Tazuko Sakane

was a Japanese film director. She was Japan's first female director, followed by Kinuyo Tanaka. Her first feature film New Clothing (初姿 Hatsu Sugata, 1936) is known to be the first Japanese feature film directed by a woman. The majority of her films are educational nonfiction films produced by Manchukuo Film Association for Japanese immigrants and Manchu in Manchukuo. Her only known surviving film is Brides on the Frontier (開拓の花嫁 Kaitaku no Hanayome, 1943).

The first Japanese women to make films came from the circles around the well-known male director, Kenji Mizoguchi, whose many films tended to center on heroines. Mizoguchi and his films about suffering women connect with current discussions about “women's directors” and women directors. When dealing with the patriarchal nature of national cinemas at the time, questions arise with Mizoguchi's unmentioned (in the text) relationship with Sakane. Under his patronage, Sakane became Japan's first and only female film director in the pre-war period. Denied work after the war (on the ground that she had to have a college degree to be a director), she was forced at age forty-two to return to Mizoguchi as his script woman.

Her surviving production memos, scripts, and correspondence were donated to the Museum of Kyoto in 2004 in commemoration of the centennial of her birth. In the Sakane collection's file for The Downfall of Osen, roughly half of her records and Mizoguchi's one-page scribble of the sequence order survive.

Situated as a minority in the film industry, Sakane was nevertheless a privileged majority member of wartime society as a Japanese national and as a person who had some control over the mass media.

Style and influence A large part of Sakane's experience with filmmaking came from assisting and editing films under the tutelage of Kenji Mizoguchi. As a woman, she was very rarely taken seriously and often belittled by the men who dominated the industry. Her first attempt at becoming a director was overshadowed by rumors established by colleagues who had assumed the only way she could have made this promotion possible was through "having an affair with Mizoguchi" and so Sakane's petition for promotion was eventually rejected. Similar to this experience, Sakane fell under scrutiny following her first film as a director, New Clothing(1936), in which her personal life, including intimate topics such as her virginity, was publicly criticized and shamed in an article merely in the studio's effort to gain attention.

Adhering to colonial standards was Sakane's only choice in order to regain her position as a director in Japan. In doing so, she left Mizoguchi and began a project, Fellow Citizens in North(1941), under the Tokyo Riken Film Company. Despite being enlisted as a director in an effort to create a propagandic film that documented Japan and assertion that the country was "one nation, one people," Sakane's personal intentions interfered. Due to wanting to maintain her personal style in spite of the colonialist assignment, Sakane created a film that documented the loss of history and native culture within Japan. However, she was made to fix and reshoot in order to create a film that met colonialist standards. Sakane never allowed political affiliations or war to affect how she filmed within these topics as a filmmaker. She merely used these situations as a means of establishing herself as a filmmaker. Year Original title English title