Selling Gender Equality in Postwar Japan; Is Cinema Helping or Hurting?

• In Event: Progressive failures or failures in progress? Considering ‘failed’ political projects in East Asia

Abstract

While Japan’s 1947 constitution was one of the first to include gender equality, the progress of gender equality in Japan is questionable. Today, even conservative Japanese politicians recognize a need for change in the gender distribution of opportunity and earning potential, implying that the gender equality projects of Japan’s recent history have failed.
This paper considers the success rate of one of the primary tools of the Japanese postwar gender equality project: popular film. In the first years after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War and Asia Pacific Wars in 1945 American occupation forces and Japanese feminists made great efforts to construct and promote new images of gender equality in Japan. The offices of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers identified the cinema and popular press as suitable media for the dissemination of gender-equal ideals, with positive depictions of gender equality a major goal of early occupation-era cinema. While gender-equal role models proliferated on the silver screen however, Japanese citizens reported only slight changes in the treatment of women outside the notably successful co-education system. This paper explores the gaps between images of gender equality and equality in practice by critically examining early occupation-era cinema. Is cinema a useful tool for the progress of political movements, or does it impede a political agenda by relegating it to the realm of fantasy and entertainment? Does film screen political potential or freeze a movement in time; can the aestheticization of a political ideal spell death to its progress?

Author

• Jennifer Coates, Kyoto University