The summer of 1937 was hot and miserable for the film industry in Japan. Cinemas were dominated by films from Hollywood and Europe, the lack of original content had deprived the domestic film industry of a true Japanese hit all year. Ticket sales were slumping, theatre-owners struggling to recoup their losses. Box office receipts of the top six cinemas fell from 10,000yen in the first week of July 1937 to barely 6,000yen the next, putting the majority of cinemas in the red. “This was a week when no customers came no matter what we tried,” cried theater-owners. Kinema Junpo, the leading film weekly, pronounced this “a grim situation for movie theaters” [2].

All this changed almost instantaneously with the breakout of hostilities between Japan and Chinese soldiers at Marco Polo Bridge on the 7th of July, 1937. War was manna to a film industry thirsty for ideas. Just as it is today, war is news, and news means business for the mass media. The news industry was the quickest on its feet to respond, sending camera crews they had already based in Manchuria towards the battlefield within days. On the 12th of July, the six major news companies (including Asahi Shinbun, Yomiuri Shinbun, Osaka Mainichi Shinbun and Tokyo NichiNichi Shinbun) paid a visit to the War Ministry’s news headquarters, where they reached a mutual agreement to “screen news films as fast as possible in movie theaters in order to ensure correct public perception of the war.” [3] Two days later, a similar meeting was held again with the news film representatives, but this time it was called by the Foreign Ministry’s Public Affairs department. According to Manago Heita, Tokyo Asahi News’s representative, the ministry lambasted the film industry for its passivity to date in conveying the cabinet’s policies, and urged them to work together as one for the war effort and actively communicate the war to the public [4]. The three main film companies, Shochiku, Nikkatsu and PCL (soon to become Toho), were not about to stand by idly either, and announced their intention to produce “military films” capturing the entire public spirit and interest in events in Northern Shina. Shochiku, then the largest film company, announced it would establish a production department specializing in military films [5].

News film was the clear victor in the early months of the war, leaving the major film studios trailing in their wake. The news film companies were the quickest on their feet in responding to the war, and the first to capture live footage of the frontline and screen it back home. Taking advantage of a special express passenger flight between Tianjin and Tokyo (with refueling stops in Dalian, Seoul and Fukuoka) that had begun operating several days before the war broke out, news companies were able to process film negatives by 5pm on the very day they had been sent. Although it generally took three days for the negatives to be processed, edited, sound recorded, and submitted to the censors, there were also instances of breaking news where news clips were shown unedited in theaters the following evening after arrival [6]. The first edition of “The Northern Shina Incident” was released on July 14th, 1937, and by the next day, theaters around the country had begun screening news films on a daily basis, with some even screening several a day.

The success of news film was undeniably linked to its extensive coverage of the war. Long lines formed outside movie theaters, audiences eager to catch a glimpse of battlefields on the mainland and experience the war vicariously as the army advanced down the coast. Within a month of the war, average attendances were hitting upward of 4,000 customers per day, far outstripping the pre-war average. Audiences also had plenty of other incentives to watch news films. If they spotted a relative in the film, they could request for a sukuriin gotaimen – a blow-up of the scene in the film. These were dubbed in the newspapers as ginmaku no saikai (on-screen reunions). News films were also priced attractively. Whereas a trip to the cinema cost 50sen or 1en, a news film cost only 10-20sen, and with the introduction of army-sponsored news film theaters, sometimes even free [7] .

The production of news films stepped into full gear in synchrony with the rising popularity of news films. In the first month of the war alone (July 1937) over 2000 reels of news films were submitted to the film censorship bureau [7] .By the end of 1937, an average of 150 news films were being produced a week by the nine major companies: Tokyo-Osaka Mainichi News, Tokyo-Osaka Asahi News, Yomiuri News, Houchi Talkie, United Alliance News, Paramount News, Soviet Special Report, Tokyo Nichinichi’s Sekai no ugoki and Tokyo Asahi’s World Report [9]. A report on news film in Kinema Junpo in December 1937 remarked that “just as audiences’ appetite for such films has grown at a ferocious pace, the need for news films has rapidly multiplied.” [10]

The distribution of news film also expanded rapidly. Within the first month of the war, a flurry of new contracts were signed between news companies and theater owners as the former sought to expand viewing audiences and the latter sought to guarantee their supply of news films. Tokyo Nichinichi signed a “lightning agreement” with Shochiku’s theater department on July 13th that assured Tokyo’s Shochiku News Cinema would only screen their films. Within a few months, the number of news film theaters had reached an all-time high, with over 1000 theaters around the country screening news films. In a commentary on the the “news film fever” created by the China Incident, Matsusaki Masao, a film critic wrote “Before the Incident one would be hard-pressed to name even one or two News Film Theaters, but now with one stroke one could hit over sixty theaters.” [11] Japan’s first underground cinema was built especially to screen news films, and by January 1938 there were twenty-three news film-only cinemas in major cities alone (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe) [12] . Many theaters which had previously been struggling with poor ticket sales over the summer of 1937 quickly converted their line-up to screen only news films.

