(17 May 1887 – 5 January 1951) was a Japanese sociologist and

film theorist Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for unde ...

who played an important role in the study of popular entertainment and helped pioneer statistical studies of everyday life in Japan.

Career

Born in the

Kanda Kanda may refer to: People * Kanda (surname) *Kanda Bongo Man (born 1955), Congolese soukous musician Places * Kanda, Tokyo, an area in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan **Kanda Station (Tokyo), a railway station in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo * Kanda River, a ri ...

area of

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

, Gonda was early attracted to the

socialism Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...

Isoo Abe was a Japanese Christian socialist, parliamentarian and pacifist. He largely contributed to development of baseball in Japan, and was called "Father of Japanese baseball." He created a baseball club of Waseda University. Early life and educ ...

, and his early political activities earned expulsion from Waseda High School. He later studied at

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies , often referred to as TUFS, is a specialist research university in Fuchū, Tokyo, Japan. TUFS is primarily devoted to foreign language, international affairs and foreign studies. It also features an Asia-African institution. History The Uni ...

and

Tokyo University , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

where he was influenced by German statistical sociology. His first book, ''The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures'' (Katsudō shashin no genri oyobi ōyō), was published in 1914, and was the first full-length monograph in Japan studying the medium of cinema. His later research on lower class life and popular play focused on how popular culture was generated from the bottom up and challenged top-down notions of national or modern culture.See Harootunian and Silverberg.

Selected bibliography

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Career

Selected bibliography

References

Further reading