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

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406 Laura Miller 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
Japan’s Cinderella Motif 407 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.
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Japan's Cinderella Motif: Beauty Industry and Mass Culture ...

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