Still from The Masseurs and a Woman (1938) Hiroshi Shimizu, Part 1: The Shochiku Years . Museum of the Moving Image. Hiroshi Shimizu, Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years . Japan Society. In matters of style , diligence is usually understood to be antithetical to spontaneity. This is the conventional wisdom when it comes to cinematic style too, and among viewers in the West, Japanese cinema in particular tends to be thought of as the effusive outpouring of maverick auteurs—iconoclasts raging against the machine and rejecting commercial constraints to protect their cherished individuality. So it can be surprising that many of that tradition’s great achievements in fact emerged from an industrial studio system built around mass production.…