The Shadow Staff: Japanese Animators in the Tōhō Aviation Education Materials Production Office 1939–1945

Memory, aesthesis and nescience: The development of instructional animation in Japan

‘The registering of facts in historical records, and the registering of the facts conveyed by the records within the minds of historians, would be impossible without memory’ (Megill, 2007: 25). If memories are not recorded, and if historians do not somehow access those records, then the construction of history is stalled. Moreover, memory itself must be assessed for its credibility – a memory of a rumour is still a rumour, and a memory of a belief does not confirm the truth of that belief.

The screening of Fantasia became an animation industry legend. Foreign films had been banned from public exhibition since 1937 (Hirano, 1992: 207), and Fantasia itself would not be distributed in Japanese cinemas until 1955, but had a powerful effect on its tiny, invited audience. Ushio Sōji, then working as an animator under his real name of Sagisu Tomio, sat in the dark and wept at the finale (Ushio, 2007: 195). We only know this because it is his account of the screening some 66 years later that confirms not only the existence of the confiscated film print (seized along with a copy of Gone with the Wind), but also the convoluted route it took to Japan and the identities of some of the audience members. Before the posthumous publication of Ushio’s memoirs in 2007, the clandestine Fantasia screening was hinted at by industry personnel, but never confirmed. It was shown only to the topmost animation directors – even their deputies were not privy to it, although some had heard that it took place (Mochinaga, 2006: 96).

Quite inadvertently, this stolen copy of Fantasia may have been one of the most powerful tools of American propaganda. The majority of the men in the screening room were makers of short, black-and-white documentaries and instructional films; they could not have competed with Fantasia on equal terms, even if they had wanted to. None of the Japanese viewers were aware of the film’s expense to its American producers. Fantasia had cost almost $2.3 million, but had found its distribution severely curtailed by the build-up to war. By 1941, it had only recouped a fifth of its production costs, and looked set to be a flop – in fact, it did not go into profit until 1969. Considering the poor reaction to Pinocchio and the prohibitive price of Fantasia, many of Disney’s backers were dealing with the unpleasant prospect that the previous success of Snow White had been nothing more than a ‘tremendous fluke’ (Barrier, 1999: 273, 279). In short, the cartoon business was nowhere near as lucrative as it first appeared.

Fantasia was also a dramatic narrative, an aesthetically pleasing experience. It could be viewed as entertainment, without the martial undertones of many Japanese films from the same period, most of which were now made under the auspices of the 1939 Film Law, which encouraged propagandistic works and pro-government documentaries (bunka eiga, or ‘cultural films’). To a general audience, music, song, and an unfolding story were surely of greater aesthetic impact than recitations of facts. Fantasia, like the handful of Japanese dramatic narrative cartoons released in cinemas in the 1940s, encouraged a ‘fundamental orientation … of delight and admiration’ (Megill, 2007: 34). Historians are naturally tempted to seek out the most entertaining works from a medium, at the expense of less pretty, less easily categorisable examples. It is easy to forget that dramatic stories form only a part of the world of animation, albeit often a part with greater longevity. This is no less true in the English-speaking world, where the GPO Film Unit, renamed the Crown Film Unit in 1940, employed animators such as Norman McLaren and Lotte Reiniger to make sequences within pious public information films that did not ‘fit snugly into the upholstered seats of the local Odeon’ (Anthony et al., 2009: 5). In Japan, from the 1920s to the 1940s, animated, narrative fictions were greatly outnumbered by instructional animations: cartoons in the pursuit of facts.

Dramatic narratives were not money-spinners in the early Japanese animation business; although they attracted the attention of film magazines, they often served as little more than apprentice pieces to advertise the filmmakers to more lucrative clients. As early as 1920, the director Yamamoto Sanae had suggested that the basic economics of running an animation studio and collecting revenues rendered it ‘impossible to make entertainment films’ (Tsugata, 2007: 174). Although there were occasional entertainment shorts in the 1920s, the bulk of the revenue of the early Japanese animation business came from educational films, government-sponsored public information announcements, and piecework such as credits, titles and optical effects. From 1922, the Japanese Ministry of Education offered subsidies and incentives to animators for the production of educational films, creating a cottage industry in self-consciously worthy films (Miyao, 2002: 203) such as Yamamoto Sanae’s Baidoku no Denpa (1926, The Spread of Syphilis). Notably, the audiences for these films were overtly adult. Early film ordinances in 1911 had foreseen motion pictures of all kinds as potentially harmful to children unless consumed in moderation (Makino, 2001: 54), whereas Japanese filmmakers soon recognised the potential for using animation to elucidate educational topics. The most popular term for animation in the period, alongside manga-eiga (‘cartoon films’) and many years ahead of the post-war term anime, was senga, best translated as ‘graphics’, a reflection of the Japanese industry’s reliance on below-the-line work, such as animating diagrams, charts and maps as components of documentary films.

