A glance around the world in the 1920s reveals a heterogeneous film history but one replete with anxieties about American cultural imperialism and the homogenising tendencies of mass culture. The German film industry competed most successfully with America in that its domestic productions outweighed foreign imports in the 1920s and Britain put up a very good fight at the box office, with 1927 its annus mirabilis. However, protectionist measures would characterise a decade in which national cinemas sought to hold their own against Hollywood's incursions into other national cinemas. Audiences in Australia, Canada and India, for example, received a diet of mainly American fare. The American challenge to European and other cinemas was also underwritten by the federal support that the American film industry received from the US Government's Commerce Department, designed to support a developing industry. Nevertheless, the national cinema that produced the highest number of films in the 1920s was Japan's. Japanese cinema was a domestic product, and rarely exported, yet its major studios were highly organised and vertically integrated and directors tended to enjoy more artistic freedom within the evolving studio system. The significance of Japanese cinema may have been ‘discovered’ in the West by Noël Burch in the 1970s but we see the beginnings of Yasuijuro Ozu's career as an auteur in the Japanese cinema of the 1920s.