Hara Setsuko
If you have nothing better to do so you just drink
Actress | 17 June 1920 – 5 September 2015
In the past six months, I have been getting wasted less often.
“What are you talking about? You’re out there getting drunk night after night, swaying back and forth on your stool at the bar while totally out of it!” Well, I don’t know what ordinary people call it. But for me, personally, I would only call that being “slightly tipsy.”
With great anguish, you try to force solid matter and liquid out of your mouth. You have lost your phone, your wallet, even your dignity. Filled with immense regret, you think to yourself, “Ugh, I wish I hadn’t drank.” That’s what it means to be wasted. And by that definition of the word, I have been nowhere near it as of late.
In the past, I was buying a new pair of glasses once every quarter. People would look at me all puzzled and ask, “Are you, like, super particular about your glasses or something?” No, I am not the slightest bit particular about my glasses. It’s just that I would wake up in the morning, and my glasses would be gone. What else could I do in that situation except go and buy new glasses?
Now, as I have been having to go to the optician less often as of late, I noticed this transformation in myself. Just for a moment, I grinned to myself as I thought, “Hey, maybe I actually have learned a little something from all these famous drunks.”
But then I realized that it was probably just all due to a change in my work duties; one which meant that I was hanging around a different set of people. Where in the past I was drinking nearly every day with questionable people, I am now drinking only a couple of times a week with more respectable people. Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s all it is.
They say that your environment changes you, and so too does it change the amount of alcohol you consume. Hara Setsuko, known as a legendary actress, was also someone who—likely because of her environment—began hitting the bottle hard.
Hara was a popular actress, active during both the pre- and postwar periods, known for films like Tokyo Story and Blue Mountain Range. While she was particularly favored by Ozu Yasujiro, she was also in high demand by other noted directors such as Kurosawa Akira, Naruse Mikio, and Kinoshita Keisuke.
Hara’s appeal lies in her mystique.
In 1963, Hara suddenly disappeared from the silver screen. Not only did she not hold a press conference to announce this, but she didn’t even give a reason why, and she effectively retired at the young age of 43.
Since then, she refused to give any interviews to the media or otherwise engage with the public in any way for more than 50 years, until her death in 2015 at the age of 95. After her retirement from the entertainment industry, she lived with her older sister and her sister’s husband, leading a secluded life.
Shrouded in so much mystery and helped in part by her beautiful appearance, she had become a legend.
Regardless of the profession, whenever someone either dies young or retires early and in doing so cuts one’s ties with the industry, it is not uncommon for that person’s abilities to subsequently be blown out of proportion. Hara might be someone who falls into this category.
“Silence is golden; eloquence is silver.” There are times when I’ll be at a meeting and remain quiet throughout the entire thing, until someone, noticing a slightly distant look in my eyes, will wonder what exactly it is that I’m conspiring, and ask me for my input. In reality, the only thing running through my mind in that moment will be thoughts about what I’m going to have for dinner, or about the results of the day’s sumo tournament. When even a regular office worker like me is seen in that way, it must be even more so the case for a former actress.
Despite Hara being so beautiful and so popular, there was no shortage of critics who lambasted her for being a “wooden actress.” Or, rather, I should say that she was almost like the textbook definition of one. Even Hara herself admitted in an interview, “I don’t think there’s ever been an actress in film history who has been called a wooden actress more times than me.” “I have played such a narrow range of roles…”
Film critic Shirai Yoshio pegs Hara as neither an actor’s actor nor as the idol-type starlet, but rather as a “passive actress.” She was the kind of actress who would come alive only once the director had properly established the scene.
Audiences, too, did not expect acting prowess from Hara.
In the film Repast, based on an original work by Fumiko Hayashi, she plays a housewife who has grown tired of her life. But even before the film’s release, people were saying she was a miscast because she was “too beautiful” for the role. Meanwhile, complaints were pouring in from people who, in anticipation of scenes where she would have to noisily slurp her tea-soaked rice, protested, “What the hell are they thinking, making such a beautiful woman do that sort of thing?!”
Urban legends like “idols don’t go to the toilet” were probably not yet around at the time. But considering the amount of backlash there was about her merely slurping some tea-soaked rice, had there been a scene that showed Hara squatting down in the toilet, it is a safe bet to say that movie theaters all around the country would have instantly turned into utter hellscapes filled with agonizing wailing.
Because of her overwhelming beauty and her lifelong singlehood, Hara was dubbed “The Eternal Virgin.” One would never have guessed it from those beautiful looks of hers that she was, in fact, knocking back drinks on the daily.
Hara, who became talkative when she drank, was the stereotypical “happy drunk.”
She particularly liked beer. Speaking in a magazine interview with Uehara Ken, her co-star in Ozu’s Late Spring who was a non-drinker, he asked her, “So, I understand you drink quite a bit?” Hara denied it, telling him it was all just “exaggerated rumors.” But when Uehara said that he himself could barely drink even one beer, Hara laughingly teased him, “Oh, come on. Where’s the fun in that?!” (By the way, the heartthrob actor Uehara Ken was the father of Kayama Yuzo.)
She would drink every night. Sipping slowly, she’d savor her way through one or two bottles. But then it was also not uncommon for her to think that she would have “just one more” and end up drinking seven or eight bottles a night, making it obvious how much she loved to drink.
However, Hara was not an innate, natural-born drunk. Rather, it was her involvement in the film industry coupled with the unstable social environment of the immediate postwar period that had made her start drinking.
In the initial postwar phase, the country’s electric power system was unstable, and film studios—places with high power usage—were frequently experiencing outages. Film shoots require lots of waiting around to begin with, and these power outages meant that actors now had to wait even longer. Naturally, this meant that even their sleeping hours were being cut short. Hara remembers how “having a quick drink just to get a good night’s sleep” became her new routine, and her alcohol consumption increased.
