Imperial Designs: Fashion, Cosmetics, and Cultural Identity in Japan, 1931-1943
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© 2011 Rebecca Ann Nickerson IMPERIAL DESIGNS: FASHION, COSMETICS, AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN JAPAN, 1931-1943 BY REBECCA ANN NICKERSON DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in East Asian Languages & Cultures in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Ronald P. Toby, Chair Professor Nancy Abelmann Professor Antoinette M. Burton Assistant Professor Robert T. Tierney Abstract This dissertation analyzes how women and gender shaped Japanese imperial culture at home by examining fashion and cosmetics in the 1930s and 1940s. In contrast to conventional narratives of Japanese imperial history that posit Japan’s nation- and empire-building projects as separate entities, one extending out from the other, I place women and gender at the heart of my analysis in order to show how nation and empire were mutually constituted through a singular process of colonial modernity. I examine debates on the “national uniform” and ethnic costumes to demonstrate how women functioned as objects in the quest to define Japanese cultural identity, which I argue was shaped through both Japan’s semi-colonial relationship with the West and its imperial aspirations in Asia. At the same time, I introduce the figures of Miss Shiseido— an innovative marketing campaign by Japan’s leading maker of luxury cosmetics—and Tanaka Chiyo—Japan’s first fashion designer—to show how the materiality of fashion and cosmetics enabled individual women to act as subjects with the capacity to shape and transform their world through their consumption practices and the choices they made in assembling their appearance. By analyzing the ways in which critics struggled to respond to shifting ideals of femininity through discourses on women’s fashion and cosmetics, I show how women and gender were constitutive of Japanese imperialism and how they expose the incompleteness of Japan’s imperial regime. ii Acknowledgments This dissertation has been a collaborative project that has benefited from the support and generosity of many individuals. I owe my greatest gratitude to my advisor, Ronald P. Toby, who allowed me the freedom to take this project in new directions and offered the guidance and advice necessary to see it through to completion. The conversations I had with Antoinette Burton never failed to challenge and inspire me, and they have shaped this project in innumerable ways. I am also indebted to the other members of my committee, Nancy Abelmann and Robert Tierney, as well as to Karen Kelsky. During my research in Japan, I received valuable support from Yoshimi Shun’ya. My dissertation research was supported by generous funding from a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship. At the University of Illinois, I received funding from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. I owe special thanks to Deborah Richie and Mary Ellen Fryer for their tireless help in securing this funding. I am grateful the staff at the University of Tokyo Library, Ochanomizu Library, and the Shiseido Corporate Archives for their assistance in tracking down resources. Writing a dissertation is a long, arduous, and lonely endeavor, but I was fortunate to have a supportive network of friends and family who helped guide me through the process. I want to thank James Welker, Akiko Takeyama, Tze May Loo, Danielle Kinsey, Dunja Jelesijevic, Xiao Hui, Akira Shimizu, Maggie Camp, Natalie Havlin, and Donna Tonini Larkin for their intellectual support and valuable feedback along the way. I am especially grateful to Alison Goebel and Valerie Barske for their friendship and camaraderie over the years. In Japan, Kendall and Yuri Heitzman, Aiko Komatsu, and Norio Kimishima always provided me with a iii safe place to land. Finally, I owe special thanks to my parents for their generous support over the course of this very long journey, and to Ileana Speer for her patience, understanding, and good humor throughout the writing process. iv Table of Contents INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………..……1 CHAPTER 1: LIVING THE “DOUBLE LIFE:” GENDER, FASHION, AND IMPERIAL CULTURE AT HOME……………...……………………………………………………..……16 CHAPTER 2: FASHIONING DIFFERENCE: ETHNIC COSTUMES, CLOTHING REFORM, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF RESISTANCE………………..……………..….......62 CHAPTER 3: IMPERIAL MAKEOVER: MISS SHISEIDO AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN JAPANESE WOMAN, 1934-1937………………………………………..…….…..92 CHAPTER 4: DESIGNING WOMAN: TANAKA CHIYO, GENDER EQUALITY, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN JAPANESE FASHION…………………………….………....139 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………….………...176 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………180 v Introduction This dissertation analyzes how women and gender shaped Japanese imperial culture at home by examining fashion and cosmetics in the 1930s and 1940s. The title, Imperial Designs, refers to both Japan’s imperial ambitions and to the materiality of the fashions produced in prewar and wartime Japan. One of the primary assumptions at the core of this dissertation is that Japan’s nation- and empire-building projects were not separate entities, one extending out from the other, but rather they were mutually constituted through a singular process of colonial modernity. I look at discourses on fashion and cosmetics in order to bring into view the fundamental role that women and gender played in constituting Japan’s imperial project, functioning as they did as objects in debates concerning Japan’s cultural identity. Such debates reveal how Japan’s semicolonial relationship with the West and its imperial ambitions in Asia shaped Japanese cultural identity both “at home” and in the empire. At the same time, I utilize the materiality of clothing and cosmetics to show how women acted as subjects with the capacity to push back against these discourses and shape “Japanese” identity through their consumption practices and the choices they made in assembling their appearance each morning. Empire at Home Studies of empire, in Japan and elsewhere, have a tendency to operate within a binary of empire and metropole. In the context of British history, for example, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose have argued that this binary has “allowed for…a historical sensibility portraying Britain as an ‘island nation’ mostly untroubled by its imperial project.”1 Similarly, Andre Schmid has 1 Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, "Introduction: Being at home with the Empire," in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan culture and the imperial world, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 1 criticized modern Japanese historiography as “island history;” that is, he asserts that scholarship on modern Japan is too often characterized by “a top-down, metrocentric approach that renders colonial history tangential to the main narratives of the modern Japanese nation.”2 Following on these critiques, I take nation and empire to be intertwined in a singular project of colonial modernity, which Tani Barlow has defined, in the case of Japan, as “the formation of the Japanese nation-state through the colonization of Asia.”3 For Barlow, nation and empire were not “positively defined, elemental, or discrete units;” rather, they were intertwined in a “complex field of relationships.” In other words, nation does not precede empire; they are two sides of the same coin. In order to overcome the tendency to think of nation and empire as separate projects, Antoinette Burton has argued that it is necessary to “recast the nation as an imperialized space – a political territory which could not, and still cannot, escape the imprint of empire.”4 Louise Young’s work on Manchuria and “Japan’s total empire” has taken up this important issue of “empire building at home” in Japan and demonstrated that the Japanese nation did not exist as a discreet unit while the empire lingered somehow “out there;” rather, they were linked in a dialectical relationship, constantly shaping and being shaped in mutually constitutive ways.5 This dissertation contributes to this body of scholarship by analyzing how Japanese cultural 2 Andre Schmid, "Colonialism and the 'Korea Problem' in the Historiography of Modern Japan: a review article," Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (2000): 952. 3 Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 12. For more on nation and empire as “mutually constitutive projects,” see Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997). 4 Antoinette Burton, "Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating 'British' History," Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 3 (1997). 5 Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the culture of wartime imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14. 2 identity was shaped through both its semi-colonial relationship with the West – a condition that resulted, in part, from the “unequally treaties” Japan was forced to sign with the West in 18586 – and its imperial aspirations in Asia. The struggle to preserve Japan’s “unique” culture and traditions in the face of Westernization and modernization has been well documented.7 In the