Britain’s studios failed to achieve the stability of Hollywood’s, but Japan’s film industry succeeded. Its growth after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and the advent of talking pictures strengthened a studio system much like America’s.
Two large, vertically integrated companies, Nikkatsu and Shochiku, dominated several smaller firms. Despite the Depression and the increased expense of sound-film production, feature output remained high (400 to 500 per year in the early 1930s), and new theaters were constantly being built. Most important, Japan was virtually the only country in which U. S. films did not overshadow the domestic product. Nikkatsu and Shochiku could profit from showing Hollywood films in their theaters while limiting American penetration of the market.
A third major player entered the game in 1934. Ichiro Kobayashi, a show-business entrepreneur who mounted extravagant stage revues, formed Toho (Tokyo Takarazuka Theater Company) by buying and merging two small companies specializing in talkies. Along with creating Toho as a production firm, Kobayashi erected movie theaters in Japan’s major cities.
While bringing Toho’s production up to speed, Kobayashi used imported films to build up attendance at his theaters. He also hired many major directors, such as Teinosuke Kinugasa and the swordfight specialist Masahiro Makino. Toho became Shochiku’s chief competitor. Nonetheless, the two vertically integrated companies cooperated to keep Hollywood at bay. Shochiku began to buy up smaller firms to keep pace with Toho, and the expenses of sound filming forced marginal production houses out of business. The industry consequently became more centralized in the course of the 1930s, with three majors and six to ten lesser firms.
The audience’s appetite for films remained keen. The Depression was easing by the mid-1930s, and movies had become a central part of urban life. After the 1923 earthquake, the rebuilding of Tokyo had created a westernized popular culture, and the passion for western clothes, jazz, whiskey, and fads continued throughout the 1930s. Japanese moviegoers were as familiar with Harold Lloyd and Greta Garbo as they were with their own stars.
Meanwhile, Japan embarked on ambitious military plans. The nation was Asia’s dominant power, having defeated China and Russia in war and having annexed Korea. As political parties proved ineffectual, military factions gained influence in government. Some officers argued that modern Japan had to expand its markets and its sources of labor and materials. In 1932, Japan announced its imperialist aims by invading Manchuria.
The search for “national autonomy” led to government regulation of the economy under a declared “emergency”—one that was to last for thirteen years. At first, however, filmmaking and other aspects of popular culture were comparatively unaffected. Censorship was tightened somewhat, but on the whole the genres that had flourished in the 1920s continued to be exploited.
The historical film, jidai-geki, was still the realm of swordfights, chases, and heroic deaths. The directors Daisuke Ito and Masahiro Makino continued to contribute to the genre, encouraging filmmakers to use rapid cutting and imaginatively staged fight scenes.
11.16, left The popular vaudeville comedian Enoken plays a reluctant swordsman.
11.17, right The atmospheric tenement setting of the opening discovery of the suicide in Humanity and Paper Balloons.
11.18, left A young woman in love with a student discovers that he is not interested in her in Woman of the Mist.
11.19, right In Street without End, the young wife, spurned by her husband’s family, goes to his sickbed.
Among the many satires of the chambara (swordfight films) was Toho’s Enoken as Kondo Isamu (11.16).
More psychologically oriented jidai-geki began to come from younger directors. The most prominent member of this group was Sadao Yamanaka. His A Pot Worth a Million Ryo (1935) is a warm comedy in which a gruff samurai befriends an orphan. Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), Yamanaka’s most famous film, shows a ronin (masterless samurai) unable to find work and eventually driven to suicide. Yamanaka filmed this quietly ironic tale in a distinctive manner, with low camera positions, deep perspectival framings, and somber lighting (11.17). This was Yamanaka’s last film; drafted and sent to the Chinese front, he died there in 1938.
The gendai-geki, or contemporary-life film, included many genres: student and salaryman comedies, the haha-mono (“mother tale”), and the shomin-geki, films about lower-class life. From the early 1930s through the war, these and kindred genres were the bulwark of the major studios. Shochiku’s stars Kinuyo Tanaka and Shin Saburi and Toho’s Hideko Takamine and Setsuko Hara made their reputations in these unpretentious films portraying work, romance, and family life in Japan’s cities and towns.
