Diva Misora Hibari as Spectacle of Postwar Japan’s Modernity

This chapter examines Japan’s premiere diva of popular song, Misora Hibari (1937-1989) as a child star who grows up in postwar Japan.  It asks, what kinds of gendered negotiations between childhood and adulthood does the child star have to make, in what kinds of historical contexts, and to what effects?  And finally, how does the shoujo – here, the child star diva – help define the period?  This chapter covers not only the period of the late 1940s and 1950s when Misora Hibari was credited with boosting the Japanese public morale as the spunky singing orphan, but also the period that followed – the Jet Age of the 1960s and 1970s – as a site of national negotiations of modernity through the images of Hibari the diva. This essay contends that Misora Hibari’s star text enacted postwar Japan’s supra-text, particularly during the years when she occupied media and stage as the shoujo orphan, “Tokyo Kid.” Both nation and child star alike performed themselves as spunky orphans – even nascent cosmopolitans – while masking the hard-hitting realities of the period.  It is the intensity of the diva and her life – both on- and off-stage, transmitted aurally and figuratively – that makes of her a parable of modernity.