The Star Actress Reconstructed by Japan’s Defeat:

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Other Title
  • 敗戦のスター女優
  • 敗戦のスター女優 : 占領期における原節子のスターペルソナ
  • ハイセン ノ スター ジョユウ : センリョウキ ニ オケル ゲンセツコ ノ スターペルソナ
  • 占領期における原節子のスターペルソナ
  • The Star Persona of Hara Setsuko in the Occupation Period

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Abstract

<p>The purpose of this paper is to empirically reveal why Hara Setsuko’s value among stars under the U.S. occupation rose the most and how her star persona was constructed by the desire of the Japanese people in light of the socio-cultural condition after the defeat in the Second World War. Although the research on film stars so far has paid much attention to cinematic representation, this paper emphasizes discourses surrounding stars, especially the relationship between films and images/texts in fan magazines from the perspective of star studies, and explores what kind of value the construction of individual identity across plural media texts created in the norms of gender/sexuality in the U.S. occupation period.</p><p>Hara Setsuko, as the image of the ideal woman which was required after the war, had already presented an intellectual and strong willed image during the war, and became the most popular star in the occupation period by embodying the continuity between the interwar and the postwar. She created a persona, which “keeps a distance from others” in both her cinematic performances and in the personality represented in fan magazines. This enhanced her cultural value in the discourse on Japanese female bodies during the occupation period. She discursively constructed an ideal persona as a “disjunctive body” never conceptually overlapping with the “defeated body” evoking the historical trauma of defeat represented by “pan-pan”—street prostitutes who solicited American soldiers. This paper analyzes how Hara Setsuko was estimated and desired by the public in the historical context of the occupation, and elucidates the postwar consciousness of Japanese people through her star persona, which visualized the relationship between the U.S. and Japan.</p>

Journal

  • eizogaku

    eizogaku 96 (0), 68-88, 2016

    Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences

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