UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Reproduction Without End: The Gendered Labor of Japanese High Growth Cinema DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Kimberly Heather Icreverzi Dissertation Committee: Professor Rei Terada, Co-chair Professor Akira Mizuta Lippit, Co-chair Associate Professor James A. Fujii Associate Professor Jennifer Terry 2015 © 2015 Kimberly Heather Icreverzi DEDICATION To My Grandmothers— Dorothy, Rosemary, and Virginia For filling me with your love and so, too, your love of language and letters I wish you could have lived to see this ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Figures iv Acknowledgments vi Curriculum Vitae ix Abstract of the Dissertation x Chapter I Reproduction without End 1 Defending Life, Imagining Ends 1 Parsing Postwar Japanese Cinema 3 Social and Cinematic Techniques of Reproduction in the Shōwa Genroku 6 Again and Again (When) a Woman Ascends the Stairs 13 Chapter II When Hamano Sachi Makes Movies: The Problem of Reproducing Onna 32 Hamano’s Autobiographical Complaint: Disentangling Women 36 The Public Problem of Hamano’s Life as a Director 43 On Seeing Pink/Not Being Seen: The Disappointment of Accumulation 51 Hamano’s Pink Challenge to the Visual Regime 56 Chapter III Otoko ga otoko o otoko to shite mitomeru: Serial Reproductions of Masculinity in Tōei Studios’ Ninkyō Films 84 It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Otoko as Series 88 Serial Time in the Return of the Chivalrous 97 A Dominating Figure in a Landscape: Ken-san’s Labor in Karajishi Botan 103 Acting for in Fuji Junko’s Red Peony Gambler 107 Give me Your Death!: The Remaking of the Sexual Division of Labor in High Growth 115 Chapter IV Reproducing Impasse: Yoshida Kijū’s Techniques of “Transformation” 130 Yoshida’s “Ethics of Transformation” 137 The Dialectics of Impasse 141 The Postwar Thing: Anxiety around Mono 153 Epilogue Japanese Cinema is Alive 165 References 171 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) 1.1 Our work is just beginning 15 1.2 The hostesses’ beauty regimen 17 1.3 Behind Bars 22 1.4 Foot work 23 The Three Busty Sisters’ Meat Hunt (1999) 2.1 Kokan 57 2.2 Panfera 57 2.3 Tainted love 60 2.4 The Tokyo Metropolitan Office Buildings 66 2.5 Recircuiting the liquid exchange 67 2.6 Sexuality as Life Source 68 3.1 Hashimoto Osamu Tokyo University Demonstration Poster (1968) 90 Shōwa Zankyōden: Karajishi Jingi (1969) (trailer) 3.2 Otoko 92 3.3 Starring Takakura Ken 92 Shōwa Zankyōden: Shinde Moraimasu (1970) (trailer) 3.4 Otoko = yakuza 93 Shōwa Zankyōden (1965) (trailer) 3.5 Ninkyō ni ikiru otokodate / The manliness that lives in ninkyō 94 iv Shōwa Zankyōden: Karajishi Botan (1966) 3.6 A Dominating Figure in a Landscape 104 3.7 Visualizing Impasse 106 Red Peony Gambler (1968) 3.8 Peony Sequence Shot 1 111 3.9 Peony Sequence Shot 2 111 3.10 Peony Sequence Shot 3 112 3.11 Peony Sequence Shot 4 112 3.12 Peony Sequence Shot 5 112 3.13 Yokō Tadanori, Sengo Nihon Eiga no Hitotsu no Nagare / 118 One Current of Postwar Japanese Cinema Honō to onna (1967) 4.1 Hiding in Plain Sight 145 4.2 Disrupting Obstructions 147 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The word in Japanese for “hometown,” shusshin, refers not only to the place you were born or raised, but can also refer to the university you graduate from—your academic home. As uncertain as I might be about what town I can claim as home, I have no questions about the university that raised me. It has been my extraordinary privilege to study, think, and learn at Irvine. Thank you to the many communities at UCI who have made this dissertation psychically and materially possible. I would be remiss not to start with the three remarkable women who have supported me as Graduate Program Coordinators during my (long) tenure in Comparative Literature at Irvine: Arielle Read, Lynh Tran, and Bindya Baliga. I don’t know what I’d have done in graduate school without the three of you. While there are no doubt those people who have a far less melodramatic experience of it than myself and many of those around me, graduate school seems to me somewhat like an exercise in coming up against the unbearable and finding ways to fight it off, with cyclic persistence. At every juncture when I thought I could do no more, however, I encountered someone of saintly proportions whose generosity pulled me back in. Watching Jim Fujii navigate the sometimes volatile minefield of the university with unwavering ethics has inspired me. That he somehow manages to be such a wonderful person working within the academy was what first enabled me to see that a career in this profession could be viable at all. It is likewise no exaggeration to say that if I had never encountered Kiyomi Kushida at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, none of this would have ever been written. While I could never say just how she did it (though anyone who has encountered her will know that she did), Kushida-sensei helped me to fall in love with my research again at a moment when it felt utterly impossible. 