thoughts. However, the bureaucrats oft en emphasized the importance of individuals’
happiness and mutual support. Norisugi remarked, “We should understand that the group life on which our society and state are based is the foundation for any individual happiness, and thus we should make an eff ort to vitalize our spirit of social cohesion and public-mindedness.” 27 Th is suggests that the new generation of bureaucrats did not simply insist on fostering a nation allegiant to the state but also saw society as mediating the relationship between the people and the state and aspired to turning the people into its subjects. In short, the people were conceptualized as the potential members of a soci- ety that had ambivalent implications vis-à-vis democracy, capitalism, socialism, and nationalism. Th is notion of the people as the members of a society would be unthink- able without the infl uence of discourse issuing from the Taisho democracy, for example the work of Yoshino Sakuzo, but because of limited space, I will not be able to discuss this aspect in more detail here.
Th e idealized concept of the people that this new generation of bureaucrats advocated during the Taisho democracy was, as it were, an eclectic mix of capitalist, democratic, socialist, and nationalist ideas. “Th e people” was conceptualized as a group of homoge- nous social subjects and was premised on the seeming dissolution of diff erences in class, race and ethnicity, gender, generation, and geography. Th e bureaucrats’ primary goal was to overcome the people’s current diff erences through such practices as mutual sup- port. One might say that “the people” in this social education policy were congruent to
“the people” targeted by the popular magazine King (launched in January 1925). Th is magazine tried to appeal to a cross-section of readers irrespective of diff erences in age, gender, and occupation. But, as we have seen, it is not clear whether advocates of social education attempted to promote the people’s consumption as King did. On the other hand, the bureaucrats’ idealization of the people could be seen to echo criticism the left - ist philosopher Tosaka Jun voiced in his 1937 essay looking back at the boom of “the people” in literature of the 1920s, insofar as both attempted to evade or even eradicate their possible political skepticism about the imperial state. 28
such as youth circles, and measures against poverty and unemployment. However, it is certain that the Ministry paid special attention to cinema, and its cinema-related proj- ects gradually increased and were developed in diverse ways. Th ey included the systems of approving and recommending fi lms, research on exhibitions and audiences, fi lm pro- duction, lecture series for the benshi , exhibitors, or administrators of social education in local governments, expositions on movies, distribution of fi lms, and touring screenings in local districts.
Th rough these multiple conduits, the Ministry strove to disseminate the fi lms they produced, approved, or recommended as signifi cant sites for social education in the people’s everyday lives. But why was cinema considered to present such a powerful edu- cational opportunity? Th ere were three plausible reasons. First, the remarkable popular- ity of cinema was recognized by the 1910s and it became a form of recreation considered most worth describing with the adjective “popular” or “ minshu-teki .” Th e fact that cin- ema was popular meant that audiences tended to go to the movies not out of obligation but out of their own free will. Offi cials thought that cinema had an advantage in that it could make up for gaps in school education because movie theaters could function as widespread sites for further educating those who had already graduated from school. 30 Some offi cials also asserted that because many people enjoyed movies voluntarily, cin- ema fi t into social education, which they thought was more “unintentional” than the
“intentional” formal education people underwent in schools. 31