Japanese animation’s use in education dates from the Ministry of Communication’s hiring of Kitayama Seitarō (1888–1945) to make Chokin no Susume (1917, Recommendations for Your Savings). A second work, with a similar theme, Chiri mo Tsumoreba Yama to Naru (1917, Even Dust Piled Up Will Become a Mountain), led to many other public information films on saving, and a competition run by the ministry to find new script ideas (Tsugata, 2007: 134).

Kitayama Seitarō, who founded Japan’s first animation studio in 1921, did so with the intention of making instructional films, such as his Kiatsu to Mizuage Pompu (1921, Air Pressure and the Water Pump). His work achieved early attention, and indeed imperial praise, when he was hired in 1922 to provide explicatory animation for a plan to generate power for Tokyo by incinerating trash. City councillors had previously rejected the scheme when it had been demonstrated with a scale model at a power station, but somehow assented when it was presented as a cartoon (Tsugata, 2007: 178–179). This achievement, or at least the myth of its efficacy, bolstered by words of encouragement from Prince Higashinomiya, would secure Kitayama and his colleagues more government contracts in the years that followed, including Yamamoto Sanae’s Yūbin no Tabi (1924, The Mail’s Journey), commissioned by the colonial Governor-General’s office in Korea, and Kitayama’s science education film Shokubutsu no Seiri (1924, The Physiology of Plants).

The chief benefit of such government contracts was that payment was guaranteed – in an era where cartoons were not yet long enough to form a main cinema attraction in their own right, animators were usually reliant on fickle audiences or parsimonious cinema managers, whereas informational films had alternative audiences in town halls and colleges. However, this same benefit also kept much instructional animation away from the traditional journals of record in the Japanese film business. In an issue that also troubles record-keeping elsewhere (e.g. Anthony et al., 2009: 5), the historiography of animation often takes notice only of extant, or completed, screened dramatic/fictional works. This can lead to odd counter-intuitive gaps in the available Japanese data, such as the apparent six-year hiatus from 1918–1926 in the recent Anime Sakuhin Jiten (Dictionary of Animation Works), the largest book ever published on Japanese animation, which misleadingly implies that there was no animation created in Japan at all during those years (Stingray and Nichigai Associates, 2010: 891). In fact, Kitayama alone was completing a new animation project almost every month in that period, demonstrating a business acumen that largely eluded the more artistically minded pioneers who had preceded him (Tsugata, 2007: 174).

As a result, many of the earliest works of Japanese animation are absent from contemporary records as they were not part of the ‘entertainment’ business. There were, for example, no box office receipts to be tallied for Kitayama’s Kōkū Eisei (1922, Oral Hygiene) since it was only shown to customers at a Tokyo dental surgery. Kitayama’s contribution to the work comprised dozens of simple graphics of teeth and tooth decay, as well as a closing cartoon sequence, Kōkū Sensō (Oral War). Although the finale amounted to little more than two reels (approximately 10 minutes) from a feature-length film, it was still the longest piece of animation made to that date in Japan (Tsugata, 2007: 175). Never screened in a cinema to paying audiences, it largely escaped the notice of animation historians.

In fact, it is possible to argue that the first 30 years of the Japanese animation business was a period in which such ‘invisible’ productions comprised the majority of Japan’s animation output, with occasional narrative stories as exceptions rather than the rule. Such a point is particularly relevant if we consider that even some of these narrative cartoons were really instructional or promotional films in disguise, such as Kitayama’s Kinrō no Ari (1930, The Industrious Ant), intended as a parable for use in moral education, or Ōishi Ikuo’s Usagi to Kame (1918, The Hare and the Tortoise), commissioned to promote Morinaga milk chocolate. Moreover, this concept can be seen to endure throughout the Pacific War. As early as 1939, the Japanese Navy began assembling a ‘Shadow Staff’ of animators, employed to produce detailed schematics and animated diagrams for instructional films.

Memory and commemoration: The lost works of the Shadow Staff

There were, of course, Japanese cartoons still being made for the consumption of the public. As in America, cinema animation in the 1930s and 1940s was made ‘for the entertainment of general audiences in movie theatres for audiences of all ages’ (Shull and Wilt, 2004: 9). Initially, Japan appears to have been no different, with short foreign cartoons often offering the first burst of colour on a programme that was otherwise monochrome. The animator Mochinaga Tadahito, for example, recalls seeing one of the Silly Symphonies playing as a second feature to Gary Cooper’s Lives of a Bengal Lancer in the 1930s (Mochinaga, 2006: 62).

