Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 79. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2013. xiv, 408 pp. (Figures.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-06569-7.
Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan is an impressive, in-depth analysis of the film stardom in Japan during the 1910s and 1920s. As Fujiki notes upfront, the star might be indeed “nothing but [a] product of differentiation” (10), and I must admit that such an impression was one of the side effects that this monumental book left with me. The exhaustive approach taken by the author results in an almost immersive experience of reading through dense accounts of the making of stars. Flipping through 300-plus pages, one will gradually begin to grasp the nonlinear evolution of stardom in early twentieth-century Japan. The question of enlightenment is often present in the background of each chapter, but is not always addressed explicitly. This is especially true of the book’s conclusion, a point which I will return to shortly.
The book traces three main strands of early film stardom in Japan: early Japanese film stars (from the 1910s until the mid-1920s), American film stars (from the mid-1910s onward), and a new type of Japanese film star (after the early 1920s). Though these strands overlap in time, the overall chronological presentation of the formation of each strand fulfills one of the book’s aims: to narrate the larger structural change in institutional and social processes of the production of a star persona rather than presenting in-depth studies of individual stars. By dialectically moving through these strands, Fujiki weaves a transnational history of early film stardom in Japan that does not follow the Hollywood-versus-national-cinemas paradigm. The important dimensions of the transnational operation of film stardom in Japan that the book highlights include: the circulation of American star images in an unprecedented scale that was made possible by the development of print media, the reception of these images by Japanese audiences and critics, and the restructuring of the Japanese film industry and its star system, modeled on Hollywood.
The book’s aim is to maintain a fine balance between the effort to historicize film stardom and the need to underscore the incomplete nature of the process of differentiation as characteristic of stardom, that is, the plasticity of the star persona and the fluidity and multiplicity of meaning attached to the star image. It follows that one of the most engaging chapters is the one on the replacement of the onnagata (female impersonators) by actresses. Starting in the early 1920s, the Japanese film industry largely adapted the American production system and established the new star system. The change also less directly, but no less profoundly, affected representations of domestic stars by making direct comparison with American film stars possible. One of the most illustrative transformations brought by this change was the abolishment of the onnagata. Although film actresses appeared in some shinpa films and in rensageki as early as in the 1910s, they were not perceived as comparable to American stars, whose images were already widely circulated and consumed in Japan. Instead, both female performers and critics relied on the existing theatrical model, especially those of the onnagata, and fans and critics centred their aesthetic judgments around gei, the art of acting. One of the important ways in which the onnagata came to be seen as problematic vis-à-vis American film stars is the perceived incongruity between gender and sex that onnagata embodies. Femininity was no longer understood as part of gei, virtuosic mastery of theatrical conventions, but rather as the “natural” capacity of the female performer. While the onnagata survived as a distinctive—“classical” and “national”—form of performing arts, in cinema, medium-specificity arguments were strongly made against the onnagata. Some male audiences exercised a new type of fandom around body-based sexual images of American film actresses. That itself came to be recognized as problematic by many critics, but as Fujiki argues, a heterosexual fan/star relationship was now seen as “normal.” These male fans and critics together formed and practiced a new discourse of sexualized spectatorship.
As Fujiki acknowledges at the onset of the book, the history of early film stardom in Japan remains incomplete without a discussion of stars in comedy among others, male stars in the 1920s, and jidaigeki stars. Nonetheless, one of the accomplishments of the book is to provide a coherent historical narrative of the formation and transformation of film stardom during the 1910s and 1920s without compromising the subtlety and complexity of individual strands. This is particularly remarkable given the extremely limited primary sources available for this area of study. The book is a welcome addition to “early” cinema studies. It has turned historiographical insight into an innovative approach and contributed to broaden our sense of what counts as archival materials for the study of cinema.
The closing discussion of Ri Kōran, or Li Xinglang (1920–2014), shows a marked shift in tone, focusing more on the historical development of Japan and the figure of Ri. This conclusion is relatively new to this project: neither Fujiki’s dissertation, on which the book is based, nor the revised Japanese version of his dissertation, which came out six years earlier, contains any discussion of Ri’s stardom. In Stars (British Film Institute, 1998), Richard Dyer defines “star image” as not “an exclusively visual sign, but rather a complex configuration of visual, verbal and aural signs” (34). In the Japanese version, Fujiki refers to this passage to acknowledge the importance of audio sources even for the study of silent cinema. In Making Personas, he contextualizes the passage differently to argue that the star is a media(ted) phenomenon which “appears not only as the ‘image’ […] but also as a persona to which consumers can attach meanings and emotions” (14). The star image of Ri—who was singer and actress—is aural as much as visual, and the transnational stardom of Ri must be addressed against the vibrant audio-visual culture of imperial Japan. We must then “imaginatively consider,” to borrow his phrase, forms of spectatorship that take into account her dynamic star persona (23). The conclusion serves as a deeply suggestive beginning of such an imagination.
Junko Yamazaki
University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
pp. 674-676