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Chapter 4 - Stars, Occupiers, Parents and Role Models: Cinema as a Way of Being (Japanese)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2023

Jennifer Coates
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Summary

Hara Setsuko was so beautiful, and she had so many male fans. I thought she certainly wasn’t like other girls … When she died last year, so many men came to the Bunpaku memorial event, they were standing in the aisles, and there were no empty seats scattered about as usual. She really had a lot of male fans. But I always felt, how would you put it, she was a bit above everything. Maybe there were people like that in real life, you know, well, kind of closing their hearts and living out their whole lives alone. I thought, ‘Well, I guess there is also that kind of way to live’ (sō iu ikikata mo arun da nā to omoimashita). (Koyama san 2016)

Many participants in this study explicitly connected watching films in the postwar era to the development of an understanding of how to be in the world. For most, this was a question of variety and possibility. Following the narratives of particular characters and stars, both onscreen and off, presented a variety of lifestyles and opinions. In many cases, the ways of living, and ways of being a person, presented onscreen were narrated as suggesting alternatives to the ways of thinking and behaving that were observable at home. The varieties of ‘ways to live’ displayed by postwar cinema and its characters and stars ranged from the personal and domestic to the political, and from the adoptable, through the adaptable, to the unacceptable.

Stars as Role Models

Hara Setsuko as a Model of Femininity

Exploring the formative impact of star persona in the lives and personal narratives of participants in my study, I am informed by Richard Dyer’s definition of the star persona:

The star phenomenon consists of everything that is publicly available about stars. A film star’s image is not just his or her films, but the promotion of those films and of the star through pin-ups, public appearances, studio handouts and so on, as well as interviews, biographies and coverage in the press of the star’s doings and ‘private’ life. Further, a star’s image is also what people say or write about him or her, as critics or commentators. (Dyer 2004: 2–3)

Type
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Information
Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968
An Ethnographic Study
, pp. 96 - 119
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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