The Golden Age of 1950s Japanese Cinema｜An Explosion of Expression Born of a Gap in Censorship

The mid-to-late 1930s, and the early-to-mid 1950s.
Japanese cinema had “two golden ages,” one on either side of World War II, and because both shaped the history of Japanese film that followed, they are essential to understand.

This time, I want to focus on the 1950s. Recently, I suggested beginning with Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), but why exactly do the films of this period matter so much?

It is not simply that they are masterpieces by legendary directors. It is that circumstances peculiar to the era worked as a tailwind for creators and led to an “explosion of expression.” And since such a moment can be expected to come around again, every creator should be preparing for it now. So let me begin by looking at the era from above.

The first golden age, in the 1930s, was a time when politics could no longer ignore the voice of the professional soldier, and the military, with the army at its core, rose to power. Beginning with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the Kwantung Army, the army’s force in Manchuria, widened its military operations on its own authority. The sight of the army running out of control, acting on its own and ignoring the state’s decision-making process, gave people in the film world a premonition of an ominous future.

Then came the May 15 Incident in 1932, Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, and the February 26 Incident in 1936, and once the National Mobilization Law was enacted in 1938, cinema could no longer ignore the wishes of the military. The years from 1938 until the outbreak of the Greater East Asia War in 1941 were, in effect, “the last era” in which one could still create, under extreme conditions. Under the wartime regime, film was placed under state control and military censorship tightly restricted expression. Until defeat came in 1945, cinema was stripped of its freedom of expression, and even when the war at last ended, for creators the suffering went on without end.

The reason is that the wartime military was simply replaced after the war by GHQ, the headquarters of the Allied occupation. Through the late 1940s, GHQ forced the studios to make “democracy films,” and now it was GHQ that did the censoring. Japanese cinema passed through a dark age across the 1940s and produced little worth naming, but this history teaches that every form of expression dies under censorship.

Just when it seemed that Japanese cinema was finished, the victors of the war began fighting a proxy war over hegemony among themselves. When the Korean War between the United States and the Soviet Union broke out in June 1950, it became an unexpected tailwind for a Japan searching for its postwar recovery, and the economy’s revival sped up as if it had been oiled. The moment the turmoil across the sea in Korea turned the eyes of the occupation forces in Japan toward the peninsula, film creators found themselves holding an unforeseen chance. With America squaring off against the Soviet Union head-on, GHQ’s censorship became a dead letter in practice, and as the domestic economy recovered rapidly, the film industry grew explosively.

The Korean War ended in an armistice in July 1953. In the meantime, following the San Francisco Peace Treaty of September 1951, GHQ left Japan in April 1952, and Japan, at least on the surface, regained its sovereignty as an independent nation. This windfall stirred the creators whose livelihood was expression.

People who had suffered under the suppression of expression for more than ten years now let their work leap free, like fish returned to water. The result was the many masterpieces that still represent Japan today, and they came about because the fury people had carried deep in their guts and their insatiable hunger to create had at last reached the critical point where the two crossed. In other words, the decisive difference is that, unlike the 1930s, when oppression was tightening, the 1950s brought complete liberation from censorship.

This miraculous “vacuum of power” quite literally brought a golden age to Japanese cinema, but only a few years later the signs of the next oppression began to drift in. As 1960 approached, a struggle over the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty broke out on a national scale.

What sustained the golden age, moreover, was the working generation that had experienced the war directly, people who knew in their skin how grave a thing the censorship of expression was. In the later 1950s, however, a generation grew in number that had lived through the war as children but had never faced an enemy on a battlefield. On top of this, high economic growth drove a rapid influx of people from the provinces into the big cities, and the industry was confronted with the need to answer a “new demand,” which the existing creators could not possibly meet.

Freedom of expression is nothing so gentle as words make it sound.
Nothing conveys this better than these three films.