- Convenor:
-
Akiko Miyamoto
(Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Visual Arts
Short Abstract
This panel investigates the modern girl in Japanese cinema as a contested formation rather than a stable social type or a simple icon of modernization. It asks how modern femininity became visible, intelligible, and morally legible within Japanese mass culture—and where that legibility broke down.
Long Abstract
This panel examines the modern girl (moga) in Japanese cinema as a contested formation rather than a stable social type or a simple icon of modernization. Bringing together four papers on cinema, star discourse, advertising, and reception from the Taishō period through the early postwar years, the panel asks how modern femininity became visible, intelligible, and morally legible within Japanese mass culture—and where that legibility broke down.
The first paper theorizes the modern girl as a regime of visibility through a comparative analysis of Naruse Mikio’s Street Without End (1934) and Ozu Yasujirō’s Woman of Tokyo (1933). Focusing on working women in urban space, it shows how moga-ness is produced through contrasting strategies: Naruse’s choreography of gazes that turns female labor into metropolitan spectacle, and Ozu’s narrational management of concealment and disclosure that transforms visibility into moral surveillance. Together, these films reveal the modern girl as a fragile condition shaped by space, affect, and ethical judgment.
The second paper examines the Japanese reception of Western literary films, focusing on adaptations of La Dame aux Camélias (Camille). Challenging narratives of one-directional modernization, it demonstrates how critics and audiences interpreted foreign melodrama through the Shinpa emotional logic of giri and ninjō, exposing tensions between modern femininity’s outward appearance and inherited moral frameworks.
The third paper turns to the Chinese actress Bai Guang, whose wartime and postwar roles in Japanese cinema reveal the limits of modern-girl legibility in a transnational context. Despite her femme fatale image in Chinese-language cinema, she was repeatedly cast in Japan in passive roles shaped by restrictive media expectations.
The final paper analyzes cosmetics advertisements featuring the jidaigeki actress Fushimi Naoe, tracing how vamp personas circulated through film magazines. Oscillating between seduction and restraint, these images reveal how modern femininity was commodified and managed across media.
Taken together, the panel argues that the modern girl in Japanese cinema was not a coherent symbol of progress, but a site of negotiation where visibility, desire, morality, and control were continually produced and contested.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how actor Fushimi Naoe’s “vamp” star image circulated beyond film through 1930s cosmetics advertising. Analyzing magazine advertisements, it shows how her persona linked cinema and consumer culture, and prefigured the “modern girl.”
Paper long abstract
This paper focuses on the actor Fushimi Naoe, who gained particular appeal as a “vamp” figure within the genre commonly referred to as Japanese period film Jidaigeki. By examining cosmetics advertisements in which Fushimi appeared as a model, this study investigates how her star image was connected to consumer goods and circulated beyond the screen. Specifically, it analyzes cosmetics advertisements published in film magazines, paying close attention to Fushimi’s visual representation, the advertising copy accompanying her image, and the ways these elements were linked to the films in which she performed.
In Japanese cinema, the “vamp” is typically characterized by her capacity to seduce and metaphorically attack men. This figure is often understood as a precursor to the later “modern girl” (modan gāru). However, the vamp image did not develop solely within cinematic narratives. Film magazines of the period frequently featured movie stars as models for cosmetics advertisements, often alongside short descriptions or anecdotes related to their film roles. These advertisements thus functioned as an important site for the extension and reinforcement of star images. Fushimi was no exception: in one advertisement, for example, she is described as a figure who overwhelms and captivates male spectators, directly echoing the affective power of her on-screen vamp roles. This paper concentrates on advertisements from the 1930s, when Fushimi’s acting ability and public recognition were at their height.
An examination of these advertisements reveals two contrasting yet interconnected strategies. Some advertisements explicitly draw on Fushimi’s strong vamp persona cultivated in film, while others present an image seemingly opposed to the vamp, emphasizing restraint or refinement. Nevertheless, both types rely on her established vamp characteristics, promoting forms of beauty designed to appeal to both male and female audiences. Moreover, these advertisements implicitly assume not only women but also men as subjects of cosmetic use.
Based on these findings, this paper discusses the effects and significance of Fushimi Naoe’s deployment in 1930s cosmetics advertising, its relationship to the later emergence of the modern girl, and the distinctive characteristics of Fushimi’s star persona within Japanese film and consumer culture.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Western film adaptations of Camille were received in Japan through the “Shinpa mode.” Focusing on melodrama and female stardom, it shows how modern girl imagery emerged through tensions between Western modernity and persistent Shinpa emotional frameworks.
Paper long abstract
This paper reconsiders the reception of Western literary films in Japan from the Taishō period to the early Shōwa era through the concept of the “Shinpa mode,” focusing on cinematic adaptations of La Dame aux Camélias (Camille). While previous film historiography has emphasized Western literary cinema as a catalyst for the modernization and Westernization of Japanese cinema, this paper argues that reception practices were equally shaped by a persistent emotional and narrative framework rooted in premodern theatrical traditions.
By examining French, Italian, and American film adaptations of Camille—including the French version starring Sarah Bernhardt (1912), the Italian diva film featuring Francesca Bertini (1915), and the American production starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino (1921)—this study shows how Japanese critics and audiences actively interpreted these Western melodramas through the lens of giri (social obligation) and ninjō (human emotion). Rather than perceiving these films as purely Western or modern, reviewers frequently compared the actresses’ exaggerated bodily expressions to the performance style of onnagata actors in Shinpa theater, thereby locating “Shinpa-like” qualities within Western cinema itself.
