Concealing with Sunshine: Audio-visual Displacements of Violence in Pre-war Japanese Military Films

• In Event: Empire of “Hope”: Ideal and Reality of Greater East Asia in the Imperial War Films

Abstract

During the militarism period of Japan, many war films were produced and viewed by the public, contributing to the creation of entire picture of war for Japanese people. Contrary to the positive representation of reality in this one and only audio-visual medium at that time, negative images were deliberately removed with the cooperation of film industry. As Abé Mark Nornes argued in Japanese Documentary Films (2003), brutal violence of Japanese soldiers (to themselves as well as others in colonial territories) was hidden in the documentaries through editing and narration styles. Likewise, in feature films and animations, no blood shedding was depicted and expression of soldier's death was limited to implication. But ironically, while those unrealistic styles were employed, film and animation makers were also elaborating very realistic audio-visual expression of battlefield and weapons with such methods as special effects and perspective drawings. Some contemporary Japanese pop-culture critics such as Otsuka Eiji and Kasai Kiyoshi find an origin of Japanese animation in this history.
In this paper, I will examine how this realistic audio-visual strategy displaced the true reality of war by analyzing two influential war films, Battles on the Hawaii and Malay Sea (1942) and Momotaro Divine Soldiers of the Sea (1945), especially focusing on the effect of those audio-visual representations. Also, I will discuss what kind of problems this ‘defective’ realism devoid of reality pose to our present understanding of the war by investigating the discourses on the discovery of the two films in post-war period.

Author

• Masato Dogase, Chubu University