Female Authorship, Subjectivity and Colonial Memory in Tanaka Kinuyo’s The Wandering Princess (1960)

Tanaka’s fourth film, The Wandering Princess ( Ruten no ōhi , 1960), is the subject of Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández’s chapter. Based on the autobiography of Saga Hiro (1914-1987), a Japanese aristocrat who married the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo, The Wandering Princess was marketed as a ‘women’s film’ by highlighting the three women who occupied key positions in the production: scriptwriter Wada Natto, star Kyō Machiko and director Tanaka Kinuyo. With this in mind, Armendáriz-Hernández examines Tanaka’s work against more prevalent representations of women and national history in postwar Japanese cinema in order to argue that the film and, crucially, Tanaka herself occupied a liminal gendered position within early 1960s Japanese cinema.