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Abstract
This study examines the U.S. Occupation Government's film policy and its effects on the Japanese cinema. It is based on government documents (directives, day-to-day memoranda, inter-departmental memos, conference records, correspondence, censored scripts, etc.) from archives in Washington, D.C. and Tokyo, as well as interviews with Japanese filmmakers, screenings of films made during the period, and newspapers and film periodicals.
The Occupation authorities, in their attempts to democratize Japan, liberated the Japanese film industry from the repressive prewar and wartime restrictions implemented by the Japanese military government, but at the same time, they established their own censorship. A comparison of these two systems is followed by an explanation of the bureaucractic structure of the Occupation's military and civil censorship.
The American censors recommended that Japanese filmmakers choose "democratic" topics, such as biographies of fascism fighters and advocates of civil rights and equal rights for women. Akira Kurosawa's 1946 film, "No Regrets for Our Youth", is an example of this kind of "democratic film," and is studied as such. In contrast, the Americans prohibited film treatments of themes including militarism, feudalism, xenophobia, anti-social behavior, and above all, any criticism of the Occupation itself.
The portrayal of the Japanese Emperor in film created a unique dilemma for the American censors, caught between their ostensibly reformist mission and the imperatives of Cold War politics. This dilemma was most vividly revealed in the process of banning the 1946 documentary "The Japanese Tragedy", made by leftist director Fumio Kamei. Similarly, the rise of the union movement in the film industry drew a sharp response from the increasingly anti-Communist American bureaucracy and its Japanese representatives, climaxing in the summer of 1948 with the suppression of the third strike at Toho Studio. The history of the labor movement is recounted, and discussed in the context of the effects of Cold War politics on Occupation film policy.
Japanese film-making during this period was shaped by political, cultural and ideological conflict on many levels. Many of the sudden, yet irrevocable changes which resulted continue to affect Japanese cinema to this day.
