Jasper Sharp writes:

During the postwar Occupation, up until 1951, the distribution of American films in Japan was handled directly by an agent of Hollywood’s Motion Pictures Export Association (MPEA) known as the Central Motion Picture Exchange (CMPE). The effective result of this was that of the 55 foreign films imported to Japan in 1947, 51 (or 92.7%) were American. The situation didn’t get much better throughout the next ten years, with American films representing roughly 70% of the annual imports to Japan, and all of the major Hollywood studios operating offices in the country.

Many thanks for the Harley reference (and to Chris Berry and Tim Bergfelder for their responses) - I had no idea that a monograph had been written on this very topic as early as 1940.  In a way, though, it makes sense, because the '20s and '30s saw Hollywood's aggressive international expansion, and the consequent responses, economic, cultural, and political, from the countries that received the exports.

The situation in Japan strikes me as a little different to the remarkable similarity that struck me as to the reasoning behind the contemporary Chinese censorship of horror films and political censorship in British cinema between the wars.  In effect, the occupying Americans in Japan were trying to re-establish Hollywood as the dominant power in domestic film exhibition by political brute force, just as they tried to do in France with the Blum-Byrnes accord.  In other words, they were trying to see off potential local trade barriers.  The difference was in the weapon of choice.

In inter-war Britain, however, a situation seems to have existed in which anything went, just as long as it didn't stray too far into the realms of domestic politics.  The British establishment didn't have any fundamental problem with cinemagoers seeing Hollywood movies most of the time.  Dorothy Knowles makes the point in The Censor, the Drama and the Film (London, Allen and Unwin, 1934) most average income cinemagoers knew of America purely from Hollywood: the only ones who actually went there did so on a one-way ticket to Ellis Island.  So the BBFC (which, as research in the '80s by Richards, Pronay, Aldgate and Dickinson & Street showed, was effectively acting as an unofficial and unaccountable organ of the Home Office) had no problem with portrayals of social deprivation, organised crime, you name it ... as long as they were clearly ones that were imported from somewhere that was clearly understood to be outside the everyday lives of the mainstream audience.

Interestingly, the one exception to this rule seems to have been comedy.  You don't need to read too far beneath the surface of Gangway, and as John Ellis's article points out (can't remember the entire reference, but it's reprinted in Higson and Ashby, British Cinema, Past and Present), Radio Parade of 1935 is an astonishing film given the prevailing censorship culture of the day, portraying Lord Reith as a self-righteous, sanctimonious buffoon and the BBC as an irrelevant vanity project.  Will Hay seems to have had a particular talent for slipping under the BBFC's radar, given that in the following few years he'd send up the IRA and, on repeated occasions, the secondary education system (which, in the late '30s, Labour were campaigning hard to argue was fundamentally broken).

From the work my MA student did, I got the impression that Chinese censors take a similar approach to Thai horror films.  Religious faith and superstition are allowed to be portrayed, just as long as they are something that foreigners do and the indigenous, scientifically and centrally planned society comes in contact with it only as a form of entertainment, ultimately to be giggled at.  But were domestic filmmakers to want to go there, that would be a different story.

Many thanks
Leo