Page "Sound film" Paragraph 57

During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with the United States.

Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West.

It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai ( Dawn ), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system.

Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: Taii no musume ( The Captain's Daughter ) and Furusato ( Hometown ), the latter directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.

The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi.

Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made in the country were still silents.

Two of the country's leading directors, Mikio Naruse and Yasujiro Ozu, did not make their first sound films until 1935 and 1936, respectively.

As late as 1938, over a third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without dialogue.