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Chapter Five: The Emperor's Celluloid Army Marches On
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chapter five The Emperor’s Celluloid Army Marches On Japan’s surrender to the Allies in 1945 marked an end to the physical reality of Japanese empire, but Japanese filmmakers continued to struggle with the loss of empire in the years after the war. For those who had lived their entire lives under the reality of Japanese empire—many of them outside the home islands of Japan—the question of how the newly decolonized Japanese nation fit in Asia was anything but self-evident. Not surprisingly perhaps, filmmakers often turned to the past, and cinematic representations of Japan’s Asian empire continued unabated throughout the U.S. Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), intensifying during and after the Korean conflict, when Japan became a critical base of operations for the United States. Postwar films had to come to terms with the causes of Japan’s crushing defeat and offer possible explanations as to why its loyal imperial subjects-turned-citizens were suffering. Occupation officials were eager to reeducate the Japanese so that they turned away from the empire-building of the past and retooled themselves into a modern democracy (after the American model). Films about the war (in the immediate postwar period, this generally referred to the years between 1941 and 1945) proliferated. After the Occupation, filmmakers enjoyed greater freedom to explore themes of Japanese wartime victimhood , which produced a genre of films that critics called the “postwar antiwar film.” Japanese filmmakers routinely denounced war, but none ever challenged the underlying imperialist impulse. As a result, Japanese filmmakers and audiences would reclaim their empire onscreen time and again. The mix of guilt and nostalgia in these films created a formula that was strikingly similar to that of the films produced before the war. Postwar melodramas such as Bengawan River (1951, Bungawan soro) or Woman of Shanghai (1952, Shanhai no onna) are tragic love stories set in Japan’s former imperial territories that pair Japanese men with Asian women (played by Japanese the emperor’s celluloid army marches on 133 actresses) in what is perhaps an instinctive revival of the goodwill film genre popular in the late 1930s. Bengawan River tells of a romance between a Japanese deserter and an Indonesian woman during the last weeks of the Pacific War, while Woman of Shanghai is about two ethnically Japanese spies who have grown up in China and fall in love with each other in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.1 It is unclear how either film escaped the attention of Occupation censors, given that their subject matter appears to violate censorship directives against representing Japan as a militarist power. Whatever the case, it is clear that there was a strong demand for such films. While it should not surprise us that filmmakers would turn to proven genres, it is instructive that audiences still suffering the affects of war could be nostalgic for retreaded plots about “misunderstood” Japanese working selflessly for the benefit of unappreciative Asian populations. The war may have ended, but empire was a separate matter, and a relevant one. The Japanese Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Ri Koran at the peak of her career in the Manei-produced film Beautiful Sacrifice (1941). [35.175.212.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:56 GMT) 134 the attractive empire desire for films about their empire, however, was no longer predicated on the actual physical possession of imperial territories, and prewar genres such as the goodwill film continued to provide a useful model for how to interpret Japan’s pre-1945 role in Asia in a contemporary context. Other Asians in these postwar films were not always romantic partners; indeed, they often became either comic foils or simply ungrateful competitors. The kind of representation of imperial territories seen in Western films are also apparent in these films. Examining the different interrelations of Japan and America, Japan and Europe, and Japan and its own past reveals the durability and usefulness of these images of Asia, highlighting their transhistorical and transnational hybridity . Japanese cinema is neither dependent on nor wholly independent of the international context in which it exists. The lure of the exotic and the appeal of the foreign in Japan’s cinema of empire must be seen in relative, not absolute, terms. Defeat and National Downsizing When I walked home after listening to the imperial proclamation . . . people on the shopping street were bustling about with cheerful faces as though preparing for a festival. . . . I don’t know whether this was a...