I'm not sure I agree. American censors were uncomfortable with almost any reference to the war, even anti-war sentiments. There were indirect visual representations of the war, such as graveyards, but you didn't see a lot of explicitly anti-war content until after the Occupation. The most visible agenda being pushed by the Occupying forces was a focus on liberalism and heterosexuality.Michael Kerpan wrote:Anti-war sentiments were practically mandatory in the Occupation era (due to the demands of US censors).
However, in my opinion most of the anti-war content in the later post-war films is more useful at indexing the cognitive dissonance of Japan's political culture than it is in showing how successful the Occupation project had been. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's essay on post-war melodrama made in Japan does a great job of articulating the "victim consciousness" of these films.
While it's true that there was more sexually themed content in Japanese films than American films, I'm not sure if I would categorize them as risque. Films like Teenage Sex Manual were basically after school special style films that tried to portray the "dangers of youth" and such. The girls in these films weren't usually bad, but rather misled and abused by their boyfriends and other men.Lots of risque stuff (though mild compared to later films) started cropping up after the war. "Bad girl" films were quite popular then.
Women and women's bodies were definitely one of the main battlefields of post-war Japanese social life, but women didn't become real agents in film until the fifties as far as I can tell. The social and political of emasculation of men was present in films almost immediately after the way, since the trauma of the war was placed completely on the shoulders of men