In this chapter, I touch very simply on film production in the colonies and places occupied by the Japanese Empire up to the end of the Second World War. More concretely, I will look at the following places: Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Shanghai, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Japan acquired Taiwan from the Qing Empire after winning the Sino-Japanese War in 1895—the same year that the Lumière brothers invented the cinema. This tells us that Japanese modernity and Taiwanese colonization ran parallel to Japanese film history. In 1901, the first film screening in Taipei was conducted by a Japanese named Takamatsu Toyojirō. Entrusted by the governor general with the pacification of the Taiwanese population, he would later travel throughout the island to spread the Japanese language carrying his camera equipment with him. More than anything else, cinema was considered an effective cultural apparatus for colonization and Japanization. In 1921, a Japanese man visited Taiwan and shot an education film about nutritional hygiene called Preventing Cholera (Yufang huòluàn in Chinese, Yobō kakuran in Japanese). This was the first footage shot on the island, and this fact shows the colonial function of film. The first permanent film theater in Taipei was erected in 1907, but the screenings there were mostly of films from the Japanese “homeland,”1 and it was only much later that mass entertainment films were produced in Taiwan. The first film produced by a Taiwanese person was Liu Xiyang’s Whose Fault Is It? (Shui zhi guo) in 1925. This was the story of a geisha and a banker passionately in love with each other whose relationship is endangered by a gangster. This film ends with the banker saving the geisha. Although the film is long since lost, it is not hard to detect the influence of Japanese shinpa and action plays and movies.
To Japanese directors in the “homeland” seeking exoticism, Taiwan consistently provided auspicious material. The first example of this was Song of Sadness (Ai no kyoku), shot in 1919 for Tenkatsu Studios by Edamasa Yoshirō, a director who had been sympathetic to the Pure Film Movement. This is a melodrama with a ridiculous plot about a young girl living in Tokyo who is kidnapped and sold off to the circus. Ten years later, she finds herself in Taiwan, having been raised as daughter of the chieftain of the indigenous Takasago tribe. The film was produced with the most modern techniques and technologies at the time. Notably, it directed attention to Taiwan (even if no actual location shooting occurred there), a peripheral region of the Japanese Empire that most people did not notice. Reform movements in film history that take as their subject heretofore unknown remote regions are not rare, as evidenced by Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan, 1933) and the Chinese Fifth-Generation filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief (Dào mǎ zéi, 1986). Even though the film borrows modernist forms, Song of Sadness’s narrative repeatedly shows events as the working out of karma, suggesting that this film was still no more than an extension of the early sideshow films.
Tasaka Tomotaka’s 1927 film for Nikkatsu, Hero of Alishan (Arisan no kyōji), was actually shot in Taiwan. In the film, an indigenous youth, while belonging to a savage tribe, is presented as a proud human being. That said, we cannot necessarily conclude simply that Song of Sadness is a discriminatory film and that Hero of Alishan is not. It is first necessary to scrutinize the structure of Orientalism that stretches across the background of both films. The Japanese were not the only ones to make films featuring an air of exoticism. In 1929, Bai Da Film Company’s Blood Stains (Xie Hen) directed by Zhang Yunhe was set in a trading post in the “savage region” of a mountainous area where a young girl, dressed as a boy, boldly avenges her late father. In the 1920s, not only were films imported into Taiwan from the “homeland” and from Hollywood, but Shanghai films were also imported, passing through Amoy and Tainan (where they had to undergo brutal censorship). In Blood Stains, we can detect the influence of Kyoto jidaigeki along with Shanghai wuxiapian (stories of martial heroes).
In Gohō, the Righteous Man (Gijin gohō, 1932), directed by Andō Tarō, the drive to enlighten blends beautifully with exoticism. The superiority of civilization to savagery is proclaimed in this tale of a righteous Taiwanese man who chooses to sacrifice himself to stop the Takasago tribe from headhunting. At the same time, however, we should not ignore the fact that the protagonist embodies the ideal character as praised by Confucius and seems to have no connection to a modern Japanese ethos. In the 1943 wartime film Sayon’s Bell (Sayon no kane) by another Japanese director, Shimizu Hiroshi, the circumstances are completely different. In a village that has accepted the values of the Japanese Empire, a daughter of the Takasago Tribe, played by Ri Kōran,2 shows her devotion to the departing soldiers and sacrifices her own life. The setting is no longer that of a remote backwater rampant with savagery but rather is an idealized space, a utopia.