For all the popularity of news films, they remained a predominantly urban phenomenon, with the concentration of movie theaters highest in Tokyo and Osaka. Still, the reputation of news film reached far and wide, even in rural areas which lacked the facilities to screen these films. Matsuaki writes of his experience traveling to the countryside just hours away from Tokyo, and encountering a group of enthusiastic villagers “who had heard all about news films, but there was no theater within close distance where they could watch it. Thus, they elected a representative who would travel several hours to Tokyo once a week to watch news films, and then share what he watched with his village when he returned. Their inability to watch their loved ones in battle and the sincerity of their words moved me to tears…. Imagine this unfortunate situation replicated in Kanagawa, Shizuoka, Chiba, Saitama! The ones who contribute the most troops to the front line are those from the countryside, yet they reap the least benefits”. [13]

Unlike news film produced in China during the same period, which often emphasized the struggle of the individual soldier, in Japanese news film the individual received almost no attention, the emphasis placed on the coordination of entire battalions of troops advancing [14] . These troop scenes would often be interspersed with gunfire and explosion scenes, alternating between the city and the countryside. Most of the sounds however, were carefully orchestrated in the editing studios – although on-site recording for news films was available, the cost was high and the quality low, and for most of the news films the sound of bombs falling, gunfire and troops marching came from stock recordings in Tokyo sound libraries. The audience was none the wiser.

Nearly 95% of all news film titles produced in the first year of the war contained the word “Shina” or some aspect related to China [15] . Even so, there was hardly any visual or verbal reference to China, or Chinese people in news films. The war could have been taking place anywhere, had it not been for occasional visual markers like the Bund in Shanghai. If one were to judge from the news films alone, Japan’s army was fighting an invisible “enemy” whose existence was apparent only from mysterious gunfire and explosions. Very rarely did Chinese people appear in Japanese news films; those who did were either waving white flags or the Japanese flag. Whether this was out of coercion or free will is not stated, but their faces were often unsmiling and spoke of fear and helplessness. But to unsuspecting audiences, news films told the tale of a victorious Japanese army crusading against an enemy which lurked beyond the horizon and in the shadows, winning hard-fought battles in lands full of flag-waving welcoming villagers and townsfolk.

Despite appearing to be in the pink of health, the news film industry was in fact, starting to founder by the end of 1937. It faced increasing criticism about its superficial coverage on the war, partly attributable to its technique of condensing events into short digestible newsbites. An article in Nihon Eiga in the spring of 1938 was strongly critical of the industry, arguing that it glossed over the war without explaining the motives and justification for the Japanese Army’s actions [16]. In addition, the rising costs of keeping up to date with the war in a foreign country, as well as fierce competition within the industry, soon began to catch up with news film companies. A zadankai (discussion meeting) between the Ministry of Culture, the military and the film industry revealed the true health of news film production; despite a steady flow of revenues it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay profitable, and many news film companies began requesting for government financing [17] . Ultimately though, it would be factors beyond its control that weakened the power of news film – and led to eventual consolidation in the industry.

News films, together with other media forms like war movies, newspapers and radio broadcasts, were heavily monitored and weighed in upon to supply the Japanese public with the ultimate “patriotic experience” and drum up support for the war. They were immensely successful at first, providing audiences with the whole deal – auditory, visual, and sensual experience of the war on a distant shore. News films held audiences in their grip as they followed the Japanese Army down the Chinese coast. The swift advance of the troops generated headline after headline for the news industry, launching the news film industry into full gear. By December 1937, Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing – China's three most prominent cities – had tumbled one after another into Japanese control, less than six months after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident [18] . The mood back home was euphoric, and news films stoked this climate with their exuberant headlines: “Hats off Nanjing warriors”; “Occupying Wusong town, Onward we attack!” But there remained a sense of distance between audiences at home and soldiers at the frontline. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the majority of troops were primarily from farming or working classes in the countryside, whereas viewers of news films were predominantly urban. It would be several more years before total mobilization for war had swept up every member of the household in preparation for an attack on the homeland – it may have been war on the continent, but peacetime society back home – crowds were still swarming theaters to experience the visual spectacle of a distant war in a foreign land.

