Santa Clara University Scholar Commons History College of Arts & Sciences 12-2007 Gender, Citizenship, and Dress in Modernizing Japan Barbara Molony Santa Clara University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/history Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the History Commons Recommended Citation Molony, B. (2007). Gender, Citizenship, and Dress in Modernizing Japan. In M. Roces & L. Edwards (Eds), The oP litics of Dress in Asia and the Americas. London, UK: Sussex Academic Press. Copyright © 2007 Sussex Academic Press. Reprinted with permission. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts & Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in History by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. APTER 5 GENDER, CITIZENSHIP AND DRESS IN MODERNIZING JAPAN BARBARA MOLONY Between the 1870s and 1945, dress was one of the signifiers ofJapan's transi tion from being objectified as an "Oriental" country subordinate to the West to playing a dominant role as the bearer of "universal" (Western) modernity to East Asia. 1 In the late nineteenth century, Western dress indicated a yearning for international respect for Japan's modernity; by the early twentieth century, when Japan had largely achieved diplomatic equality with the West and colo nial dominion over parts of Asia, Western dress had come to be taken for granted by "modern" Japanese men. In some cases, colonial subjects could be distinguished by their "traditional" clothing and bodily adornment, although this "traditional" dress was likely to be part of an invented tradition encour aged py Japanese anthropologists to distinguish quaint and backward natives from modern colonists.