Mass Media. Next to owning a radio, movies were the most popular form of entertainment in Occupied Japan. However, buying tickets for the whole family could be expensive. In recognition of the importance of film in the mass media, Occupation censors and information officers kept a close watch on the studios, directors, and scenarios. Censors banned ultranationalistic themes and worked closely with information specialists who pressed wholesome and democratic story lines. Some filmmakers resisted, but on the whole Japan’s film world complies while managing at the same time to be inventive and creative within these strictures.

Women on the Screen. The Japanese began making moving picture images as early as 1897, and women were soon in demand as actors on the silent screen. Contrary to Kabuki drama, there was little desire in Japanese moviedom for men to play women’s roles. Nevertheless, women of good family found it difficult to become film actors and retain their reputation. One such example of a stifled film career in the 1920s is that of Irie Takako (1911- ). Over her family’s objections, she appeared in several silents in the 1920s, retired, but was brought back by director Kurosawa Akira in 1962 to play a savvy older samurai wife and mother in a huge hit in Japan and overseas, Sugata Sanjurō, set in 1860s Japan. As Japan shifted into talkies in the early 1930s, new movie stars were born. During the Occupation period, at least five women stand out as master film actors: Tanaka Kinuyo, Takamine Hideko, Hara Setsuko, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and Kyō Machiko. The first four were already major stars. The fifth was new to the scene in 1949. They appeared in many popular films directed by Japan’s finest filmmakers. As was the case elsewhere, Japanese women did not become film directors or cinema photographers in early postwar Japan, but a few wrote screen plays, such as Wada Notto, who worked closely with her director husband, Ichikawa Kon, in 1950s antiwar films. During the Occupation, new radio roles opened up in debates, quiz shows, and dramas, In the near future, there would be television, which made its debut in early1953, less than a year after the Occupation had ended.

Tanaka Kinuyo. Among the most popular and beloved of film stars from the early era was Tanaka Kinuyo (1909-1977). Born in Shimonoseki, she began her career in the silents in 1924 and moved easily into talkies. She appeared, in fact, in the first Japanese talkie, and played a wide variety of women, though frequently cast as “the eternal girl.” One of her wartime propaganda roles was as a patriotic mother in “The Army,” 1944. By the Occupation years, she had reached her thirties and acted in both leading and supporting parts. They were as diverse as a prostitute in Women of the Night (1948), and as a 1890s feminist in My Love is not for Burning (1949), both directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Unfortunately, both films are rarely shown in the U.S., and neither is available in VHS or DVD format. Tanaka was the quintessential, urban lower class widow who nobly and willingly sacrificed all for her family in director Naruse’s 1952 film, Okaasan/Mother. In the same year, she was the long-suffering and abused woman turned prostitute in Mizoguichi’s The Life of Oharu, set in 17th century Japan. In the meantime, in 1949, Tanaka was sent to the U.S. as a public relations official for the Japanese film industry. A wonderful photo of her was taken during the visit with American film star Bette Davis, both attired in kimono. Upon returning, Tanaka ran into criticism for “going Hollywood.” Her desire to direct films was laughed at by her friend and reputed lover, Mizoguchi. She finally got backing to direct a film in 1953, Love Letters, but not to great acclaim. She directed six films in all, while continuing her acting career. She was as good, suggests Kinoshita Chika, at playing the oppressor as the oppressed. Years later, 1974, she was again seen by international audiences in the role of an aging prostitute from the outcaste burakumin class in one of her final films, Sandakan No. 8, set in an early 20th century brothel in Southeast Asia. It was a demanding role, and her acting was of Academy Award stature. She was not nominated (among foreign stars, mainly the British received the nod from Hollywood), but she did receive the best actress award, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin Film Festival, 1977.

Hara Setsuko (b. 1920 in Yokohama), a younger actor than Tanaka, was often cast as the ideal wife, daughter-in law or daughter. She was considered by film critics to be a great beauty in the Japanese classical mode. For her roles and the persona she projected, Hara also got dubbed the Eternal Virgin. During the Asia/Pacific War, she appeared in a German-Japanese film and her image was used in propaganda and advertisements. After 1945, she had roles in many of Ozu Yasujirō’s films, beginning with Late Spring in 1946, playing to perfection a daughter who is taking care of a widowed father. He, in turn, longs for her to marry. For Hara’s wartime roles and patriotic stance, some have implied war complicity. If so, she appeared in a redeeming role in another 1946 film, Kurosawa’s No Regrets for our Youth. In this, she was the daughter of a liberal professor at 1930s Kyoto Imperial University, and her great love was a radical leftist student. Though he was imprisoned and died in jail, Hara’s character joined his mother’s family in the countryside as a devoted daughter-in-law and hard-working farm field hand. Hara, in films and real life, was photographed in both kimono and western dress and featured in magazine articles discussing the merits of kimono versus yōfuku or Western style clothes. Still famous and in demand, she suddenly and mysteriously retired in 1962, age forty-two, and lived a secluded life in Kamakura.

