was a genre of socially conscious, left-leaning films produced in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Tendency films reflected a perceived leftward shift in Japanese society in the aftermath of the 1927 Shōwa financial crisis. Notable examples of the genre are Tomu Uchida's A Living Puppet (1929), Kenji Mizoguchi's Tokyo March and Metropolitan Symphony (both 1929), Tomotaka Tasaka's Behold This Mother (1930), and Shigeyoshi Suzuki's What Made Her Do It? (1930).
History and themes
Tendency films were melodramas aimed at the mainstream commercial market, in contrast to the documentaries produced by the Proletarian Film League of Japan, and often featured proletarian protagonists set against upper-class counterparts. Tomu Uchida's A Living Puppet was the story of an "insincere but talented man who cannot survive within the structure of a capitalist society." The success of What Made Her Do It? prompted Japan's Home Ministry to increase its scrutiny of political films: a Censorship Review from June 1930 describes the art form as having "embarked on a concerted effort to influence the thinking of society in general." Film historian Tadao Sato marks the end of the tendency film genre with Sotoji Kimura's 1933 film Youth Across the River. Teppei Kataoka, screenwriter of A Living Puppet and Metropolitan Symphony, served a two-year prison sentence and underwent tenkō (forced ideological conversion) following his arrest in 1932. Some of the exponents of the tendency film turned to films which advocated the Japanese government's policy and military. Suzuki directed two propaganda documentaries in 1933, on which Sato comments:<blockquote>If we accept [What Made Her Do It?] as a work of genuine leftism, we can only marvel at the speed of his political conversion. But, as is more likely the case, if we see it merely as a rather extreme expression of social do-goodery, the question of political conversion is reduced to virtual irrelevance. During World War II, Mizoguchi made a series of films whose patriotic nature seemed to support the war effort, including the historical drama The 47 Ronin (1941–42). While some historians see these as works which Mizoguchi had been pressured into, others believe him to have acted voluntarily.