Tezuka Osamu, a schoolboy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, recalled film prints transported by car around his neighbourhood, and screened in local halls:

When I was at elementary school, I would go to every one of these screenings. There would be a cartoon film beforehand. A Japan-made five-minute cartoon film, but I found these more interesting than the main features that followed. The main features were usually dull. As the teachers selected them for instructional purposes, I am sure they were probably educational, but they were also worthy, dark and didactic. And when I think about it, the films became immensely nationalistic and martial. (Tezuka, 1997: 15)

The 9-year-old Tezuka recorded the titles of some of these sanctimonious live-action features, such as Tasaka Tomotaka’s Gonin no Sekkōhei (1938, Five Scouts) and Kamei Fumio’s documentary Shanghai (1938), but oddly does not note, or perhaps simply does not recall, the cartoons he saw. By that time, animation was reflecting similar propagandist influences, with films such as Sora no Shanghai Sensen (1938, The Aerial Battle over Shanghai) and Sora no Arawashi (1938, Sky Eagles) in which Japanese animal pilots shoot at images of Popeye and Joseph Stalin in the clouds. Other films of the period were subtler in their anti-Western message. Arai Wagorō’s O-Chō Fujin no Gensō (1940, Madame Butterfly’s Fantasia) retold the ending of Puccini’s opera, with its emphasis on the heroine’s abandonment by the feckless foreign cad Pinkerton. The pinnacle of such entertainments would come in two parts: Seo Mitsuyo’s widely seen five-reel children’s cartoon Momotarō no Umiwashi (1943, Momotarō’s Sea Eagles), and its more accomplished nine-reel sequel, Momotarō Umi no Shinpei (1945, Momotarō’s Divine Sea Warriors), which eluded many audiences due to evacuations from urban areas at the time of its release. Both were commissioned by the Ministry of the Navy in the wake of the secret Fantasia screening, and both have understandably dominated subsequent discussion of Japanese animation in the 1940s (e.g. Akita, 2004: 258; Komatsuzawa, 1994: 191–195; Mochinaga, 2006: 98–99), as surviving works that allow analysis of their themes, reception and production.

Although animation histories of the war era to date have concentrated on such narrative propaganda films, shown as entertainment (e.g. Clements and McCarthy, 2006: 715–716), the Navy Ministry’s interest in animated propaganda, while widely known today, was secondary to its use of animation in education. The narrative cartoons, such as Momotarō no Umiwashi (1943, Momotarō’s Sea Eagles) are remembered because they left a record of their existence, not only in the minds of impressionable young audiences, but in terms of posters and press coverage. However, the Japanese Navy also invested heavily in animation for a much narrower audience of military personnel; these films are not remembered, because they were not seen by general audiences, and seemingly wilfully forgotten by many of their creators.

The Agency of Cultural Affairs Japanese Cinema Database (Monbushō Nihon Eiga Jōhō System) lists 21 lost ‘animated’ films made by the Tōhō Aviation Education Materials Production Office (Tōhō Kōkū Kyōiku Shiryō Seisaku-sho), and one further film that utilises the same animation staff without carrying the office’s name on its credits. The data are patchy in the extreme, based largely on descriptions of objects (the number of reels or the titles on lost canisters) rather than content. According to one of the filmmakers, these works were only ‘80% animated’, with introductory portions in live action giving way to graphic representations of concepts, schematics and instructions (Ushio, 2007: 193). Staff records, completion dates and participant records for the films are partial at best, although the available titles, locations, crewmembers and topics permit sorting into eight broad categories (see Appendix for full details):

Considering that the instructional films listed run to approximately 66 reels, and that only 30 reels of narrative cartoons were released in Japanese cinemas during the same period (Animage, 1989: 22–26), it is possible that twice as much Japanese animation was produced in the war years for instructional purposes as was produced for entertainment. However, in terms of the ‘aesthesis of history’ (Megill, 2007: 33), such works are inconveniently fragmentary, not 100 per cent animated and not designed as entertainment – they are mere instructional tools, not works of art. Although these films are lost, we can get some idea of their content from equivalent films produced by other combatants, such as Aircraft Recognition for Royal Navy Gunners (Imperial War Museum, 2009), which tirelessly recites differences between friendly and enemy aircraft, presumably in a similar manner to the discussion of variations in ships’ wakes to be found in the Japanese Group D films.

Since they were made for a small and secretive audience of Japanese military professionals, the Shadow Staff films were never officially distributed in theatres, and hence have no official release date or presence in filmographies. They are, for example, entirely absent from the relevant pages in general chronologies of Japanese animation (e.g. Stingray and Nichigai Associates, 2010: 892; Yamaguchi, 2004: 183) and from the putatively ‘complete’ published history of the parent studio (Galbraith, 2008: 37–59). Similar issues arise in the study of American films from the same period, many of which are also either lost, neglected or edged out of company histories and retrospectives (Shull and Wilt, 2004: 15).

