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  • How to Be a Domestic Goddess:Female Film Stars and the Housewife Role in Postwar Japan
  • Jennifer Coates (bio)

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 high-profile 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 high-rise housing developments (danchi) that visually confirmed Japan’s postwar rebuilding. [End Page 29] As Hiroko Hirakawa has observed, middle-class, full-time professional housewives are “elite minorities in Japanese society, yet politicians, bureaucrats, conservative intellectuals, business leaders, and the mass media have portrayed them as the prototypical inhabitants of postwar Japan.”1 The widespread assumption that a significant number of full-time professional housewives existed in postwar Japan is apparent in the extensive media coverage of the role, peaking in the “Housewife Debate” (shufu ronsō)2 conducted in Fujin kōron (Women’s Review) magazine beginning in 1955. These discussions focused on the beneficial and detrimental aspects of the housewife role for female development and for Japanese society more generally, although the actual existence of significant numbers of full-time housewives in everyday life went unquestioned. How did the housewife become such a persuasive construct? Responding to this question, this essay explores the representation of female film stars as housewives in the film journals and fan magazines of the early occupation era, to suggest that the Japanese mass media, and particularly its star system, played a part in situating the full-time professional housewife as a normative female role in postwar Japan.

Many historians have noted the persuasive influence of publications aimed at the adult female demographic, especially with respect to desirable or acceptable roles for women.3 Discourse on the full-time professional housewife at the center of the nuclear family was particularly charged in the early postwar era, in part due to popular understanding of the role as having been newly imported from the United States. Throughout this essay, such claims are treated as discursive techniques rather than historical fact; the Japanese family structure, like the family imagined elsewhere in the world, has continued to develop and change throughout history. Furthermore, popular understandings of the desirable or “normal” in relation to the family rarely reflect the full diversity of how we live. This essay focuses on one aspect of this issue, exploring how an imagined gendered role was made to seem understandable, attractive, and even inevitable for the mass public of postwar Japan. All further references to ideas of the family, tradition, and normality are made with this in mind: namely, that such concepts are discursively constructed and maintained, and distinct from lived everyday experiences.

Andrew Gordon suggests that the “reality gap” between media treatment of gendered roles and everyday experiences is evident in both pre- and postwar Japan in relation to the housewife.4 In the context of formalized initiatives to “rationalize” the home and standardize the role of the housewife, which were central...

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