American moviegoers may know Setsuko Hara: symbol of the quiet strength of the Japanese woman in films from the 1940s and ’50s, especially Yasujiro Ozu’s “Late Spring,” “Early Summer” and “Tokyo Story.” And we know Shirley Yamaguchi: a spitfire whose career included starring roles in Samuel Fuller’s “House of Bamboo” and King Vidor’s “Japanese War Bride.”

But these actresses — two of Japan’s biggest stars from the 1930s through the 1950s — shared an earlier, dicier chapter in their careers that has been largely invisible here. “The Most Beautiful: The War Films of Shirley Yamaguchi & Setsuko Hara,” a nine-film series beginning Saturday at Japan Society in Manhattan, offers a rare glimpse of their early days as featured players in the propaganda films that supported Japan’s series of wars in Asia.

In “China Nights” (1940) on Saturday, Ms. Yamaguchi plays an embittered Chinese orphan who becomes involved with a noble Japanese merchant marine officer — and who doesn’t get over her hatred of the occupying Japanese until he finally hauls off and slaps her in the face.

And in “The New Earth” (1937) on Tuesday, Ms. Hara plays a dutiful daughter of an old samurai family whose foster brother, whom she expected to marry, rejects her because he’s been infected by Western-style individualism. She’s so shamed that she hikes to the top of a volcano carrying her wedding kimono and prepares to throw herself into the crater.