In November 1896, the first moving pictures ever shown in Japan were projected by a Lumière cameraman, yet the experience was not silent. The Japanese audience did not hear the mechanical whir of the projector alone; they heard the voice of a benshi, a live narrator who sat beside the screen and provided the dialogue, emotional commentary, and sound effects for the entire film. These storytellers were not mere extras but the true stars of the silent era, descendants of traditional kabuki and bunraku theater performers who had adapted their oral storytelling skills to the new medium. By 1908, Shōzō Makino had begun his career as a pioneering director, recruiting Matsunosuke Onoe, a former kabuki actor, to star in his productions. Onoe became Japan's first film star, appearing in over 1,000 films between 1909 and 1926, establishing the jidaigeki genre that would define early Japanese cinema. The benshi system persisted well into the 1930s, with silent films still being produced as late as 1938, a third of all Japanese films. This unique cultural fusion meant that the transition to sound in Japan was not a sudden technological shift but a gradual decline of a beloved performance tradition, as the benshi were gradually pushed out by the advent of synchronized audio in the early 1930s.
The Golden Age And The War
The year 1950 marked the moment Japanese cinema truly entered the global consciousness when Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, followed by an Academy Honorary Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1952. This victory launched the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, a period where the works of six great artists, Masaki Kobayashi, Akira Kurosawa, Ishirō Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujirō Ozu, redefined the art form. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, released in 1954, became a global phenomenon, while his friend Ishirō Honda, collaborating with effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, unleashed Godzilla on the world in the same year. Godzilla was the first Japanese film to receive a wide release in the United States, spawning the kaiju subgenre and the longest-running film franchise in history. However, this artistic renaissance occurred in the shadow of a dark past. During World War II, the government had used cinema as a propaganda tool, producing films like The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya in 1942, which utilized special effects to depict the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers established the Civil Information and Education Section, which banned over 500 pre-war and wartime films, burning half of them. The occupation authorities forbade films that showed revenge as a legitimate motive or depicted feudal loyalty as honorable, effectively making the production of jidaigeki films involving samurai impossible for a time. Yet, the industry rebounded with a vengeance, producing war movies that covered themes previously restricted, such as Hideo Sekigawa's Listen to the Voices of the Sea in 1950 and Tadashi Imai's Himeyuri no Tô in 1953.