twenty times the size of Yogyakarta),23 Yogyakarta boasts three popular shopping plazas and six modern malls with several more in various stages of planning and development. The oldest of the six, the *Malioboro Mall* located on Yogyakarta's main tourist drag, was built in the early 1980s. The *Ambarukmo Plaza* or *Amplaz—*where I spent many hours taking notes and drinking coffee—went up in 2006. I was also a regular patron and observer at the somewhat older but nonetheless comfortable *Galeria Mall* (built in 1995). Since my last visit to Yogyakarta in 2014, two new "mega" malls have opened. The *Lippo Plaza* is located next to the four-star *Hotel Saphir*24 and the *Hartono Lifestyle Mall*, billed as "the largest mall in Central Java" is in a complex with the Yogyakarta Marriott.25 Although not yet fully occupied, the *Hartono* will eventually have nine floors of shops and parking space for 1,300 cars and 350 motorcycles.

All of the malls are all brightly lit, multi-storied, air-conditioned structures with a large assortment of retail shops, cafés, regional and Western-style restaurants, and fast food chains, among them Wendy's, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonald's, as well as less expensive food courts with mostly local fare. The newest malls are billed as lifestyle and leisure centers which feature, in addition to shops and restaurants, modern multiplex cinemas where the latest Indonesian, Indian, and American films are shown.

A characteristic feature of many Asian malls is their floor plan. All of Yogyakarta's malls are anchored by a large western-style supermarket in the basement and have at least one multi-level department store. More significantly, they are built around a large open public space on the first or ground floor level (or both) which is visible from all other floors. This open space is used for a variety of retail and entertainment purposes including computer, automobile, and furniture exhibitions, fashion shows, talent competitions, home sales, appliance rentals, and handicrafts fairs. Each of the malls also features several western-style coffee shops and dimly lit billiards or game rooms, often located on the upper floors. Not surprisingly, these are for the most part masculine spaces filled with young men who

23 In a recent article in *The Jakarta Post* (September 17, 2013) entitled "No more Malls in Jakarta: Jokowi" the governor of Jakarta, Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, promised that he would issue no more building permits for malls in the capital. He pledged, instead, to build more public spaces and mosques.

24 The Lippo Plaza has replaced the former Saphir Square Mall, which went up in early 2000s and underwent bankruptcy in 2010 due to its inability to compete with the larger Ambarukmo Plaza Mall and concerns relating to its environmental impact, see "Sederet Mall Baru Siap Berdiri, Yogyakarta dalam Masalah" [A series of new malls ready to go up, Yogyakarta faces problems], *Kompasiana*, May 29, 2012. Accessed July 25, 2015. http://regional.kompasiana. com/2013/05/29/sederet-mall-baru-siap-berdiri-yogyakarta-dalam-masalah-564128.html.

25 "Mal Terbesar Se-Jawa Bagian Tengah Ada di Yogyakarta!" [The largest mall in all of Central Java is in Yogyakarta!], *Kompas*, December 6, 2013. Accessed May 12, 2014. http://properti.kompas.com/read/2013/12/06/1635320/Mal.Terbesar. Se-Jawa.Bagian.Tengah.Ada.di.Yogyakarta.

congregate to smoke, watch passers-by, or simply pass the time hanging out with friends (*nglencer, nongkrong*). In the evenings and on weekends (especially *malam minggu* or Saturday night) the malls are filled with married couples, young parents with small children in tow, the occasional befuddled senior citizen being shepherded along by an eager grandchild, and, above all else, throngs of young people—most of them, it is important to note, in small, same-sex groups. Young women in Islamic headscarves, long sleeved tunics and wide-legged pants or maxi skirts navigate the crowd arm-in-arm, avoiding eye contact with male passersby. Others, less demurely dressed in tight jeans, talk on cell phones and giggle with girlfriends. Larger groups of young people congregate in the food courts to eat snacks and sweets; those with more money enjoy a chicken and rice box at "Kentucky" or an ice cream cone at McDonald's. Aside from the occasional small purchase and quick meal, many young mall-goers merely engage in window shopping, checking out the various goods on display, perhaps taking note of prices, and enjoying the ambiance of the colorful, bustling, air-conditioned atmosphere.26

As a number of consumer theorists have noted, modern leisure and consumption require that actors acquire a new and distinctive set of social skills, which is to say, a consumer habitus. Of course, not everyone is familiar with the requisite code of behavior and self-presentation.27 Here in Yogyakarta, those who are *au courant*, are referred to as "already developed" (*sudah maju*) and "modern" (*modèren*); those who are not (or not yet), are deemed "less developed" (*kurang maju*), "old-fashioned" (*masih kuno*), or *kampungan* ("newly arrived from the village"). The (for the most part unstated) behavioral expectations of modern Indonesian malls include prohibitions on squatting, spitting, sarongs, plastic sandals, bare chests and bare feet, haggling, and the use of regional languages when speaking with mall personnel. In this modern environment, western-style jeans are the unspoken dress code and the use of the national language, Indonesian, is deemed most appropriate. Security guards are stationed at the entrances to monitor the crowds and to turn away those who do not meet minimum standards of presentability.28 However, there also appears to be a high level of self-discipline and even self-censorship: most people

26 In the early 2000s, news articles raised concerns about window shopping and the economy. Some surveys indicated that as many as 70% of mall goers did not buy anything, see "Malls for All?" *The Jakarta Post*, February 7, 2004, accessed May 12, 2014, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2004/02/07/malls-all.html. This situation raised questions about the economic viability of the growing number of malls in Indonesian cities, particularly but not only in the capital. Planners, however, indicated an awareness of the importance of Indonesians developing a mall habitus and insisted that when their economy improved, window shoppers would be primed to buy. See Lyn Parker and Pam Nilan, *Adolescents in Contemporary Indonesia* (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Van Leeuwen, *Lost in Mall*.

27 See Haenni, *Islam de Marché*; Jones, "Women in the Middle."

28 Indonesian friends from Jakarta reported that in the early 2000s, security guards at some Jakarta malls offered shoes and appropriate clothing to those inappropriately dressed.

recognize the mall as a specially marked cultural space, and they are eager to behave accordingly. Those who lack the proper clothing or modern sensibilities—like the man who served as the driver of the run-down mini-van I use when visiting Yogyakarta—confess that they just don't feel comfortable in the malls, any more than they do at the related spaces of modern consumption and self-identification, western-style restaurants and modern cinemas. For these still largely rural and working-class Javanese, malls are too expensive, the food is too foreign, and their air conditioning only makes for headaches and chills.

In addition to its bright and bustling palaces of modern consumption, Yogyakarta also has a modest night scene (*dugem*) of discotheques, hotel bars, and clubs. Individual establishments tend to come and go, all the more so in recent years because some of these morally murky places have been targeted by working-class Muslim vigilantes. Since the early 2000s, Muslim militias have taken to attacking such sites on the grounds that they are centers of "moral impropriety/vice" (*maksiat*)—a vice which is almost always portrayed as "made in the West." As one young Yogyakartan clubber explained to me, "When the anti-*maksiat* groups begin to make threats, the clubs close for a while until things quiet down. Then they reopen, sometimes in the same building, sometimes in another location with a different name."

#### Cosmopolitan subjectivities: The individual as project

If not among the working class vigilantes, among the new middle class a much remarked upon new cosmopolitan social style has emerged that both parallels and builds on recent developments in consumption and leisure. The new style is referred to in Indonesian as *gaul* (pronounced like howl) which means "social/hip."29 At its most basic level *gaul* designates someone who is both socially at ease in and socially savvy with regard to the modern landscapes of malls, theaters, restaurants, and universities, all of which lie outside the established hierarchies and disciplines of the rural countryside. *Gaul's* associations with a modern cosmopolitanism and hip sophistication are nicely captured in the following comment made by a young Javanese college student in response to my question, "So, what *is gaul*?"

*Gaul* means someone who is self-assured and good at adapting socially. A kid who can talk to older people or to people from the village or to city people or modern people is a *gaul* kid. They're "up-todate" (*tidak ketinggalan jaman*), developed, and "advanced" (*maju*). *Gaul* is modern. I think whoever or whatever is not *gaul* is just not modern (*tidak modèren*).

29 See Smith Hefner, "Youth Language."

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Yogyakarta's bookstores were flooded with handbooks on how to cultivate the mysterious but alluring habitus of this new *gaul* style. These books, which are modelled very much on similar advice books in Europe and the United States for aspirants to middle class status which we see reflected in the stance taken by the film *Stella Dallas*, see Sarah Frederick in this volume, had titles like: *All about Gaul!*; 30 *Gaul Smart with the World*; 31 and *Gaul*: *Take Advantage of More Opportunities.*32 The authors of this last book state that *gaul* is "any activity where one has an opportunity to meet people who are interesting and to invite them to engage in a relationship."33 They assert that, furthermore, "experts" have now determined that *gaul* is the best method for achieving social success, both personal and professional.

Gaul has now become an important value/skill in everyday life as well as at work. Those who are not *gaul* (*yang tidak gaul*) are considered not really ok. Why? The impression is that they are not trendy (*tidak trendi*). This might be surprising because usually trendiness is judged by outward appearance—does he follow the latest fashion trend or not. But now *gaul* has also become a measure of trendiness.34

Personal and professional success in the face of rapid urbanization requires new forms of social interaction across ethnic, religious, regional, and gender lines as well as new understandings of the self. *Gaul* ideology encourages flexible, open, and ostensibly "democratic" (but in practice thoroughly apolitical) interactions. It is meta-ethnic rather than ethnically marked. Like the new horizons of consumption to which it is linked, *gaul* posits the modern individual as an on-going project ever in need of self-making improvements. The improvements have first and foremost to do with oneself as a product and presenter. All individuals, these *gaul* self-help books explain, have both strengths and limitations (*kelebihan dan kekurangan*). The point is to be aware of one's own personal qualities, to learn to minimize one's limitations and "optimize" one's strengths (*ngoptimalin bakatnya*) in social interactions. This emphasis on self-understanding and on self-development as a continuous and quasi-career enhancing process is a central theme of the *gaul* guidebooks, exemplified in the following excerpt from *All About Gaul!*

30 Adi Kurnia, *All about Gaul!* (Bandung: Simbiosa Rekatama Media, 2005).

31 Wining Rohani, *Gaul smart Dengan Dunia* [Social smarts for interacting with the world] (Yogyakarta: Gloria Graffa, 2004).

32 Eileen Rahman and Petrina Omar, *Gaul: Meraih Lebih Banyak Kesempatan* [*Gaul*: Take advantage of more opportunities] (Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2004).

33 Rahman and Omar, *Gaul*, 9.

34 Rahman and Omar, *Gaul*, 6.

 We could say that it happens because you maintain several negative characteristics. Or you just haven't developed a strategy to rid yourself of those characteristics […] like egoism, stubbornness, and thinking you're always right. Everyone has an ego, but don't become egotistical; that's dangerous you know! The effects of these characteristics are simple. You become too self-confident and in the end, conceited. Or you become too self-effacing/self-conscious (*minder*), and in the end, overly timid. Of course other people don't like these characteristics. If you exhibit them, people will stay away from you. But you don't have to give up. *You should remember that life is a process that never ends. Everything that you are and everything that you know will continue to develop, as long as you believe that everything is a process*. 35

Unthinkable or unattractive under the earlier scheme of Javanese social style and self- presentation, with its heavy emphasis on ascribed social classifications and identification with ethnically marked communitarian categories and consumption, the achievement of "personal style" is critical to the new *gaul* habitus. Yet, as the above quotation makes clear, personal style is not viewed as something that just happens through interactions with one's family or natal community; it requires conscious reflection, cultivation, and self-making work. And that is what the proliferation of *gaul* handbooks is about. These handbooks take as their focus, not the recognition of a communal, ethnic, or local identity, but the cultivation of the individualized self-confidence and ego-centered social skills required for interacting outside of one's circle of family and close friends. *Gaul* orients one to a distinctive social world, but it is a world made up of expressive individuals rather than tradition-minded communities.

