How can we understand what cinema means to others? One of the biggest issues in audience and reception studies is the ultimate unknowability of the processes going on in the mind and body of another person as they watch a film. This has implications for our understanding of how these processes contribute to meaning making, in relation to how viewers understand the events and images onscreen to relate to, inform or contrast with their own lives and understandings of the world. This book approaches the question of viewers’ relationship to film from a different angle, asking instead what it means to engage discursively with one another through cinema. What does talking about the cinema do?

This is more than a simple curiosity. Over more than a century of cinema, grassroots popular support for the movies has waxed and waned, peaking in countries as diverse as the USA, the UK and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the organised studio systems. In the same century, many corners of the world have seen the cinema co-opted by governments and organisational institutions, which imagine film technologies as a means to influence those same grassroots audiences. The consistent use of cinema, among other popular entertainments, to persuade or attempt to manipulate viewers keeps the question of what (and how) cinema means to viewers at the forefront of inquiry. This book takes postwar bureaucratic interventions into Japanese cinema production and exhibition as the starting point for an exploration of the roles that cinema can play in our lives, as viewers, citizens and humans.

Postwar Japanese cinema presents an ideal case study for this investigation due to a coincidence of particular socio-political, historical and structural factors occurring in the first decades after 1945. Japan was a relatively early adopter of film technology, beginning in the 1890s, contemporaneous with many countries around the world and not far behind France and the USA. At the same time, the early Japanese cinema industry was in many ways expressly local.