The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Imagined America in Occupied Japan:(Re-)Educational Films
Shown by the U.S. Occupation Forces to
the Japanese, 1948–1952

Yuka TSUCHIYAINTRODUCTION
In post-WWII occupied Japan, the U.S. Occupation Forces showed
hundreds of educational documentary ﬁlms to the Japanese people. The
topics of these ﬁlms varied from American culture to public hygiene andinternational relations. This paper will explore the imposition and reception of the educational program carried out by the Occupation Forces
through ﬁlms, thereby showing what messages the Americans tried toconvey and how the Japanese audience read these ﬁlms.1
There has been considerable scholarly discussion of commercial ﬁlms
in occupied Japan, most notably, for example, in Kyoko Hirano’s Mr.
Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation,
1945–1952.2 John Dower also touched upon popular commercial ﬁlms
in Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.3 Few scholars have explored, however, the educational documentary ﬁlms shownin the same period, in spite of their unique signiﬁcance arising from thepolitical messages encoded in the narratives. Akira Abe, a scholar of educational history, has dealt with the educational documentary ﬁlms in his
Japanese language book Senryo-ki chiho kyoiku seisaku no keisei katei[The Process of the Formation of Local Educational Policies in Occupied
Copyright © 2002 Yuka Tsuchiya. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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YUKA TSUCHIYAJapan].4 Using the records of the Occupation Forces, Abe listed 304 titlesof educational ﬁlms shown by the Occupation Forces and discussed thesigniﬁcance of the ﬁlms in postwar Japanese local education. Since his
study was made from the perspective of Japanese educational history,
however, it regards the educational ﬁlms as educational materials usefulin the postwar Japanese schools rather than situating them in a context
of U.S. foreign policy.
In contrast, this paper argues that the educational ﬁlms in occupied
Japan were part of the U.S. re-education policy for Japan, and in a larger context, part of the American postwar project to export the “consensus culture” overseas. The purpose of “re-education,” as explained in the
U.S. policy papers, was to “effect changes in certain ideologies and waysof thinking of the individual Japanese” by using “all possible media andchannels.” More concretely, the re-education policy aimed at eliminating militarism and the “anti-foreign complex” among the Japanese, anddisseminating “democratic principles” and information on the “U.S. andother United Nations.”5 Marlene Mayo has referred to the essence of reeducation as “the extension of propaganda and psychological warfare
into the peacetime era.”6 James Tent, in his study of occupied Germany,
has termed it a “catchword” to describe the conquerors’ attempt todemocratize the defeated countries.7
Re-education, however, did not aim at any truly democratic society.
As historian Charles S. Maier argues, the U.S. viewed the postwar world
as “a tabula rasa” where it could build a “consensual American hegemony.” This consensus was based on the “commitment to productivity”
in which political conﬂicts would be submerged as issues of secondary
importance. West Germany and Japan, Maier argues, were the most successful examples of the U.S. politics of productivity, since these twocountries became “massive economic forces that lack concomitant political weight.”8 In this paper, I will stretch Maier’s thesis further to emphasize the manipulative information policies that the U.S. employed toestablish consensual hegemony in the postwar world. On the one hand,
the U.S. disseminated the mythic images of consensual U.S. society
through educational ﬁlms and other media, while on the other hand, italso intended to establish a consensual culture in other countries under
its inﬂuence.
According to Godfrey Hodgson, the myth of a consensual society rests
upon the idea of a “natural harmony of interests,” with everyone belonging to the mainstream culture on an equal basis. The only threat to suchIMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN

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a society came from communism, and therefore the U.S. and its allies inthe “Free World” had to continue their “prolonged struggle” against it.9
Outside U.S. national borders, such a myth served the U.S. imperialinterest in two ways: in stopping people from revolting, both against U.S.
domination and against domestic domination, and in establishing a uniﬁed bloc against Soviet inﬂuences. Edward Said, in his discussion of
post-WWII foreign language programs in the U.S., has referred to a U.S.
propaganda campaign, in which “what counts is not what people are or
think but what they can be made to be and think.”10 The evidence inPenny M. Von Eschen’s study supports this point. The Truman administration saw racial discrimination in the U.S. as its “Achilles heel in a
propaganda battle with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of Africa andAsia.” Consequently, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) launched aradio and press campaign in African countries, attempting to project“positive images of black Americans as examples of American democracy at work.”11 The Occupation Forces in Japan also manipulated theimages of U.S. society and its relations to the world using the ﬁlms. A
utopian American society free of class, racial, and gender conﬂicts—andthe desirability of the rest of the world coming to emulate it—was a recurrent theme in educational ﬁlms shown in occupied Japan.
This paper will also emphasize the importance of the audience’s
agency in interpreting the ﬁlms. Peter Burke explains reception theory
as a way to understand cultural transmission with an emphasis on thereceivers “on the grounds that what is received is always different fromwhat was originally transmitted because receivers, consciously or unconsciously, interpret and adapt the ideas, customs, images and so on offeredto them.”12 Further, George Lipsitz argues that ﬁlms “resist univocal
interpretations and inscribed ideological closures,” and are open to avariety of readings.13 Lipsitz’s discussion is founded upon commercial
ﬁlms, and admittedly, educational documentary ﬁlms might allow lessfreedom for the audience because of the overtly inscribed messages.
Even so, my study establishes that audiences had some freedom in reading the ﬁlms.
I
The internal documents of the Occupation Forces clearly show that
educational documentary ﬁlms were part of the larger reorientation andre-education program framed by U.S. political interests. The educational

