9
Although the Taishō period formally lasted from 1912 to 1926, some historians identify 1900 to 1930 as the “Greater Taishō” era, a time of cosmopolitanism and optimism, marked by increased participation in politics and society, empowered through compulsory education and mass literacy. Furthermore, this era witnessed the rapid growth of mass consumerism, the development of sophisticated mass media, and the flowering of new forms of mass culture, primarily in urban areas. Many of these changes were associated with the term modanizumu (modernism), visible in striking shifts in urban lifestyles and dramatic new movements in the arts and popular culture. Tokyo was the undisputed center of Japanese modernism, Japan’s first modern metropolis. It contained the majority of the nation’s government facilities and a high concentration of its cultural institutions.
Mass literacy allowed urban and rural consumers alike to encounter images and descriptions of fashionable trends and new ways of thinking, stimulating desires for both material goods and alternative lifestyles. Two terms are often employed to describe these emerging tastes: bunka seikatsu (the cultured life), associated with material aspirations of middle-class consumers, especially in terms of household architecture and décor that promoted hygiene and convenience; and ero guro nansensu (erotic-grotesque nonsense), associated with literature, art, and amusements that were decadent, deviant, bizarre, or absurd. The eroticism, playfulness, and taste for novelty prevalent in Edo urban culture—but less visible in the serious-minded Meiji period—thus resurfaced in the 1920s and ’30s as urban commoners once again indulged proclivities for the sexy, comical, and twisted in novels, theater, and art. Many conservatives were appalled by these trends and sought a “return” to native Japanese values and norms. As the nation achieved parity with Western powers, some began to reject Western modernity as a role model and advanced the idea that Japan would lead the world in a synthesis between East and West, an attitude sometimes known as Japanism.
As these developments occurred domestically, Japan was emerging abroad as a major military and economic power, in possession of several of its own colonies, a topic that will be explored in chapter 10.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
Emperor Meiji died on July 30, 1912. His life had symbolized the changes of his period so perfectly that at his death there was a clear sense that an era had come to an end. The reign of Emperor Taishō (“great righteousness”) began in 1912 and ended in 1926. Because of Taishō’s poor mental and physical health, his son, Crown Prince Hirohito (1901–89), took over official duties as prince regent in 1921. Hirohito reigned as Emperor Shōwa from 1926 until his death at age eighty-seven, witnessing Japan’s rise and fall as a great power, along with its postwar resurrection.
Political accomplishments of the era include the advent of powerful political parties, the emergence of labor and women’s movements, and the proliferation of democratic political ideologies. When Japan went to the polls for the first time in July 1890 to elect three hundred members to the House of Representatives in the Imperial Diet, the bicameral legislative body established in the Meiji constitution, popular political parties captured a majority of 171 seats. These new Diet members denounced the “clique” government of the Meiji oligarchs, but their only real weapon was their right to deliberate on the state’s annual budget. Nevertheless, over the course of thirty years, political parties patiently wrestled the reins of state from the hands of the oligarchs, inaugurating an era of party government, under which the heads of major political parties routinely served as prime ministers and named their own cabinets. As political party members continued to be the majority elected to the lower house, the old generation of leaders had to rethink their negative attitudes toward party government. In 1896, Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi named Itagaki Taisuke, former leader of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement, to be his home minister. Two years later, Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), president of the Kenseitō political party, became prime minister, the first leader of a political party to serve in that office.
Itō even formed his own political party, a pro-government, national unity party that merged with the Kenseitō in 1900, forming the Seiyūkai party, which held an absolute majority in the Diet from 1908 to 1915. In 1918, Seiyūkai leader Hara Takashi (1856–1921), “the great commoner,” became the first elected member of the Diet to become prime minister. Hara won voters for the party through classic pork-barrel politics, promising schools, roads, and railroads to districts electing Seiyūkai candidates. The party was also criticized for stuffing ballot boxes and falsifying election returns. Katsura Tarō (1848–1913), a protégé of Yamagata Aritomo (another member of the ruling Sat-Chō clique), organized a counterattack against the Seiyūkai by forming his own party in 1913, called the Rikken Dōshikai. Katsura’s party was joined by several minority parties frustrated by Seiyūkai success, forming the Kenseikai party in 1916.
One major catalyst for the shift to party-dominated cabinets was the outbreak of rice riots throughout the country in 1918. Between 1914 and 1918, inflation related to World War I severely drove up the prices of consumer goods, with rice prices leaping by 60 percent in 1918. Irate consumers took action. The unrest began in July in a small fishing village, where a group of women mounted a protest against the cost of local rice, then spread like wildfire to Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, and other industrial centers in western Japan. Angry citizens forced rice dealers to sell their stock at discounted prices and clashed with the police and army in street battles throughout the summer. Collectively, the riots constituted the largest mass demonstration in modern Japanese history, as a million or more people took to the streets. The state mobilized a hundred thousand troops to suppress riots in over a hundred locations. Protesters were arrested en masse, and more than five thousand were given stiff sentences for relatively minor offenses. Nevertheless, officials were afraid of further popular unrest and granted many of the rioters’ demands, increasing imports of cheap rice from Japan’s colonies in Korea and Taiwan (see chapter 10), enacting laws to reduce the possibility of inflationary price bubbles, and accepting the appointment of Hara Takashi (1856–1921) to the post of prime minister. Handing the reins of state to the president of a political party, alongside the emergence of two strong mainstream parties, marked the advent of democratic, party-based government.
Factory laborers remained a small proportion of Japan’s total work force during the early Meiji era; nearly two-thirds of all employed persons still worked in agriculture. In the 1870s, there were only a few thousand factory workers, primarily working in textile mills. This number rose dramatically, however, reaching more than four hundred thousand in the 1890s, although men still constituted less than half of factory workers and were usually engaged in skilled industries such as metalworking, shipbuilding, machine tools, munitions, and chemicals. As skilled workers they received much higher wages and enjoyed a higher social status than female textile workers. During World War I, there was a dramatic increase in heavy industry; market opportunities resulted as allied countries placed orders in Japan, and the economy expanded on all fronts, but particularly in iron and steel, shipbuilding, and heavy machinery. From 1914 to 1918, the number of factory workers in Japan increased by 63 percent; the majority of these were male career workers in heavy industry.
Propelled by the World War I boom, Japan passed several major economic milestones in the 1920s. Manufacturing’s proportion of the gross domestic product surpassed that of the agricultural sector. Japan’s manufacturing sector was characterized by a dual structure: the top tier consisted of profitable heavy industries, conglomerates (zaibatsu), and other large textile, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical firms; the bottom half contained small- and medium-scale workshops that made consumer goods, and small subcontractors that supplied parts to top-tier firms. In the 1930s, at least 70 percent of retail shops were small, family businesses that usually produced and/or sold a single product such as tofu or tatami mats. Life was hard for the owners and workers of the modest enterprises in the lower tier. Wage cuts, layoffs, and bankruptcies were common when the economy hit a periodic downturn.