Yasujiro Shimazu had helped create Shochiku’s “Kamata flavor,” an atmosphere of poignant cheerfulness associated with the gendai-geki made in the firm’s suburban Tokyo studio, and he continued it in such lighthearted talkies as Our Neighbor Miss Yae (1934). Heinosuke Gosho, formerly Shimazu’s assistant, carried on the Shochiku tradition in the early sound comedies Madam and Wife (1931; see p. 209) and The Bride Talks in Her Sleep (1933), as well as in the melodramas The Dancing Girl ofIzu (1933) and Woman of the Mist (1936; 11.18). In such films Gosho won fame as a master of the shomin-geki.
Also working in the gendai-geki was Mikio Naruse. He started at Shochiku with salaryman films and contemporary comedies before discovering a more astringent, pessimistic tone. Apart from You (1933), Nightly Dreams (1933), and Street without End (1934) won critical praise despite their bleak look at prostitutes, sailors, and struggling single mothers. These melodramas established Naruse as an outstanding director of actresses and, in lengthy dissolves and brooding close-ups, revealed his ability to build up a sense of society’s suffocating pressures on women (11.19).
Moving to Toho, Naruse quickly established himself with a series of feminine dramas. The most famous was Wife, Be Like a Rose! (1935), an urban comedy that modulates into harsh melodrama. Kimiko has picked out a young man to marry, but she must locate her runaway father. She talks him into returning for her wedding. The confrontation between the father and the high-strung mother, who secretly wants him back, shows Naruse’s skill in handling complex emotional
11.20 A high-angle shot of the daughter’s grief in Wife, Be Like a Rose!
Situations (11.20). The film’s last shots, tracking in and out on Kimiko and her mother, abandoned by the father once more, intensify our awareness that Kimiko’s marriage will be devoted to taking care of her mother. Wife, Be Like a Rose!—one of the few Japanese films of the 1930s to be seen in the West—won critical accolades and established Naruse as a major director.
The successes of Yamanaka, Gosho, and Naruse confirmed Japanese studios’ policies of encouraging directors to specialize in certain genres and to cultivate personal styles. This practice differentiated each company’s product and fed fans’ interest. In addition, many of the gendai-geki directors had started in the 1920s, when genre innovations and stylistic originality were prized. As a result, Japanese films of the 1930s experimented with storytelling and technique to a degree not common in most western sound cinema. For example, To mu Uchida’s Police (1933) presents a plot straight out of Warner Bros. (two old friends from the neighborhood, one a cop, the other a gangster) but enlivens it with bold compositions, bursts of hand-held camerawork, and rapid intercutting between past and present.
Hiroshi Shimizu, another exponent of humanistic comedy, also displayed a distinctive style. His films centering on children (e. g., Four Seasons of Children, 1939) won him the most fame, but he also excelled at adult subjects, as seen in Arigoto-San (Mr. Thank You, 1936) and Star Athlete (1937). Shimizu’s stylistic signature is the shot in which the action moves straight at or away from the viewer while the camera tracks backward or forward to keep up with the figure (11.21). Shochiku’s flexible policy allowed Shimizu to travel across Japan in search of ideas, shooting films on location from sketchy notes rather than scripts. The arrangement proved productive: between 1924 and 1945 Shimizu directed an astonishing 130 films.
By common consent, the two most influential Japanese directors of the 1930s were Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. They contrasted in almost every way. Ozu
11.21 A characteristic Shimizu track-back from marching students drilling during a country outing in Star Athlete.
Worked only for Shochiku, whereas Mizoguchi began with Nikkatsu and became a free-lance. Ozu started in comedies and shomin-geki, and he maintained an everyday humor in virtually all of his films. Mizoguchi, whose first films were melodramas, probed every situation for grim psychological and social implications. Ozu was a master of editing and static, closely framed shots, whereas Mizoguchi cultivated a style of long-shot framings, long takes, and camera movements. On the set, Ozu was quietly insistent, while Mizoguchi exploded into demonic tantrums. Ozu and Mizoguchi illustrate how the Japanese studio system permitted directors an enormous range of originality (see box).
Avoiding the strict division of labor practiced in Hollywood, Shochiku and Nikkatsu had cultivated a cadre system in which the director and scriptwriter had considerable control over their projects. Supervision tended to be even less stringent at smaller firms. Toho favored a producer system, which, like that of Hollywood in the 1930s, placed a producer in charge of several directors at the same time. While Toho films did have a somewhat glossier, mass-manufactured look, directors could still work in idiosyncratic ways at most studios before 1938. After that, they had to face the demands of a nation engaged in total war.