Thus, the authors of the new *gaul* guidebooks offer tips on how to make friends, how to be a good listener, how to express oneself, and how to make the most of one's individual abilities and talents. The small guide whose title translates as *The Secret to Successful Social Interaction*, for example, suggests that the reader should always "be present" in social interactions, should put the interlocutor first, and act like an equal partner in conversations rather than like a parent/elder—all skills identified as necessary in navigating the modern, socially varied, landscape. To underscore this focus on direct, more democratic interactions, authors often address the reader with the youth slang equivalents of "bro" (*brur*) or "dude" (*bo, coy*) and will regularly interrupt their narrative to ask rhetorical questions: *"*What do you think will happen if you continually exasperate people? I'm sure you know the answer." "What do young people today find so

35 Kurnia, *All About Gaul*, 14–15, emphasis added.

engrossing in just hanging out in coffee shops or in the malls? What do they accomplish that way? Nothing."36

The intended audience for these guidebooks is the young people, eager for middle-class status, who have arrived in urban centers in large numbers in order to take advantage of new educational and employment opportunities. Many are living on their own and away from close parental supervision for the first time or commute daily to schools or work sites some distance from their homes. The publications hold particular appeal for those in their late teens and early twenties who have grown up in villages or small towns, in socially conservative or closely monitored backgrounds. And although the authors tend to take males as their focus, according to publishers and authors as many if not more females than males buy and consume these publications. The books speak most directly to those young people who feel insecure and uncertain in the new urban environments of high school and college campuses, internet cafés, modern offices, cinemas, and shopping malls. These modern environments require the employment of cosmopolitan interpersonal social skills and poised self-confidence in interactions with individuals from widely varied backgrounds—including, most importantly, members of the opposite sex.

#### Sex and modernity

The deep insecurities that many young people feel in interacting with members of the opposite sex may be difficult for the casual observer to comprehend. Javanese women are not sequestered or kept out of public view. On the contrary, middle-class or aspiring middle-class parents actively encourage their daughters to pursue an education. In 2011 according to World Bank statistics, the ratio of Indonesian female to males in tertiary institutions had reached 85 percent and by 2012 had surpassed the percentage of males.37

Classrooms, with the exception of the Muslim boarding schools, are not sex-segregated, though students nonetheless tend to self-segregate into same-sex groups. Socializing outside of school also tends to take place in single-sex groups with taunts and teasing back and forth as the most common form of interaction. Young people report having "boyfriends" or "girlfriends" in high school or even middle school, but this may consist of little more than passing notes or innocent flirtation.38 A surprising number

36 Wishnubroto Widarso, *Kiat Sukses Bergaul* [The secret to successful social interactions] (Yogyakarta: Kanisius, 1997).

37 In 2012, the ratio of females to males in tertiary institutions in Indonesia reached 103.5% and has only risen since that time, accessed April 25, 2017, http://data. worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ENR.TERT.FM.ZS/countries/1W-ID?display=graph.

38 Smith-Hefner, "The New Muslim Romance"; see also Linda Rae Bennett, *Women, Islam and Modernity: Single Women, Sexuality and Reproductive Health in Contemporary Indonesia* (New York: Routledge, 2005) as well as Parker and Nilan, *Adolescents*.

of students, by college age, have had relatively few opportunities to interact with members of the opposite sex in other than a superficial manner, and certainly not in an intimate one-on-one situation like a date.

Since Indonesia's 1974 marriage reforms, the notion that young people should not be forced into arranged marriages has become widely acknowledged. Yet "dating" is a highly contested means of getting to know possible marital partners. Dating is particularly risky for young women whose reputations depend on the appearance of chastity and whose behavior is constantly being evaluated by neighbors, friends, and community members.39 Parents regularly request that their children, particularly their daughters, wait to have a serious boyfriend until they have finished their educations. Dating is also an important focus of the required religious education that all young people receive in the schools. This education teaches young people that "there is no dating within Islam";40 there is only chaperoned meeting for the purposes of negotiating marriage. Despite concerns over dating and mixed-sex socializing, marriage is nonetheless viewed as compulsory—preferably as soon as possible after graduation.41 How and where to find an appropriate marriage partner without overstepping the bounds of Islamic propriety has thus become a point of tension for many young people and particularly for many young women.

#### Back to the mall: Satan, sin, and consumption

As noted earlier, not everyone views the new cosmopolitan life styles and leisure-as-consumption as unambiguously positive. There are ripples of discontent even among established members of the middle class. Jakarta-based newspapers and glossy women's magazines lament the lack of physical exercise and creativity among urban youth who prefer to spend their afterschool and weekend hours hanging around the malls socializing with friends. A 2009 article in *The Jakarta Post* describes a program called *Wiken Tanpa ke Mall*, which literally means a "weekend without going to

39 Bennett, *Women, Islam and Modernity*; Parker and Nilan, *Adolescents*.

40 See Salim A Fillah, *Nikmatnya Pacaran Setelah Pernikahan* [The pleasure of courtship after marriage] (Jakarta: Pro-U Media, 2005).

41 The Australian sociologist Gavin Jones, and his colleague, Bina Gubhaju, describe Indonesia as following the pattern of "universal marriage," defined as a country where less than 5 percent of women are still single in their late forties. In Indonesia in 2005, they write, only 2 percent of Indonesian women were never married in their late forties, see Gavin Jones and Bina Gubhaju, "Trends in Age at Marriage in the Provinces of Indonesia," Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series No. 105 (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2008), 11. Although this pattern has shifted in many areas of South and Southeast Asia and may shift with later generations in Indonesia as well, marriage is still taken for granted by the vast majority of Indonesian youth. According to this near-universal norm, women who reach their mid-twenties and are not yet married are considered "old maids" (*prawan tua*) and anxious concern is expressed over their "marketability" and, in particular, their declining fertility.

the shopping mall," organized by several local groups in an attempt to get young people in Jakarta to go to the zoo rather than hanging out at the malls. Among the parents interviewed for the story was a father who said he agreed with the effort because, "Going to the mall has become like an addiction for many people living in the capital, including children. The kids should be involved in more creative activities."42 It was a comment I often heard from parents of young people in Yogyakarta as well. *Nglencer* "hanging out, doing nothing" has become a key worry of parents, teachers, and community leaders and is the focus of similar concerns voiced by Malays and Singaporeans (where the term used for this activity is *lepak*).43

These middle-class anxieties aside, the strongest critiques of the new leisure and consumption life styles come from conservative and even some mainline Muslim groups who identify the new consumerism with westernization pure and simple. Consumption in this view is a subtle form of (Western) re-colonization that captures young people's bodies and minds through the alluring but superficial devices of new trends and fashions. In recent years, a stridently moralizing religious counter-discourse has emerged in opposition to the new leisure-as-consumption. This discourse depicts the new consumption-oriented lifestyles as materialistic and hedonistic and cautions against the opportunities for sinful activities that malls and other modern leisure sites provide.

Among the most fiery of these critiques are the copious works of the Muslim entrepreneur Abu Al-Ghifari, printed by his personal publishing house, Mujahid Press.44 Al-Ghifari blames the moral corruption of today's youth directly on media and consumptive flows from the West.45 He points to American movies and television shows which are widely watched by Indonesian youth (offering the anachronistic examples of Bay Watch,

42 "Jakartans Enjoy Non-mall Weekend Recreation," *The Jakarta Post*, June 14, 2009. Accessed June 22, 2014. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/06/14/ jakartans-enjoy-nonmall-weekend-recreation.html. This same parent lamented the lack of opportunities for healthy outdoor activities in the capital, saying he takes his young daughter to the mall because there are so few alternatives. Yogyakartan parents made similar complaints about the shrinking green spaces in the city, the traffic gridlock, and increasing levels of pollution associated with mall expansion.

43 Fischer, *Proper Islamic Consumption*, 67.

44 Among Al-Ghifari's works are: *Kudung Gaul: Berjilbab Tapi Telanjang* [Trendy headscarves: Covered but naked] (2002); *Remaja dan Cinta: Memahami Gelora Cinta Remaja dan Menyelamtkannya dari Berhala Cinta* [Teens and love: Understanding teen love and safeguarding them from the love of teen idols] (2003a); *Pacaran Yang Islami, Adakah?* [Muslim dating, does it exist?] (2003b); *Selingkuh, Nikmat yang Terlaknat* [Cheating, a damning pleasure] (2003c); *Gelombang Kejahatan Seks Remaja Modern* [A wave of modern teen sex crimes] (2004a); *Romantika Remaja: Kisah-Kisah Tragis dan Solusinya dalam Islam* [Teen romance: Tragic stories and solutions in Islam) (2004b)—all of which have been published in multiple editions. Note too, the top-selling Islamist magazines, *Hidayah* [God's guidance] and *Sabili* [Fighters for the holy cause] which recently stopped publication and then reemerged in 2014 as *Sabiliku Bangkit* [Sabili revived], which offers a similar message.

45 Al-Ghifari, *Gelombang*, 47.

Beverly Hills 90210, and Melrose Place) as contaminating young people with ideas of free sex and promiscuity as an individual right.46 He describes Western youth as behaving "like animals" and free sex as an extreme form of "narcissism which develops into a wandering lust that can never be satisfied, eventually becoming an insatiable sexual hunger."47 The outcome is a condition he calls "hypersexuality" which, in the case of women can be understood as a type of "pathological masochism." When sexual freedom has gone too far and can no longer be controlled, the only solution, Al-Ghifari and other authors writing in this genre write, is to quickly marry.48

The works of Al-Ghifari and others writing in this genre are uniform in their condemnation of Western immorality and their appeals to young people to avoid situations that offer the temptation of *berzina* (illicit sex). Satan, these authors remind young readers, is in all those places (cinemas, night clubs, bars, discothèques, and malls) that create opportunities for *berkholwat* (being alone together with an unrelated member of the opposite sex) and lead quickly to other immoral acts like being too close together, or holding or touching each other. The best defense is to avoid such places altogether.49 An even more radical course of action—that taken up by Islamist vigilantes—is to force such places to close down.50

#### Sociable but *Shari'a*-minded

Muslim resistance to the dangers of mall immorality also takes other, less militant, forms. Indeed, some of this resistance adopts the trappings of mall cosmopolitanism, becoming an accommodating and hybridized variety of Muslim consumption, similar in some respects to the *Islam de*

49 Al-Ghifari, *Remaja dan Cinta*, 48.

46 Al-Ghifari, *Gelombang*, 110–113, 117–121.

47 Al-Ghifari, *Gelombang*, 40–41.

48 Al-Ghifari, *Remaja dan Cinta*; Al-Ghifari, *Pacaran Yang Islami*; M. Fauzil Adhim, *Indahnya Pernikahan Dini* [The beauty of early marriage] (Jakarta: Gema Insani, 2002).

50 Because of their well-trained and muscular security personnel, large malls are rarely the target of Islamist vigilantism. However, since the overthrow of the Suharto regime in May 1998, other centers of middle-class cosmopolitanism, including cafés, bars, and discotheques, have been the targets of repeated attacks, not least by the nationally organized militia known as the Islamic Defenders' Front (*Front Pembela Islam*), see Ian D. Wilson, "'As Long as it's Halal': Islamic Preman in Jakarta," in *Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia*, eds. Greg Fealy and Sally White (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2008), 192–210. On the rise of various Islamist groups in Indonesia, see Anthony Bubalo and Greg Fealy, *Joining the Caravan? The Middle East, Islamism, and Indonesia* (Sydney, NSW: Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2005); Noorhaidi Hasan, *Islamist Party, Electoral Politics, and Da'wa Mobilization among Youth: The Prosperous Justice Party in Indonesia* (Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Working Paper, 2009); Yon Machmudi, "The Emergence of New Santri in Indonesia," *Journal of Indonesian Islam* 2, no. 1 (2008): 69–102; Machmudi, *Islamizing Indonesia: The Rise of the Jemaah Tarbiyah and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS)* (Canberra: ANU e-press, 2008).

*marché* (Market Islam) described by Patrick Haenni. Haenni sees in this the "embourgeoisement" of the process of Islamization; that is, a disengagement from the political and a corresponding refocusing on personal development and upward mobility.51 He notes the appearance in the 1990s of a new pamphlet genre in many areas of the Muslim world which focuses on topics of self-cultivation and improvement, but within an Islamic frame, "a form of predication closer to coaching than theology."52

In Indonesia, among the books on *gaul* sociability that flooded the bookstores in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were those that offered an alternative, Islamic sociability (*gaul Islami* or *gaul syari'i*) based on a distinctive blend of Muslim piety and individual self-expression—where the self-expression that is prescribed is more systematically responsive to religious norms than typical in more mainstream *gaul* culture. These more moderate Muslim tracts include such titles as *The Gaul Era: Tips for Muslim Youth on Becoming Sociable without Losing Your Muslim Identity*, 53 *Sociable but Shari'a-minded*, 54 *Becoming Friends with Islam*, 55 and *Sufi Funky: [How to] Be Gaul and Pious*. 56 These books, like those of more conservative Islamist authors, lament the current state of the world and its negative effects on today's youth and counsel young people against being drawn into sin and immorality. However, rather than rejecting this new world of materialist consumption outright, they offer the believer tips for how to enter more effectively—but also ethically—into its dizzying corridors.

