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.
democracy as well as in the age of the total war regime. Th e other issue is that of the actual educational power of fi lms over audiences.
Th ese questions are not monolithic, but they reveal ambiguities. Th ere are both connections and disconnections between the policy of cinema as social education in the 1920s and the policies of the total war regime. Th e most crucial disconnection is that bureaucrats in the 1930s no longer assumed that the link between the people and the state was the society Norisugi and other offi cials had proposed. In a 1939 article, Fuwa Suketoshi, who was the head of the Ministry’s Social Education Bureau and a proponent of the Film Law that was enacted in the same year, criticized the 1920s pol- icy: “Infl uenced by individualistic cultural policies, the previous view of popular rec- reations was that they should be democratic and pleasurable. Th is showed a lack of the guiding national spirit, and did not ask for more than pleasure.” 55 Because we have examined the 1920s policy of social education, we know Fuwa’s criticism was unfair.
Th e new generation of bureaucrats of the time clearly denied individualism. However, it is important here that Fuwa almost completely ignored the concept of society—the very ideal Norisugi and other offi cials insisted on as the basis of the people’s mutual sup- port, public mindedness, and equal opportunity. For Fuwa, the people were not social subjects that should constitute the nation-state via their mutual support but a nation that should dedicate itself to the state. He asserted that cinema was nothing more than a means of edifi cation to facilitate this objective. In this period, the word “ minshu ” was used less and less frequently, while “ kokumin ” or “the nation” and “ taishu ” or “the masses” were more and more oft en used. At these junctures, fi lm policy under the total war regime largely departed from the ideas of the 1920s.
However, 1930s fi lm policy was grounded on the 1920s version in many more ways than simply the development from the Ministry’s system of recommending fi lms to receive the Education Minister’s Award. One of the most crucial ideas that continued on from the 1920s was that the education the bureaucrats planned should infi ltrate into the consciousness of the people without a sense of coercion. In the aforementioned article, Fuwa stated that for edifi cation, fi lm “must take advantage of the medium’s power of compelling through guiding the minds of the masses without them being aware of it.” 56 Another belief that retained its power was that fi lm appeals to the audience’s emotions and by extension to a person’s full personality. Th is becomes clear when we see that in the 1930s the Ministry set as their goal “the enlightenment of the nation’s intelligence and the cultivation of their emotions and will [ joi ]” in order to accomplish the full mobi- lization of the nation’s spirit. 57 Moreover, the idea of employing the popularity and mass appeal of recreation for education, rather than separating the two, was also continu- ous. 58 On the surface, the fi gures under the total war regime seemed to have attempted to characterize their thought and policies as radical by diff erentiating them from those in the 1920s, but under the surface they oft en continued the previous policies and thought.
At this point, it becomes more reasonable to understand the transition in the bureau- crats’ views and policies regarding cinema from the 1920s through the late 1930s not as a shift but as an update, with many earlier aspects explicitly or implicitly taken over and
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reworked to a greater or lesser extent, even though certain other parts might have been dropped.
Th e second issue is whether the fi lm policy was as eff ective as they had intended.