After Hokkaido and Okinawa, Taiwan was Japan’s third-oldest colony, but unlike Korea, as I will explain, filmmaking by Taiwanese was not well developed. In the 1930s, films with shinpa-style stories were produced there, such as Spring Breeze (Wang chunfen, 1938), directed by Andō Tarō and Huang Liangmeng, but by 1941, the governor general had established the Taiwan Motion Picture Association. As controls were tightened, Taiwanese filmmakers were forced into silence.
In 1945, when Japan withdrew from Taiwan and Nationalist Party rule began, the government quickly tried to ban the screening of Japanese films, but they were not able to achieve this because of popular opposition. Mandarin-language films began to be produced through the auspices of the government, but ordinary Taiwanese who used Hokkienese-related dialects of Taiwanese as well as Hakka could not warm up to these films. In 1956, when nongovernment film production in Taiwanese began, it was immensely popular right away. Japanese films continued to be supported by the masses and many coproductions were made until official relations between Japan and Taiwan ceased. In the 1970s, Taiwan’s young generation, which could not understand Japanese, enjoyed Japanese films through a person who explained the movie in Taiwanese when it was screened. This custom was rooted in Japanese benshi. Indeed, Wu Nien Chen’s A Borrowed Life (Tò-sàng, 1994), which depicts the filmmaker’s relationship with his father, includes a scene in which the director—as a young boy—is taken by his father to see the Shōchiku film Kimi no na wa (1953) at a theater in a mining town, and the screening is accompanied by a benshi’s interpretation.
Japan annexed the Great Korean Empire in 1905, and in 1910 began to rule it as a colony. But the rule over Korea did not go as smoothly as that over Taiwan, and nationalist movements incessantly hassled the governor general, who suppressed the movements through harsh means. The film industry run by Koreans was extremely active in comparison with that of Taiwan and had produced innumerable filmmakers. They were, moreover, deeply connected with rising nationalist sentiments in various ways.
The first Korean production was The Righteous Revenge (Uirijeok gutu) directed by Kim Do San in the colonial capital of Keijō in 1919. Just the fact that the film was rooted in the rensageki form that was enormously popular in the “homeland” during the 1910s, testifies to how much Korean cinema from the beginning was under the influence of Japanese shinpa. Since that time, even after Korean independence, the influence of shinpa has been overwhelmingly strong. Although calls were made to eliminate any trace of colonial coloring through government policy, it could not be wholly eradicated. Resonating with popular songs and the vocal art of pansori3 from the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), shinpa found a soul mate in the Korean melodramatic imagination.
In Korea, as with Taiwan, the governor general at first planned to carry out education and enlightenment through film, having the former head of a mass theater troop, Yun Baek-nam, direct Plighted Love Under the Moon (Wolha-ui maengseo, 1923) to encourage personal savings. After that, however, the impulse toward making films by Korean people was stronger than that of government-supported film, and when a Japanese man opened up Chōsen Kinema in 1924, Korean independent productions flourished as if in opposition. This took place around the same time that independent directors were emerging one after another in Kyoto.
The most important director throughout the 1920s was Na Woon-gyu. A figure connected with anti-Japan movements, Na directed, wrote, and starred in Ariran (1926), a powerful film that raised national pride and resistance. The protagonist, a young man, goes to prison for killing the minion of a member of the Japanese military police who has humiliated his younger sister. “Because I was born here in Korea, I have killed a crazy man,” the benshi improvised, explaining that seven years ago during the nationwide anti-Japan movements, he became deranged on account of being tortured by the Japanese military police.4 Audiences were electrified and police in the theater demanded an end to screenings of the film. Near the end of the film, when a singer stood and sang the theme song, a newly composed song in the style of a folk song, the entire audience raised their voices in unison. The melody of Ariran is familiar even today. Na directed seventeen films altogether and passed away at thirty-six years of age.
Several additional directors were active from the 1920s through the 1930s. Yi Kyŏng-son caused a stir with Long Cherished Dream (Changhanmong, 1926), his adaptation of the Japanese novel The Golden Demon, but he eventually left Korea through Shanghai and went into exile in Bangkok. Lee Gyu-Hwan, who had studied at Shinkō Kinema in Kyoto, directed The Ownerless Ferryboat (Imjaeobtneun naleutbae, 1932) in Keijō. A strongly anti-Japanese film, it tells the story of a poor and old ferryman who loses his job because of the construction of a bridge by the occupying Japanese. The man ends up killing a Japanese engineer who tried to rape his younger sister. Even so, apart from individual films that were critical of Japan, the trends of Korean cinema largely followed those of Japanese films on a smaller scale. If shinpa films were popular in the “homeland,” then they would be made in Korea; if tendency films were popular in the “homeland,” then they would be made in Korea, and so on. Although produced in overwhelming numbers in the “homeland,” however, jidaigeki alone never developed in Korea. The first talkie in Korea was produced just a bit later than that in the “homeland,” appearing in 1935: Yi Myongho’s The Story of Chunhyang (Chunhyangjeon). The film, a celebrated story from the repertory of the traditional vocal art of pansori, became a national story not unlike Japan’s Chūshingura. At present, including both South and North Korea, the story has been filmed more than fifteen times since 1923; this popularity speaks to the fact that in Korea, in the interest of self-recognition and national belonging, melodrama works at a more profound level than political ideology.
