American Film Star Unsettling Japanese Culture: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Clara Bow’s Image in 1920s Japan

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the star formation of Clara Bow in relation to the rise of consumer culture and modern girls in Japan during the latter half of the 1920s. While her original images were produced in the United States, she was identified as a representative of modern girls and associated with the new audiences who were recognized as modern girls and/or the petit bourgeois class. In being so, this American star functioned to disclose contradictions between her fans’ consuming activity and their national identity, but concurrently induced reactionary discourses. Her screen persona balanced its flapper-sensationalism and other properties, such as her seemingly spontaneous characterization, socially marginalized positions, and active physical movements. This ambiguity about the star’s attributes allowed Japanese media to take advantage of this star as a controversial yet lucrative subject. It follows that the vernacular formation of this star persona involved cultural and even political conflicts among her fans’ self-defining identities, critics’ valuations and evaluations, and governmental directions. While her fans’ activity increased the diversity and mobility of people’s identities and values in the nation, critics mostly was bent on prescribing them into either/or categories of binary oppositions, such as American versus Japanese and modern versus pre-modern. Thus, the American stars unsettled Japanese culture, but turned out to enhance the reactionary trend in which to confine Japanese people into a monolithic identity.