Abstract

This article examines how the actresses were mobilized to propagandize for Japanese Empire in the late Colonial Korea. Under the war basis, the actresses were called upon to present themselves as "Women in the rear guard" whose images were different from their existing images related to extravagance, vanity, dissolute life and so on. In propaganda films, they played an 'industrial worker', a 'mother of militant nation', and a soldier's mother, sister or love. Out of screen, they had to display that they were carrying out a radical reform of their life style, behavior, and even family life. Moreover, famous actresses were symbolized as the cultural interchange within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere(大東亞共榮圈). Especially Moon Ye-Bong(文藝峰) and Kim Shin-Jae(金信哉) made a lot of appearances in propaganda films. Moon played the role of "Madam in the rear guard(銃後婦人)" who endures whole suffering alone. That character reminded the Korean audiences of her old established image of "a wise mother and good wife(賢母良妻)". Kim acted "a lost sister" of a boy to be a soldier. Through that character, Kim could represent herself as a bright and healthy woman relevant to the New System(新體制). Although their acting could be to perform "Becoming Japanese", they could never be "Japanese". Paradoxically, their position could have a political significance only when they were dressed in Korean clothes, since the dynamics of "Becoming Japanese" discourse had been based on the difference between the colonizer and the colonized. It was necessary that their acting like a nation revealed the incomplete national identity and the contradiction of "becoming Japanese" discourse.