In *Sociable but Shari'a-minded*, for example, the author, Muhapi, writes,

In this book I want to help youth to understand an era which is becoming so much more complex and more challenging, and some say, more crazy (*edan*). *Don't get pulled into ignorance, laziness, let alone drown in the world of darkness that is immorality, that is considered "gaul!*"57

Their broader message, however, is one that links a principled sociability (*gaul yang berprinsip*) with personal success.

Typical of these tracts is the small book *Make your socializing more sociable: The secret to great socializing that's still acceptable*, by Alwi

51 Haenni, *Islam de Marché*, 9.

52 Haenni, *Islam de Marché*, 76.

53 Muhammad Najib Salim, *Zaman Gaul: Tips Menjadi Gaul bagi Remaja Tanpa Kehilangan Identitas Keislamannya* [The *gaul* era: Tips for Muslim youth on becoming sociable without losing your Muslim identity].

Alatas.58 In its opening chapter, entitled "Leisure and Pleasure," the author offers the usual litany of leisure activities that modern young people find pleasurable, but that often make others unhappy. These activities include aimless hanging out with friends, smoking and taking drugs, going to clubs and discotheques, wasting time at malls, and reading and watching pornography. Most of these activities, the author admits, are enjoyed more often by males than by females; however, young women are hardly immune from the lure of modern sociability. Alatas describes how recently an increasing number of teenage girls have lowered themselves to taking pictures of their breasts and naked bodies with their cell phones and sending them to friends or posting them on the internet for everyone to see. But "self-confidence," he writes, "does not mean selling oneself so cheaply." Those things that are free and enjoyed by everyone clearly lose their value. As support for his argument, he cites the example of the virgins in heaven, described in Islamic *hadith* as being as beautiful as coral and rubies because they have never been touched by humans or *jin*.  Only Allah can give us true happiness."59

Instead of leisure as pleasure and consumption, these Muslim *gaul*  authors propose a "principled sociability" (*gaul yang berprinsip*) and religious study (*ngaji*/*tarbiyah*). Principled sociability is sociability that is responsive to and based on an understanding of the requirements and prohibitions of Islam. Religious study is the means to obtain that knowledge. Young people are encouraged to use their free time to seek religious knowledge, including, most importantly, knowledge of Islamic law (*shari'a*). It is only by organizing one's free time and *habitus* around God's commandments that one can learn how to resist things forbidden by religion. The model at work here is not that of the self-expressive individual consumer. It is that of the pious believer, whose piety is defined with reference not to the expressive celebration of personal feelings, but to knowledge of God's commands.

Sociability that is truly "OK" is that which is principled.

[. . .] We have to hold on tightly to our religious principles. If our friends invite us to go against the requirements of God or to do something forbidden by our religion, we have to refuse. "Sorry, this is against my principles. I can't go along with it." But if they still press us, what do we do? [If they say,] "Oh you act so pious. Have you become an *ustadz* (religious scholar/teacher)?" If they say that, don't be surprised. Just respond, "Better to act pious than to act like a *kafir* (unbeliever)!"60

58 Alwi Alatas, *Bikin Gaulmu Makin Gaul: Kiat Bergaul yang Asyik dan Oke* [Make your socializing more sociable: The secret to great socializing that's still acceptable] (Jakarta: Hikma Press, 2006).

59 Alatas, *Bikin Gaulmu Makin Gaul*, 26–27.

60 Alatas, *Bikin Gaulmu Makin Gaul*, 97–99.

What is of particular interest in this discourse is that, even while occasionally railing against the West, these authors do not suggest that Muslims seal themselves off from the social world or from the changes linked to globalization. While there are dangers associated with Westernization, "Muslims have to keep up with the latest in order to develop and advance so that we are not left behind."61 In fact, these authors liberally quote Western figures throughout their works, urging young people to take their inspiration from people like Henry Ford, Helen Keller, and Albert Einstein, in order to overcome difficult odds and to make a difference in the world. Like the new Muslim celebrity-preachers described by James Hoesterey,62 these authors draw on western psychological models from Freud to Howard Gardner to "buttress their claims to modern authority while encouraging new forms of religious experience." Also like Hoesterey's celebrity preachers, the *gaul* authors are themselves entrepreneurs who, in addition to writing books, typically write advice columns in newspapers and magazines, work as consultants, offer educational seminars, and participate in television and radio talk shows. As a result, their message of principled sociability has an influence that extends far beyond the readership of their books.

#### Modern Muslim subjectivities

It was to this discourse of "principled sociability" that the students in my study consistently referred in describing the temptations of consumption and, especially, interactions with members of the opposite sex. An example of this discourse as applied to shopping arose early in my research in a discussion with a second year dentistry student from Gadjah Mada University. In response to my queries about her weekend, she described with obvious embarrassment having gone with a small group of girlfriends to a student bazaar where she just couldn't restrain her "urge to consume" (*jiwa konsumsi saya*). She had spent the equivalent of US\$12.00 (Rp. 100,000) on ethnic crafts like Papuan ashtrays and Balinese carved wooden wall hangings. Next time, she vowed, she would be more disciplined (*lebih disiplin)* and "hold to her principles." When asked if she considered shopping wrong or sinful, she cited the example of the Prophet who didn't avoid the marketplace, but never lingered. Ideally, she said, one should have a specific aim or objective in mind when going out to the market or mall, purchase what one needed, and then quickly return

61 Muhapi. *Gaul Tapi Syar'I*, 37.

62 Hoesterey, "Marking Morality," 2; see also Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, *New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere* (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) and Charles Hirschkind, *The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

home. She, however, would not return to the student bazaar because she laughed—in that environment, "women just can't keep their desire to consume under control."63

Nonetheless, by 2010, spending time at the mall had become an important and valued leisure activity for a majority of middle-class and aspiring middle-class youth. The newer malls like the *Amburukmo Plaza* were so crowded on weekends that there were long lines of cars and taxis snaking down the street waiting for a parking spot to open up. Even much older malls like the *Malioboro* were often so packed with mall-goers that it was difficult to navigate the escalators. Young people reported that in addition to offering a comfortable, clean, and modern environment where one could browse the latest fashions and lifestyle trends, going to the mall had become an enjoyable way to pass time with friends "hanging out" or "showing oneself off/putting oneself out there" (*mejeng*). They readily admitted that *mejeng di mall* or hanging out at the mall included the exciting possibility of seeing and being seen by members of the opposite sex. However, rather than spaces of sin or immorality (*maksiat*), they argued malls were "safe" spaces (*tempat yang aman*) where their acts were controlled and surveilled both by their friends and by a watchful public eye. While they conceded that a certain amount of flirting was also a possibility, they were quick to add that it was done in such a way that it did not violate religious norms (*tidak melanggar batas agama*). Interactions, they pointed out—if they occurred—typically took place between groups. None of the young women I knew would ever consider going to the mall alone, but always went with a female friend or friends. Young men too typically moved around the mall in small same-sex groups. The groups were, nonetheless, very much aware of each other, and group members would exchange discreet glances or smiles or even, in some cases, attempt to deliberately cross paths. Among younger groups of mall-goers, in particular, joking and even calling out to one another is not uncommon, though most of the calling and joking tends to be from young men to the groups of young women, who do their best to pretend to ignore it.

In their article on youth and mall culture in the nearby Javanese city of Solo, authors Pam Nilan and Michelle Mansfield describe a similar pattern among high-school aged youth they studied. They focus their research during the fasting month (Ramadan) when young people flock to the malls in the late afternoons to spend time with friends while waiting to break the fast together. Texting has become an integral part of mall interactions, they observe, enhancing and supplementing the physical interactions taking place between groups of young people. "Observed reactions [on the part of the young people involved] indicate that at least some, if not the

63 See Jones, "Women in the Middle." Especially damning to women is the label *cewek matre* "material girl" or *mata uang* (literally, "money eyes") both designating a woman who is only interested in money or involved with a man only for his money.

majority, of text messages were exchanged flirtatiously," they write.64 The young people they spoke to emphasized, however, that what is important "is not to diminish the religious merit of fasting" (*yang penting nggak ngurangi pahala puasa*). While enjoying the atmosphere and each other's company, young people supported one another to insure that no one broke the fast early. Nilan and Mansfield's respondents were somewhat younger than my own; nonetheless, the concerns they expressed with socializing in a manner that was fun but did not violate religious norms or limits were in line with those expressed by the young people in my study.

#### Leisure, consumption, and the new Muslim middle class

In embracing a principled, religiously-informed sociability, young people draw on widely available discourses that address and express the major concerns in their own lives. For the university students in my study and the majority of Javanese youth, these concerns have everything to do with the anxieties that surround achieving and maintaining middle-class status: how to stay clear of the enticements of the urban social scene; how to avoid serious sexual involvements; and how to stay disciplined and focused, all so as to finish their educational program and obtain a college diploma. Liberally sprinkled with borrowings from contemporary youth slang (*bahasa gaul*) and making major concessions to popular interest in self-expression and self-making, this principled sociability comes across as thoroughly modern, even trendy. It is a mechanism of principled integration into, not segregation from, the allures of the marketplace. It is, in Patrick Haenni's terminology, a key feature of *l'Islam de marché*: an Islam accommodated to rather than rejecting modern consumption and capitalism, but accommodated on terms that remake and yet restrain individual habitus—while not challenging the larger economic system as a whole.

Significantly, young aspirants to middle-class status referred to this theme of principled sociability not only to differentiate themselves from the perceived hyper-individualism of the West, but also from wealthy Indonesian elites like the Jakartan suburbanites described by Van Leeuwen. The general consensus among Muslim Javanese college students is that sexual experimentation is associated with wealthy, urban individuals who did not have a good family life and moral upbringing. The stereotype is that sexually "looser" women and men attend expensive private schools and that many of these wealthier individuals come from families that didn't give them sufficient love and attention while they were growing up. I was frequently told that these young people are the products of "broken homes" (due to divorce or separation) or of families in which the parents were too

64 Pam Nilan and Michelle Mansfield, "Youth Culture and Islam in Indonesia," *Wacana* 15, no. 1 (2014): 15.

busy with their professional careers or consumer lifestyles to spend time with their children. Not surprisingly, there is also an assumption that these young people had insufficient religious training. As further evidence for these generalizations, students pointed to the recurrent stories in newspaper and magazine articles of Indonesian media stars who described their broken home life and lack of religious education, their flirtation with sex and drugs, and their eventual turn to a life of Islamic piety. These examples were widely cited by parents and young people as moral lessons for those who would be tempted to go astray. Islam, in other words, has become a defining feature of the new middle-class habitus, one which separates the new middle class from both the unenlightened and uneducated lower classes, but also from the morally suspect wealthy elites who have been tainted by excessive Westernization.65

In approaching the new Muslim middle class through the optic of leisure and consumption, we get glimpses of new and contested Muslim subjectivities. However, by paying more attention to the moral debates raging in and around the mall, so to speak, we can also appreciate that the nature of these contestations is not limited to economic or political concerns, as some of the early literature on Asian middle classes implied. As the religious sphere increasingly shifts away from the settled world of "tradition" and established religious hierarchies, new options for individual "choice" and expressivity have appeared. At the same time, the individual is confronted by a host of public groupings trying to woo or pressure him or her toward their way of being. There are more options, more choices, but also a painfully enhanced awareness that many groups are trying to convince one to follow *their* way. The contest and deliberation reaches down into the most intimate spheres of the individual.

The Javanese example speaks to the question: Is individualism an inevitable aspect of the globalization of consumption, of modern lifestyle choice, of the development and spread of new middle classes? The idealized model of consumption and lifestyle in the liberal West is one that emphasizes the autonomy and self-expressivity of the individual. The reality of course is more complicated. Our market places and our social worlds are sites of powerful and perpetual social communication, both by advertisers and businesses and by masses of consumers. Not surprisingly then, the autonomous individual of liberal consumption theory turns out in fact to be a heavily socialized being—socialized through and for consumption. He or she is, in Patrick Haenni's terms, an *individu du marché.*

While one might expect Muslim consumers to reject this capitalist model outright, the trend across the Muslim world is more hybrid and accommodating than it is oppositional. If the consumerist West is populated by *individus du marché,* the Muslim world is giving rise to, to borrow Haenni's phrase again, an *Islam de marché*. This is to say, that rather than

65 Mark Liechty, *Suitably Modern: Making Middle-class Culture in a New Consumer Society* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

rejecting capitalist production and consumption outright, the main currents of thought and practice in the Muslim world are developing their own models of capitalist consumption. These are for the most part system-accommodating rather than system-rejecting.66 But they attempt to embed the mall, so to speak, in a world of religious ideals – albeit ideals in dialogue with markets and market culture.

All this is to say that Indonesia's new middle class is being redefined not just with reference to shopping, fashion trends, or even social activism, but also in relation to a new and more individualized, but still thoroughly normativized, profession of Islam. As young people experiment with new ways of practicing and experiencing the city through leisure sites like modern shopping malls, their understandings of self and of morality are being challenged and reshaped. What I have tried to suggest is that, even at the heart of modern consumerism's cathedral, the mall, Islam is nurturing alternative forms of middle-class modernity.

#### Bibliography

66 See Haenni, *Islam de Marché*; Deeb and Harb, *Leisurely Islam*; and Fealy, "Consuming Islam."

Haenni, Patrick. *L'Islam de Marché* [Market Islam]. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005.

Tokyo: The Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2004. Accessed April 25, 2017. http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/.

#### Sarah Frederick

**The Leisure of Girls and Mothers: Affective Labor, Leisure, and Taste in the Transnational and Transmedia Adaptations of** *Stella Dallas*

**Abstract** Analyzes the cultural capital attached to gendered leisure activity and work in the story *Stella Dallas* as it moves from novel to film and from the United States to Japan to create its own genre of mother melodrama as *A Mother's Song* (Haha no kyoku, 1936). By comparing these texts and their creators, the chapter develops an understanding of the symbolic properties of leisure across cultures in the early twentieth century. It argues that various versions of the story use the category of the girl (*shōjo*) to explore a potential space of leisure outside the workplace or the heterosexual family unit. Of course, this space was also easily occupied by expectations that the leisure would cultivate the young woman's taste and domestic skills. Considering a flexible use of the concept of affective labor, the paper looks at the ways these texts used aspirational activities on the edges of "leisure" to negotiate various anxieties surrounding wage and unpaid domestic labor by women in the early twentieth century in relationship to class and sexual identities. A central case is the use of piano playing in the Japanese versions as a multifaceted activity, both work and leisure, that could represent good taste and potential for marriage, while also providing access to professional activity and a way for women to support themselves outside the family structure. In the Japanese case, this allowed them to remain permanently attached to what was seen as girl culture, including aspirations to cross cultural spaces and media, as does the entertaining story *Stella Dallas*.

**Keywords** Yoshiya Nobuko, Stella Dallas, women, cinema, adaptation, Japan

#### Introduction

Chino Bōshi's playful book *Literary Girl's Companion* takes up works of contemporary literature it classifies as "girls' fiction" (*shōjo shōsetsu*).1 For Japan, one definition of the *shōjo* (girl)2 is that she is a "non-worker."3 Chino's volume itself is a sort of celebration of play and reading for fun in a "girlish" mode. He associates that leisure with the girl and girls' magazines, particularly *Girls' Companion* (*Shōjo no tomo*)*,* which was published from 1908 to 1955.4 Chino Bōshi's book recasts the term "girls' fiction" from the prewar period to talk about contemporary women writers and comic books, and reflects on what it means to read them as producers of leisure material rather than works of literature and art that could be handled with traditional academic tools. He ends his book talking about his plans to use his own "free time" (*jiyū jikan*) to extend his "study trip" (*shūgaku ryokō*) to Paris.5 My translation of the term "study trip" is awkward precisely because the meaning lies between work and play, denoting a form of leisure that may result in cultivation and learning but might also result in a product for which the player is paid (here a book). Often behind such trips and leisure activities by a girl is the domestic and wage labor of a parent or other supporter who makes them possible.

It is this ambiguous and gendered interaction between work and leisure that I will explore, in particular the anxieties concerning the relationship between the two as grappled with in the works of fiction and film examined in this article, namely the American and Japanese adaptations and translations of the novel *Stella Dallas,* a story of a mother and daughter's pursuit of cultural capital through tasteful leisure. I should note that these texts and adaptations are fictional representations with different contexts, which each bear their own perspectives on these issues. In fact, the "girl" culture associations of the various American and Japanese, men and women creators of these works frame the perspectives on work and leisure in their work.

In 1920s Japan, we see terms related to the "study trip" above, such as "self-cultivation" (*jishū*) and "cultivation" (*shūyō*), connected with girls and young women. "Cultivation" was a key concept in 1920s and 30s Japan, when it stood at the interstices of work and leisure and was thought to be acquired through a combination of schooling, reading, and white-collar work. This type of work included that performed by what came to be known

1 Chino Bōshi 千野帽子, *Bungaku shōjo no tomo* 文学少女の友 (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2007). Clearly Chino's adoption of the "girl" stance is playful.

2 *Shōjo* is now taken to be an untranslatable Japanese concept that it is retained in Romanization rather than translated in English language scholarship. See, for example, Frenchy Lunning, "Under the Ruffles: Shōjo and the Morphology of Power," *Mechademia* http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mechademia/toc/ mec.6.html, 3–19.

3 Chino Bōshi, *Bungaku shōjo no tomo,* 8.

4 *Shōjo no tomo* 少女の友 (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1908–1955).

5 Chino, *Bungaku shōjo*, 218.

as "working women," *shokug*y*ō fujin*, in what were seen as higher echelon service industry areas such as "elevator girls," department store clerks, telephone operators, and typists. These sorts of jobs were distinguished from the physically-demanding labor of so-called "factory girls," *jokō*, who came largely from poor families under a form of indentured servitude and who fueled Japanese economic growth in the 1910s and 20s, particularly through their work in the textile industry.

Many social pundits and educators interested in the situation of upper middle-class women thought the experiences of "working women" should be re-deployed after marriage in service to husband, children, and extended family. Whatever its intentions, "cultivation" necessarily enriched both the work and leisure experience for women of that era and could not but help spilling over beyond the confines of non-wage labor of marriage and childrearing, as shown by Barbara Sato.6 This quality distinguished "cultivation" from its related precursor, the "good wife, wise mother" (*ryōsai kenbō*) education promoted during the Meiji period. Compared to the "good wife, wise mother" educational goal, "cultivation" and its companion "hobbies," *shumi*, were more flexible and less institutionalized.

Indeed many of these working women did not marry, being sometimes able to make that choice due to the degree of financial independence they had gained through their work. Those who did marry came with new skills and interests such as flower arranging, piano playing, and sewing, or routines of service industry politeness, which would be directly employed as part of the affective labor for the household. Others might be more focused on the education of children or self-fulfillment at home. The experiences of these working women would leave imprints on the education of their daughters. While the work of these married women moved into the domestic sphere and separated from wage labor, it also often remained in conversation with it.

As Kathi Weeks and others have shown, it can be remarkably difficult to talk about women's non-wage labor as much as it has been a frequent topic of inquiry among feminists.7 Particularly difficult in this respect are the more thoroughly "immaterial" forms of labor, for which Hardt and Negri have proposed the term "affective labor." Referring to the entertainment industry, they say, "this labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion."8 As a category this might

6 Barbara Sato, *The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 134–151.

7 Kathi Weeks, "Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics," *ephemera: theory and politics in organization* 7, no. 1 (2007), 233–249.

8 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, *Empire* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 292–293. This form of "affective labor" is connected to the concept of "immaterial labor" sketched by young Karl Marx in his *Grundrisse*.

well extend to self-cultivation performed by women, and perhaps children. Veblen, the first sociologist of leisure, defined leisure primarily as the conspicuous non-engagement in productive labor. He defined the work of servants and housewives who are facilitating the leisure of the gentleman head of the household, but also are not engaged in productive work, as performing "vicarious leisure" or providing leisure for others and enhancing through their own non-engagement in productive labor the conspicuous waste of their master. He writes:

In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class. This vicarious leisure class is distinguished from the leisure class proper by a characteristic feature of its habitual mode of life. The leisure of the master class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of a proclivity for the avoidance of labor and is presumed to enhance the master's own well-being and fullness of life; but the leisure of the servant class exempt from productive labor is in some sort a performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily directed to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not his own leisure. So far as he is a servant in the full sense, and not at the same time a member of a lower order of the leisure class proper, his leisure normally passes under the guise of specialized service directed to the furtherance of his master's fullness of life. Evidence of this relation of subservience is obviously present in the servant's carriage and manner of life. The like is often true of the wife throughout the protracted economic stage during which she is still primarily a servant—that is to say, so long as the household with a male head remains in force.9

As Japanese middle-class households in the 1920s moved away from having maids or servants, the burden of providing a fully comfortable domestic space fell on the housewife's shoulders alone. Magazines, especially *Shufu no tomo* 主婦の友 (The housewife's friend, 1917–2008) emphasized the need for the housewife to serve as both the efficient "manager" and the servant in the household, providing spouse and children with some space for leisure rather than pursuing their own goals.10 In the case of a daughter, this may often take the form of creating space to acquire "taste"

9 Thorstein Veblen, *The Theory of the Leisure Class. An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions* (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1899), 59. Later he refers to the vicarious consumption of goods such as "food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment" as a "subsidiary range of duties" executed to enhance the conspicuousness of the consumption of time and substance by the gentleman, ibid., 68.

10 Sarah Frederick, *Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan* (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 85–92. One excellent resource on views about middle-class children in this period is Mark Jones,

through activities that might look like leisure but are in fact training for the affective labor she may perform later in either a service industry or as a wife and mother.11

As indicated above, the transcultural aspect of these efforts is important, particularly in the aspirational experience of girls and women in 1920s and 30s Japan. As we see from Chino's examples, the "girl" has been a figure ambiguous not only in her relationship to adulthood and childhood, but also in her cultural location: she is often a culturally hybrid or even cosmopolitan figure. There are some historical reasons for this: the early twentieth-century magazines that helped to popularize the term were very much a part of the Meiji Era (1868–1912) culture that valued culturally Western things. Many of the readers were students at missionary schools and were learning English there, acquiring school routines based on European models. But it was also because the "girl's" leeway for "leisure" made this cultural mix a part of the conception of this figure from the start.

The image of the *shōjo* is that of a girl who has been given the time to consume products and develop skills on her own that allow her a certain fluidity to become more cosmopolitan and move across cultures, but also to cross class divides through education. At least in novels and movies, she often has a complicated family situation (orphaned, mixed marriage parents, foster parents, etc.) that is designed to signal a complicated identity.12 Her leisure also gives her the time and space for a more intense and broader range of emotions, which in turn allows her to be imagined as empathizing beyond identity markers dear to her parents.

Living during this flexible period between the confines of parental authority and marriage, she was able to explore through "cultivation" multiple possible futures and identities with an imaginary unlimited by physical location. The most mobile of women—generally speaking, the most wealthy—had options such as studying abroad or extensive travel.13

*Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Monograph Series, 2010).

11 Veblen himself rather stresses the need of the gentleman to acquire the trappings of taste through what in fact is an "arduous application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way," which includes learning a foreign language, playing an instrument passably well, and acquiring the capacity to distinguish fine foods from regular fare, see Veblen, *Theory,* 74–75.

12 One excellent example is the silent film Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Minato no Nihon musume 港の日本娘, Shimizu Hiroshi 清水宏 director, 1933), which uses the space of Yokohama to link the cultural hybridity of schoolgirls going to Christian schools to a biracial character. It also considers how these identities operate across multiple class positions, from a girl who falls into prostitution and lives in a housing project with a house-husband (often shown doing the ironing) to her friend who lives in a house with a picket fence.

13 Sally Hastings, "Travelling to Learn, Learning to Lead," in *Modern Girls on the Go: Gender Mobility and Labor in Japan,* eds. Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, and Christine Yano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 193–208; Sarah Frederick,

For most, however, this movement took place through the fictional stories and the multiple media, especially photography, recorded music, and film that were increasingly circulating during the first part of the twentieth century. Such stories themselves were leisure material, but they also showed alternate ways of living in relationship to gendered leisure and work.