Just so she would have something to do, Hara also picked up smoking around the same time, and she was at one point smoking 40 cigarettes a day. While it seems she did eventually quit, her love of drinking remained.
According to her co-actresses, Hara would get somewhat frolicky when drunk. This is surely something that many can relate to.
Hara says, “Alcohol is good when I feel I’m about to become hysterical. I use alcohol to help me let those feelings out. But I don’t bother other people. I just have it when I’m by myself.” It seems that for Hara—who could not be described as a sociable person—alcohol was a social lubricant for communication in her interpersonal relationships. At times when she drank alone, she was using it as stress-relieving medicine.
But while Hara can come across as someone rather self-important, the many actors and actresses who performed with her have shared stories relating to her drinking that instead paint her as a rather candid, straightforward person, giving us a real sense of closeness with her.
One time, as they were on an on-location shoot in the countryside, they were in a large room at an inn, playing cards for money. In her next movie, Hara was going to play a virtuous wife who loved to gamble, so she began showing an interest in it as preparation for her role.
According to co-star Awaji Keiko, while the men were only betting small, cautious amounts of money, Hara instead cheerfully said, “Here I go!,” and slapped down an enormous stack of money. The men all turned pale. It was an entirely different side to Hara; one that defies her public image.
Beloved by the public and idolized even by her own co-stars, Hara commanded one of the highest salaries in the industry. In 1950, her fee for one movie was said to be three million yen, which in today’s money would be approximately 21 million yen (USD$135,000).
Once, when Ozu wanted to cast Hara in a film of his, his production company Shochiku were reluctant to agree because of her high fee. Hara then famously told them, “You can pay me half my fee. I just want to appear in the film.”
There are various theories regarding the reasons behind Hara’s retirement.
One primary cause is believed to have been health-related: she suffered from an eye condition that she had developed due to prolonged exposure to all the studio lights during filming. Also, she had never even aspired to be an actress to begin with, doing so in large part only in order to financially support her family, including her father and her older sister along with her husband. Thus, some people believe that just as soon as she had managed to save up enough money, she simply quit without hesitation.
In any event, because her disappearance was so sudden, the truth remains unclear. But then again, the ambiguity surrounding her retirement has undoubtedly been a major factor in making Hara an actress of legendary stature.
Naturally, the media wanted to hear from Hara in regards to the circumstances behind her retirement, so they kept tirelessly requesting for interviews with her. She would flat-out refuse them all. This troubled the media, so they began secretly photographing her—it was an era when things like privacy were far less respected. Occasionally, magazines would publish pictures of her as she was getting into her car at home, standing in her garden, or cleaning her porch.
By the 1990s, this trend of them candidly photographing her had finally subsided. But then, suddenly, all of Japan would be reminded of Hara Setsuko once more.
In 1994, Hara was ranked 75th on the list of the country’s richest people, with 380 million yen (USD$2.5M) paid in taxes and an estimated income of over 1.2 billion yen (USD$7.8M). In first place this year was Takei Yasuo, chairman of Takefuji Corporation, and most of the list was dominated by executives and family members of major consumer finance companies. In the actor category, Mita Yoshiko was at the top of the list.
Hara’s income that year had come from the sale of a plot of land in Komae, Tokyo, that she had purchased back when she was still acting. Newspaper articles at the time estimated the price of sale at around 1.3 billion yen (USD$8.4M).
By the way, she had bought this land in 1947 for 430,000 yen, which in today’s currency would be around 43 million yen (USD$280,000). The fact that she could sell it off for 1.3 billion despite the fact that the bubble had already burst by then just goes to show the extraordinary rise of land prices in Tokyo. In addition to Komae, Hara had also bought land in Suginami, Nerima, and Kanagawa Prefecture.
Having experienced the postwar period’s extreme levels of inflation, many had lost their confidence in cash and had instead turned to real estate in order to build their wealth. While it seems like in Hara’s case this strategy had paid off, the curious thing is that after her purchase of the property, she had left it completely untouched for decades.
She had used it back in her acting years, but following her retirement, she moved in with her sister and her husband in Kamakura. Thus, the house in Komae—despite being in a prime location right in front of the station—stood there vacant, without it being rented out to anyone or without her doing anything else with it. She did not lease it out even just to earn some rental income. I realize this is starting to sound more like a story about Hara’s money management techniques, but please bear with me for just a little while longer.
With the public’s attention focused on her once more, the press swarmed Hara’s house in Kamakura (for some reason, this was a rented house). But, of course, she refused all interviews.
So now the weekly magazines began making regular pilgrimages to Kamakura once again. Then, in 2000, Friday magazine published the latest photograph of Hara. While they’d titled it something seemingly complimentary—“THE DIVINE APPEARANCE OF HARA SETSUKO AT 80!”—it was a picture of her taking out the trash.
40 years or so after her retirement, and here she was being secretly photographed in the early hours of the morning, taking out the trash. One can’t help but feel sorry for her.
What with the recent retirement of “Heisei Diva” Amuro Namie, I wonder if 40 years from now they’ll be photographing her taking out the trash, too…
In an interview at the height of her acting career, Hara said the following.
I look forward to the day when I’m an old grandma, when I have quit acting, and I’ll be able to just go out for a walk anywhere in peace without anyone speaking a word to me.
I suspect that the future she envisioned for herself at the time never came to pass. The longer she remained silent, the more “Hara Setsuko, the actress” became deified, and then the whole thing just took on a life of its own. Was staying true to herself the very thing that actually caused her life to become so constrained? There’s no way for us to know that now.
However, knowing Hara’s straightforward demeanor, it could well be that she was in fact perfectly content with her life, just as long as she could enjoy drinking some good beer.
