The Modern Boy as the New Body of Modernity? Contesting the Meaning of Masculinity in Early 20^th-century Japan

ABSTRACT

This article examines textual and visual representations of the modern boy during the height of his circulation in the Japanese media during the 1920s and 1930s. Depending on the ideological agendas of the various cultural producers constructing the modern boy in discourse, the body of the modern boy signified different things. On the one hand, he was endorsed as a novel and utopic form of embodied modernity, a prototype of the modern Japanese man who personified the spirit and energy of the times. On the other hand, he was also portrayed as a display of inauthentic, failed masculinity with the didactic purpose of demonstrating what a modern Japanese man was not. By analysing competing views of the modern boy in conversation with questions of gender, modernity and power, this article argues that the modern boy constitutes a complex and contradictory narrative of Japanese masculinity shaped by competing ideological agendas of the period. The ambivalence of the modern boy discourse points to the way modern masculinity was a highly contested and politicised concept during the 1920s and 1930s, as individuals, social institutions and the state vied to control the contours of the ideal male body in early 20^th-century Japan.

KEYWORDS:

• Modern boy
• masculinities
• gender
• modernity
• interwar Japan

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Associate Professor Romit Dasgupta, who shaped my thinking on the modern boy. I thank Associate Professor Joanna Elfving-Hwang and Dr Laura Dales who helped in the development of this paper. I am also grateful to Dr Barbara Hartley for mentoring me in the early stages of writing, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their generous and thought-provoking feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The modern boy term in Japanese katakana appeared in various versions in the Japanese media: modan boi, modan bōi, modān bōi and mobo. Where I have quoted original text, I have used the version used by the original author.

² Both interwar critics such as Ōya Sōichi and contemporary Japan scholars have attributed the first use of the term modan gāru to either Kitazawa Shūichi or Nii Itaru (Ōya, 1929, October; Takahashi, 1999; Yonekawa, 2002). Thus far Barbara Sato (2003) has documented the earliest use of the term in Kitagawa Chōgo’s 1923 article entitled ‘Modan gāru no hyōgen – Nihon no imōto ni okuru tegami’, published in the April instalment of the magazine Josei kaizō (Women’s Reconstruction).

³ This was female intellectual Kodera Kikuko’s answer to the question of how a moga is defined in the November 1930 issue of the magazine, Modan Nippon (Modern Japan).

⁴ The article’s title is published as ‘Chronque’, a typological error as the contents page records the title as ‘Chronique’.

⁵ See Deborah Shamoon’s (2012) work on the modern girl in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novels for an illuminating example of the sexual and racial fetishisation of the modern girl. See also Francesca Dal Lago’s work (2012) on visual images of the modern girl of Shanghai for a case study of the intense fetishisation and commodification of the modern girl in one of Japan’s interwar geopolitical neighbours.

⁶ Erving Goffman (1956/1959) has argued in his seminal work on the presentation of the self that the gendered person is a socially embodied individual, located within a social context and the rules of social behaviour.

⁷ Laura Mulvey’s (1975) seminal article on cinema apparatus and the psychic structures of pleasure puts forward the influential argument of the male gaze that derives scopophilic pleasure in looking at and objectifying women.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Library of Australia under the 2018 Asia Study Grant.