Following World War I, however, the Western nations once again competed with Japan for trade in Asia, resulting in an economic recession. Inflation rose faster than wages, and factory workers became increasingly involved in labor-union movements, engaging in strikes and confrontations with management and calling for higher wages and improved work environments. Many blue-collar workers also resented the perks that were given to management employees, such as company housing, profit sharing, and health benefits. They further resented society’s view that urban laborers were social undesirables. In a letter to a newspaper in 1913, one worker complained about the lack of respect uniformed laborers received from mainstream society, explaining that many factory workers left home in disguise, dressed as businessmen or students to commute to the plant, in order to avoid the contempt of the public. The writer claimed that if workers wore their uniforms in public, “people would be astonished not only by our numbers but also by our good behavior.”1
Management employees were part of the city’s new middle class—in contrast with the older middle class, which consisted of merchant or artisan business owners. Most earned their positions on the basis of educational qualifications earned at public and private universities established during Meiji. Male white-collar workers, known as sarariman (salarymen), numbered about 1.5 million in 1920. They enjoyed status and standards of living that set them apart from their blue-collar colleagues. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, popular “how-to” books advised how one could enter the desirable ranks of the middle-class sarariman. They described how to behave in the large new corporate environments, focusing less on intellectual competence and more on the ability to conform. Qualities for success included being temperate, orderly, and harmonious. One shouldn’t be peculiar or radical. Such advice marked a return to emphasizing obedience and conformity—a moving away from early-Meiji exhortations to be individualistic and self-reliant. The emerging middle class also included government officials, doctors, teachers, policemen, military officers, and bankers in large cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. During and after World War I, women also gained new opportunities to work in white-collar professions as nurses, teachers, salesclerks, switchboard operators, bus conductors, office clerks, and receptionists. Status for most middle-class women, however, was still best attained through making a good marriage match.
A 1924 version of the board game Sugoroku visually depicted the routes to success (or failure) in life by gender. The goal at the center of the board is a beautiful nude dancer, reached on the right-hand, male side through success in business or politics. On the female side, one can attain the goal only through marriage to a successful man—and it’s unclear how reaching the dancer constitutes a reward for women.
Labor movements were supported by the wide emergence of liberal thought and radicalism among intellectuals, including currents such as democratism, socialism, and anarchism. Many intellectuals had lost faith in the capitalist system, which exploited the underprivileged. Several powerful professors on the faculty of law at Tokyo Imperial University popularized liberal and democratic ideas. These academics were highly influential: their students manned the most important state agencies, and they were often consulted by officials or asked to serve on government commissions. Many identified with the Left, believing strongly in freedom of expression and equality of the sexes, alongside greater popular participation in politics. Professor Yoshino Sakuzō (1878–1933) promoted the idea of democracy based on the people (minponshugi), campaigning for universal male suffrage. Under the Meiji constitution, only male property holders over age twenty-five who paid at a certain tax threshold were eligible to vote. In 1890, this comprised just 1 percent of the populace. Extension of the vote to all male citizens over age twenty-five was achieved in 1925. Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948), a scholar of constitutional law, popularized an “organ theory of government” that bolstered political parties’ authority. Minobe argued that the state was a legal person composed of separate institutions, or organs, such as emperor, cabinet, Diet, and bureaucracy. Each organ had to function properly to keep the national body healthy. Each organ was separate, however, and the Diet, which expressed the highest will of the people, did not depend on the emperor for its power.
FIGURE 46. Takabatake Kashō, Greater Success Amidst Life’s Ups and Downs Sugoroku, 1924. Insert in Kōdan kurabu magazine.
Marxist philosophy attracted many intellectuals, professors, and students because it provided a systematic methodology for analyzing how all nations might undergo the transition from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism. Marxism held out an integrated view of the problems in society, offering an attractive alternative to what many saw as corrupt capitalism and repressive government. Socialists and communists both drew from Marxist ideas. A short-lived Socialist Party was first formed in 1901, espousing pacifism, reduction of armaments, and universal suffrage. A more robust version, focused more squarely on economic issues and working-class concerns, was established in 1926 and won four Diet seats in the 1928 elections. Its platform condemned the capitalist system and called for nationalization of basic industries, the redistribution of land to tenant families, welfare legislation, and women’s suffrage. The Japanese Communist Party was founded in secret in July 1922 by a small group of journalists and political activists. Outlawed by the state and hampered by factional disputes, it largely acted as an underground party engaged in propagandistic and educational activities until after World War II, when it became a legal political party.
The most radical political actors were the anarcho-syndicalists, who believed in instigating “direct action” to topple the state. Journalists Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) and his partner Kanno Suga (1881–1911) were leaders of a movement that believed in replacing the government, by allotting all political power to the people, and in abolishing the private ownership of land and capital. In 1905, Kōtoku visited American anarchists in San Francisco and returned to Japan convinced that only direct action—a massive general strike by workers—would overthrow the state and put economic and political power in the hands of the working class. Kanno began living with Kōtoku in 1909. They were arrested, along with many other political dissidents, following the 1910 High Treason Incident, a bungled plot to assassinate Emperor Meiji with a bomb. Twenty-four anarchists were sentenced to death; twelve, including Kōtoku and Kanno, were actually executed. The incident led to increased repression of ideological movements thought to be subversive. Another influential anarchist, Ōsugi Sakae, had been in prison during the incident and was spared the noose. The police later arrested Ōsugi and his lover Itō Noe, editor of the feminist journal Seitō, in the chaotic aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. The couple, along with Ōsugi’s six-year-old nephew, were beaten to death and their bodies were thrown into wells. Ōsugi famously advocated free love, engaging in multiple affairs with women. His relationship with Itō drove another jealous lover, the writer Kamichika Ichiko, to stab the anarchist in 1916, leading to a public scandal that inspired the 1969 film Eros Plus Massacre.
The earthquake occurred in Tokyo on September 1, 1923, killing over 120,000 and leaving over two million homeless. The massive destruction made large swaths of Tokyo available for reconstruction. Old wooden buildings were replaced with impersonal concrete structures. Major new avenues were cut through the rubble of small streets. Moats dating from Edo, which had provided city transport and evening entertainment, were paved over to support more roads, railways, and subways. Displaced middle-class families moved to Tokyo’s suburbs in increasing numbers. Pre-earthquake Tokyo still contained green expanses from the gardens of former daimyo estates, but redevelopment radically reduced the city’s green space; it would disappear almost entirely following the city’s destruction by firebombing in 1945.
Film director Kurosawa Akira devotes a portion of his memoirs to the earthquake, which had a profound effect on him as a young boy. Kurosawa had started the day at Japan’s largest foreign bookstore, Maruzen. A few hours later the store would be in ruins. He remembers how he heard a rumbling sound from the earth and saw the wall of a nearby storehouse crumble: “Then before our eyes, the two storehouses belonging to the pawnshop started shedding their skins. They shuddered and shook off their roof tiles and then let go of their thick walls. In an instant they were skeletons of wooden frame.”2 Kurosawa recounts how fires erupted everywhere and darkness swallowed the city, creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, because electricity was completely cut off. A tragic consequence of the earthquake was the massacre of Korean residents by gangs of vigilantes who claimed that the Koreans were poisoning water wells. Kurosawa recalls being told to avoid drinking from a well with strange notations written in white chalk, supposedly Korean code to indicate it had been poisoned. Because he had scribbled the lines himself, he realized that the rationale for lynching Koreans was dubious. Kurosawa’s elder brother dragged him to see the aftermath of the fires in order to conquer the fear of death. Mountains of ghastly corpses, charred black, were piled up on bridges and in gutters while others floated in rivers of brownish red.
