The Modern Girls: Japan’s Generation of Change



The Modern Girls: Japan’s Generation of Change

The modernization of the world that began during the industrial revolution slowly made its way across the word throughout the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. The Modern Girl or the Modern Woman was spreading throughout the world in the early twentieth century. When Western culture made its way to Japan the young girls no longer saw a need in their parents traditional ideals, they saw a freedom in clothing and self-expression that had once been frowned upon. Women wanted the right to vote, they wanted to work, and they wanted the ability to choose what they were able to do with their lives. Yet in Japan the Modern Girl, also known as modan gaaru or moga, became a subject of concern from those who valued traditional roles. Japan as a country wanted to preserve their national identity from industrialization while they adapted to the change that was sweeping the world. When the Modern Girl began to rise with the roaring twenties young women in Japan weren’t immune to the change in culture. What made them different created a cultural backlash against their wish for freedom. Yet they were able to become a cultural icon in their own right and usher in a new era of women’s freedoms in their country that included sexual freedoms which frightened their parents. Their power over the change of the pre-war Japanese era drove fashion and change for women of the country but also had a cultural impact on the future of Japanese women. What the modern girl offered the Japanese people in the new century was faced with both criticism and acceptance but it would also become the catalyst that would define what the future generations of Japanese women would become in popular culture. The rise of the modern girl would divide the country into those who embraced the new generation versus those who disregarded it as something that would bring the down fall of Japanese society, by looking at it from a historical perspective it is easy to note that the rise of this generation would bring forward a culture that would become Japanese in its own right through fashion, cosmetics, and the café culture that has been embraced by the Japanese people. The modern girl symbolized how the modernization of women in Japan lead to the fear for the future of Japan’s national identity and the downfall of their pride in their country.  

 
            After the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912 Japan ushered in the Taishō Era, starting July 30th 1912 until December 25th 1926. The Taishō Era was short in the terms of Japan’s long history, but it was met with an industrial boom that came with the First World War This drove the prices of goods up as well as demand for what was offered, but it also placed a heavy burden on the country’s population who suffered because of the rising prices. It was also a time period in which placed Japan as a world power which earned them a seat in the League of Nations. Japan’s reach in the Eastern Asian nations began to spread during this time as they begin to invade neighboring nations. The people of Japan also begin to demand equal rights but it is only given to men over the age of 25 in 1925. “Universal male suffrage was established for men (not women) over 25 in 1925 and citizens' interest and participation in Japanese politics and social activism increased. Pro-labor laws were passed and generally the rights of workers were to improve until the military crackdown in the 1930's.”[1] This period also brought about one of the most devastating events in modern Japanese history, the Great Kantō Earthquake, the earthquake killed over 100,000 people and devastated Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures. When the Taishō Era ended Japan would enter the Shōwa Era and would also bring about the downfall of the Japanese Empire that had risen in power during Taishō’s reign.
            The rise of the Modern Girl began before the Taishō Era as Japan began modernizing but where each person stood in the slow changing era differed on their sexual orientation. In Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History, Toby Slade address the matter of where women stood in the modernization of the country, “Women’s participation in the project of modernization, was far thornier matter. In a favorite Meiji formulation, the nation’s goal was the adaptation of Western technology to preserve the Japanese spirit and the manifestation of this as clearly gendered. For the average urban male, modernization was mandatory. But for females—emblems of that native essence—Westernization was inherently problematic. In the dispute over the fate of Japanese culture in the modern age, women’s bodies and lives thus constituted ‘contested spaces’.”[2] Slade’s argument shows that women weren’t meant for modernization in Japan they were supposed to represent the national identity of Japan. While men were forced to modernize in order to fit into the ideal of the rising world power. These ideals were closer to the European beliefs during the Victorian Era in which patriarchy gave power to men over women. Slade further argues,
Figure 2: Japanese Traditional and Modern Women of the 1920-1930's
“This contest was often played out between two antithetical images of women. On one hand, the modern girl—sporting pumps, a short dress and bobbed hair and conspicuous in such modern spaces as cafes and urban streets—represented, at least, an enchantment with the material surface of Western modernity. She also held the promise of threat of cultural and sexual liberation and the possibility of militant social action. On the other hand, the traditional woman—championed in official ideology as ‘good wife, wise mother’ (ryō sai kenbo) and belonging to the space of the home—stood guard over conventional values sanctioned by Confucian and Victorian morality alike. These poles in the debate represent politico-cultural ideologies, aesthetic choices and even marketing strategies, all played out predominantly on the bodies of women and their clothing.”[3]
The argument of the traditional woman over the new modern woman was something that wasn’t only occurring in Japan but throughout the world. The difference from what was happening overseas and Japan was that they were desperate to hold onto these ideals even when they couldn’t slow the consumer culture that had taken hold.