The Disney studio, whose work on Victory through Airpower (1943) is well known, produced many less widely seen films in the period, including the Donald Duck short The New Spirit (1942) promoting the payment of taxes (Shull and Wilt, 2004: 125–126). Notably, the Disney studio’s ‘hidden’ output of instructional animation was even higher than that of its Japanese counterparts, at five times its pre-war annual productivity: ‘204,000 feet of film, 95% of it for government contracts’, as against a previous peak of 37,000 feet (Solomon, 2009[1998]: 146). Disney embarked upon ventures in instructional filmmaking, after ‘tests revealed that trainees learned faster and had better retention when material was presented in animation, rather than live action or illustrated lectures’ (p. 145). Beginning with Four Methods of Flush Riveting (1941) for the Lockheed corporation (compared to the Group A films in the Japanese list), Walt Disney soon moved into films promoting the purchase of war bonds. By 1942, the Disney Studio had been classed as an ‘essential industry’, churning out ‘scores’ of forgotten films under the auspices of the War Manpower Commission. According to Marc Davis, one of the Nine Old Men:

Many of the films were fully animated, although some were diagrammatic … They had one series they called The Rules of the Nautical Road, thousands and thousands of feet that they turned out, done very simply, on what various lights meant and so on. But we really animated many of those things: I did some animation as well as story work on them. We used top-flight people when they were available. (Solomon, 2009[1998]: 146)

As Solomon notes, with a running time of 207 minutes, The Rules of the Nautical Road was ‘longer than Snow White and Pinocchio combined’ (p. 146). The studio’s wartime magnum opus was an unnamed Beechcraft aviation maintenance and repair manual that ran for six hours.

But America’s closest equivalent to the Tōhō Aviation Education Materials Production Office was Major Rudy Ising’s ‘Fort Roach’, the 18th Air Force Base Unit (First Motion Picture Unit) in Culver City, which ‘turned out more animated footage than any of the other Hollywood studios’ (p. 147). Artists also served by drawing insignia and logos, and in the case of Dick Kelsey, by making the models used for attack briefings.

Unlike the Japanese, the American industry also produced some films that were both instructional and entertaining. The films of the Shadow Staff, born from a 20-year tradition of Japanese educational films for adults, and intended for a restricted audience, seem to have been bluntly, humourlessly informational. Compare this with the Private Snafu series made by Warners from 1943–1946 for the American army, born from a tradition of films that had to succeed on their own merits as entertainment. Mainly directed by an uncredited Chuck Jones, with scripts from Theodore Geisel (‘Dr Seuss’) and Phil Eastman, and the voice of Mel Blanc, Private Snafu similarly united a group that would go on to post-war fame in their homeland (Shull and Wilt, 2004: 82). Like the works of the Shadow Staff, Private Snafu was intended solely for military personnel, but unlike the Japanese equivalent, Private Snafu was played for laughs. Its exclusivity was encoded internally, with ‘sex and vulgarity’ designed to establish that the films were not intended for an audience of children. Moreover, Private Snafu educated its audience with a negative dialectic, discussing matters such as hygiene, sanitation and weapons maintenance by showing the title character getting things wrong, with humorous consequences (p. 84).

Hence, some American cartoons in the war period, both public and restricted, appear to have maintained their tone from pre-war days, whereas the Japanese industry maintained the pre-existing split between the publicly-seen entertainment cartoons, now made mainly for children (Mochinaga, 2006: 98–99), and instructional films, not ‘entertaining’ at all, now made solely for adults in the military. This division, however, also seems to have been reflected among the staff rosters, maintaining ongoing associations of pre-war personnel and companies, subsequently obscured, both to their contemporaries and present-day observers, beneath wartime umbrella organisations. Mochinaga Tadahito, who was making the children’s propaganda cartoon Fuku-chan no Sensuikan (1944, Fuku-chan’s Submarine) during the presumed peak of Shadow Staff output, felt that ‘shooting on military instruction films’ (gun no kyōzai no satsuei) was prioritised ahead of more ‘entertaining’ propaganda such as his own production. However, he also suggested that such an allocation of resources did not reflect favouritism towards education over entertainment, but rather towards former staffers from the film company Asahi Eigasha over their newly amalgamated colleagues from Geijutsu Eigasha (Mochinaga, 2006: 105). Mochinaga felt, although he offered little proof beyond general wartime austerity, that both the Shadow Staff and the concurrent production of Ryūichi Yokoyama’s Uwanosora Hakase (1944, Professor Sky-Above), made by staff from the former Asahi Eigasha, received better resources than his own production, made chiefly by staff from Geijutsu Eigasha. Asahi, originally established as the newsreel production division of the Asahi Shinbun newspaper, had been forced to merge with several smaller companies as part of wartime media consolidations, but its stronger reputation and wider connections often made it seem as if it swallowed the smaller companies whole, rather than uniting with them. Mochinaga complained that former Geijutsu employees were treated like newcomers, and received poorer treatment, implying that the Asahi staff claimed a form of unspoken seniority, and that the internal company struggle for budgets, manpower and equipment rivalled external pressure from air raids (p. 105).