In fact, the war was not formally called a war until the end of 1937. Disagreement between the cabinet and the military added uncertainty to how long the invasion would last and where it would extend to. Accordingly, the naming of the war took several permutations. Initial news reports called the war the Northern China Incident ("Hokushi Jihen"), the frontline was known as the Northern Chinese Battleline ("Kahoku Zensen"). By the time the war reached Shanghai however, news films began using the names of Chinese cities in their marketing, partly because of their exoticism, at the same time because they were more familiar to the general public. News films with titles like "The Chinese Frontline in Shanghai" and "Shanghai in the flames of war" began appearing in print advertisements in magazines and newspapers. Shanghai set the precedent for identifying battles by the city's name, so even when the war turned inland and the cities became more obscure, the practice of titling news films according to the name of the nearest city continued: from Nanjing to Wuhan and later Chongqing (where Chiang Kai Shek moved the Nationalist government), as well as Nanchang, Canton, Hong Kong and Hainan in the South. It was not just the major cities, but small towns and regions that were featured in news films – names of towns like Wusong (present-day Suzhou), regions like Zhejiang as well as geographical features like the Yellow river [19] . Through the naming of news films – and in synchrony with other forms of mass media – the Japanese public began to be intimately acquainted with China’s geography and visual landscape.

While on one hand appearing to teach audiences about China, in reality the focus of news films was always on the troops, with little attention given to the occupied land or people. The storyline did not veer far from the standard theme – victory after overcoming adversity. Partly, this was a nod to the censors by concentrating on the central task they had been given, to rouse patriotic feelings through the films. But equally important, the production cycle made it impossible for news films to be presented in any other format. Because time was of the essence, the turnover period between shooting the film and screening it was extremely constrained. On average, films were processed, edited, and submitted to the censors within two to three days after the film had arrived from the battlefront [20] . The punishing production cycle which initially was the reason for news films' success would eventually become its liability.

Shanghai under War -The Second Shanghai Incident [21] (Asahi News, late August 1937), a 30-minute special on the battle of Shanghai, appealed to patriotic sentiment with a 7-minute sequence of harried refugees escaping the city on ships bound for home interspersed with scenes of burning roofs in the countryside, followed by footage of the navy’s resplendent warships in the Yangtze river unloading tanks, trucks and horses into the harbour. Another news film on the battle for Shanghai, a 20 minute short film titled Shanghai Frontline (Asahi News, filmed on September 9th 1937), remarkably had no shots of the city itself as it had not yet fallen under Japanese control. Instead, to recreate the sense of an urban battle, they showed scenes of pitched fighting in the streets from house to house, the aerial bombing of Nanjing by planes that had taken off from ships in the East China Sea, as well as an extended sequence featuring action-packed footage from the siege of Baoshan castle north of Shanghai, which was won only after a dramatic siege. In Nanjing, where a blanket ban on filming had been imposed after mass killing of civilians started, news films contented themselves with reporting on the aftermath of its capture, with long, no-cut scenes of General Matsui’s victory march through Nanjing’s city gate. These scenes of victory over China’s two most well-known cities cemented the public’s belief in the military’s remarkable success on the mainland.

But as the troops advanced inland, “victory” became a decidedly hard sell. After the fall of Nanjing, the Japanese army began sporadic, unsuccessful incursions into Shandong and Shanxi provinces, but this went largely unreported [22] . Meanwhile, the few successful conquests that had been made were duly blown up onto the big screen as news films. Anqing (Anhui province) a port-city on the Yangtze river, was captured in the middle of June 1938, as well as Kaifeng (Henan province), the ancient Chinese capital; both victories were duly turned into news films [23]. On June 12, Chiang Kai Shek’s army, fleeing Kaifeng, destroyed the dikes on the Yellow River, which stymied the advancing Japanese army but also killed Chinese civilians. In news film lingo, this translated into “The treacherous Chinese army’s wild move creates tragedy in the Yellow River” [24]. According to the American ambassador to Japan then, Joseph Grew, “Of course no word of any Japanese setbacks is ever allowed to appear in the local press, but when we read that the Japanese have occupied a certain town, and when several weeks later we again read that the same town has been occupied, it is not difficult to draw conclusions.” [25]

