"You Can't Replace Gone with the Wind with Chūshingura": China Nights and the Problem of Japanese Film Policy in Occupied Shanghai

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The Japanese-made film Shina no yoru (China Nights, 1940) featured Ri Kōran, an ethnically Japanese actress who masqueraded as Chinese both on and off the screen. The film is widely regarded as Japanese propaganda, but it was condemned by Japanese cultural bureaucrats and, contrary to historiographic orthodoxy, became surprisingly popular with Chinese audiences in occupied Shanghai. Drawing on box-office figures and official reports, this essay argues that the popularity of the film depended on a transnational and transmedia complex of popular song and ersatz Hollywood romance that sustained a disaffiliated reading formation, in Japan as well as in Shanghai. Such fissures in the production, distribution, and especially reception of cinema in wartime China remind us of the gaps between critics and audiences in the power-laden and ambiguous construction of all national cinemas.