Ironically, Mochinaga lived to write his memoirs, and his beleaguered Fuku-chan no Sensuikan (Fuku-chan’s Submarine) has survived. The rival films he mentions are not as well served by film history: Uwanosora Hakase (Professor Sky-Above) has become an infamously lost work, and the subject of much speculation by the next generation of animators, including the college thesis of the future anime director Ishiguro Noboru (Ishiguro and Ohara, 1980: 54), while the works of the Shadow Staff disappeared almost entirely from the record.

The most prominent animator among the Shadow Staff, Ōishi Ikuo, was killed on 4 December 1944 on his way back to Japan from a location hunt in the Caroline Islands, rendering it impossible for posterity to obtain any memoirs or testimonials of his experience. His assistant, Sagisu Tomio, found post-war success as an animator and special effects producer, but under an assumed name, Ushio Sōji. Ushio referred to his wartime work in two volumes of memoirs, Yume wa Ōzora o Kakemeguru: Onshi Tsuburaya Eiji Den (2001, Dreams Bustling in a Big Sky: The Life of My Mentor Tsuburaya Eiji) and the posthumously published Tezuka Osamu to Boku (2007, Tezuka Osamu and I), but these traces alone were not enough to reconstruct the story of the Shadow Staff. It was only with the availability of limited production data on the Agency of Cultural Affairs database (added since its initial inauguration in 2006) that Ushio’s vague reminiscences could be verified. The combination of these fragments has made it possible to re-appraise scattered data about his wartime activities, and make some sense of these obscure anime works.

‘Memory tells us as much about the present consciousness of the rememberer as it does about the past’ (Megill, 2007: 35). Ushio clearly did not trust his own celebrity enough to depend on it for the success of his memoirs; as his brother Sagisu Tadayasu observes in his afterword, Ushio’s work is presented merely as a participant’s testimonial of ‘the golden age of children’s comics and the early period of television [sic] animation in real time’ (Ushio, 2007: 276) – a period approximately spanning the three decades after 1946, and not including the war at all! Both volumes of Ushio’s published autobiography are titled as if they are commemorations of more famous figures: the effects specialist Tsuburaya Eiji and the anime/manga creator Tezuka Osamu. As is common with such memorials, the books’ titles carry an implicit teleological rhetoric, that we should commemorate these individuals because it is their achievements that have led the narrative towards the place where we find ourselves. They are important figures in their field, and hence it is important for ‘us’ to remember them. ‘Us’, as Megill (2007) cautions, is a dangerous assumption. Who is ‘us’? Aficionados of Japanese animation? Fans of war films? Other animators? Japanese readers? Like all memorialists, Ushio Sōji wants to commemorate himself: he carefully describes Tsuburaya as his ‘mentor’ in his first book, and we should impart equal weight to the two parts of his second book’s title, Tezuka Osamu to Boku (Tezuka Osamu and I). ‘Tezuka’ is the name that sells the book (not merely to its readers, but possibly also to its publisher in the first place), but the narrative of ‘I’ is the story that Ushio truly wishes to tell, since nobody else has done so. In publishing terms, this is perfectly understandable as a means of appealing to an audience wider than a small number of animation historians; in historical terms, it allows Ushio to insert powerful, unprecedented revelations. Seemingly unaware of the implications, he offers memories that can offer contributions of immense value in the assembly of a narrative history of Japanese animation. In asides presented out of chronological order amid his nostalgic reminiscences, Ushio delivers information that dispels what Megill would term nescience: rejected history, or the reassertion of historical actors and activities thought to have been ‘dead and gone’ – a type of ‘repressed memory’ (Megill, 2007: 42–43).

Ushio died before the second volume of his memoirs was printed, and wrote no framing text to place his memoirs in context; consequently, we cannot know if he knew of the sensitive nature of the information that he was sharing, which would permit others to throw traces of data elsewhere into sharp historical relief. In his book, Ushio recalls the foundation of a Special Film Unit (Tokubetsu Eigaban), formed by the amalgamation of the Tōhō Cultural Film Department and the film company Nihon Eigasha.

