we will probably have to accept this assessment. Still, this was apparendy not the opinion of the youngsters in the au­ dience at the time. Scriptwriter Hirosawa Sakae was eight years old in 1931, and he still retains vivid memories of the Human Bomb films: “ Both Valorous Gloiy and Loyal Spirits were thrilling films. But since the story lines o f the two were almost identical, one got the feeling of hav­ ing seen the same film twice, especially since they both incorporated the same news footage. That part was fairly boring. The really important part was the climax where they blow up the enemy barbed wire de­ fenses. The battlefield is bathed in sharp, crystalline moonlight. So this is the famous moonlight o f the Chinese mainland, I remember thinking. The commanding officer pours some sake into the mess kits of each of the young heroes. Then the three nod deeply to each other as a sign of their firm resolve.” 3” Deep bows and shared smiles were to take on even greater iconographic meaning in the war films of the talkie era. “After the three soldiers thrust their bomb under the barbed wire and light the fuse,” Hirosawa continues, “ the orchestra shamisen set up a staccato strumming ‘ji-ji-ji-ji-ji’ and the hand-held drum went ‘thunk-thunkthunk,’ much like in a Kabuki performance. Next the benshi’s voice would rise to stirring pathos: ‘Looking down upon us from on high, His Majesty the Emperor! On our backs we bear the heavy burden of the united will o f all our nation’s people.’” 39 The late film researcher Yamamoto Kikuo develops the interesting thesis that the Human Bomb Patriots myth played an active role in the ideological conditioning of the Japanese people.40 All three men had come from impoverished homes. In the popular imagination they were identified as the epitome o f the traditionalist theory that true human virtue comes from the combination Hin-Ko-Chu (poverty, filial piety, and loyalty). The logic of this neo-Confucian idea held that poverty creates the strongest bonds within a family, causing everyone to work and to share in mutual dependence. The poorest families, therefore, display the noblest examples of filial piety. Giving one’s all in order to repay one’s

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Charac ters in T agaw a SuihO’s enorm ously popular Nora h'uro comic strip emulate the T h ree Hum an Bom b Patriots (Shorten h'urabu, Ju ly 1932).

parents for the benefits of life and sustenance is but a miniature version of the “ best” relationship between citizen and nation, since the good cit­ izen is bound by strings of eternal gratitude for the “ benevolence” (that is to say, the very existence) of the Emperor. Although real soldiers com­ monly cried out “ Okaa-chan!” (Mama!) as they lay dying, screen sol­ diers such as the three Patriots invariably shouted Tennd Heika Banzai! Through this substitution, the image of the parent was subsumed into that of the sovereign. This metaphorical elevation of the nation’s most economically de­ prived classes as models of perfect citizenship provided a straw for peo­ ple to grasp at in the midst of spiritual and physical alienation. The doc­ trine is found most clearly in the fiery Loyalist-Agrarian preachings of Tachibana Kôzaburô. It gave focus to the nation’s antimodcrnist groanings, emphasizing the very real bonds of mutual sympathy that were then growing up between the underprivileged and the ideologues of promilitarist ultranationalism. The idea of turning back the clock to a more pastoral time, free from the brutal and competitive curse of capi­ talism, had widespread appeal in 1932. When the Three Human Bomb Patriots story was still headline news, the nation’s two top women’s magazines, Fujin Koron (Matrons Forum) and Shufu no Tomo (Housewife’s Friend), rushed reporters off to interview the families of the three men. T he April issue of Fujin Koron rhapsodized that “ only in households where poverty has fused the entire

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family into a closely cooperating unit can such filial piety and such mag­ nificent martial valor be nurtured to the fullest flowering.” 41 During the Pacific War, a decade later, films showing the family as the “ spiritual training ground” o f military heroism became an impor­ tant part of the nation’s “ universal mobilization for total war.” By then, they had the specific responsibility o f serving “ national policy (kokusaku).” A standard characterization then was the so-called militarist mother (gunkoku no haha), who took pride in training her sons into stal­ wart, selfless military men and drew a paradoxical satisfaction from her sons’ all-but-inevitable deaths on the battlefield. These semifictional militarist mothers were largely the direct descendents o f the Sanyushi mothers (who, in turn, were largely the creation of the women’s magazines of the spring of 1932). We see a clear foreshad­ owing of them in the words of this Human Bomb Patriot mother, pub­ lished in Fujin Koron: “ Here I am receiving the warmest condolences and sympathy from everybody and it had never occurred to me that my Kenji had such especially laudable qualities. But I’m thankful for his death now and know that I should feel pride and joy at being the mother of such a fine military man. This thought gives me solace and deep satisfaction.” 42 Kiwamono and bidan films on various themes continued to be made well into the thirties, albeit in gradually declining numbers. Whereas the “ Exhibition Prospects” column of Kinemajunpo was still proclaiming in mid-1932 that “ if it isn’t showing a Three Human Bomb Patriots film, it just isn’t a movie theater,” 43 the reputation of all kiwamono “ quickies” was soon in steep decline. By early 1933, the phrase kiwamono had turned into one of complete opprobrium. We see this in the following Kinema Jiutpo review of Tanaka Shigeo’s I f Japan Should Be Bombed (1933, Kawai, lost?): “A while back, someone wrote an article tided, ‘All Honor to the Kiwamono Film’ in which he argued that since the great Chikamatsu himself had written kiwamono dramas, one shouldn’t dismiss such fare lightly. But isn’t it about time now to make a distinction between Chikamatsu’s classics and the stuff passing as kiwamono features nowadays? The latter range from vulgar dismemberment-murder stories to mili­ tary films. As for me, 'kiwamono’ has passed over into the purely pejora­ tive column of my vocabulary.” 44

Step Two: The “ Crisis-Tim e” Jap an Mood Around five in the evening of 15 May 1932--a few days after Goro and Yaeko’s love suicide four young naval officers sympathetic to

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Tachibana’s brand of Agrarianism burst in on Prime Minister Inukai as he lay napping at his official residence. “ We can talk this out,” the old man pleaded with them. “Talk is useless [Mondo muydj. Shoot!” came the reply. As the prime minister lay mortally wounded, other members of the cabal—including a “ Farmer’s Death Band” —stormed through Tokyo, blowing up banks and power stations. By morning, the at­ tempted coup, if indeed it had been one, was over. The culprits were quickly rounded up. For the next several months, however, the little dia­ logue between the prime minister and his assassins became a black com­ edy routine repeated by students and members o f the smart set as a form o f greeting. With exquisite brevity and cynicism, “Mondo muyo” seemed to express what many people were feeling: helplessness in the face of economic depression, irritation at the incompetent haggling o f politicians and their party politics, and, most profoundly, despair at the possibility that the solution to anything could be found through the means o f rational debate. While failing to achieve the destruction of urban capitalism, the aborted rebellion did succeed in bringing down what remained of the Taisho era’s system of party politics, along with its superstructure of ra­ tional parliamentary debate. The conspirators had been in full harmony with Inoue Nissho, leader of the earlier Blood Pledge Corps Ketsumeidan Incident, who had asserted that “ I transcend reason and act completely on intuition.” 45 At his trial, the assassin Lieutenant Koga admitted that the 15 May plotters had “ thought about destruction first” and had “ never consid­ ered taking on the duty o f construction.” On the advice of General Araki Sadao, they had decided that the heavy mantle of Westernized “ distortions,” hiding the spirit of the nation from her people, “ must now be broken through by the Yamato spirit.” Araki, by now minister of war, commended the actions of “ these pure and naive young men” and ap­ plauded their motives with “ unrestrainable tears.” 46 A sizable portion of the public, following the trial in the papers and the radio, were aroused to similar sentiments. In the new era—Araki would soon dub it the “ Era of Crisis-Time Japan ” —direct action ap­ peared more eloquent than words, and “ sincere belief” seemed to have become the exclusive property o f the young, fanatical militarists. In the intellectual life of the nation, images and gestures were coming to have greater prestige than ideas. The film industry, with uncanny precision, had been paralleling this mood-drift for some time in a steady stream of B movies. When the time

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came, they merged neatly into the new “ 15 May Ethos.” Images of un­ hesitating reflex loyalism, long the domain o f boy’s magazines, now ap­ peared on-screen. The “ General Nogi film” and the “ draft film” were two such types. General Nogi, the Russo-Japanese War hero, had captured Port Ar­ thur after a hideously prolonged siege, resulting in mountains of Ja p a ­ nese dead. In the Nogi-theme films, such as Yoshimura Misao’s Remem­ ber General Nogi! (Omoi okoseyo! Nogi Shogun, 1934, Shochiku, lost?), the general anguishes over the slaughter of his men. In the aftermath o f the war, he travels the country visiting the graves of the fallen and aiding their surviving families. Usually the beneficiaries do not know the iden­ tity of the kindly old man. Within hearing, they continue to curse “ that demon Nogi” for their catastrophic loss. Finally, discovering his true identity and learning that Nogi had also lost a pair of sons in the con­ flict, their hatred melts into reverence for this gunshin, this true “ god of warriors.” Yamamoto Kikuo draws a parallel between the Nogi films and the prewar jidaigeki films featuring Mito Komon, the Tokugawa era official who would travel the countryside disguised as an elderly itinerant. Whenever Mito Komon found a case of abused power, he would step in to destroy the tyrant and set matters right again for the peasants. This is precisely what General Nogi does. By substituting Nogi for the legen­ dary Mito, the film manages to foster the impression that the military and the poorest classes were bound together by invisible bonds o f affin­ ity. This message meshed well with the Tachibana Agrarianist dream of an ascendant military offering salvation to Japan.47 Representative examples of the draft film span half a decade and include Ishiyama Minoru’s Draft Notice (Shoshurei, 1931, Kawai Films), Kumagai Hisatora’s Mobilization Orders (Doinrei, 1932, Nikkatsu, lost?), and Watanabe Kunio’s Draft Notice (Shoshurei, 1935, lost?). The story, usually set in the Russo-Japanese War period, tends to thwart the idea o f military service as a boon for the lower classes. Typically, a poor farmer is suddenly called up for service. His wife is ill and commits sui­ cide the night before his departure. Worried about leaving his little son all alone in the world, the farmer tries to work up the courage to kill him. Up to this point, the situation has more in common with the ten­ dency films of the late 1920s than with the Human Bomb Patriots pat­ tern, but then, the 15 May Ethos had many points of coincidence with the Japanese left. The little family is eventually saved by the interven­ tion of a kindly policeman who takes charge o f the boy while the father

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goes off to probable death. In most versions, he does not die but re­ turns covered with military honors. The issue of why the draftee and his family must accept the sacrifices thrust upon them is never probed in these films. Inherent in the nation­ alist ideology from the Meiji Era onward was the conviction that “ ours is not to reason why,” as far as service to the state was concerned. By 1941, when the Home Ministry disseminated its primer On The Way of the Subject (Jinmin no Michi), the total subordination of personal affairs had become integral to the very definition of a Japanese citizen: “ What we normally refer to as private life is, in the final analysis, the Way of the Subject. As such, it has a public significance, in that each so-called pri­ vate action is carried out by the subject as a part of his humble efforts to assist the Throne.” 48 In all of the draft films, however, the destitute draftee’s family prob­ lems are ultimately solved by the deus ex machina intervention of some representative of the authority establishment. While serving to under­ score the benevolent, paternal concern of the polity for the least of its citizens, such solutions tend to blur the essential contradiction between the individual’s private “ good” and the prescribed “ Way of the Sub­ ject.” The draft film hints at the tragic consequences of this contradic­ tion, and then turns away. Since premodern times, whenever the issue of loyalty was taken up in drama or literature it was to depict an essentially tragic relationship. Such works depicted unrewarded sacrifice as the highest form of ethical virtue. The draft films manage to stay within this tradition by depicting the reflex loyalty of the poor draftee as the modern equivalent of the same “ feudal” virtue. However, by depicting only the tragic potential of the man’s virtue and by arranging to avoid its actual, tragic consequences, the films seem to be acknowledging an important change in the mental­ ity of audiences from feudal to modern times. The object of feudal loyalty was a concrete person, while the object of the modern citizen’s loyalty was the state, an abstraction. Despite the urgings of the govern­ ment, the two realities —one’s personal life and the state —never success­ fully merged into one. In feudal loyalty-to-a-person, there was at least a contiguity between the two realities; in loyalty-to-the-state, the contigu­ ity was rarified in the extreme. Still, although the feudal ethos played al­ most no direct role in the practical life of the modern individual, its power as an aesthetic continued to move audiences profoundly. Modern renditions of Chushingura and Kanjincho brought forth emo­ tional responses similar to those of earlier generations. In the draft films,

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the poverty-stricken draftee’s willingness to sacrifice his family’s welfare could be felt, aesthetically, as sharing in the moral beauty of these far older works. It is sufficient to depict only his willingness to draw forth the emotional association. Depicting his family as experiencing actual tragedy in his absence would have dispelled the aura o f “ beautiful anachronism,” summoning up critical responses in terms o f modern, practical morality. In 1932, these scenes of (potentially) tragic selfsacrifice invariably brought Japanese audiences to tears.49 They were tears of pity, perhaps mixed with a certain degree o f horror, but they were tears o f admiration and wonder as well. Yet another group of theme films, the Junshi, or loyalty suicide film, clearly appealed to these same tears o f admiration. When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, General Nogi followed him in death. At his side, Madame Nogi also committed suicide. This act made her a heroine in her own right and a potential model for the “ new” militarist woman. During the Manchurian Incident, the newspapers recalled several bidan from an earlier era in which military wives emulated her “ martyrdom.” In early 1932, Kimura Kakichi launched a series o f Junshi films with Wife of Lieutenant Inoue Gives Her Life as a Parting Gift (Shi no senbetsu Inoue Chui Fujin, Shinko, lost?), based upon the most sensational o f these bidan. Like Madame Nogi, the wife shares her husband’s AiwAi-class ethic. When he is about to set off for the Manchurian front, she toasts his suc­ cess with sake and then, that very night, commits suicide to encourage him to die bravely for his country. Unlike the suicide of the wife in the draft film series, her death is “ exemplary” rather than tragic. Both Nikkatsu and Makino Productions made their own films based on this same incident. During the heavy fighting around Shanghai, a Major Kuga Noboru was wounded, lost consciousness, and was captured by the Chinese. His wounds were treated by the Chinese, and soon afterward he was re­ leased. He immediately went to the grave of a fallen comrade and put a bullet through his head. There were clearly extenuating circumstances, which made the bidan of his suicide all the more appealing in the news­ papers. The first media reports of the incident were accompanied by the following encomium by Minister of the Army Araki Sadao: “ Here we find the quintessential manifestation of the spirit of honor and of the reliability of the Military Man.” 50 As a doctrine, this notion was for­ malized a decade later in the batdefield catechism, The Field Service Code (Senjinjitsugi): “ No soldier is to shame himself by becoming a captive.” 51

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Matsuishi Osamu’s Major Kuga, Flower of Chivalry (Bujin no Seika Kuga Shosha, 1932, lost?) was but one film extolling Kuga’s “ exemplary” but futile death. Four other companies, including Shochiku, made compet­ ing versions of the story during the height of the Human Bomb Patriots rage (see footnote no. 34). In 1934, with the craze in partial remission, Sone Chiharu took up the theme again in his Toast to Admiral Togo (Togohai, 1934, Shinko, lost?), managing to blunt its grisly moral. A RussoJapanese War soldier is blinded in action and then captured. After his release and return toJapan, he is chilled by the attitude o f the public to­ ward him and decides to commit suicide. At this point, Admiral TOgO steps in to dissuade him, and the man decides to devote himself to rais­ ing his son into a fine soldier for the state. On the eve of the Pacific War, Major Kuga’s deed was invoked yet again in Mori Keinan’s plain-language commentary on the 1941 Field Service Code, Senjin Jitsugi. There, Kuga is lauded as “ a model for the military man.” More than a few soldiers had copies of Mori’s book with them in the caves o f Saipan and Okinawa when they blew themselves up during the last stages of the fighting. With so many films of the early thirties echoing the thanatopic side of the ultranationalists’ spiritist message, one might wonder how much direct influence such groups wielded over the film industry itself. After more than sixty years, the answer is not easy to obtain. Since the film world contained few ideologues from either the right or the left, the di­ rect influence o f pure ideology on film production can probably be dis­ counted. Patriotic themes tended to be exploited commercially until they were played out, and then dropped. Political pressure groups could, however, have their say as investors in specific film projects. Their im­ pact was comparatively great in the case of such small, “ independent production” companies as those centering on a single star, such as Arashi KanjurO or BandO TsumasaburO. But these were often relationships fraught with discord, since the stars usually refused to become mere puppets. Such was the case of Bando and his company. In February 1931, a public mudslinging contest broke out between the Kokusuikai (National Essence Society) and the infamous Kokuryukai (Amur River Society) over which of the two factions had the controlling interest in the com­ pany.52 Bando insisted that neither of them did. Howling with injured dignity, the Kokuryukai leveled a blast at him through the newspapers: “ Bando owes our society a great debt of gratitude. After his resignation from Shochiku, we invested seventy' thousand yen in his new company

Into a Valley of Darkness

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0

'W' > ' ' r/ / J

|> i -

? *v ' ‘?

Band« TsumasaburO as the dying eponym ous hero o f Sakam oto Ryom a, made with the financial backing o f several right-wing organizations (BandO TsumasaburO Productions.

1928).

with the understanding that it would exert itself in the task of national education through films made in line with Kokuryukai principles.” 53 At least part of the problem was that Bando’s popularity was sagging badly, and he was having serious difficulty making any films at all. When it came to generating films with the appropriate ideological orientation, the arnw itself was far more efficient. In the davs of the Manchuria and Shanghai crises, the military pursued a two-tiered pol­ icy in the matter. With the larger companies, it tended to stay in the background, providing desirable films with partial funding, horses, mili­ tary equipment, and manpower, all virtually free of charge. In the case of the smaller production companies, on the other hand, their “ sup­ port” tended to dominate the production of the film. Without financing and the loan o f planes from the army; the tiny Tokyo Cinema Company, for instance, could never have dreamed of making the air-battle spec­ tacular Big Sky {Ozora, 1932). Occasionally, the army or the navy would hire a production com­ pany outright to make a propaganda picture. Film units connected with the major newspapers were often favored since they already were /

J

45

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Into a Valley of Darkness

experienced molders o f public opinion. The army hired Mainichi to make Defend Manchuria (Mamore ManshU, 1932, lost?), a film of documen­ tary footage interspersed with dramatized sequences that argued Man­ churia was part of Japan ’s national survival “ lifeline.” 54 The part-talkie Crisis-Time Japan (.Hijoji Mhon, 1933), another Mainichi-produced propaganda film, was to become so infamous that over a dozen years later it would be introduced as “ evidence” at the Tokyo War Crimes trial. Eyebrows were probably raised when Mizuno Shinkichi, a former film production manager at Mainichi, described it to the tribunal as “ a pioneering effort in educational cinema, a thesis film.” Crisis-Time Japan was, in fact, an audacious experiment in using film as a medium for political indoctrination. The indoctrinator was none other than War Minister Araki Sadao himself. A striking man with the Prussian-style mustachios o f his class, Araki appears on screen in full military uniform to lecture the nation on “ the truth about Japan ’s present-day situation at home and abroad.” What follows is a long, high-blown oration on Kòdò (the “ Imperial Way” ) and the divine mission o f the nation’s military. The Orwellian message is that the best and most stable form o f peace is a state o f perpetual war, supported by “ the utter determination to steel our national will until the ultimate victory is attained.” A grotesque profusion of thuses and therefores stud the text, serving to bind together otherwise unrelated assertions. The total effect is the kind o f gibberish typical of the militarist rhetoric o f the era. According to Maruyama Masao, the renowned political scientist who often quotes from the film in his treatise, “ Theory and Psychology of Ultranational­ ism” (1946), the Imperial Way doctrine held that: “The standard ac­ cording to which the nation’s actions are judged as right or wrong lies within itself (that is to say the ‘national polity’), and what the nation does, whether within the nation’s borders or beyond them, is not subject to any moral code that supersedes the nation.. . . Within Japan the stan­ dard of values is relative in proximity to the Emperor; by extending this logic to cover the entire world, the ultranationalists engendered a policy ‘causing all the nations to occupy their respective position vis-à-vis Japan.’ Once this order was secured there would be peace throughout the world.” 55 In the film, Araki often refers to a chart that Maruyama finds “ in perfect agreement” with the above explanation. The chart shows the Imperial Way to be both “ perpetual in time” and infinitely “ expandable in space.” That which protects it is “ the mission of the Imperial Forces.”

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Aside from the chart, however, the film’s visual content often has no clear relation to the narration. “ Thus we must ask what it is that disturbs the peace of Asia,” Araki demands, as shots of Chinese refugees and Chinese soldiers surrendering their weapons are flashed on the screen. “And are the waves of the Pacific really all that quiet?” accompanies a montage o f Japanese and U.S. batdeships flashed on screen in staccato alternation. But their “ batde” is nothing more than a phantom. In fact, Japan and the Western powers were at the time still in London discuss­ ing naval disarmament. Instead of actual gunfire, we see huge waves ex­ ploding across the ship decks.56 One main contention of Crisis-Time Japan is that “ Westernized” Ja p ­ anese society has grown soft and degenerate (represented by a montage of youthful mogas and mobos lounging in cafes and disporting on the dance floor). Brief shots of military footage from Manchuria flicker through the sequence as if to alert the consciences o f the revelers to the sufferings o f “ our boys at the front.” In general, the Manchurian crisis and the national call to arms is presented as a kind of national salvation: “ From now on, mobilization of national defense will not be simply for the purpose of fighting wars; rather it shall be the instrument o f the total spiritual unification of our entire populace.” The accompanying montage pulses with the same urgency and resolve that the military hoped to convey with the term “ crisis-time.” According to the Araki logic, the national “ crisis-time” provides an opportunity to set aside all petty individual concerns, just as the troops do on the distant battlefields. It is an opportunity to join the surge of construction at home and national assertion abroad. The script de­ scribes the visual sequence as follows: “Japanese women undergoing training; a large-scale construction project; shot of a speeding motorcy­ cle; shots of various sections of society rapidly being put on a prepared­ ness footing; hurrying bicyclist; a roaring locomotive; swift walking feet; a busy newspaper office; a factory and smokestacks.” 57 By 1934, there was a steady flow o f national policy documentaries, many closely resembling Crisis-Time Japan. Extravagant army or navy backing allowed the insignificant companies producing them to insert lavish foldout advertising pages in Kinema Junpo, which were made of thick paper o f much higher quality than the rest of the magazine. Such was the case of Ajiasha’s rg j6 (ig j6 Nen, 1934, lost?), which warned of military preparations being carried out by “ Country X and Country Y.” Under the boldly printed slogan “A clear depiction o f the great crisis inevitably to unfold in 1936,” the advertisement goes on to

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Ad for The Great Order (Daito, 1934), a docum entary commissioned by both the navy and the arm y (A'inema Junpo, 1 M ay 1934).

promise theater operators that “ this is a film with outstanding box-office prospects!” 58 Other films of the same ilk included Japan Marches jWorth (Hokushin Nihon, 1934, lost?), produced by Yokohama Cinema, and YouthfulJapan (Seinen Nihon, 1934, lost?), produced by a shadowy company calling itself Chijo [Planetary] Film Corp. The latter advertised itself, unpromisingly, as “ a roundtable discussion” talkie. As one might suspect, such productions were highly unpopular with audiences, even when they were attached to regular film showings as a bonus. Great Order (Daigdrei, Daito, 1934, lost?), directed by Yoshimura Misao, a veteran director of Human Bomb Patriot films, was harshly re­ viewed in the film journal Eiga Hyoron: “ The picture comes under the category' of ‘National Policy Film,’ but this is somewhat peculiar. Just what arc we ordinary' civilians, having no connection to the military, ex­ pected to do in this ‘Crisis Era’? Are we to go about our daily tasks with a pained scowl on our faces, ceaselessly intoning ‘Crisis Time! Crisis Time!’? . . . This film reminds me of some huge cardboard warship, set afloat on the water with no means of propulsion and carrying not a sin­ gle canon for armament.” 59 The phrase “ crisis-time” took hold in Japan as one of the cliches of the period. But it was often used at the expense of the intended spirit. “ What time is it? It’s crisis-time!” was the pun making the rounds of the coffee shops, suggesting a certain amount o f passive resistance to the

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new era. The term was quickly usurped by commercialism and de­ based: “As part of crisis-time Japan ’s campaign to improve the physical condition of the nation, take w a k a m o t o ! ” ran an ad for a stomach tonic. Signs outside Tokyo cafes proclaimed: “ In tune with this Crisis Time, our girls give death-defying service!” Mainichi writer Kiryu Yuyu, among the last of the staunch antifascists, sourly noted in 1935 that “ it seems to be the mission of this one phrase to turn us into a na­ tion of shameless and irresponsible louts.” 60 “ Fascism” itself was a phrase very much puzzling to the public mind in crisis-time Japan. Like so many of the psychic phantoms generated by the media, the sense that the nation was being impelled to make an “ either/ or” choice regarding this altogether foreign-sounding concept seemed to come out of nowhere, thrusting itself toward the center of public consciousness. Hito no Uwasa (Rumors about people), one o f the publications thumbed through by train passengers and clients at beauty parlors, surveyed leading personalities of the cultural scene in 1932: “ Do you approve of the trend toward fascism?” The responses were typically muddled: (critic): I am not especially opposed to fascism, nor can I say that I am absolutely in favor of it. h a t a t o y o k i c h i (popular writer): I don’t know much about this Western term, “fascism.” But when it comes to patriotism and utter loyalty to the Emperor, I consider myself to be in the front rank. t a k a g o r i i t s u e (critic): Fascism is no longer an issue to be decided by the preferences of individuals. It is, I think, inevitable. k u r i s h i m a s u m i k o (film actress): I can’t say its the thing I admire the most, but I do support movements of this sort. With the passing of the Eros-Grotesque fad, society would otherwise return to the same old pace, wouldn’t it?6' iw a y a sazan am i

The last response, by actress Kurishima, reflects the confusion engen­ dered by the orthographic representation of “ fascism” in Japanese katakana script. The word used was fassho, while the word for “ fashion” was fasshon. Kirishima was not the only one to miss the difference.62 The humor magazine Tuben lampooned this confusion with a car­ toon by Ushijima Issui.63 Like the blind men who try to describe the ele­ phant, Ushijima shows a journalist, a politician, a literary figure (Kikuchi Kan?), and a right-wing ideologue. Each is groping a different part of a great sheeplike beast labeled “ Fascism.” The beast waiting to devour

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Intellectuals and politicians grope a sheeplike beast labeled “ fascism” in Ushijim a Issui’s cartoon (fui«?,June 1932).

Japan was, of course, not Fascism in the European sense but militaristic bureaucracy in the Japanese sense. In the next chapter, we will look at how the bureaucracy gradually drew the film industry into the embrace of the state, often with the en­ couragement of the film executives themselves. We will also see how the officials looked over their shoulders at their counterparts in Ger­ many, while developing coercion and persuasion techniques uniquely fitted to the domestic situation. As a mark of their success, we find nu­ merous film executives actively collaborating in the formulation of the 1939 Film Law, the instrument that formalized the submission of their industry' to state control.

2 The Unsatisfactory Mirror

A Matter o f Patriotism and Profit On 14 February 1933 the League of Nations voted forty-two to one con­ demning Japan ’s invasion of Manchuria. Matsuoka Yosuke, the Ja p a ­ nese plenipotentiary, rose from his seat and with a peremptory “ Sayonara,” led his delegation out o f the world body. The domestic press roared its approval o f “ this plucky show of Japanese manhood,” but the aftermath was tense. Having staked out an isolated position in the eyes of the world, the Japanese government and military became more sen­ sitive than ever to the manner in which the world perceived them. “ Hos­ tile propaganda,” generated by the foreign press and cinema, became an object of anxiety. Travelers abroad carried back horrific reports. In late 1932, director Ushihara Kiyohiko returned from Europe raging at the “ perverse” de­ pictions o f his country on film. In the liberal journal Kaizo, he described a show of U.S. news films at a Paris movie theater. Juxtaposed with foot­ age of Japanese planes bombing Shanghai (“ the sounds of the explo­ sions rocked the theater, making all comment redundant” ) was a huge U.S. naval exercise “ with big guns belching fire and a squadron taking off from the carrier Saratoga.” Ushihara then went on to excoriate the domestic film industry for failing to make features “ capable of counter­ ing such powerful anti-Japanese propaganda.” The industry needed to emerge from “ the protective cocoon of entertainment value” and take up the task of making films embodying the national mission. “Japanese film needs firm guidance and leadership from the national authorities,” he concluded.1 Iwase Toru of the Seiyukai Party echoed the theme the following year in a scandalized address before the Sixty-Fourth Diet. On a junket to Europe the previous summer, he had attended a foreign-made pro­ duction on Japanese culture, featuring a row o f dancing geisha who looked “ completely emaciated and who were all in advanced states of 51

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dishabille.” Iwase had to flee the theater, “ overcome by the shame of it all.” 2 Litde or nothing could be done to influence the content of foreign films, but many held that the Diet should at least “ counteract their will­ ful perversions.” Two years after Iwase’s speech, the Home Ministry stepped to the rescue with the “ Film Export-Import Regulation” of 1935, requiring the Ministry’s explicit approval of every foot of celluloid sent abroad. It prohibited all films “ insulting the national polity, the mil­ itary or foreign policy.” Thereafter, exported films were made to bear the responsibility of correcting foreign misapprehensions and of “ illu­ minating the nations of the world with the brilliance of the Imperial Way.” 3 Within days of Iwase’s 1933 lecture to the Diet, Shochiku’s Kido ShirO announced that his company would start making features “ in res­ onance” with the military —“ I am fed up with the anti-Japanese quality of so many o f those foreign films that claim to introduce the ‘realities’ of our activity in Manchuria to world opinion. With the backing of the government, we will make films as a patriotic service to the nation, re­ gardless of whether or not they reap financial rewards or bring us a fa­ vorable response from the fans.” 4 Between the lines, here one may glimpse a hint of the self-serving element that tended to permeate the commercial film industry’s “ ser­ vice to the nation.” As observers at the time were quick to point out, army backing made the production of a war film a bargain not to be missed. Nor was there any reason to be seriously concerned about the approval of the crowd. Although critics in the top film magazines con­ sistently blistered the cheap production values and even cheaper emo­ tions of the war epics, their point was usually missed by the sentimen­ tally patriotic crowds of the nation’s towns and villages. In 1935, even as military activity on the continent was slipping into a comparative lull, Kogyokai (Promotion World) magazine was still remarking on the “ clever strategy of those film companies capitalizing on the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for war pictures.” 5 Up to this point, war film production had been a complete free-forall in which the film industry’s instinct was to milk commercial profit from the hyperpatriotic mood of the times. Although many of the di­ rectors had been inspired by a certain amount of genuine nationalist fervor, especially when the fighting was at its height, the low budgets and assembly-line techniques imposed upon them made it clear that their employers were no more committed to propagating the ideals of

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militarism than they had been to the “ leftism” o f the earlier era o f ten­ dency films. Thus, Shochiku’s Kido, whose liberal leanings were widely known, often adopted patriotic and authoritarian positions when com­ pany profits were involved. For every Itami Mansaku (who carried out a positive if veiled struggle against military “ spiritism” ), and for every Mizoguchi (who drifted into “ calligraphism” after a few disastrous at­ tempts at making militarist fare), there were many more who were will­ ing to sell their souls just to keep working. This psychological weakness was shared by many in the arts. Tatsuno Yutaka’s description of the mentality of painters in a 1935 article in Bungei Shunju was probably just as true of filmmakers: “ When we look at them in the cold light of reality, we find that those artists who turn out works for commercial purposes are just as corruptible as ordinary mer­ chants or politicians. Artists of this sort are equally vulnerable to outside manipulation o f the content of their work. And, even more than the graphic arts, members of the literati seem actually to pride themselves on their collaborationist spirit, making them the most easily corrupted o f all.” 6 Postwar, Nakajima KenzO explained the collaborationist mentality as part of the traditional weakness o f the artist in Japan: No matter what one thought in one’s heart-of-hearts, it was necessary for us to creep under some protective branch in order to avoid becoming isolated and vulnerable. This was a minimal requirement for survival. Under the prying eyes of the Neighborhood Associations and with the lack of opportunities to escape overseas, one was forced into close company with ones immediate neighbors. The scholars, meanwhile, seemed to be striving to rationalize the situation according to the Toennes gesellschajl-gemeinschajl theory. Japan, they' claimed, was in a transition from a gesellschajt society [with its emphasis on individual interests] back to a gemeinshcaft [organic] society. In short, the situation was one of “all being stuck in the same boat.” This meant that all manner of thinking and ways of feeling had to be forced into an uncomfortable coexistence. It was a situation steeped in a sense of futility.7 Whatever the motivation, the film industry continued to produce films closely conforming to the aims of the promilitarist bureaucracy. In their utter lack of irony, in their affirmation of unreflective obedience as the criterion of good soldiery and good citizenship, and in their willing­ ness to further the impression of a national “ prowar” consensus, these

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mid-thirties films promoted many o f the same messages put forward in the National Policy films of the late thirties through the mid-forties. Fear of the censor’s shears was, of course, one cause for the ideolog­ ical conformity o f the industry, but there was one other: filmmakers were already well advanced in the process of internalizing the con­ straints and imperatives being forced upon them by the controllers of national film policy. This, in addition to a painful awareness of their own self-interest, would make them increasingly the willing tools o f the control bureaucrats. For their part, the Home Ministry’s censorship offi­ cials were aware o f this internalization phenomenon and of course ap­ proved. In 1934, after complaining that there were still too many Ja p a ­ nese films steeped in “ lascivious eroticism or preaching seditious socialism,” the Ministry’s Censorship Annual suddenly beamed with unac­ customed warmth: “ Since the outbreak of the Manchurian and Shang­ hai Incidents and the events of national importance arising from Japan’s decision to withdraw from the League of Nations, our country’s film in­ dustry has provided an important voice in the proclamation of a na­ tional state of emergency and the need for absolute national unity. The censorship division notes with great satisfaction the appearance in the last few years of a large number o f military films and of films calling upon the people to strengthen their Crisis-time resolve.” 8 Despite this nod o f approval, forces were at work seeking to rein in further the film industry. Even before the Nazis had finished preparing their own film law, Iwase Toru was to put before the Diet a “ Proposal for Bringing Cinema into Line with National Policy.” It was passed on 4 March 1933. The bill reflected the Reform Bureaucrat’s dislike for things “ still unregulated,” taking note of the fact that “ up to now, the government has left control of the national film industry to the civilian companies operating solely for their own benefit.” 9 It dismissed “ mere censorship” as only the negative side o f all-encompassing “ film leader­ ship.” The logical corollary, however, was expressed in almost shock­ ingly vague terms in the bill —as the need for “ some sort of positive gov­ ernment leadership.” Clearly, the concept still needed time to mature. In the following months, the press reported on a flurry' o f semipri­ vate discussions held between high-ranking government officials and film industry executives. The stories were studded with such buzzwords as Crisis-time, National Policy, control, and regulation: “ In order to come to terms with the theoretical aspects of this Crisis-time, a meet­ ing was held at the Home Ministry under the aegis o f the head of the Bureau for Criminal Affairs, Matsumoto Manabu, to establish the

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foundations for the appropriate regulation o f the movie industry and the encouragement of a new breed of cinema, National Policy Film.” 10 In March 1934, the administration of Prime Minister SaitO set up a Film Control Committee (Eiga Tosei linkai), as prescribed by the Iwase bill, with the job of pondering the “ entertainment-propaganda func­ tion” o f the film medium. Again, the vague wording of the order be­ trayed an equal bleariness of vision: “ Investigate and debate the issue of film regulation and other important matters concerning cinema.” 11 Meeting around a huge green table in the Home Ministry, old-style bu­ reaucrats listened to the vigorous thought-control ideas o f Bureau Chief Matsumoto. They took careful notes and generated reports but took lit­ tle concrete action. The marathon discussions ended abrupdy when the Saito government collapsed. In any case, the idea that a purely govern­ mental committee could provide “ positive” cultural leadership was al­ ready behind the times. New administrative ideas were now on the hori­ zon, generated by a new generation o f zealous bureaucrats.

Regulating National Life and Controlling the Producers o f Culture Developments on the cultural front from 1934 through 1936 reflected a political shift in the nation as a whole. The Manchurian Incident had widened the split between the two main factions in the army: the Impe­ rial Way (Kodo) and the Control (Tosei) factions. The radical Kodo group, centering on General Araki, had been deeply involved in the anarchic terrorist incidents of 1932 and was made up of field-commander types — single-minded men who hated politicians and were unimpressed by the supremacy of law. They were romantic and genuinely idealistic, qualities that hardly suited them for the duties of practical administration. Ranged against them was the “ businesslike” Tosei group, made up of suave, upper-echelon figures. The plans of the latter called for the estab­ lishment of an orderiy bureaucratic state. By eariy 1934, with Araki’s res­ ignation and temporary eclipse, the Kodo men began to lose their political ascendancy to their rivals. The famous 26 February Incident o f 1936 rep­ resented a last futile effort to recapture their lost influence. Kita Ikki, their chief ideologist, was executed along with thirteen others. After this, discipline was restored, and the advocates o f “ control” became domi­ nant in both the army and the organs o f state. The state administrative apparatus had long been the bastion of the “ control” mentality. Now, paralleling the rise o f the army Control

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Faction, a new, energetic kind of bureaucratic official came to promi­ nence, the Kakushin Kanryo or “ Reform” Bureaucrat. These new-style officials often drew inspiration from the success of the National Socialists in bringing “ order” to the social mores of Ger­ many, and they set about doing the same for Japan. Nazi prestige was at a high point just then, and it was fashionable among elite officials of all shades of opinion to make a pilgrimage to Germany where, if fortu­ nate, they might have their photograph taken with Goebbels or even Hider himself. The apparent success of the Nazis in the area of social policy stimu­ lated efforts to remold the most intimate features of Japanese national life. Many of the lessons the bureaucrats brought back, however, were garbled in the translation from one culture to the other, and the results were often marked by excess. For example, the notion came into vogue among bureaucrats and the political right that Japan was suffering from a “ double scourge” brought on by the Jews and by the “ intellectual Jew ­ ishness” o f their domestic admirers. According to a survey done by BenAmi Shillony, in 1938 alone there were no fewer than thirty-eight books and thirty-three articles exposing “ the Jewish attack on Japan.” These were fleshed out by translations of such works as German naval com­ mander Alfred Stoss’s Der Kampf zwischen Juda und Japan (The Struggle between theJew s andJapan). The latter contended that the Jews, along with the Freemasons, were conniving to throtde Japan through their puppets, the Western powers and China. Since there were almost no actual Jews resident in Japan, the term tended to be used for its emotional impact. The point was that in the Jap ­ anese context, liberals and individualists were just as alien, just as evil, and just as deserving of forcible expulsion as the actual Jews in Germany. Cultural legislation like the 1939 Film Law was partly intended to aid in the ejection of such “ intellectualJewishness” from the public scene. The prestige of the National Socialist model remained strong through the ensuing four years of the China Incident. But, the incon­ gruity of the Nazi model must have been obvious to all but the most superficial minds. After all, the Aryan supremacist views of the National Socialists invariably would have put the Japanese in the position of an inferior race. In June 1934, Bungei Shunju reflected awareness of this con­ tradiction in an article nervously querying, “Are the Nazis Really Friendly to Japan?” —“ in the self-conceit of their racial notions, it is not only the Jews but all nonwhites who are affected by their exclusionary policies. Nazi prejudices must be taken with the utmost seriousness.” 12

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Italy, Ja p a n , and G erm an y “ smash the international Jew ish econ­ om y” (Shu/can, 21 M arch 1943).

In any case, despite the glamour of the Nazi model, its ideology could hardly serve the purposes o f the Japanese bureaucracy. Indige­ nous ideologies, often referred to collectively asjapanism, emphasized the intimate familial interconnectedness of the individual with the State and provided all the moral structure needed. For example, Nazi theories of racial and cultural purity probably had little to do with the ludicrous “ Mama-Papa” controversy of 1934. On 29 August of that year, Education Minister Mastumoto Genji inveighed against the new habit o f Japanese children of calling their parents “ Mama” and “ Papa,” rather than using the time-hallowed terms Okaa-san and Otoosan. “ This Mama-Papa business must be brought to a stop,” Matsuda thundered. “ It is an affront to Jap an ’s ancient traditions of filial piety.” With the start of the China Incident, a mounting chorus called for ridding the language o f its baggage of foreign words. This reached a fever pitch during the Pacific War, when all English terms in Japanese were condemned as “ enemy language.” The purge even reached into the world of athletics, focusing on such imports as baseball and golf. All the familiar English-based terminology was swept away and replaced by archaic-sounding Japanese.

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In 1940, the control obsession entered a new phase when the Home Ministry tried, with only partial success, to clothe the nation’s entire ci­ vilian population in a “ national people’s uniform” (an outfit somewhat similar in style to that of Maoist China). The press, by then a wellseasoned ally in the campaign for rigid social conformity, immediately touted the uniform as a “ solution to the confusion about how to dress.” Asahi Graph photographers stalked the streets of Ginza, snapping pic­ tures of women in “ un-Japanese” (meaning unsuitable) apparel. The photos were then graded on a scale of one to ten according to the de­ gree to which they “ insulted the mood of Crisis-time Jap an ” and then published for popular edification. Inevitably, the Reform Bureaucrat administration began to take a keen interest in the impact of cinema on the nation’s mores. Kissing on­ screen had long been considered an “ invitation to lasciviousness,” but to the new bureaucrats it also represented “ a seduction to un-Japanese be­ havior.” Imported cinema, endlessly fascinated with the kiss, was a fa­ vorite playground for the censors’ talents. Critic Iwasaki Akira would re­ call that after the censors had done their work, one would see the foreign man and woman approach to embrace, but just as they touched they were apart again —“ It was like one of the feats of the magical ninja in the old-time movies.” 13 When the PCL Company came out with Re­ sponsibilityfor the Kiss (Seppun no Sekinin), the tide was so abhorrent to the Home Ministry it ordered it be changed to Responsibilityfor Love (Ren’ai no Sekinin). One thousand feet o f the film were slashed, ostensibly because the scenes represented “ an open appeal for free love.” 14 The rising tide of bureaucratic invasions, affecting private lives as well as the public arena, were met with audible sighs of resignation and the occasional wry pun. Resignation (coupled with outward conformity) was the doctrine preached in the November 1936 issue o f Kaizo maga­ zine: “ Examples of bureaucratic hubris can be found the world over, in the West as well as in the East, in the distant as well as the recent past. At such times, the best course is not to cause a commotion, not to go on a rampage of resistance, but to comply. If one but submits, a new day of relaxation and understanding is sure to come along.” 15 This was a prin­ ciple many in the film industry had already been following for some time. There were few signs such a day was coming anytime soon. The Peace Preservation Law system, inaugurated in 1925, was coalescing into its ultimate shape during the 1934-36 period. Stimulated by the campaign against domestic Communists and other subversives, as well

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as by the events in Manchuria and China, justice officials devised new methods of handling ideological offenders. By 1931, official policy for their treatment already had shifted from overt oppression to emphasis on tenko, or “ ideological rehabilitation.” This ultimately set the stage for a system of mass thought control that would soon become so pervasive as to touch almost everyone’s lives. In order to trigger the “voluntary” political conversion of actual thought criminals, government officials in charge of tenko policy set to work refining the psychological mechanisms to be used. Although the harsher measures of mass jailings, executions, and domestic exile were never completely suspended, the subder methods of the kondankai “ con­ sultation” system were achieving far greater success. Offenders would meet, usually one-on-one, with procurators or specially trained police officers to discuss issues in an atmosphere of family-like intimacy. As Procurator Hirata Susumu summed it up, the procedure was based on the assumption that “ no thought criminal is hopeless. Since they are all Japanese, it only takes a little wheedling to bring them around to realiz­ ing that their ideas are wrong.” 16 In wintertime, the chat sessions would take place around the cozy warmth of the station-house stove; in sum­ mer, a fan would distribute a breeze evenly to the interrogator and his charge. Cigarettes and small talk invariably preceded the formal ques­ tioning, which involved an endless round of filling out of forms. Even at this stage, the interrogator helpfully guided the detainee through the maze of details, as eager as anyone to “ get it all over with.” Whether or not the detainee was ultimately arrested and prosecuted depended on a wide range of considerations: the nature of the crime, the attitude of the offender, and, to an amazing extent, the discretion of the interrogator. Knowledge of this last factor often had a telling effect on the detainee. Even if arrest and imprisonment followed, the pressure for conver­ sion continued relentlessly. The journals and novels produced by such former Proletarian writers as Hayashi Fusao, Takeda Jun, and Takeda RintarO, all of whom wrote about their experience of tenko in prison during the mid and late thirties, would become an independent genre in Japanese literature. After their release, most reformed thought crim­ inals were treated with great solicitude by the government. In 1936, a special “ Thought Criminal’s Protection and Supervision Law” was passed by the Diet, establishing an entire network to aid them in rein­ tegrating into society. In 1937, Justice Ministry Protection Division Chief Moriyama TakeichirO published a book explaining the law, in which he described the entire system —from first interrogation through

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final release from prison as “ a mother-father system to control thought crimes.” 17 The image of leftist writer Kobayashi Takiji, whose brutally beaten corpse was released from police custody in February 1933, was of course never very far from the minds of Japanese artists and intellectuals. But the public uproar caused by this atrocity had made it clear even to the police that it had been a blunder of immense stupidity. Thereafter, naked terror was rarely even an implied element in the system used on ordinary individuals in the cultural world. In any case, by the mid­ thirties, the gender technique of inducing tenko had become such a highly developed art form, there seemed little need for the rough stuff. When it came to cultural policy, those in government most deeply involved in its implementation were aware that the simple, vertical in­ sertion of authority from above rarely achieved the results hoped for. They knew that a means had to be found that could engage the creadve energies of the actual producers of culture. The solution they found had already been pioneered by Moriyama’s “ mother-father” thought con­ trol consultation (kondankai) system. In 1938, Home Ministry Police Division Chief Matsumoto Manabu employed a modified version of the kondankai consultation technique when he set to work reorganizing the Japanese Academy of Art. This time, however, rather than reforming thought criminals, his purpose was to instill in the minds of graphic artists a renewed appreciation of the Japanese spirit. He did the same with writers by inviting them to participate in Literary Arts Consultation Sessions, where they sat to­ gether drinking tea and discussing how they might do their part in “ clar­ ifying the national polity.” The system was gradually expanded to in­ clude leading figures from all the fields of contemporary culture: magazine editors, musicians, stage and radio personalities, cartoonists, and filmmakers. Almost invariably, the kondankai proved a resounding success. In a spirit of warm camaraderie, top officials would massage their artistic egos, gently guiding them through phases o f self-criticism toward a deeper appreciation of their mission as spokesmen for the true Japanese essence.18 The weakness o f the system was that it was geared to the individual. Marshaling entire sectors of national culture, such as the film industry, was quite a different matter. As it happened, the new-style bureaucrats were already exploring fresh concepts, mostly imported from the fascist Italy. These ideas seemed a promising new approach —an answer to the longstanding problem of developing “ some sort of emphatic leadership”

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for the film industry. The new motto was kan-min (administration based on the “ cooperative union” of the government regulators and the civil­ ian entity it regulated). Even as the Film Control Committee, established during the SaitO administration in 1934, sat in futile debate, the reform bureaucrats were wooing the film industry with invitations to “ cooperatively unite” in a new kan-min organization: the Dai Nihon Eiga Kyokai (Greater Japan Film Association). The idea for the Association, it was reported, had actually come from the industry’s leading intellectual, Kido ShirO. It was he who had approached Karasawa Toshiki, the newly installed head of the Home Ministry Police Division (and one o f the pioneers o f the kondankai system). Kido was filled with concern about the destructive interne­ cine warfare within his industry and its nagging sense of inferiority to the other spheres of cultural productivity. The organization was formally launched at a gala event held in a hotel ballroom in the Hibiya Park region of Tokyo. Assembled from the government side were the home and education ministers, along with representatives from the army and navy, in full dress uniform. Admiral SaitO Makoto, the former prime minister who would be assassinated in the 26 February Incident, attended as the Association’s nominal head. Kido had done his part by pulling in a galaxy of leading intellectuals and captains of the film industry. Among those attending was the wiz­ ened figure o f Yokota Einosuke, a legendary personality from the very dawn of film in Japan. More recendy, Yokota had become infamous for having raised a bronze statue to himself at the Nikkatsu studio with “ contributions” deducted from his employees’ salaries. Kido had lured him into a ceremonial position by dangling before his eyes the possibil­ ity of a national medal. The Association’s statement of purpose was read from the podium. Its mission was to coordinate the film world in accordance with na­ tional policy (kokusaku, the ubiquitous epithet) and thereby encourage the production of superior films that would “ 1) exalt the spirit of the nation, 2) stimulate national industry and research, and 3) provide wholesome public entertainment.” 19 In his address, Police Division Head Karasawa Toshiki managed to give the word “ wholesome” an ominous and distinctly authoritarian tone. While lauding the “ cultural mission of cinema,” he reminded the film people in the audience that he intended to “ ensure the wholesome quality o f public life” by seeing to the expulsion of those influences that were harmful to the public spirit.20

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In the months following its inauguration, however, the outlook for the Greater Japan Film Association did not appear to be especially bright. “This,” reports Iwasaki Akira, “was because the film companies’ attitude remained stuck in a mentality vacillating between nonresistance and noncooperation.” 21 For its part, the government was pleased simply to have the Association in place for future use. In the meantime, it was allowed to remain semidormant, as a casual meeting place between government officials and industry executives.22

The Critics and Thought Control During this period, the only significant activity of the Film Associauon was the publication of the new film magazine Nihon Eiga (Japanese Film). The magazine itself, while never rivaling the popularity of the estab­ lished film journals, became the public forum for the new iikan-min spirit” in film. Kikuchi Kan, the right-leaning doyen of the literary es­ tablishment, graced Nihon Eiga with a column in which he often detailed (or “ dreamed up,” as he put it) script ideas for films that would be wor­ thy of the new Japan. Nihon Eiga was, at that time at least, the only jour­ nal in Japan willing to explore extensively the aesthetic ideas of Karl Ritter, Veit Harlan, and other Nazi filmmakers. Invariably, there would be stills, reproduced in the best quality, from such films as Urlaub auf Ehrenwort and Hitlerjungen Quex, as well as current Japanese films. U.S. films, with their “Jewish liberalism and dollar-worship,” were often played down. In the pages of Nihon Eiga, trenchant articles of criticism by Iijima Tadashi or Hasegawa NyOzekan ran cheek-to-jowl with those by a handful of reactionary critics expressing their “ awe and envy” of Dr. Goebbels’s miraculous rejuvenation of German cinema. And, in issue after issue, bureaucrats and directors would sit together in zadcmkai roundtable symposia, weaving ideas for a similar new order in Japanese film. As Japan’s first and only state-supervised magazine, it bestowed on film researchers a kind of official stamp of approval that appealed to large segments of the nation’s intellectual elite. In a June 1939 article Imamura Taihei contrasted the journal with “ the welter of lower-class magazines,” praising Nihon Eiga for its “ unique function of bringing writers and intellectuals into closer contact with the film world, while at the same time introducing general readers to critical perspectives on the medium they had never before suspected of existing.” 23

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Coming from one of the nation’s leading film theorists—one who had himself founded several film magazines and whose influence con­ tinued to extend to virtually all the rest —the statement is filled with dis­ turbing implications. Putting aside for the moment meditations on the personal capitulation the statement seems to represent, we find here a clear indication of the sense o f insecurity and social inferiority still dog­ ging most film critics at the time. We know that twenty years before, filmmakers were still considered kawara kojiki (riverbed beggars), vulgar, and déclassé. Apparently the same stigma cast its shadow over those in­ tellectuals who wrote about film. Clearly a certain segment of the public felt contempt for the film critics, as we can see in the following letter from a student to the film magazine Eigakai: “ Most film reviews appearing in the monthly maga­ zines are either fawning advertisements for the various film companies or self-complaisant posturings by the reviewers themselves. Just what are the benefits derived by the large number of people who plunk down good money to buy such trash?” 24 While this may have been a fairly wide perception at the time, it is actually a gross misrepresentation o f the true state of aflairs in the thir­ ties. Serious and worthwhile film criticism—at least on the technical as­ pects of cinema—had begun in 1913 with the establishment of Kaeriyama Norimasa’s Film Record (later retitled Kinema Record). Katsudô Shashin ^asshi (started in 1915), Katsudô no Sekai (from 1916), Katsudô Kurabu (from 1918), and other magazines of the Taisho period provided a forum for a lively exchange of ideas among important young intellectuals, lit­ erary figures, and even aristocrats. Kinema Junpo was also established in 1918, which started as a magazine almost exclusively devoted to intro­ ducing foreign films. Later, after inaugurating its Best Ten Awards in 1924, it developed into one of the most powerful voices in the Japanese film world. By the 1930s, Kinema Junpo was being referred to as the “ rul­ ing party” of the film world, in contrast to the “ opposition party,” Eiga Hyôron (Film Criticism, founded in 1925). The avowed purpose of Eiga Hyôron was “ to scrutinize each film in a serious and deliberate manner.” 25 It soon expanded its focus to theoreti­ cal problems: montage theory, the aesthetics of the talkie, and the like. Not only did it feature explications by Japanese critics, it kept its wide readership abreast of theoretical developments abroad through fre­ quent translations. In its July 1935 Tenth Anniversary Issue, Eiga Hyôron could boast that “ looking back through the pages of our journal, we can discern the evolution of Japanese film itself.” 26

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Eiga Hydron was not the only magazine devoted to high-brow explo­ rations of film theory in the 1930s. The most important o f these in­ cluded: Engeki Eiga (Theatrical Film, established in 1926), Gekijdgai (Thea­ ter World, 1929), Eiga Chishiki (Film Knowledge, 1929), Eiga Shüdan (Film Group, 1935), Eigaka (Film World, 1937), and Eiga to Ongaku (Film and Music, 1937). As some of these names suggest, a favorite theme of the era was exploration of the relationship between film and the other arts. This being the era of the “ literary film” (hungei eiga)—with film versions of such famous novels as Shimomura Kojin’s Jirô ’s Story, Muro Saisei’s Elder Brother, Younger Sister, and Mori Ogai’s The Abe Clan—there was also wide interest in the relationship of film to literature. Critic Kitagawa Fuyuhiko took this interest a step further. His scenario-as-literature movement proclaimed original film scripts to be a kind o f literature. This led to the establishment of the journal Shinario Kenkyü (Script Stud­ ies) in 1937. In the period before the Manchurian Incident, the Marxists had been very effective in generating activity in most of the fields of culture. Purokino (the Japanese Proletarian Cinema Union), with Iwasaki Akira as one of its leading figures, not only made films but also put out film journals of rather high quality: Puroretariato Eiga (Proletarian Film), Puro­ kino, and a scattering of ephemeral “ information sheets.” The Purokino movement was crushed along with all the other overtly left-wing publi­ cation enterprises during the harsh days o f the early thirties. But even as the winter of totalitarian thought control deepened, leftist film critics, including many from the old Purokino movement, retained the energy (and daring) to launch a new magazine, Eiga Sôzô (Film Creativity) in 1936. Under increasingly difficult circumstances, Eiga Sôzô continued to pub­ lish articles with a dialectical materialist perspective until 1939. During the thirties, film critics like Tanaka Saburô (founder o f Kinemajunpo), Iijima Tadashi, Shigeno Tatsuhiko, Kitagawa Fuyuko, Kishi Matsuo, and Iida Shinbi became widely recognized cultural figures, and their essays began to appear in the most prestigious mainstream intel­ lectual journals of the period: Bungei Shunju, Kaizo, and Bungei. Tsumura Hideo, writing under the pen name “ Q.,” had been in charge of the Asahi Newspaper film column since the early Showa period. His weekly contributions were followed zealously by hundreds of thousands of young readers. After the start of the Pacific War, he would become a leading extragovernmental advisor on national film policy. Filmmakers and film critics had become central toJapanese cultural and intellectual life in the thirties; so much so that in 1935 Imamura

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Taihei could jusdy claim that it was “ no longer possible to separate film from the intense interior life of our intelligentsia.” 27 This was actually a rather dangerous boast for the period, since “ interior life” was the very terrain right-wing ideologues, the Police Bu­ reau, and the various Reform Bureaucrats sought to dominate. Clearly, as the importance of film continued to grow, the authorities could not allow free rein to the opinion-molding of the critics. It was in the inter­ ests of the authorities to play on the inferiority and insecurity complexes o f the critics, both as individuals and as a group. Through this chink in the latter’s armor, government officials were able to gradually project a considerable amount of psychological influence and even a certain de­ gree of ideological control. A golden opportunity to do just this came in November 1936 when Goebbels “ banished” the profession of art criticism in Germany. On 27 November, he announced: “ The attempt to present to the readers, al­ most at the conclusion of the performance itself, a complete criticism of the work concerned has become a particular evil. I forbid once and for all the continuance of criticism in its present form, effective today. From now on, reportage on art will take the place of that criticism that sets it­ self up as a judge of art. The latter is, after all, a complete perversion of the concept of ‘criticism’ dating from the time of Jewish domination of German art. Reportage on art should not be concerned with values, but should confine itself to description.” 28 German writers under the age of thirty were specifically forbidden from printing any sort of reportage, be­ cause “ we have often experienced in Berlin the spectacle of twenty-two and twenty-three-year-old boys taking forty and fifty-year-old artists to task.” Those over thirty, who had learned “ the difficult craft of art de­ scription,” would be specially registered as “ professionals.” Only those duly registered were allowed the right to report in German newspapers. Concealment of one’s name (through a pen name) was also forbidden. Knowing the Reform Bureaucrat’s penchant for copying Nazi inno­ vations, Japanese film and art critics held their breath. “ Registration” was, after all, one of the favorite techniques of the Japanese bureaucrat for implementing “ supervision.” Apparently, however, they never seri­ ously contemplated the measure. One good reason would have been that Goebbels’s decree had backfired on him in Germany —good writ­ ers persistendy refused to participate in the new “ reportage” criticism and the public was annoyed at the loss of their favorite reviewers. Still, the decree did provide the Japanese authorities certain benefits. First, it opened a whole new front in the Reform Bureaucrats’ general

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assault on those areas of public life “yet unregulated” (mitdsei). Second, it hovered over the critics’ heads, a Damoclean warning of what might happen if they ignored the basic aims of state policy. The bureaucrats’ allies in the various film magazines played this theme to the hilt. In Au­ gust 1939, Takeda Tadaya direcdy echoed Goebbels’s line, demanding that critics “ resist the lure of films which wear the mask of liberalism and look at them with unbiased objectivity.” This, he says, is the “ role appropriate to servants of the state in time of war.” 29 While the above undoubtedly reflected the secret sentiments of the reform bureaucrats, the tried-and-true kondankai consultation method demanded subtlety and no small degree of flattery. The critics were in­ vited to cordial roundtable discussions at the Home Ministry or at posh traditional restaurants, where they were quickly put into a cooperative frame of mind. Who, indeed, could resist courtship of this sort? Some critics, like Tanaka SaburO and Tsumura Hideo, were even induced to take on official positions in service to the government. The overall result was that Japanese critics continued for several years more to reflect the government’s ideological conditioning while still producing work of rea­ sonably high quality (as did the filmmakers). It also ensured that criti­ cism in Japan would, for the time being, avoid a situation similar to that of 1937 Germany. On 15 March of that year, Captain Wilhelm Weiss, head of the Reich Press Association, issued the following anguished complaint: “ The newspapers make a catastrophic mistake when they believe that they can fulfill the requirements of the prohibition of criti­ cism by praising everything indiscriminately. This mistake must be cor­ rected instandy.” 30 Without a doubt, the spirit of genuine critical inquiry remained alive in the work of Iwasaki Akira, Itami Mansaku, Imamura Taihei, and many others. Still others did their best to disguise their own servile awe of authority in order to maintain the semblance of independent think­ ing. The brilliance of the government tenko technique was its ability to induce perfectly rational, sharp-witted people to actually believe —or perhaps to believe they believed—the government line. Freed from “ having to praise everything indiscriminately,” they were able to pro­ vide the state with a greater measure of their creative or intellectual talents. The case of Imamura Taihei, prewar Japan’s most renowned thinker in the area of pure film theory, was not at all an unusual one. Even before he began turning out his string of distinguished theoretical works —Eiga Geijntsu no Keisei (The Style of Film Art, 1938), Eiga to Bunko

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(Film and Culture, 1940), Nihon Eigaron (Theory o fJapanese Film, 1941), Manga Eigaron (Theory o f Animated Film, 1941), and Nihon Eiga no Honshitsu (The Essence of Japanese Cinema, 1942)—he had been a commanding presence in the magazines. As with most Japanese intellectuals, a youthful infatu­ ation with Marxism and socialism had left a permanent mark on Imamura’s ideals and the structure of his thought. Marxism was surely the origin of his vantage point on filmmaking as a “ collective mode of production.” Throughout the war years, he continued to proclaim the “ avant-garde” role o f film, while muting its Marxist significance, as an agent in the inevitable transition from individualistic capitalist art (char­ acterized by artists working in isolation) to a socialistic society. Classical dialectical materialism, which held social and artistic phenomena (phi­ losophy, morals, etc.) to be superstructural reflexions of the modes of production, lay at the core of his critical methodology. As SatO Tadao points out, “ the main thrust of his critical activity was a deep probing of how those elements of an art work’s superstructure —including its ar­ tistic content and form —are based on this substructure.” 31 Develop­ ments in animated film, for example, he related to the advent of the production-line system of manufacturing. In a postwar memoir, Imamura himself recalls the manner in which film and Marxism appeared to him as two sides of the same coin: “ This was just when subversive thinking was being translated from the printed word to the visual image, and this in turn brought about a new golden age for film. I count myself fortunate in having been on the scene at the time. I was able to witness the emergence of socialism onto the screen and, by way of the visual image, to deepen my grasp of social science.” 32 Imamura was arrested as a thought criminal in 1932. Soon released, he was placed under “ protective custody.” “ Thereafter, I invariably re­ ceived a visit from the tokko Special Police once a month. One could count on these visits with more certitude even than those o f the monthly bill collectors from the gas or electricity companies.” In the autumn of 1938, the film magazine with which Imamura was affiliated, Eiga Shudan, was suspended. “ Up to this time, actual surveillance had not been very strict, but thereafter, pressure began to be exerted on those organiza­ tions which had managed to survive earlier suppressions. Such was the fate o f the All Japan Student Film Research Association, which was now forced to disband as a ‘pacifist front organization.’ The journal Eiga Shu­ dan had had close ties with this student group, being the chief vehicle for the publication of their ideas. It was this of course which brought it under the scrutiny o f the plainclothesmen.” Actually, however, Eiga

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Im am ura Taihci ( 1 91 1 86), film critic and theorist (.Nihon Eiga, August

>939)-

Shudan was never the organ of any particular ideology, being something like a club for people who enjoyed discussing and analyzing films. Still, the government had begun to perceive a threat even from associations as loosely knit as this. Thereafter, whenever the critics wanted to form a discussion circle, they were forced to apply for police permission, and there would often be a plainclothes policeman taking notes at the gath­ ering. It was an era when oppression appeared to be an unchanging fact

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of life, and this apparent permanence made everyone feel daunted and overpowered. “ Some of us fell into despair,” Imamura recalled, “ and by 1940, this was the mental state of nearly all of us.” 33 Imamura’s transition away from Marxist theorizing never took him as far as overt, slavish collaboration with the authorities. His gradual shift to compliance was probably due to a gradual loss of confidence in the ultimate rightness and triumph of his own Marxist belief system. It came from the uneasy perception that the New Order “ was here to stay.” 34 The next several years were actually those of his highest achieve­ ment. As Makino Mamoru points out, “ his analysis focused on the ele­ ments unique to cinematic expression, which he often compared to the functions of the other genres of art. He also pointed out that some of the functions of literature and linguistics were being taken over by the documentary film.” 35 It was probably not completely coincidental that these were the very areas the government was interested in fostering under the new Film Law. As we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, there was a tense balance in Imamura’s writings on documentary film between a rational­ istic spirit of resistance against and a pragmatic cooperation with the thinking of the Reform Bureaucrats. In the face of the ultranationalism and spiritism of the era, he insisted on the absolute preeminence of rea­ son and logic. When he analyzed the weaknesses of Japanese propa­ ganda films, however, he recommended filmmakers to study Soviet and Nazi films to learn the methods by which they “ delicately evoked a wor­ shipful attitude toward the national spirit.” Such contradictory positions he sometimes allowed to appear side by side on the same page, without any effort to reconcile them. In 1938, in addition to editing Eigakai, Imamura began working for the film section of Domei News Services, which had developed a close relationship with Cabinet Information Bureau. Soon the two activities began to interpenetrate. Ads for Domei’s series of documentary fea­ tures Monthly Film Report (Eiga Geppo—“ We’re Japan’s March o f Time!") regularly appeared on the inside cover of Eigakai. The ad copy for After the Fall o f Hangchou, What Next? (Hanko Koryaku Sono Go Kuru Mono, 1939) warned readers that “ the war of attrition has just begun,” 36 and, in fact, most Domei films had the avowed purpose of raising war-consciousness on the home front — You Are the Spy!(Supai wa Kimi da, 1938), A World Class Police Force Protects the Home Front (Jugo no Mamori Matto Shi Sekai ni Hokoru Knsatsujin, 1938).37

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Therefore, without actually succumbing to the rabid war hysteria around him, Imamura nevertheless found himself slowly absorbed into one of the institutions whose business it was to keep the war going. In 1940, he took charge of the film column for Domei Gurafu (Domei Graph), the company’s version of Life. At the outbreak o f the Pacific War, he used the column to “ dream” about a time when “ the vast en­ tirety of Asia will become the backdrop for Japanese cinema and the various races of East Asia will have their parts to play.” When his book War and Film (Senso to Eiga, 1942) was published, a Lieutenant Hiraide o f the Naval Public Information Section wrote the introduction. Com­ menting on these developments, Makino Mamoru remarks that “ we must leave it to the historian of the future to decide whether all this represented simple conformity with the era or was a sly ruse for survi­ val in hard times or was an innate flaw in Imamura’s personality from the beginning.” 38 About his own activities during the Pacific War, Imamura would write: “ My theoretical work was stymied by the banning o f Eiga Shudan and the dissolution o f the research groups. After 1942, 1 had reached a complete impasse and from 1943 onward, I stopped writing almost com­ pletely.” 39 This, as we shall see, was an overstatement.

The Film Law After the establishment of the Film Association, many in the filmworld waited anxiously for the other shoe to drop: the promulgation of a com­ prehensive film law. Years of concerted criticism o f the industry’s unbri­ dled profit-seeking had softened public resistance to the introduction of some form of government intervention and control. Educational “ ex­ perts” on the far right added their voice to the campaign to promote the state to its rightful leadership position. After all, as one of the oftrepeated formulas ran: “As far as the government is concerned, the movie theater is a kind of classroom or spiritual training center.” 40 On the other side of the political spectrum, Iwasaki Akira carried on a lonely struggle against the final triumph of the Reform Bureaucrats. He analyzed the Nazi film law, passed in 1934, describing to his readers how the once dazzling German film industry had “ plummeted into an abyss from which it may never again arise.. . . After the enforced flight of Jews and liberals from the industry, those who remain are little more than hacks.” 41 In 1937-38, Iwasaki documented the catastrophe in the pages of any film magazine still willing to print his articles. Even in the

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pro-Film Law magazine Nihon Eiga, he boldly condemned “ the effects of regulation” as having caused the death of creative German cinema. Although he was not the only individual resisting the introduction of similar regulation in Japan, he was certainly the most intrepid. And for this, he was eventually made to pay dearly. Inside the film industry, there was anxiety and ambivalence as the law loomed on the horizon. Few really wanted controls, but some indi­ viduals such as Nikkatsu’s ambitious Negishi Kan’ichi, saw its potential benefits. In his view, established companies like his own financially trou­ bled company, now had a golden opportunity to create a kind of government-civilian (kan-min) cartel in order to control destructive com­ petition and to bar new competitors from entering the field: “As I see it, the Japanese film world is at an impasse. Throughout the whole indus­ try, the sense nowadays is that we really need a firm guiding hand, most probably that of the government itself.” 42 The general attitude both inside of and outside of the industry, how­ ever, was one of helplessness before inevitability'. An oft-heard argument at the time was: “ It’s only a question of whether we will become a na­ tion along the lines of the Communist or the fascist model.” 43 The mood vacillated between vague hopes and a sense of impending doom. In the September 1936 issue of Kinemajunpo, a long zadankai ended with this surprisingly frank exchange: I get the impression that government rules and regulations are going to put a stranglehold on Japanese film production. Little by little they’ll be tightening the leash. n: No question about that. It's all going to be strictly controlled, including the artistic side of the business. a : There doesn’t seem to be much hope, does there? f.: Hope? None at all.44 a:

Perhaps the reason the participants speak freely here is because their names are disguised (although o f course the government could easily have discovered their true identity). After the 1939 Film Law was passed, however, they would publish under their real name articles expressing their “ hope” for its future benefits. The prophet of the law and its truest believer was Tatebayashi Mikio, Karasawa’s very' able lieutenant at the Police Division. Tatcbayashi, who seems to have had ambitions of becoming a sort of Japanese Joseph Goebbels, was an example of the new-style bureaucrat par ex­ cellence. A frequent contributor to Nihon Eiga magazine, he skillfully

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used its pages to create a mood of expectancy. A month after the above zadankai, he signaled the shape of things to come with his “Three Stages of Film Nationalization.” The first stage, he wrote in Nihon Eiga, is that of “ state disinterest and noninterference.” In the next stage, the state is awakened to its administrative responsibility by the obvious irrespon­ sibility of the film producers and engages in censorship. In the last stage, the state becomes an active participant in the production of films, which remold the social fabric.45 As the leading force in this ambitious effort, Tatebayashi was far above the tribal loyalties pitting individuals of one ministry against those of another. The collaborator he selected for the task of writing the new film law was Fuwa Suketoshi, a member o f the Education Ministry’s Film Recommendation Unit. Fuwa, with his baby face and intense studentlike gaze, was one of the keenest minds in the new bu­ reaucracy. He was another outspoken advocate of “ positive” govern­ ment encouragement of high-quality, ideologically sound films. Fuwa would reaffirm his deep admiration for Tatebayashi half a century later, recalling him as his “ mentor,” “ a man of awesome learning, not at all your typical bureaucrat.” 46 The papers soon got wind of the new collaboration and in Novem­ ber 1938 began speculating about the preparation o f an “ unprece­ dented film law with regulations of incredible severity.” 47 In fact, how­ ever, the wording of the country’s “ first national law on culture” was to be very mild, making it sound like a routine bureaucratic measure. Its phrasing was intended to balance the conflicting demands of various ministries. As Fuwa described it in a 1986 interview: Tatebayashi called me to say he wanted to write a film law. The problem was that the Home Ministry folks were in the business of chopping, not encouraging, and that was why he needed Education Ministry help. So wouldn’t I lend a hand? Anyway, we slowly gathered in ideas. At that time, in order to put a law before the Diet, you had to have it first reviewed by the Legislative Bureau. Then, after it passed the House of Representatives, it was handed on to the Privy Council, where the Genro [elder Statesmen] had a whack at it. We figured we’d get a worse beating from the Genro than in the House of Representatives. So we Home and Fxlucation fellows sat up working until twelve each night. There were five or six of us holed up in the Hoso Kaikan Building in front of the Imperial Palace. But it was Tatebayashi and I who did the real work. Then just when it was all set and we were about to send it over to the Diet, a jurisdictional dispute broke out with the Welfare

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Ministry saying that film shows should run three hours and Health saying that they should be kept to two and half hours. Neither of them had anything to do with the writing of the law. They just wanted to put in their two cents before it got sent over. The real reason they got involved is so stupid it’s funny: you see, written into the law is a provision for “on-the-spot” inspections during showings at film theaters. The police had their “inspection” passes to theaters at the time. So the boys in the other agencies wanted to get their own free movie passes. That’s what it was all about.48 Over in the Diet building, Tatebayashi allies Tsurumi Yusuke and Akamatsu Katsumaro engaged in frantic lobbying, trying to create a pre-introduction consensus. The last thing any of them wanted was a drawn-out debate giving the other agencies a chance to use the law for their own purposes. The Welfare Ministry had already pushed its way in as one of the administering bodies. Home Minister Kido Koichi rose to present the bill. He had done his homework well and was handling the subsequent question-andanswer period “ with detailed precision,” when the Minister of Educa­ tion began to interrupt with pronouncements of his own. The minister was none other than the feisty General Araki Sadao, former leader of the Imperial Way faction. “And being in his usual form that day,” Fuwa would recall, “ the general’s statements tended to be, well, generaliza­ tions of the fuzziest, most banal sort -things like, ‘let us carry forward this sort of thing in that sort of manner.’ ” 49 Dietman Kii Toshihide (soon to become president of the All-Japan Educational Film Research Association) had the idea of bringing in Prime Minister Hiranuma to catalyze a quick passage and even elicited from him the statement that “ cinema is, as you say, o f the utmost im­ portance.” ’’0 This did the trick. The Film Law was passed as written on 6 March 1939 and went into effect on 1 October as Imperial Rescript No. 66. The law’s opening phrases proclaimed the new era with a rather dramatic flourish: “ In order to serve the progress of national culture, the aim of this law is to implement the development of cinema and to ensure the healthy development of the industry.” 51 Although its main clauses represented the closing of a coffin lid over creative cinema in the nation, this is not how industry representatives chose to see them at the time. As managers of business, they had often had their invest­ ments imperiled by the arbitrary or capricious decisions of officials scattered throughout the government structure. Now, they figured, if

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stricter regulation was inescapable, they could at least enjoy the secur­ ity and “ freedom” afforded by clearly defined guidelines.52 The rhetoric of the clauses appealed to the vanity of many in the film world as well. Among the better classes of the public, film people were often considered a vulgar, immoral lot. A mere generation before, mothers would threaten suicide to stop a son or daughter from entering the profession. Now, in one huge leap, filmmakers became the purveyors of an art whose “ qualitative improvement” and “ healthy development” the state itself deemed worthy o f fostering. The new prestige of motion pictures and of those who made them did, in fact, last throughout the entire war period. Some, such as Yoshimura KozaburO, recalled the pe­ riod with unabashed nostalgia — “ I believe that the social position o f the film people has never been higher than it was in the middle of the war. We young directors were all infected by National Policy fever and strut­ ted about as if we were the purveyors of public enlightenment.” 53 One wonders about the degree to which Fuwa and Tatebayashi were inspired by the German film law. Tatebayashi found that the mere contemplation of it left him “ dumbstruck with utter, utter envy.” 54 How­ ever, when asked directly in the 1986 interview about the degree of in­ fluence, Fuwa responded: “ O f course we looked at it, as well as at the quite similar Italian law. The Greater Japan Film Association had put out a few pamphlets on the statutes and we looked them over. That was about it.” 55 In a 1943 article for Eigajunpo, however, Fuwa evinced a far deeper appreciation for the German law: “Japanese laws tend to be phrased simply in terms of musts. One must do such-and-such; one must not do something else. This is then followed by specification of penal­ ties. Present-day German laws go far beyond this; they explicate the meaning and purpose of the law. The composition of their Film Law, for instance, is masterful, explaining the entire Nazi worldview as it per­ tains to the issues at hand. It is deeply impressive.” 56 Comparing the two laws, one finds them quite different in mood, if not in actual content. Both laws provide for preproduction censorship. But, the Nazi law emphasizes its uncompromising severity from the very start. Article One states that before being allowed to go into production, the plot oudine and shooting script for all drama films (spielfilm) must be submitted for inspection to the State Script Censor (Reichsjilmdramaturg). This essentially placed the state at the very center of the film production enterprise in Nazi Germany. Since in German, Filmdramaturg means sce­ nario writer, Reichsjilmdramaturg clearly had the connotation of an official state scriptwriter who operated as censor.

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The Japanese law also requires preproduction censorship, but it builds toward that provision slowly; it does not appear until Article Nine. In his Explanation of the Film Law, a slim volume published in 1941, Fuwa Suketoshi indicates that the idea for the provision was not simply an arrogant demand imposed by a central government insensitive to the concerns of the industry. Rather, he states, it was an actual blessing: “ In the past it was quite common for a film project to be so severely cen­ sored, usually on the grounds of public decency, as to make the film vir­ tually unmarketable. Such bolts from the blue would have a devastating effect on film producers. The present law seeks to protect filmmakers from such damage through the preproduction inspection system.” 57 Fuwa had a point here. In 1939 alone, I05japanese films had either been suspended in production or banned all together for some infrac­ tion of the various codes of public decency. Eighty American and twenty European films had also been forbidden. Now, not only films but also filmmakers were to be incorporated into the new “ fail-safe” system of control, a system that billed itself as “ being for the protection of the film producer.” As a bureaucrat, Fuwa was fully aware of what a bureaucracy could do if it really wanted to hamstring an industry. On the other hand, he apparendy really did believe that his Film Law was an embodiment of solicitude and of a certain amount of leniency as well: “Article Nine de­ mands nothing more than notification of intention to make a film, and makes no reference to government approval or certification. This means that one can begin shooting ten days after the appropriate notification has been filed. In fact, this article requires the Home Ministry and the Information Bureau to act swiftly to evaluate a script once the notifica­ tion has been filed.” 58 Article Five required all those seeking employment in the film indus­ try as directors, actors, and cameramen to be tested for “ aptitude” and then registered with “ the legally designated agency of their profession.” In addition to guarding against the technical incompetence (something one would assume the industry itself had sufficient means o f doing), the provision sought to protect the industry from another sort of individual. As Fuwa states in his Explanation, “ It is not at all uncommon for individ­ uals to be so filled with their own popularity and importance as to act in a manner detrimental to public morality.” 59 The villain his tortured phrasing is trying to describe here is, of course, the “ politically un­ sound” filmmaker. As a bulwark against the entrance of such individu­ als into the industry, the Law established a “ technical competency test.”

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In addition to straight problems concerning technical knowledge and aptitude, other categories on the test clearly had the motive of probing the political thinking of the applicant. Under the heading of Common Knowledge Questions—further broken down into The Citizen’s Com­ mon Knowledge, Cinematic Common Knowledge, and Scientific Com­ mon Knowledge—the applicant would be quizzed on “ the nature of the dignity of the Emperor” or told to describe in detail “ the most im­ portant ideals of the Japanese Imperial State.” As time went on, the frankly political coloring of the examinations deepened. Tests during the Pacific War would feature such questions as: Citizen’s Common Knowledge Question: In reference to the present international situation, explain the spiritual significance of the slogan “All citizens are soldiers.” Japanese History Question: Explain the derivation and significance of the phrase “The eight corners of the world under one roof” (hakko icchu).60 The organization administering the certification was the Greater Japan Film Association, which Kido ShirO had helped establish in 1935. Postwar, Kido would admit that reinvigorating the organization had had its own “ charms” for leaders of the industry: “Through the Associ­ ation, we could debate with government and military officials on an equal footing.” 61 The law completed its legal fence around the entire film-related world by issuing strict regulations for the theater owners as well. (This, of course, was where the Welfare Ministry came in.) No program for a film showing was to be longer than three hours. For decades, exhibition had been subject to local regulations, but now it came under the direct control of bureaucrats, who continued to shorten show times further as part of their “ Luxury is the Enemy” campaign. By 1941, the mandated length of a showing was down to two-and-a-half hours.

The Foreign Film “ M enace” Foreign films and the theaters that showed them were the obvious targets o f ultranationalists and the Reform Bureaucrats alike. Articles Twelve and Sixteen of the Film Law, empowering the relevant state officials to restrict the distribution and exhibition of foreign films, had the ultimate result of cutting the flow of such films into the country to a mere trickle.

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Whereas 140 features had been imported yearly in 1938 and 1939, the number fell to 56 in 1940. Thereafter, imports declined further, with Ger­ man and Italian features becoming ever more prominent.62 Explaining the necessity for these provisions, Fuwa’s convoluted phrasing is casuistic: “ No one can prove that the popularity of foreign films exerts absolutely no negative influence on the unique Japanese cul­ ture or on the independent development of the nation’s cinema. To in­ sist on such a line o f reasoning would be untenable.” 63 Aside from as­ serting that there are “ unwelcome influences,” Fuwa remains mute on just what these influences are. In the typically vague and nonanalytic language of the Reform Bureaucrat, he is registering alarm at the un­ checked potential of foreign films to influence the basic thinking pat­ terns of Japanese nationals. For some years, there had been a growing suspicion among officials that the usual censorship methods of excising offending portions of a film were not enough. The only way to effec­ tively control the menace was, they reasoned, to dispense with the im­ portation of foreign films altogether. In the months before the promulgation o f the Film Law, Tatebayashi Mikio of the Home Ministry was diligently attempting to demon­ strate a connection between foreign films and the “ un-Japanese” think­ ing structure of an important segment of the population: “ One must seriously question the proposition that the urban cosmopolite would suf­ fer dire consequences by being denied access to some of the informa­ tion provided by foreign films. Indeed, is not this sector of our populace overly Westernized already?” 64 Censors had been targeting foreign (especially U.S.) films for special attention since the autumn of 1936. In November o f that year, they trimmed 370 feet from the film version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth be­ fore releasing it. This was nothing, however, compared to fate of Marcel Carne’s Jenny, slashed by over 15 percent. The amputations proved to be a mortal blow at the box office. Antiwar films, such asJean Renoir’s clas­ sic Grand Illusion, were confiscated at port-of-entry and shipped back. In 1937, with the war in China underway, revisions in the Foreign Currency Exchange Law made it ever more difficult to buy films from abroad. A large stock of undistributed films tided the theaters over until 1938, when 144 new foreign features (less than half the number of the previous year’s releases) were distributed. Still, the popular rage for U.S. films carried on unabated. Westerns, such as John Ford’s Stagecoach, con­ tinued to have a passionate following until they were pulled from the screen after Pearl Harbor.

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Henry Koster’s One Hundred Men and a Girl, which opened in late 1937 and starred Deanna Durbin—a quite popular actress in the United States but one of the Japanese public’s all-time favorites—became the last foreign smash hit before the end of the war, running for a total of nine weeks at Hibiya Eiga Gekijo and Nihon Gekijo in Tokyo. Its suc­ cess provoked a snarling attack from Representative Noguchi Kazumi before the Diet: “ Why do we allow our people to become inebriated with such bald-faced Americanism? This twinkle-eyed, white-toothed wonder, Deanna Durbin, stirs up crazed emotions among the public. And what are they getting out o f it? It only reinforces their long-time worship of the keto [lit., “ red hairs,” a term of racial disparagement for Caucasians]. This, plus the eight hundred thousand yen in precious na­ tional reserves handed over to the Americans, makes the film a double menace to the nation.” 65 Even in this time of intense nationalist fervor, Hollywood films re­ tained the power to evoke a deep-rooted racial inferiority complex to­ ward the Caucasian gods and goddesses of the silver screen. Tokugawa Musei, the widely revered henshi narrator, attests that this complex had a long history. He would recall going to see the performance of a promi­ nent vaudeville actress in his youth: “ It was the only time in my life that I felt ashamed of being Japanese. Compared to her plump, vigorous arms, waist, legs, and bosom, the Japanese body seemed to me a poor, feeble thing. It occurred to me that if one were to attempt to love a crea­ ture such as this, one would need a body able to stand up to her’s. Need­ less to say, my Japanese body just didn’t fill the bill.” 66 In a 1929 essay tided “ The Sexual Charm of Motion Pictures,” film reformer Kaeriyama Norimasa described the standards by which a screen actress should be judged beautiful. The criteria were all based on the Western face, rather than that of the typical Japanese: a double folded eyelid, a nose that stands out more far prominently than the mouth, deep-set eyes, skin the whiter the better, and so on.67 As Deguchi Takehito points out in his essay on the subject, “ an inferiority com­ plex toward Caucasians tended to overlap with the concept of the ‘modern.’ ” 68 Since the period of the Film Law was also the time when middle schoolers were being taught from the Kokutai no Hongi (The Principles of the National Polity) about the divine origins of the Japanese race, this Cauca­ sian complex was a particularly galling legacy from the recent past. As late as 1940, we find Ministry of Education official SaitO Masa warning that if Japanese continued to worship the physical attributes of the

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Westerners they saw in films, “we will remain in eternal thralldom to the spiritual colonialism of the West.” 69 But developing the logical grounds for the outright condemnation of foreign films—particularly U.S. films—was an extremely slippery task. Mainly, how was one to account for the historical debt the Japanese film industry owed the West? From the teens o f the century, U.S. films had been consistendy held up as models for the reform of Japanese cin­ ema. In those days, the most prominent agents of change had been the many “ Blue Bird Photoplays,” melodramas that Universal Pictures turned out between 1916 and 1920. As Kinugasa Teinosuke recalled, “ something about them seemed to say ‘this is the way a film should be made!’ ” 70 Mori Iwao, later a major producer for Toho, reported that “ for young Tokyo intellectuals of the Taisho era, the very epitome of ‘living the cultural life’ was a trip to the Cafe Parisuta in Ginza for cur­ ried rice and coffee, invariably followed by the latest Blue Bird at the nearby Komparuza.” 71 Kaeriyama Norimasa found the extraordinary popularity of these U S. features useful in eliciting the support of the press for his own “ Pure Film Movement” in the late 1910s. He could point to them as eas­ ily recognizable models or goals for the future development of Japanese film. In the teens, film reformers like Kaeriyama were largely concerned with importing formal techniques into the national cinema from the more advanced West- a greatly increased number of shots per film, use of Griffith’s innovations in crosscutting, adoption of modern scriptwriting techniques, and the like. As Yamamoto Kikuo points out, however, by the early twenties, the most enduring influence of U.S. films was their subject matter rather than their style of presentation: “ Genres and sub­ jects from that nation’s cinema were transplanted into our own where many took root and continue to survive into the present day.” 72 Makino ShOzQ, popularly known as “ father of Japanese film,” was equally fond of being referred to as “ the D. W. Griffith of Japan.” A strong nationalist himself, Makino clearly recognized the importance o f U.S. cinema to the development of the industry in Japan. As Kishi Matsuo reports, “ Makino reacted swifdy and angrily when, in the sum­ mer of 1924, a nationalistic element among the distributors seized on the Californian anti-Japanese immigration laws to try to block the im­ portation of U.S. films. He condemned the movement as lunacy, insist­ ing that ‘culture has no borders.’ As the development o f the Japanese in­ dustry depended upon continued influx of U.S. films, he said, ‘I will undertake their distribution here if no one else will!’ ” 71’

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M akino ShOzO (1878 1929), “ father” o f Jap an ese cinem a (National Film C enter Archives).

In the twenties, the new Shochiku Company formally dedicated itself to “ making films in the U.S. style.” T he adoption of the “ speedy” Holly­ wood techniques and “ snappy” dialogue inevitably, if inadvertently, com­ municated an ideological message to the screen, lauding nonchalance, energy, and optimism. From the start, films made consciously in this style gave clear indications of how Americanized cinematic structures tended to bring with them at least a superficially “American” message. The 1920s marked the high tide of “Americanism” in prewar film, but the influence remained quite strong deep into the thirties. In his

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silents, Ozu openly advertised his debt by casually inserting Hollywood posters into the background of his scenes. By the early thirties, even the plots of samurai films came to be infused with U.S. elements. Inagaki Hiroshi, Itami Mansaku, Yamanaka Sadao, and the scriptwriter Mimura ShintarO drew on the “ free spirit” of U.S. films of the thirties to redirect the jidaigeki away from the pessimistic and often turgid emo­ tionalism of the old days. One groundbreaking work was Inagaki’s Thousand and One Nights on the Road (Matatabi Senichi Ya, 1936), which was actually advertised as “ the Japanese version of Capra’s It Happened One Night." Mimura’s scenario for Thousand and One Nights reproduces many of the situations and character-types developed in the original Robert Riskin script. The samurai talk in the jargon of contemporary salary­ men, and the cart-haulers and laborers speak their own breezy form of blue-collar language. The Japanese film even reproduces the CapraRiskin democratic “ cult of the common man” —in much the same way Clark Gable’s outspoken newspaperman succeeds in bringing Clau­ dette Colbert’s society girl down to earth, the central character of Thousand and One Nights, Matahachi, brazens down a yakuza boss and even humbles a young daimyo lord. Situations, character-types and flowing camera movements introduced in the films of Mamoulian, Capra, Stephen Roberts, and Edmund Goulding were all key ingre­ dients in the amazing flowering of “ liberal,” socially conscious, realist samurai films in the period from the early thirties through the very early forties. Although Frank C apra’s increasingly strident appeals to U.S.-style “ common-man” democracy was out of harmony with the times in Japan, his influence seems to have been especially strong. Shi­ mizu Hiroshi, for instance, repeatedly uses the travel structure of It Happened OneNight in his own films (Love Excursion, 1934, Arigatosan, 1936, etc.). And, as Yamamoto Kikuo points out, “ Shimizu was in love with the simple, honest and pure character types Capra developed using Jim m y Stewart and Gary Cooper. From the mid-thirties onward simi­ lar characters make frequent appearances in his own films.” 74 In short, while bureaucrats like Fuwa Suketoshi could register strong antipathy toward foreign films, it was quite another matter to develop a critique explaining how their influence had retarded the growth o f native cinema. The hostile bureaucrats could of course al­ ways point to their alien ideological implications, and in this they had allies eager to help them. Soon after the outbreak of the war in Europe, Hazumi Tsuneo noted with horror that, “Americanism, by way of the silver screen, has penetrated the hearts and souls o f our young people,

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affecting their outlook on life. Ignorant people continue to discount it as nothing more than frivolous appeals to free love or manifestations of shallow ‘jazz mania.’ This grossly underestimates the menace. Such films are powerful tools for the strengthening of U.S. patriotism and are an integral part of the U.S. world strategy. People intoxicated by the surface glamour of these images would do well to reflect more deeply on their own gullibility.” 75

The Kondankai System in Practice In the period just before the passage of the Film Law, right wing politi­ cians and Reform Bureaucrats were almost alone in calling for a ban on foreign films. Lacking a real consensus, they had to create the illusion of one. This was apparently the purpose of the round-table discussions government-backed Nihon Eiga ran in April 1938. The participants ad­ dressed themselves to the question: “ Do We Really Need Foreign Films?” Printed in dialogue form, it seems to be a reasonably faithful transcription of the actual conversation. Today this discussion is a valu­ able document offering us a glimpse into how the kondankai system was practiced by elite bureaucrats for the purpose of inducing cooperation from film world personalities. On one side were representatives of the leading film companies: Nikkatsu, Shochiku, and Toho. On the other, in their role as hosts of the symposium, were Karasawa Toshiki, Tatebayashi Mikio, and bureau­ crats from Education and Home Ministries. Throughout the discussion, the latter held the initiative. With great skill and supreme confidence, they set the terms of the discussion and subtly herded the film industry executives toward the conclusions they wished to elicit. Following the standard bureaucratic tacdc, Tatebayashi depicted the need to limit foreign film imports as a demand arising from other sectors of society or the government: “ The Ministry of Finance is deeply con­ cerned about the problem of seven or eight million yen being leached from the nation each year. Elsewhere too, we often hear the complaint that such an ouday of cash for products wielding such a dubious influ­ ence over our national culture bears careful scrutiny.” Tatebayashi thus evokes the appalling image of a materially poor Japan painfully straining its resources to support the luxury of imported features. Having seized the emotional high ground, he is free to assert, without having to provide any proof or specifics whatsoever, that foreign

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Tatebayashi M ikio (front, ccntcr) at the height o f his influence, surrounded by filmworld personnel (.Nihon Eiga, August 1939).

films were by their very nature disreputable and spiritually “ dubious.” Since the main thrust of his argument is that “ the Ministry of Finance is deeply concerned,” who would now dare to quibble about the validity of the second part of his assertion? Tatebayashi concludes his first point with a question that rings of authority: “ How could one possibly defend the continued importation of foreign films?” Then, without pausing for an answer, he goes 011 to sum up the only two counter arguments he feels have merit of consideration: “ First, there is the notion that by showing foreign films, the level of Japanese culture will somehow be raised. Ig­ noring the obvious flaws of this proposition, one can discern a second line of defense: foreign films represent a valuable instructional resource for directors, writers, actors, and cameramen.” 76 Foreign films arc thus effectively stripped of their aura as aesthetic objects. Practical service to the state becomes their sole value. And value, in the budgetary world o f the bureaucrat, is always quantifiable: “Assuming the correctness o f the proposition that foreign films will en­ rich our culture and advance our own cinematic techniques, how many films would be necessary to carry out such a task? Proper administration of foreign film importation requires that we be able to indicate the pre­ cise number of such films.” 77

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Here, we see Tatebayashi shifting responsibility for the limitation of foreign films to the industry representatives themselves. Although the industry representatives had begun the discussion with the intention of fending ofT the government’s plan of severely limiting foreign film im­ ports, they now find themselves trapped into a discussion of how the pol­ icy should be implemented: You just said that we would have to import a certain number of films. That’s the sort of vagueness which is bound to cause problems. Just how many constitute “a certain number?” i k e d a ( s h o c h i k u ) : We would like to import as many as we would be allowed. t a t e b a y a s h i : We simply must have a concrete answer on this. Should the limit be one hundred films, two hundred? Be specific. How many? s a s a k i : Even if we decided now on one hundred fifty, we wouldn’t be constrained to import the full number, would we? For example, if there were only ten films of any value, we should be able to import only those ten, I think. t a t e b a y a s h i : Once a figure of a hundred or two hundred films has been settled on, we couldn’t import only, say, twenty features. Haven’t any of the companies involved in exhibition put any thought into coming up with an appropriate figure? Am I to assume you have no opinion on the matter? n e g i s h i k a n ’ i c h i ( n i k k a t s u ) : It would probably be best for you to decide the upper limit.78 ta te b a y a sh i:

The industry people are then encouraged to put themselves in the position of the government regulators —one of the favorite tactics of the Reform Bureaucrats in such kondankai situations. The executives quickly find themselves caught in a gyre of shrinking expectations. The following sequence represents the final victory of the technique: That’s why we are appealing to you to look at this from the point of view of the government! n e g i s h i : Of course if all film imports were to be b a n n e d , there would be many of us film executives delighted at the prospect of having the field all to ourselves. But that would be a little bit too lonely a prospect.7-* k a r a s a w a (h om e m in is t r y ) :

The kondankai tactics used bv the bureaucrats would alternate between instilling anxiety and obvious “ ego massages.” Sometimes it /

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would cause the subject to voluntarily provide ammunition for the offi­ cials to use against him later Notice the amazing reversal of roles which now takes place: I have a friend who’s a movie lover. He says that Western films used to be head and shoulders above ours, but the situation has completely reversed itself in recent years. He says that moviegoers in the know are much more interested in theJapanese product and that those who continue to brag about seeing Western films are behind the times. Have Japanese films really improved so much of late? i k e d a : Yes they have, especially in the last two or three years. There’s been amazing progress. e g u c h i : I’m not sure that expert audiences actually preferJapanese ones. . . s a s a k i : Yes, I think its still too early to claim that we lead the pack already i k e d a : In other words, that’s our mission for the future. k a r a s a w a : So, if Japanese films are not superior right now, they certainly would be if they had similar financial backing and better plot constructions. After all, both the direction and the acting of our pictures are of a higher standard . . . n e g i s h i : In my opinion it isn’t larger quotas for imported films that we need right now I think we’ve already learned everything there is to learn from them. Since the Ministry of Finance is worried about balance of payments, why don’t we just stop importing films altogether. Instead, the importation of raw film stock should be completely liberalized. It’s in that area that we are experiencing the greatest difficulties.80 karasaw a:

The Faith o f the Reform Bureaucrats The Reform Bureaucrats were indeed a new breed; their oudook and temperament differed significandy from the old ministry officials whose careers reached back into the teens and the twenties. Nor did they have much in common with the mystical ultranationalists, such figures as Araki Sadao. Still, it is not easy to achieve an insight into what they really believed or the nature of the “vision” they sought to impose on so­ ciety. When they were not engaging in verbal duels with those they sought to dominate, their expression tended to slide into dense jargon and clichés. Furthermore, their reign lasted a mere eight years or so; in the domain of film policy, the tenure of the most prominent individuals was never more than two to three years.

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Although there were significant individual differences among the elite bureaucrats, one could probably take Fuwa Suketoshi’s pro­ nouncements on the nature of “ culture” as fairly representative of the thinking of the entire caste: “ The very term culture suggests the notion of development, of cultivating potentiality. A thriving culture is one that is steadily developing. It is in the progress of culture that we find our reason for living.” 81 This one statement reveals three key elements in the Reform Bureaucrats’ world view. First is the conception of na­ tional culture as a dynamic, ceaselessly “ developing” entity. Second is the implicit optimism in the notion of culture as something perfectible. The third element is a corollary of the second - the endorsement of social or cultural interventionism (“ cultivating potentiality,” as Fuwa puts it). All three elements set the bureaucrats poles apart from the organicist views of the traditional conservatives (typified by the radical Agrarianists who had inspired many of the coup attempts in the early thirties) and from the believers in the static ideal of kokutai or “ national essence.” Although Fuwa and other top bureaucrats did often refer to the Ja p ­ anese kokutai as “ based on unchanging principles and instilled with an eternal, sacred spirit,” they are clearly more inspired by those aspects of society that can be improved through their own wise leadership. Tatebayashi Mikio, who had been the chief driving force in the movement toward a national film law and who had called in Fuwa to help write it, was perhaps the most radical exponent of this view. The metaphor of the bureaucrat’s “ hoe,” tilling undeveloped (cultural) ground, tended to dominate his writings in the 1938 39 period: “ Before the creative inter­ vention of state policy, there was nothing, no true national culture, only fallow potential.” 82 Ensuring the “ progress of culture” was therefore the raison d’etre of the elite bureaucrat. That which authorized and empowered them in this task was the much invoked term, shido genri, or “ leadership princi­ ple.” Since Japan’s unique “ parafascism” was not centered on the per­ sonality cult of a single all-transcending individual, leadership was dis­ persed among the top echelons of the various government agencies.83 The officials identified their will with the state. When Fuwa referred to “ we,” he assumed he spoke with the full authority of the state: “ We must develop a vigorous movement within the populace, based on an unceas­ ingly aggressive creativity. Since the life of the people is the nurturing element for such a movement, wc servants of the state must take positive steps to support and promote this life.” 84

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Meanwhile, in their rejection o f individualism and their worship of the national polity as the unique creation of the Japanese “ race,” they undoubtedly did have an affinity with the European fascists: “ The true progress of human society passes beyond the worshipful elevation of the individual. The endless progress of the collective creative spirit has nothing to do with the empty rhetoric of ‘freedom.’ ” 85 The emergence of the Reform Bureaucrat came about as a result of administrative reforms enacted in the early thirties. The leaders of the Meiji reform era (1867-1912) had carried out their own project of nation-building in an autocratic, top-down manner, relegating state bu­ reaucrats to the task of implementing the policy initiatives of the politi­ cal elite. In the Taisho period (1912-26), the locus of political power shifted to the political parties. Each time a different party came to power, it would institute sweeping personnel changes in all of the gov­ ernment ministries. Officials identified with a rival party were replaced by loyalists of the incoming administration. Top-echelon bureaucrats were thus subject to every shift in the political wind and rarely had the chance to impose their personalities on the posts they held. The aftermath of the i5june Incident of 1932, however, marked the beginning of the end of party-centered administration. The new “ na­ tional unity” cabinet of Prime Minister SaitO Makoto instituted radical reforms aimed at political stability. The catchword of the hour was kokusaJcu (national policy) and one of the intentions of the reforms was to ensure the continuity of its administration. The elite bureaucrats were the chief beneficiaries. They were at last secure in their various posts and they boldly set to work regulating the life of society. The most powerful and prestigious of the ministries—Home, Fi­ nance, Foreign Affairs—traditionally had their pick of each year’s crop of national university graduates. The young men were then intensively groomed and swiftly promoted to positions of high responsibility. Therefore, when the press began to explore the newly invigorated bu­ reaucratic structure, the reporters were impressed and often charmed to find articulate young men —many still in their early to mid-thirties— heading up ministry sections, and even whole divisions. The papers en­ joyed contrasting their fresh, earnest faces with the tired, wizened looks of the old party leaders. Dubbing them Shin (New) Bureaucrats, the press hailed them as the nation’s best and brightest, the potential saviors of “ Crisis-Time” Japan. As the latter began to exert a penchant for rad­ ical (i.e., totalitarian) initiatives, the term was changed to Kakushin (Re­ form) Bureaucrat.

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Karasawa Toshiki was the first of the New Bureaucrats directly to impress his personality on the film industry and national film policy. Ap­ pointed in 1935 as head of the Home Ministry Police Division, at the less than youthful age of forty-nine, he not only had under him the cen­ sorship section—the traditional contact point between government and film industry —but was also charged with leading the industry into a constructive engagement with national policy (kokusaku). Long involved with the administration of tenkô persuasion policy, it was he who inno­ vated the kondankai system for the purpose of eliciting the cooperation of the film executives.86 Temperamentally, Karasawa combined the qualities of an old-time “ sympathetic policeman” with the intellectual alertness of an elite na­ tional university graduate. His soft-sell techniques went down well with the executives, and he developed an especially close relationship with Kido ShirO. The crowning achievement of this connection was the Ja p ­ anese Film Association, which represented the institutionalization of the kondankai system within the film industry.87 It was during the “ Kara­ sawa years” that Kido ShirO was encouraged to dream of an equal part­ nership between filmmakers and government. The emergence of Karasawa’s protégé, Tatebayashi Mikio, repre­ sented the gradual shift away from the techniques of persuasion toward a vigorous assertion of the leadership principle (shidd genri). Six years younger than Karasawa, Tatebayashi became head of the home cen­ sorship section soon after Karasawa became division chief. Almost im­ mediately, Tatebayashi set to work drafting proposals for the national film law, but it was not until the outbreak of the China Incident and the subsequent shift in national sentiment that his ideas began to gain ground. Thereafter, throughout 1938 and up to the passage of the Film Law in September 1939, he became a dominant presence in the film magazines. Further adapting Karasawa’s kondankai techniques -this time to the magazine roundtable (zadankai) format —he set himself up as discussion leader in a series o f intense debates with film executives and prominent intellectuals, pondering the question of “ how cinema should best serve the national polity (kokutaiJ.”88 Whereas Karasawa preferred to stay behind the scenes as a kind of gray eminence, Tatebayashi quickly emerged as the first of a series of “ superstar” bureaucrats who would adroidy use the press to promote both their policies and their own personalities. Each of these superstars would exhibit subtle differences in emphasis, rhetorical style, and, to a certain extent, policy direction. Tatebayashi, for instance, consistently

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Kikuchi K an (1.), dean o f the literary establishment, with K arasaw a Toshiki (r.), form er National Police Comm issioner (jVihon I'-iga. April

'94')-

called for the “ total spiritual conversion” of everyone in the film busi­ ness: “ The time has come to open your hearts wide to thcyamato spirit and to reflect that spirit, not just in your work, but in your private lives as well.” 89 Tatebayashi faded from the scene shortly after the passage of the Film Law and was replaced by Fuwa Suketoshi. After coauthoring the law at age thirty-seven, Fuwa launched himself as the authoritative interpreter of its “ spirit.” In many ways, his ascendancy (lasting until early 1941) marked the acme of the reform bureaucrat’s influence on the cultural life of the nation. The Tatebayashi doctrine had emphasized the total subservience of filmmakers as, quite literally, “ minions” (goydnin) of the state.90 Fuwa now recast this role as one of “ pioneering a bright new future for Japanese culture.” 91 For him, the Film Law was but one dimension o f a total reordering, indeed a renaissance, of na­ tional culture: “ Firm leadership in all our national arts will restore our identity as a people; it will move us beyond the present impasse of liber­ alism, commercialism, and aesthetic solipsism, all of which are the un­ wholesome legacy o f the era of Western influence.” 92 rite leadership principle was not just to be applied to filmmakers, but to the general film-going public as well: “A whole new attitude toward film viewing is

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called for, one that encourages the populace to use film not only as a me­ dium of entertainment, but as a means of education and of training in the proper role of the citizen.” 93 Fuwa’s hegemony came amidst the ballyhoo of the Konoe Fumimaro’s program for a total mobilization of the national spirit. Re­ form bureaucrats throughout the government, bursting with confidence and a zeal for change, began to put forward ideals that were lofty, ambi­ tious, and romantic. Unlike their dour bureaucrat predecessors, Fuwa and his kind seemed to be inspired by visions of a totalitarian utopia: “ By making over all of daily life into a realm of art, the full potential of education and the raising of the conditions of life can be achieved.” 94 Unfortunately, accompanying this almost charming naïveté was an utter blockheadedness and ignorance about the minimal conditions necessary for the fostering of creativity, and it was this that made the elite bureaucrats fail, ultimately, in their self-professed mission. The take-off point for their soaring flights of vision was a crude notion of so­ ciety as a machine and of the producers of culture as, for all intents and purposes, robots: “A chief goal o f cultural policy is to organize and cen­ tralize the mechanisms of national culture so that, in times of crisis, the leadership need only push a button to bring about the effective mobiliza­ tion of its entire reserves in service to the state.” 95 Under the regime of the third and last of the superstar bureaucrats, Kawazura Ryüzô, the system began to come apart. Slightly older than Fuwa, and with the striking features of a Japanese Humphrey Bogart, Kawazura rose to power in early 1941 as chief of the fifth division (for cultural policy) of the newly inaugurated Information Bureau. It was he who so stridendy invoked the term “ crisis” and who so arrantly abused the “ leadership” push button as to cause a general breakdown in the machine itself. In his conversations with (or, more properly, lectures to) his charges in the film world, he repeatedly used the term maishin (full speed ahead) to indicate the urgency of the policies he was pushing.96 It also seemed to serve as a warning to those who stood in his way. Unlike his immediate predecessors, he displayed litde interest in film as either art or entertainment. Rather, he promoted himself as the au­ tarch of film policy whose personal will reverberated to the shifting needs of the nation itself. A shrewd businessman type, Kawazura had a sure instinct for the points where the industry was most vulnerable (the allocation of raw film stock, for instance), and there he applied over­ whelming pressure to bring the company men to heel. Inevitably, the result was the final destruction of the system of mutual trust originally

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envisioned by Karasawa Toshiki. Furthermore, he mixed “ exhorta­ tions” with open threats, couching them in the impenetrable language of the bureaucrat.97 As we shall see, this was to bring on a kind of gen­ eral nervous breakdown among filmmakers on the set.98 Kawazura’s disgrace and downfall in late 1942 (covered in chapter 8) signaled the end of personalized bureaucratic leadership in cultural pol­ icy, leaving a vacuum ultimately filled by representatives o f the military in the last stages of the Pacific War. Thereafter, the sole criterion of film policy became “ direct service to the war effort.” By then, the culturenurturing idealism o f the reform bureaucrat had itself become a casu­ alty of total war. Although the kondankai system often succeeded in mobilizing individuals in the pre-Pacific War period, the ultimate “ button,” capable of mobi­ lizing the masses, was far more difficult to find. The latter, of course, was the function of propaganda. The next chapter will look at the “ cul­ ture film” (documentary), which had been given new life by the Film Law. We will investigate how the bureaucrats and the filmmakers ad­ dressed the daunting problems of turning this celluloid “ factual” me­ dium into an efficient “ weapon in the worldwide propaganda war.”

3 The Glory Days of the Kulturfilm

News Films and the Outbreak of the “ China Incident” On 7July 1937 there was an exchange of fire between Japanese and Chi­ nese troops at Marco Polo Bridge, near Beijing. By 30 July the army’s prime objectives seemed to have been attained and bold headlines pro­ claimed “ The End of Disorder In Northern China: Japanese Forces Bringjustice and Dignity.” But still the fighting continued to spread. Al­ though the Japanese cabinet and even certain members of the high command were eager to contain it, the initiative in the affair remained largely with the local Japanese commanders and their allies, section chiefs within the General Staff in Tokyo. As in the Manchurian Inci­ dent, the government seemed to lack the authority, or perhaps the de­ termination, to bring events under control. When a Japanese naval officer was shot in Shanghai the following month, general war became nearly inevitable. Japanese forces in north China advanced relendessly southward until they met stiff resistance around Shanghai. A contingent landed at Hangchou Bay in early No­ vember and routed the Chinese forces there. Canton was taken. On 13 December the capital at Nanjing was itself overrun. Peace negotiations carried out before and after the occupation of Nanjing, with Germany as the mediator, collapsed, and, on 16 January 1938, the cabinet of Konoe Fumimaro issued its famous dictum, “ We shall no longer treat with the Kuomintang government.” In other words, Japan would no longer consider the Nationalist government a party to its negotiations, and it intended to set up its own regimes in the occupied areas. Al­ though the military still projected a fairly swift victory, part 2 of Japan’s “ Fifteen Years’ War” only now had begun in earnest. In its regular editions and in a steady stream of “ extras,” the major dailies reflected the image of a nation engulfed in the euphoria of a vic­ torious war. From the first days of the conflict -quickly dubbed the “ China Incident” - massive black headlines depicted enemy soldiers, in 92

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pell-mell retreat, as snarling beasts being driven to the slaughter: “ Final Death Frenzy Overtakes Remnants of the Chinese Army!” 1 The world o f commerce was quick to participate in the commotion, feeding on the iconography of war to push a wide range of products. The image of plummeting bombs, for example, tended to dominate newspaper adver­ tisements. The makers o f Shiropu Drops changed the shape of their candy to the “ New Invincible Bomb shape!” Another ad showed a plane dropping a bomb labeled “ IM AJI Insect Repellent,” along with the slo­ gan “ To China! To Manchuria! A must inclusion for your packages to the boys at the Front!” Clearly, for many manufacturers, the up mood of a brand new war, complete with thrilling victories, was a boost for busi­ ness: “ Raise your spirits with military songs! Raise your spirits with Norshin aspirin tablets!” Documentary newsreels fresh from the front also became a com­ modity to be avidly consumed by the public. At least in the major cities, even news films were now talkies. Toho’s Hassei (Talkie) News had been operating since February 1934 with programs changed twice monthly at Hibiya Eiga Gekijo. A few months later, programs were being changed on a weekly basis by interspersing Japanese-made features with those from the German company UFA and Paramount’s Movie-Tone. Dur­ ing the pre-incident years, viewers had tended to prefer the more so­ phisticated construction of these foreign productions, a preference that annoyed and concerned government authorities. After Marco Polo Bridge, however, the newsreel units of the major papers took the lead once again. With their privileged access to the front and to the officers and men fighting there, they alone could satisfy the public demand for authentic sights and sounds fresh from the war. Al­ most everyone knew someone at the front, and so interest in the prog­ ress of the fighting, in the terrain, and in the daily lives o f the troops was intense and personal. When a viewer spotted a loved one on the screen, he or she was awarded a few frames of the scene after the showing. The most dramatic o f these “ reunions at the screen” (ginmaku no saikai) would be written up in the newspapers. In the early days o f what was then called “ The North China Inci­ dent,” regular theaters mounted nightly shows for the commuter crowd. “The drawing power of these shows is terrific,” Yomiuri reported in Au­ gust. “ Even as the sun sets, thundering applause and cries of banzai can be heard from outside the theatres.” 2 In contrast to this, the regular fare of drama films showing at the theaters was singularly nonmilitaristic. In addition to Toyoda Shiro’s

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Housewives collecting sennin bah (thousand-stitch waistbands) for the boys at the front (him tun. Decem ber 1937).

novel-to-film version of A Young Person (Wakai Hilo, Tolio, 1937), Ja p a ­ nese features included Ughts of Asakusa (Asakusa no Tomoshibi, Shochiku, 1937) and a pair of Enoken (Enomoto Kcn’ichi) comedies, Sarutobi Sasuke and Donguri Donbei. By a curious coincidence, the top foreign film of the hour was Sydney Franklin’s film version of the Pearl Buck novel, The Good Earth. Japan-side distributors hyped the film with ungainly poster copy suggesting its timeliness: “At Shanghai and in North China, His Majesty’s forces are universally invincible! Now in this sea­ son of victory, see the film about China all the world is lauding as the Greatest, the mightiest masterpiece of the year!” 3 Despite the obvious incongruity of the Caucasian actors Paul Muni and Louise Rainier playing Chinese— their eyes subtly “ slanted” by tape at the sides— the film was a major sensation. In addition to the regular theaters, which charged admission for their newsreel programs, the army funded a number of Shina Jihen Kan (China Incident Theaters) where admission was free. The ladies’ maga­ zine Shufu no Tomo, along with other patriotic women’s groups, cooper­ ated by organizing “ Ixcture and Film Nights” of newsreels, inter­ spersed with “ fresh reports from the front” provided by women who had visited there as volunteer aides. The major news organizations were, of course, also the main news­ reel makers of the period: Asahi Shinbun, Osaka Mainichi, Yomiuri, Domei.

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and the Shinbun Renmei (made up of a group of strong regional papers). Shochiku,Toho, and other regular film companies had their own camera­ men in the field as well. During the first half year of the Incident, thea­ ters specializing in inexpensive sixty- to ninety-minute newsreel pro­ grams sprang up rapidly in the major cities: “ Now, here in northern Osaka! A new Shochiku News House nears completion!” “ Learn about the world through your own eyes! Hear the throbbing heartbeat of the world with your own ears! For the news fan, nowhere could be better than Ashibe House —Fully air conditioned!” 4 “ Where once there were two or three newsreel theaters, there are now twenty-three in Tokyo alone,” Hazumi Tsuneo reported with amazement.5 Although they were invariably edited into a patriotically gratifying form, the newsreels opened the public’s eyes to the pleasures of “ documentary realism,” and this, in turn, quickly became the deci­ sive factor in molding the aesthetic tastes of “ Showa teens” (1935-45). As Hazumi observed, “ Our whole way of looking at and thinking about things has been radically altered.” Literature turned toward the “ re­ portage novel,” 6 illustrative art deepened its commitment to photo­ graphic style, and photography itself moved into the mainstream as a genuinely popular art form. A natural corollary was that many drama films also tried to take on the look of a documentary. Even when a film­ maker chose not to follow the documentary route, his film had to find a way to accommodate the new demand for realism. “ In order to achieve some degree of independence from the authority of the documentary'” Sawamura wrote of Five Scouts in 1939, “ Tasaka had to take possession of another kind of truth: the truth about human relationships.” 7 As in the Manchurian Incident, the papers played up the “ deathdefying” courage of their own camera crews and the pilots who braved night and the elements to rush the undeveloped footage back to the homeland. Before long the profession was graced with the informal title “ warriors without a gun.” “ It used to be that war photographers took the greatest risks and suffered the greatest casualties, but its now the same with the cinematographers. One after another they are getting hit; the casualty figures are really shocking.” 8 As we shall see in chapter 5, “ the fighting newsman” became the hero of several drama films in the early Incident days. Painful memories of the international furor stirred by the Litton Commission in the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident had made the military far more sensitive to the need for better PR for its military ventures. In north China, and then in central China, army information units sprang up rapidly staffed by officers with newspaper experience.

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Journalists were no longer looked upon as pestering onlookers, which had often been the case in Manchuria. They were now dignified with a clearly defined, official role “ unifying battlefield with home-front and providing the world with an accurate perspective on Japan’s true inten­ tions in the conflict.” The newspapers, for their part, pledged themselves to the concept of “ constructive criticism.” In practice, this was little more than a euphe­ mism for uncritical concurrence with the pronouncements of the mili­ tary High Command. Occasionally, however, individual journalists dared to construe it to mean a certain independence of opinion. As the war dragged on, of course, such attitudes were treated with increasing severity. The news filmmakers made every effort to keep in tune with govern­ ment policy; the days of even nominal independence were numbered. The 1939-40 period saw a massive bureaucratic reordering o f society. To the bureaucrat, those remaining sectors of public activity, which had not yet been “ rationalized” and brought under direct control, simply belonged in the category of “ still unregulated,” with the clear connota­ tion of “ unfinished business.” In October of 1939, just as the Film Law was taking effect, the government turned to the matter of bringing news films into line with national policy. In place of the existing structure of three newspapers and one news service (Domei), the idea was to consol­ idate them all into one easily administered unit. On 23 October, representatives of the four companies were called to a kondankai at the prime minister’s residence for discussions with Home Minister Ohara Naoshi and Kawarada Kakichi. The eventual result was that the news film sections of the four companies were merged into the Nihon News Film Company (Nichiei), a kan-min (government-civilian) organization launched with a capital investment of four hundred thou­ sand yen from the Cabinet Information Board (naikakujohobu). The formal establishment of Mchiei in April 1940 also signaled the end of showings of foreign-made newsreels in Japan. However, an ar­ rangement was made with both Paramount and Pathe under which cer­ tain carefully selected segments of their features, mostly “ human inter­ est” topics, were edited and then exhibited under the tide, Nichiei Foreign News. With the conflict bogging down on the continent, the Information Board, in cooperation with top newspaper editors, began working out longer-range editorial strategies. These eventually became guidelines for the propagandistic manipulation of printed news, as well as for

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newsreels and war documentaries. To a certain extent, they even influ­ enced drama films by sketching in the outlines of the “ worldview” to be demonstrated by politically alert characters. In a highly revealing chapter in his Fifty Tears o f Journalism (1943), I to Masanori, a Keio University professor of national defense and a former specialist on military strategy with Domei Tsushin, oudined the evolu­ tion of this policy: “ Our newspapers had to graduate from being simply domestic organs for public discussion and debate. They now have the responsibility of contributing to the national cause by providing effec­ tive propaganda, in order to function as weapons in the worldwide con­ flict of ideologies.” 9 In general, the strategy was to depict the world as divided between “ those nations seeking to benefit from the status quo” and “ those seek­ ing to bring about a new order.” This gave such expressions as hakko icchu (“ eight corners of the world under one roof” ) a revolutionary im­ port applicable to all of Asia. ItO points out that, as the China Incident developed, the first foreign power to become involved had been the U SSR . Soviet border incursions into Manchuria in 1937 had gradually escalated into the “ Nomonhan Incident” of May 1939—a massive colli­ sion of mechanized ground forces and aircraft in which the Japanese Army was badly mauled. As a result, portraying the incident as the proof of collusion between the “ Chungking regime” and the Soviet Union became for a time a high priority in newspaper editorial policy. Since the immediate aftermath of the Manchurian Incident, the Chinese regime had regularly been depicted as the puppet of “ unnamable powers” plotting against Japan. This worldview even forms the backdrop of Yamanaka MinetarO’s adventure novels o f the mid-thirties. In his Iron Man o f Asia {Dai Toa no Tetsujin, 1934), for instance, the Soviet Union is seen masterminding a vast, sinister plot that unfolds in the fast­ ness of “ the great Secret Mountains” of far western Manchuria. Al­ though it remains unidentified, references to “ the power to the north” are plain enough. Yamanaka then goes on to list the threatening nations in a manner typical of the period: “ The Chinese, of course, followed by the countries, Y, and even the Jew, are all seeking to suffocate the infant state of Manchukuo.” 10 Elsewhere, he warns that beyond the immedi­ ate neighbors of Manchuria, even more sinister powers lurk far to the west, all of them deeply intent on the same ends. During the early phases of the China Incident, designating Britain or the United States as “ silent partners” of the Chungking regime was tacitly off limits. A sequence in Kamei Fumio’s 1938 feature-length

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documentary Shanghai, however, comes perilously close to breaking the taboo. The narrator is describing the fierce resistance o f the Chinese army forces within the city, and we see great, gaping holes running through whole blocks of buildings. These were made by the Japanese army in order to get at the nests o f enemy soldiers situated amidst the densely grouped dwellings. The camera penetrates one such hole, lead­ ing from building to building, and comes upon the remains of an aban­ doned enemy “ nest.” The narrator comments: “ we find here that the Chinese forces were freshly provisioned by outside forces.” A loaf of bread is displayed with the label “j o h n s t o n ’ s b r e a d ” clearly printed on it. Next, we are shown another large hole at the back o f the same building. Immediately beyond the hole, British soldiers casually stroll around in what is obviously a part of the British Concession. The cam­ era focuses on a group of British soldiers clad in shorts. In the context of the sequence, the merry wave they give seems to have a “ knowing” quality to it, as if they are saying “ we know you know about us, but what can you do about it?” Despite the film’s reputation as vaguely “ defeatist,” this scene at least is a masterful piece of propaganda that must have pleased the authorities. Writing in 1943, ItO Masanori explains that direct references to Brit­ ain as a hostile power had to be delayed another year or so: “After the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, the China Incident has come to be perceived as part of a new World War, thus confirming the conviction of our leadership that only a worldwide solution can bring the Incident to a successful conclusion. In particular, after the breakdown of the AngloJapanese conference in the summer of 1939, most newspapers pushed forward with a ‘strike at Britain’ campaign, with articles warning the people of the inevitability of a conflict with the Anglo-American pow­ ers.” 11 U.S.-Japan relations were similarly soured by the Incident. After U.S. abrogation of the Japan U.S. Trade Agreement on 26 July 1939, speculation about war with the United States began appearing in news­ papers, with special insistence on blockading the Anglo-American aid routes to Chiang Kai Shek. According to ItO, with the formadon of the Three-Power Agreement with Italy and Germany in September 1939, the press was assigned a new task, that of awakening the people to the existence of a hostile en­ circlement of Japan, the so-called “A BCD (American-British-ChineseDutch) Line.” ItO concludes his discussion by pointing out that, espe­ cially during the first half of the China Incident, Japan condnued its economic dependence on the United States: “As rupture of economic

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relations with Britain and the United States became inevitable, the need for an entirely new economic structure in East Asia led to a campaign for a radical reordering of the region’s economic regime.” In terms of the film world, this policy was reflected directly in the bureaucratic ef­ forts to eliminate film imports from the West.

Feature-Length Documentaries in the First Year o f the China Incident A week after the events at Marco Polo Bridge, the Foreign Ministry and other officials of the Konoe government summoned representatives of the nation’s news filmmakers to a kondankai to discuss the proper atti­ tude for handling war news. The regular film companies’ turn came several weeks later, in August. The Home Minister told them that they had a vital role to play in the “ general mobilization of the national spirit” (a popular slogan direcdy attributed to the Konoe). “ This time the conflict is likely to be a prolonged one,” the Minister warned them, “and so I must ask you to join in the effort to steel the will of the homefront on an ongoing basis.” The Ministry’s reform bureaucrats had al­ ready drawn up a list of “ don’ts” that was distributed to the several dozen representatives gathered in the room: i) Don’t subject the mili­ tary to ridicule; 2) Don’t exaggerate the cruelties of war with overly re­ alistic depictions; 3) Do nothing to break the spirits of families who have men at the front; and, 4) Do nothing to stimulate pleasure-seeking or degenerate hedonism. Although the government had already decided on a plan to “ mobilize art” as part of the nation’s total war effort, it still had little to give in the way of “ positive inspiration.” 12 To “ edify their spirits,” the film company men were referred to The Fundamentals of Our National Polity (Kokutai no Hongi), which the Ministry of Education had started distributing in March of the same year. Steeped in the mysticism of Jap an ’s ancient historical texts, the book was utterly opposed to individualism and liberalism, glorifying instead abject loyalty to the state. Throughout the China Incident and on into the Pacific War, the Home Ministry almost universally was despised as the archetypal organ of totalitarian control. Tsuchiya Hitoshi, who had regular contact with it as Nichie’s energetic film production chief, remembers shuddering each time he walked down its “ dark and featureless” halls - “ From the several incinerators in the courtyard out back, black smoke billowed up twenty-four hours a day, consuming unpublishable manuscripts and

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great loops of celluloid slashed from films.” 13 Most of the film people who had contact with the Ministry’s Censorship Office remember it and the functionaries who worked there with utter contempt. In a recent interview on his ninety-third birthday, Tsuchiya characterized them as “ paper-shuffling nitwits who couldn’t remember a conversation from one day to the next.” In his autobiography, Kurosawa Akira sneers that they “ seemed to be mentally deranged —they all behaved as if they suf­ fered from persecution complexes, sadistic tendencies and various sex­ ual manias.” 14 Toba Yukinobu, who became a young official in the Home Ministry Censorship Office in 1939, however, provides a quite different image in a short memoir written some years before his death. The memoir gives us a rare glimpse into the Censorship Office’s inter­ nal workings and the way the censors saw themselves: “ We censors were clearly divided into two factions the young Tokyo University graduates and the former policeman types who were veterans of the earlier film censorship. Members of our faction figured that since cen­ sorship was an unavoidable fact of life, we should use our position to further the cause of film-as-art. We actually made up the majority, and although there might have been a few unpleasant personalities, we were on the whole a calm, good-hearted lot. In fact, the Tokko Special Police gave proof to this fact through their antipathy toward us and their con­ sistently calling us ‘scum.’ ” 15 Outsiders, however, condemn this depic­ tion as thoroughly self-serving. Waka Koji, a benshi still active in Nagoya, remembers Toba himself as a haughty and overbearing figure who would bark orders at him while resting his feet on his desk. A walk down the blankly grim Ministry hallway was apparendy suf­ ficient to intimidate even the feistiest of movie executives. “ None of the film company men opposed head-on the trend of events,” reports Iwasaki Akira. “At best, they fled into attitudes of noncooperation and nonresistance. People like that could be led anywhere if only a strong enough will and the proper amount of power were mustered against them. The worst of them actually welcomed the war as a benefit to their company profits. Such was the case in the early days of the Incident, at least.” 16

The “ Kam ei Fumio Case” At this time, the film world was in crisis. A powerful new rival in both the field of drama films and documentaries was rising to confront the older film companies. In September 1937, two months after the start of

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the China Incident, Photo-Chemical Laboratory (PCL) merged with its subsidiaries to form the Toho Film Corporation, Ltd. The old Commis­ sioned Film Production Unit of P C L was then reinvigorated as the Toho Culture Film Section. Aside from Nikkatsu, all of the drama film companies were also making documentaries as a sideline, but only Toho and Shochiku were serious enough to establish an independent documentary unit. Even Shochiku’s commitment to the production of “ culture films” (hunka eiga —the era’s epithet for the documentary genre) was apparently half hearted. Its culture film unit quickly wilted into a form of limbo for sec­ ond rate talents, and placement there was tantamount to a demotion for directors failing in the business of drama films. Toho, on the other hand, invested real efforts in the area, referring to its own documentary section as the Second Production Unit and treating it as a full-fledged counterpart to its First (drama film) Production Unit. Success came early with a string o f distinguished feature-length war documentaries commencing in the first months of 1938. The central figure in the department was Kamei Fumio. Like many young intellectuals, the thirty-year-old Kamei had a mildly leftist-tinged past (postwar, he would become closely allied to the Communist Party). Since he kept his ideological leanings to himself during the war period, it took several years for the authorities to sniff him out as a “ thought criminal.” Their discovery and Kam ei’s subsequent martyrdom is an episode we will treat shortly. In 1928, at age twenty, Kamei had made the pilgrimage to the Soviet Union where he encountered a documentary film that apparently left a lasting impression on him. The film was Yakov Blyokh’s Shanghai Docu­ ment (Shanghaisky Dokument, 1928), a film study of the effects of Western imperialism on China, featuring a highly realistic depiction of the ex­ ploitation and oppression of workers in the city. “ Blyokh’s was clearly a new art form for a new age,” Kamei was to report in later years. “ It was perfecdy in tune with the youthful aspirations of the moment, a time when the documentary appeared far more fresh and youthful than the drama film.” 17 Kamei stayed on to study film in Leningrad and then at the Soviet film institute G IK until 1933. There he studied the montage theories just as they were being developed and implemented by the masters. Along with the new techniques, he became fascinated with the potential of documentary as a medium of social analysis and criticism. After return­ ing home in 1933, he the joined PCL Film Company.

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Kamei was given his first chance to edit a feature length film in the fall of 1937, just as PCL was being transformed into Toho. The film was Through the Angry Waves [Doto 0 Kete, released December 1937), a noncom­ bat military feature commissioned by the navy. Toho had put the distin­ guished cameraman Shirai Shigeru aboard the Ashigaru when it went on a formal visit to Britain for the crowning of King George and then to Germany. On the return voyage, word came of the outbreak of hostil­ ities in China, causing the ship to rush home under full steam. Kamei edited the footage with a dramatic flair. The climactic scene has the ves­ sel stoutly plowing forward as tremendous waves crash down on her bow. Set to the stirring strains of naval marches played by the Navy Band and narrated by the former benshi Tokugawa Musei, the film caught the mood of the hour and was a smash hit with audiences. In the final days o f 1937, Kamei was given another project, a feature commissioned by the Ministry of Education, China Incident (Shinajihen). As before, Kamei proved himself an excellent craftsman, although this time the material was mostly footage the public had seen already. The significance of the project appears to have been that it was a final test before he was placed in a leading position for the most ambitious set of war documentaries yet attempted. The project was a trilogy of films, treating the war in terms of three major Chinese cities: Shanghai, Nan­ jing, and Beijing. Actually, it was the popular benshi Matsui Shunsei who first came up with the idea of making Shanghai. Kamei, who apparently did not have a very high opinion of Matsui, recalled the circumstances in an inter­ view not long before his death: “ He was typical of the opportunistic journalists flourishing in those early days of the war. He bounded off to Shanghai as soon as he heard about the fighting and, after collecting to­ gether a few episodes along with a few photos, he put out a little book. Matsui then marched into Toho, assuring them that if they made a film out of his ‘reportage’ it was sure to be a major hit.” 18 Under the leadership of Mori Iwao, widely considered a “ liberalist,” the mood at Toho was comparadvely progressive at the time. “ Mori was antimilitarist on the grounds that army meddling in politics was throw­ ing the country into confusion,” Kamei was to recall, “ and I tended to agree with him on that score. But once the government set its new distri­ bution policy in place, it was virtually impossible to reverse the overall trend toward national policy films.” 19 At the planning session for Shanghai, Kamei engaged in a dialogue with Mori, which was later to become famous: “ Mori had been abroad

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for rather a long time and he told us that on his way home, he had stopped in Shanghai and that the Rising Sun flags snapping briskly at the sterns o f the military ships there had brought tears to his eyes. When I retorted that ‘the people o f Shanghai must have shed even more tears at the sight o f a Japanese flag,’ a chilly silence descended on the room.” 20 The cameraman selected for the job was Miki Shigeru, already re­ nowned for his work on Mizoguchi, Suzuki Shigeyoshi, and Itami Mansaku pictures. Miki’s documentary o f a solar eclipse, Black Sun (Kuroi Taxyd, 1936), was the first Japanese documentary to receive international recognition. Later the UFA Film Company incorporated Black Sun into a science film series, which was otherwise a purely German project. Miki Shigeru went on location in October 1937 with cameras and sound equipment to capture the lingering aroma of victory in the aftermath of the fighting there in August. Kam ei’s job was to edit the footage he sent back. Plans for what Miki should shoot were fairly vague. Mori Iwao had suggested he include shots of the grave markers of the Three Human Bomb Patriots, as well as those of heroes who had fallen in the recent batde there, periodic newspaper reportage having made the place into a kind of patriotic shrine. Kamei also provided Miki with a general shopping list o f appropriate subjects: “ I emphasized scenes ap­ pealing to the sentimentality of theJapanese public, things like a red sun at sunset. Miki Shigeru faithfully shot everything on the list.” What came back were four hours of ruins, battle-fatigued troops, and sullen-faced Chinese war victims. Noda Shinkichi, a fresh recruit to Toho’s documentary film division, managed to find a corner in the crowded screening room when the company officials viewed the rushes: “ Every single cut spoke of the pathos and inhumanity of war. When it was over and the lights came up, a heavy silence filled the room and none o f the top brass moved from his seat for a long time. Finally, the producer, Matsuzaka, unable to contain himself any longer, turned to Kamei and asked, ‘Well what do you think?’ Kamei replied in a low, confident voice as if he were talking to himself, ‘Fine, fine! I can do something with this.’ ” 21 Kamei took several weeks to edit the film into a masterpiece of sub­ dued irony. The narration, supplied by Matsui Shunsei and filled with patriotic clichés about “ holy war,” “peace for Asia,” and “ inevitable vic­ tory,” is consistendy undercut by the visual content—freshly erected Japanese grave markers and vistas of war-ruined landscapes, which flow across the screen in long traveling shots.

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K am ei Fumio (1908-87), docum entary film director (YVaka K o ji arehive).

