Modern Girls on the Go

GENDER, MOBILITY, AND LABOR IN JAPAN

By Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, Christine R. Yano

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8113-8

Contents

List of Figures……………………………………………………ixPreface: Modern Girls in a Global World Carol A. Stabile………………xi1. You Go, Girl! Cultural Meanings of Gender, Mobility, and Labor Alisa
Freedman, Laura Miller, and Christine R. Yano…………………………1PART I NEW FEMALE OCCUPATIONS……………………………………….2. Moving Up and Out: The “Shop Girl” in Interwar Japan Elise K. Tipton…213. Elevator Girls Moving In and Out of the Box Laura Miller……………414. Sweat, Perfume, and Tobacco: The Ambivalent Labor of the Dancehall Girl
Vera Mackie………………………………………………………67PART II MODELS AND MODES OF TRANSPORTATION……………………………5. “Flying Geisha”: Japanese Stewardesses with Pan American World Airways
Christine R. Yano………………………………………………….856. Bus Guides Tour National Landscapes, Pop Culture, and Youth Fantasies
Alisa Freedman…………………………………………………….107PART III MODERN GIRLS OVERTURN GENDER AND CLASS……………………….7. The Modern Girl as Militarist: Female Soldiers In and Beyond Japan’s
Self-Defense Forces Sabine Frühstück………………………………..1318. The Promises and Possibilities of the Pitch: 1990s Ladies League Soccer
Players as Fin-de-Siècle Modern Girls Elise Edwards…………………..149PART IV MODERN GIRLS GO OVERSEAS…………………………………….9. Miss Japan on the Global Stage: The Journey of Ito Kinuko Jan
Bardsley………………………………………………………….16910. Traveling to Learn, Learning to Lead: Japanese Women as American
College Students, 1900–1941 Sally A. Hastings………………………..19311. A Personal Journey Across the Pacific Yoko McClain………………..209Bibliography………………………………………………………227Contributors………………………………………………………253Notes…………………………………………………………….257Index…………………………………………………………….267

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

YOU GO, GIRL!

Cultural Meanings of Gender,Mobility, and Labor

Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller,and Christine R. Yano

This volume investigates the lived experiences and cultural depictions ofwomen who worked in service industries and other jobs that were inspired byideas of mobility in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. Dignified uniformedwomen operating elevators and rhythmically announcing floors representedthe height of luxury in twentieth-century department stores but werescorned in the global media as symbols of a regimented society. Especially inthe 1920s, young women coveted employment as department store clerks, anoccupation they perceived as a step toward self-cultivation. Artists and writers,both before and immediately after World War II, objectified women paid todance with men in dancehalls as tantalizing aspects of foreign allure in the Japanesecity, while providing glimpses of their real physical and emotional exhaustion.During the Jet Age, stewardesses on Pan American World Airways wereparagons of glamour and the public face of Japanese economic and technologicalprogress. Beauty queens competing in international pageants embodied newpossibilities for women in the postwar era. Students and educators led the waytoward cosmopolitanism as some of the first Japanese people to travel to theUnited States during two pivotal historical moments: the years of modernizationfollowing the 1868 Meiji Restoration and the years of recovery after thewar. Female soldiers have changed the composition and image of the JapaneseSelf-Defense Forces, while female soccer players have promoted women’s rolesin competitive sports and corporate culture. Ladies League soccer in the 1990spaved the way for the victory of the national team, Nadeshiko Japan, in the 2011World Cup Finals, an event touted by the mass media as the most hopeful in ayear marred by the triple disaster of the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake,tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. Tour and charter buses are still staffed withfemale guides, who turn an ordinary ride into a memorable event.

All of these modern working women, often conspicuous in their variousuniforms, have influenced social roles, patterns of daily life, and Japan’s globalimage. Some have led lives that were ordinary and routine; others enjoyed rareprivileges. What binds them together as the focus of this volume are the waysin which their lives, and the modernity they circumscribe, have been definedby their mobility, both literally and figuratively.

