Gambling with the Nation: Heroines of the Japanese Yakuza Film, 1955–1975

ABSTRACT

A revamped period-drama film genre surfaced after the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952), featuring androgynous comic heroines who cross-dressed to perform male and female yakuza roles. By the late 1960s, they had been replaced by increasingly sexualized figures, and later by the ‘pink’ violence of the ‘girl boss’ sub-genre. Yet masculine themes in the ‘nihilistic’ yakuza films of the late 1960s and 1970s have been the focus of most scholarship on the genre, with scant attention paid to the female yakuza film. This article offers an iconographic reading of the heroines of the yakuza genre, arguing that the re-imagining of a postwar ‘Japaneseness’ was conducted as much through the yakuza genre’s heroines as its heroes. Through analysis of key visual motifs, narrative tropes, and star personae, the image of the female yakuza can be read as a commentary on social conditions in postwar Japan. We can see the rapid social and political changes of postwar Japan reflected and mediated through the changing image of the female yakuza heroine during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Notes

¹ For example, Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film, and Schrader, ‘Yakuza: A Primer’.

² Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 5.

³ According to Kinema junpō (Film Report magazine) records, which list the top ten box-office earners, critical successes, and popular hits each year, films featuring yakuza characters entered the box-office top ten in 1960 with Road of Chivalry (Ninkyō nakasendō, Matsuda Sadatsugu, 1960), which made 350,910,000 yen, the highest box-office taking that year (Kinema junpō besuto ten 85 kai zenshi 1924–2011, 158). While the Kinema junpō figures are rounded to the nearest 10,000 yen (man) and fluctuate over time due to inflation and changes in the tax on ticket prices in 1973, it is evident that the top-earning film each year was the most popular and widely seen, at least until video rental began. Yakuza films begin to appear in the Kinema junpō reader’s choice of best ten films in 1972 with Female Prisoner no. 701: Scorpion (Joshū 701 gō: Sasori, Ito Shunya, 1972) in seventh place, Theatre of Life: Story of Youth, Passion and Spirit (Jinsei gekijō: seishun, aiyoku, zankyō hen, Katō Tai, 1972) in eighth place, and Modern Yakuza: Outlaw Killer (Gendai yakuza: hito kiri yota, Fukasaku Kinji, 1972) in tenth position (Kinema junpō besuto ten 85 kai zenshi 1924–2011, 294). Yakuza films appeared in every box-office, readers’, and critics’ top-ten lists each year until 1976, when even this prolific genre began to suffer from sharply declining cinema audience numbers, and studios invested less in star-studded productions.

⁴ Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses’, 342.

⁵ Fuji Junko was the stage name used by actress Shundō Junko for the first part of her career. She starred as Fuji Junko in a series of popular jidaigeki and yakuza films in the 1960s, before retiring in 1972 on her marriage to kabuki theater actor Onoe Kikugoro VII. She returned to television acting as Fuji Sumiko in 1974, before moving back into cinema, this time largely appearing in the melodrama and romance genres. She was awarded the Blue Ribbon Prize for best supporting actress in 1999 and 2006.

⁶ Godzic, ‘Iconographic-Iconological Method in Film Research’, 156.

⁷ As early as October 1945 General Douglas MacArthur had suggested equal rights for women as the highest of five priority reforms. Universal suffrage, female admission to national universities, and the elimination of the prewar adultery law followed, while the Land Reform Law of October 1946 allowed women to inherit equal shares of property. Article 14 of the 1947 Constitution states ‘there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of creed, sex, social status or family origin’, while Article 24 guarantees ‘the essential equality of the sexes’. According to a survey by Asahi shimbun in April 1947, 57.9% of respondents supported the family reform, while 37.4% were opposed. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, 129.

⁸ Hirano, Mr Smith Goes to Tokyo, 149.

⁹ The Eiga Rinri Kanri Iinkai (Film Classifications and Ratings Committee), reorganized in 1956 as the Eirin Kanri Iinkai and shortened to ‘Eirin’, classifies Japanese films according to violent and sexualized content. While Eirin does not practice censorship, a film without Eirin certification is often difficult to release in commercial cinemas.

¹⁰ Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern, 134.

¹¹ Hiratsuka, In the Beginning, Woman was the Sun, 160.

¹² Horiguchi, Women Adrift, xix.

¹³ Ibid., vii.

¹⁴ Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 5.

¹⁵ In suggesting that the national image propagated by the yakuza film is that of an imagined ‘traditional’ Japan, I am referring to Benedict Anderson’s understanding of the nation as ‘an imagined political community’ (Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6). The ‘Japan’ invoked by the yakuza film is here understood as an idealized concept, rather than historical fact. Reference to this ‘traditional Japan’ seeks to situate contemporary Japan in positive relation to an imagined national past. The yakuza heroine’s connection to and understanding of Japanese ‘tradition’ is therefore not a connection to any ‘real’ or actual past but is an attempt to naturalize idealized national qualities by situating these qualities within an unchanging national history. I thank my anonymous reviewers for the suggestion that the yakuza heroine’s costume echoes the miko’s.

¹⁶ Osgood and Adams, ‘A Cross-Cultural Study of the Affective Meanings of Color’, 149.

¹⁷ Jacobs et al., ‘Cross-Cultural Color Comparisons’, 5.

¹⁸ Nakajima, Uji Shūi monogatari, 108.

¹⁹ Croissant, ‘From Madonna to Femme Fatale’, 274.

²⁰ Okakura, Ideals of the East, 192.

²¹ Wakakuwa, Kōgō no shōzō, 416.

²² Chiba, ‘Kano Hōgai no Hibo Kannon o yomu’, 56–57.

²³ Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 5.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Yoshihara, Embracing the East, 187; Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 61.

²⁶ Butler, Gender Trouble, 6.

²⁷ Ibid., 13.

²⁸ Ibid., 16.

²⁹ Isolde Standish notes that this trope changes in the jitsuroku, or ‘true account’, yakuza films of the 1970s, as narrative themes involving peer bonding and corrupt oyabun reflect a general disillusionment with figures of power and authority in the wake of the Lockheed scandal. Standish, Myth and Masculinity, 187–88.

³⁰ Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan, 171.

³¹ Robertson, ‘It Takes a Village’, 125.

³² Ibid., 124.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Shamoon, ‘Misora Hibari and the Girl Star’.

³⁵ Yano, Tears of Longing, 23.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Satō, ‘Nihonteki dentō to seiyōtekina mono’, 24.

³⁸ Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 14.

³⁹ Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy, 14; Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation, 390.

⁴⁰ Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 20.

⁴¹ Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation, 390.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, 123.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses’, 342.

⁴⁶ Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan, 171.

⁴⁷ Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words, 102.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 102–103.