By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
Out of the three states being evaluated, Japan’s relationship with fascism is the murkiest. Whether or not Japan ever really truly embraced fascism is a question that depends on how you define fascism, and that’s not an easy task. Nevertheless, Japan did exhibit many fascist characteristics, especially in the 40s. The interesting part of cinema in this story, however, is in the following few decades after the destruction of the previous state and under the subsequent influence of the USA. The subject matter for this third and final article in this series will be a country whose people and culture were made to adapt rapidly to an overnight complete change in state and occupier, and how some of the most innovative and greatest films in history came from it.
The Japanese film industry wasn’t nearly as robust as Europe’s or Hollywood, but it definitely wasn’t helped by the handicap of censorship during the war. As a result of the second Sino-Japanese war, the Japanese home ministry created and enforced harsh guidelines for the film. The guidelines were ever-changing, and so meetings with publishers on what was allowed were frequent. Mostly the rules applied to the usual, representing ideal submissive citizens as role model characters, themes of superiority through nationalism, racism, or culture, and a downplay of Japanese atrocities in China. Most Japanese filmmakers resorted to making documentaries that always painted the war in a good light.
Japanese Soldiers Marching Through Northern China
By 1940, the censorship committee greatly expanded and consolidated all Japanese media into a completely state-controlled branch of government. This included increased guidelines and even blacklists for publishers which were to be ceased from publishing at all. All of this strangled the Japanese film industry into deterioration, but that changed after the war and during the consequent US occupation.
“Seven Samurai” Poster
Under Douglas Macarthur’s control, the new plan for Japan from America was to export American cultural values and society through media into Japan and establish American ideals as a model structure to be assimilated to. Similar plans were enacted in post-war Italy and Germany through ‘denazification’ programs, but only in Japan did America become such a huge part of a nation’s cinema so quickly. This new doctrine for Japan was highly effective and Japan, a historically isolationist and only recently imperialist country, almost immediately throughout the 50s and 60s adapted to American markets, especially the film industry.
Douglass Macarthur; General Who Oversaw US Occupation of Japan
American silent films inspired legendary filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa to spearhead and dominate the Samurai genre, which in turn directly influenced the entire western genre in America. For example, Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” was so well received in Japan and America, that it was directly adapted into a western, “The Magnificent Seven”. In fact, there were several examples of beloved western films being direct adaptations of Japanese samurai films. If you examine any of your favorite American action films from the 50s or 60s, there’s a good chance it was done in Japan first. Some of the great samurai films from this era were, “Yojimbo”, “Rashomon”, and “Sanjuro”. “Godzilla” also invented the genre of ‘Kaiju’ which are films about giant monsters which became a monumental success in Japan and America alike. But all of these films still kept pieces of Japanese culture and philosophy alive, even exporting their practices to American audiences. The original “Godzilla” contains messaging about the dangers of nuclear power, and “Rashomon” for example is explicitly about the philosophical ideas behind what truth is and its relevance to human perspectives. Despite just coming out of a brutal warmongering regime and undergoing occupation, Japanese cinema was able to overcome and dominate the global market.
Akira Kurosawa Directing “Yojimbo”