[1] Notable examples of the genre are Tomu Uchida's A Living Puppet (1929), Kenji Mizoguchi's Tokyo March and Metropolitan Symphony (both 1929), Tomotaka Tasaka's Behold This Mother (1930), and Shigeyoshi Suzuki's What Made Her Do It?
[1] Daisuke Itō's jidaigeki (period drama) films had increasingly featured heroes in revolt against the social system of historical Japan, including Servant (1927) and Man-Slashing, Horse-Piercing Sword (1929).
Despite winning the Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year in 1929, Masahiro Makino's Street of Masterless Samurai was cut severely.
was produced by Teikine, a studio specialised in entertainment films, and introduced "vulgar elements" (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith) aimed at its audience.
[2] ABC Lifeline, which contained scenes of striking workers, was produced by Shochiku, a studio wary of the genre's underlying ideology,[2] and directed by the "nominally conservative" Yasujirō Shimazu.
prompted Japan's Home Ministry to increase its scrutiny of political films: a Censorship Review from June 1930 describes the art form as having "embarked on a concerted effort to influence the thinking of society in general.
[5] Teppei Kataoka, screenwriter of A Living Puppet and Metropolitan Symphony, served a two-year prison sentence and underwent tenkō (forced ideological conversion) following his arrest in 1932.
[4]Tomotaka Tasaka, director of Behold This Mother, later directed a series of films in favour of Japan's war efforts, including Five Scouts (1938) and Mud and Soldiers (1939).