Shortly after, the government stepped in and introduced dramatic change in the news film industry. As early as November 1937, Ito Fukuo from Tokyo Nichi Nichi News film had remonstrated to officials from the Home Ministry and Culture Ministry about the financial cost and tough competition in the news film industry [26]. The response went beyond what they had requested for. On April 5th 1939, the Film Law was passed, establishing what the military had been urging for years – tight controls on the content of all films at every stage, from script approval, to planning, filming, editing and screening. Films with even the slightest hint of criticism of the war, the military or the emperor were rejected. The screening of news films and documentaries on the war was made compulsory at all theaters, at military theaters these were free to the public. A year later, in April 1940, all the news film companies were extinguished in one fell swoop, and consolidated to form the Nippon News Film Company, which was now in charge of scripting and producing all news films. It was the eve of the Pacific War and the beginning of total mobilisation for war. The end had come for a vibrant industry that had once captured the hearts of the public, but like the troops could not extricate itself from the bog of war in inland China.

Film studios’ first shot in the battle for dominance at the cinemas　was to recycle staid material from earlier war films. They floundered miserably. Human Bullet Reporters (Shinkou Kinema, 1937), released two months after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, was a mish-mash combination of old and new. Nikudan, or human bullets, was a theme recycled from the "Human Bullet Patriots" fever of the 1933 Shanghai Incident, where three young soldiers died while planting bombs in an assault on the Chinese troops defences and became national martyrs. The focus on news reporters cashed in on the popularity of news films; even news films themselves had started to make documentaries about their own correspondents. The first wave of war movies tanked. At a hurriedly convened meeting of film studios at the end of 1937, executives moaned the lack of a decent war movie hit. Calling such movies "seasonal fruit" and "crudely produced military items", they blamed the long production time for fiction films – most of the films released till then had been planned before the war – and one executive even suggested "perhaps it may not be possible during the war" for a true war film that captures the heart to emerge. [27]

They would not have to wait long. By the first week of 1938, the war hit that had been prayed for descended on theatres. Five Scouts (Nikkatsu, 1938) focused on the esprit de corps and camaraderie of a company of soldiers resting in a deserted hamlet in the Chinese countryside. The film borrowed heavily from the realistic style and composition of news film. The scene opens with the ruins of a Chinese-style brick gate, on top of which two soldiers are planting the Japanese flag. The scene cuts to the company of soldiers below the gate, who are standing at attention to the flag while a trumpeter plays Kimigayo [28] . The camera slowly pans back upward to the gate, on top of which the two soldiers remain on patrol while the flag flutters in the wind. The use of the brick gate – which to the Japanese public was distinctly Chinese – left no doubt as to the location of this film, and was also a common feature of news films. The planting of the flag, as well as the slow, upward pan towards the patrolling soldiers on guard above, was another leaf taken from news films – A New Dawn Falls on Northern Shina and Shanghai (Tokyo Mainichi News, September 1937), for example, was one of several news films which had used this scene to great effect to symbolise the new era the Japanese occupation had ushered in.

Five Scouts was filmed entirely in the studios, its material drawn extensively from wartime stories printed in the newspapers and images from news film. According to Tasaka, "I had no experience of the war, and had to resort to combing newspapers to get a sense of the wartime reality. I used that as the skeleton of the film, and painstakingly gathered other materials to come up with a script." [29] But while the background closely mimics the images of Chinese landscape as portrayed in news film and in the newspapers, by comparison it is clearly only an imitation. The long, pan shots which news films used to great effect to convey the vastness of the continent lack depth of field and sense of reality. Its soldiers are too clean – even after having marched for hours on end through the parched land or fleeing through sorghum fields after being attacked by the Chinese troops, they emerged unscathed, their leaves of camouflage untouched. Just like in news films, there are repeated shots of visual symbols that appeared Chinese, such as bridges and gates made of stone or brick, but with one major difference: the bridges in the movie were far too intact. Chiang Kai Shek's army often destroyed bridges upon retreating into the inland - thus it was rare that news films were able to film an intact bridge. Instead, they often focused on scenes of soldiers hauling lumber to rebuild bridges left in ruins, or simply crossing the currents on horses or man-made rafts.

