UC Berkeley

This dissertation, titled “Staging the Bright Life: White-Collar Cinema in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth (1954-1971),” examines the ubiquity of the male white-collar employee (or salaryman) in Japanese media, focusing specifically on this figure’s iteration in studio cinema during the decades following the Second World War. Although first emerging during the expansion of industrial capitalism and the managerial class in the 1920s and ‘30s, I argue that the salaryman acquired an exceptional ideological centrality in the era of high economic growth (1954-1971), bolstered by mass media representations, which profoundly shaped popular perceptions and discourse on work, class, gender, and national identity. In particular, I take up studio cinema contextualized within serialized fiction, advertising, popular social science texts, and management literature to elucidate what I term a “mass cultural theorization” of the salaryman, in which he was posited as both an object of fascination elaborated through analysis of his working patterns, consumption practices, and intimate relationships, as well as a subject of identification framed as an “everyman” specific to the era. Such texts enlist a set of narrative and formal conventions that situated the individual within the unprecedented expansion of Japan’s postwar economy, thus dramatizing the suffusion of economic logics into everyday life for what was in fact a demographically heterogeneous audience.

By elucidating salaryman cinema, an integral yet neglected genre of Japanese studio film, my research functions both as a cultural history of this figure’s central role in the fabrication of an enduring middle-class image of Japan as well as an inquiry into the status of Japanese postwar cinema as a medium in flux. Attending to Tōhō Studios and its films such as the Company President series (1956-1970), The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman (1963), and You Can Succeed Too (1964), amongst others, both tracks the salaryman figure’s mediation of the high growth era’s economic and cultural shifts, and indexes film’s compensatory transformations as it was decentralized and resituated amongst emergent concepts of leisure and mass media. I argue that these films and the contingencies of their production are important for both understanding the industrial response to film’s much discussed decline post-1958, as well as locating in these responses an image of an expanding white-collar world of leisure technologies and consumption. I claim that the compensatory measures of studio cinema to maintain viewers mobilized articulations of the media and leisure technologies towards which white-collar cinema's salaryman-spectators migrated.