Misora Hibari and the Girl Star in Postwar Japanese Cinema

Abstract

In Japanese cinema after World War II, the girl star becomes a site of contesting normative and deviant models of female behavior and also a site for confronting anxieties surrounding the perceived loss of native culture. Part of the process of redefining “proper” girl behavior in the postwar period involved an erasure of older behavioral models and the creation of an imaginary, idealized “traditional” girl persona, derived not from prewar examples but from postwar anxieties about the loss of morality and chastity in girls. This can be seen in the career of Misora Hibari (1937–89), the single most popular female film and singing star of the early postwar period and an icon of “proper” Japanese femininity. Hibari’s career underwent several transformations: she began performing on stage immediately following World War II, in 1946, as a precocious, scandalously sexualized child, but in making the transition to teen film star, her image changed radically from disruptive and risqué to conservative and chaste. This essay focuses on the early part of her career, when she was a girl star, and on the girl stars who succeeded her, through the 1970s. Hibari’s career mirrors changes in postwar society and changes in status of the sexuality of girls and women, as both audience and industry played out fantasies of what it means to be female and Japanese in the postwar years.