A persona, whose meaning is originally close to the idea of “mask” from the Latin, is the expression that conveys the identity of a character/personality to audiences. As stated by P. David Marshall and Kim Barbour, persona are ways of being that are forms of presentation and performance to produce certain effects. In other words, a persona is “a strategic form of communication” or “a strategic public identity” (Marshall and Barbour 2015, 2–3). In this regard, a persona is not the display of a true self, but rather is the practice of a constructed self-presentation to society. From a Jungian psychoanalytic perspective, a persona is also a designed “mask” of the self we present to make a particular impression on others in the world—it is a compromise between the individual and society (Jung 1992, 158). These ideas have been made effective as tools for analyzing social life in Erving Goffman’s study about the performance/presentation of the self. In his influential text, Goffman (1959) explored how the individual composes a version of him/herself for the world and requires careful staging to maintain the self (Marshall 2010, 39). With its close relationship to performance, how have previous scholars tackled the self of film stars or the persona of celebrities?

With the publication of Richard Dyer’s Stars (1979), star or celebrity studies first articulated the question of how to analyze screen performers and developed its methodological framework from both film and performance studies perspectives. Combining semiotics and sociology, Dyer provided a methodology to study stars. Dyer (1986) focused on the relationship between stardom, star images, and the discourse of individualism, proffering a model for mining the cultural significance of stars by examining the network of ideological discourses from which they emerged (Holmes 2005, 8). Building on previous work about stars, whose approaches put stress on either the relationship between audiences and stars (Stacey 1994) or the relationship between the industry and stars (McDonald 2000), P. David Marshall (1997) explored the way celebrities embody audiences and pursued how power is articulated through celebrity. P. David Marshall (2015) recently has presented a manifesto for “persona studies.” In his recent publications, he has proposed some terminology to analyze the public self to emphasize the move from a representational media and cultural regime to a presentational media and cultural regime through the arrival of online culture (Marshall 2006, 636–44; 2010, 38–40). He investigates the transformation of celebrity discourse from a system of representative individuals to an expansive new presentation of the self from perspectives such as contemporary labor and employment and the theoretical frame of affect or social networking’s reorganization of contemporary society (Marshall 2014, 158). In order to understand the concept of the star persona, we will focus on an iconic example from Japanese cinema.

Hara Setsuko (1920–2015), called Japanese cinema’s “legendary actress,” was known as an “eternal virgin” (eien no shojo). She made her debut as a film actress in 1935 and was selected as the heroine of Atarashiki tsuchi (The daughter of the samurai), directed by Arnold Fanck in 1937. The German-Japanese coproduced film catapulted her to instant fame. She gained much popularity as the goddess of militarism, since she appeared in many wartime propaganda films. In the democratized climate following the Second World War, she could easily conform to new female images embodying democratic ideology and succeeded in monopolizing fame especially, during the Occupation period (1945–52). As the scholar Yomota Inuhiko (2000) argues, Hara Setsuko has functioned as a national signifier and always fulfilled the desire of the Japanese, representing the notion of Japan through own her body in her career from the prewar to the postwar. Although stars or celebrities are fundamentally ephemeral, Hara Setsuko, in a “representational media system,” constructed a star persona that audiences desired, slightly changing it to fit the historical and cultural turn from the prewar through the 1950s until she became a “legend.”

Her popularity peaked in the era of the democratic turn during the Occupation in Japan as her persona was promoted and constructed by audiences. In 1947, she was voted first in a popularity poll of actresses in the magazine Eiga fan and ranked first in Kindai eiga and second in Eiga fan in 1951. Again, in 1952, Eiga fan ranked her second, and Kindai eiga placed her third in 1953. These fan magazines were the two most popular magazines at the time. After that, she never appeared again in the top ten rankings. Although the readers of these fan magazines were relatively young, the result of the popularity poll by Mainichi shinbun (January 13, 1952) showed Hara Setsuko’s enduring popularity: Hara Setsuko was No. 1 (19,082 votes), Kogure Michiyo was No. 2 (14,078 votes), and Gary Cooper was No. 3 (5,197 votes). According to these polls, her popularity across generations was much higher than other actresses. The reason for Hara’s popularity was that her star persona was constructed not only in film through her characters but also outside of film. In other words, her film characters—embodying female individualization and the democratization of women—were reinforced by her personality represented in fan magazines. The practice of her performance through text and image in fan magazines had a high affinity to the ideal female image in the postwar era. If we consider the cause of her popularity, it is important to articulate the situation of media society, because the public media environment related to the construction of stars is limited to media such as film, magazines, newspapers, and radio. In other words, Hara’s career overlaps with the pretelevision era. Hara did not act on stage or perform on radio, nor did she ever appear in public. This is the reason why we need to focus on the relationship between screen images and discourses in film magazines, especially fan magazines focusing on star images. To grasp her star persona, it is significant to investigate the network of intertextual discourses through the circulation of star images in fan magazines (which people were able to possess in everyday life) and star texts on screen.

