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This article examines the interconnection of gender, race, and propaganda in two German-Japanese filmic co-productions: Arnold Fanck's Die Tochter des Samurai and Itami Mansaku's The New Earth (both 1937). My analysis will focus on the female title hero of both films, the samurai daughter Mitsuko, portrayed by Hara Setsuko. By situating Fanck's film in the context of a longer Western obsession with East Asia, I will demonstrate how Mitsuko becomes the perfect vehicle for National Socialist propaganda, effortlessly embodying traditional values while appealing to a modern audience. Mitsuko's character is furthermore the site where Itami and Fanck's contrasting perspectives on Japan become apparent, with Itami utilizing the character to push back against Fanck's exoticizing gaze. Thus, these films, and in particular their representation of gender and race, constitute the site of a power struggle between Nazi Germany's depiction of Japan and Japan's struggle to assert its own self-image.

Two motifs (authorial signatures)-trains, and laundry hung up to dry-occur through most of Ozu's work, the former in (I think) every film from Story of Floating Weeds on, the latter in many of the silent films as well. The aspect of Ozu's system that needs to be stressed here is its openness, its non-judgemental quality-more specifically, his refusal to use cinematic means to tell his audience how they should judge the characters: camera angle (high, low, tilt shots), lighting (bright, dark...), camera distance. If we gain new freedoms, we should also beware of casually casting off the past without asking ourselves what in it-what standards of seriousness, what beliefs, what aspects of our lives-might be worth preserving.

An obituary for Hara Setsuko who died on Sep. 15, 2015 is presented. Setsuko was the personification of the particular mood of classical Japanese cinema--quiet, serene, accepting, yet intense and moving--represented by Ozu and his Tokyo Story.

After the end of World War II, [Setsuko Hara] appeared in many films of renowned Japanese directors, including Akira Kurosawa's \"Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi\" (No Regrets for Our Youth) and Tadashi Imai's \"Aoi Sanmyaku\" (Blue Mountain Range).

[...]some of the most impressive performances by women in Japanese cinema consist of a subtlety, containment and a \"holding back.\" [...]the best films of the period combined elements of traditional Japanese culture and aesthetics, with some of the new principles of individualism introduced by the occupation. Sugimura's Variety obituary describes her as \"a lady of the stage,\" and indeed she was a member of an important theatre group, for which she won a cultural merit award in 1974.41 She starred in more than 900 performances of a play called \"Life of a Woman\", and performed in at least one TV series in the 1970s as a middle-aged housewife who runs her husband's business.42 There is no question that Sugimura's contribution to the construction of the postwar Japanese woman was significant. Because she almost always played older women, she was more or less desexualized, and could therefore get away with more unorthodox behaviour than some of her contemporaries. [...]I believe there is far more complexity to these stars and their various roles than conventional film criticism has thus far revealed.