General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

My Love Has Been Burning

My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu; also released as Flame of My Love) is a 1949 Japanese black-and-white drama directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, produced by Shochiku in Kyoto, in which a young woman leaves her family to work for a liberal political party and the cause of women's rights in Meiji-era Japan.¹^•² It stars Kinuyo Tanaka as Eiko Hirayama, a fictionalized version of the feminist pioneer Hideko Kageyama.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Waga koi wa moenu; English titles My Love Has Been Burning and Flame of My Love²
Director / studio	Kenji Mizoguchi; Shochiku, Kyoto¹
Release	Japan, 1949; Rotten Tomatoes lists the original theatrical release as February 13, 1949³
Format	84 minutes, black and white, 35 mm (some listings, including the Museum of the Moving Image, give 96 minutes)¹^•⁴
Screenplay	Yoshikata Yoda and Kaneto Shindo, based on a novel by Kogo Noda and on Hideko Kageyama's Mekake no Hanshogai⁵
Lead cast	Kinuyo Tanaka (Eiko Hirayama), Mitsuko Mito (Chiyo), Ichiro Sugai (Kentaro Omoi, leader of the Jiyuto party), Koreya Senda (Taisuke Inagaki, founder of the Jiyuto), Kuniko Miyake (Toshiko Kishida, feminist)⁵
Music / cinematography	Music by Senji Ito; cinematography by Kohei Sugiyama and Tomotaro Nashiki¹^•⁵

Spoilers

Story and source

The film is drawn from the autobiography of Hideko Kageyama, a late 19th-century pioneer in the fight for women's rights in Japan. Her book Mekake no Hanshogai (Half a Lifetime as a Mistress) provides the model for the central character, much of the political background, and a number of plot details. In her book Kageyama presents herself as a woman who behaved in as masculine a fashion as possible; Mizoguchi's chief departure from the source was to feminize his heroine as Eiko Hirayama.²

The film's protagonist is Eiko, a teacher in 1880s Japan, who defies her parents and goes to Tokyo with a male friend to join a newly founded political party, but learns that, as far as women's rights are concerned, women have to fight on their own behalf.¹^•³ The film includes scenes of violence, notably the crushing of a protest at a silk mill, which is based on a real incident.¹

Historical setting

The film's politics reflect the difficult birth of party politics in Meiji Japan. The first organizations opposing the national government were widely viewed as close to treason, coming soon after the Seinan civil war. The first group to organize itself into a small political party was the Jiyuto (Freedom Party), fundamentally a party of middle-class capitalists, although many of its younger members spoke out on citizens' rights in general and women's rights in particular. It was joined in 1881 by the Kaishinto (Progressive Party), founded by the ex-government member Shigenobu Okuma. The two opposition parties were as hostile to each other as to the government, and their tensions made suppression relatively easy, though both survived under various names.²

Police raids on early political campaign meetings, such as the one shown in the film's opening scene, did occur quite often.²

Production and reception

The film belongs to Mizoguchi's suite of feminist films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which stretches from The Victory of Women to The Life of Oharu. After the war, the US occupation army under General MacArthur imposed strict controls on Japanese cinema, and Mizoguchi was one of the directors who used the new "democratic" imperatives to make a series of angry films about the rights of women, all starring Tanaka Kinuyo; the Karlovy Vary festival notes call My Love Has Been Burning the best of them.²^•¹

Made cheaply and quickly, with a rough visual texture, the film was harshly criticized on its original release in Japan and was characterized as "a film made by a wild animal." In an interview with Tsuneo Hazumi, Mizoguchi admitted he had made a "Barbaric" film, one arising from the frustrations of the war years and inspired by the paintings Picasso made just afterwards: "Or at any rate, I wanted to engage objects hand-to-hand."² Later assessments have been more favorable: Senses of Cinema's director profile calls it an out-and-out masterpiece of the period, "a masterly account of Meiji-era politics and society" that exposes the complacencies of liberal thought.⁶

Kinuyo Tanaka

Kinuyo Tanaka (1909–1973), with a career spanning more than 50 years and over 250 films, was Mizoguchi's key collaborator in the last decade of his career. For the harrowing scene in which her character bashes out her teeth with a stone, she famously had several of her own teeth removed for verisimilitude. She later became Japan's first successful female director, directing six films between 1953 and 1962, beginning with Love Letter (1953), and was for many years the only woman filmmaker in post-war Japan.²^•⁷

Related Mizoguchi film

Two years earlier, Mizoguchi had made The Love of Sumako the Actress (Joyu Sumako no koi, 1947), the second entry in his so-called "women's liberation trilogy" made with Shochiku and starring Tanaka, which dramatized the love affair of the actress Matsui Sumako and the writer Shimamura Hogetsu.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026