The eminent novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki was celebrated for his ambivalence toward the West and the modernism it was perceived as harboring. Before his celebrated return to traditional values during the prewar and wartime years, however, Tanizaki was positively enthusiastic about things viewed as foreign to Japan. Among these was the cinema.
It offered a useful paradigm to the Japanese position in the modern world of the 1920s. As one of Tanizaki's characters sums it up: "The more he thought about it, the less sure he was about where the world inside the film ended and where the world outside the film began." Movies thus offered a new relation to the real -- just what Japan needed.
This relationship was much on the minds of many Japanese intellectuals of the time. Hideo Kobayashi, the famous literary critic, upon seeing the sound-film "Morocco," wrote that it "generated a sense of intimacy, so that we feel closer to the Moroccan desert we have never seen than to the landscape of Ginza before our eyes."