The Advent of Sound in Japanese Cinema

The advent of synchronous sound is the most fundamental rupture in the history of cinema. Building on the growing general interest in and the excellent recent scholarship on Japanese cinema’s fraught transition to sound, this book paradoxically offers a narrow thematic and chronological focus yet also a broad and diverse range of topics and approaches. Limiting its scope entirely to the 1930s enables this volume to achieve a cohesiveness that is rare in anthologies, while its other strength is its breadth: fifteen very different angles from which to approach the 1930s and the advent of sound offer a clearer picture of the sheer variety of innovations in and reactions to the contested sound transition in Japanese cinema. Part 1 explores the industrial side of film production, with one chapter for each major studio. Part 2 explores the new storytelling possibilities the advent of sound enabled. Part 3 traces the careers of three key yet often overlooked directors, while Part 4 describes the important roles that individual or collective actors played in Japanese cinema during the sound transition. Finally, Part 5 traces the evolution of soundscapes in 1930s Japan, ultimately taking readers beyond the doors of the movie theater to a broader understanding of sound. Many take for granted the seeming superiority of sync sound to silent cinema, but the drawn-out, hotly contested transition to talkies in Japan shows that in the 1930s, neither spectators nor filmmakers necessarily shared this assumption—and perhaps we should not either.