Cinema has existed for more than 100 years. It has been a large part of the cultures of many countries world wide for much of that time. As with culture, the current situations and peoples reactions to them impact cinema. This impact creates style in films that are unique to the place, and to a lesser extent time, they are made. In Japan cinema had a unique start and was originally heavily influenced by the traditions of the Kabuki and Noh theaters. Soon, however, these influences were removed as the film industry in the quickly modernizing and changing country grew. The state of Japanese affairs and the unique perspective of the Japanese people in the early twentieth century played key rolls in the development of a Japanese national cinematic style.
Motion pictures arrived in Japan in 1896. These early Kinetoscope and Vitascope projections proved vastly popular. In 1897, the crown prince and eventually Emperor Taisho himself attended movies. Unique to Japan was the respectability films received. In the Western world, cinema was generally considered a distraction of the masses or the theater of the poor. In Japan, movie tickets sold for the same prices as live theater tickets. Perhaps the world’s first permanent theater dedicated strictly to movies was opened in Tokyo in 1903. The first films shown in Japan were imports from the Lumiere brothers in France and the Edison Company in America. Due to Japan’s history of isolation, many of the upper class viewed their first scenes of the rest of the world. In this sense, the earliest films seen in Japan were enjoyed as education as much as entertainment. Soon, however, Japan was making its’ own films.
The early acceptance of cinema by the upper classes posed unique problems in the development of a Japanese film style. In the West, film audiences were not theater audiences. The lower class movie patrons were not interested in the dramatic plays popular at the time so action sequences, which lend...