In early twentieth-century Japan, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, composers, and sound engineers worked across the boundaries of stage, screen, radio, and print — adapting each other's work, moving voices and images between media, and building shared creative networks that shaped the emergence of modern Japanese culture. This project takes that cross-media practice as its central object.
It focuses on two case clusters: the Zenshin-za progressive theatre troupe and its collaborations with playwright Kubo Sakae, and the Narutaki-gumi scriptwriting collective in 1930s Japanese cinema. Bringing together literary studies, theatre history, film studies, and sound studies, the project combines archival research and close reading with data-driven network analysis through the Japan Biographical Database (JBDB).
Primary source materials will be catalogued and, where possible, digitised for inclusion in Tohoku University's Digital Archives (ToUDA). The project culminates in an international symposium and an open-access edited volume.
