Japan's Cinderella Motif: Beauty Industry and Mass Culture ...

Asian Studies Review 

September 2008, Vol. 32, pp. 393–409 

Japan’s Cinderella Motif: Beauty Industry 

and Mass Culture Interpretations of a 

Popular Icon 

LAURA MILLER* 

Loyola University Chicago 

The Allure of the European Cinder Maid 

The tale of Cinderella is firmly entrenched in the global imagination as that of a 

pitiable girl who transforms into a stunning example of Euroamerican beauty in 

which her magnificent gown and sparkling accoutrements enable her to capture the 

heart of a handsome prince. Cinderella proved to be immensely popular in Japan. 

Her name appears in countless manga, films, books and other forms of popular 

culture. She has been especially prevalent in imagery found in the beauty industry. 

Because Japan has its own rich storehouse of pretty heroines and exemplary women, 

one wonders why Cinderella proved to be so appealing to a Japanese consumer. 

Why do girls, and in some cases boys, want to present themselves as modern-day 

versions of the European cinder maid? 

The answer can partly be found in how the meaning of Cinderella has morphed 

into a strong message of self-transformation and individual achievement in the 

Japanese setting. Cinderella is especially attractive to young women, gay men and 

the working class. For everyone, both inside and outside mainstream folk models of 

success, Cinderella offers a powerful allure in that she represents the possibility of 

triumph over adversity. This potential for victory is egalitarian, available to anyone 

willing to believe in their dreams. 

There is a long history of feminist critique of fairytales such as Cinderella. Karen 

Rowe (1979) notes how the story has a negative impact on female socialisation and 

acculturation by promoting the belief that it is only passivity and beauty that are 

rewarded. Cinderella buttresses patriarchal social models of women as dependent on 

male objectification, approval and rescue (see, for example, Simone de Beauvoir, 

*Correspondence Address: Department of Anthropology, Loyola University, Lake Shore Campus, 6525 

N. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60626, USA. Email: lmille2@luc.edu 

ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/08/030393-17 Ó 2008 Asian Studies Association of Australia 

DOI: 10.1080/10357820802295955

394 Laura Miller 

1971, p. 271). 1 Other feminists point to the Disney Cinderella as the perpetuation of 

a restrictive Euroamerican beauty ideal. The blonde, pale-skinned Anglo Cinderella 

is presented as the epitome of goodness and femininity. In this essay I will trace how 

the meanings and representations of Cinderella have shifted in the Japanese context, 

allowing culture producers, advertisers and consumers to sidestep some of these 

issues. Instead of passivity, Cinderella is used to denote individual agency to 

overcome obstacles or to achieve one’s dreams, thus reconfiguring her message in a 

manner that appeals to a wide range of consumers. 

Cinderella’s Global Journeys 

There are hundreds of redactions of the Cinderella story cycle, and similar 

transformation tales in multinational folk literature. According to Arthur Waley 

(1947), the first written record of a Cinderella story is found in China in the ninth 

century. Researchers have found Cinderella wonder tales in virtually every culture. 

There exists a rich history of Cinderella analysis in which scholars investigate 

religious, sexual, metaphoric and developmental interpretations of the story. 2 

The global version of the tale most people are familiar with is the one made 

popular by Walt Disney (1950), which itself was based on French writer Charles 

Perrault’s 1697 story Cinderilla; or, The Little Glass Slipper (Darton, 1982, p. 85). In 

the Disney version, adorable male critters with magical abilities and a fairy 

godmother come to the aid of a good-hearted girl abused by a mean stepmother and 

two nasty stepsisters. The oppressed scullery maid is nevertheless able to attend a 

fabulous royal ball where she meets a prince, flees leaving behind a glass slipper, and 

eventually achieves her dreams of happiness and romantic love. The Disney anime 

premiered in Japan on 7 March 1952, and is still a ubiquitous children’s 

entertainment staple easily available in many shops. 

From that time on the rags-to-riches story of a girl who is magically transformed 

into a beautiful princess has become firmly entrenched in Japanese popular culture. 

Even Kitty-chan gets into the act, and in 1989 an anime short film was released in 

which Hello Kitty stars as Cinderella (Tsuji, 1989). The name ‘‘Cinderella’’ appears 

in thousands of Japanese titles for movies, plays, musicals, books, manga and 

songs. 3 Memorable tunes have included Message to all the Cinderellas by Takai 

Mamiko; Weird Tokyo Cinderella by the girl idol group Saint Four; the JAL 

campaign song Cinderella Summer by Ishikawa Yuko; and Cinderella Christmas by 

Kinki Kids. The Alfee song Cinderella Isn’t Sleepy was the commercial image song 

for the Kanebo cosmetic company in the year of its release. 4 Cinderella is found in 

thousands of manga titles, including Cinderella Express (Matsumoto, 1984), 

Cinderella Eve (Nakai, 2000), Cinderella Wars (Kawa, 1990), Cinderella Collection 

