From Film Colony to Film Sphere

Abstract

This chapter traces the development of film institutions within the formal colonies of Taiwan and Korea and its extension to the semicolonial film market of Manchuria. It examines how legislation, production, exhibition, and reception conditions differed in each territory and considers salient shifts in official and popular perceptions by Japanese film journalists and filmmakers. It considers the ways in which the colonial government used film education programs to assimilate indigenous Taiwanese populations while combating the undermining influence of Chinese films. It also explores the role of colonial film censorship in the struggle to maintain social order in Korea, along with popular Japanese perceptions of the Korean film industry in the domestic Japanese market. Finally, it analyzes the film Vow in the Desert (Nessa no chikai, 1940) and how ideology shifted away from organized institutional concepts of Japanese empire to the more indeterminate idea of the Greater East Asian Film Sphere.