In the late 1930s, a second generation of filmmakers appeared, including Bang Han-Jun and Yun Bong-chun, who both trained as assistant directors in the “homeland,” and who worked to incorporate a modernist, enlightenment spirit removed from stock shinpa tropes. However, with Japan on the imperialist march, in 1940 a film law was established in Korea as well, eliminating almost all possibilities for Koreans to take a leading role in filmmaking. For those who wanted to direct at any cost, they had to abandon the adult world, which was subject to strict censorship, and instead had to entrust their ideas to the children’s world. Choi In-Kyu’s Tuition (Su-eop-ryo, 1940) depicts the warm-hearted relationship between a teacher and a poor elementary school student who cannot pay his fees. His next film, Homeless Angel (Jibeopneun cheonsa, 1941), features a young orphan who looks after street urchins. In similar ways, these filmmakers were forced to turn to the world of children in Taiwanese cinema in the early 1980s and in Iranian cinema in the 1990s.
In 1942, all Korean studios were closed down, and in their place, the governor general established the new Chōsen Cinema (Chō’ei). Filmmakers from the “homeland” arrived one after another and directed several films, using Koreans, who had been the center of Korean cinema, as staff on site. Hinatsu Eitarō’s You and I (Kimi to boku, 1941) and Toyoda Shirō’s Figure of Youth (Wakaki sugata, 1943) acted as an extension of the imperialization policies at the time, praising the drafting of Korean students to the front. In addition, Imai Tadashi made Suicide Troops of the Watchtower (Bōrō no kesshitai, 1943) for Tōhō. Shot like a Hollywood western, the film narrates the story of a Japanese policeman, his family, and their Korean servants, as they risk their lives trying to overcome kyōhi (anti-Japanese partisans).
Tuition (dir. Choi In-Kyu, 1940).
When Japanese colonial rule ended in 1945, film production in the Korean language resumed immediately. Choi In-kyu directed Hurrah! For Freedom! (Jayu manse, 1946) to celebrate the one-year anniversary of national liberation, and a rush of anti-Japanese films followed. Kang Hon-sik’s My Home Village (Nae Kohyang, 1948) was the first film made in North Korea, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. South Korea is one of the rare nations in the world that has gone for so long without officially screening any Japanese films (the ban did not end until 1998). Even so, the influence of Japanese cinema permeates every crevice of South Korean film, with innumerable Korean re-makes of Japanese films. Ironically, at the same time, the Japanese film world featured a great presence of zainichi performers. In fact, during the postwar period, the percentage of roles played by zainichi Korean actors and stars was so high that Japanese made them the standard of beauty for the men and women of the era for well over half a century.
Suicide Troops of the Watchtower (dir. Imai Tadashi, 1943).
In 1932, Japan established the state of Manchukuo in what are now the three northeastern provinces of China and appointed Pu’i, the last emperor under Qing China, as its emperor. In 1936, the Manchurian Film Corporation (Man’ei) was established in Shinkyō (now Changchun). Man’ei set out to produce national policy films whose primary purpose was the civilization of the Manchurian people.
When it was established, Japanese celebrated Man’ei as the studio with the largest land holdings in all of East Asia. In the postwar period, however, it was called the “shame of Japanese film history,” and up to this point, film history has treated the topic of Man’ei as taboo. The paucity of extant films also has proven to be an obstacle to research. However, when we consider the fact that it was returnees from Man’ei in the postwar period who built the foundation for Tōei films in Japan, that the Chinese Communist Party administration made use of its facilities and technologies, and that its personnel have spread out as far as Hong Kong and Taiwan, we might ask whether it is time to reexamine, within the larger context of Asian film history, the merits and demerits of this studio that ran for more than nine years.
