Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History

By Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland

Diva Nation explores the constructed nature of female iconicity in Japan. From ancient goddesses and queens to modern singers and writers, this edited volume critically reconsiders the female icon, tracing how she has been offered up for emulation, debate or censure. The research in this book culminates from curiosity over the insistent presence of Japanese female figures who have refused to sit quietly on the sidelines of history. The contributors move beyond archival portraits to consider historically and culturally informed diva imagery and diva lore. The diva is ripe for expansion, fantasy, eroticization, and playful reinvention, while simultaneously presenting a challenge to patriarchal culture. Diva Nation asks how the diva disrupts or bolsters ideas about nationhood, morality, and aesthetics. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780520969971

Book preview

Diva Nation

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Leslie Scalapino – O Books Fund, established by a major gift from Thomas J. White.

Diva Nation

Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History

EDITED BY

Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2018 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Laura, 1953- editor. | Copeland, Rebecca L., 1956- editor.

Title: Diva nation : female icons from Japanese cultural history / edited by Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018000763 (print) | LCCN 2018004780 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520969971 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780520297722 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520297739 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Women in popular culture—Japan.

Classification: LCC HQ1762 (ebook) | LCC HQ1762 .D58 2018 (print) | DDC 305.40952—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000763

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface: Transnational and Time-Travelling Divas

Laura Hein

Diva Seductions: An Introduction to Diva Nation

Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland

1. Kirino Natsuo Meets Izanami: Angry Divas Talking Back

Rebecca Copeland

2. Ame no Uzume Crosses Boundaries

Tomoko Aoyama

3. Searching for Charisma Queen Himiko

Laura Miller

4. Izumo no Okuni Queers the Stage

Barbara Hartley

5. From Child Star to Diva: Misora Hibari as Postwar Japan

Christine R. Yano

6. Yoko Ono: A Transgressive Diva

Carolyn S. Stevens

7. Transbeauty IKKO: A Diva’s Guide to Glamour, Virtue, and Healing

Jan Bardsley

8. Seizing the Spotlight, Staging the Self: Uchida Shungiku

Amanda C. Seaman

9. The Unmaking of a Diva: Kanehara Hitomi’s Comfortable Anonymity

David Holloway

10. Ice Princess: Asada Mao the Demure Diva

Masafumi Monden

Afterword: Diva tte nan desu ka? (What Is a Diva?)

Rokudenashiko (Translated by Kazue Harada)

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

1. Ame no Uzume on a seal stamp calligraphy board

2. Izanami no Mikoto from a deck of oracle cards

3. Himiko mascot for the city of Sakurai

4. Amaterasu and Ame no Uzume in the Eight Million Gods set of postcards

5. Misora Hibari movie poster for Lonesome Whistle

6. Ame no Uzume as she is represented in the Noh play Uzume

7. Kirino Natsuo photograph

8. Izanami in a state of decay

9. Cover from The Goddess Chronicle

10. Ame no Uzume performs in front of the cave

11. Ame no Uzume no Mikoto painting

12. Ame no Uzume and Sarutahiko

13. Himiko the shaman queen

14. Mahoroba no Sato Himiko

15. Queen Himiko contest poster

16. Himiko Five Color Sōmen

17. Moriyama Himiko map

18. Izumo no Okuni

19. Izumo no Okuni statue in Kyoto

20. Misora Hibari movie poster for Tokyo Kid

21. Yoko Ono from a pamphlet

22. The cover of IKKO’s Beautiful Days in Korea

23. Kanehara Hitomi photograph

24. Asada Mao at the 2012 World Figure Skating Championships

25. Diva tte nan desu ka? (What Is a Diva?) by Rokudenashiko

Acknowledgments

Ideas for this edited volume stretch back to at least 2012, when a group of us came together at the University of Missouri-St. Louis for a symposium on Pop Heroines and Female Icons of Japan. The gathering was hosted with support from the Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professorship in Japanese Studies, International Studies Programs, and a grant from the Northeast Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies. Fellow symposium participants who did not ultimately contribute chapters but were still inspirational for the project include Hideko Abe, Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, Masayo Kaneko, and Karen Nakamura. The chapters in this volume by Bardsley, Copeland, Yano, and Miller were also presented as papers on the 2013 panel Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in San Diego. We owe gratitude to discussant Karen Nakamura for her insightful comments and to William Tsutsui for being a gracious chair.

