Before 1941, Japan was the second-largest filmmaking country after America, producing nearly five hundred films each year. By 1945, however, that number had dropped to twenty-six films. Needless to say, this reduction can be attributed to conditions during the Second World War when Japan was fighting America and the Allied powers and to the widespread devastation wrought by the war on Japanese soil, which brought about the forced unconditional surrender of Japan. Here, I would like to take up this peculiar four-year period. In the postwar period, among progressive cultural critics reflecting on this “dark age,” some said that because state directives for wartime film eliminated any freedom of production, virtually no works produced in that period were worth watching. Conversely, scholars like Noël Burch offered an opposite interpretation. They praised the Japanese cinema produced during wartime as having achieved a high level of pure formal perfection precisely because it was cut off from the influence of foreign films. They see the dismantling of these controls in the postwar period as meaning the dissolution of this formal perfection.1 In the postwar period, the film world avoided conducting thorough historical research on the activities of people in the film industries during the wartime period. It is an undeniable fact that this dearth of solid research adds to a complicated sense of ambivalence toward wartime Japanese cinema.
Film censorship began before the war. The film law promulgated in 1939 was fundamentally different from previous systems, however. It had the goal of complete state control of Japanese cinema by creating an approval system that would regulate production and distribution. Directors and actors had to be registered and licensed, and works were censored from the stage of the script. Needless to say, this system was a childish imitation of film regulations in Nazi Germany. Among cineastes, there were those like Iwasaki Akira who were opposed to this system and who were imprisoned for their opposition; but the vast majority was in favor insofar as the film law protected their existing position and eliminated competition from new companies. Even the supposed leftist Kimura Sotoji worked on a committee for the law’s enactment, as though hoping that its passage would eliminate all vulgar movies. Some filmmakers expected that this law would give validity to the then-despised genre of cinema and allow for its social value to be recognized. What happened in fact was that without any noticeable increase in the respectability of cinema, the state now had total and merciless control.
In 1941, when the ABCD line2 of the Allied nations imposed economic sanctions on Japan, the Eastman Film that had been imported from America to that point was in short supply. Because raw film produced in Japan was designated for military use, this placed severe restrictions on its civilian use, creating a life-and-death issue for film companies. Integrating companies was thus seen as an urgent matter. Tōhō, as the new power, was able to survive by becoming useful to the military with innovations in aerial photography and other new technology as well as by its enthusiastic response to the military’s demand for documentary films. The fact that Tōhō lagged behind other studios in both jidaigeki and gendaigeki turned out to be fortunate. Tōhō became a pioneer in opening up the marketplace for war films, and throughout the war, no company produced greater quantities of war films. By contrast, older companies like Nikkatsu and Shōchiku found it much more difficult to change direction to ally with the military. As a result, in 1942, when Nagata Masaichi, the strategist of Shinkō Kinema, established the Daiei studio (Dai nihon eiga) by merging existing film companies, it actually absorbed Nikkatsu. This made three film companies—Tōhō, Shōchiku, and Daiei—and all were forced to quickly reduce the scale of their operations. In affiliation with the military, many filmmakers were dispatched to the southern colonies and Manchukuo3 to produce propaganda films. For example, it is said that Ozu Yasujirō went uncomplainingly into military service and participated in the fighting with poison gas in China, but when he saw Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) at a theater appropriated by the Japanese military in Singapore, he was convinced that Japan would lose the war.4 Mizoguchi was sent abroad but complained that he was not treated as a commissioned officer. Aware that he was ill suited to the job, he nonetheless struggled to make films for nationalist goals. Long before that, Yamanaka had died of disease on the battlefields of China. Itami Mansaku, while bedridden with tuberculosis, wrote an essay titled To Hope for the End of the War. Abe Yutaka went to the South Pacific, and Uchida Tomu went to Manchuria. Imai Tadashi and Toyoda Shirō made propaganda films in Korea.
Many filmmakers contributed to the war effort. However, when we look at the films that took war as a theme from the perspective of our time or at the films that depicted Japanese soldiers or common people under wartime conditions, we see that all of them are not necessarily purely films promoting the war. A couple of concrete examples can illustrate this assertion.
Five Scouts (dir. Tasaka Tomotaka, 1938).
