Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity 9781474409704

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Tanaka Kinuyo

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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN EAST ASIAN FILM Series Editor: Margaret Hillenbrand Available and forthcoming titles Independent Chinese Documentary Dan Edwards Ozu, History and the Representation of the Everyday Woojeong Joo Moving Figures Corey Kai Nelson Schultz Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Qi Wang Hong Kong Neo-Noir Edited by Esther C. M. Yau and Tony Williams edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/eseaf

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Tanaka Kinuyo Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity

Edited by Irene González-López and Michael Smith

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Irene González-López and Michael Smith, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/13 Chaparral Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0969 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0970 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0971 1 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Notes on the Contributors Acknowledgements Preface: Light and Shadow in the Life of Tanaka Kinuyo Furukawa Kaoru Introduction: Onna Monogatari Irene González-López and Michael Smith 1 Dancer, Doctor, Maiden, Mother: Tanaka Kinuyo’s Early Star Image

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1

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Lauri Kitsnik 2 Meetings and Partings: How Tanaka’s Films End

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Alexander Jacoby 3 Tanaka and Mizoguchi: Politics and Rebellion in the Early Post-war Era

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Michael Smith 4 The First Female Gaze at Post-war Japanese Women: Tanaka Kinuyo, Film Director

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Irene González-López and Ashida Mayu 5 Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and Direct

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Ayako Saito 6 Female Authorship, Subjectivity and Colonial Memory in Tanaka Kinuyo’s The Wandering Princess (1960)

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Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández 7 Panpan Girls, Lesbians and Post-war Women’s Communities: Girls of Dark (1961) as Women’s Cinema

187

Yuka Kanno Index

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Figures

P.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

Tanaka Kinuyo xv The river scene from The Dancing Girl of Izu 40 The pier scene from The Dancing Girl of Izu 41–2 The jealousy scene from The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine 43 Tanaka’s idiogest in The Dancing Girl of Izu, A Woman of Tokyo, Dragnet Girl 44 The lake scene from The New Road 47 Tanaka driving a car and skiing in Kinuyo the Lady Doctor 49 Tanaka and Mizukubo Sumiko on a promotional pamphlet for Shine On, Japanese Women 50 Love Letter 113 Promotional material from Kinema junpō, early November 1953 116 The Moon Has Risen: broadcast by Nihon Eiga Senmon channel 120 Newspaper advertisement, The Eternal Breasts, Yomiuri shinbun 1955, p. 2 134 Relocation of book launch party 136 Fumiko’s farewell to her children 137 Kinuyo’s amendment 141 The wedding of Saga and Pujie in the newspaper Asahi shinbun (1937). 157 Advertisement for The Wandering Princess in the newspaper Yomiuri shinbun (1960) 160 Soldiers marching forward over the figure of Ryūko (Kyō Machiko) 169 A reworking of the actual newspaper article (Figure 6.1) about the wedding of Ryūko and Futetsu is used in the film 170 Wearing a Chinese dress, Eisei dances to the traditional Japanese song ‘Sakura sakura’ sung by her mother 171 Ryūko speaking in Chinese about Chinese traditions in the Manchurian court 173 Displaying a Chinese style, Ryūko is publicly admonished by a general of the Kwantung Army for being in a position of privilege normally reserved for the Japanese 173 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Notes on the Contributors

Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández is a Ph.D. student at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid (Spain), currently writing up her doctoral dissertation on female authorship and representation in the films directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. She graduated in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Navarra (Spain) and has studied Japanese language and culture at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy). With the support of the Monbukagakusho Scholarship and the Japan Foundation Fellowship, she has been a visiting researcher at the Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo (Japan). Her research interests and publications include the study of women filmmakers in Japan, gender representations in Japanese cinema and popular culture and transnational film connections between Japan and Latin America. Irene González-López was awarded her Ph.D. in Japanese Film Studies from SOAS, University of London in 2017. Before arriving in London, she spent seven years in Japan, where she completed a BA in Japanese Studies and an MA in Film Studies. Irene’s research interests are Japanese cinema, gender studies, popular visual culture and stardom. In addition, Irene is a translator and has worked with several film festivals in Japan and Europe. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Kingston University. Alexander Jacoby is a writer and film scholar with a special interest in Japanese film. He undertook doctoral studies at the University of Warwick; the focus of his Ph.D. thesis was the representation of Kyoto in Japanese film, 1945–65. Since 2009, he has lectured on Japanese film, manga and anime, and world cinema at Oxford Brookes University. Alex has curated or co-curated film programmes in Britain at the BFI and for BAFTA and the Barbican in association with the Embassy of Japan. He has also worked internationally as a co-curator for the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone and Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, and at the Museum of Modern

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Notes on the Contributors

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Art, New York, in association with the National Film Center, Tokyo. His writings on Japanese film and other subjects have appeared in print and online in The Times, Japan Times, Sight and Sound, Screen, Senses of Cinema, CineAction, Film Criticism, and the book Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (ed. Phillips and Stringer). He is the author of A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors (2008, Stone Bridge Press), and is currently working on a monograph on Hirokazu Koreeda for the BFI and Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming essays will appear in The Japanese Cinema Book (ed. Phillips and Fujiki), The Long Take (ed. Gibbs and Pye) and A Companion to Japanese Cinema (ed. Desser). Yuka Kanno is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University, where she teaches in the areas of queer studies, film and visual culture. She has published articles on queer film culture and lesbian and feminist authorship and spectatorship, as well as on girls’ culture in Japan. Furukawa Kaoru was born on 5 May 1925 in Yamaguchi Prefecture, in the neighbourhood of Ōtsubo of Shimonoseki, Tanaka Kinuyo’s home town. After graduating in Education Studies from Yamaguchi University, Furukawa worked as a teacher in a junior high school, and later became the managing editor of Yamaguchi Newspaper. After his experience as general manager of the Press and Information office, he became a writer. In 1991 he was awarded the Naoki Prize (104th edition) for his book on the life of the renowned opera singer Fujiwara Yoshie. Lauri Kitsnik (Ph.D. Cantab.) is Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, UK. His work has appeared in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, the Journal of Screenwriting and Woman Screenwriters: An International Guide (2015). Ashida Mayu completed a Ph.D. programme at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University. Mayu is currently the president of NPO Kinder Film Fest Kyoto, and her main research interests are children’s cinema and film festivals. Ayako Saito is a professor in the Department of Art Studies at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, specialising in film studies. Her publications include ‘Hitchcock’s Trilogy: A Logic of Mise-en-Scène’ (Endless Night: Parallel Histories, Cinema and Psychoanalysis, University of California Press, 1999), ‘Politics of Crying and Reclaiming Women’s Public Sphere’ (Senses of Cinema, 2003), ‘Reading as Woman: The Collaboration of Ayako Wakao and Masumura

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Yasuzo’ (Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film Theory, Wayne State University Press, 2010), and ‘Occupation and Memory: The Representation of Woman’s Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema’ (The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also edited Film and Body/ Sexuality (Shinwasha, 2006), co-edited Invisibility: Representation of Invisible Race – Dismantling the Race Myth, Vol.1 (University of Tokyo Press, 2016), and co-authored books, including Wakao Ayako, Film Actress (Misuzu Shobo, 2003), Male Bonding: East Asian Cinema and Homosociality (Heibonsha, 2004) and Fighting Women: Female Action in Japanese Cinema (Sakuhinsha, 2009). Michael Smith was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds in 2013. His research looked at the representation of women in early post-war Japanese cinema, particularly focusing on how the key political and social issues of the period affected their on-screen portrayal. Michael’s main research interests are Classical-era Japanese cinema, women directors and 1990s American independent cinema.

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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank the following for their help and support with the project: Julian Ross, Chris Fell, Alex King, Leeds International Film Festival, White Rose East Asia Centre, Lúcia Nagib, Wachi Yukiko (Kawakita Memorial Film Institute), Mika Ko and Catherine Russell. We would like to especially thank Richard Chatten for editorial assistance and Kawanami Kayako, Onizaki Ayuko and Furakawa Kaoru at Tanaka Kinuyo Memorial Hall, Shimonoseki Memorial Museum of Modern Forerunners.

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Preface: Light and Shadows in the Life of Tanaka Kinuyo Furukawa Kaoru

1

Tanaka Kinuyo lived a happy early childhood in Shimonoseki as the daughter of an affluent merchant family, but things took a turn for the worse with the sudden death of her father. Her elder brother, Keisuke, on whom the family relied, disappeared and the second, Kanae, left home for Tokyo without leaving a trace. Tanaka’s widowed mother Yasu took charge of the family business, but under the administration of a dishonest clerk the family was soon driven into poverty. Turned adrift, Yasu took her four remaining children, of whom Tanaka was the youngest, and decided to ask her elder brother in Osaka for support. Around the same time, her elder daughter Shigeko divorced and returned home, and so mother and five children left Shimonoseki. Kinuyo was in her first year of primary school. Yasu’s brother in Osaka was Kobayashi Yasutarō, a man who had also failed in business and eked out a living by running a private school for children from the neighbourhood. This situation was what Kinuyo’s family tumbled into. Life was hard in the slums. During the time Kinuyo lived in Shimonoseki, she took lessons in biwa. Putting to use that talent, at the age of ten she appeared on stage as part of the Biwa Girls’ Operetta Troupe (Biwa shōjo kagekidan) of the amusement park of Rakutenchi in Osaka. Kinuyo stood out and quickly became a child star. With her income she supported her entire family; throughout her life she would always continue to bear the weight of the family. While she was performing at Rakutenchi, Kinuyo watched a film for the first time. She became fascinated with being an actress, but at this point it was only a faraway dream. When the 1 September 1923 Great Kantō earthquake struck, all the film studios in Tokyo were destroyed and they all at once moved their offices to Kyoto. At the time, Kinuyo’s brother Haruo worked as an office junior in the Shōchiku

1

Honorary President of the Tanaka Kinuyo Memorial Hall (Tanaka Kinuyo bunka-kan, Shimonoseki). Text translated by Irene González-López.

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Shimogamo Studio branch in nearby Osaka. Having heard from Haruo that his sister wanted to become an actress, Inoue, the manager of Osaka’s branch, introduced Kinuyo to Nomura Hōtei, the studio chief of Shōchiku Shimogamo. By chance, Shirai Shintarō, the president of the entire Shōchiku Kinema Company, was also present that day and they decided to cast her in a film in a child role. In her fourteenth spring, Kinuyo took her first step as an actress. Kinuyo was a very lucky person. When she longed to become an actress, a natural disaster relocated Japan’s film industry to Kyoto, a city close to where she lived in Osaka. In other words, it was film that approached Kinuyo. From that moment, she stepped into a career as an actress and began working her fingers to the bone. She became famous for starring in Japan’s first talkie, The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, Shōchiku, 1931) and from there she advanced along the path of stardom. Encounters with different people also brought luck to Kinuyo. The first of these powerful and fateful meetings was with Kido Shirō, the president of Shōchiku Ōfuna Studios. In 1938 Shōchiku was planning the adaptation of Kawaguchi Matsutarō’s melodrama The Love-Troth Tree (Aizen katsura). The leading role was planned for Takamine Mieko, but Kido opposed this and instead put forward Tanaka. Stating ‘I won’t shove people aside’ Kinuyo firmly refused, but was eventually convinced to take the part by Kido. Finally, The Love-Troth Tree was produced with Tanaka Kinuyo as the lead and director Nomura Hiromasa at the megaphone, becoming the tremendous hit all at Shōchiku wanted. Before and after the war, it was this film which made Kinuyo’s status as a top actress resolute and unshakeable. Her next encounter was with the director Mizoguchi Kenji. Among the films created by the duo, one can mention The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai-onna, 1952), which was awarded the International Prize at the Venice International Film Festival; and Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), for which Mizoguchi won the San Marco Silver Lion Award for best direction. Through these two films and others, Kinuyo entered the international limelight. Preserving her status of top star, she later starred in The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō, 1958). She was 48 at the time, and in order to play the role of a much older woman convincingly she had four of her healthy front teeth pulled out. As this episode demonstrates, Kinuyo’s success as an actress was due partly to her innate good fortune, but was also the result of her almost aggressive dedication to her craft and of the passion with which she infused her work. When she was in her forties and continuing with her acting career, Kinuyo felt the desire to become a film director. With her first film, Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953, original story by Niwa Fumio and script by Kinoshita Keisuke), her ability

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as a director was acknowledged. Until then, it had been believed that film directing was a man’s job and Kinuyo’s advancement faced significant opposition from within the industry. Nevertheless, she characteristically carried out her original intention and directed, in total, six films. Worldwide, even nowadays, women directors are still an exception. Together with Leni Riefenstahl, the German director of films including the Olympia series (1938), Kinuyo has left her name in the history of world cinema as a woman director. Parallel with her work as a director, Kinuyo continued acting, asking: Even when my eyes will not see, even once I am not able to say my lines, would I still be able to continue being an actress? In this way Kinuyo expressed her devotion towards film. Her last film as a prominent character, at the age of sixty-four, was Sandakan No. 8 (Sandakan hachiban shōkan: Bōkyō, original story by Yamazaki Tomoko, directed by Kumai Kei). For her role as an older woman, which intensively encapsulated all the skills involved in her past performances, Tanaka received Best Actress award at the 1975 Berlin International Film Festival. Two years later, she became seriously ill and her finances reached such a low point that she could not even pay the hospital expenses. The majority of her abundant wealth had been used by her siblings, who in case of sickness depended on her. Sometimes, the younger Kinuyo would even stop working for a time in order to attend their sick beds. Kinuyo lived out her destiny as the youngest daughter, taking care of her unfortunate family until the end, and her eventful life came to an end on 21 March 1977. Her official funeral as a member of the cinema industry was held at the Tsukiji Hongan-ji temple in Tokyo, and attended by five thousand devoted fans. According to her will, her remains were taken to the family grave in Shimonoseki. With this, Yasu and some of the brothers and sisters of the Tanaka family were again reunited. All the relatives’ ashes were carefully laid to rest, and after Kinuyo the grave-cover was closed. Pressed to leave their home town, the Tanaka family fittingly chose the Kanmon Straits of Shimonoseki as the place for their last ease. Tanaka Kinuyo’s life was attended by splendid light and shadows of deep sorrow, but she remained to the end a tenacious, admirable woman who fought to live out her life as a great actress and a praiseworthy director.

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Figure P.1 Tanaka Kinuyo.

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Introduction: Onna Monogatari Irene González-López and Michael Smith

In November 2012, a symposium was held at the University of Leeds entitled Kinuyo Tanaka: Actress and Filmmaker. Coinciding with the retrospective of the work of Tanaka Kinuyo (1909–77) held at that year’s Leeds International Film Festival, the symposium was the first English-language event centred on the unique career of Tanaka. The enthusiastic reaction to the symposium and retrospective demonstrated the depth of scholarly and popular interest in a figure who had previously received very little attention from English-language film historians. This book, the first collection on Tanaka’s life and work in English, aims to work towards remedying this oversight by highlighting Tanaka’s contributions to cinema as both actress and filmmaker. Tanaka Kinuyo is genuinely remarkable in her own right. In a 52-year career the actress appeared in approximately 250 films, working with a veritable who’s who of Japanese directors and maintaining a position as one of the country’s principal film stars as the industry changed from silent to sound and from monochrome to colour. In addition to this, Tanaka was the first woman in Japan to build a career as a commercial feature filmmaker, directing six films between 1953 and 1962, a time period in which very little filmmaking activity was carried out by women, not only in Japan, but across the world. This book is based on the firm belief that, for various reasons, Tanaka Kinuyo is a figure of hugely underappreciated significance to world cinema history, and the collection of essays contained within collectively make a case for her to be recognised as a pioneer both for her work as an actress and for her trailblazing oeuvre as a filmmaker. However, we believe that film analysis cannot exist in a vacuum, especially given that the life of Tanaka Kinuyo ran parallel with an extraordinary period of social, political and cultural upheaval in Japan. Much, but not all, of the arguments presented in the text will be based around the idea that Tanaka’s work offered up alternative, socio-politically grounded feminine subjectivities during a time when Japanese, and arguably global, cinema was organised, managed and authored almost exclusively by masculine forces. Finally, through analysis of the fascinating figure of Tanaka Kinuyo and the contexts in which

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Irene González-López and Michael Smith

she operated, we believe that much can be revealed about the classical era of Japanese cinema, particularly in relation to the representation of women both in front of and behind the camera. In the pages that follow, scholars from both the Anglophone and Japanese-speaking communities will analyse the work of Tanaka as both an actress and filmmaker; but before this, we feel it is necessary to outline exactly why the figure of Tanaka Kinuyo is of such crucial importance to world film history and, in the process, shed light on how her tumultuous life intersected with the development of a nation embroiled in a prolonged struggle to establish new identities.

Japan at the time of Tanaka’s birth For hundreds of years, the regulation of the family in Japan, as well as the rights and duties of its members, were based on customs and varying local administrative regulations (Mizuno 2007: 147). This meant that there were great differences across geographical regions and social classes. The promulgation of the Meiji Civil Code in 1896, however, changed this reality for ever. The drastic process of transformation meant that a new body of law was needed to fill the gap left by the dissolution of feudal landholdings. Not unlike other legislation of the time, the Civil Code sought a systematic centralisation of power over national subjects who were to be standardised and categorised. Based on German and French codes of private law, the Civil Code, which came into effect in 1898, was supposed to contribute to making Japan a modern nation equal to those in the West (Fujime 1997: 87–100). However, at least for most women, it meant the formal dispossession of most of their rights. As William Johnston explains: The Civil Code of 1898 supported both the state’s claim to legal modernity and its efforts to strip women of their customary rights. Women suddenly found themselves unable to inherit property, assume the headship of households, or divorce husbands according to established custom. They became legal minors and were cut off completely from political activities. (2005: 30) This legal effacement of women’s rights was achieved by enshrining the concept of the ie family in the civil code. Literally translating as ‘household’, the system took the form of an extended family and was typically headed by the oldest male of working age. With the introduction of the civil code, women ‘were not legally recognised persons and therefore enjoyed no rights’ (Yoshizumi 1995: 188). Such legal and practical dependence on the patriarchal structure meant that the ie system could only be considered as a family ‘far removed from a democratic

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3

one based on equality and mutual respect in which both sides have rights and duties’ (Yoshizumi 1995: 187). Nevertheless, perhaps the Code did not come as a surprise to many. After all, in 1889 the Meiji Constitution and the Law of Election had already denied women the right to vote, and the following year’s Law on Assembly and Political Association banned them from joining political parties or attending political gatherings. By the end of the Meiji era (1868–1912), more than ten years after the promulgation of the Civil Code, such repressive gender ideologies had become normalised and naturalised by many, albeit in the face of opposition from some women’s groups. Such was the legal and social context at the time of Tanaka Kinuyo’s birth in November 1909. This was the year in which Prince Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), former Prime Minister of Japan and major agent in the enactment of the Meiji Constitution in 1889, was assassinated by a Korean nationalist in Manchuria. Also in this period, one of the most radical exponents of the early women’s movement in Japan, Kanno Sugako (1881–1911), an anarcho-feminist journalist and activist who had participated in the Red Flag Incident of 1908,1 was plotting to assassinate the Meiji emperor. This conspiracy, known as the Great Treason Incident, led to the arrest of Kanno in May 1910 and her eventual execution. More importantly, it was also used to justify even tighter control and repression of any act connected to ideologies deemed potentially subversive (Sievers 1983: 139–58). Although Tanaka’s own family seem to have not been implicated in any of these events, one could argue that her background embodied the mixture of the traditional with the modern alongside the renegotiation of ideologies and imaginaries that this entailed. Tanaka’s mother Yasu belonged to a wealthy family linked to the renowned Taira samurai clan and hence represented the traditional customs and values of the upper social classes. On the other hand, her father Kumekichi fought in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) and was, according to Tanaka, a very liberal ‘modern man’ who was enthusiastic about everything that was new (Tanaka [1975] 2006: 296). Tanaka’s father died a year and a half after her birth and Yasu moved with her children to Osaka. Economic hardship as well as legal and social restrictions for women led her to seek the support of her brother Kobayashi Yasutarō, who became another great influence and guide in Tanaka’s childhood. A man of letters, he belonged to the first generation of graduates of Meiji University, founded in Tokyo in 1881, and supported Tanaka in her search for professional fulfilment (Tanaka [1975] 2006: 298). Just as the lives of these three people were deeply affected by the events and ideas of their time, Tanaka’s life was partly shaped by the frenzied socio-political development of Japan during the twentieth century.

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The youngest of eight brothers and sisters, Kinuyo exhibited an exceedingly strong personality from a very early age. Her autobiography recounts an incident in 1919 where she was scolded and detained by her teacher for secretly looking at her biwa2 music exercises while in class. Forced to stand in the rain while her laughing classmates left school, the nine-year-old Tanaka felt deeply humiliated. Despite being a very good student with high grades, she confronted her tutor, declaring she had no intention of studying in a school with this kind of teacher and left, never to return again to the formal education system (Furukawa 2004: 47–8; Tanaka [1975] 2006: 303–4). It follows that Tanaka did not experience the ideological indoctrination and gendered socialisation carried out in mainstream schools, which were being increasingly monitored by the state, and this may have been instrumental in both the development of her individualistic personality and her perception of the state of affairs for women in Japan. Rather than education, it was in the performance of show business that she learnt about gender roles, national myths, romance, friendship and power dynamics. From the day she left school, Tanaka concentrated on the practice of her musical instrument, an activity in which she had already shown potential. When her music teacher founded the Biwa Troupe (Biwa kagekidan), recruiting girls in their early teens to stand in direct competition with the popular Takarazuka Revue, Tanaka soon became one of the main performers (Tanaka [1975] 2006: 304). In other words, before reaching the age of twelve Tanaka was already a star. The Biwa Troupe’s venue was in Rakutenchi, one of Osaka’s most fashionable entertainment districts at the time. It was there that she watched a film for the first time, and Tanaka enthusiastically recalled the excitement of the cinematic experience and detailed the strong attraction she felt for the stars on the silver screen (Tanaka [1975] 2006: 305). From an on-screen standpoint, women by this time played important roles, with the Shōchiku actress Kurishima Sumiko (1902–87) being counted as among the nation’s first real film ‘stars’. As Furukawa Kaoru details in his preface to this volume, by her early teens Tanaka had decided to become a film actress; her mother, however, vehemently opposed her daughter’s decision. It took almost two years to convince her, but thanks to her uncle’s persuasion and a good word from her elder brother, who worked for a Shōchiku company, Tanaka was hired by the studio in 1924 and would spend the next several years shifting between Tokyo and Osaka. Tanaka’s own movements mirrored the way in which women of her generation were gravitating towards big cities. Ironically, it was soon after the promulgation of the Meiji Civil Code that family patterns in Japan gradually began to change. The main reason was the change in the national economic emphasis from agricultural to modern industrial. During the peak of feudalism, approximately

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80 per cent of Japan’s population lived in rural areas (Liddle and Nakajima 2000: 91), but by 1920 over a third of people resided in cities and towns with a population of over 1,000, a number which would rise exponentially over the following years (Hunter 1989: 94). This shift caused women to work outside the home in two main patterns. Many were sent to live and work in factories, with textile mills drawing the majority of their workforce from the ranks of young unmarried Japanese women (Pharr 1977: 229). On the other hand, the growth of white-collar offices provided multiple employment opportunities for young women, both within the businesses themselves (where they generally provided administrative support as secretaries or as members of the typing pool) and in the service industries which sprang up in response to the influx of young people into Japan’s cities. The development and public perception of these distinctly feminine employment roles were often linked to the modan gāru (modern girl) archetype, which is discussed in these pages by Lauri Kitsnik, but the importance of white-collar industry lay also in the relocation of thousands of young Japanese adults to the city, away from the repressive family structure. It led to the creation of a new type of domestic arrangement, the katei (literally, family), a smaller parent and child unit closely resembling the post-war nuclear family. Owing to many of the couples meeting in the hub of modernisation which was city life, the katei was focused on the husband and wife rather than extended family. At the very least, urbanisation loosened the shackles of family ties for the many Japanese women who moved to the city.

Tanaka’s entry into cinema By the time Tanaka began to work in film in 1924, the cinema industry was already well-developed structurally and economically. Although some local filmmaking practices remained, particularly in southernmost Okinawa (Ko 2010: 78), film production in Japan was by this time governed by established models of studio production and national distribution. Studios such as Shōchiku and Nikkatsu were large-scale businesses operating out of modern facilities with extensive technical and administrative support. The 1930s are commonly considered the first golden age of Japanese cinema – the second being the 1950s, the most famed portion of Tanaka’s career. Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956), Ozu Yasujirō (1903–63) and Naruse Mikio (1905–69) were already major studio filmmakers by this point, and Tanaka worked with the latter two in the pre-war period, along with other luminaries such as Gosho Heinosuke (1902–81) and Shimizu Hiroshi (1903–66). By the early 1930s, Shōchiku in particular was in the vanguard of the creation of a highly influential narrative style which began to tell women’s

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stories from a modern perspective. Studio head Kido Shirō (1894–1977) was cognisant of both the growing influence of the West on Japanese popular culture and the scores of women who were arriving in the nation’s cities owing to the urban centralisation of modern capitalist industries. With the arrival of sound, Kido also began to use Shōchiku’s Ofuna studio to specialise in a form of contemporary drama usually referred to as the shōshimingeki, which were predominantly domestically-set dramas designed to appeal to a predominantly female audience: Aware of women’s growing spending power and the need to foster new audiences, [Kido] saw the commercial potential in attracting women into cinemas and as a concomitance Shōchiku was instrumental in providing female audiences with an iconology of the ‘modern women’. (Standish 2005: 53) Kido had dual reasons for targeting an urban female audience: he saw that there was a market in the rapidly modernising Japan for films which recognised (if they did not directly challenge) repressive feudalistic attitudes towards women while at the same time noting that ‘women don’t come to the movie theatre alone . . . we can have larger audiences while spending less money on advertising’ (quoted in Wada-Marciano 2008: 80). In these films, which sought to reflect the realities of city life, women played a multitude of roles in familial and employment contexts. The style was variously labelled as kamata-chō or ofunachō (after the Kamakura studio which replaced Kamata in 1936), and such was the influence of the studio head on production that several sources use the term ‘Kidoism’ to describe it (Anderson and Richie 1982: 451; McDonald 2001: 175). Alongside Shōchiku stalwarts Ozu and Shimizu, filmmakers such as Gosho, Naruse and Mizoguchi also worked for the studio during this period. Broad stylistic differences among them may have persisted, but Kido spearheaded an overall move towards making films which acknowledged the ills of society while retaining a generally optimistic outlook towards human nature and the essential good which exists within individual members of society. Much like the more renowned American system, studios in Japan would retain key performers on salaried contracts. Although Tanaka would remain contracted to Shōchiku for the following twenty-six years, not everyone was immediately impressed. When she was initially employed, Shōchiku divided its production between two studios; Shimogamo in Kyoto (where jidaigeki period films were produced) and Kamata in Tokyo (which focused on contemporary-set gendaigeki). The Kansai-based Tanaka was employed at Shimogamo, but when Shōchiku decided to move its entire production operation to Tokyo she was forced to interview at Kamata. Kido was reportedly unimpressed by

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Tanaka on their first meeting, dismissing the fourteen-year old as yet another ‘wannabe kid’ and worse, a diminutive and not particularly good-looking one at that. According to Keiko McDonald, Tanaka ‘stood there silent, staring him down, fixing on him a look that would be famous later on when she became known as the very personification of grim determination’ (2005: 185). Tanaka was soon set on to work at Kamata. Idolising early Shōchiku star Kurishima, Tanaka rapidly rose through the ranks and was already a kanbu (leading actress in smaller productions) by the age of nineteen (McDonald 2005: 185). As was the case in the early years of the Hollywood studio system, young Japanese acting talent often appeared in advertising campaigns for any number of products. Shōchiku was particularly enthusiastic in the pursuit of these opportunities to promote its talent roster, so it was not unusual that Tanaka, alongside fellow star Yagumo Emiko (1903–79), appeared in a print advertisement for face powder within a year of beginning work at the studio (Inoue 2006: 147–8). Tanaka also struck up a hugely successful partnership with leading man Suzuki Denmei (1900–85), with the pair appearing in eight films together between 1928 and 1931, most notably Ushihara Kiyohiko (1897–1985)’s sociallyconcerned The Life of Workers in the Big City (Rōdō hen, 1929) and Marching On (Shingun, 1930). It was through her packaging with Suzuki in the shōshimingeki that Tanaka first became known as a genuine film star. Peter B. High argues that Tanaka’s partnership with Suzuki appealed to audiences because of the clear dichotomy which existed between the two: Suzuki, with his slicked back hair and Hollywood good looks, was an icon of the new mobo-moga subculture. Tanaka Kinuyo, who had recently displaced Kurishima Sumiko as the nation’s sweetheart, represented the traditional ideal of the demurely sweet girl-next-door. In this sense, she was in sharp contrast to her counterpart, Clara Bow’s peccantly feisty girl-next-door in William Wellman’s Wings . . . (2003: 13–14) The comparison between Tanaka and Clara Bow (1905–65) is worth investigating. Bow was a colourful figure known as the ‘It girl’, a term roughly analogous with the modan gāru, and according to Norman Zierold she achieved this status by playing characters whose behaviour was: daring and sometimes outrageous. Flirting and easy infatuation were the order of the day. Dancing, drinking, rouge and lipstick were all accepted. Old-fashioned sexual inhibitions were thrown overboard, but to everything there was a limit . . . Clara Bow was naughty, but underneath she was very nice. (1973: 169)

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Although Bow’s abrasive rejection of old-fashioned notions of how a woman should behave was somewhat tempered by basic standards of respectability, her characters could still be considered near opposites of those which Tanaka was famed for playing with Suzuki. In Wings (William A. Wellman, 1927), Bow’s character is overtly sexualised (as evinced by the famous shot where she appears naked from the chest up) and proactively joins the war effort by becoming an ambulance driver, a profession hardly associated with her gender. On the other hand, Tanaka’s character in the similarly-plotted Marching On is a kimono-clad woman from a land-owning family who passively supports the conflict simply by cheering her love interest, played by Suzuki. Meanwhile, Mantrap (Herbert Brenon, 1926) sees Bow playing an unsatisfied young wife stranded in Canada, who betrays her older (and sexually impotent) husband by seducing a New York divorce lawyer, a man she physically desires but also sees as her route back to America, which is positioned as a modern and free nation in relation to the stifling regression of rural Canada. Conversely, Tanaka’s character Kozue in the He and . . . trilogy (Ushihara Kiyohiko, 1928–9) is once again characterised by traditional values, particularly when positioned alongside her ‘modern and bourgeois’ stepmother, who is ‘depicted as self-centred and hedonistic’ in opposition to the altruism and filial piety of her stepdaughter (Wada-Marciano 2008: 64).3 Tanaka’s roles as chaste, traditional woman expectantly fall on the mild side of the conservative and masculine ideology that was being challenged by Bow. Nevertheless, the point to make here is that she was placed alongside more modern counterparts (often Suzuki as the westernised mobo [modern boy]), thus allowing the dichotomised debate surrounding modernity in 1920s Japan to be played out on-screen. The negotiation of modernity was often played out through dichotomies circumscribed by gender and sexuality, that is, modern man versus traditional woman, as in the case of Suzuki and Tanaka, or moga versus traditional woman, as Wada-Marciano (2008) further analyses. As some chapters in this volume will demonstrate, Tanaka was not necessarily always associated with the non-modern, but what is clear is that she was fully involved in the debates around the changing social world of Japan even in the early stages of her career.

Pre-war stardom and the embodiment of national ideas The Japanese film industry did not turn to sound until the early 1930s, with the conversion not becoming fully complete until the final part of the decade. The transition brought about a whole host of challenges for everyone involved in film production, not least actors now forced to add another dimension to their

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performances. Tanaka coped with these struggles better than some of her contemporaries and Shōchiku showed faith in her ability to transition by casting Tanaka as the female lead in Gosho’s The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, 1931), the studio’s first full-length sound production and a film widely regarded as the first technologically successful Japanese synchronised talkie. Despite the largely traditional character played in the film, as a professional Tanaka was clearly positioned at the forefront of the switch from an old system to a newer one – another facet of the complicated relationship with modernity and change which typified her career. The years preceding Japan’s 1941 entry into war with the Allied forces witnessed the rapid ascent of Tanaka at Shōchiku. Tanaka reached daikanbu (executive rank), the highest position an actress could attain, by the time she was 25 (McDonald 2005: 189), and in this period usually appeared in at least ten of the studio’s productions per year, a breakneck pace only accelerated by the fact that she was the female lead in the vast majority of these films. She made early sound era appearances in films by familiar directors such as Naruse in Two Eyes (Sōbō, 1933), Ozu in Dragnet Girl (Hijōsen no onna, 1933) and Gosho in Burden of Life (Jinsei no onimotsu, 1935), alongside a hugely critically successful appearance in Shimazu Yasujirō (1897–1945)’s Okoto and Sasuke (Shunkinshō: Okoto to Sasuke, 1935). In the film, Tanaka plays Okoto, a woman who has been blind since childhood but is still so indoctrinated by feudal social values that she refuses to marry Sasuke, a servant of the house, on social grounds. Against the backdrop of these traditional characters, there is something of an exception to be found in Ozu’s Dragnet Girl. Here, Tanaka plays a Yokohama typist leading a double life as the girlfriend of a small-time gangster. However, even in a film where Tanaka plays a modern girl who behaves in a less than pristine fashion, she eventually reforms and also convinces the gangster to give up crime. There were many variations on the biographical details of the characters played by Tanaka during this period, as Ayako Saito and Lauri Kitsnik argue in these pages, but a defining facet which made her characters so remarkable could be the adherence to an anachronistic moral code in a harsh, unforgiving contemporary reality. During the Second World War, cinema in Japan was, much like any other resource, diverted towards supporting the war effort, or as High puts it, the Japanese film world was a microcosm of the entire sphere of Japanese wartime culture, experiencing the same pressures and reacting according to the same pathology as those in other areas of cultural endeavour. (2003: xiii) The primary way in which pressure was exerted was through the implementation of legislation. The 1938 National Mobilisation Law ‘authorised sweeping

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state controls over labour, industry and other civil sectors’ and thus provided a legal framework for more specifically directed actions (Kasza 1993: 195). As an industry with a strong potential for influence, cinema was a natural target for state action and the 1937/39 Film Laws allowed the Censorship Office of the Home Ministry not only to exert control over every stage of the creative process, but also to compel exhibitors to include government-produced education films as part of their programmes (Brodey 2014: 290). The Film Law made it a requirement for everyone, from stage hand to exhibitor, working in the film industry to obtain a state licence and anyone found to be in violation could face up to six months in prison (Kasza 1993: 235). This was not an empty threat; notable figures imprisoned for opposing the Film Law included critic Iwasaki Akira (1903–81) and documentary filmmaker Kamei Fumio (1908–87) (Nornes 2003: 177; Standish 2005: 138). Re-emphasising the Meiji concept of ‘good wife, wise mother’ (ryōsai kenbo) as the optimum model for Japanese femininity, magazines such as Shufu no Tomo (Housewife’s Friend) frequently stressed the importance of the family concentrating its energies on the war effort, directly linking the family with the propaganda effort by coining neologisms such as ‘family patriotism’ (katei aikoku) and ‘family service to the state’ (katei hōkoku) (Nishikawa 1999: 486). Of course, the main way in which Japan’s male populace supported the war was by fighting in it, an option which was not available to Japanese women, who were instead deployed in practical and nurturing roles using skills which had already been developed by years of ryōsai kenbo education and by the division of labour in the household. All women were mandated to join the Women’s National Defence Association (WNDA, Kokubō fujinkai), an organisation which saw soldiers off as they departed, nursed them when they were wounded and prepared supplies to send to the front (Pharr 1977: 231; Kaneko 1995: 9). Therefore, the role of women was one of fervent support for the public war efforts and quiet strength on the domestic front. Tanaka appeared in several wartime films which could be argued to have propagandistic messages, including playing a spy’s mule in Yoshimura Kōzaburō (1911–2000)’s On the Eve of War (Kaisen no zenya, 1943) and a role in the statesponsored Shōchiku compendium Victory Song (Hisshōka, 1945). The most notorious of her wartime appearances, however, is in one of the most controversial pieces of Japanese cinema of the era, Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–88)’s Army (Rikugun, 1944). The film is famed for a denouement featuring Tanaka’s character frantically racing to see her enlisted son as he marches through their town prior to being dispatched to the combat theatre. The scene, which is discussed in more detail here by Alexander Jacoby, provoked angry reactions from censors, who insisted that Tanaka’s emotive, quivering reaction to her son’s prospective

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involvement in the conflict was in fact a tacit condemnation of the nation’s military manoeuvres rather than a simple elocution of maternal anguish. Tim Cross writes that the film was commissioned by the Ministry of War and was criticised for ‘not doing enough to glorify the war it was funded to commemorate’ (2013: 123–4), while Donald Richie more plainly states that ‘mothers were supposed to be smiling proudly as sons were sent off to battle; the kind of scene which occurred with some frequency in other pictures’ (2005: 93). Considering the wide reach of Meiji ideology and the nature of wartime state censorship it might seem reasonable to define the pre-war era as one in which the nation’s women were plainly and uncomplicatedly oppressed. Hirota Masaki, however, argues against such a universally negative view of the period. Although it may have seemed like a ‘one way process of shutting women up in the home’, it was a period in which the role of a woman, be it as moga or wartime housewife, was promoted and thus the possibility for women to develop selfworth was established in Japan for the first time in its history (1999: 214–15). Women were allowed to work outside the home for the first time and, as Michael Smith argues here in relation to Tanaka’s appearances with Mizoguchi, had the opportunity to be active in multiple spheres, albeit on a limited scale. As supportive wives, city girls and famed actresses, women were in the forefront of national imagery.

The golden era As the chapters in this volume by Smith, Kanno, González-LÓpez and Ashida attest, the years immediately following Japan’s surrender in 1945 saw significant changes to the legal status of Japanese women. The Civil Law (1947) was a wideranging piece of legislation giving women the legal right to be the named owners of property, control the finances of their family and automatically receive one third of their spouse’s estate as inheritance (Yoshizumi 1995: 189). In the same year, the Labour Standards Law decreed that a man and woman in the same job should receive the same compensation and also granted twelve weeks’ maternity leave to women (Hoover 2011: 159). In 1948, abortion was decriminalised for the first time in the country’s history, with legal justifications for termination including poor financial situation and risk of hereditary illness (Norgren 2001: 40), and the New Civil Code framed marriage as a union between two individuals, with parental permission no longer needed for over-25s and adultery now being valid grounds for a woman to file for divorce (Fuess 2004: 147, 150). A year later, over thirty women’s higher educational facilities were given full college status (Hara 1995: 103), giving Japanese women the opportunity to strive for the same scholastic achievements as their male counterparts. In the space of just two years, a

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Japanese legal system which was heavily implicated in the repression of women was overhauled so that they now had more control over their personal financial affairs, a degree of equity in the workplace and their salaries, access to legitimised higher education, freedom to marry (and divorce) and reproductive rights. Against the backdrop of these theoretically radical changes, a golden age of Japanese studio cinema began to emerge, with women’s themes and star actresses at the forefront. After the war, the occupying administration, known as General Headquarters (GHQ), worked closely with the film industry to ensure that Japanese cinema was reflecting the broad ideological messages which it was attempting to convey via its social and legal reforms. As such, stories of women’s liberation were welcomed and Mizoguchi made two films starring Tanaka during the Occupation period which addressed these topics; The Victory of Women (Josei no shōri, 1946) and My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, 1949). Alongside encouragement of broad thematic grounds, a system of double censorship was held in place until 1949. The system required studios to submit scripts for approval at the pre-production stage as well as censors having to pass the finished film before it could be released for public consumption (Hirano 1992: 40). As such, films made during the period of direct Occupation oversight of cinema which address issues of women’s rights have often been accused of reflecting Occupation propaganda, an issue dealt with at length in studies by Lars-Martin Sorensen (2009) and Kyoko Hirano (1992). Even after the departure of the Occupation, films based around women became increasingly common; the shōshimingeki continued to be the dominant form of contemporary drama during this time, only now the films had the added impetus of focusing on the socio-political events of recent years. At Shōchiku, Ozu was at the top of the list of those who were investigating the changing parameters and dynamics of the Japanese family in the post-war years. Further afield at Tōhō, Naruse was occupying the same thematic ground, although his works often focused on the nature of female independence in relation to the family, while Mizoguchi’s career-long interest in the world of organised prostitution became more pressing in the first half of the 1950s as the debate surrounding criminalisation accelerated. Other notable filmmakers were also delving into the world of women’s issues during this period. Kurosawa Akira (1910–98) produced several contemporary dramas in the period, including Stray Dog (Nora inu, 1949), an Occupation-era film which uses the trappings of the police procedural genre to examine the impact of the war and the subsequent rise of organised crime on women. The 1950s films of Shimizu, looked at by Alexander Jacoby here, explored the themes of maternal sacrifice in a much more cynical way than was common of the period. Kobayashi Masaki (1916–96), meanwhile, helmed domestic dramas such as Somewhere Under the Broad Sky

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(Kono hiroi sora no doko kani, 1954) and prostitution narratives including the controversial Black River (Kuroi kawa, 1957), which focused on the criminal subcultures surrounding American military bases in Japan. In short, many highprofile Japanese filmmakers were not only making films which dealt with life for women in post-war Japan, but were doing so by bringing forward a wide range of issues which affected women during the period, including the impact of the urban shift on the family, war widows, the changing role of women as wives and daughters, access to education, the legality and morality of abortion, prostitution, divorce and adultery. Part of the reason for this was that many of the biggest film stars of the early post-war period were women, with a fleet of female actresses including Tanaka, Hara Setsuko (1920–2015), Kagawa Kyōko (1931–), Takamine Hideko (1924–2010), Yamada Isuzu (1917–2012) and Kyō Machiko (1924–) all reaching the peak of their stardom from the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Against this backdrop of radical reform and the corresponding thematic interest in women’s issues, conditions were favourable for these actresses to enjoy the best years of their careers from a popular and, in most cases, artistic standpoint. This was no more true than with Tanaka, who during the period appeared in a diverse palette of films, many of which not only dealt with the matters of the day but have also been acknowledged as classics of the era and, indeed, of world cinema. Much of Tanaka’s work during this watermark period dealt with the contemporary situation for women in post-war Japan. In Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, 1948), Tanaka played a mother of a small child who is forced to resort to drastic measures to keep her family solvent while waiting for her husband’s repatriation. In a much darker film in style and tone than is typical of the normally optimistic filmmaker, Tanaka’s character is a brooding, complex woman whose decision to resort to prostitution, an issue very much in the public consciousness in the run-up to the 1956 Anti-Prostitution law (which is detailed by Kanno and Saito here) ultimately results in her being assaulted by her returning husband. Tanaka also starred alongside Takamine in Ozu’s more familiarly Kidoist The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyōdai, 1950), playing an unhappy wife whose sister works to reunite her with a former love – a theme which clearly corresponds with the 1947 Civil Law definition of marriage as the pursuit of happiness. Tanaka also played lone mothers in two films with Naruse in the early 1950s, both of which featured extremely different characterisations and locations but were united in expressing the difficulties of single living as a woman. In Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza keshō, 1951), Tanaka’s character is a geisha working in the Tokyo pleasure district to support her young son and contemplating, in the face of continued inequity, whether the time for her to chase her own happiness

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has already passed. Mother (Okāsan, 1952), which is discussed in these pages by Jacoby, finds Tanaka as a small-town widower with two older children, both of whose futures seem to lie away from their town and, more to the point, away from the eponymous maternal figure. Both films hint at a theme which recurs throughout the analyses of Tanaka’s work as an actress and as a director: the gap which existed between the superficially enhanced position of Japanese women brought about by the post-war legal changes and the actual realities of their situation in a recovering nation. It was Tanaka’s post-war work with Mizoguchi, a mixture of contemporary and period-set films, that brought both her and the filmmaker their biggest recognition. The implications are discussed by Smith, but it is worth pointing out that the vast majority of English-language work on Tanaka as an actress has concentrated on her work with Mizoguchi. Their relationship was a logical one; Mizoguchi had a career-long interest in the sacrifices made and injustices doled out to Japanese women and Tanaka was the actress he most frequently used as a conduit for his nuanced, mostly sympathetic portrayals of Japanese women. As a woman who commits a crime of passion in Utamaro and His Five Women (Utamaro wo meguru gonin no onna, 1946) and as the bourgeois outcast forced to resort to work as a courtesan in The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai-onna, 1952), Tanaka played women who refuse to submit quietly to unjust treatment. The Victory of Women and My Love Has Been Burning, meanwhile, feature Tanaka playing independent professional women whose actions, emotions and overall sense of morality are clearly informed by the new cognisance of women’s rights issues in Japan. Tanaka also starred as women wronged by fallible humans and the movements of history in two of Mizoguchi’s most critically-acclaimed films, Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, 1954), and in her final collaboration with Mizoguchi, The Woman of Rumour (Uwasa no onna, 1954). Their professional relationship ended acrimoniously shortly afterwards when Mizoguchi used his position as Chair of the Directors’ Guild of Japan to (unsuccessfully) attempt to block her from receiving a filmmaking assignment. Nevertheless, their work together in the early 1950s is generally perceived not only as their respective creative watermarks but also as what brought both figures to the attention of the West for the first time. The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff won prizes at Venice International Film Festival in consecutive years, with the latter two being awarded the Silver Lion, the festival’s second-highest award. Tanaka was also a richly acknowledged figure domestically. In 1948, she received the Best Actress prizes in the influential Mainichi Film Awards for Mizoguchi’s The Love of Sumako the Actress (Joyū Sumako no koi, 1947 ) and the relatively littleknown Kinoshita/Shindō Kaneto (who would later write a book on Tanaka’s life)

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film Marriage (Kekkon, 1947); she would claim the same accolade the following year for her work in Mizoguchi’s prostitution drama Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, 1948) and Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind. Interestingly, the other major domestic recognition came at the very end of her career for Sandakan 8 (Sandakan hachiban shōkan: bōkyō, Kumai Kei, 1974), for which she received the Best Actress awards from both Mainichi and the venerated film magazine Kinema junpō. Tanaka was awarded the same prize at the 1975 edition of the Berlin Film Festival – the only major international acting award of an on-screen career which spanned over half a decade. Considering the esteem in which Sandakan 8 was held at the time, the fact that very little has been written in either English or Japanese on the film or on Tanaka’s performance in it speaks to a larger truth: the lack of attention paid to Tanaka’s career after the immediate post-war golden era. This is a charge that can fairly be levelled at this book too, which almost exclusively focuses on her acting work up until the mid-1950s. While there are some practical reasons relating to access for Western scholars, it still stands that there has been precious little scholarly focus on the final quarter of her career. The reason for this is that Tanaka’s career as a star film actress was finished before her fiftieth birthday, her last major leading roles being in Ozu’s Equinox Flower (Higanbana, 1958) and Kinoshita’s The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō, 1958). There would be supporting roles in the following years in successful films by Ichikawa Kon (Alone Across the Pacific [Taiheiyō hitoribochi], 1963), Kurosawa (Red Beard [Aka-hige], 1965) and Naruse (A Wanderer’s Notebook [Hōrōki], 1962), but by the middle of the 1960s Tanaka was mainly a television actress, with little notoriety until the autumnal recognition of her work in Kumei’s film. Much as was the case with her Hollywood contemporaries Rita Hayworth (1918–87) and Joan Fontaine (1917–2013), age dimmed the light of an actress who had spent the majority of her long career as a leading lady. By the time of her death in 1977, Tanaka the actress was mourned for who she was in the film world rather than for what she had become.

Behind the camera After twenty-nine years in the industry as a performer, Tanaka Kinuyo turned to filmmaking in 1953. While she cannot be labelled as Japan’s first female film director – a prestige that belongs to Sakane Tazuko (1904–75) for New Clothing (Hatsusugata, 1936) – Tanaka was certainly the only woman active as a commercial filmmaker between 1953 and 1962 in Japan, and one of the few in the world, as we will discuss in further detail later. During those ten years, she made six feature films. Although this may not seem a

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high number, it is not a fact to be taken in the abstract; after Tanaka there have been relatively few women who have found regular work as filmmakers within the boundaries of mainstream Japanese cinema. Tanaka’s star status ensured the visibility of her work; five of her six films were by the major studios Shintōhō, Nikkatsu, Daiei and Tōhō (through their Tokyo Eiga imprint). Furthermore, this gave her access to a remarkable number of high-profile actors and creative staff; her debut feature Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953) was adapted for the screen by Kinoshita and her second film, The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955), came from an unused Ozu script gifted to her by the great filmmaker, and her films consistently featured top-line acting talent such as Mori Masayuki (1911–73), Kagawa Kyōko, Ryū Chishū (1904–93), Kyō Machiko and Sugi Yōko (1928–). As the chapters by Saito, ArmendárizHernández, Kanno, González-López and Ashida will reveal, Tanaka’s work as a director was simultaneously representative of and exceptional in the popular and critical film culture in Japan. Tanaka’s work as a filmmaker was not notable merely because of her gender, but also because she was making films during a transitional time for Japanese women; freshly enfranchised and with increased access to education and a growing range of employment opportunities, women in Japan were beginning to enjoy a degree of equity after a modern history that had been characterised by patriarchal subjugation. Although, as mentioned above, many male mainstream filmmakers addressed female issues, few approached them with the ferocity typical of many of Tanaka’s films. In her brief sojourn into filmmaking, Tanaka directly tackled difficult topics such as forced rehabilitation centres for former prostitutes and the subsequent struggle to integrate back into conventional society (Girls of Dark [Onna bakari no yoru], 1961), breast cancer (The Eternal Breasts [Chibusa yo eien nare], 1955), interracial relationships and the stigma they bring (Love Letter) and women wronged by the machinations of history (The Wandering Princess [Ruten no ōhi, 1960] and Love under the Crucifix [Oginsama, 1962]). Aside from these obvious themes, we see many other broad tropes which correlate with the evolving situation for women in post-war Japan; The Moon Has Risen looks at the gravitational pull which the city held for young women who sought to take advantage of the professional, personal and romantic opportunities it offered, and the idea of sex for women as a recreational rather than a functional pursuit is explored in Girls of Dark and The Eternal Breasts, both of which feature complex, engaging lead female protagonists who are above all else characterised by their imperfections. As a filmmaker, Tanaka therefore has three layers of relevance; she was the only Japanese woman making films during the artistically and historically significant post-war classical era of her nation’s cinema; her activity as a filmmaker coincided with a period of immense socio-political importance for

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Japanese women, and her films themselves directly addressed the contemporary female audiences on a thematic and narrative basis. In evaluating the status quo of women filmmaking, Angela Martin identifies two kinds of omission that poignantly apply to Tanaka’s case (2003: 29). Firstly, she highlights the lack of availability of works directed by women owing to the films being lost or removed from distribution. Tanaka’s films as a director have been broadcast on commercial television pay channels in Japan, although only half have been released on domestic video or DVD. Outside Japan, her work has recently started to be shown at festivals and academic conferences,4 but remains generally inaccessible. Secondly, Martin states that this loss ‘reflects and is reflected in the discipline of film studies’, which tends to ignore the work of women filmmakers and focus on their male counterparts; as Martin rightly notes, this applies also to feminist film theory (2003: 29–30). In the case of Tanaka, there is a clear tendency to concentrate on her overwhelming career as an actress, which seems to eclipse her work as director. Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, in their classic study The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1982: 185), give a brief but positive commentary on her facets as filmmaker. This is, however, an exception and the majority of histories of Japanese cinema have traditionally elided this significant aspect of her career (Sato 1982; Richie 2005; Standish 2005). Yet, as in the case of exhibition, one can appreciate a positive trend towards acknowledgement and reappraisal (Jacoby 2008; Sharp 2011; Stevens 2016; Armendáriz-Hernández and González-López 2017). Japanese-language scholarship on Tanaka, although much more profuse, has almost exclusively revolved around her acting career (Furukawa 2004; Shimura 2006; Ishiwari 2008; Ōba 2014). These works offer detailed biographies and analyse her work with the great directors of the classical era, while only briefly mentioning her role as director. Tanaka herself reinforced this disposition in her memoirs, where she barely dedicates three pages out of a hundred to the subject ([1975] 2006: 372–5). On the other hand, scholars such as Saito Ayako (2007, 2012) and Katō Mikirō (2011) have effectively advocated the films Tanaka directed as being objects of research in their own right rather than a subsidiary to her work as an actress. Thus, set against the status quo of women’s filmmaking, her case complies with the general worldwide trends identified by Martin, but also evidences the efforts being made to overcome both kinds of omission. Tanaka’s status as one of the most celebrated stars of Japanese cinema seems to have both protected her work from being fully omitted while simultaneously inciting the neglect of her director persona. In many senses, Tanaka is a privileged figure in the history of women’s filmmaking. E. Ann Kaplan, focusing primarily on American cinema, divides this

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history into four phases, the first two of which are particularly relevant to Tanaka. After a first phase of female pioneers (1906–30), women were ‘silenced’ in a gradually consolidated industry built around the studios as ‘powerful male bastions’ during the years of classical Hollywood (1930–60) (2003: 17–18). At the time Tanaka was directing mainstream films in Japan, only a few others, including the actress Ida Lupino (1918–95) in America and Jacqueline Audry (1908–77) in France, worked in commercial cinema. As with these contemporaries, Tanaka’s worldwide status as forerunner, therefore, has long been disregarded by the narrative of women’s filmmaking history.5 In a 1961 roundtable discussion gathering Tanaka and other influential Japanese women working in the cinema industry, Tanaka seems surprised to realise that perhaps only a handful of women around the world were doing what she was (Kawakita et al. 1961).6 All the participants show great concern about the role of women filmmakers, producers and critics in the West, suggesting that the West served for them as a parameter by which to measure Japan’s modernisation and advance towards gender equality (Armendáriz-Hernández and González-López 2017). Tanaka’s work in effect challenges presumptions about the progressive lead of certain Western nations and powerful cinema industries over those perceived to be on the periphery, such as Japan. Her achievement, however, is not the reflection of a gender-equal national industry: quite the reverse. Like Hollywood, the Japanese studio system was a conspicuously male-centred organisation where very few women could reach key positions. Scriptwriting was probably the area where women could most easily develop a fruitful and acknowledged career, and hence arguably exert significant influence on the work of male directors. Such is the case with Wada Natto (1920–83), essential to the films of her husband Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008), as well as Mizuki Yōko (1910–2003) and Tanaka Sumie (1908–2000), who each wrote some of Naruse Mikio’s most renowned films. The lives and work of Wada Natto and Tanaka Sumie, who contributed scripts to three of Tanaka’s films, are discussed in depth in the chapters by Armendáriz-Hernández and Saito respectively, so we will here concentrate on Mizuki, one of the most accomplished scriptwriters in the history of Japanese cinema, who unfortunately rejected Tanaka’s offer to collaborate on her films (Kinema junpō 1977: 117). At the age of twenty-three, Mizuki began her career by scriptwriting for stage plays and radio dramas. Under the tutelage of the prolific Yasumi Toshio (1903–91), Mizuki entered the cinema industry as a writer in 1949 and achieved critical and popular acclaim in 1950 for Until We Meet Again (Mata au hi made, Imai Tadashi) (Kitsnik et al. 2015:). This was the beginning of her fruitful collaboration with the director Imai Tadashi (1912–91), which includes outstanding works such as The Tower of Lilies (Himeyuri no tō, 1953), The Story of Pure

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Love (Jun’ai monogatari, 1957) and Kiku and Isamu (Kiku to Isamu, 1959). A substantial number of Mizuki’s scripts are original stories rather than adaptations, and hence the influence of her work on Imai’s image as a fine director of women’s stories and social issues should not be underestimated. In addition to Imai, multiple-award-winning Mizuki wrote celebrated scripts for directors such as Naruse (especially their films Mother [Okāsan, 1952] and Floating Clouds [Ukigumo, 1955]), Yoshimura Kōzaburō (e.g. The Age of Marriage [Konki, 1961]), Ichikawa (e.g. Younger Brother [Otōto, 1960]) and Kobayashi Masaki (e.g. Kwaidan, 1964). In the 1970s her work in film notably decreased, but she continued writing for television. Mizuki’s work has been identified with a sensitivity for women’s issues (Ōkubo 2008: 230–1; Kitsnik et al. 2015; Japanese Women Behind the Scenes 2016), which could explain why Tanaka wanted to collaborate with her for her opera prima. Moreover, her persona can also be associated with humanist left ideologies, not only because of her collaboration with directors such as Naruse and Imai, but also because of her personal life story. A Tokyoite, Mizuki attended a girls’ senior high school in the pre-war era and then graduated from Bunka Gakuin (a prestigious vocational school connected to, for instance, director Kamei Fumio, and actresses Irie Takako [1911–95] and Takamine Hideko), which hints at a culturally affluent upbringing. Other biographical details, such as her appearances as an actress in the Tokyo Left-Wing Theatre, her study of Russian and her marriage to and quick divorce from scriptwriter Taniguchi Senkichi (1912–2007), can only reinforce this image of an educated, independent and self-aware woman. It is undeniable that women like Mizuki, Wada Natto and Tanaka Sumie played very significant roles in the imaginary fabricated by the studio system, and consequently in the configuration of the post-war josei eiga (woman’s film). As also reflected in the literature industry of the time,7 writing was celebrated as an intellectual and artistic employment arena where woman could compete with men, and as such female screenwriters often featured in film journals and magazines. Directing, on the other hand, was largely perceived as a man’s job. In the previously mentioned roundtable in 1961, Tanaka states that Mochizuki Yūko (1917–77), an actress who had directed a medium-length film, claimed that being a director was such a physically and psychologically demanding task that it was unsuitable for women (Kawakita et al. 1961: 67). Later on, Tanaka points out leadership as a necessary quality for a director, and the actress Takamine, also taking part in the discussion, states that having to lead a large crew would be very hard for her (Kawakita et al. 1961: 67). All the participants seem to vaguely agree that the role of leader and co-ordinator, as well as the hard labour entailed in direction, make it less suitable for women and even claim that this is the reason why most women filmmakers (around the world) rarely manage to make more

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than one or two feature films. Although in general terms Tanaka and the others criticise the gender inequality pervasive in the cinema industry, they fail to point out any specific ways, in the film world and society at large, in which female directors are hampered from accessing mainstream productions. On the other hand, it is worth underscoring that several women at the time were successfully conducting work in the industry that demanded those same skills. Actresses Kishi Keiko (1932–), Kuga Yoshiko (1931–) and Arima Ineko (1932–) led Ninjin Club (Bungei purodakushon ninjin kurabu), a production company which was seeking to protect actors’ freedom of work against the constraints of the studios, and which was responsible for the production of Tanaka’s last film, Love under the Crucifix (Oginsama, 1962).8 In 1955 Mizunoe Takiko (1915–2009) joined Nikkatsu to produce over seventy films in the following fifteen years, including Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, Nakahira Kō, 1956) and Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, Suzuki Seijun, 1967). Outside the world of mainstream fiction, Atsugi Taka (1907–98) and Haneda Sumiko (1926–) were directing documentaries. While they are exceptional cases, these women and others effectively occupied positions of leadership, co-ordinated and monitored staff and handled the physical and psychological challenges of work on set. Therefore, although the magnitude of a major studio’s feature production in terms of workforce, budget and infrastructure cannot easily be compared to all of these cases, some of which are lower-scale productions, the existence of Ninjin Club, Mizunoe and Haneda demonstrates that positions of leadership in the film industry other than the glorified position of ‘director’ were being occupied by women. Taking into consideration the conditions faced by professionals such as Tanaka and Takamine in the early 1960s (and their own perceptions of those conditions), one can only imagine the opposition and struggle faced in the prewar era by Sakane Tazuko. Sakane joined the Nikkatsu Studio in 1929 to work as a script girl on Mizoguchi’s crew. On the basis of her diaries, Matsumoto Yumiko explains that, in order to avoid being bullied, Sakane soon began dressing in male fashion (2001: 248–9). Extant pictures of Sakane on set show her with a short haircut, wearing knickerbockers, a leather jacket and a peaked cap (Ikegawa 2001; Matsumoto 2001). According to Matsumoto, at the time these kinds of clothes were not manufactured for women, so Sakane went to a children’s store to buy boy’s clothes (2001: 249). After spending years proving her worth as a script girl, editor and assistant director, Sakane became an essential member of Mizoguchi’s crew. When she was finally given the opportunity to debut as director in 1936 with New Clothing (Hatsusugata), it is said that Sakane suffered fierce bullying from her all-male crew, who ignored her commands and openly spoke badly of her within hearing range (Matsumoto 2001: 249). Since neither the film nor reviews are extant, it is impossible to judge Sakane’s work.