Shanghai opens with a shot of the customs building clock tower as it strikes noon. The camera pans left, the screen filling with billows of smoke. Eventually, a vista of the city opens out with some of the destruc­ tion visible. The film uses maps and a camera tour through the city, showing “ the political complexity of Shanghai and the manner in which theJapanese Army had to struggle and sufier amid these complications.” One of Kamei’s most effective devices was to montage shots of the vari­ ous flags on buildings in the Foreign Concession, French, British, United

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States, and Nazi German. In a scene at the port, they flutter in massed array. Shanghai includes a number of explicit propaganda sequences (such as the “Johnston’s Bread” piece described above). But much of the propaganda message suffers subtle subversions. A line of Chinese POWs, among them a very small and frightened boy, bow in stiff Jap a­ nese fashion as several Japanese officers approach. One of the prisoners is questioned about the treatment he is receiving. “ Have you received good medical treatment?” “ Hau (good).” “ Is the food good?” “Hau Cut to a scene where the POWs are seated with bowls of rice in front of them. As if on command, they pick up the bowls and begin to eat. The camera pans along a table. Here and there we see prisoners who stare stonily at the food, refusing to touch it. A victory parade of troops led by officers on horseback passes through the city gate as the narrator expostulates: “ In every sense of the phrase, this procession signifies a historic dawn for the city of Shang­ hai.” The next cut is a long study of faces in the Chinese crowd: the faces are blank, but it is not difficult to guess the bewilderment and rage lurking there. One wonders if the aporia o f the film was apparent to Japanese audi­ ences at the time. Kamei indicates he fully expected it to be: “The reason I included such shots was that I knew my audience would be looking at the film intendy. This was because in those days, audiences at newsreel showings were always searching the screen for a glimpse of a loved one, a brother or a father or a friend. This made them ‘deep readers of the screen,’ or perhaps we might say of the screen’s sub-rosa meaning.” 22 The motif of death and ruin is everywhere in Shanghai. At regular intervals, we see soldiers and sailors placing flowers at the grave markers (many of them right on the sidewalks of the city) of their fallen com­ rades. A railroad pump car takes us out past incredible vistas of dam­ age. Many viewers back home must surely have wondered, “ how can it be worth all of this.” The film ends with a strange, obviously staged propaganda set piece, reminiscent of those often found in the news film of the time. A French Catholic priest steps from among his herd o f war orphans to address the Japanese troops in seemingly rehearsed English: “Thanks to you and the kindness of the Japanese Army High Command, these young chil­ dren will be saved.” 23 The children then put on a litde performance, parroting the words of a Japanese nursery song, “ Otete wo Tsunaide” (All

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Join Hands). As they form a chain of linked hands, some are holding aloft Japanese flags. A crane shot looks down on them, as they create geometric shapes with, almost, the precision of a Busby Berkley musi­ cal. Clearly there is nothing spontaneous to any of their actions. Quite literally, they are dancing for their supper. The military backers of the film, who were annoyed by Kamei’s lapses into antiwar sentimentalism, filed a pro forma complaint about the overall tone of the film with Toho. Reportedly, an irate officer burst into the Army News Information Bureau waving his sword and shout­ ing “ How dare you release such a depressing war film!” 24 In the theaters, however, Shanghai was well received. Most critics liked it too. The phrase “ one of the few really superior culture films” continued to be invoked even after Kam ei’s arrest in 1941. A review written at the time of its release by Tsumura Hideo was fairly represen­ tative: “A distinctive quality of this film is the way it summons up widely varying and often very subjective interpretations among its viewers. To my mind, its elegiac portrayal of the fields scarred by batde represents an entirely new departure for the Japanese documentary. The film is a near masterpiece.” 25 Later that same year (1938), Kamei went off to make the second film in Toho’s Chinese City Trilogy, Beijing (Pekin, Toho, 1938,).26 The city was already under firm Japanese control, but this was not what inter­ ested Kamei. His biographer Tsuchimoto Noriaki, who has access to his shooting notes, writes that “ the notes invariably connect the scene or image listed up to be shot with some famous snippet of prose or poetry.” 27 Kamei’s notes state: “Among my colleagues, Shanghai is con­ sidered a documentary ‘in the tragic mode,’ while my Beijing can easily be called a love story [ren’ai mono]. China’s old cultural capital is alter­ nately portrayed as a glowing oasis in the middle of the desert and as a grand courtesan whose beauty has been ruined by age.” 28 Taking his own unauthorized “ vacation” from the wax, Kamei focused on scenery, daily life scenes, traditional dance, and drama. Perhaps the most mem­ orable sequence in the film is a leisurely saunter down a busy commer­ cial street. On and on the camera travels, peering into shop windows and doorways. Snippets o f conversation and the clatter of activity in front of the shops grow louder as we approach and then fade away as we pass on, heightening the you-are-there feeling of this extraordinary inspection of occupied Beijing. No wonder the film was widely referred to as a “ travelogue.” Tsu­ mura Hideo was especially harsh on Kam ei’s “ desertion of duty.” He

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K am ci’s Shanghai (Toho, 1938). Frcnch priest thanking the Jap an ese arm y for “ mak­ ing it possible to save all o f these children.”

called it a failure because of its “ utter lack of conviction —idle curiosity seems to be in command here, making it little more than a display of picture postcards.” 29 Later in 1938, Kamei set to work on another war documentary, Fight­ ing Soldiers (Tatakau Heitai, Toho), with Miki Shigeru again slated as came­ raman. This was despite the public argument that had just broken out between the two over who was the true “ author” of the films on which they had collaborated. In a zadankai, Kamei had dismissed the creative role of cameramen in general: “ They only see the world through a view­ finder. They're sort of like horses with blinders on.” 30 Presumably he meant that cameramen looked only at what they were shooting at the time, without taking in the whole context of the scene. Kamei insisted that without this context the essential you-arc-there feeling could not be imparted to the film. This, he insisted, was the really creative part, achiev­ able only by a masterful film editor. Miki, renowned as one of Japan’s great cameramen, was outraged and argued back with equal vigor. Years after Miki's death. Kamei would render a partial apology for the affront: “ I shouldn't have made that dig about a horse with blinders.” 31

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The mission of Fighting Soldiers, which had strong backing from the Public Information Section of the army, was to cover the army as it moved toward Wuhan. They naturally wanted a stirring portrait of their valorous troops in action. However, the military was just then re­ considering the propaganda value of depictions of individual bravery, which for decades had been the essence of the military bidan published in the papers. The new policy emphasized “ group spirit” over individ­ ual enterprise. The approach was to show the army as a well-organized, completely integrated fighting machine. Kamei’s own ideas, however, differed utterly: “ We completely gave up the original plan of depicting our fighting soldiers as a unified mass and switched to portrayals of them as individuals. My idea was to treat not the war per se but the men caught in the winds of war.” 32 Not only would he emphasize the indi­ vidual, he intended to depict war itself as pathos, a dangerous proposi­ tion as it proved. By the time Kamei and Miki reached the front that summer the war situation had become grim. Pushing toward Hangchou, Japanese troops were confronted by an enemy who refused to meet them in pitched bat­ tle. Furthermore, the “ Resist Japan Movement” had taken root among the Chinese populace, turning the countryside into a charred, guerillainfested wilderness.33 With only a mule to carry their equipment, Kamei and his crew trailed the vanguard of the Japanese assault through the largely de­ serted landscape, making their film from the wreckage of a poindess and now seemingly endless war. Fighting Soldiers opens with the tide imposed over the smoking stack of a ship, followed by a slow pan left along an embankment o f the Yangtse. A freighter, or perhaps a troop ship, looms into view, at its stern a snap­ ping Japanese flag. The martial music in the background is undistin­ guished, even trite. Imposed over a stationary shot of the same river scene, the title: “ The soldiers at the front cheerfully cooperated in the making of this film.” The music stops. Profound silence. Another title, against a blank background: “ Right now, the continent is suffering the birth pangs of the coming New Order.” The Chinese character for “ pain” grows larger on the screen, and low voices of a male chorus begin humming an elegiac tune. A long shot of a man praying at a small country shrine. Cut to a burning house, then to the creased face of an old man. It is a magnificent face, sadly gazing beyond the camera in close-up. Although the shot is held only for five seconds, the old man be­ comes the subjective center of the next several shots. Again the house. It

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appears to be his house. Three small children, the smallest holding a baby, stand nearby. His children? Two of the tots fidget pathetically with their hands, impotent and uncomprehending before the horror of the scene. Cut to the house again, now a mere pile of embers. In an open field, a figure lies crumpled in sorrow before a grave. This opening sequence is a marvelous betrayal o f the army’s de­ mand for “ impersonality” and for portrayals of “ group spirit.” It sets the perspective for viewing the rest of the film, even the parts featuring the troops in action. We are positioned to view it all from the center of a terrible silence. Like the old man, we are the witnesses to incomprehen­ sible tragedy. After a shot of a cloudy sky, we have a long shot of a smoldering vil­ lage. A line of refugees, one a grandmother with a baby, staggers past. Everyone carries a burden. Interspersed with these are shots of the dry, cracked land. The humming of the male chorus begins to recede, turn­ ing to a whisper. A jizd-like Buddhist figurine stands by the road. Its in­ clusion is one of the film’s many montage “ attractions,” perhaps in­ spired by Eisenstein. With its hands covering its face, the figurine seems to be crying for the people. The camera holds on the image in near si­ lence. Then there is a sudden roar. The metal chatter of tank treads. One tank, then another, and yet another appear at the top of an em­ bankment, a Rising Sun flag fluttering at the back of one. A pan up from a gully as they pass in mechanized, inhuman grandeur. Who, see­ ing this film, would not instinctively think, “ invaders” ? The film’s military sponsors could not have missed the unambiguous meaning of the next sequence. The Rising Sun flag on one of the tanks almost fills the screen in a traveling shot. Behind it, and around the edges, the endless ruins of a city flow past. The flag seems to be dragged across the landscape, creating the havoc we see. A cut to a traveling shot descending into a riverbed, filled with parked military vehicles, signals the beginning of an entirely new se­ quence. In the background we hear a pastoral melody, punctuated rhythmically by distant cannon fire. The new theme is the military camp, a favorite subject among Japanese audiences. Tethered horses come into view, then soldiers at their tent sites. Some are sprawled on the grass asleep. Tarpaulin-covered tanks are parked indiscriminately among ordinary passenger cars in a field. A string of military donkey carts, winding its way into camp, reminds us that for all its “ iron invin­ cibility,” the Japanese army is still only partially mechanized. As of old, it largely moves by foot, by donkey, and by horse.

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A POW, arms tightly bound behind his back, is being interrogated. “ How old are you?” “ Thirty.” “ How many children?” “ Two.” “ Do you want to go home?” “ Yes.” One wonders what makes them ask this ques­ tion. Is it intended as psychological torture? “ What work do you do?” “ I’m a farmer.” He looks down, probably yearning for home and chil­ dren. But he is unlikely ever to see them again. The standing order was “ spare no prisoners.” Although Japanese audiences would not have known this, within the hour his lifeless body will probably be rolled into a ditch. The sound of cannon fire is constant as we view the inside of a field hospital. In the semidarkness, soldiers with bandaged heads stare off vacantly. Next comes coverage of a field hospital and water sanitation activi­ ties. “ No matter where you go in China, the water is bad and this makes the troops dream of the crystal clear streams of their hometowns.” A doctor looks through a microscope. Microbes swarm on the slide. Shots o f the cncampment after the company has moved on. Rub­ bish is strewn everywhere. Tide: “ From that day, the farmers set back to work.” A shot of a wooden plow breaking through the cracked sur­ face of the land. Next comes a shot of a rural shrine with a Japanese flag flapping in the breeze next to it. A ruined farmhouse. A rubblecovered kitchen stove. Scenes of farmers scrabbling together a make­ shift encampment. One day, with the troops far in advance of them, Kamei and his film crew struggled along a white, ruler-straight road. In a nearby field they spotted something that made them stop and hurriedly set up their equipment: “ It was a scene not to be missed at any cost. There, standing stock still, was a sick horse, abandoned by the army. As our cameras were running, it slowly went down like an old tree, heaving its last breaths in anguished pants. By this time I had lost all distinction between people and horses. Here before me was the embodiment of the pathetic fate of all life caught up in the war.” 34 Kamei’s “ fighting soldiers” all appear to be beasts of burden, dumb beasts, groaning beasts on the way to slaughter. One plods along through the merciless summer heat in a heavy winter overcoat. Others are now reduced to mere boxes of cremated remains, stored away by comrades in a temporary shed. Title: “ 7o die in service to His Majesty! These words lift the souls of the soldiers to lofty heights.” The day’s last light shows on the horizon. A box of cremated remains is enshrined on a simple table in a farmhouse. Sake bottles are placed next to it as an

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K a m e i’s cryptic Fighting Soldiers (Toho, 1939). Both the dying horse anci the endless road beyond became emblematic o f the “ China Incident.”

offering. The voice of a soldier reading from a letter. A shot of the group of soldiers seated in one corner of the room. He is reading a let­ ter from their comrade's wife who does not know her husband is dead. The letter is filled with the everyday doings of home: “ I was too busy to pick up the photograph from the developer the last time I wrote, so here it is.” A shot of a picture of the man’s little boy. “ You will be sur­ prised at how he’s grown.” The letter is read to the spirit of their com­ rade, and the photo is placed on his makeshift altar. That is the best they can do. Next we see the men asleep. In the background we hear the braying of a donkey. Its eerie sound is like weeping. A few scenes later, we have the strangely prolonged company HC^re­ enactment scene that would irritate the “ purist” faction of documen­ tary film theorists. The group commander studies a battle map on a table in a requisitioned house. Scouts hurry in and out with their reports while, through an open door in the background, we see wounded men being carried on stretchers and troops forming up in the garden. The scene is tense because a sniper is nearby. Hut the actors, real soldiers playing “ themselves,’' have an amateurish stiffness on film. When the

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commander hurries out to join his men, he is so flustered by the camera that he leaves his sword behind.35 The scene in fact reenacts actual events of several days before, which had been recorded in the company combat diary. Kamei was later to comment: “ If you want to consider it a set piece, of course you can. But that only proves the point that the cinematic medium can never do with­ out a certain measure of fiction.” 36 When Kamei was prosecuted for making this “ seditious” film, the army charged him with lese-majeste for using His Majesty’s troops for his own purposes. Real military action scenes pick up as the army approaches Hang­ chou. Maps with animated arrows show the pincers closing in on the city. A title: “ The day anti-Japanese resistance collapsed at Wuhan.” A close-up of a Chinese Nationalist flag as, in the background, we hear a Christian chant. It is Russian Orthodox. The overlapping here is pecu­ liar indeed. Interior scenes of the church appear. Candles. A Russian Orthodox priest in close-up. A long take of the huge mural depicting Christ behind the altar. Clearly some connection between the National­ ists and the Russians (but “ White,” presumably anti-Communist Rus­ sians) is being made. The meaning is virtually incomprehensible. Cut to the church exterior. The camera pans up the onion-shaped dome and holds on the cross. More scenes of destruction and desolation follow: “ The Hangchou Railroad Station destroyed by bombs.” A scene in which a solitary cat prowls past an abandoned train engine and on through the deserted wreckage of the platform is accompanied by the voice-over o f a scream­ ing baby. Stenciled on one of the blasted walls is “ Defend Wuhan!” There is something pathetic about this faded message, speaking of the failed determination and terror of the city as it confronted its fate. The resounding thunder of marching feet, and then we see a parade of troops entering the city. The city center looks as Western as London or New York. The huge, pillared Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, formerly a British concern, dominates the screen. In front of it victory celebra­ tions are under way. An army orchestra is giving a concert on its steps for a crowd of soldiers situng in the street. The music is heavy and lugu­ brious: Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav, no less. Scenes of soldiers sprawled in exhausted sleep. Some sleep sitting up. Their clothes are dirty and in tatters. Flics cover their immobile faces; they are too exhausted to brush them away. The concluding sequence starts with the title “ On that day, life began to stir again amid the rubble and ashes of the town.” A man

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garbed in a dark coat is digging an old pot out of the smoldering ruins. Children also pick through the rubble. Again, the dark-coated man wandering in despair as he searches the completely leveled ruins. The next-to-last shot is of a little boy, clutching a puppy and staring mutely into the camera. Bizarrely, the shot is badly out of focus. The fi­ nale music picks up as the camera pans over the harbor. Even after the war, Kamei repeatedly denied he had the intention of actually making an “ antiwar, antimilitary” movie: “ Many claim to per­ ceive defeatism or pacifism in the film. But in fact, when I talked to mili­ tary public information people, it was they who demanded this sort of treatment. They didn’t want another glossy treatment like the standard news films, but rather a probing of the deeper aspects of the war, of its hidden dimensions. So I actually made the film with virtually no fore­ bodings at all.” 37 In 1940, when Fighting Soldiers was being prepared for submission to the censors, Kam ei’s boss at Toho, Mori Iwao, was called in and told that his company should “ rethink” submitting it at all. The joke running around the censorship office had been that the film should be retitled “Tired Soldiers.” Mori took the hint and shelved it permanendy. Post­ war, it was presumed lost until its rediscovery in the mid-sixties. Kamei went on to make other fine documentary films in the days be­ fore the Pacific War. The most notable of these was his Kobayashi Issa (1941), wherein he took his cameras to Nagano Prefecture, once the hometown of the great haiku poet. Issa’s poems about poverty spoke as much of the modern setting as they did of the era in which he had lived. Because of the film’s implied social criticism —such as Kamei’s contrast of the upper-middle-class tourists enjoying the region’s opulent spas and golf courses with the poverty-stricken locals pruning the greens by hand —the new Cabinet Information Bureau decided to withhold from it the designation of “ culture film.” 38 Kamei’s days as a filmmaker were numbered; in any case, there was no way to rescue him from the gathering storm. In 1941, the police divi­ sion circulated a secret report, “ On the Social Movement Situation” : “ Kamei Fumio uses a dialectical materialist position in his documentary’ films to try to propagandize audiences with his social views. His Shanghai and Fighting Soldiers are both pacifist and his Ina Bushi uses the dialectic materialist point of view to depict the destructive effect of capitalism on feudal society; his Kobayshi Issa describes the tragic situation of Shinano farmers. . . . All of these films seek to stir up antiwar and proCommunist sentiments among the general public.” 30

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This, of course, is largely nonsense. The outlook provided by Shang­ hai is occasionally ironic, but hardly overdy pacifist. We do hear echoes of Marxist class-consciousness in Kobayashi Issa, but nowhere does it hint that the answer to the farmers’ troubles is to be found in revolution. Among all of Kam ei’s extant wartime features, only Fighting Soldiers gives off a whiff of genuine sedition. Yet, Kamei himself avows that, far from attempting to undermine the war effort, he was actually trying for a new, more penetrating portrayal of it. In short, Soldiers was a creative ex­ periment, in a still-new medium (the war documentary). An artistic masterpiece of its genre, it is characterized by enormous empathy for all of the beings that came under the camera’s gaze, be they horses, Chi­ nese civilians, or Japanese soldiers. Operating without clearly defined ideological borders (a problem that dogged the makers o f war-drama films as well), Kamei boldly explored new terrain of feeling and poetic expression. In typical bureaucrauc fashion, the terrain was ex post facto declared forbidden and Kamei pilloried as an object lesson for those tempted to follow him. On g October o f that year, the Special Higher Police arrested him as a violator of the Peace Preservation Law of 1925: “ I was awakened early in the morning by four tokko detectives. Two began to search the house, while the other two stood guard outside. About forty books were confis­ cated as ‘evidence.’ Among these was Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a few works by Gorky. I had no idea what purpose this evidence was supposed to serve.” 40 Kamei was kept in custody for a year without being charged, and then released. However, as a form of punishment for “violating the Film Law,” his name was temporarily stricken from the list of film directors. He would be the only person ever punished under the articles of the law, becoming persona non grata at Toho, from which he was eventu­ ally fired. Several years later, however, he was reinstated and hired by Nichiei Film Company, where his talents remained underemployed until the surrender.

Issues Raised by Other Toho Military Documentaries jVanjing (NanJcin, 1938) was the third film in Toho’s Chinese City Trilogy. For one reason or another, its editor, Akimoto Ken, did not accompany his chief cameraman, Shirai Shigeru, to the continent. Collecting the camera equipment left behind for him by Miki’s crew in Shanghai, Shi­ rai moved on to Nanjing, arriving there two days after the fall of the city.

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As Akimoto was to recall, “ Inside the city walls, to the left of the gate, there was a Chinese fighter which had buried its nose in the soil as it crashed. All up and down the broad Chungshan Boulevard, the debris of household goods was scattered everywhere in a pathetic fashion. We were warned by an officer to be careful because remnant units of the enemy were still engaged in sniping.” 41 O f course, what was actually in process in the city was something far more monstrous: “ Chinese civilians had been forced to line up along a high fence. The line seemed to stretch on endlessly and when I walked beside them many began calling out to me, some holding out to me rancid-smelling bags of tobacco or handfuls of paper money. Their faces were imploring and grief stricken. Since all of them were on the way to be shot, even I became the object of their desperate supplica­ tions. Although I understood their forlorn entreaties, I could do nothing and this made me very sad.” 42 Shirai also reports witnessing similar scenes at the waterfront. Yet, despite being “ sad” he managed to con­ tinue filming. He did not shoot the massacre scenes, of course, because that was “ off-limits.” 43 Rather, Shirai aimed for the patriotically satisfying scenes. His foot­ age of the cremation of dead soldiers, complete with a synchronized re­ cording o f the snapping and popping flames, was praised by a contem­ porary reviewer as “ instilling in us deep solemnity and even deeper respect; no true Japanese could see this scene without being moved to tears.” 44 When the rivers of civilian blood had been washed from the boulevard in order to allow General Matsui and the occupying army to march there in a bugle tooting victory parade, Shirai was there too, cranking his camera. The latter became one of the highlights of the film Nanjing. Anatole Litvak’s Battle of China (1944) includes extensive footage of the massacre, much of it shot in sixteen millimeter by the missionaries John Magee and George Fitch, and smuggled out of China by Fitch. Depicted are alleyways clogged with numerous bodies and shots at Nanjing hospitals, where citizens, many of them young children, are treated for mutilations inflicted upon them by ordinary Japanese sol­ diers. We see lines of dead bodies, some of them shot, some bayoneted, some with their heads crushed by rifle butts. Other scenes were obvi­ ously not shot by the missionary. He could never have been present at the actual executions we see, where officers and soldiers shoot civilians in the back of the head and have them fall into open graves. Nor could he have photographed the live burials, in which young women are

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pushed into holes on top of each other while smirking soldiers throw dirt in their gasping faces. These scenes, assuming they are genuine, must surely have been shot by Japanese army cameramen. Among the Japanese reporters and literary figures who visited Nan­ jing after its fall, there were of course individuals of deep integrity. Such was the prominent novelist Ishikawa TatsuzO, who had been sent to the front in 1937 as a member of the Pen Detachment. At first, he sent back the usual impressionistic pieces to be published in Chuo Koron. But when he visited Nanjing two months after the great massacre, Ishikawa’s atti­ tude changed dramatically. The surreptitious notes he made during his investigations were carefully concealed from his military hosts. Immedi­ ately upon his return to Japan, he produced in eleven feverish days a 330-page manuscript. “ It is my intention to inform the Japanese people about the true nature of the war,” he wrote in the introduction, “ and by informing them cause deep self-reflection among those now drunk on the wine of victory.” 45 All copies of the issue of Chuo Koron carrying his horrifying account were quickly confiscated by the police and both Ishi­ kawa and Chuo Koron editor Amamiya KenzO were arrested, prosecuted, and then imprisoned for several months. Viewing it today, the overwhelming impression of the documentary Nanjing is the dominance of the spoken word. Endlessly, it seems, we are shown stiff-looking military officers delivering ceremonial speeches in stilted language and high-pitched voices. Contemporary audiences must have groaned with boredom. However, Tsumura Hideo, reviewing the film in 1938, found it much to his liking: “The on-location soundrecording is much more effective here than in Shanghai. The groans of the wounded Chinese soldiers being treated by our army surgeons and the mournful tolling of a bell at an ancient mountain temple leave a last­ ing impression, but perhaps the most moving sound is the low roar of the frigid wind blowing on the microphone as Commander Matsui re­ cites his memorial address at the service for our loyal dead.” 46 Other Toho military documentaries of the same period included The Yangtse River Fleet (Yosuko Kantai, 1938), by Kimura SotGji. Kimura had been known as the director of leftist-tinged “ tendency” dramas, such as his Hurrayfor the Farmers (Hyakusho Banzai)—made in 1930, when he was twenty-seven, and widely hailed as a masterpiece. In 1931 his radical in­ clinations came to the surface in real life when he led a strike against Shinko Kinema and then departed the company with thirty other mem­ bers. Thereafter, however, Kimura progressively moved to the right, eventually becoming an active participant in the Film Association. After

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Ishikawa Tatsuzô (1905 ). His truthful account o f the N anking M assacrc in Living Soldiers was banned from publication (Bungei, M arch 1940).

langtse, his next military picture for Toho was Naval Bomber Squadron (Kaigun Bakugekitai), more of a special effects film than a documentary. Scripted by Kitamura Komatsu, renowned for his breezy “ Smart-Set” scripts for Ushihara Kiyohiko in the twenties, it reenacts Lieutenant Nakano's celebrated long-range bombing raid on a Chinese airbase from Japan. Miniatures fashioned by Tsuburaya Eiji, the world famous expert in special effects, were intercut with real flying footage shot by Miki Shigeru. One contemporary review applauded “ the first class ded­ ication” demonstrated by Kimura’s work but complained that “ the min­ iature mountains and airfields are of such poor quality as to bring dis­ credit on both the director and his special effects man, Tsuburaya.” 47 After making Bomber Squadron, Kimura departed for Manchuria in order to set up the Manchukuo National Film College in 1941. Another Toho documentary - War Comrades' Song (Senyü no Uta, 1939), directed, edited, and shot by Richard Angst, a German resident in Japan —became the focus of a raging debate about the proper na­ ture of documentary films. Angst’s film follows the activity of a con­ voy of naval patrol boats as it departs from Shanghai and proceeds up the Yellow River, engaging in guerrilla suppression and “ civilian

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indoctrination-pacification” missions along the way. The film is a curi­ ous pastiche of stunningly shot riverside scenery and stiffly performed reenactments. In one scene the flotilla has put in at a war-ravaged town, and several officers stand amid the wrecked machinery of a cottonginning factory. In a series of shots from various angles, we see the face o f one of the officers grow tense: “Who’s there? . . . Lai-lai! [Come out!]” From behind the cotton bales, an elderly Chinese steps forth, quaking with fear. He is followed by a steady stream o f children, whose fearful expressions turn to delight when they receive handfuls of candy from the Japanese soldiers. The sequence, along with subsequent ones depicting the refurbishment of the factory, could well have been part of a drama film. The batde sequences are also obvious recreations, with the camera posidoned diagonally in front of the firing Japanese ma­ chine guns. Throughout the film, unlikely camera set-ups (such as views from the shore as the convoy passes) and recurrent, all-too-apparent staged “ vignettes” undercut the film’s designation as a “ documentary.” War Comrades’ Song came at the peak of the furious row among film theoreticians over the issue of such reenactments in culture films. Imamura Taihei and Iwasaki Akira, who differed profoundly on the nature of documentary film, were united in their condemnation of this prac­ tice. Imamura’s purist views on the culture film genre led him to insist that the expressions on the faces of ordinary people were far more pow­ erful than those of professional actors and that montages of images from the real world were far more “ eloquent” than anything created on the studio lot. For his part, Iwasaki Akira found the Angst film to be “ a most disconcerting” work: “ The obvious spuriousness of the drama­ tized scenes have given it a very bad reputation among viewers. Al­ though some might try to counter by saying that this film is essentially the work of a foreigner, one could point out numerous other examples amongjapanese-made works as well.” 48 The issue came to a head with the release of Shinko’s “ culture film” Hospital Ship (Byoinsen, 1940, lost?), a film that apparendy fell far short of any reasonable definition of the documentary genre. Based on a book of reportage by Ogaku Yasuko, it depicted the activities of military nurses on board a hospital ship commuting between the homeland and China. Much of the action had been pre-scripted and often featured professional actors. Although it was fairly popular with the public, it in­ furiated the critics. After delivering a fiery denunciation of this practice in his regular “ Monthly Culture Film Report” column, Tanabe KoichirO concluded “ Hospital Ship so irrevocably violates the boundaries of

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documentary cinema that rather than engaging in further criticism here, I can only hold my tongue.” 49 Complicating matters was the position taken by Paul Rotha in his book Documentary Film, where he specifically encouraged “ creative dra­ matizations of actuality.” Translated in 1937 by Atsugi Taka, the book had become the bible of the documentary filmmaker in Japan. Kamei Fumio reports having been much encouraged by the Rotha doctrine — “ Knowing I had such a strong ally abroad gave me much needed confi­ dence.” He was only one of many who had resorted to brief “ creative dramatizations.” The debate rumbled on and on, the purist faction holding that it had vasdy important implications for the future development of the genre. Atsugi Taka, naturally, took the pro-Rotha position, insisting that “ such methods are necessary if the documentary is ever to go beyond being naive photographic reportage. The present era demands a far higher level of artistic achievement.” 50 Iwasaki’s attacks on the reenactments in War Comrades’ Song and Hospital Ship, meanwhile, were couched in the context of a general assault on the “ evils brought about by the Rotha doctrine.” Proponents of the anti-Rotha position focused on the perceived di­ chotomy of falsehood/fiction versus fact/reality. In the case of Imamura, for instance, the issue of actors versus ordinary people and of stu­ dio shots versus “ real” images increasingly became the acid test for whether a documentary was truthful or was marred with “ falsehood.” In film journals, the debate over the proper nature of the documen­ tary spiraled toward ever-greater abstraction. Iwasaki and some few others, meanwhile, tried to confront the reality of an alarming new situ­ ation: under the ideological pressures of the hour, documentary film was moving progressively away from being a genre concerned with truth-telling of any sort. Even more effectively than drama films, it was proving capable of making simple, literal truth into highly believable and potentially effective propaganda. Makers of culture films were rarely able to overcome the hobbling influence of the parties or agencies commissioning their work. Even the increasingly strident progovernment critic Tsumura Hideo saw this as a dilemma threatening the viability of the entire culture film movement. In his newspaper persona as “ Q / ’ he stated in 1938 that “ there is one obvious reason why the general filmgoer abhors the majority of docu­ mentaries- the stench of propaganda that inevitably permeates them.” 51

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Even Atsugi Taka, Japan ’s leading proponent of Rothaism and a documentary filmmaker in her own right, raged at the “ banal sprighdiness” of many of them. In February 1940, she would stigmatize a whole class of documentaries as “ Sandwich-board Man Ballyhoo Films” : Among the recent flood of so-called culture films are a considerable number that are litde more than propaganda commissioned by one or another government agency. Looking at the development of the Japanese documentary up to now, we must recognize the central role their sponsors have played in bankrolling the genre. This situation, of course, inflicts on the filmmakers restrictions and problems of all sorts, but even more to be piued is the viewer who must endure these shamelessly propagandisdc Sandwichboardman Ballyhoo Films. Even if we grant a few notable exceptions, we must admit that most of them are more or less infected with the disease of ballyhooism. These latter mindlessly celebrate the assertions of their backers, much like the morning-coated wedding guest who goes about clinking glasses with all he meets, repeating over and over again, “Congratulations! Felicitations!” In the words of Shimizu IkutarO, describing a similar mood at the Convention of the League for Spiritual Mobilization, “such glassy-eyed jubilation has a quality suggesting brain fever!” 52 Such grumblings, however, appear to have been limited to a dissatis­ fied minority. At least until the eve of the Pacific War, the framers and supporters of the Film Law largely succeeded in orchestrating a public atmosphere of expectation and enthusiasm for a coming “ golden era” of culture film. Their greatest success in this enterprise was in enlisting the fervid cooperation of key members of the nation’s intellectual elite. Hopesfo r Culture Film Inspired by the Film Law A year or so after the passage of the Film Law, the one article that ap­ pealed to ultranationalist and closet liberals alike was Article 15, the pro­ vision for the mandatory showing o f the news films and “ culture films” (the notion being modeled on the German KulturfUm) as part o f each theatre program. The new category of “ culture film” did in fact unleash a surge of hope among many filmmakers and theorists of cultural policy. Up to this time, finding places to exhibit their films had been a major problem for most of the documentary filmmakers. Yokohama Cinema, with its ready access to major movie theatres in downtown Tokyo and elsewhere, was an exception to the rule. For the most part, “ educational

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films,” scientific documentaries, and travelogues on regional cultures had been consigned to a route of school auditoriums and Buddhist tem­ ples. Their production had been, at best, an isolated backwater o f the film landscape. Now, with a vast new captive audience, culture film surged forward as a major industry. Kido ShirO claims that Article 15 was actually his own brainchild: “ It is the one thing from that era which, even today, I am proud o f having accomplished. I got the idea in Germany when I saw how they stimu­ lated the development of their own Kulturfilms by eliminating admission taxes for theatres showing them.” For Kido and his kind, at least, the Film Law seemed to be a modest cornucopia of benefits. After the war, he would contend rather implausibly that “ it never occurred to me that the law would be used as a means of drawing us into the web o f the to­ talitarian regime.” 53 In the autumn of 1939, film journals and more general magazines dealing in thought and opinion were filled with articles hailing the “ new age of culture film.” Elementary school teachers, college professors, writers, old aristocrats, and Reform Bureaucrats weighed in with opin­ ions about the future direction it should take. Hasegawa NyOzekan and Imamura Taihei were among the most en­ thusiastic admirers of the culture film provision in the Film Law. Both rose to the occasion, elevating the debate about its nature to the arena of elegant grand theorizing. Like the philosopher Nishida KitarO, cultural theorist Hasegawa NyOzekan was at this time deeply involved in the project o f extricating the Japanese Spirit from its thralldom to and sense o f inferiority toward the rationalistic culture o f the West. In his articles published in film magazines of the 1939-40 period and then in his book Study o f Japanese Cinema (1941), he expresses aspirations for culture film closely interwoven with a position stressing Japanese uniqueness and the special aesthetic consciousness o f the race. These emotions come from “ two thousand years of continuous history in the realm o f feeling.” 54 This invocation of Japan ’s historical roots shows a strong affinity to the formula Nishida KitarO had expounded a year earlier in his book The Problem o f Japanese Culture: “Western logic tends to address the world of things, while Oriental logic is concerned with spirit. Now, some peo­ ple might contend that logic addresses itself only to objective relation­ ships and that there is no such thing as a logic of spirit. Even they, how­ ever, must grant that spirit is a thing that manifests itself in the historically objective world. It can be considered and discussed only

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within this context, making it as much a concrete thing as any other thing in the temporal world.” 55 According to Hasegawa, this history has resulted in an artistic sense fusing aestheticism (shinbisei) with ethical elements. Shinbisei informs the Japanese person that there is a beauty in each shape, as in dance. This shape, or kata, is fundamentally different from the Western “ symbol” (al­ though it often functions in a similar manner). Hasegawa states that by maintaining its shape and fundamental mysteriousness, kata serves as a medium through which the kokoro (inner life) of the daily world rever­ berates in the mind o f the individual. That which is seen as “ stylized” in Kabuki by the foreigner is really the kata o f each character. Each shape, or kata, has a spiritual corollary showing the social position of the indi­ vidual. This, in turn, is based upon the historical unity and continuity of the Japanese people. It is shared by all Japanese people, no matter what their class. And, because the traditional arts are intuitively accessible to all members of the race, there is no distinction between “ high class” and “ low class” art. For this reason, entertainment and “ enlightenment” cannot and should not be divided one from the other (as they tend to be in the West). This line of thinking leads Hasegawa to his specific prescriptions for a uniquely Japanese culture film. As an instrument of intellectual train­ ing, it must maintain a fusion of i) intellectual content (communicated on an everyday level avoiding “ textbookishness” ) and 2) a high level of artistic treatment. Two conditions are necessary to achieve this fusion: intelligence and intuition. It is in the correct balancing of these two ele­ ments that Hasegawa seems to see the proper nurturing of the Jap a­ nese people of the future. Intelligence—by which he means the ana­ lytic faculty—informs and is informed by the “ intuition,” which resides at the heart of all Japanese arts.56 In short, Hasegawa proposed a role for culture film as something more than a mere tool for the intellectual training o f the Japanese pub­ lic. It is equally part o f the nation’s spiritual training program. We see this in his insistence that scientific knowledge has a certain modality, part of which is practical and part aesthetic. Hasegawa’s brand of seishinshugi (spiritism) has certain properties in common with the Greek no­ tion of paidea. Science is morality because one’s life is made orderly by a belief in it. At the same time, that which is truly “ scientific” has achieved its most aesthetically beautiful form. In this and in one other important aspect, Hasegawa’s wartime views come close to the ultranationalist position. He hails the Film Law

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as being “ the first effort to form and control our nation’s cinematic art.” He then attacks modern liberal society as the reason for the continued low quality o f cinematic art. In an oblique reference to Gresham’s Law, he says that “ because of the absolute freedom allowed in the film world, the bad films have filled up the market place, driving out the good ones.” 57 Active intervention by the authorities is therefore to be welcomed. When he draws a parallel to Kabuki, Hasegawa’s point becomes quite clear. Kabuki grew spontaneously out of town culture in the feudal era. If the Bakufu government had not intervened in its development— regulating this element and proscribing that—it would not have achieved the marvelous flowering it did. Art seems to flourish only when it is put under the limitations and constraints of the era in which it finds itself. These include political restrictions, as well as those of class and historical necessity.58 Thus, in this case, Hasegawa comes close to iden­ tifying the political forces operating to repress culture as the very ele­ ments nurturing it. This is the same paradox residing at the heart of all totalitarian cultural theories. Perhaps in a different historical context, Hasegawa’s opinions would have less of an ideological aroma. In the 1941 context, however, he seems to be a virtual fellow traveler of such ultranationalists as Otsuka KyOichi. In an article in Eiga Hydron in early 1939 “Japanese Film at the Crossroads,” Otsuka says: At this very moment Japan stands at one of the great turning points in history and, in carrying out its mission of rebuilding Asia, she must thrust aside all opposition. We Japanese have the blood of our ancestors throbbing in our veins. It is unthinkable that we should ever allow our splendidJapaneseness to fall into ruin. On the contrary, this love for things Japanese is destined to well up within the creative artists among us, taking on marvelous new forms. Seen from this vantage point, the way forward forJapanese cinema is the bringing to real life that unique beauty which is native toJapan. It is this which we must carry with us as we march out into the world.59 Imamura Taihei, the second grand theorist, was of course no friend to the “ blood and spirit” school o f thought or to their pseudoanthropological hymns of racial self-worship. In recoiling from them, he used his analytical brilliance to wrap himself in abstract theory. As a result, how­ ever, he ended up weaving fantastic pipe dreams, which were of little use to actual documentary filmmakers.

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Imamura insisted on placing the genre in the vanguard of a huge transformation that would overtake all of art. The art of the future, he said, would progressively shed its fictional elements and embrace “ doc­ umentary truth.” At the same time, the documentary would begin to re­ produce the genres that were once exclusive to fiction: “ The future of the documentary film is to diversify itself into the various genres of the narrative and eventually to supplant the drama film from its old preem­ inence. Imagine if you will, several different individuals making their own documentaries on the same subject. The results would vary accord­ ing to their talents and personalities. One documentary might be like a drama, another like a poem, yet another like a grand epic. Still, they would all be documentaries dealing in fact, rather than some form of fiction. The process I describe here is not merely a future potential; it is fast becoming a present reality.” 60 In the end, such conjecturing by establishment intellectuals had very litde impact on the actual production of culture films. The cluster of small- and middle-sized production companies were of course delighted by the boom in business brought to them by the Film Law. But the ac­ tual filmmakers, or some of them at least, were made tense by being thrust so far into the national limelight. In the spring of 1940, documen­ tary cameraman Yoshida Shigeru issued this plea in Eiga to Ongaku: “ I hope the Education Ministry and the various magazine and newspaper critics will not be like an overcurious stranger whose fondling and pok­ ing causes the newborn baby to suffocate.” 61 The Makers o f Culture Film A remarkable number of the filmmakers who responded eagerly to the Film Law’s demand for high quality films capable of serving the “ pub­ lic enlightenment” needs of the nation had once been members of Purokino (The Japanese Proletarian Film League). Purokino was a Communist-backed documentary film movement that had flourished from 1928 until its final suppression in 1934. Its avowed intention was “ to use the camera as a tool to grasp social reality and as a recording weapon in the bloody struggle for liberation.” 62 The movement had sent many socially concerned young men off to various corners of Japan, armed with their Eyemo cameras, to record social injustices and left wing demonstrations. For Iwasaki Akira and many others, the movement provided first time experience and instruction in the craft of filmmaking.

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Many were subsequently arrested, imprisoned, and at least threat­ ened with torture. As with many of their counterparts from the literary and academic worlds, a significant number committed tenko as a result of the experience (or simply through an original lack of conviction). After this, a sizeable number went to work for the documentary divisions of PCL, Manchurian Film Association (Man’ei) and elsewhere. One of the chief beneficiaries of this influx of talent was Geijutsu Eigasha (lit., Art Film Co.). Its staff included such former Purokino members as Atsugi Taka, Iwasaki TarO, and Inoue Kan. From Purotto, the theatre-world counterpart of Purokino, came Wakayama Kazuo and Kobayashi Eiji. The latter had been arrested in 1939 in connection with the “ Red Purge” launched against teachers in Nagano Prefecture. For some, the very act of moving into the company seemed to inspire a form of tenko, causing them to renounce their old leftism and embrace progovernment positions. Such was the case of Inoue Kan who now tended to specialize in war documentaries with a strong collaborationist flavor. His widely praised Young Warriors of the Sky (Sora no Shonen Hei, 1941) documented the training of youths in the Navy’s Yokaren cadet academy. The close-up shots of the pilot’s tense, childish faces as they go through their midair exercises, along with the remarkable (and dangerous) footage of planes wheeling in the air was compared favorably with the spectacularly suc­ cessful drama film, Burning Sky (Moyuru Ozora). In 1942, Inoue made Ea­ gles o f the Sea (Umiwashi), another documentary with aerial footage, about an air unit stationed in China. Founded in 1937, Geijutsu Eigasha made nothing remarkable dur­ ing the first two years of its existence. In order to keep going, it fol­ lowed the usual pattern o f companies dependent upon specially com­ missioned films, making shorts for various government agencies. With Ishimoto Tokichi’s Snow Country (YuJciguni, 1939), a study of a farming village in Yamagata Prefecture and its struggle for existence during the winter months, Geijutsu Eigasha sprang to prominence as a producer of genuine culture films. According to documentary film historian Tanikawa YOshio, “A brilliandy edited depiction of the struggle of farmers against the ravages of winter, Snow Country captured the hearts of general moviegoers across the nation. The film helped the docu­ mentary industry graduate from the realm of humble newsreel footage and finally establish its product as an art form in its own right.” 63 Noda Shinkichi, who shares this estimation, pointed out that “ in the prewar period, depictions o f such struggles with nature often had the ulterior

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purpose of putting forth a disguised and extremely indirect critique of contemporary reality.” 64 Thanks to the high standards it set for itself, Geijutsu Eigasha be­ came respected as a company sincerely dedicated to a move toward world class documentary filmmaking. It solidified its leading position by publishing Bunka Eiga Kenkyu, a magazine devoted to the growing debate over the nature and future of documentary film in Japan. This, of course, did not mean that it was impervious to the propaganda de­ mands of the government. In addition to Inoue Kan’s films, mentioned above, it churned out such features as The People Stand Up (Tachiagaru Hitobito), depicting regional military hospitals. Starting in 1940, it began turning out “ Documentary Reports on the Continent” in line with the Information Bureau’s new Building the New Order propaganda pro­ gram. Such included Canton, South China, Economy o f South China, and Electrification of the Continent. Toho, of course, was also the producer of excellent “ pure” docu­ mentaries. In addition to the distinguished work by Kam ei Fumio, it had a crew of ten to twelve other directors capable of rising to the occa­ sion. Yoshino Keiji’s Snow Crystals (Tuki no Kessho, 1939) became a criter­ ion of excellence for works of its sort and received homage both at Ven­ ice and at the Pacific Scientific Congress, held in Chicago. Yoshino’s microscopic examination of artificial snow moves through the various stages of crystallization, until the flakes blossom out in their infinite va­ riety of wondrous shapes. According to Tsumura, writing in 1943, the special quality of Toho films was that they took a broad-ranging view of their subjects, filling the screen with beautiful images. Compared to the quality of the smaller companies, he rated the Toho productions as “viewable, at the very least.” He apparendy was thinking of the product of the Tokyo Hassei Co., about which he wrote, “ The very mention of the name Tokyo Hassei brings a glaze to my eye, causing me to lose my appetite for the rest of the week.” 65 Nor did Tsumura have a high opinion of Shochiku’s culture film di­ vision. Although it also turned out military features, none o f them com­ pared with the great features produced by Toho, and only Takagi To­ shiro’s The Advance on Canton (Koto Shingun, 1940) merited special mention. Tsumura dismisses its nonmilitary subjects, commenting that “ the best that can be said about the Shochiku features is that they sometimes suc­ ceed on the sentimental level; their structuring however remains consis­ tently brainless.” 66 As the company of Kido Shir 5, who took credit for

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the idea of including culture film in the Film Law, such criticism must have been a blow to Shochiku pride. Jujiya Documentary Films Corporation specialized in science films, pure and simple. O r not so “ simple” as Tsumura complains: “ their films have a mechanistic quality reminiscent of a lesson in a cram school.” 67 Its list, including Life of a Cicada, Life of a Dragonfly, and Man and the Para­ sites, was basically intended for schools. Riken Scientific Films Company was the true master in the field of pure science films. Established in the spring of 1938, it was to continue in an expanded form right up to the last months of the war turning out in May 1945 Mountains and Water, a film about the prevention of moun­ tain erosion through replanting. The range of natural science subjects it covered was huge: Plankton, Life o f the Seabirds, Sounds, Evaporation, The Sun, The Oshima Volcano, and a host of other scientific subjects. Shimomura Kenji, a young genius whose interest in bird life led him into filmmaking, directed many of the latter. Shimomura’s A Day in the Tideland (Aruhi no Higata, 1940), a study via telephoto lens of the teeming life on a shoreline at ebb tide, was to become Japan’s most celebrated pure sci­ ence film of the entire era, winning every prize in the field. “Pure” Science and the Screen o f “Ambiguity” In a significant passage in his Films and Filmgoing (1943), Tsumura Hideo comments that “ We often hear on the tongues of people such prolix phrases as ‘the scientificality of the documentary film,’ suggesting that it has some deep affinity with the natural sciences. In this country, not just the social scientists but almost everybody in the humanities is eager to paint himself as some kind of ‘scientist.’ ” 68 Tsumura is prodding a sensitive nerve hidden just below the surface of the documentary filmmaker in wartime Japan. The emphasis on nat­ ural science, or “ pure” (in other words, noncontroversial) science, was actually a means of eliding the fact that the objective, “ documentary” base of the culture film was at this time adrift in ambiguity. In the intel­ lectual and psychological context of the late-thirties-to-mid-forties pe­ riod, the formula of Wakon Tosai—referring to the Meiji era marriage of convenience between “ Western knowledge” and ‘Japanese spirit” —was splitting once again into its original dichotomy. Western knowledge was officially held to be infected. It was the source o f alien ideologies, the source of “ dangerous thought.” Where once such opprobrium had applied only to communism, anarchism,

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socialism, and other forms of radical sedition, it was now being ex­ tended to Christians, liberals, and social scientists in the Western tradi­ tion. To some ultranationalists, even the objective sciences were sources o f skepticism and materialism. Rejection o f the scientific method, as applied to the study of society, was already well advanced. In 1933, Minister of Education Hatoyama IchirO had ordered the suspension of Kyoto University professor Takikawa Yukitoki, who was known for his liberal theories on law. In those days, it was necessary for Hatoyama to claim that such thought was “ Marxist.” Then came the turn of Minobe Tatsukichi, whose perfecdy reasonable Essentials o f the Constitution, containing the notion of the Emperor as “ an organ of the state,” was attacked in the 1934-35 Diet anc* ^ en banned. Minobe him­ self barely escaped assassination in 1936 and was arrested in 1938. Thereafter, books and individuals were banned indiscriminately, not because they were “ Marxistic,” but because they were liberal or “ ration­ alistic.” With the architects of Japan’s New Order moving swiftly to im­ pose their own meaning on every aspect o f life in the nation, there was precious little territory left for “ objective” treatments by documentary filmmakers. Films of social criticism were o f course out all together, with the possible exception of deeply encoded films of the Yukiguni sort. Sociological and anthropological studies, ethnographies, historical treatments of Japanese history (except of the “ right” sort), and treat­ ments of the various problems affecting daily life were perilous. Nothing in the Film Law specifically banned them; indeed the word­ ing seemed to encourage them. In any case, specific decrees were far too vague to be a safe guide through the welter o f ministries and bureaucrat personalities empowered to censor or even proscribe a film. One simply “ never knew,” for certain. And this ignorance, this anxiety, and the overaccommodating spirit that it bred made the bland objectivity of the “ pure” science film seem a safe haven. It became the place of retreat for those whose probing, creative spirit had been housebroken. As a result, makers of science films continued to pursue their minute studies of weather patterns, plant and animal life cycles, and the pro­ cesses by which everyday necessities were manufactured. Significandy, “ pure” science films abjured genuinely speculative subjects, such as theoretical physics. Not only were they difficult to make, precedents in other totalitarian societies—Stalin’s U SSR , for example —earmarked them as potentially dangerous. “ The Scientific Mind,” a term put into popular use by Minister of Education Hashida, referred to a science of close observation. The term was coupled in the public mind with the

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Ad for The Story o f the Microbes (Jujiya Culture Films), a “ pure science” film using micro­ scopic cinem atography (F.igajunpo, O ctober 1941).

image of men peering through microscopes and telescopes. Indeed, Japanese documentary' explorations into the cinematic possibilities of these instruments of magnification ranked among the best in the world. The violation of the haven of “ pure science” was only a matter of time. In 1940, Toho director Akimoto Ken made the film The Geology of M l. Fuji (Fuji no Chishitsu), narrated by the benshi Tokugawa Musei and scripted by none other than Kamei Fumio. Although it was awarded the Kinema Junpo Best Four spot for the year, it caused ominous flashes on the horizon. As its title purported, the aim was an applica­ tion o f the scientific mind to the most revered (indeed, deified) moun­ tain o f Japan. The very notion o f such an analysis was an implicit challenge to the ultranationalist iconography according to which the mountain was the ageless unchanging symbol of the “ Eternal Land of the Gods,” Japan. Taking a geological perspective and demonstrating how the present shape of the mountain is simply a fleeting stage in its ceaseless evolution and transformation, Kamei may possibly have meant the film to be a veiled attack on the “ antiscientific” nature o f the

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ultranationalist position. The attack did not go unnoticed; several newspaper articles branded the film a sacrilege. The Home Ministry also let it be known that it gready disapproved of such a “ disrespectful” treatment of a hallowed national symbol. The film could have fared worse. But Akimoto, apparendy through a failure o f nerve, tended to visually portray the mountain in a static manner, thus undercutdng the thematic intent of the script. According to fellow filmmaker Noda Shinkichi, this seriously flawed its aesthetic merit as well: “ It turned into a run-of-the-mill ‘education’ film, a regrettable but probably ines­ capable development.” 69 That the autonomy of “ pure science” was nearing its end was underscored less than a year later. A 1941 Riken film actually bearing the name The Scientific Mind (Kagaku Suru Kokoro) featured a lecture by Ed­ ucation Minister Hashida. From the mysteries of organic electricity, the discussion subdy veers into a discourse on modern national defense and the need for increased armaments. The makers of science films increasingly found themselves between the horns of a dilemma; on the one side was the pressure o f ideology, on the other was the stigma of irrelevance. Burrowing into the comfortable political ambiguity afforded by the “ pure” science film, they often bur­ rowed too deep. In making their escape from the controversial present, they often strayed into the arcane. “ This film tells us more about the subject than we could ever want to know . . . who but a specialist could follow the logic of this piece?” 70 were oft repeated complaints in the magazine columns dedicated to culture film. Kamei Fumio, in his brief term as documentary film critic for Nihon Eiga, referred to the tendency toward informauon overload, characterized by a continuous stream of minutiae, as “ telegraphic encodement” : “ One can well imagine the dis­ tress of someone on the receiving end, the viewer in this case, who dis­ covers that the code simply does not afford decipherment.” 71 In his Explanation o f the Film Law (1941), even Fuwa Suketoshi took ex­ ception to this tendency, warning severely that documentary makers must “ avoid explanations which can be understood only by those with highly specialized knowledge. Keep in mind the true nature of cinema as the medium best suited for communicating with the general public.” 72 Still, the yearning for the unassailable objectivity of scientific truth was to be found everywhere in society at the time. It was not just the filmmakers. In a somewhat different context, members of a zadankai published in the January 1940 issue of Bungei Shunju referred to it as “ pining for the bland abstraction of purity.” 73

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In the ivory tower of grand film theory, far above the heads of film­ makers working in the field, the term “ science” still had the ring of au­ thority. “ Documentary film: Is it art or is it science?” they queried one another. The general consensus was that it was not, or should not be, “ art.” “ The prestige of documentary film is today at its peak because it alone is the medium for the scientific presentation of unmediated real­ ity,” Iijima Tadashi wrote in late 1939, “ The presentation of reality is the central function of the documentary. Its journalistic nature must be given full play now.. . . No pretensions about ‘art’ should be allowed to cloud its presentational lucidity.” 74 Imamura Taihei was at the forefront of the “ art-science” debate. Throughout the wartime period, he consistendy espoused a faith in sci­ entific knowledge and the scientific method. In this sense, at least, he was at odds with the superpatriotic irrationalists. In fact, for him, the ul­ timate model for the documentary film—including those films designed to carry a wartime propaganda message—was to be the science film. In such films, the basic facts are objectively there. The task of the science film director is to go beyond merely explaining the facts. He must bring his art into play (yes, Imamura does see a role for “ art” in the documen­ tary film) by depicting the process by which the facts have been derived: “ It is no longer a matter of simply explaining the end-product conclu­ sions of research; one must vivify the process by which they were reached. In this way, science can be made dramatic and even artistic.” 75 By rooting the documentary in the science film, Imamura is clearly trying to inoculate the entire genre against the antiscientific, analogical attitudes of such spiritist film critics as Sawamura Tsutomu. For Sawamura, it was not the correctness of the factual content but the correct­ ness of the filmmaker’s belief system that made all the difference: “ In culture films, the political and philosophical posture of the filmmaker is o f paramount importance. He must dedicate his whole being to the awakening possibilities of our new State. If he does that, works of great strength and beauty are sure to arise and come forth.” 76 Imamura seems to be responding to such pronouncements when he warns against the notion that “ a wonderful art can arise from a faulty, nonscientific basis.” 77 At the same time, however, Imamura’s naïve acceptance of the au­ thority of the scientific fact as the basis of documentary films had wor­ risome implications. As SatO Tadao points out: “We can no longer leave science exclusively to the scientists. Society as a whole must make the decisions about what kind of research should be funded by the state and

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the social goals to be set for the technology of the future. In other words, it is very important not only to tell a scientific fact correcdy and interest­ ingly; one must also evaluate it socially and ethically.” 78 In the science films of the wartime period, the viewer is left with no indication of the ideological purposes being served by the film’s presen­ tation of its facts. A film dramatically presenting the research leading to the development of superior bomber sights, for instance, is a powerful means of impressing the viewer with the nation’s military might. The end result, in such a case, is political propaganda, effectively masque­ rading as scientific enlightenment. Imamura’s writings on culture film shared in the moral ambiguity of the era. This became more pronounced over the next several years. Writing about “ The Correct Path for Culture Films” in 1943, he still in­ voked “ science” as the panacea: “ the real reason for the unscientific quality of so many of our culture films is to be found in the overall back­ wardness of science in this country.” 79 And, at a time when it must have been dangerous to do so, he could still assault the irrationalism of the spiritism advocates: “There are some who in their overzealous advocacy o f the spiritist approach are completely out of tune with the modern age, sneering at science and disregarding even the minimum of ration­ ality.” 80 At the same time, however, he places limits on his argument with these “ irrationalists.” He makes it clear that under the conditions of “ the world war of ideologies,” even the full-blown spiritist is a comrade-in-arms. The differences between the two are over means rather than ends. In the end, the appeal of truth-seeking seems to have lost its intrinsic value to Imamura. “ Factuality” had become an instrument in service to the state; its value was now to be judged by its ability to create a more plausible form of propaganda. In place o f “ truthfulness,” he invoked the need for “ logicality,” the peculiar use of which drifts perilously close to Sawamura Tsutomu’s “ correctness of faith.” Imamura states that, for propaganda to work, it must have its facts right. And, only sound logic is capable of establishing the accuracy of a fact. When we say it is true, we mean that it jibes with logic.. . . Now, it is often said that the central function of propaganda is to lead people into a different way of considering things, and this again points to a central role for logicality. Only logic is capable of swaying people in their opinions. Illogical propaganda is nihilism, demagoguery. Although it might seem effective for a while, it inevitably wrecks itself on the hard rocks of fact. Clearly,

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such propaganda will do more harm than good in any prolonged conflict, such as the present one. Adolf Hider confirms this observation when he says, “facts are the most powerful propaganda.”81 The “Propaganda Problem ” From the early days of the Japanese cinema, movies often carried strongly nationalistic messages, but these tended to be haphazard, de­ pending upon the convictions o f the individual filmmakers. Such films were, in any case, never intended to inculcate a consistent worldview in their viewers. This of course reflected a lack of consensus within gov­ ernment circles as to what that view should be. In the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident, certain elements in the military, such as Araki Sadao, did try to use cinema as part of their effort to propagate their own ideology. Despite the occasional use of adroit montage sequences, however, their “ lecture films” made little impact on the public. One aspect of the “ propaganda problem” —as it emerged in the mid-thirties—was the general aversion toward the very term “ propa­ ganda.” Within the military, propagandistic manipulation of facts was still widely equated with lying, an activity “ utterly incompatible with the military spirit.” Compounding the issue was the fact that the same word, senden, was also used to indicate commercial advertising. “ The public looks down on the political propagandist as if he were some sort of snake-oil salesman!” 82 a military observer complained in 1932, about the popular confusion. In 1940, Tsumura Hideo repeated the lament: “The term carries the direst of connotations, as if it were the tool of vil­ lains, allowing them to make the blackest of deeds appear white as snow.” 83 Sporadic efforts to substitute a different term continued into the Pacific War, serving only to make this dimension of modern warfare all the more murky. As we have seen, concern about the propaganda effect of films dates from the international reaction to the Manchurian crisis. With the out­ break of the China war—and especially in its confrontation with China’s burgeoning Resist Japan movement—this concern became critical to the Japanese government. The time had come to grapple with the problem head-on. The emergence in the mid-thirties of the term “ national policy” had created a category heading, at least, for films intended to carry out a propaganda function. However, the only place where film was specifi­ cally linked with “ propaganda” was the section in the Film Law dealing

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with culture film. And even here, close inspection of the section reveals an overlapping o f purposes, suggesting that the specific notion of “ polit­ ical indoctrination” had yet to emerge as something distinct from the old-time “ good citizenship” training of the classroom. The framers of the law left themselves ample leeway to accommo­ date policy as it coalesced. This was because they could never decide exacdy what sort of propaganda effect they wanted from the culture film. They were careful to make the wording o f the law sound nondraconian, since it was their hope to stimulate the industry to supply its own specific solutions to the problem. From the reform bureaucrats’ standpoint, this was a sign o f their own enlightened attitude toward administration. To the actual producers of film, however, such vagueness remained the source o f endless irritation and anxiety. After all, it set up the bureaucrat (along with certain representatives of the military) as “ finicky buyers,” who could at any time reject what did not suite them. By making the exhibition o f certain kinds of film compulsory, the government approved only those films that served its purposes. Those that did not simply were not granted the culture film designation (or had it withdrawn, as in the case o f Kam ei’s Fighting Soldiers). Films denied this distinction were usually consigned to the studio warehouse. The confusion over what should constitute a culture film and what propaganda functions it should serve was never fully resolved. Certainly the Film Law itself offered little help, since the definition o f a “ culture film” drifts from one bureaucratic ambiguity to another. The first line of Article 15 refers to “ films providing special benefits for civilian educa­ tion,” while in the second line it becomes “ films important for enlight­ enment propaganda.” In his Explanation of the Film Law, Fuwa Suketoshi makes a distinction between three types of culture film: 1) the culture film proper, designed to carry out the (vaguely defined) task of cultural elevation; 2) topical news features, with special emphasis on coverage of the war, and; 3) en­ lightenment propaganda (keimo senden) films, dedicated to the purpose of persuading the populace to support a particular policy or program.84 Therefore, on paper, at least, explicidy propagandistic films were kept in sanitary isolation from the rest—a further indication perhaps of the general anxiety stirred by the term senden. Furthermore, the exam­ ples provided by Fuwa of “ enlightenment propaganda” all fit neady and unexceptionably within the category o f “ public service” : encourage­ ment o f sending parcels to the troops at the front or the construction of more veteran’s hospitals.85 While the need for political propaganda

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must have been prominent in Fuwa’s mind, he allows it to go largely un­ mentioned. Whenever he approaches the topic, he thrusts it back into obscurity, referring to the need for “ wholesome, inspirational and in­ structive films.” 86 Complicating matters was the fact that the framers of the law apparentiy really did intend to inspire the production of films of genuine cul­ tural (as well as propaganda) value. Mixed with all the manipulative cynicism was an equal measure o f genuine idealism. The problem was that the bureaucrats were psychologically trapped within their own “ control methodology.” A ruling principle of that methodology in­ formed them that more effective cooperation could be obtained by forc­ ing those they controlled to develop their own hypotheses as to what was required of them. This was the remote control “ button” Fuwa and oth­ ers believed they need only to push in order to generate “ creativity.” Looming large in the background were the accomplishments of the Soviets and the Germans; both had taken immense strides toward turn­ ing political propaganda into, almost literally, an “ art form.” Their suc­ cess tantalized Japanese critics, increasing their irritation at the “ crud­ ity” of Japan’s own efforts in the field. In his book An Introduction to the Movies (1943), a little volume written for high schoolers, Nagahara Yukio wrote: “ Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will impresses all the world with the greatness of the German race. In terms of such political so­ phistication, the films we make here in Japan still have a very long way to go.” 87 Imamura Taihei, although he remained uninfected by any kind of Nazi ideology, was equally impressed by Germany’s ability to mount gi­ gantic propaganda spectacles. When Leni Riefenstahl’s Fest der Volker premiered in June 1940, he wrote enviously that “ only Germany’s na­ tionalized film industry could produce such a masterpiece, thus proving that progress for documentary film demands the highest level of state commitment. In Japan the genre remains the victim o f parsimonious commercial producers.” 88 Writing three years later, Imamura went on to urge the adoption of specific techniques from Soviet and German propaganda cinema: “ Po­ litical geniuses such as Stalin and Hider have a firm appreciation of the spectacle aspect of politics and they are endlessly inventive in finding ways to enthrall the masses and to bring them into deep spiritual com­ munion with the state. Unless Japanese filmmakers school themselves in this area of technique, they will never be able to summon up and unify the patriotic emotions of their audience.” 89 Imamura’s comment here

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actually misses the mark. The China Incident documentaries were often just as sophisticated and inventive in terms of propaganda “ technique” as their German counterparts. The root cause of the Propaganda Prob­ lem lay elsewhere, at a level far more difficult to remedy. It was the lack of a consensus as to what made good propaganda. Further, it was the lack of national coordination of the propaganda efTort or even a general sense of the urgent need for such coordination. As a result, responsibil­ ity for communicating the “ wrong message” was thrust back on the filmmakers themselves. The scandal over Fighting Soldiers was a case in point. Both Kamei and the Toho executives had believed that it fitted the bill perfecdy as a propaganda piece, a confidence echoed by many critics. The entire doc­ umentary film community was therefore shocked by the intensely hos­ tile reaction it stirred among the army brass. In the end, this work of world-class craftsmanship was never submitted for formal censorship and therefore never released for general viewing. The effect of such un­ pleasant lessons was to spread waves of irrational fear throughout the industry, eventually strengthening the tendency toward the “ sandwichboard ballyhoo” films condemned by Atsugi Taka. As with the case of all military propaganda, the ultimate judge was the military itself. But the armed services were sorely riven by intense disputes over ideology and even strategic policy. First there was the Im­ perial Way versus Control Faction conflict, which, even after its bloody “ solution” in the aftermath of the 26 February Incident of 1936, contin­ ued to smolder. Then there was the alarming breakdown o f command in the early days of the China Incident, pitting the Army Ministry against the Military Affairs Bureau and the middle-ranking young zeal­ ots at the front. Army-navy relations were also marred by ill will and huge differences over policy. To top it all off, a considerable number of army (and navy) officers continued to equate propaganda with “ unmanly lies.” This was despite the fact a substantial body of research on the subject had already been amassed for the use of “ information” (i.e., propaganda) units recendy attached to both branches of the military. Regular officers tended to look down on the new Information Division officers as effete parvenus. With no understanding of propaganda warfare as an area of specialty, they had little respect for those assigned to carry it out. And, when it came to judging the propaganda merits of, say, a particular documen­ tary, they were confident they knew as much as the experts—more, in fact, since they instinctively understood “ the military spirit.” That

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which caused the damning of Kam ei’s film, for instance, was its “ mis­ representation o f the spirit of the army.” The issue of “ propaganda consciousness” was first raised in 1921, when Asahi Shinbun ran a series of articles crediting the British propa­ ganda unit, Lord Northcliffe’s “ Crewe House,” with breaking the mo­ rale of the Central Powers in the final days of the Great War: “ The Kaiser’s forces, invincible on the field of batde, dissolved into mud be­ fore an onslaught of English words and images.” 90 The Germans, the article maintained, failed to appreciate two new dimensions of modern “ total war” —the economic and the intellectual. However, it was not until the aftermath of the Manchurian Inci­ dent, ten years later, that the concept of “ intellectual warfare” (shisdsen) began to make headway among the upper echelons of the military. Japan had just suffered its own propaganda “ defeat” —for such was the general evaluation of the “ misunderstanding” leading to the Litton Commission’s condemnation of the incursion. In 1932, army and navy ministry officials formed an Emergency Situation Study Circle to dis­ cuss ways of countering the troublesome disinformation (dema) cam­ paign being waged by the Nationalists against them in China. Among other matters, the latter were claiming that Morinaga, Japan ’s top candy manufacturer, was peddling poisoned candy on the mainland. The Study Circle’s status, however, was unofficial and its meetings intermittent. The China Incident served to intensify efforts to coordinate “ intel­ lectual warfare” strategies for both the home front and the battlefront. The old army-navy study circle was given new life as an official “ advi­ sory” board and apportioned offices in the prime minister’s residence. Its new tide was the Cabinet Information Board (naikakujohobu). Three years later, in 1940, it was elevated further, as the Cabinet Information Bureau, with sweeping powers and a staff eventually totaling 550. For its headquarters, the Bureau took over the imposing Imperial Theater Building in the heart of the swank entertainment district of Tokyo between Hibiya Park and the Imperial Hotel. The Shinkokugeki theater troupe had been performing there but was abrupdy ousted when the bureaucrats moved in. The building’s opulent trappings, the potted palms, and the crimson carpet spread out in the spacious, marble-floored lobby, were left intact. Many o f the Bureau’s executive offices were occupied by active duty military men who were there to give their branches of service a more di­ rect role in manipulating public opinion. The chief of the First Division

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Tani M asaharu, acting director o f the Cabinet Inform ation Bureau (Shashin Shuho, O ctober 1942).

(planning) was a navy man, and an army man headed the Second Divi­ sion (information). Foreign Ministry officials staffed the Third Division (foreign affairs). Command of the Fourth Division, which censored printed matter, phonograph records, plays, and films, was assigned to a Home Ministry bureaucrat. The same was true of the Fifth Division, which dealt with film policy. Buried deep in the organizational chart, therefore, was a potential empire of totalitarian controls. Its mandate, to “ unify and coordinate information strategies among the various branches o f the military,” seemed to indicate it would be a Goebbels-style propaganda ministry.91 But such was not to be. Although army and navy men held key bureau posts, the two branches maintained their own independent propa­ ganda units and continued to work at cross purposes deep into the Pa­ cific War. Designing and producing the instruments of propaganda warfare — pamphlets, flyers, films, and so on—was equally anarchic, with results that were often counterproductive. In 1940, the army sponsored a parttime group of civilian admen to write copy for ordinary consumer items, incorporating a strong national policy message. Inevitably, the admen fell victim to a conflict of interests. The unit collapsed when it

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came to light that they were taking a double salary, one from the army and another from the product manufacturers. In August of the same year, yet another army-backed outfit set up shop in a nondescript downtown Tokyo office building. Stenciled on the door was “ Tanaka Trading Company,” and even army officers were re­ quired to wear civilian business suits as they entered and exited the premises. Inside, some of the nation’s top cartoonists worked to produce leaflets designed to be dropped over enemy lines. Despite its drab exte­ rior, it was a prestigious operation, with an advisory board including prominent diet member Tsurumi Yusuke and Foreign Minister Matsuoka YOsuke. Many of the multicell cartoons had storylines created by the immensely popular mystery writer Edogawa Rampo. Those di­ rected at Chinese troops lampooned the Kuomintang and promoted the Japanese puppet regime based in Nanjing. In the early days of the Pa­ cific War, however, the leaflets underwent a profound transformation as they targeted U.S. troops. A favored new theme was the infidelity of wives and girlfriends back home. The illustrations moved from the lurid to the pornographic. When they were delivered to the fronts in the Phil­ ippines and elsewhere, local commanders were outraged by their “ un­ military” spirit and ordered them burned by the baleful. Throughout the China Incident and into the Pacific War, Japanese propagandists tended to follow the guidelines laid down in 1937 by theo­ rist Koyama EizO. “ Untruths should be avoided,” he wrote, “ because the truth tends to come back with a vengeance. The short-term benefits of a disinformation [dema] campaign are all too soon replaced by long­ term distrust.” 92 This of course did not mean all the facts need be re­ ported. The art of the propagandist lay in “ contextualizing” inconven­ ient developments so as to minimize their influence. The counteropinion, represented by Komeyama KenzO and Kuriya Yoshizumi, began to gain ground after 1939. “ Propaganda must use all available means at its disposal,” Kuriya held, “ and this under certain conditions includes deception.” He openly criticized the “ self-defeating moralism” o f the traditional Japanese military commander as “ unin­ formed, naive and mistaken.” 93 Komeyama’s influential handbook War and Propaganda presented a detailed, practical guide to dema disinforma­ tion tactics, based on years o f research. As long as Japan continued winning on the batdefield, the gulf between the two positions remained academic, with propagandists drawing on each according to the situation and the oudook o f his own unit. In eariy 1943, however, as the war situation grew dark, the military'

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high command took to disguising tactical retreats as “ repositionings” (lenshin). Thereafter, disinformation became the name of the game in the form o f trumped-up victories and absurdly exaggerated “ war re­ sults.” With such dema now at the center of the nation’s propaganda strategy, the kempeitai military police became obsessed with the notion that enemy disinformation was making inroads among the general pop­ ulation, undermining its will to continue the war. By the last year of the war, even the most moderate expression of dissatisfaction was seen as the direct result of enemy psychological manipulation. The thought po­ lice made careful analyses of every bit of graffiti scribbled on walls, and a worker’s ill-timed sigh on the assembly line could result in his or her arrest and endless hours of questioning. And, Finally, a “Reality Problem” In his famous postwar study Propaganda: The Study o f Men’s Attitudes, Jaques Ellul makes the point that the more educated a man, the more susceptible he becomes to the allure o f propaganda. The reason is that “ modern man worships ‘facts’ —that is he accepts ‘facts’ as the ultimate proof of reality. Facts in themselves provide evidence and proof, and he willingly subordinates values to them; he obeys what he believes to be necessity.” 94 Takeyama Michio (author o f The Harp o f Burma) found a similar mechanism at work among Japanese intellectuals of the war period: “Among the great unsolved mysteries troubling my mind is the degree to which intelligent Japanese were genuinely duped by the propaganda of the era and the manner in which they purposely duped themselves into believing what they knew to be patently false,” he writes in his Psy­ chological History o f the Showa Era. According to Takeyama, the intellec­ tuals who publicly praised Japan ’s aggression in China as a “ holy war” were not consciously lying, rather they were simply “ obeying the domi­ nant social perception” of the era: “ It’s like the story of the ‘emperor’s new clothes.’ Those who see him parading down the street might have pointed out his nakedness if they had been alone. But they are mem­ bers of a group —of society, in fact—and they take it as their duty to accept and even support the pretense. It is a solemn fact that [during the war years] there was a collective social perception quite apart from that of the individual and it was this perception which, figuratively speaking, clothed the nakedness of the emperor. The boy in the story who pointed out that the emperor was unclothed would have, in the

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Yam am oto KajirO’s The Composition Class (Toho, 1938).

wartime context, been considered a fool, woefully lacking in the ability to distinguish between private and public perception.” 95 Yamamoto KajirO’s immensely popular film The Composition Class (Tsuzurikata Kydshitsu, 1938, Toho) depicts a young girl who commits the same “ crime” as the boy above. It is a true-life moral parable, of sorts, in which she eventually learns to respect the power of “ socialized percep­ tion” (shakaiteki chikaku). Linking four of the most famous autobiographical sketches by the child literary prodigy Toyota Masako, Yamamoto’s film depicts the wretched surroundings of her poverty-stricken family with a stark real­ ism clearly influenced by the high prestige of the “ documentary touch” of the late thirties. Masako’s teacher tries to nurture her talent as a writer. “ You have to write honestly,” he instructs his class, “ setting things down just as they appear before your eyes, things that have happened in the recent past. Set it all down in just the order you saw and heard the events. Just relax and let it flow.” 96 As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Masako’s observa­ tional and writing abilities are truly remarkable. In one essay, about a chicken that escapes into the yard when her father tries to kill it, she writes: “ When you crouch down as if you were repairing a geta sandal,

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it’s easy to catch them right away.” The photographic realism of de­ scribing the man’s movements in terms of everyday actions indicates Masako’s talent for quintessential description. It is summer vacation and a woman moving out of the neighbor­ hood presents Masako with a pair of rabbits. “At first I thought of giving it to our landlords, the Umekis, but they’re rather stingy despite being so rich and so I decided not to. The poor rabbit’d die from their pennypinching for sure.” The rabbits instandy become the central attraction in the Toyota household, and Masako sets to work on an essay about her new pets. It so impresses her teacher he secretly submits it to Red Bird youth magazine. When it appears in print, he hands the girl a copy. “ Mama! Mama!” Masako rushes up to her mother in the communal back yard they share with other slum dwellers. “ They’ve published my essay about the rabbits! Look!” The mother takes the magazine in her hands with a look of wonder and disbelief. “ Well isn’t this something! We’ll have to get you some kind of reward!” First one neighbor and then others gather around, sharing the girl’s joy. The scene ends with a close-up of Masako’s face as she drinks deliciously from the spurting water pipe at the well. Cut to the entryway of the teacher’s house where his wife waits to greet him: “ Something really awful’s happened!” “ What?” “ Miss Toyota’s essay, the one that was published? Well, its causing a big problem.” “ Why’s that?” “ She wrote about the Umeki family, you know. And she said that they were rich but stingy, right? Well, that’s got the Umekis on a ram­ page. One of their girls is in the third grade and somebody went and showed it to her. She came home bawling.” “ Now there’s a problem. I hadn’t foreseen that. What’ll I do about this now?” “ You litde fool!” Masako’s mother reviles her in a subsequent scene, “ How could you bad mouth a neighbor like that? And in print too!” Masako stands stunned. “ Do you have any idea what it would mean if Mr. Umeki got really mad at us? Do you?” Masako retreats out into the backyard as her mother follows, berating her ferociously. To the right, we see one of the neighbors at the well, taking it all in as she stolidly pounds away at a piece of laundry. She looks on with a terrible coldness.

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Although she was one of those who had joyfully congratulated Masako for her publication, circumstances have now changed, and she seems equally willing to see the girl receive the punishment she “ deserves.” This understated addition to the scene masterfully represents the fickle­ ness of seken (community opinion), a vasdy powerful force in traditional Japanese society. The next several scenes demonstrate the magnitude of Masako’s “ crime.” The teacher visits the Toyoda house to apologize for the trou­ ble. “Anyway, it was my carelessness that caused this. Masako just honesdy wrote what she’d heard. It was my decision to send the story to the magazine. I’m to blame.” At first the father tries to hide his chagrin, but he can’t contain himself. “ Its that little fool, Masako! She’s honest to a fault. Here she is a sixth grader already and she writes stupid stuff like that!” A few lines later, he admits the full scope of the disaster that has befallen them. “ If you hurt the feelings of important people like Mr. Umeki, its bound to be . . . well, terrible! H e’s very influential in this neighborhood, you know, so if you cross him, you won’t be able to get work anywhere around here.” In the next scene, the teacher is in the Umeki house, sitting stiffly in front of him. The latter waves his hand in front of his face, dismissing the incident. “ I hope you don’t think I’m that kind of person. I don’t hold grudges and make people go hungry! Ha-ha-ha!” But a moment later, his mood changes. “ Being a retired military man, you can be sure I would do nothing unjust. But if you want to be a contractor, you can’t do anything without the support of community opinion [seken]---- Pub­ lished stories like this one cause one to lose face. . . . Its all a matter of trust, you see? I have to take into account the opinion of the community. In the end, it would be my employees who would suffer.” Thereafter family troubles multiply. Work ceases to come the father’s way. His bicycle is stolen. He is swindled out of his pay when he does find the occasional job. While the immediate cause of all their ill fortune is not necessarily Masako’s essay, it continues to lie heavily on their minds. When the mother sees the girl fooling with pen and paper, she snaps, “ Masako, I hope you’re not going to go and write something stu­ pid again!” Masako has to pretend she has learned her lesson—“ Don’t worry, I’m not going to write anything!” And what is the lesson learned by those involved? The teacher, whose carelessness made him an “ accomplice” of sorts, has learned “ caution” and that even the naive veritism of a child’s essay can

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threaten the system of values vigorously policed by community opinion. “ Seken is a force you always have to reckon with. I see now what a big mistake it is to ignore it. Up to now, I’ve only been considering what it takes to write a good essay, but I see now that community opinion counts for a lot when judging the qualities of an essay like Masako’s.” When we realize that Umeki, the man whose “credibility” was in­ jured by the essay, is actually a kind of small-town politician, the mean­ ing of seken here becomes far more ominous. He is a man whose powers and interests are closely interwoven with the power structure of local so­ ciety. Like any politician, his own power is based upon maintaining an il­ lusion of goodness, fairness, and generosity, regardless of whether he possesses any of these qualities in reality. At all costs, he must maintain a public perception of himself as worthy of the confidence placed in him. This is what he means by “ credibility.” It does not matter what people think privately, nor does it matter that personal experience has shown them that he is a sham. What is important is that they be reminded that such perceptions must never, ever, be given public expression. Takeyama Michio speaks of a double-layered psychology operating on the public mind in this era: “ publicly acceptable thoughts and per­ ceptions which are allowed public expression on the one hand and pri­ vate thoughts and perceptions, which are not.” 97 Umeki’s power ulti­ mately derives from his ability to maintain the integrity o f this psychological structure —to do so, he must swiftly suppress any invasion of the lower (private) level into the upper (public, official) level. Any public indication that the lower level of perception even exists—such as Masako’s essay published in a magazine—threatens not only Umeki but, potentially, the entire social order o f the era. For the ruling caste, seken is a powerful tool indeed. Yet, as an illusion maintained by un­ spoken convention, it is a singularly fragile one. When someone breaks ranks - crying out loudly, “ Why, the Emperor has no clothes!” as it were—the illusion disappears into thin air. As an intellectual, the teacher has probably already achieved an in­ tuition into this secret mechanism within seken. The new lesson he has just learned is that community opinion has teeth; it has the power to coerce and to punish those who break its iron rules, even when such is done in all innocence. This is “ the way of the world,” because for all in­ tents and purposes Japan is the world. There is no mercy and no safe haven for those whom seken decides to persecute. All that is left to one is acceptance, silence. When confronted with facts that fail to conform to the official version of the truth, one can only avert one’s eyes.

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The remainder of the teacher’s speech to his wife appears to be a warning directed to liberal-minded teachers. Back in the TaishO period, in the days of Miyazawa Kenji and Arishima Takeo, such teachers had been the driving force in the best (and usually the most elite) elementary and middle schools. There, children were given considerable leeway to develop as individuals. The very notion o f a composition class similar to the one we see in the film, dated from the late TaishO period. In the first decade o f the ShOwa period (1926-35), the “ composition movement” gained further ground, with two nationally circulated magazines.98 With no precise equivalent in the West, its pedagogical methods were completely home grown. The notion was to use essay-writing as a means of consciousness-raising, first among well-to-do pupils and fi­ nally among children o f the nation’s wretchedly poor. It is not surpris­ ing, therefore, that in the mid- and late thirties, the movement found its strongest base in the Tohoku Region, which was reeling from the end­ less, terrible famines of 1925-38. By 1938, however, the era had begun to change. A massive “ red purge” of schoolteachers was just under way. In February 1940, the last o f the movement would be crushed in the suppression of the Daily Life Education Movement; fifty-five teachers from the Tohoku Region, along with others in Nagasaki, Yamaguchi, and Aichi prefectures, would be ar­ rested on charges o f “ Communist agitation among school children.” Some of the movement leaders would commit suicide in prison while others simply died of mistreatment there. In exact accord with the emerging government policy, the teacher in the film warns that the old liberal teaching methodologies pose a grave danger, not only to the instructors themselves, but to their pupils as well: “All this has brought home to me just how close a connection there is between what we do in our composition classes and in the world at large. Up to now, we have simply concerned ourselves with our narrow area o f responsibility, ignoring the big picture. But, if we don’t face up to the wider significance of what we are doing, we’ll be doing a serious disservice to the welfare of our own pupils.” 99 And, now, what is the lesson learned by Masako? She has learned to dissemble in the face o f intimidation. Although she will continue to write descriptions o f her life, this despite her mother’s reproach, she will confine her observations to a very personal level. She will write about the poverty she shares with her family, even about her father’s desperately unhappy plan to send her off to become a geisha, but she will make it all sound like a depiction o f the weather. She’s

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unhappy, but as her father would always say, “ Let tomorrow take care of itself.” The apparently “ happy” ending of the film seems to cancel out the earlier themes of poverty and oppression. Good fortune suddenly shines down on them all. The father has found a good full-time job. And this means Masako will not be sent off to be indentured after all. Instead she has found a job o f her own at a nearby factory. “ Look! You can see it right over there!” Masako chirps happily, clinging to the teacher’s arm as she and her classmates go for a last walk after graduation. “ Even though I’ll be working at the factory, I’m not going to quit essay-writing. In fact, I can’t wait to set down all the new experiences I’m bound to have.” The teacher’s farewell advice to her is almost unbelievable, con­ sidering what they have gone through together. “Yes, that’s right. From now on there’ll be all sorts of new experiences waiting for you. So, just like before, I want you to look at things carefully and write them up with your usual honesty. That’s the way people become a success in this world, you know.” 100 The teacher’s words are almost the same as before. By some secret agreement, however, the terms of discourse have been changed. “ Hon­ esty” no longer means what it once did. It is no longer coupled with “just the way things are, just the way it seemed to you.” Rather, the ad­ vice has subtly but clearly changed; now it is “ look at things carefully.” In other words, don’t look at things with the same naive honesty as be­ fore. Look at the facts, but see them in terms of what they axe supposed to mean. See where they fit into the officially prescribed order of meaning. It is as if the teacher were rephrasing the comment much heard among intellectual circles of the time: “ we have a kind of freedom of speech, but a freedom within bounds.” As Takeyama points out, “ In those days, such was the ‘freedom’ enjoyed by Japanese of all walks of life.” 101 Stay­ ing within the bounds is not only safe and moderately satisfying, Ma­ sako’s teacher informs us, “ it’s the way people become a success in this world.” Actually, o f course, these bounds had created an airless bell jar. As late as 1939-40, one witnesses intellectuals floundering in the suffocat­ ing environment. It was a motif that would surface abrupdy and gener­ ate a number of articles in leading intellectual magazines before fading away again. The fear was that the nation was losing its grasp on reality. Often it was in their titles rather than in their content that the articles signalled their sense of distress. The context for some was aesthetics: “ Is Artistic Objectivity a Possibility?” For others it was politics: “ How to

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Grasp the Reality of Our Era,” “ The Pretense o f Common Sense,” “ Pretense and Reality,” “ Politics and Common Sense,” and “ The Ideal and the Real.” 102 In 1939, Hazumi Tsuneo published an article with the title “ The Tendency to Evade Reality.” In it, he reviews a pair o f films, by Shima Koji and Shimizu Hiroshi, featuring children: “ Shima’s Roadside Beauty attempts to deal with problems whose forthright treatment is at present forbidden. Instead he peeks at them apprehensively through the eyes of children. Only the children have vivacity; the adults, who must con­ front the tragic reality intimated there, seem to scurry for cover when­ ever the camera is pointed in their direction.” 103 About Children o f Four Seasons (Kodomo no Shiki), Hazumi complains that its director Shimizu “ seems mesmerized by the surface details of his beautiful scenery. When human characters do finally make their appearance on screen, they seem stylized as if they are just another part of the background scenery. . . . The film seems to have no underpinning o f reality. The kind o f movies we need right now are those capable o f grappling with the severities of daily-life reality.. . . But that seems to be one challenge few are capable o f rising to these days.” 104 Around the same time, Atsugi Taka was equally discouraged about the situation of culture film: “ It is an irony that, just as the documen­ tary film movement seems about to take root in our country, it appears to be shying away from direct confrontations with reality and, as a re­ sult, is in grave danger o f being left behind without having developed its full potential.” 105 In the January 1939 issue of Bungei, It5 Sei addressed the subject of “The Novel and Reality” with deep pessimism: “When one attempts to set down a careful record of the present times, one hears a voice, some­ times shouting from the outside and sometimes even coming from within. It seems to say ‘you mustn’t write this! You dare not say that!’ . . . The only mental stance recommending itself at the present time is commonsense o f the most quotidian sort, warning us to be alert lest we be run down as we cross the street.” 106 The January 1940 issue of Bungei Shunju ran a zadankai titled “ Break­ ing Through to the Reality of the Domestic Situation.” Its insistence on “ the need to scrutinize reality” marks it as an unusually bold piece for the era. Here participants report the sensation o f “ inevitable Reality towering over us, threatening to crush us with its terrible weight.” 107 As published, the zadankai presents an eerie sight. The censors have slashed their way through, leaving swaths o f blank white spaces amid

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the wreckage of sentences. One riddled sentence reads: “As soon as we try to express some new direction in thought, the government or the bu­ reaucracy simply . . . i t . . . without. . . or even . . .” 108 After the film industry’s much-delayed conversion to sound, the quality o f Japanese cinema surged. Indeed the thirties marked one o f its golden eras. It was also an era o f cutthroat competition among the var­ ious film companies. The next chapter will look at the state o f the in­ dustry from the mid-thirties and examine some o f its remarkable achievements in the jidaigeki (samurai) and gendaigeki (modern drama) genres. The filmmakers’ attempts to make their films outwardly con­ form to the insistent demands of kokusaku (national policy), while pre­ serving for themselves a certain degree o f intellectual independence, will also be examined.

4 The Film Industry in the China Incident

A Conflict o f Egos Japanese cinema began its reluctant sidle into the talkie era in August 1931 when Shochiku, using the domestically developed Dobashi system, scored a resounding box office success with The Lady Next Door and My Wife (Madamu to Nyobo, Gosho Heinosuke dir.). Even after this, support for talkie conversion remained soft at Shochiku. At the other compa­ nies, many executives seemed still to be hoping Adolph Zukor had been right when in 1925 he dismissed De Forest’s talking pictures idea as just a passing fad. A year later the situation seemed bleaker than ever. In April 1932, when Nikkatsu tried its hand at talkie production, the mili­ tant benshi union struck back hard. In early May, there were picket lines around Nikkatsu chain theaters and no one inside to narrate the silent features, which were still the company staple. The strike spread, with the orchestra union joining in. The issue was finally decided by the emer­ gence of newer companies less encumbered by traditional ties with groups and individuals directly threatened by the conversion to sound. In November, PCL started construction on a full-fledged sound stage, and in February 1933 the J O company was established as the nation’s first “ talkie only” producer. In 1935, talkies were, just barely, outnum­ bering silents. By 1937, only a handful of silents continued to be pro­ duced, almost all of them by marginals. The transformation coincided almost precisely with the film industry’s surge forward as an arena of high finance and big profits. Slow-but-steady growth had characterized the first half o f the thirties, but the second half was a period of unprecedented expansion. In 1935, there were 1,586 movie theaters nationwide, with a total of 185 million admissions annually. By «1940, 2,363 theaters were selling over 400 mil­ lion tickets.1 Now, as never before, crafty and unscrupulous entrepren­ eurs, some remarkably young, could build huge empires, make a for­ tune, and wield immense personal influence as moguls of the movie 149

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G osho Heinosuke’s comic gem The Lady Next Door and M y Wife (Shochiku, 1931), Ja p a n ’s “ first full-fledged talkie.”

world. As in the past, however, it remained a risky business and a single miscalculation could plunge them once again into near oblivion. One intention of the framers of the Film Law was to control and if possible eliminate this chaotic activity. The bureaucratic establishment despised the industry’s willingness to pander to the public’s “ low” taste for eroticism, nihilistic violence, and sentimentalism, and they deeply distrusted the upstart entrepreneurs swarming through the industry like pirates. At least part of their attitude stemmed from a traditional class snobbism, closely akin the old aristocrats’ scorn for the original film pro­ moters in the early days. As Baron Shibusawa Eiichi put it in 1916: “ The motion picture industry is overrun with men untutored in culture and devoid of any credo in life other than the gospel of private gain. We need an infusion of men of intellect and social standing.” 2 Two decades later, a new caste o f “ reformers” was arising in place of the old barons and counts— the elite bureaucrats. The old-time, “ untu­ tored” businessmen were also being replaced by a new breed recogniz­ able to us today the corporate raider. Standard Japanese film histories project two contradictory, seem­ ingly irreconcilable images of the film industry from the mid- to late

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thirties. On the one hand, there is the image of a central government authority imposing steady, irresistible pressure from above, eventually converting the industry into a robodzed factory for ideologically correct movies. Viewed at the focal length o f utmost generality, this certainly appears the case. But change the focal length and the image shatters into a mosaic of anomalies. How, for instance, does one account for the outstanding, indeed, the brilliant quality o f Japanese cinema in this era? Similarly, the details of the Film Law, even after its enactment, did not add up to a system o f total vertical control. This was never attained, even in the latter stages of the Pacific War. When we superimpose the film historians’ second image of the era—that o f swirling intercompany warfare—the two images show little congruence. This second image de­ picts a situadon of uproarious chaos, one abounding in opportunities not only for the cunning entrepreneur but also for the cinematic expres­ sion o f remarkably diverse opinion, even liberal opinion. The anomaly is that many of the filmmakers, deeply hued with liberalism and some­ times “ humanism” —Tasaka Tomotaka and Inagaki Hiroshi being just two examples—at the same time were developing their experimental formulas in full harmony with the New Order ideology. The only way to explain the apparent contradiction is to point to two other factors, both o f which are a major themes of this book: r) the commercial instincts of the film entrepreneurs, which caused them to align themselves almost spontaneously with government bureaucratic policy and, 2) the apparent equal spontaneity with which filmmakers internalized and were ultimately aesthetically inspired by state ideology to create works o f quite superior quality. Before elaborating on the sec­ ond o f these propositions, however, we need to look at the internecine warfare that rocked the film industry at this time and which historians usually characterize as the final phase of its transformation into a “ truly modern” capitalist enterprise. The melee commenced around 1933-34 in the form o f a theater building boom that actually changed the Tokyo skyline. Yurakucho, along with the adjoining Ginza and Marunouchi districts, had long rep­ resented the very heart of the modern, metropolitan capital growing up from the rubble o f the Great Kanto Earthquake o f 1923. Daily, an end­ less swarm of salarymen, office girls, well-dressed shoppers, and youth­ ful couples swarmed through its streets. Here we find the major “ legiti­ mate” theaters -Kabukiza, Meijiza, and Hogakuza. But it was still Asakusa, redolent of late Meiji and TaishO era culture, that remained the mecca of the movie-going public. For some reason, efforts in the

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early thirties to develop Yurakucho into a genuine popular entertain­ ment center had come to nothing. Construction of the Nichigeki, said to be patterned after New York’s Roxy and planned as the biggest thea­ ter in all Asia, had commenced in 1929. A full four years later, the gird­ ers of its unfinished frame were turning red with rust. Into this almost virgin terrain plunged Kobayashi IchizO, the tycoon who had made his fortune developing real estate along the Osaka-Kobe railway line and who, in 1932, had organized the Tokyo all-girl Takarazuka Gekijo Corporation. This same Kobayashi was the chief financial backer of the new PC L and would play a key role in the formation of Toho. In 1933, he built three grand theaters, Toho Gekijo, Hibiya Eiga Gekijo, and the Yurakuza. This activity was a clear challenge to Shochiku’s Otani, who had been the dominant theatrical promoter in the Tokyo region. Kobayashi’s bold plan was executed after careful planning, starting with an exhaustive survey o f the crowds of train riders passing through Yurakucho station. The vast majority were employees working in the of­ fices in the area. To pull crowds such as this into his new theaters, he needed to charge popular (low) prices, which could be done only by as­ sembling massive audiences for a single showing. He aimed for the cas­ ual moviegoer, the after-hours office crowd, and families in town for the weekend. Significandy, as he added one gigantic theater after another to his personal empire, Kobayashi managed in his public statements to give his activity a patriotic, “ national policy” tone: “ My real purpose is to shift the base of theater-going from the semidegenerate idol boys [idle boys? Kobayashi uses an English term here, the epithet mobo apparendy having gone out o f fashion] and the Asakusa-based movie-crazed lon­ ers. This conforms with current national policy calling for the suppres­ sion of vicious life and the promotion of a national cinema based, not on individualistic entertainment, but on family-centered entertainment. I am contributing to the creation of a new, wholesome milieu for woridclass cinema.” 3 Kobayashi’s flurry of buyouts and construction activity was to have the unwelcome effect o f spurring the Nichigeki theater project on to completion. Before long, its four thousand-seating-capacity auditorium was open for business, posing an affront and a threat to his plan to dom­ inate the region. The entrepreneur struggled hard to absorb the theater into his empire, but this only stimulated powerful rivals. A fierce territo­ rial dispute broke out between Nikkatsu, Shochiku, and Toho (which was beginning to coalesce out o f the merger of PC L and JO ). For one

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T h e Nichigeki Theater, opened in late 1933, was brought under Toho M an ­ agement in early 1935 (Nichigeki program covcr, 1937).

brief moment, Nichigeki came into the possession o f Nikkatsu. But the victory' eventually went to Toho, Kobayashi already having moved on to other business ventures inside the same company. In the next phase —commencing in 1936 and continuing well into 1937 the entire film industry became a vortex o f Byzantine intrigues, powered by the personal ambitions and rivalries of the chief plotters. The objective causes were the financial collapse of Nikkatsu and the abrupt emergence of Toho as the powerful rival to Shochiku. One major result was a scries of corporate takeovers that saw Shochiku fur­ ther expand its empire. Along with the Shinko company, already a Sho­ chiku satrapy, it took a controlling interest in Nikkatsu, along with two other independents, Kyokuto and Zensho, both producers of lowbudget jidaigeki.4 Parvenu Toho, meanwhile, continued to consolidate its own base as a modern, streamlined film company. In 1933, P C L had already intro­ duced a “ Hollywood-style” producer system, vastly increasing the power of the producer over film projects. When Toho was formally in­ augurated in September 1937, it continued the policy. In the name of “ world-class film production,” Toho thus broke with the old “ family” system that in other companies entangled employees in a web of vaguely defined, semifeudal loyalties. Toho personnel were regularly

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hired on the basis of one-to-three year contracts, which the company was free to terminate when necessary. The employees had the benefit of knowing exacdy what was expected of them and what their salaries would be. Toho quickly emerged as the ravening wolf o f the film industry, in­ stigating an endless round o f star-stealing (kikmukt) incidents. Top exec­ utive Mori Iwao launched his campaign with a series o f raids aimed at both Nikkatsu and Shochiku, bringing off stunning coups. Lured by higher salaries and the promise of more equitable treatment, the cream of Japan’s acting talent began to flow into his company. Irie Takako, Hara Setsuko, Takamine Hideko, Okochi Denjiro, Yamanaka Sadao, and ultimately, at a later date, Kinugasa Teinosuke, Shimazu YasujirO, and Makino Masahiro all slipped away from their “ parent” companies and entered into contractual relationships with Toho. To Kido ShirO at Shochiku, perhaps the bitterest blow o f all was the defection o f his superstar Hayashi ChOjurO (later to become Hasegawa Kazuo). As Shochiku’s only realjidaigekx star, Hayashi/Hasegawa was the company’s most treasured property, to be pampered with every sort of considerauon. The bonds that tied him to the company were deep. Be­ fore making his debut at Shochiku Kyoto in 1927, he had been the disci­ ple and then the son-in-law o f acting great Nakamura Ganjiro, whose own close ties with Shochiku went back decades. To carry off Hase­ gawa, Toho laid its trap well. Mori Iwao began by working through Hasegawa’s mother, to whom he gave one hundred fifty thousand yen six months before he called on Hasegawa to defect. Thus obligated, Hase­ gawa found it impossible to refuse when the call finally came in Septem­ ber 1937. Even amid the rising clamor o f the China Incident, the news­ papers found space to howl at his ingratitude and perfidy. Hasegawa was to recall bitterly: “ It was rumored Shochiku had poured a vast amount of money into the newspaper campaign against me. I don’t know if this is true or not, but the papers did give me a fearful drubbing.” 5 Then, on 12 November, a spectacular incident brought public sympa­ thy back to Hasegawa’s side. Late that evening, he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant, and the face so beloved to millions of female fans was slashed deeply on the left cheek. After successful surgery, most of the damage was repaired, but thereafter, the camera tended to favor his right side in close-ups. A vaguely etched scar was to remain visible for the rest o f his life. A few days later, the assailant, Kim Sei Kan, a twentythree-year-old Korean chauffeur, was arrested. Hasegawa refused to

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Hayashi ChOjOrO/Hasegawa K azu o (1908 84), in his early days as a jidaigeki superstar at Shochiku studios (Kinema Junpo. 4 O ctober

■929)-

press charges: “ O f course I wonder who put Kim up to the attack, but at the urging of various friends and acquaintances I was persuaded to give up this line of inquiry.” Superficial evidence suggested that pos­ sibly someone at Shochiku was deeply involved, but Hasegawa himself decided to keep the lid on the issue firmly shut. “ The true villain is the pre-modern mentality that held sway in Japan at that time,” was his concluding comment.6

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One of the natural suspects was Kido Shird himself. Indeed, as later activities would indicate, he had been particularly irked by the defection of stars and was constantly anxious about the possibility of more. First, he tried to create a four-company agreement with Nikkatsu, Shinko, and Daito in order to disbar star-stealing under pain of a boycott. When this effort proved ineffective, he continued to search for ways to obstruct the practice. In another example of company commercial interests intertwining with those of the increasingly totalitarian regime, Kido found his solution in the Film Law o f 1939: “ Since this was an era when film artists were running around filled with self-importance, I would have to admit that we did occasionally use the authority granted by the Film Law to reign them in so that they would no longer be so disruptive to the industry.” 7

Flickers o f Resistance in Jidaigeki In the twenties and thirties, thejidaigeki moved from strength to strength, the last years o f the silent era having achieved a flowering as astonishing as anything produced by any genre in any film-producing nation of the time. The world-weary, “ nihilist” ronin characters created by script­ writers Suzukita RyOhei and Yamagami ItarO —became iconic expres­ sions of huge social import to mid-twenties Japan, and the directorial work of Ito Daisukc, characterized by fast-paccd montage and resdess camera movement, represented one of the great peaks of silent film achievement. By the end of the silent era, jidaigeki had qualitatively far surpassed the Hollywood western, the genre to which it was often, and misleadingly, compared. After faltering briefly during the early transition to sound, jidaigeki found its proper voice in the mid-thirties. Nikkatsu, even as it slowly dis­ integrated as a viable corporation, led the field, along with its affiliate, Chiezo Productions, a middle-sized company centered around the long­ timejidaigeki star Kataoka Chiezo. The energy and inspiration for this second flowering radiated from the small township of Narutake, in the outskirts of Kyoto. There, a group of youthful intellectuals and filmmakers banded together regu­ larly to drink beer and passionately debate the films of Ozu, the new Hollywood talkie realism, and the future of jidaigeki. In attendance were Inagaki Hiroshi, already famous for his exceptional films with Kataoka Chiezo, along with a pair of scriptwriters, Yahiro Fuji and Mimura ShintarO, whose work for the jidaigeki would soon be ranked as a high

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point in Japanese cinematic realism. Unlike the established masters of the genre—ItO, Makino, and Kinugasa Teinosuke, who never com­ pletely shucked the heavy-spirited romanticism o f their Meiji-born generation—these young men had come to maturity in the cosmopoli­ tan and comparatively liberal Taisho years. Although their base was the tradition-bound Kyoto region, Tokyo, the throbbing hub of na­ tional culture, lay a mere four and a half hours down the new Tokaido Express Line. Yamanaka Sadao and Itami Mansaku, arguably the two greatest members of the Narutake group, were regular commuters on the run to Tokyo where they drank copiously with Ozu YasujirO and his circle, watched him on the set at the nearby Ofuna Studios, and ob­ served the life o f the great metropolis. Inevitably, the innovations they brought to their jidaigeki films largely came from their fascination with the shoshimingeki (modern “ salaryman” ) genre of the Tokyo filmmakers. While setting their work in Japan’s sword-and-sandals era, Yamanaka and Itami motivated their characters with the same needs, ambitions, and anxieties experienced by twentiethcentury man. Itami Mansaku’s wittily understated Akanishi Kakita (Chiezo Productions, 1936) features samurai “ company men” who while away the rainy season in the clan casde gossiping and playing board games like modern employees on a company excursion. The eponymous central character, who is actually a secret agent, is a modern antihero, with an unemphatic, perfecdy commonsensical view of the world around him and a sweet-tooth that eventually causes him severe stomach problems. The modern “ salaryman” mentality isjust as evident in Yamanaka’s dark masterpiece Humanity and Paper Balloons [Ninjo Kami Fusen, PCL, 1937) set in an Edo era nagaya, not at all different from a crowded slum apartment block of prewar Tokyo. One of the central characters dedicates all his en­ ergies in a futile effort to petition a clan bureaucrat for a position with the daimyd lord who had once employed his father. Much like the many des­ perate job-seekers of depression-era Japan, he stands in the rain waiting for the opportunity to plead with a cold and officious functionary. Many of these iAoiAtmm-inspiredjidaigeki demonstrate how the genre could at this late date still probe the social justice issues of concern to liberals, even as this same tendency was being snuffed out in gendaigeki. The crucial difference was o f course the temporal setting, safely re­ moved from the present, a distinction which for a while at least seemed to satisfy most censors. Some Japanese critics claim to find this crypto-liberal spirit still flickering below the surface as late as 1941 in Inagaki Hiroshi’s film The

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Sea-Crossing Festival (Umi o Wataru Sairei, script by Mimura ShintarC). The story opens with a port town festival in progress, where traveling showmen gather for three days of performances. Unexpectedly, a new group of performers appears in town —marvelously skilled trick horse­ men who thrill the onlookers, stealing them away from the more tradi­ tional attractions. On the second day o f the festival, when a woman is attacked by three horsemen, she is rescued by Yotaro, a ronin who cuts down their leader. The next day, another set of sinister characters ar­ rive in town, eventually taking Yotaro away with them. Although a let­ ter from Yotaro arrives somewhat later promising he will return, he never does. The film ends with the girl who loves him gazing wistfully out to sea. The impression is that she will wait in vain. According to modern critic Fujita Motohiko, the trick riders repre­ sent the army and fascism. Yotaro, the only man who stood up to them, represents those few who opposed the rise of fascism. The ominous fig­ ures, therefore, become the tokko keisatsu, or modern thought police. “ Thus the film shows the development o f a pessimism in the scriptwriter Mimura,” Fujita concludes. “ It depicts the oppressive constriction of the atmosphere created by the advent of fascism in the contemporary world o f the filmmakers. The Japanese people are being slowly forced into the position of having to support a war they don’t want. This mes­ sage is most plain in the film___It is the last representative of the liberal spirit inJapanese film until the end of the war.” 8 One remains uncertain whether many in the audience at the time could have read such a deeply encoded “ gesture of resistance.” Certainly the censors missed it, since they passed the segments in question without substantial cuts.

The Fates o f Three Directors The bloody conflict on the continent also began to have a direct impact on the film world. Among the innumerable victims o f the China Inci­ dent was Yamanaka Sadao. On 25 August 1937, the day his Humanity and Paper Balloons opened at three major Tokyo theaters, he and his col­ leagues were holding a celebration on the grass in front of the PC L stu­ dio canteen. A telegram arrived for Yamanaka, his call-up notice, the akagami (Red Paper) secredy dreaded by most o f the nation’s young men. A photograph o f him still exists, taken several days later at the litde send-off ceremony held for Yamanaka at Heian Shrine, showing him standing in the middle of a circle of well-wishers lofting banners on poles. His eyes peer out forlornly at the world from under the brim of a

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festive white fedora. His shoulders droop and seem to turn inward to­ ward his chest, his hands clasped self-protectively at the level of his groin. The only other face visible is that of one o f the banner holders. His eyes are averted from the camera and the face etched with grimness. Thirteen months later Yamanaka Sadao would die of pulmonary pneu­ monia in a field hospital in Kaifeng, 150 miles west of Hsuchou in China. The end of Itami Mansaku’s directorial career began somewhat ear­ lier and, in its own way, was just as pathetic. The immediate cause ap­ pears to have been his desperately unhappy collaboration with Dr. Ar­ nold Fanck on a German-Japanese National Policy film project called The New Earth. Effective collaboration between the two men was doomed from the start. Itami was a man of liberal thinking who would, as we shall see, pour unveiled scorn on the worst excesses of the protofascist Spiritist fac­ tion in Japanese film. Fanck, a very capable filmmaker in his own right, was apparently a true Nazi. Itami was a subtle artist, a man of enormous literary talent as well as a master of psychological portrayal in cinema; Fanck, a former geologist, had worked in a single genre since the twen­ ties: the mountain climbing film. “As documents [Fanck’s] films were in­ comparable achievements,” Siegfried Kracauer would comment post­ war, “ the glittering white o f glaciers against a sky dark in contrast, the magnificent play of clouds . . . the ice stalactites hanging down from roofs and windowsills of some small chalet.” 9 But even in these pre-Nazi era films, Kracauer reads a message reeking of ubermensch-ism: “ It was the credo of many Germans with academic tides, and some without.. . . Nothing seemed sweeter to them than the bare cold rock in the dim light of dawn. Full o f Promethean promptings, they would climb up some dangerous ‘chimney,’ then quiedy smoke their pipes on the summit, and with infinite pride look down on what they called ‘valley-pigs’ —those plebeian crowds who never made an effort to elevate themselves to lofty heights.” 10 Before arriving in Japan in March 1936, Fanck had enlisted the aid of Kawakita Nagamasa and his wife Kashiko of the Towa Import Company, Japan’s leading importers of foreign films with long and close ties to Germany. They were thrilled to be of service to this “ worldrenowned film director” when he asked them to find ajapanese director willing to collaborate on filming the script he had brought with him. Upon arrival in Japan, Kashiko took him to a screening room and un­ reeled for him several Japanese films. Fanck selected Chüji in His Heyday

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Directors Ozu YasujirO (1.) and Yamanaka Sadao (r.) at the China front in January 1938

{Elga Hydron, April 1938).

(Chüji Uridasu), telling her that this was the director he wanted to work with: “ O f all the work I’ve seen so far, his is the most like Rene Clair!” 11 The director was Itami Mansaku, who was just then completing his masterpiece, hochiyama Soshun. Itami, however, was far from eager to collaborate and three times turned down the Kawakitas’ entreaties. How and why he finally re­ lented remains a mystery. Even after agreeing, he continued to harbor grave doubts about the script Fanck had brought with him. The story' was typical European “ orientalism,” mixed with a strong dose of raceconsciousness: A Japanese (Teruo, eventually played by Kosugi Isamu) comes home from a long stay in Germany filled with awe for Europe and a rather low opinion of his homeland. Waiting for him is Mitsuko (Hara Setsuko), his fiancé, but Teruo is no longer interested in marriage since he has fallen in love with another, a German woman (Ruth Eweler) whom he had met on board ship. When Mitsuko attempts sui­ cide, her father (Hayakawa Sesshu) sits down with Teruo and brings him back to his senses, rekindling in his heart an appreciation for the wonderfulness of Japan. The couple decide to marry and move to Man­ churia, which has now been opened to Japanese settlement. The final

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sequence shows them as pioneers, breaking the earth of the “ new land” with their plow. In the finale, Teruo places their newborn baby in one of the furrows, proclaiming joyously that it “ too will become a child of the land.” In the background, a Japanese soldier, armed with rifle and bay­ onet, stands at attention like some guardian deity as the bitter cold wind riffles through his fur collar. Kawakita Kashiko would recall to interviewers many years later that “ Itami disliked Fanck’s script and he threatened to reject the project out of hand if not allowed to participate in its revision. Itami did in fact come up with a script of his own, a perfectly delightful one about Ja p a ­ nese children.” 12 Fanck, however, would have none o f this, insisting that his first real Japanese-German film collaboration have a clear, proFascist political message. Fanck won out. The script reeked of propaganda, stressing the harmony of the po­ litical goals o f the two countries. In one scene, a Japanese character speaks to the German girl o f a “ whirlwind” (obviously Communism) threatening her country from the east and his own from the west: “ But know that here, on the eastern edge, it will dissipate on our ramparts.” In November 1936, the same month the film went into production, the two countries became signatories to the Anti-Comintern Pact. As soon as Fanck and Itami started shooting, the inevitable conflict of sensibilities and of wills broke out. Fanck was behaving strangely in the eyes of his Japanese collaborator, instructing his renowned camera­ man, Richard Angst, to concentrate on scenery. According to Saeki Kiyoshi, Fanck’s assistant director on the project, “ He went around doing a lot of nature shots —much of it stuff that didn’t have the slight­ est relevance to the film he was supposed to be making!” 13 At first, Itami kept his peace, only muttering under his breath “bakabakashii!” (idiotic). As the personal collisions intensified, however, it became clear the two had to work out a compromise or the whole project would collapse. The compromise was an amazing one. There would be two different versions o f The New Earth, one by Fanck and the other by Itami. At the studio, it was agreed, Fanck would shoot his scenes in the morning, and then Itami would use the same stage and scenery to shoot his in the eve­ ning. A similar relationship was worked out for location shooting. Rich­ ard Angst, who was responsible for shooting both sets of scenes, was ex­ hausted: “ It was a murderous work schedule. For more than six weeks, I had to spend the daylight hours with Dr. Fanck and his German version. Then, from seven p . m . until well past midnight, I was on assignment with the Japanese version!” 14

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StafT photo o f directors Arnold Fanck (front) and Itami Mansaku (behind) on location for New Earth (1937). C am eram an Richard Angst is on the far right (National Film Archive).

The total cost, of coursc, was horrendous and, to make matters worse, Itami’s version was spiraling out of control. The toll on his men­ tal and physical health was becoming apparent to everyone. “ Itami gradually relinquished direction of the project to me,” Saeki recalls, “ and, in the end, there were whole days when he failed to show up for the shooting. It seems he was trying to convince himself that he was no longer really connected with the project.” 15 Kitagawa Fuyuhiko re­ ceived the same impression when Itami blurted out to him, “ I get a headache every time I hear the name of that monstrosity.” 16 Both versions premiered in Japan in February' of 1937, first Itami’s and then, a week later, Fanck’s. Perhaps because o f its novelty as a film about Japan made by a German, the Fanck version was a sensational hit with Japanese audiences. Itami’s version was almost universally ac­ counted a dismal failure. In Germany too, the Fanck version was a big success. The critics raved: “ What impresses us is the startling intersection of German and Japanese aesthetic sensibilities. Never before has a two hour picture

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The New Earth ( I owa, 1938).

about an exotic culture brought such a sense o f intimacy and reality, even to viewers with virtually no previous knowledge to draw upon.” 17 As it turned out, however, when a team of N H K Japanese staff writers went to Germany in 1985 to do research on the film, they found proof that the reviews were anything but spontaneous reactions. Goebbels had sent around a circular beforehand announcing that the film was impor­ tant for public relations and ordering the critics to praise it highly.18 In 1938, the exhaustion and mental pain from Itami’s ordeal sud­ denly took its toll 011 him. He was stricken with T B and hospitalized. Thereafter, he lived the life of an invalid, eventually becoming com­ pletely bedridden. Until his death in 1946, he turned his efforts to scriptwriting and criticism. The literary importance of his essays of this pe­ riod, especially his h'atakana £ uihitsu, was brought to postwar public attention when Oc Kenzaburo, the Nobel Prize novelist, edited and is­ sued an anthology' of them in 1971.19 His scripts too arc of outstanding quality, including his Matsu the Untamed (Muhomatsu no Issho), which Inagaki Hiroshi filmed twice, once in 1943 with Bando Tsumasaburo and once in 1958 with Mifune Toshiro.

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A Troubled Era o f Greatness: Gendaigeki As the genre treating “ modern” or contemporary life, gendaigeki was es­ pecially susceptible to the ideological pressures of the era. The advent of full-scale warfare on the continent in mid-1937 inevitably increased official pressure, indirect at first and then increasingly overt. Many film­ makers, unsure of what was expected of them, tried to retreat into ma­ terial removed as far as possible from the political arena: love romances or, as in the case of Mizoguchi, geiddmono, treating the world of the tradi­ tional performing arts. On the rare occasions filmmakers actually turned to social commentary, they tended to affix improbable, lastminute-rescue conclusions to dramas that were clearly moving in the di­ rection of tragedy. As we shall see in the next several sections o f this chapter, directors and scenario writers deployed a wide range of strate­ gies to ensure safe passage of their work through the maze of bureau­ cratic proscriptions and exhortations. An especially abundant harvest of “ safe,” nonpolitical love ro­ mances appeared in 1937-38. Indeed, films with love (ren’ai) or marriage (kekkon) in their tide blossomed in profusion: A Manual o f Ill-Advised Love (,Ren'ai Bekarazu Tokuhon, Nikkatsu), Town o f Youthful Love (Ren’ai Seishungai, Daito), A Love Trip to Hawaii (Ren’ai Hawai Tabiji, Nikkatsu), The Enemy Fleet Called Love (Ren’ai Teki Kantai, Shochiku), To Livefo r Love (Ai ni Ikiru, Nikkatsu), Newlywed’s Roadmap (Shinkon M ichi Shirabe, Daito), Newlywed’s Treasure Box (Shinkon Tama Tebako, Daito), and A Parade o f Brides (Hanayome Seizoroi, Shinko). Even mothers had their love dramas: Mother’s Dream (Haha no Yume, Shochiku), A Marriage Proposalfor Mama (Mama no Endan, Shochiku), Mother’s Melody (Haha no Kydku, Toho). At Shochiku, Shimazu Yasujirô was the master craftsman o f this sort of fare. His 1938 hit, Three Fiancé Crows (Kon’yaku Sanba Garasu), with Takamine Mieko, launched a trio of young actors to stardom: Sano Shüji, Saburi Shin, and Uehara Ken. All three went on to become the nation’s top matinee idols. Shimazu was Kido Shirô’s natural choice to direct Shochiku Ofuna’s most ambitious love romance film to date, The Love-Troth Tree (Aizen Katsura, 1938). But Shimazu was at this time in se­ cret negotiations for an eventual move to Toho, and he rejected the pro­ ject with the sullen comment, “ I’m sick o f melodrama.” 20 Gosho Heinosuke who had made Japan’s first talkie in 1931 and whose dexterous touch with light romantic comedy rivaled that of Shimazu, could not be considered for the project since he was still recovering from a lung dis­ ease. Ozu Yasujirô, Shochiku’s supreme artist o f the shoshimin genre,

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was temperamentally unsuited and always steered clear of such block­ busting, all-star company productions. He was, in any case, still in the army on the Continent. Nor could Shimizu Hiroshi be considered, al­ though he was reputedly Kido’s favorite among all of the Ofuna direc­ tors. He was at his best with semidocumentary pictures usually focusing on young children. Under the influence of certain critics, Shimizu at this time was exploring the novel notion of “ director-as-artist,” an atti­ tude that would have wrought havoc with the nervous Shochiku execu­ tives on a program picture like The Love-Troth Tree. The job eventually went to Nomura K 6sh5 , who at thirty-three was already a veteran of numerous Shochiku melodramas. Starring Uehara Ken and Tanaka Kinuyo (now passing her prime as the “ nation’s sweet­ heart” ), Love-Troth Tree (along with its sequel) was not only the most suc­ cessful work in Nomura’s career, it became the greatest box-office sensa­ tion in prewar and wartime Japanese film history. Its motif, love between a young doctor (Uehara) and a nurse (Tanaka), was already shopworn, but it remained invariably popular with Japanese audiences. The plot, drawn out interminably by endless misunderstandings and near misses (including the famous scene in which they just miss each other at the train station), kept audiences on the edge of their seats, and they loved it. “An upbeat, happy film” was Kido’s invariable demand of a director. Since taking charge of Kamata Studio in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, he had dedicated the company to making films that provided audiences with a hopeful view of life. As had been the case during the Kamata Studio era, comedies, musicals, and shoshimingeki were the forte of the new talkie-era studio at Ofuna. Although Kido em­ phasized “ women’s films,” his heroines were usually smartly dressed, modern, and “ forward-looking.” They had litde in common with the wretchedly victimized, self-sacrificing souls who inhabited Mizoguchi Kenji’s Shimpa-style tragedies - White Threads o f the Cascades (1933) or Ozen o f the Paper Cranes (1935). Mizoguchi’s more recent masterworks, Osaka Elegy and Sisters o f the Gion (both 1936, both Dai Ichi Eiga), were stark uncompromising depictions of women who paid the price for challenging the male-dominated order —a far cry from the win-out-inthe-end Shochiku formula. The enduring achievement o f Shochiku was undoubtedly its petitbourgeois shoshimingeki. As scriptwriter Noda KOgo had described it back in 1930: “ The technique is to pick up some litde incident in the lives o f a group of ordinary people and, by thickening it with appropri­ ately arranged details, instill the brew with the feel of high drama.” 21

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Here Ozu Yasujiro reigned supreme. Turning from pure comedies at the very end of the twenties, he projected his college and home dramas against the background of the era’s chronic economic depression. Often, as in Passing Fancy (1933) and An Inn in Tokyo (1935), the depression is pic­ tured as a very real landscape—a barren wasteland strewn with the over­ sized litter of the industrial age. Across this landscape his characters tramp in futile hope toward the distant smoking chimneys o f a factory locked away behind a gate. Despite their inevitable disappointment (or perhaps because o f it), the characters deal with each other in a kindly manner, helping each other through the hard times and speaking to each other with a deeply touching openness. Ozu’s aim is almost never “social criticism” ; rarely is it even “ realism” in the blatandy naturalistic sense of linking the motivation of characters to their economic or social situation. His theme would probably be best described as “ the truths o f life.” In his I Was Born But. . . (Umarete wa Mita Keredo, 1932), one of his si­ lent masterpieces, the economic crisis was but a pervading psychological mood of apprehension: the anxiety faced daily by an office worker who feared, with good reason, that loss of his job would plunge him and his family into an abysm of poverty. This time it is a pair of young boys who learn one of life’s truths: their father, whom they had worshipped as a hero, is nothing more than a salaryman who must sometimes humiliate himself (and his sons, as well) to please his superiors. Such is the way of the world. In Ozu’s first talkie, Only Son (Hitori Musuko, Shochiku, 1936), the in­ herent sadness of such truths becomes far more pervasive. A country mother, who has scrimped and sacrificed to put her only son through college, comes to visit him in Tokyo. She finds him with a wife and child living in deep poverty, his dreams of success dashed on the rocks o f eco­ nomic necessity. But even here, one is struck by the affection and kind­ ness shared among all parties concerned. In Ozu’s films at least this last bit of human dignity survives even the worst of times. Unlike the domestic economic crisis, the war almost never intrudes into the world o f an Ozu film. In I Was Born But. . . , we do see '‘Bakudan Sanyushi” (“ The Three Human Bomb Patriots” ) written in calligraphic script above the classroom blackboard. In the original scenario by Fushimi Noboru, the film actually ends with a sequence in which the eld­ est boy comes upon a troop o f marching soldiers. One o f the soldiers hands the boy some money, asking him to go purchase some candy for him. When the boy comes back, he has to chase after the troop a long distance and when he tries to give the soldier the candy, he is glared

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down by the commanding officer, a routine repeated several times in the characteristic Ozu “ gag” pattern. When the boy finally comes home, his parents are relieved since they thought he had run away Ozu chose to excise this scene while shooting the film, probably because it dis­ tracted from the thematic unity o f the film. There is yet another mo­ ment that does make it to the screen. It is a scene that causes us (we who view the film in the postwar era, that is) at least to think about the war. The mother and father slip into the bedroom of their sleeping sons and gaze lovingly at their faces. They talk about the children’s future and whether they will have to share the salaryman’s fate of their father. As we watch this scene from our distant remove in time, we know some­ thing neither the parents nor the director could have known. The fate awaiting these children will be far worse. Theirs is the generation that twelve years later will be flying kamikaze missions in the last months of the war. In Warm Currents (.Danryu, 1938), Shochiku’s next big melodrama sen­ sation after The Love-Troth Tree, director Yoshimura KszaburO succeeded in expunging any hint o f the war on the continent or the wartime aus­ terity at home. To do this, however, he had to promise Kido Shiro to make a full-fledged war film the very next year. Although Nikkatsu had already cashed in on the rage for war dramas with its Five Scouts and Toho was about to bring out The Marine Brigade at Shanghai, Shochiku had yet to produce a big budget China Incident war film. Therefore, even as the first plans were afoot for Warm Currents, an executive deci­ sion was sent down to begin production on The Legend o f Tank Com­ mander jYtshizumi. The two film projects were fated to intermingle in a curious way. Based on Kikuchi Kan’s largely factual story, serialized in Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, Mshizumi depicted the most renowned war hero of the China Incident. With his ability to turn out films in the currently fashionable documentary style, Shimizu Hiroshi had been considered perfect for the job. But Shimizu would have none o f it: “ Why don’t you pick out one o f the assistant directors. You’re bound to find somebody with the spunk to carry' it through.” 2- This, of course, would have been thoroughly unacceptable to the army, which was expected to back the film heavily. The man finally chosen was certainly more than a mere as­ sistant director, but the few pictures he had directed consistently flopped. Still, Kido, an excellent judge of talent, had him marked as a winner. The man was Yoshimura Kozaburo. one o f Shimazu Yasujiro’s many disciples.

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Although the Mshizumi project was in itself a great opportunity for the twenty-seven-year-old Yoshimura, he decided to push his advan­ tage. “All right I accept,” he told the company boss, “ but I’d like to add one condition, if I might.” 23 The condition was that he first be allowed to direct Warm Currents. Yoshimura’s audacity paid off when Kido de­ cided to take the gamble. And this too paid off. When Warm Currents pre­ miered in December 1938, it instandy became a nationwide hit, almost rivaling The Love-Troth Tree. The film’s central personality, Keiko (Takamine Mieko), turned out to be a presence new to the Japanese screen. The character belonged to the class of pampered bourgeois daughters—one of the staples of films in the thirties—whose portrayal ranged from the delightful bubblebrain to the selfish villain. Keiko, however, is an individual of intellec­ tual substance. She reads The Cherry Orchard in the original Russian, and the Leica camera strung over her shoulder is no mere affectation. Later we see strips o f negatives she evidendy had developed herself, draped around her room. The critics raved, and even Mizoguchi Kenji indicated he felt threat­ ened by the newness o f the Keiko character. His forte was also the de­ piction of strong, modern women, but women whose psychology was still constrained within the formulas o f self-sacrifice or self-destructive rebellion. After a showing of the film, he leaned over to his scriptwriter Yoda Yoshikata and muttered “ If you people don’t come up with a really good script for me, I’ll be outstripped by the younger crowd!” 24 For Japanese audiences already grown weary with the strain of the war, the film had a special appeal of a different kind. The world evolved by Yoshimura was completely contemporary, but one from which the slightest suggestion of war had been erased. Kishida Kunio’s script had featured a send-off scene of men on their way to the front, but in the film, even this passing reference has been removed. Left behind is an al­ most perfectly realized fantasy Japan: modern, stylish, physically com­ fortable, and completely absorbed in peacetime concerns. One might speculate that it was this “ what if” element—this suggestion of what Japan would have been like if there had been no China Incident which made it so popular. Made in 1938, almost a year before the passage of the Film Law, Warm Currents would be among the last of the gendaigeki to evade the government’s “ total mobilization for war” mentality. In 1940, the year Yoshimura went on to make The Legend o f Tank Commander Mshizumi, gen­ daigeki itself had become the target o f official antipathy.

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One mid-August Sunday morning, the guard at the studio gate handed Kido ShirO a packet bearing the imprimatur Watanabe Suteo, head of the Home Ministry Censorship Division. The contents repre­ sented a direct assault on the Shochiku cinematic tradition: “The fol­ lowing arc proscribed henceforth: i) the so-called shoshimin films, 2) films depicting the single-minded pursuit of private happiness, 3) films deal­ ing with the lives o f the super-rich, 4) those with scenes o f drinking in cafes or o f women smoking cigarettes. Also proscribed are all words or phrases aping foreigners, along with frivolous, silly gestures.” 25 Basically, it was a message to the studio that the time had come to conform to the mood o f austerity being decreed throughout the coun­ try. The authorities were ordering the dimming of the gaudy neon lights of the big cities as an expression of solidarity with the men fighting at the front; it was unthinkable that their privations and self-sacrifice should be “ mocked” by luxury and gaiety on the screen. The Home Ministry’s Articles o f Warning reflected major political and social policy changes just then coalescing behind the scenes and re­ flecting that the bureaucratic administrators of the Prime Minister Konoe’s New Order were now ready to impose control over the very fabric of daily life in Japan. Films depicting lifestyles other than those officially ordained were now to be treated as an afTront to national authority. The Imperial Rule Assistance Association (taisei yokusankai), established as the instrument to implement this control, was outfitted with a Daily Life Leadership Office. In December 1940, Office Chief Kita Soichiro ad­ dressed the following message to the film industry': Those of us able to understand the causes of the confusion and moral degradation endemic to the present era grieve at the brazen manner in which wholesome everyday speech is corrupted by twisted or eccentric forms of expression. Furthermore, women talk as if they were men. One of the clear causes of this situation is the movie entertainment nowadays. Aberrations in dress, both at home and in the workplace, are incorporated indiscriminately into today’s films, and this is then copied willy-nilly by the general public. In a word, film entertainment must abandon its low instincts and help point the public toward its sublime mission of developing into the greatest, most powerful people on earth.26 Looming behind all this was yet another layer o f significance. It was a theme Kikuchi Kan, the founder of the prestigious Bungei Shunju and editor-in-chief o f ./VIhon Figa. would extrapolate on in September 1940,

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only a month after the issuance o f the Articles. In his column for the film magazine, we find Kikuchi attacking the validity o f private emo­ tions: “ Look to the borders of the Empire and you see the struggles and privations of the [Japanese] new setders. Behold the tense confronta­ tion wracking the entire Asian continent, pitting whole peoples against peoples. Is it too much to ask, of romance films as well as of ‘public enlightenment’ culture films, that they shoulder some responsibility for the national welfare? Such themes as the pursuit o f love based on indi­ vidual emotions pales into insignificance in times like these. We need to invoke the heavy hammer o f the New Order in order to set our cosmop­ olite filmmakers straight.” 27 As an experienced novelist, Kikuchi should have known that such a pronouncement could only paralyze the creative spirit. In fact, litde more than a year later, he would turn around to slash at the “ slave men­ tality” imposed upon the filmmaking community by the bureaucrats’ overregulation o f film content. And, during the Pacific War years, al­ though he would remain firmly committed in support of the war effort, his pronouncements and actions were usually characterized by the com­ mon sense of practical leadership. But here, we see the darker side of the great popular novelist; the bombast and counterproductive irration­ alism o f this statement indicates that for a time he too was swept up in the frenzy of the government’s General Spiritual Mobilization. In the same Mhon Eiga column, Kikuchi Kan also turns his guns on the realist cinema o f such directors as Mizoguchi and Uchida Tomu: “ While it is necessary for cinema to have an artistic base, the time has come to turn away from the artistic grimness and negativity one asso­ ciates with realism-tinged works. Films must both draw forth the tears of the masses and rock them with convivial laughter. Such would be an ap­ propriate definition o f the wholesomeness [Kikuchi uses here the bureaucrat’s favorite buzzword, kenzen] demanded of today’s cinema.” 28 Actually, Mizoguchi had by now retreated from the social criticism and realism of his earlier sound films. His masterful Straits o f Love and Hate (Aienkyo, Shinko, 1937) absolves society of responsibility for the characters’ suffering. Misfortune is the product of personal weakness rather than the structure of society. Then, after a near-disastrous foray into war film (Camp Song, 1938), he plunged into the relatively arcane world of geiddmono, depicting the performing arts world of the lateMeiji era. Clearly, another target of Kikuchi K an’s attack was Uchida Tomu’s Earth (Tsuchi, Nikkatsu, 1939), which despite its unremitting

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gloom had won the Kinema Junpo Best One award for that year. Based on Nagatsuka Takashi’s naturalist novel and shot on loca­ tion in a farming village over the span o f an entire year, Earth ri­ vals Yamamoto KajirO’s Horse (Uma, Toho, 1941) as a masterwork of documentary-style drama. In a manner similar to Imai Tadashi’s post­ war Echigo Tsutsuishi Oyashirazu, which follows the process of sakemaking through the cycle o f a year, Earth follows the cycle o f rice planting and harvesting, depicting how the year is passed in endless toil. Due to the prewar arrangement between rural landlords and their tenant farmers, this drudgery is largely unrewarded since the bulk of the harvest must go to the landlord as “ rent.” Unlike the original novel, however, the film avoids direct confrontations between the two sides over this issue. In a period when official policy was urging the ex­ pansion o f the agricultural sector to meet wartime needs, the censors would never have allowed such a depiction. As Shigeno Tatsuhiko points out in a postwar analysis: “ In the Taisho era o f novelist Naga­ tsuka, one could say that an awareness of the problem was still nascent among the farming class, but when we come to the era which gave birth to Uchida’s Earth, it had already spread widely throughout the nation and this in turn triggered overt repression by the authorities.” 29 With no external oudet, the bitterness of the characters is turned in­ ward on themselves and their families.

“ Fooling” the Censors Slipping past the wartime censors or, better yet actually pleasing them while maintaining the artistic integrity of one’s film, often involved care­ ful calculation on the part o f both the scriptwriter and the director. The list of what one could not show on screen was constandy growing. As early as 1917, Order Number 12 o f the Police Division had issued a list o f seventeen proscriptions covering three areas: 1) depictions of the Imperial Family, 2) treatments o f the structure o f the state and so­ ciety, and 3) depictions o f crime and licentiousness. In 1925, this same list was taken over by the Home Ministry Censorship Division. Pro­ scriptions concerning the military were formalized in 1927, and two years later, Chief Censor Yanai YOshio compiled and issued a massive volume (about a thousand pages), called On the Protection and Administra­ tion o f Motion Pictures. Therein appears another list of proscriptions, di­ vided into two categories: Public Security and Public Morals. The se­ curity category covered such familiar topics as the Emperor and crime,

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along with the new category, “ tenets o f the race” (minzoku kakushin). Under the morals category, proscriptions concerning religious worship, libel, and depictions of lewdness, rape, and kissing were elucidated.30 As we have already noted, regulations concerning film continued to proliferate throughout the thirties, culminating in the 1939 Film Law. And, as shown by the 1940 Articles of Warning handed to Kido Shiro, the bonds of constraint continued to be wound ever more tighdy around the film world thereafter. Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu YasujirO, both of whom were closely in­ volved in the preparation o f their own scripts, often worked in dread of the censor’s pencil or shears. In Ozu’s case, the target was usually his sense o f humor. For example, the script for his University's a Fine Place (.Daigaku Yoitoko, 1936) contained a gag scene in which two students are collared by a teacher for skipping out on their military training class. “Attention!” the teacher barks at them. Next he orders, “ Squat and do push-up!” In the following sequence, the pair get confused, turning the scene into a hilarious parody o f military training, somewhat in the style of Laurel and Hardy’s You’re in the Army Now. When they finally straighten themselves out and are standing at attention, the teacher be­ gins to lecture them in the overblown rhetorical style of General Araki. The censors took offense at the scene and had it cut, leaving only a shot of the teacher shouting “Attention!” followed by a shot o f the boys standing at attention. Experiences of this sort were almost routine. Still, even when the cuts had to be made in already-shot footage, they rarely involved more than ten to fifty meters for the entire film. If filmmakers used common sense, they could usually protect their film from complete destruction at the hands of the censor. At times, however, even common sense and careful obedience to the published film regulations were not enough. So many ministries and watchdog organizations were involved in the censorship process that disaster could come suddenly from any direction. Once again, this was to be the unhappy experience o f Ozu. In 1939, after returning from the China front, he wrote a script, The Flavor o f Green Tea over Rice, about a man who receives his call up notice. He and his wife, a member of the idle class, have different interests and the two have long been somewhat estranged. On the night before his departure, however, the two reaf­ firm their love for each other and, as a symbol o f their reconciliation, settle down to a simple midnight meal of tea over rice (ochazuke). Ozu intended it to be a deeply touching scene, filled with the quiet truth of

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conjugal love. But this was not how the censors saw it, and they disal­ lowed production of the script.31 Tradition has it that the censors disliked it because departure for the army should have been a joyful occasion, to be celebrated with festive red rice, not with humble ochazuke. Furthermore, as Sato Tadao sug­ gests, some of the dialogue also lacked the martial spirit mandated by the authorities.32 Ozu was of course deeply shocked by the decision. He had been confident that the film was completely in tune with the times and the requirements o f the law. Tests of wills pitting filmmakers and exhibitors against the censors and, sometimes, the police were nothing new in Japanese film history. In the days of silent film, it was often the benshi narrator who could change a film’s story line as he narrated it and thus rescue it from proscription.33 In 1908, eleven years after the introduction of cinema into Japan, the police forbade the Yokota Company from showing a French feature tided The French Revolution. Revolutions and executions of royalty, even of foreign royalty, were considered dangerous themes for Japan’s own Im­ perial system. A few weeks later, an article appeared in the newspaper informing the public that the program at the theater had been changed. The new film would be a full-length feature -Boss o f the Cave Gang: A Talefrom the American West. In fact, however, it was the original French Rev­ olution film, rctitled but uncut. When it was shown, the benshi narrated an entirely different story about a husband and wife team of robber barons who live in luxury with their stolen goods. In the finale, the police come to arrest the criminals, accompanied by a huge number o f loyal citizens there to aid the police as a service to the state.34 In the talkie era, o f course, such creative interventions were com­ pletely out of the question. Scriptwriters and directors were therefore obliged to use other strategies to give their films the correct political coloration. Starting with the most obvious of these strategies, the film­ maker could select from a menu of simple visual devices, incorporat­ ing them into the film in a near gratuitous manner. The menu in­ cluded: 1) shots of the national flag fluttering against the sky, 2) shots of people standing prayerfully at a shrine, 3) shots o f a character reveren­ tially contemplating the majesty of a mountain, 4) lovingly held shots of a household altar or shrine or a photograph of the family patriarch (as we see in The Toda Brother and His Sisters, 1942), 5) wartime slogans put up in the household (The Whole Family Works) or a classroom (I Was Born B u t . . .), or 6) lingering shots of statues o f national patriots (such as Saigo Takamori in Uchida’s Theater o f Life, 193b) or photographs o f

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high government figures (such as the minister of education in A Pebble by the Wayside, 1938). Slightly more extended sequences might include friendly representatives of official authority, policemen, or village may­ ors, as in Thundering Roar (1939). In Ozu’s I Was Born B u t . . . , young children talk about their future in terms o f becoming military men. In such films as Shimazu’s A Brother and H is Younger Sister (1939) and Ozu’s Toda Family, characters go off to start new lives in Manchuria when they reach an impasse in their home or work lives. Films could be given an overtly promilitarist turn simply by introducing a single plot ele­ ment, such as Takamine Hideko raising her horse to sell to the army in Yamamoto KajirO’s Horse (1941). The subde use o f a military song also could give an otherwise unrelated scene an aura in resonance with the military spirit, such as the use of the military song “ When We Go To Sea” (Umi Yukaba) as the concluding background music on the train in There Was a Father;35 In certain cases, the tide o f a film could suggest strongly patriotic content, which in fact is not there, as in the case of Sasaki Keisuke’s rather ordinary melodrama, A Patriotic Flower (Aikoku no Hana, 1942). Another, more elaborate technique employed at the time involved a kind of ideological brinksmanship. Even in the late thirties, there were a few films that explored the outer limits of official toleration for social commentary'. The technique was to append a speech—or more accurately, a peroration —to the end of a film and thereby, it was hoped, deflect the censors’ disapproval of its potentially explosive so­ cial content. One such case was Naruse Mikio’s 1939 film The Whole Family Works (.Hataraku Ikka, Toho, script by Naruse). The year 1939 was hardly an auspicious moment to turn out a realistic social drama. To make mat­ ters worse, the novel Naruse chose to make into a film had been written by Tokunaga Sunao. The latter had once been a flaming leftist of the “ proletarian literature” school and was the author of a dynamic, multi­ angled depiction of police repression and company callousness, Town without a Sun (1929). Then, with political persecution at its height in 1933, Tokunaga suddenly broke with his Marxist colleagues, denouncing their “ oversensitivity to the political situation.” This allowed him to avoid his former colleagues’ fate -arrest, imprisonment, and the almost inevita­ ble tenko political conversion. Paradoxically, this in turn allowed Toku­ naga to keep some shred of his ideals intact at a time when many of his fellow leftists were rushing to the other extreme of the political spec­ trum, turning out overtly collaborationist literature.

