Modernism, gender and consumer spectacle in 1920s’ Tokyo

Abstract

A lot has been written about how, in the first decades of the twentieth century, cinema validated new perceptual structures and how these affected literary narrative. But the department store was also a vital part of the mobile spectacle of modernity. Ginza and its department stores provided experiences of urban flâneuring and visual consumption that would have important effects on gender and subjectivity. This essay focuses on three short stories published between 1922 and 1931, all set in department stores or on the Ginza: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō’s ‘Aoi hana’ (The Blue Flower, 1922), Itō Sei's ‘M hyakkaten’ (The M Department Store, 1931) and Yokomitsu Riichi's ‘Nanakai no undō’ (Seven Floors of Exercise, 1927). The stories share a radically experimental modernist form: fragmented interior monologues, montage-like juxtapositions, abrupt shifts of narrative perspective. They are also connected in their preoccupation with looking, with the drama of seeing and being seen. My analysis traces how the domain of vision becomes a place of struggle over subjectivity, how gendered visual hierarchies are undermined and at least temporarily reversed.

Keywords:

• gender
• visuality
• department stores
• Tanizaki Jun'ichirō
• Itō Sei
• Yokomitsu Riichi

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was supported by grants from the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, as well as a Japan Foundation Short-Term Fellowship. Early versions were presented at invited lectures at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, University of London and the Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford. I am grateful to the organizers and to the audience for their comments. Thanks are also due to Kerstin Fooken for last-minute help with materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See my analysis (Hayter forthcoming) of the editorial statement in the inaugural issue of Bungei jidai (October 1924).

2. On the complex politics of post-earthquake reconstruction see Schencking (2013).

3. This argument is developed in Yoshimi (2008, pp. 253–266).

4. The most notable studies of Japanese department stores are Hatsuda (1999), Tamari (2000, 2006), Tipton (2012), Yoshimi (1996) and Young (1999).

5. In Capital, Marx writes that: ‘The commodity form, and the value relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising from this. It is nothing but a definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1976, p. 165). For Adorno (1981, p. 84) phantasmagoria is ‘the occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product’.

6. Studies of modernity and visuality are too numerous to be exhaustively named here. My summary draws on Lowe (1982), Jay (1988) and Lamarre (2012).

7. Page numbers in the text refer to Tanizaki (1981). All translations from the Japanese are mine unless otherwise indicated. An English translation of the story has been published as ‘Aguri’ (Tanizaki 1963). I keep the original title because of its reference to the ‘blaue Blume’, the metaphysical object of desire of German romanticism. It is an ironic, almost tongue-in-cheek choice for a story of very physical pleasures and pains. For Miyoshi (1991, p.31) the title is an oblique comment on the solipsistic perceptions of the protagonist.

8. Amur adonis or fukujusō in Japanese (literally ‘a grass of good fortune and longevity’), a plant from the buttercup family native to East Asia, is a traditional New Year's gift in Japan.

9. Page numbers in the text refer to Itō (1989). An English translation can be found in Itō (2005).

10. See Bruno (1997) for a beautifully articulated argument about the spatio-kinetics of film, which proposes the viewer as voyageur, rather than voyeur. For Bruno, moving images that have to do with inhabiting and traversing space cannot be explained with theories of the (static) eye only.

11. Page numbers in the text refer to Yokomitsu (1981).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irena Hayter

Irena Hayter is a Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds. Her work has appeared in journals such as Japanese Language and Literature and POETICA, as well as in the edited collection Perversion in Modern Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis (eds. Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent). She can be contacted at [email protected]