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ﬁlms were imported, edited, and distributed by the Educational Films
Unit (EFU) of the Motion Pictures and Theatrical Branch (MPTB), within the Information Division of the Civil Information and Education
Section (CI&E), which was one of the “Special Staff Sections” within
Douglas MacArthur’s General Headquarters. (See Figure 1.) CI&E’s
function was to disseminate democratic ideals and pro-American attitudes among the Japanese through various media. Radio, ﬁlms, publications, public lectures and discussions, and even schools were understoodas realms of information dissemination.14 CI&E set up branches corresponding to each medium, such as the MPTB, the Radio Branch, and thePress and Publication Branch.
The responsibilities of these media branches were stated in a document titled “Political Information-Education Program” prepared by
CI&E in June 1948, calling for the coordinated action of media branches to change the “cynical” attitudes of the Japanese people toward theirgovernment by making them aware of the rights and responsibilities of
democratic citizens, to eliminate the “totalitarian” aspects in Japanesesociety, and to force Japanese recognition of the “beneﬁts of living in a
free, democratic state.” To carry out these objectives, the document further proposed some concrete “media plans.” MPTB was to 1) persuade
Japanese ﬁlm producers that their ﬁlms can “contain a certain amount ofpolitical education material and still be entertaining,” 2) suggest to thempossible “political education themes,” 3) distribute newsreels including“timely materials concerning political education,” 4) screen and distribute “Allied documentaries” produced in the U.S. and other Westerncountries, and 5) distribute 1,000 16mm ﬁlm projectors for showing educational ﬁlms. In November, this document was further expanded into a
158-page book titled Information Programs, which came to serve as themost basic reference material for all the CI&E ofﬁcers.15
It is clear from these documents that the educational ﬁlm program wasaimed at the political re-education of the Japanese, intending to commit
them to appreciate and protect the “free and democratic” world underthe American hegemony. It is signiﬁcant that the educational ﬁlm program rapidly expanded after April 1948.16 Although the “re-education”
of the Japanese in pro-American democracy was built into occupation
policies from the very beginning, this policy assumed an increased
importance as the U.S. struggled to establish its hegemony in the areas
where it saw a political power vacuum. The rapid expansion of educational ﬁlms after 1948 should be understood in the global context inIMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN

197

which the U.S. was trying to export conveniently constructed images ofitself and the world to counter the Soviet inﬂuence.
In the spring of 1948, the newly established EFU was actively engaged
in the “media plans” mentioned above. Although the unit at ﬁrst consisted of only two ofﬁcers, Donald (Don) W. Duke and Major E. J.
Hennessy, by the summer of 1949 three more people had been added.
After April 1948, and especially toward the end of the occupation, other
CI&E units were gradually diminished or dissolved. EFU, however, survived until the end of the occupation.17
Don Duke was engaged in the U.S. government’s overseas media programs throughout his career. His job-related movements illuminate theglobal scale of the U.S. information dissemination activities in the postWWII period. Duke was born in 1917 and grew up in Davenport, Iowa.
Before coming to Japan, he was working as a public relations ofﬁcer anda “stage manager” for the Navy Department. He was thirty years oldwhen he joined the occupation in July 1947. After returning to the U.S.
in April 1951, he served the State Department as a motion picture ofﬁcer (1952), spending some years in Bangkok (1954) and Bonn (1956)
before heading the Department’s Production Division, TV Services(1960) and being appointed Special Assistant to the Director of TV
Services (1962). He further served in Lagos, Nigeria, as an audio visual ofﬁcer (1965), and, during the Vietnam War, was stationed in Saigon
as a TV-motion picture ofﬁcer.18
From spring to summer of 1948 was a vigorous time for Duke. The
U.S. Department of the Army19 was collecting and shipping hundreds ofAmerican and other Western documentary ﬁlms to EFU, which was busy
screening them to pick the ones that best ﬁt the re-education purpose inJapan. The imported ﬁlms had begun to arrive in early 1946, but the number dramatically increased after 1948. Between July 1946 and December
1951, the Department of the Army sent more than 800 ﬁlms.20 Although
the Department was collecting documentary ﬁlms from many different
companies, it was also producing some original ﬁlms speciﬁcally designed for use in the occupied countries.21
EFU sent the selected ﬁlms to Japanese ﬁlm companies, where they
were “adapted” for the Japanese audience. “Adaptation” included translation into the Japanese language, the recording of Japanese narration,
Japanese titling, editing, and duplicating. For the Japanese ﬁlm industry, CI&E meant the survival of Japanese ﬁlm companies formerly under
the control of the Imperial government. At the same time, it provided

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business opportunities for new companies.22 The ﬁlm “adaptation” companies competed against each other to win contracts with CI&E, andEFU took advantage of their competition.
Since EFU was expecting to receive a large supply of 16mm ﬁlm projectors from the U.S. in June 1948, it needed to speed up the adaptation
process. Duke ordered ﬁlm-printing companies to operate seven days aweek, twenty-four hours a day, with three 8-hour shifts. Japanese companies, however, could not always meet Duke’s expectations because ofillness among its workers, the result of poor living conditions and scarce
food supplies, as well as a shortage of light bulbs, chemicals, and so on.
Duke further organized a contest in “adapting” the American documentary series “This Is America” among six Japanese ﬁlm companies toencourage their competition.23
In addition to “adapting” American ﬁlms, EFU also started to orderJapanese ﬁlm production companies to produce original educational
ﬁlms. Unlike imported ﬁlms, these ﬁlms were especially designed toeducate the Japanese. About thirty titles of the CI&E educational ﬁlms
were Japanese-produced. In some cases, other sections of the Occupation
Forces requested MPTB to produce such ﬁlms. In January 1949, forexample, the Economic and Scientiﬁc Section (ESS) requested MPTB’s
cooperation in preparing a script for a ﬁlm dealing with the “grievancemachinery of labor relations,” especially in the coal industry; as a result,
Safety Lamp: Grievances of Workers (CIE191) was produced.24 At othertimes, the request came from the Japanese government. Model HealthCenter (CIE131), for example, was produced as requested by the
Ministry of Welfare.25 There were forty-six Japanese ﬁlm companies
interested in producing CI&E educational ﬁlms initially, but ultimately
CI&E contracted with four big companies, Daiei, Toho, Shochiku, andNihon Manga Eiga. Toho in particular had had a strong labor union andhad produced leftist and antiwar ﬁlms in the early occupation years. By
the summer of 1948, however, the Occupation Forces had successfully
purged the major leftist producers, substituting those cooperative withthe occupation.26
MPTB supervised the process of production, screened the preliminary
versions, and made revisions. In January 1950, for example, MPTB
screened and gave advice on The New Police Force (CIE167) preparedby a Japanese ﬁlm company. It suggested that they delete certain “undemocratic” actions of the protagonist (policeman), such as “making
registrations,” and instructed them to emphasize more “simple, demo-IMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN

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cratic acts while on patrol duty” such as “speaking to local citizens, joking with children.”27 Another example, How To Hold A Meeting, explaining the democratic proceedings of meetings, was produced by the Toho
Studio in the summer of 1948. An American “Visiting Film Consultant”
in MPTB, Mr. Simmel, gave advice to the producers. These ﬁlms, therefore, were not Japanese ﬁlms in any true sense. In fact, MPTB ofﬁcers
sometimes referred to them as “CI&E-produced ﬁlms.” It was ironic thata “democratic” procedure was taught in such an authoritarian way—
through the production of ﬁlms ordered by the Occupation Forces.28
All of the evidence reveals the sheer enthusiasm of CI&E ofﬁcers inshowing educational ﬁlms to the Japanese, which probably came fromtheir belief that they were engaged in an important historical project tore-educate the defeated Japanese through educational ﬁlms. Educationalﬁlms in occupied Japan were never detached from the overall politicalobjectives of the occupation, but were an important tool for keeping theJapanese under American hegemony.
II
What concrete messages, then, did the educational ﬁlms convey to theJapanese audiences in the service of such political objectives? CI&E distributed almost four hundred documentary ﬁlms during the occupation
and assigned serial numbers to them.29 I grouped the 328 titles that I
found in the CI&E records into eleven categories, shown below:30
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
(E)
(F)
(G)
(H)
(I)
(J)
(K)

Culture and Geography of Western Countries: 82 titles
America as Model of Democracy (including labor relations): 69 titles
Hygiene and Other Practical Information for Living: 30 titles
Japanese-produced ﬁlms: 30 titles
The World United (including anti-communism): 24 titles
Education: 23 titles
Food and Natural Resources (including ﬁshing and agriculture): 18 titles
Science and Technology: 14 titles
Sports and Recreation: 13 titles
Reconstruction of Countries: 7 titles
Others, Unknown: 18 titles

Because of the vast obstacles I encountered in searching for and identifying the ﬁlms, I could not select and watch the ﬁlms equally from eachcategory listed above.31 Even so, there are some common threads running through the ﬁlms, and the threads changed chronologically.

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I watched two out of nine ﬁlms released in Japan in 1946. Steel Town
(CIE7, Category B) was a wartime Ofﬁce of War Information (OWI)
ﬁlm portraying the mobilization of the steel industry, produced by a highly successful director, Willard Van Dyke. Van Dyke started his career
as a photographer on the WPA Art Project in the 1930s. From 1941 to
1945, he served as a producer for OWI and acted as liaison ofﬁcer
between OWI and a group of Hollywood writers providing scripts for
OWI.32
The ﬁlm shows a uniﬁed America where native-born and immigrantlaborers work side by side in perfect harmony. Frank, the protagonist, is
an immigrant man from the “Middle East,” who came to the U.S. fortyﬁve years before and who has been working in a steel factory in
Youngstown, Ohio. Teamwork among men of different ages and backgrounds rules the factory. The perfect teamwork of steel workers does
not stop in the factory. They have organized a town orchestra, since “steel
men got a habit of doing things together.” In private, Frank is raising a
warm, Christian family “up on the hill.” Frank’s colleague, Fred, represents the union in the labor management committee, where the managers
and workers cooperatively discuss “how to make more steel.” Steel Town
portrays a classless America, where everybody is assimilated into themainstream.33
The other ﬁlm released in 1946 was Freedom to Learn (CIE4,
Category F), which has many themes in common with Steel Town. Theﬁlm ﬁrst portrays an Iowa farmer whose father has immigrated to the
U.S. from Bohemia. He believes in the value of education and sends his
two children to school every morning. After the scene of children goingto school, the ﬁlm somewhat abruptly shifts its focus to the students’
lives at the University of Iowa. It shows education as an extension of
everyday experience, comparing people going to church and students
attending religion class, or people working in the cornﬁeld and students
learning about agriculture. The intended message is the value of education as the foundation of civilized, democratic life. However, the sightof the overwhelmingly white, homogeneous campus reveals the hollowness of such an ideal.34 What the ﬁlm actually underscores is conformity among American youth rather than democracy among diverse
students.
These two early ﬁlms show the creation of the unity and consensus
myth during WWII. Lary May argues that “during the war patriotism
became synonymous with the avoidance of class or cultural conﬂict as