These women have labored in new places, which they have made more invitingby their presence and have used their jobs as means to move into spacesonce exclusive to men. Not only have they occupied urban spaces, but theyhave also defined them, both enacting the cosmopolitanism of their momentand serving as a domesticating salve. They have been featured in photographs,artworks, and stories about the growth of Japan. They have performed jobs thatwere considered fashionable at their inception and thereby represented ideasof modernity at different historical times. Their presence has been taken forgranted by Japanese consumers: if these women were not seen working, manypeople would feel that something was amiss.

Crossing the traditional borders between anthropology, history, literature,and visual studies, Modern Girls on the Go tells the stories of these women whohave affected how Japanese history has been experienced and is remembered.We discuss aspects of modern women’s labor that are rarely analyzed, includinghiring and recruitment, training, job performance, manners, uniforms, interpersonalcommunication, and physical motion. Our chapters question whatemployment outside the home has meant to women and how women, in turn,have changed the look and meaning of “work.”

We profile these employees and use them as a framework for viewinggeneral opinions about women in the workplace and family and to bring tolight unexpected ways women have supported, even challenged, the corporatestructures underpinning the Japanese economy, currently the third largestin the world. Our chapters highlight how work has been a major factor inshaping women’s attitudes toward marriage, childrearing, sexuality, and self-improvement.By exploring how female laborers have been conceptualized simultaneouslyas model employees, erotic icons, and domesticating presences,our research exposes contradictions inherent for women in the workforce.

In fictional accounts and often in reality, working women have been youngand unmarried, raised in the countryside but seeking employment in the city.Their accounts disclose differences between values associated with Tokyo andthe rest of the nation. The symbolic meanings ascribed to women’s laboringbodies provide insight into the relationship between gender, technology, andmodernity and how mobility has been associated with sexuality in the popularimagination. Although some jobs have been phased out by technologicaladvances or economic recessions, the employees who held them openeddoors, some literally, for women in Japan today. This volume demonstrateshow seemingly ordinary workers may be reconfigured as pioneers of modernity.Modern Girls on the Go details the symbolic places working women haveled themselves and others to go. We do not attempt here to catalogue all theplaces where they have gone. Rather, by selecting a representative sampling ofjobs, experiences, historical time frames, and class positions, we take gender(particularly, the image of young adulthood) as a guiding frame that binds ourdiscussion of the constitutive ties of modernity, mobility, and labor in Japan.

The Mobile Modern Girl

Many of the jobs we analyze were created in the 1920s and 1930s, a time ofunprecedented change in Japan, the effects of which are still felt today. Tokyo,more than other cities, became a construct through which to view the advancesand contradictions of national modernization characterized by both capitalistgrowth and control of the police state. Rebuilt after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquakeinto a modern metropolis, Tokyo was filled with mass transportation,new architecture, and crowds at work and play in bustling business and entertainmentdistricts. The urban labor force grew, and new middle classes arose.Yet economic recessions were a source of social instability, and numbers of theunemployed and the homeless increased.

Women, who could be paid less than men and were believed to be bettermannered and more subservient, replaced male employees in several servicesector jobs. Their hire followed the expansion of employment opportunities forwomen in Europe and the United States and was similarly the object of bothcritical analysis and media curiosity. Tokyo versions of American and Europeanjobs, such as bus guide and elevator girl, spread to other parts of Asia.Women also staffed new urban entertainments where men and women mixed,including dancehalls and department stores. These workers were associatedwith the erotic allure of the modern metropolis, while their lives were usuallyfar less glamorous than their images. As explained particularly in the first partof this volume, some social critics saw the women in these sites as symbolizingthe threats urban culture posed to the patriarchal family, which was promotedas the backbone of the nation, especially as Japan mobilized toward war.

In the interwar period, urban modernity was experienced through the circulationof images, such as photographs in magazines, movies, and departmentstore windows, rather than through the purchase of goods. The Japanese publishingindustry flourished, though subject to strict censorship, and a varietyof magazines became available for a diverse readership (see, e.g., Frederick2006). Authors and journalists shared a prevalent desire to document and classifythe material culture of daily life (see, e.g., Silverberg 2007). As we discussin the chapters, media accounts of female workers convey the promises andfailures of consumer capitalism and paradoxes underlying new gender roles.In the 1920s, social critics coined words to describe the social advances andcontradictions that were visually apparent in Tokyo and to make sense of rapidhistorical change. For example, “modan,” from the English “modern,” was usedplayfully and pejoratively to denote a kind of modernity characterized by spectaclesof newness and consumption.

The “modern girl” (modan garu, abbreviated as moga) is the media figurethat best represents this complex time and is the category in which womenemployed in new urban jobs were often placed. The neologism “modern girl”might have been used first by journalist Nii Itaru in an article published in theApril 1923 issue of the highbrow journal Central Review (Chuo koron) discussingthe “Contours of the Modern Girl” (Modan garu no rinkaku) (Silverberg1991b: 241). The term has also been attributed to social critic Kitazawa Shuichi’sessay titled “Modern Girl” (Modan garu) in the August 1924 issue of the magazineWoman (Josei) (Silverberg 1991b: 240; Sato 2003: 57; Yonekawa 1998: 14).

Especially from the second half of the 1920s, the word “garu,” a loanwordbased on the English “girl,” was included in the titles of several fashionablejobs, particularly those with Western-style uniforms, and in nicknames associatedwith receiving money (Yonekawa 1998: 22, 38-39). “Marx girls” (Marukusugaru) and “Engels girls” (Engerusu garu) were criticized for their radicalfashions and politics. “Stick girls” (sutekki garu) and “steak girls” (suteki garu),perhaps more imagined than real, were paid the price of a beefsteak to befashionable accessories to men as they strolled Tokyo’s entertainment districts(Onoda 2004: 79-80). “Kiss girls” (kissu garu) allegedly exchanged kisses for amodest fee (Nakayama 1995). “One-star girls” (wan suta garu) played bit partsin films.

Although plastic mannequin dolls had been produced in Japan since 1925,the Takashimaya department store employed two movie actresses, Sakai Yonekoand Tsukiji Ryoko, to stand silently and model fashions in their showwindow in 1928, launching the job of “mannequin girl” (manekin garu). Theirless alluring male counterparts were sandwich men and advertising clowns.Women assisted cab drivers as “one-yen taxi girls” (entaku garu). Three womenwere chosen from 141 applicants to be Japan’s first “air girls” (ea garu) andbegan work as attendants on an April 1, 1931, flight operated by the Tokyo AirTransport Company (Tokyo koku yusosha), one year after “sky girls” were firstemployed in the United States on a commercial flight between Chicago andSan Francisco (Inagaki and Yoshizawa 1985: 30). The “air girls” resigned onApril 29 because of working conditions and salaries. All of these workers didnew things in spaces that were new in Japan. They were seen as simultaneouslyattractive and dangerous because they flaunted a new agency premised on consumerculture.

Images of the modern girl at work and play filled Japanese journalism, literature,and film in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The modern girl was understoodby postwar scholars, including Miriam Silverberg, to be a mediaconstruct that represented anxiety that Westernization and consumer capitalismhad advanced too far in Japan. According to Silverberg (2007: 148), themodern girl “existed largely as a phantasm of the anxiety-ridden critics whoclung to a seemingly established order during a period of rapid transition.” Themodern girl was represented by her striking physical appearance—sportingshort hair and wearing either Western fashions or Japanese kimono with theobi sash tied high to emphasize her hips and make her legs look longer—andher perceived licentious behavior. As observed by members of the scholarlycollective Modern Girls around the World (2008a: 9), which has been devotedto studying gender in the global interwar context, the modern girl projects “anup-to-date and youthful femininity, provocative and unseemly in its intimacywith foreign aesthetic and commodity influences.”

Yet the modern girl, in Japan and elsewhere, was not merely a passive consumerof goods; she was also an active producer of customs. Among the manytraits assigned to the modern girl, her overdetermined physical mobility, seemingautonomy from the family system, and extended sexuality most vividlyillustrated her subjectivity in and subjection to this moment of rupture withthe past. This notion of the modern girl was predicated on the urban act ofseeing and the appearance of more young women in public places, developmentsmade possible by increased educational and employment opportunitiesand mass transportation. Arguably, the few favorable and mostly derogatoryassessments of the modern girl involved her ability to leave home to go to work.While many scholars have analyzed images of the leisurely modern girl, fewhave acknowledged the iconography of her labor.

Interwar modern girls were often shown in motion. Especially from themid-1920s, female legs, standing or walking, symbolized a new kind of urbanwoman. The cover illustration of Maeda Hajime’s 1929 Story of WorkingWomen (Shokugyo fujin monogatari), a study of more than twelve progressivenew jobs and problems in marriage that these employees faced, contrastsa uniformed female bus conductor (often called a “bus girl,” basu garu) and apassenger clothed in ornate kimono, looking as if she could be either goingto work or shopping. In 1931, ethnographer Kon Wajiro (1888–1973) and his”Modernology” (kogengaku) associates, whose work is cited in several of thefollowing chapters, carefully diagrammed the legs of bus conductors and otherworking women as they walked or rode about Tokyo and sketched their sockwrinkles to see patterns of both social and physical mobility. They mapped thepatterns dancehall girls etched on the dance floors during their working hours(Kon and Yoshida 1931: 35–55).

Especially between 1929 and 1931, the height of modernist artistic movementsdepicting Tokyo life, photographic montages of women walking and gettingin and out of buses and taxicabs were published in magazines to conveythe rhythms and tempo of the city. These images were often given musical titles,such as the many “Symphonies of Ginza Women” (Ginza nyonin kokyokyoku)included in the Shiseido geppo (Shiseido Monthly), the publicity periodicalfor Shiseido. Some of the women pictured in this periodical might have been”Shiseido girls” (Shiseido garu), models who traveled around Japan to givedemonstrations of new beauty techniques. In literature ranging from NatsumeSoseki’s late Meiji novels like Sanshiro (1908) to Tanizaki Junichiro’s 1925 Naomi(Chijin no ai), a fictional character’s ability to traverse the city showed his or herlevel of acclimation to modern practices.

We adopt the mobile modern girl as a heuristic device to show how shehas been visibly present in other time periods and places. Aware that the moderngirl moniker began life as a historically tethered reference, we appropriatethe idea, not only for its potency, but because we wish to semantically extendits meaning and thus provide new ways of understanding the significance ofwomen’s labor. The concept of the modern girl offers the possibility of seeingin working women of many eras and locations the qualities that first led to thecreation of the term. We argue that women in Japan after the 1930s have oftenbeen viewed through her image. We show that women continue to be associatedwith spectacles of modernity premised on the possibilities of mobility,consumption, and technological advancement. In addition, we give examplesof modern girls incarnate to underscore how images of female employees oftendiffer from their real material and social conditions and the discriminationthey face on the job.

Whether they have realized it or not, stewardesses, soldiers, athletes, beautyqueens, educators, and the other women we profile not only exemplify largereconomic, political, intellectual, and social forces, but also have actively changedthe notion of work in Japan. We recognize the importance of examining howhistorical terms originated and do so in our above discussion on Silverberg andthe modern girl. At the same time, we view the extension of academic conceptsto other domains as a productive method for stimulating new lines of researchand understanding. Recognizing genealogies while extending concepts to newrealms is one of our primary goals with this volume.

Another theme here is the language used by and for women to describetheir jobs. Modern girl is a prime example of the Japanese historical custom oflabeling women who mark a break in preconceived notions of gender, therebymaking their lifestyles easier to comprehend and less threatening and turningthem into symbols of social progress and problems. Jan Bardsley (2000)explores early postwar concerns about potential ruptures in gender politicsin her analysis of the new types of working women who were debated in thepages of the magazine Fujin koron (Women’s Review). One of these new workerswas the 1950s “salary girl” (saraii gyaru), a type described as desiring independencethrough work and leisure. Many denigrating labels were created insubsequent decades. For example, women who take too long for their lunchbreaks, who wear sexualized clothing to the office, and who use a baby-talkregister when speaking to male coworkers have all been labeled in negativeways (Miller 1998, 2004). A twenty-first-century example is “arafo” short for”around forty,” voted the top media buzzword of 2008 in the U-Can survey(Jiyu kokuminsha 2008). Arafo is one of a series of value-laden terms usedto designate women around age forty who theoretically have more choices infamily and employment than earlier generations; the word has been appliedmost often to single members of this demographic who have prioritized careersover marriage and are thus believed to shoulder the blame for Japan’sfalling fertility rate (See Freedman and Iwata-Weickgenannt 2011).

(Continues…)
(Continues…)Excerpted from Modern Girls on the Go by Alisa Freedman. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.