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The Whole Family Works, both the novel and the film, frankly delin­ eates the psychological effects of abject poverty. At the same time, how­ ever, it is all somehow made amorphous through a subtle deboning of its class-conflict skeleton. Still, the very nature of its material made it a potential target for the zealous censors: The pitiful salary of a laborer in a printing factory consigns his family, overwhelmed by elderly parents and numerous children, to a borderline existence. Although the situa­ tion could have been set any time in the prewar period, patriotic war­ time slogans appear plastered on the walls, and the brief sequence in which one o f the sons dreams about army maneuvers makes it clear that the setting is contemporary Japan. However, as the script notes, the war on the distant mainland is only “ a kind of intensified depression from the point of view of the family.” 36 Kiichi, the eldest boy, now twenty-two years old, is especially bright and pleads with his father to be allowed to continue his schooling. To do so, however, would threaten the family’s precarious economic balance, since he would have to quit his job. Stimulated by his ambition, the younger children begin to demand a similar opportunity. In a manner vaguely reminiscent of the two sons in Ozu’s I Was Born B u t . . . , the laborer’s children confront the imposed “ givens” of their life and demand to know why it has to be so. Sato Tadao deftly summarizes their query: “ Why is it only workers are so poor? Why can’t one prosper in the world without going to school? Why is it that workers can’t be proud of themselves as workers?” But these are ques­ tions the film never satisfactorily answers, choosing instead to mirror the uncomprehending anguish of a class caught, perhaps forever, at the very bottom of Japan ’s economic system. As Sato explains, “ Taking into account the era, The Whole Family Works pushed its complaints against the social situation to the very limit. Under the conditions pre­ vailing at the time this criticism represented a high point in terms of its honesty and truthfulness.” 37 Naruse himself would later comment that “ If I were to criticize my own work, I’d have to admit that the film leaves much to be desired.” 38 That the original novel ended by leaving the dilemma unresolved had created aesthetic and political problems that he found “ dumbfound­ ing.” The aesthetic problem was one of closure; film audiences prob­ ably would not accept the gloomy negativity of a conclusion that re­ solves nothing. Nor probably would the studio. At the same time, however, he was trapped by the kinetic energy of the story’s naturalistdeterminist structure. Barring an illogical deus-cx-machina salvation, a

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Narusc M ikio’s The Whole Family Works (Toho, 1939). T h e father, played by form er benski narrator Tokugawa M usei, is surrounded by three o f his sons.

“ happy-ending” resolution was unthinkable. The logic of the story de­ creed that the boy either abandon his family or completely subordinate his own welfare to theirs. Since he could not employ Tokunaga’s solu­ tion of simply abandoning the conclusion to the imagination of his au­ dience, Naruse was caught between two unappealing choices: “At a certain point, I fell into complete despair, finding nothing in the real world I could cling to with certainty.” If the young character aban­ doned his family and sought his own private happiness, the film would surely be condemned for its “ radical individualism.” This left Naruse only the second resolution. The boy would have to stifle his ambitions, abandon his education, and allow himself to sink into the same futureless morass as his father. “ Self-sacrifice,” after all, was the official de­ mand of the hour. But how gloomy! At this point, Naruse’s nerve broke, and he decided on the ruse he would regret for years after the end of the war. After all, it had become almost standard practice among directors and scriptwriters faced with similar wartime pressures to resort to a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty. In their otherwise excellent Children of the Wind (haze noNaka no h'odomo. Shochiku, 1937), for example, Shimizu Hiroshi and his script­ writer Saito Ryusuke had turned to the time-worn “ found letter” device

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of melodrama to rescue the father from jail, thus allowing the film to conclude with the joy o f a miraculously reunified family. But the mira­ cle did not go down well with critics at the time, and Shimizu was roundly scolded in print, even by his old friend Hazumi Tsuneo. The ruse employed by Naruse would therefore have to be subtle enough to evade the notice o f most viewers. He would use a sleight of hand, a little rhetorical flourish, to change an obviously negative dé­ nouement into something that at least appeared to be positive. In an interview on the release of the film, he still sounded confident: “ In The Whole Family Works, I certainly don’t intend to provoke despair at the so­ cial reality. In fact not a single member o f the family finds himself de­ feated by that reality, nor is it my purpose to present such a character in the film.” 39 Reading the Whole Family script, one can almost see the ragged edge where two mutually incompatible worldviews are spliced together. This comes in the scene near the conclusion where the boy Kiichi makes up his mind to leave his family and try to make his own way in the world. His motivation is utter despair: “ During all my twenty two years o f life, I made myself believe that things were going to get better. Must I go on and on, just enduring and wearing myself to the bone? . . . I’m not criticizing Dad, but I don’t want to live the same hand-to-mouth existence all my life as him.” 40 The problem is that if he quits his present job, it will be a calamity for the family. At this point, a school-teacher friend of Kiichi steps in to solve the crisis. He takes Kiichi to a tea shop to talk over his options. In the next scene, the fam­ ily waits tensely as Kiichi returns with the teacher. Noboru and Gen, the younger brothers, follow Kiichi upstairs: : What’s Big Brother going to do? We really feel sorry for Dad too. n o b o r u : You’re not going to leave us, are you? I'm sure you're not! k i i c h i : Yeah, I guess you’re right.

noboru g en

:

Kiichi then goes downstairs to tell his father and the teacher that he has decided to stay with his job. The teacher is relieved and gives him a little lecture of hope: listen to me! There's no big rush about this. The thing to do is pour yourself into the tasks at hand [ganbaruj while hanging on to the conviction you have now. That’s what I hope you do. k i i c h i : I’ll do my best.

t ea c h er

: N ow

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The last scene picks up the teacher’s “ do one’s best” [gambaru] theme, as if the film had been a paean to spiritist group solidarity: Okay! I’m going to pour my efforts [gambaru] into that big con­ struction job! l i t t l e s h o : And I’m going to make big efforts [gambaru] too! g e n : Put your all into it! l i t t l e s h o : (standing on his head) I’m going to go all out! e i s a k u : Me too! (he then copies his brother by standing on his head)41 g en

:

To redirect (or mask) the ultimate significance o f the film’s plot, such rhetorical flourishes were not at all uncommon. Uchida Tomu de­ ployed the technique at the end o f his ironically titled Unending Advance (Kagirinaki %enshin, Nikkatsu, 1937)—with deeply disturbing results. Uchida’s film is a shdshimin tragedy based on an original story by Ozu Yasujirô. It tells the story o f a hardworking company employee who gleefully looks forward to the day he can buy his own home. By scrimp­ ing and saving, he figures he will be able to purchase one by the time he retires. Suddenly, however, the company president announces that the mandatory retirement age is now fifty-five, rather than the original sixty-five. This destroys the man’s plans, and he sinks into deep depres­ sion and finally goes mad. In a long sequence, he dreams about how it might have been. In the dream, he has been promoted to office man­ ager, and all the world is rosy. Even after he awakes, his fantasy persists as a delusion. He takes over the office o f the company vice president and then insists on taking his office colleagues out to dinner. At the res­ taurant, an emergency call is put through to the daughter to come and take her father home. In the concluding portion of the film, she arrives with her fiance. Faced with the mental collapse o f her father, the daughter is in vexation and despair. “ What’s to become of us?” “ It’ll come out just fine!” the fiancé answers with solid confidence. Up to this point, the film has moved steadily toward its preordained, pathetic con­ clusion. A perfectly ordinary man has been brutally betrayed by the system. As long as the system remains unchanged, nothing can be done. The scene obviously calls for bitter reflection on the nature of soci­ ety. But no, at this point the fiancé launches into a grand speech—an incrcdible muddle of mixed messages. The harangue is in fact a major innovation of the scriptwriter, as it does not appear in the Ozu original. At first, the fiancé urges the daughter to demand that the company take

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Uchida Tom u’s Endless Advance (Nikkatsu, 1937).

responsibility for the psychological damage done to her father. The rest sounds like a caricature of social Darwinism: It's a plain fact that if you want to fight, you’re going to have to light spiritually and economically, just to survive in the everyday world. It’s open warfare between individuals, states, races; there's even a conflict pitting one era against another! Every' battle has its own characteristics, but basically they are all the same they amount to the struggle for survival. When these are the stakes, a person has the right to fight in whatever manner he or she sees fit. In this survival-of-the-fittcst world, look where father’s gotten himself. He tried to take on the world with his honesty and negative life force. Now’s the era of positive life force. Fight for life with the utmost fury, seize by violence the opportunity to live! The more brutal the struggle for survival, the deeper the appreciation for the fragility of physical existence.42 It is not really clear what set of opinions inspired this eerie and un­ connected peroration. It is markedly different from the kodoha ravings of General Araki who was, in any case, officially side-lined after being implicated in the 26 February Incident. Rather, we see the lurking spirit of Nazism. It becomes unmistakable in the film’s concluding lines, which are spoken by the daughter: fci was about to forget all about poor, sick dad. . . . But that’s all right too, isn’t it? After all, father's a remnant for the past. In life, it’s the duty o f the present to bury the past!” 43

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In 1966, the scriptwriter Yagi YasutarO tried to explain the mystery about his state o f mind when he wrote the above dialogue: “ It involved the ideological confusion and anxiety o f the World War II years. As I re­ read the script today, I can plainly detect such anxiety in the lines deliv­ ered by the boyfriend at the end of the film. It was a script deeply influ­ enced by my mental confusion at the time.” 44

Filmworld Individuals in the China Incident The China Incident call ups cut an uneven swathe through the film in­ dustry in 1937. Yamanaka Sadao was drafted along with scriptwriter Sawamura Tsutomu. A year later, Yamanaka was dead, and Sawamura became so ill that he was released from service. Inagaki Hiroshi, al­ though he was the right age, was never called up. Koishi Eiichi, director of several Hasegawa Kazuo features, served as a sergeant in southern China from 1938. Taguchi Satoshi was drafted in 1941, soon after direct­ ing Generals, Staff, and Soldiers, and served in north China. Honda Inoshiro, who would make the earliest Godzilla films, was also drafted and served for many years. Yoshimura Kozaburo did not serve until the Pa­ cific War. As it turned out, neither the director o f Five Scouts, Tasaka Tomotaka, nor its scriptwriter, Kazahara RyOzO, actually served in the army. Tasaka was drafted at the very end o f the war and was stationed in Hiroshima, where he was radiated by the atomic bomb. O f Shochiku’s famous “Three Crows,” Sano Shuji, the youngest o f the three, was drafted in July 1938 and served in China for three years as a de­ coder with the Fifteenth Army Air Wing. He was drafted again in 1942 (soon after he finished starring in There Was a Father) for another two years, and yet again in March of 1945. With these huge gaps in his pro­ fessional career, he was never able to achieve the prominence his acting talent seemed to promise. As for the other two “ Crows,” Saburi Shin was never called up. Uehara Ken had done his service a number of years before the war, and so he too was not drafted in the China Inci­ dent. Neither was Kosugi Isamu, who often portrayed military men on screen. On 10 September 1937, Ozu YasujirO received his own “ red paper” (draft notice). In those days, the time between call up and actual depar­ ture for the front was remarkably short. So, two weeks later, Ozu pre­ sented himself at Osaka port ready to be shipped out. One of his last acts before boarding ship was to send a postcard to a friend: “ I’m ofT to the front for a little bit!” Three days later, he arrived in Shanghai.

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Ozu was assigned to a special unit operating in central China, and he continued to serve there until his release and return to Japan in Au­ gust 1939. In his book on Ozu, Sato Tadao informs us that units such as his specialized in gas warfare. As a gesture to the Geneva Convention, which Japan never actually signed, the gas was not lethal but of another variety that could immobilize enemy troops for ten minutes or so, allow­ ing Japanese forces to advance across rivers against their dug-in posi­ tions on the other side.45 One suspects that gas of some variety was used against the Chinese forces opposing the Japanese landing near Shang­ hai in 1937.46 Ozu was with the Japanese forces that took Nanjing in December, and after a two-month march north toward Hsuchou, he participated in its capture in April 1938. According to Sato, he participated “ on numer­ ous occasions” in assaults using gas warfare. In the fighting, Ozu learned to respect the Chinese forces, not so much for their prowess as their starding ferocity: “ One would expect the Chinese to run away in the face of an all-out assault by our forces —constituting the strongest military in the world—but they stuck to their trenches with stolid bravery.” 47 As one o f the most prominent individuals in the film industry, news­ paper interviews with Ozu were often published back home. In Decem­ ber 1937, he commented to a reporter from the Tokyo Asahi that “ it is my determination to take in all the sights of the battlefield and, if I come through this alive, make some sort o f movie in service to the national cause.” 48 A week later, he repeated the same ambition to another re­ porter: “ Now that I am at the front, I have no expectation of returning home alive. At the same time, I’ve experienced the reality of war and have for the first time ever confidence that I can really make a war film. The films turned out so far are half baked and unconvincing, having mostly been directed by people who have never known the real thing. The reality of war is a noble, edifying experience. If I happen to return alive, I want to make this experience into a realistic film.” 49 Clearly, the idea of making a war film continued to grow in his mind all the while he was at the front. In May 1938, he told the Tokyo Asahi: “ I’ve already got an acceptable working plan for a war film and I’m about to get started on it.” 50 In the last part of his stay in China, however, Ozu seemed to feel in­ stinctively that war films would never be his medium. In an interview with Miyako Shinbun in late July 1939, shortly before his return, he re­ vealed a semiconscious resistance to carrying out the plan: “ The sorts of experiences I’ve had over here and the various notions of how to bring

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them to the screen are still in the form of a jumble of notes—half of which I managed to leave behind on a march.” 51 In a zadankai immediately after his return, Ozu did indicate that the idea was still strong in his mind: “ One script idea involves a unit of sol­ diers surrounded by the enemy and covers the time until they’re able to break out. After fighting their way free, they find their force has shrunk to a quarter o f its original size. Still, on reflection, they decide that those who died had not lost their lives in vain. That’s the conclusion I intend to build toward.” 52 This, however, is the last heard of the pro­ ject. In the September issue o f Taiyo, he wrote: “ I f I’m asked about what film I intend to make next, I must say I have no clear goal or plan. One notion I’m ruminating is to make it something bright and lively. Still, having said this, I may yet turn out a dark, brooding piece after all.” 53 Despite his obvious reticence, Ozu continued to fuel talk that he was about to make a war film. On 16 January 1940, Miyako Shinbun reported:” After wrapping himself in silence since his return from the front last year, Ozu YasujirO finally turns his hand to a new film. The title decided upon is The Boyfriend Goes to Nanjing, with shooting due to start soon after the New Year. There is eager speculation about the new ground sure to be broken by the first major director to approach the subject with a firsthand knowledge of the war situation over there.” 54 But, Ozu himself squelched the rumors: “The reason why I’m not mak­ ing my first postreturn film a military one is that objective conditions at this time are such that I’m unlikely to make a satisfactory contribution to the field. But I’m still anxious to do a war film when I can. A similar situation probably confronts the novelist Hino Ashihei.” 55 As it turned out, The Boyfriend Goes to Nanjing was no battlefield story’ and was eventually rejected by the censors. After this experience, Ozu seems to have dropped the idea o f doing anything connected with the war in China. In 1943, Ozu would be attached to the army and sent to Singapore as a member of the Army Information Division, Film Section. The plan was for him to make a film about the campaign in Burma. Again the press stirred up great expectations for an Ozu war film: “ Filming starts momentarily!” But again no such film materialized. Ozu calmly prevar­ icated, claiming that circumstances were not yet right to begin shooting. In the meantime, he feasted on confiscated U.S. films, such as Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane, which had never reached Japan. At the time of the surrender, he burned the footage (mostly interviews with Ba Maw,

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the collaborationist Burmese leader) he had shot and became a detainee at Cholon under British military supervision. The case of Mizoguchi Kenji was quite different. Both aesthetically and in his personal life, he contrasted sharply with Ozu. Yoda Yoshikata’s description o f the difference in their aesthetic styles suggests much about the difference in their personalities as well: “ Mizoguchi’s method is to accommodate himself to the subject at hand, to follow it as it runs so to speak. Ozu, on the other hand, pulls the subject into him­ self, making it conform to his stance. Whereas Mizoguchi tries to find the eye in the middle of the raging storm, Ozu depicts the stillness at the center o f silence.” 56 One might say that in his abortive plans to make a war film, Ozu had been attempting to convert the reality of war into something com­ patible with the integrity of his own aesthetic world, but that it ulti­ mately proved “ indigestible.” The feelings aroused in Ozu by the war, along with his uncharacteristic nationalism in deciding to “ affirm” the aims of the war, had placed it beyond his reach as an aesthetic object. Although he consciously wanted to make a war film embodying this af­ firmation, the artist in him fought against it on a semiconscious level. And, fortunately, the artist won in the end. Yoda’s contrast o f the two directors implies that Mizoguchi Kenji’s instinctive habits o f mind provided him with less resistance to outside pressures. When he was called upon to make national policy films, as he was on two occasions, he dutifully made them. Neither of these, how­ ever, turned out to be real combat films. In the midst of the hysteria gen­ erated by the Three Human Bomb Patriots and the Lovers’ Suicide Rage, he made The Dawn o f the Founding o f Manchukuo (Aianmo Kenkoku no Reimei, Shinko, 1932), depicting the patriotic ardor of a young Manchu princess and her romantic liaison with a Japanese man in the days lead­ ing up to the Manchurian Crisis. The film would so embarrass Mizogu­ chi that later in life he would claim to have no memory of it. In 1938, he made the disastrous film The Camp Song (Roei no Via, Shinko, starring Kawazu Seisaburo and Yamaji Fumiko). Contemporary reviews, such as this by Uehara KOzO, gave The Camp Song credit for a considerable degree o f emotional power, little o f it, how­ ever, having to do with the war: “ The depictions of the young wife’s suf­ fering under postfeudal constraints and the affecting portrayals o f the closeness of a mother and her child rivet the viewer, moving us deeply.” 57 If we were to apply Yoda’s formula to the story, which Yoda himself worked up with scriptwriter Hatamoto Shuichi, the “ raging storm” is

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Director M izoguchi K en ji (I.) with his scriptwriter Yoda Yoshikata (r.) {F.iga Hyoron, Ju n e 1939).

only partly represented by the war. Since most of the story is set on the home front, the disturbance mostly comes from Mizoguchi's traditional motif o f the callousness of men toward women. The “ eye of the storm” is also readily recognizable: the quiet loyalty and constancy of a woman, the wife and mother. Thus, despite expectations to the contrary, Mizo­ guchi turned Camp Song into another shimpa-style melodrama, this time with a wartime theme. Viewers typically responded to it as a kind of shimpa-style drama, as well. “ I watched it through a veil o f tears!” one fan raved.58 But not everyone approved: “ The aftertaste of this film is dry vacuity. Yes, its glimpses into the hearts of mother and child bring tears to the eyes, but upon reflection, these very tears cause us to feel a twinge of embarrassment.” 59 The film did not survive the war, and so we must reconstruct it from contemporary accounts and reviews. A young man marries a woman of low social standing and they have a child. His father, apparently a wid­ ower, is extremely proud of his Bushi-class heritage and condemns the son for sullying the family name. The wife is sneeringly rejected by the old man. The young man is drafted and heads ofT to war. One of the few stills o f the movie that survives shows him marching by in silhouette as the wife looks 011, her face beaming with the required pride and joy.

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Ad for M izoguchi’s Camp Song [Nihon E g a .Ju n e 1938).

In her arms, she holds their little boy, who wears his own little army hel­ met and waves a small hi no maru flag. The fate to which the husband must abandon his wife is pure shimpa. The night before his departure, the husband had tried (but failed) to convince his proud, skinflint father to reconcile himself with his wife. In­ stead, as soon as his son is gone, the old man whisks his grandson away from the mother, taking him to his villa in rural Ibaragi. This is just the beginning of the woman’s tragedy. Repeatedly, she makes vain trips to the villa to plead with the old man and wheedle him into returning the child. She herself lives in the most abject pov­ erty, and these fruitless trips take a terrible toll on her purse and her spirit. The nine-year-old boy longs for his mother as well and, in one episode, persuades a good-hearted local doctor to help him make his way back to Tokyo. But, almost immediately, the two are torn apart again. The little boy then finds a way to slip away from those taking him back and so returns to his mother. At first, she greets him with feigned severity, but soon she snatches him up, swearing they will never part again.

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The following morning, the grandfather appears in the entryway, thundering threats. As the tension between mother and grandfather reaches its peak, the kindly country doctor husdes: “An emergency an­ nouncement!” The old man assumes the doctor has come to announce the death o f his son in battle and instantaneously undergoes a miracu­ lous change of heart. He asks the mother to forgive his past coldness and welcomes her to his home.60 The reaction of contemporary reviewer Ueno to this turn of events (“ One can only wonder at the lack o f talent in the construction o f this plot!” ) probably represented the majority opinion. The two brief batdefield scenes featuring the husband had clearly been inserted simply to highlight the main theater of action as “ the home front.” They also pro­ vided the opportunity for the soundtrack to play two full renditions of “ Camp Song.” But for some fans even this was not enough. Such was the reaction of one contributor to Bungei: “ Now the point could be made that the only really appropriate place to play the song is the scene in the trenches. Still, to those of us who went to see the picture with the nor­ mal expectations, the dde is treacherously misleading.” 61 The part of the film garnering the greatest disapproval was the fi­ nale, after the arrival of the doctor. As Ueno reports: “ The ‘emergency announcement’ brought by the doctor turns out not to be news o f the husband’s death, but of his exemplary martial valor. The crudity of this gimmick for bringing the film to a happy conclusion is all too apparent. Paradoxically, however, it makes the rest o f the film impossibly somber and grim.. . . Although there are hints anticipating the sudden melting o f the father’s flinty heart, diese alone are insufficient for us to accept his sudden reversal. It is an absurdity for the film to turn the tables on it­ self and the viewer so abruptly, trying to force down our throats this fairy-tale conclusion. The result is laughable, and yet it lacks the humor to make us really laugh.” 62 One can surmise from this description that, unlike Ozu, Mizoguchi had no strong conception of the war. Judging from his postwar depic­ tions o f the samurai class, one can infer an instinctive dislike for the martial spirit in any of its incarnations. Ozu, on the other hand, had a participant’s knowledge of the war, and because he could not take possession of this knowledge for artistic purposes in no way means that he rejected it. Any study of Ozu’s public statements in the wartime period can only persuade us that he shared much of the militarist’s thinking about the war. His problem appears to have been that war simply failed to inspire him creatively as an artist.

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In contrast, Mizoguchi’s attitude toward the war and the national au­ thoritarian structure that supported it was, from start to finish, one of fear and dread. Yoda Yoshikata, who knew him intimately during these years, recounts several anecdotes, indicating that dismay was the ruling emotion. His retreat into “ traditional arts” (geiddmono) history pieces was probably less a protest against the war than an implicit statement that neither its reality nor its ideals held any interest for him. The bureau­ crats in charge of cultural affairs, meanwhile, found a way to approve this desertion. The spirit depicted in his geiddmono—which showcased various aspects of the nation’s “ two-thousand-year history of aesthetic feeling” —is in complete harmony with the theoretical stances of Nishida KitarO and Hasegawa NyOzekan. The authorities could gladly accept this and applauded it, even though Mizoguchi nowhere proclaimed the absolute superiority of Japan or the ‘Japanese Spirit.” The case of Naruse Mikio bears similarities to both Mizoguchi and Ozu. He also managed to avoid making overt military propaganda, de­ spite some evident pressure to do so. Throughout most of the war years, his work tended to alternate between comedies, geiddmono, and rather half-hearted national policy pieces. Sincerity (Alagokoro, Toho, 1939), his next film after The Whole Family Works, ends with one o f the important characters receiving his call-up notice and going into the army, but oth­ erwise the plot is pure melodrama. His short subject film A Facefrom the Past (Natsukashii Kao, Toho, 1941) has a sequence in which a family sees their son in a military newsreel. Shanghai Moon (Shanhai no Tsuki, Toho, 1941), a melodramatic “ spy” feature about a propaganda radio station in China, represented Naruse’s most ambitious effort in the national policy field. In aju ly 1941 article for Eiga magazine, however, he made it clear that he shared none o f the nationalist fervor of the time: “ While in Shanghai, I saw as many U.S. films as I could. . . . If other filmmakers were given a similar chance to see the wonderful advances the United States has achieved, Japanese cinema would progress by leaps and bounds.” 63 The title of Naruse’s last wartime film, Until Victory Day (Shori no Hi Made, Toho, 1945), also belies its true nature. Rather than a trium­ phant “ war spirit” feature, it was a nonsense comedy, musical review, made so late in the war that very few actually saw it. During the China Incident period, two other prominent directors had significant experiences on the mainland. Both of them Ushihara Kiyohiko and Kinugasa Teinosuke were too old to go to the front as soldiers. Much like the writers in the Pen Detachment, they were sent on brief sojourns to collect material for the purposes of reportage.

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In June 1938, Ushihara and his crew were commissioned by the Pa­ triotic Home-Front Association to document the assault on Hangchou. Dubbed the Ushihara Detachment, none o f the members had combat experience, and, as Ushihara was to record in his autobiography, the sight of the carnage shocked them to the core. One evening, he and his crew looked down into the Hangchou River, lit by the city beyond: “The dully glistening surface of the river was clotted with the corpses o f the defeated enemy. In an endless stream they would silendy flow past. Be­ fore leavingjapan for the front, we had been severely warned that under no circumstances were we to shoot footage of the dead, be they enemy or our own. And yet, here before our very eyes was an endless proces­ sion of these forbidden objects. This was our first experience o f naked warfare. Here, for the first time was the great test of our spirits, and of our stomachs.” 64 Confronted with similar scenes, Ozu YasujirO’s reaction had been one of almost casual sangjroid: “ Probably because I’d already experi­ enced the Great Tokyo Earthquake, I felt no particular sensation on confronting the mounds of dead left behind by the enemy. This seems to prove that when one is face-to-face with such a vast reality, the emotion dissipates.” 65 Ushihara had also experienced the Tokyo earthquake, de­ scribing it in horrific yet moving passages in his celebrated autobiogra­ phy, but it did not seem to harden him as the China Incident had Ozu. The purpose of Kinugasa Teinosuke’s trip to China was vague at best. The only record of it available today is a photographic essay pub­ lished as a special section in the May 1939 edition o f Chuo Koron, under the militant-sounding title, Striking at the South China Front (Nanshi Sensen wo Tsuku). The overall effect is much like a Kamei Fumio documentary. The copy, which is typical militarist propaganda, is consistendy under­ cut by the visuals. A two-page spread, showing ruined buildings, has the caption: “ They were magnificent ruins. Yet all of them had been mili­ tary installations, not one of the private dwellings thereabouts had been touched.” 66 But, no matter how hard we scrutinize the photos, we can see nothing but broad vistas of utter ruin. Not a pillbox, nor even a gun is to be seen; only wreckage, scattered clothing, and kitchen utensils. An­ other double page is labeled in big lettering “ Toward the New Order.” The photo shows a line of dispirited Chinese civilians in traditional cos­ tume. In another picture, a man is hefting a pair o f children balanced on litde seats dangling from either side of the pole he is carrying. The only “ new” element is a prominendy displayed Japanese flag. Yet an­ other page is labeled “ Emergency Distribution,” and indeed one photo

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docs show Japanese troops doling out rice. Another picture, of precisely the same spot but immediately after the soldiers have taken away their rice sacks, shows civilians scrabbling to pick up, grain by grain, the spilled rice. Despite the surge in the quality o f gendaigeki in the second half of the thirties, war dramas lagged far behind. In the next chapter, we will look at the war-film genre in the first years o f the China Incident and at the desperate search for new formulas to treat a war whose “ reason why” re­ mained unclear. The first solution was found by director Tasaka Tomotaka, whose Five Scouts launched a flourishing subgenre of new-style “ humanist” war films. Although several o f these films garnered interna­ tional praise for their touching portrayals of the soldier’s essential hu­ manness, they often had a disturbing submotif -the rejection o f the need to probe the causes o f war. In fact, as we shall see, they represented a concerted attack on the venerable notion o f historical causality.

5 War Dramas in the China Incident

A “ Treason” o f the Film Companies The nation’s sudden plunge into total war had brought on a crisis of confidence in the Japanese film industry. While the early China Inci­ dent newsreels stirred audiences to thunderous applause, the war drama films following on the program were often greeted with disap­ pointment and groans o f boredom. Company executives publicly wrung their hands at the way talkie newsreels had changed the percep­ tions and expectations of their audiences. As Shochiku’s Kido Shirô wailed in late 1937, “ I would bow down to the ground to anyone able to make a war film capable o f rivaling the visceral [skintaitekij impact of these newsreels.” 1 The very titles of the first China Incident war films indicated that the industry remained trapped in archaic formulas. The Glorious End o f the Two Human Bomb Officers, made by the little Sekizawa Company, and Daito’s The Human Bomb Brothers were clearly little more than talkie ver­ sions o f the kiwamono “ quickies” churned out in the Manchurian Inci­ dent. Even films garnished with stylishly modern titles — The Flaming Front (Daito), In the Crossfire (Tokyo Hassei), and W ild Winds on the Border (Nikkatsu) —were regularly lashed by the press as “ impossibly inappro­ priate to the new era o f total war and total mobilization.” 2 Tatebayashi Mikio accused them of “ poisoning public support for the war” and Masutani Tatsunosuke, another Home Ministry official, took the as­ sault a step further: “ The [film] industry is using the Incident to bilk the film-going public. These films constitute a form of national treason!” 3 “ Why,” a reporter for Nihon Eiga queried in November 1937, “ has war film turned its back on the greatness now being achieved in other areas o f our national cinema, and retreated into the premodern shadows of uninspired plots and turgid sentimentalism?” 4 Both Sho­ chiku’s Kido ShirO and Toho producer Mori Iwao acknowledged

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their companies had been casting “ desperately, randomly” about for a new kind o f war film.5 Toho managed to come up with the “ least bad” (for such was Tatebayashi’s backhanded compliment) war film of this early period Striking at the North China Skies (Hokushi no Sora wo Tsuku, 1937, Watanabe Kunio, dir.) The hero is a journalist whose superpatriotism goes beyond the reports he files for his papers. Soon after the Marco Polo Bridge In­ cident, he comes home and is outraged to find his sister holding a party for her school friends. He sternly lectures them all on the impropriety of such frivolity at a time o f national emergency. Back at the front, he sets aside all pretense o f journalistic neutrality and engages in an unauthor­ ized, semimilitary exploit of his own. Striking manages to play on two of the three major themes dominat­ ing early China Incident war films. The first was the heroic image of the war correspondent, reflecting the flood of self-adulatory reportage that had been rivedng newspaper readers since the early days of July. Eventu­ ally, the Home Ministry began to frown on this usurpation of the fighting soldier’s heroism, but in the first half-year of the Incident, a dispropor­ tionate number of war films, such as Shinko’s The Human Bomb Journalists at the Battle o f Tsushu, had newspaper men as major protagonists. The second major theme was the condemnation o f home-front fri­ volity and the call for a mood of solemnity and abstinence. Dating from General Araki’s didactic Crisis-Time Japan (1933), it remained a message very difficult to dramatize; as in Striking, it usually took the form of a mor­ alistic lecture. Other films touting this as their main theme—Shinko’s The M ilitarist Mother’s Letter and Nikkatsu’s Way o f the Warrior- cut back and forth between batdefield heroics and contrasting portrayals of “ model” and “ frivolous” youth at home. Noting the “ weak entertain­ ment value” of Way o f the Warrior, Kinemajunpo warned exhibitors that it would be “very much a gamble to show as the main feature.” The third theme developed during this period is the depiction of the battlefield as a place of “ reconciliation” between the capitalist class and the rebellious worker. This was the main theme of Sasaki Yasushi’s Song o f the Advancing Army (Shingun no Uta, Shochiku, 1937), the period’s “ second least bad” film. Ando (Saburi Shin) receives his draft notice while in jail for having organized a strike at the factory where he had worked. Toya­ ma, the factory-owner’s son and one of the factory’s managers, has also been called into service. Toyama visits Ando in an attempt to achieve reconciliation, since they will now be fellow soldiers, but is rebuffed.

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Later, at the front, they find themselves in the same unit and class antag­ onism quickly melts into genuine friendship. When Ando is hit by an enemy bullet, he dies in the arms of the grieving Toyama. Hijikata’s Siz­ zling Hand Grenade (Nekketsu Teruidan, Dai to, 1937) and Human Bomb Brothers (,Nikudan Kyodai, Daito, 1937) repeated the theme. Although Tatebayashi did give faint praise to Striking at the North China Skies, his Home Ministry colleague Masutani reported he had “ stormed out 011 it midway, nauseous with loathing.” For quite different reasons, Iwasaki Akira also loathed the film: “ One cannot help being shocked at the barbaric and infantile prowar clichés spewing from the mouths of the youths in the Tokyo street corner scene. It may be too much to ex­ pect such cretins to engage in rigorous analysis, but surely we could hope for some slight shred of reason.” 6 Immaturity was also the reason cited by Hirabayashi Kogo in the October 1937 issue of Bungei for his own exasperation, not only at the war films, but at the war novels of the period as well: “ Distinguished war drama is usually the product of nations that have known defeat. As the ever-victorious “ fortunate party” in all of our foreign wars, we Japanese feel self-satisfaction with our situation and this may have left us inca­ pable of profound thought on the subject.” 7 “ Rigorous analysis” and “ profound thought” were demands impos­ sibly beyond the ken o f the early China Incident filmmakers; they had more pressing demands to meet. The company executives continued to see war films as short-lived, low-budget investments to be turned out as quickly and with as little strain on company resources as possible. From the other side, the government insisted that they “ seriously present the aims and reality of the war.” And here was another dilemma. How were filmmakers to explain a conflict whose very raison d’etre was hidden in the swirling mists of incomprehensible pronouncements? In an autumn zadankai in Nihon Eiga, film executives turned to an Education Ministry official for advice and elicited only shoulder-shrugging perplexity: “ Well, I don’t know . . . something wholesome and bright, I guess. Something inspirational.” 8 Clearly, it would be up to the filmmakers themselves to find a creative answer to the challenge.

Five Scouts: The Beast with Many Bodies A full fourteen months after the start o f the China conflict, Hino Ashihei, the brilliant war reportage novelist, claimed to have found his own personal path through the confused situation. In the introduction to his

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best-selling novel Barley and Soldiers (Mugi to Heitai), he wrote: “ I have been at the very center of this vastness called war and yet understand nothing. I am like a blind man. .. .For the present I lack the words to say anything about [the meaning] of this grand fact. In the meantime, I console myself with one modest solution, the conviction there is some­ thing useful about preserving a record of the direct experiences o f a sin­ gle soldier.” 9 As we shall see in this chapter, Hino’s professed inability to “ under­ stand” the China Incident must ultimately be seen in the context of the era’s “ rejection of history,” a trend that permeated intellectual and aca­ demic discourse and even penetrated to the public via popular journal­ ism. In practical terms, the result was a general perception o f a taboo against probing the causes of the war with China. Hino’s “ modest solu­ tion,” for example, seems to have been a product o f this sense of taboo. He chose to focus on the minutiae o f the conflict, the highly personal­ ized sensations of the individual soldier, and then, hurdling the political and historical issues o f the war itself, to come to ground again in a realm where war is part of the general human condition, an eternal verity in the fixed nature of things. In film, Tasaka Tomotaka emerged as a close counterpart to Hino Ashihei.10 He too managed to draw creative inspiration from the taboo against reasoning “ why.” Additionally, the solutions he worked out for the film led to an entirely new logic for wartime Japanese cinema. Al­ though it would be another year before he actually made a film out of a Hino novel, Tasaka’s Five Scouts (Gonin no Sekko Hei, Nikkatsu, 1938) clearly takes the same approach to the war that Hino would adopt in his famed Soldiers trilogy o f that year.11 As in Hino’s novels, he averts his gaze from the total picture of the war, presenting instead a mosaic of minuscule slices o f life. The historical and political void at the cen­ ter of the work is suffused with the same glow o f genuine comradely love as in Hino’s novels, the same tragic sense of life. By emphasizing the simple human traits of his soldiers, he was able to give them spiri­ tual depth and accessibility, investing them with a profundity far greater than that of the characters in any previous Japanese war film. Thenceforth, war would be treated as a universal, as well as an eternal, fact of life. The original inspiration for Five Scouts had been a newspaper bidan published in the papers during the first month o f the Incident. Even the names of the actual soldiers find their way into the film. Five Scouts was in fact the second version of the same bidan, the first being Yoshimura

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Misao’s Flaming Front (Aloetatsu Jensen, Daito, 1937), which had opened in November to the usual caustic reviews. The first innovation o f Tasaka’s version was to radically simplify the story. A company o f soldiers is resting in a deserted hamlet. Five of their number are ordered to reconnoiter nearby enemy fortifications. Four of them return from the mission and wait anxiously for the fifth, who makes his way back late that night and is welcomed with expressions of loving fellowship. The next morning, the company gathers for an inspirational talk from their commander before moving on to their next batde. Although there is but one actual combat sequence in the entire film, death is a periodic topic of conversation among the soldiers. They speak of it in tones of hushed reverence. Hearing the shot that kills an enemy sniper, a soldier raises his hand and mutters in Chinese, ‘'m eifa” (“ can’t be helped” ). The deaths o f their own comrades are invariably invested with a heroic splendor: And what do you think he said to me as he lay there? k i m u r a : What did he s a y ? n a k a m u r a (eyes wide with wonder and admiration): “I can seeJapan! 1 can seeJapan!” —That’s what. Then he started to sing “ Kimi Ga Yo” [the national anthem]. But he only got out the first words.1* nakam ura

:

Lieutenant Okada, the company commander, has made writing in the company field diary a personal fetish. “After having written in it,” he tells Sergeant Fujimoto, “ I feel it would be all right for me to die any time. Whenever I have time, I read over the diary. You should do that, too. No matter how difficult the circumstance, your courage comes surging back. The spirits of our dead seem to gather together in your body.” 11 The men themselves seem to be oblivious of the diary. They have only each other, and they form a unit of warmth and affection surpass­ ing even the most idealized family. In most subsequent war films, at­ tempts would be made to replicate Tasaka’s richly detailed portrait of his “ family” of soldiers. Tasaka also solved the problems inherent in the construction of an all-male drama that avoided the usual dramatic conflicts. He did this partly by demoting the narrative to secondary importance. A string of vignettes, again similar to a technique used by Hino, move out laterally from the film’s thematic center (which we might call “ harmony under conditions of tension” ). The narrative flow is broken into irregular bits.

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which are unified not by the story but by the mood. A skillful and often an audacious experimenter with film sound, Tasaka has the soldiers hum or sing some of the more popular military songs of the era. The words to “ Roei no Uta” (“ Camp Song” ) and “ Umi Yu Kaba” (“ When We Go to the Sea” ) were almost universally known, and the melody alone was sufficient to communicate the feelings or thoughts of the men. Their movements and dialogue are orchestrated into the music, giving the men a universal, stereotypical quality, which in turn makes them seem both harmonious and selfless. The soldiers, therefore, are not developed as individuals, nor even as “ types” (the usual Hollywood formula for depicting the fighting unit). Rather, the sum total of their combined characteristics creates a single personality, a group personality. Furthermore, it is a personality that never quite emerges from the realm of the ideal into that o f the real. The ideal Japanese soldier is a sharing creature. A single cigarette is passed from hand to hand, and the very smoke entering the lungs o f one is enjoyed by the others. When a soldier staggers into camp laden with watermelons, he flops them down in the middle of the group shouting out “ Come on, eat them up!” He smiles blissfully, as if already tasting the sweet juice that will soon be filling the mouths o f the other men. Feelings are shared through immediate intuition. One cannot be sad without tears springing to the eyes of the others. Since they are melded into a single, sentient organism, as it were, the loss of a comrade is like an amputation. But far worse is to be the one separated from the group. When corpsmen come to take a wounded man to a field hospital, he shrieks “ No, I’m all right! There’s no need to send me back with a wound like this. Just let me stay. Please! Please!” “ The bullet’s gone through your shoulder,” a corpsman replies, “What would you do if you lost your arm?” “ I don’t care what happens to just one arm. I can still carry out my duties just fine,” he insists, trying to heft a rifle to prove his point. Even the spiritist scriptwriter-critic Sawamura Tsutomu found the episode “ embarrassing.” Still, variations on the same theme were re­ played in a host o f subsequent war films, gradually becoming one of the obligatory dramatic clichés of the genre. In the later versions, how­ ever, it would often turn into garish displays o f self-sacrifice. In the original script for The Legend o f Tank Commander Nishizumi (1940), for ex­ ample, the motif becomes utterly macabre. A wounded soldier lies athwart the path o f advancingjapanese tanks. “Just run over my legs!” he shouts to them.14

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T h e ideal Jap an ese soldier is a sharing creature. Five Scouts (Nikkatsu, 1938).

In Five Scouts, the grief of the other men over the inevitable depar­ ture o f their wounded friend swells into an emotion of universal propor­ tions. After the ambulance carries the man away through the darkened town gate, the men slowly disperse. One wanders out into a field, where he picks up a leaf. In the gathering dusk, he uses the leaf as a whistle, humming through it. The tune, which echoes hauntingly through the surrounding countryside, is “Aoba Shigeru Sakurai.” Audiences at the time immediately would have recognized it as the parting song of par­ ent and child. The painful separation of the wounded man from his group thus melts into the pain of the mother who has waved her boy off to the front. Sawamura Tsutomu, who was just then embarking on the formidable task of formulating an aesthetic for the national policy film, was especially moved by the scene: “There is no art without the essence of such emotion. War films must strive to insert genuine human emo­ tions and thereby inspire the spirit of the nation. Only through such genuineness and purity of spirit will the people truly be able to unite.” 15 For Private Kiguchi Kiichi, the anguish of separation turns into the terror of alienation in Five Scouts's only extended episode. He has become separated from the other four while on reconnaissance. Throughout the

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night, the others wait for him in oppressive silence. Even the company commander wanders distraught in the rain. “ Kiichi!” shouts one of the men into the gloom. “ If you’re alive, come back. If you’re not — well, that’s all right, too. But it’s just . . . that we want to know!” The next shot shows Kiguchi’s feet slogging through a morass o f raindrenched mud. Panting sobs communicate his desperation. Finally, he limps into camp, and the entire company turns out to welcome him, weeping for joy. After Kiguchi finishes his report to his commanding officer, he melts into the loving arms of his fellows. They jubilantly load him with food and cigarettes. Kimura is almost speechless with emotion. His body quivers as the others begin to weep along with him. Thank you. Thank you. n a k a m u r a : Oh, Kiguchi! We’re so happy. k i g u c h i : Thank you. Thank you. kig u ch i:

The scene is a celebration of life, o f survival, as well as o f fellowship. One o f Tasaka’s most important innovations here is his break with the thanotological message of the earlier “ Human Bomb” films. Sawamura applauded this affirmation of life at the front. This, too, was part o f the latter’s “ aesthetics of genuine emotion” : “ Tasaka grasps here something vast. Or, if you will, he puts the nobility of life under the microscope and magnifies it.” 16 The mood of the soldiers is now intense, and it must be discharged in some direction. Private Toyama raises his eyes heavenward and in­ tones the first words of the national anthem: “ Ki-mi-ga-yo-o-wa . . The others pick up the refrain, punctuating it with sobs. Cut to the com­ pany commander’s field office, where he is surrounded by other officers. They are all standing at attention, listening to the men sing. The next morning, a bugle sounds reveille in the predawn darkness. The men are about to march out to a new battle. Lieutenant Okada stands before them, his drawn sword resting ceremoniously on his shoulder. His speech to the men shows how the “ family circle” of the company overlaps two other spheres, family and country: “You and I know that this is the hour in which we might be asked to give ourselves in gratitude for His Majesty’s great benevolence to us, to our families, and to our nation. The eyes o f our families, our brothers and sisters, our wives and children, look eagerly upon us and what we do here today.

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T h e typical “ spiritist” smile (Five Scouts).

From now on, I want you to entrust your lives to me as you would to your fathers. Ixt us join together in the glorious death o f the warrior hero! Tenno Heikei Banzai!” 17 Lieutenant Okada thus presents himself as the father of the soldier family. The military at the time actually did prescribe this notion of one’s commanding officer and in some tracts went so far as to detail which officer rank should play the role of the elder or younger brother. More important, however, the image o f the commanding officer as the benign father figure for the fighting unit becomes another of the ubiqui­ tous cliches o f later war films. According to Sawamura: “The speech’s emphasis on the instability of life under wartime conditions counterbal­ ances the earlier scene affirming its noble preciousness.” 18 As the men listen, most faces are intense, as befits men about to com­ mit their lives to some perilous action. Some however smile. In the na­ tional policy war films of a slightly later period, this smile takes on ideo­ logical significance, becoming the insignia of a “ spiritist” genre. In the words of Sato Tadao, it would proclaim the battlefield to be “ the train­ ing ground of the spirit, and war itself a spiritual exercise.” 19

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The new formulas Tasaka innovated for Five Scouts proved to be enormously popular, and his sudden emergence as the leading maker of war dramas proved to be the long-awaited turning point in the field. Those critics who continued to hold the very term “ military film” in contempt tried to argue that it did not belong in that category at all. “ What good does it do to call it that?” Mizumachi Seiji wrote, “ It’s a work o f art, a poem about men and war.” 20 In Kinema Junpo’s “ Exhibi­ tion Value o f New Releases,” the editor told the theater owners that Five Scouts was “ a film of substance, not to be dismissed as a mere military film,” 21 and it won the Kinemajunpo Best One Award for 1938. As with Hino Ashihei’s works, the absence of a political center made Five Scouts accessible to a wide spectrum o f admirers. Even as Iwasaki Akira was praising it for its “ defense of humanistic values,” it was winning awards for its depiction of “ true military spirit” at the Nazi Berlin Film Festival and a special “ People’s Culture” award at the Venice Film Festival, recendy launched under the auspices of Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture. Ozu YasujirO, in the only combat film script he ever wrote —Farfrom the Land o f Our Parents (writ­ ten in 1942, but never filmed)—rendered his own homage by following its general dramatic structure and even inserting his own version of the scouting sequence. The praise, however, was far from universal. Some government of­ ficials voiced concern over the impression Five Scouts might make on ordinary viewers abroad, and it was subjected to particularly intense scrutiny by the Foreign Ministry. The latter sent Japanese embassies around the world a secret circular detailing the film’s demerits as a tool of propaganda: “ The film’s overall effect is depressing. . . . It plays into the hands of the Chinese propaganda machine, which likes to portray us as losing the war. More seriously, it confirms the impression among the English and the French that their aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s resistance effort is bearing some fruit.” According to the circular, the film: 1) fails to develop the atmosphere of a victorious Japanese Army by playing up the pathos of war; 2) gives the impression of a war carried out by guerrilla methods rather than those of modern military science; and 3) implies to foreigners that our forces face defeat, since it portrays the unit as having been reduced from two hundred men to less than a hundred.22

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Tasaka and the Rejection o f History A few months after the start of the China Incident, the Emperor issued a chokugo (Imperial Rescript) with the ostensible purpose of explaining to Japanese soldiers the reasons and purposes o f the war.23 Five Scouts (1938) actually shows Lieutenant Okada reading the rescript to his men at the front. They stand at ease in a large barn, the commander in the center, as the camera views the group in extreme long shot. The omi­ nous, dark ceiling of the building dominates the top third of the screen. Okada tells them he already has read the rescript and had wept tears of gratitude. “Attention!” he commands and begins to read it aloud. The Emperor informs them that despite his sincere intentions for the peace and mutual prosperity of all Asian nations, the Kuomintang govern­ ment willfully has refused to understand the Japanese position. This fact has filled his heart with grievous suffering. And so he must call upon his soldiers to endure infinite hardship in order to effect “ self-reflection” (hansei) among the intransigent enemy leaders. This is all there is to the message. Aside from vague references to the enemy’s “ refusal to understand,” the suffering of the Imperial heart, and the government’s “ sincere intentions,” there is no reference to his­ torical causes nor any substantive explanation as to “ why we fight.” Lieutenant Okada reads (or rather intones) the message in an unemphatic, rapid-fire voice. The instant he utters the last syllable of the re­ script, there is a cut to his makeshift headquarters the following morn­ ing. The message o f the editing seems to be, “ so much for ‘reasons,’ let us return to duty.” The reading scene features no reaction shots o f the men taking in the message. Its wording, in any case, is so archaic as to be virtually in­ comprehensible to the semieducated soldiers. This, however, does not seem to perturb them. They continue to stand stiffly at attention, impas­ sive to the words. They know their job is not to understand but merely to carry out the formal procedure of listening with profound reverence. The scene has disturbing implications. For the first time since their arrival at the front, the soldiers’ supreme commander has deigned to give them an explanation as to why they are there. In a U.S. or English or even a German film, such a scene might have incorporated a certain amount o f discussion. Individual soldiers would have tried to express their own understanding in their own words. Tasaka’s failure to develop the scene in the above manner is no mere oversight. In fact, in his very next film M ud and Soldiers (1939), he

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reiterates the same “ ours is not to reason why” theme. There, a squad of soldiers lies huddled, utterly exhausted, in a trench. The inevitable cigarette is being passed from hand to hand. One o f the men breaks the silence and chants in mock solemnity: “ Where in the world are we? What in the world are we doing here?” “ What a bunch of impertinent rubbish!” comes the response. A sound o f grim laughter and a string of farts ensues. The smoothness of the interchange seems to be ritualistic, as if it were a kind o f skit which they already have reenacted many times. The point is clearly that, by 1939, the soldiers have become in­ ured to the chimera o f a reasonless war. As we have already seen, a number o f the early China Incident films took up the ideological task of deconstructing leftist “ class-conscious­ ness.” In Tasaka Tomotaka’s “ humanist” war films, however, the new target is the liberal culture of rationalism. In a superbly subde manner they reflect the assault in the late 1930s on the notion of historical cau­ sality. They established a (usually unenunciated) message firmly embed­ ded in many o f the subsequent war films of the period. The message is: the specific causes of the conflict are beyond the comprehension o f or­ dinary people, soldier or civilian. As long as human beings are human, war is their quintessential condition. “ Essences” and “ quintessences,” such was the nomenclature domi­ nating historical discourse in China Incident era Japan. In May 1937, the Ministry of Education issued a slim volume The Essence o f the National Polity (Kokutai no Hongi), distributing copies to every elementary and mid­ dle school history teacher in the land. The Ministry commanded that it be used as a supplementary teaching text and that it become the focus of all history teaching henceforth. It was the purest example of mystical ultranationalism ever produced by a Japanese government ministry. Postwar, historian Ienaga Saburó would characterize it as “ a mixture of Kojiki mythology and Nihon Shoki genealogy, expositing on the divine ori­ gins o f Japan and its imperial system, not as myth but as if it were literal historical truth.” 24 It is unlikely the Ministry actually expected the individual history teachers --most of whom had had at least a minimal exposure to West­ ern historiography—to believe in this sort of fantasized history. It was sufficient that they conduct their classes as if they believed. Following a traditional and highly efficient practice of Japanese bureaucracy, the Education Ministry imposed the impracticable Kokutai no Hongi on its teachers and then sat back, expecting them to work up a logical curricu­ lum for this patently antilogical doctrine.

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In the 1937-38 issues of History Education (Rekishi Kyoiku), the journal for those teaching history on the preuniversity level, we witness peda­ gogical theorists scurrying to their task: “ The historical notions o f the recent past have led us astray. The tricky mechanism [inchiki karakurij of Western thought made it seem everything had to be explained in terms of causality and other rationalistic principles. But what light does this shed on such metaphysical problems as religion or the origins o f a state?” 25 “That which defines an era is its spiritual essence, its distin­ guishing spiritual characteristics. Clarifying these essences is the mission o f history education, just as clarifying the essence o f our own national polity [kokutai no meicho] is the mission of our modern state.” 26 “ To understand a moment in time or the actions of a nation, we must turn to motives, not causes or results.. . . When judging who is right and who wrong, one must be careful not to put all one’s focus on the outcome [kekka] of an event. The results of any event must be seen in terms of the motives of the parties involved. . . . Seen in this way, we are invariably struck by how morally pure the motives of our own divinely-originated state have been throughout history.” 27 The historical discourse of essences had actually begun decades before in the uniquely Japanese discipline of toynshi (oriental history), which took China as its primary focus. Typical of the approach was Naito Konan’s work in the teens, elucidating the “ essential” characteris­ tics of the Tang and the Sung dynasties. When it came to ancient Jap a­ nese history, Naito and his colleague Shiratori Kurakichi tended to de­ mote archeology to second place in favor of the mythology of the Kojiki. This was because “ it alone speaks of what really happened, of what was fully manifested.” 28 Although lines of causality were not completely ignored, the mecha­ nism of history tended to be seen as a mysterious process, one of “ coa­ lescing.” This notion was one of those subsumed into the Kokutai no Hongi view of history in the late thirties.29 The combined effect of these two —the kokutai and the toyoshi discourses —rationalized the impotence of the historian in the face of contemporary events. Until the essence of the era had coalesced, making itself manifest in its essential form, it was best to have great patience and to wait. Such was the meaning of Tokutomi Inoichiro’s pronouncement on the China Incident in History Educa­ tion: “ The curtain has gone up on a vast drama with still no clear sight of how or when it will end. It is too soon to view it from the vantage point of history.” 30 This was precisely the message that found its way into the popular

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journalism of the era and formed the antihistorical backdrop to the war literature of Hino Ashihei and the war films o f Tasaka Tomotaka. In Five Scouts, the issue of the practical function of “ history” is ad­ dressed most directly in the several scenes where company commander Okada writes in or reads from the field diary. He is the representative, homuncular historian of the Incident. For him, it is through the diary, rather than the Emperor’s Chokugo, that the “ incomprehensible vast­ ness” (Hino’s phrase) o f the Incident is made comprehensible. Okada sees his role as historian in terms of beatification. No matter the actual circumstances, each of his fallen soldiers is recorded as having died with the name of the Emperor on his lips. As one pedagogue historian put it in History Education: “ Kokushi (national history) separates itself from the history of facts and gives itself over to an understanding of and propa­ gation o f its spirit.” History does not stand away in objective isolation: “ it melds with the character of the individual —such is the take-off point where historical consciousness becomes a mirror for practical reality.” 31 The function o f history, therefore, is inspiration—or, as the film’s Okada puts it, making “ the spirits o f the dead gather together in your body.” 32 In accordance with the militarist ideology of the period, the living soldier already considers himself to be part of the world of the dead. Only in death does the man transcend “ the history of facts” and merge with his essence as a soldier. In the pages of the field diary, his deeds and his death are immortalized as part of Japan’s military legend. The men are not fighting for a “ cause,” but for the privilege of becoming part o f this eternal legend. Such, at any rate, is the intensely romantic view of Lieutenant Okada.

Mud and Soldiers and Legend of Tank Commander Mshizumi On 23 August 1938, the Cabinet Information Board called together military officers in charge o f “ information” along with representatives of the bundan literary' elite to confer on how literature could be “ mobi­ lized” in service to the war effort. The idea was to put together a “ Pen Battalion” (pen butai) that would be sent to China to cover the great as­ sault on Hangchou. Kikuchi Kan, who was put in charge o f selecting the personnel for the detachment, decided to give priority to writers of “ popular literature.” This was the field, he reasoned, that would bene­ fit most from direct observations of the battlefield. “ For writers o f pure

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Elite figures o f the literary world arrive in Shanghai as members o f the “ Pen Battalion” in 1938. From left to right: Satfi Haruo. Kikuchi K a n , K ojim a SeijirO, H am am oto H i­ roshi, K itam u ra Kom atsu, Yoshiya Nobuko, and Yoshikawa Eiji (Asahi Graph, Septem ­ ber 1938).

literature,” he reasoned, “ sojourns with the army for periods of a month or two would hardly be sufficient.” 33 Two groups were initially sent to the front, one assigned to the army and one to the navy The army group included playwrights Kawaguchi Matsutaro and Kishida Kunishi, novelists Niwa Fumio and Hayashi Fumiko, and eight others. The navy group included Kikuchi Kan and scriptwriter Kitamura Komatsu. They set off amid great fanfare, and the long “ reports” they sent back to the magazines and newspapers kept the nation’s readers engrossed. With the exception of Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s report on the aftermath of the massacre at Nanjing (which was sup­ pressed before it reached the eyes of the public), they were little more than energetic exercises in propaganda. Hayashi Fumiko, the cele­ brated author of Horoki, probably represented the writers’ state of mind when she wrote soon after her return: “ Since I went over at government expense, I assumed I had the responsibility to write something” 34 As with most o f the other participants, that “ responsibility" apparently did not entail finding out the truth of the war, but rather to provide good service to one’s official sponsors. Hayashi’s book Battle Front (1938), for instance, is filled with rhapsodic descriptions of the Imperial Army moving out to action.

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Evaluating the collective results of the Pen Detachment’s several months at the front, Sugiyama Heisuke (one of the participants) would admit a few years later that the “ harvest from the batdefield was rather paltry.” 35 Ozu YasujirO’s evaluation was far more harsh: “ When top writers go to the front, the Army never lets them up on the firing line. They come over dressed like play soldiers, some packing pistols and some even with a sword dangling at the hip. The troops over there are disgusted when they get a load of them. Kikuchi Kan at least had the sense to go over in a suit and with his walking stick.” 36 Hino Ashihei was on hand to greet the first Pen Battalion writers as they alighted from the plane in Shanghai. Soon after the beginning of the war, Hino had accompanied the army as a sergeant and witnessed much of the early fighting. In 1938, he turned his field diary into the “ re­ portage” novels, Barley and Soldiers (Alugi to Heitai) and Mud and Soldiers (Tsuchi to Heitai). In almost microscopic detail, he describes the Chinese countryside through which the troops had to slog, the muddy creeks filled with the bloated corpses of Chinese soldiers, the shattered farm­ houses with bedding drooling from the windows, the nights of camarad­ erie while the big guns boomed in the distance, and the endless, dusty barley fields stretching to the horizon. The lice, the joys of a soggy cig­ arette, and the orange color of the troops’ feces (the result of an uninter­ rupted diet of pumpkins) are celebrated in long, almost lyrical passages. Describing a line of Chinese prisoners, Hino allowed that they “ resem­ bled us as closely as one’s neighbors” and that this realization gave him “ an unpleasant sensation.” 37 But, aside from the beheading of three prisoners—who have made themselves seem villainous by screaming anti-Japanese slogans before they die —there is not the least hint of the atrocides which he must have witnessed in Nanjing. Tasaka’s M ud and Soldiers (Tsuchi to Heitai, Nikkatsu, 1939) is very loosely based on Hino’s novel dealing with the first days of the China Incident. Since the original “ novel” had no real plot to speak of, Tasaka draws on its psychological milieu, preaching a doctrine of resignation to the impersonal “ rhythm” of events. This time, Tasaka largely abandons the image of the comradely unit of soldiers as a single, sympathetic organism. Instead, the men be­ come percussion instruments in a vast orchestra, beating a varied rhythm across the continent. The rhythm shifts according to the ter­ rain, beating fast as feet cross a dry, dusty field, then faster still as they break into a charge. Sometimes the rhythm is syncopated by the clopclop-clop of the horses pulling gun caissons (almost nowhere in the film

Tasaka Tom otaka (1902 74), director (.Nihon Eiga> O ctobcr 1937).

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is there the suggestion of mechanized warfare). Continuously, we hear in the background the muffled boom of artillery and the chatter o f ma­ chine guns. In Five Scouts, off screen space had been a deserted void. Here it is made a region filled with hostile presences, unseen guerrillas who con­ stantly snipe at the soldiers and occasionally unleash barrages of artil­ lery. Often the rhythmic pattern o f marching feet resolves into the lu­ gubrious slog o f feet squelching through mud. A bone-tired soldier misses the road and marches straight into the mire of a paddy. His laughing buddies pull him back into the rhythm, and they all march on into the night. The conductor of this orchestra o f war remains out of sight. Kosugi Isamu, who had played the paternal Lieutenant Okada in Five Scouts, is reduced in rank here to a mere sergeant who marches alongside his men. The film opens with troop ships plowing toward China. There is no mention of who or what set them in motion. Cut to a stateroom where generals are communicating the objective o f the mission—a landing at Hangchou to lower-ranking officers. In a sequence of shots, we follow the orders as they are transmitted down the chain to lower-ranking groups. Finally, we focus on Sergeant Tamai (Kosugi) as he repeats them to his small group of men. Our first impression is one of men united ob­ jectively and vertically in a hierarchy, rather than subjectively and hori­ zontally into a community. Even in the dramatic sequences, the camera usually maintains an impersonal, voyeuristic distance. When a young soldier lies dying on the batdefield, it circles him and the group of con­ cerned comrades from a distance, as would a documentary cameraman who has happened upon the scene. The prevailing documentary tone allows the weaponry o f war to be­ come the protagonists of some of the longest sequences in the film.38 On two separate occasions, the slow destruction of an enemy-held farmhouse is minutely detailed in near-real time: heavy machine guns shattering the roof tiles, filling the air with pulverized debris. The heavy thud of the field artillery joins the chatter of the automatic weapons, opening gaping holes in the walls. Again, the motif is music, horrible and hypnotic, but a kind of music all the same. These two scenes are far too long to be included simply for their overall, rhythmic effect. They stupefy and thrill the senses. The ghasdy fascination o f modern warfare is obviously another element. There is a certain satisfaction, even pleasure, here. It was George C. Scott’s Patton who actually put this guilty pleasure into words. Watching his tanks blast

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their way through an enemy-held village, he exclaims “ God, I love war!” Ozu Yasujiró also gave it expression. Describing his sensations at seeing VVusung soon after arriving in China, he told reporters: “ There wasn’t a house left intact. It makes you figure that war’s the business of destroying buildings. You get the feeling its perfecdy all right to blast a house to pieces.” 39 In M ud and Soldiers, the men occasionally give fleeting acknowledg­ ment of this pleasure. After a shell from a grenade launcher lands squarely on the roof of an enemy-held farmhouse, two close-ups show soldiers grinning in satisfaction. In general, however, the emotions of the soldiers are repressed. They seem struck dumb by the incomprehen­ sible grandeur of the war and the machinelike organization of which they are a part. Another striking difference between this film and Five Scouts is the in­ articulateness of its soldiers. A young soldier, striding next to Sergeant Tamai, tries to make a statement about all the marching: “ You know, its all. . . what should I say?” Word is shouted back by a superior to “ Shut up and stop troubling the sergeant!” As mere human beings caught in war’s vastness, they are no longer the masters of their own personal fates. There is in fact nothing articulate they can say. Inevitably, the re­ sult is something like nihilism. Near nihilism is equally apparent in the scene already mentioned, where the soldier asks in mock seriousness “ What are we doing here [in China]?” and is greeted with cynical laughter and the breaking of wind. At the end of the film, the men sit in a circle, drinking sake and singing military songs. They appear to be reaffirming the fellowship of the earlier Tasaka film. This time, however, the camera hovers at a dis­ tance and then begins to track to the left of the group along an endless vista of ruins. The soundtrack continues the voices of the men, but our attention is elsewhere. It stops at a singed tree, just beyond the crum­ bling wall of a courtyard; the branches are filled with nests, and birds flutter back and forth. Cut to a shot of a pair of stray dogs silently nos­ ing around in the ruins and then to the tree again for a close up of sev­ eral perched birds, chirping and ruffling their feathers. The scene is strikingly reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s description in SlaughterhouseFive of the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing: “ there is nothing to say about a massacre. . . . Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-wee?’40 A bugle blast breaks this last calm in M ud and Soldiers, calling the men to

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Tasaka’s M ud and Soldiers (Nikkat.su, 1939).

assembly. Soon there is the rhythmic sound of the treading feet again as the men march off to a new assignment. When Mud and Soldiers was released, critics almost immediately sensed the incompatibility of two radically different forms of depiction: “Although it tries to blur the demarcation, the disjunction between the world of the individual and that of the group is all too distinct.” 41 Such criticism must have been especially painful to Tasaka, since the tri­ umph of his earlier Five Scouts had come from his success in harmoniz­ ing the two. But Five Scouts had been scripted and largely shot in Japan, at a safe distance from the complications of actual combat conditions. To make Mud and Soldiers, Tasaka (along with his two young scriptwriters, Kasahara Ryozo and Toyama Tetsu) spent months among the soldiers at the front: “After we arrived, we discovered that our script had to be com­ pletely redone,” he told Ozu Yasujiro in a 1939 zadankai. “ Our experi­ ence there caused us to reevaluate our criteria and the thought of turn­ ing it all into a film filled us with dread.” 42 The effects of this dread are apparent when we compare the origi­ nal script with the film. The script is filled with little Hino-esque vi­ gnettes characterizing various individuals in the group. The fact of

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Tamai’s fatness, for instance, is a running joke. It is a recognizable ex­ tension of the world of human foibles celebrated in Five Scouts, albeit in a considerably more muted form. Although a few of these vignettes are incorporated into the final film, they are scattered and have litde collec­ tive impact. The individuality o f the characters, the very basis of the film’s “ humanism,” is overwhelmed by a huge impersonal weight. “After a while on the continent, I found I had no firm plan of action at all,” Tasaka reported after the war, “ and if I expected to get some kind of inspiration on location, that didn’t happen either.” Exposed to the scene of actual warfare, Tasaka ran into the farthest limits of his “ humanist” approach. As Ozu pointed out to him in 1939: “ There’s not much in common between the soldiers who populate the imaginations of people back home and the real soldiers at the batde front.” 43 The “ humanist” ap­ proach emphasized a continuity of personality stretching from the character’s life at home to his actions, thoughts, and sensations at the front. In opposition to this, Ozu time and again emphasized the radical rfu-continuity separating the psychology of the civilian from that of the soldier: “ One undergoes a distinct mental change. The process starts the first time you come under fire. Thereafter, the worse things get, the more profoundly you change on the inside. None of Hino’s novels give you any sense of this happening. I find them really disappointing on that score, and the same goes for the so-called war films.” 44 The search for the appropriate cinematic formula to overcome the personal-versus-impersonal disjunction was carried on by a number of directors over the next several years. Eventually, Yamamoto KajirO came up with an effective solution in his Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya (1942). In the meantime, directors lurched uncertainly between stereo­ typical “ impersonality” (as in Abe Yutaka’s Burning Sky) and romanti­ cized portraits of individual heroes. Yoshimura KOzaburO’s Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi (.Nishizumi Senshacho Den, Shochiku, 1940) was to be one of the last of the “ human­ ist” war-film dramas. It also marked the start of a small series of “ con­ temporary hero” films, which would eventually include Kato’s Falcon Fighters (1944) and Believe That Others Will Follow (1945). By focusing on a single individual, the style of the film contrasts sharply with the strongly “ objective,” documentary flavor of the two top war films of the previous year, Mud and Soldiers and Kumagai’s Naval Brigade at Shanghai. Yoshimura spent a week touring the battlefield where the real Nishi­ zumi had fought: “ Littered among the unruly weeds and grass were

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unexploded hand grenades and the bleaching bones of enemy soldiers. In the distance, there was intermittent gunfire from stragglers still lurk­ ing in the area.” Yoshimura also underwent a period of training in the Army tank school: “ The tanks were a fairly crude affair, being little more than an iron box on caterpillar treads. One wonders how such unwieldy vehicles could have been used in actual combat. But the training really came in handy when we started shooting.” 45 Unlike Tasaka, Yoshimura seems not to have been intimidated by his experience at the front, although he did report in his postwar autobiog­ raphy that the prospect o f having to make a combat film left him with the feeling of “ dull depression.” Apparently buoyed by the Shochiku tradition o f cheerful and determinedly “ up-beat” pictures, he braved the same pressures as Tasaka and yet turned out a picture depicting his frontline soldiers as “ members of a sort of war buddies club” (Yoshi­ mura’s own phrase).46 The original script, written by Noda KOgo, was heavily freighted with slurs against the cowardly Chinese and their lack of fighting spirit. In a sequence in Noda’s script, the company cook gleefully describes his first experience in batde: “ Those Chinese didn’t put up much resistance. I just turned the machine gun on them and went ‘da-da-da-da,’ and they dropped in bunches of twenty or thirty.” 47 In the film, however, Yoshimura excised much of Noda’s bloodthirsty racism. By showing Nishizumi and his men as deeply feeling people (in many scenes they are brought to tears by admiration or pity) and by gendy poking fun at their many failings (one soldier refuses to go to the latrine—“ I’m scared of the dead bodies!” ), Yoshimura keeps the film well within the terrain of the “ humanist” tradition as originally marked out by Tasaka. Still, there is a problem with considering Nishizumi as an example of cinematic humanism. Its central character is actually a kind o f super­ man, albeit a wonderfully accessible one. Played by the enormously popular matinee idol Uehara Ken, Nishizumi’s stodgy spiritism comes across onscreen as deceptively modern. The “ spiritual” smile about which Sawamura had written a few years earlier—“ that o f the man who both reveres life and lighdy casts it aside in the line of duty” —plays handsomely across his face. Not only is Nishizumi unfailingly brave and selfless in battle, he proves himself an enterprising inventor by rigging up a water strainer for the cook. And yet, many of the lines issuing from his mouth have the quality of something engraved at the base of a statue (“ No matter what, Nishizumi will never retreat under fire!” ).

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One year before Mshizumi, nationalist critics had attacked Yoshimura’s spectacularly successful love melodrama Warm Currents, com­ plaining that it “ reeked of butter” (i.e., was overly Westernized). There, the highly Westernized fashions and decors are matched by the equally “Western” personality traits in the characters—a highly assertive indi­ vidualism, as evinced by the two central female characters. We see a similar self-expressiveness in the figure o f Nishizumi. There is some­ thing intellectual and dandyish about the tank commander’s manner of speaking and dressing, even in his pensively held cigarette. Uehara Ken’s own physical features contrast sharply with those o f the men around him. He seems vaguely alien, un-Japanese. As Joan Mellen notes: “ sultry-eyed and with a pencil-thin mustache, he resembles a Ja p ­ anese Errol Flynn.” 48 Within the confines of a eulogistic national policy film, it was neces­ sary to endow such strongly individualistic characters with thoughts and attitudes closely conforming to the militarist ideology. Nishizumi is therefore made the embodiment of the old-fashioned martial virtues: he is stalwart, modest, and severe with himself, yet kindly toward his men. He believes in the war efTort, as both a national necessity and as an op­ portunity to purify his own spirit and those of his men. When he finds several of them arguing about whose turn it is to stand guard duty, he wins their admiration by lecturing them that “ it’s not a matter o f doing things according to one’s turn, but a matter of each person developing his spirit of self-sacrifice.” Shigeno Tatsuhiko complained about this bigger-than-life quality in the January 1941 issue o f Eiga Hyoron: “ The film fails to get away from the stylization of the old-style sword dramas. Like the heroes of the old bidan films, Nishizumi is a mythologized figure, a flawless hero uncom­ plicated by self-doubt.” 49 Nishizumi’s implausible and contradictory nature —intellectual and cosmopolitan on the outside and rigidly conventional on the inside — becomes apparent only when we isolate him out of the rush o f events surrounding him. And this is something Yoshimura gives us little oppor­ tunity to do. The glimpses we catch o f Nishizumi and his men come mosdy during the occasional rest stops punctuating the army’s relendess plunge toward Nanjing, and then beyond. The film opens with a messenger on horseback galloping through an artillery barrage. He arrives at his destination and collapses seriously wounded. The scene after next is a batde incomparably more ferocious and bloody than anything Tasaka had ever shown. A Japanese unit is

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Yoshim ura KozaburO’s legend o f lank ('.ommander Nishizumi (Shochiku, 1940). Nishizumi (U ehara Ken) stands ori the left, the droll com pany cook (Sakamoto Takeshi) in the center.

being decimated before our eyes under a withering barrage of artillery and machine-gun fire. By the time the tank column arrives, they have taken heavy casualties. In subsequent battle scenes, too, the film makes it clear that for every victory and every advance, the Japanese are pay­ ing a high price in blood. Nishizumi cradles the head of a dying com­ rade. Rather than announcing his end with the prescribed shout of Tamo Heika Banzai, the man merely groans. Nor is there even the slight­ est hint that each “victory” has achieved anything more than to clear the way for yet another bloodbath. Every time Nishizumi comments on the overall war situation, he is deeply pessimistic. He shakes his head muttering “ This war is terrible, really terrible.” 50 One o f the remarkable features of the film is its frequent depiction of Chinese troops. Since they wear their distinctive, German-style hel­ met, they are easy to recognize. In early documentary' sequences, we see them on guard duty or setting up their weapons. Later, in a scene re­ creating a nighttime battle, the camera follows their activity for some time, illuminated by their campfires. The subsequent battle is a melee of Japanese and Chinese soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. The enemy troops seem just as brave and almost as fierce as their Japanese counter­ parts. At one point, a Chinese man clambers on top of Nishizumi’s tank and is about to lob a grenade down the hatch when he is shot dead.

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Even in the scene where Nishizumi is mortally wounded, the soldier who shoots him is not shown as completely contemptible. He crawls wounded through the rubble o f a house on the other side of the creek. Surrounded by the carnage o f his dead comrades, he painfully raises his rifle and sights down the barrel at Nishizumi. Twice he almost loses con­ sciousness, but each time he tenaciously brings himself back to his task. After he shoots Nishizumi, a line o f tanks open up on his position with a devastating barrage. After the smoke clears, we see him roll over, his eyes glazed in death. There is a great difference in spirit between such depictions and the intense loathing for all Chinese that Noda had expressed in the original script. Yoshimura’s decision to portray the Chinese as essentially wor­ thy adversaries, with a degree of valor, gives his battle scenes a majesty and pathos missing from most other Japanese combat pictures. The problem is that he includes a derogatory scene depicting a Chinese woman, a holdover from the Noda script. By doing so, he creates the impression of admiring the Chinese soldiers while holding the civilians in contempt. As with similar depictions in M ud and Soldiers and Kumagai’s Naval Brigade at Shanghai, the woman seems to be there solely as an opportu­ nity for the Japanese soldiers to demonstrate their own pan-Asianism. Nishizumi’s men have found her wounded, hugging a little baby. “ Have no fear,” he comforts her in her own language, “ We Japanese soldiers would never harm you peasants. We are all your friends.” As they lov­ ingly pass the infant from hand to hand, one soldier remarks with won­ der that it is “ not at all different-looking from a Japanese baby. Whether they be Chinese or Japanese, babies are babies!” exclaims another. It soon becomes apparent that the woman’s husband has run off to save his own skin after the he and his wife had been set upon and robbed by Chinese soldiers. In the end, the woman repays Nishizumi’s men by slipping away in the night, leaving behind the corpse of her baby. The men decide to build a tomb for the child. On its tiny coffin, Nishizumi inscribes “ Litde Nameless One.” Despite these occasional lapses into self-extolling propaganda, the Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi remains today one of the most artis­ tically successful, and even likable, war films of the entire Fifteen Years’ War era. Since Nishizumi KojirO was an actual war hero who, after his death, was widely hailed in the press as a true gunshin (i.e., incarnation of the god of war), the pressure on both the film’s scriptwriter and director to portray him as a heroic superman must have been quite intense.

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Under such circumstances, it was quite an achievement to be able to endow him with the attributes and appeal o f an ordinary man. Koshi TarO’s favorable review of the film’s treatment o f Nishizumi, was clearly also meant as a defense of the entire genre o f “ humanist” war films: “ Perhaps some would prefer to imagine Nishizumi as some kind of fero­ cious warrior demon. In fact, however, he was simply another fairly or­ dinary man, who loved his family and died like so many o f his comrades in this conflict. People are most often at their best when they are simply being human. That which makes a human a ‘god’ is the fact of his basic humanity. Such is the essence of true miracles.” 51 As Mr. Average Man on the batdefield, the “ humanist” war-film sol­ dier had a home-front propaganda role to play. Not only was he invari­ ably brave when called to duty, he knew instinctively the right spiritual “ posture” to take when confronting hardship or personal loss. Here, it was his fortitude, more than his martial bravery, which made him a model for the national program o f “ steeling the will of the civilian pop­ ulation for prolonged conflict on the continent.” Although the newspa­ pers continued to portray the invincible sweep o f the Japanese army across China in the form of aggressive arrows loosed against various points on a map, the nation could not help observing the endless stream of war dead returning to the homeland. Their cremated remains, neady wrapped in immaculate white, were paraded en masse through the streets in ever-lengthening funeral processions. In April 1939, the first of many gigantic funeral ceremonies was held at the Tokyo’s Yasukuni Jin ja, the national shrine for war heroes. The most popular song of the time was a dirgelike ballad, “The Mother at Kudan Station” (Kudan no Haha). The old mother, a country woman, is all alone as she alights at the station closest to the shrine where her dead son is to be honored. Since this is her first time in the big city, she wanders the streets, fretful and confused. Yet, for all her pathos, she is not a tragic figure. In her own way, she too is a model of fortitude. And the implication is that many, many more will follow in her footsteps before its “ over over there.” Tasaka’s M ud and Soldiers abounds in metaphorical images of the war as a grueling road that winds ever onward. In the Legend o f Tank Com­ mander Mshizumi, too, the hero makes it clear to his men that there will be no early conclusion to it. “ The war’s just started,” he would reiterate, “At the shortest, it’ll continue for another three, four years.” Nishizumi himself harbors no illusions about returning home. “ Sooner or later,” he says, “ I’m going to bccome part of the earth of this land [China].”

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Five Scouts and the Legend o f Tank Commander Nishizumi served to give audiences instruction in how to endure unendurable losses and how to carry on without giving in to despair. The “ humanist” films, with their “ infusion of genuine human sentiment,” confronted the spiritual prob­ lems of an era of seemingly perpetual war. Such films, along with songs like “ Kudan Station” reminded the population that they were not alone in mourning personal losses. They provided, not an oudet for grief, but a model for the “ correct” posture o f bearing grief. No matter one’s in­ nermost thoughts and feelings, such forms had to be obeyed in public.

The Issue o f “ Humanism” in a War Film What unites the “ humanist” films into a recognizable group is their tendency to de-emphasize martial heroics and hatred o f the enemy, while promoting emotion, especially affection, over any form of con­ ceptual thought.52 The soldiers have in common that essential human nature which emerges after the incidentals and blemishes o f individual character have been erased, much as the Kokutai no Hongi view o f his­ tory wiped away factual incidentals in favor of “ essences” and “ true motives.” Philosophically, the films also bear resemblance to the hu­ manism of the early Greeks and Romans. There, the term was used to distinguish the human (or “ humane” ) realm from that o f the beasts on the one hand, and from the divine on the other. In making the latter contrast, the concept usually stressed some pathetic aspect o f the human condition: mortality, fallibility, or frailty. Similarly, one finds the “ humanist” war films appealing because of their frank acknowledg­ ment of the fears, foibles, and weaknesses of their characters. The films, however, do not conform to the universalist or interna­ tionalist aspect of modern humanism. While the affinity of blood unites the soldiers in brotherhood, it isolates them from the alien world around them. SatQ Takeshi’s Chocolate and Soldiers (Chokoreto to Heitai, Toho, 1938), perhaps the tenderest o f the “ humanist” films, is one such depiction of an almost hermetically sealed, all-Japanese world. The central charac­ ter is a kindly, hard-working father whose greatest pleasure is to pass his time in the bosom o f his loving family. One day, his call-up notice ar­ rives, and he is sent to the front. Through a stream of letters, his mind, affections, and concerns remain firmly anchored at home. The doings of his wife and child are at least as real to him as his new surroundings. At home, the man’s young son busily collects chocolate wrappers. When

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he has collected enough, he will send them off to the manufacturer to receive a free box o f candy. At the front, the father spends his spare time writing letters and gathering chocolate wrappers from his comrades for his son’s collection. Clearly, the other men’s feelings of companionship and friendship with the father extend to the boy they have never met. The man’s single act o f martial valor is to volunteer as a member o f a suicide squad in a desperate attack on the enemy defenses. Before he sets out, he drinks a final toast with his mates from a litde cup presented him by his son. In a close-up, we see the smile so typical o f these “ hu­ manist” war films (and signifying his determination to die with one’s close comrades). Meanwhile, back at home, the boy has sent off his wrappers to the chocolate company. Just as he receives his gift box, noti­ fication arrives that his father has died in battle. The boy, in confusion and grief, shouts “ to hell with those chocolate bars!” Then, in the only “ promilitarist” moment in the entire film, he swears vengeance against the enemy who killed his father. The chocolate company, hearing of the incident, shows its patriotic solidarity with the war effort by awarding him a scholarship. In the context of the era, praising such films as “ humanist” involved a certain audacity. Within a few years, any writer discussing “ humanism” (or its corollary,” liberalism” ) would be obliged to prefix such terms as “ decadent,” “ nihilistic,” “ superficial,” or at least a sneering “ so-called.” In the 1938 reviews of Five Scouts, however, the term humanism was widely employed in a positive sense. To be sure, Sawamura Tsutomu warily avoided using it explicitly in his review, preferring such safely neutral sub­ stitutions as “ showing a human countenance” and “ true human feeling.” On the other hand, Tsumura Hideo, who was fast becoming the most authoritative progovernment critic, used it boldly: “ This is an achieve­ ment worthy of praise. At last humanism has found expression in a Jap a­ nese war film!” 53 As the Pacific War approached, however, even constrained depictions of the humanness of individual soldiers came under fire. The new Nazi war films, with their open disavowal o f the worth of the individual, were often adopted as the standards of excellence by a breed of critics even further to the right than Sawamura Tsutomu. According to Nakatani Hiroshi’s frigid definition, the successful war film must translate itself out of the realm of “ humane feelings” (ninjo) into the nonhumane (hininjo): That which makes Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers inferior to [Karl] Ritter's Holiday on Word of Honor is Tasaka’s insistent attempt to reduce the

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totality of war to the level of the human feelings of his characters. Just what does his indulgent close-up of Sgt. Tamai’s blistered feet tell us about the true severity of human combat? The essence of war is not simply the travail, the pain, the strength, the bravery, or the nobility of the individuals who fight it. It has nothing to do with the bonds uniting individual to individual nor, even, individual to state. Rather, it is the very negation of such emotions; it is the epitome of the anhuman, the inhuman. In his capacity as a soldier, each fighting man is a microcosm of the state he serves. When the viewer of a war film sheds tears at the spectacle of loyalty and bravery, he is actually experiencing the climactic excitement that arises when he first perceives, in the single soldier on the screen, the state in its entirety and the people in their entirety. It is a leap from the world of human individuals to that of non­ humanness (hiningensei).” ^* Nakatani’s position here is clearly extreme, even for mid-1941. Still, such war films as Burning Sky (1940) and some o f those made in the last days of the Pacific War did tend to reflect his oudook. The majority, how­ ever, chose a middle route between Tasaka’s detailing of the soldier’s frail humanness and Nakatani’s iron dream of “ nonhumanness.” Deep into the late thirties, Japanese philosophical humanism con­ tinued to fight a rearguard action against the ideologues, attempting to preserve a semblance of integrity. In 1939, Funayama Shin’ichi, a close colleague of the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, published a long essay in Chuo Koron to announce the birth o f a “ new humanism” : “ The defini­ tion of man is not set for all eternity, but is in constant evolution. Therefore we must reject any ‘humanism’ purporting to base itself on eternal verities. The way forward is to reject the humanisms o f the past, including the Western notions born o f the Renaissance, and re­ place them with the new.” Funayama is o f course announcing here a compromise with the ideologues. In an attempt to carve out a place for his own principles in Japan ’s New Order, his “ new,” watered-down ver­ sion becomes applicable only to a certain region of the world. We sec this when he turns his attention to the China Incident: “ The historical significance of the China Incident is to be found in its establishment of an East Asian community, rooted in a new set of universal values. The ideal o f East Asian unity is inextricably interwoven with humanism and an appreciation of our common situation. If the economic needs o f Japan become the sole vantage point, the ideal o f ‘unity’ becomes a sham when its sole purpose is creating a camouflage for our own raw economic self-interest.”

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Sergeant Tam ai (Kosugi Isamu) inspects his blisters in M ud and Soldiers. Nationalist critic Nakatani Hiroshi criticized this scene (Nikkatsu, 1939).

Rather than “ all humanity,” the new, truncated “ universalism” is confined to the Japanese and their fellow Asians, all o f whom are bound into the Dai Tôa (Greater East Asian) community. Clearly, while exclud­ ing any allegiance to the hateful West, Funayama is still hoping to sub­ merge Japan’s narcissistic nationalism within a wider context: “ East Asia,” after all, is certainly a far wider context that “Japan.” Even in terms of this limited and rather ungenerous version of hu­ manism, the” humanist” war films fail to measure up. They are tales of racially solipsistic love, paeans to the “ miraculous” Japanese spirit. The affections of the soldiers are confined exclusively to the world of fcllowJapancse (although animals or very young alien children may be benefi­ ciaries of it when they wander into that little world). Remarkably similar treatments are to be found in all of Hino’s war literature, which the ideologue Sugiyama Heisuke defined as “ the fraternal love of those united by the ties of blood.” 56 There is little to suggest that any of the soldiers ever considered themselves tied to the local population through East Asian fellowship. The filmmakers avoided the necessity of drawing

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members of the foreign (Chinese) population into their circle of affec­ tion by simply not presenting them on screen. The towns where the Ja p ­ anese troops lodge are usually utterly deserted, and the surrounding countryside is a hollow of silence. A few humanist films —Mud and Soldiers and the Legend of Tank Com­ mander Kishizumi—do feature short vignettes o f encounters with Chi­ nese. But, as we have already seen in the case o f Mshizumi, their purpose appears to be to contrast the inhuman qualities o f the enemy with the solicitousness of the Japanese. A scene much more affecting (and effective, as propaganda) comes near the end o f Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers. Sergeant Tamai enters a pill­ box that has just been taken and comes face to face with a few Chinese survivors. The camera focuses on a violendy trembling youth in the cor­ ner. Much like the description of the Chinese soldiers in Hino’s novel, this one also seems “ no different from one’s next door neighbor” in Japan. The young Chinese is clutching a knife. The camera holds on his feet as the knife drops into frame with a clang that echoes in the eerie si­ lence. It is the sound of utter defeat, resignation, surrender. Then, the camera pans across the floor, following the long chain that shackles him to his position. Almost immediately after this scene, the film concludes with the soldiers gathered once again into their exclusive world of cam­ araderie and racial affinity. War film was not the only genre to preach the joys and solace o f an all-Japanese world. In Imai Tadashi’s Takiko Village (Takiko Mura, Toho, 1940), a “ humanist” kokusaku film of the noncombat variety, a village po­ liceman stops a brawl among local youths with this exhortation: “ Look around you. Do you see any foreigners here? Your faces all look alike, right? Your brothers, your uncles, your cousins and second cousins are all [over on the continent] fighting on the same side. Over there, they share the same cigarette and read each other’s mail. They’re tied by bonds stronger than brotherhood. . . . Shoulder-to-shoulder, they go into battle, men from Hokkaido and Kyushu. What’s this foolishness of quarreling just because you’re from different schools? Once you’re over there, in a foreign land, who do you think you’ll have around to talk to? You’ll only have each other and nobody else!” 57 While the “ humanist” films implicitly affirmed “ emotion” over causes and reasons and circumscribed “ humanity” within the confines of an all-Japanese world of a small group of soldiers, they still had a message

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that claimed for itself a universal truth: that war is a part o f the essen­ tial human condition. In the next chapter we will look at a subsequent subgenre that rejected all such universalisms, science and logic in­ cluded. The “ spiritist” films bannered “ the utter uniqueness o f the Ja p ­ anese spirit” and held warfare to be the proving ground o f that spirit. Although Sawamura Tsutomu fervently admired Tasaka’s films, he himself went on to lay the groundwork for this second breed o f war film.

6 “The Time for Rationality Is at an End”

The Rise o f the Spiritist Film: Sawamura Tsutomu and Kum agai Hisatora As the “ humanist” trend in war film tapered off, a new one, the spiritist film, gradually emerged in its place. The earlier variety had emphasized the essential humanity o f the soldiers, depicting their Japaneseness in the form of a naturally arising mutual sympathy. The bonds tying the men together had been depicted as instinctively felt in the “ humanist” films. There, the soldiers give no indication of a tension about their identity as Japanese, and there is no inner struggle to measure up to its demands. In contrast, the spiritist film is invariably a drama of spiritual strug­ gle. “Japaneseness” is highlighted and problematized as a kind of para­ dox: while the individual had inherited this Japaneseness at birth, one must undergo a spiritual voyage in order to “ realize” it in one’s own life. As it began to surface in the pages of film magazines in the late thir­ ties, the impetus for the new spiritist tendency seems to have come from the Blood and Soil message o f Nazi racism. This was clearly the case with Otsuka KyOichi as he propounded his notion o f Japanese art and its “ national mission” in the January 1938 issue of Eiga Hyoron: “ It is un­ thinkable that we should ever allow our splendid Japaneseness to fall into ruin. On the contrary, this love for things Japanese is destined to well up within our creative artists, taking on marvelous new forms. Thus the way forward for Japanese cinema is to expand outward into the world, promoting the beauty of the Japanese spirit to the entire planet.” 1 In a series of essays published between 1939 and 1940 and reprinted in his Theory of Japanese Film (1941), Hasegawa NyOzekan developed a similar theme. He avoided Otsuka’s strident rhetoric by spiritualizing the notion o f “ blood” into kokoro (heart or mind): “ The Japanese feeling about history is distinctly different from that o f the Westerner. When 223

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the latter speaks of his nation’s history, he must take on a certain objec­ tivity, talking about foreign invasions and the subsequent commingling of bloodlines.” 2 According to Hasegawa, the Japanese have a more personal rela­ tion to their nation’s history, akin to family memories of one’s personal lineage. This is due to the “ continuity of personality” (again, probably meaning their “ essential Japaneseness” ) running through all o f Ja p a ­ nese history. For all its “ modernity,” Japanese cinema still must mani­ fest the message inscribed within the Japanese kokoro. This message is the ethos dwelling within the national language. The mission o f the na­ tional cinema, he claimed, was to preserve the Japanese past by build­ ing it into a new art form: “ By doing this, it will take up the task of ed­ ucating the people in that two thousand year old Culture of Feeling that is our special heritage.” 3 Following his own erudite, circular path, he returns to the point of Otsuka’s rhetorical departure. He managed to skirt the vortex o f the fanatical ultranationalism only by making his theory not a practical aesthetics, but a meta-aesthetics of film. After laying the groundwork, he left the practical development of the spirit­ ist film to others. The prophet and high priest of spiritism in cinema was the script­ writer Sawamura Tsutomu. His face, as delicate as a Mandarin intel­ lectual, often appeared in film magazine photos in the late thirties of zadankai discussions on official policy for the new cinema. As one of the central theorists propounding the idea o f “ People’s Cinema” (kokumin eiga), he approached his job with unusual confidence and energy. When certain critics grumbled that the quality of films had fallen off due to the controls clapped on the industry by the film law, Sawamura rebutted them vigorously: “ Some of our film geniuses seem to be still floundering in the waves of the new era, unable to grasp the necessary conviction.” 4 Lack of “ conviction” causes filmmakers to fall back on the sorry old formulas—slice-of-life shoshimingeki and cheap comedies that “ merely breed lethargic hedonism in our people.” 5 When people indulge in purely escapist fare, Sawamura says, they are merely observers o f that which does not concern them: “ Today’s filmgoer might be intrigued by such things as fires in the distance, but is it really the mission of cinema to pander to tastes as low as this? If such became the case, cinema would have to be condemned as altogether unsuited to these grave times.” fi Sawamura then moves on to the mission o f cinema: “ The goal is not simply to be ‘fun’ or even ‘artistically excellent.’ Although I am not

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saying that ‘usefulness’ is the only criteria to be applied to it, the times demand that today’s cinema directly serve the state and the lives of its people.” 7 Sawamura is clearly uncomfortable with the idea o f cinema as art, particularly when it is used as a vehicle for the expression o f a personal artistic vision. His rejection o f the tradition of individualism seems to coincide with Joseph Goebbels’s pronouncement that “ if we must admit that Art involves the artist in an exclusive loyalty to his own personally held beliefs, then it is best that cinema not be ‘A rt’ at all.” 8 Sawamura’s next point is a fascinating one—cinema must not be­ come the preserve o f any particular intellectual or social class in society: “ Only when it becomes meaningful to all o f our nation’s people can one say that it has grasped its true essence.” 9 In an essay entitled “About People’s Cinema,” he draws a parallel to the situation of People’s Liter­ ature (kokumin bungaku): “ The call goes out for a literature written for all the people in their entirety. Looking back over our cultured history, one cannot find a single era in which all classes were drawn into intimate communion with the same literary forms. In ancient times it was a liter­ ature of and for the Court; in Edo times it was the literature of the townsmen. More recendy it has been the literature of the Leftists or of the bundan elite. Creation o f a literature and of a cinema accessible to all people is central to our national slogan of ‘One Hundred Hearts Beat­ ing as One’ (ichi oku isshin).”i0 Since cinema has such a central role in both shaping culture and in training up the national spirit, it cannot possibly remain exempt from centralized political control: “ For better or for worse, this is both the fate of cinema and a tribute to its vast persuasive powers.” 11 Still —and this is where Sawamura finds himself at odds with the meddlings of the cen­ sorship bureaus—“ there is no necessity for cinema to be turned into a mere loudspeaker for the views o f politicians. Within the order of the state, there is a proper sphere for each. Politics has a methodology proper to politics, and cinema has one proper to itself as well.” 12 As a sincere supporter of the New Order, Sawamura was especially sensitive to disharmony in this area. Time and again he clearly states that the whole point of the new national cultural policy is to encourage a healthy blossoming o f (radically) nationalist art. This position created for him an unsolvable dilemma. Balancing the natural tendencies of the totalitarian state with the minimal “ breathing-space” requirements o f creative art proved in the end to be an impossible task. Since the con­ tradiction allowed for virtually no middle ground, it often led to artistic

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impasse. Ignoring this fact tended to render Sawamura’s arguments patendy illogical. Yet, as we shall see, his romantic “ mind-over-matter” phi­ losophy typically fed on illogicality. Tertullian’s motto o f “credo quia absurdum ” would have struck a very responsive chord with him. Early 1940 seems to mark a turning point for Sawamura; in Febru­ ary he announced that “ the time for captious rationality is at an end!” Over the next year he would stake out an increasingly romantic, anti­ realist, and antirationalist position: “ The era of realism-worship has passed and the new era looks forward to a rebirth of passion. The new cinema will unfurl the Hag of romanticism in the hearts o f our people and bring their ideals to flower. Muck-raking among the reality of things-as-they-are has lost its power to breed art. It is the new task o f art to lead people out o f everyday reality toward the ideal shape of what they want to be.” 13 The florid extremism in Sawamura’s film reviews tended to isolate him from the mainstream critics. Sometimes, he would excoriate such widely recognized masterworks as Ozu’s I Was Born But . . . for their “ limpness of spirit.” 14 Elsewhere, he wildly praised films his colleagues had found marred by serious aesthetic flaws. Such was his reaction to Kumagai Hisatora’s Abe Clan (1938), based on Ogai’s famous short story. Critic Isono Tatsuhiko had already ex­ pressed the mainstream reaction to the film in his review for the March 1938 issue of Kinema Junpo: “ Kumagai shows us in this film neither the original Mori Ogai nor his own better nature. It is the product of the director’s darker, sinister side.” 15 Sawamura roared to the defense of the work: “ What breadth! What density it has! If I may be allowed the ex­ pression, what violence of vision! Kumagai has ignited a bomb in the sluggish Japanese film world, blowing open a hole for fresh breezes to enter. He dazzles us with the fury o f his determination to cut through the Gordion Knot strangling our national cinema. This work tosses and turns with Kumagai’s own passionate convictions about life. Writhings of this sort are of course far from the coolness of the Mori Ogai origi­ nal. Yet it is clear that the present era demands from us just this sort of tumult. The lack of this in our present-day cinema is one of its chief flaws.” Ih

Kumagai Hisatora’s The Abe Clan Although The Abe Clan is generally considered the “ acme” of Kumagai’s directorial work, its ideological implications remain cloudy, reflecting

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the fact that the director was still in the process o f moving away from class-struggle films toward his ultimate embracement of hysterical na­ tionalism. The only thing that never changed throughout his career was the ferocious passion he imprinted as his trademark on all his works. In 193 1, he made Mobilization Orders (Dóinrei, Nikkatsu) and A Scout in North China (Hokuman no Teisatsu, Nikkatsu, lost). Even here, he appar­ ently broke the mold o f most of the contemporary militarist program pictures, since it was praised in progressive circles for the “ social con­ sciousness” motif he managed to slip in. Iwasaki Akira for example ex­ tolled Mobilization Orders as a “ bold exploration of the situation of farm­ ing class poverty under the yoke of imperialist policies.” 17 In 1936, with his Takuboku, Poet of Passion (Jonetsu Shijin Takuboku, Nikkatsu, lost?), Kumagai was hailed as one of the nation’s top direc­ tors. Here, already, we find the curious ambiguity that would mark his films during his “ transition” period. Even though it frankly depicts the poverty of Takuboku and his pupils, this is litde more than a backdrop for highlighting the furious enfant terrible energy animating the soul of the poet Takuboku. Some contemporary critics found the film an overly personalized distortion. Yamauchi Tatsuichi, for instance, com­ plained that “ Kumagai pretends to be acquainting us with the Taku­ boku soul; in fact however it is a frail disguise for his own rebelliousness and negativity.” 18 His Wandering People (Rumin, Nikkatsu, 1937) is a “ naturalist” study of a group of emigrants in a Kobe assembly camp on the eve of their de­ parture for Brazil. The social background is one of pathos—the clear failure of the promise o f the Meiji state to improve the lot o f the lowest classes. This element, however, remains unanalyzed. Instead, we have the phenomenon Sawamura would describe as the “ writhings of a will bent on survival.” On the surface, the film has little or no ideological viewpoint, but there are hints o f one nonetheless. As one emigrant de­ parts, he remarks to his companions: “ another crowd just like this one will be passing through here in another ten days. Japan has just too damn many people!” 19 The point is, o f course, that Japan needs lebensraum. In Rumin, however, even this notion remains undeveloped. Rather, in the final sequence, our attention is focused, as if within a con­ stricting iris, on the emotional state of a single young man. His words are a memorable expression o f Kumagai’s eternal “ rebel” motif. As their ship pulls away from shore, the youth hands a tape streamer to his old mother and with intense bitterness comments: “ Throw it that way or anywhere you like. Just throw it at Japan. At Japan!” -’"

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Kumagai’s next film was The Abe Clan (Abe Ichizoku, Nikkatsu, 1938), a historical drama set in the seventeenth century, treating the theme of junshi, or loyalty suicide. The year before, Tsumura Hideo had issued his famous call for the development o f a new genre —rekishi eiga (history film)—to replace the venerable jidaigeki genre. He condemned the relendess flood of program pictures celebrating stalwart wandering swordsmen and righteous Edo officials as “ a string of fairy tales sani­ tized o f the stink o f real history.” 21 Tsumura strongly encouraged the filming of Ogai’s historical works, and this may well have influenced Kumagai’s decision to make the film. In any case, its theme was a timely one for a season of war. Voluntary death in service to the nation had been extolled by the Human Bomb Patriot films o f the early and mid thirties. But, there the treatment had been largely exploitational. The Abe Clan would broach the issue once again, this time on a far pro­ founder and more contemplative level. Kumagai took on the project in the immediate aftermath o f an un­ pleasant experience in Germany: “ Thanks to the big success of The New Earth, the prestige of Japanese directors was high and so I got a contract with the German film company Terra to do some films in their country. The first was to be a project written and produced by Arnold Fanck, The Diplomat’s Daughter. Differences with Fanck over the script—which I felt was a mish-mash of idealism and opportunism—escalated into outright conflict. By that time I was a fire-breathingjapan-ist and so I ended up tossing aside the contract and storming out. I had long harbored doubts and resentment toward the haughty Europeans, but this experience was a real shock. Abe Clan was made soon after my return to Japan.” 22 Ogai had written the original story right after the “ loyalty suicides” of General Nogi and his wife, following the death o f Emperor Meiji. Much like the Mishima suicide in 1970, the incident had stirred the na­ tion deeply while leaving it confused as to its meaning. Rather than ex­ plicitly stating his own opinions on the issue, Ogai’s “ objective” account is strangely ambiguous. In 1938, Sawamura Tsutomu was probably cor­ rect in reporting that “ one cannot be sure precisely what Mori Ogai’s opinion was o f feudal loyalty and the issue of loyalty suicide. Depend­ ing on the subjective stance of those you ask, the response is likely to vary gready.” 23 In his own script, Kumagai adds to the Ogai story a few innovations of his own. The first is an expressionistic touch. Volcanic eruptions of Mt. Aso are featured in the first and last sequences of the film, thus bracketing the convulsions of the human world as part o f the tumult of

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Nature itself. He also adds two characters, a servant of the Abe clan named Nakama Tasuke and his sweetheart, Osaku, a servant next door. For the most part, Kumagai follows the main events of the Ogai story faithfully. Hosokawa Tadatoshi, governor o f Etchu, has died, and even persons who had little direct connection with the late daimyo begin to kill themselves, since this is what public opinion expects o f them. To suppress this, word is passed down that anyone who kills himself with­ out express permission will have died “ the death of a dog.” Eighteen men alone have been given the required permission, and in the film we see them walking cheerfully to the place of seppuku. On his deathbed, Lord Tadatoshi had specifically forbidden some of his retainers to com­ mit suicide, among them Abe Yaichiemon, who feels deeply humiliated when the rumor spreads that the real reason he had not died was cowar­ dice. Finally, he summons his five sons and commits seppuku in front of them, an act in clear defiance o f the dead lord’s wishes. In Kumagai’s film, he first performs a ritualistic dance, full of dignified pathos. In the wake of the death of the old daimyo lord, a clique o f clan bu­ reaucrats has strengthened its grip on the inner council of the youthful new lord. They take a legalistic line toward the “ unauthorized” junshi suicide of the Abe clan patriarch. They persuade the new daimyo to pun­ ish the clan by dividing the patrimony between the five sons, thereby de­ stroying its authority. The eldest son, enraged at this humiliation, impet­ uously cuts off his mage (samurai top-knot) and, offering it to the former lord’s spirit, announces his intention to become a monk. This displeases their new lord, and the young man is arrested and beheaded like a com­ mon criminal. When the remaining sons determine to avenge their brother, their lord sends men to arrest them. The day before the attacking party is dispatched, the brothers as­ semble the entire family, and, after a ritual meal, all of the household women and children are put to death. Only the young men are left. Next morning, they meet the attack, and after a fierce struggle, all are exterminated. “ Unlike the cool objectivity of the Ogai original,” Sawamura com­ mented, “ Kumagai’s attitude is quite subjective throughout, as if he himself were deeply involved in the events.” 24 Early sequences of the film show the loyal retainers following their lord in death with cheerful determination, their outward calm betraying none of the inner debate Mori Ogai had included in his short story. Absent from the film are the misgivings glimpsed in the following passage from the Ogai origi­ nal, depicting the turbulence in the mind of ChOjirO, one of the young

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retainers selected to die: “Along with the realization that he was most certainly expected to commit junshi, he was struck with another real­ ization of almost equal force: that he was being forced by others onto the path leading to death.” 25 Although Kumagai does imply certain doubts about the system of values impelling his central characters to act as they do, he allows these doubts to float in the mind of the viewer without having his main char­ acters give voice to them. The patriarch, Abe Yaichiemon, who has been denied the privilege o f junshi, finds the scorn of his peers intoler­ able. Therefore, although unauthorized to do so, he too chooses “ the way o f honor.” As Sawamura writes: “Although he does not belitde life, Kumagai here depicts the great nobility in dying when one is called upon to do so.” Sawamura finds this a “ refreshing” break with the “ overemphasis on the value of life-at-any-cost that mars so much of our cinema today.” 26 Like Kumagai, Sawamura saw a transcendent beauty in unreasoning, chivalric death. For this reason, he applauded the way the film replaces Ogai’s laconic realism with histrionic affirmations of romanticism. Actually, the main focus o f Kumagai’s film is elsewhere. Subdy but forcefully, he highlights the one-sided conflict between the clan bureau­ crats and the “warrior-zealot faction” -- those clan samurai remaining faithful to the original bushi spirit. The “ bureaucrats” are depicted as skilled in manipulating for their own purposes the rules that regulate the lives and actions o f the clan samurai in peacetime. The genuine samu­ rai, with their outmoded codes of honor and absolute sincerity, are vir­ tually defenseless against them. In a way, it is a replay of the conflict between the real life tôseiha (Control) and kodoha (Imperial way) factions in the army, which in 1936 had reached its climax in the 26 February coup d’état attempt. Kumagai uses this conflict to develop his spiritist message. Running through the film is the irreconcilable tension o f antinomies: casuistry versus sincerity, purely formalistic logic versus spiritual purity, inauthen­ ticity versus authenticity. Early in the film, soon after the “ authorized” junshi of the eighteen retainers, clan bureaucrats crow over the impressive number of deaths. Their manner of speech displays the pettiness o f their clerical souls: “ We can be justly proud of the number of loyalty suicides. They es­ tablish the honor of our domain. This puts us far ahead of any other domain in the entire country.” The highest-ranking clan official, Hayashi Geki (who is identified as having been brought up in Edo, the

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administrative center of the Tokugawa Bakufu) goes on to elaborate fur­ ther: “ Past statistics clearly show that there were two loyalty suicides on the passing of Lord KatO Kiyomasa, nine when Lord Shimazu passed away in Satsuma three years ago, and ten when Lord Date died in Sen­ dai that same year.” Another responds: “ So with our eighteen, we’ve es­ tablished a new precedent!” Their conversation next turns to Abe Yaichiemon: “ Through our late lord, the Abes gained many honors and emoluments. And yet, here they remain alive without a thought to repaying their great debt.” Later, when the eldest son of the Abe clan is sentenced to decapita­ tion, his brothers make desperate appeals to save him from such an ig­ nominious death. MatashichirO, a neighbor o f the Abes, attempts to intercede for the young man with clan bureaucrat Hayashi Sotonori: Isn’t there some w a y to give him permission to commit hara-kiri like a true samurai? m a ta sh ich ir

O:

N o matter how often you ask, there’s no way to change a decision on punishment once it’s been sent down. W hat is more, an act o f such rudeness toward our late lord demands the severest measures. m a t a s h i c h i r O: Is there no w ay to get him o ff as a bereaved relative o f one who committed loyalty suicide? so to n o ri:

Absolutely impossible. You refer to a ‘loyalty suicide,’ but was not the person concerned stricdy forbidden to undertake such an act? If we do not make a clear distinction between authorized and unauthorized suicides, orderly administration breaks down. t a k e u c h i (another samurai): But Gombei’s intendons were of the utmost sincerity . .. s o t o n o r i : A distinction has been made between his act and those that were authorized. Orderly administration of the realm must be uphold. This is the rule, established by policy.27 so to nori:

The irreconcilable conflict in the above argument pits “ compassion” and “ intentions” (key terms in the vocabulary o f spiritism) against the legalist’s “ rules” and “ policy.” Although they are shown realistically, rather than as mere caricatures, the film’s bureaucratic villains are not much different from the pompous government officials in Kumagai’s earlier film Takuboku. They are depicted as a cancer eating away at the spiritual base o f Japan’s bushi heritage. Kumagai clearly hates the modern Japanese state and its “ bloodless” leadership -the bureaucratic elite, the politicians, and other petty offi­ cials. On the surface, this sentiment seemed to put him in league with

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the old Left, but such was not the case. Like the Agrarianist superpatri­ ots and the followers o f Kita Ikki, he reveres the image of a harmonious, premodern, organic society, based on “ blood” and spiritual heritage. Even after the triumph o f the army Control Faction after the 26 Feb­ ruary Incident, there continued to be substantial emotional support for the antibureaucrat partisans of passion. Sometimes support found its way into print. In January 1940, a little over a year after the premiere of Abe Ichizoku, Bungei Shunju ran an article by the soldier and writer Asahara Goro titled “ Be Ready to Die, Politicians!” It reflects a position re­ markably close to that o f Kumagai. When you enjoin us from eating, we don’t eat. When you tell us not to wear something, we don’t wear it. Told not to talk, we shut up our mouths. Told not to listen, we clamp our hands over our ears. Like the proverbial three monkeys, we have followed these orders with the utmost docility. Indeed Japan has a very obedient populace. You politicians can surely take satisfaction in that. But do you have any notion of the dissatisfaction boiling in the mind of the returned veteran? The bureaucrats who demanded of the nation’s people that they be prepared to die display no readiness themselves to die. The sight of this situation enrages the veteran. We expect far more from the gentlemen who have allowed the China Incident to bubble on so interminably. The bureaucrats endlessly spin out new rules and regulations, and the politicians are only concerned with their own reelection.28 Among the critics reviewing The Abe Clan. there were few “ partisans of passion,” and nobody had the temerity to discuss the film’s overt as­ sault on the bureaucratic caste or its mirroring of the sentiments of the failed rebels of 26 February. Most critics found themselves out of sym­ pathy with the film’s sturm-und-drang spiritism. Reason and logic were, after all, their stock-in-trade. For Isono Tatsuhiko, the film reflected Kumagai’s “ sinister side,” his “ unruly” rebel spirit —“ He simply must stand aside and seriously take stock of himself.” 29 There was something catchy about this call for “ self-reflection,” and it quickly became an epi­ thet to be flung at Kumagai and his work, as in Tanaka Takashi’s re­ mark that “ The only way for Kumagai to overcome his present spiritual crisis is to immerse himself in self-reflection.” 50 Kumagai was deeply hurt by such criticism, taking it as a complete rejection of himself as an artist. “ Surely criticism of this sort was the

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main reason why I lost my original passion for filmmaking,” he would report after the war.31

The Naval Brigade at Shanghai Sawamura Tsutomu, representing a minority of critics, found himself in total agreement with the spiritist message o f Kumagai’s film. His fifteen-page review reads in many places like the manifesto of a new re­ ligious creed: “ Cast aside your effeminate nostalgia! Be wary of nihilis­ tic resignation. Put your faith in the blood throbbing through our veins! This is the credo of Kumagai’s Abe C/an.” 32 Announcing that he too wanted to write scripts “ about the beauty and strength of the struggling human spirit,” Sawamura became a close collaborator with Kumagai. The first film he scripted for the director was The Naval Brigade at Shanghai (Shanhai Rikusentai, Toho, 1939), based on the Second Shangahi Incident o f 1937. Before the film went into production, however, Sawamura was drafted and sent to Manchuria as a private second class. There, the rig­ ors of army life proved too much for his frail body and delicate constitu­ tion; much to his chagrin he found himself hospital after the first few months. After a long convalescence, he was shipped back home and re­ turned to civilian life. Since Naval Brigade at Shanghai premiered while he was still in the army hospital, he had to wait on pins and needles for news o f its reception: “ I asked my family to send me every review, down to the tiniest clipping. Some were full of praise, others completely negative. It occurred to me that few other films had caused such a jumble of opinions.” 33 It is not clear whether Sawamura, had he been on the scene, would have agreed with Kumagai’s decision to cast the film as a semidocumen­ tary. In the scriptwriter’s absence, the director announced that the film would “ suppress the dramatic element and look at things from a newsfilm standpoint.” Naval Brigade was to be his first war film in over eight years and he now felt “ a certain contradiction in presenting ‘personal­ ity’ in the midst of that vast, solemn affair called war.” 34 In a new departure, he turned away from his previous emotional involvement with his characters, watching them from a distance as they were enveloped in the grand spectacle o f seemingly endless chaotic action. Despite its stereotypical characterizations and other flaws in dramatic construction, the film is breathtaking. The camera

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takes full advantage of the authentic locations o f the actual fighting in Shanghai, and one o f its stylistic innovations is to pan from a medium shot o f one of the characters, out across a huge expanse o f the ruined cityscape. Except for reaction shots, which are of course in close-up, long shots prevail in the film. The screen is constantly animated with a multitude o f simultaneous detail: men running, falling, crouching to fire, and lobbing hand grenades; lorries filled with soldiers careening away from the camera as terrified civilians swarm diagonally toward it; shells bursting in the foreground and mid-distance while troops charge from the mid-distance deeper into the frame. The film opens with a long documentary narration introducing the city and the events that happened there. It is strikingly reminiscent of Kam ei’s Shanghai and actually incorporates some footage shot by Miki Shigeru for the latter film. The main difference is that the narration is far more patriotic and instead o f Matsui Shusei’s subdued, laconic de­ livery, the narrator’s voice often trembles with indignation or fervor. In the opening shot, the camera pans left from a position high over the city. On and on it turns until it holds on a vista of the harbor where we see a flotilla of large warships surrounded by a swarm o f sluggish sampans. Cut to a map, apparendy the very same one used in Kam ei’s documentary, introducing the complicated political configuration o f the foreign concessions. The camera then holds on a long shot of a huge Japanese flag fluttering above a white, multistoried building. The build­ ing is immediately recognizable to anyone who has seen Kamei’s Shang­ hai: “ Behold the proud and stately headquarters of our Naval Brigade.” The accompanying narration is a typically slanted interpretation of the outbreak of the Shanghai Incident: “ The Chinese Army’s aggressive acts at Marco Polo ignited the conflict. In Shanghai too, one can sense the gathering of a storm.” The following sequence is a smooth transition to the film’s dra­ matic portion. The camera slowly circles a plain wooden grave marker, inscribed with the name Oyama, standing in a barren field: “ The as­ sassination on 9 August o f Lt. Oyama came amid these threatening circumstances. . . . Despite the humiliations and atrocities, the Jap a­ nese side staunchly pursued a policy o f peace. But this only stirred the contempt and conceit of the Chinese.” Next, in what appears to be the garage o f the naval brigade building, troops are lined up diago­ nally to a flower-decked funeral altar (Lt. Oyama’s). Lieutenant Kishi (played by Ohinata Den) is reading a letter before the altar with deep emotion.

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In the very next scene Kishi turns to his men, vowing to avenge the atrocity. As the script describes the scene: “All eyes are filled with deep admiration. The men watch their commander who, with the same ex­ pression of spiritual intensity, nods back to them” (italics mine).35 The peaceful intentions of the Japanese and the belligerence o f the Chinese is the theme for the first part of the drama. When Kishi goes out on his inspection tour, we see the city gripped in tension. Civilians are running distractedly through the streets. In a schoolyard, soldiers and Japanese civilians dig trenches. At one of the barbwire gates to Shanghai’s Japanese sector, soldiers hurriedly put up barricades of sandbags. Suddenly, they come under sniper fire. One o f the men falls wounded. The firing grows in intensity, and others fall. Still, the troops are urged to “ Stand fast! No matter what the provocation, don’t fire until the order comes!” Here again, we find the motivational plotting recognizable from yakuza/jidaigeki program picture. As in the press treatment of the leadup to the Manchurian Incident, the situation in Shanghai is depicted as the prelude to a predictable climax, a rampage of outraged fury. By emplotting an actual event (the Second Shanghai Incident of 1937, the first being in 1932) along the lines of this easily identifiable dra­ matic format, Sawamura and Kumagai divert attention from the issue of historical causality—which had brought the Japanese naval brigade to Shanghai in the first place and is the reason they are now the targets of the implacable enmity o f the locals. Within this ahistorical and apo­ litical jidaigeki moral universe, the motives of the Chinese appear to be litde more than cowardice and primordial malice; consequendy, the jus­ tice due their victims (the Japanese soldiers and civilians) appears per­ fectly obvious. The Imperial Army, by implication, is identified with the “ true” samurai spirit—forbearance, bravery, and loyalty. Kumagai’s form of cinematic spiritism is typically steeped in pa­ thos; it is almost always played out against the background o f a losing battle. In The Abe Clan, the idealistic zealot faction is overwhelmed by the daimyd’s worldly bureaucrats, and the Abes themselves are crushed by the might o f their feudal lord. In Naval Brigade, the small force o f Japanese troops must first endure murderous sniper fire without firing a shot in return. When they do begin to fight, they must face forces out­ numbering them ten to one. When one of their comrades falls to a bul­ let, the others plead with their commander: “ Please let us shoot back!” “ It is forbidden!” Lieutenant Kishi replies, with a fixed expression re­ vealing his stoic military spirit. The men follow his lead, grimace in the

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direction o f the hidden snipers, gritting their teeth. Later, an uncon­ scious, dying soldier is carried into the temporary infirmary. A com­ rade has to pry his fingers from the rifle he still clutches to his chest. In close-up, the bullets are removed from the rifle, proving he had not fired a single shot. Lieutenant Kishi is the stereotypical spiritist military commander, a flesh and blood illustration o f the Field Soldier’s Manual (Senjinkun). He loves his men with a stern paternalism and a deep sense of pathos. Time and again, a badly wounded soldier refuses the lieutenant’s orders to leave his post and go for treatment. Invariably, Kishi gives the man a deep penetrating look; slowly it transforms into a half-smile of approval. Unlike the military officers in the humanist war films, he is neither a lov­ able father figure nor an egalitarian comrade-in-arms type. When he is not at the barricades directing the men in the savage fighting, he sits stiffly aloof among his immediate subordinates in the dark and gloomy command room in the H Q building. He is a model but not an inspira­ tion to his men. For their part, the soldiers are depicted as having al­ ready achieved the determination and loyalty to duty necessary to carry out their tragic, self-sacrificial roles in the events. The tragic spirit o f the soldiers, as samurai-militarists, is contrasted with the spiritual ordinariness of the Japanese civilians. The latter hud­ dle in undifferentiated masses, quaking with fear at each nearby shell explosion. Under the naval brigade’s protection, they are litde more than uncomprehending sheep. They are appalled by the sudden explo­ sion of Chinese hatred and aggrieved by the threat to their livelihoods. In anonymous voice-over, a woman in the crowd sadly complains: “ So this is what we get after putting in such efforts over the last twenty years!” The only Japanese civilian to emerge as an individual is a semihysterical mother (played by old-time movie actress Hanabusa Yuriko), who rushes out of the gymnasium and runs toward the barricade block­ ing the road out of the setdement. This is where considerable military action is taking place; small-arms fire is being exchanged between the two sides. She frantically thrusts aside the soldiers who try to stop her and runs out the gate in the direction of the enemy. Presently she re­ turns, clutching some precious item to her breast. As she passes the gate once again she is wounded and falls to the ground. The camera follows the item she had been carrying as it rolls away a can of condensed milk for her baby. Later she is interviewed by a reporter who expresses admiration for her bravery. Clearly, the dramatic intention of the scene

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is to provide commentary on the irony of moral perceptions. From the Japanese soldier’s perspective, her act was not bravery but one of heed­ less stupidity. As the sole representative of the “ ordinary” mentality, her act emphasizes the enormous gulf lying between her mind-set and the spiritually indoctrinated troops. Running through the film is a subplot featuring a young Chinese woman (Hara Setsuko) who represents the anti-Japanese faction o f the Chinese population. They are sheltering in a temple next to the brigade headquarters building. Despite their own desperate plight, the Japanese soldiers show them great kindness, giving them medical treatment and even sharing their meager rations with them. In one early sequence, Lieutenant Kishi orders his men to distribute some of the company’s hardtack provisions. The women at first shrink away from the soldiers, but their resistance begins to melt at the kindly tone of the soldiers and the sight of the food. A child approaches and takes one of the proffered biscuits. The mother does likewise. Just as the other women begin to gather around, the character played by Hara Setsuko launches into a tirade, reviling them for taking gifts from the enemy. The mother angrily responds: “What’s wrong with get­ ting food for my child if they want to give it?” Hara continues to rant until she is struck in the face by one of the soldiers. “ We’re only trying to show kindness!” he splutters. A similar scene follows in which the soldiers return to distribute cigarettes. “ Quick! Run for your lives!” Hara shrieks, “ We don’t know what they plan to do to us. Hurry up! Run!” Clearly, just as she does not understand the good intentions of the soldiers, she fails to understand the “ true intentions” of Japan’s actions in China. Gradually, she grows weak from hunger; the soldiers find her nearly unconscious. When they touch her, she jumps up and runs out the door, only to fall again after a few steps. They thrust some hardtack into her hands, and she slinks away to eat it greedily, her eyes betraying the first waver in her anti-Japanese determination. The soldiers return to put up a sign in the temple: “ We will not harm good, ordinary people. Signed Shanghai Naval Brigade Commander, Lieutenant Kishi.” The women gather around in wonder and gratitude. “ Oh! What good people you Japanese soldiers are!” This time even Hara seems ready to be convinced. A short series of shots show her secredy watching Lieutenant Kishi as he directs the fighting. It is now clear she has realized the mistake o f her former opinion and that now she too is to be counted among the “ good people.”

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K u m ag ai’s N aval Brigade at Shanghai (Toho, 1939)- H ara Sctsuko's young Chinese wom an upbraids her com panions for accepting food from Ja p a n ese soldiers.

Writing in 1942, Imamura Taihci expressed grave reservations about the film’s depictions of the Chinese women. “ Hara Setsuko’s ‘antiJapanese woman’ is quite unnatural and so is Tsubaki Harue’s groveling “pro-Japanese woman.’ If such portrayals seem unpleasant to usjapanesc, one can well imagine how the Chinese would read them. I'hat such two-dimensional characters continue to appear in Japanese films is worrisome indeed.” 36 1’he fighting grows ever more desperate. Clearly, if the rescue force (which has landed nearby) does not break through soon, the entire force will be annihilated. Their numbers are steadily depleted before the fren­ zied Chinese mass attacks. The battle scenes are as horrific as those in A ll Quiet on the Western Front or Vidor’s Big Parade. Postwar, Kuinagai would assert that his film had an “ antiwar” message, an incredible claim considering his oft-expressed promilitarist fanaticism during the war. Still, the realistic slaughter dominating the last twenty minutes o f the film is indeed appalling, even stupefying. Reactions to Naval Brigade were mixed. As expected, the film’s amaz­ ingly graphic documentary sequences and spectacle quality made it a

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major hit at the box office. Among the critics, Iwasaki offset the sharp criticism quoted above with an equal measure of praise: “ The depic­ tions o f night fighting -filled with the strange bugle calls and the un­ nerving shouts of the attacking Chinese —have a convincing reality. Then, in the aftermath of batde, the only sounds to be heard are the in­ sects and the sofdy sifting rain. The latter has a lyrical quality unusual to war films.” 37 Similarly, Hasegawa NyOzekan had special praise for two aspects o f the film: “ First is the fact that real soldiers play roles in the film and, second, that it refuses to become ensnared in the usual roman­ ticism.” 38 Others, however, complained about the coldness and distance o f the central characters. An often-heard complaint was the conspicu­ ous absence of the “ humanist” element.39 No one dared broach the subject of the film’s historical veracity. For Kumagai, the film represented a great move forward in his own spiritual voyage from “ social consciousness” to ultranationalism. “ I sup­ pose I’d have to count this as one of my failings, but around the time I finished the film, I was much more concerned about the state of affairs in the nation than with the problems of filmmaking. One o f the things I tried to express most forcefully in the film was the fact that the war was a defensive rather than an aggressive one. I tried to use the film to make it clear to my countrymen that lying behind the war was Japanese re­ sentment against the colonial machinations in Asia by the AngloAmerican powers. In order to carry out this resistance it was necessary for Japan to strike at their running dog, Chiang Kai-shek.” 40 O f course, Kumagai was not alone in this opinion. Nationalism at this time was making deep inroads even within the comparatively liberal profession of filmmaking. Only in the passion of his conviction did he stand out; he had became a fanatic. “ What Hider is doing in the sphere of politics and war is art,” he told a reporter in early 1941, “ In film we must do the same sort of thing as Hitler. Such is our mission.” 41

A Story of Leadership Sawamura, whose illness had forced him to surrender the idea of ever returning to military life, continued to treasure “ the lingering scent of army wool and leather.” However, as he renewed his collaboration with Kumagai, he turned to material from the home front. A Story of Leader­ ship (Shidd Monogatari, Toho, 1941), his next Kumagai collaboration, is about an old railroad engineer, Seki (Maruyama Sadao), and his young purc-at-heart army trainee, Sagawa (Fujita Susumu).

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Scriptw riter Saw am ura Tsutomu (I., 19 15 77) and director K um agai Hisatora (r., 1904-86) in front o f an open set for Story o f leadership {Nihon Eiga. O ctober 1941).

Kumagai’s choice of background music for the opening crcdits seems to announce his final conversion to semimystical Japanism. A lone voice sings a hymn: “ Oh ye soldiers of His Majesty / What are your rightful tasks? / Render up all of your honest heart / In serv ice to the Son of Heaven.” 42 Next comes a magnificent documentary-like montage, shot in the pale light of very early dawn, of a stoker shoveling coal into the furnace of a locomotive. In dramatic silhouette, we sec men working around the train engines in the rail yard. Cut to the roundhouse office where Seki stands before the desk of his superintendent. He wants to know why he has not been given a sol­ dier trainee like the other engineers: “ I realize I’ll be retiring in another three years. But I have thirty five years of experience. And, well, I'm not likely to be called up at my age. You see, 1 want to make a contribution in this crisis time /hijoji/ by training military cadets.” A few days later, when the superintendent tells him he is to have a trainee after all, “ his eyes glisten with tears of gratitude.” 43 The scene in the classroom at the locomotive Corps base explains why Sawamura and Kumagai have shifted their attention from the bat­ tlefield to the home front. The trainees are being addressed by the head

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instructor: “ Even in training, you must prepare yourself for the eventu­ ality o f death. As much as the soldiers at the front, we must all become embodiments of the true military spirit.” In 1941, the year of the film, the government was resurrecting the early Meiji-era slogan, “All Citi­ zens Are Soldiers.” And, as it prepared for ultimate conflict with the Anglo-American powers, a new slogan —“ The Batde Front and the Home Front Are One” —had just been launched in the newspapers. Trainee Sagawa’s first outing with Seki in the cab of the engine is introduced by a shot of the locomotive surging through the early morn­ ing darkness toward the camera. Seki gives instructions in voice-over. Sagawa’s head appears out the window of the approaching locomotive. Suddenly, there is a massed chorus of voices shouting “ Banzai! Banzai!” In the darkness, screen right, we dimly make out a crowd of figures wav­ ing tiny flags, indicating the train is carrying a load o f army recruits. The crowd-roar subsides and then explodes again as the train passes an­ other station. Throughout the film, Kumagai often uses shots from the locomotive window to depict the general mobilization of the nation. We see troops doing military exercises, construction corps trainees practic­ ing the laying of track, and children playing their own war games. At one point, after Sagawa and Seki bring their train to a halt at a station, they watch a solemn procession of soldiers detraining, each carrying a litde box o f human ashes in a white cloth tied around his neck. As the two stiffly salute the procession, the camera cuts to pan down a line of photographs of dead soldiers. In the background we hear the furious sounds of war. The next scene shows Seki participating in a vast out­ door military funeral. The prayer the military officer reads, or rather chants, is filled with mystical spiritist rhetoric. All three of Seki’s daughters attend the ceremony as members of the Greater Japan Women’s Association for National Defense (DaiMhon Kokubo Fujinkai), in which the eldest daughter (Hara Setsuko) is especially active. She collects stitches for senninbari (amulet belts given to soldiers departing for the front) and often helps with troop send-off ceremonies. Their home throbs with the pulse of home-front activity. The girls sing military songs as a sign of their youthful high spirits, and the phrase “ don’t forget there’s a war on” is often on Seki’s lips. Since Seki’s trainee, Sagawa (Fujita Susumu), will soon be sent to the front, Seki feels great pressure to teach him as much as he can in the short time remaining. In one scene, he covers the train speedometer and has Sagawa guess their rate o f speed. Time and again Sagawa fails the test. When Seki loses patience and shouts at him “ Idiot!” Sagawa

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lapses into humiliated silence. Secretly, however, Seki is highly pleased with the progress o f his student (in fact he harbors the wish to have him as a son-in-law). As the two rest in the communal bathtub in the roundhouse, he apologizes for his earlier sharpness: “ Well, Sagawa, you and I are different. You’re likely to be sent off to the front at any time. So in the meantime I want to train you up as much as possible. You understand me, don’t you? This is the only way I can be of service to the nation.” Story o f Leadership is largely based on a short story by Ueda Hiroshi. The script’s one innovation is the character, Kusano, a trainee freshly graduated from Tokyo Imperial University. Sawamura claims that as he wrote the script, he felt a close identification with this character. Like himself, Kusano is an intellectual, filled with the weaknesses and anxieties o f his kind. Unlike Sagawa, who as a farmer’s son is “ pure” and uncontaminated by the cosmopolitan spirit of the city, Kusano must face a monumental spiritual batde with himself. Alongside depic­ tions of doomed batdes in (or with) the outside world, works in the spir­ itist vein often focus on inner battles of the spirit; usually it is the only theme. Sawamura himself apparently suffered great anguish while in the army because of his own university background. In the film, as it was in reality, an important element in finally “ understanding” the spirit of the army is to overcome one’s own intellectualizing tendencies. This was the nature of the inner battles Sawamura would develop in subsequent works. Over time, his anti-intellectualism became increas­ ingly strident. Kusano’s “ problem” is introduced when a package o f books, all of them difficult works in German, arrives for him at his squad leader’s of­ fice. The officer flips through them with an amused look —“ You’re not planning to read these here, are you?” “ Yes,” Kusano replies, looking greedily at the books. “ While you’re in training, I think you’ll have more than enough to occupy your mind without troubling yourself with stuff like this. Leave them in the keeping o f your squad leader for the time being.” Kusano replies stiffly, “ Wakarimashita (I see).” He looks crushed and deeply resentful. In the next scene, one of his comrades has found the letter from the college friend who had sent the books. He reads it aloud to the others as Kusano sits in deep humiliation: “ Your description in your last letter of hiding in the toilet in order secretly to practice your German pronunciation had us all feeling sorry for you.” In the barracks room, the absurdity of the image has everyone laughing hilariously.

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The rigors of training are excruciating for Kusano. Not only is he somewhat weak in body, he clearly lacks the spirit of fanatical determi­ nation that makes Sagawa such an ideal trainee. His mind is too clut­ tered with other thoughts to take in the instruction being given to him. This becomes abundantly clear in an especially heavy-handed scene in which he stands in the cab next to his own engineer-trainer. The loco­ motive thunders on into the snowy night. The trainer is trying to say something, but Kusano is thinking o f his school days, shown by the superimposed montage o f students’ faces, all o f them laughing merrily. Kusano is ordered to go out along the catwalk toward the front o f the engine to inspect something. As he engages in this dangerous maneuver, the superimposed images o f his reverie continue. Inevitably, he slips off the train. As it turns out, he only breaks an arm. A few days later, he sits in the railroad office being scolded by his trainer. It is here that he makes his spiritual breakthrough. “ I was wrong! Everything I was thinking was completely wrong! I . . . I’m sorry!” One has the impression that he is re­ ferring to the very act of engaging in personal thinking. The impression is strengthened when we contrast Kusano with Sa­ gawa. Except for occasional thoughts about his mother, Sagawa ap­ pears to be completely free o f any tendency to engage in private rumi­ nations. Working under his trainer, he gives himself body and soul to the task at hand. Frequent close-ups o f his face, often shot through the front window o f the cab, show him with a fanatic, intense expression. Even as he travels from his camp to the roundhouse, he pours over a manual for his job. Now that Kusano has rejected all extraneous thinking, his rehabilita­ tion begins. His usual anguished facial expressions have disappeared, and he now takes on the same open, joyful look that has been Sagawa’s expression from the very beginning. Actually, there is one scene in which Sagawa clearly is thinking. Again the content o f his thoughts are shown in a montage of superim­ positions and crosscuts. After a minor conflict with Seki, brought on because he had referred to Seki as a “ civilian” unrelated to the war ef­ fort, Sagawa sits at the controls o f the train trying to understand what had so upset his mentor. As the train rumbles along, the sound merges with that o f gunfire. A montage of images, some of soldiers fighting, some o f civilians working feverishly on the home front, passes before his eyes, all o f the images unified by the background thunder of war­ fare. Throughout the sequence, Sagawa’s expression indicates he is

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i

\ K u m agai’s Story o f Leadership (Toho, 1941)- T h e young trainee Sagavva (Fujita Susumu) in the throes o f a mystical, “ spiritist" revelation.

having a mystical revelation. Suddenly his face relaxes. At last he has understood. He has finally grasped the full significance of the phrase “All Citizens arc Soldiers.” In his role as Sagawa, Fujita Susumu puts in an unusually stiff per­ formance. The number of facial expressions he can muster are but four: shy boyish pleasure, impassivity, fanatical determination, and wonder at some mystical revelation. His mastery o f the latter makes him the per­ fect spiritist film actor. Kurosawa Akira seems also to have recognized this fact, since he chose Fujita to play the lead in his own spiritist period piece Sngata Sanshiro (1943). Story of leadership ends with Sagawa’s long-expected departure for the front. Gathered at the train station is the usual flag-waving crowd. Among them are Hara Setsuko and her two sisters, all wearing their Women’s National Defense Association sashes. This time, Sagawa is just another passenger in the coach. He leans out the window saluting his mother, the girls, and his old instructor Seki with great emotion. In this scene, the salute takes on iconographic significance. First, it represents the official relationship, under the direct auspices of the army, which first brought Seki and Sagawa together. In this sense, both the salute

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and the relationship are purely formal; they are devoid o f personal emotion. In fact, they proscribe personal emotion. And yet the salute throbs with emotion—gratitude, pain of separation, longing, and even love. The salute represents both what once bound them together and what now tears them apart. It is the icon of a special kind of pathos, the evocation of which is the aesthetic aim of the spiritist film. The high point o f the scene is the short sequence in which Sagawa pulls himself in from the train window for a moment and sits down. His hand re­ mains frozen to his forehead in salute. He looks down at the engineer’s manual given to him by Seki. Seki had his daughter sell something to the pawnshop in order to pay for it. Sagawa’s frozen salute now seems to be directed at the book itself, his last tangible bond with Seki. The image of pathos is quite moving. An instant later, he is back at the win­ dow saluting again, as the train pulls out with Seki running alongside. The very last sequence features the train surging down the tracks as a series of newspaper headlines are superimposed on the screen: the Nazi invasion o f Russia, the Japanese occupation of French Indochina, and, finally, “ Tripartite Alliance Enters Second Year.” In spiritist films of the Pacific War, the very last scene generally shows the young hero, whose progress we have watched closely through all the stages of his military training, swallowed up in his military group. In the end, he is no longer even recognizable as an individual. The finale of Story of Lead­ ership seems to be an early version o f this pattern. As the train moves on, Sagawa becomes swallowed up in the vast impersonal events of politics and war. As the dramatization of the spiritual and technical training of young men for war, the film is the first of its kind. “ I wondered why no previous film or novel had taken up the theme,” Sawamura Tsutomu commented after the premiere.44 With the coming of the Pacific War, the theme would dominate all the important spiritist films. There, combat se­ quences are relegated to the very end, and the sole significance of the battlefield is its role as the proving ground for the young men’s martial training. Although Story of Leadership opened fruitful new territory for the spir­ itist film, it was a box office disaster. The official film magazine Eiga Junpo, which was active in pushing the film, angrily put the blame on the “ low taste” of the film-going public. At the same time, it included an overt dig at the overzealous “ control” mentality of the elite bureau­ crats: “According to theater owners, one o f the main reasons for its commercial failure, was the phrase ‘leadership’ in the title. The domes­ tic situation since the start of the military crisis on the continent has

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made the public heartily disgusted with anything smacking of ‘leader­ ship’ or the ‘New Order.’ ” 45 It was a failure among the major critics as well. Imamura Taihei branded it such because o f its shallow psychological depictions. Iijima Tadashi identified its fatal flaw as its “ aggressive naïveté,” which seems to have been his own contemptuous code word for spiritism.46 Story of Leadership marked the end o f the collaborative relationship between Sawamura and Kumagai, and it was the last film Kumagai was to make for many years. Soon after finishing the film, he succumbed completely to nationalist mysticism. Turning his back on the film world, he went off to commune undisturbed with the National Essence, as the guiding light of the Sumera-juku Association, a semireligious cult based on “Japanism.” Iida Shinbi comments that, “ according to some reports, he became a sort o f high priest.” 47 After the war, Kumagai did return to filmmaking, but of the four films he turned out, only Chieko Shd dis­ played any of his old power.

