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  • Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics
  • Sabine Frühstück (bio)
Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. By Laura Miller. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. xiv, 256 pages. $55.00, cloth; $21.95, paper.

In the 1970s, disgusted by the willingness of women to undergo expensive, painful, and exhausting operations in order to ensure that their faces and bodies reflected a certain ideal of beauty, the French performance and multimedia artist Orlan developed the notion of a "radical performance." Using a computer-generated face that was based on artistic representations of Diana, Europa, Psyche, Venus, and Mona Lisa, Orlan employed cosmetic surgeons to create that face on her in a number of "life performances." In 1997, she planned to get a big nose made in Japan; it was to be as big as possible and preferably beginning above her eyebrows on her forehead. The surgical procedure was to be carried out in protest against the operations done on Japanese women's faces in their pursuit of beautification according to some fictitious Caucasian ideal.

Unfazed by Orlan's critique, beauty enhancing in Japan has become a $15 billion industry that includes 173,412 beauty parlors. In her new book Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics, Laura Miller finds an industry closely tied with the production and transformation of ideas about gendered identity and new forms of consumer capitalism. Miller also provides a forceful critique of the trope of emulation as suggested by Orlan in her in-depth examination of aesthetic salons, dieting products, weight-loss activities, breast enhancement efforts, beauty language, and beauty imaging. Indeed, she suggests that the following technologies are at work in the formulation of beauty in current-day Japan: the "creolization" or melding of East Asian and foreign notions of beauty; the unblended coexistence of the Japanese-created Other and a reinvented notion of the traditional; and the continuous negotiations of the idioms of ancient knowledge and naturalness and modern technological rationality. The book begins with a chapter on "Changing Beauty Ideology" (chapter 1) in which Miller describes the radical changes in what has been considered beautiful from the Edo period (long, thin faces, fair skin, small lips, blackened teeth, thickset necks, and rounded shoulders) to current ideals. She continues to describe beauty technologies through the following seven chapters.

"Aesthetic salons" or "esute salons" (chapter 2), the laboratories that promise that women's ugliness can and must be defeated by technology, offer facials, hair removal treatments, and body treatments for weight loss and body reshaping. There the concept of beauty is transformed from a subjective idea into a standardized, quantifiable notion delineated by measurements for [End Page 243] weight, bust, waist, hips, and thighs, among others. These esute salons sell both desire and anxiety about appearance as well as the idea that the body is something that can be assuaged only with esute products and treatments. If the client does not know what her deficiencies are, the salon points them out and offers treatments and products to fix them. Before-and-after measurements and photos detail and celebrate resulting changes in the body.

Suggesting that it may represent a rebellion against the cult of cuteness, Miller introduces a comparatively new bust-consciousness as another dimension of the "body-conscious" look in chapter 3 on "Mammary Mania." Breast augmentation techniques are certainly promoted with instructive slogans that suggest such rebellion: "The breast is a woman's self assertion. . . . The most important thing is not size but that they point upward" (p. 76) or "Goodbye to the old me—at the Bust Clinic I'll get confidence!" (p. 75). The desire for the ideal, and ideally bigger, breast represents a shift away from the past when the cute and submissive girl was primarily evaluated as a future occupant of the wife/mother social category. The breast no longer primarily denotes maternity and motherhood; it also has become a symbol for the independent, sexualized self.

In chapter 4, Miller delineates the practices of "Body Fashion and Beauty Etiquette" that have emerged from the idea that the body consists of malleable surfaces ready to be inscribed with new meanings. In...

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