Daring To Be First: The Japanese Woman Director Tazuko Sakane (1904-1971)

<jats:p>When Tazuko Sakane wrote those lines in 1936 at the age of 32, she was already out of the mainstream of expectations for a woman in Japan. She was a woman of good family divorced and determined to live on her own terms— with help, it must be added, from a sympathetic father. Her poem goes on, but its opening lines are enough. They speak for a defining moment in this young woman’s life. She titled this expression of that moment “Intoxication” (Yoi), and no wonder. The goal she was setting herself lay in an exclusively male preserve, one which partook of traditional theater’s place beyond the pale of socially acceptable affiliations. Cinema itself in 1936 was expanding and evolving at a youthful pace, as art and industry both, but it was decades shy of being ready to imagine, much less welcome, a woman in the director’s chair.</jats:p>