Screening Enlightenment

During the six-and-a-half-year occupation of Japan (1945–1952), U.S. film studios—in close coordination with Douglas MacArthur's Supreme Command for the Allied Powers—launched an ambitious campaign to extend their power and influence in a historically rich but challenging film market. In this far-reaching "enlightenment campaign," Hollywood studios disseminated more than six hundred films to theaters, earned significant profits, and showcased the American way of life as a political, social, and cultural model for the war-shattered Japanese population.In Screening Enlightenment, Hiroshi Kitamura shows how this expansive attempt at cultural globalization helped transform Japan into one of Hollywood's key markets. He also demonstrates the prominent role American cinema played in the "reeducation" and "reorientation" of the Japanese on behalf of the U.S. government. According to Kitamura, Hollywood achieved widespread results by turning to the support of U.S. government and military authorities, which offered privileged deals to American movies while rigorously controlling Japanese and other cinematic products. The presentation of American ideas and values as an emblem of culture, democracy, and sophistication also allowed the U.S. film industry to expand. However, the studios' efforts would not have been nearly as extensive without the Japanese intermediaries and consumers who interestingly served as the program's best publicists.Drawing on a wide range of sources, from studio memos and official documents of the occupation to publicity materials and Japanese fan magazines, Kitamura shows how many Japanese supported Hollywood and became active agents of Americanization. A truly interdisciplinary book that combines U.S. diplomatic and cultural history, film and media studies, and modern Japanese history, Screening Enlightenment offers new insights into the origins of this unique political and cultural transpacific relationship.

American moviemakers had to tread carefully with the American military and governmental occupation authorities if they were to expect to be able to penetrate the newly opened market for their films in postwar Japan. In sum, filmmakers were secondary players in a game of very serious hardball. Kitamura provides vivid glimpses into what qualities in specific American movies appealed to Japanese critics and audiences. He describes how, as the Japanese spirit revived, lively movie discussion groups sprang up in Japan. Recommended., Hiroshi Kitamura has written an excellent overview of the role played by Hollywood films in shaping the cultural reconstruction of Japan during the American occupation. His book reflects wide reading in Japanese sources, the research of film scholars, and current scholarship of American occupation policy.... This fine book will be of value not only to diplomatic and military historians but also to persons interested in the American occupation of Germany, as so many parallels are implicit in it., In addition to his significant contribution to diplomatic history and U.S. relations with Japan, Kitamura adds to our understanding of Japanese history in the critical period after the war.... What he details so carefully through his examination of the Central Motion Picture Exchange (CMPE) and the Eiga no tomo, among other organizations and entities, is how Japanese came to embrace the carefully scripted and edited manner in which American films were reintroduced to Japan during the occupation., Kitamura shows that Hollywood and SCAP [the occupying authorities led by General Douglas MacArthur] were at loggerheads almost as often as they were in harmony.... SCAP censorship caused problems for American films as various as Frank Capra's political fable, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, unseen in Japan during the Occupation due to its portrayal of corruption in US politics, to the Tyrone Power swashbuckler, The Mark of Zorro, which in an era when samurai films were practically banned, was criticized for its portrayal of swordplay as a 'fine and fashionable art of killing.'... His book sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Occupation history., Kitamura's book is a new contribution to the field of cinema in occupied Japan in covering such diverse groups as the American film distributor, the Central Motion Picture Exchange (CMPE); Japanese exhibitors and movie theaters; 'cultural elites’ including critics, journalists, and scholars; and moviegoers. Attention to all these groups allows readers to see the complicated dynamics in which Hollywood films become the icon of democracy and modernity in occupied Japan.... It can be highly recommended to all scholars and students of the US occupation of Japan, film history, and Japanese cultural and intellectual history.

Hiroshi Kitamura is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary.