Abstract
This chapter focuses on the way in which the department store became a key site for the constitution of Japanese modernity in early-twentieth-century Japan. The first Japanese department store, Mitsukoshi, not only provided new goods along with pragmatic ideas of how to use and how to evaluate them, but also sought to promote images and advice on how to integrate the “new” into existing lifestyles and value systems. Mitsukoshi offered a new type of consumer experience to explore how “to be modern.” This can be well tuned with the government policy, “reform of everyday life,” which encouraged people to be more efficient and rational in everyday practices. This policy was also well fitted to new middle class who sought to new lifestyle which would be modern. To be modern was particularly important for an urban working woman who was often seen as a modern girl. Department store provided them with not only a set of ideas to be modern, but also a new aestheticized urban consumer space as a stage to perform. Hence, Mitsukoshi served both as a political device to create modern citizen and as a cultural device to produce modern consumers in political and cultural transition era of Japanese modernization.
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Notes
- 1.
It is generally accepted that Mitsukoshi was established as the first Japanese department store in the 1900s. “Gofukuten” in Japanese means draper store. (Mitsukoshi Gofukuten started using the official name “Mitsukoshi” in 1928.) Mitsukoshi was originally a draper’s store , “Echigoya,” founded by Mitsui Takatoshi in 1673. He opened drapery shops in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo (Tokyo) to expand his business, which included not only a drapery shop, but also banking activities in 1683. This business provided strong financial background for Echigoya (later became Mitsui Gofukuten) to eventually become part of the Mitsui group (“Zaibatsu”).
- 2.
There would seem to be some overlap with the concept of “the frame” in cinema theory referred to by Deleuze. “All framing determines an out-of-field,” he explains (Deleuze 1986, 2017: 19). He remarks that the out of field “refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but it is nevertheless perfectly present” and “the frame teaches us that the image is not just given to be seen” (Deleuze 1986, 2017: 16), rather it can encompass all the potential component or the whole world in some way.
- 3.
Mitsukoshi sometimes used mannequins in the window display to enhance its narratives and theatricality (Mitsukoshi 1919 Vol. 9 issue 8).
- 4.
In his explanation of the bodily sensation and architecture, he argues that there might be a dialectic unconscious communication though bodily sensation between the architect and the person who encounter the work (Pallasmaa 2013: 71; Tamari 2016b).
- 5.
Tarde wrote, “The movement and the noise of the streets, the store window, the frenetic and impulsive agitation of their existence, affect them like hypnotic spells. Now urban life, is it not social life concentrated and taken to an extreme? --- Society is imitation and imitation is a type of hypnotism” (Tarde 1900: 91, 95 cited in Williams: 348).
- 6.
Tarde’s intention was to reveal modern consumer’s mobile vision and sensory experience in expositions, automobile shows , movies, and perhaps department stores in the city. Williams explains Tarde’s approach:
“When he is faced with such spectacles, in the consumer’s mind are mixed emotional hyperactivity and paralysis, envy and scorn, conscious choice and semiconscious obedience initiative and submission, desire and repulsion. The analogy with hypnosis emphasizes these ambiguities” (Williams 1982 349).
Hence, Tarde concluded that social man, the city dweller, is “a veritable somnambulist” (Williams 1982: 350).
- 7.
Yet, at the same time, the department store offered women the capacity to engage in relatively independent action outside the control of men. On the other hand, it reinforced the traditional stereotype of femininity with the emphasis on dressing-up and making-up skills.
- 8.
Ueno (1990: 184) regards war as a necessary “dumping ground” for an expanding economy.
- 9.
Women normally worked in more menial work for lower pay, and their position was more that of unskilled or semiskilled workers. They were not able to work in mainstream business management, but had to be content with the role of assistant or typist. It was very rare that women could become a manager .
- 10.
The 1922 data was incorporated in the 1924 report. This is the most significant early data. Although the increasing numbers of women’s workers were noticeable, the Meiji and Taisho government did not conduct research (Murakami 1983: 54). Therefore, it is hard to find reasonable statistical data. In 1923, the Osaka local recruitment center (大阪地方職業紹介事務局) compiled data from 69 recruitment centers and made a report on wage levels. This data could well be the first reliable data on working women (Murakami 1983: 55). In his investigation of working women, Murakami focused on the Tokyo City Research Report of 1924, which is the most reliable data on the conditions of working women.
- 11.
Hereafter this and subsequent research by Tokyo City will be referred to as “Tokyo City Research.” All the researches cited which was conducted over a number of years between 1922 and 1938 were surveys of women’s employment. Confusingly, there were also a number of women’s employment reports carried out by the Tokyo Prefecture (i.e., larger metropolitan area) which are also referred to by year. Information for further research on women’s employment for both Tokyo City and Osaka City is referred to in the same way.
- 12.
According to the 1924 Tokyo City research report, the increase in numbers of working women resulted from the financial crisis of the middle classes, the effects of the women’s emancipation movement, and the transformation of the economy producing new types of jobs (Tokyo City Research 1924: 63).
- 13.
The Modern Girl is often described as one of the key types of New Woman. There were, however, some differences between them in the case of Japan . New woman was usually well-educated intellectually and often engaged with women’s social and cultural problem. Writers, such as Hiratsuka Raicho, Yosano Akiko and Ito Noe were some of the famous figures as New Women. Unlike the New Woman, the Modern Girl often rendered as a girl who is apolitical, emotional rather than rational, and a hedonistic consumer in urban life.
- 14.
But they were also taught to educate/guide customers in a subtle way, which did not threaten established notions of gender roles. In effect, they not only had to successfully mediate Japanese and the modern Western culture, but also had to learn to mediate between the neo-traditional “good wife, wise mother” doctrine and the exciting style of the new modern girl.
- 15.
The term modern and its derivatives modernity, modernism, and modernization derive from the Latin, meaning “just now,” “of today,” to the new moment as seen as a departure from tradition and previous times (Buci-Glucksmann 1994; Habermas 1981, 1985; Hansen 1995; Miyoshi and Harootunian 1989; Harootunian 2000; see the latter especially for a discussion of the use of the term by intellectuals in Japan in the 1920s).
- 16.
Featherstone characterized “the aestheticization of everyday life” by three aspects: the effacement of the boundary between art and everyday life; the project of turning life into a work of art; and the rapid flow of signs and images in everyday life which is, he remarks, central to the development of consumer culture (see Featherstone 1991, Chap. 5).
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Tamari, T. (2018). Modernization and the Department Store in Early-Twentieth-Century Japan: Modern Girl and New Consumer Culture Lifestyles. In: Krasteva-Blagoeva, E. (eds) Approaching Consumer Culture. International Series on Consumer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00226-8_10
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