Kurosawa Akira's One Wonderful Sunday: censorship, context and 'counter-discursive' film.

Reading One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki Nichiyobi, 1947) as counter-discursive film, this paper challenges humanist readings of the film to argue for a more critical commentary on the problematic postwar. The essay investigates the labels of 'pro-democratic' and 'compliant' director ascribed to Kurosawa Akira (1910-98), stemming from the reception of No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi, 1946). In light of Kurosawa's experience with negotiating censorship boundaries, the essay argues that Kurosawa's strategy should be read in terms of creativity and critique rather than mere compliance with external demands, with a close reading of One Wonderful Sunday providing evidence of critical construction. The film is placed in the context of SCAP policy to demonstrate that such 'problematization films' were not only useful to Occupation aims but welcome, seen as supporting the wider goal of rebuilding Japan in a realistic way. The essay concludes that simple binary expectations, attached to terms like censorship and non-censorship, discourse and counter-discourse limit our understanding of the complex censorship process. Once the contextual location of the viewer is taken into account, however, the seeming disjunction between non-censorship and counter-discursive film are seen to disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]