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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.