Our editor at the University of California Press was the incomparable Reed Malcolm, who is always willing to help out the bad girls. We thank him for the encouragement and interest in our concept. We also thank our editorial assistant Zuha Khan for her patience and hard work. The art department staff at the press are amazing. We would like to thank the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for their insightful comments.

We were fortunate to receive permission for many fine images of divas. We thank the following people and publishers: Yamamuro Keishiro and Otsuka Kazuhiko of the Visionary Company Ltd., as well as the artist Ōno Yuriko; the Takumi Promotion Company, Hiromatsu Kozue, and the Kojiki Yaoyorozu Kami Ukiyoe Museum in Hita City and So-hyun Chun; the Rev. Lawrence Koichi Barrish and the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America; Okubo Masami and Kirino Natsuo; Corinna Barsan and Grove Atlantic; Shimoda-san and Heibonsha; Ando Chieko and Shinoda Seiji of the Permission and Publication Department, and the Idemitsu Bijutsukan; Koizumi Takayoshi and Gakken Kyōiku Shuppan; Yamauchi Hideyuki and the Yamatokōriyama City Tourist Association; the artist Debuchi Ryoichiro; Stephen Herrin and Monash University Library; Baldwin Saho and Hanagiri Madoka of Bungeishunju Ltd. (Bungei Shunjū); and Endo Tetsuya and Kobayashi Jun of the Literature and Non-Fiction Department, Kadokawa Corporation. Mahalo to Dania and Mayumi Oda, and many thanks to Rebecca Jennison for helping us find the perfect cover image.

Many thanks to the sculptor and manga artist Rokudenashiko (Igarashi Megumi). We are thrilled that a reigning diva of the art world added allure to our volume with an adorable Manko-chan manga. We are grateful to Anne Ishii for facilitating her contribution.

We owe gratitude to our respective universities, the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Washington University in St. Louis, for technical and financial support. We are grateful for the brilliance and collegiality of all the contributors to this project. Finally, we received input and comments from friends in various settings, but special mention goes to the Chesterfield Writer’s Camp, which was extraordinarily memorable and productive.

Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland

August 2017

Preface

Transnational and Time-Travelling Divas

LAURA HEIN

According to my dictionaries, the diva is defined blandly as a famous female singer, judgmentally as a self-important person, typically a woman, who is temperamental and difficult to please, and, fundamentally as a goddess (Stevenson and Lindberg 2005–2011, Cosgrove 1997). Moreover, as this book demonstrates, divas systematically draw our attention to the performative nature of identity, to gender, and to battles over control of female bodies and female sexuality. A diva is invariably a strong personality who uses her body to speak when language fails, as Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland stress in the introduction to this volume. At the same time, the diva represents dislocation, something that presupposes a stable historical or geographic past and so is an excellent entry point into understanding social and political tensions in a specific time and place. Divas identify dissonance in a generalizable way but they always do so by capturing unexpressed aspects of specific experiences. Moreover, by showing their perspective to rapt audiences, they wittily and theatrically make themselves impossible to ignore. Divas convey the point that their pain was unfairly inflicted; without social injustice, there could be no divas. As Miller and Copeland put it, divas are not born, but rather, they are generated from the friction produced when female genius meets social stricture.

Every diva has her own story to tell and a single individual can figure in a variety of narratives. Josephine Baker (1906–1975), the African American performer who became globally famous after moving to Paris provides a glamorous example. Not only was she a magnetic and extremely sexy stage performer, she ran her life by her own rules and also used her prestige to desegregate American concert halls and to assist the French Resistance. Like the other divas in this book, she has never really died, most recently reappearing on her 111th birthday as a Google Doodle (Moyer 2017). Baker embodied an irrepressible creativity and self-expression despite enormous obstacles—the heart and soul of the diva’s social power. Since gender is baked into the definition of the diva, of course that creativity was inseparable from Baker’s female identity and especially her sexuality, offstage as much as when she was center stage. Baker exemplified the 1920s global phenomenon of the New Woman, who delayed marriage and childbearing, worked for pay, and lived away from her family. She also was an international poster girl for the racier version of the New Woman, the short-skirted, short-haired, sexually active flapper, moga, and la garçonne, to give only the derisive American, Japanese, and French terms.

