The chatty movie magazine Eiga no Tomo (Friends of the movies), which first appeared in January 1931, offered a vision of modern, everyday gestures to its readers. In its monthly illustrated narratives of the private practices of stars and starlets, in its gossipy accounts of scenes on movie sets, and in its sensational ads for foreign and Japanese movies, the magazine firmly established moviemaking and moviegoing as embedded in seikatsu, with some meaningful shifts in emphasis over the decade. A close chronological reading of select material from the magazine from 1931 through 1941 reveals a...

The chatty movie magazine Eiga no Tomo (Friends of the movies), which first appeared in January 1931, offered a vision of modern, everyday gestures to its readers. In its monthly illustrated narratives of the private practices of stars and starlets, in its gossipy accounts of scenes on movie sets, and in its sensational ads for foreign and Japanese movies, the magazine firmly established moviemaking and moviegoing as embedded in seikatsu, with some meaningful shifts in emphasis over the decade. A close chronological reading of select material from the magazine from 1931 through 1941 reveals a transition from a focus on sensual pleasures grounded in sexualized gender difference, and in a discourse of national difference that also insisted on universalizing, to a transposition of eikatsu onto the Japanese occupation of China.