THE NEW METROPOLIS
With the end of sankin kōtai and the loss of samurai stipends that supported many Edo-era merchants and artisans, the population of Tokyo dropped steeply in the early Meiji period, falling below six hundred thousand by 1873. Nevertheless, as Tokyo was reestablished as the national center of industry, commerce, entertainment, and consumption, its population swelled once again, reaching 1.4 million by 1898 and over two million by 1908. Like early seventeenth-century Edo, Tokyo and other Japanese cities witnessed an accelerated process of urbanization in the 1890s as people from rural areas increasingly moved to the city to work in the new factories, shipyards, and other industries fostered by state industrial policies. Cities that acted as centers of foreign trade and were connected by the national transport system, including Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, and Yokohama, grew fastest. From the 1890s to the 1920s, new patterns of urban life that supported the growing populations emerged, including advanced transportation, mass-consumer-oriented businesses, and modern forms of popular recreation. New city dwellers who had moved from the countryside were no longer able to lead the self-sufficient lifestyles of farmers; they needed to purchase food, clothing, and daily goods. They also needed affordable distractions to provide relief from the rigors and boredom of factory and office labor. Mass culture and mass consumption advanced with the prosperity of the war years and accelerated after the 1923 earthquake opened large areas of Tokyo for redevelopment.
Japanese modernism, like varieties of modernism emerging in other leading nations, was characterized by “new technologies of speed, sound, and light—the motorcar, airplane, telephone, radio, rotary press, and moving pictures.”3 These technologies enabled the mass marketing of products and services to urban consumers. Modernist tastes, however, did not fully replace traditional preferences; most urban residents freely consumed both trendy fashions and older styles of apparel, traditional foods and new imports, time-honored amusements and the talkies.
Modern businesses and institutions clustered in different areas of the city. Ginza reinforced its early-Meiji reputation as a retailing and banking center. Its streets were lined with department stores, fashionable boutiques, and cafés. The popular practice of window-shopping there even generated its own word—ginbura, or strolling leisurely in Ginza. Other emerging centers of entertainment and consumption included Shinjuku and Shibuya. Asakusa, the center of popular amusements during the Edo period, retained this niche by updating its offerings with cinema, burlesque, and other attractions. The Kasumigaseki section of Tokyo acted as the center of government, with brick structures housing the Supreme Court, the metropolitan police department, and most national ministries. Leading corporations and big businesses began to cluster their headquarters in Marunouchi during the 1920s.
As private green spaces disappeared, parks were set aside for public use for the first time. In 1873, Ueno Park in northeast Tokyo—site of a Buddhist temple where Tokugawa defenders made their last stand—became the first public park. Facilities constructed in Ueno Park included a zoo and several art and science museums, all on scenically beautiful grounds where the public could enjoy recreation and relaxation. Hibiya Park, near Ginza, formerly the site of a military parade ground, opened in 1903 as Tokyo’s first “Western-style” park. There, visitors could admire some of the oldest trees in the city and glimpse a portion of the moat from the old Edo Castle. Rather than traditional gardens, Hibiya featured large expanses of lawn and seasonal flower beds. Many came to sample the novel facilities, such as an area dedicated to the new bicycling craze, a monumental fountain with a huge water-spewing crane, a modern bandstand where orchestras performed on Sundays and holidays, and a restaurant serving Western-style foods. Professional baseball parks began to appear in cities in the 1920s, when Japan’s first professional teams were formed, accompanied by other types of public facilities for spectating or engaging in sports.
FIGURE 47. Photograph of a subway entrance in Tokyo, 1929. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
All of the new workplaces, shopping areas, and entertainment quarters were tied together via growing networks of streetcars, railroad lines, and subways. Horse-drawn streetcars were commonly used in early Meiji but were phased out with the introduction of electrified streetcars in 1903. Private railroad companies, serving outlying and suburban areas, constructed many intra-Tokyo rail lines. These companies also constructed houses in residential suburbs, allowing occupants to live in more spacious and fashionable housing while commuting farther to employment and shopping in the metropolis. Private rail lines terminated at convenient stops along the Yamanote line encircling central Tokyo. At the terminal station, the private rail companies—such as Tokyu and Seibu in Tokyo, and Hankyu and Hanshin in Osaka—opened large department stores, allowing commuters to pick up food or sundries before returning home. The first subway, billed as “the first underground railway in the Orient,” was built in 1927 between Asakusa and Ueno, a distance of just over a mile. New segments were added almost annually until, by 1940, the lines stretched from east to west across the entire city, from Asakusa to Shibuya, allowing Tokyoites to travel speedily by avoiding street traffic.
Desirable urban housing was scarce for the aspirational middle class. Local and national authorities constructed modern public utilities for city dwellers, such as improved water supplies, sewer facilities, gas, and electricity, but many older houses still lacked indoor toilets or bathing facilities. The working class continued to live in cramped, tenement row houses without kitchens, toilets, or baths, relying on cheap food stalls and public bathhouses for everyday needs. After World War I, newly constructed suburban housing offered the ideal of “cultured lifestyles” (bunka seikatsu) centered on the family, with private bedrooms for couples, floored kitchens, and bathrooms. These bourgeois domestic spaces were hybrids of Western and traditional styles that allowed families to blend fashion, habit, and convenience. Parlors for entertaining guests were typically furnished with Western-style chairs, sofas, and tables, often constructed of lightweight bamboo or rattan so that they might be placed on rugs without damaging tatami mats underneath. Parlors were decorated with framed paintings and chandeliers and usually included a phonograph and radio. Other areas of the home retained Japanese features. Most occupants continued to sleep on portable futon mattresses on tatami, putting their bedding away during the day. Entrance halls (genkan), where shoes were removed, remained ubiquitous. For dining, individual trays were exchanged for round, short-legged tables (chabudai). Family members sat around the tables on floor cushions (zabuton) rather than on chairs.
Department stores were the urban temples to mass consumption. In the early Meiji period, large stores followed the Edo tradition of specializing in dry goods but gradually increased the variety of their offerings. Edo’s Echigoya, renamed Mitsukoshi, capitalized on the desire for Western-style fashions, bringing in a French designer to develop a new apparel department and stocking foreign-made goods. In the early 1900s, Mitsukoshi pioneered innovative advertising, with life-size poster displays of new fashions at railway stations. They also offered a catalog sales department and home delivery services. In 1904, Shirokiya (forerunner of today’s Tokyu chain) began to carry jewelry, luggage, and food and to offer other services, including a photography studio. Their newspaper advertisements emphasized the convenience of one-stop shopping for an enormous variety of merchandise. In 1911, Shirokiya erected a four-story building featuring Japan’s first elevator. Three years later, Mitsukoshi countered with its new flagship, a five-story, Renaissance-style structure—reportedly the largest building east of Suez—that featured central heating, Japan’s first escalator, banks of elevators, and row after row of glass display cases. Salesclerks were all identically attired young women, originally in kimonos but, after World War I, increasingly in Western-style women’s suits, complete with hats and gloves.
FIGURE 48. Painting depicting interior décor of a “culture home”: Wada Seika, Mrs. T, 1932, Honolulu Museum of Art. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
At these vast emporiums, consumers could learn about, examine, and purchase the latest domestic and imported products and fashions, advertised in rapidly expanding varieties of print media. Clothing and accessories occupied significant floor space, accompanied by cosmetics, fountain pens, tableware, furnishings, and small electrical goods such as fans, heaters, and sewing machines. Other floors housed groceries, prepared foods, and gift-oriented foods, from fancy imported chocolates and caramels to exquisite, seasonally themed tea sweets from famous traditional makers. The stores purveyed culture as well as merchandise, featuring art and exhibition galleries and multiple restaurants, usually occupying the top floors. Even the rooftops offered entertainment, with game rooms, amusement parks, and small zoos for children. In short, a major department store held something of interest for everyone, and a Sunday outing to the store was an eagerly anticipated event for all members of the family. Before the 1923 earthquake, customers were usually required to exchange their street shoes for store slippers at the entrance, but afterward, marble and wood were used to replace tatami flooring, allowing consumers to enter and leave quickly.