(Imai, 2005), Cinderella Honeymoon (Matsuyuki and Takatsuki, 2005), Cinderella 

Panic (Mizushima, 2004), Cinderella Road (Izawa, 1997) and Cinderella’s Stairs 

(Kurebayashi, 2007). The motif of a young woman achieving her dreams of love or 

success is often associated with the Cinderella title. The Toho movie studio held its 

first Toho Cinderella Audition in 1984. This is a talent contest held irregularly every 

three to six years (there have only been six winners since 1984). It is only when a 

winner becomes successful that the subsequent contest is held. The idea behind this 

spacing is that to truly be a Cinderella the selected woman must triumph against all

Japan’s Cinderella Motif 395 

odds to make it in the entertainment industry. Only when she has achieved her 

dream is it meaningful for the next Cinderella to be chosen. The winner may be 

selected from as many as 30,000 contestants. 5 Of course, in order to succeed in 

contests such as the Cinderella Audition, a young woman must have the type of 

body currently promoted as the most desirable in media imaging. The beauty 

industry, and in particular the aesthetic salon [esute saron], is relentless in creating 

hopes of beauty attainment through consumption of its services and products, which 

are offered to women (and men) of all ages. Beauty may be an abstract idea, but the 

beauty industry is invested in presenting it as a commodity that anyone may acquire 

through participation in their regimens. 

The Cinderella Body as an Achievable Ideal 

The film Shimotsuma monogatari (Nakashima, 2004) portrays the unusual friendship 

that develops between two girls from radically different subcultures. The story was 

originally published as a novel (Takemoto, 2002), and licensed overseas under the 

name Kamikaze Girls. Early in the film we learn that Momoko, one of the main 

characters, lives with her low-life father and hazy grandmother. Momoko’s mother 

ran away with her gynecologist at age forty, got breast implants, started getting 

treatments at an aesthetic salon, and eventually entered the salon’s Cinderella 

beauty pageant. When the mother fails to win the crown, Momoko’s father dances 

with glee at her shame. 

Viewers in Japan are accustomed to seeing aesthetic salon Cinderella beauty 

contests promoted in magazines, on subway signs, and on television. The theme of 

total beauty transformation is often expressed through symbolic icons such as the 

Princess, Cinderella, or the J-Pop Diva. For example, salon advertisements have 

often featured GirlPop celebrities such as Amuro Namie and Hamasaki Ayumi as 

spokesmodels. Customers are also invited to compete in salon-sponsored contests 

that celebrate their beauty progress towards these beauty ideals. For almost twenty 

years, the Takano Yuri Beauty Clinic has been holding the Aesthetic Cinderella 

Grand Prix, offering a fantasy of beauty achievement within the reach of ordinary 

women of all ages. 

The Cinderella of the aesthetic salon is of particular interest as an individual who 

has achieved total beauty self-transformation. Takano Yuri Beauty Clinic is one of 

the most successful of the national chain salons, with shops throughout the nation. 6 

The aesthetic salon is somewhat different from the Euroamerican spa industry, 

which grew from the domain of leisure rather than self-improvement. The goal of 

the salon is to help customers to change their appearance, not to provide a restful or 

rejuvenating time out. The salon reflects a type of beauty Taylorism 7 in its 

production and presentation of the salon’s winning Cinderella contestants. The 

salon’s use of the principles of standardisation and scientific measurement is 

intended to provide an exact account of how one’s body has changed. The new 

customer is precisely measured, with details entered onto a form that will provide 

evidence of change later in the process. At Takano Yuri Beauty Clinic the client has 

calculations made of the bust, waist, hips, thighs and calves. Each segment is given 

individual attention as an area of potential progress towards the Cinderella ideal. 

Confidence in the transformative power of the salon’s beauty technology is often


manifested in photos that show before aesthetics [esute mae] and after aesthetics 

[esute ato]. 

The story of Takano Yuri herself has elements of Cinderella-like success as 

someone who overcame a history of skin problems to eventually become a 

recognised beauty specialist. In 2005 she served as Chief Judge for the 2005 Miss 

International Beauty Contest, testament to her Cinderella trajectory. Struggling in 

her younger days to understand her bad skin, she read about French facial 

treatments and used this information to develop her own product line in the early 

1970s. She opened her first shop in 1977, primarily offering facials but eventually 

selling additional services, especially lucrative hair removal treatments. In time her 

aesthetic salons were repackaging and promoting the hottest spa trends from around 

the world. In 1990 she first began holding the Aesthetic Cinderella Grand Prix. 

