Reception of earliest shown Japanese films in U.S.

[Kirsten Cather]

After many dead end searches, I am hoping someone on this list can point me
to some helpful sources for a project I'm currently working on in a film
historiography seminar.

I'm doing a reception study of the first Japanese films shown in the U.S.
and hoping to investigate marketing, exhibition practices, and criticism of
these. Ideally, I'd like to look at both nationally and locally (in the San
Francisco -- Bay area) to see how what films were shown and how they were
received differed in terms of the arts cinema and
Japanese/Japanese-American communities.

My biggest problem is pinning down nationally what was first shown --
various sources point to different dates and I'm having trouble getting any
definitive information. The most seemingly reliable (a 1958 Japan Times
article) says exports (presumably to the U.S. since in Europe there seems
to have been Japanese films shown as early as 1912) began in 1946.  But
almost all secondary sources I've looked at uniformly point to Rashomon
(after winning 1st prize at the Venice Int'l Film Festival) as the moment
of the explosion of Japanese cinema in the US. The only definites I know
that were shown by 1953 in the U.S. are Rashomon, Ugetsu (shown in NY in
1952), and Gate of Hell. I have a hard time believing that Rashomon was the
very 1st film to be shown, but perhaps this is true? What about FIve Scouts
which won the popular culture award in Venice in 1938 or Moon over the
Ruined Castle which won in 1937?

Other questions I'll just throw out to see if anyone has some
info/sources/ideas for search strategy?
1) How did the UniJapan Film's "Association for the Diffusion of Japanese
Films Abroad, Inc." created in 1955 affect distribution/export to the U.S.?
2) How did the Japanese Motion Picture Law of 1939 affect exports to the U.S.?
3) How did the U.S. Motion Picture Association's "Advisory Unit for Foreign
Films" created in 1950 affect the distribution/import of Japanese films in
the U.S.?

Any information or sources which may relate to any of my many questions
would be much appreciated.

Thanks very much for any information you can provide,
Kirsten Cather
(grad student in modern Japanese literature at Berkeley)