Japanese Orientalism: The Construction of Chinese Representation in Wartime and Manchukuo Cinema

Abstract

During Japan’s wartime period (1937-1945), films produced by the Manchukuo Film Association served as propaganda tools to reinforce Japanese imperial ideology. These films portrayed Chinese characters in ways that marginalized and subordinated them using visual, narrative, and linguistic techniques. While previous research has examined these portrayals qualitatively, this study applies quantitative methods to validate these findings. Three computational techniques were used: (1) Film Scene and Shot Duration Quantification, (2) Social Network Analysis (SNA), and (3) Stylometric Analysis of Dialogue. The results show that Chinese characters received 32% less screen time than Japanese protagonists, with shorter average shot durations (3.4 seconds compared to 6.8 seconds for Japanese characters). Chinese figures were often framed in ways that reduced their visual prominence. The analysis of social network by Japanese characters showed that Japanese characters held a centrality degree (0.70) in a structural sense behind Chinese characters (0.30) to confirm their status as peripheral. When we analyzed dialogue on a stylometric basis, we found that 68% of the Chinese character lines contained negative sentiment whereas 22% of Japanese character dialogue had negative sentiment. This is also because Chinese characters had less lexical diversity (0.34) than their speech was, which means they were less varied and dynamic. In addition, Japanese dialogue often contained ideological keywords such as ‘civilization’ and ‘harmony’ in agreement with the imperial Japanese narrative of superiority.