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201

well as the making of a new American Way of consensus.”35 The wartime
U.S. government regarded ﬁlms as the ideal vehicle to convey such a
message to Americans. OWI instructed ﬁlmmakers to portray American
society as a new “melting pot” of “many races and creeds that shows thatpeople can live together in freedom and progress.”36 Both ﬁlms reﬂectﬁlmmakers’ efforts in this line.
In 1948, science, medicine and technology emerge as a key theme of
the CI&E educational ﬁlms. The science portrayed in the ﬁlms is of aheroic and paternalistic nature. In both Journey Into Medicine (CIE 32,
Category F) and Streptomycin (CIE 222, Category F), young, earnest,
white, male specialists in white gowns—a symbol of scientiﬁc authority—save the future of civilization. Journey Into Medicine is an awardwinning documentary of 1947 produced by Van Dyke. It shows the
progress of a medical intern, Dr. Marshall. He ﬁrst works at the Presbyterian Hospital for the Poor of New York and then at a public healthcenter in Baltimore. In New York, Dr. Marshall treats children andbabies from poor European immigrant families. In Baltimore, accompanied by an African American nurse, he visits African American families
in a poor neighborhood. He is also actively involved in the campaign todefeat diphtheria. The doctors are always white (mostly men), and those
who seek help are always the poor or the non-white, often children
accompanied by poor parents. Streptomycin was released in November
1950, although its production date is unknown. The ﬁlm portrays Dr.
Waxman and his young disciples, who are working to combat diseases
with newly-discovered useful microbes. Although the central ﬁgure is
the elderly Dr. Waxman, the camera constantly catches the young researchers working under him.37 Both ﬁlms emphasize the role of sciencein establishing a stable and prosperous American society, and imply theimportance of white manhood in such efforts.
I observed a similar stance toward science and medicine in more pragmatic ﬁlms on hygiene. One example was Home Care of Tuberculosis(CIE 86, Category C). The ﬁlm was produced in 1943 but released inJapan in November 1948. It seems to aim both at the training of publichealth nurses and at the education of the American general public. In theﬁlm, a public health nurse, upon a doctor’s request, visits a house where
there is a TB patient. The nurse explains step by step to the patient andhis family about the home care of a TB patient. From time to time, thescenes in the house are interrupted by a medical commentator underscoring and supplementing the important points in each scene. Although

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this ﬁlm features a white woman as the key ﬁgure, it shows that the nurse
is working under the control of the white male doctor, her activities areauthorized by the white male commentator, and she helps a white malepatient who is eventually able to return to work as a breadwinner.38
The “American Way of consensus” created in the wartime ﬁlms continued in the postwar ﬁlms, with a new emphasis on family and gender.
Campus Boom (CIE 73, Category F), released in December 1948, pictures the Syracuse University campus, which was extremely crowded
because of the G.I. Bill of Rights. Male veteran students are unanimously
portrayed in a favorable light, as “courteous, respectful, self-disciplined
adults,” and also as good fathers and husbands. “Married students withchildren rank the top grades among the veterans,” the ﬁlm explains.
Women are portrayed either as the wives or future wives of the veteranstudents. While a married male student leaves home for campus, his wife,a baby in her arms, waves good-bye. A single veteran student participates in a campus festival with a female student because nothing “could
be more festive than having a lively girl on your arm.”39
Women At Work (CIE 225, Category B), released in December 1950,
shows that American women can work outside of the home, while maintaining “femininity.” The ﬁlm portrays four women working in different workplaces. Hazel, a married woman with two children, works at anelectronics factory to supplement her husband’s income so that they canlive in a comfortable house and send their children to college. Joan is asecretary to a bank manager, and for her a job is merely an “interval
between school and marriage.” Martha is a research assistant of “theinstitute of cancer,” the only woman in this ﬁlm who has some professional ambition. Ann is a store clerk, who gave up her interest in music
to support her parents because of her father’s illness.
Each of the four women represents certain realities in post-WWII
America. Although the popular discourse encouraged married women tostay home (as Joan would probably do after marriage), the actual number of married women in the work force continued to rise. Since the postwar consumer culture made it difﬁcult for many families to satisfy all
their material demands on the husbands’ income, many wives decided
to “help out” ( just as Hazel did). In the meantime, the professionalization of women that had begun in the late-nineteenth century had nevercompletely died out, and a small percentage of career-oriented womenlike Martha survived the “doldrums” of the conservative years. Further-

IMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN203

more, when men could not work as breadwinners (as in Ann’s family),women simply could not meet the “norm” of public discourse.40
On the one hand, the ﬁlm shows the diverse options available forwomen in postwar America. On the other hand, it assures the audiencethat American working women never lose their “femininity.” All thewomen in the ﬁlm wear feminine clothes and make-up and never forget
to check the weather every morning to decide what to wear to work.
Further, the ﬁlm never shows non-white or very poor women. The ﬁlm
conveys a mixed message: American women are free and independent,
while at the same time “feminine” and not threatening to men or to theoverall conformity of American society.41
Although Country Store (CIE 223, Category B), released in November
1950, deals with a theme very similar to wartime ﬁlms such as Steel Town
and Freedom to Learn, a new emphasis was placed on the “freedom” ofthe people in a small town in Kentucky. The ﬁlm shows how the small
rural town is organically connected to the rest of America. Even though
residents live in the countryside, they are always “well-informed by radio
and press,” and “interested in national and world affairs.” They “freely
express their mind” even though “their opinions may not be agreed
with.” “Here and everywhere in America, people like to hear all sides of
the question and make their own decision,” the narration concludes.
However, in this homogeneous ﬁctional town, no one seems to bring up
a radically different view that might disturb the harmony. Country Storeshows a utopia of “free- thinking” people, with no racial, class, gender,or religious conﬂicts.42
The theme of brotherhood among democratic countries appeared in
1948, but rapidly expanded in 1949 and 1950, with an increasing emphasis on the unity of the “free world.” The earliest example is Out of Ruins(CIE 38, Category J), a Canadian ﬁlm produced in 1946 dealing with thereconstruction of Greece. The ﬁlm portrays Greece as a foremother ofWestern civilization, and a land of poor, yet free-thinking people. Itshows the Allied aid to Greek reconstruction as a noble work, and views
Greek children as “tomorrow’s citizens, not only of Greece, but of thewhole world.” Running through the ﬁlm is the message that a uniﬁed
Western civilization will reconstruct the world.43
Along similar lines, Border Without Bayonets (CIE 142, Category E),
released in February 1950, portrays the border towns of British Columbia, in Canada, and Washington State, in the U.S.A. The ﬁlm explains