Japanese film adaptations further crystallized this interpretive framework. The 1915 Nikkatsu adaptation cast the celebrated onnagata actor Tachibana Teijirō as the heroine, translating Western melodrama into Japanese spaces and Shinpa performance codes. In the early Shōwa period, as actresses replaced onnagata, attempts were made to align Camille with the image of the modern woman. The Nikkatsu version planned for Okada Yoshiko, later replaced by Natsukawa Shizue, exposed tensions between the modern girl’s outward appearance and the inner logic of the Shinpa heroine. By contrast, the 1932 Shōchiku adaptation starring Kurishima Sumiko reaffirmed a self-sacrificing Shinpa-style heroine, privileging moral obligation over romantic fulfillment.
Through these cases, this paper challenges one-directional models of Western influence and highlights a bidirectional process of cultural negotiation. The figure of the modern girl in Japanese cinema emerged not simply as a symbol of modernity, but through ongoing friction with deeply rooted Shinpa emotional modes that continued to shape gendered representation.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Chinese actress Bai Guang’s two appearances in the Japanese films, analyzing their visual representation, particularly bodily images that evoke both admiration and fear, and reconsidering the cultural meanings of the “Chinese woman” constructed in Japanese cinema and media.
Paper long abstract
Paradoxically, the outbreak of war intensified the movement of personnel between Japanese and Chinese film production sites. Yet within the long and complex history of Sino-Japanese cinematic exchange that extended across both the wartime and postwar periods, only one actor in each country starred in films produced by the other: Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Japan and Bai Guang in China. In contrast to the high visibility of Li Xianglan (Yamaguchi Yoshiko) in wartime mainland China and postwar Hong Kong, Bai Guang—despite starring twice in Japanese films—has remained largely unknown in Japan. This paper seeks to clarify part of the reason for this obscurity through an analysis of film texts and contemporary critical discourse surrounding them.
In Chinese-language cinema, Bai Guang was widely known as an emblematic figure of the passionate femme fatale, a star image deeply shaped by her experiences during the war. Yet she never appeared in Japanese films in roles that emphasized eroticism or allure. During the wartime period, she was cast as a taciturn, uneducated rural woman; in the postwar era, she appeared as an innocent and pure-hearted orphan. Across both periods, Bai Guang consistently performed—or was made to perform—the imagined image of the Chinese woman demanded by Japanese mass media of the time.
The decades from the 1930s to the 1950s, during which Bai Guang was active, were marked not only by warfare across Asia but also by the growing dependence of the film industry and audiences on the star system. Film stars were expected to embody models of popular culture and idealized figures for mass audiences. Within this context, Bai Guang was assigned roles that ran counter to prevailing trends and expectations: an unattractive woman during the war and a woman lacking strength in the postwar years. As a result, she was unable to function as a “model” figure in the sense required of a star. Instead, she was consumed merely as a faithful embodiment of the representations of Chinese women that Japanese mass media sought to present to the public.
Paper short abstract
This paper defines the Japanese modern girl (moga) as a cinematic regime of visibility, not a stable social type. Comparing Naruse Mikio’s Street Without End (1934) and Ozu Yasujirō’s Woman of Tokyo (1933), it shows how urban spectatorship shapes moga-ness via spectacle and moral surveillance.
Paper long abstract
This paper defines the Japanese “modern girl” (moga) not as a stable social type but as a cinematic regime of visibility: an aesthetic arrangement through which women’s labor, urban consumer space, leisure, and sexual legibility are made visible, circulated, and regulated within modern mass culture. Rather than equating the modern girl with surface markers such as Western dress or employment, the paper examines the conditions under which women’s bodies become visually and morally legible in the modern city, and the points at which that legibility becomes unstable.
To specify these conditions, the paper compares two early-1930s Japanese silent films: Naruse Mikio’s Street Without End (Kagirinaki hodo, 1934) and Ozu Yasujirō’s Woman of Tokyo (Tokyo no onna, 1933). Both films center on working women, yet they construct modern femininity through markedly different directorial strategies. Naruse foregrounds the production of visibility at the level of the scene, treating urban space as a field of intersecting sightlines and evaluative gazes. Ozu, by contrast, foregrounds the management of visibility at the level of narration, organizing concealment and disclosure so as to position the spectator within an ethical framework of judgment.
In Street Without End, the Ginza café functions as an apparatus of metropolitan consumption that converts female labor into spectacle. Through blocking, movement, and spatial design, Naruse choreographs competing gazes—customers, managers, and passersby—so that the heroine’s work becomes assessable and exchangeable within the urban scene. By contrast, Woman of Tokyo structures visibility through a division between day and night. The heroine’s daytime office work produces an image of respectable modern femininity that depends on the concealment of nocturnal labor at a dance hall. When concealment fails, visibility is transformed into moral surveillance, routing the spectator toward judgment through the family’s economy of honor and shame.
By bringing these films into dialogue, the paper demonstrates how Japanese silent cinema organized modern femininity through space, narrative timing, and spectatorship. It argues that the modern girl was not a coherent symbol of progress but a fragile configuration produced through negotiations between spectacle, morality, and control.