Abstract: This chapter traces how the film studios Shochiku and Nikkatsu participated in the Japanese film industry's extended transition to sound cinema. Shochiku pursued a production policy that encouraged its directors to explore the potential of sound film aesthetics piecemeal, as they continuously went back and forth between silent cinema, sound-version films, and full talkies. Nikkatsu came to lead the way in redefining the aesthetics of the jidaigeki genre, gradually re-shaping the norms and aesthetic modes to bring contemporary aesthetics and thematic concerns into their representations of the past. This chapter explores how Shochiku and Nikkatsu negotiated issues such as songs, language, elocution and other sound practices, and the changing relation between on-screen and off-screen space.

Keywords: language, music, realism, period films, historical reception

For critic Ōtsuka Kiyoshi, the decisive factor behind the abundance of excellent Japanese films released in 1936 was the completion of the industry's transition to sound. Indeed, when Ozu Yasujirō directed his first talkie Hitori musuko (The Only Son) (1936), he was the last of the major directors in Japan to do so, and it signalled the irrevocability of the Japanese transition. Although Japan's first technologically and critically successful talkie Madamu to nyōbō (The Neighbour's Wife and Mine, dir. Gosho Heinosuke) was released in 1931, sound film did not form the majority of films produced in Japan until 1935, and then only if we include the various iterations of the so-called saundo-ban, or “sound version” – silent films with a mechanically synchronized soundtrack consisting of music, song, special effects, and sometimes unsynchronized dialogue/narration – which was a widespread practice during the Japanese cinema's transition from silent to sound.

This protracted transition had primarily economical and structural causes. Financial constraints delayed investment in the necessary facilities and technology, and the Japanese film industry was geared toward the quick production of cheaply made products designed for rapid dissemination, in contrast to the more expensive, high-end product that sound films – said to cost three times more to produce than silents – constituted at the time. Furthermore, the uneven spread and quality of sound recording and playback technology within the industry and along regional divides, ensured that the transition continued throughout the 1930s, with benshi narration accompanying many rural screenings of sound films well into the 1930s and silent films still being produced as late as 1941.