A Blossoming Flower Stunted: the Enigma of the Modern Girl in Japan, Both Past and Present
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A Blossoming Flower Stunted: The Enigma of the Modern Girl in Japan, Both Past and Present Abstract The Japanese modern girl was one who challenged all the traditional values and customs women were expected to maintain in early twentieth century Japan. Like the American “flapper,” she discarded typical dress and attitudes and dared to live a less inhibited life. She rejected ryosai kenbo ideology of living life solely for the sake of marrying and having children, and instead sought out education and work. However, the Japanese modern girl wasn’t nearly as pervasive in reality as the American “flapper” was. One need only study Japanese advertisements in the early 1900s to see that images of the modern girl were indeed prolific, but statistics show just how small a number of women actually lived this sort of lifestyle despite encouragement by popular culture. Fast forward to present day Japan. Popular culture no longer consists primarily of magazines and advertisements, but rather anime (Japanese cartoons) and manga (Japanese comic books). While women are certainly less inhibited than they were in the past century, and while certainly more women are able to live the independent lifestyle the modern girl advocated, popular culture today still expresses confusion regarding just what roles women should fill. Japanese women still face confusion to this day when they are told they can be one thing by the media while the restraints of cultural expectations prevent them from being the ideal figure the media encourages them to be. Primarily through analysis of early-twentieth century advertisements and case studies of present-day anime and manga, this paper will explore the continuing confusion women face when pressured to live two conflicting lifestyles simultaneously. Analysis of secondary sources will provide contexts for both time periods and ascertain public response to the primary sources. My findings are consistent with my thesis – women in the early 1900s were pressured by popular culture to be the modern girl while society begged her to maintain tradition – a phenomenon today reflected in anime and manga. The effects of certain aspects of popular culture have long been debated. Some people see popular culture as such an involved phenomenon that it can literally recreate its audience in accordance with the themes and ideas it is propagating – for example, children become violent because of violent video games. Others say that popular culture is a manifestation of the ideals of a particular subgroup and thus a culture created by its people, i.e. repressively violent people creating violent media to release tension. Still others say that popular culture is the amalgamation of these two theories. I have long been interested in popular culture and its impact on audiences and vice versa. For this reason, much of my studies in history classes have been in regards to Japanese popular culture, especially in terms of how the audience is shaped by or shapes the media. I myself am a big fan of anime, Japanese animated films or television shows, and manga, Japanese graphic novels or comic books. Female characters in these art forms are treated much differently than female characters are treated in Western forms of art, and I became curious as to why. While researching the scholarship available on the portrayal of women in Japanese media, some common themes emerged amongst the discussion. In literature on the early twentieth century, scholarship is replete with discussions of the newly arrived Japanese modern girl – modan gyaru in Japanese and shortened to moga for simplicity – a woman who shed her restrictive traditional Japanese garb and instead donned short dresses and cut her long hair for more face-framing styles. She abandoned old notions of humility and submissiveness to her husband (or father, or brother, or whichever man was nearest) and instead set out to lead a more independent life. She was prominent in advertisements and magazine articles throughout the early and mid twentieth century. Scholarship on anime and manga focus on how audiences respond to and help create the media, the significance of anime and manga as unique art forms, and the redefining of roles so often represented as humans utilizing mechanical limbs as their own or girls transforming into superheroes with uncanny abilities. But no matter how progressive the art or how redefining their themes, the women somehow always seemed to be held back from true independence. That is the focus of this paper: questioning if the past representations and expectations of women still impact Japanese media to this day, maybe even subconsciously. The portrayal of the modern girl in Japanese advertisements and magazines pre-World War II attempted to liberate Japanese women from old ideologies1, but because men were primarily the only ones hired as workers, the majority of women were never able to truly escape their roles as wives and mothers. Only the rich and famous were able to live as modern girls, and because these women received the most attention, masses of women attempted to be like them and break from norms with no success. This phenomenon of the rare modern girl has an impact today on anime and manga, where one can see that animators and artists attempt to give women more freedom and independence, but there is still something that ties them to their roles as wives and mothers both in the media and in reality. Today, women do indeed have more freedom to live as modern girls, but they are given a confusing image as to what defines their gender role when even free, independent girls in anime and manga are often still worrying more about finding husbands and raising children than living life as they desire. What this paper will argue is that Japanese women face confusion to this day when they are told they can be one thing by the media while the restraints of cultural expectations prevent them from being the ideal figure the media encourages them to be. 1 Most notable of these ideologies is ryosai kenbo, according to which women were to stay at home, produce children, and follow every order their husbands dictated. Current Literature As alluded to above in providing a frame of reference for this topic, there is indeed a large amount of literature and scholarship available on the modern girl and on anime and manga in general, but not much discussing how past themes and events affect those themes and representations of the present. Furthermore, the terms “modern girl,” “anime,” and “manga” almost never even appear in the same work. In the realm of modern girl research, many scholars have made significant contributions. Alys Eve Weinbaum and her colleagues Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow all worked together to produce an exhaustive work titled The Modern Girl Around the World, which describes the modern girl phenomenon as portrayed in cultures all over the globe.2 As most works regarding the modern girl do, this book goes into great depth discussing the status of the modern girl in various societies, her perception of herself, and how the general public viewed her. One of the primary focuses of this work discusses how the modern girl is seen as a symbol of excessive consumption due to the fact that she is often associated with advertisements and decadent enjoyment (primarily through smoking, drinking, and other forms of pleasure), yet she is also a symbol of enlightenment and achievement because of her ability to break the social norm through efforts to become an independent woman. Barbara Sato is perhaps the most well-known for her work regarding the modern girl in early twentieth century Japan, particularly in her work The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan.3 Sato is considered the eminent scholar of the modern girl in Japan. In this work, Sato meticulously details all the changes a Japanese woman faced in identifying herself as “woman” during the twentieth century, notably theorizing that women’s changing identity was a primary way of catching attention in advertisements. She even briefly touches on the confusion everyday women faced when they could not become the ideal modern girl, but does not explore it further than saying that the modern girl was not in line with the contemporary ryosai kenbo ideology. Other eminent scholars include Kathleen Uno and Barbara Molony, who offer a kind of hybrid of these previous two theories in positing that “the mass media functioned as a conduit for commercial advertising interests that sought to redefine feminine identity based on the operatives of a model of consumption that promoted idealized images of independent and cosmopolitan 2 Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow, eds, The Modern Girl Around the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 3 Barbara Hamill Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women In Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). women.”4 In other words, the mass media portrayed women in such a way as to redefine female identity in terms of consumerism. Many other scholars have also pursued similar topics, editing in their own nuances but mostly sticking to the same time periods and arguing the same ideas regarding the modern girl, which is why their research has also proved useful in understanding this phenomenon. However, none of the works studied analyze the recurring themes of confusion between media and reality in the past and today, thus providing a niche for original research. Many arguments also posited regard the modern girl as a feminist symbol. If one was interested in studying the modern girl of the early twentieth century in the light of feminism, a very good source is Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminine Consciousness in Modern Japan by Sharon Sievers.5 While discussion of the modern girl’s relation to feminism and liberation is important, it is critical to note that this paper does not make a feminist argument about whether the continued confusion between media and reality is a good thing or a bad thing.