Other Spiritist Films Sawamura continued to pour himself into scenario-writing up to the end o f the war. The next script to be made into a film, Sun of the Eightyeighth Tear (Toho, 1941), was directed by Takizawa Eisuke, largely known for his old-style jidaigeki. Thematically, Sun o f the Eighty-eighth Tear is re­ markably similar to Story o f Leadership and was, according to critics and filmgoers, marked by the same flaws. The story is set in the ship-building town o f Uraga, the very place Admiral Perry’s “ Black Ships” had sud­ denly landed eighty-eight years before. “ They say the visit caused a huge uproar,” one o f the characters narrates at the beginning of the film. “ Some o f the fishwives became hysterical with fear. It was a big mistake to show such weakness to the Americans. That’s why, even now, America looks down on us so.” 48 The main character, old Teppei, is made of the same stuff as Seki in Story of Leadership. Like Seki, he is a superpatriot whose main concern in life, aside from the welfare of his family, is service to the nation. The name Teppei (lit., “ Iron-Peace” ) symbolizes his essence: “ iron” because he is as strong in spirit as the material he uses to build ships and “ peaceful” because of his placid self-assurance. Most of his sons and daughters are named after famous warships built in the Uraga shipyard. One of the main conflicts in the film concerns the problem of “ spirit.” It pits Teppei’s purely spiritist approach to shipbuilding against the realistic pragmatism of a young university-educated engineer. Like

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Kusano in Story of Leadership, the latter’s misguided intellectualism makes him blind to the miracles that can be wrought by the absolutely deter­ mined spirit. The problem is they have to build a destroyer in far less time than it normally takes. “ Can’t be done! Absolutely impossible. It’s too late. There’s a limit to human strength, you know,” the young engineer TajirO warns, “ I’ll grant you, there’s something to this willpower stuff. But its got to have its feet firmly planted in reality, in science.” Teppei’s spir­ itism is that of a man of action: “ Impossible? Are you proud of that? I may be no great shakes at all this science stuff, but I see no merit in ra­ tionalizing away delays in constructing vital military equipment!” 49 The head of the company gives a lecture over the loudspeaker to his workers. Like Teppei, he had been a sailor on the Mikasa, Admiral Togo’s flag ship in the great victory at Tsushima during the 1905 war. The workers are now fired with the proper spirit. They urge each other on: “ Everyone! Let’s work full out until we collapse!” In a show of single-minded determination, they plot out how they are going to do the impossible —“ First o f all, our break time is too long!” “ Yeah! Let’s not waste a single second.” “ Lets set an example for the entire Uraga Shipworks!” O f course they bring the ship in on time. And, o f course, in the end TajirO cheerfully admits: “ Well, I guess I’ve lost!” Itami Mansaku, writing from his sickbed, expressed his absolute dis­ gust with the script. He commented dryly that “ it is the nature of cin­ ema to be severely limited as to the maximum weight of ‘message’ it can carry, making it unsuitable for the articulation of abstract concepts.” The real problem in this conflict, according to Itami, is the oversimplifi­ cation of Teppei’s thinking: This in turn comes from the oversimplification of Sawamura’s own philosophy. One gets the impression that such feverish emotionalism reflects a stunting of psychological growth. By having the ship built on time, the author obviously intends the laurel to go to spiritism. Granted, when it comes to turning out one single military vessel on short order, there may be some practical advantage to hysterical energy. But when it infects a major building program, it must surely be a first-class hazard.. . . Looking at the weaknesses of the script, I am forced to conclude that there are no shortcuts to art either. “ Spirit” alone, even when thoroughly aroused, does not cause the spontaneous flowering of a work of great persuasiveness. If I am wrong here, then all of us who have toiled long years toward the refinement of our expression have toiled in vain.50

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Itami’s criticism seems equally valid for Submarine Number One (Sensuikan Ichigo, Nikkatsu, 1941), directed by Igayama Masanori and scripted by Nagami RyuzO. In fact, key sections of the dialogue are clearly in­ spired by Sawamura’s films. Submarine Number One opens with a shot of a stone tablet that reads “ Birthplace of Captain Sakuma.” Cut to the village classroom where the teacher is addressing his students: “ Today we do the lesson everyone has been looking forward to. About Captain Sakuma.” He instructs his pupils to open their textbooks to the chapter and then has one boy read it aloud. We learn that Captain Sakuma had been a pioneer in the de­ velopment of submarine technology in Japan. Then, in 1900, he and his crew were trapped in their prototype submarine and died in agony from asphyxiation. Before he died, however, Sakuma, had scrawled out a farewell message in his notebook, praising his men for their loyalty, their stoicism, and the pride they all felt in having the opportunity to give their lives in service to the nation. Fearing that this accident will set back the development of submarine engineering in Japan, he carefully writes down a technical description of the chain o f events leading up to the accident. After carrying out this invaluable service, he too succumbs to asphyxiation. Part of the significance of this scene in the classroom is that the story o f Captain Sakuma had just been elevated to the position o f an official bidan and, under the tide of “ The Last Testament of Capt. Sakuma,” it was included in the newly revised Textbookfor Moral Education (Fifth Edi­ tion) for third graders. The tcacher reminds the class that Sakuma had studied in the very classroom they are in: “ This is something to be very proud of. So pay close attention to today’s lesson so you can follow in the footsteps of the great Captain Sakuma.” 51 Various students rise to announce their intention to do just that. The tcacher praises them for their “ rippa na determination.” This repeated invocation of the term rippa (magnificent) seems to have had a special significance in the official educational policy for young pupils. The shushin (morals) textbooks of the period consistendy modeled the private virtue o f the citizen on the public virtu of the military man. The implication was that war, even in times of apparent peace, was the universal condition of socicty. The 1939 version of The Teacher’s Guide to Elementary School Shushin Education points out that “ the entire system of national and personal values is warranted good, true, and beautiful through the actions, the spirit, and the recorded words o f exemplary

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military men.” In other words, it was the explicit intention of such text­ books to infiltrate the military ethos into the very language of the civilian’s value structure. For example, the term rippa, which was used to describe the image of a man successful in the world, was first introduced to young pupils in the form of the rippa na military officer, and his rippa na exploits or manner of death. The film’s two heroes, Hidaka and Katagiri, also announce their as­ pirations for the future —Hidaka wants to become a submarine designer and Katagiri a submarine captain. Late that evening, the two friends stand in front of Sakuma’s memorial column to affirm their pledge to carry out their ambitions. The years pass, and the two make good on their pledge. A single se­ quence shows Hidaka working away on his studies at his desk. Far more attention, however, is paid to the training Katagiri receives at the naval academy for submariners (shown in the form o f a lengthy montage of documentary footage). The disparity in treatment clearly reflects the film’s message that the military’s training program is far superior to Hidaka’s rationalist technical education at the university. The former emphasizes refinement o f the spirit as far more important than the mas­ tery o f technical skills. The latter is purely intellectual, fostering no real spiritual growth. This disparity is made stunningly visual in the se­ quence where Katagiri first appears before Hidaka in his full military regalia. He towers over Hidaka, who sits on the floor gazing up in admi­ ration at his rippa na figure. Katagiri’s attainment o f the moral and spiritual authority o f a mil­ itary officer is demonstrated in the sequence where the sister of a young submarine trainee comes to ask him to speak to her brother. As she tearfully explains, her brother appears to have suddenly turned coward, and now he wants out of the training program. However, when Katagiri confronts the young man, it turns out that his desire to quit is far from cowardice. Rather, he has a “ doubt” about the useful­ ness of submarine service to the nation. It has never seen real action in wartime. Therefore, he wants to join the Naval Brigade, which has re­ cently shown its abilities during the fighting at Shanghai. Katagiri’s counterargument is pure spiritism: “ So you are hoping to get in on some flashy action, are you? Clearly you haven’t developed the submariner’s spirit yet. The point is that submariners maintain the same mental attitude, whether it is wartime or peace. For us, every day is combat. Confident and settled in our minds, we silently devote our­ selves to the defense of our territorial waters.” Katagiri’s lecture

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brings the young man to tears, and he promises never to doubt the submariner’s mission again. The inevitable conflict between the film’s two heroes breaks out when Hidaka, now a full-fledged submarine designer, visits Katagiri with his plans for a new submarine. “ I think I’ve made the ideal subma­ rine,” he boasts. But as Katagiri inspects the plans, he only shakes his head with disappointment. Hidaka defends his design by pointing out that he has worked out the best possible balance between speed and ar­ mament. Greater armaments would slow down the boat while greater speed would require a diminishment of armaments. Furthermore, to do it any other way would involve too great a sacrifice o f the living environ­ ment of the submariners. But Katagiri remains adamant —“ We de­ mand both speed and greater fire power!” While closely paralleling the debate with the engineer in Sun of the Eighty-eighth Year, the one that now breaks out is far more lively in its expressiveness. Hidaka explodes: “ Katagiri! If you ever get on a submarine, don’t say such absurd things! . . . Your design is nothing more than a scrabbling together of technical theory and popular misconceptions.” “ Oh really? Well, any­ thing you try to put together without technical theory is bound to be a pile of crap!” “All right, just tell me this. What about the time when a squad o f our planes successfully flew thorough a raging hurricane? Can you explain that by your technical theory? And what about Kushimura’s plane? He managed to get back to base even with the loss of one wing!” “All right, I grant you the power o f spirit. But technical theory proves to us that ten plus ten is always twenty, never thirty!” “ You are such a fool. The spirit o f the battlefield far surpasses any common sense or technical theories, don’t you know that?” Katagiri then seizes a scrap of paper on his desk and scrawls out in big characters “ Devotion Unto Death.” He thrusts the paper into Hidaka’s hand and tells him to use it as his motto as he rethinks his plan. Hidaka snatches it away and storms out. In the next shot, we see him riding the train, thinking deeply Clearly, Katagiri has succeeded in making his point. In the following sequences, Hidaka is wracking his brains for the re­ quired spiritual breakthrough that will help him come up with a revo­ lutionary design. He often glances at the paper. “ Devotion Unto Death.” O f course, he eventually makes the breakthrough and he works on feverishly. Even when the plan is finished and approved, he does not let up. With the same fanatical energy, he guides the workmen through the difficulties of executing his design. In the end, he collapses from exhaustion.

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The concluding sequences show Katagiri, now the commander of the new sub, putting it through strenuous paces for its trial run. Docu­ mentary footage of a sub repeatedly submerging and resurfacing is interspersed with shots of large-scale naval maneuvers with batdeships firing their big guns. In this prelude period to war with the United States, the Japanese Navy is clearly preparing for a major naval conflict in the Pacific. As with the other spiritist films, the critical reaction to Submarine Num­ ber One was cool. Tanaka Takeshi’s review represents the disappointment of those who otherwise were in tune with the film’s spiritist message: “ It’s a shame such a nationally significant film should fail to achieve a popular following.” The flaw, as with similar films, was in its dramatic construc­ tion. Scenes such as Katagiri’s lecture to the young trainee were clearly included simply to maximize the film’s ideological message. “ It’s just too sudden and point blank. Such emotional outbursts seem to come pounc­ ing out at one from nowhere. It’s really quite confusing.” 52 The tendency to hover on the surface of their central character’s “ rippa-ness” blocks all access to their psychological interior, Tanaka says, making it impossible to construct a drama based on reasonable, or even comprehensible, motivation.

Spiritist Women and Women o f Spirit The “ spirit” celebrated in both kinds o f spiritist films—those centering on military production and those depicting military training—was basi­ cally a masculine spirit. Fiery determination, fanatical devotion to duty, and martial valor were its key features. Women played a distinctly sub­ sidiary role, as occasional helpers, but more often merely as emotionally involved observers of the spiritual dramas enacted by their men. The scene in Submarine Number One, where Katagiri lectures the girl’s younger brother, concludes with the boy achieving an insight into the spiritual nobility o f the submariner’s mission. At his side, his sister breaks into tears of joy and admiration at the event. In Story o f Leadership, Hara Setsuko’s character is also essentially an observer. The characters she portrayed in subsequent spiritist war films, however, reflected the grad­ ual evolution of Japanese women toward a more active (if still modest) role in wartime society. In Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sly (1943), made during the second flowering of the spiritist subgenre, Hara would play an older sister who dedicates herself to leading her weakling brother to­ ward a spiritual awakening.

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Even where women take on a more central function, one looks in vain for portrayals of them confronting the realities of a world at war. A pose of stoicism veils their individual hearts from view. While Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver (1942) became emblematic o f all the wives and mothers o f soldiers in wartime Britain and the United States, she was also uniquely individual. The artistic excellence o f Garson’s portrayal of a deeply feeling woman strengthens rather than weakens its value as wartime propaganda (this, despite the fact that some o f the propagandistic elements weakens its artistic excellence). In comparison, Mrs. Miniver’s counterparts in Japanese film tend to be stereotypical manne­ quins who mouth the appropriate phrases and apparently actually feel the officially prescribed emotions. This, even in the Japanese context, inevitably weakened both their dramatic and their propaganda value. Needless to say, the heavy pressure for ideological conformity was largely responsible for bringing about this situation. Ironically, one of the strong points o f Japanese cinema had been its rich tradition o f var­ iegated and vivid portrayals of femininity. In the late thirties, especially, the screen had featured an ever-expanding repertoire o f female “ types.” In its early days, from soon after the Russo-Japanese War through the teens and into the twenties, thejidaigeki was dominated by male char­ acters while modern gendaigeki dramas almost invariably consisted of tales about women. Granted, there was only one “ type” in those days: the ever-victimized heroine of the shimpa tragedy (typically portrayed by oyama female impersonators). In the original stage productions and in the film versions o f the Taisho period, shimpa was characterized by long scenes of psychological tension, often smothered in bathos. While intel­ lectuals and other nonsentimentalists scoffed at such fare as “ threehanky tear-jerkers,” the largely female audiences were enthralled. Many or most o f them could readily identify with the heroines and their des­ perate struggles against the invisible powers o f oppression in their maledominated world. As the thirties advanced, however, portrayals o f women in Japanese cinema teemed with vitality. Character types ranged from the stalwart, proletarian matrons played by Iida ChOko to the breed o f stylishly modern, intellectually alert women played by Takamine Mieko, Todoroki Yukiko, or Okada Yoshiko. Even outside of Shochiku, which was dedicated to a constant expansion o f female depictions, other direc­ tors explored the outer and inner reaches of women’s relationships with men, with each other, and with society as a whole. While none of the era’s various female characters displayed the extreme idiosyncratic

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individualism o f a Scarlett O ’Hara, this was probably due to the re­ pression o f feminine individuality in real life rather than an oversight on the part of the filmmakers. National policy films effectively cut themselves off from this rich tra­ dition. Rather, the “ spiritist” women were saddled with the function of portraying (or “ modeling,” to be more precise) emotions and motiva­ tions that were unlikely to arise naturally under normal circumstances. Their psychological improbability—such as the “ deep satisfaction” of a mother at the death of her son in batde—necessitated the expunging of all hint of independent thought or individual psychology. Instead, women were depicted according to models largely developed in the pages of the elementary school shushin and kokugo (national language) textbooks. Such was the case o f the militarist mother, whose archetype emerged in the third revised edition o f the seventh grade Kokugo text­ book, under the tide “ Hello-o, Ichitaro” (Ichitaro Ta-ai). An old mother, who has walked all the way from her mountain village in her straw san­ dals, presses through the crowds at a wharf for one last glimpse of her son as he departs for the front in the Russo-Japanese War. “ She looked to be about sixty-four or five and had a small juroshiki-wrapped parcel tied to her back.” She spots the ship and cries out, “ Hello-o, Ichitaro! Raise your rifle if you’re on board!” A rifle is raised on deck and she continues, “ Don’t concern yourself about us at home. Serve His M a­ jesty well! Raise your rifle if you understand!” Again a barely discern­ ible rifle is raised on the ship. The short textbook passage ends with the line “ It is said that everyone present on the wharf that day shed tears of admiration.” 53 Even today, in Kanagawa Prefecture, a bronze statue stands in a rural park depicting an old woman with her right hand raised as she peers off into the distance. The inscription at its base reads “ Hello-o, Ichitaro!” Variations on the militarist mother theme became increasingly com­ mon in cinema as the thirties progressed. Typical of her image in the pre-China Incident period was Nakano Kaoru in Taguchi Satoshi’s Mother, Defender of the Nation (Gdkoku no Haha, Nikkatsu, 1936). A woman whose husband has died on the battlefield dedicates herself to the task of raising their three young children to be rippa na citizens. Her depic­ tion, however, features a rather “ modern” element. Rather than staying home and drudging away at piece work while the children are at school—something her forebears of the Meiji and Taisho eras would have done —she enterprisingly goes off to Tokyo for a year to master the

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craft o f Western-style sewing and returns to open a sewing school. The film ends with her seeing off her oldest boy as he departs for glory at the front in north China. After the start of the bloody China Incident, however, films about mothers o f soldiers often ended with the return o f the son as “ one of the honorable war dead.” Such was the case of Kurata Isamu’s The Soldier’s Field Manual—Mother and the Battlefield (Senjinkun—Haha to Senjö, Daito, 1941, lost?). A synopsis of the film in Eigajunpo (October 1941) de­ scribes the conclusion thus: “ Kawamoto’s admirable mother listened to the account of his brave death, holding back her tears of pride.” 54 In addition to the militarist mother, other stereotypes considered ap­ propriate for women included the loyal wife of the military officer and the stalwart “ patriot-wife.” These latter were first developed in the pages of the women’s magazines before being transferred to the screen. A cinematic example of the former was Kimura Kakichi’s 1931 The Wife o f Lt. Inoue Gives Her Life as a Parting Giß (already discussed in chapter 1). Developing an appropriate image and spiritist role for the latter became the theme o f numerous films made a year or two into the China Inci­ dent. By this time, the practical role of real-life women in service to the war effort had become a prominent feature of the domestic landscape. The first Aikoku Fujinkai (Patriotic Women’s Association) was formed as a support group on the home front during the Russo-Japanese War. With its close ties to the Imperial Court, it was largely aristocratic in na­ ture. The activities o f most women during the conflict were largely con­ fined to collecting stitches on senninbari amulet belts and waving the troops off as they departed for the front. Then, with the end of the war, housewives were returned to the kitchen, and their lives were once again circumscribed within the ideal o f ryösai-kenbö (a good wife and dedicated mother). The apparent liberalizadon of thejapanese woman’s lot in the twen­ ties and thirties was mostly confined to the young girls who went out into the city to work in restaurants and business offices and to the daughters and matrons of upper-middle-class families. These latter were a favorite subject of films produced by Shochiku, giving the im­ pression that they were far more common than they probably were. Such film characters and their counterparts in real life increasingly be­ came the targets of government austerity measures as the political crisis of the thirties deepened. In any case, the situation of average married women, especially those living in rural areas, was little affected by the winds of change. Except for daily excursions to the food market or

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prayerful moments spent at the local shrine, there was little for them to do outside the home. Their main link to the outside world, or indeed with each other, was through the various women’s magazines. Shufu no Tomo (founded in 1925) and similar publications, most o f them as thick as a good-sized book, provided the usual practical advice on sewing, family health, and other housewifely duties. But more importandy, they provided a forum for a growing dialogue among women about deeper concerns. Through an endless stream o f apparendy “ true” confessions, as well as serialized novellas, readers learned o f the lives o f other women in circumstances similar to their own. The spiritual problems o f dealing with their husbands’ sexual infidelities and the suffocating restrictions o f tradi­ tional family life were among the subjects to come under scrutiny. As Shufii no Tomo, Fujin Koron, and the others gradually extended their influ­ ence, they began to play an important role in forming the opinions— social, spiritual, and political—o f their vast number of readers. Al­ though the magazines strove to create a more “ modern” consciousness in matters affecting the home, their political message was usually staunchly conservative, if not reactionary.55 Not only did they serve to solidify support for the war effort, they willingly provided a conduit for the endless stream o f government regulations concerning the clothing and feeding of families. They taught housewives how to do with less rice and provided patterns for sewing kokuminfiiku civilian uniforms for husbands and children. In 1941, when the government began trying to coax women from wearing skirts into wearing monpe (bloomers which were usually worn when doing manual labor), the magazines aided the plan by running attractive pictures o f women wearing the garb. The sum effect was to prepare the way for the new and far more ac­ tive role women would have to play in wartime society. Ideologically and spiritually, they pioneered a “ third” way for women (married women in­ cluded) to interact with the world around them. If they were no longer the cloistered housewife, neither would they be like the bourgeois social­ ites who flitted through the Ginza on shopping sprees. Rather, they would go out into the streets, dressed in sober, white aprons, carrying out their patriotic duty to mobilize the home front. Although it would still be some time before they began replacing men on the production lines of heavy industry, there was suddenly plenty for them to do outside the home. Especially after the enactment of the 1938 National Mobilization Law, public-spirited women were busy sending off the troops, organizing victory celebrations, distributing

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rationed goods, promoting the Patriot Savings Movement, and render­ ing other forms of voluntary labor service. Under government encour­ agement, a system o f neighborhood associations was begun with civil defense exercises as its central activity. In 1937, 3 percent o f the nation’s male population (1,070,000 men) had been sent to the front. By 1941, this figure had swelled to 7 percent (2,390,000 men) and continued to grow.56 This meant that, even before the Pacific War, women were be­ ginning to shoulder traditionally masculine responsibilities. When groups of physically able women began to form a Women’s Fire Bri­ gade, the military saw this as an opportunity to spread their “ spiritual indoctrination” to this segment of the population under the guise of “ military preparedness training.” By 1938, participation in one or another of the various patriotic or national defense women’s associations came to be seen as the equivalent of good citizenship. Several o f the older women’s civic groups that had worked for an improvement in the social situation of women —the YW CA and the Suffragette Union—took the opportunity to efface their old image as supporters of individualism and liberalism by proclaiming their new mission of service on the home front. But it was the newer or­ ganizations which took center stage. The National Defense Women’s Association, which had started in the early days o f the Manchurian In­ cident, now affiliated itself with the Army Ministry and spread a net­ work of branches across the nation as the “ Greater Japan National De­ fense Women’s Association.” This arrangement apparently did not sit well with the bureaucrats in Education Ministry, however. They moved swiftly to set up their own rival organization, the Greater Japan United Women’s Association. Since both organizations, along with the Patriotic Women’s Association, were rivals carrying out the same tasks, they were soon locked in a cold war. For several years, the government tried fruit­ lessly to merge the groups. Only after the outbreak of the Pacific War did it manage to draw them into a single umbrella organization, the Greater Japan Women’s Association, under the joint sponsorship of five government agencies, including the Ministry of Education, the Home Ministry, and the military. As one might guess, it soon became the bat­ tleground for fierce interagency rivalries. Still, despite their bickering, the new organizations served a vital function in expanding the horizons of ordinary' women throughout the nation, especially in the rural areas where most of them still lived. Farm­ ing wives in the past rarely had a moment to spare for themselves. Now, they found themselves freed from household drudgery for upwards of

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half a day at a time, even if only to listen to political indoctrination lec­ tures. In its own way, it all represented a kind of women’s liberation. The “ liberation” was of course merely incidental to the official pur­ poses of such activity. Behind each smiling face in the flag-waving crowds at the railway stations was a lurking fear—What if I become a war widow? Another important aspect of these women’s associations was to provide emotional support for the wives of the fallen. Not only did they wave the men off to the front, they were on hand to solemnly receive the endless stream of boxes of human ashes returning home. As the China Incident progressed, some films tried to take up the task o f instructing women in the proper spirit in facing the prospect of widowhood. One of the problems was that the films were almost invari­ ably scripted and directed by men. Further complicating the task was the nature of the Japanese language itself, where most of the words ex­ pressing “ fortitude” have a clearly masculine connotation. Such was the case in Masuda Haruo’s A Testament in the Sky (Ozora no Isho, Daito, 1941, lost?), a film about the ace navy pilot Maze Hei’ichirO. Before he leaves for the China front, Maze catechizes his new bride to prepare herself for the worst. “ Don’t break down in effeminate (memeshii) tears,” he warns her. At the end of the film, Kazue, his wife, re­ ceives the news of his death. According to the script, “ when she takes the announcement in her hands, she is holding a baby in one arm and stiffens her back in an admirably manly (o-oshii) manner.” 57 Although the linguistic contrast between “ womanish” (memeshii) and masculine (0oshii) was perhaps unintentional, it does add another dimension to the phrase in popular usage at the time—“ drafting the housewife out of the home.” Originally intended to indicate the situation in which women were required to leave the home and take over the responsibilities of the departed men, it also carried the implication of a kind of “ defeminiza­ tion” of womanhood. Nursing the wounded was chief among the traditional feminine roles in wartime, and Japanese cinema was never remiss in celebrating the nation’s “ angels in white uniforms.” We catch sight of them in nu­ merous war films featuring scenes in field hospitals. The years 1940 and 1941 were particularly rich in films about female medical personnel, with such pictures as Shinko’s documentary Hospital Ship (Byoinsen) and Fujita Ju n ’ichi’s drama film Maidens with Silver Wings (Ginyoku no Otome, Toho). Although it was not a war film, one should note that Toyoda ShirO’s superb Spring on Leper’s Island (K'ojima no Ham, Tokyo Hassei) was also made in 1940. This latter, starring Natsukawa Shizue, is the story of a

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woman doctor who dedicates herself to the treatment of leprosy pa­ tients who have been refused admission to the island’s hospital. In 1941, the trend continued with such films as Toyoda’s A Record of My Love (Waga A i no Ki, Tokyo Hassei), starring Yamagishi Mihoko. This time, however, the treatment had a particularly strong national policy mes­ sage: the encouragement o f single women to marry disabled veterans. The women’s magazines had been developing this theme for several years. For example, the November 1939 issue o f Fujin Kurabu featured two serialized novellas and an article of reportage dealing with severely disabled veterans. One o f the novels, The Fatherless Child, was written by Kawakami ShirO, himself a disabled veteran. “ How will my wife and child fare in the world after losing me?” reads the editorial blurb on the first page o f the novel. “ Revealed here is the most painful problem for all brave soldiers! A cry from the heart of all our men at the front!” In the novel, one of the characters marries a wounded soldier. The same theme is taken up in an article tided “The Passionate Love o f a Maiden o f Japan: Visiting the New Home of a Wartime Bride,” about a middle-aged Red Cross nurse who married a severely disabled soldier, “ completely mutilated” by a land mine. Most of the man’s face had been destroyed by the explosion. With no nose or ears, “ he rarely ven­ tures out-of-doors since his features invariably cause consternation among passers-by.” The woman frankly admitted that it was deep sym­ pathy and love of country, rather than any special love for the man himself, which caused her decision to marry him in order to devote the rest o f her life to his care. The reporter concludes the piece by employ­ ing the masculine-sounding adjective for special valor: “ What a beauti­ ful, what a manly (o-oshii) resolution this new wife has!” The wounds suffered by Toyoda’s veteran in The Record of My Love (¡Vaga A i no Ki, Toho, 1939) hardly compare with this. But since his back­ bone has been partially shot away, leaving him totally paralyzed from the waist down, he is certainly not a desirable candidate as a marriage partner. In the film, which is based upon a true-life account by Yamaguchi Satono, the heroine (whose name is changed to Satoko here) is also a Red Cross nurse. Satoko becomes emotionally involved with the man, Yamada, as she nurses him in a Tokyo military hospital. W'hen she re­ turns to her rural home on vacation, Satoko broaches the idea o f mar­ rying him to her parents. They are deeply impressed by the “ correct­ ness” o f her desire, but cannot bring themselves to agree to the marriage. For the time being, Satoko also gives up the idea. Back in the hospital in Tokyo, however, she learns that Yamada’s mother had died

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and that he had been unable to go to her at the time of her death. His mother had been widowed early in her marriage and had brought up Yamada while toiling in the family rice fields. Thanks to her efforts, he had been able to go on to college in Osaka. Soon after graduating, he was drafted and sent to the Manchurian front, where he received his crippling wound. Thereafter, the mother had come to the hospital every day to console and encourage her son. Learning o f all this, Satoko feels a surge of powerful sympathy: “ How unhappy Mr. Yamada is! I want to give him comfort” becomes her every waking thought. She asks the head doctor at the hospital to intercede for her with her parents. They eventu­ ally agree and the two are married. Although their household lacks the joyful nonchalance typical of most newlyweds, the couple are clearly bonded together by “ a love reinforced by deep mutual understanding.” Stimulated by Satoko’s selfless devotion, Yamada sets to work preparing a new life for himself as a writer. The problem of how a disabled soldier can return to the world as a useful individual was the subject of several national policy films. Among them was Takagi Koichi’s A Shieldfor His Majesty’s Realm (Kokoku no Tate, Shunju Eiga, 1941, lost?), in which a disabled soldier sets to work on a map designed to help the fishermen o f Lake Biwa. The usual spots had all been fished out, plunging the industry into decline. Thanks to the disabled soldier’s survey efforts, assisted by former comrades-in-arms, new fishing areas are identified and the industry revives.

Sky Above, Death Below In terms o f scale, 1939-40 was an important turning point for the Ja p a ­ nese combat picture. Sequences in The Naval Brigade at Shanghai and The Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi depicted ground fighting of a feroc­ ity never before seen on the Japanese screen. Critics and moviegoers alike began using the Hollywood term “ spectacular” to describe the sense of bigness and grandeur that opened before them on the screen. Abe Yutaka’s The Flaming Sky (Moyuru Ozora, Toho, 1940) was the first film actually to be conceived as a Hollywood-style “ spectacular” and to bill itself as such. “ Thrilling dogfights and burning patriotic passions raise the spirits o f the home front to a fever pitch! The best Japanese spectacular ever!” 58 the company brochure proclaimed. Unlike batde on the ground, which was soaked in mud, blood, and pathos, combat among the clouds was somehow unreal, noble, and—as the advertising copy openly suggested - fun.

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O f course there had been air warfare films made in Japan before, but they were nothing compared to this. That very year, Kimura Sotoji had made an ambitious semidocumentary about the intensive bombing of Chungking, Naval Bomber Squadron (Kaigun Bakugekitai, Nichiei, 1940), but it was almost universally judged a failure, a “ bore” in fact. As Tsumura Hideo put it: “Naval Bomber Squadron is to be commended for its boldness in opening new territory to the documentary—but aside from a new screen process and a detailed set of a bomber’s interior, it has very litde to offer.” 59 The Flaming Sky openly invited comparison with the new Hollywood airplane spectaculars, and, even in this lead-up period to the Pacific War, there were an amazing number o f the latter available for viewing in Japan. Victor Fleming’s Test Pilot had arrived at the end of 1938 and, by early 1940, William Wellman’s Men with Wings, Lloyd Bacon’s Wings of the Navy, and Howard Hawks’s vasdy acclaimed Only Angels Have Wings. In late 1941, just two months before the outbreak of war with the United States, audiences crowded in to see Paramount’s glorification of the new B-17 bomber, I Wanted Wings. At least one critic, Aoki BunzO, saw the spectacle film as unsuited to the Japanese character: “ The spectacle is a genre still undeveloped in Japan. Perhaps the main reason for this is the lack o f capital, but almost equally important is the fact that life in Japan is so quotidian as to be the very opposite o f the spectacular. There can be litde doubt that Flaming Sky is the best film o f its type to appear so far in Japan, but those of us who have seen what the Hollywood aerial spectaculars can achieve, know all too well the degree of its insufficiency.” 60 Such reactions o f frank disappointment indicate a consciousness of a rivalry between Japanese and U.S. cinema, as if, even before actual combat began, the industries of the two nations were already locked in a “ movie war.” In the instance of Tsumura Hideo, this was indeed the case. Starting from this period, he wrote numerous articles encouraging filmmakers to strengthen the appeal of their pictures as a means of re­ sisting the powerful subliminal propaganda in U.S. films. In 1944, he would actually give one of his books the tide Film War. Despite the worried criticism that Japan ’s first real spectacular had failed to surpass its American (or German or Italian) rivals, the general public was pleased enough to make it an enormous hit, and it ran for a full four weeks. With lavish backing from the army, Toho had access to nine hundred actual aircraft. Tsuburaya Eiji was also on hand to per­ form the special effects wizardry that would eventually make him world

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famous. Another factor helping the film’s success was that the aerial vic­ tories depicted were, for the most part, real. The Flaming Sky opens by introducing us to the life of the young pilottrainees on base. In a sequence visually similar to several in Triumph of the W ill (1936), we see them washing and sharing toothpaste as they brush their teeth, eating at long rows of tables in severe silence, cleaning and assembling their rifles, doing laundry, and showering. These docu­ mentary sequences are interspersed with dramatic vignettes designed to introduce us to individual characters and to the manner in which the training encompasses the most personal aspects of the trainees’ lives. In one scene, an officer is checking the trainees’ bank books to see how they are using their money. Quizzing them about a rather large withdrawal, he discovers a young man and three friends had used their money to gorge themselves on anpan sweet rolls. How many rolls did each of you eat?” “ Twenty.” The officer is furious: “ We have already provided your bodies with sufficient nourishment. I f this kind o f glut­ tony were to make you sick, who do you think would be responsible?” After a pause, he continues: “ Do you think you are actually the posses­ sors o f those bodies of yours?” “ No, sir!” “ Then tell me. Who is the rightful possessor?” One after another, they shout out in an earnest manner: “ His Imperial Majesty’s Empire, sir!” Sequences, mosdy o f documentary footage, show the young pilots plummeting straight down like German Stukas and swooping up again. The next scene is their graduation ceremony, where their commanding officer demands that they refine their spirits for the coming batde: “ From my recent observation o f your attitude in training, I would say you are still lacking in passion and dedication. Your fretfulness is all too obvious. Consider yourselves warned about this.” Next, a tide flashed on the screen indicates that two years have passed. The squad has been in China for some time now. Their old commanding officer from the school arrives to lead them at the front. The first scene of aerial combat takes place soon after. One after an­ other, the Chinese aircraft (old-model biplanes) are shot down by the Japanese fighters (of the modern, mono-wing variety). As the Chinese planes careen out o f control, looping wildly in a downward spiral, they make a humorous, high-pitched whining sound. The Chinese forces are so contemptibly weak as to be laughable, the sequence seems to be tell­ ing us. But the Japanese side has also had a casualty; a bomber has been shot down, and its crew, made up of members o f the group we have

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A be Yutaka’s Flam ing Sky (Toho, 1940): “ D o you think you’re the possessors o f your own bodies?”

been following, is lost. Abruptly, the reality of death has made its ap­ pearance among the group. Back at base, the others actually cry for their lost comrades. Although we have not been able to grow as elose to them as the sol­ diers in Five Scouts, they also are a loving little family. Yet this is no “ hu­ manist” film. Rather, it takes the spiritist message and develops it as if it were a religious creed. As with any religion, it provides its own solace in time o f spiritual crisis. This is made abundantly clear in the next se­ quence, where two o f the young pilots stand grieving silently in the night. “ Yamamura,” one of them says, “ today I got a clear conccption of how important it is to die a good death.” “ Me too. I am determined to do it admirably (rippa ni) when I die!” In the context of the movie, we know that this is not an idea that has occurred to him spontaneously. In earlier sccnes, we see the young pilots being inculcated with the spiritist religion. Most notably, the command­ ing officer had addressed just such an issue in his graduation address at the training school: “To die admirably is to have lived admirably. This is the essential spirit of Japanese bushido, which put religiously would be the

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unity of life and death. The bushido spirit is the very mind of God. . . . Still, as ordinary people, we have to admit that our training leaves us filled with anxieties and irritation. When you confront such periods of spiritual doubt, respectfully read His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Meiji’s august teachings to his soldiers. These will set your soul afire, bringing forth the spirit o f bushido within you.” The second dogfight scene is even more brutal. At first, we have the usual shots o f Chinese planes trailing smoke as they loop and plummet earthward. But this time, we actually see a Chinese pilot drooling blood from his mouth as he dies. We see the hate-filled face of another Chi­ nese pilot as he machine-guns the plane o f a Japanese pilot. The latter slumps in his seat in just the way the downed Chinese had. The wounded pilot’s comrades wait in anxiety for his return. Re­ peatedly, they lift their eyes skyward. Shots of empty sky fill the screen. Eventually, his plane does limp home but crashes on landing. His com­ rades lovingly lift him out of the wreckage and rush him to the infir­ mary. His drawn out death scene reminds us that, despite the film’s spectacular footage, its subtext is about the bushido way of death. The at­ tending physician is none other than Hasegawa Kazuo. The masculine roughness of his dress and his nearly shaven head makes him almost un­ recognizable at first. As if to emphasize that he is not playing one of his typical, sweetly romantic scenes here, he actually allows the camera to catch the deep scar on his left cheek. Audiences at the time must have been startled by this touch. “ Its all over for me,” the dying man murmurs. His friend looks down into his face with a big tear rolling down his cheek. Before the man dies, there is a ceremony he must perform. First, he slowly recites the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers as the others snap to attention. Then, asking to be propped up, he shouts Tenno Heika Banzai'just before expir­ ing. A flapping H i no Maru is superimposed over the scene as the heavy strains of cinematic martial music well up. Planes are shown taking off from the base. They fly across the sky in vee formation as the “ end” mark comes up. The close coordination between documentary footage and special ef­ fects using models in Flaming Sfy made it an important experimental fore­ runner of such Pacific War period spectaculars as Yamamoto’s Sea War from Hawaii to Malaya (1942). Even more important, however, were the film’s glimpses of military training. This also previews the Pacific War era, when films would focus on such training, making it central to their dramatic and thematic structure. In Flaming Sly, such scenes establish the

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Finale o f Flam ing Sky. T h e majestic death o f a w arrior o f the sky. Faintly superim ­ posed is a w avin gjap an ese flag.

important thematic element of bushido-style death, but they have yet to find their place in the forward movement of the drama. Whereas such spiritist films as A Story of Leadership and I he Sun of the Eighty-eighth lear fo­ cused on the conflict between rationalism and antirationalism, the Pa­ cific War films would introduce an entirely new dramatic formula: the progress of a young man from spiritual weakness and confusion toward his ultimate fulfillment as a modern incarnation of the bushi warrior. Be­ cause this new formula had not yet fully evolved by 1940, the training scenes in Flaming Sly appear as little more than isolated vignettes. While the 1939 40 period saw the emergence of technically superior combat films, a major change in government policy toward China was under way, emphasizing a more constructive attitude toward the popu­ lace of that nation. In the next chapter, we will look at the films inspired by this policy shift, along with the problems rooted in the radically dif­ ferent nature of Chinese geography and the on-goingjapanese super­ iority complex toward its people—that flawed them.

7 China Dreams

“ Intractable Footage” and the Anxiety o f Vastness Although the war in China was clearly far from over, the Cabinet Infor­ mation Board in mid-1939 began to shift propaganda policy to a new motif: Construction of Greater East Asia (Dai Towa Kensetsu). Later that year, the Board signaled the change by commissioning Domei to produce the documentary New Continent (Shin Tairiku, distributed by Shochiku, 1940, lost?). Directed by Tanaka Kiji and narrated by Tokugawa Musei, the film was saddled with the task of illustrating the positive di­ mension o f the new order that Japanese intervention was imposing on China. However, as Imamura Taihei made clear in his review of New Continent, images of destruction tended to dominate the screen: “ The camera starts with the front of a Chinese movie theater that is already back in business and pans left, taking in a long row of dwellings blasted to pieces in the shelling. The sign of a ruined tailoring shop creaks in the breeze. Already blades of grass are poking through the pavement. The sight is ghasdy. Just as appalling are the faces o f the refugees crammed into the Concessions. Their expressions reveal utter hostility and contempt.” 1 According to cameraman Yoshida Shigeru, the obvious tension between the message of New Continent and its visual content was the re­ sult o f trying to flesh out a theme “ at once shapeless and ever so hope­ lessly vast” with concrete images “ that simply were not there. It is not only a formidable task, it’s an impossible one. Just what does one do when the footage proves altogether intractable? Anyone who thinks it’s easy to impose conceptual order on the reality we find there is either an ignoramus or a fool.” '2 With astounding frankness, Yoshida goes on to detail the “ insurmountables” doggingjapanese cameramen in China. Foremost among them was the deep-seated anti-Japanese sentiment of the populace. His

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crew made a filming trip to a district once famous for the efficiency of its experimental agriculture station. The electrical pumps for the irrigation system had been destroyed during the fighting there and then repaired by a special brigade of Japanese technicians: When our camera crews arrived, a gnarled old farmer who seemed to have projapanese sentiments was selected to be interviewed out in the restored fields. The idea was to have him tell a few anecdotes about the Japanese efforts at restoration. But every time he was on mike with the cameras rolling, he would launch into encomiums about how it was Chiang Kai Shek who had transformed the swamps into rice fields and that the fighting had destroyed them. His narration implied that the Japanese forces had simply destroyed all the good work Chiang had done for the region. Blithely ignorant of Chinese and therefore without the least notion of what he was actually saying, we shot several hundred feet of film (at a cost of 20 sen per foot!).3 With documentary footage proving “ intractable,” the task of devel­ oping the new propaganda motif o f Sino-Japanese “ amicability and cooperation” fell to the makers of drama films. For the film industry this seemed to signal exciting new possibilities. Japanese civilians were, for the first time, to have a prominent and even a potentially “ heroic” role in continental affairs. Alongside the austere military dramas, the continent was now thrown open as the location for films o f adventure and romance. Here too, however, daunting problems confronted the filmmakers. Although war films had for several years been showing soldiers travers­ ing China’s endless plains and fields, the camera rarely focused on the countryside as a subject o f depiction. Battle scenes were usually mon­ tages of explosions, faces, and moving masses o f men against vaguely defined natural backgrounds. Often the point of the marching scenes, such as those in Mud and Soldiers, was to emphasize the arduousness and dreary sameness of the terrain. In an article in Bungei, Shigeno Tatsuhiko saw the vastness o f the Asian mainland as a challenge that Japanese filmmakers were not yet ready to meet: “ On the continent, the beauty o f the landscape is o f an entirely different order and quality, one that disconcerts the traditional Japanese perception of beauty. It’s an entirely new experience for us to see flat land, uninterrupted by mountains, stretching out until it meets the sky. Somehow it symbolizes the fact we are confronting a radically new situation over there.” 4 Similarly, Kurata Bunjin, who was directing

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A Vast and Fertile Land in Manchuria that same year, reported the despair o f his cameramen: “ They were always complaining that these uninter­ rupted reaches of level land just weren’t photogenic.” 5 For cameramen familiar only with the nature o f Japan, “ photogenic landscapes” were broken up into the multilayered vistas o f fields in the foreground and the humped shapes of mountains, surmounted by a thin strip of sky be­ yond. No matter how broad the Japanese plain, it invariably ended in misted foothills or mountains. How was one to register on film the pro­ digious sense of distance created by the actual experience of Manchuria or the flat regions o f central China? In his article, Shigeno indicated that the predicament was inherent in contemporary film technology: “A camera provides a much narrower breadth o f view than our eyes. So when you project it onscreen, a flat horizon actually gives a constricted feeling. Furthermore, footage of a broad plain without geographical variations emphasizes its vacancy rather than any powerful sense of vastness.” 6 O f course, Hollywood directors had been confronting similar prob­ lems in the American West for decades. John Ford, in his Three Bad Men (1926), experimented with silhouetting his wagon trains o f pioneers against distant ranges o f mountains and used the natural undulations of the landscape to show them moving off toward the horizon and then disappear. For his Stagecoach (1939), he began using the spectacular back­ drop o f the Monument Valley rock formations to dwarf his human characters and thus create a sense of inexhaustible distances. Confronting Japanese filmmakers were unbroken vistas o f wheat, barley, or rice fields, almost devoid of such natural features. Akutagawa MitsuzO, the renowned documentary filmmaker for the Manchurian Railroad Research Division, creatively used montage to overcome the problem. In his Secret Border of Jehol (Mikkyo Nekka, Mantetsu, 1936), an ethnographic portrait o f western Manchuria, a caravan of heavily laden camels moves off toward the distant horizon. Superimposed over their gradually dwindling shapes are a series of shots taken straight on from the front of the camel train, thus creating the impression o f inter­ minable travel in a near void. But this was only a one-time solution, and Japanese filmmakers were never to find an equivalent to John Ford’s method for treating the unac­ customed spaces o f the mainland. Vow in the Desert (1940) did feature scenes of a road being built through a desert, but thereafter filmmakers turned to the more familiar terrain of riversides or retreated completely into the cities.

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Invitations to a “ Royal Paradise” Official policy and popular imagination tended to divide continental Asia into various regions according to their significance to the Japanese homeland. As early as 1930, Ishiwara Kanji, one o f the architects of the Manchurian Incident, was propounding the thesis that Japan ’s di­ vine mission was to “ assist” the people o f all Asia. By this, he meant that the Chinese along with the region’s other principal nationalities must be led by Japan toward their “ proper place” in the world: “ The four races will share a common prosperity through a division of re­ sponsibilities,” he wrote, “Japanese, political leadership and large in­ dustry; Chinese, labor and small industry; Koreans, rice; and Manchus, animal husbandry.” 7 With the foundation of Manchukuo, based on the Harmonious Cooperation of the Five Nationalities (gozoku kyowa), the importance of Manchuria surged. From the mid-thirties, it became the empire’s “ Golden West,” beckoning ordinary Japanese to its vast, fertile, and ap­ parently empty lands for setdement and exploitation. Official propa­ ganda dubbed it a “ Royal Paradise” (odo rakuen), where Japan ’s age-old social and economic contradictions would dissipate in the spirit o f mu­ tual cooperation and prosperity. Emigration to Manchuria provides the happy ending to a number of films in this period, including Ozu’s Brothers and Sister of the Toda Clan and Shimazu’s A Brother and His Younger Sister. In the Fanck and Itami film New Earth we see the hero in the closing scene joyfully plowing a Man­ churian field with a tractor. Tractors, which were still a comparative novelty in domestic Japan, are much in evidence in films about setde­ ment in Manchuria, suggesting (quite misleadingly) that farming tech­ niques there were even more advanced than in the homeland. Films specifically designed to encourage emigration seemed to be free to play up the grimmest aspects of life in Japan. In Toyoda ShirO’s Ohinata Village, for example, a girl with tuberculosis commits suicide so that her mother and brother can go to Manchuria. She leaves behind a note saying, “ I hear that if you move to Manchuria, you won’t have to spend your entire life like us in this mountainside hell of eternal night.” 8 The significance o f China proper was different again. In military films, it had been a largely unpopulated land of devastation where sol­ diers learned the nobility o f suffering and death. In the newer films, with civilians as central characters, the motif was Construction o f the New Asia and “ Sino-Japanese fraternity.” An awe of China’s antiquity

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and vastness combined with an idealized vision o f Japan ’s role as leader of Asia. The little speech given by a character at the beginning of Watanabe Kunio’s Vow in the Desert blends perfectly this strange mixture of rever­ ence and paternalism. Atop the Great Wall, he reaches out and strokes one o f the stones, commenting to his companion, “Just looking at the hugeness of this thing makes me wonder at the marvelous capabilities of mankind. This is the foremost testimony to the greatness of the human will.” “ What do you mean?” “Just look at these bricks! Can you even im­ agine the amount of effort that went into making each and every one of them?” He then turns away from the wall and pointing back toward Beijing, announces, “ But what we are doing now rivals even this. In terms of importance, it’s a second Great Wall of China!” He is referring to a military highway being constructed by Japanese engineers. In the films about constructing a New China, the Japanese charac­ ters are surrounded and almost overwhelmed by the teeming popula­ tion. Out on the street, they are tense and self-conscious under the cold watchful eyes of the crowd. They are obsessed with the problem of how to convert this hostility, perhaps not to friendship, but to “ understand­ ing.” Japanese characters in the Manchurian settlement films, on the other hand, seem to be completely unburdened by such anguish. There is little evidence o f the presence of a local population. While China re­ mains Their land, Manchuria is indisputably Ours, to the Japanese. The human dramas played out there are usually direct continuations of problems Japanese characters have brought over with them from their homeland. Although the official function of Toyoda’s Ohinata Village (Ohinata Mura, Toho, 1940), was to recruit “ pioneers” for Manchuria, we are shown only one character actually in Manchuria. The village elder, Horikawa (Kawarazaki Ch 5jir 5 ), goes there to inspect the land for pos­ sible future settlement and returns with the beatific smile and burning eyes of a religious convert. Single-handedly, he persuades the villagers that the solution to their problems is to resettle half the village in the Promised Land of Manchukuo. The opening segments of the film make it clear that no other solution is available. Cramped in its dank, dusky mountain valley, the village is being suffocated by overpopula­ tion: “ The allotment of rice-growing land per person is surprisingly tiny. Because of the lack of fuel, the mountainsides are being denuded of trees, and a significant portion of the families are hopelessly in debt to the local oil merchant.” The latter lords it over the rest like a typical

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evil capitalist. The mayor is in despair: “ Even God cannot save this vil­ lage!” Shots of the bleak, shut-in valley are contrasted with the end­ lessly stretching fields of Manchuria. Whereas we see precious little sky in the village scenes, the sky often fills more than half the screen in the shots o f Manchuria. There are other thematic contrasts as well. Whereas the villagers are crushed by poverty, debt, and sickness, a se­ quence in Manchuria showing tractors plowing fields and neat rows of new homes is accompanied by the narration: “ With our own hands, we make houses and cultivate rice fields.” The film skillfully gathers to­ gether glimpses o f the difficulties and aspirations of a broad crosssection o f the villagers—the girl dying of T B ; the hopelessly toiling mothers; the timid man in debt to the oil merchant, who wants to know if his kind will be also allowed to emigrate; the bent old woman who yearns to go to the Manchurian grave site o f her eldest son, killed in the Russo-Japanese War. For various reasons, they all long to be free of “ this hellish mountainside,” the embodiment o f their sorry fate in their native land. Just as the batdefield was often depicted as a place to reconcile the domestic social contradictions dividing classes and individuals, Man­ churia frequendy became the scene of similar resolutions. Such was the case of Kurata’s A Vast and Fertile Land (Yokudo Manri, Nikkatsu, 1940)—a film focusing on a group o f two hundred pioneers from Nagano prefec­ ture struggling to tame a wild stretch of Manchurian land and create wet rice paddies. Rather than the usual guerrilla warfare with local “ bandits,” the conflict is largely o f a spiritual kind. Under the direction o f their leader (Egawa Ureyo), the pioneers pit their wills against the alien and intractable land to construct water channels for their fields. One of their number is a middle-aged man who had once been a fac­ tory strike leader. Although he has apparently long since committed tenko, the others have dubbed him “ the Red General” and accuse him of failing to understand the true “ farmer’s spirit.” Despite having rejected his seditionist past, he remains tainted with a rationalistic worldview and out of harmony with those around him. While contemporary re­ views praised the film’s total lack of “ that crudeness we associate with national policy films,” there are in the case o f this character clear echoes of the government policy that encouraged the rehabilitation of former tenko-\its as contributing members of society. The man eventually grows discouraged and decides to return to Japan. At the port, however, he sees a group of women arriving as brides for the setders. Their bravery and extraordinary determination impress him deeply, and he regrets his

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own lack of spiritual fortitude. With this, he resolves to return to the vil­ lage and try again. In Watanabe Kunio’s Song of the White Orchid (Byakuran no Uta, Toho/ Mantetsu, 1939) a subplot features a similar spiritual crisis, this time however without the heavy ideological overtones. The younger brother of the central character marches off joyfully with a band of pioneers heading for Manchuria. But when next we see him in his frontier village, the enthusiasm has cooled to lethargy. He oversleeps the daily flagraising ceremony and at one point even lies down in the fields, feigning illness while the others continue to labor. He is infected with “ hedon­ ism,” a spiritual ailment that keeps him from realizing his true nature as a Japanese. He takes to stealing money from his brother (Hasegawa Kazuo) in order to engage in drinking bouts at the local brothel. When Hasegawa confronts him there and strikes him, he disappears into the night, howling curses. In the end, however, he comes to his senses (i.e., realizes his bonds of affinity to his fellow Japanese) and returns to help defend the village from an attack by Communist guerrillas. The main plot o f Song o f the White Orchid centers around the troubled love affair between Yasukichi (Hasegawa), an engineer for Mantetsu, the Manchurian Railroad Company, and a Chinese singer (Ri Koran) in Mukden. Although R i’s character is pro-Japanese, a series of misunder­ standings separates the two, leaving her bitter and resentful. Her brother, a leader of the guerrilla group, then draws her into his own or­ ganization. During a lull in the attack on the village, Ri appears before Yasukichi in Communist military uniform, causing him to ask in con­ sternation, “ How dare you present such a sight as this? You, a woman with such a deep appreciation of us Japanese!” In the end, o f course, love wins out and she switches sides again to fight at her lover’s side.

R i Koran Song of the White Orchid represented the beginning o f the famous screen romance between Hasegawa Kazuo and Ri Koran that over the next year and a half was to continue into two further pictures. Each of the films, which collectively became known as “ the Continental Trilogy,” probes the same question —Can a Chinese woman who has reason to hate the Japanese be guided to an “ understanding o f their true inten­ tions” through her romantic involvement with a Japanese man? Sat 5 Tadao calls such films rashamen films, a term of opprobrium originallyused to describe a Japanese woman who had become the mistress o f a

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Westerner: “ It seems to be a kind of universal archetype. When the con­ queror wishes to enlist the cooperation o f the conquered, he creates a love story with the male as the conqueror and the female as the con­ quered.” 9 In the postwar period, Hollywood made similar films (Tea House in the August Moon, Sayonara, etc.) presumably with the similar mo­ tive of effecting a metaphorical reconciliation between former wartime enemies. O f course, neither the Hasegawa-Ri films nor the later U.S. films had much chance of eliciting a positive response from the people of the defeated nation. Film critic Tsuji Hisaichi, who was in charge of film censorship for the Shanghai Army Information Board during the Inci­ dent, did his best to keep the “ Continental Trilogy” from being shown to Chinese audiences: “ Even though there is no intention to insult the Chinese, none of the films succeeds in portraying a living, breath­ ing Chinese. To put it blundy, the inability to portray the real mind o f a Chinese is bound to arouse an unpleasant backlash among audiences there.” 10 Rather, the sexual paradigm seems to have been aimed at audiences in the conquering nation. In the case o f Hollywood films it was part of the slow dismantling o f the demonic image o f the Japanese built up by U.S. propaganda during the war. The Hasegawa-Ri films, meanwhile, were stupendously successful in Japan because they confronted the wellknown hostility of the Chinese people toward the Japanese invaders and recast it as a “ misunderstanding.” I f only the Japanese would show the same patience and consideration Hasegawa shows toward Ri, domestic audiences were told, the hostility would melt away and the Chinese would realize that the apparent aggression was but the affectionate prodding of a lover. Ri Koran was uniquely suited to the task of portraying the sympa­ thetic Chinese woman an image almost completely new to Japanese audiences. The daughter of Japanese parents, she was born in 1920 in Manchuria as Yamaguchi Yoshiko. She studied singing under a White Russian teacher in Mukden and, due to her truly wonderful voice, was eventually picked up by the Mukden Broadcasting Company, which was looking for Chinese singers. This is when she was given her stage name of Ri Koran (Li Hon Lan, in Chinese). In 1935, she entered a girl’s school in Beijing at a time when anti-Japanese feelings were running high, and so she maintained her masquerade as a Chinese national. In 1938, she was asked to dub songs for the Manchurian Film Com­ pany (Man’ei), but when she arrived on the lot everyone was so taken

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with her she was almost immediately asked to appear on screen. Man’ei had been founded only a year before, in August 1937, with half its capi­ tal coming from the Manchukuo government and the other half from Man’tetsu, the Manchurian Railway Company. It would be another year before its huge new studios in Shinkyo (Harbin) were operational. When R i arrived, there were still only a hundred or so people working in production; the number however would soar to over a thousand Ja p ­ anese and another five hundred Chinese by the end o f the Pacific War. All o f R i’s early Man’ei films reflected the company policy of turn­ ing out pure entertainment features in the hopes o f luring Manchurian (and possibly Chinese) audiences away from the strongly antijapanese features being made by the Chinese in Shanghai. The idea was to separ­ ate Manchuria from China, not only politically, but culturally as well. As with most o f Man’ei films at the time, R i’s first picture — The Honey­ moon Train (1938)—was a remake of a Nikkatsu B movie. It was a com­ edy set on the train from Manchuria to Beijing, in which she played the wife o f a Chinese youth. Man’ei’s Nikkatsu connection came through Negishi K an’ichi, the former head of Nikkatsu’s Tamagawa studios, who also arrived in 1938 to become the studio production chief. With Negishi and Makino Mitsuo (the brother of the director Makino Masahiro) in command, Man’ei began to attract a flow o f important directo­ rial talent from Japan. After starring her in a number of these B-movie potboilers, com­ pany executives selected Ri to represent Man’ei as their “ ambassador of Manchu-Japanese Good Will” to the Foundation of Manchukuo Expo­ sition being held that year in Tokyo: “ The prospect of setting foot for the first time on the soil of my ancestors made me dance for joy.” How­ ever, the feeling changed quickly when she arrived in Japan with her Japanese passport in hand but dressed as a Chinese. “ Hey you! What do you think you’re doing in that get-up, huh?” the immigration officer in Shimonoseki challenged her when she presented her passport. “ Listen. You’re a member of a first class nation. But here you are wearing the clothes and speaking the language of a third-class people like the Chinks. Aren’t you ashamed?” Later in the trip when she appeared on the Nichigeki stage, she was made aware o f the tremendous antiChinese prejudice of ordinary Japanese people at the time. After she sang a Japanese song, “ there was a roar of applause and someone shouted, ‘You’re Japanese was great!’ This really depressed me. Here was a Japanese audience reveling in a sense o f superiority when they heard a ‘Chinese’ trying to speak their language and sing their songs.”

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In Takashimaya Department store, the site o f the exposition, as well as on the streetcar, people tended to glare at her in her Chinese garb. “ They studied me from the top of my head to the tips of my fingers as if they were thinking, ‘you disgusting chink!’ ” 11 Later that year, Ri Koran was scouted by Toho and eventually given the female lead in Song of the White Orchid. Watanabe Kunio’s directorial style, which emphasized speed o f production over careful coaching o f his actors, left her confused and anxious: “ Chinese women have their own femininity, which is different from Japanese women. Since I’ve never been very feminine, it was no easy task for me to conform to the ‘grammar of Japanese femininity.’ At this point, Hasegawa Kazuo [who often did roles impersonating women] stepped in to help. ‘Womanly beauty is in its forms,’ he told me. ‘If I were to play your part, I’d do it like this.’ He then immediately modeled the gestures and eye move­ ments for me. His finesse, compared with my own awkwardness, red­ dened my face for shame.” 12 With White Orchid, Ri Koran was on her way to becoming one of the major film personalities of the wartime era. Although it was not her orig­ inal intention to hide her identity as a Japanese, the Toho executives quickly recognized that her mystique should be as a “ Chinese” who spoke Japanese fiuendy and who was deeply sympathetic with the Jap a­ nese Spirit. The background story they worked up for her was that she had been the daughter of a former mayor o f Mukden and therefore a member of the elite Chinese society of Manchuria. Audiences apparendy suspected that she was not what she purported, and in a 1943 zadankai, Hazumi Tsuneo actually mentioned her true identity as ajapanese.13 For solid promotional reasons, however, the Toho company maintained the veil of illusion, and this seemed to satisfy most moviegoers. With the release of the second Hasegawa-Ri film China Nights in June 1940, the nation’s passionate love affair with the young actress from Manchuria reached hysterical proportions. The August edition of Nihon Eiga commented wonderingly on the “ insanity” it caused: “All the first-run movie theaters showing the picture are thronged, and you al­ most invariably hear renditions of that sentimental theme song from the mouths of apprentice boys riding their bicycles through the streets or blaring from record players at cafes. It’s as if the entire city were drunk on China Nights.” '* Year’s end saw the release of the third film in the trilogy, Vow in the Desert. Although it did not quite attain the success o f the second, it did confirm the popularity of R i Koran as a phenom­ enon of sociological importance. Theaters were packed, and the records

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featuring songs from the movie sold out within a few hours. Even as Japan was about to descend into the maelstrom of the Pacific War, the sweet and ardendy romantic strains of Chinese melodies were forcing the military ballads off the hit charts. The Ri Koran fever reached its acme on February 1941, when she was to appear on stage at the Tokyo Nichigeki Theater in a show called “ Koran Sings.” Multitudes had been gathering from early the evening before, and by the time the doors opened at noon, a line wound around the immense theater building, reputedly the largest in all of Asia, seven and a half times. Police estimates put the number at over a hundred thousand, and they were frankly terrified. Elements in the crowd grew unruly, and traffic was being obstructed in the whole re­ g i o n - a n unheard-of situation in wartime Japan. Eventually the fire department was called in to turn their hoses on the crowd in order to drive them away from the building. The occurrence is recorded in the history books as the “ Nichigeki Seven and a H alf Times Encirclement Incident.” 15 Although Man’ei films suffered a dreadful reputation in Japan, both Toho and Shochiku eagerly developed joint projects with the company in order to feature its top star. In 1942, for example, Shochiku turned out Soochow Nights, yet another rashamen picture in which Ri was paired with Sano Shuji. By this time, Ri was too busy to appear in pure Man’ei features. However, thanks to these joint productions, the Man’ei mark became familiar on Japanese screens, and an ever in­ creasing number of Japanese directors—including the celebrated Shamazu YasujirO—migrated to its Shinkyo studios. Throughout this entire period, Man’ei remained under the firm leadership of Amakasu Masahiko, the sinister, quasimilitary figure whose mild looks (and reputation) were reminiscent of ajapanese Hein­ rich Himmler. Dubbed “ the Shdwa era monster,” he was universally known for his responsibility in the bestial murder in 1923 of the an­ archist couple Uesugi Sakae and It6 Noe, along with Ito’s five-year-old nephew. After being tortured to death, their bodies had been flung down a well near the stationhouse. A close collaborator with the military’s extreme far right, Amakasu was also rumored to be one of the engineers of the Manchurian Incident. Amakasu’s appointment as Man’ei’s managing director in Novem­ ber 1939 provoked shock and disbelief. Even MutO Tomio, the highranking government information official who had much to do with Amakasu’s appointment, was to admit in a postwar memoir that “ when

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the rumor got around, there was an uproar in the cafes and restaurants among the Japanese intellectuals in Harbin. Some observed that an ultraright ronin-type like Amakasu could get such an appointment only through the conniving of top army figures. Others simply laughed bit­ terly at the paradox of the least civilized man in all Manchukuo taking control of its most prestigious cultural institution.” 16 Despite these forebodings, however, the regime o f Amakasu-thechild-murderer turned out to be mild, rational, and even marked with a certain interest in social justice. Breaking with the policies o f his prede­ cessors, he refused to supply actresses to junketing high officials; to such requests, he would laconically reply that “ actresses aren’t geisha.” He also tried to narrow the gap in treatment between Japanese and Chi­ nese employees. Most surprising of all, however, was his commonsensical attitude toward movie production. He ordered filmmakers to cast aside their old Japanese habits of mind and to work out new formulas specifically designed to appeal to Manchurian audiences. Overt propa­ ganda was out. Man’ei, he said, was in the entertainment business.

Depicting the Chinese During the China Incident, the Japanese popular imagination tended to conceive of the Chinese as hostile, faceless masses, as columns of ref­ ugees stolidly trudging roads to nowhere, or as clumps o f lifeless flesh littering trenches and riverbeds. When individuals did appear, in films or in literary works, they were usually little more than stick figures, sketched in to represent the shifdessness of the Chinese national charac­ ter or to mouth pro-Japanese platitudes. In a 1940 article in Kinema Junpo, novelist Ueda Hiroshi took note of this fact with irritation and concern: “ Too many o f our propaganda films look down on the Chi­ nese while pandering to the self-image of Japanese. What kind o f ‘prop­ aganda’ is that?” 17 Ueda himself was no liberal, and all of his wartime output—much of it as a writer drafted into the arm y—belonged squarely in the category of national policy literature. Still, he used his solidly prowar credentials to encourage a more perceptive approach to the Chinese characters in film and literature: “ There is an ancient [Jap ­ anese] saying that goes ‘leave no beautiful fields to your descendants.’ How different the Chinese are! Over there I often heard tales of a Chi­ nese burying some porcelain ja r o f modest worth so that it could be dug up and sold as a precious andque by his great grandchildren. How do we Japanese expect to oppose such a far-sighted mentality as that? The

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more one penetrates the enigmatic Chinese mind, the more one realizes what a daunting task carrying through this war is.” 18 Gestures toward understanding the Chinese and of extending to them a certain amount of empathy were made even in the early days of the China Incident. The first of those to do so was Kawakita Nagamasa, president of the film import enterprise Towa. His father had been an officer in the Russo-Japanese War and had spent many years in China. Kitagawa himself had spent a period of time auditing courses in oriental philosophy at Beijing University in his late teens. Throughout his career as an importer mostly of European films, he still maintained close emotional ties with continental Asia. In 1939, he would play a key role in the establishment of Chunghwa Dyan-ying, the Shanghai-based film production company that turned out entertainment features minus the anti-Japanese message. Kawakita’s film was The Road to Peace in the Orient (Toy6 Heiwa no M ichi, Towa, 1938), directed by Suzuki Shigeyoshi. Suzuki had originally planned to interweave two story lines. One thread -about a young Ja p ­ anese propaganda and pacification specialist who develops a close friendship with the Chinese people--was eventually abandoned as “ too difficult to make,” and the final film came out with only a single story line. A young Chinese farming couple flees the flames of war and, along the way, discovers the kindness of the Japanese soldiers. Their original fear and enmity is therefore transformed into respect and amity. Despite the naive transparency of the film’s propagandistic storyline, reasonably impartial Japanese film historians tend to give Kawakita and Suzuki high marks for the manner in which they went about making the film. Rather than casting the usual crew o f Japanese professional actors to impersonate Chinese characters, they recruited Chinese nationals, most o f them complete amateurs. This was no small trick, taking into ac­ count the ferociously anti-Japanese mood of Shanghai in the days after its brutal conquest by the army. Since the actors had reason to fear for their own lives and those of their families, Kawakita did his best to hide and protect those he could. When the film was released in late March, however, it was a boxoffice disaster. Given the wartime fervor of Japanese audiences, this was almost inevitable. Other factors working against the film were the large number of spoken tides (since most of the actors spoke only Chinese) and the lack of a single top-name Japanese actor. There were aesthetic complaints as well. Critics called it “flat” and “ little more than a travel­ ogue,” 19 since the couple, wending their way southward in the direction

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Suzuki Shigeyoshi’s The Road to Peace in the Orient (Towa, 1938).

of Nanjing, manage to stop and admire most of the tourist attractions on the way. Perhaps the main reason for the film’s failure with Japanese au­ diences stemmed from its elimination of the youngjapanese pacification officer, the single charactcr they could have identified with readily. This sort of problem would be amply rectified two years later in China Nights. Fushimizu Osamu’s immensely successful China Nights (Shina no loru, Toho, 1940) works the rich metaphorical possibilities afforded by the commonplace image of China as a disreputable “ woman” in need of redemption. As early as 1911, popular historian Yamaji Aizan had char­ acterized the nation as “ not a powerless country like a single woman, but an infelicitous one like a prostitute.” 20 Although it is discretely muted, the film’s first scene introduces Ri Koran’s character as some­ thing perilously close to a “ fallen woman.” Opening positioning shots identify the location as Shanghai. The fa­ miliar figure of Hascgawa Kazuo comes strolling through a dense crowd of scurrying Chinese, exuding a cheerful confidence that makes it clear he is at home here. Through him, we are instantly oriented to view the alien scene from the perspective of a Japanese civilian. He will be the audience’s trustworthy guide, the one who models the proper attitude a

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Japanese, as "a member of a first class nation,” is expected to display to­ ward the Chinese. The first object lesson occurs in the very next scene. A Japanese man is abusing a young, dirty-faced Chinese woman, demand­ ing that she return some money she had taken (for what services we are never told). Without hesitation, Hasegawa steps up to the man and cau­ tions him: “ Please hold your temper for a while longer. Look at all these Chinese people watching!” Shots of the tense stillness of the crowd fol­ low. He then takes out the appropriate amount of money and thrusts it into the hand of the dumbfounded man. The young woman, whom we recognize as R i Koran, announces in Chinese that she does not want to be “ obligated” to a Japanese. Hasegawa looks deep into her eyes and then coolly lights a cigarette. In this short sequence, the film defdy establishes the theme of the story to follow, while at the same time establishing its broader signifi­ cance. The young woman’s anti-Japanese attitude comes from a typical misunderstanding of the true, benevolent intentions of the Japanese in China. No matter what the immediate cause of her resentment, it is after all only a misunderstanding that Hasegawa will take upon himself to correct. This inevitably leads to the love affair that, in turn, will place a further set of demands on Ri Koran’s ability to understand and adapt to the ways o f the Japanese. The film develops in three phases. The first phase seems to be a kind of Japanese version of Taming of the Shrew. Hasegawa brings Ri into the boarding house where he lives with his sister and various other Jap a­ nese, announcing that they all have a responsibility as Japanese to win the girl over from her mistaken opinions. A series of humorous tests of wills with the sullen, rebellious R i follows. Like Kate in Taming of the Shrew, it is necessary for the man to break R i’s rebellious spirit in order to remake her into a demure, lovable companion. Trying to get her to take a bath, Hasegawa must grab her by the scruff o f the neck and march her to the tub. A similar struggle occurs when they try to make her eat. Feelings begin to warm between Ri and Hasegawa when the girl falls ill with a fever and he nurses her through the night. After this, Ri displays the sudden ability to speak fluent Japanese. A new crisis de­ velops when Ri visits the ruins o f her former home. In a flashback we discover that she had once been the pampered daughter of a prosperous family, but that the home had been destroyed and her family dispersed because o f the fighting in Shanghai. After her reverie amid the ruins, her old resentment returns and she goes back to the boarding house with the announced intention of leaving the place for ever.

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Enraged by her ungratefulness, Hasegawa strikes her, and she falls to the floor, her hand pressed to her burning cheek. Hasegawa remorse­ fully apologizes as she looks up at him in deep thought. The strains of organ music well up in the background. Suddenly she jumps up and passionately embraces him, asking him to forgive her for her ingrati­ tude. This proves to be the culminating crisis of the film’s Taming o f the Shrew phase. It miraculously transforms R i’s thinking about the Ja p a ­ nese in general, and about Hasegawa in particular, making it possible for their romance to begin. It may be that the filmmakers intended this scene to carry added weight as a metaphor for Japan ’s application o f “ whip o f love” (ai no muchi) to the misguided Chinese people. I f so, it completely misfires. In her autobiography, Yamaguchi/Ri sensibly points out: “ In prewar Japan, striking a woman was often considered a kind of male expression o f love, with many plays and films featuring scenes in which the woman discovers that her man truly loves her when he strikes her. But this sort o f thing has meaning only within the Japanese context. If I had been playing a Japanese woman when I was struck by Hasegawa and if the audience had been exclusively Japanese, there would have been no problem. As it was, however, Chinese audiences saw this Chinese girl being struck by a Japanese man. I ’o them, the notion of her falling in love with the man represented a humiliation both in terms of the story and in symbolic terms.” 21 The second phase o f the film is a melodramatic interlude in which Hasegawa is kidnapped by anti-Japanese gangsters and rescued in a blaze of gunfire. In the third phase, we watch the enraptured couple strolling through various scenic spots in the city as Ri sings some o f the most famous songs in the film. This is finally brought to an end when Hasegawa, who is the pilot of a riverboat, is ordered to take a load of supplies up river for the army. When Ri objects to his departure, he gives her one last lecture —if she cannot understand a “Japanese man’s special sense o f responsibility,” she will never understand the Japanese people. Watanabe Kunio’s A Vow in the Desert (Nessa no Chikai, Toho, 1940), the third film of the trilogy, retreats somewhat from the heavy romance of China Nights. Although scenes of misty-eyed love and sweet songs abound, the main theme is Constructing the New Asia and includes much documentary footage about road building. The last segment fea­ tures a thrilling, semidocumentary sequence about efforts to control a huge flood. Communist guerrillas try to sabotage the project of building

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China Nights (Toho, 1940). R i K oran “ awakens to a m an’s love” after being slapped by H asegawa Kazuo.

a road from Beijing to Sian, giving the film a strong action (katsugeki) subplot. This time, Ri Koran plays the daughter of an upper-class intellec­ tual with distinctly pro-Japanese sentiments. It is unlikely that Chinese audiences would find much to admire about this rich and pampered daughter of a collaborator. In China, she and her sister stroll around in fashionable garb, contrasting starkly with the poverty of their fellow countrymen. When she visits Japan, she travels first class on the ship. Hasegawa, whom she encounters on board, is traveling second class. Al­ though she unreservedly expresses pro-Japanese sentiments, Hasegawa finds her rather aggressive wooing a distinct burden as he sets out to fin­ ish the construction project begun by his elder brother. The documentary segments of Vow in the Desert allow for the incor­ poration o f straight national policy propaganda appeals. Until he is as­ sassinated by a Communist terrorist, Hasegawa’s elder brother (played by Egawa Ureyo) is in charge of the highway project. At one point, he goes to the home of a wealthy land owner to convince him to allow the road to pass through an edge of his property. Egawa’s appeal stresses its

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benefits for the local population. As he speaks, we see a montage de­ picting farmers struggling to take their goods to market through seas of mud during the rainy season. At the end of the film, however, when we see the road completed and open for traffic, the only vehicles moving on it are a stream of military trucks hurrying toward the front far to the west. Perhaps through an oversight, the film never tries to reconcile the contradiction o f these two sets of images. In fact, Egawa seems to ac­ knowledge the cynicism in an early part of the film when he states that “ roads are vital for the pacification of the country.” By its very tide, Nomura Hiromasa’s Soochow Mghts (Soshu no Yoru, Shochiku, 1942) was clearly intended to recall the mood of the earlier China Mghts. Although R i’s romantic partner this time is Sano Shuji, its story develops in much the same fashion as the former film. Sano plays a youngjapanese doctor, fresh out of Tokyo University Medical School, who has dedicated himself to caring for ordinary Chinese civilians a task he identifies as his “ service to the Empire.” Ri, meanwhile, plays the head of an orphanage who boldly expresses contempt for the Jap a­ nese. When another Japanese doctor tries to give medical treatment at the orphanage, she turns him away, saying “ No need for Japanese doc­ tors!” Sano is outraged by this attitude, and he immediately goes to the orphanage and begins giving one of the children a medical examina­ tion. When Ri tries to stop him, he roughly pushes her aside, confident that he is completely right and she completely wrong. His later explana­ tion of his actions to a colleague has obvious metaphorical significance: “ In carrying out our task, we often run into various kinds o f obstacles. At such times it is sometimes necessary to be pig-headed and to push right on through.” A few scenes later, after Ri displays further anti-Japanese sentiments, he gives her the standard serm on- “ Your resentment all comes from misunderstanding. We are here to help build the New Asia!” Sano goes on to prove his point by jumping into a river to save one of R i’s or­ phans. After he expends great efforts nursing the child back to health, Ri becomes convinced that the Japanese are kind people after all. It is not long before they are engaging in conversations as follows —“ We have so much to be thankful to the Japanese for . .. to the doctors and to the soldiers.” “ Oh, that’s all right. It’s enough if you understand our true intentions.” Sharing such sentiments, they inevitably fall in love. In the end, how­ ever, Sano insists that she marry another man, a Chinese who has proven the desperation of his own love for Ri by attempting to murder

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Sano. By averting a marriage between Sano and Ri, the film may be telegraphing a shift in thinking about “ interracial” marriages. Made in the final months before the outbreak o f the Pacific War, just when Japan was drawing ever closer to Germany, some of the Nazi “ racial purity” thinking may have been at work in the background. Although the film was released shortly after Pearl Harbor, its miseen-scene casually displays the U.S. military and cultural presence in China. As R i’s ship pulls out of Shanghai harbor, it passes a war vessel displaying the U.S. flag. Another scene uses a Texaco station as a back­ drop, and in yet another scene, several huge Bette Davis posters dwarf the characters in the foreground. None of this enemy iconography, however, occasions any particular comment. With the start o f the Pacific War, the “ Continental Boom” quickly faded away. Soochow Nights along with Shimazu YasujirO’s The Great Green Land (Midori no Daichi, Shochiku, 1942) were the last major films about ci­ vilians in China. The spectacular victories over the United States and British caused popular interest to turn to the newly conquered regions in the south. Perhaps this explains the strange reincarnation of Ri Koran as an aboriginal Takasago tribal girl in southern Taiwan. The film was Shi­ mizu Hiroshi’s Sayon’s Bell (Sayon no Kane, Shochiku, 1943). Unlike her previous films, the love affair is not with a Japanese man and there is no internal drama about overcoming anti-Japanese prejudices and adoptingjapanese ways. Village people are already so thoroughly colonized in spirit as to appear quasi-Japanese. Although conditions in the village remain primitive and villagers mostly wear native dress, the feeling is that they actually are throwbacks to the ancient days when Japan was “Yamato.” In the happy village, life is simple and emotions pure. Ri spends her time herding pigs and looking after the village children. She is in love with a certain young man who has just returned from training in Japan (which everyone calls naichi, “ the homeland” ). Soon however, he and several other young men are honored with call-up orders. Those who were passed over are desolate but are consoled by the promise that they too will be called soon enough. The village farewell ceremony for the men is an eerie caricature of Japanese-style loyalism. While others dance joyfully in the background, a woman with a baby in her arms stands facing her husband. For all to hear she announces: “These are the final words to you from me, your wife. When you have gone into battle please do not concern yourself

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Shim izu Hiroshi's Sayon’s Belt (Shochiku, 1943}. A Ja p a n e se flag flutters over a T ai­ wanese native village, evoking the peace and simplicity o f prehistoric Japan.

with my welfare. Do not think of your child. Put all your heart and soul into the fight. From this day, you are not my husband. Nor are you the father of this child. Become an outstanding soldier in the Japanese Army." The film ends with Sayon’s death. As her lover marches off into the night with the other recruits, she follows at a distance. At a dangerous ford in the river, she slips and perishes in the current. In the film, it is not clear whether her death was intentional or not, but in the plot descrip­ tion o f the “ production plan,” submitted by the filmmakers to the Infor­ mation Bureau before going into production, the meaning o f the inci­ dent is made clear: “The film is based on a true, exemplar)- incident in which a native girl threw herself into a river as she saw olf her lover into the army. The film will stress the purity of spirit and the depth of the loyalty of the native Takasago peoples to His Majesty the Emperor.” 22 When the rage for continental films passed, Ri Koran's impact on Japanese audiences also began to wane. She did appear in Shimazu’s A Vow (Chikai no Gassho, Toho, 1943) and Makino Masahiro’s Musicians at the Front (Yasen Gakutai, Shochiku. 1944) playing her usual role as a Chinese

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singer sympathetic to theJapanese army. But these were only minor parts and for the rest of the wartime period, she never starred in another Jap a­ nese picture. Even as her importance inJapanese film declined, however, her popularity among Chinese audiences rose dramatically. Through such films as the Chunghwa Dyan’ying production A Fragrance throughout the World (1943), she developed a wide following who continued to re­ member her fondly even into the postwar years. Between May and June 1939, major military collisions occurred between Japanese and Soviet forces along the Manchuria-Mongolian border at Nomonhan. Then, with the start of the Second World War in Europe, Japanese attention again began to fix on its “ real enemies,” those powers that had all along been “ backing” China. A popular per­ ception began to grow that Japan, too, would ultimately have to take sides. The next chapter looks at the domestic scene during the 1940-41 period and the manner in which the government prepared for this war. The period marked the high point o f bureaucratic hubris, with govern­ ment control extending to all phases of national life. It was also the time when the bureaucrats attempted to take final control of the unruly film industry.

8 On the Eve of a New War

1940: “ Luxury Is the Enemy!” As Japan entered the forties, the public mood was gray, and the appear­ ance o f the crowds in the street was drab. Over a hundred thousand young men had already perished in the China Incident, and there was a widespread feeling the nation was groping through an endless “ valley of darkness.” 1 In the early days of the Incident, the downtown office crowd had taken to dining on hinomaru bento (“ Rising Sun” box lunches), as a symbol of solidarity with the boys at the front. These consisted of a sim­ ple box of rice, topped with a small, red-pickled plum—an image al­ most identical to the national flag. Now, in 1940, such symbolic acts o f self-denial took on a new meaning as material scarcities began direcdy to affect the daily lives of everyone. White rice itself was in short supply and restaurants were allowed to serve it only at certain times o f the day. Housewives needed a ration coupon to buy it for their families. The same was true of most wheat products, eggs, soy sauce, matches, and charcoal. Candy was becoming a rare treat for children with chocolate an almost unheard-of luxury. But the scarcities, no matter how severe, did not completely account for the gloomy mood. This was largely the result of conscious bureau­ cratic efforts to bring to the homeland a taste of the privations suffered by the troops in China. Returning from two long years at the front, the novelist Hino Ashihei had become an eloquent spokesman for austerity at home. In his na­ tive city, Fukuoka, he found even the last vestiges of peacetime gaiety both affronting and “ eerie” : “ It wasn’t anything definite. Perhaps it was just the nonchalance of the city scene. Compared to when I left, life ap­ peared to have taken on a gaudy quality. Yes, it’s the glamour of the place that gets to me. I can’t help feeling angry about how comfortable everyone seems to be. This, despite the exertions and discomforts of the men at the front. Don’t they know there’s a war on?” 2 286

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Under the slogan of “ Scale Back the Level of Daily Life,” the gov­ ernment launched a campaign to stamp out “ waste, frivolity, and osten­ tation.” In 1939, fashionably coifed ladies had become the particular targets o f street-corner intimidation. Specially assembled groups of schoolchildren would surround them, chanting “ Let’s do away with per­ manents!” Then, on 7 July 1940, the government issued its famous “ 7 July Restrictions” calling for the prohibition of selected luxury items. The evening papers bannered Minister for Industry Fujiwara Gintarô’s demand that the general public embrace the spirit o f abstinence and self-sacrifice. The very word luxury was given a treasonous connotation when, the following month, the government put up thousands of streamers throughout the capital city, proclaiming “ Luxury is the Enemy!” Members of the National Veteran’s Association and the vari­ ous women’s associations stood on street corners and at subway en­ trances handing out slogan-filled flyers that often began, “ If you are a true Japanese . . . ” A “ true” Japanese man wore the khaki-colored People’s Uniform, despite the fact that no law actually compelled him to do so. A “ true” Japanese woman shunned store-bought Western dresses and garbed herself modesdy, preferably in baggy monpe trousers. Police­ men and plainclothes detectives prowled the streets of the Ginza pounc­ ing on young ladies in expensive dresses or colorful kimonos: “Just look at yourself! While our troops are over there fighting, you’re indulging yourself!” Dance halls were among the last bastions of merrymaking to fall be­ fore the puritanical onslaught. From the end of the Taishô Period, they had been among the chief attractions of city nightlife, where customers bought tickets for three-minute dances with the girls employed there. With the outbreak o f the China Incident, even before they were pro­ scribed outright, the dance bands were compelled to supplement their programs of waltzes and sensuous jazz tunes with stirring renditions of Roei no Uta and other military songs. Further regulations, such as the compulsory registration of each customer at the door, followed. Then, on 1 November 1940, the doors were locked for the duration. About the new austerity measures, stage and screen comedian Furukawa Roppa secretly confided in his diary: Gasoline controls are putting us on a ration of seven gallons a month. So that’s the end of the joys of motoring, I suppose. I’ve never ridden in anything but a car for the last ten years, but now I am back in my old student days, riding buses. The cruelty of this wears me out. I spit with

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On the Eve of a New War disgust every day. Whole sectors of the city are closed to the automobile, the ultimate inconvenience. When it comes to entertainment, there’s still a lot of leeway. But I can’t help feeling that prohibiting students from viewing movies and plays on weekdays is going too far. One gets the sense of serious shortages in all material areas. How long will all this last? That’s the real issue. It’s my hunch we’ll gradually get back on an even keel sometime after next spring. Then again, maybe not.3

Comedy, Roppa’s métier, was also to be severely curtailed in the name of “ austerity.” The Home Ministry’s Watanabe Suteo issued new instructions for film content. Now only “ wholesome entertainment” films with positive themes would be passed for viewing by the public. Asahi Shinbun seemed to approve: “ Whether they like it or not, filmmak­ ers will have to follow the national policy line, just like everybody else. By the time of next summer’s obon festival, the Roppa, Enoken, Entatsu, and Achako comedies, along with the monster movies and cat-demon features will all be long-gone from the nation’s screens.” 4 As with every other emotion, mirth would have to play its part in the Total Mobiliza­ tion of the National Spirit. The year 1940 was one o f stupendous national and international de­ velopments. Hitler launched his blitzkrieg to the west, conquering Bel­ gium and Holland, and ultimately overrunning the Maginot Line. France was defeated and the British put to humiliating route at Dunkirk. As with everyone else in the world, the Japanese public intendy followed the news under the huge black newspaper headlines. But their real con­ cern was with the growing harshness o f their own daily lives. In May, Asahi Graph ran a three frame cartoon epitomizing the public mood. In the first frame, a crowd is gathered around an “ extra” edition about the war in Europe posted on a telephone pole. In the next frame, the atten­ tion of some in the crowd is directed toward a man pasting a new an­ nouncement on a nearby wall: “ Huh? Another extra?” In the last frame, the crowd notices that it reads “ House for Rent.” They all abandon the original extra and eagerly rush over to find out the details.5 For the man in the street, the year’s domestic political events must have seemed almost as distant as those in Europe. On 16 July, a little over a week after the promulgation of the 7 July Restrictions, the Yonai cabinet fell, clearing the way for the return of Prince Konoe Fumimaro to government leadership. Almost immediately, he proclaimed a “ New Political Order.” The phrase had been in circulation for several months and was meant to indicate the dissolution o f all the political parties, the

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assumption of near-dictatorial powers by the cabinet, and the consoli­ dation of the nation behind the war effort. In fact, however, the phrase provided little more than the appearance of a united front, behind which the various military and political groups each interpreted it in their own way and continued to jockey for power and influence. The bureaucracy, meanwhile, was becoming edgy lest Konoe’s plans for a new, fascistic mass movement should undermine their own authority. Throughout the summer months, the public was given litde indica­ tion o f either this behind-the-scenes struggle or o f the shape o f things to come. Instead, the Konoe government showed itself adept at serving up new sets of slogans. In the radio address inaugurating his new ad­ ministration on the evening of 22 July, the Prime Minister first used the phrase ichi oku isshin (one hundred million hearts beating as one). So ef­ fectively did the four ideograms project the image of a people totally united in effort and shared feeling that it continued to be used prominendy until the very end of the Pacific War. Furthermore, the brevity of the phrase was in accord with developments in commercial advertising copy, which, for the past year or two, had turned to the use o f slogans appealing to the eye when printed boldly in the papers or on billboards. “Hakkô icchü” (the eight corners of the world under one roof), a phrase attributed in the eighth century Nihon Shoki to Emperor Jimmu, also came into use at this time. Although its meaning was obscure to modern readers, it lentJapan’s self-proclaimed mission to unite the worid a poetic aura that seemed to emanate from archaic times. A third phrase coined during the summer months of 1940 was “ don’t be late for the bus.” Rather than appearing on posters and pamphlets, it gained cur­ rency by word o f mouth. The immediate reference was to the various parties in the Diet that were scrambling for a place in Konoe’s New Order. By extension, however, it took on the added connotation that the regime was issuing a final “ all aboard” to those who remained isolated and vulnerable—in defense of liberalism or individualism. With the coming of autumn, the shape of the new political structure began to emerge. Its central feature was a “ public organization,” the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai), inaugurated on 12 October as a loose structure for uniting the people behind the gov­ ernment through various volunteer groups. As with similar organiza­ tions in the past, the new body was little more than a tool for the au­ thorities, imposed from above for the purpose of manipulating the populace. The public was already weary of such tactics, and, not sur­ prisingly, there was litde enthusiasm for the New Order. According to a

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December 1941 poll conducted by Bungei Shunju, 600 out of the 680 re­ spondents indicated they had no clear idea of what the New Order was all about, in any case.6 Although the issue remains subject to considerable debate, Konoe seems to have been aiming for a system similar to the European fascist regimes. Both he and the army wanted to achieve the regimentation of society into residential and occupational corporations that would con­ stitute the “ integrated state.” 7 At the same time, it represented a threat to the authority of the bureaucrats, something they were desperate to avert. The Home Ministry moved swiftly to counter the Imperial Rule Assistance Association by establishing its own network o f tonarigumi neighborhood organizations throughout the country. Each tonarigumi was comprised o f ten households, the representatives of which formed a chonaikai or block association. At the top o f the pyramid were the ad­ ministrating offices in the Home Ministry itself. Since these associations had responsibility for distributing rationed food, collecting contribu­ tions, and circulating official announcements, their power and authority was readily apparent. Ultimately, the victory went to the Home Minis­ try which, in April 1941, could announce that most o f the population had already been organized into the tonarigumi system. On 27 September 1940, Japanese Ambassador Kurusu Saburô signed the Tripartite Pact with German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Italian Foreign Minister Ciano, thus establishing the Axis. The mil­ itary significance of the pact was made clear in its third article, stating that if any of the signatories should come under attack, the three na­ tions would aid each other by “ employing any political, economic, or military means deemed necessary.” 8 But the pact had a cultural dimen­ sion, as well. Magazines and newspapers actively supporting the government’s cultural policies had already been working hard to create a mood of friendliness, especially toward Germany. The coincidental arrival around this time of Ixn i Riefcnstahl’s Olympiade films, Fest der Volker and Fest der Schonheit, gready helped the endeavor. Under Ministry of Educa­ tion encouragement, entire elementary and middle schools filed off to see the pictures. The obvious aesthetic merits of both films, particularly part 1, made them record-breaking hits, with lines wrapping two to three times around movie theaters. Critics of all political hues praised Riefenstahl’s craftsmanship and urged Japanese filmmakers to study her films. Their ideological significance was duly noted as well. In Eiga Hyoron, Okada Shinkichi wrote: “ Fest der Volker impresses upon us the

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greatness o f the Nazi spirit, the power of German organizational abil­ ities, and the excellence of their scientific knowledge. While clearly in­ dicating the spiritual basis of Nazi Germany, it provides us with valu­ able hints for the construction of our own new political order.” 9 Five days before signing the pact with Germany and Italy, the Konoe government, with the advance permission of the French Vichy govern­ ment, sent troops into northern Indochina. Less than a year later, it would move its troops south to occupy the entire region, thus bringing both Singapore and the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies within easy striking distance. The new situation would alarm the United States to such a degree that war with Japan became immanendy probable.

Shortening the Leash on the Film Industry In 1940-41, a tidal wave of government regulations virtually swamped the film industry. The tactics of forced consolidation used against the film magazines were to provide a foretaste o f the methods eventually to be used against the industry itself. In August 1940, the Home Ministry police division called in the heads of the thirteen companies publishing film magazines to inform them that, “ In the present crisis, film journal­ ism serves no urgent state purpose. We expect such publications to im­ mediately conform to New Order policy by merging and reducing their numbers.” 10 On 1 October, all thirteen publishing houses were dissolved and then reorganized into four new ones: Nihon Eigasha (publishing four film journals), Eiga Shuppan (publishing three), Dai Nihon Eiga KyOkai (publishing Mhon Eiga), and Nihon Eigajigyou Rengokai (pub­ lishing one film business magazine). Among the film magazines forced to suspend publication was Kinema Junpo. In its place, a new magazine, Eigajunpo, began publication in Ja n ­ uary 1941. Although its format was the same typing-paper size as its pre­ decessor, its pages had the pulpy feel of newsprint. Kinema Junpo's an­ nual Best Ten ratings were also taken over by Eiga Junpo. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Best Ten award ratings would be lim­ ited exclusively to Japanese film. A Best Ten list for non-Japanese films had in any case become irrelevant since there were very few foreign films entering the country. In order to understand the developments that rocked the film indus­ try in the 1940-41 period, it might be helpful to review the bureaucratic restrictions and exhortations imposed on it from the outbreak of the China Incident. In 1937, the Home Ministry was still the agency most

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vigorously active in providing both censorship and “ leadership” for the film world. Its power originated with the 1925 Regulations for Cen­ sorship o f Motion Pictures. Film Historian Okada Susumu gives this picturesque description of the Home Ministry staff in its heyday up to the promulgation o f the 1939 Film Law: “ Everyone in film production had to bow down to the young martinets in the Censorship Section. They operated as a branch o f a feudal police state, spying out and swooping down on any hint of social nonconformity. They were the ones who turned back coundess foreign films at port of entry and slashed to ribbons the mildly leftist tendency films.” 11 Since a great many detailed rules and regulations were already in place at the start of the China Incident, the Home Ministry’s first directives (issued in Au­ gust 1937) were relatively commonsensical. Film producers were warned to avoid: 1) subjecting the army to ridicule, 2) excessively bloody depic­ tions of the cruelties o f war, 3) depictions o f family pathos when a man is called into the army, and 4) depictions of pleasure-seeking and degen­ erate lifestyles. But this was only the first step. Thereafter, the regula­ tions and restrictions grew in severity. In April 1938 an admissions tax was imposed. In July, on the first an­ niversary of the war, the government decreed a halt in the production of movie projectors based on the new laws controlling the use of steel and iron. This was the first instance in which the government would demon­ strate its life-or-death power over the industry by withholding raw mate­ rials vital to the industry’s survival. The same tactic would be repeated in mid-1941. On 30 July 1938, the Home Ministry Censorship division called in scriptwriters from each of the film companies for one of its famous kondankai. After five hours o f conversation they came up with a new list of guidelines calling for: 1) celebrations o f the “Japanese spirit” as seen in the family system and of the national spirit of self-sacrifice; 2) use o f film to reeducate the masses, especially young people and women, whose Westernization has caused them to reject traditional values; 3) re­ jection of slangy or foreign expressions in dialogue; 4) imbuing respect for fathers and elder brothers; 5) suppression of “ the tendency toward individualism inspired by European and American films.” 12 At the end of the same year, construction laws were gready strengthened, making it all but impossible to put up new theaters or do major renovations on ex­ isting ones. At the same time, the first laws governing the importation of foreign films were passed with the clear purpose of “ stemming the tide of foreign influence.” 13

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The year 1939 saw the first reorganization of the film industry under the kokusaku national policy principles. In June, the previously existing government-civilian (minkan) organizations —the Japan Directors Asso­ ciation, the Japan Cinematographers Association, the Assistant Direc­ tors Association, and so on—were all unified under the new Japan Film Personnel Association (Eigajin Kydkai), pledged to carrying out the New Order policies. Its first chairman was film director Kimura Sotoji, with Noda Kogo and actor Egawa Ureyo also placed in leadership positions. In September—the same month Nazi Germany invaded Poland—a monthly Voluntary Service Day was established. On this day, women and youngsters were expected to devote their energies to various public service projects. Movie theaters participated by providing free admis­ sion for the families with men serving at the front. At noon each day, moviegoers and personnel at the film studios were to stand in one min­ ute of silent prayer for the success and safety of those on active duty. On 1 October, the Film Law came into effect, placing detailed controls on the production of films (starting with the “ preproduction censorship” of scripts) and mandating the incorporation of one documentary in every film show. Shimizu Akira makes an interesting point about the Film Law’s open use of the term mandatory showings: “ In their casual use of such totalitarian language, we can get a sense of the degree to which the public had become inured to constant compulsion.” 14 In the first month of 1940, the five major film companies—Shochiku, Nikkatsu, Toho, Shinko, and Daito—were forced to introduce a monthly “ Electricity Conservation Day,” requiring them to suspend shooting on all studio sets for twenty-four hours. In April, the news film sections of the nation’s four leading newspapers were subjected to the government’s “ shrink and consolidate” policy. Newsreel production was put under the umbrella of a single public corporation, Nihon News Eigasha (later re­ named as Nihon Eiga, or “ Nichiei” ). That same year, a Home Ministry directive forbade the showing of foreign newsreels, especially those turned out by Fox and Paramount. On 21 May 1940, the Japan Culture Film Association was estab­ lished in order to carry out the functions prescribed by the Film Law. With typical bureaucratic stinginess, however, the sponsoring govern­ ment agencies failed to provide the resources necessary to carry out its lofty kokusaku tasks. A full year later, its facilities were still so primitive that Kamei Fumio had to make a desperate appeal to the organization’s parent body, the Japan Film Association - “ It doesn’t matter if it’s a shack or a shed, but please provide us with some sort of film projection

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facility. Only in this way can we actually contribute to the upgrading of the national cinema!” 15 In September 1940, the film companies got their first bitter taste of the contempt their new bureaucratic masters felt for them. Quoting the need for “ conservation o f film stock,” the Home Ministry ordered each o f the five major film companies to reduce their production to less than forty-eight films a year. The total for the small-scale Nan-O and Tokyo Hassei companies was four films or less apiece and for minuscule Kyokuto it was a mere two. That very month, a Home Ministry official wrote an article for the culture journal Eiga to Ongaku making it clear that “ conservation” was not the whole story. It was actually part of a larger strategy: “As we move from the old way of doing things to the New Order, every aspect of national life is undergoing thorough renovation. Nothing can be spared, not even the most time-hallowed practices. It is time for a clean sweep.” Evoking the image of “ being late for the bus,” he warned: “ There are sure to be a few tragic individuals unable to overcome their old self-indulgence and find themselves left behind by the trend o f the times.” He then made clear the implications o f the New Order for the film industry: “ In the first half of the current year, 260 films were made by Shochiku, Toho, Shinko, and Daito alone. Yet how few of these works reflect a mature consciousness o f our era. Now’s the time for these old-style film companies, sunk deep in profit-seeking and liberal­ ism, to shuffle off into oblivion.” 16 The tone of the Home Ministry official’s pronouncements seems to ring with self-confidence. This at least was the face shown to the public. Behind the scenes, the ongoing territorial disputes were about to turn into ferocious combat. The Home Ministry and the Ministry of Educa­ tion had for years been arguing over which of them had final authority over the film industry. The Cabinet Information Board had also been insisting on its own prerogatives despite the fact its governmental status had never been clearly defined. Even the newly established Daily Life Guidance Section, a part of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, had begun issuing statements about national film policy. Then, in De­ cember 1940, the Konoe administration outflanked its arch rival, the Home Ministry, by dramatically upgrading the Cabinet Information Board into that o f a “ superagency” to be called the Cabinet Informa­ tion Bureau. The Greater Japan Film Association became one o f the Bureau’s satrapies. Indeed, the Second Section of the Fifth Division came to hold sway over every facet o f the nation’s cinema, except for

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censorship. Its chief executive was Kawazura RyuzO, the talented and ruthless bureaucrat who quickly made his presence felt throughout the entire industry. As had been the case all along, the film executives accepted the emergence of their new lord and master with hardly a word of surprise or complaint. “ It was the will of the all-powerful state,” Kido ShirO was to comment later. “ What else could we do but put our trust in it and obey?” 17 As 1940 drew to a close, the government stage-managed a huge pub­ licity event that, for a brief moment, succeeded in raising the spirits of the entire populace from the doldrums of the previous months. Starting on 10 November and continuing for five full days, the entire nation cele­ brated the fictitious twenty-six-hundredth anniversary of the mythical founding o f the Japanese state. Nagata HidejirO, head of the celebra­ tions committee, circulated a pamphlet to all the citizens o f the nation making it clear that the festival had supreme importance as a national religious event. Householders were instructed to “ purify” the little Shinto shrines they had in their homes and to decorate the family room with chrysanthemums (the Imperial symbol): “ The first day of the festi­ val should be a joyous event o f deep spiritual significance. Food should be prepared with the greatest o f care [magokoro] and the day passed in recounting to the children the myths of our Empire’s foundation.” 18 A massive sports festival, held on the grounds of the Meiji Shrine, was filmed and later released nationally as a culture film tided The Ath­ letic Exhibition of the Century (Seiki no Taiiku Saiten, Nichiei, 1940). The most famous (and marvelously cinematic) image o f the national celebration involved hundreds of athletes forming themselves into the number “ 2600.” In small villages as well as the big cities, there were midnight lantern parades and other events clearly inspired by Riefenstahl’s thrill­ ing footage of the Nuremberg Rally. There was no way to know that the flower-covered floats passing under the neon arches and the fireworks il­ luminating the skies would be the last true festival held in Imperial Japan.

Life Inside the “A B C D Encirclement” Throughout the spring of 1941, vague rumors circulated that the United States was planning to mediate the conflict with China. As if to strengthen these hopes, Ambassador Nomura KichisaburO intensified negotiations with the White House, begun the previous autumn. In

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September 1940, Foreign Minister Matsuoka YOsuke surprised and de­ lighted the nation by arranging a nonaggression treaty with Moscow, thus easing the threat to Japan ’s northern borders which had lain heav­ ily on everyone’s mind. The euphoria did not last long. Negotiations with the United States were soon locked in stalemate, and the radio began to hint darkly of a coming crisis. New tensions were mounting on the Soviet-Manchurian border where the Kanto Army was reported to be assembling large forces again. In September, when Hitier launched his attack on Russia, air-raid drills were undertaken all over Tokyo with unparalleled serious­ ness. Great formations o f tanks and soldiers were seen being loaded onto trains at Shinagawa station. They would leave at midnight, head­ ing down the Tokaido line toward the west. No crowds were allowed to assemble to see them off, and there was no word o f their departure in the press. From late summer, the newspapers had been using a new phrase to describe the rising threat to Japan ’s southern flank: “ The A BCD Encirclement,” suggesting a concerted effort by the American, British, Chinese, and Dutch powers to contain and isolate the Japanese nation. By linking the four nations together in this manner, the newspa­ pers sought to identify them as an alliance of potential adversaries. Still, even with these new foreign dangers, ordinary citizens clung to the belief that the war would not grow any larger and that at the last possible moment some sort o f compromise would be worked out. After all, for all the criticism of U.S. motives in the newspapers, fan magazines still had their usual coverage of Hollywood gossip. And American mo­ vies, while noticeably fewer, continued to be shown in movie theaters. Among those appearing on Japanese screens that year were Frank Lloyd’s The Howards of Virginia, William Wellman’s The Light That Failed, John Ford’s Stagecoach, and Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Even Sawamura Tsutomu found the latter film impressive: “Mr: Smith is litde more than a naive hymn to the virtues o f democracy, yet it is so cinematically compelling that it becomes vital for our camp to subject it to a thorough-going criticism. Setting aside our natural chagrin at having been outdone by our rivals, we must penetrate the secret of its success and harness it to our own purposes.” 19 Flipping through the film magazines o f 1941, one is struck by the number of foreign films with war or militarism as their theme. Along with the lavish two-page ads for Paramount’s promotion film for the B-17, I Wanted Wings, are similar ads for the Italian film by Goffredo Alessandrini, Luciano Serra Pilota. The latter, made under the supervision of

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Mussolini’s war-pilot son, Vittorio, appeared on Japanese screens with a special recommendation from “ our allies-in-arms,” the Hitler Jungend. A delegation o f the Hitler Jungend had arrived in Japan for an ex­ tended stay in 1938, soon after the signing of the anti-Communist Tri­ partite Pact of that year, and the blond, blue-eyed youths succeeded in winning the affection of the nation.20 Not surprisingly, a number of the foreign militarist films were German. The few French films advertised in Japan this year were strikingly peaceful in contrast. Produced by the Vichy government, they had to follow Goebbel’s directive that they be “ light and non-nationalistic.” Chief among these was Le Grand Elan, a ski film extolling health and wholesomeness (presumably a subject more to the German taste than the French). The German militarist films arriving in 1941 included such Hitler youth films as Viktor de Kowa’s Chin Up, Johannes! (Kopf hoch, Johannes!) and Aus der geschichte des Fahnleins Florian Geyer. Documentaries included UFA’s The German Army (covering the conquest of Yugoslavia, edited ac­ cording to the same principles as Campaign in Poland, which had astounded Japanese audiences the year before) and Victory in the West (covering the conquest of France). Okada Shinkichi reflected the unani­ mous opinion that “ these German imports are having an extraordinary influence on our own film industry. They provide invaluable hints for the improvement of Japanese national policy films.” 21 As it turns out, however, it is not easy to trace many direct influences from these Nazi films onJapanese filmmaking. One important exception would be the combat documentaries made in the early part of the Pa­ cific War, such as those by Iida Shimbi (before 1942, Iida had been a film critic who sometimes wrote studies on German film). Another exception is Shima K oji’s Twelve Hours to Departure (Shussei Junijikan, Daiei, 1943), which clearly takes its situation from Karl Ritter’s Leave on Word o f Honor. The films of Karl Ritter struck an especially responsive chord among Japanese filmmakers and critics. In a February 1940 zadankai for Star Magazine, Mizoguchi Kenji observed that “ Ritter has the same out­ look on war as we do.” By “ outlook,” he was referring to a certain inef­ fable quality to Ritter’s style —“ his films glow with a spiritual light.” 22 This was probably due in part to the director’s theme o f Heldentod (death of the hero, heroic death). While having clear reverberations with simi­ lar Japanese concepts, its roots seemed to stretch back even further into antiquity. None other than Iwasaki Akira (who, for reasons to be dis­ cussed below, expressed an admiration for Ritter) found something awesome in the Heldentod ideal. In 1975 he would write: “ perhaps it is

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only the German mind that is capable of perceiving such mystical beauty and majesty in the act of self-abnegation. Its spell seems similar to that which mesmerized Japanese youth during the war. But the pedi­ gree of the Japanese version reaches no further back than the Meiji era, while Heldentod springs from sources far older. Emerging from the pri­ meval German forests, it pulses through the Medieval legends of the Mbelungen and moves on into the present day.” 23 When Operation Michael (Untemehmen Michael, 1937) and the abovementioned Leave on Word o f Honor arrived inJapan in 1940, however, they both ran into trouble with the censors. Operation Michael is about a Worid War I infantry commander whose column is hopelessly encircled by a superior British force. He calls in artillery, knowing that it will kill his own men as well as the enemy. The Japanese censors applied their rule against excessive depictions o f batdefield slaughter to the film and cut it severely. Before it was mutilated, however, a large number of critics and film directors were given an opportunity to see the uncut print. In Leave on Word of Honor (Urlaub auf Ehrenwort, 1938), a young com­ pany commander in World War I gives his little group of soldiers an un­ expected, and slighdy illegal, holiday during their stopover in Berlin on the way back to the front. The men solemnly swear that they will return before the day is out. The drama then follows the story of each man’s experiences. The film fared even worse than Operation Michael. As with the latter, critics and directors were allowed to see the uncen­ sored print, while public showings were banned. According to Iwasaki Akira, “ the official reason for its prohibition is that it affirmed the ac­ tions of a second lieutenant who granted military leave to his subordi­ nates in clear violation of orders issued by the High Command. But one suspects the film was suppressed for quite different reasons. Surely the main reason is to be found in its muted appeal for peace. While avoiding any clear-cut pacifism, one senses there a deeply grained spirit out of sympathy with any affirmation of war.” 24 Iwasaki claims to find a strong antiwar (even humanist) message in Operation Michael as well. Such a perception clashes sharply with the manner in which Ritter’s work is generally seen in the West. For in­ stance, D. S. Hull refers to it as “vile . . . the work o f a despicable direc­ tor.” 25 Ritter’s biographerJohn Altmann reports that the Waffen S.S. re­ peatedly praised Ritter as “ our dear friend, a political soldier, a political artist . . . a true National Socialist.” 26 Ritter himself claimed that his films dealt with the unimportance of the individual, making it clear that “ everything personal must be given up for our cause.” 27 His self-avowed

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K arl R itter’s Leave on Word o f Honor (UFA, 1938).

mission was “ to show German youth that senseless, sacrificial death has its moral value.” 28 Iwasaki’s peculiar notion that Karl Ritter’s films had a secret pacifist message has in any case little to support it other than the moral author­ ity of the man making the assertion. That Iwasaki was himself a man of great courage and honor, and of insight as well, is beyond doubt. But in this case the evidence seems to be against his interpretation. The formalistic objections of the Japanese censors to Leave on Word of Honor were undoubtedly enough to ban the film. One need only point to the fate of Ozu’s wartime version of Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, whose production was also banned around this time, to see how strong these formalistic considerations were in the tight bureaucratic minds of the era. A member of the Army Information Section publicly queried in vain, “ Why can’t wejapanese make war films as sophisticated and effec­ tive as the Germans?” 29 Perhaps the answer lay in a key difference be­ tween German and Japanese filmmaking. Unlike the Japanese situation,

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where filmmakers were often hobbled by poorly defined bureaucratic regulations and equally vague objections, German filmmakers were en­ couraged to strive for greater psychological sophistication through the employment of film strategies and devices that were “ numerous and subde” (Kracauer). Goebbels, who fancied himself an “ artist,” did at least appreciate propaganda as an “ art form” in which ultimate effect legitimized any means at the filmmaker’s disposal. In Japan, there were very few “ artists” among the officials controlling film. And, since none of them could conceive o f propaganda as an art, they could see no sense in a policy of “ flexibility.” Apparendy, there was one other result from the challenge issued by the above-mentioned Army Information Section officer. It stimulated the producers at Nikkatsu to attempt a film along the lines o f Operation Michael. Such at least was the original idea for General, Staff, and Soldiers. Iwasaki reports that “ by setting the film in China’s Xanshi Province, the idea was to depict a major campaign both from the perspective of the HQmilitary stafT and those at the front. It was a bold concept but in the end the Information Section red-penciled it back into the ‘safe area’ ex­ plored by so many war films in the past. When it inevitably fell far short o f its German model, critics were able to proclaim ‘the inimitable greatness’ o f Ritter’s achievement.” 30 After giving up key elements of the story line, the only remaining ele­ ment of the German original in General, Staff, and Soldiers was the manner in which the progress of a specific military campaign becomes the orga­ nizing structure of the film. The same sort of structure characterizes the famous war documentaries and newsreels UFA and Tobis turned out in the first years of the war in Europe. In fact, one suspects that these latter had a greater influence on the way in which the film was shot and edited than did Operation Michael. The overall tone o f the film, too, seems to have more in common with the German documentaries than with any o f Ritter’s films. It begins with an objective clearly set and proceeds at a relendess pace toward the achievement of that objective. Like Baptism of Fire and Victory in the West, the film General, Staff, and Soldiers ends in notable victory. Ritter’s most famous films were all made in the 1937-38 period, be­ fore Nazi Germany went to war. Set in the First World War, they arc steeped in just that “ flavor of defeat” which Ozu Yasujiró and Tasaka Tomotaka found most appealing. While Kumagai’s Naval Brigade at Shanghai does finally end in a clear victory, it too exudes the desperation of a losing batde against overwhelming odds. According to Tasaka, the

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lack o f this quality tended to flaw U.S. war films: “ No matter how charming or clever they may be, they remain in mind as something for­ eign to us, something irreconcilably American. Ritter’s films, however, penetrate the Japanese viewer to the soul.” 31 On the other hand, it was just this “ lost cause” quality, especially in Five Scouts, that had dissatisfied certain critics and bureaucrats. With the actual war bogging down on the Asian continent and morale beginning to flag at home, the need for a more upbeat attitude toward the conflict was obvious; the makers of war films would have to change direction in order to accomplish this new propaganda task. But they were at an aes­ thetic impasse and needed new models. Until September 1939, the Japanese were the only advanced nation fighting a major war and making films about the war using the modern talkie film technology. They had been the pacesetters, pioneering the medium in service to the war effort. After 1939, they were joined by a host of other modern nations, and the art of the war film (and war doc­ umentary) was being revolutionized. Leading the way—in the eyes of many Japanese, at least—was their victorious ally, Germany. Taguchi Satoshi’s General, Staff, and Soldiers (Shogun to Sanbo to Hei, Nikkatsu, 1941-42) went into production in April 1941, just as the UFA and Tobis war documentaries were coming into the country. Campaign in Po­ land had arrived in late 1940, Balkan Blitzkrieg in May 1941, and Victory in the West slightly later that year. Although Taguchi was to make a drama film, based on a campaign already concluded, he was clearly aiming for an effect similar to these: “ I ruled out all the tired old fictional plots, aiming instead for a clean documentary-like structure. I wanted to make ajapanese film rivaling, in scale at least, anything made elsewhere in the world. I wanted to show war as the swirling movement of great human masses.” 32 To do this, he chose to suppress the individuality o f his soldiers to a greater extent even than Tasaka had in Mud and Soldiers. Since they were to be treated as part of a war machine, his actor-soldiers had to be melded into a single mass: “ I didn’t want them merely playing soldiers, I wanted them to turn into soldiers, body and soul.” His actors perform this task convincingly. Although the audience would have known many of them from other Nikkatsu films, they seem very much like the real thing. The only soldier in the film to emerge as a distinct “ personality” is a cook who serves up the ubiquitous foodstuff of soldiers at the China front with ironic wit: “ Oh, yummy! We’ve got pumpkin again today!”

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The true identity of the actor playing the General, however, is hard to miss. He is Bando TsumasaburO, familiar to all as a great star from the silent days o f jidaigeki. Unfortunately, he is the weakest element in the film. Taguchi had planned to give him an aura of lofty distance as the central genius who sets in motion and controls the vast military forces of the campaign. “ In real life,” Taguchi says, “ it’s well nigh im­ possible to get up close to a general. That’s why I adopted the policy of having the camera peek at our general from as far away as possible.” This was a fortunate decision since Bando’s fustian acting style is ab­ surdly unsuited to a film trying for a documentary look. His “ general” is straight out of the repertoire of classical jidaigeki heroes. Even when he gives his orderly a compliment on a well cooked egg—which would surely have been delivered in a casual manner in real life he sounds like he is bestowing a fief on a faithful retainer. General, Staff, and Soldiers opens with a messenger galloping on horse­ back up the hill to the fort that serves as a temporary headquarters —a familiar and not very hopeful beginning for a film intending to depict a Japanese victory comparable to those o f Germany in Europe. In a Ger­ man film, he would have been driving a motorcycle. This film moves forward drenched in sweat exuded from horse and human flesh. Al­ though horses are also in evidence in Campaign in Poland, all forward movement is done on the steel treads of tanks. Very soon, however, we are introduced to the film’s central device, clearly connecting it with the Nazi documentaries: the map. It is affixed to the wall in the staff conference room where the officers ponder the best way to carry out a vast pincers operation intended to surround and destroy a Chinese army of two hundred thousand. A full lecture on the problem and its possible solutions ensues. One officer uses a pointer to explain the disposition o f the Chinese defending forces (represented by white oblongs) and the various Japanese attacking units (black arrows). Later, the oblongs and arrows are shown to be moveable. The use o f animated maps in the German documentaries to create a “ magic geography” is famous. Kracauer makes the point that they re­ semble “ graphs of physical processes” and that they show “ how all known materials are broken up, penetrated, pushed back, and eaten away by the new one [the German Army], thus demonstrating its super­ iority in a most striking manner.” 33 In the Taguchi film, the map remains a simple, low-tech, practical tool. Its correspondence to the actual geography is illustrated by cut­ aways to the terrain being discussed. When we are told that the key to

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Taguchi Satoshi’s General, Staff] and Soldiers (Nikkatsu, 1942). Bandft Tsumasaburd as the general.

the operation is the storming of a formidably steep and rugged moun­ tain, an extended shot from an airplane panoramically inspects the mountain. Movement of the arrows is followed immediately by the movement of horses, tanks, or men. At no time does the map take on an abstract reality of its own, as it does in the Nazi documentaries, where actual space is turned into mere documentary annotations on the artifi­ cial reality of the animated maps. In Victory in the West, we look down to­ ward an extraordinarily realistic depiction of the Low Countries, as if from an earth satellite situated over Germany. Flashes over the labeled cities indicate their bombardment; swiftly piercing arrows show the penetration of Wehrmacht ground forces. Other little touches in General, Staff, and Soldiers demonstrate Taguchi's awareness of the German documentaries. In Campaign in Poland, Hitler is shown in his car, moving among his troops like a warlord. In Taguchi’s film, the general makes similar epiphanies on horseback, like a real warlord. In both films, there is homage to the cameramen and re­ porters who cover the combat. The opening caption to the main part of Victory in the West stresses the heavy losses among front-line news

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cameramen, adding that “ they were doing a soldier’s duty, always in the front lines.” As members o f the P K (Propaganda Kompanie), they were actually under the dual command o f the German army and o f Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. Taguchi, meanwhile, emphasizes the sensation o f watching the ac­ tion as if it were being shot by cameramen in actual combat. “We made it an absolute rule never to set up the camera ahead of where the troops are advancing.” 34 In one scene, a cameraman whirrs away at a group of soldiers as they rest during a lull in battle. Elsewhere, a member of the civilian press reaches up to pick a plum from a branch. A close-up of his hand closing around the plum. The crack of a rifle shot and the hand slips away below the frame. The reporter is only wounded. When he apologizes to the medic for causing him trouble, the doctor responds “ We’re all in this together. Your role is as important as the soldiers.” One of the most important similarities is the almost complete depol­ iticization o f the soldiers. In the German documentaries, the soldiers are never used to echo the official propaganda line (according to Kracauer, “ this was probably due to the influence o f the High Command: talking politics would have offended venerable army tradition” ).35 Ta­ guchi proudly asserts about his own film that “ there isn’t a single banzai cheer in the entire film.” Soldiers and officers do occasionally mouth some of the usual slogans, but they are so brief and formulaic as to be virtually unnoticeable. This went against the general trend in Japanese war films that were becoming filled with increasingly ardent spiritism. In General, Staff, and Soldiers, victory is achieved the old-fashioned way, not so much by “ spirit,” as by discipline, superior organization, strategy, and firepower. Still, for all the elements Taguchi takes from the German films, there are vital differences. The UFA and Tobis films preface their coverage of the campaigns with extended presentations of the rationale for the fighting. The Poles have been committing atrocities against the ethnic Germans on their territory; the English have been seeking excuses to throtde the Reich; the Treaty of Versailles was the product o f evil inten­ tions, and so on. Although their list of provocations is largely specious, the Nazi filmmakers did pay lip service to the Western tradition de­ manding to see effects (in this case, the launching o f the Blitz) as stem­ ming from definable causes. General, Staff, and Soldiers, nonetheless, fol­ lows the established pattern of Japanese war films and plunges into combat direcdy. Justifications and the pretense of appealing to “ objec­ tive world opinion” are completely absent.

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Also, the mood of Taguchi’s film remains reserved and even some­ what bleak. The final victory has litde of the triumphant spirit surging through the Nazi films. There is no gloaung over mountains of cap­ tured “ booty” (a term actually used by the narrator in Victory in the West), no lovingly held shots o f the carnage inflicted, and no lines of shambling prisoners. Rather, the final sequence is a traditional one. A group o f officers gathers around the flag-covered body of a dead col­ league to tell him o f the great victory. We are back in the traditional world o f the Japanese soldier, where life and death are linked by a seamless continuity. “ I’ve come to keep you company,” whispers one of the men as he sits down with a sake bottle next to the body, “ so you won’t get lonesome.” Aside from General, Staff, and Soldiers—since shooting the film took al­ most a year, it was not actually to be released until early 1942 —few other war films of importance were produced in 1941. Kuratani Isamu made The Soldier’s Field Manual—Mother and the Battlefield, based on a Hino Ashihei story. Koishi Eiichi turned out Soaring Passions (Maiagaru Jonetsu, Shinko, winner of the number nine spot of the Eigajunpo Best Ten list for 1941), about a farming boy who becomes an airplane mechanic, a film Iijima Tadashi praised for its “ intensely frank and sincere quality.” 36 In 1941, Sawamura’s spiridst pictures were released: A Story of Leader­ ship and The Sun of the Eighty-eighth Year. It was also the year of Ozu’s Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and Mizoguchi’s Genroku Chushingura (Shochiku-Kowa)—both films superficially reflecting the mood of the times without actually participating in it. Ozu’s film features an elder sister whose unpleasantness is emphasized in a scene where she sits be­ fore a mirror primping herself. One could, if one wished, read into the scene a “ luxury is the enemy” message. Furthermore, in the end, the elder brother (Saburi Shin) takes his mother and younger sister off to the promised land, Manchukuo. The traditional subject matter o f Mizoguchi’s Genroku Chushingura had obvious spiritist connotations. But the most outstanding feature of this film (which actually elides the famous assault on the Kira mansion) was its extraordinarily authentic mise-en-scene. By setting his films in historically remote eras and doting on visual details, Mizoguchi was adopting a tactic (sometimes called “ calligraphism” ) similar to that used by Italian film directors who wanted to escape from making fascist prop­ aganda.37 In 1941, a number of important films featured children as their cen­ tral characters. The former actor and newly arrived director Shima Koji

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repeated his success from the year before (the semimythical Matasaburo, the Wind Child) with his Jir o ’s Story (JirdMonogatari, Nikkatsu, 1941). Shi­ mizu Hiroshi, who tended to specialize in semidocumentary treatments of children, such as Children in the Wind (Kaze no naka no Kodomotachi, Shochiku, 1937), made Look-Back Tower (Mikaeri no To, Shochiku, 1941) about children in a reform school. Seen from a the postwar vantage point, the education to which the children are subjected seems quite fascistic. The head of the school has no doubts about the rightness of his authoritar­ ian methods. And those around him who do have doubts are soon won over. The male teachers (including Ryu Chishu) and the house mothers (including Miyake Kuniko) are portrayed as stern but loving parental figures who dedicate themselves to grinding down the individuality of the children “ for their own good.” When a child breaks the iron-clad discipline of the institution, he or she is made to engage in a ritualistic apology. Fascistic education was also extolled in such documentaries as People's School (Kokumin Gakko, Nichiei, 1941, lost?). The film unveiled the government’s newly reformed elementary school, now renamed “ Peo­ ple’s School.” One advertisement for the film read: “A brand new de­ parture for national policy films! See how our schools have extricated themselves from the old liberal-individualist education to embrace the ideal o f solid leadership and firm direction!” 38 The new teaching concepts and methods brought about by this “ ex­ trication” are also a main theme of Ueno KOzO’s Village School (Mura no Gakko, Riken, 1941). Group-work projects are the “ innovation” explored in this film. In addition to their classroom work, the children are shown working out the problems of various crops, plotting irrigation ditches, making charcoal, and so on. As the school principal explains, “ Various questions spring to mind when one is engrossed in a work project. What is this I am doing? How should I go about doing it? These are the seeds that when planted in the students’ minds bloom into a true love of learning.” Lest one mistake him for an old-style liberal, he adds that “ this spontaneously arising spirit of construction and public service is a concrete manifestation o f just that group resolve destined to form the cornerstone o f the New East Asia.” The obvious point he does not make is that this “ spirit o f construction” has the extraeducational bene­ fit o f harnessing his young students to the wartime production system. By the end of the Pacific War, schools will be sending their pupils out to fields, mines, and factories to work long hours without any pretext at all of “ educational value.”

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Youngsters in other countries under Japanese rule also came in for treatment in documentaries and drama films. Asahi Eiga’s documen­ tary Children of the Battlefield (Senchi no Kodomo, 1941) depicts the adversities suffered by the children of south China. These hardships are seen as China’s age old poverty, rather than the ruin brought on by the Japanese invasion. In fact, under Japanese leadership, they look forward to a far brighter future. In October, the Korean-made film Angels without a Home (Ienaki Tenshi, Keijo Koryo Eiga Kyokai, 1941) appeared on Japanese screens. This drama about the lives o f Korean street children brought under the care of an orphanage was extraordinary because the entire cast, including its leading lady, Moon Ye Bong, and the director, Che In Gyu, were Kore­ ans. When the film was offered to the Education Ministry for inspec­ tion, officials saw it as a superb opportunity to publicize the govern­ ment’s long-standing program of “ Uniting the Homeland and Korea” (i.e., assimilate Korea as an integral part of Japan) and they immediately approved it as “ Ministry of Education Recommended Film Number Fourteen.” This was apparently done without considering the difficulty that the language spoken onscreen was Korean (of course subtided into Japanese). The Japanese colonial authorities had long since oudawed Korean as a medium of instruction in schools on the peninsula, replac­ ing it with Japanese in all grades except the very lowest. Therefore, how could a Japanese ministry—the Ministry of Education, no less —put its stamp o f approval on a work that flaunted the continued use o f a lan­ guage that had been legally abolished and was now, officially, nonexis­ tent? The dilemma was that the recommendation had already been published, and to rescind it would bring disgrace 011 the Ministry. Gready embarrassed, the education bureaucrats put their heads to­ gether to come up with a stratagem by which they could retract their recommendation while, at the same time, not appearing to do so. At this point, the details become somewhat sketchy. Perhaps due to some genuine confusion, or more probably, due to bureaucratic deviousness, the Korean language version of the film (the only one in existence) be­ came designated as the “ Revised Version.” In other words, the official fiction went as follows: the Ministry had seen and approved a film in Japanese, but subsequently, some unknown party had replaced it with an all-Korean language “ revised” version, and this unauthorized ver­ sion was now being distributed in Japan. Advertisements for the film reflected the Ministry’s cumbersome sleight of hand. At the top of the ad, in heavy black lettering, appeared the words: “ Now Showing- the

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Revised Version of Ministry o f Education Recommended Film Num­ ber Fourteen.” In small print and in parenthesis on the line just below appears: “ The Revised Version is not the Recommended Version.” The polidcs of language continued to be a trouble spot between the two peoples for many decades after the end of the war. For example, until the South Korean government lifted the ban in September 1993, publicly performing songs in Japanese had been forbidden by law.

The Bizarre Case o f You and Me On 16 November 1941 another film, billed as “ a Joint Film Project for the Unification of the Homeland with Korea,” opened at the Tokyo Kokusai with ads that boasted the backing of the Office o f the Governor-General o f Korea and the Japanese Army Information Sec­ tion. The film was You and Me (Kimi to Boku, Korean Army Information Section, 1941, lost?). Since it was in Japanese and had a cast studded with some o f the top names of Japanese filmdom, the Education Minis­ try had no trouble putting its seal of approval on this one. The Japanese Army was equally enthusiastic about the film, since its avowed purpose was to stimulate the recruitment of volunteers from the untapped man­ power resource of the peninsula. It had been scripted and directed by Hinatsu Eitaro, a Korean living in Japan who had been working in the jidaigeki film industry for over nine years. Hinatsu’s personality and the tale of how his film was made tells us much about the relationship between Japan and her colony Korea and about the inner workings of national policy film production in the days just before die Pacific War. Hinatsu, whose real Korean name was Heo Yeong, was made the subject of a superb biography by Utsumi Aiko and Murai Yoshinori, and much o f the information below is based upon their book. 59 From our own vantage point in time, it is difficult to understand why a Korean national would want to make a film that portrays his people as worshipful, servile subjects of a nation that had conquered them, bru­ talized them, enslaved large numbers o f them for forced labor in the homeland, and that relentlessly now pursued a policy o f extinguishing their language and culture. Hinatsu seems to have had two motives. The first involved career advancement. Having worked in the Japanese film industry for years with little chance of progressing to a directorial posi­ tion in an established film company (due to his Korean identity), he was probably eager to show the world that he could make films. To do this.

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he latched onto a subject sure to appeal to large sections of Japanese of­ ficialdom, one which no Japanese national could handle as well. The second motive seems to have come from his own thoroughly “ colonized” psychology. During this period of his life, at least, he ap­ pears to have been ajapanese ultranationalist. In an October 1941 z.adankai (soon before the premiere of You and Me), he says: I’ve been over here for sixteen years and, along with my seniors and friends, have achieved a fairly firm grasp of how life is lived here, including a proper appreciation of our [sic] national consciousness. At the same time I am struck by how rare it is for an ordinary Korean and someone from the [Japanese] Homeland [naichi] to open their hearts to one another and to join hands in true friendship. On the other hand, there is no denying the terrific upsurge of patriotic ardor engendered by the China Incident among the twenty four million citizens on the Peninsula. The Incident broke out just when my son was born, and I was so eager to raise him into a model soldier for the Empire, I decided not to enroll him in my own [Korean] family register, but to have him put down in that of my wife’s family, since they are citizens of the homeland. I yearn to see the day when all Korean people can take up arms in defense of theJapanese Empire, just like you here in the homeland.40 The script Hinatsu carried around to Shinko Kinema and then to the Governor-General’s Office in Seoul was filled with just this sort of too-good-to-be-true sentiment. The hero of the film, “ Kaneko Eisuke,” is a volunteer at a military training camp near Keijo (Seoul). When he and the other volunteers march through the town streets they sing Ja p ­ anese military songs, “ their faces beaming with pride and joy.” The town folk rush out to give them food and praise. Explaining his motive for becoming a volunteer, Eisuke says: “ In this time o f crisis, it’s not fair to put all the responsibility on the shoulders o f our brothers in the Homeland. We the youth of the Peninsula must also bear arms in ser­ vice to His Majesty’s Empire. This is only fair is it not?” When he tells his old father he is about to leave for the front, the father declares: “ Wonderful! I am proud to have a son become a soldier in service to Japan!” As Eisuke leaves the house, his mother tells him: “ Even if you can’t carry out your filial duties to your parents, never stint in your loy­ alty to His Imperial Majesty!” At the station, someone in the crowd shouts to him: “ Don’t worry about the home front! The union o f Korea and Japan is firm!” 41

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The other motif running through the film is his romance with and finally his marriage to a “ a girl from the Homeland.” Boat rides on a lake and the marriage itself, along with the singing of the volunteers, allow the inclusion of a good deal o f music in the film. This, according to contemporary viewers, was the only saving grace o f a film with vir­ tually no plot. Hinatsu first approached his old company, Shinko, to have them take on the film project. As Utsumi and Murai put it, “Armed as he was with endorsements from the Korean Governor-General, the Army of Korea, and the Soryoku Domei, Hinatsu was sure Shinko’s well-known susceptibility to authority would cause them to readily agree to the plan.” 42 After some consideration, and a great deal of trepidation in the face o f such impressive official backing, the company executives came to the obvious conclusion that “ it simply won’t make a profit.” Other companies he approached also declined. Hinatsu refused to be discouraged. Back he went to his friends at the Governor-General’s Office and through sheer perseverance was given a promise from the Army of Korea to throw its support and prestige be­ hind the film. Although they would not provide the funding for the film, the colonial army did help by using its influence to pull in some of the top stars of Korean film for the project. Among them were the actresses who had starred in Angels without a Home and who had the largest follow­ ing on the peninsula. In order to spur on his allies in the Japanese film industry, Hinatsu was not above using nationalistic blackmail: “ For obvious reasons antiJapanese elements will be eager to have this project sidetracked. That’s precisely why you must help me push it through.” 43 This was the appeal he made to film executive Sat 5 Kunio, who then used his influence to enlist top name performers from Japan. Needless to say, the backing of the army also gready influenced Sato’s decision. In those days, if the military called, there was not a star in Japan who could refuse to re­ spond. Additionally, as one industry veteran put it: “ It was well known that if one worked on projects directly under the aegis of the army, one could probably avoid conscription. Some actors, such as Ohinata Den, were especially diligent in pursuing this tactic.” 44 And so, in their ca­ pacity as quasimilitary functionaries, many o f the top male stars of the day - - Kosugi Isamu, Kawazu KiyosaburO, Maruyama Sadao, and Ohi­ nata Den - descended on the relative backwater, Seoul. The final coup in this extensive recruitment effort was their success in pulling in the fab­ ulously popular Ri Koran from the Manchurian Film Company. The

On the Eve of a New liar astonishing list goes on. Tasaka Tomotaka was brought as a directorial advisor, and famed him critic Iijima Tadashi was recruited to help with script revisions. Almost immediately before shooting began, however, Tasaka seized an excuse to slip away. Although he is listed on the credits as “ advisor," he did litde for the film. In the note left behind as he hastily departed, he praised Hinatsu for his “ noble efforts,” while referring to the “ patheti­ cally poor” equipment at the Korean film studio. Iijima also managed to escape from any substantial involvement in the project. Indeed, in the Eiga Junpo zadankai quoted above, he pretended to have almost no knowledge of the film. Clearly, both he and Tasaka sensed the approach of a disaster that could injure their careers. The film was shot at the cramped and dilapidated Koryo Film Stu­ dio, using antiquated cameras and lighting equipment scrabbled to­ gether from the colonial army and other film studios. “ People in the homeland simply couldn’t imagine the primitive conditions prevailing here for filmmaking,” Hinatsu would later report. Out on the streets, however, it was a different story: Backed by the full authority of the colonial government, the filmmakers could sum­ mon up crowds and use the public buildings of Keijo, Seoul, and its en­ virons for scenes of grandiose pageantry. An entire artillery regiment of the colonial army was used for the parade of volunteers through down­ town Keijo. Hundreds of extras were provided by calling up students in the Volunteer Labor Force. At the train station, the actual stationmaster was called upon to make an appearance. The film opened more or less simultaneously in Japan and through­ out Korea. Audiences in Korea were normally quite sparse for films in Japanese. But this was not a “ normal” situation. Despite the language and the presence of the Japanese actors, it was still the most spectacular film to be made by a Korean national. In a country where radios were still scarce and film-going was the main source o f entertainment and news, this one fact would have stirred a great deal of interest. Education officials of the colonial government ordered all middle and high schools to march their students off to see it. The youngest members o f the audi­ ence were probably little aware of the manner in which it ignored the true feelings of Koreans toward Japan ’s policy of assimilating their country. After all, it would have corresponded perfectly with the ideol­ ogy- being drummed into them daily in the classroom. Furthermore, Hi­ natsu had generously sugared his propaganda with extended interludes of apparently rather good musical performances.