FIGURE 49. Shiro Kazama, Advertising poster for Isetan department store in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, 1936. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The most sought-after goods were not necessarily new fashions or confectionaries from Paris or America. Traditional goods and foods also evolved with new methods of production and advertising. The Dentsu advertising agency, founded in 1907, was a pioneer in designing colorful, graphic images for labels, ads, and posters for new and older products alike. Brand-name varieties of sake, miso, rice crackers, pickles, and other traditional foods gained popularity. Kimono styles changed rapidly, and the development of inexpensive silks (meisen) and silk cottons allowed women to purchase larger numbers of kimonos for different seasons and moods. They could be accessorized by a dizzying array of shawls, handbags, and removable collars, some made with fur or embellished with gold or precious stones.
Despite the iconic status of department stores, consumers generally preferred to buy daily provisions in their neighborhoods. Most urban neighborhoods then, as today, had their own purveyors of vegetables, tofu, tea, rice, fish, and other daily foods. Most also contained drugstores that stocked both traditional herbal remedies and modern pharmaceuticals; office supply shops that carried ink, brushes, and handmade paper alongside fountain pens and utilitarian notebooks; hardware stores; and ceramics sellers. For most people, everyday consumer life was a seamless fusion of traditional and modern elements. Furthermore, while modern tastes were often influenced by Western fashions, products were often significantly adapted to suit Japanese preferences and needs.
Food choices continued to broaden during this era. Foreign foods introduced during Meiji now reached larger audiences, often modified to accommodate local ingredients and tastes. The meatier, oilier fare of Western and Chinese cuisine was believed to provide higher levels of nutrition, along with a chance for culinary adventure; foreign dishes were consumed in greater quantities both at home and in restaurants. Chinese noodles, different in taste and texture from traditional udon and buckwheat soba, first gained popularity in Nagasaki as champon (slang for “mix”), a cheap and savory combination of leftover meats, soup, and noodles. Following the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), over a hundred thousand Chinese entered Japan as students or workers, clustering in Yokohama, Kobe, Sapporo, and parts of Tokyo, which resulted in a proliferation of cheap eateries serving Chinese foods. Some began to adapt their fare to Japanese tastes, introducing dishes such as ramen, which used Chinese noodles cooked in a Japanese manner. Housewives began to incorporate popular Chinese and Western recipes into their repertoires to increase the variety of home-cooked meals. Instructions for preparation, written in easy-to-follow language for beginning cooks, were readily available in women’s magazines and cookbooks, which underwent a publishing boom in the early twentieth century. Many urbanites also swapped traditional breakfasts of rice and tea for the simpler-to-prepare bread and coffee.
By 1923, there were around five thousand Western-style restaurants in Tokyo. Department stores dedicated one or two floors to these eateries, providing an array of culinary styles. Chinese and Western restaurants were often more convenient and comfortable than Japanese establishments, where one generally had to remove one’s shoes and sit on the floor. Furthermore, most women felt uncomfortable entering male-dominated traditional eateries, so department stores offered welcome options for females who wished to dine out. At high-end Western-style restaurants, customers sat on wooden chairs at tables with white tablecloths and dined on beefsteak and imported wine. More affordable eateries adapted Western dishes to suit Japanese tastes, usually serving entrées with white rice. The most popular dishes were breaded pork cutlets (tonkatsu), rice with curry sauce, and deep-fried potato and meat croquettes (korokke). One popular hybrid dish, omelet rice (omuraisu), consisting of an egg omelet stuffed with fried rice and topped with ketchup, was invented in 1902 at a restaurant called Rengatei in Ginza and is still operating today. All of the dishes used relatively small amounts of meat and were thus affordable for many.
Tokyo’s large population of working-class consumers also frequented new establishments offering cheap, quick, Japanese-style dishes. Yoshinoya, a purveyor of stewed, soy-sauce-flavored beef over rice (gyūdon), became the world’s first fast-food franchise, opening at the Nihonbashi fish market in 1899 and spreading quickly through Tokyo and other cities (the first such franchises in America were A&W in 1916, followed by White Castle in 1921). Sushi grew in popularity, and shops instituted home delivery by bicycle. Terry’s Japanese Empire, a 1914 English travel guide, was perhaps the first to describe the dish for non-Japanese audiences, identifying “small silvery trout seasoned with vinegar, cooked with rice, and called sushi.” It noted that sushi, “though unsavory and unpalatable to foreigners, is much liked by the Japanese.”4
Another type of influential new eating and drinking space in urban society was the café, which appeared in Tokyo in the early 1910s. Cafés were fashionable hangouts for artists, intellectuals, and chic young people, who gathered to engage in free-wheeling conversations while imbibing coffee, black tea, cocktails, or newly invented soft drinks like Ramune, a carbonated lemonade. Cafés symbolized the modern liberated spirit but simultaneously had a reputation for decadence. Popular authors frequently used them as settings for their stories.
CHANGING GENDER NORMS
Waitresses were the heart of café life, their “flower and spirit.” Different areas of Tokyo were known for the distinctive styles of their waitresses: in Ginza they were refined, elegant, and often dressed in kimonos; in Shinjuku they wore Western fashions and were more boldly flirtatious and better educated than their Ginza counterparts. Waitresses did not earn wages and worked solely for tips. They had to repay café owners for meals and buy their own kimonos or uniforms.
After the 1923 earthquake, larger, more elaborate cafés sprang up throughout urban entertainment districts. While older cafés were modeled on small European bistros and salons, the new establishments were multistory buildings with colorful neon signage and luxurious furnishings. They played jazz and served a larger clientele of male white-collar workers attracted by the prospect of engaging in fashionable modern life and mingling with young female waitresses in a relatively cheap and direct manner, in contrast with the expensive and time-consuming rituals of teahouses and geisha. Prostitution was not technically part of the waitress’s job, but like Edo-period geisha and bathhouse attendants, many provided erotic services to clients in order to earn extra income. In the 1920s and ’30s, such services became more apparent as café owners urged waitresses to attract clientele by offering amenities like “subway service,” allowing the customer to slip his hand through a slit in the waitress’s skirt, or “organ service,” in which a waitress lay across the laps of a few customers and they played her body like a keyboard.
Beginning in 1929, ordinances in various cities attempted to restrict the location of the increasingly immoral cafés, but that didn’t stop their proliferation; the number of cafés and bars in Japan grew rapidly in the late 1920s and early ’30s, reaching a peak of over thirty-seven thousand in 1934. They ranged from small, cheap backstreet establishments to the ornate extravaganzas of Ginza. Even the poorest young male student could enjoy a night in a café that suited his budget. The popularity of cafés offering erotic adventure represents another parallel with Edo-period tastes, replicating the pleasure quarters for modern audiences. Café waitresses, along with other new female urban occupations such as dance-hall girls, modern actresses, and cabaret performers, faced social disapproval. Their labor did not correspond to either traditional work for women, in the home, the farm, the family business, or the brothel; or to modern work considered suitable and respectable, at the factory, the hospital, the office, the department store, or the school.
