Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945 by Hikari Hori (review)

Hikari Hori's Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945 speaks to several areas of recent scholarly interest in Japanese history and film studies, making a significant intervention in both fields. The suggestive title encourages the reader to place the book alongside Michael Baskett's The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (2008), or David Ambaras's Japan's Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (2018), and Hori's writing certainly captures the atmosphere of an era in which imperial expansion was mediated in terms of attraction, intimacy, and other romantic or charged terms. At the same time, Hori insists on nuance in her account of the production and reception of the films and visual culture materials that carried these affects across Japan and its occupied lands and colonies.

Through four detailed chapters covering imperial photography and newsreel film, entertainment film, documentary film, and animation, Hori balances the bureaucratic narratives of government and industry production with accounts of audience reception of state-sanctioned media texts. Chapter 1, which investigates the role of photography, display, and newsreel film in the construction of the Showa emperor's public image, blends archival sources with visual analysis of a number of portraits and photographs. Comparisons with representational practices during earlier eras and in other countries provide context and contrast for Hori's argument (p. 62), which emphasizes the many stages in the development of the practice of photographing and displaying images of the emperor during the long and politically turbulent Showa period. Hori demonstrates how an initial "stardom" phase of attraction (p. 42) was succeeded by emphasis on distance and veneration, before the humanization of the emperor in the early postwar years. Added color is provided by the childhood memories of Emperor Hirohito recounted by filmmakers (p. 230, note 122) and material from autobiographies describing citizens' impressions of the ruler. Most striking are the descriptions of lèse-majesté cases and material from police reports documenting subversive and noncompliant viewing attitudes, including accounts of anti-imperial graffiti in film theaters (p. 67). While Hori notes the enormity of the subject and the impossibility of exhaustive coverage in this volume, it is also instructive to have some indication of the multiple modes of reception of Japanese media in the colonies (p. 66). This strong first chapter paints a picture of media consumption as enormously varied, and reception as unpredictable and nuanced, despite the efforts of censors and government bodies.

The second chapter on motherhood and "entertainment film" continues this commitment to examining all sides of dominant media tropes and genres. Here again there are a number of references to filmmaking practices, censorship, and film texts from other countries, both Axis and Allied. These comparative readings are designed to highlight how "the relation of gender to modernity" is shared across very different national ideologies, which nonetheless insist on the "inclusion or exclusion of women in the modern nation-state" (p. 74). This is a convincing point well supported throughout the volume, effectively cautioning against any simplistic reading of Japanese or other Axis countries' gender ideologies as part of a wrong or flawed way of thinking that ultimately led to defeat. Instead we see Japanese filmmakers and industry personnel borrowing and adapting material and practices from Hollywood and British cinema as well as Italian and German film cultures. At the same time, citizens are shown moving in and out of state control, finding new possibilities in the roles offered even under restrictive circumstances.

The depth of historical context in this chapter is enlightening and provides convincing material for reading selected popular film texts "against the grain" (p. 20), rather than simply reproducing accounts of what state actors aimed (or claimed) to communicate through media representations of public policies. For example, an examination of Kokufu organization and activities gives a strong sense of the new opportunities middle-class women could find in...