Riding on the success of Five Scouts, the director Tasaka Tomotaka was able to visit actual battle grounds on the mainland in September 1938 in preparation for his new movie. The few months he spent with the troops at the frontline dramatically changed his impression of the troops, the war, and the mainland changed, and compelled him to rethink his next movie, Mud and Soldiers (Nikkatsu, 1939). The film’s storyline was based on a similarly titled book by Hino Asahei, Barley and Soldiers, a bestselling war diary by a military press officer which recounted the minutiae of the soldiers’ daily lives in a matter-of-fact, reportage style. Tasaka recounted several years later the difficulty in rendering the story into a film after visiting the continent: "While we knew we would be basing our script on Hino's work, we had no idea how to bring this to life at the actual battlegrounds. Anyway, we went there with a blank sheet. But even after going there we found ourselves unable to say with confidence, "Yes this is it [how he would film it]" [30]. At a zadankai in 1939, he told Ozu Yasujirou, "After we arrived, we discovered that our script had to be completely redone. Our experience there caused us to reevaluate our criteria and the thought of turning it all into a film filled us with dread." [31]

Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi (Shochiku, 1940), was one of the most popular war movies, and can be considered the equivalent of today’s action flick. The movie was based on the real-life story of Nishizumi Kojiro, which had been popularised by Kikuchi Kan, who wrote a series of columns on his life in Mainichi News. Kikuchi, along with Noda Kogo, the movie’s scriptwriter, and the illustrator Ihara Usaburo, had been one of several “pen battalions” dispatched to the mainland to translate the war into stories, illustrations and movies easily digestible by the Japanese public. Noda recalled that upon reaching Shanghai, “the smell of gunpowder had not yet disappeared and the outskirts of the city was still lined with unexploded grenades and sun-bleached bones. We would occasionally hear the sound of gunfire from retreating soldiers in the distance.” [32] This was more than a year after the Japanese army had occupied the city. The mood of ferocious, bloody fighting was transferred on screen, with dramatic images of entire villages and towns on fire, and every battle scene showing heavy casualties on both sides. One soldier notes that the war may have to carry on for another five or six years. Another chips in, “the battle has only just begun.”

As was necessary for all war films of the era, Nishizumi features the requisite “baby scene”, where the soldiers come across a wounded Chinese woman with her baby in a barn. She recoils in fear when the soldiers approach. But a soldier speaks in Mandarin, “We are your good friends. Don’t be scared.” A Japanese doctor tends to her wounds. But in the night, she escapes, leaving her baby who has inexplicably died in the night. The next morning, the men dig a grave and build a mini-altar for the “little nameless one”. According to the film historian Peter High, this was the only patriotic scene left over from Noda’s script, which was dramatically changed by the director Yoshimura. The original script included racist depictions of Chinese soldiers as inept sitting ducks. These were excised in the movie, which features the enemy as “worthy adversaries”, who fight man to man in every battle, and in the end succeed in taking Nishizumi’s life. High argues that this adds a “majesty and pathos” to the movie that is lacking in other war films, but that this creates a disharmonious contrast with the other standard patriotic scenes. [33]

In the spring of 1938, Kawakita Nagamasa [34], chairman of Towa Trading Company (then known chiefly as an importer of European films), made the following criticism of cinematic portrayals of the war to date: "In China, they call foreigners waiguoren. But this does not include Japanese. In Japan, the word for foreigner, gaikokujin (the characters in Chinese are identical) probably does not include the Chinese in anybody's mind. Instead, we think of red-haired, blue-eyed Westerners. But in truth, the Japanese don't even understand one-tenth about the Chinese what they do about gaikokujin." [35]

Kawakita was one of a minority of film producers and directors displeased with the superficial treatment of the war in the majority of news films and drama films released till then. They put together films that approached the war holistically, and encouraged audiences to reflect on the military’s presence on the mainland and Japan’s relation to China and its neighbours. In this chapter and the next, I will examine the works of two key figures in the wartime cinematic world: Kawakita Nagamasa, a film producer, and Kamei Fumio a documentary director and editor. Both sought to create public discourse about the meaning of the war through their films, which offered insights into the mainland that had never been seen in cinemas before, but the films that resulted and the outcomes they reached were entirely different.