Author Tanizaki Jun’ichirō commented on the “sordid, craven” nature of cafés that “appear to be places for eating and drinking, whereas in reality eating and drinking are secondary to having a good time with women.”5 His first important novel, Naomi (1924–25), relates the story of a fifteen-year-old café waitress who becomes an object of obsession for Jōji, a wealthy young engineer. In an echo of Genji’s adoption of Murasaki in The Tale of Genji, Jōji decides he will raise Naomi to become his perfect mate, a glamorous, westernized woman. He funds English, music, and dancing lessons and excursions to the movies and theater. The manipulative Naomi eventually gains complete control over Jōji, forcing him to make more extravagant purchases and to endure her relationships with other men. Naomi is often identified as the quintessential example of a moga (modern girl), characterized by the mass media as selfishly obsessed with the latest fashions and sexually promiscuous.
Moga were identifiable through their shockingly short skirts that revealed bare legs and short, bobbed hairstyles. Their counterpart was the modern boy, or mobo, who favored a slicked-back hairstyle and horn-rimmed spectacles called “roido” glasses because they were popularized by silent-film star Harold Lloyd. Moga and mobo frequented the beer halls, cabarets, and jazz clubs in entertainment enclaves like Ginza, Shinjuku, and Asakusa. They knew all the latest movies, dance steps, and fashions, spending hours window-shopping at Ginza’s famed department stores.
During the 1920s, only a very small percentage of Japanese women actually wore Western dress on the streets, but the new presence of the moga in urban society was magnified by the mass media. Her face and figure dominated advertising posters for products such as beer and perfume. Newspapers and magazines published racy stories, real and imagined, about the adventures and affairs of moga. The short, waved bob hairstyle of the moga was thought to signal eroticism, but many women who cut their hair were not advertising their wantonness. Rather, they opted for an easy-care style that suited their busy lives, liberating them from time-consuming traditional coiffures.
The moga challenged official gender ideology, which urged women to become “good wives and wise mothers,” and served as a symbol of women’s increasing agency. By playing freely in the streets and openly flaunting sexuality, moga demonstrated they would not be enslaved by old-fashioned gender norms. For mainstream society, they represented both threat and titillation. The public’s continued fear of such modern women as dangerous—along with its appetite for the erotic and grotesque (ero guro)—was demonstrated in the media and popular obsession with the 1936 case of Abe Sada, a waitress who strangled her married lover, then cut off his genitals and carried them in her purse as a symbol of their undying love. The passionate tale was translated to film in a 1976 Franco-Japanese production, In the Realm of the Senses.
FIGURE 50. Moga on a poster advertising Sapporo beer, ca. 1920s–1930s. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Feminist publications began addressing women’s changing circumstances in the 1910s. Japan’s first such journal, Seitō (Bluestocking, a term describing intellectual European women), was dedicated to improving women’s status and welfare and began publication in 1911, spearheaded by novelist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971). The graphic, art deco cover of its first issue pictured a Grecian-looking female figure standing in front of a kimono. The issue opened, famously, with Hiratsuka’s words, “In the beginning, woman was the sun.” Members of Seitō and their readers often referred to themselves as “New Women,” who wore Western dress, had educated opinions, and insisted on selecting their own romantic partners. The pages of the journal provided an array of lively views on women’s issues, such as premarital sex, legalized prostitution, abortion, and women’s suffrage.
Movements for women’s suffrage began in 1918, before universal male suffrage was passed in 1925 and while just four nations had given women the right to vote. In 1922, legal prohibitions against women’s participation in politics and attendance at political meetings were repealed. Journalist Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1981), a Seitō cofounder, emerged as a tireless activist for women’s political rights and for fighting corruption in government. After the postwar constitution allowed women to be elected to the Diet, she gained a seat in 1953 and remained in office through the early 1980s. Another postwar female Diet member, Katō Shidzue (1897–2001), was a strong advocate of birth control during the 1920s and cofounded the Japanese branch of Planned Parenthood in 1948. Katō brought activist and sex educator Margaret Sanger to Japan six times to raise awareness of reproductive rights.
The role of full-time housewife also expanded and professionalized during these years. During the Meiji period, most middle- and upper-class households had employed maids to clean and cook, but these responsibilities shifted to the modern housewife. The tasks she was now expected to manage included keeping household account records, planning and executing nutritious and enticing menus, and maintaining proper household hygiene. She replaced her husband as the primary decision maker for home-based consumption, making choices about furnishings and interior décor that had been left to men in previous eras. Bridal encyclopedias (hanayome bunko) became popular aids for young homemakers expected to master the myriad domestic tasks associated with modern, cultured lifestyles. They contained as many as twenty volumes, each dedicated to a single topic such as sewing Japanese clothing, sewing Western clothing and items like curtains, cooking traditional side dishes, cooking Western and Chinese dishes, household economics, etiquette and beauty, ikebana and chanoyu for the home, knitting and crocheting, cleaning and laundry techniques, and home medicine. Housewives even adopted a kind of uniform—the kappōgi—a pristine, white apron-smock that protected their kimonos and kept the long sleeves from obstructing chores.
MASS MEDIA AND MASS CULTURE
During the Taishō era, new forms of mass media proliferated, resulting in the wide dissemination of information and images about modern urban life. Newspapers and magazines evolved to become major commercial concerns, targeted toward demographically distinct audiences. Products of technology such as photography, recordings, radio, and movies became accessible in everyday life and began to shape and influence the lives of ordinary people.
After decades of compulsory education—by 1930, nearly 90 percent of adult Japanese had at least six years of elementary education—Japan’s masses were remarkably literate. An immense outpouring of print supported their reading interests. By 1920, there were over a thousand different newspapers published for an audience of six million subscribers. The largest, Osaka mainichi, climbed from a circulation of 260,000 in 1912 to 670,000 in 1921 and reached 1.5 million in 1930. Newspapers had changed in character, from the Meiji-era small enterprises espousing particular political causes to complex big businesses with platoons of college-graduate reporters. With large sums of capital at stake, major newspapers adopted a conservative outlook on national affairs in order to avoid trouble with official censors, who could suspend issues or shut down production.
Readers could browse through books and magazines at one of the nation’s ten thousand retail bookstores. Thousands of magazine titles were created to cater to specific audiences of different genders, ages, and interests. Serious readers found discussion of contemporary policy and serialized literary novels in the intellectually minded Chūō kōron (Central review) and the bolder and more critical Kaizō (Reconstruction). Taiyō (Sun), established in 1894, was the first national journal specifically targeting the middle class. Kingu (King), an entertainment-oriented serial, became Japan’s first million-seller in 1927. Women’s magazines, such as Fujin kōron (Women’s review) and Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s friend), were especially numerous, as they targeted the main consumer for a household. They generally offered articles supporting the official ideology of “good wife, wise mother,” encouraging efforts to improve marriage, family life, and domestic management. Other articles, however, urged women to tap their human potential, to dare to pursue professional or artistic careers. Children too enjoyed their own publications, such as Shōnen kurabu (Boy’s club) and Akai tori (Redbird). All magazines provided key forums for advertising targeted toward a certain demographic, further encouraging consumerism as a form of status among all segments of society.
FIGURE 51. Fujin Gahō (Lady’s graphic) magazine, January 1908. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum.
Record companies produced music for all tastes, from patriotic marches to jazz, to be played on the radio and on phonographs. Radio stations began operations in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya in 1925. The first broadcast programs included classical music and radio plays. The following year, three independent broadcasting companies merged into the state-sponsored NHK—modeled after the British Broadcasting Company—which remained the country’s sole broadcaster for two decades. Radio was largely an urban medium; 95 percent of households owning receivers lived in cities. As part of their “cultured lifestyle,” middle-class families gathered in sitting rooms to enjoy Beethoven or plays by famous writers especially commissioned for radio. In 1928, NHK initiated brief morning calisthenics programs, which they continue to air daily on national TV.