(Another beauty contest, the Miss Japan Grand Prix, also uses this term.) In the 

Aesthetic Cinderella Grand Prix, the woman who loses weight most dramatically 

within a three-month period becomes the winner. Three months prior to the final 

judging, contestants explain their desire to become slim and beautiful to a panel of 

beauty experts. During the evaluation process, they give a speech in which they 

celebrate their accomplishments. At her crowning Grand Prix Cinderella wears the 

official magenta swimsuit with matching pumps, and is adorned with a fauxdiamond 

tiara, draped with a big white fur stole, and presented with a lavish 

bouquet (Figure 1). 

Takano Yuri details her philosophy for how to win the Grand Prix in ‘Five Points 

for Making a Cinderella Body’, a list that is ubiquitous in salon brochures and the 

official salon newsletter, entitled Yurist. The name of the publication is the 

combination of her name and the suffix -ist, a borrowed English morpheme that 

means something like ‘‘one who does’’. Takano Yuri’s five points for achieving the 

Cinderella body include: keeping a diet diary graph and weighing and measuring 

oneself four times a day; doing exercises before an aesthetic salon treatment; 

watching calorie intake and chewing one’s food slowly; getting nutritional advice 

and eating a balanced menu of foods; and finally, frequent visits to the salon for 

beauty treatments. 

Once she has embarked on her Cinderella journey, the contestant must keep 

vigilant track of her progress by recording weight loss in diet journals or diaries, and 

by graphing weekly and monthly results. Diaries for the purpose of reflection or 

reconsideration, called hansei, are common in institutional settings such as schools 

and corporations, so the self-disciplining dieter is accustomed to this form of 

surveillance. The Takano Yuri beauty contestant ranks her feelings of hunger or 

fullness on a scale of zero to ten before and after each meal, as well as recording the 

number of times she has chewed her food. 

The Cinderella battle in 1997 had two thousand contestants and thirty-three 

finalists. The twenty-one year-old winner, Miss Shimazu, talked about how she was 

an exchange student in the United States for a few years, and because everyone there 

is obese, she was not aware of her own heaviness (Yurist, 1997, p. 6). Once she 

returned to Japan she suddenly noticed how slim other women were. She began 

treatments at Takano Yuri Beauty Clinic, including the algae treatment and the G5 

treatment, in which the body is massaged with an electromassage machine. One 

result of the salon’s socialising program is that patrons have accepted the premise


Figure 1. Aesthetic Cinderella Grand Prix. Takano Yuri Beauty Clinic brochure, 1996. 

that beauty is not simply an abstract idea, but can be calculated from the body’s 

precise measurements. Salon customers therefore look to the published lists 

proclaiming Miss Cinderella Grand Prix’s measurements as guideposts to their 

own transformation. 

Message to All the Cinderellas 

A powerful appeal of the Cinderella story is its claim to egalitarianism – all eligible 

maids may attempt to wear the glass slipper. Cinderella also fits well with 

longstanding Japanese ideas about self-development and discipline. In the European 

Cinderella tale, only one woman can wear the glass slippers, which once enclosing 

her feet transform her into a true princess. But Takano Yuri promises that any 

woman can reach a new pinnacle of beauty with the salon’s help. In the realm of the 

Takano Yuri salon, all contestants are Cinderella and are referred to with the plural 

suffix –tachi. Thus we find countless references to Shinderera-tachi or ‘‘the 

Cinderellas’’. This notion appears explicitly in the salon’s promotional materials. 

One description of the beauty contest stated that ‘‘From the first contest, a 

fundamental idea for Cinderella-tachi is that anyone can change her body’’ (Yurist,


1999, p. 2). The basis for the salon message is found in a key scene in the Disney 

Cinderella movie. When Cinderella wonders if she can go to the royal ball, she is 

made fun of by her stepsisters. Yet Cinderella insists that all unmarried maidens may 

attend the event. In the precincts of the salon, any woman, no matter how old she is, 

can become a Cinderella. Indeed, salon brochures and promotional materials 

sometimes feature middle-aged Cinderella-tachi. In one brochure the featured 

Cinderella is fifty-nine year-old Mrs. Ode, who drastically lost weight and poses in 

the official magenta swimsuit. We are reminded that in the film Shimotsuma 

monogatari, even Momoko’s forty year-old mother still dreams of becoming 

Cinderella. 

Any woman may become Cinderella if she works hard enough, has self-discipline, 

and pays for salon treatments. Feminists and critics sometimes represent beauty 

contests as a tussle between inner and outer beauty, but the Takano Yuri salon has 

brilliantly fused these into one struggle. The lexicon of self-help and intense effort 

usually reserved for moral development has been adopted by Takano Yuri, where 

women are urged to work hard at aesthetic progress. The Japanese beauty industry 

in general has adopted self-help ideology as one of the most effective ways to sell its 

products and treatments (Miller, 2006).The pursuit of beauty is about self-mastery, 

and Cinderella is a deserving woman who earns her status through both effort and 

the salon’s magic. Among the Cinderella-tachi, one contestant said ‘‘It wasn’t only 

my body, I felt as if I dropped fat from my heart’’ (Yurist, 1997, p. 5). A few years 

later a contestant named Hanada-san said ‘‘With body aesthetics, not only my body, 

but my heart is transformed’’ (Yurist, 1999, p. 3). 

