Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (review)

In Screening Enlightenment, Hiroshi Kitamura presents the history of Hollywood cinema in Japan during the American Occupation. Today Japan is one of the largest markets for Hollywood films outside the United States; Kitamura argues that this did not occur by accident, but was the result of years of carefully planned importation, beginning immediately after the end of the Pacific War. Kitamura charts the deliberate efforts that took place during the Occupation to use Hollywood film to educate the Japanese citizenry about American-style democracy; he argues that this program succeeded through the combined efforts of the U.S. and Japanese governments, the Hollywood film industry, and fan activity. The result was measured not only in box office returns, but also in the positive attitude of the Japanese public toward U.S. popular culture.

Kitamura provides background to his topic by briefly reviewing in the first chapter the state of Japanese cinema and the importation of films from the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, Japanese films tended to be more popular, even as they adopted Hollywood-style editing conventions and modes of production. Imported motion pictures had even more difficulty reaching audiences in the 1930s as the military government tightened censorship and control over the industry in an effort to use film as wartime propaganda. Through the late 1930s, the Japanese government increasingly restricted Hollywood imports; during the years of the Pacific War it suspended them entirely. While this history may be familiar to scholars of Japanese film, Kitamura's review is informative.

The second chapter, "Renewed Intimacies," covers the war years and the resumption of film importation at the start of the U.S. Occupation. After briefly describing the state of Hollywood film production during World War II, Kitamura discusses how in the final months of the war, the U.S. film industry organized to resume large-scale exports while avoiding the kinds of protectionist trade practices and resistance to imported cinema that had thwarted its earlier attempts to break into the Japanese market. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA, 1922) worked with the State Department to create the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA, 1945), a legal cartel run by a former head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with the explicit aim of securing a majority share in foreign markets, particularly those which had been formerly closed or restricted. Kitamura then outlines the policies of SCAP (i.e., the General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for Allied Powers, or GHQ/SCAP) on regulating cinema, both domestic and imported, to encourage pro-American values. While at first these efforts at strict censorship and control were overseen by the Civil Information and Education Section, it was not until the formation in 1946 of the Central Motion Picture Exchange (CMPE)—a bureau nominally within SCAP but in fact run by film industry executives—that importation of Hollywood film began in earnest, carefully planned and on a nationwide scale. Kitamura concludes, "The founding of the CMPE completed the institutional endeavors to set up the U.S. film industry's postwar campaign in Japan. This outcome was the result of a corporatist matrix formed in response to the war—an extraordinary moment that brought together the U.S. government, the military, and the film industry" (p. 41). Kitamura credits this unlikely alliance with ensuring the successful importation of Hollywood film.

In the third chapter, Kitamura discusses the Japanese film industry's experiences with censorship by the Occupation government, using the examples of three films, Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel; Kurosawa Akira, 1948), Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki; Ōba Hideo, 1950), and Daibosatsu tōge, which the Toyoko Motion Picture Company attempted but failed to produce in 1949 (the film, titled The Sword of Doom in English, finally appeared in 1966, coproduced by the Takarazuka and Tōhō movie studios and directed by Okamoto Kihachi). The comparison of a film that could not gain SCAP approval with two...