In answer to his earlier question about Japan’s ignorance of the mainland, Kawakita funded a big-budget production, The Road to Peace in the Pacific (Towa, 1938). It was one of the first real Sino-Japanese productions and the first drama film during the war to break out of the studios and shoot on location in the mainland. The script was written and directed by Japanese but the actors hired were Chinese. In a radical move for a Japanese film, the entire dialogue was in Mandarin, emphasizing that the film's point-of-view would be that of the Chinese side, not the military. To hire its Chinese cast, Towa organized classified advertisements in the Shanghai newspapers. Shanghai, which had a booming film industry prior to the outbreak of war, was full of jobless actors looking for work, and hundreds turned up for the auditions held at the ballroom of a hotel. Although many film industry veterans had fled along with Chiang Kai Shek's army, those without political leanings, or the means to flee to Hong Kong, were stranded in the city. [36]

Upon its release at the end of March in 1938, newspapers and film magazines were inundated in expensive colour advertisements promoting the film. The movie's main cast, the male lead Xu Chong, and three female actresses Bai Guang, Zhong Qiufang and Li Ming were flown to Tokyo for a press conference with the national media. The publicity that the film generated was part of Kawakita's campaign to nudge the media into providing more balanced coverage of the mainland. But the odds for success were not high: although the fighting had temporarily reached a standstill, there was ferocious debate both in Japan and international circles over the legitimacy, intent, and extent of its invasion of the mainland. Meanwhile, independent-minded branches of the army had started making forays into the inland; it would be a matter of weeks before the military announced the start of "full-scale war" in China. It was in this hostile and tense climate that the Chinese actors landed in Japan for a benign "cultural exchange" with the local media. The three Chinese actresses were complimented on their beauty, and queried about their first-time visit to Japan, shopping at Ginza, as well as Chinese prejudice towards the Japanese, to which Bai Guang answered, "It's a sensitive topic and I don't feel like talking about it." [37]

For all the media buzz that the film created, it was a major disappointment at the box office. It fared no better on the mainland, where it was released a year later. Aiming to be a Sino-Japanese production that built the bridge for peace between both sides, it succeeded in pleasing neither. It lacked the fast-paced drama and action of military films that the Japanese public had come to expect. The average viewer did not have the stamina to sit through nearly two hours of subtitles of a slow-moving film. Critics blasted the film as a bland travelogue, criticizing the long, extensive scenes devoted to famous landmarks that came hand-in-hand with bland political lessons. On their way to Beijing, Zhao and Lan reach the Great Wall's Badaling pass. Lan innocently wonders, "What's this wall?" Upon being told that it was meant to keep out foreigners, she says "But it obviously hasn't been of use, because the Mongolians came, and so have the Japanese." To make the point clear, they are surrounded by Chinese bandits, who are quickly chased away by a passing platoon of Japanese soldiers. "How helpful of the Japanese troops," says Lan in gratitude. When they arrive at Beijing, they tour famous attractions such as the summer palace and Tian Tan with their friends. The Empress Dowager's marble boat inspires criticism of the Western imperial powers who pillaged the nation, and is of course a backhanded compliment to the Japanese army for removing them. And at the movie’s conclusion, as if the message had not been explicit enough, an old Chinese man, Rui Xiang (the father of Zhao's friend Wang Minsheng) launches into a lecture about the need to work together under the Five-Colours flag [38] for the sake of the nation. Peace will start from Northern China, he says. He tells the younger generation seated around him that they need to have take a step back and look further afield, for the Japanese have helped China by defeating the imperial powers, and that Japanese culture will be the spark that inspires China's new era.

Kawakita was not the only filmmaker seeking to portray a more authentic China than the hollow images in news films and the caricatures of war films. At the same time that Kawakita and Towa were planning their movie, Toho Film had decided to fund a documentary trilogy introducing China’s three major cities involved in the war, Peking, Shanghai and Nanjing. Toho was a relatively new arrival in the film industry, born of the merger between PCL and its subsidiaries two months after the Shina Incident. It would grow into a major force to be reckoned with, its independent and well-funded documentary unit unparalleled at that time. [39]

For the first instalment of its City Trilogy, Toho chose the renowned Miki Shigeru as cameraman, who was known for his camerawork with Mizoguchi Kenji and Itami Mansaku, and Kamei Fumio to edit the footage. Kamei was a promising filmmaker who had already proven himself through two other popular documentary features, Through the Angry Waves and Shina Incident (both released by Toho in 1937). Before Miki went to Shanghai in October, Kamei provided him with a shopping list of appropriate subjects, "scenes appealing to the sentimentality of the Japanese public, things like a red sun at sunset. Miki Shigeru faithfully shot everything on the list." [40] But when Miki returned and screened the six hours of footage he had filmed to Toho officials, there was a moment of stunned silence. Instead of glorious victory, he had captured the ruins of a city scarred with the heavy casualties of war everywhere. The following tale has been repeated many times and mythologised in different ways, but Kamei is said to have stood up and nonchalantly accepted the challenge, saying "It's fine, it's fine, I can work with this." [41]

