Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast episode 582, The Men of Chivalry Part 2.

Looking back, the period of roughly 1935 to 1975 must have been a wild time to be an actor, a director,

really anyone involved in Japan's film world who specialized in Jidae Gecki, the period pieces set

in feudal Japan. Just to give a quick overview from the late 1920s, really all the way until

the implosion of the whole film industry late during World War II, because the film industry,

like pretty much all other industries

suffered heavily during the war years, just 25 movies in total were made in 1945.

Gideke really dominated the film market.

They were by basically any metric, the most popular genre of film in all of Japan, though

unfortunately very few of those films

survived today.

We talked all about this last week.

I won't belabor things too much here by going back over it.

The genre would then plummet off the cliff during the immediate post-war years, largely because

of censorship put into place by American forces occupying Japan, which outlawed any media which

was thought to promote militaristic values. After the occupation ended in 1952, though, the

Gidai Gecki would experience a multi-decade resurgence, returning to the big screen as one of the

most popular, if not the most popular genres in Japanese film,

only to fall by the wayside rapidly again in the 1970s.

Didiagy have not vanished since then.

They're still made down to today, but they're also nowhere near the dominant cultural force they once were.

And that raises a very interesting question. Why?

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