Session 166: Sculpting the Power of the Image: Visual Representation of Prewar Japan

Organizer: Rei Okamoto, Northeastern University

Chair: Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University

Discussant: Barbara Hamill Sato, Seikei University

Keywords: Japan, visual media, nationalism, gender, popular culture.

The image is a source of power—useful for its connotative strength and prized for its ambiguity. For these reasons, the image maker treads a dangerous path, wanting to harness this power while knowing that the value of visual expression lies in its unbroken energy: to assert, to suggest, to play both sides of the same coin in a way that will subvert, neutralize, or reinforce other images and readings of those images.

This panel investigates how artists try to unleash the expressive power of the image—as film and as manga—while at the same time attempting to control it. Our focus is on the period from the early twentieth century to 1945. Daisuke Miyao looks at how representations of Japan in early European and American films incorporated the dual image of aestheticism and horror, while Japanese intellectuals attempted to appropriate these images as an embodiment of ideal Japanese nationhood. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano examines cinematic images of women in Japanese adaptations of Hollywood films, which was a subjective act that often subverted the power of the original. Hideaki Fujiki sheds light on the popular "modern girl" movie star Natsukawa Shizue, whose public persona as a commodity of consumer culture assisted her position as an advocate of nationalism. Rei Okamoto reconstructs the prewar discourse on theories about manga as a blending of image and text that is superior for conveying nationalism and supporting total war.

In both manga and film, language anchors the image in an attempt to direct its connotative powers in a certain articulated direction. These four specific examples demonstrate the manner in which modern identity was forged and sculpted within a complicated context of competing images and definitions.

Dames in Kimono: Exoticism, Japonisme, and Nationalism in Cinema from Madame Butterfly to Ringu

Daisuke Miyao, University of California, Berkeley

Japan was a very popular subject in European and American films in the early history of cinema. There was a twofold perspective toward Japan in these filmic representations: an aesthetic view and a political view. First, Japonisme connected the image of Japan closely to the female domain in the middle-class home. Women’s ideal roles in the discourse of the home were premodern purity. In the period of modernity, Japanese art was nostalgically considered to embody the same characteristics as ideal middle-class women. Here, the gendered construction of the middle-class domestic sphere was extended to the racial paradigm. Second, Japan was viewed as a modernizing nation, often with the image of a political and economic threat ("yellow peril"). European and American films with Japanese subjects incorporated these twofold images of Japan: "aestheticism" and "horror." Across the Pacific, Japanese intellectuals who pursued the modernization policy tried to appropriate these foreign-made films with Japanese subjects both as an ideal representative of modernization and as an ideal image of Japanese nationhood. Closely examining the Madame Butterfly films and The Cheat (1915) in relation to the development of two major film genres, melodrama and horror, this paper traces the volatile intersection of Japanese and white American culture. Referring to the issues of race, gender and nation, it analyzes the historical trajectory of American images of Japan, and of Japanese self-images in the world. This paper also casts light upon the notion of self-exoticization observable in the Golden Period of Japanese cinema through the recent popularity of "J-Horror" in international markets.

Adapting the Modern: Images of Women in Interwar Japanese Cinema

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University

The interwar period of Japan witnessed the increased presence of women in the public sphere especially in the cinema, where the unprecedented image of women on screen was shaped by processes of adaptation from Hollywood films. While film scholars have often focused on adaptation from literature to film, the act of adaptation actually occurs at various levels of cultural hybridization. This paper focuses on "adaptation" as a subjective act, by scrutinizing the mimesis and abjection of female images in Japanese films’ absorption of Hollywood. Iistoricizing the process itself reveals existing discourses of power imbalance between original and copy, Hollywood and Japanese cinemas. By adapting acting style, image, and narrative, Japanese filmmakers created an illusion of leveling these disparities in production modes, often subverting the power of the original. Examples range from the overt imitation of Mary Pickford in Hanabusa Yuriko’s performance in Soul on the Road (1920) to the on-screen chastening of the actress Okada Yoshiko in Woman of Tokyo (1934)—her modern girl image overlapping with her off-screen star image as ethnically mixed vamp, and to the Japanese adaptation of Stella Dallas (1937), The Music of Mother (1937), in which the victimized woman is ethnicized within Japanese mis-en-scène in contrast with her husband’s identification with European knowledge and culture. I argue in each case that adaptation is neither a neutral nor passive act, but rather represents autonomy for the cultural subject.

Popularity, Respectability, and Nationalism: A Modern Girl Film Star in Japan’s Rising Consumer Culture

Hideaki Fujiki, Nagoya University

During the 1920s, as the consumer culture arose in Japan, female film stars identified as "modern girls" emerged. This paper examines a then most popular "modern girl" actress, Natsukawa Shizue, and discusses how the formation of this marketable star served the thriving nationalism at that time. Modern girl stars were not monolithic, but played different roles in the Imperial capitalist society. Whereas such controversial stars as Clara Bow evoked contradictions between her fans’ consuming activity and their national identity, Natsukawa’s star formation helped harmonize the tension between consumption and dominant cultural values. It was attuned to the overall historical context, in which the rising consumer culture and Marxist sentiment were not simply repressed by, but also accommodated the expanding nationalism. Films represented Natsukawa as a respectable screen persona, combining sophistication (a motif shared in consumerism and highbrow culture) with spirituality (a motif commonly seen in tendency and nationalist films) in her characterizations. Women’s and general magazines further promoted this respectability, as well as her popularity, by featuring her as a fashion model and a public opinion leader. Concurrently, filmic and extra-filmic representations functioned to humanize her commodity status, and, in so doing, concealed its materiality, whose value was generated only from differentiation and exchange between commodities. Thus, emerging as a respectable public persona in the rising consumer culture, Natsukawa, if not a pro-nationalist, contributed to the dominating force of nationalism that was homogenizing the culture.

Theorizing Manga as Nationalism: The Discourse on the Role of Wartime Manga

Rei Okamoto, Northeastern University

During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan underwent an unprecedented expansion of its modern institutions. Emerging mass society, mass culture, and expanding media consumption characterized this period As the total war system was increasingly intensified in the 1930s, the contemporary cartoonists who engaged in creating manga, one of the emerging visual media of the time, experienced the rise and fall of the proletarian manga movement, dominance of "nansensu" manga as a popular genre, and the increasing presence of war physically and ideologically. This was also the period when these cartoonists began theorizing about manga, especially in relation to Japanese wartime mobilization. A close study of this discourse reveals that, by defining manga as an ideal medium for conveying nationalism, the cartoonists played a role as active agents of the war. In the course of this theorization, they attempted to recover the artistic quality of manga from being merely a commodity of consumerism, as evident in nansensu manga, as articulated by, for instance, former proletarian cartoonist Katō Etsurō. The discourse reflected the ambiguity inherent in the nature of manga as a hybrid of the visual and the verbal, as well as its marginalized identity as neither art nor literature. This paper reveals how subtly and intricately the various desires and ideals of the cartoonists regarding the future direction of the medium were manifested in the discourse.