A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby
cinema. Noel Burch, in his fascinating but tendentious account of prewar cinema in Japan, has argued that “the social pressure to adopt Western modes undoubtedly abated during those dark years,” and it may be that nationalist sentiment encouraged the development of a style of cinema influenced by Japanese traditions. Directors such as Mizoguchi in The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Hiroshi Shimizu in his children’s films perfected the use of long shots to situate characters in their environment, a technique owing much to the aesthetics of traditional Japanese painting. But those directors, along with others such as Mansaku Itami and, until his conscription and death, Yamanaka, continued through the thirties to make films with a strong element of social criticism. Moreover, some of the most individual aspects of Japanese films at this time actually incurred the disapproval of the authorities. The quotidian banality of Ozu’s narratives, and those of other directors specializing in the realist genre of shomin-geki, had no parallel in Western popular cinema of the time. Yet this genre was specifically discouraged by the military government, since its slice-of-life method seemed to serve no purpose in furthering the militarist agenda. It is heartening that, at a time when a Japanese government inspired by nationalist ideals was perverting native traditions and leading the country to disaster, Japanese filmmakers were continuing to produce works of art founded in the more humane aspects of their cultural inheritance.
Imperial Screen, Colonial Screen: Japanese Film in War and Occupation
Japan had pursued a full-scale war with China from 1937, and by the time the Pacific War broke out in 1941, the militarists had succeeded, more or less, in establishing a stranglehold over film production. The active companies were consolidated into three large concerns: Shochiku and Toho absorbed some smaller studios, while the new Daiei was founded from the rest. Scripts were vetted before production and individual talent was repressed: willingly or not, directors were obliged to produce work which furthered the war effort. With a few notable exceptions—for example, The Life of Matsu the Untamed (Muhō Matsu no isshō, 1943), a humane and moving period film, scripted by Mansaku Itami, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki—the films of the wartime period were too constrained by the ideology of the time to achieve the aesthetic distinction of their forebears. Nevertheless, the war provided an impetus to the careers of some younger directors. With many filmmakers drafted or otherwise engaged, assistants such as Kurosawa and Kinoshita found themselves abruptly promoted into the director’s chair. Their careers would flower in the postwar era.
After Japan’s surrender, the industry and its individual talents became subject to other controls. Many prewar and wartime films were deliberately destroyed by the Occupation authorities, further reducing an archive already depleted by aerial bombing, natural disasters, and plain indifference. Other films were released or re-released in censored prints. Meanwhile, the production of new films was subject to stringent criteria: scripts were censored, period films in general were discouraged, and directors were expected to promote democratic ideals. At times this led to rather heavy-handed social commentary: films such as Kinoshita’s Morning for the Osone Family (Ōsone-ke no asa, 1946) were less concerned to create characters than to manufacture mouthpieces for political positions. But Allied dictates gave some directors the scope to explore personal interests which a purely commercial cinema might not have permitted. Mizoguchi’s most uncompromisingly feminist films were produced in response to American demands that films show the emancipation of women, a theme that Mizoguchi pushed far further than MacArthur’s regime can have intended; My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, 1949), in particular, was more radical in its conclusions than any commercial Hollywood film dared to be either then or since. At around the same time, Kōzaburō Yoshimura made The Ball at the Anjo House (Anjō-ke no butōkai, 1947), the subject of which was the decline of the prewar aristocracy; with this film, the director initiated an intelligent analysis of social change in Japan which was to prove his abiding concern, lasting throughout the 1950s.
The 1950s: The Genius of the System
Nevertheless, it was the departure of the occupying authorities in 1952 that heralded a Golden Age for the Japanese cinema. Censorship no longer promoted certain topics or prohibited others; indeed, the only regulation of content came from a voluntary body known as Eirin, which gave the industry and its artists a remarkable freedom to depict matters political, social, and personal. The studios did not, in general, provoke the wrath of the Moral Majority: fearing the re-imposition of government censorship, they eschewed the depiction of explicit sex or violence through the early and mid-fifties. Yet anyone comparing Japanese cinema of this period with Hollywood productions of the same era will notice the generally greater frankness of Japanese films. Shirō Toyoda’s Marital Relations (Meoto zenzai, 1955), to take one example, attempts no explicit treatment of sexuality, yet it remains as emotionally perceptive and as adult an account of a love affair as any film produced anywhere in the world at that time.
At the same time, Japanese audiences remained avid consumers of Japanese films. By now the major studios had fully developed their distinctive house styles, appealing to different segments of the viewing public. Shochiku continued to be celebrated for the bittersweet “Ōfuna flavor”—named after the location of its studios outside Tokyo —of its home dramas, comedies, and melodramas, which directors such as Ozu and Kinoshita raised to its highest level. Toho’s prestige director was Kurosawa, who made almost all his films there; otherwise, the studio made white-collar comedies and monster movies, including the world-famous Godzilla (Gojira), directed by Ishirō Honda. Daiei made some prestigious adaptations of classic and contemporary literature, often focusing on female protagonists; Mizoguchi, Yoshimura, and Toyoda made some of their finest films there. Later in the decade, Daiei moved downmarket, making chanbara which profited from the flair of such expert younger artisans as Kenji Misumi. These established outfits were joined by the resurgent Nikkatsu, which had resumed production in 1954. Nikkatsu spent several years casting around for a style; this period of uncertainty produced at least one masterpiece, Tomotaka Tasaka’s The Maid’s Kid (Jochūkko, 1955), before the studio eventually decided to court the youth market. Two younger companies, Toei and ShinToho (the latter originally an offshoot of Toho), made more generic films: the former concentrated almost exclusively on chanbara, while the latter produced numerous thrillers and horror films. Among many relatively undistinguished films, Toei produced some superior jidai-geki and some of the major works of socially conscious filmmaker Tadashi Imai, while ShinToho was responsible for the striking ghost stories of Nobuo Nakagawa.
The balance of popular and prestige projects is notable, illustrating how, with a loyal audience and decent profit margins, the major studios were able to take risks, offering their best directors the freedom to pursue their own concerns. Of course, this freedom was never absolute; for instance, the plot of Mizoguchi’s masterpiece, Ugetsu, was altered at studio insistence to provide a more commercially acceptable ending. Still, the cinema—a medium more than any other dependent on financial support—has always had to make such compromises. A film like Ugetsu, with its visual grandeur and dramatic scope, could not have been created outside the commercial system. That system gave directors such as Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and Uchida the resources to produce meticulously detailed and richly atmospheric films, often on an epic scale. Yet the distinction of these films lay in the individuality of their attitude to people: the pessimistic humanism of Mizoguchi, the heroic humanism of Kurosawa, the satiric irony of Uchida. At the same time, the Japanese studio system produced the delicate family dramas of Ozu, the romantic tragedies of Naruse, Kinoshita’s sentimental melodramas, and Heinosuke Gosho’s varied, complex accounts of the emotional lives of men, women, and children. Compared to the historical epics of the period, these films were made on a small scale. Yet their visual beauty and outstanding acting continued to demonstrate the technical professionalism guaranteed by the studio system, while illustrating, at the same time, the personal concerns of their directors. Moreover, these personal concerns included a marked degree of social criticism, no less barbed for being subtly inflected.
For the studio system and its major artists, however, this Golden Age was also an autumnal one. In the late fifties, Japanese productions took three quarters of the domestic market share, and more than five hundred films were made annually. Yet within a decade the industry had virtually collapsed: its most creative established talents had either retired or were producing second-rate films, while the most creative artists of a younger generation were able to work only outside the