Three Japanese Actresses of the 1950s: Modernity, Femininity and the Performance of Everyday Life

Abstract

Japan in the 1950s was a period of accelerated social transformation as a new generation came of in the wake of the seven-year American occupation. The so-called golden age of Japanese cinema corresponds to a time when a national culture had to be reinvented that would be both democratic and Japanese. Among the contradictions of this cultural moment was the definition of the feminine. Although the Occupation brought with it the legislation of rights, resistance to women's was implicitly linked to the protection of values. Analysis of the star-images of female movie stars of the 1950s is a means of tracking the negotiation of gender roles through this contradictory period. Three of the most popular actresses of the time, Hara Setsuko, Takamine Hideko, and Sugimura Haruko, were identified strongly with the gendai geki, or films with contemporary settings, through which their star-images were linked to the discourse of everyday life. These three women represent a range of acting styles which, I will argue, correspond not only to different images of women, but also to different subject-positions for women within postwar narrative cinema. Of course there are many other important female stars in the 1950s, including Tanaka Kinuyo, who also directed six films; and Kyo Machiko andYamada lsuzu, actresses who exemplified the physiognomy of the classical beauty. Kyo, who starred in both Rashomon (1950) and Ugetsu(1953 3), may have become the emblematic traditional woman for foreign audiences, but in Japan Kyo represented a new sensual carnality. The characters she plays in Mizoguchi's Street of Shame (1956) and Naruse's Older Brother Younger Sister(1953), for example, are defined by an aggressive sexuality, and her physical appeal was particularly titillating to Japanese male audiences for whom her image was linked to the freedoms of American democracy. Certainly the culture of burlesque and striptease that flourished in the postwar period promoted a confused notion of women's as a liberation of the flesh. As Joanne Izbicki notes, the subject of this liberation was the male audience, amplified and stimulated by the American G.I.s, whi le female subjectivity was sublimated to the objectified body of the female dancer. The only freedoms for women within this display of sexuality were employment opportunities for performers and cash prizes offered by the plethora of beauty contests. (1) For the male critic Saburo Kawamoto, Kyo's appeal lay in part in her transgression of the norms of Japanese femininity--her adoption of an American-style openness about sexuality. (2) Indeed, there is a deep ambivalence about the Japaneseness of the top stars of this period. Both Hara Setsuko and Mifune Toshiro had slightly Caucasian features, suggesting that their star-images might have been linked to new notions of physical appeal within a global culture. Their popularity in fact complicates any kind of absolute Japanese! Western duality once we consider them within a framework of Japanese modernity, and I would argue that the popular culture of 1950s Japan needs to be recognized, precisely, as a key site of modernity. As Harry Harootunian has pointed out with respect to the interwar period, modernity is a specific cultural form and a consciousness of lived historical time that differs according to social forms and practices. (3) Japanese modernity differs from European modernity in that the transformat ion of everyday life was also an ongoing encounter with the new that came from elsewhere. (4) If Kyo's appeal lay in her transgression of the norms of Japanese femininity, the identity of the modern Japanese woman remains undefined, and arguably erased by the direct appeal to male audiences in Kyo's star image. There is no question that women comprised a portion of audiences of the period, many of them new wage-earners in the postwar period. In numerous films of the Occupation and the years immediately following it, the ideology of the good wife and wise mother confronted the sexuality and independence that the Americans introduced to Japanese cinema. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.