            This young woman became a part of the rising influx of Western culture in Japan and they had made their impact as swiftly as their Western counterparts. Miriam Silverberg’s essay “After the Grand Tour: The Modern Girl, the New Woman, and the Colonial Maiden,” describes the brief appearance of the Modern Girl of this era, “The modern girl, makes only a brief appearance in our histories of prewar Japan. She is a glistering, decadent, middle-class consumer who, through her clothing, smoking and drinking, flaunts tradition in the urban playgrounds of the late 1920s. Arm in arm with her male equivalent, the mobo (Modern Boy) and fleshed out in the Western flapper’s garb of the roaring twenties, she engages in ginbura (Ginza-crushing).”[4] Silverberg’s assessment brings forth the similarities of the Modern Japanese Girl to the Flappers of the Western World. This shows that Western culture has taken root in Japan and given these women a sense of freedom that they hadn’t known. They could go out and enjoy themselves the same way as men, they could indulge in the freedoms of being a liberated woman like the women of western cultures such as the feminist culture that had swept through the United States and England. They were new and for those who valued the traditional values of Japan, “The modern girl in Japan was celebrated and feared mainly for her new sexuality.”[5] The modern girl ushered in a fear that would bring about fear in those who saw them as a threat and they were regarded by those who saw them as a commodity that they would be able to use in order to gain something that they hadn’t had before.
Figure 3: 1930's Shiseido Advertisement
Fashion and mass print media became the source of the Modern Girl’s newly minted world. “A newly booming publishing industry, including mass circulation magazines as well as book and newspapers, celebrate the modern lives of middle-class women and men.”[6] These magazines had advertisements geared towards women that would allow them to see the latest in fashion and cosmetics, companies such as Shiseido saw a need to market their products towards this rising demographic in order to have them buy their products. They used the fashion styles that were sweeping the world in order to gain the attention of their rising consumer base in order to market the new woman that was on the rise in Western culture. This brought about a consumer culture that came with the Modern Girl, in which magazines were tailored to sell to these young women. Silverberg writes that
“The identity of the Modern Girl is based on her awareness that she may have always fashioned herself with a similar cosmopolitan “Modern Girl look.” As a marker of capitalist modernity, she was an advertising icon suffusing once banal objects with an intense aura and occupying new social thought through the positions she took in advertisements. I would add to this that what the Japanese Modern Girl expressed in her own inimitable style was sometimes historically repressed or could be appropriated for different ideological ends, just as her magic, sensual touch was used to animate all sorts of commodities. This seems common in many places where Modern Girls wrapped themselves in bright colors, painted their faces, as they discarded all semblance of propriety and fixed racial identity of hierarchy, prowling not so much in search of boys but pleasure seeking in their masquerade, as Modern Girls.”[7]
Many of the new fashion styles rising from the 1920’s broke away from the norms of restrictive clothing for women. They had more of a flowy base without the extra fabrics that had been normal during the nineteenth century. For Japanese women they were no longer restricted to the long process that would come with wearing a kimono, or the tight uncomfortable hairstyles that they would have to put up each day, “having shed her “shapeless, unbecoming kimono” (the description is Tanizaki’s) in favor of “Western clothes” that “accentuate every curve and hollow, give her body a brilliant surface and lively flowing lines.”[8] Now they were free to cut their hair and wear clothes that were no longer a part of the traditional world they had once lived in.