Considering a case of both cross-media and cross-national translation is useful to understand the specifics of the Japanese situation and Japanese media, as well as for a comparative understanding of the changing relationship between leisure and modernity more generally, particularly as these stories are highlighting changing notions of gender roles and sexuality. A similar trajectory across countries, languages, and media from Victorian England to Japan and China of Ellen Wood's melodramatic *East Lynne* (1860) has recently been followed by Xuelei Huang; my method is similar in focusing on retellings in multiple media, and shares the interest in complicating "influence" relationships. In the media-rich and increasingly globalized nature of media of the early twentieth century, specific stories circulated in conjunction with more general sets of codified images, sentiments, and genres that affect their reception in ways both globalized and localized.14 For this purpose, I will focus on the travel of a particular novel and film from America to Japan and into film adaptations to consider their framing of leisure and taste among girls and women in 1930s Japan as the plot and the imagery move across spaces and languages.

The product is itself meant for consumption as leisure material, but it also engages in some meta-reflection on the intersection of women's and girls' activities that have a leisure aspect with social change, class, and sexuality. In all versions, we see a distinction between the successful self-cultivation for vicarious leisure on the part of the girl, contrasted with a failure to match the norms of a socially acceptable provider of vicarious leisure on the part of her mother. Ultimately the "mother love" that is a theme in all versions is cemented by the mother giving up the financial support that allows for her own "leisure" and moving into manufacturing labor so that her daughter may develop the wherewithal to rise socially. As a result, the girl is allowed to fully engage in the cultivation of skills and tastes that prepare her for affective labor in an upper-class, cosmopolitan, and cultivated married life. The character of her cultivation as affective labor (or the preparation for it) is highlighted through the fact that the steps preparing her to become a housewife and provider of vicarious leisure are the same that opened the way for her to become a professional entertainer.

"Beyond *Nyonin geijutsu,* Beyond Japan: *Kagayaku* Writings by Women Travellers in Kagayaku (1933–1941)," *Japan Forum* 25, no. 3 (2013): 395–413.

14 Xuelei Huang, "From East Lynne to Konggu Lan: Transcultural Tour, Trans-Medial Translation," *Transcultural Studies* 2 (2012): 48–84.

#### *Stella Dallas*

The American novel *Stella Dallas*, by Olive Higgins Prouty (1892–1974) of Massachusetts, was published in 1923.15 It was first made into a film in 1925, in a silent version directed by Henry King and starring Belle Bennett, Lois Moran, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.16 Another better-known film version directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck came out in 1937, followed by a long running radio drama (1937–1955) sequel, which is sometimes credited as being the first "Soap Opera" and was sponsored by Bayer and Double Dandrine Shampoo.17 There was also a 1990 remake called *Stella* with Bette Midler.

In American film studies, the 1937 *Stella Dallas* is often marked as the quintessential "maternal melodrama," and was the focus of extended debates among feminist film critics.18 While the novel began in serialization and Prouty claimed not to want it to be too melodramatic or cliché, it already contains many references to the film culture of which it will become a part. It uses cinematic language "close ups" and people imagining becoming "like folks in the movies." At one point, the teenage daughter Laurel, who has come to Mrs. Morrison's house for the first time, has a glance at the elegant living room before she is noticed. "It was like a scene at the 'movies' with all those books, and the piano, and the comfortable chairs, and the big portrait hanging over the fireplace, and the pretty lady behind the steaming tea-kettle, and the dog, and the boys (there were three of them in the room. One of them, the littlest one, was seated in her father's lap)—only it was real!" But as she looks at her father, "suddenly the room faded, disappeared, and a close-up of his face dawned on the screen before her, as it were. Why, her father was gazing at the lady behind the tea-kettle, as if—as if—! Laurel had seen too many close-ups of faces not to recognize that look!  It flashed over Laurel that perhaps this man wasn't really her father after all!"19

15 Olive Higgins Prouty, *Stella Dallas* (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1923).

16 Henry King, dir. *Stella Dallas* (Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., 1925).

17 King Vidor, dir., *Stella Dallas* (Samuel Goldwyn, 1937). Lux Radio Theatre, starting off with a one-hour presentation introduced by Cecil B. DeMille (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=n1X0s6hIkxI). It was then restructured to fifteen-minute installments written by the Ann and Frank Hummert's Hummer Radio Factory, 1937–1955, as "The famous story of mother love and sacrifice." The source for the sponsorship information is Jim Cox, *The Great Radio Soap Operas* (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2008), 229–230.

18 Linda Williams, "Something Else Besides a Mother: *Stella Dallas* and the Maternal Melodrama," *Cinema Journal* 24, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 2–27; E. Ann Kaplan, "Mothering, Feminism, and Representation: The Maternal Melodrama and the Woman's Film 1910–1940," in *Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film,* ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 130–135; E. Ann Kaplan. "The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor's Stella Dallas," in I*ssues in Feminist Film Criticism*, ed. P. Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 126–136.

19 Prouty, *Stella Dallas,* 42–43.

Meanwhile, his story has its own Japanese history. Rewritten as *Haha no kyoku* 母の曲 (A mother's song) by the popular woman writer Yoshiya Nobuko 吉屋信子 (1896–1973), the story was reset in Japan and serialized from 1936–1937 in a heavily illustrated version in the mass-market women's magazine *Ladies' Club* (*Fujin kurabu*, 婦人倶楽部). When this "translation adaptation," *hon'an*, was released as a book in 1937, Yoshiya claimed in the postscript that her novelization was created at the behest of "Mr. Mori" of the Shintōhō movie studio in preparation for a film version.20 Mori refers to a producer at the studio who was also regularly involved in overseeing the adaptation and translation of stories that had potential for theatrical production. Interestingly, he had also overseen a direct translation (with the original American setting) of the novel *Stella Dallas* into Japanese, collected with *La Bohème* in an anthology of *Popular World Literature* (*Sekai taishū bungaku zenshū* 世界大衆文学全集), a collection itself created as leisure reading for the type of social climbers depicted in the novel.21

The film adaptation of Yoshiya Nobuko's version was released as a film in December 1937, starring several famous actresses. As the US version of 1937 with Barbara Stanwyck was only released in August, it is unlikely or impossible that the makers of the Japanese version, with its release date in December 1937, directly incorporated elements from it, even though there are some uncanny similarities. Like *Stella Dallas* in the US, *A Mother's Song* spawned multiple remakes and TV dramas in Japan over the years. Having consulted with both the film studio and the magazine, Yoshiya writes that they were in favor of her "taking the theme from *Stella Dallas*, and moving it into a story of Japanese mother-love [. . .] In both East and West a mother's love is the same. However, I think I was able to depict this mother, who holds on to this ignorant but pure, rich love for her daughter, in a way that will go over especially well in Japan and, without forcing things, transfer the story so that it depicts Japanese customs as well as a Japanese mother, daughter, and husband."22 While the title character is the mother and not the girl, it is this relationship and contrast between mother and daughter that highlights the position of the girl as being in a temporary space of "leisure" enabled by her mother's sacrifices, and the layers of class, taste, work, and sexuality that surround the girl as a figure developing the skills for refined vicarious leisure in modern Japan (Fig. 1).

#### *STELLA DALLAS* IN THE US

In the American version of the novel, the drama surrounds the eponymous Stella Dallas, a 30-something mother who has married Stephen Dallas, a richer man who worked as a factory manager in her hometown of

20 Yoshiya Nobuko, "Sakusha no kansō 作者の感想 [The author's thoughts]," in *Haha no kyoku,* in *Yoshiya Nobuko senshū* 吉屋信子選集 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1938), 301.

21 Purōchi ブローチー (Prouty), *Sutera darasu* ステラ·ダラス [Stella Dallas], trans. by Mori Iwao. *Sekai bungaku zenshū* vol. 20, (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1928).

22 Yoshiya, *Haha no kyoku,* 301.

Figure 1: Cover of Program for Tōhō Studios Nagoya Takarazuka Theater showing *A Mother's Song*, December 1937, featuring actress Hara Setsuko as Keiko, holding a piano score.

"Milhampton Massachusetts" (a fictional hybrid of various Massachusetts mill towns). The man is rather easily seduced by this lower-class woman in large part because he is depressed, having just broken up with the love of his life and fiancée, Helen Morrison, a move he makes because his own family's fortunes have fallen and he does not wish to make her suffer from his newfound poverty. He and Stella have a child, Laurel, whom he adores. He also rebuilds his financial situation to the point of getting a job in New York. Stella refuses to go with him, preferring to stay behind in Milhampton with her friends, and so that Laurel can remain in the same private girls' school in their town. Although now raised in status through her marriage to Stephen, she still feels uneasy acting the part of the upper-class wife. To her later detriment, one of her fun-loving friends in Massachusetts is Ed Munn, a horse track regular and drinker with class origins closer to Stella's own. In New York, Stephen happens upon Helen Morrison as she is riding a horse in Central Park, a clear marker of high respectability and the skills associated with upper class vicarious leisure. Helen is now a widow with two sons, but is still in love with Stephen. Although Stella continues to raise Laurel, making her fashionable clothing from pattern books and magazines, Laurel looks up to the more graceful and refined Helen Morrison, to whom Stephen has introduced her during a holiday visit.

Stella draws her own models for how to dress and apply make-up primarily from magazines and movies, but these are often incongruous with her actual surroundings. Particularly in the film versions, this excess of lace, frills, bold patterns, and make-up is highlighted as Stella's failing and the visual suggestion is that these are what drove Stephen Dallas away and certainly would drive potential suitors for Laurel away. In many senses, Stella tries too hard, makes too many outfits, and applies too much make-up. She also has poor taste in leisure goods.23 She likes popular music and cheap fiction. In the 1925 film, she goes for the "latest Elinor Glyn" novel rather than Bernard Shaw's *Man and Superman,* which has been lent to her by the mother of a potential suitor of Laurel's at a high-end resort to which she has taken Laurel to meet high class people in a leisure setting (Laurel is seen playing tennis, boating, and the like).24 Eventually Stella sees herself through the eyes of the rich young boys and girls with whom Laurel is socializing and realizes that she must separate herself from her own daughter if Laurel is to be able to marry any of these young gentlemen. She agrees to divorce Stephen so that he may marry Helen and have them raise Laurel together, an arrangement that Laurel only agrees to when Stella pretends to get engaged to the alcoholic and vulgar Ed Munn, who also tends to make lascivious comments toward Laurel. In the silent movie, this is dramatized by Stella frenetically playing the piano while singing a love song to Ed's photo, all as an intentionally tasteless performance to repulse Laurel (while of course this is not audible in a silent film, the images highlight the ineptitude of her playing and her uncontrolled emotional state).

These performances seem genuine—and genuinely abhorrent—to Laurel, but Helen sees through what Stella is trying to achieve based on her own intuition as "a mother." Stella disappears from Laurel's and Stephen's life, and starts working in a factory, getting by with Ed Munn's support

23 Another important aspect of excess in Stella's behavior is getting drunk (with Munn). This view of drinking as an impropriety for women (but not the husbands of the leisure class) is marked by Veblen: "The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence." Veblen, *Theory,* 70.

24 Elinor Glyn is the creator of the concept of the "it girl." The film is a bit selfreflexive in this way, and one imagines that Elinor Glyn is something probably closer than Bernard Shaw to the Hollywood world of which the film is a part.

(but not in a romantic relationship). Eventually Ed shows her the newspaper announcement for Laurel's wedding. In one of the most famous final scenes of all of the American movies, Helen makes sure that the curtains of their grand home in New York remain open so that Stella, who is coming there to get a glimpse of her daughter's wedding through the window, can see the success of her sacrifice as Laurel marries a young gentleman amidst the rich surroundings inside (notably this famous scene is *not* a wedding in the original novel, but rather a debutante style tea for Laurel—her options remain open and the event contrasts directly with the unsuccessful birthday party that Stella had planned). While Stella is a middle-aged mother and usually analyzed as such, we can also read her entire life motivated by the wish to remain a sort of "girl." This aspect appears in her bearing and in her highly vicarious pleasure in Laurel's success. While her own problems in "taste" are partly due to class and upbringing, they manifest themselves to a major degree in her efforts to remain too girlish for her age. Many have wondered how she could be so successful in making tasteful dresses for her daughter, while failing so miserably when doing the same for herself. But one reason for her failure is that her own clothing is too young for her, and her makeup and hairstyles are depicted as being heavily artificial in order to keep her looking young.

Her girlish dreaming, which is based partly on the movies and which had led her to pursue Mr. Dallas, exceeds the boundaries of decorum. When she and Ed Munn go to buy decorations for Laurel's birthday party, they behave like children on the train, he throwing spitballs and she giggling. Her excessive girlishness is mistaken by others for improper sexuality and bad breeding, while it is largely about trying to hold on to "friends" from her youth and to a sense of play. To others it seems like she is wasting time and is too much at leisure, going about town, even as her real intentions are to help her daughter in securing a match with an upper class gentleman. The enduring marker of her class background is her inability to use the resources made available to her by Dallas to make the best of her leisure opportunities to cultivate herself, even as she succeeds in creating the environment for Laurel to do so. In Japan, this would be the equivalent of failing to apply her "cultivation" properly, even as her dressmaking for Laurel meets with some success. The more properly brought up Ms. Morrison is able to fully integrate home decorating, managing the household, bringing up her children, and low-key elegance into the perfect performance of vicarious leisure; she wears lovely dresses, rides horseback without risking proximity to the racetrack, and avoids exaggerating effects in her make-up. As Stella is unable to work out this integration, it is only when she eschews the environment provided by Dallas, supports herself, and removes herself from Laurel's environment completely that Laurel is able to pursue her cultivation unimpeded, unmarred by the uncanny vision of a girlish older woman accompanying her own daughter. A disturbing aspect of the novel is the apparent message that a woman such as Stella, who did not grow up to acquire the skills needed to provide high-end leisure in her youth, cannot acquire the taste necessary to be accepted as an adult in a different social class. She simply has to return to her original environment, moving from vicarious leisure to work in a factory. The creators of the 1937 film especially explore the tragic aspect of Stella's quandary, building a strong sense of empathy for her that is shared by Helen in a further sign of her social refinement. It is through this fictional and exaggerated plotline of melodrama, of which this film becomes a quintessential example, that Stella is granted some space to be happy and that her awkward but understandable desire to enjoy life a little bit—just as girls and women going to see this movie might—is given the rationale of being part of the self-sacrifice for her daughter. An important key to sympathy for Stella is the clear indication that she works hard to support Laurel's move into the apparently effortless beauty of Helen Morrison's home: we see Stella sewing, ironing, decorating for a party, and so on, even if she has trouble keeping up with all the housework and her home is a bit slovenly. Her domestic affective labor is realistic and visible. This is played out with an important difference in a particular scene in the silent film and the 1937 version. At one point, Stephen makes a somewhat sudden visit back to Milhampton and there is a sense that he comes bearing some warmth or hope for his relationship with Stella. In the silent version, one problem with the sudden visit is the slovenliness of the home. Stella's dressmaking items are scattered everywhere and the kitchen sink is piled with dishes. Stella quickly makes herself up and does her hair, but the performance is not successful. In the 1937 version, however, Stephen comes into a living room nicely decorated for Christmas, and Barbara Stanwyck is wearing the most subdued and tasteful dress and hairstyle we see in the whole movie.

While most analyses of the films are about Stella's bad taste in clothing and read her extravagant behavior (mistakenly) as excessive sexuality, this homemaking work and its challenges are quite important. In 1937, we see a gesture to the aspirations of the moviegoer to truly succeed at these affective labors, but for good measure the scene is followed by the gut-wrenching tragedy of Munn ruining Stella's otherwise convincing and sincerely felt performance. In all American versions, and in the Japanese as well, Stella ultimately needs the space of a resort hotel for her daughter to interact sociably with the right kinds of boys, and she needs to hide away in her room as much as possible. Finally, it is important to acknowledge the place of the black maid in Laurel's household at the birthday party film scenes (in the 1937 version, she is played by Hattie McDaniel of *Gone with the Wind*). In each version, the overlap between Stella and the maid's role is highlighted. In the silent film, a pair of maids are quite comically called in to put on airs for the birthday party, popping up each time the doorbell rings in a highly choreographed way. Barbara Stanwyck's Stella also carefully places her maid, who casts a somewhat doubting expression that seems to question the likelihood that her performance will succeed. Since Stella has grown up as a sort of scullery maid for her own father in their mill town, there is an awkwardness to the two women being together and sorting who will perform what affective labor for the birthday party, with Stella being jumpy and ill at ease as she waits for the guests where she will try to perform a cultivated caring mother for them. She quickly realizes that the party has already been ruined by gossiping among Stella's friends about her cavorting with Ed Munn—they have forbidden their children to come. This outcome does not seem to affect the maid, though presumably she will lose her job as Stella's status declines. The setting in depression era America and the slippage and tension between working class women and the black servant women is one of the very American aspects of the film. Laurel is depicted in the novel as a girl not engaged either now or in the future in productive labor and she remains so in the movie versions. But in the original novel, her potential future employment in the service industry as a pianist and music teacher rather than providing vicarious leisure for a gentleman from the leisure class is a serious option. Once Stella realizes she must convince Laurel to live with Helen and Stephen in New York if she is to have any hope for marrying up, she agrees to the divorce and pushes Laurel to go to live with her father and Helen Morrison. However, Laurel's sympathy and love for her mother prompts her refusal to leave. She would rather stay and go to work as a stenographer. Stella is upset about this prospect:

A stenographer! Laurel, her beautiful Laurel, shut up all day long in an office, reeking with tobacco smoke? Laurel the servant for a lot of men, taking dictation, taking orders? Laurel wearing paper cuffs and elastic bands and pencils in her hair; eating lunch out of a box with a lot of other girls, also wearing paper cuffs and elastic bands and pencils in their hair? No. No. It musn't be. It simply musn't be. Why, even she herself wouldn't have been a stenographer. [...] It would be like planting an orchid between the cobblestones at the corner of Washington and Winter Streets to stick Laurel in front of a typewriter, inside one of the big grimy office-buildings downtown. She'd get all dust and dirt and trampled and spoiled in no time. She mustn't be sacrificed like that! Why, New York would go simply crazy about Lollie. It would exclaim over her, oh-and-ah over her, like the people at the Horticultural Shows over some new amazing flower. Oh, gracious, what can I do? What can I do to save the kid?25

Here she sees that her own cultivation work for Laurel, her exhibition piece for the "Horticultural Show," is about to fail and be trampled upon. She has to give up her hobby of mothering the girl to help her marry up and to put her into the hands of those able to make this possible. The failure

25 Prouty, *Stella Dallas,* 270–271. The quote is already long, but at this juncture, Stella considers suicide, stopping mostly because this would damage Laurel's reputation, particularly given that her grandfather committed suicide as well—it might be seen as a family disposition.

would be her daughter having to do this sort of office work, rather than marrying and taking care of her husband through tasteful affective labor at home. Instead, the plot leads to a distinct opposition in their respective activities: the daughter fully at ease to come out in New York society and the mother working in a sweatshop. The *Time* magazine headline for the review of the silent film was: "Sweat-Shop Employee, She Looks on from the Street at Her Daughter's Debut."26 Laurel is thus able to go from girl to wife with no interruption, directly applying the good manners and cultural skills she cultivated as a student to the domestic space. We learn no more about their marriage after Stella has witnessed its conclusion from outside the window. Stella's project of raising the girl is complete and the audience can enjoy her "success" while seeing the tragedy of their separation as the necessary condition of this success and joining in Helen's empathy. As Lauren Berlant writes in *The Female Complaint,* in *Stella Dallas* "modern love's promise of transcendence and deracination from the determinations of history are available as grounds for and explanations of dependable life only to people with money. For the rest, romantic heterosexuality provides a motor for class mobility."27 Although it takes two generations, this is quite arguably the overall message of America's *Stella Dallas.* As Berlant shows, Prouty's later novel *Now, Voyager* and its film version starring Bette Davis more fully problematize the role of heterosexuality in American class, and more fully reflect Prouty's own bisexuality.

Given the leisure culture of film itself at this time, the cinema is much more Stella's taste than that of the prim ladies at the resort or from the private school looking down on her. Via Helen and Laurel's own respect for Stella, the audience's empathy is with Stella as well, even if they might not wish to wear her outfits. In fact, there is even something appealing in Stella's vernacular speech and her "fun" sort of playful taste in movies, music, and clothing. The women at the resort who criticize her are rather stodgy and hypocritical, laughing at her living in another town than her husband, though in one case the woman herself is divorced while, as Stella points out, she herself "is only separated." Again, the film's audience, which showed its appreciation through the box office success, is likely much closer to Stella's world than to her husband's, and while they might wince at her outfits, they know that the inspiration comes from the same magazine advertisements and movies that they are scouring. Again, the echo with audience's own aspirations is strong in the 1937 movie, when Stella tells Steven that she "wants be like all the people in the movies doing everything wellbred and refined." The movie has held longstanding interest in large part because it helps to bring out the inconsistencies in and anxieties about class mobility and self-transformation through leisured consumption of

26 "Sweat-Shop Employee, She Looks on from the Street at Her Daughter's Debut," *Time* magazine, May 28, 1923.

27 Lauren Gail Berlant, *The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 175.

fashion and beauty products that were part of the late 20s and 30s milieu of post-Depression America. This interest was enhanced by the excellent acting through which both Belle Bennett and Barbara Stanwyck in their respective versions brought out the grotesque as well as the appealing aspects of this misguided and ambitious mother figure.

#### *STELLA DALLAS* IN JAPAN: *A MOTHER'S SONG*

Turning to the Japanese version, *A Mother's Song* (Haha no kyoku, 1936; film 1937),28 how are these dynamics transformed in the nearly contemporary rewriting and remake in Japan? Yoshiya Nobuko's "translation" offers a complete resetting of the story in Japan, with Laurel becoming Keiko (played by the great Hara Setsuko [1920–2015] early in her career), Stella the mother named Ine, Stephen Dallas a doctor named Junji, and Helen Morrison a professional pianist named Kaoru (played by another major actress, Iriye Takako [1911–1995]).

Both the Japanese novel and the film are replete with references to and influences from multiple entertainment platforms including the cinema, serialized fiction, book anthologies, radio shows, and live and recorded music, as well as live theater, all of which thematize leisurely consumption of popular culture and its relationship to domestic life, labor, and status during the early years of the Pacific War. Some of the Japanese changes from the original versions highlight related but divergent views of social class, women's labor, and marriage in the two contexts (though we have at least five versions, each with its own context, namely: Prouty's *Stella Dallas,* Henry King's silent film *Stella Dallas,* the adaptation novel by Yoshiya Nobuko *Haha no kyoku,* the film of *Haha no kyoku,* and King Vidor's sound film of *Stella Dallas* with Barbara Stanwyck). The silent film *Stella Dallas* was listed in the top three for 1926 by Japan's major film magazine *Kinema Junpo*, and it is not surprising that the development of Japanese versions found interest.29 Yoshiya Nobuko was chosen for this adaptation task just as she reached a high point in her popularity. In some sense she resembled Higgins Prouty, author of the original, but she was more famous and prolific in serialized fiction. Yoshiya refers to Prouty in the adapter's postscript as "an American woman writer," an American equivalent of herself.

