{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026661659782200527, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01464513706346226, 'mean_word_length': 5.3428571428571425, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945 by Hikari Hori (review)

Hikari Hori’s Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945 speaks to several areas of recent scholarly interest in Japanese history and fi lm studies, making a signifi cant intervention in both fi elds. The suggestive title encourages the reader to place the book alongside Michael Baskett’s The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (2008), or David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (2018), and Hori’s writing certainly captures the atmosphere of an era in which imperial expansion was mediated in terms of attraction, intimacy, and other romantic or charged terms. At the same time, Hori insists on nuance in her account of the production and reception of the fi lms and visual culture materials that carried these affects across Japan and its occupied lands and colonies. Through four detailed chapters covering imperial photography and newsreel fi lm, entertainment fi lm, documentary fi lm, and animation, Hori balances the bureaucratic narratives of government and industry production with accounts of audience reception of state-sanctioned media texts. Chapter 1, which investigates the role of photography, display, and newsreel fi lm in the construction of the Showa emperor’s public image, blends archival sources with visual analysis of a number of portraits and photographs. Comparisons with representational practices during earlier eras and in other countries provide context and contrast for Hori’s argument (p. 62), which emphasizes the many stages in the development of the practice of photographing and displaying images of the emperor during the long and politically turbulent Showa period. Hori demonstrates how an initial “stardom” phase of attraction (p. 42) was succeeded by emphasis on distance and veneration, before the humanization of the emperor in the early postwar years. Added color is provided by the childhood memories of Emperor Hirohito recounted by fi lmmakers (p. 230, note 122) and material from autobiographies describing citizens’ impressions of the ruler. Most striking are the descriptions of lèse-majesté cases and material from police reports documenting subversive and noncompliant viewing attitudes, including accounts of anti-imperial graffi ti in fi lm theaters (p. 67). While Hori notes the enormity of the subject and the impossibility of exhaustive coverage in this volume, it is also instructive to have some indication of the multiple modes of reception of Japanese media in the colonies (p. 66). This strong