心の奥から永遠まで感謝しております．And to Rei Terada, who stepped in as advisor following my comprehensive exams: you have been my most frequent and committed interlocutor and I am humbled to have had the opportunity to learn from you. Thank you for being such a careful reader and for pushing me further than I ever thought I could go. Jennifer Terry is the only member of my current committee who has seen me through each stage of my graduate career, a committee member since my MA exam. Jenny, thank you for seeing me through this process and for helping to make space for me in Women’s Studies, where I received so much of my education at Irvine. It was with the Department of Women’s Studies that I learned how to be the kind of academic that I want to be. TAing, attending talks, taking seminars in Women’s Studies, all of these activities provided the critical apparatus I was so hungry for when I made the decision to go to graduate school. Thanks due also to the other members of the department, past and present, who have contributed to this education especially Kavita Philip, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Kang, Lilith Mahmud and Jeanne Scheper. Though Akira Mizuta Lippit and I never had the chance to have institutional overlap, we have had the pleasure to get to know each other over several years of conferences, symposia, and talks. Aki—you are a tornado of an intellectual force, who I am delighted to have had the chance to move alongside, even for this short duration. In the four years that we worked together, in independent studies, seminars, audited undergraduate classes, and in instruction, I learned an incredible amount from Jonathan Mark Hall, my first advisor. Jonathan, I am so very grateful that it was your archive and constant provocations that introduced me to Japan Studies. vi At various moments, and sometimes in the briefest of encounters, the kindness and support from Comparative Literature faculty Jane Newman, Gaby Schwab, Susan Jarrett, Annette Schlichter and Nasrin Rahimieh likewise sustained my academic life at Irvine. Dina Al- Kassim taught me more about the power of language in my first quarter of graduate school than she knows. I think constantly about Vicki Johnson’s cultural studies seminar, which modeled the rigor she explained was demanded of interdisciplinary study. I am forever aspiring to that. Anne Walthall put me through a modern Japanese history bootcamp and taught me how to write a damn good précis. Mimi Long, even while at Riverside, has been a mentor friend, and feminist comrade. So much of what made Irvine a dynamic place to think, though, were the incredible graduate students it attracted. I feel as if I’ve lived three different lives over the course of graduate school, but all of my various selves benefitted from conversations with Travis Tanner, Ken Yoshida, Jessica Ostrower, Tamara Beauchamp, Joey Carnie, my great friend Juliana Choi (not from Irvine, but adopted by us in seminar), Kate McDonald (another UCSD adoptee); those I worked with in planning the Asian Visual Cultures Workshop—Yuka Kanno, Erin Huang, Hyun-Seon Park, Christine Cowgill, and Yun-Jong Lee; and, in this last life at Irvine, Gerald Maa, Anna Finn, Chris Kang, Meriwether Clarke and Vinh-Paul Ha. With the support of the Center for Asian Studies and the sponsorhip of Rieko Kage, I spent a semester in research at the Graduate School of Law at Kobe University in 2007. However, it is Tomoko Yamashita, tasked to be my tutor in support of my research in law but through a great miracle also forced to be my friend, to whom I am most indebted. Tomoko, you are indefatigable. To the lifelong friends I made in those short months in Kobe, especially the feias—Maria Clara Pessoa, Julia Cadaval Martins, Lyn Rycroft, and, yes, Guillaume Bouscavel—I look forward to many more adventures together. The Japan Foundation supported my return to Japan in 2010, when I received their Japanese Studies Fellowship. This gave me the opportunity to study at Meiji Gakuin University with Saitō Ayako and Yomota Inuhiko. While I was still struggling with my Japanese, Saitō- sensei gave me an invaluable crash course in Japanese cinema. I will never forget the first time I saw Takakura Ken in ninkyō with her.