We can think of the cinema as gendered in a number of ways: as a gendered physical space, as gendered in its appeal or content and as gendered in its modes of production, to name just a few. As the preceding chapters have suggested, the question of gender arose often in my ethnographic study during interviews, questionnaire surveys and participant observation. Gender in Japanese cinema history has been explored in relation to particular film genres (Standish 2005; Zahlten 2017) and Hollywood imports (H. Kitamura 2004; Terasawa 2010; Kitamura and Sasagawa 2017), and as a factor in the crafting of star persona (Fujiki 2013). A smaller number of studies have queried the gender demographics of the Japanese cinema audience at particular historical moments (Laird 2012; Hori 2018; Fujiki 2019). This chapter takes an ethnographic approach to the examination of gender-related factors troubling Japanese cinema in the period 1945 to 1968, beginning from the expectations about cinema’s role in changing public attitudes to gender documented by the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP GHQ) during the Occupation of Japan (1945–52). During this period, audiences responded to censored cinema content, and the provision of cinema theatres, in a number of unpredictable ways that countered SCAP expectations. Applying a similar logic to the common narrative that a lack of interest in the cinema on the part of female viewers led to shrinking audience numbers after 1958, the second part of this chapter explores various gendered factors in cinema access and enjoyment in the late 1950s and 1960s that complicate this picture.

In the early years after defeat, when film was imagined as a means to change viewers’ attitudes towards Occupation-mandated social reforms, the cinema was enlisted in the push towards democracy and gender equality, at least as far as those states were imagined in 1945. Female audiences were imagined as the recipients of narratives and performances showcasing proactive women availing themselves of the new rights for female citizens included in the 1947 Constitution of Japan. Yet as the cinema audience began to decline after 1958, film critics in the popular press blamed women for turning their backs on the cinema.