            Another aspect brought forth by these middle-class citizens was that they were a part of a consumer culture that took in foreign style. Where they socialized was also Western based, Michael Hoffman’s article in The Japan Times, “The Taisho Era: When modernity ruled Japan’s masses,” addressed the culture of the Modern Japanese Youth, “Where did mobo and moga hang out? Most typically, in the new European-style cafes springing up here, there and just about everywhere, especially in the Ginza, Tokyo’s little Europe. The first one opened in 1911 (coffeehouses, quite different, had been around for a generation); by 1939, nationwide, they numbered 37,000. To the cafes streamed mobo and moga and all their various sub-species.”[9] Their hang out wasn’t only there for them to socialize many young women were employed in many of the places they frequented. Instead of following the traditional route of marrying after they finished school they sought employment as café waitresses, hostesses, dancers and shop girls to name a few. The Modern Girl was two different people in the eyes of many, “On the one hand, she came to symbolize the sexual and social decadence typified by the café hostess, the prostitute, and the unfaithful wife. On the other hand, she projected an image that overlapped with that of the professional working woman, and thus became a sign of fundamental change in the tenor of everyday life.”[10] The changes from the professional working woman that started during this time would create another aspect of the Modern Girl during the post-war Japanese Era known as the Office Lady, or OL, who did all of the office tasks in a professional environment. Most of what came out of the Modern girl that would be considered positive wouldn’t be attributed to these young women. This process added “another layer to the already multilayered identities that Japanese women consciously and unconsciously adopted. By buying into ideas, even if they could not afford the actual commodities, urban women were redefining the modern, encoded in figures like the modern girl, self-motivated middle-class housewife and professional working woman.”[11] What the Modern Girl did in the Taisho Era and early Showa Era changed how women in the years after would live in the world.
            Just as there were those who embraced this change in young women who created their new identity, there were other’s that feared the sweeping changes overtaking the new generation of young women and changing Japanese society. There was a general fear from the older generation of how heathenistic these women were becoming. “A child as Taisho dawned would have had grandparents molded by the Edo Period (1603-1867), living symbols of how startlingly Japan had changed within living memory… Between Edo and Taisho stood the stern and patriarchal Meiji Era (1868-1912), surely one of the most energetic regimes in world history.”[12] In the time between the Edo and the Meiji Eras the United States opened its closed borders to the world and laid forward a long list of treaties to keep Japan from closing themselves off from the world. From this the country slowly modernized but these two generations would be the opposition for the Modern Girl because as her parents and grand-parents they still believed in the traditional views of old world Japan.
“Youth in general, and young women in particular, were another lightning rod for the fears of modernity run rampant. Even as some celebrated the jaunty figure of the modern girl, others worried that she signaled the onset of far-reaching social decay. They feared that liberated women, perhaps even more than angry schoolteachers or militant laborers, might upset the established order of society and weaken the Japanese state. Anxious press reports described modern girls and boys as part of a communist conspiracy to weaken the nation by turning privileged youths into degenerate hedonists. They worried that the rise of divorces initiated by women would destroy the family system. In 1925 the press described a short-haired, Western-dressed woman accused of murdering a foreigner as a “vanguard moga.” Such labeling suggested that the modern girl, in particular, was un-Japanese and even criminal.”[13]
The fear of the Modern children of the pre-modern families were that their traditional lives before the United States and the nationalistic pride of the Japanese was in danger. The fear was mainly based in how their daughters left the home and went to work instead of marrying, or the influx of Western culture coming into the country as their children emulated the Western World.