The aesthetic salon promises beauty within a short, specified period of time. It 

draws on yet another peripheral meaning in which Cinderella is used as a metaphor 

for a specified time limit or a short time available to do something. For example, 

shops often use this metaphor in advertisements to alert customers to the expiration 

of their sale periods. So we find things such as ‘‘Yodobashi Computer twenty-four 

hour Cinderella sale!’’ The song by Kinki Kids entitled Cinderella Christmas 

includes the lyrics ‘‘Cinderella Christmas, a dream that lasts until midnight’’. In 

other words, sales, dreams and beauty rest all have expiry dates. The new expression 

‘‘Cinderella time’’ [shinderera taimu] has multiple meanings, yet all of them relate 

to the idea of a specified duration in which something must be done. In some 

cases it refers to ‘‘beauty rest’’ that occurs when one goes to sleep at night. It has 

also been used by companies to refer to their internet down-time from after 

midnight to the following morning. Some people use it to mean the very last train 

scheduled for the evening that they must take to get home. Finally, it is used by some 

Maid Cafes (restaurants where waitresses dressed in maid costumes deliver 

putatively obsequious service to customers) to refer to specific time-limit reservation 

times. 

The Absent Prince Charming 

These various expressions of the Cinderella motif are an interesting contrast with 

Cinderella’s meaning in the United States, where she is firmly linked to the Prince. In 

their book Cinderella’s Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding, Otnes and Pleck 

(2003) document the role of the expensive wedding and all its rituals as an expression


of the pursuit of a perfect romantic love in American culture. Unlike Cinderella 

ideology in the United States, which has become a metaphor for romantic love and 

storybook romance, the aesthetic salon’s Cinderella story is about the self and the 

individual’s pursuit of a dream of beauty. Recall that in the movie Shimotsuma 

monogatari, Momoko’s mother actually leaves her husband to follow her dreams, 

one of which was to become a beauty queen. Cinderellas in aesthetic salon photos 

are never accompanied by adoring male partners. There is no male gaze in the salon 

advertisements or informational brochures, only photos of once chubby and frumpy 

women who transform into perfectly coiffed and sleekly thin beauties. (This trait is 

true for other media in the beauty industry as well. See Miller, 2006.) Once they 

reach their goal, Cinderella-tachi speak about what they are able to do with their 

new bodies (Yurist, 1999, p. 3): ‘‘Even at my company I was able to go to the top, so 

it is the best feeling’’, ‘‘This summer I can wear a bikini and play on the beach’’, and 

‘‘Now I can try a modelling career’’. Feminist critiques of the beauty industry in 

Japan have tended to focus on the unrealistic visual models of ultra-slim, sexualised 

and cosmetically-enhanced women used to sell treatments and products. But the 

discourse of egalitarian access to self-transformation has also been a powerful and 

equally insidious theme. 

One reason that the aesthetic salon business continues to thrive, despite the many 

well-publicised dangers of fraud and bodily harm, is that it has tapped into the 

potential for human agency in the beautification process as a hook for selling 

products and treatments. In order to adhere to a belief in self-improvement and the 

optimistic dream of change, consumers willingly disregard the manifest fakeness of 

so many of the treatments and products that are sold. The Walt Disney version of 

Cinderella followed the basic folktale in which magic allows anything to happen. 

Within the salon, it is the magic of technology, combined with the woman’s own 

inner strength, that enables her to become Cinderella. This belief in the possibility of 

change is seen in Takano Yuri’s 1999 Cinderella Book brochure, which contains 

bouncy exclamations throughout, including, ‘‘I became a new self!’’ Describing the 

Euroamerican Cinderella, Freedman (1986, p. 68) says that ‘‘Hard at work in her 

clogs, Cinderella was ignored. Transformed by her satins and slippers, she 

conquered the world’’. In place of an ornate gown and feet in glass slippers, 

the Japanese salon princess uses her slimmed body itself as the primary marker of 

her new status. The embellishments of her state are secondary to the new body; thus 

she stands in her magenta swimsuit rather than in a ball gown. 

Similar to the Miss America contest, the Aesthetic Cinderella Grand Prix also had 

its birth as a purely promotional event. Instead of drawing visitors to Atlantic City 

for summer fun and spectacle, Takano Yuri draws individual women into the salon 

for the hard work of beauty transformation. Marketing executives for Takano Yuri 

understood the appeal of the Cinderella story and that its main point for Japanese 

women was not about a fairytale romance, but rather about dreams of one’s own 

self-achievement. Rather than captivating a prince, salon contestants strive for 

individual beauty attainable through both self-discipline and the magic of the salon. 