Another reason cinema was considered a useful tool for social education is that the offi cials and their intellectual associates assumed that unlike other existing media, cin- ema commanded the full range of an audience’s attention, ranging from intellectual knowledge through the emotions and the body. Th ey repeatedly pointed to both positive and negative infl uences emanating from cinema. Th is type of argument began by 1911, when the French movie serial Zigomar became controversial for its purported mali- cious infl uence over children and the Board for Research into Education Popularized for the General Public was founded. Similar arguments appeared in the May 1917 issue of the journal Teikoku kyoiku , which was edited by the Society for Imperial Education ( Teikoku kyoiku kai , a private association that consisted of professors and schoolteach- ers). Th is society was a powerful pressure group, and three months earlier they had sent to both the Home Ministry and the Education Ministry “Th e Petition for Regulation of Motion Pictures.” In the early 1920s, the Ministry ordered each prefectural government to submit reports about both the benign and evil infl uences cinema wielded over chil- dren and the people as a whole. 32
And yet, the Ministry’s offi cials and associated intellectuals were primarily inter- ested in actively using cinema for education, rather than to censor it. What is intriguing here is that many of them noted movies’ emotional appeal as the unique characteris- tic of the medium. Yamane Mikihito is an excellent example. He was originally a jour- nalist for movie magazines but became a fi lmmaker and took a directorial role in the Home Ministry’s fi lms for their Foster National Strength Campaign ( Minryoku kanyo undō ) in 1921. Meanwhile, he was also associated with the Education Ministry in that he oft en contributed articles to the journal Shakai to kyoka . In his 1923 book Motion
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Pictures and Edifi cation , Yamane argued that the great advantage of cinema lay in solicit- ing “shared emotion, empathy and instant comprehension [ etoku ]” from audiences by provoking their passion, rather than making them understand a story in an intellectual sense. Th us, cinema, he continued, more powerfully attracted people both in urban and rural areas than “unintelligible” lectures. By tapping into this medium for education, educators could lead a disorderly “crowd” to unwittingly become a socially solidifi ed
“group,” he concluded. 33 Other offi cials and intellectuals pointed out that the eff ects of cinema ranging from knowledge to sensory stimulation and emotion could ultimately be focused on the full development of the people’s personality and moral attitudes. 34 Yet, we also should not overlook the fact that although they appeared as if they had com- prehended the complete power of cinema over audiences, many aspects were actually left unexplored; for instance, they never referred to cinema’s possible encouragement of thought and debate among audience members.
Lastly, cinema was thought to be an eff ective means of social education because it was a modern medium par excellence and wonderfully matched modern life. One offi cial wrote that modern life was full of various kinds of stimulations, including the sound of trains, cars, construction, people’s voices, and fl ashy colors on billboards. So cinema, a peculiar characteristic of which was to generate stimulation, pertained to this environ- ment more than the theater. 35 An argument that positioned cinema as part of the mod- ern lifestyle was also common. Nakata began his 1928 article with an acknowledgement that “the reform of industry, the progress of transportation, and the dissemination of education” had dramatically transformed social life during recent years. Th ese condi- tions, he contended, led to pitiless economic competition, fi ssures in peaceful families, increased poverty, excessive demands for effi ciency, mechanical modes of exploitation, overwork, and fatigue. Th us, popular recreations were crucial for contemporary people to recover from work-related exhaustion, and cinema was the most optimal popular recreation for this purpose because the stimulation it provided was easily and cheaply accessible and consumable in a short time without any special preparation for under- standing it. 36 Here we see their intention to incorporate cinema not only into education but also into the pattern of modern life they idealized. Th ese offi cials and their intel- lectual associates placed importance on the act of moviegoing as part of their vision of modern life in which work and leisure were systematically designed in a balanced way.