Japan’s all-out attack on China in 1937 marked the beginning of the war in the Pacific. The government banned existing political parties, tightened its alliances with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and mobilized the home front around a war-based economy.
At age twenty-four Yasujiro Ozu began directing with a jidai-geki, but he quickly turned to the gendai-geki. Between 1928 and 1937, he made thirty-five features, running the gamut from the student slapstick (Days of Youth, 1929) and the urban comedy of manners (An Introduction to Marriage, 1930) to the gangster movie (Walk Cheerfully, 1930). He consolidated his fame with three masterpieces in 1933 (Woman of Tokyo, Dragnet Girl, and Passing Fancy). His first sound feature was The Only Son (1936), a shomin-geki about a mother following her son to Tokyo to discover that he has not succeeded despite the education she has drudged for years to provide. Ozu characteristically followed this quietly despairing film with a lighthearted satire on the wealthy classes, What Did the Lady Forget? (1937).
Ozu was deeply influenced by the Hollywood cinema, particularly the social comedies of Charles Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch and the gag comedies of Harold Lloyd. Like many Shochiku directors, he adopted the 1920s American comedy style—brief shots of actors and details of setting, edited together crisply and concisely. But Ozu extended this style in several ways. At unexpected moments he inserted shots of unobtrusive objects or adjacent landscapes
(11.22). In dialogue scenes, he systematically filmed from within a 360-degree circle surrounding the characters, changing the view by multiples of 45 degrees (usually 180 degrees). This strategy consistently violated Hollywood's traditional 180-degree continuity editing. He edited as much for visual pattern as for dramatic emphasis; his 360-degree cutting produces close " graphic matches" between two shapes. A graphically continuous version of shot/reverse shot is shown in 11.23 and 11.24.
11.22 A boiling teakettle punctuates the drama in Ozu's Woman of Tokyo.
Most strikingly, Ozu refused certain resources of film technique. He was the last major director to convert to sound. He also limited his use of camera movements. Above all, he restricted his camera position by filming only from a low height, regardless of the subject. This tactic again allowed him to draw attention to the composition of the shot, balancing the dramatic value of the actor and the milieu with the purely visual design of the frame (11.25).
Ozu's style amplified his intimate dramas. His comedies, like those of Lubitsch and Lloyd, are based on embarrassment and psychological revelation, qualities that could be signaled by a judiciously placed close-up of an expression
11.23 In Passing Fancy, the man grabs the woman's arm as he faces her from the right.
11.24 Ozu cuts to a position 180 degrees opposite, showing the man now on the left.
11.25 Like the previous illustrations, this frame from The Only Son exemplifies Ozu's low-height camera.
11.26 A cutaway to an industrial wasteland in Ozu's Inn in Tokyo (1935).
Or a gesture. His social dramas, lingering on the cycle of life within an indifferent city, were intensified by enigmatic urban landscapes (11.26).
Several of Ozu's films mix comedy and drama so thoroughly that the style alternates between humorous commentary and poetic abstraction. I Was Born, But.. . (1931), for instance, is at once a satire on the bootlicking salaryman, a comedy about brattish children, and a sober study of lost illusions. At any moment, Ozu could create a low-key pictorial joke (11.27). His films' poignant evocation of missed opportunities, regrets, and foreknowledge of separation is reinforced by a measured style that finds even the most mundane object an occasion for contemplation. Ozu's distinctive handling of narrative and technique influenced Yamanaka, Shimizu, and Naruse.
Kenji Mizoguchi began directing five years before Ozu. In the high-output 1920s, his forty-two films established him as an eclectic director with artistic pretensions. He made melodramas, crime dramas, even imitations of German Expressionism, but he did not become recognized as a major director until the 1930s.
