Dissonance to affinity: An ideological analysis of Japanese cinema in the 1930s

This doctoral dissertation examines the ideological transformation of Japanese cinema in the 1930s. The primary objective is to bring historical insight into the years of the parallel progression of war and "peace," Imperial Japan's aggression in China and the Japanese people's pursuit of "modern life" in a time of political disquiet. In so doing, this dissertation highlights the continuity of "the modern" through a time of discontinuity in the correlative dimensions of social realities and cinematic representation.; Chapter 1 presents the development of Japanese cinema as ideologically analogous to Japan's process of modernization and its quest for autonomy and national identity. Together with the advent of sound systems, the modern appeared on screen as artistic expression which suggests the filmmakers' strategic vision of Japanese modernity. This visualized modernity alluded to advanced Amerika as the national-cultural image of the US, belittled or excluded Shina as the backward China, and magnified Nippon as Japan's self-image. Significant changes in the power relations appeared in modern women on screen.; In the 1930s, the Japanese people sought a modern life they could call their own. As Chapter 2 shows, even Army propaganda such as the film Hijoji Nippon inadvertently acknowledged that the Amerika aspect of modernity was dominant in the culture of consumption. Yet, as Chapter 3 shows in the case of the happy "music film," Tokyo rapusodei, Japanese cinema served the ruling order of the imperial-capitalist society by endorsing Japanese capitalism and social progress. Even as the total-war regime forced people to give up their modern life, and ordered Japanese cinema not to refer favorably to the West, the modern did not vanish. Rather, Japanese cinema transmuted the modern into technology to persuade audiences to embrace Japan's "holy war." The most powerful example is Shina no yoru, which Chapter 4 explores. Thus, this dissertation illuminates that the strategic use of the modern continued to contribute to Imperial Japan's ideology.