During the Occupation, Japan was under the dominion of the United States, which tried to cultivate the nation as the bearer of “women’s liberation” and “democracy” and aimed to reconstitute the nation by mobilizing people as citizens in relation to the state. Cinema was utilized as a technique of propaganda to radically alter Japanese ways of thinking. Hara stared in No Regrets for Our Youth (Kurosawa Akira, 1946), a so-called “democratic enlightenment film,” (minshushugi keimō eiga), wherein she left a vivid impression on screen: She performed an egoistic woman who persisted in her belief against feudal society. In A Ball at the Anjo House (Yoshimura Kōzaburō, 1947), she played the role of a woman seeking to dismantle the paternalistic family and guiding her father a symbol of the patriarchy, into a new era. In one of the most important films of the Occupation period, Aoi sanmyaku (Imai Tadashi, 1949), she played a teacher who democratized her feudal town. These representative works established her fame, and the characters she performed in the films became ideal models of the postwar era.

Her modern persona was constructed not only by her characters but also by the discourses about her facial appearance. Her eyes, which had clear double eyelids, nose, and mouth were bigger than those of other Japanese actresses. Futaba Jūzaburō, a film critic, mentioned “the Japanese face photogenically has many negative points. Flat nose, small eyes, thick lips, these features are far from an intellectual face. Unfortunately, movies project only physical appearances. Therefore, the most intelligent actress Tanaka Kinuyo is not suited to a female lawyer role, but rather for a woman downtown living by sewing” (1947, 15). A fan magazine, discussing the rise and fall of big stars, proclaimed the predominant future of modern Japanese cinema actresses such as Hara Setsuko, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and Takamine Hideko in contrast to Tanaka Kinuyo and Yamada Isuzu (Hata 1949, 34). Tanaka Kinuyo and Yamada Isuzu had been a symbol of Japanese beauty in the prewar period. But after defeat, many texts in magazines positioned their beauty in the past and placed Hara as the new norm of present-day beauty. Another factor that influenced the change of female beauty was the move from the lack of popular entertainments due to militarism and fascism in wartime to the enjoyable climate brought about by liberalism and democracy. American films, which had been prohibited from 1941 to 1945, were imported again after the war. People thronged to film theaters to see American movies and American culture. As the value standards for the Japanese changed, the reception of Hara Setsuko was mediated through the Western body. As a result, Hara’s persona was constructed through the gaze of a hybrid of Western and Japanese bodies.

In addition to her modern beauty, her intellectual face on screen was also desired by the Japanese nation, and her persona was reinforced by text practices in fan magazines. Although women were seen as property of the households and thought to be subordinate to men in the prewar era, the defeat in the war and democratization by the United States changed perceptions of womanhood from passive to active and from dependent to independent, while also asserting a woman’s individuality and intellect. Notably, intellect was one of the most distinctive features used to differentiate the postwar ideal woman from the prewar ideal woman. Hara’s fondness for reading was well known through fan magazines. She referred to herself as a “book buff” (Hara 1949, 18–19) and said “I am reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky these days. I am addicted to reading until daybreak” (Hara 1948, 21). In addition to these statements, her brother—who was working as a cameraman—said: “she is a hard worker and always at the top. She devours books whatever she can lay her hands on them” (Aiada 1952, 91). Her acquaintances reinforced this image of Hara’s intellect. Her film roles, such as a leader of democracy, teacher, and daughter of a university professor, and the discourse about the real Hara Setsuko in fan magazines overlapped to successfully construct her intellectual image.

Kissing is another example of her modern female image. The screening of films in Japan, both Japanese and foreign, until the defeat, had been strictly censored. During the prewar era in Japan, sexual depictions, especially scenes of kissing, had been cut as “immoral,” because kissing was regarded as a symbol of Western degeneracy and immorality. However, a genre of postwar Japanese cinema called “seppun eiga” (kissing films) had kissing as a central feature. It is said that David W. Conde, who worked for the US State Department during the Occupation as the head of the Motion Picture Department of Civil Information and Education Section, justified the sequence of kissing and had a Japanese filmmaker insert such a scene as a symbol of democracy. Meanwhile, film companies like Shōchiku or Daiei produced “kissing films” as if they had been anticipating this order (see Hirano 1998, 237–60). At the time, many film critics criticized the “kissing films” because kissing was seen as an extremely private act and never done in public. Many thought it had the potential to destroy Japanese culture and norms. In response, Hara reportedly commented in a fan magazine: “I don’t agree with ‘kissing’ in Japanese films. Kissing has not become natural in our life yet. If the time comes when shaking hands is not unnatural instead of taking our hats off and bowing our heads in greeting, I will not hesitate to kiss on screen” (“Ofu sukurīn no Hara Setsuko,” Eiga fan, January 1946). This remark, with its strong will and firm belief, differentiates Hara from the indecisive, feeble, and obedient female image that was admired as an ideal image of a woman in the prewar era. Needless to say, there is also the possibility that these comments were promotional or film companies’ tactics to sell her. What is important is that there was a distinct intertextual discourse about Hara Setsuko that was shared between the readers and the media. In this way, she could present her persona as the ideal female image that corresponded to the consciousness of the general public living in the postwar era.

In short, Hara Setsuko constructed a “mask” to reflect what the people of Japan most desired in a star after defeat in the war. Her integrated persona was discursively constructed by the intertextual circulation of film and texts in other media, such as promotion, publicity, newspapers, and magazines. During the pre-television era in Japan, images and texts in fan magazines in particular were significant for building one’s star image. Hara did not cause scandals and continued to refuse sexualized performances (such as kissing) and thereby held onto her “eternal virginity.” Hara suddenly disappeared from the film industry in 1962 and lived secluded from the world until passing away in 2015 without ever marrying. She was always a mystery to her fans, which contributed to her myth. There has never been an actress like Hara Setsuko in Japanese cinema history and perhaps there will never be another like her again.

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