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After directing a culture film (bunka eiga) about the Ainu people in 1941, Sakane moved to the continent to join the Motion Picture Association of Manchuria in 1942 (Ikegawa 2001: 19–20). There she found a much more accepting and fruitful working environment that enabled her to direct several documentaries, culture films and newsreel films.9 After the war, however, Sakane returned to Japan but was never able to direct again, owing to a new regulation that required directors to hold a university degree (a measure that in itself served as a gatekeeper against women, who rarely attended higher education at the time). Sakane returned to work once again as an assistant for Mizoguchi and other directors, but retired in 1950. Ikegawa Reiko points out that Sakane has been praised as ‘the only woman director of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ and simultaneously condemned as a ‘director of propaganda’ (2001: 16–17). Her experience reiterates the fact that, in addition to the job itself (as physically hard-labour as it surely was back then), it was the power dynamics and furthermore the hierarchical group bullying practices facilitated by the environment of the studio system and its gender-fixated crews which played very important parts in preventing women from developing their creativity. It was not until Tanaka’s debut in 1953 that another woman was able to direct a film in Japan. It is also worth noting that after Tanaka’s publicised entry into filmmaking, several women, such as the actress Hidari Sachiko (1930–2001), managed to sporadically direct one or two feature films, and Hamano Sachi (1948–) established herself within the pink (soft porn) film industry; but it was only in the 1990s that Kazama Shiori (1966–) accomplished a substantial filmography of feature fictional works as director. Tanaka’s six feature films were only surpassed in recent years by Kawase Naomi (1969–). Unlike Tanaka, who was engaged in commercial cinema, Kazama and Kawase both predominantly work in the independent sector. Nevertheless, it must be highlighted that in the last two decades Japan has seen the emergence of a burgeoning generation of prolific and diverse female commercial filmmakers.10

Women’s filmmaking and authorship Returning to the classical studio era, it seems that it was the symbolic power associated with the position of the ‘director’ of feature fiction mainstream productions that was prohibited for women. In the late 1950s, directors stood at the zenith of cinema art and industry and associating the figure with traditionally male qualities such as leadership, physical resilience and authority placed the role further out of reach for women. The idea of the director as an omniscient figure of authority, as master or sensei, leads us to the next key point in the

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discussion of women’s filmmaking, which deals with the notion of the auteur. The label ‘auteur’ is one of the most effective means through which one can place a director in the spotlight and stimulate research on her or his personal life, aesthetics and working style; and for this reason, it is useful to instigate the appraisal and visibility of women filmmakers. Nevertheless, as Martin convincingly argues, ‘authorship is the main aspect of film theory that directly affects women filmmakers; however, for historical reasons, it actually contributes to the omission of women’s films from circulation and from film theory’ (2003: 29). Analysing writings of several theorists and critics, including those of Cahiers du Cinéma, which fundamentally changed the way we think about authorship in cinema, Martin claims that the term auteur appears conflated with male-related qualities such as ‘virility’ and images of, for instance, youth as an explosion of violent anger, that may not easily apply to women’s filmmaking (2003: 31). This ‘call for a selfexpression is very different from the later feminist call for the personal to be political rather than ego-centric’ (Martin 2003: 31). Although, as we will discuss later, the imposed correlation of women’s filmmaking with feminist or women-centred themes can be problematic, Martin’s discussion renders visible another kind of barrier which has traditionally hampered women from becoming, and being perceived as, auteurs. In the case of classical Japanese cinema, established authors such as Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa were often portrayed in film magazines as being authoritarian, demanding, stubborn or opinionated, qualities that in general terms greatly differ from the image of traditional femininity socially prescribed for women at the time. This symbolic association, added to the fact there were indeed no female directors for long periods of time, contributed to configure the author in Japanese mainstream cinema as an ungendered, masculine figure. Authorship has been fundamental in the development of Japanese film studies, giving rise to an extensive body of scholarship.11 Since Kurosawa was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice in 1951 for Rashomon (1950), the success of certain Japanese directors in international film festivals could only fuel the fascination for the unique worlds these individuals were able to re-create on-screen. However, in 1986, Hasumi Shigehiko warned against the frenzy of ranking the ‘giants of Japanese cinema’ to be recorded in world cinema history (trans. 2016), and by then the emphasis on the auteur had generally decreased in film studies and criticism. Yet numerous monographs on Japanese directors are still regularly being published (and this present book is one example), as if the vast legacy of Japanese cinema were an inexhaustible mine of fascinating individual authors. On the other hand, the definition, consumption and appraisal of auteur films by domestic and international audiences are imbricated with the

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process of imagining Japaneseness, especially in terms of identities of gender and nation. Thus, the work of these directors became a window for the world into Japanese culture, and conversely, it appeared that Japanese identity could be explained, or at least understood, through the narratives and aesthetics these films exhibited. Since auteurism first arose in the late 1940s through André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, before being later expanded on by the American critic Andrew Sarris in the 1960s, the concept has been widely discussed and contested. In later years, the core of the analysis shifted from the intentions and biographical experiences of the author towards an almost unconscious imprint consistently left by the auteur on the films (Wollen 1972 and Staiger 1985, among others).12 The main criticism of auteurism, which has led to it being generally marginalised from current film theory debates, is its disregard of the collaborative aspect of creating a film. In the case of Japan, it is very difficult to determine the input of, for instance, Nogami Teruyo (1927–), an invaluable member of Kurosawa’s crew since she worked as continuity editor on Rashomon and is variously credited in some of his other films as assistant director, assistant producer and production manager. The excellence of Kurosawa’s film and his ‘unique world’ would probably have been impossible also without the mastery of cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo (1908–99). In a similar way, one can question to what extent Wada Natto is responsible for what is considered Ichikawa’s cinema, or Tanaka for the world of Mizoguchi’s films. The collaborative nature of film is sharpened even more in the environment of the classical studio system, not only on account of standardised crews, but also because the disposition, arrangement and financing of the system entailed that many conditions and demands were forced upon any contract director, thus circumscribing his or her decision-making. Despite the decline of auteurism, and despite Roland Barthes’ claim for the death of the author,13 the figure of the director remains central in discourse around cinema and, as mentioned earlier, this is particularly true for Japanese cinema. The multi-layered and contested notion of the author is further complicated when we zoom into female authorship. Since the development of feminist film theory in the early 1970s, scholars, activists and artists have sought to define female authorship and to develop ways to use it as a tool against patriarchy. Drawing on the limitations perceived in analysing a film primarily through the lens of its auteur, debates have also risen around the legitimacy, applicability, necessity and benefits of differentiating female authorship (Johnston 1973; Mulvey 1975; de Lauretis 1987; Mayne 1990; Tarr 1999; Grant 2001; Kaplan 2003; Levitin et al. 2003; Martin 2003). In their introduction to Women Filmmakers (2003), Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis and Valerie Raoul consider

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that ‘whether a feminist message, or even a “woman’s point of view”, can still be conveyed without falling into stereotypes is debatable’ (2003: 10). Relatedly, E. Ann Kaplan in the same volume states that ‘consideration of how these topics are treated raises the final question: is the gender of the filmmaker more significant than the values or political perspectives a film espouses?’ (2003: 15). It seems problematic, in an attempt to deconstruct and problematise gender, to incessantly underscore ‘feminine’ qualities; that, in an attempt to demand equality, we should seek a distinct way of filmmaking and authorship inside which to circumscribe female authors. Yet, on the other hand, authorship constitutes a powerful means of palliating the ongoing omission of women directors and their histories. In the face of this, Martin criticises the emphasis traditionally placed on defining the female auteur using the biographical experiences and personality traits which supposedly appear embodied in the film through a feminine voice (2003: 34–5). Her concrete and well-grounded critical analysis leads, unfortunately, to the rather ambiguous proposal of an alternative understanding of the term – something Martin herself admits (2003: 35). Nevertheless, the aims she puts forward are compelling: to appraise the dialogue between filmmaker, production context and spectator; to focus on the style underpinning the ‘writing’ of the film (which perhaps is not the sole creation of the director but is instead organised around her); and to encompass a wider range of female auteurs, who have no room in strict feminist definitions of authorship (2003: 35–6). In this light, rather than obstinately attempting to prove Tanaka a feminist filmmaker, this volume aims to explore her agency and voice within a specific historical and geographical context. In comparison to that of other female directors, Tanaka’s case is particularly intriguing for several reasons: she is not known to have embraced a defined feminist ideology, neither did she have any experience in other aspects of filmmaking apart from acting. Moreover, owing to her early debut and fame, her own personal development took place almost exclusively within the industry, and was on display for all Japanese people; hence conspicuously making her aware of the construction and performance of a public persona. We believe that there is still a political necessity to explore and exhibit the configuration of female subjectivity on film, and that authorship remains the source of fruitful discussion that generates positive knowledge about cinema and its relation to society and history. These ideas will be discussed in further depth in the second part of the book, where the chapters, bridging Japanese and Western film theory and practice, consider potential ways of identifying Tanaka’s authorship, the means through which female authorship is culturally and commercially constructed, and Tanaka’s position in the global history of female film authors.

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In revisiting the notion of authorship, the role of stardom emerges as another relevant question to address. There are two main approaches to this: the director as star, and the star as author. In his work on Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), Robert E. Kapsis (1992) examines the creation and transformation of the director persona and contends that this public text or image plays a crucial role in the reputation the director may achieve as auteur, commercial mass-pleaser or crafts(wo)man. Against the idea that the director’s reputation is earned chiefly on the basis of the perceived value of his or her films, Kapsis identifies four key components that contribute to the production of a director persona: the biographical legend; consistent motifs and stylistic techniques within film oeuvre; critical discourse and reception; and marketing paratexts (1992: 11–13). Kapsis’s work serves as a useful framework for the case of Tanaka because it engages with the particularities of the classical studio system and surrounding industries, and more importantly, because it merges authorship with theories of stardom – in particular Richard Dyer’s (1979) understanding of the engagement of the artists in their own star persona – that can provide insight into star-turned-director Tanaka Kinuyo. Drawing on Kapsis for the analysis of contemporary Japanese female directors, Colleen Laird rightly points out that his proposed model overlooks ‘the role that gender plays in gendered marketing campaigns that addresses gendered audiences and crafts a gendered director persona’ (2013: 3). Moreover, Laird contends that the emphasis placed on the ‘feminine’ aspect of the public persona can play a significant role in locating the director closer to commercial cinema and further from high art auteur cinema. This argument recalls Christine Geraghty’s study on stardom (2000), in which she classifies different types of stars and underscores the difficulties encountered by female stars in being perceived as star-as-performer, the category most associated with high art cinema. These works serve as a starting point for examining the politics underpinning the labels for female filmmakers through their construction, both personal and social, self-managed and otherwise. The second approach which is gaining visibility in film studies is that of the star as author. In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MOMA) launched a series of screenings titled ‘Acteurism’. According to MOMA, this term would apply to ‘actors who were able to develop their screen personalities with sufficient consistency and vivacity that they themselves became vehicles of meaning in their movies’ (MOMA 2014). Focusing on American cinema, the event argued that stars such as John Wayne (1907–79) or Barbara Stanwyck (1907–90) ‘carried a nexus of emotional, moral and social values with them from movie to movie, which their directors were able to variously celebrate, criticize, and exploit’ (MOMA 2014). Acteurism proposes revisiting the authority of

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performance, instead of rendering performance as a simple result of direction. In this way, it bridges high culture and scholarship with popular culture, where actors remain at the core of the consumption and evaluation of films. In the first part of the book we will further explore these ideas by aiming to elucidate any consistent elements in Tanaka’s screen personality, how they developed in the work of different directors, and their potential for conveying complex and at times contradictory ideological messages. The preface to this book was written by Furukawa Kaoru, Honorary President of the Tanaka Kinuyo Memorial Hall (Tanaka Kinuyo bunka-kan), which is located in Tanaka’s home town of Shimonoseki. The centre opened in 2010, and we would like to thank it once again for its generous contribution and support. Furukawa is the author of Flower and Storm: The Life of Actress Tanaka Kinuyo (Hana mo arashi mo: joyū Tanaka Kinuyo no shōgai, 2002), one of the first and most comprehensive biographies of Tanaka. For this publication, Furukawa concentrates on Tanaka’s personal life to reveal, as he puts it, the lights and shadows in her life, some of which are widely unknown to a general audience. Framing Tanaka as a youngest daughter vying to support her family in difficulties, Furukawa provides a perceptive and powerful picture of Tanaka. The first half of the book concentrates on Tanaka as an actress. Lauri Kitsnik examines her early career in the 1930s, when she became the top star in Japanese cinema. On the basis of the impact of her star persona, which was crucial in the production, promotion and even scripting of the films, Kitsnik suggests talking about ‘joint stardom’ or joint authorship between Tanaka and the directors of the films. Against preconceptions of a homogenised star image, this chapter explores her versatile acting skills and the various facets of her star persona, ranging from traditional girls to modern career women and athletes. Kitsnik introduces the notion of ‘idiogest’ to analyse the gestural characteristics of Tanaka’s acting style which constitute a fundamental element of her star image. In terms of narrative, this chapter pays special attention to the problematic, often ailing, relations between Tanaka’s characters, motherhood and romance, and explores how these female roles relate to contemporary shifts in femininity and Tanaka’s real life. In the following chapter, Alexander Jacoby moves to the 1940s–50s to explore Tanaka’s second period of popularity as a mature actress. Like Kitsnik, Jacoby shifts from the common auteurist focus of Japanese film studies to analyse these canonical films as star vehicles for Tanaka. Jacoby argues that her star persona exercised a shaping influence on tone and meaning that worked to clarify the ideological assumptions of the films, and thus advocates a ‘staras-auteur’ approach. Examining the climax and endings of several case studies, Jacoby contends that the ideological trajectory of each work is made explicit

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via the resolution of a narrative thread concerning Tanaka’s relationship with a male friend, lover or relative. Moreover, when the central relationship is with another woman, the ideological implications of the resolutions are correspondingly more radical. Through this original approach that places great emphasis on the depiction of touch in Tanaka’s departures and reunions with other characters, Jacoby invites us to revisit classical works of the so-called post-war golden age of Japanese cinema from a new and compelling perspective. While Kitsnik and Jacoby illuminate the intertwined elements making up Tanaka’s star image, Michael Smith focuses on one such facet to provide an indepth analysis of her embodiment of feminine subjectivity in My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949). Grounded in a comprehensive examination of the post-war gender reforms and their application, Smith demonstrates that Tanaka and Mizoguchi’s creative partnership expressed contradictory ideas on the legal position and realities of gender equality, which in turn reflected the complex, historically rooted moral, social and practical paradigms underpinning gender politics. As social movements from the Meiji era are revisited in this post-war film, this chapter bridges these two crucial periods in the history of Japanese women and overlaps Tanaka’s star image to shed light on the ideological connotations within. A close reading of her character in the film complicates the critical conception of Tanaka’s star persona as being related to the yamato nadeshiko archetype of traditional, conservative femininity. In the second part of the book, Irene González-López and Ashida Mayu examine Tanaka’s turn to directing by concentrating on the production and reception of her first two films, Love Letter and The Moon Has Risen. Tanaka’s decision to become a filmmaker is here regarded as a specific example of the consequences for women of the legal, social and economic changes of the post-war period that Smith explains in his chapter. In line with the reinvigorated attention paid to women in the public sphere, both films were heavily promoted as the work of a ‘woman director’ and as such were expected to be ‘different’, but simultaneously Tanaka’s authorship was called into question by the contribution and support of male directors. Examining both the diegetic and non-diegetic realms, this chapter first sheds light on the representation of gender roles and power dynamics in the first post-war films directed by a woman; and secondly, through an array of primary sources, it explores the ways in which the figure of ‘woman director’ was being defined, contextualised and negotiated in the public sphere. Ayako Saito concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955), to discuss the subject of female authorship from another perspective. The analysis of this film, Kinuyo’s first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the

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same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Through a fascinating analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews and contemporary reviews, Saito renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. In this way, Saito claims a position for both in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. On the basis of analysis of this collaborative process, Saito convincingly argues that Tanaka Kinuyo challenged, albeit not always explicitly, male-dominated representations of women prevalent in the industry. Moving on to Tanaka’s next film, Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández discusses The Wandering Princess (1960), based on the autobiography of Saga Hiro (1914–87), a Japanese aristocrat who married the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo. Widely publicised as a ‘woman’s film’ through highlighting the collaboration of scriptwriter Wada Natto and star Kyō Machiko, the film proves an extremely useful vehicle through which to further examine Tanaka’s position as a gendered author exploring and constructing female subjectivities. Armendáriz-Hernández examines Tanaka’s work against predominant representations of women and of the national past in post-war Japanese cinema in order to argue that The Wandering Princess and Tanaka herself occupied a liminal gendered position within early 1960s national cinema. In the final chapter, Yuka Kanno examines Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru), which follows the lives of retired panpan women in a correction home for ex-prostitutes. Within this diverse female community, Japan’s first lesbian film character emerges and defies traditional representations of lesbianism in Japanese popular culture. This character is rendered pivotal in the understanding of the desire, solidarity and conflict inherent in the female community, a key theme in this chapter. The female continuum is approached as both diegetic and relational, encompassing the film’s narrative space and that embodied by three women: Tanaka Kinuyo (director), Yana Masako (novelist) and Tanaka Sumie (scriptwriter). Drawing on queer and feminist theory and criticism, Kanno states the case for Girls of Dark as ‘women’s cinema’ by reframing the female continuum in the specific Japanese post-war context. This compelling discussion relocates the concept of women’s cinema within the Japanese history of cinema and film theory. Since 1983, each year, the Mainichi Film Awards has given out the Tanaka Kinuyo Award to an actress whose career has not only been successful but has also had remarkable longevity. This testifies to the level of reverence with which Tanaka’s achievements in her 52-year career are viewed within the Japanese film industry. Her films, her public persona as a professional woman and her well-known personal determination all significantly contributed not only to the development of the Japanese film industry and star system but also to the construction and redefinition of a national image and to the development of a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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modern female subjectivity. This book calls for a reappraisal not only of these key issues, but also of the startling and iconoclastic figure of Tanaka herself.

Notes Note on Japanese names, romanisation and translations Japanese names are given in the Japanese order, family name first, except in the case of scholars (now) publishing predominantly in English and presenting their name in Western order. Thus, Ayako Saito and Yuka Kanno are generally cited as such in the text. An exception has been made in the Bibliographies, where the styles used in the relevant publications (and in the conventional citing of these) have been retained, and this has been carried over to the text indicators referring to these publications. In the romanisation of Japanese words, macrons indicate long vowels, but these are not given in words commonly used in English, for example ‘Tokyo’ (not ‘Tōkyō’). All translations are the authors’ unless otherwise stated. 1. Taking place on 22 June 1908, the Red Flag Incident was a day of civil unrest which resulted in the imprisonment of leading communist activists, including Kanno and Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923). 2. A biwa is a mandolin-like musical instrument shaped as a short-necked lute. It is widely used in narrative storytelling and a variety of genres of Japanese traditional music and, according to Tanaka’s autobiography ([1975] 2006), it was very common for girls in the early twentieth century to learn it as an extra-curricular activity. 3. The trilogy consists of He and Tokyo (Kare to Tōkyō, 1928), He and the Countryside (Kare to den’en, 1928) and He and Life (Kare to jinsei, 1929). 4. For example, The Japanese Women Filmmakers Conference (University of Colorado, 2000), 26th Leeds International Film Festival (2012), Seoul International Women’s Film Festival (2012), and retrospectives held at the Catalonia Film Library (2013), the Austrian Film Museum (2014) and University of Oslo Library (2016). 5. Others would include Wendy Toye (1917–2010) and Muriel Box (1905–91) in Great Britain, Edith Carlmar (1911–2003) in Norway, Agnes Varda (1928–) in France, Ana Mariscal (1923–95) in Spain, Wang Ping (1916–90) in China and Tatyana Lukashevich (1905–72) in the Soviet Union. 6. The other participants of this roundtable discussion were film producer, distributor and curator Kawakita Kashiko (1908–93), film critic and magazine editor Yamamoto Kyōko (1908–93) and actress Takamine Hideko (1924–2010). The text has been translated in Armendáriz-Hernández and González-López (2017). 7. Among successful Japanese women writers of the time one could mention Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), Hayashi Fumiko (1903/4–51), Enchi Fumiko (1905–86), Nakazato Tsueko (1909–87) and Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–84), among many others. 8. Among the films produced by this highly under-appreciated and under-studied company one could also highlight Black River, The Human Condition trilogy (Ningen no jōken, Kobayashi Masaki, 1959–61) and A Full Life (Mitasareta seikatsu, Hani Susumu, 1962). 9. Unfortunately, only one of her documentaries survives. For Sakane’s complete filmography, see Ikegawa (2001: 18).

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10. In addition to Kawase Naomi, this would include Nishikawa Miwa (1974–), Ogigami Naoko (1972–), Iguchi Nami (1967–), Ninagawa Mika (1972–), Iwata Yuki (1972–) and Andō Momoko (1982–), among others. On contemporary Japanese female directors see also Laird (2013), Komatsu (2006), Bingham (2010), Mori (2006) and the online database Japanese Women Behind the Scenes (2016). 11. On the role of auteurism in Japanese film studies see for instance Yoshimoto (2000) and Hasumi (2016), who conversely also reflect upon the contribution of Japanese cinema to the development of auteur theory worldwide. 12. On theoretical work and debates on auteurism see Wollen (1972) Caughie (1981), Clayton and Curling (1979), Stam (2000), Yoshimoto (2000), Levitin et al. (2003), Gerstner and Staiger (2003), Wexman (2003) and Hasumi (2016), among others. 13. In 1967 Barthes wrote an essay entitled The Death of the Author in which he rejects the relevance hitherto placed on the author’s identity in interpreting a text, and instead underscores the role of the reader in giving meaning to a text (Barthes [1967] 1981).

Bibliography Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie (1982), The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Armendáriz-Hernández, Alejandra and Irene González-López (2017), ‘Roundtable: the position of women in post-war Japanese (Kinema Junpō, 1961)’, Film Studies 16, Spring, pp. 36–55. Barthes, Roland ([1967] 1981), ‘The Death of the Author’, in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship, London: Routledge, pp. 208–13. Bingham, Adam (2010), ‘Original visions: female directors in contemporary Japanese cinema’, Cineaction!, Summer, pp. 56–61. Brodey, Inger S. B. (2014), ‘The Power of Memory and the Memory of Power: Wars and Graves in Westerns and Jidaigeki’, in David LaRocca (ed.), The Philosophy of War Films, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, pp. 287–312. Caughie, John (ed.) (1981), Theories of Authorship, London: Routledge. Clayton, Sue and Jonathan Curling (1979), ‘On authorship’, Screen 20: 1, Spring, pp. 35–61. Cross, Tim (2013), ‘Fictocritical Momentum: Yamakata Masculinity as Hakata Tradition’, in Andrew Cobbing (ed.), Hakata: The Cultural Worlds of Northern Kyushu, Leiden: Brill, pp. 211–30. de Lauretis, Teresa (1987), Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Dyer, Richard (1979), Stars, London: BFI Publishing. Fuess, Harald (2004), Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender, and the State, 1600–2000, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fujime, Yuki (1997), Sei no rekishigaku, Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan. Furukawa, Kaoru (2004), Hana mo arashi mo: joyū Tanaka Kinuyo no shōgai, Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū.

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Geraghty, Christine (2000), ‘Re-examining Stardom: Questions of Texts, Bodies and Performances’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies, London and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 183–201. Gerstner, David A. (2003), ‘The Practices of Authorship’, in David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (eds), Authorship and Film, New York: Routledge, pp. 3–26. Gerstner, David A. and Janet Staiger (eds) (2003), Authorship and Film, New York: Routledge. Grant, Catherine (2001), ‘Secret agents: feminist theories of women’s film authorship’, Feminist Theory 2: 1, April, pp. 113–30. Hara, Kimi (1995), ‘Challenges to Education for Girls and Women in Modern Japan: Past and Present’, in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: Feminist Press at the City of New York University, pp. 93–106. Hasumi, Shigehiko (2016), ‘Countering errors in the age of discovery: on the international critical assessment of Mikio Naruse’, originally published in 1986, trans. Earl Jackson, Jr., Lola 7, November, (last accessed 30 October 2016). High, Peter B. (2003), The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–1945, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hirano, Kyoko (1992), Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945–1952, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hirota, Masaki (1999), ‘Notes on “The Process of Creating Women”’, in Wakita Haruko, Anne Bouchy and Ueno Chizuko (eds), Gender and Japanese History, Vol. 2, Osaka: Osaka University Press, pp. 197–220. Hoover, William D. (2011), Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Hunter, Janet E. (1989), The Emergence of Modern Japan: An Introductory History since 1853, London: Longman. Ikegawa, Reiko (2001), ‘[Manei josei kantoku] Sakane Tazuko’, Rekishikagaku kyōgikai, November, pp. 16–28. Inoue, Miyako (2006), Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ishiwari, Osamu (2008), Tanaka Kinuyo, Tokyo: Waizu Shuppan. Jacoby, Alexander (2008), A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to the Present Day, Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. Japanese Women Behind the Scenes (2016), Academic online project led by Catherine Munroe Hotes, (last accessed 1 October 2016). Johnston, Claire (1973), ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema’, in Claire Johnston (ed.), Notes on Women’s Cinema, London: Society for Education in Film and Television, pp. 24–31. Johnston, William (2005), Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan, New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press.

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Kaneko, Sachiko (1995), ‘The Struggle for Legal Rights and Reforms: A Historical View’, in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: Feminist Press at the City of New York University, pp. 3–14. Kaplan, E. Ann (2003), ‘Women, Film, Resistance: Changing Paradigms’, in Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis and Valerie Raoul (eds), Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 15–28. Kapsis, Robert E. (1992), Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kasza, Gregory J. (1993), The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press. Katō, Mikirō (2011), Nihon eiga-ron 1933–2007: Tekusuto to kontekusuto, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kawakita Kashiko, Tanaka Kiniuyo, Takamine Hideko and Yamamoto Kyōko (1961), ‘The position of women in the film industry (Eigani okeru josei no tachiba)’, Kinema junpō 282, late April, pp. 65–9. Kinema junpō (1977), ‘Tanaka-san no omoide’, early May, pp. 113–19. Kitsnik, Lauri, Jule Selbo and Michael Smith (2015), ‘Japan’, in Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo (eds), Women Screenwriters: An International Guide, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 108–30. Ko, Mika (2010), Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness, Abingdon: Routledge. Komatsu, Arashi (2006), ‘Nihon no josei kantoku wo megutte: Tōkyō kokusai josei eigasai sankasha wo chūshin ni’, Jōsai kokusai daigaku kiyō 14: 2, pp. 23–42. Laird, Colleen (2013), ‘Imaging a female filmmaker: the director personas of Nishikawa Miwa and Ogigami Naoko’, Frames 3, pp. 1–25, (last accessed 30 October 2016). Levitin, Jacqueline, Judith Plessis and Valerie Raoul (eds) (2003), Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, Vancouver: UBC Press. Liddle, Joanne and Sachiko Nakajima (2000), Rising Suns, Rising Daughters: Gender, Class, and Power in Japan, London: Zed Books. Martin, Angela (2003), ‘Refocusing Authorship in Women’s Filmmaking’, in J. Levitin, J. Plessis and V. Raoul (eds), Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 29–37. Matsumoto, Yumiko (2001), ‘Shoki no futari’, in Yoshida Mayumi et al. (eds), Josei kantoku eiga no zenbō, Tokyo: Pado Uiimenzu Ofisu, pp. 248–53. Mayne, Judith (1990), The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. McDonald, Keiko I. (2001), ‘Saving the Children: Films by the Most “Casual” of Directors, Shimizu Hiroshi’, in D. Washburn and C. Cavanaugh (eds), Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 174–201. McDonald, Keiko I. (2005), ‘Married to the cinema: actress and filmmaker Kinuyo Tanaka (1909–1976)’, Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer, pp. 184–204.

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Mizuno, Noriko (2007), ‘Family and Family Law in Japan’, in Miyoko Tsujimura and Emi Yano (eds), Gender and the Law in Japan, Sendai: Tohoku University Press, pp. 147–56. MOMA (2014), ‘Acteurism: The Emergence of Ann Sheridan, 1937–1943’. Event presentation from the official website of the Museum of Modern Art of New York, (last accessed 30 October 2016). Mori, Naoto (2006), Nihon hatsu eiga zero jidai: atarashii J mūbī no yomikata, Tokyo: Firumu Aato. Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16: 3, pp. 6–18. Nishikawa, Yūko (1999), ‘The Modern Family and Changing Forms of Dwellings in Japan: Male-Centered Houses, Female-Centered Houses, and Gender-Neutral Houses’, in Wakita Haruko, Anne Bouchy, Ueno Chizuko and Gerry Yokota-Muramaki (eds), Gender and Japanese History, Osaka: Osaka University Press, pp. 477–507. Norgren, Tiana (2001), Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan, Studies of the East Asian Institute, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nornes, Mark Abe (2003), Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ōba, Kenji (2014), Ginmaku no koi – Tanaka Kinuyo to Ozu Yasujirō, Tokyo: Shōbunsha. Ōkubo, Kiyoaki (2008), ‘Sakugeki to jōnetsu: Mizuki Yōko no [Ukigumo] kyakushoku’, Hyōshō 2, pp. 224–44. Pharr, Susan J. (1977), ‘Japan’, in Janet Zollinger Geile and Audrey Chapman Smock (eds), Women: Roles and Statuses in Eight Countries, Toronto: John Wiley, pp. 217–58. Richie, Donald (2005), A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs, Tokyo; London: Kodansha International. Saitō, Ayako (2007), ‘Josei kantoku no eizō hyōgen – shakai to kojin no aida ni’, lecture given at 2nd Conference of Cultural Studies Research, 12 November. Saitō, Ayako (2012), ‘Onna ga kaki, Onna ga toru toki: Nihon Eigashi ni okeru futari no Tanaka’, Geijutsugaku Kenkyū 22, Society of Art Studies, Meiji Gakuin University, pp. 13–31. Sato, Tadao (1982), Currents in Japanese Cinema: Essays, Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International. Sharp, Jasper (2011), Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Shimura, Miyoko (2006), ‘Tenkōki no Tanaka Kinuyo to Irie Takako’, in Saitō Ayako (ed.), Eiga to shintai/sei, Tokyo: Shinwasha. Sievers, Sharon L. (1983), Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sorensen, Lars-Martin (2009), Censorship of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Staiger, Janet (1985), ‘The politics of film canons’, Cinema Journal 24: 3, pp. 4–23. Stam, Robert (2000), Film Theory: An Introduction, New York: Blackwell. Standish, Isolde (2005), A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film, New York and London: Continuum.

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Stevens, Isabel (2016), ‘Women with a movie camera’, Sight and Sound, uploaded 18 November 2016, (last accessed 20 October 2016). Tanaka, Kinuyo ([1975] 2006), ‘Watashi no rirekisho’, in Kobayashi Shunta (ed.), Joyū no unmei: watashi no rirekisho, Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, pp. 289–389. Tarr, Carrie (1999), Diane Kurys, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2008), Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Wexman, Virginia Wright (2003), ‘Introduction’, in Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Film and Authorship, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press: pp. 1–20. Wollen, Peter (1972), Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2000), Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yoshizumi, Kyoko (1995), ‘Marriage and Family: Past and Present’, in Kumiko FujimuraFanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: Feminist Press at the City of New York University, pp. 183–98. Zierold, Norman (1973), Sex Goddesses of the Silent Screen, Chicago: Regnery Press.

Filmography A Full Life (Mitasareta seikatsu, Hani Susumu, 1962) A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, Ozu Yasujirō, 1948) A Wanderer’s Notebook (Hōrōki, Naruse Mikio, 1962) Alone Across the Pacific (Taiheiyō hitoribochi, Ichikawa Kon, 1963) Army (Rikugun, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944) Black River (Kuroi kawa, Kobayashi Masaki, 1957) Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, Suzuki Seijun, 1967) Burden of Life (Jinsei no onimotsu, Gosho Heinosuke, 1935) Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, Nakahira Kō, 1956) Dragnet Girl (Hijōsen no onna, Ozu Yasujirō, 1933) Equinox Flower (Higanbana, Ozu Yasujirō, 1958) Floating Clouds (Ukigumo, Naruse Mikio, 1955) Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza keshō, Naruse Mikio, 1951) Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1961) He and Life (Kare to jinsei, Ushihara Kiyohiko, 1929) He and the Countryside (Kare to den’en, Ushihara Kiyohiko, 1928) He and Tokyo (Kare to Tōkyō, Ushihara Kiyohiko, 1928) Kiku and Isamu (Kiku to Isamu, Imai Tadashi, 1959) Kwaidan (Kobayashi Masaki, 1964) Love Letter (Koibumi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1953) Love under the Crucifix (Oginsama, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1962) Mantrap (Herbert Brenon, 1926)

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Marching On (Shingun, Ushihara Kiyohiko, 1930) Marriage (Kekkon, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1947) Mother (Okāsan, Naruse Mikio, 1952) My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949) New Clothing (Hatsusugata, Sakane Tazuko, 1936) Okoto and Sasuke (Shunkishō: Okoto to Sasuke, Shimizu Yasujirō, 1935) On the Eve of War (Kaisen no zenya, Yoshimura Kōzaburō, 1943) Rashomon (Rashōmon, Kurosawa Akira, 1950) Red Beard (Aka-hige, Kurosawa Akira, 1965) Sandakan 8 (Sandakan hachiban shokan: bōkyō, Kumai Kei, 1974) Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) Somewhere Under the Broad Sky (Kono hiroi sora no doko kani, Kobayashi Masaki, 1954) Stray Dog (Nora inu, Kurosawa Akira, 1949) The Age of Marriage (Konki, Yoshimura Kōzaburō, 1961) The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1958) The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, Kobayashi Masaki, 1959–61) The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai-onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1952) The Life of Workers in the Big City (Rōdō hen, Ushihara Kiyohiko, 1929) The Love of Sumako the Actress (Joyū Sumako no koi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1947) The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyōdai, Ozu Yasujirō, 1950) The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, Gosho Heinosuke, 1931), The Story of Pure Love (Jun’ai monogatari, Imai Tadashi, 1957) The Tower of Lilies (Himeyuri no tō, Imai Tadashi, 1953) The Victory of Women (Josei no shōri, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1946) The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1960) The Woman of Rumour (Uwasa no onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) Two Eyes (Sōbō, Naruse Mikio, 1933) Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953) Until We Meet Again (Mata au hi made, Imai Tadashi, 1950) Utamaro and his Five Women (Utamaro wo meguru gonin no onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1946) Victory Song (Hisshōka, Masahiro Makino, Mizoguchi Kenji, Shimizu Hiroshi, Tomotaka Tasaka, 1945) Wings (William A. Wellman, 1927) Younger Brother (Otōto, Ichikawa Kon, 1960)

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Chapter 1 Dancer, Doctor, Maiden, Mother: Tanaka Kinuyo’s Early Star Image Lauri Kitsnik

Long before she became a film star with an international following in the post-war years, Tanaka Kinuyo (1909–77) had a prolific and celebrated acting career that went all the way back to the days of silent cinema. First appearing on-screen in 1924, Tanaka arguably reached her early career peak in the mid-1930s, at least in terms of popularity. Employed at the Shōchiku Studios, she starred in a number of critically acclaimed films and has been commonly referred to as the first female film star in Japan.1 However, just as her later career tends to be oversimplified by a focus on her portrayals of long-suffering women, so one has to bear in mind the dangers of relying on only one facet of her early work. During the 1930s, Tanaka actually appeared in a wide array of roles ranging from traditional maidens to modern career women, which allowed her to display versatile and idiosyncratic skills in acting. In this chapter, I will be tracing the elements that made up what could be called Tanaka’s early star image. Richard Dyer has pointed out that ‘Stars embody social types, but star images are always more complex and specific than types. Types are, as it were, the ground on which a particular star’s image is constructed’ (1998: 68). It should be added that the notion of star image necessitates the merging of various types in order for it to be produced in the first place, and within Japanese cinema Tanaka represents an instructive case of how success in moulding a star is related to versatility in casting roles. First, after providing some context to her stardom, I will examine the gestural characteristics of Tanaka’s acting style by drawing on the work of Chika Kinoshita (2001) and introducing the notion of ‘idiogest’. The second half of the chapter focuses on the various contradictory types Tanaka played in a number of key films from the 1930s, while also looking at how such roles reflected contemporary shifts in femininity.2 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Joint stardom and ‘name appeal’ Tanaka Kinuyo herself has singled out five films that she considered seminal to her acting career. These are Embarrassing Dreams (Hazukashii yume, 1927), The Flowers of Love in Bloom: The Dancing Girl of Izu (Koi no hana saku: Izu no odoriko, 1933, both directed by Gosho Heinosuke), Okoto and Sasuke (Shunkishō: Okoto to Sasuke, Shimazu Yasujirō, 1935), A Woman of Osaka (Naniwa onna, 1940) and The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952, both by Mizoguchi Kenji) (Shindō 1983: 26).3 The last of these, often hailed as the masterpiece built around her star status and acting skills, seems to fit neatly with Tanaka’s mature image. In a telling manner, the biopic Film Actress (Eiga joyū, Ichikawa Kon, 1987),4 starring Yoshinaga Sayuri (1945–) as Tanaka, abruptly ends with a scene that depicts the shooting of The Life of Oharu. It is as if her career was perfected at that moment and put in freeze-frame for future audiences. Near to one third of Film Actress is dedicated to the behind-the-scenes production of A Woman of Osaka and the often tense relationship between Tanaka and Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956). Arguably, Tanaka’s subsequent collaboration with the director, which resulted in such highly acclaimed films as Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, 1954), has all but overshadowed her associations with other filmmakers. However, looking at her personal top five as well as at her output from the late 1920s into the 1930s, it can easily be argued that the early collaborations with Gosho Heinosuke (1902–81) were equally as important as those with Mizoguchi, and similarly decisive for the course her career was to take. Gosho also provided Tanaka with her first lead role in 1927’s Embarrassing Dreams. In Film Actress, this incident is presented as a source of a rift between Tanaka and Shimizu Hiroshi (1903–66), another young Shōchiku director who had cast Tanaka only in smaller roles; the two were also romantically involved at the time.5 When evaluating Tanaka’s collaborations with Mizoguchi or Gosho, it seems appropriate to talk about joint authorship or even ‘joint stardom’. The latter is also suggested by how some of their works were presented and promoted. For instance, the opening credit sequence of the The Dancing Girl of Izu displays the stylised signature of the director (‘a film by Gosho’ [in the simplified phonetic hiragana script]), while Tanaka’s name appears in the same frame with the film’s title. This practice of identifying a film by its star had been hitherto largely confined to male period drama (jidaigeki) actors, with several Kyoto-based small production companies established around their star personas in the late 1920s.6 The case of Tanaka, then, is quite exceptional for its contribution to breaking down gender bias in film stardom. On the other hand, it is worth noting that her early career progressed hand in hand with those of a string of male stars with whom she was frequently paired on-screen, such as Suzuki Denmei (1900–85)7 and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Hayashi Chōjirō (1908–84) in the early 1930s, later to be followed by a trio of Shōchiku’s leading men often referred to as sanbagarasu (‘Three Crows’): Uehara Ken (1909–91), Saburi Shin (1909–82) and Sano Shūji (1912–78). Another remarkable feature of Tanaka’s early years is the uncanny attention paid to the name ‘Kinuyo’. Shindō Kaneto has noted that as Tanaka’s career advanced,8 main characters thus named were beginning to make their appearance in scenarios; even Kurishima Sumiko (1902–87), the biggest star actress to date, had nothing to match this (Shindō 1983: 107).9 Quite uncharacteristically for a Japanese actress, Tanaka had kept her birth name for her acting career.10 In Film Actress, this decision is given a somewhat melodramatic explanation by being linked to Tanaka’s hope that it will catch the attention of and provoke a reunion with her estranged elder brother Ryōsuke, who was at large after having escaped army duty. Whether this is true or not, it certainly provided an opportunity to blur the lines between fact and fiction, allowing Tanaka’s film roles to be read as something of an amalgam of her real life persona and cinematic imagination.11 This interest and investment in her name is best attested by a series of ‘Kinuyo’ characters Tanaka played over the course of the decade. In these films, scriptwriters were assigned to create projects with original stories that took advantage of her star status and image as their starting point. Such examples include The Story of Kinuyo (Kinuyo monogatari, 1930); The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, 1931, both directed by Gosho Heinosuke); Kinuyo the Lady Doctor (Joi Kinuyo sensei, 1937); Kinuyo’s First Love (Kinuyo no hatsukoi, 1940) and View of the Stage (Butai sugata, all three directed by Nomura Hiromasa, 1940).12 The use of her forename in film titles effectively frames the phase of Tanaka’s career this chapter discusses, with the films The Story of Kinuyo (1930) and Kinuyo’s First Love (1940) roughly acting as markers.

Tanaka’s idiogest In what is probably the most elaborate study of Tanaka’s acting to date, Chika Kinoshita identifies four properties which are ‘exploited by [individual] directors to different ends’, naming them as Tanaka’s ‘smooth, prompt and light way of walking; fluid but restless gestures; inclination to avoid eye contact; and ambiguity in facial expressions’ (Kinoshita 2001). She then proceeds to show how these qualities interact with camera movement and mise-en-scène, arguing that collaboration with Tanaka produced ‘a form of staging specific to Mizoguchi films’ (2001). Kinoshita’s interest lies exclusively in Tanaka’s work with Mizoguchi and how her acting helped shape his idiosyncratic use of cinematic space as it underwent a transition since the late 1930s. In effect, Kinoshita is examining the aspect of Tanaka’s acting which Philip Drake has called idiolect, a repertoire of performance signs that individual stars often become associated with: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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The idiolect of the star – the recurring elements of their performance that they carry from role to role – operate, for those who recognise them, as ostensive inter-textual signifiers, offering the return of familiar pleasures . . . The deliberate recurrence and specific deployment of these bodily signs gives stars a higher degree of gestural investment because their meaning is partly imported intertextually. (Drake 2004: 74) It follows from here that such an idiolect not only has the capacity to contribute to creating a specific cinematic space, but also facilitates the expectations of an audience familiar with the star’s image. However, ‘idiolect’ as a term which primarily refers to linguistic performance can be somewhat misleading, especially when discussing silent film; ‘idiogest’ would be a more proper and precise option.13 While Kinoshita relates how Mizoguchi ‘exploited’ Tanaka’s existing star image and idiogest, I would like to consider its very composition out of various elements and character types before it was selectively employed by Mizoguchi to meet his particular goals. What kind of idiogest, then, characterises Tanaka’s early career and how does this inform her more familiar mature star image? What most viewers and critics have not failed to notice is the often exaggeratedly vivacious acting style in some of her 1930s work, notably in The Dancing Girl of Izu. This bungei eiga (literary film), which I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Kitsnik 2014), is a loose adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novella by Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972). The simple plot takes Mizuhara (Obinata Den, 1907–80), a university student from Tokyo, on a trip to the rural Izu Peninsula. Here, he meets a troupe of itinerant performers and falls in love with the eponymous dancing girl Kaoru (Tanaka), only to be forced to bid her a tearful farewell at the end of their journey. Deborah Shamoon points out that ‘Kinuyo’s Kaoru is an otenba [tomboy]. She is lively and coquettish . . . always in motion . . . and she is clearly uninhibited about showing her emotions’ (2009: 144). Tanaka being in constant motion is best exemplified in a scene by the river where she is running and hopping around incessantly, at one time caressing the bridge pillar, then running off to climb the rocks, all the while displaying a series of smiles and nervously touching her face (Figure 1.1). All this is underlined by a rapid, almost bravura-like framing and editing. Interestingly, Kinoshita has noted that Tanaka brought new mobility and restlessness to Mizoguchi’s space, despite the composition remaining the same as in his earlier films with other actresses (Kinoshita 2001). While Kinoshita argues that such mobility has the effect of displaying ambiguity in power relations in films such as The Love of Sumako the Actress (Joyū Sumako no koi, 1947), the same restlessness in The Dancing Girl rather suggests childlike behaviour and spontaneity being somewhat forcibly played out by an actress already well past her teens. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 1.1

The river scene from The Dancing Girl of Izu.

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Kinoshita also points out Tanaka’s inclination to avoid eye contact and notes her being ‘an actress who tends to reflect or deflect the look’ (2001). This could not be less the case in The Dancing Girl of Izu, where she often unabashedly stares right on, displaying an array of emotions that promptly oscillate between joy and sadness. This is particularly true in a long scene towards the end of the film where the student cheers her up with news about brighter prospects for her family’s future, only to let her know about the inevitability of their having to go their own ways the next day (Figure 1.2). While Kinoshita mentions ambiguity in facial expressions as a feature of her work with Mizoguchi, Tanaka’s many close-ups here are referring to easily distinguishable emotions as they switch from one to another.14 Two years earlier, Tanaka had starred in another Gosho feature, The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine, often considered the first film in Japan to fully employ sound. There is a scene where Tanaka, a long-suffering wife of a struggling playwright, spies from behind the blinds on her husband being entertained by a jazz band at their neighbour’s house. This is the key moment of the film when the conflict between her and the eponymous neighbour’s wife (Date Satoko, 1910–72) is fully substantiated. Her expression moves from surprise to puzzlement to being deeply hurt; Tanaka gradually puts on her hallmark

Figure 1.2

The pier scene from The Dancing Girl of Izu (continued overleaf). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 1.2

The pier scene from The Dancing Girl of Izu (continued).

worried look as her eyes start to wander and her lips quiver. This is underlined and emphasised by the camera finally moving to capture her bending a hairpin in the palm of her hand (Figure 1.3). Kinoshita rightly points out Tanaka’s ‘command of multi-layered expressions rather than enigmatic opacity’ (2001). In this scene, her wide face again becomes an excellent playground for the display of a sequence of feelings. Fighting between feelings of joy and disappointment is by no means unique to Tanaka. Although idiosyncratic expressive faces can be identified for most Japanese star actresses (e.g. Hara Setsuko or Takamine Hideko), what characterises Tanaka’s expressive style are climactic moments that simultaneously engage facial expressions and manual gestures. This salient feature of Tanaka’s idiogest is markedly different from one of the most iconic gestures in Japanese cinema, that in Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, Ozu Yasujirō, 1953) where Noriko (Hara Setsuko) suddenly covers her face with both of her hands and sobs. In Tanaka’s case, similar intensity is usually achieved by her deploying a single hand, often holding an object, which she then absent-mindedly brushes against her chin or cheek. In The Dancing Girl of Izu it is a pen given to

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Figure 1.3

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The jealousy scene from The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine.

her by the student as a farewell gift, in A Woman of Tokyo (Tōkyō no onna, 1933) it is a phone receiver, in Dragnet Girl (Hijōsen no onna, 1933, both directed by Ozu Yasujirō) a revolver (Figure 1.4).15 On the one hand, this characteristic close-up might be a conscious device to unbalance her oval face by introducing a foreign object. On the other hand, this has much to do with silent film acting in general, as timbre of voice is not available to supply a wider array of emotions, especially the more subtle ones.16

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Figure 1.4

Tanaka’s idiogest in The Dancing Girl of Izu, A Woman of Tokyo, Dragnet Girl.

Although Tanaka became one of the most celebrated actresses during the first decade of talkies and beyond, her acting style was necessarily embedded in certain limitations of silent cinema which placed more emphasis on close-up shots and gestures, rather than on a combination of visual and aural elements.17 Arguably, Tanaka was able to use that background for her benefit. She has recalled how in the earliest days of her career she was often employed as a body double for Yanagi Sakuko (1902–63), a popular and prolific actress. This apprenticeship led to her being later humorously complimented by Mizoguchi, who remarked that ‘Tanaka’s back side is even better than her front’ (Takizawa and Tanaka 1998: 131), underlining her ability to employ minimal gestural means for expressiveness. In order to mould an acting style which for many reached its high point in a string of Mizoguchi films, Tanaka made the most of the various experiences she had while still in the lower ranks of the industry in the 1920s.

‘Maternal child woman’ When discussing the early career of Yoshinaga Sayuri (who played Tanaka in Film Actress), Gregory Barrett has pointed out that Tanaka, ‘best known as the sacred, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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suffering female in Mizoguchi films’, at the same time represents the ‘prewar precedent for the Girl Next Door’ (1989: 196). This (arche)type is concomitant with an industry strategy of promoting young actresses early on in their careers, a practice sometimes called uridashi (selling out).18 Elsewhere (Kitsnik 2014), I have discussed how The Dancing Girl of Izu is particularly notable as a franchise that by successive (re)adaptations has offered career opportunities for a group of fledgling actresses starting with Tanaka and later to include Misora Hibari (1937–89), Yoshinaga and Yamaguchi Momoe (1959–) in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s respectively.19 Besides The Dancing Girl of Izu, Barrett lists Tanaka’s roles as a bakery girl in Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (Seishun no yume ima izuko, Ozu Yasujirō, 1932) and as a worker at a tonkatsu (pork cutlet) restaurant in Song of the Flower Basket (Hanakago no uta, Gosho Heinosuke, 1937) as representative examples of the ‘girl next door’ type. In addition to the persistent identification with a particular social class, this trend hints at a desexualised version of a young woman/actress which has the benefit of appearing palatable to a wider range of audiences. Indeed, Tanaka recalls that in her early years she was often called ‘Kinubō’ (the male version of the name Kinuyo) owing to her tomboyish rather than straightforwardly feminine appearance (Takizawa and Tanaka 1998: 133). Inasmuch as direct sexual appeal is removed from the equation in the case of the girl next door, in terms of her future roles the issue seems to be whether this complicates a transition to playing adult women.20 Doing more justice to her unquestionably diverse output, Kinoshita characterises Tanaka’s pre-war star image as that of a ‘maternal child woman’ (Kinoshita 2001). This oxymoron astutely summarises the complex typology of roles that dominated her early career. After all, alongside the parts of adolescent girls in the films mentioned above, Tanaka at the same time played young wives who strive to adapt to the modern conditions they are placed in, notably in The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine. Cast after the first choice suddenly fell ill, Tanaka has reflected on her surprise as she, considered still fit to play child roles (koyaku), was almost overnight elevated to being a mother of two (Takizawa and Tanaka 1998: 136).21 While the marital crisis is neatly contained by her embracing and reaffirming the role of a wife and mother in The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine, Tanaka’s screen motherhood in subsequent films tended to be much more problematic, as we shall next observe.

From ‘modern girl’ to motherhood Both The Dancing Girl of Izu and The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine ultimately display traditional gender roles within a submissive relationship. However, it would be wrong to say that all the characters Tanaka played in the period subscribed to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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this quasi-feudalistic mode. In fact, a number of her roles suggest shifting patterns in the contemporary society. This versatility of types (certainly a studio strategy in its own right) is evident in films where she depicted emancipated ‘modern girls’ (moga), such as Tokiko in Dragnet Girl.22 Tokiko, a typist (one of the most typical jobs of all for a modern girl), is part of a plot to steal money from her employer and during the escape ends up wounding her boyfriend with a revolver. In a very narrow time frame (only two and half months separated the releases of The Dancing Girl of Izu and Dragnet Girl), Tanaka’s star image is placed in an ideological (and moralistic) tension between a mannerly traditional girl and a mischievous modern one. In a number of subsequent films where Tanaka depicts varieties of modern girls, what seems at stake is nothing less than womanhood as narrowly defined by becoming a mother. While Tanaka’s better-known late career roles suggest that mothers will always have to make sacrifices, many of her earlier roles instead point at the difficulties of being a mother in the first place. The New Road (Shindō, Gosho Heinosuke, parts I and II, 1936) displays such a character arc from modern girl to motherhood. Tanaka’s acting in this film, based on the best-selling novel by Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948), still resembles her excessive vivaciousness from earlier films, especially in a pivotal scene where a rendezvous leads to a conversation by a lake between Akemi (Tanaka) and her love interest Kudō Ippei (Sano Shūji). This has a clear thematic and intertextual connection to scenes from The Dancing Girl of Izu: a great deal of movement on Tanaka’s part emphasised by the employment of various unusual camera angles (Figure 1.5). In the story of The New Road, complications arise when a meeting with her prospective mother-in-law (Okamura Fumiko, 1898–1976) badly backfires. On top of this, Akemi discovers that she is pregnant with Ippei’s child. This is indirectly revealed in a scene where Akemi is touching her breasts while consulting a handbook on family planning. The plot takes a tragic turn when Ippei is killed in a plane crash not long after, leading to Akemi telling his younger brother Ryōta (Uehara Ken) of her resolve to bring the baby up by herself.23 The contrast between her former self as a modern girl is clearly underlined by the opulent Western dresses and hats suddenly being replaced by traditional clothing in the second half of the film. In the final scene, Ryōta akwardly proposes to Akemi by insisting that women can get married to just about anyone. To this Akemi replies ‘No, I can’t marry you just like that’, leaving the story open-ended. While reconciliation with Ippei’s family is attained, the film suggests a complicated transition from a modern girl to mother.24 The topic of problematic motherhood is revisited in subsequent films. In A Man’s Recompense (Otoko no tsugunai, Nomura Hiromasa, parts I and II, 1937), based on the novel by the most popular female writer of the day, Yoshiya Nobuko

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Figure 1.5

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The lake scene from The New Road.

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(1896–1973), Sumi (Tanaka) is another emancipated modern girl. Her prospective romance with an archaeologist, Shigeru (Saburi Shin), fails after she shows flaws in her character by lending money to her delinquent brother. Another suitor, Kino (Natsukawa Daijirō, 1913–87), agrees to marry her even after discovering that she is pregnant with Shigeru’s child. Later, in a house fire, Kino loses his sight when trying to save his mother-in-law. After both the blind husband and her son are drowned in an accident, Sumi is admitted to a mental hospital. In the final scene, we see her walking aimlessly to the sound of Hawaiian guitars, oblivious to her surroundings. This tragic ending once again suggests that elevation to motherhood is not easily allowed for a modern girl. A similar arc of events is presented in South Wind (Minamikaze, Shibuya Minoru, 1939), where Kiriko (Kinuyo) gives birth to an illegitimate child who later dies. It is almost as if being ‘contaminated’ by modern life and a more flexible version of femininity effectively blocks the path to a traditional role as wife and mother. By the time of The Love-Troth Tree (Aizen katsura, Nomura Hiromasa, parts I and II, 1938), where Katsue (Tanaka) is a widowed nurse in love with the young doctor Tsumura (Uehara Ken), playing a single mother had already become something of a cliché for Tanaka, given as the film’s premise, rather than a consequence of a series of events.25 As The Love-Troth Tree demonstrates, Tanaka’s late 1930s collaboration with another director, Nomura Hiromasa (1905–79), proved to be a very successful one, especially in commercial terms, and also notable for the way her image developed to include aspects of modern life and women’s new roles in it, as I will analyse in the following section.

Career women and recreational activities An earlier product of this fruitful collaboration, Kinuyo the Lady Doctor, in its light-hearted mood, provides a more positive depiction of contemporary femininity. Yamaoka Kinuyo (once again merging Tanaka’s real name and her screen character), fresh out of medical school, opens her own practice and healthy young men begin to swarm into the waiting room to be examined by the latest attraction in the town. This comical premise is accompanied by a romance plot with a handsome doctor from a bigger hospital, Asano (Saburi Shin). Here, Tanaka was allowed to fully embrace being a modern girl with all the implications of social mobility the archetype suggests. This in turn challenged traditional notions of womanhood by making her into a modern urban professional, an image already light years away from naive rural maidens such as Kaoru in The Dancing Girl of Izu. Tanaka was to reprise her role as a doctor in Record of a Woman Doctor (Joi no kiroku, Shimizu Hiroshi, 1941), a film about a group of interns visiting a remote village which has no access to proper medical assistance. Just as in Kinuyo the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Lady Doctor, the male protagonist, a local schoolteacher, Kamiya, is again played by Saburi Shin. Although creating an all too familiar pairing, the romance between the leads remains undeveloped, rather uncharacteristically for such Shōchiku star vehicles. This could partly be explained by the fact that the film was made a crucial few years later than those discussed before, in the context of the ongoing war effort and tightening state control on the film industry, which resulted in a more serious tone, very much in contrast to that of earlier, lighthearted comedies.26 Consequently, Record of a Woman Doctor finds Tanaka in a markedly nurturing mode, as if to emphasise what was expected of Japanese women in these new conditions. Kinuyo the Lady Doctor, released only months before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident which triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), still displays a more relaxed world where women of some means could engage in the various recreational activities available to the burgeoning middle class. Interestingly, Tanaka’s own profile in People in Cinema (Kinema no hitobito, 1927) lists dancing, music, tennis, horse riding, swimming and biwa playing among her hobbies (Asashima 2006: 144). All these are present in her films from the 1930s, meshing her real life persona with the screen characters’. While The Dancing Girl of Izu and Okoto and Sasuke enabled her to show off her talents in traditional arts, proficiency in several modern ‘arts’ was subsequently added to extend her star image. She plays table tennis with her love interest in A Man’s Recompense and rides a horse in Men Against Women (Dansei tai josei, Shimazu Yasujirō, 1936). In Kinuyo the Lady Doctor, she is shown driving a fashionable car and is presented as an avid skier in scenes filmed in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture (Figure 1.6).

Figure 1.6

Tanaka driving a car and skiing in Kinuyo the Lady Doctor.

There is a certain athletic aspect to Tanaka’s early star image, best attested to by her appearance in the now lost Shine On, Japanese Women! (Kagayake Nihon no josei, Nomura Hiromasa, 1932, co-written by Japan’s first female scriptwriter Mizushima Ayame, 1903–90). This film, timed to be released during the Tenth Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where Japan topped the medal table in swimming,27 is a story of two village girls (Tanaka and Mizukubo Sumiko, 1916–?) and their aspiration to become Olympic athletes. While women in bathing suits had been a notable attraction in early cinema, not least for titillation, this was arguably a more political move in presenting Japanese women in an international context as sportswomen rather than exotic beauties, an image which was both athletic and modern (Figure 1.7). 28

Figure 1.7

Tanaka and Mizukubo Sumiko on a promotional pamphlet for Shine On, Japanese Women.

Conclusion This examination of Tanaka’s early career has uncovered a string of contradictory types that defy a neat linear order of development from one to another. Naive traditional girls and self-conscious modern women, troubled mothers and tomboyish typists all exist alongside each other without creating any discernible conflict within Tanaka’s overall image. This trend seems to underline Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Dyer’s notion that ‘the star’s image is characterised by attempts to negotiate, reconcile or mask the difference between the elements, or else simply hold them in tension’ (Dyer 1998: 72). Such oscillating movement also goes along the social ladder, as the low status of an itinerant entertainer (Kaoru) can be subsequently balanced by a young urban professional (Doctor Kinuyo), before moving back to the working-class girl in Kinuyo’s First Love. What seems to be a defining feature of much of Tanaka’s work are the roles where uncomplicated motherhood or happy marriage are denied to her characters. This in turn seems to bear resemblance to her real life: after the failed engagement to Shimizu, she remained single for the rest of her life and never had children. In Tanaka’s early mother mode, children are almost always born out of wedlock or die young. Even the more ambiguous denouements, such as the final scene of Men Against Women, where she chases her love interest on horseback to the Great Wall of China, suggest that conventional courtship or traditional marriage is not an option for the character types played by Tanaka. In the conclusion of Kinuyo’s First Love, eldest child Miyoshi Kinuyo (Tanaka) has to take charge of the family business, a rice cracker (senbei) shop, and by doing so gives up any romantic aspirations for the foreseeable future. The final scene of the film has a weary-looking Kinuyo open the shop in the early morning to toast crackers alongside her elderly father. This new self-effacing type has hints of Tanaka’s future roles both as Mizoguchi’s heroines and as the protagonist of Mother (Okāsan, Naruse Mikio, 1952), a woman still full of life but unable to remarry owing to her loyalty to her family. Somewhat ironically, Kinuyo’s First Love also turned out to be the beginning of the end for Tanaka’s romantic roles and marked a strong shift towards the all-forgiving mother mode of her mature career.