The first permanent cinema opened in Asakusa in 1903. The Electric Palace (Denkikan) was originally a showplace for scientific oddities, including experiments in electricity, photography, and x-ray technology. Reborn as a movie house, its façade was decorated with banners and murals featuring scenes from popular films. The public quickly embraced the movies, and theaters proliferated throughout major cities. Japanese fans followed stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and Harold Lloyd as eagerly as their American counterparts. A special class of entertainers called benshi narrated the silent films in Japanese. These individuals followed in the tradition of jōruri narration from Bunraku, dramatically reading the on-screen scripts in different characters’ voices and explaining the narrative or social context, especially for unfamiliar foreign settings or situations.
The Japanese began to make their own films in 1899, just two years after first importing movie projectors, and began producing their own cameras the following year. Early films often starred Kabuki actors in both male and female roles or featured demonstrations of martial arts and swordsmanship. By the mid-1910s, there were more than a dozen studios making over a hundred films a year. The most popular genres were samurai epics (chambara), like the ever-popular story of The Forty-Seven Rōnin, and light, flirtatious comedies. In the 1920s, studios began to produce realistic contemporary dramas with improved scripts; in the 1930s, they introduced talkies. By 1940, there were 2,363 movie houses in Japan and per capita consumption averaged six films per year. Most cinemas were located in cities, but they could also be found in provincial towns such as Saga, a relatively remote, small city in Kyushu that boasted four movie theaters in the 1920s. Over time, Japan’s well-honed studio system would produce numerous masterpieces by renowned directors such as Ozu Yasujiro (1903–1963) and Kurosawa Akira (1910–98). Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) and Late Spring (1949) and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Rashomon (1950) are usually considered among the fifty best films ever made. Japan ranks third among all countries (following France and Italy) in the number of Academy Awards won for Best Foreign Film.
Film was not simply a medium for entertainment. Documentary films or newsreels shown before features helped generate patriotism and support for nationalist projects, such as the Russo-Japanese War, Emperor Meiji’s funeral, and Japan’s colonizations of Taiwan and Korea (see chapter 10). The new religious group Oomoto employed a traveling crew to attract potential adherents in remote rural areas by showing movies. Film was also an important medium for avant-garde art. Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1926 silent work, A Page of Madness (Kurutta ippeiji), set in a lunatic asylum, used experimental film techniques, such as double exposure and superimposition, to represent blurred visions of insanity and reality.
Live theater also thrived in both traditional and new forms. Storytellers and Kabuki continued to attract large popular audiences. During Edo, Kabuki had been seen as a disreputable art for the townsfolk; fans from the samurai class would have disguised themselves for a visit. As Western enthusiasm for exotic Japanese traditions climbed higher in the twentieth century, Kabuki, like ukiyo-e, came to be canonized as a unique cultural treasure, representative of Japanese aesthetic identity. New forms of dramatic theater that contrasted with the stylized dance-dramas of Kabuki and Nō also emerged. “New drama” (shingeki) adopted naturalistic acting styles, contemporary themes, and the use of actresses in female roles. Urban audiences welcomed productions of classical and modern foreign plays such as Greek tragedies, works by Shakespeare, and more recent works by Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. Audiences also loved vaudeville and burlesque revues, such as the Casino Folies, established in Asakusa in 1929, which played to tastes for ero guro nansensu, characterized by sexiness and absurdity. Another new form of theater, the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female theater group, was founded in 1913 by Kobayashi Ichizō, the president of Hankyū Railways, at a hot-spring resort town that served as terminus for a rail line from Osaka. The “Takarasiennes” performed spectacularly staged musicals and revues featuring several hundred girls, resembling Hollywood extravaganzas. Stars were billed as “beauties in male dress,” a twist on Kabuki’s onnagata, and were idolized by young women who developed crushes on the “actors.” A second Takarazuka theater was soon opened in Tokyo.
Asakusa, the center of Edo commoner amusements, successfully blended old and new attractions. Acrobats, performing monkeys, and archery stalls manned by seductive young women still captivated many, but they were accompanied by modern diversions such as merry-go-rounds, aquariums, burlesque revues, and jazz clubs, not to mention fourteen movie houses. Kawabata Yasunari’s modernist novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929–30) describes how “in Asakusa, everything is flung out in the raw. Desires dance naked. All races, all classes, all jumbled together forming a bottomless, endless current, flowing day and night, no beginning, no end. Asakusa is alive. . . . The masses converge on it constantly. Their Asakusa is a foundry in which all the old models are regularly melted down to be cast into new ones.”6 The novel claimed that a hundred million people a year frequented Asakusa’s many attractions.7
MODERNISM IN LITERATURE AND ART
By the 1920s, writers like Kawabata were deeply steeped in all manner of Western literature, philosophy, and art. With cheap translations available for nearly every notable foreign publication, modern intellectuals read novels by Proust, Kafka, and Joyce, dramas by Strindberg and Brecht, and poetry by Rilke and Eliot. They were keenly aware of European literary trends, such as tendencies toward irony and detachment and the disruption of seamless chronological narratives. Japanese literary modernists, including Kawabata, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Okamoto Kanoko, and detective-fiction pioneer Edogawa Ranpo, whose pen name was created to evoke Edgar Allen Poe, rejected the naturalist trends of Meiji literature, characterized by the flat, confessional style of the “I-novel” that strove to transparently represent reality without stylization. They also rejected direct imitation of Western styles, seeking their own authentic, modern voices. Their works were action-driven and highly stylized; characterized by cosmopolitanism, often featuring foreign characters and settings; and conveyed a sharply visual sense of spectacle that reflected the popularity of the movies.
Kawabata was one of Japan’s first modern writers to be translated into English and the first to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1968. Although he is best known for the novel Snow Country, another novel, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, better represents the spirit of Japanese literary modernism, with its pastiche of snatches of conversation, song lyrics, and lists. The narrator is a flaneur, a denizen of Asakusa who befriends a gang of delinquents with names like Boat Runt and Left-handed Hiko. Rapidly shifting scenes featuring punchy slang underline the importance of chic fashionability and knowledge of the latest trends among urban cognoscenti; the parallels between Edo’s pleasure quarter and modern Asakusa are unspoken but apparent. Translator Alisa Freedman notes the novel’s theme of “simultaneous lament for a fading way of life and celebration of the new sites and entertainments that have replaced lost landmarks and pastimes.”8
In art, the modernist group MAVO presented groundbreaking conceptual work that presaged better-known, post–World War II avant-garde groups like Gutai and Hi-Red Center (see chapter 11). MAVO was a short-lived art-activist commune of around fifteen members who wished to fuse modernist aesthetics with radical politics. It was founded in 1923 and led by Murayama Tomoyoshi, who had been impressed by the social potential of movements such as Dadaism and Constructivism when he studied in Weimar Germany. The group opposed state authoritarianism, bourgeois norms, commodity culture, and the official art establishment. Their first group act was to shatter the glass roof of an exhibition hall housing the annual exhibition of the Nika Art Association, an elitist group established in 1914 to promote “fine” contemporary art. MAVO identified politically with anarchists and Marxist revolutionaries, championing the proletariat. They considered themselves cultural anarchists and declared, “Lazily, like pigs, like weeds, like the trembling emotions of sexual desire, we are the last bombs that rain down on all the intellectual criminals.”9 Members engaged in painting, architecture, performance art, and illustration. Two of their primary art forms, collage and assemblage, incorporated mundane items such as shoes or machine fragments to more closely tie art to daily proletarian life. MAVO also staged street parades and avant-garde performances of dance and theater. Like modernist writers and the larger cultural trend of ero guro, their work was sensational and sometimes commercial; they produced advertisements, product designs, and manga comics alongside more politically charged works.
