Japanese Cinema During World War I

For Japan, World War I has been described as a fire on the other side of the river. In Japanese film history, World War I is considered the forgotten war. However, melodramatic and documentary films were produced in Japan during the fall of Qingdao and the Nikolayevsk massacres. Furthermore, numerous WWI films—both fiction and non-fiction—were imported and regularly screened across Japan.

In this lecture, I first introduce the types of films released. I then discuss the formation of the system used by the government, which employed these films as propaganda. I also explain the process by which the difference between fact and fiction in films was represented. Finally, I consider how, as a result of World War I, there was a shift from European cinema to Hollywood cinema, which strongly influenced Japanese modern culture.

OGAWA Sawako is Associate Professor of Film History of Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences at Hokkaido University. She has published a monograph about comparative film history of European and Japanese early cinema (Eiga no Taidō: 1910nendai no Hikakueigashi, Kyōto: Jimbun Shoin, 2016). Her research interests include adaptations between literature, theatre and film, and Operetta history in the 19-20th century. A recently published article (Englisch) is; “The First World War and Japanese Cinema: From Actuality to Propaganda”, Jan Schmidt, Katja Schmidtpott (eds.), The East Asian Dimension of the First World War: Global Entanglements and Japan, China, and Korea, 1914–1919, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/New York, 2020, pp. 159-182.