            Writers began to write about the dangers of having a daughter that is a Modern Girl, the sole reason was that they thought her a scornful woman who takes advantage of her sexuality and her ability to seduce men. It was noticeable that the Modern Boys weren’t subjected to the same scrutiny as the girls because the young women were just stepping away from a patriarchal society in which the boys already had the power. Since young women ran cafés they could seduce men without having to live by the traditional style such as courtesans or geisha’s who worked under one house and had to serves as entertainment. Café women had more control over what happened within their own shops. For those who opposed the Modern Girl this was a lifestyle in which they opposed for their daughters and wives. “Unease continued in the excited discussion, mainly by male writers, of the figure identified as the “modern girl.” She embodied the exhilaration of Japanese modern times and captured much popular attention from about 1925 through the early 1930s. The modern girl was said to be something new in Japan.”[14]
This embodiment brought forth writers such as Junichiro Tanizaki who wrote the 1925 novel Naomi, in which the story’s protagonist is enthralled with a Modern Girl and wishes to change her into an educated young woman. Naomi is underage when he meets her, she’s fifteen at the time and he is twenty-eight years old, and he believes that he can use this to his advantage by creating the perfect wife that is nothing like the modern girls running around during the time. The main protagonist, Joji, has fears about relationships between men and women that had begun to manifest from childhood when during a class the teacher taught them about Antony and Cleopatra,
Figure 4: Naomi Cover Image
“When I was in middle school, we learned about Antony and Cleopatra in a history class. As you probably know, Antony engaged the forces of Augustus in a naval battle on the Nile. Cleopatra followed Antony into battle, but when she saw that things looked bad for her side, she immediately turned her ship and fled; whereupon Antony, realizing that the heartless queen was deserting him, withdrew from the battle at a critical moment and chased after her.”[15]
Love for him was a frightful affair and he avoided it as much as he could because he feared a love like Antony and Cleopatra. As a working man he lived a modest life, he had a home and didn’t worry about whether he offended anyone but Joji wanted something more. The lesson on Antony and Cleopatra was used in the novel to outline the future of his relationship with Naomi, since Joji is telling the story as though it were a memory of what happened and how he ended up in the life he did because of his love for a Modern Girl. He believed that Naomi was different from the traditional girl, she was outspoken and alive, “Naomi exceeded the bounds of mere liveliness; she was too rough in everything she did. Her speech, supercilious and lacking in feminine gentleness, was often vulgar. In short she was a wild animal.”[16] She was a tomboy, and had friends that were both male and female, although the majority of them were male, in his eyes she was the best person to mold into what he wanted as an ideal wife. With her mother’s permission he married her but didn’t have any kind of sexual relations with her until she was of proper age, until that time came he had her schooled on proper etiquette and education so that she would be a worldly woman.
            The story was one of grooming for Joji but behind the scenes, when he would leave for work Naomi was becoming the Modern Girl, the free spirit and a sexual being. Her outside relationships with her male friends slowly began to create a divide with Joji although he wouldn’t separate from her. After he realized about her relations with others Joji’s reaction wasn’t one of scorn, “Naomi and I talked in bed that night as though nothing had happened; but to tell the truth, I hadn’t been able to put it out of my mind completely. She was no longer chaste: not only did this thought cast a dark shadow over my heart; but it also lowered the value of Naomi, who’d been my treasure, by more than half.”[17] He’d only seen her as a piece of property as the wife he wanted but not in the way that is common in which love is involved by both parties. Naomi was no longer valuable to him but he still wanted to keep her. As she grew up she became more alluring and began taking multiple relationships by the time the two of them separated he was frightened by her lack of regret and her I don’t care attitude on how she can so easily go from one man’s bed to another’s.
