Japan

ERUPTION AND INTERRUPTION OF WAR

By 1937, Japan was essentially at war with China. War was inevitable, to anyone with eyes to see, as early as 1931, but by 1937 the military draft and regular excursions into the Chinese heartland indicated that Japan was a nation at war. Cinematic excursions into China became increasingly common as well, with the infamous stardom of Yoshiko Yamaguchi being the most famous instance of the Japanese trying to conquer China on screen and off. A Japanese woman born in Manchuria, Yamaguchi was passed off as a Chinese actress, Li Hsiang-lan, and she appeared in a handful of overt propaganda films inevitably portraying a Chinese woman in love with, rescued by, and otherwise indebted to a Japanese soldier. The effectiveness of propaganda films like Shina no yoru ( China Night , 1940) within China is more than questionable, as Chinese audiences wanted no part of such films. On the Japanese homefront, propaganda was the order of the day by 1940, but Yamaguchi-Li's talent and beauty may have overcome the otherwise obvious intentions behind the film.

Government censorship was always a factor in the production of Japanese cinema. As early as 1925, a centralized state censorship board was established to oversee film content, with particular concerns for public security and morality. Leftist filmmaking of the late 1920s and early 1930s (including many documentaries) encouraged further government intervention in the early 1930s, but it was the ever-increasing social conservatism and imperialistic militarism that led to the Pacific War and the virtual nationalization of the film industry and its heavy censorship by 1940. The production of kokusakueiga (national policy film) led to the overtly propagandistic nature of the entertainment cinema, while the government forced the merger of the major studios into three concerns: Shochiku, Toho and Daiei (which had

taken Nikkatsu Studios under its new corporate banner). In the early period, from 1937 to 1941, a number of interesting films were produced whose overt propaganda value may be questionable. Films like Five Scouts ( Gonin no sekkohei , 1938) and Mud and Soldiers ( Tsuchi to heitai , 1939) seem rather grim in their portrayal of ground combat in China, while Airplane Drone ( Bakuon , 1939) is a rather charming comedy. Masterpieces like Mizoguchi's Genroku chushingura ( The Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin of the Genroku Era , 1941) and Ozu's Chichi ariki ( There Was a Father , 1942) similarly show far less overt propaganda content than Hollywood's rabid anti-Japanese, pro-war films of the 1940s, but other, less well-known films take an anti-Western tack. Toho's all-star, big-budget Ahen senso ( The Opium War , 1943), directed by the prolific Masahiro Makino and starring Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, for instance, is charmingly propagandistic, with Japanese actors portraying the Chinese and British characters that make up the film. But as the war took a turn for the worse, so, too, the film industry declined—resources becoming ever scarcer and filmmakers ever subject to censorship. Ironically, when the war ended and the US Occupation forces arrived, the film industry was subjected to some of the same rigid censorship codes, though put to different ends.