With Five Scouts (Gonin no sekkōhei, 1938), Tasaka Tomotaka (1902–1974) demonstrated his sharp observation of human beings against a backdrop of war. He shows a captain of the Japanese Army on the battlefront in China who is deeply beloved by the soldiers under his command. His men go out to observe enemy positions, but when they do, one of the soldiers does not return. The worried troops stay up all night waiting for him, and when he returns, they set out for a new battlefield. By focusing on the themes of anguish and trust on the battlefield, Tasaka avoided celebrating the heroism of war and made a film that was strongly imbued throughout with moral sensibility. Five Scouts was a prizewinner that year at the Venice Film Festival. In 1939, Tasaka presented Earth and Soldiers (Tsuchi to heitai). The film depicts the Japanese troops as they move day after day, marching toward their deaths, not wavering even as soldiers continually desert. In neither film does the enemy—whether Chinese nationalist or communist—ever appear. Tasaka’s focus was always on anonymous Japanese soldiers who bear tremendous difficulties and do not back away from self-sacrifice; his showing us this morality makes it possible for us to see how Japanese fascism can have a certain unique beauty.
The vast majority of Japanese unconsciously considered the war not as a battle against a threatening other, but rather as an action that they knew only through the great austerities that they had to undergo. This shared hardship affirmed their sense of belonging to a community. In her analysis of Japanese wartime cinema, the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict argued that these films emphasized the misery of battle and the suffering of soldiers to such an extent that if this appeared in the context of an American film, it would be interpreted as being antiwar.5 This is a fascinating perspective, but in fact, by emphasizing the tragic beauty of war, Japanese filmmakers urged the Japanese people to have gratitude and sympathy for soldiers and, in that way, strove to cooperate with national directives. There were almost no propaganda films about the necessity of vigilance against a fearsome enemy. Yoshimura Kōzaburō’s The Spy Has Not Yet Died (Kanchō imada shisezu, 1942) is a rare exception. In Japan, it was not particularly necessary to depict the enemy as monstrous or evil. What was important was to use images of the suffering of the Imperial Army to convey the moral message of the infinite obligation to the emperor and the necessity of repaying that obligation. Here we can see a decisive difference that separated Japanese and Western views of war at the time. Incidentally, Japan underwent modern unification around the same time as Italy, from the middle of the nineteenth century. Both were newly emergent nations, late to the game of colonial acquisition; unlike Italy, however, Japan never saw any resistance movements among the people.
In The War at Sea from Hawai’i to Malaya (Hawai mare oki kaisen, 1942), Yamamoto Kajirō realistically depicted the harsh training of young Japanese soldiers. He was assisted by special effects director Tsuburaya Eiji. In this film, Tsuburaya beautifully recreated the attack on Pearl Harbor and the destruction of America’s pacific fleet with miniatures. Tsuburaya would demonstrate his extraordinary talents once more at Tōhō during the postwar period by making monster movies (kaijū eiga). In Army (Rikugun, 1944), Kinoshita Keisuke shows a sickly young man who manages to recover and join the military. Kinoshita’s camera follows the boy’s mother every step of the way as she anxiously rushes after her son as he is marching in a solemn military parade, just before being sent off to the battlefield. As an extraordinary expression of pathos, the scene is successful. Although the film incurred the wrath of some in the military, it is too ambiguous to be interpreted as a work of resistance to the war.
The director most enthusiastic about making films in support of the government’s war policy was Kumagai Hisatora. Both Shanghai Brigade (Shanhai rikusentai, 1939) and A Tale of Leadership (Shidō Monogatari, 1941) are relentless hymns in praise of militarism. Many directors who also made national policy films actually began in left-wing movements in the early 1930s or had made tendency films, including Tasaka Tomotaka, Imai Tadashi, and Yamamoto Satsuo. After the war, many of these directors changed direction quickly, advocating democracy, and participating in leftist movements. Thus, the direction of ideology shifted to its opposite, but in both cases, America remained the enemy.
At the same time that many propaganda films were encouraging the war spirit, some intellectuals felt that the future of Western modernity had reached its limits, and there was an attempt to return to Japanese aesthetic traditions. In 1942, a symposium called “Overcoming Modernity” focused on Kyoto-based philosophers. It constituted one of the world’s first debates on the idea of “postmodernism.” In the two sessions of the symposium, the dominant idea was that, for the “sublime spirit” of Japan, neither European culture now seen to be in decline nor a trivial American culture of “material civilization” were of any use. (During the symposium, word came that the Nazis had occupied Paris and inevitably this encouraged the feeling that the symposium had a “world historical mission.”) The only one to oppose this idea was the film critic Tsumura Hideo, who urged his fellow participants not to underestimate the effects of American culture. He also cautioned against an overzealous belief in spirit that would lead them to take technology too lightly. Tsumura alone was able to operate within the ideological currents of the age. At the same time, through his rich experience with Hollywood and European film, he was still able to look at things soberly.6
Within these conditions, the work of documentary filmmaker Kamei Fumio (1908–1987) was well outside the norm. Kamei had studied at the Leningrad Film School, and in The China Incident (Shina jihen, 1937), a film planned by the Ministry of Education and Culture, he simply displayed compliance with the policy of promoting the war. However, his following film, Shanghai (1938), while seeming to follow the producers’ intention to make nationalist propaganda, contained a deeply antiwar subtext. He included extensive quotations from actual Chinese newsreels, boldly explaining them away as being examples of enemy propaganda. Furthermore, he showed the faces of the colonized people as they gazed at Japanese soldiers on the march, allowing the scene to unfold at length using a moving camera and without cuts. Through his depiction of the tense gazes of the people, he showed the politics and violence not only of the military invasion but also of the act of filming. In addition, Kamei himself did not go to Shanghai, but rather he acted as director by taking the rushes provided by his cameraman Miki Shigeru and editing them in Tokyo. In Fighting Soldiers (Tatakau heitai, 1938), Kamei focused on endless shots showing the exhaustion on the faces of soldiers at the front. Of course, there was a limit to the effectiveness of Kamei’s subterfuges and this was the end. Screenings of Fighting Soldiers were banned; he was stripped of his filmmaking credentials and arrested.