But Baker’s explosive impact on the twentieth century also derived from the variety of ways she engaged with the specific places where she—or her image—lived and visited. Baker destabilized gender, sexuality, race, and national identity in different ways in her two countries of citizenship. In the United States, where she was born and grew up, Baker represented the struggle of African Americans for full inclusion in an aggressively hostile society, particularly after she refused to play segregated concert halls on a 1951 tour. Meanwhile her effect on interwar French culture was subtly different, as analyzed by Tyler Stovall (2008). Stovall notes that Baker could freely perform topless and choose white lovers in Paris in contrast to New York, where such behavior contravened obscenity and miscegenation laws. Baker’s racial alterity as an African American garçonne was not enough to explain why the women she portrayed in French films never got the guy: that is to say, never achieved success as romantic leads. Her cinematic characters actively pursued the men they wanted, and were invariably punished for doing so, much like Izanami in Copeland’s Chapter 1.

While French observers were perfectly willing to acknowledge Josephine Baker’s transracial allure, unlike American cultural producers, they still could not treat her as worthy of long-term love with a European man. That was because she challenged French anxieties about colonialism, not just about sexuality and race. Baker’s adoption of African and Caribbean dramatic story lines and dance steps in her performances—most famously in her banana skirt—associated her with France’s imperial possessions even though at that point she had never visited any of them. The French state had only eked out victory in World War I by absorbing colonial labor, both as soldiers on the front and as farmers and factory hands imported into France itself. As Stovall notes (2008:3), "This unprecedented presence of the colonized in the métropole both reaffirmed the global greatness of France and called into question some basic assumptions about French identity."

By 1919, convinced of the centrality of the colonies to national survival, but increasingly anxious about the implications of that fact for national identity, French leaders promoted white family settlement in the colonies rather than the older pattern in which single men paired up with native women in marriages of convenience. In an empire struggling to create a safe space for white domesticity, it made sense to acknowledge the attractions of native women while ultimately demonstrating the impossibility of interracial relationships (Stovall 2008:6). The native woman could come to Paris as a spectacle (Stovall 2008:6), which acknowledged the colonial creativity and (wo)manpower that France so desperately needed, but filmmakers denied to the diva herself, or to the characters she played, fulfillment of their hearts’ desires. Josephine Baker thus simultaneously challenged and reinforced the idea of the New Woman as savage, enacted celebrations of empire [and] at the same time anticipated its loss, revealed the gendered nature of French ambivalence about colonialism, and showed that blackness in Europe is central, not peripheral to the European experience as a whole (Stovall 2008:7). That is a heavy weight for one pair of shoulders, no matter how shapely.

Many of the Japanese divas gathered here, like Yoko Ono, Misora Hibari, IKKO, and Kanehara Hitomi also wielded influence across national boundaries. Ono was part of the phenomenally influential avant-garde New York art movement that included composer John Cage and video artist Nam June Paik, but never gained equivalent attention for her ideas. In part that was because her international audience saw her as a Japanese woman in ways that made her seem less of an artist, as Carolyn Stevens discusses in this volume (Chapter 6). At the risk of caricature, the ideal Japanese woman is reserved, calm, and exhibits great forbearance while cheerfulness, pep, and optimism—qualities associated with ideal women elsewhere—are the attributes of delightful children rather than adult females. When a Japanese diva commands attention, even when performing her art with calm, she is already breaking a social norm. By contrast, having a magnetic personality and believing in oneself is in itself less transgressive in the United States, masking the radicalism of Ono’s art. And while divas everywhere trust their own judgment over that of other people, IKKO seems very Japanese indeed, as Jan Bardsley argues in Chapter 7, when the celebrated beauty expert describes the key to her own personal growth as learning how to stop misinterpreting other peoples’ suggestions as bullying and instead overcome her own stubbornness to learn from others.

