Re-orientating Japanese cinema: cold war criticism of ‘anti-American’ films

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In the context of the United States’ Cold War strategy in Asia, a range of Japanese films produced shortly after the end of the Occupation (1945–1952), became subject to hostile media coverage by both the American and British press throughout 1953. Such criticism, I argue, was widespread enough to form a more general discourse that post-Occupation Japanese cinema was systematically promoting ‘anti-American’ values. Such a discourse, however, often conflated films based on quite different topics and political persuasions, from ‘communist’ atom bomb films produced by the Japanese independents, to studio films that dealt with subjects generally taboo under the Occupation, such as the Pacific War or American army bases. Despite the attempts of Japanese producers and critics to repudiate some of these charges, in the short term this hostile criticism led to distribution problems for particular films, and in the longer term a decline in studio productions dealing with such contentious topics as well as a sharp division between the studio and independent sectors which had otherwise been significantly intertwined.