The goddess condition Japanese actress Setsuko Hara died

A flower offering platform is set up in the "Tojo" cinema where the film starring Hara Setsuko is being staged (photo taken on November 26). (CFP/Figure)

If a woman is beautiful, lucky, intelligent and clean, and can save people from fire and water, she will undoubtedly become an eternal goddess. On September 5, 2015, the Japanese actress Setsuko Hara, who died at the age of 95 and broke the news on November 25, has never faded the aura of "eternal virgin" and "holy girl". 84-year-old Japanese film master Masahiro Shinoda still feels nostalgic a few days ago: "Hara Setsuko is the eternal heroine in my heart." Although this heroine died out as early as 1963, the real heroine of his early masterpieces can only be his unpaid wife, Shima Iwashita.

In 2006, when I interviewed Masahiro Shinoda, I asked him, "Did you, Nagisa Oshima and Kishige Yoshida premeditate that you want to fight against Yasujiro Ozu?" The 75-year-old gentleman's eyes shone with youth, as if he had returned to the scene when he was young and starred in "Tokyo Twilight" with Ozu Hara. He smiled and replied, "Not really." Ozu-sensei's film looks very beautiful. But when we assistant directors are lying on the ground playing the board, all we care about is the scenery at the bottom of the skirt of the original knot sitting there demurely. ”

Of course, Hara Setsuko is not only Masahiro Shinoda's, but also the eternal goddess of the Japanese film industry.

Hara has a high nose and deep eyes, a long body shape, and a different appearance from traditional Japanese actresses, so that the voice that suspects that she is a mixed race lasts for many years. But she was really a native of Japan.

She was fortunate enough to step on the drums of the times and spent her 27 years in film. Led by his second brother-in-law, Kumagai Hisaho, Hara Boldly dropped out of school and made her debut on the screen at the age of 15, gaining the appreciation of the early-deceased genius Masao Yamanaka and starring in a supporting role in "Hanoi Yamanaka Sotoshi" (1935), one of his three posthumous works. Her youthful image was immediately portrayed by Arnold Fink, a giant of alpine cinema and the excavation of Lenny Riefenstahl, and took on the Role of the German-Japanese co-production of The New Land (1937). This film depicting the colonization of "Manchuria" not only made her a national superstar, but also won the praise of Hitler, Goebbels and others. She was the first Japanese actress to travel to Europe and the United States, and her Europeanized beauty was widely popular in Germany and France.

With the deepening of the war of aggression against China, she played the role of a Chinese in the "national policy film" "Women's Classroom" (directed by Toyo Abe, 1939), "Shanghai Marines" (directed by Kumagai Hisashi, 1939), "Journey to the East" (directed by Toshio Otani, 1940) and "Opium War" (directed by Masahiro Makino, 1943), promoting militarism, and thus became acquainted with Li Xianglan. After the war between Japan and the United States, the naval battle of Hawaii and Malay Bay, of which she was the heroine, was released in December 1942 and became a huge hit, making her a "goddess of the rear".

At the end of the war, Hara Traverse Traverse Japan's Second Golden Age of Cinema. She reversed the image of a "Nazi beautiful girl" and became a democratic intellectual woman and was deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. In Akira Kurosawa's postwar transformational work, No Regrets, My Youth (1946), she starred as the daughter of a university professor based on the famous jurist Takikawa Yukitatsu of Kyoto University and the famous left-wing newspaperman Hidemi Ozaki. She quickly became a goddess in the hearts of male students, and Nagisa Oshima, an ally of Masahiro Shinoda, was also recruited at this time - 15-year-old Nagisa Oshima applied to Kyoto University with full illusions about Hara Setsuko.

In Yoshimura's realistic themes of "The Dance Party of the Anjo Family" (1947) and Keisuke Kinoshita's romance film Miss Cheers (1949), Hara Setsuko created a series of new female figures. In The Blue Mountains (1949) and Snow Teacher and the Children, she played a teacher with new ideas — in 1942 during the war, her role as a teacher in Young Teacher was at the other extreme.

In The Last Escape (directed by Chiyoshi Taniguchi, 1957), Hara played the role of a Japanese woman who remained in Fengtian after her defeat, the leading teacher of the nurse students known as the "White Orchid Troops". This role, like the Chinese images she played during the war, is full of the flu of the times.

The hustle and bustle of the war gradually quieted down, and she returned to the emotional themes that attracted female audiences at the right time, joining hands with a number of giants. Naruse's "Mountain Tone", based on Yasunari Kawabata's original work, is a vague theme of unrequited love, and she reveals her acting skills that are completely different from the screen image of the "Holy Virgin". She starred in Akira Kurosawa's work "Idiot", which lasted more than 4 hours. Kurosawa's daughter, Kazuko Kurosawa, and others have told me that this is Akira Kurosawa's favorite work and the favorite work of those around him.

Hara is smart and brave enough. In 1946, during the strike wave of The Toho Company, she immediately sentenced her to current affairs, and formed the "Ten Flag Society" with hideko Takayama and other stars to become an independent actress, not only to avoid the defeat of the post-war democracy movement, but also to be exempt from the studio restrictions, and could appear in the films of various companies at will. Otherwise, she would not have met the giants of Shochiku and grown up with Hideko Takayama to become a post-war twin sister. Yasujiro Ozu once commented: "The emergence of stars like Hideko Takayama and Setsuko Hara in Japan can be said to be the result of the dramatic growth of movies. ”

With her perfect image and tacit cooperation, she became the savior of Ozu Yasujiro after the war: as long as Ozu shoots a failure that does not meet the status of a giant, the honor of the giant can be saved through the works starring Hara Setsuko - "Late Spring" after "The Chicken in the Wind", "Mai Qiu" after "Mai Qiu" after "Sisters Of Munakata", "Tokyo Story" after "The Taste of Tea And Rice", this "Kiko Trilogy" constitutes the peak of Ozu's career.

On December 12, 1963, Yasujiro Ozu passed away, and Hara Setsuko was mourned in a low-key disguise, and only Sada Masahiro and other guardians were able to see it, and they no longer appeared in the public eye. Her screen age is also fixed at 42 years old. In the words of Ozu's disciple and famous screenwriter Osamu Takahashi: "She died for Ozu' martyrdom." "Why doesn't she cleverly perceive the decline of Japanese cinema? In the early 1960s, with the rise of television, the Japanese film industry slid into a trough. Keep going, is there anything she can't bear?

Hara was self-disciplined and almost ascetic. Her relationship with Yasujiro Ozu has been speculated about, especially at an izakaya party, when Ozu sat next to her, his face was red and shy. However, unlike Hideko Takayama's self-disclosure of "I have two or three things with director Akira Kurosawa", all speculation about Hara Setsuko and Ozu stops at the feeling of affection and pity. In December 2014, in the special issue of the veteran film magazine "100 Best Actors and Actresses in The Japanese Calendar Year", Hara Setsuko ranked 4th, and Hideko Takayama was at the top of the list.

After the shadow, Hara Setsuko took refuge in the ancient capital of Kamakura, lived alone next to the ancient temple and quietly read, relying only on telephone calls and nephews and nephews to communicate with the outside world, this avoidance was more than 51 years. The only time she received public attention was the sale of her 2,900-square-meter mansion in Tokyo's Setagaya district, a movie-obsessed area, in 1995. Even when he died, his family members complied with the will and made it public until this month.

Hara is the goddess. In 1959, she starred in Inagaki Hiroshi's "Birth of Japan" as the most central goddess in Japanese mythology and legend, the ancestor of the Japanese imperial family, Amaterasu, who has never been seen before or since.