9:40 (13:00 after speed adjustment), b&w, silent – intertitles in English
Source : can be viewed on YouTube here
This is an informational film made for the YWCA (Young Woman’s Christian Association), which in an preliminary intertitle explains that it has been working in Japan for fifteen years ‘for Japanese students, for nurses, and for women who marry to join their husbands in the United States and Hawaii’.
Despite the YWCA’s patronage, however, the film is not overtly propagandistic for the organisation, except in the sense that in presenting Japan, it tends to emphasise women’s experience, e.g. in describing rice as the equivalent to bread in the Japanese diet and showing terraced rice fields, it points out that most of the labour involved in cultivating and processing rice is female.
The intertitles are sometimes patronising and the sequences are generally very brief, but the technical quality is surprisingly good and there are some interesting sequences of scenes of everyday life, particularly of women’s work. The most extended and most interesting sequence, however, is of the Ainu bear ceremony, though this ends before the bear is killed.