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

A manga (Japanese comic) illustrating a meeting between Pipo-kun, the mascot for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, and Manko-chan, the famous anthropomorphized female genitalia.

Transbeauty IKKO

This chapter explores how Ikko, transgender celebrity make-up artist and lifestyle-guide author, uses her personal story and beauty expertise to encourage all women to find self-confidence. The chapter analyzes Ikko's performances in diverse venues: music videos; high school visits; the promotion of beauty tourism to Korea; cameo film appearances; lifestyle guides; and television appearances. It is shown that in all venues, Ikko openly discusses her own history of overcoming personal adversity, offering her life as what Eva Illouz has termed a therapeutic biography and employing a language of recovery to inspire others. It is argued that this call to a personal aesthetics of virtue, beauty, and self-cultivation can lead to social change, even when the diva does not seek political action.

Seizing the Spotlight, Staging the Self

This chapter discusses the life and works of Uchida Shungiku and focuses on how she recasts the traumas in her life, including rape and an unexpected pregnancy. As she matured as a woman and as an artist, her roles move from actor to educator to humorist, and she uses her experiences to educate her readers, who are primarily women, about the institutional sexism that women face, as embodied by her own experiences. Her outspokenness and honesty has made her a transgressive figure in Japanese society. She accomplishes this stance through the skillful deployment of humor and anger in literature, manga, and drama.

Izumo no Okuni Queers the Stage

This chapter introduces the dazzling brilliance of Izumo no Okuni, the woman credited with founding kabuki. Given the scant historical record regarding the real Okuni, the chapter draws extensively on the 1969 novel by the post-war literary diva Ariyoshi Sawako. In Ariyoshi’s telling, Okuni rises from a provincial shrine dancer to become a willful diva, enthralling sophisticated Kyoto audiences. Refusing to allow either her sexual identity or performance style to be constrained by societal norms, she championed theatrical innovation to achieve wild success. Since a feature of Okuni’s performance was to cross-dress and dance as a man, the chapter interprets Okuni’s performance art through the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz.

Kirino Natsuo Meets Izanami

Kirino Natsuo picks up where the Kojiki leaves off in Joshinki (The Goddess Chronicle), her creative retelling of the Izanami-Izanagi myth sequence. She invents an afterlife for the goddess Izanami. In so doing, Kirino defies earlier gendered stereotypes by reconstituting Izanami with a diva-esque interiority. Izanami is furious that she has been locked in the underworld while her male partner roams the world freely. Her anger spills over into the imaginary human world Kirino designs, and it disrupts the myths that have been invented to keep female desire in check. Using Lauren Berlant’s notion of the “diva citizen,” this chapter finds in the angry voices of both Izanami and her author, Kirino, a creative force meant to challenge and change social and institutional practices of gender discrimination.

Ice Princess

Asada Mao’s life recounts a dramatic narrative of suffering and triumph. It follows a girl considered beautiful during her meteoric rise to skating stardom, a period of hardships she confronts tacitly, and the performance of her life at the 2014 Olympics that touched many around the world. This chapter reconsiders Asada’s public persona as a diligent athlete and as the good girl-next-door who speaks with a smile. Asada seems to embody an ideal Japanese young womanhood. Behind this innocent persona, however, is a strong woman with a fierce commitment to her professional performance and audiences and with a skillful way of concealing her personal life from the public eye. This chapter argues that Asada is a diva who captures the heart of people with her extraordinary looks, artistry, and athletic talents—a diva whose spectacular performances and risk-taking behaviors always excite audiences and whose good-girl persona may be her greatest performance of all.

Searching for Charisma Queen Himiko

Himiko was a third-century ruler described only briefly by Chinese historians. In contemporary culture, she is cast as an elderly priestess, an adorable shrine attendant, or a vain sorceress. She morphs from ancient shaman in manga to ditzy gal in video games and anime. She is commodified and objectified in communities as a touchstone for local commerce and community character. Himiko is a rich resource for regional groups in need of a city mascot, beauty-contest theme, or touristic motif. She also appears in divination products and advertising to denote female power and ethnic spirituality. Himiko replaces the high priestess in tarot cards and is channeled by divination providers. This chapter explores these many reinventions of Himiko in order to track how her varied iconography encodes assumptions about gender and power.

From Child Star to Diva

This chapter problematizes Japan’s premiere diva of popular song, Misora Hibari (1937–1989), as a child star who grows up in postwar Japan to become a transgressive diva. I ask what defines this female child star, this singing shōjo (young female) on stage? 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 shōjo—here, the child star–turned–diva—help define the period? The remnants of the child star give poignancy to her adult divahood as the Japanese public stood witness to her continual transformations. And in witnessing these transformations, I contend that Misora Hibari’s star-text enacted postwar Japan’s supra-text, with the complexities of an era and a nation.

Ame no Uzume Crosses Boundaries

Ame no Uzume no Mikoto is widely regarded as Japan’s first comic-erotic diva. She is a shamanistic trickster goddess who appears in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Uzume uses her body and performance effectively to establish communication and overcome actual and potential crises. In one of the most celebrated episodes of the mythology, Uzume’s comic-erotic dance successfully invites the sun goddess Amaterasu out of the Heavenly Cave. This chapter first outlines the portrayal of this goddess in the classical texts. Then, using Tsurumi Shunsuke’s theory, the discussion focuses on Uzume’s ability to cross various boundaries and find ways to communicate even in the most dangerous and challenging situations and with potential opponents. Applying the theory to the contemporary “vagina artist” Rokudenashiko, the final section of the chapter demonstrates the significance and validity of the Uzume model of comic subversion and revitalization in our misogynistic society.

Diva Seductions

The introduction describes how we define and think about the diva in this volume. We discuss the way divas systematically draw our attention to the performative nature of identity, to gender, and to battles over control of female bodies and female sexuality. We want our case studies to move beyond archival portraits to consider historically and culturally informed diva imagery and diva lore. From ancient goddesses and queens to modern singers and writers, we note that each chapter critically reconsiders the female icon, tracing how she has been offered up for emulation, debate, or censure. We ask how the diva disrupts or bolsters ideas about nationhood, morality, and aesthetics. She is ripe for expansion, fantasy, eroticization, and playful reinvention, yet her unavoidability also makes her a special problem for patriarchal culture.