Fighting Media Delinquency with Soviet Sound: Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (1931) in Japan at a Time of Crisis

Abstract

This paper uses a transmedial lens to examine Japan’s engagement with Soviet film, focusing on the 1933 adaptation of Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (Putevka v zhizn’, 1931) for the Japanese pictorial medium of kamishibai. Challenging an unspoken consensus that it was The Road to Life’s status as ‘the first’ Soviet talkie that accounts for its tremendous success and continuing influence, it was in fact the film’s ‘conversion’ narrative that explains equally, if not more so, its popularity and impact. Although a product of a markedly different cultural context, The Road to Life and its depiction of reformed Soviet teenagers appealed to the Japanese state, the Japanese film industry, and to kamishibai creators alike, as each in their own way strove to distance themselves from an associative link with ‘juvenile delinquency,’ as well as from representatives of the Japanese Left who were increasingly persecuted by the state. As such, the film’s conversion narrative functions as a powerful metaphor for the political transformations that both Japan and its visual media underwent in the early 1930s.