The result, Shanghai (Toho, 1938) was a nuanced and finely detailed documentary which on the surface appeared to be a standard, propaganda film. It came with the requisite patriotic music and narration and heroic footage of the navy, army, and the naval pilots. But there was much more to the movie than meets the eye, as was foreshadowed in the opening scene. The movie opens with the solemn chimes of a clock tower on the Bund, but quickly transitions to a pan of Shanghai's cityscape. The skies are alight with fires and the lingering plumes of smoke from smoldering roofs. We are introduced to the river-borne route that the navy took to attack the city, and shown admiring images of resplendent naval destroyers and planes. Next, we are introduced to Shanghai's major landmarks – famous hotels, consulates, bridges, and financial institutions. Everywhere on the Bund Chinese people are going about their daily lives amidst the naval ships in the background. "There is no sign of fighting, and all looks peaceful," says the voiceover narration. "But just look further ahead, at the Chinese settlements." [42] The movie transitions to clips of anti-Japanese posters, films and finally to the shuttered shophouses and near-deserted ruins and rubble of this part of town which experienced fierce fighting. Indeed, nothing is as it initially seems, as this movie prepares the audience from the start.

Kamei’s empathy went beyond the displaced villagers. The weariness of the soldiers is evident in every step forward they take as they march on; in another wrenching scene we watch the slow, painful collapse of a horse too tired to continue any further. In stark contrast with Nanjing and even Shanghai, the army’s victory march into Wuhan’s central square was infused not with patriotism but war-weariness; every note of Kimigayo ringing hollow as the soldiers stare blankly into space. As argued in "Landscape Overexposure", this was partly because of the vast difference in the battle on the coast and in the inland. In Towa’s trilogy of the coastal cities, the military’s swift victories made it easy to stir up patriotic sentiment. Fighting Soldiers marked Japan’s slide into an intractable war that would eventually prove impossible to win. Kamei himself later reflected, “this was the time when Japan began to slide deep into war, and consequently into the morass of the Pacific War. I kept wishing for the end of the war as I was filming soldiers and Chinese farmers being killed or injured in sacrifice to the war.” [43]

Upon its completion, the movie was dubbed by the censors as “Tired Soldiers”. Toho ran a series of advertisements in the weeklies in the spring of 1940 in preparation for its upcoming release. But the political climate which had excused the release of Shanghai and Peking had changed significantly, and the Film Law’s passage in April 1940 tightened the criteria for what was acceptable in a film, including strict rules for representing the military and the emperor with utmost reverence and admiration. Toho received a note from the censors that they should “reconsider” its release, and taking the hint, voluntarily withdrew the film. A year later, Kamei was arrested by the Special Higher Police under the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, accused of stoking “antiwar and pro-Communist sentiments among the general public”. He was held in custody for a year, the only filmmaker to be punished under the Film Law. Years later, in 1977, upon the rediscovery of the film, Kamei wrote that “I hadn’t deliberately set out to film an antiwar movie. I just wanted to portray as simply as possible the war in all its rawness.” [44] But the bell had tolled for the end of realism in war films. From hereon, an entirely different species of film would be necessary to mobilize the public.

“The Japanese think of the continent in romantic colours, as a sort of paradise. This is the fervour that gave birth to the Continental Trilogy.” [45]

- Yamaguchi Yoshiko, formerly known as Ri Koran

Here is examined the romanticisation of China, and of Japan’s relationship with China in Toho’s “Continental Trilogy”, comprising Song of the White Orchid (Toho, 1939), Shina Nights (Toho, 1940) and Vow in the Desert (Toho, 1940). Each of the films revolved around the screen romance between the male idol Hasegawa Kazuo and an upcoming “Manchurian” star, Li Xianglan (Ri Koran in Japanese, real name Yamaguchi ). The storyline across the three films was nearly identical. Li, representing the mainland, played the impudent beauty, who upon meeting Hasegawa, representing Japan, falls in love and overcomes her earlier prejudice and misunderstanding of Japan’s benevolent intentions. The gender play was further reinforced by the actors nationalities– Hasegawa the charismatic male Japanese and Li the beautiful Chinese actress who spoke perfect Japanese. But Li Xianglan was really Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the daughter of Fukuoka merchants who had immigrated to Manchuria and was near-fluent in Mandarin. Promoting Li/Yamaguchi as a Manchurian star however, fit perfectly with the studio’s marketing – and made her a role model in the eyes of the authorities. Yamaguchi herself was fully aware of the manipulation of her role in this gender-nationalism battle. As she later wrote in her memoirs, “Japan stood for the strong male, China for the subservient female. If China obeyed Japan, Japan would protect it. This was the hidden message in the films.” [46]

