Feeling freedom: Japanese and American wartime films on the liberation of the Philippines, 1943–1945

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article juxtaposes the Japanese wartime film Dawn of Freedom and Hollywood films on the Philippines during WWII as a method to analyze the representational strategies by which the U.S. and Japanese empires tried, respectively and in opposition to the other, to nurture the feeling that the peoples of the Philippines and beyond would enjoy freedom under their stewardships. Under pressure from the twin crises of colonialism and capitalism, the two empires sought to establish hegemony in the Asia-Pacific by fashioning a new model of empire that disavowed imperialist intentions and territorial aggrandizement while promising freedoms that included but went beyond national self-determination. The article focuses on four overlapping freedoms that run through the Japanese and Hollywood films: namely, political self-determination/consumerist freedom, freedom of self-sacrifice or the freedom to die, freedom in romance, and freedom from racism. Despite their differences, the author argues that the two sides in the imperial film wars shared much more than what is commonly realized and that the new strategy that advanced and yet disavowed imperialist ambitions while promoting the feeling of freedom, has great relevance for understanding the militarized world today.