Shoshimin-eiga

Shōshimin-eiga (小市民 映画), literally "petty bourgeois film" or "lower middle class film", is a genre of Japanese realist films which focus on the everyday lives of ordinary or middle class people. An alternate term for the shōshimin-eiga is the pseudo-Japanese word shomin-geki, literally "common people drama", which had been invented by Western film scholars. The term shōshimin-eiga as a definition of a specifically Japanese film genre presumably first appeared in 1932 in articles by critics Yoshio Ikeda and Ichiro Ueno.