Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945–1964 by Jennifer Coates (review)

In Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945–1964, Jennifer Coates forcefully argues that representations of women in postwar Japanese cinema encoded popular attitudes toward the Allied Occupation and its legacy, as well as other transformations occurring in Japan. As Coates observes, one of SCAP's most radical policies was to promote gender equality and prescribe new forms of femininity. She writes, "While reforms issued by SCAP affected everyone, a high proportion of reforms dealt specifically with women and their roles in postwar Japanese life" (p. 21). During the Occupation, female characters were a primary vehicle for democratization ideals in Japanese films. These films were heavily censored by the American authorities and produced with the goal of highlighting specific social and political messages.

Analyzing images of women as signifiers fraught with meaning even after the Occupation ended, Coates asks why cinema audiences consumed such highly repetitive content with relish. She deploys the concept of "icons" in multiple ways: through her analysis of iconic film stars, through her focus on the repetitive use of visual and narrative patterns, and through the use of an "art-historical iconographic analysis" (p. 1) as her method of relating this repeated imagery to broader issues in postwar Japanese society. She draws on the arguments of scholars such as John Dower, Ayako Saito, Yoshikuni Igarashi, and others who suggest that Japan's wartime defeat and occupation were experienced as emasculating and that in this context, representations of women were highly charged, especially when used to promote the occupier's values. Igarashi writes, "In postwar Japan, both the American occupation authorities and Japanese society deployed bodily images as tropes for radically shifting social configurations. Bodies emerged in the immediate postwar period as ambivalent entities that represented both the liberation and the subjugation of Japan."¹ Saito similarly argues that "the body was the most privileged signifier of ambivalence of the occupation" and that representations of women were particularly fraught since "the liberated sexualized image of women was often presented in tandem with degraded and feminized men as the iconic image of the nation's defeat."²

Coates builds on this and other scholarship—most notably theoretical work by Miriam Hansen—to develop her own original lines of argumentation. Drawing heavily on Hansen's concept of vernacular modernism, Coates argues that representations of women "were central to the public negotiation of Japan's rapid modernization and Westernization during the occupation period 1945–1952) and its aftermath" (p. 110). She repeatedly asserts that "the images under discussion here are read as imaginative possibilities rather than reflections of real life change" (p. 156). Her central contention is that "in the socio-historical context of the occupation and its aftermath, the female body in the public sphere was a highly charged concept in its relation to SCAP-mandated social reforms. The characterization, imagery, and narratives of women in the public sphere addressed and mediated popular anxieties related to changing roles for women and the Westernizing or Americanizing influence of the occupation" (p. 159).

Compared with Hansen's theory-driven historiography (which I will touch on later), however, Coates's approach is closer to tropology, with attention given to repetitive imagery and the chapters of the book organized around different tropes. Coates states that she viewed approximately six hundred films made between 1945 and 1964 for the project, but her argument relies primarily on extended close analysis of single texts that comprise a much smaller set of films. She also often draws on monthly and bimonthly film journals for evidence of the films' popular reception, including not only the cinephilic Eiga geijutsu, Kinema junpō, and Eiga hyōron, but also the more gossipy fan magazines Eiga bunko, Eiga fan, Eiga goraku, and Eiga romansu. She tends to avoid auteurist readings, even though none of the films she analyzes are low-budget, formulaic genre texts. Rather than director or studio, Coates...