Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the representation by director Yoshimura Kozaburo in two postwar films film of women working in traditional professions in Japan's old capital of Kyoto, suggesting how tradition opens up potential spaces for female self-determination.

Paper long abstract:

"In societies that are changing very rapidly," Hanna Papanek observes, "ambiguous signals are presented to women [...] They become the repositories of 'traditional' values imputed to them by men in order to reduce the stresses men face." Yet Japanese tradition, and women's role within it, is more nuanced and ambiguous than this formulation implies. This paper will discuss the representation in postwar Japanese film of women working in traditional professions in Japan's old capital of Kyoto, using as a case study a sequence of films directed by Yoshimura Kozaburo in the years 1951-60. Dramatising women in a range of occupations and social circumstances, ranging from geisha to kimono designer to sweetmaker, these films, made in the wake of the dramatic social and legal changes ushered in by the US Occupation, present nuanced and multi-faceted images of Japanese tradition, exposing its restrictive and repressive aspects, but highlighting its potential for liberation.

This talk will focus in particular on the last two films in the sequence, Night River / Undercurrent (Yoru no kawa, 1956) and A Woman's Uphill Slope (Onna no saka, 1960), exploring how they dramatise the position of women in small-scale traditional industries in relation to broader social and political issues. In Night River, the role of artist and designer opens up possibilities of self-determination for heroine Kiwa (Yamamoto Fujiko) in both professional and personal terms. In A Woman's Uphill Slope, the liberated heroine (Okada Mariko), a postwar "modern girl", again finds self-determination when she accepts the leadership of a family-owned sweet-making business in the old capital, in a film which weighs positive and negative constructions of tradition through the contrasting life courses of two women. Beyond this, the films link the experience of the heroines to wider transformations: the establishment of a new economic model based around industrial labour and corporate capitalism; the existence of organised radical politics; the changing urban landscape of Japan.