Notes 1. Kurishima Sumiko (1902–87), Tanaka’s colleague from the Shōchiku Studios, is the other common contender for this title. 2. I fully acknowledge that any composite picture of Tanaka’s early career would inevitably be an incomplete one, not least because only a fraction of her films from that period have survived to this day. 3. Two films out of five, Embarrassing Dreams and A Woman of Osaka, are no longer available, although the script of the latter (by Yoda Yoshikata, 1909–91), sometimes hailed as a mid-career masterpiece for Mizoguchi, is available in Kinema Junpōsha (1965). 4. The film is based on Shindō Kaneto’s Tanaka Kinuyo: The Novel (Shōsetsu Tanaka Kinuyo, 1983). Shindō also wrote the script (together with Hidaka Shin’ya and the director). 5. Tanaka has noted that any relationships between studio employees were greatly discouraged at the time at Shōchiku (Takizawa and Tanaka 1998: 133). Some years earlier, the marriage of the actress Kurishima Sumiko with director Ikeda Yoshinobu

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6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

Lauri Kitsnik (1892–1973) had been concealed from the public by the studio in order to keep up the illusion of romance with her frequent co-star Iwata Yūkichi (1887–1980). The relationship between Tanaka and Shimizu resulted in an unusual ‘trial marriage’ personally facilitated by the studio head Kido Shirō. This cohabitation eventually proved unhappy and the engagement was broken off. These include Bando Tsumasaburō (1901–53) and Bandō Tsumasaburō Purodakushon (Bantsuma Puro, 1925–36); Arashi Kanjūrō (1903–80) and Arashi Kanjūrō Purodakushon (Kan Puro, 1928–9 and 1931–7); and Kataoka Chiezō (1903–83) and Kataoka Chiezō Purodakushon (Chie Puro, 1928–37). See Standish 2005: 38–9. Tanaka had been elevated to the top industry rank, kanbu (leading member), in 1929. Kurishima’s career pre-dates that of Tanaka and was at its height in the late 1920s. Her representative works include No Blood Relation (Nasanu naka, 1921), Madame Pearl (Shinju fujin, 1927) and Life of a Woman (Onna no isshō, 1928), all directed by her husband Ikeda Yoshinobu. Shortly after starring in What Did the Lady Forget? (Shukujo wa nani wo wasureta ka, Ozu Yasujirō, 1937), Kurishima retired from acting but returned as part of the all-star cast, which included Tanaka, in Flowing (Nagareru, Naruse Mikio, 1956). See also Fujiki 2013: 218–45. In comparison, her notable contemporaries often adopted a screen name; for instance, Higashibōjō Hideko (1911–95) became the actress Irie Takako and Aida Masae (1920–2015) is better known as Hara Setsuko. See Kitsnik (2014: 121–2) for how Tanaka’s real-life romantic involvement with the baseball star Mizuhara Shigeru (1909–82) informed some alterations in the adaptation of The Dancing Girl of Izu. Add to this a close approximation of her name as Kinuko in Symphony of Youth (Seishun kōkyōgaku, Nomura Hōtei, 1928) and Young Miss (Ojōsan, Ozu Yasujirō, 1930), and Okinu in Okinu and the Head Clerk (Okinu to Bantō, Nomura Hiromasa, 1940) and A Tale of Archery at the Sanjusangendo (Sanjūsangendō tōshiya monogatari, Naruse Mikio, 1945). The term idiogest has been used in a somewhat different context and meaning by Erin Brannigan (2011: 160) to discuss choreography in film musicals. This scene has been analysed in painstaking detail by Nolletti 2005: 56–60. Writing in 1928, Habuto Eiji pays a great deal of attention to Tanaka’s hands, in fact all but fetishises them, recalling a visit to a shooting set where she was made to play the piano for the first time in her life. ‘I think that the beauty of these hands was the main reason why I was impressed by Tanaka Kinuyo’ (Habuto [1928] 2006: 314). It is worth noting that, upon the advent of sound, Tanaka’s voice actually became one of the most recognisable features of her star image. Her Kansai accent (she was born in Shimonoseki, on the Western tip of Honshu, and began her career in Osaka and Kyoto) has been credited with providing local colour as well as making the voiced lines seem more naturalistic, a major concern for early sound cinema. Gosho stated that, despite worries about whether she would be able to make a successful

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17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

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transition to the new medium, ‘her delivery imparted lifelike nuances to the dialogue and offered a valuable suggestion for solving the problems faced by the talkies that followed’ (Iwamoto 1992: 322). Another Gosho film, The Bride Talks in Her Sleep (Hanayome no negoto, 1933), is solely based on a simple premise, apparent from the title, related to Tanaka’s voice. This background distinguishes Tanaka from her slightly younger contemporary Hara Setsuko, who started her career after sound had been fully adopted, debuting in 1935. See Nishikawa 1994: 83, 97. Tanaka was also something of an exception for appearing in her version of The Dancing Girl of Izu at an already advanced stage of her career. Interestingly, some accounts suggest that Tanaka was a candidate for the female lead (and by extension a representation of Japanese feminine beauty) for the first German–Japanese co-production The New Earth/The Daughter of the Samurai (Atarashiki tsuchi/Die Tochter des Samurai, Arnold Fanck and Itami Mansaku, 1937). According to Janine Hansen, ‘[w]hile the Kawakitas state [the director] Fanck initially wanted Shochiku’s star Tanaka Kinuyo for his film, he writes that it was Kawakita who tried to persuade him to hire Tanaka, an actress he not “even” considered beautiful’ (2015: 5). Other sources state contractual reasons behind Tanaka not getting involved in the project (Haukamp 2014: 8). Whatever the reason, Hara Setsuko was then cast in what was her first major role. It could be argued that actresses from the next generation such as Hara, Yamaguchi Yoshiko (1919–2014) or Kyō Machiko (1924–) corresponded with and catered to the Western image of ‘oriental beauty’ better. Ironically, it was only as the perennial Japanese mother that Tanaka was properly introduced to and accepted by international audiences. Of course, this was not the typical middle-aged mother of the 1930s exemplified by the work of actresses specialising in the fukeyaku (roles of old women) such as Hanabusa Yuriko (1900–70) or Yoshikawa Mitsuko (1901–91). A rare take on the gangster film genre by Ozu, Dragnet Girl was made at the height of the popularity of American films such as The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1932) and is significant for suggesting alternative ways for how the careers of both its director and Tanaka might have developed. While Tanaka’s many later roles as a mother left to take care of her children alone could be pinned down to the post-war fatherless generation, a similar trend can actually already be seen in her pre-war films. Chika Kinoshita (2015: 51–2) notes how this film, which significantly tested the water with its controversial topic, was subject to extensive cuts by the censors. By far the most commercially successful melodrama of the late 1930s, The Love-Troth Tree spawned a number of sequels and imitations, capitalising on the structure of a seemingly endless chain of near-miss encounters, in effect creating a sub-genre of surechigai film (Standish 2005: 194).

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26. In another Shimizu film from the same year, Ornamental Hairpin (Kanzashi, 1941), straightforward romance is similarly denied to Tanaka’s character, a narrative strategy which can be read both as conforming with the war effort and critiquing it. 27. All but one of the twelve medals Japan achieved were won by men. The exception was the silver won by Maehata Hideko, who went on to became the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic gold medal four years later in Berlin. 28. See Bernardi (2001: 210) on how the Australian swimmer-turned-actress Annette Kellermann (1887–1975) was being emulated in Japanese cinema in the early 1920s.

Bibliography Asashima, Reikichi ([1927] 2006), ‘Kinema no hitobito’, in Mamoru Makino (ed.), Saisentan minshū goraku eiga bunken shiryōshū, Vol. 8, Tokyo: Yumani Shobō. Barrett, Gregory (1989), Archetypes in Japanese Film: The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of the Principal Heroes and Heroines, Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Bernardi, Joanne (2001), Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Brannigan, Erin (2011), Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image, New York: Oxford University Press. Drake, Philip (2004), ‘Jim Carrey: The Cultural Politics of Dumbing Down’, in Andrew Willis (ed.), Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 71–88. Dyer, Richard (1998), Stars, London: BFI Publishing. Fujiki, Hideaki (2013), Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Habuto, Eiji ([1928] 2006), ‘Kinema sutā no sugao to hyōjō’, in Mamoru Makino (ed.) Saisentan minshū goraku eiga bunken shiryōshū, Vol. 10, Tokyo: Yumani Shobō. Hansen, Janine (2015), ‘The New Earth [1936/37]: A German–Japanese Misalliance in Film’, in N. J. Y. Lee and J. Stringer (eds), Japanese Cinema: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. IV, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3–13. Haukamp, Iris (2014), ‘Fräulein Setsuko Hara: Constructing an International Film Star in Nationalist Contexts’, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 6: 1, pp. 4–22. Iwamoto, Kenji (1992), ‘Sound in the early Japanese talkies’, trans. Lisa Spalding, in A. Nolletti, Jr. and D. Desser (eds), Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 312–27. Kinema Junpōsha (1965), Nihon eiga shinario koten zenshū. Tokyo: Kinema Junpōsha. Kinoshita, Chika (2001), ‘Choreography of desire: analysing Kinuyo Tanaka’s acting in Mizoguchi’s films’, Screening the Past, uploaded 1 December 2001, (last accessed 10 November 2015). Kinoshita, Chika (2015), ‘Something more than a seduction story: Shiga Akiko’s abortion scandal and late 1930s Japanese film culture’, Feminist Media Histories 1: 1, pp. 29–63, (last accessed 9 May 2016).

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Kitsnik, Lauri (2014), ‘Gazing at Kaoru: star image in film adaptations of The Dancing Girl of Izu’, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 6: 2, pp. 118–33. Nishikawa, Katsumi (1994), Izu no odoriko monogatari, Tokyo: Film Art-sha. Nolletti, Arthur Jr (2005), The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter through Tears, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shamoon, Deborah (2009), ‘Misora Hibari and the girl star in postwar Japanese cinema’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35: 1, pp. 131–55. Shindō, Kaneto (1983), Shōsetsu Tanaka Kinuyo, Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha. Standish, Isolde (2005), A New History of Japanese Film: A Century of Narrative Film, New York and London: Continuum. Takizawa, Hajime and Tanaka Kinuyo (1998), ‘Sutā joyū he no michi’, in Kyōto-fu Kyōto Bunka Hakubutsukan (ed.), Interview Eiga no seishun, Tokyo: Kinema Junpōsha, pp. 126–42.

Filmography A Man’s Recompense (Otoko no tsugunai, Nomura Hiromasa, parts I and II, 1937) A Tale of Archery at the Sanjusangendo (Sanjūsangendō tōshiya monogatari, Naruse Mikio, 1945) A Woman of Osaka (Naniwa onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1940) A Woman of Tokyo (Tōkyō no onna, Ozu Yasujirō, 1933) Dragnet Girl (Hijōsen no onna, Ozu Yasujirō, 1933) Embarrassing Dreams (Hazukashii yume, Gosho Heinosuke, 1927) Film Actress (Eiga joyū, Ichikawa Kon, 1987) Flowing (Nagareru, Naruse Mikio, 1956) Kinuyo’s First Love (Kinuyo no hatsukoi, Nomura Hiromasa, 1940) Kinuyo the Lady Doctor (Joi Kinuyo sensei, Nomura Hiromasa, 1937) Life of a Woman (Onna no isshō, Ikeda Yoshinobu, 1928) Madame Pearl (Shinju fujin, Ikeda Yoshinobu, 1927) Men Against Women (Dansei tai josei, Shimazu Yasujirō, 1936) Mother (Okāsan, Naruse Mikio, 1952) No Blood Relation (Nasanu naka, Ikeda Yoshinobu, 1921) Okinu and the Head Clerk (Okinu to Bantō, Nomura Hiromasa, 1940) Okoto and Sasuke (Shunkinshō: Okoto to Sasuke, Shimazu Yasujirō, 1935) Ornamental Hairpin (Kanzashi, Shimizu Hiroshi, 1941) Record of a Woman Doctor (Joi no kiroku, Shimizu Hiroshi, 1941) Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) Scarface (Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1932) Shine On, Japanese Women! (Kagayake Nihon no josei, Nomura Hiromasa, 1932) Song of the Flower Basket (Hanakago no uta, Gosho Heinosuke, 1937) South Wind (Minamikaze, Shibuya Minoru, 1939) Symphony of Youth (Seishun kōkyōgaku, Nomura Hōtei, 1928) The Bride Talks in Her Sleep (Hanayome no negoto, Gosho Heinosuke, 1933)

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The Flowers of Love in Bloom: The Dancing Girl of Izu (Koi no hana saku: Izu no odoriko, Gosho Heinosuke, 1933) The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1952) The Love of Sumako the Actress (Joyū Sumako no koi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1947) The Love-Troth Tree (Aizen katsura, Nomura Hiromasa, parts I and II, 1938) The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, Gosho Heinosuke, 1931) The New Earth/The Daughter of the Samurai (Atarashiki tsuchi/Die Tochter des Samurai, Arnold Fanck and Itami Mansaku, 1937) The New Road (Shindō, Gosho Heinosuke, parts I and II, 1936) The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) The Story of Kinuyo (Kinuyo monogatari, Gosho Heinosuke, 1930) Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, Ozu Yasujirō, 1953) Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953) View of the Stage (Butai sugata, Nomura Hiromasa, 1940) What Did the Lady Forget? (Shukujo wa nani wo wasureta ka, Ozu Yasujirō, 1937) Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (Seishun no yume ima izuko, Ozu Yasujirō, 1932) Young Miss (Ojōsan, Ozu Yasujirō, 1930)

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Chapter 2 Meetings and Partings: How Tanaka’s Films End Alexander Jacoby

In the celebrated final scene of Army (Rikugun, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944), a mother is separated from her son, a soldier leaving for active service. In the celebrated final scene of Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) a mother is reunited with her son after a long and painful separation. In both films, the emotional charge of the ending is predicated on the mother’s intense feelings for her son, the situations being parallel, though opposite. The films are separated by ten years and are the work of two different directors, both recognised auteurs with strong directorial personalities, whose respective oeuvres display clear commonalities of theme and style. But the connecting link is the star, Tanaka Kinuyo, who plays both mothers, and whose commitment, precision and intensity are of central importance in imbuing the two scenes with their emotional power. Without wishing to dispute the importance of directorial agency, I wish in this chapter to try the experiment of reading these two films, along with others starring Tanaka, as vehicles for the star and as films in which Tanaka’s presence exercises a shaping influence on tone and meaning. In a collaborative medium, the notion that stars, as well as directors, may exercise an authorial function is not especially controversial, and, as Gary Bettinson writes, ‘The credibility of the “star-as-auteur” premise may be tested by tracking performative continuities across a filmography’ (2015: 385). Beyond this, continuities of theme and ideological implication may be adduced in connection with a star persona. Star personas are associated with particular roles and narrative formations; therefore, they help to shape the directions a film may take, and the implications it may contain. In this chapter, I propose to focus in detail on the climaxes and endings of selected films, in which Tanaka’s presence and conduct is key to resolving the ideological questions that the films have posed and to clarifying the overall ideological movement of the narrative.

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Richard John Neupert writes that ‘notions of closure involve industrial, generic and ideological structures, as well as other dependent structures such as a star system’ (1995: 73), and that ‘ideological structures . . . help determine plausible or “appropriate” endings in the cinema’ (1995: 74). These structural determinants are not of course absolute, and on the level of individual films it is, precisely, the choice of an ending that may help to determine, or clarify, the ideological standpoint of the work. Star personas too, of course, are ideologically charged, and the properties associated with a particular star are one factor that helps shape the choice of an appropriate ending: witness, for instance, the way in which Greta Garbo’s star vehicles gravitate repeatedly to tragic or melancholic resolutions, in the face of the almost universal Hollywood validation of the happy ending. In this chapter, in the context of the work of one Japanese actress, I hope to suggest how the potential ideological implications of star persona intersect with, and are clarified by, the charged ideological environment of the ending. Richard Dyer tells us that ‘star images function crucially in relation to contradictions within or between ideologies, which they seek to “manage” or “resolve”’ (1998: 34). The years spanned by Tanaka’s career were unusually rich in ideological contradiction. She began to act in the late silent period, when the eager westernisation of the Taishō era (1912–26) was giving way to a renewed nationalism, and worked through the era of militarism, when liberal and left-wing filmmakers sought coded methods of expressing dissent, as well as through the era of post-war, American-influenced liberalism. These ideological contradictions are expressed through a complex star persona which was able to lend weight both to conformist/conservative characterisations and to liberal or radical ones. Catherine Russell, in an essay on the star personas of Japanese actresses during the 1950s, does not discuss Tanaka in depth, but notes in passing that she ‘starred regularly in period films, and tended to exemplify the feminisuto ideals of beautiful suffering and endurance’ (2003: 35).1 In fact, at least in the post-war era, Tanaka’s appearances in period films were balanced by numerous significant performances in modern dress, and her more passive characterisations were offset by assertive and challenging ones. While she frequently inhabited relatively traditional female personas – wives and mothers – she was also available to play liberated career women (e.g. a lawyer and an actress), and ambiguous characters such as the heroine of Shimizu Hiroshi’s Ornamental Hairpin (Kanzashi, 1941), whose crucial property is, arguably, to borrow Robin Wood’s phrase, a ‘resistance to definition’ (1998: 94). Rather than exemplifying fixed ideals, the films in which Tanaka stars in the 1940s and 1950s pose ideological questions which are resolved, or at least clarified, through the treatment of her relations with other characters. These

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characters are most frequently, but not exclusively, male; in a typical pattern, the values embodied in a Tanaka film are explicated through her interactions with a male friend or a relative. The relative is sometimes a husband and sometimes a son – Tanaka had been playing mother roles intermittently since the early 1940s, and her gravitation towards such roles was confirmed by her starring role in a 1952 Naruse Mikio film actually entitled Mother (Okāsan). In both Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953) and Sansho the Bailiff, Tanaka plays a mother, though the two films’ emphases are rather different; the mother–son relationship is central to the latter, whereas in the former the boy is a small child and the key relationship is that between husband and wife. Although these appear to be the most common patterns, certain films instead place central importance on the Tanaka character’s relations with another woman, a situation which imbues them with a distinct ideological trajectory. Kinoshita Chika has summarised the ‘crucial properties of Tanaka’s acting . . . her smooth, prompt and light way of walking; fluid but restless gestures; inclination to avoid eye contact; and ambiguity in facial expressions’ (2001). Kinoshita notes that these properties are differently inflected by different directors, so that the inclination to avoid eye contact is absent, for instance, from Tanaka’s collaborations with Ozu Yasujirō, where her performance style is crucially modified by his distinctive way of framing and directing his actors. Nevertheless, these characteristics are recognisable across Tanaka’s work, alongside what I would identify as a fifth crucial property of Tanaka’s acting, or arguably as a subdivision of gesture, that of touch. Physical contact frequently takes place between Tanaka and other characters, male or female, and this contact is often given specific charged emphasis. I am not arguing that this property is unique to Tanaka; one notes, for instance, the climactic instance of physical contact between Noriko (Hara Setsuko, 1920–2015) and Kyōko (Kagawa Kyōko, 1931–) in Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, Ozu Yasujirō, 1953), which has led Robin Wood to declare that ‘one of the keys to the film is touch’ (1998: 123). Nevertheless, films starring Tanaka seem to use touch often enough, and with sufficient emphasis, to make it a significant element of her screen persona and a structuring gesture in her films. The climaxes and endings of Tanaka’s films frequently derive their intensity from the precisely inflected presence or the deliberately highlighted absence of physical contact, a detail that significantly clarifies the tone and ideological implications of the resolution. Catherine Russell’s comments on another of Tanaka’s post-war vehicles may provide a useful starting point here. Mother is, as its title suggests, a representative of an important genre in Japanese cinema, the haha-mono (mother-film) genre, and also the work of a canonical Japanese auteur, Naruse Mikio.2 Russell is addressing the film in the context of a director-based study,

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but she situates Tanaka’s performance in the title role in the context of a multifaceted star persona which has accrued alternative meanings and potential in the work of other directors and through her conduct outside the cinema. She writes: ‘Seeing Tanaka Kinuyo, one of the top actresses of the time, coming off a string of feminisuto pictures with Mizoguchi and recently back from a trip to the United States, in this stereotypical role of the prematurely aged housewife triggers the central contradiction of the film’ (2008: 237). This contradiction is the gap between the social validation of an ideal of motherhood and the actual unhappiness that it creates, as Masako (Tanaka), a widow, gives up the possibility of remarriage because of the objections of her daughter Toshiko (Kagawa Kyōko). Russell argues: The sadness conveyed by Tanaka is the sadness of someone caught in a social trap, which is embodied in the home and in the national character to which the home and family system are inextricably linked. To follow her own heart would be to break her children’s faith in the system that she has come to embody. The key contradiction of the film is that she does have a body. While a children’s story [the film was based on one] can conveniently overlook that fact, in the cinema, in the person of Tanaka Kinuyo, this body belongs to a desiring subject. (2008: 241) These contradictions are encapsulated in the final scene of the film. In one of the significant instances of physical contact between Tanaka’s character and a male relative, Masako plays a game of rough and tumble with her young nephew, who has been taken into the house and is living there as a surrogate son. Significantly, the boy addresses her as ‘Mother’, and the gesture of playful contact carries a strong charge of maternal affection. But this apparent image of domestic contentment is qualified by the subsequent close-up of Tanaka, which shows her tired and breathless, her slight smile resolving into a faint frown. The detail recalls earlier scenes in the film where Masako has been shown to be dizzy and nauseous, and the reiterated intimation of human frailty undercuts the spoken voiceover (delivered by her daughter) urging her to ‘live forever’. If that voiceover, like the image of contact between woman and boy and the film’s title itself, insists on Masako’s identity as, exclusively, a mother, this is ironised by the circumstances. The scene here arguably invites interpretation in Oedipal terms; having decided against remarriage, the widowed mother sublimates her physical energies into play with the male child, himself a substitute for her son by blood, who has died earlier in the film. Its concluding moments simultaneously insist on Tanaka’s status as a mother and challenge it. As Russell implies, this challenge is in part a function of the way in which the film re-inflects Tanaka’s screen persona. Andrew Britton, discussing ‘the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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function of stars as embodiments/mediators of contradiction’, argues that ‘the contradictions enacted by stars in their films are always at least latent in a particular genre’ (1995: 143). The classic haha-mono focuses on mothers whose suffering is a generic given (‘In the usual haha-mono there is no escape for mother’, Anderson and Richie claim; ‘She must sacrifice and suffer’ [1982: 318]), and is validated by widespread assumptions about maternal duty. Indeed, even the happy endings towards which Daiei’s post-war haha-mono generally moved can be read as further validating their heroine’s unquestioning acceptance of the maternal role. But in Mother, the casting of Tanaka problematises this validation. A Japanese audience in 1952 had, during the last seven years, seen Tanaka play career women, a prostitute and a radical feminist in the Occupation-era films of Mizoguchi: these roles open up alternative models of female conduct to the generic validation of motherhood characteristic of the haha-mono, and the spectator’s potential awareness of these models is crucial to the troubled effect of Naruse’s ending. Thus, while Masako does sacrifice and suffer, Mother, read in relation to the radical films of the late 1940s, is able to challenge the notion that she must. It is perhaps not surprising that such ideological problematisation should take place at the end of a period where the social position of women had changed more rapidly and dramatically than at any other moment in Japanese history, through a combination of constitutional reform and drastic shifts in visible norms of conduct. A similar narrative trajectory, and similar iconography, is offered in Naruse’s slightly earlier and superficially rather different film, Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza keshō, 1951). In Tanaka’s first post-war collaboration with the director, she plays Yukiko, a bar hostess with a young male child, Haruo, the issue of a temporary relationship some years back. The film traces the heroine’s relationships with a number of adult men, among them her clients and patrons, and most significantly with a slightly younger man, Ishikawa (Hori Yūji, 1922–79), with whom she falls in love. Ultimately, however, Ishikawa prefers her protégé, Kyoko (Kagawa Kyōko), and Yukiko, accepting their relationship, is left alone but for her son (the casting here is significant; as in Mother, Tanaka gives up her potential happiness for Kagawa). The opening sequence intriguingly connects the boy with one of the adult men. We see Haruo move through the streets of Tokyo back towards Yukiko’s home, which, however, he does not enter. A crane shot carries us up to the higher story, before cutting inside to reveal Yukiko sitting in front of a mirror. Hearing a noise, Yukiko calls out, ‘Haruo, is that you?’ Instead, her former lover, Fujimura (Mishima Masao, 1906–73), walks into the frame, initiating a tension between the claims of adult sexuality and those of motherhood. That tension is highlighted in the dialogue: Yukiko states that she feels sorry for Fujimura’s wife and son; Fujimura replies that only his son matters, and Yukiko concurs: ‘It’s the same for me. You do sacrifice for your children, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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don’t you?’ As in Mother, it is parental love that seems ultimately to be validated by the film, but that validation is not unambiguous. The film is structured by a number of key instances of touch. In the opening scene, at Yukiko’s request, Fujimura tightens her obi (sash); this purely functional contact mutates into an attempt to caress her shoulder, a gesture which Yukiko repels by looking back at him with a reproachful glance, so that he releases her. The hint of sexual imposition here, which Yukiko easily fends off, is reiterated in more menacing form in a later scene where Yukiko visits an older man, Sugano (Tōno Eijirō, 1907–94), from whom she hopes to borrow money on behalf of a colleague, and almost becomes a victim of an intended sexual assault. Leading her to a warehouse, Sugano initiates physical contact when he presses a handful of banknotes into her hand, continuing to grip her hand, and then touching her shoulder, in a gesture which is a clear sexual advance. Here, touch is explicitly foregrounded in the dialogue: when Yukiko knocks his hand away and flings the money onto the floor, he scornfully retorts ‘You tell me “No” with your hand too’. This heralds a violent interaction as the man attempts to assault her and Yukiko struggles to break free, eventually pushing him violently away and fleeing back into the street. In both these instances, physical contact is initiated by a man, and rejected by Yukiko; by contrast, the interaction between Yukiko and Ishikawa, whom she appears to love, consists primarily of conversation and glances. There are moments of near-contact, as Yukiko reaches out to light his cigarette, and as Ishikawa’s arm gently brushes against hers while they walk side by side in the grounds of the National Museum. But the only instance of direct touch between them is functional, when Yukiko takes his arm to hurry him away from a former customer who has tried to rob her and threatens to reveal that she works as a bar hostess. The near-absence of contact here arguably foreshadows the abortive nature of this romance, which will end with Yukiko’s resigned acceptance of his love for Kyoko. These negative interactions with adult men leave Yukiko’s young son as the only male object of her affection, and the film’s climax significantly highlights this through an instance of touch. Earlier in the film, Yukiko’s decision to look after Ishikawa has required her to break a promise to take her son to the zoo. This disappointment impels the boy to run away and leads to a tense climax as Yukiko and her neighbours search for him. This plot structure anticipates, on a modest, quotidian level, films such as Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, which move through separation to a final reunion between Tanaka and a close male relative. Here, when the boy is found, unharmed, his return precipitates the film’s final instance of violent physical contact as Yukiko, furious at the anxiety he has caused, slaps him. This moment of violence is juxtaposed, a few minutes later, with the final image of contact between mother and son, in

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which she renews her promise to take him to the zoo. The promise is cemented by another act of touch, as Yukiko and the boy lock their little fingers round each other. The detail is touching but ironic, since it was Ishikawa’s presence which had led her previously to break the promise. As Catherine Russell notes, ‘Yukiko loses Ishikawa to Kyoko when she has to search for her son’ (2008: 210); therefore, the fact that she is able to take Haruo to the zoo now underlines the thwarting of her romantic hopes. Suggestively, the final image of contact (which Naruse shoots in relative close-up) is followed by a closing image of solitude as Yukiko makes her way across a bridge. In these instances, then, a tension between romantic and maternal affection is ostensibly resolved by the narrative in favour of the latter, with that resolution highlighted by a significant instance of physical contact. Nevertheless, the films both end with an acknowledgement of the mother’s exhaustion and/or loneliness, which opens up the possibility of a more critical reading. The ambiguity is not decisively resolved in either film. In other films starring Tanaka, however, similar plot formations and gestures are linked into more overt, explicit ideological assertions, and it is to these that I wish now to turn.

Tanaka’s reunions The closing scene of Sansho the Bailiff is one of the canonical endings in cinema, with a privileged status in film criticism. Approaching the film from a traditional liberal humanist perspective, Mark Le Fanu writes, ‘Of all the great endings in Mizoguchi’s cinema, the ending of Sansho the Bailiff is surely the greatest’ (2005: 64). For Gilbert Adair, the film ‘exists for the sake of its own last scene’ (1995: 121). These judgements are advanced in the context of tributes to the film’s director, Mizoguchi Kenji – Le Fanu is writing in a monograph on the director’s work; Adair celebrates him as ‘one of the greatest practitioners of mise-en-scene the cinema has ever known’ (1995: 121). In an earlier essay, Robin Wood analyses the film and the ending in particular in some detail, and pays tribute to ‘a heightened, contemplative and serenely accepting perspective on life that is wholly lacking in sentimentality’ . . . ‘Style in Sansho Dayu is the convincing embodiment of the cinema’s supreme intelligence and sensibility’ (1976: 248). Without wishing to dispute Mizoguchi’s responsibility for the unique qualities of this scene, I want to try the experiment of reading the ending of Sansho the Bailiff not primarily as that of a Mizoguchi film, but as that of a Tanaka film, linked by gesture, detail and implication to other Tanaka films. It is worth approaching Sansho the Bailiff via a dissenting view: Catherine Russell’s critical reading of the film, which attacks the melodramatic approach of the film and

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finds fault with its female characterisations. She cites Tadao Sato as repeating ‘the familiar adage that Mizoguchi’s preoccupation with suffering women was bound up with his own guilt about the women he had caused to suffer’, and that ‘all Japanese (men, presumably) should feel equally sorry for the wrongs dealt out against women over the past centuries’ (2011: 66). Russell goes on to comment that ‘in keeping with this feminisuto sensibility, neither Tanaka Kinuyo’s performance nor [co-star] Kagawa [Kyōko]’s really endow their characters with personality; rather, they embody icons of grief’ (2011: 66–7). She further asserts that ‘The father in the film is absolved after his death, but Zuchio [sic; the correct romanisation is ‘Zushiō’] finds his redemption not in his moral conviction but in the pathos of his grieving mother’ (2011: 64). Yet while the film’s climax does privilege the relationship between mother and son over the public impact of Zushiō’s action, Russell, I think, errs in drawing so clear a distinction between the ethical and the emotional, the personal and the political. In fact, Zushiō’s moral conviction, as expressed in the actions he has taken to defeat Sansho and close the labour camp, is the precondition of the personal salvation he and his mother, Tamaki, are able to achieve. The Buddhist icon of the goddess of mercy, Kannon, which Zushiō inherited from his father and which represents the father’s humane ideals, is the object that enables the blind Tamaki to recognise her son; and she responds to his expression of guilt with the words: ‘I know that you have followed your father’s teachings; that is why we are able to meet again now.’ As Robin Wood writes, ‘in performing a noble, altruistic deed . . . before renouncing temporal power, Zushio has indeed followed his father’s path . . . The sense of loss and waste (the devastation of the tidal wave, the monstrousness of human cruelty) is counter-balanced by that of achieved mystic unity, the past alive in the present, the dead living on in the survivors, the transmitted values reaffirmed and validated’ (1976: 247). In other words, the reunion is ideologically motivated; Zushiō is allowed to find his mother because of his adherence to specific values. Despite the Heian era (794–1185) setting and the Buddhist inflection they are given, these are essentially the broadly egalitarian and humanist values of post-war liberalism; as Mark Le Fanu notes, the depiction of the slave camp ‘can only be understood in relation to the whole dismal contemporary history of the concentration camps that blighted the middle years of the twentieth century with their catalogue of oppression and torture’ (2005: 67). Tadao Sato complains that ‘the ideas of compassion that Masauji, a provincial official, propounds seem like mere propaganda for democracy’ (2008: 122), but it is not necessary to share his pejorative attitude to accept the accuracy of the perception that the film is really about the recent, rather than the remote, past.

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The interdependence of the personal and the political is expressed through physical contact. Mark Le Fanu rightly notes that ‘the whole force of the recognition really comes through touch: it is physical’ (2005: 64), but touch also establishes a link between the human drama and the object which carries explicit ideological significance. The blind Tamaki initially believes Zushiō to be an imposter, and recoils from his embrace. But she is able to identify the Kannon statue by touch, after which her hands move immediately to Zushiō’s face; Tanaka’s touch links the object to the man and associates the values represented by Kannon with the reunion. Given the last word in the film, Tanaka’s character is also privileged to make an explicit statement defining the ideological resolution towards which the film has moved. Thereafter, during their final embrace, Tamaki continues to hold the statue in one hand. The ideological implications of the ending of Ugetsu are similar, and again are expressed and clarified through a reunion with a character played by Tanaka – in this case, Miyagi, the wife of the protagonist Genjūrō. Like Zushiō, Genjūrō has ‘gone astray’; where Zushiō had capitulated to the values of the slave camp, Genjūrō has been seduced by the ghostly anti-heroine Wakasa, played by Kyō Machiko (1924–). Again his liberation is achieved superficially through acceptance of Buddhist values – it is a monk who warns him of his perilous situation, and paints on his body the sutras which will defend him from supernatural assault – but arguably the monk assists mainly to promote the domestic and familial against the carnal, and the proof of Genjūrō’s moral and emotional development is his reunion with his family. In this case, the character played by Tanaka is now dead; but the film’s conclusion is nevertheless presided over by Miyagi’s ghostly presence, in which guise, as in Sansho, she delivers explicit, spoken approval of the male protagonist’s conduct: ‘You are again your true self, in the place where you belong . . . You’ve finally become the man I’d hoped for.’ The film’s final shot reiterates this. Genjūrō’s son runs over to place an offering on his mother’s nearby grave alongside a freshly planted sapling which carries with it inevitable connotations of new life, expressing in natural form the continuity between the generations which Miyagi’s supernatural presence reinforces. Genjūrō’s discovery of Miyagi, whom he does not yet know to be a ghost, is marked by a single instance of direct physical contact: as he enters the cottage, Tanaka embraces her husband while welcoming him home. This affectionate contact is followed by a more indirect gesture as Miyagi lifts up their sleeping son and places him in Genjūrō’s arms; although husband and wife do not touch each other here, their contact is mediated through the child that is passed between them. Genjūrō carries the boy to the hearth and kneels down at the right-hand side of the screen with the child in his arms. Although Miyagi kneels down close beside him, Mizoguchi frames the two-shot so that the hanging cord

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which supports the stew pot divides them from each other. The composition unites them within the frame, but also visually enacts their imminent separation and expresses Genjūrō’s acceptance of the role of parent, a role he is obliged to take on as a result of Miyagi’s death. The dividing line is broken only briefly as Miyagi leans towards her husband to pour some sake into his cup, though here again, direct physical contact is withheld. Genjūrō will later place this cup as his offering on Miyagi’s grave. After this instance of contact, Mizoguchi’s camera pans leftwards so as almost to exclude Genjūrō from the frame, though his presence is implied by the face of the sleeping child he is holding, which remains in view for the rest of the shot. The frame is dominated, however, by Miyagi’s tearful face. After this, although Miyagi and Genjūrō again share the frame in successive shots, there is no further physical contact between them. When morning comes, Genjūrō wakes to find his wife absent. Physical union thus gives way to the spiritual union exemplified by Tanaka’s voiceover, which begins, significantly, while both Genjūrō and his son touch the mound of bare earth on her grave. The final scenes of the film, then, stress the continuing spiritual union of man and wife, and of mother and son, and, as in Sansho the Bailiff, this union is ideologically motivated. Robin Wood argues: Mizoguchi through his narrative rejects commercialism (the pursuit of easy money separated Genjūrō from Miyagi) on the one hand, and ‘ivory tower’ aestheticism (the claustrophobic though alluring world of Wakasa) on the other, in favour of a progress towards an art that will truly express the assimilated experience of life. (1976: 237) More broadly, the film, and Miyagi, champion Genjūrō’s rejection of passion and aestheticism in favour of dedication to the familial and human. The similarity of these two canonical Mizoguchi endings can of course be ascribed fairly to the director’s control as auteur, but here I want to set them in the context of other key Tanaka films, in the attempt to trace the narrative and thematic parallels that can be drawn with films elsewhere in her oeuvre. To illustrate this, I would like to discuss the end of a film by another renowned director starring Tanaka, Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, 1948). This Occupation-era film prefigures the two Mizoguchi films in making a reunion between Tanaka’s character and a male relative the climax of the film and using it as the pretext for the film’s ideological resolution. The film remains relatively little discussed in Western literature, in part because its melodramatic tone, with its theme of prostitution and depiction of physical violence, is atypical of its director. This deviation from the norm has led some commentators to

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dismiss the film as at least a partial failure (‘In a picture as melodramatic as A Hen in the Wind’, Donald Richie observes, ‘Ozu’s heightened interest in beauty . . . is obtrusive’ [1977: 234]). If the melodrama is in some respects atypical of Ozu, it is, however, rather more typical of a Tanaka star vehicle. (It is perhaps worth noting that two of Tanaka’s other collaborations with Ozu, Dragnet Girl [Hijōsen no onna, 1933] and The Munekata Sisters [Munekata kyōdai, 1950], are also uncharacteristically melodramatic within the context of his oeuvre.) Indeed, Steve Neale’s remarks on melodrama as a form in which ‘the narrative process is inaugurated by the eruption of (hetero)sexual desire into an already established social order’ (1980: 22) are suggestive here, although the social order of immediate post-war Japan was the opposite of an established one; it was, rather, precarious and in the process of rapid transformation. The institution of heterosexual marriage, however, was as strongly validated by the American occupiers as it had been by the post-Meiji values of ryōsai kenbo (‘good wife, wise mother’). Ozu’s film demonstrates the stresses faced by a marriage in the specific social context of the immediate post-war era. Here, the reunion between Tokiko (Tanaka) and her husband Shuichi (Sano Shūji, 1912–78) is set in the context of the many Japanese servicemen still abroad, awaiting repatriation, after the war, and the dire material circumstances of many on the home front. Ozu’s more direct, explicit focus on the problems of the moment may be discreetly indicated in the name Tokiko, which translates as ‘time-child’; she is indeed a child of the Occupation era and, amid its poverty and disruption, is forced into prostitution in order to pay for medical treatment for her ailing son. The husband’s discovery of this leads to a crisis, and escalates into a scene, surprising for Ozu, in which the physical contact characteristic of Tanaka’s climaxes takes a drastically violent form. As Shuichi attempts to leave their upstairs room, Tokiko moves to prevent him, initially locking her arms around his legs, and then moving to block his way at the top of the staircase. The husband knocks Tokiko down this (very steep) staircase, a scene which has a dramatic horror as Tanaka falls like a broken doll. Hasumi Shigehiko comments on the absence of staircases in Ozu’s ‘last period’ (initiated the following year by Late Spring [Banshun, 1949]) (1998: 86–7). By contrast, the staircase is a reiterated motif in A Hen in the Wind, with obvious symbolic emphasis: ‘The stairway’, David Bordwell notes, ‘filmed squarely at several points, will “pay off ” in the brutal shot of Tokiko tumbling down it’ (1988: 306). The unusual, starkly vertical composition gives an added intensity to the drama as Tanaka falls; there is subsequently an equally unusual high-angle shot from the husband’s point of view, as he looks down, horror-struck, at his wife’s prone body. Drawing on Sato’s work, Bordwell finds a broader ideological implication in the marital confrontation: ‘Shuichi’s violence toward her becomes emblematic

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of the ingrained brutality of the war years’ (1988: 302). The husband’s subsequent implied repentance for that violence, and his forgiveness of his wife’s transgression, enact on a domestic scale the process of ideological transformation that Japan was undergoing during the Occupation. The husband’s change of heart is marked by a shift from violent physicality to tender contact; the scene culminates in the delicate image of Shuichi helping Tokiko to her feet as they agree to start anew. The final interior shot visually cements their reunion, Ozu framing Tanaka’s hands as they gradually lock around Sano’s back. However, the emphasis in the scene falls firmly on Tokiko’s self-abasement; she even goes so far as explicitly to invite further violence, telling Shuichi, ‘I’ll take whatever you do to me. Hit me. Hate me.’ In contrast to Sansho, where the Tanaka character responds magnanimously to the male protagonist’s apology, in Ozu’s film it is the man, despite his recent violent conduct, who is permitted to respond magnanimously to Tanaka’s repentance. Shuichi’s change of heart is suggested as he reaches out to take his wife in his arms and encourages her to get to her feet; significantly, however, there is no direct apology on his part. Tokiko, still obviously hurt, takes faltering steps back towards the staircase; Shuichi follows her and takes her in his arms, at which point she falls to her knees. Bordwell argues that ‘the final embrace unites the traditional, stoically suffering Japanese woman and Ozu’s typical diffident, confused man. . . . The male falters, scraping by on good intentions and the strength of his woman – shown, during the embrace, as a pair of hands knotted firmly behind his back, as if in prayer’ (1988: 304). As I see it, the image visualises quite the reverse: female weakness and male strength. The relative position of the actors strongly underlines the power relations in the relationship: Sano upright; Tanaka, passive and on her knees, clutching his legs, and eventually lifted by him to her feet. Likewise, and in contrast to the Mizoguchi films discussed above, it is Sano’s character who is permitted to make an explicit statement of ideology: ‘Whatever happens, we’ll keep calm. We’ll trust each other, no matter what. That’s how a true married couple should be. . . . We’ll embrace each other and go on.’ The threatened relationship is repaired on his terms; and the Tanaka character’s role in this climax is reduced to passive acceptance of her husband’s vision of marriage. Discussing the Japanese cinema of the 1950s, Catherine Russell argues that ‘Among the contradictions of this cultural moment was the definition of the feminine. Although the Occupation brought with it the legislation of women’s rights, resistance to “women’s liberation” was implicitly linked to the protection of traditional values’ (2003: 34). The resolution of Ozu’s first post-war collaboration with Tanaka, produced during the Occupation, seems to resolve this contradiction by redescribing women’s rights in terms of an idealised monogamy

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reached through the voluntary reorientation of the patriarch, whose status as such is untroubled. The liberal ideals of the Occupation are endorsed, but in relatively contained, conservative form.

Tanaka’s separations Tanaka’s films do not always end in union; often, they conclude with division, with consequently different ideological emphasis. In another chapter in this volume, Lauri Kitsnik explores Tanaka’s star persona of the 1930s, a period when she was still available for romantic roles. A transitional work in this light is Shimizu Hiroshi’s remarkable 1941 film, Ornamental Hairpin, which I have discussed in depth elsewhere (Jacoby 2007). Here Tanaka’s persona is still essentially that of her romantic period, but the film pivots around her subtle rejection of the ideological norms of the time. The film as a whole is controversial in the context of the cinematic priorities of the militarist regime, legally enshrined in the 1939 Film Law, which discouraged, in particular, ‘slice-of-life films’ and films about people seeking personal integrity (Anderson and Richie 1982: 129). Set among the leisured guests at a country hot spring resort, a ‘slice-of-life’ film about characters seeking personal happiness and integrity, Shimizu’s film falls into a category discouraged by the Film Law; as I have observed elsewhere, ‘In 1941, to make an apparently apolitical, escapist film about the middle class at leisure was itself subversive’ (2007: 69). A potential militarist sub-plot, which may have served as the excuse the film needed to be made at all in this time of strict censorship, focuses on a soldier, Nanmura (Ryū Chishū, 1904–93), gradually recuperating from his wounds, and his rehabilitation is traced through a series of ‘walking exercises’, each one more challenging than the last. The exercise sequences chart not only Nanmura’s recovery, but also the growing affection of Tanaka’s character Emi for the soldier. This is mediated through ostensibly functional physical contact with him. In the first walking exercise, in a field, she helps him to his feet after he falls; in the second, across a set of stepping stones over a river, he again falls, and Emi carries him the rest of the way on her back. As I have noted elsewhere, ‘the gesture is beautifully ambiguous – while Emi’s willingness to touch the soldier hints at sexual feeling, the piggy-back ride also has maternal connotations. Nanmura’s helplessness makes him seem childlike, and this is one moment in which customary gender roles are inverted in their relationship, the weak, dependent man reliant on the physical strength of the woman’ (2007: 72). In the third and most challenging exercise sequence, Nanmura must climb a steep stone staircase; if he reaches the top, he will be able to return to Tokyo. In this light, the absence of physical contact in the final exercise sequence becomes

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doubly significant: Nanmura must not be touched, since by definition he must climb without support; but at the same time, the lack of contact between him and Emi foreshadows their separation, since Emi, alone among the characters in the film, will refuse to leave the resort. A last instance of near-contact occurs when Emi takes his crutches from him so that he can begin the attempt; thereafter, she watches from the bottom of the stairs, so that the physical distance between them gradually increases. At times, Shimizu’s compositions dramatically emphasise this distance. For instance, the shot in which Nanmura, having reached the top, declares that he can return to Tokyo is filmed from the bottom of the steps, with Emi facing into the camera and partially cut off by the bottom of the frame; Nanmura, meanwhile, is a tiny figure at the top and back of the image. His successful climbing of the stairs heralds not merely his departure from the resort but, we may assume, his return to the war effort, a supposition that Shimizu subtly bolsters when the two boys who have been cheering Nanmura on celebrate his victory with cries of the nationalist term ‘Banzai’. The film’s last scene shows Tanaka climbing the same flight of stairs, silent and alone. By concluding the film with Emi’s loneliness rather than with the soldier’s triumph, Shimizu subtly rejects the anti-humanist dogma of the time, implicitly highlighting the tragic human cost of militarism. In the Mizoguchi films, a reunion with Tanaka serves as the mechanism by which a liberal ideology is endorsed. In Shimizu’s film, a parting which leaves Tanaka isolated serves as the mechanism by which nationalist ideology is rejected. A similar mechanism of ideological critique operates in the endings of two films by Kinoshita Keisuke, both starring Tanaka. Although made a decade and a half apart and in the different cultural situations of the war and post-war eras, both are films about the relationship between a mother and son and both end, not in reunion like Sansho the Bailiff, but in separation. Kinoshita’s 1944 film Army, which features one of the earliest of Tanaka’s mother roles, contains one of the most famous climaxes in wartime cinema, which has been analysed in detail by a number of English-language critics.3 In it, Tanaka’s character, Waka, sees her son off to war. In the wartime context, the conventions of the hahamono, with its focus on sacrificial maternal duty, lent themselves easily to a militarist implication. But Tanaka’s presence and performance again trouble and undermine the explicit, endorsed meaning of the film. As Peter High notes, ‘the scene comes at the very end of the film, after all of the script’s dialogue has ended – a tactic allowing [Kinoshita] to skirt the disapproval of the preproduction censors’ (2003: 402). Indeed, Tanaka’s last spoken words in the film seem explicitly to support the film’s ideology – after Waka tells a neighbour that ‘there is nothing in the way of private stuff I have to tell him anymore’, she stands reciting the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, the set

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of precepts promulgated to the military by the Meiji Emperor in 1882 (‘The soldier and sailor should consider loyalty their essential duty . . .’).4 As High points out, Kinoshita undercuts this apparent declaration of political loyalty by directing Tanaka to perform it with a ‘desperately unhappy’ expression, thus ironising the spoken text (2003: 402). The scene is preceded by the last sequence in which we see the whole family together, and here Kinoshita’s framing and the direction of the actors underscore the imminent tragedy by emphasising the closeness of the family. The camera pans from a close-up of the son’s uniform hanging up on one wall to the open shoji (room divider) framing the family as they sit over dinner. The composition keeps all four family members together in shot, stressing their status as a unit as they finish their meal. Afterwards, the eldest son offers to massage his mother’s shoulders, and Kinoshita cuts to the opposite side of the table as the young man moves behind her to do so. The new composition is another group shot, which is extended for nearly three minutes, and again contains all four of the characters, except for the interval of roughly thirty seconds when the younger son leaves the frame to transfer some leftovers to the refrigerator. On his return, he takes up position behind his father in order to massage his shoulders, and the physical contact between the two children and their respective parents continues insistently through the duration of the shot, even as the father issues his departing son with advice for his conduct at war. At the end of the shot, an off-screen clock tolls, heralding the son’s departure, and Kinoshita captures the contrast between the parents’ respective expressions: the father’s eager smile juxtaposed with the mother’s anxious gaze. There follows the first scene described by High, in which Waka, alone in an outhouse, recites the Imperial Rescript, her face half-shadowed by lowering expressionistic darkness. The sound of the marching soldiers is heard outside, and she goes out to follow the parade. In stark contrast to the relative stasis of the preceding scenes, Kinoshita orchestrates an elaborate sequence of flamboyant camera movements and cuts between different angles as Waka runs through the crowd in the effort to find and keep pace with her son. The physical contact which had expressed the closeness of the family is replaced by a contact which enforces division, as the surrounding crowd jostles Waka, impeding her progress and coming between her and her son. Again in contrast to the preceding scenes, Kinoshita pointedly divides the mother from the son through a camera technique which cuts between the marching body of men on the one hand and the watching crowd on the other. Only in two shots do mother and son share the frame. One brief shot finally links the two as Waka catches up with and makes eye contact with her son, after which the director reverts to cutting between them. When, finally, the camera cuts back again to frame the soldiers,

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the mother and the crowd in a single group shot, a passer-by moves into shot from the right of the screen and knocks Waka to the ground. Ikeda Tadao’s script had apparently described this scene only in the nondescript words ‘the mother sees the son off at the station’ (Koresky 2014). Kinoshita’s protest against the war is expressed through a visual contradiction of the explicitly conformist words of The Imperial Rescript that Tanaka had delivered in the previous scene. Where in Sansho the Bailiff Tanaka’s character was to be privileged to deliver the closest thing there is to the film’s message, here she gets to deliver what ought, according to the approved notions of the time, to be the film’s message, but which is, in fact, subverted through technique so as to emphasise the tragedy of separation caused by the war. In the aftermath of the film’s release, ‘an army officer is reported to have stormed into the main offices of Shochiku film studios, ranting that Kinoshita had committed treason’ (High 2003: 402). Fourteen years later, Kinoshita again directed Tanaka in The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō, 1958), a period film adapted from Fukazawa Shichirō’s debut novel about a legendary community where the elderly are abandoned on a mountain on reaching the age of seventy. Again, the film’s central focus is on the relationship between a mother, Orin (Tanaka), and a son, Tatsuhei (Takahashi Teiji, 1926–59), who will be obliged to abandon her. In this film, Tanaka’s character accepts the ideological obligations of her society, insistently conforming to the custom despite her evident health and vigour; her complicity in the ideological norms of the time is most dramatically expressed through her decision to bash her strong teeth out in order to attain the traditional helplessness of age. Emotionally, the film pivots on the irony that Orin exercises her self-determination in the service of the ideology that will destroy her. In the post-war era of American-influenced liberal humanism, the resolution poses questions about the limits of freedom, highlighting the degree to which available choices are circumscribed by cultural and social determinants. The film climaxes with the inevitable separation towards which the narrative has moved. In the long climactic sequence, Tatsuhei carries Orin on his back to the summit of the mountain where she will be abandoned. Again, touch is a significant detail; Orin is carried on a chair mounted on her son’s back, and clutches its wooden handles rather than holding directly onto her son; thus, the object itself seems symbolic of the cultural obligations dictating their separation. Tatsuhei’s reluctance is expressed visually as he turns back momentarily before continuing towards the mountain, and as he pleads with his mother to speak to him, something which, according to custom, she is forbidden to do. In response, she silently releases the handles and reaches out to caress his shoulders, a gesture which impels him to continue up the mountain. When they reach

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their destination, Orin takes up her position on a tatami mat before stretching out a hand towards her son, which he convulsively grasps before seizing her for a final embrace. Eventually, sobbing, he picks up the empty chair and leaves her, moving leftwards and forwards in the image while the camera slowly moves in the same direction, pulling back over the ground he has yet to traverse as if dictating his movements. In the process, the skeletons of previous victims are revealed, scattered over the ground. In contrast to other films, where Tanaka’s character is privileged to deliver an explicit ideological statement at the climax, here she is obliged by custom to remain silent; Keiko McDonald observes of this sequence that ‘Since Orin is forbidden to speak, Tatsuhei’s is the only voice that is heard’ (1994: 122). After she has been abandoned, snow begins to fall (a fortunate circumstance in the sense that it will hasten Orin’s death). Tatsuhei returns to catch a final glimpse of his mother; his, and the viewer’s, last sight of Tanaka’s character sees her crouching under the falling snow in silent prayer, manipulating a set of prayer beads. While, in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Buddhist teachings were assimilated to the values of post-war liberal humanism, the attitude towards Buddhism in Kinoshita’s film seems essentially negative; it is seen as one of the cultural forces that shape the fatalism and resignation that typifies this society, and which lead to Orin’s physically unnecessary death. The last spoken line of the film, which underlines this fatalism, is delivered by Tatsuhei’s wife, who, after her husband returns to the village, forecasts the continuation of the cycle: when they reach the age of seventy, she states, they too will go to the mountain. Our last sight of Tanaka distantly recalls Army, the final shot of which shows Tanaka with her hands clasped in prayer. However, the separation of mother and son is not actually the very last scene of Narayama. Just as Kinoshita’s exploitation of techniques drawn from traditional Japanese theatre in the bulk of the film creates a certain, quasi-Brechtian distance from the medieval society he depicts, so too the ending of the film translates the viewer into the modern world. We see a train approach the station of Obasute (literally meaning ‘abondoning the elderly’), and skiers are seen standing at the platform, emphasising the town’s modern function as a place of leisure and relaxation far removed from its desperate past. McDonald suggests that this conclusion invites us to perform an ‘objective analysis’ of the events dramatised by the film and ask ‘Does poverty still rule this little village despite this change to a modern ski resort?’ (1994: 124). Above all, this brief coda challenges the seemingly immutable ideology in which the historical characters were entrapped; the sense of a ‘return to normal’ is furthered by the contrast between the set-bound, artificial snowscapes of the preceding scene and the location work of the last shots. The brevity of the final sequence leaves it ambiguous. One may read it as a gentle indictment of the

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complacency of the modern, leisured tourist, who will ski on the pistes that once covered the bodies of the abandoned dead. But the depiction of improved communications and leisured visitors implies, at least, that the desperate poverty depicted in the rest of the film has given way to a more prosperous present day, in which the village, as a tourist attraction, has some share. Ending in this way, Kinoshita at least implicitly endorses the freedoms and prosperity of the postwar present against the poverty and inflexibility of the past. A present-day Orin, after all, would not have to die. In Army, the son accepts the prevailing ideology while the character played by Tanaka protests; in The Ballad of Narayama, the character played by Tanaka accepts the prevailing ideology, while the son protests; in both films, the prevailing ideology, which is collectivist and anti-humanist, wins, but is not endorsed, and in both cases the film’s opposition to that ideology is expressed through the dramatisation of a tragic separation. In contrast, films by Ozu and Mizoguchi offer an endorsement of liberal humanism mediated through reunion. The importance of Tanaka herself in mediating these ideological conclusions is confirmed by the fact that she is often privileged to make an explicit statement of ideology, although this statement is not necessarily equivalent to the values endorsed by the films as a whole; at times, it is ironised and challenged.

Tanaka the radical Thus far, we have seen that Tanaka’s presence moves films towards liberal conclusions, either through endorsing a liberal ideological stance or through repudiating a totalitarian one. Even though Tanaka’s character does not always herself endorse liberal ideology (in The Ballad of Narayama, indeed, Orin vehemently endorses the repressive social system), her situation and fate help to clarify the liberalism of the films. Is Tanaka’s persona also available for radical political statements? Star personas are not infinitely elastic, and it may be that Tanaka’s most frequent characterisations, as wife and mother, are less resistant to definition than the maiden and widow roles associated with Hara Setsuko. The Tanaka roles detailed above tend to signify a liberal inflection of traditional roles. If, as Richard Dyer has shrewdly commented, ‘The star phenomenon consists of everything that is publicly available about stars’ (2013: 2), then it is worth drawing attention to the very negative reaction that attended her newly westernised persona after a three-month trip to the USA during the Occupation period, a response which seems to parallel the dismay with which American commentators greeted Ingrid Bergman’s liaison with Roberto Rossellini.5 Japanese audiences, it seems, were not willing to countenance a wholly modern, or wholly westernised, Tanaka.6 But we should be careful not necessarily

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to equate westernisation with progressiveness, and the availability of Tanaka’s screen persona for radical ideals can be examined by returning to Mizoguchi, and exploring the endings of two films which move towards the rejection of a male protagonist, and the concomitant establishment of bonds between women. In Mizoguchi’s last collaboration with Tanaka, the 1954 geisha story The Woman of Rumour (Uwasa no onna), Tanaka, as Hatsuko, plays an ostensibly conservative figure, the proprietor of a geisha house, and thereby a woman implicated in the sexual oppression of other women. The film culminates in her reconciliation with her previously alienated daughter, brought about by their shared realisation of victimhood; both have been courted and exploited by a doctor, and both have rejected him. For the daughter, Yukiko (Kuga Yoshiko, 1931–), this awareness leads to a reconciliation with the traditions of the geisha house, and thereby an implicit acceptance of wider social structures oppressing women. When her mother falls ill, it is Yukiko who takes over the running of the institution. A touching scene shows her tending to her mother’s needs, supplying her with drink and, in another significant instance of physical contact, wrapping a shawl around her shoulders. Despite this limited instance of female solidarity within the family, the rejection of a male suitor clearly limits the options open to the character played by Tanaka and particularly to her daughter, leaving them trapped; and the broader oppression of women represented by the geisha system remains in force. The details of this resolution, however, imply a critique of that system rather than acceptance of it. In the first place, although Yukiko has expertly adopted the mannerisms and tones of voice of a geisha house madame, she still wears Western dress, refusing the traditional garb of her profession. (A customer comments, ‘The house is modernising itself.’) The decision not to show her in kimono is crucial, carrying the suggestion that her acceptance of this role is provisional and may not be permanent. Finally, a bleak portrait of another young woman on the verge of entering the house ensures that the film ends on a sour note, demonstrating the captivity of the majority of the women in this situation. As a group of geisha file out to their next appointment, the sister of a geisha who has died is making an appeal to be accepted into the profession. The issue is left deliberately unresolved, but visual clues hint that she will eventually be accepted – significantly, she is photographed just within the territory of the house itself, whereas, on her first appearance earlier in the film, she had been restricted to the liminal space of the genkan (the vestibule which, in a Japanese house, marks the boundary between uchi and soto, i.e. inside and outside). Yet the apparent resignation implied by the woman’s expected admission to the house is strongly placed by the challenging query voiced by another geisha: ‘Will there always be girls like us?’ In The Woman of Rumour, Tanaka, as geisha house

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madame, represents the negative side of traditional values, which, by the end of the film, have ensnared her daughter and others. The implication is critical, and the irony of the conclusion is no less trenchant because the character is viewed with sympathy. The earlier Mizoguchi–Tanaka collaboration, My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, 1949), ends similarly, with the rejection of an unreliable man by two women who have been his lovers. But here the outcome is given an explicitly political dimension; Tanaka plays a feminist activist, Eiko; her husband, Omoi (Sugai Ichirō, 1907–73), is a leading liberal politician. The film associates female liberation with liberalism, but also finds that liberalism is not enough. In the film’s climax, Eiko discovers that her husband has been having an affair with the servant girl, Chiyo (Mito Mitsuko, 1919–81), precipitating her rejection of him and departure in order to found an educational institution for girls. On the train, she is joined by Chiyo, who leaves with her. The scene in which Eiko confronts her husband and leaves their house is visually paralleled with an earlier scene of reunion. With the adoption of a new constitution, a general amnesty has been declared, and Eiko and her husband, whose political activism has earned them a jail sentence, have been released. Their release is celebrated in a banquet, but in contrast to the conclusions of Ugetsu and Sansho, the happy personal outcome is explicitly dissociated from the political: at the banquet, one of the liberal campaigners counsels his colleagues to ‘stop celebrating this constitution’, and to celebrate instead ‘being together again’. The insistence on a personal focus is motivated by the fact that the constitution is disappointing, since it makes no guarantee of women’s rights. The later separation of the couple is foreshadowed by the fact that the husband chooses to go off after the celebration to drink with his fellow liberals, while Eiko, who is tired, returns to the house her husband has found for them. The scene which follows discreetly highlights the perpetuation even in liberal circles of conventional gender roles; we watch Tanaka as she carefully moves clothes from a drawer to a box, before the off-screen noise of drunken revelry heralds her husband’s return. Eiko, followed by Mizoguchi’s characteristically flexible camera, goes to the front door to let him and his friends in. Initially it appears that the friends will stay for a drink, and Eiko is obliged to play the role of devoted hostess. After they depart to allow Omoi to rest, Eiko, in a particularly expressive instance of the ‘fluid but restless gestures’ which Kinoshita Chika identifies as key to Tanaka’s acting style, helps him into his yutaka robe. While this instance of physical contact is essentially functional, the way in which Tanaka’s hand pauses on Omoi’s back after the gesture is completed gives it a supplementary erotic charge. The eroticism becomes more explicit when Omoi states ‘We’re alone at last’ as Eiko fastens his obi around his

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waist, and when he enquires if she has put on make-up, a question to which she responds with an embarrassed giggle. But their intimacy is soon interrupted by the off-screen voice of Chiyo, whose presence will be the eventual cause for their separation. The scene is carefully paralleled and contrasted with the later sequence in which Eiko, who has been informed of her husband’s affair with Chiyo by the servant’s own husband, returns home and finds them in a clearly compromising position. Here it is Eiko, rather than Omoi, who enters the house via the front door. Whereas previously Chiyo had interrupted Eiko and Omoi’s intimacy, now it is Eiko who discovers Omoi and Chiyo together; and this time it is Chiyo rather than Eiko who adjusts Omoi’s dress (he is now wearing a Western-style shirt, tie and waistcoat, emphasising his status as a newly elected liberal politician). Eiko, concealed behind the shoji, overhears enough to confirm her husband’s infidelity. In the verbal confrontation that follows, Mizoguchi frames Eiko and Omoi in the foreground while Chiyo is symbolically positioned between them, but in the far background and partially concealed behind one of the shoji, so that she appears tiny and isolated. The composition stresses both Chiyo’s intervention in the central relationship and her social marginalisation owing to her inferior class status, a fact which Omoi explicitly acknowledges when he dismisses her as only a servant and concubine. After he departs, Eiko confronts Chiyo, who clutches Eiko and falls sobbing on her lap as she makes clear that she aspires only to be Omoi’s mistress and does not intend to threaten Eiko’s status as wife. Eiko remains seated stiffly and does not respond physically to Chiyo’s touch, but the contact between the two women prefigures the film’s resolution with its assertion of female solidarity, as does Eiko’s declaration that women cannot be free while they think in such terms. After attending the celebrations of Omoi’s election to the Diet, Eiko returns home and packs her bags. Omoi confronts her, and here Tanaka again delivers an explicit ideological statement when he asks her if she cannot forgive him, reframing her departure in political terms. ‘It’s not a personal matter; it affects all women . . . As long as men won’t consider women like human beings and will keep treating them like domestic tools, there won’t be any freedom or rights of the people.’ Having announced her decision to found a school for women, Eiko walks out. The conclusion owes a debt to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), a play that was significant for liberal Japanese intellectuals and feminists in the early twentieth century.7 Two years earlier, Tanaka had starred for Mizoguchi in a biopic of the leading Meiji- and Taishō-era actress, Matsui Sumako, in The Love of Actress Sumako (Joyū Sumako no koi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1947), which restages one of Sumako’s performances as Ibsen’s heroine Nora. The ending of My Love

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Has Been Burning, however, is arguably more radical than Ibsen’s, since Eiko departs with a specific political goal in mind. In the film’s coda, she leaves by train for Okayama. Seated with a book, she listens, with a characteristically ambiguous Tanaka expression, as other passengers read aloud from a newspaper which extravagantly praises her husband, before leaning back in silent exhaustion. There follows the film’s beautifully affirmative resolution: the train passes into and then emerges from a tunnel, bringing us symbolically back into the light; the camera rests on the door to the compartment as it is pulled open and Chiyo emerges from the steam beyond to approach Eiko, kneels down in front of her, grasps her arm, and ask her permission to join her: ‘Teach me the way of women.’ In one of the most moving instances of physical contact in Tanaka’s oeuvre, Eiko lifts Chiyo onto the seat beside her; Chiyo lets her head rest of Eiko’s shoulder; and Eiko pulls her white shawl around them both. This radical conclusion is visually celebrated by the embrace between them, recorded in a close two-shot which intimately frames the two women, and above all, as Robin Wood has noted, by the whiteness of the shawl which dominates the final image, so that ‘the whole screen seems suffused . . . in a white radiance’ (1997: 9). It is a gesture which celebrates the reconciliation of the two women, but which, beyond that, symbolises their broader hope for liberation, a hope which, given the progressive constitutional reforms of the Occupation era, may have seemed more plausible in 1949 than at any time before or since. In fact, however, these liberal reforms bore only partial or temporary fruit; the thirty-nine female candidates elected to the Diet in 1946 set a record which would endure, embarrassingly, until the early twenty-first century, at which time Japan remained, in terms of gender issues, one of the developed world’s least equal countries. If the imagery of Tanaka’s reunion with a man serves generally to endorse liberal or reject totalitarian values, here, Tanaka’s rejection of a male lover and voluntary union with a female friend points to the limitations of liberalism, and hints at more radical possibilities of social change, still tantalisingly unfulfilled.