            Andrew Lee a staff writer for The Japan Times writes that “The best hint of what “Naomi” by Junichiro Tanizaki is about is its Japanese title “Chijin no Ai,” (“A Fool’s Love”).”[18] The title changed in its English translation to Naomi which loses its power and turns it into the story of how a twenty-eight year old man falls for a Lolita type of character who is fifteen when they meet. The novel is trying to show the appeal of the Western World in Japan as well as trying to show the appeal of a western girl. The novel had become a hot topic in Japan, splitting everyone on their views of the Modern Girl. Lee brings this forth in his article saying, “Desiring her was something that made men like Joji uneasy and excited at the same time, which was much like the Japan’s fetish for modernization in the early 1900s. They knew they needed it, but at what cost?”[19] The cost for those opposing the Modern Girl was the loss of national identity that these girls would be lost to the generation of western fetish and the country would lose everything. Joji’s fetish wasn’t for something Western but for the chance to control the outcome of who Naomi would become when she grew up, by exposing her to the lifestyle of the Modern Girl but restricting her ability to act on the same desires as the other women around her made Naomi try to create her own freedom.
The arguments of where did the Modern Girl fit into the mold was constantly questioned. In “The Modern Girl as Militant” Silverberg brings up the point of where the Modern Girl stands in the face of the criticism about their adoption of Western culture writing, “Was the Japanese Modern Girl Japanese? Europeanized? Cosmopolitan? To the artist Kishida Ryusei, who defined the short-haired Modern Girl by her body, clothing, and rapid style of walking on Ginza, she was all of the above. While she appeared for the most part in Japanese-style clothing, the face of this beauty, originally that of a Japanese person, has been harmonized to become, in a most natural fashion, a Western-style face.”[20] Silverberg is pointing out that even though the Modern Girl has adopted Western styles they are still Japanese. For the novel Naomi the female character had begun her life in a situation that allowed her mother to agree to the union with Joji further idealizes a culture in which a man has control over a woman. A westernized woman is not as controllable as a traditional woman and so Naomi and Joji’s relationship fails due to his misconceptions of the modern girl’s influence.
            The two sides of the argument also brought about the harassment as well as the welcoming of what this meant for the future of Japan. Michael Dunn’s article for the Japan Times Culture section, “Modern girls and outrage,” addresses the two sides as well as the positives of the Modern Girl in Japan versus the traditional woman. Dunn states that the “Moga, and the denizens of the cafe society generally, had to defend themselves against frequent charges of not being “properly Japanese,” and were held for comparison against the idealized, kimono-wearing, subservient housewife who stood for all that was proper in family life. Popular magazines came out with arguments on all sides, and even the government — with military values in mind — began to eulogize the new, healthy-looking young woman who could swim and play tennis. The traditional woman was therefore gradually remodeled, and the “compound bijin” (beauty) appeared, who was just as comfortable in traditional kimono as in the latest Western fashions.”[21] For those who were still set against the Modern Girl’s rise they believed that Western materialism was the reasons behind the rise of these girls,
“They lost sight of their true essence as a classless community living in harmony under a benevolent emperor. By the 1920s, this argument went, the nation was marked by crass profit-seeking and hedonism, emblematized in “modern girls” and American movies, in fast living (supiido) and eroticism. Remarkably enough, given the commercialism and ribald character of so much of Tokugawa popular culture, these trends were usually described simply as Western cultural invasions, in particular the poisonous output of the United States. American democracy was condemned as a sleight of hand that satisfied the ignorant masses with trivial goods.”[22]
They would be split on the topic for the years to come as Japan began to user in the Showa Era after the fall of the Tashio Era. The Modern Girl would only last until the imperialistic effort of Japan took place and Western cultures were no longer the poison that many had thought it once was.
