Structural Friction: Reginald Eyre and the Limits of British Film Propaganda in Wartime Japan, 1916–1919

This article reconstructs the British effort to distribute official war films in Japan between 1916 and 1919 through the career of Reginald Eyre, the agent who managed it, drawing on the largely untapped Foreign Office and Ministry of Information records at The National Archives read against contemporary Japanese film journalism. It argues that the campaign’s uneven fortunes are best understood through the concept of structural friction: the resistance generated when a media flow encoded within one industrial, institutional, and cultural system enters a reception space organised by different codes. Three distinct layers of friction—industrial, formal, and affective—are distinguished and weighed. Britain’s marginal film industry and the episodic, benshi-unfriendly form of its actuality footage, rather than any simple absence of shared war experience, emerge as the decisive obstacles in commercial exhibition. Yet the campaign is shown to have been no uniform failure: it secured Imperial patronage and elite diplomatic visibility, reached very large audiences through a non-commercial circuit of schools, YMCA halls, and factories, and produced a bespoke royal film tailored to local values. Eyre appears less as a functionary than as a cultural intermediary, and the case illuminates the reception, not merely the production, of transnational wartime propaganda.