Notes 1. Tadao Sato defines feminisuto, a Japanese-language transcription of the English ‘feminist’, as follows: ‘The image of the woman suffering uncomplainingly can imbue us with admiration for a virtuous existence almost beyond our reach, rich in endurance and courage. One can idealize her rather than merely pity her and this can lead to what I call the worship of womanhood, a special Japanese brand of feminism’ (1987: 78). 2. Itakura Fumiaki (2007: 101–38) defines the haha-mono more narrowly, pointing out that while films about mothers had existed previously, the term itself was devised by Daiei in the 1940s to promote films starring Mimasu Aiko. Following Anderson and

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Richie, I am using the term more generally to refer to Japanese films made during the studio era focusing centrally on mothers and motherhood; although not necessarily categorised as constituting a discrete genre at the time, these share sufficient plot formations and ideological assumptions to make the categorisation critically meaningful. See, for instance, Bock (1978: 196–7), Richie (2001: 93) and High (2003: 402). For a translation of the 1882 Imperial Rescript for Soldiers and Sailors, see Henshall (2014: 505–6); the extract cited is on page 505. For a detailed account of the response to Bergman’s affair with Rossellini, see Smit (2012: 82–99). For an account of Tanaka’s trip to the USA and the reaction in the Japanese press to her apparent westernisation, see Fujiwara (2009). For a discussion of Ibsen’s reception and impact in Japan, see Auestad (2006).

Bibliography Adair, Gilbert (1995), Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema, London: Faber & Faber. Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie (1982), The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Auestad, Reiko Abe (2006), ‘Ibsen’s individualism in Japan: John Gabriel Borkman and Ōgai Mori’s Seinen (1910)’, Ibsen Studies 6: 1, pp. 44–67. Bettinson, Gary (2015), ‘Commentary: Hong Kong Stars and Stardom’, in Cheung et al. (eds) A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, Chichester: John Wiley, pp. 379–88. Bock, Audie (1978), Japanese Film Directors, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International. Bordwell, David (1988), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, London and Princeton: British Film Institute and Princeton University Press. Britton, Andrew (1995), Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist, London: Studio Vista. Dyer, Richard (1998), Stars, London: BFI Publishing. Dyer, Richard (2013), Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Abingdon: Routledge. Fujiwara, Chris (2009), ‘Love Letter: A centenary valentine to Japanese screen legend Kinuyo Tanaka’, Museum of the Moving Image, uploaded 23 October 2009, (last accessed 1 August 2016). Itakura, Fumiaki (2007), ‘Daiei hahamono no janru seisei to sutajio shisutemu’, in Iwamoto Kenji (ed.) Kazoku no shōzō: hōmu dorama to merodorama, Tokyo: Shinwasha, pp. 103–38. Hasumi, Shigehiko (1998), Yasujirō Ozu, trans. Hasumi, Ryōji Nakamura and René de Ceccatty, Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile/Cahiers du Cinéma. Henshall, Kenneth (2014), Historical Dictionary of Japan to 1945, Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press. High, Peter B. (2003), The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–1945, Madison: Wisconsin University Press.

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Jacoby, Alexander (2007), ‘Country Retreat: Shimizu Hiroshi’s Ornamental Hairpin (1941)’, in Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer (eds), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 63–77. Kinoshita, Chika (2001), ‘Choreography of desire: analysing Kinuyo Tanaka’s acting in Mizoguchi’s films’, Screening the Past, uploaded 1 December 2001, (last accessed 1 August 2016). Koresky, Michael (2014), ‘A mother’s tears’, Eclipse Series 41: Kinoshita and World War II, DVD liner notes. Le Fanu, Mark (2005), Mizoguchi and Japan, London: BFI Publishing. McDonald, Keiko I. (1994), Japanese Classical Theater in Films, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Neale, Stephen (1980), Genre, London: BFI Publishing. Neupert, Richard John (1995), The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Richie, Donald (1977), Ozu: His Life and Films, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Richie, Donald (2001), The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan, Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. Russell, Catherine (2003), ‘Three Japanese actresses of the 1950s: modernity, femininity, and the performance of everyday life’, CineAction 60, pp. 34–44. Russell, Catherine (2008), The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Russell, Catherine (2011), Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited, New York: Bloomsbury. Sato, Tadao (1987), Currents in Japanese Cinema: Essays, trans. Gregory Barrett, Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International. Sato, Tadao (2008), Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema, trans. Aruna Vasudev and Latika Padgaonkar, Oxford; New York: Berg. Smit, David (2012), Ingrid Bergman: The Life, Career and Public Image, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Wood, Robin (1976), Personal Views: Explorations in Film, London: Gordon Fraser. Wood, Robin (1997), ‘Kenji Mizoguchi: Overview and Sisters of the Gion’, in O’Grady, Gerald (ed.), Mizoguchi the Master, Toronto: Cinémathèque Ontario, pp. 8–9. Wood, Robin (1998), Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond, New York: Columbia University Press.

Filmography A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, Ozu Yasujirō, 1948) Army (Rikugun, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944) Dragnet Girl (Hijōsen no onna, Ozu Yasujirō, 1933) Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza keshō, Naruse Mikio, 1951) Late Spring (Banshun, Ozu Yasujirō, 1949) Mother (Okāsan, Naruse Mikio, 1952)

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My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949) Ornamental Hairpin (Kanzashi, Shimizu Hiroshi 1941) Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1958 The Love of Sumako the Actress (Joyū Sumako no koi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1947) The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyōdai, Ozu Yasujirō, 1950) The Woman of Rumour (Uwasa no onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, Ozu Yasujirō, 1953) Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953)

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Chapter 3 Tanaka and Mizoguchi: Politics and Rebellion in the Early Post-war Era Michael Smith

The early post-war era saw a raft of legal changes which worked to superficially enhance the position of Japanese women. Alongside the landmark achievement of universal suffrage, these reforms included provisions aimed towards equity in divorce, inheritance, property ownership and access to education. During this period, Tanaka Kinuyo appeared as the rebellious, ideologically-infused lead character in a trio of Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) films: The Victory of Women (Josei no shori, 1946) and The Love of Sumako the Actress (Juyo Sumako no koi, 1947) and My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, 1949). By examining the latter, the chapter will argue that Mizoguchi and Tanaka’s creative partnership expressed contradictory positions on the legal position and realities of gender equality, which in turn reflected the nature of a public discourse informed by complex, historically-rooted moral, social and practical paradigms. Furthermore, I state the case for My Love Has Been Burning as a text which complicates the critical conception of Tanaka’s star persona as being related to the yamato nadeshiko archetype of conservative, traditional femininity.

Background As the introduction to this book has made clear, the years which immediately followed the conclusion of the Second World War not only were a time of tumultuous social and civic upheaval for the Japanese populace, but were also the site of substantial legal revision of the status of Japanese women. As a distillation of the relationship between the social world and popular culture, cinema was tireless in its representation of the changes in life for Japanese women. Following on from this, as arguably the foremost film star of the period, Tanaka Kinuyo played a key role in films made by various high-profile filmmakers which implicitly and explicitly dealt with the situation for Japanese women post-1945.

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Two of the biggest areas of reform which affected women during the period were their newly granted freedom to participate in the nation’s political process and the eventual tacit criminalisation of prostitution (which is covered in these pages in the chapters by Kanno). Both of these changes, though quite different in scope and impact, were among a raft of reforms which worked towards a legal conception of Japanese women as no longer secondary citizens, but respected equals. Whereas the newly granted entitlements for women to receive inheritance and purchase property in their own name were less immediate, the 1946 achievement of suffrage and the 1956 outlawing of licensed prostitution had instantly visible, tangible effects – just as prostitutes were forced either to find alternative employment or resort to the streets after 1958 (when the law actually came into force), the legalisation of women’s participation as both voters and candidates ten years earlier forced the consideration of gender issues in Japanese political life. Before examining how Tanaka’s role as a Meiji-era political activist in Mizoguchi’s My Love Has Been Burning reflected this new equilibrium, it is worth briefly overviewing how Japan had handled the involvement of women in politics.

Women and politics The movement to allow women to participate in the political process in Japan to vote had been present in varying degrees since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which saw the formation of the nation’s first modern centralised government. Japan’s first ever general election of 1890 was held under conditions of extremely limited suffrage, with only high-tax-paying men of at least twentyfive years of age and with established residence in certain mainland prefectures eligible to vote – restrictions which effectively meant that just over 1 per cent of the population were actually enfranchised. One of the first acts of the newly formed Imperial Diet was to formally criminalise women’s participation in politics by making it illegal for a woman to even attend a political meeting, an act which was not overturned until 1921. The 1910s were a time of particular strife for Japanese politics, with both the questions of genuine popular representation and women’s general rights being increasingly broached by a populace which was encountering new types of intellectual thought such as Marxism and feminism. There was also a more macroscopic focus on women’s rights during this period, with Raichō Hiratsuka’s (1886–1971) Bluestocking (Seitō) group publishing, between 1911 and 1916, an eponymous magazine which contained debates about precisely what it meant to be a ‘new woman’ (shin fujin), a term which connoted a woman who stepped outside traditional expectations of femininity and exercised choice

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over everything from her dress to her romantic partners. Ever controversial and unflinching in its subject matter (the magazine was repeatedly censored by the Ministry of Domestic Affairs for its frank and open discussions about sex), Seitō was revelatory by being the first publication in Japan to be ‘avowedly feminist . . . [it] placed an increased emphasis on those social issues which were important to women’ (Imai 2002: 190). Initially, the various 1920s enfranchisement movements were splintered and fractured along dividing lines related to social class, religion and political background, but the formation of the Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations (Tōkyō rengō fujinkai) in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) provided a degree of unity. The group was initially focused on co-ordinating relief efforts but soon expanded its horizons into, among other areas, the suffrage effort. Led by activist Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1981), the Women’s Suffrage League (Fusen kakutoku dōmei) was a derivative of the TFWO, which fought throughout the 1920s for women to attain the vote. In 1924, the WSL published a strongly worded manifesto which emphasised the importance of bringing women into the political establishment in order to effect change: 1. It is our responsibility to destroy customs which have existed in this country for the past twenty six hundred years and to construct a new Japan that promotes the natural rights of men and women; 2. As women have been attending public school with men for half a century since the beginning of the Meiji period and our opportunities in higher education have continued to expand, it is unjust to exclude women from international suffrage; 3. Political rights are necessary for the protection of nearly four million working women in this country; 4. Women who work in the household must be recognized before the law to realize their full human potential; 5. Without political rights we cannot achieve public recognition at either the national or local level of government; 6. It is both necessary and possible to bring together women of different religions and occupations in a movement for women’s suffrage. (Molony 2000: 656–7) Their efforts to gain suffrage gradually gained traction and in the 1920s the question of women’s rights became a legitimate concern for both politicians and society in general. The latter was aided immeasurably by Japan’s burgeoning and rapidly expanding print media sector, a significant part of which was the new genre of women’s magazines. Initially, the magazines were reluctant to challenge

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the status quo, but, as editors chased high sales, ‘the tone and contents of magazines shifted, and certain ironies, complexities, and contradictions came to the fore’ (Sato 2008: 80). This meant that, by the early 1920s, titles such as Woman’s Review (Fujin kōron) and Housewife’s Friend (Shufu no tomo) combined practical household tips with discussions on a range of issues including women in the workplace, the division of household labour and even divorce. The willingness to openly discuss the question of women’s issues in a rapidly modernising society was symptomatic of a general cultural atmosphere where women’s rights were no longer a taboo issue. Nevertheless, from the late 1920s, the fervent nationalism which swept the country meant that any genuinely radical reforms were swept under the carpet as the nation banded together to support the mobilisation and execution of its part in the twentieth century’s biggest conflict. After the suffrage movement had lain dormant for years, the arrival of the Occupation in 1945 immediately reactivated it and brought it to a swift and a successful climax. On 11 October, General Headquarters (GHQ, the administrative base for the occupying personnel led by General Douglas MacArthur) issued a directive listing five initial areas which the Occupation reforms would work towards: ‘enfranchisement of women, encouragement of labour unions, introduction of “liberal” principles into education, reform of the judicial system, and “democratization” of economic institutions’ (Moore and Robinson 2002: 10). The immediate targeting of suffrage reflected the fact that women had been able to vote in the USA since 1920, and the same was quickly achieved in Japan with the country’s first post-war general election on 10 April 1946. Not only were women permitted to participate in Japan’s political process as voters for the first time, but they were also allowed to stand as candidates for the House of Representatives, the law-making house of the Diet. Despite the feminist activist (and future elected politician) Ichikawa Fusae predicting a 10 per cent turn-out among women, 67 per cent of Japan’s women took advantage of their new entitlement to vote (Pharr 1981: 24), and 39 women were also elected to the Diet in the 1946 elections (Imamura 1996: 272–3). In some respects, the high turnout was no surprise and merely reflected the fact that women’s suffrage had been a growing issue within Japan since the first years of the twentieth century. Japanese women had been ready to participate in the political arena for some years, and grasped their new opportunity with remarkable fervour. While the election was taking place, a small group of GHQ staff set about drafting the first significant piece of legislation the newly formed legislature would be asked to consider. The Constitution of Japan (Nihon-koku kenpō), which passed both houses in 1947, was the result of a long and complicated process that had been in progress since the moment the Occupation had landed on Japanese soil. After successive drafts by Japanese politicians and

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legal scholars had failed to satisfy, MacArthur decided to bring the process under the auspices of his operation. To this end, he constructed a drafting committee which mainly comprised high-ranking military personnel and experts from various fields in the civil world. Among their number was Beate Sirota (1923–2012), a twenty-two-year-old American citizen of Austrian heritage who had mainly been raised in Japan and was fluent in its native tongue (Dower 1999: 364–5). As her fascinating account of her time in Japan makes clear, Sirota’s upbringing had caused her to understand the fundamental inequality which existed between the genders in Japan, and she set about ensuring that women’s rights on a range of issues would be enshrined in the Constitution (Gordon 1997: 108). It is important to note that, up until now, women had in the eyes of the law essentially been considered second-class citizens in Japan. Kaneko summarises this as follows: Japanese women had few individual or political rights before World War II. Under the prevailing ie, or family system, which was the foundation of prewar Japanese society, the proper place for women was considered to be within the home, under the authority of the male family head. (1995: 3) Sirota’s dogged insistence on correcting this was reflected in Article 24 of the Constitution, Section 1 of which specified that marriage be ‘based on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual co-operation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis’. Section 2, meanwhile, targeted a broader range of equality measures to be enacted in the future: With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes. (Constitution of Japan 1946) After the American-authored draft was completed, it was passed over for review by a team led by the Japanese legal scholar Matsumoto Jōji (1877–1954). A tense period of back-and-forth debate between the two camps followed, and, according to Dower (1999: 380), the bilingual Sirota’s delicate negotiating skills were key in ensuring that ‘one of the strongest equal rights provisions in modern constitutional law had survived’. In addition to Sirota’s clause, there were other measures in the Constitution which were designed to promote equality between the sexes. Article 14 outlawed discrimination on a wide range of grounds which included gender, while Article 18 deemed that indenture contracts were illegal. Finally, Article 26 (2) defined the basic right of all boys and girls to receive education.

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The years which followed saw the Diet, now a generally more liberal legislature owing to the purging of many of Japan’s more hardened political conservatives and the new female influence, pass a raft of legal measures which followed up on the promises made in the Constitution. For example: i. The Civil Law (1947) defined marriage as the pursuit of happiness between two people and gave a woman the right to own property in her own name, take control of family finances and be automatically entitled to a third of her husband’s estate in the event of his death. (Yoshizumi 1995: 189) ii. The Labour Standards Law (1947) stipulated that a man and woman in the same job should be paid the same salary, and granted women twelve weeks of maternity leave. (Hoover 2011: 159) iii. The New Civil Code (1948) provided a further definition of marriage as a ‘union formed by the will of two individuals’ and also stipulated that parental consent for adults aged under twenty-five was no longer required, giving legal legitimacy to the ‘love’ marriage. Furthermore, adultery by either spouse was now a valid justification for divorce, reversing a legal imbalance which previously existed in the favour of husbands. (Fuess 2004: 147, 150) iv. The Eugenic Protection Law (1948) formally decriminalised abortion for the first time and provided a wide range of legal justifications for termination, including risk of hereditary illness, and inability to financially support the child. (Norgren 2001: 40) v. In 1949, thirty-one ‘women’s higher educational institutions’ were elevated to full college status. (Hara 1995: 103) In addition to the legal changes which occurred in this time period, there were also mitigating social factors which helped to change the position of women in the post-war years. Chief among these was the demographic shift from rural areas to urban environments, especially prevalent among young adults who sought their fortune in the developing white-collar industries of Japan. This had, in truth, already started to happen before the war. Since the turn of the century, Japan had been gradually transforming from a rural economy into the modern, urban-based capitalism which became fully entrenched following the Second World War. Women in the city acted as what Bordwell (1988: 34) has termed ‘the invisible proletariat’ – a discreet band of administrative (stenographer, secretary) and service industry workers (waitress, hostess) who supported the new burgeoning urban capitalism of the city. Improved access to education and an increased variation of employment types meant that more opportunities were

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available to the Japanese woman than she had previously been afforded at any point in the history of her country. By the time the Occupation formally departed from Japan in 1952, Japanese women had, for the first time in the nation’s history, a degree of legal equity and were active participants in the political direction of their country.

Tanaka and Mizoguchi Many of the most famous Mizoguchi films, particularly from the Western perspective, feature Tanaka in a starring role; if Western film viewers have seen Tanaka, it is likely to be in well-distributed and critically canonised Mizoguchi films such as The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952), Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, 1954). Part of the logic for the oft-made connection between Tanaka Kinuyo and Mizoguchi Kenji is therefore simply quantitative; Mark Le Fanu (2005: 27) calculates that the twelve extant Mizoguchi films in which Tanaka features constitute over a third of the director’s surviving work. However, the dynamic also relates to the fundamental sociopolitical concerns of Mizoguchi’s work. Thematically, Mizoguchi was a director specifically and intrinsically concerned with women and Tanaka was the actress he most often used (casting her a total of fifteen times) as the vessel for his complicated, affectionate and generally sympathetic portrayals of Japanese women. Although Tanaka starred in four Mizoguchi films in the first half of the 1940s, it is in the films from the post-war portion of Mizoguchi’s career that the director’s fascination with her can be most clearly evinced. She being his chief inspiration for the eponymous woodblock print artist’s depictions of female sensuality in Utamaro and His Five Women (Utamaro wo meguru gonin no onna, 1946) and the bourgeois outcast forced to resort to work as a courtesan in The Life of Oharu, he used period settings to exhibit her feminine beauty, which only blossomed as she matured, in an almost knowingly iconic fashion. Tanaka also starred in two of Mizoguchi’s most critically acclaimed films, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, and would return to the world of prostitution in a modern setting, in her final collaboration with Mizoguchi, 1954’s The Woman of Rumour (Uwasa no onna). Freda Freiberg (1981), Keiko McDonald (2006), Audie Bock (1978), Tadao Sato (2008) and Mark Le Fanu (2005) have all written of the strong connection between the actress and the filmmaker, and indeed the latter pair’s analyses of Tanaka’s work in the films of Mizoguchi can provide an introduction to how she tends to be understood as an actress. Le Fanu positions Tanaka as an essential collaborator in creating the specific type of femininity which he sees her as representing in the work of Mizoguchi:

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Stoicism and sacrifice (projected as part of a woman’s duty) are an element of the composite image, along with dignity, integrity and a certain rather complicated submissiveness. Encasing the whole picture is a very special brand of beauty, elegance and deportment . . . whatever vision of womanhood emerges from these extraordinary movies is put there by her [Tanaka] as well as by the director . . . (2005: 24) Sato (2008: 108), meanwhile, shares Le Fanu’s view, but puts it into a specifically Japanese context: She became one of the most popular actresses in the history of Japanese cinema, embodying chaste, healthy, pure, winsome characters – the very models of the ‘pink flower of Yamato.’ Le Fanu and Sato both identify Tanaka as embodying a type of femininity that, considering the qualities described, could be argued as being representative of how Japanese patriarchal society (which now in the post-war period was beginning to be strongly questioned) had typically idealised Japanese femininity. Sato’s use of Yamato in metonymical terms makes explicit a highly romanticised link between traditional, feudal Japan and the women whom Tanaka played in the films of Mizoguchi (and, as his brief statement indicates, the work of other filmmakers). Such a correlation is an interesting one to consider, not only when looking at the types of films which Tanaka directed herself, and the female protagonists to be found within them, but also when looking at the films examined throughout this collection, all of which have notable interactions with this received critical wisdom. Ironically, none questions this perception of Tanaka as an actress more than Mizoguchi’s own My Love Has Been Burning.

An exception Commercially unavailable and rarely exhibited theatrically in the West, My Love Has Been Burning marks Tanaka’s ninth appearance in the work of Mizoguchi Kenji. The film deals with two broad socio-political themes, the right to political representation and the fight for women’s equality, that were of definite relevance to the time of production. The film was released in 1949, three years after the country’s first general election and during a time period when the question of women’s rights had once again been raised by the raft of Occupation-era and subsequent legal changes. Therefore, in terms of narrative content, the main issues raised by the story synchronise perfectly with both the debates and legal reforms which had taken place in Japan over the course of the previous years.

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My Love Has Been Burning is by no means unique in allegorising the sociopolitical present into the historical past. There are, naturally, other films made during the immediate post-war period which focused on issues of contemporary relevance and placed them in a period setting, particularly in the case of prostitution (Mizoguchi’s own The Life of Oharu, for example). In My Love Has Been Burning, Tanaka manages to maintain the Le Fanu and Sato perception of her as a dignified, stoically composed portrait of Japanese femininity while also challenging the corresponding social structure which demands compliance with strict gendered roles. Alongside the thematic relevance, the complexities of Tanaka’s much-overlooked performance in My Love Has Been Burning override any chronological incongruity created by its period setting. My Love Has Been Burning begins in 1884 in Okayama Prefecture, which sits in the west of Honshu, Japan’s main island. Okayama is presented as a relatively traditional place still largely untouched by the initial twitches of modernism which were beginning to occur in Meiji-era Japan, particularly in the new capital of Tokyo. In Okayama, there is no sign of the burgeoning white-collar industries or public transportation systems which started to be organised during the Meiji period. Eiko, the character played by Tanaka, is a politically-minded young adult from a rigidly bourgeois family who do not share her socialist attitudes regarding the fair and equal treatment of all people. The film opens with the visit to Okayama of Kishida Toshiko (1863–1901, here played by the actress Miyake Kuniko [1916–22]), a nationally renowned female political activist who receives a warm welcome from a throng of supporters. Among them is Eiko, and Kishida tells her that she has heard about the girls’ school which she has opened. Kishida tells Eiko that, when there is a parliament, there will be women like Eiko serving in it. Emphasising the duality of the struggle from the female perspective, Kishida adds: Women have always been raised in submission to men’s desires. But we’re not slaves. If men are humans, then women are too. I defend this principle to the end. The character of Kishida, brief though her appearances may be, is important for two reasons. Firstly, both her rhetoric and her encouragement to Eiko identify the political causes with which Eiko will be involved throughout the film: the larger struggle for political reform and the more personal fight for gender equality. Secondly, her appearance provides an opportunity for Eiko’s conservative, restrictive background to be thrown into relief. Eiko’s father is vocal in his opposition to his daughter being associated with Kishida, telling Eiko that Kishida is a member of the ‘thieving Liberal Party’. Although not without controversy,

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the actual Liberal Party (Jiyūtō) of the late nineteenth century was a movement spearheaded by ex-samurai who had been stripped of their land income by the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and is largely credited with being Japan’s first political party. The Liberal Party, as in the film, sought to represent the populace as a whole through a constitutional democracy rather than continue to limit government involvement to the elite classes. The behaviour of Eiko’s father demarcates his own political views as being contradictory to those of the Liberal Party and, most importantly, his own daughter. This is further demonstrated through his response to Chiyo (Mito Mitsuko, 1919–81), a servant of the house whose father sells her into indentured servitude in order to clear personal debt. When Eiko learns of this, she becomes enraged, and says that it is ‘trade in human beings’, a label which is clearly inspired by the leftwing political rhetoric of the Liberal Party. Eiko’s father, however, is unsurprisingly unsympathetic towards the plight of the younger servant and is more concerned with Eiko’s own behaviour. Using the Japanese word damare, an extremely sharp command translating as ‘shut up’ in English, he tells her that daughters do not argue with fathers. Following this affirmation of his conservative view of the world, he informs Eiko that her school has been ordered to close and that she has been placed under house arrest, both punishments presumably ordered for her public involvement with Kishida. The joining of her father’s forceful avowal of a hierarchy based on gender with the condemnation of Eiko’s political beliefs fuses the two issues together and, in her father, creates a figure who embodies exactly what Eiko is fighting against. As is the case with Mizoguchi’s prostitution narratives, which frequently feature unlikeable, controlling men as customers, management figures and family members, the male represents everything that is unjust about the present social and political situation.

Two men Realising that her position in Okayama is untenable should she wish to continue along the same political track, Eiko joins her home-town friend Hayase (Ozawa Eitarō, 1909–88) in the more politically tolerant surroundings of Tokyo. Hayase is involved with the far-left fringes of the Liberal Party, and it is in fact the firebrand leader of the group, Omoi (Sugai Ichirō, 1907–73), who takes her to Hayase’s living quarters upon her arrival in the city. Eiko’s association with the two men continues throughout the rest of the film, and a very clear distinction arises between the liberal political beliefs of males involved in the Liberal Party and their own personal conduct towards women. It is through her interactions with Hayase and Omoi that Eiko begins to take her own radical path away from the patriarchy which they are both ultimately shown to represent.

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Hayase is shown as a man of very little political or personal integrity. Concerned that people will surmise that Eiko ran away from Okayama to live illicitly with him in Tokyo, Hayase quickly proposes marriage. Eiko rejects this, saying that she would like to study in Tokyo and is capable of finding a way of supporting herself. Hayase’s response to this is both brutally honest about the job opportunities available to women at this point in history and telling regarding his barely concealed hierarchical attitude towards women, with him telling Eiko, ‘It’s not like you to become a hairdresser or a waitress.’ It is here that a distinction arises between the time of the narrative’s setting and that of the film’s production; in 1949, there were far more employment and educational opportunities available to women such as Eiko, who could now in theory train to be much more than casual or semi-skilled workers. Shortly after Eiko’s arrival in Tokyo, Hayase is outed as a covert operator for the government by Omoi, who banishes him from the party. Unable to believe that Hayase is capable of betraying his political convictions, Eiko confronts him and he confirms Omoi’s accusation. After she again turns down his marriage proposal, which is given this time with the added incentive of a share of the money he has earned from the government for his treachery, Hayase pushes her to the ground and mounts her, presumably to take by force the physical prize which Eiko has already implicitly denied him twice via her rejection of his marriage proposals. His attack is an unsuccessful one, and Eiko escapes relatively unharmed. Hayase’s final interaction with Eiko occurs much later in the film, after she has been imprisoned for her part in a botched attempt to free female mill workers who were being grossly mistreated by their land-owning employers. Hayase, now openly working for the government, arranges for Eiko to be brought to him in another part of the jail. When Eiko arrives in the room, the contrast between the two is striking. Hayase is well-groomed and smartly dressed and is sitting comfortably, a package which exudes the shallow arrogance connotative of misplaced power; Eiko, meanwhile, wears a grubby prison-issued kimono and paces around the room nervously, avoiding eye contact. Hayase proposes to her for a third time, this time sweetening the deal with a promise that she would be released from prison immediately. When Eiko refuses this, Hayase resorts to attacking Eiko’s divergence from the conventional path of womanhood: A woman can only be a woman with the love of a man. It is by getting married, starting a home and family, and raising her children that she can become a woman . . . you forgot what it meant to be a woman. Eiko’s response is simply to tell Hayase that they will never meet again, and they do not. Hayase, being a member of an establishment fighting to keep the status Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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quo of hierarchical Japanese society, has personal views clearly in line with his apparent political views. That she chooses to deny him speaks of both her political convictions and her willingness to stray from the conventional trajectory of Japanese female life, as outlined by Hayase. Through her rejection of Hayase, Tanaka’s Eiko is established as a politically motivated character who is reluctant to conform to gendered familial roles, thus making her noticeably different from the ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) character archetype discussed throughout this book, and by extension from Le Fanu and Sato’s conventional understanding of her as an actress (a point to which we shall return later). A more complex dichotomy between views towards woman and general political beliefs is found in the case of Omoi, the Liberal Party figure with whom Eiko forms a relationship following Hayase’s betrayal. Omoi is vocal in urging senior figures in the Liberal Party to refuse the government’s invitation to join their administration, an offer which he feels is insincere and merely an attempt to fracture the party into smaller, less threatening factions as opposed to the danger presented by its current state as a popular unified movement. During these debates, Eiko is always at his side, but never contributes and is often literally obscured from the camera’s view by the male figures. Directly before the leader of the Liberal Party enters the chamber of representatives to announce his decision, there is a series of shots which reveal Omoi and others lobbying the leader, and it is only when one of the men moves from standing directly in front of her that Eiko is revealed to be at Omoi’s side. Although she is ever-present at important political moments in the film, both her silence and the lack of attention paid towards her physical positioning demonstrate that the only woman in the group is not regarded as an equal by the men. When the leader of the Liberal Party accepts the government’s offer, Eiko and Omoi decide to continue to pursue the goal of governmental representation for the masses outside of the party structure. Their involvement in an unsuccessful agrarian revolt leads to their imprisonment. After they are released from prison, Eiko and Omoi live together in something of a hazily defined romantic relationship; in Japan at the time it certainly was (and in comparison to the situation in the West is still) relatively uncommon for an unmarried man and woman to live together. On Omoi’s first night of freedom, he drinks with friends while Eiko, playing the wife role, stays and tends to their house. When Omoi returns, he notices that Eiko is wearing make-up and begins to make advances towards her, which she rejects. Although Eiko clearly has feelings for Omoi, it is never clear if those feelings are based on a genuine attraction or simply a desire to be alongside a man with political beliefs ostensibly matching her own. After Eiko rejects his sexual advances, the newly successful Omoi (Omoi’s career as a politician takes off after his release and he is eventually elected to the first ever Japanese National Diet) begins an affair with Chiyo, who has also ended up in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Tokyo by this point, and it is Eiko’s discovery of the affair, occurring just before Omoi’s election, which provides the narrative denouement to My Love Has Been Burning. After Eiko confronts Omoi about the affair, he reveals his position on monogamy: Whether I have one woman or two doesn’t change anything. You’re on different levels . . . she is just a servant, a concubine. This statement hits Eiko with revelatory force, and she asks Omoi rhetorically if these are his true feelings about women. Omoi’s loaded words confirm not only his own conventional views regarding a male’s right to have more than one partner, but also an allegiance to the behavioural codes of the upper classes of which he, as a soon-to-be-elected politician, is an influential member. That a man whose political convictions have been shown to be, in left-wing ideological terms, beyond reproach still cannot help but behave towards women using such a patriarchal mind-set serves to crystallise the separation of the two causes of political representation and women’s rights. The mistreatment of Tanaka’s character by even the most ostensibly liberal and permissive male protagonist underscores the cynicism which characterises Mizoguchi’s views on the inability of men to make a positive contribution towards gender equality. Eiko shows no anger towards Chiyo, and instead consoles her as she pleads her feelings for Omoi. Dead centre to camera and in medium close-up, with Chiyo crying on her lap, she emphasises the gravity with which she regards women’s rights as a political cause: ‘As long as [men] think like that, women won’t be free. Freedom and equality are the conditions for women to be happy.’ These words radicalise Chiyo, who was previously scornful towards what she saw as Eiko’s empty rhetoric, and she joins Eiko in returning to Okayama to reopen her school. The character of Omoi is positioned in terms of his romantic dealings with women being a purely personal matter and completely separate from his political beliefs, while Eiko is cast in ideological terms as seeing no separation between the issues of women’s rights and equal political representation for all classes. With Eiko lacking support from men, the only way in which the film sees her as being able to advance the issue is through the education of other women. Be it represented through the open oppression of old patriarchy found in Eiko’s wealthy father or through Omoi’s deeply ingrained sexism, in My Love Has Been Burning men from both ends of the political spectrum demonstrate an unwillingness, or a basic inability, to understand the fundamental injustices attached to Japanese patriarchal society. Aside from dialogue and narrative events, another way in which women’s inferiority to men is elucidated is via the cinematography of the film. Alongside

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the aforementioned ‘blocking’ of Eiko which takes place in scenes of a crowded nature, the balance of the power relations between male and female characters occupying the same shot is often made clear through the positioning both of the actors and of the camera. In the section of the film located in Okayama, there are two examples of this which occur sequentially, and both involve the male character standing over the female character while she is in a physically lower position. The first of these is when Eiko’s father is scolding his daughter for being associated with Kishida. Eiko is kneeling on the floor while her father is standing directly in front of her, and the camera is positioned at her level. Immediately following this shot, the film cuts to the harbour where Chiyo is awaiting the arrival of the ship which will take her to Chichibu, her destination after following her father’s sale of her into indentured servitude. Visibly upset, Chiyo sits alone at the harbour while the gangmaster stands over her and places his hand on her chin, lecherously examining her with a smirk on his face. In both instances, by having the male character stand over the female character, his physical superiority is emphasised. Similarly, the vulnerable static positions of Eiko and Chiyo speak of a helpless situation which is beyond their control, and of their inability to challenge the patriarchal family systems at the base of both their predicaments. The shots make clear that the balance of power in rural, traditional Okayama lies with the male. There are several other scenes in the film where the subjugation of women is emphasised through the seated/ standing dynamic, the two most memorable being the scene in Hayase’s room shortly after Eiko arrives in Tokyo, where Omoi offers her a job with the party newspaper, and the attempted rape of Chiyo by her employer’s guards. However, alongside an emphasis on the physical inferiority and lowly social status of women, there are two sequences which illustrate the peripheral position which women occupy in the political space of Tokyo. Around thirty minutes into the story, after Hayase has been banished, there is a high-angled long shot from behind the bottom of the central staircase of the building which houses Omoi’s faction of the Liberal Party, in which we witness Omoi and two men arguing over whether to accept the Prime Minister’s offer to join the government. Eiko is visible at the bottom of the stairs, but her lack of participation in and, indeed, relevance to the debate is shown by the fact that she remains in the lobby of the building rather than in the inner sanctum of the upstairs meeting rooms. Additionally, the next cut is to a tight medium shot of the three men as they descend the staircase, thus eliminating her from view altogether. Similarly, after Omoi has been elected, an extreme long shot shows senior party figures celebrating presidentially on a balcony above thousands of supporters, before a cut to Eiko, who is relegated to the inside of the building with more junior figures. In both sequences the cinematography and editing show Eiko as being

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physically distant from the inner circle of Omoi’s political movement, a group in which the narrative events of the film show her to have neither a significant voice nor a place. If men are a lost cause here, women certainly are not. The only two people aside from Eiko who do understand the importance of women’s rights issues are the activist Kishida and, eventually, the servant Chiyo. The dynamic between the three, a grouping of mixed social classes, reinforces the importance of education in the promotion of women’s rights issues: Kishida’s words to Eiko at the beginning of the film clearly have an effect on her, as evidenced by her heavy involvement in Tokyo’s left-wing political scene, while Chiyo is converted to the cause through her friendship with Eiko. This clear chain of influence legitimises the education of women by women, rather than involvement in the male-dominated mainstream political scene, as the only way in which true equality can be achieved. Eiko’s return to grass-roots education is thus the logical conclusion to her quest for equality. Fittingly, the film was released at a time in which gender equality had been legally enshrined, an achievement completed by an enforced overhaul of a political system which My Love Has Been Burning positions as being burdened by the historical baggage of patriarchy and, in terms of representing women’s interests, completely unfit for purpose. In broadly political terms, the incompatibility of the struggle for political representation and women’s right issues in My Love Has Been Burning can be read as a classical feminist critique of Marxism, a movement which began to gain popularity in Japan during the time in which the film is set.1 Given that the political actions which Omoi is involved in revolve around wrestling power away from the land-owning classes and redistributing it to the workers, it is fair to identify the movement as a Marxist-inspired one, especially considering that Omoi and Eiko are imprisoned for their part in a violent confrontation with the land-owning classes. In Heidi I. Hartmann’s seminal essay ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’ (1979), she identifies Marxism as being fundamentally ‘sex-blind’ and an ideology which ‘subsume[s] women’s relation to men under worker’s relation to capital’. As demonstrated, women’s rights are shown as being at best a non-issue and at worst a hypocritical blind spot for the left-wing male activists in My Love Has Been Burning, and Eiko’s disconnection from the broader movement in favour of a singular focus on the issues of her own gender fully supports Hartmann’s ideas regarding the general ignorance of Marxism regarding questions of a specifically female nature. Eiko’s true rebellion is seen not only in her decision to devote her life to the advancement of the position of women in Japanese society, but in her doing so independently of the main political ideology which was shaping Japanese left-wing politics at the time in which the film was set.

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This dismissal of Marxism correlated with the situation in 1949 Japan. In the years following the conclusion of the Second World War, the Marxist thought which had informed much of the left-wing politics of the nation over the previous half-decade was increasingly pushed to the fringes of a society which was necessarily primarily concerned with the social and practical reconstruction of the nation. Needless to say, the Japanese Communist Party and similar leftist groups were not met with great enthusiasm by the American-led Occupation and, although they were allowed to field candidates in elections,2 their operations were accordingly carefully monitored. Additionally, the policy of rural land reforms championed by the MacArthur administration (in which tenants became owners of their plots) was naturally hugely popular with many followers of the radical left and subsequently tactically reduced the relevance of left-wing political movements to Japanese society (Nishi 1982: 286–7). It should also be added that, although women like Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980) and Kondo Magara (1903–83) were high-profile figures in the inter-war Communist movement and in modern times more women have been elected under the banner of the Japanese Communist Party than as part of any other group, very few women appeared to have been involved in the Japanese Communist Party during the immediate post-war years. Given the film’s clear correlation with the ideological aims of the Occupation, it is no surprise that My Love Has Been Burning has been labelled a propaganda piece. Ayako Saito (2014: 329) lists it as among a series of films ‘made with a clear objective to inculcate the ideology of democracy, as promoted by the recommendations of the CIE [Civil Information and Education Section, one of the propaganda arms of the Occupation]’. Alongside Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi, 1946) and other Mizoguchi films such as The Victory of Women and The Love of Sumako the Actress, Saito argues that the ‘Democratisation’ films had in common ‘the representation of apparently strongwilled, liberated, and independent women’ and in particular often featured a lead protagonist who ‘unabashedly criticises patriarchal, conservative men for their sexist views’ (2014: 329). Similarly, Kyoko Hirano (1992: 165) groups My Love Has Been Burning together with Victory and Sumako as a trio of Mizoguchi films which ‘straightforwardly advocate women’s liberation, and feature Tanaka Kinuyo portraying spiritually and politically conscious heroines’. She also reveals that Shindō Kaneto (1912–2012), who co-wrote the screenplay, claimed that My Love Has Been Burning was a project forced on Shōchiku, the film’s producer and distributor, by the Occupation (1992: 167). In one sense, it is easy to read the film as an uncomplicated advertisement for women’s liberation (which is presumably what it was intended to be, if Shindo’s recollections are correct). By the time the film had been released, practically all the

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rights which the Liberal Party had been fighting for had been achieved – Japan was now divided up into a prefectural system of local government and had a fully elected national government. Furthermore, the women’s reforms which Tanaka’s Eiko had herself been fighting for had also been achieved, not least of which was the achievement of suffrage. The film, therefore, could on one level be read as a celebration of how far things had progressed; power had been wrested from the narrow elite, nationalism had been defeated and the country now had a freshlyminted set of liberal laws approved by a fully enfranchised population. On this level, the battle was already won. However, Eiko’s polemics, questioning whether women could really be free in a patriarchal society, bring a much more cynical undertone to the conclusion of the film. While women might have achieved a degree of superficial legal equity by 1949, there still remained a significant intellectual and practical gap between the text of legal acts and their direct implementation in Japanese life and, most importantly, attitudes. Although feminism as a movement was not a factor in Japan during the 1940s and 1950s, when it returned in the 1960s it was with a vengeance, which indicated that simple legal reforms alone had not been enough to achieve social equity for women in Japan. The second wave of Japanese feminism, led by activists such as Tanaka Mitsu (1943–) and Enoki Misako (1945–), was initially linked with the larger student-oriented political New Left (Shin-sayoku) movement which took place in Japan during the 1960s. Julia C. Bullock’s description of the evolution of second-wave Japanese feminism is eerily reminiscent of what we see in My Love Has Been Burning: many Japanese women became disillusioned with the chauvinistic treatment they received from male comrades – ranging from their relegation to kitchen duty to sexual harassment and even rape. In the 1970s, such frustrations erupted around the world into a flurry of ‘women’s liberation’ movements or women-centred political organisations and theoretical attempts to redefine women’s roles in society. In Japan, this came to be known as uman ribu (women’s lib). (2010: 4) Mirrored historically twenty years later, the sidelining and even abuse of women by the New Left echoes the trajectory of Eiko in the film. The aims of Tanaka’s Eiko are in line with the far-reaching reconstruction of society which secondwave feminists aimed for. What Mizoguchi and Tanaka create is a character ahead of her time, a portrait of a woman who, both in the 1880s and 1940s, waits for society to catch up with her in the battle for gender equality.

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The pink flower of Yamato Hopefully, it has been demonstrated that, in My Love Has Been Burning, technical and narrative elements combine to illustrate the inferior social and political position of women in late nineteenth-century Japan. At the film’s conclusion, Eiko acknowledges the problems related to her gender and, by returning to Okayama with Chiyo to resume her education of women (a process which has already been shown to lead to radicalisation), moves to directly challenge the patriarchy. In spite of an ideological rebellion which would seem opposed to strict gendered roles, the performance and composition of Tanaka Kinuyo as Eiko matches much of the Le Fanu/Sato delineation of her as representing idealised classical Japanese femininity. To better explain how this is achieved, the key terms which Le Fanu and Sato use to describe Tanaka need to be unpacked and analysed in light of her performance here. Le Fanu (2005: 24) identifies ‘stoicism’ and ‘dignity’ as being important parts of Tanaka’s performances, and both elements are present in Eiko. Despite finding herself in a range of situations which objectively speaking would seem likely to provoke an animated response, Eiko remains calm and in control of her emotions at all times. This is usually aided by the character with whom she is sharing the scene, which is often Chiyo, being at the other end of the spectrum in terms of visible emotion. The most extreme example of this is the aforementioned scene near the end of the film where Chiyo is sobbing theatrically on her lap as Eiko, her expressionless face centre-frame, states, ‘Freedom and equality are the conditions for women to be happy.’ Through placing of the animated Chiyo alongside Eiko, the latter’s stoicism and lack of visible emotion are made readily apparent, and this strategy is repeated in the film on several occasions, both with Chiyo and with Hayase (most notably, in the scene after he has been exposed as a government agent). In terms of dignity, Eiko carries herself in a fashion analogous with the contained emotion betrayed by her face. Even when confronted with a range of personal situations which could potentially turn confrontational, Eiko remains placid and never acts in a way which might place her essential femininity in question. Furthermore, the camera is sure to record symbolic gestures which perpetuate the presentation of Eiko as dignified. After she has warded off Hayase’s assault (an action that we do not see, but only hear), we see Eiko ensuring that her kimono is tied correctly before she re-enters the public space of the street. Similarly, when Hayase visits her in prison to offer her freedom in exchange for her hand in marriage, Eiko calmly dismisses him and begins to leave, but not before bowing her head to the prison worker guarding the door to the cell. The recording of the kimono tying and the bow to the guard both signify

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that, even when under extreme duress, Eiko has not forgotten to carry herself as a member of polite society. Le Fanu continues along similar lines by writing of the ‘beauty, elegance and deportment’ which was to be found in Tanaka’s performances. Considering the fact that both Hayase and Omoi want her, Eiko is certainly presented as an attractive woman in My Love Has Been Burning and, in terms of elegance, the only time we see her out of a smart kimono or Western business dress is when she is imprisoned and thus forced to wear a prison uniform kimono. If the description of her beauty seems brief, it is because, while the viewer is aware of her being an attractive woman, her refraining completely from romantic involvement with the men who desire her means that she is not positioned as a sexual woman. Her only embraces are platonic, and, tying in with part of Sato’s (2008: 108) definition of Tanaka, she remains ‘chaste’ and ‘pure’. Eiko’s lack of sexual activity and reluctance to marry relate to her ‘integrity’ as a woman fully committed to fighting for the equality of her gender, an integrity which finally defeats the ‘submissiveness’ previously shown both by her remaining on the periphery of political life and by her acting as common-law wife to Omoi. This integrity is carried through to the end of the narrative, where she ‘sacrifices’ a potentially comfortable life with Omoi in Tokyo in favour of a return to grass-roots education in the oppressive surroundings of Okayama. Finally, we return to Sato’s culturally specific image of Tanaka as representing the ‘pink flower of Yamato’. In Japanese, the term yamato nadeshiko has two unrelated meanings; in botany, it is a frilly pink carnation, but it is more commonly used to refer to a ‘Japanese woman with all the traditional graces’ or ‘an idealised Japanese woman’ (Kenkyusha 2003: 452). This idealised notion is strongly linked with the Confucian ideal of a Japanese woman: elegant, dignified, and, above all, with a knowledge of her role in a hierarchal system which was ‘an organisational prescription of male order in society’ (Wakakuwa 1995: 62). This basically translates to a woman who at all times acts in the best interests of the patriarchal familial and social structures which had governed Japan throughout its history and were only just beginning to be questioned in the post-war era. The ‘pink flower of Yamato’, poetic though it may sound, is thus imagery directly derived from a national social order in which a defining feature was the subjugation of women.3 It is interesting to note that, while Sato labels My Love Has Been Burning ‘brilliant’ (2008: 90), he focuses his limited analysis on the political implications of the film rather than on how Tanaka’s character complicates the yamato nadeshiko archetype he himself assigned. Le Fanu’s more expansive analysis also looks at the film in more general terms, concentrating on the incongruity between the ‘passionately committed’ subject matter and Mizoguchi’s ‘rigorously disengaged’ cinematography (2005: 137) at the same time as labelling the film not only ‘one of the most obviously

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“feminist” documents in the Mizoguchi canon’, but also one of the first examples of avowedly feminist cinema (2005: 136). The only direct allusion to Tanaka made by either writer is when Le Fanu says that her part in My Love . . . ‘must surely’ be one of the finest performances of her career (2005: 134). These heights are reached by transcending the conventional understanding of Tanaka as an actress. With her composition, dignity and elegance, Tanaka as Eiko conforms to the superficial elements of yamato nadeshiko but in the final reckoning refuses the obedience to patriarchy which it demands in favour of following her own path to improve the position of women in Japanese society. Managing to both represent the idealised Japanese woman while at the same time challenging the logic behind it, Tanaka’s performance in My Love Has Been Burning complicates Le Fanu and Sato’s conception of her as an actress through a gendered social and political rebellion which went beyond the considerable gains which had been achieved by the late 1940s and demanded that more be done to address the cognitive dissonance between the new, enhanced legal rights of women and the realities of their position in a patriarchal Japanese society.

Notes 1. For further information on the relationship between Marxism and Japanese politics, see Bernstein (1990) and Mackerras and Knight (1985). 2. The JCP’s dire performance in the initial post-war elections indicated its lack of relevance in the early Occupation years, but by 1949 its candidates received 10 per cent of the national vote and occupied 35 seats in the Diet (Kohno 2001: 72). 3. The expression has been used in more recent years in a number of different contexts, including as the nickname of the Japanese women’s soccer team, the title of a popular anime series (Yamato nadeshiko shichi henge, somewhat comically known as The Wallflower in English) and, inevitably, as the nickname of a number of different Japanese porn actresses.

Bibliography Bernstein, Gail L. (1990), Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bock, Audie (1978), Japanese Film Directors, Tokyo; Oxford: Kodansha International for the Japan Society. Bordwell, David (1988), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, London, Princeton: BFI Publishing/ Princeton University Press. Bullock, Julia C. (2010), The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Constitution of Japan (1946), Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet. Official website, (last accessed 30 October 2016).

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Dower, John W. (1999), Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, London: Penguin. Freiberg, Freda (1981), Women in Mizoguchi Films, Melbourne: Japanese Studies Centre. Fuess, Harald (2004), Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender, and the State, 1600–2000, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gordon, Beate (1997), The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir, Tokyo; New York: Kodansha. Hara, Kimi (1995), ‘Challenges to Education for Girls and Women in Modern Japan: Past and Present’, in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: Feminist Press at The City University of New York, pp. 93–106. Hartmann, Heidi I. (1979), ‘The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union’, Capital & Class 3: 2, pp. 1–33. Hirano, Kyoko (1992), Mr Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945–1952, Washington; London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hoover, William D. (2011), Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Imai, Kei (2002), ‘Japanese Feminism and British Influences: The Case of Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980)’, in Gordon Daniels and Chushichi Tsuzuki (eds), The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1660–2000: Volume V: Social and Cultural Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 189–206. Imamura, Anne E. (1996), Re-Imaging Japanese Women, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kaneko, Sachiko (1995), ‘The Struggle for Legal Rights and Reforms: A Historical View’, in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: Feminist Press at The City University of New York, pp. 3–14. Kenkyusha (2003), Kenkyusha’s New Japanese–English Dictionary, Tokyo: Kenkyusha. Kohno, Masaru (2001), ‘Why Didn’t the Japanese Socialists Moderate Their Policies Much Earlier to Become a Viable Alternative of the Liberal Democratic Party?’, in Bernard Grofman (ed.), Political Science as Puzzle Solving, University of Michigan, pp. 65–84. Le Fanu, Mark (2005), Mizoguchi and Japan. London: BFI Publishing. Mackerras, Colin and Nick Knight (1985), Marxism in Asia, New York: St. Martin’s Press. McDonald, Keiko I. (2006), Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Molony, Barbara (2000), ‘Women’s rights, feminism and suffragism in Japan, 1870–1925’, Pacific Historical Review 69: 4, pp. 639–61. Moore, Ray A. and Donald L. Robinson (2002), Partners for Democracy: Crafting the New Japanese State under MacArthur, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nishi, Toshio (1982), Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952, Education and Society, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Norgren, Tiana (2001), Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan, Studies of the East Asian Institute, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Pharr, Susan J. (1981), Political Women in Japan: The Search for a Place in Political Life, Berkeley; London: University of California Press. Saito, Ayako (2014) ‘Occupation and Memory: The Representation of Woman’s Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema’, in Daisuke Miyao (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 327–61. Sato, Tadao (2008), Mizoguchi Kenji and the Art of Japanese Cinema, Oxford; New York: Berg. Wakakuwa, Midori (1995), ‘Three Women Artists of the Meiji Period (1868–1912) Reconsidering their Significance from a Feminist Perspective’, in Kumiko FujimuraFanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds) Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: Feminist Press at The City University of New York, pp. 61–74. Yoshizumi, Kyoko (1995), ‘Marriage and Family: Past and Present’, in Kumiko FujimuraFanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: Feminist Press at The City University of New York, pp. 183–98.

Filmography My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949) No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi, Kurosawa Akira, 1946) Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1952) The Love of Sumako the Actress (Juyo Sumako no koi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1947) The Victory of Women (Josei no shōri, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1946) The Woman of Rumour (Uwasa no onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954) Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953) Utamaro and his Five Women (Utamaro wo meguro gonin no onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1946) Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1948)

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Chapter 4 The First Female Gaze at Post-war Japanese Women: Tanaka Kinuyo, Film Director Irene González-López and Ashida Mayu

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Tanaka Kinuyo directed six films in nine years, a concentrated production period that resulted in a limited but greatly diverse filmography. Her work as a filmmaker is hard to analyse as a coherent oeuvre because the formal, narrative, technological and even ideological features significantly vary from one film to another. Tanaka worked with different geographical and historical sceneries, and although she always operated within the broad realm of melodrama, she experimented with biopics, jidaigeki2 and war films, among other sub-genres. As other chapters in this volume demonstrate, one of the few distinct cohesive characteristics of her filmography is the concern with gender – and more specifically with the experience of femininity. In her third feature, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955), Tanaka provided a powerful and unique depiction of this subject, and collaborated for the first time with the woman scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie (1908–2000). For this reason, this work is often underscored as establishing Tanaka Kinuyo as a prominent film director in her own right, and furthermore as a director of women’s films (Katō 2011; Saito 2012; González and Ueda 2015). Consequently, however, her previous, first two films, Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953) and The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955), have been somewhat disregarded, partly because the renowned directors Naruse Mikio (1905–69), Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–98) and Ozu Yasujirō (1903–63) substantially contributed to their production and direction. In this chapter, we would like to focus precisely on these two films as the site of emergence for the first female gaze at post-war Japan. Like any other outset, it was fraught with uncertainty; many wondered whether it was a whim of a great star or the beginning of a new career; others considered what kind of films women should make and if they could even effectively direct them at

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all. As a milestone in the history of Japanese cinema as well as in the history of Japanese women, Tanaka’s decision to direct caught the public’s attention and provoked a mass of opinions. Both Love Letter and The Moon Has Risen were heavily promoted as the work of a ‘woman director’ and as such were expected to be ‘different’; but simultaneously, Tanaka’s authorship was called into question by the contribution and support of male directors. How could these contradictory ideas coexist? Our intention is not to determine who should be acknowledged as the author of these works, but rather to shed light on how gender was being constructed in both the diegetic and non-diegetic realms of the films. We aim to illuminate, on the one hand, the ways in which the first post-war films directed by a woman depicted gender roles and power dynamics, and, on the other, the ways in which the figure of the woman director was being defined, contextualised and negotiated in the public sphere. Relying heavily on examination of the promotion and reception materials of the films, we analyse Tanaka’s films not so much as auteur works but as commercial products intended to address a mass audience, imbricated in the mesh of intertextual references that governed the sphere of popular culture and inscribed in the studio system as well as in the broader socio-political context of post-war Japan. Thus, before embarking on the analysis of each film, we shall contextualise Tanaka’s turn to filmmaking in order to explain how gender politics circumscribed her personal and professional experience as an actress and director.