            What the modern girl signified in Japan was the end of an era of women, the patriarchal era in which the rest of the world had been a part of. Like the children of the Meiji Era were a part of change for those of the Edo period. Everything changes and with these changes bring new challenges. As each generation took hold they brought new challenges for their parents who lived in the previous generation. The Modern Girls grew up and became mothers, many would have children that would grow up in the next era of change. Those who grew up in the Post-War Japan would become a different kind of Modern Girls, the baby boomers, who would give birth to the hippie generation and so on. Each generation would continue to bring their parents their own share of grief. Dunn’s article “From sexual Liberation to liberation from sex” addresses the social changes and how parents become their own parents, “Young people are forever shocking their elders, and elders, however shocking they themselves may have been to their own elders once upon a time, never fail to play their generation’s perennial role of shocked onlookers to shocking youthful behavior of one sort or another.”[23]
Figure 5: 21st Century Vintage Japanese Street Fashion in Harajuku
Throughout the article he points out that Japanese parents are shocked over their children’s over promiscuous, or lack thereof, behaviors although they themselves had acted in a similar fashion when they were growing up. The article points out how the children of the twenty-first century are indifferent to sex, “the dominant response to the subject among Japanese teens, it seems, is the verbal yawn, “Mendokusai,” roughly translatable as “What a nuisance.”[24] Andrew Gordon brings this up in his book but also states that, “In the early twenty-first century, young people obsessed with cell phones, sending text messages, and pictures rather than listening to their teachers, flaunting their sexuality as well as outlandish fashions and hairstyles, were everywhere to be found. But youths – such as the “modern girls” and “modern boys” of the 1920s – who acted differently from their parents (and upset them in the bargain) have been present throughout Japan’s modern history as they have been around the world.”[25] This generation is growing up to be as different as their parents but they are also the new generation of Modern children.
            What the Modern Girl of the 1920’s and 1930’s brought to Japan was in part social change, they took out the old systems in which girls were to act in a precise manner and brought forth a liberation of their own lives. Their changes echo those of all women in the early twentieth century that sought social change for their own rights. In Japan the repercussions of this change are felt though each generation that would come in the decades afterward. Novels, music, and movies would document these changes. The first Modern Girl would be ushered like the Jazz babies of the Western world, each generation would mirror a social change that was occurring throughout the world. All of the changes that occurred in women’s history began with the suffrage movement and although each country dealt with these changes in a different way for the girls of Japan these changes were partly connected to outside influences. Yet those influences would also create different views for each generation as they passed along. Today’s Modern Girls are their own creation and the next would only take the positives with them that were brought forth by the previous generation.
Bibliography
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-------------.“The Modern Girl as Militant.” In Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945,
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[1] “History of Japan – Taisho and Early Showa Period 1912-1945” available from http://www.japanvisitor.com/japanese-culture/history/taisho-japan-history.
[2] Toby Slade, Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History (New York, NY: Berg, 2009), 51.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Miriam Silverberg, After the Grand Tour: The Modern Girl, the New Woman, and the Colonial Maiden,” in The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, , edited by Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow(Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2008), 354.
[5] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), 157.
[6] Ibid, 139.
[7] Miriam Silverberg, After the Grand Tour: The Modern Girl, the New Woman, and the Colonial Maiden,” in The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, 355.
[8] Michael Hoffman, “The Taisho Era: When modernity ruled Japan’s masses” available from http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2012/07/29/general/the-taisho-era-when-modernity-ruled-japans-masses/#.WEL84jX-VOW
[9] Michael Hoffman, “The Taisho Era: When modernity ruled Japan’s masses” available from
[10] Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham and London; Duke University Press, 2003), 10.
[11] Ibid
[12] Michael Hoffman, “The Taisho Era: When modernity ruled Japan’s masses”.
[13] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 158.
[14] Ibid, 155.
[15] Junichiro Tanizaki, Naomi. (New York, NY; Vintage, 2001), 49-50.
[16] Ibid, 92.
[17] Ibid, 161.
[18] Andrew Lee, “Naomi” available from http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/12/14/books/book-reviews/naomi/#.WEM4BTX-VOU
[19] Ibid.
[20] Miriam Silverberg, “The Modern Girl as Militant”. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945. (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1991), 244.
[21] Michael Dunn, “Modern girls and outrage” available from http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2007/05/10/arts/modern-girls-and-outrage/#.WEM8HjX-VOU
[22] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 217.
[23] Michael Dunn, “From sexual liberation to liberation from sex,” available from http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/01/16/national/media-national/sexual-liberation-liberation-sex/#.WELo7jX-VOV
[24] Ibid
[25] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 314.

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