Another fine actor and future box office star began working as a child, age five, in 1929. Takamine Hideko (b. 1924 in Hokodate), was dubbed the Shirley Temple of Japan in the 1930s. Overworked and exploited, she became the main support of an extended family and graduated to adolescent roles during the Asia-Pacific War and mature women in a variety of post 1945 parts. Her long and varied film career of over 300 films is unfortunately not well represented in Japanese movies currently available to fans and film students in VHS or DVD format, such as her triumph as a Tokyo stripper in the late Occupation period film, Carmen Comes Home, 1951. Takamine’s artistry is on view in a few films made somewhat later, Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954 (the fortunes of a young primary school teacher and her students during the Asia-Pacific War); Floating Clouds, 1955 (based on Hayashi Fumiko’s novel of thwarted love); and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, 1960 (an aspiring bar owner). She also appeared in the third part of a grim anti-war trilogy, Kobayashi Masaki’s The Human Condition, 1959-61, which was set in postwar Siberia. Takamine frequently worked with director Naruse Mikio, who for political reasons did not receive as much support from Japanese studios as Kurosawa and Ozu and never became as well known overseas. A recent ambitious Naruse retrospective of over 30 films, playing in several American cities, 2005-2006, has helped to correct the record and to give greater display to Takamine’s considerable talent as well as to Naruse’s versatility. Takamine married in 1955 but made a point of continuing her film career.

For a time in Occupied Japan, the Japanese star with the greatest name recognition to Americans was Shirley Yamaguchi (b. 1920- ), a versatile singer and film and stage actress. She was first known to wartime Japanese audiences in 1939-1940 as the young Li Xianglan (Ri Ko Ran) and was thought to be Chinese. In fact, as Japanese fans were stunned to learn later, she was one of their own. She was born to a business family in Manchuria as Yamaguchi Yoshiko and educated at a private girl’s school in Beijing, where she acquired fluent spoken Chinese. American army officers who were trained during the Pacific War in specialized civil affairs and in crash courses on Japanese language and culture for future duty in Occupied Japan knew her very well from multiple showings of the propaganda film, Shina no Yoru (China nights). The film had three endings, depending on whether the intended audience was Japanese, Chinese, or Southeast Asian. Under her real name, Yamaguchi, she was lucky to get back to Japan alive in 1946 after being accused by the Chinese of being a war criminal. In a modest comeback, she appeared in few stage plays and films. Kurosawa picked her in 1948 for a leading role in Scandal, opposite a rising and dynamic male star, Mifune Toshirō, an Army veteran who was redefining Japanese masculinity in roles ranging from samurai to salaryman. In 1952, Yamaguchi married Japanese American sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, and went to Hollywood. There, she starred in several films, most notably, Japanese War Bride, directed by King Vidor. She also appeared in House of Bamboo, 1955, and Navy Wife, 1956. After divorcing Noguchi in 1957 and returning to Japan, she became a television journalist and married a Japanese diplomat. Much later, as Otake Yoshiko, she turned politician and was elected several times as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party to the Upper House of the Japanese Diet. In the 1990s, she headed a private reparations group to deal with Korean and other comfort woman issues on a non-governmental basis. Many survivors, however, preferred instead an official apology and payments from the Japanese government.