At the time of its establishment, Man’ei relied on both technology and personnel from Tōhō. The studio found Chinese newcomers as actors, and in 1938, produced its first feature film. This studio, however, would begin to display its truly unique features the same year with the arrival of Negishi Kan’ichi and Makino Mitsuo from Nikkatsu. In the following year, 1939, Amakasu Masahiko5 became the head of Man’ei, and from around this time, a motley bunch of former leftists, rightists, and military men who found it increasingly difficult to be in the homeland arrived at Man’ei in search of a new paradise in which to live, looking like the proverbial procession of monsters.
Broadly speaking, Man’ei produced two kinds of films: educational films and entertainment films. The former were culture films for propaganda purposes, aimed at civilizing the native population—the original purpose of Man’ei. The latter were regular feature films, and these gave birth to the star Ri Kōran. By around 1941, Man’ei established a regular course of making thirty entertainment films annually. Several of the films produced by Man’ei showed in the “homeland” as well, but they were not particularly highly regarded. The Manchurian people, who were subjugated in their native lands, were by no means fond of the films. This lack of popularity in China was because these films were produced by Japanese who had no interest in or knowledge of the differing lifestyles of various ethnic groups in China. To most Japanese, all of these peoples were identically exotic. Even if it did not bother Japanese, for people in China, it would feel unnatural for a Manchurian actor to play a role speaking the Chinese language. The expression for an apology in Japanese, gomen nasai, was rendered directly into Chinese as toipuchi, a word that no one would ever use, so the films of Man’ei were contemptuously called “toipuchi films” by native Manchurians.
Ri Kōran (1920–2014) was Japanese, but she was raised as a Chinese person in Manchuria and Beijing. She not only was beautiful but also was blessed with an extraordinary capacity for languages and an ability to sing; when she became a star at Man’ei, she came to star opposite the “homeland” star Hasegawa Kazuo at Tōhō. In this film, she plays a “daughter of China” in the anti-Japanese camp; however, she comes to love the earnest character of Hasegawa, and after some stormy drama, she finally switches to the pro-Japan camp, giving the films a happy ending.
Ri Kōran [Yamaguchi Yoshiko].
The film that truly made her famous was Fushimizu Shu’s China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940). With the heady atmosphere of its cosmopolitan port-town setting, the gangs, action, and a pure-hearted daughter, the format of the film anticipated Nikkatsu’s borderless action (mukokuseki) films by twenty years. The primary principle of Ri Kōran’s films is that the invader is always a man, while the person from the invaded country who is obedient and loyal to the invading power, is always a woman. If it were the opposite, a love story between a Chinese man and a Japanese woman, the film likely never would have even made it through the planning stages. Most Japanese viewers unquestioningly believed that she was Chinese. As long as a person’s actions fit with the Japanese stereotype, nationalism would confirm that interpretation. Later, Ri would go on to play the daughter of a Taiwanese indigenous person as well as a Korean daughter in Japanese films. Once Japan surrendered, she went to Hollywood in the 1950s, and under the name Shirley Yamaguchi, she played the role of a Japanese war bride. In this instance as well, she plays a woman from the invaded country. As an actress, Ri Kōran has occupied an extremely important place within the context of numerous issues, including colonialism, nationalism, and gender both in what she herself has done and what her image has meant to different people at different times. Moreover, in the 1970s, she went to Beirut to help shoot interviews with Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, as well as with members of the Japanese Red Army, garnering a prize from a Japanese television station. Ri Kōran’s unusual life is currently being mythologized as an original Japanese musical, causing a stir not only in Japan but also in China.
Let us return to the discussion of Man’ei. After 1942, there were shortages of raw film in Japan, and with this as one of the reasons, several filmmakers—from Kimura Sotoji to Uchida Tomu—left the homeland for Manchuria. The film My Nightingale (Watashi no uguisu, 1944),6 a coproduction of Man’ei and Tōhō directed by Shimazu Yasujirō, scripted by Iwasaki Akira and starring Ri Kōran, was a melodrama in the musical mode and almost entirely in the Russian language. Although completely unthinkable in the homeland, this production shows that the spirit of “Five Tribes Working in Harmony”—touted as the national policy of Manchuria—had a kind of life among a certain coterie of filmmakers.
When Manchukuo collapsed in 1945, the occupying Soviet Army quickly seized Man’ei’s equipment and film. The Eighth-Route Army that arrived next turned it into the first Chinese Communist Party studio, requesting technical assistance from remaining Japanese staff. Many Manchurian staff fled and sought refuge in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Negishi and Makino, who had returned to the “homeland” early, built the foundations for today’s Tōei and welcomed returnees from Man’ei. In this way, Man’ei planted the seeds for regional cinema through a large part of East Asia. A figure who followed one of the strangest and most convoluted paths within this configuration was the cameraman Nishimoto Tadashi. Returning to post-defeat Tokyo, he spent the 1950s at Shin Tōhō and shot films there about Emperor Meiji. He then made his way to Hong Kong in the 1960s and became the cameraman for anti-Japanese productions from King Hu and Bruce Lee. Man’ei thus became the source for wandering film personnel for half a century during the postwar period.
