Organizer: Sharon Hayashi, McGill University, Canada

Chair: Mark Nornes, University of Michigan

Discussants: Mark Nornes, University of Michigan; Mark Driscoll, University of North Carolina

At a time when heated debates are taking place throughout East and Southeast Asia over Japanese history textbooks, quasi-official visits to Yasukuni Shrine, national border disputes, and the deployment of Japanese Self-Defense Forces abroad, an examination of Japan’s unresolved legacy of imperialism in Asia and the mediation of these contested historical representations, seems not only timely but urgent. Drawing on postcolonial critiques of nationalism and empire and recently discovered archival sources, this panel offers new approaches to examining wartime film culture in the Japanese empire. Working at the intersection of film studies, intellectual history and cultural studies, our focus on spectatorship and periodization explores the ways in which an analysis of film culture can help rethink questions of colonialism and empire, regionalism and nationalism, collaboration and resistance. Besides offering a complex notion of spectatorship, an examination of film culture also foregrounds the continuity between colonial and imperial cinemas, questioning the simplistic dichotomy between interwar and wartime cinemas and the narrowly nationalist rubric of this narrative. Chika Kinoshita constructs a theory of female spectatorship of Onna Keizu (1942), a melodrama set in the Meiji period, locating it within the genre of home front cinema. Michael Baskett maps the cultural geography of Korea in imperial Japanese film culture in the 1930s and 1940s to question the postwar periodization of wartime cinema. Sharon Hayashi highlights Japanese film culture’s negotiation with the standardization of cinematic language during the transition to sound in the expanding Japanese empire.

Chika Kinoshita, University of Chicago

Onna keizu (Genealogy of Women, 1942) had every reason to be a smash hit. It featured Tôhô studio’s two top stars, Hasegawa Kazuo and Yamada Isuzu, was based on the well-known theatrical repertoire derived from Izumi Kyôka's novel, and was directed by Makino Masahiro, the most popular director of the time. The box office records measured up to the expectations. The film shared the story formulae and the setting with a number of melodramas made during the same period, 1939-1945, such as Mizoguchi Kenji's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939): a romantic couple is separated because of one partner's devotion to professional obligation. Two kinds of readings have been offered of these wartime melodramas set in the Meiji period. First, they allowed both the filmmaker and the spectator to escape from the war into nostalgia for the past. Second, on the contrary, they echoed the state's call for the subject’s complete devotion to the war effort. This paper, taking the enormously popular Onna keizu as an example, hypothetically genders the spectator as female, with a hope to throw into relief complex addresses and textuality of these films. Combining archival research on popular film periodicals and a textual analysis of Onna keizu, I will construct a wartime female spectatorship. I argue that the cinema of mobilization was less a monolithic training ground than multi-dimensional machinery through which the spectator's desire, pleasure, suffering, and even resistance were played out and channeled.

Michael Baskett, University of Kansas

In this paper I examine Japanese representations of the cultural geography of colonial Korea (Chosen) in part to question the paradigm of "war cinema" as it is generally applied to 1930s/40s Japanese film culture. Whereas the term "war cinema" as it has been used in postwar Japanese film scholarship broadly refers to films produced between 1937 and 1945, Japanese film culture itself was inscribed within an ongoing and much larger imperial enterprise on the behalf of which colonial war(s) were fought. Idealized representations of the cultural geography of Asia were vital to the legitimization of Japan’s imperial project and constructed a simulated spatial relationship between consumers of imperial film culture and the cultural landscape of empire (here denoted as specific geographic spaces and their indigenous populations). This paper discusses the colonial in this relationship through a historical examination of two moments in the development of cinema under the Japanese in colonial Korea. The first occurs in the 1930s between the text and the spectator-subject as articulated in prewar Japanese film journals which stressed the role of Japan in a) the introduction of the notion of film as a professional practice and b) the creation of a modern film industry in colonial Korea. The other is the 1940s when Japanese Pan-Asianist rhetoric is used to deny the existence of Japanese colonialism and the cultural geography of colonial Korea is presented in iconographic images that are less exotic and more familiar to Japanese spectator-subjects.

Sharon Hayashi, McGill University, Canada

The visual dimensions of imperial cinema have been widely analyzed and debated yet studies of sound remain much neglected. What role did language in cinema play in shaping conceptions of the Japanese empire? This presentation will examine the process by which a new cinematic language was created during the transition from silent to sound cinema in Japan from the early 1930s to the early 1940s and situates this transition against the backdrop of both increasing regional awareness within Japan and the expanding Japanese empire. In an attempt to rethink the transition to sound cinema outside of the narrow parameters of national film histories this paper will discuss debates on the creation of a standardized Japanese cinematic language and the use of regional dialects in the context of national, imperial and global film markets. The latter half of the presentation will focus on the writings of Iijimi Tadashi, one of the central founders of postwar cinema studies in Japan whose wartime writings remain largely unexamined. In the absence of State guidelines to deal with the unique linguistic problems facing the film world during the late1930s, Iijima developed a theory of cinematic language that addressed the issue of Japanese as both a spoken and written language circulating on screens throughout the empire. His arguments for the creation of a standard cinematic Japanese negotiated questions of film dialogue, subtitling and dubbing which both upheld and opposed official language policies of the time and reflected many of the conflicts between nationalism and Pan-Asian ideology.