Rethinking the Young Female Cinema Audience: Postwar Cinema-Going in Kansai, 1945-1952

Abstract:During the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), female audiences, particularly children and teenaged girls, became the market for censored cinema content designed to support the democratic re-education of the Japanese populace. Early postwar cinema characters and narratives modeled the new rights and powers becoming available for women in Japan in the years after the 1947 Constitution. An ethnographic approach gives a conflicted picture of the cinema audience who viewed these narratives, demonstrating that an easy inference of mass female viewership from female-oriented film content, marketing, and censorship is not supported by the memories of female viewers. To better understand the complicated relation of young female audiences to Occupation-era cinema and its censored content, this article analyzes the memories of a number of female viewers who engaged with the cinema and its stories between 1945 and 1952.