Setsuko Hara: Japan’s Eternal Virgin

On this day 10 years ago, Setsuko Hara, widely considered the greatest Japanese actress of the country’s Golden Age of Cinema, passed away at the age of 95. Known as the “Greto Garbo of Japan” and the “Eternal Virgin,” she was most closely associated with the films of Yasujiro Ozu, though she also starred in movies by acclaimed directors like Akira Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Mikio Naruse. Despite abruptly retiring at the age of 42, Hara left an indelible mark on the movie industry.

15 year old Setsuko Hara in “Tamashii o nagero” (1935)

The Pre-Ozu Years

Born Masae Aida in Yokohama on June 17, 1920, Hara aspired to be a teacher as a youngster. However, due to her family’s financial difficulties — brought on by the Great Depression — she left school in her mid teens to help contribute to the household income. Her sister was married to up-and-coming director, Hisatora Kumagai, who encouraged her to take up acting. Joining Nikkatsu Corporation, Hara made her silver screen debut in the 1935 film Tamerau Nakare Wakodo yo (Don’t Hesitate Young Folks). She was just 15 at the time.

Her breakthrough role came two years later in Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami’s German-Japanese co-production, Die Tochter des Samurai (The Daughter of the Samurai, known in Japanese as Atarashiki Tsuchi, The New Earth). She impressed as Mitsuko, a traditional Japanese woman who attempts to commit suicide by throwing herself in a volcano after being rejected by the man she was supposed to marry. The promotional tour for the film took her to various countries in Europe and to the US, where she was reportedly shown around by the hugely popular movie and music star, Marlene Dietrich.

Returning to Japan, the actress appeared in several propaganda films during World War II. According to Yuka Kanno, an associate professor at Doshisha University’s Graduate School of Global Studies, Hara presented the image of a “woman stoically bearing hardship at home,” whereas after the conflict, “she frequently played bright, assertive, and independent women.” In Kurosawa’s 1946 melodrama Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth), for instance, she starred as Yukie, a naive, sheltered, genteel bourgeois daughter who undergoes a profound transformation into a socially conscious adult on a mission to help better the lives of rural farmers.

Setsuko Hara in “Tokyo Story” (1953)

The Noriko Trilogy

Three years after No Regrets for Our Youth, Hara collaborated with Ozu for the first time, starring in Banshun (Late Spring), a movie about a widowed father named Shukichi (Chishu Ryu), who feels compelled to marry off his only daughter. Hara’s character, Noriko, though, is reluctant to ride off into the sunset with a potential suitor as she has a close bond with her father and doesn’t want to leave him behind. The societal pressure to marry leaves Noriko feeling conflicted and Hara wonderfully captures her internal struggles in an understated way.

In her second Ozu film, Bakushu (Early Summer) in 1951, Hara once again starred as Noriko. While there are similarities between the two characters — both are single women in their late 20s facing pressure from family members to tie the knot — the Noriko in Early Summer is more optimistic and single-minded than the self-sacrificing Noriko in Late Spring. She agrees to marry her childhood friend Yabe (Hiroshi Nihon’yanagi) even though she knows this will disappoint her family, who see Manabe, a wealthy businessman and golfer who we never see, as a more appropriate husband.

Hara was again lauded for her performance, with Ozu stating that he wished he had “four or five more like her.” The Yokohama native’s most famous role as Noriko, though, came two years later in Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story). Initially seen as “too Japanese” for international audiences, Ozu’s moving drama gradually gained global attention after it won the British Film Institute’s inaugural Sutherland Trophy in 1958. In a poll of film directors by Sight and Sound magazine five decades later, it was voted the greatest film of all time, while Noriko, a generous war widow who suppresses her emotions, is widely considered the movie’s most memorable character.

Turning Down Kurosawa

In between the “Norioko Trilogy,” Hara was reportedly offered the role of the wife in Kurosawa’s 1950 classic Rashomon, but turned it down as her brother-in-law, Kumagai, didn’t feel it was appropriate for her. The part was played by Machiko Kyo instead, who established herself as a leading figure in Japanese cinema on the back of the movie. It won the Golden Lion at the 12th Venice Film Festival in 1951. That same year, Hara was cast by Kurosawa as Taeko in Hakuchi (The Idiot), based on a Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel. That film, though, wasn’t nearly as successful as Rashomon.

Another legendary director that Hara worked on multiple movies with was Naruse. The pair collaborated on five films, including Meshi (Repast), which helped to revive the genre of shomin-geki films about Japan’s lower-middle class families, Yama no Oto (Sound of the Mountain), based on Yasunari Kawabata’s novel of the same name, and Shuu (Sudden Rain), in which Hara’s character, Fumiko, stands up to her overbearing husband. Writing for the British Film Institute (BFI), critic Matthew Thrift said it was “one of her finest performances as Fumiko,” adding that it was “a far cry from the dreamy Noriko she played for Ozu.”

A year after Sudden Rain, Hara worked with Ozu again on Tokyo Boshoku (Tokyo Twilight), one of the auteur’s darkest postwar films. In the 1960s, they collaborated on two more movies: Akibiyori (Late Autumn) and Kohayagawake no Aki (literally meaning “Autumn of the Kohayagawa Family,” but titled The End of Summer in English). The latter was Ozu’s penultimate film before his death in December 1963. Hara never appeared in another movie after his passing. Her final role was as Riku in Hiroshi Inagaki’s historical drama film Chushingura with Toshiro Mifune in 1962.

Setsuko Hara in later life

Setsuko Hara: Away From the Spotlight

Hara was compared to Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo, who was intensely private and similarly retired from the film industry unexpectedly when she was relatively young. After stepping down from acting, Hara withdrew from public life completely, refusing to be photographed and declining nearly all interview requests. She lived a peaceful life alone near the sea in Kamakura. A journalist from the Yomiuri Shimbun reportedly arranged a brief telephone call with her in 1992. Asked about her stardom in the 1950s, the modest actress replied, “It was not just me who was shining. At that time, everyone was shining.”

A timeless national treasure, she was dubbed Japan’s “Eternal Virgin” by her fans due to her on-screen wholesomeness, some of the single characters she played and the fact that she never married in real life. The public was fascinated by her. In 2001, Satoshi Kon released Sennen Joyu (Millennium Actress), an animated drama film that was loosely based on her life, as well as the life of fellow actress Hideko Takamine. Fourteen years later, Japan’s “Eternal Virgin” died of pneumonia at a hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture. Her passing was not announced until November 25, 2015, over two months after she died.

Hara’s family requested the delay, as she wished for “no fuss to be made.” A reluctant superstar who shunned the limelight for more than 50 years, she was Japan’s biggest female celebrity for around three decades. Hara was a captivating actress, whose on-screen presence had a huge impact on Japanese audiences, including renowned novelist Shusaku Endo. After watching one of her films, he wrote, “We would sigh or let out a great breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this: Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?”