Bruce Lee was all but unknown in Japan at the time of his death in July 1973, remaining so until the December 1973 release of Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1974) posthumously made him a superstar. His popularity was the focus of both a special section of the film journal Kinema jumpo (The Movie Times) and the cover of its annual overview of the previous year's film industry and market, which juxtaposed images of Lee and French star Alain Delon.

 

In his 2014 essay, "Bruce Lee: A Visual Poetics of Postwar Japanese Manliness (Modern Asian Studies 48: 1477-1518 doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000437), Jonathan Mackintosh finds in such juxtaposition a kind of mirror image, both embodying in their film roles stoicism, purpose, and a kind of ineffable hurt or vulnerability. In this sense, Delon and Lee are emblematic of a "sleek and slim, fit, tempered, and toned" (1509) new masculinity, at once strong and beautiful.

 

This beauty, in particular, is described by Mackintosh as indicative of a "newly empowered female gaze" (1511) associated, however laterally, with the bishonen ('beautiful boy') of increasingly popular girls' manga:

 

Their exploration of male vulnerability, in speaking to female desire, were the most graphic illustrations of the passive sexualization of the male, which is not unrelated to the emotional uncertainties - hurt and the search for a name - that were embodied in the sleek form of Lee's and Delon's new man.... The exaggerated performance of male aggression they depicted was certainly muscular and assertive, a kind of performative prophylactic apparently shielding the male body on display from the violence of the gaze, and yet - in common with pop star and manga cuties - it is precisely their male body on display, its physicality affectively re-signified, that openly invit[ed] a desiring look.' (1511-12)

 

Particularly given the illustration of a flower linking the images of Delon and Lee - a feminine touch that seemingly contrasts with the masculinity of the photographs - as read through Mackintosh's discussion, this cover gives us something of a starting point not only for Hong Kong film fandom in Japan, but specifically Japanese women's fandom of male Hong Kong stars.