The author supplements his analysis of the immediate text with an examination of the way in which Paul Rotha’s work on documentary film was imported and received by Japanese theorists of cinema. Rotha’s Documentary Film (1935) was well received in Europe and America, but it never attained the status it was to acquire in Japan following its translation by Atsugi Taka (first edition in 1938). The author explains this imbalance by reference to the events of the latter half of the 1930s, when Rotha’s book first arrived in Japan, and especially Japan’s invasion of China and the government’s drumming up of nationalist feelings, with the subsequent ideological conversion of most progressive intellectuals into rabid nationalists. The article focuses on the struggle of meaning of the book by examining a range of different choices in the various editions of the translation in order to explain how and why Rotha’s book became a ‘Bible’ for both militarist and leftist documentary film makers and critics in Japan.