It is clear that these ideas of using cinema as social education were infl uenced by dis- cussions of popular recreation that fl ourished from the late 1910s through the early 1920s. Th e discussions were an extension of discourse on the popular arts ( minshu gei- jutsu ron ), which was initiated by Honma Hisao’s essay “Th e Signifi cance and Value of Popular Arts” in the August 1916 issue of Waseda bungaku , which triggered contributions by Shimamura Hogetsu, Nakamura Seiko, Osugi Sakae, Tsubouchi Shoyo, Oyama Ikuo, Hasegawa Nyozekan, and other critics. Obayashi Soshi, Tachibana Takahiro, and Gonda Yasunosuke, among other critics and scholars, discussed more “popular” entertainments such as the motion picture and vaudeville. Tachibana and Gonda were closely associated with the Education Ministry’s policy of social education, as they both served as members of the Research Board on Popular Recreations (Minshu goraku chosa iinkai, founded in
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April 1920) and as lecturers in the lecture series for the benshi (Katsudo shashin setsumei- sha koshu kai, February 1921) and the National Lecture Series for Local Administrators and Educators of Film (Zenkoku kyoiku eiga jimu tanto kyouikusha koshukai, October 1927). Gonda resigned from the Board and left the Ministry in May 1923. One might speculate that he did so because he was also a researcher affi liated with the Ohara Institute for Social Issues, which was known to be committed to Marxism; but this seems implau- sible because Tachibana, a censor at the Metropolitan Police Department, left the Board with him. 37 In any case, Gonda returned to the Ministry by October 1927 38 and was engaged with the Ministry’s practices concerning social education until 1943. 39
It is also obvious that the Ministry’s policy of social education had an intellectual debt to discussions on popular recreations. In particular, their ideas overlap with Gonda’s in the three areas I noted above: cinema’s popularity, its infl uence, and its relation to modern life. Gonda saw the motion picture as a popular state-of-the-art recreation, and this recognition was the theoretical foundation for what he conceived of as “uninten- tional education.” In his 1922 book Th e Base of Popular Recreation , Gonda discussed the
“goal-immanence” of popular recreation as its important characteristic. He argued that, unlike labor, which aims to earn money, popular recreation is important to the people precisely in terms of its process per se rather than because of a particular result. Gonda also insisted that the pleasure and value of popular recreation came from the very pro- cess (or “real life”) whereby contemporary people, who did not have suffi cient free time, used the products provided by the capitalist industry. He pursued this argument while criticizing the “culturalist” conception of the popular arts by pointing out that the elites were attempting to impart culture to the people in a top-down manner. 40 By popular recreation he meant, “it is created not for people, but by people and from people.” On the other hand, however, Gonda stressed the educational eff ect of cinema and the need for the widespread educational use of cinema. In a record of his lecture carried in the February 1922 issue of Shakai to kyoka , for instance, he appraised the situation in which the active use of cinema in social education was about to be realized. 41 Gonda’s ambiva- lent conception, albeit not deliberately, served to strengthen both Tachibana’s ideas about propaganda and the Ministry’s notions about unintentional social education.
Tachibana remarked, An ideal piece of propaganda “tacitly and profoundly achieves its objective while veiled under the fl ower of the art.” 42 Similarly, as we have seen, the Ministry’s offi cials assumed that the people would absorb education unawares, as part of the process of taking pleasure in popular recreation.
Gonda also oft en touched upon the eff ect of cinema on human beings. Comparing cinema with kabuki as “an old type of popular recreation,” he identifi ed the essence of the former in the way that it provided powerful, intuitive stimulation and so allowed audiences to enjoy each work without having to know its story beforehand. 43 In addi- tion, he suggested that cinema aff ected a variety of the audience’s faculties, including knowledge, thought, emotion, and “sprit.” He also pointed out both educationally ben- efi cial and harmful eff ects on audiences by Western and Japanese movies. 44
Gonda was a representative thinker who regarded cinema as a typical modern product and sought to position it in the context of a lifestyle that the rise of capitalism had created.
