The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (review)

Michael Baskett's The Attractive Empire attempts to recover the "lost" history of the mass media during Japan's imperial era (1868-1945),¹ with a particular emphasis on film, although manga and magazines are also included in his analysis. The book is slim, five chapters in total (154 pages of text), indicating the difficulty of finding and gaining access to such material. That being said, this is an important book for anyone interested in Japanese history, film, and mass media in general.

As the author himself notes, this book is "the first comprehensive study of imperial Japanese film culture in Asia from its unapologetically colonial roots in Taiwan and Korea, to its more subtly masked semicolonial markets in Manchuria and Shanghai, and to the occupied territories of Southeast Asia" (p. 3). Baskett's study is based on three assumptions: (1) Japan had a cinema of empire (often unknown, ignored, or unacknowledged), which merits analysis; (2) the concept of Asia was central to Japan's collective national identity during this era; and (3) film cultures involve the participation of all levels of society and are not some top-down propaganda as the Frankfurt school might have it.² This last premise leads to his argument that filmic visions of empire were thus, by necessity, attractive to its audiences. In short, Baskett is challenging the idea that ordinary Japanese were unwilling participants in Japan's prewar empire building.

In what ways were these films made attractive to their audiences? The answers to this question are the basis of the book's use of films as texts for analysis. In the main, Baskett looks at how the ideology of being modern, or technologically advanced, was the linchpin of this attractiveness: that modernity and its promise of a better life were used to seduce (in Jean Baudrillard's sense³) Japan's subjects (both at home and in the colonies) into becoming part of the imagined community⁴ that was Japan's empire. The mass media of this era attempted to undermine the linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and historical traditions that stood in the way of breaking with the past and that might obstruct efforts to become part of the new order—part of Greater East Asia.

To make such a case, Japan had to be certain of its identity as Asian, the second premise upon which this book is based. Thus, the heroes of the films, manga, and magazine articles that were disseminated throughout the empire were seen as part of a pan-Asian culture in which adventure and selfless labor would transform Greater East Asia and make it an empire to rival that of the British (at the time, the United States was not seen to have any sort of imperial leanings, but Britain had the world's largest empire). In support of this mass media "crusade," Japan became a prolific film producer—making more films in 1937, for example, than Hollywood itself (p. 3)—and it imported Japanese trained abroad, in the United States especially, to help with this project. Such propagandist filmmaking also involved both the censorship of locally produced films and restrictions on the importation of Hollywood films, although the latter resulted in an interesting power play in which the United States threatened to make all the villains in its films Japanese if the markets in East Asia were not opened up to U.S. films once more (p. 112).

Baskett's analysis of these films reveals that Orientalism by any other name is still a form of othering with pernicious political repercussions. The films often depicted its non-Japanese Other as simple, backward, pleased to be civilized, and admiring of the modernity on offer by Japan. A related genre depicted the women of the empire as feisty and anti-Japanese females, who could be wooed and won round by the rational, heroic Japanese leading man. Fans of the novels and films set in the colonies of...