Transforming the Feminine Ideal: How Setsuko Hara Adapted to Changing Times (Preview)
by Patrick Galvan

In her Nov. 5, 1990 New Yorker essay, “The Odor of Pickled Radishes,” Phyllis Birnbaum recalled a statement novelist Shusaku Endo made on the legendary Japanese film actress Setsuko Hara. “After seeing [one of her movies], we would sigh or let out a great breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this: Can it be possible there is such a woman in this world?” At the time of this declaration, Hara had been absent from the screen for nearly thirty years. She’d abruptly retired in 1963 and lived in Garbo-like seclusion in the coastal city of Kamakura, refusing to make public appearances and rarely granting interviews. Even a request from former colleagues to appear in a documentary about frequent collaborator Yasujirō Ozu (director of such classics as 1949’s Late Spring and 1953’s Tokyo Story) was declined. Birnbaum nevertheless described Endo as one of several male acquaintances “who dream of meeting Hara just once before they die. Hara was so refined, so moral, so beautiful, so representative of all that Japanese men valued in women that she remained excitingly out of reach for the hordes of males who adored her.”

In Japan and abroad, Hara is known as “the Eternal Virgin,” a moniker attributed to her on-screen wholesomeness and her reputation as the ideal Japanese woman. Part of the male fascination with the actress no doubt stemmed from her mysteriousness. Persistent rumors of partial occidental heritage fed into theories about her unique beauty: her long face, wide eyes, and sculpted nose seemed distinctly Eurasian. There also remained unanswered questions regarding her personal life. In Hara’s day, a beloved actress’s retirement typically coincided with marriage. Hara never married and, in her lifetime, had no confirmed romantic attachments. There was speculation of affairs with Ozu as well as her director brother-in-law, Hisatora Kumagai; another unsubstantiated rumor claimed she’d been the romantic partner of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur during the postwar American Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). But she never spoke of anyone special, and the fact that she remained single was not lost on eventual foreign admirers. Famed American talk show host Dick Cavett claimed in The Criterion Collection’s online magazine Current to have glimpsed Hara on a trip to Kamakura. So enamored was he with the star of Tokyo Story that he deposited a bouquet on her doorstep and fled after ringing the doorbell.

Hara’s appeal to the female demographic was somewhat different. Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson’s landmark 1959 study The Japanese Film: Art and Industry describes the actress as a “woman’s woman,” whose on-screen dynamic with males demonstrated their failure “to understand, one, her business talent and, two, her true feminine delicacy.” And her ultimate popularity with both sexes—according to film historian Tadao Sato—stemmed from the depiction of a Japanese who persisted despite bearing “much psychological strain during the modernization process…. [T]o the Japanese such sincerity was the mark of true beauty in a woman.” Richie put it more succinctly in his 2006 book Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People: “She had become an ideal: men wanted to marry someone like her; women wanted to be someone like her.”

The other fascinating quality of Setsuko Hara’s stardom is how her image as the ideal Japanese woman evolved alongside early twentieth-century history. Hara’s career encompassed one hundred and one motion pictures over a period of twenty-seven years, during which time Japan’s sociopolitical climate experienced numerous drastic changes. Depending on what society—or whatever power happened to govern it—called for, she could be anything from a nationalistic flag-waver to a symbol for democratic values to a quietly suffering domestic figure. 

Wartime Heroine

Setsuko Hara was born to Yokohama silk merchants on June 17, 1920. The youngest of seven children, she’d planned on becoming a schoolteacher until the global effects of the Great Depression tanked her family’s business. Dropping out of school at age fourteen, she was encouraged to join the film industry by her brother-in-law and debuted in Tetsu Taguchi’s Don’t Hesitate, Young Folks! (1935). Despite appearing in several movies into the following year and being saluted in the December 1936 issue of Shinchō magazine—wherein critic Takao Itagaki praised her “harmonious blend of pure Japanese taste and fresh modernity”—Hara remained a lesser- known talent until Sadao Yamanaka’s Priest of Darkness (1936). The picture was a solid kabuki adaptation that allowed Hara to showcase her dramatic range—as a young woman prepared to sacrifice her dignity for a sibling. The springboard to stardom, however, came not from accolades received on this film, but from an acquaintance made on set.

The person in question was European director Arnold Fanck, who at the time was in Japan scouting talent for The Daughter of the Samurai (1937), a co-production between Japan and Nazi Germany. The plot—a Japanese man gives up a German fiancée, as she doesn’t want a mixed-blood marriage, to wed the countrywoman betrothed to him—served as propaganda for both nations: endorsing Nazi ideologies of racial purity as well as the feudal Japanese tradition of arranged marriage. Fanck intended his female lead to be “a symbol of Japan.” After being dissuaded from casting Kinuyo Tanaka (on the basis that she wasn’t considered beautiful enough), he discovered Hara on the Priest of Darkness set and in her saw the potential to represent Asian femininity.

The Daughter of the Samurai birthed Hara’s image as the ideal Japanese woman—albeit with an exoticized slant catering to foreign sensibilities. Fanck’s primary goal with this picture was “to represent Japan and its people’s mentality in a way Europeans could understand.” As Christin Bohnke has written, 1930s Western audiences were “familiar with depictions of Japanese women as demure, beautiful, fragile, and sexualized objects.” Hara, under Fanck’s direction, embodies these stereotypes: perpetually clad in kimono; referring to cherry blossoms in a farewell note; so timid yet so dramatic that she attempts suicide at a volcano. Although this sensationalism—coupled with the film’s logy pace and overwrought melodrama—antagonized Japanese critics, The Daughter of the Samurai gained enormous publicity through its international production and promotional tour. Hara accompanied the picture to both Europe and America and returned home a well-known public figure…

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Patrick Galvan is a film journalist whose writing has been published by SYFY WIRE, ourculture, Offscreen, and Crooked Marquee, and is author of Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career (2022).

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 3