By 1928, Yoshiya had made enough money from royalties and film adaptations to make a well-publicized trip around the world with her partner Monma Chiyo. Yoshiya lived with Chiyo from 1923 to Yoshiya's death in 1973, and adopted Chiyo in the postwar period. Also of significance to this chapter is that on her return from that trip she went to California and toured Hollywood with Sōjin, a Japanese actor active in Hollywood who at the time was playing various "Oriental" characters (though never Japanese

28 Yamamoto Satsuo 山本薩夫, dir. *Haha no kyoku* 母の曲 (Tokyo: Tōhō Eiga, 1937).

29 Takeda Shiho, *Yoshiya Nobuko kenkyū* [A study on Yoshiya Nobuko] (PhD diss., Gakushūin University, 2013), 125.

ones). Yoshiya had many interactions with the film industry in Japan, including consulting on the Japanese subtitles for *Little Women*, starring Katharine Hepburn (1933). Her daily writing routine involved writing all morning and going to see movies with Chiyo in the afternoon.30 Her novelization was also influenced by plot patterns of Japanese and "Western" movies (she watched both), and we can imagine that she was adapting not only this particular novel but also drew on a range of related plotlines. While we might expect that Yoshiya as a person with a same-sex partner might alter the plot to suit her own biography, that is and is not the case, just as Higgins Prouty's own bisexuality does and does not appear in this work explicitly. Meanwhile, the director of *A Mother's Song,* Yamamoto Satsuo (1910–1983), was a leftist director and student of Naruse Mikio (1905–1969), who seems to have taken on this project for income more than passion for the storyline.31

As Takeda Shiho has pointed out, a major difference between these texts is that the mother in the Yoshiya version and its movie adaptation does not herself aspire to rise to the higher ranks of providers of vicarious leisure, even if she sometimes makes attempts to learn certain skills under pressure.32 The source of the daughter's own taste is the readings suggested by her father and the school, as well as the cultivation of her own musical talent. Yoshiya specifically writes that her text contests the "good wife, wise mother" education popular in the day, where an educated mother was considered necessary to raise the class status of her daughter. This is why Yoshiya refers to both Ine and Stella as "ignorant" in the postscript to her novel adaptation of *Stella Dallas* in 1936, without meaning this as a criticism.  She writes in the magazine serialization that this "stupid mother" is one who can be idealized as much as any product of modern education or even the "cultivation" of the workplace, the view that white-collar work would cultivate the taste of a woman for the benefit of her future marriage. This does not mean that she rejects the educational system, but rather that she values other aspects of it, namely the female friendships and humanistic learning that girls experience there. These are not instrumentalized for marriage and family but of value for themselves. This stance on "girl" culture and its lifelong value is expressed in her 1921 essay on erotically charged friendships among schoolmates, "Loving One Another," which argues for a celebration of such friendships (rather than fear of them) because of the positive role they can play in fostering ethical behavior.33 Perhaps reflecting the leftist

30 Yuka Kanno, "Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke," *Mechademia* vol. 6 (2011): 287–303.

31 Yamamoto Satsuo, *Watakushi no eiga jinsei* 私の映画人生 [My film life] (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1984), 65; see also the translation of this work, *My Life as a Filmmaker* (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Ann Arbor, 2017), 11–12.

32 Takeda, "Yoshiya Nobuko," 145–150.

33 Yoshiya Nobuko, "Aishiau kotodomo" 愛し合う ことども [Loving one another], *Shin shōsetsu,* January 1921, 79–80. To this end, she quotes Edward Carpenter and his views on same-sex love as a kernel for socialist democracy.

Figure 2: Schoolyard as space of leisure and management of social hierarchies.

inclinations of the director Yamamoto Satsuo, even as he worked within a popular film production studio, the film would go beyond the novel in emphasizing the cruelty of educational institutions as they try to incorporate all aspects of girls' cultivation into the broader purposes of the family and the imperial-state.

The opening of the 1937 Japanese film first shows us the schoolyard, the institutional space that frames girlhood, and the students arranging flowers in the yard (Fig. 2). In the next shot, we see the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) meeting of mothers and the principal in a tearoom (Fig. 3).

The PTA meeting includes two important details. First, the room has an Ikebana flower display, which seems to have been arranged by the girl students whom we saw in the schoolyard in the opening shots of the film. It is part of their trained leisure skills that will help them perform their expected work as wives and mothers later. While this might be seen as simple cultural education, the principal's speech makes clear the importance placed on the cultural modeling that the mothers are to perform in order to have successful daughters. The composition of the scene, with the principal in the center and the mothers lined up on both sides, emphasizes the gender division of labor that the school expects after adulthood. In a later scene, Ine also tries to learn Ikebana to please her husband, and her inability to do it well is seen as sign of her hopelessness. The playful space of the schoolyard is constituted by the surrounding institutional buildings, but still allows for free play. In the school's tearoom, the manners learned in school are employed in a more regulated fashion under the guiding gaze of the school principal. Secondly, we see the women drinking coffee out of Western cups. Ine first displays her country background by bringing the coffee to her mouth with the stirring spoon (Fig. 4). From the start, her "taste" is put front and center. But rather than

Figure 3: PTA meeting with school principal, organizing the role of mothers' leisure activities and reading in their childrearing.

putting on airs in public like Stella, Ine is shown as awkward and miserable in this environment. Her only aspirations for tasteful leisure are shown within the domestic setting.

The formal conversation led by the principal is about elements from the mothers' own experiences as girls that might be useful to guide their daughters. The other mothers prod Ine into describing her childhood reading material, which turns out to have been limited and decidedly lowbrow, taken from entertaining storytelling (*kōdan*), including humorous samurai tales. Her admission makes everyone laugh, as it neither demonstrates literary refinement nor displays any of the erudition shown by the other women who for the 1910s would seem to have been highly educated. We do not hear what they read, but we would expect a combination of modernized neo-Confucian moral tales, some Western literature, and perhaps children's stories from modern girls' magazines. But it is made clear that the daughter of this "stupid mother" has actually developed a most refined talent for piano playing.

This formative text by a "writer of girls' fiction" about "motherly love" also shows the effort needed to develop such a skill as playing the piano well, which is commonly associated with emotional richness. It is this exertion for the "cultivation" discussed earlier that results in the difference in social standing between those who have acquired such vicarious leisure skills and those who have not. Though beyond the scope of this chapter, the screenplay for the 1950s Japanese remake opens with the schoolgirls talking about what they might do together during the summer vacation. When Keiko (the counterpart of Laurel in the Japanese version, appropriately written using the character 桂 to represent a laurel of flowers) says she must focus on her piano practice, the other girls criticize her diligence

Figure 4: Ine (Hanabusa Yuriko) displays table etiquette errors when drinking Western tea at the PTA meeting and is scorned by the other mothers.

after she has left: "I guess she's too good to play with us!"34 This reflects the more ambivalent but central role of the piano playing, an invention of Yoshiya for the story in the 1930s Japanese versions. Importantly, it is this skill that allows Keiko to move across the various public, domestic, and media spaces of the film and across the borderline separating work as a music entertainer and providing vicarious leisure to her family. In the novel adaptation by Yoshiya, Keiko is described first in terms of an image of bourgeois elegance, out of place in a working class house. She plays a lacquered piano, wearing a neatly tied *obi*-belt over a crisp morning glory print cotton summer kimono, looking cool and refined on a hot day. This is a look that is nicely translated into the white polka-dotted dress of Hara Setsuko, the actress playing this role, in the film version.35 Her mother is introduced as one "we would never guess could be the mother of this lovely *shōjo,* if we did not hear the girl call out 'Mother'." The mother is described as tired and overworked, with an "overly rich voice," and she loudly complains of being hot and overwhelmed by the plinking (*ponpokopon*) of the piano. Her name, "Ine" (稲), meaning "grain of rice" sets her up as a simple girl from the country and foreshadows her later difficulties with the etiquette of eating Western food and interacting with upper class people.

Two kinds of "leisure" for women are contrasted in the mother-daughter pair: the daughter's is that of a student in a girls' school, who studies classical piano and uses polite language while acquiring the skills that will

34 Koishi Eiichi 小石榮一, dir., *Haha no kyoku* 母の曲, (Shintōhō Studio, 1955), scene 1.

35 As suggested by the illustrations in the serialized version, Keiko seems to have been written from the outset for Hara Setsuko, who may be best known outside Japan for her role as Noriko in Ozu Yasujiro's *Tōkyō Story* (1953).

qualify her to provide high-class leisure to the leisure class; the mother's is that of a temporary relief from the hard work of securing her husband's comfort and her daughter's acquisition of upper-class tastes and skills by herself enjoying Japanese popular entertainment, period films, radio storytelling, and popular songs. These, she says, are consumed without much effort, unlike the *Anthology of World Literature* and the *Anthology of Modern Literature*, which her husband had bought her to "better her taste," but which were lacking in pronunciation guides for the characters and were full of long foreign names in *katakana* script.36 In later scenes, Ine is shown lacking interest in eating Western food or interacting with foreigners at a resort. This lack of higher aspiration in Ine's own leisure pursuits is a major difference between the American and Japanese texts. Rather than attempting to be too girlish, as Stella does with her outfits, Ine maintains her purity as a loving mother by not displaying interest in upward mobility for herself. Such purity of spirit is strongly associated with the "girl," *shōjo*, and with the *shōjo* writer who created this adaptation (Fig. 5).

This addition to the plot works powerfully in a sound film. For Keiko, piano playing is initially a "hobby," *shumi*, but for Kaoru it has become a career. In both cases it is seen as an indicator of good "taste," the terms used for "hobby" and "taste" being the same. In the American silent film *Stella Dallas,* the mother's home also has a piano and Stella herself plays it in the key scene where she performs her "love" of Ed Munn. Laurel is often posed near the piano as if she plays it. In the 1925 American book version that contains stills from the movie, there is a lovely photo of Laurel and her beau on the piano bench.37

While this is not a major part of Prouty's written story, it is likely that Yoshiya Nobuko picked up these elements from the visual features of the illustrated book and the silent film, which had been released in Japan in 1927. In fact, these images of the girl playing the piano that we see in the illustrations accompanying Yoshiya's adaptation, as well as in the silent film have been influential in Japanese popular culture, from melodrama to contemporary schoolgirl *anime*. In something akin to Mariam Hansen's concept of vernacular modernism, these visual images of cultured leisure travel across boundaries as they find their way into Yoshiya's novel and its film adaptation in new ways, including the addition of the medium of radio, on which Keiko makes her piano debut (Figs. 6, 7, and 8).38 In 1930s Japan, a piano was directly associated with Western culture and a bourgeois lifestyle. The whole set of piano associations in European and

36 Edward Mack shows that these volumes were important signs of cultural capital in this period while at the same time they were part of the spread of high literature into mass culture. See Edward Mack, *Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 126, 131.

37 Prouty, *Stella Dallas* (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925), n.p.

38 Miriam Bratu Hansen, "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism," *Modernism/modernity* 6, no. 2 (1999): 60.

Figure 5: Keiko's taste in Western dress and rose decoration on the piano is contrasted with Ine's efforts at Ikebana. Here Keiko suggests that her mother move the arrangement to the parents' room, representing also the ways that Ine's cultural accomplishments are socially confined to the domestic and Japanese sphere whereas Keiko's have the potential for personal pleasure, cosmopolitan cultural capital, and professional independence inside and outside the home.

American culture is already present in Japan via literary works and films. At the same time, the meaning of a lifestyle associated with piano playing and its relationship to gender roles is expanding from this original context while continuing to draw on the range of meanings and status ascriptions associated with it. The place of the piano as an "instrument of the middle classes" has been noted by Max Weber,39 and this is clearly the mode in which Laurel interacts with the piano in *Stella Dallas*.

During the Meiji period, the piano had been a sign of substantial wealth but by the 1930s, a broader range of individuals owned a piano. In her aspirational drive for her daughter, Ine has urged her husband to purchase one for Keiko. From the outset, Keiko's knowledge of classical music is a symbol of her effort at "cultivation" and is contrasted with the mother's ignorance and lack of taste. Her mother often asks Keiko to play something less depressing and more lively, perhaps the "Jaa, jaan jaan, jaan" that one hears at dramatic moments of a radio story show. An early scene in the movie has Keiko trying to teach her mother to say "Mendelssohn's *Gondellied*."40 Ine tries to learn the name, but when she attempts

39 Max Weber, *The Rational and Social Foundations of Music,* ed. and trans. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth (1921) (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958), 120–124.

40 Felix Mendelssohn composed two piano pieces of that name, both of them belonging to the genre "Lieder ohne Worte" [songs without words] which he invented with his sister. The first (Op. 19.6) was published in London in 1932, the second (Op. 30.6) was written in 1833 and published in Bonn in 1836.

#### SARAH FREDERICK

Figure 6: Keiko speaks through the radio to her mother, "Where are you?" as Ine listens to her live piano performance.

Figure 7: Keiko's face superimposed on the piano, highlighting its important role in in her identity.

