In Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano studies the not yet fully explored field of Shōchiku cinema during the interwar period. Important works have been already published, centering on some single directors: for example, David Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988) and Arthur Nolletti's The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter through Tears (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). However, taking into consideration that Shōchiku cinema played a significant role in the contemporary mass culture, an investigation of the dynamics between films and their social, political, and cultural contexts—particularly in terms of “modernity”—has been wanting until now.
As a studio established to produce “modern” films in contemporary settings in Japan, Shōchiku Kamata Studio depicted the newly emerging social reality of modernity, such as the urban space, the salaried man, and the modern girl, or moga. Yet what should be...
