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Japanese Film Heroines
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15488 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
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12 / 1989 |
2,251 Words |
| Author
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David Tracey
David Tracey is a film critic residing in Japan. |
The role of women in Japanese society has changed in a number of ways that won't show up in government reports. A woman wearing a kimono these days, unless she is quite elderly or a bar hostess, will turn heads in the streets of Tokyo. No longer do wives walk the traditionally respectful three paces behind their husbands, and career women may now choose from a variety of specialty magazines published just for them. And of course, in recent months women have rather spectacularly made their presence felt in the Japanese national political scene.
At the same time, it is rare to see a woman smoking in a train station, even though dozens of men may be puffing away with abandon. And staying single beyond one's late twenties is still somewhat taboo for women, while men have another decade or so before family members start introducing potential marriage partners.
The sweeping social changes that have left an odd variety of traditional customs behind are vividly depicted in Japan's movies. Japanese filmmakers, noted for their particularly domestic outlook in an already inward-looking nation, have for decades made movies that speak volumes about what Japan is all about even though the vast majority are never shown outside the country. The window on social change that Japanese cinema presents is particularly clear when it comes to the roles leading actresses have portrayed in the past few decades, surely the most exciting in Japan's history. The gap between popular actresses' roles thirty years ago and today is as vast as the growth in Japan's GNP in the same time. Yet some aspects of the image of film women today, deeply rooted as they are in the Japanese psyche, have remained, proving that the more things change, the more they stay Japanese.
Long-Suffering Mothers
While the rest of Japan was working its way out of postwar poverty in the 1950s and early 1960s, Japanese film heroines lagged miserably behind. Movies about hard-working, long-suffering mothers were among the most popular productions of the time--Japan's golden are of cinema, when ticket sales were seven times what they are today. Mired in poverty, enduring one tribulation after another with unswerving resolve, often for cruelly unappreciative families, the plight of the suffering matriarch resulted in enough films to become a genre in Japanese cinema. Haha mono, or mother films, were industry standards of the day and include classics made by masters like Yasujiro Ozu.
Typical
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