Once the Takano Yuri contest became fixed in media consciousness, other salons 

began to hold their own similar competitions. For example, Slim Beauty House, a 

competing chain of successful aesthetic salons, sponsors the Slim Queen Contest. It 

is similar to the Takano Yuri Aesthetic Cinderella Grand Prix in that it selects


winners from among salon patrons who have lost weight over a period of four 

months. Slim Beauty House also awards overseas trips and cash to the winners. It 

also holds the ‘‘Slim King Contest’’ for men. 

The use of Cinderella in beauty advertisements is quite common. Consider the 

Cinderella Beauty Cupping apparatus, a device used to achieve weight loss. 8 One may 

also buy a breast enhancement product named Pueraria Breast Gel Cinderella Body, 

which promises to increase bust size in a matter of months. 9 Both of these items index 

the meanings of beautification and change. One magazine featured an article entitled 

‘‘I want to become a princess!’, which instructs readers on how, with the right dresses, 

hair, make-up and sparkly accessories, they are able to instantly change into a ‘‘special 

Cinderella’’, even at the eleventh hour (Popteen, 2003). Recently, the Utsunomiya 

Takeuchi Clinic began to offer the Cinderella Metamorphosis Symposium website. 10 

Their website carries the banner ‘‘I want to be even more beautiful than before!’’ 

Webpages feature both Miss and Mrs Cinderella, and viewers may click on Cinderella 

photos and get before and after pictures. The fact that there is a ‘‘Mrs Cinderella’’ 

suggests that getting a man is not the primary motivation at work here. In one case the 

Mrs Cinderella was a fifty-one year-old who had had eyelid surgery. There is even a 

page for the Cinderella Boy who has cosmetic surgery. The guys claim ‘‘I want to 

become an even cooler hot dude’’. Making oneself attractive to potential partners 

should also be considered a possible motivation for individual consumers, but the 

discourse used in advertising rarely makes this the central message. 

Cinderella-style Romance 

Of course, it must be noted that the Cinderella tale of finding romantic love is also 

found in Japanese popular culture. The Japanese self-help literature in particular 

eagerly embraces Cinderella as an icon who represents all sorts of psychological 

wish-fulfilment fantasies, from landing a great marriage partner to exaltation of 

victory over adversity. Kurokawa Ihoko (2006), a self-help author who calls herself 

a ‘‘sensitivity analyst’’ writes books about how women may program an internal 

Cinderella Brain that will allow them to become happy and beautiful, and get the 

prince of their dreams. In some cases the linking of Cinderella with romance is 

presented with a humorous twist (Figure 2). In a comic entitled The Trials of 

Cinderella from the series OL shinkaron (Evolution of the Office Lady) by Akizuki 

Risu (2000), a young woman muses about whether or not to marry an affluent 

doctor. Instead of a future of promised storybook romance, however, her good 

angel underscores the bright financial future by wearing Hermes, Cartier and 

Chanel. 11 Marriage to Prince Charming is therefore only a strategy for getting access 

to coveted brand goods. 

The linking of Cinderella with romantic fantasy is also discussed by Wakakuwa 

Midori, a gender studies professor and art historian who asked her female students 

to write essays about what Cinderella meant to them. For many of the women, the 

story of Cinderella represents the belief that one should seek one’s cherished desires 

for the future. One student wrote that ‘‘I think it is a story about really holding onto 

a dream’’ (Wakakuwa, 2003, p. 79). Although she also noted that many of the 

students felt that one required a Prince Charming in order to be happy, this was 

because they thought it was only through marriage that they could achieve the


Figure 2. The trials of Cinderella. Risu Akizuki, Survival in the Office: The evolution of 

Japanese working women, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000, p. 61). Reproduced 

with permission of Kodansha International. 

dream of having their own separate home. This is similar to the premise of the 

Akizuki comic mentioned above, in which a marriage prospect is not seen as an end 

in itself but rather as a stepping stone to material gain. Wakakuwa also sees in the 

Cinderella story a discourse about hypergamy, or women’s ability to change class 

status through marriage. The American psychologist Colette Downing (1990)


published an influential book on the ‘‘Cinderella complex’’, a syndrome in which 

women desire to be rescued or taken care of by others. Wakakuwa believes that 

Japanese women have become infected with a Cinderella complex as well, and that 

female consciousness about dependency has not changed in the years since 

Downing’s book came out. Wakakuwa also introduces us to one of her students’ 

theories related to the ‘‘glass slipper complex’’, in which women believe they will be 

happy if they have enough purity and innocence. In her summary and thinking 

about this idea, Wakakuwa links the glass slipper, in its unadulterated simplicity, to 

medieval European paintings and representations of the Virgin Mary. In order to 

underscore her virginal state, artists often portrayed Mary in an unadorned and 

simple fashion. Interestingly, there is also a debate among folklorists about whether 

or not the original French tale referenced a ‘‘fur slipper’’, which was misheard or 

mistranslated as ‘‘glass slipper’’. 

