Category: The Occupation
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1950-53: THE END OF THE OCCUPATION
“…the treaty forced Japan to agree to conditions of inferiority unmatched in any of the other forty-plus security treaties negotiated between the United States and other nations in the 1950s.”
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1949: THE KING’S TAIL
Time to talk about the film that nearly ended anime before it began: “The King’s Tail”.
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1949: THE FOX, THE LOST, THE HORROR
While there’s only one cartoon from 1949 that’s available for me to watch, it’s arguably the most important and difficult year in Japanese animation history.
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1948: MORINO, MASAOKA AND OFUJI
This year, groundbreaking artist and director OFUJI Noburo got back into the studio to make “Kuma ni Kuwarenu Otoko” / “The Bear Dodger”.
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1948: THE BATTLE OF KINUTA STUDIO
In early April, Watanabe’s new leadership fired 1200 employees, including over 250 studio staff, specifically targeting “Communist party members, sympathisers and all forty-two animators”.
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1947: MASAOKA’S POWERPLAY
The list of companies selected to make propaganda for the Occupying Forces in 1947 was very short. Alongside Daiei, Shochiku and Toho was a much smaller name: Nihon Manga Eigasha. And that was MASAOKA Kenzō’s firm.
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1947: ARAI & TOHO
On May 3, the new Constitution of Japan came into effect, replacing the Meiji Constitution of 1889. The Occupiers had taken the entire system of governance and thrown it out.
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1946: KUMAKAWA’S MAGIC PEN
It also wasn’t a shock to learn that OFUJI Noburo made it into the studio in 1946 too. His cartoon was the first animated version of any work by “the father of the Japanese short story”, AKUTAGAWA Ryunosuke.
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1946: MASAOKA & TOHO
Japan, on the other hand, remained Japan. General MACARTHUR, now the effective leader of the country, was completely upending it. But he chose to use as much of the existing framework of the state in place as he could to enact the changes needed to democratise the country.