**About the Editors**

**Marcos Centeno** is a lecturer in Japanese Studies and coordinator of the Japanese programme at Birkbeck, University of London. Before that, he worked for the department of Japan and Korea at SOAS where he taught several courses on Japanese Cinema and convened the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. Centeno Mart´ın was also a Research Associate at Waseda University and a Research Fellow at the Universitat de Valencia. His research interests revolve around ` Japanese documentary film, Hani Susumu, film theory, transnationality, postwar avant-garde, and representation of minorities.

**Michael Raine** is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, Canada. He has written widely on Japanese cinema, with an emphasis on the transmedia transition to sound in prewar Japan, wartime image culture, and the postwar 'cinema of high economic growth'. He has published most recently on the Japanese musical, Imamura Shohei's The Insect Woman, and wartime cinema in Occupied Shanghai. His anthology, ¯ *The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan* (co-edited with Johan Nordstrom), 2020 is published by Amsterdam ¨ University Press.

## **Preface to "Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode"**

Writing on Japanese cinema has prioritized aesthetic and cultural difference, and obscured Japan's contribution to the representation of real life in cinema and related forms. Donald Richie, who was instrumental in introducing Japanese cinema to the West, even claimed that Japan did not have a true documentary tradition due to the apparent preference of Japanese audiences for stylisation over realism, a preference that originated from its theatrical tradition. However, a closer look at the history of Japanese documentary and feature film production reveals an emphasis on actuality and everyday life as a major part of Japanese film culture.

That 'documentary mode'—crossing genre and medium like Peter Brooks' 'melodramatic mode' rather than limited to styles of documentary filmmaking alone—identifies rhetoric of authenticity in cinema and related media, even as that rhetoric was sometimes put in service to political and economic ends. The articles in this Special Issue, 'Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode', trace important changes in documentary film schools and movements from the 1930s onwards, sometimes in relation to other media, and the efforts of some post-war filmmakers to adapt the styles and ethical commitments that underpin documentary's "impression of authenticity" to their representation of fictional worlds.

> **Marcos Centeno, Michael Raine** *Editors*