In tune with the times In 1953, film critic Eito Toshio proclaimed Tanaka best actress of 1952 for her celebrated performances in The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, Mizoguchi Kenji), Mother (Okāsan, Naruse Mikio) and The Ataka Family (Atakake no hitobito, Hisamatsu Seiji 1912–90) (Eito 1953: 72). This acknowledgement can be said to symbolically mark the end of a deep slump during which many of her films had been harshly criticised. Tanaka, in her early forties, had been ridiculed for playing maiden roles, being paired off with much younger actors and using thick make-up to disguise her age (Kawamoto 1992: 334–5; Shimura 2006: 82). Such was the case of Phoenix (Fushichō, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1947), where her love interest as a young widow was played by Sada Keiji (1926–64), who was seventeen years younger than Tanaka; the opposite, however, would not surprise anyone. Tanaka’s popularity and her support from the industry led to this kind of seemingly unlikely pairing, which ran against the grain of the conventions of a studio system where leading female roles were almost exclusively for young actresses. Moreover, as a clear example of a male-centred

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entity, the Japanese studio system offered extremely limited alternatives for women in key positions aside from those of actress and scriptwriter. To make matters worse, Tanaka’s return from a US tour as an ambassador of goodwill in 1949 caused tremendous scandal. After travelling around America meeting politicians, film stars and Japanese communities, Tanaka paraded around the Ginza district of Tokyo in sunglasses, red high heels and a fur, throwing kisses from a convertible car and greeting the crowd in English with ‘Hello!’.3 The press fiercely condemned her brazen behaviour and Tanaka shut herself up in her house for months, where it is said that she even thought about committing suicide (Kawamoto 1992: 336–9). It could be argued that what Tanaka did was not wrong in itself. Had it been another actress, such as the more outwardly glamorous Kyō Machiko (1924–), public opinion would have probably been amusement at her Americanised performance. The problem lay in the identity Tanaka had come to embody and consequently the expectations the public held towards her. In discussing the reasons behind this uproar, Kawamoto Saburō argues that her star persona had been, during the war and the early post-war period, associated with a resilient and self-sacrificing femininity which supposedly embodied the enduring nature of Japanese identity. Tanaka had come to typify a traditional subservient Japanese femininity through her roles as mother and wife, and in the last few years particularly as war widow (1992: 333–7). One can mention her roles in Army (Rikugun, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944) and A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, Ozu Yasujirō, 1948) as examples of this. However, if we consider her roles as a modern and strong feminist in other contemporaneous films such as The Victory of Women (Josei no shōri, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1946) and her performance as a fallen woman in Mizoguchi’s Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, 1948), it follows that Tanaka’s star image cannot be so easily categorised, as this volume as a whole aims to underscore. Therefore, it was not the bold modern style which could not be accepted in Tanaka – the public were used to seeing Tanaka assume different modes by now – but rather the foreignness she was exhibiting. Through her constant presence from the silent era through the war years and up to the post-war period, Tanaka’s image of femininity had come to convey a sense of national identity which was not immutable but which at least needed to remain ‘truly’ Japanese. This was particularly crucial in 1949 against the background of the Allied Forces Occupation (1945–52) and the spread of panpan (independent street prostitutes) who often dressed in an Americanised fashion. As has been widely discussed, gender and sexuality functioned as allegorical sites of international power relations, where the traumatic past and vulnerable present were negotiated to ease the crisis of Japanese masculine authority and identity (Izbicki 1997; Igarashi 2000; Hori 2002; Slaymaker 2004; Standish 2005;

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Wada-Marciano 2009; Saito 2014). The connotations of Tanaka’s look were, thus, glaring. Up until that moment, Tanaka had been associated with a certain role in this pervasive narrative which was staged for the male national subject and which simultaneously benefited the USA’s own narrative of victory and rescue. This is likely why she was selected as an ambassador in the first place; to convey a desirable image of an innocuous and ‘cultural’ Japanese identity. Pictures of the trip indicate that she fulfilled this role during her stay in the USA (see note 3); however, it seems she dramatically betrayed that image on her return to Japan. Therefore, the scandal lays bare the political nature of this construction of Japanese femininity and its effectiveness on the popular imaginary which had come to naturalise it. Looking at these unfortunate events, Furukawa Kaoru explains in his biography of the actress/director that when Tanaka announced her decision to debut as film director in 1953, some critics saw it as an imprudent move by an actress in crisis (2004: 478–9). However, Eito’s article in Kinema junpō mentioned above demonstrates that Tanaka had already overcome that slump. In fact, she was by this point receiving acclaim not only in Japan but also abroad, as her presence at the Venice International Film Festival that same year attests. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that these negative experiences made her realise that her acting career was no longer assured and hence influenced her decision to become a director. In her memoirs, Tanaka claimed that at this time she became conscious that the life-span of leading actresses was a short one, and so she was seeking new ways of engaging in the cinema industry (Tanaka [1975] 2006: 372–3). Notwithstanding this key point, other factors may also have propelled her debut. Broadening the context, Tanaka’s resolution can be positioned within the current of radical transformations that Japanese women, and by extension society as a whole, were experiencing since the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945. In the midst of political and economic chaos, material devastation and widespread poverty, women had been granted the right to vote in 1946 and gender equality in the family, education and employment was officially established through the new Constitution (1946), the Civil Code (1948) and other significant laws. The Allied Occupation placed gender at the centre of the political public agenda, claiming that ‘women’s liberation’ was essential to the democratisation of Japan (Hirano 1992; Dower 1999; Koikari 2002). Tanaka supported this progressive trend advocating gender equality. In her memoirs, she recalled that the sight of so many American professional women deeply impressed her during her visit to the USA, and partially triggered her desire to make films ([1975] 2006: 372). Similarly, in an interview in 1953, Tanaka declared: ‘Now that there are women Diet members in Japan as well, I thought it would be good if there was at least one woman film director’4 (Kinema junpō 1953a: 50).5 Moving away from the conceptions often linked to a submissive

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and vulnerable position, Tanaka sought to align herself with the image of a modern and democratic femininity. Relatedly, she was often erroneously advertised as the first Japanese woman director, a label which disregarded the work in pre-war Manchukuo of Sakane Tazuko (1904–75), who after the war was denied work as a director and relegated to script girl (Ikegawa 2001). Therefore, Tanaka’s decision was framed within the post-war transformation of the nation and presented as a product of the gender reforms and consequently of Western influence, instead of being used as an opportunity to trace back and illuminate the history of Japanese women in film. The benefits of the gender reforms sanctioned by the Occupation for women cannot be stressed enough. Without belittling their significance, scholars have argued that the changes were partially used as propaganda to safeguard US interests, and that they also concealed Western patriarchal conceptions of femininity which actually perpetuated inequality (Liddle and Nakajima 2000; Koikari 2002). As the workings of the studio system illustrate, the application of the reforms was, moreover, fragmentary and the gap between publicised ideas and the everyday reality of women was conspicuous. With the end of the Occupation in 1952, a new era started. Now that sovereignty had been recovered, in some sectors of society there was a will to redefine the national identity and to re-evaluate the outcome of the Occupation. Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967), prime minister during the last years of the Occupation, remained in power and his policies, which became known as the Yoshida Doctrine, placed great emphasis on Japan’s economic and financial growth at the expense of perpetuating the country’s reliance on the USA (Edström 1992). The social conservatism advanced by Yoshida’s government was felt also in the trends of the mainstream cinema industry. In her study of the history of Japanese cinema, Isolde Standish notes a general tendency in the early post-war to recontain women within traditional roles of passivity and sacrifice through narratives of heterosexual romance (2005: 193–6). She argues that ‘under the terms of sexual equality inscribed in the new post-war Constitution, the myth of heterosexual romance became one of the narrative vehicles through which dominant constructions of sexuality are defined and the ideals of patriarchal society upheld’ (2005: 193). During these years, in the prestigious women’s journal Fujin kōron (Women’s Review) sexual morality linked to romance and marriage was strongly advised as the path to construct a truly modern respectable nation. At the same time, the journal began to poignantly criticise the Occupation’s alleged ‘women’s liberation’ in the light of the sexual exploitation it had allowed or even fostered; and this revisionism was accompanied by a reinvigorated, and eventually successful, anti-prostitution movement (e.g. Fujin kōron 1952a, b, c; 1953a, b; 1954;

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and many others).6 Streetwalkers and women soliciting foreigners, such as those depicted in Tanaka’s debut film, became the targets of the harshest condemnation. It is against this revisionist background of identities and morals that we will examine Love Letter.

Reconstructing Japan, reconstructing patriarchy Released approximately a year and a half after the end of the Occupation, Love Letter revolves around two of the most frequently depicted figures in Japanese cinema of the period: the returned soldier and the panpan.7 The film recounts the reunion of Reikichi (Mori Masayuki, 1911–73), a repatriated naval veteran who sets to work translating love letters for panpan, with his long lost lover, Michiko (Kuga Yoshiko, 1931–), who, to the outrage of Reikichi, turns out to have been one of these women. In addition to a timely subject, the fi lm offered several attractions likely to appeal to the public. There was, of course, Tanaka’s star persona and the fact that this was the first post-war film directed by a woman in Japan. Additionally, the film was based on a serialised novel by the prolific and renowned male writer Niwa Fumio (1904–2005) that had been published in the newspaper Asahi shinbun that same year, ensuring that the story was familiar to the public. Publicity was further guaranteed by the casting of extremely popular stars in the leading roles; Kuga made it onto the cover of Eiga fan (Film Fan), perhaps the most important Japanese fan magazine at the time, in the month of the film’s release. The popular appeal of Love Letter was also informed, we will argue, by What Is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa, Ōba Hideo, 1953–4), a trilogy that became one of the most lucrative films in post-war Japan and that was released just three months before Tanaka’s opera prima.8 The films shared significant thematic features, such as the re-encounter of lovers separated by war, the relevant use of prostitutes as secondary characters and the suffering of the heroines for love. It is, however, the ideological implications that these shared themes have with regard to gender, nation and trauma that deserve further attention. Both films partake in the discourse of ‘victimisation’, analysed in terms of its cinematic representation by Hori (2002), Standish (2005) and Wada-Marciano (2009), among others. This narrative, which became popular during the post-war period, presented Japanese civilians as victims of militarism and war, and in this way avoided reflecting on their responsibilities for the nation’s past. What Is Your Name? stands out as the epitome of the victimisation trend. Virtually all the characters developed in the story are essentially good-hearted and did not hold positions of power during the war. They have struggled to survive amid dysfunctional families, material and personal loss, tragic coincidences and abuse; all wish to

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leave the past behind and concentrate on working for a bright future. Only a veteran of war, played by Ryū Chishū (1904–93), explicitly expresses regret for the past and blames the military for the tragedy Japan and its people endured. In Love Letter, the heroine Michiko is similarly tyrannised by her stepmother and then ordered to marry a man she does not love, who moreover dies on the front. After moving to Tokyo, she becomes the mistress of an American soldier who eventually leaves the country as she miscarries their baby. A victim of circumstance who must endure her fate, Michiko accepts Reikichi’s contempt with resignation. For his part, Reikichi, although a war veteran, is presented as a culturally aware and sensitive man, distant from the features commonly associated with the military or power structures in general. He is offered as a victimised exponent of what Standish refers to as the ‘fated generation’ of Japanese people who saw their youth destroyed by the war (2005: 182). In this light, Love Letter arguably conforms to the victimisation discourse, so apparent in What Is Your Name?; however, it offers meaningful variations. In the last sequence, Reikichi takes a taxi with his friend Naoto (Uno Jūkichi, 1914–88), another translator of love letters who can be said to have guided Reikichi’s reintegration into society. They are travelling to the hospital after Michiko has had a car accident, which is framed as perhaps being a suicide attempt. As their tense journey proceeds, Naoto cites the Bible, telling Reikichi ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’. He insists that all Japanese people are as much victims as they are responsible for the war and criticises those who project their frustration onto panpan. The film, therefore, ultimately proposes overcoming the victim complex by accepting responsibility, albeit abstractly. The use of humanist philosophy and Christian morality, both in vogue at the time and unquestionably connected to the West, suggests the rejection of the past as well as the reaffirmation of a new Japan rising from the ashes and seeking guidance outside its frontiers. At the film’s climax, Naoto implies that forgiveness and responsibility must nurture the social reconstruction that can lead Japan to a bright future. Nevertheless, the entire argument for Reikichi to forgive Michiko is based on the assertion that she is not really a panpan. Naoto, Reikichi’s brother Hiroshi (Dōsan Jūzō, dates unknown) and Michiko herself repeatedly state that she is ‘different’ from those women. She ambiguously explains her relationship with the American GI as the desperate decision of a confused and vulnerable woman in need, and thus disavows any sexual desire on her part. Moreover, Michiko’s salvation is possible because she has lost the definitive visual evidence of miscegenation: their child. In discussing the politics of What Is Your Name?, Yoshikuni Igarashi argues: It becomes clear that sexual desires and their seemingly unhampered flow in post-war society are to be condemned: female sexuality in particular is demonized as destructive to social mores. If we see the social problems of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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prostitution and interracial children as standing in for the larger issues of Japanese defeat and the presence of the United States, the story of Kimi no nawa reverses the causal relations between the defeat and subsequent social confusion. In this reversal, repression and normalization of the problem – female sexuality – become the means to recover the social order and erase the larger causes looming behind the social problems. (Igarashi 2000: 111) In What Is Your Name?, secondary characters who base their relationships on sexual desire meet a disastrous end. In the case of women, these are presented as the antithesis of the heroine who follows pure love, and thus the film exhibits the classical ‘madonna–whore’ dichotomy. Tanaka’s film does not make such use of secondary characters, but ultimately conforms to the condemnation of female deviant sexual behaviour by symbolically punishing Michiko with the car accident, and imbricates sexuality and politics by drawing a link between oversexualised women and Americanisation. In contrast to the panpan, the secondary character played by Kagawa Kyōko (1931–), a cheerful young woman working at a book store who becomes friends with Hiroshi, stands out as the embodiment of a prescriptive ideal of healthy, clean and desexualised Japanese femininity.9 Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, the plot places great emphasis on the fact that Michiko should be ‘forgiven’ by Reikichi, and therefore indirectly makes her the offender and him the victim. Ultimately, both films suggest that once the initial chaos of the end of the war has been overcome, it is time to resume subjecting women’s bodies to patriarchal normalisation. It follows that the control of sexual economies was fundamental to Japanese men recovering their sense of power; and in terms of socio-economic structures, it is undeniable that the gendered division of roles and labour was pivotal in the recovery and progress of the system that led Japan into its post-war economic miracle. The return to patriarchy advocated in Love Letter is, nevertheless, qualified. Michiko’s tragedy starts before she falls into an interracial relationship. It begins when she succumbs to her father’s mandate and marries a man she does not love. Similarly, as Standish points out, the heroine of What Is Your Name? chooses a marriage based on material security and old social mores, and thus goes against the codes of the myth of romantic love in a ‘democratic’ fashion (2005: 195–6). Both heroines, therefore, fail to choose individual romance over traditional patriarchal authority and values; and this is the actual turning point in their ill-fated lives. In contrast to arranged marriage, and following the tradition of the Occupation films, romantic love is portrayed as redemption and selffulfilment for women. However, taking into account Reikichi’s logic in forgiving Michiko, her bearing of the fallen woman’s stigma, her symbolic punishment and the generalised insistence on marriage, it becomes clear that the theme of romance feeds back into the recontainment of women within patriarchal family Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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structures. The woman must be free to choose her partner – but she needs his recognition, protection and ultimately control in order to remain integrated in normative society. On the other hand, masculinity and the male experience of romance are also problematised in Love Letter. In the first part of the film, Reikichi’s love for Michiko is presented as bordering on the obsessive. Carrying a picture of young Michiko in a student uniform, he wanders the streets of Tokyo in search of her. Determined to wait for Michiko, Reikichi refuses to date other women. Since returning from war, he is unable to express his feelings about Michiko to anyone, and his frustration and self-imposed silence lead to confrontations with his brother Hiroshi. As the picture in his pocket reveals, Michiko functions as a surrogate for his loss: she represents purity, the unstained pre-war happy past which he longs to return to. This idealised image is overtly underscored in a long flashback of pastoral scenes of Reikichi and Michiko at a very young age. The two children appear laughing and joking around, playing with other children in the open fields, singing and enjoying the cherry blossom, all along completely unaware of the tragic fate that awaits them. Standish notes that the theme of the ‘fated generation’ became dominant in the early 1950s in films where ‘the historical trauma of defeat finds expression in a compulsive re-enactment of disempowerment in the symbolic terms of emasculation’ (2005: 182–3). Reikichi, previously a successful and respected member of the Japanese imperial navy, now depends economically on his younger brother and makes a living translating letters for panpan, who he initially despised. This symbolic emasculation is visually conveyed in the opening sequence of the film (Figure 4.1). After saying goodbye to a woman in a car, Hiroshi returns home, dressed in a suit and holding a briefcase. Reikichi, on the other hand, is wearing a plain shirt, hanging up the laundry on the clothes line. After greeting his younger brother, he tells Hiroshi that he has cooked a meal for him. They chat while Reikichi is busy with the laundry, and Hiroshi shaves and sits down relaxed. Through their conversation we learn that Reikichi spends most of his time at home, voluntarily taking care of the household chores. Against the sexualised, successful and productive masculinity of his younger brother, Reikichi is introduced as taking the feminised role of a traditional housewife. He can accept this transformation of his own gendered role, but not the fact that Michiko has changed. One could say that, similarly, audiences were effectively adapting to the reinvigorated westernisation the county was experiencing but nostalgically cherished the idealised Japanese femininity which they connected to Tanaka, and therefore they could not allow her to become something else – thus the furore over her return to Japan in 1949.

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Love Letter.

In contrast to this troubled masculinity, in What Is Your Name? men seem almost unaffected by war and defeat, both emotionally and materially. All the main male characters, especially those of Reikichi’s generation, have successful jobs and are self-confident. They understand the prostitution backgrounds of female characters and so they assist these women, who in turn are presented as helpless victims of war. In the popular trilogy, salvation for women means leading a ‘decent life’ and this is achieved only through marriage and/or financial support from men. Once in this situation, women easily reintegrate into society and there is no trace of stigma. Trauma and renovation are projected almost exclusively onto women (and military men), and the masculine identity crisis is completely disavowed. In other words, in What Is Your Name? the continuity of patriarchy comes across as the easy and natural path to reconstructing Japan. On the basis of this contrast, we propose to read Love Letter as a male melodrama. The film is primarily about Reikichi’s fears, contradictions and desires; about his incapability to come to terms with the past and react to the present. Michiko appears for the first time after one third of the film has already elapsed, and her emotions are not developed in any great depth during the film. In an attempt to capture the heightened and conflicting emotions which hinder him

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from acting in a rational and logic manner, it is the evolution of Reikichi’s subjectivity that the camera instead follows. On the other hand, women’s agency is meaningfully underscored in the film. Michiko finds herself a job and is determined to rebuild her life with or without Reikichi, an independence almost unthinkable in most Japanese romantic melodramas of the time. Her decisions and the way she deals with her past are based on pragmatic reasoning. Throughout the film we are presented with conflicting versions of Michiko’s past, but the truth remains unclear; we are not granted exclusive access to her inner self to dissect her personal story, which only she knows. Meanwhile, Reikichi is characterised in the style of the archetypical female protagonist of a classical melodrama and is completely exposed to the viewers. The camera penetrates his psyche to give us access to his fantasies and memories, as the sequence of his imagined flashback demonstrates. Therefore, the chief focus of Love Letter is ultimately on the challenge posed to men to overcome the trauma of defeat and its subsequent crisis of masculinity, allegorically reflected on uncontrolled female sexuality. Like other contemporaneous popular films, it upholds the restraint of female sexual behaviour and the necessity for traditional gender structures; however, it does not offer a simplified and safe fantasy of continuity and disavowal like What Is Your Name?. In Love Letter, war, defeat and occupation are presented as gendered experiences, leading to distinct problematics. In this case, patriarchy must first be relinquished and emasculated in order to re-establish itself according to post-war democratic ideals.

Framing Love Letter Love Letter was well-received by critics and audiences alike (e.g. Eiga geijutsu [Film Art] 1954; Mori 1954; Ueno 1954; Tanaka [1975] 2006: 374). Gender, both in front and behind the camera, became the main emphasis of the reviews. Several critics were surprised that instead of a traditional melodrama about women in the domestic realm, Tanaka had chosen the controversial subject of prostitution on which to base her film (Kinema junpō 1953a). The critic Ueno Ichirō (1954), however, considered this theme to be a worthy subject for a woman director and one to which Tanaka had given a distinguished feminine touch. Despite this, Ueno, like many others, stressed the significant contribution of famed directors Kinoshita and Naruse. Kinoshita adapted the book for the screen and, together with Naruse, under whom Tanaka served as a kind of apprentice during the making of Older Brother, Younger Sister (Ani imōto, 1953), carefully selected the film’s crew for her. For this reason, some critics denounced Love Letter on the grounds that it ‘smelled a lot like’ Kinoshita and Naruse (Furukawa 2004: 485). Considering that Tanaka claimed that she wanted ‘to

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portray women from a female’s perspective’ (Tanaka et al. [1975] 1997: 34), this collaboration appears incongruous. In Tanaka’s defence it must be noted, however, that she first asked Mizuki Yōko (1910–2003), the acclaimed female scriptwriter who regularly worked with Naruse and Imai Tadashi (1912–91), to adapt the original novel, but Mizuki declined the offer (Kinema junpō 1977: 117). On the other hand, leading actor Mori Masayuki (Reikichi) praised Tanaka’s energy and calm on set, and declared to the women’s journal Fujin kōron that he never felt conscious of the fact that it was a woman directing the shoot (Mori 1954: 228). Even before its release, the making of the film became a spectacle of gender performance in its own right. It is worth imagining the impact produced in 1953 by witnessing a woman, and not just a regular one but the celebrated star and archetype of femininity Tanaka Kinuyo, dressed in male fashion commanding an all-male crew of over sixty people in the middle of the busy neighbourhood of Shibuya (Tokyo). The amount and variety of photographs published in the press indicate that the shoot became a genuine media event. As Joanne Liddle and Sachiko Nakajima explain in their history of Japanese women, despite the gender reforms very few women held management positions in the early 1950s, and when they did it was usually over female staff in schools, magazines or nurseries, and thus these roles were performed indoors and not usually exhibited in the public domain (2000: 211). Reflecting the historical relevance of Tanaka’s actions, the film journal Kinema junpō published several promotional articles and interviews before the release of Love Letter. These texts praised Tanaka’s courageous initiative and her skilful directing of actors, while repeatedly insisting upon the combination of gender roles Tanaka was expected to fulfil (1953a, b, c, d). Everyone agreed: Tanaka was doing a man’s job. In this light, aspects such as Tanaka’s attire, her public display of authority and her choice to avoid domesticity and concentrate on a male character reinforce this idea of a performance of ‘masculinity’ (as understood in the popular imaginary of the time). These ‘masculine’ features, however, were levelled in the press by emphasising the unique feminine approach (‘josei rashii’) Tanaka brought to the male-written story and the realistic portrayal of women’s subjectivity she was expected to offer (Kinema junpō 1953b, c). This paradoxical gender compound is exemplarily conveyed in visual terms by one such piece of promotional material (Kinema junpō 1953b) (Figure 4.2). On the right-hand page there is a picture of Tanaka in her director’s chair sitting in a slumped, masculine posture and clothing, with a serious expression of concentration, surrounded by male crew members. There is no eye contact or communication between the figures, who are located and framed in clear hierarchical terms. On the left-hand page, however, Tanaka appears relaxed, laughing with several actresses,

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Figure 4.2

Promotional material from Kinema junpō, early November 1953.

as they fold clothes together in what seems a rather egalitarian layout of positions and actions. In another picture on the same side, Tanaka is looking down at a little boy who hugs her in an affectionate manner. Tanaka’s attitude here may not be said to be indisputably maternal, yet to include in the film promotion this particular picture with a boy who merely appears in one scene as an extra does not seem coincidental – especially in view of the vast number of photographs available to the press. What the composition of this photo spread conveys, therefore, is not a rejection of hegemonic gender roles, but rather the expectations laid on Tanaka to perform what was considered man’s work while permeating it with feminine sensibility; and at the same time it effectively suggests the seeming impossibility of uniting both in one image. Like the film’s narrative, the promotional materials bear witness to a time of redefinition, when Japan sought to reorganise the social economy and struggled to negotiate the problematic combination of what were perceived as traditional and modern gender mores, which underpinned the socio-economic structures. Placing the film in the broader context of its production and the gender dynamics affecting Tanaka and her star persona reveals further the internal contradictions that this challenge entailed.

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A controversial homage to Ozu With the exception of Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956), most of the acclaimed filmmakers of the early post-war era gave full support to Tanaka’s turn to filmmaking. In Tanaka’s second work, The Moon Has Risen, it was Ozu Yasujirō who became the masculine presence of authority hovering over the film. Ozu wrote the script together with Saitō Ryōsuke (1911–2007) in 1947, but the project, which was initially intended to be directed by Ozu for Shintōhō Studio, was repeatedly delayed. Eventually, Ozu and the producer Eisei Koi (1908–92) offered it to the Directors Guild of Japan (Nihon eiga kantoku kyōkai) to be produced by the recently reopened Nikkatsu Studio. This, however, brought a string of complications to the project, which became trapped in industry politics. Indeed, several press articles and Tanaka herself described the making of the film as demanding ‘strenuous efforts’ (kushin, written in Japanese with the character of hardship/ affliction and that of heart) (Yomiuri shinbun 1954, 1955; Tanaka 1955). In September 1953, the major film studios of Japan (Shōchiku, Daiei, Tōhō, Shintōho and Tōei) signed the ‘Five-Company Agreement’ which established three categories of contracts for actors and filmmakers, and regulated their moves between studios. The real aim of this agreement, however, was to protect the group’s oligarchy and exclusivity over stars and directors in order to ostracise Nikkatsu Studio, which had recently returned to film production (Kakita 1992: 91). As a result, many actors were afraid to get involved with the project, which was originally offered just a few months after the agreement was established. This led to multiple casting issues that delayed the film, and as a result the final casting was composed of predominantly new actors barely known to the public (NFC 1971: 25). While The Moon Has Risen was initially intended to be released in March 1954, the shoot actually began in October of the same year, and only then thanks to the encouragement of the film’s production committee established by the powerful figures of Ozu, Naruse and Ushihara Kiyohiko (1897–1985), who openly dissented against the five-company agreement (Nikkatsu Theatre News 1954: 5; Tanaka 1955: 56). Through this defying of the authority of the fivecompany agreement, Tanaka’s career, not only as director but also as actress, was placed in jeopardy. Complications notwithstanding, this also meant that the film received great publicity even before the beginning of its production, as an example of the debates and controversies around the studio system at the time.10 The Moon Has Risen is a ‘home drama’ that makes use of an overall comical and relaxed tone to tell the story of the romances of three sisters living with their father near the monumental temple complex of Tōdaiji in Nara after the war. Upon release, it received a mainly favourable and supportive critical response. The film critic Futaba Jūzaburō, for instance, asserted that ‘the box-office records of the

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premiere have been extremely positive, and the film is being praised by many’ (1955: 84). Virtually all reviews mentioned Ozu, almost as a co-author of the film – something that would rarely happen in the case of other scriptwriters. Futaba, among others, celebrated Tanaka’s delicacy in respecting the ‘taste’ of Ozu conveyed in the script (1955: 84). Likewise, a review in the newspaper Yomiuri praised Tanaka for staying faithful to Ozu’s style while simultaneously infusing the film with a feminine touch (again using the expression ‘josei rashii’) (Yomiuri shinbun 1955). These reviews suggest that Ozu’s status as director permeated the film, and his signature or ‘taste’ was expected to be found not only in the script but also in the mise-en-scène and cinematography. Tanaka was acknowledged as a skilful craftswoman, whose main responsibility lay on adding a feminine factor, which was, moreover, never clearly defined in these texts but rather repeated as a maxim. According to Futaba, Tanaka’s mastery in mimicking Ozu’s camera style proved her talent as a film director (1955: 84). Far from rejecting this approach generalised in the media, Tanaka spoke profusely about Ozu when introducing The Moon Has Risen to the readers of Eiga geijutsu (Tanaka 1955). In terms of aesthetics, it is undeniable that Tanaka offers a tribute to the classical master by making use of his most distinctive features.11 For example, the film opens with a series of transitional shots, a stylistic device that will recur throughout the film. Tanaka also makes use of static total front shots of the characters as they speak and often locates the camera 90 cm off the ground, mimicking the famed Ozu shot. Nevertheless, it is important to note that this reproduction of Ozu’s aesthetics is more apparent in the first third of the film, which later gradually evolves to exhibit its own style where Ozuian aesthetic features appear less frequently.12 In other words, the impact of the initial scenes that exude Ozu’s distinct and familiar style eclipses the cinematographic style of the rest of the film, which is in fact rather dynamic. This is especially evident in Tanaka’s direction of Kitahara Mie (1933–) in the role of Setsuko, the youngest sister, where the vitality of the character is underscored by her jaunty, impulsive and often hurried movements which make use of the entire frame on-screen with fluid camera work. Since the script had been written eight years previously, it had to be edited in accordance with the state of affairs in 1955. However, most amendments seem to have accommodated the demands of the sponsor, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (NTTPC, nowadays known as NTT). In fact, according to Kakita Kiyoji’s account of the history of the Directors Guild of Japan (1992), it was NTT which originally re-instigated the project. The telecommunications company had been established in 1952, backed by the government in an attempt to propel the technological recovery of the country after the war (NTT 2014). Seeking to promote its services, NTT had produced several short films but soon turned to commercial cinema in order to reach a broader audience and enhance the impact of its publicity. Kakita explains that NTT approached the Directors Guild in late Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1953 to create a film that would include references to its technologies, expecting it to be released by April 1954. Under such a tight deadline, the guild chose to make use of an extant script and decided upon Ozu’s work. Because of the film’s various delays, NTT reduced its sponsorship from an initial 7 million to a final 3 million yen, but the script retained the subtle advertising content (Kakita 1992: 90–1). This explains the various references in the film to the new microwave technology, the compliments regarding its speed and convenience and the use of a communication tower as a location, which blatantly contrasts with the rest of a film set primarily in Nara Park amid traditional Japanese architecture. The time lapse between the original script, the agreement with NTT and the release of the actual film could also account for certain anachronistic elements. For instance, in the script Amemiya (Kō Mishima, 1927–), an electrical engineer fond of the second sister Ayako (Sugi Yōko, 1928–), travels to Osaka in order to launch the installation of a microwave transmission line for telephone communication between Tokyo and Osaka. By 1955, however, both cities, as well as Nagoya, were already using microwave lines and the technology had been normalised, thus losing the sense of novelty conveyed in the film (NTT 2014). After Ayako and Amemiya have disclosed their mutual fondness for each other thanks to the stratagems of the young Setsuko, the engineer returns to Tokyo and the pair begin sending each other telegrams using a series of numbers, a code which becomes a riddle for the members of the family as well as for the film’s audience. The numbers turn out to be references to poems in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Manyōshū). Taking into account the advancement in telecommunications technology, the use of poetry of the eighth century and the old-fashioned medium of the telegram in the development of this romance efficiently works to highlight the traditional manners of the characters. Furthermore, we would suggest that the alleged anachronism evokes a negotiation between the modern and the traditional, where the former is praised and put into use, but the latter is confirmed as positively ruling emotions and personal interactions. While the film was a relative box-office and critical success, several reviews denounced the inclusion of old-fashioned attitudes that presented a chauvinist, obsolete image of women and the way they relate to men. Futaba criticised one of the last scenes, where Setsuko kneels in the lap of his boyfriend ‘as a kitten’ while he tells her ‘I will pet you’ (kawaigatte yaru). An outraged Futaba asked ‘What young man with a certain education would nowadays use such an expression as “I will pet you” towards a woman?’ (1955: 84). This scene deserves further analysis for its insightful articulation of gender politics, both through the dialogue and through the camera work. After a quarrel, Shōji (Yasui Shōji, 1928–2014) invites Setsuko to move with him to Tokyo and, it is implied, to marry him. Shōji explains to Setsuko how life will not be easy in Tokyo and tells her she will have to work hard, do laundry, cook and do everything by herself (it is unclear whether she will be Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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doing this just for herself or for both of them). Framed in a front medium shot from a slightly low angle, Shōji stands straight, sticking his chest out in a posture that exudes self-confidence (Figure 4.3). Meanwhile, Setsuko is shown in two counter-shots from a moderately elevated angle as she silently nods, her eyes cast down, her shoulders sagging. While Shōji continues his speech, the camera cuts to a two-shot, where he stands in profile on the left and Setsuko is in a squatting position on the right with her back to the camera, still silent. The camera then returns to a shot/counter-shot composition, but this time with a manifest low angle of Shōji and a high angle of Setsuko; he speaks, she nods. In the following shot, however, Setsuko begins her speech. She does not tell Shōji what to do, neither does she assure him how life will be in the future; instead, she explains the emotional stress their quarrel has caused to her and others,

Figure 4.3 The Moon Has Risen: broadcast by Nihon Eiga Senmon channel. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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reflects upon the attitudes that led them to this situation and points out how she intends to act in the future (at this point Shōji interrupts her speech). Setsuko’s lines are framed in a two-shot in which both figures appear in profile kneeling and the fixed camera is positioned approximately 90 cm from the ground, contributing to a cinematography that conveys equality and intimacy. In this scene, words, postures, composition and camera work effectively to define two distinct gender identities and roles, first asserting masculine authority and Setsuko’s subjugation to it, and then associating the female with emotions, reflexivity and conciliation. Similarly to Futaba, another viewer in his twenties stated that this scene ‘set my teeth on edge’, and made the women watching the film with him ‘laugh out loud’. He also claimed to feel embarrassed by the way in which the housemaid (played by Tanaka herself) was treated by other characters almost as a ‘slave’ (Kinema junpō 1955: 188). Indeed, the three sisters generally exhibit very conservative ways of interacting with others, not only the housemaids. It is with the utmost respect, for instance, that Setsuko asks her eldest sister Chizuru (Yamane Hisako, 1921–90) for permission to go on a short trip. Likewise, Chizuru, who repeatedly features serving men across the film, is told by her father in the last scene that she should remarry, a comment to which she responds with silence. Her father, who is far from being portrayed as a domineering figure, proposes the man in whom Chizuru has shown a special interest throughout the story, but it is nevertheless suggested that it is the patriarch who must advance and approve the decision. Despite sharing a very close and positive relationship, all family members never fail to follow traditional codes of respect and compliance associated with social hierarchies of power – including those defined by gender. They make use of formal registers of language and gestures that would commonly be associated with the upper class or the pre-war society. In addition to these kinds of attitudes, the bucolic scenery away from the city and its problems, and the absence of references to contemporary socio-political issues, make it difficult to locate the film in a firm historical context, although we are told that the story takes place a few years after the war. There is a sense of escapism that can also be associated with nostalgia towards an undetermined past of peace, order and prosperity where the family members complied with hierarchical roles, where they could enjoy a wealthy lifestyle (although none seems to have a job), and where such naive romances, based on a subservient ideal of femininity, could take place. It is important to note, however, that portrayals of idealised patriarchy and submissive women such as those perceived by some in The Moon Has Risen were not uncommon at the time, neither were they always condemned, as the example of What Is Your Name? clearly evidences. Had the film been directed by Ozu, would critics and spectators have reproved its gender politics? The chief reason for the criticism seems to be rather that this depiction came from the only Japanese woman film director at the time, who was expected to put forward a more progressive, non-male-centred alternative. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Returning to Standish’s remarks on the gender politics of melodrama in the early 1950s, this analysis of Tanaka’s first films has further demonstrated the ways in which romance themes worked to reinforce conservative conceptions of gender. However, this chapter has also shed light on the reactions in popular culture towards these discourses, revealing the diversity of interpretations and attitudes. Viewers did not uncritically accept the ideologies conveyed onscreen, and film journals and magazines constituted exciting sites of interaction between films and society. In this time of great social contradiction and disparateness, cinema functioned as, to borrow Miriam Hansen’s words, a ‘reflexive horizon’ (2000: 12) of social experience through which to negotiate, reflect upon or disavow the changing reality of Japan and its traumatic past. Hansen explores Shanghai silent films as a configuration of a vernacular modernism; similarly, Tanaka’s early works exhibit an important concern with the negotiation between the traditional and the modern that Japan was revisiting now that it was free from foreign censorship. Outside the diegetic realm of the films, the examination of reviews and promotional material has illuminated the various expectations placed on Tanaka, and the challenges she encountered in order to establish herself as a director in her own right. By interweaving the analysis of these paratexts with that of the film texts themselves, and contextualising these discourses within the status quo of the cinema industry, this chapter has attempted to further our understanding of the complex, dialectical and multilayered articulation of gender in and around film. The fascinating life and work of Tanaka Kinuyo provides an excellent vehicle for this endeavour.

Notes 1. This work was supported by the British Association of Japanese Studies and the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, from which Irene has held scholarships. We would also like to thank Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández for sharing invaluable primary sources. 2. Period films usually set in the Tokugawa Era (1615–1868). 3. There is a short documentary entitled The Travels of Kinuyo Tanaka (Tanaka Kinuyo no tabidachi, 2009) about her experience in the USA, which is included in the Criterion Collection edition of The Life of Oharu; the footage was discovered in 2003. The March 1950 issue of Eiga Fan includes pictures of her arrival in Japan. 4. Recently enfranchised, women participated for the first time in Japanese history in the 1946 general elections. As a result, 39 women were elected to the Diet, the Japanese parliament. 5. Translations by the authors, except otherwise specified. 6. The system of legal prostitution was finally outlawed in 1956. 7. The term panpan encompassed several sub-categories, each with its own nomenclature. For instance, those dealing with foreign patrons were known as yōpan, and hence they

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9.

10.

11. 12.

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constituted just one type among others, contrary to the general misconception that all panpan worked with GIs (Chazono 2014). What Is Your Name? was originally a radio drama aired by NHK from April 1952 over two years. The film adaptation was released in three parts, two in 1953 and the last one in 1954. Owing to its enormous success, it was adapted also into a novel, a play and several television dramas. This was very much in line with Kagawa Kyōko’s star image, which had been consolidated in recent films such as Naruse’s Mother and Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, 1953). Although beyond the scope of this research, the film could serve as an interesting case study through which to examine the structure and politics of the 1950s Japanese studio system, and to enquire into the power dynamics at play between studios and individual filmmakers, which could add another dimension to the discussions around authorship and auteurism. It is also significant that Tanaka cast Ryū Chishū, who had played similar roles in many of Ozu’s films, for the father character. The low camera is perhaps the most persistent element, but the setting of traditional Japanese rooms with tatami arguably lends itself to this camera position.

Bibliography Chazono, Toshimi (2014), Panpan to wa dare na no ka: kyatchi to iu senryōki no seibōryoku to GI to no shinmitsusei, Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai. Dower, John W. (1999), Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, London: Penguin. Edström, Bert (1992), Yoshida Shigeru and the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’, Stockholm: Stockholm University, Center for Pacific Area Studies. Eiga geijutsu (1954), ‘Nihon eiga no shinjin gunzō’, January, pp. 46–50. Eito, Toshio (1953), ‘1952 nen no Nihon eiga de mottomo inshō ni nokotta haiyū tachi’, Kinema junpō, Spring Special Number, pp. 72–3. Fujin kōron (1952a), ‘Panpan wo tsukū michi’, July, pp. 60–6. Fujin kōron (1952b), ‘Panpan to bōeki’, October, p. 27. Fujin kōron (1952c), ‘Kekkon mae seiteki taiken’, October, pp. 120–5. Fujin kōron (1953a), ‘Baishōfu no inai sekai wo’, April, pp. 44–7. Fujin kōron (1953b), ‘Akasen kichi no mondaiten hanbei eiga to iwareru’, December, p. 54. Fujin kōron (1954), ‘Baishun kinshi hōan wo meguru’, February, pp. 132–9. Furukawa, Kaoru (2004), Hana mo arashi mo: joyū Tanaka Kinuyo no shōgai, Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Futaba, Jūzaburō (1955), ‘Tsuki wa noborinu’, Kinema junpō, late February, p. 84. González, Irene and Ueda Mayu (2015) [González-López and Ashida], ‘Josei no seiteki yokubō no hatsuro: Tanaka Kinuyo kantoku sakuhin, Chibusa yo eien nare’, CineMagazinet! 19, Autumn, pp. 1–9, (last accessed 22 August 2016).

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Hansen, Miriam B. (2000), ‘Fallen women, rising stars, new horizons: Shanghai silent film as vernacular modernism’, Film Quarterly 54: 1, October, pp. 10–22. Hirano, Kyoko (1992), Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945–1952, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hori, Hikari (2002), ‘Eiga wo miru koto to kataru koto – Mizoguchi Kenji [Yoru no onna tachi] (1948nen) wo meguru hyōron, jendā, kankyaku’, Eizō gaku 68, pp. 47–66. Igarashi, Yoshikuni (2000), Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ikegawa, Reiko (2001), ‘[Manei josei kantoku] Sakane Tazuko’, Rekishikagaku kyōgikai, November, pp. 16–28. Izbicki, Joanne (1997), ‘The shape of freedom: The female body in post-surrender Japanese cinema’, U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 12, English Supplement, Special Issue: Gender and Imperialism, ed. Brett de Bary, pp. 109–53. Kakita, Kiyoji (1992), Nihon eiga kantoku kyōkai no 50 nen, Tokyo: Nihon Eiga Kantoku Kyōkai. Katō, Mikirō (2011), Nihon eiga-ron 1933–2007: Tekusuto to kontekusuto, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kawamoto, Saburō (1992), ‘Tanaka Kinuyo to sensō mibōjin’, Sekai 568, May, pp. 332–41. Kinema junpō (1953a), ‘Tanaka Kinuyo no mune no soko no koko ni wa’, late October, pp. 50–1. Kinema junpō (1953b), ‘Tanaka Kinuyo [Koibumi] wo kantoku’, early November, n. p. Kinema junpō (1953c), ‘Koibumi’, early November, p. 60. Kinema junpō (1953d), ‘[Koibumi]: ōpun no aru hi’, early December, p. 44. Kinema junpō (1955), ‘Tanaka Kinuyo kantoku ni yosu’, Spring Special Number, p. 188. Kinema junpō (1977), ‘Tanaka-san no omoide’, early May, pp. 113–19. Koikari, Mire (2002), ‘Exporting democracy?: American women, “feminist reforms”, and politics of imperialism in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23: 1, pp. 23–45. Liddle, Joanne and Sachiko Nakajima (2000), Rising Suns, Rising Daughters: Gender, Class, and Power in Japan, London: Zed Books. Mori, Masayuki (1954), ‘Tanaka Kinuyo-san omedetō’, Fujin kōron, February, p. 228. NFC (National Film Center) (ed.) (1971), Tanaka Kinuyo tokushū (2), NFC vol. 2, Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan Firumu Sentā. Nikkatsu Theatre News (1954), ‘[Tsuki wa noborinu] seisaku memo’, no. 16. Kabushikigaisha Shinsekai Shuppansha, p. 4. NTT, official website of the NTT History Center of Technologies, (last accessed 11 November 2014). Saito, Ayako (2012), ‘Onna ga kaki, onna ga toru toki: Nihon eigashi ni okeru futari no Tanaka’, Art Studies 22, pp. 13–31. Saito, Ayako (2014), ‘Occupation and Memory: The Representation of Woman’s Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema’, in Daisuke Miyao (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 327–62. Shimura, Miyoko (2006), ‘Tenkanki no Tanaka Kinuyo to Irie Takako’, in Saito Ayako (ed.), Eiga to Shintai/Sei, Tokyo: Shinwasha, pp. 79–110.

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Slaymaker, Douglas (2004), The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction, New York: Routledge Curzon. Standish, Isolde (2005), A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film, New York; London: Continuum. Tanaka, Kinuyo (1955), ‘[Tsuki wa noborinu] satsuei zenki’, Eiga geijutsu, January, pp. 56–7. Tanaka, Kinuyo ([1975] 2006), ‘Watashi no rirekisho’, in Kobayashi Shunta (ed.), Joyū no unmei: watashi no rirekisho, Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, pp. 289–389. Tanaka, Kinuyo, Takizawa Hajime and Ema Michio ([1975] 1997), Tanaka Kinuyo kikigaki, Kyoto: Kyōto Bunka Hakubutsukan. Ueno, Ichirō (1954), ‘Koibumi’, Kinema junpō, late January, pp. 64–5. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2009), ‘The postwar Japanese melodrama’, trans. Bianca Briciu, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 21, December, pp. 19–32. Yomiuri shinbun (1954), ‘[Tsuki wa noborinu] sutaffu no netsui’, 16 December, evening edition, p. 2. Yomiuri shinbun (1955), ‘Kokoro seijunna kasaku [Tsuki ha noborinu]’, 7 January, evening edition, p. 2.

Filmography A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, Ozu Yasujirō, 1948) Army (Rikugun, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1944) Love Letter (Koibumi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1953) Mother (Okāsan, Naruse Mikio, 1952) Older Brother, Younger Sister (Ani imōto, Naruse Mikio, 1953) Phoenix (Fushichō, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1947,) The Ataka Family (Atakake no hitobito, Hisamatsu Seiji, 1952) The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1952) The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Travels of Kinuyo Tanaka (Tanaka Kinuyo no tabidachi, 2009, produced by Kobayashi Masaki kantoku itaku gyōmu sewanin-kai Geiyūkai) The Victory of Women (Josei no shōri, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1946) Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, Ozu Yasujirō, 1953) What Is Your Name? (Kimi no nawa, Ōba Hideo, part I 1953, part II 1953, part III 1954) Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1948)

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Chapter 5 Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and Direct Ayako Saito

1 Tanaka Kinuyo (hereafter Kinuyo) is undoubtedly one of the most important film actors in Japanese film history. There are only a handful of actors, male and female alike, who can vie with her in her long career and remarkable accomplishments. Her reputation as the only woman director of six feature films during the post-war golden studio era, however, never seems to have enjoyed the same appreciation as her acting career does. Her films have rarely been shown outside the occasional women’s film festival circuits.1 Despite the overall warm and often welcoming media reception her films received upon release, her directorial place in Japanese film history has been critically belittled, to say the least, and often ignored. Although lacking the substantial experience of working as an assistant director (except for her observing on the set of Naruse Mikio’s Older Brother Younger Sister [Ani imōto], 1953), Kinuyo learned the art of direction indirectly from watching films and from having worked for a number of great directors, observing in a roundtable talk: ‘The only thing I know next to acting is directing, I don’t know anything else’ (Kawakita et al. 1961: 66). She did receive substantial support from her mentors, including Naruse (1905–69), Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–98) and Ozu Yasujirō (1903–63), but this unfortunately worked against her. She was regarded as a token woman director, and it was thought that credit for her films should go to the effective supporting team of studio staff as well as the above-mentioned masters. Moreover, it was Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) who is known to have adamantly opposed the idea of her directing films. He was rumoured to have made one of the most blatantly insulting remarks about her directorial efforts, claiming that ‘Kinuyo does not have enough brains to be a film director’, although some argue that this hardened attitude was motivated by the director’s own personal spite towards her (Furukawa 2002: 428–32). Unfortunately, Mizoguchi’s discourse nonetheless seems to have set the standard for assessments of Kinuyo as director. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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There are two interrelated reasons, I would argue, for such an unfair assessment of directorial work. First, she was not only a ‘woman’ but also an ‘actress’. Though the major determining factor for box-office success is production values (including stars), directors have historically sat at the top of the power hierarchy of studio film production in Japanese film, while the status of actors has been relatively low. News of Kinuyo’s decision to take up directing, announced in early 1953, was met by rather sceptical media responses. Some said the reason for her turn to a directorial career was simply the post-war demise of her status as Japan’s leading film actress. In fact, in the early 1950s, she was thought to be in the midst of a long ‘slump’ (with one headline reading ‘Will She Come Out of a Slump, a New Role of Tanaka Kinuyo’, Yomiuri shinbun 1951: 4). One critic, for example, made a negative remark about her undertaking the role of film director, writing: even though she managed to make a comeback with films like Mother (Okāsan) or The Four Chimneys (Entotsu no mieru basho), what we see there is her only taking on the mother roles. It seems she might have sensed some pity and anxiety about the downfall of her career, no longer being cast as a leading lady but only as an aging woman, or just in supporting roles. (Furukawa 2002: 434) The male-dominated media discourse not only regarded her directorial attempts as her way of trying out something else besides acting, but also depreciated her credit as the first and only woman director during the golden age of Japanese cinema, regarding it almost as a stain on her great reputation as an actress. Sexism, ageism and professional hierarchies definitely underwrote the general depreciation of Tanaka as a legitimate filmmaker. Second, the apparent lack of an auteurist visual style in Kinuyo’s films seems to have raised questions about their artistic worth. That is, the apparent conventional look of her films, lacking any particular stylistic features such as long takes, mobile camera, formalist mise-en-scène or artfully elegant framing and composition, is often taken at face value without being given a second thought. This is partly because of the difficulty in accessing her films at all, never mind the repeated viewings required to judge film style fairly. If they are not judged on the basis of aesthetics, on the other hand, women directors are often judged solely on political qualities that are defined and identified as feminist. Such an assumption demands that women directors be endowed with ‘a feminist perspective’, which should refuse the dominant formal conventions of the masculinist gaze.2 For example, Katō Mikirō argues that The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955) is ‘the only one of six Tanaka films that deserves credit for having achieved the level of masterpiece’ because it shows ‘the mesh of cinematic configuration of women’s distinct psyche’; at the same time, he dismisses Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, 1961) as a ‘conventional melodrama’ lacking in any cinematic innovativeness, although he does not provide any persuasive analysis of the film to support his claim (Katō 2011: 168). For women directors, there seems to be an ‘either/or’ in place – feminist or otherwise, progressive or otherwise, conventional or otherwise, political or otherwise, that is – and Kinuyo’s case is no exception. Rather than simply attempting to valorise Kinuyo as an ‘auteur’ or a ‘feminist’ filmmaker, this chapter holds a twofold aim. The first is to provide a critical re-evaluation of her directorial career from a historical perspective in the context of women’s cinema and melodrama in the post-war period of Japanese film industry. Each of her six films, from Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953) to Love under the Crucifix (Oginsama, 1962), explicitly or implicitly, reveal at least some melodramatic concerns, as well as featuring women characters in one form or another. While her second feature film, The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955), is not overtly melodramatic, they all to a certain extent belong to the genre within the Shōchiku tradition of women’s films in the post-war period (Yomiuri shinbun 1948: 2).3 Moreover, whereas the first two films were written by men – Niwa Fumio (1904–2005, the original novel) and Kinoshita (script) for Love Letter, and Ozu and Saitō Ryōsuke for The Moon Has Risen – the next three films were written by female authors (both original stories and/or scripts): The Eternal Breasts, scripted by Tanaka Sumie (1908–2000), The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, 1960), scripted by Wada Natto (1920–83), and Girls of Dark, again scripted by Tanaka Sumie. Furthermore, her last film, Love under the Crucifix, was planned by a woman producer, Nagashima Hisako, former secretary of the President of the Shōchiku Studio, and produced by Ninjin Kurabu/Carrot Club, a production company originally founded in 1954 by three major actresses, Kishi Keiko (1932–), Kuga Yoshiko (1931–) and Arima Ineko (1932–), and publicised accordingly.4 Kinuyo’s later directorial attempts were thus heavily women-oriented and supported at the levels of both production and reception. The second aim is to demonstrate Kinuyo’s creative directorial intervention which manifests in her films. Despite the seeming endorsement in her films of traditional, patriarchal views on gender and femininity, close examination of her films as film texts and modes of production suggests that Kinuyo consciously, albeit not always explicitly, presented in her films a challenge to male-dominated representations of women. The Tanaka Kinuyo Memorial Hall in Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture holds her archival collection, including shooting scripts, books, costumes and personal letters. Shooting scripts are especially valuable as historical documents which locate and demonstrate Kinuyo’s authorship in the process of translating scripts into visual images.5

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Shedding light on the creative collaboration between director Tanaka Kinuyo and scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, who belonged to the same generation but had radically different upbringings and backgrounds, I will present a detailed analysis of The Eternal Breasts through examination of archival materials such as screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews and contemporary reviews to illuminate the ways in which Kinuyo’s visual translation and intervention in Tanaka Sumie’s narrative construction within the film’s scenario are manifested in the filmic texts and representation of femininity of both films. In so doing, I hope my analysis will attest to and reclaim the unappreciated aspect of women’s contributions to filmmaking practices in the studio era of Japanese film history.

2 Both Kinuyo and Tanaka Sumie (hereafter Sumie) were born in the late Meiji era (1868–1912), but their upbringing and social backgrounds were contrasting. Kinuyo was born in 1909 in the city of Shimonoseki and raised in Osaka during many of her formative years. Born into a respectable family, she was barely able to attend elementary school because of her father’s untimely death and the subsequent financial difficulties her family faced. From an early age, she was an avid movie fan and aspired to be an actress. I will leave the details of her career description to other relevant chapters in the volume; here it suffices to point out that in her 52-year acting career, in which she appeared in more than 250 films from the age of fourteen, Kinuyo was known for having achieved her extraordinary accomplishments through dogged hard work and total dedication to her craft, despite being considered neither an exceptionally beautiful nor an inherently gifted actress (Tanaka 1975 [1997]: 43). Despite the fact that she played a number of different characters and roles, as evidenced in other chapters of the volume, her predominant star image in her pre-war prime was of a good-hearted, innocent girl who experiences many hardships, shows great perseverance, passion and strong will, yet in the end willingly accepts her fate (Tomita 2008: 494). In later years, she played various challenging, sometimes not very attractive roles, which ranged from prostitutes to old mothers and housemaids. In real life she was independent and strong-willed, quite different from the heroines she played early in her career. She began living with Shimizu Hiroshi (1903–66) in her late teens (1927–9), and was rumoured to have had many romantic interests, including Mizoguchi and Shōchiku Kamata studio head Kido Shirō (1894–1977). Ultimately, Kinuyo never married and was quoted as saying she was married to cinema as proof of her dedication to her craft; the top section of the Tanaka Kinuyo Memorial Hall’s home page quotes this statement.6 For all her petite figure and innocent face, she was a forerunner

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of the ‘career woman’, with ambitions and a will of her own. Her views on gender roles were contradictory, however, caught between traditional and modern understandings of femininity.7 Although information on her private life is scarce, we know that Sumie was born in Tokyo in 1908, a year earlier than Kinuyo. She attended Tokyo Women’s Higher School (former Ochanomizu University, one of the most prestigious women’s universities in Japan), which indicates a middle-class background independent of her family’s financial situation. After graduation, she began work as a teacher of Japanese literature at a prestigious women’s university in Tokyo at the same time as writing plays for the theatre. In 1934, twenty-four-year-old Sumie married shingeki playwright Tanaka Chikao (1905–95) and in 1939 her first feature-length play, Spring・Autumn (Haru・aki), attracted critical attention, but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that her career as a scenarist flourished. Her screenwriting debut was with the film Our House is Happy (Waga ya wa tanoshi, Nakamura Noboru, 1951), a domestic comedy set in the Occupation period, and she was especially prolific between 1952 and 1962, a period during which she wrote thirty of her thirty-five film scripts. While she was a popular scriptwriter throughout the 1950s, Sumie continued to write plays for both theatre and television, as well as poems, novels and essays. She also maintained a household with her husband and three children, as she continued writing, and converted to Christianity in 1952, a decision which would influence the thoughts and ethics of her work as a writer. Through the 1950s and 1960s, she became one of the most famous ‘lady writers’ (joryū sakka) of her generation. Together with Mizuki Yōko (1910–2003), she was particularly renowned for her screenplays for Naruse, which included Repast (Meshi, 1951), Flowing (Nagareru, 1956) and A Wanderer’s Notebook (Hōrōki, 1962).8 Unlike Kinuyo, Sumie was outspoken about her feminist concerns; for example, in one roundtable talk she succinctly stated, ‘I want to change the patriarchal system of Japanese society into something else during our generation’ (Tanaka et al. 1965: 48). In another, earlier talk with Mizuki, she criticised male-biased representations of women in popular culture (Tanaka and Mizuki 1953: 79, 83). Interestingly, though she admitted to having no other pleasure in life besides writing, she also confessed that part of the reason she continued to write was that her husband encouraged her – or told her – to do so, and that she was simply obeying his order (1953: 81). Whereas Kinuyo was a professional woman caught between traditional gender values and the practical reality of ‘working like a man’ in a heavily male-dominated industry, Sumie was an independent writer, with a close relationship to her husband and family, who was caught between the desire and pressure to write professionally and her familial responsibilities as a wife and, in particular, a mother.

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Both Kinuyo and Sumie belonged to the new modernist movement of the late 1920s and 1930s. Kinuyo was born in a provincial city steeped in traditional cultural values, while Sumie was a middle-class city girl with an elite education. Both were a part of the ‘modern girl’ (moga) generation, yet, while Kinuyo was more of a ‘modern girl’ type – she did, in fact, play moga characters early in her career – Sumie’s upbringing, education and career more closely matched the ‘new woman’ (atarashii onna) stereotype (although the two types overlap and are not strictly exclusive of one another).9 Both were professional women; however, Kinuyo’s acting career as a performer was similar to other occupations held by modern women, such as dance-hall girls, café waitresses and cabaret dancers, while, as a teacher, Sumie occupied a more respectable position on a par with department sales clerks or typists (Mackie 2013: 71–4; Tipton 2013: 27–9). In fact, these two women’s stories may well represent the two major types of women’s occupations in modern Japan. On the one hand, an actress shares ‘some form of commodification of women’s bodies and sexuality’ (Mackie 2013: 72), having close affinities with factory workers and domestic servants, and on the other hand teaching/writing is considered work for more elite women who might regard ‘temporary work’ as ‘preparation for marriage (katei seikatsu no junbi)’ (Tipton 2013: 27). Kinuyo’s career flourished before the war, but during wartime, because of the industry decrease in production and heavy censorship, she ‘wasted her prime as an actress’ (Kawakita et al. 1961: 66) and was deprived of the opportunity to develop her craft and career. Few details are known about how she began directing, except that it was the Shintōhō producer Nagashima Ichirō who approached Kinuyo with the idea (Furukawa 2002: 419).10 Kinuyo confessed in a roundtable talk that the feeling of having lost precious time compelled her to accept the offer as a sort of rebellion (Kawakita et al. 1961: 66–7).11 In contrast, while Sumie’s career as a teacher began before the war, her role as a scenarist flourished after the war (Kawakita et al. 1961: 66), and she was able to maintain a steady and stable writing career. This difference in the two women’s career trajectories during the post-war era may have resulted from differences in the nature of their professions, actress and author, particularly insofar as ageing can have a detrimental effect on an actress’s career in mainstream cinema, while for an author the opposite might be true. In this light, the representation of the bodies and sexualities of the women protagonists and their worlds in The Eternal Breasts and Girls of Dark may well reflect the ideological, social and class differences between the two types of professional women that Kinuyo and Sumie represent. Interestingly, the heroine of The Eternal Breasts is a female poet and housewife, like Sumie, who is roundly white-collar. On the other hand, the heroine of Girls of Dark is a former prostitute, arguably the lowest rung of the performer/body occupations which

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require, to one degree or another, the performance and commodification of feminine sexuality, a hierarchy in which actresses might be regarded as the most glamorous. These films do resonate, at some level, with the radical changes that many women faced with regard to post-Occupation representations of sexuality and women’s independence in political, social and cultural contexts. As such, the meeting of these two Tanakas in their forties was in many respects a fascinating historical encounter between women whose professional and private lives were at once so different and, at the same time, so similar. Not only are their paths in the post-war years significant in the context of Japanese film history, but they also have important cultural implications for women’s history.

