Things That Speak: Peirce, Benjamin, and the Kinesthetics of Commodity Advertisement in Japanese Women's Magazines, 1900 to the 1930s

What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says —but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.

—Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

Introduction

Commodity advertisements in Japanese women's magazines published and circulated from the first decade of the 1900s through the 1930s, especially advertisements for feminine commodities like cosmetics, were new, modern forms of print media deeply imbricated in what was to become Japan's Fordist political-economic and cultural formation of mass production and mass consumption that paralleled developments in the United States, Germany, and England.¹ David Harvey persuasively demonstrates that Fordism necessitated profound cultural transformations through which individual consumers were schooled in the habits, thoughts, and practices that would make them modern desiring consumer-subjects.² The advent of modern technologies—from assembly lines, through mass transit and mass circulation magazines, to photography and radio—occasioned profound change in the mode of perceptual experience. Walter Benjamin identified shock as the quintessential perceptual experience of capitalist modernity, the corporeal and physiological response to, and shield from, the onslaught of sensory stimuli brought on by urban traffic, crowds, trains, intrusive commercial advertising, display and spectacle, heavy industrial plants, new mass media, and even the technologies of film and photography, all of which characterize the particularity of modern experience.³ Bypassing the cognitive or intellectual faculty—the prevailing mode of language and reading—shock is a sensory mode of subject-engagement with the world rooted in the mimetic faculty, and in tactility and immediacy. But it is not just a bodily reaction to stimuli, it is also a distinct sign system—a modern capitalist semiosis—that has been harnessed by many actors, including government agencies, media outlets, and commercial enterprises.

I argue, through an analysis of gendered advertisements that I call "schoolgirl speech advertisement" or "women's language advertisement," that magazine consumption was part of the process by which readers became modern. The ads deploy a form of speech originally called "schoolgirl speech," later called "women's language." The language appears in ads as "direct reported speech" alongside an image of the subject who "speaks," making the text imaginatively "sound" as if the woman in the ad is speaking directly to the reader.⁴ This process involves two dimensions. First, the text-speech and the image-body in the advertisement are conjoined in space and time, the semiotic effect of which is to produce a perceived organic unity between the text and the image as speech and the body that speaks it. Second, the imagined scene presents itself as the "here and now" to the reader/viewer. Reading—the text-speech—is secondary to the imagined sensory experience of the total scene of here and now by the reader.

Schoolgirl speech was (putatively) spoken in the late nineteenth century by a handful of daughters from elite families who could afford to send them to high school for girls. The most salient characteristic of schoolgirl speech was what critics described as "strange" utterance-ending forms, such as teyo and dawa, and it came to be called "teyo-dawa" speech (teyodawa kotoba), a term that became synonymous with "schoolgirl speech" (jogakusei kotoba). This speech, and the behavior and character of the girls and young women who spoke it, scandalized a cadre of scholars and teachers who saw it both as a degradation of proper, ladylike (read "elite") speech and comportment and as an effect of rapid social change associated with modernization. Schoolgirls and schoolgirl speech, as we will see, had become symbolic of the modern, and mass women's magazines of the twentieth century (re)cited and publicized this linkage of schoolgirls and modernity, and made it—along with the transformation of "schoolgirl speech" into "women's language"—a common-sense association in Japanese mass public and consumer culture by the 1930s.

But a sense of physicality, tactility, and immediacy also pervades the schoolgirl speech advertisement and operates at a horizon distinct from that of the symbolic or the linguistic proper. It...