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Kyoto. The Shochiku, by restoring the Kamata Studio in Tokyo in the following year, began producing in both cities, which turned out respectively gendai-geki or contem¬ porary plays and jidai'geki or historical plays. But the Nikkatsu was active only in Kyoto for more than ten years, until 1934. In this manner, the centre of the film in¬ dustry was shifted to Kyoto. Not only the big two, but new and smaller productions and corporations concentrated their forces in Kyoto and vicinity.
The change brought about by the Great Earthquake was not merely a geograph¬ ical one. The Great Earthquake of 1923 was the cause of a most essential revolution in the Japanese screen. In a word, it put an instantaneous end to the older, unnaturally “theatrical” motion picture art which had been in a gradual course of decline. It was by this single but mighty stroke of the earthquake that cinemas as “canned plays”, as described in the first chapter, and the KabukP style Oyama or men assuming female roles, as described in the second chapter, were completely wiped out of the picture. These disappeared together with the studios in Tokyo.
But a more important effect of the earthquake was its psychological imprint engraved deep in the mental outlook of the entire Japanese population in every social status. The earthquake was the climax, an enormous panic in addition to the depres¬ sion which had been a heavy enough burden on the people. The spirit of the Japanese was keenly hurt by this great shock and the subsequent hardships. And though there was felt, on the one hand, a reactionary vigour inspired by the noble end of restoring the city of Tokyo and Japan in general, the pessimism shared by the majority, on the other, was sure to lead to a decadent nihilistic outlook or else to a positive criticism of the nature and system of the society in which they lived — Marxism. These two tendencies are clearly manifest in the activities of the films of that time.
No doubt the majority of the films were cheap, sentimental works inherited from the earlier years, or else adaptations from newspaper serial novels by popular writers represented chiefly by Kan Kikuchi. But even among these, there were some good pictures. The Japanese were now gaining mastery over the art of film production. A significant contribution to this progress was, of course, made by the frequent and abundant importation of American and European films which proved to be excellent examples. Up to that time even the most progressive men of the film circles were thinking in terms of a photoplay or dramatic films, an art with a dramatic form though not a theatre art. But now for the first time they came to feel the possibility of an art that is not a photoplay but a cinema, so to speak, independent of the stage and dramat¬ ic form.
This conception was brought forward to the Japanese producers by the many translations of the advanced film theories of Europe, but, more than that, by the practi¬ cal examples in the works of D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Abel Gance, F.W. Murnau
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