Sex on Screen in Japanese Cinema 1950s-1990s
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
East Asian Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Gerow, Aaron
Abstract
This dissertation argues for using visible sexuality in theatrical film as a framework for exploring changes in what it was possible to see in Japanese film from the 1950s to the 1990s. Using Linda Williams’s concept of the obscene coming on/scene and Hasumi Shigehiko’s formulation of cinema as a system defined by its limits (what it cannot show), I argue for the pleasure of viewing human bodies as they cannot normally be seen, especially in ways which attract sexual interest, as a driving force behind cinema’s economic and entertainment power. Central to this analysis is also viewing Japanese film as part of an international film industry, where foreign films are regularly imported, screened, and influential on the Japanese industry’s own self-awareness as a “national cinema.” Sexuality and the body in film are therefore frequently sites of discourse around Japanese identity through comparisons with foreign bodies and foreign sex. To conduct this analysis, the dissertation treats three different erotic film motifs as cross-temporal and transnational nexuses for approaching the broad category of sexuality in film. The first chapter looks at the motif of the ama diving girl, particularly as she appears in Shin Tōhō films of the late 1950s, as the herald of new displays of the naked body in commercial cinema. Ama actresses such as Maeda Michiko and Banri Masayo were fleshier, with larger breasts, than previous Japanese stars, and envisioned as competition to American and European actresses such as Marilyn Monroe; at the same time, the ama as a sex symbol harkens back to the mythology of a premodern “natural” Japan. In chapter two, I look at three films depicting live childbirth, including genitalia, and how the inclusion of genitalia makes ostensibly educational films about human reproduction potentially erotic and, for industry and state authorities, obscene. The first film, We Want a Child (Vi vil ha’ et barn, dir. Alice O’Fredericks, Lau Lauritzen Jr., 1949, released in Japan in 1954) is a Danish film educating audiences on healthy marriage and childbirth; the second, Abortion (堕胎, dir. Adachi Masao, 1966) is a pink film (independent theatrical softcore/sexploitation) about a radical gynecologist looking to liberate women from the burden of bearing children; the third, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (極私的エロス・恋歌1974, dir. Hara Kazuo, 1974) is a documentary following women’s liberation activist Takeda Miyuki through her pregnancy and childbirth. This chapter additionally uses writing about childbirth from Japanese women’s liberation (ribu) activists of the 1970s to contextualize the stakes of depictions of childbirth in film. The final chapter reflects on the potential of creating a “Japanese queer cinema” through rereading and recontextualizing films as “queer” through historiography, critical analysis and screening spaces marked as queer. In particular, I look at how historical films have been reread as queer, at how gay pornographic (pink) theaters served both as cruising spaces and as a new source of gay media in the 1980s, and at how Japanese LGBT film festivals, starting in the 1990s, attempted to create local queer spaces for and by LGBT community members in the midst of growing mainstream attention.
Recommended Citation
Casiello, Caitlin, "Sex on Screen in Japanese Cinema 1950s-1990s" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1231.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1231