One recent expression of a unique Cinderella ideology is Takahashi Keiko’s 

(2007) Book to Solve Destiny’s Equation. It sports a provocative cover that asks 

‘‘What happens to Cinderella afterwards?’’ (Figure 3). Takahashi notes that the 

Cinderella story does not end with her marriage to the Prince. Like other people, 

Cinderella has a life trajectory that evolves after marriage. Takahashi proposes that 

there are four different paths that a Cinderella might take in life. The Fate of Ruin is 

in store for the Cinderella who combines the characteristics of pain and recklessness. 

She barges around causing trouble, never trusting anyone. The Fate of Indolence 

awaits the girl who combines a life of pleasure with lethargy. She wastes her days in 

ease and idleness. The Fate of Collapse will greet the one who combines pain and 

lethargy, while the Fate of Prodigality is the path of the princess who lives a fast life 

of dissipation and painful recklessness. In her characterisations and the drawings 

that accompany each type, it is notable that although people from her palace life 

populate her future, Cinderella’s Prince is nowhere to be seen (Figure 4). The 

illustration for The Fate of Ruin, for example, shows an ill-tempered Cinderella 

haranguing a group of cowering palace ladies. Two maids fearfully peak out from 

Figure 3. Reading Cinderella. Left to right: Cinderella Collection (Imai, 2005), Book to Solve 

Destiny’s Equation (Takahashi, 2007), The Wisdom of Cinderella Beloved by the Prince She 

Met (Sato, 2004), Cinderella of the Sky (Yoshiki, 2003). Photo by Author.


Figure 4. The Fate of Ruin. Takahashi Keiko, Book to Solve Destiny’s Equation (Tokyo: 

Sanpo, 2007). Reproduced with permission of Sanpo publishing. 

behind a curtain at the scene, where Cinderella appears to have upended a table, 

breaking dishes and destroying an elaborate cake. Prince Charming is absent and is 

not part of this Cinderella’s continuing story. 

Sato Tomio (2004) also uses Cinderella as the vehicle for lifecourse advice 

(Figure 3). His book, The Wisdom of Cinderella Beloved by the Prince She Met, 

tells readers that anyone can become a Cinderella if they have confidence and 

think big rather than simply search for a Prince Charming. He provides counsel in 

several categories that make it clear that becoming a Cinderella has little to do 

with hooking the Prince. As general advice he warns that it is not sufficient just to 

be beautiful: one can only transform into a true beauty if they have a beautiful 

heart. He lists numerous admonishments associated with different areas of life. For 

love life: Talk to your man about your big dreams, and together the two of you 

may raise those dreams. For money: if you have a big dream, lots of money will 

follow. For business: If you forget to have a heart in the workplace, your job will 

never improve. 

Everyone wants to be Cinderella 

The aesthetic salon and the beauty industry are not the only places where we may 

locate the symbolic meaning of self-transformation through the lens of Cinderella 

imagery. In other forms of popular culture Cinderella often has nothing to do with


storybook love, and instead indexes an individual quest for fame, success or a happy 

life. Early in her singing career J-Pop artist and ex-model Kahara Tomomi was 

called the ‘‘Cinderella of the geinokai’’ [entertainment business], due to her fast 

transformation into a megastar after her debut (Connell, 2000). By skipping the 

usually slower progression of idol production she became marked as someone who 

had changed from a newbie into a star almost immediately. 

The symbolic meaning of Cinderella as someone who has a reversal of fortune or 

radically transforms is seen in numerous other cultural products. The idea of change 

is apparent in the name of a photography studio, Total Photo Cinderella Studio, 

where children dress up for their portraits in order to adopt fantasy identities such as 

those of cowboys and princesses. In the manga Cinderella Collection (Imai, 2005), 

the main character is an unremarkable high-school girl named Nina who is 

pressured by a classmate into entering the magazine modelling business as a parttime 

job (Figure 3). The result is a meteoric rise to fame as she begins appearing in 

television home dramas, commercials and morning shows. Although she has a love 

interest, her Cinderella story is about her own progress from mousy girl to media 

star. On the cover of Volume 5, Nina is represented as a rock star success story 

rather than as the passive object of male rescue. In the manga Cinderella Boy by 

Yumeno Makoto (1996), a nondescript and neglected high-school girl named Riku 

is talked into cross-dressing as a boy, and once her transformation is complete she 

becomes a popular ‘‘guy’’ on campus. 

Popular writer Nakamura Usagi (2004) uses an obvious Cinderella on the cover 

of her book, one in the Shopping Queen series, suggesting that it is through 

consumption that women may change into Cinderella. The famous business writer 

Noguchi Yukio (1997) published a guide entitled Cinderella’s Personal Computer. 