REVOLT AGAINST THE WEST
Another new philosophical turn that became apparent during the Greater Taishō era was increased criticism of the West—which, after World War I, many began to imagine as a collective threat to Japan’s national independence and sense of cultural autonomy. Following Japan’s rise to “great power” status and its position as the strongest nation in Asia, some writers and intellectuals imagined a Japanese destiny surpassing Western accomplishments, leading the world to a higher level of civilization that would fuse Western and Asian elements. In order to achieve this, some advocated protecting Japan’s pure, indigenous culture from further adulteration by Western pollutants such as science and technology. This culturalism, or Japanism, emphasized stronger ties to Asian nations, grounded in their common struggle to combat Western racism and exploitation of colonial peoples. The resurgence of cultural nationalism reflected Japan’s centuries-old pattern of embracing and then rejecting foreign influences: from Nara mass importation of Chinese civilization to Heian indigenization of arts, from Tokugawa isolationism and nativism to Meiji enthusiasm for Western institutions and culture. In contrast with Fukuzawa Yukichi’s earlier assertion that Japan must “leave Asia” and become a Western-style civilization, cultural nationalists now urged leadership over Asia, conservation of traditional culture, and abandonment of Western norms and values. This stance assumed that Japan, as the strongest Asian nation, would take responsibility for “civilizing” underdeveloped Asian nations by removing the influence of Western imperial powers. Culturalists also assumed that it was somehow possible to disentangle “pure” native culture from modernity.
Art historian Okakura Kakuzō, a disciple of Ernest Fenollosa, was among the first to articulate pan-Asian views. His works, written in English during his tenure as curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, aimed to educate American audiences about Japanese cultural superiority over Western nations. In The Ideals of the East (1903), Okakura declared that “Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas.”10 This claim suggested that all Asians shared a spiritual, aesthetic worldview, but Okakura also pointed out that Japan alone had successfully assimilated both Asian ideals and the competitive, scientific spirit of Europe and America. In his view, it was Japan’s mission to lead the world to a higher synthesis of East and West.
Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906), still much admired, proposed that the tea ceremony acted as a microcosm of Japanese philosophy and aesthetics and as evidence of its cultural superiority over the West. The book explained how tea, originally a product of China, was a globally valuable commodity, a staple of English life, but only Japan had developed sophisticated arts around tea appreciation. China was a defeated nation that could not protect Asian heritage, while the United States and Europe were too crassly commercial and materialistic to cultivate elevated levels of aesthetic appreciation. Western Orientalists eagerly received Okakura’s florid praise of Japan, seemingly failing to notice the sharp rebukes of European and American practices contained in the work. In describing the carefully orchestrated décor of the Japanese tearoom, he contrasts this with the methods of “the Occident”:
In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud. Many a time have we sat at a festive board contemplating, with a secret shock to our digestion, the representation of abundance on the dining-room walls. Why these pictured victims of chase and sport, the elaborate carvings of fishes and fruit? Why the display of family plates, reminding us of those who have dined and are dead?11
Okakura claims Japan’s superior respect for nature, in contrast with Western disregard and abuse of the environment, in this passage about ikebana:
The wanton waste of flowers among Western communities is even more appalling than the way they are treated by Eastern Flower Masters. The number of flowers cut daily to adorn the ballrooms and banquet-tables of Europe and America, to be thrown away on the morrow, must be something enormous; if strung together they might garland a continent. Beside this utter carelessness of life, the guilt of the Flower-Master becomes insignificant. He, at least, respects the economy of nature, selects his victims with careful foresight, and after death does honor to their remains. In the West the display of flowers seems to be a part of the pageantry of wealth, the fancy of a moment. Whither do they all go, these flowers, when the revelry is over? Nothing is more pitiful than to see a faded flower remorselessly flung upon a dung heap. . . . Anyone acquainted with the ways of our tea- and flower-masters must have noticed the religious veneration with which they regard flowers. They do not cull at random, but carefully select each branch or spray with an eye to the artistic composition they have in mind. They would be ashamed should they chance to cut more than were absolutely necessary. It may be remarked in this connection that they always associate the leaves, if there be any, with the flower, for the object is to present the whole beauty of plant life. In this respect, as in many others, their method differs from that pursued in Western countries. Here we are apt to see only the flower stems, heads as it were, without body, stuck promiscuously into a vase.12
Anti-Western feelings increased in 1919, when the Paris Peace Conference refused to approve a Japan-sponsored racial-equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles. After the war, many Japanese feared that the newly established League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations, would perpetuate white privilege. Japanese delegates to the League of Nations drafted a clause for the Treaty of Versailles requiring that member nations not discriminate against one another on the basis of race or nationality and that they try to grant equality to foreign subjects living in their territory. Adoption of the clause would have challenged established norms of imperialism, including the colonial subjugation of nonwhite peoples. The other member nations refused to endorse the proposal, and this rejection led to public anger in Japan—particularly against the United States, since the chairman of the League of Nations was President Woodrow Wilson.
The 1924 U.S. Immigration Exclusion Act, intended to preserve the ideal of white American homogeneity, also fanned anti-Americanism in Japan. The act favored Northern Europeans, providing large quotas to “Nordics,” with smaller allowances for Eastern and Southern Europeans. Immigration from Asia was prohibited entirely, and this applied pointedly to the Japanese, given that the Chinese had been legally excluded since 1882. Many Japanese viewed the new law as a deep racial insult, amounting to a declaration of war between the “yellow” and “white” races. A high-profile suicide expressing opposition to the U.S. law galvanized popular protest in different forms. Massive anti-American rallies were organized, and boycotts of American goods and movies became widespread throughout the summer of 1924, agitated by extensive media coverage of American racism.
Another strain of the new anti-Western sentiment included the condemnation of mass consumerism and the elevation of native rural life as an antidote to decadent, foreign ways. Conservative officials and intellectuals viewed consumption as wasteful, immoral luxury and urged citizens to save and to exercise self-control. They idealized rural thrift and reliance on traditional goods and warned that city life brought moral corruption and decadence. The new urban world of mass consumption and entertainment still represented only 20 percent of the nation’s population in the 1920s and ’30s. Sparkling representations of wealthy, exciting urban life caused resentment among rural populations. The countryside still lacked many basic amenities, from modern medical treatment to hygienic water and sewage systems. Farmers could not taste exotic new foods; their diets were bland and monotonous, and many suffered from malnutrition. During Meiji, most had continued to mix their rice with cheaper grains like barley or millet; but by the 1920s, even poor tenant families—who spent half or more of their income on food—practiced the formula “white rice plus three side dishes” (ichiju sansai) as the standard for civilized meals. Their side dishes, however, were often tofu dregs or pickles made from radish leaves or weeds. Common staples such as soy sauce, miso, and sugar were luxuries used sparingly by the rural poor. Commonplace urban foods like meat cutlets, bread, or ice cream could not even be dreamt of. The growing divide between urban and rural lifestyles created a major source of discontent among the 80 percent of the populace who still resided in the countryside. This resentment spawned support for military factions in the 1930s that advocated expansionism on the continent as a means to improve rural standards of living.
