Imaginary Conquests: Folktales, Film, and the Japanese Empire in Asia

Imaginary Conquests: Folktales, Film, and the Japanese Empire in Asia

This article highlights three family-targeted films made under the wartime Japanese empire: Yamamoto Kajirō's musical comedy Songokū (1940) and Seo Mitsuyo's animated Momotarō films, Sea Eagles (1943) and Divine Warriors of the Sea (1945). Significantly, these films are based on two fantastical premodern stories--the Chinese novel Journey to the West and the Japanese Momotarō legend, respectively--whose quest narratives map onto Japan's contemporaneous military expansion into mainland China and the islands of the South Pacific. Despite the films' seeming alignment with ultranationalist ideology, I argue that the geopolitical trajectories of their narratives are rendered ambiguous by their various reception contexts, paratextual relations, spectatorial pleasures, and media modes. In the case of Songokū, the comedic, parodic stylings of its star, Enoken, proved an uncomfortable match with the already nativized Journey to the West story. This pairing generated a great deal of official hostility. The Momotarō films, conversely, were made with the explicit support of the Japanese Navy. I draw on Thomas Lamarre's work to argue that the hierarchy of beings (human, animal, demon) overlaid representationally on the Japanese, the South Pacific inhabitants, and the Euro-Americans is undercut by the varying degrees of plasmaticity in Seo's animated line.