Divas also build on each other’s performances. It seems highly likely that the much younger Misora Hibari (1937–1989) carefully analyzed Baker’s performance style and that her own self-presentation as spunky orphan, nascent cosmopolitan in tails and a top hat, and the embodiment of grit and determination owed something to Baker’s commanding diva presence. It seems even more likely that, when, according to Christine Yano in Chapter 5, Misora’s audiences felt a certain kind of yearning for premodern sexuality, she was affecting them in much the same way as did Baker her Parisian fans. The persistent rumors that one of Misora’s parents was Korean underscores that surmise, and also suggests that, just as Baker did in France, Misora’s performances opened up space in postcolonial Japan to wonder if national vitality might have been powered by colonial energy. The refusal of the modern Imperial Household Agency to excavate Himiko’s tomb, probably because doing so would reveal artifacts made in Korea or modeled on older Korean objects, raises similar issues.

Moreover, figures such as Izanami, Himiko, Ame no Uzume, and Izumo no Okuni have served as potent sources of imagination in the modern period, as amply illustrated in this volume, because attempts to minimize their power and significance are so obviously encoded in the official record. Himiko was the first Japanese ruler whose name we know from a contemporary written source, suggesting that she was an ancestor of the current emperor. Women today are barred from ascending to the Chrysanthemum Throne and the current government is on record as committed to retaining that restriction, even though nearly all the young members of the imperial family today are female. That context means that invocations of Himiko in the twenty-first century remind people that Japan was ruled—and ruled well—by a woman in the past. As Laura Miller suggests in Chapter 3, Himiko can never just be a focal point for lighthearted tourist activities, particularly after other divas from the ancient mythical record have captured feminist imaginations.

Writing in 2008, Kirino Natsuo focused on the unfairness that Izanagi and Izanami experienced such different fates after begetting a world full of gods and people. In Kirino’s retelling of Japan’s version of the myth of Adam and Eve (another wronged diva), the traditions that banished Izanami to the dark underworld of death were nothing but cruel selfishness by cynically powerful people. Similarly, in an example not in Diva Nation, contemporary visual artist Tomiyama Taeko began her 2007–2009 series, Hiruko and the Puppeteers, with the abandoned leech-child, the hiruko, born after Izanami and Izanagi’s first sexual encounter, which they put in a boat and sent out to sea. The leech-child drops out of the mythic record but, like Kirino, Tomiyama wondered what happened to the unwanted and cast-off people in these long-ago stories. She imagined the hiruko on a transformative sea journey during which it became the folk god Ebisu and joined other gods and puppets below the waves (Hein and Jennison 2017; Tomiyama and Takahashi 2009).

Tomoko Aoyama (Chapter 2) skillfully invokes another powerful goddess hiding in plain sight in one of Japan’s creation myths. When Ame no Uzume lured the Sun Goddess back into the world, she enacted a creative performance that highlighted her sexuality and evoked laughter, which both banished fear and purged the world of evil. Uzume was a diva of the masses in this reading, while Uzume’s twentieth-century champion, Tsurumi Shunsuke (2001), went even farther, framing her as Japan’s first democrat, both because the changes she made benefitted everyone and because she sparked an emotional connection that engaged all the members of her audience, laughing with rather than laughing at her. Moreover, the real kicker was that even the fiercest warriors, like Sarutahiko, enjoyed the fact that Uzume was in charge. So does Tsurumi Shunsuke; he describes Uzume as, among her other virtues, full of vitality, which brings out the life force in others. These ancient stories—and their modern interpretations—suggest a world in which women unashamedly celebrated their bodies and their creative and comic gifts. The men around them—with the exception of Susa-no-o—respected their productive labor as weavers, diplomats, and wise rulers. Perhaps such a world never existed, but imagining it still feels liberating.

Divas from Japan’s more recent past also reveal women who were robbed of respect for their creative endeavors. Not all of them appear in these pages; another individual who would have fit comfortably within this book is Hōjō Masako (1156–1225), one of the key people who established warrior rule in Japan. But, to return to Diva Nation, as Barbara Hartley explains in Chapter 4, when Ariyoshi Sawako stopped to think in the 1960s about the origins of kabuki, she soon imagined an entire novel from the implied narrative inherent in the bare facts: one woman whose name we know, Izumo no Okuni, applied her Shinto shrine-dance knowledge to secular themes in 1603 and created a new and instantly wildly popular performance genre. Because she had no access to then existing stage venues, she and the other women she trained had to perform in a dry river bed. More comfortably situated male performers regularly stole her ideas. Nevertheless she persisted. A quarter-century went by, during which the government was codifying and controlling social status to an unprecedented extent; in 1629 women were permanently barred from kabuki, a ban that continues to this day.

