The Council on East Asian Studies presents
Sawako Ogawa, Associate Professor of Film History, Hokkaido University:
“Japanese Cinema During World War I: Authenticity of moving images and the influence of American cinema.”
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 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.