The Imperial Screen : Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931-1945 (2003)

This is a massive book filled with details of Japanese films and censorship during the time period from 1931 through 1945. The time is called “the fifteen years war” since it starts from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, goes on through the Japanese attacks on China and then on into World War II itself.

”Although the politicians, the military, and the thought police did have their roles to play,k it was the elite bureaucrats of the Home Ministry censorship division and of the Cabinet Information Bureau who were most directly involved in the implementation of state film policy.”

The author talks about censorship in Japan around 1930, and how the radio stations were almost completely in the hands of the government.

The right-wing nationalists emphasized getting the youth of the country converted to their way of thinking. Magazines and novels stressed the Japanese military.

A 1934 book called the Record of the Coming Japanese American War detailed the Naval strategy for Japan, and how it needed to get the US Navy into an all-or-nothing final battle, which is just what the Japanese tried to do during the war.

As far as what happened in Manchuria, it was a media event for Japan. Before the incident, the newspapers carried stories of supposed Chinese-inspired incidents, all to stir up the Japanese people against China. The supposed bombing by the Chinese of a railroad lead to the Mukden incident, and the newspapers competed with each other to cover the story. Films began to be turned out, although generally they were not considered that great.

Some of these included The Manchurian March, Justice is Strong and the Dawn of Manchuria.

The author lists behind the name of the films in Japanese what year they were from. Many of the films are listed as “lost” or “destroyed.” Many films were destroyed at the end of the war by the Japanese themselves, and others are just lost, much as original recordings of television shows become lost over time.

In January of 1932 another media event was the Shanghai incident.

An early propaganda-type film was Crisis-Time Japan, 1933.

A 1935 Film Export-Import Regulation was put into effect which prohibited all films that were considered “...insulting the national polity, the military or foreign policy.”

The filmmakers in Japan pretty much voluntarily went along with the government line of propagandistic, pro-military films. This was even before government control of film stock and even stricter censorship rules came into play.

One thing the author talks about relates to the anti-Jewish feelings in Japan. “..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 Jewishness' of their domestic admirers. In 1938 there were 38 books published that were anti-Jewish, once even claiming that the Jews and the Freemasons were working together to throttle Japan. All of this despite the fact that Japan had, and still has, a very tiny Jewish population.

People who were considered “thought criminals” sometimes ended up with government agents trying to alter their way of thinking, sort of trying to brainwash them.

The Foreign Ministry came up with its own rules for moviemakers:

1. Don't ridicule the military.

2. Don't exaggerate the cruelties of war with overly realistic depictions.

3. Don't do anything that would have an adverse effect on the “spirits” of the families with men at the fighting front.

4. Don't do anything to stimulate “pleasure-seeking” or display “degenerate hedonism.”

A 1937 trilogy of films called the China Incident was started, to deal with the cities of Beijing, Nanking and Shanghai.

The author talks about the Rape of Nanking, and how that did not end up in the Japanese films.

( What was basically going on was that the Japanese populace was being shown all the successes the Japanese military was having, but all of the atrocities were being left out. The newspapers likewise carried news of all the successes, and this all helped to cause the civilians to think that nothing was going to stop the Japanese war machine.)

(When the military started having reversals, the news was kept from the civilians (and even from some of the men in government); defeats were termed as victories or strategic repositioning, and it wasn't really until the B-29s began bombing Japan in earnest that the civilians began to realize that the war had taken a decidedly ugly turn for Japan.)

”During the China Incident, the Japanese popular imagination tended to conceive of the Chinese as hostile, faceless masses, as columns of refugees stolidly trudging roads to nowhere, or as clumps of lifeless flesh littering trenches and riverbeds.”

A new list of guidelines for films came into being on July 30, 1938. In this case films were to:

1. Celebrate the “Japanese spirit”

2. Re-educated the masses, especially among young people and women who had become too “Americanized”

3. Do away with slang and foreign expressions in dialogue

4. Emphasize respect for fathers and brothers.

5. Suppress any tendency towards individualism.

On May 21, 1940, the Japan Culture Film Associate was established to carry out the goals of the film law.

In September, 1940, the film companies were ordered to reduce the number of films they made each year. For the major film companies the maximum was 48 films a year; for smaller companies the maximum was 4 or 2, depending on the size of the film company.

(And, of course, the fewer films you allowed to be made, the easier it was to control the content of those films.)

Trying to make Westerners into nonhuman or subhuman creatures was made complicated by pre-war exposure to Westerners and their ideas, and by how the Japanese had developed a liking for the actors and actresses from the West.

As time went on, censorship of films became even stronger. The kempei officers, the though police, examined film scripts and rejected two of every three submitted for preproduction censorship.

The book also has a section about the Yasukuni Shrine, the controversial shrine that stirs up trouble whenever visited by a Japanese prime minister. The idea behind the shrine is that any soldier who dies in battle for the Emperor has all his past sins washed away. He is revered as a god, and their souls take up residence at Yasukuni.

The spirits of the living and the dead were supposed to meet at the shrine. This became something that was very important, and something that was easily exploited by the military.

The book also talks about factory production later in the war, and how the morale of the workers fell. There were hardly any strikes or war stoppages, but there was a problem with moonlighting and absenteeism. There was a 10% absentee rate in the war plants as of 1943.

The book talks about the Japanese efforts to propagandize the peoples of countries they took over, giving them lots of anti-British and lots of anti-American propaganda, stressing the “evils of Western colonialism.”

In the middle of 1943 Japanese newspapers began to stress the anti-Japanese prejudice of Americans, leading to one article called “This Is the Enemy; The Tribe of Beasts Called America.”

Japanese history films were expected to put what was going on in Japan's war efforts in a type of historical context, and to stir up anti-Allied feeling. The films didn't succeed in doing either, basically.

Apparently one problem with Japanese war films was that they would show the enemy fleeing and being defeated, but didn't bother showing the enemy as people; they were just sort of a faceless mass.

One slogan that was used for what was going to be the final battle in Japan was “child, parents, and grandparents united in sacrificial death for the nation.”

The book also talks about how many films were destroyed at the end of the war, some by the Japanese and some by the Americans.

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