After World War I, the American film industry achieved international dominance and became a principal promoter of American cultural expansion, projecting images of America to the rest of the world. Japan was one of the few countries in which Hollywood lost its market control to the local industry, but its cultural exports were subjected to intense domestic debates over the meaning of Americanization. This dissertation examines the interplay of economics, culture, and power in U.S.-Japanese film trade before the Pacific War.
Hollywood's commercial expansion overseas was marked by internal disarray and weak industry-state relationships. Its vision of enlightened cooperation became doomed as American film companies hesitated to share information with one another and the U.S. government, while its trade association and local managers tended to see U.S. officials as potential rivals threatening their positions in foreign fields. The lack of cooperation also was a major trade problem in the Japanese film market. In general, American companies failed to defend or enhance their market position by joining forces with one another and cooperating with U.S. officials until they were forced to withdraw from Japan in December 1941. Culturally, Hollywood was signified as a major change agent for promoting a new world of capitalist modernization, interdependence, and peace unified by the universal influence of democratic, non-political American values and ideals.
Domestic divisions characterized the Japanese film market and reception of American films. On the one hand, Japanese films came to control a large part of the domestic market, and Hollywood was increasingly criticized as a tool of cultural imperialism, a major source of ideological pollution corrupting Japanese traditions and national identities. Such critiques, underlying the growing campaign to impose official controls on American movies after the mid-1930s, were embedded within the nationalist discourses that helped to define the U.S.-Japanese conflict as a clash of civilizations. On the other hand, American films continued to enjoy strong, if limited, popularity, especially among the urban middle-class youth, and the official anti-Hollywood ideology coexisted with a subterranean counter-discourse that imagined American pictures as providing a positive, liberating force and alternative models for modern Japanese life.