As rural life came to be portrayed by ideologues as a pure reservoir of national values, movements nostalgically promoting folkways arose in the 1910s and ’20s. The folk craft (mingei), movement spearheaded by Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) and the folklore movement, associated with Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), were both attempts to locate the native spirit of Japan in the everyday lives of common rural people, rather than in elite traditions of art and literature. Both men were products of Tokyo Imperial University, deeply educated in Western literature, art, and philosophy—and thus, ironically, their quests for a unique Japanese identity were heavily influenced by Western models. Yanagi drew from the English craft movement, championed by William Morris as part of a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Under the guidance of English artist Bernard Leach, Yanagi and potters Hamada Shōji and Kawai Kanjirō started a movement to reappraise the country craft of the people, including handwoven textiles, utilitarian pottery, basketry, and simple furnishings. They valued irregularities and imperfections in works, just as the tea masters of earlier centuries valued wabi aesthetics. In his book The Unknown Craftsman, Yanagi criticized industrial goods, describing the value of handmade crafts: “On reflection, one must conclude that in bringing cheap and useful goods to the average household, industrialism has been of service to mankind—but at the cost of the heart, of warmth, friendliness and beauty. By contrast, articles well made by hand, though expensive, can be enjoyed in homes for generations. . . . Machine-made things are children of the brain; they are not very human. The more they spread, the less the human being is needed.”13
Yanagita, revered as the father of Japanese folklore and rural anthropology, was influenced by the nineteenth-century European boom in folk and fairy tales, associated with authors like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. During Meiji, foreign advisors like Lafcadio Hearn and Basil Hall Chamberlain gathered and translated miscellaneous Japanese folklore and myths. Yanagita hoped to systematize collection of such tales from remote rural regions. Initially a bureaucrat who served in a variety of prestigious posts, Yanagita gained greater renown for his vast surveys of village life in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1910, he published his first book of folklore, The Legends of Tono, an assortment of ghost stories and explanations of local customs from a remote area in northern Japan that he dedicated to “people living in foreign countries.” Yanagita heard the tales from local storyteller Sasaki Kizen but felt a responsibility to polish the rough anecdotes, crafting the stories in the literary style of European folklorists. Sasaki found them unrecognizable and published his own collection in 1935, which included this story to explain local taboos:
If you go into the mountains, at times you will find trees that have two separate trunks growing out of a common base. Only some of the trees are growing with the two trunks twisted around each other. Those twisted together are that way because on the twelfth day of the twelfth month, the mountain deity counts the trees in his territory. To mark the total of how many thousands or tens of thousands of trees he has, he twists the two trunks of the last tree together. For this reason, only on the twelfth day of the twelfth month, people in the nearby community are prohibited from climbing the mountain. It would be terrible if by mistake someone went to the mountain and was counted as a tree.14
Yanagita often romanticized rural life in his works, yet in reality he had little regard for farmers and country ways. He criticized the rural mentality for its servile, submissive attitude toward superiors, its ignorance, and its fear of strangers. He applied double standards to rural and urban lifestyles, believing that farmers should not be allowed to squander their resources on consumption of modern or luxury goods, unnecessary for country life but desirable for urban elites like himself.
Both Yanagi and Yanagita created significant new fields of Japanese studies in their respective efforts to construct a modern Japanese identity grounded in traditional rural values and practices. Their momentous achievements nevertheless demonstrate how deep the divide between the urban and rural had grown. Urban intellectuals, far removed from the primitive beliefs and daily misery that typically characterized agrarian life, could nostalgically romanticize the rural while ignoring real farmers’ impoverishment and their demands for more equitable standards of living.
Another aspect of the revolt against the West occurred among iconic writers like Kawabata Yasunari and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), who had both championed literary modernism. As they grew older, they reverted to more traditional narratives that celebrated native aesthetics. Tanizaki’s novel Some Prefer Nettles (1929) pits the westernized “cultured life” of an unhappy couple, Kaname and Misako, against that of Misako’s traditionalist father, who lives happily like an Edo-era merchant, dressing in antique kimonos, collecting Bunraku puppets, and keeping a young mistress with blackened teeth. The novel seems to critique the state of Japan’s cultural hybridity, represented by the tawdry Eurasian prostitute Louise whom Kaname frequents. Over the course of the plot, Kaname turns away from his preference for American culture, English literature, and foreign prostitutes, embracing the arts and aesthetics of Japan’s past. Tanizaki’s later essay In Praise of Shadows (1933) eloquently laments how the necessities of modern life, such as heating and lighting, mar the aesthetics of traditional Japanese architecture. He includes a paean to old-fashioned Japanese toilets. Although cold and dark, their wooden construction offered the “inexplicable power to calm and sooth [sic]. The ultimate, of course, is a wooden ‘morning glory’ urinal filled with boughs of cedar; this is a delight to look at and allows not the slightest sound.”15 By contrast, he finds Western toilet facilities with gleaming white tile and porcelain “very crude and tasteless,” exposing unmentionable bodily functions to “excessive illumination.”
In summary, Tokyo and other Japanese cities experienced accelerated urbanization during the Taishō era, spurring the rapid expansion of mass transit, consumerism, and mass media. The face of the capital changed following the devastation wrought by the 1923 earthquake, allowing for extensive development of modern facilities, such as broader streets and enormous department stores. The literate public increasingly advocated for their own interests, participating in a wide variety of political, labor, and feminist movements. In material culture, middle-class preferences in food, housing, clothing, and décor frequently blended imports with Japanese tastes and sensibilities. New technologies such as the radio, phonograph, and especially movies offered modern amusements but did not displace older forms of entertainment like Kabuki or erotic teahouse culture, now transplanted to the café. National economic development and military success abroad spurred confidence in native cultural identity, expressed in both anti-Western sentiment and nostalgic celebration of rural life. Nationalistic claims of cultural exceptionalism and racial uniqueness would help undergird state efforts to rationalize expansion and control of neighboring East Asian countries, as explored in the next chapter.
FURTHER READING
Gardner, William O. Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Gerow, Aaron. Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Harootunian, Harry D. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Minichiello, Sharon, ed. Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy 1900–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.
Sand, Jordan. House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Sato, Barbara. The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media and Women in Interwar Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Schencking, J. Charles. The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Silberman, Bernard S., and H.T. Harootunian, eds. Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Young, Louise. Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
RECOMMENDED FILMS
A Page of Madness. 1926. Feature film directed by Kinugasa Teinosuke. Silent avant-garde film depicting life in an asylum.
Eros Plus Massacre. 1969. Feature film directed by Yoshida Yoshishige. Fictionalized biography of anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, considered one of the most representative films of the Japanese New Wave movement.
I Was Born But. 1932. Feature film directed by Ōzu Yasujiro. Silent film about two young brothers who are disillusioned by their father’s workplace servility.
In the Realm of the Senses. 1977. Feature film directed by Oshima Nagisa. Explicit treatment of the relationship between the notorious Abe Sada and her lover.
Kagero-za. 1981. Feature film directed by Suzuki Seijun. Tale of a playwright in the 1920s who meets a beautiful woman whom he believes is the ghost of his wife.
Kanikōsen. 2009. Feature film directed by Sabu. Adaptation of well-known short story from the proletarian literature movement, depicting the mutiny of workers, who have been subjected to harsh working conditions, on a crab cannery boat.