Across a variety of genres, Mizoguchi concentrated on the social dilemmas facing the Japanese woman. In White Threads of the Waterfall (1933), a circus entertainer works to send a poor student to school; in the end, the lovers commit suicide. In The Downfall of Osen (1935), a gang-
11.27 Shirts on a clothesline are echoed by the salaryman as he exercises in the morning in I Was Born, But. . . .
11.28 In Sisters of Cion, Umikichi learns that her sister has been taken to the hospital.
Ster's girlfriend sends a young man to medical school; after he has become successful, he finds his benefactor in a railroad station, old and demented. In Oyuki the Madonna, modeled on Guy de Maupassant's short story " Boule de suif" ("Tallow Ball"), a prostitute gives her life to save a rebel leader Mizoguchi's two outstanding melodramas of the mid-1930s, Naniwa Elegy (1936, aka Osaka Elegy) and Sisters of Cion (1936), show women swapping sexual favors for power, only to find that men will not honor their bargains. He later saw these two bitter films as marking the beginning of his maturity: "It is only since I made Naniwa Elegy and Sisters of Cion that I have been able to portray humanity lucidly." 3
Mizoguchi was drawn to situations of high emotion— men's sadistic abuse of women and children, women's distraught response to the threat of poverty or solitude, scenes of harsh bargaining and quarrels. But in filming he adopted what would, after World War II, be called a "de-dramatizing" approach. His staging and framing put scenes of emotional intensity at a distance, inviting the spectator to react less viscerally to the material.
Mizoguchi thus tended to stage highly charged scenes in long shot (11.28). Often the characters turn away from the viewer (11.29), or they are hidden by a wall or a shadow (11.30-11.32). Only at the end of Naniwa Elegy and Sisters of Cion does Mizoguchi give us abrupt, intense
11.29 Ashamed, Ayako shrinks away from her lover, and from the viewer, in Naniwa Elegy.
11.30 I n The Downfall of Osen, Osen's gangster lover goes to her with a sword and the shot stands vacant for a moment. ..
11.31 . . . before she backs into the wall. . .
11.32 ... and he confronts her
Close-ups of his protagonists, each woman challenging the audience to reflect on why she must suffer (11.33).
Moreover, the camera records the action steadily, refusing to cut in to a character's reaction. To an unprecedented extent, Mizoguchi exploited the long take. There are only 270 shots in Oyuki, fewer than 200 in Naniwa Elegy, and fewer than 125 in Sisters of Cion. Further, these long takes are seldom designed to follow the movements of the actors, as in the work of Max Ophuls and Orson Welles. Mizoguchi's long takes force us to watch painful acts of self-sacrifice unfold at a relentless pace.
Ozu and Mizoguchi were among the most honored directors of their day, one representing the heights of the shomin-geki, the other exemplifying a prestigious cinema of social critique. Their work suggests the richness of what came to be recognized as the first golden age of Japanese cinema.
11.33 For the first time in the film, as Ayako is turned out onto the streets by her family, we have a clear frontal view of her in the curt final shot of Naniwa Elegy.
Government Pressure on the Industry The film industry was slowly brought into line with the new policies. In this jingoistic atmosphere, western culture became suspect. Studios were ordered not to portray jazz, American dancing, or scenes that might undermine respect for authority, duty to the emperor, and love of family. In April 1939, Japan’s Diet passed a law modeled on Goebbel’s edicts to the Nazi industry (p. 271). The Motion Picture Law called for nationalistic films portraying patriotic conduct. The Home Ministry established the Censorship Office, which would review scripts before production and order revisions where necessary.
Although American films were still playing in Japan and some Japanese directors dodged the terms of the new law, political constraints were much stronger than ever before. For instance, the Censorship Office rejected Ozu’s script for The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice because the married couple’s parting meal was not the “red rice” traditionally reserved for seeing off a war-bound husband.
As the Chinese war intensified, the government forced the film companies to consolidate. In 1941, authorities agreed to a three-part reorganization. One group was dominated by Shochiku, another by Toho, and a third, unexpectedly, by the small firm of Shinko.
Shinko’s key executive was Masaichi Nagata (who had produced Mizoguchi’s Naniwa Elegy and Sisters of Gion for his independent firm Dai-Ichi Eiga). Nagata used the consolidation scheme to gain control over Nikkatsu, whose production facilities were absorbed into his group.
Nagata’ group was renamed Daiei (for Dai-Nihon Eiga, or “Greater Japan Motion Picture Company”). Nikkatsu was allowed to keep its theater holdings separate, so Daiei initially had difficulties in exhibiting its product. After the war, Daiei would become Japan’s major force on the international scene.
