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76 C H A P T E R 4 Imaging Modern Girls in the Japanese Woman’s Film In Japan during the 1920s and early 1930s, the true other of modernity was not so much the worker but woman. —H. D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity T his chapter focuses on the Japanese “woman’s film” and considers how national and modern gender identities converged in Japan’s interwar period.1 Japanese cinema in this era coincided with a prevalence of cultural discourses on modernity: what it meant to be Japanese and modern was an open question. In these self-reflexive discourses about modernity, one detects a historical consciousness as newer forms of experience specific to capitalism were often pitted against older forms related to feudalism. In similar terms, the woman ’s film became the dominant subgenre of the modern film and a signifier of “the new” next to the antiquated genres of shinpa and period films, which remained tied to prefilmic theatrical representation and “masculine” feudal narrative respectively.2 This is also the period when Japan witnessed an increased presence of women in the public sphere, especially in the cinema. With the increase of women in the urban workforce after World War I, they gained a newfound independence and autonomy, expressed in the popular trope of the moga, or the modern girl.3 Women’s visibility as actresses in place of oyama (female impersonators) and new storylines of women’s struggles demonstrate the emerging ubiquity of the moviegoing experience as female consumer capitalism . Women’s identities became linked to a new culture of consumption surrounding the appearance of modern capitalist forms and technologies such as department stores, movie theaters, and the print media. The woman’s film Imaging Modern Girls 77 served both to configure a female identity as consuming subject and to provide material for her consumption. My approach is to view the woman’s film genre primarily as a reflexive discourse on the experience of modernity and the modern girl figure as the reification of this Japanese vernacular modernity.4 One might counter that the concept of vernacular modernism presents an illusion of a centerless cultural formation standing outside the hegemony of the West. However, I intend to make the term “vernacular” serve as a constant reminder of the particularity of that modern experience, which is both culturally specific and globally influenced. I direct attention to a few core inquiries related to how the filmic genre expressed a material and delimited version of Japanese modernity, specifically focusing on the image of the modern girl. Japanese cinema—like other national cinemas—was marked, from its inception, by the cinema’s Western origins in France and the United States—that is, the Japanese learned how to make films in the presence of these preeminent cinemas, especially that of Hollywood in the post–World War I period.5 As a result, the Japanese films contain an “authenticity complex,” and often display this history in their referentiality to their Hollywood predecessors.6 Thus the primary question is how to analyze these films as something beyond insufficient copies of Western films, especially given the fact that Japanese films incorporated influences of Hollywood—but with subtle differences—as they competed against Hollywood -made pictures and other Japanese films in the domestic market. Within this context of the cinema’s referentiality, I discuss the central trope of the woman’s film, the modern girl, and the desires it embodies as a social discourse of the disruptions wrought by modernity in Japan. How can we talk about the woman’s film as both a critical term and a historical practice in the context of Japanese vernacular modernity? My discussion starts from the assumption that the concept of the woman’s film—originating in studies on Hollywood cinema with its own spectatorial regime—cannot simply be applied to Japanese cinema without some modification. My historical research offers a definition of the woman’s film genre based on audience composition and the genre’s place within the Japanese film industry in the 1920s and 1930s. From this definition, the problem of the critical stance toward cultural discourse in the period can be developed by examining Miriam Silverberg ’s ideas on the identity play of the 1930s as it was often depicted through the modern girl images. I would like to offer in response some alternative structures for how to understand the apparent changes in Japanese identity in the historical swing between modernity and 1930s nationalism. My analysis of...

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