Even with films that do not treat war as a central theme, one can clearly see the influence of wartime conditions. During this period, Inagaki Hiroshi shot a series of films between 1940 and 1942, featuring the national hero and swordsman Miyamoto Musashi as the protagonist.7 To make a work extolling such an austere spiritual seeker embodying the way of the warrior is clearly a response to the demands of the age.
The jidaigeki dominant to that point were produced for the purpose of entertainment and had nonsensical stories. When these films came to be rejected by the censors, filmmakers voluntarily changed to making lyrical works with a sublime and solemn air. As one example, Mizoguchi Kenji shot Genroku Chūshingura between 1941 and 1942, with a massive budget. Because he was aware that Chūshingura, as a popular theme for entertainment movies, had become entirely separated from the historical facts, when he planned the work, he constructed sets for Edo Castle that reproduced the actual dimensions of the original buildings, sets that include the pine corridor where the sudden attack by Asano Takuminokami on Kira Kōzukenosuke took place. The film is one long series of scenes of warriors debating what to do and solemn ceremonies repeated over and over with the element of imperial ideology introduced as a kind of justifying fig leaf. The work was shot as an authentic expression of Japanese ideology, but strangely, the final attack on Kira’s mansion that is usually the highlight of any Chūshingura movie was left out, and contemporaries saw the work as a failure. Nonetheless, in this nearly four-hour film, we can see the formalism of Mizoguchi’s sophisticated long takes and his consciousness of spatial continuity attain near-sacred levels. Mizoguchi forced himself to shoot a film about Miyamoto Musashi, like Inagaki, but without much success.
Makino Masahiro circumvented national policy but in a different way from Kamei Fumio. Even after he shot Japan’s first operetta film Lovebirds’ Song Contest (Oshidori uta gassen, 1939), he continued to direct entertainment works that mixed witty modernism with humanist sentiment, making use of stars like Hasegawa Kazuo and Furukawa Roppa. As the tinge of wartime became stronger, he directed a new adaptation of Izumi Kyōka’s novel A Woman’s Pedigree (Onna keizu, 1942), changing the protagonist’s profession from a German literature specialist working for the military bureaucracy as a translator into an explosives researcher. Additionally, he remade D. W. Griffiths’s Orphans of the Storm as Opium War (Ahen sensō, 1943), shifting its setting to mid-nineteenth-century Guangzhou. At first glance, it certainly appears to extoll the idea of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, but at its heart, it is actually an homage to that Hollywood master from the enemy country.
Sugata Sanshirō (dir. Kurosawa Akira, 1943).
The most important new director to debut in the first half of the 1940s was Kurosawa Akira (1910–1998). In Sugata Sanshirō (1943) and its sequel (1945), set in an age when the traditional art of jiujutsu was changing into the modern sport of judō, he presented a narrative of a youth who continuously undergoes austere training, a modern character reminiscent of Miyamoto Musashi. He falls into moral quandaries from his inborn sense of justice, but when at dawn he sees a lotus blooming in a mud puddle—suggesting the ability to maintain your purity even when your surroundings are filthy—he achieves enlightenment. From his first film, Kurosawa already had a consistent theme that he depicted with powerful brushstrokes. This theme was learning how to avoid a false problem right before our eyes (e.g., how he should combat the karate techniques of his archrival) and to devote oneself to resolving a single question of truth (how to achieve enlightenment in this life). In the spring of 1945, when Japan’s defeat appeared an imminent possibility, Kurosawa was considering a film adaptation of the story of Jeanne d’Arc, The Powerful Princess (Arahimesama) starring Hara Setsuko. In the absence of raw film, this work, which could have been a call to arms in a time of emergency, was shelved. Before long, Japan lost and the war ended.