Noguchi wrote this work because he noticed that most computer how-to books 

were aimed at male white-collar workers. He targets women who want to improve 

their chances of future career success, and gives advice on how the personal 

computer can change a woman’s life and work. The title does double duty at 

marking the advice as meant for women and also as conduct writing that will help 

women change. 

New age pundit Matsushita Hitomi, author of numerous books on ‘‘powerstone’’ 

divination and other esoteric subjects, uses the image of Cinderella in her writing 

and on her website. A schedule for her public talks is available on her website, 

‘Magical Cinderella’. 12 She offers advice on how one can live beautifully and get a 

beautiful aura with the use of powerstones. Matsushita has also been characterised 

in various media as the ‘‘Powerstone Cinderella’’. Cinderella is associated with other 

divination businesses, such as the fortune-telling site Nine Star Chinese Cycle 

Astrology Nine Cinderellas, where one can learn about one’s Cinderella star type, 

together with corresponding personality type and love style. 13 

The fact that Cinderella has a metaphoric meaning residing in the notion of 

change is seen in the way in which her name is also used to describe male characters 

who undergo dramatic alteration. During the 1970s the name Cinderella was used in 

the novel Japanese English construction Cinderella Boy [shinderera boi], to refer to 

someone who becomes a famous person overnight. This meaning appears regularly 

even now, as seen in a report by Parry (2007) on the Japanese golf phenomenon 

Ishikawa Ryo, who was given the nickname ‘‘Cinderella Boy’’ because of his


fairytale rise to fame. The image of male transformation also surfaces in the feature 

film Mr Lady: Cinderella at Daybreak (Segawa, 1990), a story about a father who 

does a stint in a gay club’s drag show in order to earn extra cash. 

Boys’ Love manga artist Yoshiki Aya (2003) created a comic that features a 

beautiful gay male Cinderella. The character Takami Noboru is a sweet-natured 

construction worker who captures the attention of two wealthy executives who see 

him perched on high-rise scaffolding while on a job. By the end of the story Takami’s 

worries about homosexual love are allayed and every sexual fantasy is fulfilled. He 

falls for both men and can’t decide which one to bond with, so he stays with both. 

The cover of the manga depicts Takami between his two lovers, one of whom is 

placing a princess crown atop his head (Figure 3). It is through becoming the object 

of intense desire for both men that Takami has achieved his deepest dreams and 

finally become a true Cinderella princess. 

An interesting spin on the theme of Cinderella-like transformation appears in the 

TV drama special entitled I want to be Cinderella! (Tsumura, 2006). In this story a 

less-than-desirable boy named Kuramochi Bon, who works in a fast-food shop, has 

an accident involving an odd doctor who takes him to his clinic. The doctor claims 

to have created a medicine that will allow those who drink it to change into anyone 

they wish to look like. Bon begs the doctor for the ‘‘petite surgery’’ drug, and is 

given three bottles with the warning that the elixir will last for only twenty-four 

hours, thus stressing the Cinderella theme. The doctor’s side remark about how it 

only works with imagination and belief is a clue to the true meaning of the story. 

Bon believes that the putative drug has worked its magic and changed him into a 

famous male beauty. The poster and cover for the TV drama contrast the two actors 

who play Bon before and after his apparent Cinderella conversion (Figure 5). The 

transformed cute version of Bon is played by actor Okura Tadayoshi, member of an 

eight-man idol group named Kanjani Eight. A pivotal scene occurs early in the 

drama after Bon is teased for being unattractive, when his mother tells him ‘‘A man 

is not just his face’’. In fact, we come to realise that the transformation has only 

taken place in Bon’s head, providing a psychological boost to his confidence and 

feelings of self-worth that makes him suddenly more attractive to others. As 

‘‘Cinderella’’ he is able to advance in his hamburger shop hierarchy and date a 

beautiful girl. The take-home message is that true self-transformation is about 

internal confidence-building and not external appearance. 

Although everlasting storybook romance has become the primary Cinderella 

theme in the United States, Disney’s anime also included the notion of believing in 

one’s dreams. It was this message that made a great impression in Japan, as reflected 

in many of the essays written by Wakakuwa’s students (2003). In the Disney anime 

Cinderella sings ‘‘A dream is a wish your heart makes’’ (David, Hoffman and 

Livingston, 1950) to her animal companions. The lyrics reinforce the message about 

having faith in one’s dreams, which may come true if we keep on believing in them. 

