Animation: A World History

15Asia

Japan¹

In the 1930s, Japanese militarism grew so much as to dominate national politics;² the Fifteen Years’ War began in September 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria by the Japanese Army and, the following year, the foundation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. In 1933, the League of Nations condemned the Japanese way of acting, leading Japan to resign its membership: The population gradually entered into a sort of contrived isolation brought about by the major powers, thereby widening the ideological expansionist culture. At the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1933, movie houses were forced to screen massive doses of pedagogical, documentary, and propagandist films. The Ministry of Army and especially the Ministry of Navy commissioned ...