Re-Viewing the Past: The Uses of History in the Cinema of Japan, 1925-1945

Abstract

In this thesis I use historical films to construct a social history of Japan's tumultuous interwar and wartime periods. I analyze filmic depictions of the Bakumatsu period (1853-1868), Japan's rocky transition to modernity, from the perspective of the audiences of 1925-1945, an era in which societal interest in representations of the Bakumatsu period soared. Methodologically, I use close visual analysis but move beyond an aesthetically-minded film studies approach to raise issues of audience reception, war and society, empire, sexuality and gender, censorship, urban spaces and popular culture in modern Japan. I have thereby intervened in the existing scholarship, which has either largely ignored films or focused overmuch on film's aesthetic merits. I seek to reclaim films, especially popular films, as historical sources. Close visual analysis illuminates aspects of visual texts that a solely historiographic approach might overlook. And a 'history-as-experience' focus on the audience, and the history of the period in which a given visual text was produced, is critical to the process of historical contextualization. The body of films I analyze offers vital evidence of then-current socio-cultural conditions and perspectives on history. I analyze commercially successful films, produced from 1925 to the war's end, in five chapters, on revisionism, comedy, serial history, hate the enemy films, and romances, respectively, and highlight the ambivalence of each type over the significance of the Bakumatsu period. Despite increasing pressure on the film industry to produce deadly serious hegemonic narratives supportive of the state and later the war effort, the hit films I examine contain many potentially subversive undercurrents. Their box office success indicates that covert resistance to Japan's militaristic course won favor with audiences. Those who lived through the 'dark valley' of 1925-1945 used Bakumatsu films to create a popular culture that was lighter in tone, and more resistant to state goals, than prior research on interwar Japan suggests.