Japan until 1953, when the actress-turned-director Tanaka Kinuyo made her first film. Not only is Sakane's life illustrative of the constricting roles enforced by Japanese society almost vengefully upon women, but her involvement at Manchuria Film Association further poses questions pivotal in theorizing the mutual implications of feminism, imperialism, and colonialism. That being said, Sakane has long been marginalized, if not erased, from the history of Japanese cinema. At the historical

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... ure when cinema started to entwine with nationalism in Japan in the early 1900s, Sakane was born in Kyoto, a city dubbed "Japan's Hollywood." Sakane's father was a wealthy inventor and businessman with connections to the film industry. As a young child, Sakane developed her cinephilia through frequenting cinemas with her family. She went to Doshisha Women's College to pursue a degree in English literature at a time when only one percent of Japanese women received higher education, yet her stepmother forced her to quit college in her second year (Ikegawa 2011, 7). At the age of twenty, Sakane's parents arranged for her to marry a gynecologist. Four years later, her marriage ended with her divorcing her husband, who had been found disloyal (McDonald 2007, 129). After her marriage broke up, Sakane decided to obtain a job instead of getting remarried, an unusual decision for an upper-class woman in those days. In 1929, Sakane's father helped her join Nikkatsu Studio as Kenji Mizoguchi's assistant. At the time, Japanese cinema had just entered a