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that “the border is well policed and supervised, but there is no need of
an immigration ofﬁce” because of the “mutual understanding and respect” between the two countries. Various scenes show the peaceful livesof the people in the border towns, and the ﬁlm concludes with two national ﬂags ﬂuttering in the wind side by side.44
The producer, Jay Bonaﬁeld, was also involved with the productionof two other documentary ﬁlms during the 1940s, Frank Buck’s Jungle
Cavalcade (1941) and Savage Splendor (1949). These ﬁlms dealt with
American explorers capturing wild animals in the Malayan jungle andon the African plains, respectively.45 Both narratives were characterized
by a colonialist stance—civilized American men exploring “savage”
lands. The narratives can be contrasted to the brotherhood of Canada andthe U.S. portrayed in Border Without Bayonets. The border towns, inhabited mostly by white people, are positioned at the opposite end of animagined linear progress of civilization from the Malayan and African“savage” lands.
Films dealing with the uniﬁcation of the “free world” rapidly increased
toward the end of the occupation, and particularly after the outbreak of
the Korean War. United Nations Answers Aggression (CIE238), United
Nations and World Disputes (CIE245), As Russia Sees It (CIE253),
Under the United Nations Flag (CIE 262), The Fight for Freedom(CIE264), International Free Trade Union (CIE293), Communist
Footprints (CIE303), The People’s Response (CIE314), and Partnershipfor Peace (CIE316) were all “UN or Department of Army pictures wehave released since the Korean War, which are anti-communist innature,” according to Don Duke.46
Many of the CI&E educational ﬁlms showed an imagined America, aharmonious, prosperous society free from racial, class, gender, or religious conﬂicts. No class war, no racial uprising, and no rebellious
women existed in this imagined consensus society. Uniﬁed America wasat the same time the leader of the uniﬁed “free world.” Even though theconsensus society was a ﬁction, when the majority of Americans
believed in the ﬁction, it began to assume a real power to suppress dissension, as one can see in the repressed and “homeward-bound” 1950’s.
The U.S. government wanted to extend the myth (and the real suppressing power) of consensus to the rest of the world that was now a “blank
sheet” in their eyes.

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205

III
It is admittedly a difﬁcult job to evaluate how Japanese audiences
accepted the inscribed messages in these educational ﬁlms. It was onlyin March 1950 that CI&E began to collect audience reactions systematically, although, even before that, EFU had been incorporating audience’s reactions reported by Japanese theater managers into the “EFU
Weekly Reports.”47 As for any ﬁrst-hand responses by Japanese audiences, I found only 565 sheets of audience reports submitted to the
Occupation Forces between June and November 1950.48 Although thisdata, collected only during a half-year period, does not provide us withmuch opportunity to assess reactions in the long-term, they still offersome insight into the Japanese audiences’ reception of the ﬁlms.
Audience reactions were recorded on several different forms. One
form was a half-letter-size sheet titled “Film Receipt.” This was literally a receipt of educational ﬁlms checked out from CI&E, including date,ﬁlm titles, the signature and title of the receiver, the number of people
attending the screening, and “comments.” Another form was also a halfletter-size sheet titled “Educational Film Attendance Report,” which
included the same information as the “Film Receipt” and also the exact
place of the screening. Still another type was a variety of ruled paper onwhich members of the audience wrote comments freely. In all these
forms, the reporter, representing the audience, summarized the reactionsof the audience in the “comment” section. Some wrote only “Very good,”or nothing at all, but others wrote detailed comments.
It is important to know who wrote these comments, because such comments might indicate different meanings depending on whether they represent only a small minority of elite population or include the lower
middle-class to working-class people. Judging from the titles of thereporters, they seem to represent a relatively wide band of upper to lower
middle-class backgrounds. Although some of them were obviously the
local elite such as teachers and village ofﬁcials, not all reporters belonged
to the well-educated or relatively wealthy class. They included, forexample, leaders of the local dairy farmers, representatives of various
obscure associations, and supervisors of work places. Some of themwrote comments in English, indicating their high educational level, but
the majority wrote in Japanese.49 Also, the reporters did not write theirown reactions, but summarized the reactions of the group that they were

