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THE ATTRACTIVE EMPIRE: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan. By Michael Baskett. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008. viii, 216pp. (Tables, photos.) US$48.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3163-9.
A significant volume of Japanese cinema scholarship has examined the filmmaking practices and film texts that reflect the cultural policies of Japan's increasingly militarized Imperial regime. Although periods and places in focus are varied, all agree that cinema was an integral part of the empire-building project. However, many of the scholars primarily focused on the ways in which Japanese cultural producers, in collaboration with non-Japanese filmmakers, implemented Imperial policies in film texts during the fifteen-year-war (1931-1945) in particular. As a result, the questions around the convoluted sites of cultural consumption or the various authences' experiences of colonial cinema before, during, and after the wartime period remain unanswered.
The Attractive Empire refuses to identify Imperial Japan's cinema as a mere one-way tool of its wartime propaganda. Instead, the book relocates it in a panoramic and dynamic cultural landscape of expanding Japanese empire in the Asian continent trembling under the threat of the Western colonial powers. Many detailed case studies drawn from original archival research illuminate a range of events and experiences of the colonial film culture in the...