3 The Eternal Breasts is the story of the final years in the life of the woman poet Nakajō Fumiko (1922–54, hereafter Nakajō, to differentiate her from the character in the film) and is based on the book of the same title, which was written by a young male newspaper journalist, also a poet himself, Wakatsuki Akira (1931–?), and published in April 1955. Nakajō was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, but eventually succumbed to the disease. She became known for an anthology of poems published in early July 1954, only a month before her death on 3 August. Entitled The Removal of Breasts (Chibusa sōshitsu), the anthology contained honest expressions and raw emotional verse relating to her private life, especially the revelation of her failed marriage, passionate sexual yearnings and fear of dying. Wakatsuki visited the dying poet in her last days and after her death published The Eternal Breasts, which consists of critical reviews of Nakajō’s The Removal of Breasts and his memoir of their intense and intimate exchanges. Revealing the sexually charged nature of their relationship, the book was deemed both sensational and disrespectful to the poet. It became a bestseller, and its inherently melodramatic nature lent itself perfectly to film adaptation. Kinuyo was reported by the Asahi shinbun to have been intrigued by the book: unlike her previous two films which received a great deal of support from those around her, [The Eternal Breasts was] a self-motivated project that happened because ever since she read the book, she has felt deeply sympathetic towards the poet, and long wanted to make it into a film . . . in this sense, The Eternal Breasts is noteworthy as a significant film within her directing career. (Asahi shinbun 1955: 2) In addition, as Kitagawa Fuyuhiko points out, it is indeed a film that establishes Kinuyo as a director in her own right (Kitagawa 1955: 95). Irene González-López

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and Mayu Ueda (hereafter González/Ueda) also argue that ‘in this film, in an era of Japanese film history when women were only portrayed by male directors [Tanaka] succeeded for the first time as a woman director in depicting a woman character who actively enjoys her own sexuality’ (2015: 8). Kinuyo’s strong commitment to this material as being ideal for woman’s film is apparent in the film both as text and as product. Given that Kinuyo was encouraged by post-war discourses of gender equality to take up directing, I should note here that Wakatsuki’s depiction of Nakajō and his interpretation of her life and poems are also strikingly gender-conscious. His writing demonstrates his sympathy for the poet’s repressed sexuality and, more generally, the oppression of women within a patriarchal society. In fact, he makes direct references to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir in his attempt to understand the motivation for her poems. For example, he argues that what de Beauvoir writes about the repression of women within the patriarchal institutions of marriage and moral values effectively describes Nakajō’s own way of life in The Removal of Breasts, observing that she ‘might be regarded as someone who unconsciously lived de Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy’ (Wakatsuki 1955: 200–1). He frames male critics’ negative reviews of the poet from this Beauvoirian perspective, and goes so far as to say that ‘Nakajō Fumiko might be described as a Japanese de Beauvoir in that she is an existentialist author who materialised an unconventional and anti-quotidian intent in her writing’ (Wakatsuki 1955: 201). Although his honest revelation of the sexual nature of his relationship with the poet prompted controversy and Wakatsuki was greatly criticised for exploiting the dying poet, for women such as Kinuyo, who had experienced the gap between post-war discourses of emerging gender equality and social reality, a major appeal of the book (other than Nakajō’s life story and her poems) might have been Wakatsuki’s empathetic comments about women within Japanese society, as well as his frank sympathy for the tragic poet and her works. Both Wakatsuki and Nakajō are credited as the authors of the original story. Publicity materials testify that the film was deliberately promoted as a ‘woman’s film’ (josei eiga), clearly an effort by the film industry to address a potential female market. Indeed, the already well-established Sumie was selected by Kinuyo as the most appropriate scenarist to adapt the film (Nakajima et al. 1955: 41). A newspaper advertisement for the film reads: ‘This is a film directed by Tanaka Kinuyo, dedicated to all womankind. The pathos and intensity of women’s lives have never before been so revealed’ (Yomiuri shinbun 1955: 2) (Figure 5.1). This advertisement thus emphasises that the film was written, adapted and directed by women, and targeted at all women; in sum, it declares itself as women’s cinema in every aspect.12

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Figure 5.1

Newspaper advertisement, The Eternal Breasts, Yomiuri shinbun 1955, p. 2.

A comparative examination of the published scenario with the shooting script and Kinuyo’s own copy of Wakatsuki’s book, covered in her red annotations throughout, suggests there are two layers of intervention in Wakatsuki’s original narrative: one by Sumie, who adapted it to her own original narrative and character construction, and the second by Kinuyo through her visual translation and articulation of the heroine’s desire and voice. I will discuss how Kinuyo revised Sumie’s script in more detail later, but will first take a look at Sumie’s treatment of the original novel. A strong emphasis on the relationship between women in the film is already apparent in the script and Sumie’s loose film adaptation presents a dramatic story developed from the events described in the book. It follows the two-part structure of the original story. More importantly, it introduces a more complicated relationship between the story’s male characters and the two main female protagonists. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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In the book, the major characters are Nakajō and Wakatsuki, and both Nakajō’s husband and her real-life lover, the male poet Ōmori Taku, are referred to briefly in Wakatsuki’s outlining of Nakajō’s biographical information. However, the husband’s love affair and Ōmori’s wife are implied, without names, only in her poems. In the scenario, on the other hand, more characters are present. In fact, the first half of the plot revolves around two triangles. The first consists of Shimojō Fumiko (hereafter Fumiko, played by Tsukioka Yumeji, 1922–), her husband Shigeru (Orimoto Junkichi, 1927–) and Shigeru’s lover, whom he marries after his divorce from Fumiko. The second triangle is made up of Fumiko, her secret love interest the male poet Hori Taku (Mori Masayuki, 1911–73) and his wife, Kinuko (Sugi Yōko, 1928–), an elementary school teacher who is also Fumiko’s best friend from college, a poet and a Christian. By making more explicit the couple structure and entangled relationships within each triangle, Sumie manages to introduce more characters (for practical reasons) and more melodramatic elements by contrasting the two couples, and thus foregrounds the conflicts, repressions and pressures that the institutions of marriage and family bring about. In the latter half of the film, after the mastectomy, the narrative focuses more on the intimate relationship between the dying poet and a young journalist, Ōtsuki (the character of Wakatsuki, played by Hayama Ryōji, 1932–), culminating in the poet’s desperate cry for love and life against the backdrop of her impending death. Interestingly, however, even in post-surgery hospital scenes where melodramatic elements are pronounced, Sumie still maintains the same contrastive structure by introducing an old woman patient (Iida Chōko, 1897–1972) and her caring husband (Hidari Bokuzen, 1894–1971), as if to underline the difference between the quotidian, familiar interactions of the old married couple and the intensity and unusual nature of the tragic bond between Fumiko and Ōtsuki.13 Kinuyo’s direction basically follows Sumie’s scenario. However, Kinuyo’s annotated shooting script indicates cut dialogue and scenes, as well as additional continuity drawings of shots specifying character positions and objects within the frame, evidence that the cinematically innovative scenes in the film owe much to Kinuyo’s mise-en-scène and her own inspirations from Wakatsuki’s book. In addition to some scenes which I will analyse in more detail, there are two examples among many that attest to Kinuyo’s directorial intervention. The first is her effective use of location. As with Tokyo in her first directorial effort, Love Letter, Kinuyo makes the best use of Hokkaidō in The Eternal Breasts by changing the setting indicated in the script, effectively bringing realistic references to location into the diegetic world.14 For example, in Sumie’s scenario (Tanaka 1956: 80–101) Fumiko’s book publication party is partly held in the same house as the earlier poetry reading, but Kinuyo places the scene in a beer hall in Sapporo (Figure 5.2), as is the case in the book (Wakatsuki 1955: 111). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 5.2

Relocation of book launch party (see note 5).

It is important to note this relocation, not only because it is a reference to the actual setting of the film – Sapporo is famous for its beer – but also because it is the result of Kinuyo’s intervention in the script through selecting a scene directly from the book.15 A further intervention is found in the final scenes of Fumiko’s life, where Kinuyo revises the script by cutting out some dialogue from her mother and brother-in-law in order to concentrate more on the intimate and tragic farewell to her children (Figure 5.3). Generally speaking, there are a few manifest characteristics of Kinuyo’s treatment of Sumie’s scenario. First, she subtly undermines the clear-cut heterosexual triangle structure predominant in Sumie’s narrative by visually foregrounding female interrelationships, be they mother–daughter conflict or intimate friendship and jealous rivalry. In the opening sequence, for example, one key difference between scenario and film is the way the film introduces Hori and Kinuko, the latter of whom is not identified as Fumiko’s college friend as in the scenario, but rather is implied to be a high-school friend through a photo of the three together (lessening any middle-class implications). In the scenario, soon after Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 5.3

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Fumiko’s farewell to her children.

we see Fumiko and her husband on bad terms, Hori and Kinuko visit Fumiko together, a sequencing which clearly follows Sumie’s narrative strategy of making explicit the contrast between the two couples and implicating a triangular conflict between the two women. However, in the film, neither Kinuko nor Hori appear in the opening; instead Hori encounters Fumiko in the park as she returns home from a poetry reading in the second sequence. Kinuyo introduces Hori in a dramatic manner here, by way of extensive use of shot–reverse shots of Fumiko and Hori approaching each other, as well as through a tracking shot that accentuates Fumiko’s emotional reaction. Kinuyo’s visual translation thus creates a strong melodramatic tone in this first encounter between the two, as if to express Fumiko’s excitement via camera movement. Kinuyo’s implicit rewriting of Sumie’s narrative organisation is more or less consistent, in that the director seems to respect the one-on-one relationships revolving around Fumiko (Fumiko– husband, Fumiko–Hori, Fumiko–Kinuko, Fumiko–mother and Fumiko–Wakatsuki) without limiting them to heterosexual pairings, which allows her to concentrate more on narrating from Fumiko’s perspective. This strong emphasis on Fumiko’s subjectivity follows perfectly in the tradition of the women’s film. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Secondly, Kinuyo’s direction makes the narrative more compact and less dialogue-driven, relying more on subtle mise-en-scène and tight editing. As a director, she maintains the repetitive structure which is constructed so efficiently in Sumie’s script by accentuating visual repetitions, which suggests that she knew very well the formal and visual principles of classical Hollywood cinema. For example, as I discuss in detail below, the posture in which Fumiko throws herself on the tatami mat and wrenches her body to express emotional pain at the discovery of her husband’s affair is repeated when she collapses with agonising physical pain in her chest; the scene in which Hori takes a bath in an earlier scene is later mirrored after Fumiko’s surgery; and the composition of the scene in the hospital when, facing her fear of death, Fumiko is alone in the corridor which leads to the morgue and she stands clutching the wrought-iron gates is repeated near the end of the film, after Fumiko has died, when her children run to the fence to cry out ‘Mother!’ with their backs to the camera. Thus, Kinuyo translates visually the repetition established in the scenario in order to intensify the affective connection between scenes, illuminating their tragic differences. In addition, her distinctive use of space is augmented through contrasting cinematography. Interior scenes, especially those of Fumiko’s divorce, the discovery of her cancer and her subsequent hospitalisation, are often photographed as shadowed and claustrophobic. On the other hand, outdoor scenes emphasise open spaces and the natural landscape of Hokkaidō; likewise, scenes shot with either Hori or Kinuko have brighter lighting and more spacious composition. Another characteristic of Kinuyo’s visual translation is that Fumiko is presented as being in possession of an intense gaze (performed superbly through Tsukioka Yumeji’s wide, expressive eyes).16 She also often turns around to discover something in an almost Hitchcockian manner; at the same time, Kinuyo uses the backs of characters as expressively as their eyes, sometimes in a gesture of refusal or silent contestation (as in the scenes discussed below). The extensive use of a hand mirror and of the bars in the hospital sequences as metaphors for Fumiko’s confinement join the circumscribed visual field in indicating Kinuyo’s familiarity with classical Hollywood cinema. This classical presentation is all the more effective because it follows a familiar Hollywood tradition of woman’s films, exemplified by such films as Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940), Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) and The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949), to name but a few. However, the film does not always follow realist classical presentation. In certain melodramatic scenes, the excessive intensity of erotically charged affects seems to break the realist stability of the narrative movement.

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4 Two scenes, in particular, illuminate the ways in which Kinuyo freely interprets the script and renders Fumiko’s inner conflicts through mise-en-scène rather than words. The first is when Fumiko comes home early from the poetry meeting to find her husband, Shigeru, and his lover entwined in the marital home. In the script, the lover hides herself in a small room and Shigeru tries to shut the fusuma (wooden framed paper sliding doors). Fumiko sheds tears of protest and reproaches her husband, who does not even deny his betrayal, while the lover remains in the other room smoking. Sumie does not write in detail about the setting of the scene, concentrating instead on conveying the dissolution of the marriage through dialogue. In the film, on the other hand, Kinuyo presents the entire situation in a different, more elaborate manner. When Fumiko returns home early, she finds the door locked and knocks on it; the scene cuts to the inside of the house, showing Shigeru and his lover quickly trying to straighten her kimono. As Shigeru opens the door, Fumiko enters the house, telling him she had heard that he had a guest and asking who is visiting. Shigeru pretends nothing has happened, sitting in the foreground with Fumiko visible at the kitchen sink in the background. Shigeru notices that his lover has forgotten to take her purse and slides it to where she stands off-screen. Fumiko notices something going on behind her back and rushes to Shigeru, only to find the woman sneaking out of the other room. Fumiko runs outside to catch her. Then in a long shot, the camera shows Fumiko from behind, standing in the middle of the frame, as the tiny figure of the escaping lover disappears at the far right corner of the frame. She then reenters the house, angrily telling her husband, ‘You have lied to me, saying you broke up with her. Please tell me the truth.’ Shigeru walks to the kitchen in the far background of the frame to avoid her, and blames her for being too good a wife by ‘supporting an unhappy husband, forgiving an unfaithful husband’.17 Fumiko sits in the foreground, restraining herself, before noticing something. A quick close-up shot from her point of view shows a white tabi (Japanese sock) under the cushion. After a few exchanges between shots of tabi and Fumiko’s point of view of Shigeru followed by a shot of Fumiko staring at him, she then bursts into tears and throws herself on the tatami mat, wrenching her body. Now their positions are reversed from at the beginning of the scene, each occupying the space previously occupied by the other. The scene ends with a shot of Shigeru sitting at the edge of the kitchen, a pair of tabi thrown at him from behind. The entire scene is beautifully co-ordinated by relatively quick cuts (the rough continuity sketches in the shooting script show sixteen shots), with orchestrated framing and positioning of the character movements. There is

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little more than ambient sound, although music does accompany the scene for melodramatic effect when Fumiko starts sobbing. Kinuyo boldly cuts out almost all the dialogue from the script, limiting it to one conversational exchange which informs the viewer that Fumiko’s husband has cheated on her before and continued the affair, despite her efforts to maintain their marriage. The use of tabi here is effective, in that it realistically shows the sexual nature of the affair and betrayal. The way Fumiko sobs as she clutches the tabi in her right hand at the end of the scene visually translates to image her sexual frustration and desperate yearning. The affective intensity of the scene, focusing on Fumiko’s humiliation, frustration, jealousy and disappointment, is all condensed into one intense look at the tabi and a shot from behind showing her desperation and loneliness. This kind of nuanced, elaborate melodramatic presentation of the hurtful discovery of her cheating husband is nowhere to be found in the film’s scenario. The second scene is one of the most unusual and highly melodramatic scenes in the film: that is, the unforgettable bath scene in which, after her mastectomy, Fumiko stops by Kinuko’s house and asks if she can take a bath. The entire bath scene is sketched out in the scenario. The narrative setting sees Fumiko pleading with Kinuko to look at her scars from the mastectomy, and telling her that she wants to take a bath in the same bathtub as Hori had used, confessing her feelings for Kinuko’s late husband. The conversation ends with Fumiko asking, ‘Why is it so wrong?’ Sumie’s primary intent in establishing this scene is, I would assume, to invoke Fumiko’s feelings of guilt and self-pity for having loved a married man (her best friend’s husband) and render the subconscious self-blame that generates in her mind a causal connection with her breast cancer, which acts a symbolic loss of femininity and motherhood. The indirect association between her love affair and the breast cancer is already implied in Nakajō’s original poems.18 Sumie seems to exploit this feeling of guilt, and uses the bath setting to heighten Fumiko’s guilt over the affair, implicitly criticising her unbridled relationships with men. With slight modifications to the scenario, however, the shooting script adds dialogue from Kinuko where she states that, though Fumiko’s plea to take a bath has surprised her, she can nonetheless relate to her feelings. The dialogue ends with Fumiko’s confession of her love for Hori to Kinuko, as in the scenario, but Fumiko’s final line – ‘Why is it so wrong?’ – is changed in the shooting script to ‘I’m a bad woman’, then crossed out by Kinuyo (Figure 5.4). In her notes on the script, Kinuyo draws ten cuts for the scene with the names Kinuko and Fumiko. As such, although Sumie has created the narrative setting, it is Kinuyo, the director, who reconfigures the scene through elaborate cutting and complex interaction between the two women who love the same man. As we

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Figure 5.4

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Kinuyo’s amendment.

see below, the film presents a far more complex elaboration of the entire scene than is found in the scenario/script. For the majority of readers, who will not have seen the film, I will elaborate the shot description below so as to show the complexity of Kinuyo’s subtle but elegant direction. In the Sapporo Beer Hall, we see Fumiko’s friends and family welcoming Ōtsuki and celebrating the publication of her poetry book in her absence. The scene ends with a slow dolly shot of the empty chair with a beer mug and the book before fading to black. The next shot is a subjective shot of Fumiko’s hands floating in the bathwater, and we hear her off-screen voice saying, ‘I feel I could die now.’ Then the scene cuts to outside, where Kinuko is making a fire for the bath, asking if the temperature is OK and saying she was so surprised to see Fumiko and hear her plea to take a bath, adding, as in the shooting script, that she can relate to Fumiko’s feelings. We hear Fumiko off-screen saying that Kinuko is such a good person, and that she is very grateful (as in the shooting script). As I have already indicated, this shot is composed very similarly to the

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previous scene in which Hori is taking a bath. In the scenario, both scenes are set in the bath. In the earlier scene, however, Hori is not seen in the bath but instead is making the fire for the bath as Kinuko is drying the laundry. Therefore, the visual and especially the compositional repetition of Hori and Fumiko taking baths should be credited as Kinuyo’s directorial rendition. In the next shot, mirroring exactly how Hori was framed in the earlier scene, Kinuko opens a small window and accidentally sees Fumiko’s naked chest; but this time Kinuko catches a glimpse of the surgical scars left on her friend’s chest – or more precisely, as the book explains, not only the scars but also severe burns from radiation treatment (Wakatsuki 1955: 140).19 In repeating these bath scenes through similar visual construction, Kinuyo visually foregrounds the Hori– Fumiko substitution. Moreover, by overlapping Hori and Fumiko in this way, Kinuyo on the one hand maintains the triangular love conflict after Hori’s death while stressing the close bond between the two women; yet at the same time, she seems to suggest Fumiko and Hori are one and the same, thus taking him away from Kinuko.20 Shocked by the sight, Kinuko quickly shuts the window, apologising to Fumiko, and Fumiko submerges her head in the water. Their movements are orchestrated in such a way that the camera’s position remains the same, creating an empty space in the middle of the frame between the shut window and Fumiko’s upper back in the water. This, too, is rapidly edited. The next shot shows an utterly disconcerted Kinuko from behind, then her face frontally when she hears Fumiko calling her. This is followed by a very quick cut to the medium close-up frontal shot of Fumiko exposing her upper torso from the tub, looking directly towards the camera as she says with an almost ecstatic, triumphant look: ‘Kinuko, please take a good look at my chest with my breasts removed.’ This shot is markedly different from other scenes in the hospital, where she is frequently shot with bars in the frame blocking the spectator’s view of her. We then see Kinuko outside as she listens intensely to Fumiko asking her to ‘Look, take a good look at this’. This causes Kinuko to wince and she tells Fumiko to ‘stop talking like that and just hurry and get out of the bath’. The scene cuts back to the previous frontal shot of Fumiko, who now leans further forward towards the camera, then turns around and says: ‘For a long time I’ve wanted to take a bath in the bathtub your husband used. I think that’s why I became ill with a disease like this.’ Then a quick montage series of shots follows as: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Kinuko outside hears Fumiko say, ‘I was really fond of Mr. Hori.’ Fumiko opens the window. Kinuko reacts to this, exclaiming, ‘No.’ Fumiko turns round in the frame of a small square window in the right middle round of the screen frame, with Kinuko standing in the left foreground. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Here again, as if to co-ordinate the two circle movements, Fumiko then turns round to show her back through the window, while Kinuko again turns round to reveal her own back. The rapid movement of the two women is shown in a single quick shot. The shot ends with both of their backs to the camera, with Fumiko humming then turning again to shut the window as Kinuko shuts the door. In the next shot we see Kinuko entering the house, silently crying. The montage of the entire scene is so quick that the spectator feels almost vertiginous. The masterful orchestration of the opening and shutting of the window, the two women simultaneously turning round and the complex play of looks intensifies the affective exchanges of Kinuko and Fumiko, making the scene powerful and unforgettable. Kitagawa (1955), Katō (2011) and González/Ueda (2015) all praise the scene’s originality and consider it the crystallisation of Kinuyo’s attempts to undermine the dominant male principle of visual pleasure codes of classical Hollywood cinema that define women as the object of the look. In particular, González/Ueda argue persuasively that the film constructs Fumiko as the locus of the look. According to them, throughout the film Fumiko is an active controlling agent of the look rather than the passive object of the look. They also contend that, by having Fumiko terminate the look on her own impulse by shutting the window in the end, Kinuyo thwarts the audience’s expectation of the visual pleasure of looking at the breasts of the film’s title (González/Ueda 2015: 5–7). They conclude that the film, and thus Kinuyo herself, challenge the gendered Hollywood look by rejecting the heroine’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, instead constructing her as ‘the subject of showing, enticing the look’ (2015: 7). González/Ueda underline Kinuyo’s intention to depict Fumiko’s ‘inordinate love and desire (ijō na aiyoku)’ and argue that the entire scene is constructed to stress that extraordinariness (2015: 5). As we see in González/Ueda’s attentive reading of the scene, the film does show the self-awareness in the play of looks. Fumiko’s frontal shot inviting Kinuko’s look, as the authors argue, apparently seems to seduce the spectator to look at the heroine, yet the spectator is ultimately denied this vision. However, I would like to add another dimension to this reading of the scene by underlining the ambiguity of Kinuko’s desire for the look. The narrative setting in which Fumiko’s provocative, or demanding, invitation to Kinuko to look at her, and her scars in particular, has a mythical and cultural dimension, precisely because it evokes a feeling of breaking the taboo of looking at something one is not supposed to see. The psychoanalyst Kitayama Osamu offers an interesting observation, albeit in an entirely different context, about the ‘prohibition against looking/ prohibition of don’t-look’ (miruna no kinshi) often found in Japanese fairy tales (1993, 2010). In discussing this prohibition in the context of a culture Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of shame, Kitayama analyses folk tales of inter-species marriage (irui kon’in), such as the stories of ‘the snake wife’ and ‘the grateful crane’. In these tales, the plots revolve around the ‘prohibition against looking’ at a wounded wife/ mother, who usually takes care of the hero masochistically. For Kitayama, what differentiates this from the Oedipal taboo of incest in Western culture is that this prohibition is meant to be broken, and is broken in the tales with tragic consequences. The tales typically end with the woman feeling ashamed at being exposed, or angry at being violated, upon which she dies or disappears. As he writes, ‘[t]he purpose of the “Prohibition of Don’t Look” is to present that sudden disillusionment caused by exposure of the self as a wounded animal instead of a beautiful image, and to avoid the shame of the exposed woman’ (2010: 96). Moreover, what is at stake in this prohibition in such stories is not the revelation of the true identity of the wife/mother, but what she is supposed to hide from the hero; that is, everything related to female sexuality, including scenes of breastfeeding, mother (especially pre-Oedipal)–child relationships and reproduction activities (Kitayama 1993: 4). He suggests that this prohibition dictated by the wife/mother exists in Japanese culture to preserve a cultural fantasy of disavowing mother–child separation, ironically only for it to be violated (1993: 7–8). Considered in relation to the above scene in The Eternal Breasts, Kitayama’s discussion of the prohibition against looking foregrounds the specific cultural and social implications of Fumiko’s insistence on ‘looking’, which makes the scene even more poignant. Fumiko’s invitation to look at her scarred breasts is exactly the invitation to violate the very cultural prohibition that imposes ‘Don’t look’ (miruna). That is, Fumiko boldly invites Kinuko to violate the prohibition (the erotic look, in terms of the cinematic code of looking at women’s nude bodies, and the cultural code of observing activities involving female sexuality). Precisely because of her unusual invitation to violate this culturally coded prohibition, the scene is all the more subversive. The prohibition is directed not only at the male protagonist, as in the fairy tale, but at a woman as well, thus strongly invoking an implicit refusal of the Oedipal intervention of the father. As interpreted by both Katō and González/Ueda, the narrative context of the scene is supposed to signify an imaginary (fantastic) union with Hori through a sharing of the same bathtub. However, the hyperbolic play of looks and the inordinate emphasis on Fumiko’s invitation to violate the prohibition against looking in both narrative and visual terms allow the intense, almost erotic, intimacy between Fumiko and Kinuko to supersede Fumiko’s heterosexual desire for Hori, albeit through an extremely complex scene tinged with a sado-masochistic play of looks.21 In this sense, the tragic tale of the exposed breasts assumes almost mythical status, the symbol

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of female sexuality par excellence. In this regard, this ‘extraordinary’ scene about the woman poet’s ‘inordinate love and desire (ijō na aiyoku)’ could be read almost as the director’s enunciatory representation of the complexities of female desire. This is exactly why, it seems to me, it is pertinent that the following scene shows, as scripted in the scenario, Fumiko laying her head on Kinuko’s lap as if she were her child, revealing her emotional attachment to Kinuko despite Fumiko’s aggressive attitude towards her in the bathtub. In their interpretations of Nakajō’s poems and her background, all of which point to her struggles with her own sexuality and womanhood/motherhood, Kinuyo and Sumie demonstrate, wittingly or unwittingly, a subversive attempt to reconfigure prohibited representations of female sexuality. In playing with a look that at once invites and rejects, they invoke a cultural dimension of shame through Fumiko’s unconscious guilt over falling in love with her best friend’s husband, and in her own breast cancer, that resonates with discourses of female sexuality more broadly. Following this scene, the narrative shifts its focus to depicting the final interaction between Fumiko and Ōtsuki. As González/Ueda observe, the film depicts clearly the sexual nature of their relationship by showing the brassiere in a shot added to the shooting script, while the book does not state this in any explicit manner.22 One could argue, as González/Ueda do concerning Kinuyo’s depiction of Fumiko’s ‘inordinate desire’, that ‘for Fumiko to reclaim her feminine sexuality . . . her physical relationship to Ōtsuki was indispensable’ (González/Ueda 2015: 5), thus allowing Kinuyo to succeed for the first time as a woman director in ‘depicting a woman who enjoys her sexuality on her own initiative’ (2015: 8). The film could also be read as Sumie’s and Kinuyo’s tacit intention to represent ‘woman’ as she is, now liberated from socially normative roles of wife/mother by challenging cultural prohibitions against looking. Kinuyo’s depiction of Fumiko’s love and desire was exceptionally bold, ahead of its time, and was thus deemed by some almost scandalous.23 Fumiko’s true nature has been revealed, with nothing to hide. She is a woman on her own; yet, as the fairy tale mandates, she will die in the end. The film ends not with Fumiko’s death, however, but with the children and Ōtsuki together at the side of Lake Toyor where Hori and Kinuko went on their honeymoon and Fumiko had long wanted to visit. More importantly, the film does inscribe woman’s writing with the inclusion of one of Fumiko’s poems, which seems almost as a will for her children,24 being superimposed over the last shot (as had been done throughout the film), as if to rewrite the tragic ending of the story of both real life and fairy tale through her resurrection. This ending resonates with that of Sumie and Kinuyo’s Girls of Dark, which also rewrites the original, woman-penned story’s unhappy ending.

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5 The main difference between The Eternal Breasts and Girls of Dark, in terms of their approaches to women’s film and melodrama, owes partly to the fact that Japanese film history was facing a big structural and generational change in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, alongside the rapidly growing economy and post-war rebuilding process, new directors such as Masumura Yasuzō (1924–86), Kawashima Yūzo (1918–63) and Suzuki Seijun (1923–2017) began making modernist films. The new trend of ‘Sun-tribe’ (Taiyōzoku) films moved away from traditional melodramatic style and called for a more masculinist discourse as a means of rejecting the older war generation. A radical shift occurred around 1959/60, during the student anti-security treaty movement which culminated in 1960, when the film industry saw the emergence of so-called Shōchiku nouvelle vague directors such as Ōshima Nagisa (1932–2013), Yoshida Kijū (aka Yoshida Yoshishige, 1933–) and Shinoda Masahiro (1931–). These younger directors were unabashedly critical of, among other things, the melodramatic tradition of Japanese film. In December 1959, Shōchiku’s president Kido Shirō declared a ‘breakaway from its melodrama tradition’, departing from star-centred and overly plotdriven melodramas and moving towards more socially conscious stories that closely reflected the everyday lives of ordinary people (Yomiuri shinbun 1959: 5). An article dated 11 June 1960 discusses the generational shift the film industry was then undergoing, in which it was observed that ‘teenagers are turning their backs on’ conventional melodrama, and that many young directors were ‘more geared towards a documentary mode of filmmaking’, only interested in ‘grappling with realist cinema’ (Yomiuri shinbun 1960a: 5). Introducing Ōshima as being at the forefront of the eradication of melodrama (melo bokumetsu), the article concludes with a pithy, direct quotation of his words: ‘Melodrama is no good anymore. Period.’ Interestingly, as if to contest this article, another piece, dated 3 July 1960, featured Kinuyo defending melodrama. It reported on her current activities, playing up her cinephilia (‘she loves watching films, sometimes four in a day’), and listing her favourite directors as Jean Renoir, René Clément, William Wyler and Pietro Germi, to name but a few. Asked about the ‘melodrama debate’, it quotes Kinuyo as saying she knew from long experience that ‘melodramas will never die out’, that ‘it is quite natural that modes of expression and representation change according to the passage of time’, and therefore, ‘as long as films manage to incorporate contemporary social issues into their subjects, audiences will gladly go to the theatres to watch melodrama’ (Yomiuri shinbun 1960b: 15).

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In this sense, Girls of Dark appears to have been Kinuyo’s attempt to reconfigure the traditions of women’s film and melodrama in ways that would speak to a contemporary audience; as the Japanese title of the film, Onna bakari no yoru (literally, All-Women’s Night) suggests, the film was intended as a woman’s film by women filmmakers. Whereas The Eternal Breasts draws directly on the tradition of the woman’s film as centred on a female protagonist’s subjective desire and sexuality, Girls of Dark is more concerned with the female protagonist’s relationship to the world at large, paying closer attention to those social issues that affect her directly. Since I have discussed this film elsewhere (Saito 2012), and Yuka Kanno discusses the topic extensively here in Chapter 7, I will only outline a few issues here which are pertinent to my discussion of the collaboration and negotiation between Kinuyo and Sumie. Based on a novel by Yana Masako entitled Although There Is a Way (Michi aredo, 1960), Girls of Dark depicts the struggles and conflicts by which the heroine, Kuniko (played by Hara Chisako, 1936–), a former panpan (a derogatory term for prostitutes whose main customers were American soldiers during the US Occupation of Japan), is confronted in her attempts to rehabilitate herself. As with The Eternal Breasts, different versions of the script suggest that the final film text of Girls of Dark is a product of layers of rewriting by Kinuyo and Sumie. One major difference between Kinuyo’s and Sumie’s Girls of Dark is in their attitudes towards prostitution. Sumie confessed in an article in the film journal Kinema junpō that while she had always found a character she could identify with in all the scripts she had written, in Yana’s novel she ‘could not find any character she found lovable in the material, nor could she overcome her feelings of hate towards prostitution’ (Kinema junpō 1961: 115). In another talk, she confessed that she had sympathy with female criminals but that this was not the case with prostitutes, and never hid her anger at the men ‘who make the trade possible’ (Yomiuri shinbun 1961: 9). She continues to say that ‘it’s quite natural that there should be a limit to the sympathy and understanding of society at large for former prostitutes’, and ‘it’s one thing to understand their rehabilitation, but totally another to accept and welcome them to your own home’. The writer’s frank attitude towards former prostitutes reflects typical middle-class discourse about prostitution.25 Despite Sumie’s hostile attitude towards prostitutes, however, Girls of Dark does not present simplistic doctrinaire views about prostitutes but rather explores the different discourses surrounding them. The film is told from the point of view of Kuniko, showing more sympathy towards her than the other female characters she encounters over the course of her rehabilitation, including the wife character (Nakakita Chieko, 1926–2005) in a shop where Kuniko is employed. Although there is an element of heterosexual romance in the narrative, the film emphasises woman-to-woman relationships,

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even touching on homosexual desire. In this regard, as in The Eternal Breasts, Girls of Dark is considered a ‘woman’s film’ within traditional melodrama, as Kinuyo stresses in the article (Yomiuri shinbun 1960b: 15). According to Sumie, despite her distance from the subject of the narrative both she and Kinuyo agreed to rewrite the ending of the story. In the original work, the ending offers no way out for the heroine, foregrounding the difficulty of rehabilitation: she is deprived of even the possibility of a decent marriage because of the opposition of her boyfriend’s parents and she ultimately finds herself back on the street again. Neither Sumie nor Kinuyo wanted such a pessimistic ending, and they transformed it by presenting an image of Kuniko trying to rehabilitate herself through physical labour (Yomiuri shinbun 1961: 9); and it was Kinuyo who settled on ending the film with the heroine working as a female clam diver (ama) in the open sea. While The Eternal Breasts follows the tradition of the woman’s film faithfully, portraying the female protagonist’s passion and sexual desires from her own perspective and subjectivity, Girls of Dark addresses more directly social issues filtered through the female protagonist’s experiences and subjectivity. In both instances, Sumie’s script depicts strong-willed women, and Kinuyo’s direction is solid, emphatically showing their vision of a women’s world in both private and social spheres. The collaboration of Sumie and Kinuyo is inscribed in the two films both through their modes of production and in the creation of the filmic texts that illuminate female subjectivity with dramatic articulation. The two films are at once the products of a fruitful creative partnership between two women with different backgrounds and ambitions, as well as a site of the negotiations between them. In this sense, Kinuyo’s directorial career is more than the record of a single female director’s accomplishments. The female authorship here is not necessarily considered as individual creativity, but rather historically constituted as a collective agency of women’s discourse and a mode of critical practice, which is inevitably aesthetically involved. The two Tanakas’ authorship of these films as director and scriptwriter is open for exploration, demands to be reclaimed and deserves further readings for future generations of women filmmakers and scholars who search for lost voices in film history.

Notes This chapter is a revised and expanded version of a lecture entitled ‘When Women Write and Direct: Two Tanakas in Japanese Film History [Onna ga kaki, Onna ga toru toki: nihon eigashi ni okeru futari no Tanaka]’ (Saito 2012: 13–31), delivered at the Women’s Film Festival in Seoul in April 2012 for the screening of The Eternal Breasts and Girls of Dark in a programme entitled ‘Asian Spectrum: Japanese Cinema 1955 X 2012’. I would like

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to thank Lori Morimoto and the two editors of this volume for their generous editorial help in finalising the manuscript. Translation of Japanese into English is mine unless otherwise noticed. 1. The National Film Center, Tokyo included Tanaka’s directorial films in a Tanaka Kinuyo retrospective on the occasion of the centenary of her birth in 2009. I am grateful to the National Film Center for allowing me access to its print of The Eternal Breasts for my analysis. 2. See, for example, Katō Mikirō, ‘When an Actress Becomes a Director: Tanaka Kinuyo, Chibusa yo eien nare (1955)’ (Katō 2011, 160–70). 3. Kinuyo’s work as a director could be regarded as an extension of the industry’s overall efforts to endorse the post-war promotion of gender equality implemented by the Occupation government (1945–52). 4. See Donna R. Casella’s analysis of the work of Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood’s only woman director in the immediate pre-war period. Arzner directed sixteen feature films between 1927 and 1943, and Casella underlines the fact that women wrote nearly all of Arzner’s films by ‘either contributing the original story or participating in the adaptation, dialogue, and/or full screenplay, and publicity material was quick to point this out’ (Casella 2009: 241). 5. I would like to thank the Museum for allowing me access to these precious materials. Figures 5.2 to 5.4 reproduced courtesy of the Museum. 6. See (last accessed 17 August 2016). 7. In her interview with Shindō Kaneto, Kinuyo spoke about her relationship with Mizoguchi, showing her subtle understanding of the complex dynamics between a male director and an actress, as well as her ambivalent feelings about the choice between her professional and private lives. She said that at one point during the war she would ‘risk her life on her work’ for Mizoguchi and that her passion for her work was ‘second to none’, yet at another point she felt rather ‘envious of the quotidian life of a married couple’, but in the end Mizoguchi would have thought, ‘well, that woman, she’s fine as long as she performs in front of the camera, but it would be such a burden to have her as a wife’ (Shindō 1975: 425–6). In another interview, she confessed that she had always realised she was not pretty and therefore from an early age made great efforts to ‘look pretty’ as a sign of ‘defiance’ (Tanaka 1975 [1997]: 43). 8. For an overview of Sumie’s career, see Lauri Kitsnik’s entry ‘Sumie Tanaka’ (Kitsnik et al. 2015: 119–20). 9. As Tipton explains, the term ‘new women’, albeit part of the whole ‘modern girl’ category, was typically used by the media in somewhat sensationalist coverage to refer specifically to the new literary talents of women and the emerging women’s liberation movement, represented by the launch of the feminist journal Bluestocking (Seitō) (2013: 26). 10. Nagashima was born Nakajima Tōichi, an uncle of actress Kagawa Kyōko and a former publicity agent for the trading company Tōwa Shōji, founded by Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–81), one of the main sponsors of Japanese cinema both inside

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and outside Japan. In the post-war years, he joined Shintōhō (1948-62) as a publicist before becoming a producer, and also worked for Tokyo Eiga. His work with Kinuyo began with publicity work on Naruse Mikio’s 1951 Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza keshō). When he produced Naruse’s Mother (Okāsan, 1952) with Kinuyo in mind as the heroine, Kinuyo was initially very reluctant to agree to the role (Nagashima 1977: 114–15). Nagashima was the major force behind Love Letter materialising as Kinuyo’s directorial debut: he had known Niwa Fumio from pre-war years; he was technical advisor on Young Season (Wakai kisetsu), Niwa’s 1936 novel about a film publicist (Shimizu 1987: 218–19), and it was he who asked Niwa to write the original story of Love Letter for the Asahi newspaper with a view to adapting the film with Kinuyo as director (Tanaka et al. 1971: 5). Nagashima’s filmography as producer includes Kinuyo films such as Mother, Love Letter and Girls of Dark, as well as Shimizu Hiroshi’s The Shiinomi School (Shiinomi gakuen, 1955) and Kawashima Yūzō’s Being a Woman (Onna de aru koto, 1958). Kinuyo also spoke earlier in the talk of a major motivation for taking up directing: ‘Well, it’s because I love cinema, in a nutshell. Moreover, in the post-war climate, women were allowed to take on more challenges and try what they wanted to do, relatively speaking, and I thought I too could give it a try’ (Kawakita et al. 1961: 66). In reference to the post-war emergence of female politicians she said that, aside from acting, directing was the only thing she was knowledgeable about. In one of the essays included in a special issue of Tanka kenkyū (Tanka Study), a poet recalls that his mother, who was born in 1923, used to say that she saw the film The Eternal Breasts, starring Tsukioka Yumeji, and that ‘this Fumiko woman had grand passion, and was such a great person’ (Tokita 2014: 47). In Wakatsuki’s book, the old woman who shared the room with Nakajō is referred to, especially in the scene of their sexual intimacy. In Love Letter, Kinuyo placed strong emphasis on actual locations in Tokyo: the Suzuran street (later known as Koibumi yokochō), Shinjuku Station, Shibuya Station, Ginza, Yūrakuchō, the Meiji Shrine and Hibiya Park were all beautifully shot and realistically captured. Thus, the film provides precious visual records of contemporary city landscapes in immediate post-war Tokyo. In addition, if we look closely at the differences between Kinoshita’s script and the final film, we see that Kinuyo already claims her authorship in Love Letter. The most revealing example is Kinuyo’s treatment of the last sequence, after the car accident of the heroine (Kuga Yoshiko, 1931–). The original novel does not tell readers whether Michiko is saved or not, but ends with an internal monologue by the male protagonist (Mori Masayuki) asking for forgiveness of his cruel attitude to her. In Kinoshita’s script, this is altered to a happy ending which indicates that Michiko is saved. However, Kinuyo opted for Niwa’s ending, although not completely faithfully; the film ends more ambiguously, by instead showing Mori’s worried face cross-cut with the close-up face of the bedridden Kuga staring directly at the camera. According to Ogawa Tarō in his book on Nakajō, Wakatsuki was approached by Nikkatsu, and had the chance to meet with Kinuyo. He recalled this meeting as

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follows: ‘I thought it was such an honor to meet with the world-famous actress. When I saw her I said to her, “isn’t the book pretty dismal”, and she answered, “I don’t think it was dismal, and I am confident that I will not make a dismal film”’ (Ogawa 1995: 212). The episode reveals that Kinuyo likely had first-hand information about the relationship between the journalist and the poet. In Love Letter, Kinuyo also utilises (albeit not as extensively as in this film) a close-up of the heroine’s face in the final scenes, effectuating the underlying strong will of the heroine, who has until then appeared passive throughout. Because of his prior abuse of his public office, Nakajō’s husband was relegated from serving in Hokkaidō to serving in Takamatsu. The demotion led to his addiction to both alcohol and sleeping pills, and caused him to be abusive to his wife (Wakatsuki 1955: 140–2); however, Ogawa implies that the husband taking sleeping pills may be fiction created by the poet (Ogawa 1995: 187). For example, two poems articulate her subconscious sense of guilt and the connection she makes between disease and punishment. The first reads: ‘With my lips impressed, the cancer scornfully and secretly grows in the burning breasts’; and the second reads: ‘A woman resembling me, for adultery she received a sentence of removal of the breast/she was sentenced to have her breasts removed, in ancient times’ (Wakatsuki 1955: 134, 193). Interestingly, Ogawa refers to a real episode recounted in a memoir of the poet by another close poet friend: while taking a bath at the house of one of her veteran poet friends (Masuko Miyata) Nakajō, in response to her friend asking about the temperature of the water, called for her to come to the bathroom. When the friend peeked through the small window in the bathroom, she was startled to see the poet standing apart from the bathtub, exposing her naked scarred chest (Ogawa 1995: 214). Although the situation in the film might have been inspired by this episode, the cinematic rendition of the entire scene should be credited to Kinuyo, as I demonstrate here. Katō calls this repetition of the two bath scenes ‘trans-temporary cross-cutting’, suggesting that the repetition creates the effect of Hori and Fumiko taking a bath together in the spectator’s mind, as a sort of Kuleshov effect, even though the characters are taking baths at different times (Katō 2011: 166). I do not fully agree with this reading, because it seems to me that the effect of the repetition is not of these two taking a bath together (as a realisation of Fumiko’s secret romantic fantasy), but rather a visualisation of Fumiko’s desire to possess the man by taking his place through taking his place in the bath. According to Ogawa, before her marriage at the age of nineteen, Nakajō also had a close, almost homoerotic attachment to one of her school friends (Ogawa 1995: 56). The authors pay attention to how the mammary pads for Fumiko’s brassiere, which appeared in an earlier scene when Fumiko first met Ōtsuki, are echoed in a shot the morning after Fumiko and Ōtsuki’s lovemaking, which this time shows only the brassiere without the pads. They read this second shot as an indication of Fumiko’s recovery of confidence about her femininity.

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23. In one not-so-enthusiastic contemporary review of the film, Fujii Shigeo, who like Wakatsuki was a newspaper journalist, claims that the explicit depiction of the sexual nature of the love between Fumiko and Ōtsuki is a fatal blow to the film, arguing that ‘this kind of scene should not be depicted on screen’, and even confesses that he felt repelled by the ‘filth’ when he was watching the scene (Fujii 1956: 82). Yamamoto Kyōko, on the other hand, writes a more favourable review, which specifically appreciates the pathos expressed in the bath scene (Yamamoto 1956: 51). 24. The poem reads: ‘Children, accept my death as the only gift that Mother leaves as her inheritance.’ 25. Sumie even points out how closely the mistress of the store (Nakakita Chieko, 1926–2005) where Fumiko works as a live-in employee, who does not hide her contempt for the heroine, resembles herself in her appearance (Yomiuri shinbun 1961: 9).

Bibliography Asahi shinbun (1955), ‘A self-motivated project’, evening edition, 21 June, p. 2. Casella, Donna R. (2009), ‘What women want: the complex world of Dorothy Arzner and her cinematic women’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 50: 1/2, pp. 235–70. Fujii Shigeo (1956), ‘The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare)’, Eiga hyōron 13: 2, February, pp. 80–2. Furukawa, Kaoru (2002), With Flowers and Storms: Life of Actress Kinuyo Tanaka (Hana mo arashi mo: Joyū Tanaka Kinuyo no shōgai), Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, pp. 444–7. González, Irene and Ueda Mayu (2015), ‘Manifestation of female sexual desire: a Tanaka Kinuyo film’, The Eternal Breasts (Josei no seiteki yokubō no hatsuro: Tanaka kinuyo kantoku sakuhin, Chibusa yo eien nare)’, CineMagazinet! 19, Autumn, pp. 1–9, (last accessed 28 February 2016). Katō, Mikirō (2011), Nihon eiga-ron 1933–2007: Tekusuto to kontekusuto (Essays on Japanese Cinema: Text and Context), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kawakita, Kashiko, Tanaka Kiniuyo, Takamine Hideko and Kyōko Yamamoto (1961), ‘The position of women in the film industry (Eigani okeru josei no tachiba)’, Kinema junpō 282, late April, pp. 65–9. Kinema junpō (1961), ‘Hatred towards prostitution’, 287, June, p. 115. Kitagawa, Fuyuhiko (1955), ‘The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare)’, Kinema junpō 134, late December, pp. 95–6. Kitayama, Osamu (1993), Miruna no kinnshi (Vol 1: Kitayama Osamu chosakushu: nihongo rinsho no shinso), Tokyo: Iwasaki Gakujutsu Shuppansha. Kitayama, Osamu (2010), Prohibition of Don’t Look: Living Through Psychoanalysis and Culture in Japan, Tokyo: Iwasaki Gakujutsu Shuppansha. Kitsnik, Lauri, Jule Selbo and Michael Smith (2015), ‘Japanese Women Screenwriters: Collaborators’, in Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo (eds), Women Screenwriters: An International Guide, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 108–30. Mackie, Vera (2013), ‘Sweat, Perfume, and Tabaco: The Ambivalent Labor of the Dancehall Girl’, in Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller and Christiane R. Yano (eds), Modern Girls on the Go, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 67–84.

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Nakajima, Kenzō, Tanaka Kinuyo and Gosho Heinosuke (1955), Roundtable talk, ‘Hoping for the emergence of new film critics’, Kinema junpō 129, early October, pp. 36–41. Nagashima, Ichirō (1977), ‘Memories of Ms Tanaka: the last address’, Kinema junpō 707, early May, pp. 114–15. Ogawa, Tarō (1995), Let Me Hear the Words of Love: Document, Nakajō Fumiko (Kikaseteyo ai no kotoba wo: Dokumento Nakajō Fumiko), Tokyo: Motoami shoten. Saito, Ayako (2012), ‘When Women Write and Direct: Two Tanakas in Japanese Film History (Onna ga kaki, Onna ga toru toki: Nihon eigashi ni okeru futari no Tanaka)’, Geijutsugaku kenkyū 22, Society of Art Studies, Meiji Gakuin University, pp. 13–31. Shimizu, Shunji (1987), Fifty Years of Subtitling (Eiga jimaku sūpā gojūnen), Tokyo: Hayakawa shobō. Shindō, Kaneto (1975), A Film Director – Kenji Mizoguchi and the Japanese Cinema (Aru eiga kantoku no shōgai – Mizoguchi Kenji no kiroku), Tokyo: Eijinsha, pp. 388–428. Tanaka, Kinuyo (1975 [1997]), Tanaka Kinuyo Interview (Tanaka Kinuyo kikigaki), Interviewed by Takizawa Hajime and Ema Michio on 15 August, Kyoto: The Museum of Kyoto. Tanaka, Kinuyo, Kawakita Kashiko and Nagashima Ichirō (1971), Roundtable talk, ‘Actress・director・cinema (Joyū・kantoku・eiga)’, Film Center 1, April, pp. 4–9. Tanaka, Sumie (1956), ‘The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare)’, Eiga geijutsu 4: 1, January, pp. 80–101. Tanaka, Sumie and Mizuki Yōko (1953), ‘Pleasure and pain in writing scenarios (Shinario wo kakukoto no yorokobi to kurushimi’, Kinema junpō, Spring Special Issue, 60, April, pp. 78–83. Tanaka, Sumie, Mizuki Yōko and Wada Natto (1965), Roundtable talk, ‘When women write scenarios (Onna ga shinario wo kakutoki)’, Kinema junpō 390, early May, pp. 46–51. Tipton, Elise K. (2013), ‘Moving Up and Out: The “Shop Girl” in Interwar Japan’, in Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller and Christiane R. Yano (eds), Modern Girls on the Go, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 21–40. Tokita, Norio (2014), ‘Centring on Fumiko (Fumiko wo meggutte)’, Tanka kenkyū 71: 8, pp. 44–7. Tomita, Mika (2008), ‘Tanaka Kinuyo’, in Iwamoto Kenji and Takakura Kōtarō (co-supervised by), Encyclopedia of World Cinema, Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center. Wakatsuki, Akira (1955), The Eternal Breasts, Star-Crossed Poetess, Nakajō Fumiko (Chibusa yo eien nare: hakkō no kajin Nakajō Fumiko), Tokyo: Daini Shobō. Yamamoto, Kyōko (1956), ‘The Eternal Breasts: Sensitive Direction (Chibusa yo eien nare: komayakana enshutsu)’, Eiga geijutsu 4: 2, February, pp. 50–1. Yomiuri shinbun (1948), ‘Revival of the Ōfuna-style: Shōchiku changed gear to the melodrama line of production’, morning edition, 29 October, p. 2. Yomiuri shinbun (1951), ‘Will she come out of a slump, a new role of Tanaka Kinuyo’, morning edition, 4 March, p. 4. Yomiuri shinbun (1955), ‘The Eternal Breasts’ advertisement’, evening edition, 21 November, p. 2. Yomiuri shinbun (1959), ‘Breaking the shell of melodrama’, evening edition, 7 December, p. 5. Yomiuri shinbun (1960a), ‘Is the era of melodrama over?’, evening edition, 11 June, p. 5.

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Yomiuri shinbun (1960b), ‘Melodramas will never die out – Tanaka Kinuyo’s discourse on cinema’, morning edition, 3 July, p. 15. Yomiuri shinbun (1961), ‘Rehabilitation of fallen women: having watched girls of dark: talk between Ms Tanabe Shizuko and Ms Tanaka Sumie’, morning edition, 7 September: p. 9.

Filmography A Wanderer’s Notebook (Hōrōki, Naruse Mikio, 1962) Being a Woman (Onna de aru koto, Kawashima Yūzō, 1958) Engagement Ring (Konyaku yubiwa, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1950) Flowing (Nagareru, Naruse Mikio, 1956) Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza keshō, Naruse Mikio, 1951) Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1961) Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946) Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) Love Letter (Koibumi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1953) Love under the Crucifix (Oginsama, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1962) Mother (Okāsan, Naruse Mikio, 1952) Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) Older Brother Younger Sister (Ani imōto, Naruse Mikio, 1953) Our House is Happy (Waga ya wa tanoshi, Nakamura Noboru, 1951) Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) Repast (Meshi, Naruse Mikio, 1951) The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Four Chimneys (Entotsu no mieru basho, Gosho Heinosuke, 1953) The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949) The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyōdai, Ozu Yasujirō, 1950) The Shiinomi School (Shiinomi gakuen, Shimizu Hiroshi, 1955) The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1960) Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940)

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Chapter 6 Female Authorship, Subjectivity and Colonial Memory in Tanaka Kinuyo’s The Wandering Princess (1960) Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández

The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi) is the fourth film directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. Released in January 1960, this large-scale production was her first work in the colour and widescreen formats and her only collaboration as director with the Daiei Studio. Five years after her previous film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955), Tanaka returned behind the camera to once again direct a josei eiga (woman’s film) as a female-centred melodrama aimed at and made by women. In The Wandering Princess, Tanaka fictionalised the best-selling autobiography of Saga Hiro (1914–87), a Japanese aristocrat who married the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo in 1937 and subsequently became directly involved in the colonial politics of the Japanese empire. In order to adapt Saga’s memoirs, Tanaka collaborated with Wada Natto (1920–83), one of the few women scriptwriters at the time, and with Daiei’s top star Kyō Machiko (1924–), who played the challenging role of this unique heroine. Tanaka’s film ranked twenty-seventh in the Kinema junpō poll for best films of 1960 (Kinema junpō 2003: 92), the year in which the post-war Japanese studio system reached its peak in terms of number of film releases.1 Despite its historical subject, popular appeal and production values, The Wandering Princess has been largely ignored by Japanese film scholarship. However, as with other works directed by Tanaka, this film offers an interesting opportunity to explore the intersections between women’s authorship and representation in post-war Japanese cinema. In this chapter, I will locate The Wandering Princess within the career of Tanaka as a film director and within the broader context of Japanese cinema in 1960. The focus of my analysis is the relationship between Tanaka’s authorial position as the only woman director in the Japanese studio system and her representations of women on-screen.

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Firstly, I will examine the production and historical contexts of Saga’s story and Tanaka’s film, taking into account the construction of The Wandering Princess as a woman’s film. Then I will study the configuration of Tanaka’s authorship in her career as film director by exploring how she negotiated her gendered position in the production of The Wandering Princess and the authorial agency implicit in her choices. In the second part of the chapter, I will contextualise and analyse The Wandering Princess in relation to the dominant representations of women and of the national past in post-war Japanese cinema. I will argue that The Wandering Princess and Tanaka herself occupied a liminal gendered position within Japanese cinema at the beginning of the new decade. Focusing on the subjectivity and multifaceted experiences of a Japanese woman in Manchukuo, Tanaka’s film is located in between the melodramatic film tradition of Japanese victimisation and colonial nostalgia and the representation of a new (female) subjectivity emerging from Tanaka’s authorial position as a woman director making women’s films. I will contend that although The Wandering Princess offers a problematic representation of the colonial past, it also escapes the fatalistic approach and the historical determinacy of post-war melodramas by constructing a female character who is not a mere victim nor a projection of male desires and traumas, but an agent of negotiation and resistance.

A woman’s story of love, tragedy and hope in Manchukuo In the years following Japan´s war defeat and the downfall of its colonial empire in 1945, stories narrating individual’s experiences of the war populated Japanese media and cultural production from novels to films and from personal memoirs to radio and television dramas (Gluck 1993; Igarashi 2000: 104–30; Shimazu 2003). The Wandering Princess was one of these post-war stories focusing on the life of a Japanese woman, Saga Hiro, during and after the wartime period. Saga was a fascinating figure in the history of the Japanese empire and SinoJapanese relationships, occupying a singular position as one of the few women publicly involved in the troubled history of Manchukuo, the puppet state that the Japanese empire created in Northeast China, historically known as Manchuria, between 1932 and 1945.2 As depicted in her memoirs (Aishinkakura 1959), Saga became intertwined with this unique project of Japanese colonialism in 1937 when the Kwantung Army, the Japanese military force in the region, arranged her marriage with Pujie (known in Japanese as Fuketsu, 1907–94), the younger brother of the appointed emperor of Manchukuo, the last Chinese emperor Puyi (1906–67). The wedding initially served as a propaganda tool to demonstrate the friendly relations between Japan and Manchukuo (Figure 6.1). However, since Puyi had no children, there was also the intention of placing a future son of the

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Figure 6.1 The wedding of Saga and Pujie in the newspaper Asahi shinbun (1937). The headlines refer to the friendship between Japan and Manchukuo and to the imperial and aristocratic background of the spouses.

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couple on the Manchukuo throne in order to introduce Japanese blood into the Chinese dynasty (although in the end, Saga and Pujie had only two daughters) (Aishinkakura 1959: 47). Saga published her memoirs in the spring of 1959,3 but the story of her life had returned to the public arena in 1957 when her eldest daughter Eisei (1938–57) disappeared and was subsequently found dead on Mount Amagi in the Izu Peninsula. Apparently, she died in a love suicide with a male classmate, although Saga’s autobiography instead suggested that he murdered her (Aishinkakura 1959: 259–64). The unclear circumstances of their deaths and Eisei’s family background brought considerable attention from the media, which named the incident the ‘Love Suicide at Mount Amagi’ (Asahi shinbun 1957).4 As for Saga, the tragic death of her daughter was a triggering factor for writing her memoirs with the aim of building, and indeed becoming herself, a ‘bridge of friendship’ (kakehashi) between Japan and China (Aishinkakura 1959: 267). In fact, in her subjective account of her life, Saga not only narrated the many difficulties she and her family experienced during the war and the defeat, but also the love story with her husband and their mutual commitment to both the Japanese and Chinese nations and cultures. In spite of the political nature of their wedding and the difficult relations between their two nations, the marriage of Saga and Pujie lasted throughout their lifetime, with them overcoming all the obstacles they faced, which included sixteen years of separation following the Japanese surrender and the subsequent dissolution of Manchukuo. As she describes in her autobiography, after the war defeat Saga went through a long and difficult journey of repatriation to Japan, where she settled with her two daughters and her family. For his part, Pujie was captured by the Soviet army and spent several years in different prisons and Chinese re-education camps. The couple lost communication until the late 1950s, when the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai finally allowed them to exchange letters (Aishinkakura 1959: 153–258). In 1960, Pujie was released from prison and, a year later, Saga obtained permission to live with him in Peking, where they stayed together until Saga’s death in 1987. Recalling the complex experiences of many Japanese during the war and the colonial period but also providing a glance at the wartime life of the nobility and the imperial court in Japan and China, Saga’s memoirs quickly became a bestseller and attracted the attention of the cinema industry. A few months after their publication, in August 1959, the film project was presented to the media with a contract signing attended by Saga Hiro, her youngest daughter Kosei (1940–), Tanaka Kinuyo, Kyō Machiko and Daiei’s managing director Matsuyama Hideo (Asahi shinbun 1959a). From the very beginning, The Wandering Princess was conceived and constructed as a woman’s film and, although it is

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not known whether Tanaka went to Daiei with the idea or the studio recruited her after securing the adaptation rights, her involvement in the project certainly determined the particular position of the film within the genre as a josei eiga not only about women and for women, but also made by women. At the event, Tanaka affirmed her intention of directing a new version of War and Peace seen from a woman’s perspective, and the unmistakable headline of ‘original work, script, direction, all women’ clearly emphasised the female authorship of the film production (Asahi shinbun 1959a).5 Similarly, later promotional materials made in preparation for the theatrical release also focused on women as the content, authors and audience of The Wandering Princess. For instance, a Daiei press sheet defined the film as the ‘definitive woman’s film made by all women’ (Daiei 1960). Likewise, newspaper advertisements (e.g. in Yomiuri shinbun 1960a; Figure 6.2) used the word josei (女性, meaning both ‘woman/women’ and ‘female’) profusely and prominently in order to highlight the presence of a woman’s original work (josei no gensaku), a woman’s script (josei no kyakuhon), a woman director (josei no kantoku) and a woman protagonist (josei no shuen). These ads often stressed the melodramatic features of the film and the affective response of the (presumably female) audience, referring, for example, to the women’s tears caused by this ‘masterpiece of deep emotion’ (Yomiuri shinbun 1960b). Even in visual terms, the female faces of the star Kyō Machiko and the actress playing the minor role of the Manchurian Empress (Kindaichi Atsuko, 1939–) dominated the commercial images of The Wandering Princess.

Negotiating authorship: Tanaka Kinuyo as a woman director doing woman’s films The Wandering Princess marked the return of Tanaka to the director’s chair, starting the second period of her career behind the camera. Following her three films in the mid-1950s, Tanaka had concentrated on her acting work, which was still successful but increasingly limited to supporting roles. During this period, it might have seemed that her career as director was a soon-finished adventure, but Tanaka’s directorial projects were by no means an ended aspiration. In 1957, the Yomiuri newspaper asked Tanaka about this issue. Revealing her cinephilia and her practical mind, Tanaka expressed mixed feelings about continuing or abandoning her career, aware of the difficulties behind helming a film production, but also stating her own desire to accept this challenge again: There are many films I would like to make, but I hesitate, thinking that one film costs a lot of money. Without too much cost, like a short film or at best a medium-length film, I think it could be a children’s story such

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Figure 6.2

Advertisement for The Wandering Princess in the newspaper Yomiuri shinbun (1960).

