How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Female Film Stars and the Housewife Role in Postwar Japan

Abstract

How are mass publics persuaded to accept new gendered roles? The capacity of popular media to influence our understandings of the roles available and appropriate to us has proved a fascinating topic for researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and for academic and nonacademic writers alike. The case of early postwar Japan is particularly engaging in terms of this question because a booming popular press, rapidly increasing cinema attendance, and occupation censorship of mass media productions combined to create a complex nexus of factors that influenced popular understandings of how to be a post-defeat Japanese citizen. Gendered roles were publicly scrutinized as Allied occupation agendas clashed with grassroots understandings of gendered performance. Mass media productions were co-opted into the project of reforming the roles and identities available to the Japanese public during the early years of the occupation (1945–52). The Japanese cinema and its surrounding print media generated alternately seductive and disciplining affects (emotions or desires) around these new gendered roles. The role of full-time professional housewife was not only one of the more highprofile roles under discussion in the popular press of the postwar era but continues to inform how Japanese home life is understood, both domestically and internationally, today. This role has been imagined alternately as an import from the United States, as a continuation of the gendered behavior of Japan’s recent past, and as a modern way of living in the new highrise housing developments (danchi) that visually confirmed Japan’s postwar rebuilding.