From 1940 onward, the Japanese government enforced a decidedly more puritanical form of film-making to take account of war preparation and to enlighten with the 'national Japanese philosophy' and the spirit of the complete sacrifice of the nation. The rest of Japan's cinematographic war was governed by nationalistic battle movies of which the leading exponents were Yutaka Abe (1895-1977) and Kajiro Yamamoto (1902-1974).
Documentaries were a lesser feature of Japan's wartime film-making. Film historian John Gillett, an authority on Japanese cinema, would make a major rediscovery at the Toho studios when bunka eiga filmmaker Fumio Kamei's Tatakau heitai (Fighting Soldiers,1938) was unearthed. The hour-long documentary was shot in China and recorded conventional maneuver scenes but also encompassed moments of implicit empathy for the Chinese peasants and refugees. Gillett once compared the film to John Huston's 1945 documentary The Battle of San Pietro and indeed the Imperial Japanese authorities found the film far too humanistic in its take on the enemy, hence the film's banning and all copies were rumored to have been destroyed with the exception of one print's survival.
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| Fumio Kamei's controversial Tatakau heitai (1938) |
Impressive for more conventional reasons was Yamamoto's The War at Sea From Hawaii to Malaya (1942), part documentary and part melodrama; it extolled the navy spirit as it would culminate at Pearl Harbor, and was deemed the top Japanese film of its year. The film mixed reality and reconstruction to quintessential effect- the attack on Pearl Harbor being put together entirely with model work, evidently convinced some American military advisers in Japan that it was one-hundred percent genuine footage of the raid.