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He explained this in terms of what he characterized as two dimensions in the living con- ditions of workers. For one thing, the people who had to work long hours did not have suffi cient time and money, so they could not help briefl y and effi ciently making use of ready-made, cheap amusements. Also, because the division of labor made work monot- onous, the laborers needed leisure time dedicated to pleasurable stimulation in order to relieve their frustration. Although Gonda did not emphasize this point to the extent that the Ministry’s bureaucrats did, he characterized cinema as an integral part of modern life insofar as it could contribute to these two dimensions of workers’ lives. Moreover, he saw the diff erences between school-based and social education as running parallel to the diff erences between systematic and unsystematic education, conceptual education and practical, commonsensical education, intelligent education and emotional educa- tion, and education distant from and closely related to people’s lives. Because, in his view, social education possessed these characteristics, he came to the same conclusion as the Ministry’s offi cials: social education was in a symbiotic relationship with cinema, and it had begun to spread throughout the public sphere and into people’s everyday lives. 45
Notably, disparate viewpoints have been expressed regarding Gonda’s political posi- tion. Some scholars have claimed that Gonda shift ed from a progressive standpoint in the 1920s to a more conservative one in the 1930s, 46 as the titles of two of his books published in 1921 and 1941— Th e Issue of Popular Recreation and Th e Issue of National Recreation —indicate. Indeed, in the latter, he diff erentiated “national recreation” from his past idea of “popular recreation” and insisted that it was high time to regulate recre- ation for the sake of completing the “full mobilization of the national spirit.” 47 Recently, other scholars have increasingly contended that Gonda’s work had already contained conservative ideas in the 1910s and 1920s. 48 Th is is relevant to my own view, as I have suggested. However, this is not to say that Gonda’s ideas were completely congruent with those of the Education Ministry’s bureaucrats. Whereas “the people,” as idealized by the bureaucrats, encompassed a broad range of social strata beyond geographical and class diff erences, Gonda mostly assumed the people were the “new social class” or labor- ers thought to reside in urban areas. 49 However, Gonda and the bureaucrats shared the usage of the word “people” as if it referred to a real entity, despite the fact that it was lit- tle more than a conceptual category. While Gonda abstracted “the people” in a Marxist manner as social subjects generated by the rise of capitalism, he endeavored to present them as substantial beings on the basis of his empirical research. “Th e original texts on the issue of popular recreation exist not in the Maruzen Book Store but in Asakusa dis- trict,” he said. Th us, the people or “ minshu ,” he emphasized, signifi cantly diff er from what Western terms such as “public,” “folk,” “people,” and “Volk” mean. 50 Still, as we have seen, it is diffi cult to say that his conceptualization of “the people” was predicated on his pure observation without any abstraction. More fatally, his empirical affi rmation drew attention away from the fact that he also thought of popular recreation as a means for social education. Th e bottom-up cultural creation he advocated was premised upon the same idea as the top-down social education the Education Ministry was promoting.
Given these features of Gonda’s work, it is not surprising that it was a vital theoretical resource for the Ministry’s policy of social education, all the more because he worked
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as an advisor and a lecturer for the Ministry. In the end, however, we must also take a look at whether the discussion of popular recreation and the policy of social education actually had any eff ect, even though it remains diffi cult to precisely assess it. We have seen that the Ministry’s offi cials and associated intellectuals’ main goal was to educate the people so that they could become members of society—a process that would be bol- stered by the development of independent will and autonomy, the public mind, cooper- ation, and equal opportunities. Yet, their secondary goal was also to guide them to attain the “moral character” ( jinaku ) suitable to the subjects of society. In this scenario, the people so educated would develop an awareness of themselves as a nation or “ kokumin .”
While the fi lms the Ministry recommended in the 1920s may have aff ected the audi- ences’ moral character, it is doubtful that they had any eff ect on their national awareness.
Th is is because in this decade most of the recommended fi lms came from Western coun- tries rather than Japan. For instance, on January 1, 1921, when the fi rst recommended fi lms were announced, all of them were American and European. 51 In addition, some critics pointed out that the added “recommended by the Ministry of Education” label in the credits of educational fi lms would have seemed obtrusive and hence would have undermined their popularity. 52 Indeed, as I have discussed elsewhere, the audiences of the time were by no means homogenous but expressed a variety of values and senses, which threatened intellectuals’ ideals as well as the government’s regime and policy. 53 Th ese points suggest that the policy of promoting cinema as social education and popu- lar recreation never went beyond idealism and that the people targeted by this education were nothing but imaginary. Th ese measures expressed an ideal and an intention that might be summed up as “We must do something” but rarely provided a concrete suc- cessful example. But this does not mean that these fi lms had no eff ect, only that no eff ect has become historically visible. If we suppose that the ineff ectiveness of the 1920s policy was broadly recognized, we would assume that it would not have continued. In fact, its vision, albeit transformed, was taken over by and developed into the fi lm policy of the regime of total mobilization in the 1930s and early 1940s. Th e belief that the people could be educated through the movies permeating the public space of their everyday lives was never abandoned. In fact, it was increasingly enhanced.