Obviously, the fi lm policy as implemented by the national government did not go as they had foreseen. For example, movie theaters had not become ubiquitous across the whole country even by the late 1930s. 59 In addition, in the 1930s and early 1940s, bureaucrats, fi lmmakers, and critics repeatedly discussed measures for “expanding and enhancing the social range of movie audiences.” 60 Th is suggests that the actual size of audiences did not reach their expectations. In a 1942 roundtable discussion organized by a movie magazine, Fuwa expressed his dissatisfaction with the current size of audi- ences and demanded an improvement: “We should advertise to the intellectuals inces- santly. For fi lms that will attract a new social range of audiences, persons concerned should take suffi cient time to come up with advertisements and try diff erent approaches than the conventional methods. Otherwise, there can be no improvement from the cur- rent state of the box offi ce.” 61 Th is statement also implies that there were diff erences in audiences’ tastes. It follows that the concept of the people without division the bureau- crats dreamed of in the 1920s, the notion of the masses Gonda advocated, as well as that of a nation transcending diff erences in geography, occupation, age, and gender that was formulated through abandoning the concept of the people in the 1930s, were all nothing more than ideals and very far from reality. 62 In addition, a recent study defi nes “national policy fi lms” as those exempted from the censorship fees charged by the Home Ministry and then points out that those fi lms were not popular compared to “entertainment mov- ies” and did not attract audiences. 63 Furthermore, when we look at the dubious eff ect of the national policy fi lms or of the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity fi lms” that pro- moted the assimilation policy (or kominka ) in East Asia, their eff ectiveness is all the more uncertain. 64
However, there is not enough evidence to prove that the Education Ministry’s fi lm policy of the 1920s and the later government-wide national fi lm policy had failed. As we have seen, not only was the policy of fi lm as social education targeted at movie theaters, but there were also attempts to diff use their educational fi lms into the public space of people’s everyday lives by conducting a variety of activities such as nontheatrical screen- ings, touring screenings, public lectures, speeches, and exhibitions. Even when an audi- ence member did not willingly go to a theater and was somehow compelled to do so, he or she might have been interested in and aff ected by the fi lm while watching it. As the wartime regime gained strength, many bureaucrats and intellectuals, like Fuwa, increas- ingly criticized the commercial fi lms that centered on romance and instead urged fi lmmakers to produce national policy fi lms that excluded it. Still, it seems that the 1920s policy aiming to educate people by utilizing entertainment was not completely rejected. For even the commercial fi lms that the bureaucrats disdained did not counter nationalist and imperialist ideology but rather could invoke it to a considerable degree.
Moreover, if the regime of imperial Japan was sustained and advanced by the “multifac- eted decision makings” and the “competing multiple visions” that consisted of politics, economics, military aff airs, culture and media, 65 then some “national policy” fi lms’ lack
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of popularity does not mean that the attempt to nationalize the fi lm culture as a whole or to turn it into propaganda was ineff ective.
Th ings were not simple. 66 Without doubt, the national fi lm policy did not go as bureaucrats expected in many ways. But most Japanese fi lms produced in the period did not also become a force to undermine the total war regime and its full mobilization of the nation. Th ey neither made the audience doubt the notion that they were a nation nor turned their attention toward the violence of the empire against other Asian countries and regions. As the Education Ministry’s bureaucrats and the advocates of popular rec- reation of the 1920s argued, people probably enjoyed movies as leisure; at the same time, as they did not discuss, entertainment movies and education fi lms seemed not to have encouraged or provoked audiences into free active discussion nor to have prompted political consciousness vis-à-vis the status quo. Accordingly, it cannot conclusively be said whether the government’s fi lm policy was eff ective.
Th e audience we have looked at is conceptual in nature and is riddled with ambigui- ties. Th e audience that we have scrutinized is neither fl esh and blood, nor does it match the kind of spectator or mode of spectatorship that we can infer through analyzing a movie on the basis of either a (post)structuralist–psychoanalytic model or a Deleuzean model. Rather, we can read this conception of the audience from the measures taken by the bureaucrats and intellectuals and their discourse within a specifi c set of histori- cal circumstances, especially the rise of capitalism, from the 1920s through the 1930s and early 1940s. Nevertheless, this makes a signifi cant case that the more visible a cer- tain kind of medium becomes in a society, the more likely it is that the audience will be conceptualized as useful and serviceable to power. While the conditions of media and power have changed together with the social formation as a whole, this tendency as such has continued until the present. In such a top-down conceptualization, audi- ences are molded into an idealized form of community and its subjects, while various other kinds of potential within the audience become precluded or marginalized. In the interwar period, the bureaucrats and their associated intellectuals never presupposed that the audience was passive. Rather, they sought to incorporate their very activeness into idealized projects labeled society, social education, the state, and the empire and to deploy cinema as an educational tool in the people’s everyday lives. Th is activeness, they further thought, was grounded not simply in the people’s intelligence but in their emo- tional commitment and their entire personalities. But at the same time, this can be seen as an attempt to position and fi x the audience within such a homogenous category or identity as “the people” or “the nation.” Th is conception elided the audience’s unpredict- able responses, their open-form debate occurring throughout and aft er watching a fi lm, diff erent audiences’ diverse perceptions, modes of reception and interpretation, and the incessant fl uidity of their identities or the possibility of reception irreducible to their identities and other possible ways of understanding audiences. Th eir grand ideal prob- ably stopped these options from being explored. Th e policy of social education in the interwar era shows that understanding the audience itself—not simply understanding spectatorship—is not only a vital goal of fi lm studies but also a crucial social and politi- cal issue within its historical context.