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as Kegarenaki itazura [Miracle of Marcelino, Ladislao Vajda, 1955] or Akai fusen [The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse, 1956], but at the moment I’m still hesitating. However, I really would like to direct a film this year. (Yomiuri shinbun 1957: 4) In the event, a new opportunity to direct arrived in 1959 with the film adaptation of Saga Hiro’s memoirs. For the first time in her career as a filmmaker, Tanaka did not act in the film and concentrated on her work behind the camera. As previously pointed out, the promotion of The Wandering Princess established a specific relationship between female authorship and genre that placed Tanaka in a gendered position as a ‘feminine director’. This position was certainly determined by the commercial strategy of Daiei to attract the female audience, revealing to some extent the limited choices available to Tanaka as a woman director. However, taking into consideration Tanaka’s career behind the camera, the relationship should also be considered in terms of her authorial agency as a female filmmaker negotiating authorship within the specific industrial circumstances of the Japanese studio system. As the only woman directing commercial films in post-war Japan and as a star embodying ideals of femininity for male directors and the audience, Tanaka automatically began her career behind the camera from a gendered position. In her first two films, Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953) and The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955), Tanaka constructed her authorship as film director under the shadow of male filmmakers and writers such as the novelist Niwa Fumio (1904–2005) and the scriptwriters and directors Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–98) and Ozu Yasujirō (1903–63), all of whom actively participated in these two films. As I have discussed elsewhere (Armendáriz-Hernández 2016), this does not indicate a lack of Tanaka’s authorship in those films, but rather points to the different strategies she used to claim and construct her authorial space inside and outside the filmic text. For instance, by appearing on-screen in a few meaningful scenes of these two films, Tanaka inscribed her authority and subjectivity as the film director, complicating the female images she embodied as actress and the apparent subordination of her authorship to that of those male authors. From another authorial position, Tanaka’s decision to return to directing with The Wandering Princess followed the path she had initiated with The Eternal Breasts, and would continue with Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, 1961) and Love under the Crucifix (Ogin-sama, 1962), in which she chose to collaborate with other women authors in filming women’s stories. In these films, Tanaka’s authorial strategy points to her need to create and/or intention of creating a female space from which to make possible and vindicate women’s authorship and subjectivity within the male-dominated cinema industry and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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its representational imaginaries of women. In this sense, starting from The Eternal Breasts, Tanaka more clearly addressed the relationship between women’s authorship and the construction of female characters and spectatorial positions within the woman’s film genre. In the particular case of The Wandering Princess, the authorial agency of Tanaka could be traced in her negotiated choices of adapting Saga’s story and collaborating with Wada Natto and Kyō Machiko. Saga’s memoirs provided Tanaka with direct access to the subjectivity of a real-life heroine and a captivating tale of romance and tragedy, suffering and resistance. The story fitted perfectly into the generic conventions of the woman’s film, and had the potential for expanding its boundaries in terms of female representation by reclaiming the experiences and affects of a Japanese woman as the central subject of a historical narrative set during war and in a colonial scenario. Moreover, Saga’s story also offered Tanaka the chance to enlarge her directorial work in terms of film production and mise-en-scène. Besides her first experience of filming in colour and widescreen (labelled Daiei Scope by the studio), which were both already standards in the Japanese film industry, Tanaka faced particular visual challenges such as representing imperial palaces and noble mansions, re-creating historical sights and shooting war scenes.6 Saga’s aristocratic background and the combination in her story of Sino-Japanese languages, cultures and locations also allowed Tanaka to explore the expressive possibilities of elements such as scenery, costumes and landscapes. Tanaka’s collaboration with Wada took place within the structure of Daiei Studio. The Wandering Princess was Wada’s first script for a director other than her husband, the renowned filmmaker Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008). She had written most of Ichikawa’s films since 1949, working with him for different studios and mainly adapting literary works from a variety of genres (Ōguro 1960). Among others, she had adapted for Ichikawa some celebrated anti-war stories about soldiers facing the end of the war and of the Japanese empire in the colonies, such as Bengawan River (Bungawan soro, 1951), The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1956) and Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 1959). For her adaptations of Fires on the Plain and Odd Obsession (Kagi, 1959), Kinema junpō recognised Wada as the best scriptwriter of 1959 (Ōguro 1960). Daiei’s successful employment of the husband and wife team from 1956 onwards made Wada a feasible and prestigious female choice to work with Tanaka in constructing The Wandering Princess as an ‘all woman’ production. In fact, according to Ichikawa, Tanaka insisted that Wada write the script, to which eventually she agreed, albeit reluctantly (Ichikawa and Mori 1994: 457). Presumably, Wada was not interested in collaborating with other directors beyond Ichikawa, as she often declared that she never thought nor wanted to become a scriptwriter, but did so only to support

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her husband’s career as a film director.7 With this in mind, her collaboration with Tanaka complicated Wada’s authorial position, which previously was not constructed in terms of female authorship or representation but instead was linked to Ichikawa’s male authorship.8 Nevertheless, although Wada was not particularly experienced in the genre of woman’s film nor identified as a ‘feminine’ scriptwriter, she had already written some powerful female characters for Daiei films such as Nihonbashi (1956) and Odd Obsession, the latter of which also had Kyō Machiko as its female protagonist. As Michael Smith notes, Wada’s female characters were generally ‘strong-willed, smart, and of a more stable mind set than their often rash male counterparts’ (2015: 123), a characterisation that also embodies the protagonist of The Wandering Princess. Overall, as the analysis of Tanaka’s film will illustrate, Wada’s adaptation of Saga’s memoirs foregrounded the female subjectivity already present in the book, for example constructing the protagonist as the subject of the flashback narrative and using her voice to narrate and express her own experiences and feelings. Moreover, Wada’s script specifically indicated the use of Chinese language in the scenes located in the Manchurian court and public spaces, bringing realism to the historical narrative and recognising the Chinese identity of the female protagonist (Wada 1960). Working for Daiei, Tanaka also had the opportunity to cast Kyō Machiko, giving The Wandering Princess intertextual relations with other Daiei films and with the distinct ideas of femininity embodied by the actress. As Joanne Izbicki (1996) and Kitamura Kyōhei (2016) have highlighted, Kyō emerged as an actress during the Allied Occupation (1945–52), personifying a new post-war femininity and, in particular, a new notion of the female body and sexuality which departed from traditional representations of Japanese women on-screen. Kyō’s transgressive femininity, the Japanese version of the ‘vamp’ according to Kitamura (2016: 81–2), was evident in films with contemporary settings, such as A Fool’s Love (Chijin no ai, Kimura Keigo, 1949), Older Brother, Younger Sister (Ani imōto, Naruse Mikio, 1953) and Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1956), in which she played the characters of rebellious, sensual and westernised women. But her sexualised image was also quite obvious in jidaigeki such as Rashomon (Rashōmon, Kurosawa Akira, 1950), Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953) and Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953), in which Kyō was placed in conventional female roles as a kimono-clad lady or a geisha, but nonetheless always embodied the sexual desires of the male protagonists. Moreover, beyond Kyō’s roles onscreen, her off-screen persona was also constructed and perceived as the appealing image of a modern, fleshy and westernised sexuality. As Anderson and Richie have stated, Kyō ‘was the first star to be built on a glamour and sex-appeal campaign, her body being more often featured than her face’ (1982: 402).

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In the context of post-war Japanese society, Kyō’s star image in and outside of her films stood to represent the liberated and positive eroticism of the female body after the constraints of women’s representations during the war, which were mainly limited to desexualised roles as wives and mothers (the so-called ryōsai kenbo or ‘good wife, wise mother’). However, rather than reflecting and inflecting the changes, feelings and desires of everyday Japanese women in the post-war era, ‘the freedom represented by Kyō’s body’s display was a freedom imaged and imagined by and for men’ (Izbicki 1996: 118). In this sense, the sexualised body of the actress mostly appealed to and titillated the fantasies of the male audience that consumed her image as a way of affirming their masculinity in the new post-war order. As Izbicki points out: to free Japanese men from the traumas inflicted by the social conditions that ensued after the war and defeat, the signs of femaleness were publicly displayed as available to men’s sight – and, through fantasy, as available for their sexual satisfaction. (1996: 119) Certainly, Kyō’s appeal and star persona were the result of a complex process in which the female audience and Kyō herself also participated, opening the image of the actress to contradictory and ambiguous readings. For example, the acting skills and authorial agency of Kyō also played a part in the construction and the attractiveness of her female image in terms of the force, intensity and individuality she lent to her characters. As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto affirms in comparing the performances of Kyō and Hara Setsuko (1920–2015) in Kurosawa’s films, ‘even when she plays the role of a noblewoman, Kyo Machiko always has a touch of the common woman. What we see on the face of Kyo is the raw energy of a commoner who never gives up at a time of extreme adversity’ (2000: 193). Nevertheless, the dominant representation of Kyō often subordinated her female subjectivity and personality to her sexualised body depicted from the narrative point of view of the male characters and, in any case, from the perspective of male filmmakers. In this regard, a noteworthy example of Kyō’s image can be found in Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (Yōkihi), directed by Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) in 1955. Remarkably similar to The Wandering Princess in terms of narrative and genre, Mizoguchi’s film is a romantic and tragic melodrama, told in flashback, in which Kyō played the main female role of the princess who, like Saga Hiro, was caught in familial and political intrigues. Although, as the title indicates, the film re-enacts the story of a female Chinese historical figure, Kyō and her character are visualised and narrated from a male perspective: firstly from the point of view of the male protagonist, the Chinese emperor, who remembers her as a loved and desired concubine who sacrificed for him, and secondly from Mizoguchi’s camera, which looks at Kyō and

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her character as an object of love and sexual desire.9 Moreover, as is typical of Mizoguchi films, Princess Yang Kwei-Fei constructs an ideal of femininity in terms of the self-sacrificing virtue of the female protagonist who ultimately gives her life for the emperor and for the reestablishment of his power. Taking into consideration Kyō’s star persona, her casting in the role of Saga could be read as part of Tanaka’s authorial agency to problematise the dominant representation of women in post-war Japanese cinema. In contrast to Princess Yang Kwei-Fei and other films in which Kyō appears as an object of desire or a female figure of threatening sexuality, both ‘imagined by and for men’, her role in The Wandering Princess offered a desexualised image of Daiei’s star. As I will explore in the following pages, Wada’s script and Tanaka’s direction contained the disruptive sexuality of Kyō’s star persona by making her character the subject of the story and inscribing her image within the generic codes of romantic love and motherhood. The role of Saga as mother and wife placed Kyō into traditional representations of Japanese femininity, avoiding the visualisation of her body in terms of sexual pleasure for male characters and audiences. Nonetheless, Tanaka’s film also foregrounded the features of tenacity and resilience associated with the actress, contributing to make her character a heroine rather than merely a passive victim.

Women and wartime past in post-war Japanese cinema Adapting Saga’s memoirs and teaming up with Wada and Kyō, Tanaka assumed an authorial position previously unseen in the Japanese film industry. From this space of female authorship and subjectivity, she directly addressed the recent past of the Japanese nation, engaging with personal and collective memories of the war and the colonial empire from a woman’s perspective. Made within the production framework of the Japanese studio system and the genre conventions of its woman’s films, The Wandering Princess is inscribed in a wider context of film representations of women and of the national past. In post-war Japan, narratives of war guilt, victimhood and colonial nostalgia dominated cinematic memories of the war and of the Japanese empire (Baskett 2008: 132–54). Most films conveyed and constructed these narratives through melodramatic representations of the Japanese as powerless victims of the abstract evil of war, or of the militarism and its leaders, participating in the formation of a collective consciousness of victimhood (higaisha ishiki) regarding the war and its consequences (Orr 2001: 106–36). Overall, these productions presented an anti-war message, but ultimately left unquestioned individual and collective responsibilities for the war and the Japanese aggressions in Asia. In the particular case of Manchukuo, post-war films mainly focused on the painful experiences of

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Japanese civilians and soldiers after the surrender of August 1945, being part of broader representations of the hikiagesha (repatriates) in personal memories and cultural productions (Tamanoi 2009; Watt 2009: 138–66). However, even while producing anti-war accounts of suffering and victimisation, film depictions of Manchukuo also provided, paradoxically, a nostalgic visualisation and remembering of the colonial past (through its landscapes, ways of life and stories), allowing Japanese filmmakers and audiences to re-imagine and reclaim the lost empire on-screen (Baskett 2008: 132).10 Women’s images and stories played an important role in the construction and dissemination of these historical narratives of the national past. Post-war cinema often resorted to female characters to deal with the memories and legacies of the war and the defeat, in particular, representing women’s sufferings and victimisation ‘not only as testimony to women’s historical situation, but also as a reflection on the trauma of the society as a whole’ (Briciu 2008: 2). In stories set during the wartime period, female figures were usually located on the domestic front as innocent victims experiencing the difficulties and tragic effects of an external and visually absent conflict; they embodied a passive subject without agency, and thus without war responsibility. For instance, Twenty-Four Eyes (Nijūshi no hitomi, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1954), one of the most emblematic anti-war films in post-war Japan, offered such an example of a female-centred melodrama, in which a maternal schoolteacher goes through the war years in the idealised space of a small Japanese island. From there, despite her symbolic opposition to the war, she cannot do anything but passively endure and cry, waiting and hoping for the end of the war.11 Similarly, Daiei’s maternal melodramas known as haha-mono (mother stories), the studio’s most representative and popular genre in terms of women’s characters and audience, also represented the female figure of the mother as a ‘lacking subject . . . suitable for portraying the hardships of the war period, all while stressing the character’s lack of wartime responsibility’ (Wada-Marciano 2009: 24).12 Under the appearance of being apolitical melodramas, these and other women’s stories made it possible for Japanese post-war audiences to express and reconcile with the past from the position of victims. However, in spite of the central position of female characters in the narrative, most films lacked a real cinematic articulation of women’s historical experiences and subjectivity. According to Ayako Saito (2003a, b), female characters, bodies and affective expression (for example, women’s tears) were often a site for the projection and healing of the wounded male subjectivity of filmmakers and audiences, as well as that of the nation. The images of passive women suffering and crying on-screen allowed both individual and national male subjects to dialogue with the wartime past and reclaim their lost masculinity, in turn rebuilding a male

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national identity after the traumatic experiences of war, defeat and Occupation. In this sense, many female characters, particularly those of mothers, in post-war Japanese melodramas did not function as producers of meaning but rather as ‘bearers’ of it (Saitō 2003b: 87), becoming ideological vehicles for the dominant male subjectivity while excluding women as historical subjects. By the time of Tanaka’s film in 1960, interestingly, male-centred military narratives overshadowed film representations of the war and the colonial past, shifting the images of suffering and victimisation from women (mothers) on the domestic front to soldiers fighting in the colonies. This was the case with acclaimed anti-war films such as The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, both made by Ichikawa and Wada, and The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, Kobayashi Masaki, 1959–61). From different ideological standpoints, these films focused on the traumatic experiences of individual male soldiers in the colonial territories, offering a humanistic perspective on the war and highlighting the irrationality and oppression of the wartime military regime. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points out, from the mid1950s, economic recovery and changes in the Japanese social context marked a symbolic end to the early post-war era and made female figures and narratives such as those of the mother no longer necessary (2009: 22). The ongoing process of rehabilitation of both Japanese masculinity and the national past was progressively displaced to film representations of the military’s character and stories, from revisionist war films and kamikaze heroes to pacifist narratives and victimised soldiers, which constructed new male and national identities.13 With this displacement, the female subject and women’s experiences of the war were further marginalised, as female characters in military stories and colonial settings predominantly played supporting roles that depended narratively, visually and affectively on the male protagonists.14 Even a film like Queen of Asia (Sen’un Ajia no jo’ō, literally Queen of Asia under War Clouds, Nomura Hiromasa, 1957), which supposedly focused on the female historical figure of the Sino-Japanese crossdressing spy Kawashima Yoshiko (1908–48), turned its female protagonist ‘into a very dependent woman – dependent, that is, on a Japanese army officer’ (Stegewerns 2015: 98). As a female-centred, mainstream melodrama, The Wandering Princess is certainly located within these representations of women and of the national past. We should, however, ask how Tanaka’s gendered position behind the camera and her commitment to depicting Saga’s story from a women’s perspective engaged with these dominant representations. As the only woman director at the time, did Tanaka inscribe her female authorship in the film by representing a female character that, beyond an ideological objectification and affective appropriation, articulated the historical experience and subjectivity of this particular woman and her wartime past in Manchukuo?

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Female subjectivity and colonial memory in The Wandering Princess Following Saga Hiro’s memoirs, The Wandering Princess shows the most important events and everyday episodes in the last twenty years (1937–57) of the life of Ryūko (Saga’s fictional character played by Kyō). Tanaka’s film mirrors the structure of the original account of Saga and is constructed as a long flashback presenting the story of Ryūko as the post-war memories of a Japanese woman who looks back at her past through the difficult years of the war and the colonial empire in Manchukuo. As the most tragic event in Ryūko’s life, the film opens with a brief and ambiguous scene in which the protagonist, characterised as a middle-aged woman, discovers the dead body of her schoolgirl daughter. At this point, the narrative does not clarify the context of the death or even the name of the characters, although text on-screen sets the scene in December 1957 at Mount Amagi, thus relying on the knowledge of the audience about the real incident. After the opening scene, the narrative goes back in time to 1937 when Ryūko is herself a schoolgirl and Japan is a colonial empire controlled by the military powers. Thereafter, the film follows Ryūko’s life in chronological sequence throughout three thematic and spatial blocks. In the first block, the narrative is set in Tokyo and focuses on the irruption of the Japanese army into the life of the young Ryūko and her family in order to arrange her marriage with Futetsu, the fictional name of Saga’s husband Pujie, who is played by the Japanese actor Funakoshi Eiji (1923–2007). In this initial part of the flashback, the past is shown from an omniscient position, without a discernible subjective point of view, or the voice of Ryūko as narrator, being presented. However, the sequence of images of Ryūko, first as an adult woman in 1957, and then, after the title, as a schoolgirl in 1937, establishes the female character as the point of connection between the present and the past and the subject of both the historical memories and the film story. During this segment of the film, the narrative shows the marriage arrangements and the first encounters of the couple, emphasising the oppressive power of the military over the life of the female protagonist and the whole Japanese nation. Anticipating this idea visually, the first appearance of the young Ryūko at the beginning of the flashback is constructed through images of her body being literally overlapped by a group of marching soldiers (Figure 6.3). The scene, which accompanies the opening credits, shows the soldiers as a collective, systematic and unstoppable force with no face or individual identity; the only visible parts of their bodies are their legs, which move forward without hesitation over Ryūko’s figure. The undefined condition of military power is openly stated some scenes later, when Ryūko’s family discuss whether they

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Figure 6.3 Soldiers marching forward over the figure of Ryūko (Kyō Machiko). should accept the omiai (preliminary marriage meeting) proposed by the army. The dialogue addresses the issue of the military as an obscure but powerful force when Ryūko’s grandmother complains about the military interference in family matters: Ryūko’s grandmother: I will go myself and refuse the omiai. Who is the most important person within this so important army? The Minister of the Army? I will meet him in person! Ryūko’s uncle: It can’t be said that the Minister is the most powerful. Grandmother: Then who? Uncle: In a word, the army. Grandmother: No individual person? Uncle: Exactly, the army is the power. As these scenes suggest, the military force of the Japanese Army, in particular the Kwantung Army in Manchukuo, appears as a totalising power which is more influential than the aristocratic elite represented by Ryūko and her family. In fact, they end up accepting the marriage meeting and ultimately agreeing to the wedding. In this regard, the characterisation of Ryūko also represents her powerless position in relation to both the military and her duties as the daughter of a noble family. Initially, she is depicted as a privileged, cheerful and westernised student with dreams of becoming a painter and is more concerned with her painting lessons than with the plans for marriage. However, when the army bursts into her life, Ryūko loses her voice and vitality, saying few words in the family discussions about the marriage proposal and instead enacting the

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kimono-clad quiet femininity expected from an upper-class Japanese daughter in the late 1930s. Tanaka emphasises this by making expressive use of the miseen-scène to convey the feelings of the female protagonist. In fact, the female figure of Ryūko often appears observed or heard through windows, doors and corridors, caged just like the birds which she has in her room and which Tanaka eloquently frames in a close-up shot before introducing the marriage offer in the narrative. The film makes evident the political nature of the marriage by avoiding representation of the wedding, instead showing official documents and propaganda images of the media coverage of the event (Figure 6.4). However, despite this and the previously displayed military manoeuvres behind the matrimonial project, the narrative also constructs the first meetings of the couple in terms of a love story by depicting how Ryūko and Futetsu look at each other with interest and gentle respect. Symbolising their affection, the romantic film score of Kinoshita Chūji (1916–), brother of film director Keisuke and composer for most of his films, accompanies the scenes in which they meet and prepare for their life together. In this sense, beyond the power of the military over Ryūko, her family and the nation, this first block of the film conveys a feeling not only of resignation but also of romanticism, which is enhanced by the film’s emphasis on the refined rituals and way of life of the Japanese aristocracy. Taking advantage of filming in colour and widescreen, Tanaka carefully re-creates the spaces of the Meiji-style house of Ryūko’s family and of the Japanese Imperial palace. Particularly evident is her deployment of flowers in prominent places within the frame and the use of floral images as pillow shots, which help to visualise

Figure 6.4 A reworking of the actual newspaper article (Figure 6.1) about the wedding of Ryūko and Futetsu is used in the film. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the elegant and delicate environment in which Ryūko has grown up, but also to express Tanaka’s authorial presence in terms of her construction of Ryūko’s femininity and romanticism. In fact, during the whole film, Ryūko and her love story are often envisioned in relation to the recurring flowers and plants that appear as symbols of the beauty and endurance of love in the face of the difficulties she has experienced in her life. The second block of the film moves the setting to Shinkyō, the capital of Manchukuo, where Ryūko and Futetsu make their family home after the wedding. The narrative develops their romantic relationship against the historical backdrop of the Japanese colonial regime and the advancement of the war in Asia, showing how the couple, particularly Ryūko, assume and negotiate the difficulties derived from their love and their national identities. In their new home, Ryūko and Futetsu fall in love and create a space of domestic happiness where Japanese and Chinese cultures coexist in harmony. In this space, Japanese is the common language between the characters, identifying the house with Ryūko’s role as wife and mother, but Chinese culture is also effectively incorporated; for instance, since her first appearance in the family home, Ryūko is mostly dressed in Chinese clothes. Despite living a modest life far from the standard of the aristocratic class to which they belong, Ryūko and Futetsu are happy and have hope for the future. Their scenes together here also demonstrate their good intentions and authentic commitment to the construction of Manchukuo as a national projection of their Sino-Japanese love, and the birth of their child Eisei reinforces this colonial ideal by embodying a Manchurian identity in which Chinese and Japanese languages, cultures and races are successfully integrated (Figure 6.5). Unlike the pre-war representation of ill-fated interracial romances between a

Figure 6.5 Wearing a Chinese dress, Eisei dances to the traditional Japanese song ‘Sakura sakura’ sung by her mother, who also wears Chinese clothes, under the affectionate gaze of her Chinese nanny. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Japanese male soldier and a colonial female other, Ryūko and Futetsu represent a more positive Sino-Japanese identity, since their romantic relationship and love for both nations resists the oppression of the military power and the colonial system. Even when the interests of their nations clash, the couple try to understand each other’s position, and do not allow historical circumstances beyond their control to undermine their marriage. In this regard, intertwined with the Sino-Japanese identity of the protagonists, this second block of the film also offers a more positive image of gender relations, representing a respectful and supportive relationship between wife and husband. The characterisation of Ryūko and Futetsu as a married couple departs from the gender dynamics between the anti-war hero and his dependent, sacrificing wife or lover in films such as The Human Condition. In Tanaka’s film, Ryūko and Futetsu develop a more equilibrial relationship, as both share the constraints of their Sino-Japanese identity and an overall concern for and dependence on each other. In particular, the character of Futetsu appears as a rarity in Japanese cinema of the time because he is characterised as a gentle husband and father, attentive to the needs of Ryūko and of their daughter, rather than as a heroic soldier or a self-confident hero. To underline this, the film presents Futetsu taking care of Eisei after a nightmare and singing her a lullaby, but also shows him in moments of desperation without any stoicism. For instance, the film includes a scene in which Ryūko prevents Futetsu from impulsively committing suicide after hearing news of Soviet invasion and the retreat of the Kwantung Army from the Manchurian capital. As well as his vulnerability, the scene evidences the strength and determination of the female protagonist in support of her husband during a moment of weakness.15 Similarly, in the face of the worsening of the war situation in Manchukuo, Ryūko’s decision to not return to Japan and remain with Futetsu, which she explicitly expresses on several occasions, becomes another daring choice of the protagonist. Her decision not only conveys her love for her husband, but is also proof of her personal agency in times of conflict. Regardless of their domestic happiness, Ryūko and Futetsu also confront the harsh reality of the colonial occupation and the difficulties deriving from their position in between the two countries. Most of the scenes set outside their home are in Chinese (with Japanese subtitles) and are located in the political space of the Manchurian court, in which the authoritarian power of the Kwantung Army represents the main obstacle to the happiness of Ryūko and her family and, implicitly, to the national project of Manchukuo. In this scenario, the female protagonist occupies a complex position as a Japanese woman married to a member of the Manchukuo imperial family. On the one hand, in spite of her faithful love for her husband, Ryūko is watched with concern by Manchukuo’s emperor Fubumi (Puyi’s fictional character), who suspects she is a spy serving Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the interests of the Japanese military. He ultimately recognises Ryūko’s loyalty to her Chinese family as she demonstrates a genuine adoption of Chinese costumes, language and traditions (Figure 6.6), and embodies a perfect wife and mother in comparison with the Manchurian empress, who is characterised as a beautiful but infertile ‘doll’. On the other hand, the Kwantung Army mistreat Ryūko, who despite her aristocratic status is discriminated against as the wife of a Chinese, indicating the colonial and gender hierarchies in which women and colonised subjects occupy lowly positions (Figure 6.7).

Figure 6.6

Ryūko speaking in Chinese about Chinese traditions in the Manchurian court.

Figure 6.7 Displaying a Chinese style, Ryūko is publicly admonished by a general of the Kwantung Army for being in a position of privilege normally reserved for the Japanese. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Beyond the family home and the Manchurian court, the film also points out the contradictions of Japanese colonialism in Manchukuo by depicting a brief incursion of the female protagonist into the everyday life of the local population. Just after the birth of her daughter, Ryūko takes Eisei for a walk in a park near their house. The park is represented as an idyllic setting inhabited by children playing and by older people enjoying their free time. There is no military presence, nor any Japanese settlers; only the local population in the peaceful atmosphere of an ordinary park. Talking with Chinese children, Ryūko asserts her Manchurian identity and discovers with sadness the Japanese abuse of the local population. But the scene, entirely spoken in Chinese, also presents a problematic reading of the history of Manchukuo as a natural continuation of the Chinese empire: Child: Ryūko: Child: Ryūko: Child: Ryūko:

Is she your daughter? She is cute! She is Manchurian, like you. That’s not true! You’re Japanese! It’s clear when you speak Chinese. Yes, I’m Japanese. But I came and married a Manchurian, so now I am Manchurian too. Then you may know, is it true that the Manchurian Emperor is the young brother of the Japanese Emperor? Not at all. He was Emperor of China. But the Qing dynasty ended and he became the Emperor of Manchukuo. He can’t speak a word of Japanese.

Ryūko’s conversation with the children reflects the fraternal relationship between Japan and Manchukuo that supposedly was conveyed by imperial propaganda and which the children naively read as a blood relation between the emperors of the two nations. After these words, the children, recognising Ryūko as Manchurian, warn her to take care of herself, as two Manchurians were killed by the Japanese in the park the day before. They also refer to an incident in which some Japanese went to the restaurant run by the family of one of the children and left without paying the bill. As these warnings reveal, the film does not completely ignore the problems of the colonised population, but neither does it go further to consider Japanese responsibility for that situation. In fact, Ryūko’s reaction to the children’s comments is to buy sweets and food from a market stall and share them out with the people around, showing her goodwill as a Japanese who really believes in the ideal of the Manchurian nation. Failing to recognise the constructed nature of Manchukuo as a nation produced and imagined by Japanese imperialism, this second block of the film does not mention the involvement of the Japanese army in the foundation

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of Manchukuo, neither is there any reference to the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) which started only a few months after the wedding of the protagonists. Only the Pacific War (1941–5) and the Soviet Russian invasion in August 1945 are mentioned as decisive conflicts that change the history of Manchukuo, provoking its collapse and, as a consequence, the sufferings of the protagonist and many other Japanese repatriates, as depicted in the third and last block of the film. In this final segment, the narrative follows the female protagonist in her difficult journey of repatriation to Japan. The Soviet incursion forces Ryūko and her family to leave their home and accompany the emperor and the Manchurian court to a safer place in the mountains. A scene in the train station illustrates the desperate situation of the population trying to abandon the capital, while Ryūko’s voiceover expresses her feelings of guilt for the privileged position of her family in the evacuation, explicitly introducing for the first time the inner thoughts and subjectivity of the protagonist into the narrative. In the mountains, following the Japanese surrender, emperor Fubumi dissolves the nation of Manchukuo, and as a result Ryūko has to separate from her husband. From that moment onwards, Ryūko’s voice narrates her wandering around postdefeated Manchukuo with her daughter Eisei, the fatally ill Manchurian empress and a group of women, children and elderly people of the Manchurian court. On-screen, the images show their traumatic experiences through the chaos of the defeat and the Chinese Civil War (1927–50): from the attack of a local guerrilla looking for vengeance against the Japanese, to their cold, starvation and disease when escaping to the mountains; from their detention by the Chinese communist army to their exhausting transfers from one prison to another and their public humiliation as traitors. Although this third block of the film certainly proposes a narrative of suffering and victimisation, Ryūko’s characterisation undermines the passivity and the lack of agency of the dominant representation of the Manchurian repatriates. The first-person narration contributes to the expression of the protagonist’s point of view and feelings from a subject position, stressing not only her sufferings but also her will to survive. The voiceover of Ryūko, as well as the first scene of the film, set in 1957, shows that she is in fact alive, making the traumatic experience of repatriation less fatalistic and despairing than other contemporary films. In addition, the visual and narrative representation of Ryūko also resists the complete victimisation of the character. A considerable number of close-ups emphasises the facial expression of the protagonist, displaying, with the help of Kyō Machiko’s acting, a dignified grit against the series of difficulties in which she is involved. Moreover, Ryūko’s endurance and surviving force are enhanced by the contrast between the protagonist and the

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Manchurian empress. In her long journey, Ryūko always stands up and keeps walking despite fatigue and uncertainty, acting as physical and moral support to the weak empress who, addicted to opium, ultimately dies in spite of the efforts of Ryūko to protect her. By contrast, the protagonist and her daughter overcome every difficulty and finally manage to return to Japan, sharing a boat with many other Japanese repatriates. Following their re-entry into Japan, Ryūko’s personal narration also accompanies the last sequence of the film in which the narrative jumps to an undetermined time in the late 1950s. The protagonist is by this point a mature woman living modestly with her parents and taking care of Eisei, who is now a schoolgirl educated in the Japanese culture but with a growing interest in her Chinese origins. Years after their separation, Ryūko still waits for news about her husband and continues writing him letters in the hope of finding out his situation (the voiceover narration is revealed as the content of those letters). Finally, one day, she receives good news from Futetsu: he is alive and well, imprisoned in a Chinese re-education camp with his brother. However, Ryūko’s happiness in resuming communication with her husband is soon effaced by the unexpected suicide of Eisei. The narrative again avoids explaining the circumstances of her death, as the images on-screen repeat the close-up of Eisei’s face from the opening scene and show her funeral, without providing any extra information. Over these images, Ryūko blames herself as a mother for not being able to recognise the pressure upon her daughter which the traumatic experiences in Manchukuo and the burdens of her Sino-Japanese identity provoked. Ryūko’s expression of her failure not only disrupts the traditional images of the sacrificing mother by making the female protagonist reflect on and transcend her maternal role; it also indirectly points to the national failure of the Japanese colonial project, as Eisei embodied the ideal of a Manchurian identity. Leaving out any reference to the ‘double love suicide’ and to the existence of the second daughter in real life, the character of Eisei becomes a final victim of the collapse of Manchukuo and of the war which separated her family and her two nations. After these tragic events, the last scene offers a romantic end to the narrative by reuniting Ryūko and her husband on-screen. Images of Futetsu in a Chinese prison are combined with those of Ryūko in mid-winter Japan mourning the loss of her daughter, while the voiceover narration reproduces the letters of support and affection exchanged by the couple. In her letter, Ryūko tries to make sense of the death of Eisei, sharing with Futetsu her grief and feelings of loss. In reply, Futetsu’s voiceover expresses his sorrow and his desire to be physically reunited with Ryūko soon. The comfort of her husband’s loving words gives Ryūko hope for their future together and this emotion is translated on-screen in the final image of the film. Looking confident and smiling,

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Ryūko is positioned close to a tree in the home garden; the tree was planted when Eisei was born and has since grown. Now, after a bitter winter, spring has arrived and the tree’s flowers have blossomed again. Ending the story of Ryūko in this way, The Wandering Princess disrupts the usual narratives of resignation and helplessness against the hardships of life, affirming instead the power of individuals to overcome those difficulties.

The liminal gendered position of Tanaka as a ‘semi-director’ As the analysis of the film has demonstrated, The Wandering Princess conformed in some respects to the dominant representations of women and of the national past, but challenged them in others. Focusing on the powerless condition of a Japanese woman caught in the historical flux of Japanese colonialism and militarism in Manchukuo, Tanaka’s film reproduced, to a certain extent, the ambivalent narratives of war guilt, victimhood and nostalgia that shaped most of the melodramatic depictions of the war and of the Japanese empire in post-war Japanese cinema. However, the film also complicated those narratives and their usual construction of female characters by locating a female protagonist in a colonial scenario and by making her experiences and her subjectivity the central matter of the film. Within a traditional narrative of suffering and victimisation, The Wandering Princess portrayed a woman who negotiates her difficult circumstances, expresses her feelings and desires and, as an individual agent, resists historical adversity by finding the strength to live and love. From this perspective, Tanaka‘s heroine embodied a new type of subjectivity that, as I will explore in conclusion, placed Tanaka and The Wandering Princess in a liminal position within the Japanese cinematic landscape of 1960. The year of the release of The Wandering Princess in 1960 sets the film apart from the socio-historical milieu of post-Occupation Japan in which Tanaka directed and located her first three films. In fact, the beginning of the new decade was a defining period for Japanese cinema and society in which, despite the discourses of economic growth and political stability of the second half of the 1950s, Japan’s post-war identity and socio-political order were being critically questioned. The nation’s involvement in Cold War politics brought to the public arena the tensions and contradictions which underlay the historical narratives of the past and the construction of the post-war democratic society. For instance, the 1960 anti-Anpo (US–Japan Security Treaty) demonstrations, led by student groups and civil society, against the scheduled renewal of the bilateral agreement, and the assassination of the socialist politician Asanuma Inejirō (1898–1960) in the same year, expressed the unresolved conflicts regarding the war, the defeat and the geopolitical role of Japan in the polarised Cold War world.

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These tensions and contradictions also emerged in the film world, particularly in the cinema and critical writings of a young generation of filmmakers who debuted during this period, such as Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006), Ōshima Nagisa (1932–2013) and Yoshida Kijū (1933–). Although in 1960 these and other directors of the so-called ‘Japanese New Wave’ were still working within the Japanese studio system, they nonetheless exhibited a disapproving and rebellious attitude towards the mainstream cinema. As Isolde Standish points out, many of these filmmakers ‘had close links with left-wing student organisations and sought through cinema to challenge the politics of conservatism and the accepted grammar of “visual style” of the major studios’ (2011: 17). For example, Ōshima ([1959] 1992) wrote an article about his own employer Shōchiku in 1959 in which he openly criticised the studio and its films for their stagnation and lack of social and political consciousness. During the 1960s, some of these young directors, especially Ōshima, would advocate overcoming the victim consciousness that, in their view, dominated the humanistic films and melodramatic modes and genres produced by the Japanese studio system and by some independent directors associated with the 1950s ‘old left’. In addition, the cinema of this new generation of filmmakers would develop innovative notions and representations of subjectivity that aimed to construct film subjects (film characters, but also filmmakers and audience) as active agents capable of politically engaging, questioning and/or transforming the socio-historical reality of the Japanese nation.16 It was in precisely this context that, a few months after the release of The Wandering Princess, Kinema junpō’s film critic Nemoto Jirō analysed Tanaka’s film as a work located in between the melodramatic tradition of the studio’s productions and the new cinematic subjectivities emerging from the young directors of the Japanese New Wave (Nemoto 1960). In his critical piece, Nemoto groups Tanaka Kinuyo together with other actors who had become directors during this period, such as Yamamura Sō (1910–2000), Saburi Shin (1909–82) and Uno Jūkichi (1914–88). He calls them ’semi-directors’, observing their outsiders’ authorial position and their fresh approach as actors who became directors without following the usual path of assistant-director apprenticeship and without dedicating themselves exclusively to their directorial career. According to Nemoto, this unique position allowed them to make films in which the naturalistic realism (shizenshugi riarizumu) that dominated many acclaimed works in post-war Japanese cinema could finally collapse. Nemoto refers, among others, to Ichikawa and Wada’s Fires on the Plain, The Human Condition and Chikamatsu’s ‘Love in Osaka’ (Naniwa no koi no monogatari, Uchida Tomu, 1959) as successful films well-received by the critics but ‘covered with a veil of emptiness and entire darkness’ (1960: 134). In his view, those

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films failed to represent the human experience because their directors used the characters as ‘guinea pigs’ to demonstrate conceptual propositions they created in their mind (1960: 134). Being placed in a passive subject position, the protagonists become merely reactive towards the circumstances imposed upon them by the directors. By contrast, the films of the semi-directors were able, according to Kinema junpō’s critic, to overcome the ‘empty despair’ and the ‘cause-and-effect relationship between circumstances and personality’ (Nemoto 1960: 134–5) which invaded these celebrated works and their characters. In Nemoto’s view, Tanaka and the other actor-directors achieve this by depicting the strength and courage of individuals who manage to survive under adverse conditions by countering those circumstances with their vitality and energy. In the case of The Wandering Princess, Nemoto affirms that Tanaka’s film destroys the formula of the tragic melodrama in presenting a character that, despite her vicissitudes, shows an intrinsically human consciousness as she persists in surviving traumatic circumstances and hoping for a happy life with her family. In particular, Nemoto mentions the final sequence in which the film, ‘through a gentle cross-cutting montage of the exchange of letters between wife and husband far apart from each other, expresses their limitless attachment to life even after the death of their daughter’. In this way, Tanaka’s film conveys ‘their desire of being together soon, living in love and reinforcing their “bond” (kizuna) as a married couple’ (1960: 134). Despite his general praise of the semi-directors, however, Nemoto ends his article by complicating the position of Tanaka and the others, in that he points out their weak social consciousness and the limited capacity of their films to confront society. In his view, for instance, The Wandering Princess fails on this point because the film is not able to transcend the personal tragedy of the protagonist, leaving unexplored the historical significance of her position as the wife of the brother of Manchukuo’s emperor. Nevertheless, for Kinema junpō’s critic, the authorial attitude found in those films of Tanaka, Yamamura, Saburi and Uno should be considered a starting point for the creation of a ’new wave of Japanese cinema’ (nihon eiga no atarashii hadō) able to challenge Japanese society and its conventions (1960: 135). In this sense, Nemoto places his hopes for this task in the emerging generation of filmmakers and their stronger social consciousness, pointing in particular to Ōshima who, according to the critic, successfully represented the differences between rich and poor in his debut film A Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi, 1959). Grasping the liminal position of Tanaka’s film in the Japanese cinema of the 1960s, Nemoto’s article offers a clever interpretation of The Wandering Princess as a film departing from the historical representations of individuals who

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cannot but succumb to overwhelming circumstances. However, he did not take into account that both Tanaka’s authorial position and her film representation differed from those of the other semi-directors and were, in part, specifically determined by the female gender of Tanaka as a woman filmmaker. Unlike in the case of Yamamura, Saburi and Uno, who shared a certain degree of interest in political and social matters that could have influenced their films,17 in the case of Tanaka and The Wandering Princess the film representation of the female character depicted by Nemoto emerged from her authorial position as a female director. As this chapter has explored, it was from that gendered position that Tanaka adapted Saga’s story and worked with Wada Natto and Kyō Machiko in Daiei, moving within the boundaries of the mainstream representation but purposely creating a different type of heroine. Her condition as a woman behind the camera doing a woman’s film translated on-screen into the construction of a female protagonist as a historical subject, whose experiences and subjectivity became the heart of the narrative. Certainly, as Nemoto implicitly points out, the position of Tanaka regarding the wartime past was not one of radical critique, as advocated by the Japanese New Wave directors, but conformed to the dominant narratives of post-war Japanese cinema and society. Like many Japanese who experienced the constraints of the war and of Japanese militarism and as a filmmaker who participated in propaganda films supporting the wartime ideology,18 Tanaka most probably felt herself a victim of those historical circumstances and looked indulgently at the past from that point of view. In fact, as Tanaka affirmed, she wasted the most productive period of her acting career as a result of the pause caused by the war (Tanaka et al. 1961: 66). In this sense, Tanaka’s intentions in directing The Wandering Princess were presumably not aimed at offering a critical indictment of the wartime past, but rather at representing a resilient heroine and her love story, going beyond the construction of female characters as mere bearers of ideological positions or projections of male subjectivities. As a result, The Wandering Princess offered an affirmative portrayal of a woman’s historical experience which, following the aesthetic and narrative conventions of women’s films, represented a genuine female subjectivity in post-war Japanese cinema.

Notes 1. According to the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren 2016), 547 films were released in 1960, the highest number produced in one year in the post-war Japanese film industry before 2012. 2. Although Japanese presence in the north of Manchuria dated back to the Meiji era, Manchukuo was officially established in February 1932 following the so-called ‘Mukden Incident’ in September 1931. Allegedly initiated by Chinese troops, the

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

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incident was actually a simulated attack planned and executed by the Japanese army to justify the military invasion of the whole of Manchuria and part of Mongolia. Unlike other Japanese colonies, Manchukuo was a formally independent state, although the Japanese army and government effectively ruled and managed the territory as an essential part of the Japanese empire. The occupation and foundation of Manchukuo gave rise to the period of intense military conflicts in China that finally resulted in the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937–45). The Mukden Incident is commonly regarded as the starting point for the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45). On the history of Manchukuo see, for example, Young (1998) and Yamamuro (2006). Saga’s autobiography has been published several times, by different publishers and with revised and extended contents. In all the editions she used the pen name Aishinkakura Hiro, drawing on the surname of her husband. In this chapter, I use the text adapted for Tanaka’s film, the first edition of Saga’s memoirs published in 1959 by Bungei Shunjū (Aishinkakura 1959). Unless otherwise indicated all translations are my own. Although Wada Natto was not present at the meeting, her name as the scriptwriter of the film was explicitly indicated by Matsuyama when pointing out the presence of women authors in the project (Asahi shinbun 1959a). For example, in her previous films Tanaka had always filmed on location, such as in the streets of Shibuya (Love Letter), the temples of Nara (The Moon Has Risen), or in places related to Nakajō Fumiko in Hokkaido (The Eternal Breasts), demonstrating her concern for film realism. In the case of The Wandering Princess, the impossibility of filming in China became an obstacle for the production of the film, as covered by newspaper articles that reported the difficulties of Tanaka and her team in re-creating Manchurian landscapes in Japanese locations (Yomiuri shinbun 1959; Asahi shinbun 1959b). See, for example, her words concerning this issue in Wada and Okada (1960: 55). This may be the reason why the work of Wada in Tanaka’s film has often been dismissed as an unsuccessful project in her career as scriptwriter. According to the film critic Ōguro Toyoshi, rather than signifying a ‘first chance’ in Wada´s career, The Wandering Princess was a big failure (1960: 54). Ichikawa also pointed to Wada’s own dissatisfaction with the script: ‘It would be the first time that she wrote a script that she disliked so much’ (Ichikawa and Mori 1994: 457). For instance, as Chika Kinoshita astutely notes, in his films with Kyō, Mizoguchi never failed to include her in a naked bathing scene (2007: 332). In Princess Yang Kwei-Fei, the erotic image of Kyō stepping out of the bathtub is offered to the audience, her body opportunely framed and covered to hide a full view of her back. For example, during the Occupation, films such as Desertion at Dawn (Akatsuki no dassō, Taniguchi Senkichi, 1950) and Woman of Shanghai (Shanhai no onna, Inagaki Hiroshi, 1952) presented stories of interracial romances that nostalgically recalled the wartime colonial propaganda of the so-called ‘goodwill films’ (shinzen eiga) and at the same time constructed a narrative of victimisation about the colonial past (Baskett 2008: 137–45). For a more detailed analysis of Twenty-Four Eyes from this perspective see Sato (1982: 109–13) and Orr (2001: 109–16).

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12. For example, it is worth mentioning here one of Daiei’s early haha-mono films, Wandering Stars Are Still Alive (Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru, Koishi Eiichi, 1949), since it has many points of connection with The Wandering Princess. Both are based on the memoirs of a Japanese repatriated woman (in this case on the autobiography of Fujiwara Tei [1918–2016] – see Fujiwara 1949) and present a female-centred story set in Manchukuo. However, unlike Tanaka’s film, Wandering Stars. . . depicts the female protagonist purely as a sacrificing mother and only focuses on her passive sufferings after the defeat, constructing a narrative of victimisation that visualises the experiences of the repatriates without considering their former position as colonial agents. 13. On war films and issues relating to soldiers, masculinity and national identity in 1950s Japan see Standish (2000: 68–157), Wilson (2008, 2013) and Stegewerns (2015). 14. On the presence and role of female characters in Japanese war films see Hauser (1991) and Coates (2013). 15. The star persona of the actor Funakoshi Eiji certainly contributes to the characterisation of Futetsu as a gentle and romantic hero. As Donald Richie notes, Funakoshi was a Daiei actor who specialised in ‘those light male leads called nimaime in Japan – secondary roles, the men attractively weak so as contrast with the tachi, the typical strong macho hero’ (2001: 248). Nevertheless, even in his leading role as a soldier in the military narrative of Fires on the Plain, Funakoshi does not embody a heroic masculinity, but rather a vulnerable and powerless one. 16. On the issues of subjectivity and anti-victimisation in the New Wave directors see, for example, the analysis of Ōshima’s initial films and writings in Yoshimoto (2007) and Roberts (2015), the discussion on Yoshida’s concept of self-negation in Yoshida (2006) and Noonan (2010), and the examination of female subjectivity in the early 1960s films of Imamura in Briciu (2012: 35–103). 17. For example, Yamamura had also directed The Crab Cannery Ship (Kanikosen, 1953), the film adaptation of the homonymous novel written by Kobayashi Takiji (1903–33) in 1929 and considered a classic of pre-war proletarian literature. Similarly, Saburi had shown an interest in political and social topics in films such as Square of Isolation (Hiroba no kodoku, 1953) and Insurrection (Hanran, 1954), being regarded, although not without controversy, as a ‘hero of the new-left’ (Kimata 2009). In the case of Uno, he was an actor of the shingeki movement, literary ‘new theatre’, a form of Westernstyle modern theatre of leftist orientation, and one of the founders of the left-wing theatre company Gekidan Mingei (People’s Art Theatre). 18. On the wartime career of Tanaka Kinuyo, see Lee (2011).

Bibliography Aishinkakura, Hiro (1959), Ruten no ōhi: Manshū kyūtei no higeki, Tokyo: Bungei shunjū. Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie (1982), The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, expanded edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Armendáriz-Hernández, Alejandra (2016), ‘Repensando el autor en el cine japonés. La autoría femenina de Tanaka Kinuyo en La luna se ha levantado (1955)’, in A. Lozano Méndez (ed.), El Japón contemporáneo: Una aproximación desde los estudios culturales,

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Barcelona: Bellaterra-Centro de Estudios e Investigación sobre Asia Oriental Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, pp. 79–104. Asahi shinbun (1937), Keiko bibishiki Hiro hime, kinō Fuketsu-shi to o-kekkon, Tokyo, extra issue, 4 April, p. 2. Asahi shinbun (1957), Amagisan shinjū: Shi wo isogu wakamono-tachi, Tokyo, morning edition, 11 December, p. 9. Asahi shinbun (1959a), Gensaku, kyakuhon, kantoku, āru josei, Tokyo, evening edition, 21 August, p. 4. Asahi shinbun (1959b), Kinuyo kantoku ōwarawa – kyū manshūkoku fūkei no saigen ni, Tokyo, evening edition, 28 December, p. 4. Baskett, Michael (2008), The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Briciu, Bianca Otilia (2008), The Cinema of the Victim: Gender and Collective Trauma in the Postwar Japanese Woman’s Film, MA thesis, Carleton University. Briciu, Bianca Otilia (2012), Negotiating Power: Gender and Body Politics in the New Wave Japanese Cinema, Ph.D. thesis, Carleton University. Coates, Jennifer (2013), ‘Victims and bystanders: women in the Japanese war-retro film’, Media, War & Conflict 6: 3, pp. 233–48. Daiei (1960), The Wandering Princess, Daiei press sheet no. 879. Eiren (2016), Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan. Official website, (last accessed 20 May 2016). Fujiwara, Tei (1949), Nagareru hoshi wa ikiteiru, trans. Mizushima, Nananko V. (2014), Tei, A Memoir of the End of War and Beginning of Peace, Tonbo Books. Gluck, Carol (1993), ‘The Past in the Present’, in Andrew Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 64–96. Hauser, William B. (1991), ‘Women and War: the Japanese film image’, in Gail Lee Bernstein (ed.), Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 296–314. Ichikawa, Kon and Mori, Yūki (1994), Ichikawa Kon no eiga-tachi, Tokyo: Waizu Shuppan. Igarashi, Yoshikuni (2000), Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Izbicki, Joanne (1996), ‘The shape of freedom: the female body in post-surrender Japanese cinema’, U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal: English Supplement 12, pp. 109–53. Kimata, Kimihiko (2009), ‘Kōen: Saburi Shin wo saiken suru: dai 3-kai anakuronizumu no kai’, Athénée Français Cultural Center, (last accessed 20 May 2016). Kinema junpō (2003), Sengo Kinema junpō besuto ten zenshi 1946–2002, Tokyo: Kinema junpōsha. Kinoshita, Chika (2007), Mise-èn-scene of Desire: The Films of Mizoguchi Kenji, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago. Kitamura, Kyōhei (2016), ‘Jūsō-ka suru Karada he no manazashi: Vanpu joyū toshite no Kyō Machiko no bunseki’, Journal of Mass Communication Studies 88, pp. 77–96. Lee, Kyoung-suk (2011), ‘Senji-ka Nihon eiga ni okeru Tanaka Kinuyo no hyōshō henka kenkyū’, Bungaku kyōiku 43, pp. 111–46.

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Nemoto, Jirō (1960), ‘Semi direkutā no kōseki: “Ruten no ōhi” o meguru mondai’, Kinema junpō 254, March, pp. 134–5. Noonan, Patrick (2010), ‘The alterity of cinema: subjectivity, self-negation, and selfrealization in Yoshida Kijū’s film criticism’, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22, December, pp. 110–29. Ōguro, Toyoshi (1960), ‘Shinario sakka Wada Natto: josei raitā no tokushitsu’, Kinema junpō 252, February, pp. 52–4. Orr, James J. (2001), The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ōshima, Nagisa ([1959] 1992), ‘A Review of “Sleeping Lion: Shochiku Ofuna”’, trans. Dawn Lawson, in Annette Michelson (ed.) (1992), Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956–1978, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 36–41. Richie, Donald (2001), ‘Ten Dark Women’, in James Quandt (ed.), Kon Ichikawa, Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, pp. 247–52. Roberts, M. Downing (2015), ‘Ōshima Nagisa on Responsibility and Premonition: Shiiku (1961) and Amakusa Shirō Tokisada (1962)’, in M. Downing Roberts (ed.), Perspectives on Oshima Nagisa, Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, pp. 91–115. Saito, Ayako (2003a), ‘Orchestration of tears: the politics of crying and reclaiming women’s public sphere’, Sense of Cinema 28, October, (last accessed 20 May 2016). Saito, Ayako (2003b), ‘Ushinawareta farosu wo motomete: Kinoshita Keisuke no “namida no sanbusaku” saikō’, in Hase Masato and Nakamura Hideyuki (eds), Eiga no seijigaku, Tokyo: Seikyūsha, pp. 61–117. Sato, Tadao (1982), Currents in Japanese Cinema: Essays by Tadao Sato, trans. Gregory Barrett, Tokyo: Kodansha International. Shimazu, Naoko (2003), ‘Popular representations of the past: the case of postwar Japan’, Journal of Contemporary History 38: 1, January, pp. 101–16. Smith, Michael (2015), ‘Natto Wada’, in Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo (eds), Women Screenwriters: An International Guide, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 120–4. Standish, Isolde (2000), Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the ‘Tragic Hero’, Richmond: Curzon. Standish, Isolde (2011), Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, New York; London: Continuum. Stegewerns, Dick (2015), ‘Establishing the Genre of the Revisionist War Film: The ShinTōhō Body of Post-Occupation War Films in Japan’, in King-fai Tam, Timothy Y. Tsu and Sandra Wilson (eds), Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, Abingdon; New York: Routledge, pp. 93–106. Tamanoi, Mariko Asano (2009), Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Tanaka, Kinuyo, K. Kawakita, H. Takamine and K. Yamamoto (1961), ‘Eiga ni okeru josei no tachiba: Zadankai’, Kinema junpō, April, pp. 65–8. Trans. and introd. A. ArmendárizHernández and I. González-López, ‘Roundtable: the position of women in post-war Japanese cinema (Kinema junpō, 1961)’, Film Studies 16, Spring, pp. 36–55.

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Wada, Natto (1960), The Wandering Princess, Script, Shinario, New Year Special Issue, pp. 135–61. Wada, Natto and Okada Susumu (1960), ‘Bungaku-shinario-eiga’, Kinema junpō 252, February, pp. 55–8. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2009), ‘The postwar Japanese melodrama’, trans. Bianca Briciu, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 21, December, pp. 19–32. Watt, Lori (2009), When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Wilson, Sandra (2008), ‘War, soldier and nation in 1950s Japan’, Journal of Contemporary History 48: 3, pp. 537–55. Wilson, Sandra (2013), ‘Film and soldier: Japanese war movies in the 1950s’, International Journal of Asian Studies 5: 2, pp. 187–218. Yamamuro, Shin’ichi (2006), Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion, trans. Joshua A. Fogel, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Yomiuri shinbun (1957), Haikei go busata-shimashitaga . . ., Tokyo, evening edition, 9 February, p. 4. Yomiuri shinbun (1959), Manshū sagashi ni shikuhakku. Tokyo, evening edition, 8 December, p. 5. Yomiuri shinbun (1960a), The Wandering Princess, advertisement, Tokyo, evening edition, 17 January, p. 4. Yomiuri shinbun (1960b), The Wandering Princess, advertisement, Tokyo, evening edition, 24 January, p. 4. Yoshida, Kijū (2006), ‘My theory of film: a logic of self-negation’, trans. Patrick Noonan, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22, December 2010, pp. 104–9. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2000), Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2007), ‘Questions of the New: Oshima Nagisa’s Cruel Story of Youth (1960)’, in Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer (eds), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, Abingdon; New York: Routledge, pp. 168–79. Young, Louise (1998), Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Filmography A Fool’s Love (Chijin no ai, Kimura Keigo, 1949) Bengawan River (Bungawan soro, Ichikawa Kon, 1951) Chikamatsu’s ‘Love in Osaka’ (Naniwa no koi no monogatari, Uchida Tomu, 1959) Desertion at Dawn (Akatsuki no dassō, Taniguchi Senkichi, 1950) Fires on the Plain (Nobi, Ichikawa Kon, 1959) Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953) Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1961) Insurrection (Hanran, Saburi Shin, 1954) Love Letter (Koibumi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1953)

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Love under the Crucifix (Oginsama, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1962) Miracle of Marcelino (Marcelino, pan y vino, Ladislao Vajda, 1955) Nihonbashi (Nihonbashi, Ichikawa Kon, 1956) Odd Obsession (Kagi, Ichikawa Kon, 1959) Older Brother, Younger Sister (Ani imōto, Naruse Mikio, 1953) Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (Yōkihi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1955) Queen of Asia (Sen’un Ajia no jo’ō, Nomura Hiromasa, 1957) Rashomon (Rashōmon, Kurosawa Akira, 1950) Square of Isolation (Hiroba no kodoku, Saburi Shin, 1953) Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1956) The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, Ichikawa Kon, 1956) The Crab Cannery Ship (Kanikosen, Yamamura Sō, 1953) The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, Kobayashi Masaki, 1959–61) The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge, Albert Lamorisse, 1956) The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1960) Twenty-Four Eyes (Nijūshi no hitomi, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1954) Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi, Ōshima Nagisa, 1959) Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953) Woman of Shanghai (Shanhai no onna, Inagaki Hiroshi, 1952) Wandering Stars Are Still Alive (Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru, Koishi Eiichi, 1949)

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Chapter 7 Panpan Girls, Lesbians and Post-war Women’s Communities: Girls of Dark (1961) as Women’s Cinema Yuka Kanno

The film Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru) was directed by Tanaka Kinuyo and released in 1961, nine years after the end of the US Occupation of Japan and three years after the full abolition of state-regulated prostitution. The beginning of the film inscribes these historical moments with an opening shot of a headline on the Prostitution Prevention Law, followed by a rapid-tempo montage of women on the street, a woman and a man embracing at a hotel, and women being loaded into a police wagon. A male voiceover track speaking of the disappearance of the red-light district and wondering about the whereabouts of women on the streets overlaps with this succession of shots. Written, adapted and directed by women, Girls of Dark traces the experience of one such woman, unfolding her struggles and her aspiration to ‘start over again’. While revolving around Kuniko (Hara Chisako [1936–]), a former street prostitute (panpan), 1 the film also places equal emphasis on her relationships with others at the Shiragiku Protective Facility for Women. With the passage of the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, unenforced until 1958, and the resulting (official) disappearance of the panpan as its background, the film portrays both solidarity and conflict in women’s communities. It is also from within this female space that one of the earliest lesbian figures in Japanese film emerges. Within two weeks of the Second World War’s conclusion, the Japanese government established the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), which provided exclusive ‘comfort facilities’ for the Occupation forces, where women were recruited for ‘the urgent national task’ of, according to the government, comforting the soldiers (Kobayashi and Murase 2008: 23).2 Street prostitutes catering exclusively to US Occupation forces had already begun to emerge immediately after the war, but when the RAA was shut down because of widespread venereal disease among the troops, many of the former RAA sex workers began to work privately and were given the name ‘panpan’.3 As an embodiment of ‘subversive Americanism’, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to borrow the words of Yoshimi Shunya, the panpan were both despised and envied (Yoshimi 2007: 109). This ambivalence is reflected in Kuniko, the protagonist of Girls of Dark, whose supposedly excessive sexuality is the object of constant surveillance and correction. The theme of the ‘regenesis’ of ex-prostitutes in the space of the women’s rehabilitation facility was also recalled in a series of ‘panpan films’ such as Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1948) by Makino Masahiro (1908–93), Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, 1948) by Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) and White Beast (Shiroi yajū, 1950) by Naruse Mikio (1905–69). Post-war Japan, as John Dower has argued, socially and culturally treated women’s bodies as symbols not only of political, but also literally of physical liberation (1999). Yet, for whom was this liberation intended? Did the women themselves genuinely feel freed? Just as those chastised by fellow panpan for their unrestrained sexual desire in Tamura Taijirō’s 1947 novel Gate of Flesh, women and their bodies were represented in a wide range of cultural arenas in post-war Japan and their treatment was far from liberated; rather, they were punished for sexual excess. This chapter considers the correlations among lesbian representation, women’s communities and women’s cinema that are present in the film. Girls of Dark can be considered an unusual film in representing a lesbian character within the framework of commercial films on general release in 1961. Its lesbian desire is generated from and within the women’s space of the correction facility, a domain which accommodates other ‘deviant’ women: former sex workers such as panpan and housed prostitutes from the red-light district. The exploration here of the connection between lesbianism and female communities will use what Claire Johnston called ‘women’s discourse’, a critical concept in early feminist film theory, which, I believe, remains significant for the analysis of ‘women’s cinema’ (Johnston 1975: 7). In the following pages, I hope to show that this connection between lesbian narrative/desire and female spaces and communities, deeply embedded in the very specific historical conditions of Japan’s post-war experience, makes Girls of Dark an example of women’s cinema.