Family life was notably inhospitable for these divas, beginning with Izanami, who was fatally wounded by her son and then reviled by her brother/husband. Both the sun goddess Amaterasu and Ame no Uzume were attacked and ritually defiled by Susa-no-o, Amaterasu’s brother. Uchida Shungiku, whose father attacked and ritually defiled her by raping her and whose mother then wounded her by withholding protection tells a similar modern story in the chapter by Amanda Seaman (Chapter 8). Uchida’s reclaiming of her physical and emotional life after those betrayals matches the imaginative redress performed through Ariyoshi and Kirino’s novels but is all the more impressive because she is a real human being coming to terms with literal assaults. Successful divas are debt collectors—their honesty is a claim for reparations but their demands are rarely met with an equally honest response.

Uchida achieves her own measure of redress by reclaiming both her body and a loving family life or, as Seaman puts it, what sets Uchida apart . . . is the degree to which both sexuality and motherhood define her dramatic persona and performances. Like her sister divas, Uchida is phenomenally talented, creatively mixes prestigious and popular artistic forms, and foregrounds her own sexed body, but she also seems to have found a pathway through her own suffering to nurture her children as well. As David Holloway reveals in Chapter 9, Kanehara Hitomi also now lives happily with her children, although she emigrated from Japan in order to do so. Asada Mao, the subject Masafumi Monden introduces in Chapter 10, retired from competitive ice skating in April 2017, opening up space for a future family life if she desires it.

These women are inventing their own families as best they can. Chapter 7’s IKKO does something similar, in a way that draws on Japanese cultural resources, when she adopts an onē-kyarakutā stance as a helpful older sister. The idealized post-World War II Japanese family—the first generation born after the wide dissemination of birth control—was composed of a girl and then a younger boy, so that big sister could help her little brother with tasks that girls were better at than boys, such as arithmetic homework. When IKKO offers to be a big sister to Japanese teens, everyone involved knows exactly what that relationship means. Josephine Baker, too, created a family more nurturing than the one she was born into and she went to Japan do so. While Baker met many Japanese individuals in interwar Paris, including painter Fujita Tsuguharu, for whom she modeled, the most meaningful such friendship for Baker herself was with Miki Sawada, whose husband worked in the Paris embassy. The two women met again in New York in 1935, when Baker stayed at Sawada’s apartment after being refused service at a hotel that catered only to whites. Their feminist union produced a transnational family in 1954, when Sawada arranged a tour to benefit the Elizabeth Sanders Home for abandoned mixed-race children, which she had founded in 1948. Josephine Baker not only gave thirteen concerts while in Japan, financially supporting Sawada’s kids, she also adopted two boys from Sanders and took them to France, after sitting through a newly invented Shinto adoption ceremony invoking Amaterasu, the sun goddess (Ara 2010). Baker went on to adopt ten more children from around the world, bringing to life on a small scale her utopian vision of a postcolonial, postracial global family.

Diva Seductions

An Introduction to Diva Nation

LAURA MILLER AND REBECCA COPELAND

Divas . . . rise above trivialities like nation or law. . . .

—Koestenbaum 1993:132

DIVA INSPIRATIONS

We did not go searching for her, this diva from Japan. She was already there. When we opened standard histories of Japan, we could not forget the brief mention of Himiko, the shaman queen; this, despite the pages upon pages about shoguns and emperors. Did she really rule with sorcery? When we entered the kabuki theatre, drawn initially perhaps by the alluring onnagata, it was Okuni who captured our imagination. Who might she have been? And why was the stage taken from her? Brought up on masculine fantasies of Oriental Butterflies, we were caught off guard by a woman as powerful as Yoko Ono. How could a mere woman wreck the Beatles? And, should we hate her for it? The New York Times Book Review may have encouraged us to read Murakami Haruki, but we found the fiction of Kanehara Hitomi and Kirino Natsuo stayed with us longer. She lodged herself firmly in our consciousness, this diva of Japan. She seduced us.