The use of gender play to represent nations and political intentions was not new to cinema. The film critic Sato Tadao dubbed these “rashamen” [47] films, “When the occupier wants to convince the occupied to cooperate, he comes up with a pure love story between the two to conceal his attentions. It is a universal archetype.” The relationship between Li and Hasegawa’s onscreen characters has formed the main subject of research into Japanese films about China. Their gender representations need little elaboration. In the box office hit Shina Nights (Toho, 1939), Li plays Guilan, an untamed, impertinent Shanghainese maiden who has lost her family in the fighting. Hasegawa plays Hase, an immaculately groomed naval officer who rescues Guilan from a Japanese man who is harassing her to return some money. Hase persuades the other members at his hotel to take Guilan in, but instead of gratitude she is full of vitriol and hate for the Japanese. Thereby begins the “civilizing” process through which Hase attempts to groom Guilan into a gracious and well-mannered lady, and culminates in the “slap”, whereby Hase, frustrated with Guilan’s rejections, gives her the “whip of love” which brings her to her senses and she awakens to Hase’s good intentions [48]. While this may have fit into Japanese stereotypes at the time, the act of a Japanese man slapping a Chinese woman in order to win her to his side would not, and did not win any hearts or minds on the mainland. As Li/Yamaguchi later pointed out, “the notion of her falling in love with the man represented a humiliation both in terms of the story and in symbolic terms.” And Tsuji Hisakazu, a film censorship officer for the Shanghai Army Propaganda Unit, did his best to prevent the trilogy from being shown in China, “To put it bluntly, the inability to portray the real mind of a Chinese is bound to arouse an unpleasant backlash among audiences there.” [48]

Yet, behind the romanticisation of China the exotic and China the beautiful, there were subtle contradictions that underlined the black-and-white stereotypes portrayed in the film. The opening scenes where Li and Hasegawa’s characters meet, for example, all revolve around money, and its misappropriation by a Chinese character. In Shina Nights, Hase saves Guilan from a Japanese man demanding money from her which she denies taking, “I’m not that sort of person. I would die before doing something like that.” And in Song of the White Orchid, Li refuses the money that Matsumura offers her for her rickshaw-puller’s injuries, “that’s a terrible habit of Manchurians [extorting money from the Japanese by faking injuries]. Please know we have plenty of good habits too.” As documents from the Japanese army’s occupation period in China revealed, one of the most common reasons cited for mistrust between Japanese and Chinese was over conceptions of money. “Chinese people eat and don’t pay,” complained Japanese shopkeepers, who whined about having to constantly worry about overpaying when shopping. [49] Guilan’s involvement with a money dispute represented Japanese fears at being duped by the Chinese, but the delineation of the plot seems to suggest that anxiety is unfounded. And in Song of the White Orchid, Li’s decency in refusing money that she feels inappropriate signals that not all Chinese accept money without principals. Needless to say, this was also intended as an edifying portrayal of how the ideal Chinese person should behave with regards to monetary transactions.

Another contradiction that the films unveiled was Japanese tendency to treat the Chinese as lower-class, and that the Chinese actually had good reason to feel ill-will towards the Japanese. This “superiority complex” and “reasons for misunderstanding our intentions” was clearly pointed out in the military’s secret documents – it is clear that they at least were aware of the extent of prejudices on the ground. [50] Thus, besides Hasegawa’s gallant hero role, it is also important to consider the numerous other side characters in the background, who often act and think in opposition to his chivalrous behaviour. In the opening scene of Song of the White Orchid, for example, Matsumura’s car brushes against Li’s rickshaw and a conflict ensues between the driver and the rickshaw-puller. The storyline suggests that the rickshaw-puller has exaggerated his injuries in order to extort money from Matsumura. Matsumura, appears as the gallant hero because of his insistence that Li accept the wad of notes he takes out form his wallet, but also in contrast to the uncouth behaviour of his driver, who pushes the rickshaw-puller and tosses a coin in his direction. While this scene on the surface appears to be criticising the “terrible habits” of Manchurians, it also subtly points out the superiority complex of the Japanese towards the Chinese, in the driver’s contemptuous treatment of the rickshaw-puller – although the driver’s prejudices appear to be accurate.