[The Special Film Unit] comprised about thirty people. Our task was to secretly make four maki on level bombing theory and ten maki on practical bombardment. This ‘Shadow Staff’, including me, was under the direct supervision of the executive director Masutani [Rin] and the director Mori [Iwao]. (Ushio, 2007: 237)

The term ‘maki’ has been left in Japanese here because it is a recurring problem in the historiography of Japanese film. A maki is a counting word for rolled objects, and can mean either reels of film or chapters of a text (Nelson, 1974: 356). Hence, it is possible to read Ushio’s claim here as a reference to 14 separate instructional films, although since the Cinema Database has found evidence of 13 reels on the subject of bombardment (Group B), we can safely assume that Ushio is referring to the four films listed. The ‘missing’ reel might be a film that has disappeared from the historical record, but is more likely to have been wound onto one of the other reels. Film lengths in this period were often given in reels instead of metres or minutes, and hence it is difficult to determine precisely how long these films were. A reel can hold up to 11 minutes of film, although several cartoons released during the period crammed up to 12 minutes onto a single reel, presumably for ease of portability (Tsugata, 2007: 186).

However, it is possible to make an estimate based on the general running time of cartoons in the period. The Animage (1989, 20–26) history of Japanese animation lists both reel counts and running times for 18 Japanese cartoons released between the years 1936 and 1945. The total number of reels counted is 37, with a combined running time of 310 minutes, generating an average reel length of 8.4 minutes. Assuming similar running times for works by the Shadow Staff in the same period, then the average ‘two-reeler’ ran for approximately 16 minutes.

Such an estimated length is particularly noteworthy in the case of the Group B film Bakugeki Riron: Danchaku-hen (1942, Principles of Bombardment: Impact), as it is listed with a size of six reels, implying a running time of up to 66 minutes, although the calculations noted above suggest a more realistic estimate would be approximately 48 minutes. Even so, such a running time would still make it longer than the following year’s 37-minute Momotarō no Umiwashi (1943, Momotarō’s Sea Eagles), which was breathlessly hyped on its release as the ‘first feature-length’ Japanese cartoon (Gerow, 2008: 10). Moreover, at eight reels, and with a presumed completion date of 1944 or earlier, Nagamura Eiichi’s Group F film Musen Riron: Sankyoku Shinkūkan (Principles of the Wireless: Triodes and Diodes) could have been a reasonable contender as the ‘first feature-length’ Japanese cartoon, ahead of the actual record holder, Seo Mitsuyo’s 74-minute Momotarō Umi no Shinpei (1945, Momotarō’s Divine Sea Warriors).

Ushio’s own recollection of the films is slightly different to the data harvested by the Agency of Cultural Affairs. He refers to one film variously as Bakugeki Jissai-hen (Practicalities of Bombardment) or Suihei Bakugeki Riron (Principles of Level Bombardment), dividing it into three parts: Riron-hen (Theory), Jissai-hen (Practice) and Ōyō-hen (Application). However, it seems likely that he is referring to the same films already listed on the database as parts one and two of Suihei Bakugeki Riron (Ushio, 2001: 239–240).

According to Ushio (2007), a ‘practical’ component involved him climbing aboard an Akatonbo (Dragonfly) training biplane in order to watch military exercises in Ise Bay. Since there was no way a filmmaker could get a bomber’s eye view without actually sitting at the bombardier’s station, Ushio was eventually made to operate it himself, sighting a 5-metre square target in the sea below, and then releasing the lever with a shout of ‘Tei!’ (‘bombs away’). He made many sorties, sometimes as many as four a day, until his proficiency at dropping dummy bombs was considered to be good enough to animate the experience for others. The Japanese Cinema Database does not give a year for the Principles of Bombardment films, but Ushio specifically dates his training with the Suzuka Air Squadron for a 1-year period from autumn 1939, placing the notional production somewhere around 1940–1941. Ushio further notes that his training film had been used to instruct the Navy pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor, implying it was completed and in active use by mid-1941 (Ushio, 2007: 237).

Memory and tradition: The legacy of the Shadow Staff

‘We must be educated into tradition. Each person and generation must actively appropriate tradition’ (Megill, 2007: 36). Megill’s last warning on historical errors cautions against the teleological assumption that the present situation derives directly from its most obvious antecedents. The Anime Encyclopedia (Clements and McCarthy, 2006: 203–205, 527–528, 645–646) deliberately includes thematic entries that delineate multiple, contrasting ‘histories’ of Japanese animation from the perspectives of widely differing traditions: e.g. in reaction to foreign influences, or in terms of ratings and box office, or even in terms of technology and formats. An appraisal of the contribution of the Shadow Staff to anime history must be considered in the light of these alternative views, as yet another perspective to add to an already multifarious set of ‘traditions’. Until Ushio’s memoir, published only when he and the rest of the Shadow Staff were dead, the activities of these filmmakers remained largely unmentioned, not least because an admission of involvement in military propaganda during the Pacific War risked censure as a Class C war criminal during the US Occupation of 1945–1952 (Hirano, 1988: 146, 1992: 214). With heavy competition for jobs in a Japanese film industry drastically reduced in size from its wartime peak, most filmmakers could not risk such scrutiny.