Figure 8: Keiko's face fades into her mother's, highlighting the importance of Keiko's cultural accomplishments for her own aspirations as a mother.

to explain to her husband what Keiko is playing, she botches it as Gondellied's *Mendelssohn*. The difference is not only between lowbrow and highbrow, but also between pre-Meiji Japan and modern Japan as symbolized (simplistically) by ignorance about and familiarity with western things. In the Japanese film, it is not so much the piano itself but the image of a young woman playing it that is beginning to mean something on its own, including access to Western culture and a sense of interiority and self-direction. Given the references to the husband's work in colonial Manchuria, this knowledge of the west is being deployed in this 1937 film in connection with Japanese claims to special status within East Asia based on mastery of European cultural refinements, an important element of 1930s Japanese imperialist ideology. Orientalist taste already has an important role in the original American *Stella Dallas* novel. Laurel's emerging acculturation and her step-mother's established taste is marked by their knowledge of foreign literature, and, interestingly, also by their appreciation of the opera *Madama Butterfly*. Stephen Dallas is proud of Laurel's cultured taste for art, music, and the exotic when she describes her response when she heard an orchestra play a tune from the opera: "And all of a sudden I saw that lovely Japanese lady in the beautiful white satin kimono on her porch with the pink sky beyond, singing about her baby. The orchestra played it lots of times after that. I asked them to, and it's my favorite piece of music now".41

Unlike Laurel, Keiko plays the piano quite seriously, and this becomes a central feature in the plot. Near the beginning of the novel adaptation, Junji has already learned that his first love, Kaoru, is now a professional pianist. Having just returned from Korea, where she has been teaching piano at a mission school, she would be giving a concert right there in Fukuoka that fall.42 That Kaoru is a professional pianist highlights the link between the skills of a professional entertainer and a provider of vicarious leisure in a family environment. Even when Kaoru is playing the piano on stage and in a professional capacity, her visible cultural sophistication also makes her an appealing enough mother figure (or sister figure) for Ine to pass Keiko off to her, and it certainly is part of her continued appeal for Junji (Fig. 9).

The piano also provides feminine atmosphere in Kaoru's home, where it is surrounded by flowers and Western statues. When Ine first visits Kaoru in the novel, she sees that the whole modern apartment décor works together, from grand piano to Western side tables to a lapis lazuli vase with a yellow rose. Particularly in the film, the piano is the centerpiece of

41 Prouty, *Stella Dallas* (1923), 32.

42 Kaoru is an unusual figure in the images of Korean mission school teachers, who were usually western or Korean women. The missionaries themselves were often in an ambiguous position, sometimes supporting nationalist movements, but also trying to make peace with the colonizers. As their goal was more to proselytize than to intervene, a (possibly Christian) Japanese pianist might have been an imaginable character. Yoshiya might also have wanted to create a sort of "Westernesque" figure in Kaoru. See Indra A. Levy, *Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

Figure 9: Professional pianist Kaoru (Iriye Takako) gives Keiko a lesson at her modern apartment.

a glamorous apartment set in high-key lighting. Visually it parallels the architecture of the modern institutions displayed: the school and the hospital, both all bright and white. At the same time it marks a feminine space where only the characters Ine, Keiko, and Kaoru ever appear and never any equivalent of the school principal. This visual similarity between the professional and domestic spaces represents the way the piano is used to present the possibility of a woman supporting herself, no small feat in 1930s Japan.43

I would argue that both Yoshiya Nobuko the author (who did not marry) and the actress Iriye Takako (at this point single and successful) represented similar hopes for young women. Kaoru's ability to transform her own artistic skills into a career provides an alternative to the marriage plot ending and an alternative to playing piano simply in order to be a good marriage candidate and create a pleasant domestic atmosphere. Indeed, another important change in the Japanese story is that Kaoru has never married (Helen Morrison was a widow with two sons and a deceased toddler daughter—all used as a basis for her "motherly" potential), choosing to channel her "passion" into the piano and making this a way to support herself. While Laurel's "leisure" is playing tennis, Keiko has instead a "hobby" that might extend across the boundary of work and play. While she does marry a young scientist at the end of the story, he "wants her to continue with her piano career and to be happy," and there is a sense that she could

43 That the "translator" Yoshiya Nobuko is able to live on her own and support herself and her girlfriend by writing fiction as well as side projects like this translation is also well-known to many of the readers and viewers as well. This comes only from later history, but Hara Setsuko would also become famous for remaining single, and was until her recent death often referred to as an "eternal maiden."

use this skill to support herself should the marriage with which the film culminates not work out.44 Meanwhile, Kaoru's piano skills had supported her in a job. After Junji broke off his engagement to her, she took a job in Korea as a piano teacher. Otherwise, she might have fared like the harassed stenographer Stella feared Laurel might become. With the elevated cultural status connoted by the piano and her study in France, and her pent-up passion for Junji, she moves to the colonies to put her hobby to good use to support herself. Her marriage to Junji later means that her piano can finally be transformed into part of her gracefulness as a doctor's wife.

In both the marriage and the work at the Korean mission school, her hobby is part of respectable affective labor that also takes on a more material quality when it helps support the East Asian power balance—the Japanese figure acquires Western "cultivation" and brings it to the Korean colony. Of course, a mission school is not an outpost of the Japanese empire, and it is unclear whether there could be any historical basis for such a character. But in the symbolic layout of the novel, Kaoru's time in Korea has two purposes. One to purify her of her failed engagement by spending time abroad. The second to show her ability to share her European taste with colonial subjects, just as Junji shares his knowledge of western medicine by going to Manchuria to help combat a "new influenza" there. But Kaoru's work remains within a sisterly girl's sphere where she maintains independence, while Junhi is sent where he is told. Visually he is placed (by the director, Yamamoto) in hospital settings that are quite forbidding.45 In the film version, the Korean mission school is not shown framing Kaoru's life, but strong emphasis is given to her status as an independent performer and teacher. Kaoru becomes more fully the type admired by young Japanese women at the time, as shown in the book version through Keiko's girlish crush on her in an early scene where we see Kaoru from Keiko's perspective: "Behind her father, there was a beautiful woman, pure like a white lily and wearing stylish western clothing." When her father asks whether she likes this woman, she gushes: "'Oh, yes, I like her so very much. If she were a teacher at my girls' school everyone would be all worked up and have crushes on her—[...] Junji laughed happily. Indeed it made him happy to see his love, Kaoru, reflected so fondly in the eyes of an innocent girl".46

In the novel version as well, Yoshiya has the Helen Morrison counterpart be not a mother, but a single woman who has never had children. The basis of the empathy between Ine and her is their "women's heart" rather than "mother love." They also interact in a warm sisterly fashion, somewhat along the lines of the female homosocial sphere of Japanese girls'

44 In the 1950s Japanese version the groom is an opera singer, which gives a greater sense of shared interests, though perhaps more anxiety about their future together.

45 Of course, the mission school is an institution as well. The imagery is, however, absent, and Kaoru is presented as an independent figure able to go there or not at her own volition.

46 Yoshiya, *Haha no kyoku,* 33.

Figure 10: Keiko's mother and teacher are posed like schoolgirls in sisterly romances as they watch Keiko being courted by a wealthy boy at a resort.

fiction, and this is highlighted in a two shot of the mother and stepmother that mimics the illustration styles of Takabatake Kashō's pairs of girl friends popular in the same era (Fig. 10). In this sense, the two "mothers" are changed back to "girls" and are allowed to maintain some of the *shōjo*'s flexibility regarding a future marriage. While technically Kaoru does marry Junji when Ine steps aside, this is barely perceptible in the film version. Her empathy for Ine is very strong and her bond with Kaoru is stronger than in the American equivalent.

Without the conceit that they understand each other as "mothers," they are instead bonded as women, and women who are basically on their own—Junji is usually off in the empire dealing with "the strange form of influenza" rampant there. The "jun" of his name implies purity, and perhaps his efforts are what allows them a pure girlish place in Japan, though this is somewhat speculative. Minaguchi similarly argues for this importance of the kind male character in this film version, though I see it more through his absence than anything else.47

The *shōjo* character Keiko does get married, but much more highlighted in the film is her success story as the girl artist. Not only is she able to move comfortably in all spaces of Japanese-style and Western-style homes, schools, and resorts, but she is also able to be present through the air, playing on the radio in public. Meanwhile, the classic melodramatic moment of their marriage, so highlighted in the American versions and Yoshiya's novel as well, is usurped by the powerful scene of Ine listening to her on the radio, a scene with a long set-up that takes up much more screen time than the wedding, and is clearly a "tear jerker." It is here in

47 Kiseko Minaguchi, "Yamamoto Satsuo's *Haha no kyoku* [Mother's melody]: Making a Father's story of *Stella Dallas,*" *Iconics* 6 (2002): 89–110.

Kaoru's apartment, listening to Keiko's piano performance, rather than in the wedding scene, that Ine looks with admiration and tears of joy on her daughter's success.

Although Prouty's *Stella Dallas* is less expansive about the various trajectories for young women than her later novel *Now, Voyager*, we see in *Stella Dallas* an element that is seldom noted, but may have inspired part of Yoshiya's plot. Being released from a guardian role is a key in Stephen Dallas's financial freedom to marry someone like Stella in the original novel, and amazingly, Japan plays a role in this:

If Stephen's mother hadn't died just when she did; and if, on top of that Stephen's sister Fanny hadn't received, in reply to an application she had made to teaching a girls' boarding school in Japan, summons to sail immediately, Stephen's infatuation would probably have burned itself out before he was in a position to consider additional financial burdens of any sort. Suddenly Stephen found himself free and unfettered. There was no more need to send weekly checks to Chicago. There was no more need to send letters there, or to go there from time to time himself. Stephen was entirely cut off from his old associations, his laboring boat had lost even its dragging anchor, and was touching the shores of a country on the other side of the earth.48

Fanny herself becomes a "girl" type character who can remain single without relying on her brother or parents and travel to Japan, just as Kaoru went to Korea of her own volition. Going out for this kind of immaterial labor opens up space for Fanny's own experience of travel as a single woman. It also eases Stephen's financial situation and time constraints, which allows him to pursue his apparent sexual interest in Stella. Somehow Fanny also becomes like a character in one of Yoshiya Nobuko's novels.

More broadly, looking at the scholarly discussion of the American movie *Stella Dallas*, we can see critics only recently beginning to talk about the same-sex erotics implied in certain scenes between Helen and Stella, an element that I think is picked up on much earlier by Yoshiya Nobuko.49 An important aspect of this is that Helen has the manners to put Stella at ease in her home, in a way she never was able to be at, for example, the resort. Obviously, looking at the role played by women as providers of and objects of representation in leisure entertainment across multiple cultural spaces and media can be revealing about how these spaces and media might reflect and be agents of social change. We can see here that all of the texts are on some level conservative about gender roles and marriage—in

48 Prouty, *Stella Dallas,* 90–91.

49 Patricia White, *Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability* (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 94–134. She also explores the implications of Laurel and Stella comforting each other in the bunk on the train.

all versions the happy ending is brought about by a girl marrying a man from a good family and her mother getting to see it. At the same time, we can also see that, particularly for audiences such as the Japanese, with access to multiple versions the multiple visual images, plot alterations, sounds, and fashion choices used to represent forms of work, home life, and leisure did open up some space for imagining a range of trajectories and developing empathy for them.50 After 1937, the "girls'" culture came under government attack because of the idleness associated with it and the non-productive nature of passionate friendships among girls. Deborah Shamoon writes: "But by the late 1930s, what had once seemed an innocent way to prevent girls from becoming prematurely sexually active now interfered with the wartime government's total war strategy. The attack on girls' culture was not a condemnation of homosexuality but of sentimentality. The *shōjo* was by her nature nonproductive and non-reproductive, but the total war effort could not afford to allow any citizen to be idle, even the formerly protected girl students."51 *A Mother's Song* is produced at the cusp of that shift towards viewing girlhood as underproductive. This suggestion is supported by a change in the 1950 remake: the "other man," called Ryūsaku (竜作 "Dragon Maker," evoking an organized criminal) in the earlier version, is renamed Kokusaku (国作 "Nation Builder," a sort of name only popular during the long Pacific War). His wartime-tinged masculinity is depicted as an impediment to the mother-love and girlhood that came to be seen as the essential element of the story during the previous decades.

At the same time, I would argue that the multiple layers of translation and re-visualizing of *A Mother's Song* and *Stella Dallas* in the Japanese setting also allowed for other readings. Even from the perspective of the state, there were two separate demands on the former leisure space of the girl and young woman. As Yoshiko Miyake shows in "Doubling Expectations," during the 1930s and 40s the Japanese state needed both women's factory labor and reproductive labor, and vacillated in its support for these two contradictory policies.52 Although piano may be a way to make a living or improve the feel of the household in the early 1930s, it became increasingly associated with leisure rather than productivity. For the creators of the novel adaptation and film, however, leisure associated activities remain an important space for difference and interpersonal relations. In that context, the sympathy for an array of women characters in the different versions of this story—and perhaps especially for the financially

50 There might be some question of whether audiences in 1937 would remember the 1927 film, but given that it was listed among the top three films in 1927's *Kinema Junpo,* and seen as worth remaking and adapting in these ways, they might well have done so.

51 Deborah Shamoon, *Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls' Culture in Japan* (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011), 56.

52 Yoshiko Miyake, "Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women's Factory Work under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s," in *Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945*, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 267–295.