Late spring setsuko hara biography

Puncturing the Legend

Some years before Hara Setsuko’s death in 2015, writer Ishii Taeko’s editor asked her to solve the mystery of the Golden Age movie star’s retirement. In 1962, Hara withdrew from the spotlight after her final screen appearance at the age of 42, and refused interviews for over half a century.

Ishii thought that in her nineties Hara might be willing to look back on her life, and visited her Kamakura home on several occasions. Each time, she was received politely by Hara’s nephew and his wife, who lived in the same house, but was never able to meet the actress herself. On Hara’s ninety-fifth birthday on June 17, 2015, Ishii brought flowers and a letter, and was told as usual that she was in good health. Three months later, though, Hara passed away. Ishii’s book Hara Setsuko no shinjitsu (The Truth About Hara Setsuko) was published the following year. In the three and a half years it took to complete, Ishii carefully combed through materials dating back to before World War II, accumulating valuable testimony relating to the celebrated actress in the film business.

“At first I could only picture Hara as pure, proper, and beautiful, as she appeared in the parts she played in the films of Ozu Yasujirō and her role as an English teacher in Aoi sanmyaku [The Green Mountains], so I doubted whether I could write a compelling biography. During my research, though, I found that she was sometimes dissatisfied with the parts she was given and felt conflicted. This drew me in to the search for the real Hara Setsuko,” Ishii says. “In the books and articles about her to date, one story is repeated like a legend: that her great affection for Ozu and shock at his death led her to retire. Fans of both Hara and Ozu seem to want to believe in a deep mutual attachment between them. In my writing, I worked to puncture this lege

Japanese actress (1920–2015)

Setsuko Hara (原 節子, Hara Setsuko, 17 June 1920 – 5 September 2015) was a Japanese actress. Though best known for her performances in Yasujirō Ozu's films Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), she had already appeared in 67 films before working with Ozu. She is widely considered to be one of the greatest Japanese actresses of all time.

Early career

Setsuko Hara was born Masae Aida (会田 昌江, Aida Masae) in what is now Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama in a family with three sons and five daughters. Her elder sister was married to film director Hisatora Kumagai, which gave her an entry into the world of the cinema: he encouraged her to drop out of school, which she did, and then she went to work for Nikkatsu Studios in Tamagawa, outside Tokyo, in 1935. She debuted at the age of 15 with a stage name that the studio gave her in Do Not Hesitate Young Folks! (ためらふ勿れ若人よ, tamerafu nakare wakōdo yo).

She came to prominence as an actress in the 1937 German-Japanese co-productionDie Tochter des Samurai (The Daughter of the Samurai), known in Japan as Atarashiki Tsuchi (The New Earth), directed by Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami. In the film, Hara plays a woman who unsuccessfully attempts to immolate herself in a volcano. She continued to portray tragic heroines in many of her films until the end of World War II, like The Suicide Troops of the Watchtower (1942) and The Green Mountains (1949), directed by Tadashi Imai, and Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky, directed by Kunio Watanabe.

Postwar career

Hara remained in Japan after 1945 and continued making films. She starred in Akira Kurosawa’s first postwar film, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946). She also worked with director Kimisaburo Yoshimura in A Ball at the Anjo House (1947) and Keisuke Kino

For the South Korean film, see Late Spring (2014 film).

1949 Japanese film

Late Spring (晩春, Banshun) is a 1949 Japanese drama film directed by Yasujirō Ozu and written by Ozu and Kogo Noda, based on the short novel Father and Daughter (Chichi to musume) by the 20th-century novelist and critic Kazuo Hirotsu. The film was written and shot during the Allied Powers' Occupation of Japan and was subject to the Occupation's official censorship requirements. Starring Chishū Ryū, who was featured in almost all of the director's films, and Setsuko Hara, marking her first of six appearances in Ozu's work, it is the first installment of Ozu’s so-called "Noriko trilogy", succeeded by Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951) and Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953); in each of which Hara portrays a young woman named Noriko, though the three Norikos are distinct, unrelated characters, linked primarily by their status as single women in postwar Japan.

Late Spring belongs to the type of Japanese cinema known as shomin-geki, a genre that deals with the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people of modern times. The film is frequently regarded as the first in the director's final creative period, "the major prototype of the [director's] 1950s and 1960s work". These films are characterized by, among other traits, an exclusive focus on stories about families during Japan's immediate postwar era, a tendency towards very simple plots and the use of a generally static camera.

Late Spring was released on September 19, 1949, to critical acclaim in the Japanese press. In the following year, it was awarded the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics' award as the best Japanese production released in 1949. In 1972, the film was commercially released in the United States, again to very positive reviews. Late Spring has been referred to as the director's "most perfect" work, as

Setsuko Hara’s face, it seems, has been stuck in a smile for the past century. It should not be surprising that some have chosen to remember her, this Japanese woman, one of the greatest movie stars of any era—our Garbo, our Bergman, our Hepburn—frozen in sweetness. I sound accusatory. But when I was a child, I would pause Naruse films whenever she beamed on a bike. That wattage, that force. “The only time I saw Susan Sontag cry,” a writer once told me, his voice hushed, “was at a screening of a Setsuko film.” What Setsuko had wasn’t glamour—she was just too sensible for that—it was glow, one that ebbed away and left you concerned, involved. You got the sense that this glow, like that of dawn, couldn’t be bought. But her smiles were human and held minute-long acts, ones with important intermissions. When she looked away, she absented herself; you felt that she’d dimmed a fire and clapped a lid on something about to spill. Over the last decade, whenever anyone brought up her lips—“Setsuko’s eternal smile,” critics said, that day we learned that she’d died—I thought instead of the thing she made us feel when she let it fall. 

This look of hers is a species of side-eye, perfected in its contemporary form by Billie Eilish or Rihanna. I wonder why its occurrence in paintings, in films and in screenshots of YouTube videos strike a chord within us. Perhaps it’s because the side-eye feels like the accidental unveiling of a secret. A flicker, and a woman seems to step inwards, drawing a curtain around herself, letting a bark of rage or laughter float from the top. The side-eye is not as unambiguous, committed, or as adolescent as an eye roll—it’s an ocular seismograph for something deeper, more fleeting. The thrill of witnessing a side-eye is that of chasing fireflies: of catching the elusive dart, the streak of bright-green. 

There’s something about Setsuko’s eyes that makes me want to whip out a tape measure and figure out the ratio of eye to skin, then p