Hara Setsuko (1920-2015) is one of Japan’s most admired actresses from its golden age of cinema. Frequently dubbed the “eternal virgin,” her legacy today draws largely on post-war films which are readily available on DVD or streaming platforms, primarily roles in which Hara portrays the quintessential self-sacrificing Japanese woman who must set aside personal feelings, or ninjō, in the face of family pressures, or giri. In the public imaginary, Hara is a woman frozen in time, a nostalgic embodiment of traditional values unsullied by modern society.

This paper offers a re-examination of Hara’s legacy reflected in a collection of less-discussed films from the occupation period: Temptation (Yuwaku, 1948), Woman in the Typhoon Zone (Taifuu-ken no onna, 1948) and The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951). Although often considered highly flawed from a cinematic perspective, these works highlight the roles of marginalized female characters who exist in a liminal space outside the framework of conventional social roles such as daughter, sister, wife or mother. Legal changes in women’s status in the early years of the occupation period, including the right to vote and legal rights granted in the 1947 constitution, further contributed to this liminal state in which the possibility, if not the actuality of female agency, was brought into public discourse. This paper concludes by considering why these liminal female characters vanished so completely from Hara’s later post-occupation films.