As for the productions of the Special Film Unit, of those that had survived the fire-bombings of the closing days of the war, many were destroyed in the autumn of 1945.

… anything reminiscent of the wartime era, anything that reeked of connections to the military, was either shredded or burned and buried. Anything considered harmful by the Occupation authorities was fair game for destruction. I was disconsolate when I heard that films I had put my heart into, and animation I had completed with new technology, these treasures had been buried in a deep pit. (Ushio, 2007: 209–210)

Time may have obscured Ushio’s memory of the precise date, and indeed the nationality of the figures that destroyed his work. Only too aware of the significance of propaganda films to vengeful victors, the Tōhō studio is known to have pre-emptively destroyed several films before the Americans arrived at the Soshigaya building where much of the Shadow Staff’s output had been produced (Hirano, 1992: 42, 211), and there is no reason to believe that the works of the Shadow Staff itself were not considered similarly sensitive. This was also the attitude at Man-Ei, a Japanese studio in Manchuria, where initial plans to burn down the entire complex were only thwarted by Chinese staff who appreciated the value of the plant and machinery (Mochinaga, 2006: 128). There was undoubtedly a mass burning of ‘harmful’ movie materials by the Occupation forces, but that was not until April/May 1946, when US soldiers lit pyres of propaganda by the banks of the Tama River on three occasions (Hirano, 1992: 43). In theory, at least one copy of each film was preserved and sent to archives in Washington, from which they were largely returned to Japan by 1967. However, many films have simply disappeared.

The ‘tradition’ of Japanese animation is that early pre-war hobbyists struggled to find success until the gradual industrialisation of animation processes, firstly for theatrical features at Tōei from 1956, and then with radical cost- and quality-cutting measures at Mushi Productions from 1962 (Yamaguchi, 2004: 66–70). Although it is usually acknowledged that anime had pre-war precursors and wartime propaganda high-points, the sheer volume of wartime instructional output has not previously been discussed. Nor has the fact that many of the Shadow Staff remained in the business through the late 1940s and 1950s, and became vital conduits for the transmission of animation skills to the postwar generation. It is hence unsurprising that the Shadow Staff has been quietly forgotten by anime ‘tradition’. Those figures whose names were prominent on the surviving publicly-released propaganda cartoons, are indelibly part of the historical narrative. But those who worked in secret on instructional films may have even been grateful that their work was so swiftly erased from the record. Perhaps only now, more than six decades after the end of the war, the time is right to re-incorporate their achievement into the history of animation in Japan.

Intriguingly, the recent inclusion of the Shadow Staff films on the Agency of Cultural Affairs Japanese Cinema Database runs contrary to its own stated parameters. According to its front page, the online database covers: ‘information on Japanese films publicly exhibited from 1896–[the present day]’ (www.japanese-cinema-db.jp/, accessed 24 June 2011, emphasis added). Although not part of the sphere that the database aims to encode for researchers, the Shadow Staff films are nonetheless present, either through oversight, happenstance, a diligence above and beyond the call of duty, or a willingness on the part of the Agency of Cultural Affairs to welcome the forgotten Shadow Staff back into its own narrative of Japanese film.

Ushio (2007: 237) offers a final, unexpected claim, concerning the secret contribution of the Shadow Staff to live-action films of the period. Sure that the military procurement officers would be ignorant of animation production methods, Tōhō deliberately overestimated the amount of film required for animation by a factor of 300 per cent, claiming that the excess had been used on bad takes and deleted scenes. This was a patent lie – owing to storyboarding and shooting frame-by-frame, animation was actually prized for allowing its filmmakers to conserve film stock. The extra film acquired was then secretly utilised in live-action films, including Kawanakajima Kassen (1941, The Battle of Kawanakajima), Ahen Sensō (1943, The Opium War) and Kurosawa Akira’s 1943 film debut Sugata Sanshirō.

There are only a few names present on the extant Shadow Staff film credits: Ōishi Ikuo, Sagisu Tomio (i.e. Ushio Sōji), Tamai Masao, Fukuda Saburō, Nagamura Eiichi, Mori Takeshi, Matsuzaka Yoshihito, Ichino Shōji, Yamada Kōzō, Wakabayashi Toshirō, and Watanabe Ōtori. With the addition of Tsuburaya Eiji and Seo Mitsuyo, known to have been present, the number is persuasively close to the ‘dozen’ claimed by Ushio as attendees at the infamous screening of Fantasia.