Lesbian, or just crazy? The portrayal of lesbianism in this film is unique in terms of its historicity as well as in terms of its mode of representation. Japanese films before the 1960s rarely demonstrated explicit lesbian desire, identity or subjectivity. There were, of course, cinematic representations of lesbian-like sexual acts between women, if expanded to ‘adult films’ (seijin eiga), and films that depicted romantic yet non-sexual female–female intimacy based on the novels by Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973) had already been produced in the 1930s.4 Before this film, female same-sex desires and relationships tended to be expressed only in two patterns: schoolgirl romance and as a kind of lesbianism manifesting only in physical terms. In the former case, female–female desire can easily be denied in the name Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of friendship (or kinship), and in the latter lesbianism exists only as a purely sexual, erotic act. Nonetheless, by separating the body and the spirit, these patterns represented women’s desire for other women either as merely a sexual behaviour or as emotional bonding. Discussion of ‘lesbian representation’ in general, particularly in relation to Japanese film, entails a great deal of difficulty. If we have a mere visual allusion and connotation on the one pole, there is also an excessive visuality on the other. As D. A. Miller astutely pointed out in his reading of Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), the representation of homosexuality has often been consigned to connotation, which is ‘the dominant signifying practice of homophobia’. As opposed to this doubtful and debatable secondary meaning (‘but isn’t it just . . .?’), denotation is immediate and self-evident (Miller 1991: 123–5). A number of Japanese cultural texts with lesbian narratives and images have also been read as secondary, or as subtext, and thus female–female desire has been concealed, suppressed, or substituted, at best, for other forms of intimacy such as emotional ties and ‘friendship’.5 Excessively visualised lesbianism, on the other hand, serves as a kind of spectacle. In such cases, lesbianism means something where desire is represented and defined by sexual acts, or more precisely by genitally-centred physical contact. Narratively and thematically unmotivated, this spectacular lesbianism often visualises sexual behaviours with no intimacy or emotional intensity. Its role is to serve and enhance the heterosexual plot and its narrative resolution. At a glance, Girls of Dark might appear one such film. One of the women at the facility, Kameju, demonstrates an excessive attachment to another woman, but her lesbianism does not fit either the pattern of ‘secondary lesbianism’ or that of ‘spectacular lesbianism’. Performed by the inimitable kansai comedienne Naniwa Chieko (1907–73), the theatrical exaggeration of the Kameju character does not provide the audience with an easy point of identification or a route for affective attachment. As a corollary to the ways in which representations of lesbianism tend to be polarised, predominantly serving the heterosexual male gaze, a fundamental question still remains: what counts as evidence of erotic desire and relationships between women? Even though sexuality may ‘exceed any given performance, presentation, or narrative’, and therefore ‘is never fully “expressed” in a performance or practice’ (Butler 1993: 315), I still want to grapple with the expression of lesbian desire and subjectivity in Girls of Dark. The film also lays out a narrative device to lead us to interpret Kameju’s attachment to another girl as having nothing to do with lesbian desire. That is to say, her narrative position as an older, former prostitute and syphilis-carrier could explain her eccentricities and, accordingly, reduce her lesbian desire to a clinical condition. In fact, the women of the pleasure quarter, the red-light districts and the streets have often been associated with syphilis in Japanese films. At the beginning of Girls of Dark, Kitamura, a facility staff member (played by Sawamura Sadako [1908–96]), Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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informs a group of women inspectors that ‘probably the disease causes Kameju to have fits sometimes’. As this representational connection between prostitution and lunacy is well-established, lesbianism as its manifestation does not seem like a drastic leap. The treatment of Kameju in the early part of the film has a historical resonance with the pathologisation and criminalisation of female homosexuality, views heavily influenced by sexology discourses of the 1910s and 1920s. Kameju’s braided hair and the immature pestering of the object of her obsession are all visual reminders of Japanese schoolgirl culture of the early twentieth century, in which intense female–female intimacy urged the formation of the new term and concept of ‘same-sex love’ (doseai), which was brought to public attention as an emerging social problem (Pflugfelder 1999; Furukawa 2004; Akaeda 2011). In this scenario, Kameju’s lesbian desire is nullified as nothing but a seizure caused by the disease. The film nevertheless forcefully invites us to read Kameju as a queer character. The compulsive physical and emotional attachment to another woman witnessed on-screen surpasses the narrative containment of lesbianism to mere insanity. With her manic behaviour, the film visually marks Kameju as an odd woman who leaves a somewhat eerie impression on the viewer, but the sense of disconcertment or inappropriateness she creates should instead be related to temporality. As the conversation between the women inspecting the facility indicates, her braided hair creates a striking gap with her narrative position as a fifty-nine-year-old woman. Kameju’s desire for a much younger woman (Yoshimi, played by Tominaga Misako [1933–75]) is proved destructive when the latter’s habitual escape attempts from the facility to reunite with a boyfriend finally lead Kameju to insanity and suicide. Thus, her appearance, unrequited love for a much younger straight woman and immature, hyperactive behaviour all register Kameju’s temporal deviancy, the disparity between her narrative position (as mature older-aged woman) and the visual register (as immature and hyperactive behaviour) emphasises her temporal oddness. Kameju is not only out of time, but also out of place. Embodied by Naniwa, her Kansai regional dialect differentiates her spatially from others whose speech does not show any specific geographical markers. It is this temporal and spatial singularity that inscribes Kameju’s queerness, if, as Judith Halberstam has argued, queerness can be thought of not only in terms of sexuality, but also in terms of temporality and spatiality (Halberstam 2005). In this way, Girls of Dark anchors Kameju’s lesbianism by casting her queerness in its temporal and special deviancy, rather than in sexual identity. Despite these incongruities, the film does not register this eccentric character as a complete ‘other’ to be excluded from the all-female intimate space. On the contrary, the reaction of the other women to Kameju’s obsession with Yoshimi, who generally shows a curious passivity to her advances, indicates the film’s emphasis on her lesbianism as one such element of difference constituting Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the diversity of female space. Although in women’s cinema ‘female bonding’ often works as the mechanism whereby lesbianism is repressed or concealed, in Girls of Dark such bonding becomes the very locus from within which lesbianism emerges. The film invites lesbianism as a kind of temporal and spatial error into the screen; nonetheless, Kameju’s difference does not make her an alienated figure, as it constitutes just one among many other variations. As such, Kameju makes this female space even more heterogeneous and dynamic.

Women’s communities In Girls of Dark, women’s communities are multi-layered, and their plurality and heterogeneity make up equally diverse forms of female bonding. Although the plot can be summarised as tracing the second life of a former panpan, women’s communities and the relationships among them are the real gravitational pull of the film. Instead of highlighting individual efforts and failures, Girls of Dark more closely deals with how the members of these groups simultaneously impede and support one another. It is this seemingly contradictory nature which characterises women’s communities in this film. Taking the Shiragiku protective facility as an example, from the very beginning, the heterogeneity of and in these communities is visually articulated by the ways in which three different women’s groups – the supervising, the supervised, and the members of the women’s organisation who inspect the facility – occupy the same space. After an exterior establishing shot, the camera goes inside and captures the governess Nogami (Awashima Chikage, 1924–2012), whose brisk gracefulness lights up the screen. While she is explaining the facility to the visitors, her confident way of speaking and behaviour indicates her matriarchal position in this female space. At that very moment, Kuniko enters the scene carrying tea for Nogami’s guests. This is one of the ways in which Girls of Dark emphasises the differences among women within the female space: the surveying and the surveyed, and the women who come to inspect the place and leave convinced of ‘our’ difference from ‘them’. Even among the surveyed inmates, groups are separated on the basis of whether or not their members carry venereal disease. Later in the film, Kuniko takes a job at a factory, expecting her final separation from the facility. Instead of the friendship she hopes to find in this new environment, she undergoes a brutal beating inflicted by female co-workers, who accuse her of seducing their boyfriends. These female workers punish her with a candle used to burn and injure her genitals. The scene, which suggests the rape of a woman by other women, has an explicitly sexual nature, as we can see the ecstatic expression on the face of the main aggressor. In spite of the physical and emotional persecution Kuniko faces, it is almost always women who obstruct Kuniko’s efforts to break with her past, and the film is by no means a utopian paean to female solidarity; Kuniko still enters another Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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female community by the end of the film. In this way, Girls of Dark creates female spaces filled with contradictions and ambiguities, where solidarity and exclusion, as well as erotically charged violence and affections, often cohabit and compete. Panpan women who claim and fight over territory are also bound by the principle of reciprocity in Makino’s Gate of Flesh or Mizoguchi’s Women of the Night; therefore, it cannot be said that panpan films of the 1940s do not fail to portray women’s communality. Yet, what differentiates Tanaka’s film from other panpan films lies in the ways it represents its patriarchal figure. The patriarch in the other films is either a father figure who takes the women under his wing, or a potential love interest. An example of the former occurs in Women of the Night, which portrays a hospital director (played by Murata Hirotoshi [1899–1958]) as an understanding and reliable man with whom the female patients act flirtatiously. The latter can be found in Naruse Mikio’s White Beast, in which the former panpan protagonist must compete with a female doctor who is romantically involved with a patriarchal male supervisor in the rehabilitation facility. In Gate of Flesh, which was remade three times after Makino Masahiro’s 1948 attempt, the wild and masculine Ibuki invades the film’s female space, rupturing the women’s bonds by becoming the object of their affections. Such a father-like character is absent in Girls of Dark. In contrast, female leaders may come across as stern, but are also tender and dignified. In a strong departure from the original novel, for instance, the film replaces the male headmaster with the young and affectionate matron Nogami. As well as sharing a great degree of intimacy with Kuniko, she also believes passionately in her potential. Their relationship, I would argue, appears an even queerer point than Kameju’s lesbianism. The strong ties between Kuniko and Nogami, which are even maintained through correspondence when Kuniko is away from the facility, reveal an intensity that overwhelms any other intimate relationship in the film. Faced with repeated setbacks, and continuous failure to break with her past, Kuniko experiences the bond with Nogami as her only anchor. Nogami is not alone in her advocacy for the women. After Kuniko is severely injured by the factory workers, a female supervisor (Sugai Kin, 1926–) brings her assailants to Nogami in order to make them apologise for their actions. She does so not only as an ethical imperative, but also to protect them from involvement in a police matter. Although the male director of the factory tries to settle the case by retreating to safe ground, the proactive attitudes of the two women sharply contrast with his cowardice. From the factory director to the grocery store owner who lusts after Kuniko, the male ‘authority’ figures in Girls of Dark are represented ironically as indecisive, unreliable, calculating and opportunistic. Even at the film’s highest moment of heterosexual romance in which Kuniko falls in love with the gardener Hayakawa (Natsuki Yōsuke, 1936–), who proclaims that he does not care about her past, the romance is immediately thwarted after his mother objects to their marriage. In this way, the film does not give Hayakawa a chance to be a strong-minded male who acts on his desires Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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against his mother’s will. It is after this break-up that Kuniko joins a women’s community for the third time, as we see her among supportive female divers at the seaside. This ending suggests the importance of female community to Kuniko, rather than reliance on a father or a male lover. Like the character of Kameju, Girls of Dark also carries its own anomalous temporality, if we think about the time lapse between this film and the proliferation of other panpan-themed films as mentioned above. In her analysis of panpan discourse and its association with Christian rhetoric, Arai Eiko points out that male Christian leaders often overlapped panpan with Mary of Magdala or the Samaritan Woman by mentioning redemption and salvation (Arai 2007: 160). The representation of panpan as saints, then, should not be seen as a uniquely cinematic phenomenon, nor are they coincidental aesthetic preferences. Historians and literary critics have observed the widespread use of ‘confession’ and ‘redemption’ in cultural and philosophical discourses of the period. For instance, Oguma Eiji writes that the post-war experience implanted Christian feelings of remorse and sin in people’s minds, which led to a tendency to seek a ‘god’ who would punish and forgive their sins. Considering this, we can say that certain visual and narrative motifs in these panpan films are firmly anchored in the post-war ethos. Girls of Dark, however, is quite different. It does not divide women into ‘virgins’ or ‘fallen women’, and its treatment of male characters also differs from that of other films in the genre, in which a patriarchal figure, either as protector or love interest, makes an inevitable appearance.

Creating women’s communities All these diverse communities are created by another women’s community: Yana Masako (1911–86), the author of There Is a Way But (Michi aredo, 1960) on which the film is based; Tanaka Sumie (1908–2000), the screenwriter; and Tanaka Kinuyo (1909–77), the director. Girls of Dark, and the uniqueness of its women’s communities, would not exist without the collaboration of these three female authors. In terms of collaborative filmmaking, Ōkubo Yasuaki (2008: 227) insists on the importance of ‘compound-eye thinking’ (fukuganteki shikō) as a way of examining film texts, by seeing the filmic singularity of Floating Clouds (Ukigumo, Naruse Mikio, 1955) in the synergetic relationship between the writer of the original novel (Hayashi Fumiko, 1903–51) and the screenwriter (Mizuki Yōko, 1910–2003). The idea of ‘compound-eye thinking’, or plural female authorship, might be also useful in thinking about Girls of Dark as the result of the creative and collective work of three women. In the film, expressions of women’s carnal desire, intimacy and subjectivity are mediated and relayed from one form to another. Yana’s original novel, for instance, emphasises female–female eroticism and emotional intensity. The beginning of the novel, which describes bodily intimacy between Kuniyo (whose name is changed to Kuniko in the film) and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Chieko as they grab each other’s breasts and kiss, corresponds with its ending, where Kuniyo expresses a keen sense of longing for Chieko. The film version is silent about the erotic desires these women share and focuses only on their emotional ties. Whereas the film condenses lesbianism into one character, in the novel there are more, particularly in a passage where three older women gather around a young newcomer to spend all their wages on sex with her. Although the film does not fail to convey the eroticism of the assault scene, the sexual excitement of the factory workers as they punish Kuniyo is also more explicit and daring in the novel. Yana’s rigid and direct style, characterised by Inagaki Taruho as ‘essential newness and strength’, renders intimacy among women carnally materialised (2001: 120). Instead of erasing the sexual and homoerotic elements, the film transfers them through the mediating work of adaptation: as the intensity of the intimate relationship between Kuniyo and Chieko in the novel recedes into the background, another relationship, between Kuniko and Nogami, comes to the foreground in the film. The person who becomes the creative agency by mediating the novel and the film is Tanaka Sumie, the screenwriter known for a series of Naruse’s films: Repast (Meshi, 1951), Lightning (Inazuma, 1952) and Late Chrysanthemums (Bangiku, 1954). With her earlier collaboration with Tanaka Kinuyo in The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955), she had already tried to inscribe a female subjectivity which is social and sexual at the same time.6 The replacement of a male director (in the novel) with a female one (in the film), and the resulting creation of women’s space and community, was an unmistakable signature of the female screenwriter’s adaptation. Needless to say, Kuniko’s entrance into another female community at the end of film does not exist in the original novel. Although such a creation certainly attests to Tanaka Sumie’s emphasis on the bonds between women, she does not always characterise former ‘girls of dark’ with full sympathy and support. Kuniko’s seduction of the grocery store owner, or her yearning for male bodies while indulging in nostalgia for her past, also relates her past as panpan to her excessive and unrestrained sexual desire. Certainly, Tanaka Sumie never seems to identify with women like Kuniko while depicting the struggle of panpan and former sex workers who attempt to break away from their past. Her acute awareness of the discrimination and exclusion shown by women towards women, as well as of society’s coldness and bias against them, leads to internal heterogeneity and differences rather than to the uncritical idealisation of women and their communities. That is why the final decision of Kuniko, despite her continuous disappointment with and violent exclusion from women’s spaces, poses ambivalently critical questions about the very potential of women’s community and her persistent longing for it. The actress is constantly exposed to a sexualising gaze and constructed as a sexual being by the effects of such a gaze. It is not difficult to imagine that an actress like Tanaka Kinuyo, who was by this point in the autumn of her 52-year Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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career, had been faced with the question of whether ‘being a woman’ is consistent with being sexualised by others and not by oneself. Competing evaluations of Tanaka’s ‘femininity’ and ‘beauty’ by male critics and scholars, situating her sometimes as lacking sexual appeal and at others as the owner of an erotic voice, reveal the ways in which Tanaka and other actresses have been constantly scrutinised under the sexualising gaze of others.7 When Tanaka Kinuyo embarked on a career as a director with Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953), the subject of panpan was already in her mind. Eight years later, it returns to her fifth film Girls of Dark, as if the memory of the war, for Tanaka, is also the memory of these women. One critical incident needs to be mentioned when considering Tanaka’s connection with panpan. In 1949, she embarked on a goodwill tour of the USA (visiting Honolulu, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles) as a cultural envoy. On her return, Tanaka paraded through Ginza in sunglasses and a fur over an afternoon dress and red high heels. The media sniped at her for throwing kisses from her convertible, while shouting ‘Hello!’ to the roadside crowd. This biting criticism of her behaviour overlaps with the hostility and contempt towards panpan, who were also known for their bright red lipstick and garish clothes, and what the media saw in both Tanaka and panpan was their excessive ‘Americanism’.8 The experience of being gazed at as a sexual being throughout her whole career, and of being criticised for her ‘Americanised’ behaviour, arguably strengthens Tanaka’s affinity with panpan. These women were derided as if they were fraternising with ‘America’ itself. Their bodies, penetrated by the USA, were engulfed in the discourses of sexual excess, and over-represented in diverse cultural fields, including literature, film and theatre. Tanaka and the panpan shared, in short, the experience of women who became sexualised through US–Japan relations in the aftermath of defeat. The critic Kawamoto Saburō points out that Tanaka’s career retains a continuity connecting pre- and post-war Japan, which he argues evokes a collective sense of unity in the audience, or more simply: ‘Tanaka Kinuyo has a history’ (1994: 20). Continuously faced with the problem of ‘being a woman’ as an actress, Tanaka, in turn, tries to confront the same problem as the director of Girls of Dark. Yet, she does not do so alone, but collectively with Yana Masako and Tanaka Sumie. By considering this film in and through the mediating relations of creation, adaptation and cinematic visualisation, we can imagine women’s communities in all their contradictions and economic and cultural complexities, of which lesbianism is an undeniable part. This continuum leads to the final point I want to make about Girls of Dark as women’s cinema.

Girls of Dark as women’s cinema In what sense is Girls of Dark an example of women’s cinema? What does it mean to re-evaluate this film as women’s cinema? Furthermore, how can women’s cinema Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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be meaningful within a contemporary context?9 In order to consider these questions, I would like to revisit the history and debate around this concept and clarify the differences between ‘women’s cinema’ in Anglophone feminist film theory and women’s cinema, or josei eiga, in Japanese film history. Women’s cinema came to the theoretical foreground in Anglophone film critical discourses, notably in the UK, from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In her pioneering essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Laura Mulvey denies the pleasure of mainstream narrative films and advocates the breaking down of existing cinematic codes and structures. Her conception of women’s cinema is instead based on utilising modernist aesthetics and formalism to enable simultaneously radical filmmaking and viewing. Claire Johnston’s equally influential ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’ (1973) appeared at around the same period. In this short article, contributed to a pamphlet accompanying a film festival she organised with others, Johnston proposes the potential of women’s cinema at a polar angle from Mulvey’s. Under the influence of the critical innovation led by Cahiers du Cinéma as well as other Marxist modes of ideological analysis, Johnston argues for the effectiveness of mainstream films, which can be mobilised as a political tool as well as entertainment. Here we can see the different conceptions of women’s cinema in Mulvey and Johnston. For the latter, women’s cinema as counter-cinema does not have to destroy the pleasure of narrative films. On the contrary: for women’s cinema to be ‘political’, we need narrative pleasure: ‘in order to counter our objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released: women’s cinema must embody the working through of desire: such an objective demands the use of the entertainment film’ (Johnston 1973: 31). Johnston’s definition of women’s cinema allows us to situate Girls of Dark as one such film, in its use both of the cinematic conventions of commercial films telling women’s stories and of the ways in which ‘collective fantasies’ are released. In thinking about women’s cinema made by Asian women filmmakers, Ayako Saito points out that when women who used to be actresses turn into directors within the studio system, they tend to follow the formal conventions of mainstream commercial films while dealing with themes that touch upon the ‘peripheral and private life sphere’. Tanaka Kinuyo is one such case. Without ostensibly exhibiting an authorial signature by displaying a formal edge of aesthetic newness, she made a series of films that stay close to marginalised women with quiet empathy and solidarity. Girls of Dark also depicts women who become social subjects by choosing their lives, and by refusing to be defined and identified by others as merely sexual. In this sense, the film exemplifies what Johnston has named ‘women’s discourse’ (1975: 7), a concept elaborated on in her analysis of Dorothy Arzner to contrast with what she sees as the male discourse structuring the patriarchal ideology of classical Hollywood films. It does not replace Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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male discourse, but survives in the form of irony; not being expelled or erased, ‘the continued insistence of women’s discourse is a triumph over non-existence’ (1975: 7). Alison Butler points out that the idea of ‘discourse’ serves as an antidote to the historically embraced modernist practice of formalism, for it ‘may be distributed across the film discontinuously, through a variety of articulations, which may be aesthetic, semantic, ideological and social’ (2002: 13). Teresa de Lauretis raises a similar question about aesthetics and women’s cinema: ‘to ask whether there is a feminine or female aesthetic or a specific language of women’s cinema, is to remain caught in the master’s house’ (1987: 131). Any critical judgement on film presupposes a certain framework, but questions on the ways in which this framework itself is structured through highly gendered hierarchical relations have been neglected far too long by film studies in Japan.10 In what Hori Hikari refers to as ‘the discursive space of Japanese cinema made by men and in which men practiced their criticism’, Tanaka has been narrated as a woman whose failing career as an actress prompted her to turn to directing (Hori 2002). If she did well, it is because of the help, guidance or influence she received from male ‘mentors’ such as Mizoguchi, Ozu Yasujirō, Naruse and Kinoshita Keisuke. A number of scholars and critics (mostly male, curiously) never hid their contemptuous or belittling attitudes towards both her stardom and directorship (Shindō 1983; Yomota 2000; Furukawa 2004).11 Yet, what is the point of analysing Tanaka’s texts and authorship while keeping her thus confined in the ‘master’s house’? Thirty years ago, de Lauretis wrote that ‘feminist theory should now engage precisely in the redefinition of aesthetic and formal knowledge, much as women’s cinema has been engaged in the transformation of vision’ (1987: 131). This promise remains unfulfilled, and if it is ever fulfilled in the future, the analysis of Girls of Dark should at least contribute to engaging in transforming or ‘re-visioning’ the discursive space created and maintained by male perspectives.12 In Japanese film history, ‘josei eiga’ (josei means woman/women, and eiga cinema/film) cannot be dissociated from the Shōchiku Studio. From the 1920s, Shōchiku produced a body of films about and addressed to women, albeit directed by male directors, and as such josei eiga became a signature genre of the studio. Hori points out that josei eiga embodied the characteristics of the Shōchiku Kamata studio, drawing the audience with star actresses as well as detailed portrayals of mundane affairs. In other words, josei eiga was another name for films that had ‘trivial’ and ‘weak’ themes, and it should be understood, thus, as a genre gendered as ‘too feminine’ (2002b: 61). In Imagining Modern Girls in the Japanese Woman’s Film, Mitsuyo WadaMarciano defines the josei eiga that emerged in the 1920s as a reflexive discourse of modernity in which national and gender identities converge through the image of modern girls (moga), a figure that reified Japanese vernacular modernism Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in relation to consumer subjectivity and print media. (2005: 16). Likewise, Chika Kinoshita writes that women’s film was a label that surfaced in the late 1930s, when the Japanese film industry took a new interest in those once considered ‘peripheral’ in terms of geography and class, thus attempting to construct Japanese cinema as national culture by including previously excluded audiences and genres (2011: 207). While Wada-Marciano places emphasis on the importance of modern girls as consuming subjects in terms of emerging Japanese woman’s film, Shimura Miyoko situates a series of films adopted by the novels of Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948), or ‘kikuchi mono’, as pioneering films of josei eiga. According to Shimura, these films that appeared in the late 1920s were produced with an awareness of women as target audience, even though they were aware of a diverse audience segment (2007: 78).13 These discourses, which situate josei eiga in relation to Japanese modernity, nationalism, consumer culture and an alternative public sphere, have in common a female audience at the centre of the genre’s definition. This is not, of course, limited to Japanese film history; particularly since the paradigm shift of the Anglophone feminist film theories in the 1980s, a female audience has been at the definitional core of women’s cinema.14 Whether one puts stress on women as images, filmmakers or spectators, the discussion around josei eiga, in Japan at least, did not expand much beyond a focus on the periods of the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, as mentioned above, scholars have closely dealt with this genre, developing a detailed discussion about its emergence and role, yet the term josei eiga itself has never come under close scrutiny. It was simply regarded as equivalent to ‘woman’s film’ without definitional and conceptual elaboration. For woman’s film is not the same as women’s films or women’s cinema, all of which own specific meanings, overlapping sometimes, differentiating themselves from one another at others. Judith Mayne provides a useful classification of these admittedly complex concepts. Woman’s film refers to the Hollywood product in which ‘figures of women serve for the “scopic and narratological regime”, as seen in the Hollywood product’, while women’s films signify works by women directors, with a wide range of perspectives (1990: 5–6). The distinction between ‘woman’ and ‘women’ here is predicated upon the opposition elaborated by de Lauretis: ‘woman as constituted in representation’ and ‘women’ as historical subjects (1984: 15). Women’s cinema, according to Mayne, is something that problematises the very scopic and narratological regime with which woman’s film can be unwillingly complicit. What kind of film, then, is Girls of Dark? This is a film not only made by a woman but also collectively created by women: a novelist, a screenwriter and a director. They all problematise, in their own ways, women’s historical experience within the existing visual and narrative conventions while relating it to a wider, historically conditioned social structure. The ways in which the film conveys the differentiation of women and men in authority while emphasising women’s communities demonstrates the sharp critical distance towards those represented in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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existing panpan films such as Gate of Flesh, Women of the Night and White Beast. Drawing on the work of Claire Johnston, de Lauretis and Mayne, we can call Girls of Dark an example of women’s cinema. It places women (in the plural) who struggle to become social and historical subjects, rather than woman (in the singular) as constituted in representation, without depending on a ‘father’ or a ‘male lover’ at the centre of the image and narrative. In short, it is women’s cinema because of its embodiment of what Johnston called ‘female discourse’. It bears repeating that the film, which dealt thematically with the ‘correction’ and independence of former panpan women, was released in 1961, long after the panpan film boom. Such an anachronism renounced the contemporaneous realism of capturing ‘actuality’ or the formalism of aestheticising women’s experiences, but this temporal deviation was inevitable for re-visioning and re-presenting women sexualised by the others. Girls of Dark acts out its own queer temporality, along with the character of Kameju, at the diegetic level. Drawing on the concept of ‘minor’ literature’ elucidated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986), Alison Butler (2002) proposes women’s cinema as ‘minor cinema’. She explains that minor literature is the literature of minority or marginalized groups who write in major language by appropriating this forced language; it is a literature in which the individual concern becomes all the more necessary as a whole other story is vibrating within it. (2002: 20) Because a minor literature emerges from a deterritorialised group, its function is to conjure up collectivity, even in the absence of an active community (Butler 2002: 20). In Butler’s conceptualising of women’s cinema, community is the central concern. Just as minor literature projects community rather than expressing it, women’s cinema also imagines communities as many and varied, each of them involved in its own historical moment. I find it appropriate to call Girls of Dark women’s cinema, in that the individual story in the film allows the story of post-war Japan to reverberate within it, and varied communities are imagined and projected as necessary spaces for women who attempt to have a social existence. I also want to return to the relationship between women’s communities and lesbianism in Girls of Dark. As Judith Mayne has pointed out in discussing the films by Dorothy Arzner, lesbianism is usually represented by ‘female bonding’ in the film, but it can also be one of the many forms that female bonding can take (1990: 117). This is precisely what Girls of Dark shows us. On the one hand, the film represents the lesbian Kameju as a temporal and spatial deviant, whose desire can be narratively read as the effects of syphilis. Here we see the good old stereotype of the lesbian: her desire for another woman should not threaten the world of female bonding by gender identification; therefore, she has to die. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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On the other hand, lesbianism in this film exemplifies a form of female bonding. The lesbian desire of Kameju is represented as generated from within the women’s community of the correction facility. The women in this film, therefore, never ostracise the eccentric Kameju, whose difference constitutes one variance, but not otherness. Projecting the amplitude of women’s communities, the very space and time that simultaneously enable and hinder intimate relationships among women, this film pursues the possibility of women’s collectivity, one to be gained through the struggle to become a social being, not only a being sexualised and determined as such by others. That the film was made by women for women about women does not make Girls of Dark women’s cinema. Through the act of telling a story about women who try to define themselves in connecting and negotiating with ‘different’ women, which is the act of invoking women’s collectivity, this film becomes women’s cinema. Bringing women’s points of view to the fore – which is to say, positioning women as social subjects – women’s discourse critically juxtaposes the positions that see women as only sexual objects. If this discourse works unsystematically and incoherently ‘through a variety of articulations, not always aesthetic, but semantic, ideological, or social’ in the film text (Butler 2002: 13), then Girls of Dark provides one such case. Without relying on formal strategy or stylistic innovations, it simply and modestly addresses solidarity, conflict, difference and friendship within a conventional form. Female sexuality in Japan was often narrated as a shift from pre-war chastity and innocence to post-war liberation and excess. Girls of Dark, however, imagines and tells a ‘minor’ story of women and their communities aspiring to a social existence against the official narrative.

Notes 1. Panpan refers to female sex workers who provided services to the soldiers and other workers of the Allied forces, mainly US, during the Occupation from 1945 to 1952 (Mitsuhashi 2004). 2. Among the recruited women, a small number of professional prostitutes existed, but the majority had no experience in sex-related work (Chazono 2014: 35). 3. According to numerous historians, the word panpan was originally used by Americans to refer to available women in the South Seas during the war (Dower 1999: 132). 4. For instance, the 1958 film Priestess with the Sullied Flesh (Yogoreta nikutai seijo, Doi Michiyoshi) portrayed mock-lesbian sexual acts between nuns in the convent. The films based on Yoshiya’s novels include Adonis (Fujujusō) and Campanula (Tsuriganesō), both directed by Kawate Jirō in 1935. 5. These literary texts include Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Tales (Hana monogatari, 1916–24), Tamura Toshiko’s Resignation (Akirame, 1914) and Ishii Momoko’s Phantasmal Red Fruit (Maboroshino akai mi, 1994) among many others, and the film texts Nana (Nana, Otani Kentaro, 2005) and Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma monogatari, Nakashima Tetsuya,

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8. 9.

10. 11.

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13. 14.

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2004). For more on the queer female–female intimacy of these literary and film texts, see Kanno (2011). For more details on the collaborative relationship between Tanaka Sumie and Tanaka Kinuyo in The Eternal Breasts and Girls of Dark, see Ayako Saito in this volume. ‘She is not particularly beautiful, but . . .’ was almost a conventional epithet used by directors and critics to describe Tanaka Kinuyo. One of the most popular male stars, Suzuki Denmei (1900–85), also openly dismissed Tanaka as a ‘non-beauty’ (fubijin), and was once reported to be writing an essay on that very topic (Furukawa 2004: 166–7). Yamada Kōichi and Yamane Sadao, meanwhile, characterise Tanaka’s stardom and appeal in terms of her ‘cuteness’ and ‘sister-like presence’ (Yamada and Yamane 1984). For instance, the media called Tanaka Kinuyo an ameshon actress, which refers to someone who takes a short trip to the USA in order to increase their prestige. There is a general tendency to see women’s cinema as an obsolete concept in contemporary film studies, yet some feminist scholars insist on its importance by approaching it from new perspectives. See, for example, Patricia White (2015) and Alison Butler (2002). There are, of course, exceptions, such as the work of Ayako Saito, who has been reframing the framework for women’s images, filmmaking and spectatorship. Furukawa cites the essay on her appearance and acting by Sugimoto Shun’ichi, who describes Tanaka’s appeal as a moderate beauty, detailing the faults with her facial features and referring to her as ‘a bit ugly [sukoshi busu]’ (165–6). Re-vision was originally defined by Adrienne Rich as ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes’, which is also ‘an act of survival’ for women (1979: 35). Later on, feminist scholars Mary Ann Doane, Patria Mellencamp and Linda Williams borrowed the concept for the title of their edited collection Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (1984). In Rethinking Women’s Cinema, de Lauretis also emphasises the importance of the concept of seeing ‘the differences among women’ by arguing that difference should not be limited to ‘sexual difference’ (1987: 136). All translations from Shimura are the author’s own. For instance, in writing about the ‘woman’s film’, a genre of Hollywood films lasting from the silent era up until the early 1960s that was most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, Mary Ann Doane writes that these films ‘deal with a female protagonist and often appear to allow her significant access to point of view structures and the enunciative level of the filmic discourse. They treat problems defined as “female” . . . and, most crucially, are directed toward a female audience’ (1987: 3). Later, de Lauretis further complicates women-as-audience by arguing the importance of addressing the spectator as a woman, ‘regardless of the gender of the viewers’ (1987: 133).

Bibliography Akaeda, Kanako (2011), Kindai Nihon ni okeru onna dōshi no shinmitsu na kankei, Tokyo: Kadokawa gakugei shuppan. Arai, Eiko (2007), ‘Kirisuto kyōkai no “panpan” gensetsu to magudara no maria’, in Keisen jogakuen daigaku heiwa bunka kenkyūjo (ed.), Senryō to sei: seisaku, jittai, hyōshō, Tokyo: Impakuto shuppankai.

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Saito, Ayako (2008), ‘Yureru, onnatachi: Ajia no josei eiga kantoku, sono rekishi to hyōgen’, Shakai to bungaku 27, pp. 101–14. Butler, Alison (2002), Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen, London and New York: Wallflower. Butler, Judith (1993), ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Henry Abelove et al. (eds), Lesbian in Gay Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 307–20. Chazono, Toshimi (2014), Panpan to wa dare nano ka: kyatchi to iu senryōki no seibōryoku to jīai to no shinmitsusei, Tokyo: Inpakuto shuppan-kai. de Lauretis, Teresa (1987), Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. de Lauretis, Teresa (1984), Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, Gill and Felix Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press. Doane, Mary Ann (1987), The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Doane, Mary Ann, Patria Mellencamp and Linda Williams (eds) (1984), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Los Angeles: American Film Institute. Dower, John W. (1999), Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: Norton. Furukawa, Kaoru (2004), Hana mo arashimo: joyū Tanaka Kinuyo no shōgai, Tokyo: Bungei shunjū. Halberstam, Judith (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York and London: New York University Press. Hori, Hikari (2002), ‘Eiga wo miru koto to kataru koto – Mizoguchi Kenji [Yoru no onna tachi] (1948nen) wo meguru hyōron, jendā, kankyaku’, Eizō gaku 68, pp. 47–66. Inagaki, Taruho (2001), Inagaki Taruho zenshū 11, Tokyo: Chikumashobō. Johnston, Claire (1973), ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema’, in C. Johnston (ed.) Notes on Women’s Cinema, London: Society for Education in Film and Television, pp. 24–31. Johnston, Claire (1975), ‘Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies’, in C. Johnston (ed.) The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema, London: British Film Institute, pp. 1–8. Kanno, Yuka (2011), ‘Love and Friendship: The Queer Imagination of Japan’s Early Girls’ Culture’, in Mary Celeste Kearney (ed.), Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 17–34. Kawamoto, Saburō (1994), Ima hitotabi no sengo nihon eiga, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kinoshita, Chika (2011), ‘Merodorama no saiki: Maikono Masahiro [Fukeizu] (1942) to kankyaku no kanōsei’, in Fujiki Hideaki (ed.), Kankyaku he no apurōchi, Tokyo: Shinwa sha. Kobayashi, Daijirō and Murase Akira (2008), Shinpan minna wa shiranai: kokka baishun meirei, Tokyo: Yuzankaku. Mayne, Judith (1990), The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Miller, D. A. (1991), ‘Anal Rope’, in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, New York: Routledge, pp. 119–41.

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Mitsuhashi, Junko (2004), ‘Panpan’, in Inoue Shōichi and Kansai seiyoku kenkyūkai (eds), Sei no yōgoshū, Tokyo: Kōdansha. Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16: 3, pp. 6–18. Oguma, Eiji (2002), ‘Minshu’ to ‘aikoku’: sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei, Tokyo: Shin’yōsha. Ōkubo, Yasuaki (2008), ‘Sakugeki to jōnetsu: Mizuki Yōko no Ukigumo kyakusyok’, Hyōshō 2, pp. 224–44. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. (1999), Cartographies of Desire: Male–Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rich, Adrienne (1979), On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, New York: Norton. Shimura, Miyoko (2007), ‘Kikuchi Kan no tsūzoku shōsetsu to ren’ai eiga no hen’yo: josei kankyaku to eigakai’, in Iwamoto Kenji (ed.), Kazoku no shozo: hōmu dorama to melodorama, Tokyo: Shinwa sha. Shindō, Kaneto (1983), Shōsetsu Tanaka Kinuyo, Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2005), ‘Imaging modern girls in the Japanese woman’s film’, Camera Obscura 60, pp. 15–54. White, Patricia (2015), Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yamada, Kōcichi and Yamane Sadao (1984), ‘Sutā ga joyū ni narutoki’, Bessatsu Taiyō 48, pp. 91–102. Yomota, Inuhiko (2000), Nihon no joyū, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Yoshimi, Shunya (2007), Shinbei to hanbei: sengo Nihon no seijiteki muishiki, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Filmography Adonis (Fujujusō, Kawate Jirō, 1935) Campanula (Tsuriganesō, Kawate Jirō, 1935) Floating Clouds (Ukigumo, Naruse Mikio, 1955) Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, Makino Masahiro, 1948) Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1961) Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma monogatari, Nakashima Tetsuya, 2004) Late Chrysanthemums (Bangiku, Naruse Mikio 1954) Lightning (Inazuma, Naruse Mikio, 1952) Love Letter (Koibumi, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1953) Nana (Ōtani Kentarō, 2005) Priestess with the Sullied Flesh (Yogoreta nikutai seijo, Doi Michiyoshi, 1958) Repast (Meshi, Naruse Mikio, 1951) Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955) White Beast (Shiroi yajū, Naruse Mikio, 1950) Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1948)

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Index

abortion, 11–12, 87 accent and dialect, 52–3n, 190 adultery, 8, 11, 76–7, 87, 94, 132, 135, 138–40, 151n affect, 138, 159, 162, 166, 167 Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie, 61, 78–9n, 163 anti-security treaty movement (Anpo movement), 146, 177 Arima Ineko, 20, 128 Armendáriz-Hernández, Alejandra, 161 Army (Rikugun, 1944), 10–11, 57, 70–4, 106 Arzner, Dorothy, 149n, 197 Atsugi Taka, 20 auteur and authorship, 21–3, 30n, 57, 66, 127–8, 131, 178 case of Tanaka, 17, 24, 105, 126–48, 155–6, 158, 161, 162, 165, 167, 171, 180 star as author, 25–6, 57 women’s authorship, 17–18, 23–5, 127, 145, 147–8, 155, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 181n

Ballad of Narayama, The (Narayama bushikō, 1958), xiii, 15, 72–4 Barrett, Gregory, 44–5 Berlin International Film Festival, xiv, 15 biwa, xii, 4, 29n, 49 Black River (Kuroi kawa, 1957), 12–13, 29n Bordwell, David, 67–8, 87 Bow, Clara, 7–8 breast cancer, 16, 132, 140, 142, 145, 151n Bride Talks in Her Sleep, The (Hanayome no negoto, 1933), 53n Britton, Andrew, 60–1 Buddhism, 64–5, 73 Bullock, Julia C., 98 Bungei eiga (literary film), 40 Burmese Harp, The (Biruma no tategoto, 1956), 162, 167 Butler, Alison, 199 censorship Film Law (1937/39), 10–11, 69 Occupation era, 12, 97

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Index

205

Chikamatsu’s ‘Love in Osaka’ (Naniwa no koi no monogatari, 1959), 178 Christianity, 110, 130, 135, 193 colonialism, 155, 162, 173, 174 colonial nostalgia, 156, 165, 166, 181n Imperial-Colonial Japan, 155, 158, 162, 168, 171, 172,

127–9, 131–48, 150n, 151n, 155, 161, 162, 194 adaptation, 132–5 cinematography, 137–8, 141–3 mise-en-scène, 135, 138–40, 142–3 promotion, 133–4 reception, 152n

174, 176 Kwantung Army, 156, 168, 172 representation of, 156, 165–6, 167, 177, 182n

script/scenario, 134–6, 138–42

Daiei studio, 16, 61, 78n, 117, 155, 158–9, 161, 162, 163, 166, 180 Dancing Girl of Izu, The (Izu no odoriko, 1933), 37, 39–46, 48, 49, 51, 52n, 53n de Lauretis, Teresa, 197–9, 201n Directors Guild of Japan, 14, 117–19 documentary, 20–1, 29n, 122n, 146 Doll’s House, A (1879), 77–8 Dragnet Girl (Hijōsen no onna, 1933), 9, 43–4, 46, 53n, 67 Drake, Philip, 38–9 Dyer, Richard, 36, 50–1, 58, 74 Embarrassing Dreams (Hazukashii yume, 1927), 37, 51n Eternal Breasts, The (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955), 16, 27–8, 104,

family system (ie), 2–3, 5, 60, 86 Fanck, Arnold, 53n female roles, 5, 6, 8, 11–13, 61, 87, 92, 106, 129, 131, 148, 163, 164 career woman, 45–6, 48–50, 58, 61 daughter, 60, 75–6, 136, 176 fallen woman, 111, 113 geisha, 13–14, 75–6 housewife, 60, 131 mother, 13–14, 46–8, 51, 53n, 57–66, 70–5, 129–30, 136–8, 140, 144–5, 152n, 164, 165, 167, 171, 173, 175 widow, 60, 74 wife, 13, 41–2, 44, 58, 68, 74, 76–7, 79n, 144–5, 147, 164, 165, 171, 172, 173, 179 see also prostitution female sexuality and desire, 16, 110–11, 114, 131–3, 135, 140, 144–5, 147–8, 151n, 152n, 163, 164, 165

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206

Index

female subjectivity, 1, 24, 114, 137, 143, 145, 147–8, 155, 161–6, 172, 175, 177, 178, 180, 182n femininity, 7–8, 88–90, 99–101, 104–5, 107, 112–13, 129–32, 140, 145, 151n, 161–3, 165, 170–2 feminism, 23–4, 77–8n, 83–4, 96–8, 106, 127–8, 130–1, 133 Film Actress (Eiga joyū, 1987), 37, 38, 44, 51n Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 1959), 162, 167, 178, 182n Floating Clouds (Ukigumo, 1955), 19, 193 Flowing (Nagareru, 1956), 52n, 130 Funakoshi Eiji, 168, 182n Furukawa Kaoru, 107 Futaba Jūzaburō, 117–19, 121 Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, book 1947, film 1948), 188, 192 Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, 1953), 163 gaze, 104, 138, 143 gesture and touch, 39–45, 59, 62–3, 65–72, 75–9 Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza keshō, 1951), 13–14, 61–3, 150n Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, 1961), 16, 28, 128, 131–2, 145–8, 149n, 150n, 161, 187–200

as woman’s film, 195–200 adaption of, 145–8, 193–5 González/Ueda (González-López, Irene and Ashida Mayu), 132–3, 143–5 Gosho Heinosuke, 5, 6, 9, 37–8, 41–2, 43, 45, 46, 53n Haha-mono, 59, 61, 70, 78n-9n, 166, 181n; see also female roles Hansen, Miriam 122 Hara Chisako ,147, 187 Hara Setsuko, 13, 42, 52n, 47n, 53n, 59, 74, 164 Hartmann, Heidi I., 96 Hasumi Shigehiko, 22, 30n, 67 Hayashi Fumiko, 29n, 193 He and . . . trilogy (Kare to . . . 1928–9), 8, 29n Hen in the Wind, A (Kaze no naka no mendori, 1948), 13 14–15, 66–9, 106 High, Peter B., 7, 9, 70–2 Hitchcock, Alfred, 25, 138, 188 Hollywood cinema (classical), 6–7, 18, 58, 138, 143, 149n homosexuality, 31, 144, 148, 151n, 187–91, 193–4, 199–200 Hori Hikari, 106, 197 Human Condition, The (Ningen no jōken, 1959–61), 29n, 167, 172, 178 humanism, 64, 72–4, 110

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Index

207

Ibsen, Henrik, 77–9 Ichikawa Fusae, 84, 85 Ichikawa Kon, 15, 18, 19, 23, 37, 45n, 162, 163, 167, 178 Igarashi Yoshikuni, 106, 110–11 Ikeda Yoshinobu, 51–2n Imai Tadashi, 18–19, 115 interracial relationships, 16,

Kawakita Kashiko, 29n, 53n Kawakita Nagamasa, 149n–50n Kawase Naomi, 21, 30n Kido Shirō, xiii, 52n, 129, 146 Kidoism, 5–7, 13 Kikuchi Kan, 46, 198 Kinoshita Chika, 36, 38–40, 47n, 59

110–11, 181n Irie Takako, 19, 52n Iwata Yūkichi, 51n-52n Izbicki, Joanne, 106, 163, 164

Kinoshita Keisuke, 74 Tanaka’s work with, 10–11, 14–15, 16, 70–2, 104, 106, 114, 126–7, 150n, 161, 197 see also Army, The Ballad of Narayama Kinuyo the Lady Doctor (Joi Kinuyo sensei, 1937), 38, 48–9, 51 Kinuyo’s First Love (Kinuyo no hatsukoi, 1940), 38, 45, 51 Kishi Keiko, 20, 128 Kishida Toshiko, 90–1 Kitahara Mie, 118 Kitayama Osamu, 143–4 Kobayashi Masaki, 12–13, 19, 29n, 167 Kuga Yoshiko, 20, 75, 109, 128, 150n Kumai Kei, 11, 15 Kurishima Sumiko 4, 7, 38, 51n, 51n-52n, 52n Kurosawa Akira, 12, 15, 22, 23, 97, 163, 164 Kyō Machiko, 16, 28, 53n, 65, 106, 158, 162, 163, 164–5, 168, 175, 180, 181n

Japanese Communist Party, 97, 101n Jidaigeki (period film), 6, 37, 58, 72, 104, 163 Johnston, Claire, 188, 196–7 Josei eiga (women’s film), 19, 133, 137–8, 146–8, 155–6, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165, 180, 197–8 Kagawa Kyōko, 13, 16, 59–61, 64, 111, 123n, 149n Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma monogatari, 2004), 200–1n Kamei Fumio, 10, 18–19 Kanno Sugako, 3, 29n Kaplan, E. Ann, 17–18 Kapsis, Robert E., 25 Kataoka Chiezō, 52n Katō Mikirō, 23, 127–8, 144, 149n, 151n

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208

Index

‘Lady writers’ (joryū sakka), 130 Laird, Colleen, 25 Le Fanu, Mark, 63–5, 88–9, 99–101 Life of Oharu, The (Saikaku ichidaionna, 1952), xiii, 14, 37, 88, 90, 105, 122n Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953), xiii–iv, 16, 27, 104–5, 109–16, 128, 135, 150n, 151n, 161, 195 casting, 109 promotion, 109, 115–16 reception, 114–16 Love of Sumako the Actress, The (Joyū Sumako no koi, 1947), 14, 39, 77–8, 82, 97 Love-Troth Tree, The (Aizen katsura), xiii, 48, 53n Love Under the Crucifix (Oginsama, 1962), 16, 20, 128, 161 MacArthur, Douglas, 85–86, 97; see also Occupation McDonald, Keiko, 7, 73 Mainichi Film Awards, 14–15, 28 Makino Masahiro, 188, 192 male roles father, 64, 91, 172 husband, 59, 65–8, 76–7, 138, 172 soldier, 57, 67, 69–71, 109–11, 166, 168 son, 59, 61–3, 65–6, 70–3 see also masculinity

Manchukuo, 21, 30, 108, 155–8, 163, 165–6, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 179, 180–1n, 182n Man’s Recompense, A (Otoko no tsugunai, 1937), 46–7, 49 Marching On (Shingun, 1930), 7–8 marriage, 15, 67, 87, 92, 108, 111–12, 132–3, 135, 144, 148, 168, 170, 172, 179 Martin, Angela, 17, 21, 24 Marxism, 83, 96–97, 101n, 196 masculinity, 112, 115, 146, 164, 166–7, 172, 182n crisis of, 106–7, 111–14 male subjectivity, 106–7, 110–14, 127, 164, 166–7, 180 see also melodrama Matsuyama Hideo ,158, 181n Mayne, Judith, 198 Meiji era, 71, 77, 83, 90–1, 93, 129, 170 Civil Code, 2–5 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, 70–2, 79n Liberal Party (Jiyūtō), 90–1 melodrama, 67, 104, 114, 122, 128, 135–8, 140, 146–8, 155, 159, 164–7, 177, 178, 179 ‘home drama’, 117 male melodrama, 113–14 see also Hollywood cinema memory, 165–6, 167, 168, 180

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Index Men Against Women (Dansei tai josei, 1936), 49, 51 Mizoguchi Kenji, 5, 6,11, 20, 21, 22, 27, 57, 59, 61, 68, 70, 105–6, 117, 163, 164–5, 188, 192, 181n feminisuto, 58, 64, 78n, 101 personal relationship with Tanaka, 14, 117, 126, 129, 149n Tanaka’s work with, xiii, 12, 14–15, 23, 37, 38–41, 44–5, 51, 51n, 63–6, 74–7, 82–3, 88–101, 197 see also Life of Oharu, The, My Love Has Been Burning, Sansho the Bailiff, Ugetsu Mizuki Yōko, 18–19, 115, 130, 146–7 Mizunoe Takiko, 20 Mochizuki Yūko, 19 modern boy, 7–8 modern girl, 5, 7–8, 45–8, 131, 149n, 197–8 Moon Has Risen, The (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955), 16, 27, 104–5, 117–21, 128, 161 cinematography, 118–21, 123n mise-en-scène, 119–21, 123n production, 117 reception, 117–19, 121–2 Mori Masayuki, 16, 109, 115, 135, 150n mother see female roles

209

Mother (Okāsan, 1952), 14, 19, 51, 59–62, 105, 123n, 127, 150n Mulvey, Laura, 196 Munekata Sisters, The (Munekata kyōdai, 1950), 13, 67 Museum of Modern Art of New York (MOMA), 25–6 My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, 1949), 12, 14, 27, 76–8, 82, 83, 88–101 cinematography, 93–6, 100 Nagashima Ichirō, 131, 149n Nagashima Hisako, 128 Nakajō Fumiko, 132–3 Naniwa Chieko, 189–91 Naruse Mikio, 5, 6, 12, 19, 52n, 117, 123n, 126, 130, 163, 188, 192, 193, 194, 197 Tanaka’s work with, 5, 9, 13–14, 51, 59, 61, 104, 105, 114–15, 150n see also Ginza Cosmetics, Mother national identity, 23, 106–7, 116, 122, 166, 171, 182n nationalism, 58, 70, 98 Neale, Steve, 67 Neighbour’s Wife and Mine, The (Madamu to nyōbō, 1931), xiii, 9, 38, 41–3, 45 Nemoto Jirō, 178–80 New Clothing (Hatsusugata, 1936), 15, 20 New Road, The (Shindō, 1936), 46–8

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210

Index

New Wave (Japan), 146, 178, 179, 180, 182n; see also Shōchiku studio, Ōshima Nagisa, Yoshida Kijū New Woman (atarashii onna/shin fujin), 83–4, 131, 149n Nikkatsu studio, 5, 16, 20, 117, 150n Ninjin Club, 20, 29n, 128 Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (NTTPC, NTT), 118–19 Niwa Fumio, xiii, 109, 128, 150n, 161 Nomura Hiromasa, 10–11, 38, 46–7, 48, 49, 52n, 167 Nomura Hōtei, xiii, 52n nostalgia, 112, 121, 156, 165, 177, 194 Occupation (Allied Forces), 67–9, 106–7, 111, 114, 147, 163 Constitution (1947), 85–6, 107 films made under, 61, 66, 68, 111 first general elections, 78, 85–6, 107, 122n gender reforms, 11, 61, 78, 68, 82–3, 85–8, 96, 108, 115, 133, 148 New Civil Code (1948), 11, 87 occupying forces and GIs, 110 other democratic reforms 11–12, 13, 87 women’s liberation (josei kaihō), 11–12, 68, 97, 107–8, 133

Oedipal taboo/complex, 60, 144 Okoto and Sasuke (Shunkinshō: Okoto to Sasuke, 1935), 9, 37, 49 Ornamental Hairpin (Kanzashi, 1941), 53n, 58, 69–70 Ōshima Nagisa, 146, 178, 179; see also New Wave (Japan) otherness, 106, 172 Ozu Yasujirō, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14–15, 26, 42–4, 45, 52n, 53n, 59, 74, 106, 118–19, 121, 123n, 126–7 collaboration with Tanaka, 16, 66–9, 104, 117, 161, 197 see also Hen in the Wind, A, Dragnet Girl, The Moon Has Risen Panpan, 10, 106, 109–11, 122n-123n, 147, 187–8, 191–2, 194–5, 200n; see also prostitution patriarchy, 8, 16, 91, 94, 96, 99, 108–9, 111, 113, 128, 130, 133 Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (Yōkihi, 1955), 164–5, 181n propaganda, 12, 18–19, 97, 156, 180 prostitution, 11–13, 15, 61, 66–7, 83, 90, 106, 108–9, 113, 122n, 131–2, 147, 187–200 in Girls of Dark, 187–200 Prostitution Prevention Law (1956), 13, 83, 108, 187

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Index rehabilitation of 16, 187, 191–3 see also panpan Pujie (Fuketsu), 156–7, 158 Raichō Hiratsuka 83–4; see also women’s organisations Rashomon (Rashōmon, 1950), 22, 23, 163 Record of a Woman Doctor (Joi no kiroku, 1941), 48–9 Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), 187; see also prostitution Red Flag Incident, 3, 29n Richie, Donald, 67 romance, 108–9, 111, 137, 147, 151n, 162, 165, 170, 171, 176, 179 Russell, Catherine, 58–60, 63–4, 68 Ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), 10, 67, 93, 164; see also femininity Ryū Chishū, 16, 69, 110, 123n Saburi Shin, 39, 48, 178, 179, 180, 182n Saga Hiro, 28, 155–8, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 181n Saito, Ayako, 23, 97, 166, 167, 196 Sakane Tazuko, 15, 20–1, 29n, 108 Sanbagarasu (‘Three Crows’ trio of actors), 37–8; see also Saburi Shin, Sano Shūji, Uehara Ken

211

Sandakan No. 8 (Sandakan hachiban shōkan: Bōkyō, 1974), xiv, 15 Sano Shūji, 38, 46, 67 Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, 1954), 14, 37, 57, 59, 62–5, 68, 70, 72–3, 76, 88 Sato, Tadao, 64, 67, 78n, 88–9, 99–101 Shiinomi School, The (Shiinomi gakuen, 1955), 150n Shimazu Yasujirō, 9, 37, 49 Shimizu Hiroshi, 5, 6, 12, 37, 48 51, 51–2n, 54n, 58, 69, 129, 150n; see also Ornamental Hairpin Shindō Kaneto, 14–15, 38, 51n, 97, 149n Shine On, Japanese Women! (Kagayake Nihon no josei, 1932), 49–50 Shintōhō studio, 16, 117, 131, 150n Shōchiku studio, xiii, 4, 5–7, 9–10, 12, 89, 36, 51–2n, 53n, 72, 97, 117, 128–9, 146, 178, 197; see also Kido Shirō, New Wave (Japan) Shōshimingeki, 5–7, 12–13 Sirota, Beate, 86 Standish, Isolde, 106, 108, 110, 112, 178 stardom, 7–8, 57–8, 60–1, 74, 109, 127, 146, 164, 165, 182n ageing of, 15, 105, 107, 131 joint stardom, 37–8, 105–6

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212

Index

stardom (cont.) see also Tanaka Kinuyo and auteur and authorship studio system (Japan), 5–9, 18, 23, 25, 105–6, 117, 123n, 127, 161 crisis, 146, 178 Five-Company Agreement, 117 gender politics, 1, 18–19, 20–1, 28, 105, 115, 130, 143, 155, 164–7 golden era, 5, 12–14 introduction of sound, 6, 8–9 Sugai Ichirō, 76, 91, 146 Sugi Yōko, 16, 119, 135 Sun-tribe (taiyōzoku), 146 Suzuki Denmei, 7–8, 37, 201n Suzuki Seijun, 20, 146 Taishō era, 58, 84–5 Takamine Hideko, 13, 19, 20, 29n, 42 Tanaka Kinuyo 1949 visit to America, 60, 74, 79n, 106–7, 112, 122n, 195, 201n acting style, 39–45, 59, 76, 101 debut as director, 15–16, 104–8, 150n early career, xii–xiii, 4–10, 37–51 family and personal life, xii–xiv, 3–4, 15, 51, 51–2n image as film director, 104, 115–16, 118

post-war era, 13–15, 88–9, 105, 107 shooting on location, 115, 119, 135, 150n, 181n star image, 7–9, 37–51, 53n, 57, 60, 69, 74–5, 88–90, 99–101, 105–6, 129, 201n wartime career, 10–11, 131 see also stardom, and auteur and authorship Tanaka Kinuyo Award, 28 Tanaka Kinuyo Memorial Hall, 26, 128 Tanaka Sumie, 18, 19, 27–8, 28, 104, 128–31, 149n and The Eternal Breasts, 30, 133, 135–6, 147 and Girls of Dark, 147, 152n, 193–5 Taniguchi Senkichi, 19, 181n There is a Way But (Michi aredo, 1960), 147, 193 Tōhō studio, 19, 16, 117 Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, 1953), 42, 59, 123n Tower of Lilies, The (Himeyuri no tō, 1953), 18 Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi, 1959), 179 trauma, 109, 114, 164, 166–7, 175 Travels of Kinuyo Tanaka, The, 106, 112n Tsukioka Yumeji, 135, 138, 150n

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Index

213

Uehara Ken, 38, 48 Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953), 11, 14, 37, 59, 62, 65–6, 73, 76, 88, 163 Uno Jūkichi, 110, 178, 179, 180, 182n urban migration, 4–5, 16, 87 Ushihara Kiyohiko, 7, 8, 117 Utamaro and his Five Women

mise-en-scène, 162, 168, 170, 171 reception, 158–61, 178–80 Sino-Japanese cultural relationship, 171–4 technological advances, 155, 162 war films, 162, 166–7, 177, 182n wartime Japan, 9–11, 17–18, 44, 68, 72, 85, 109, 112–14,

(Utamaro wo meguru gonin no onna, 1946), 14, 88

172, 175 cinema industry, 10–11, 104, 70–2 militarism, 58, 70, 113, 165, 168–9, 174, 181n National Mobilisation Law (1938), 9–11 Wellman, William A., 7–8, 53n Westernisation, 2, 6, 58, 74, 79n, 106, 108, 111, 163, 168 What is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa, 1953–4), 109–11, 113–14, 121, 123n wife see female roles Wings (1927), 7–8 Woman of Osaka, A (Naniwa onna, 1940), 37, 51n Woman of Rumour, The (Uwasa no onna, 1954), 14, 75–6, 88 women directors, xiv, 1, 15–17, 18–23, 29n, 30n, 32n, 104, 107–8, 148; see also Sakane Tazuko, Tanaka Kinuyo Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, 1948), 14–15, 106, 188, 192

Venice International Film Festival, xiii, 14, 22, 107 vernacular modernism, 122, 197–8 victim discourse, 109–10, 113, 156, 165–6, 167, 175, 178 Victory of Women, The (Josei no shori, 1946), 12, 14, 82, 97, 106 visual pleasure, 143, 181n Wada Natto, 18, 19, 23, 28, 128, 162, 167, 178, 180 collaboration with Tanaka, 155, 162–3, 165, 181n Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo, 106, 167, 197–8 Wakatsuki Akira, 132 Wanderer’s Notebook, A (Hōrōki, 1962), 15, 130 Wandering Princess, The (Ruten no ōhi, 1960), 16, 28, 128, 155–85 adaptation, 155, 159, 162, 163 cinematography, 162, 170

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women screenwriters in Japan, 18–20, 115; see also Wada Natto, Mizuki Yōko, Tanaka Sumie women’s Communities, 10, 31, 136, 147 in Girls of Dark, 191–5, 199–200 women’s film 17–21, 23–5, 133, 143, 202n women’s organisations, 10, 83–4, 149n women’s rights, 2–3, 11–12, 16–17, 68, 83–8, 90–101 Wood, Robin, 58–9, 63–4, 66, 78

Yagumo Emiko, 7 Yamaguchi Yoshiko, 53n Yamamura Sō, 178, 179, 180, 182n Yamato nadeshiko, 30, 89, 100–1, 101n; see also femininity Yana Masako, 28, 147, 193–5 Yoshida Kijū, 146, 178; see also New Wave (Japan) Yoshida Shigeru, 108 Yoshinaga Sayuri, 37, 44–5 Yoshiya Nobuko, 46, 188, 200n

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