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Since the film seems to have been lost, there is probably no way to accurately gauge the film’s practical success in carrying out its propa­ ganda mission. Recruiters for the volunteer paramilitary forces at the time had little trouble achieving their quotas, since induction into the force promised the recruit food, clothing, and at least a minimal income. Contemporary reports speak of an application rate twenty-eight times larger than the quota (this was apparendy not unique since similar drives in colonial Taiwan were obtaining comparable results). Further­ more, to ensure that volunteerism would be a major “ cultural theme” in novels, poems, and essays produced by Korean writers (inJapanese only, of course), the Korean Educational Authority established a special corps o f official literary hacks (the Korean Literature Association) and set them to work on the project. You and Me was actually not the first, nor the last, volunteer recruit­ ment film made in Korea. Two others had been chunked out locally sev­ eral months before. Produced on a far smaller scale, Garden of Victory and The Volunteer (both made in the spring o f 1941) lacked the vital backing afforded Hinatsu’s film. Another weakness, in the eyes of the military at least, was that their stories left their heroes at boot camp, rather than taking them onto the batdefield, as did You and Me. Neither did they pur­ sue the “ unite Korea and the Homeland” theme to a degree satisfactory to the Japanese authorities. The reality o f the Korean volunteer’s life in the army was far from the sunny idyll depicted in these films. Often the victims of brutality and the racist contempt of their Japanese officers, they seethed with resent­ ment. This tended to come to the surface when they were put in charge of enemy prisoners or garrisoned villages in occupied territory. Their reputation during the Pacific War was especially bad. From Indonesia to South East Asia to the Philippines, they developed their own notoriety for brutality and massacre. After the premiere of You and Me in Tokyo, domestic critics preferred to remain silent rather than risk the ire of its powerful government sponsors. Those few who did cover it in the press tended to shroud their doubts behind pious statements about its “ excellent intentions.” Hazumi Tsuneo’s carefully constructed review was a classic example of saying one thing and meaning the other: “ For the first time ever, we see cinema attempting to respond directly to the specific propaganda needs of the High Military Command. In such films, artistic merit is a bonus. The central criterion for evaluating it should focus on how effectively it presents its message. Thus, to say that it is indeed effective is the highest

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form of praise.” 45 Other reviews mixed platitudes about the film’s vital propaganda mission with sly comments about its “ rather sloppy con­ struction,” its “ amateurishness,” and “ heavy-handed preachiness.” 46 Shin Eiga cautioned theater owners “ to expect a rather scanty house after the first day or so.” 47 The Korean Film Directive, very similar to the Japanese Film Law, had gone into effect in July 1940 with particularly unfortunate results for the region’s filmmakers. Under the atrocious cultural policies of the Ja p ­ anese, it had of course always been frustrating, if not dangerous, to try to make films. But there had been bright spots in the relatively distant past. One such case was R a Ungyu’s Arirang, made in 1926. “ Its scenes o f the Korean countryside caused a sensation wherever it was shown,” Ri Ei’ichi reports, “ and its theme song, Arirang, swept the nation to be­ come the anthem of a people who had lost their birthright. Its freshness seemed to clear the atmosphere o f nihilism and frustration left in the wake o f the 1 March Incident.” 48 Before long, however, such nascent nationalist stirrings were vigorously stamped out, just as the 1 March In­ cident had been crushed back in 1919. Thereafter, filmmaking by Kore­ ans became an increasingly difficult business. The Japanese Film Yearbook for 1942 offers this straightforward depiction of the situation preceding the enactment o f the Film Directive: “As an industry it is utterly desti­ tute o f capital, equipment, and trained personnel. Its only resource is the passion to make films. It was common at the time for companies to spring into existence for the purpose of making a single film and then to collapse into oblivion when it failed at the box office.” 49 With the passage of the Film Directive, Japanese money began to flow into the Korean film industry. Indeed, the industry was almost completely inundated by Japanese money and overrun by the accompa­ nying flood o f carpetbaggers from the homeland. Production and distri­ bution came to be managed by Japanese executives who were naturally most comfortable with fellow countrymen as staff personnel. Thereaf­ ter, as the 1943 Eiga Nenkan blundy states, the task o f wiping away all trace o f a distinctive Korean identity in Korean film was begun in ear­ nest: “ Korean cinema has a mission of supreme national importance the production of a stream o f ‘cultural bullets’ designed to enlighten the peninsula’s 25 million inhabitants, thus further strengthening the union o f Korea with the homeland. Its future is assured under the principles of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, as a branch of Japanese cinema. It would be a grave mistake therefore for Korean film to mire itself in provincial considerations of Korean identity;” 50

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None o f this, however, was to have much significance for Hinatsu. He went south with the victorious Japanese armies in the early days of the Pacific War, and there he stayed. His activities making Japanese propaganda aimed principally at Australia will be covered in the later chapter in this book. He would never return to his homeland.

“ Not One Foot o f Raw Film Stock to Spare!” By mid-1941, relations between Japan and the A BCD countries had reached a point of no return. The tactic used by the Western powers to force Japan to stop its military activities in China was to apply increas­ ing pressure on its lifeline of natural resources. The Japanese demands, in January and in May, that the Netherlands East Indies supply petro­ leum and other natural resources was answered in July by even further restrictions on oil exports to Japan. Then, on 26-27 July, just as Japan was moving into southern Indochina, Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands East Indies froze Japanese assets. On 28 July, the Ja p a ­ nese government responded in kind. The eight U.S. film companies with offices in Japan were among the foreign enterprises whose assets were frozen. On 1 August, when the United States increased the pres­ sure further by imposing an embargo on all oil exports toJapan, the mil­ itary saw the situation as desperate. To them, it represented a de facto declaration of war. In his recently published diary, Emperor Hirohito’s chamberlain, Irie Sukemasa, reports on the great psychological impact the embargo was having: “ The ambivalence and ambiguities in Jap a­ nese perceptions of world events have disappeared, being replaced by a sense o f clear-cut alternatives: peace or war.” 51 As if to telegraph to the people that they must prepare for the latter, government pronounce­ ments replaced the term New Order with the far graver sounding one, War Emergency System. The deepening crisis of natural resources had a direct influence on the Japanese film industry. The government’s establishment of the huge Fuji Film factory at Ashigara in 1930 had gone far toward ensuring a do­ mestic production base for film stock. But, with hundreds of films being made yearly, movie makers were still heavily dependent on imports from abroad, especially from Kodak in the United States. As relations with the United States soured, raw stock also became a scarce commodity. Making matters worse, the nitrate compound that was its main compo­ nent was also a strategically vital ingredient in explosives.

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Kawazura RyOzO, the autocratic chief of the greatly strengthened Information Bureau’s fifth division, had effectively become the czar of film stock allocations. He had the power to bestow (or withhold) the very life substance of the industry. Needless to say, the international develop­ ments of July and August greatly enhanced his hand, and he moved swiftly to exploit the advantage. On 16 August 1941, he suddenly an­ nounced: “ We can no longer provide the civilian sector with even one foot of film stock.” Shock and despair seized the industry. “ The announcement was like a bombshell,” Shochiku’s Kido ShirO recalled. “ O f course we had been watching the situation with considerable anxiety for some time, but none of us had expected it to come to this.” 52 On the eighteenth, Kido called in the heads of the industry to an emergency meeting at the Film Association. The result, however, was little more than thunderous denunciations o f the Information Bureau. No constructive counteraction emerged. Still, the company men knew they had to do something to soften the terms of surrender. At the same time, they knew that Kawazura was “ only using a bargaining tactic to get us to cooperate more fully with the military.” This realization cheered them enough to “ put aside vain debate and draw up a minimal reorganization plan of their own.” 53 On 23 August, they presented the plan to the Bureau but were greeted with extreme coldness from the assembled panel of bureaucrats and military men. The following day, when they returned for their an­ swer, Kawazura kept them waiting for more than two hours. Clearly it was a tactic to make them the prey in a psychological cat and mouse game. When Kawazura suddenly came into the conference room he gave them a stern lecture on the “ uncooperative spirit” of their propo­ sal. Then, just as abruptly, he ended the meeting without giving a sub­ stantive response to the plan. The full cataclysm burst upon the industry a few days later. Unveil­ ing a plan of its own, the Information Bureau demanded the reduction of the entire industry to two feature film production companies, along with one other for culture films. Each of the feature film companies would turn out two films a month. At the time, the larger companies Shochiku, Nikkatsu, Toho, Shinko, and Daito - had each been averag­ ing one new production a week. In addition to these, there were the films being made by companies under the Toho umbrella: Tokyo Hassei, Nan-o, Takarazuka, and Taiho. Additionally, there was also the

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Shochiku-controlled Koa, along with Shinko, a company with close fi­ nancial ties to Shochiku. Kawazura’s plan called for the reduction of a total production of over thirty films a month to a mere four. The timehonored trademarks of Nikkatsu and Shochiku, as well as those of Toho and the rest, would disappear under gray bureaucratic designations “ Studio Number One” and “ Studio Number Two.” Furthermore, the redivision into two parts of an industry already dominated by three fierce traditional rivals —Nikkatsu, Shochiku, and Toho—was certain to cause a flare-up of rancorous warfare among the parties concerned. O f the three, the financially strapped Nikkatsu was in the weakest position. Despite the fact it continued to turn out works o f superior artis­ tic quality (Five Scouts, to name but one), the company had long been tot­ tering on the verge of bankruptcy, and its directorate had split into feud­ ing factions. Shochiku and Toho tended to look upon it as the “ Poland” o f the Japanese film industry, a terrain ripe for partition and absorption. Just as the latter two companies were closing in for the kill, a new fig­ ure burst upon the scene to disrupt their plans. The result was to be a soap opera continuing into the early days of the Pacific War. Nagata Masaichi, who had created the Nikkatsu offshoot Dai Ichi Eiga and, after its demise, had become studio chief for Shinko’s Kyoto studios, broke off a vacation in Kyushu when he heard about the com­ ing reorganization and hurried up to Tokyo as Shinko’s representative. A seasoned veteran of the filmworld’s infighting, he knew how to turn a fluid situation to his advantage. Nagata’s first move was to present him­ self as a “ disinterested outsider” to the other film companies, thereby becoming its main spokesman at the Information Bureau. He then set about developing a personal relationship with Kawazura and Fuwa Suketoshi, before whom he placed a new and completely unauthorized plan. “ In a two-company system,” Nagata told them, “ there is likely to be compromise in any number of areas. But if you put together a system of three companies, you can be sure of a healthy competition as to which can turn out the very best product.” '’4 Shutding back and forth between the relevant ministries involved, he was the first to notice that hidden tensions were creating fracture lines in the united front o f the govern­ ment side. In fact, the Information Bureau, the Education Ministry, and the Home Ministry were locked in a secret but deadly struggle over ad­ ministrative “ territory.” Working his psychological influence into these cleavages, he succeeded in pushing his three-company plan relentlessly forward. Eventually he was able to convince the Information Bureau

T h e August 1941 m eeting between m em bers o f the Cabinet Inform ation Bureau (upper) and the fiimworld executives (lower). Above, K aw azura Toshizo sits second from the right with Fuwa Suketoshi, third. Below, N agata M asaichi sits third from the right with K ido Shirfi on the far left (. Wion Eiga. Septem ber 1941).

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people that such a three-company system could operate under their im­ mediate control, reflecting their policies and opinions in the most direct manner. Kawazura greeted the idea with mounting enthusiasm. Why allow the industry to be dominated by Shochiku and Toho, both of which had a tendency to look to their own advantage even at the cost of public ser­ vice? Why not create a purely kokusaku production company from scratch, modeling it along the lines of the nazified UFA of Germany? The Infor­ mation Bureau huddled in secret meetings to redraw their proposal. The new reorganization plan, announced by Kawazura on 10 Sep­ tember, called for the formation of three feature companies, one culture film company, and a single public corporation to handle the distribution o f their films. Nikkatsu, Daito, and Shinko would be clumped together into a third company, with Nagata as its effective head. Nagata is re­ ported to have “ shed actual tears of joy” at the success of his coup de théâtre.55 This was the high point o f Kawazura’s influence, as well. After dic­ tating the new shape of the film industry, he set about creating a new metaphor for the role of its product in an age of total war. Just as a drop of oil would become “ a drop of blood” in the domestic sloganeering of the Pacific War, Kawazura explained the significance of film under the present “ super crisis-time” conditions as “ a bullet in the arsenal dedi­ cated to the prosecution of total war.” As such, it was “ unthinkable to allow the production o f a single misfiring bullet. We must ensure that film producers will provide maximum effect with the barest minimum of resources.” 56 Even when wrapped in Kawazura’s typically turgid, bureaucratic manner o f speech, the image of movies as “ bullets- not one of which must be allowed to misfire,” was lucid and captivating. It came to be used repeatedly by bureaucrats and nationalist critics over the months to come. Nagata Masaichi, in his effort to present himself as completely in tune with the thinking of the Bureau section chief, invoked it frequendy. Similarly, when Kawazura called on the film industry to “ strip itself naked” (i.e., divest itself o f all ulterior motives) and to join in the government’s new system, Nagata seized on that image too, calling on his fellows to “ make ourselves stark naked and share our innermost thoughts.” 57 Kawazura’s “ maximum effect with the barest minimum of resources” was also taken over by Nagata and others. Eigajunpo made it a topic for discussion in a zadankai article in which participants stretched their imaginations (to say nothing of their readers’ credibility)

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by suggesting that studios shoot their films at sixteen frames per second rather than the standard twenty-four: “ I hear that Eastman started push­ ing the twenty-four frames a second standard as a means of upping the consumption of his product,” one participant averred.58 As with Tatebayashi Mikio and Fuwa Suketoshi before him, Kawazura proved himself a master at setting linguistic traps designed to en­ snare and dominate the film executives. And, as we have seen, the latter entered the traps with ready gullibility. When a film became a “ bullet,” its corollary was clear—those on the production line would have to ac­ cept decisions made at the government level about the number and type of “ bullets” to be produced. Henceforth, cinema would have to con­ form to the logic of a metaphor. O f course, even as a “ weapon in the world war of ideologies,” cinema did have, as the bureaucrats put it, an “ entertainment function.” But, this too would have to be rationalized in terms of the “ comfort and consolation” it afforded those striving to win the war. The metaphor seemed to have a hypnotic effect on film executives, filmmakers, and the critics, allowing Kawazura to control the discourse and perhaps even the thinking of all parties involved. It had the power to disarm resistors, forcing them into lockstep with its logic. Meanwhile, the drama of high-level intrigues was about to thicken considerably. A new personality appeared on the scene to menace Nagata’s leading position in the new “ Wartime Emergency Film System.” Nikkatsu’s Hori Kyusaku had decided to set in motion a power play of his own. As a member of Japan’s oldest film company, he deeply re­ sented being at the mercy o f “ the upstart of Shinko,” Nagata Masaichi. His counterplan called for the absorption of both Shinko and Daito into Nikkatsu. Since his company was already under the joint domina­ tion o f Toho and Shochiku, this was far from an easy idea to put for­ ward. Furthermore, with Nagata firmly ensconced in the good graces o f the Information Bureau, Hori had to move against him with the greatest of care. Hori’s first step was to draw Shochiku magnate Otani TakejirO into the scheme by persuading him to fire all the other top executives of Nik­ katsu on 30 October, “ in order to save the company.” In their place, Hori was put in a position of exclusive control as managing director. Next, he secured Otani’s backing to hoist himself into the council that was negotiating with the government. When Kawazura tried to block him from joining the discussions, Hori bypassed him by drawing upon the support of his bitter rivals at the Home Ministry'.

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With the instincts of a sharp corporate lawyer, Hori set to work outmaneuvering the Bureau. “ Nikkatsu’s policy is based on the joint agree­ ment of all its chief holders,” he argued. “ If our creditors do not jointly agree, there is no way for even the Bureau to order this merger.” 59 Hori knew that Nagata’s plan had won the tacit support of the Kawazura group, and so his strategy was to adopt various arguments designed to throw them into disarray. He thereby managed to slow the momentum and, while the Bureau was puzzling out a response, he advanced yet an­ other plan o f his own. The latter called for turning over all of the facil­ ities of Nikkatsu’s nearly bankrupt production division to Nagata’s newly formed company (soon to be called Daiei). Nikkatsu, meanwhile, would maintain its independence and identity as a distribution com­ pany, based upon its vast nationwide network of theaters. At this point, Hori’s efforts received a boost from a completely unex­ pected direction. On 18 October, the Konoe government was replaced by Tojo Hideki, and almost immediately, Japan moved toward its final showdown with the “A BC D ” powers. On the morning o f 8 December, Hori Kyusaku went to the Infor­ mation Bureau headquarters for his own showdown. The whole nation had been in a state o f tense excitement over the news about Pearl Har­ bor and the landings in Malaya. Although the meeting went ahead as planned, there were constant interruptions due to the steady stream of bulletins from the various fronts. The attention of the Information Bu­ reau officials was clearly distracted from the business at hand. For them, the Hori plan now seemed to represent little more than a tiny detail in a vast new propaganda effort. And, as Kido Shiro was later to recall, “ the Bureau had never really thought out the film situation in its entirety, and since it tended to stress control over the production phase, it was not particularly averse to Hori’s ideas about distribution.” 60 Almost by de­ fault, therefore, Hori’s scheme for rescuing Nikkatsu by reincarnating it as a promotion-exhibition company became part of the new regime for film during the Pacific War era.61 Still, Nagata also emerged with something to show for his efforts. When the Greater Japan Motion Picture Company (Dai Nihon Eiga or Daiei) came into existence with Shinko Company as its controlling con­ stituent, Nagata was made Daiei’s managing director. Toho and Shochiku, which had hoped to evenly divide the film world amongst them­ selves, bore an understandable grudge against the “ smooth-talking opportunist” (Kido’s favorite epithet for Nagata).

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A final twist in the film world melodrama came less than a year later, giving Kido and the other Nagata-haters a measure o f satisfaction. On 10 October 1942, Managing Director Nagata was arrested in his office by police detectives. The charges were vague, but they included the ac­ cusation that he had bribed Information Bureau officials. The real problem seems to have been that Nagata had created for himself a flamboyant image that could easily be interpreted as out of harmony with the “ national unity” spirit of the times. Although all of the details have yet to come to light, Nagata seems to have fallen victim to the chronic infighting among the various bureaucratic agencies. Throughout the Pacific War, just as the army was often pitted against the navy, there was a constant vying for prestige and power between the Home Ministry and the Information Bureau. Hori Kyusaku, whose personal interests lay with the Home Ministry, expressed the widely held impression that there were “ definitely many selfish mo­ tives at work among the officials o f the Bureau.” 62 Conjectures o f this kind turned into viciously inflamed rumors, and these, in turn, were used by the various plotters to terrify their enemies. Before long, both Daiei and the Bureau were engulfed in a wave of charges and insinua­ tions. Nagata, who was never formally charged during his fifty days in­ carceration at Kosu Prison, was probably one of the victims o f the shadow war between the Home Ministry and the Information Bureau. His well-known back door access to the Bureau’s inner councils had apparendy made him particularly vulnerable. The incident seems to have thoroughly dismayed the Bureau leadership. In December 1942, Kawazura, the last o f the Reform Bureaucrat “ superstars,” was fired from his position. A few months later, Fuwa Suketoshi departed for an ob­ scure post in the Chunghua Dyan’ying offices in Shanghai. It was the end o f an era. The period between 1940 41 saw a surge in bureaucratic edicts directlyimpinging on the creative aspect o f filmmaking, almost all o f which were phrased in the virtually impenetrable rhetoric of the Japanese bu­ reaucrat. Inevitably, this situation had a severe psychological impact on the filmmakers themselves. The following chapter will explore the con­ sequences o f bureaucratic excess on individuals in the film world. Some, such as Iwasaki Akira, would actually experience the dreaded “ knock in the night.” Others would capitulate in fawning attempts to ward it off.

9 Repression and Internalization of Control

No Regrets for Whose Youth? In the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, Kurosawa Akira made a fascinating and disturbing film called No Regretsfo r Our Youth (Waga Seishun ni Kui Nashi, 1946, Toho). It starts in 1933, when the government turned its attention to driving the last o f the liberals out o f the univer­ sities. A Kyoto University Law Department professor (Okochi DenjirO) leads his students in the resistance movement. He is especially close with two students, Noge (Fujita Susumu) and Itokawa (Kono Aritake), both o f whom are in love with his daughter Yukie (Hara Setsuko). Noge is stalwart in his leftist beliefs and sees clearly the advent of fascist repres­ sion. Itokawa is nonchalant and optimistic. Eventually the movement is crushed, and the professor warns his students that they must end their resistance. Itokawa is relieved since he has been under heavy pressure from his poor, widowed mother to finish school and rise in the world. Noge storms out and disappears into the (Communist) underground. Seven or eight years pass and Itokawa has risen in the world as a chief prosecutor. Noge meanwhile has become a virtual fugitive. Yukie, who loves and admires Noge for his strong social conscience, marries him. Since he continues his covert activities, they live in the knowledge that he will someday be arrested. When this hap­ pens, Yukie is also taken by the police and grilled mercilessly. She stead­ fastly refuses to say anything to betray her husband. After her release, she hears that Noge has died in prison. Yukie goes off to take care of Noge’s parents, a poor farming couple who must endure shame and in­ timidation as “ parents of a spy.” Remaining true to her beliefs, Yukie tells Itokawa that “ time will be the judge o f who was right.” With the end of the Pacific W'ar, Yukie and the professor are widely acclaimed for their resistance to oppression. The film is a wishf ul fantasy. Although there were indeed some w'ho

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endured arrest and torture without committing tenko, the film misrepre­ sents the real situation faced by men (and women) of conscience in that era. While there were a few real spies, the vast majority of those ar­ rested were mere “ thought offenders,” almost all o f whom eventually recanted and went on to provide useful services for the state. They had been selected for intimidation largely because of some flamboyant ac­ tivity that had brought them to public attention. The rest of the nation’s intellectuals and artists found ways to still their consciences and to conform. When the actress Okada Yoshiko defected into Soviet territory on Sakhalin (Karafuto) in January 1938, the public tended to see her act as one o f insane folly. As the saying went, “ for the Japanese, there is no Switzerland,” no safe haven where one could escape. As a matter of fact, arrests for violations of the Peace Preservation Law de­ clined dramatically from a high o f 14,622 (with 1,285 indictments) in 1933 to ^23 (162 indictments) in 1941. By the time of the Pacific War, if not considerably earlier, almost all of the nation’s “ best and brightest” were active collaborationists. A look at the names most prominently involved in the making of No Regretsfor Our Youth proves the point perfectly. Hara Setsuko and Fujita Susumu were both indispensable presences in spiritist and other na­ tional policy films from 1940 to the end of the war. Its scriptwriter, Hisaita Eijiro, had been arrested before the war as a leftist dramatist and underwent tenko conversion in prison. During the war he scripted Yoshimura KOzaburo’s Final Struggle (Kessen, 1943) and other national policy scenarios. As for Kurosawa, most of his wartime work (films and scripts) were either variations on spiritist themes or explicit propaganda pieces. Looking at the collaborationist backgrounds of these people, the film’s tide No Regretsfor Our Youth seems cynical, if not defiant. “ No regrets” for whose youth? However, aside from acknowledging the bare facts o f their earlier years, there is no need to besmirch their reputations further. Kuro­ sawa, Hara, and Hisaita all went on to artistic greatness in the post­ war years. The first two, especially, are known and loved throughout the world. Rather than condemning them for their wartime activities, the purpose of this chapter is to explore a small part o f the pathology of creative minds under totalitarian control. The time for pursuing the issue of individual “ wartime responsibility'’ has long since passed; the time for understanding what really happened has been too long delayed.

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Iwasaki Akira Goes into the “ Pig Box” Although we cannot ascribe all o f the motivations of the film people to fear of “ the knock in the night,” neither can it be underestimated. The sizable body of tenko literature, much of it produced before the end o f the war, is eloquent on the subject. Murayama Tomoyoshi, an impor­ tant figure in prewar Japanese painting, avant-garde theatre, and film, was one o f those who had undergone tenko. His novel, White Nights, viv­ idly describes a character “ sitting in the dark corner of his prison cell, visualizing the scene of torture by the police.” Eventually, he “ ends up with the full recognition that he could not stand up to such conditions.” 1 There are also a few first-person accounts of arrest and detention by people of the film world. For instance, Sakasai Koichiro’s A Cinema life vividly describes the left-wing activist movement on the lot of Shinko Kinema and the violent police raids that eventually destroyed it in the early thirties.2 Certainly the most moving account is that o f Iwasaki Akira as re­ corded in his memoir, A Personal History o fJapanese Film. Candidly he tells of his arrest, his year-long imprisonment, and the unbearable anxieties that afflicted him. For this reason, we can probably take it as a faithful measure o f how far courage and resolve can take one under such condi­ tions. His chilling depiction begins quite literally with a “ knock in the night” in January 1940: I can still hear that ferocious pounding on the door, breaking the predawn silence. I went down to the entryway clad only in my pajamas, while my wife fearfully peered down from above. “Who is it?” I demanded. My breath billowed white in the chilly air, and my arms were shaking from either the cold or the excitement. It was as I had expected. No sooner had I unfastened the hook than the door was violendy slid open. Two men in black overcoats forced their way in and pushed me down onto the step. As I struggled to my feet, the taller of the two announced, “You’re Iwasaki, right?” “Who arc you?” “ From Ikebukuro.” They were the district police. Around this time, just about everyone who was the least bit involved with a “ movement” was being arrested, detained, or imprisoned. Since I had worked with Purokino [the Proletarian Cinema Union], I had already had several experiences in the “ pig box” [jail]. I knew they would fashion a criminal title for me, which, of course, I would firmly

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reject. This time, however, I had the gut feeling that the matter would not be over with the expiration of the twenty-nine-day “detention” period allowed under law. The detectives were soon joined by a third who had been guarding the back door. They came into the house and began a scrupulous search. Above the ceiling, under the porch, under the window sills, under the tatami mats, inside the walls —they searched it all. Next, they tackled the bookshelves, piling books, magazines, and newspapers onto the floor. From my desk they pulled out notes, diaries, and manuscripts, and added these to the mound as well. My only “fortune” was my library, and it was quite large. Ignoring the usual Japanese novels and plays, which even the detectives knew to be harmless, they grabbed every book on which the author’s name was written in katakana [i.e., translations of foreign works], since it was assumed that such books were the source of “dangerous thoughts.” These they carted ofT to the police stauon, and I with the rest. I understood that it took them three trips to get it all. During the months I was confined to the “Special Detention Room,” at Ikebukuro Station House, my several hundred books remained piled up right outside the door. In this way irreplaceable works were lost to me forever.3 Throughout the three coldest months of winter, Iwasaki was held without charge in an unheated cell. “ I carefully folded my overcoat into a floor cushion and sat on it, day in and day out, jiggling my legs to get warm. I was given no hint of how long this would go on.” When ques­ tioning began in early April, the detective of the Special Higher Police focused his questions on Iwasaki’s involvement with the Dialectical Ma­ terialism Study Circle and the Film Theory Research Circle. As Iwasaki could point out, however, all the meetings of these two groups had been carried out in strict accordance with the law. In fact, they had been at­ tended by a plain clothes member of the Thought Police, who sat there openly taking notes. But the interrogators only responded by saying, “just because its not forbidden doesn’t mean its permitted.” The real reasons for Iwasaki’s arrest were never fully explained. On one occasion, however, he was given a broad hint. On that day, he and one of the detectives sat around the brazier in the interrogation room as they were waiting for the day’s questioning to begin, engaging in light conversation. As was often the case in such circumstances, the mood was friendly and informal. Suddenly the policeman commented to him in a half-joking manner, “ You know, Iwasaki, you wouldn’t be in this fix if you hadn’t gone and opposed the Film Law and had that argument

Iwasaki Akira (1903 81), six years after his ordeal at the hands o f the Thought Police (Eiga Hyoron, M ay 194O).

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with Hayashi Fusao.” 4 Iwasaki had suspected all along that the reason for his arrest had to do with his open criticism of the law, but he was startled and puzzled by the reference to Hayashi. Hayashi Fusao, once a left-wing writer of great repute, had been ar­ rested and imprisoned three times, whereupon he committed tenko. Un­ like the others who had done the same, Hayashi made a genuine switch of sympathies to the ultranationalist position, becoming one of the government’s staunchest supporters in the literary community. Thereaf­ ter, he poured his energies and talents into justifying the war and provid­ ing an intellectual base for the New Order. He also had a close relation­ ship with the filmworld where he operated as a critic and occasional scriptwriter. In a September 1938 zadankai at Nihon Eiga, he seemed to operate as Tatebayashi’s right-hand man, echoing the latter’s call for “ the complete spiritual renewal of the film industry.” In the same zadankai, he expressed “ profound gratitude” for having been twice jailed: “it forced me to sit quiedy and think things through.” Hayashi then went on to recommend, perhaps jokingly, that “ it might be a good idea to toss all the film critics in there for a while, as well.” 5 This was the same year in which he wrote the original story for the movie Ranch Story (Bokujo Monogatari, Toho, 1938, lost?), about a war veteran who establishes an ultranationalist organization. The unit sponsoring the film was the Cen­ tral Federation for Japanese Culture, which had close ties with the head o f the Home Ministry Censorship Division, Tatebayashi Mikio, and with Police Division chief, Karasawa Toshiki. Hayashi’s sincere com­ mitment to the ultranationalist cause continued throughout his postwar life, culminating with his Defense of the Greater East Asian War, published in 1975, the year of his death.6 Iwasaki and Hayashi had been close friends since their school days when they were both active in various Communist cultural movements. Even after Hayashi’s tenko, the old sentimental ties kept the deep ideo­ logical differences between the two under control. Their final break took place around the time of the premiere of Ranch Story. The two were participants in a zandankai for a magazine where they engaged in a heated exchange. Afterwards they went out drinking, presumably to patch up their relationship, but fell to quarreling again. As he stormed out of the bar, Hayashi delivered a last reprimand: “ Clearly you’re still haunted by that old ghost, Marxism. You’re a fool, Iwasaki!!” The two never spoke on friendly terms again. Around the time of Iwasaki’s arrest, rumors had been circulating that Hayashi had been making a “ black list” for the authorities. Iwasaki

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himself was not convinced that it was Hayashi’s intention to have his old friend arrested, and as Iwasaki’s biographer Kazama MichitarO sug­ gests, “ it could have been simply that Hayashi let slip Iwasaki’s name when he was chatting with Police Division Chief Karasawa or Tatebayashi Mikio.” 7 From the beginning, it seemed clear to Iwasaki that the police interro­ gators were intent on drawing out the process for as long as possible. Eventually, he was ordered to write a “ memorandum,” the usual method o f coaxing a prisoner on the way to tenko. They made it clear that this was the only way for him to gain eventual release. Furthermore, he was becoming anxious about his own deteriorating physical condition. “ I was afraid. My mind dwelt on the diseases and the lingering death so often brought on by prolonged incarceration; and this undercut my faith in the ideals I had once cherished the most.” 8 Iwasaki was required to spend a month writing a report about his former life and activities. Such was standard procedure in eliciting a tenko conversion. When he submitted it, however, it was rejected out of hand: “ Do you think we could accept a memorandum as silly as this? Go soak your head in cold water and rewrite the whole thing!” 9 He was then handed someone else’s memorandum and told to use it as the base for his own. Apparently, even when it came to “ personal confessions,” one had to follow a precstablished form. While he was in the Ikebukuro “ pig box,” Iwasaki experienced di­ rect physical abuse for the first and only time during his incarceration. He had joined in a protest over the serving o f rotten rice and was taken out of his cell and beaten with a bamboo stick, a favorite weapon of prison authorities and the kempei military police against their helpless prisoners. On 9 September 1940, Iwasaki was taken from the police station and driven through the streets o f Tokyo. This was his first sight o f the out­ side world since his arrest in January. “ My unruly beard stuck out every’ which way and I had what we called ‘a prison tan,’ a pale gray tinge to the skin caused by prolonged deprivation o f sunlight. In short, I looked like your typical criminal type.” 10 His destination was the Tokyo Superior Court building in Kasumigaseki, where he was summarily told that “ as we have not yet decided on the disposal of your case, you are hereby remanded into the custody of the Tokyo Detainment Facility.” Conditions in the new “ pig box” were, if anything, worse than at Ikebukuro. “ Still, aside from suffering an­ other long spell of imprisonment amid swarming bugs, foul air, and

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unimaginably filthy conditions,” Iwasaki recalled, “ I experienced no di­ rect violence.” 11 Some of those around him were not so lucky. One day a pair of stu­ dents, clearly of Korean parentage, were brought in as thought crimi­ nals. For several days thereafter, they were taken into a special room for questioning and torture. Iwasaki was deeply impressed by their brave bearing, for when they returned to their cells they refused to show any terror of their ordeal. Iwasaki was finally released on 22 February 1941. This of course did not mean that he was completely “ free,” for he had been placed under “ protective custody” (actually a form of strictly monitored parole). For­ tunately, Iwasaki had good friends in the film industry, among them Negishi Kan’ichi, the former studio chief at Nikkatsu Tamagawa. For sev ­ eral years, Negishi had been head of production at Manchurian Film Company (Man’ei) in Shinkyo (Harbin), and it was his idea to place Iwasaki in the Tokyo branch office of Man’ei as a means o f “ reintegrat­ ing” him into normal society. Since Man’ei operated under official gov­ ernment sponsorship, Iwasaki’s affiliation with the company would have the appearance of cooperation with the government, and such would certainly improve the conditions o f his parole. This was what Iwasaki liked least about the plan, and, for a time, he resisted it. But when Negi­ shi promised him that his involvement in the actual work of the com­ pany would only be marginal, Iwasaki finally agreed. Thus, in the end, even Iwasaki Akira was drawn into the system he had fought so hard against.

Dancing in a Circle o f Spearmen It is not easy to imagine the intolerable pressures a totalitarian system can bring to bear on the lone individual, especially someone endowed with artistic sensibilities and imagination. Tsukasa Osamu is surely cor­ rect when he warns us against judging such people’s actions without really understanding the situation: “ Only those who have actually lived through the period can understand the vigorous efficiency with which antiwar thinking was rooted out. The eyes and ears of the authorities seemed to be everywhere, penetrating every level of society.” IThe key ingredient of that situation was not the actual laws and pris­ ons and police brutality; it was the constant unease threatening the mental well-being of artists and intellectuals. A well-wrought totalitar­ ian system docs not have to constantly employ methods of brutality. It

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succeeds best when it permeates the imagination, causing the artist to punish himself for acts against the system. In the end, he will internalize the censorship codes and apply them more harshly against himself than ever the censor could from the outside. The following anecdote about Mizoguchi shows us how this imagined terror can work, even on an art­ ist noted for his unflinching realism and brave social criticism. Yoda Yoshikata, his scriptwriter and close collaborator, narrates the tale of what happened immediately after finishing Osaka Elegy (1936): Mizoguchi asked me to come at once, so 1 hurried over to his home in Omuro [near Kyoto] and found him sitting cross-legged on the porch in a spot of sunlight. He was terribly worked up. “Well, you sure got me into plenty of trouble with your writing!” “What are you talking about?” I asked. “ Don’t ask me what. You know perfectly well. I may end up having to go to prison, that’s what!” “ Did something happen with Osaka Elegy?” “It’s been confiscated by the censors.” I was shocked. I had been overwhelmed with such exultation and was filled with tremendous hopes. Now, suddenly, I felt a vast darkness settle on my heart. Gulping down some beer, Mizo[guchi] said, “ I got a call from the Home Ministry. So I’m prepared for whatever might happen.” Assistant Director Takagi, who had come in with me, tried to give him some reassurance: “ But there’s nothing to be so scared of just because the Censorship Office has called you in.” Mizo almost exploded in response, “You just don’t know anything at all! All they have to do is push a button and the whole matter is handed over to the police. Just one push of the button and a police officer is on the way over.” “Can’t you talk things out?” “ Impossible! Absolutely impossible!” Hearing this I was plunged into despair. A few days later, Mizoguchi made the trip up to Tokyo. Just to indicate how things came out, the confiscated film was somehow passed by the censor and released without a single cut. We were all overjoyed, and hearing that Mizo was back from Tokyo, I went over to the studio. He was seated in a chair with his right shoulder raised —his characteristic gesture. He was in high spirits and had his chest thrust way out with a kind of braggadocio. I greeted him saying, “It must have been a really trying experience. But it’s great that it came out all right.” Without even looking at my face, he addressed the rest of the people in the room: “The censors are

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all a bunch of kids! They don’t know anything about anything.” Afterwards, I had a chance to speak privately with Takagi, who had gone up with Mizo. “The old man’s really changed his tune, hasn’t he,” I said. “What happened up there, anyway?” “ He was so worked up he just couldn’t get himself to go into the office. He begged me to go in his place. He just wanted to stand in the hallway. So I tried everything I could, telling him that it looked like everything would work out just fine. Suddenly he said ‘Do you think so?’ And this gave him the courage to go in.” Hearing this, I could clearly visualize Mizogchi’s face and I began to laugh so hard I had to hold my stomach. This was one of the many times I couldn’t decide whether Mizo was a weak person or a strong one.13 Mizoguchi and Yoda then immediately moved on to create their sec­ ond masterpiece, Sisters o f the Gion (Gion no Shimai, Daiichi Eiga, 1936). Comparing the two films, Yoda was to write: “ Structurally, Sisters is the better o f the two. But when it comes to frankness o f expression and depth o f its engagement with society, Osaka Elegy is by far the better film.” 14 Yoda seems to be implying here that the scare Mizoguchi had experienced over Osaka had caused him to retreat, ever so slighdy, in his stance of social criticism in Sisters o f the Gion. Two films later, in 1938, Mizoguchi would make his second disas­ trous foray into national policy films, Camp Song (Roei no Uta). As we have already noted, such collaborationist films tended to freeze his creative inspiration, leaving him deeply humiliated after he had finished. Post­ war, Mizoguchi would comment about Camp Song that the company “ pushed me so hard that I decided to quit once it was finished.” 15 To this, Yoda replies skeptically: “ Mizo claims he had been forced into it, but if he had been really adamant, the company would of course have backed down. After all, he was Mizoguchi Kenji!” 16 Although Yoda as­ cribes other possible motives for making the film, one can imagine that the desire to please the authorities played no small part, as it surely did when he joined the team of directors to make yet another one, Song of Certain Victory (Hisshoka), in the last year o f the war. There appear to be certain psychological parallels here with the case of the novelist Ishikawa TatsuzO. The artistic temperament o f both men led them to create works sharply edged with aggressive social criticism, which they undoubtedly knew would cause friction with the authorities. And as Yoda reminds us: “ In those days, the Home Ministry was certain

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to swoop down on any work boldly probing the underside of society.” 17 When confronted with the consequences o f their audacity, both men would then quail and retreat to the opposite extreme, where they would overidentify with the authorities. Since Ishikawa was by far the rasher of the two, his rebound into ab­ ject collaborationism was all the more pronounced. In 1938, after writ­ ing and attempting to publish (in the magazine Chuo Korori) his virulendy antiarmy reportage account of the events at Nanjing, Living Soldiers, Ishi­ kawa experienced the full brunt of official terror. He was put on trial and sentenced to four months in prison with a three-year stay o f sen­ tence. None of his fellow writers had the courage to stand up for him in his hour o f need. Later that same year, the army generously gave him a second chance, “ a final opportunity to redeem himself” by writing a more “ positive” book about the war. After revisiting China, he wrote 7~he Wuhan Operation, which was published almost uncut in the January 1939 issue of Chuo Koron. As Donald Keene says, the book “ was written with a totally different intent from that of Living Soldiers.. . . [It] presum­ ably reflected Ishikawa’s decision to clear himself o f the reputation of being opposed to the military.” The author’s capitulation was to serve him well. Having “ established himself in the eyes of the military as someone they [the army] could trust,” he enjoyed official patronage until the end of the Pacific War.18 While Mizoguchi never achieved similar “ trust” from the military, there are indications enough that he tried. Not only did he periodically attempt to make militaristic “ morale-boosters,” but his behavior on other occasions also betrayed a keen desire to identify with the authority of the power structure. On such occasions he seemed to lapse into mo­ mentary hysteria, and his actions took on a ludicrous, operatic quality. In 1942, for instance, Shochiku was planning an army-sponsored film touting “ Sino-Japanese Friendship.” Mizoguchi was to be the director and Yoda the scriptwriter. Yoda relates: As we prepared for the trip to China to gather background material, Mizo’s childishness soared to new heights of hilarious absurdity. First, there was his fretful insistence on outfitting himself with a sword. Connoisseur that he was, just any sword wouldn’t do and word had it that he had set his heart on a genuine Bizen. In any case, he came up with a respectable antique, which he strapped to the belt of his kokumin fuku (national citizen’s uniform). Thus attired, he completed the impression of martial stylishness with a cap and a pair of jackboots.

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Everybody took turns trying to talk him out of it. We pointed out that since he was not going as an army man, his ensemble was a terrible exaggeration. But he wouldn’t listen. Finally, just before our departure, he was overcome by a sudden bashfulness, whereupon he sealed up the sword in his baggage never to draw it out during the entire trip. The next round of zaniness came with his taking umbrage at the level of official hospitality he was to be accorded. It had been quite sensibly pegged at the level equivalent to a colonel. “ If I’m not given the treatment of a full general, the whole thing is off!” he roared. A studio official well versed in such matters tried to smooth his feathers by explaining that the equivalency of a colonel was the very best possible and that he could be sure he would be treated with the utmost courtesy. “ No, this is absolutely unsatisfactory! Go to the GHQand get my rating changed to that of a general. Do they intend to treat me the same as Yoda here, or even Takagi or Sakai? Outrageous!” Then he pulled out his letter of appointment from the Ministry of Education Film Committee (which was cosigned by the Prime Minister). Brandishing it in the air, he shouted “ Look! Signed by the Prime Minister himself! How dare they try to treat me as lower than a general!” 19 The issue was finally setded when they promised him they would look into the matter “ the instant we arrive in China.” In all probability many other film people exhibited similar aberrant behavior. In Mizoguchi’s case, it was limited to temporary episodes clearly in conflict with his basic convictions. Although fear could inspire him to commit acts of which he would later be ashamed, he never made a film designed to convince his audiences o f the rightness of fascism (or even the war). After the war, others whose wartime activity had been far more disreputable than his would cynically invoke “ the hysteria o f the hour” to dismiss their activities in service to totalitarian ideology. Such was the case of Yagi YasutarO, who, as we have seen, tried to pass off the Nazi-like diatribe at the conclusion of his script for Unending Advance as “ the result o f intellectual confusion and anxiety due to the world war.” In fact, however, the same tendency ran through all of Yagi’s wartime work; in addition to writing run-of-the-mill national policy films like A Record o f My Love, he wrote Burning Sky. Yagi also collaborated with Hayashi Fusao to turn out the fascist propaganda piece Ranch Story, and he even maintained a close and profitable friendship with the notorious Captain Amakasu Masahiko.20 The vast majority o f filmmakers had no particular interest in fur­ thering the ideological aims o f the state, and yet a great many did just

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that without the least cynicism. They were not coerced or even threat­ ened; they lent their talents to the effort with apparent willingness and even pride. In their circumstances, conformity and the accompanying official approval must have hovered before the eyes with great allure. Czeslaw Milosz, writing about the intellectuals of Eastern Europe in the 1950s, makes the point that “ it is not ‘might and coercion’ which draws intellectuals into the web of the totalitarian state.” Rather, “ there is an internal longing for harmony and happiness deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.. . . Whatever one might say, the New Faith affords intellectuals great possibilities for an active and positive life.” 21 After the war, Iwasaki Akira would write that “without a doubt, every last one of them [Ozu, Tasaka, Uchida, and various other film artists] harbored strong moral qualms about war. But once the artillery opened up in foreign fields, they rallied to support the war. It wasn’t that they had been forcefully drafted into the war effort. Rather, they gave of themselves freely, feeling it their duty as subjects of the state. In the words of Okuma Nobuyuki, ‘they were completely absorbed into the body politic.” ’22 This “ absorption” phenomenon took several forms, depending upon the individual’s power position within the film industry. The sub­ mission o f the top film company executives, for example, came in the form o f friendly socializing (o-tsukiai). They were caught into a web of personal relationships, friendships, and eventually even loyalties to indi­ vidual government or military officials. Many of the executives partici­ pated actively in the construction of the bureaucratic control apparatus, without sharing a belief in much of its ideological underpinning. Some like Kido ShirO and Toho’s Mori Iwao even harbored liberal tendencies. But these beliefs too were little more than vague sentiments, which could easily be set aside. As Mori admitted postwar, he had been “just another ‘powerless liberal,’ never a banner-waving antiwar stalwart.” 23 In the early stages of their fraternization with the authorities, the ex­ ecutives thought o f their dealings with the Home Ministry bureaucrats as simply a higher order o f business negotiations in which each side jockeyed for the best deal possible. Kido, for instance, would claim he had supported the Film Law because “ it allowed us to negotiate with the army and government people on an equal footing.” 24 W'ith the deepen­ ing “ partnership” between the public and private sectors, however, vari­ ous executives found themselves taking high level posts within the con­ trol apparatus. Kido became Executive Director o f the Greater Japan

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Film Association; Towa’s Kawakita Nagamasa was put in charge o f the production of Japanese propaganda directed at the Chinese. Indeed, as government-sponsored posts and organizations proliferated at home and then, during the Pacific War, in the occupied territories, virtually every filmworld executive (along with a great many directors, scriptwrit­ ers and critics) was awarded his plum in the form of an official tide. Once they became semigovernment officials in their own right, they had to expound on the government slogans and use the bureaucratic jargon of the totalitarian regime as if these were their own. All this while, however, they continued to rationalize their deepening involve­ ment as a means of protecting the welfare of their individual companies and the industry in general. The power struggle over the future of pure “entertainment” films is a case in point. Starting around 1940 and continuing through the early years of the Pacific War, the issue became a focus of contention in the bargaining between the government and the film executives. Although the Infor­ mation Bureau recognized a role for purely escapist films, it condemned the ongoing “ flood” o f entertainment films as wasteful of resources and as harmful to the “ nation’s wartime resolve.” It demanded a far greater commitment to the production o f national policy and military features. Kido and Mori took this to mean that they could negotiate a quid pro quo arrangement, balancing the need o f “ national policy” with en­ tertainment. But, as Mori recounts in his autobiography, the film execu­ tives were fast losing their leverage with the government. Not only was their relative power completely unequal, they had been subtly maneu­ vered into having to empathize with their negotiating partners, the indi­ vidual bureaucrats to whom Mori refers as “ petty clerks” : The policy they used as a cudgel against us was that our films had to raise the fighting spirit of the nation and that any film unlikely to fulfill this task was to be disallowed. Our relative positions of strength thus came to be set in stone, because the policy of the state did indeed confirm the bureaucrats as our watchdogs. And, for their part, these petty clerks were so swept up in the whirlwind of war as to lose any concept of what constituted real entertainment. Although I agreed to cncourage die production of morale-boosters and in fact turned out quite a few of them, 1 still insisted on the counterbalance of solid entertainment features allowing people to forget the war. I argued tirelessly that this was the soundest wartime policy. The petty clerks, of course, did not agree and struck back at us by curtailing our quota of raw film stock.25

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After August 1941, when Kawazura RyuzO dropped his bombshell about “ not one foot o f raw film stock,” the film executives could no longer even pretend that they were bargaining on an equal “ public sector/private sector” footing. Thereafter, good personal relationships with individual bureaucrats, military officers, kempei officers, and other officials became essential to the daily running o f their companies. Such socializing helped to secure vital materials and even personal services. For Nagata Masaichi, who curried a special relationship with Fuwa Suketoshi and Kawazura, it opened for him the doors to personal power. Mori Iwao, meanwhile, writes candidly about one o f his own “ special friends,” an unnamed officer in the Kempeitai: “ Since we had grown rather close, I often had the opportunity to lay before him my ar­ gument for pure entertainment features. He understood my position and ended up supporting me, both openly and secretly. I was equally ap­ preciative o f one other service he could render. If ever I mentioned a yearning for meat or good fresh fish, he would whisk me off to one of the first class underground restaurants where I could feast on succulent delicacies. Since such places purveyed their black-market commodities exclusively to the Kempeitai, ordinary citizens either didn’t know about them or steered clear.” 28 Needless to say, once they were in such relationships, the executives were expected to provide their own “ services,” both on a personal level and through complete cooperation with the government. In order to understand the second manifestation o f “ being swal­ lowed up by the state,” one must appreciate the psychological situation experienced by all intellectuals and artists in the Japan of 1940 41. In his Psychological History of Showa Japan, Takeyama Michio describes it thus: “ With no material for objective judgment, the strain o f prolonged confusion pushed a great many people beyond the breaking point. Thereupon, they mentally went over the edge, floating in an unstable realm where spirits soared and plummeted amid waves of wishful think­ ing and bizarre fantasies. Silly, groundless speculation took on the power of solid reality.” 27 Starting in late 1940, after the Film Law came into effect and the New Order was inaugurated, various individuals in the film industry' began to display a curious- indeed, a bizarre -kind o f enthusiasm for the totalitarian system of controls and its ideology. They embraced it with a despairing passion similar to Czeslaw Milosz’s description o f in­ tellectuals under Stalinism who “ circled the New Faith like a moth

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around a candle and, in the end, threw themselves into the flame for die glory o f mankind.” 28 The phenomenon was strongest among directors and scriptwriters; it being the particular affliction of those most indmately involved in the creative aspect o f the filmmaking process. In the face o f implacable au­ thority, they lost confidence in their own judgment and began publicly to call on the film authorities for even greater controls and direction. Their anxiety came less from the loss of their freedom than from the wretched uncertainty as to what they were expected to do. One after another, they went into print to grovel at the feet of their inscrutable masters, the censors. In late 1940, Shochiku scriptwriter Inomata Katsuhito reflected the mood in an article tided “ In Praise of Tightened Censorship” : “ I used to bellow my resentment at those irri­ tating censors who seemed to quibble over every line o f a script. But now I see it as a bracing reminder of the utter seriousness o f our duty as writers. Such censorship simply reflects the imperative of these times, warning us that no one can do an irresponsible job anymore. My former bitterness at the tightening of censorship is now transformed into fer­ vent gratitude. It is the hidden benefactor calling the nation’s cinema back from the slopes of decadent decline. It serves as a trusty mentor that sdrs us to true self-awareness and an intrepid spirit.” 29 In 1941, the pleas for more active government “ leadership” became ever stronger. “ Under the spirit o f the New Order, the film projects we propose are unlikely to stray very far in the direction o f ideological wrong-headedness,” Tasaka Tomotaka assured the government in a March 1941 issue of Nihon Eiga. “ Yet we need positive guidance from the authorities lest we be cowed into the production of shallow, formalistic pieces.” 30 In April, only half a year before he was arrested, even Kamei Fumio would make a similar request on behalf of the Culture Film As­ sociation: “ Nowadays we are all aware of the need for a program for the political reeducation of film personnel. The surest way to get this done would be for the appropriate government agency to attach some au­ thoritative person to our research institute in order to provide clear and definite guidelines. I wish to emphasize here that this is the fervent wish of us all.” 31 In December, critic Hazumi Tsuneo expressed dismay at the rising tide of hysteria and urged a return to a more relaxed atmosphere: “This is not a problem confined to the pages o f the film magazines. It encom­ passes the entire filmmaking community. Glance at anything written

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about film in the last half year or so and you find a mood of inexorable austerity, grim sobriety, and unsympathetic rigidity. Writers sound as if they were mouthing lines straight out of a government pamphlet; they speak with the fastidiousness of a straight-laced bureaucrat. There’s nothing particularly strange about a government official sounding off in such tones. But now amateurs intone the same lines in the same high flown manner. It’s grotesque and I wish they would stop it.” 32 Even Kikuchi Kan sounded a note of concern about the phenome­ non. Although he never once wavered in his basic faith in the Film Law system, he too perceived that something had unexpectedly gone awry: “ Recently filmmakers have become obsessed with the newly strength­ ened censorship regulations. If the authorities continue to increase con­ trol limidessly, the eventual result is all too apparent. Cinema will be­ come merely a part of the apparatus of state policy, with content so shrunken and austere as to make it anathema to the public. This would end any effective role for it in national cultural life.” 33 It is unlikely that the root cause of this mass derangement lay exclu­ sively with the obduracy of the censorship system. There had to be something more. In fact, over the previous several years, growing pres­ sure had been exerted on filmmakers to engage in a kind o f tenko of the spirit. In late 1938, Tatebayashi Mikio sent out the first call for their complete spiritual conversion: “ Now is the time for all film people to turn their backs on their old ways and, calling on the bodhisattva of universal salvation, to start all over again. Filmmakers must reconfirm in their minds their essential mission as filmmakers. They must no longer seek to satisfy themselves, but cast off their silly notions o f ‘art.’ They must now embrace their true essence as loyal scriptwriters, trust­ worthy directors, and faithful actors in humble service to His Majesty the Emperor.” 34 Thereafter, in their every public pronouncement, Tatebayashi, Fuwa, Kawazura, and others of the official haute monde made it clear that there could be no meeting o f minds between the artist and the state bureaucrat, except as fellow “ servants of the Emperor.” The elite ad­ ministrator, with his vasdy closer proximity to the Throne was, of course, in the superior “ leadership” position. “And,” Tatebayashi would claim, “ the state expects the administrators of film policy to adopt an at­ titude of utter blindness toward matters of ‘artistic quality.’ ” In 1941, Sawamura Tsutomu was also proclaiming the complete subordination of art to the state: “ The goal [of the cinema of the fu­ ture] is not simply to be fun or even artistically excellent. Cinema must

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be of direct service to the state and to the lives of the people. I am not saying that usefulness is the only criterion to be applied; far from it. Cin­ ema must engage the viewer’s interest, and, of course, it must seek the highest aesthetic expression. Still, if we must admit that art involves the artist in an exclusive loyalty to his own personally held beliefs, then it is best that cinema stop trying to be ‘art’ at all.” 35 Japan ’s “ cinema of the future” was officially given a name in May 1941: People’s Cinema (kokumin eiga). The definition o f this new cinema, as provided by the Information Bureau, seemed designed to breed con­ fusion and anxiety: “With its roots thrust deep in the life of the people, it will realize the lofty ideals of our nation. Arising from a deep artistic sense, People’s Cinema will loyally serve national policy as the organ of enlightenment and propaganda.” 36 The filmmaking community found it impossible to understand, let alone conform to, a directive phrased in such high flown, self­ contradictory gibberish. If one had to make a film with its “ roots thrust deep in the life o f the people,” in what way should it differ from the “ slice of life,” shoshimin geki, the very genre that had once been Shochiku’s forte and that was now explicidy condemned by government edict? And what was the meaning of “ a deep artistic sense?” Had not this also been condemned on numerous occasions? Sawamura, who must have been involved in the formulation of the People’s Cinema notion, tried to be helpful by adding commentary of his own: As the war becomes prolonged and the day-to-day lives of the people become aggravated by multiplying complexities, the reality of their lives will lead them into spiritual confusion. Human frailties will gradually rise to the surface, atomizing society. It is at this point that the power of film to unify and exalt the nation’s hundred million souls will be called upon. And what should we show on our screens at this time? Things of broad, general interest, rather than of special interest; the ordinary rather than the bizarre; the beautiful rather than the ugly; images of bravery without grandiosity; images of joy rather than of pathos. These are the principles of the film of the future.37 The effects produced by such “ clarifications” ranged from handwringing bewilderment to utter paralysis of the creative spirit. When the Information Bureau sent out the call for “ superior People’s Cinema scripts,” offering special cash grants to successful candidates, not a sin­ gle new script could be found to satisfy its criteria. Instead, the prize

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money was split between Shochiku’s There Was a Father and Nikkatsu’s General, Staff, and Soldiers, both of which had been written long before the announcement. It was fast becoming clear that an unbridgeable chasm had opened between the bureaucrats and ordinary mortals, including the filmmak­ ers. They simply did not speak the same language. Appeals for explana­ tion were regularly met by utterly incomprehensible exhortations: “ We expect films that can be loved and understood by all the people, which stir their souls, give them courage to overcome every obstacle and ad­ versity, lead them to hopeful, healthy lives, and imbue in them the driv­ ing energy of wholesome (kenzen naru) thought.” 38 In an early 1941 magazine article tided “ What Is ‘Wholesome?’ ” the famous playwright Miyoshi Jü ro cited the definitions given by two top bureaucrats—each clearly contradicting the other: “ Pronouncements by figures o f authority multiply, the contradictions getting compounded twenty-fold.” 39 To describe the situation of the conscientious filmmaker, Miyoshi used a striking simile: “ It is like dancing in the middle of a cir­ cle of spears. The spearmen, thrusting into the circle, feel no particular danger. But what of the dancer? If he even touches one of the spears, his blood drenches the ground. A dancer may, of course, choose to with­ draw from the circle. But this is not an option many filmmakers would choosc lightly. So the problem is, how is one to dance? Now is the time for a control policy of explicit instructions.” 40 Control bred bewilderment, bewilderment bred anxiety, and anx­ iety bred pleas for even more exacting control. This was the psychologi­ cal vicious circle that finally subjugated the Japanese filmmaker. The fol­ lowing roundtable discussion, published in the March 1941, offers a glimpse into the process by which filmmakers embraced and internal­ ized control: Now that we are fortunate enough to have a film law, the new leadership spirit can move the entire medium toward a single objective. Each of the administrative agencies is eager to press forward on this. Even if there are personnel changes, the spirit of the law will not be diverted, no matter what. This is because its foundations have been firmly fixed. t a n a k a s a b u r o (Chairman of the Greater Japan Film Association and former editor of KinemaJunpo): The problem is the lack of specific guidance. Rather than giving us such abstractions as “do it in the spirit of the law,” we need direct leadership we need “intervention,” in the good sense of the term. We want to be told concretely, point by point, fu w a s i'k e t o s h i:

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what needs to be done. As it stands now, it’s entirely unclear whether filmmakers are being instructed to use their past experience or some sort of intuitive “wisdom” to brew up the correct sort of stew. Or, is it the case that the government people are themselves unsure about the matter and therefore only talk about “spirit?” Here’s an example: when it comes to choosing between five different methods (of treating a subject), rather than being told to “interpret the spirit of the law” by ourselves, we want to be told, “do such and such.” Now, this is probably very difficult for you government people to do. But for us, when it comes to filmmaking, it seems to be the only way to overcome problems as they arise. We want you to give us precise guidance from the start. k i m l ’ r a s O t Oj i (film director): I have absolutely no complaints about the Film Law itself. The problem is its actual administration. Up to now, the power invested in those charged with administering its provisions has been too weak. If the administrators could act in a more decisive and clear-cut manner, it would be a great help. f u w a : That’s why we’ve got to strengthen the Film Association into an all-embracing organizadon. If film people get to talk with officials on a regular basis, concrete guidance of this sort can be worked out.41 “ Concrete guidance” was something the bureaucrats were never able to achieve in their policies on filmmaking. In another zadankai, pub­ lished in the August 1943, we find Tanaka SaburO still making the same appeal to the new head of the Information Bureau, Inoue Seiichi: “It’s about time the authorities came up with a concrete, point-by-point lead­ ership plan, telling us precisely what they want and how they want it done. In its absence we wander in a chilly fog looking over our shoulders in constant anxiety.” 42 The filmmakers’ slavish embracement of control had been brought on by a neurotic capitulation before the incomprehensible mouthings of the bureaucrats. With this capitulation, they surrendered to the state their creative powers. Thereafter, it was up to the state —the Informa­ tion Bureau, the military, and, at a later stage, even the Kempeitai—to decide what to do with this power. To the bureaucratic mind, creativity was like any other “ strategic power source.” The government adminis­ trator thought of it as something that could be controlled and rationed “ turned on or turned off,” as Tatebayashi Mikio had put it some years before —in any manner the state in its wisdom saw fit. In an attempt to debunk the metaphoric reification of art as a commodity or a “ re­ source,” one film reporter pointed out, “ Film art is not a material ‘thing.’ If one is running short of sake, one could get by in a pinch by

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watering it down. But who can seriously believe you can ‘extend’ art by diluting it or, by botding it and keeping it in ready reserve?” 43 Nor did the film-going public much appreciate the ideologically “ correct” films this collaboration produced. In the closing days o f 1941, Hazumi Tsuneo went to the big Nichigeki Theatre to see Sawamura Tsutomu’s film The Sun o f the Eighty-eighth Year. The posters outside the theater proclaimed it to be “ Dedicated to our one hundred million fel­ low countrymen!” The film’s lavish budget and star-studded cast should have assured it a good audience. But, after the lights came up and the thrilling military theme music faded away, Hazumi looked around at the many empty seats in the huge theater. “ Not a voice was to be heard. But it was far from the silence o f speechless admiration. Rather, in the mosdy deserted hall, the faces had a puzzled and self-scorning look. They looked as if they had just realized they had been hoodwinked by the fox in the fairytale.” 44 After being cowed and, to a greater or lesser extent, made “ servants of the state,” filmmakers along with the rest of the nation faced a new chal­ lenge. The next chapter looks at the coming of the Pacific War and the films made in the early “ season of victory.” In these latter we often find strange echoes o f Western imperialist attitudes and, even, racial stereo­ types all too familiar in earlier Hollywood films.

10 The First Year of the Pacific War

The Japanese Filmworid: “ In the Light o f a Perfectly Clear Situation” In the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the editors of Japan’s mass-circulation magazines sent out waves of reporters to track down and interview prominent cultural figures about their feelings on that fateful day. The respondents, including famous professors, movie stars, novelists, poets, and radio broadcasters, uniformly reported their deep satisfaction that “ the inevitable conflict has commenced at last.” With the same enthusiasm she had shown in her China Incident “ re­ portage,” Hayashi Fumiko rhapsodized in Shufu no Tomo: “ This dawn of all future dawns bathes us in a clear morning light.. . . Gratitude springs from our soaring hearts.” 1 Fellow novelist Ozaki ShirO wxote from a troop ship pulling out o f Saigon harbor: “Amid the densely packed troops on deck, I looked out at the old sea with new eyes. Only the day before, the sight had been so wearying; now it seems to surge with re­ newed life.” 2 Director Makino Masahiro, who had missed the morning an­ nouncement because o f a golfing excursion with his scriptwriter Oguni Hideo, records the strange elation o f those around him: Strolling back to the clubhouse, I spotted a single-page newspaper “extra” edition fluttering on the ground. I picked it up and read the news that was stirring the entire nation.. . . Although there was no particular reason to hurry, we tore back to the studio where the air was crackling with excitement. Furukawa Roppa [the comic actor] seized me by the arm. “ It’s war! A man’s pathway to glory!” he ranted. “ Don’t you think so, Makino-chan? Soldiering is a man’s pathway to gloryjust like the stage actor as he storms down the hanamichi." People standing around were struck by Roppa’s phrase. We all agreed it would make a good film tide and so, later in the day, I wrote it down on a piece

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The First Year of the Pacific War of paper and stuck it up on the studio bulletin board. And in fact we did use it as a film ude.3

Yamamoto KajirO, whose Hone had been the major box-office sensa­ tion of the year, heard the news from his wife as he was leaving in the morning for the Toho studio. His frank postwar analysis of his reaction rings true and was probably shared by many of his fellow countrymen at the time: Upon hearing the news, I felt a subde sensation of pleasure at everything becoming clear at last. We had received no substantial rationale for fighting [during the China Incident].. . . The ten years leading up to that December morning, spanning the years in which I grew from late youth to early manhood, had been filled with phantoms one could never reach out and touch. Now, on this particular morning, an enemy and a reason for fighting had been made obvious. One need not think about whether or not we would win or whether our cause was just. It was as if a black curtain had suddenly been drawn back, bathing us in the light of a perfecdy clear situadon. It was a heady sensation.4 In their own autobiographies, neither Shochiku’s Kido nor Toho’s Mori Iwao make special mention of their feelings on the occasion. For Mori, the new war only meant more headaches: “ Thereafter, manage­ ment problems went from bad to worse, increasing in number by leaps and bounds.” 5 After four and a half years of murky warfare in China, the reasons for the conflict had faded from public view. Films (and novels) o f the for­ mer era had tended to portray it as a perpetual war, as if it were part of the modern existential condition. To be sure, the authorities had inter­ dicted the depressing images presented in Kam ei’s Fighting Soldiers—the dying animals, the war-weary’ soldiers, and the sullen refugees —but even Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers (1939) presented a view o f the war not very different. Most combat films of that period depicted the war’s futil­ ity graphically, as a grueling road that winds ever onward across a rav­ aged landscape. The eponymous hero of Tank Commander Mshizumi (1940) would tell his men bluntly that “ the war’s just started. . . . Our enemy’s not just China. It’s all those countries opposing the construc­ tion o f the New Asia. So tighten your belts, men.” 6 The new war against the Anglo-American powers, with its sudden, ecstatic revelation of a “ perfecdy clear situation” seemed to whisk away all grim fatalism. Still, only the foolish or the hopelessly optimistic really

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believed ultimate victory would be swift. As Kikuchi Kan pointed out to his readers in the early spring of the next year, “ there are those who caution us the war might last five, ten, or even a hundred years.” 7 But at least the broader picture had now come into focus. The AngloAmerican powers could at last be openly proclaimed as Japan’s “ mortal enemy,” the opponent Japan should have been fighting all along. Kurosawa Akira, Yamamoto KajirO’s disciple and chief assistant di­ rector, would use this notion of “ a mortal enemy” (shukuUki) to impart a double meaning to the climactic fight scene in his first directorial work, Sugata Sanshird (1943). SanshirO’s opponent is Higaki Gennosuke, a suavely sinister, alien figure who regularly appears in a top hat and car­ rying a walking stick. He has challenged SanshirO to a fight in a desolate field at night with “ the stakes in this fight our very lives.” Just before the batde, SanshirO’s companion warns, “ I always knew you two were des­ tined to a great match of strength, but this is a fight to the death. This is not permitted!” Sugata’s opponent, Higaki, gives his own response to the warning: “ If we had been permitted to fight it out earlier, perhaps it would not have come to such an ultimate conflict as this.” 8 The ensuing batde, as befits a struggle between mortal enemies, is long and grueling. Both conflicts, the one in Kurosawa’s film and the one unfolding in the Pacific, were more than mere contests of prowess. They seemed to represent the inevitable collision o f two incompatible ways of thinking or, even, of “ being.” An article by ultranationalist Okushi Toyo’o in the January 1942 issue of Bungei Shunju emphasized the point: “ Victory in this war will have significance transcending the batdefield. First of all, like the night wind blowing away old storm clouds, it will sweep away that pernicious hegemony that the Anglo-Americans once held over our minds. Similarly, misgivings based on the enemy’s superior material wealth will also be brushed aside. The batde at Hawaii shows us once and for all the disastrous flaw in the American worldview.” 9 This is what T 5j 5 Hideki meant when, in the same year as Sugata Sanshird, he declared the war to be “ a combat o f spirit against spirit.” 10 Unlike the Anglo-American side, which conceived the war in terms of political institutions (democracy vs. fascism) and racial stereotypes (white vs. yellow), the Japanese conception was a struggle to realize, at home as well as abroad, a system of values that was both “ uniquely Japanese” and virtually incomprehensible to the Westerner’s systems of logic. As John Dower demonstrates in his War without Mercy, strong racist undercurrents pervaded the thinking and the propaganda o f both sides

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in the conflict. U.S. depictions o f theJapanese as monkeys and as insects have come under intense scrutiny and much deserved condemnation in several recent Western and Japanese publications.11 Japanese propa­ ganda also tended to portray the Western enemy as various kinds of an­ imals (usually wolves or donkeys who would be turned so as to expose their tails and anuses to the viewer), but the most popular image was as one-horned oni (demons). The task of converting Westerners into nonhuman or subhuman creatures was, of course, complicated by the public’s frequent prewar exposure to the images of attractive Western actors and actresses on the screen. Furthermore, as we have already seen, Western standards of beauty had been adopted for the selection o f actors and actresses from a very early period in Japanese cinema. There is no clear evidence that a new, more “Japanese” standard was ever clearly defined, even during the Pacific War years. Uehara Ken, Takamine Hideko, and Kogure Michiyo all continued to be prominent in the industry, despite their rather occidental looks. On the other hand, one could contend that Hara Setsuko and Fujita Susumu were the preferred choices for roles in the war­ time morale booster because they were perceived as more “ traditionally Japanese-looking.” 12 Propagandistic drama films rarely attempted to make American or British characters look physically repulsive (unlike many Japanese characters in U.S. propaganda films). In fact, actors playing such parts were often quite good-looking. This seems to corre­ spond to the phrase^o-ww, which wartime poets often used to denote the Anglo-American enemy: yd suggesting both “ charming” and “ suspi­ cious” and ma denoting “ demon.” Rather than presenting Westerners as disgusting to look at, they appeared as either sinister, cowardly, or foolish. In the cartoon Momotaro, Divine Warrior of the Sky (1944), for ex­ ample, British General Percival sports the single horn of an oni demon, but the main point o f the scene in which he appears is his quaking cow­ ardice and lack of martial dignity. The manner in which the early victories helped to sweep away much of the lingering feelings of racial inferiority toward Westerners was the theme o f Kamiya Shigeru’s essay “ The Soul o f December Eighth,” in the February 1942 issue of Bungei Shunju: One often hears reports of how Japanese people are despised and discriminated against abroad. When I walked through the sections of Shanghai and Tsingdao reserved for whites, 1 always got a vague feeling of being out of place. It is not because their hair and skin color is

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different from us Orientals, rather it is the invisible barrier coming from the superiority complex harbored by these colonizers and would-be masters of Asia. Even the White Russian refugees in Harbin, so beholden toJapan for their welfare, seemed confident of the dominant status of Western culture. Now, with the recent developments, our uncomfortable feelings have disappeared like the morning mists, and only the blue sky above limits the expansion of our national spirit. A recent excursion to a movie theater confirmed my impression of a sea change in the ordinary Japanese person’s fatuous worship of all things Western. At Hongo-za in January, I attended a showing of news films about the Pearl Harbor attack, along with the Vichy French film Le Grand Elan and a German short praising that nation’s volk. Naive assertions in the latter film caused litde bursts of laughter among the audience, demonstrating they were no longer uncritically impressed by all things Western. In that laughter, I could read a new self-confidence and self-respect.13

Films in the Season o f Victory: 1942 The 1942 New Years film season opened on a clear but chilly Sunday. As in previous years, crowds thronged to the Tokyo entertainment districts o f Yurakucho, near Ginza, and Asakusa. Although the women’s finery was muted, there was more than the usual seasonal festivity in the air. Hong Kong and Manila had just been taken; Kuala Lampur, threequarters o f the way down the Malay Peninsula, was on the verge of fall­ ing; and the name “ Bataan” was on almost everyone’s lips. Aside from the news features fresh from the front, however, there were almost no military films being shown. The film industry had been caught unprepared by the turn o f events and so the theater marquees offered mostly romances and comedies. Shochiku’s top attraction, which opened on 28 December, was Soochow Nights, the love melodrama set in occupied China with Ri Koran and Sano Shuji. Toho’s New Year’s feature was the Hasegawa Kazuo/Roppa comedy that Makino had been shooting in early December. It opened on 7January under the tide Roppa had suggested, A Man’s Pathway to Gloiy. Part 1 of Mizoguchi’s Genroku Chushingura (Shochiku) was still playing in Shinjuku, and, in Asakusa, the usual assortment of jidaigeki were to be found. Reviews of the seasonal fare mirrored the mood of the times. Na­ kamura Noboru’s romance, Another Joy (Aratanaru Kofuku, Shochiku, scripted by Yoshimura KOzaburO and Kinoshita Keisuke) was lam­ basted by Bungei Shunju for its American (i.e., “ enemy” ) flavor: “Although

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it masquerades as a national policy feature, it stinks of the old ethos of individualism and Americanism___Now that we know how easily those vast Yankee warships can be destroyed, we should be exploring the root cause o f the pitiful weakness in the basic tenets of American culture.” 14 The critic was quite correct about the film’s Yankee “ stink” ; it was based on Clarence Brown’s Wife versus Secretary (1936). American-made films, of course, were not shown. Viewers seeking exotic, foreign fare had to setde for one of the several German or Italian pictures or one of the musical melodramas churned out by Peron’s Nazi-lcaning Argentina. Several of the latter were in circulation at the time, Puerto Cerrada and Noches Andaluzas (distributed through the Ger­ man UFA). Shoppers were exposed to a far more militaristic atmosphere. Signs announcing “ Big Spring-of-Victory Sale!” were in many windows. Ban­ ners with war slogans were everywhere: “ In this decisive hour, we plunge forward in self-sacrifice!” “ East Asia is made brilliant with our wartime successes!” The nationwide Marudaka Store chain held a “ Fes­ tival of Military Toys,” and Mitsukoshi in Ginza was just opening its “ Greater East Asian War Exposition,” under the joint sponsorship of the army, navy, and Cabinet Information Bureau. For those with the time and money, travel agents were offering trips to mountain spas. The ad for one destination appealed to the holiday-goer’s patriotic spirit: “ Prepare for National Defense by skiing! —Yuzawa Spa Association.” 15 Newsreel theaters launched a gaudy “ Defeat the Anglo-American Enemy Festival” on 8 January, but the fare was still rather sparse. Nihon News films were fleshed out with the recent documentary Our Navy (Waga Kaigun, Toho, 1941) and another feature tided Sumo Wrestlers. When war broke out in December, the Information Bureau carefully prepared for an even greater burst of public interest than at the start of the China Incident by nearly tripling the usual two hundred copies of each news feature to over six hundred copies for national distribudon. Since this included the first “ footage” of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the early landings in Malaya, the Bureau had the news theaters keep them on the screen for a full two weeks. Actually, as Shimizu Akira points out, the military had cited reasons o f “ military secrecy” to ban movie cameramen from covering the Pearl Harbor attack. According to Shimizu, “ the navy released only a few reconnaissance photographs taken by navy pilots of the damage inflicted on the base, and so the news-film makers had to be content with repeated use o f these stills, augmented by loquacious narrations.” 16 The four-minute Nihon News

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No. 79 (9 December 1941) did feature military images set to a stirring naval march, but these were only the blurry images of the Navy on maneuvers. With actual combat footage still unavailable, the bulk of Nichiei’s first coverage of the new war tended to be montage sequences o f the re­ action at home. The very first shot of News No. yg—the military officers at the High Military Command announcing the “ commencement of hostilities” —immediately became one o f the universally recognized im­ ages of the Pacific War era. After a shot of a crowded and frenzied newsroom (“Japan’s announcement is flashed to all the corners o f the world” ), figures are shown kneeling in front o f the Nijubashi Bridge at the Imperial Palace (“ Prayers for victory are sent up by young and old” ). This was followed by a close up of an outdoor loudspeaker and then of an old man listening with his hand cupped to his ear. The first combat scenes reached theJapanese screen on 16 December (Nihon News No. 80): high-altitude bombing of Hong Kong’s port facilities. The problem with expanding the number o f prints available for dis­ tribution was that the extra copies had been made from film stock allot­ ted according to the ration system established the previous September. Therefore, even as footage of new batdes and victories came pouring in, Nichiei was unable to maintain its trebled rate of distribution. By midJanuary 1942, the newsreel company was back to distributing only two hundred prints nationwide, to cover the fall of Hong Kong and the as­ sault on Manila. The first feature length combat documentaries— Daiei’s Hong Kong, along with Nichiei’s trilogy, Destroying the Enemy—A Record of the Greater East Asian War, The Burning Pacific, and From the Start of the War to the Fall of Manila —were all made under the direct supervision of the Information Bureau and were not to be released until 1 February. O f all the drama films opening in the early days of 1942, the one that most pleased the Information Bureau was Mori Issei’s Omura Masujtro (Shinko, 1942). Omura (played by Ichikawa Utaemon) was among the relatively few “ patron saints” revered by both the army and the navy. He had been one of the pioneers of Japanese military science and the chief proponent of universal military conscription in the very early Meiji pe­ riod. It was he who had promulgated the phrase “All Citizens Are Sol­ diers,” intended to signify the replacement of the hereditary, samurai military caste with a modernized army made up of commoners. In 1869, Omura was wounded by a band o f samurai reactionaries and died a lingering death. In the film, director Mori uses the period during which the great man lay dying to effect a reconciliation between him

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and his estranged wife. The idea was to lend a bit of humanity to a fig­ ure popularly known only through inscriptions on public statues and textbook entries. Director Mori considered this film his best work during the wartime period, and he was especially proud o f the finale: “ In a long shot, we look through the shoji door from outside as the wife approaches and quietly closes it. That was the effect I was looking for—a sense of calm finality, the death of a great man.” 17 Although Mori would claim that Omura Masujirô had been a hit, contemporary reviews do not sup­ port this assertion. Eiga Junpo called it “ stiff, dark, and turgid.” The reviewer’s coup de grâce came in the last line of the article: “ We recom­ mend the film be distributed where it can find its natural audience — there are a great many veteran’s organizations and young men’s patri­ otic associations which would surely show it at one of their meetings.” 18 The film’s great service to the war effort was to reinject the term “All Citizens Are Soldiers” into public consciousness. In the mid-Meiji pe­ riod, the brilliant reactionary Yamagata Aritomo had adopted the slo­ gan for his Prussian-style army, which he conceived as a bulwark against the threat of the liberal and largely antistate People’s Rights Movement. As the phrase implies, all civilians were (potential) soldiers, and they too were morally bound to the Emperor in an ethos of loyalty-unto-death. In the latter stages of the Pacific War, “All Citizens Are Soldiers” re­ vealed a far more ominous dimension. It was used as part of a complex of slogans to imply that if the nation were to go down in utter defeat, all Japanese, civilians as well as soldiers, would be expected to die along with it. This other implication of the phrase was already being developed in the 1942 season of victory. Although Kikuchi Kan often warned his readers against excessive euphoria, he himself was swept up in the new hysteria. When he wrote the following, immediately after the release of Omura Masujirô, he seems to have been completely oblivious to its overtones o f Swiftian irony: “ The creed o f the Empire is that ‘all citi­ zens are soldiers,’ and this is the spiritual foundation of our recent victo­ ries. We who were brought up during the Meiji and TaishO eras were ex­ posed to an education overstressing the importance of life at any cost. From here on, our education o f the young, yea even the very young, should stress notions of life and death placing the state at its very center. I think third and fourth grade elementary students should be instilled with the resolve and taught the techniques o f dying for their nation, just as the eleven and twelve year old sons of samurai were taught how to commit hara-kiri in former times.” 19

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On i April, another of the “ War Preparations” innovations decreed the previous fall went into effect. The nation’s movie theaters were di­ vided into two separate groupings (or “ tracks” ), a White Track and a Red. Each week, the three remaining film production companies (Shochiku, Toho, and Daiei) would provide one film each for the two “ tracks.” The first films to be distributed under this new system were Shimazu YasujirO’s Green Earth (Midori no Tairiku,Toho, 1942) and Ozu’s There Was a Father. Made in strict accordance to the ideological requirements of the Pa­ cific War era, There Was a Father (Chichi Ariki, Toho, 1942) is one o f the few such films to be recognized as an artistic masterwork today. The first draft for Father had been written in 1937 by Ikeda Tomio, Yanai Takao, and Ozu just before the outbreak of the China Incident, but it had to be abandoned when Ozu was called into the service. As Yanai reports, “ We waited for Ozu to get back, and three years later, in 1942, we were sitting around the same old table again. But it was an entirely new era, and this caused us to revise the script.” 20 While the original script is no longer available, making it impossible to say just what was changed, one can easily detect the strong ideo­ logical currents below the film’s placid surface, which caused the U.S. postwar critic Joan Mellen to condemn it as “ containing many of the attitudes encouraged during this [wartime] period o f extreme nation­ alism.” 21 Although David Bordwell commented that “ one can sympa­ thize with Mellen’s criticism of the film,” he takes a far less censorious view of the work, pointing out that “ it is able to make these appeals by virtue of particular patterns that have already emerged in early Ozu films.” 22 The story is deceptively simple. High school teacher Horikawa (Ryu Chishu) takes responsibility for the accidental drowning of a student, resigns his post, and moves back to his hometown with his son, RyOhei (Sano Shuji). A model father, Horikawa insists that his son devote him­ self to his studies and “ make something of himself in the world.” Even­ tually, Ryohei is put into a dormitory while the father goes off to work in Tokyo. This effectively ends their life together, and throughout much of the movie the son pines for his father. However, whenever it seems they can to live together again, “ duty” in one form or another intervenes to make it impossible. On one such occasion, Ryohei exclaims to his fa­ ther: “ I’ve been looking forward to living with you since my junior high school days and I was so sure that this time I would get the chance, but now . . .” At this point, the father launches into his famous lecture on

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the absolute supremacy of duty: “ O f course I want to live with you too. But that wanting and one’s work are two different things. It doesn’t matter what the job is, once it’s given to you, it becomes your sacred vo­ cation. Every man has his duty, which he must fulfill to the best o f his ability. . . . Selfish thoughts are inappropriate; you have to throw away that part of yourself.” Mellen finds such sentiments repellent: “ Ozu could not have made a more subtle appeal to the Japanese support o f the war, since in 1942 their utmost effort for social good could only have been seen in a mili­ tary context.” 23 Bordwell’s analysis, meanwhile, is more concerned with the manner in which the film “ modulates into wartime propaganda” than with simply seeking out its collaborationist elements. Unlike the characters in a Sawamura Tsutomu spiritist film, Horikawa is not a creature straight out of the world o f the elementary school morals text­ books. Rather, his words and actions come from more complex psycho­ logical motivations and are clearly related either to situations occurring within the film or to a wider criticism o f the self-abnegating, rise-in-theworld philosophy dating from the Meiji period. Coloring the views o f critics in 1942 was the fact that There Was a Fa­ ther had been released as an Information Bureau “ People’s Film” (Kokumin Eiga). The designation naturally drew special attention to the issue of its “ leadership function” (i.e., the soundness of its ideological under­ pinnings). “ We should not consider it as an isolated work, but in terms of the wider effects it is likely to have on the public mind,” Iijima Tadashi wrote in a rambling, tortuously argued review, in which he also tried to enunciate a new people’s film aesthetics. “ In films treating ordinary life, such as There Was a Father, there is a tendency to resolve problems on the individual level. But for these personal emotions to take on a na­ tional significance, they must be stirred by the highest form o f artistic inspiration.” 24 Significandy, Iijima fails to elucidate “ artistic inspiration” and even leaves us wondering how he rates the aesthetic merits o f the film under review. Here, in the earliest stages o f the new war, we can already see signs o f the intellectual paralysis that eventually overcame most war­ time critics. The criteria they invoked were often vague, representing a fumbling attempt to bring their criticism in line with the formulae im­ posed by the bureaucrats, particularly the Information Bureau’s power­ ful film czar, Kawazura RyuzO. Just as Kawazura had parlayed his authority to allocate raw film stock into a commanding position in the reorganization of the film industry,

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he now attempted to influence film content and even the standards by which the films were to be judged. The formula he enunciated repeatedly in private consultations and publicly in the film magazines amounted to a set of impossibly contradictory demands, couched in the rhetoric of ex­ hortation: i) turn film into the perfect propaganda instrument for mobi­ lizing mass emotions, while 2) maintaining “ the highest artistic achieve­ ment.” 25 The formula represented one o f the typical traps set by the Japanese bureaucrat to keep those whom they seek to control in perpet­ ual submission, a tactic still in wide use today. Since most films were al­ most certain to fail one or the other of these goals, the officials were free to express their “ deep dissatisfaction” (with both films and filmmakers). This allowed them to keep for themselves the moral high ground in their dealings with the filmworld. O f all the films designated as a “ people’s film,” There Was a Father was the most successful in satisfying the two contradictory demands. Thereafter, high hopes for worthy successors almost invariably met with disappointment. In September 1942, Bungei Shunju would sigh: “ These are really the summer dog days for drama films.” 26 The blue-ribbon board o f leading directors, assigned to read through the hundreds of scripts submitted to the Information Bureau, expressed similar disap­ pointment with the results of their search for “ superior People’s Cinema scripts.” In March, Yamamoto KajirO wrote: “ I was hoping for some­ thing liberating, brave, and fresh. But such hopes were dashed all too soon.” 27 Mizoguchi noted that “ most of the scripts display a political canniness making them either too calculating or too hesitant.” 28 Some superior film scripts did eventually turn up —bringing to public atten­ tion such new talents as Kurosawa Akira and Kinoshita Keisuke—but these few exceptions did little to improve the general situation. By 1944, people’s cinema had ceased to be a meaningful category. O f the fortyone pictures turned out by the three companies that year, twenty-nine received the people’s film designation.

Imaging an Alien World The Occupied South arrived at last on Japanese screens in late May with the premiere of A Bouquetfrom the South Seas (Nankai no Hariataba, Toho, 1942). Its opening credits are superimposed over a montage of waving palms, gendy curling waves, and dark-skinned natives scurrying up palm trees or paddling outriggers into the lagoon. For director Abe Yutaka (of Flaming Skies fame), the islanders were but part o f the local

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fauna. They gaze impassively from treetops at a huge Japanese seaplane banking to descend toward the harbor. Later, giggling, grass-skirted girls flit past the camera, hurrying down to the moonlit beach where the drums are throbbing. The real drama —about a group o f civilian aviators and mechanics begins in a torrential downpour. A new manager has just arrived to take over the company operation on the island in order to restore discipline and to open a new commercial flight lane southward beyond the equa­ tor. One o f the amazing features o f A Bouquetfrom the South Seas is that, despite the vast military operations storming through the region just then, the film features no soldiers, no combat, and not even the mention of warfare. Like its exotic locale, its events take place in a world apart. In the scene where the new manager, Igarashi (Ohinata Den), first ad­ dresses the company men, he reveals himself to be an authoritarian technocrat with only a hint o f the usual spiritist mentality: “ In the face of my utter determination, all obstacles will be mowed down without mercy.” The men smile in sheepish amazement. “ Precision and rational logic are the cornerstones of my managerial policy.” The Americansounding emphasis on rational logic signals a major departure from the previous, “ humanist” and spiritist, depictions of the Japanese group leader. Igarashi arrives to find little o f the iron discipline or unity of pur­ pose of a military group. Many o f the men are strongly individualistic, even disruptively so. A pilot, who has been grounded because o f bad eyesight, wanders around pleading with his fellows to intercede for him with Igarashi. Each time he is refused, he intones, “ You’re just another one o f those heardess characters, aren’t you.” Eventually he goes mad. One of the few elements uniting the men is their dislike and distrust of Igarashi, and an important part of the plot development is the manner in which he eventually proves himself and earns their respect. But he never earns their absolute obedience, and up to the film’s climax he must repeatedly engage in contests of wills. The formula of internal conflict within an individualistic group was a remarkable departure for the era. Its exotic backdrop and spectacular aerial sequences (some using special effects, again supplied by Tsuburaya Eiji) highlight further its apparent debt to Hollywood films of the thirties. Although an anonymous critic in Bungei Shunju grumbled that the film’s “ retrograde American-style mentality” cast doubt on the whole preproduction censorship system,2!) Mita Ikumi, writing in Nihon Eiga, saw matters in a broader perspective: “ Most viewers will spot the

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similarity o f this film to such American productions as Night Flight. Still we must remember that Japanese film is now entering previously un­ known terrain. It must bring before our eyes little-known worlds and re­ alize visually scenes that previously had only been imagined. In the era just dawning, we Japanese are summoned to new and unfamiliar climes. And, in order to meet the challenge, Japanese cinema must acquire the ability to evoke the mood of exoticism, which had once been the forte of foreign features.” 30 The “ exoticism” he refers to here had never been seen as a quality of the East Asian mainland. To the Japanese, the geography and culture of China was contiguous with that o f Japan, and the two regions were bound together by ties of blood and history. To be truly “ exotic,” the peoples and scenery depicted had to be more profoundly alien. “ Exoticism” is o f course the product of the colonialist mentality. “ Exotic peoples” are alien peoples, conquered and held in helpless sub­ mission for the leisurely inspection and pleasure o f the conqueror. There is no question o f affinity. Thanks to the sudden conquests to the south, Japanese people (in real life and in film) were confronted with an entirely new situation. Like the Europeans before them, they were now in a position to revel at the sight of themselves as they penetrated the soft, warm lushness o f an exoticized southern world. As Bungei Shunju crooned, “A Japanese plane with its red Rising Sun insignia on both its burnished wings whooshes over the distant South Seas. Below is a world of exoticism, one we are duty-bound to conquer and tame.” 31 The Western powers were the pioneers in the field of colonial subju­ gation, and so it was only natural that the Japanese should take the Eu­ ropean experience as a point o f departure when they established their own colonial administrations (and attitudes). Similarly, since creating the sensations of “ exoticism” had long been explored in U.S. films, many in the Japanese filmworld agreed that “ an appropriate degree of Americanism must be permitted.” Unfortunately, in both its own colo­ nial policies and in its cinematic depictions of Japanese characters con­ fronting the “ other” —particularly in the form of interactions with the peoples to the south —Japan made little progress beyond the stereotypes created by their Western forerunners. “ Exotic” characters from the south made their first memorable ap­ pearance on screen in October, with Yoshimura KOzaburO’s Windfrom the South, Part 2 (Minami no Kaze, Shochiku, 1942). Part 1, released a month earlier, had introduced the main character, Munakata Rokurota (Saburi Shin), a rich and pampered loll-about who harbors big plans

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but is unable to keep a job. The main plot is his desultory romance with a friend of his sister’s. This is suspended for a time when his mother, who talks like the ideal militarist mother but indulges her son’s adoles­ cent behavior, finally takes him off to their ancestral home in Kagoshi­ ma in order to “ make a man o f him.” Indeed, during their extended stay there, he does seem to undergo a transformation through his expo­ sure to the region’s celebrated Satsuma Bushi Spirit. This makes him more masculinely assertive with women, especially his old sweetheart, but it fails to make him any more realistic about the ways of the world. In Kagoshima, Rokurota also meets an old friend from his wander­ ing days in Singapore, Kaseda (Ryu ChishO), and the latter tells him an amazing story. While in Cambodia, Kaseda had fallen in with a local, Shen Chip (Saitó Tatsuo), who took him on an excursion to a river filled with gold. Shen promised to bring him there again if Kaseda would help him spread his religion, “ Ko Dai KyO,” inJapan. The leader of the religion, Shen informs him, is actually part-Japanese. He is none other than the son, by a native woman, of the great Meiji hero, Saigo Takamori. Shen tells Kaseda that Saigo had not really died in the Seinan civil war, as was generally believed. Rather, he had fled to Southeast Asia in the late 1870s. Rokurota, ever the gullible optimist, is fired up by the idea and pours his family funds into the project. Part 2 picks up the story and takes it to its inevitable denouement. Rokurota plunges into feverish activity, sparing no expense in building a magnificent church for the new religion, one which looks suspi­ ciously Christian. Even its religious symbol- the Satsuma crest being a cross within a circle—seems to play on the Christian motif. Above the altar, however, hangs a large picture, not of Christ, but o f Saigo Takamori. With everything ready at last, Rokurota and Kaseda eagerly await the arrival from Cambodia of Shen and The Great One, Saigo’s son “ Rakuin.” On the appointed day, Rokurota and Kaseda go to Kobe to meet their ship. On board, they search for the pair in First Class and then in Second Class. Suddenly, Kaseda points, “Ah, he’s here!” In a burst of music, similar to that used in Hollywood films to denote “ the kasbah” or “ the harem room,” we see two figures undergoing customs inspection. Shen, whom we have already seen in flashbacks, is dressed in white, like an Indonesian. The other, Rakuin, is made up to look extremely swarthy and is dressed something like a Chinese merchant. He stands with his eyes rolled up in a vulgar caricature of an oriental prince. Clearly they are not what they claim to be. Kaseda hurries forward to

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greet them, speaking first to Shen in the gibberish that will pass for “ Cambodian” in the movie. He then introduces Rokurota to Rakuin. A close-up o f their hands as they shake. Suddenly, a third hand enters the frame, grasping Rakuin’s wrist, pulling it away from Rokurota. In the next shot, a long shot, we see this new figure roughly leading Rakuin away. Another man, in a white suit, takes Shen by the shoulder intend­ ing to lead him away as well: “ We’re the Port Authority police. We have some business to take care o f with these two.” In the next scene, Rokurota is sitting disconsolately in the room of the ryokan he has prepared for his two foreign guests. A maid hurries around collecting dishes of uneaten food. She piles them on a tray and exits left. Suddenly, we hear an off-screen crash and a scream. She hur­ ries in to Rokurota, pointing back at the door in terror. “ What’s wrong?” “ Oh, sir!” Next there is a full shot of the doorway. To the sudden strains of the same “ kasbah” music as before, Shen appears, bowing, grinning, and rubbing his hands together obsequiously. The false buckteeth pro­ jecting from his mouth make him look like a “Yellow Peril” villain out of a low-grade Hollywood feature. Shen then brusquely summons his companion to come in from the shadows of the hallway. Rokurota steps aside as Rakuin, the Great One, sweeps into the room, his nose in the air. He goes to the cushion set out for him in the place of honor and, still playing the oriental prince, setdes himself down with exaggerated magnificence. A close-up reveals that he is still wearing his shoes, which he removes only after Shen gives him a scolding look. Rokurota meanwhile kneels before him and bows in for­ mal greeting. Rakuin, who apparendy has no concept o f civilized be­ havior, does not know what to do until Shen coaches him with exagger­ ated bowings o f his own head. Rakuin copies this in a clumsy, sidewise motion. Next, Kaseda abruptly bursts into the room, agitated and angry. Going down on his knees before his friend, he says, “ Oh, Roku! I don’t know how to apologize for this . . . Ahh! What a stupid story! . . . The Port Authority ran them through the ringer to see if they were politi­ cally or ideologically dangerous. Well, there’s no problem there. But, after all the trouble I put you through, it turns out that everything about this Rakuin character is a baseless lie!” During the ensuing pause, the camera looks down on Rakuin. He seems an imbecile, sniffing and wrig­ gling his nose while still maintaining his pompous air. Shen, meanwhile, sits there writhing in guilty discomfort under Rokurota’s gaze. The dia­ logue continues in the following manner:

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t u 'till? p * « t ill«

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Yoshirriura KozaburO’s Windfrom the South, Part 2 (Shochiku, 1942). Hollywood’s ‘‘in­ sidious A sian" stereotype is recycled here to depict a servile, but inept, Southeast Asian.

(pointing at Shen): It’s all so idiotic! This damn fellow has no notion of the difference between fantasy and reality. He’s taken in by his own lies. How can one get a hold 011 an inscrutable mind like that? s h e n (pointing at his own breast): Xot-so, not-so! Me knows this self ver-r-ry well! God . .. (raising his arm in a pious gesture). . . tells me everything Himself!” s h e n (pointing an accusing finger at Rakuin): Me also deceived! That man, bad man!32 kaseda

Cut to a bust shot of Rakuin. He is digging snot from his nose, which he then inspects with great interest before flicking it away and thrusting his finger up his nose again: Rakuin here turns thirty-five this year . .. [Kaseda is interrupted when Rakuin, now screen left, violently blows his nose into his own sleeve.] kaseda

:

The First Year o f the Pacific War It’s not hard to figure out that even i f Saigo had gone to South East Asia he would have been far too old to have sired this fellow. r o k u r o t a : You should have known that before, right? k a s e d a : Ah! How do you expect me to figure out the age o f these b l a c k kased a

:

fello w s?

Rolling his eyes toward the ceiling and raising his hands in his comic-religious gesture, Shen begins to chant in gibberish again. Next comes a long shot, taking in all the characters in the room. To the left is Shen, in exaggerated prayer. To the right, Rakuin yawns in vacuous oblivion. Kaseda, in the middistance, slumps disconsolately while, in the background, Rokurota rolls his head back over the top of his chair in amazed amusement at their (his and Kaseda’s) stupidity in having trusted such ridiculous foreigners. The obvious moral to be drawn from the episode is that Kaseda and Rokurota had indeed been foolish in their trust and therefore deserved this comeuppance. From the beginning of the film to its end, despite their seemingly sympathetic depiction, neither of these Japanese char­ acters earns the viewer’s respect. Indeed, according to the official stan­ dards of the era, they are perfect negative examples. As citizens of crisis-time Japan, they are hopelessly “ bad” —weak, selfish, unmanly, and avaricious. This, the film seems to be saying, is the sort of person who takes a foreigner at his word; so, beware. One is particularly struck by the similarity o f these caricature South­ east Asians to the stereotypes, both humorous and sinister, used in old Hollywood films to depict various racial and ethnic groups. The buck­ toothed obsequiousness of Shen, in fact, mirrors almost perfectly the Hollywood (and wartime poster) image of “ the Evil Jap .” The reaction of the maid makes it clear that the “ otherness” of the two “ Cambo­ dians” is frightful to look upon. Their faces are repulsive masks hiding their true intentions. Indeed their very humanity is in doubt. As Kaseda exclaims: “ How can you get a hand hold on an inscrutable mind like that?” We know from the context that the intentions of the two foreigners are nefarious, while not exactly “ evil.” True to the old Hollywood for­ mula, their attempted trickiness is ineffectual. We see through the Great One’s impersonation of grandness almost instantly, and a brief police interrogation unravels their entire hoax. Their true identities are thus fully revealed: they are not sophisticated “ enemies” but mere “ inferiors”

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attempting to put on airs of importance. When he is found out, Shen fidgets under Rokurota’s gaze like a guilty child. Kaseda underlines Shen’s childlike position by scolding him: “ Hey! Get over here and apol­ ogize in a proper manner!” Like a pathological child, Shen does not know the difference between fantasy and reality and is “ taken in by his own lies.” “ Childish” and “ pathological” were the very adjectives the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead would apply to Japanese culture in a report she gave at a December 1944 conference in New York. During the Pacific War there was a vogue in the United States for applying psychoanalytical jargon in an effort to characterize the Japanese enemy. Others spoke o f “ paranoid, criminal, and grandiose” behavior and an article in the Psychoanalytical Review called attention to the Ja p a ­ nese male’s “ infantile disregard for reality.” 33 Needless to say, these wartime “ scientific findings” only served to confirm stereotyped per­ ceptions, which had long been in circulation. “ Childlike” had of course been the characterization applied to Native Americans and to Africans for centuries. It also came to be used as an alternate to “ sinis­ ter and inscrutable” in characterizing Orientals from the early days of Hollywood onward. Windfrom the South, therefore, takes Western racist caricatures of the East Asian (including the Japanese) and projects them onto the people o f Japan’s newly conquered territories. It also draws on different sets of Hollywood conventions employed in the portrayal of other ethnic groups. The line “ I can’t tell the age of dark-skinned people” was often expressed about Blacks. The “ kasbah” music was part of Hollywood’s evocation of “ the Middle East,” as were Shen’s comical religious ges­ tures. Rakuin’s vulgarity and swarthy, oily look were (and to a certain extent still are) regularly used to portray Arab or Mexican villains. Films o f the later Pacific War period, especially those purporting a “ documentary” approach, tended to use the criterion of “ diligence” to underline the difference between Japanese themselves and the peoples of the conquered territories. In Burma War Record (1942), for instance, the narrator says that “because life is easy here [in Myanmar], the locals are a trusting and happy-go-lucky lot. They spend their days in idleness, be­ lieving in the afterlife.” On the other hand, in the cartoon feature Momotaro, Divine Warrior of the Sea (1944), the islanders (portrayed as various kinds of animals) redeem their worth by displaying “ great diligence” in helping theirJapanese occupiers prepare an airfield to be used in the at­ tack on the enemy.

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Like their European colonialist predecessors, Japanese officialdom tended to divide the world into “ high” and “ low” cultures. In an Octo­ ber 1942 Bungei Shunju article, an army medical officer introduces “ The Sanitation Conditions in the Southern Region” by stating that “ indis­ putably, the culture of the tropics is an extremely retarded affair.” 34 This was also the assumption underlying the comments of the Information Bureau’s Fuwa Suketoshi in a zadankai a few months earlier. In discou­ raging the distribution to the Occupied South of such “ high-grade” pic­ tures as Yamamoto’s Horse, he says, “ Such aesthetically excellent works are inappropriate for export. Most of the countries making up the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere simply have not achieved the intellectual sophistication necessary to appreciate the culture o f Japan.” 35 Tsumura Hideo expressed similar caution about the reception of Japan ’s cine­ matic art, because “ all o f these southern peoples, those o f Burma, Ma­ laya and Indonesia, and even the Philippines, remain in a very low con­ dition of intellectual achievement.” 36 The arbiters of policy for the newly conquered territories tended to be obsessed with identifying “ elites” among the subject populations, often singling them out for more severe treatment as potential “ class en­ emies” of the army’s Imperial Mission. Discussing film policy for the South Seas territory, Tada Reikichi dichotomized the South Sea island populations in terms of their exposure to cinema. Only a tiny, “ superfi­ cially Westernized” class actually attended film showings, but due to their exposure to the products of Hollywood, they had been “ thor­ oughly debauched.” It was toward this class that Tada harbored genu­ ine antipathy. “ It would be a good idea,” he sneered, “ to strip them of their Westernized veneer.” The lower classes, who never go to the mo­ vies in any case, he dismisses out-of-hand as “ barbarians.” 37 The East’s Song o f Victory (Toyo no Gaika, Nichiei, with the Army Com­ mand for the Philippines, 1942) reflects another variation of this thinking. The narration, scripted by Sawamura Tsutomu, openly condemns the very existence of “ that class of America-aping mongrels,” the reasonably well-to-do residents of Manila, of Filipino-American parentage. The first segment of Song o f Victory constitutes a tour of occupied Manila, ex­ posing the American plot to wash away the nation’s “Asian soul” in a flood of dollars. Against a montage of Chesterfield, Caltex, and Nash Automobile billboards, the narrator says: “ Decades of American materi­ alism have debauched Filipino morals, creating a race of hedonists. We are sad at the sight of these degraded specimens of Asian culture. It is our [Japan’s] great mission to drive out this Americanism and to recall

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the Filipino people to their true spiritual homeland, Greater East Asia.” A pair of ladies stroll by in sun dresses and sandals, casually licking ice cream cones and, after a pause, the narrator resumes: “ In carrying out our task, the greatest stumbling block is the mixed-blood (konketsu) popu­ lation.” The latter are shown lounging in the early evening cool o f an outdoor cafe, riding bicycles through the streets, and on horseback along the bay-front esplanade. Attributing to them a contradictory psychology, the narrator says, “ They choose to hate themselves more than the Yan­ kee enemy. . . . While citizens of the Orient, they are proud of the fact that their Asian blood is highly diluted and they choose to look down on pure-blooded Filipinos.” 38 The entire diatribe takes up six minutes screen time. The esplanade scene, with Bataan peninsula hulking low on the horizon across the water, is used effectively to transfer our attention to the batde underway there. The narrator comments that “ it is impossible for them [the citi­ zens strolling through the park] not to know what is happening over there, but they are only interested in the private pursuits of their own lives.” Next the camera focuses on a pair of women, gazing toward the peninsula: “ Surely they have a husband or a brother or a son who has been taken off to fight for his American masters. They stand separated from the crowd, repeatedly making the sign of the cross, with no inten­ tion of leaving.” The stiffness of their posture, however, suggests that they have been posed to illustrate the message of the narrative script. The bulk o f the film covers the campaigns down Bataan and the eventual capture o f Corregidore. It is here that Sawamura indulges his penchant for hymns to the sublime Yamato Spirit of the troops. Finally, at Marivalcs, at the tip of the peninsula, we are shown the bedraggled, defeated specimens o f the Yankee spirit. They are U.S. prisoners slump­ ing along with faces downcast. Interspersed with these shots are others o f the Japanese troops marching along with heads held proudly high. “ What a disgusting sight these able-bodied Americans make,” the nar­ rator comments. “ They show no shame at their defeat!” As if to hint at the horrible (Bataan) death march awaiting the U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of their Filipino allies, the narrator com­ ments on the sea of prisoners: “ The crowds of American troops look like clots of algae on the surface of a swamp. While there were still so many, one wonders, why did they surrender so easily? In defeat, why don’t they do the manly thing and commit suicide?” The climax o f the film features a tour o f the amazing facilities on Corregidore, the tennis courts, the water reservoir, and the underground

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electric train system running the length o f the island. Following a pattern already established in the documentaries about the Malayan and Bur­ mese campaigns, the camera explores the mountains of booty —trucks, artillery pieces, and unexpended shells- -that the cowardly enemy had allowed to fall into Japanese hands. The finale is a scene of jubilant Fili­ pinos who “ now realize that Asian peace will never be achieved unless everyone cooperates in the establishment of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

“A Lot Easier Than in China!” : Malay War Record and Burma War Record Shimizu Akira suggests that we compare the dominant slogans of the China Incident with those of the early Pacific War in order to appreciate the difference between the “ feel” of the two conflicts. From 1938-39 on­ ward, the leading slogan for the China Incident was “ the Eight Corners of the World Under One R oo f” (hakko icchu). Implied here was not so much the actual gathering of territory under a Japanese “ roof,” but rather the superimposition, over the terrain o f the real world, of the “ map” o f a spiritual world. Its outer borders are infinity itself, and so corresponded to no recognizable borders on any geopolitical map. The meaning o f the war in China, then, was not really the conquest of its territory but rather its “ awakening” and transformation. With no con­ cretely attainable goal in sight, there was no end in sight. The predominant slogans of the Pacific War, particularly during the first eighteen months, lauded the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. Although this too had its unrealistic dimension, at least it spoke of real territory that could be seized and held. Its boundaries were real, though still vague in some places. The expansion of those boundaries as depicted graphically in the newspapers of the first six months clearly indicated success in the war; when they began to shrink visibly in 1943, the opposite implication could be read. When it came to the enemy, slogans did not call for his transformation or renewal, but “ anni­ hilation of the Anglo-American enemy” (eibeigekimetsu).^ In a fascinating z.adankai in the summer of 1942, Tsumura Hideo asked a group of the most important news cameramen covering the war to characterize the difference between the two wars from their perspec­ tive. All of the participants agreed there was a huge difference indeed: “ We shot a lot of aerial footage during the Incident, mosdy burning truck convoys. Now we train our cameras on big ships blowing up and sinking!” “The biggest and best difTcrcncc between then and now is the

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absence o f a concerted guerrilla war. It’s been a lot easier than in the China Incident.” “ I don’t think these whites have the stomach for that kind of fighting. The Chinks are a lot more persistent.” “ In Malaya or the Philippines, you can stroll from the air field to your billet with no worries, even at midnight. That’d be unthinkable in China.” “ Yeah, in China, if you got left behind on a march, that’d be the end of you. Bang! You’re dead!” 40 It took a mere fifty-five days for General Yamashita’s sixty thousand troops to fight their way down the length o f the Malay Peninsula. With the fall o f Singapore on 15 February, a total o f 130,000 Allied troops (British, Australian, Malay, and Indian) went into Japanese captivity. The magnitude of the victory in real and symbolic terms was staggering. Although Japanese audiences were served the sights and sounds o f this victory in short newsreel dollops from the outset, they had to wait more than nine months before they could see it as a continuous featurelength documentary. By then, the terrible reverse at Midway had taken place, and although its military implications were hidden from the pub­ lic, there was a noticeable slowdown in patriotically satisfying news. As a piece o f morale-boosting propaganda, the premiere on 27 August of Malay War Record (Marei Senki, 1942, Iida Shimbi and Miki Shigeru, edi­ tors), came at a most opportune time. Malay War Record opens with shots of a flotilla of ships plowing through a misted sea, as the narrator explains that they have set out from Indochina on their way to Malaya. A simple map is flashed on­ screen covering the region from Hainan to the Malay Coast. Next comes a montage of captured British footage, showing reinforcements being assembled from different parts of Britain’s eastern empire. UFA’s Sieg im Westen had used similar captured footage set to parodic music to portray the British as buffoons. In the Japanese film, how'ever, the shots are laconic. Rather than overt ridicule, Iida's editing seeks to build a sense of great historic irony. The next sequence presents an image that will later be used for its ironic effect. It starts with a pan down the clock tower of the Singapore Government House to a bronze statue in front -that of Stanford Raffles, the nineteenth-century founder of the city. Next, a medium shot o f the statue is accompanied by narration explaining that Raffles had, more than 120 years before, recognized Singapore’s preem­ inent importance to the British Empire. The camera dollies in so that Raffles’s image, his arms folded in a pensive pose, fills the screen. Shot from the base of the statue, the figure seems to tower above the viewer

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in an oppressive manner: “And there it stood, the arrogant statue of Raffles, set up to commemorate the victory of the British Empire.” 41 A flight of British warplanes rises into the sky as the narrator says, “ So it came to pass, Britain made the foolhardy mistake of challenging Japan.” Cymbals clash as “ December 8th” is flashed onscreen, and, in the early morning light, we see Japanese soldiers clambering down the side of a ship into landing craft off the Malay coast. Cut to the beach, looking back out at the ships. There is no indication of enemy resistance as the troops move out in trucks. The following sequences, depicting the lightning drive down the pe­ ninsula, are interspersed with map illustrations featuring moving ar­ rows. The surge southward is dramatized by a montage of shots of speeding trucks, soldiers on bicycles, and tanks. A close-up of the front of a churning tank tread. Suddenly the tank lurches to a halt. The cam­ era briefly holds the shot. The next shot explains the hold-up: a de­ stroyed bridge sprawls in the water like a dead serpent. Construction troops, many of them wearing only a loincloth, clamber through the wreckage as they erect a new bridge. The narrator explains that they regularly repaired seven or eight bridges daily during the campaign. The latter scene struck an especially responsive chord with Tsumura Hideo when he reviewed the film in October 1942: “ The bodies of these men sharply contrast with the tall, slender ones of the British POVVs. Despite their puny size, the bodies o f the Japanese exude an electric en­ ergy, indicative of the gallant and brave spirits animating them. Particu­ larly striking in this aspect is the image of the seminaked engineers toil­ ing in the river.” 42 Interspersed among the scenes of rapid advance and the “ battle scenes,” which are really nothing more than shots of large guns being fired, there are several sequences emphasizing the travail of the soldiers as they pull or push trucks and field pieces up muddy embankments. Their grimaces o f exertion were undoubtedly seen by audiences of the time as proof of their superior soldierly spirit. Over shots of troops ped­ aling bicycles, the phrase “ On to Singapore!” is flashed repeatedly on the screen, indicating that this is their single thought. The final assault on the island appears on film as a montage of murky shots. This was because most o f the action occurred at night. Furthermore, as the daytime shots looking across to the island clearly in­ dicate, the skies over the island were heavily overcast during most o f the fighting. Aerial shots show other bombers flying in formation and hazy images of targets burning on the ground, little more. For audiences at

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the time, the sequences depicting the surrender were undoubtedly the most satisfying. British soldiers, bedraggled and bewildered, are shown laying down their arms and emptying their pockets to their conquerors. The shock of their humiliation is clearly apparent. One soldier sits, star­ ing up at a Japanese officer, his hand on his cheek in astonishment. The extended sequence covering General Percival’s surrender at the Ford Auto Plant was of course the highlight of the film, provoking great joy in movie theaters at the time. In December 1942, Oba Yahei re­ ported, “ When the Supreme Commander Yamashita withered his de­ feated opponent with that ferocious scowl, he looked like a great eagle about to pounce on a miserable sparrow. I couldn’t help shouting with delight. This is surely the absolute high point of the film for ordinary people.” 43 The sequence begins with a group of figures walking toward the camera down a tree-lined road. From left to right we see a British sol­ dier carrying a white flag, another soldier carrying a British flag, a mus­ tachioed Japanese officer striding along with his hand on his sword hilt, ajapanese and a British officer, and General Percival. As he approaches and passes the camera, the general appears almost comic with his ex­ traordinarily weak chin and ridiculous, baggy military shorts. Cut to the conference table inside the plant where Percival and his staff officers wait nervously for Yamashita’s arrival. One o f the officers abrupdy turns to the right, as if he hears something outside. Cut to the exterior where ajapanese staff car has drawn up. Its roof is camouflaged with several palm branches. The door opens and Yamashita emerges, his jowly face stiff and impassive. The great climactic scene comes next. Yamashita, with his inter­ preter standing to his left, sits with a ferocious glare on his face. He ges­ ticulates vigorously with his right hand, often pounding the table to em­ phasize his points. In place o f a sound track of the actual voices, the narrator delivers the lines off screen. Percival: “ There’s looting happen­ ing throughout the city, and there are a lot of noncombatants . . .” Yamashita: “ Nothing to worry about. All noncombatants will be pro­ tected under the principles of bushido” Percival looks anxious, rubbing his diminutive chin and at one point thrusting the end o f his pencil into his mouth. Yamashita: “ Does the English Army intend to surrender or not?” Percival (pausing in thought): “ We have decided to ask for a cease­ fire.” Yamashita fixes him with an imperious glare and brings his hand down in a slicing motion. “ The time approaches for our night assault! Will the English Army surrender? Yes or no?” “ . . . Yes.”

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Two images from the early days o f victory recurred frequendy in many subsequent films of the Pacific War era. The first was the bolus o f roiling smoke and flame rising from the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. The second was this one, where the fiery-eyed General Yamashita humiliates the British Empire by intimidating one of its highest military com­ manders. The Pearl Harbor scene would be reconstructed in miniature several times, including the (now missing) submarine periscope view in Tasaka’s Navy (1943). Yamashita’s brow-beating of Percival would be re­ created in an exquisitely funny scene in the full-length cartoon Momotaro, Divine Warrior of the Sea (1944), where a chinless Percival and his fel­ low officers squirm and gibber away in amazingly authentic-sounding English. After the scene at the Ford Plant, the remainder o f Malay War Record focuses on the symbolic nature of the victory. First, there is a held shot of a mud-bespattered British flag on the ground. O ff screen the narra­ tor relates in monotone: “ The history of Singapore, the greatest citadel of the British Empire, hereby comes to an end. Mark the time and date—seven fifty in the evening, 15 February.” Enemy troops are pa­ raded through the streets, Indian and Malay conscripts making up a sig­ nificant part of their number. The next shot emphasizes the magnitude of the victory —the camera pans across a sea o f prisoners in the thou­ sands and tens o f thousands. Especially when they were first shown in newsreel form, such scenes were wildly cheered by Japanese audiences. For Tsumura Hideo too, the sight was the very essence of the heady wine of victory, and he craved more: “ I always find myself dissatisfied with the all too brief glimpses of the prisoners’ faces—especially those of the British and Americans. News films on Bataan and Corregidore do show Yankee faces, but I want to get a longer look at those crestfallen mugs. It’s a shame that in the scenes where the Japanese commander in­ spects the prisoners at Singapore we aren’t given more close-ups. Their endless lines provide great satisfaction to the viewer, so why not indulge us a bit more?” 44 The bronze figure of Stanford Raffles reappears in a bust shot. This time he seems to be contemplating the power and majesty of the army that has conquered his city: “ Raffles could never have anticipated such a day. This marks the end of the one hundred year history of British ag­ gressions against East Asia.” The narrator draws our attention to an irony of history known even to the ancients, one that has been sung in the poetry o f many nations. A great empire has fallen; only its proud symbols endure. The poetic counterpart to the statue of Raffles is the

Above: G eneral Yam ashita browbeating G en eral Percival into surrendering Sin ga­ pore [Malay War Record, Nic hiei, 1942). Below: Seo Mitsuo’s Momotaro, Divine Warrior o f the Sea (Shochiku, 1945) reproduces the fam ous scene.

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sneering visage o f Ozymandias. With great despair, his image must now look out over the forces of a new and equally great empire which has risen to replace his own. In their newsreel footage, as well as in their feature-length war docu­ mentaries, Japanese filmmakers seem to have been keenly aware of the iconographic potential of enemy statues. In The East's Song of Victory, the statue of the hero o f the Philippine independence struggle, Jose Rizal, is used for similarly ironic purposes. There, however, the irony was that “ present-day Filipino people have no idea o f what was in his [Rizal’s] heart-of-hearts.” Newsreel footage o f the conquest o f Indonesia shows the occupiers taking down the statue o f a Dutch monarch in Jakarta. Rather than unceremoniously toppling it to the groundj it has been carefully wrapped and is gently lowered to the ground, as if it had an­ cient religious significance. The war documentaries produced by the Germans stressed the utter debasement of their defeated enemies and the complete discontinuity between the old world and their own New Order. Malay War Record, however, subtly invokes faint lines of continuity. These lines are sum­ moned up again when Yamashita stops as he is reviewing a line o f Brit­ ish POWs and steps forward to shake Percival’s hand. His gesture indi­ cates that, despite the circumstances of the moment, he is saluting Percival as a fellow military man and as a gendeman. But more than the man, he is honoring the idea o f empire, a notion he represents as much as Percival. Such a scene would have been unthinkable in a China Inci­ dent documentary. The solemnity and somberness of the commentary at Raffles’s statue contrasts sharply with the earlier images o f the humiliation of General Percival and the trampled British flag. The contradiction sug­ gests an ambivalence on the part of the filmmakers, indeed on the part of the Japanese propaganda policy, about how the British enemy should be portrayed. Other films of the 1942 period echo a similar am­ bivalence. In Makino’s Opium War, it almost negates the film’s antiBritish propaganda mission - the British officers are portrayed as haughty but refined gentlemen, dedicated to the expansion of Queen Victoria’s empire. In appearance and in demeanor, they seem not at all dissimilar to the “gentlemanly officers” of the Meiji Era Japan who launched their own campaign of imperial aggrandizement at the end o f the same century. The theoreticians of Japan ’s “ culture war” (bunkasen), on the one hand, found it easier to discount the cultural appeal of the United States

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M alay War Record uses the statue o f Stanford Raffles lor com m entary on the ironies o f history.

than that o f the British. The United States was “ immature,” “ material­ ist,” “ pleasure-seeking,” and “ frivolous.” The ideologue Kata Tetsuji put it as a matter of “ barbarism riding in on the back of modernism.” 45 On the other hand, the abiding respect amongjapanese for the antiq­ uity of British royal institutions and for the dignified mien of her people was not as easily dismissed. Lurking below the surface was a feeling of commonality, to say nothing of envy. The British served as a model, since they also were an island people who had risen to world domi­ nance. In the newly conquered regions to the south, especially, Japanese administrators were keenly aware of having inherited the British impe­ rial mantle. “ In the sense of world dominance,” Kata states, “ Britain is clearly the more important, both materially and spiritually.” In the same zadankai, “ The Culture War,” another nationalist thinker, Nakamura Kenzo, summarized the differences between the U.S. and British cultures in terms of the potential “ threat” they each posed: “As enemies to be confronted in the field, both are of course formidable. But America, despite its recent surge to world prominence, has a potentially fatal flaw there is no such thing as an American race, no undcrgirding

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o f intertwined lines of blood. Ultimately, Britain is the stronger enemy because it is united racially and culturally. The British are the greatest menace.” 46 Another aspect of the symbolism employed in the latter part of Malay War Record deserves attention here. The film invites comparison with Sieg im Westen, especially when we recognize that the scene of Percival’s surrender is clearly the counterpart to the scene of the French surrender in the railroad car at Compiegne in the German film. Both scenes have high symbolic significance surpassing even the magnitude of the victories. In the case of Compiegne, Hitler specifically ordered the railroad car - the very one in which the German military had signed the terms o f the Armistice Agreement in World War I —to be rolled out for the French surrender in 1940. At the end of the sequence Hitler is quoted as saying that he hoped he had now “ requited in some small way” the humiliation suffered by the German nation on that previous occasion. For the Japanese, the meaning of the scene at the Ford Plant was clearly different. Rather than a “ requiting of past humiliations,” it represented a kind of “coming of age” ceremony. The Japanese cameramen who did most of the shooting for Alalay War Record displayed a keen awareness of the German war documentar­ ies. On the one hand, they acknowledged that “ in terms of musical scor­ ing, Sieg im Westen was a big influence.” Most of their comments, how­ ever, emphasize the differences between their procedures and those of the Germans: “ Many parts of the German film have clearly been restaged in order to attain the maximum psychological effect. You only need to look at the attack with the flamethrower to see what I mean. It is virtually impossible to get shots like that on a real batdefield. We have a sense of propriety —or call it ‘morals’ if you will - even when we’re making propaganda. Bald-faced reenactments like that would never be permitted in ajapanese newsreel.” 47 A postwar revelation by another cameraman who worked on Malay War Record provides an ironic rebuttal of this assertion of a “ moral” propriety. The scene at the Ford Plant conference table had actually been doctored for the screen. As former army Information Officer Kameyama MatsutarO would relate to film historian Tanaka Jun’ichirO: “ On that fateful day we were the only camera crew allowed at the meeting. . . . Since the tempo of the actual negotiations was very slow. I got the idea of under-cranking the camera, which of course has the effect of speeding things up on screen. This tended to emphasize the salient traits of the two main characters. Yamashita looks even more

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decisive and Percival appears actually quailing. So I would say it was a big success.” 48 Allied news-film makers similarly doctored the footage o f Hider after he exits the train at Compiègne to produce the impression o f a gloating “ victory jig.” Clearly, the only “ moral” applicable to the pro­ duction of propaganda is the effect it generates. Burma War Record (Biruma Senki, Nichiei, 1942), which opened in midSeptember, one month after Malay War Record, also documents a massive Japanese victory in the first half-year o f the war. This one, however, was a near-disaster at the box office, probably because of its significandy dif­ ferent format. Whereas the December issue of Eiga no Tomo listed Malay War Record as the number one money earner of the year, Burma War Record ranked a dismal thirty-six out of a total of forty-five releases. This unexpected result cannot be attributed to a sudden flagging of popular interest in war-related films, since the documentary Divine Warriors of the Sky, opening the same month, ranked number six, and a war drama was number three. Contemporary criticism of Burma War Record focused on the com­ parative lack of battle footage and the “ sdffness” of its narration. Whereas Malay emphasizes the emotional gratifications of victory, Burma—especially the last segments covering Tôjô’s proclamation o f Burmese “ independence” —reeks of insincere government propaganda. The first part of the film is a travelogue-like discourse on the nature of the country and its sufferings under Britain’s half-century of colonial domination. Coverage of the drive on Rangoon tends to elide the na­ ture of the fighting. The visual treatment of the victory at Pegu — “ where our army overwhelmed them and rushed on, like angry waves” - is almost impressionistic. Whereas Malay War Record had fea­ tured many shots of prisoners, Burma emphasized the staggering amount of materiel left behind by the enemy. This is seen as a sign o f the cowardly panic of the British. A line o f burnt-out trucks and moun­ tains o f undestroyed fuel drums are juxtaposed with shots of playing cards and a picture of Churchill lying in the mud: “ The discarded vis­ age of Winston Churchill reproachfully glares at the gutted and aban­ doned equipment.” After the fall of the oil fields to the north, more piles of supplies and equipment, mostly intended for Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, are shown near the border between China and Burma: “ We were shocked to find the number of trucks and weapons left behind by the fleeing enemy.”

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Whereas the regional inhabitants are rarely shown in Malay War Record, the cooperative attitude of Burmese locals features large in this film. We see them hauling supplies, doling out water to thirsty troops, and gathering in crowds to wave their arms in welcome to their Ja p a ­ nese liberators. Their enthusiasm for the Japanese, at least at this point in time, was genuine, and the scenes set the stage for the film’s final burst of overwrought East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere propaganda. The section covering the campaign ends with the narrator intoning, “Ah, what a great victory! The very shadow of the enemy has been driven from all Burma. Chungking [Chiang’s capital] frets in isolation, and India rises up to threaten Britain with shouts for independence.” Over a scene of war rubble, words are flashed on the screen: “ From amid the ruins, Young Burma stands up, burning with hope.. . . First, a politi­ cal solution . . . ” The last line grows larger on the screen and is followed by a sudden cut to the Japanese Diet Building Triumphant music wells up as we see Tojo Hideki standing at the rostrum. “Young Burma!” read the words superimposed on the screen. “At the 29th Diet, our prime min­ ister gives you the most splendid of gifts.” The “gift” was the promise of eventual independence and the establishment of a provisional govern­ ment and national army so that the Burmese could fight along side the Japanese against their common enemy, Britain. This is followed by an ex­ tended speech by Dr. Ba Maw (who in 1943 would become the first prime minister of Burma). Here, he addresses his fellow countrymen, telling them to “ consider the Japanese your own flesh and blood.” In the final sequence o f the film, we see native dances and more crowds expressing their jubilation. The final image of the film uninten­ tionally reveals the sham of Burmese “ independence.” A flag featuring a peacock in its center, the Burmese national emblem at the time, flut­ ters in the breeze. Superimposed over the flag we see Japanese troops marching forward. The flag, for some unexplained reason, is badly tat­ tered and gives a rather forlorn impression. Burma War Record was a relative failure pardy because Japanese audi­ ences were unwilling, or unable, to be stirred by the “ liberationist” rhet­ oric of the government’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere poli­ cies. Popular interest centered on the performance of Japanese troops and on demonstrations of their military superiority over the AngloAmerican enemy. In an era o f ultranationalism and racial narcissism, securing the political independence of alien peoples apparently had al­ most no place in the concerns of the general filmgoer.

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Early Pacific War Dram a Films The Day England Fell (Eikoku Kuzururu no Hi, Daiei, 1942, lost?), directed by the program picture-maker Tanaka Shigeo, is an account of the cap­ ture o f Hong Kong in December 1941 that attempts to “ personalize” events by mixing in elements of melodrama. According to the script, which still exists, the film opens at a dock in Hong Kong in November 1941. The journalist Fujimoto is about to board a steamship to return to Japan. All around him are other Japanese, hurrying aboard to escape the escalating anti-Japanese violence of the British officials. Shots o f a boarded up Japanese-owned store with its windows smashed. At the dock, British customs officials harass the Japanese refugees, overturning their luggage so that the contents spill out. At the dock, Fujimoto meets an old antagonist, So, a Chinese na­ tionalist journalist who is there to bid him a nostalgic farewell. “ Do you really believe Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘all-out resistance’ is the surest way to save China?” Fujimoto asks him. “ O f course. I believe it implicitly!” Clearly, the Chinese journalist will learn the error of his ways before the film is over. The spiritual degeneracy o f the British colonists is emphasized in a scene set on a terrace at the Hong Kong Hotel. A party is in progress under little British and nationalist Chinese flags strung in chains. Ladies dressed in skimpy apparel dance to the throb of jazz music. The conver­ sation of a group of British officers sitting at a table reveals the pride and overconfidence that will bring about their downfall. They gloat over the probable failure of the U.S.-Japanese talks just then going on in Washing­ ton. “ It seems to me that Japan has no choice but to cave in.” Journalist So, who has joined their party warns them of underestimating Japanese strength. But they merely scoff—“ Hong Kong has absolutely nothing to worry about. The defenses that have taken Britain the better part of a century' to construct are not likely to be pushed down so easily.” 49 At the Kitazawa residence in downtown Hong Kong, there is a dif­ ferent kind of gathering. Among them is Koren, the Chinese fiancé of the Kitazawa’s son, Kensuke, who is now in the army back in Japan. Koren has her own propaganda message for the film audience: “ The young Chinese in Hong Kong do everything they can to escape reality. They just crawl into their shells and think only about their private lives.” 50 As the international situation darkens, a large Japanese force as­ sembles near the Hong Kong border. Second Lieutenant Kitagawa

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Kensuke is there too, commanding a battalion. Even as they wait for the final attack orders, Kitazawa maintains a program of rigorous training, which serves as a contrast to the degeneracy and laxity of the British. When a soldier collapses from exhaustion after a grueling forced march, Kensuke scolds him, “ It’s spiritual laxity that has brought you to this pass!” But he is actually a kindly commander and he secredy asks a noncommissioned officer to look out for the man. The day o f the attack arrives, and as the troops surge toward Hong Kong, they are met by Chinese refugees coming the other way seeking the “ safety” of the Japanese lines. When Kensuke hears that his mother, sister, and brother have been interned in a Hong Kong prison, he re­ plies, “ Even if by some chance my mother is there, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The only thing that concerns me now is fighting well.” Extended combat sequences follow and panic-stricken British troops descend on a crowd of Chinese at a fire hydrant, driving them off at bayonet-point. When the refugees resist, pleading that they are dying of thirst, they are mowed down by wild bursts of machine-gun fire. Among those mortally wounded is Koren, still clutching the sweater she had knitted for Lieutenant Kitazawa (thus ending the probable diffi­ culty of a Chinese marrying an officer of the Japanese Imperial Army). In the very next scene, Japanese soldiers burst into a deserted British officer’s mess room. They gape in disbelief at the rows o f cups still steaming with freshly brewed coffee. A staccato series of shots - papers strewn on the floor and a slowly swinging refrigerator door—seems to be a jeering comment on the pell-mell retreat of the overpampered for­ mer occupants. Soon the prison is taken and Kensuke’s mother hears that her son has died valiandy at the very gates of the prison. She takes the news with pride, like a true militarist mother. In the background, the strains of the national anthem “ Kimi ga Yo” well up, erasing the necessity for comment on the improbable irony of the incident. A white flag now appears atop Victoria Peak, signaling the surrender of the British forces in Hong Kong. Coming immediately after the ex­ tended scenes inside the prison, however, the “ liberation” from Euro­ pean colonial oppression, which the assault on Hong Kong was sup­ posed to represent, the significance is diminished. The “ liberation” we have been following has been that of the Japanese prisoners. Probably because of its timely content, rather than for the excel­ lence of its construction, The Day England Fell was awarded the Number Ten spot on the Japanese Film Magazine Association’s Best Ten list. To

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Iijima Tadashi, however, the film left “ a somewhat roughshod impres­ sion.” 51 His main criticism centered on the virtual absence in the sec­ ond half of the Chinese and British characters who had been presented in the first part. Postwar, Takaiwa Hajime, one o f the film’s scriptwrit­ ers, attributed this failure to “ difficulties” of the era: “ When we went to Hong Kong to prepare the script, we were amazed at the depth of the antipathy o f the local people toward the Japanese. As a result, our minds tended to go numb when we set to creating believable nonJapancsc characters.” 52

“ In the End, We All Became Servants o f National Policy” The situation o f the filmworld’s creative artists, executives and critics had been harsh in the days of the China Incident, but conditions were destined to become far more severe with the coming o f the Pacific War. According to one account, the oppressive mood of the new era afflicted even the younger bureaucrats of the Home Ministry censorship office. In his postwar memoir, former Home Ministry censor Toba Yukinobu recalls: “After the army began dictating domestic policy [in the midPacific War period], our situation changed rapidly. Film censors lost their autonomy. More and more, the functions we once carried out were usurped by lieutenants and captains of the Kempeitai Military Police.” 53 Under the unsympathetic eye of the kempei officers, two out of every three scripts submitted for preproduction censorship were rejected out of hand. Furthermore, as Toba relates, “ in the last murderous stages of the war, everything, including the movies, came to be judged in terms of their potential contribution to the war effort. This spelled the final doom of artistic cinema.” 54 This is surely what film director Yamamoto Satsuo meant when he claimed that “ in the end, we all became servants o f kokusaku [national policy].” 55 Serving the kokusaku quickly took center stage in the film magazines as the main criterion for the film criticism as well. The com­ mentary portion o f Shin Eiga’s “ New Films” column would characteris­ tically begin with phrases such as, “ This film intends to demonstrate to domestic viewers the proper behavior of Japanese women in the present phase of our national crisis.” 56 While there was no evidence of resistance even o f the mild, passive sort occasionally evinced during the China Incident — neither was there much passion for the production of national policy features. As early as April 1942, Iijima Tadashi began putting out veiled warnings that the

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psychological situation in the film community was again deteriorating se­ riously: “A persistent rumor going the rounds has it that the new system deeply depresses the more creative spirits in the film world. The argu­ ment holds that since there is no competition and no way to gain per­ sonal satisfaction, a general falling off in quality will inevitably result.” 57 In his autobiography, Yamamoto Satsuo poignantly recalls the de­ pression and despair o f filmmakers compelled to make films under di­ rect orders from the military. However, his statement that “ we were obliged to make national policy films under the constant threat of im­ prisonment and torture” 58 has little basis in truth and tells us more about the shame and embarrassment he experienced postwar at having collaborated with the wartime regime. Much like Imai Tadashi, an even more zealous collaborator, Yamamoto’s postwar reputation was based on his (often excellent) leftist films and his active political commitment. In any case, Yamamoto Satsuo managed to avoid making the sort of vi­ cious hate-the-enemy propaganda that came back to haunt so many of his colleagues. He only made two national policy features, neither of which contained particularly repugnant messages. According to Yamamoto the purpose of his first ko/cusaku film, Winged Victory (Tsubasa no Gaika, Toho, 1942), was “ to put before the public the philosophy of military air service.” 59 This, however, was only part of the requirements communicated to him as he set about planning the film. As Yamamoto reported, the problem was that: “ While the youths them­ selves are most eager to join up, their relatives pose objections. Mothers tend to be the most opposed, followed by grandmothers. Such resistance defeats even the most vigorous recruitment efforts.” 60 The situation was of course a source of great embarrassment to the army, which backed Yamamoto’s film “ with a largesse unprecedented in a film with so few scenes of actual combat.” Kurosawa Akira, whose star was very much on the rise in 1942, had written the script for Winged Victory. After working as Yamamoto KajirO’s assistant director on Horse, he had turned most of his efforts to script writing, demonstrating a talent and enthusiasm for national pol­ icy scenarios matched only by Yamazaki Kensuke, the cowriter of The Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya. Kurosawa submitted two of his scripts to the Information Bureau for entry in their competition for people’s cin­ ema scripts, winning third prize for his A ll Is Quiet and first prize for his Snow, a semidocumentary treatment of northern Japan. The prize money netted him a total of 2,300 yen ($46,000) —“ for the time, a fabu­ lous sum!” he reports, since his salary as assistant director had been a

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mere 48 yen ($960) a month. More scripts followed, not all of them deemed “ appropriate” by the wartime bureaucrats: “ Two scripts, A Thousand and One Nights in the Forest and Sampagita Flower, were buried for­ ever in the Home Ministry censorship bureau.” 61 Winged Victory—the one he wrote for Yamamoto Satsuo—was his second script actually to be made into a picture (the other being Currents o f Youth, directed by Fushimi Shü). In 1943, he would make his directorial debut with yet an­ other of his own scripts, Sugata Sanshiro. Despite its subject and lavish army backing, Winged Victory is not a spiritist film like most of the other films focusing on military training nor is it a “ hate-the-enemy” piece like The Day England Fell. Its opening sec­ tion is actually an ode in praise o f a mother’s love. Depicted with deeply moving conviction by Irie Takako, she is no ordinary militarist mother, resurrected from the textbooks. The two young boys, played by Kodaka Takashi and Kodaka Masaru also give outstanding performances. In the first scene we see the seaplane crash that takes the lives o f both the boys’ fathers, Ookawa and Noda. The mother of Noda’s son had al­ ready died, and so Ookawa’s widow, Nobuko (Irie), takes charge o f the boy, Takashi, and raises him with her own son, Yukichi. She makes no distinction in her love for the two and teaches them to love each other as if they were true brothers. Although she is desperately poor, she never yields in her determination to raise the two into fine pilots like their fa­ thers. But, even to put food on the table for the two, she must work late into the night. Still, on those rare occasions when she has the time, she takes them out to the riverside and plays with them as if she had not a care in the world. The boys, of course, return her love unrestrainedly. The strain of her labors, however, takes its toll and she is stricken with tuberculosis and eventually dies. When the film was released, critic Nanbu Keinosuke was to write admiringly about her deathbed scene: “ This year’s crop of ‘mother’ pictures have mosdy been dark contem­ plations of death. This one, however, makes us feel no such darkness. There is something light-hearted and quite natural about the mother’s death here.” 62 While “light-hearted” is hardly the appropriate term for her death, it does shun the bathos that normally afflictsJapanese films in such circumstances. Therefore, whenever the memory of the mother is invoked (and it is quite often), we remember not an interminable death­ bed scene but her shining, still-young face as she played with the chil­ dren. The image remaining in the viewer’s mind is equally divorced from that other “ darkness” called war. This becomes apparent later in the film, when Yukichi’s aunt brings the newspaper containing news of

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In Yam am oto Satsuo’s Winged llcloiy (Toho, 1942), Iric Takako breaks with the “ mil­ itarist m other” stereotype to give a portrayal o f w arm , motherly love.

