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Blood Spear, Mt. Fuji: Uchida Tomu's Conflicted Comeback from Manchuria
- Source: Asian Cinema, Volume 12, Issue 1, Mar 2001, p. 91 - 102
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- 01 Mar 2001
Abstract
Following the surrender of the Japanese in World War II, the colonial tables were turned. The Chinese took control of Manchuria and the Manchurian Film Cooperative, and the Americans took control of Japan and its film industry. In a sense, the Japanese, who had fabricated and controlled Manchuria's film industry from 1937–1945, writing the lines to be spoken by Chinese actors in Manchurian productions, were now forced to appear as the puppet actors in an American production. In the early days of the Occupation, the overlay of democracy in Japan seemed to have been effortlessly deployed. But in the postwar period, the ideology that drove Japan to reach new heights of modernism and atrocity on the Continent was not so effortlessly put to rest. As the Japanese cinema entered its post-war golden age, a "working out" of militarist, modernist, and feudalistic ideology on the level of mass culture took place in Japan's packed movie theatres. In this period, celebrated filmmaker Uchida Tomu brought his Manchurian experience living on the edge of Japanese ideological extremes back to Japan with him and infused it into his conflicted 1955 samurai classic Chiyari Fuji (Blood Spear, Mt. Fuji).