A new star on the postwar scene was Kyō Machiko (born in Osaka in 1924). She quickly became popular with Americans in Occupied Japan as well as with Japanese movie-goers. At first, a dancer on the Tokyo stage, she broke into films in 1949 and played an impressive range of roles from historical costume dramas to contemporary women. Rashōmon, an unexpected prize-winner at a European film festival in 1950, helped to give both its director, Kurosawa, and Kyō international recognition. It also brought attention to co-star Mifune’s frenetic acting style in the part of an accused rapist. She next appeared with great effect in Gate of Hell, another Japanese prize-winning film at a European film festival in 1952 and an Academy Award winner for color photography in 1953. The setting was late Heian Japan, 1150s, at the time of the first skirmishes between the Taira and Minamoto samurai families for military control of Japan. Kyō, attired in gorgeous costumes, played an elegant married woman of the Kyoto court and doomed love object of an obsessed country samurai. In 1955, she was a prostitute in Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, a film that was used with success by Japanese feminists to advocate an end to licensed prostitution. She, too, had a brief turn in Hollywood and was nominated for the Academy Award in 1956 for a comic role opposite Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford in Teahouse of the August Moon, set in Occupied Okinawa. In Mizoguchi’s great 1953 film, Ugetsu, she was a mysterious ghostly presence; Tanaka Kinuyo was also in the film as a potter’s wife. In Ozu’s Floating Weeds, 1959, she did an amusing turn as a seductive entertainer in a traveling acting troupe. As a side bar to Hollywood and Japan, the 1957 film Sayonara, starring Marlon Brando as a pilot on leave in Japan during the Korean War and based on a best-selling novel by James Michener, featured Umeki Miyoshi, winner of the Academy Award for best supporting actress playing opposite Red Buttons. The two were doomed lovers, a maid and a GI, who were unable to sustain a relationship in the face of discriminatory laws and military rules regulating international marriage.

Enthusiastic Japanese audiences helped to make a new star out of an eleven year old singing sensation, Misora Hibari (one of the persons featured on this site). She was born in Yokohama in 1937 to a barely surviving lower class family. Apparently one or both parents were resident Koreans, though this was not publicized or known at the time. A prodigy with a mature and wide ranging voice, she began singing locally as a child with her father’s amateur band and ventured into the Tokyo entertainment scene after the war. In 1949, she was cast in a film which turned her into an overnight sensation and a much sought-after child film star, frequently playing the role of an orphan overcoming adversity. In the 1950s, she appeared in several hit films as part of a teenage girls’ trio and continued to make movies until the 1960s. Her greatest fame, however, was as a singer or emoter of enka, Japanese popular songs of love and melancholy sung in the pentatonic scale. Years after the death in 1989, her records continued to sell at the top of the charts.

Since a representative collection of Japanese films from the Occupied period (subtitles in English) is not available in the United States, it is difficult to generalize about the effects of filmmaking on the democratization of Japan or on the expansion of women’s public and private roles on screen. Certainly actresses were in great demand but often the roles, as before, were either the good family woman respected by society or the bad women marginalized in sex work. In between were a few independent working women. Admirers of film director Kurosawa have argued that Stray Dog, 1949, is the one film which best symbolizes or captures the Occupation. Perhaps so. The film, which is set in Tokyo, is excellent, but it deals primarily with the intertwining stories of two veterans of the lost war. One is a policeman who has lost his gun; the other is a criminal who ends up with the gun. Although the film seems to be addressing Japan’s inabilities to find solutions to its many postwar problems, it does so through the criminal world and underside of Tokyo. The women are thieves, prostitutes, or entertainers. The catalyst for the film is, in fact, a women pickpocket who lifts the policeman’s gun in a tram car. No good wives or wise mothers here. It is necessary to see Kurosawa’s body of work for the whole period, especially Ikiru (To Live), 1952, before making judgments.

Ozu’s films, nostalgic and elegiac, primarily feature women who fit the prewar mold. Hara Setsuko in Tokyo Story, 1952, however, manages to be a chaste war widow, dutiful daughter-in-law, and independent office worker. At the end, her grateful father-in-law urges her to seek a life for herself. When incorporating children into his movies, Ozu almost always portrays little boys, whose behavior ranges from adorable to obnoxious. In Tenement Gentlemen, 1946, his first postwar film and perhaps atypical, he portrays a childless and grumpy widow who lives in a row house in lower class Tokyo and is tricked into caring for a lost boy. She does so, reluctantly at first but with growing affection. She finds it harder than she had imagined to return him to his father, a war veteran, and decides to help other lost and orphaned children as best she can. Two frequent players in cameo or characters roles for Ozu and other major directors were Sugimura Haruko and Sawamura Sadako (1908-1996). Both had important stage careers on the stage but enjoyed acting in films and later in television.

In the first years following the Occupation, 1952-1954, as Japanese filmmakers were released from Occupation censorship if not self-censorship, there was a series of lurid films about the bar and brothel culture in Japan. This paralleled exposes in magazines, newspapers, and fiction. For the first time, Japanese directors used Caucasians, often amateurs and embarrassingly bad, to act the parts of GIs and other foreigners, such as in Red Light Bases, 1951. This film genre, with few exceptions (such as Imamura Shōhei’s Pigs and Battleships, 1961), did not develop to great heights, and for movies the Occupation period remains a barren zone with respect to the interaction of occupiers and the occupied.