Shanghai was the center of Chinese film production from the 1910s. After Japan established Manchukuo in 1932, filmmakers there began actively producing anti-Japanese films. In 1937, the Japanese Army occupied Shanghai, but because the film studio was in the French concession, they were largely able to continue producing independent films after that. The Japanese Army then asked Kawakita Nagamasa of Tōwa Trading to take control of Chinese film. Kawakita began by having Suzuki Shigeyoshi shoot The Road to Peace in the Orient (Tōyō heiwa e no michi, 1938) to placate the Chinese population. When Kawakita established the China Movie Company in 1939, he went so far as to welcome the secretly anti-Japanese Zhang Shankun to produce the “National Defense Film” Mulan Joins the Army (Mokuran jūgun). Moreover, in 1942, he consolidated twelve studios to make China United Productions Limited. Kawakita had heard that criticism was leveled at the film studio at Man’ei; in response, he adopted a policy of avoiding production plans that placed only Japanese in leadership positions, provided raw film stock for Chinese films made by Chinese, and avoided commentary on content. Of course, regardless of how liberal a policy this might have been, Kawakita could not erase the fact that Japanese, with the support of the military authorities, ruled the world of cinema in China during this period. Again a coproduction with Man’ei starring Ri Kōran, Eternity (Wàn shì liú fāng, 1943) stirred great interest. Against the backdrop of the Opium War, the film tells the story of Lin Zexu, who fought heroically against the violent oppression of the British military. In an odd coincidence, Makino Masahiro shot The Opium War (Ahen sensō) in the same year.
In 1945, when the Japanese were defeated and the Chinese Nationalist Army returned, the Chinese filmmakers who had worked there, beginning with Zhang Shankun, were branded as traitors and fled to exile in Hong Kong, thus establishing the foundation for a flourishing film industry there in the postwar period.
Finally, I would like to touch briefly on film production in Southeast Asia, in particular, in places occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War, from 1942 to 1945.
In Indonesia, film production by the native population was forbidden, and propaganda films were made by Japanese under the rule of the Japanese military. These films were made to teach Indonesians the Japanese language and to encourage them to form neighborhood associations based on the Japanese model to learn about the Japanese spirit.
Calling Australia (1944), a film shot in Jakarta by Hinatsu Eitarō, who I discussed in the section on Korean film, was a fake documentary produced with the aim of hiding the abuse of prisoners of war by the Japanese Army. This work, which appeared to be shot autonomously by an Australian prisoner, was sent to the allied nations through the Red Cross. After the war, Australia reassembled the prisoners of war who were forced to appear in it and made a documentary to expose the film’s mendacity. Hinatsu had a Japanese name, but in fact he was a Korean named Huh Young, and he remained in Jakarta even after he received notice of the resurrection of his Korean homeland. When Indonesia became independent, he made several melodramas there under the name Dr. Huyung. He is remembered in Indonesian film history as being the first director in that country to shoot a kiss scene.
The circumstances in the Philippines were drastically different from those in Indonesia. This nation, which had been a direct colony of the United States, was already making musicals and melodramas with a strong Hollywood influence in the 1930s. As part of a larger colonial policy, the United States had planned to set up Manila as the Hollywood of Asia. In Indonesia as well, the Japanese military forced prisoners of war to appear in films. The Dawn of Freedom (Ano hata o ute), a 1943 film made through the auspices of the Japanese military, was a coproduction directed by Abe Yutaka and Herald De Leon. Abe had studied in Hollywood in the 1920s, but even so, could achieve only a rigid directing style. Leon had a much more classical Hollywood touch, steeped in the techniques of light, dreamy melodramas. The difference between the two directors is clear at a glance. The contrast vividly demonstrates the differences between Japan and the Philippines in the depth of their experience of American film. Dawn of Freedom aimed to praise the Japanese Army’s driving the United States out of the Philippines, but ironically, it drew its most impressive and moving episodes from an American movie: John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941). Under the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, filmmakers encountered Hollywood in numerous forms and then made films based on those memories. When Japan was defeated, the cameraman Miyajima Yoshio burned the negative for The Dawn of Freedom to destroy the evidence so the facts about prisoner abuse would not be discovered. As a result, in spite of his transgressions, he flourished as a central figure in left-wing movements in the postwar Japanese film world.