Yukichi’s exploits as an ace war pilot and places it in front of Nobuko’s funeral tablet in the little household shrine, with the comment, “ Your mother is bound to be pleased.” Actually, it seems completely inconsis­ tent that she should be overjoyed by such news. Consciously or uncon­ sciously (most probably the latter), the filmmakers consistently subvert the war-aflirming message of the film. Yukichi, still only twelve years old, swears to his dying mother that he will watch over his younger “ brother,” Takashi, and that he will make sure that he too becomes a pilot. The propaganda motive in his lines is quite apparent: “ I’ll make sure he enters the pilot training school. You don’t need any money for that. Every month you receive clothes, books, pencils, and even a little allowance, you know.” The two boys grow to young manhood in quite different ways. Yuki­ chi has become an ace in the China Incident air war. In his uniform and jackboots, he looks every bit the stout-hearted military man. Takashi meanwhile has become a test pilot for a company designing military air­ craft. A heavy smoker with a flair for stylish clothes, he is the rakish, hotshot pilot straight out of the American aviation films of the thirties. The

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difference between the two boys is attributed to the fact that they are, after all, not “ real” brothers. In a Sawamura Tsutomu-style spiritist film, this difference would have been exploited for didactic purposes. Takashi, representing the laxness of the “Americanized spirit,” would be brought back to an ap­ preciation o f his “ true Japanese spirit” by his Japanese-spirited elder brother. In this film, however, the old didacticism is almost over­ whelmed by the film’s real theme of love. Although Yukichi looks like the quintessential, hard-bitten militarist in his uniform, he proves capable of deep affection when he is assigned as an army representative to the very firm where Takashi is working as a test pilot. His task is to give expert advice on improving the design of the new fighter (the Hayabusa), in order to make it out-perform its rivals, the British Spitfire and the Hurricane. The plot thickens. During a test flight, Takashi disobeys Yukichi’s or­ ders and crashes as a result. At the crash inquest, events take an ironic turn. It is decided that the cause o f the crash was “ human,” not me­ chanical failure. Even Yukichi has to testify that Takashi had disobeyed orders. In the end, Yukichi himself is ordered to take up the plane. News o f this outrages the still-hospitalized Takashi, and he storms at his brother’s “ betrayal.” During the test flight, Yukichi’s plane also goes out of control and seems about to crash. Miraculously, however, the plane lands safely, and Yukichi steps out, beaming with joy. He has located the mechanical flaw that had caused the previous plane to crash, thus clear­ ing his brother’s reputation. The last sequence of the film is a documentary montage o f air activ­ ity over Burma in the spring o f 1942. This is intercut with shots o f Yuki­ chi and Takashi, each piloting his own Hayabusa as they attack the same B-17. Apparently Yamamoto had planned a far more spectacular air battle, but lack of time and resources had forced him to trim the scene to the bare minimum: When I edited the scene, I had to give up the idea of showing the faces of the brothers as they fought or shooting from the point of view of the enemy airmen as they return fire. Rather, I put together the sequence as objectively as possible. In part of it, I even had to make Hayabusa fighters stand in for American fighters supporting the B-17. Filming the dogfight scenes from as far away as possible, I tried to disguise the substitution. As it turned out, however, the gamble failed completely. Even ordinary' viewers recognized the Hayabusas for what they really

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were, and thought they were Japanese planes joining in the attack on the bomber. The popular reaction was, “What’s the big deal? Dozens of Japanese planes attack and manage to shoot down only one American bomber!” I was highly embarrassed. Officers of the army air corps, however, were complimentary about the scene, saying it was much like the real thing.63 Winged Victory is a miraculous sort o f film to find at this stage in Jap a­ nese wartime cinema. The ideological demands of the war situation had progressively narrowed the sphere o f “ private emotion,” making it little more than a furtive presence in standard kokusaku films. This film, however, steps out of the trend. Although the two central characters demonstrate the required loyalty and dedication to duty, their lives are quickened by deep afTection; the war itself becomes but another phase in the drama of their relationship. This of course is not what Sawamura Tsutomu meant when, several years before, he had called for “ real human emotions” in war films. He was pointing to the need to make the officially prescribed emotions of the soldier—emotions o f comradeship and the feelings of pathos at the death of a comrade—more plausible on the screen. As we shall see in the next chapter, the cinematic expression of “ real human emotions” of this sort became highly codified. A new breed of spiritist films was about to be launched, telling over and over essentially the same story of a young man’s struggling progress toward spiritual fulfillment as a “ true” Japanese warrior.

11 The New Spiritism—“A Progress of Souls”

T he Travails o f Making a Combat Spectacular Yamamoto KajirO’s The Sea Warjrom Hawaii to Malaya (Hawai Marei Oki Kaisen, Toho, 1942) was the most influential war film of the entire Pacific War period. The Toho company launched it with great fanfare on 8 De­ cember 1942 “ to commemorate the first year of the Greater East Asian War,” claiming by war’s end that it had been seen by more than a hun­ dred million people at home and abroad. “ The movie that has united the Empire!” read the posters. During the half year leading up to its premiere, an intensive public relations campaign whipped up public ex­ pectations as never before. The special effects were the selling point that the newspapers, film magazines, and even such youth publications as Shukan Shokokumin routinely described as “ Epoch-making! The greatest in screen history!” 1 A huge model of Pearl Harbor spread out across six thousand square meters o f the Toho lot and exact scale models (calculated at 1: 600) were floated in the fifteen hundred square meter pond. “ The bat­ tleships floating around in the pond were about two meters in length,” Director Yamamoto reports, “ and the water was waist deep. It really was a sight to see.” 2 The resulting illusion o f reality was so good that U.S. occupation authorities viewing the film just after the war report­ edly took it for the genuine article.3 Tsuburaya Eiji, the creator of the il­ lusion, instantly was hailed as “ the god of special effects,” a reputation that endured well into the postwar years. When the navy first called on Toho in mid-1942 to make a film about the Pearl Harbor attack, they already knew who they wanted to direct it. The year before, Yamamoto Kajiro had directed Horse (Uma, Toho, 1941), a film about a girl in northern Honshu who raises a colt and fi­ nally sells it to the army. “ We want this new film to look something like Horse," the navy representatives demanded, referring to the latter film’s harmonious blend o f documentary and dramatic sequences. 382

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Tsuburaya E iji’s scale m odels were used for the clim actic Pearl H arbor attack scene in Yam am oto KajirO’s Sea WarJrum Hawaii to Malaya (Toho, 1942).

Once Sea War was in production, Yamamoto found not only the navy but the Information Bureau and even the High Military Com­ mand peering over his shoulder with expectancy and no small amount of anxiety, an experience Yamamoto found “ nerve wracking” : “ Horse had been a fiction film fleshed out with documentary sequences, but the navy was demanding that I stick ‘faithfully to the facts.' It took me three or four months to sort out the various elements of this seemingly contra­ dictory project.” 4 In his vivid account o f preparations for the actual shooting, Yama­ moto reveals how the military bureaucracy, much like the government, could thwart the carrying out of its own orders. The director’s problems began when he and his scriptwriter, Yamazaki Kentaro, v isited Suzuka Air Station on their first information-gathering excursion: We presented the letter of introduction from the Naval Department to the commander of the base, but it turned out to be worthless. Everything at Suzuka was hush-hush, hidden behind thick, closely guarded doors. We weren’t even allowed a glimpse of air station operations.

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ihA Progress o f Souls”

Later, when vve were led into the mess hall of the Tsuchiura Air Group, we saw a large poster attached to the far wall. It was labeled “ c h a r t f o r t h e p r e v e n t i o n o f e s p i o n a g e . ” It was done cartoon style. Hovering above the ground were figures labeled “foreign spies” and below ground was another set of root-like figures labeled “domestic spies.” These root figures branched out into tiny tendrils and these latter were labeled in the following manner: “intellectuals,” “journalists,” “persons connected with the movie industry.” Thus, for all intents and purposes, the military' had decided to treat us as spies. Ever) thing was shrouded in the darkest mystery. Naval regulations absolutely forbade our setting foot onboard an operational Japanese flat-top. Since much of the drama had to take place on just such a ship, this was indeed a stumbling block. Not only were we forbidden to inspect charts showing the construction of the ships, they wouldn’t even vouchsafe a photograph showing exterior of one. We were reduced to pleading our case before intransigent naval bureaucrats: how could we construct a set with nothing to base ourselves on? But the officials only sneered at us. “You were able to construct sets of fairy' castles without any actual models to go by. So what’s the problem?” Finally, “ Harry” Mimura dug up somewhere three recent editions of life Magazine, featuring an abundance of pictures of aircraft carrier islands (where the commander stands), equipment for launching and retrieving aircraft, lifts, storage rooms, officers’ quarters, gun rooms, sailors’ living quarters, and lengthy picture stories about life aboard a carrier. The upshot was that we had to construct our set based on these pictures . . . of an American carrier!5 Building the set presented formidable problems as well. The biggest was making the deck strong enough to support the weight o f actual tor­ pedo planes: “ These were middle-sized craft, carrying a crew o f three. Even using dummy torpedoes, without explosives or firing mechanisms, the planes weighed over three tons apiece. When they reached their take off speed of one hundred kilometers an hour, their weight actually tre­ bles. In order to support such weight, our ‘flight deck’ had to be more than one hundred millimeters thick. Under that, we had to put together a framework of pine from a half a meter to a full meter thick. At a time when such materials were painfully scarce, how were we to get hold of them? To make matters worse, we needed no less than two thousand square meters of the stuff!” 6 Even after they succeeded in requisitioning the supplies, transportation became another headache of monumental proportions. “ It was at times like these,” Yamamoto writes, “ that I deeply regretted losing my marvelous assistant director, Kurosawa Akira.”

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Miraculously, however, the film was finished a full two weeks before the release date. But there was still one last hurdle to confront: On the day it was formally viewed by the Navy Censorship Board, a voice rang out in the darkened basement screening room, “What’s this? It’s an American carrier, isn’t it? The film should be burnt. It’s an insult to the Imperial Navy!!” The voice was that of a high official of the Board. “What are you talking about?” I thought to myself, “it’s because you asses wouldn’t let me see the real thing that I had to base myself on pictures from Life. You stupid bastard!” After the official’s angry outburst, the room was deadly quiet. No one seemed willing to take up the theme and to condemn the film. In fact, I never heard anything again about the complaint once the group broke up and dispersed. It strikes me as incomprehensible that after such a scene, the issue was allowed to lapse completely without any further consequences.7 High School and elementary school pupils across the country were marched off to see the film, and munitions workers, civic organizations, and youth organizations formed special viewing groups. In China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific, the occupation govern­ ments mounted special free showings for military personnel and local collaborationist big-wigs. Sea War was also shown in regular movie thea­ ters from Manila toJakarta, where it was received enthusiastically by the ordinary citizens.

The Return o f Spiritism in Film The enormous popularity and critical success of The Sea Warfrom Ha­ waii to Malaya was only part of its significance to the Pacific War period. Its narrative - focusing on a young boy who undergoes training at the Naval Air Cadet Academy (Tokkaren) and then becomes a pilot in the Pearl Harbor attack - was a carefully crafted a piece o f propaganda, as subtle as anything generated by any of the wartime media. While Tasaka’s Five Scouts had been the central “ text” of the China Incident films, being emulated and even “ quoted” in many subsequent films, Sea War played an even more central role for the new round o f spiritist films o f the Pacific War period. In this section we will look at a rather unified set of major films in­ heriting not only the Sea War plot structure but also the very soul of its central character. These include:

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The New Spiritism— “A Progress o f Souls ” 1. Watanabe Kunio’s Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky (Kessen no Ozora t, Toho, 1943, scr. Yasumi Toshio). Hara Setsuko plays the elder sister of a young and sickly boy. Through her gentle chiding, and the example of a group of Yokkaren cadets who regularly visit the house, the boy is inspired to overcome his physical weaknesses and to become a cadet himself. As Iijima pointed out in a contemporary review: “The film avoids depictions of the youngsters as supermen, persuasively making the point that anyone can become a fine military man.” 8 2. Tasaka Tomotaka’s Navy (Kaigun, Shochiku, 1943). Sawamura’s script for the film skillfully condenses the long novel by Iwata Toyo’o (Shishi Bunroku), serialized in Asahi Shinbun fromJanuary to December 1942. It follows the careers and spiritual development of a pair of boyhood friends. One, a painter, finally overcomes his spiritual crisis by harnessing his artistic talents to the service of the war effort. The other, Tani Mahito, is a fictionalized version of the actual navy hero Yokoyama Seiji. Tani never waivers in his determinadon to become a submarine officer and eventually becomes commander of one of the midget submarines participating in the Pearl Harbor attack. After dying in action, he and his comrades became revered as the “the Nine Submarine Patriots.” Under the influence of Sawamura’s pure seishinshugi script, director Tasaka put aside his earlier “ humanist touch,” creating instead a deeply worshipful portrait of “ the Navy Spirit” and the modern young men who embody it. The film’s “crowning touch,” the scene of combat at Pearl Harbor, is lost from all available prints. 3. Kinoshita Keisuke’s Army (Rikugun, Shochiku, 1944, scr. Ikeda Tomiyasu). Based on the novel by Hino Ashihei, the story line resembles that of Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky. Under the constant encouragement of his father (Ryu ChishQ) and mother (Tanaka Kinuyo), a weakling son overcomes his timidity, undergoes military training, and eventually marchcs ofT to war as a man. When it was released, Nihon Eiga praised the family scenes: “ Especially in the way it treats the affection of wife and husband and of parents and children, it displays at its best the traditional familism undergirding our nation.”9 4. Yamamoto KajirO’s Kato's Falcon Fighters (Kato Hayabusa Sentotai, Toho, 1944, scr. Yamamoto and Yamazaki Kenta). The entire nation mourned when the actual Lieutenant Kato died in aerial combat over the Gulf of Bengal in May 1942, and, like Tank Commander Nishizumi, his personality and exploits became legendary. For reasons to be discussed below, portrayals of the martial virtues of individual gunshin heroes were coming under official disapproval.

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When the film was released, director Yamamoto was at pains to dissociate the film from the old school of hero-worship: “ Such treatments, tend to make the gunshin hero as hard to digest as a mouthful of sand.” He then goes on to connect Lieutenant KatO with the new spiritist discourse, which by this time had ripened into maturity: “ Of course, 1 try to communicate his greatness as a warrior, but my real purpose is to show how he represented a spiritual posture every bit as relevant to daily life as to the batdefield.” 10 The script, which Yamamoto wrote with Yamazaki, his collaborator on Hawai Marti, dwells on the love and respect KatO inspires in his men. His exploits as an aerial ace, meanwhile, are depicted in episodic, documentary sequences. As a group, this new crop of spiritist films seems to create its own hermetically sealed world, retelling essentially the same story (about the spiritual development o f a young “ Everyman” hero), while sharing the same code of incantatory language and images. Several o f the films present the archetypical story in its entirety, others focus on one or an­ other of its phases. Aimed principally at young audiences, the films had the purpose of recruiting youths into the various military training pro­ grams, with the assumption that the war would still be going on when they reached maturity. This is the implication in the tide of a late entry in this genre o f films: Sasaki Yasushi’s You Are the Next Wild Eagles (Kimi Koso Tsugi no Arawashi Da, Shochiku, 1944). The title of the kamikaze re­ cruitment drama Believe That Others Will Follow (Ato ni Tsuzuku wo Shinzu, Toho, March 1945, lost?) has the same implication. As the titles Army and Navy suggest, the two films were expected to be direct embodiments of the “ spirit” o f their respective branches o f the military. From start to finish, their sponsoring agencies pampered them lavishly while at the same time scrutinizing them severely. Hino Ashihei, author of the original novel for Army, published an open letter to the filmmakers calling for an attitude of piety: “As I wrote [the novel], I ded­ icated myself afresh to the service of His Imperial Majesty. I would sit upright and bow in the direction of the Imperial Palace before daring to set pen to paper each morning.” 11 Since the end o f the war a sea change in Japanese popular con­ sciousness has made these films almost as inaccessible to most Japanese viewers as to Westerners. Their endless hymns to tamashii (soul) and seishin (spirit) ring no special chord among the generations who know only the peace and relative prosperity of recent times. Culture historian Yamamoto Akira writes about the difficulty even older-generation

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viewers have today trying to reexperience the original emotional power of such films: Nowadays, when one sees them on videotape or even in a revival house, one simply cannot duplicate the special psychological environment of the wartime era when we first saw them. I remember trooping off with the rest of my fourth grade class to see The Sea War from Hawaii to Malaya at a downtown theater in December 1942. Before the show, a naval officer gave us an inspirational speech. Then we had a lecture from our principal. Upon returning to school, we sat down to a writing assignment on “The Greater East Asian War and Our Firm Resolve as the Nation’s Youth.” When I saw the same film [in 1984], sitting in a small screening room and filling the pages of my notebook, the feeling was completely different. As the scenes I had thrilled to forty-two years before unreeled before my eyes, I found myself scoffing in complete disbelief The old consciousness was simply no longer there.12 The spiritist films stake out for themselves a special psychological terrain, sealed away from modern rationality. Their raison d’être is a polar opposite to the U.S. Why We Fight series of war education films, made under the supervision o f Frank Capra. As we have already seen in Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers, probing the reasons and causes of war was al­ ready a taboo in the China Incident. In a similar manner, several o f the later spiritist films directly address themselves to the issue of historical causality in order to dismiss or subvert it. A brief prelude to Army, for instance, features a dramatization of the same incursion by British forces in 1863 as was depicted in Pirate's Flag Blasted Away. Its purpose this time, however, seems more to have to do with establishing the loyalist lineage of the central character than with explicating historical meanings. The jidaige/d style of acting clashes with the more naturalistic style of the rest of the film, thus negating any sense o f continuity between the two eras. “ Then” and “ now” evidently be­ long to two incompatible orders of reality. Tasaka’s Navy takes a quite different tack. It treats the viewer to sev­ eral straightforward lectures, including one by the hero’s teacher and mentor. The boy and his comrades sit in a semicircle on the tatami floor, the camera peering over their shoulders as the old man expounds on the “ machinations” of the Westerner powers at the London Naval Conference and the league of Nations. Then, in the next several shots, the camera views the scene from different places in the room, as if

Tasaka Tom otaka’s Navy (Shochiku, 1943). I he “ preceptor” o f the main character lectures the boys on the necessity o f war with the United States.

overcome by impatience. This is followed by an abrupt cut to a parade ground where thousands of white-clad cadets are singing and march­ ing in a series of vast concentric circles. The whole sequence is a subtle subversion o f the assertion that the war can (or should) be placed in a rational historical context. Although the boys listen and respond re­ spectfully, they have already given themselves to the cause and feel no particular compulsion to reason out the “ why” o f the matter. Similar subversions occur in Navy's other lecture scenes, such as the one in which the officer discourses on the historic mission of their branch o f the service. The camera moves in to study the boys’ intent expressions. Clearly; the real message is neither in the words nor in the facts they pur­ port to relate; rather, it is in the mute smile playing faintly on the boys’ lips when the officer touches on the theme of self-sacrifice for the nation. It is in the sudden straightening o f the posture when the name of the Emperor is mentioned. It is in their eyes, picked out in extreme close-up and strangely reminiscent o f those of Ozu’s characters after the war eyes so trusting and unguarded, so warm, limpid, and frank, that one al­ most forgets that they are the eyes of fanatical determination. Every

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scene in this remarkable film invokes the code of a single discourse: mys­ tical, ultranationalist seishinshugi. In his book Film Policy (1943), Tsumura Hideo devotes several pages to the ineflability of the Japanese spirit. It is “ a thing of intuition, mak­ ing difficult, nay foolish, all efforts to expound on it rationally.” Tsu­ mura seems to concur with the nation’s top military leaders that spirit alone is the key to victory. In one passage he approvingly quotes a con­ versation overheard on a train: “You know, if foreigners were able to get a firm understanding of the nature o f the Japanese Spirit, let’s say through some written report or something, it would be like stealing the plans to our country’s best weapon. Japan’d be done for. But fortunately we don’t have to worry. It’s something far beyond the comprehension of any foreigner.” 13 Even comparatively mild expositors of Japanism like Hasegawa Ny 5 zekan affirm this eternal ahistorical spirit. To him, it is the racial en­ dowment o f every Japanese individual, a presence that is discernibly there. This presence, however, has an elusive quality and is in constant danger o f being “ lost from view.” It is also deeply paradoxical. Although it is a natural endowment, the presence slips easily into absence. Fur­ thermore, it requires great struggle on all levels (personal, national, and international) for it to be “ realized” in the world. This was the urgency in the cry o f the young ultranationalist officers o f the thirties: “ Clarify the national polity” (kokutai no meicho wo!). Somewhat like the “ Godli­ ness” of the Puritans, Japanese spirit was an “ absence” requiring great effort to make it a “ presence.” It was a transcendence toward which one groped while fending off the torments and lures of the flesh —the pull of familial affection being one o f the most insidious. From their inception in the 1939-41 period, the pure seishinshugi films are dotted with episodes detailing the pitfalls awaiting those with as yet unperfected souls. (One is tempted to liken such tales to a kind of Pilgrim's Progress, with Yasukuni Shrine, the ultimate abode o f the dei­ fied gunshin warrior, as the goal, but to do such would breed serious misconceptions.) The lure of Western-style individualism is one such pitfall. In Navy, for instance, there is the young artist who has fallen into anomie. Unable to fuse himself with the new spirit o f the times, he has come to despise both himself and his work: “ I can’t go on just copying the French paint­ ers, churning out flowers or pumpkins. I know our soldiers are dying at the front. But even with that knowledge, what is a painter to do?” 14 The hero rescues him by setting him to painting posters of battleships: “ It’s

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T h e stalwart “Jap an ese spirit” remains serenely unmoved by the lies poured forth by the “ dem on Roosevelt” (Shukan Gaho, February

•943)-

time to get a new set of goals in life. Do you think only soldiers can be patriots?” Another pitfall is the selfish, possessive feeling of parents toward their children. In Sasaki Yasushi’s Our Planes Fly South (1943), a dozen or so mothers sit docilely as a school teacher (Ryu Chishu) lectures them on the proper way to bring up their sons. He admonishes them against let­ ting their love turn into “ pampering,” for this will lower their potential value to the state. “ Remember,” he continues, “ motherhood is a sacred trust; it involves a high sense of responsibility to the nation.” Similarly, at the beginning of The World o f Ijove (Ai no Sekai, Toho, 1943, dir. Aoyanagi Nobuo), a story about a girl juvenile delinquent, the narrator di­ rectly addresses the audience: “These children do not belong to us alone. They have been entrusted to us by the state, and it is our obliga­ tion to rear them as treasures of the nation.” Overconcern for the welfare o f one’s own flesh and blood in war­ time is seen as a form of disloyalty to the state. When an old father in Army betrays his grief at hearing that his son’s battalion has been anni­ hilated in a heroic action, he is brought back to his senses when a fellow worker (Ryu Chishu) rebukes him for allowing himself “ to be overcome by selfishness in this hour of national crisis.” The good parent surren­ ders all feelings of possession when a son is called into service: “ I no longer consider him to be a child of mine,” the mother says in Navy. In

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Army, the lad is hardly out the door when the mother refers to him as “ an angel,” among the honorable dead. Not only do the parents no longer own their children, the young warriors are taught to consider their own bodies as the exclusive posses­ sion of the Emperor and his military forces. This is the lesson o f the hu­ morous anpan sequence in Abe Yutaka’s Flaming Sky, where the officer thunders at the young trainees, “ How dare you desecrate those bodies entrusted to you by the Imperial Army!” Such negative examples, how­ ever, are presented as isolated, uncharacteristic breaches in the cheerful self-discipline that unites the whole nation, and the violators are visibly grateful for having been set straight again. The seishinshugi film takes quite literally the slogan “ One Hundred Million Hearts Beating as One” (ichi oku isshin). The harmonious conti­ guity of hearth and barracks is emphasized in the purest o f these films. Films treating the theme of mind-body training do this by rhythmically intercutting scenes at the academy with others set at home. In The Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya, for instance, the scene of the young hero prac­ ticing in a flight-simulation machine dissolves to his sisters and mother sitting at a table reading aloud his letter about the experiences. In Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky, the elder sister has devoted herself to inspiring her younger brother to overcome his childhood illnesses to become a naval cadet. She sacrifices her own personal interests in order to be a model for him to follow. Similarly, in Army, the father and mother unite in the often frustrating task of training up the spirit of their faint-hearted son, determined to make him good soldierly material. To all of these mothers, fathers, and elder sisters, the essence of good parenting is iden­ tical with their duties as good citizens. The real intention is directed more toward the public good than to the private good of the child. The 1941 government pamphlet Way of the Subject states the issue clearly: “ Pri­ vate life is, in the final analysis, ‘the way of the subject’ . . . it has a public significance.” 15 The elementary school Morals (Shushin) and National Language (Kokugo) textbooks were central to the early education of all Japanese citi­ zens, forming a body of universally “ shared knowledge” that filmmakers could draw on with confidence. They used this textbook-based common knowledge to impregnate many of their scenes'and images with an intertextual meaning now largely lost on the modern viewer. In the morals textbooks, for example, the private virtue o f the citizen is consistendy modeled on the public virtue o f the military man. The implication is that war, even in times of peace, is the perpetual condition o f Japanese society.

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The calm satisfaction with which movie parents greet the call-up (and likely death) o f their son suggests that, to them, it is as natural as his school graduation or marriage. They congratulate themselves and are congratulated by friends and relatives. Not only must the citizen be prepared to welcome the inevitable call to arms, “ even those who do not go out to the battlefield are required to serve their country in their places o f work by giving their all in Chugi [vertical loyalty to the Emperor].” 16Junshoku (death in the line o f work) was a term commonly used in the era, implying a moral equivalence between death through overwork in the factory and death on the batdefield. In explaining the significance of a textbook passage describing the death of Russo-Japanese War gunshin hero Hirose Takeo, the 1943 ver­ sion of the Teacher’s Guide told teachers: “ In bringing to mind the last moments of a gunshin, we seek to imbue in the pupil the sacred import of the statement in the Imperial Rescript on Education: ‘In times of na­ tional emergency, sacrifice everything in service to the polity.’ The in­ tention of this material is to indicate that even in the most routine ac­ tions, the true Japanese leads a life of implicit fealty to the national purpose.” 17 Films like A Bouquetfrom the South Seas (1942), Searing Wind (1943), and Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful (1944) all have characters who knowingly sacrifice themselves in the line of work, some going so far as committing junshoku. These characters are clearly modeled on the above principle. Response to the call of duty is depicted as instinctive, as if it were in the blood or in the genes. There is an essential difference between these films and those made by the Allies depicting the sacrifices of civilians in the course of hazard­ ous war work. The theme of the latter is brave endurance and “ doing one’s part” ; yet, for all their spirit of voluntarism, the non-Japanese civilian’s sacrifices for the war effort remains a form of gesellschaft. The master discourse of spiritist films, however, is that o f a gemeinschafl, seam­ lessly linking the individual to the nation, the civilian to the fighting man, peace to war, and, indeed, life to death. Unlike the katsugeki combat action films, the presence of an enemy — even a thoroughly despicable one —is irrelevant to the seishinshugi film. 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. Focusing on the external enemy is a kind o f distrac­ tion. In the teki gaishin (hate the enemy) films produced in the second half of the Pacific War, villainous enemies do appear in the flesh (most

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notably in the paranoid spy features). These, however, were generally considered to belong to a distincdy inferior genre. Loaded with all this ideological cargo, the Pacific War era spiritist film takes on a rather static quality. Events and incidents are conflated into types of situations: the moment when the boy decides to become a naval cadet; the tense period of waiting for word that he has qualified for entrance; the final family meal; and the long scenes where pilots or soldiers must endure hours of torment waiting for the return of a com­ rade. From film to film, such scenes become as standardized and recog­ nizable as the michiyuJa and uchi iri scenes in Kabuki. Characters are con­ flated too: the sickly boy, the inspirational elder brother, the “ militarist mother,” and the caring, “ democratic” sergeant. Heroes, where they ap­ pear at all in the usual sense, tend to be depersonalized into embodiments of the same spiritual virtues that formed the chapter headings in the mo­ rals and national language textbooks: Incorruptibility (Seiren), Public Mo­ rality (Kotoku), Conscientiousness (Shisei), and Loyalism (Chug). Pacific War era spiritist films, as we have noted, did not spring up fresh and fully formed in the post-Pearl Harbor era. They drew heavily on the small number of “ classical texts,” principally Tasaka’s China In­ cident films and those scripted by Sawamura Tsutomu in the first flow­ ering (1939 40) of the seishinshugi film. Tasaka’s films provided many im­ ages, allusions, and narrative sequences incorporated into later films. The paradoxical smile at the end o f Five Scouts is one such image. When it reappears in subsequent films, the image is anchored in this prior cinematic history, giving it added semiotic weight. Although it began in Five Scouts as an expression o f “ we who are about to die” com­ radeship, the smile now becomes an abstraction without any particular meaning content. It plays across the lips o f the mother in Naiy as she hears o f her son’s call-up; the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor evokes it in many other films. As a sign, it does not signify anything in particu­ lar. The military salute is another such empty sign; the soldier salutes everyone, not just his comrades or superior officers. Like so many other seishinshugi images, they become incantatory devices, gesturing toward a meaning that, to borrow an image from Paul de Man, “ collapses from abyss to abyss, until it threatens to lose itself in bottomless depths.” 18 Five Scouts drew heavily on such empty' signs to summon up shared emotions or sense impressions that take the place o f conceptual thought. One example is the already discussed synergy o f taste impres­ sions, where the soldiers seem to be able to imbibe the flavor of the to­ bacco or fruit going into the mouths of their comrades. The sharing of songs is common in the war films of most nations, but there is something

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profoundly different about the highly emotional rendition of the Ja p a ­ nese national anthem, “ Kimi ga Yo,” at the end of the Tasaka film. One could call it a sign of “solidarity” ; but of solidarity in what? Singing the national anthem at this point actually replaces the direct bonds of friendship and solidarity among the men with the evocation of a higher realm of infinite abstraction. The concept of the Emperor, after all, is one that “ surpasses all human understanding.” Even today, and espe­ cially within the confines of the family, Japanese tend to pride them­ selves on their intuitive mutual understanding (isshin denshin). The no­ tion is that when all is implicit, no words are necessary. The wordless communication of Tasaka's characters and those in subsequent films is clearly that of the Japanese family, of isshin denshin. In the new crop of spiritist films, the identity between army and fam­ ily is constantly invoked, the connection having already been made ex­ plicit in the Kokugo textbook chapter “ Letter From the Barracks,” where a young recruit writes home: “We’re all one big family here. We recruits are the children, the commander’s the father and our squad leader’s the mother.” 19 The scenes at the Yokkaren Academy in both Yamamoto’s Sea War and Watanabe’s Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky illustrate the meaning o f the chapter when it asserts that “ this daily life environment is ideal for training up the military spirit.” 20 The corollary assertion, that “ the army is the school of the citizen,” is the theme of numerous other Kokugo textbook chapters. Similarly, the story of applying, entering, and undergoing training in this “ school” is central to many o f the later spiritist films. The novice ultimately gradu­ ates to the battlefield, which then becomes the proving ground for what he has learned in the way o f fighting spirit. Although mastering the skills of mechanized warfare is an important part of this training, it has a far loftier purpose: that of preparing the warrior to be worthy of his own death in battle and his ultimate enshrinement in the Yasukuni pan­ theon as a gunshin. Such is the archetypical storyline that virtually all the seishinshugi films follow. The invariable sequence is: i) novice, 2) trainee, 3) initiate, 4) warrior and “ sacred mission,” and 5) ultimate fulfillment in extinction. The.Xovice The Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya, the first o f the new spiritist films, truncates this phase. In the very first scene the boy meets his older cou­ sin as the latter strides down the paddy-lined road o f their village. There is not the slightest hint o f sweat on the cousin's pristine white

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cadet’s uniform — this, despite the heat and the heavy suitcase he car­ ries. Symbolically, he is the classic elder-brother-as-soldier figure often held up to veneration in the Kokugo readers. He will play the part of pre­ ceptor for the younger boy (in subsequent films, this part is taken by elder sisters, teachers, and even mothers). In Sea War the boy is already psychologically prepared to enter the recruit phase. In the very next se­ quence, his preceptor-cousin tests his metde by challenging him to a dangerous high dive into a lake. Afterwards, they sit with water beading on their muscular bodies, discussing the details of his enrollment. In later films, however, this stage is made dramatically significant by presenting the novice as physically or spiritually weak. In Army, and espe­ cially in Decisive Battle in the Sky, the transition from novice to recruit be­ comes the main part of the story. In the latter film, Hara Setsuko plays the elder sister who for some reason has taken over the role of rearing her younger brother. Their home is situated near the Yokkaren Academy, and the family is often visited by the young cadets. Katsuhiko, the middle-school brother, is often seen lying in bed, too exhausted to romp with the other boys. At school, he is known as a weakling and is often ex­ cused from severe physical exercise. One day, immediately after a visit by some o f the cadets, Hara goes up to Katsuhiko’s bedside. “ Why do you suppose those boys are so lively and you’re like this?” she chides gendy. “ Because I’m weak. . . “ Why do you say because? Wrhy can’t you be en­ ergetic like them? I was so disappointed when I saw you out on the calis­ thenics field that time .. . you couldn’t jump the vaulting horse. I know the teacher said you didn’t have to. But why didn’t you try anyway? Just to get you to do your best, I’d do anything for you.” Katsuhiko responds by pulling die covers up over his head, and Hara begins tickling him. In the next scenes, however, we see that her efforts have not been in vain. Little by little, the determination to make himself strong takes hold in the boy, and it is not long before he has thoroughly transformed himself into a successful candidate for the academy. Physically weak boys who are inspired to transform themselves into useful material for the war effort appear in other war films, including Army and You’re the Next Wild Eagles (a picture that otherwise does not fit the classic seis/nnshugi film pattern). The Trainee

W’hen the drama moves from the home to the training field, the vis­ ual texture of the film changes radically. Documentary sequences of

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Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky (Toho, 1943). H ara Setsuko plays the elder sister who perform s the role o f “ preceptor” for her brother.

calisthenics, massed ceremonies á la Leni Riefenstahl, and combat training with real military hardware, often leave the upper third of the frame filled with sky. The effect is a heady liberation from the compres­ sion of the traditional Japanese-style home interior. The contrast is emphasized by the crosscutting, discussed above, between home and training field. This is also the phase in which spiritist ideology is fore­ grounded by long lectures by training officers and conversations between the trainee and his guide. All of the above-mentioned seishinshugi films feature extended sequences of this sort. The Initiate The boy exchanges his trainee’s uniform for that of the real military man. The significance of this event has already been established in sev­ eral key h'okugo textbook passages. The academy graduate now stands before his mother (or father, elder sister, younger brothers, etc.) as a fin­ ished product. He smartly salutes everyone assembled to greet him, his face glowing with joy and confidence. “ How admirable (rippa) you’ve

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become!” everyone comments with awe in their voices. The mother may instinctively reach out to touch him, but his happy salute seems to indicate that he is beyond maternal caresses. He can now talk to his pre­ ceptor on an equal footing, looking him straight in the eye and “ speak­ ing from the stomach.” He is now a modern bushi and an officer. Often, however, this first conversation with the preceptor as an equal features a spiritual crisis. A boy in the initiates’ squad has died in training, and he blames himself. The preceptor tells him that remorse of this sort will be his inevitable lot as an officer. As an initiate, he is now as much a part of the dead as of the living. The Warrior and H is Sacred M ission

In this phase, the hero dissolves into the military organization, losing all those qualities that had once highlighted his individuality onscreen. Even when he appears, which is not very often now, it is often difficult to pick him out from the crowd of fellow officers. The focus o f attention has shifted to the depiction o f the military as an impersonal entity as it embarks upon a mission of vast strategic and historic importance, often the Pearl Harbor attack. Maps, formal military conferences, and pano­ ramic views o f fleets, air armadas, or armored columns dominate the screen. Kato’s Falcon Fighters provides a variation on the treatment of this stage, since it is only at this point we meet the central character. Still, as we shall see, he is portrayed as a “ hero” who bonds with his men so completely as to lose his distinctive individuality'. Fulfillm ent in Extinction

The scope of the action narrows to the hero’s group on their final mis­ sion. He is now so completely integrated into the tightly knit unit as to be indistinguishable from those around him. He is now part o f the synaesthetic “ group personality,” which Tasaka had depicted in Five Scouts. Their corporate fate and corporate extinction lacks the poig­ nancy o f an individual death. Sometimes the climactic moment is not even shown, as in Kato’s Falcon Fighters, where it is recorded in titles that slowly roll up the screen until they dissolve into the end mark. The hero and his comrades have returned to the textbook o f exemplary martial virtues from which their story seems to have come in the first place.

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Militarist Mothers The Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya features the following eerie dream se­ quence. We see the face of the boy as he sleeps in his hammock in the barracks room of the academy. Trees in front of his old home are super­ imposed over his face, which then disappears as the camera moves into the house. It moves resdessly from room to room, searching in wide pan­ ning sweeps. In voice-over, the boy calls out, “ Mother? Mother, where are you?” The camera discovers his sisters, wearing strange, large bows in their hair. Then the mother appears, proffering the box o f food she has made for him. “ Gee! I’d sure like to cat some of that again!” he ex­ claims. Dissolve to the mother, seen from the back, as she kneels before the family altar. She rings a litde bell at her side and commences to pray. The boy whispers to her in voice-over: “ Stay healthy until I achieve dis­ tinction for meritorious action at the front!” She continues to pray, ap­ pearing not to have heard him. “ Mother! Mother, turn this way, please!” he calls out in agitation. She continues to pray. Cut to a shot of a loud­ speaker as a trumpet blares reveille. The boy’s dream is obviously designed to show the mental state of the young recruit. Home is alien to him now, and the links of childhood love are changing to nostalgia. But what of the scene with the mother impassively praying? She is, of course, praying for (or is it to?) him. To her mind, he is already one of the dead. The militarist mother (gunkoku no haha)—who not only willingly sur­ renders her son for service to the nation but who actually encourages him to render himself up in supreme sacrifice —is a stock character of the seishinshugi film. She had her inception in “ The Sailor’s Mother,” a chapter in the fifth-grade Kokugo reader from 1918 to 1932. His eyes bleary with tears o f admiration, the young sailor reads this mother’s letter: “ You wrote that you did not participate in the batde of Toshima Island. You were in the attack on Weihaiwei on 10 August but you didn’t distinguish yourself with an individual exploit. Why have you gone to war? Your life is to be offered up to requite your duty to His Im­ perial Majesty.” 21 As we read the above today, it seems incredible that a mother should actually write such a letter, and one might wonder how many did (the above letter, however, was apparently genuine). Officially, at least, such militarist mothers were objects of veneration. Throughout the entire Fifteen Years’ War period, she was the subject of numerous

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films and innumerable articles in magazines. In fact, the above Kokugo passage was brought to the screen in the opening section of a “fdwamono” war film made in the early days o f the China Incident, The Ma­ rines at Dawn (.Akatsuki no Rikusentai, 1937, Daito, dir. Nagatomi EijirO). As an image in drama and film, the militarist mother’s roots seem to intertwine with those o f the mothers in the Shimpa melodramas o f the early twentieth century. As Sato Tadao characterizes the latter: “ From Meiji times, lower class families would go to extremes to get a son through college in Tokyo. Mothers and sisters would cast aside all chance o f personal happiness to achieve this aim. Writing about this phenomenon [the great ethnologist] Yanagida Kunio would often evoke the image o f the mother wearily working into the night in the old coun­ try home.” 22 Portraying militarist mothers was a problem o f some delicacy for the filmmakers. The great ideological detail with which she had been developed in the newspapers and textbooks tended to make her an image as stiff and unworldly as an icon saint. How was one to make her believable and dramatically viable as a woman animated by the same maternal instincts as any other mother? In the late thirties, Sawamura Tsutomu had complained that most war films had lost sight o f “ real human emotions” and that their characters had become “ mere pup­ pets jerked around on ideological strings.” 23 Although he was referring to soldiers, this was at least as true of the militarist mother. Yamamoto Kajiro and Yamazaki KentarO, as they collaborated on the script for Yamamoto’s Sea War, were the first to work out a solution to the problem. They invested the mother character with hints of a se­ cret “ mother’s war,” which is allowed to surface several times in the film. Invariably, such scenes are juxtaposed with ones in which she bravely denies any possessive interest in her own flesh and blood. In the next moment the declaration is undermined by a subtle, wordless apnrin. In one scene in the early part of Sea War, the mother and the girls are making holiday rice cakes and speculating about whether the boy will be able to come home from training for the celebration. “ It’d be strange if he didn’t get at least a few days off, wouldn’t it mother?” the younger sister asks. “ I haven’t got the slightest idea,” the mother replies, busily inserting pieces o f wood into the stove, “Anyway, he isn’t a member o f this family anymore.” The sisters stare at her, amazed by her coolness. Just then, the boy bursts in with a cheerful military salute for each of them. The mother approaches him, appearing bent and small next to

T h e m other’s “ secret d ram a" in Sra War from Hawaii to Malaya. Above, she quietly dis­ avows concern for her m ilitary son. Below, she betrays her true feelings.

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his muscular body. She looks up at him and “ in a voice choked by tears” (script’s phrase), she says, “ I’m so very glad you’ve come.” That is all there is to the scene, since it would be improper to develop it further. Two years later, in Army, Kinoshita Keisuke does develop the aporia further, and it almost caused him serious trouble. The scene comes at the very end of the film, after all o f the script’s dialogue has ended —a tactic allowing him to skirt the disapproval of the preproduc­ tion censors. The mother, played by Tanaka Kinuyo, is sweeping the entryway of the house. A neighbor stops to ask why she is not out to wave off her son’s outfit as they depart for the front. “ H e’s already a magnificent angel,” she answers, “there is nothing in the way of private stuff I have to tell him anymore.” Then, after the neighbor departs, she leans against the wall of the dusky entryway, slowly and almost inaudibly re­ peating the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers. Her eyes have lost their expres­ sion of determined nonchalance and she looks desperately unhappy. Next she is hurrying down the street toward the bustle o f a huge crowd. The distant sound of marching feet and blaring trumpets. The following sequence is among the most celebrated in Japanese film his­ tory: the camera moves in complete sympathy with her emotions, stooping and peeking under elbows or standing on tiptoe, as if desper­ ate to catch a glimpse of the precious son beyond the sea of heads and hats. The scene wrenches the heart and, for this viewer at least, brings tears to the eyes no matter how often it is seen. Postwar critics applaud it as a daring condemnation o f war, made under the very noses of the authorities. When the film premiered on 22 November 1944, the scene did cause a stir. An army officer is reported to have stormed into the main offices of Shochiku film studios, ranting that Kinoshita had committed treason. Compared with this, the anonymous reviewer for Nihon Eiga was lenient: “ The scene must be counted as a miscalculation on the part of the director. Such lack o f common sense mars this otherwise fine piece of work.” 24 There were others, however, who praised this very scene for its “ stirring propaganda effect.” We do know that in other media, spiritist propaganda had turned deeply paradoxical by mid-1943. This was the year in which the re­ nowned painter Fujita Tsuguji began turning out his officially commis­ sioned gyokusai (mass suicide by soldiers) picture series —scenes of ant­ like slaughter in which soldiers writhe in dying agony on top of a monumental heap of mangled corpses.

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Final shot in Kinoshita K cisukc’s Army (Shochiku, 1944). Tanaka K inuyo's pathetic mother caused a storm o f controversy that continues to this day.

The final sequence of The Last Visit Home, a kamikaze film made a few months before the end of the war, is clearly reminiscent o f the conclu­ sion of Army. A mother comes to her son’s air base to bid him farewell before his suicide mission. In a scene of wrenching poignancy, we see a close up of her hand as she gently strokes the wing tip of the plane that will become his coffin. Then, as his plane rises out o f sight, she puts her hands together in the same prayerful gesture as Tanaka Kinuyo at the end of Army. One film that makes the “ mother’s war” a central part o f the drama is Sasaki’s Our Planes Fly South (Aiki Xlinami e Tohu 1943, Sho­ chiku). In the opening scene, the father (Saburi Shin) and mother (Nobu Chiyo) look at their little son’s sleeping face and discuss his fu­ ture. “ Since he's not so strong, I'd like to see him become a doctor,” the mother confides. Soon afterward, the father dies at sea, leaving the rearing of the young boy to the mother. She takes him from their city home to the countryside. It is her intention to leave the boy there with in-laws while she returns alone to the city in order to earn money to put him through middle school. The local school teacher, however,

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Yoshimura Misao’s Last ¡'hit Home (Daiei, 1945). T he hand o f a kamikaze pilot’s mother caresses the wing o f the plane that will soon become her son’s coffin.

talks her out of the plan, insisting that her true duty is to stay by her son’s side. Although the boy thrives in the country, the mother contin­ ues to worry about his physical strength and never wavers in her deter­ mination to make him a doctor (rather than a soldier). But the boy, now in his early teens, has a will of his own. Suddenly, he announces his desire to enter officer training school to become an army pilot. She is horrified: “ Vou want to fly one of those airplanes?!” She repeats her conviction that he is physically not up to it and that he should aim for a “ less strenuous kind of work.” That night, however, she sits up late engrossed in thought. Then she opens her husband's diary for inspira­ tion and turns to the date their son was born: “ 1 don't care what he be­ comes, as long as it’s of service to the nation.” She takes this as her husband’s consent to the boy’s ambition and, setting aside her own fears, bravely tells him to go ahead with his plan. The usual scenes of Yokkaren training follow. Many months later, when the boy finally re­ turns on furlough, lie steps from the train with the brisk salute of the “ initiate” trainee. The mother’s eyes glow with pride and admiration for the fine young man he has become.

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Thereafter, the film begins to diverge from the standard seishinshugi film pattern. The center o f the drama shifts to the front, where the boy pilots a reconnaissance plane. On his first mission, the plane is attacked and badly damaged. In a straight spiritist film, this would be the last of him. This time, however, we see his plane slowly descending toward rugged jungle terrain, trailing a plume of fuel vapor. He looks back at his copilot, exchanging with him the standard “ we who are about to die” smile of comradeship. Then, he looks at the omamori amulet his mother had given him before his departure and, as if receiving inspira­ tion, manages to bring the plane gendy down on the beach of a nearby island. The newspaper reports this miraculous escape from death, quot­ ing him as saying he had heard his mother’s voice telling him to turn the plane in that direction. In an extremely unusual departure for seishinshugi-combat features, the boy meets his mother again and shares with her his inner thoughts and feelings.

T he Demoted Hero o f the Pure Combat Film Tales o f individual heroism —especially tales in which the hero survives the combat —became quite rare from the middle period of the Pacific War onward. The reason for this was not only that real combat had by this time become desperate, but also that films were beginning to con­ form to a change in emphasis dictated by a reform in school textbooks a number of years earlier. “ The Sailor’s Mother,” the textbook chapter quoted above, ends on an extremely significant note. The boy’s commanding officer also reads the mother’s letter and then turns to the boy, saying, “ I understand your disappointment in having missed the battle. But you must understand that the old mode of warfare, in which the soldier goes into battle in order to cover himself with personal glory, is dead and gone now. Now­ adays, officers and men must fuse into a single unit, each of us carrying out our tasks no matter how small they may be.” 25 The message here is precisely that of most Pacific War era combat films. The “ old mode of warfare” the officer refers to was epitomized by the bushi warriors who fought against the invading Mongol army in the thirteenth century. According to contemporary reports, each stood sep­ arated from his comrades like an island surrounded by a sea of enemy soldiers, eager to be personally credited with those he had slain. In sam­ urai films, similar scenes were repeated countless times. In the new, anti-individualist mode o f warfare described by the

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officer above, however, individualistic bushi-iike heroism was demoted in importance, and a new form o f corporate heroism advanced. This reflected a substitution in the language used in textbooks: yuki (brav­ ery) was replaced by chugi (implicit feudalistic loyalty) as the chief vir­ tue o f the soldier and o f the civilian. The “ shared knowledge,” pro­ vided by elementary school textbooks, was o f course subject to direct manipulation by the state. By revising the textbook, the state was in effect revising the shared intellectual outlook of the populace. Between 1904 and 1943, there had been five major textbook revi­ sions. Up to 1932 (when the fourth revision took place), militarist educa­ tional material tended to be dominated by tales o f outstanding individ­ uals. Thereafter, however, even when his deeds were recounted, the doer’s name was often dropped in favor o f “ a certain soldier.” Subse­ quently, merit was gradually shifted from the individual to the faceless group; indeed, it was often emphasized that the glorious act had been made possible only by the combined efforts of the outfit. The 1943 Teacher’s Guide was quite specific about this. Describing the significance of a new inclusion in the reader (about the nine submariners who had become national heroes after dying in the attack on Pearl Harbor), the Guide states: “Although the nine gunshin have been highlighted here, the purpose is not to tell tales o f personal valor but to emphasize once more the essence of corporate unity.” 26 We have already noted how the central character of the pure seishinshugi film almost literally disappears into the vast war machine in the concluding segments of the film. It was, however, Taguchi Satoshi’s Gen­ eral, Staff, and Soldiers (Shogun to Sanbo to Hei, Nikkatsu, 1942), which took this process to an experimental extreme. Its depiction o f the military machine animated from the top down by a single strategic purpose is completely devoid of Sawamura’s “ real human emotions.” As cinema it is almost intolerably turgid fare. From beginning to end, the dominant image is the wall map, on which markers move relendessly toward the objective. The extremity of Taguchi’s experiment was never repeated. Subse­ quent directors learned that even if they could not develop a personality cult for their combat heroes, cinema demanded that they give them some sort of palpable reality. Once again it was Yamamoto KajirO who tried to offer a solution. Reaching back into the “classic texts” of the China Incident, he resurrected Tasaka’s image of the fighting unit as a single organic entity. The personality of the central character is stripped o f any hint of the superhuman and is diminished. Since he seems to have no personal history antedating his appearance amid the group and

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no interests or concerns extending beyond it, his relationship with the group provides us with most of our information about his qualities as an individual. The character is Lieutenant Kato in Kato’s Falcon Fighter (Kato Hayabusa Sentdtai, 1944, dir. Yamamoto Kajiro). He arrives by literally de­ scending from the clouds. His plane is late, and his future comrades have been peering up into the sky with expressions of expectation and concern. Dropping lightly from the wing to the ground, Katò removes his flight cap and scratches his head as if to say, “ Oops, sorry guys!” an interesting entrance for a hero. What he is really doing is making himself available for instant bonding with the group. Soon, they are all gathered around the dining table, which will be their place o f rendez­ vous and communion throughout the film. In scenes resembling those in Five Scouts, they savor their friendship in the form of shared food, drink, and cigarettes. Still, the film is dominated by its spectacular aerial sequences. The numerous titles superimposed on the screen and the voice-over narra­ tion almost never speak of KatO the individual. It is the progress of the war and the relentless shifting of its theaters of action that drive the film forward. Rather than depicting a dominant personality, the hurried vig­ nettes of life on the ground serve to trivialize him. Therefore, when KatO disappears into the clouds on his last mission, he leaves behind no strong impression whatsoever. It is the war, his position o f command, and his superior skill as an organization man that have lent him, for the duration, the stature of “ hero.” Viewers at the time would have noticed the startling contrast between his portrayal and the hero of The Legend o f Tank CommanderMshizumi (1940). Nishizumi’s men are obsessed with him, and it is through their adoring eyes we come to know him. He is invested with unmistak­ able personal idiosyncrasies much like those used to depict the near­ superman heroes of Hollywood war pictures. As opposed to the individ­ ualistic, dashingly handsome Nishizumi, Katò is subdued and homely. The tank commander is a virtuoso of invention both in camp and on the battlefield. Katò’s motto, on the other hand, seems to be “ let’s do it by the book, men.” Whereas Legend clearly has the purpose of exploring and establishing Nishizumi’s greatness, when one of KatO’s men asserts that “ Uncle is a great man,” we take it as an affectionate cliché rather than an observation of fact. While the “ demotion” of the military hero emerges as a clear ten­ dency in the late-war period, it was never actually enunciated explicitly as official film policy. In critical circles, it remained a controversial subject.

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Iijima Tadashi, for example, found the tendency problematic in Kato’s Falcon Fighters for purely cinematic reasons. “ The film moves in erratic leaps and bounds,” he complained, “ and there is a general insufficiency of shots illustrating the various anecdotes in the film, particularly the aerial combat scenes. Without them, the heroic dimension o f the cen­ tral character remains rather abstract. The fast tempo of the develop­ ments in the Greater East Asia War pardy, but only partly, pardons this weakness.” 27 The issue of the proper role for the military hero in war dramas remained in flux throughout the wartime period. At one pole o f the controversy were the ideologues who condemned all forms of “Ameri­ canizing” individualism; at the other pole were those who decried the deadening effects of such considerations on the nation’s cinema. Yamamoto KajirO’s subsequent work continued to push the ten­ dency toward its outer limits. His last combat film to be completed, The Torpedo Squadron Moves Out (Raigekitai Shutsudo), made in the grim last months of 1944, represents the final disposal of the hero as the central figure. Once again we have the Five Scouts' semibiological group unity. But no single individual ever emerges to give it a personality. Although they are all equally “ heroic,” it is not their individual valor but their pa­ thos that moves the audience. As with their counterparts in the real war, they are likened to a storm of cherry petals fluttering down in a cascade of tragic beauty. At the end of the film, they all die attempting to ram their planes into enemy ships, and their epitaph is given by an admiral, who sighs, “ Thank you. Thank you all.”

The Yasukuni Doctrine The loyal soldier who falls in batde for his Emperor does not die in vain. All the sins o f his previous life are washed away by the blood he sheds, and he is revered as a god, a gunshin. This is the immortality promised by the doctrine closely connected with Yasukuni, the vast Shinto shrine es­ tablished in 1869 and located in central Tokyo. Although wartime prop­ aganda intentionally gave the impression that the Yasukuni Doctrine was as ancient as the Kojiki (the eighth-century compendium of racial myths), it was actually the product of the bitter political struggles o f the Meiji Restoration period. After the turn of the century, the doctrine was disseminated to the public through chapters in the kokugo and shushin textbooks, where the significance of Yasukuni Shrine continued to be an important topic o f discussion throughout all five revisions. It held that

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Im ages o f the Yasukuni Shrine flicker through Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky and other films o f the era.

one need only go there and prayerfully clap one’s hands to have one’s loyal dead appear before one instantly. Mothers crowded the shrine pre­ cincts daily, seeking to commune with their dead sons; there were even several extremely popular songs (Kudanshita no Iiaha being one example) celebrating these forlorn figures and their pilgrimage from the country­ side to the shrine. Yasukuni’s soaring torii gate represented the entryway to a special, psychic space shared by all Japanese, whether living or dead. It symbol­ ized the erasure of any discontinuity between the two. At the same time, it was an important symbol of the state, since the shrine was one of its officially designated organs. By identifying itself with the shrine, the state took possession of the psychic space, subsuming the aura of an eternal, transcorporeal entity in which all Japanese, living or dead, dwelt as “ spirits.” The image of the Yasukuni gate flickers through all of the seishinshugi films. Documentary footage of ceremonies at the shrine appear in Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky, Navy, and Army. “ We’ll meet again at Yasukuni!” was a typical farewell for screen soldiers as they em­ barked on their final mission.

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The “Yasukuni Spirit,” in its more abstract form, is even more in ev­ idence. We find it in the many scenes where the mother kneels before the family altar; it is also in the prolonged bow made by soldiers before the graves or bodies of fallen comrades. It is the hidden meaning of the many scenes in Navy, where white-uniformed cadets visit the Naval Mu­ seum to stand in long, reverential silence before the relics o f heroes of former wars. The objects o f such reverence are many and varied, from ancestral swords to calligraphic scrolls emblazoned with spiritist mot­ toes to the poster-sized photo of Admiral Togo hanging above the desk in the novice’s room. In Our Planes Fly South, the Yasukuni Spirit is linked with obeisance in the direction of the Imperial Palace. On a visit to her son’s military school, mother and son first bow to a cenotaph commem­ orating the war dead, and then the mother turns and bows, alone, in the direction of the Palace. As she bows, “ Kimi ga Yo” wells up in the back­ ground. Next comes a montage sequence with Rising Sun flags and groups o f citizens in various locations around the country. All bow in profound solemnity toward the Palace. In Naiy, a recurrent image is the magnificent volcano on Sakurajima, dominating Kagoshima harbor. The hero often goes to a promon­ tory to gaze at it in silent awe. Once he has breathed in its spirit, his body bends forward in a profound bow. Like Yasukuni itself, the moun­ tain is the embodiment of many presences. For a moment, it is Japan it­ self, its might, its majesty, and its devastating beauty. Then it is the young man’s elder brother, who has just died in the war. The hero speaks to the mountain as if addressing his brother: “ Wait for me. I’m the next to go forth!” In this film, especially, scenes of bowing are so in­ sistent that the act takes on a fetishist quality. The message seems to be that, in the sacred homeland, everything and everyone is united in the Yasukuni spirit. In the scene immediately following the one where he in­ forms his mother of his acceptance into the academy, the young man rushes out to tell his old teacher. The streets he hurries through have been transformed into a vision o f an idealized Japan. A crisp Rising Sun flag flaps at the doorway of each house. Neighbors are out sweep­ ing the already neat streets, as if performing an act o f ritual purifica­ tion. They greet him open-heartedly, bowing as he hurries past. A group of school girls strolls along, stopping to bow with exquisite polite­ ness when one of their number reaches her door. Over and over they re­ peat the ritual, until the group has completely dispersed. None of them is a real person; they appear to be the custodial angels of a tranquil heaven of harmonious joy.

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In the straight combat features, the Yasukuni doctrine takes a form considerably less satisfying on the personal level. The anti-individualist training of the characters leaves no place for the notion of an immortal, individual soul, and thus it bears litde resemblance to the religion cher­ ished by the praying mothers. Rather, for the soldier, one’s true essence is the yamato damashii (Japanese Spirit), which one has already within one. One’s individual reality is nothing more than a disruptive illusion. “ You possess neither hands nor feet,” one of the training officers in Army instructs his charges. “ Hardship and suffering are solely the prod­ uct of a mind that considers itself a ‘self.’ ” The soldier’s “ immortality,” as a gunshin, is in fact the utter extinction all personal properties and complete identification with a nonpersonal abstraction. Only in death can one translate that abstraction into reality.

“ There Can Be No Improvement in Production without Improvement in Character” “ Raise production” films (zosan eiga) formed another genre stressing the spiritist message. While the films treated above had the ulterior purpose of stimulating enrollment in military training programs, their real func­ tion was the ideological indoctrination of the entire movie-going public. In the case o f the raise production features, however, seishinshugi served more practical needs. Throughout the Pacific War, the manpower crisis in Japanese heavy' industry steadily deepened. In 1939, the Diet had passed the General National Mobilization, Article 4 of which stipulated that citizens with certain technical abilities could be called up for work at any time. By mid-1943, the interpretation had to be greatly expanded, for almost as many citizens were receiving “ White Paper” labor conscription notices ordering them to factory work as those receiving “ Red Paper” military call-up notices. Because of the harsh conditions and long hours (even the twelve-hour limit on the workday was repealed in late 1943), these White Papers came to be almost as dreaded as the Red. W'ith so many men at the front, labor shortages in the factories were severe. In February 1944, the Decisive War Emergency Measures were passed, allowing the call-up o f twelve-year-old middle-school boys and fourteen-year-old girls. Even this proved insufficient. Eventu­ ally, over twenty-five thousand convicts were put to work on the pro­ duction lines. Additionally, thirty thousand prisoners o f war, thirtyeight thousand Chinese, and a total of 1.3 million Korean laborers

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were forced to work under slavelike conditions in mines and heavy construction projects. Labor shortages, however, were only part o f the problem. The war itself was going badly, and the material advantage over the enemy, earned by the early victories, had long since dissipated. The Japanese retreat from Guadalcanal on 31 December 1942 had been disguised as an “ adjusted advance” (tmshin), a phrase that quickly came to be so overused that only blind optimists failed to grasp its true significance. Now the phrase was gyokusai (lit., “ breaking o f the jewel,” meaning sui­ cidal defense). Rather than a military victory, the gyokusai o f the six thousand on Attu in May had won a “ spiritual” one—“ Military Spirit Displayed at its Finest!” the Tomiuri Newspaper headline read on 31 May 1943. That autumn, there would be more gyokusai, on Tarawa and Makin. On Kwajalein in February 1944, it would be the same. Due to overwhelmingly superior U.S. air power, the Japanese navy had lost control of the sea. “ Put your all into it! The enemy is going till out too!” 28 proclaimed the new slogan, plastered on walls and tele­ phone poles. But how was one to overcome the tidal wave of war mate­ rial being spewed forth by enemy factories far out o f bomber range? Posters proclaimed the ultimate victory o f spiritist “ determination” over present disadvantages: “ Final victory is ours in the war of spirit and production!” 29 When the relentless U.S. submarine campaign began to choke off the Japanese lifeline of raw materials, the clarion call went out: “ Build more ships, and more!” With production now fall­ ing behind losses, a mid-1943 Yomiuri headline declared: “ Make the impossible possible!” 30 The accompanying article promised that the Japanese people, united in spirit, could not possibly be defeated. In July, film magazines began running full-page ads joindy spon­ sored by Nihon Eiga and the Council for Heavy Industry announcing a competition for “ raise production” films. With amazing frankness, the copy depicted the national dilemma: “ The ravening enemy embraces mechanized warfare with fanatical devotion and throws himself upon us, bolstered by his vast military production. We are truly engaged in a War of Production!” The ad called on readers to provide scripts “dem­ onstrating a lofty spirit combined with bold construction capable of urging forward our own productive powers.” 31 Most of the scripts eventually selected featured scenes in which workers resist radically increased work norms (usually 50 percent for women and 100 percent for men). Typically, the central character would overcome this resistance by some feat of selfless bravery or

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superhuman effort, thus proving to the resisters the power of spirit over such mundane problems as exhaustion or the breakdown of over­ worked machinery. Slumping morale in the nation’s factories had begun to retard growth in production and was even affecting the quality o f strategically important weaponry. Strikes and other organized work stoppages were rare (Ienaga SaburO lists only 417 in 1943), but moonlighting and absen­ teeism were becoming serious problems.32 According to the industrial journal Diamondo, war plants in 1943 were facing a 10 percent absentee rate, and it predicted that by mid-1944 the figure would rise to 15 per­ cent.33 Other reports, including a N H K radio broadcast by a prominent physician, suggested that some factories in key war-related industries had to contend with up to 40 percent absentee rates.34 Furthermore, a July 1944 article in Asahi Shinbun quoted a complaint by an army general that 10 percent of the warplanes produced by the nation’s factories had to be rejected as defective.35 Shin Eiga ran its first zadankai on raise production films in June 1943, with participants from the Information Bureau, the Greater Japan In­ dustrial Production Patriotic Association, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Japanese Steel Producers Board, and other industrial organizations. The fact that the only film-related person present was a reporter from the magazine (who constantly deferred to their “ superior expertise” ) dramatized the completely subservient role the film industry would be playing. “ The distinction between battlefront and home front is no longer valid,” one participant solemnly reported. “ Since a special time will be set aside to show these films to workers in factories, the films must requite the expenditure of prccious man-hours.” Such pressures surely would have been highly stressful for creative minds, and yet a number of the films thus produced were of better than average quality. This was largely due to the fact that some o f the finest talents in the business —Kinoshita Keisuke, Yamamoto Satsuo, Yoshimura KozaburO, and finally even Kurosawa Akira were thrown into the effort. Kinoshita’s Blossoming Port (Hana Saku Minato, Shochiku, 1943), made before the genre settled into its final seishinshugi pattern, is the most hu­ morous and delightful of the lot. A pair of charming swindlers (Ozawa EitarO and Uehara Ken) arrive on a little island just south of Kyushu and set to work winning the confidence of its gullible and open-hearted residents. They announce that they intend to restart the island’s little ship-building yard, laying idle since its failure fifteen years before. The

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idea is to collect a little money in “ investments” and then to disappear. As it turns out, however, the whole island is excited by the plan, and people pour their life savings into the project. Since the con artists are not real villains, they gradually become uneasy about the magnitude o f their own success. Meanwhile, before their very eyes, construction o f the first of the big wooden ships quickly moves toward completion. In a touching scene on a sand dune overlooking the sea, they discuss the goodness and generos­ ity o f the islanders and their disgust with themselves. When the attack on Pearl Harbor is announced over the radio, they find their own love of country aroused. The building of ships is now vital to the survival of the nation. They confess their original criminal intentions and dedicate themselves, along with their own money, to the ship-building enterprise they had started. Thus, bad intentions are ultimately changed into good deeds. The story of Blossoming Port is a gem of O. Henry-like irony. Made in the sunny and relaxed Shochiku “ Ofuna-Mood,” it is among the last of its kind to appear during the war. Those calling for raise production films, however, had an entirely different kind o f film in mind: “ The films must take up the technical aspect of our expanding strategic production system, depicting the pains and serious commitment applied to over­ coming problems as they arise.” 37 In their Shin Eiga zadankai, the industry representatives turned back to Sawamura Tsutomu’s Sun o f the Eighty-eighth Year for inspiration. Al­ though they found its depictions o f the factory “ oppressive,” they were impressed by its exaltation of dedicated patriotic labor as a form o f spir­ itual purification. The theme of all subsequent raise production films would be “ the beauty o f patriotic labor and the joy o f working in a pa­ triotic labor unit.” 38 Once it was established, none o f the films strayed far from the basic dramatic formula: i) the government calls on a fac­ tory to increase production o f a war-related item, 2) the main charac­ ter^) confront obstacles to achieving this goal, 3) disagreements arise about how to overcome the obstacles, pitting a conservative, techno­ cratic faction, which wants to rely on the usual “ scientifically sound” methods, against a radical, spiritist faction seeking a miraculous break­ through, 4) the main character becomes involved in a mildly romantic relationship, and 5) in the end, the spiritists win out, magnificendy achieving the increased quota.39 Yamamoto Satsuo’s Searing Wind (.Neppu, Toho), the first film to follow the formula, premiered in the fall of 1943. The opening documentary

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sequences follow the mining of iron ore in China. After coolies load it onto a ship, it departs for Japan. As the ship pulls into Kita Kyushu har­ bor, the camera studies a group of Caucasian POWs who sit smoking cigarettes, apparendy on a rest break. The next shot shows the prisoners shoveling mounds of ore. A series of shots of an iron smelting factory fol­ lows, and this leads into the dramatic portion of the film. A foreman comes into the factory manager’s office to complain that Smelter No. 4 is not working properly, and, at a conference, the man­ ager explains that “ smelters are like babies —they need a good mother.” Kikuchi, a young engineer (who will represent the technocrat faction), rises to say he wants to take the job of “ mothering” the smelter. How­ ever, following the dramaturgic pattern established by Sawamura Tsutomu, a bitter conflict soon breaks out between the “ rationalist” Kikuchi and Shibata, the proponent o f the seishinshugi way. Shibata is played by Fujita Susumu, and his characterization uses many o f the physical gestures (such as vigorously rubbing his head whenever he is praised) he had developed for his role as Sugata SanshirO in Kurosawa’s film, made only a few months before. Whereas SanshirO was a man of few words, Shibata frequently lectures the men on the proper spirit o f patriotic labor. When the men curse “ that damned demon smelter,” Shibata responds with his standard motto: “There’s no such thing as an unsolvable problem, only people incapable o f finding solutions —Show some guts!” 40 He is especially demanding of the con­ scripted laborers, who have been ordered to the factory by White Paper: “A conscripted worker has the same obligations as a conscripted soldier. You must give your all in service to the nation.” In another sequence, Shibata strolls with Kumiko (Hara Setsuko), who clearly has fallen in love with him. A file o f real-life POWs comes toward them, and Kumiko remarks sympathetically, “ I wonder what they’re feeling right now.” Shibata responds sarcastically, “ What’s this? A case of ‘how pitiful?’ ” This is a clear reference to an actual incident reported some months earlier in the papers. Looking at a column of be­ draggled American POWs being marched off to forced labor, a house­ wife had exclaimed “ How pitiful they look!” Thereupon she was sur­ rounded by a group of enraged citizens who accused her o f harboring “ sympathies unsuitable to a Japanese national.” In the film, Kumiko turns aside Shibata’s implied criticism by responding mysteriously, “ Stop it. You’re the one who’s really pitiful!” As with the budding warrior heroes in the spiritist military films, Shibata has his “ preceptor,” an old foreman named Yoshino (Sugai

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IchirO). The latter is known among the other men as “ the god of the blast furnaces.” When a power outage shuts down the smelter, causing the sur­ face of the molten ore to cool down and harden, only Yoshino insists that there is a way to save it. His plan is a radical measure once tried with “ mi­ raculous” results in Germany. They will insert dynamite into the smelter and blow off the hardened “ scab.” Kikuchi, the scientific rationalist, is horrified. “ Your plan is much too simple-minded,” he tells Yoshino, “ You’re the foreman, so you surely can understand my position as a sci­ entist. I absolutely oppose this scheme!” Although the manager also for­ bids the project, Yoshino and Shibata secretly push forward. When old Yoshino has a stroke and plunges to his death from the top of the smelter, Kikuchi blames Shibata’s “ passionate recklessness” for the death. In a darkened alley, Shibata challenges Kikuchi to have it out be­ tween them. The ensuing fist fight turns into a grueling contest o f en­ durance. Each time one o f them is knocked down, he gets up to resume the batde. In the end, they both lie on the ground, exhausted and pant­ ing. As they stare at each other, the ferocity melts into mutual admira­ tion. Then, like the sun from behind a cloud, a smile beams forth on Shibata’s face. It is the smile o f deep understanding and comradeship, the seishmshugi smile of soldiers at the front. Kikuchi returns the smile unreservedly. This o f course means that Kikuchi will now go along with Shibata’s plan for the smelter. The dynamite is inserted and the miracle -another victory for the spiritist way —is accomplished. Chiba Yasuki’s Words the Bloodied Fingernails Wrote (Chi no Tsume Moji, Daiei, 1944, lost?) also features a conflict between spiritists and rational­ ists. The managers o f an aluminum factory confront the reality that the enemy is now encroaching on the very regions where Japan mines its bauxite (the raw material o f aluminum). The conservative, “ reason­ able” faction pins its hopes on new deposits recently found in Manchu­ ria. The problem is that shipment is no longer reliable. The opposing faction centers on the research being carried out by a young scientist, Yasukawa, who believes he can substitute domestic materials to create high grade aluminum. Ignoring the girl who wants to marry him, he throws himself into his research with fanatical determination. As the script points out: “Aluminum is his true lover. Junko comes second.” 41 Elements of the Daiei program picture creep in at the end with a melo­ dramatic conclusion: the hero rushes to the deathbed o f his old teacher to learn the details of a vital formula. Sinking the Unsinkable Battleship (Fuchinkan Gekichin, Shochiku, 1944) made by that master of program pictures, Makino Masahiro, celebrates

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T h e old engineer, Yoshino (Sugai IchirO), on the brink o f death in the line o f work in Yam am oto Satsuo’s Searing Wind (Toho, 1943).

the “ unsung heroism” of the workers who produced the explosives for the torpedoes that eventually sank the pride of Britain’s East Asian navy, the Repulse and the Prince o f Wales. Following the established formula, the film depicts worker resistance to a navy order to increase production one hundred percent. This time, the factory’s top engineer is a spiritist zealot who pushes the men to overcome equipment troubles to achieve the new quota. Each o f the film companies was assigned one of the three strategic sectors of national industry. Toho made films about steel production, Daiei did aluminum, and Shochiku covered coal production, with Rag­ ing Torrent (Gekiryu, 1944, dir. Ieshiro Yojimi). Other films focused 011 de­ picting fields of labor. For example, Port of Life (lnochi no Minato, Toho, 1944), directed by Watanabe Kunio, was about longshoremen, and No­ mura Kosho’s Santaro Pitches In (Santaro Gambaru, Shochiku, 1944) treats youths working in an airplane factory. The latter focuses 011 one boy, Santaro, who seems incapable of carrying out any of the assignments given to him. In the end, he shows himself proficient at painting the large red dots 011 the wings of Zero fighters. Critics found the film’s

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message about everyone contributing to the war effort whatever talents they have to be “ far too preachy.” 42 Along with young boys, women had also become an important labor resource in 1944. In a speech made a few months after the beginning of the war, Prime Minister TojO had stated that he was strongly opposed to drafting women into the labor force. Women, he said, must continue in their “ natural mission” as mothers, wives, and keepers of the home. In January 1944, however, conditions forced Toj 5 to make an about face and establish a Women’s Labor Battalion for aircraft manufacture and other essential industries. After this, pressure became intense on unmar­ ried women to enter the factories, and those who were not working were sometimes accused o f being “ women of leisure” or even hikokuminteki (“ unworthy o f being called Japanese nationals” ). The change in policy was quickly translated to the screen. The pre1944 film Searing Wind, discussed above, shows women working in facto­ ries, but only as clerical staff. Even as the men make frantic efforts out on the factory floor to meet their increased quotas, the mood among the women in the office is comparatively relaxed. When one of the girls mentions she wants to go home early, the other one says, “ Why not? Go right ahead.” In Kurosawa Akira’s The Most Beautiful (Ichiban Utsukushiku, Toho, 1944), however, we find no such nonchalance. Women make up the bulk o f the labor force in a factory producing lenses for bomb sights, and they demonstrate the same fanatical dedication to surpassing pro­ duction quotas as their male counterparts. Aiost Beautifuls obsessive use of production charts (which constantly rise and fall according to the physical and spiritual condition o f the girls) makes it clear that every little fluctuation in their productivity has a direct impact on the war ef­ fort. Their squad leader (Yaguchi Yoko) demonstrates that she under­ stands this importance by refusing to leave her post even when her mother dies. Kurosawa reports that originally he had been asked by the Navy to make a combat feature using Zero fighter planes. But since the navy was already scraping the bottom of its resources, “ they really couldn’t have spared any fighters to make a movie, and I never heard anything more about it.” 43 The replacement project was The Most Beautiful. The film announces its spiritist message in the very first scene. Over a loudspeaker, the factory manager (Shimura Takashi) is giving his morning pep talk to the factory personnel: “ Only an indomitable spirit of deep responsibility can achieve outstanding production results.

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4 IS)

There can be no improvement in production without an improvement in personal character!” The montage cuts back and forth between Shimura and the workers lined up in military fashion. One of the lines is made up of extremely young boys —a depressing sight. For some unaccountable reason, Kurosawa refers to the film as “ not a major picture, but the one dearest to me.” 44 The probable explana­ tion is that soon after finishing it, he married the leading lady, Yaguchi Yoko. The film itself is a dark and gloomy rendition o f the standard formulas for the genre. The girls become incensed at hearing that quo­ tas have been raised 100 percent for male workers and only 50 percent for female workers. They demand at least a two-thirds increase. In a scene clearly lifted from the military dramas, a sick girl begs not to be sent home. She cannot bear “ abandoning” the group. The head of the girls’ dorm, played by Irie Takako, replaces blankets over the sleeping girls in a manner similar to the training officer in Yamamoto’s Sea lia r from Hawaii to Malaya. Even the film’s “ documentary' look,” which docs help raise it above most of the other films of its genre, harks back to Sea War. Apparently, there was considerable resistance at the time from the parents of girls kept in factory dorms and forced to work long hours under conditions ruinous to their health. The Most Beautiful acknowl­ edges this problem in the scene where the sick girl refuses to go home. She fears her “ stubborn” father would forbid her to return to the fac­ tory (as in fact he eventually does). Another film about factory girls Sasaki Keisuke’s A Woman’s Voyage (Josei Koro, Shochiku, 1944), released the same month as Most Beautiful—makes similar parental resistance central to the story. As in the Kurosawa film, a factory representative has to travel to the girl’s hometown to convince the parents to let her return. Conditions in the wartime factory dorms were bad, and, as the war continued, they grew absolutely frightful. In a memoir about her expe­ riences in late 1944, a former girl factory worker describes the situation: “After only one day of training, they set us to work on these huge tooling machines. O f course there was a continuous stream of mistakes and ac­ cidents, some o f them quite serious___ The worst part was the constant hunger. For example, in the last weeks o f the war, our menu was some­ thing like this Breakfast: two and a half corn-powder dumplings; lunch: nothing; Dinner: one cup of rice and one and a half dumplings. Sometimes our families would send us personal packages of provisions, but these were always confiscated before we got to see them.” 4"’

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T h e leader o f the girl factory workers brigade (Yaguchi Yf>ko) receiving a spiritist lec­ ture from the elderly line foreman in Kurosawa A kira’s Most Beautiful (Toho, 1945).

Perhaps because it was made before the food situation reached this state, The Most Beautiful gives little suggestion of such privations. Still, even in early 1944, when the film was produced, girls were already suf­ fering, particularly due to the lack of any form of heating. The exhaus­ tion of the girls, and their resulting depression, is shown as an important concern in The Most Beautiful. Both the “ dorm mother” and the factory managers speak of it openly. To build up their stamina and raise spirits, they institute volleyball games. Shots o f the girls playing joyously arc intercut with shots of a chart showing dramatic rises in production. But this is a stopgap. Following scenes show the girls relapsing into lethargy and depression. “ What time is it now?” a girl groans as she stands at the row of lens polishing machines. The other girls seem equally dispirited. Suddenly, we hear the rasping sound of a lens being misground and a shot of the chart shows production declining once again. On the volley­ ball court, too, the old pleasure in the game is gone. Lacking all other means, the manager has to resort to his old exhortations, relating “ per­ sonal spirit” to industrial productivity. In the film, at least, this seems to work and it ends with the girls fulfilling their increased production norms.

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The film’s pathetically upbeat conclusion fails to mask the despera­ tion overtaking the real home-front situation. Health problems caused by malnutrition and overwork quickly became so endemic few filmgoers could have been unaware of the situation. Then, after the commence­ ment o f large-scale U.S. bombing raids in November 1944, a new prob­ lem emerged. Large segments of the urban population, particularly women and children, had to flee to the countryside. Thereafter, it be­ came increasingly difficult for the government to maintain control over the movement of the workers in its strategic industry plants. The spiritist film was but one of the genres renovated to meet the changing needs of the Pacific War period. The B-moviejidaigeki genre was also assigned a new function, stirring up a passionate hatred among the populace against Japan ’s “ historic enemy” (shukuteki), the AngloSaxon powers. In the next chapter, we will look at how, under their new appellation as “ history” films, they were adapted to this purpose. The midwar period also saw the dual flowering of “ liberation” films, depict­ ing the struggles o f colonized Asian peoples against their Western mas­ ters, and “ antiliberation” films, portraying the independence struggles of the people of Korea (long a colonial possession of the Japanese Em­ pire) as the work o f “ bandits.” The burgeoning spy film genre, which al­ lowed the Kempeitai military police to project themselves as Japan ’s “ first line of defense against the enemy’s fifth column activities,” will also be considered.

12 Trends in the Middle Phase

Hate the Enemy: A New Role for the History Film The inhabitants of Japan’s newly conquered empire to the south re­ ceived heavy doses of anti-British and anti-U.S. propaganda emphasiz­ ing the evils o f Western colonialism. Propaganda directed at domestic Japanese audiences, on the other hand, had left this theme curiously ne­ glected. In the early months after Pearl Harbor, the Information Bureau did sponsor exhibitions on the “ History o f Anglo-American Crimes,” and on N H K radio there were daily readings from Okawa Shflmei’s book of the same tide. But this theme was quickly overwhelmed by the vastly more powerful propaganda of victory. In mid-1943, newspapers and popular magazines resurrected the issue of Western racism in the hysterical hate-the-enemy propaganda campaign that followed the fall of Saipan. The theme, however, was Anglo-American racism toward the Japanese themselves. In the Octo­ ber 1944 issue o f Shuju no Tomo, one article titled, “ This Is the Enemy: The Tribe of Beasts Called America,” began with the lines: “ ‘Time to get up! Hey, get up!’ The disgustingly piglike American mother wriggles her loathsome body as she tries to rouse her son. ‘Kill the Japs!’ she screeches at him. Such is her daily greeting.” 1 Even in the last phase of the Pacific War, the history of Western im­ perialist aggression against the peoples of southern Asia remained a shadowy subject without much reality. A brief segment o f the seventyfour-minute cartoon feature Momotaro, Divine Warrior of the Sea (Alomotaro: Umi no Shimpei, Shochiku, 1944) presents this history to its young viewers as, quite literally, a drama of shadows. The segment begins with a map o f the East Indies: “Among the islands strewn like stars across the sea, there was one as beautiful as a dream. The inhabitants of this island country lived happily under their native king. Then, one day, a black ship sailed into port.” The old-fashioned sailing ship is in­ deed black. In fact, the ship and its crew are all silhouettes. The ensuing 422

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story is presented in the style of an Indonesian wayang shadow play. The ship’s captain, in the garb o f a seventeenth-century Dutchman, strides up arrogantly to the king’s throne and after a deep obeisance, explains that he has come to request that a tiny bit of land be set aside so that they can rest and reprovision their ships. The captain hints that if the king will comply, he will share in the ship’s treasures: “ Egyptian tobacco, jewels from India, carpets from Persia.” Even as the captain speaks of these treasures, however, we see the ship’s crew preparing their weapons for the attack. Soon they raise a pirate flag and begin bombarding the palace. Thus the island nation falls under the Western yoke. In the epi­ logue o f the story, the narrator says that deep in the jungle there is an ancient tablet that reads, “ One moonlit night our savior will come from the north astride a white horse. Wielding divine weapons, he will surely come to liberate our race.” The very next scene shows MomotarO’s bombers revving their engines in the moonlight. Fuwa Suketoshi and other government bureaucrats had, since the late thirties, been demanding the transformation o f the old sworddrama genre into authentic “ history films.” The film industry responded by producing a number of serious-minded works apparently inspired by this ideal. These included Kumagai’s The Abe Clan (Toho, 1939), Uchida Tomu’s History (Nikkatsu, 1940), Kinugasa’s The Battle o f Kawanakashima (Toho, 1941), and Mori Issei’s Omura Masujird (Toho, 1942)—all focusing on events in Japanese history from the past three hundred years. Earlier periods, especially when the Emperor was an active political presence, were avoided since it was forbidden to depict the “ Son of Heaven” on screen. Now, as the Pacific War approached its midpoint, responsibility for depicting historical developments beyond Japanese shores fell to the makers o f the newly reconstructed jidaigeki/history genre. The result was a number of films attempting to exploit the rich possibilities in the history o f Western aggression. For the first time ever, Japanese cinema embarked on the production of overt hate propaganda. One early example was Arai RyOhei’s spectacular Pirates of the Sea (.Umi no Gdzoku, Nikkatsu, 1942, lost?). Set in the early seventeenth century when Holland was seeking to extend its empire up from Battavia to in­ clude Taiwan, a small band of Japanese residents on Taiwan arc de­ picted as the main factor in frustrating Dutch imperial ambitions. Governor-General De Witte and his successor Noyts use treachery in their negotiations with the local Japanese population and with the Edo Bakufu government. A naval engagement between Dutch and Japanese

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forces in the region ensues. When the Japanese swashbuckler Hamada Yahei (Arashi KanjurO) captures Noyts in a daring raid on his palace, the Dutch are forced to renounce their evil designs and to retreat. Need­ less to say, there was apparendy no suggestion of the right o f the Taiwa­ nese people to independence or self-government (Taiwan having be­ come part o f the Japanese Empire in the early twentieth century). Rather, as the film posters read, its real purpose was to be “ a hymn to the greatness o f the Japanese race.” Although it had fair success at the box office (ranking number twenty-one in earnings for the year), most critics sneered or ignored it completely. Iijima Tadashi’s review was barely a line long: “ Utterly, utterly ridiculous.” 2 Makino Masahiro’s The Opium War (Ahen Senso, Toho, January 1943) was undoubtedly one o f the most bizarre of all the history films dealing with Western imperialism in Asia. Set in the late 1830s, when Britain was extracting painful concessions from China through military action and smuggled opium, the film is actually a costume-piece romance, re­ plete with special effects and a long interiude o f Busby Berkeley-like dance numbers. In the first scene, Charles Eliott and his younger brother George are in India, gleefully preparing their plot to introduce a large shipment o f opium into China. Charles (Aoyama Sugisaku) looks grave and digni­ fied in his frock coat and goatee, while George (played by the one-time heart-throb, Suzuki Denmei) looks like a demonic Errol Flynn. If their plan works, it will serve as a means o f “ rescuing Her Majesty’s Empire from its financial difficulties” ; if it also brings harm to the Chinese, so much the better. Soon they are in Canton with three powerful British frigates, where they succeed in storing their twenty thousand boxes of opium in an official British warehouse. Almost immediately, however, they learn that they are up against a formidable foe, Lin Tse-Hsu (Ichi­ kawa Sarunosuke). Specially commissioned by the Chinese Emperor to stamp out opium traffic, Lin travels around like a Chinese Mito Komon, hiding his identity behind dark glasses. Wherever he comes upon the selling o f the narcotic, he whips off his glasses (his face is, apparently universally known) and arrests the malefactors. Refusing to be cowed by the Elliots’ efforts to intimidate him with British naval power, Lin sets a trap. He invites them to a banquet. In front of the tables, there is a large dance floor, serving as a stage. The backdrop is a vast clock, which slowly ticks its way toward eight o’clock as the British guests sit riveted through ten minutes (real time) o f “ ex­ otic” dances. At precisely eight o’clock, a fire lights the city sky. It is the

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Makino Masahiro’s Opium Hflr(Toho, 1943). Villainous “ British gentlemen” plan the plunder o f Asia.

warehouse full of opium. The Elliots and their party hurry back to their ships and commence a merciless bombardment o f the city. Onboard, the younger brother George goes mad with delight: “ You know, 1 just love giving these Chinese a hard time!” At the end of the movie, Lin looks out across a sea of flames, thundering that some day someone will rise up to revenge the outrage against Asia and punish the British for their arrogance. It is difficult to imagine anyone taking Opium Itflras a serious piece of hate-the-enemy propaganda. Makino was a strong advocate o f the need for pure entertainment films to offset the dour cinematic fare the government was pushing on the public: “At the time, the company [TohoJ was trying hard to get us all to try our hand at war films. When they came to me, I told them I'd never been in the army and so wouldn't be very' good with that sort o f material. I compromised by agreeing to do The Opium War, but only if they allowed me to do it my way.” 3 Although Japan never experienced direct colonization by a Western power, nineteenth-century history did provide material that could have

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been used effectively in enemy-baiting history films—particularly the foreign meddlings of the late Edo period and the notorious “ unequal treaties,” which had granted foreigners extraterritorial rights in Japan. One episode that did make it to the screen was a badly mangled ver­ sion of the ''''Maria Luz Incident.” The true facts o f the story had been brought to public attention by Kikuchi Kan in his Popular History o f the M eiji Era. When the Peruvian sailing ship Maria Luz put into Yokohama for repairs in 1872, it was discovered to be carrying a load of over three hundred Chinese coolies on their way to work on the American Trans­ continental Railroad. Meiji government investigators found them in a pathetic state, many having already died of malnutrition. A trial ensued during which a number of foreign governments tried to undermine the Japanese attempts to release the coolies from their work contracts and send them back to China. Eventually, the Russian czar intervened on humanitarian grounds and the coolies were released. Daiei seized on the idea of making the story into a film,4 and re­ leased it as The Slave Ship (Doreisen, Daiei, 1943, lost?). “ Behold Japan ’s unwavering demand for Justice!!” the posters proclaimed. The assertion that the coolies were “ slaves” hyperbolized the situation, which was al­ ready gruesome enough, allowing the filmmakers to implicate the United States, whose slave-owning past was widely known. By changing the ship’s Peruvian captain to an American, the image of Yankee per­ fidy was complete. When jidaigeki veteran Marune SantarO was assigned to script and then direct the film, he published an article in Eiga no Tomo about the line he intended to take: “ The film highlights one o f the most infamous incidents in the long history of Anglo-American crimes against China. Along with the villainies of the opium trade, slave trans­ porters like the U.S. sea captain Herero committed innumerable atroc­ ities against Chinese nationals. These are the same people who today sink our hospital ships in vile disregard for international law.” 5 Once again, however, the resulting film failed to deliver the hopedfor propaganda impact. This was partly because Marune, as he himself admitted, was “ weak on historical perspective.” 6 According to the disap­ pointed reviews at the time, he apparently turned it into an ordinary mystery-thriller with pompous old-time jidaigeki star Ichikawa Utaemon in the lead role. The trial scene was roundly condemned as an absurd travesty. “ Sometimes the judge becomes so excited he comes down from his seat on the dais,” one scandalized critic reported. “ Such scenes can only injure the prestige o f the Japanese state. It just goes to show that Marune Santaro remains trapped in an outmoded school of cinema.” 7

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Improbable situations and hyperbolic acting styles tended to make such jidaigeki-style propaganda pieces a laughing stock. As Mizumachi Aoki complained, “ Their cheap, impossibly childish plots are more likely to draw upon themselves the contempt of their viewers than to stir up anger at the enemy. One need only look at the real historical facts lying behind such films as The Slave Ship to see how completely they miss the opportunity to rouse hatred against our Anglo-American foe. What a waste!” 8 History films were assigned two propaganda functions: i) to put be­ fore the general public the historical context in which Japan was carry­ ing out its “ multidimensional” (political, cultural, intellectual, and mili­ tary) conflict with the West, and 2) to stir up enemy-hating passions in the people that, it was hoped, could be translated into greater involve­ ment with the war effort. The films were at least partial failures on both points largely because the scriptwriters and directors assigned the task were unable to free themselves from the simplistic narrative conventions of thejidaigeki program picture. Character motivation in such films typically centered on personal revenge. Although set in a vaguely identifiable past, they exhibited a strongly ahistorical bent, lacking any notion of a dialectical conflict between systems of thought or of politics. Conflict between competing codes of behavior was also missing. The jidaigefa-derived drama gener­ ally features only one such “ code” (that of the bushi), and the conflict is between those who uphold that code and those who either ignore or consciously break it. In contrast, U.S. propaganda films purporting to depict the nature of the Japanese (such as the R K O feature Behind the Rising Sun, 1943) placed great emphasis on depictions of the code of behavior motivating enemy civilians and soldiers. The depictions were, o f course, fractured, fanci­ ful, and often ludicrous distortions o f fact (for example, “ the cult o f bushido” in Behind the Rising Sun appeared as a form of religious fetishism in which Japanese characters pray before a statue of Buddha whose fea­ tures turn into those of a demon). At the time, however, such depictions did serve to reinforce in the American viewer’s mind a perception of the war in the Pacific as a struggle between two utterly incompatible ways of thinking. Although Japanese ideologues often condemned “ the degenerate Anglo-American world-view” in essays and widely published zadankai discussions, only the slogans of this discourse found their way into films. Rather, in accordance with the standard jidaigeki narrative formula, the

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evil of the Western enemy had to be reinvented for each film. In order to rouse him to action, the typical samurai hero needed to be confronted with a concrete enemy and a specific set of wrongs. Similarly, his coun­ terpart in the “ history'” films did not go into batde with the notion o f “ protecting our way of life,” but to wreak vengeance on an enemy whose atrocities he has personally witnessed (or even experienced). The net re­ sult is a miniaturization, or trivialization, of the nature of the conflict. A good example of this tendency was The Pirate’s Flag Blasted Away (Kaizokuki Futtobu, Shochiku, 1943, lost?), which purported to treat one of the most infamous episodes o f the Bakumatsu period. In September 1862, a British civilian was cut down by Satsuma clan samurai when he failed to give way to a feudal lord’s procession. The incident outraged the foreign community at Yokohama, and this led to the attack on K a ­ goshima a year later by a British naval squadron. In the bombardment, much of the city was destroyed. But the British too suffered heavy dam­ age and had to withdraw before completing their assignment. The inci­ dent was acclaimed by patriots as a victory over the foreigners, and its memory continued to glow in patriotic breasts into the Pacific War era. As a seishinshugi film directed by Kumagai Hisatora, or even as a straight historical drama by Inagaki Hiroshi, The Pirate’s Flag Blasted Away might have been a major triumph of nationalist cinema. But the Shimogamo studio in Kyoto was by this time a miserable backwater of the proud Shochiku film empire, a place of exile for directors whose ca­ reers were sliding toward oblivion. Inevitably, the film became another jidaigeki program picture, with little relation to actual history. It con­ cludes with the central characters leading a boarding party onto the British flagship where they wreak havoc among the ungainly British sail­ ors. A still of the scene, published in Mhon Eiga, shows a grotesquely gri­ macing “ Britisher” (obviously a Japanese actor) being cut down by a noble-countenced samurai (Takada Kokichi). As barrels of gunpowder explode around them, the men o f Satsuma haul down the hated Union Jack and raise the Rising Sun on the ship’s mast.9 One of the few history films to carry out its assigned propaganda functions cfficicndy was Thus Blew the Divine Wind (Kakute Kamikaze wa Fuku, Daiei, 1944). The script was based on a novel by Kikuchi Kan and had been worked over by a succession o f scholars and scriptwriters (in­ cluding Gosho Hcinosuke). The director was Marune SantarO, who abandoned the cheap “ entertainment” formulas that had all but de­ stroyed his Slave Ship. This time he turned out a serious drama, marred only by the patriotic speeches delivered by several o f the actors. The

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Tsuji KichirO’s hrate's Flag Blasted Away (Shochiku, 1943). An obvi­ ously phony nose identifies the Jap an ese actor to the loft as a West­ ern evil-doer.

stiffness of their on-screen performances seems largely to have been due to off-screen pressures, which were becoming quite severe. As the film went into production, Colonel Sawahata of the Army Information Unit issued the following exhortation, apparently with a straight face: “ We expect you to pour into your work the same fighting spirit manifested by our troops at the front. If you collapse while the film is in production, please shout 'Long Live the Emperor!’ as you topple over.” 1" Set in the late thirteenth century, Thus Bleu' the Divine Wind depicts the preparations for the second Mongol invasion, its defeat by the stalwart

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Japanese defenders, and finally, the “ miraculous” intervention of a ty­ phoon (known ever after as the “ Kamikaze” ). The film’s constant refer­ ences to “ national emergency” make it clear that close parallels are to be drawn between the nation’s response to that first crisis and the duty o f the modern citizens in meeting the present one. Hojo Tokimune (Kataoka Chiezo) seems to be emphasizing the parallel when he says: “ Though a second or even a third national emergency may strike Japan, we have nothing to fear. Let each man expend himself to the utmost, sure in the knowledge that the Divine Wind will, when the time comes, arise to face the foe.” 11 After the execution of the arrogant Mongol ambassadors, almost all private sentiment is submerged in the unified national effort of prepar­ ing for foreign invasion. The Kamakura Shogun’s order to turn out ar­ maments is followed by a montage of swords being forged, arrows being feathered, and bows being fashioned. The latter is done by women in an assembly-line procedure clearly evocative of a modern factory. “ More spirit! Put your life’s blood into it!” the chief armorer urges them, “We need an endless supply of arrows- arrows capable o f striking clear through the helmets of the enemy!” Similar scenes follow with a multi­ tude of hoes digging the ground for planting, trees being chopped down, and ships being built. Although some critics were to complain that the film’s repeated evocations of the contemporary situation robbed it of its depth as a historical recreation, it never completely slips into didacticism. Perhaps the film’s greatest saving grace was that no Japanese actors strut across the screen as garishly bogus “Westerners.” Caucasian villains, however, remained essential to most of the other historical propaganda pieces. White Russians from Manchuria occa­ sionally obliged by playing such roles, and several large-budget pictures featured villains played by resident nationals of the Axis powers. Runof-the-mill pictures had to make do with impersonations by Japanese actors —much to the irritation of the general public. In late 1943, cartoonist-critic Sugiura Yukio came up with the following suggestions for the “ improvement” of hate-the-enemy features: 1. Japan ese actors should never be made to play Americans or Englishmen. After all, our PO W camps are filled with the real thing. It’s time to put them to work to serve our cause. 2. N ever let them pretend to elegance. Enem y characters should appear ordinary, with a dash o f vulgarity. They arc, after all, little more than vicious brutes. I f a Japan ese has to play one o f these foreigners, he

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Trends in the Middle Phase tends to arouse more pity than antipathy. We sympathize with his humiliation at having to undertake such a disgusting task. But a single glimpse of one of those real brutes will rouse audiences to snarling anger. 3. Have the brute engage in the most vicious, reprehensible actions (their real behavior should provide plenty of examples). An appropriate climactic scene would show him attempting to rape a beautiful Japanese woman- preferably played by one of our more popular actresses. This will surely fan the emotions of the audience to a white heat and the theatre will be filled with cries of disgust and outrage (if a film doesn’t achieve such an eifect, how can we possibly call it a “weapon of war?”) Then, just as she is about to lose her chastity, a righteous, handsome Japanese man should burst into the room to rescue her. 4. The blows and kicks theJapanese hero rains upon the foreign villain must be the real thing. The devil must actually be beaten to a pulp!12

Judging by the still-extant films of the era, no filmmaker took up Sugiura’s sadistic suggestion to actually pummel POWs on screen.

“ Liberation” and “Antiliberation” Films National liberation films formed a subgenre of the history film. Rather than directly appealing to racial animosity, however, they seek to give substance to the claim that Japan is fighting for the liberation of all Asians from the yoke of Western tyranny. Although their production values are distinctly higher than the straight hate-the-enemy pictures, they still betray an affinity with their distant jidaigeki antecedents, espe­ cially in the motivations of their central characters. Such is the case of Tani, theJapanese hero of Koga Masato’s Tiger of Malaya (Marai no Tora, Daiei, 1943). An intensely private motive the de­ sire for revenge—drives him to become an anti-British revolutionary. As with the standard history films treated above, this tends to trivialize and miniaturize the significance o f his subsequent activity. In a film attempt­ ing to treat one of the major themes o f Japan’s “ holy war,” this becomes a dilemma. The manner in which Tiger o f Malaya comes to terms with this di­ lemma makes it a reasonably interesting film. The task is carried out in a three-stage narrative process. In the first stage, Tani is the victim of an atrocity; in the second, he works toward his private revenge and fi­ nally accomplishes it; and in the final stage, he fuses his rebel group

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with the Japanese Army and thus becomes one of the heroes of M a­ layan “ liberation.” The film opens in British-controlled Malaya in 1932. A long tide is superimposed over a street scene in Kuala Lampur, explaining that, “A cabal o f Malayan Chinese merchants and Communists, enflamed by the Manchurian Incident, have joined with the British to use terror in order to force a boycott of Japanese goods and to drive Japanese mer­ chants out of Malaya.” Next, we see Tani Yutaka sitting in his barber­ shop, making paper cut-outs for his little daughter. Meanwhile, in the office of the British chief-of-police, the chief plots with the Communist agent Chin Pun Kei (a sinister figure in dark glasses) to stir up antiJapanese riots. The chief says that the main target is Tani Yutaka, one of the leaders of the Japanese community. The following scene emphasizes the British-Communist connection. Tani and his mentor, an older Japanese, are strolling by the seashore. “ But Chin Pun Kei is little more than a puppet whose strings are being jerked by the English,” the older man is saying, “ What a race o f hypo­ crites those English are. The face they show the world is that of a gendeman, but in fact, they’re evil to the core.” 13 The conversation moves on to the subject dearest to their hearts, yamato damashii (the Japanese Spirit). Tani’s mentor says, “ We must never forget our spiritual heritage. As immigrants here, we must be especially careful to show foreigners that we are still true Japanese, now and forever.” The riots begin. Tani’s barbershop is wrecked and his little girl is shot dead by the Communist, Chin. This, of course, establishes the re­ venge motive. Then, in one of the film’s more unlikely scenes, Tani lis­ tens at the police chief’s door as he tells someone on the telephone that he has safely stashed Chin away in Hong Kong. Mad with rage, Tani rushes in and, in the ensuing struggle, brings a large chair crashing down on the chief’s head and then escapes. Tani wanders the seashore. He throws himself down on the sand and shrieks out toward the sea: “ I swear blood revenge against all of them. Though it may cost me my very life, I promise to wipe out every last one o f them!” In the next scene, a montage of news clips about the outbreak of war on the European continent suggests a broader histori­ cal context for his revenge. At this stage, the parallel only serves to con­ trast the two dimensions: Tani’s personal (hence “ miniature/trivial” ) lust for vengeance and the great historic struggle now commencing. A long tide flashed on screen underlines the potential contradiction: “Just when his native Japan faces its greatest crisis, Tani Yutaka turns away

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from his homeland and becomes the bandit ‘Tiger o f Malaya.’ He be­ comes ‘Harimau,’ bent on avenging the wrongs he has been made to suffer.” A montage of train and bank robberies, along with a scene where Tani/Harimau and his men burn a British flag, summarizes his activi­ ties. Next, villagers gather around a “ Harimau” wanted poster. The camera pans left, to the scene of a traffic accident. A man dressed in a white tropical suite and pith helmet (since he is played by a Japanese, it is hard to tell whether he is supposed to be British or a “ bad” Malayan Chinese) stands over the body of a child, apparendy hit by his car. Roll­ ing the child over with his cane, he imperiously orders the crowd: “ Out of the way, scum!” The child’s mother rushes out and throws herself on the body, weeping. The man impatiently taps her on the shoulder with his cane. Just then a clod o f mud spatters his white suit. Cut to faces in the crowd. They beam with satisfaction. A held shot o f Harimau stand­ ing with his companions, his eyes cold with hate. His native costume makes it clear that he has become one with the Malayan people. But, in the final shot, he tumbles the man to the ground using a judo move, thus implying his real identity as ajapanese Further sequences confirm Harimau as a sort of Malayan Robin Hood, stealing from the rich colonialists and bestowing the funds on the poor natives. When Chin and his Communist thugs attack Harimau and kill his old mentor, the moment o f final revenge arrives. He traps Chin in a blind alley. The latter rips off his dark glasses and gazes in ter­ ror at Harimau’s gun. The ensuing pause is the corollary of the climac­ tic moment of a naguri komi scene in a standard jidaigeki (where the hero slowly twists his blade in the body of the boss o f the evil gang). Finally, Harimau pulls the trigger. In the film’s final segment, Japanese military commanders are plan­ ning their invasion of Malaya. They fear the British will blow a certain dam and thereby block the invasion route. Someone suggests Harimau for the job o f immobilizing the sappers. The scene in which Harimau commits himself to the assignment represents the final elevation o f his private vendetta to high patriotic service. The officer tells him that he must now act as an integral part of the Japanese Army. To do this he must revert to his original identity. “ I am not Harimau,” he declares, “ I am ajapanese!” Although Tani and his group succeed in their assignment, most of them die. Mortally wounded himself, Tani gasps out to the last remain­ ing member of the group, “ Look to the Divine Wind! It will come

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blowing out of Japan sooner or later!” The strains o f “ Umi Yukaba” swell in the background as army officers look down on his body, praising him as an “ outstanding” (rippa na,)Japanese. This completes the reinte­ gration of Tani’s career, which had begun as “ trivial” vengeance, into Japan’s grand liberationist mission. The funeral oration of an army offi­ cer makes this clear to the remnant o f his group o f Malayan fighters: “ Harimau rendered up his life in service to the Japanese Army, dying se­ renely in the belief that a day of joy and glory is about to dawn for his compatriots. The message he left the Malayan people was ‘Advance be­ yond your own dead bodies! Cooperate with the Japanese Army to strike down America and Britain!’ Tani’s spirit now pulses in the blood of all his beloved Malayan people!” The film ends with a montage of news clips of the victorious sweep down the peninsula toward Singapore. “ Liberation” films typically show slight interest in the native culture being “ liberated.” Tiger features a single brief shot of a folk dance, its only acknowledgment of a native Malayan heritage. For the most part, the “ natives” (actually Japanese in “ black face” ) appear on screen only to grovel in worshipful gratitude at Harimau’s feet. In the summer of 1942, film magazines circulated reports that Toho’s Kinugasa Teinosuke and scriptwriter Oguni Hideo had been commissioned to do a film about the turn-of-the-century Philippine rev­ olutionaries Jose Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo. Nothing ever came o f the film, but the description of the project suggests that it too was to empha­ size the “Japan connection.” 14 Rizal, who was part-Chinese, would be portrayed as having had a Japanese mother. After Rizal’s execution by the Spanish, the story would shift to Aguinaldo, who heroically lead the Philippine insurrection using ingenious guerrilla tactics, first against the Spanish and then against the U.S. Army. As Shin Eiga explained, “ The real tragedy of this history is the way in which the white race has fooled them so completely, time and again.” 15 Kinugasa did eventually make a “ liberation” film, Forward, Flag of In­ dependence (,Susume Dokuritsuki, Toho, 1943), one that replaces the revenge motif with a spy format. All of the action is set in the environs of Tokyo, thereby providing ample opportunity for the “ liberation” leader to ex­ press boundless admiration for yamato damashii and indeed for most things Japanese. The film opens with various Indian independence leaders gathered in Tokyo to hold a Congress of Indian Representatives. Lai (played by masterful character actor Sugai Ichiro) is a turncoat who works at the Tokyo Indian Club and reports the identities o f all new arrivals to the

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British Embassy. The British Ambassador (SaitO Tatsuo) is particularly concerned about the reported arrival of the charismatic independence leader, Prince Narin (disguised under the pseudonym of Ratan). Since this is a completely fictionalized Tokyo, there are no police apparent anywhere, and the ambassador drives around the city in a limousine clearly marked “ British Embassy,” kidnapping activists from the streets and imprisoning them in the British Embassy. There, they are sadisti­ cally tortured to death. Ratan (Hasegawa Kazuo) lives next door to the Tachibanas, a patri­ otic couple who also have deep sympathy for the sufferings of the Indian people. On one o f his early visits to the couple, Ratan sits in formal seiza posture, and when Mrs. Tachibana (Irie Takako) urges him to sit more comfortably, he responds, “ No, this is the posture of Japan. It is in this posture that I want to experience your country.” 16 His attention is then drawn to a wind chime: “Ah, what a beautiful sound.” This gives Mrs. Tachibana the chance to expound on the beauties of Japanese culture and the spirit that gave it birth: “ It is a natural sound created by the wind itself. We Japanese people find profundity in even this, the simplest o f things,” she explains. It never occurs to Ratan to point out that wind chimes can also be found in India (indeed all over the world). It is a magic moment in which to commune with the unique genius of the Ja p ­ anese spirit. “Japan is in the midst of war. And yet, there seems to be no contradiction between such violence and this unfathomable beauty. You Japanese manage to keep alive the spirit of your ancestors, even in these difficult times.” Mr. Tachibana responds in a hushed, rapturous tone, “ Yes, and we are truly thankful for that.” Ratan’s face suddenly grows sad as the sob of violin music wells up in the background “ But we In­ dians have had everything taken from us, the legacy of our ancestors and even our own identities. Everything has been stolen by the English. There is nothing left to lose. Wrhen I think of this . . . WTien I think of this . . . ” The Tachibanas commiserate with him softly. In the entire sequence, the Tachibanas never express the least inter­ est in the culture o f Ratan’s country. They take at face value his asser­ tion that it has been completely wiped out and that “ there is nothing left to lose.” Since he has no authentic culture o f his own, it is only natural that this “ independence” leader of India should wish to take on the cul­ ture of Japan: “ In order to prepare for the struggle to come, I want to learn everything I can about Japan - politics, economics, everything.” In the context of the ideology lying behind the movie, this statement cannot be taken as idle flattery’.

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Foncard, Flag o f Independence (Toho, 1943). T h e Indian freedom fighter (Hasegawa K azuo, left) clasps hands with his sympathetic Jap an ese neighbor.

The official Japanese policy toward the benighted (i.e., “ culturally undeveloped” ) regions to the south was to inculcate as much of the Ja p ­ anese spirit as possible. The naive cultural narcissism displayed by the Tachibanas is but a reflection of the semiofficial pronouncements to be found in many of the intellectual journals of the time. An extreme, but not untypical example is Shimura Rikuya’s assertion that, “ the point at which all the world’s cultural history finds satisfactory resolution exists in Japan alone. Such is the very raison d’etre of our foreign policy.” 17 The plot of Flag of Independence follows the melodramatic course of a typical spy thriller, filled with clandestine meetings, kidnappings, and narrow escapes. Eventually, Ratan is captured by the British ambassa­ dor and imprisoned in the embassy. Despite the efforts of his Japanese friends and a demonstration by Indian supporters outside the gate, Ratan decides that all is lost and gulps down the poison he has hidden in his pocket watch. His casket is carried into the Congress of Represen­ tatives and his will read to the assembly. It praises the solidarity shown by the Japanese and concludes with the statement, “ Only through armed struggle can India attain its independence.” This of course is in

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opposition to the policy o f Gandhi (whose photograph is nevertheless on display at the conference) but completely in line with the Japanese hopes for a “ second front” against the British inside India itself. Flag of Independence was released on 21 October 1943, exactly two weeks before the opening of the Greater East Asian Conference in Tokyo, under the aegis of the TojO Government. National leaders from Thailand, the Philippines, Burma, Manchukuo, and the pro-Japanese Nanjing government were invited to attend. The conference ended with the proclamation of a “ Greater East Asian Declaration,” in which each of the signatory nations pledged to strive to “ liberate Greater East Asia from Anglo-American domination.” Japan’s original 1941 declaration of war had referred only to the “ defense and continued existence” of the Japanese Empire. This was now amended by Foreign Minister Shigemitsu to incorporate the concept o f “Asian liberation,” ignoring the ob­ vious fact that both the Nanjing and Manchukuo regimes were litde more than puppet governments. Philippine President Jose I^aurel, whose country had just achieved a form o f nominal independence, had a clear purpose for attending the conference. With Japan ’s abandonment of Guadalcanal and the annihilation on Attu, Laurel had become con­ vinced that the writing was on the wall. His presence was apparendy based upon the calculation that this might be his country’s last opportu­ nity to achieve even a nominal form o f independence before the United States returned. O f those attending, Burma’s Ba Maw —the enthusias­ tic supporter of Japan featured in the documentary Burma War Record— was the sincerest believer in the ideals put forward by the conference. No representatives from either Malaya or Indonesia were invited, al­ though they too had been occupied by the Japanese. Based on a decision made that March at a conference in the presence o f the Emperor, both regions were designated “ strategic resources areas,” making them ineli­ gible for independence. The issue of Korean independence never came up at all, since it was an integral part of “ Greater Japan.” The handling of the various occupied territories inevitably caused problems for the makers of “ independence” films. Abe Yutaka’s Shoot That Flag, a film using a large number of Filipino actors with the pur­ pose of stirring up anti-U.S. sentiments by playing on the theme of Phil­ ippine national self-pride, was released in early Spring 19.44. In the April issue o f Eiga Hyoron, Iji Tomoyuki, a figure with close ties to the Infor­ mation Bureau, expressed serious reservations about its potential mes­ sage to the Filipino people: “ It encourages them to achieve selfawareness. It cries out to them to return to the Orient. But in view of

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the Japanese policy on independence throughout the occupied regions, is it not possible they may confuse the call for self-awareness with the no­ tion o f national self-determination? This may be permissible for a na­ tion such as the Philippines, whose independence has been approved, but what of the other regions designated for different treatment? The call for self-awareness must avoid any hint o f independence.” 18 Films treating the Korean independence movement contrasted sharply with those treating similar activities in Malaya and India. Imai Tadashi’s masterful Suicide Troops o f the Watchtower (Boro no Kesshitai, Toho, 1943), for example, depicts as “ outlaws” the guerrillas operating in northern Korea against the Japanese. It follows a pattern established after 1931 when similar resistance groups in Manchuria were branded “ bandit horsemen.” In fact, the opening tide of the film suggests the two national groups are one and the same: “ Today, northern Korea is a vital Japanese industrial region. The region is targeted for invasion by Man­ churian bandits as they flee our pacification troops pressing on them from the north.” 19 However, the reviewer for Shin Eiga made explicit the true identity o f the “ bandits” : “ The border police substations have the task of fending off the depredations o f an assortment of thought crimi­ nals, anti-Japanese bandits, and local thieves.” 20 In other words, they were Korean Communists. A youthful policeman, Asano, has just been assigned to the border post. His experiences, interwoven with the central events o f the film, constitute a watered down version o f the standard spiritist drama. He tends to be lax and undermotivated. After he is severely reprimanded by his commander, Asano decides to quit and go home. Takazu (the central character o f the film) refuses to let him go and sets about instill­ ing the proper “ spirit” in the boy. In the finale, Asano distinguishes himself in the batde against the “ oudaws,” thus proving he has the “ spirit” after all. A more important theme is harmony and cooperation between the ethnic Koreans and the Japanese. By 1943, Korean Unification with the homeland (naicho-ittcki) had taken on a new and even more urgent sig­ nificance with the implementation of the new Korean military draft system. Early in the film, the entire hamlet is shown pitching in to help the policemen build the stone fortress that will also be their own refuge when the bandit army attacks. Many o f the police officers are them­ selves Korean (although they speak only Japanese among their com­ rades), and the film tends to make a point that the two nationalities are so intertwined as to be virtually indistinguishable.

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The difference in language is a source of tension onscreen as it was, in fact, among the actors on the set. Inside the police station, there is a telephone that is regularly used to check on outlying border posts. Next to the phone is a sign reading, “ Use only National Language!” The offi­ cial fiction is that there is only one “ National Language,” Japanese. But there is abundant evidence, even on film, that the fiction had little basis in reality. Seoul (Keijo, Dai Nihon Bunka Eiga, 1940), a documentarymade by drama film director Shimizu Hiroshi, almost lovingly dwells on the abundance of hangul script used on shop signs lining the streets. In Suicide Troops, there is an outdoor drinking party during which one of the local policemen breaks into a Korean song. His Japanese comrades can do nothing but sway their bodies rhythmically. After a policeman is murdered, his fellows comb the village outskirts in pairs of one Japanese and one Korean, the latter serving as an inter­ preter. Still, the film asserts that the language situation is about to change. One pair o f policemen enters the one-room village school as a pupil reads aloud from his National Language (Kokugo) textbook. When he mispronounces the word bimbou (poverty) as pimbou- a typical Ko­ rean pronunciation mistake -the teacher gently rehearses him in the correct pronunciation. Director Imai had far worse problems on the set. Speaking of one prominent Korean actor’s trouble with pronunciation, Imai reported: “ It took Tazawa over three hours to get a single line right.” 21 The movie’s greatest admission is undoubtedly its acknowledgment of an organized anti-Japanese resistance movement in northern Korea. To be sure, the facts are carefully blurred, making it appear the rebels have no support among the populace. One of the “ bandit” -guerrillas sneaks into the village to warn his father of the impending attack. His father and sister are so disgusted with his activities that they will have nothing to do with him. However, after he is captured and put in the po­ lice jail, he begs to be released to help fight off his old comrades (who have by this time killed his father). He dies heroically defending the vil­ lage. In a later sequence, when the defenders arc running out of ammu­ nition and are about to be overwhelmed, Commander Takazu hands his wife (Hara Setsuko) a gun, saying, “ You’re ready for any eventuality, aren’t you?” As a good Japanese, she will never allow herself to be taken alive. Next, there is a cut to a Korean mother who carefully lays her baby on the floor and draws out a pistol. Despite the fact that she is not Japanese, she also clearly intends to participate in the Japanese tradition of gyokusai. In the end, however, it proves to he unnecessary.

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Imai T adashi’s “ antilibe ration” Suicide Troops o f the Watchtouer (Toho, 1943). Although set in K orea, the sign by the telephone reads “ U seJapanese language only.”

Imai’s vivid (and technically superb) depiction of combat in north­ ern Korea was to incite a bizarre reaction in the renowned director of Shanghai Naval Brigade. As Imai would recall postwar, “ One night, Hara Setsuko visited me with a letter from her brother-in-law, Kumagai Hisatora. The letter went something as follows “Just when Japan must pour all its energies into securing its strategic position among the south­ ern countries, the Jews start an intrigue to divert our eyes to the north. Suicide Troops of the Watchtower is clearly part o f this Jewish plot designed to throw us into confusion. The film must be halted immediately.” 22 Suicide Troops displays much o f the technical mastery Imai would bring to his postwar “ leftist/peace” films. Iijima Tadashi praised it lav­ ishly for the “ visually dense” manner in which it integrates beautiful documentary shots of the north Korean setting with its dramatic se­ quences. The aesthetic success o f Imai’s other national policy films of the wartime era would become the source o f great embarrassment to him in later years. In 1986, he tried to make amends: “Alter I was ar­ rested during my student days, I wrote a tenko recantation and then, dur­ ing the war, went on to make several films that would have to be labeled

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as ‘war collaborationist.’ I still consider them to be the biggest mistake of my life. It taught me about my own weakness as a person. It took a long time after the war to regain my self-confidence, as a result.” 23

Spy Films “ Spy consciousness” had never been a particularly high priority during the China Incident, although Chinese spies would have been able to op­ erate more freely in Japan than any Westerner. Bocho (spy prevention) was the occasional theme of the government-sponsored educational “ shorts” shown to school children and civic groups, but it never became an important ingredient in drama films of the period. In the months leading up to December 1941, however, international intrigue was in the air. A vanguard o f Japanese agents worked feverishly in southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies to prepare the way for the lightening ad­ vances the following spring, and it was assumed enemy espionage oper­ ations were also afoot. In October 1941, a half-hour semidocumentary, On the Spy Front (Bochosen wo Iku), warned the public that “ the crying need of the hour is spy prevention!” That very month also saw the arrest in Tokyo o f the Soviet spy Rich­ ard Sorge and his chief accomplice, Ozaki Hotsumi. The public heard nothing of the incident until 16 May 1942 when the newspapers startled the nation with headlines reading - “ International Spy Ring Smashed!” Indeed, the full story of their audacious exploits did not emerge until postwar (both Sorge and Hotsumi having already been executed in No­ vember 1944). For seven years, the pair, along with a small circle of underground Japanese Communist activists, had collected information from within the highest government circles, radioing it directly back to the Soviet Union. As far as is known, this was the only case in which a foreign (or at least a Caucasian) spy was able to work effectively inside Japan. In the wake o f the shock over the Sorge incident, the Information Bureau began pushing for spy films “ to alert the public to the menace in our midst.” A few days later, Nikkatsu assigned Yamamoto Hiroyuki to direct Fear of the Fifth Column (Daigoretsu no Kyofu, 1942, lost?), which, after its release, only proved that the industry had a long way to go to master the new genre. A young scientist working on a “ soundless airplane en­ gine” is targeted by an espionage ring working out of the British em­ bassy. Their accomplice is a Chinese woman spy (Todoroki Yukiko) a femme fatale described onscreen as having “ the exotic charm o f a Mata

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Storyboard card for the “ spy awareness” campaign carried out by government-sponsored narrators who toured residential districts on bicycle.

Hari.” An equally outlandish character is “ Pastor Scott,” whose church in Tokyo is the site of the plotters’ meetings and about whom one critic sneered: “As a spy he is ludicrously inept, a buffoon more dangerous to himself than to national security.” 24 The plot apparently was strewn with trite plot divices: spy messages sent out through notes on a piano, microphones hidden in flower vases, exploding bombs, secret cameras, and murders arranged to look like automobile accidents. Its melodra­ matic climax featured a furious shoot-out with the righteous h'empeitai (the anti-espionage military police force). Although the spy film genre was launched at the behest of the Infor­ mation Bureau, it was almost immediately hijacked by the Kempeitai, which was steadily extending its domestic influence at the expense of the Information Bureau and even the Home Ministry. Kempci officers worked closely with the scriptwriters o f Fear of the Fifth Column, providing information on how real spies would recruit Japanese nationals for their purposes. Ironically, these relatively minor characters often became the only ones depicted with any sort of psychological realism. The underlying problem afflicting Fifth Column and most o f the sub­ sequent spy thrillers was the virtual absence in Japan of a serious espi­ onage or detective tradition in either cinema or fiction. In contrast, Britain and the United States had a rich tradition on which filmmakers could draw to make their own espionage features. In the late 1930s, Kric Ambler and Graham CJreene had made the genre

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respectable with their specialty, the “ psychological spy thriller.” In the mid-forties, some of these were transposed to the screen: Journey into Fear (1942), The Ministry of Fear (1944), and The Confidential Agent (1945). The literary forerunners of the Japanese spy film, meanwhile, tended to be juvenile detective fiction, first published in serial form by such writers as Yamanaka MinetarO and Edogawa Rampo (author of The Boy Detectives and The Man with Twelve Faces). A 1936 newspaper ad for The Man with Twelve Faces gives a clear indication of the quality of its content: “A mys­ terious genius of disguise! The renowned detective Akechi Kogoro and his quick-witted boy partner go into action. Your heart will be thunder­ ing from start to finish!” 25 The “ detective” work o f the spy films tends to be o f the same breed, depending on flashes o f miraculous intuition, rather than the plodding techniques of real crime investigation. The webs o f intrigue, spun by the films’ inevitable Kempei heroes to snare the foreign agents, are almost as elaborate and fantastical as those o f the spies themselves. In late 1942, Yoshimura Kozaburo entered the field with his The Spy Isn’t Dead Tet (Kancho Imada Shisezu, 1942), bringing to the film his visual flair, along with a stab at psychologically realistic motivation. This is ac­ complished in the opening sequence —an astonishingly graphic depic­ tion o f the Japanese aerial bombardment of Chungking. In a series of tilted shots, we see buildings blasted to pieces and a torrent o f civilians fleeing in terror. Since there is no doubt as to the authors o f this horror, the images could just as easily have been part of an anti-Japanese prop­ aganda film. It is here that we encounter the young Chinese who will soon go to Japan as a spy. This one scene makes it abundantly clear why he should wish to strike at the country where he had received his college education. After this, however, The Spy Isn't Dead Tet settles into the melodra­ matic pattern that will be the hallmark o f the genre. Once in Japan, the young man becomes the tool of an American master spy (Saito Tatsuo)—a veritable Dr. Mabuse who unleashes one fiendish plot after another against Japanese society. Bombs are set off at strategic targets, and the master spy even works to cause a catastrophic fall in the stock market. In the end, his Chinese accomplice realizes the error in his po­ litical beliefs, but dies a fiery death at the hands of the American in the burning factory. The wide-ranging intrigues the American sets afoot impressed critic Shimizu Akira, who commented that “ this demonstrates how foreign spies can operate as masters o f disinformation designed to undermine

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the wartime resolve of the public.” 26 Other critics, however, fretted that Yoshimura’s stylistic dash tended to obscure the film’s “ spy conscious­ ness” message. Iijima Tadashi found Yoshimura’s intense scrutiny of the Chinese spy’s psychology “ distracting,” and Nanbu Keinosuke leveled the same complaint against the film’s “ look” : “ Yoshimura’s flamboyant visual style tends to overwhelm the story. While the film’s content is di­ rected to ordinary viewers, its style, however, is designed to please only intellectuals.” 27 In his next film, On the Eve o f War (Kaisen no ^enya, Shochiku, 1943), Yoshimura actually expands the dramatic use o f camera angles and lighting. In one scene, SaitO Tatsuo (again playing a U.S. spy) talks on the telephone. Shot from a low angle, his face is made sinister by diago­ nal strips of dark shadow, an effect created by light coming through window blinds. The film is also the most elaborately plotted of all the wartime spy features. In typical Shochiku style, it is spiced with a cer­ tain amount of romance and even erotic tension. This time, the coun­ terespionage hero (played by matinee idol Uehara Ken) breaks with the usually dour Kempei image and must struggle against his romantic feel­ ings for the woman (Tanaka Kinuyo) he uses to mislead the U.S. spies. The film treads dangerously close to the tabooed region of sex-withthe-enemy, when Uehara orders Tanaka to use her feminine allures to delay the enemy mission. The explosive implications in this are some­ what defused by the fact that the object of her seductions is actually a Japanese American. Although consummation o f the liaison is avoided, Tanaka dies along with the spies, in an auto wreck she herself causes. Although it probably did little in service to spy consciousness, On the Eve of War certainly did much to put a human face on the widely feared Kempeitai. Yamamoto Hiroyuki, the second most important director o f spy films, clearly took his stylistic cue from Yoshimura. Both You Are Being Aimed At and The Man from Chungking are made ominous by the use of deep shadows. One impressive shot in Man from Chungking features a room banded in shadow. Two figures —the male spy and a woman —are shot from a low angle which causes them to loom large on the screen. Although they share the same frame space, the spy seems to tilt to the right while the woman he is menacing tilts to the left. The effect is that they belong to two different planes, strongly emphasizing their relation­ ship as adversaries. The Man from Chungking [Jukei Kara Kita Otoko, Daici, 1943), made in the waning days o f 1943, reflected the government's obsession with

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Yoshim ura KOzaburO’s On Ike Eve o f War (Shochiku, 1942). T h e slanting bars o f shadow across the face o f the Am erican spy (Saito Tatsuo) emphasize his evil nature.

spurring increased military production. It focuses at least as much on flagging production-line morale in a warplane plant as on the spy’s plot to blow it up. Executive producer Hisamatsu Seiji explained the film’s “ public enlightenment” goals in a Shin Eiga magazine article: “ Foreign agents have opened a two-pronged attack against us sabotage and ideological subv ersion intended to lower the morale of the public.” 28 The truth of Hisamatsu’s assertion is hard to verify. Referring to American espionage and sabotage activities inside Japan, ladislas Farago, a U.S. naval intelligence officer who worked on psychological propaganda aimed at Japan, commented postwar that “we did not have a single agent in Japan to help us. In fact we worked from a single suite of rooms in the Library o f Congress.” 29 The Man from Chungking’s lazy, morally dispirited workers engage in a form of “ sabotage” of their own. They are depicted, not as villains, but as good-hearted slackers whose only sin is that they lack the proper 'Ja p ­ anese spirit.” Their “ sabotage” is small-scale pilfering, mostly wire and other bits of metal, which they sell on the black market to keep them­ selves in money for jovial bouts of beer drinking. When they are caught,

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they arc not seriously punished, but given long-winded seishinshugi lec­ tures on duty and citizenship. But when they return to the factory floor, the enemy agent approaches them with the honeyed words: ‘Japan’s bound to win in any case, so what’s the problem with a little thing like that?” About this sequence, Hisamatsu comments, “The machinations of our adversaries are so skillful and intricate, we must double and treble our vigilance. If even a single worker is lulled into complacency by such words, the war effort suffers.” 30 The film’s melodramatic action picks up considerably in the final se­ quences featuring the blowing up of the factory and the heroic efforts of the workers to save their machinery. The lazy workers have, by this time, seen the error of their ways, and they redeem themselves by valorous activity. In the background o f the final scene, the spy’s lifeless body lolls out o f the door of a crashed car, surrounded by policemen and on­ lookers. Looming up suddenly in the foreground, we see the shadowy figure o f the master spy the original “ Man who came from Chung­ king.” He watches the scene while casually lighting a cigarette and then strolls off. As he exits, a title is flashed on the screen: “A spy! One of them yet lives!” After The Man from Chungking, there was a fourteen-month hiatus in the production of “serious” spy films, suggesting the genre had reached an impasse. Officers o f the Kempeitai had been expressing publicly their disappointment at their ineffectual quality —this despite their own deep involvement in the planning phase. In August 1943, Kempei Colonel Shirahama Hiroshi thundered that he felt “ personally af­ fronted by spy features with no clear structure, no message, and there­ fore no right to exist.” 31 At the same time, the Kempeitai remained keenly aware of the usefulness of spy features to their organization. First, they were an excellent vehicle for promoting a positive image of themselves to the public. Second, because the genre dealt with matters in their area of expertise, spy films permitted them to participate actively in the film-making process, and thus to exert influence on film­ makers in a very direct manner. Among other concerns, this involve­ ment allowed individual Kempei officers to observe the actual filmmak­ ing process and to acquire a certain amount of technical knowledge in the field. This is demonstrated by the steady flow o f reasonably wellinformed film magazine articles by middle-rank Kempeitai officers. Their on-the-set “ advisory” role represented a far deeper penetration of the film world than the army, navy, or even the Information Bureau of­ ficials had ever achieved. And finally, by positioning themselves within

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the movie industry, they could (and did) use film magazines as vehicles for propagating their message to a reading audience they might not oth­ erwise have reached. Frequently, the “ message” was used to evoke a paranoia designed to strengthen the Kempei’s hold on the nation’s “ heart and mind” (minshin). Such was the argument put forward by Kempei Major Amano HeizO: “ Even everyday activities must now be guarded as national se­ crets. The spirit of espionage prevention must become a national ethos. The nadon will never really be secure until every housewife puts spy prevention into practice at home.” 32 Major Amano makes clear that he is not really referring to foreign spies and saboteurs: “ the most imma­ nent danger to the nation comes from the ideological intrigues of the enemy, resulting in laziness, labor unrest, pilfering, hoarding, war weari­ ness, and pacifism.” All o f these problems were in fact the spontaneous result o f late-wartime domestic conditions, but idendfying them direcdy with “ enemy sabotage” made the Kempeitai’s job o f suppressing them somewhat easier. “ Spy consciousness” thus became the code word for interjecting Kempei influence into the household and indeed into the psyche of the individual citizen. As another Kempei officer, Lieutenant Ishizaki Kanzo, put it in early 1944: “ Taking great care with what you say, rejecting the enemy’s ideological snares, and believing firmly in our inevitable victory is the surest means o f spy prevention.” 33 Maintaining the spy consciousness metaphor required the return of espionage films. Since Toho had not made a single one so far, this was the company selected to restart the genre. The film was Spy Ship Sea Rose” (Kancho Umi no Bara, Toho, January 1945, lost?), directed by veteran filmmaker Kinugasa Teinosuke. Since the real usefulness of the new film was chiefly symbolic, the Kempeitai did not saddle the filmmakers with “ serious” didactic messages, as had been the case with The Man from Chungking. They were freed to create a yarn o f swashbuckling in­ trigue, complete with plot devices reminiscent of Yamanaka MinetarO’s novels. One novelty was to have the spies operate out o f a submarine, the Sea Rose. Having lost their East Asian spy base of Corregidore, the Unites States (portrayed here as on the point of ultimate defeat) is re­ duced to this expedient as their only means o f striking back at Japan. In­ side Japan. only a few operatives are left, most spy networks having al­ ready been destroyed by the ever-vigilant Kempeitai. By collecting information from various “ loose-lipped” civilians, the remnant of spies succeed in relaying information that causes the sinking of a Japanese

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Kem peitai military police take a suspect into custody in On the Spy Front (Nichici, 1941).

convoy, with much loss of life. But soon the Kempeitai hero (played by Fujita Susumu) is on their trail. Not only does he succeed in rounding them up, he helps set a trap that allows the navy to sink the Sea Rose, along with a number of other U.S. submarines. The real Kempeitai made no secret of their close involvement with the film. When it went into production in October 1944, Major Amano

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hailed it ecstatically as “just what we have been waiting for, for so long.” 34 Hirosawa Sakae, who was just then beginning his film career as an assistant director on the picture, was delighted to be connected with a Kempeitai film project: “ The rumor was that even young guys like myself would be exempt from the draft.” 35 Although it did not quite work out that way for Hirosawa, he was around long enough to observe the obtrusive presence o f the Kempeitai officers: “ They came to watch us shoot almost every day. They’d come by in turns, with their sabers rattling at their hips. They had youthful faces, but their expressions were haughty and arrogant.” 36 Despite the fictions and overwrought fantasies spun out by the spy films, Japan was never overrun by U.S. “ master-spies.” The United States was far more successful in using its intelligence network inside Nazi Germany to gather crucial information aboutjapan. Communica­ tions between Germany and Japan, as well as the secret correspondence between Japan ’s ambassador to Germany and his home office, were all successfully snooped by American or British spies. In Asia, the United States’ biggest espionage success was the breaking o f the code used by the Japanese navy, a major factor in the victory at Midway. Its “ secret war” efforts against Japan also included some ludicrous failures. Oliver Caldwell, who worked for the Office o f Strategic Services during the period, was to recall that “ someone dreamed up the idea of releasing thousands of bats from American aeroplanes [sic] over Japan, each bat carrying a small firebomb set to go off hopefully after the bat found a new home under the eaves of a Japanese house. The bats were expected to start great fires in Japanese cities. For reasons I never learned, the bats were not successful arsonists.” 37

Tales of Jungle Combat Surprisingly few drama films about the ground war and die trials of Japanese foot soldiers were made during the Pacific War, none achiev­ ing the critical or popular acclaim of such China Incident combat spec­ taculars as Naval Brigade at Shanghai or Tank Commander Nishizumi. Accord­ ing to one critic in the spring of 1944, the combat film had been too much infected by the ideology of the spiritist dramas: “ The results are, all too often, overly cerebral.. . . While audiences may understand the lofty ideals put forward, they remain unmoved and even bored.” 38 A second drawback was that they remained obsessed with the victories of early 1942. The details o f the latter were already known through the

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documentary feature films, and they tended to suffer in comparison with them. Not only did they retell old tales, their underlying message was monotonously familiar: i) Japanese soldiers are uniformly brave and efficient in combat, and 2) the enemy are vile cowards who would rather run than fight. Such seems to have been the case of Shima Koji’s The General Assault on Singapore (Shingaporu Sokogeki, Daiei, 1943, lost?), which came out eight months after Malay War Record and covered essentially the same events, this time from the vantage point of a company o f infantrymen.39 The few individual characters to emerge in the film were soon swallowed up again in the momentum o f the campaign. At one point the soldiers abandon their bicycles and cut inland through thick jungles infested with snakes, poisonous insects, and man-sized lizards. Traveling up jungle riv­ ers in boats, frequent fire-fights take place with enemy units, which invar­ iably either surrender or are wiped out. The capture of an important enemy base provided a few flashes of humor, apparendy drawn from the actual lore of the campaign. The men are gorging themselves on the mountains of canned goods left behind by the British (they call them “ Churchill Rations” ). The company commander has to rush around warning his men to avoid the bars of “ high-quality chocolate” —they are actually a laxative. The top selling point o f General Assault was its extensive use of POWs. Army Colonel Oba Yahei wrote in Shin Eiga about the thrill of seeing so many actual Indian and British soldiers brought to the Ja p a ­ nese screen. “ The sight o f them pitted in uneven combat against our own spiritually superior troops is bound to raise the fighting morale of the entire nation.” 40 But the lackluster performances given by the POWs, who were surely there under duress, proved a big disappoint­ ment. “The Anglo-Indian POWs manning the ‘front lines’ have a desul­ tory, lethargic look,” a viewer moaned. “And, after their line is pushed back, we see nothing o f the desperate fierceness that would be expected of soldiers at bay. The overall effect is a let-down.” 41 The failure to depict the enemy “ effectively” was widely seen as the major flaw in Japanese combat pictures. According to Mizumachi Seiji: “ There are plenty o f films that show the enemy fleeing before an assault of our troops and falling under a hail of bullets. But we don’t get any sense o f their reality. They seem to be there only to provide a contrast for depictions o f our own soldiers.” 42 Only one combat film, he wrote, succeeded in “ peeling off a piece o f the shell o f abstraction obscuring our view of their real nature.” This was Abe Yutaka’s Shoot That Flag

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(Ano Hata wo Ute, 1943, Toho—also known as Dawn o f Freedom, the En­ glish title affixed to the version circulated in the occupied Philippines). The film is unique in Japanese cinema up to this time, since it effec­ tively uses the excellent talents o f a group of Filipino actors, many o f them major stars from their own prewar domestic film industry. It cov­ ers the events from shortly before the fall of Manila through the storm­ ing of Corregidore. Hundreds of Filipino and U.S. POWs are used as extras, and the central roles are dominated by the Filipino actors, along with several English-speaking Caucasians. Since most of the dialogue is in either English or Tagalog, the issue o f language figures large in the film. In two key scenes, U S . and Japa­ nese military officers negotiate through interpreters, and in another scene, a Filipino POW and an elderly Japanese soldier try hard to com­ municate their strong mutual affection despite the fact neither knows a word of the other’s language. In the second half, mosdy made up of batde scenes, the Filipino soldiers use English to talk with their U S. officers while the Japanese troops, naturally, use Japanese among themselves. Meanwhile, in the central drama of the film—about the friendship of a Filipino boy and a Japanese soldier—the two communicate freely in En­ glish, the native language of neither. The soldier, Private First Class Ikejima, is played by Okawa HeihachirO, who had worked several years in Hollywood and whose command o f English on screen is nearly per­ fect. The incorporation o f so many scenes in which the Japanese soldier talks to Tonio and the other children in English is astonishing. Through­ out the warume era, English was considered “ enemy language,” and its use in films had been stricdy forbidden. Ricardo Passion (who plays the boy, Tonio) reported in a postwar interview that the Tagalog scenes forming the early part o f the film had actually been directed by Gerardo de Leon, officially the film’s assistant director.43 De Leon, who was already a prominent director in the pre­ war era, left his own clear imprint on the film. The scenes he shot have a shadowy atmospheric quality, and, since his forte had been realistic melodrama, his actors create a convincing mood of fear, tension, and even romance. His fluid camera movements and muted emotional style contrast sharply with the stiffer, more didactic style employed by Abe Yutaka. Although the combat sequences are dynamic —the panoramic scene in which the Filipino-American line breaks and the soldiers flee in panic is choreographed in a quite effective manner—other scenes, such as the climactic surrender o f the U.S. soldiers, tend to be static, with groups of actors posed in little pageantlike masses. More than one

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contemporary critic noted the affinity with jidaigeki. The latter scenes, presumably, were all directed by Abe. The propaganda theme of Shoot That Flag, about the dilemma of double loyalties and its ultimate resolution through the rejection o f the United States and the embracement of the Japanese cause, is far from subtle. In Manila, which has been declared an “ open city” by the re­ treating U S. Army, Filipino civilians wait in dread for the arrival of the Japanese Army. Mrs. Garcia bids a tearful farewell to her eldest son who, as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, must hurry off to the front in the Bataan jungle. The youngest son, Tonio, salutes his brother bravely and asks him to bring back an enemy (Japanese) helmet. However, the civil­ ians and the Filipino troops will soon discover their real “ enemy.” Little Tonio is run down by a U.S. military vehicle rushing out o f the city to safety. This leaves the boy crippled. At the front, the U.S. officers show nothing but contempt for the Fil­ ipino people. The commander orders an artillery barrage on a village still full o f civilians —“ We need not be concerned with the Filipino peo­ ple. If we can kill ten Japanese at the cost o f a hundred civilians, it’ll be well worth it.” Back in Manila, one of the children says to Ikejima: “ Before, we were afraid of Japanese soldiers, but now we are not afraid.” “ If you are good boys and girls, you need not be afraid,” he replies softly. In another scene, Private Ikejima performs a storyboard play for the children in English, and in further scenes, he gives Tonio little spiritist lectures about not being discouraged by his handicap. Eventually, he arranges an operation for Tonio to restore his ability to walk. Central to the film’s propaganda message is the theme that, as fellow Asians, Japanese and Filipinos are united in a “ commonality of blood,” and the operation in­ cludes a quite literal transfusion of Ikejima’s blood to Tony. Despite the insistently propagandistic nature o f all the scenes he appears in, the superb performance by the child actor Ricardo Passion makes them moving and almost believable. At the front, Japanese propaganda leaflets offering kind treatment to those who surrender are dropped over the Filipino trenches. The sol­ diers rush to grab them, hiding them under their shirts. The central vil­ lain o f the film, Colonel Adams (played by Filipino American Burt Leroi), flies into a rage when he discovers the men have the leaflets and orders them all to be executed on the spot. At the height of the tension between the U.S. and Filipino troops, the strains of Ave Maria well up from across the no-man’s-land separating the two forces. Next we hear a

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voice over a loudspeaker from the Japanese lines. It is the mother o f Tonio and Lieutenant Garcia, telling o f the goodness of the Japanese and denouncing the United States as their real enemy. O ff screen, we hear the sound o f the rifle fire. Adams has carried out his atrocious exe­ cution. In his ecstatic review of the film, Tsumura Hideo found in the handling of this scene an example o f the “ beauty in cruelty.” 44 Despite their grandeur o f scale, the subsequent batde scenes lack the feel o f reality. The U.S. and Filipino troops are slaughtered like ants, while the Japanese troops appear not to take a single casualty The U.S. soldiers are craven and grotesque in their treachery As they flee under heavy Japanese shelling into a fortified cave, an officer observes the swarm of Filipino allies pressing in after them. “ We don’t want to be suffocated in here by those yellow monkeys!” he shouts, and orders the American troops to mow them down with machine-gun fire. Even Tsu­ mura Hideo had reservations about the ultimate effect o f this particular scene: “All right, we know that the American Army is a monster of cruelty. One has to expect such from a nation made from a mongrelized mix of races. Still, if you overdo this aspect, the film will lose its credibil­ ity. The effect will be diametrically opposite what was intended.” 45 The climax o f the film is the surrender at Corregidore. Under a white flag, a group o f U.S. officers approaches the Japanese field com­ mander (played by Fujita Susumu) to request a “ truce.” “Are you trying to insult the Imperial Japanese Army?” theJapanese commander replies with deep loathing in his voice, “ We demand total surrender. If you do not do so, we will recommence our attack immediately!” The scene is reminiscent of General Yamashita at Singapore. Gone is the gentle­ manly attitude o f the Japanese Army when General Nogi received the surrender of the Russian general, Stessel, at Port Arthur in 1905. The Japanese commander treats the American troops with scorn and hatred. There is not the slightest hint that he will be magnanimous in his victory (and, in fact, awaiting the captured U.S. and Filipino soldiers is the Ba­ taan Death March). Commenting on the moral of the Shoot That Flag, Army Colonel Nishiyama Katsu o f the Imperial Headquarters Press Department made this distinction between the Filipino and the U.S. troops: “ While we must recognize that the Filipino people have been corrupted body and soul by hedonism and depravity, we cannot hate them. Rather we should warmly welcome them into the fold as lost brethren who had the misfortune of having been brought up in the wrong manner. It is the Americans and the entire Anglo-Saxon race that deserve our hatred.

