Socializing the audience: Going to the cinema in post-war Japan

What makes a ‘good’ audience? In posing questions about audience behaviour, we must first think about expectations of who makes up ‘the audience’ in a particular place or time. Often a bad or mis-behaving audience is simply not the audience we had expected. Furthermore, we cannot assume ‘the audience’ to be uniform, or to follow as we might expect from marketing strategies. In order to understand how audience behaviours might diverge from the expectations of filmmakers, theatre owners, advertising strategists, and censorship bodies or those who seek to influence behaviours and attitudes through cinema, we must approach the audience as a diverse group of individuals with varied and competing desires, needs, and obligations.

In Occupation-era Japan (1945-1952), the offices of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers explicitly positioned the cinema as a means to change audience behaviours. Cinema content was developed under strict censorship, with the goal of reforming the Japanese way of life. The legal protection and implementation of gender equality was conceived as a means to ‘democratize’ post-war Japan, and so filmmakers were advised to include gender-equal characters and narratives in post-war productions, creating film content which presented women as emancipated members of society. Yet Japan even today struggles to achieve gender parity. So why did viewers not take the models of the cinema home as expected? This article presents ethnographic and archival materials suggesting a significant difference in how male and female viewers accessed and related to the cinema, arguing that socializing the audience requires establishing how that audience is constituted.