 During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with the United States.Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West.It appears that the first Japanese sound film, "Reimai" ("Dawn"), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system.