Mind-Munitions

The Second World War 239
throughout the area it wished to control – but only once the wireless
sets had been adjusted to receive only Japanese transmissions.
Listening to foreign radio propaganda was forbidden. The
Japanese themselves broadcast in more than twenty-two foreign
languages from transmitters in Batavia, Singapore, and Saigon,
with Australasia and India being prime targets for their attention.
The most famous Japanese broadcaster was ‘Tokyo Rose’, a
Japanese-born American-educated woman who played on the
homesickness of American troops serving in the Pacific by her
suggestive voice and choice of American swing music. Much more
explicit were the pornographic postcards and leaflets directed at
Australian troops depicting their wives and sweethearts in various
embraces with drunken British or American troops stationed in
their homeland. The Japanese also used a method favoured by the
Russians, namely the prisoner of war broadcast in which captured
soldiers made unscheduled statements over the air about how well
they were being treated. Anxious relatives were thus forced to
listen to the entire programme in the hope that their son or
husband might appear before the microphone at some point. Yet it
is unlikely that such methods had any real impact; the fact of the
matter was that the Japanese had started the Pacific war by attacking
Pearl Harbor and no amount of justification or explanation
could erase the memory of that.
Like the radio, film was rigorously controlled by the Japanese
authorities. Again, strict censorship controls prevented the portrayal
of images or messages that might have a critical or detrimental
effect upon the regime or its emperor. Control was tightened by a
1939 Motion Picture Law that required the submission of scripts
prior to filming, and production was dominated by two combines:
the Shochiku company (producing about 85 per cent of all Japanese
films) and the Toho company. Newsreels were produced mainly by
the Nippon Eigasha, which had a budget of 7 million yen in 1943.
Newsreels were produced depicting Japanese successes, often
incorporating captured Allied footage, such as Capture of Burma
and Occupation of Sumatra. In so far as feature films were concerned,
historical themes were used to spread anti-British
sentiment, such as The Day England Fell (1942), about the brutal
and racist attitudes of the British in Hong Kong, and The Opium
War (1943), in which the British are alleged to have subdued the
Chinese by turning them into drug addicts. A brief revolt by film