With the closure of Tōhō’s ‘lower’ (valley-based) Kinuta building after the war, the ‘upper’ (hill-top) Soshigaya building where many of the instructional films were made was repurposed and became the educational film division of Tōhō Studios. Some staffers faded from view after the Pacific War, although several of them stayed in the film business. The executive director, Masutani Rin, went into the private sector but soon drifted back into entertainment, becoming the director of Polydor Japan, and eventually a consultant to both Sony and the Motion Picture & Television Engineering Society of Japan. Wakabayashi Toshirō would co-write Ashida Iwao’s Baghdad no Hime (1948, Princess of Baghdad), one of the first Japanese cartoon features of the post-war era. Tamai Masao returned to his pre-war job as a cinematographer, working for Tōhō on many later films, including the original Godzilla (1954). Kankura Taiichi, listed as a camera operator on the Shadow Staff, followed a similar path at Tōhō and worked on movies including Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Latitude Zero (1969). Nakazawa Hanjirō, a Shadow Staff director and camera operator, shows up as a cameraman on Tōei movie credits into the 1980s, including the Truck Yarō film series and The Gate of Youth (1981). If the careful ‘forgetting’ of their wartime activity allowed them to secure post-war employment, it surely does no harm to ‘remember’ it now, long after any real or imagined statute of limitations has passed, with the Shadow Staff themselves deceased, and our own horizon of expectations arguably more objective and academic. Probably, little has been aesthetically ‘lost’ – the British and American equivalents of Shadow Staff films reside today in archives largely unwatched and unwanted, and it is unlikely that the destroyed films contained anything of enduring artistic merit. But by remembering them now, we are not only able to assert, as does Ushio Sōji, simply that they ‘were there’ at all, but also to incorporate production statistics that radically transform our understanding of the volume and type of animation produced in Japan in the 1940s.

Relics of the Shadow Staff’s instructional movies can sometimes be discerned in post-war Japanese entertainment. The anime series Zero-sen Hayato (1964) drew directly on the aviation experiences of Sagisu Tomio (Ushio, 2007: 234), Tsuburaya Eiji appeared to revisit targeting scenes from the bombardment films for similar sequences in both Mothra (1961) and Godzilla versus Mothra (1964) (Inomata, 2007: 82–83). Meanwhile, Mori Takeshi, Ichino Shōji, Matsuzaka Yoshihito and several other members of the Shadow Staff would join forces with the surviving animators of Nichidō (an abbreviation for the entity more properly known as Nihon Dōgasha – the Japanese Animation Company). These animators would work on some of the earliest cartoons of Japan’s post-war recovery, not only for cinemas, but also instructional films for the Occupation authorities (Tsuchiya, 2002: 198). Eventually acquired by Tōei, the group formed core staff within Tōei Animation (Ushio, 2007: 221). It was this company that made Japan’s first full-length colour animated feature, Hakujaden (1958, Legend of the White Snake), beginning Japanese animation’s long journey out of the shadows, towards the globally recognised position it holds today.

In the construction of a ‘master narrative’ of the history of Japanese animation, within a ‘grand narrative’ of the history of animation, film or Japan itself, any researcher must be selective. Master narratives and retrospectives of American or British animation largely avoid discussion of wartime instructional films for reasons of simple aesthetics. Not even the craziest Disney fan would volunteer to sit through a six-hour aeronautical engineering documentary at a film festival; nor should we expect a general audience to consider watching Aircraft Recognition for Royal Navy Gunners for fun. However, the Japanese material has been ‘lost’ not only for this reason, but also for matters of nescience and commemoration: it is not remembered because there is nobody to remember it, and it is not commemorated because its makers lost the war. Such items are curios on the resumés of American animators, but for Japanese animators they would have been dangerous admissions to make in a post-war Occupation environment.

As Megill (2007: 73) argues, ‘memory and forgetting are so closely tied up with each other that they are inseparable – that every remembering is also a mode of forgetting, and every forgetting is also a mode of remembering.’ Nowhere is this more apt than in a comparison of what has been heretofore generally understood to be the history of Japanese wartime animation (e.g. Animage, 1989: 20–26; Clements and McCarthy, 2006: 715–717; Yamaguchi, 2004: 56–61) with the ‘lost’ history of the Shadow Staff. Concerning the period 1939–1944, the official record has literally forgotten more animation than it remembers. The restoration of the Shadow Staff to narratives of Japanese animation history is long overdue.