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Poster for A be Yutaka's Shoot That Flag (a.k.a. Dawn o f Freedom) (Waka K oji archive).

They and they alone are the enemies of all mankind.” 46 Colonel Nishiyama’s barely suppressed undertone o f contempt for the Filipinos reflects a similar ambivalence displayed two years earlier in Sawamura Tsutomu’s documentary The East's Song of Victory. With their Filipino “ lost brethren,” the Japanese occupation authorities would never achieve the semirapport their counterparts had with the Indonesians. The success of Shoot That Flag in pulling in major Filipino acting tal­ ents and in eliciting from them performances of such quality is therefore all the more surprising. Fernando Poe, who plays Lieutenant Gomez, the

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neighbor and best friend of the older Garcia boy, had in real life been a captain in the U.S. Army. Featuring him in the film signified a major propaganda coup. The pathetic U.S. POWs in the final surrender scene perform woodenly and speak in a stilted manner; clearly they have been coerced into their parts. But what of the Filipino actors? At this late date, it is impossible to accurately grasp their motives, which must have been quite complex. Burt Leroy, who plays the murderous U.S. colonel, died at the hands o f theJapanese before the end o f the occupation. Leopoldo Salcedo, another important Filipino actor in the film, worked actively against the Japanese as a spy. He was arrested, but spared execution, probably due to his prominent participation in the film.47 Shoot That Flag, which premiered in February 1944, was the last of the triumphant land-war spectaculars. As the year wore on, the sense of impending defeat began to penetrate public awareness and this led to a steady shrinking of mental horizons. Interest in the outside world, even in those regions still under Japanese control, flagged. The newspaper headlines announcing ever greater damage inflicted on the enemy often evoked wry disbelief. In his diary entry for 20 May, comic actor Furukawa Roppa wrote: “ Got up at seven thirty and read the newspaper. An­ other huge victory, bigger than ever. Maybe I should just quit reading the papers.” 48 In his own diary entry for 8 September, Reserve General Ishiwara Kanji confided that “ the people are disgusted with the military and with the government; they do not care any more about the outcome of the war.” 49 September saw the premiere o f Tanaka Shigeo’s film about Guadal­ canal, The Human Bullet Suicide Battalion {Nikudan Teishintai, 1944, lost?). The following synopsis, published in Nihon Eiga, indicates that this last of the jungle combat spectaculars was steeped in intense pathos: “A suicide battalion goes ashore on a remote deserted South Seas island. As they struggle forward, they must eat handfuls of raw rice and shoots of fresh grass. Deep in the jungle they are scorched by the sun and pelted by torrents of rain. And still they push deep into enemy ter­ ritory. All of the men, including their commander, suffer wounds, but their lust for battle remains undimmed. In the very jaws of death, they intone His Imperial Majesty’s Rescript to Soldiers. This sublime de­ piction of our nation’s military spirit would move even a demon to tears of admiration.” 50 With the war entering its final phase, government control over many as­ pects of society, including the film industry, began to break down. In the

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next chapter, we will see how official policy began to swing back and forth between ultra-austerity and the encouragement of pure entertain­ ment. The cultural life of the nation was crumbling. With the abolition of the last film magazines, film criticism itself moved toward oblivion. The dreams for a vigorous documentary film culture also came to naught at this time. From here on, the “ culture film” had to serve the immediate needs of the state.

13 The Late War Period

Closing the Lid o f an “ Iron Coffin” Japan was losing the war. In the latter half of 1943, the military high command managed to hide this fact, just barely, by disguising strategic retreats as “ redeployments.” But the writing was on the wall. In the wake o f the announcement on 21 May of the death of Admiral Yama­ moto, killed in an air ambush, there was a worrisome shift in the domes­ tic mood. Within days of the funeral came the mass suicide o f the troops on Attu. The government’s attitude toward the civilian sector took on an unprecedented harshness. “ The enemy’s going all out!” 1 a new gov­ ernment slogan proclaimed; the implication was, “ so why aren’t we?” Behind the scenes, there were signs of chaos. The changed “ objective situation” had ushered in a period of bitter interagency feuding. The military, meanwhile, was pressing hard on the bureaucrat’s domain of ci­ vilian control. A series of crises rocked the official establishment, at least some of them clearly orchestrated by the military. The Information Bu­ reau, already sorely disadvantaged by the hurried departure of its two star figures, Kawazura and Fuwa, became the ultimate victim o f one of these crises. On the morning o f 9 June 1943, an AsahiNewspaper article sent a chill through the film industry: “ Daiei’s Blossoms o f the Battlefield Banned: ‘Lack of Fighting Spirit’ Consigns It to an Iron Coffin.” The article an­ nounced that the film, due for release on the twelfth, had suddenly been withdrawn “ until further notice.” For the first time since the outbreak o f the Pacific War, the Home Ministry had imposed on a film its most awe­ some wartime condemnation, that it “ fosters pacifism at a time when the nation faces its severest test in this batde-unto-death.” 2 A Home Ministry official expressed “ grave concern” that the film­ makers had undermined the preproduction censorship process by changing the script after it had been passed by the Information Bureau. Executives and production chiefs from all three studios were called in

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for a tongue-lashing: “Not only is this an example of utter duplicity', it is an arrant subversion of procedures established by law.” 3 It quickly emerged, however, that the script in question had not been changed. Kikuchi Kan, now president of Daiei (which had made Blos­ soms), issued a point-blank denial o f the filmmakers’ culpability.4 The Information Bureau, along with the Home Ministry itself, were now thrown on the defensive. KatO Iwao, chief of the Ministry’s censorship division, was forced to make a red-faced public retraction. The real problem, he explained, was that the objective situation had changed radically during the period between the passing of the script and the time of its release. “ In any case,” he concluded lamely, “ we hope all par­ ties concerned will have learned something from this.” 5 The changed situation KatO referred to was clearly the darkening prospects of the war itself, along with its effect on public psychology. But the overall impression, slyly noted by the press, was that the bureaucrats had been forced to shoot themselves in the foot. The initial (false) charge that the script had been “ significandy” altered bore the hallmarks of a panicky cover-up. Some powerful entity beyond the control of the agen­ cies involved (the military?) had pressured them into rescinding a toplevel decisión. With their “ leadership” role in the administration o f film policy now in peril, they responded in a manner typical of the belea­ guered bureaucrat: they sought to shift the blame through a fictitious ac­ cusation and then, when that was exposed, attempted to minimize the issue by explaining it away. The aftereffects, however, did not go away. The civilian officials of the Information Bureau, in particular, emerged with their prestige and power reduced. Thenceforth, they would have to take their cue from their military colleagues. Another casualty was the last remnant o f the old relationship of “ trust and cooperation,” which once reigned between the film execu­ tives and the reform bureaucrats. In the year after the fall of Kawazura Ryüzó, the executives had done their best, through scrupulous obedi­ ence and painful compromise, to revive the relationship. Now, in place of the confidence that they were finally on the inside of the system, came the realization that they had no way of avoiding the terrors of sudden, arbitrary shifts in government policy. To minimize the damage, they turned their attention to currying favor with the powerful new players in the game —middle-ranking army, navy, and Kempeitai officers. Making matters even worse for the industry, a general ambivalence about film as a “ weapon” of war seemed to be spreading through

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Ad for Nihon K o ’on, m anufacturers o f 16 mm. projectors. C opy reads: “A weapon in the w ar o f ideologies!!" (. Yihon Eiga, Ju ly 1943).

government circles. Fluctuations in the allotment of raw film stock re­ flected this. In January 1943, the government had announced new aus­ terity measures in the rationing of film stock, which was communicated to the industry’ as a general reduction in the number of films each com­ pany would be allowed to make. In the gloomy July aftermath o f the Blossoms of the Battlefield affair, the Information Bureau announced a sig­ nificant increase in that allotment, perhaps as a confidence-building measure. By the end of the year, however, it became clear that such an increase would not materialize. Instead, the government announced a new policy seriously curtailing deliveries. Thereafter, the exigencies of war made film stock an ever more scarce commodity.

In the Wake o f the Decisive War Emergency Measures February 1944 was a busy month for the government regulators. On the eighth, a new uniform was decreed for schoolgirls, designed more for the factory and field than the classroom. The upper part was a shirt of durable material, tied at the wrists and the waist by leather laces. The

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bottom was a baggy pair of bloomers (motnpe), cinched at the cufi's by a similar set of laces. On the seventeenth came a directive reducing the number of intellec­ tual magazines to a mere three. Then, on the twenty-eighth, a tidal wave of new regulations loomed over national life. Under a headline announc­ ing the promulgation of new “ Decisive War Emergency Measures,” Asahi Shinbun warned its readers “ to be ready for a new round of belttightening stemming from the emergency measures proclamation.” 6 Over the next several days the deluge descended. Some regulations were clearly commonsensical, such as the commandeering of unoccu­ pied land for the growing of extra vegetables. Others, such as the start of a program evacuating schoolchildren (gakudd sokai) from the cities to the countryside, made it clear that the prospect of enemy bombing of the homeland was at hand. For the already battered entertainment industry, the proclamation spelled first-rate disaster. A new and far-reaching austerity program was launched under the name of “ expulsion o f high-class hedonism.” Up­ market restaurants, bars, and geisha houses were ordered closed. Simi­ lar treatment was given theaters serving up expensive, “ aristocratic” amusements. This meant the end for the Kabukiza and eight other major Tokyo theatres. Similar-sized theaters were closed in Osaka Na­ goya, Kobe, and Kyoto. Officially, they were to be “ suspended” for one year, but the real meaning was clear: “ closed for the duration.” A particularly wretched fate awaited the Nichigeki Theatre. Its vast, luxurious auditorium was completely gutted to make room for the as­ sembly of a peculiar new weapon. Here, school girls fitted out large bal­ loons with incendiary devices. Afterwards, the balloons —a total of ten thousand of them by the end o f the war - were released into the wind currents blowing toward the North American continent. Approximately ten percent of the balloons reached their destination, causing forest fires from Alaska to Casper, Montana. “ Expulsion of hedonism” actually represented far more than restau­ rant and theater closings. The papers announced it as a blueprint for a sweeping, egalitarian reformation of society. Some years earlier, the no­ tion of people’s literature and people’s films had been introduced as part of a program to develop a new “ classless” form of entertainment. The new movement was apparently an extension of the same idea. Rather than for those privileged with leisure time, all entertainment would be put to the service of “ alleviating the fatigue” of Japan’s new home-front heroes, the “ production-line fighters.” As Asahi explained:

Schoolgirl workers taking a b rief rest behind the Nichigeki Theater, rlosed for the duration a n d ro n ve rtrd tr> w ;ir nm dtirtion

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“ High-class facilities are a redundancy that our national resources can no longer support. We need to relocate first-run houses out of our crowded city centers and into the worker’s residential districts, where they can do the most good.” 7 The relocation policy, put into effect nationwide on 23 April, com­ pletely restructured the film promotion system. By having new films pre­ miere at local movie houses across the country rather than in Tokyo’s Asakusa or downtown Osaka, the authorities were clearly aiming to make the old entertainment centers less attractive to the throngs who once gathered there. Not only was the new system more “ equitable” to workers assigned to factories in or near the smaller provincial cities, it helped keep crowds from making fuel-consuming trips to the metropol­ ises. And this of course meshed neady with the larger purpose o f evacu­ ating the larger cities before the U.S. bombers arrived. The film companies were appalled. Shochiku and Toho were espe­ cially hard hit by having many of their best theaters closed or confis­ cated. The company executives “ felt like admirals who have to watch their biggest batdeships being scutded and sent to the bottom.” 8 Fur­ thermore, as Shimizu Akira would recall, the new regulation resulted in a rather strange state of afTairs: “ On the one hand, theatres in oudying districts, where the auditorium was separated from the toilet facilities by a simple half door, were suddenly elevated to the status of first-run the­ aters. Many of the old, downtown luxury palaces, on the other hand, were demoted to third-class status.” 9 Not only were there theater closings, the new regulations also de­ creed drastic reductions in the maximum playing time of film shows. An entire show, including the news film, was now limited to one hundred minutes. The running time for drama films was cut to seventy-three minutes or less. This latter came as a particular shock to most directors, since ninety minutes had long been the accepted running time for a movie. It was part of the established, and by now instinctual, format according to which scriptwriters and directors first conceived their film projects. The new format of seventy-three minutes just did not “ feel” right to most scriptwriters or directors. Toho’s chairman of the board commiserated with his production staff: “ If the role of politics is to make everyone feel equally bad, this is politics in the best tradition.” 10 Mizoguchi Kenji helped keep the filmmakers’ resentment from turn­ ing into open rebellion by bringing in his Danjuro the Third (Danjurd San dai, Shochiku, June 1944) at a mere sixty-five minutes. The film one of

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his geidomono (performing arts) films—was widely praised for its high ar­ tistic merit, and the Film Association expressed its deep gratitude by giv­ ing him a specially contrived award. For the comedian Furukawa Roppa, who was under exclusive con­ tract to Toho, the closing of all of the company’s big theaters meant a serious disruption o f his professional activity. He was even more a stage than a screen personality. He nevertheless quickly adapted himself to the new situation and plunged back into his work: “ For the time being I’ll put my efforts into organizing a traveling entertainment troupe. I’ll keep it as small as possible. Our top people will work out a few one-man routines, and the whole troupe will do a touring play,” he wrote in his diary on i March.11 The stalwart attitude of Toho in seeing its important employees through the difficult times was a source o f reassurance for Roppa. His entry for 2 March was, “ Toho says they’ll guarantee the living o f all its actors and employees. They say we should just keep working and leave the rest to them.” 12 Toho and the two other film companies extended their paternal con­ cern beyond the directors and assistant directors still working at the stu­ dios. Those who had gone off to the front were given equal treatment. Hirosawa Sakae was to discover this fact in a very graphic way on his first day of work at Toho in late 1944. Entering the cramped secondfloor room reserved for assistant directors, he noticed a table: “ It was thick with dust and the film canisters serving as ashtrays were heaped high with butts. A green felt bulletin board, suspended from a couple of nails, caught my eye. Lined up on the board were nameplates reading Kurosawa Akira, Ichikawa Kon, Taniguchi Senkichi, and other cur­ rently employed directors. Just below was another line o f tags with the names of personnel on active duty at the front or who were sick. Below each o f these names were little cartoon drawings indicating the reason for their absence. Those who’d been called up had a little battleship or the figure of a saluting soldier. Below the guys who were sick was a pic­ ture of a medicine botde.” 13 O f course, only the largest and most influential companies could af­ ford such generosity. For ordinary citizens, life in mid-1944 had become numbingly grim. In his diary entry for 3 March, the great novelist Nagai Kafu described the commuter crowds in Tokyo as if they were herds of zombies: “ They act as if they’ve seen it all and that nothing more could surprise them. If they were drafted and sent to the front, there would be no tears. If they were told the city was about to be flattened in an air

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raid, there would be no fuss or even concern. Come what may, they just leave it to chance, no longer capable of any strong emotion. Their only concern in life is to get into this one train car. And for that, they are will­ ing to fight tooth and nail.” 14

The Fate o f the Culture Film The Decisive War Emergency Measures also put paid to the ambitious plans for the culture film genre.15 It decreed the abandonment of the provision, mandated in the 1939 Film Law, that a culture film be in­ cluded in every film program. Because of the drastic reduction in show times, there was now barely enough time for one news film and the fea­ ture film. Still, full-length documentaries, mostly about the war, contin­ ued to be made and shown at the theaters. To cover the spring of 1942 air campaign in Burma, cameraman Sakasai had hunched against the glass nose of a bomber, exposing himself to the spray o f enemy bullets. When this footage was released, as Army Air Corps War Record (Rikugun Kogun Senki, Nichiei, 1943), the advertising posters had played up his courage: “A death-defying cameraman in the midst of battle at the Burma front!” The next year, Sakasai’s camera­ work for Watanabe Yoshimi’s Attack to Sink (Gochin, Nichiei, April 1944) was equally audacious. The film shows a submarine’s departure from Penang and then moves on to depictions of ship-board life during the three-month cruise. One camera was put in a waterproof glass box fixed to the conning tower facing toward the bow; another one at the bow pointed back toward the conning tower. This set-up provided dra­ matic footage of the sub submerging, along with shots of crewman rushing out on deck as it resurfaced. The dramatic highlights of the film were, of course, the tensionfilled scenes in which enemy ships are stalked and then torpedoed. One of the sinkings is quite spectacular. Through the periscope, we see a British oiler break in half. First the foresection sinks and then, after keel­ ing over, the aft slips beneath the waves. In his autobiography, Sakasai describes the scene of pathos that he shot but was not allowed to put into the film. After sinking the tanker, “ the surviving crewmen, floating on rafts or clutching debris, approached our sub. A machine gun opened up on them, cutting off their cries for help. I simply cannot understand why. Soon the screaming sailors disap­ peared under the waves, one after another. It was such an appalling sight, I had to avert my eyes.” "’

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While Attack to Sink projects an aura of military efficiency and victo­ rious combat, the opposite implication could be gained from the second major documentary of 1944, Bomb Blasts and Shell Fragments (.Bakudan to Danpen, Riken, 1944). Like Attack, it was a winner of the Ministry o f Ed­ ucation Award, and all the theaters throughout the country were or­ dered to screen it within a set period of time. The advertising copy made it clear that viewers were being prepared for the hard times ahead: “ The enemy is planning air raids on the population centers o f our homeland! Countrymen! It is time to rouse yourselves to take imme­ diate protective measures!” 17 As with its predecessor, Fire Bombs (Shoidan, Riken, 1943), it was designed to help civilians understand the sort o f damage to be expected in a bombing and oudined basic fire-fighting and safety procedures. The film’s detached scientific stance—featuring oscilloscopes measuring blast waves and charts showing the number o f calories emitted by various kinds of bombs—could hardly have been re­ assuring to its viewers. Celebes (Serebesu, Nichiei, 1944), the third major documentary o f 1944, starts with the glorious parachute assault at Menado in the spring of 1942. After covering the ground campaign against the Dutch and the subsequent construction of military bases, it moves on to a careful study of life in the island’s major population centers. The last part is a trek into the interior where the wildlife and native customs are given close at­ tention. Shot on location during the better part of a year, the film was widely acclaimed for its excellent ethnological depictions. A review of the film in Nihon Eiga, however, makes clear the film’s propaganda pur­ poses: “ The images of our fellow countrymen cheerfully going about their work of reconstruction make one truly proud. Similarly heart­ warming is the sight of the aboriginal people as they cooperate with the Imperial Army.” 18 After the first year of the Pacific War, the culture film was clearly re­ treating from the high-minded goals set out for it in the Film Law. Cut­ backs in allotments o f raw film stock and “ consolidations” began to re­ duce the total number of such films. In late January 1944, production companies were yet again consolidated, leaving only four in the field: Nichiei, Asahi, Dentsu, and Riken. By this time, the documentary had become little more than a vehicle for official propaganda or instruc­ tional material for wartime preparedness. When scientific subjects were treated, the knowledge they sought to impart usually had direct rele­ vance to the war effort. In late 1943, a short feature called Hoiyuji TempU (Hoiyuji, Nichiei) was

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Bomb Blasts and Shell Fragments (Riken, 1944), produced to prepare the public for things to come.

produced, but even here, the underlying message was the superiority of yamato damashii, rather than objective history. In his book, Film Policy (1943), Tsumura Hideo refers to the culture film masterworks o f the post-Film Law period A Day in the Ttdeland (Aru Hi no Higata), and Ishikawa Takuboku —as “ effeminate and wishy-washy in execution and in content.” 19 The following year, in his book Film War, he spells out the fate in store for culture films as one of “ focusing on the glory of Japan's military might and the achievements of her material civilization.” 20 A Vow to Alt. Fuji (Fuji ni Chikau, Nichiei, 1943) has the familiar theme of military' training for boys. This time they are fourteen to nineteenyear-old trainees at the Army Tank Cadet Academy, located at the foot of the revered mountain. From the opening scene, in which the boys run toward the camera in ordered ranks, the mountain tends to domi­ nate the background. The passage of time during their six-month train­ ing period is made visual by the gradual downward spread of the snow­ line on the mountain. The training steadily moves toward the day the boys will actually start up their tanks, and the climactic scene is a huge mock tank battle carricd out amid swirling clouds of dust. The film ends

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with a spiritist speech by the school’s top military officer and the film’s theme song. Navy Hospital Ship (Kaigun Bydinsen, Nichiei, 1943) represented the sec­ ond time the subject had been taken up in a culture film. The first, Hos­ pital Ship, had been made during the China Incident period and was es­ sentially a paean to the loving care of Japanese nurses and doctors for Japanese military men. This time, however, the scope of activity is wid­ ened to include treatment of the natives on Japanese-held South Sea is­ lands. Patients aboard ship include several U.S. POWs as well. Judging by the tense expression on their faces, however, one strongly suspects that this was little more than a propaganda stunt designed to convince audiences at home and abroad o f the good treatment afforded prison­ ers. The POWs were probably ordered into the hospital beds for the filming and then were removed as soon as the shooting was finished. Navy Hospital Ship often makes the claim that U.S. submarines were systematically sinking Japanese hospital ships, and the narrator repeat­ edly launches into extended tirades against the “ inhuman brutality of the Anglo-American beast.” Thus, it seems to follow that a film with such a strong hate-the enemy-tone would also use war prisoners to bol­ ster its propaganda message. This was clearly the case with such similar scenes worked up for Call­ ing Australia (Goshu no Yobigoe), the 1943 Japanese Army propaganda film made in Indonesia and aimed at Australia. The latter film, written and directed by the Korean-born Hinatsu Eitaro (the creator of You and Me), depicted Allied prisoners living it up in a country-club-like prison camp, with a swimming pool and excellent health facilities. It featured scenes of prisoners gorging themselves on steaks and being carefully treated in the local hospital. After the war, however, survivors o f the prison camp condemned Calling Australia as not just a lie, but a kind of “ war atrocity.” The only time prisoners saw the inside of theJapanese hospital was dur­ ing the shooting of the film, and, as soon as the shooting was finished, they were pushed out of the hospital at bayonet point.21 The January 1944 list of culture film shorts demonstrated how com­ pletely the genre was now harnessed to the war effort. Winning Through (.Kachinuku Tame ni, Nichiei) appealed for increased war production, while acknowledging the overwhelming production capacity of the United States. The narrator assures viewers that “just as we beat England’s spin­ ning industry at the end of the last century, we can surely beat America’s war industry today.” Ships out of Wood (Mokuzjosen, Nichiei), meanwhile, in­ directly admitted that Japan’s merchant marine was now in a desperate

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T h e “ culturc film” N aiy Hospital Ship (Nichici, 1944). T h e scene showing doctors treating an enem y prisoner is probably a propaganda set-piece.

state due to submarine sinkings. It encouraged the expansion of wooden ship construction because of their lower cost and because they could be built faster than iron ones. Gas Masks (Bodoku Men, Tsushin) claimed that once U.S. bombing began, they would surely be dropping poison gas on major population centers. As 1944 progressed, the four production companies tended toward specialization. Asahi made war production films, such as Factory Change­ over (Tenkan Kojo), about converting factories from civilian to military production, and The Renewal Workshop (Saiki no Shokuba), which encour­ aged using disabled veterans in the factory'. At Dentsu, Kamei Fumio was put to work scripting features about emergency food production: Potato Buds (Jagaimo no Me) and Chickens (Mwalori). Nichiei handled prep­ arations for American bombing. The films included: Experiencing the Kita Kyushu Bombing, covering the first (and fairly ineffectual) U.S. raid 011 the Japanese homeland inJuly, followed by Dealing with Enemy Fire Bombs and What Kind of Enemy Planes Will Be Coming? By late spring 1945, even the titles of culture films were telegraph­ ing the growing desperation. In April, a Riken documentary; Classroom

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Factory (Kyoshitsu Kojo), showed young children assembling war materiel in their own classrooms. The tide o f an Asahi film, released in June, seems to hover between pathos and genuine hysteria— We’re Working So Hard! (Watashitachi wa Konnani Haiaraiteiru). It depicts young female work­ ers in a garment factory, with many scenes speeded up in order to com­ municate the urgency the girls (and presumably the rest of the audience) must be feeling. The girls are clearly pushing the edge of human endu­ rance. When a spool o f thread slips from a sewing machine and skids across the floor, the off-screen female narrator (who introduces each scene from the girls’ standpoint, using the pronoun “ we” ) exclaims: “ When we are working so hard, why does it have to go and fall off?!” Onscreen, one o f the girls puts her head down and breaks into sobs. The implication o f the scene is readily apparent. As Shimizu Akira points out, “What the girls are really saying is-‘We’re working ourselves to death! Why, why isn’tJapan winning this war?” ’22

The Fate o f the Cartoon Film On the entertainment page of the 7 March 1944 edition o f Asahi News­ paper, just above that day’s installment of Hino Ashihei’s serialized novel Army, there appeared a little article tided “ Fukuchan Moves Out!” In the center of the article was the familiar face o f the “ Fukuchan” himself: a flat oval for a face, a circle for a nose, dots for eyes, and a crushed, black grade schooler’s cap on his head: “ Dear Friends, many thanks for your kindness over the years. With the war on and all, newspapers just don’t have space for the likes of me.” This was the farewell (for the dura­ tion, at least) of one o f the most beloved cartoon strips in the news­ paper’s history. Created by Yokoyama Ryuichi in 1936, Fukuchan dif­ fered from the majority o f children-oriented cartoons by being, not an animal or a strange semihuman, but an ordinary grade-schooler inhab­ iting the everyday world shared by real schoolchildren. His world changed as the real world changed, and, for many children, his reac­ tions to it were just like their own. Now Fukuchan was saying goodbye. “ You’ll still be seeing me around now and then. Now that even the home front has become a bat­ tlefield, I’ve got a lot o f work to do helping people boost production and stuff. So, see you later, folks!” 23 Actually, Fukuchan had already per­ formed distinguished service in boosting war production in a featurelength cartoon released the previous August, Fukuchan s Production Increase Unit (Fukuchan no %osan Butai, Shochiku, >943). With the coming of the

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war, Fukuchan, along with several others of the nation’s favorite car­ toon characters, had taken on a secondary existence as patriotic heroes of the silver screen. In the spring of 1942, he became a pilot attacking the bases of a nameless enemy in Fukuchan’s Air Attack (.Fukuchan no Kishu, Shochiku). So popular were these animated features that Shochiku planned a drama film with real actors, to be called Fukuchan’s Neighbor­ hood Association (Fukuchan no Tonarigumi), and directed by Shima Koji. But the script ran into problems and the project was abandoned. Submariner Fukuchan (Fukuchan no Sensuikan, Shochiku, 1944), scripted by film critic Shigeno Tatsuhiko, was Fukuchan’s boldest military ad­ venture. He and his gang from the comic strip join the crew of a subma­ rine that picks off enemy ships one after another. On the surface, how­ ever, they are harassed by planes from a big enemy carrier. The sub sneaks into an enemy harbor and uses its deck cannon to blow up all the shore facilities and a few merchantmen as well. As they try to leave the harbor, they are attacked again by the carrier planes and are damaged. After undergoing repairs, they return for a huge climactic battle. Through the periscope, we see enemy warships ablaze. At last, they find their nemesis, the carrier, and this too is sent to the bottom. Japanese experiments in animation date back to 1917, but cartoons did not really start coming into their own until the early 1930s. Although most were probably reworkings of fairy tales or simple collections of sight gags, many o f these early cartoons were already reflecting the ag­ gressive, militaristic mood o f the new era. Often, but not always, the he­ roes were familiar characters from comic strips in the newspapers or the magazine Shonen Kurabu. One such was “ Boken Dankichi” based on the extremely popular comic strip by Shimada KeizO. One very short Dan­ kichi feature, probably from around 1931, shows the character riding an elephant that squashes hordes of grotesquely shaped, black natives under its feet. Dankichi then jumps down and beats the old native king until he surrenders his crown to the boy. MomotarO, the victorious folk-tale conqueror of Onigashima, is fea­ tured in an openly militarist cartoon called Momotaro of the Sky (Sora no Momotaro, 1931). Penguins from the South Pole come to ask him to rid them o f a huge eagle that is killing them one by one. MomotarO sets off with his old crowd in a military plane, fitted out with a machine gun. After a prolonged air batde, the eagle is killed by machine-gun fire. In the last scene, the penguin natives cheer MomotarO’s plane, which has unfurled aJapanese flag and is dangling the dead bird from the end of a rope. It is not difficult to sec this film as an allegory of future war with

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the United States (represented by the eagle), and, in fact, this is the era in which Shorten Kurabu magazine began serializing its youth-oriented novels fantasizing just such a military conflict. Tagawa SuihO’s extremely popular character, the scrappy little mon­ grel dog Norakuro, also made frequent appearances on film in this pe­ riod. In his comic strip form, Norakuro is a soldier. At first the stories were simply humorous tales about military life, much like the popular U.S. comic strip Beede Bailey. Although there is a rival “ army” -the Monkey Battalion —their combat usually resulted in nothing more than bumps on the head. With the start o f the China Incident, the univer­ sally popular comic strip turned violent, and vicious. The Chinese sol­ diers are depicted as pigs who usually are slaughtered by the well trained forces o f Norakuro’s Wild Dog Battalion. These stories, how­ ever, apparently never were put on film. The Norakuro cartoon features that do survive Private Second-class Norakuro {Norakuro Nitdhei, 1933) and Corporal Norakuro {Norakuro Gdcho, 1934) —tend to revolve around humor­ ous incidents in his dog army life and the rivalry with the Mountain Monkey Battalion. In the comic strip, Norakuro advanced one military rank each year until he reached the level o f captain in 1941. At this point, the strip was suppressed at the insistence of the army, which evidendy disliked being made the butt of cartoon humor. In the middle of the Pacific War, MomotarO made a dramatic return to the silver screen in the feature-length cartoon Momotaro, Eagle o f the Sea {Momotaro Umi no Washi, Geijutsu Eigasha, 1943). While Murata Yasushi’s graphics for the 1931 MomotarO film were relatively primitive, those o f Seo Mitsuo for this one rivaled the sophistication of almost any animated film made anywhere in the world at the time. The film’s only human figure, Momotaro, is aided in his attack on the new “ Demon Island” (Pearl Harbor) by hundreds of cute but thoroughly dis­ ciplined rabbits, monkeys, and birds. “ It knocks those Yankee Betty Boops and Popeyes right out o f the running!” 24 the advertising copyproclaimed. And, with the exception of the work o f Walt Disney, the claim was largely accurate. The movements of the figures are smooth and natural, as are the take-ofT and landing scenes of the airplanes. Seo is reported to have spent hours studying documentary footage of war planes to accomplish the latter. The aircraft carriers are also impres­ sively authentic-looking, and the scenes 011 deck are often shown as if taken from dramatic crane shots. Momotaro, Divine Warrior of the Sea {Momotaro Umi no Shimpei, Shochiku, 1945), made by Seo the following year, is even more dramatic.

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Single frame cartoon, using the character MomotarO from the pop­ ular cartoon film Momotaro, Eagle o f the Sea. Here, MomotarO wears an arm band identifying him as a m em ber o f the arm y’s Enlighten­ ment and Pacification Unit. His gesture, along with the contrast in body types, is rich in iconographic significance.

This is the film about the conquest o f Singapore already discusscd in chapter 10. At the time o f its release, the only criticism of the film was that MomotarO looked somewhat fatter and older than in the former film. In the Pacific War, it was the fate of all manga eiga (cartoons) to carry a hate-the-enemy message. Sometimes, however, it was so subtle as to be almost invisible. Such was the case of Yokoyama Michiko’s short car­ toon The Spider and the Tulip (Kumo to Churippu, Shochiku, 1943). In this simple tale, a miniscule fairy child is pitted against a wiley, evil spider, who wants to catch and eat her. The smooth-talking spider wears a bowler hat, smokes a pipe, and often hums to himself melodiously. Right down to the timbre o f his “ crooner’s" voice, he is an amazingly accurate spoof of . . . Bing Crosby! Two more cartoons drafted popular comic strip characters for mili­ tary duty: Mabo's Paratroop Detatchment (Alabo no Raktisen Butai, Sato Eiga

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Seisakusho, 1943) and Sankichi-the-Monkey's Fighting Submarine (Osaru Sankichi no Tatakau Sensuikan, Nihon Manga Films, 1943). Although all of these features had a wide appeal for audiences, in the occupied territories as well as at home, they were extremely expen­ sive in man-hours to produce. As the war grew increasingly desperate, an endless stream of young men trooped out of the studio labs to the front. In the end, cartoon features became virtually impossible to pro­ duce. When Seo Mitsuo began making Divine Warrior o f the Sea in 1943, he had to watch his corps of young draftsmen dwindle away. In the end, he often had to work virtually alone. After one and a half years of he­ roic, lonely effort the film was finally released in early 1945.25

Twilight o f the Film Critics The gradual decline in film production, along with government warn­ ings that paper too was about to join the growing list of scarcities, made it clear to film critics that their sphere of activity would soon become another casualty o f the war. The editors o f Nihon Eiga apparently had this in mind when they devoted their October 1943 issue to the question o f “ The Function o f the Film Critic.” Fifteen prominent critics re­ sponded with articles three pages in length. Tsumura Hideo, however, was given more than seven pages, reflecting his commanding position as a progovernment “ insider.” Although various roundtable discussions would continue to be published for another year, this represented the last time critics would be given space to discuss the general meaning o f their craft and its future under the tightening wartime conditions. In his introduction to the special issue, Kikuchi Kan, once the magazine’s editor, broadsided the entire profession for its snobbism to­ ward the public and fearful subservience to the authorities: “ No wonder film critics are stigmatized as irresolute opportunists. Instead of provid­ ing fresh ideas, they simply cheer the occasional success and howl down the rest. And with what hauteur they dole out their abuse! These fools seem to think that by sticking their noses into the air they add to their own stature.” 26 The tone of the articles by the critics themselves ranged from per­ sonal vendettas to high theorizing. Some, like Kitagawa Shoichi, took the opportunity to proclaim their unstinting support for the war effort and their utter fealty the national leadership: “ Critics must no longer allow themselves to be motivated by private opinions or taste. They must see themselves as loyal functionaries of the state.” 27 Sawamura

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Tsutomu, as he had already been doing for several years, wrote selfpityingly about how his fellow critics had savaged the films he had scripted. Several critics followed Kikuchi’s lead by expressing profound contempt for the majority of their colleagues. Nanbu Keinosuke, for in­ stance, called them “ bohemian failures,” while characterizing wartime films as “ ersatz cinema.” Ueno Kozo also tended to see his fellow critics as little more than failed artists, but he ended his article constructively, with a call for a major effort to turn out an authoritative Theoretical Histoiy ofJapanese Film. Tsumura Hideo echoed an old theme of Sawamura Tsutomu’s, warning that “when critics ignore the needs of the state and invoke the tired old notion of cinema as an independent art form, they are acting like shiftless dilettantes.” 28 The influence wielded within the power establishment by the still relatively young Tsumura (age thirty-six in 1943) was now far greater than that of any other film critic and was even overshadowing that of Kikuchi Kan. In addition to his constant stream of articles on film where he openly sounded like a spokesman explaining the logic of gov­ ernment policies the very titles of his books during this period boasted of his close proximity to the center of authority. His Film Policy (1943) ex­ plicated the propaganda goals of domestic cinema and his Film War (1944) was a detailed explanation of official film policy for each of the Occupied Regions. Although he regularly skewered films for their low production quality, “ artistic value” had become little more than a minor concern to him. Not only did he tirelessly promote the idea of bringing Japanese film into direct service to the war effort (he was an important force behind the emergence of increase production films, for instance), he constandy invoked the need for films with a strong hate-the-enemy message. A number of critics made Tsumura himself a target of their abuse, an indication of the wide-spread jealousy inspired by his surging power and authority. No one mentioned him by his real name, preferring in­ stead to use his newspaper pseudonym, “ Q.” Claiming that “ Q ” had not changed his critical methods in ten years, Oki NaotarO used the spe­ cial issue to state: “ Q seems to think being a criuc means you no longer have to grow as a human being. After ten years, his mind seems to have bogged down in mud.” 29 To Ishikawa Jun: “ Q,’s fundamental contempt for his readers’ perceptive abilities makes him repetitiously pound home the same points over and over.” 10 Even Imamura Taihei had unkind words for Tsumura’s overbearing personality: “ Until recently at least, Q would take an arrogant attitude toward filmmakers, treating them as an

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Film critic Tsum ura H ideo (1907 85), known to hundreds o f thou­ sands o f Asahi readers as “ Q ” (\1h011 Ajgfl,July 1941).

inferior race. . . . Such snootiness makes for poor film criticism, serving only to intimidate both the makers and viewers of films.” 51 The spec ial edition of Nihon Eiga represented the valedictory of ac­ tual criticism for the remainder of the war, the Information Bureau hav­ ing already decided on a large-scale reduction in the number of film magazines. In November, Eigajunpo issued a larger-than-usual edition bannered as the "I^ast Issue.” Soon afterwards, Eiga no Tomo and several others followed it into oblivion. Whereas there had been thirty-three Him magazines in 1940, now there were only three: Eiga Hydron, Shin

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Ml

Eiga, and Nihon Eiga. Two of these would cease publication in late 1944. Only Nihon Eiga continued regular publication into the early months of 1945,32 but it was no longer a magazine for the general public, nor was it sold on the newsstands. In December 1944, it abandoned its familiar cover o f hand-painted designs and became an in-house journal, serving the practical needs of the film industry. By mid-1944, film criticism had in any case declined to little more than extended plot summaries with the addition o f an even briefer ex­ planation of the film’s “ national policy” purpose. After the spring of 1944, film magazines also had to carry articles completely unrelated to cinema—about civil defense procedures or exhortations for redoubled efforts in war production. Thus it had come to pass that, starting two full years before the end of the actual war, the once-flourishing wartime Japanese film culture began to wither away. Even before the film magazines disappeared from the stands, film criticism had become a servile profession, a situation for which the critics themselves expressed shame. Filmmaking too was be­ coming a servile act, with filmmakers required to harness their creativ­ ity to increasingly hysterical government policies. Documentary film be­ came, for all intents and purposes, propaganda film, pure and simple. The old organs of film policy, too, were breaking down as the military shouldered its way toward direct control of the home front. By late 1944, virtually all o f the nation’s energies were being channeled toward one mad, apocalyptic vision —a grand, decisive batde with the enemy in which the waning fortunes of war would be reversed and ultimate vic­ tory seized from the jaws of impossibility. In the final six months of the war, the nation’s hopes for such a victory were pinned on a last “ secret weapon,” the kamikaze pilot—“ the very epitome of yamato dam ash iiA number of kamikaze recruitment films began to be produced in late fall 1944. At least one of them, The Last Visit Home, contained scenes of emotional intensity rivaling anything pro­ duced in the entire wartime era. By then, however, the nation’s cities were being reduced to rubble, along with the major film studios, and production plummeted. The next chapter will look at the final days through the eyes of the filmmakers who experienced it. In the immedi­ ate aftermath of the Surrender, the issue of war responsibility of film­ makers was raised only to be returned to obscurity. The key element in silencing the debate was the conundrum, “who among us has the right to point the finger of accusation.”

14 In the Shadow of Defeat

Raising the Divine Wind The fall of Saipan was announced to the public on 19 July 1944. That evening, Prime Minister Tojo addressed the nation, making a claim that would be invoked repeatedly over the next year: the enemy’s bold ad­ vance toward the homeland presented Japan with “ a golden opportu­ nity” to destroy them and win the war. On 23 July, a new cabinet was formed with general of the army Koiso Kuniaki as its head. Tojo’s face was conspicuously absent from the published photograph of the tiredlooking and mosdy elderly men constituting the new government. Defeats and mass suicides continued to mount through the follow­ ing weeks, Guam and Tinian having gone the way o f Saipan. The cen­ ter o f Japan’s “ ultimate defense perimeter” had been breached, putting Tokyo within enemy bomber range. Scarcely a day passed without re­ ports of enemy assaults by sea or air or land. In mid-September, key is­ lands in the Palau chain fell, opening the way to immanent invasion of the Philippines. Still, of all these disasters, it was the image of the dead on Saipan that continued to burn most painfully in the minds of most Japanese. “We weep; we grieve,” Kitamura Taro intoned in a N H K poetry read­ ing broadcast, “All the people of the land close their eyes in mourning / Not for the mere fact of their death only do we lament / We mourn the brave hearts o f our gallant dead / Such purity. Such nobility. Our breasts burst with gratitude.” 1 In the September 1944 issue of Shin Eiga, staff writer Oguro Toyoshi wrote: “ On that far, lonely island of Saipan, all our soldiers and civilians have gone down in death. Holy soil has been defiled, and the enemy hordes come at us like billowing mist.” 2 With this dirgelike, almost de­ spairing tone, Oguro began his article introducing a new film, Torpedo Squadron Moves Out (Raigekitai Shutsudo, Toho, 1944). The film was sched­ uled for release on the third anniversary o f the attack on Pearl Harbor.

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Oguro warned, “ 8 December 1944 -the situation by that time may be far, far worse.” Yamamoto KajirO, whose Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya had been released on the first anniversary of the war, was to direct this one as well. Yamamoto’s comments in the same issue of Shin Eiga made it clear that Torpedo Squadron Moves Out would reflect the semihysterical “ determination” that had seized the government and military in the aftermath o f Saipan: “ What will be the counterpunch to finish off the Pacific War? Surely it will come from our torpedo squadrons. And what is the spirit of the squadron pilot? Absolute determination to hit the target on the first try. Valor such as this will surely bring the mon­ ster to bay.” 3 The navy, which had refused Yamamoto even a glimpse of an ac­ tual carrier when he was making Sea War, threw its full support behind the project this time and even attached a specialist in torpedo plane tactics, Naval Commander Aiko Fumio, to Yamamoto’s staff. Aiko’s close collaboration on the script was especially significant since Torpedo Squadron would feature kamikaze-like tactics, this despite the fact offi­ cial policy on such activities had not yet been finalized. The painful deliberations, which would result in the dispatch o f the first Special Attack (kamikaze) Corps against U.S. naval forces at Leyte in late Octo­ ber, were still under way. The comments of Aiko and his colleague Colonel Nagai Tsuyoshi in a zadankai for Shin Eiga were an early indication of the new spirit sweep­ ing through the navy. Asked to define “ torpedo squadron spirit,” they responded with grisly frankness: How should we put it? We let them cut our flesh while we b r e a k their bones. n a g a i : M ore to the point, we let them break our bones and we rip their heart out, I guess.4

a iko

:

When the military first announced its new policy in late October, the formula repeated in newspaper headlines was “ to go into action means to die.” Thereafter, tai-atari (body smashing) became a favored means of assault, not only against ships, but against B-29S as well. The first recorded ramming attack against a bomber had taken place in May 1943 when, as tradition had it, a Sergeant Oda saved an entire convoy by crashing his K i -43 fighter into a B-17. Suicide crash-attacks against enemy ships had occurred occasionally since the early days of

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the Pacific War the most notable success being the sinking of the air­ craft carrier Hornet in the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands in September 1942. Although the press hailed the feat as “ a bidan in the great tradition o f the Three Human Bomb Patriots,” they represented only the spo­ radic, spur-of-the-moment decisions of individual pilots. The new, systematic use of aerial suicide tactics was the brainchild of Vice Admi­ ral Onishi TakijirO, who went to the Philippines in mid-October 1944 to take over the First Naval Air Fleet. Within days o f his arrival, he had re­ cruited the first kamikaze (literally, “ divine wind” ) units from members of the 201 st Air Group at the Mabalacat airbase fifty miles north of Manila. A few days later, they went into action. The papers immediately picked up the exploits o f the kamikaze pi­ lots and, on g November, they made their first onscreen appearance in a long segment of Nihon News #232. There, for the first time, audiences watched the pathos-filled ccremony in which a line of young men, some barely out o f their teens, drink a last ceremonial cup of sake. The pilots then run to their planes, start up the engines and take ofT. Shots show their comrades on the ground, waving their caps in a final salute. The sequence ends with the planes growing smaller and smaller in the sky until they completely disappear amid the clouds. Throughout the remainder of the war, official propaganda empha­ sized the voluntary nature of kamikaze service, and, in fact, there was never a lack of young volunteers for such duty. Still, this is not to say that the organized special attack units operating in the last phase of the war were a genuinely spontaneous phenomenon. Rather, the psychological environment encouraging such actions was, at least in part, another of those psychic holograms generated by the media. Coverage in the press and news films compounded with radio plays, radio poetry readings, and several drama films created the impression that it was a popular ground-swell, arising naturally from the deepest recesses of the Ja p a ­ nese soul. This was undoubtedly a development in direct response to the Wartime Emergency Regulations Concerning Leadership of Public Opinion (issued by the cabinet in 19 October 1944), which stated that “ the government welcomes acts of noble and extreme self-sacrifice in­ spired by love of country, and will institute measures so that they may have the greatest effect.” 5 Torpedo Squadron Moves Out was clearly part o f the new public educa­ tion campaign. It opens with an attack on a U.S. armada, recreated by intercutting documentary footage with Tsuburaya Eiji’s special effects (this time, far inferior to his work for earlier war films). Bombs blow up

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Scenes like this becam e a standard feature o f 1945 news films (Nihon News, no. 248).

one ship after another. In voice-over, wc hear the Imperial Headquarters announce an impressive Japanese victory: four enemy carriers, three bat­ tleships, and over one hundred fifty planes. Amazingly, the announce­ ment goes on to admit very heavy Japanese losses as well: one battleship, two carriers, one cruiser, and over sixty planes. Although Japanese air­ craft losses in such an encounter at this stage would have been even greater, mention of losses like these clearly represented the new official policy (established by the same 19 October cabinet decree) to inform the public of the true gravity of the war situation. The announcement ends with the statement that “ the battle has ended without the decisive defeat of the enemy.” Cut to the faces of a group of pilots on a carrier, as they listen to the announcement. When it concludes, they stand up, sighing in disappointment. The mood o f de­ pression is deepened in a subsequent scene. A group of pilots are resting at a tropical island air base. Although the others are drinking beer and laughing merrily, one remains sunk in gloomy silence. “ We’ve lost so many excellent young men,” he mutters, “ liquor just doesn’t taste good anymore.” 6 The island base is pounded repeatedly by enemy air attacks. During the first two attacks, pilots scramble to their fighters and take off. But, later in the film, there arc no more planes to throw against the enemy. They have all either been transferred to other bases or lost in combat.

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The pilots and ground crew must sit stoically in their underground shel­ ter while the enemy blasts their base above. The most important scenes in which the “ torpedo squadron spirit” is openly discussed take place inside the bomb shelter. Significantly, it is a noncombatant, a quartermaster in the base’s clerical offices, who is the most articulate spiritist. When someone asks one o f the older pilots to expound on the torpedo squadron philosophy, the latter simply answers, “ Oh, I just get tongue-tied. Ask somebody else.” It is therefore left to the quartermaster, a comparative outsider, to explain its meaning to us, the outsiders in the audience. To him it represents the modern flowering of Japan ’s ancient spiritual heritage. The classical strains of gagaku music well up in the background as he speaks: “ Nowadays, I think a lot about the superiority of the Japanese race. We find it in the Kojiki and the song o f the defenders in the Manyoshu. Then there are the noble-minded pa­ triots o f the Meiji Restoration. All of them had to face hard times like these. Perhaps we can see it in them too . . . w'hat I was talking about. You know, the torpedo pilot spirit.” In the next section o f his little speech, he openly addresses the film audience, inviting us to commune with this spirit. The gagaku music turns into an orchestral version o f Umi Tukaba as he speaks: “ Yes, the Japanese are truly a superb race. If every one of us only realized it and imbibed the spirit of the torpedo squad, how strong we’d become! That’s the essence o f our divine land.” At this point, the aerial bom­ bardment above grows fiercer. The light flickers, and clumps of dirt fall from the ceiling. But, the earnestly conversing men seem oblivious. Yoshimura, the pilot who had called himself “ tongue-tied,” sits with his eyes closed, as if in deep meditation. Then, in an interval between the explosions, he says with quiet reverence, “ In a word, we take down the enemy with our very bodies. That’s the torpedo squadron spirit. It means. . . to die.” There are more bombing raids, and then, after the arrival of a large new squadron of fighter planes, a huge melee air battle takes place in the sky above the base. On a blackboard someone totes up the number of enemy planes downed—eighty-one. The chief of the native village on the island comes marching ceremoniously into the base. Behind him, other natives carry a load o f food, a gift of gratitude for the Japanese victory over the Americans. Suddenly, the chief turns to the pilots who are watching him, and, with an idiotic, bucktoothed grin, he holds up his forefinger and shouts out, “Japan number one!”

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Throughout the film, the pilots make little comments to indicate that they are slowly making up their own minds to follow in the way of the kamikaze. There are no speeches by superior officers demanding such sacrifices. Rather, just as the quartermaster had preached, it seems to well up from within them as a natural response to the need of the hour. The climax o f the film is another attack on a huge U.S. naval task force off the Philippines. After all the spiritual preparation of the early part of the film, we know that this will be a suicide mission for the entire air unit. One after another, they fly their planes into the ships with stoic, expressionless faces. The action of the scene, much of which takes place in nighttime silhouette, is slow and elegiac. Unlike the withering bar­ rages shown in actual news films, the antiaircraft fire seems almost des­ ultory. Fujita Susumu, who plays the assault force commander, has time to exchange leisurely spiritist smiles with his crew before they hurtle to their deaths against an aircraft carrier. In addition to fostering “ the spirit of the torpedo squadron” among Japanese audiences, the film had a secondary propaganda mission. The 19 October cabinet policy paper called for a concerted effort to incite much stronger feelings against the enemy. “ Hate-the-enemy” had al­ ready been a major motif—indeed the main m o tifs of numerous films before this time. But now, the government courted the most naked ex­ pressions o f race hatred possible. Writers of “ war poetry” had already been peppering their verses with such emotions since the early days of the war. Around this time, Hino Ashihei was turning out such poems as “ Laughable Enemies,” about a supposed Japanese naval victory in the South Pacific: “The swarms of hairy, twisted-nosed savages / Sank and rotted idiotically / in the equatorial waters. / Now the brutal, obdurate enemy / Panting heavily / Menacingly approaches the Land of the Gods.” 7 The few remaining film magazines responded enthusiastically to the new policy with their own enemy-baiting contributions. The November 1944 issue of Shin Eiga was completely given over to the twin themes of tai-atari (body-smashing) and Uki gaishin (hating the enemy). Articles on the latter theme included “The Bestiality of Our Enemy, America,” “ On the Bestiality of American Cinema,” and “ Their Forty Year Plan to Exterminate the Japan Nation.” The famed jidaigehi scriptwriter Yahiro Fuji produced an article tided “ This Is the Sort of Hate-theEnemy Film I Want to Write,” while Kurosawa Akira wrote a brief cri­ tique o f existing enemy-bashing films.

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When Yamamoto KajirO wrote the script for Torpedo Squadron Moves Out, he knew better than to have his military characters openly express the vulgar race-hate sentiments found in Hino Ashihei’s poem. In one scene, two officers have just finished questioning a downed U.S. pilot (apparendy played by an actual POW). When the pilot turns to go out with the guard, they call him back and demand that he show them proper military respect. He responds by flipping them a casually con­ temptuous salute, turns again, and walks away. The Japanese officers watch him leave with looks o f deep disgust. “What do you think of that? It just goes to show what they’re really like,” one o f them comments. “ Yes. I get the picture,” the other replies. This reserved attitude does not, however, extend to the civilians por­ trayed in the film. A steady stream of murderous race hatred flows from the mouth o f the elderly Japanese woman who runs a Japanese-style restaurant on the island (played by Higashiyama Chieko, who will play the mother in Ozu’s postwar Tokyo Story). “ These American bastards! I intend to kill two or three before I die,” she shrieks. Somewhat later, after an air raid in which the enemy planes have purposely machinegunned a group of native women and children, a U.S. pilot has been captured. When she hears that he is still alive, she flies into a rage of murderous passion: “ Why don’t you have the natives kill him? Doesn’t he have blue eyes? He has red hair, doesn’t he? Like corn floss? Just let me kill him. Let me kill him!” Venomous tirades of this kind were comparatively rare in Japanese wartime cinema. In fact, overt enemy-baiting rhetoric would all but dis­ appear in the films of the very last months of the war. With the empire crumbling and the enemy almost literally at the gates of the capital, one gets the impression of a general turning inward. The world of the Jap a­ nese becomes circumscribed by the beaches o f the home islands, and the enemy seems to become less real. The Last Visit Home, one o f the last kamikaze feature films to be completed and actually released, is purged of all hate-the-enemy sentiment. It ends with the young kamikaze pilots flying ofT into the sky from their Kyushu base. No effort is made to de­ pict the batde (probably Okinawa) toward which they are headed. By then, the world beyond the home islands would become the Land of Death from which no one returns. This is certainly the impression created by the repetitive structure of the documentary Army Special Attack Squad (.Rikugun Tokubetsu Kogekitai, Nichiei), a forty-minute documentary produced in February 1945. It opens with a series of shots of individual pilots, the camera holding on each

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face as the narrator identifies him by name, rank, and the time and place of his death. In one sequence, a group of pilots is merrily playing games. The narrator explains that they display no anxiety because “ their minds are made up” and that “ they are experiencing the joy of having found a place to die.” Several of the sequences show the young men “ purifying” their bodies in a stream. Next, they are lined up in their flying suits, being addressed by a high-ranking officer. The last cup of sake is drunk at a table set up next to the runway, and then the pilots hurry to their planes. The mechanics crank up the engines, and one after the other the planes take off. The same process is repeated with different squads, end­ ing each time with the planes fading to little dots in the sky. This too is the finale of Sasaki Yasushi’s Girls o f the Air Base (Otome no iru Kichi, Shochiku, April 1945), which, despite its documentary-like title, is actually a drama film. Most of the film is a variation on the spiritist “ increase production” dramas produced between 1943 and 1944. The girls treat and actually refer to the planes under their care as their “ ba­ bies.” When one of the planes develops serious engine trouble, the girls give up their own rest time to “ nurse” it back to health. When they hear that the same problem has caused it to crash, they break down in tears and carry out a symbolic funeral. Part of the drama of the film revolves around the paternal concern of the older man in charge, who feels that his girl mechanics are losing their femininity due to the constant strain of work, a motif one would expect from Shochiku film. Only gradually are we made aware that the base is for a Special Attack Corps unit - the planes the girls are lavishing their love on are to be kamikaze planes. With this realization comes the sense that the girls’ relendess cheerfulness, also a remnant of the old Shochiku formula, is jarringly out of place. In the scene where the pilots fly off on their final mission, their breezy nonchalance becomes an ill-fitting mask; one that hides, not their true feelings, but their inability to feel anything at all. The entire sequence betrays the failure of the filmmakers to find an ap­ propriate response to the new, nightmarish reality. The boys smartly sa­ lute the girls, thanking them for all their efforts, and bound onto the wings of their planes. The music, as they take off, is almost jaunty, and the crowd cheers as if for a favorite soccer team. In one brief shot, just before the planes disappear into the clouds, a single girl bows her head, her hands prayerfully pressed to her lips. The Last Visit Home, made a few months later, would pioneer an entirely different response, one which despite its ideological baggage probes deep into the mindset of the kam­ ikaze pilot as well as those who wave them off.

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By the beginning of 1945, the consciousness of ordinary Japanese was being saturated with the slogans of mass death: “ one hundred mil­ lion kamikaze” (ichi okunin no kamikaze), “ the loyalty death of the one hundred million” (ichi okunin no gyokusai). It penetrated too the pages o f Nihon Eiga. The 1 January edition —now shrunk to a mere twenty-five pages and distributed only to members of the film industry—featured a brief article by the secretary of the newly established Cinema National Service Organization: “ Those members not otherwise employed had best devote themselves to strategic war production work. Equally laud­ able would be to volunteer for service in a suicide battalion and to die an exemplary death at the front.” 8 Another slogan was “ child, parents, and grandparents united in sac­ rificial death for the nation,” suggesting a particularly grim image o f what seemed to be in store a grinding, endless conflict in which the entire populacc suicidally threw itself on the overwhelmingly powerful enemy in suicide charges until the very last generation joins the carn­ age. In the immediate postwar years, former benshi Tokugawa Musei would recall a grisly, yet humorous fantasy that came recurrently to mind: It seemed likely we were all doomed to a glorious warrior's death. Although just when could not be known, it seemed likely w'e would all, myself included, be skeletons within a few months, or at best a year. One’s wife would be a skeleton and one’s children too. How ridiculous for a skeleton wife to upbraid her skeleton husband. What meaning would there be for skeleton parents to worry about the wedding of their skeleton daughter or bemoan the bad marks in math brought home by their skeleton son? So what is there to worry about? Just live as merrily as you can until the flesh is ripped from your bones. Encourage one another and try your best until the day of the skeletons arrives.9 In an article on the war situation in the Philippines, poet Sat5 Haruo reacted with disgust at the rampant use of the term “ one hundred mil­ lion kamikaze” : “ It sickens me to see the true kamikaze spirit equated with such hysterical bombast. I read a report from someone at the front who put it better than I could. He writes that if only ten thousand or even only a thousand had the true kamikaze spirit, there would be no way/ we could lose. Now that makes sense!” 10 The Last Visit Home (Saigo no h'ikyd, Daiei, July 1945, dir. Yoshimura Misao and Tanaka Shigeo) seems to be in accord with the above think­ ing. It does not beat the drum for “ the death of the hundred million” ;

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rather it is a film of genuine pathos and deep feeling. While it makes no attempt to penetrate to the individual motivadons of the boy pilots assuming there was such in this crescendo period of mass hysteria—it far surpasses the standard depictions of the “ militarist mother” and convincingly portrays the grief of those who must stand by and smil­ ingly wave them off. What makes the film truly extraordinary is that the events depicted on the screen were taking place in the real world at the same time. The plot is clearly structured after Karl Ritter’s Leave on Word of Honor (Urlaub auf Ehrenwort). Word comes to a squadron of future kami­ kaze pilots that there will be home leave for the whole group. This, of course, can only have one meaning - the day of their final departure is at hand. Most eagerly hurry off to their homes, but two have elected to stay behind on base. One is the only son of a widow and he just does not have the courage to say goodbye to his mother for the last time. The other is the squadron leader who is too busy to go home. In his place he sends another young pilot whose home is too far away to reach within the allotted time. The squadron leader’s parents treat him as if he were their own son. In gratitude for their kindness he promises to slip them onto the base when the time comes. We watch the visits home of several other men, as well. One plays the flute at a festival in his hometown, deeply impressing all those who hear him. “ Only a man whose mind is made up could play with such grace,” a neighbor comments. Another is the father of a young child. With the sleeping child beside them, he and his wife have a final quiet meal together: “ Setsuko, you’re a lot stronger than I imagined. I thought you’d cry,” he comments. “As long as you’re here, I won’t cry . . . later I’ll cry my heart out,” she replies.11 The boy who had elected not to go home has a visitor, his elderly mother. “ KyOichi, you’re to become a kamikaze. That’s so, isn’t it?” “ Yes, that’s so.” The mother bends in sorrow, barely suppressing her tears. Then she looks up, smiles bravely and says, “ Well, congratula­ tions. I’m really proud of you. . . . Now, you mustn’t fall behind your comrades. Don’t be late like you usually are.” The scene is heart­ rending. Although her words accord with the official prescription, they express a pathos-filled acceptance of fate transcending mere propa­ ganda. One suspects real scenes, much like this one, were being enacted in real life throughout the nation. Indeed, some mothers may have actu­ ally modeled their own farewells on the scene. Throughout the closing months of the war, the media remained ob­ sessed with the Special Attack Corps. Lines of small photographs of the

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latest glorious dead dominated the front pages o f the newspapers. More than half the pages in the February issue of Bungei Shunju were given over to Nakano Minoru’s emotional account o f a weeklong stay with a kamikaze squadron.12 Although interest in the subject was wide, the film industry managed to turn out comparatively few kamikaze pictures. Love and Vows (Ai to Chikai, Toho, 1945, destroyed?) appears to have been a particularly disreputable example of the subgenre. Directed by Imai Tadashi (along with his Korean collaborator, Sai To), it was a propaganda piece with the unforgivable intention o f recruiting Ko­ rean youths for the kamikaze corps service.13 Newspaper ads read: “ Opening tomorrow—a spectacular Korean-Toho cooperative pro­ duction! A waif clutches to her little breast the torn photograph of a pilot!” Since it premiered on 26 July, barely three weeks before the end of the war, and was apparently subsequendy burned, Imai was able to keep his postwar reputation intact by pretending it never existed. The innocent, indeed romantic-sounding title may have helped him in this deception. On the day the war ended, Yamamoto KajirO was making yet an­ other kamikaze film, Come and Get Us, America (Amerika Yosoro, Toho). Needless to say, its production was suspended and the rushes hurriedly torched. Haruhara Masahisa’s Tigers of the Sea (Umi no Tora, Daiei, Feb­ ruary 1945) was a kamikaze film of a different sort, dealing with young men trained to sail explosives-laden, plywood boats into the sides of enemy capital ships. This too was apparently destroyed. Yet another film, Watanabc Kunio’s Believe That Others Will Follow (.Ato ni Tsuzuku wo Shinzu, Toho, March 1945, destroyed?), might possibly be added to the list because it also dealt with suicide tactics. A ground war film, rather than one about aerial combat, it was a biographical film about an actual person, Company Commander Wakabayashi (played by Hasegawa Kazuo) who served bravely, first in China, then in Singa­ pore, and finally on Guadalcanal. It depicts the privations endured by the soldiers there and ends with their self-destruction in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful enemy offensive. Ucno Ichiro reviewed the film, commenting that, “ since constant enemy air raids have turned the homeland itself into a battlefield, I wouldn’t be surprised if audiences gave it the cold shoulder.” 14 Circumstances made the critic’s pessimistic forecast unnecessary. The film premiered on 8 March, the day before the Great Tokyo Bombing, and so never received very wide play. As with so many other films, all existing copies were apparently incinerated along with the commercial heart of the city on that day.

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The Firestorm Descends Thirteen B-25 bombers led by James Doolitde had carried out the very first aerial attack on Tokyo on 18 April 1942. The planes mosdy dropped small firebombs of poor quality causing moderate-to-slight damage in several areas, including Shinagawa and Ginza. Among the several peo­ ple killed were school children who ran toward the bombs as they came down, apparendy thinking them leaflets. Several planes were shot down, the pilots captured and executed. Official fire-fighting units, aided by ci­ vilian organizations, quickly put out the fires. The incident roused the nation to wrath against the United States, but it was not long before the “violation” was forgotten, leaving the Japanese people more confident than ever that the skies over Japan were all but inviolable. The government, of course, knew better. With the fortunes of war turning against them in 1943, it instituted large-scale air-raid drills and also sponsored a number of culture films attempdng to instruct the pub­ lic on basic air-raid procedures. Still, despite the growing number of military defeats in the South Pacific, the idea of a major attack on the capital seemed fantastic. The first Pacific War drama film preaching air raid preparedness was Enemy Bombing Raid (Tekiki Kushu, Shochiku, April 1943), a box office disaster jointly directed by Nomura Kosho, Yoshimura Misao, and Shibuya Minoru. It belongs to the subgenre of tonarigumi (neighborhood association) films, all of which feature a character who lacks the appropriate “ emergency cooperative spirit,” causing problems for the rest of the neighborhood association. This time it is a woman who refuses to participate in the air-raid drills. She learns her lesson by being terrified when a real enemy plane penetrates the air space over the city. Eiga no Tomo panned the film, complaining that “ it merely rehashes things all of us already know.” 15 In late 1943, rather than dwelling on the unhappy thought of enemy attacks on the home­ land, more optimistic minds preferred to fantasize about Japanese air armadas smashing the cities of the United States. Among these was Akinaga YoshirO, a minor novelist, who proposed such an idea for a film in Shin Eiga: “ One of the big film companies should turn out a blockbuster that would wipe all those American Air Force films right off the screen. Seatde, Oakland, San Francisco —it should show all of their militarized cities on the West Coast being bombed to rubble and dust.” 16 All such fantasies ended emphatically a little over a year later when, around midday on 24 November 19 4 4 , air-raid sirens in Tokyo began wailing. Soon, the first B-29S appeared over the city—a group of glinting

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silver dots, etching long white vapor trails against the blue sky. The eerie beauty of the scene attracted many citizens who chose to watch rather than huddle in one of the many air-raid trenches dug along the streets. Ishikawa KOyO, a member of the Tokyo Police Department and the only person officially authorized to photograph the gradual destruction o f the city over the next half year, was out in the streets with his camera before the first bombs struck. About the November raid, he wrote in his diary: “ The people of the metropolis still have no notion o f the horrors o f aerial warfare. Crowds gather in the streets and point at the forma­ tions of bombers as if they were watching an air show. Today, police and firemen shouted themselves hoarse trying to get them back into shelter.” 17 The first attack, carried out by a force o f eighty bombers operating out o f the new bases in the Marianas, blasted the Nakajima airplane factory situated in the Musashino area. The factory and the surround­ ing residential area were almost flattened, and there was heavy loss of life. A few days later, a large section o f the Daiei’s Tokyo Studio was req­ uisitioned and aircraft-manufacturing equipment moved into Stage no. 3 on the lot. On 29 November, twenty bombers carried out the first night-time raid on Tokyo, dropping heavy explosives and firebombs on Kanda and the Nihonbashi region. Another raid hit Tokyo on 3 December. Furukawa Roppa, who was performing in the rural town of Sugakawa, heard the news blaring from the radio in the drawing room of the inn where he was staying: “ The report said it was seventy planes hitting Tokyo this time. Appalling! I shuddered as I listened to the radio. From two to three p . m . , they dropped incendiaries and regular explosives. Our boys intercepted them and shot down fifteen. The radio claims our own damage was only slight. That’s what they always say. Afterwards, I went over to the theater next door to my lodgings. The audience was in an uproar. Nihon News was on the screen. Scenes of kamikaze pilots. Maybe it’s just that my nerves arc shot, but I couldn’t help shedding tears. It was embarrassing.” 18 More raids hit the city minutes after the dawning of the New Year, 1945. “The radio was talking about various New Years celebrations when the sirens went off,” Roppa wrote in his diary. “You could actually hear the drone of the bombers in the background as the announcer spoke. What a New Years Eve it’s been. And now what a New Years day!” 19 When the New Year dawned, smoke was still rising from charred ruins in Kojima-machi, Kanda, and other neighborhoods in

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the city. Here and there massive craters and wreckage blocked major thoroughfares. More attacks came on the 6th, 8th, gth, and 13th. At two thirty in the afternoon, 27 January, seventy B-29S swarmed over the city’s center, targeting the very heart of the metropolis. In his diary for the day, police photographer Ishikawa Koyo recorded seeing “ columns of black smoke rising from the Asakusa and Hongo regions—just like in the movies, only for real. That’s the horrifying part.” 20 In the Yurakucho entertainment district, bombs had fallen in the immediate vicinity of the AsahiNewspaper Building and the Nichigeki, the most famous the­ ater in all Japan. The Yurakucho Station, meanwhile was a scene of carnage: “At first I couldn’t take it all in. Under the girder bridge, right near the main entrance, fifty, sixty corpses were heaped in a ghastly pile. They seemed to be torn apart—hands and legs severed, intestines drool­ ing, eyes blown out of their sockets. The Torii-do, Hattori Watch Shop, and the Okamoto Pearl Building were raging infernos. The roar of the flames mingled with the shrieks of those still trapped inside. The street was dusky with thick smoke.” 21 Two theaters, one o f them the large Tokyo Nanmyoza, were destroyed in the raid. One o f the most disas­ trous blows came from a single bomb slamming into a corner of the Shochiku’s headquarters building, killing six people instantly and maiming thirty more.

Spiritual Countermeasures Morale sagged noticeably after the first two months o f heavy bombing; here and there people began to speak of the possibility of defeat. In the January issue of Bungei Shunju, doctor-novelist Hayashi Ko published an article tided “ The War of Nerves,” holding that it was the intention of the United States to wear down the population through tension and lack of sleep. After a medical discussion of the physical effects of stress on the body, he recommended such countermeasures as keeping the body warm at all times and imbibing small amounts of acidic foods—“ salted plum or a bit of vinegar.” His final recommendations, however, were spiritual: “ There is nothing to fear if you just realize that Being itself is eternal. You yourself, in this life, are but a tiny part of that eternal being.” 22 In the February issue of the same magazine, Kikuchi Kan adopted an entirely different strategy to soothe public anxiety; he discounted the amount of damage caused by the bombings —“ There are all kinds of false rumors flying about these days. Don’t believe everything you hear.

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In fact, the loss o f life has been almost negligible. At the present rate o f destruction, it would take many decades before they wipe out Tokyo.” 23 The government had its own countermeasures. In addition to issu­ ing a steady stream of exhortations to “ righteous indignation,” “ deter­ mination,” and “ endurance,” it set to work relaxing some of the auster­ ity restrictions o f the previous several years. The film industry was one o f the prime beneficiaries o f the new policy. On 23 January, a question about the government’s willingness to allow continued production of drama films was raised in a general budget debate in the Diet. State Minister Ogata responded with an astonishingly fervent affirmation of the importance of film to the war effort: “A brightening o f the public mood is o f paramount importance under the present circumstances. Al­ though the supply situation has become grave, it is in the national inter­ est to procure and distribute sufficient stocks of raw film to serve this purpose.” 24 Ogata’s statement represented a dramatic cancellation o f the huge cuts in film stock allotments, decreed only four months before. Later in the same debate, Minister o f Armaments Yoshida Shigeru rose to re­ confirm the decision by saying, “ I agree this is something we need to do.” 25 Although they were not fully confident of the government’s ability to deliver on its promise, filmmakers were jubilant about the outcome of the debate. First, they were assured of a continuing supply of film stock. Second, they were given the go-ahead to turn out more pure entertain­ ment pictures. This had been made clear by the repeated invocation o f the formula calling for “ films that not only carry out the tasks of enlightenment-propaganda, but are cheerful and uplifting.” Actually, the government had been softening its attitude toward entertainment films since the fall of Saipan. The result, starting in the autumn o f 1944 and continuing up to war’s end, was a surge of jidaigeki films remarkably free of wartime propaganda. Still, when it came to “ cheerful entertainment features,” nothing could rival a good comedy. Madcap, slapstick features had been a main­ stay o f Japanese cinema since Kurihara Thomas made his Amateur Club in 1920. Soon afterward, Saito Torajiro emerged at Shochiku, cranking out a host of merry nonsense silents at the rate of one or two a month. With the arrival of the talkies, quick-tongued comics-Entatsu, Achako and most especially Furukawa Roppa and “ Enoken” - moved from the Asakusa variety stage to the screen with great success. Enomoto Ken’ichi, the little, nimble-bodied “ Enoken,” was the reigning king of

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slapstick. In the thirties, Yamamoto KajirO had put out a stream of Enoken pictures, including the classic Kinta the Pickpocket (Chakkiri Kinta, Toho, 1936). But in the aftermath of the 1939 Film Law, humorless bu­ reaucrats had put the brakes on such screen antics, calling them “ empty-headed” and “ degenerate.” Films of the Pacific War period were, of course, not all spiritism and militarism. In the early part of the war, especially, laughter would occa­ sionally rock the movie theatres. Even such relatively late films as Inagaki’s Matsu the Untamed (1943) had moments of delightful humor. But the fact remained that there were very few pictures advertised as straightforward comedies. In January 1942, there had been the mildly funny Land of Laughter (Warai no Kuni, Nikkatsu, dir. K 5 ga Seijin). Makino Masahiro, who consistently championed the idea of pure enter­ tainment features and could rarely suppress his own sense of humor on screen, made Hanakosan (Toho) in 1943. In mid-1944, Kawashima Yuzo made The Man Who Came Back (Kaettekita Otoko, Shochiku), a comedy about a returned veteran, and Enoken starred in Ishida TamizO’sjidaigeki, Three-Foot Tall Sagohei (Sanjaku Sagohei, Toho, 1944). A heavy-heartedness, however, tends to infect almost all the wartime comic features. Although Enoken’s diminutive samurai Sagohei cuts a hilarious figure strutting around with a gigantic sword strapped to his waist and a wheel attached at the tip so he can pull it, he spends much of his time looking for an appropriate place to die. A stark pathos tends to subvert the humorous intentions of Hanakosan as well. Worse, the cen­ sors came down hard on one of the latter’s bittersweet comic sequences. Near the end of the film, Hanako (Takamine Hideko) and her husband are romping in a field of tall pampas grass. She has just learned of his call-up orders and, because she is required to be “ happy” for him, she has to hide her tearful face behind one of the masks they have been playing with. The censors ordered the shot of her tear-glistening face to be cut from the film. There were no less than three new comedies in the spring of 1945. Although all of them had gone into production before the bombs began to fall on Tokyo, their release within a short span of time (two of them released within days of each other) suggests that they were part of the “ spiritual countermeasures” the authorities had been calling for. Tasuke-of-the-Cbudless-Heart (Tenbare Ishin Tasuke, Toho, January 1945), scripted by Kurosawa Akira and directed by Saeki Kiyoshi, marked the return of Enoken to the screen in his old persona as the braggartcoward hero who manages to outwit and defeat a band of evil samurai.

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Rather than the wartime motifs of loyalty-unto-death and cooperation with the authorities, it seems to pit the ordinary “ little guy” against the social power structure. The film was a comic brew, spiked with protodemocratic spirits and a strong whiff of sedition. Tsumura Hideo, who by now could find merit only in films direcdy aiding the cause o f the war, despised it: “ O f course the workers in our war plants need comedy features. But these moronic Enoken pictures are an insult to everyone’s intelligence.” 26 Actually, the film is quite funny and can easily be en­ joyed by audiences today. Naruse Mikio’s Until Victory Day (Shori no H i Aiade, Toho, January 1945, lost?), starring Tokugawa Musei and Furukawa Roppa, was a far less successful effort. This is how Nihon Eiga describes the unhopefulsounding plot: “A scientist invents an ‘entertainment bomb.’ When it ex­ plodes, various kinds of acts and comedy routines come popping out. The ‘bomb’ is detonated in front o f soldiers and sailors on a lonely South Sea island, bringing unexpected joy to their hearts.” 27 Reflecting on the film after the war, Tokugawa Musei commented that “ you could actually feel the approach o f inevitable defeat in the utter imbecility of its storyline. The fact it had been directly commissioned by the navymade it all the more pathetic.” 28 Roppa, Enoken’s chief rival and sometimes friend, was very' much in the public eye during the last year of the war. Part of the reason was the continuing official dislike for Enoken’s brand of humor. Enoken, in any case, had been put out of commission for several months after riding his bicycle into an air raid trench in January. Roppa tirelessly shutded between the movie set and the N H K radio station, where he did a weekly show. During the last months of the war, he spent much of his time traveling to many of the nation’s smaller cities to do one- or twoday shows. Enoken’s humor was of the manic “ red nose” variety, animated by a lithe physical restlessness. Roppa, meanwhile, was the classic “ white face comedian,” 29 whose persona ranged from the sedate to the neuro­ tic and whose humor was the product of his intellect. As Sait5 Tsuruo described him, “ From the neck up, Roppa with his big moon face, was hilarious. From the neck down, it was another matter. He never fully mastered the art o f hand gestures or body language. His legs and feet were never brought into play; they seemed never really to belong to him.” 30 After starring in Until the Day of Victory, Roppa’s other major film appearance that spring was his title role in SaitO Torajiro’s The Brash

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From left to right: Enom oto K cn ’ ichi (“ Enokcn,” 1904 70), Y a­ mamoto KajirO (1902 91), Furukawa Roppa (1903 61).

Stationmaster (Tokkan Ekicho, Toho, March 1945). In this gag-filled com­ edy, he plays a “ cheerful,” warm-hearted superintendent of a small rural station. Among his other duties, he must train women to carry out the roles once assigned only to men. In the final portion of the film, a huge shipment of rice arrives and must be immediately loaded onto a train. The job is too much for him and his lady helpers to com­ plete on time, but he solves the problem by calling in a group of sumo wrestlers who are in town for a tournament. Movies, even the most cheerful of movies, could only provide a brief respite from the exhaustion o f frenetic days in the war plant and nights in air raid shelters. To keep the populace working and in a reasonably “ elevated” mood, the government resorted to one last set of “ counter­ measures.” While newspaper headlines proclaimed “ Final Conflict Looms for the Homeland!” and “ Nation’s One Hundred Million Pours Its Hatred of the Enemy Into War Work,” advertisements appeared in the lower half of the page announcing “ Victory in war begins with your body buy Club Hormone Foods!” “ Go all out for your country! l ake Berutsu Bullet Pills!” Drug manufacturers, many of them with such suspicious-sounding patriotic names as Hokoku (Selfless-Service-to-theNation), had begun pushing an assortment of medicaments on the pub­ lic. Among the ads was this one from the Greater Japan Pharmaceutical Co.: “ For those suffering from tired bodies and mental stress. For every

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manner o f depression. For night work and other times demanding men­ tal alertness. For overexertion. The most powerful new amphetamine on the market! —Hiropon Tablets.” 31 Since very few other advertise­ ments were appearing in the papers at the time, the marketing o f stim­ ulants and even hard drugs to the public was clearly carried out with the direct approval o f the government. In his diary, Roppa often mentions taking a dose of Hiropon, after which he felt a “ wonderful renewal.” 32 The epidemic of drug addiction that afflicted postwar Japan would often be blamed on the U.S. occupation forces. However, one need only examine the newspapers o f the last months o f the war to see its real source.

Scorched Earth During the first two months of 1945, the persistent bombings o f Tokyo and other large metropolises made only a moderate impact on the pro­ duction and exhibition of movies. In January, a single movie theater in Tokyo had been destroyed, while three more were lost in February. However, as Shimizu Akira was to recall, “ I just can’t grasp 1945 as the sequel to 1944. In January and February, things were still tolerable. But from March onward we plunged into the cauldron o f hell.” 33 March was the month in which U.S. bombers accomplished the task Kikuchi Kan had claimed would take “ several tens of years.” On 4 March, the city was hit with the biggest bombing raid to date. One hun­ dred fifty B-29S blasted the Hongo and Sugamo regions, causing great fires and leaving over a thousand dead. Still worse was on the way. Before dawn on 10 March, 130 bombers used the novel tactic of sweeping in over the city at extremely low altitude, scattering thousands of small incendiary bombs. They made no pretense of going for mili­ tary targets. Rather, their targets were the wood-and-paper dwellings in the densely packed residential neighborhoods. The raids lasted most of the day, with wave after wave of bombers surging to the attack. Police photographer Ishikawa was sent to cover the situation in Asakusa, the nation’s largest entertainment district: “At Asakusabashi intersection, I found my way blocked by a cyclone of flames. An endless stream of terror-stricken people flowed toward me across the Ryogoku Bridge. Automobiles, caught among the debris and the flood of humanity, stood abandoned every which way. I left my own car next to a police box and elbowed my way through the melee. It was like going upstream in a rag­ ing current. At the bridge, I was struck by a blast of ferocious heat from

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the approaching wall of flames. I could barely keep my eyes open. Squinting up at the sky, I glimpsed through rifts in the smoke, a gaggle of low-flying B-29S. A crimson light glinted off their bloated white bel­ lies as they spewed more bundles of fire bombs.” 34 Roppa recorded the catastrophe from the comparative safety of his home in Setagayaku: “ From the third floor balcony, one can see a boundless sea of flames. And a cruel north wind seems to be pushing the perimeter out further. Kanda and Ueno are burning. Marunouchi. Shinjuku, even. My own neighborhood here is illuminated with a ruddy light. . . . Is the Divine Wind blowing backward onto us? Surely this is the wrath of God.” 35 Estimates put the dead at 12 0 ,0 0 0 , with 2 3 3 ,0 0 0 buildings destroyed on that day alone. Ishikawa’s camera documented it all —the clumps and piles of charred bodies, the heat-twisted girders of gutted build­ ings, and the leveled vistas of cityscape dark under the smoky sky. On 14 March, a similar raid decimated downtown Osaka. Smaller raids con­ tinued to be directed at selected targets in Tokyo throughout March and then, on the night of 1 3 - 1 4 April, 170 B-29S rained firebombs all over the city again. Raids, big and small, became so frequent that civilians fit­ ted their waking and sleeping patterns to them. Through most of March, a typical entry in Roppa’s diary would read, “An hour or two before dawn, I heard the sirens go ‘boo! boo!’ again. I got up, put on my robe, and went down into the shelter.” 36 It was not long, however, before he had become inured to the siren’s sound: “About one a . m . ‘boo!’ I woke up, but since it didn’t sound like this neighborhood, I went back to sleep.” 37 Starting in March, the rising toll in destroyed movie theaters around the country reflected the gradual destruction of the cities. Forty-five the­ aters were lost in Tokyo in March. During the same month, Nagoya lost twenty-four and Osaka twenty-six. In April, Tokyo lost thirty more the­ aters, Yokohama five, and Kawasaki ten. On the night of 24 May, two flights of two hundred bombers apiece delivered the coup de grâce to Tokyo. Another twenty-eight movie houses went up in flames, along with most of the buildings still standing. It was at this time that Roppa lost his home (and almost his life). After the Great March Tenth Raid, the intellectual and cultural life of the city virtually collapsed. Although single-page newspapers contin­ ued to be put out almost daily, almost no magazines or books were pub­ lished. None of the great theaters were still in operation (or even stand­ ing, for that matter). After the huge raid in May, the city itself was all but

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dead. Its factories, office buildings, and government buildings were gut­ ted. Those who chose to stay on had to face disease and possible starva­ tion. Water was only occasionally available from government ration trucks or from dribbling faucets sticking up amid the ruins. Astonish­ ingly, however, U.S. bombers continued to strike at the urban corpse well intoJune. For the citizens o f Tokyo and all the other major urban centers of Japan there were still two places where they could gather. The first were the “ people’s bars” the government had opened around the city, often situated in ruined air raid shelters. Although they did not open until five-thirty p . m ., eager patrons would begin lining up from about four. The second sort of gathering place was the few remaining movie thea­ ters, some already in partial ruins. On io May, the government reopened all the surviving theaters closed under the 1944 Wartime Emergency Measures. For the most part, they were allowed to establish their own show times. On the twenty-ninth, “ special solace” showings were held in regions where no theaters remained. Usually these consisted of simply project­ ing films on a large white sheet, attached to the outer wall o f a building. The sound equipment was not the best and the fluttering breeze made the images hard to see, but the showings were inevitably attended by overflowing crowds. Perhaps more than “ entertainment” in the usual sense, the crowds were straining for a glimpse of a world still untouched by devastation. This was certainly the point made by the Asahi Shinbun critic who reviewed Naruse Mikio’s feature The Story o f Sanjusan Gendo Temple (Sanjusangendo Toshiya Monogatari, Toho,June 1945): “ We, the survi­ vors, live amid the gnarled ruins of a blasted landscape. With what long­ ing do our eyes behold the sublime beauty o f that temple! Beyond that, we desire nothing more. Nothing.” 38 May was a month o f big decisions in the film world, some of which were based on contradictory appraisals of the future war situation. On the one hand, the Cabinet Information Board took the opportunity to carry out a final reorganization and consolidation of the film industry. In the name o f “ greater efficiency,” it gathered together the disparate kan-min organizations- the Film Association, Nichiei Distribution Com­ pany, and the Greater Japan Promotion Association —into a single um­ brella institution, the Eiga Kosha (quite simply, “ the Film Company” ). The Toho executives, however, knew that the war was lost and that it was time to prepare for the aftermath. On the night of 24 May, even as the firebombs were igniting fires around their Mukojima Studios, they

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were drawing up plans to hide their camera lenses, microphones, and other expensive equipment from seizure by the invading enemy. Kuroda Tatsuo, who headed the project, rented a house near the main gate of Hakone Shrine, near Izu peninsula: “ We filled the innermost rooms with packing cases of equipment. Rumor had it that the entire contents of our Tokyo studio would eventually be crated up and moved into hid­ ing somewhere in the same neighborhood.” 39 A survey o f theaters bombed-out in June records twenty-three more in Osaka (between i and 15 June) and eight in Kobe (on 6 June). After the middle of the month, U.S. strategic bombing switched to smaller cit­ ies, as can be seen in the following partial list o f newly destroyed movie houses: Kagoshima (6), Hamamatsu (9), Shizuoka (8), and Toyohashi (7). Since this accounted for all the theaters in Kagoshima and Toyoha­ shi, “ special solace” showings were begun at the end of the month. In July, a staggering total o f 140 theatres were destroyed nationwide, al­ most all of them in such small regional cities as Kumamoto (6) and Taka­ matsu (7). When Japan surrendered on 15 August, a total o f 530 thea­ ters had been destroyed. After the hostilities ceased, 1,271 would be left to reopen.40

His Majesty’s Voice After the U.S. landings on Leyte, the front-page format of the nation’s newspapers underwent a dramatic transformation. To the left were the vertical rows of photographs of the latest Special Attack Corps dead. The right-hand column was devoted to the previous day’s “ war results” — grossly inflated, of course. The figures for destroyed enemy aircraft and ships, meticulously classified into “ Sunk,” “ Exploded,” and “ Set afire,” looked as impersonal as a column of statistics from the financial pages. The current government slogan had made it clear that the ideal trading price for “one enemy ship” was “ one Japanese aircraft.” 41 In late June 1945, front-page formats changed again, becoming ever more drab and austere. The column of photographs of fallen kamikaze pilots was replaced by a stark list o f names. Gone too were the head­ lines in bold type announcing yet another trumped-up victory. Various short articles still claimed “ Huge Enemy Losses in Latest Okinawa Counter-Attack” and “ Forty More Enemy Planes Downed,” but there was no heady fanfare. By mid-July, the front page was projecting an eerie calm o f resignation. Litde maps and accompanying articles de­ scribed the largest of the previous day’s air raids. Other reportage

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tended to be devoted to Allied conferences in Europe. Most advertising had long since disappeared, the major exceptions being banks and in­ vestment concerns: “ We continue to batde on! Prepare for your family’s financial stability when its all over.” “ Let us help you transfer your funds to safety —Greater Japan Investments.” 42 On 8 August, the papers announced the atomic bombing of Hiro­ shima (6 August): “ B-29 Uses New Type of Bomb: Damage Extensive.” Several prominent film people were among the 140,000 Hiroshima dead. Maruyama Sadao, who had played the old train engineer in The Story of Leadership, was in the city with his own theater troupe, the Sakuratai. Burned and heavily irradiated by the blast, he died in agony ten days later. Seven other members of the same troupe died lingering deaths. One of these was Sonoi Keiko, who had played the mother in Inagaki’s Matsu the Untamed. She too was heavily irradiated and died five days after Maruyama. Twelve members of the regional Hiroshima branch of the Film Company also lost their lives. Shirai Sentaro, the Daiei jidaigeki director who made A Shadow Standing on M l. Fuji (1942) and Dragons Promontory (1945), was serving as an army second lieutenant in the Hiroshima Division at the time and was killed outright by the blast. Tasaka Tomotaka, the director of Five Scouts had been drafted as a buck private a few months earlier and was stationed in the city in a unit under Shirai’s command. He too was injured and had to fight radiation sick­ ness for four years before recovering enough to return to his directorial career. The announcement of the A-bombing of Nagasaki three days later was pushed to the bottom of the front page by news from Manchuria that the Soviets had invaded. The Nagasaki article bore the multiple headlines, “ Imperial Government Condemns New-type Bomb—A Cruelty Worse than Poison G a s—Abandon Such Weapons Immedi­ ately!” Asahi carried a statement by a die-hard army colonel. “ By mov­ ing our entire national life underground,” he claimed “ we shall forge the way to ultimate victory!” 43 The day after Nagasaki, Yamamoto KajirO was still in Tateyama, northeast of Tokyo, working on his Special Attack Corps film, Come and Get Us, America. A huge U.S. task force, complete with carriers, had gath­ ered in the waters immediately off-shore: “ Their fighters came in low over the rooftop of the hotel where I had ensconced my cast and crew, letting loose a fusillade of machine-gun fire. The smell of gunpowder filled the grounds and even penetrated to our rooms. We soon discov­ ered this was no indiscriminate raid and that their targets were a nearby

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air field and the flack guns defending it. The actresses, who had all been screaming their heads off, settled back to their card games as if they hadn’t a care in the world.” 44 By his own account, Yamamoto had received warning that Japan ’s surrender was immanent: “ Three or four days before, a messenger ar­ rived from the studio with a confidential letter from the studio director [Mori Iwao], warning me that ‘a major event’ was about to happen. ‘In that case suspend shooting immediately and send all of the actresses back to Tokyo.. . . Crew safety is the top priority, so don’t worry about losing equipment.’ ” 45 After the war, Mori would report that he had known about the impending surrender for about half a month. With his close, amicable ties with many top military officers, it is not hard to ima­ gine how he acquired the information. The problem was how to spread the word to those individuals, such as Yamamoto, who would be the most vulnerable in the new political climate after surrender—“ I could only hint at what I knew and had to hope that the correct intuition would get through to them.” 46 Such intuitions filtered quickly through the industry. Over at the Daiei Tokyo Studio, half of which was being used for airplane manufac­ turing, Ushihara Kiyohiko was working on Island of Fear (Kyofu no Shirna), scripted by Sawamura Tsutomu. Ushihara would recall that “ rumors of unconditional surrender came out of nowhere, passing through our minds like a cold draft.” 47 Makino Masahiro, who was in Kyoto produc­ ing the film Song of the Destruction o f the Anglo-Americans (Eibei Gekimetsu no Uta), got the message when the project was abrupdy canceled. Shochiku executive Kido ShirO, who was told o f the impending development by a newspaperman friend, commented, “ It looks like we’re done for.” Masumoto Kinen, who was present at the time, observed him roll his eyes toward the ceiling and heave a great sigh. Masumoto interpreted the gesture as “ a wry acknowledgment of the likelihood of his becoming a prime target of the vengeful Americans, once they arrived.” 48 On the morning of 15 August, studio clerks began setting up a large radio on a balcony overlooking the courtyard of Toho’s Setagayaku Stu­ dio. By now, everyone knew that the Emperor himself would be ad­ dressing the nation at noon with “ grave news.” At the appointed hour, the radio came alive with a rendition of “ Kimi ga Yo,” followed by the Emperor’s unfamiliar, high-pitched voice calling on the nation to “ bear the unbearable.” One of the listeners in the courtyard, scriptwriter Yasumi Toshio, remembers thinking that he would not have to wear his people’s uniform to the morning script conferences anymore. Then, as

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the full significance of the moment sank in, he thought, “ What an idiot! The world’s coming to an end and I’m thinking about clothing!” 49 The reaction of critic Hazumi Tsuneo, who was now working at Toho as a producer, was quite different. First, it was “ rage at the thought of nine years of hard work going to waste and at all the projects we had planned and which now had to be scrapped.” Then, with the moral agility typical of the intellectuals who had collaborated with the war­ time propaganda machine, he instandy switched sides and began think­ ing up projects in tune with the coming era of democracy. In his diary, he jotted down how he spent the rest of the day: “ No more air raids from now on. Just think of it! Develop new projects. Abandon Tokyo no Nakama. Rethink everything.” 50 Back at his inn in Tateyama, Yamamoto KajirO’s star, Takamine Hideko, listened to the drone of Zero fighter planes in the late afternoon. They were being ditched at sea by pilots determined to die with their aircraft. Yamamoto himself was in deep depression. As much as any other filmmaker, he had poured the best of his talents into the war ef­ fort: “ I couldn’t repress the anger seething within me. All the while, just out the window the bright summer sun seemed to mock my mood. The sea, in the distance, was a dazzling aquamarine. For the first time in my life, I felt as if nature and the world of humans were at odds. I sat at the table drinking beer with Fujita Susumu. His face was dripping wet. Tears.” 51 Yamamoto’s own emotional state concerned many on his staff. Suzuki Kazuo, a twenty-five-year-old member of the art department, remembers wondering whether the Americans would go for the direc­ tors who had collaborated with the government—“ the issue was top­ most in everybody’s mind, Yamamoto’s especially.” 52 Almost immediately after the Emperor’s speech, the Home Ministry ordered all the film theatres in the land to close their doors for a week. In the streets of Tokyo, all was confusion and consternation. There were suicides in front of the Imperial Palace. At his official residence in Tokyo, Vice Admiral Onishi TakijirS, founder of the Special Attack Corps, also took his own life, slashing open his stomach in the same jumonji crisscross fashion Mishima Yukio would use twenty-five years later. His final disposiuon ended with a haiku poem: “ Now all is done / And I can doze for a million years.” 53 Around the city, young military diehards desperate to stave off surrender went on a rampage, murdering high-ranking officers. Planes from the Atsugi Air Base showered the city with leaflets urging continuance of the war. Rumors, probably put about by elements opposing surrender, suggested that the occupation

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forces planned to castrate all Japanese men and force the women into prostitution. It was said that children under five should be carefully hid­ den since the Americans intended to feed them to their military dogs. According to Tanaka Ju n ’ichirO, terror griped many in the film world, as well: “ Many a director reversed his whole ideological orienta­ tion with unseemly haste. They charged around the studios spouting off about ‘pacifism’ and ‘democracy.’ ” 54 Everyone tried to second-guess what the Americans would do once they landed. At Toho, someone gave the order to gather together the negatives and, if possible, all existing positive prints of such war films as Shoot That Flag and Believe That Others Will Follow and to burn them im­ mediately. The idea was that they would anger the occupying forces be­ cause they used POWs for hate-the-enemy propaganda. Yamamoto’s crew not only destroyed all negative and positive prints of the unfin­ ished Come and Get Us, America, they burned the scripts and all the stills as well. Daiei similarly disposed of The Day England Fell and The General Assault on Singapore. It remains unclear what other films were destroyed (or, more important, which ones they failed to destroy; films assumed lost continue to turn up even today). According to Iwasaki Akira, who had less to fear than most, “An apparendy plausible rumor had it that everyone involved in the making of anti-American pictures would be arrested, charged with war crimes, and executed. Others held that it was the Americans’ intention to utterly wipe out our nation’s cinematic tradition.” 55 Toho’s Mori Iwao appears to have been one of the few to keep a cool head. Convinced that The Sea Warfrom Hawaii to Malaya and a few other war films would have great cultural and historical value for future generations, he ordered them to be carefully sealed and buried on the property of one of the Toho studios. It was he, also, who decided to have Kurosawa Akira continue the filming of The Man Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, a semicomic version of the Kabuki play Kanjincho, with Enoken and Okochi Denjiro. Mori saw it as “ an essential studio moralebooster” as they waited for the arrival of General MacArthur.

T he Occupiers Arrive Movie theaters reopened on 22 August with a completely changed bill of fare. Except for some rural towns where theater owners seemed to think it was still safe to show them, all films having to do with the war and the posters advertising them disappeared without a trace. Soon,

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some theaters were showing U.S. pictures confiscated by the govern­ ment and stored in vaults during the war years. On 27 August, the van­ guard o f the occupation army came ashore, and General MacArthur, who would arrive three days later, ordered the creation o f the Informa­ tion Dissemination Section, United States Armed Forces in the Pacific. The latter was to be administered by General Bonner Fellers, head of the Psychological Warfare Branch under MacArthur. On 20 September, Fellers called in the heads of all the film compa­ nies to a meeting at the Information Dissemination Secdon (IDS), now located in the Nissan Building, next to Hibiya Park. Kido Shiro at­ tended as head of the Film Corporation, along with Kikuchi Kan from Daiei and Toho’s Mori Iwao, along with about forty other film execu­ tives. Through the American Nisei interpreter George Ishikawa (who deeply impressed Kido with his intelligence and striking good looks), they were told: “ Occupation forces will probably be here some time. We hope you will be cooperative. If you have any questions or opinions, don’t hesitate to voice them.” 56 Speaking for the Japanese side, Kido in­ stantly pledged the loyal cooperation o f the Japanese film industry. At the same time, he took advantage o f the nonthreatening atmosphere of the meeting to launch into what appears to have been a self-serving at­ tack on the sudden emergence of a strong Communist faction within the industry: “ There’s bound to be a resurgence of Communism in the near future. When that happens, what should the position of the man­ agement be?” 57 This threw the U.S. side into confusion until David Conde (a former psychological warfare officer whose “ leftist” policies Kido would grow to despise) countered Kido’s probe by saying that the subject was “ too complex” and would best be handled at a later date.58 The “ Communists” Kido referred to was the coterie, headed by Iwasaki Akira, which was just then coalescing into the Free Film Workers Group. The latter was pushing for punishment of “ war criminals” in the film industry. Kido would of course be one of their prime targets. Two days after this initial meeting, on 22 September, the ID S was transformed into the C IE (Civilian Information and Education Section) with Colonel Kermit Dyke (formerly of the Office of War Information) as its chief. One o f its tasks was “ to make clear to all levels of the Ja p a ­ nese people the true facts of their defeat, their war guilt, and the respon­ sibility of the militarists for present and future Japanese suffering.” 59 Also, as Hirano KyOko summarizes, they were “ to teach American val­ ues through the Japanese media by encouraging certain values and dis­ couraging others.” In short, the C IE was to carry out propaganda in

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support o f occupation policy. Censorship, the obverse side of the prop­ aganda coin, became an arena of conflict between the largely civilianstaffed C IE and another outfit, the often-autocratic Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), directly under the control o f military intelligence and staffed by military men. The conflicts and subsequent confusions brought on by this dual structure make up a story lying beyond the scope of this book. Those interested in exploring further this subsequent chapter o f censorship and bureaucratic caprice in Japan can find no better, nor more succinct, account than Hirano KyOkO’s Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo (Smithsonian, 1995). Despite the alphabet soup of contending control agencies, the film world soon learned that occupation policy (toward them, at least) was to be far less draconian than the nightmarish imaginings of so many. As expected, it demanded a new form o f propaganda—this time encour­ aging democratization, antimilitarism, and respect for the individual. Its excesses tended to be concentrated in two areas. First was the mistaken belief that jidaigeki films fostered militarism, superpatriotism, and “ feu­ dal loyalty.” Initially, they were completely banned from production and the screen. Later, as restrictions eased, some period pictures were made, but the swordplay was severely limited. “ The principle of no killing, no cutting, and no drawing of the sword left us in a quandary,” Ito Daisuke was to recall. “After racking our brains we came up with one possible ‘fight’ sequence —the opponent does draw his sword, but the hero fends it off with his iron fan.” 60 The second excess was the massive burning o f films carried out by the U.S. Eighth Army at an airfield on the banks of the Tama River in Tokyo between 23 April and 4 May 1946. The films included war films, jidaigeki, and other movies considered to “ foster antidemocratic atti­ tudes,” or which “ might be subject to misuse.” One negative and two prints of each were, however, set aside and submitted to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In December 1967, most were returned toJapan. As for the issue of war crimes or “ responsibility” in the film industry', SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) took a fairly sen­ sible and moderate line. Filmmakers and producers who started making militarist films only after the start o f the Pacific War were never made targets o f investigation; those who prominendy collaborated with the militarist policies of the government before this period were targeted. Two separate lists of purge candidates were prepared and submitted to the occupation government. First there was the official list, drawn up by

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the All-Japan Film Employees Union Association (Zenei). The other one was put together by the circle formed by film critic Uryü Tadao and Iwasaki Akira, the Free Film Workers Group. Following SCAP guidelines for the purge of political offenders in the government and military, the Zenei list established three criminal clas­ sifications, labeled A, B, and C. Class A offenders, who were recom­ mended for permanent expulsion from the industry, included Otani TakejirO and Kido Shiró of Shochiku, Osawa Yoshio o f Toho, Hori Kyusaku of Nikkatsu, as well as Kikuchi Kan and Nagata Masaichi o f Daiei. The category also included another twenty-three former officials of the Home Ministry and the Information Bureau. Kawakita Nagamasa of Towa, Mori Iwao of Toho, director Kumagai Hisatora, and seven other individuals were labeled Class B. They were recommended for temporary suspension. The penalty for Class C offenders had a distincdy Asian ring to it. Yamamoto KajirO, Yoshimura KOzaburO, Shima Kóji, Sasaki Yasushi, Watanabe Kunio, and others were all condemned to “ self-reflection and criticism.” The list was greatly reduced when SCAP applied its rule o f prose­ cuting only those who were active before December 1941. In the end, it was cut to a total of thirty-one persons in all categories. Kikuchi, Hori, Otani, and others were dropped, but Osawa, Nagata, Mori, and Kido were retained. Mori Iwao was relieved when he heard the punishment he was to receive: “ I expected something far worse, like banishment to the most frigid part of Alaska and being forced to work in a salmon can­ nery. So I looked on mere banishment as a lucky break.” 61 Mori and Nagata, along with others who were considered only “ war exploiters,” were released in 1948. Kido had to wait until 1950. He saw the distinc­ tion that allowed his chief rival, Nagata Masaichi, to return to the in­ dustry two years before him as an outrage, and in his autobiography he thundered: “ Before the war, Nagata had mostíy been involved in mak­ ing cat-demon films and other B movies, so he was only temporarily ex­ pelled. Then, after this tap on the wrist, he was let right back into the in­ dustry.” As Kido describes it, his own exile seems not to have been very onerous: “ Over the next three years I did some legal work and had plenty of time for fishing, reading philosophy, and watching movies.” 62

Epilogue Later generations have often wondered why the issue of the responsibil­ ity of individual members o f the film community during the war years

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was never vigorously pursued. Part of the answer might be found in the logical dilemma that arose when the issue received its first (and last) public airing, during a debate held by Zenei at Toho in December 1945. Yamamoto KajirO’s name had just been put forward as a candidate for chairman of the union, whereupon the cameraman Miyajima Yoshio rose to remind the group that Yamamoto had been the director of some of the most famous war films: “ One tends to see him as a war collabora­ tor.” What, he asked, did the assembly feel about this issue? Everyone’s attention focused on Yamamoto, causing him to “ turn somewhat pale and squirm uneasily in his chair.” 63 Sekikawa Hideo, who in 1944 had directed The Big Wings (Oinaru Tsubasa, Toho-Nichiei, 1944, all prints and negatives reportedly burned before the arrival of the occupation troops), rose to point out that “ Everybody here, to a greater or lesser ex­ tent, was pulled into the war effort.” Miyajima himself, Sekikawa con­ tinued, had been the cameraman on Abe Yutaka’s Shoot That Flag. Therefore, surely it was not his intention to single out Yamamoto as the only one present bearing war responsibility. Rather, he continued, “ I take it to be your intention to call on all of us, yourself included, to re­ flect upon and criucize our activities during the war.” 64 Since everyone shared at least some o f the “ guilt,” no one had the moral right to accuse the others. As Hirosawa Sakae, who was present at the meeting, comments: “ In the end, no ethical stance was achieved. In­ stead, in typical Japanese fashion, everything was swept under the car­ pet of vagueness. As it turned out, this was to be the only time the issue of wartime responsibility would be aired publicly. There was no sequel to the discussion.” 65 If none in the filmmaking community could broach the subject, what then of the film critics? One might expect someone among their number to address the subject of “What Happened?” Yet here too we find the same dilemma of enforced silence. Tsumura Hideo, as we have already noted, had become deeply involved in the formulation of war­ time film policy and in the latter stages of the war turned into an ar­ dent advocate of virulent “ hate-the-enemy” films. Iijima Tadsashi had an official relationship with the Film Association, was involved (to some extent, at least) in the scripting of the infamous Korean-Japanese mili­ tary recruitment film You and /, and later wrote at least one other war propaganda script. Kitagawa Fuyuhiko, who spent much time in Sin­ gapore, worked on scripts for war documentaries. Hazumi Tsuneo was involved in the creation of the warume Japanese-Chinese Film Friend­ ship Society in Shanghai. The list goes on. Much of this activity could

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be explained as a natural response to the needs of the wartime era, but it did make the critics vulnerable to the charge that “ You too___ ” Even Iwasaki Akira felt it necessary to confess to having been an “ uncon­ scious war criminal.” 66 Actually, one man did make a gesture at coming to terms with the issue of “ responsibility” —Itami Mansaku. Tuberculosis had forced him to retire from directing during the Pacific War, and he spent the rest o f his days writing scripts and criticism from his sickbed. Only a month be­ fore his death in 1946, he published an article on “The War Responsibil­ ity Issue.” Rather than focusing on the problem o f individual respon­ sibility, however, he widened the circle o f “ guilt” to include the entire Japanese people: When you think back, you realize it runs from top to bottom-from the all-embracing control system, the absurd newspaper reportage, the idiotic radio commentary, and continues all the way down to the street committees, neighborhood associations, civil defense groups, and ladies’ societies. Such civilian groups collaborated spontaneously, passionately in fact, in abetting the schemes of the wartime controllers. If you try to find the actual faces of those who continually repressed us and made us suffer the most, just whose face do you come up with? They are near to hand and easily brought back to mind —the face of some local merchant or that of a farmer in the outskirts of town or one of the petty clerks in the district government office or the post office. In other words, they were the people all around us, those we had contact with and had to deal with in the process of taking care of the business of daily life. Moving on to an analysis o f himself, Itami wrote, “ The fact I never wrote a single prowar script doesn’t mean I consistently harbored anti­ war convictions. It was just that I was sick and so was never given the op­ portunity to work on material o f that sort. Therefore, when it comes to deciding the nature o f ‘war responsibility’ in the film world, who’s to undertake the task? I have no idea.” 67 The issue of the personal responsibility of filmmakers during the war was allowed to lapse, which is just as well since it offers litde to illu­ minate our understanding o f the wartime era. A more fundamental question, however, remains as vital and pressing for us today as it was in the immediate postwar period: How (meaning by what process) were talented individuals, endowed with normal instincts toward justice and humanity, drawn into active support of the totalitarian system?

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Unfortunately, the red herring of individual responsibility has made our best witnesses (the directors, scriptwriters, critics, and others who worked during the wartime era) hide behind a wall of silence or shroud their real motives beneath a veil of self-exculpatory deceit. For the com­ pany executives Mori Iwao and Kido ShirO, both o f whom felt they had been selected as “ scapegoats” for the industry’s collective guilt, the ex­ cuse was, respectively, “ irresoluteness” and “ gullibility.” Mori repeat­ edly summoned up the image of himself as a “ weak-willed liberal.” Kido ShirO, for his part, paints the picture of a well-intentioned naif. About the Film Law, which he himself had helped create, he writes in his autobiography that “ it never once occurred to me that it would be­ come an instrument for totalitarian control.” 68 In a murky essay written in 1953, Tsumura Hideo excused his own wartime activity as a form of “ mental illness” —“ Thus it was that my psyche came under the powerful control of others, and it was this stim­ ulus that caused me to try to do the same to those whom I could influ­ ence. In the end, my energies went shooting off in an entirely unin­ tended direction.” 69 In a similar vein, scriptwriter Yagi YasutarO had invoked “ the philosophical confusions and psychic anxieties of the Sec­ ond World War.” For Sawamura Tsutomu, it was “ youthful idealism.” This claim, at least, has an authentic ring. He was indeed very young (being only thirty when the war ended), and his film criticism and wartime scripts blaze with the almost mystical enthusiasm of the true believer. In the Septem­ ber 1969 issue of Scenario, he wrote, “ I would buy and read everything I could lay my hands on about the historic encroachment of Western im­ perialism on A sia .. . . It would be a lie if I were to claim never to have sensed the aggressionist element in Japan ’s activity on the mainland. But, in my youthful fervor, I suppressed my doubts and swallowed whole the gilded phrases of the era. I was aflame with the ideal of Asian liber­ ation.” 70 Until his death eight years later, Sawamura remained, like the novelist Hayashi Fusao, an unrepentant apologist for the “ idealistic mo­ tives” of Japan during the Fifteen Years’ War period. Naturally enough, it never occurred to Sawamura to suggest that fear or coercion had been motivating factors for him. Almost everybody else, however, made recourse to “ the intolerable pressure” of Them: “ the authorities,” the government, the Information Bureau, the Tokkô Police, or the Kempeitai. Yamamoto Satsuo claimed, implausibly, that the threat of “ imprisonment” and “ torture” was the reason why people

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like himself made war propaganda pictures. His conclusion is equally lame—if he had not made them, “ someone else would have had to bow' to the pressure and humiliations imposed by the authorities.” 71 I n a n e ssa y p u b lis h e d in th e O c t o b e r 1945 issu e o f Bungei Shunju, K ik u c h i K a n , o f a ll p e o p le , m a d e th e c la im t h a t “ p e o p le lik e m y s e lf w e r e o f te n th e ta r g e t o f a s sa s s in s .” B la m in g a ll th e n a t i o n ’s tro u b le s o n “ t h e h i g h - h a n d e d n e s s o f th e m ilita r y c liq u e ,” h is a r tic le is o n e o f th e first to e x p la in th e c o lla b o r a tio n is t a tt it u d e o f c u lt u r a l fig u re s lik e h im s e lf a s th e re s u lt o f “ th e d e c e p u v e p o lic ie s o f th e g o v e r n m e n t a u th o r itie s .”

This was precisely the defense that Itami Mansaku demolished so brilliandy in the essay he wrote just before his death: “A popular but illu­ sory notion holds that there is some clear distinction to be made between those who were deceived and those who did the deceiving, and that the civilians were ‘fooled’ by the authorities—the military and the bureaucratic elites. But when you ask a former officer or bureaucrat, he will point to even higher echelons, saying that he too had been tricked. The implication is that the fact of your having been deceived absolves you of all guilt and responsibility. This is itself a great delusion.” In the immediate postwar years, many o f the most ardent makers o f wartime propaganda films were back at work, this time making pro­ democracy pictures that excoriated the system they had served so loy­ ally: Tasaka Tomotaka, Imai Tadashi, Hisaita EitarO, and Yagi Yasutaro. Even Sawamura Tsutomu turned his hand to a prodemocracy script (which was never made, however). In his classic Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1959), Donald Richie looked for the antecedents of these reborn “ tub-thumpers for democracy” and decided that “ they very' much resembled the fanatic samurai o f Choshu who in the late 1860s had shouted ‘Honor the Emperor! Expel the barbarians!’ until it be­ came apparent that they were helpless against modern weapons, and thereupon, changing their tune with fluent facility, they became leaders of Westernization.” 72 Both groups of individuals —the Choshu samurai and the film­ makers—operated in times of profound historical disjuncture. For those living either at the end of the Shogunate or the end of Imperial Japan, the edges of the past and the present just did not seem to fit together any more. Indeed the past had lost all value, except as a set of “ false” lessons that had to be rejected. Then, because it had rejected the past so utterly, the new era was already flawed with its own deep-seated false­ hood. Recognition of this fact probably lay in the back of Itami Mansaku’s mind when he wrote: “ What is to be done with a people who

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can so easily wave off the past with the casual assertion that ‘we have all been hood-winked’? They are bound to be fooled, time and time again. In fact, the nation has already started wolfing down a new set of lies. The deception, this time as always, is o f our own making.” 73 The new “ lies” Itami refers to were only partly the rationalizations being feverishly generated at the time by the collaborators with the an­ cien régime. Clearly, he sensed the advent of “ lies” of far greater mag­ nitude. It was still too early to achieve a clear grasp o f just what they would be, and yet, with astounding prescience, he indicates the mental­ ity that would generate them—the impulse to wall off the past from the present, to place history in sanitary isolation from the concerns of the present day. One falsehood, born in the immediate postwar moment and yet continuing into the present day, was the notion of the virtual noncontiguity of prewar and wartime Japan with postwar Japan. Yet, one need only look at the modus operandi of present-day Japanese bu­ reaucracy, for instance, to see how little has changed, despite the flurries of purges and reshufflings. Its current incarnation is largely the result of “ reforms” carried out in 1933-34, whereby the ministries (and thereby, in many cases, individual bureaucrats) were granted broad autonomy. As in the prewar and wartime period, the bureaucracy operates today with little accountability to the political representatives chosen by the people. And, as I pointed out in the introduction to this book, many of the old bureaucrats’ high-handed tactics of control —the linguistic traps, the enforced delimiting of discourse, the setting of unachievable goals, and so on —continue to be used today. T h e p r o je c t o f id e n tif y in g j u s t w h a t e le m e n ts fro m th e p r e w a r p e ­ r io d p e rs is t in to th e s o c io c u ltu r a l m ilie u o f p r e s e n t - d a y J a p a n r e m a in s la rg e ly u n a t t e n d e d . P a r t o f th e p r o b le m is t h a t t h e r e is still so m u c h w o rk to b e d o n e in r ig o r o u s ly a n a ly z in g th e a c tu a l p o lic ie s a n d p r o c e ­ d u r e s o f th e p r e w a r a n d w a r tim e p e r io d s . T h i s is e s p e c ia lly so in th e c a s e o f th e in te r a c t io n b e tw e e n th e a d m i n is t r a t o r s o f c u ltu re d p o lic y a n d th e p r o d u c e r s o f c u ltu r e , r a n g i n g fro m th e e lite r a n k s o f th e n a ti o n ’s in te lle c tu a ls a n d a rtis ts to th e m a n u f a c tu r e r s o f m a s s e n t e r t a i n ­ m e n t. T h e s w e e p in g , f o rm u lis tic g e n e r a liz a tio n s c r e a te d b y l e a d in g p o s tw a r th e o ris ts o f c u ltu r e c o n tin u e to fo rm th e c o n c e p tu a l f ra m e w o rk (a n d o u t e r lim its) o f a ll to o m a n y s tu d ie s a tte m p tin g th is s o rt o f p r o je c t. T o c ite j u s t o n e e x a m p le o f s u c h c o n s tr ic tin g a n d u ltim a te ly m is le a d in g g e n e r a liz a tio n s , w e h a v e th e in flu e n tia l f o r m u la tio n c r e a te d b y Y o sh im o to T a k a ’a k i in 1957. F o r h im t h e p h e n o m e n o n o f lenko is t o b e g r a s p e d a s th e in e v ita b le r e s u lt o f fa u lty id e o lo g y ; it w a s a ll “ th e c r a z e d

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flowering o f a false intellectual Asianism, growing out of the half­ feudalized consciousness of the populace at large, which itself was under-girded by a half-feudal social structure.” 74 Presumably, if they had gotten their ideology right, artists and intellectuals would have been immune to the threats and lures of the authorities. In the introduction to this book, I proposed using the filmworld as a microcosmic representative of trends, attitudes, and developments mir­ roring the culture at large. The willing participation of the film industry in the creation of the (probably false) sense of a prowar sentiment among the public during the Manchurian Incident and China Incidents was clearly paralleled by the mass media industry at large. Similarly, the kondankai procedures, which the bureaucrats used so ably to manipulate the filmworld executives into cooperating in the construction of the to­ talitarian control system, were used just as effectively with the nation’s literary and artistic elite. Reading the zadankai roundtable discussions featuring top bureaucrats on the one side and writers or composers or painters on the other, one finds the former using the same rhetorical techniques as with the film people. Strikingly similar too was the man­ ner in which creative people in the other arts were caught into the di­ lemma o f attempting to obey the impossible and often incomprehen­ sible demands o f the control officials. The mass nervous collapse of filmmakers in 1940-41, noted in chapter 3, and the hysterical “ internal­ ization o f control” phenomenon, discussed in chapter 9, were hardly isolated phenomena. The “tenko” process experienced by the famous painter Fujita Tsuguji, for instance, clearly included both these phases. Along with count­ less other artists, novelists, and even philosophers, Fujita was eventually able to harness his talents and inspiration to the war machine, just as the filmmakers had. The amazing inventiveness of Tasaka Tomotaka in creating a compelling “ humanist” war film genre had parallels in the other arts as well. Although Japanese cultural historians regularly point to imprison­ ment and torture (real or threatened) as the era’s typical means of in­ ducing tenko conversion, one of the subthemes of this book has been to use the experience of film world personalities to highlight an entirely different form, a “ tenko o f the multitudes” based on “ ego massages” and psychological manipulation. I believe that this, along with the geo­ graphical insularity of Japan, affording so few opportunities for escape, goes far to explain the almost universal collaboration o f Japan ’s best and brightest.

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Wartime film and literature are studded with approving accounts of the phenomenon I term the “ tenko of the multitudes.” Iwata Toyoo’s spiritist novel Navy\ the original for Tasaka’s film o f 1943, devotes three central chapters to the gradual conversion of a young, mediocre painter to the militarist cause. Confronting a world where official doctrine pro­ claimed the “ insipidity” of the aesthetic ideals of his Westernized train­ ing in the fine arts, the man is “ seized by a desperate anxiety, as if the very earth were giving away under his feet; his only thought was to es­ cape his condition [of social irrelevance].” 75 Led by his preceptor, the novel’s protagonist, he moves gradually (over the space of thirty some odd pages) toward his crisis of faith: “ How can I go on painting as I have up to now?” 76 His ultimate decision to “ convert” is actually phrased as a decision to conform: “Are not artists also subjects o f the state? The only difference is that we take up the brush rather than the gun as a weapon.” 77 Fifteen pages later, he indicates the potential “ cost” of his abandonment of fealty to artistic truth in favor of fealty to the needs o f the state: “ Even if my work [as a painter of warships in action] has no value as art, and even if I am expelled from the community of artists, I can see no shame in my decision.” 78 Many wartime artists turned out just this kind of propaganda art. After the war, the same artists rejected these works as an aberration in their careers. Returning to their old “ avant-garde” postures, they systematically hid their wartime production and suppressed all memory of their conversion. Iwata’s own instinct was probably to do the same. Interest in his Navy, however, never completely faded, and it was actually republished in 1983. For this reason, his wartime description of political conversion remains today a significant document on how artists at the time portrayed their conversion to themselves and to their public. The mere fact he was able to sustain his account through tens of pages in the novel strongly suggests that Iwata was, in part at least, drawing on his own personal experience as a tenko-ite. And just what was the moral he depicted for contemporary' readers? It was, of course, the doctrine of accommodation to the reigning ideol­ ogy o f the hour, o f feigned “ conversion,” of “ Ketman,” as Czeslaw Mi­ losz puts it. In the late forties, Milosz also feigned conversion (to the Polish brand of Stalinism) before escaping to the West. Referring to the age of totalitarian ideology characterizing the central decades of the twentieth century, he would write that, “ surely man has never before been subjected to such pressure, never has he had to writhe and wriggle so as to adapt himself to forms constructed according to the books but

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obviously not to his size.” 79 “ Ketman” is the psychological posture adopted by intellectuals and artists everywhere who confront this sort o f pressure without any hope of physical escape.80 The key feature of Ket­ man is that it combines cynical dissimulation with a genuine (if provi­ sional) act of faith. The reasoning is that “ since I find myself in circum­ stances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best.. . . If my work is successful it matters litde how it will be presented and toward whose glory. Obvi­ ously I must pay for the right to practice my profession with a certain number of articles and odes in the way o f tribute. Still one’s life on earth is not to be judged by transitory panegyrics written out o f necessity.” 81 Surely this was an attitude shared by many o f Japan ’s intellectuals, writers, artists, and filmmakers. After stripping away the hokum of post­ war rationalizations—o f having been misled, of madness, or of having to work under the gun—one thoroughly convincing motivation re­ mains: the desire to keep working and thereby to redeem one’s worth from the remorseless flood of time. Who among us today could say we would not have done the same under similar circumstances? At this very' moment, scattered across the globe, from North Korea to Iran and everywhere else the tenets of official orthodoxy continue to rule, we can be sure there are practitioners of Ketman. A certain amount o f empathy is, perhaps, our only means of access to an interior understanding of Japan ’s “ tenkd o f the multitude.” Since the issue o f “ blame” is no longer relevant, “ forgiveness” is equally irrel­ evant. Since the issue of “why” can only be answered in terms of moti­ vations, and since these are just the elements most systematically hidden by the principals—most of whom are by now dead, in any case —the present-day historian can only trace out the path o f “ how.” This book represents but one faltering step on that trail.

NO TES B IB L IO G R A P H IE S IN D E X E S

NOTES

Introduction 1. T su ru m i Shunsuke, Kyodo Kenkyu: Tenko, in Tsurumi Shunsuke Chosaku, vol. 2 (Tokyo: C h ik u m a S hobo, 1975), 7. 2. I b id , 8. 3. L aw rence O lson, Ambivalent Moderns: Portraits of Japanese Cultural Identity (Savage, M d.: R o w m a n & Littlefield, 1992), 134. 4. Ibid., 64. 5. See “ K aik ak u wo KentO S u ru Z a d a n k a i," Nihon Eigay M a rc h 1941, 29. 6. See review by Iw am o to K enji, “S engo 50 n en to E iga 100 n e n ,” Tosho Shinbun, 7 O c to b e r 1995, 1; see also Y om ota Inuhiko, “ N ip p o n Riga o Y om itoku 10 satsu,” Ronza, D ec e m b e r 1999, 249. 7. Inose N aoki, “T eikoku n o G in m a k u ni T suite,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 10 S e p ­ te m b e r 1995. 8. S him aji T a k a m a ro a n d S h im aji T a k a ro , eds., Sekai no Eiga Sakka # 3 /: Nihon Eiga (Tokyo: K in e m a ju n p o s h a , 1976). 9. Fujita M otohiko, JVifam Eiga Gendaishi (Tokyo: H a n a g a m ish a, 1977). 10. See S h im izu Y oshinori, “Sakka no SOzOryoku H iro g eru K anO sci,” Tokyo Shinbun, 16 D e c e m b e r 1997; see also K a w a m u ra M in a to a n d U e n o C h izuko, eds., Senso wa Dono Yo ni Yomarete kita no ka (Tokyo: A sahi S h in b u n , 1999), 300; K im u ra K a z u n o b u , e d ., Senjika no Bungaku (Tokyo: Im p a c t S h u p p a n , 2000); a n d N a rita R yuichi, “ S ens 5 ron o Y om itoku 10 satsu,” Ronza, M a r c h / A pril, 2000. 11. T h e m o re p ro m in e n t rep resen tativ es o f this “ new g e n e ra tio n ” include U e n o S hizuko (Nationalism and Gender; 1998), K a w a m u ra M in a to (The Fall of Manchukuo, 1997), N a rita RyOichi (All Out War and Modernization, 1996), T suboi H id e to (Festival o f Voices, 1997), Y asum aru Yoshio (“Comfort Women” and the Work o f the Historian, 1998), an d M asaki T su n eo (Colonial Illusions, 1995). 12. N a rita RyQichi, K a w a m u ra M in a to , a n d U en o Shizuko, “Sensf> w a d o n o yo ni K a ta ra re te K ita k a,” in Senso wa donoyo ni Katararete Kita ka (Tokyo: A sahi S h in b u n sh a, 1999), 21. 13. R ckishigaku K enkyukai, ed., Taiheiyo Sensoshi, 5 vols. (Tokyo: T oyo K eizai S h in b u n sh a, 1953 54).

518

Notes to pages xix xxiii

14. Iwasaki A kira, Nihon Eiga Shishi (Tokyo: A sahi S h in b u n sh a, 1977). 15. Shim izu A kira, Senso to Eiga (Tokyo: S hakai Shisosha, 1994). F u k u sh im a Yukio a n d M ark u s A b e-N o rn es, eds., Nickibei Eigasen (Tokyo, Y am agata D o c u ­ m entary' Film Festival, 1991). 16. N arita et al., Senso wa donoyo ni, 23. 17. Ibid. 18. See the in tro d u c tio n to S him izu A kira, Shanghai Sokai Eiga Shishi (Tokyo: S hisosha, 1997), 5. 19. N a rita et al., Senso wa donoyo ni, 25. 20. Ibid. 21. See, for instance, Y am an ak a H isashi, Bokura Shokokumin to Senso Oenka (Tokyo: O n g a k u no T o m o sh a, 1985). 22. See, for instance, his discussion o f Pacific w a r c o m b a t films in Nihon Eiga Shisdshi (Tokyo: S an Ichi S h o b o , 1970), 245. 23. SatO T a d a o , Nihon Eigashi 2 vols. (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i S h o te n , 1995). 24. Ibid., 71. 25. T a n a k a J u n ’ichiro, Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi%3 vols. (Tokyo: C h u o k o ro n -

sha, 1957]. 26. A u th o r’s interview w ith M ak in o ¡Vlamoru, 27 J u n e 1999. 27. N one o f the above is in te n d e d as a rejection o f his w ell-deserved status as J a p a n ’s lea d in g film critic. W h a te v e r p a rtic u la r defects we m ight p o in t to, b o th Sat6 a n d T a n a k a (along w ith D o n a ld R ichie, in English) p re p a re d th e g ro u n d for all su b seq u e n t research. T h e y provide th e overview s alm ost as use­ ful to day as w h en th ey w ere first w ritten . In reference to S a to T a d a o , th e re is one last observation to be m ad e a b o u t his status as a rep resentative P eriod T w o (film) historian. P erhaps m o re th a n any o th e r film scholar, he has m a d e g rea t ef­ forts to redress th e historic w rongs J a p a n c o m m itted ag ain st its A sian n e ig h ­ bors. In recent years, he has d e d ic a te d h im self to in tro d u c in g th e J a p a n e s e view ing public to th e best o f m o d e rn A sian cin em a, no t only C h in ese, b u t K o ­ rea n , Philippine, T h a i, a n d In d o n esia n . O ften the works he p ro m o te s a re strong indictm ents o f J a p a n e s e w artim e activities. 28. S ak u ram o to T om io, Daitoa Senso to Nihon Eiga Tachimi no Senchu Eigaron (Tokyo: Aoki S h o ten , 1993), vii. 29. Quoted in Sakuramoto, Daitoa, 66. 30. S ak u ram o to , Daitoa, v. 31. See S a k u ra m o to T o m io , Senjika Furuhon Tanpo - h'onna Hon ga Atta (Tokyo: Aoki S h o te n , 1986); see also Yoake niNaJcu h'arasu (Tokyo: S hin H yo ro n , 1991) a n d Serno to Manga (Tokyo: Soshisha, 2000). 32. H a ra K a z u o 's d o cu m en tary , The Imperial Army Marches On ( Yuki YnkiU Shingun, 1986). 33. S ak u ram o to , Daitoa Senso to Nihon Eiga, iii. 34. Yoshikawa M a ri, “M o to K oku ShO nen S a k u ra m o to T o m io ni K ik u ,”

Notes to pages xxiii 8

519

in Senjika no Bungaku, edited by K im u ra K a z u n o b u (Tokyo: Im p a c t S h u p p an k ai, 2000), 221. 35. Ibid. L a te r in th e interview, S ak u ram o to indicates this attitu d e w as ex­ ten d ed to film p ersonnel, as well (232). 36. Ibid., 234. 37. Ibid. 38. S a k u ram o to m entions such w riters as A be T om oji a n d Ien ag a SaburO. 39. N a rita et al., Senso wa donoyo ni, 49. 40. Ibid. 41. Ib id ., 50. 42. For an exten d ed critical discussion o f th eir ideological stance, see M iyadai Shinji a n d K a w a m u ra KyOsuke, eds., SensoronfMosdron (Tokyo: KyOiku Shika S h u p p an k ai, 1999). 43. K obayashi Y oshinori, Sensoron (Tokyo: G e n to sh a, 1998).