For many of us the diva has directed the course of our research, guiding us through our projects, insisting that we give her the attention she is due. Occasionally she thwarts us when we try to pursue her, tricking us with her elaborate costumes and masks. She taunts us until we learn to see through her performances. Or more accurately, perhaps, to see her performances for what they are—playfully political portraits of national anxieties and shifting social ground. Certainly, there are thousands of Japanese divas who have not been accorded a chapter in this volume. The cutely illustrated Bijuaru Nihon no hiroin (Visual Japanese Heroines) by Rekidama Henshūbu (2013) highlights more than eighty famously admirable women, many of whom could easily be considered a diva. However, our choice of whom to discuss was not determined by any particular measure of importance. The decision was more personal. In this volume are the divas who accrued to us, who came to us indirectly, surprisingly, slipping into our consciousness very nearly of their own accord. In the course of doing research on Japanese beauty queens, for example, Jan Bardsley kept encountering IKKO, the transgender beauty expert extraordinaire. Unexpectedly, Himiko repeatedly made an appearance in Laura Miller’s fieldwork on divination services and locally designed tarot cards. And Asada Mao, with her sequined costumes and sequenced discipline, skated her way into fashion scholar Masafumi Monden’s research.

Given the diva’s magnitude and blatant presence, our goal in Diva Nation is not a celebration of notable women, or a quest to uncover the concealed or neglected women of history. We owe gratitude to the scholars who came before us and opened so many doors. But we are now beyond the find-the-woman phase of feminist research (Conor 2004:4).¹ These divas are not veiled, unseen, obscure, or hidden. They are all too overt, with their exposed breasts, satin sheaths, and tattooed male drag (Figure 1). Surely there are those who have tried to push the diva back into the shadows, cloak her nudity with modest drapes. The diva is not always an acceptable woman. She often refuses to behave, to follow the rules, to act with decorum. The diva is a stubborn species, fated to survive (Koestenbaum 1993:119). She will not be covered, or silenced, or tucked away. Take for example, Ame no Uzume. The most conservative, patriarchal defenders of the male imperial line in Japan inevitably must bring in Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess and legitimizing ancestor of all the emperors. It is as if her very presence as a shining role model should be enough to satisfy (and silence) the legions of women who came after her. May they all be like Amaterasu, sunny and distant. But how do we account for the erotic Ame no Uzume, the goddess who lured the Sun Goddess out of her cave? Is it not she, more than the Sun Goddess, who captures our imagination and appeals to our earthly selves? And speaking of mythic divas, in Kirino’s Joshinki (2008; translated as The Goddess Chronicle, 2012), the mythological story of Izanami, the diva-goddess is allowed a voice, a feminist one that forces us to recognize her unrepentant anger. We therefore have no choice but to acknowledge the diva. She is already there, thrusting herself in our faces and troubling us with her stories and provocative representations. The diva does not simply survive, she flourishes. She is ripe for expansion, fantasy, eroticization, and playful reinvention, yet her unavoidability also makes her a special problem. She may be memorialized, celebrated, or demonized, but she will not be ignored.

1. Ame no Uzume on a seal stamp calligraphy board. From the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America. Photo by L. Miller.

Our inspiration for Diva Nation culminates from curiosity over the insistent presence of unruly women, women who refuse to sit quietly on the sidelines of history but who nevertheless have not been fully admitted into mainstream scholarship or routine knowledge. What does their sequestering tell us about the formation of national myths or the establishment of gender roles? How does the diva disrupt or bolster ideas about nationhood, morality, and aesthetics? Our case studies of these individual divas are less concerned with offering archival portraits or biographies than with interpreting historically and culturally informed diva imagery and diva lore. Our aim is to consider her a worthy object of analysis rather than simply an obligatory persona. She has become fodder for creative productions and reinterpretations that transcend time and space (Figure 2). Because she will not go away, she reappears in unexpected contexts, disrupting our assumptions and complacency. Our goal is to track diva eruptions and sightings, and to consider her effects in a spectrum of national and personal realms.

2. Izanami no Mikoto from a deck of oracle cards, Nihon no Kamisama kādo: Gods and Goddesses of Japan, drawn by Ōno