Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Columbia University. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2017. xi, 295 pp. (Illustrations.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-1454-2.
Hikari Hori’s Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945 is a work of impressive breadth and erudition. Hori argues cogently that one cannot understand the enormous production of films, newsreels, and anime in this time period if one reduces it to a state-directed endeavor to indoctrinate the population. Her book builds on John Dower’s study of prewar anime (War Without Mercy) and Tak Fujitani’s path-breaking work on the creation of the modern emperor (Splendid Monarchy); it is also in dialogue with recent studies of Japanese war-time film. Hori deftly combines analysis of the production of war-time films with a study of their reception by audiences. In contrast to state-centered studies of propaganda, she argues that the commercial film industry in Japan continued to make a variety of film genres and to produce a vast number of films until the cataclysmic final years of the Pacific War. While she does not deny that filmmakers were manipulated by the agencies of the state, she shows that they made films primarily to cater to the preferences of film audiences and to generate profits. Films and works of popular visual culture generally are heterogeneous in their production and reception. In addition, Japanese filmmakers continued to be in dialogue with global film cultures, whose products circulated widely within Japan before 1942. Notwithstanding his ambition to create a national style of animation, Seo Mitsuyo borrowed extensively from the international style of Walt Disney and took inspiration from Chinese animators in his Momotarō: Divine Soldiers of the Sea. Hori’s book title, Promiscuous Media highlights the heterogeneous nature of visual media and suggests the transnational interaction of visual cultures.
Promiscuous Media consists of four main chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. In her first main chapter, Hori considers the bifurcated culture of the Emperor’s image in the age of mechanical reproduction of images. The prewar portraits of the Emperor and of the imperial family (goshin’ei) were sacred objects preserved in all institutions of the state; ordinary Japanese were exhorted to protect these objects in emergency situations at the risk of their lives. If the imperial portrait preserved aura of the visual image (in the sense that Walter Benjamin uses the word), it coexisted uneasily with representations of the imperial family reproduced endlessly in film, magazines, postcards, and newspapers intended to be seen by consumers, even as the government strove to control and regulate the protocols governing images of the emperor in all public media. In chapter 2, she discusses women’s films (josei eiga), one of the most popular genres of the wartime period. Notwithstanding the state’s advocacy of economic austerity and its well-known pro-natalist stance, popular melodramas like A Mother’s Music and The Love-Troth Tree appealed to the desire of women for consumer goods and a middle-class lifestyle. Hori treats this genre as the site of struggle between the state and film makers and delineates the complexities, tensions, and contradictions to be found in the major works of the period. The chapter (and the one that follows) also analyzes the rapidly changing gender norms during the war mobilization and highlight the minority but important role of women in the film industry. In her final two chapters, Hori adopts an auteurist approach to two directors who pioneered the genres of documentary and animation respectively in the prewar period. Atsugi Taka, an early documentary script writer associated with proletarian movement, not only translated Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film into Japanese but she also applied his theories in her two surviving documentaries produced under the system of war mobilization. Seo Mitsuyo, a director of important anime of the pre-war period, is the subject of the fourth chapter that also considers the pre-history of Japanese animation. Hori notes that the post-war development of animation industry in Japan was enabled by the wartime shift from artisan style production to streamlined production practices, notably during the production Seo Mitsuyo’s final Momotarō anime.
Overall, Hori makes a convincing argument against the conventional view that visual culture was a tool in the hands of government to indoctrinate the citizens with nationalist ideology. Referring to the work of Katō Atsuko, she debunks the notion that wartime films were largely national policy films (kokusaku eiga), and shows convincingly that until the final period of the war many films were produced commercially for entertainment purposes. More broadly, particularly in her three chapters on film, she takes exception with the idea that Japanese state was fascist and that Japanese filmmakers adopted a fascist esthetics. It is unfortunate that she does not use her own readings of specific works to engage more productively with Tansman’s notion of aesthetic fascism and to question more polemically the question of fascism in the Japanese state. While she states that this topic is beyond the scope the book, I believe a deeper engagement with fascism and its esthetics would have strengthened, rather than detracted from, the thesis of the book. That said, I would recommend Hori’s book for both Japanese scholars and for scholars of visual culture generally because of her transnational approach. Hori’s global focus allows her not only to explore similarities between Japanese films and those of the Axis powers but also to discover commonalities with American or British films of the wartime period.
One structural weakness of the book is the loose connection between the first chapter on the imperial portrait and the three other chapters that focus on film. By devoting a chapter to the imperial photographs, Hori widens the scope of the book beyond cinema but at the cost of weakening the cohesiveness and cogency of her arguments. In the epilogue, Hori discusses the famous photo of General MacArthur standing alongside the Japanese emperor, an iconic image of the postwar period, and argues that it functioned as a signifier analogous to the goshin’ei of the wartime period. While her argument is most interesting, the epilogue reads as an extension of the first chapter and seemed inadequate to the larger thesis of the book.
Robert Tierney
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA