Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (review)

The 1920s and 1930s were a time of massive change in Japan. As the nation recovered from the devastating Kantō earthquake of 1923, the consumer market underwent a period of unprecedented expansion, as did the publishing industry and the related mechanisms of censorship. Meanwhile, the economy swelled and then collapsed, driving the Japanese to increase colonial holdings on the Asian mainland. In conjunction with these developments, there emerged an increasingly complex, cosmopolitan, and hybrid culture of the “modan” that profoundly transformed Japanese life and expression.

The last few years have seen a small boom in English monographs documenting various facets of this changing culture, but now, Miriam Silverberg's Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense rises to the top of the list. This well-researched book represents the culmination of over a decade of research conducted before Silverberg's death in 2008. Many chapters may be familiar to readers from articles she wrote in her last years, but there is much that is new, especially in the overarching discussions of popular culture framing specific chapters.

Silverberg argues that the culture of the modan era consists of a mélange of different ideas, lifestyles, subcultures, social classes, and ethnicities that coexisted, sometimes forming jarring and seemingly irreconcilable juxtapositions. Rather than presenting a chronological look at modan society as a whole, she makes the wise strategic decision to focus on certain parts of this mix, juxtaposing chapters examining different groups, places, literary forums, and concepts within popular culture. Her look at modan society thereby becomes as much a montage as the society itself. (Silverberg is quick to point out that the montage is a critical expository mode in the art, film, and writing of the era.) In these various chapters, she draws upon an eclectic assortment of materials ranging from contemporaneous commentaries, governmental studies, and fiction to more ephemeral sources, such as magazines and even programs from popular entertainment.

The first of the three parts of the book examines the meaning of “modernity,” “modernization,” “modernism,” and “modan” within the context of Japan of the 1920s and 1930s. Silverberg focuses on the ways modernization helped turn people into subjects—both desiring subjects within a culture of rising consumerism and imperial subjects within the Japanese empire. She also provides some overarching discussion of the montage-like culture of the era and its characteristic “documentary impulse,” evident in virtually all aspects of mass media. This documentary impulse, especially as seen in the work of “modernologists” Kon Wajirō, Gonda Yasunosuke, and others, has provided a great wealth of material to Silverberg, and their work features prominently in her account of modan Japan.

The second part of the book contains two chapters on two key figures in modan culture: the “modern girl” (moga) and the café waitress. Silverberg argues that these two figures came to occupy a significant position within the cultural imagination, not because of their numbers, but because journalists and authors were obsessed with documenting what they saw as women's changing realities. Silverberg consequently takes care to distinguish between what we know of the “reality” of these women and the images of them created by the mass media.

Also in the second part of the book are two chapters on magazines marketing modan culture to consumers, namely Eiga no tomo (Friends of the Movies) and Shufu no tomo (Friend of the Housewife). In great detail, Silverberg traces the changing contents of these two journals during the interwar period. The chapter on Shufu no tomo, as well as the previous chapters on moga and café waitresses, complement other recent work, such as Barbara Sato's and Sarah Frederick's books on modern women and the media, but what is particularly fresh about Silverberg's analysis is the careful documentation of the ways the domestic and the nation interplayed on the pages of one particular journal as the empire grew and mobilized for war.

Part 3 focuses on Asakusa, the busy park in Tokyo where many developments in modern...