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Notes
1 . Siegfried Kracauer , “ Cult of Distraction ,” in his Th e Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , trans.
Th omas Y. Levin ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 1995 ), 323–328 . Also see his
“Th e Mass Ornament,” in this volume, 75–86 ; Miriam Bratu Hansen , “ America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity ,” in Lee Charney and Vanessa R.
Schwartz , eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1995 ), 362–402 .
2 . Gonda Yasunosuke , Minshu goraku no kicho ( Tokyo : Dojin sha , 1922 ), chapter 2 ; his
“ Minshu no bunka ka, minshu no tameno bunka ka: Bunka shugi no ichi kosatsu ,” Taikan (June 1920 ) , reprinted in his Gonda Yasunosuke chosaku shu , vol. 4 ( Tokyo : Bunwa shobo , 1975 ), 18–56 .
3 . Siegfreid Kracauer , “ Propaganda and the Nazi War Film ,” in his From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 1947 ), 273–307 .
4 . Although, named according to the emperor’s name, the offi cial period “Taisho” lasted from 1912 to 1925, I followed the historian Narita Ryuichi, who defi ned Taisho democracy as lasting from 1905 to 1931. See Narita Ryuichi , Taisho Demokurashi ( Tokyo : Iwanami shoten , 2007 ) .
5 . In his chapter on Gonda, Aaron Gerow provides an English translation of minshu goraku . While Gonda himself once mentioned “mob amusement” as a good English translation and Miriam Silverberg suggested “popular play,” Gerow chooses “popular entertainment” because he places importance on its industrial implication. (See his Visions of Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 [ Berkeley : University of California Press , 2010 ], 254 ). However, I will use “popular recreation(s)” because this idea is derived from the advocates’ interest in the relation between leisure and work in an industrial society, as they responded to such European thinkers as Kirk Patrick, Th omas Carlyle, William Morris, Welner Sombart, and Karl Bücher. See, for instance, Obayashi Soshi , Minshu goraku no jissai kenkyu ( Tokyo : Dojinsha , 1922 ), 4–5 ; Gonda Yasunosuke , Bijutsu kogei ron ( Tokyo : Uchida rokakuen , 1921 ) .
6 . Carol Gluck , “ Th e People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography ,” Th e Journal of Asian Studies 38 . 1 (1978): 25–50 . Also see Takashi Fujitani , “ Minshushi as Critical of Orientalist Knowledge ,” Positions 6 . 2 (1998): 303–322 .
7 . For social education, numerous books and articles have been published in the fi eld of education. Matsuda Takeo’s Kindai nihon shakai kyoiku no kenkyu ( Hakata : Kyushu daigaku shuppankai , 2004 ) provides a good critical overview on the historiography. Th ere are also quite a few works on popular recreation, including Ishikawa Hiroyoshi , Goraku no seizenshi: Taishoki to dainijitaisen chu o chushin ni ( Tokyo : Tokyo shoseki , 1981 ) ; Yasuda Tsuneo , Kurashi no shakai shisoshi: Sono hikari to kage ( Tokyo : Keiso shobo , 1987 ) ; Yoshimi Shun’ya , Toshi no doramatorogi ( Tokyo : Iwanami shoten , 1987 ) .
8 . Film historian Tanaka Jun’ichiro and other scholars have dealt with social education and popular recreation as a combined topic, but they generally have not inquired into their relationship. See Tanaka’s Nihon kyoiku eiga hattatsushi ( Tokyo : Kanyuhsa , 1979 ) .
9 . For the emergence of the new generation of bureaucrats, see Fukushima Hiroyuki , “ ‘Shakai kyoiku’ kanryo no tojo ,” Kyushu shigaku 129 (September 2001 ): 19–46 .