All companies participated in the war effort. The government supported the production of newsreels, documentary shorts, and films celebrating the uniqueness of Japanese art. The most elaborate example of the last category is Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939), an adaptation of a popular Japanese play. Kikugoro Onoe is expected to become a kabuki actor like his father and uncle, but he is a lackluster performer. When he takes up with the maid Otoku, his family disowns him. Her faith enables him to keep trying to perfect his art. At the climax, he gives a devastating performance and is hailed by the audience, while Otoku dies alone. The film won a prize from the Education Ministry.
11.34 In The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum, Kikugoro’s mother scolds him for associating with the maid Otoku, who watches apprehensively in the background.
11.35 A stupendous gathering of the samurai in The Abe Clan.
Mizoguchi’s sympathy for women, along with his interest in theatrical performance and stylization, makes Last Chrysanthemum one of his most important works. He continued to employ long takes, wide-angle lenses, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting (the use of starkly lit patches in a dark space), and slow rhythm. The camera, poised at a distance, often forces the viewer to scan the frame to pick out the significant action (11.34).
Alongside tributes to the purity of Japanese culture were patriotic films supporting the war effort. Tomo-taka Tasaka’s Five Scouts (1939) set the pattern for subsequent efforts, stressing the unity of a fighting group and the quiet heroism of its members. As in many Japanese battle films, the enemy is not seen; war is not a sordid struggle among men but a test of the purity of the Japanese spirit. Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers (1939) and Kimisaburo Yoshimura’s Story of Tank Commander Nishizumi (1940) continued to promote the image of the modest, humane Japanese soldier.
The jidai-geki adjusted to the war period by becoming statelier and more grandiose. In The Abe Clan (1938, Abe Ichizoku) family honor vies with friendship in a setting that downplays violence and emphasizes the spectacular beauty and power of the martial code (11.35). The gendai-geki celebrated national ideals in a more prosaic way. Because of Kobayashi’s ties to government agencies, Toho led the charge with stridently patriotic vehicles. Shochiku offered such films as Shi-mazu’s A Brother and His Younger Sister (1939), in which a young man abandons petty office politics and carries his sister and mother off to a fresh start in China; a clod of earth clings to their plane wheel, bringing a bit of Japan to the world they are building.
Austerity and Patriotism In attacking American forces at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan declared war on the United States and Britain. Japanese forces seized western colonies throughout the Pacific and soon dominated East and Southeast Asia. By mid-1942, Japan seemed a new imperial power, holding major islands as well as Siam, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and major portions of China. Japan promised to lead the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” but usually the Japanese occupation was at least as harsh as its colonial predecessors.
Full-scale war reduced resources on the home front. The government cut screenings to two and a half hours, rationed film stock, and limited studios to releasing two features per month. Production dwindled to about a hundred features in 1942, seventy in both 1943 and 1944, and fewer than two dozen in 1945. With most men drafted and most women working in factories or community groups, film attendance fell drastically.
Patriotic efforts became more shrill. Films celebrated kamikaze raids and the struggle against partisans in China. Toho produced the extravaganza The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya (1942), directed by Kajiro Yamamoto and released on the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. The film’s historical sweep and excellent miniatures and special effects made it an outstanding propaganda piece. Yamamoto exploited the unseen-enemy convention in a chilling scene: on the night before the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese sailors on a battleship listen quietly to a radio broadcast from an American nightclub.
11.36 The husband in A Diary of Our Love watches his wife, framed in a distant window, prepare his food.
11.37 The decentered deathbed scene from There Was a Father, determined by Ozu’s low camera height.
11.38 Throughout Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, the changing of households by the mother and daughter is signaled by shots of their plants and bird.
Home-front films continued to emphasize patience, humility, and cheerful stoicism. In Naruse’s Hideko the Bus Conductor (1941), the gracious heroine (played by the beloved Hideko Takamine) brightens her rural community. A Diary of Our Love (1941) shows a husband returning wounded from the war and being nursed back to health by his devoted wife. Shiro Toyoda’s direction used Mizoguchi’s oblique, long-shot aesthetic to mute the sentimental story (11.36).
In such films as A Diary ofOur Love and Naruse’s Oh, Wonderful Life (1944), a comic musical that occasionally reverses the sound track, directors continued to explore novel techniques. On the whole, however, most films of the period from 1939 to 1945 are virtually indistinguishable from Hollywood or high-budget European films of the era. The seriousness of the war effort demanded noble, solemn technique, and the daring experimentation of the 1930s was felt to be frivolous. Even Ozu and Mizoguchi toned down their styles for their Pacific War efforts.
Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa in Wartime Ozu’s output slackened in the war period, when he was repeatedly drafted. His only films were Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and There Was a Father (1942). The first, quite close in plot to Shimazu’s A Brother and His Younger Sister, shows an upper-class family recalled to its duty by the youngest members. While carrying a serious message, the film contains Ozu’s characteristically quirky comedy. There Was a Father proved more severe; not a trace of humor enlivens this tale of a teacher who sacrifices himself to the greater national need.
Toda Family and There Was a Father contain much lengthier shots than Ozu had used before; the camera dwells on the actors’ moments of deliberation and resignation. Ozu continued to exploit 360-degree shooting space, a quiet handling of dramatic moments (11.37), and transitions composed of landscapes and objects (11.38). After There Was a Father, Ozu was captured in Singapore while planning a battlefront film and spent the remainder of the hostilities as a prisoner of war.
Mizoguchi fared better. He was entrusted with one of the most prestigious projects of the war, a two-part version of a classic tale of self-sacrifice. Genroku Chu-shingura (aka The Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin, 1941 and 1942), tells how a lord’s retainers patiently suffer indignity before avenging his death.
Earlier film versions told the story with vigorous swordplay and overblown emotions. Predictably, Mizoguchi dedramatized the tale. For three hours he dwells on the ronin’s slow preparation for the deed, their calm acceptance of their mission, and their resignation to their ultimate punishment. The long take is carried to extremes, both films totalling only 144 shots (making each shot, on average, over ninety seconds long). The climactic battle takes place offscreen, recounted through a letter read by the lord’s widow. Mizoguchi’s long takes, monumental compositions, and majestic crane shots ennoble a drama of fidelity to duty (11.39, 11.40).
After Genroku Chushingura, Mizoguchi returned to direct four films, including the jidai-geki Musashi Miyamoto (1944) and The Famous Sword Bijomaru (1945). Both betray the industry’s paucity of means in the last phase of the war, and except for some very long takes, they are far more orthodox in style than Genroku Chushingura.
Of the several directors who made their debuts during the war, the most promising was Akira Kurosawa. A scriptwriter and assistant director at Toho, he worked
11.39 A retainer weeps at the lower left while his lord goes into a garden to be executed in Genroku Chushingura.
11.40 I n a distant framing reminiscent of Mizoguchi’s 1930s work, a woman struggles to keep her brother from assassinating Lord Kira in Genroku Chushingura.
11.41, left One of Sanshiro’s opponents is hurled endlessly through the air...
11.42, right. . . before crashing against a wall, causing a window frame to float down in slow motion (Sanshiro Sugata).
For Yamamoto before being entrusted with directing Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a tale of martial arts set in the late nineteenth century. Sanshiro brings hurly-burly action back to the period film, which had become static and solemn under the influence of wartime ideology. The plot centers on a classic martial-arts conflict: Sanshiro, a hot-headed young judo fighter, must learn restraint under the guidance of a harsh but wise master. Kurosawa handled the combat sequences with a kinetic bravura, using elliptical editing, slow motion, and sudden changes of angle (11.41, 11.42). Sanshiro Sugata was a major influence on postwar jidai-geki films, and it was the ancestor of Hong Kong martial-arts films and the “spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone.
The film’s success led Kurosawa to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata //, 1945). More significant, however, was his second film, the home-front drama The Most Beautiful (1944). Several women are working at a plant that manufactures precision lenses for airplanes’ gun-sights. The plot shows, in episodic fashion, a string of personal dramas, some comic, some intensely serious. Lacking the physical exuberance of the judo films, The Most Beautiful reveals Kurosawa’s interest in the psychology of stubborn, almost compulsive dedication to a social ideal. Both Sanshiro and The Most Beautiful fitted wartime ideology, but they also showed Kurosawa to be a virtuosic, emotionally intense director.
Gradually, three years of Allied “island hopping” pushed Japan’s forces back. In August 1945, after months of firebombing Tokyo and other cities, U. S. planes dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered soon afterward.
Like most of the nation’s institutions, the film studios were hard-hit, but even the devastation of the war and the reforms of American occupation could not loosen the major companies’ stranglehold on the industry. The Japanese studio system would retain control for three more decades.
World History