Cinderella is widely seen as someone who eagerly follows her or his dreams and 

tries their best no matter what. When a woman appears to reject the Cinderella 

script, promoted in popular culture narratives and representations, of fervently 

embracing the fruition of her dreams, she may find herself chastised for being 

insincere, fake and phony. A woman who demurs in the face of grand opportunities 

is unconvincing. In a book that catalogues all sorts of nasty behaviours of the ugly


Figure 5. I want to be Cinderella! TV Drama DVD cover (Tsumura, 2006). Reproduced with 

permission of Liverpool. 

or rude woman [busu], Agasa (also known as Agatha, 2006, p. 54) points out the 

specific traits that will brand a woman as a ‘‘fake-girl’’ [burikko]. 14 She uses a comic 

illustration of Cinderella falsely acting surprised and distressed that her foot fits 

perfectly into the glass slipper. Cinderella says ‘‘I did it. It’s perfect . . . what shall I 

do???’’ The stepsisters in the background note her fake behaviour, saying 

‘‘Cinderella is really being a burikko!’’ 15 The reader knows that Cinderella 

desperately wants to escape her wretched situation, so the exclamation is an 

obvious case of fake girlishness. 

In Japan’s cultural milieu, Cinderella may be a lone woman in search of beauty, 

the office worker wanting to use her computer to the best advantage to attain


Figure 6. ‘‘Cinderella is really being a burikko’’. Agasa, Ugly Chick Inspection: Understanding 

your ugly chickness using psychological tests (Tokyo: Homusha, 2007). Reproduced with 

permission of Homusha. 

success, the girl or boy who achieves overnight stardom, or the man who completely 

changes his self-identity. By moving the meaning away from storybook romance 

with a desirable male and instead focusing on the potential for change that 

Cinderella embodies, culture producers have been able to play with and at times 

disrupt the Cinderella idea in ways that continue to enfold and develop. Through a 

discourse that renders Cinderella accessible for mainstream and marginalised 

members of society who are in search of a new and superior existence, she has 

become a productive idiom for selling and illustrating attainable dreams. 

Acknowledgments 

I received much help from many people while writing about Cinderella, particularly 

from Jan Bardsley, Tokomo Aoyama, Hiromi Dollase, and anonymous reviewers. 

Special thanks are extended to Rio Otomo for help in soliciting image permissions. 

I greatly appreciate permission to use images granted by the Sanpo, Homusha, 

Kodansha, and Liverpool Studios. 

Notes 

1. Two children’s books by Babette Cole are parody feminist revisions of the Cinderella story that 

attempt to counter the male rescue narrative. In Princess Smartypants, the Cinderella character 

loves her single life and resists pressure to find a prince. She lives happily ever after when it is 

clear that no prince can or will wed her. In Prince Cinders a laundry-doing prince is the hapless 

hero in search of a princess. Both books were translated into Japanese by feminist scholar Ueno 

Chizuko (1995a; 1995b). 

2. A sampling of some of this vast literature is found in Behrens and Rosen (1994). Mulhern (1980; 

1985) has specifically examined Japanese Cinderella stepmother folktales, linking them to 

possible Jesuit influence and offering psychoanalytic interpretations.


3. Cinderella is also a popular name in adult films and print media pornography. 

4. ‘Message to All the Cinderellas’ (Shinderera-tachi e no dengon, Pony Canyon, 1986); ‘Weird 

Tokyo Cinderella’ (Fushigi Tokyo shinderera, RIVSTAR, 1984); ‘Cinderella Summer’ (Shinderera 

sama, 1981, Radio City); ‘Cinderella Christmas’ (Shinderera kurisumasu, 1998, Johnny’s 

Entertainment); ‘Cinderella Isn’t Sleepy’ (Shinderera wa nemurenai, 1985, Toshiba EMI). 

5. Details about past winners of the Toho Cinderella Audition are found at the online website 

http://www.toho.co.jp/tca/. 

6. For more on the aesthetic salon industry see Miller, 2006. 

7. The term Taylorism refers to the influential theories of standardised scientific management 

proposed by the American engineer and consultant Frederick Taylor in the early twentieth 

century. 

8. An advertisement for the Cinderella Cupping apparatus is found online at http://www.igoods.jp/ 

s/aikea/1002/. Cupping is described in detail in Miller, 2006. 

9. Pueraria Breast Gel Cinderella Body is found online at http://www.swissline.co.jp/sin/index001. 

html. 

10. The Utsunomiya Takeuchi Clinic’s Cinderella Metamorphosis Symposium website is found 

online at http://www.takeuchiclinic.com/zadankai/index.html. 

11. The series has been translated into English. The Cinderella comic in that version is found in 

Akizuki, 2000. 

12. Matsushita Hitomi’s ‘Magical Cinderella’ website: http://www.magicalcinderella.com/welcome.html, 

accessed 2 August 2007. 

13. Nine Star Chinese Cycle Astrology Nine Cinderellas is found online at http://mobcast.jp/ura9//, 

accessed 2 August 2007. 

14. The original meaning of busu is ‘‘ugly’’, but it can now be found in etiquette books and articles to 

refer to bad or rude behaviour. 

15. For more on the persona of the burikko, see Miller, 2004. 

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