Book Description
From the late 1920s through World War II, film became a crucial tool in the state of Japan. Detailing the way Japanese directors, scriptwriters, company officials, and bureaucrats colluded to produce films that supported the war effort, The Imperial Screen is a highly-readable account of the realities of cultural life in wartime Japan. Widely hailed as "epoch-making" by the Japanese press, it presents the most comprehensive survey yet published of "national policy" films, relating their montage and dramatic structures to the cultural currents, government policies, and propaganda goals of the era. Peter B. High's treatment of the Japanese film world as a microcosm of the entire sphere of Japanese wartime culture demonstrates what happens when conscientious artists and intellectuals become enmeshed in a totalitarian regime.
English language edition is revised and expanded from the original Japanese
Back Cover copy
"Who could have predicted that the most detailed and precise analysis of our country's wartime propaganda would come from an American scholar born and educated in the postwar era?"-Kawamoto Saburo, film historian, Mainichi newspaper
"One is filled with admiration for the author's breadth of perspective, the objectivity of his approach, the vast reaches of material he covers and the care with which he analyzes each film and document."-Iwamoto Kenji, professor of film, Waseda University, Tosho Shimbun
"In bringing the English-language reader through the duration of wartime cinema under Imperial Japan up to the tensions that characterized film under the American occupation, The Imperial Screen is an essential complement to the scholarship by Dower, Hirano, and Buruma on war, culture, and memory."-Joanne Bernardi, associate professor of Japanese and film, University of Rochester