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representing, although probably such “summaries” inevitably reﬂected
the reporters’ bias. Although it is difﬁcult to determine exactly whatgroups among the Japanese population these comments represented, it
can be assumed that they reﬂected the opinions of a wide range of middle-class people, including the lower middle-class.
There are clear patterns in their reactions—enthusiastic comments on
certain ﬁlms, and relatively passive comments or no comments at all onothers—although few wrote negative comments, understandably because they probably did not want to challenge the authority of the Occupation Forces. One thing that struck me the most was the materialistic
reactions of the Japanese audiences. They did not react very much to theabstract political messages or overtly educational contents. For example, democracy and the harmonious living in small towns that I discussed
in the previous section did not interest the Japanese people enough forthem to make any comments. Also, one commentator frankly wrote that
the Japanese-made educational ﬁlms such as For a Bright Home Life
(CIE211)—apparently a didactic ﬁlm—were “rather boring.” Instead,the audiences were most interested in three themes: science and technology, sports (particularly baseball), and recreation (particularly square
dance).
Admiration for the advanced science and technology of the U.S. wasrepeatedly expressed by many writers. For example, a man representing
a group named aoba-kai [the Green Leaves Association] who watched
Modern Highway (CIE143) was impressed with the American highways,
which looked like “beautiful patterns,” and wished that someday theywould also have similar highways in Japan. Modern technology wasclosely associated with increased production. A commentator from the
Ministry of Fishery was “deeply impressed with Men and Machine(CIE70)” because the ﬁlm showed “production power as the foundationof human life and social administration.” The “scientiﬁc” way of ﬁre prevention, the “scientiﬁc” way to combat disease, and the “scientiﬁc” wayto practice sports, etc. were commended by many commentators. Even
Atomic Power (CIE36) gave a “wonderful impression to the audience
about science and human [sic]” according to one woman commentator.
[Original in English.]
Sometimes their admiration extended to well-organized social resources, which they viewed as the result of material prosperity. The representative of a railway museum, after watching Museum of Science andIndustry (CIE94), wrote that he hoped “to have such institutes in our

IMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN

207

country.” Another commentator, from CIE Film Sketch No. 26 (CIE173)
and For a Bright Home Life (CIE211) “learned how American living
standard is high,” and keenly felt the need “to modernize our home life
more effectively [sic].” [Original in English]. At other times, writers simply admired the American ﬁlm technology. Some commentators fromrural areas said nothing about the ﬁlm’s contents, but enthusiastically
expressed their fascination with American color ﬁlm. A male village ofﬁcial in rural Fukushima Prefecture wrote: “Our village is surrounded by
the mountains and there is no entertainment except for some magazines,
newspapers and radio. Some villagers go to watch movies a few times a
year, but most of us had never seen movies before. The excitement of
the farmers who watched color ﬁlms was beyond description.”
American sports in general, and particularly baseball, were popular
themes. Baseball Swing King (CIE113) “made people . . . interested inbaseball,” and Little League Baseball (CIE206) helped people “understand that baseball is a sport that should be recommended” because it“unites the people.” Vacation Sports (CIE132) was shown in the plazain front of the City Hall of Wakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture. The audience (approximately 3000 citizens) were “totally interested in the ﬁlm
and admired it in various terms.” The same ﬁlm was also shown at aschool in a small village. Students “cried out in admiration” at the fascinating scenes of water sports. “This is just the kind of ﬁlm only theAmerican people can make,” the writer admiringly reported.
Parents and children of a rural elementary school in Fukushima Prefecture enormously enjoyed Square Dance (CIE213). The commentatorsummarized the audience’s view of the square dance as “a very gooddance” because “men and women, young and old can dance all together” and because it would create a “civilized nation” [bunka kokka]. At
another elementary school in the same prefecture, the audience was“greatly interested in the square dance” which “came from America,”
and was “modern,” and “uplifting.”
Several commentators accurately received the encoded messages ofAmerican consensus society in terms of race, gender and family. Pueblo
Boy (CIE171) surprised the audience because “such a tribe is also living
a civilized life in the U.S.” A man from the Tokyo Labor Ofﬁce commented on California Junior Symphony (CIE139) that the “beauty of theﬁlm” lay in the “children of diverse racial groups getting together without any discrimination” to form the orchestra. The audience also realized that there were no rebellious women in American ﬁlms. Students of208

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a private school in Tokyo watching Women’s College in America(CIE83) “changed their mind” about American women, because the ﬁlm
showed humble and calm women students, while they had previously
thought American women to be pleasure-loving and ﬂamboyant. Dairy
farmers who watched American Stock Raising (CIE84) and Cattle andthe Corn Belt (CIE312) felt that American youth were trained to be farmers “under the reliable government and understanding parents,” and commended the ﬁlms’ emphasis on harmonious family life as the key tosuccessful business.
These audience reactions suggest that the CI&E educational ﬁlms successfully imported the ideal of conﬂict-free and production-oriented“consensus culture” that Maier and Hodgson have discussed. The audiences were overwhelmed with the material prosperity of American society and its comfortable, “civilized” life and wanted to emulate it. The
advanced technology, baseball and dance—symbols of the afﬂuent society—were apolitical and political at the same time. They obscured political issues under the guise of innocent entertainment or the optimistic
idea of progress, while such an apolitical innocence was at the same time
the key element of the “consensus” to which the U.S. government waspolitically committed. By buying into the ﬁction of consensus, theJapanese audience was also accepting the power of the myth to suppress
dissension and unite the nation toward the shared goal of economic
growth, thus contributing to the creation of “massive economic forcesthat lack concomitant political weight” that Maier has pointed out.
In the apparently successful importation of the consensus culture,
however, the Japanese people had their own agency, because they reacted to the encoded messages selectively. The Category B ﬁlms portraying the U.S. as the model democracy and Category F ﬁlms showing the
U.S. as the leader of the free world did not impress the Japanese audience as much as more practical or entertaining topics. Category B and F
ﬁlms were the most political and propagandistic in their encoded messages, but the Japanese did not necessarily buy into them. Instead, they
appreciated the ﬁlms that inspired them in their own desire for afﬂuent
and comfortable lives. In other words, they were choosing the messages
they wanted to hear, and also converting them to serve their own convenience, to “unite” their own people for reconstructing the country, andto make their own life “uplifting” and “civilized.” John Dower deﬁned
the occupation as “democratic revolution from above,” but at the sametime acknowledged the healthy and energetic “popular consciousness”

IMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN209of the Japanese that resisted the American imposition. In the present
study, too, a certain resiliency in the Japanese audience was observed.
Most signiﬁcantly, however, the Japanese spontaneous reading of theﬁlms and the American message of consensus did not conﬂict, but rather
supported each other. The Japanese audience cast their desire for an afﬂuent future on the ﬁlms, while their desire was supported and encouragedby the ﬁlms’ message to ignore dissension and focus on leisure and production.
It should be noted, however, that the Japanese commentators citedhere did not represent the whole Japanese population. Mire Koikari, in
her gender analysis of occupation policies, argued that it was only middle-class women who beneﬁted from occupation policies, while theresistance of the working-class women was brutally suppressed. The
reporters cited in this paper were not necessarily the “elite,” but more orless belonged to the middle-class.50 The working-class people who weremost likely to dissent from the picture of consensus society—and therefore most likely to be suppressed by the power of consensus—were notrepresented in the audience reactions.
CONCLUSION
Toward the end of the occupation, Donald Nugent, Chief of CI&E,
addressed the Japanese audience when a new CI&E ﬁlm was released:“I am happy to say that the motion picture branch of our section has
played an important part in the rebuilding of Japan, through its production, release and distribution of educational ﬁlms.”51 The U.S. government and the Occupation Forces seemed satisﬁed with the successful
exportation of U.S. consensual hegemony to Japan.
The Japanese people, however, did not passively receive the imported ideal. The educational ﬁlms in occupied Japan should be understoodneither as one-way cultural domination by the U.S. nor as entertainment
freely chosen by the Japanese people. While the U.S. government clearly intended to re-educate the Japanese through the ﬁlms for their own
political interests, the Japanese audience shrewdly took advantage of theﬁlms as self-motivating tools for material prosperity.
Most importantly, the U.S. political goals and the Japanese reception
did not contradict each other, because the image of classless consensus
served both the American hegemony and the Japanese economic reconstruction. The middle-class Japanese admired the U.S. material

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prosperity that was based on consensual hegemony, and showed no hesitation in emulating it. Just as the dominant group of Americans
embraced the ﬁction of consensus and contributed to the emergence ofan afﬂuent but repressive culture of the 1950’s, the Japanese audience
accepted the ideal of consensus and dreamed of a prosperous and harmonious society. Although it is difﬁcult to measure the long-term impactof the CI&E educational ﬁlms, the ﬁlms may have helped unite theJapanese in focusing their energy on economic growth and leisure, while
suppressing any doubt about such unity and conformity.
By showing the overwhelming afﬂuence of U.S. society, the ﬁlms
might have also renewed the Japanese inferiority complex and yearning
for Western culture, which had long existed within Japanese society. The
ﬁlms re-afﬁrmed the West-centric notion of the linear progress of civilization and technology, and encouraged the Japanese to work hard
toward it to maintain their honorary position in the “Western” hemisphere. The educational ﬁlms taught the Japanese middle-class that it
was their legitimate and feasible goal in the postwar world to devote theirlives to economic and technological growth under U.S. hegemonic protection.
NOTES
1
The educational ﬁlms were shown not only in big cities but also in rural villages allover the country, and even on whaling ships. The Occupation Forces imported 1,300
American-made 16mm ﬁlm projectors called NATCO (named after the manufacturer,
the National Company) in order to show the ﬁlms. The ﬁlms became popularly known
to the contemporary Japanese people as “NATCO ﬁlms.” In this paper, however, I willrefer to those ﬁlms as “(CI&E) educational ﬁlms,” the most commonly used term in therecords of the Occupation Forces.
2
Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American
Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, D.C.: Smithonian Institution Press, 1992).
3
John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York:W.W. Norton & Co., 1999).
4
Abe Akira, Senryo-ki chiho kyoiku seisaku no kesei katei [The Process of the Formation of Local Educational Policies in Occupied Japan] (Tokyo: Kazama-shobo, 1983).
Hereafter, the names of Japanese authors of Japanese-language publications are shownwith family names ﬁrst. For Japanese authors who mostly publish in English and use theWestern form of family name last, I have followed their own practice.
5
The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, SWNCC-162 series (July 1945February 1946), The Records of SWNCC, microﬁlm, roll no. 14, the National Diet
Library, Tokyo. The original documents are stored at the National Archives II, College
Park, Maryland.
6
Marlene Mayo, “Psychological Disarmament: American Wartime Planning for the
Education and Re-education of Defeated Japan, 1943–1945,” in The Occupation of

IMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN211

Japan: Educational and Social Reform, ed. Thomas Burkman (Norfolk, Va.: The
MacArthur Memorial, 1980), 78.
7James Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denaziﬁcation in AmericanOccupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1.
8Charles S. Maier, “Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International
Economic Policy after World War II,” International Organization 31, no. 4 (1977):
607–32.
9
Godfrey Hodgson, “The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus,” in America In Our
Time: From World War II to Nixon, What Happened and Why (New York: Doubleday,
1976).
10
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 292.
11
Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 125–28. Mary L. Dudziak
also mentions the U.S. propaganda campaign in Africa. Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41 (November 1988):61.
12
Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1997), 196.
13
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 176–7.
14This responsibility of CI&E was described, for example, in the State-War-Navy
Coordinating Committee policy paper, SWNCC162/D, “Positive Policies for Reorientation of the Japanese” (19 July 1945).
15
National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, RG 331, GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box5305, ﬁle 12 and 15. Hereafter, all the GHQ/SCAP, CI&E records are stored at the
National Archives II.
16
According to Abe’s study, only nine educational ﬁlms were released in 1946, andall the rest were released after 1948. Abe, Senryo-ki, 722–9.
17
Sato Hideo, ed., Rengo-gun saiko-shireikan soshireibu minkan-joho-kyoiku-kyoku
no jinji to kiko [Personnel and Organization of CI&E, SCAP], vol. 2 of Sengo kyoiku
kaikaku shiryo [Postwar Educational Reform Documents], (Tokyo: Kokuritsu kyoiku
kenkyu-sho, 1984).
18
Department of State, ed., The Biographic Register (1974).
19
The Army Department’s Reorientation Branch, Civil Affairs Division, located in
New York, was in charge of this task.
20
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5308, ﬁle 9.
21
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5308, ﬁle 6.
22
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5305, ﬁle 11.
23
Ibid.
24
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5305, ﬁle 3.
25
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5305, ﬁle 4.
26
Matsuura Sozo, Senryo-ka no genron dan’atsu [Suppression of the Freedom of
Speech under the Occupation] (Tokyo: Gendai janarizumu shuppankai, 1969), 174–83.
Ironically, Toho’s Educational Film Division, where CI&E ﬁlms were being produced,
was the last stronghold of the leftist producers, which the president of the company
described as “composed of 90 percent of Communists [sic].” GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box5305, ﬁle 8.
27
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5308, ﬁle 6.
28
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5305, ﬁle 9.
29
CI&E records include a ﬁlm numbered 397, although I have not found all the titles
up to 397.

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30
When a ﬁlm extended over more than one category, I assigned just one category,judging from the central theme of the ﬁlm. As for those ﬁlms whose contents I could not
determine, I tried to make the best guess from the titles.
31
Finding the actual ﬁlms was a time-consuming process. Many of the imported ﬁlms
were re-named when they were “adapted” for the Japanese audience, and the new titles
were further translated into Japanese. Each imported ﬁlm, therefore, had three different
titles, two in English and one in Japanese. Since the U.S. archives store the ﬁlms under
the original titles, I needed to ﬁnd out the original titles ﬁrst, then search in the archives’
database. In some cases the original titles sounded too general (such as Brazil or New
Zealand ) to narrow down the search.
32
Directors/Filmmakers, vol. 2 of The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1984), 546.
33
Willard Van Dyke, Steel Town, no. 6 of American Scene, 35mm, 27min., Ofﬁce of
War Information, 1944. All the ﬁlms cited in this paper are stored at the Motion Picture,
Sound, and Video Branch, National Archives II at College Park, Maryland.
34
Freedom to Learn, no. 9 of The American Scene, 35mm, 17 min., U.S. Information
Agency, no date.
35
Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 173.
36
Ibid., 142.
37
Willard Van Dyke, Journey Into Medicine, 35mm, 39 min., Afﬁliated Film Producers, Inc., 1947. (Copyrighted in 1957.) Herbert Kerkow, Streptomycin, 35mm, 10
min., Department of the Army, no date.
38
The ﬁlm’s original title was The Role of the Public Health Nurse, 35mm, 16 min.,the National Tuberculosis Association, 1943.
39
Frederic Ullman, Jr., Campus Boom, 16mm, U.S. Information Agency, no date.
40
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (NewYork: Basic Books, 1999); Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums; The
American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1990); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s
Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000).
41
The ﬁlm’s original title was American Working Women, 35mm, 20 min., U.S.
Information Agency, no date.
42
Country Store, 35mm, 20 min., Department of the Army, 1950.
43
Nicholas Reed, Out of the Ruins, 35mm, 10 min., the National Film Board of Canada,
1946.
44
Jay Bonaﬁeld, Border Without Bayonets, 16mm, 16 min., U.S. Information Agency,
no date.
45
American Film Institute Catalogue of Motion Pictures Produced in the UnitedStates, 1941–1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 818, 2085.
46
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5308, ﬁle 7.
47
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5308, ﬁle 6; Box 5305, ﬁle 8.
48
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5269, ﬁle 5. Hereafter, all the audiences’ comments werecited from ﬁle 5.
49
Most of the comments cited in this paper were originally written in Japanese, andtranslation is mine. For those comments originally written in English, I indicate this inparenthesis [ ].
50
Dower, Embracing Defeat, 25; Mire Koikari, “Gender, Power, and Politics in the
United States Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952” (Ph.D. diss., University of WisconsinMadison, 1997).
51
GHQ/SCAP, CI&E, Box 5308, ﬁle 7.

IMAGINED AMERICA IN OCCUPIED JAPAN
Figure 1.
Chief, CI&E
Executive Duty NGO
Administration Division

The Organization of CI&E, July 1948
(Total number of personnel: 120)

Chief
Assistant Administrative Officer
Personnel Coordinator
Clerical Officer
Supply Branch

Analysis & Research Division

Education Division

Information Division

Chief
Executive Officer
Administrative Officer
Media Analysis Branch
Research Branch
Reports & Dissemination Branch
Chief
Deputy Chief
AdvisorAdministrative Officer
Administrative Aide
School Education BranchHigher Education Branch
Adult Education Branch
Education Specialist Branch
Liaison & Investigation Branch
Chief
Administrative Branch
Exhibits Branch
Policy & Program Branch
Press & Publication BranchRadio Branch
Library BranchCentral Motion Picture Exchange
Motion Picture & Theatrical Branch

Religions & Cultural Resources Division
Chief
Administrative Officer
Field Liaison Officer
Religious Advisors
Fine Arts Advisors

EducationalFilm Unit

Source: Hideo Sato ed., Rengo-gun saiko-shireikan soshireibu: minkan-joho-kyoiku-kyoku no jinji to kiko
(Tokyo: Kokuritsu kyoiku kenkyu-sho, 1984).

213