Prologue 1. C h arles M usser, The Emergence o f Cinema: The American Screen to iyoy (Berkeley: Univ. o f C alifo rn ia Press, 1990), 247. 2. Ibid. 3. Asahi Shinbun, 2 O c to b e r 1904, 7. 4. Osaka Mainichi, 6 J u n e 1904 (rep ro d u ctio n o f original a rticle p rin te d in KinemaJunpo, 1 M a rc h 1937, 67). 5. Kobe Shinbun, 9 D e c e m b e r 1904. R e p ro d u c ed in Kinema Junpo, 1 M arch

1937. 676. T h e se films a re a m o n g the collection housed in th e N a tio n a l Film C e n ­ ter, located in K yobashi, Tokyo. Som e o f these films are also available on video from R a in b o w Pack V ideo, N ih o n V ideo Eizo K abushiki K a ish a , u n d e r the tide Nihon no Hyakunen: Meiji/Taisho. 7. Asahi Shinbun, 4 A ugust 1904, re p ro d u c e d in Kinema Junpo, 1 M arch 1937, 68. 8. See Y oshida C h ico , Mo Hitotsu no Eigashi (Tokyo: Jiji T sushinsha, 1978), 48 579. Osaka Mainichi, 17 M arch 1905, rep ro d u c e d in KinemaJunpo, 21 F ebruary *937 »49 10. Kobe Shinbun, 12 J u n e 1904, re p ro d u c e d in Kinema Junpo, 1 M a rc h !937 > 67. 11. See T a n a k a J u n ’ichirO, Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi, vol. 1 (Tokyo: C h u o k o ro n sha, 1957), 109-10. 12. O n o u e M atsunosuke, “O n o u e M atsu n o su k e n o j id c n ” in Nihon no Geidan%vol. 6, Eiga, ed ited by O z a k i H ideki (Tokyo: K yugci S h u p p a n , 1979), 49. 13. T a n a k a, Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi, vol. 1,160.

Notes to pages g 20

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14. O sh ik aw a H a ru n a m i, “K cikai subeki N ih o n ,” Bdken no Sekai, D e c e m b e r 1908. 15. S him izu A kira a n d M arkus A b e-N o rn es, Ntchibei Eigasen (Tokyo: A oyum isha, 1991), 12. 16. See M u ra y a m a K yoichiro’s discussion o f M in istry o f E d u cation film policies in the a fte rm a th o f th e G re a t K a n to E a rth q u a k e o f 1923, “M o H ito tsu no S hòw a Eiga M o n b u sh o Eiga,” in In Praise o f Film Studies: Essays in Honor o f MaJdno Mamoru, e d ited by A aron G e ro w a n d M a rk u s A b e -N o rn e s (V ictoria, C a n a d a : K in e m a C lub, 2001), 176-83. 17. B ased on a p ro g ra m p a m p h le t, p u b lish ed by N ikkatsu’s K a n d a k a n T h e a tr e in T okyo (re p ro d u ce d in Natsukashi no Fukkokuban / Puroguramu Eigashi: Taishdkara Senchù made [Tokyo: N ihon H o so S h u p p a n k a i, 1978], 76).

i. Into a Valley of Darkness 1. Y oshim ura K ò z a b u rò , Kinema no Jid a i (Tokyo: K yodo T su sh in sh a,

1985)* 129. 2. Ib id ., 131. 3. T e ra d a T o ra h ik o m en tio n s this in passing in the p reface to his pam phlet-sized pub licatio n Eiga Geijutsu (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i S h o ten , 1932), 2. 4. See H a ta n a k a Shigeo, Nihon Fashizimu no Genron Dan’atsu Shoshi (Tokyo: K o b u n k e n , 1986), for a detailed discussion o f th e suppression o f “d a n g e ro u s th o u g h t” in this p eriod. 5. S aitò M in o ru , “ N a n i ga K a re ra w o S ou S aseteiru n o ka?,” Hokkaido Shinbun, 12Ju ly 1930, 14. 6. Q u o te d in D aryl Davis, PicturingJapaneseness (New York: C o lu m b ia Univ. Press, 1996), 60. 7. M u ra y a m a T om oyoshi, “C ritiq u e o f the C e n so rsh ip system ,” a 30 O c ­ to b e r 1929 p a m p h le t q u o ted at length in M ak in o M a m o ru , “ N ih o n P u ro re ta ria Eiga D o m ei (Purokino) n o setsuritsu kitei ni tsuite n o kosatsu,” Eizogaku 27, 1983; tran slated in to English by M arkus A b e-N o rn es, ed ., In Praise of Film Stud­ ies (V ictoria, C a n a d a : K in e m a C lub, 2001), 23. 8. S atò T a d a o , “ K okka ni K a n ri sa re ta E iga,” in Koza NUion Eiga, vol. 4, Senso to Nihon Eiga (Tokyo: Iw anam i S h o te n , 1986), 4. 9. For ex am p le, K im u ra Sotoji, d ire c to r o f th e ten d e n c y film Long Live the Farmers (Hyakusho Banzai/, Teikine, 1930) w ent o n to b eco m e a hig h -ran k in g of­ ficer o f th e se m ig o v e rn m en ta l D ai N ih o n E iga K yòkai in 1937 a n d th en w orked u n d e r fo rm e r a rm y C olo n el A m ak asu M asah ik o at M a n ’ei (from 1941). For an e x te n d e d discussion o f th e te n d e n c y film p h e n o m e n o n , see T a kenaka T su to m u , Nihon Eiga Odan: Keiko Eiga noJid a i (Tokyo: S h irak aw a S hoin,

' 974)10. “Shuyo G aikoku E iga H ihyò,” KinemaJunpo, 11 S e p te m b e r 1930. 11. Y oshim ura, Kinema noJid a i, 57.

Notes to pages 21-33

521

12. M a n a N aoki, Minshu Janarizumu no Rekishi (Tokyo: S a n ’ichi S hobo, 1983), 162. 13. K in u g asa T einosuke gives a slightly different a c co u n t o f the incident in his Waga Eiga no Seishun (Tokyo: C h u o S hinsho, 1977), 42-4 5 . T h e re , he points to “a c e rtain right-w ing g ro u p ” as having d en o u n c ed the film to the authorities. In add itio n to claim ing th a t the film ’s E m press H im iko was p a rt o f th e im perial lineage (and therefore d iv in e - m ak in g h e r rep re sen ta tio n on screen an act o f sacrilege), th e arch itectu re show n in th e film h ad clearly been m odeled on th at o f Ise S hrine, d ed ic a te d to the w orship o f th e im perial family. A ccording to K in u g asa, M ak in o S hozo him self d ecid ed to pull th e film from circulation, ra th e r th a n fight th e w ra th o f th e go v ern m en t. T h e next year, w hen the furor h ad q u iete d dow n, th e film was rereleased w ith all o f th e offensive scenes cut. 14. Q u o te d in Sato, Nihon Eigashiyvol. 1, 300. 15. A aro n Gerow, “Jig o m a to eiga no ‘hak k en ’ —N ih o n eiga gensetsushi jflsetsu,” Eizogaku no. 58 (1997): 34-50. 16. H ira ta Shinsaku, Showa Yugekitai (Tokyo: K o d an sh a, 1934), 5. 17. Y am an ak a M inetarO , Gankutsujima (Tokyo: K o k u sh o K ankokai,

>933). 19518. KatO H idetoshi, “ O to n o B unka no H a jim a ri,” in Showa no Shunkan (Jo), edited by A sahi J a n a r u (Tokyo: A sahi S h in b u n sh a, 1974), 5. 19. Ibid., 6. 20. KatO H idetoshi, “Bidan no G enkei,” in Showa no Shunkan (Jo), edited by Asahi J a n a r u (Tokyo: A sahi S hinbunsha, 1974), 129. 21. KatO H idetoshi, “Shi e no S hin k in k an ,” in Showa no Shunkan (Jo), edited by A sahi J a n a r u (Tokyo: Asahi S h in b u n sh a, 1974), 209. 22. Asahi Shinbun (m orning edition), 18 A ugust 1931, 1. 23. Asahi Shinbun (m orning edition), 19 S e p tem b e r 1931,1. 24. W h en K okum in w ent o u t o f existence, in late 1930, S hochiku stepped in on the eve o f th e M a n ch u rian outbreak. In later years, lead ersh ip in this a re a w ould revert to A sahi a n d M ainichi. 25. Asahi Shinbun (m orning edition), 21 N ovem ber 1931, 1. 26. Yomiuri Shinbun (m orning edition), 12J a n u a ry 1931, 1. 27. Osaka Asahi (m orning edition), 14 D ecem b er 1931,1. 28. Kiwamono topical films d o m in a te d th e 1932 N ew Year season. In a d d i­ tion to several features a b o u t C olo n el N a k a m u ra , th e re w ere o th ers c e le b ra t­ ing the exploits o f soldiers in th e R usso-Japanese W ar. T h e se in clu d ed T okatsu ’s Fallen Flowers o f Northern Manchuria [Hokuman no Ochibana, 1932) a n d T a n a k a S h ig e o ’s “h u m a n e ” p o rtra it, Ah! Captain Kuramoto Saichi (Ninjo Chutaicho. Aa Kuramoto Saichi Taii, 1931). T h e d e a th o f a rm y scout Y am ada in n o rth ­ e rn M a n c h u ria d u rin g th e sam e p e rio d w as glorified by tw o typical bidan films, Reconnoitering North Manchuria (Hokuman no Teisatsu, 1932, Nikkatsu) a n d Pfc. Yamada—Human Bullet of Manchuria (Manmo noNikudan Yamada Ittohei, 1932, Shochiku).

522

Notes to pages 33-37

29. Ide K innosuke, “ M anshu T a ik e n d a n ,” in Osaka Asahi (evening edition), 13 D e c e m b e r 1931. 30. H ig ash i K e n d a n , “ SensO E iga M a n d a n ,” in Osaka Asahi (m o rn in g e d i­ tion), 6 D e c e m b e r 1931,14. 31. A zum a K ensuke, “ M a n s h u jih e n to E igajin,” Osaka Asahi (m orning e d i­ tion), 6 D e c e m b e r 1931, 6. 32. Q u o te d in P eter M orris, Mizoguchi Kenji (O ttaw a: C a n a d ia n Film Institu tc, 1967), 33. 33. ShinAichi Shinbun (m orning edition), 13 M a rc h 1932, 12. 34. A cco rd in g to S h u k a n A sahi, ed. M eiji, Taisho Shdwa:Nedan no Fuzokushi (Tokyo: A sahi S h in b u n sh a, 1981), 118, sixty yen w ould have been eq u iv alen t to a m o n th ’s w ages for a skilled m an u a l laborer, such as a c a rp e n te r. O n e th o u ­ sand yen rep re sen te d the yearly salary o f the p rim e m in ister (94). 35. “W aga B akudan S anyushi,” in Osaka Asahi, 25 F eb ru ary 1932, 9. 36. T h e se in clu d ed Ishikaw a S eizo’s Nikudan Sanyushi (Shinko), F u ru m i T a k u ji’s Ntkudan Sanyushi (Tokatsu), K ifuji S h ig e ru ’s Bakudan Sanyushi (Nikkatsu U zum asa), Sckizaw a D aisu k e’s Showa Gunshin Nikudan Sanyushi (Sekizawa), a n d a n o th e r film d ire c te d by Fukui S h in z ab u ro . T h e ind u stry quickly realized th a t s a tu ra tin g the m ark et w ith c a rb o n copies was b a d m erch an d isin g , a n d clever variations soon b eg an to a p p e a r in th e theaters. O n e o f these, S hochiku’s m idA pril Four Human Bridge Patriots (Hitobashira Yonyushi), was the tale o f four soldiers w ho are sw ept aw ay after fo rm in g a link across a to rre n t by h o lding logs. O f all th e H u m a n B om b P atrio t films, only o n e seem s to still b e in existence: Y ashu M o to h a ru ’s w ell-p h o to g rap h ed Flower o f the Imperial Army: The Three Human Bomb Patriots (hogun no Hana: Ntkudan Sanyushi, T e ra d a Shokai, 1932), in the je a l­ ously g u a rd e d possession o f a private collector, M a tsu d a K a n ’ichi, in J a p a n . Its first a n d (apparently) only postw ar show ing took place o n 13 S e p tem b e r 1998 at th e T a n a k a J u n ’ichirO M em o rial Film Festival, held in N itta City. O p e n in g se­ q u e n c es focus on the h o m e life a n d p u p p y loves o f th e th re e principals. In m uch the sam e m a n n e r as U s h ih a ra ’s The Army Advances, th e b a ttle sequences em p h a size th e sla u g h te r o f J a p a n e s e tro o p s in front o f th e C h in e se defenses outside S h a n g h a i (indicating p erh ap s th a t censorship rules restricting such h o r­ rific d ep ictio n s h a d yet to com e in to effect). In o n e e x te n d e d scene, the th re e heroes drin k a final toast w ith their c o m m a n d in g officer. T h e ir progress tow ard the b a rb e d w ire n o -m a n ’s-land is d e p ic ted in staccato m ontage, a n d the actu al explosion is a single, alm ost an ticlim actic, cut. In th e finale, b rie f shots d ep ict th e surge o f a tta c k in g ja p a n e s e troops, a n d , in a single shot, troops raise th eir rifles c h e erin g th e ir victory. 37. “ SensO Eiga no D ai H a n r a n ,” in Alainichi Shinbun (m o rn in g edition), 16 M ay 1932. 38. H iro saw a S akae, Watashi no Showa Eigashi (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i Shinsho,

*989)* 35 37-

Notts to pages 37-48

523

39. Ibid. 40. Y am am o to K ik u o , “Senji T aiseika n o E iga D oko,” in Sekai no Eiga Sakka, vol. 31 , Nihon Eiga, edited by S him aji T a k a m a ro (Tokyo: K in e m a ju n p o sha, 1976), 73-78. 41. “ B akudan S a n Yushi K a te i H o m o n k i,” Fujin Koron, A p ril 1932 (re­ p rin te d in Nihon Dai ^asshi Showa Senzen Hen, e d ite d by K o y a m a T ak ah ik o [Tokyo: R yudo S h u p p a n , 1979], 157). 42. Ibid., 158. 43. “ Eiga no KOgyO K a c h i,” Kinemajunpo, io ju n e 1932, 27. 44. K ii N o rio , “N ih o n M oshi K u u sh u u w o U k u re b a ni tsu ite,” Kinema Junpo, 8 M arch 1933, 18. 45. H u g h B o rton, Japan's Modem Century (N ew York: R o n a ld Press C o m -

PanY> 1955). 33546. M iy am o to S eitaro , “N ih o n Fascism n o Shiso,” in ig3oNendai no Nihon: Gendai e no Kyokun, e d ite d by K a w a n o K enji et al. (Tokyo: A sahi S h in b u n sh a, 1983), 82. 47. Y am am oto, “ Senji Taiseika no Eiga D oko,” 81. 48. Q u o te d in M a sa o M a ru y a m a , Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London: O x fo rd Univ. Press, 1969), 10. 49. Film review s in th e n ew spapers a t th e tim e often c o m m e n te d on these tears. See for exam ple “ N ik u d an SanyOshi: N a m id a no K anshO ,” Asahi Shinbun, 8 N ovem ber 1932. 50. Asahi Shinbun, 3 M arch 1932. 51. Q u o te d in Ie n a g a SaburO, The Pacific War; trans. by F rank B aldw in (New York: P a n th eo n , 1978), 49. 52. A ctually “Kokuiyu” (Black D ragon) is th e C h in ese n a m e for th e A m ur River. T h e A nglo-A m erican press, however, consistendy tra n sla ted th e society's n am e as th e “ Black D ra g o n Society” —based on a literal tran slatio n o f th e C h i­ nese c h a ra c te rs —thus m ak in g it so u n d all the m ore sinister. 53. R ep o rted in Yomiuri Shinbun (m o rning edition), 21 F eb ru ary 1931, 3. 34. T h e te rm seimeisen (lifeline) was o n e o f th e key p h rases o f th e e ra , fa­ vored in the rh eto ric o f such right-w ing figures as A raki S adao. It w as also often used in the advertising copy o f such m ilitarist “d o c u m e n ta ry ” features a s Japan Moves North {Hokushin Nihon, Y okoham a C in e m a , 1934). See Kinema Junpo, 1 O c t o b e r 1934, 43. 55. M a ru y a m a M asao , ^ohoban Gendai Seiji no Shiso to Kodo (Tokyo: M iraisha, 1964), 17. 56. T h e script for H ijoji Nihon a p p e a rs in “ E iga ‘H ijoji N ih o n ,’” Gendaishi Shiryo 40: Masu Media Tosei, vol. 1, edited by O k u d a ira Y asuhiro (Tokyo: M isuzu S hobo, 1973), 649. 57. Ibid., 242. 58. M ovie ad in Kinema Junpo, i July 1934, 23.

524

Notes to pages 48-58

59. K u ru sh im a Setsuo, “ D ai GOrei,” Eiga Hyoron, A ugust 1934. 60. Q u o te d in “S how ago S h o J ite n ,” ed. Suzuki T oshio, Gengo 14, no. 1 (1985): 59 61. “B ak u d an SanyQshi n o K a te i Im o n k i,” in terv iew er u n id en tified , in Nihon Dai £asshi: Showa Senzen Hen, 200-201. 62. For a go o d g e n e ra l in tro d u c tio n to th e issue o f th e “fascist-ization” (fasshoka) o f J a p a n e s e public life, see A w aya K e n ta ro , Jugonen Senso no Seiji to Shakai (Tokyo: O tsu k i S h o te n , 1995). A w aya perio d izes its d e v e lo p m en t as: 1) 1930 to the 22 F ebruary In cid en t o f 1936, 2) th e im m ed iate p o stin cid en t p e rio d to early 1942, a n d 3) m id -1942 to the defeat. Also see N ao y a T etsuo, “N ih o n F ascism ron” in Iwanami Koza: Nihon ReJdshi 20, Kindai 7 (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i S h o ten , 1975). 63. C a rto o n , originally p u blished in Yuben,J u n e 1932, re p ro d u c e d in Manga Iramto: Showa no Rekishi, vol. 2, ed ited by H a ra d a K a tsu m a sa (Tokyo: K o d a n sh a , 1984), 61.

2. The Unsatisfactory Mirror 1. U sh ih a ra K iyohiko, “ H ijoji N ih o n to E ig a,” Kaizo, D e c e m b e r 1932,118. 2. Q u o te d in N H K Staff, Puropaganda no Tadotta Michi (Tokyo: K a d o k a w a B unko, 1995), 126. 3. Ib id ., 168. 4. K id o ShirO, “S hochiku ga M an sh o k o k u ni S h in sh u tsu ,” Asahi Shinbuny23 F ebruary 1933, 3. 5. “SensO Eiga n o D ai H a n r a n ,” Kogyokai, 3 J u n e 1935, 59. 6. T a tsu n o Y utaka, “G eiju tsu Tosei Z e h i,” Bungei Shunju,J u ly 1935, in Bungei Shunju ni miru Showashi, vol. 1, edited by B ungei S h u n ju S ta ff (Tokyo: Bungei S h u n ju , 1988), 258 61. T a tsu n o p ro b ab ly h a d in m in d such scholars as M iki K iyoshi a n d o th e rs w ho in the early su m m e r o f 1933 h a d established th e Gakugei Jiyuu Doumei (L eague o f Free A rtists a n d Scholars) to resist th e rising te n ­ d en cy o f b u re a u c ra tic in terferen ce in th e n a tio n ’s intellectual life. T h e m ove­ m en t proved little m o re th a n a feeble gesture, however, a n d w h en th e Tokko (Special H igher) Police o rd ere d it to d isb an d som e m o n th s later, it d id so alm ost im m ediately. 7. N ak ajim a KenzO, Showa Jid a i (Tokyo: Iw an am i S h o ten , 1957), 133. 8. 1936Nen Naimusho Kenetsu Nenkan (N aim usho, 1936), 123. 9. N H K , Puropaganda, 168. 10. Asahi Shinbun, 17 F ebruary 1934, 6* n . O k u d a ira Y asuhiro, “ E iga n o K okka T o se i,” in Koza Nihon Eiga, vol. 4, >Senso to Nihon Eiga (Tokyo: Iw an am i S h o te n , 1986), 243. 12. S uzuki T o m in , “N achisu w a N ih o n ni K o-i o M o tsu k a ,” Bungei Shunju, J u n e 1934, in Bungei Shunju ni Miru Showashi, 206 11. 13. Iw asaki A kira, Eigashi (Tokyo: Toyo K eizai S h in p o sh a, 1961), 161 62.

Notes to pages $8 6g

525

14. Ibid. In an y case, b o th the film ’s director, M a ru y a m a K azuyoshi, a n d the a u th o r o f the original story, K a ta o k a T eppei, w ere alread y on th e m inistry’s “ u n d e sira b le ” list. A sim ilar fate befell G o sh o H e in o su k e ’s New Road (Shindo), fifteen h u n d re d feet (20 percen t) o f w hich w ere slashed b ecau se they d e p ic ted the d ecay o f the fam ily system , a n o th e r ta b o o subject. 15. S ugiyam a H eisuke, “K inji F u n m a n ro k u ,” Kaizo, A ugust 1936,118. 16. Q u o te d in R ic h a rd M . M itchell, Thought Control in PrewarJapan (Ith aca, N.Y.: C o rn e ll Univ. Press, 1976), 127. 17. M o riy a m a T akeichirO , Shisdhan Kansatsho Kaisetsu (Tokyo: S hotokukai, 1937), 20-21. 18. See “N ihon sh u g i to N ih o n E iga o R o n zu ru Z a d a n k a i,” Nihon Eiga, N o ­ v e m b e r 1938, 3 6 -5 0 , for a typical ex am p le o f how the kondankai system at this tim e w as em ployed to “en lig h ten ” film w orld individuals. H ere, elite b u re a u c ra t T ateb ay ash i M ikio, the H o m e M inistry disciple o f K a ra sa w a Toshiki, oversees the process w ith co n siderable skill as a debater. 19. N H K , Puropaganda no Tadotta Michiy 140. 20. Ibid. 21. Iw asaki, Eigashi, 168. 22. See “ K ore m a d e n o KyOkai to K o re kara n o KyOkai,” Nihon Eiga, A pril 1941, 2 - 9 , w h ere K a ra sa w a T oshiki, in a n interview w ith K ikuchi K a n five years a fter the lau n ch in g o f th e KyOkai, confirm s th a t this h a d b e e n in d eed the g o v ern m en t attitude. 23. Im a m u ra T a ih ei, “ E ig a H yO ron n o G e n jo ,” Eigakai 2, no. 5 (M ay

>939): 4924. A n d o S ad ao , “ Eiga H ihyo e n o F u m a n ,” Eigakai 3, no. 8 (M ay 1940): 56 (re p rin ted in Senzen Eizo Riron £ asshi Shusei, vol. 14 [Tokyo: Y um ani S hobo,

i989]. 7°)25. O tsu k a KyOichi, “ E iga HihyO K a ig a n ,” Eiga Hyoron 17, no. 7 (July

•935): 6526. Ibid. 27. T a ih ei Im a m u ra , “ KaisO n o 1930 N e n d a i,” q u o te d by M a k in o M am o ru in his in tro d u c tio n to M ak in o M a m o ru , ed ., Senzen Eizo Rironsh £ ’asshi Shusei: Eigakai, vol. 12 (Tokyo: Y um ani S hobo, 1989), 9. 28. Q u o te d by D. S. H ull, Film in the Third Reich (Berkeley: Univ. o f C alifo r­ nia Press, 1969), 95. 29. T a k e d a T a d a y a, “ Eiga R u p o ru ta a ju no H o k o ,” Eigakai 2, no. 6 (August

!939): 4 1* 30. H ull, Film in the Third Reich, 9 7-98. 31. SatO T a d a o , Nihon Eiga Rironshi (Tokyo: H y o ro n sh a, 1977), 164. 32. T a ih ei Im a m u ra , “ KaisO no 1930 N e n d a i,” q u o te d in Senzen Eizo R i­ ronsh Zasshi Shusei, 6. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid.

526

Notes to pages 69-74

35. Ibid. 36. Domei Tsushin Staff, cd., Domei J iji Nenkan: Showa 13 Nen (Tokyo: Domei Tsushin, 1937), 549. 37. For more detailed coverage o f these films, see Mark Howard Nornes’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: “ Forest o f Pressure: A History o f Japanese Documentary to 1946” (Univ. o f Southern California, August 1996). 38. Makino Masahiro, Katsudoya Ichidai (Eko Shuppansha, 1968), 6. 39. Imamura Tahei, Manga Eiga Ron (Tokyo: Shizenbisha, 1948), 5. 40. Tatebayashi Mikio, for instance, made this claim in the article “Jiji Shokan: Seishin no Nai Nihon Eiga,” Nihon Eiga, December 1937, 31. 41. Iwasaki Akira, “ Nachisu Tosei no Shotai,” Kinema Junpo, 1 June i 934> *8. 42. Negishi K an ’ichi, “ Nihon Eiga no TenbO,” Asahi Shinbun, 21 Ju ly

1938, 5943. See, for instance, Tanikawa Tetsuzo, “ Gendai Nihon no Bunkateki Jokyo,” Chuo Koron no. 596 (July 1937): 7. 44. “ Eigakai Kento Tokumei Zadankai,” Kinema Junpo, 8 September 1939,

9 *445. Tatebayashi Mikio, “ Eiga ni taisuru Kokka no GyOseiteki Kanshin no Mittsu no Dankai,” Nihon Eiga, October 1936,25. 46. Fuwa Suketoshi, Okuhira Yasuhiro, and SatO Tadao, “ KaisO Eiga Ho,” Koza Nihon Eiga, vol. 4, Senso to Eiga (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986), 257. 47. “ Eiga Ho e nojunbi,” Asahi Shinbun, 12 November 1938. 48. Fuwa et al., “ KaisO Eiga Ho,” 258. 49. Ibid., 258-59. 50. Ibid., 260. 51. Fuwa Suketoshi, Eiga Ho Kaisetsu (appendix) (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Eiga KyOkai, 1941), 2. 52. Kimura Sotoji, the former left-wing film director, was one o f the per­ sonalities to completely buy into the notion o f the film law as a “ good thing.” In fact, he had been a leading personality in the official Dai Nihon Eiga KyOkai (Film Association) from 1937. Postwar, he would comment that: “ It now seems utterly ridiculous, but at the time I managed to convince myself that the film law was an excellent method to lead the filmworld out o f its impasse. I became one o f its most fervent supporters and was especially dedicated to carrying out the clause calling for the establishment of a national film college. At the time, the government was dangling over our heads the promise o f a massive infusion o f funds. As it turned out, it was all just talk. We were completely hood­ winked.” Kim ura Sotoji, Shin Chugoku (Tokyo: Higashimine Shobo, 1953), 102. The film school did indeed go into operation, however, first as a training center for cameramen (Eiga Satsuei Gijutsusha Yoseisho, established in April 1942), and then as a full-fledged “ college” (Nihon Eiga GakkO, opened in M ay 1943), with a department specializing in training for actors. Plans were afoot to open

Notes to pages 74 -82

527

further departments (for directing and scenario writing). The school collapsed with the end o f the war. See Makino Mamoru, “ Shiryo de miru ‘Eiga Satsuei Gijutsusha YOsei sho’ to ‘Nihon Eiga Gakko,’ ” Hoshogekkan, M ay 2000. The same issue contains essays and memories by actual former students in the “ college.” 53. Yoshimura KOzaburO, Kinema no Jid a i (Tokyo: Kyodo Tsushinsha, 1985), 286 87. 54. Fuwa Suketoshi, “ Eiga GyOsei 30 Nen,” EigaJunpoy March 1943, 22. 55. Fuwa Suketoshi, “ KaisO Eiga H o ,” KozaNihon Eiga, vol. 4, 260. 56. Fuwa Suketoshi, “ Eiga GyOsei 30 Nen,” 23. 57. Fuwra, Eiga Ho Kaisetsu, 45. 58. Ibid., 46. 59. Ibid., 34. 60. “ Dai Ikkai GinO Shinsa Mondai,” Nihon Eiga, September 1940, 34. 61. Kido ShirQ, Nihon Eigaden (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjusha, 1956), 185. 62. Yamamoto Kikuo, “ Senji Taisei to Kigyo,” in Sekai Eiga Sakka No. 3 1; Nihon Eigashi, 66. Since the re-showing o f already imported films was permit­ ted, filmgoers still had a fairly wide selection of U.S. features to choose from right up to Pearl Harbor. 63. Ibid., 34. 64. “ Eigakai KentO Tokumei Zadankai,” Kmemajunpo, 44. 65. N H K , Puropaganda, 132. 66. Dcguchi Takco, “ Nani ga Hakujin Complex wo Umidashitaka,” in Nihon Eiga to Modernism, edited by Kenji Iwamoto (Tokyo: Riburopotosha, 1991), 106. On this point, I owe much to Deguchi’s excellent essay, and my line o f dis­ cussion closely follows his. 67. Quoted by Deguchi in “ Nani ga Hakujin Com plex wo Umidashi­ taka,” 108. 68. Ibid., 123. 69. Sait 5 Masa, “ Eiga to Bunkaken,” Eiga to Ongaku,Ju ly 1940, 19. 70. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga Eiga no Seishun (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha,

1977), 26. 71. Mori Iwao, Wataski no Geikai Henreki (Tokyo: Aogaerubo, 1975), 63. 72. Yamamoto Kikuo, Nihon Eiga ni okeru Gaikoku Eiga no Eikyo (Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppankai, 1983), 201. 73. Kishi Matsuo, “ Makino Shozo,” in Jinbutsu Nihon Eigashi (Tokyo: Daviddosha, 1970), 10. 74. Yamamoto, Nihon Eiga ni okeru Gaikoku Eiga no Eikyo, 183. Yamamoto also claims that Tasaka Tomotaka, director o f several ideologically sound war films, inserted a furtive gesture o f homage to C apra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in his austerely Spiritist Navy (1943). The scene where the central characters rever­ ently visit the memorial to Admiral Togo is distinctly reminiscent o f the one where Smith communes with the seated figure of Lincoln. 75. Hazumi Tsuneo, “ Eiga JihyO,” Nihon Eiga, M ay 1940, 45.

528

Notes to pages 83 -g i

“ Yunyu Eiga wa Hitsuyo ka? - Zadankai,” Nihon Eiga, April 1938, 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 81. Fuwa, Eiga Ho Kaisetsu, 14. 82. “ Kokuritsu Engeki Eiga Senmon GakkO Setsuritsuan wo Meguru Z a ­ dankai,” Nihon Eiga, April 1937, 21. 83. Roger Griffin, “ General Introduction,” in Fascism, edited by Roger Griffin (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 9. 84. Tatebayashi Mikio, “ Kokka, Bunka, Eiga: Eiga Kaisetsu noJOsetsu,” Nihon Eiga, October 1938,18. 85. Tatebayashi’s comment in “ Zadankai: Nihonshugi to Eiga,” Nihon Eiga% November 1938, 33. 86. In a taidan interview with Kikuchi K an — “ Kore Made no KyOkai,” Nihon Eiga, April 1941 — Kikuchi complains that “ even after five years o f its ex­ istence, I still can’t understand just what the Film Association is all about!” Karasawa then responds: “ Its value has been to harmonize the kanmin environ­ ment and thus prepare the way for the Film Law. It’s the place where industry executives can interact in a convivial manner with government officials. It rep­ resents a sort o f standing kondankai 87. See Aritake Shuji, ed., Karasawa Toshiki (Tokyo: Karasaw a Toshiki Denki Kankokai, 1975), for postwar interviews in which Karasawa discusses his Home Ministry career. Particularly interesting is his insider’s view o f the 26 February Incident and his subsequent removal from leadership o f the Police Division in its immediate aftermath. 88. See “ Eiga Ho wo Meguru Zadankai,” Nihon Eiga, April 1938; “ Nihon Eiga no Kakushin Zadankai,” Nihon Eiga, September 1938; “ SensO Eiga Z a ­ dankai,” Nihon Eiga, December 1938; and “ Kancho to Gyosha Zadankai,” Nihon Eiga, January 1939. 89. Tatebayashi Mikio, “ Eiga TOsei no MokuhyO,” Nihon Eiga, October 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

!4534. Q u o te d in K eene, Dawn to the West, 910. 35. S u g iy am a H eisuke, Bungei 50 Nenshi (Tokyo: M asu S h o b o , 1943), 419. 36. T a n a k a, Ozu Tasußrö Zen Hatsugen, 108. 37. H in o A shihei, Mugi to Heitai (Tokyo: K aizosha, 1938), 328. 38. M arkus A be-N ornes rep o rts th a t d u rin g th e Pacific W ar sections o f this film w ere used in a U.S. A rm y tra in in g film on J a p a n e s e tactics a n d w eaponry. 39. Ib id ., 119. 40. K u rt V onnegut J r., Slaughterhouse-Five (N ew York: D ell P ublishing C o., 1969), *9 41. Im a m u ra T aihei, “ Eiga H y ö ro n n o G e n jo ,” Eigakai, J u n e 1939. 42. T a n a k a, Ozu Yasujirö %en Hatsugen, 152. 43. Ib id ., 153. 44. Ib id ., 104. 45. Y oshim ura, Kinema noJid a i, 272 73. 46. Ibid., 274. 47. N o d a K ögo, “N ishizum i S en sh ach o D e n ,” 64. 48. J o a n M ellen, The Waves at Genji's Door (New York: P a n th eo n Books, *97 6)> H 5 49. S higeno T atsuhiko, “N ishizum i S e n sh ach ö d en H y ö ,” Eiga Hyöron,J a n ­ uary 1941,36. 50. N o d a , “N ishizum i S e n sh a ch ö d e n ,” 69. 51. K oshi T a rö , “ S akuhin H y ö ,” Nihon Eiga, N ovem ber 1940, 67. 52. R uth B enedict, w ho a p p a re n tly saw several o f the films w hile w orking w ith the O ffice o f W ar In fo rm a tio n in 1944, rep o rte d that “A m ericans w ho see these m ovies often say th at they a re the best pacifist p ro p a g a n d a they ever saw.” T en lines later, however, she a d d s th e proviso th a t “ in J a p a n they w ere in deed p ro p a g a n d a o f the m ilitarists,” alth o u g h she never was able to identify the m ech an ism m ak in g them w ork as such. See Chrysanthemum and the Sword (N ew York: M e rid ia n Books, 1946), 193 34.

540

Notes to pages 218-231

53. T su m u ra H ideo, “ E ig a jin ni T su g u ,” Nihon Eiga, O c to b e r 1941,54. 54. N a k a ta n i H iro sh i, “SensO E iga H o n sh itsu R o n ,” Nihon Eiga, J u n e

194'. 32 55. F u n a y a m a S h in ’ichi, “A tarash ik i H u m a n ism no SozQ,” Chuo Koron, J u n e 1939, 43. 56. S ugiyam a H eisuke, Bungei50 Nenshi (Tokyo: T a ra S h o b o , 1941), 351. 57. H a tta N aoyuki (script), Tajinko Mura, collected in Hatta Naoyuki £enshu (Tokyo: E ngeki S h u p p a n sh a , 1972), 273.

6. wThe Time for Rationality Is at an End” 1. O tsu k a KyOichi, “N ih o n E iga n o T en k i,” Eiga Hyoron,J a n u a r y 1938, 67. 2. H asegaw a, Nihon Eigaron, 45. 3. Ib id ., 51. 4. S aw am u ra, Gendai Eigaron, 362. 5. Ib id ., 354 56. 6. Ib id ., 354-55. 7. Ibid., 359. 8. Q u o te d in Iw asaki, Hitler to Eiga, 168 69. 9. S aw am u ra, Gendai Eigaron, 354. 10. Ib id ., 175. 11. Ib id ., 368. 12. Ibid. 13. Ib id ., 179. 14. A p a re n th e tic a l c o m m c n t in S a w a m u ra ’s review o f O z u ’s Shukujo wa Nani wo Wasuretaka, Tokyo Mainichi, 17 A pril 1937. 15. Isono T atsuhiko, “A be Ichizoku ni T su ite,” Kinema Junpo, M a rc h •93 8 ,7 8 16. S a w a m u ra T sutom u, “A be Ichizoku nitsuite,” in Gendai Eigaron, 204. 17. Iw asaki, Eigashi, 239. 18. Q u o te d in Fujita, Nihon Eiga Gendaishi, 82. 19. Q u o te d in ibid., 81. 20. Ibid. 21. Essay d a te d 1938, in T su m u ra H id e o , Eiga to Kansho (Tokyo: S ogensha,

*940 , 50. 22. Q u o te d by Iid a S hinbi, “ K u m ag ai H isa to ra ,” KinemaJunpo %okan: Nihon Eiga Kantoku %enshu (Tokyo: K in e m a Ju n p o s h a , 1976), 151. 23. S aw am u ra, Gendai Eigaron, 205. 24. Ibid., 203. 25. M o ri O g a i, “Abe Ich izo k u ,” Ogai £enshu, vol. 11 (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i Shoten , 1972), 317. 26. S aw am u ra, Gendai Eigaron, 203. 27. K u m ag ai H isa to ra a n d A d ach i N o b u o , script o f Abe Ichizoku in Nihon Eiga Senario £enshu> vol. 4 (Tokyo: K in e m a J u n p o s h a , M arch 1965), 158.

Notes to pages 232 256

541

28. A sa h a ra G o ro , “ Seijika Yo S hinim i ni N a re ,” Bungei Shunju, J a n u a r y 1940, 348-52. 29. Q u o te d in Fujita, Nihon Eiga Gendaishi, 90. 30. T a n a k a Takeshi, “ S akuhinJihyO ,” Nihon Eiga, Ju ly 1941, 89. 31. Q u o te d by Iida, “ K u m a g a i H isa to ra ,” 152. 32. S aw am u ra, Gendai Eigaron, 205. 33. S a w a m u ra T su to m u , “NyOei D ai S a n sh in ,” Eigakai, A ugust 1939, 51. 34. K u m ag ai H isa to ra , “ K irokuteki n a Shinjitsu o ,” in Kinemajunpo Bekkan: Nihon Eiga Daihyo Shinario £enshu, vol. 4 (Tokyo: K in e m a ju n p o s h a , 1958), 40. 35. S a w a m u ra , “S h a n g h a i R ik u sen tai,” 143. 36. Im a m u ra T a ih ei, Senso to Eiga, 125. S a w a m u ra ’s script actu ally has m o re to say a b o u t th e C h inese th a n com es ou t in the film. A cc o rd in g to the script, th e C hinese A rm y shows its u n m an ly spirit by using fem ale spies a n d by a ttack in g from b e h in d a shield o f tee n a g e d boys w ho w h im p er pitifully as they a re driven to th e ir deaths. T h e se elem ents are deleted from the film. 37. Iw asaki, Nihon Eiga Shishi, 178. 38. H asegaw a, Nihon Eigaron, 134. 39. See Fujita, Nihon Eiga Gendaishi, 91 94. 40. K u m a g a i, “ K irokuteki n a Shinjitsu o,” 40. 41. Q u o te d in Fujita, Nihon Eiga Gendaishi, 96. 42. T ra n sla te d into English directly from the screen by the author. 43. S crip t n o te in script for S a w a m u ra T su to m u , “ ShidO M o n o g a ta ri,” Shidd Monogatari (Tokyo: R okugeisha, 1941), 13. 44. Q u o te d by Suzuki Yukichi, “ Eiga Fogiri: K a c h i KOgyO ShidO M o n o ­ g a ta ri,” Eigajunpo, 21 O c to b e r 1941, 54. 45. “ Fogiri Eiga K 5 gy 5 K a c h i,” Eigajunpo, 21 O c to b e r 1941, 44. 46. Q u o te d in F ujita M otohiko, Nihon Eiga Gendaishi, 97. 47. Iid a, “ K u m ag ai H isa to ra ,” 152. 48. S a w a m u ra T su to m u , script for “ 88 N en n o T aiyo,” Nihon Eiga, A ugust

'941’ 65. 49. Ibid., 87. 50. Itam i M a n sa k u , “S e n a rio Jih y O ,” in Itami Xlansaku Essay Shu. e d ite d by O e K e n z a b u ro (Tokyo: C h ik u m a S hobo, 1979), 177. 51. S ince n o script for th e film is available, all q u o ta tio n s o f th e dialogue have b een taken direcd y from th e film version. 52. T anaka Takeshi, “ SakuhinJihyO ,” Nihon £ ^ a ,Ju ly 1941, 86. 53 - Q u o te d in N a k a u c h i T oshio, Gunkoku Bidan to Kyokasho (Tokyo: Iw anam isho, 1988), 47. 54. “S hin Eiga S h okai,” Eigajunpo, O c to b e r 1941, 66. 55. For a full discussion o f this asp ect o f w o m e n ’s m ag a z in e s d u rin g th e w a rtim e p e rio d , see W akakuw a M id o ri, Sense no Tsukuru Joseizjo (Tokyo: C h i­ kum a S h o b o , 1996). 56. A w aya K enro, Jugo Nen Sensoki no Seiji to Shakai (Tokyo: O tsuki S h o te n ,

>995)> 15**.

542

Notes to pages 257-286

57. From advertisement appearing on the back cover o f Nihon Eiga, June

1940»5458. Advertisement on back cover o f Nihon Eiga, April 1940. 59. Tsumura Hideo, “ Nihon Eiga no Saishuppatsu,” Eiga to Hihyd, 233. 60. Aoki BunzO, “ Sakuhin HyO,” Nihon Eiga, November 1940, 72. 7. C h in a D re a m s

1. Imamura Taihei, “ Tairiku Eiga Zuikan,” Nihon Eiga, 12 June 1941, 38. 2. Yoshida Shigeru, “ Shin Tairiku Satsuei K o ,” Bungei Shunju, March 1940. 21-28. 3. Ibid., 23. 4. S higeno T atsuhiko, “ E iga ni A ra w a reta T a irik u ,” Bungei, D e c e m b e r 1939.875. K u ra ta B unjin, “ E iga K osei,” Nihon Eiga9A ugust 1940, 55. 6. Shigeno, “ E iga ni A raw areta T airik u ,” 88. 7. Q u o te d in Ien ag a, The Pacific War,; 12. 8. T h e re a p p e a rs to be no w ritten script for Ohinata Village available for in ­ spection. T h e dialogue is taken direcdy from a video version o f the film. 9. SatO, Nihon Eiga Shisoshi, 338. 10. Tsuji H isaichi, Chuka Den’ei Shiwa (Tokyo: G aifu sh a, 1987), 257-58. 11. Y am aguchi Toshiko (Ri K oran), R i Koran: Watashi no Hansei (Tokyo: S h inchosha, 1987), 117-19. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. “ Z ad a n k ai: T airiku E iga no S h in ro ,” Eigajunpo, M a rc h 1943, 33-3 6 . 14. K a ra su Sei, “K ikaku GeppyO ,” Nihon Eiga, A ugust 1940, 43. 15. D escrib ed a t som e length in Y am aguchi, Ri Koran: Watashi no Hansei,

*53- 7316. Q u o te d in Y am aguchi, T akeshi, Maboroshi no Kinema: Man’ei (Tokyo: H eib o n sh a, 1987), 73. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

U e d a H iro sh i, “T airiku Noto,” Kinema Junpo, A ugust 1940, 60. Ibid. U e n o KOzO, “ KanshO n o Shikaku,” Nihon Eiga, J u n e 1938, 45. Q u o te d in T a n a k a, Japan’s Orient, 157. Y am aguchi, Ri Koran: Watashi no Hansei, 138. Q u o te d in “G eki E iga S h okai,” Eigajunpo, 12 M ay 1943, 27.

8. On the Eve of a New War 1. T h is p h ra s e actually cam e into co m m o n usage in th e early p o stw ar e ra an d has been used as the title for T h o m a s H avens’s excellent tre a tm e n t o f daily life in the w artim e era. 2. H in o A shihei, Senyu ni Omou (Tokyo: G u n ji ShisO Fukyukai, 1939), 63.

Moles to pages 288-304

543

3. In th e e n try for 4 N o v em b er 1940 fro m F u ru k aw a R o p p a , Furukawa Roppa Showa Nikki: Senzen Hen (Tokyo: S h o b u n sh a , 1987), 793-94. 4. “ E iga no S hintaisei,” an editorial in Asahi Shinbun, 8 Ju ly 1940,56. 5. C a rto o n in Asashi Gurafu, 15 M ay 1940, 26. 6. H ashikaw a BunzO, Showa Nationalism no Shoso (N agoya: N agoya D aigaku S h u p p an k ai, 1994), 238. 7. B en-A m i Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (O xford: C la re n ­ don Press, 1981), 4. 8. W. G . Beasley, The Modern History of Japan (N ew York: Praeger, *9 6 3)> 36 3 9. O k a d a S hinkichi, “ M inzoku no S aiten ni tsuite,” Eiga Hyoron, F ebruary

194^ *9 * 10. S h ib a ta Yoshio, Sekai Eiga Senso (Tokyo: Toyosha, 1944), 10. 11. O k a d a , Nihon Eiga no Rekishi, 284 85. 12. Iw asaki, Nihon Eiga Shishi, 168. 13. Ibid. 14. S him izu a n d A be-N ornes, Nichibei Eigasen, 43. 15. K a m e i Fum io, “B unka E iga,” Nihon Eiga, A pril 1941, 43. 16. A raki T ak aju , “ Eiga to S h in-T aisei,” Eiga to Ongaku, A ugust 1940, 45. 17. K id o , Nihon Eigadeny 192. 18. Q u o te d in A be T akeshi, Taiheiyd Senso to Rekishigaku (Tokyo: Yoshikawa K o b unkan, 1999), 12. 19. S aw a m u ra T sutom u, Eiga to Hyogen (Tokyo: Suga S hoten, 1942), 160 61. 20. H e a d in g u p th e recep tio n c o m m ittee for th e H id e r J u g e n d w as none o th e r th a n F uw a Suketoshi, c h ie f o f th e In fo rm a tio n B u re a u ’s Fifth D ivision, Second Section. 21. O k a d a , “M inzoku no S aiten ni T suite,” 48. 22. T a n a k a , Ozu Yasujiro £en Hatsugen, 150. 23. Iw asaki, Hitler to Eiga, 177. 24. Ib id ., 182. 25. H ull, Film in the Third Reich, 117. 26. Q u o te d in ibid., 123. 27. Ib id ., 140. 28. Q u o te d in ibid., 122. 29. U n id en tified source q u o ted in S h ig en o T atsuhiko, “ D oitsu E iga no Seijise i,'’ Eiga Hyoron, M ay 1941, 65. 30. Iw asaki, Hitler to Eiga, 177. 31. T a n a k a , Ozu Yantjiro %en Haisugen, 150. 32. T a g u c h i T etsu, “SensG wo K iroku n o M e d e,” Kinema Junpo Bessatsu: Nihon Eiga Daihyd Senario ^enshu, vol. 4, n o . 33. K ra c au e r, From Caligari to Hitler, 279. 34. T ag u ch i, “SensO wo K iroku no M e d e ,” h i . 35. Ib id ., 281.

544

Notes to pages 305 320

36. Iijima Tadashi, “ M aiagaru Jónetsu ni Tsuite,” Nihon Eigay Jun e

I94I> 3937. See Daryl Davis’s PicturingJapaneseness, where he uses Mizoguchi’s film as an example o f what he terms the era’s “ monumental style.” Davis contends that “ monumentalism” was a cinematic formula consciously employed by Ja p ­ anese directors to make visual, or to “ picture,” the grandeur o f the Japanese national polity. 38. Advertisement in Nihon Eiga, August 1941, 79. 39. Utsumi Aiko and Murai Yoshinori, Shineasuto Kyo E i no Shdwa (Tokyo: Gaifusha, 1987), 66. 40. “ Kim i to Boku Zadankai,” Eigajunpo, 17 October 19 4 1,13. 41. Unfortunately, it appears that neither the actual film nor the script for You and Me are in existence today. The snippets o f dialogue quoted here are script excerpts, published in a separate “ box,” supplementing the zadankai arti­ cle, published in Eigajunpo, quoted above.

42. Ibid., 88. 43. Ibid. 44. Quoted in Utsumi and Murai, Shineasuto Kyo E i no Shdwa, 108. 45. Huzumi Tsuneo, “ Eigakai Jigen ,” Nihon Eiga, December 1941, 63. 46. Anonymous “ Eiga Sanpo” column in Bungei Shunju, February 19 4 2 , 117. 47. “ Eiga no Shógyó Kachi,” Shin Eiga,January 1942, 89. 48. R i Eiichi, “ Nittei Shokuminchijidai no Chosen Eiga,” Koza Nihon Eiga, vol. 3, Talkie nojidai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986), 321. 49. Quoted in Utsumi and Murai, Shineasuto Kyo E i no Shdwa, 115. 50. Nihon Eiga Zasshi K y 5kai, ed., Eiga Nenkan: Shdwa 18 Nen (Tokyo: Nihon Eiga Zasshi KyOkai, 1943), 554. 51. Quoted in Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and ShdwaJapan: A Political Biography (London: Routledge, 1992), 107. 52. Kido, Nihon Eigaden, 191. 53. Kawazura RyüzO, “ Senjika no Eiga,” Nihon Eiga, October 1940, 4. 54. Quoted in Okada, Nihon Eiga no Rekishi, 298.

55. Ibid., 301. 56. Kawazura Ryüzó, “ Eiga Goraku no Hókó: Senjika Eiga no Shimci,” Eigajunpo, 21 April 1942, 13. 57. “ Zadankai: Eiga Senden,” Eigajunpo, April 19 4 1,11. 58. “ Zadankai: Eiga Rinsen Taisei to Kógyó Haikyü no ShO Mondai,” Eigajunpo, September 1941, 31. 59. Quoted in Okada, Nihon Eiga no Rekishi, 299. 60. Ibid., 301. 61. As Kido goes on to point out, “ the Nikkatsu Com pany had the fore­ sight o f declaring its entire film inventory as “ already designated for exhibi­ tion,” a move that allowed Shochiku to keep possession o f its stock o f positive and negative prints. Daito and Shinko meanwhile had to hand over all their own stock to Daiei. “Thanks to Hori’s maneuver, Nikkatsu was saved from this

Notes to pages 321-333

545

fate. As a result, during the latter days o f the war and into the immediate post­ war period, just when film features were becoming scarce, Nikkatsu was able to secure big profits by redistributing its old films” (Kido, Nihon Eigaden, 192). 62. Okada, Nihon Eiga no Rekishi, 301.

9. Repression and Internalization of Control 1. Murayama Tomoyoshi, Byakuya, collected in Gendai Nihon Bungaku fynshu 77: Maetagawa Koichird, Fujimori Seikichi, Murayama Tomoyoshi Shu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1957), 345. 2. See Sakasai Koichiro, Eiga ni Ikiru (Tokyo: Rodo KyOiku Senta, 1976), 45 63. Although there had been various “ class-conscious” struggle groups on the various film company lots and among the employees o f movie theatres in the late TaishO period, it was not until 1926 that they joined forces in a consoli­ dated movement. T h e year 1926 saw the formation o f the All Jap an Film Em ­ ployees League (Zenkoku Eiga JugyOin Domei: “ Zen’ei” ), most heavily made up o f theatre employees. Over the ensuing years, the organizational chart o f the movement becomes extremely confused, with new, rival unions coming into existence, then fusing with existing groups and then splitting away again in even newer constituency combinations. With the arrival o f the talkies, the benshi film narrators, along with the theatre musicians, became radicalized and formed their own unions. This activity flowed in and out o f the general “ class struggle” organizations in the form o f further mergers and secessions, culmi­ nating in the (ultimately unsuccessful) benshi strike o f 1932. T h e organizational umbrella that carried out the great Shinko Kinema strike o f 1929 (as described in Sakasai’s Eiga ni Ikiru) was “ ZenkyO Ippan Shiy 5nin Kumiai, Kyoto shibu (the Kyoto Chapter o f the General Workers’ Union). 3. Iwasaki, Nihon Eiga Shishi, 1 3. 4. Sakasai, Eiga ni Ikiru, 55. 5. “ Nihon Eiga no Kakushin Zadankai,” Nihon Eiga, September 1938, 21. 6. Fusao Hayashi, Daitda Senso Kotei Ron (Tokyo: Yamato Bunko, 1984). 7. Kazam a MichitarC, Kinema ni Ikiru (Tokyo: Kage Shobo, 1987), 114. 8. Iwasaki, Nihon Eiga Shishi, 169. 9. Ibid., 184. 10. Ibid., 188. 11. Quoted in ibid., 196. 12. Tsukasa Osamu, Senso tv Bijulsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992), 19. 13. Yoda, Mizoguchi Kenji, 55 56. 14. Ibid., 80. 15. Quoted in Yoda, Mizoguchi Kenji, 64. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 72. 18. Keene, Dawn to the West, 195 96. 19. Yoda, Mizoguchi Kenji, 105.

546

Notes to pages 333 343

20. Kadota Fusao, Amakasu Tai’i (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1975), 139. 21. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage International, 1951), 6. 22. Iwasaki, Hitler to Eiga, 184. 23. Mori, Watashi no Geikai Henrekx, 165. 24. K ido, Nihon Eigaden, 185. 25. Mori, Watashi no Geikai Henrekx, 165-66. 26. Ibid., 166-67. 27. Takeyama, Showa no Seishinshi, 132-33. 28. Milosz, The Captive Mind, 55. 29. In o m a ta K atsu h ito , “ R aisan : K e n ’etsu KyOka,” Nihon Eiga, N o v em b er 1940, 76.

30. Tasaka Tomotaka, “ Eiga D an,” Nihon Eiga, March 1941, 36. 31. Kam ei Fumio, “ Bunka Eiga GeppyO,” Eigajunpo, December 1941, 36. 32. Hazumi Tsuneo, “ Rinsen Taisei to Eiga,” Eiga Junpo, December i 94*> 8933. Kikuchi Kan, “ Omoitsuku mama,” Nihon Eiga, November 1940,50. 34. Tatebayashi Mikio, “ Eiga Hou ni tsuite,” Nihon Eiga, October 1938, 35. 35. Sawamura, Gendai Eigarony 335 36. 36. “ Kokumin Eiga nojoritsu,” Nihon Eiga, M ay 194.1,57. 37. Sawamura, Gendai Eigaron, 356. 38. “ Kokumin Eiga nojoritsu,” Nihon Eiga, M ay 1941, 15. 39. In the late 1920s, Miyoshi JurO had been the leading light in Left-wing Art League (Sayoku Geijutsu D 5mei) and the author of such Marxism-inspired plays as Who Chops Off the Head? (Kubi 0 Kiru no wa Dare da). In 1928 the Miyoshi’s League was absorbed into All Japan Federation o f Proletarian Arts (Zen Nihon Musansha Geijutsu Renmei: “ N A PF” ). After the suppression o f the proletarian art movement (including Purokino) in the mid-thirties, Miyoshi began to doubt the efficacy of “ political analysis” in art and, engaging in a quiet form o f tenko, thereafter steered into mainstream cultural activities. He subsequently wrote mildly kokusaku screenplays and became a frequent participant in official zadankai on film and theatre. 40. Miyoshi JurO, “ Naniga ‘Kenzen’ ka?” Nihon Eiga, March 194 1,53. 41. “ Kaikaku wo KentO Suru Zadankai,” Nihon Eiga, March 1941, 29. 42. “ Kessenka no Eiga GyOsei,” Eigajunpo, 11 August 1943,55. 43. Karasu Sei, “ Kikaku GeppyO,” Nihon Eiga, November 1940, 67. .44. Tsuneo Hazumi, “ Showa 16 Nen no Nihon Eiga,” Shin Eiga, January 1942,56. 10. The First Year of the Pacific War 1. KJ42.

Hayashi Fumiko, “ Shokokumin no Kokoroiki,” Shufu No Tomo%March

Notes to page*343 -353

547

2. O zak i ShirO, “O o in a ru K angcki no H i,” Hinode, F ebruary 1942, 18. 3. M a k in o M a sa h iro , Eiga Tose: Chi no Maki (Tokyo: H e ib o n sh a , 1977), 89 91-

4. Yamamoto KajirO, Katsuddya Suiro (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1965), 197-98. 5. Mori, Watashi no Geikai Henreki, 165. 6. Noda KOgo, “ Nishizumi Senshacho Den,” in Nihon Eiga Daihyd Shinario Zenshu, vol. 4, edited by Kinemajunpo staff (Tokyo: Kinem ajunposha, 1958), 73. 7. Kikuchi K a n ? “ Hanashi no Kuzukago,” Bungei Shunju, February 1942,189. 8. All dialogue quoted here is translated direcdy from the screen. 9. Okushi Toyo’o, “ Nihon Mizoku Sekaikan no Kakuritsu,” Bungei Shunju, J a n u a ry 1942,134. 10. Quoted in Shillony, Politics and Culture in WartimeJapan, 33. 11. In addition to Dower’s book, see Murakami Yumiko’s study o f Asians in U.S. cinema, Yellow Face (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1993), as one recent Japanese-language example. 12. Actually, Hara Setsuko’s screen image tended to vacillate between the “ purely Japanese” and the exotic “ Westerner.” In Kurosawa’s postwar feature, The Idiot (Hakuchi), for instance, she has an extremely Western aura. 13. Kam iya Shigeru, “jQnigatsu Youka no Kokoro,” Bungei Shunju, Febru­ ary 1942, 55. 14. “ Eiga,” Bungei Shunju, April 1942, 165. 15. Advertisement in Asahi Shinbun, 6January 1942,12. 16. Shimizu and Abe-Nornes, Nichibei Eigasen, 61. At least one movie cam­ era was used during the attack, but the jittery images captured were apparendy not made available for public release. 17. Mori Issei, Yamada Koichi, and Yamane Kazuo, Mori Issei: Eiga Tabi (Tokyo, Soshisha: 1989), 119 20. 18. “ Fagiri Eiga no KOgyO Kachi,” Eigajunpo, February 1942, 29. 19. Kikuchi K an, “ Hanashi no Kuzukago,” Bungei Shunju, February'

1942, 4920. Yanai Takao, “ Chichi Ariki Zengo,” in Nihon Eiga Daihyd Shinario £enshu, vol. 5, edited by Kinemajunpo staff (Tokyo: Kinem ajunposha, 1958), 109. 21. Joan Mellen, The Waves at Genji's Door (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 156. 22. David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics o f Cinema (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 291. 23. Mellen, Waves at Genji’s Door, 156 57. 24. Iijima Tadashi, “ Chichi Ariki ni Tsuite,” Eigajunpo, 21 April 1942, 37. 25. Kawazura RyuzO, “ Eiga Goraku no Hoko: Senjika no Eiga no Shimei,” Eigajunpo, 21 April 1942, 13. 26. Ueda KOzO, “ Eiga no Genjo,” Biungei Shunju, September 1942, 127. 27. “ Bunka Eiga Shinsa Hyou,” jVi/io/i Eiga, 17 March 1942, 23. 28. Ibid.

548

Notes to pages354~377

29. Kanda Tetsuya, “ Nankai no Hate wo Ginyoku no Hinomaru,” Bungei Shunju, August 1942,19. 30. Mita Ikumi, “ Nankai no Hanataba ni tsuite,” Nihon Eiga,]u\y 1942, 44. 31. Kanda, “ Nankai no Hate,” 19. 32. All the dialogue quoted from this film are translations o f the Japanese original taken from the screen. 33. Quoted in Dower, War without Mercy, 130. 34. Ishii Nobuta, “ NanpO no Eisei Bunka,” Bungei Shunju, October 1942, 7. 35. “ Zadankai: NanpO Eiga Seisaku,” Eigajunpo, 7 August 1942, 32. 36. Tsumura Hideo, Eiga Seisakuron (Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1943), 396. 37. Tada Reikichi, “ NanpO Sensen Jugun,” Shin Eiga, February 1942, 34. 38. All dialogue here is translated from the screen. 39. Kitamura Tsunenobu, Senzen, Senchu Togo Monoshiri Monogatari (Tokyo: Kojinsha, 1995), 260. 40. “ Senki Eiga wo Meguru Mondai,” Shin Eiga, October 1942, 44. 41. All dialogue has been translated directly from the screen. 42. Ibid. 43. Oba Yahei, “ Seniki Eiga ni tsuite,” Shin Eiga, December 1942. 44. “ Senki Eiga wo Meguru Mondai,” Eigajunpo, n April 1942, 43. 45. “ Bunkasen zadankai,” Bungei,January 1942, 32-43. 46. Ibid. 47. “ Senki Eiga wo Meguru Mondai.” 48. Tanaka Ju n ’ichirO, Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chuokoronsha,

>957). 3*749. Takaiwa Kei and Toyama Tetsu, “ Eikoku Kuzururu no Hi,” in Nihon Eiga Daihyo Shinario ^jtnshu, vol. 4, edited by Kinemajunpo staff (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 1958), 79.

50. Ibid., 88. 51. Iijima Tadashi, “ Eigajihyo: Eikoku Kuzururu no Hi,” JVifawf Eiga,June

1942, 7952. Takaiwa Hajimc, “ Sonokoro no Koto,” in Kinemajunpo Bessatsu: Nihon Eiga Daihyo Senario £enshu, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 1972), 126. 53. Toba Yukinobu, “ Ken’etsuJidai,” in Kinemajunpo Bessatsu:Nihon Eiga Sakuhin Taikan, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kinema Junposha, 1961), 26. 54. Ibid. 55. Yamamoto Satsuo, “ Tsubasa no Gaika ni Oite,” Shin Eiga, December «94^, 4356. “ Shin Eiga no Shokai,” Shin Eiga, November 1942, 78. 57. Iijima Tadashi, “ Shin Taisei Sonogo,” Shincho, April 1942, 34. 58. Yamamoto Satsuo, Walashi no Eigajinsei (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1984), 93. 59. Yamamoto, “Tsubasa no Gaika ni Oite,” 44. 60 . Ibid.

Notes to pages 378-402

549

61. Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography\ 89. 62. Nanbu Keinosuke, “ Tsubasa no Gaika ni tsuite,” Nihon Eiga, November

1942, 3363. Yamamoto, “ Tsubasa no Gaika ni Oite,” 44.

11. The New Spiritism —“A Progress of Souls” 1. From movie ad in Shukan Shokokumin, 1 December 1942. 2. Yamamoto, Katsudoya Suiro, 223 24. 3. Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film : Art and Industry (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 131. 4. Yamamoto, Katsudoya Suiro, 198. 5. Ibid., 199-221. 6. Ibid., 122. 7. Ibid., 120. Yamamoto goes on to mention that the irony o f his “ U.S." carrier set was further compounded by Fujita Tsuguji, the great Japanese real­ ist painter who had been actively collaborating with the war effort by painting huge propaganda murals. While pictures from Life had been used for the set, Fujita in turn used the open sets at Toho as the model for his famous paintings representing the attack on Pearl Harbor. 8. Iijima Tadashi, “ Kessen no Ozora he ni tsuite,” Nishi Nihon Shinbun, 19 September 1943, 23. 9. Iijima Tadashi, “ KatO Hayabusa SentOtai ni tsuite,” Eiga Hyoron, April 1944, 22. 10. Interview with Yamamoto KajirO, Nihon Eiga,January 1945,14. 11. Hino Ashihei, “ Rikugun Eiga no Kiso,” Shin Eiga, April 1943,46. 12. Yamamoto Akira, “JOgonen SensO K a Nihon no SensO Eiga,” Koza Nihon Eiga, vol. 4, Senso to Nihon Eiga, 69. 13. Tsumura, Eiga Seisakuron, 392. 14. Dialogue translated by the author direcdy from the screen. 15. “ Shinmin no Michi” (reprinted in Kazou Hijikata, Nihon Bunkaron to Tenndsei Ideology [Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1983], 264). 16. Ibid. 17. Jinjo Shogakko Shushin: Kyoshi Yd (Tokyo: Monbusho, 1939), 43. 18. Paul dc M an, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. o f Minnesota Press, 1986), 61. 19. Kokugo Kyoiku Shogaku Kokugo Dokuhon Sougou Kenkyu, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanamisha, 1937), 38. 20. Ibid. 21. Full text reproduced in Nakauchi, Gunkoku Bidan, 60 61. 22. SatO, Nihon Eiga Shisdshi, 18. 23. Sawamura, Gendai Eigaron, 67. 24. “ Saikin Eiga HyO” Nihon Eiga,January 1945, 8.

550

Notes topages 405-426

25. Quoted in Nakauchi, Gunkoku Bidan, 24. 26. Nakauchi, Gunkoku Bidan>27. 27. Iijima Tadashi, “ KatO Hayabusa SentOtai ni tsuite,” Eiga Hydron, April *944>27. 28. Inagaki Yoshihiko, Showa Kotoba 60 Nen (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985), 85.

29. Ibid., 86. 30. Yomiuri Shinbun, 25June 1943, 2. 31. Ad copy from “Ima wa Kessen da!” Nihon Eiga, M ay 1944. 32. Ienaga, The Pacific War, 209. 33* Quoted in Harada Katsumasa, ed., Showa no Rekishi: Showa no Senso (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1983), 144. 34. Ibid. 35* Quoted in Thomas R . Havens, The Valley of Darkness (New York: Univ. Press o f America, 1986), 96. 36. “ Seisan Zokyo Eiga Zadankai,” Shin Eiga, June 1943. 37. “ Seisan Zokyo Eiga no Zadankai,” Eigajunpo, 21 August 1943. 38. Ibid. 39. See Shimizu and Abe-Nornes, Nichibei Eigasen, 67-71, for another anal­ ysis o f the typical storyline. 40. All dialogue here has been translated by the author directly from the screen. 41. Information taken from “ Nidai Seisan Kakuju Eiga,” Eiga no Tomo, A pril 1943,54. 42. See for example K ida Rei’ichi, “ Saikin no SensO Eiga,” Eiga no Tomo, March 1944, 39. 43. Kurosawa, Something Uke an Autobiography, 132. 44. Ibid., 134. 45. Suganuma Yuriko, “ Kaigun Kojo no Nijussai no Seishun,” in Nihonjin no Senso, edited by Asahi Shinbin Tema Danwashitsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1988), 428.

12. Trends in the Middle Phase 1. “ Korega Teki da! YajQ Minzoku America,” Skuju no Tomo, October ! 944>352. Iijima Tadashi, “ Eiga HyO,” Kahoku Shinbun, 19 October 1942, in Iijima Tadashi, Senchu Eigashi: Shi/d (Tokyo: M. G. Shuppan, 1984), 148. 3. Makino, Eiga Tose: Chi no Maid, 103-4. 4. Many o f the films being shown in the first several months o f 1942 still bore the logos o f Nikkatsu, Daito, and Shinko, but this would not last. As had been agreed in the fall of 1941, the three firms were merged into the new Daiei, with two managing directors, Nagata Masa’ichi o f Nikkatsu and Kawai Ryusai o f Daito. From the beginning, the “ personality” o f the new Daiei Company

Notes to pages 426-435

551

was rather peculiar, since it had been conceived to reflect direcdy the will and policies o f the Information Bureau. Yet, many o f those in its line-up o f direc­ tors and actors had established their reputations in the jidaigeki field, one o f the genres the Bureau approved o f the least. Although Shima Koji and Gosho Heinosuke were known for their modern dramas, its other top directors— Ushihara Kiyohiko, Ikeda Tomiyasu, and Inagaki Hiroshi —were all known best for their period pictures. Daiei’s stable o f actors was also largely made up o f tal­ ents from the jidaigeki field, some o f whom dated back to the “ golden era” of swordplay silents turned out by Nikkatsu and the old Makino company Most of the top names o f the field were there — Bando TsumasaburO, Arashi KanjurO, Kastaoka Chiezo, Tsukigata Ryunosuke, and Ichikawa Utraemon. O f the company’s actresses, meanwhile, only Todoroki Yukiko could have been counted among the nation’s leading ladies o f the screen. 5. Marune SantarO, “ Tekigaishin tojidaigeki,” Shin Eigay]\x\y 1943, 43. 6. Marune SantarO, “ Doreisen ni Oite,” Eiga no Tomoy]u\y 1943, 29. 7. “ Geki Eiga Shokai,” Eigajunpo, 11 August 1943. 8. Mizumachi Seiji, “ Gekieiga HihyO,” Eigajunpo, 21 September 1943. 9. Back cover advertisement for Slave Ship, published in Nihon Eiga, Septem­ ber 1943. One o f the intriguing curiosities o f the film was the presence o f Kamiyama Sojin as the villainous British naval captain. In 1919, Kam iyam a had turned his back on a moderately successful career on the Shingeki stage to go off to Hollywood. Among his numerous films there was the legendary Douglas Fairbanks feature Thief of Baghdad (1924), in which he played the grotesquely evil King o f the Mongols. “ Throughout my thirty-odd film acting career there,” he would recall, “ I was often cast in bizarre, totally inscrutable parts.” Kam iyam a’s frequent portrayals o f outrageous Oriental stereotypes earned him a reputation among nationalists back home as “ a national disgrace.” Re­ turning to Jap an in 1929, his long legs and deep-set eyes made him the natural choice o f Japanese directors seeking someone to play the part o f a Caucasian villain. Kam iyam a’s career thus came a full, ironic cycle. Only a year before Pirate's Flag, he had played the Western scoundrel Jaco b in ItO Daisuke’s Kurama Tengu and would again play a similar role in ItO ’s International Smuggling Ring. 10. Sawahata Ichiro, “ Kakushite Kamikaze ha Fuku,” Shin Eiga, October

I94411. All dialogue here translated by the author directly from the screen. 12. Sugiura Yukio, “ Konna Tekigaishin Eiga wo!” Eiga no Tomo,Ju n e 1943. Sugiura’s antipathy toward Westerners was to revive in the fifties and sixties, when he turned out large numbers o f race-baiting cartoons. 13. All dialogue here translated direcdy from the screen by the author. 14. T he “Japanese connection” was to revolve around the efTorts of Meiji-era hero Hirayama ShQ to help Aguinaldo. In Jap an , Hirayama would be shown gathering together a supply o f arms for Aguinaldo. Scriptwriter Oguni was quoted as saying, “ The spirit o f this collaboration will serve as an

552

Notes to pages 435-431

inspiration as I take on this work.” One reason why this particular “ liberation” film was aborted may have been that there was already an incipient AntiJapanese guerrilla movement in the Philippines by mid-1942. In this case, the liberationist m otif could have backfired against the occupation government. T he Aguinaldo legacy was in any case up for grabs by both sides. Several U.S. war films, such as Bataan (1942), also invoke memories of Aguinaldo’s guerrilla tactics as inspiration for similar tactics to be used against the new invaders from Japan. 15. Fukai Tadao, “ Dokuritsu SensO,” Shin Eiga, August 1942, 44.

16. All dialogue here translated direcdy from the screen by the author. 17. Shimura Rikuya, “ Taisho Shokin no M ichi,” Bungei Shunju, December 1944, 48. 18. Iji Chishin, “ Taigai Senden Eiga to shite,” Eiga Hydron, April 1944, 59. 19. All dialogue here translated directly from the screen by the author. 20. Fukai Tadao, “ Dokuritsu SensO,” Shin Eiga, August 1942, 35. 21. Imai Tadashi, “ SenshO Senryojidai no KaisO,” Koza Mhon Eiga, vol. 4, Senso to Mhon Eiga, 205. 22. Ibid., 203. 23. Ibid., 205. 24. Nanbu Keinosuke, “ Shin Eiga HyO,” Shin Eiga,June 1942, 49. 25. Asahi Shinbun, isJu ly 1936, 13. 26. Shimizu Akira, “ KanchO Eiga Oboegaki,” Eiga Junpo, June 1942, 47. 27. Nanbu Keinosuke, “ Shin Eiga HyO,” Shin Eiga, June 1942,41. 28. Hisamatsu Seiji, “Jukei kara K ita Otoko ni tsuite,” Shin Eiga, August *943, 24. 29. Quoted in David Culbert, “ Why We Fight: Social Engineering for a Democratic Society at War,” in Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II, edited by K . R . M. Short (Knoxville: Univ. o f Tennessee Press, 1983), 181. 30. Ibid. 31. Shirahama Hiroshi, “ ShOrai no Bocho Eiga ni Yosu,” Shin Eiga, August 1 9 4 3 .i6 32. A m a n o H yozo, “N ih o n Seishin to E ig a ,”

Shin Eiga, O c to b e r 1943, 41.

33. Ishizaki Ryozo, “ Teki no ShisO Boryaku,” Shin Eiga, January 1944, 31. 34. Amano, “ Nihon Seishin to Eiga,” 41. 35. Hirosawa, Watashi no Shoiva Eigashi, 141. 36. Ibid. 37. Oliver J. Caldwell, A Secret War: Americans in China 1944 45, quoted in Short, Film and Radio Propaganda, 145. 38. O ba Yahei, “ Singapore Sokogeki wo Mite,” Shin Eiga, June 1943. 39. See “ Hogashi Kuzen Sandai Senki Eiga,” Eiga no Tomo, December 1942, 33 “ 36, for a detailed plot summary o f Shingaporu Sokogeki. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid.

Notes to pages 451-465

553

42. Mizumachi Seiji, “ Nikutai Aru Sensô Eiga wo,” Eiga Hyôron, April 1944,4143. This information is drawn from Markus Abe-Nornes’s program notes for Dawn of Freedom (Ano Hata wo Lite), in Media Wars Then and Now: Tamagata International Documentary Film Festival \gi (Tokyo: Yamagata Documentary Eigasai, 1991), 257. 44. Tsumura Hideo, “ Sükô no Bi to Tekigaishin no Kôyô,” Eiga Hyôron, April 1944. 45. Ibid. 46. Nishiyama Masaru, “ Yukai Sareta M ura Musume,” Shin Eiga, January *944>Si47. Abe-Nornes, Media Wars Then and Now, 259. 48. Furukawa, Furukawa Roppa Shdwa Nikki: Senzen Hen, 312. 49. Quoted in Ienaga, Pacific War\227. 50. Niigata Shuho, 27 September 1944. Director Tanaka Shigeo was well known in the industry for his “ serious and timely” film production. His numer­ ous national policy film output included I f Japan Were to Be Bombed (1933), March of the Rising Sun Flags (1939), The Day England Fell (1942), and the powerful K am i­ kaze film, The Last Visit Home (Sigo no Kikyo, 1945). Almost immediately after the surrender, he turned around and made the antifascist film Who Is the Criminal? (Hanzaisha wa Dareka, 1945).

13. The Late War Period 1. Collected in Morikawa Hotatsu, ed., Teikoku Nihon Hyôgôshü (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 1989), 44. 2. Asahi Shinbun, 9 June 1943, 2. 3. Asahi Shinbun, 19 June 1943, quoted in Sakuramoto, Daitôa, 135. 4. Kikuchi Kan, Eigajunpo , 1 Ju ly 1943, quoted in Sakuramoto, Daitôa, 98. 5. Ibid. 6. Asahi Shinbun, 29 February 1944. 7. Asahi Shinbun, 1 March 1944. 8. Shimizu and Abe-Nornes, Nichibei Eigasen, 73. 9. Ibid., 74. 10. Mori, Watashi no Geikai Henreki, 166. 11. Furukawa, Furukawa Roppa Shôwa Nikki: Senchü Hen (Tokyo: Shobunsha,

•987)>554 5512. 13. 14. 15. Daitôa, 16.

Ibid. Hirosawa, Watashi no Shôwa Eigashi, 136. Nagai Kafu, DanchoteiNtchijô, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981), 437. For a complete list o f the War Emergency Measures, see Sakuramoto, 135 40. Sakasai, Eiga ni Ikiru, 242.

554

Notes to pages 466-480

17. A dvertising copy for Bakudan to Danpen, a p p e a rin g in Nihon Eiga, J a n u ­ a ry 1944. 18. “ Serebesu E iga HyO,” Nihon Riga, D ecem b er 1944,51. 19. T su m u ra, Eiga Seisakuron, 29. 20. Ibid., 44. 21. From testim ony presented in the D utch governm ent docum entary, CallingNippon (1947). Also see U tsum i a n d M u ra i, Shineasuto Kyo E i no Showa, 171 73. 22. S him izu a n d A b e-N o rn es, Nichibei Eigasen, 77. 23. Asahi Shinbun, 7 M arch 1944. 24. Poster copy for M om otarO , Umi no Washi, in th e p riv a te collection o f W aka K oji, N agoya, J a p a n . 25. For a discussion o f several m id w ar carto o n features, see K om atsuzaw a H ajim e, “ E nem y Im a g e s,” in th e Y am agata In te rn a tio n a l D o c u m e n ta ry Film Festival 1991 catalogue, Media Wars, Then and Now, 239-49. 26. K ikuchi K a n , “ O m oitsuku m a m a ,” Nihon Eiga, O c to b e r 1943, 51. 27. K itagaw a, “S hoichi, Eiga HihyO n o K in o u to K e n ’i,” Nihon Eiga, O c to ­ b e r 1943,13. 28. T su m u ra H ideo, “ Eiga HihyO no K in o u ,” Nihon Eiga, O c to b e r 1943, 28. 29. O oki N a o ta ro , “ HihyO D am ash ii,” Nihon Eiga, O c to b e r 1943, 27. 30. Ish ik a w a ju n , “ Eiga HihyO,” Nihon Eiga, O c to b e r 1943, 31. 31. Im a m u ra T a ih ei, “ Eiga HihyO no Y ukue,” Nihon Eiga, O c to b e r 1943. Actually, Im a m u ra ’s articlc is th e freshest a n d m ost carefully th o u g h t th ro u g h o f all the fifteen. W ith his leftist theoretical b ack g ro u n d a n d his consistent v a n ­ tage p oint on c in e m a as a “g ro u p a rt,” he was o n e o f th e few critics intellectu­ ally p re p a re d to use th e official c o n c ep t o f p e o p le ’s c in e m a as th e d e p a rtu re p o in t for a new b ree d o f film criticism . His article explains his m eth o d o lo g y for a new kind o f “collective a u d ien ce criticism ” : “S how a film to a tonarigumi g ro u p , a vo lu n teer la b o r corps, o r even a g ro u p m a d e u p o f fa rm e rs o r fisher­ m en , a n d th en collect th e ir opinions, classifying th em a c c o rd in g to vocation a n d age. Film , unlike plays o r novels, is th e ultim ate collective a rt fo rm , a n d it therefore d e m a n d s g ro u p o r m ass criticism such as this.” 32. S a k u ram o to T o m io how ever claim s th a t E iga H yO ron succeeded in p u ttin g o u t slim, sm all-d istrib u tio n “special” editions in M a rc h a n d M ay 1945 (Daitda Senso to Nihon Eiga, 200). T h is claim has yet to be verified. 14. I n th e S h a d o w o f D e fe a t 1. K ita m u ra TarO, “A a S a ip a n ,” q u o te d in T suboi H id e to , hoe no Shukusai (Nagoya: N agoya Univ. Press, 1997), 245. 2. O g u ro Toyoshi, “ R aigckitai no S eishin,” Shin Eiga, S e p te m b e r 1944, 42. 3. Ibid. 4. N agai Tsuyoshi, “ R aigekitai,” Shin Eiga, N ovem ber 1944, 21. 5. Gendaishi Shiryo, vol. 40, Mass Media 7bsei (1), 525.

Notes to pages 481 497

555

6. T h is a n d su bsequent dialogue tran slated by the a u th o r directly from the screen. 7. H in o A shihei, tran slated by D o n ald K eene, Dawn to the West, 935. 8. Yoshida Yuyasu, “ EihO kara n o KibO,” Nihon Eigay 1J a n u a r y 1945,11. 9. T okugaw a M usei, Akarumi 15 nen (Tokyo: Sekaisha, 1948), 250. 10. S ato H a ru o , “ H ito u Senkyoku ni Yosete,” Bungei Shunju, February'

I94511. T h is a n d all su b seq u en t dialogue tra n sla ted by th e a u th o r direcd y from the screen. 12. N a k a n o M in o ru , “ H ak k o h a T o b ita tsu ,” Bungei Shunju, F eb ru ary

‘ 945- 3613. T h e film sta rre d T a k a d a M in o ru , a m atin ee idol from th e silent days, a n d th e K o rean a c to r K im Yu Kei. 14. U eno IchirO, Nihon Eiga, M a rc h 1945,9. 15. “ Saishin E iga HyO,” Eiga no Tomoy 1943, 32. 16. A kinaga Yoshiro, “ Bei H o n d o K ushQ ,” Shin Eiga, S e p te m b e r 1943, 39. 17. Ishikaw a KOyO, Tokyo Daikushu no %en Kiroku (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i S h o te n , *992 ), 21. 18. F urukaw a, Furukawa Roppa Showa Nikki: Senchu Hen, 706. 19. Ibid. 20. Ishikaw a, Tokyo Daikushu no %en Kiroku, 33. 21. Ibid., 35 37. 22. H ayashi H ay ao , “ S hinkeisen,” Bungei Shunju,J a n u a ry 1945, 45. 23. K ikuchi K a n , “S o n o K okoro K i,” Bungei Shunju, F ebruary 1945, 23. 24. Q u o te d in “ShOwa 20 N en Eiga N e n k a n ” (unpublished), th e h a n d w rit­ ten m an u sc rip t for w hich is on dep o sit in the Film C e n te r o f T okyo N atio n al M u seu m o f M o d e rn A rt. 25. O g a ta , “Im a HitsuyO n a M o n o ,” Nihon Eiga, J a n u a ry 1945, 12. 26. T su m u ra H ideo, “T e n b a re Ishin T asuke ni tsuite,” Nihon Eiga, J a n u a ry 1945,8. 27. “ Eiga S h okai,” Nihon Eiga, J a n u a ry 1945,14. 28. T okugaw a, Akarumi / j nen, 251. 29. See Eric Idle, The Road to Mars (L ondon: P an Books, 1999), for a n ex­ ten d e d discourse o n “red nose” versus “w hite face” com edians. 30. Q u o te d in N a k a h a ra Y um ihiko, Teihon Nihon no Kigekijin (Tokyo: Shob u n sh a, 1977), 19. 31. Asahi Shinbun, 29 M a rc h 1945. 32. For ex am p le, see his d iary entry' for 10 A pril 1945 in Furukawa Showa Nikki: Senchu Hen, 756. 33. Shim izu a n d A be-N ornes, Nichibei Eigasen, 75. 34. Ishikaw a, Tokyo Daikushu no Kiroku, 86. 35. Furukaw a, Furukawa Roppa Showa Nikki: Senchu Hen, 780. 36. Ibid., 836.

556

Notes to pages 497-507

37. Ibid., 786. 38. Asahi Shinbun, 5 Ju ly 1945. 39. Q u o te d in H iro saw a Sakae, Nihon Eiga n ojidai (Tokyo: Iw an am i S h o ten [D o jid ai L ib rary ], 1990), 109. 40. Ibid., i n . 41. M orikaw a, Teikoku Nihon Hyogoshu, 258. 42. Asahi Shinbun, 2 Ju ly 1945. 43. K a n d a R okuro, “ ShOri e no M ich i,” Asahi Shinbun, 13 A ugust 1945, 3. 44. Y am am oto, Katsudo Suiro, 250. 45. Ibid. 46. M o ri, Watashi no Geikai Henreki, 168 69. 47. U sh ih a ra , Kiyohiko Eigafu^oNen, 236. 48. M asu m o to , Shochiku Eiga, 162. 49. Q u o te d in H irosaw a, Watashi no Showa Eigashi, 137. 50. H a z u m i T suneo, Hazumi Tsuneo (Tokyo: K an k o sh a, 1959), 295. 51. Y am am oto, Katsudo Suiro, 254. 52. Suzuki K azu ro , Eiga Uragatabanashi (Tokyo: K o d a n sh a , 1980), 24. 53. Q u o te d in H a ra d a K a tsu m a sa , Showa no Rekishi (Tokyo: S h o g ak k an

>983). ' 3754. T a n a k a J u n ’ichirO, Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i S h o -

ten, 1957), 137. 55. Iw asaki, Eigashi, 214. 56. K id o , Nihon Eigaden, 215. 57. Q u o te d in S ato T a d a o , Nihon Eigashi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iw a n a m i S h o te n , 1995), *65. Also see K ido, Nihon Eigaden, 210. 58. Ibid. 59. K yoko H ira n o , Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (W ashington, D .C .: S m ith ­ sonian, 1995), 28. 60. Q u o te d in E n d o T atsuo, Eirin (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1973), 13. 61. M o ri, Watashi no Geikai Henreki, 169. 62. K ido, Nihon Eigaden, 215. 63. H irosaw a, Nihon Eiga nojidai, 129. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. Also, in volum e 2 o f his Nihon Eigashi, SatO T a d a o re tu rn s to the issue o f the film w o rld ’s “w a r responsibility” (senso sekinin), in a rueful, m agiste­ rial to n e th a t ultim ately a d d s n o th in g to th e debate: “ P robably the reason [it] w as never p u rsu e d vigorously w as th a t, to a g re a te r o r lesser ex ten t, everyone in th e film w orld w as a co llaborator. T h e h andful o f b a n ish e d film executives w ere n o th in g m ore th a n scap eg o ats—everyone knew th a t those w ho h a d m ad e w ar-su p p o rt films h a d n o t been forced to d o it against th eir will. F u rth e rm o re , th e executives them selves h a d b een painfully a w are o f th e fact th a t love ro­ m an ces h ad far g re a te r box-office a p p e a l.” SatO goes on to the fam iliar claim

Notes to pages 508-514

557

th a t “reg ret for the w ar” (senso e no hansei) h a d inspired m any o f the fo rm e r col­ lab o ra to rs to tu rn o u t “pacifist” fare in th e p o stw ar period. 66. Iw asaki, Nihon Eiga Shishi, 187. 67. Itam i M ansaku, “SensO Sekinin no M o n d a i,” Eiga Shunju, A ugust 1946. 68. K ido, Nihon Eigaden, 200. 69. In c lu d e d in Ieshiro M iyoji, Sengo Shiryo: Bunka (Tokyo: N ih o n H y o ro n sha, 1974). In T su m u ra ’s defense, it sh ould be n o ted th a t even d u rin g th e w ar years T su m u ra publicly c o m p lain ed o f “d eb ilita tin g d epressions” (see Eiga Seisakuron, 3-4), w hich he felt w ere affecting th e q u ality o f his w ork. In his postw ar recollections, these depressions becam e “m en tal illness.” 70. S a w a m u ra T sutom u, “ S ens 5 T a ik en K a r a E ta M o n o ,” Scenario, Septem b e r 1965,45. 71. Y am am oto, Watashi no Eigajinsei, 89. 72. R ichie a n d A n derson, TheJapanese Film, Art and Industry, 164. 73. Ita m i, “SensO Sekinin n o M o n d a i.” 74. Y oshim oto T a k a ’aki, Takamura Kotaro (Tokyo: S h u n sh u sh a, 1957), 27. 75. Iw a ta Toyoo, Kaigun (Tokyo: H a ra S hobo, 1983), 200. 76. Ibid., 214. 77. Ib id ., 215. 78. Ibid., 230. 79. M ilosz, The Captive Mind, 71. 80. M ilosz identifies the te rm as o f Islam ic origin: “N o t only w as the gam e played in th e defense o f o n e ’s th o u g h ts a n d feelings well know n th e re [in the M iddle E ast], b u t in d eed it w as tra n sfo rm e d in to a p e rm a n e n t institu tio n a n d g raced w ith th e n a m e o f K e tm a n .” Ibid., 57. 81. Ib id ., 69-70.

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INDEX OF NAMES

Conde, David, 504 Cooper, Gary, 81 Crew e House, 137 Crosby, Bing, 473

Abe Yutaka, n , 16, 259, 392, 4 3 8 ,4 5 1,

452, 455»507 Abe-Nornes, M arkus, xix, xxviii, xxix Akam atsu Katsum aro, 73 Akim oto K en , 114 , 115 ,12 9 , 130

Davis, Daryl, xxvi

A kinaga Yoshirö, 489 Akutagaw a Mitsuzö, 267 AJessandrino, GofFredo, 296

De Forrest, Lee, 149 De Leon, G erardo, 452 De Kow a, Victor, 297 de M an, Paul, 394 Dow er,John, 345 Durbin, D eanna, 78 Dyke, Kerm it, 504

Am akasu M asahiko, 275-76, 333 A m am iya Kenzö, 116 A m ano Heizö, 4 4 8 -4 9 ,4 58 Ambler, Eric, 443 Angst, Richard, 11 7 ,16 1 Aoyam a Sugisaku, 422 Aoyanagi Nobuo, 391 A rai Ryöhei, 423 Araki Sadao, 4 0 ,4 3 ,4 6 , 47, 55, 73, 85, 133 Aras hi K an jurö, 44

Edison, Thom as, 2 Edogawa R an po, 25 Egaw a Ureyo, 270, 281, 293 Egi R i ’ichi, 26

Arishim a Takeo, 145 Atsugi T aka, 1 1 9 ,1 2 0 ,1 2 5 ,1 3 6

Ellul,Jacques, 140 Enomoto K en ’ichi (Enoken), 94,492,

B a Maw, 3 7 3,4 38 Bandö Tsum asaburö, 44, 4 5 ,16 3 , 302, 303

Eweler, Ruth, 160

Berkley, Busby, 106 Bitzer, Billy, 3 Blykh, Yakov, ioi Bord well, David, xxix, 351 Brown, Clarence, 348

Fanck, Arnold, 15 9 -6 3 , 228, 268 Farago, Ladislas, 446

493»494»497

Caldw ell, Oliver, 450 C ap ra, Frank, 8 1, 388 C a m e, M arcel, 77 C h e ln G yu , 307 C h iba Nobuo, xvi C hiba Yasuki, 416

Fellers, Bonner, 508 Fitch, George, 115 Ford, Jo h n , 267 Fujioka Nobukatsu, xxvi, xxvii Fuji La Motohiko, xvi, 158 Fujita Susumu, 239-44, 322, 323, 346,

4'5. 454- 483 Fujita Tsuguji, 402 Fukunaga KyOsuke, 24 Funayam a Shin’ichi, 219, 220

573

Index of Names

574

Furukawa Roppa, 287, 288, 456, 464,

49«» 492 Fushimizu O sam u, 278 Fuw a Suketoshi, 72, 75, 8 1, 8 6 ,9 0 , 130,

I34>3*6, 3*7, 319, 321, 336, 338, 340, 34i , 36i Garson, Greer, 252 Gerow, Aaron, xxvi, 22 Goebbels,Jo sep h , 62, 65, 71, 163, 225, 297> 3°°> 304 Gosho Heinosuke, 28, 14 9 ,16 4 Greene, G raham , 443 G reerso n ,Joh n , 119 Hanabusa Yuriko, 236 H ara Setsuko, 160, 237 38, 241, 244, 251,

323 . 346 . 397. 4 ' 5 >44« Harlan, Veidt, 62 H aruhara M asahisa, 488 Hascgawa K azu o (Hayashi Chöjürö), 154, 155, 263, 271, 272, 274, 278, 279,

281, 347. 35 '. 436,437 H asegawa Nyözekan, 6 2 ,12 1- 2 4 , 239, 390 Hashida Kunihiko, 128 Hatam oto ShOichi, 183 H atoyam a Ichirö, 128 Hawks, H oward, 260 Hayashi C höjürö (Hasegawa Kazuo),

*54, *55 Hayashi Fumiko, 205, 343 Hayashi Fusao, 59, 327,50 9 Hayashi Sö, 491 Hazum i Tsuneo, 8 1,9 5 , 147, 274, 337, 342, 502, 507 Higashiyam a Chieko, 484 Hinatsu Eitarö (Heo Yeong), 308 14, 468

Honda Katsuichi, xx Hori KyOsaku, 319 21 Ichikawa K an , 464 Ichikawa U taem on, 349, 426 Ienaga SaburO, 202 Ieshiro Miyoji, 417 Igayam a M asanori, 248 Iida ChOko, 252 Iida Shinbi, 64, 246, 364 Iijim a Tadashi, 62, 64, 13 1, 246, 3 11, 376,

378,408,441,445,507 Ikeda Tom iyasu, 351 Im ai Tadashi, xvii, xxiii, 2 2 1,4 3 9 42, 488 Im am ura Tahei, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 118, 121, 123, I24, 13 1, 132, 135, 238, 246,

265.475 Inagaki Hiroshi, 8 1, 15 !, 15 7 ,18 0 Inomata Katsuhito, 337 Inose Naoki, xvi Inoue K an , 125, 126 Inoue Seiichi, 314 Inukai Tsuyoshi, 40 Irie Takako, 34, 314, 37 8 ,4 19 Ishida TamizO, 493 Ishihara, G eorge, 504 Ishikaw ajun, 475 Ishikawa KóyO, 490,491 IshikawaTatsuzO, 116, 205, 3 3 1, 332 Ishimoto Tokichi, 125 Ishiwara K an ji, 268 Ishiyama M inoru, 41 Isono Tatsuhiko, 226, 232 Itami Mansaku, 66, 8 1,15 7 , 15 9 ,16 2 , 247, 2 6 8 ,5 10 n ItO Daisuke, 505 ItO M asanori, 97, 98

Hirano Kyökö, xvi, 504, 505 Hirata Shinsaku, 23, 24 Hirata Susumu, 59 Hirosawa Sakae, 37, 4 50 ,4 6 2 ,5 0 7 Hirose Takeo, 393

Itò Noe, 275 Ito Sei, 147 Ito Shunya, xxvi Iwafuji Shisetsu, 7 Iwam oto Kenji, xxix Iwasaki Akira, xviii, 5 8 ,6 2 ,6 6 ,7 0 ,10 0 ,118 , 12 4 ,227 ,239 ,2 9 7 9 9 ,3 2 1,3 2 4 29 Iwasaki Torn, 125

Hisaita Eijirö, 323, 510 Hisamatsu Seiji, 446, 447

Iwase TOru, 52, 54, 57 Iwata Toyoo (Shishi Bunroku), 5 13 14

Hino Ashihei, 192-94, 206, 286, 387,

483.484 Hirabayashi Kögo, 192

Index o f Names

K aeriyam a Norim asa, 63, 78, 79

Koster, Henry, 78

K am ei Fumio, 9 7 ,1 0 1,10 2 , 103, 106, 108, n o , 1 1 3 ,1 1 9 ,1 2 6 ,1 2 9 .1 3 0 , 13 6 ,13 7 ,

K osugi Isamu, 180, 208 K oyam a EizO, 139

234< 337» 4*>9 K am iyam a Sojin, 429 30 Kaneshiro K an , 61 K arasaw a Toshiki, 82, 84, 85, 88, 91,

327»328 K asah ara RyOzO, 180, 210 K ata TetsujirO, 370 KatO Hidctoshi, 28 K aw akam i ShirO, 258 K aw akita Kashiko, 157, 161 K aw akila N agam asa, 157, 277, 335, 506 K aw ashim a Yuzo, 493 K aw azura RyflzO, 90, 91, 295, 315 21, 336 Keene, Donald, 332 Keplcy, Vance, xxix K ido ShirO, 13, 5 2 ,5 3 , 61, 73, 76, 12 1,12 6 , 154, 156, 164, 16 5 ,16 7 , 169, 190, 315, 317, 320, 321, 334, 3 3 5 ,5 0 1,5 0 4 , 509 K ii Toshihide, 73 Kikuchi K an , xv, 6 2 ,16 7 , 169, 170, 204, 205, 206, 337, 345, 350, 426, 428,

459» 474» 475* 491»496 »5 ° 4 5o64

M asuda Haruo, 257 M asutani Tatsunosuke, 190, 191 Matsuish, O sam u, 44

K itam ura TarO, 478 K itam ura Kom atsu, 117 Kobayashi Fiji, 125

Koishi Eiichi, 180, 305 K om e\am a K e n /A 139

M atsum oto G enji, 57 M atsumoto K inen, 501 Matsumoto M anabu, 5 4 ,5 5 , 60 M atsuoka Yosuke, 5 1,13 9 , 296 M ead, M argaret, 360 M ellen ,Joan , 2 13 , 351 Miki Kiyoshi, 219 Miki Shigcru, 103, 107, 108, 114, 117, 364 Milosz, Czeslaw, 334, 336, 5 13 ,5 14 Nlimura ShintarO, 156, 158

K onoe Fumimaro, 92, 288 90

M inobe Tatsukichi, 128

Kobayashi IchizG, 152,1.33 Kobayashi Takiji, 60 K obayashi Yoshinori, xxvi, xxvii K o ga M asato, 432 K oga Scijin, 493

Matsui Shunsei, 10 2 -3

Index of Names

576

Mitchell, Richard, xxviii M iyake Kuniko, 306 M iyoshijüro, 340 M izoguchi Kenji, 10 ,1 2 , 3 4 ,16 5 , 16 8 ,17 0 , 183, 184, 187, 29 7,30 5, 330 M izum achi Seiji, 20 0 ,4 51 M oon Ye Bong, 307 M ori Issei, 349, 350 M ori Iwao, 10 2 ,1 1 3 ,1 5 4 ,1 9 0 , 334, 335,

336>344’ 459, 5OI>5o6>5°9 M ori O gai, 228, 229, 230 M oriyam a Takeichirö, 59, 60 M urai Yoshitaka, 308, 310 M urayam a Eiji, 18 M urayam a Tomoyoshi, 18, 324 M uro Saisei, 64 M utö Tomio, 275 N agahara Yukio, 135 N agai KafO, 497 N agam i RyOzö, 248 N agata M asaichi, 3 1 6 - 2 1,3 3 6 N agatom i Eijirö, 400 N aitö K önan, 203 N akajim a Kenzö, 53 N akam ura Kenzö, 370 N akam ura N oboru, 347 N akam ura Shintarö, 30 N akano Eiji, 30, 34 N akano M inoru, 488 Nakatani Hiroshi, 218, 219 Nanbu Keinosuke, 378, 445,475 N arahashi Y öko, xxvi N arita RyOichi, xvii-xviii, xxiv - xxv Naruse Mikio, 174, 177, 187, 494, 498 Negishi K an ’ichi, 71, 84, 273, 329 N ishida Kitarö, 121 Nishio K anji, xxvii N oda Kögo, 2 0 ,16 5 , 212, 293 N oda Shinkichi, 10 3 ,12 5 ,13 0 Nogi Maresuke, 41 Noguchi Kazum i, 78 N om ura Kichisahurö, 295

O guro Toyoshi, 478 Ö hinata D en, 310 O kada Shinkichi, 290, 297 O kada Susumu, 292 O kada Yoshiko, 252, 323 Okam oto K ihachi, xxix Ö kaw a Heihachirö, 452 O kaw a ShQmei, 422 O kazaki Kenzö, xxii O m uro M asajirö, 350 Onishi Takijirö, 480 O nouc Matsunosuke, 7, 9 Ötsuka Kyöichi, 123 Ötsukushi Toyo’o, 350 O zaki Hotsumi, 442 Ozaki Shirö, 345 O zaw a Eitarö, 345 O zu Yasujirö, 157, 166, 167, 172, 173 75, 18 1, 18 2 ,18 8 , 200, 206, 209, 2 11, 305 Pabst, G. W., 20 Passion, Ricardo, 452 Percival, G en . Arthur E., 366, 368,

369.372 Poe, Fernando, 455 R a U ngyu, 3 13 Raflels, Stanley, 364 R i K oran , 271 -75, 279, 280, 282, 283, 347 Richie, Donald, xxx, 510 Riefenstahl, Leni, 135, 291, ¿95, 397 Riskin, Robert, 81 Ritter, K arl, 61, 297 300, 487 R izal, Jo se, 369 Rotha, Paul, 11 9 ,12 1 25 Ryü Chishü, 351 Saburi Shin, 355 Sacki Kiyoshi, i6 1, 162, 493 Saeki Tom onori, xxix Saitö M akoto, 5 5 , 6 i, 87 Saitö Tatsuo, 436,444, 445, 446

() c Kenzaburf), 163

Saitö Torajirö. 492, 494 Sakasai K öichirö, 465 Sakuram oto Tom io, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv

O guni Hideo, 343, 435

Sano Shftji, 180, 282, 347, 351

Nom ura Köshö, 165, 401, 489

Index o f Names

Sasaki Keisuke, 419 Sasaki Yasushi, 19 1, 387, 39 1, 4 0 3,4 8 5,50 6 Satö T adao, xx, xxi, xxii, 1 8 ,1 3 1 , 173, 18 1, 199, 2 7 1,4 0 0 Satö Takeshi, 217 Saw am ura Tsutomu, 2 5 ,9 5 ,1 3 1 ,1 8 0 , 196, 199, 218, 222, 224, 2 25 ,2 26 , 228, 229, 230, 2 3 3 ,2 3 5 , 240, 245, 296, 305,

338 , 339 »3 6 i> 38 i , 394 ~95 >474 Schrader, Leonard, xxx Sekine Tadashi, xvii Seo Mitsuo, 474-75 Shibusawa Eiichi, 150 Shibuya M inoru, 489 Shigeno Tatsuhiko, 64, 171, 2 13, 266,

267,471 Shillony, Ben-Am i, xxviii, 56 Shim a K ö ji, 147, 297, 305 Shim ada K eizö, 471 Shim azu Yasujirö, 164, 283, 284, 351 Shim izu Akira, xix, 10, 293, 348, 363,

577

Takagi Toshirö, 126

Takamine Hideko, 346, 502 Takam ine M ieko, 252 T ak ed aju n , 57 Takeda Rintarö, 57 Takeda Tadaya, 66 Takeyam a M ichio, 14 0 ,14 4 , 336 Takikawa Yukitoki, 128 Tanabe Köichirö, 118 Tanaka Ju n ’ichirö, xxi, 371 Tanaka Kinuyo, 13, 14 ,17 ,4 0 2 Tanaka Saburö, 66, 340, 341 Tanaka Shigeo, 39, 376 ,456 , 486 Tanaka Takeshi, 232, 251 Tanigaw a Yoshio, 125 Tanikaw a Yoshio, 125 Tasaka Tom otaka, 1 0 ,1 1 , 95, 151, 180, 194-96, 200-202, 206, 207, 2 1 1,3 10 ,

337. 3 8 6 ,3 8 9 ,3 9 4 ,

398 Tatebayashi M ikio, 71, 74, 77, 82-84, 88, 89, 190, 19 1, 192, 319 , 327, 328,

463, 470, 496 Shim izu Hiroshi, 147, 167, 176, 283, 306, 440 Shim om ura K enji, 127 Shim om ura Kojin, 64

339 » 34 1 Toba Yukinobu, 100, 376 Todoroki Yukiko, 252,442 Tokugaw a M usei, 78, 102, 265, 486, 494 Tokutomi Inoichirou, 203

Shim ura Rikuya, 437 Shirai Shigeru, 114, 115 Shiratori Kurakichi, 203 Sone Chiharu, 44

T ö jö Hideki, xxvi, 320, 34 5 ,4 18 , 478 Toyoda Shirö, 93, 257, 258, 266 Toyota M asako, 141 Tsuburaya Eiji, 117, 272, 383, 480 Tsuchiya Hitoshi, 99 Tsuji Hisaichi, 272

Sonoi Keiko, 500 Sorge, Richard, 442 Stewart, Jim m y, 81 Sugai Ichirö, 4 15 ,4 3 5 Sugiura Yukio, 4 30 -3 1 Sugiyam a Heisuke, 206, 220 Suzuki Denm ei, 13, 14, 17 ,4 23 Suzukijûkichi, 18 Suzuki K azuo, 502 Suzuki Shigeyoshi, 277

Tsuji Kichirö, 429 Tsukasa Osam u, 332 Tsum ura Hideo, 64, 6 6 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 6 ,1 1 9 ,1 2 6 ,

, , , , , , , .

127 133 218 260 361 363 367 387 434 467 474 475 476 494 507,509

, , , , , ,

Tsurum i Shunsuke, xiii, xix, xx, xxiii Tsunami YOsuke, 7 3 ,13 9

Tachibana Közaburö, 38

U chidaT om u , 11, 3 4 ,17 0 , 171, 178 U eda Hiroshi, 242, 276 U ehara K en , 180, 183, 212, 346

T ad a Reikichi, 361 Tagaw a Suihö, 38 ,4 72 Taguchi Satoshi, 2 5 ,18 0 , 253, 301 3.4 0 6 Takagi K öichi, 259

Ueno Chizuko, xxv U eno Közö, 475 Uesugi Sakae, 275 UryO Tadao, 506

Suzukita Ryöhei, 156

578

Index o f Names

Ushihara Kiyohiko, 1 3 ,1 5 ,1 9 ,5 7 ,1 8 8 U shijim a Issui, 49 Utsum i Aiko, 308, 310

Yam am oto KajirO, 14 1,17 4 ,3 4 4 ,3 4 5 , 377, 382, 384, 3 8 6 ,4 0 0 ,4 0 6 ,4 0 7 ,4 7 9 , 4 8 4 ,4 8 8 ,4 9 3 ,5 0 0 ,5 0 1,5 0 2 ,5 0 6 ,5 0 7 Yam am oto Kikuo, xvi, xxix, 3 7 ,4 1,7 9 , 81

Vidor, K ing, 14 ,16 Vonnegut, K urt, 209

Yam am oto Satsuo, xiv, 3 7 6 -8 0 ,4 14 ,4 17 Yam anaka Hisashi, xx

Waka K öji, xxix, 100 W akayam a K azu o, 125 W atanabe Kunio, 41, 269, 271, 274, 280, 38 6 ,4 8 8 ,5 0 6 W atanabe Suteo, 214 W atanabe Takayuki, xxvi W atanabe Yoshimi, 465 Wellman, W illiam, 13, 14, 260 Wells, O rson, 27 Williams, Jo h n , xxix Yagi YasutarO, 18 0 ,3 3 3 ,5 10 Yaguchi Yöko, 4 18 -2 0 Yahiro Fuji, 156, 483 Yam agam i Itarö, 156 Yam agata Aritom o, 350 Yam aguchi Satono, 258 Yam aguchi Yoshiko. See R i K oran Yam aji Aizan, 278 Yam am oto A kira, xx, 387 Yam am oto Hiroyuki, 442,465

Yam anaka MinetarO, 24, 2 5 ,9 7 ,15 7 , 15 8 ,18 0 Yam anaka Sadao, 15 7 ,15 8 , 159, 180 Yam ane Sadao, xix Yam auchi Tatsuichi, 227 Yam azaki Ken tar 0, 377, 38 3,4 0 0 Yanagida Kunio, 400 Yanai Yoshio, 351 Yasumi Toshio, 501 Yoda Yoshikata, xxx, 18 3 ,18 7 ,3 3 0 ,3 3 1,3 3 2 Yokota Einosukc, 6 1 ,17 3 Yokoyam a Michiko, 473 Yokoyam a RyQichi, 470 Yoshida Shigeru, 12 4 ,2 6 5 ,4 9 2 Yoshimoto T ak a’aki, xiii, 5 11 Yoshim ura KOzaburO, 14, 2 0 ,7 4 ,16 7 ,16 8 , 180, 2 11, 2 12 ,2 13 , 214, 2 15 ,3 2 3 ,4 4 4 ,

445 »446,506 Yoshim ura M isao, 4 1,4 8 ,19 4 - 9 5 , 4 ° 4 »4^9 Yoshino K eiji, 126 Zukor, Adolph, 145

INDEX OF FILMS

Among, 3 13 Army, 386-88, 4 0 2 ,4 11 Army Advances, 13, 19

Aa Churetsu Nikudan Sanyushi (Ah, Valorous Glory! The Three Human Bomb Patnols), 36 A a Nakamura Taii (Ah! Captain Nakamura),

Army A ir Corps War Record, 465 Army Special Attack Squad, 484 Aruhi no Higata (Day in the Tideland), 127,467 Asakusa no Tomoshibi (Lights o f Asakusa), 94 Asia Cries Out, 34 Atarashiki Tsuchi (New Earth), 154-6 2, 268

3°> 32 Abe Clan, 226 -3 3, 235 Abe Ichizoku (Abe Clan), 2 2 6 -3 3 , 235 Advance on Canton, 126 A h! Captain Nakamura, 30, 32 Ah, Valorous Glory! The Three Human Bomb Patriots, 36 Ahen Seruo (Opium War), 3 6 9 ,4 2 4 -2 5 Aienkyd (Straits o f Love and Hate), 170 A iki M inam i e Tobu (Our Planes Fly South),

Athletic Exhibition o f the Century, 295 Ato ni Tsuzuku wo Shinzu (Believe That Others W ill Follow), 387, 4 8 8 ,5 0 3 Attack to Sink, 465 Aus der Geschichite des Fähnleins Geyer, 297

3943-5>4*° Aikoku no Harm (Patriotic Flower), 174

Bakudan Sanyüshi (Three Human Bomb Patri­

A i no Sekai (World o f Love), 391 A ir Base, 439 A1 to Chikai (Love and Vows), 488 Aizen Katsura (Love-Troth Tree), 164, 165, 167, 168 Akanishi KaJdta, 157 Akatsuki no Rikusentai (M arines at Dawn), 400 A ll Quiet on the Western Front, 20, 22 Amachua Kurabu (Amateur Club), 492 Amateur Club, 492 Amerika Yosoro (Comeand Get Us, America), 506 Anata wa Nerawareteiru (You Are Being Aimed

ots), 36, 37 Bakudan to Danpen (Bomb Blasts and Shell Fragments), 466 Battle o f China, 115 Battle o f Kawanakashima, 423 Behind the Rising Sun, 427 Beijing, 106 7 Believe That Others W ill Follow, 387, 488,503 Big Parade, 14, 16 B ig Wings, 507 Birum a Senki (Burma War Record), 360,

At), 445 Angels Without a Home, 307, 310 Am to Sono Imoto (Brother and H is Younger Sis­ ter), 268

Black Sun, 103 Blossoming Port, 4 13 Blossoms o f the Battlefield, 458 -60 Böchösen wo Iku (On the Spy Front), 442, 449

Ano Hata wo Ute (Shoot That Flag/D aw n o f Freedom), 452 56

Bödoku Men (Gas M asks), 469 Bokujo Monogatan (Ranch Story), 327 Bomb Blasts and Shell Fragments, 466 Bombing o f Kita Kyushu, 467

AnotherJoy, 347 Aratanaru Aojuku (AnotherJo y ), 347

372 76

579

580

Index o f Films

Boro no Aessitai (Suicide Troops o f the Watchtower), 439 42

Daigoretsu no Kyöfu (Fear o f the Fifth Column),

Bouquetfrom the South Seas, 353-54 Brash Stationmaster; 494 95 Brave Sailors, 10 Brother and H is Younger Sister,; 268 7w .SAara (M ajor Kuga, Flower o f Chivalry), 44

Daitöa Sensö Gehmetsu Senkt (Greater East Asian War's Song o f Victory), 378

Danryü (Warm Currents), 16 7 ,16 8 , 213 Daughter o f the Diplomat, 158

Burma War Record, 360, 372 -76 Burning Sky, 16, 219, 259-64, 392 Byakuran no Uta (Song o f the White Orchid),

Day England Fell, 374-76 Day in the Tideland, 127, 467 Defend M anchuria, 46

27 1-7 2 Byoinsen (Hospital Ship), 118 , 257

Divine Warriors o f the Sky, 372 Döinrei (M obilization Orders), 41, 227 Doreisen (Slave Ship), 426 Dotö wo Kette (Through the Angry Waves), 102 Draft Notice (Kavvai Eiga version), 41

Campaign in Poland, 297, 303 Camp Song, 18 3-8 6 , 331 Celebes, 466 Chakkin Kinta (Kinta the Pickpocket), 493 Chieko Sho (Portrait o f ChieJco), 246 ChichiAriki (There Was a Father), 18 0 ,3 5 2 ,3 5 3 Chickens, 469 Chikai no Gassho ( V q w ) , 284 Chikyu wa M awaru (W orld Turns), 11 Children in the H ind, 176, 306 Children o f Four Seasons, 147 Children o f the Battlefield, 307 China Incident, 102 China Nights, 278-80 Chi no Tsume M oji (Words the Bloodied Finger­ nails Wrote), 416 Chocolate and Soldiers, 217 18 Chokoreto to H eitai (Chocolate and Soldiers),

442,443 Danjürö Sandai (Danjuro the Third), 463 64 Danjuro the Third, 4 63-64

Draft Notice (Nikkatsu version), 41 Eagles o f the Sea, 125 Earth, 170 East's Song o f Victory, 361 63, 369 Echigo Tsutsuishi Oyashxrazu, 171 E ibei Gehmetsu no Uta (Song o f the Destruction o f the Anglo-Americans), 501 Eikoku Kuzururu no H i (Day England Fell), 374 76 Enemy Bombing Raid, 489 Facefrom the Past, 187 Factory Change-over,; 469 Fallen Blossoms o f North M anchuria, 35 Farfrom the Land o f Our Parents (script), 200

2 17 -18 Chuji in H is Heyday, 159-60 Chuji Uridasu (Chuji in H is Heyday), 159 60 ChQkon Nikudan Sanyushi (Loyal Spirits o f the

Fear o f the Fifth Column, 442, 443 Fest der Schönheit, 29 0-9 1 Fest der Völker, 135, 190, 291 Fighting Soldiers, 107 - 13 ,13 6

Three Human Bomb Patriots), 36 Classroom Factory, 469 70 Come and Get Us, America, 506 Composition Class, 141 46 Confidential Agent, 444 Corporal Norakuro, 472

Final Struggle, 323 Fire Bombs, 466 Five Scouts, 194-200, 203 4, 210, 394 Flaming Front, 195 Flavor o f Green Tea over Rice, 172

Crisis-tim eJapan , 46-48

Forward, Flag o f Independence, 4 35-38 Four Human P illar Patriots, 38

Daigaku tbiloko (University's a Fine Place), 172 Daigorei (Great Order), 48

Fragrance throughout the World, 285 Fuchinkan Gekichin (Sinking the Unsinkable Battleship), 416 17

Index of Films

Fu ji ni Chikau (Vow to M t. Fu ji), 467 Fu ji ni Tatsu Kage (Shadow Standing on A ft. Fuji), 500 Fuji no Chishitsu (Geology o f M t. Fuji), 129 Fukuchan no Kishü (Fukuchan’s A ir Attack), 471 Fukuchan no Sensuikan (Submariner Fuku­ chan), 471 Fukuchan no Tonarigumi (Fukuchan’sNeighbor­ hood Association), 471 Fukuchan no Zj5san Butai (Fukuchan’s Produc­ tion Increase Unit), 470 Fukuchan s A ir Attack, 471 Fukuchan ’s Neighborhood Association, 471 Fukuchan's Production Increase Unit, 470 Gmkokan no Musume (Daughter o f the Dipfomat), 158 Gas M asks, 469 Gekiryü (Raging Torrent), 417 GeneralAssault on Singapore, 451 General. Staff, and Soldiers, 25, 30 0 -30 5 Genroku Chüshingura, 305 Geology o f M t. Fuji, 129 G in’yoku no Otome (M aidens with Wings), 257 Gion no Shim ai (Sisters o f the Gion), 331 Girls o f the A ir Base. 485 Göchin (Attack to Sink), 465 Gökoku no 11aha (Mother; Defender o f the N a­ tion), 253 Gone with the Wind, 201 Gonin no Sekkö H ei (Five Scouts), 194 200, 203 4 ,2 10 , 394 Grand Illusion, 77 Greater Fast Asian War’s Song o f Victory, 378 Great Green Land, 283 Great Order,; 48 Hachijühachi ner no Taiyo (Sun o f the Eightyeighth Year), 246 50, 342 Hanako san, 493 Hana Saku M inato (Blossoming Port), 4 13 Harukanaru Fubo no Kuni (Farfrom the la n d o f Our Parents), 200 Hataraku Ikka (W hole Fam ily Works). 173,

■74 78 H ijö jiNihon (Crisis-tim e Japan), 46 48

581

Himeyuri no To (Tower o f Lilies), xvii, xxvi Hisshoka (Song o f Certain Victory), 331 History, 423 Hitlerjungen Quex, 62 Ilitobashira Tonyushi (Four Human P illar Pa­ triots), 38 H iton Musuko (Only Son), 166 Hokuman no Ochibana (Fallen Blossoms o f North M anchuria), 35 Hokuman no Teisatsu (Scout inNorth China), 227 Hokushin Nihon (Japan Marches North), 48 Hokushi no Sora wo Tsuku (Striking at the North China Skies), 191 Horse, 174, 344, 382 H oryuji (Horyuji Temple), 466 H ospital Ship, 118 , 257 Howards o f Virginia, 296 Human Bomb Brothers, 192 Human Bullet Suicide Battalion. 456 Humanity and Paper Balloons, 157 - 58 Hurrayfo r the Farmers, 116 Hyakusho Banzai (Hurrayfo r the Farmers), 116 Ichiban Utsukushiku (Most Beautiful), 4 18 21 Ichioku Tokkotai (One Hundred M illion Kami­ kaze), 468 lenaki Tenshi (Angels without a Home), 3 0 7 ,3 10 Im pal Operation, 498 Im pal Sakusen (Im pal Operation), 498 Im perial Favor, 10 Inochi no M inato (Port o f Life), 417 International Smuggling Ring, 443 It Happened One Night, 81 I Wanted Wings, 260 I Was Bom But . . . , 166, 174, 226 Jagaim o no M e (Potato Buds), 469 Japan Marches North, 48 Japanese Spirit, 10 Jin set Gekijo (Theater o f life ), 173 Jonetsu no Shijin Takuboku (Takuboku, Poet o f Passion), 227 Journey into Fear, 444 Ju k ei Kara Kita OU)ko (M anfrom Chungking).

445 47 Justice Is Strong, 34

582

Index of Films

Kachinuku Tame ni (W inning Through), 468 Aaettekita Otoko (Man Who Came Back), 493 Kagaku sum Kokoro (Scientific M ind), 130 Kagirinaki ^enshin (Unending Advance), 178 Kaigun (N aiy). 125, 386, 388 90, 410 A aigun Bakugekitai (Naval Bomber Squadron), 117, 260 Kaigun Bydinsen (Navy Hospital Ship), 468 Kaisen no ^enya (On the Eve o f War), 445 Kaisen yori M anira Kanraku made (Dp to the F a ll o f M anila), 125 haizokuki Futlobu (Pirate's Flag Blasted

Kon'yaku Sanba Garasu (Three Fiancé Crows), 164 Kopf hoch, Johannes!, 297 Kokcku no Tale (Shieldfor H is M ajesty’s Realm), 259 Koki Kichi (Air Base), 439 Ko-on (Im perial Favor), 10 Koto Shingun (Advance on Canton), 126 Kumo to Chürippu (Spider and the Tulip), 473 Kuroi Taiyô (Black Sun), 103 Kyôshitsu Rojo (Classroom Factory), 469-70

Away), 388, 428, 429 Kakute Kamikaze wa Fuku (Thus Blew the D i­ vine Wind), 428- 30 Kancho Imada Shisezu (Spy Isn't Dead let),

Lady Next Door and M y Wife, 149 Last Visit Home, 4 0 3,4 8 5-8 7 Leave on Word o f Honor, 298,487 Legend o f Tank Commander Nishizum i, 168, 1 9 6 ,2 1 1 1 7 ,3 4 4 Light That Failed, 296 Lights o f Asakusa, 94 listen to the Roar o f the Ocean, xvii Look-back Tower, 306 Love and Vows, 488 Ijove-Troth Tree, 164, 16 5 ,16 7 , 168 Love That Reached Heaven, 28 Ijoyal Spirits o f the Three Human Bomb Patri­ ots, 36

444 45 Kancho Umi no Bara (Spy Ship ",Sea Rose ”). 448 Kanton Shingun Sho (Advance on Canton), 126 halo Hayabusa Sentdtai (Kato’s Falcon Fight­ ers), 386, 398, 407 8 Kato’s Falcon Fighters, 386, 398, 407-8 Kawanakashima Kassen (Battle o f Kawanakashima), 423 Kaze no Matasaburo (Matasaburo, the Wind Child), 306 Kaze no Naha no Kodomo (Children in the W ind), 176, 306 hessen (Final Struggle), 323 Kessen no Ozora e (Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky). 251, 386, 392, 396, 397, 409 h ike Wadatsumi no Koe (listen to the Roar o f the Ocean). xvii Aim? ho so Tsugi no Arawashi Da (You Are the Next W ild Eagles), 387 Kim iwo Wasurenai (We Won ’/Forget You), xxxvi Aim? to Baku (You and M e), 308 14 Kinta the Pickpocket, 493 Kitakyusyu Kubaku no Taiken (Bombing o f Kita Kyushu), 467 Kobayashi Issa, 113 14 Kochiyama Soshun, 160 Kodomo no Shiki (Children o f Four Seasons), 147 Kojima no Haru (Spring on I j per's Island), 257 Kokumin Gakko (People's School), 306 Kokusai Mitsuyu Dan (International Smuggling

Ring)- 443

M âbô no Rakusan Butai (M abo’s Parachute Detatchment). 473-74 M abo's Parachute Detatchment, 473-74 Madamu to Nyôbô (Lady Next Door and M y W ife). 149 Maiagœru Jdnetsu (Soaring Passions)%305 Maidens with Wings, 417 M ajor Kuga, Flower o f Chivalry, 44 M alay War Record, 364 69 Mam ore Manshù (Defend Manchuria), 46 Manchurian M arch, 33 Manfrom Chungking, 445-47 Manshù hoshinkyoku (Manchurian M arch), 33 M an's Pathu.'ay to Glory. 347 Man Who Came Back, 493 M arai no Tora (Tiger o f M alaya), 364 69 M arti Senki (M alay War Record), 364 69 Marines at Dawn, 400 Matasaburo, the W ind Child, 306

Index o f Films

M atatabi Senichi Ya (Thousand and One Nights on the Road), 81 M atsu the Untamed, 163 Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail', 503 Men with Wings, 260 M idori no Daichi (Great Green Land), 283 M ikaeri no To (Look-back Tower), 306 M ikkyo Nekka (Secret Border o fJeh ol), 267 M inam i no Kazjt (W indfrom the South), 355 -60 M inistry o f Fear; 444 M obilization Orders, 4 1, 227 M oetalsu Jensen (Flaming Front), 195 Mokuzosen (Ships out o f Wood), 468 Momotard, Divine Warrior o f the Sea, 360, 367, 422 -23 Momotard, Divine Warrior o f the Sky, 346, 472 Momotard, Eagle o f the Sea, 472 Momotard o f the Sky, 471 Momotard Sora no Shinpei (Momotard, Divine Warrior o f the Sky), 345, 472 Momotard Umi no Shinpei (Momotard, Divine Warrior o f the Sea), 360, 36 7 ,4 2 2 -2 3 Momotard Umi no Washi (Momotard, Eagle o f the Sea), 472 M ost Beautiful, 4 18 -2 1 Mother, Defender o f the Nation, 253 Mqyuru Ozora (Burning Sky), 16, 219, 259 -

64.392 M rs. M iniver, 252 M r. Smith Goes to Washington, 296 M ud and Soldiers, 201, 2 0 6 -10 , 2 18 -19 , 221 Muhoumatsu no Issho (Matsu the Untamed), 163 M ura no Gakkd (Village School), 306 Naniwa Eregi (Osaka Elegy), 165, 3 3 0 -3 1 Naniwa Onna (Woman o f Osaka), 256 Nanjing, 114 Nankai no Hanataba (Bouquetfrom the South

353 54 NanJdn (Nanjing), 114 Natsukashii Kao (Facefrom the Past), 187 N aval Bomber Squadron, 117, 260 N aval Brigade at Shanghai, 233-4 0 Navy, 125, 386, 388 90, 410 Navy Hospital Ship, 468 Nekketsu Teruidan (Sizzling Hand Grenade), 192 Neppu (Searing W ind), 414 ¡6

583

Nessa no Chikai (Vow in the Desert), 192, 267, 280 New Continent, 265 N ew Earth, 154 -6 2, 268 Ntchirin (Sun), 21 Nikudan Sarryushi (Three Human Bomb Patri­ ots), 456 Nikudan Kyodai (Human Bomb Brothers), 192 Nikudan Teishintat (Human Bullet Suicide Bat­ talion), 456

*936>47 Ninjo Kamifusen (Humanity and Paper B al­ loons), 157-58 Nishizum i Senshacho Den (Legend o f Tank Commander Nishizum i), 168, 196, 2 1 1 -

*7,344 Nuvatori (Chickens), 469 No Regretsfor Our Youth, 32, 322 Noches Andaluzas, 348 Norakuro Gochd (Corporal Norakuro), 472 Norakuro Nitohei (Private Second-class Norakuro), 472 Ochazuke no A ji (Flavor o f Green Tea over Rice), 172 Ohinata M ura (Ohinata Village), 268-70 Ohinata Village, 268-70 Oinaru Tsubasa (Big Wings), 507 Omoi okoseyolNogi Shogun (Remember General Nogi), 41 Omuro M asuji, 349, 350 One Hundred Men and a G irl, 78 One Hundred M illion Kamikaze, 468 Only Angels Have Wings, 260 Only Son, 166 On the Eve o f War, 442,445 On the Spy Front, 442,449 Operation M ichael, 298 Opium War, 369, 424 -25 Orizuru Osen (Osen o f the Paper Cranes), 165 Osaka Elegy, 165, 3 3 0 -3 1 Osaru Sankichi no Tatakau Sensuikan (Sankichi-the-M onkey's Fighting Subma­ rine), 474 Osen o f the Paper Cranes, 165 Otoko no Hanamich 1 (M an's Pathway to Glory), 347

584

Index o f Films

Otome no iru K iehi (G irls o f the A ir Bast), 485

Sayon no Kane (Sayon’s B ell), 283- 85

Our Planes Fly South, 3 9 1,4 0 3 - 5 ,4 10 Ozora no Isho (Testament in the Sky), 257

Sayon’s B ell, 283-85 Scientific M ind, 130 Scout in North China, 227

Patriotic Flower, 174

Sea-crossing Festival, 157-58 Searing Wind, 4 14 -16

Pekin (Beijing), 10 6 -7 People's School, 306 People Stand Up, 126 Pirate's Flag Blasted Away, 388, 428, 429 Pirates o f the Sea, 4 23-24 Port o f Life, 417 Portrait o f Chieko, 246 Potato Buds, 469 Pride, xxxvi Private Second-Class Norakuro, 472 Puraido (Pride), xxxvi

Secret Border o f Jehol, 267 Seigi wa Tsuyoshi (Justice Is Strong), 34 SeiJd no Taiiku Smten (Athletic Exhibition o f the Century), 295 Seinen Nihon (TouthfidJapan), 48 Senchi no Kodomo (Children o f the Battlefield ), 307 Senjinkun —Haha to Sergo (Soldier's Field M anual—Mother and the Battlefield),

254,305 Senjin ni Saku (Blossoms o f the Battlefield),

Raging Torrent, 417 Raigekxtai Shutsudd (Torpedo Squadron Moves Out), 4 0 8 ,4 7 8 -8 3 Record o f M y Love, 258-59 Rekishi (History), 423 Remember GeneralNogi, 41 Renewal Workshop, 469 Responsibilityfo r the K iss, 58 Rice Planting Brigade, 10 Rikugun (Army), 38 6 -8 8 , 4 0 2 ,4 11 Rikugun Kogun Senki (Army A ir Corps War Record), 465 Rikugun Tokubetsu Kogekitai (Army Special At­ tack Squad), 484 Road to Peace in the Orient, 277-78 Roei no Uta (Camp Song), 18 3-86 , 331 Rumin (Wandering People), 227 Saigo no Kikyo (la st Vint Home), 403, 485-87 Sm h no Shokuba (Renewal Workshop), 469 Sakebu A jia (Asia Cries Out), 34 Sanjaku Sagohei (Three foot Tall Sagohei), 493 Sanjusangendo Toshiya Monogatari (Story o f Sartjusan Gendo Temple), 498 Sankuhi-the-M onkey’s Fighting Submarine, 474 SanpagiUi Flower,; 378 Sanpagiita no Harm (SanpagiUi Flower), 378

458-60 Sensuikan Ichigo (Submarine Number One), 248-51 Senyu no Uta (War Comrades' Song), 117 -18 Serebesu (Celebes), 466 Seppun no Sekmui (Responsibilityfo r the K iss), 58 Shadow Standing on M l. Fuji, 500 Shanghai, 98, 10 2-6 , 234 Shanghaisky Dokument, 101 Shanhai (Shanghai), 9 8 ,10 2 - 6 , 234 Shanhai Rikusentai (Naval Brigade at Shang­ hai), 233 -40 Shidd Monogatari (Story o f Leadership), 2 39 -4 6 Shieldfor H is M ajesty's Realm, 259 Shinajihen (China Incident), 102 Shina no Torn (China Nights), 278-80 Shingaporu Sokogeki (General Assault on Singapore), 451 Shingun (Army Advances)3 13, 19 Shingunno Uta (Songof theAdvancingArmy), 191 Shi no Senbetsu Inoue Chui Ftijin (W ife o f Lieu­ tenant tnoue Gives H er Life as a Parting G ift), 43,254 Shin Tairiku (New Continent), 265

Santaro Ganbaru (Santoro Pitches In), 417 Santaro Pitches In, 417

Ships out o f Wood, 468 Shogun to Sanbo to Hex (General, Staff, and Sol­ diers), 25, 300-305 Shoidan (Fire Bombs), 466 Shoot That Flag/D aw n o f Freedom, 4 52-56

Sayonara, 272

Shori no H i M ade (U ntil Victory Day), 187,494

Index of Films

585

Tasuke o f the Cloudless Heart, 493 Tatakau H eitai (Fighting Soldiers), 10 7 -13 , 136 Taue Chutai (Rice Planting Brigade), 10 Tea House in the August Moon, 278 Tthkx Kushü (Enemy Bombing Raid), 489 Tenbare Isshin Tasuke (Tasuke o f the Cloudless Heart), 493

Shoshurei (Draft Notice, K aw ai Eiga), 41 Shoshurei (Draft Notice, Nikkatsu), 41 Sitg im Westrn, 297, 303 Sinking the Unsinkable Battleship\ 4 16 17 Sisters o f the Gion, 331 Sizzling Hand Grenade, 192 Slave Ship, 426 Snow Country, 125 Snow Crystals, 126 Soaring Passions, 305 Soldier's Field M anual—Mother and the Battle­ field , 254, 305 Song o f Certain Victory, 331 Song o f the Advancing Army, 191

Tengoku ni Musubu Koi (Love That Reached Heaven), 28 Tenkan Kqjô (Factory Change-over), 469 Test Pilot, 260 Testament in the Sky, 257 Theater o f Life, 173 There Was a Father; 180, 352, 353

Song o f the Destruction o f the AngloAmericans, 501 Song o f the White Orchid, 2 7 1-7 2

T h ief o f Baghdad, 429 Thousand and One Nights on the Road, 81 Thru Bad M en, 267

Soochow Nights, 275, 2 8 3-8 5 Sora no Momotard (Momotaro o f the Sky), 471 Sora no Shinpei (Divine Warriors o f the Sky), 372 Sora no Shonenhei (Young Warriors o f the Sky), 125 Soshu no Yoru (Soochow Nights), 275, 283 85 Spider and the Tulip, 473 Spring on Leper’s Island, 257 Spy Isn’t Dead Yet, 444-45 Spy Ship uSea Rose, ” 448 Stagecoach, 267 Story o f leadership, 239 -4 6 Story o f Sanjusan Gendo Temple, 498

Three Fiancé Crows, 164 Three-foot Tall Sagohei, 493 Three Human Bomb Patriots, 36, 37, 456 Through the Angry Waves, 102 Thus Blew the Divine W ind, 428 - 30 Tiger o f M alaya, 364-69 Tigers o f the Sea, 488 Toast to Adm iral Togo, 44 Toda Brother and H is Sisters, 173, 268

Straits o f Love and Hate, 170 Striking at the North China Skies, 191 Submarine Number One, 24 8 -51 Submariner Fukuchan, 471 Sugata Sanshiro, 244, 295 Suicide Troops o f the Watchtower; 439-42 Sun, 21 Sun o f the Eighty-eighth Year, 246-50, 342 Susume Dokuntsuh (Forward, Flag o f Indepen­ dence), 435 38

Todake no Kyddai (Toda Brother and H is Sis­ ters), 173, 268 Togôhai (Toast to Adm iral Togo), 44 Tokkan Ekichô (Brash Statummaster), 494 -95 Tora no 0 wo Fumu Otokotachi (Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail), 503 Torpedo Squadron Moves Out, 408, 478-83 Toward the Decisive Battle in the S ly, 251, 386,

392,396,397,409 7ow n o f Lilies, xvii, xxxvi Toy6 H eiwa no M ichi (Road to Peace in the Or­ ient), 277-78 Toy6 no Gaika (East’s Song o f Victory), 361

63* 369

Tachiagaru Hitobito (People Stand Up), 126 Takiko M ura (Takiko Village), 165

Triumph o f the W ill, 135, 261 Tsubasa no Gaika (W inged Victory), 377 81 Tsuchi (Earth), 170

Takiko Village, 165 Takx no Shiraito (W hite Threads o f the Cas­ cades), 165 Takuboku; Poet o f Passion, 227

Tsuchi to H eitai (M ud and Soldiers), 20», 206 10 ,2 18 19, 221 Tsuzurikata Kyôshitsu (Composition Class), 141 46

Index of Films

586

Uma (Horse), 174, 344, 382 Umaretewa Mitakeredo (I Was Born B u i. . .), 166, 173, 226 Umi no Gdzoku (Pirates o f the Sea), 423 24 Umi no Tora (Tigers o f the Sea), 488 Umiwashi (Eagles o f the Sea), 125 Umi wo Wataru Sairei (Sea-crossing Festival),

•57-58 Unending Advance, 178 University's a Fine Place, 172 U ntil Victory Day, 187, 494 U ntil We Meet Again, xviii Up to the F a ll o f M anila, 125 Urlaub au f Ehrenwort, 62, 298, 487 Vast and Fertile Land, 270 Village School, 306 Vow, 284 Vow in the Desert, 192, 267, 280 Vow to M t. Fuji, 467 Waga A i no K i (Record o f M y Love), 258 59 Waga Seishun ni K'ui Nashi (No Regretsfo r Our Youth), 32 Wandering People, 227 War Comrades9Song, 1 1 7 - 1 8

We Won't Forget You, xxxvi White Threads o f the Cascades, 165 Whole Fam ily Works, 173, 174-78 Wife o f Lieutenant Inoue Gives Her Life as a Parting G ift, 43, 254 Windfrom the South, 355 - 60 Winged Victory, 377-81 Wings, 14 Wings o f the Navy, 260 Winning Through, 468 Woman o f Osaka, 256 Words the Bloodied Fingernails Wrote, 416 World o f Love, 391 World Turns, 11 Yamato Damashii (Japanese Spirit), 10 Yamato ^akura (Cherry Blossoms o f Japan ), 8 Yasen Gakutai (M usicians at the Front). 284 Yokudo M ann (Vast and Fertile Land), 270 )l)suko Kantai (Yangtse River Fleet). 116 You and M e, 308 14 You Are Being Aimed At, 445 You Are the Next W ild Eagles, 387 Young Warriors o f the Sky, 125 YouthfulJapan , 48 Yukan naru Suihei (Brave Sailors), 10

Warm Currents, 167, 168, 213 Watashitachi wa Konnani HataraiUiru (W e're Working So H ard), 470 We're Working So H ard, 470

Yukiguni (Snow Country), 125 Yuki no Kessho (Snow Crystals). 126

Westfront, 1918, 20

Qgomar, 22

WISCONSIN

General Editors

wa^mmammamammm

David Bordwell, Vance Kepley, Jr.

studies in film

Supervising Editor

-------------------------------------

Kristin Thom pson

Film Essays and Criticism Rudolf Arnheim Post- Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies Edited by David Bordwell and Noel Carroll Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I I^eslie MidkifT DeBauche Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States Douglas Gomery The Imperial Screen:Japanese Film Culture in theFifteen Years' War, ig ji i g j j Peter B. High Ijovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, ig ig ig 4 j Edited byJan-Christopher Horak The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1^28 1^42 LeaJacobs Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film Kathryn Kalinak Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, i g o y i g i j Charlie Keil Patterns of Time : Mizoguchi and the rgjos Donald Kirihara The French New Wave: History and Narration Richard Neupert The World According to Hollywood, igiS ig jg Ruth Vasey The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, igufí igi8 DeniseJ. Youngblood