10 . Ehata Kiju , Shakai kyoiku no jissaiteki kenkyu ( Tokyo : Hakushinkan , 1921 ) ; Norisugi Kaju , Shakai kyoiku no kenkyu ( Tokyo : Dobunkan , 1923 ) ; Nakata Shunzo , Goraku no kenkyu ( Tokyo : Tokyo hobundo , 1924 ) .
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11 . For instance, Norisugi, Shakai no kenkyu , 160–161, 292 . 12 . For instance, Ehata, Shakai kyoiku no jissaiteki kenkyu, 1–4.
13 . Norisugi, Shakai kyoiku no kenkyu , 2 14 . Ibid .
15 . Ibid., 160–161 .
16 . Louise Yong , Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1998 ), 433–434 .
17 . Ibid., 173 .
18 . Ehata, Shakai kyoiku no jissaiteki kenkyu , 533–541 . 19 . Ibid., 244–376 ; Norisugi, Shakai kyoiku no kenkyu , 24–25 . 20 . Ibid., 12–13 .
21 . Ibid., 156–157 . 22 . Ibid., 283 .
23 . Ibid., 175, 283, 319 ; Ehata, Shakai kyoiku no jissaiteki kenkyu, 10–11 . In some parts, though, Norisugi attributed the problems to Japanese traditional customs rather than to the rise of capitalism.
24 . Ibid., 11–16 .
25 . Gustave le Bon , Th e Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind ( West Valle City, UT : Editorium , 2006 ) . Th e original French was published in 1895.
26 . For “ jomin ,” see, for instance, Yanagita Kunio , Minkan densho (1934) , reprinted in his Yangagita Kunio zenshu , vol. 8 ( Tokyo : Chikuma shobo , 1998 ), 16–33 ; Gluck, “Th e People in History,” 32–35 ; Harry Harootunian , Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, Community in Interwar Japan ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2000 ), 306–328 . For “the masses,” see Kracauer, Th e Mass Ornament . For “the citizen,” Jürgen Habermas , Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press , 1991 ) .
27 . Norisugi, Shakai kyoiku , 319 .
28 . Tosaka Jun , “ Minshuron ” (1937) , reprinted in his Tosaka Jun zenshu. Vol. 5: Sekai no ikkan toshiteno nihon ( Tokyo : Keiso shobo , 1976 ), 56–61 .
29 . For instance, Norisugi, “Wagakuni ni okeru minshu goraku taikan,” Shakai to kyoiku (June 1924): 28 .
30 . Sekiya Ryukichi , “ Shakai kyoiku no hanashi ,” Seijiron koza , vol. 5 (1929), reprinted in Ogawa Toshio , ed., Shakai kyoiku kihon bunken shiryo shusei 1.4 ( Tokyo : Ozorasha , 1991 ), 2–3 . 31 . Obi Hanji , “ Eiga kyoiku ni kansuru naigai no jokyo,” Monbusho futsugakumukyoku shakai
kyoiku ka , ed., Eiga kyoiku ( Tokyo : Monbusho , 1928 ), 17 . 32 . Nakata, Goraku no kenkyu , 138–142 .
33 . Yamane Mikihito , Shakai kyoika to katsudo shashin ( Tokyo : Teikoku chio gyoseigaku kai , 1923 ), 58–73 .
34 . For instance, Obi Hanji , “ Kogyo eiga no mondai ,” Shakai kyoiku (April 1928 ): 2 . 35 . Hanji, “ Eiga kyoiku ni kansuru naigai no jokyo,” 12 .
36 . Nakata Shunzo , “ Wagakuni ni okeru kyoiku eiga no kinkyo ,” Shakai kyoiku (April 1928 ): 27–29 .
37 . Tanaka, Nihon kyoiku eiga hattatsushi , 43 .
38 . Th is seems to have been triggered by an invitation from the Ministry to Gonda and Tachibana to the Council of Educational Films they sponsored. See “Monbusho, eiga kyoiku shingikai o moku,” Kokusai eiga shinbun , July 20, 1927, 25.
39 . Gonda Yasunosuke , Goraku kyoiku no kenkyu ( Tokyo : Shogakukan , 1943 ) , reprinted in his Gonda Yasunosuke chosakushu , vol. 3 ( Tokyo : Bunwa shobo , 1975 ), 230 .
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