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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses Shimazu’s 1934 film Tonari no Yae-chan to show how the specific use of sound, music and language underlines the unevenness and incongruent nature of Japan’s modern experience as the country faced increasingly nationalist politics while urban cosmopolitanism was still flourishing.

Paper long abstract

The under-researched work of director Shimazu Yasujirō as one of the early creators of domestic dramas of the lower middle classes (shōshimin eiga) that came to define Shōchiku studio’s so-called ‘Kamata-flavour’ lends itself well to the study of the studio’s distinct cinematic negotiation of Japan’s rapid modernisation. This paper draws on Shimazu’s film 'Tonari no Yae-chan' (Our Neighbour, Miss Yae, 1934), judged by the Kinema Junpō-critic Kishi Matsuo as a successful ‘talkie-sketch’ but a failed ‘talkie-drama’, and explores its specific use of sound, music, and language. My analyses show how these elements underline the unevenness and at times incongruent nature of Japan’s experience of modernity as the country turned towards an increasingly conservative and nationalist political climate while urban cosmopolitanism was still flourishing.

Set among two adjoined family houses in the Tokyo suburbs, a staple location of Shōchiku’s shōshimin eiga, the film sketches the lives of two families and the budding romances between their children. The film’s central thematic element of traversing liminal structures and spaces is replicated on the diegetic and non-diegetic soundtrack. As the families’ children of different ages cross from childhood to youthful romance and married life with a forced return to family-dependence, they move in between the harmonious, simple life in the suburbs and the city’s nightlife replete with Western cinema and Jazz music. Differing visual and sonic references to American sports, popular culture and Japanese and German popular song as well as contrasting acting techniques and elocution-styles negotiate the differences between the young characters. The generational divide is highlighted by one family’s parents facing the reality of Japanese militarist colonialism, crossing the liminal national boundaries to work in colonised Korea, leaving their children in Tokyo with the fate of the elder daughter unclear. Developing Wada-Marciano’s analysis of the film with a focus on the use of sound, I argue that the film’s episodic structure and conflicting visual and sonic references complicate its reading as a coherent light-hearted comedy and highlight the multifarious nature of Japan’s modern experience.