Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan by Hideaki Fujiki (review)

While there is certainly no shortage of writing about stars in studies of modern Japanese culture, scholarly investigations of Japanese stardom as a system have, until fairly recently, yet to be employed with much theoretical rigor. Making Personas by Hideaki Fujiki, a professor of film studies at Nagoya University, represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the subject. Designed as a discursive history of Japanese stardom from the late Meiji to the early Showa era, the work has two primary goals. The first is to examine the ways in which film stardom and the film star system emerged and developed within a multifaceted system of production, representation, circulation, and reception of star images. Second, the author appropriates the Japanese star system as a paradigm through which to examine modernity from a diverse array of technological, economic, political, social, and cultural factors.

Fujiki defines stars not as individual actors but as historically situated phenomena that develop from a performer’s attractiveness, the circulation of his or her identity in media, and the support of consumers of that media. The basic conditions necessary for the establishment and sustainability of modern stardom (defined here as “the process of star formation”) include a well-established film industry organized along a hierarchal division of labor as well as a sufficient infrastructure (technological, economic, political, social, cultural) enabling the mass production, distribution, and consumption of star images. Stardom does not develop in a linear fashion but along a “series of multifaceted relations of various historical conditions and processes” of which the author focuses on three key sites: the institutional, social, and transnational (p. 4). Throughout the text, these three frameworks offer a refreshingly balanced view of stardom by contextualizing the functions of: institutions related to but outside the film industry, such as the publishing and advertising industries; social networks through which consumers attach meanings and emotions to star images; and the power of transnational star images to transform and be transformed when circulated in different cultural contexts.

A central concern of this book is to analyze the Japanese star system and stardom within the context of modernity. After providing a concise critical survey of the relevant literature on modernity across the disciplines of film studies, Japan studies, Japanese film studies, and Japanese history, Fujiki contends that modernity is a useful analytical framework that enables us to “eschew modernization theory, essentialist notions of Japaneseness or orientalism, and the Hollywood-versus-national-cinemas paradigm” (p. 24). Making Personas is divided into four parts. The first three parts chart the formations and transformations of Japanese stardom through representative case studies of individual stars and star texts; the fourth part analyzes a range of interactions between Japanese stardom and modernity in two contrasting case studies. Fujiki notes that while these categories are neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive, they usefully illustrate various “structural changes” in the representations of stars and highlight “institutional practices” in the circulation of star images (p. 8).

Part 1 charts the emergence of early (1910s to mid-1920s) Japanese stars from two perspectives: that of the benshi (film narrators) and Onoe Matsunosuke (1875–1926), widely acknowledged as Japan’s first film star. Beginning with an overview of benshi stardom from their early popularity with audiences through their institutionalization within the industry in 1917 to their ultimate decline by the late 1930s, in chapter 1 Fujiki situates benshi within an exhibition-based structure. Benshi stardom incorporated elements of the kabuki star system (notably the iemoto practices of family lineages, apprenticeships, and transmissions of techniques) into the nascent film system. The lack of stable qualifications to become a benshi attracted people from a variety of backgrounds and classes, creating a perception of the profession as having low social status. As such, benshi were less likely to be perceived as role models for audiences. With an influx of images of U.S. stars after World War I, Japanese critics grew more critical of the benshi’s performance...