Retiring against time: media narratives of Momoe Yamaguchi’s ‘ageless myth’ and the ‘aging body’

This article examines the media narratives surrounding Momoe Yamaguchi, a Shōwa-era icon, focusing on her 1980 retirement and subsequent four decades of representation. Drawing on Dyer’s star theory, which conceptualises the star as an ideological sign, and integrating Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power and Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, the study employs Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis to examine three corpora: the Asahi Shimbun microfilm (1974–1999), the Asahi Shimbun digital archive (1985–2025), and the women’s magazine Josei Jishin (2018–2025). Three themes emerge: First, retirement narratives shift from evaluating Yamaguchi’s appearance to her morality. Second, commemorative discourse freezes her youthful image as a timeless cultural archive. Third, women’s magazines continually reinterpret her role as the ‘good wife, wise mother’, making her a contemporary moral exemplar. The study argues that by retiring from public visibility, Yamaguchi removed the conditions for ageing discourse, shifting the focus from appearance to moral self-discipline, and accumulating symbolic capital in the moral domain. This article identifies a third pathway for visibility governance in Japanese idol culture, in which female celebrities manage ageing risk through structured withdrawal from visibility, challenging the assumption of continuous visibility for female idols.